Sunday, June 22, 2008

Of Santa and the questions we don't ask

The other day a certain oft-forwarded piece on the follies of 'Santa' (of Santa-Banta fame) showed itself in my inbox...and a certain joke...another of Santa's supposedly funny reactions...lead me to write what is now turning to be my first blog. It goes like this:-Santa walks into a computer store and the guy, who is a salesperson, I think, tells him, "Sir, here is a machine that can reduce your work by half." The laughs come at the end of Santa's spontaneous riposte," Well then, can I have two of those?"You may or may not choose to laugh at this, depending upon the brand of humour you espouse. Frankly speaking, to me it seemed quite lame. But it generally led me to think, you know, that very often, the ones who get made fun off, or labeled as something or the other, are always those who ask questions. Santa is foolish, is what we all know and you may have read many of his exploits that testify to this fact...but this question in particular, seemed quite the obvious to me. If I didn't know what comps were all about, if I didn't belong to the generation that is more comfortable with a laptop in its bed than a human being, I'd probably say the same thing. It reminds me of how as children we would always wonder where babies came from and were told that Mom had to go to the hospital to get one from God. Or the time when my baby sis confused my parents by saying that they should have bought a wall clock instead of a refrigerator, because she thought the commercial on TV said the latter was free-it was actually the other way round. Or when my brother thought that the very fact that he was sitting in a restaurant would mean that the waiter would automatically bring up a 'rosogolla' to him...and was hurt when no such thing happened. It leads me, in other words, to conclude that it is perhaps the way we react to things or circumstances or even people we are not aware of that is considered foolish...and also leads me to think of the typically typical typifications that our world is accustomed to...

Disclaimer:-This is not a harangue against sardar jokes

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