India Chronicles Episode IV

Welcome to another episode of my observations in India. It's my 6th month here and I feel like I have blended in with the locals pretty well. Every now and then the infamous 'mm/dd/yy' format of date comes up and the reverse conversion of the ruppee to the dollar to value a particular commodity or service also perks up, but, now I must say I am getting the gist of it. I wanted this part of my episodes to focus more on the serious topics of living here, but, I couldnt let go of the humor part, so, I have decided to mix it up a little.

The Grand Slam of Sports:

My dad is obsessed with playing billiards / snooker. So obsessed that he wasnt happy with the time that he was getting at the local club table & he decided to bring the game home. So, he went out and bought a kicka** massive billiards table and kept it in my parents living room. Now, their living room IS the table itself. For those that havent had the privilege of seeing one, it is about 3-4 times the size of the pool table. I feel the need to keep a pair of binoculars to locate the ball when shooting from one end to another. The pockets are smaller and have a sharper angle and that just adds to the misery of a beginner. So, overall, billiards/ snooker is about 100 times tougher to play than pool. The first skill is to make contact.... If you think im kidding, try it. If you are a decent pool player, you will struggle, if you are a beginner, you will embarass yourself silly. Here is a lesson to all single people out there, Never never never ever take your date out to a billiards room. You will appear like such a loser that that will be your final date with the person. Anyway, I have become an intermediate level player now which also implies that I will play pool blindfolded without much trouble. My schedule was running like this. I would wake up in the morning and play a game of badminton at the gym, then play billiards with dad at lunch break followed by table tennis with the pals in the evening and a late night game of cricket under the lights. Thus, I was accomplishing the grand slam of sport every single day. I lost about 5-7 lbs in the process and was living on adrenalin. Alas, all good things come to an end. After we moved into our new place all this ended abruptly.

The Holy Cow

They are everywhere !! Yes, cows wandering freely everywhere. For millenia, for some strangely obscure reason, this guy called Krishna developed affinity towards this animal. Ever since then it has been dogma that protection of this being is the supereme religious duty. As a result, you can see cows walking around doing pretty much what they like without much discipline. In fact, the cow is the most indisciplined animal in India. About 90% of all Indians are vegetarian, which makes it the single largest vegetarian restaurant on earth. You will find more 'strictly vegetarian only' restaurants here than anywhere else in the world. In some places, the sheer mention of beef will be frowned upon. Anyway, for these reasons cows are protected like they are going to be extinct soon. Cows walk around blocking traffic. There are several instances where they are known to sit in the middle of large intersections thereby creating a traffic island. They have also evolved in this practise. They know that when they form such a traffic island that they need to tuck their tails inside and keep their hooves locked in, so, a passer by car doesnt run it over. They have mastered the art of the creation of traffic islands to perfection. Swarms of cattle often walk the streets in cities and villages as they are bound to their feeding grounds or returning from it. Last month I had my first taste of beef in India. It was at a chinese restaurant and let me tell you, the dish was delicious. Of course, now, I am condemned to die by the religious fundamentals becuase I bit into their sacred animal.

Penculiar infatuations:

Last week, I ordered some stationery to be stacked into every cubicle, so, when there was a need for a pen to write something, it was easily accessible. A week later, all the full to the brim pen stands were staring empty at my face. I wondered why? how did this happen. Where did all these pens go? who took them? My questions were all answered when I paid an emergency visit to my friends office to print a form that I had to submit on a Sunday. When I arrived at his office obviously, there were no employees on campus. I started a PC and printed out what I needed to and LO to my surprise, there was not a single pen to be found in sight to sign the damn thing !! I searched and searched till my brain blew out. I went through the personal belongings of about 70 people and finally the guard on duty gave me his pen.... Apparently, Indians are genetically pre-disposed to stealing pens. They preserve them, so, that if the world supply of pens gets over, they will be the next superpower due to their pen-count. They literally believe that in the instance of global war that the 'pen might really be mightier than the sword or the scud missile'. I have failed to understand this absolute obsession with pens. To investigate further, I looked deeper into my own past. Back in school days, we were allotted a set of pens for the semester. Pen manufacture was not very commercialized back then, so, they turned out to be expensive. We could not afford losing or dropping them or leaving them at school. They used to be precious commodities. Now, since the art of pen-making has been widely dispersed and the per unit costs are next to nothing, I must attribute this obsession with pens to the childhood trauma that we faced as kids. As a result of this lesson, I learnt to stack only one or two pens in any pen holder. I also learnt that pen stands often have a retractable harnesses retrieving the pen once it is used. People have invented the pen retainer, just like the one for retaining glasses or sunglasses if you are prone to dropping them. These ropes hold the pen around your neck like a precious commodity. I think it will take a generation to realize that pens arent going anywhere. They are here to stay.

Living with Poverty:

In a nation where the income differential between the 'have's' and the 'have not's' is as steep as the Angel falls, Venezuela, the general masses of have's mix with the have not's in a unique symbiotic way. This symbiosis is a direct result of the creation of unwritten rules that are followed by both concerned parties. For instance, if you hire a maid servant to clean the home every day, she will be paid about $20 a month (tops) in a place like Bombay. She will clean about 5-6 homes a day and will garner about $100-$120 per month in wages. Since, these are all cash wages, there is no tax levied on them. Several such people are employed in the average middle class household. There is a person for cooking, another for cleaning, another for washing, another to play with kids, another to take them to school, driver, ironing person etc etc. The job descriptions are very fragmented and divided to the least count till the subsistence level of the individual is challeneged by the scale of the income earned. So, here comes the situation where multiple people making under $ 150 per month work in the home of a person making $ 50,000 per month (just as an example). For this person, the value of $100 is nothing but loose change. His children wear shoes that are more than $ 100 on occassions. These wages havent inflated much as surplus labor dilutes them in a overpopulated country. So, even as the owner's income doubles, their salaries remain near about the same. This is the unfortunate spate of event leading to dilution of income especially in the lower classes of society. The self propelling problem that accentuates this issue even further is that this dilution occurs in the strata of society that earns the least ! So, poor people keep getting poorer as they have more offspring as a result of being uneducated about the drawbacks of having children. The psychological impact of seeing such poverty is that you cannot lead a normal lifestyle of your choice without guilt. I have borne this guilt for my life and I continue to bear it now. For example, buying a $ 70 trouser at Nordstroms making six figures doesnt feel much when the people standing next to you would be making 5 figures a year at the best, but, buying a $50 shirt in Bombay hurts when you are giving away the monthly salary for a living working individual. Some of my friends give me the counter example by climbing up the food chain. Their argument is that you cannot think of it this way or you will be perpetually unhappy. In a steep income differential curve, you have to employ as many people as possible, so, you feed as many stomachs with your income. That is the only way out of this guilt. I am trying, but, am not getting there as much as I would have liked. Also to think from the employee's point of view, they wander around in an environment that they may perhaps never afford to own. And amongst such conditions, they have to remain honest and hard-working. The question must arise in their mind, why would someone have so much and someone else, so little. As someone said it, Truly, poverty is the worst curse.

Driving me crazy:

Moving onto a more fun topic. I started driving here after about a week of landing in town. They drive on the left side of the road, which, according to an English scientist (from the early 1900's ) is the better side to drive on :). While I dont have comments on his study and his conclusions, driving on the left side just seems better, sorry, minority wins. Driving here is a challenge, just like it would be in any developing nation. I did not import my cars into India because they were left hand drive when I didnt realize that it really doesnt matter here. You could be driving and passing anyone from any side anyhow and anyway you like. The traffic culture in Bombay is probably the most disciplined of all cities in India and that too can be closely described as chaos. The strategy to driving successfully in bombay is to leave your chivalry and courtsey at home and drive like you are taking a very sick person to a hospital. I keep feeling like I am driving a F1 car on the streets as I maneovre the car around. There are no posted speed limits, so, as long as you dont kill anyone, you could drive at the speed of sound without being pulled over. I am pretty sure I heard the sonic bang while driving on a newly built 4 lane expressway here. Interesting incidents of traffic related cultures are evident from other towns where there is really no culture and discipline. In one of the most backward Indian states of Bihar for instance, they dont know what the color red means..... really, so, at traffic lights, there would be two chaps holding the ends of a rope running across the street laying on the street. During a green light, the rope will be left loose and people would drive over it, but, When the light turns red, obviously, people dont want to stop, but, the two strong armed chaps pull up the rope in order to implement the red-ness of the light. Even then, the local goons and his subjects will occassionally, pull the rope and pass their vehicle underneath it. Another absolutely scary aspect of driving in these conditions is the way people let others pass them. I discovered this at a recent long distance trip. Say you are in the passing lane behind a truck and are ready to pass. During daytime, you honk at the truck and he or his helper sways his hand outside the window as an indication that you can pass him. If he sticks it out straight, he wants to get in the passing lane himself and it is not okay to pass him. What's freaky is the version of this that happens at night. If you do the same exercise and honk at the trucker, get this, he will turn the blinker on if it's ok to pass !!!! Nowhere in any road safety manual is this procedure written up as an acceptable method to follow during low light, but, it seems to have been the process evolved out there. So, if you are ever ever driving here and are behind a truck and he suddenly turns the blinker on, he is not turning to the passing lane, he is just asking you to pass him.


Blue is the new white

During my first visit to the US, I'd found a major behavioral anomaly in the way in which things were sold. A 300 ml can of coke was more expensive at the vending machine (at times) than a 2 litre bottle of coke on sale at the super-market !!! As a child, I was amazed at how this economics worked. I'd given up explaining to myself, why this could be possible and just attributed it to abnormal social behavior of the american people. I always asked myself if the large bottle was cheaper, why is there even a market for these small cans. There is one such absolutely inexplicable behavioral anomaly I discovered in India. Fabric whiteners are no longer a developing industry. Pretty much everything associated with effective fabric whitening has been synthesized and created and sold commerically. India however disagrees with the fundamental concept itself. We feel white is not really white.. unless .... well.... it's blue. Yes, people, thats correct. If correctness of subjective statements were to be based on the majority vote, you would be stranded on a lone island calling a white bonded paper well, white !! Commerical fabric whitening solutions like bleaching powder were being sold in the market solid until the day came when a certain ultramarine blue invaded the market place. In short, ultramarine blue is nothing but a light shade of blue color and the damn packaging even says that !!!!. It does nothing but change the color of white clothes to light blue. All of a sudden, people started calling that as fabric whitening. I am not sure why the most sensible people decided to call that color white? and the process fabric whitening? I figure, clothes were so dirty at times that cleaning them with bleach didnt do the job, so, they decided to mask the yellowness with this blue and call it white. This chemical is fondly referred to as 'neel' (~ meaning blue), but, sports the label 'fabric whitener' in front. Other commercial units set up modern plants to make more sophisticated fabric whiteners, but, no, they were late in the game. The people rejected white for blue. Some of the same companies that made ultramarine blue also sold these new whiteneres (actually whiteneing effect), but, had to shut down those units or convert them into ultramarine blue manufacturing facilities to meet increased demand. So, when I'm getting stuff laundered or washed here, I threaten the person 'not to whiten it'. The concept did not stick with just fabric. When I got my apartment painted, I'd insisted on plain white. The demo shade that a wall was painted with looked light blue !!! The painter convinced me that it was white while I kept protesting.... Then I asked for ivory white and that worked out to be whiter than pure white itself. To this day, inner sunmica linings of my furniture drawers etc are blue. They remind me of the fact that I can run from it, but, I will be blue..... someday.

All of your feedback and questions are great, so, keep them coming
And here is wishing you all a Happy new year.... !!