Halloween – India Is Missing Out

It’s a fun holiday and an excuse to party and dress up more than anything else, even if it did have a different agenda when it was first celebrated. However, giving away free candy, dressing up and going to parties, meeting lots of people – great holiday festival! No wonder it is not celebrated in India!

Yes, Halloween and Thanksgiving are the two holidays that is celebrated in countries like the US & Canada and so fascinates me. I would really enjoy myself on Halloween as all things ghosts, goblins and scary stuff interests me and I would have a ball. This holiday is so good that there is a movie franchise named after it.

I can’t remember how many sitcoms, drama shows and stuff all have a Halloween theme atleast once during their run and connect the holiday into the storyline of that episode. It’s so much fun, these guys really know how to enjoy themselves. I am jealous. Anyways, the reason I don’t celebrate it is because I live in India and this festival/holiday is not recognized with the exception of some international companies based in India. But I would love it if it could be part of our culture as well.

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The Sony Walkman Walks No More

After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player. The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.

The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line’s 30-year career.

This was my childhood’s equivalent of the ipod. The idea of carrying music around with you and listening to it was not practical at that time, until Sony showed the way. I remember that I must have owned around 10 of these gadgets at different times from the age of 8 till around the age of 27. I must have carried one for each long trip that I made during those years. I go through a tough year living in a hostel in Bangalore with the help of my walkman and the many rock albums that I owned. I listened to it constantly while I spent the 12-15 hours that it took me to travel via bus or train from Cochin to Bangalore. I listened to my walkman a whole lot while living alone in a lodge in Calicut for the most part of 8 months. It was a constant companion for many years.

I’m sad to see it being discontinued but it’s become almost obsolete with ipods and mp3 portable players becoming so affordable and increasingly larger capacities.