The winter of 2012

This is my first one. Wrote it sometime in December'09. Never thought I would put it up. But what the heck...

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Prologue

"Why does time slow down like this?" he thought to himself.

The breeze was a bit cooler that night. His mind wasn't. He wanted to calm down. Why was it taking so long? 'Patience' he told himself. Everything will be as it is meant to be. He decided to stand up and just feel the breeze brush against his face. The purity of air gushing into his lungs made him want a cigarette. He sat down holding on to an iron bar which was firmly drilled into the concrete. His hands were trembling. He lit a cigarette somehow managing to hold the match against the breeze. The smoke made him feel better; it gave him the much needed patience.

The nicotine laced blood was calming him down. He relaxed and in the last moments of his life on earth, he looked back.

Chapter 1

"Are the last few moments of life always spent in thought? Maybe they are when you know you are going to die. Otherwise, you would be living your thoughtless life and die just suddenly without even getting time to look back at what you have done. But I will not take death like that. I want to feel death in all its glory taking over my life. I want my death to be as purposeful as my life.

I still remember the day when I left home. At 7, I was over. My family was dead, killed by some racist who thought that we were a disgrace to the village. I ran away to my cousins in the nearest town. But my mind stayed there. I knew what had to be done.

They put me in a school. The brainwash of education with its biased view of history, the restrictive mathematics and the fake science was all that I had after 19 years of existence. What a waste! Spending the most critical years of my life being brainwashed by fools in a government school, whose passionless efforts to thrust down the so called 'education' into my soft mind were sadistic more than anything else. It was what the world called necessary education. Sheep follow the shepherd with blind belief that he would take them to greener pastures. Little do they know that they might be heading towards their death at the hands of a butcher. I knew better. I wasn't a sheep. I knew what had to be done.

I ran, I ran towards myself, towards the real me who stood behind the walls built by the fake world. When I broke through those walls to find myself, I was surprised. I wasn't what I had expected myself to be. I looked at myself and saw a bleeding soul, wanting to finish it all off and take it down once and for all. I saw myself as a soul tortured by the vanity of the world he was in. The walls had made me weak. This has to end. Before I could think any more I merged with myself. We felt strong, and we had found a purpose for life... and a purpose for death. We knew what had to be done.

Mumbai was like a human anthill. I was one of the million ants, living in a tiny hole. There were big decorated holes, sea facing holes, holes next to the airport or glorified holes called apartments in societies. At the end they were just one of the million holes in the ever decreasing space in the megacity. The hole I lived in was very tiny. My job as a waiter at the canteen of a research facility paid me just enough to cover my living expenses. The lab was quite advanced and the doctors working there were some of the best minds in the country. The canteen owner, an old fool, he was least bothered about me and my background. To him I was cheap labour. It was good that he did not care. I needed the cover.

I worked for 9 hours a day and studied in the library there for another 6. The subjects I studied made a lot of sense. Something that I was looking for since childhood; relevant subjects written well. Every subject took me into the depths of philosophy, science and human origin. I learnt what kind of research was being done at the lab. My interest passed all barriers and I became more focussed towards my goal. I was brain storming while serving tea, solving an equation while counting money and reading a doctor's essay in my mind when asleep. Slowly every aspect of my life was taken over by it. The first decision I ever took for myself was to leave home and come here, and it was turning out to be the best decision ever.

It was the 12^th of September 2012, nearly 3 years since I came to the lab. What happened next was uncalled for. I did not need it. I was a fucking waiter for God's sake! I was the scum. I serve, and that's all I can do to make a living. Why would anyone ever want to talk to me about anything beyond the day's menu?

"What's your name?" her voice was very irritating. It had that shrill sound of genuine concern.

"Shiva" I said and walked away.

"Wait!" she said but I was at a safe distance away from her to make her feel she wasn't heard.

That night I hated myself. How could I lose control like this? I have never felt so vulnerable in life. What does she want? It had to stop. But I didn't know how. Now when I look back I think there was a part of me which wanted her to talk to me. But it was masked by the blindness of reason. I was soon to realise that rationale is just a facade; the human mind is emotional and weak. It breaks with something as small as a tear in the eye or a smile on the face.

Every day she was sat at that same table. Her eyes followed me everywhere in the canteen, and I felt like she could hear everything that was going on inside my head. I couldn't run anymore. We spoke again after some days, and then again and again. Her voice used to kill me. Every time I spoke to her, I felt a bit of me die and a bit of me reborn. Finally, one day I told her to not meet me. She said she will wait for me. I told her the wait would be futile. She looked into my eyes and I was puzzled by her calmness. She came close and whispered in my ear, "I know you are sick. But I can cure you. Give me just one chance." I slapped her hard across the face and walked out.

She did not meet me after that. I missed her, but I knew it was for the best. I could feel myself slowly recuperating from her pain, but there was something about her stuck in my head and it refused to leave.

Chapter 2

10^th December 2012

Everyday starting from that day, I decided to count down. It's easier to organise yourself when you know that time is running out. You run the fastest when your tail is on fire. So if you think you are not running fast enough, just set your tail on fire.

I lost all my sleep. I could keep my eyes closed but couldn't shut down my brain. Insomnia can exert great pressure on your body and mind. Stress is the food which insomnia feeds on, and in my case, stress was all that I had in my life. The human body reacts to stress like it would react to a predator, releasing chemicals in the brain that would keep you on your toes and ready to fight. The brain expects that the threat or stress would be resolved very soon, so it pushes the muscles harder and harder. So, if the stress doesn't resolve, Insomnia sets in. I stayed up every night with my eyes closed.

The access to the nuclear laboratory was highly restricted. I had to get in there very soon.

21^st December 2012

He was a very strange guy. His hair stuck to his skull like it was held down by the gravity from his brain. His face was large, and his body small. He looked like a caricature of himself. I had never seen him to talk to anyone at all. I had heard from people that he would win a Nobel someday. His life was inside that lab and very few knew what he was doing inside there. I was one the very few.

The house was located around half a mile from the main facility. At 2 in the morning, the only things moving on that road to his house were me and my shadow. But something was wrong. Remember that feeling you have that you are not alone, I was losing my mind! I looked back, but the road was empty. I ran, as fast as I could. His house stood there in the darkness, rising like a white block of snow.

I gathered my breath. I had to stop my hands from trembling. The door was not locked. I entered, my hands still trembling. His bedroom was easy to locate as the fan was making quite some noise in the otherwise silent house. His face was really big. My trembling hands strapped the chloroform filled cloth on his nose. He did not react at all. Shit! How do I even know he's out? But I had to take the chance. If he wasn't out, I would have to kill him. I pulled out his hand from under his head. My hands were trembling all the more now. I took another deep breath and one sharp stroke chopped of his thumb. He did not move. I took out the bandage from my pocket and wrapped up the wound as tightly as I could. I did not want him to die of excessive bleeding. I picked up his key card from the side table and ran.

It was 2.45 AM. The blood from his thumb was making me sick. I wanted to open the door and throw away that piece of flesh before I passed out of nausea. The finger print reader blinked green, and the door opened. I was the man who now controlled the fate of Mumbai. It weighed more than a 100 kilos. It was placed on its trolley. I walked out pulling the beast behind me. My hands were not trembling any more. I had finished the first phase.

It was 3.30 AM and I was more awake than ever before. I walked out dragging the bomb with me and passed the security guard whose blood now was thick on the floor. He had been easy to deal with. I guess you tend to blindly trust the person who feeds you every day, just like sheep. He was just another sheep, who had to die a few hours before the rest of the city.

I pushed the trolley up the inclined board into the back of the Jeep. Dragging 100 kilos up was as difficult as I had thought it would be. I climbed in and drove away. The main gate was guarded by 2 security men. But, they were sheep too. They were sleeping. I opened the gate quietly, and drove away into the night.

That feeling again... Was someone following me? I drove fast, to leave whoever it was, far behind. But the feeling stayed. I was losing my mind. On that cold night, I was sweating. It was 5.00 AM. I was there standing below the 'to be tallest building' in the city. The lifts used by the construction workers in the back were the ones which went up to the topmost floor. One of them was kept operational at all times for safety reasons.

I am the bad guy. I chose to be the bad guy. What is good and what is bad? It's all very relative. Think about it, good and bad just two views relatively opposite to each other. If there is no bad, how can there be any good? Just like there cannot be any construction if there is no destruction. I want to be the destructor. Just like Lord Shiva, who opens his third eye and annihilates everything that he sees, just to give rise to a new beginning. I want to do that. I want to hit Reset.

Chapter 3

He snapped out of his thoughts. He had finished his cigarette. The timer on the bomb read 25 minutes. He just sat there with an empty mind. He was the one who was going to make the prophecy come true. On 21^st December 2012, his world would be sent back to Stone Age.

Suddenly, it started raining. Every heavy drop lashing onto his body was giving him immense hope. Or was it pleasure? Maybe it was just relief. He didn't want to think about it. Sitting on the top of the tallest skyscraper in Mumbai, Shiva was looking down at the entire city. What a moment! He had imagined this very scene everyday for the past 3 years. 3 years of his life, everything had gone as planned; now was the climax, fitting in perfectly. It felt like God, sitting on top of the world, watching it crumble.

20 minutes.

The lift went down. He sprang up from the parapet and ran to see who was trying to come up. But it was still dark .He stood with his back on the right side pillar with his knife in his hand. No one was going to stop him now. His breath was muffled. He tried to keep up his weary mind. It was just a matter of a few minutes, but those last few minutes were turning out to be the longest.

The lift stopped with a jerk. He turned and dashed into it. He looked inside the lift and almost immediately he felt weak. He was scared. He tried to run out of the lift but he tripped and fell down. His eyes were red, and he felt like screaming. But he couldn't. Backed up against a pillar, he was looking dumbstruck at that figure coming towards him.

He felt her eyes penetrate his soul. Her face was calm. In that early morning light, she was shining brilliant. What was she doing here? 'I am just hallucinating. This happens. She isn't here.' He thought to himself but in vain. She put her hand on his and sat next to him.

"How much time do we have?" her voice had a disturbing peace in it.

He wanted to respond but the words were just not coming out. Finally with all his might he blurted out "8 minutes".

"I just wanted one chance to set things right" She managed a smile. "But anyways, I would have hated dying alone. Now I have you. You will be with me when I die. You will help me die."

He was numb until she put her head on his shoulder. He felt her soft hair touch him. A tear rolled down her cheek and touched his shoulder. Her hand on his hand felt warm. He was hypnotised by that feeling, something that he had never felt in his life. The lump in his throat was growing. He put one hand around her and held her. His mind was calming down again.

The lump in his throat burst out finally and tears rolled down his cheeks. She looked at him and wiped off his tears. Then, she kissed him.

He opened his eyes as she pulled away. Suddenly he felt something hit him in the stomach. He sprang up and ran to see the timer on the bomb.

55 seconds.

He stood there helpless. Disarming that device would take him a few minutes, and he did not have the time.

The best decision of his life, the goal of his life, had gone bust. He could see his soul laughing at him. Now, he wanted to live. He wanted to be with her, right there in the vanity of this Earth. His rationale and reason for life had all fallen apart. She looked into his eyes and at that moment she knew what he was feeling. She came close to him and whispered "Life has just begun." Then she hugged him tight.

There was a noise that was beyond human comprehension. They felt the eruption tear just for that obscure iota of time. For them that little spec of time was eternity.

26

I thought I will write about what goes through your head when you are 26 years old. Then I thought, it would be stupid, because I’d have to write something about every year. Every year is going to part of some phase where confusion rules and clarity looks like Delhi roads on a winter morning. But what the heck! So here goes...

The Indian way of life is strange. It’s very secure. It’s like investing in government bonds, where you get nominal returns but you get your money back for sure. You get a job, then you get married, then you buy a house, a car, a dog and then have kids and then they go to school and then you pay for them till they want you to and the cycle goes on. Low risk and low returns policy eh?

The other way is to go out, travel like a nomad, backpack all around the globe, meet different people and take every day as it comes, no planning beyond a week, and no savings beyond basic healthcare. High risk and high returns policy.

Always looking for the middle path, that’s what Indians do best. It’s in our blood. Moderates, that’s what we are (supposed to be).

Expressing these thoughts in a blog is fine. People who read this are people like you. Try speaking these out in front of your parents. I tried. And I got a response that shows off my mother’s education in psychology. She said very calmly, ‘I know you are a very responsible young man. You would always do the right thing at the right time. “And you would never let my hopes go down the drain”’.

Dumbstruck. All the 100 lines that I gave my mom were shot down by 2 lines from her. This is quite similar to arm twisting, just that you don’t scream after that, because your voice box has no air left.

Every day, I see status messages of people shouting about their marriages and engagements, pictures showing the guys sitting on horses and many pretty girls dancing in the crowd around him. Ok, that’s the only picture that is interesting in the whole album, and not because of the guy or the horse. I know this digression is quite interesting, but, getting back to where we were.

 These guys are all roughly my age, and they have already committed the rest of their life to being responsible husbands! ‘Husband’, that’s one word that is listed as a synonym to wtf in the oxford dictionary.

Some of my friends have a very similar opinion. A guy told me that I should not get married so soon and that should have a blast while I can. He is my brother in law, who married my cousin sister when he was 25! Another married cousin had the same opinion. So I spoke to some unmarried guys asking them what they thought. So this friend, who is 29, said that he is getting married this year by hook or crook. He wanted me to get married as well. Guess he needs someone to share the sorrow with. Another friend was as confused as I am, but he had created a profile on a match making website bowing down to family pressure. He was now sure that he would find someone himself, or just say yes to someone that his parents choose. Another friend called me from the US, and the first thing she asked me was when was I getting married, and that she was quite seriously looking at profiles on the internet (But girls opinions don’t count! They always sound weird). Basically, the conclusion of this entire garbage research was that grass will always be greener on the other side. Well, my married friends say there ain’t any on their side at all, and I should be happy that I have some at least, green or not. Okay, no more interesting digressions!

After a lot of thought and analysis of the responses from the unstructured interviews of my friends and cousins, I am as lost as a fish in a bowl.

Some people say that I am lost because I am single, and that if I start seeing people I would eventually marry someone. That’s not true; because even if I would want to marry someone, it’s unlikely that she would want to marry me (I am not as moderate as she would want her ‘husband’ to be). Someone suggested I should find someone like myself, which is useless because if she thinks like me then she would be as confused as I am. So, the final point is that I would have to wait till all my friends get married, and I would have no one to go out with to get some beer. I guess that is quite a breakthrough solution, because then I would either marry out of loneliness, or I would get used to it, and would do what I said in paragraph 3.

I just hope now that none of my friends have arrived at the same solution.

The House

May 1985.

The factory where He was working was an hour and half away from his rented house. He, His wife and a year and half old son lived in those 2 tiny rented rooms, miles away from urban civilisation.

When He first showed his wife the empty plot of land that He wanted to buy, closer to the factory, she was scared. The plot was right in the middle of nowhere. Barren land on all sides, no neighbours and the nearest shop could be seen at quite a distance, and there were no tar roads leading to it. The next thing that struck Her was the money. Buying land and building a house? What was Her husband thinking? They were just about touching middle class income.

But He insisted and She took it as his conviction and agreed.

He applied for a loan from all the places He could and managed to collect just about a hundred thousand rupees. With a net salary of a grand a month, they both knew what a fight it was going to be. He worked double shifts every alternate day and with all the overtime sweat they managed to stick their necks just above the water. She managed the finances shrewdly without being compromising on the child. A whole year went past in endless work and endless sacrifices so that they could survive in that house, their home.

Things improved the next year with some rise in the salary. They decided to build a garden and a make a proper fence around the house. He got back a coconut sapling from his parent's place, while She bought some rose saplings from her parent's place. They toiled in the garden, watered the plants, and when the first roses bloomed, they just couldn't stop smiling. They got new neighbours, and they got a temple about 500 yards from their place. The road to the shop still wasn't built and it still looked as if the shop was built in a large playground. The shop owner, who hailed from Rajasthan, was in his twenties and worked hard to get stocks and keep his few precious customers happy. Their child started going to an English medium school which was established that year.

Things grew as many new factories came up in and around the place. Many schools, many newly married couples in newly built houses and many kids on the streets playing cricket could be seen everywhere. The house also became a part of a cooperative housing society. The Rajasthani shop owner now had many of his brothers set up shops in the same area, competing with him.

Many years passed by and the growth rate continued to move upward albeit with its ups and downs related the national economy. Somewhere in between, there were even rumours that the factory would be shut down due to a forex reserves crisis, but thankfully some guy called Man Mohan Singh and the prime minister together bailed everyone out just in time.

Feb 2010.

He came back and decided to take a walk around the house. The garden was still looking brilliant with many new plants. The coconut tree now gave an unending supply of nariyal pani and copra. The temple was now two storeys tall and the priest it seems was charging heavily for use of the banquet halls. The Rajasthani shop owner now had a bunch of boys from his village working for him while he was working on keeping his cholesterol down. The neighbours were still gossiping. The school was now 3 storied and had a computer centre, a well maintained play ground and also had many parents desperate to enrol their kids in. The factory still produced heavy engines and was now even producing cars.

He was grateful and he was happy seeing what he saw and thinking what he thought. His Father had spent over 30 years of his life working in the same factory, so that his boy could grow up and write this blog sitting inside the same house built in 1985. The sense of heavy gratitude prevailed, gratitude to Him and to everyone around who was a part of it.

The house celebrates its 25^th anniversary this May, and the only people invited to the party are the 3 who started it all.

The Convenience of Vanity

I remember the time when I met this girl at a summer camp when I was about 11 or 12. She lived in a town which was about 300 kilometres from mine, which by 1994-95 standards would be anywhere around 6 to 7 hours. By the end of one month, the camp was over and we had to part ways. That was when we realised that we were in fact going to miss each other. So, we decided to keep in touch.

In 1994, not many people had phones at home. We were still in the queue with thousands of others waiting to get a line installed at home, without paying a bribe. So, talking to her was not possible. We decided to mail. (By mail, I mean using the services of the post office). I still remember the first letter that I received from her. The curly handwriting, the colourful sketches drawn on the sides of the pages, the smell of that paper, everything about it was so delightful. The sheer effort that she had put in to write to me was something that took the whole idea of communication to a different level. I replied to her promptly. We did manage to do this for nearly six months. But then we just got lost. The letters slowly reduced and then they stopped completely. Today, in 2009, I have no clue where she is. I do not even remember her face or her full name. The only thing that I remember distinctly is her letters.

In the years before maybe 1995, communication was an effort. It involved fetching a pen and a pad, sitting down in one place, collecting your thoughts and writing those down till you get them right, licking some stamps and then walking all the way to the nearest post box to drop in the envelope. Of course, the envelope reached the other end only after a week, when it was sorted out of the hundreds of similar looking envelopes, and had travelled by train. There was such a huge effort required to communicate even a single thought to a person staying away from you. I guess the pleasure in writing and reading these letters came out of the appreciation of that effort. Written communication then had meaning, reason and romance.

We got a phone at home in early 1996. I remember making a small little phone book which had its pages marked alphabetically. I had written down the names and numbers of my friends from school in it. The numbers were just 6 digits then. We used to call each other very rarely though, maybe once or twice a week, and used to talk only for about a couple of minutes or so. We preferred meeting up and talking instead.

My first encounter with the internet was in 1997, when my school got two new McIntosh machines. They had arrived because our school was participating in a global junior summit, trying to create awareness about global warming or something like that. I was one of the few chosen ones who got access to those machines, which were kept in the principal's office. So, accessing internet happened only when the principal allowed us to sit in her office and use those machines. Some of the students, who were chosen for participation, came from well to do families, and so they knew basics of how to use windows-95 being around 3-4 years ahead of me in technology. I was seeing a graphic user interface on a screen for the first time in my life. I remember working for long hours trying to learn Mc OS by trial and error method. I also remember deleting the system files once during my so called learning process.

My father got me a computer in 1999. It had the latest Windows-98 installed on it, and I remember playing a lot of Doom on that computer. Internet was through a dialup modem. I opened my first e-mail account on Hotmail (which I still use!!). Though I never really sent any e-mails to my friends then. A friend of mine, ahead of me in technology, showed me how to chat with strangers using a chat client. I was quite intrigued as to how he was talking to random people with fake names, and making a conversation out of nothing. I learnt my first chatting abbreviation 'asl' (Age, sex, location), which was the second thing we typed into the chat window after a hello. I would have chatted with hundreds of people across the globe, but there is not one conversation that I remember. Talking to people with fake names, fake locations, and even fake genders now seems strange.

MSN messenger was the next big thing in my life. I moved out of home to go to college over a thousand kilometres away, and I strongly believed that MSN messenger would help me be in touch with my school friends. It did in fact for a while. I did chat up with some of them on weekends. Looking back now, forget about the conversations, I don't even remember whom I chatted up with. After those first few days, I don't remember going to the cyber cafe to check mails till I got out of college.

When I went back home during summer breaks, I did log on to MSN Messenger to keep in touch with my friends from college. I do remember some of my conversations with some close friends then.

I got my first cell phone in early 2005 out of some money that I had managed to save at the end of college. That reduced my contact with e-mails and chats to a large extent. I also met some of my friends less often; we just spoke on the phone instead.

Orkut was what I got into next; sometime during late 2005, when I was in Kolkata. Many of my school friends were there on Orkut. I was happy to see them, but soon realised that I couldn't have a sensible conversation with them. So, they remained in my friend list but I never spoke to anyone of them, except maybe a couple of them who shared similar interests. Orkut was something new though. I liked the way I could create a profile; write about what books, movies activities etc I liked. Orkut allowed me to write about myself the way I wanted the world to see. It gave me the power to alter the world's perception of me through my profile page. It allowed me to portray myself as cooler, more interesting, more successful in the eyes of the world. It didn't last long though, and I gave it up in less than six months.

I got into GTalk as soon as I got an invite from my friend for Gmail. The ease of chatting right from your mail window was really very convenient. So, for chatting and e-mails, Gmail was (still is I guess) the most preferred.

My next major encounter was with Facebook, sometime in mid 2007. It was less cluttered than Orkut, offered a lot of privacy for your profile and information, and was neater to look at. I did not bother to fill up your profile information too much, because only my friends could see it, and they already knew everything about me. I still use Facebook, more than I use e-mails (non-professionally). In its efforts to improve, I think it's also going the Orkut way. It now has too much of myself on display, too many nonsense games, and too many friends whose faces I can't remember even after looking at their profile pictures. I am sure I won't last too long on Facebook either (Because Google Wave has already arrived).

Starting from hand written letters in 1994 to the current Gmail and Facebook of 2009, it's been quite a journey. In fact the motive of communication has itself undergone a change.

Earlier communication was for expressing yourself to people who are relevant to you in your life. The effort involved was high, so the motivation to communicate also had to be higher. The significance of a conversation with a friend was higher, because you heard from him only after he made an effort to write to you, and you respected that. Today, you end up talking to a person who is an acquaintance of your long lost friend just because he/she started a conversation on Facebook or GTalk. You have over five hundred friends, all scattered all across the globe. You talk to many of them every single day. You have four chat windows open simultaneously and have a new twitter update every hour. Your Facebook status update has over 10 comments you need to reply to. But at the end of the day, there is not a single conversation that you can truly treasure. There is speed, convenience and quantity, but there is no value and quality. We talk because we can talk and everyone else talks, not because we want to genuinely talk.

Our language is on the verge of destruction. The beauty of a language is in the ability of its vocabulary to express human emotion. I am sure the kids in school today have a vocabulary which is poorer than what we had then. But they are better than us at all the abbreviations while sending a SMS or typing in a chat window. Having the pleasure of reading a well written letter is rare occurrence. E-mails are used only for professional purposes and so, no one writes to anyone anymore. We just chat in abbreviations instead.

We tell the world what we do every day, every hour, and we get to know what they think of what we are doing. But, how much do we involve ourselves into what we are doing. Do we sometimes do it, just to tell the world about it? We tell our hundreds of friends that we love them all, but do we even know who will turn up when we need them the most. The telecom revolution may have brought the world closer and made it a smaller place, but it has also made it a shallower place. The ease and convenience has made us lazy. We have lost the motivation to talk to someone out of genuine concern, because it doesn't matter anymore. We take relationships very lightly, because there are just so many people to talk to now.

I am not anti telecom. It's progress after all. All I am saying is that need to have a method to our evolution. We are over involved in increasing the speed and convenience with which we communicate, forgetting about 'what' we communicate. We are talking quickly & easily but we are talking about the wrong things in a manner less way. We are travelling at the speed of light leaving behind the human in us.

The telecom and internet revolution has taken over the world. We are overwhelmed. We are enthralled and excited, and in that rush we are forgettin to add a 'g' at the end of it.

The Andhra Mess

"Telugu is vairy easy." One of my colleagues said on my day one in my new office in rural Andhra.

'Well, sure as hell it's easy for someone who hasn't spoken any other language since birth!' I thought to myself already cursing the fact that I was stuck here for the next two months. My first few days here were quite difficult. I just couldn't talk to anyone but a very few colleagues in the office who spoke English and were fantasized by my knowledge of Hindi. Rural parts of South India can be quite treacherous. The entire country upwards of Maharashtra is much easier to handle, because whatever their native language be, they understand and speak Hindi. (Of course, Makes No Sense party is trying to change that in Maharashtra very desperately!)

The fun part about India Below Maharashtra (IBM) is that every state has its own language. Not a dialect or an accent, but a unique language. To add to the beauty of the diversity, there is a change in the accent after every 3 districts, which ends up changing the language so much that the northern part of the state does not understand the southern part. But all this is well beyond concern for people like me whose knowledge about any of these zillion languages is zilch (I am trying to learn Tamil, which is one of the more widely spoken languages. Hopefully there will be a small village somewhere in IBM where they speak the kind of Tamil I learn). Languages can be learnt if you have a strong grammatical base in your mother tongue. Quite true a fact, as I did pick up French pretty quickly. Try applying this principle to any of the IBM languages. Not that their grammar is different, just that you cannot pronounce certain vowels or consonants. I guess the English came up with the phrase tongue tied after they visited IBM. I am still struggling, but am much better now that I have mastered the art of Sign language with a splash of a few Telugu words.

The next thing that took its toll on me was the food. These people, specifically Andhra people, believe in extremes. The food is either really spicy or really bland. I am still looking for something that falls somewhere in the moderate zone. Everything is in some way or the other related to rice. It will be because wheat is quite an unknown concept. That is all right. But what is not all right is the way they eat. I do not expect English mannerisms and do not follow them myself either. The gore comes when they mash the rice with the sambar in their plates. When we say, use hands to eat we don't mean the entire hand, do we? Even their wrists are dripping of rice bits and sambar. Agreed that it's the way they've been eating all their lives. But why kill the appetite of someone else at the table with your vulgar display of nasty food mashing? I have now kind of gotten used to not looking up while eating my food. The Arabs appreciate a good meal by burping. The louder (and smellier as well I guess) the burp, the more is the appreciation. The IBM'ites have their own way of appreciating a good meal. They wash their hands in their plates with the water they are supposed to drink, some hard core one's even gargle. I can't get used to that one.

For the first few days, everything was disturbing.

Well, it's been exactly a month now in this place called Ongole. All the hatred that I felt for this place in my first few days, I feel no more. I have gotten used to eating Idli and Dosa for breakfast every day. The small little shack on the side of the busy state road, sells me a hearty breakfast for 10 bucks flat. The lady who runs the place, and her son, both know me very well now. They try to sprinkle our sign language communication with tit bits of Hindi and I do the same with Telugu. Don't know why, but that humble little shack feels cozy now, feels like home. They treat me, their most regular customer, with warmth that no restaurant in the world can ever match. I prefer hanging out there. I went on a road trip one day, visiting tinier villages around this town along with a colleague. The vast endless tobacco fields are quite a sight. Also, visited a curing barn and met a couple of farmers. It was easy talking to them with my colleague as a translator. Their simplicity is worth a million times more than the millions they make from selling tobacco. They said their younger generation prefers to study agriculture technology at the Ivy League, but would like to come back here and grow their tobacco. Quite a contrast to all the software engineers and the GRE/GMAT junta who wants to study and settle down there. I guess the attachment to mother Earth comes to those who live on it. The city slickers will never know what it feels to live on Black soil whose fertility feeds them.

This little town, the capital of tobacco trade in India, has treated me with so much warmth that I can easily unlearn some eating habits and maybe even pick up some new ones. The customs may be discomforting in the beginning, but the people aren't. This little part of IBM has brought me down to earth, literally. I may still not like their language, but I love the people. I will soon be out of here, back to the crowded streets of the metropolis. But, this is the one place that I'd like to come to when I want to be at home, be in heaven, or just be on Earth.