Awaken!

People still read this so, just to keep it fresh, i'll let you know what's on my mind now.

A Swiss woman was raped and killed in India. Will we ever change? How many generations will this take?

She died.

The cold is refusing to go away and it's getting progressively harder and harder to walk on ice. Unless you're ok with your bum meeting the ground ever so often.

Dammit, the cold.

Two and a Half Men. Food regularly ends up in my nose when i watch that. Go figure.

Top Gear. Ah, Cars.

The Pope is a football fan. Go Pope!

The debt crisis in four countries that can be abbreviated as PIGS. Coincidence?

How the Swedes follow what's going on in Britain.

Cheers/Skål/Kippis!

Fish

Rape & Free Speech in India

Young people who visit discos are not entitled to candle light vigils. Yet, people accused of murder are allowed to make laws and effectively run the country.

You cannot withdraw your Facebook actions if you are a common citizen but you can get away with saying that ‘dented and painted women’ should not take part in protests for a free democracy. And then withdraw your comments and expect pardon from the people of the world’s largest democracy.

Both comments came from the son of the President of India.

This, ladies and gentlemen, are the two sides of the world’s largest democracy: India. We take pride in our differences and apparent unity yet we still harbour thoughts about women who visit discos. Where are we headed? Anarchy? I would think so. The youth of the nation are no longer very young. We are the largest and also have among the lowest average ages of any democracy anywhere, yet we are still ruled by archaic laws and people fit to be grandparents. A young woman was raped in a moving bus by six drunkards, nearly killed, and left for dead by the side of the road in the capital, New Delhi. The media turned this into their latest salvo against the government and an ineffective police force. Rapes happen all the time, most go unreported. And for the days following thise horrific act, the media gets flooded with reports of rapes happening everywhere, all the time, to women of all ages. There’s one difference between this incident and the countless ones before it: it’s not dying down. India finally seems to be going the right way, we are waking up to the fact that corruption must go and we have to be the ones to make it go; that mindsets must change, starting with our own; that we our constitution guarantees freedom to all, not just men.

Indian Rail - Toilets

My passport may have three lions on it, reading Republic of India; my skin tone and facial features may be quintessentially Indian; i may have the built of an Indian; but I’m not very Indian at heart. I have several phobias, and most of them centre around things that the average Indian would take for granted.

I love travelling by train, just so as long as i am not taken ill during the journey and as long as i can keep my use of the train’s lavatories to a bare minimum without giving myself serious kidney diseases. My fear of the toilets that the Indian Railways installs in all their long distance trains stems from their construction, not the foul smells that emanate from within. Believe me, i’ve smelt worse toilets in India, places where the stench of urea is so strong that it reaches up your nostrils like a creeper, trying to block out your supply of oxygen. I’ve seen places that are knee deep in urine, and i’ve even seen places where men and women defecate feet apart, with nothing but God’s blue sky above them. But nothing instills in me that same fear that overcomes me every time i have to make a visit to the loo in the train.

Let me paint that picture for you.  Normally a toilet would be white, with a hole at the bottom, where you see a small puddle of water. Some adventurous persons like their sanitary ware in other colours, but that’s purely cosmetic. Now imagine a toilet, in a four foot square cubicle, where, instead of water at the bottom of the hole, you can see the sleepers on the tracks below. That is not a scary thought, but wait; the toilets themselves come in two variants on the train, the Indian and the English. The English is simply a commode, were you can be seated and pick up a generous helping of diseases little known to man. You wouldn’t dare use that unless you were taking a dare or were feeling very foolish. The Indian variant is simply a hole. Yes, it’s simply a hole with two raised, feet like platforms, where, you place your feet so that your poo falls down the hole. And, at the other end of the hole, you see sunlight, reflected from railway sleepers, whizzing by at a hundred kilometres an hour. This hole is in a stainless steel plate that ‘s bolted to the bottom of the cubicle and God alone knows how many bolts are holding that plate up, keeping your bottom from meeting concrete and a hundred kilometres an hour. This is my greatest fear, if those bolts were to come lose, the plate were to fall into oblivion and you were to meet the tracks, would you die?

No, you would not. You’d be dragged along, at great speed, while things from the loos’ in the compartment ahead of you bombard you. Really, if there was a hell worse than this, i wouldn’t like to see it.

Another medium.

This being my first post from a mobile device, I'm keeping it short.

Hello world!

of India.

Eight years have passed since i started ‘living’ in India and that’s eight years of invaluable experience with the Indian junta. This may sound like it’s coming from someone who isn’t Indian but the truth of the matter is that though the Republic of India issues my passport, i am hardly the stereotypical Indian in any way at all. In these eight years, i’ve interacted with, lived with, had enlightened discussions with, fought with and had my fair share of disagreements with individuals from various parts of the country. What i’ve seen and see everyday never fails to keep amazing me; the sheer diversity of language, cultures and idiosyncrasies that this country holds within her borders; and the fact that they still manage to be united under the Tiranga.

This is not about the positives; the India that the world sees is largely what the government wants it to see. We proudly proclaim that India is Shining and she is, it’s what’s below the sheen that is disturbing, to say the least. No, this post is about the bad, the ugly, the reasons that Australians and Americans want to attack and maim us as soon as they see one of us; this is about the small mindedness and the ignorance that prevails at large.

I’ve had the chance to interact with people from India’s four largest cities and also from her smallest villages and the difference is both, pronounced and remarkable. I have regular disagreements with a certain individual who typifies the small town mentality, diffidence to those who are from larger cities and towns, and the determination to defend and preserve their values. Though i don’t agree with the majority of this individual’s claims which range from the preposterous such as the entire banking sector being illegal to the utterly ignorant such as newspapers being vile and evil, i can sympathise with his feelings. Being from what he sees as a less privileged background, one where he has no idea about the world, it’s cuisines, it’s people, their languages and ways, he strives to prove that his point of view is correct, his way of doing things is right. I fail to see the point of this as all it leaves him with is a bunch of friends who perceive him to be a village idiot or crackpot, and also with precious little knowledge on how to deal with people from around the world. This person also continually tries to impress upon me, his ideals and habits. To quote an instance, he examined my music collection in Winamp. As you’d expect with a metalhead, there was very little that he could understand and absolutely no artist that he’d heard of. What ensued was a barrage of abuses that i was supposedly betraying the motherland and not being a good Indian. To say the least, he’d be much better off in Russia.

On the flip side, i’ll cite another example of a person who’s grown up in the capital and been to the finest schools, interacted with the best minds and grew to expect that most of the populace would be like that. Sadly, that isn’t how it works; most Indians haven’t even seen an aeroplane in their lives, let alone a tarmac road. Many don’t have access to electricity and basic sanitation. With this state of affairs, this gentleman’s expectations of his fellow Indians are sky high, compared to what the ground realities are.

And what of me? I’m caught somewhere in between the two extremes, expecting better things from Indians and yet resentful of what i see.

All i can do is hope. One day, we will.

Tarmac

When you apply white shampoo to your hair and see black suds in the drain and still don’t care, you know that the reason for that gunk in your hair is something you love. There are only a few things that i love, rock and roll for instance, heavy metal, country music, The Simpsons, math, electric guitars and so on.

Today, i found another, no actually two more.

Today morning, i failed to keep my promise of waking up in time. In time to get ready to undertake a road trip to the nearest beach, which was supposed to be here. This road trip was to be by a seven seater, four wheeled car, but alas, the need to cleanse my large intestine in the morning hours got the better of me and this four wheeled contraption set off sans moi.

Sans moi and this other gentleman whom i shall call AJ. AJ and me both rose late to greet the day but after cleansing our intestines and filling our bellies, we set off to *you will know where if you click on the link above*. And we did not use a four wheeled contraption, we used one with half that number, half the number of wheels but twice as much fun. Yes, today morning, i finally came to terms with that one thing that any testosterone producing human will live, a chromed up motorbike. The bike in question was a Royal Enfield, a brand that is to India what the Harley is to the USA. Pure passion, nothing else. And along the way, i found that other thing that any petrol head craves, the long, lonely, open road.

We set off for Yanam not having the faintest idea about the road network of Andhra Pradesh and relying solely on the know-it-all Google, which surprisingly worked like a charm, getting us there via the shortest route possible. Once there, and having realised that though you can call Yanam Pondicherry and that all the vehicle license plates read PY, we pushed off, off to where, no one but God almighty and the people who built that road knew. Off we went, a clip below 80, and with the sea breeze in my already filthy hair, i found that one thing that will never desert me, tarmac.

Finally, another quick look at the GPS told us that we were half way to Kakinada, the port town in AP. But along the way, we chanced upon a complex so large and crucial to national security that even Google was forced to take its location down from the map. The map said that we’d be passing through national forest area, with the sea on one side. The sea was indeed on one side but between us and it, stood the receiving station of the output of the Krishna-Godavari D6 block, the gas terminal that supplies the trans-India pipeline with its most valuable commodity, natural gas. The Reliance Industries complex is indeed a sight to behold and the stretch of road leading up to it is one of the best that I’ve driven upon.

I have now resolved that i will own two motor vehicles before i die, one being a Volkswagen Beetle and the other now being a Harley  Davidson bike. There’s no purer rush than the open road, and no other better way to experience it that astride a motorbike, with the engine throbbing between your legs. Don’t get the wrong mental image there.

Drive Safe.