Larry King, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and my family

All right...to all you guys who don't know, my family is one of what many people would call geeks, nerds or the like, but one we are proud of, for to us, "Knowledge is power". And my uncle has so much of it that he works at a thermal power station...queer. We watch the news with ritualistic reverence, newspapers like His messages, one gets the idea, does one not?

On the one side, there is my grandfather. If you ask him the difference between an SC, an ST and an OBC, he'll probably spend the rest of the day, if not week, explaining it in legal language to you. If knowing stuff could get you land, he would have bought the Taj Mahal and have the money to relocate the Big Ben in front of it. But sadly, knowledge cant get you land or cash or all things nice, so he remains as any other of his age. He wants the habit to pass on, though, because the firs thing he does when I get back from school is to shove the newspaper, supplement and all, under my nose. He sits about 7 inches away from the TV screen, watching nothing but the news. In all probability, he may have been the force behind NDTV's decision to come up with the name 24/7.

And then there's my grandmother. Apart from getting a septuagenarian ear out for all the neighbourhood gossip(for my usage, of course) along with the aforementioned news channels in the aforementioned distance from the TV screen. All this apart, she also does what can be called a careful scrutiny of various Tamil magazines, for women and otherwise, devotional or otherwise, et cetra.

Almost last, and maybe the least(no offence, people, you're just the bottom of the sky or the top of the earth!), are these noble souls' sons and daughters-in-law. They are hard workers, but they nevertheless catch up on any news they can find. They keep their eyes peeled and their ears open, these people, looking for things such as corporate politics, management fissures and the likes. They can tell you the difference between nuclear fission and fusion, the know-how and the know-why, they can be philosophical about that last piece of chocolate, they can do a lot of things...


And now, last, but never, never the least, it is us, the third and the three point fifth generations of the family, the ones that are going to take India to the world(shamelessly copied from the Aditya Birla ad) and we are the ones that need to keep pace with our surroundings, as we are. We read the newspapers(Exception:Bala), take in carefully measured ammounts of gossip(Exception:Bala) and watch every available news brodcast(Exception:Bala), not to mention looking up everything we need on Wikipedia, Wiktionary and stuff like that(Exception:Bala).
We know, not all, but a good sized chunk of what we want to know.

bala