Old habits…

It should come as no surprise to you that a pronounced ESTJ such as myself is a creature of habit.

Here are a few amusing examples:

1. I cannot stand spelling errors. There are no exceptions to this. When I took to reading voraciously as a teenager after I was introduced to my first library by my parents, I once came across a spelling mistake of the word…’mistake’ in a novel. It was a match made in heaven. I found the error both ironic & appalling. Significantly more of the latter I assure you. I promptly took a sharpened pencil and got to work. I found 10 other spelling errors in that novel. I even had my father look up the author’s address and I wrote a letter (this was well before the Internet was invented…) to inform him of these errors that I had found and corrected in his novel. Little did I know at the time that the author had been quite dead for a few decades and that seven million other copies of this book were out there in the big wide world…
2. I once saw a friend of mine bump his head rather badly on the sharp edge of a table. I was 7 years old at the time. I’ll have you know that it has been quite a while since that day. I will never forget the look of abundant pain on his face as he furiously rubbed his head to relieve himself of the unforgiving pang. Ever since then, I cup my hand around the edge of any table that I find a child beside or under. The table could well be made of foam and I still do it. So much so that just last week, I was doing that for my daughter one evening and roughly 15 minutes later as my daughter was in another room altogether, my hand was still cupped around the table while I was eating my dinner with the other hand completely oblivious of this mannerism. My wife asked me why I had my one hand cupped around the edge of the table. I tried my best to assure her that it had nothing at all to do with the food that she had prepared. She didn’t look entirely convinced…
3. I find that it is a characteristic of most people who grew up in a crowded city in India to describe distances in units of time; not distance. This is true regardless of where they currently reside or for how long. For example, if you ask me how far away my home is from my office, I would probably say that it is around 25 minutes away; not that the distance is 25 miles. This is because in the city of Bombay where I was born & raised; it can take thrice as long (or even more on special occasions like a faint drizzling for instance) to cover that same distance (in a motorized vehicle…) due to the traffic density. If the journey took less time than that, one began to wonder if one’s wrist watch is running behind…
4. In the interest of avoiding a visit to the hospital or to the morgue, it behooved one to look both ways before crossing a one-way street in the city of Bombay. This was true even when I was growing up there…a few years ago. To its credit, I must point out that among crowded cities in India, Bombay even now still has some of the tamest road traffic in comparison. You’re practically a Jedi if you can cross the street intact in most other crowded cities in India. I have now been residing in the United States of America for the last 14 years which on any given day has significantly more law-abiding driving practices in any of its crowded cities. I still look both ways before crossing a 1-way street…