Unlucky traveler

I realized that I have not blogged in a couple of months and I seem so out of touch now. I was away in India for a month and then as if to pay for my vacation, after coming back, I ended up in a project where I had to work like it was going out of fashion. But all that is hogwash. Excuses I like to give myself for my tardiness at blogging.

Anyway, one lazy afternoon, as I relaxed on the sofa with my head leaned back and pondered about life in general, I came to the conclusion that I am an unlucky traveler. Let me elaborate on that unlucky bit. Ever since I started travelling alone and ever since the fairer sex was of interest to me, not once has a young woman sat next to me in a bus, train or plane. Elderly women, elderly men, young men, children -sure. But never a young woman. Please note that I am not saying 'hot young woman' or 'pretty young woman'. I am just saying any young woman. If my wife is reading this, (a) I am talking about the time before I met you and (b) I really don't care about who sits next to me now, so I don't think of myself as lucky or unlucky anymore.

Some people have all the luck. I know of a few friends who seemed to meet women only in buses and trains. Every time they wanted to meet a new woman, all they had to do was travel a few hours by bus or train. I have heard so many stories from them that I have felt that it was just my fate to maintain a balance in the universe in that field. There was a time when I used to travel between Bombay and Pune by bus every week. I must have done that for atleast 2 years, Pune being my place of work and Bombay being my hometown. Its a 4 hour journey each way. So in approximately 400 trips in 2 years, never once did I ever have the same luck as my friends did. Fate never gave me the chance to open up a conversation with my "fellow-young-female-traveler". In the movie 'Unbreakable', Samuel Jackson's character yearns to find someone who is at the opposite end of the spectrum as himself. I don't think my friends and I ever had that problem.

When I was about 13 or 14, there used to be a TV program called 'Yatra' (यात्रा -meaning 'journey') and I suspect that it was sponsored by the Indian Railways. Anyway, every episode was a short story about people who were travelling by train. I distinctly remember an episode where a young man and woman who are travelling from Kanya-kumari to Kashmir (easily a 3 day journey) meet on the train and fall in love. For some reason, that episode lodged itself firmly in my memory and fate cruelly reminded me every time I travelled that what I saw was a TV show and my travels were real-life.

But now when I think about it, I realise that I was unlucky only while I was in the actual process of travelling. After getting to a destination, things were alright. I have tried to form many theories to explain this dearth of interesting female company in my travels. One of my theories is that pretty young women do not travel alone because they always have some acquaintance who is dying to be with them all the time. The second theory is that younger women don't travel alone as much as younger men and so the chance of sitting next to one is reduced considerably right there. But when I look at my friends, all these theories fall flat and the only conclusion and a horrible one too, that I seem to be able to draw, is that maybe it's just me. I am not sure what it is about me though. That will be one of life's unsolved mysteries.

Spoilt

Ravi grew up in a very middle-class family in a suburb of Bombay. His home was on the 4th floor of a 6-storied building in a typical middle-class locality. Even though Bombay was bursting at its seams with more and more people migrating into the city every day and straining the already scarce resources, their building surprisingly seemed largely unaffected since it still had running water and electricity 24 hours a day. Their family was never rich enough to own a car, but then who needed a car in Bombay! The fastest way to get around the city was the incredibly efficient public transport system - buses and trains - the lifeline of the city.

Many kilometers south from Ravi's apartment, in one of the most affluent sections of the South Bombay, a huge mansion overlooked the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea. This mansion was inhabited by textile mill tycoon Mr. J.N. Patel, his wife Mrs. Seema Patel and their daughter Ms. Natasha Patel. Natasha had had a very sheltered and comfortable life. She had just graduated from college, where her biggest problem everyday usually had been, which car from her father's fleet of imported cars would she be driven in to her college by the chauffeur. She had never set foot on a bus or a train. Not that she felt that she was too good for them but it was more due to the fact that there was never a need to - especially when there were not one but many chauffeurs who could drive her anywhere in the city in an air-conditioned, imported car.

One rainy morning in July, Ravi had just walked into his cubicle at work, when he was told by his boss that he urgently needed to travel to Doghat to clear up some paperwork for a plot of land that his company was looking to buy. Doghat was a village in the interiors of the state, many miles away from Bombay. It was literally a tiny hamlet and was in such a remote place that there was not even a hotel anywhere near it. So he would have to stay in a cottage owned by one of the locals with whom he was going to do the paperwork. Ravi was to get some money from the bank for expenses and leave early morning the next day. Not one to waste time, he set out for the bank rightaway.

Natasha had walked into the bank just minutes before Ravi. She was standing just before Ravi in the queue. Tall and beautiful, Natasha always drew appreciative glances from men and Ravi was no exception. He was drawn to her rightaway. He noticed that she was wearing stylish, expensive clothes and she had a very expensive cell-phone glued to her ear. "Definitely rich", he thought. He tried to appear nonchalant and uninterested in her, but his ears were trying to catch every word she uttered.

"....and its so rainy today", Natasha seemed to be complaining to a friend on the phone.
She went on, "Yeah, I had gone to Dadar to visit a friend. Dad took the Ferrari to work, Mom took the BMW to Pune and so I had to go in the Mercedes."

Ravi corrected his previous assessment. "Not rich, but stinking rich", he thought.

Natasha went on "But the car broke down just as we set off for home. The driver tells me that it may have been a blessing in disguise since most of the roads leading to home are blocked because of the rains. Insane traffic. So I had to take the train and Oh my God, I tell you I will never travel in a local train again. I don't know how people do it. No air-condition, so many people and then the train stops every few minutes and another horde of people hop on aboard. So now you have another new set of people to stare at and to be stared at. I am so glad those 20 minutes in the train are over. I don't care if my car breaks down again and I have to stay overnight somewhere, but I am never going to take the local train again".

Ravi quickly added 'Spoilt' to his assessment of her. He thought, "If only these rich people did not live exclusively in their perfect parallel universes, they would be less spoilt, have less to complain about and be much more happier. They really need to be more in touch with what common people live like".

Soon Ravi collected his money from the bank and went home to prepare for the trip to Doghat. He caught the morning train to Velaki, the closest train station to Doghat and the only way to reach Doghat. He arrived at Velaki ten hours after he left from Bombay. The travel department at work had arranged for a car at Velaki station to take him to Doghat. He had his dinner near Velaki and then sat on a 2 hour car-ride to Doghat. Just as the sun was about to go down, he reached his destination. He was met by one Mr. Girish Tawak, the owner of the cottage he was supposed to stay in. Girish was a silent man, probably a few years older than Ravi. He ushered Ravi into a old, dilapidated cottage and told him that he would come back the next day at 9 am, when they could start with the paperwork.

The next day, when Girish arrived at 9 am, he found that Ravi looked quite groggy and not ready at all to leave rightaway. Girish noticed that Ravi did not just look uncomfortable, in fact, he looked really unhappy. He asked Ravi, "You look ill. Is something the matter?"
Ravi replied, "It was so hot yesterday night and there is no electricity here, no ceiling or table fan, nothing. I just could not sleep. I have been used to sleeping under the whirring blades of a fan in Bombay. I tossed and turned for the better part of the night and I finally gave up. I thought I might as well take a shower and get ready for tommorrow. Thats when I realised that there is no running water in this cottage. I remembered your words that the village well was half a mile from the cottage. The idea of just walking half a mile to get water in the pre-dawn hours sounded so demoralising that I just gave up that idea and tried going back to sleep. Which obviously I could not. God, I don't understand how you people live like this. I mean it must be so hard to live without electricity and running water. I don't think I can ever live in such conditions. If I am sent here one more time, I will just quit and the company can go to hell".

Girish just sat there not saying a word and listening to everything that Ravi said and he thought, "These city people are such babies. They probably think every place should be like their cities. They are so quick to complain. All they are really is spoilt. Yes, definitely spoilt".

Eight Signs That You Are A Little Over-Obsessed With Your Dog

It appears that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who think that dogs exude all that is good in life (hope, loyalty, patience, and of course, love) and those that just haven’t met the right dogs yet. In fact, canine appreciation may be so deeply engrained in human nature that it helps us to better define the essence of what humanity truly is. Apparently Gandhi would agree, as a t-shirt I recently saw (probably not the most reliable source of information, but you must admit that many of Gandhi’s more profound thoughts do to tend to end up on t-shirts and bumper stickers) quoted him as stating, “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” This rings of trueness. Even pop culture tells us that humans tend to predictably go ga-ga over dogs and similarly furry creatures. In one Star Trek episode, for example, the crew of Deep Space Nine travels back in time to capture a dangerous Klingon who has infiltrated the Enterprise disguised as a human. Although the crew expresses concern over how they will discover him, given that they know that he appears to be human in every way, fortunately he is easily found due to his distinct reaction to an animal. Whereas humans can’t help but fawn over a “Tribble” (a rapidly-breeding but adorable equivalent of a rodent), the Klingon is unable to repress his repulsion at the fuzzy-wuzzy animal, and aha, he is outted! Clearly, space-age humans, defined in this case by their appreciation of something cute and cuddly, would be dog-people.

So surely there is no crime in loving your pet, but is it possible that some people have become a little too obsessed with dogs? I am forced to reluctantly acknowledge that this is the case in our household. Below are some tips that may aid you in discovering whether you too are a complete sucker when in comes to pups:

1) You realize that you are spending more time and money on your dog’s medical care than on your own. Example: I have gone to a doctor’s office twice in the past two years. Cooper has gone to the vet five times. Sadly, the ratios aren’t much different when it comes to teeth-cleanings. (But I am happy to say that I have had more eye doctor appointments than the dog).

2) You believe that there can never be “too many” dog toys. The more dog toys the better. The dog likes his toys- no, he LOVES his toys. You love the dog and the dog loves his toys, so naturally you must spend outrageous amounts of money on designer toys that will eventually be slobbered upon, torn, or squeaked into a premature toy-death.

3) In an average day you spend more time talking to the dog than your spouse. True, it is sort of a one way conversation when it comes to the dog, but he happily curls his ears and wags his tail in delight when you talk to him. A spouse doesn’t do either of these things.

4) You can’t help but refer to the dog in a sing-songy baby-talk sort of way. He likes it. He curls his ears when you do this. He has an official name, but you tend to call him your ____________(insert name here)-y boopy bear. You would probably be horrified to hear yourself doing this, but still, you can’t help it. He is, after all, sooo cute.

5)99.9999% of the photos from your digital camera are of the dog.

6) You always seem to be covered in dog hair. You are so used to having dog hair on your clothes, on your socks, on your furniture, that you stop minding it. You notice that your close family and friends also seem to transporting hair from your dog on their clothes too. Not so surprising, as they may have sat on your couch, sat in your car or worked in your office, all places frequented by the dog. In some ways this is nice, like a badge that identifies all of your closest people (the honor of having persistent hair from Coopie sticking to you)...but then you realize that some of your friends’ friends have hair from your dog on their clothes too. At this point your forced to realize that the abundant amount of hair shed from your dog is somewhat disturbing. It is traveling in circles far beyond your own social networking.

7) In a moment when a young child, a son or daughter of your friends or relatives, does something excessively charming and cute, you announce that he/she reminds you of your dog. This is usually not taken well. Non-dog people should understand though, that this is the *highest* compliment a dog-owner can give. It is said with the utmost love.

8) On a day when you have quite a bit of work sitting on your desk, more work than you can possibly imagine getting through, you blissfully procrastinate by hacking into your husband’s blog to write an ode to how much you love the dog. I know, I know, it’s sad really...sort of depressing given how many deadlines are piling up. There’s only one thing to do to console one’s self in a case like this. Goodbye-I’m off to play with the dog.

Chick-flicks and Optimism

This Friday, I had the misfortune of watching the movie '27 weddings' or '27 dresses' or '27 wedding dresses' or something like that. Well, you get the idea. Shakespeare once said, crap by any other name would still stink which his PR person turned into the famous quote 'the rose by another name would still smell as sweet'. So it does not matter what the exact name of the movie is, it killed me.

The netflix DVD had turned up mysteriously at our home. I think it is time I changed the password on my Netflix account, so that such movies don't appear unexplicably in my movie queue. In all fairness to my wife, good soul that she is, she did warn me not to watch it before she left for work on Friday. I think she had said 'you will hate it'. Yes, those were her exact words.

But as a moth drawn to a flame, I watched it in the early part of the evening before my wife came home. Call me an optimist, but no matter how bad a movie is, I always watch it till the end in the belief that something will happen in the next few minutes, that will redeem the movie in my eyes. And so I ended up torturing myself. When my wife came back from work, she chuckled at me - it was a 'I told you so' chuckle.

Most children will feel tempted to do something that they are told not to. Some people never grow out of that phase even as adults. I have a horrible feeling that I maybe one of them. '27 dresses' was probably the worst 'chick-flick' that I have seen in a while. Once bitten, twice shy is what they say. So I have resolved to steer clear of such movies. But I have to stop this post soon now. My wife has just put on 'Dirty Dancing' on our DVD player and I need to watch it.

Our famous relative

A couple of months ago, I found out that I have Sri Lankan relatives. No one in our family knows who they are or where they are. My brother came across this interesting family trivia when he was chatting with my mother. Apparently, one of my grand-uncles - my mother's father's brother, went to Sri Lanka (Ceylon back then) for work sometime in the first half of the 20th century and he settled down there. He married a Sri Lankan woman, had kids and he never came back to India; not even to visit. The only reason my mother knew that he had a Sri Lankan family was because he used to write regularly to his brother (my grandfather) and once he sent some photographs of his wife and kids. My mother says that the woman was very beautiful. Once my grandfather passed away, there were no more letters and so no one knows where his family is and how his kids/grandkids are doing.

My brother has therefore decided to put a spin on this story. He says he has adopted the Sri Lankan cricketer Kumar Sangakkara as our long-lost cousin (or 2nd cousin to be precise). His reasons are:
1. He is a very good cricketer.
2. He is quite intelligent and extremely articulate.
3. He comes off as a very likeable person.
4. Since the chances of finding our real relatives are next to none, we might as well pick and choose the best.
And so by slightly less logical and slightly more opportunistic deduction, Kumar Sangakkara is our relative. Elementary, my dear Watson !

A tale of 2 flights

Once upon a time, there lived a man who was a software consultant by profession. There was a time in his life, when he used to travel a lot for work. He did not like it much but he had no choice. Every Monday morning, he would wake up at an unearthly hour and go to the Sacramento airport and take the 6 am flight to Minneapolis. Once there, he would eagerly wait for Thursday evening to take the 6 pm flight back home. Thank God, there were direct flights at the times he wanted. He always shuddered to think how he would have coped with it if not for these direct flights. Most probably, he would have quit his job and found something else to do.

He saw a lot of familiar faces in both the flights. He pitied them as probably they pitied him. Some of them even gave him a hint of a smile of recognition which was usually reciprocated by him - unless it was on Monday mornings, which is when he would mostly be sleep-walking and hardly notice anything going around him.

Our man was also quite well-known at home for his procrastination, usually when it came to things which only affected him. Once he forgot to buy tickets in advance and he could not manage to get tickets on his usual flights. So he was forced to buy tickets through Frontier airlines which had a stopover in Denver. He cursed himself but tried to be optimistic about the whole thing, telling himself that this was precisely what he needed to jolt him out of his procrastination tendencies. He swore to himself that he would never wait to buy tickets at the last minute.

The flight to Minneapolis through Denver was quite uneventful. As it was a Monday morning, he graduated from sleep-walking in the airport to a full-fledged slumber on the flight to Denver and then again from Denver to Minneapolis. It was on the trip back home on Friday evening from Minneapolis that he noticed that Frontier Airlines had newer aeroplanes with better facilities inside the plane. Every Frontier flight had some kind of an animal painted on its rudder. That was a neat thing to do, he observed. Inside the plane, there were 2 rows of seats in sets of 3, on either side of the aisle.

Soon he was seated on the right hand side of the aisle in the center seat. As soon as he sat down he noticed that every seat had its own little TV screen and a set of headphones. He plugged his headphones into the socket, adjusted them on his ears and set the channel he wanted to see using the controls on his right armrest and relaxed back in his seat. He changed the channels many times, changed the volume settings many times almost greedily, as if he wanted to make the most of this TV screen. When they landed, he was surprised at how fast they had reached Denver. He disembarked and walked at a brisk pace to his gate for the flight to Sacramento. Seeing him walk then, you would never believe that this was the same person who wafted sleepily through the airport like a petulant schoolboy on Monday mornings.

Very soon, he was on the flight to Sacramento. This time he was seated on the left hand side of the aisle, again in the center seat. He was thrilled to see that this plane too had the TV screens for each seat. He concluded right then that all the Frontier aeroplanes must be like this one and that he liked Frontier. It was a pity that they they did not have direct flights to Minneapolis. The plane took off soon and he decided to watch some TV. He put on his headphones and changed the channel using the controls on his right armrest, but the controls seemed to be broken. He pressed the channel buttons hard - he pressed the up button and the down button but the screen did not change. However he felt a light tap on his right shoulder. He turned to see the passenger on his right (henceforth referred to as "Passenger On Right" or POR for short) telling him that he was changing POR's channel and not his own. Our man was embarassed and he apologised. He used the controls on his left armrest and they worked like a charm. He smiled at POR and POR smiled back as if saying it was ok and that he understood.

After a while, our man decided to change channels and he committed the same mistake again. He changed POR's channel once again, but this time he realised his error in a split second and changed it back rightaway hoping that he was fast enough for POR not to notice. Unfortunately, POR's persistence of vision was that of a normal human being and our man's actions definitely took eons more than that time. So POR noticed it and this time again there were apologies rendered by our man and explanations given as to how on the right hand side of the aisle, the center seat had controls on the right and how he had just sat there on a long flight and how his brain had got accustomed to that and so on. POR was nice enought to laugh it off. There were smiles all around. Smiles of amusement, mature smiles acknowledging the apologies and sheepish smiles tendering the apologies. It was all good.

Soon the Sun set and it was dark inside the plane. People including our man and POR started dozing off. After an hour or so, our man woke up and the first thing he realised was that he could not hear anything on his headphones. He proceeded to increase the volume and he increased it to such an extent that POR sprang up with a start from his sleep and took his headphones off. He glared at our man with eyes that could kill. Gone were the mature and amused smiles. For the first time, our man felt thankful for all the metal detector checks that passengers had to undergo at the airport. He apologised profusely once again and this time he took off his headphones, wrapped the wires and put it away in the seat-back pocket in front. He promised POR that he was never going to watch TV again. Not on this flight and probably never on any flight. POR just kept watching him, his eyes were tiny slits trying to stem the anger which was trying to burst its way out.

Our man closed his eyes trying to shut out the shame that his actions had drawn towards him. Very soon, he realised that try as he might, the incident kept playing endlessly over and over again in his mind's eye and slowly it became difficult to control his laughter. He sensed though that laughter would not go down too well with POR. So he put his head down on the seat-back table in front and hid his face. He pretended to sleep while the urge to laugh went away, just supressing the full blown laughter into a long smile. Soon the plane landed and he avoided all eye-contact with POR. Light traveller as he was, he burst through the airport and caught a cab to go home.

He could not wait to tell his wife about his adventures on the plane. In the cab, he even thought of a few theories of how frequent travel, frequent time changes and frequent disruptions to his body cycle were affecting his brain. Another theory he mulled around for a while was that most right-handed people would always go for their controls on the right. Surely he was not the first person to do this. Maybe he was the first person to do it 3 times in the space of an hour. He also thought of a few solutions that could counter this problem. Very soon he was home.

Exclusion

What is it that makes people exclude others from something that they are enjoying? Inherent selfishness is something that comes to mind rightaway. Every human being is born selfish and over a period of time, based on their experiences and upbringing, some are just less selfish than the others, but the selfishness never goes away completely. This 'Selfishness' theory may be too simplistic a term because ultimately this trait stems from the age-old survival-of-the-fittest behaviour that our ancestors had to develop when resources were scarce.

I am sure you have had experiences, direct or indirect, of having been excluded from something you might have wanted to be a part of. Have you not come across clubs where membership costs are so high that you can't even dream of being a member? Have you not been turned away from a discotheque/club, just because you are a certain ethnicity, age, broke or just simply not cool enough? But, at some point of time in our lives, everyone has been the "excluder" rather than the "excludee". Just think of all those times when you have driven in a faster lane on the freeway and made sure that no one else from the slower lane cut in and slowed down traffic because that would essentially defeat the advantage of being in the fast lane. Pushing the argument to the extreme, would you not clothe and feed everyone as opposed to just your near and dear ones, if you were not an 'excluder'?

Niether complete exclusion nor complete inclusion will work socially. History has shown that to us over and over again. Complete exclusion benefits only the few, depriving the many and is not a sustainable social model, as we have seen from the many revolutions and wars for independence by the masses against the ruling few, around the world. Complete non-exclusion, where every one shares everything does not work as has been seen from the failure of almost each and every communist state all over the world, chiefly since there are no special rewards for the efforts of a progressive few and hence no motivation to go on since everyone gets the same returns irrespective of their efforts. The correct answer is somewhere in the middle.

As usual, I have gone off on a tangent. So I must stop now since I have work to do and mouths to feed. And until we arrive at the right answer, I will be excluding the rest of the world from my dining table and to be fair to them, I will also be excluding them from doing my work.