the abode of clouds - part 2

Shillong, if not Meghalaya is going crazy about this guy called Amit Paul who is on Indian Idol (I happened to watch a show in which he was singing, he seemed to be a very good singer). There were hoardings and banners all over the place exhorting the locals to vote for him. I even read a newspaper article asking people to vote. It lamented that a guy from Darjeeling was ahead of Amit Paul by 2 lakh votes (I think). The banners carried a message to the singer – “be Indian idol and make north east proud”, god save this country!! I don't know the final outcome of the show, I don't watch it.

On the second last day I managed to finish my work by around two and set out to see the local sights. I went to this place called Shillong peak a few kilometers outside the town. It is supposed to afford a very good view of the city. Unfortunately it was very cloudy and I managed to see nothing. Next I saw Elephant Falls. A nice waterfall, but the water downstream is kind of dirty – it has been made to go slow to create a tiny pool to facilitate boating, which no longer seems to take place anyway. I also saw a cathedral, a golf course and a lake called Ward’s Lake after this guy who got it built. My taxi driver (a local this time) was complaining that he had recently lost in the quarterfinals of a caroms tournament. Then he kind of surprised me by saying that last time he had won the tournament (I have absolutely no idea about the tournament). This guy seemed to follow the aforementioned television show quite avidly. Cherrapunji is supposedly a great place to visit. But the catch is that anybody wanting to go there will have to devote a day for the visit. When he dropped me off at my hotel, I gave him a tip of Rs 20. He said in a rueful voice that he was expecting it to be 50, so I had to increase it by 30 rupees!!

Coming back to Guwahati, there were traffic jams at one or two places, possibly caused because of the traffic being held up to facilitate some neta’s cavalcade. It is probably time for the courts to take notice of the discomfort caused to normal citizens whenever a VIP uses the same road as they are and to do something about this. On the return flight I actually saw rain fall from the clouds. Watching this from a plane was a novel experience. One or two people to who I told about my trip were of the opinion I have a great job. To anybody else who thinks I do, I must say the same thing I said to them – the grass is always greener on the other side!! Khublai, my reader for having read this!

the abode of clouds - part 1

Kum no? That is Khasi for ‘how are you?’ I visited Shillong around August 22nd on some official work. I flew down to Guwahati from Kolkata and then took a taxi to Shillong. It was the first time I had ever gotten onto an ATR. It’s a pretty small plane, though the ride was not as uncomfortable as I had expected it to be. Alliance Air (Indian airlines) needs to seriously do something about its air hostesses. They look thoroughly de-motivated to begin with. But the worst part is that they might de-motivate people from ever flying again with the carrier. There seemed to be present only the bare minimum amount of courtesy required to be shown to a fellow human being. Ask them something and the look they give you will make you regret your asking!!

Guess which vehicle was my taxi? A Santro!! The taxi guy was quite talkative. In his opinion if India is put under martial law after removing all the politicians, it will be a much better place. He had a good opinion about the army. Of the police though, he was pretty critical. And yes, he does not believe in seat belts. If you need to bolt out of a vehicle that has just run off the road, and down the hill, a seat belt will restrain you – that was his logic. He talked about the poor non-Assamese being killed in Assam. The general impression one I got was that he was slightly against the well-to-do part of the population. En route to Shillong there is this place called Bada Paani. It is actually a hydel power project. But the vistas there are simply stunning. There is an area just outside Guwahati which is the border between Assam and Meghalaya. The border at this place is actually the road. On one side of the road it is Meghalaya and on the other it is Assam. At one point on this road, along the Meghalaya side you will find a line of liquor shops and none on the Assam side. A little further off towards Shillong, there is a temple which is supposedly modeled along the lines of the one in Tirupati of Lord Venkateswara.

Inside Shillong the local taxis are almost all Maruti 800s, the first time I ever saw this. Unless you reserve one for your use, these taxis operate on a sharing basis. One day I had to stay back at the site till after 10 in the night. I called up my hotel to ask about dinner and found out that its restaurant had closed at 9.30 itself. I roamed about futilely on the roads near my hotel till about 10.30 to find something to eat. I came back to my room thinking that I was to go hungry that night. Luckily I had a fruit juice packet in my suitcase and also was able to persuade a waiter to provide me with some toast. The town goes to sleep very early. By around 10, everything is closed down, no traffic, no open shops, nothing.

(to be concluded in the next blog)

SLOKAS!!

Hmm, I shall give a string of slokas and their meanings starting from this blog. If i may be permitted to blow my own trumpet, these are from my class six Sanskrit textbook. I somehow still remember these, but not slokas from other classes.

na chourahaaryam na cha raajahaaryam
na bhraatrubhaajyam na cha bhaarakaari
vyaye krute vardhata eva nityam
vidyaadhanam sarvadhanapradhaanam

The wealth called education cannot be stolen by thieves, cannot be taken away by the king (let's say, the authorities), cannot be divided by brothers, is not a cause for burden. It increases on being spent, it is the most important among all wealth

Media neutrality, radio and me

The title may seem a little strange. I am going to write about three different things, there is no inter-connection. And those of you who are pretty optimistic in their outlook towards life, kindly proceed no further. This is a cynical piece of writing!!

The media is supposed to be unbiased and concern itself with only reporting facts, leaving the public to make their own deductions and conclusions. Right? Hogwash!! Today everything is about sensationalism, TRP ratings and readership survey results (i forget what the rating system used in radio is). For e.g., take the case of the sentencing of Sanjay Dutt. I think i will be right in saying that the sentencing of the guy to six years RI has had more press coverage than the death sentence given to Yakub Memon. Agreed, crores are riding on the actor, still!!

Then we have the over-enthusiastic TV channels jumping one over the other in conducting sting operations and exposes. While they do talk about good issues, it is the melodrama that gets onto your nerves. As per hearsay, the Hindu is biased towards the Left, the ToI towards the Congress and India Today towards the BJP. The day when all of mankind lets go of biases and believes in cold, clear logic, that is when the media will become unbiased!!

Now moving onto radio, 1-2 years back there was an FM radio channel in Hyderabad. We first found out about it's existence through our car music system. The channel NEVER had anything but songs on air. Contrast that with today's FM channels. You have the RJs yakking about anything and everything under the sun (if they can talk so much, i must be given the license to exaggerate a little) and that too in strange voices. This is similar to those TV shows where you have a hostess going around to colleges and residential areas asking people about songs, their lifestyles, all the while giggling and laughing like a hyena who has just had a glass of bhaang!! Another interesting thing to see is the reaction of the normal public in front of a camera. Imagine a scene in front of a court after a verdict has been give. A lawyer is being asked to comment. Now visualize the people standing behind him. Some keep straining their necks to be in the camera's field of view., some wave their hands etc.

Now coming to me, a few people must have thought what the name of the blog means. It means this and that in Telugu. Watch this space for more stuff.

a sunset with laloo

a little time back i was traveling from ranchi to delhi. i was in the ranchi airport waiting for my air deccan flight. suddenly there was a commotion, the source of which turned out to be a group of politicians. there was laloo prasad yadav, pratibha patil and jayanti natarajan. the able railway minister does look a bit amusing and everybody was craning their necks to catch a glimpse of 'lalooji'. it was my chance to see the possible next president (now simply the president). pratibha patil and jayanti natarajan caught a special flight to god knows where and laloo got onto our flight!!

imagine the union railway minister flying and that too not on the state carrier! the first two rows on either side of the aircraft were reserved for laloo and his group. whether or not it was the effect of the railway minister the pilot was in an expansive mood, constantly pointing out places on the ground and at one point of time asking us all to look at the silver lining of a cloud just before sunset.

there were some beautiful vistas, the sunlight filtering through the clouds and giving them a fiery glow. it would have been better had i got the window seat (i was able to manage an aisle seat only, damn deccan's free seating)

the beautiful sights visible form one side of the coin. the other and somewhat ugly side is the turbulence part. on a previous trip i was coming back from delhi to kolkata. it was raining heavily in kolkata that day with very strong gusts of wind. the plane was coming in for a landing when it suddenly took off again, it must have been only a couple of metres above the runway. it tried landing one more time before going for a pretty wide circle touching jamshedpur at one point and the sea on another (the kingfisher flight had a map of the plane's path). i was sitting in the middle seat. the guy on my right could not take the wild motion and promptly puked. the guy on my left held his seat tightly, closed his eyes shut (and was most probably praying). it was a relieved group that got off the plane, one hour past the scheduled arrival time.

moving on, recently i got hold of a harry potter and the deathly hallows ebook on the net. it was only 281 pages long but i read it anyway. it had sidney sheldonesque portion which was kind of shocking in a children's book. the story stopped abruptly at the end of the 281st page. i got hold of another version with 659 pages. i spent 3 days reading it and then found out it was not the original. my reaction? groan, groan, groan!! i felt like strangling whoever had written this. a lot of effort must have gone in, still.... it was similar to the synopsis i read in some respects but was not the original. there has been a newspaper report of children reading the book beginning from the back, being unable to suppress their anxiety about harry's fate. god save this world!!

the world of orkut

orkut!! in some minds, this word conjures up hours spent on the web just chatting with friends or looking up various profiles. network administrators must be one of the most hated individuals in organizations where this site is blocked. not to be left behind, people keep on finding proxy sites that enable them to chat. there is a friend of mine who was able to use gmail after a long time because of such a proxy server provided by a colleague. her words were somewhere along these lines, "bless him!"

it is kind of funny, all the stuff that keeps getting discussed here. politics, culture, porn, what not!! and that too in a variety of languages. transliteration refers to spelling the exact words of a language in another (for e.g., main hoon na is transliteration). this is different from translation where the meaning of the words is converted into the other language (for e.g., ain't i there for main hoon na)

now why did i mention this? orkut is a hotbed of transliteration activity. i am sure the britishers who introduced english to india never dreamt of the day when the indians would write their own language(s) in the queen's!! so there is a very good chance that you will see "kya be, kya kar raha hain" more than "what's up, dude, what are you doing?", and the stuff i myself have seen here!! i have discussed office work with my colleagues on orkut. obviously the normal chit-chat keeps taking place all the time. and i trust quite a large number of people will testify about meeting a lot of old friends.

i do not want to discuss the pros and cons of orkut, this has been done ad nauseam on various forums (fora for the purists). this article was just a general reflection on the site.

moving on, let us talk about corporate targets. why on god's green earth are organizations so fanatic about numbers and targets? gone are the days when people used to be happy with the basic necessities of life. today the guy who gets in the maximum 'dhanda' is the hero. the justifiation as far as i understand is that any business is here to do well, business. and growth should be a continuous process for the organization to sustain itself.

this is similar to what is called the red queen phenomenon in evolution (read about this in jurassic park or the lost world). in alice in wonderland, the red queen tells alice that she should run as fast as possible in order to remain where she is. similarly, in nature animals must evolve rapidly so as to just survive. the same logic must be extended to today's businesses. 'perform or perish' seems to be the oft-repeated quote. and in a world where there are a lot of others trying to do the same things that you are doing, well, what you have is tension, tension, tension!!


those of you who are studying, do enjoy your time now. once you start working...

rantings of a traffic victim

hmm, another effort at letting the world know what goes on inside the brain of the organism called chaitanya takes off. bless the guys (and girls, to be politically correct) who have made blogging what it is today, enabling anybody with access to the internet to put out all sorts of stuff, useful and otherwise!!

i was going to the howrah station by taxi to catch a train to ranchi yesterday. it was then that a few thoughts occurred to me. traffic in metros (generalizing, possibly in any decently-sized town, with adequately insufficient infrastructure) seems to be very intelligent. it has a mind of its own. it regulates its speed such that it achieves its ultimate aim, i.e. to not go anywhere. unfortunately its human components live under the mistaken impression that they are traveling from one place to another (and have to do this asap) which results in not-so-desirable temper swings.

aiding our hero, the traffic in its quest are the traffic signals, designed by somebody who thinks a vehicle should wait at a signal for it to change for at least the time taken for a single cell to evolve into a complete human being. the hapless humans can but pray for the day when their movements are not restricted to the ground (for illustration, refer to a good science fiction movie).

moving on, i used to pride myself on the fact that i read quite a decent amount. a conversation i had yesterday with a friend of mine and a list sent by another of TIME's compilation of the 100 greatest books were humbling experiences. it reminds me of a story i read once.

one day indra was thinking to himself how learned he was and how much he had read. along came narada ( i think) and showed him a huge pile of books. when asked what it was narada told indra that those were all the books that indra had read. this gave indra's already inflated ego a great surge. then quickly narada pointed to an even larger mound in front of which the first pile was infinitesimal. that, he told indra was a collection of books indra had not yet read. no prizes for guessing what the outcome of this was.

watch this space for occasional stories from indian mythology too. for now, adios!!