I borrowed this from http://soloman.rediffiland.com without asking the person. I hope you don’t mind. But I liked the joke very much.

Chinese laundry:

A woman was unhappy with the way her laundry was done at the local Chinese laundry, so she wrote a note and put it in the bag with the next collection of soiled clothes: "USE MORE SOAP ON PANTIES!" She got the clean laundry back, and was still dissatisfied with the results, so the following week she enclosed another note: "USE MORE SOAP ON PANTIES!" The Chinese laundryman became very annoyed, and then her clean laundry was delivered, it contained a note from him: "I USE PLENTY SOAP ON PANTIES!" ..... USE MORE PAPER ON ASS!!"

Well apart from the panty fiasco, I am reading a book by Amitava Ghosh “The Hungry Tide”. It’s a fiction based in the Sunderbans. Its about two people who have lived their cosmopolitan lives in India and America. It also about the people who inhabit the tiny islands that make up Sunderbans. It provides an insight about their lives, their poverty and many such stuff like the forest gods and how their lives are influenced by the rising tide. So far its been a good read. Will tell more later.

The other thing that I wanted to write was about how we as humans sometimes do not give much importance to wild like around us. For example, a mouse or a rat, street dogs, cats etc. While there are many poems and prose written on such things, there is this song that truly defines an English man’s (well more precisely a scots’ man) ode to a mouse. The song goes likes this:

One Brown Mouse – Jethro Tull

Smile your little smile --- take some tea with me awhile.
Brush away that black cloud from your shoulder.
Twitch your whiskers. Feel that you're really real.
Another tea-time --- another day older.

Puff warm breath on your tiny hands.
You wish you were a man
who every day can turn another page.
Behind your glass you sit and look
at my ever-open book ---
One brown mouse sitting in a cage.

Do you wonder if I really care for you ---
Am I just the company you keep ---
Which one of us exercises on the old treadmill ---
Who hides his head, pretending to sleep?

Smile your little smile --- take some tea with me awhile.
And every day we'll turn another page.
Behind our glass we'll sit and look
at our ever-open book ---
One brown mouse sitting in a cage

There have been many such parables written and even spoken in Hindi movies. Who can forget that song sung in the movie by Amitabh Bacchan… where the chuha drinks a bottle of whisky and akar ke bola “kaha hai billi”. Then there is Stuart Little, which by the way was an excellent movie, though I think that the second one was better than the first. But I hope that they don't go in for the next edition, ST 3.

Then there those times when I used to live in an Bharat Seva Ashram in Delhi where one night I was going for dinner and saw this scene: on the parapet wall, a large cat was sitting and staring at a godown rat which was maybe as large as the cat, and maybe rueing the fact that possibly this is not the right night to hunt. Man, you guys should see these rats, they are not only as big as a cat, but their bite … geez man… it hurts. When I first came to Mumbai it was during the start of the rains and the place that I was putting up at was close to an open drain that got flooded during the rains. Two very handsome and beautiful couple – whom I named Bunty and Babli – would roam around in the backyard near the open drain. They were so big that the dogs in the locality would be quite taken back when the rats would charge them. They were big… I mean really big.

Rats are actually being worshipped. The town of Deshnoke, 30 kilometers south of Bikaner, is home to world's only temple where rats are the main creature of devotion. About 20,000 rats are fed, protected and worshiped. The Karni Mata temple is one of the more curious places in all of Rajasthan. The site has been a place of worship for the last 500 years and the current Karni Mata temple was founded by the Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner at the turn of the century. To see the temple rats in their full splendor one has to come late at night or before sunrise. Then the temple floor is covered with rats running at full speed in all directions. The hungry creatures are trying to get feed for the rest of the day. If you are rat lover or mouse lover this is definitely the right place to be in.

If I have able to generate an interest in rats so far, you could check out this site http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/rats.html, and maybe write to rathelp@yahoogroups.com
ratinfo@yahoogroups.com. Else forget it.

RATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!