Thanks to the new job, my visits to Europe has doubled since I was born. That makes it two. Many of my friends were surprised that I didnt post pictures of yours truly saying 'prost!', but dint tell them that "I wannabe, but was cannab'd". However I would have loved to tell them about a new zing that opened somewhere close to my hypothalamus the first time I set foot in Bavaria. It should have been the near absence of fault. Or it should be the civic sense of the inhabitants, it could be the cleanliness or it could be absence of noise and people. But I could not tell them out of fear of being dubbed as the new globe trotter on the block and be subjected to other user experiences. Guess I overcame that fear today.
Of late, I've been wondering how long it will take us to have atleast one of the cities like there. The infrastructure was not all. The citizens there seemed to be driven by a completely different set of values which made visitors follow them too and not out of fear of any punitive reprimands. A well travelled friend who would welcome a social app for posting his visa stamps, professed that while on the outside, it might look all good, those countries are not friendly to brown skins. As if they have to pay obeisance to us for being the best country on earth for foreigners.
Why on earth do we expect the world to respect us...but for a few men who slogged their asses off to be where they are, and not because of any government grants or citizen charters. Every time the world toasts a new Indian, the media works over time to do a DNA study with a family tree. And then the goverment follows suit with garlands and cheap publicity charades. Till he becomes part of the 'comittee' trail and undoes his good work.
To continue from the earlier point, many of the European towns have been rebuilt post world war II, just around a decade before we celebrated our Independence. Social indices consistently rate the Europeans higher than any other part of the world while our motherland figures are way down the averages. How come we are still amidst the ruins of our servility and they are resplendent in their achievements, overcoming their ghastly Nazi shadows?
To digress a little, when I started work in Mumbai I started admiring the zealousness & bohemian views of its inhabitants and a belief in making things work for them rather that wait for it unlike my home state Kerala. There were completed roads and highways, relatively efficient public utilities, engliss ispeaking women, late nights and dance bars. Towering buildings, unscrupulous real estate agents, eerie alleys and gangster stories co existed with stories of toil and hope. After a decade and shifting loyalties from a migrant to a resident, the above euphemisms haven't gone beyond the list; many of them soured after its initial appeal. The promises have been packaged and sold to hedge funds and the returns have been re invested in the private coffers of the political class who withdraw little sums to buy apartments reserved for war widows and other hobbies. The citizens are in a daze and given a choice to elect the next council of ministers, they will get away to the nearest rain dance venue to practice their favourite Bollywood act. We danced till Ajmal Kasab & Co. raped our city and like thieves in twilight, marched to an agenda which returned nothing but burnt fingers.
The 'argumentative Indian' postulated by some author has now become a fundamental right. We just talk. Some people uphold this as another legacy of our oral tradition- which in my view is the closest we have ever got to calling ourselves as a nation of suckers. Another adjective that has pride of place in describing the Indians are 'value conscious'. "We are great bargainers", as identified by a retail tycoon. That is another bullshit synonym for penuriness and utter lack of trust. We go for the cheapest possible and the most short term solution for everything. And then we use it for the wrong application and wait for the rest of the population to follow. And then call it Indian ingenuity. Then we brand it and sell it to more such lazy morons. Till some one writes a book on this. And then it becomes a tourist attraction and a cultural scar almost forcing the Egyptians into a tourism campaign saying that the pyramids are still in Giza and not in Dharavi, Mumbai. Our penchant to bargain on everything has ensured that there is an inherent mistrust in the buyer-seller equation which translates to shitty prtoducts with shitty properties - almost akin to shit wrapped in toilet paper. Come on, if we were great value seekers and ingeneous, atleast couldnt we have bargained for better roads, education, sanitation and health facilities?
That takes me to the national brotherhood of being spoon fed; we keep asking. We want everything done by some one else. If we dont get it, we break what we paid for and think that belongs to the government. And if it does not belong to the govt, we take sides and point fingers. And then some politician comes over and makes this a political agenda. If he succeeds, another one will build a masjid or mandir on that spot and we start offering coconuts and our behinds. Because by then we realised that what we asked for can only be realised by god-and by the way, we have a great choice here. Some, one million versions across different colours, shapes, genders, beards and geographies. But who do we ask?
Oh! For that, we have different days to ask different gods. We block roads, burst crackers under each others asses, put strange colours on the privates, fast for days together and make up for it while others go to bed and through the rest of the year, walk naked or barefoot hundreds of miles or through buring coal, kill all kinds of herbivores including sometimes children and many more. We celebrate with a vengeance. And then we 'post' the spoils on social media, completely detached from the real world because we got a holiday: another euphemism for saying 'screw the work'.
And what happens at work? We look forward to the next holiday apart from giving commitments on behalf of others. And some other people will have to do it because some one else committed it. Now, the ingenious Indian discovered a new industry to run this sham called BPO which now contributes a chunky share to our GDP. We are okay doing shit as long as we dont take decisions. We like the feeling of 'sitting on it' after getting our asses sore travelling in our 'langots' for so long.. Today we are thankful to our servile past for leaving us with a language that has given us an identity. And with that, we are looking forward to our servile future carrying out the left over work of the world. Amid stories of economic slowdown, we blame the policy makers and they blame it on global outlook. And the baton passes on while the onlookers have gathered -waiting for the India story to turn another leaf. They are the same friends - the boisterous, pan chewing and crotch scratching ones. The hawkers have also set up their illegal stalls peddling nimbu paani and bhels. They are the farmers who survived the agricultural genocide.
Wait...one guy just got arrested for calling a populist bengali drama as a porn flick. Yet again, people have started taking sides. Where are you?
Europe can wait for now.
Of late, I've been wondering how long it will take us to have atleast one of the cities like there. The infrastructure was not all. The citizens there seemed to be driven by a completely different set of values which made visitors follow them too and not out of fear of any punitive reprimands. A well travelled friend who would welcome a social app for posting his visa stamps, professed that while on the outside, it might look all good, those countries are not friendly to brown skins. As if they have to pay obeisance to us for being the best country on earth for foreigners.
Why on earth do we expect the world to respect us...but for a few men who slogged their asses off to be where they are, and not because of any government grants or citizen charters. Every time the world toasts a new Indian, the media works over time to do a DNA study with a family tree. And then the goverment follows suit with garlands and cheap publicity charades. Till he becomes part of the 'comittee' trail and undoes his good work.
To continue from the earlier point, many of the European towns have been rebuilt post world war II, just around a decade before we celebrated our Independence. Social indices consistently rate the Europeans higher than any other part of the world while our motherland figures are way down the averages. How come we are still amidst the ruins of our servility and they are resplendent in their achievements, overcoming their ghastly Nazi shadows?
To digress a little, when I started work in Mumbai I started admiring the zealousness & bohemian views of its inhabitants and a belief in making things work for them rather that wait for it unlike my home state Kerala. There were completed roads and highways, relatively efficient public utilities, engliss ispeaking women, late nights and dance bars. Towering buildings, unscrupulous real estate agents, eerie alleys and gangster stories co existed with stories of toil and hope. After a decade and shifting loyalties from a migrant to a resident, the above euphemisms haven't gone beyond the list; many of them soured after its initial appeal. The promises have been packaged and sold to hedge funds and the returns have been re invested in the private coffers of the political class who withdraw little sums to buy apartments reserved for war widows and other hobbies. The citizens are in a daze and given a choice to elect the next council of ministers, they will get away to the nearest rain dance venue to practice their favourite Bollywood act. We danced till Ajmal Kasab & Co. raped our city and like thieves in twilight, marched to an agenda which returned nothing but burnt fingers.
The 'argumentative Indian' postulated by some author has now become a fundamental right. We just talk. Some people uphold this as another legacy of our oral tradition- which in my view is the closest we have ever got to calling ourselves as a nation of suckers. Another adjective that has pride of place in describing the Indians are 'value conscious'. "We are great bargainers", as identified by a retail tycoon. That is another bullshit synonym for penuriness and utter lack of trust. We go for the cheapest possible and the most short term solution for everything. And then we use it for the wrong application and wait for the rest of the population to follow. And then call it Indian ingenuity. Then we brand it and sell it to more such lazy morons. Till some one writes a book on this. And then it becomes a tourist attraction and a cultural scar almost forcing the Egyptians into a tourism campaign saying that the pyramids are still in Giza and not in Dharavi, Mumbai. Our penchant to bargain on everything has ensured that there is an inherent mistrust in the buyer-seller equation which translates to shitty prtoducts with shitty properties - almost akin to shit wrapped in toilet paper. Come on, if we were great value seekers and ingeneous, atleast couldnt we have bargained for better roads, education, sanitation and health facilities?
That takes me to the national brotherhood of being spoon fed; we keep asking. We want everything done by some one else. If we dont get it, we break what we paid for and think that belongs to the government. And if it does not belong to the govt, we take sides and point fingers. And then some politician comes over and makes this a political agenda. If he succeeds, another one will build a masjid or mandir on that spot and we start offering coconuts and our behinds. Because by then we realised that what we asked for can only be realised by god-and by the way, we have a great choice here. Some, one million versions across different colours, shapes, genders, beards and geographies. But who do we ask?
Oh! For that, we have different days to ask different gods. We block roads, burst crackers under each others asses, put strange colours on the privates, fast for days together and make up for it while others go to bed and through the rest of the year, walk naked or barefoot hundreds of miles or through buring coal, kill all kinds of herbivores including sometimes children and many more. We celebrate with a vengeance. And then we 'post' the spoils on social media, completely detached from the real world because we got a holiday: another euphemism for saying 'screw the work'.
And what happens at work? We look forward to the next holiday apart from giving commitments on behalf of others. And some other people will have to do it because some one else committed it. Now, the ingenious Indian discovered a new industry to run this sham called BPO which now contributes a chunky share to our GDP. We are okay doing shit as long as we dont take decisions. We like the feeling of 'sitting on it' after getting our asses sore travelling in our 'langots' for so long.. Today we are thankful to our servile past for leaving us with a language that has given us an identity. And with that, we are looking forward to our servile future carrying out the left over work of the world. Amid stories of economic slowdown, we blame the policy makers and they blame it on global outlook. And the baton passes on while the onlookers have gathered -waiting for the India story to turn another leaf. They are the same friends - the boisterous, pan chewing and crotch scratching ones. The hawkers have also set up their illegal stalls peddling nimbu paani and bhels. They are the farmers who survived the agricultural genocide.
Wait...one guy just got arrested for calling a populist bengali drama as a porn flick. Yet again, people have started taking sides. Where are you?
Europe can wait for now.
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