Quite a few of us wait to retire. We long for the days when we have nothing to do, go nowhere and stay put. I do believe too many of such days can be boring and quite disastrous.

My neighbor Mr Kishore retired the other day and since our terraces are joined at the centre he told me not to bring my dog up as he wanted to laze around. I watched him 'lazing around' on the terrace for the first day, again the second day and Mr Kishore found it too troublesome climbing up and decided to laze around at home and in bed:

Sadly, our patriotism wakes up twice a year, one being the 15th of August and the other the 26th of Jan. Maybe it's the psychological effect of the flag being hoisted or unfurled, the national anthem being sung, or patriotic speeches being said!

But after a few days have passed, we go back to the business of deriding and pulling down our country.

Once upon a time many years ago, there lived a jovial young man called Charles along with his pretty wife and three children. It was Charles’ job to look after the children in an orphanage, and he looked after the children as if they were his own. In the compound of the orphanage was an old church built in memory of the patron saint of shoemakers.

One day as Charles was at home, having his afternoon siesta, he heard the terrified voice of his wife screaming. “There’s a tiger in the compound! There’s a tiger in the compound!” Charles, who had had a hard day’s work, thinking he was in the middle of a dream, just turned over and went back to sleep, but was pulled out of his reverie by the frenzied hands of his wife. “What is it?” growled Charles. “It’s a tiger,” shouted his wife, “and it’s climbed up a tree.”

I pressed the horn, stomped on the accelerator, cursed the driver in the next car and nearly shouted at the traffic policeman. “What’s the matter dad?” my daughter asked.

“I hate being late,” I grumbled.

“D’you know of all the people whose lives were saved because they were late?”

Within a few hours of his swearing in, the new American president signed a slew of executive orders that shocked the world. One of them was that those born in the US could not assume they were American citizens.

Within a day a federal judge John Coughenour stayed the executive order, saying it was ‘blatantly unconstitutional’!