Gurgaon Chronicles!

The thing about Gurgaon is that it doesn’t feel, taste or look like a city, town or a village.  Usually there are tell-tale signs for a city or a town and they are pretty obvious.  Like for example cities are large and have large cosmopolitan population, tall buildings, entertainment hubs, office and residential complexes, etc.  Then there are towns which are smaller, rough looking, they also lack infrastructure support systems, and organized transport systems.

Here is a place which has imbibed the worst of both, it’s large, has office and residential complexes, entertainment centers and yet had no concept of infrastructure support systems or organized transport systems.  And as fate would have it I promptly landed a 3 month stint and came over to investigate this piece of terra firma paradox.  Like a regular Sherlock Holmes I tried to solve the puzzle by procrastinating on the situation, he used opium while I promptly got drunk only to realize that alcohol doesn’t heighten your mental capabilities instead just puts you to sleep, I lost some precious time in this futile endeavor.  Next I decided to do a blood hound, sniffing for clues fortunately for me unlike Mumbai, Gurgaon was easier on the nose but lead nowhere as the barren wasteland smell permeates all.  Then I decided to become a classic tourist and ask all the politically incorrect questions, does MG. Road stand for Mahatma Gandhi Road, does ‘Gurgaon’ stand for ‘jaggery village’, what do you do with all the molasses?  Fortunately for me after all the frequent travelling I can at least choose the right people to ask the wrong questions to.

Getting nowhere was frustrating me and I was reaching the stage of straining to remember my house address in Bangalore. Taxi drivers started asking me for directions very confidently and that never augers well for a tourist, as that’s the strongest indicator that you have over stayed your welcome.  Though I suspect that getting nowhere is a recurrent theme in my life, acting it was completely unacceptable so I struggled on, paid the customary 200 bucks to taxi for each drop (even for 5km ones), saw the roads act as drainage canals in minor (compared to my birth city) unseasonal rains, admired the well fed chicks, realized the differences (between ‘thekas’, ‘ahatay’ and the lack the latter) between Gurgaon and Delhi, started understanding Haryanvi a bit and learnt to tolerate Haldiram’s even.  That was not all I had to also contend with a canceled vacation trip, 24 hour power-cut, changing guest house caretakers, the local obsession for ‘parathas’ for breakfast, the extremely expensive and empty malls all in the same trip and not to forget the near equal number of Cows to Theka!

Consider this, on one side I have a very illuminating stay in Gurgaon, I take weekend trips to Delhi, get home cooked food either in guest house or at friends.  On the other side is the odd scene around the ladies, akin to bumping into past-lives!  As if all this was not enough even a dear friend decides to live the same life by spending weekdays in Gurgaon and going back weekends almost though out my trip, talk about coincidences!

It’s almost like there is a higher purpose to these trips and the answer is eluding me and hiding just beyond my peripheral vision!  Maybe the entomology of the name ‘Gurgaon’ as explained by a local has got something to do with it, “Guru-Gaon” ‘village of teachers’ or maybe more accurately ‘The learning village’…..alright, righteous baby … bring it on! 

Life Series: Blog of Evolution

I have been mulling this thought over for quite some time now without a resolution; are we supposed to learn something from life or just live it from day to day like a daily adventure, and I am not referring to mundane planning decisions or even the so called strategic planning that we do for career, money, family, etc.  Of course one would argue that we do a lot of planning to get a right job, spouse or even getting into a Mumbai local but does the plan succeed due to our meticulous calculations or was it any ways going to happen and should we really claim planning success if got a seat to sit-in at Bandra?

Most of us stop thinking about existential issues once we come into existence and the only related question we ask ourselves is how do we manage our existence and not why.  Having a philosophical bent of mind, with beliefs in occult and spirituality  and being educated in science has left me sitting on a curious spiral degenerating me into a conspiracy theorist with specialization in god, destiny, fate, free will and other related oxymoron’s.

I started my life normally with the usual biases, paranoia, and dogmas, of course it’s common knowledge that dogma’s are injurious to health but so are cigarettes. I feel dogma’s have their value in our lives they are akin to fiber only that instead of regulating bowel movements they regulate mental health.  If one analyzes dogma’s deeper, one realizes that it doesn’t matter what you believe in, you can always justify it as right or wrong be it minor social differences in our cultures to cannibalism! But had we not had them and had we questioned or flip-flopped on everything in life, I don’t think human civilization would have gotten anywhere!

I have off-late become more and more acutely aware of my evolution and the changes in my beliefs, I am only calling it evolution from the perspective of realizing the changes in my beliefs  and not because I consider I am believing in better quality beliefs.  Of course we all get caught in the daily grind starting from milk, newspaper to boss, work, vacations or the lack of it and forget all about this until the time we start going through some tough moments.  But once the though phase starts, first comes despondency and then comes philosophy the order may vary but usually one follows the other; one starts questioning why me why not my ex or my boss, but once you are past that stage but hopefully still in the philosophy mode you realize that had it not been for the tough moments you would have continued your material existence and never done any thinking. Maybe its life’s way of ensuring that one actually connects with one’s own self.

I have had the strange (well at least by my standards) incidents which reminded me of my own strengths, weaknesses, mistake patterns (both monetary and relationship ones), evolution, and the tangents I have taken.  I have even been thrown off track by words like mental compatibility, differing value systems, and cultural differences!  So I know I am the learning type and not the bungee jumper.  I know all this sounds like random gibberish but here is where I ask myself do we live our life by analyzing, understanding, and learning from its tough moments or do we think of it as just a bad stretch of road on NH8 and rough it out?

Revenge of the animal farm

I tell you it’s the curse of all the edible animals or at least they are learning from the inspired chickens! Who would have thought that a lowly clucking hen would invent something that could kill a human, serves us right with all the tandoori and tikka masala. It started with the bird spread SARS, then the very creatively named bird flu, now we have swine flu may be the fish or the goats are next!

I landed a cold then a cough and then fever, which in itself is a rarity with me; considering the high maintenance personality I usually only tend to get the lifestyle diseases. So here I am with a propensity for high end diseases landing something that’s text book flu right at the time of pandemic … I actually never thought I would use the term pandemic in a real world scenario outside of business continuity planning!! But I digress, so I promptly got worried, dreamt up couple of dire scenarios, wonder if I should write a will but was not sure if they accepted a will in an email; as there was no chance even I could read what I wrote after I wrote it.

Then my sanity kicked in, all I have to do is get the guts and go to a govt. hospital for a flu screening, it was a tough call you had a potential blue/grey wheezing death on one hand and the horror of a govt hospital on the other. Then I heard something about the UK protocol and the fact that selected private hospitals were allowed to screen and even treat patients. I personally think the whole logic of govt. control on screening, testing and tablets was something that only an academically brilliant IAS officer would come up with! Anyways I found a friendly neighborhood Apollo and went over, there were about 15 people with masks waiting ahead of me, they even had a foot controlled hand sanitizer I used some and waited for my turn.

The doc looked as if he had walked out of a Hollywood Bio-disaster flick and I was suitably scared, he looked at me top to bottom and then from side to side, which didn’t take much time at all, he then asked me what was my problem duh! Told him, he looked at me in disdain, had he not been seeing hundred patients daily I guess he would had a hearty laugh; this was bad I had to impress the doc and gain some credibility so I pulled out my ace… type 2 diabetes, he perked up and asked me what my last sugar reading was, told him, the disdain came back; finally he wrote me a bunch of cure all tablets anti-biotics and 650mg monster paracetamol and asked me to wear a mask and stay home (I could do that), I brought the meds and a 3M N95 mask for a total of Rs 420 (very ironic!) at the hospital pharmacy.

I came out looking sheepish, walked up to a rikshaw who promptly asked me for 50 bucks (its 20 by the meter) and wouldn’t budge. He knew that I knew that he knew that I deserved to pay him nothing less than 50, here I was all urban with a face mask looking at a bunch of rikshawallas who had no clue what the fuss was all about. Obviously knowing what we both knew I couldn’t get into his rikshaw and decided to walk, halfway through I agreed to be fleeced by another of his kind for Rs.30 for what was by then minimum riksahw fare. Stupid Pig!

Adventures of a Rikshaw Fare

I am sure every one of us well at least the ones with an IQ greater than that of a monkey or those who haven’t fried their grey cells on alcohol have wondered if there is a deeper meaning to life and/or if we have a purpose or a calling. I was wondering if my nomadic wanderings hid a higher calling that I was born to fulfill, and in one of those moments of zen it dawned on me!

I guess the zen masters were right about the shock value of learning by stumbling upon the answers of some seemingly nonsensical koans (that’s zen puzzles for the uninitiated) as I felt the same when I stumbled upon mine. It was this brilliant flash after which I just gaped dumbstruck, then i became seriously pissed; god damn it, it cannot be true!

Think about it, I travelled to and in half the large cities of North America, India, UK, Africa and Asia; if that was not all I have lived in some of these places for extended periods of time but I always seemed to move out of there before I reached anywhere! I have always wondered “what did I learn there?” apart from a smattering of local jargon, making some friends, losing a few of them (I rather like the term baggage), discovering what kind of stuff the locals are sensitive about and makes them go on bandhs (a.k.a. ‘our culture’) and some other random gibberish.

Well of course there’s the other existential stuff too like cuisine, malted and fermented beverages, the coffee and other sundry items like losing socks and having the ironers leave shine marks in damned odd places on the trousers. But if all this was more or less the same thing that I was doing across various cities from different countries then what was my true calling? What was the answer to my personal kaon: ‘why didn’t the chicken cross the road’?

The answer was so simple that I gasped:… in Mumbai rikshaw-walla wouldnt take the chiken to where she wanted him to, in Bangalore he wanted Rs.20 over the meter from her, … in Hyderabad he wanted half return at 12 noon, .. in Chennai he wanted to beat the crap out of her and in Delhi he wanted to run her over….!! So my calling, my sole existential purpose was to sample the different rikshaws, their fares, their design, their engines, the actresses pictures in them, the colors, the super dhak-chick music systems, the rides they offered and even interact/fight with the riskshaw-wallas that each city had to offer?? Unknowingly I had even aided and abetted them by selling my car so that I could get completely dependent on them, how convenient!

I am the rikshaw reviewer or tester!! I am the equivalent of the official Conde Nast reviewer only that my dominion is the ubiquitous rikshaw. Of course I struggled and haggled with them like every other Indian but how many of us got off at a restaurant or just short of last meter count where the change in the pocket runs out just so that you could always give him the exact change and not more, even at the cost of having to buy a coffee? How many of us have been consistently woken up by the nasty drone of a two-stroke tripod doing 90db on the sound pressure meter at 2am in the morning??

In the immortal words of a friend - TA ‘I forgive you god’ (the forgiver is greater than the forgiven right? J ) or maybe unknowingly I was a fallen god of the species necessara evelis myself!

Karibou Kenya

Perceptions are usually entrenched so deep in us that they can become a strong deterrent for us in discovering people, places, etc, especially the negative ones. The plus side of negative perceptions though is that when they get proven wrong they can come as a very nice surprise. I imagined Africa to be a little worse than the westerner’s view of India as the land of snake charmers and elephants; I imagined it to be wild, dangerous, possibly poverty/hunger stricken, hot/humid and even arid until I reached the shores of Nairobi, Kenya.

I guess I completely forgot about it being the cradle of entire humanity and bunch of other animals; the sheer audacity of my perceptions required them to be shattered in an equally dramatic manner and Nairobi did just that! 25 degree Celsius in the day and 10-15 degree in the night, greenery in the city that puts a Bangalore of 10 years earlier to shame, friendly people and scurrying Toyota, VW, Audi, Nissans, Mercedes and BMW Sedans/SUVs. The prices of things in the city were more expensive than Mumbai and the city was cleaner, greener, with better roads and buildings like no other city in India.

The Colonial outlook and customs were evident and were still ingrained in the people in their courteousness, their food and their customs. English was second language and was easily spoken and understood. They wear suits to office everyday didn’t see no flower prints in the office though I did see some radically cut dresses in the clubs! I also saw a few instances of extreme use of suits; I witnessed a hair stylist in full suit working on a clients hair, I am not sure if he had an engagement to attend immediately after!

The country was firmly on the path of progress and had an effective law and order system, the traffic sense and behavior of people on the road was in stark contrast to the raging madness of our cities. The country boasts of natural parks which are part of the seven natural wonders where you can watch the annual migration of millions of animals from the hotels along the river at $5000 a night or drive through the miles and miles of rose and coffee plantations. One has to partake in the fruits, vegetables and meats to get a taste of they were meant to be consumed.

For the people with more conventional tastes the land is of more liberated race than ours, the women are more liberated and proud the human watering holes are the proof, the clubs are open until the wee hours of the morning and the music, women and of course the alcohol are intoxicating. One finds women here working across the industries and you would see them as easily as bouncers/guards outside the clubs to being waitress in restaurants, in usual jobs and as management in professional companies. As a country they are multi-cultural with representation from different tribal zones and various African countries themselves. If you still don’t believe me ask the Indians settled here they choose to remain here for the good life! Of course everything is not like this across the country, there is poverty, hunger and disease outside the cities, medical treatment is exorbitant but we too have these problems don’t we?

The cradle of humanity did teach me a grand lesson on perceptions, humility and our place in the world and a PYT taught me four Swahili words Habari (hi/hey/helo/how are you), Emzuri (I am good), ashante (thank you) and kribu (welcome)!

Ashante!

Encounters of the wrong kind

I am still trying to get my head around the Ayurvedic massage, I mean around the concept not in the context of any physical contortion. Did Patanjali recommend it in his Ashtanga yoga or did Sushruta or Charaka mention it in their books on Ayurveda? What is the link between nasty warm herb infused nasty smelling oil being poured on you or being rubbed into you and healing? There were far too many questions and too few answers, so I took the explorers route and decided to try it out for myself.

The appointed day came and I walked into the center which was well lit up and friendly looking place with Ayurvedic powders, soaps, shampoos and oils lined neatly on shelves. I walked up to the counter not knowing what to expect, a wiry man greeted me asked me my name and made some officious looking entries in a register and asked me to step (was that a tarantula in the poem ‘won’t you step into my parlor?’) into this room with a complicated looking wooden table in its center. The room itself bore the look of having been drenched in oil while the table glistened with it. For some strange reasons the table started reminding me of medieval torture alters, but I dismissed the thought and got into the uniform (ahem .. I mean the loin cloth).

Lying motionless on the oily table with large quantities of oil on me I couldn’t but help noticing the extremely convoluted human psyche and the perverse sense of humor of our existence. Probably Freud attained enlightenment on a masseur’s table, but one can only guess who the masseur would have been in his case though. Here you are enjoying the de-stressing effect on you as the masseur works the kinks out of your body, but you are also uncomfortable with the experience all at the same time … ‘did he linger too long there’ … ‘damn can’t even move, least he thinks I am enjoying….’ … ‘this is very awkward’ …. If all of this wasn’t rattling enough I was trying not to giggle one because I am a little ticklish and two the entire irony of the situation (mine) was a little too amusing! Finally the hour was up and the masseur handed me a towel a bar of soap and pointed me to the nearest bathroom. Whew!

From a sheer scientific standpoint I feel that except for the very debatable medicinal qualities of the Ayurvedic oil used the technique itself is pretty mundane. A hot tub relaxes you to a large extent without jangling your psyche and if the kinks have not worked out yet, you can sit longer or even sip a glass of wine while in the tub. And if oil is the only difference than I know why the infamous Asian massage parlors do well, they have the oil, they have the table but minus the discomfort and awkwardness of the situation (if you catch my drift). Of course, there is a flip side to those parlors as well especially in case you have to deal with guilty conscience arising from happy endings J!.

Speed-breaker City

Bruised undercarriages bear testimony to our continued refusal to see reason, logic or commonsense; yes a bump on the city roads slows down traffic so that they don’t speed or break rules…. Wait doesn’t it even sound ridiculous suggesting it? We in India have a tendency to approach the problem from the wrong end, the problem of traffic obedience solved by enforced back breakers!

Bangalore is probably amongst the most bump infested metro in our country, the problem is so systemic that a citizen of this city gives distance and directions by the bumps, he/she is perplexed when a junction lacks one and would probably not even notice if he/she were riding a camel and not a car. If you thought those were the only problems then you are naïve, the four-lane Bangalore – Mysore expressway has bumps, bumps have bumps, they come in duets, triads, quartets and quintets. They even have personalities, some are tiny (teeth jarring), some are soft and round (did we go over a cow?), some are as large as the wheel base of the car (elevators) and some are downright mean with vertical walls (bruisers/bouncers).

It is the classic dilemma of enforcement vs. self discipline; unfortunately it requires both, incentives for self discipline and enforcement to ensure you like the incentives. As usual we approach the problem from wrong end and instead of heavily fining traffic violators we put a bump, fines will eventually make Indians better drivers holistically but bumps will only try and contain one problem. I agree there will be corruption and you and I will pay off to get out of a larger fine but even that will ensure we avoid unnecessarily pay offs right (or are you stinking rich or a megalomaniac)? But that’s no fun when compared to surprising a driver with an unmarked bump and watching with pleasure as the car violently reacts.

What really cooks my goose is that even the bumps have a nasty sense of humor, you see a small innocuous looking bump and slow down a little you and your cocky car can easily handle this right (?) and what happens next is essentially you are ready to go into labor. Yes there are good surprises too, where you see a large bump too late and you suck in your gut and grit your teeth and you just go over the bump as if you just rose up in a dream and lightly came down. Life just has a nasty sense of humor; thank god it has one though!