Wakey Wakey

Remember the summer holidays, when the excursion to the mountains was done, the homework more or less completed, and the cousins had come and gone, and it was up to you to entertain yourself? Out came paper taken from dad’s office, with the letterhead portion torn off not-so-neatly using a footruler, and out came the box of poster paints, and the brushes. My brushes were always bent like a dog’s tail, and stuck stiff with the memories of ghastly artwork from many months ago. They were made with sable hair, apparently:

The sable (Martes zibellina) is a species of marten which inhabits forest environments, primarily in Russia from the Ural Mountains throughout Siberia, in northern Mongolia and China and on Hokkaidō in Japan…. It has historically been harvested for its highly valued fur, which remains a luxury good to this day. (Wickedpedia)

Yeah! And Camel/Camlin was making 2-rupee sable hair paintbrushes for my grubby generation of schoolgoers. Rrrrrrrrrrrright!

Anyway, the paints were all dry and cracked, of course. Asking the parents for a new box was risky. Before PowerPoint and Excel, it was difficult to make a business case for the procurement of new resources for a project that was not expected to even recover costs, so the old paints had to be revived. A bit of water, vigorous shaking (with the lid PROPERLY closed) and waiting a few hours yielded acceptable results. And when the brushes were dipped in water, they un-clumped and resigned themselves to the torture that awaited them.

And so it is with the blog. I’m putting water in all the cracked paints: the ochre of comedy, the Prussian blue of insanity, the crimson of angry rants, the black and white of memories, the green of uninformed opinion, and the brown of bullshit. The dog-tailed brushes are probably made out of dog tails, but I’m getting them ready again nonetheless!