Chalta hai....

On my way to work today, the subway was a tad too crowded for comfort. No comparisions to the records set by the crowds in the mumbai locals, but by NY standards it was obnoxious. We could still accomodate a few here and there, but the reactions of people onboard got me thinking. There is a basic difference between these people and us indians. There might be a hundred other and I might have witnessed another hundred , but right now I am talking about this specific one. tolerance and accomodation. 2 words, but with essentially the same meaning. I was just trying to emphasize the difference here.

I understand personal space and all that bull crap of words these guys come up with, but what harm does the nudge of a tiny little bag of a lady do to you, who like you is just trying to reach her office on time. We could have picked up a lot more people from the platforms had this been a churchgate bound local. The difference I guess is situational. We have so many people in India that we don have the liberty of personal space, or for that matter any space. We are inadvertently invading spaces all the time in India. Its our "chalta hai" attitude towards life that just presses us to go that extra mile when it comes to accomodation.Someone steps on your well polished shoes, "chalta hai", because you know you had done the very same thing to atleast 10 different people on your way. Someones parked in your parking space in the society "chalta hai", you will park in someone else's space. Big deal. It really isn't big enough a matter to spend your precious energies on.

And thats what so cool about desh....everthing goes...."sab chalta hai!!"

PS : I love empty spaces and un-crowded places though. Infact, who doesn't.

Settling Expenses!

Have been settling down in life for the last couple of weeks...and should be almost complete by this saturday when the futon, tables and bar stools are delievered and assembled in my apartment.Almost ,because as any other money consuming activity its ongoing and never seems to end. So now the settling down expense stands roughly at 1000+ $'s including the TV, the other futon and the above mentioned 3 items. Now I could have got away with all that expense, the entire thing, if I had just opted for the demeaning option. Now the demeaning part is a figmnet of my beloved wife and my buddy Rathore's imaginations. I call it a grant.In the US they have this concept of dumping most if not all of your belongings minus the clothes, when you are moving to a newer place. Its sound logic because the moving expenses are far greater than buying the whole stuff afresh, not to mention the hard physical labor associated with. Mind you the hired help here is astronomically costly. So they dump it in and around the dust bins and every now and then the dustbins become virtual megastores of all you can pick without the hassel of paying for it.Now whats wrong with it. You wan't it , they don't. Perfectly simple equation. Apparently not because there's some stupid thing called human pride that comes into the picture. Damn the philosophers for inventing these stupid concepts.
But I extract my revenge by keeping the TV on for the entire humanly possible time and once the TV shuts off, I am on the futon sleeping my way to glory. Take that for pride!!

PS: Well I do secretly love to use all the new stuff. But thats only when I have the temporal amnesia and I can't remember that they all cost me.

Changing Lives..

This really is a reaction to what rathore has written today.....its literally an echo of what I was a few sundays back. A lonely bored guy with a light at the end of the tunnel or a silver lining in the otherwise grey cover of clouds to look forward to as rathore puts it ....But I am no more that guy, I have reached the light at the end of my tunnel and its not a freight train coming my way....but its the sun shining happily on me.
And today I can sit and reflect back on a conversation which rathore and myself had a few days back......about certain things in life that we love so much. This post was suppose to happen at least those many days back...but better late than never...at the least for this one thing. It started off with rathore posting me something like this....

"We were still 2 kms away from entering mahabaleshwar when a guy caught us near a checkpoint. He was a hotel owner (Actually, owner of 4 cottages). Although it was a little outside from the main town, we still decided to give it a chance as he was promising everything on earth for a paltry sum of 200 bucks!! The cottage was not bad at all. Everything except a TV was there and we were not bothered by its absence. After all who the hell was there to watch Kyonki saas bhi..!! By this time our asses were crying for mercy. We planned a short nap of 1 hr and fell on the bed in more or less same condition in which we entered the room."

...which I instantly recognized as the lines from one of his blogs about our journeys. And then another bit of an excerpt. And suddenly we were all nostalgic, reiterating the fondest of our trip memories in chronological , or not so chronological order . One thing led to another and for the umpteenth time we were talking about chucking up everything to become traveling journos for 'Travel and Living' and working as camera technicians for the Discovery channel. We have somehow stuffed the adventurer in us in a closet and every now and then we try and take the sneakiest of peaks at what is the best in us.....and bask in its glory. Who knows we someday might actually end up doing it or may be not. But whenever we are down and out...we can look back at those wonderful driving blogs, read them aloud and remember our days in the sun, out of the dingy light of this laptop.
Cheers to us rathore!!