That Old Box Near the Arches

     One sees in the various phases that change ushers in, the old usually are not cast out. They are just cast off. Like when you pass out of your current grade, you don't just throw your books away. You just put them away. And today, of all days, I was walking towards the first quadrangle at college. And I walked past something. And then, I shrugged. I wondered if something would work, function well, if at all it did.
     And then, I realised it wouldn't. A thing that was covered in pigeon-poop wasn't supposed to work. It is that yellow coin-box telephone. It is that. After I had walked past it, I realised it deserved more than my walking past. It demanded a photograph. And so...

The bottle-holder-ex-phone-box-pigeon-poop-bearer

     We all have our walkie-talkies now. Our very, very own mobile phones. But seeing the phone-box in the appalling condition gave birth to a seed of thought. Now that our college has been 140 years, surely, there has passed a time when the cellular entities, that live and throb in our hands, did not exist. And at that time, students like me and my classmates and friends and college-mates must've fussed around that telephone. Father Frazer wouldn't have had to keep his eyes as open for mobile phones as he does now. Chits and chits after chits must have been what texting-in-class today is. And for once, that telephone must have felt like a ruler. (No pun intended.)

And then, on the streets of Mumbai,

Fisherpersons were all the people.

Warli was all the art.

Oil never flowed into the Great Arabian.

There were no fires.

What a time that was.

What a time, that was.