Some comedian was talking about how he never realised towels were meant to be 'soft'. Growing up in a poor household, for him towels were things that lasted years and obviously they would become quite rough. When he was given a soft towel at a friend's house, he was confused. He was so used to the roughness!

This made me think about my towels and how soft/rough they are. My own philosophy is that if a thing is still doing what it's supposed to do, don't change it. The idea of disposing of something that still has use left is painful to me. I can't bear that kind of wastage. It's a bit different with clothes where you can have a lot of variety and don't really need to dump some to use more. You can also always give them away to charity or something, so it doesn't feel like you are wasting good stuff. With certain other things like towels or utensils or blankets or stuff that you'd have to actually put in the bin if you wish to discontinue, I tend to hold on quite a bit. I guess I also sort of have an attachment to certain items — my last post about the image and rosary might have indicated that. It doesn't matter how old some things are, the older they are, the more attached I am...! he he! I suppose that's part of my upbringing as well where we had one thing and had to stick with it. Those habits haven't died even though I don't have to continue with some of them. I don't even realise they are specific to me until it's brought to my attention in some way, like this comedian talking about towels. I had never thought about the softness of my towels!

Sometimes my mind goes back to parts of my childhood. It was another world altogether. I feel a longing for some bits of that world, bits of simplicity. I remember how my mom used to store certain items that my relatives brought for us as gifts from 'the gulf'. They were special items, not to be used in everyday, normal life. There was a lot of fancy cutlery in there while we used steel plates and tumblers on a normal basis. Most houses in Mangalore only use steel ones on the daily so that made sense. But those fancy things just stayed there, year on year on year, inside the ottoman bed. At some point they were things we thought of as stuff that were only there to be looked at. I don't think we ever entertained the idea of using them. I remember on dull evenings—this being before the internet, smart phones, etc—I would get my mom to open the ottoman so we could browse through all the stuff. There were fancy sarees there too and I loved looking at all the beautiful things... Kind of makes me think that I carry a bit of that hoarder in me now. I love storing beautiful stuff and looking at them from time to time. I have to remind myself to use them too once in a while. A lot of those things in the ottoman never got used. I don't even know what happened to most of it. We eventually got a lot of better things than those so maybe they never saw the light of day. But I guess they did serve a different function even if not their assigned one. They brought a bit of beauty and joy to our lives when we needed it...