Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The irritating questions hall of fame.

The sister recently created a hall of fame with respect to questions she dreads and gets totally irritated by. The last few days in the trip have been fantastic but have equally been irritating in terms of questions one has had to answer . Just to do something different lets start from the very end.

- Train journey from Bangalore to Coimbatore - Which berth is yours ?

Man next to me with an RAC ticket ( RAC stands for Reservation Against Cancellation) - Saar, which berth is yours . I point straight at both our berths (1 and 3) and say this is mine. He then proceeded to ask, so where are you working saar. I gave him a non-commital answer and just said Bangalore because I was in no mood to discuss with a total stranger the joys of living in Cambridge or discuss any further details regarding my life history especially when one is recovering from an illness.

- What's your salary abroad ?

Err.... it's decent enough to feed me and my family and to make trips as I choose to .

- Are you planning to come back ? If so , when ?

Err. The question can take many tones. Some old family friends will wonder and make declarations about your future and decisions neither you nor your wife have any clue about at that point of time. All you are interested in is the next meal, making sure you aren't sick and hoping that the jet lag would wear off. The best way of fobbing off such questions sometimes is to speak the truth and honestly say "Don't know" . Some day yes, not tomorrow is usually a good answer.

- Sir do you want a discount card ?

Err. no  , not interested, thank you.  Sir you'll get 1 point per 100 rupees and each point is worth 20 paise for you to claim. Thus the only way one can get any rewards out of customer loyalty is by buying for life at that store. Imagining the mark up is extraordinary.

Go back a few years, pesky little things used to call up and offer you discounts, personal loans and credit cards with cold calls. Never have I considered going further with any of these calls because it usually leaves me in an irritated state of mind.

Go further back to when one was studying.

What does your father do ? A follow up question was usually how much does he make ? The answer varied from he works in the CBI ( to a pesky traffic cop who was looking for a bribe for no fault of mine), to the truth and to a brusque none of your business. The follow up question was usually ignored.

Vacation vacation vacation.

Ah the vacation draws to a close. Everyone sighs - oh you've got 3 weeks off but it's amazing how the days and the hours fly. Some fun activities have included driving around in India by self with the family. The last post dealt with the joys involved in this activity. It wasn't great fun falling ill 5 days into the trip especially with a 20 hour train journey to be managed. The train journeys were fun, ofcourse one of the high points of the trip.

Oh, attending a wedding, meeting old friends and making new ones, singing ghazals and old Hindi songs in the evening in public causing jaws of members of the family to drop beyond measure , pleasantly surprising the wife with such an act of lunacy ! However members in the audience were too polite to point out the resemblance my singing would have had to a donkey braying .

A rest day later it was time to begin the remainder of the travelling down south to Coimbatore and Guruvayur where I saw one of the best sights there is to see at the Guruvayur temple. It was 9:15 p.m. and time for what they call the Srivali seva. Like most temples in India, there's a strict ban on photography inside the temples for fear of the art thieves and in addition the belief that there shouldn't be photos of idols stored elsewhere, however this was one time I really wished for my camera. All Indian temples have a sanctum sanctorum, in Guruvayur this sanctum sanctorum has space for 1000s of oil lamps on all 4 of its walls. Once the temple was to be closed for the night, the closing ceremony on certain days (either requested for/ paid for my devotees or on special occasions) all the lamps would be lit on all 4 walls. This means that once it's night you've got all walls lit up by small oil lamps which are in perfect symmetry and is one of the most amazing sights one can watch. This is then followed with a procession by 3 of the temple elephants all decked up in gold and with men alternately seated and standing atop the elephant and transitioning between these states without *any* support from the sides. These men were athletic, nimble and showed some of the finest traditions that exist still deep in the South of India. Sadly I couldn't find any photos to show the same for a reference.

After this it was time to move to the city with just 3 seasons, hot hotter and hottest . I'd say we are in the "hotter"season where it's usually tepid, miserable and usually a pain to stay. A day trip from Madras was to Kanchipuram and to the ancestral village which had to be visited for some personal reasons. One of the things I came across in these villages was the use of solar power to light street lamps in every nook and cranny. This by itself has reduced the dependence these villages have on electricity boards for electricity and providing the village with safe renewable energy.  The village in question had a school that's now in the process of starting Classes 11 and 12, there is hope and there is education and there is a choice in such villages for growth.

In the last 19 days we've been to 8 places some of which have included day trip in sweltering 35 degrees C. The measure to which I've been spoilt now shows with the fact that if I am to survive in Chennai or Madras as it was known earlier , I need the AC on to bring down the temperature to a bearable 28 degrees C . But boy has this been worth it and have I needed the break ! Certain improvements are visible, the tendency to check email has dropped - I've checked email 5 times in 3 weeks which is a significant improvement compared to previous pyrrhic vacations.


And on that note - sigh, mutter, next Monday is just 4 days away and 2 plane journeys away :( ...

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Honk, mutter to neighbour, curse, shout

Politely ask others on the roads if their affairs are in order, ( the Tamil way of asking this is Enna Vootla sollitu vanthutiyaa ... ) and then decide that it's all not worth it .

If you are wondering why all these words are in the title of this blog post, it's not very hard to get to the bottom of why I'm doing this and my locus can very well be guessed.  After all this the world is at peace again, the sun rises from the East again and there is a nice cool breeze blowing in the city of Pune in India.

Given that I've deliberately not started driving in the old blighty just to preserve these essential driving skills in India, where if you go into a roundabout, the first person in wins it's been fun. Driving around on the first day of the trip, there were still a few rules left in me . Anyone on a zebra crossing wins, I stop my car and let them pass . However the stares I received in return were as though I was a person from a different planet or a member of a species totally different than the one that inhabits the country we like to call India, Bharat, Hindustan, Jambudvipa ...

Driving down the expressway and then driving in heavy traffic in downtown during peak hours has a cathartic effect. You can put your window down, curse to your hearts content at idiots who decide to overtake you from the left and go to the right or cut right across your path from right to left.  There is no place for gentleness, the odd driver of the scooter who decides to sit in the fast lane and plod along at 40kmph on a polite enquiry for overtaking asks you if you are flying a plane to go past him and you respond with either the finger or politely inform him of the risks of a gentle push that is enough to send him and his family flying under other forms of traffic which vary from smoke belching trucks to the odd auto-rickshaw.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Playing cricket. ...

So, here we go after a long time - about time for a blog post and something regarding a passion for every Indian, cricket. Given that I'm due off on a trip soonish to the old homestead it's probably right to post this now.

 Living in the driest part of the UK and having long days in the summer allows you the flexibility and freedom to play. Cricket here is played on a ground - (yes, yes I can hear folks saying where else would you play it ..) without 10 other matches happening simultanenously, on pitches and grounds that vary in large degrees with respect to their quality. Oh and yes, cricket here is played with 22 players wearing whites, a cricket ball ( not a tennis ball, cork ball or a rubber ball) though there are times when you start a game with just 8 players with 3 turning up later. There have been occasions when folks have arrived at the wrong ground because they misheard which team was playing at which ground !  Of-course the fickle English weather can play a devastating effect on the quality of the square not to mention the effect  of rabbits and moles on the outfield  (Ask my ankle!) There are some groundsmen who've maintained an absolutely high standard throughout this season (think Gonville and Caius)  while others who've not bothered and instead  have allowed enough grass on the pitch so that it looks more like a tennis court than a cricket pitch (Oh Jesus!) and further others who've just given up (some of the village squares that we played on).

Of-course 20-20 has had an effect, all weekday games are 20-20 while the weekend games can vary between 40 and 45 overs depending on which division of which league you are playing. The 20-20 games are played usually as 15 8 ball overs which makes overweight geezers like yours truly struggle to get past the popping crease after bowling the 4th ball in an over and then curse the innovators ! It is all very civilized - sledging is not something that you do normally nor condone, idle banter usually happens - most folks usually walk and the opposition usually congratulates the bats-person when they reach a major milestone. The best games are when you play an opposition that consists of team-mates from the mid-week games especially if it contains your mid-week captain in it!  This is when the banter could reach some dizzy heights. The mid-week games are played at a very different pace to the weekend ones, the weekend ones demand tons of concentration and sustenance, there was one game we played where both the opposition and us scored less than 120 in 45 overs and the opposition won in the very last over, thus there ends up being a good tussle between bat and ball. Ah and that is a par score in 20 overs during the mid-week games.

However the significant achievement of the year for yours truly was hitting the winning runs in a match that meant we tied joint tops in the mid-week leagues. After years of growing horizontally it was interesting to be able to hit the winning runs in a game nearly 9 years since university !