Recent acquisitions

I recently purchased a laptop (Compaq Presario B1803) and a Mobiblu 1GB MP3 player. The laptop has since become quite indispensable (especially for doing assignments related to the post graduate courses). The MP3 player is also unique because of its cube-like shape and its size. Both were purchased from India. While I paid close to Rs. 75K for the laptop, I had to shell out about Rs. 7K for the MP3 player.

Another of the recent buys was an apartment in a building that is under construction in the far-flung suburbs of Mumbai (actually, in Airoli in Navi Mumbai). This is supposed to be ready for occupation sometime in March 2007.

Over the weekend, I was at Dadar (West) hunting for some "Abhang" books for a co-worker of mine. (The co-worker has initiated a "weekly prayer meeting" every Thrusday and needed some copies of the Abhang book to be able for the people to sing from the book.). I was quite disappointed at the fact that I wasn't able to find the book that I had bought a few months back from Titwala. That disappointment was even more due to the fact that the book publishers were from Parel, just some distance away from Dadar.

Until some years ago, Dadar was "the" market place where one could get most of such "Maharashtrian" things. There is still the same kind of feeling one gets these days, but its much reduced. One of the comments in the caustic monologue in "Mee anu Maza Shatrupaksh" (me and my enemies) by P. L. Deshpande (a.k.a. Pu La) was (to translate to English): "On Ranade Road in Dadar, Mumbai and Laxmi Road, Pune there is nothing that one cannot get that is available in the other parts of the world". Although this was a bit of an exaggeration (it was more of humor), one could still imagine the market place that was Dadar.