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?