Twenty- five Seven

Irritatingly acronymous

September 4, 2014
This is my 3rd post for the Write TribePro Bloggers September Challenge.

For three years in a row my daughter was a definite contender for the class general knowledge prize and she was quite confident of winning it for the fourth time. But sadly to her dismay and mine, she lost by the wrong answer to the question : What does WWF stand for? Much to her bad luck it wasn’t the conventional World Wildlife Fund vut World Wrestling Federation which was the rage of the boys in school that year.

Acronyms or abbreviations made out of the initials of the words making up a name are increasingly being used with very little concern about whether or not people understand them. Of course they are used by people who are familiar with the jargon for instance DNR would mean Do Not Resuscitate which any rookie doctor or paramedic would understand. But it is annoying to say the least when a doctor scribbles NBM ( nil by mouth) on your pre-surgery instructions expecting you to understand that he means you to eat nothing before coming in for the surgery.

Somehow acronyms have become par for the course and newspapers are happily peppered with headlines like this one : OHE wire snap disrupts CR’s Main line. This translates into Over Head Wire snaps and disrupts Central Railway’s Main line. And of course we have all the banks, corporate offices and government departments being referred to as HDFC, BOI, MEA, ONGC, GAIL, VSNL,BEST and so on and so forth.

But what is really irritating when people are referred to by their initials and you are told to go to ABC (Aditya Bhushan Chavan) who is the DDM (Deputy Manager) , HR ( Human Resources) and ask for CL (casual leave). This is particularly the case in organisations when HODs ( Heads of Department) or certain key people are alphabetised rather than being referred to as Sethi Sir or Preeti Ma’am.

How often we are asked to provide PINs and PANs while doing monetary transactions! An online transaction can be most irritating with information pertaining to these and other questions like providing a CCV and the ZIP or PIN of our mailing address. While speaking to a recorded message we are often asked to rate the IVR by pressing different numbers on the dial pad.

And enough has been said of acronyms used in everyday language on internet chat. This is an all new ballgame that gets more complicated because of the everyday idiom that is peculiar to a particular culture or country. Indeed I can go on and on with examples of irritating acronyms but I’ve got lots to catch up on so I’ll TTYL. ( Talk to you later)
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Rainbow over the city

September 2, 2014
The gloomy wet greyness of September spilled over to the second day, strangely proving true the weather forecast of the BBC which had assured us wet weather with thunder showers all through the weekend till Tuesday.

It wasn’t as wet as I’d expected though we did get caught in a sudden cloud burst after which the sky turned brilliantly bright and sunny. I was just pottering around wondering whether I should get down to some Yoga or do something less physical when I got a call telling me to look out of the kitchen window . I ran to the back of the house and saw a brilliant rainbow rising out of a cluster of buildings reaching out to the darkened sky, straddling almost the entire city! I’m glad I rushed out when I did because I managed to catch its ethereal beauty as the colours split into a faintly visible orange, yellow and green band hovering over the skyscrapers below. Sadly I couldn’t follow the rest of the rainbow as it got lost in the murky sky but I’m sure at the other end, there would have definitely been a pot of gold as the belief goes.

Rainbows are fleeting, a brief reminder of nature’s beauty even on the greyest day. And by the time I uploaded my photograph, the rainbow had just melted away.

For some unknown reason, rainbows always bring to mind the lines by Ogden Nash’s poem ” Song to be sung by the father of infant female children” which I’d learned way back as a fourteen year old when marriage and children were far from my mind.

My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky;Contrariwise, my blood runs coldWhen little boys go by.For little boys as little boys,No special hate I carry,But now and then they grow to men,And when they do, they marry.No matter how they tarry,Eventually they marry.And, swine among the pearls,They marry little girls.

My little girls have long since grown and flown the nest but strangely these words still linger in my subconscious mind to be brought to the fore each time a rainbow brightens up the sky.
Related articles

The rainbow connection(wcs4.blogspot.com)
Song of the Circus

September 1, 2014

Aaah ! As I sit down in front of my PC I realise that it is the beginning of yet another month. September has come faster than August did and even faster than July. Am I the only one who feels that time gets faster as the years go by? It is already the middle of the second half of the year and it will be just tomorrow when we welcome December.

After a dry June and wet July and August, we thought we’d seen the last of the rains when we celebrated Coconut Day mid August. But the monsoons seem to have revived with all the coconuts the sea received and this weekend was the wettest ever.

I have Wow Dinga to keep me company and after a four day break which he spent with his parents, I was happy to discover his new words and antics while the rain poured relentlessly outside. For me it was my own clown show with Wow Dinga’s exaggerated wobbly walk and forced fake laughter. He was the veritable ring master with his masterful “Tung” as he flung the bright Duplo bricks far and wide. And we his four care-takers were like the lions he’d tamed as we’d pick them up and lay them at his feet, only to have them flung again. Yesterday, he found a baton among the walking sticks left at the entrance and he marched up and down the house pointing autocratically at things.

Indeed, it reminded me of the Circus I used to visit every year with its trapeze artists and elephants and sad looking lions. My heart would be in my mouth as I watched the trapeze artists perform high above the crowd and would close my ears at the sound of the Ride of Death with the motorcyclist going round and round a caged ball. And the tin pot band with its screechy trumpets would play out melodies like Come September which remains in my memory as a circus song.