NO MELLOW HELLO

"Hello" is probably the world's most common greeting, especially because of the telephone. But I think that it's slowly becoming outdated or at least rare. The reason is that most phones (and all cell phones) now have caller ID, so that you can already see who is calling you. As a result, I have the experience of picking up the phone and hearing "Yes Ashutosh go ahead" or something similar to that. Since I have never owned a phone with caller ID, I tend to still always say 'Hello'.

But as I was pondering this, I remembered that Punekars already inculcated the tradition of not saying hello, eons before caller ID and cell phones. This is clearly explained by Pu La Deshpande in his 'Punekar Mumbaikar Nagpurkar' masterpiece, where he says that Punekars, instead of saying hello, usually respond as if someone has woken them up from a comfortable afternoon siesta, and shriek "Kon aahe?!!" (Translation: "Who the *expletive deleted* is this??!") loudly into the phone.

So that's another tradition that we Punekars taught the world. The more important tradition of course as Pu La says, is to incessantly argue aimlessly about everything under the sun.