When I woke up this morning...

The first thing I heard when I woke up this morning was a young boy calling out to his brother," Bhaiya, chai peelo!". Translated into English this means," brother, drink tea!". Or "brother, come and drink your tea!". I'm no hindi pundit so I won't debate the exact trans-literal definition or even the semantics or sentence structure.

The only reason this incident remained in my memory is because I heard this expression repeated a few times. It would not be an exaggeration to say he repeated the same exclamation 6 or 7 times! I won't say it woke me up because even an alarm right beside my ear wouldn't wake me up! My family members and close friends can attest to this. So I was already slightly awake and in alpha mode when I kept hearing this repeated. The first thought that sprung to my mind was why he needed to keep repeating. After all what's the urgency? It's just a cup of tea!

It got me thinking about the relationship between the two brothers: in fact they may not even be related. Nowadays it's common to call friends or cousins 'brother' or 'sister'. It also got me thinking about different cultural contexts. And it got me thinking about why this particular incident even stayed in my memory: it's been at least a week since this happened. Why do we remember some events and forget other more 'important' events like people's names? What is thing we call 'memory'? Its like those 'Who am I' kind of riddles: what can't be seen or touched, and yet is something we can't do without?