we were stuck on a service road in Chennai while a Corporation lorry was sucking out the muck from a manhole…I was irritated until I saw, coming out of the manhole, a sanitary worker covered from head to foot in muck….he physically threw out a lot of the crap before the suction pipe in the lorry got to work.

There are people who do this for a living…and I just read the latest issue of India Today’s offshoot for luxury lovers, which describes, amongst other things, staying in ice hotels, and cars that cost the earth (quite literally, given their petrol consumption)….how can such things co exist?

Just got, by co-incidence, several emails complimenting me on different things. Got to wondering about the days after my death….feeling chirpy as I thought of the number of compliments I would get…but soon came back to earth as I also thought of the number of not-so-good things that many of my acquaintances would think, but not say, so that the old custom of “speak no evil of the dead” could be observed!

In Tamil Nadu, however, it looks as if the motto is “speak no evil”….every Chettiar worth his name has a “chinna Veedu”, and cities have their red-light districts… teenage and unwed pregnancies abound, and female foetuses are aborted….but our Tamil ladies are sisters to the whole world and are SO pure and wonderfully chaste that just HEARING about Khushboo talking about the necessity of safe sex will pollute them.

This reminds me of the wag who was told that Miss X fainted dead away on hearing a cuss word. He quipped, “But how did the pure sweet young lady know what it was?”