Hail HBO

Its an acronym that can be quite beguiling…..yeah… but I guess it has been something that one often hears out here…at least I have- in the past six months. When I first heard the letters “HBO”, I was jubilant because I was transported back to my lazy days in kalpakkam and those long hours at home, when I was a permanent fixture on the couch thanks to the Home Box Office channel…but hey! this is something that’s so much not related to the movie channel….well yeah, weird that it might sound… this actually expands to “Honey Bunches of Oats”. This is bizarre, but I was totally taken aback by the amount of importance given to these three letters by one of my neighbours….he walks into our apartment and after singing praises in the name of these cereals,exclaims that he would form a community on the orkut website; which by the way, is one of the innumerable websites designed to waste your time in such a manner wherein you are under this illusion that you aren’t doing precisely that…. and this community would be for people who adore HBO like him. At 12 in the night, he cycles about a mile or more and braves the chill mountain winds just to procure another huge king size packet of this damn cereal. The satisfaction on his face when he is done with the day’s quota of HBO consumption, is a treat to the eyes. It amazes me as to how something so inconsequential and insignificant to me actually matters so much to him. He claims that he cannot do without it even for a single day. Boy,does he worship it!!!The Taj Mahal was built by emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved and I am quite certain that my neighbour would have absolutely no qualms in doing the same thing for these stupid corn flakes. Life is like that.