Gender-based colors???

Titan showroom:
me: I want a medium sized watch with date display on it.
Shopkeeper: No Ma'am, ladies watches dont come with the date display. I can show you gents watch if you want.

Bata showroom:
me: Sports shoes chahiye
Salesguy: You can check out these (pointing to a shelf with Baby pink and baby blue coloured shoes). These are new ones which have come for ladies.
me: No, I dont want pink, Do you have any with brown or army green colour?
Salesguy: Nahi, not for ladies, gents wala milega chalega?

Street vendor selling wallets:
me: Bhaiya, zara wallets dikhana
Street-vendor: Yeh dekho (showing a small ladies purse)... naya maal hai... fashion hai.. sab yahi lete hai
me: Nahi.. aisa nahi.. woh wala dikhana (pointing to a wallet)
Street-vendor: par woh gents ka hai madam

Why? Why is this travesty of nature happening? Why are even colors classified on the base of gender? Arent girls supposed to like army green colour? Arent girls supposed to know the current date? Are all girls supposed to have the same choice?

Let me start with watches. Go to a shop and ask for a ladies watch and youll be shown only the ones which have thin straps, small dial with no marking for minutes and no date or day indication on it. Okay, so girls will never have to know the exact timing. For them 8:44 or 8:46 will not make any difference?? I know I am not the CEO of an MNC that getting late by 2min will cost me 2-billion$ but yes, time does matter when my train from pune reaches mumbai at 8:25 and I run from one platform to another, punch my ticket and get into a local to vashi which leaves dot at 8:29. Now coming to shoes. Go to the ladies section and only colours youll find is Pink, Baby blue, Rin Supreme WHITE and some fluorescent colours. I tried one pair of WHITE shoes on and when I looked into the mirror, I could see only the shoes. It was as if the rest of me suddenly disappeared. They make everything else look drab. The ladies purse need the notes to be folded atleast 37 times in order to fit them in. You will hardly find girl's T-shirt with collar. These days you will only find "pencil" jeans (for guys who dont go for shopping with their gfs, pencil jeans are tapered till the ankle and can make any decent-looking girl look like a slut). 95% of handbags come with very short straps such that the bag will lie just few millimeters below your armpit and material used these days are so shiny that they can reflect light better than a mirror (I can rather eat a bowl of maggots than go out with that :-/).

I am not exactly tom-boyish but I prefer looking simple and decent like a normal human-being. I dont want to perform circus tricks wearing high heel sandals. I dont want my shoes to be visible on google earth. I dont want earrings that look like James bond's "Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator". I dont want a watch that looks like everything else but a err... a watch. I am done with the embarrassment of always checking the gent's section. I just dont want the manufacturers to assume that all girls have the same taste in things. I can understand that they are coming up with PINK mobiles and iPods to cater to the female population but seriously.. a PINK mercedes and Enzo ferrari?? Now thats crossing limits.

Feels like heaven

"Where do you stay in Mumbai?", "Anushakti-Nagar" I'd answer with pride as if it were some Buckingham Palace. I moved to Anushaktinagar from Kaiga (no, its not in Mars, its a place just below Goa, in Karnataka, a place so isolated that even radio signals refuse to come in, a place where the morning newspapers reach at 4 in the eveving, a place where you need to travel 65 kms just to buy a needle, a place where there are no movie theatres, basically a place where you'll feel as if you are the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust) some 10 years back. Despite no radio and movies for 13 years, I never wanted to move out of Kaiga because I have always been this small-town nature loving girl. For me Mumbai meant tall buildings, crowded roads, huge malls, slums and too much pollution. I thought I would hate it. Surprisingly I didnt. Not because I found myself loving all the above mentioned things but because I found the same "close to nature small-town" like place right in the center of mumbai. A place where the percentage of total area covered with trees is same as that of total earth area covered with water (I know I could have just said "more than 70%" :)), a place where you can wake up in the morning hearing the birds chirping, a place where each building has its own football ground, a place where you can see atleast 10 different types of birds living in a tree just outside your bedroom window, a place where snakes cross the roads at noon, a place where you can drive with your eyes closed, a place that feels like heaven. I dont think I have loved any place I've seen on this earth as much as I love "Colony". Anyway the whole purpose of this post was to show off some pictures of colony I took a few days back using my digicam. And I wanted to try out this new widget too. You will need flash installed in your PC for this. Click on the pic to see the next one. The sad part is you cant enlarge the pics and half the total space is wasted to show the text, so the pics wont be very clear.