Meri chacheri behen ke maasi ka pota...

I can see all the desi ears prop up. Partly, because of the unusual title; and partly, because all of us have heard some version of this statement. May be at a family gathering, munching on Good Day biscuits and sipping on small cups of Taj Mahal tea. Or in a pre-nuptial-bride-skill-display ceremony on a fine Sunday morning. Or mostly when a chirpy neighbor dropped over at your house for a bowl of yogurt and began weaving tales of gossip.

At some point in time, we were always astounded by the fact that people had such strong memories of seemingly long connections. We dismissed the idea of relegating such facts to our memory, for the elusive belief that we had much more "practical" fodder for our braincells.

However sophisticated we may seem than our predecessors, our inherent human urge to gossip, or socialize for the jittery, remained unfulfilled and found its vent in the social networks which we so dearly use. "Meri chacheri behen ke maasi ka pota" simply got effaced by "Me>Chacha>beti>maasi>pota". News Feed replaced word-of-mouth gossip, and Wall Photos & Videos took over the effervescent, detailed descriptions of chewy acts. They may be besotted by the colorful life of fillum stars keeping accounts of which star remarried whom, who rejected whom, and who threw a fit on the sets. But so do we leech from Celebrity pages and websites dedicated for the single purpose of cashing in on the innate human desire to invade the private lives of others.

Technology brought edification, but we still remain the friendly neighborhood gossip-mongers at heart...


When US beckoned me by Siddharth Wagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.