Gerald D'Cunha

"I wonder what ants do on rainy days?" ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood I t's raining relentlessly outside. Like Haruki Murakami, I, too, wonder what ants do on rainy days! Two days ago, while I was teaching Sharan, my eyes fell on his smartphone...  "New one?" I asked Sharan, feeling the beautiful baby in my hand. "Yes Sir," Sharan replied. "What is special about it?" I asked not realizing, that I was exposing my lack of general knowledge. "Sir, you don't know about this phone?" yelled Varun, Sharan's friend, almost mocking at my ignorance. "It's the latest Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus... It has five cameras... It can charge your phone just by placing yours on its back... etc. etc.," the young gun kept blazing. "How much did you pay for it?" I asked Sharan. "Sir, everybody knows about its price," Sharan said, ...

“W e are rich,” beamed Kannan this morning in our Tai Chi class. Obviously, the topic of discussion, today, was the cash crunch. “You know what,” Kannan explained, “I had this old Jewish habit of putting a small amount – rupees 5, 10, 20, 50 whatever – into a box and forget about it. Last week, when everyone around me was crying for cash and cursing Government, banks and ATMs, I quietly opened my box… and behold, it had over nine thousand rupees… It was like a treasure… We are rich!” I smiled when I heard this new story from Kannan. Just a few days before the demonetization was announced, I had taken out the drawer of my wardrobe for cleaning up. I had not taken it out for years… As I cleared the piles of unwanted stuff, I was pleasantly surprised to find inside hundreds of rupees 5 and 10 coins. Unlike Kannan, I had not placed those coins there consciously… Instead, I had left them there casually without realizing that, one day, they might come handy when all the bi...