A sudden eruption of protests/whimpers/whines related to one particular clue from many in my social circles in India who have now been drawn into the wordle girdle brought up a whole cluster of thoughts and memories.

Having been in the US for decades, the clue, related to homes and DIY, did nothing to even twitch my eyebrows, let alone lift them. But, I was surprised how many in my social circles in India were not familiar with that word. My niece had to look up the dictionary, and I had to allow her a handicap in our score-sharing.

(On a side-note – here we are content producers in social media – painting guess landscapes of word possiblities and sharing them. Who turned this into a competition? Why is it tickling and pricking egos? As if you need to post a better picture of a sky in response to my current obsession. I thought we had now become immune to the provocative possibilities of friends on vacations posting dinner pictures from restaurants in Spain. Isn’t that precisely why we need Meta – like new avenues for titillating provocations? Ha ha.)

Back to wordle – Naturally in some fora the discussion quickly erupted to the unfairness of using culture-specific clues.

I remember what it used to be like taking US college entrance exams from India, having to interpret comprehension texts with the kind of precision multiple-choice demands and my Indian brain thinking of nuances and subtleties that I needed to learn to quickly turn off.

So, when I came to the US, it was the early nineties of the last millennium, it took me quite a while, not just to acquire a new vocabulary, but acquire a new language and grammar of meaning making, particularly when it came to the concept of houses.
I can now reveal the word that triggered this brouhaha – ha ha – since the number of the puzzle is now history. It was ‘caulk’. There, the caulk is now out of the bag.

That word was a stranger to me too a few decades back, but perhaps a rather benign piece of ignorance, happily filling the crack in my new world understandings. More concerning to me were the other huge cracks that became progressively apparent.

A colleague couple bought a house, cut in two and moved it to the outskirts of the city, on a few acres of land, so their children could play. A friend at school bought a house, but realized later, his foundations had moved.Think about the PTSD it caused me. I still do not completely get it, but having seen it happen, the issue is mostly a matter of my neurology, a wiring problem.

What exactly is a dry wall? How is it that you can cut it up, tape it, hang i,t and so on. Really? You can do that to walls? Like the brick ones at home, plastered over with cement, that sometimes you cannot get a nail into? Remember tools to straighten nails?

I truly understood the real ‘dry wall’ concept finally, when once, investigating a leak in the air conditioning in the attic (Oh, the rituals of maintaining an air conditioning system is another story), a misstep plunged me through the ceiling in my daughter’s bedroom.

Fortunately the IKEA bed took the shock without much complaint and let me lie there in bewilderment and stupor for a while. But, I finally got it – was a true Aha moment.

Early in those times, when we were still renting, driving around new developments coming up in many places, one marveled, and I say that with some hesitation, at the sight of match-stick like skeletons of timber frames in the distance, and thinking these were to become homes that someone was going to buy, live in, bring up families in, and all I could think of was hurricanes. That the solidity of the brick look exteriors was false – that this flimsy looking stuff all around me was the real truth, under the guise of solidities, of communities and 30-year mortgages.

Can you imagine my trepidation and angst, when the time came to actually buy a home? By then, I just laid back and let trust happen.
Home ownership brought other revelations over time. I never fnished my learning by the time it was necessary to sell and move on.
Too much is flooding back, but I will leave that for some other time.

So, now that NYT has bought the temporarily favorite pastime puzzle of the world, innocuously driving traffic to the META platform, insidiously globalization supply chain streams are getting ready to the new colonization. No more building concrete a brick homes for seven generations – get ready to fall through dry walls world. We could do with some caulk in India was my realization too.

And, maybe this is one time, one wonders, what if the ownership of the game had been left in British hands. All the former colonies of the commonwealth would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Chai-time.