A box of letters, all several pages long. Letters from my father, my friends...a couple of them from my grandfather, written in a script I'm still pretty much alien to. Some photographs, of roadside picnics and me climbing trees. A photograph of my mother...black and white and somewhat yellow...the pigtailed girl in the picture looks nothing like Maa, except for her super curly hair and her impish smile, both of which have remained the same. A pocket phonebook with alphebetical tabs, contacts that have confined themselves to the phonebook,but vanished otherwise. My slam book (I wonder whether my ten year old facebook savvy niece has ever heard of a slam book) from high school...the pages bear testimony to our fervent attempts at being "cool." Friendship bands tumble out in a tangle of fibres and colours, and I fail to remember who tied which one. My "School Captain" badge, rusty and worn. The dupatta from my uniform, crumpled and spotty and yellowed...scribbled all over...parting notes from people I won't meet for years to come. An email printout I still remember every word of...a single blue earring, the other one of the pair lost in the jumble of time. And I realise it's no point trying to look for it anymore after all.
For about a week or so now, there has been a huge outrage in the Assamese community concerning a particular "news item" shown on a regional channel which passed moral judgement on women based on what they were wearing. The said piece went from being riduculously stupid to simply bizarre ....comparing girls dressed in short skirts and shorts to monkeys! As expected, the channel had to withdraw the video and issue an apology. The outrage still continues though. My facebook newsfeed is full of satirical memes featuring the so called journalist and I have seen flyers of lectures and discussions being planned in colleges to protest the moral policing. As a person who swore off watching Assamese news channels years back for its regressive content, this kind of "reporting" didn't really come as a surprise to me. In fact, it was a similar segment I saw in another one of these channels a couple of years back which actually made me skip watching these channels in the f...
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