What lies beneath your horizon (now!!)

We are living in a time when the world is claimed to be connected on an unimaginable scale yet everything seems so closer now than even a decade ago.

We fly more often. Radios have given way to TV and TV has given way to internet. Internet has made life more connected. We email at the push of the button and it reaches its destination almost instantaneously. The emails have replaced the post mails like internet has replaced TV but not more than that. We still switch on our TV like we listen to our radios although this we do only in our cars while making a quick transit.

I don’t know if there still are people who would listen to radios as a regular passion, anymore than say, in the last decade, when people tuned into the radio to listen to broadcasts about their favorite pastime, say a cricket match.

My first radio was a 2 in 1 Walkman radio, I bought from walmart (in 2001) and the first thing I hear was Dixie Chicks. Yes. Loved those days in Virginia. “Some days you gotta dance….  ”

The first walkman I had bought for myself was a Philips @Rs 600, when I was still in India, from a Philips showroom that had opened shop in Shahid Nagar, the prime location of Bhubaneswar.

I collected some oldens goldens like Kishor Kumars but I hooked more often to the “Boom Boom double boom, in my room…” and stereo nations and “happy days are just around the corner…”

So the 2 in 1 was more of a better one among these two. But I quickly gotten rid of it. (graduate students pressure!!) And that’s when I was coming into more of my new-found life style. Walking in Blacks-burgs woody avenues is more pleasurable than walking anywhere else I have ever done. I would discover   facts like this, a can of Pepsi @25 cents and so on.

Back in those days I hardly ever knew what a beer is even though I had the common sense or trivia, as you may, to put it in the list of alcoholic beverages. Samuel Adams became a favorite only in 2006,  5 years later to my love for canned drink and chicken wings. I have many more stories to tell about alcohol, I reserve for another day.

(Not really, I don’t recall everything I have enjoyed in life, this is one of the disadvantage of adults)

The chicken wings and the coke cans came with a love for comedy series on TV, like the Andrew Griffith show, the Americas in the 50s looked much like India (of a decade ago) and I thoroughly enjoyed it while solving a bountiful of homework problems for my graduate studies at Tech.

(Virginia Tech, among all the Techs in the United States)

There are plenty of stories of those times which I will tell some other day.

(Well when I am still older and not worrying about a livelihood)

So that’s how the Walkman radio quickly gave into the TV interest. Then later I don’t remember, may be a couple years later, I had turned into an American, quite a bit, with the accent, attributes, style and knowledge.

By knowledge I mean knowledge of walmart and high ways. see, how fast one really can become an American. My love for Burger King was already famed but that’s because it was pretty close to where I was at and they had like the best burgers. Santa Fe chicken was yet to come.

(I could have written a time-line of new foods on the rusty food joints that these places are but represent the best thing about USA, you meet the real Americans here)

So the later interest of TV was taking from Andrew Griffith Show to the Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier. Friends was yet to be discovered if I remember.