Provoke some...

Yaar- Papa... That's how my son addresses me. He has been doing so for sometime but somehow I only noticed it a few days back. " Yaar " in Hindi is generally used for someone who is a bosom friend ( langotiya yaar  sounds better) and "Papa" should wield respect and a guarded distance. That truly sounds like an oxymoron, surely Yaar & Papa seem contradictory. Forget calling my Father  Yaar- Papa, I wouldn't dare even uttering the " Yaar " word in front of him as he considered it  sadak chhap (language of the ruffians), all of which was forbidden to be used. I would barely see my Father once a week, sometimes even once a month when he would go off on extended business tours. He had a large family to feed and five younger siblings to get married off while I was being brought up by my Aunts. There was absolutely no way of getting any closer to my Father. So, when I heard my son calling me Yaar-Papa, it made me thinking. While everyone keeps ...

So now all of us are on FB. Well, yes, almost all of us, leave aside the underprivileged, the uninformed, the unwanted and the unwhatever. Most of us have a potpourri of friends from our various phases of life - school friends, college friends, colleagues, parents, children, in-laws, siblings, cousins, distant relatives, neighbors, spouse's friends' spouses, children's friends' parents, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends and then some complete strangers. When we receive a friend invite irrespective of who has sent it, it is considered rude to reject it or not accepting it for a long time so whether we like it or not, we end up adding everyone. While we might not be interacting with most of these 'friends' yet, consciously or sub-consciously, we get exposed to 'their' activities - status updates and photos & videos. A study of the entire melange of the varied personalities that I have as my FB friends, I have been able to group them int...