Tied up in knots

Sexual discrimination, equal opportunities, the minimum wage; sometimes you wonder how UK companies ever manage to find suitable employees. And even if they do, there's no guarantee that at some later stage, those same ungrateful individuals won't take them to an industrial tribunal over some trumped-up claim. Little wonder then, that job descriptions and person specifications in the UK are careful to clarify the company's position and its expectations.

I saw a UK job description recently and I thought it would be quite fun to re-print some of the criteria verbatim and then give my interpretation of the Indian equivalent underneath. In the world's largest democracy, (a democracy which, incidentally, has banned music and dancing in Bangalore) life can be disarmingly simple at times.

1.
UK actual: "This post has the following special circumstances: travel across England... anti-social hours... attendance at external forums... (Please note: if you have difficulty meeting these conditions because of a disability or family circumstances the appointing manager will discuss it with you in order to consider reasonable adjustments to the job or working conditions)."

India version: "This post has the following special circumstances: travel across England... anti-social hours... attendance at external forums... (Please note: if you have difficulty meeting these conditions because of a disability or family circumstances, do not apply)."

2.
UK actual: "In order to be successful in this role you will be able to... provide visionary and inspirational leadership... plan strategically... network extensively... speak influentially... challenge perceptions..."

India version: "In order to be successful in this role you will be female, tall, wheatish complexion, aged 24-30."

Originally published on Blogger on 11th August 2008. Image courtesy of a Google search on "tall wheatish" which came up with Ranee Mukherjee who is pretty but neither tall nor wheatish. Anyway, it give me a good excuse to publish this photo of her in her heyday.

Can I come out now?

There was an eclipse today. We're not quite sure when it occurred in Bangalore, but I think it was around 4.30. It was difficult to see with all the cloud and rain we're getting at the moment.

Eclipses are obviously a big deal in India and I didn't realise this until yesterday when a couple of my team asked if they could take leave because they were expected to be at home with their families. Other team members took their lunch early so that they could be inside the office, food digested, before the eclipse really got going.

And do you know, Bangalore - or at least the road outside this office - has worn a very deserted look this afternoon. I think people have stayed indoors in large numbers and I'm guessing that a lot of these probably won't come out until it gets dark. I pass no comment other than to say that I was genuinely surprised that people were so superstitious but logically, if there are fewer people on the roads, one assumes there are also going to be fewer accidents.

My daughter however, obviously thought she'd go one better and treat yesterday as an ominous day instead. Out with her mother, she tumbled over and cut her lip open. This morning we were at Manipal Hospital bright and early so she could have the wound stitched.

Originally published on Blogger on 1st August 2008 and re-published today, 22nd July 2009, on what has seen another eclipse - and quieter roads as a result. The next eclipse is due on 11th July 2010. Image from today's Google landing page.

Funskool

Those scallywags at Funskool have been at it again. With hindsight, the plastic duck should have served as a warning. I think we had something similar when we were little: one of those little pull-along ducks that waddles and makes a funny quacking sound. Only the Funskool duck never managed a quack and all that Niharika could do was drag the thing along. The wheels didn't go round because the rubbber tyres were too tight, and if you took the rubber off, the wheels slipped: no movement and no quacks. It didn't really bother my daughter but even so, I'm of the old school that believes that if you pay for something, it should be of merchantable quality; and the Funskool duck was not.

Last week it was Niharika's birthday and so I bought her some Noddy jigsaws. I didn't look at the box and it was only when we were starting to put the pieces together that I realised I'd bought something from Funcrap again.

For a start, the jigsaw pieces don't lock together properly. They do all marry up but they don't really lock together. The result is that you can pull the puzzle apart in no time - and indeed, you can inadvertently pull it apart whilst you're trying to fit the pieces together. Worse still though, one of the jigsaws had four pieces missing. I know, I know; in the face of bomb blasts and derrorist threats, such little trivialities are really just that - trivial. But you know, Funskool generally strikes me as the kind of company which, it ever went into book publishing, would probably miss out the last page of a whodunnit or print pages upside down. Shoddy is the word. In any event I've just dropped Funskool a line:

Dear Funskool

Would you mind asking your workers in the jigsaw division to look under their benches please. I bought a four-in-one Noddy jigsaw in Bangalore last week and there were four pieces missing. I thought "four-in-one" meant four jigsaws in one box but I see now that it could mean that four pieces are missing from one puzzle. If that's the case, I really think that should have been explained a little more clearly. I'm assuming though, that this is a genuine error and that the pieces are still somewhere in your workshop. If it helps, the missing pieces show a little bit of Bumpy Dog's ear, Noddy's left foot, some of Dinah Doll's stall and a part of Mr Plod's leg. I'd normally suggest that you fit them together to ensure that you have found the right pieces, but you'll have difficulty doing that with Funskool jigsaws because they slip and slide all over the place.

Incidentally, while I'm writing to you, do you think you might get quality control checks in your plastic duck department? My daughter's pull-along duck (you call it a Wiggler duck, we call it a drag-along duck), has never quacked and its wheels don't go round. I think you probably need to use a little less rubber on the tyres.

Yours sincerely

etc

PS. Have you ever considered going into book publishing? Agatha Christie novels are rightly considered masterpieces of their genre and yet her name is little known in India. Perhaps there's another market there for you.


Originally published on Blogger on 31st July 2008 and I'm pleased to say that although I'm still waiting for a reply to my e-mail, I've never bought another Funskool product since.

B-Movie

They're already referring to last Friday as 25/7. I find that a little strange, because in terms of loss of life, more people are killed on Bangalore's roads in 24 hours than were killed by Bangalore bombs last Friday. Still, New York has its 9/11 and London has its 7/7; Bangalore will have its 25/7.

In actual fact, if we're following US nomenclature, we should probably be referring to the event as 7/25 - only that sounds a little too much like an alarm call. "Oops, 7.25 already, time to put the kettle on / give the cat its ringworm tablet / count the typos in The Times of India... " It just doesn't have the same ring to it. If only the terrorists (or "derrorists" as the TV newsreaders invariably pronounce them), had had a little foresight and let their devices explode a day earlier on 24/7. Now that has something, and it would have been particularly apt for Bangalore, what with all those out-bound call centre processes to the US, Europe and Australasia. But no, 25/7 it is and one staff illustrator at The Deccan Chronicle even gave us his interpretation of the derror which had ripped through the heart of Bangalore when the bombs went off. Only it wasn't his interpretation. It was his drawing of a photograph of American office workers running through Manhattan as the twin towers burned behind them. There they all were, towering skyscrapers, Caucasian men wearing braces (or 'suspenders' as they say in the US) and an African-American woman with terror written across her face. Surprisingly, none of the people in the drawing were Indian which is a little strange considering that these were bombs planted in an Indian city and which killed and injured Indian people.

Forget the plagiarists, what is the city doing to combat the derrorist threat? Well, quite a lot actually. The side gate at TGI Fridays on Airport Road has been locked and the gate across the main entrance has been pushed to. It's not been actually barred because that would be silly and would prevent people from parking their vehicles. But it does now have to be manually opened by one of the guards. A little further up at the Leela Palace hotel and Galleria, the gates there are neither locked nor pushed to, but they are half open and give the appearance of the Leela either just about to close or just about to open. In terms of anti-terrorism measures, half closing a gate means diddly squat, but it does send out a message to those who would wish to disrupt democracy by dastardly deeds. That message says, "Let this be a warning. Don't push us. We know how to close these gates and we're not afraid to do so."

At the Forum shopping mall, we queued up for ages as a result of the beefed up security. The underneaths of vehicles are normally inspected by a man wielding a mirror on a trolley, but this time he'd been joined by three other men. Our car was stopped and somebody poked around in the boot while two others tested the children's toys for explosives. Strangely, nobody even attempted to open the driver or passenger doors. The Forum though, was a joy. The place is normally heaving but on Saturday, a day after the blasts, it was actually quite pleasant to window-shop there.

My own theory on the local response to terrorism (ie, locked and half-shut gates and half-hearted security) is that the city wants to be doing something and wants people to be re-assured that it's doing something, but it actually doesn't have the first clue about what to do. Shortly after the bombs exploded, various uniformed officials and the odd sniffer dog could be seen scouring the bomb blast sites but I wonder whether everybody knew what they were doing there, and to be honest - and with no disrespect to Bangalore - those bomb sites looked a good deal less disrupted than some other parts of the city. CMH Road looks like a bomb site. MG Road looks like a bomb site. Forget Commercial Street. And these are prime shopping areas for the city. At times - he said with his velvet moaning hat on - you wonder whether you haven't been transported to Basra or Beirut. In fact I should probably make it a point to steer clear of cities beginning with the letter B. So that's Birmingham out. I rest my case.

Originally published on Blogger on 30th July 2008. Image from 4 Basra although it could just as well have been taken in parts of Bangalore.

Do you – tall, educ, fair – take this man…

Indian men really do lead the life of Reilly. Well, a good deal of them do, anyway. Cosseted and pampered by doting mothers up until they complete their education, when it comes to finding a bride, they leave that to their parents too. Forget all that messy stuff about boy meets girl, boy buys girl flowers, sends text messages, buys chocolates, takes to cinema, buys more flowers, sends more texts, asks girl to take HIV test... oh, the list goes on. No, just stick an ad' in the paper.

It's high time I passed comment on the matrimonial ads' in the papers so here goes. First there's the Boy seeks Girl section (huge numbers of desperados subdivided by caste and/or religion and/or geographical region) and then there's the Girl seeks Boy section (fewer prospects but with the same sub-divisions).

I suppose the first thing to say is that at times you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Scandinavia rather than dusky India (let alone dark Dravidian south India). Most of the indivduals are described as either "wheatish" or "fair" which reflects, I feel, not only a rather sad state of affairs, but also many Indians' perceptions that a white skin is more attractive than a dark one. I personally disagree, but then I'm a whitey, and you only have to walk along the beauty products counters in supermarkets to see what a huge market the skin-lightening industry has become. There's an advert currently playing on TV where a forlorn Priyanka Chopra sits dabbing her face with skin-lightener in the hope that Saif Ali Kahn will ditch his latest squeeze and come back to her. Priyanka, stop it. You look great as you are and if you carry on that way you'll end up looking like Michael Jackson.

This advert (one of many) appeared within a yellow box in The Times of India at the weekend.

Wanted Beautiful
educated homely
Girl aged 30-35 yrs
from respectable
family for a good
looking Agarwal
boy, issueless,
innocent divorcee
39 / 5'4" / Graduate
(looks younger)
well settled in Chennai
belonging to a
highly respectable
North Indian business
family.

E-mail BioData &
Photo (Must) to:

This innocent divorcee (yeah, right), a youthful 39 (so he's in his forties), is a little short at 5' 4'' (but almost certainly looks taller) and seeks a life partner. Under 29s and over 35s need not apply. However, if you're not excluded by age, have the looks of a goddess, and brains which you're prepared to put into cold storage while you dust his house and make small talk with his boring family, then you could be the girl of his dreams (provided you come from a respectable family of course). It's like when I buy fruit from a roadside vendor and I ask - and always kick myself for asking - "these mangoes, they're sweet are they?" And what does the vendor say? "Oh sweet, very sweet sir, lovely and sweet." One of these days I'm going to meet an honest man who says, "Nah mate, these are shit. 'Orrible tasting mangoes these are. If I were you I'd box my ears and go and buy some from Sanjay down the road; now his mangoes are lovely and sweet." Of course she's going to come from a respectable family, goddammit!

All I can say is, no wonder the advertiser felt the need for a yellow box. If I were in his shoes I would also have added another line: "free sari for every applicant - while stocks last - terms and conditions apply."

Oh, and another thing to point out is that there always seems to be a predominance of Brahmins looking for alliances. Now the sceptics amongst us might think that, OK, if you're from the elite caste, finding a match should be child's play shouldn't it? Apparently not because the matrimonial pages are littered with Brahmins, and if the text below, taken form another box advert, is anything to go by, they're a picky bunch.

Rajasthani Gaur
Brahmin
South Delhi based
Business family
Settled in Delhi
Invites
Matrimonial
proposal
For their daughter
Fair, slim,
beautiful,
charming...
Doing her own
export business...

Again, come on love. If you're so beautiful, successful, slim (and fair of course) and running your own export business at the tender age of 24 or 25, how is it that you haven't been snapped up long ago?

Sorry Miss Fussy, but all the handsome, cultured, top class, well educated, professional businessmen met their girlfriends at the local nightclub or on social outings with friends. Besides, they're too busy with work to read matrimonial ads. Don't despair though, there's a short-arsed north Indian businessman in Chennai who I might be able to persuade, if only he'll be a little flexible on age and location. Leave it with me, I'll get right back to you.

Running on empty

Bangalore seems to be grinding to a halt. It was announced yesterday that from August we can expect power cuts of up to seven hours a day. In the countryside it will be well into double figures. The monsoon had not really landed properly this year and so the dwindling water supplies plus the daily increasing demand in the city mean that we all have to be careful of the resources we have.

Bangalore is home to over eight million people now (and most of those seem to be on the roads at virtually any time of the day). A consequence of the pending power cuts is that individuals and companies are stocking up on diesel for their generators. When I called in at two petrol stations on Airport Road this morning, both had run dry of diesel. I then headed to Old Madras Road and joined a queue at the Venkateshwara Service Station (people do occasionally queue in India but only at petrol stations and urinals in my experience). I waited for about ten minutes and then filled the tank: 36 litres for about eighteen quid - eat your heart out Gordon Brown. That should last me for about a fortnight but I'm going to be careful, seeing as Bangalore is feeling the pinch, to avoid unnecessary journies. That doesn't include my newly arranged chauffer driven jaunts to the pubs on a Friday night which, after a week spent immersing myself in various software projects, are very necessary. I've never been one for drinking and driving and whilst you can get probably get away with it in India by flashing enough money at the right time, that's one habit I'm certainly not going to get into. Having said that, the Bangalore authorities are getting tougher on drink-driving, even though we passed a chap last week who was as drunk as a Lord and gesticulating wildly from his car window. I think he even had the cheek to yell some abuse at a traffic policeman who just waved him on through.

But today has also seen Bangalore hit by bomb blasts in different parts of the city. The information is sketchy at present but I understand that there have been seven blasts and one fatality. That will almost certainly escalate to more, and the news channels will be full of earnest reporters talking earnestly to other earnest reporters and asking "why, oh why, oh why? as the same footage of blood stained concrete, discarded sandals and the odd body is replayed on an endless loop behind them. Cynical, me?

As the old saying goes, there are four types of people:

The Optimist: There is always someone worse off than me.
The Pessimist: I'm always worse off than someone.
The Cynic: There's always someone.
The German: Worse off than myself, someone always there is.

And to round things off, my wife bought a box of eggs, stuck it on the back seat of the car, forgot about it and then sat on it. Scrambled eggs on the upholstery. It's been one of those days.

Originally published on Blogger on 25th July 2008.

Congestion, what congestion?

Visiting dignitaries must think that Bangaloreans are a right bunch of moaners. I've just seen another cavalcade of a dozen or more cars shoot past our office, sirens blaring. They must have been doing at least 50 kph, probably more, and you never do that on this road unless you're a drunken bus driver or you're travelling at unsociable hours.

It's the same old routine whenever a politician of any importance comes to the city. The signs on the main roads go up that there's to be no parking due to the visit of a VVIP. I'm sure someone, somewhere in this country, has come up with another title to outdo what for most people would suffice as VIP, and it wouldn't surprise me to see at some point, the acronym ESVVIP (Extra Special Very Very Important Person). I've learnt that Indians generally, love authoratitive sounding titles, and I bet it rankles like hell with those politicians who thought they were sitting pretty as VIPs, only to suddenly find themselves rubbing shoulders with (or more likely, touching forelocks in deference towards), a VVIP. Anyway, I digress.

After the VIP, VVIP, ESVIP and MDIBTYD signs have gone up, (that's My Dad Is Bigger Than Your Dad), the police come along and block all the side roads. One policeman, one road, and he'll stand there for the next half an hour picking his nose and preventing any traffic from exiting that road until the cavalcade has passed.

I don't blame the authorities at all for taking the measures they do to protect their great and the good. This part of the world has seen its fair share of street assassinations, the last being Benazir Bhutto of course, and besides, these politicans are busy people. If they had to travel through the city like the rest of us mere mortals it would take them forever. Just imagine poor old Manmohan Singh or Mrs Gandhi stuck at traffic lights and engaging hawker after hawker with, "No thanks I really don't need boxes of tissues, a copy of The Week, that novelty toy motorbike or the cowboy hat. No really, keep the chess set, the wooden snake and the beads from Rajhastan and you can tell your friend with the skewer through his cheeks that such devotion really doesn't do anything for me. And while you're at it, please tell that young urchin to stop tapping my elbow and saying "Sah, Sah / Madam, Madam." I'm meeting the President of the US in half an hour and I've just had this shirt / blouse ironed." I mean, you can see their predicament.

Bullet and bomb-proof cars would probably work of course, but where's the fun in that and besides, what do you do then with all the decoy drivers and decoy passengers? They've all got families to feed.

And so the cavalcades continue to whizz through the normally congested streets of Bangalore whilst everyone else waits silently in the wings. And I can almost hear Mr Singh leaning over to whisper to Mrs Gandhi, "Typical BJP state. All they ever do in Bangalore is moan about traffic jams but I've yet to see the evidence myself."

Originally published on Blogger on 18th July 2008.

Expat seeks ant slayer

After nearly five years away from books, my albums and my CDs, not to mention all the other accumulated junk collected over the years, it's great to have everything unpacked and under one roof. We moved out of Indiranagar yesterday and into another locality a couple of kilometres down the road.

When my chattels from the UK arrived in India in May, I pretty much left them as they were. As we were about to embark on a UK trip and also planned to move out of Indiranagar, it made little sense to unpack everything only to have to pack it all up again a couple of months later. But now we're in. The bookcases are up and most of the books are on. The various components of my antique hi-fi are in place and now all that's required is to link them all up. Pretty soon, all being well, I could be listening to vinyl once more. And although I'll probably never read the bulk of those books again or listen to the majority of those 70s and 80s records, it's somewhat comforting and reassuring to have them all back with me.

There are problems though. Despite the fact that we were able to sit out on our terrace this morning drinking tea, watch the kites soaring in the distance, and remark how peaceful the area was generally, we've lost our smart address. No longer can we direct friends along the lines "But Tarquin dahling, we're so easy to find! Come down 100 Feet Road, go past the Levi's store, past Reebok and Nike, turn right at Benetton and you can't miss us."

I jest of course, and to be frank, much of Indiranagar is hardly posh (to use an already over-used Indian term). Defence Colony has some quiet streets and some palatial houses, but the area we were in was somewhat mixed and certainly crowded. Our road had become quite scruffy and I try to convince myself that it must have been going that way before we settled there and that other residents in the street, on seeing us move in two years ago, didn't tut-tut to each other and say, "Oh dear, another foreigner. There goes the neighbourhood."

I'll be interested to see which insects we're plagued with at this new address. At my first address in Indiranagar it was red ants and I remember waking up on more than one occasion to find the bed (and myself) covered in ants. Much later, when Niharika was born, we used to wrap the legs of her cot in polythene and then position these in tubs of water, our reasoning being that only swimming ants, or those which knew how to parachute, would be able to get to her. It worked too.

At our last address, on the parallel street to my first one, it was the cockroaches which held sway. I don't ever recall seeing a red ant in that house, possibly because the cockroaches had eaten them all. We had rats too, but at least they were outside and on the one occasion that one did make it into the kitchen, it was quickly knocked out cold by our maid.

Now that we've moved, my money's on ants again. There were some large flying ants in the house last night and I also had my toes bitten by red ants when I nipped outside briefly. Some bright spark will probably tell me shortly, "Oh didn't you know? The name of your area literally translates as ferocious biting-ant place." It wouldn't surprise me. After all, Domlur, where we lived before, supposedly means "mosquito village".

Originally published on Blogger on 17th July 2008. At our current location, the insect pests are black ants.

Plus ca change

Still in diary-transcription mode (or "transcriptionist" as they say in these 'ere parts), I see that in 1978 and '79 I used to note when the Caroline Roadshow was in town. For those not in the know, Radio Caroline was a pirate radio station which used to broadcast from the Mi Amigo anchored somewhere in the English Channel. Tuning in to Radio Caroline used to be a regular routine for me, particularly to the listeners' top ten which was broadcast on either a Friday or Saturday night; I can't remember which now. Every week, somebody's top ten faves would be played and, the station having a distinct hard rock bent (I don't think that the term "heavy metal" had been coined in those days), you'd invariably find that Stairway to Heaven, Freebird and one or more Deep Purple numbers would always be in there somewhere.

The Caroline Roadshow was an extension of the radio station. Every so often, the roadshow would hit town and you'd be treated to four hours of classic heavy rock. I was - and still am for that matter - into heavy rock in a big way. These days I have neither the follicles, the biker's jacket or the denim waistcoat covered in murals and patches, but I still have the love of the music. (For that matter, I also don't have the perfect hearing that I had in the days before I used to troop up to Hammersmith Odeon, The Rainbow Theatre, The Marquee, The Lyceum and all those other venues to gradually deafen myself. My diary entry for Friday 2nd November 1979 - the day after seeing AC/DC and Def Leppard in London - reads, "Still partially deafened" but it didn't prevent me from going to the Caroline Roadshow later that evening).

The roadshows were always good, sweaty events, the end of the evening ritually signalled by Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird slung onto the turntable, the initial arm waving and swaying during the slow build-up, soon giving way to frenzied head-banging as that particular song reached its finale. (Actually, I was never a big fan of Freebird but what was for me, the slow boring start and Ronnie Van Zant's lazy southern drawl, always gave me enough time to queue up at the gents and still have plenty of time to amble back for the guitar finale).

Which brings me right back to Bangalore 2008. I was at the Hard Rock Cafe on Saturday night, and listening again to a lot of the old stuff they used to play thirty years ago on Radio Caroline. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple: all just as popular now as when I was tuning in to Caroline and compiling my own top ten. Now where to place Don't Fear The Reaper - fifth or sixth? Somebody commented, after I'd be singing along to Tom Sawyer, that it was good to see somebody who knew their Rush songs. Well I should do, I've been listening to that particular song for the last 28 years and following the band for even longer.

So I suppose it should have been no surprise that the final song of the evening (or at least, the last one they played before they turned the lights on), was Freebird. Thirty one years after the singer and two of his band were wiped out in a plane crash, I remained true to part of my old routine at least. I went to the loo.

Originally published on Blogger on 14th July 2008.

Moving out

The new contracts have been signed, a removal company has been appointed and empty cartons have been delivered. After nearly five years in Indiranagar, it's time to move on.

In Britain, moving house costs a fortune, but then again most things in Britain cost an arm and a leg. I had three quotes to move our house contents four kilometres down the road. The most expensive one was a couple of hundred pounds, the cheapest, about seventy three pounds. Those prices include packing, wrapping, loading and unloading and will probably take four men the best part of a day. In Britain, I should think you'd be lucky to get the bubble wrap for seventy five quid.

But I shall miss Indiranagar. To give an English simile, I suppose that parts of it would be what Islington (the posh bits anyway) are to London, and whilst we're not exactly moving to the Bangalore equivalent of rough and ready Clapton, we are certainly moving away from the city..

We're exchanging a three-bedroomed, three-bathroomed ground floor apartment for a three-bedroomed, two-bathroomed house. Whereas now we have a little rat-infested patch of ground to the side of our kitchen, we'll be gaining a sit-out area and two terraces (something to give me kittens when Niharika goes walk-about and I wonder whether she's on the terrace with those all too familiar low-level walls).

But the bedrooms are a good size and it will be nice to finally unpack all my stuff from England, get the bookcases up, get the hi-fi wired and start annoying the neighbours with the loud music I've been unable to play for so long. I don't really mind moving so much but I hope this will be the last move in this city. Thankfully, we'll still be on a reasonable road and should therefore still benefit from the traders who come swinging by with their fish, fruit, vegetables and general household items. That's a definite plus, but on the downside we're moving to a house that has no back-up power supply; something we've been able to take for granted during the last two years at our current address.

We're also a little more off the beaten track as far as our driver is concerned. I'd thought about this and the routine will now be that I'll drive myself to work in the morning and then Hegde will meet me at the office and pick the car up from there. That sounds like a good arrangement and Shilpi has also persuaded him to stay late on a Friday so that he can drive me home from the pub.

Originally published on Blogger on 10th July 2008

Once bitten, several times bitten

Once bitten, several times bitten

I don't know what it was that bit me the other night whilst I was sleeping but it certainly had a damn good feed. In fact judging by the number of bites over my right ear and on the back of my head, whatever it was seems to have rung a few friends up and invited them over for lunch as well.

Mosquito bites go with the territory unfortunately, particularly at this time of year. Before I settled in India and was just the occasional business traveller, I used to come armed with pills to ward off malaria. Six of them tasted OK but the seventh was disgusting and you had to take these for the duration of the trip plus, I think, for one month after you got back. When I moved here I gave up the idea of taking pills and in any event, Bangalore is not one of those places where malaria is a problem.

But malaria or no malaria, those damned insects still bite and there have been recent outbreaks of chikangunya and dengue in the city. The children sleep under nets but we don't, and this last week or so I've been bitten to pieces. The bites on my head are very painful and I wonder in fact whether it was something else other than a mosquito that bit me. Like a Bengal Tiger for instance.

In any event, our evening routine remains the same. We sweep our bedroom and bathroom with one of those mosquito zappers shaped like a tennis racket. Press the button and a small electric charge runs through the "strings"; enough to give out an unpleasant tingle if you happen to inadvertently "bat" your wife, but fatal for a mosquito. If it doesn't kill them straight away, it certainly fries them a little. "Tssss" they go, as they hit the charge (and when Niharika was just learning to speak she knew that a dog went "woof", a cat went "miaow", a cow went "moo", a mosquito went "tssss" and a cockroach went "splat").

But inevitably there's always one or two that you miss or that somehow sneak in during the night and one or two is all that it takes. When we move I think we'll take a leaf out of our children's books and sleep under a net.

Originally published on Blogger on 8th July 2008. But I've not slept under a net since.

Treading on the little people

Indians are good are keeping the downtrodden down. They're not the only ones of course, and I unwittingly joined in the game the other day too.

I've lost count of the times I've heard, when people are discussing servants, the phrase "don't spoil them"; an exhortation usually followed by the warning, "or they'll jump all over your head." Spoiling might mean being too familiar (such as smiling more often than is healthy), taking a servant on an outing with you, allowing a servant to eat at your table or sit on one of your chairs, saying "No go on, keep that one rupee change. Have it for going. Do you still have that shopping bill for a thousand rupees?" There are hundreds of examples of how you should and shouldn't treat servants and funnily enough - because I was reading this in an old Victorian publication not so long ago - those lessons on how the masters should behave have barely changed in the last hundred or more years. The difference these days is that the oppression is dealt out by Indians to Indians - and not by British overseers.

The master-servant relationship is one thing but similar rules come into play when dealing with tradesmen or indeed any situation which involves a financial transaction. Here's my story.

Stickler that I am for the dark ages, we don't have a coffee machine in the office. Instead of all that messy business of people going backward and forward to make brews, slopping tea on the floor, leaving the area like a complete pigsty etc, we have chai wallahs who come round to the office four times a day. They come in through the door, do a quick headcount and then deliver a small cup of coffee or tea or badam milk to our desks. We have two companies which keep us watered. One comes at 9am and 2pm, the other comes at 11am and 4pm. Each drink costs four rupees and we pay the guys at the end of each month, a total of around fifty pounds.

OK. Both companies supplied their drinks in the same sized plastic thimbles. Recently however, company two (the 11am and 4pm shift) had been handing out smaller cups and half filling these. I mentioned it the other day to the admin people here and was told, yes, they'd already mentioned it but the practice was persisting. So I said, tell them again and if it doesn't improve we'll cut their service or cut the amount we pay them. It improved for a bit, and then we had a couple of instance last week when we received small, semi-filled cups again.

So the upshot was that instead of paying for twenty five days at four rupees each, we paid them for 10 days at that rate, and fifteen days at three rupees, a matter of about 167 rupees I think (less than two pounds in Sterling). I explained this to the proprietor when he came in last week and he immediately said that he'd cut that amount from the coffee boy's wages.

So there you have it. The Brit complains about the service and treads on the vendor. The vendor in turn, treads on the coffee boy who'd done the pouring. Petty? Harsh? Maybe, but at the same time, the boy could have been cheating his employer and after all, he was warned. As Ronnie Corbett said in that classic sketch about class in 1967, "I know my place." (And do click on that link).

Originally published on Blogger on 3rd July 2008.

To drive or not to drive

We have eighteen days left at our current apartment. When my landlord hiked the rent in May I immediately responded, telling him that it was too much and we'd be moving out. Then, reflecting that we had a trip to England coming up soon, not to mention a consignment of house contents on its way to me across the Arabian Sea, I told him that we'd continue at the new rate, buying myself enough time to get our holiday out of the way, and my goods in the house.

So here we are, everything settled and I gave Shylock my notice for the second time, two weeks ago. Now we need to find somewhere to live. Apart from the first month in Bangalore when I stayed in the back of beyond at Hebbal, I've always lived close to the centre of town. I was on 2nd Cross for over two years and then moved to the adjoining street where we've been ever since. I like the convenience of where we are but we're really paying too much rent and I could be putting that money into my children's accounts rather than a Bengali's pocket.

It looks as though we'll be moving a little further out. Shilpi has found a place in KR Gardens close to the old airport, and although the place was a complete tip when we visited it two weeks ago, the landlord assured me that everything would be cleaned up. I told him that I'd believe that when we saw it and that I wouldn't be parting with any money until I was assured that everything was clean and working as it should do. So we're off to have a second look this weekend, and I'm expecting that I'll be saying to him, "that sink needs replacing, this drain cover is broken, this tap doesn't work, the bulb's gone..."

But then I have a reputation for being a fussy devil to maintain, and I've always found in India that it helps to keep your suspicion levels high and your expectations low. If we do move to KR Gardens though, my regular trips to the pub will have to be re-assessed. I'm currently a five minute walk away; KR would be half an hour or more. I have the car of course but I don't drink and drive which means it would either be a crab-wise stagger along Airport Road on a Friday night, or a smooth drive having been drinking unsatsisfying sweet lime soda all evening.

Decisions, decisions. And Gordon Brown thinks he's got a tough job keeping dwindling Labour Party supporters on his side, and the British public in favour of military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He should be in my shoes!

Originally published on Blogger on 2nd July 2008. We did move and I did walk to and from the pub. Twenty minutes was my best time and I used to try and beat that every Friday night but never managed it. It was always twenty minutes, twenty one minutes, twenty two minutes...

Wanting the best

I have an amazing capacity for hoarding and for trivia... and for hoarding trivia. Having recently transcribed my diary for 1975 I see that at the beginning of that year, I was five feet, two inches tall and took a size eight shoe. That shoe was occasionally one with a four inch stack heel (well it was the seventies after all) and I clumped onto a bus every morning at 8.15, arriving at school between 8.40 and 8.45.

On 12th February that year, my brother found a frog at school. I received a Valentine's card from Anne Windsor two days later and on 20th February I went to bed in clean pyjamas and between clean sheets. I bathed my sore toe in salt water on Friday 14th March and exactly two months later, my sister's goldfish nearly choked to death on seaweed in its bowl. (I don't know if goldfish can actually choke, but that's what I wrote). Looking back now it amazes me that I chose to record some things over others. Why for instance would I note that on September 21st I killed five wasps and on October 9th, my sister sewed the ear on an elephant she was making? Surely something more exciting or notable happened on those days didn't it?

In any event, I find it quite fascinating reading about the little flirtations at school, the games of football with friends long-forgotten and narrowly missing an IRA bomb blast in Oxford Street, London.

But I also recorded the trips we made; journeys to visit our grandparents in London and in Dorset, visits to Hylands Park, Central Park, Admiral's Park, Danbury Lakes. Days out to Cambridge, Canterbury, London, Finchingfield. I was a fairly naive twelve year old for most of 1975 but I appear to have been quite active, most of that summer seemingly spent in swimming pools or having kick-abouts with friends.

And as I was typing up these thoughts from long ago I wondered what, if we stay in Bangalore for much longer, my children would write about in their diaries. We have Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh, both of them scruffy and overcrowded, and the only decent swimming pools are not public baths like the ones we used to go to, but membership or guest-only affairs in clubs and 5-star hotels. Nandi Hills is a reasonable trip and not too far away but whereas we had a huge choice of parks and opens spaces within ten minutes' reach, and London and Cambridge were an hour's car journey, in Bangalore - at the wrong time of day - we'd be lucky to make it from Indiranagar to City Market.

It's horses for courses. Bangalore is home to over seven million people, Chelmsford was maybe a hundred thousand or so in those days, I don't really know. But what I do know is that some of those qualities of life just aren't here in India. They are is in some respects but it's the little things like parks and open spaces and cleanliness and a good infrastructure which, over time, can begin to niggle.

Originally published on Blogger on 26th June 2008. In the year since I wrote that entry we've moved house twice and we now live in an apartment complex - Sriram Stepford - where the children have grass to play on, swings to swing on and a pool to swim in, a facility they use daily. They also have sunshine throughout the year. So yes, horses for courses as I wrote back then, and it's not so bad. The photo is of Hyland's House, Chelmsford.