Business As Usual

Pleasant morning. Slight chill. Soothing, non-devotional music (for a change) from the Chinese Hut. The love birds of the Garden went about their business – as did the pretty girl (of our November 20, 2010 post) and her Sugar Daddy. They left hand-in-hand, in the cover of darkness – just before daybreak. This May-December romance is certainly going strong.
During the exercises, it was like any other day with women members outnumbering the men. Of late, there have been some significant absentees – Yusuf Rassiwala, Tara Chand, Ram Shankar Shukla, Pratap Bhatt… Some women have also been missing for long – Santosh Tyagi, Nafisa Syed, Rachika Majerekar, Ramila Mistry, Nazma Sayed among others. Those attending are not too regular either. Almost everybody has been complaining of winter cramps.
Bapu Rane (left) has apparently a bigger problem to complain about. He happens to be a victim of the massive demolition drive currently on at Adarsh Nagar – the locality he resides in. His house is not an illegal structure, but he has made a five-feet extension which will now have to be knocked down, and he does not like it. For the past week or so, he has been chasing municipal officials to regularize the extension, but to no avail.
“People in the neighborhood have constructed huge double-storeyed houses and got them regularized after bribing the municipality people,” Rane complained this morning. “I have made only a five-feet extension to my house for a tiny verandah and they are bent upon breaking it down. Is this justice?”
Rane knows that there is not much we can do to help him out – except perhaps lend him a sympathetic ear. But that is all he needs. The very fact he has the Club as his sounding board gives him the moral strength to carry on his struggle to protect that five-feet projection from his home.