LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

BENGAL is a land of colours, a place where the spices from our mother’s kitchen amalgams with those pale hashes’ smoke on the university campus. Here the smell of the wet land is poignant and this reverberates in those wine glasses that go around, touching those luscious bong lips, flows down, warm, through the veins of what we call ‘THE CITY OF JOY’.

Culture rings a bell everywhere here, and when it’s not the tolling bells of Kalighat, it’s got to be your doorbell! 😉

Variety is the spice of life, and more so, when you are married to a bengali babu, who goes to office cursing the traffic, and comes back home with an irritated face and who remembers his colleagues by theirs wife’s beauty! So, whenever the doorbell rings be sure, your darling pasher barir kakima (neighbour’s wife) is looming on the other end. Sometimes, even accompanied by their ‘little (devil) one’ who is mostly busy picking  his nose, contempt with the inner content or kicking your street collections off! And, here she comes, eyebrows raised in unison, questions all over her face and all those secret information about other people brimming over her lips.

Holy s***!! This rings a bell, right? And here my motto is very simple, not to scare the hell out of you, but just to remind you of  those ‘desperate housewives’.. ;p

Recently, I was at the Crossword store with a friend of mine, and I chanced upon a cookbook which was titled : ‘COOKBOOK FOR DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’ . We had a good laugh over it, but somewhere I realised that these aunts of ours are indeed DESPERATE. Poor people, they will tell you every detail of other’s household as if they are the appointed moral guardians of the society, and if you are a teenager, madly in love and badly searching for a place, and then you decide to call the happening thing home when your parents are out, you might be tensed more about your neighbour getting to know than your parents! Concern! #BEWARE OF THY NEIGHBOUR!

As we are now, cosmopolitan, living life the corporate style, with yummy mummies and cool daddies, life has changed. The wind has hit Bengal and its changing. Unless I’m in a North-Kolkata suburb, in those narrow alleys of rusted old doors and Nakur’s sweets,  I don’t really get to see these faces nowadays. As the metropolitan city’s dusk is about to set, I see the horizon has changed. All the hullaballoo  is there but the sounds are different. They are not the chatter of those neighbours, but the pumping loud beats from the nightclubs.

The change is evident. Yes, we are alone. And there are lesser prying eyes over us. The more our generation complains the lesser the future generation receives of the para-culture. Human eyes are replaced by technical gadgets, but then why has the crime rates shot up?

We are moving on, our lives are changing from what they used be. Values, morals, ethics are being redefined every day. The constraints are getting dropped each passing day as we are embracing a renewed sense of openness and freedom, but amidst all these where are our people of the neighbourhood gone?  They are vanishing soon, those aunts are getting extinct. No one watches over us anymore, and come to talk about other’s household with a child in their tow.

Done saying all these, I would simply want to ask what you think you like more.? The human eyes that bothered about you, or these highly sophisticated security systems at your houses?. What do you like for yourself, the human touch or the machine world?

And to all those aunts who had spent hours, patiently on their toes, to overhear a fight at my home, and made a good spicy script outta it for circulation,  I would like to raise a toast and say: “Cheers! Life would have been so dull without you…”

For now I will just retrieve back to my couch and will have at the tip of my tongue: “LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR!! ”

 

Hurrah!! This post has been selected by Blogadda as a Tangy Tuesday pick. 🙂 😛