The Garage Aspect

The world’s outpouring of grief for technocrat Steve Jobs has been unprecedented. Death seems to have magnified his personal appeal. Suddenly, the world not only talks about his family and his estranged father, but of his culinary skills, what a nice person he was and all things apple. Food blogs cry out about how they choked up while baking apple tarts and how he loved apple as a child with the same fervour as geeks crying out about iPads and iPhones. And to think it all started in a garage.

The garage has a mystic, romantic appeal in the makings of tycoons. Journalists writing his eulogy pumped up the garage appeal to the masses. In fact, I suggest those who don’t have garages yet get one pronto. Who knows? Our progeny may make it big and if they don’t, we will have ourselves and the lack of a garage to blame for it.

I wish to tell everybody that my parents’ home did not have a garage. Our scooter occupied either the front verandah or a part of our drawing room. That’s right! We didn’t need any toys to play on, we played on the real thing. Though I can’t say my mother was too pleased on rainy days when the scooter’s wheels would slide in alongside our muddy footprints onto the polished teakwood floors. But those are minor irritants in the life of mothers and children didn’t have to worry about them.

One never knows what life has in store for them. As the garage factor was missing from my life while growing up, I had to ensure that I gave myself a garage experience.

I lived in a garage when I first started work in Bangalore. I can’t say with entire honesty that it was beautiful, but it kept out the rain and taught us a lesson or two on bladder control on rainy nights. Obviously, the garage could not contain a bathroom and a kitchen – one corner already had the kitchen. The other corner the entrance. There really wasn’t place to add a bathroom. Garages are rectangular and that was the plan.

So, the bathroom was outside the premises and a heavy outpour meant getting soaked in the rain for a pee. One weighed the pros and cons (bladder and rain volume) and made the decision.

I digress, but the point is, I read so many things about Steve Jobs in the past week and almost all of them had the garage featured prominently. So much so that I threw my mind to my garage days and decided to share it. Now that the garage part of the story is intact, I can choose to meander about life in my usual manner, and lay that worry behind me. If ever anyone wants a garage story, I have one. Phew!