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!
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