Leslie's Laughs

Tomorrow I turn 69.  Turn 69 .. that's like getting into a new position, turning over a new leaf, or turned on its head.  No change!  But birthdays are meant for musing, reminiscing and otherwise boring people who deign to read on. Small consolation that John Lennon would have turned 83 too.  Not to mention it's World Postal Day - to remind us that Dead Letters still exist and haven't been stamped out yet. Bad pun, but that's my problem - for all of 69 years. When I turned sixty, I decided it was the Swinging Sixties.  Easy to calculate. It comes after the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties which as Geography students know are merely a lot of wind depending on where you are. But there were milestones throughout the decade, which isn't over yet, but it's worth celebrating anyway. A couple of years before the 60 year mark I decided that I would not retire.  People I worked with and for were unhappy that I quit, but I just didn't want that handshake, watc...

  [An apology to all those who don't share my opinion or my experiences.  To misquote Khushwant Singh, it's written with malice to none at all.  But seriously, India Today, 75 - nay 76 years - later, needs to hear this. A chance encounter with Vedika Singh, an energetic intern, caused me to finally pull this out and write it down.  I must confess I had attempted to get ChatGPT to write this just to see how it would fare. As you can imagine it was all artificial and no intelligence.  But that's the free version.  I understand if you pay a tidy sum it can even select things to write that you never knew existed.  Another time, another story.] History A friend of mine turned 60 last year and a great big bash was planned, secretly.  He loves to read - apart from being glued to Netflix, I hear.  So, in a flash of what was then mistaken for brilliance, I decided that I would present him with a One Year Subscription to Reader's Digest (with bonus fre...

  Image by upklyak on Freepik I am sure many of us are shortsighted enough to remember the good old eye-testing charts beginning with a large E and ending with an indecipherable string of letters which apparently no one but Superman can read. Well, that happens to me every morning but with a few bells and whistles thrown in. Let me explain. The Eyetest Equipment: The daily newspaper. In my case, The Telegraph. The Day: Everyday except when the powers-that-be declare a string of holidays as in the recently concluded Pujas. The Place: My favourite place is the "Library" which some people call the Necessarium or the plebs call the Bogs. For one thing, there's no fan and pages don't fly. For another, some of the news is so frightening is scares the crap out of you. The Story So, just like the eye-test, they soften you up by giving you a few large advertisements in the first four or four and a half pages.  Easy on the eye - some of the pin-up girls in jewellery are even ea...

  Image by storyset on Freepik WAGs Analysing Chat Behaviour The Types of WAGs There are various types of WAGs (WhatsApp Groups) and they attract all sorts of people. I might do another post on the types of WAGs, but for now, let's focus on the users. Some of the regular WA users are listed below, more for fun than anything else. Read and react. Do you fit the bill in any of your groups? The Winners Ravi just left the conversation after a heated exchange and the rest of us are left to continue (Who’s left?). Raging controversy on the group. Who's right? Whoever is left! This happens pretty often when there is controversy. People leave. And whoever is left feels they have “won”. Lurkers and Scanners These people rarely post.  They may read and delete or they may just not read the messages. They might have the option of “archiving” the group, so that the pings do not disturb them. Or they mute the notifications and read at leisure. Peekers and Voyeurs This bunch of people are r...

  [There are times when one is tempted to use four-letter words when faced with a problem.  So, they created this five-letter version.  Here's my take on some of the interesting things that happened along the way as I, like many others, got "hooked".  Do leave a comment and let me know how you fared.] This fascination for the five-letter word at the stroke of midnight has caught the imagination of entire generations, older ones included.  Wordle came into our lives surreptiously, insinuating itself into our consciousness without any fanfare.  Within minutes of a WhatsApp message sent innocuously by someone with his or her first winning streak, we, too, were hooked. There were a lot of nay-sayers who famously misquoted Shakespeare:  "What's in a game?", they asked as they sneakily searched for the answers themselves.  Within weeks there were user groups who discussed and argued about certain words, the most famous one being too many options with th...

  Received as a meme from a number of friends [The full-page advertisement on the front page of The Telegraph, Calcutta, of Jan 13th and the conversations of the past few days prompted me to put down a few thoughts in a spirit of humour tinged with trepidation.  WhatsApp would probably call the advertisement a clarification or a disclaimer or something equally interesting, but it seems to also indicate concern at the campsite!  In this blog post I might name some friends to whom I remain grateful or non-aligned as the case may be.  Hope you all take in good spirit, or with good spirits.] Your FNG As The Friendly Neighbourhood Guru (FNG for short, but not for long) I was asked my opinion on the raging controversy over WhatsApp's announcement about their change in their privacy policy.  Aruna , my favourite educationist, bounces questions off me whenever something digital happens, from Zoom to Doom. So began some sharing of opinions, mostly hearsay and unsupported...

A Christmas Carol There's a line in a Frank Sinatra Christmas song that goes like this " Overeating, merry greetings from  relatives you don't know ".  A couple of days into the twelve days of Christmas and the truth of that kicked this idle mind into gear.  Not the "overeating", that goes without saying, it's the greetings from relatives you don't know. And friends.  And friends of friends.  And acquaintances. And unknown numbers from WhatsApp Lists or known ones from WhatsApp groups.  I'm not getting into Instagram here.  You're probably thinking, "Here's Ebenezer Scrooge to spread his Christmas jeer" but I say, "Bah, humbug!"  Old Eb never had social media to contend with. Between Cratchits and Hashtags he would have embraced the Ghost of Christmas Past and thrown away his device. Sorry for the literary references (What the Dickens is he talking about?) but that's really how the idle mind wanders.   I got to thi...