“Didi, what is porn?”

The small Andheri family of four was having dinner when 11-year-old Kamlesh suddenly asked, “Didi, what is porn?”
Didi, 17, froze and quickly said, “Ask mama!”
Mama, embarrassed and not knowing how to handle this, said, “Ask Papa!”
Papa, a man of the world, cleared, as delicately as possible, little Kamlesh’s doubt.
Lesson over, he asked, “But beta, where did you hear this word?”
So the son replied, “Oh Papa, you have asked me to read the newspaper every day, isn’t it? Well, I was reading the Times of India in the evening and they had written about some porn star called Sunny Leone. I had heard of film star and cricket star but I did not know what a porn star was…”

NOA Salutes: The award winner among us

Local boy Money Sharma – yes, that’s his real name – made headlines some time back when he won the Nat Geo Moment Awards 2011 for his photograph of a Ganga Aarti ceremony in Varanasi. The 25-year-old brought home a professional Nikon D300S with AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200 mm ED VR II lens. Sharma, who calls himself a “journalist by profession and a photographer by choice,” shot the Thane Kite Festival at Hiranandani Meadows on Makar Sankranti yesterday.
Here are a few vignettes from the event.

On the first day of the New Year…

On the first day of the New Year, a tale of greed and family honour.
Near our housing complex is a small village and in that village stays a barber.
The barber’s `shop’ is a ramshackle, cardboard-cloth-tin four wall structure under a small tree alongside our locality’s main road. With every passing month, the photographer in me observes the different colours of the leaves – and also their absence in winter, and later, as if by magic, their reappearance.
Sometimes, there is a customer on the solitary chair; most often it is the barber himself, sleeping away the hours, waiting for someone to turn up.
But this tale is partly about the barber. Its main protagonist is his daughter-in-law, a housemaid in some of the houses in our complex.
Over several weeks, the housewife in of one of the houses noticed things missing – money, jewellery and finally, her son’s cellphone. She reported this to her husband, who, by an amazing coincidence, happens to be a police officer. The cop asked around and his suspicions zeroed in on the housemaid.
He confronted her. “Tell us the truth. You should realise that if I take this up at an official level you could be behind bars.”
The housemaid admitted to all the thefts. She was immediately sacked.
When he heard this, the barber, in a fit of rage, picked up a huge stone from the roadside and rushed towards his daughter-in-law.
“I will kill her,” he screamed loudly. “She has destroyed my family’s reputation.”
But some villagers managed to stop the old man and cool down his anger.
His daughter-in-law now does not stir out from her home. Nobody is our complex – or anywhere else – is ready to employ her.