Do They Happen to You?

I struggle to do certain things although apparently they appear very simple. However much I resolve to get them right or avoid them next time, I fail and repeat them.

And, as there are no clear guidelines available on what is the right approach to take, it becomes all the more difficult to decide what to do.

I am sure many among you, like me, find them difficult, too.

Socializing
Socializing is perhaps the most difficult thing to do, especially with people whom you are neither fully familiar nor completely unfamiliar with. In office, on road or in any such neutral venue, when I run into a person I’m partially familiar with, I struggle to decide what to do. I don’t know the person enough to engage in a conversation; yet, I have to acknowledge my familiarity with the person.

So what do I do? Snap a quick smile, a ‘hi’ and walk past? Or keep quite and pretend I didn’t notice the person, and go?

The problem with the first approach is if the person doesn’t acknowledge you in return, you might feel bad. The problem with the second approach is the person might feel you tried to ignore him/her.

Stamping out angry thoughts in the morning
In the morning until I leave my bed, my mind is cluttered with snippets of bitter memories - like snubs, minor betrayals, letdowns, etc. - rising from the inner recesses of the mind and gushing forth. Maybe this happens with many of us because our mind, I have read, remains at its sharpest in the morning.

As these unpleasant experiences tumble forth, I counter them with retorts but my angry flashes hit the bed sheet covering my face and return to me again. Strangely, once I leave the bed and get involved in other activities the mind becomes calm.

Making a choice
When I have to make a choice and the options are marginally different from each other, indecision sets in. When I settle on a choice, the other options look better and a series of negatives come to mind about the option I had chosen. When I drop the option, the negatives somehow fade into the background and the option starts looking better again.

I know it is indecision and I have heard advices on how to be decisive, but they feel effective only until I have to make a choice again.

I am sure these things happen to most of us (although some don’t want to admit they happento them) and we try to counter them as we think best, but the problems linger. I have been living with these for very long and don’t remember a day I didn’t think they were silly and that the next day I wouldn’t let them bother me. But I did.

What about you?

Chinese Peculiarities

I have an interest in China and things Chinese for sometime now. Although I take interest in countries, people and cultures in general, my interest in China seems to have an obsessive character to it.

I have read articles on Chinese culture, history, politics and, of course, China's rise to global prominence. But, I guess, fictions provide the best view of people and societies.

I am reading a Chinese fiction, The Eye of Jade, a detective thriller where the protagonist is trying to unravel a complex plot to trace a missing antique piece – an eye of jade – which dates back to the Han dynasty.

I don’t know whether or not the search will be successful as I haven’t finished the novel, but the novel has provided me with some interesting insights on how China and Chinese society work. Some of the things are common place and some unique.

The society is cleaved into two broad classes: first, people who stay in the cities and second, the provincial population.

For example, if you are an eligible bachelor but hail from provinces, your provincial upbringing is enough to disqualify you as a groom of a girl who comes from a city. Provincial peculiarities are looked down upon by the by urbanites.

There is a premium on staying in Beijing.

Arranged marriage is an established practice. The prospects are generally put in touch with each other by common social contacts.

Some resent the Communist party for its miserable human-right records while others are thankful to the party due to personal stability acquired through loyal service in government positions.

There is no press freedom; the media, used as a propaganda tool, is part of the Communist party and completely controlled by it. The people working in the media are party loyalists.

There are noodle bars everywhere and of different varieties - small, large, up-market and dingy. The noodle bars sometimes double up as sex parlors.

Going through this maze, the protagonist is trying to find her way to the eye of jade. The story is interesting and the language is very simple.

Qualities of the Crow

Photography is a new-found hobby for me. I owe it to two friends who helped me buy a Cannon ‘point and shoot’ camera at a discounted price one and half years ago.

Since then I have looked for photo-worthy things and clicked them. Of all things I find nature most interesting to photograph.

And of all things natural I find birds most fascinating to capture.

While with other gifts of nature there are swathes of monotonous sameness in their looks, personalities, habitations and food habits - one type of bird is always refreshingly different from another on various counts.

It isn’t easy to find good avian variety in cities, though. Their numbers are dwindling steadily due to pollution and expanding concrete jungles.

But, despite the shrinking population, there is no dearth of the bird I find most intriguing – the crow. The crow is most clever of all birds.

With its wit and flair for improvisation, the crow somehow manages to outwit other birds and grab its morsel.

The crow is aggressive but clever enough to know who to pick up a shindy with. It never engages itself in a full-scale battle with a big kite; instead, it descends, hits the kite with its claws and goes.

While with its measured aggression it holds its own among biggies like kites, its pedestrian appeal finds it a place among harmless and unassuming birds like pigeons and sparrows.

A crow rules in a flock and also is effective enough alone.

Another virtue of this bird is its observation. The crow almost always manages to spot its food – be it a scuttling mouse or a piece of bread – and once the prey has been spotted, it seldom fails to savour it.

And doesn’t the crow look elegant while gliding from one windowsill to another?


PS: What drew my attention to the crow is an interview by RK Laxman, the famous Times of India cartoonist, on his recently published biography. In the interview, Laxman likened the crow with the “common man” of his cartoons.

For the uninitiated reader, RK Laxman is an Indian cartoonist who is famous for his satirical takes on Indian politics and the “common man” is a theme that runs across almost all of Laxman’s cartoons: while the political dramas play themselves out, the common man stands by and observes. The common man is a silent observer in a noisy democracy.

The crow, Laxman says, has the qualities of the common man in that the bird is witty and is a survivor.

Vignette of a Corporate Success

Our US director is here and we went out for a lunch today sponsored by our team.

We went to a European restaurant. The whole team couldn’t join because a part of our team is based in Hydrabad; the rest is in Bangalore.

Even among the Bangalore ones some dropped out giving flimsy excuses.

The one-hour lunch revealed the other side of her personality. Our director is a petite lady with short and pointed features (she is around 55). This was the second time I saw her in person. The first time was a few days ago when we had a general meeting; the earlier evening she had arrived in India.

In the meeting, she looked just like a corporate boss: no-frills and business-like.

The purpose of the meeting was to know her team members well. The majority of her team is based in India and she is first time in India. So she wanted to check every aspect of every member’s personality.

We gathered in a big conference hall and she kicked-off the meeting with a presentation, explaining why we shouldn’t leave the company. Then we stood up one-by-one and introduced ourselves. You had to tell your name, how long you were with the company, your passions, etc.

You couldn’t say an odd or pompous-sounding passion – like I want to change the world, for example - because the crowd sitting at the back would immediately boo you. Imagine how embarrassing it can be.

And as we went through this embarrassment, she paced up and down, stooped and her hands clasped behind her, looking like an intellectual appraising her audience with disdain.

But today, during the lunch, she was a different person. The swagger had been replaced by diffidence. The grandeur had been replaced by friendliness. And the distant cautiousness had made way for warmth.

She talked about herself, her family and how she made it. I asked her about her educational background and she got a little embarrassed.

She didn’t graduate and started working very early in life. She worked in bank counter, manufacturing, software, IT process where she currently is. She revealed she is a slow learner.

She said her strength lay in the fact that she took up things that others refused to do. She prides herself on having struck the right balance between profession and family. She has a large family with a brood of grandchildren, and she is very fond of them.

Taking about current problems of the US, she said the US is suffering from a dearth of good engineers because the standard of math and science has fallen due to women liberation movement.

American women had been moving away from science and math because they found them difficult. And the women liberation movement whose purpose was to create equal opportunity for men and women in every spare of life, including education, insisted that science and maths be made easy so that women could take to them, thus bringing down the standard.

Meanwhile, I finished my chicken steak and she finished her beef steak. The other two members had ordered for pizza and a fish-based item (whose name I don’t remember).

We sipped iced tea and she drank diet coke; then it was time to leave.

Which side of her you think is real - the commandeering corporate boss or the caring and modest granny?

I think they are just different shades of the same personality.

Ridiculous Retribution

Sometimes a sudden anger leads us to an action we don’t approve of later. But, unable to lid our emotions, we perform it anyway.

Our company provides us with ‘pick-up and drop’ cab service because of our unconventional working hours aligned to US time zone as they are. Ours is an outsourcing company.

Although we spend a few hours in cabs during commuting, the cab becomes a world of its own with its characteristics and uniqueness.

You make new cab mates, a mix of employees from various departments, and the cab becomes a host to a mini social unit.

A part of this small and mobile social circle is the cab drivers. Some drivers participate in small talks with employees and become a part of the circle while others just stick to driving.

But travelling in office cab isn’t always about camaraderie.

There are two types of vehicles in service, Tata Sumo and Tavera. The latter is a heavier one, and because of its studier built one needs to be very careful while shutting its doors.

While closing a door, you have to bring it close to the vehicle’s body and then give a gentle push; otherwise, the door will shut with a bang, shaking the whole body of the vehicle.

Unmindful, I forgot to follow the door-shutting ritual twice. And each time the driver snapped at me. Although I apologized each time, the driver’s insolent bursts left me feeling a little uneasy.

The chauffeurs keep changing every two days or so, and there is an army of them. So each time a chauffeur replaces an old one, you don’t see the earlier chauffeur for sometime. The moody driver was withdrawn from our cab and I didn’t see him for a while and somewhat forgot the incident.

Yesterday it was his turn to drive us back home again. As I was stepping into the cab, I heard a blast of brazen laughter behind me. There was a cluster of drivers sharing a joke.

After a while, in the cab, it occurred to me that maybe the driver was bragging about the snubs he administered to me; I tried dismissing the thought as petty concern about something whose veracity I wasn’t sure of.

But, strangely, the more I tried to wriggle out of the grip of the thought, the more firmly it gripped me, until it led to a dull anger, seeking an outlet.

As the cab stopped in front of my house, I swung the door wide open. I got down, but held the door at a distance. Then I slammed it into its frame. Bang! As the driver burst into a garrulous roar, I coolly walked to my house’s main gate.

Even as I walked out of the scene, his loud verbal onslaught continued, and reluctant to be outdone, I first asked him to shut up and then dared him to come and stand before me.

He rushed to the spot and a full-blown remonstration followed. I used harsh words in English and Hindi, he used some in Kannada. We didn’t follow each other.

PS: Probably my ridiculous retribution, clumsy outburst - or whatever you may like to call it – had to do with the fact that I tried too hard to divert my attention from the incident and the harder I tried, the more focused I became. Maybe sometimes we should just relax and let a concern die its own death and not try hard to stamp it out.

The English Language

I recently finished “the mother tongue” by Bill Bryson. I am both delighted and disappointed by the book. The book is on the history of the English language: how English developed into a language, the historical crosscurrents that contributed to the development of English, the founding fathers of the language, the languages that English has absorbed words and phrases from. The list is quite long.

The book informs you not just about the English language but also the history of the country that gave birth to it, England. It takes you through different historical phases of England charting the growth, which occurred through many ups and downs, of the English language. Through the ebbs and flows of British history, the English language often lost its supremacy as the primary language of England to other languages brought by conquerors.

After the Normans, who came from France, conquered England driving out the Celts, the English society got divided into two halves – the commoners (the English-speaking populace) and the aristocracy (the Normans who spoke French). English remained the language of the common man, and French came to be spoken by the aristocracy, who didn’t try to embrace English until the fourteenth century. This bipolar- linguistic pattern of the society determined the coinage of words; for example, while cow has an Anglican origin (spoken by commoners), its meat – beef – is of French provenance (spoken by aristocracy). English later absorbed words coming from both the layers into its lexicon.

If the word ‘Anglican' surprised you, probably this bit of history will help. Angelics had come from a part of Germany and occupied England driving out the Celts. The Anglics contributed numerous words to English. The Anglic language sounds very much like English to this day. English is a Germanic language.

The book is replete with such trivia and serves them in a very arresting manner. The writing is engaging and informs the reader of the quirks and nuances of English – there are many – in a very absorbing way. Maybe English honours students already know most of the things, but they would have read them in a solemn format. Here Bryson narrates the history of English in a way William Dalrymple tells the past of India.


But the book is also very limited. It doesn’t mention the role played by the commonwealth nations – India, for example – in the growth of English as a global language. In the chapter entitled ‘Future of English,’ the book has largely dealt with US concerns about English. The book is completely silent on the role that British colonization played in the spread of the English language.

Bryson brings to light many interesting trinkets from the English speaking world – mainly the US and UK (the small English-speaking world for him).

Did you know, for example, that there is a community in America that does not speak English; its language is Pennsylvania Dutch? But that is the least strangeness of the community. The community is as insulated from rest of America as it is from the world of technology; so much that it lives without even the most elementary technological amenity like electricity. Their clothes and way of living are completely medieval. Which form of OK is right – ‘ok’ or ‘okay’; there is an elaborate history behind it? The book has much more than this, but I don’t remember all of them.

After reading the book, I wrote a mail to Bill Bryson calling his book ‘good but parochial’. I got an ‘out of office’ reply. The mail said if you don’t hear from me at all, please accept my apologies.

If you find any factual error, please mention it in your comments.

The White Tiger

Even as The White Tiger broke into the hallowed shortlist of the Booker, I remained ignorant of it, dismissing it as just another okay work by a debutant novelist that would eventually lose out to The Sea of Poppies, which was deservedly enjoying good reviews. Then suddenly one day I saw a balding man, with an unassuming personality wearing a bow tie, looking at me from the front page of news papers holding the coveted prize in his hands. The captions screamed that Aravind Adiga had won the Booker for The White Tiger.

We underestimate the first timers, don’t we?

As The White Tiger started flying off the shelves, I avoiding further delay brought my copy of The Tiger home.

The White Tiger, at one level, can be thoroughly dismissed as another India-bashing book. It takes a grim view of everything Indian and slams every Indian evil – caste system, poverty, poor-rich divide, etc. – that has already undergone enough literary battering by several Indian authors writing in English. Sometimes the book makes you feel bad for being an Indian; sometimes the book makes you feel bad that you are reading it despite being an Indian.

But, sadly, each time you put it down, the what-happens-next curiosity gets the better of you and you start reading it again. There lies the strength of The White Tiger. The novel is a breath-taking piece of storytelling: it is a fun read with simple language, minimal plot detours (the subplots have been skillfully weaved into the main narrative and don’t keep the reader waiting to know where the main plot is headed) and wry humour.

The story is in first person where the protagonist, Balram Halwai, the son of a Rikshaw puller, is writing an autobiographical letter to the visiting Chinese Premier. Being from the ‘Dark’ (Dark being the poor India and Light being rich), Balram goes through all kinds of privations and denials – premature stoppage of education, menial jobs, early loss of father to TB, etc. – and laps up an employment as a rich man’s driver. As a quick learner and keen eavesdropper, Balram starts observing the depravities of the rich and learns to get things done without being observed. Balram manipulates the head driver and wangles up the opportunity to be the driver of his master’s America-return son, Ashok, who is going to Delhi with his wife, Pinki Madam.

Delhi is a new world for Balram which exposes him to new lessons in life. It is in Delhi that Balram understands the clear divide between the poor and rich.

As Ashok and Pinki Madam settle into the city of boulevards, manipulation and corruption, Balram acquires ‘education’ in how the rich city dwellers live their lives. Delhi also teaches Balram that although the ‘Dark’ alleyways will sometimes intersect the ‘Light’ lanes for their survival, they will never merge and become one.

It is in this heatless city that Balram decides to crossover – from slavery to entrepreneurship. And he commits every sin – murder, stealing, betrayal – on his way to entrepreneurship.

The White Tiger is unlike a Booker-winning book: it’s readable and entertaining with the occasional doses of intellectual snobbery wrapped in the fine coating of humour.

Balram, now a successful entrepreneur and ‘social pillar’ in Bangalore, ends his letter to the Chinese Premier justifying the amoral acts he committed on his way to success. He writes, “ Even if they throw me in jail and have all other prisoners ‘dip their beak’ into me – even if they make me walk wooden stair to the hangman’s noose – I will never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat”.

“I have made it! I have broken out of the coop (of slavery)!”