Tiny Pony

I came across this blogpost thanks to Harshita Yalamarty. In it, Frank Chimero talks of a 'Tiny Pony'.

"...a thing that is exceptional that no one, for whatever reason, notices. Or, conversely, it is an exceptional thing that everyone notices, but quickly grows acclimated to despite the brilliance of it all."

Chimero had listed some Tiny Ponies, which are so very relevant. It gave me the idea for this blogpost, a list of my Tiny Ponies, as many as I can think of.

Being able to make quick and cheap STD/ISD calls. And e-mail. I often feel thankful for this as when my best friend in school relocated to another city we had to keep in touch by writing letters. I have all of them preserved carefully, but it is no match for the archiving services at Google. We could, at best, make calls to each other maybe once in six months. Now thanks to Facebook I know how beautiful she looked on her wedding day, even though I could not attend her wedding.

Being able to use CTRL+F and find anything in an e-document. I am all for old-fashioned books, with the crisp of their pages on my fingers and the smell of print, but it would sure do good if they came with CTRL+F options. For the sake of all those times I hopelessly search for a brilliant quote in a 500 page book, and end up looking for a needle in a haystack.

Being able to FWD or BCK quickly while watching a video on youtube or VLC player.  I know we could do that with a VCR and later a VCD player. But it is so much cooler when you can note the exact time and take the video with the help of the cursor to that exact spot. Or even, when you miss a dialog and you quickly press ALT+BCK and voila! it plays again. Compare that to watching Television. No pause, ALT+BCK or ALT+FWD. And all those commercials. Not worth it, watching Star Movies, now that you can download and watch movies at your own pace.

Being able to find out basically anything on the internet, in literally no time. Yeah, this is very obvious. Yet, I have a wonderfully suitable story for this one. On my brother's birthday I decided to treat him to lunch. We crossed out Italian, Chinese, South Indian, North Indian from the choices of cuisine and that left us with no options as far as our limited knowledge of restaurants was concerned. So we logged on to the net, more specifically www.foodiebay.com and found out this Mexican place called Sachos. It had been there, right under our noses, at CP (opp. Shankar Market). By the way, the food was great, and the Mexican music... awesome!

All of these things and others, like 'Bumping into old friends on Facebook', 'Reading Frank Chimero's blog, who lives I-dunno-how-many miles away', 'Listening to the Bob Dylan song which, for a long time, I could not listen to as I had destroyed the cassette',  'Putting my thoughts online and having then read, commented upon and liked by friends and strangers', etc. are the wonders that internet has brought to us. Our generation can actually understand it as we are the transition generation. Some of our younger sibling, nieces, nephews and in some cases, children will never be able to fully comprehend how internet and mobile telephony has changed lives. There are truly 'Tiny Ponies' making our lives easier and at times enriched.

But there is one more Tiny Pony I have to mention here. It has nothing to do with the wonders of technology, and perhaps it is very much exclusive to me. But it serves as a metaphor to something which most of us would have experience sometime or the other.

It happened when I was suffering from eye flu and confined to the house. I was sitting beside our lawn with a book in hand. After a long time I had this luxury of not having anything particular to do. 

I looked up from the book and scanned around. The boundary wall of my house had become almost black in places because of the moss… it had been raining that bad. Heaviest rainfall the dessert that is Delhi had seen in years, in decades.

There were trees and lush green plants in our garden and outside the house. Such is the way our house is situated, surrounded by greenery, while being in a city.

The aroma of the wet earth mixing with the fragrances rising from the washed plants. A heady combination, surely!

My eyes wandered towards a corner of the lawn, which used to be my favorite. The place where once stood a hibiscus tree. Big, red hibiscus flowers. Although hardly a tree, more like a shrub. But as a child it looked huge to me!

I would climb on the boundary wall, next to the tree, to pluck flowers. My mother would dissect them to tell me what the different parts were. I would look for bumble-bees, the fat, black ones, and put them on my palm. Delightful! The simple pleasures of childhood!

The tree was no longer there. It vanished, like so many happy things do, eaten to death by termites. My mother had put sacks of salt and bottles of kerosene to stop the termites from entering our house, leaving that spot infertile forever.

I was left with an eternal love for hibiscus. It is the happiest flower that there is. That day my eyes were searching for their hibiscus, there happiness, contentment.

I looked away. There was no point longing for something that no longer was there. Was that so? In one solitary corner of our garden, so far it went unnoticed by my eyes. A plant, a magical plant. Growing on it were three white hibiscus flowers. White! Rare, pure, like silver, like snow.

I had never seen a white hibiscus before, but there it was, sitting pretty in my own garden. All this while I had not noticed it. Like we fail to notice so many wonderful things in our lives, which make it magical, exciting.

I wish we wouldn't!