Just as the traffic signal blinks red at one of the busiest crossings in the city, children come to your law-abiding civilized cars - balloons in their hands. Shape, colour and size of the balloons are governed by the calendar. Around independence day, they'll sell orange, white and green balloons, while around Valentine's Day, they'll all sell hearts. Series of red hearts balanced upon a stick, floating past the busy lives standing at the halt. Hearts priced according to your willingness to grab one. Show interest and the price goes up; turn away and it's yours before you've paid. I had always felt that these balloons are machine-blown - multiple and big. But a careful glance and you notice at an obscure corner of the signal, a woman seated in a tricycle for the disabled, quietly blowing up the balloons - her tricycle handle full of multicoloured sticks waiting to be attached to the balloons and children crowding around to get their share as she resignedly blows in breath into these little flexible bags.

How much perseverance in each of those air-filled bags...all to be submitted to the whims of a consumerist world. The equation between cost and production has always been too twisted to be academically determined; for cost is not worth and worth is, often, way beyond affordability.