The other day, the wife actually spoke to me. She asked me why this column never covers world events and views, like the Arab-Israel conflict or Ukraine-Russia war? My answer is always the same, “I can’t cover any of that this week, because this week is my mother’s birthday. (Just to clarify, every week is not really my mother’s birthday, however, this week it is)”.
The wife then, like any well-settled mammal from the Serengeti plains, got a little territorial and asked me why this widely read, sorry, make that mildly read, column, never features her birthday? A tough question to answer, so I simply went with the truth. I blamed it on the editor, who, I said, found family birthday greetings a tad nepotistic. Imagine, if every week a whole column was dedicated to one relative or the other’s birthday.
However, under Indian constitutional law or labour law, (I forgot which), Article 17b, para 16 points out that in India, the mother and the cow are sacred. Also, as I explained to her, once she was out of earshot, and had left the room, “Unlike you, my mom actually reads the damn column, and moreover unlike you, she doesn’t correct the spellings and point out obvious grammatical errors”.
