The First World

There is a very skewed system of classification that demarcates the nations of the world into different economic and socio-political spheres, thereby terming them as first world, second world and third world respectively, and you can read more here, if you don't want to read on and have fun.

Your choice. The blue pill or the red pill.

Or was it the red pill and the green pill? The yellow pill and the white one?? A hypochondriac's dream come true.

Anyways, the whole build-up towards the three worlds classification was to provide my two paise to the raging debate on whether the first world actually should be called so. One would imagine that first world nations would have a civilization where better standards of living prevail, life in general is good, and there is less pollution and they have good TV shows and all that jazz. I am sure you get the picture.

The essence of delineating nations based on this worlds system is to have them ranked on how close to a utopian existance these nations come to, the smaller your number, the closer you are to it.

This entire flow of thought came about as I was trying to figure out the strange behaviour that people in western nations have, of subsisting purely on toilet paper. Yes, no water.

Absolutely mortifying thought, ain't it? I agree.

The very first time (and thankfully ONLY time till date, touchwood) that I had to relieve myself at a no-water-only-toilet-paper place, the last time I was in Scandinavia was a frightful experience.

It was on a sunday morning in my first weekend here at Oslo, when I was visiting a museum, the Museum of Cultural History that I felt the need to go. Serendipitously enough, the museum had a free loo.

All the public loos here are paid toilets, and one has to insert 10 NOK, the equivalent of 72 Indian rupees everytime one has to go. Even relieving oneself is quite a burden on the pocket in the costliest city on earth.

Any which way, after a job well done, I discovered that there was no water. The first world countries don't use water. Nor to they use mugs. What I had to do later is obvious, and needs no description.

All these thoughts were running through my mind when I had to rush from my office to my hotel room, since the john there had running water.

I think the lack of mugs and accessible running water in most of the western nations is a contributing factor to reverse brain-drain, the kind where the Indian diaspora want to get back home to settle here after having endured years and years of not having had properly clean parts where the sun don't shine.

A lot of people that I know have gone off to the US on further studies, and have settled there. There are quite a bunch of other people who have also gone to lot of other first world countries. A lot of people highlight the various problems they face, including lack of proper food, possible encounters with racism, unfulfilled promises of getting laid and so on and so forth.

But not too many people seem to be forthcoming enough to highlight this particular problem, maybe because they just wipe it off their minds while wiping it off their behinds.

Of course, there are a lot of other issues that make you really wonder if things are actually as hunky-dory as one would imagine. High divorce rates, screwed up kids, dysfunctional families, bad bland food, reality TV and so on and so forth.

Its not like we live in a perfect land. People fight here too. The scourge of Reality TV has invaded our drawing rooms with middle class families splurging on SMSes to vote for some random Debojit or whoever so he becomes the next world-superstar-idol-of-Calcutta or something or the other.

Kids are screwed up in the head as badly. Why, I will not pretend to be holier-than-thou here and act like I was a good boy when I was younger. Sure, I had some good points that only a parent with unconditional love for their messed up child could discern. However, more often than not, I think I have put my folks through torrid times when they'd have probably wished that things would have transpired differently round about the time of my conception.

With the wide variery of food available, no complaints on that front. Ungrateful wretches, count your blessings.

Our country does not have a welfare system in place that enables the elderly people to look out for themselves courtesy of the government, as it is in the first world nations. Being eternally optimistic, it just is about looking at this as a window of opportunity to repay your parents for aiding you in you becoming what you are at this point in time, a sense of gratitude that is unflinchingly missing in the 'developed' countries.

However there is something about being from the subcontinent, about being Indian, that just makes you feel different and feel special about yourself. This feeling is even more enhanced if you're a "brown supremacist", a Racist movement whose quintessential member is a vegetarian curry and rice munching Tam Bhram with roots in Chennai, having lived in Delhi, working in Bombay with a girlfriend from Calcutta (to cover all four parts of the country somehow). Its our way of showing the Nazis and the skinheads and all the other racist people the stuff that we are made of. Taking over the world by writing software is our way of doing things.

Shady jokes apart, regardless of the huge population, the crumbling infrastructure, the huge divisions among all spectrums possible, the messy political climate or the haphazard way in which our way of life is being led, no matter which part of the world you finally end up making your life in, you secretly end up thanking God for having made you come from where you did.

The Writerly Life

"The Writerly Life" is a book that I picked up recently from the Strand Book Stall in Bangalore. It is a book that contains the entire collection of non-fiction writing ever doled out by one of my all time favourite authors, R.K.Narayan. It contains a whole host of essays of varying sizes that he wrote over the length of his entire career, and like anything else written by him, they are a real pleasure to read.

Sitting alone, on my warm cozy bed in a vague part of Scandinavia at 11:00 PM on a thursday evening, it is the words of this gentleman that creates this wonderful atmosphere that I was thriving in, nay, revelling in,with the rain falling outside the window of my hotel room, and me snugly tucked in bed with a warm cup of hot chocolate by the side, melodious strains of 'box of rain' by The Grateful Dead playing away on my ipod. Solitude never seemed more inviting.

I have always considered this as possibly the best scenario to sit and completely enjoy reading a book, and I must confess that this was all that I could wish for and then some.

The title of this post might be a tad misleading, because one might end up thinking that this is related to my life or my endeavours as a blogger who aspires to have his blog reach the stellar heights of popularity that some very well written ones have managed to achieve. I am not really sure what I am going to write about in the lines that follow, though I have an intuitively good feeling about it, all the same.

Sure, I dream of being an author someday. I bet every single person who maintains a blog and is regular about posting in it harbours a secret desire to want to be a published author and bask in the glory that follows, and reach a level of unparalled self-satisfaction that goes with the territory.

I have additional motivation to be a best-selling published author someday. I would like to invest a lot of hard work towards writing the book, and then sit back on a hammock in the sun with a Sombrero covering my face and sleep all day, occasionally waking up to sip a fruity cocktail, as I rake in the moolah courtesy of the royalties generated through my book.

This is a pipe dream, though I hope it never remains this way forever.

For seven years of my life from the age of thirteen to twenty, my family used to live in a beautiful locality in Mysore named Yadavagiri, and our residence was on Vivekananda road, barely a couple of hundred metres away from where R.K.Narayan's Mysore residence was located. He passed on while we were still living there, though I never did have the good fortune of being able to see him at his residence since he never did come back to Mysore during that time.

There has been an ongoing campaign in Mysore to have an indelible RKN stamp on Mysore city, and you can read more about it here. There is a proposal to name the Mysore-Chennai Express as the Malgudi Express, and I personally endorse this suggestion wholeheartedly. It is very much on the lines of the GoDaan Express named after one of PremChand's works.

I must have said enough number of times that I profess a deep love for Mysore city, and one significant part of the reason is because of RKN's wonderful descriptions of the city and its various people and the sights and sounds. The manner in which he has managed to bring the city to life had awakened me to realize how wonderful the place I lived in actually was.

Mysore is a far cry from the idyllic town that he portrayed in his autobiography 'My Days', but there still are traces of the old grandeur and remenants of the city that his words have made me aware of.

As a teenager, Mysore seemed like a boring pensioner's paradise, primarily because that was what people kept on calling it then, and Bangalore was just waking up to its new found glory as the choicest of destinations for all and sundry, specially those in the information technology domain, which is now currently proving to be its undoing.

With all the 'happening people' visiting Bangalore, its emergence as the supposed rock capital of India, with all its avant-garde people and all the international concerts that it was host to, not to mention the ever-so-elusively-popular Brigade road and MG Road, where, we were told by those we considered lucky enough to visit the city with increasing frequency, that each and every woman is by herself, a wonderful sight to behold, it was but natural that some of us less-informed ones were in awe of Bangalore and everything that it stood for.

Enough has been said about Bangalore's meteoric rise and its equally spiralling fall, and this post is not about that. Bangalore does have its good points, and no words from some inconsequential Mysore-phile are going to negate that.

Pretty much everything that RKN has written, fiction or otherwise has something or the other that I can associate some part of Mysore or some part of my life with. It could either be some location or the atmosphere or the general ambience, or something totally beyond description. The power of suggestion is very potent here.

One is engulfed by an entire flood of fond memories of different kinds as one goes through some of RKN's books. I can distinctly remember pestering my father for a kite in class 5 because it was the kite flying festival back then, and every other kid in my neighborhood had one. Not wanting to be left out of the pleasant melee, despite knowing as much about flying a kite as I did about women back then, I boldly ventured to go fly a kite, and had one of the best times of my life doing so.

I can recall this other instance when it was Ganesha Chaturthi, and I was made recently aware of a custom of visiting houses to prostrate before a hundred and one Ganesha idols, and did so with the intent of being blessed with greater academic prospects and ending up with sore knees in the bargain because of having worn shorts that time, and for also having my faith strengthened and having had another fond memory to add to my basketful of recollections.

There are of course, the innumerable instances of having been very naughty at school and having done things that I was ashamed to death of, at that point because the teachers made me feel that way, but those very things would now bring about a chuckle or a huge grin in the least.

I could go on and on about a lot of such cherished recollections, and have a feeling that I am drawing parallels between some parts of my life and that of Swami's, and it wouldn't be entirely untrue. Power of suggestion kicking in once again.

As I sit here, typing away on some Norwegian style keyboard, hunting for the special character keys that are arranged in some weird manner, I can't help but count my blessings and feel thankful for all the great times that RKN's books have provided me with.

Thank you, wherever you are.

Tagged (updated)

I don't know why tags exist, but they do.

A random attempt at easing the pangs of ennui (a word definitely coined by a mallu who just happened to get bored and wanted to screw around with the English language) felt at the office led me to fulfilling this tag. I was tagged by T.B.

The silent hum of the A/C along with random buzzing of horrible cell phone ringtones (one of them that stupid whistling theme from Fanaa, ohh Lord!!), interspersed with the noise of people typing away on keyboards have led me to this state. I like the sound of me typing away though.

At this rate, I would be agreeable to do a pig census if only I were going to get paid for it, and would be provided with clean, decently prepared vegetarian lunch with a sweet lassi as an aperitif.

The tag:
Write a post with six weird facts or habits about yourself.
At the bottom name the six people you will tag next.
Leave them a comment to let them know they've been tagged and to read your blog.

I am not in a position to completely honour the tag by passing this on to six other people, but all the same, I thought its going to be fun writing down stuff, given the fact that I am as normal as normal can be.

Let me state, categorically, that I am not going to tag people. Instead let me make it completely voluntary.

Dear Reader,

You've read the tag. You want to take it up on your own and honour it, be my guest.
If you know about any ongoing pig-census, send me a mail. I would appreciate that too!

Thank You


Now, the tag, six things about me that you probably don't know. I wonder why you'd bother anyway.

1. I read matrimonial ads in the sunday newspapers to make fun of the ads.
The manner in which every single person is respectable, fair, of above-average height, and wants someone from a respectable family with wheatish complexion and high paying MNC job husband posted abroad and all is just too funny to read.
Its almost as if everyone is similar, and wants people with similar tastes. I shudder to think of such a homogenous society.

2. I gross people out to try and eat food off their plate.
This is sometimes achieved by taking toilet humour to extremes, but it seldom does happen. In addition, my appetite is not even remotely voracious, ergo, the action defeats its own purpose.

3. I worship the TV, quite literally.
There have been instances when I have gotten down on my knees after an elaborate tribal dance around the TV and prostrated in front of it in a manner befitting the honour given to Gods by the cannibal societies. This has happened in the not-too-distant-past, the last time being when I was emotionally overcome with joy at having tuned the old TV in my hotel room in Oslo to receive English channels that cast some really decent shows.
Tribal worship time, it was.

4. I pretend that I am pretending to be a misanthrope.
...which means, I am one, you retard. So much for what you learnt in school about english usage.

5. I am scared of potatoes growing from the back of my ears
Enid Blyton has left this indelible scar in my psyche with content in some of her books that have naughty kids who don't wash the backs of their ears accumulating so much dirt that they grow potatoes back there. After having read it, my paranoia levels shot up and till date, post-bath, the back of my ears get a hard scrubbing, just in case.

6. I am afraid of heights.
Dead scared. Not of inclines; those I can take head on. Trekking is not out of question.
Its the sheer drops that scare me. The third floor of the forum in Bangalore is ample enough height to trigger my fears. Concrete jungles, be damned.

End of tag.

Now that you've been enlightened, and can win some trivia quiz about me if I ever get to a level where such a thing will warrant itself.
I have successfully passed my time, I bid thee adieu.