A Cleansing Service

I was away for the extended weekend at my aunt’s place. One news which I got was that there had been a marriage proposal for me. I had mentioned about my eligibility but to get a proposal is flattering. The news had been concealed from me by all my relatives and my parents for they were worried that I might go out of control. But finally I got the news and accompanying was a lot of leg pulling by my cousin brothers and sisters.

I do realize that the proposal is not for me but for the B.Tech degree in Computer Science which I am hopefully completing this May. With this degree what you require is just a decent face and then a proposal would follow from any family. Obviously the family should satisfy two conditions, namely, there should be a girl of marriageable age in the family and that the family knows the value of the degree.

Enough of marriage talks. My uncle – whom I visited - has bought a new laptop. The laptop is mainly for the use of my younger cousins. Though it had the good old Microsoft Windows as the operating system, the browser was something that I was surprised of. It had both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Considering that no one in their family is very tech savvy, I consider it a major achievement for Firefox. Also, though my cousins did not know of all the advantages of Firefox, yet that was their choice for the web.

When I returned to my home, a cleansing spree was awaiting. The cleansing spree was more of removing unwanted materials from the house including books, clothes etc. which were taking up a lot of space. No one remembered when these were used last, if ever. All the members of the family were thinking of newer and newer areas which could be covered in the house for removal of older and unused materials.

After that, came the hunt for people who could actually make use of these products. People do not want to throw all the things. They like to give it to “less fortunate” ones even if the first thing that the latter do is to throw the things. The latter cannot say ‘no’ to the former, or rather the former do not like to hear a ‘no’ from the latter. So, the above procedure works for everyone.

For things like old books, magazines etc, you need persons professionally employed to handle these things. I am talking about the guy who takes your newspapers and pays you by the kilo. The day being Sunday, we had not much of a problem finding such a person. However, he cleared only the paper stuff from the house. Other things like cloth etc were still awaiting their new fate.

I am a firm believer in such kind of activities of cleaning houses of things which are not required. But people do not tend to involve me in these activities for sometimes I get various anxious at such kind of events. I am of the view that if an item has not been used for say, 5 years and is only probable to be used once in a blue moon, then it belongs to the category of things which need to be shown the door. The duration may change depending on the item.

Finally, an integrated service which helps in these activities in homes would be not a bad idea. The unwanted things which need to be thrown out and which people find difficult to part with are almost the same – old magazines, plethora of books for which a separate book is required for indexing, old clothes, small electronic items etc etc. What the people fail to realize is that these days it is preferred to buy new items instead of re-engineering old ones. The integrated service needs to be given some authority when it enters a home. The service should also consist of buying of all these materials at reasonable prices so that they could be disposed off then and there and the materials do not end up staying in the houses to be found again in another such cleansing spree after two years.