Thanksgiving and Papaji Kanpur Wale.!!!
Circa 1987: One cold morning in Lakhimpur, the sleepy little town in UP, India.
Yours truly was a bleary eyed, grade 6 kid who had to get up, out of the coziness of a warm bed to sit on chair and solve some algebra problems. If your mom was a teacher, you'd know that life as a kid is not always easy.
The doorbell rang, it was the newspaper guy. I ran to pick it up but what caught my attention was a funny little pink colored pamphlet, with broad headlines, "Papaji Kanpur Wale ki Loot Maar Saree Sale" (loosely translated as, "The big brother from Kanpur organizes a grand sale for sarees").
Circa 2005: Night of Nov 24, Thanksgiving eve. Santa Clara. Time: 10.55 pm
Three friends bent over a laptop screen finding out where the best deals were and where do you get a laptop at throwaway prices. Two of them sifting through a 7 inches thick pile of newspaper pamphlets advertizing the deals. Some offer 40%-70% off and some offer digital cameras for $10.
Just then, another chum joins in. He immediately pounces on the laptop and opens his mail account. No body objects for he has just received an excel spreadhseet which lists all the deals(and they were some 2000 of them, gathered from newspaper cuttings). All of us watch intently. It indeed is a spreadsheet with deals organized by stores. We perform all sorts of MS Excel jugglery to find the best deals and zero in on a couple of stores we might want to attack, even as I wonder how much effort would it have taken to build the list.
The morning after is a mad scramble. After 10 minutes of incessant shouting, buddies manage to wake me up and all of us jump in a car to raid the store we decided a night before. We come to the store and we are heartbroken, the store is not yet opened and the queue outside is no less than a good 500 meters and I am not exaggerating.
In the end, we do manage to get some good deals, though, I am sure several others got better than us. But what existed was a festive spirit, a kind of mild competition to grab the deal before the other guy and a sense of triumph when you do manage to buy something cheaper.
Two days later, the spirit is gone but the feeling lingers on. When sanity returns, you understand that there is no difference between Papaji Kanpur Wale and Thanksgiving. While Papaji narrates his story of how he suffered severe export losses and how he has to dump everything at dirt cheap prices and how the city is lucky to host him and how this sale will only last 2 days (which invariably gets extended to 10 days but never in instalments of more than 2 days), with thanksgiving, its much more organized. Imagine all cities and towns of India hosting Papaji Kanpur Wale on a single day and the government declaring a holiday that day to enable people to raid him. That would be Indian Thanksgiving.
And then the people. I always thought that only middle class women would be interested in Papaji Kanpur Wale, but that can be explained by the fact that Papaji only sells sarees. If Papaji diversifies into selling DVD players, TVs, Camcorders, SD Memory cards, Laptops etc., I am sure enthusiasm level in India too would transcend sex and age boundaries.
In the end, there is no difference. People are the same be it in Sitapur or in San Jose. Vendors are the same, be it Papaji Kanpur Wale or Walmart (and I know it sounds weird).
Sky is blue, wherever you look at it from and blood is indeed red, wheresoever it flows. Feelings, spirit, everyday concerns, daily struggles, dreams and aspirations have a universal color and vibration. You find cadence and resonance everywhere.
Yours truly was a bleary eyed, grade 6 kid who had to get up, out of the coziness of a warm bed to sit on chair and solve some algebra problems. If your mom was a teacher, you'd know that life as a kid is not always easy.
The doorbell rang, it was the newspaper guy. I ran to pick it up but what caught my attention was a funny little pink colored pamphlet, with broad headlines, "Papaji Kanpur Wale ki Loot Maar Saree Sale" (loosely translated as, "The big brother from Kanpur organizes a grand sale for sarees").
Circa 2005: Night of Nov 24, Thanksgiving eve. Santa Clara. Time: 10.55 pm
Three friends bent over a laptop screen finding out where the best deals were and where do you get a laptop at throwaway prices. Two of them sifting through a 7 inches thick pile of newspaper pamphlets advertizing the deals. Some offer 40%-70% off and some offer digital cameras for $10.
Just then, another chum joins in. He immediately pounces on the laptop and opens his mail account. No body objects for he has just received an excel spreadhseet which lists all the deals(and they were some 2000 of them, gathered from newspaper cuttings). All of us watch intently. It indeed is a spreadsheet with deals organized by stores. We perform all sorts of MS Excel jugglery to find the best deals and zero in on a couple of stores we might want to attack, even as I wonder how much effort would it have taken to build the list.
The morning after is a mad scramble. After 10 minutes of incessant shouting, buddies manage to wake me up and all of us jump in a car to raid the store we decided a night before. We come to the store and we are heartbroken, the store is not yet opened and the queue outside is no less than a good 500 meters and I am not exaggerating.
In the end, we do manage to get some good deals, though, I am sure several others got better than us. But what existed was a festive spirit, a kind of mild competition to grab the deal before the other guy and a sense of triumph when you do manage to buy something cheaper.
Two days later, the spirit is gone but the feeling lingers on. When sanity returns, you understand that there is no difference between Papaji Kanpur Wale and Thanksgiving. While Papaji narrates his story of how he suffered severe export losses and how he has to dump everything at dirt cheap prices and how the city is lucky to host him and how this sale will only last 2 days (which invariably gets extended to 10 days but never in instalments of more than 2 days), with thanksgiving, its much more organized. Imagine all cities and towns of India hosting Papaji Kanpur Wale on a single day and the government declaring a holiday that day to enable people to raid him. That would be Indian Thanksgiving.
And then the people. I always thought that only middle class women would be interested in Papaji Kanpur Wale, but that can be explained by the fact that Papaji only sells sarees. If Papaji diversifies into selling DVD players, TVs, Camcorders, SD Memory cards, Laptops etc., I am sure enthusiasm level in India too would transcend sex and age boundaries.
In the end, there is no difference. People are the same be it in Sitapur or in San Jose. Vendors are the same, be it Papaji Kanpur Wale or Walmart (and I know it sounds weird).
Sky is blue, wherever you look at it from and blood is indeed red, wheresoever it flows. Feelings, spirit, everyday concerns, daily struggles, dreams and aspirations have a universal color and vibration. You find cadence and resonance everywhere.
posted by Prashant @ 7:58 AM
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