The Evolution of Pastime
Once the trouble of getting a residence was settled, the inevitable problem of pastime arose. We had a house – fine! But what to do inside those four walls? Thankfully we had to spend most of the daytime in the office. Still you can’t be in the office forever and you can’t sleep whenever at home.
In those early days, we used to come back from office and make a meticulous attempt to decide how much money we owed to one another. We had to share equally the price of a washing soap or the fare of the auto. It wasn’t as easy as it seems. Added to the complexity was the urge to pass as much time as possible to avoid sitting idle in the rooms. Don’t think that there was a lot of money involved. It was more about the time than the money. We called the piece of paper, on which we put the final calculated result, the ‘log file’. The ‘log file’ is still alive but with much less time attached to it.
No matter how scrupulous we were regarding the ‘log file’ it wasn’t enough. So next came the newspaper. If you don’t understand what ‘reading between the lines’ means, you should have watched me then. No piece of news, however insignificant, could escape my studious vigor.
The newspaper session couldn’t last long. After all, how long can you force engineering students to read like that? (The answer, I suppose, will be, “three days preceding the exam”) So to aid the ‘log file’ and the newspaper came the FM radio. Now, this one was a real good source of entertainment. We liked the programs especially those on ‘Radio City’, stuff like ‘Dr Love’ or ‘Love Guru’.
At the end of the first month, we got our first salaries. I received my credit card too. Using that we added the final object to our pastime collection, a 21’’ flat screen colour television. Today the TV is the most used of the lot. But all other forms of our previous pastimes still exist.
In those early days, we used to come back from office and make a meticulous attempt to decide how much money we owed to one another. We had to share equally the price of a washing soap or the fare of the auto. It wasn’t as easy as it seems. Added to the complexity was the urge to pass as much time as possible to avoid sitting idle in the rooms. Don’t think that there was a lot of money involved. It was more about the time than the money. We called the piece of paper, on which we put the final calculated result, the ‘log file’. The ‘log file’ is still alive but with much less time attached to it.
No matter how scrupulous we were regarding the ‘log file’ it wasn’t enough. So next came the newspaper. If you don’t understand what ‘reading between the lines’ means, you should have watched me then. No piece of news, however insignificant, could escape my studious vigor.
The newspaper session couldn’t last long. After all, how long can you force engineering students to read like that? (The answer, I suppose, will be, “three days preceding the exam”) So to aid the ‘log file’ and the newspaper came the FM radio. Now, this one was a real good source of entertainment. We liked the programs especially those on ‘Radio City’, stuff like ‘Dr Love’ or ‘Love Guru’.
At the end of the first month, we got our first salaries. I received my credit card too. Using that we added the final object to our pastime collection, a 21’’ flat screen colour television. Today the TV is the most used of the lot. But all other forms of our previous pastimes still exist.
posted by kb at 1:37 PM
3 Comments:
Abe saale it is possible you spent so much time on the "log file" because of the miserly nature of people around you??.......anyway thats that........TV kaun sa kharida re??
ONIDA BLACK
"But we would soon find out that this humble dwelling had added benefits other than its inexpensiveness."
still waiting for this part.....
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