World of India!

Just checking to see if I am still alive in January 2009 :)

You have read about me cribbing about Bangalore traffic in the preceding posts. The state of roads in Bangalore does not make matters any easier. Some one has now come with an idea to photograph potholes in various areas in Bangalore (www.bangalorepotholes.com). You can even search on your area to have a good look at the potholes you wade your way through on a daily basis! Splendid!

But i doubt if this site can succeed in its aim of shaming the local government into improving the state of affairs. These guys have a hide thats tougher than a rhino and given that Bangalore has been categorized as an A1 status city now by the Central govt., resulting in a fat increase in the allowances of the officials responsible for the infrastructure, this hide is likely to get thicker still.

But the effort has to be lauded. My only suggestion is that the site could do with a option which will enable a reader to rate the best pothole in the city!

Bangalore is full of people and commercial establishments who think that their only calling in life is to plunder and pillage all those who work in the I.T sector. They have this quaint notion that we make money by the sack full and therefore are legitimate targets.

The people who run Bayleaf restaurant in Koramangala belong to such a breed. They have become inspired by this thought so much lately, that they decided to run a Goan food festival. Since, I am a Goan from my mothers’ side, I could naturally not resist and decided that this was an opportunity that was hard to miss.

1 fish curry, 1 fried fish, 1 steamed rice and 1 beer later – I realized that the only item worth eating is the steamed rice and the Kingfisher beer. If this is what passes for Goan fish curry, even the fish in the curry would have been disgusted. The fish fry did not have a trace of the famous Goan Reichado masala. But the management must be given full marks for being ambitious. Each item on the menu is priced above Rs.200/- taking the sum total of my misery to Rs.850 off, excluding the tip.

To their eternal misfortune the captain presented me a feedback form, which I duly used to massacre the food and the chef. To the captains’ credit, he sent over the chef to meet me and discuss the shortcomings, but that did not help my wallet regain its original size, of course.

Such is life!

One of the charms of living in India is to discover that people from the most religious state in India-Tamil Nadu- have elected a chief minsiter who is a confirmed athiest and questions the very core of their beliefs about their religion day in and day out.

I am in Bangalore now since the past 2-3 months and have had enough time in the city to start spouting opinions on it like a water fountain : )

To start with , Bangalore is not as hot as many Bangaloreans want people to believe. The traffic has gone out of control and that is the single biggest factor driving everyone in this city mad. Things might improve when all the road building projects end- but don't pin your hopes too much on this too happen over the next 2-3 years. Parking spaces are few and far between and parking tickets everywhere are exorbitant (Rs.20-30). Its unaffordable even for us IT guys whom local bangaloreans think of as spoilt rich. So I wonder how the locals cope with these nonsensical rates.

Eating out is very expensive. Rentals are exorbitant- even in the outskirts and this is the only city where petrol station attendants in almost all stations will try to rob car drivers silly by playing all kinds of tricks. On the latter, I can write a book. In fact these days i am beginning to enjoy the battle of wits with these tricksters. The Chennai auto wallah contagion of total lawlessness has finally caught on with the Bangalore auto wallah and they are now vying with their Chennai counterparts for the top spot in terms of fleecing passengers (Chennai autowallahs still lead the race, but only marginally.) Road rage has become a hazard due to the traffic problems and going by the way a couple of my neighbours have behaved recently, it seems that traffic is making bangaloreans more and more intemperate even at their homes. And then, Bangalore goes on a curfew at 11:00 pm with all eating places shutting down. For people like me who have to stay late at office often, its a big spoiler.

The only solace in Bangalore is the weather. Its almost always pleasant and on this count Bangalore beats any big city in India, hands down.

But man can't live on weather alone (old jungle saying)...what say?

Where is this blog disappeared? We will be back after a short commercial break...

Since a few years now, I have noticed a new trend when I go to watch the movies. Just before the movie starts the Mngt. "requests'" you to stand and pay your respects while they play the national anthem in the movie hall, just before the movie starts. This trend is true in almost all multiplexes in Mumbai and a few in Pune.

Now, no one will shy away from singing his own national anthem, but surely there is a time and a place for everything? What this drive amounts to is forcing people (since there is no choice but to stand up once a anthem is played, without that action signifying a dis-respect to the anthem, although Vikram Chauhan would dispute that) into displaying their love for their nation, when they have come to enjoy a movie. More importantly why do we as a nation feel the urge that our citizens have to repeatedly publicly proclaim and display the respect to the nation? Why can't our minders let us decide when we want to pay our respects to the nation and in what form? Its as if the powers that be have decided that the masses are a idiotic lot who don't have the heart & brains to decide this and therefore come up with this silly diktat.

At a broader level, nationalism and its jingoistic display is something that is becoming a feature of India and Indians. While at one end we have a whole bunch of people who have a massive inferiority complex about all things Indian, on the other side we have a equally idiotic bunch who see India as the be all and end all in everything on this planet ("ah, planes? we discovered it thousands of years ago! Nuclear bombs? Cmon, India discovered the Brahmstra as early as in the age of Mahabharata!). In the past decade or so, the much lauded 9% growth rate and the emergence of India in the mind space of the world at large, has given much ammunition to a display of nationalistic sentiment which is more often than not crass, rather than a genuine display of affection and respect for India and its culture. In reality, it stems from an inferiority complex about India and is an attempt to conquer this feeling of inadequacy with a desire to distinguish oneself through the concrete achievements of other fellow Indians on the world stage or even the much more abstract- 9% growth rate.

There is a thin line between being patriotic and being nationalistic. Charles De Gaulle defined this rather well when he said " Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. "

So when people pay respects to the nation and its culture of their own accord, it can be safely described as positive love. But when some one in the political leadership forces people to display such a respect, invading and not taking into consideration the context of time and space in which these people are, surely this is nothing but nationalism?

Einstein once famously castigated nationalism as an infantile disease and a measles of mankind.Going by recent evidence, it seems that the authorities, have decided that they want more of this disease shoved down our throats.

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