#RaiseYourOneBlade
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Philips Norelco Oneblade Usage & Review
#RaiseYourOneBlade
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Understanding how change becomes differences
When I think of my childhood, I remember people less vividly than I remember things. I remember scented erasers topped with a strip of translucent green. Also a cheaper eraser enigmatically called Sandow. And soap - the history of Indian homes in the 1960s and 1970s can be written in soap and detergent.
Lifebuoy was the soap you washed your hands with afterwards. Hamam or Cinthol was the bar to bathe with except for people with aspirations who bought Moti, a fat round of soap too large for small hands, or Pears. But Pears was posh; any household that routinely used Pears was the sort of place that bought crates of Coca Cola instead of bottles of Kissan orange squash, where the children went to boarding school and owned complete sets of comics.
The only detergent that seems to have survived as a brand is Surf. Not that anyone used the word 'detergent' in the 1960s. Surf was detergent: it was the generic word for any powdered soap that came in a box and was used to wash clothes. Nobody had heard of Rin or Nirma; a cheap yellow cake of washing soap called Sunlight was widely used, but it was an inferior thing, used off-stage by the hired help, not the housewife.
There was a soap to wash woollens with called Lux Flakes, which smelt nice, but disappeared from the market early on. I think our parents liked the thought of collecting petrol-perfumed woollens in giant brown paper bags so much that they were willing to pay Novex, Snowhite or Bandbox a bit extra for that privilege. Dry-cleaning was a way of being modern, smart and confidently good class.
Nearly everybody used Colgate and that hasn't changed, but for a while Binaca Green was a real contender. We were pioneering ecological puritans: we brushed our teeth with a horrible non-foaming toothpaste that left us with a bad taste in the mouth entirely because it claimed to be made up of chlorophyll. The only good thing to be said for Binaca Green was that it sponsored the Radio Ceylon programmes "The Binaca Hit Parade" and, later, of filmi songs called Binaca Geet Mala.
There was a short-lived star in the toothpaste stakes, though, called Signal, which came in white and red stripes. Even a child my age who could barely recognize a polysyllabic word knew that the red stripes were made of a magical substance called hexachlorophene. Not that we cared: our interest was limited to our scientific curiosity about how the toothpaste worm came out continuously striped. It was later that I learnt that hexachlorophene caused fits and paralysis and was especially bad for children.
Summer was announced by the ganeriwala or the sugar-cane man who stationed his cart outside the house and ran giant sticks of sugar-cane, six at a time, through his hand-cranked press. Then he'd double the husked sticks and run them through again - and again and again. The juice ran through a sieve filled with broken ice into an aluminium jug. Before he gave you the glass, he mixed in a patented powder that was nine parts kala nimak, a kind of rock salt. The juice, the 'ganne ka ras', was nectar and no one really minded about the dirt or the germs or the deep black of his fingernails for the same reason as no one boiled water at home or bought water outside except from vendors who sold it for two paise a glass: because we were stupid and didn't mind dying young.
The cotton-carder and the sugar-cane man are nearly extinct. When I was a child in Kashmeri Gate, the chuskiwala would visit once a week with his brown wooden box lined with a kind of woolen felt. He would then shape for us roughly conical lumps of shaved ice and colour them with radioactive liquids. They were horrible, unnatural colours; I ate the ice lollies because all my older cousins did. I later became an enthusiastic patron of the four-anna orange bar peddled by the Kwality Ice Cream man in the neighbourhood.
But because my childhood happened in an autarkic India, committed to the twin gods of self-sufficiency and high tariff barriers, it was the things that we didn't have that I remember better than the ones that we did. Orange bars, HMV records, Godrej refrigerators, bond paper, Cadbury's Fruit & Nut, Naga shawls, Phantom peppermint cigarettes and ugly walnut tables from Kashmir were nice but they were available (if your parents had the money to spare) and therefore not nearly as desirable as the things you couldn't have except from that supermarket in the sky called "foreign".
Wrigley's Spearmint, Quality Street and (for unknowable reasons) Kraft cheese was the toll that foreign returners routinely paid for going abroad without their families, but these were perishable things from an inferior heaven. The real loot, or maal, was impossibly rare consumer durables.
Seiko watches, for example, with 17 jewels and radium dials. Not one of us knew what jewels were doing inside a watch but they were precious and the number gave us a way of measuring value in the same way as 17 gun salutes told you something about the standing of a princely state.
The thing in question didn't have to be expensive: it merely had to be foreign and better in some real or imagined way than its Indian equivalent.
So if you played table tennis you craved Japanese Nittaku balls instead of the deceptively foreign-sounding but actually desi, Montana. Later the Chinese came up with cheap, virtually indestructible balls called Shield but those were never as fetishized as the Nittaku balls because they became increasingly available in India and where was the romance in that?
But nothing was as glamorous as a can of Dunlop tennis balls. Unlike Indian tennis balls, these were sealed in pressurized containers and when you pulled the metal tab, there was a little whoosh and you breathed in a compressed burst of scientific-smelling foreign air.
So geometry boxes by Staedtler, table tennis bats called Butterfly, Bic ballpoint pens, little flat torches that dangled off key-chains, and Parker 45 pens with impossible-to-buy-in-India ink cartridges - these were a few of our favourite and much desired things. We almost never got them, but when we did, we experienced a gloating fulfillment that only scarcity can induce.
Pundits sniff disapprovingly about the consumerism that the liberalisation of the economy has encouraged. This would seem to suggest that before 1991, Indians, willy-nilly, lived in a state of non-consuming grace. This is just not true; the children of the 1960s loved things much more intensely than their children do simply because they didn't have them.
You can spot us at a distance in airport terminals: we're the grey-haired men who can't tear themselves away from the cigarette cartons even though we stopped smoking three years ago and won't part with money to buy any for our friends. We are that odd cohort, a Duty-Free generation that never went abroad in its youth -
connoisseurs, therefore, of the unavailable.
Lifebuoy was the soap you washed your hands with afterwards. Hamam or Cinthol was the bar to bathe with except for people with aspirations who bought Moti, a fat round of soap too large for small hands, or Pears. But Pears was posh; any household that routinely used Pears was the sort of place that bought crates of Coca Cola instead of bottles of Kissan orange squash, where the children went to boarding school and owned complete sets of comics.
The only detergent that seems to have survived as a brand is Surf. Not that anyone used the word 'detergent' in the 1960s. Surf was detergent: it was the generic word for any powdered soap that came in a box and was used to wash clothes. Nobody had heard of Rin or Nirma; a cheap yellow cake of washing soap called Sunlight was widely used, but it was an inferior thing, used off-stage by the hired help, not the housewife.
There was a soap to wash woollens with called Lux Flakes, which smelt nice, but disappeared from the market early on. I think our parents liked the thought of collecting petrol-perfumed woollens in giant brown paper bags so much that they were willing to pay Novex, Snowhite or Bandbox a bit extra for that privilege. Dry-cleaning was a way of being modern, smart and confidently good class.
Nearly everybody used Colgate and that hasn't changed, but for a while Binaca Green was a real contender. We were pioneering ecological puritans: we brushed our teeth with a horrible non-foaming toothpaste that left us with a bad taste in the mouth entirely because it claimed to be made up of chlorophyll. The only good thing to be said for Binaca Green was that it sponsored the Radio Ceylon programmes "The Binaca Hit Parade" and, later, of filmi songs called Binaca Geet Mala.
There was a short-lived star in the toothpaste stakes, though, called Signal, which came in white and red stripes. Even a child my age who could barely recognize a polysyllabic word knew that the red stripes were made of a magical substance called hexachlorophene. Not that we cared: our interest was limited to our scientific curiosity about how the toothpaste worm came out continuously striped. It was later that I learnt that hexachlorophene caused fits and paralysis and was especially bad for children.
Summer was announced by the ganeriwala or the sugar-cane man who stationed his cart outside the house and ran giant sticks of sugar-cane, six at a time, through his hand-cranked press. Then he'd double the husked sticks and run them through again - and again and again. The juice ran through a sieve filled with broken ice into an aluminium jug. Before he gave you the glass, he mixed in a patented powder that was nine parts kala nimak, a kind of rock salt. The juice, the 'ganne ka ras', was nectar and no one really minded about the dirt or the germs or the deep black of his fingernails for the same reason as no one boiled water at home or bought water outside except from vendors who sold it for two paise a glass: because we were stupid and didn't mind dying young.
The cotton-carder and the sugar-cane man are nearly extinct. When I was a child in Kashmeri Gate, the chuskiwala would visit once a week with his brown wooden box lined with a kind of woolen felt. He would then shape for us roughly conical lumps of shaved ice and colour them with radioactive liquids. They were horrible, unnatural colours; I ate the ice lollies because all my older cousins did. I later became an enthusiastic patron of the four-anna orange bar peddled by the Kwality Ice Cream man in the neighbourhood.
But because my childhood happened in an autarkic India, committed to the twin gods of self-sufficiency and high tariff barriers, it was the things that we didn't have that I remember better than the ones that we did. Orange bars, HMV records, Godrej refrigerators, bond paper, Cadbury's Fruit & Nut, Naga shawls, Phantom peppermint cigarettes and ugly walnut tables from Kashmir were nice but they were available (if your parents had the money to spare) and therefore not nearly as desirable as the things you couldn't have except from that supermarket in the sky called "foreign".
Wrigley's Spearmint, Quality Street and (for unknowable reasons) Kraft cheese was the toll that foreign returners routinely paid for going abroad without their families, but these were perishable things from an inferior heaven. The real loot, or maal, was impossibly rare consumer durables.
Seiko watches, for example, with 17 jewels and radium dials. Not one of us knew what jewels were doing inside a watch but they were precious and the number gave us a way of measuring value in the same way as 17 gun salutes told you something about the standing of a princely state.
The thing in question didn't have to be expensive: it merely had to be foreign and better in some real or imagined way than its Indian equivalent.
So if you played table tennis you craved Japanese Nittaku balls instead of the deceptively foreign-sounding but actually desi, Montana. Later the Chinese came up with cheap, virtually indestructible balls called Shield but those were never as fetishized as the Nittaku balls because they became increasingly available in India and where was the romance in that?
But nothing was as glamorous as a can of Dunlop tennis balls. Unlike Indian tennis balls, these were sealed in pressurized containers and when you pulled the metal tab, there was a little whoosh and you breathed in a compressed burst of scientific-smelling foreign air.
So geometry boxes by Staedtler, table tennis bats called Butterfly, Bic ballpoint pens, little flat torches that dangled off key-chains, and Parker 45 pens with impossible-to-buy-in-India ink cartridges - these were a few of our favourite and much desired things. We almost never got them, but when we did, we experienced a gloating fulfillment that only scarcity can induce.
Pundits sniff disapprovingly about the consumerism that the liberalisation of the economy has encouraged. This would seem to suggest that before 1991, Indians, willy-nilly, lived in a state of non-consuming grace. This is just not true; the children of the 1960s loved things much more intensely than their children do simply because they didn't have them.
You can spot us at a distance in airport terminals: we're the grey-haired men who can't tear themselves away from the cigarette cartons even though we stopped smoking three years ago and won't part with money to buy any for our friends. We are that odd cohort, a Duty-Free generation that never went abroad in its youth -
connoisseurs, therefore, of the unavailable.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Kareena Kapoor Holi uncensored pics !!!
There is nothing to censor in this pic :)
Sunday, March 4, 2012
HomeFood Vs HomePage
My Mom asked me how can I share this lovely food prepared just for you ??
O Mom!! Its so simple. Share button is right there on your screen !!
O Wow !! said my mom.. Then she asked me "How do I get to know whether you find it tasty or not ??"
Hmmmm.... I paused !! Then i said "Hey its very simple... You'll get a notification from Facebook that your son like your home made food !!"
Saturday, October 8, 2011
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