Overseas visitor

The last few days have been busy thanx to a visitor from overseas, Australia to be precise! The lady is of Indian extraction, having been born here and moved to Australia at the age of about 21 - she is back here in India almost 40 years later to celebrate her 60th birthday in the place of her birth in Madurai. Now that's a nice, original way to spend your 60th birthday I would think!

This visitor had been to India once in between, some 16 years ago so she was seeing a new India, quite different from what she had seen one and a half decades earlier. I asked her what her initial impressions of the country of her birth were and she came out with some very original view points which I thought must be recorded lest we over look some of what we take for granted. She cited the industriousness of the ordinary people on the street as something that was striking - for instance the pin-men or the ironing man in our neighbourhoods who show up at our doorsteps and collect all our washed clothes that need ironing and return them all neatly ironed. Something she has never seen in the many countries that she has visited! She even noticed that these industrious folks don't use electricity, prefer charcoal, and noted that they have territories to operate in! I could bet that a lot of folks who use these pin-men are not aware of these issues!

The other thing that seemed to strike her is the complete acceptance of the driving public to animal obstacles they encounter on the road and the complete acceptance by the bovine species to traffic buzzing around them while they lie in the middle of the highway and chew their cud! She wondered whether it was a kind of 'live and let live' policy on the part of both humans and animals that allows such a situation to exist!! Now isn't that a unique perspective? After all its their world too, right?

Sometimes it takes a visitor to point out ordinary things in our lives!