Thursday, January 10, 2013

Happy Clogging! – My Losar Greetings



New Year, as per the Gregorian calendar, is just over and it’s time for another of the few new years we, the Bhutanese celebrate, in different parts of this small country – Lomba in Haa and Paro region, Chunipa  Losar in the East, Dasain in the southern part and the Daw Dangpa Losar.  The immediate one due is Chunipa Losar, popularly known as ‘The Sharchokp Losar’. 
And it is time for another round of greetings – sending wishing cards (on the dwindle now), calling up friends and families (the order of precedence here is intentional; friends are always dealt with first, especially friends of the opposite sex type, after which comes the family), sending text messages (sms), which is the most popular form as of now, and finally through social networking sites, the most popular being the facebook ( I can’t imagine how we would have managed our lives without this facebook!).
For the point for discussion, let me take the most popular of the mediums, the sms.  By now, I am very sure that people would have already started sending them, most comprising of just a simple “Happy Losar”, while a few would sound very lyrical and the better ones circulated further by the recipients, for their friends, taking the credit to themselves, of course.  But, it’s not the plagiarism issue that I am going to discuss here.  I leave that to their conscience.
As thousands of sms are sent from equal number of mobile phones across Bhutan, my lay brain, technically (and is it electronically too?)  illiterate that I am, can only imagine what is happening in the air – text messages made up of letters, numbers and punctuation marks – physically going around and flying in all directions.  Such things happening, unavoidably, there will be lot of collusions, as each individual message try to move towards the direction it was intended, and the wind playing its part, or better still, havoc.  A funny situation would have occurred, whereby the letters in the words of messages would get entangled, not able to move any direction due to the resultant force each is trying to apply, looking something like vapour trail left behind by jets.
“qaswer3thgf6yuk$mnj*h9vcm*6np#5u7yt2rewagh<sqwgds>cuit?dvhv”!  Can anyone, out there, make a head or tail of this?  I can’t!  If all letters, excepting those letters with closed and rounded edges, like the letters o, d, I and b, due to obvious reasons, get entangled in the air, each trying to go their own way and the wind trying to take them on its way, the jumbled crowd would like something like the above.  It may even look like a handful of iron filings clinging on to a magnet.
Imagine a colony of ants, or swarm of ants, or an army of ants, (not sure which is correct?) moving around in a disorderly and haphazardly manner, each trying to get a piece of a grasshopper’s carcass, that has just been smashed by a careless human foot.  The scene may even look something like that.  The messages will then get clogged and not reach its intended address. (Hey, we sometimes receive a day old sms, remember?)  At least not on time!
But in reality I know no such things will happen.  Words and letter will not move physically in their physically form.  It is just my wild imaginations that gave me this crazy idea.  Anyway thank you for bearing with me.
Here’s wishing everybody a very Happy Losar.  Let’s clog the air with our greetings.  Happy Clogging!  Hehehehe…. 

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