India - travels in my nightie

Off with the nighties

2010-08-06T07:01:00.004+01:00

My India travels are at an end. I flew back into England earlier in the week and now plan to settle here. My thanks to the followers of this blog which is now closed. Meanwhile, catch my take on England over at England, this England.

For the Flovations!

2010-07-29T11:14:00.005+01:00

Live long and prosper. I've enjoyed your company, and your professionalism and expertise have always made me appear better than I actually am. Take a bow (back row, left to right) Binu, Suresh, Revanna, Tomy, Vasanth, Roshan, Raghavendra, Ravichandra, Nagesh; (front row, left to right) Prasanthan, Maya, Urmila, Vinod, Philip and Mary. Prashant and Vinod M, you too.

Splash it all over

2010-07-16T12:20:00.004+01:00

Poor old EasyNag. Before he came to pick me up this morning, a tanker carrying Brut eau de toilette, turned over on Airport Road and drenched him in the stuff. At least I'm guessing that that's what happened because he was smelling like an extremely fragrant Henry Cooper this morning.

One of the mysteries I'm content to take back with me to the UK is why India has such an enduring fascination with the 1970s. On the one hand you have some of the best IT brains in the world developing some of the best software in the world, and on the other you have Denim, Brut and Old Spice filling supermarket shelves whilst Hotel California or Daddy Cool are piped through the speakers. Go to The Only Place for a steak and it will be served up with lettuce, cucumber and tomato floating in the gravy. Millers 46 - or is it Millers 45? I lose count - anyway, the other 'steak place' looks as though it was decorated in about 1973 (and I think has the Hotel California album cover on the wall) and even Koshy's, Bangalore's very own Transport Caff, has chipped formica table-tops and milk jugs that last saw washing-up liquid in 1978. I just don't get it. Then again, as I've written before, I smell like my dad these days and so I'm just as guilty as the next man. At least I don't have flares.

Pictured, Henry Cooper - before he found Brut.

Adios, Scorpio

2010-07-13T09:54:00.005+01:00

We're car-less again. I sold the Scorpio yesterday and spent the best part of the day running around sorting out paperwork. I advertised the vehicle on Sulekha on Friday and had a flood of enquiries; so many that I stopped answering the phone after a while. I showed some potential buyers the vehicle on Saturday morning, took a deposit on Sunday and wrapped it up yesterday; not bad really, and I'm still surprised, given the state of the roads in this country, that cars hold their value so well.

My brother-in-law thinks that the ad was so popular because I mentioned in it that there had been "one very careful British driver". I'm just pleased that I have managed to survive Indian roads for nearly three years, and if friends are to be believed, now that I can drive in India, I can drive anywhere in the world. Maybe, but I'm in no hurry to try the highways of Afghanistan; not yet, anyway.

When I placed the advert I was really tempted to write, "one very careful British driver; horn barely used, although indicators do show some sign of wear and tear". I actually started typing that but then deleted it because I didn't think that most people would understand, let alone appreciate, the sarcasm. But this morning there's a gaping void where my car used to be parked, and for the first time in years I had to take a rickshaw to work. I would have taken an EasyCab but, true to form, they sent me a text message about five minutes before the car was due to tell me that there were no cabs in my area. As I've blogged before, there's nowt easy about EasyCabs. In any event, it worked out OK and I got a speedy-rick ride to Whitefield and the promise of a repeat session tomorrow morning.

In the meantime though, my dear Scorpio - complete with my customised IN A RAGE decal - is now ferrying other folk across Bangalore's blighted highways. Farewell.

A good weekend for Europe

2010-07-04T06:41:00.004+01:00

South America must be in mourning; its soccer fans at least. Brazil crashed out to the Netherlands on Friday, and yesterday Germany sent Argentina packing.

I was back in the Sports' Bar watching Friday's match: lots of Indian Dutch fans and even more Indian Brazilian supporters. Yesterday was a more difficult call for me. If both teams could have lost to each other I'd have been the happiest person in India. I'm no fan of the German national side or the Argentinians for that matter. The Germans are ruthlessly efficient and skilful whereas England are compulsively inefficient and unimaginative. It's probably that factor alone which rankles with me: sour grapes. As for the Argies, I've never forgiven Maradona for the Hand of God goal, and each time I see him strutting along the touchline it makes my blood boil. So, although it was a difficult choice for me yesterday - particularly as Germany sent England packing a week ago - I was behind the German team. I won't say that I was cheering them on, but I was certainly glad that they won so convincingly and have sent Maradona back to Buenes Aires with a flea in his ear.

I wonder though, when an Indian national squad will make it to the world cup finals. Of course, cricket is the main sport here. In a country with teeming cities, you can still have a knock about with a bat and ball in a crowded back alley, three feet wide. Playing football there would be a different matter altogether. Then there's the weather. Most of the country is dry for much of the year, and football's one game that thrives on wet pitches and soft ground. Go for a sliding tackle on a stony pitch in Hyderabad and you'd well and truly skin your knees.

Then again, Africa's not known for being one of the most temperate continents and yet Ghana, Algeria, The Cameroons, Ivory Coast and Nigeria all made it through to the Group stages, whilst South Africa, who got a free pass thanks to hosting the tournament, also gave a good account of themselves. There's no reason why India shouldn't also be up there too on the soccer world stage, and the sport seems to have a pretty good following, particularly in the north-eastern states (where it's wetter).

Twenty years ago West Germany, worried about its soccer team's poor showing, initiated a soccer academy which is now well and truly paying dividends. Perhaps they should think about doing the same in India - and indeed England for that matter.

A language they all understand

2010-06-25T10:58:00.005+01:00

I should preface this post by saying that it has nothing at all to do with India. Actually, it rightfully belongs on an England-aaagh type blog, but for the time being I'm lodging it here.

I see that campaigners in Britain are calling for the "Breast is best" slogan to be scrapped. Apparently, it's just not convincing enough new mums to breastfeed because, according to The Breastfeeding Network, it "implies something special, whereas breastfeeding is the physiological norm."

I find this quite extraordinary. Are we saying that young British mothers don't know that what their bodies produce naturally, is a darned sight better for baby than say, Nestle powder, or formula food, or a Big Mac and fries?

Personally, I find nothing at all wrong with "Breast is best". As far as I'm concerned, it does exactly what it says on the tin and is completely unambiguous. Not to worry. I've come up with an alternative slogan that today's young mothers, brought up in a culture of binge drinking, nightclubs and Friday night vomit, will be very familiar with if they've ever walked past a building site in a low-cut top. "Oi, love! Get yer tits out!"

My apologies to sensitive Indian readers.

The language of disappointment

2010-06-13T04:33:00.007+01:00

I'm kicking myself that I had such a restless night. Kicking myself because it was pondering about the English football team's performance against the USA in the FIFA World Cup that kept waking me up. Can you believe it? As they are fond of saying in India, "What nonsense!" Having had a full and energetic day out yesterday with my office colleagues, I'd imagined that my shattered limbs would induce my head into a sound and solid sleep. Nothing like it. I kept waking up.

I cranked up the internet at around 6am, and went straight to the BBC News website. A familiar headline: "US hold England to draw after goalkeeping blunder." The story was full of the same nouns and adjectives that we Brits whose memories don't extend beyond 1966 are so used to seeing: suffered, nightmare, disappointing; those three words appearing in the opening sentence. It goes on: hopelessly, limitations, subdued, and in the final sentence, that over-used phrase, ran out of ideas.

It can be a miserable existence being an England supporter. I can't really count myself a diehard fan but of course, I'll always root for the country in any sporting competitions - and invariably come away disappointed. In fact, it's a double whammy for me because I also followed Leeds United when I was younger, and they stopped winning anything from the moment I started supporting them. As Tony Harrison wrote in his marvellous poem, V:

"... I'd survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week..."

There's that word again, "disappoint". I've used it in the title of this post; the BBC used it, Tony Harrison used it. It's the single most appropriate adjective to sum up English international football (and Leeds United). That's a real pity because the country is certainly behind the team. Everywhere in England at the moment there is England football team merchandise. A week ago, walking through the City of London, there were plenty of official England team shirts being worn, and they cost forty quid a throw. At one point I thought that I might actually buy shirts for all of us and fly the cross of St George in India. Then I thought, "What's the point? They'll only disappoint." And so it appears.

But it's a burden, this weight of expectation; and being British there's nothing I can do about it. I'm stuck with it, saddled with this frustration through no fault of my own, and keeping myself awake at night fretting about eleven donkeys who really should have given the USA a damn good hiding but instead, disappointed.

Pictured above, left to right, Frank Lampard, Robert Green, Wayne Rooney, Emile Heskey and James Milner.

Make mine a gin and porridge

2010-06-06T05:58:00.005+01:00

What is it about Brits and travel that turns them into alcohol-obsessives? I had my breakfast at Gatwick airport yesterday morning; a good, traditional full English breakfast with double bacon, double sausage, double egg and all the trimmings. This would have been about eight o'clock in the morning. On the table next to me, an English chap was tucking into his breakfast - and a pint of lager. Behind him, a retired couple were also munching on toast - and swigging alcohol; bottled beer for him, vodka for her. In fact the majority of the diners were drinking something alcoholic or the other - at eight in the morning.

I can't imagine that these people would normally settle down to hard liquor with their cornflakes so what possesses them to do so as soon as they hit the airport? Maybe it's because they can. Apart from Smithfield meat market in the city of London, I know of no other areas in Britain where the pubs are open at the crack of dawn. Smithfield pubs have traditionally had a special licence because the argument went that the meat porters liked nothing better than a nice pint of beer after their shifts had ended. And for these guys, working through the night, knock-off time was just as the birds were waking up.

I suspect though, that this need for alcohol is more about holiday spirit than it is about liquid spirit. It's the same mind-set that sees British families huddle together in souwesters on a stony English beach, as the hail lashes down and they all sip tea from flasks and tell each other what a jolly fine time they're having. It's the Dunkirk evacuation, the spirit of the Blitz, the Dam-busters, the 1966 World Cup, Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon in 1977. It's the By-God-we're-British-and-we're-going-on-holiday-and-we're-going-to-use-every-opportunity-we-can-to-drink-alcohol-(even though a nice cuppa would taste a good deal better) stiff-upper lip, fight them on the beaches type attitude.

And I suppose, when all's said and done, that's fair enough. I wasn't going on holiday, I was returning to Bangalore, my place of work and my place of abode. I had no right, no excuse to drink Guinness, and so I had a large cappuccino instead.

Beach photo from Pinktape.

The trouble with travel

2010-06-03T17:51:00.005+01:00

I'm in the UK again, briefly. I was on a flight to Dubai at 4.15am, and then another one out of Dubai at 8am. We actually flew over the Burj Khalifa and I can tell you, that from where we were sitting, it didn't look that tall at all. I arrived in London in brilliant and warm sunshine, just as my wife was telling me about the hail storm that had hit Bangalore. For once, it looks as though I took the right call and followed the sun.

But you really take pot luck when you travel. Of course, you can try to get an aisle seat, and on a row which offers extra leg-room. If you're lucky, you might even get upgraded to business or first class. None of this however, necessarily guarantees you peace of mind - or simply, "peace" on your flight. Waiting at Bengaluru International Airport this morning I found myself praying that I wouldn't be sat next to the girl with the irritating laugh or the fat white man whose bulk would certainly have spilled over into the seat next to his. Maybe he can't help being fat, but I do honestly think that people who impose their weight on others should either pay for two seats or go in the hold with the baggage.

Fortunately, the irritating girl jumped on the Air France flight, whilst Mr Blubber was dragged kicking and screaming, his two podgy arms flailing uselessly, as he was shoved into one of those metal containers with the suitcases and boxes of over-ripe mangoes. Only in my dreams.

Talking of luggage though, whilst we were waiting on the plane out of Dubai, it made me laugh to hear the captain announce that Emirates, the award-winning airline, was going to be a little late taking off because they had to remove an item of luggage belonging to a no-show passenger. As the captain was talking, I was looking out of the window watching the baggage handlers trying to locate the offending article. And they well and truly threw all the luggage around in that particular container. When they finally found the passenger's case it was literally thrown out, landing on the apron with (presumably) a resounding thud. Emirates might be award-winning in some respects, but it wouldn't get my vote for luggage-handling, nor for that matter, for the on-board entertainment which continually froze while I was watching it today.

I was lucky at Dubai as well. Waiting for that flight in the departure lounge I happened to sit next to a woman and her two unruly children, and again I found myself offering up a silent prayer not to be seated anywhere near to where they were sitting. As it turned out, I couldn't have been farther away if I'd tried. When I boarded later, I saw the two kids leaping all over the front row in business class; a real bummer for anybody who was upgraded to business today, only to then find themselves sitting next to the Amityville family. Of course, it would have been a whole lot worse for the poor passengers who'd actually paid for the privilege of a business-class ride in the hope that they could sit out their six and a half hours in comfort, well away from children and ineffectual mothers.

No, all in all I got off very lightly, but for some strange reason found myself at the very back of the plane on both occasions; so far at the back in fact that they overlooked my breakfast on the first plane.

In the greater scheme of things, such irritations are mere trivia, I suppose; although when you have fifteen hours of travel lined up ahead of you, anything that can be done to make that time as pain-free as possible has got to be for the good. And that includes annoying laughs, overweight passengers and raucous children. Maybe next time I should opt for the hold.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

Death, the great equalizer

2010-05-26T06:41:00.009+01:00

I sometimes think it would have been cheaper if we'd bought season tickets for the Manipal Hospital. Having had three children born there, and then all the subsequent trips for check-ups and jabs and runny-nose remedies, I have spent a small fortune on medical care. In fact, the money I've spent at the Manipal Hospital would probably be sufficient to fund a radical new course in India: "How to build a road". Or maybe not.

Anyway, I was at Manipal Hospital again yesterday and picked up the most up-to-date sheet on in-patient billing. There are five categories of care that in-patients can opt for: General, Semi-Special, Special, Ultra Special, and Ultra Deluxe. Interesting that, because if the category below "Special" is "Semi-Special", surely that category below "Semi-Special" should be "Not-at-all-Special" or maybe, "Also-rans".

When Shilpi had our children at the Manipal Hospital, I opted for either the Ultra Special or the Ultra Deluxe. I can't remember which category we went for now but I know we were on the 1oth floor. So, if you spend a day in the General maternity ward you pay Rs 3,000, but if you opt for one of the two deluxe options, you pay Rs 7,000. A consultation as a General patient will cost you Rs 600 but if you are an Ultra Deluxe patient then you'll have to stomp up Rs 2000.

One presumes that the actual consultation (eg: "You have about a month to live") would be the same regardless whether you were a General patient or Deluxe patient. I'm guessing that if you are in the General ward you probably have to share a room with someone who possesses not only smelly feet but lots of noisy and uncouth relatives, and that when the doctor passes his judgement on you he clears his throat, farts loudly and then spits into the waste-paper bin. In the Ultra-Deluxe situation you have a room to yourself and the doctor smiles. To my mind, it's Ultra - special or deluxe - all the way.

But it is interesting, going through the charge sheet, to see what you're actually paying for. When my first son was born, he spent nearly a month in intensive care. I'd opted for a deluxe accommodation for his mother and so when he was under high intensive care I was paying Rs 5,000 per day, whilst the person who had opted for a general ward was paying Rs 3,500 per day. It didn't matter that the actual NICU ward conditions were the same for all babies, regardless of which level of care their mothers had opted for. So again, Rs 200 per hour for oxygen if you are a General patient, but you pay Rs 500 as an Ultra. That always struck me as rather daft and also explains why I was paying an average of Rs 10,000 per day whilst Mark was in Manipal intensive care. Then again, at the time, I'd have paid a lakh a day just to have him well and with us. Thankfully, he is, and I'm wondering when I'll break it to him that he didn't have bikes and playthings when he was a child because I spent all his toy allowance on hospital fees.

And so everything, absolutely everything, on this Manipal Hospital billing sheet is split out across the five categories: bed charges, intensive care, consultations, services... Everything that is except mortuary (spelt 'mortury'). When you die, regardless of how Utra or Deluxe you've been - or aspired to be - in life, your body goes into General: Rs 500 for a stiff for up to 12 hours, Rs 1000 for 12 to 24 hours, and Rs 3000 for "outside body" whatever that means. Maybe it means collecting a body from somewhere else. So there's really no escape from mixing with the riff-raff. You might have led a serene and cossetted life but if your body ends up at the Manipal Hospital (and I presume that in this respect, Manipal is no different from any other Bangalore hospital) you'll just as likely be next to a daily wage labourer who has been a wife-beater, alcoholic, and errant father and who has just been messily squashed flat by half a ton of bricks. So much for snobbery.

Mortuary feet by Ingrid Newkirk.

And the winner is...

2010-05-14T05:19:00.004+01:00

Well my guess would be that they've never sharpened a scythe in their lives. Bizarre and tenuous genealogical plug via Ancestry.

Allegedly

2010-05-03T17:26:00.006+01:00

'Allegedly' must be one of the most over-used words. These days, it seems to me at least, that journalists can write whatever they like, about whoever they like, as long as they include the A-word in their copy. That gets them, and the newspaper off the hook. Take, for example, this hypothetical sentence:

"Lalit Modi has landed in the brown sticky stuff for taking back-handers." You'd never see that in a newspaper because, of course, it hasn't been proven yet that he is corrupt. That will be a matter for various authorities - and probably courts - to decide. It is, however, perfectly acceptable to state, "Lalit Modi is in the brown sticky stuff for allegedly taking back-handers."

I'm quite sure that all newspapers in India have an 'Allegedly lawyer'; a legally qualified individual who checks through copy and liberally sprinkles lots of allegedlies all over the newsprint. 'Allegedly' is good like that. It covers editors' backsides.

However, what happens when you italicize 'allegedly'? It seems to be the vogue in certain sections of the Indian press to do just that. Here's that sentence again. "Lalit Modi is in the brown sticky stuff for allegedly taking back-handers." Does it change the meaning? I think it does.

You can read that two ways. The first reading says to the reader, "We don't want to be sued and so we're being really careful to stress that Mr Modi is only alleged to have been a naughty crorepati." The other reading says, "Lalit Modi is in the brown sticky stuff for (wink, wink) taking back-handers."

That's the problem when you try to be too clever, or too careful. You end up confusing a perfectly sound and sensible word and sowing enough doubt for a court of lawyers to put it to the judge that by italicising 'allegedly' you are in effect saying that Mr Modi was most definitely a naughty boy; no two ways about it. Allegedly.

Photograph, courtesy of kcgadiyar, shows Mr Modi allegedly admiring Preity Zinta's bottom.

Is there anybody out there?

2010-04-27T04:01:00.005+01:00

The Bangalore Mirror ran a report the other day about the aftermath of the fire at Carlton Towers on Airport Road. Their focus was on the family of one of those who died but it was also reported that the fire had prompted a major review of fire safety in high-rise buildings.

I'd like to see one of those special investigative reports by The Bangalore Mirror and they should start with Xtreme Sports Bar and Cirrus and 100 Feet Road in Indiranagar. Xtreme is on the 4th floor, Cirrus on the 5th. One narrow staircase leads to both and on Wednesday evening, when I was coming out of the place, that stairwell was partially blocked by beer barrels and a large cut-out promoting IPL. The stairs are also uneven; so uneven that I managed to sprain my ankle on the way down.

Both of these bars are busy places, particularly at the weekend, and it would only take a fire on say the third floor, to completely trap everybody on the floors above. Both bars - spacious and labyrinthine inside - have one entry and exit which lead directly onto the stairwell. If Carlton Towers was a tragedy, then this place is a death-trap waiting to happen. Bangalore Mirror, go on, pay the place a visit and prove me wrong.

And whilst on the subject of Carlton Towers, two months on, the place is still exactly as it was after the fire had taken place. I was in England, working in London, at the height of the IRA's campaigns against British real estate. The Bishopsgate bomb in the City of London in 1993, devastated a huge swathe of the financial district and yet within days, the glaziers were in, removing dangerous broken glass from window panes and boarding them up. Two months on in Bangalore and the broken glass is still there. Would it really take so much effort to get a decent glazier in and make the place secure?

Re-published in The Bangalore Mirror on 28th April 2010.

Collecting razors in Mumbai

2010-04-24T03:17:00.004+01:00

I was briefly in sweltering Mumbai last week; this after a six week stay in Brrrr-itain. Realizing I'd forgotten to pack my razor, I called Housekeeping and asked them to send me up a shaving kit. Five minutes later, there was a knock at my door and I was presented with a small pack containing a razor and some shaving cream.

The chap had barely gone when I realised that I'd also forgotten my toothbrush. So I phoned through to Housekeeping again. Another five minutes later and a second member of staff arrived and presented me with... another razor. "Thanks," I said, "but you already sent me a razor. It's a toothbrush and toothpaste that I need." The chap looked at me, "Five minutes, I'm coming."

Five minutes turned into ten, ten into twenty, and when it got to half an hour, I phoned Housekeeping for a third time. "Hello again, I phoned for a shaving kit and then a toothbrush. I have the shaving kit but I am still waiting for the toothbrush, could you send it along please?"

And whoever took my call only heard the words, "Hello... shaving kit... toothbrush... shaving kit... toothbrush" because five minutes later there was another knock at the door and I was handed my third razor of the morning and a toothbrush and toothpaste. I'm sure if I'd stayed at that hotel for a week I'd be thinking now about establishing myself as a razor retailer.

Photo courtesy of TakePart.

Feed the birds - six pounds a bag

2010-03-27T08:07:00.013Z

It doesn't have the same ring to it as the Mary Poppins' song, but it's closer to reality.

Sainsbury's sells a range of products for wild birds including "Robin and Songbird" food (£3.18 for a 1kg bag "contains berries and small insects") and RSPB Table Mix (£6.48 for a 4kg bag). Both bags carry advisory notes that the product is not for human consumption - just in case the "contains berries and small insects" statement wasn't enough of a warning - but strangely also state that the product "may contain nuts". Presumably that helpful advice is for the benefit of those birds which have mastered the power of reading.

How do I know all of this? Because my parents are singularly responsible for the most spoilt wild birds in Essex, that's why. They stop short of stocking live meal worms in the fridge (although some people do) but both of the above products were added to the weekly shopping bill yesterday, and my father was telling me that he also buys peanuts for the tits and niger seed - whatever niger seed is - for the finches. "Do you have fat balls?" I asked him. "Mind your own business" he replied.

My mother has been known to spread lard on the bread - sliced bread, I might add, specifically bought for the birds - and to remove the washing line so that seagulls can land. I wondered what the fluorescent jacket and paddles in the kitchen were for. Now I know. They're used to guide migratory birds in to the landing strip ("back garden" some people might call it) after their long and arduous flight from Africa.

The Brits are a nation of animal lovers and my parents are right up there with the best of them. In fact, they are the best of them. And although I'm taking the mickey, it's lovely to see the birds who, for their part, know exactly which side of their sliced-wholegrain-may-contain-nuts is buttered, and flutter down in their hundreds. In fact, they're so used to the routine that they wait in the trees for my father to put the food out. And before he's half way back up the path, the robin is there, tucking into whatever it is that robins eat.

I don't see too much wildlife in India. It's there but I suppose I don't make the time to look for it. Occasionally I've spotted some interesting-looking wren-like birds where we live, and the mynahs, kites and parrots are commonplace. Maybe when I'm my parents' age, and I have more leisure time, I'll take more of an interest and buy live kittens for our semi-domesticated eagles.

The animal-lover in me is still there, it just doesn't get much of a chance to shine in India. Shortly after I first arrived in the country I did rescue a street dog and pay for it's badly infected and painful leg to be amputated. It did Tripod - as I named him - little benefit. Shortly after his op, too slow to get away, he was rounded up by a municipal dog-catching unit and probably gassed. I have also been known to boycott a local shop purely because I saw the owner throw a rock at a stray dog. Wanton cruelty, and I'm sure he misses my 50 rupees a week.

Anyway, enough of this rambling, I've got to dash; there's a queue of sparrows at my parents' back door, and they're all holding little bowls.

Great Tit photo courtesy of Waveney Valley Blog.

Travels in my Mumbai nighties

2010-03-22T17:14:00.004Z

Courtesy of Mumbai Paused.

Well of course I need a bag!

2010-03-21T08:08:00.005Z

The carrier bag is an endangered species in Britain. In Marks and Spencer's, if you need a carrier bag to drop your groceries into, they'll charge you five pence for each one. M & S used to give out 460 million carrier bags a year. Since it introduced its 5p charge in 2008, it's reduced that figure by 83 per cent, and the profits from the remaining bag sales are donated to an environmental charity.

Tesco and Sainsbury, the UK's largest grocers, also discourage the use of carrier bags. Tesco's bags are all now degradable and are handed over by the check-out operators. Sainsbury and Tesco also give out clubcard points for every bag that their customers recycle. All this is a good thing - up until a point.

I was in Tesco last week. I'm on a one-man shopping mission to determine Britain's tastiest hot-cross buns and Britain's finest spotted dick puddings. As part of my mission, I have to visit the nations' supermarkets. Emptying my basket at the Tesco check-out last week, the sales assistant asked me if I'd like a carrier bag. "No thanks," I said, "if you can just balance those buns on my head I'll juggle the other items on my way back to the car." I ended up with a couple of degradable plastic bags which, by the time I'd reached home, were already well into the degrading process, a large hole having appeared in one.

Other shops are no better, and in fact in some, you are made to feel like a criminal. "Do you need a bag?" asked the sales assistant in Waterstone's bookshop last week. It was tipping down with rain outside. "No, that's OK" I should have said, "I'll open up the pages and use it as an umbrella."

Then there are those shops where you have to ask. Out and about during another rainy morning yesterday, I asked the sales assistant for a bag for another book I'd just bought. "We recycle out bags," she said, "is that alright?" She looked a little worried and I thought she was going to hand me a re-cycled bag with "SPERM DONOR REJECT" printed on the side, or "HIV CLINIC - YOU'RE POSITIVE!" or "ALDI". Instead, I was given a Debenhams' bag.

So there you have it. Britain's nation of shopkeepers will sell you the goods but you'll have to fight for the bags to put them in. I suppose that's a good thing and if I cast my mind back to the days when we used to troop into town to help mum with the shopping, we went prepared. They may well have had carriers back in those days but I know that we always took bags and a shopping trolley with us. Mum would take the items out of the trolley and I'd be at the other end packing them into bags. I still try to do that in Spar in Koramangala, much to the amusement often, of the check-out girl and the person whose job it is to pack.

India of course, is a past master at recycling. There doesn't appear to be any official policy as such - apart from in those states like Tamil Nadu where they're trying to enforce a ban on plastics - but the rag-pickers do a good unofficial job. And at the end of the day, the country's half-hearted awareness does, I suppose, provide a living of sorts for a vast army of scavengers.

I'd like to see the UK taking a leaf out of Tamil Nadu's books and offering those really great re-cycled newspaper bags: efficient, environmentally friendly, and hip. Perhaps the supermarkets can also train their staff to use a little bit of common sense. If I have more than half a dozen items, I'm going to need a bag and if the sales assistant can't work that out then perhaps they need to add a "common sense" button on their cash registers.

Plastic-munching reptile from lilith-ezine.

Re-published in Bangalore Mirror on 31st March 2010.

Gentle Giant

2010-03-17T18:34:00.006Z

Here's a nod to Roy Nixon's cartoon cliche week, and an observation of media cliches in Britain.

Gentle giant.
This term is commonly applied by journalists to overweight murder victims with learning difficulties. The term, "learning difficulties", itself a cliche, can mean that the person concerned either has a mental disability, or didn't bother going to school or is burdened with hereditary stupidity. Particularly unfortunate gentle giants may suffer from all three. This makes them particularly liable to attacks by anti-social elements in British society because they are perceived as easy targets. "Anti-social elements" is another cliche which I'll look at in another post.

Lennie Small in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a literary "gentle giant".

England Baaaaaa!

2010-03-15T06:29:00.005Z

TV viewers in Britain were treated to Lambing Live last week. The BBC has obviously cottoned on to the fact that whilst fly-on-the-wall exposes make for cheap TV, fly-on-a-stable-wall documentaries are even cheaper. And so we had presenter Kate Humble breathlessly telling us, in little thirty-second trailers, that there had been joy and tragedy on the farm that day, while the farmer sat beaming next to her, counting his BBC cheques as well as his lambs.

I didn't watch Lambing Live and so my questions about how you can keep viewers interested by showing them five hours' worth of vets' arms disappearing up the back-end of a ewe must remain unanswered. As my dad commented, returning in a few months time to watch Mint Sauce - one lamb's journey from farm to table, might make better viewing.

Still, for the most part, British TV is a refreshing change from Indian TV. In Bangalore, without any Indian language under my belt (because I'm lazy and British, a 'deadly combination' to coin an Indian phrase), the majority of channels are out of the running. Those that are left tend to narrow down to sensationalist (AXN) factual-but-dull (Travel and Living, Nat Geo, Discovery, Animal Planet, The History Channel), factual-and-repetitive (ditto), News (Indian-grating, BBC-ok, CBS-so-so). That pretty much leaves us with BBC Entertainment (which can be excellent) and CBeebies (also excellent if you are teething, haven't yet mastered the power of speech and shit your pants straight after breakfast). My one-year-old loves it. There are the film channels too but they're not for the faint of heart. Ten minutes of film followed by ten minutes of adverts turn a Wallace and Gromit film into a six-hour epic. When Avatar hits the small Indian screen it will take three days to watch.

But you know, horses for courses, and Indian TV will get better, whilst British TV can at times gives the impression of dumbing down, even though the BBC in particular still broadcasts some cracking media. I watched a programme about Victoria and Albert last night (the Royal couple, not the Royal museum in Kensington) and it was lovely - fantastic artwork, a good story and Fiona Bruce presenting. Following that, David Dimbleby took us on a tour of British imperialism; again, fascinating stuff, particularly so for me as there was quite a bit on India last night.

Two great programmes for a Sunday evening, and it would have been even better had the BBC not commissioned its Lark Rise to Candelford drama which was all about actors trying to outdo themselves with improbable 'local' accents and which should have been prefaced with the BBC warning, "The following programme contains scenes of an extremely tedious nature, viewer discretion is advised."

Kate Humble and sunday roast courtesy of The Daily Telegraph.

Indian shoppers beware

2010-03-06T08:05:00.005Z

A comment by Journomuse on yesterday's India-aaagh post has prompted this entry. I was drawing comparisons between the cost of living in England and the cost of living in India, and Journomuse commented that thanks to the likes of Big Bazaar and Food World, Indian supermarkets now offer as many options as their western counterparts.

They're certainly getting there and I have written about this before - see The Big Boys Get it Wrong as an example. Currently there isn't the choice that you'd find in a Tesco or a Sainsbury's but it's certainly better than it used to be, even though stock control often leaves a lot to be desired. Go to the cheese counter one week and you'll find it stuffed full of Dolcelatta. Return the following week and it will have completely disappeared.

This post however, is not about dairy produce stock control but rather to sound a warning for Indian shoppers who may be dazzled by the lure of supermarkets and their buy-two-get-one-free offers. It's a slippery slope.

Forty years ago, in my home town of Chelmsford, the High Street boasted a small grocer's shop (Sainsbury), a fishmonger's shop (Macfisheries), bakers shops in Tindal Street, and several butchers' shops. A short walk away in Broomfield Road there was a poulterer's shop which had pheasants hanging outside. Today, the poulterer's shop is a charity shop and the other shops have either been bulldozed or now house mobile phones or electrical items. There's not one food shop as far as I can recall, although funnily enough when the market traders come to town at weekends they set up stalls on the pedestrianised High Street selling fresh fruit and vegetables, breads and fine meats.

Back in India, as I was telling my parents the other day, we can quite easily call up our local Malayali shop half a dozen times a day. "A dozen eggs and a loaf of bread please." Two hours later, "Water please baiaa". Later again, "Huggies medium Baisahib, and make it fast. Jalte hai." That's a routine that is practised not just by us but probably by the majority of the people in the apartment complex where we live. Delivery is free of charge of course and the change is meticulously counted out to the last rupee. Somehow they still seem to make a profit, despite employing an army of delivery boys.

That, in my book, is as good as convenience shopping gets. I also make a point of stopping at the roadside to buy my fruit and veg rather than picking it up off a shelf in Spar, even though the fruit at Spar is generally cheaper.

I don't know, the UK shopping model may never be replicated in India. After all, India has far more mouths to feed than the UK does and there will always, presumably, be the need for that corner shop which sells absolutely everything. Indian supermarket shopping is still in its infancy however, but I can see a day when bigger hypermarkets in the large cities set up all-singing, all-dancing shops in plush retail parks. For the time being though, whilst lamenting the loss of our own niche traders I'm supporting India's nation of shopkeepers.

Rajasthani fruit stall from tropical island.

Re-published in The Bangalore Mirror on 19th March 2010.

England-Brrr!

2010-03-02T08:05:00.005Z

On Sunday I was in a swimming pool in India my kids. Yesterday, my teeth were chattering in Heathrow. It's bloomin' freezing in Britain!

Indian readers may be pleased to hear that for the next couple of months it's going to be a little more England-aaagh! than India-aaagh! I am back in my home country and with the weather the way it is, there will definitely be no travelling in nightwear of any description. For the first time in over a year (and then back in the UK) I am wearing a shirt and a heavy thick woollen jumper. I think it was three degrees yesterday and I see from The Times today that the temperature will struggle to a maximum of 10 degrees and a minimum of twelve.

So that's the big difference of course between Bharat and Blighty and I was dismayed, travelling back on the M25 yesterday, to see the road liberally sprinkled with potholes - almost as if the pothole fairy (who is surely a thick-set Irish navvy) had been along with her sack of goodies throwing out potholes wherever she went. Potholes? In England? On the country's busiest motorway? I think a letter to The Telegraph from "disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" is probably in order.

"Ah yes" I said, lamely to my father as he dodged another hole, "but the ones we have in India are much deeper than this."

So that's the first eye-opener for me: an affluent western country that would appear, on the face of it, to be suffering just as much from bad roads, as some of the poorer eastern ones. England is just emerging from its worst winter for thirty years, and in Scotland it's closer to fifty years. Snow and ice have exacted a heavy toll on the country's infrastructure and it's going to take a little while to fix. The roadworks are already up on the M25 and A12 and there are going to be more, of that you can be sure. Meanwhile, I'm hoping that it's going to warm up a little. The weather's bright enough, but at ten degrees that's still a good twenty or so lower than it was when I left Bangalore early yesterday morning. Global warming? There's no evidence of that from where I sit.

Picture from Central Chronicle, taken in Hampshire in January this year.

The car in the ditch in front is a Toyota

2010-02-25T11:40:00.004Z

Who'd have thought it eh? $30 billion knocked off its market value in the past month and its president in tears before a US congressional committee; Toyota - once the watchword for quality and reliability - now faces a huge uphill battle to win back public confidence and - presumably -market share.

This story has no real India link, but I was never a great fan of that "The car in front is a Toyota" line and I also wanted to contrive a way of using this photo which, coincidentally, shows a Toyota Corolla in the recycling bin.

Image courtesy of Atlanta Bargain Hunters.

Join the queue for Britain

2010-02-22T11:29:00.005Z

I see that Indians wishing to settle in Britain will be educated in the art of queueing. About bloomin' time too. I appreciate that when you take the decision to live in a foreign country, that you also accept that country's rules, regulations, appalling bad habits and sub-standard drainage system; when in Rome etc, and I've always maintained that in India, the only place you'll find people queuing is at public toilets (if of course those in the queue can wait long enough before dashing off to the nearest tree or wall).

At least that used to be the case. At my daughter's school the other week the mums and dads first formed an orderly queue outside the gates and then, once inside, those who wanted snacks, queued in orderly lines for their tickets (and then pushed and shoved to present the tickets to the vendors dispensing chat and samosas). Once the event was over there was a fairly orderly and polite procession of cars away from the school.

So it's not as if civilised behaviour is absent in India. Of course it isn't, and there are undoubtedly more highly educated Indians than there are highly-educated Britons (and probably French and Germans put together as well for that matter). I think the predilection for a free-for-all rather than a queue, is born out of the fact that there are just too many people in the country and that if you started all this queuing nonsense in India you'd never get anywhere. Imagine queuing at a road junction for instance, waiting patiently to get into the traffic flow. You could wait all day until a strolling cow provided you with an opportunity to edge yourself in, because believe me, nobody else would give you an inch. Barging in is part of life in India and whilst westerners like me find it irritating in the extreme, it's just the way of the world over here. For that matter, the Germans haven't got a clue about queuing either and they've got no excuse at all.

All in all though, I think that a little bit of sensitisation to what works in Britain and what irks in Britain is going to be a good thing for Indians planning to settle in Albion, if only to prevent some of them from getting punched on the nose. And while the authorities are at it, they might also slip in that it's polite to hold doors open, to let women and children go first and to not spit. Well at least that's how it was when I was living in the UK, although admittedly, things might have changed since.

Cartoon: In the queue.

Re-published in The Bangalore Mirror on 28th May 2010.

Contains pork and beef

2010-02-14T07:55:00.007Z

An interesting little anecdote regarding a Travel and Living programme on the Discovery channel. This was a food programme and before it started there was one of those helpful advisory messages much beloved by the BBC. This one ran along the lines of, "Warning, the following programme contains beef and pork. Viewer discretion is advised." Lovely.

Lamb from PetTeet Park.

There's no escaping Annual Day

2010-02-07T05:40:00.006Z

It's just dawned on me why Indian films drag on for so long. There's a conditioning process at work here which dictates that an event or celebration has to last for at least three hours. That conditioning starts when a child attends school and, more to the point, when the school celebrates its Annual Day.

Niharika's school had its Annual Day last Friday. We were in the queue outside the school by 5.45 and a gruelling five hours later, we just made it in time for last orders at our local Pizza Hut.
Let's be honest here. All of us are only interested in seeing our own children perform. This being the case, if I'd had my way, I'd have said to my daughter, "Listen darling, don't be offended, but would you mind just doing your little song and dance routine for mummy and me at home? That way, I'll still be able to go to the pub with my mates and more to the point, I won't have to get covered in dust on a chilly school sports' ground for over three hours." But naturally, being the responsible parent that my wife is, she was having none of that.

And so it was that we trooped along for the event and then waded through twenty-odd dance routines and a narrative which saw a never-ending stream of fairy-tale characters improbably adrift in a wood. To the school's credit, the lighting and the staging were fantastic, and to the children's credit - those who had speaking parts - their lines were spoken absolutely word-perfectly. The children had been rehearsing this event for some while, and Niharika had had to turn up at the school for the past two Saturdays and on Republic Day. Remember too, that these are five and six year olds that we're talking about; little children up on a big stage, delivering lines to a packed audience of stupified and semi-frozen adults.

The school has got it's Annual Day organisation down to a fine art. We were told in advance that transportation to the school would be arranged for the children but there'd be no return drop. In other words, unless you want your son or daughter to be left at school over the weekend, you'd better come to Annual Day, enjoy the show and then pick them up at the end. We were also warned that we'd have to wait until the end of the show to collect the children. Never mind that your daughter might be appearing in an opening scene, unless your child was in the nursery school, you'd still have to wade through the whole nine yards.

I think we had to wait a couple of hours until Niharika's starring moment came along, and then I drifted back off into my coma until the National Anthem presented me with the opportunity to stand up and stamp some life back into my frost-bitten toes. Of course, Niharika was the best performer of the evening and put all the other kids to shame. She danced the most beautifully of all the children and she threw her partner all over the place. Boy, she really controlled that little male partner of hers and there was no question of who was in control in that relationship. That all bodes well for the future. I want to see her still throwing the boys around when she's in her teens and beyond.

Hypothermia notwithstanding, Annual Day was OK, albeit over-long. The dance routines could have been shorter; the external heaters, hired. One great added bonus however, was the rendition of L'il Red Riding Hood by a very sultry-sounding deep south chanteuse. I've been unable to find that cover on YouTube but here's the 1966 version by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. Listen to the lyrics and now imagine four-year-olds dancing to it. Inappropriate? You decide.

Singles' Awareness Day

2010-02-01T20:38:00.006Z

I'll be honest. On occasions I've been known to moan about life in India. However, for sheer politically correct stupidity, you need look no further than America (with Britain not too far behind).

Listening to some syndicated US radio show today, I learn that Valentines' Day is now also known as Singles' Awareness Day. I only hope that Cupid wasn't listening because if he was, he would have turned his bow and arrow on himself. Singles' Awareness Day, whatever next? How about Saddos' Awareness Day perhaps, or Not-Getting-Any-And-Pretty-Pissed-Off-About-It-Actually-Thank-You-For-Reminding-Me Day, or even Not-Tied-And-Don't-Give-A-F*** Day?

I suppose that Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day will also now be referred to as Fathers' Awareness Day and Mothers' Awareness Day, respectively; or perhaps - a little more radically - The-World-Doesn't-Just-Revolve-Around-Mum/Dad Day. Really, there's no end to the amount of fun you can have dreaming up scatterbrain awareness days so as not to offend those who are single or mothers or fathers, on days that celebrate lovers and fathers and mothers.

The problem is, that the Americans in particular really believe that by dreaming up ridiculous awareness days they're showing that they're sensitive and all-inclusive and erm, 'aware', whilst everybody outside America (with the exception of a large dumbed-down percentage of Britain), thinks that they're just plain daft.

Cupid image from ImageShack.

Room for confusion

2010-01-29T08:35:00.006Z

Kal is a strange word isn't it? Kal Milenge (and thank you Poornima, for the correct spelling) was an early phrase that I learnt in Hyderabad some years ago - "see you tomorrow". But then kal also means yesterday so I understand. I suppose though, that you can get away with having the same word to mean both yesterday and tomorrow because as soon as it's dropped into a sentence there's never going to be any confusion. After all, you're hardly like to mean, "see you yesterday" are you? Or "I went to the supermarket tomorrow". Why then not economise and make one word do for two?

I think that the word set has the most meanings in the English language. I can't remember where I read that but just trawling through the sawdust in my head as I'm writing this I can think of a number of different definitions for that three letter word.

But let me give my readers a simple sum. What's four into sixteen? OK, you can put away the calculator now. The answer, if you're British, is four. Four goes into sixteen, four times. Four fours are sixteen. However, I venture to suggest that my Indian readers will say that the answer is sixty-four; in other words, four multiplied by sixteen. Again, I suppose the interpretation is only really going to matter if your a Brit sitting an Indian maths exam - or vice versa.

However, there are those subtle difference between India and Britain where you really can come to a great deal of harm unless you learn pretty quickly what the signs or words being thrown your way, mean . Take flashing headlights for instance. In Britain, headlights flashed at you mean, "OK buddy, you can go; I'll let you into the gap of traffic, or over the narrow bridge." Headlights turned on and left on for more than a few seconds however, mean, *@%$@* thanks for cutting me up, you so-and-so" or "Move over!" (generally used if you're on a motorway). In India, flashing lights mean only one thing: "get out of the way, I'm coming through."

And then there's the word "medicine". Perhaps someone can confirm, but on more than one occasion I've heard the word medicine used, when what the person really means is "poison". So cockroach medicine is actually not medicine at all, it's poison to kill the little blighters. And if you think that differentiation between those two words doesn't matter, go and speak to the cockroaches in my flat who thought they were getting a pick-me-up and are now all feeling distinctly under the weather.

Marathalli street art - continued

2010-01-21T05:06:00.003Z

A little while ago, over on India-aaagh, I posted about the mural on the Marathalli bridge. Work on the project continues and apart from the Picasso elephant - which warrants a separate explanation and post - it looks to be coming on quite well.

However, towards the middle of the bridge, and on the left hand side if you're travelling towards Whitefield, there's the following message painted in large black capital letters:

KEEP THE CITY CLEAN

DO NOT DEFECATE THE WALLS

Sound advice, but I'm sure they meant to say DEFACE rather than DEFECATE which has an entirely different meaning. And if they had meant to write DEFECATE, that word should have been followed by ON or UP or NEXT TO or ALONGSIDE or AROUND.

A little while ago, driving along Jeevan Beemanagar Main Road I watched a sign-writer carefully mis-spelling a very basic word. He'd already written a good deal of the message correctly but was meticulously erring with this last word. I can't remember what it was now but it was very basic if - and this is the point - you can read the language you've been tasked with writing. He obviously couldn't, which was why he wrote CAHIR instead of CHAIR and why our Marathalli artist wrote DEFECATE instead of DEFACE. Then again, to turn DEFACE into DEFECATE takes some doing - two extra letters and all switched around - and so I wonder actually whether what he's written was actually correct as far as he was concerned. Funny old thing, language.

Old Therapist gag from Cartoonstock. Better gags over at Roy Nixon's cartoon blog.

Goat to work

2010-01-15T08:58:00.003Z

I still live in hopes of seeing this scene in India. I've seen goats in autos, a goat being held on a bike, and bunches of chickens on bikes, but never a goat piggy-backing on the driver. My thanks to Tomy for sending me the photo which, I suspect, is doing the rounds as a viral e-mail.

Casualty figures

2010-01-14T10:26:00.004Z

The first thing I do, on turning on my PC each morning, is commemorate the dead. I have two remembrance blogs: WW1 Remembrance and WW2 Remembrance. Each day, I select a name at random and then, using on-line archive resources just say a few lines about that person.

I'm a little out of the loop regarding news in Britain. I go to the BBC's news website every day and so I know what's happening over there, but it's not the same as actually being in the country and hearing stories discussed and debated. One topic which is a hot potato however, is Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more to the point, the toll of young men who are being killed or maimed there.

I see that the number of British military personnel killed in Afghanistan since operations began in 2001 now stands at 247. That's the figure as of today. These are the casualties figures for this same day - 14th January - during the First World War. These totals exclude naval and air force personnel.

1915: 83
1916: 104
1917: 136
1918: 138

And these are the figures for British Army (only) personnel on this day during the Second World War years:

1940: 9
1941: 14
1942: 28
1943: 61
1944: 43
1945: 40

The First World War in particular, still maintains a tight grip on the consciousness of most Britons and the scale of the conflict is staggering. Those figures above are pretty low in general terms and when a particular offensive was raging, those hundreds turn into thousands, on a daily basis. Look at July 1916: 18,239 dead on the 1st of July; 1,439 on the 2nd; 2,338 on the third.

Such daily casualty figures are truly staggering, and little wonder why most Britons who can count back three or four generations of Britons, will have relatives who served or were killed in one or other of the World Wars - particularly the First World War.

Yesterday, when I was commemorating Harry Jarvis Bobbins who died of wounds on the 13th January 1915, I realised with a shock that he left not only a widow but also three young children the same age as my own. Never to see my children again would be the most awful thing I could imagine and yet of course, it would be far worse for them and something that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

And the reason for this maudlin post today is just really to say that I miss the serenity and the respectfulness of war memorials. Bar a handful of what they termed "thankful villages", that is, those settlements which did not lose a single man during WW1, every city, town, village and hamlet in Britain has a war memorial; several in all probability. And every November, for two minutes on the 11th, and two minutes on Remembrance Sunday, people stop what they are doing and bow their heads. I miss that in India and I also note that the war memorial (and the garden it was in) that was on Cubbon Road, has now disappeared. I do hope it makes a return at some point and hasn't been melted down for scrap.

Fowl deeds

2010-01-08T08:23:00.006Z

I'll say one thing for Bangaloreans: they care for their chickens. Believe it or not, there's even a retirement sanctuary somewhere in the city for those birds which have either stopped laying, or are just too old and tough and decrepit to be of much use to anybody.

The most wizened, ancient and frankly, inedible birds, all find their way to the Bangalore Home for Distressed Fowls and here they peck out the remaining days of their lives in a serene and sedate environment.

And when it's finally time for them to go to that great coop in the sky, the caterers at our company make a bulk purchase and shove them into our biriyanis.

Chicken photo from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Archimedes, he say...

2010-01-06T04:40:00.004Z

It’s a shame that otherwise normal colleagues occasionally come down with a bad case of corporate bollocks. Witness this e-mail sent from an otherwise sensible IT manager on the successful completion of an office move from one side of Bangalore to the other.

Under the sub-heading, “Limelights of the move” (he meant “highlights” of course) and having stated that “six servers, two Routers , four PIX , 22 Desktops and four printers” were moved with “calculated implementation” in a “flawless execution” he quoted Epicurus:

“The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

Poor old Epicurus: a perfectly decent ancient Greek philosopher reduced to a vehicle for corporate bollocks.

I don’t know whether such over-blown bullshit is common currency in the UK but it’s certainly very evident in the call centres of India. Not so long ago, the finance manager of a well-known Mumbai-based BPO sent round an e-mail congratulating all and sundry on the successful migration of a subsidiary company to PeopleSoft software. No matter that logging into PeopleSoft to apply for leave – for example – now takes ten times longer than the previous system of simply sending an e-mail request, and no matter that in their rush to get everybody onto the wonderful PeopleSoft system, salaries were drastically aligned to the detriment of the staff and the benefit of the Indian Exchequer. To then congratulate all and sundry on a wonderful job was like pouring a large dose of Corporate Bollocks salt into a festering wound.

And yet the Indian call centre generation seems to thrive on CB. I’ve visited many call centres in most of the large Indian cities and they all follow the same depressing model of gung-ho “can-do” even though, to coin an Indian phrase, the eager-beavers on the phone lines and in the data centres are being “royal screwed” by the company they’re working for.

For three hundred pounds a month or less - often a good deal less - they’ll work their eight or nine hour shifts through the night while they bend over backwards to help western customers. They’ll also be expected to stay late on occasions for team briefings or training, and the periodic team-building away-days are taken in their free time, not the company’s. And at the end of their shift they’ll line up for their cab back home and maybe take a couple of hours to reach their destination, struggling against crowded roads and poor infrastructure.

Little wonder then, that Indian call centres serve up large doses of corporate bollocks to their meek employees. Giving them an id pass makes them feel a little special; tie that onto a colour coded lanyard depicting length of service and suddenly you’ve got a hierarchy of longevity where the blue lanyards (one year’s service or more), envy the brown lanyards (three years’ service plus) who look up the orange lanyards (five years and counting). Those who make it to black (seven years) or, heaven forbid, yellow (ten years plus) will have digested enough CB to sink a small Caribbean island.

And then there is the “employee of the month”, the “most improved employee”; the trophy for “idea of the month”, “best team performance”, “outstanding performer of the month.” The sadness is that people are taken in by all this CB and to such an extent that it’s quite common to see these awards – when the CB has obviously become too great - listed on CVs. I gave up crowing about my “best soap sculpture for an under nine year old” when I reached nine. In India - and no doubt other countries as well - such honours are recalled with pride.

If I had a say in corporate awards I’d have one for the most irritating tic (throat-clearing would win), one for the most appalling dress sense and one for the best "casting-couch approach to promotion" by a new employee. As Archimedes might have said - if only I hadn't got there first:

“Great glory falls on he who obeys, greater glory on she who puts out for her boss.”

Originally published on India-aaagh.

Vishnuvardhan's wake

2009-12-31T10:13:00.004Z

Yesterday, I wrote that the public outpouring of grief over the death of Vishnuvardhan, had some way to go before it matched the grief exhibited when Rajkumar died. Sorry about that, I was wrong.

I see in this morning's paper that 60 vehicles were set ablaze and shops and offices stoned. No policemen were killed but two people did commit suicide by jumping in a well. I'm not sure whether the two people knew each other and jumped together at the same time (perhaps even holding hands), or decided quite independently of each other that life without Vishnuvardhan was going to be too much to bear and that therefore they had better jump into a well.

In our locality, a poster of Vishnuvardhan has gone up and was garlanded with flowers this morning. Shops and vehicles suddenly have photostats of the actor pasted onto their windows; not so much as a means of expressing the owners' grief, but rather as a way of saying, "Oi, don't throw stones at me, I'm a Vishnuvardhan fan."

What it all boils down to is that the Kannada film industry has lost two of its greats in the last three years - Rajkumar and Vishnuvardhan - leaving just Ambareesh to fly the flag. No doubt there'll be more of the same when his time comes.

Tiger's not out of the woods

2009-12-14T07:18:00.005Z

If I was asked to name the world's most boring sportsman, Tiger Woods would get my vote. I should say straight away that I'm not really a golf fan, or for that matter, a sports' fan in general. Blame that on years of following - and being disappointed by - Leeds United. But Tiger Woods has surely got to be the dullest individual on the golfing circuit, and in my book, duller even than British F1 driver Nigel Mansell (ret'd) who, in a poll to see whether watching paint drying was actually more interesting than listening to him drone on about hairpins and chicanes, lost out to a tin of Dulux peach emulsion.

And whilst I'm not at all surprised that women want to sleep with him - "Tell me Miss X what first attracted you to the multi-millionaire golfer, Tiger Woods?" - I'm somewhat surprised that he found time to shag so many of them. Managing to stay top of his game and still fit in an extra hole or two after golf was done for the day, is pretty impressive in my book, even if his morals leave something to be desired.

Thank goodness though, that Accenture has decided to drop the most boring golfer from possibly the most boring advertising campaign ever, and at the same time, good riddance to Accenture and all the other holier-than-thou advertisers who have pulled the plug on Tiger because of his wayward personal life. There must be panic in the Accenture Board Room right now about their, "We know what it takes to be a Tiger" strapline. If they still want to stick with the Big Cat theme, maybe they should think along the lines of leopards changing their spots.

Image from Accenture.

Dalrymple's discourse

2009-12-11T03:36:00.003Z

I see that author William Dalrymple was in Bangalore this Wednesday. I've got a couple of his books - The White Mughals and The Last Mughal - and I thoroughly enjoyed reading both. He's been in the city promoting his latest book and in the brief extract published in yesterday's Times of India, he made a good deal of sense.

He wrote, "This is home. I wonder why, when the humidity reaches saturation point; when in the monsoons I see slush all around. But last year, writing Nine Lives and travelling across rural India reminded me of how much I love this country and why I made it my home."

I couldn't agree more. I've always thought that rural India is good for the soul and I still think that some of the best times I've had in the country were when I was rattling across Orissa in a jeep. The scenery in that state was just stunning and we really went to some very remote tribal areas in Koraput district and elsewhere. The problem with working in any city, I guess, is that if you stay there too long, you get beaten down by the dirt and the dust and the daily grind. Escape the confines however and there is another world altogether.

The games children play

2009-12-08T04:10:00.003Z

I've just posted on India-aaagh about ponds and small children. Am I being a little harsh? After all, the residents' committee members who voted the idea of a stagnant death-trap, only had our own best interests at heart. In between fishing out the bodies of toddlers, children of nursery school age- the few survivors that is - might like to go and watch the mosquitoes mating. Yes, the pond might be a good idea after all.

Here are some other suggestions for the Sriram Stepford Committee.

1. Find the broken glass
Broken bottles will be buried in the sand-pit area. Children will be encouraged to dig for these with their bare hands, or to probe with their feet. This will help improve the child's dexterity. The first child who succeeds in finding all the pieces of a broken bottle and then manages to put them back together again will be treated to a strawberry whirl ice cream.

2. Mind the mine
A small portion of the grassed area will be converted into a minefield. This will serve the dual purpose of a) encouraging children to read the signs that say Keep Off The Grass and b) teaching children to tread carefully. Only anti-personnel, cluster mines will be used so that, at worst, a child may lose a leg... or two. Successful competitors will be treated to a chocolate fizz ice lolly.

3. Look out, there's a bike about
All of the Stepford paths are currently traffic-free. The introduction of two-wheelers and three wheelers into the complex will serve to educate children about the perils of life outside a gated community. As in the real world, bikers and autos will need no encouragement to cut corners, drive on footpaths and ride across grassy areas. Those children who succeed in directing vehicles across the mined area will be treated to peach-lemon mousse.

4. D O G spells ouch!
The admission of stray dogs into the community will enable little ones to a) tell one dog apart from another b) understand the meaning of 'dog-bite' c) become acquainted with Dr Srinivasan and his course of five anti-rabies jabs.

There, I reckon it took me about fifteen minutes to come up with those four ideas; I should think that the Stepford Committee could do a lot better than that. Anyone else have any ideas?

Angry dog pic from Mark Tanaka's blog.

Civic inconvenience

2009-12-05T06:01:00.005Z

Delayed bill. Monthly electricity bills are being delivered to the residents in our area on 19 or 20 of every month, when the last date for bill payment is 22nd of the month. This gives the customer two days to clear the bill. The date of reading on the bill is shown as 3rd of the month. This delay in despatching the bill is causing inconvenience to customers. Will the authorities ensure that bill is delivered by the 8th or 10th of every month so that there is ample time to pay?

Philip, Marathalli

Dead plants. I recently went out of station for one week, locking the gate behind me. On my return, all the potted plants on my verandha were dead. Will concerned authorities please ensure that it rains more often when I travel?

Percy Throwersekeran, Jayanagar

Dirty Dogs. The stray three-legged dog that I have adopted and feed, has recently taken to picking through the mounds of rubbish that lie a few yards around the corner. Will the authorities kindly educate man’s best friend that such habits are unsavoury and that 1st Choice Dog Chews are far tastier than refuse? Such dirty practices by crippled canines give our city a bad name.

Sunil, Bangalore; 1st Choice Dog Chews (India) Pvt Ltd

Off colour. Yesterday I inadvertently dyed two blue towels that I had left soaking with a multi-coloured one. These towels were expensive. Will the authorities please ensure that my local shops stock “colour run” removal products to compensate for my carelessness?

Sree Lakshmi, Ashoknagar

On the throne. Three nights ago I ate a double egg chicken roll at the Infant Jesus Chikin Tandoor stall and I have only just emerged from the crapper. I am greatly debilitated and inconvenienced, not to mention a little sore. Will the authorities please ensure that vendors wash their hands with Dettol after urinating at the roadside?

Shittu, Hennur

Wider necks. My children are very fond of the St Dalfour jam range. However, the jars are too narrow to accommodate a dessert spoon and using tea spoons invariably leads to sticky fingers. Will the authorities please brokerage a deal between St Dalfour and state spoon manufacturers so that our children can eat cleanly?

Smita, Domlur

(Only one of the above is bona fide).

Carry on regardless

2009-12-03T08:31:00.003Z

Carry on up the Leela was my last blog entry for India - travels in my nightie. I abandoned the blog shortly afterwards and then deleted all the posts. A few months later I started India-aaagh and then decided that I'd re-publish all the old India - travels... posts. Thus, you see how I waste my time.

And so now I'm stuck with two India blogs which deal with exactly the same topics - my perspective, as a foreigner, on life in India. It was never my intention to continue posting entries on this blog once I'd re-posted all the old pieces but thanks largely to the Jack and Jill post, I have gathered a number of followers for this blog, and it now seems churlish and impolite to just leave you all adrift. So I will continue to update here and over at India-aaagh. In fact I'm just going there myself. Do pop along if you have a minute.

Sid James courtesy of allposters.com.

Carry on up the Leela

2009-11-30T03:57:00.003Z

Potential derrorists reconnoitering Bangalore's hotels must be quaking in their shoes at the new beefed-up security at the Leela Palace hotel. Now, instead of a couple of security guards in surprisingly crisp-looking black and white uniforms, there are about ten of them. Sorry, I mean "den of them" (Once you're in Barkha Dutt reporting mode, it's incredibly difficult to break the habit).

In addition, there is at least one guard with an antique-looking rifle. One of the newspapers here recently pointed out that many of the Bangalore police force's rifles date back to the sixties (that's nineteen sixties, not eighteen sixties) and this one looked to be of a similar vintage. The guard obviously regarded it as an antique piece because he had it casually resting on one shoulder as he lolled at the gate.

Access to the Leela Palace Hotel is no longer directly from Airport Road. You have to take a left at the Manipal Hospital crossroads and then taken another immediate left, driving along what is effectively a service road in front of the hotel. That's where you then have to wait while the den security guards do their stuff.

Shilpi and I had to get out of the car while the guards checked inside the front and back. I also had to open the bonnet and the back of the car. We were both then searched in a separate area; those airport-type buzzy devices waved over us. Strangely, the children were left in the car. Maybe the guards thought that a white foreigner with a family was an unlikely derrorist suspect but since when did any extremist conform to accepted norms?

We were waved on and I got the car valet parked. The valet asked me if I had anything valuable in the car and I was tempted to say, "Yes, there's a couple of pounds of semtex taped under the baby seat. Please be careful not to man-handle it, it cost me six thousand rupees at Mothercare."
The thing is - and hence the title of the post - that the whole response to the derrorist threat, is straight out of a Carry On... film: low-budget farce. The security guards bearing company names on their uniforms such as Alert Commandos are just boys. There's not even a single threatening moustache between them. Me, if I were a derrorist attempting to attack the Leela, I think I'd just bypass the whole queuing up routine and go straight through the front doors. I'd probably ignore the padlock and chains on what were once access points into the main Galleria. I'd probably also ignore the typed sign on those doors and the arrow pointing helpfully to the left which indicates, "Entrance this way." Instead, pausing momentarily to shoot the semi-comatose guard lounging with his Lee Enfield, I'd direct a blast of well-aimed fire from my semi-automatic weapon at the glass doors and then, with a Sid James cackle, or a Kenneth Williams wince, step through the shards and into the hotel.

Originally published on Blogger on 28th December 2008. Security at the Leela has become more relaxed in the eleven months since I wrote this. It is still, however, tighter than it was before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008.

Christmas past

2009-11-26T05:45:00.002Z

Well, another Christmas in India has come and gone. It's the 26th and business as usual. I remember coming into work on 26th December 2003 and thinking how odd it was to be working on what is Boxing Day in the UK. Five years on it doesn't seem strange at all; Christmas Day in India is just another festival day.

It's all very different from the UK and to be frank, I've never really enjoyed Christmas in India. In England at least, the build-up is relentless. It starts around July with the first charity Chritsmas card catalogues dropping through the door and then the hype slowly builds from there. By October (I'm trying to remember), most supermarkets will have Christmas merchandise in the shops and by the time Halloween has passed, it's full-on Yuletide build-up and you can't enter a shop without Slade's "So Here it is Merry Christmas" assaulting your eardrums. In fact the commerical hype is way overboard. Nevertheless, as the days darken and the lights come on early, there is a sense of building towards a festivity, something to look forward to, a time to share time with family and friends. Our Christmases at home were always family affairs - Christmas Day with our parents and siblings and then Boxing Day with grandparents. These days of course, my grandparents, sadly, are long dead and the three of us "kids" each live on different continents. Cynic that I am, the next time we'll all be together may well be for a funeral.

Britain is supposedly a Christian land, not that you'd notice that necessarily from the Christmas cards that are on sale. These days, political correctness gone mad means that as well as British TV giving airtime to Iran's nutcase president to air his "alternative" Christmas views, most British retailers and manufacturers are overly cautious about offending the sensibilities of non Christians in Britain. And so you get half-hearted cards that offer "Season's Greetings" instead of celebrating the birth of Christ which is what Christmas is all about. Ah well, come the day of Judgement. In Bangalore, I walked straight into a card shop and picked up three entirely suitable religious cards with no trouble at all. But then again, India is for the most part, a tolerant (and often polictically incorrect) society. Muslims, Christians and Hindus live, for the most part, in harmony. When the firebrands get it into their heads to stir up trouble, they do so with spectacular and ferocious fervour (witness the Hindu/Muslim clashes in Gujarat a few years back and the Hindu/Christian clashes in Orissa and Karnataka this year). But for the most part, people do live-and-let-live.

Nevertheless, Christmas in India just doesn't seem like Christmas in the UK. I think for me that it has a lot to do with weather (it just can't be Christmas with the sun blazing down) but also because in India there is none of that over-hyped commercial build-up. Yesterday a lot of people were still working and there were still the street vendors pushing their heavy carts up the street and yelling out their normal sales-pitches.

We spent a nice day with family and friends and the children received lots of presents from Father Christmas (although he clean forgot to bring me my two maids). And yet earlier in the day, Niharika had woken up and wandered into our room and had been quite happily playing and chatting and hadn't even remembered it was Christmas Day. It was daddy who had to remind her that she should have a look at the Christmas tree downstairs to see if Father Christmas had been. I know she's only three and a half but I'm sure that when I was her age I was peering out of the window at night trying to catch a glimpse of Santa and his sleigh and then later, at three in the morning, waking up to see a bulging pillow case of presents, and yelling out excitedly, "He's been! He's been!".

If we spend too many more Christmas Days in hot countries and then subsequently move back to a colder and nominally Christian country, it will be interesting to see what my children make of their new environments. Maybe when she's older, Niharika will sit down to her blog - "Travels in my starchy British clothing" - and write, " I don't know, Christmas in Britain just deosn't feel right. It's bloody cold. Where's the warm Indian sun?"

Originally published on Blogger on 26th December 2008.

Come back!

2009-11-23T03:35:00.003Z

Dear Father Christmas

Day five without our maids and we realise with a shock that when you make a mess and leave it there, it's still there when you come back later. Nobody's cleared it away, it's still there!

Actually, we have assistance in the house: one lady who comes in the morning between 8.30 and 12.30, and another who comes between 12.30 and 3.30. So we have some cover but it's not the same. I mean, there's a whole 17 hours when we have to fend for ourselves. Seventeen hours! OK, so the children are asleep for maybe nine of those but that still leaves eight hours for them to make a mess. Mark was one year old at the weekend. I think I had changed his nappy once in those previous twelve months. The tally's now gone up to four! I'd forgotten all about that little joy. And there was me thinking that babies these days were self-cleaning.

Father Christmas, you must understand that we don't have to cook (because shift number two cooks for our evening meal) and we don't have to wash up (because shift number one washes up our plates, pots and pans from the previous night) but there are still chores. Yesterday evening I even had to peel my own moosambies! Our live-in maids would not only peel them, they'd take ALL the pith off as well, every last scrap of it. And then of course they'd clear the peel away, tidy the kitchen, peg out the washing, bring it in when dry, bath the kids, clear away the toys, sweep the floors, tidy up... I can't understand why they left us.

But Father Christmas, they've gone! They went back to Meghalaya last Friday and we may never see them again. Malme says she will come back, and I hope she does, but in the meantime Father Christmas, please send us two more. My evening drinks with the lads have gone right out of the window. Wednesday and Friday nights used to be mine, now I have to share them with my wife and kids!

Father Christmas, I've been good all year (well maybe not good, but certainly not too bad) and this domesticity lark is killing me. Please Santa, send us two more maids or at least second us an elf or two before we go crazy.

Happy Christmas old man.

From

Spoilt Brit, Bangalore

Originally published on Blogger on 24th December 2008. Malme returned with another girl in mid February and peace and sanity was restored.

Worthy of the Greeks

2009-11-22T02:01:00.004Z

Some businesses certainly choose their names well. There was Oblivion, a short-lived nightclub on 100 Feet Road in Indiranagar which sank into oblivion not too long after it opened, and there is Odyssey.

An odyssey is a long, eventful journey. Odyssey in Indiranagar sells books, toys, music and gifts. The store - also on 100 Feet Road - is newly opened and spread across three floors I think. There should be a fourth a floor in the basement but I don't think that that's functioning yet. We've been to Odyssey a number of times. The selection of merchandise - toys' section at least - is reasonable, but it's when you get to the cash desk on the ground floor that the place lives up to its name.

We were in Odyssey yesterday to pick up something for my son who is a year old today (and it doesn't seem a year ago that I was writing on here about all his trauma in the Manipal Hospital). We picked up a couple of items, one for Mark and one for Niharika so that she can open something too and not feel left out. I took them down to the ground floor cash desk along with two pots of bubbles and explained to the sales assistant that I was still shopping and that I'd be back soon to pay got the goods. I asked if they could gift-wrap the two main presents.

Ten minutes later, I returned to the cash desk and in that short space of time, they'd lost the bubbles. I know what must have happened. They sold my bubbles to somebody else. Not to worry, I'd picked up two more pots. One of the items had been wrapped, the other not been, so I waited while two assistants struggled to wrap up a bucket and spade. In the meantime, I presented my card for payment.

Again, typical India, you never know that when you hand over a card or money that you're actually going to be served. It's just as likely that somebody else will jump in ahead of you or that, the sales assistant will suddenly disappear somewhere, or that the counter will close down, or that the till will be struck by a meteor. All of these things (except the meteor bit) are so common that it just isn't funny. Yesterday was no exception and so I waited, and waited while the person in front moaned about whatever it was she was buying.

"Sorry sir, we can't take a card with a chip." The sales assistant's apology awoke me from my stupor.
"But I don't have anything else to pay you with," I said.
"Please be here sir, I'll try another machine upstairs."

Now that was my fault and I should have also remembered that it's very much an Indian trait to want to please, or rather not to want to displease. That's good, but if something can't be done, say so. The sales assistant did just that, but because I moaned, he made a pretence of saying that he'd try the card on another machine. So off he went, and five minutes later came back.

"Sorry sir, we can't take a card with a chip."
"No worries," I said, leave the items here, I'll go and get you some cash. And don't sell my bubbles!"

We left for the bomb site that is CMH Road these days. (Well it's always looked a bit of a bomb site ever since I've been here, but the new Metro work has made it a complete mess). I bought some cards, got some cash and returned to the shop, parking the car in a nearby street. This time I just took Niharika with me, leaving Shilpi and Mark in the car.

Back at Odyssey and they still had my bubbles and the other gift had been wrapped. It would have been perfect if they'd got my bill, or even remembered what the prices of the gifts were. But no. So what happened next? Well you can guess can't you? They had to unwrap the presents to get to the bar codes and re-scan them into the till.

And it was just at that point in time, when sales assistants 1-9 were running around like headless chickens, that Shilpi called to tell me that she'd set the car alarm off: bells, sirens and flashing lights going at full tilt. So back again. I scooped up Niharika, and tore round the corner to where the car was parked. Mark, who was obviously feeling left-out, had thrown up (baby vomit on the upholstery). Perhaps it was the car alarm which did it. I turned off the alarm, left Niharika there and returned to Odyssey for a third time.

And that's pretty much it. I waited another five minutes or so during which time I scribbled some choice comments in the visitors' book. Underneath the gentile compliments such as, "lovely ambiance" (now there's an extremely over-used word) I wrote in capital letters, "YOUR SERVICE IS APPALLING. GENERALLY A GOOD RANGE OF MERCHANDISE BUT YOUR SHOCKING CUSTOMER SERVICE IS A MAJOR DETERRENT." (Or something like that). And I left.

And if any senior Odyssey folk should happen to stumble upon this post whilst Googling for their store, do us all a favour will you and just make a couple of small changes. Instead of having just one cash counter on the ground floor, put some on the other floors as well. I'm also convinced that a lot of yesterday's fuss was due to too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were at least five sales assistants there yesterday falling over themselves to get it wrong. Please allocate one assistant to a till - two maximum - and if fussy Englishmen turn up and say that the debit/credit card they have is the only one they have, just train them to say, "Have you ever heard of cash, sir?"

Originally published on Blogger on 21st December 2008. Greeks and sirens from silevad.

Bob Fleming's folkin' classics

2009-11-21T07:06:00.005Z

You know that winter has arrived when everybody in the office starts coughing and spluttering. At times it sounds as though we're working on a flamin' TB ward rather than in an office. Coughs, snorts, splutters, throat-clearings; you name it, we've got it. And so for anybody reading this who has a bit of a tickle in their throat; a little irritating irritation, here's a Fast Show Classic from Bob Fleming and his pals. Enjoy.

Originally published on Blogger on 18th December 2008. The coughers and splutterers are still with me plus, now that we've moved into a bigger office, a couple of snorters as well. Lovely.

Whilst on the subject of the Fast Show, treat yourself to this drinking game sketch as well.

Look out, there's a zebra about

2009-11-20T09:48:00.006Z

I see that my countrymen are exporting road safety.

There was a report on the BBC website yesterday that the UK Government is set to spend £1.5m on improving road safety in developing countries. It was reported that in some parts of the developing world, road accidents are "a bigger cause of death than malaria". Well I can tell you for a fact that in developed Britain, road accidents are a also bigger cause of death than malaria, and Britain - allegedly -has one of the lowest road-death rates in the world.

So what exactly is the money going to be spent on and where is it going to be spent? The BBC was unclear about precisely which countries would be benefiting, but whoever gets the dosh will be delighted to hear that it's to be spent on zebra crossings and road markings (probably double yellow lines if I know the UK).

You see that's what happens when you have a well-meaning developed country trying to impose its culture - or regulations - on a developing country. Bangalore has plenty of zebra crossings but I've never seen a single car stop at one to let a pedestrian cross. Similarly, a lot of the roads here have road markings but that won't stop every driver in the city ignoring those markings if his way ahead is blocked.

The Minister for Development, Mr Gareth Thomas, said: "I want to see this funding make a real impact on reducing casualty numbers where it's needed most. It will help with implementing basic safety measures."

No it won't, it's going to increase casualty numbers. Hospitals in those countries which are to receive British money can expect to see a surge in admissions to their accident and emergency wards. At the same time, drivers everywhere will be holding their hands up and saying to traffic police, "But officer, I just didn't see him. I mean, the last thing you expect to come across is some idiot painting black and white lines in the middle of a road."

Image courtesy of Staebrook News.

Broken sleep

2009-11-19T07:52:00.002Z

OK, if you have a violin, now's the time to get it out.

I'm fortunate in that I don't require much sleep - five hours is usually enough - and I'm normally up at the crack of dawn. This morning, staring somewhat blearily at my laptop at 5am having abandoned all hope of sleep, I made a note of the previous night's interruptions. Here they are:

1. People talking outside the house.
This was the first interruption of the night and that was probably at around 3am. I don't think the people had stopped outside but they were talking loudly enough, as they passed, to wake me up.
2. Coughing and spluttering.
My poor wife is having terrible trouble with her sinuses at the moment and my disturbed sleep as a result, is far less irritating than the congestion must be for her. Nevertheless, it still counts as disturbance factor number two.
3. Dogs barking.
Anyone living in a city in India will appreciate this one. These packs of dogs were not in the immediate vicinity but still close enough.
4. Baby crying.
My eleven-month old son woke up about 4am (possibly as a result of 1, 2 and 3 above), came into our bed and then decided to thrash around, emitting the odd Tourette's-like shriek.
5. Water tank filling.
Our neighbour's tank fills up at five in the morning and makes a hell of a racket. At this point in time I abandoned all hope of sleep, came downstairs and played heavy rock (loud) until I left for the office. I was at my desk this morning by 7.30am.

Alright, you can put your violins away now. Please! They're keeping me awake.

Originally published on Blogger on 5th December 2008. We've moved house since I wrote this, which means that 3. and 5. above, no longer apply. Thank goodness. Yawners courtesy of Waka Austin.

Blame it on the medical shop

2009-11-17T11:02:00.005Z

PeopleSoft, that is. I'll explain.

Some while back, on a family holiday in Sri Lanka, we stopped at a medical shop in Colombo. We'd flown in from England, realised we'd forgotten the malaria tablets, and were now trying to buy the local equivalent. We were in luck. The shop had plenty in stock, and before you could say, "Wickramasinghe", there they were on the counter. And then they were given to another sales assistant who wrote down the price and handed the bill to the cashier who, on being given the money, handed the bill to somebody else who stamped it. The bill then came back to me and I went to a new fifth link in the chain who, examining my bill to satisfy himself that it had been stamped (even though he'd seen his colleague stamp it) handed me my malaria tablets. The best of it was that I think those tablets cost about ten Sri Lankan rupees which was the equivalent of five Indian rupees.

And my contention is that whoever came up with the PeopleSoft software, had been to that very same medical shop in Colombo and had their eureka moment.

I have never had the misfortune to work with such a cumbersome, user-unfriendly piece of software as PeopleSoft. In fact wasn't it PeopleSoft that came up with the motto, "If you've got a nut, we've got the sledgehammer to crack it"?

For those blessed individuals who have never worked with PeopleSoft and have no idea what it is, go and Google. Just type, "useless piece of shite" and you'll go straight to the PeopleSoft home page. For those of you who can't be bothered to do that - and I don't blame you in the slightest - PeopleSoft is essentially an HR tool that companies introduce for their employees if they want those employees to waste not only their time, but their colleagues' time as well. It's the on-line HR equivalent of going into a Sri Lankan chemist's and ordering ten rupees worth of malaria tablets.

I'm going to cut a very long story short, but suffice to say that four of my team who put in their customary backbreaking day's hard slog under the usual trying conditions of artificial lighting, aggressive air-conditioning and banal chit-chat, suddenly found that because their attendance had not been marked on-line, their day's work had been recorded by PeopleSoft as leave, and that consequently their holiday entitlement had been docked by one day. And since this occurred, e-mails have been flying backwards and forwards to various Indian cities. People in Gurgaon are on the case. People in Mumbai are on the case. The software support team - presumably employed in the first place to help clean up the PeopleSoft mess - are all looking at their screens with furrowed brows. I half expect to see the story reported in tomorrow's Times of India.

And while we're all having great fun with PeopleSoft, the originators, having sold PeopleSoft to Oracle for about $10.3 billion in 2004, must be lying back smirking on some gorgeously sandy sun-kissed island. I hope they get bitten by mosquitoes and all the medical shops are closed.

Asian tiger mosquito courtesy of flushrush.

You want to put some oil on that

2009-11-15T07:18:00.002Z

"You want to put some oil on that."

That at least, is what a car mechanic in the UK might say if you turned up at his workshop complaining that your car had developed a squeak.

Actually, it wasn’t so much of a squeak, more of a grating sound under the bonnet; a rasping noise when I drove the car away from the house on Friday morning. It didn’t last long, but on the journey to work I heard it again, intermittently. When I reached the office, my driver was there and I told him what I’d heard.

“Have a listen, Hegde” I said, “when you’re driving the car. See if you can hear it too.”

We have a good arrangement, my driver and I. I drive myself to the office where he picks up the car and then drives it home. He cleans the car, drops my daughter to school, picks her up a couple of hours later and then spends the rest of the time sitting outside the house. In the evening he drives back to my office and then I drive home, dropping him off at a bus stop on the way home. Sometimes I wonder who’s the driver and who’s the driven. Maybe I should just cut out the middle man.

Anyway, in the evening, driving back towards home, he reminded me about the squeak.

“I found what it was” he said. “There was a rat under the bonnet.”

At which point in time I know that my Indian readers will say, “Well of course it was a rat. Any dumb fool could have told you that.” It had been raining and I suppose the rat had just hopped up on the wheel and then shuffled up under the bonnet. The Scorpio is quite a big car and there’s plenty of room under the hood. You could probably squeeze in half a dozen rats there. This is India after all.

“Did you get it?” I asked.

“The rat’s gone.” He replied.

But it hadn’t gone. Driving back, we both heard the same noise again.

“Get it for me please, Hegde, will you?” I asked. I was heading off to the pub and Hegde was going to wait for me. “I don’t care what you do, but just get rid of it for me please will you?”

Some hours later, driving back home, I asked him again whether he had got the rat.

“Rat’s gone” he repeated.

But it was still there. I heard it again on Saturday and so on Sunday morning, armed with a long stick, I went out to the car and cautiously raised the bonnet. Not a sausage. Not even a rat. My neighbour came out and looked at me.

“Rat in your bonnet?” He asked. “I have the same thing. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

But I don’t want to get used to it and more to the point I don’t want Ratty chewing up cables and wires. Actually, I’ve not heard anything more since Saturday, but I wouldn’t bank on the creature not reappearing (there you go, some nice double negatives dropped into a sentence).

Still, at least now I know why most Indian motorists don’t indicate. It’s because they’ve got rats under their bonnets which have chewed up their indicator cables. And there was me thinking it was because most drivers in this country don't have the first idea about road courtesy or basic driving skills.

Originally published on Blogger on 3rd December 2008. Rat picture from the Brookswville Show.

Children's Nehru Day

2009-11-13T02:56:00.003Z

When we were little, my brother and sister and I would moan to my parents, "But why isn't there a Children's Day?" Mother's Day we were familiar with (bunches of daffodils or Cadbury's Black Magic for mum), and Father's Day too (socks and Old Spice for dad). But what about Children's Day?

And my mother always had the same answer. "Every day is Children's Day."

My, how good that used to make us feel! It didn't seem like it at the time but you know, looking back now, she was right. When I was little I don't think I had any real responsibilities at all; not even wiping up dishes or pulling the sheets up over my bed. Even when we progressed from childhood into adolescence, the tasks weren't onerous. Washing and wiping up was a duty which my brother somehow seemed to consistently avoid by rushing to the loo as soon as dinner had finished, and emerging some while later just as the last utensil was being packed into a drawer. (I'm sure his memory of that time is that I did exactly the same, but this is my blog and not his, so I'll be liberal with my recollections.) Cleaning the windows was another of my tasks, whilst my sister had to tidy my father's study once in a while. We made our beds and polished our shoes but that was pretty much it. Every day was children's day.

But now there really is a Children's Day and today is it. Niharika's school has some function or the other and even Google has included brats on it's home page.

I suppose - although the day may be intended to raise awareness of those poor children who really don't get the opportunity to have a childhood and either live in poverty or are supporting families, or suffering abuse - that it has already become just another commercial excuse and that even now, as I write, children all over the world are beaming back at their doting parents and saying, "take me shopping". These days there always seems to be some Awareness Day or the other. We've just had Remembrance Sunday and I think 1st December is World AIDS Day isn't it? Then there are the more bizarre ones like World Smile Day (which I recall from when I was younger, and my sister and I smiling at a dour man who we used to pass every day on our way to school) and Walk A Dog to School Day (both these days falling in October, for those who are curious).

In fact, I would certainly endorse a Grumpy Old English Git Day if only there was still a date in the diary available. Drop Foil in your Beer Day was on Wednesday and tomorrow, if I felt so inclined, I could put a pair of Y-fronts on my head, walk down the road and declare it National Wear Your Pants on Your Head Day (even though it does clash with Wear Your Clothes Inside-Out Day). In any event, I don't know why I'm making such a fuss. As my mother will tell me, next time I speak to her, "Every day is Grumpy Old English Git Day".

Originally published on Blogger on 14th November 2008.

Today, almost one year on, my daughter's school is celebrating Children's Day one day early and I see that whilst Children's day is universally celebrated on the 20th November, in India - no surprises here - it's been "preponed" or "brought forward" to the 14th November in order to coincide with Nehru's birthday. I also see that Children's Day was first celebrated in 1954 - so my parents obviously kept quiet about that one. Nehru photograph from schema root.

Spot the difference

2009-11-11T08:41:00.005Z

The motoring supplement of The Sunday Times in Great Britain, used to run a weekly feature where readers were presented with a photograph of a section of British road. They were asked to study the photograph carefully and then suggest why they should be particularly careful if they happened to find themselves driving along it.

Go on then. Click on the image above and see if you can spot any tell-tale potential hazards.

Are you done? OK, here's what I can see.

1. There's a steep climb coming up and not only that, it involves sharp bends. Beware of vehicles that are coming down the hill too fast and which might career into your path. This will be a particular problem in the autumn and winter when the fallen leaves make the road slippery or when snow and ice turn the road into a ski-slope.

2. There's a house on the right hand side which has a partially concealed driveway. A vehicle emerging from that driveway could cause an on-coming vehicle to swerve into your path.

3. You might be so busy reading the road signs, and hoping that a vehicle doesn't dart out of the partially concealed driveway on your right that you completely miss 96 year old Mrs Jenkins who lives in the house on the left. Yes, that's her driveway just going out of shot and she is about to step in front of your car.

Actually all of those answers are way to easy, and the Smart Alec who used to write that column for the Sunday Times would have pointed out that what we should have been looking out for is the adverse camber, or the Little Tiddington Rambler's Association just out of shot around the corner (note the sweet wrappers on the grass) or the evidence of subsidence and the likelihood of there being a great gaping abyss also, just out of shot.

In any event, for some reason I was thinking of that column this morning as I drove through a fairly typical Indian street at 7.15am, and I was wondering what the Sunday Times journalist would have written about my street.

Let me help him out.

1. Bikes overtaking on the inside and outside and some also heading straight at you. Ditto cycles.

2. Buses, cars, auto-rickshaws, bikes and cycles which pull out without any indication and which also pull in without any indication.

3. Pedestrians walking in the road or standing in the road who are completely oblivious to the traffic that is shooting by.

4. Dogs and cows, oxen, handcart-vendors ditto.

5. Potholes, industrial debris. Adverse camber? You should be so lucky.

6. The Little Tiddington Rambler's Association on an exchange visit to India and now hopelessly and helplessly lost (just out of shot).

UK photo courtesy of Transport Cafe. Indian photo courtesy of Bicycling around the world.

Please don't pee in the sugar bowl

2009-11-09T07:52:00.006Z

There's a sign in the gents' loo at work which advises patrons to "Say 'No' to spitting into dustbins." It goes on, "Say 'No'. Say 'Chhheee!" and finally, "Say No. Take a stand." So there we have it, a pretty unequivocal message that we shouldn't spit into dustbins.

But I ask myself why, when there are urinals, toilets (and even sinks), would anybody want to go to the trouble of spitting into dustbins? And surely, while the company is at it, wouldn't it do equally well to advise people not to defecate in corridors, not to practice projectile vomiting, and not to expose their genitalia to colleagues (at least, not during work hours)? Well obviously, as disgusting as the habit sounds, spitting into dustbins must be enough of a problem to warrant a sign in the gents loos (whereas the other three unsavoury habits are apparently not).

Spitting in India appears to be something of a national pastime, at least amongst the working - or dare I say, lower - classes. Look at any BMT bus in Bangalore and the sides of it will be covered with spit. Wait next to a BMT bus too long and you stand a pretty good chance of being hit by somebody's phlegm or betel-nut jet. For some individuals, spitting seems to be almost as reflexive as blinking but I have to say that I'm surprised that enough company employees, the vast majority of whom are well-educated, have such disgusting habits that their employer feels the need to put up a sign in the Gents'.

But why have a sign that says, "Say no to spitting into dustbins"? Wouldn't it have been better to say, "Say no to spitting"? It's like that lovely sign in the Manipal Centre on Dickenson Road which greets you when you climb the stairs. "Please do not spit here" it says, stencilled in red paint as you reach the top of the short first flight. And I've always been tempted to get my own stencil, and go to the Manipal Centre when there's nobody around, and in the opposite corner of the stairwell, spray, "Spit here instead please."

Photo courtesy of Avinash's blog.

Remembrance

2009-11-08T01:35:00.004Z

It's a shame India has forgotten its British Empire war dead. Thousands of Indian troops died in the First World War and I suppose, though I don't know for sure, thousands more during the Second World War.

There may have been a Remembrance Service in Delhi, but if there was, it certainly didn't get much coverage in the newspapers the following day. That may have been because a road was dug-up somewhere, a this-a-halli or that-a-palya got flooded by sewage, a VVIP dropped by to congest traffic and employ policeman, or Paris Hilton exposed an already over-exposed nipple.

In Britain, we've got better at Remembrance as the years have gone on. Now, with only three known surviving British First World War veterans in Britain, we not only have Remembrance Sunday, we mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month with a two minute silence as well. In offices and factories people down tools or pens and stand behind their desks or benches with their heads bowed. This is all as it should be.

And how touching to see those three veterans at the Cenotaph in Whitehall yesterday; fitting too that after so many years and so many millions of men, that these last three represented each of the services: 112 year old Henry Allingham (RAF), 110 year old Harry Patch (British Army) and 108 year old Bill Stone (Royal Navy).

India has its fair share of war memorials, plaques and cemeteries but, Commonwealth War Grave Commission cemeteries aside, scant attention appears to be paid to these. As I said earlier, that's a shame because an Indian life lost is no less important than any other life. That Sikh who died in the mud at Festubert or that Labourer who froze to death at Etaples was still some mother's son, a husband, a brother, a father.

We who follow in their footsteps, owe the generations that went before a debt of gratitude and it surely isn't too much, once a year at least, to bow our heads under an Indian sun and remember those who sacrificed their todays for our tomorrows.

Originally posted on Blogger on 12th November 2008. The three WW1 servicemen that I mentioned above, all died this year.

Image, courtesy of the National Army Museum, shows men of The Garhwal Rifles marching down the La Bassee Road in France, August 1915.

Singh is dead

2009-11-06T05:07:00.005Z

Casting my mind forward, I wonder how the news will be greeted in the UK when it is announced that John Major, or Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair has been called to that great debating hall in the sky. Those three individuals probably have getting on for thirty years of combined British leadership under their belts (or in their iron handbags) but actually, I don't wonder at all what the British reaction will be.

The news will certainly be headline and on pages 3-94 of the national newspapers that day, there will be the usual mix of gushing tributes and considered opinion. In certain parts of the country I'm sure, there will also be toasts in pubs and also the words "good riddance" floating on the breeze.

But that's pretty much as far as it will go. There will be no day of National mourning and the shops and banks will stay open, and children will go to school.

Yesterday, former Indian Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, died in hospital in Delhi after a long illness. He was 77. Mr Singh was Prime Minister of India for less than a year, between 2nd December 1989 and 10th November 1990. I know nothing about the man at all really, other than what I've read today on various websites, but he appears to have been generally liked (as much as any politican is "liked"). He will be remembered chiefly for implementing the recommendations of the Mandal Commission which saw a fixed quota of jobs in the public sector being reserved for the so-called Backward Classes; a move which, incidentally, may be popular with the Backward Classes but which continues to draw flak from other Classes.

I'm in no position to pass comment on the late Mr Singh or his policies but I do find it a little irritating that as a result of his passing, schools and banks have closed. Before he was Prime Minister, Mr Singh was Finance Minister and I should think that wherever he is now, looking down on the people whose destinies he was in charge of for eleven months, he's smiling wryly to himself. It's the end of the month and whereas banks would normally be processing salary payments for the people of India, today they have a holiday and salary payments will be delayed. Thanks a lot Mr Singh.

It reminds me of the time when I used to commute backwards and forwards to London and would face the inevitable delays on the line. A points' failure here, a signal failure there; leaves on the line; the wrong kind of snow. I swore that if it ever got to the point where I contemplated suicide, it would be under the wheels of the 5.17 to Norwich on a Friday afternoon; maximum and massive inconvenience of my own making. By passing away when he has done, Mr Singh has effectively done the same thing.

And again it makes me wonder, seriously makes me wonder, how India has become as strong as it has - sheer hard work probably. But just think where India could be were it not for umpteen festival holidays, bandhs (that's "strikes" to you and me) and impromptu closures of services because a former politician has died. Why, the country could have probably filled all the pot-holed roads in India and still had a few minutes left over to tackle social deprivation.

Originally published on Blogger on 28th November 2008.

The parable of the maid and the tea

2009-11-04T03:12:00.005Z

Once upon a time there was an Englishman: tall, handsome, with a finely chiselled jaw, dashing good looks [skip a bit - ed]... who moved from his home in England to settle in India. Being a simple soul he had never had any previous experience of either employing or dealing with servants and so it was that when he suddenly found them thrust upon him, he treated them the same as he treated everybody else: with courtesy, with a smile, and with a please and thank you. (Everybody that is except auto drivers, tax inspectors, policemen etc).

The Englishman's wife, however - beautiful, petite, as fresh as the morning dew, as happy as [skip again - ed] ... knew better than her husband because she was Indian and because she had had plenty of experience of dealing with servants. She knew that there was a fine line between being even-handed and "spoiling" a servant and having them "jump all over your head". She was not a bad person, far from it, but she knew that servants had to be kept in their place and that "please" and "thank you" were words you did not use else you sank to their level.

And so it was, soon after the two maidservants arrived, that the Englishman asked one of them if they could make him a cup of tea - please. There was an initial hiccup - see Make Your Own Tea here - but thereafter the Englishman got his tea every morning; without asking again. "Thank you", he would say, and - when returning the empty cup - "thank you" again, "that was a nice cup of tea."

His wife though - who still knew better - did not say thank you and did not say please, and every day she would have to remind her maidservant to make her a cup of tea. This made her mad - and even madder when she realised that the maidservant had indeed made a cup of tea - and given it to the driver.

And so the Englishman, who does not know how to treat servants, and who has come down to their level, writes this parable about his wife (who does not get her tea), and writes about himself - and how he gets his tea every morning (without asking). And gets biscuits too (without having ever asked). And gets them served on a china plate.

This parable is for my wife - whom I love dearly - and for anybody else of course; tea drinkers in particular. [Picture stolen from an old post on the Idea Champions blog. I'm hoping they''ll forgive me, as I've given them a link.]

Originally published on Blogger on 27th November 2008.

Turkish delight

2009-11-02T03:08:00.003Z

We took a short trip to the Leela Palace yesterday for coffee and a stroll through the gardens, but completely mis-timed our visit. The place looked like a police training college; dozens of traffic cops and their khaki colleagues all falling over each other in their efforts to look calm, organised and prepared.

"Who's coming?" I asked a plain clothes policeman (who was very obviously plain clothes, and just as obviously police).

"Turkey Prime Minister" he replied.

We went for our stroll and then into the Oxford Book Store for coffee and cakes. Three quarters of an hour or so later we returned to get the car. The place was still swarming with police but I handed the ticket to the valet and he disappeared. No sooner had he done so than somebody shouted something, somebody else blew a whistle and all movement of traffic ceased. Shilpi and Niharika wandered into the main hotel lobby but I stood outside waiting to see what would happen next.

Of course, the first thing was that everybody was moved behind temporary barriers. Figuring that this was probably likely to happen, I'd already moved, but one woman, unaware of what was going on, strolled out into the area where the hotel manager and various other lackeys were waiting to receive their foreign guest.

"Madam, please move behind the barrier" a policeman asked her politely.

"What's all the fuss about?" the woman demanded.

"VVIP visit" said the policeman.

"Well I'm VVIP as well" the woman retorted, (and she might just as well have added, "and what are you going doing to do about that, sonny Jim?" because that was what her body language was saying).

All credit through, to the moustachioed one (the policeman, not the woman). He looked at her appealingly, motioned "wait five minutes" with his hand (an action which involves bringing the four fingers and thumb together in an opening and shutting beak-type movement) and gently ushered her towards where she should have been standing.

Me, I've seen her inflated, self-important type so many times before in Bangalore that I was really hoping the cop would take exception to her rudeness, straighten his moustache and then lathi charge her before beating her to a pulp on one of the Leela's exquisitely upholstered sofas. "Only in fairy stories" as the saying goes.

Anyway, a few minutes later, The Turkish PM and his wife did indeed arrive and the whole place erupted in chaos - policemen rushing forward, Turkish security men rushing forwards and backwards, and Leela hotel staff throwing garlands of flowers around the dignitaries' necks. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen the Turkish PM before and I certainly wouldn't recognise him again. Shilpi took a photo of his retreating back, but having caused me to wait in the lobby for the best part of half an hour, taking the photo of an anonymous politician - Turkish or otherwise - appealed to me not in the slightest. Nonetheless, I wish him well in Bangalore and I'm sure that he and his wife have already sent a warm glow through certain parts of the city. Indeed, you could almost feel that warmth this morning as motorists sat fuming in their cars, waiting for his cavalcade to pass.

Originally published on Blogger on 24th November 2008.

Waiter, there's some foil in my beer.

2009-10-30T06:24:00.002Z

If there's one thing that Indian men like, it's their drinks to be perfectly served. If somebody asks for a large whisky with two ice cubes and lukewarm water, that's exactly what he expects to be given. Try presenting him with water that's either too cold, or too warm and the drink will be unceremoniously returned. As for adding an extra ice cube, don't even think about it.

Last night, a friend of mine waited while the barman poured his bottle of Kingfisher into his glass. (Again, if your glass is empty, you don't pour the bottle into the glass yourself, you wait for the barman to do it for you. Me, I prefer DIY). In so doing, a tiny piece of foil from the bottle rim went into the glass with the beer. My friend pointed this out to the barman who then went off to fetch a long-handled spoon and fished the offending piece of foil out. Would you credit it, when his glass was re-filled shortly afterwards, exactly the same thing happened.

Once is forgivable, twice is careless. The barman was "blasted", told to be more careful and then, much to my amusement, instructed to pick all the remaining foil from around the bottle rim so that it wouldn't be third time unlucky. My friend then took a few more sips and went outside to take a call.

"So what do you think happened next?" I asked Shilpi when I was sitting down with her later that evening.
"You dropped some foil into his beer, didn't you?" she said.

My wife knows me well. Having done just that, I stood at the bar sniggering to myself as I watched the foil (which was a good deal larger than the two previous pieces put together) floating in the centre of his beer.

Unfortunately, my pal was some time on the phone and by the time he came back, the barman had either noticed the foil and whisked it out sharpish, or it had just floated off to the side of the glass and stuck there. In any event, I'm sorry to report, there was no dramatic climax.

Originally published on Blogger on 13th November 2008.

A visit to the bank

2009-10-28T02:41:00.004Z

I had to transfer some cash from one account to another but forgot to take a pen with me to my local HSBC bank. No worries, There was an HSBC promotions' girl in the foyer clutching an armful of 2009 diaries and some forms.

"What are those for?" I asked.
"Personal detail updation" she replied. Great word that, "updation", only to be found in the Indian sub-continent. Why use "update" or "updating" when you can make an entirely new word by sticking an "ation" on the end?
"OK, I'll updation myself" I said, "but I need to borrow your pen please."

I filled out my paying-in slip and then turned to the form. I get plagued with calls from HSBC, invariably asking me if I would like to make regular monthly payments or whether I would like to transfer the balance from one credit card to another. The answer's always "NO" to both.

Here though, was an opportunity to update my details. So I dutifully gave my account number, and ticked the box that said, words to the effect, "Don't pester me with your pitiful marketing offers." I then updationed my phone number giving a fictitious one.

The question is, now that the bank has an incorrect phone number for me, will they revert to the one that is currently in their system and still plague me with bad pronunciations of my name? Logic would suggest they might but then this is a useless multi-national corporation we're talking about, so they may not.

I ticked a few more boxes and then finally was asked to complete the following sentence in no more than ten words: "For me, HSBC is the world's local bank because..."

I wrote, "it treats its customers like country bumpkins."

That's seven words. I gave the form back to the promotions' girl and she gave me a diary finished in best imitation leather (or plastic to you and me). So all in all, not a bad ten minutes' work. Now if only Airtel would do something similar.

Originally published on Blogger on 7th November 2008. The calls from HSBC persist. Pictured, Naina Lal Kidwai, CEO, HSBC India.

Club Cabana, Bangalore

2009-10-27T02:21:00.004Z

But first...

If you're a recent follower of this blog, welcome to you and thanks for following. As I state at the top of the right hand column, this is my vehicle for re-publishing older posts from 2007 and 2008. I also blog at India-aaagh. The piece below was originally published on Blogger on 29th October 2008.

Club Cabana

We have a history of giving staff holidays on the wrong days. In the early days, I shouldered some of the blame myself. We'd have our four statutory holidays - Independence Day, Republic Day, Gandhi's birth anniversary, and May Day - and then we'd choose others from the huge catalogue of festival days in India. Christmas Day was always a holiday, Good Friday too; but the other days were selected by people in the office. As we have a fairly large representation from Kerala, the festival of Onam in September is usually a holiday for us too.

Choosing the occasion is not a problem, but making sure that you earmark the right day for that occasion, can be. On more than one occasion we've booked time off thinking that that was actually Onam or Dasera, only to find, when the day approached, that it was the day after we'd arranged, or the day before. Despite consulting with people in the office, we would still occasionally get it wrong and, even now, having been taken over by a large multinational, I'm happy to see that the tradition persists. On Monday, whilst everyone else in Bangalore was out bursting crackers for Diwali, we sat in the office. Yesterday, with some offices back at work, we had the day off. Today we're back at work again - and everyone else seems to be off again.

Then again, festival timings vary throughout the country. Our lords and masters sit up high in Mumbai these days and I think that the main Diwali celebrations in Maharashtra were celebrated yesterday, rather than today. So Tuesday was earmarked for our holiday.

In any event, it didn't matter to Shilpi and me. We took ourselves off to a resort on the way to the airport and spent the day splashing around in the pool and shooting down water slides. At fifty quid for four adults and two nippers, I thought that was pretty good value; worth it actually to get out of the city and away from the added pollution of sulphur in the air. Plus we had the resort virtually to ourselves (remember, everybody else had taken the previous day off).

We hadn't packed towels so I asked for three at the poolside and was told that that was fine but that there was a two hundred rupee deposit per towel. That was also fine. We dipped, we splashed, we dried off, and then we went for a walk to the kiddie pool area, taking one towel with us and leaving two where we'd been. When we came back half an hour later, there was only one towel there. "Great," I thought, "there goes two hundred rupees." (Which even so is still only two pounds fifty).

Now you have to understand that this place was pretty much deserted. There was only one other group and they were sitting at a table next to where we were. Discovering my missing towel, I asked the only person at that table at the time whether, whilst he'd been there, he had seen anybody take our towel. He professed innocence and ignorance.

So I called one of the attendants and told him that I was a towel missing. "Don't worry," he said, "I'll give you another one so that you can hand that in with the other two."

Which is all well and good but then why have the two hundred rupee deposit system? I mean, I was being honest (if careless), but I could just as easily have kept one towel for myself. Surely the deposit system is supposed to encourage people to return what they've been given. But then again, maybe Club Cabana feels that if its clientele can afford swish SUVs (there were four parked outside), they're not going to be bothered about nicking well-washed towels. So why not do away with the deposit system then?

Anyway... we had a great time and absolutely no complaints, towel related or otherwise. Today my sunburned shoulders, coming hard on the heels of a sleep-of-the-dead's night sleep (despite all the bangs and crashes from fireworks) are testimony to the fun we had. As Dr Seuss might say,

Dad is glad, very very glad.
What a day dad had.

Credit for the most boring photo in the world goes to Sparkles, Ibiza and its laundry page.

25th October - A day in the life

2009-10-25T04:42:00.003Z

A day like any other day perhaps, but on this day:

1. Mrs Olive Bothwell died, aged 93. Olive was my father's cousin; a Nixon by birth. Her father Edgar, was my grandfather's eldest brother. She was an only child. Olive was born in November 1914 when the First World War was less than four months old and the British troops were facing the Germans at the First Battle of Ypres. In 1939 she married Charles Stanley Bothwell but by January 1941 she was already a widow. Stan, as he was known, had joined the Pioneer Corps to fight for his country but he never made it out of England. He was knocked down and killed one night on a darkened English road; a victim of careless driving or blacked-out streetlamps and car headlights. It probably didn't matter much to Olive. What mattered to her was that she had lost her husband. Stan is buried under a Commonwealth War Graves headstone in St Pancras cemetery, London. Olive never re-married and when she died early yesterday morning in a care home in Essex, England, she had been a widow for over 67 years. Olive, you and Stan are finally re-united. RIP.

2. I sent a text message to my old school friend Jo, wishing her a happy birthday. Funnily enough, I've always remembered her birthday, even though it was thirty years ago when I would have first become aware of that - and probably about the same length of time that I last wished her happy birthday. These days it's so easy: a text message winging across thousands of miles. Five rupees I think that cost.

3. We admitted Niharika to another school in Bangalore. She already goes to a nursery school but at the grand old age of three, we've booked her a place for the next term starting in June 2009. It was actually a fairly painless process. We met the principal, paid a hatful of rupees and she was in.

4. My Scorpio was a year old - at least it was a year since I picked up the car. So I've been driving on these crazy roads for 365 days.

5. Buffet lunch at Mainland China. Pretty good food. Shilpi, expecting baby number three, has various cravings at different times. Yesterday it was Chinese, other days it might be South Indian, or pizza. Thankfully all her cravings are pretty much in tune with my own eating desires. She selects the food, I pay. It's an arrangement which works pretty well. My brother-in-law also joined us yesterday.

One day in 365, just another day.

Originally published on Blogger on 25th October 2008. Fast forward one year: another happy birthday message to Jo, lunch at home, again shared with my brother-in-law; Niharika is now a seasoned schoolgirl while her youngest brother will be six months old in five days' time. Meanwhile, my other son has just tipped a bottle of ink over the floor whilst I've been writing this. A day in the life +365.

Pictured, Olive and Stan Bothwell on their wedding day, 18th February 1939.

Say cheese!

2009-10-24T03:46:00.002+01:00

The telephone conversation must have gone something like this:

Policeman: Hello is that Anand J Anand Photographic Services?
Anand: Hello?
Policeman: Hello is that Anand J...
Anand: Hello?
Policeman: Hello?

[OK, I'll fast forward a few minutes]

Anand: No, this is Anand J Anand Photographic Services India (Private) Ltd.
Policeman: You take photos?
Anand: Ah yes sir.
Policeman: I have a small job that you might be interested in. I have three people and I need somebody to take their photographs for official purposes.
Anand: Passport photos?
Policeman: Something like that.
Anand: We are an esteemed organisation sir; highly reputed business sir, taking photographs in Bangalore since the last three months sir.
Policeman: How soon can you come?
Anand: Give me five minutes.
Policeman: But I haven't told you the address yet.
Anand: Bangalore is it? We are here only. Half an hour max. What is the address?
Policeman: [Gives address and three landmarks and then repeats the address three times, each time altering the details slightly and each time giving a different landmark]
Anand: And your good name sir?
Policeman: My name is Vishwanath Ranganatha Rammamurty-Srikanth Vasudevan Rao, but you can call me Sir.
Anand: Very good sir, I am coming sir, half an hour sir...

The conversation - and the names - are completely fictitious but picture the scene yesterday in Bangalore. Police arrive at a house in Bangalore and then pick a photographer from a phone directory to come and take some pictures. The poor chap turns up only to discover that he's not been hired to take picture at a wedding or family get-together, but at a crime scene. His subjects are all lying in pools of blood with their throats slit.

The crime scene photographer who should have been on duty yesterday was, for some reason, not available, and so one of the khaki boys called up a local photographer, somehow omitting to tell him that he'd be photographing stiffs. No wonder the poor chap looked so shell-shocked. There was a photo of him in this morning's Bangalore Mirror standing listlessly outside the House of Horrors, having just stumbled upon the murdered mother and her two children in the family house. He walked in, took one look at the victims on the floor and then fled.

Let's reprise that telephone conversation today:

Policeman: Hello, is that Anand J Anand Photographic Services?
Anand: No, this is Anand J Anand fine cakes and pastries; reputed Bangalore bakery since yesterday afternoon. You want egg puff, veg puff, chocolate brownie?

Originally published on Blogger on 21st October 2008. Photo of Richard James, Aphex Twin.

TV movies

2009-10-23T03:32:00.003+01:00

I watched Mississippi Burning last night. I hadn't realised it was on but, hopping through the channels, suddenly there were Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman waging war with racists in 1960s America. So I watched the film through again.

It can be a gamble watching films on TV in India. Power cuts, censorship, and incessant advertising can all contribute to ruining an evening's viewing. I got away with it last night but I was lucky. It normally doesn't flow so smoothly.

Take, as an example, the film that was showing the other day - Premonition I think it was. It wasn't a particularly great film but we'd watched it long enough to be engrossed. Just at the point where Sandra Bullock - who has the ability to see into the future and spends most of the film jumping between her present reality and future reality- was rushing out of the house to save her husband from messily killing himself, we had a power cut. There was only about ten minutes left of the film, but the outage lasted for fifteen minutes and so we missed the end. I'm assuming that Sandra Bullock did save her husband but it would have been nice to see how she did it. We contemplated buying the DVD but as I said to Shilpi, the film will probably be repeated several dozen times over the next few weeks so we can tune in again and hopefully catch the end of it - current permitting of course.

Some channels also seem to show more adverts than others. The Pogo channel can be a nightmare and it is not at all unusual to have five minutes of film followed by five minutes of ads. That's not an exaggeration because I timed the sequences on one occasion. If you can believe this, those five minute Tom and Jerry cartoons are sometimes broken with ads. Tom's just about to have an iron rammed into his face or all his teeth knocked out by a golf ball and suddenly you're looking at a grinning Bollywood actor trying to sell you cable, or coke, or chocolate.

And if the power cuts and the ads don't get you, the censorship might. No nudity (full or partial) and no swearing (unless it's a word like WANKER which the Indian censors don't seem to have picked up on and so let go. It actually amuses me to think that somebody in an airless room in Mumbai took the trouble to edit a Guy Ritchie character's dialogue so that he ended up miming to the word "F***ing" but was allowed to say the word that immediately followed it: "wanker". Swearing aside, risque scenes are also cut. Thus in the classic When Harry Met Sally scene, when Sally is in a crowded cafe simulating an orgasm for Harry's benefit, the Indian made-for-TV version takes you from Sally starting with a slight moan to a none too subtle leap forward to the elderly lady on a neighbouring table calling the waiter over and -as she points towards Meg Ryan - saying, "I'll have whatever she's just had."

Taking all the above into consideration therefore, you can imagine how surprised I was a couple of nights ago to switch on the TV and, hopping through the channels, find Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz starring opposite each other in - what I learn today - is a film called Elegy. I have favourite actors and Ben Kingsley is one of those. Just as you would normally expect a Sandra Bullock film to be average/mediocre, so you'd expect a Ben Kingsley film to be good+. And it was. Again, we came to it half way through but I sat there pretty much hooked and noticed also that there appeared to be no censorship (what minimal swearing there was had not been edited) and - marvel of marvels - no adverts. I was just thinking that it couldn't get much better when Penelope Cruz, reunited with her old lover (Sir Ben), but by now suffering from breast cancer, sat down in front of him and took her top off. No censorship, not a blurred image in sight, just Penelope Cruz's chest and Ben Kingsley taking her photograph. Marvellous. I almost choked.

And that was as far as I got. I think I probably walked out of the room to attend to Niharika and when I came back, Shilpi had switched channels (probably in protest against Ms Cruz's lascivious behaviour). And you know, I just could not find that wretched channel afterwards. I think I surfed up and down the eighty-odd channels a couple of times after that but there was no Ben and no Penelope to be seen. If Shilpi hadn't witnessed the whole thing as well, I might have thought I'd imagined it all.

So that's another film that I need to complete, and if you're wondering why I don't just go and buy the DVDs, here's the postscript. A little while ago I bought a number of DVDs from one of those dodgy shops near Commercial Street. I happily watched No Country For Old Men, Atonement and a number of others until it came to 3.10 to Yuma. It was just reaching the climax when the DVD froze and that was that. So that's the third film I need to complete; serves me right for buying a pirate DVD.

Originally published on Blogger on 10th October 2008.

The cat in the hat goes splat

2009-10-22T03:27:00.004+01:00

The sun was not out, it was too wet to play
So we sat in the house on that cold day in May.
We sat and we sat and I thought, “How I wish
I wasn’t indoors with this spoilsport fish,
And Sally who never says boo to a goose,
I've got to get out, I have to cut loose.”

But we sat there and stared, just Sally and me;
Our mother was out for the day on a spree.
Our mother was out on her own spending money
And she did not care that the sun was not sunny
Or that we were at home all alone on our own,
Just Sally and me and our fish with the moan.

Then Sally said “Yikes!” and she pointed like that
And who should we see but the cat in the hat
Outside on the kerb, looking cold, drenched and soggy
A miserable, hat-cladded, sad looking moggy.

But our fish said, “No, no”
Make that cat go away
You know what he does
When he comes here to play.
He should not be here,
He should not be about.
He should not be here
While your mother is out.”

But I cut him short there
And I threw the fish out.
I threw the fish out
Of the house to the cat;
In one gulp he was gone,
In one gulp that was that.

“Have no fear” said the cat,
“I will not make a fuss”
And he stepped off the kerb
straight under a bus.

SPLAT! went the cat
In the hat as we sat.
How that hat cat went SPLAT!
Just like that as we sat.

And Sally and I did not know what to do,
The cat just a corpse and and our dreary fish too.
So we sat and we sat on that cold English day
Too bored to converse and too cold to play.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Cat in the Hat, the cat comes into the children's house, makes a huge mess, makes another huge mess with Thing One and Thing Two and then clears everything up before the children's mother comes home. The fish is, I suppose, the moral conscience in the story. It's the fish who tells the cat he should not be there while the children's mother is out and it's the fish who tells the cat to stop his high jinks. The fish also shakes with fear when it sees the children's mother returning home. The fish takes on the role of fishy guardian (but then after all, he's a fish and has good reason to be wary of a cat in the house).

I've borrowed the itialicised lines from the original, but the others are my own. My apologies to Dr Seuss.

Originally published on Blogger on 3rd October 2008 at a time when my three year old daughter was seriously into Dr Seuss.

An outrage

2009-10-21T03:39:00.008+01:00

On 26th November 2008 a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks was launched at targets in Mumbai. The attacks lasted for three days and claimed the lives of 173 people. I watched NDTV's reporting of the drama and wrote the following spoof mid-way through the events and at a time when the identity of the attackers, and their nationalities, were unknown. NDTV News 24x7 reporter Barkha Dutt was later criticised for her reporting of the story which gave the terrorists - or "derrorists" as she would say - vital information on the location of hostages cowering inside hotels. The Pakistan-based militant organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba was later identified as the group behind the outrage.

An Outrage

Bark At Dat:
"Day thirty three and the hostage situation is finally over. All derrorists have been cleared from the hotel; situation now calm."

[Leans meaningfully into earpiece]

"News just coming through... do NOT adjust your volume control, I am just hearing that... I have been told shout even louder. So to repeat, DAY THIRTY THREE, HERE IN MUMBAI. NEWS JUST REACHING US IS THAT ALL DERRORISTS, DEAD!"

[Scroll bar at foot of TV screen reads: "Situation still critical. Terrorists continue hotel rampage]

"So there you have it. The outrage they are describing as India's 9-11, is finally over."

[Leans into earpiece and looks earnestly at camera. A large explosion is seen over Bark At Dat's shoulder]

"In all my years as an over-bearing shouty mouthpiece, I never thought I would see the day that I would be kept up working for so many nights. It has finally happened. India's 9/11, 10/11, 12/11... 33/11 is finally over."

[Scroll bar at foot of TV screen reads: "Gunfire heard in Taj Oberoi]

"To recap, thirty three days ago, derrorists stormed the Taj Oberoi and started shooting people. They shot all the people, then started shooting up the fine furnishings. They got bored and started playing carom board while they waited for the security forces to come and kill them.

[Scroll bar at foot of TV screen reads: "No end in sight to hotel siege". Bark At Dat looks a little uncomfortable and starts chewing her lip]

"So who are these derrorists? What drives them? [Turns to a shock-haired academic standing next to her. He's picking his nose.] I have with me now, Professor Earnest from the Indian Institute of Advanced Derrorist Studies. Professor?

Professor Earnest:
"I don't know. Nobody knows and because nobody knows we'll assume they're from Pakistan. Keep the old hatred burning, if you know what I mean."

Bark At Dat:
"Fascinating. Back to Shoutyman in the studio."

Shoutyman:
"Thank you Bark At. I can shout louder than you."

Bark At Dat:
"No you can't."

Shoutyman:
"Can too. And I can lean forward as if in pain, twist my body, gesticulate and look VERY VERY SERIOUS. I have a Masters in Excitable Behaviour and Speaking Very Quickly, and a PHD in Advanced Interruption Techniques."

Bark At Dat
"Well..."

Shoutyman:
[Screaming] "AND... NEWS JUST COMING IN... YES... YES. THE HOTEL SIEGE IS FINALLY OVER. I REPEAT, THE SIEGE IS... FINALLY... OVER."

[Scroll bar at foot of TV screen reads: "No end in sight to hotel siege"]

Originally published on Blogger on 28th November 2008.

When technology falls short

2009-10-20T04:02:00.003+01:00

This is another one of those driving-related posts. As Private Eye's Glenda Slagg may have said, "Indians - dontcha just love the way they drive." Last night was one of those nights when everybody seemed out to get me - from the car which suddenly stopped dead in its tracks in front of me to let somebody out, to the people walking three abreast in the road. There was even a cow in the road on my journey back home last night.

But this post isn't a moan about bad driving. You accept, when you get behind the wheel in India, that everybody else is a madman, and that you're the only sane person in the country (but then again, you also tell yourself that when you drive in Britain too). No, I want to draw attention to those quirky and amusing little add-ons and eccentricities which some drivers in India insist upon.

I'm guessing that apart from the odd antique Ambassador and some rusty old Fiats, that most cars on the road in India are equipped with hazard lights. However, on more than one occasion recently, I've passed broken down vehicles - their hazard lights blinking away merrily - onto the back of which the drivers have stuck lumps of foliage. It seems to be common practice here that if you break down and you don't have hazard lights, you warn other drivers by laying some rocks in the road a couple of feet away from the vehicle and then camouflage the back of it so that it resembles a tree. The stalled van that I passed the other day had its perfectly good hazard lights largely obscured by branches and leaves.

Another add-on that some drivers have is flashing rear lights when they brake. So you don't just get the brake lights coming on, you get brake lights then reverse lights, brake lights, reverse lights and so on.

Finally, as the theory must go, if God had intended us to indicate to people which way we were turning, he'd have given us orange blinking lights on our arms. He didn't, and so while all vehicles would appear to have functioning indicators, the minority of drivers who actually think to tell the person behind what they're doing, may simply flop an arm out of the window instead.

I hope that when the Tata Nano hits the streets, Sir Ratan takes all these comments on board and equips each vehicle with foldaway plastic branches at the rear, and a couple of fold-away plastic arms at the front; one on each side.

Originally published on Blogger on 1st October 2008. I'm sorry to report that Sir Ratan has missed an opportunity.

Two persons hurt in climbing mishap

2009-10-19T02:08:00.005+01:00

Here’s how the Indian TV news channel NDTV 24x7 would report the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme. All names (except those of Jack and Jill), are fictitious.

Prashant - TV Anchor
Two persons have been injured in a freak climbing accident. Jack and his companion Jill had gone up a hill to fetch a pail of water when Jack fell down and broke his crown. Jill came tumbling after. Live from the hill, our reporter, Amrita Shah, takes up the story.

Amrita Shah
Thank you Prashant. Well, as you say, two persons - Jack and Jill - had gone up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Suddenly, Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Prashant.

Prashant
Thank you Amrita. What do we know about the hill?

Amrita
Not too much. Jack was going up the hill to fetch a pail of water when he fell down and broke his crown. Jill came tumbling after.

[Headline appears at the foot of the TV screen: “hill breaks crown of pail-boy Jack”]

Prashant
What news of Jack and Jill?

Amrita
Prashant, it seems that Jack had gone up the hill to fetch a pail of water. We know nothing about the pail, or how heavy it was but it seems that Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. I have here with me, an eyewitness to the accident, Mr Shahid Trivedi. Mr Shahid, tell us what you saw.

Shahid Trivedi
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.

[Headline appears at the foot of the TV screen: “Boy and girl tumble down hill. Water spilled”]

Amrita
Jack and Jill. What do we know about them? Are they brother and sister? Are they married? Just what were they doing on the hill together?

Shahid Trivedi
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail a water.

Amrita
And what happened next?

Shahid Trivedi
Jack fell down and broke his crown

Amrita
Go on.

Shahid Trivedi
And Jill came tumbling after.

Amrita
Prashant, there you have it. Two people innocently going about their business to fetch a pail of water when one of them falls down, breaks his crown, and the other comes tumbling after. Back to you in the studio Prashant.

[Headline appears at the foot of the TV screen: “Water errand ends in tragedy”]

Prashant
I have with me in the studio now, Professor Chandrashekar Belagare from the Indian Institute of Applied Hill Sciences. Professor: a hill; Jack; Jill; a pail of water. A tragedy waiting to happen?

Professor
Well that depends on the hill, the two persons, the object they were carrying and the conditions underfoot. Let us look at the evidence so far.

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

Clearly, one would suspect that if Jack’s fall was severe enough to break his crown then the surface of the hill must have been slippery or unstable. But I think we’re overlooking something quite fundamental here. Who was carrying the pail? Jack fell down and broke his crown and – this is the key – Jill came tumbling after. If Jack and Jill had been carrying the pail together, would they not have fallen at the same time? The fact that Jill came tumbling after suggests that Jack lost his footing first and perhaps knocked Jill over as he slipped.

Prashant
Professor thank you very much. So there we have it, two persons – Jack and Jill – went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Later in the programme, Osama bin Laden captured in Afghanistan, President Bush says rent-boy menage-a-trois was "just a brief lapse of judgement", and Pakistan launches nuclear warheads against key Indian cities. But next up, join us after the break for a studio discussion about hills, boys and girls and whether water-fetching trips should be supervised. We’ll be right back...

Originally published on Blogger on 22nd September 2008.

Senseless bureaucracy

2009-10-18T04:14:00.002+01:00

I've always wondered why, when confronted with officialdom in various forms, it's a requirement to include your father's name on documents or applications. It's one of those Indian practices which makes absolutely no sense at all; at least none that I can see. It's not as if the name is verifiable or, even if it were, that it is ever going to be checked. And because there is no earthly reason for including that question, you might wonder why the question is continually asked. Well wonder away, because it still is asked.

On our own company vetting form, (which I devised solely to waste cold-callers' time), I included the father's name requirement and also asked people to give the name of their paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother (and some people actually filled the details in or at least wrote "don't know"). I could just as easily have asked for the name of their dog or their favourite primate.

What makes the whole "father's name" thing even more ridiculous is that names in India (like spellings) are completely flexible and interchangeable. Forenames are swapped with surnames and vice versa, spellings are altered to reflect numerological superstitions, and even partial addresses can be included in a name. I'm sure the British are originally to blame for requiring the father's name to be stated on official documents but isn't it about time somebody in India stood up and said, "this is just plain daft, let's do away with it"? Then again, there are probably entire government "father's name" departments devoted to perpetuating the old paternal red tape traditions. We may well be stuck with this anachronism for another couple of centuries.

Another bureaucratic tradition which has also puzzled me, is the need for a company seal on documents. Again, this must go back to British days when letters and envelopes were secured with wax seals. In these modern, post quill pen days, when you can order a seal from any local shop and have it delivered in a matter of hours, the insistance on having documents stamped with a company seal is, again, quite ludicrous. I could go out today, order a seal bearing the name IBM - Bangalore, crib a logo from the internet, invent an address and print up a letterhead. Signing the letter with a fictional name, the letter would be given authority by my recently purchased seal. Hey presto, I'm a senior executive with IBM, as witnesseth (yes, Indian legal documents still use "witnesseth") my hand and seal. And if you don't believe me, go and ask my father.

Originally published on Blogger on 18th September 2008. The cartoon, published in Punch in 1857 seems to suggest that we British probably were to blame.

Smash crash Sunday

2009-10-16T03:07:00.003+01:00

When I was in the UK recently, I took a trip to London with colleagues. I set out from my base in Essex reasonably early on a bright Sunday morning and I hadn't gone very far before I reached a familiar junction close to the railway station. This junction is normally controlled by traffic lights but on this particular day, the lights weren't working.

Now as I said, this was relatively early in the morning, probably about 9am, and it was a Sunday, so no commuter traffic. Nevertheless, as if magnetically drawn to one another, two cars had somehow collided and the drivers were standing next to their dented pride and joys, exchanging insurance details. I should also add, that although this particular junction can get busy during peak hours, the roads are wide, the approaches to it are clear and visibility generally is good.

As I drove past the accident I thought how different this was from India and how dependent British drivers are on road traffic signals. Although I have, on rare occasions, been known to grumble slightly about Indian roads, I also acknowledge that the chaos and mayhem that generally prevails is probably the only way that driving in this country can work. Start following rules (like waiting at red lights, obeying"no left/right turn" signs and driving the wrong way up a one way street or dual carriageway) and there would soon be traffic snarl-ups.

Indian drivers follow just two unwritten rules: "fortune favours the brave" and "might is right". Indian bus and lorry drivers know this very well but even if you're driving a little Maruti 800 you can still get by as long as long as you follow the first rule. In India, no quarter is either expected or given and I did laugh (as you do, cursing and spitting between your teeth) when, waiting at a junction in East London later that same day, British-Indian drivers just refused to let me out. If you want a taste of a corner of an English field that is forever foreign, take a drive through Ilford. I guarantee you'll find no smashes at traffic junctions there.

Originally published on Blogger on 17th September 2008.

Airtel - We're really, really shit

2009-10-15T08:26:00.003+01:00

I just checked Airtel's website and it would appear that the company doesn’t have a strapline. My first thought was that this was a bit odd, but on reflection I can appreciate that to come up with a single line that summarises a company of Airtel’s magnitude must be an extremely tough proposition. Or is it? Here are a few of my suggestions:

Airtel – we’re really, really shit.

Airtel – we never forget you’re a snivelling customer

Airtel – government service from the private sector

Airtel – who the hell are you?

Airtel – we know you know your place

I could go on, and on… and on… but let me just try and give a brief justification for why I feel compelled to assist Airtel with a strapline.

During my week in England, my wife took out a wireless internet connection with Airtel. It doesn’t matter that we already have an account for mobile phones, she still had to present a number of different documents and then sign another agreement. Unfortunately though, we’ve moved house and so when, a couple of days later, an Airtel employee visited our old address to verify that we lived there still, we weren’t there.

I got an e-mail from Airtel at the weekend telling me that the internet connection had been suspended because the address could not be verified and that we should call in at an Airtel office as soon as we could. This we duly did yesterday.

In the short time we were in the office, we were seen by four different smirking Airtel employees and told that the internet connection had been withdrawn, we would get a refund within 40 days and that we would then have to re-apply. It didn’t matter that we had a revised proof of address with us, the connection had been terminated and that was that. Great customer service from a company we’ve done business with for several years. The problem is that, as far as I know, none of the opposition are much better. I had a connection with Reliance when I first came to India and they were absolutely hopeless. Maybe I should try Vodaphone. They’re the new kids on the block and maybe they have brought some western customer service out to the east. On second thoughts, they probably outsourced all that to India long ago.

Originally published on Blogger on 16th September 2008 - and still waiting for the refund in October 2009.

London tourist

2009-10-14T03:19:00.002+01:00

I took a couple of my Indian colleagues to London yesterday. They’re over here spending time in the Ipswich office and as I am here for a short time as well, I thought I’d show them some of the sights.

It’s rare that I get a chance to do this type of thing. Friends in India are unfailingly kind and generous and have always gone to great lengths to make me feel at home. Yesterday it was my turn.

We drove into London via the A13 which took us past the City airport and some of the newer Docklands developments. Then it was into the City proper: Bishopsgate – Threadneedle Street – Cheapside and St Pauls. I parked at St Pauls and we had a bite to eat before walking round St Paul’s churchyard. Back in the car and into the West End via Fleet Street – Aldwych – The Strand. I parked in an NCP car park in Covent Garden and we watched some entertainment in the plaza before walking down to Piccadilly – photos of Eros – Leicester Square – photos of cinemas – Trafalgar Square – Lord Nelson and the National Gallery – and then down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. We were fortunate that a troop of cavalry, possibly Lifeguards, was coming towards us – breastplates gleaming - as we were walking down. We photographed them and then moved up to the Victoria statue in front of Buck House.

And then it was back up The Mall and into Covent Garden to fetch the car. I thought it might be a good idea to drive to Westminster but having got there, we then went round in circles for a short while as there were major diversions in place – a bit like Bangalore without the tourist attractions (and the heat and the noise).

I think we crossed the river three times yesterday; three and a half times if you count the brief foray we made onto the Millennium Bridge when we were at St Pauls. Re-crossing at Waterloo it was then back through the City, into Bethnal Green and up Vallance Road (erstwhile home of the Kray brothers), and then out into Essex via Whitechapel, Mile End, Stepney and Bow. I love London and although it’s only been a few weeks since I was last there with Shilpi and the children, the city endlessly fascinates. I could return again and again and never tire of the place.

I drove back to Ipswich where we had a drink and a bite to eat and then, having dropped the guys, it was back to Essex again; all in all a trip of between two hundred and fifty and three hundred miles I should think. The weather had been lousy in Essex and Suffolk but in London there was not a drop of rain and for a while at least, I was walking around in a t-shirt.

On reaching home my mother told me of the run-around that she and my father had had trying to find a chemist that was open on a Sunday. How different from India where at times, every fifth shop seems to be a medical one and where many are also open 24 hours.

Originally published on Blogger on 8th September 2008.

Travels in my Blighty

2009-10-13T04:49:00.003+01:00

I've mentioned the word "Blighty" quite a bit in this blog. For me, the word has huge First World War connections. I've read and researched and written extensively about World War One and I have a website: Chailey 1914-1918 and a connected Chailey 1914-1918 blog which deal with just one small Sussex community during the The Great War. Old soldiers I interviewed in the 1980s would refer to England as "Blighty" and it was every soldier's wish, faced with the horrors of trench warfare, to get what they called, "a Blighty one"; that is, a wound serious enough to be sent home to England.

My mother asked me last night where the term Blighty came from and you know, I didn't know. I said that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a derivation of a Hindustani word and I looked it up this morning and lo and behold, it is. The Thorndike Barnhart dictionary that I consulted says this: n. British slang. 1. England; home (used originally by soldiers on foreign service). 2. a wound that sends a soldier home [Hindustani - bilayati: foreign, European]

Back home in Bangalore I have a huge tome, a reprint from a far earlier work called Hobson Jobson which is a collection of Indian and Anglo-Indian terms and phrases from the time the British were in India. I dip into it every so often but hadn't checked Blighty. There are many words of course, which are still in common (and often slang) usage today. My east London Indian van driver direction giver on Thursday might just as well have said to me, "Yes mate, take a left here, a right there and have a dekko at the road sign..." To have a dekko means to have a look and that of course, comes from dekhna (have I spelt that correctly?) In fact the expressions, Kya dekhta hai (what are you looking at?) and sub auto rickshaw wallahs chor hai (all auto drivers are thieves) were two of the first phrases I learned when I moved to Bangalore. Both have been used to good effect on a number of occasions.

Originally published on Blogger on 6th September 2008. The military-related blogs have since increased from two to eight.

Back to Blighty

2009-10-12T04:18:00.004+01:00

Well it's definitely not nightie weather in England, and neither is it dry. I seem to have brought the monsoon with me from Bangalore and as any Brit will tell you, there is a reason why Albion is known as a "green and pleasant land".

But it's good to be back again even if, on my flight over here, I had one chap in front of me who seemed to determined to push his seat back even farther than it would go; and a small boy behind me who relentlessly kicked the seat. That happens from time to time but all in all, nothing to complain about and I was actually quite impressed by the new Bengaluru International Airport. For the most part, the approach road to the airport was good and was pretty much floodlit all of the way. The guards, the airline staff and even the customs officials were courteous, and the facilities were not bad; certainly a vast improvement on the old HAL airport. The only complaint really would be the toilets in the departure lounge which seemed very small and which, really did smell like - well - toilets.

But I was impressed with the courtesy and having been brought up myself to believe that "manners maketh man", it was nice to see some of that being practised at BIAL. To me, it makes a lot of difference.

England was bright and pleasant when I landed and the last part of the approach to Heathrow was over London; a beautiful aerial view of the Thames estuary and then the Thames and West End with all the landmarks clearly visible. It looked fantastic.

Arriving at Heathrow I quickly picked up my hire car and then drove right through London into the heart of the city, making a quick detour to south London to sort out my passport and visa. I parked the car close to Guy's hospital and then negotiated with the Indian attendant on the price. The charge (for twenty minutes) was three pounds. Used to the way of doing things in India, I got that down to two pounds and then headed off again. In a queue of traffic, I hopped out of the car and approached the van driver in front. "Which way do I go for Tower Bridge?" I asked him.

An Indian face leaned out of the window. "As it 'appens, I can tell ya," he said in broad cockney. "Turn left at the lights, 'ang a right..." Getting back into the car I noticed the van bore the logo of the "Desi Group". I should have known the driver would be Indian.

And then it was a drive back over Tower Bridge and out through the City and East End: Aldwych, Mile End, Stepney Green, Bow, Stratford and then into the Essex countryside; a quick tear up the M11 after all the clutch control through London. I think I reached my parents' house at about five, after what would have been a fifteen hour journey. But it was wonderful to see London again at close quarters and good to be back in England.

Originally published on Blogger on 5th September 2008 - and I plan to see a good deal more of Blighty in 2010. Photos depict Tower Bridge under construction in 1892.

Ganesh Chaturthi

2009-10-08T05:10:00.002+01:00

I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but I always consider that the Ganesh Chaturthi holiday marks the start of the holiday season in south India, and I see that this festival is particularly celebrated in the south.

When I moved to India in 2003, my first port of call was Hyderabad, and I stayed in Secunderabad for a week from 5th September that year. Just a few metres away from the house I was staying in there was a Ganesha shrine and I think every night whilst I was there, there was relentless pounding on drums.

The Ganesh festival always seems a long while in coming and is heralded, often a couple of months in advance, by gangs of children knocking on the door for money to buy an idol. Being a Christian - albeit not a very good Christian and certainly not a regular church-goer - I'm never too comfortable about giving money for idols. Thankfully, I'm at work for a good part of the week and so I tend to avoid the dilemma of eager children at the door with their hands outstretched. But I do give money to them and think to myself that, fair enough, that's their culture and religion. It may not be the religion that I follow but I have no right to question their faith and besides which, I am still a guest in their country. In this land of contradictions, India is good at teaching religious tolerance - and also exhibiting at times, extreme religious intolerance.

But I do remember wondering, five years ago, with a pillow shoved down tight over my ears as the Hyderabadi drum-beaters went about their work, why the bloody hell had I chosen to settle in such a noisy country? (Incidentally, the Christians got their own back at Christmas by carol-singing round the streets at gone midnight).

Today, the streets of Bangalore are deserted: no school buses and barely any office workers. Add into that mix that when I left this morning it was raining cats and dogs and Thor was throwing down lightning bolts and shaking the clouds with his roars, and you'll understand that Bangalore was again really quite pleasant to drive through. Most of the people in the office are off celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi but apart from a few fireworks in the early hours of the morning, it's pretty peaceful; certainly none of the drum-banging that was taking place in Hyderabad. Speaking to people here, it seems the further north you go - certainly until you reach Mumbai, the noisier it gets.

I'm going to miss my fifth anniversary in India because I'm flying to the UK tomorrow; my fourth (and final) trip there this year. But by the time I come back, all the Ganesh idols will have been immersed, we'll have another few weeks of monsoon to contend with and the majority Hindu population will be gearing up for Dussera and Diwali (and probably other holidays in between).

Happy Ganesh Chaturthi to all.

Originally published on Blogger on 4th September 2008.

Babel

2009-10-06T04:00:00.002+01:00

We'd been asked by our support team in the UK to get somebody to look at one of our servers. We'd tried various fixes using their expertise there but nothing had worked. In the end we called out an engineer from APC, the company which built and supplied the server in the first place.

When the guy turned up it was clear that he could not speak a word of English. I don't speak any Kannada and I'm barely technical - turning on my pc in the morning is about as technical as I get. Our support team in the UK are very technical (of course) but also non Kannada speakers (again, of course. I mean, if we as a race, struggle to speak our own language, we're hardly going to be conversant in a Dravidian language). Thankfully we have Kannada speakers and technical people in the office and so we had a situation where, having taken the call, I then passed the phone to one of our local language experts who in turn translated what was being said to the APC engineer.

For his part, he couldn't have been more disinterested had he tried, and while we were doing our best to break down language barriers, he was on the phone to someone else. When he did listen to what was being said he responded along the lines that it was all Dutch to him and that he was going to get a more senior colleague to come and have a look. Our support team in the UK rang off and thankfully, the senior colleague who turned up later that same evening, was able to press the right buttons or replace the right bits which have rectified the problem with that particular server.

I suppose there was an unexpressed expectation on our part that the Indian engineer employed by the Indian company in southern India would speak fluent English. Of course, there's no earthly reason why he should do but we do take it for granted that people will understand what we say, even though large swathes of south India are quite happy with their own local languages. Britons generally get round the language problem by, instead of trying to understand what the other person is saying, shouting the words slowly whilst gesticulating and pointing: YOU... SERVER... FIX... OK? LIGHT BLINKING. STOP LIGHT BLINKING OK?

Thankfully it didn't come to that but it was still a lovely typical Indian story in, of course, a typical Indian setting in India...

Originally published on Blogger on 2nd September 2008. It's a measure of how far I've progressed - or regressed - in a year, that I refered to this as a "lovely Indian story". Today I'd write that it was typically frustrating Indian episode.

Lashings of splashings

2009-10-05T12:40:00.003+01:00

The other day I was telling Shilpi the story of my brother's friend, Steve.

The snow's great while it lasts in England. Everywhere looks clean and fresh for a short while but when it melts, particularly if there have been heavy falls, the slush piles up on the roads and it's just very wet and mucky: melted ice mixed with the dirt from a thousand vehicle wheels. Steve was driving along on just such a typical slushy day, and probably driving too fast at that. He zoomed through a pile of slush at the side of the road and promptly sent a tidal wave of slush and muck over two old ladies who were waiting at a bus stop. I don't think he meant to do it, but looking in his rear-view mirror and seeing the effect of his rash driving, Steve being Steve, decided to turn the car around and go back and repeat the exercise.

So he duly approached the bus-stop at speed again, drenched the women for a second time, and then headed off. This time though, the women took his registration number and it wasn't long before he got a knock at the door, swiftly followed by a fine and probably points on his licence; just desserts for inconsiderate behaviour.

And the reason I mention this now is that yesterday, driving along flooded roads on a rain-soaked afternoon in Kammanahalli, I did exactly what Steve had done - the first part at least.

We'd set off on, as it turned out, a fruitless trip to visit a bookshop out towards Hennur. As we left home, the clouds were already threatening and we hadn't gone very far before we were driving through torrential monsoon rain. I always like driving in the rain because the cyclists, motorcyclists and (for the most part) the auto drivers who normally clog up the roads, all make themselves scarce and take shelter under flyovers or in shop doorways. Furthermore, lightly and even moderately flooded roads don't hamper my driving because my vehicle is big.

So anyway, we're driving along through flooded roads and I have a rickshaw in front of me which is travelling at a snail's pace. I've never noticed this before but I saw lots of drivers yesterday driving with their hazard lights on. What's the point of that? Surely everyone can see that the roads are flooded. Use the hazard lights if you've broken down but why drive with hazard lights on? Then again, I'll never understand driving in India and so I'm happy to leave that as a rhetorical question.

In any event, I pretty soon got fed up with trailing the rickshaw and so I accelerated past it just as two more rickshaws were heading towards me. The result of that acceleration was that I dumped a tidal wave of water into not only the auto I was passing but the two that were coming towards me as well. It was unintentional, it would not have been pleasant for the auto drivers or their passengers (if they had any) but it was certainly dramatic.

I've been similarly drenched whilst travelling in autos. On one occasion, going to meet a colleague from the UK, I was completely soaked and had to then make a detour to buy another shirt. It's one of the hazards of travelling during monsoon I suppose and particularly, I should admit, travelling in a country where you encounter inconsiderate behaviour on a daily basis.

So I'm sorry if you were one of the splashees but if you were, you'll know that unlike my brother's friend Steve, I didn't then turn around and attempt to repeat the exercise.

Originally published on Blogger on 1st September 2008. There have been a few more flooded roads since I wrote this...

Wireless connection

2009-09-30T03:12:00.003+01:00

In our old place, I had a broadband internet connection which linked up to my modem via a hefty cable through the window frame. I drilled a hole through the frame with a large drill bit and then fed the cable through it. It was a similar story with the TV cable in the house before that. That too came in through the window.

Such Heath-Robinson set-ups are quite common in India and outside our old house, nailed to the tree, was a junction box into and out of which sprung all manner of cables. (And therein lies another reason why, when a tree or branch falls down in a storm, you'll often lose your cable connection and your electricity).

I decided that when we moved to our current address, we'd dispense with cable and go for a wireless connection and it's really just laziness on my part that has prevented me from organising that. A couple of days ago though, somebody from Tata dropped off a leaflet advertising their internet service and so Shilpi called them up and last night an engineer came round.

I'd forgotten that he was coming and so I wasn't home when Shilpi called me to say that Dinesh was in the house. I spoke to him and asked him what service they would provide, explaining that I was only interested in a wireless connection.

"We'll install a satellite dish on your roof and then connect that to your computer with a cable", I was told.
"OK, so that's not wireless then is it? There's a physical connection between the satellite dish and the computer."
"It's Wireless, satellite sir."

I explained that I was out and asked Dinesh if he could come back in an hour's time. He said he would do. Sure enough, an hour later, as I was just finishing dinner, he called again and Shilpi asked him to come in five minutes because we were eating. It was probably getting on for eight by now and this chap was still hanging around waiting for us to see him.

"Look," I said to my wife, "I don't want to have cables trailing through windows and this guy is only providing that cable service. We can probably save him a trip by telling him now that we're not interested."

So I called him and there was then a fairly lengthy conversation during which time Dinesh said to me - several times - "sorry sir, I didn't get you" and I replied (several times) in turn by saying - slowly -"I'm sorry, that's my English accent." In the end though, I gave up, and passed the phone back to Shilpi with Dinesh still insisting that he'd like to come round. He did come round, straight away got his presentation out which had an illustrated diagram of a satellite dish, a cable and a computer and then started his spiel.

"Can you provide a wireless service?" I asked, "Something without cables and wires."
"We will install a satellite dish" he said.
"Linked to my laptop by a cable?" I asked.
"Yes sir."
"Well I'm looking for a wireless service," I explained, "I know that Tata do a wireless service [and so do Airtel for that matter] and that's the kind of service I'm looking for."

And that was it. Dinesh left. And I offer this little story as an illustration of

a) How difficult it still is at times to communicate. In the same way that I sometimes have trouble understanding the local accent in Bangalore, a lot of people - even some old friends of mine - struggle to understand my accent when I'm speaking on the phone. (And I should say that I think my accent is a fairly flat Essex one with no strong dialect).
b) The persistence of sales people. I think some of the misunderstanding was genuine. I also feel that having had a bite, Dinesh wasn't going to stand for any old nonsense about a potential customer not wanting cable.
c) The politeness and long-suffering of sales people. We'd arranged a time for Dinesh to call. He was true to his word and we delayed him twice. He was unfailingly polite and courteous throughout and probably encounters such delays every day. Indeed, that seems to be part of Indian life; IST they call it over here: Indian Stretchable Time.

Originally published on Blogger on 29th August 2008.

In the fourteen months since, we've moved house again and obtained another "wireless connection" with the cable trailing in through the window. When I was in the UK a month ago, I bought a dongle and some airtime from one of the UK providers. The dongle came from Staples, the airtime came via a voucher. Simple, and I was up and running in ten minutes.

Room for Swedes

2009-09-25T09:47:00.003+01:00

I wonder if the powers that be at IKEA have considered opening stores in India. The suggestion seems ridiculous at first thought. Why would a European furniture manufacturer with a reputation for quality but cost-effective furniture come to a country where everything is so much cheaper? Why indeed, but just hold on a minute.

Number one, India is not as cheap as it used to be. Some things are still ridiculously cheap but furniture - good quality furniture at that - does not necessarily fall into that bracket. Let me re-phrase that. Good quality furniture is certainly going to be cheaper here than the equivalent good quality furniture in the west, but first you have to find a really top-notch craftsmen and second, I have yet to see quality, utilitarian furniture of the IKEA ilk in India. At this point in time I should probably point out that IKEA is already in India in the form of four floor to ceiling Billy bookcases in my house, and one half Billy bookcase. I found it preferable to ship my IKEA furniture from the UK rather than go to the trouble and expense of getting something made locally; something that would almost certainly not have offered me the flexibility that Billy does.

The reason for asking the IKEA question now is that we're looking for something suitable to put my daughter's toys and books into. We've been to a number of stores but you know, we just can't find anything that's a combination of well-made, robust and aesthetically pleasing. I had hopes yesterday, when we visited the Home Store (part of Shoppers' Stop), that we would find something, but there was really nothing there. In the end, we've placed an order with a local company, Wood and Wicker, which makes quality furniture to order. We've settled on two small bookcase / cupboard combinations, subscribing to the old adage that yes, they'll be expensive but you get what you pay for and just as Billy has made it across the Arabian Sea, these two items of furniture will also follow the same passage when we move to England (whenever that may be).

But if I were working for IKEA, I might look hard at the Indian market and consider opening up shops in some of the larger metros. If the executives there did but know it, most of the furniture shops in Russell Market in Shivajinagar (and even Wood and Wicker for that matter), will trot out ancient German IKEA catalogues and promise to make you something "exactly like" the furniture pictured. They can't of course which is why IKEA could make a killing. After all, if Mothercare can come to India, sell items for more than you'd pay in the UK and still apparently turn a healthy profit, I'm sure the Swedes could do the same.

Originally published on Blogger on 26th August 2008. A couple of months ago there was a story in the local newspapers which effectively said that Ikea's plans to open in India had either been rejected by the powers that be, or that the Swedes had decided they just couldn't be bothered with the hassle. I forget which. That's bad news for the consumer, but good news for Mr Ali's Speshul Furnitures Emporiam.

Family values

2009-09-21T05:58:00.002+01:00

I guarantee, without fail, that when I meet my pals in the pub, they will always ask after my wife and children. And that's not just one of those throw-away "how you doing?" type comments, they genuinely do seem to want to know how my family is faring. I can't say that I ask them how their wives and children are, even though most of them have families. In the same way that it seems to be knocked into you in India that that's one of the first things you ask, in Britain I would suggest, such enquiries - at least during the opening of a conversation - are rarely there.

I may be wrong on that last point, I've been a long time away from England, and even longer from bumping into casual acquaintances in English pubs. The topic of family will generally come up in most conversations with friends - at some point - but rarely as an opener.

In India, the conversation seems to go like this:
Friend: Hello, how are you?
Me: I'm fine thanks, how are you?
Friend: Fine. How's the wife and kids?

In England it might go like this:
Friend: Hello, how are you?
Me: I'm fine thanks, how are you?
Friend: Fine. Bloody awful weather we're having... she's not bad looking... did you see that Arsenal have signed Etienne de Faberger from Marseilles... she's not bad looking... have you seen the price of brussel sprouts?

But then again, India is definitely more family oriented than Britain, and probably most of the civilised west for that matter. Over here, as an ageing parent, you can generally look forward to one of your kids coming to look after you or joining them in their home. In Britain, you have just got to hope that your kids dump you in a decent old people's home rather than on the street.

Originally published on Blogger on 22nd August 2008

Adrenalin Drives

2009-09-14T05:18:00.002+01:00

That's the headline on the front page of the Deccan Chronicle's Bangalore supplement. Actually, the headline reads, Adrenalin 'drives' but as I can see no earthly reason for that additional punctuation, I've removed it.

Anyway, the story concerns the latest pastime in the city which, if the article is to be believed, sees Bangalore's thwarted night-clubbers and party animals heading off for a "Refreshing drive" on the "newly dolled up [sic] highways". "The road leading to the new airport is a dream and the airport does have a few eateries that are open 24/7 so we like to head there and hang out till the wee hours," says one woman. Another talks of carrying picnic baskets and beer (drink-driving anybody?) and heading off along the Mysore Road; a convoy of two cars and four bikes where "the ones on the bikes love doing their wheeleys [sic] as the road doesn't have many vehicles."

You know, reading this article, I really do feel as though I've come from a different planet and at the same time, I feel fortunate that, with the benefit of having travelled on some pretty decent roads in developed countries, I can see what rot this really is.

I remember, a good while back (so it's a possibility that I might have already mentioned this on this blog), that somebody - a local I think - explained to me that MG Road in Bangalore must be like Oxford Street in London. Well yes, of course it is, it's just like Oxford Street without the shops, the decent pavements, the tourists thronging from around the world, and the safety standards that we take for granted in the west. In Oxford Street I like to walk along and look up at the architecture. Try that on MG Road and you'd just as likely trip over a trailing cable or stumble on a pot-hole and sprain your ankle. Now I know that that might sound smug, and I can see that if people don't have anything to compare Bangalore's amenities to, that they might think that MG Road is like Oxford Street and that Brigade Road is like Regent Street rather than some run-down B-Road in a dismal English seaside resort. But those people have televisions don't they? Or do they suppose that what they see on TV is only from a film set and that in England you don't have decent parks in cities, and proper pavements and sensible, responsible driving?

But really, what right do I have to dismiss the comments in The Deccan Chronicle from people who obviously enjoy driving along Bangalore's highways? But let me give my perspective - my moany-old-git point of view.

There is nothing refreshing about driving on Bangalore's roads - and I would extend that to Indian roads in general - at any time of the day or night. During the daytime, Bangalore's roads are choked with traffic. At night, you run the risk of not seeing that pot-hole, or that speed-breaker (we call those "sleeping policemen" in England), or not seeing that lorry or bus bearing down on you on the wrong side of the road without its lights on. (Or some idiot motorcyclist coming in your direction doing a wheelie).

At times, it's almost as if you slip back into some Pollyanna fantasy world full of frolicking lambs, and small children holding hands and running through chest-high grasses. "We usually jam up at a club, hang out till 11.30pm" says one frustrated party-animal "and then decide to hit one of these Coffee Day outlets and stay there till dawn. We play dumb charades, antakshari and truth and dare. Some of us take colouring books and crayons and the girls take their dollies to play with." Actually, I made that last sentence up, but you get the picture.

But again, you know, good for him - or her - and I hope that they have many more happy days of driving on Bangalore's roads. But you know, if they get such an adrenalin rush over here, how on earth would they react if they were stuck in a traffic jam on the M6 or M25 in England? Nothing short of orgasmic I shouldn't wonder.

Originally published on Blogger on 21st August 2008.

More rain

2009-09-10T04:41:00.001+01:00

It's funny you know; after the long hot summer months everybody longs for rain. A few downpours later and everybody wants the dry days back again. We've had our fair share of drenchings recently and last night was one of those. It had been dry all day but then, around nine o'clock or so, the heavens opened and it fell down in stair-rods for a couple of hours.

We were all at home, nice and dry, but when I looked out of the window, the street had turned into a river and the drains were over-flowing. Nothing unusual in that of course, but more worrying for me was the fact that a delivery boy had left his moped parked out in the street - well out in the street - opposite my car. This meant that anybody wanting to pass, had a very narrow gap in which to do so.

I'm going to start moaning again, so if you don't want to hear another whinge, look away now.

Life in India could be so much simpler if road users had a little more consideration. People in general, could do with being more considerate, but let's just stick to road users for the time being. There often seems to be little (or zero) foresightedness amongst Indian drivers. Drive along a street with cars double parked and the driver coming towwards you will just as likely flash his lights at you to say, get out of the way, I'm coming through, rather than looking for a convenient place to stop so that you can both pass.

If the driver being flashed at has the same mentality, both cars will continue going until they're almost bumper to bumper and neither can move. There might then be a few gesticulations and expressions of anger and then, somehow, each will move a fraction of an inch and then another fraction of an inch until both can pass. Anticipating just that sort of encounter the other week, I held back on the double-parked road I was travelling along to let the person coming towards me pass, only to see the car behind me, start to overtake me. I stuck my hand out of the window and thankfully he stopped, but it surely doesn't take the brains of an archbishop to work out that sometimes it's the tortoise that wins the race and not always the hare.

I don't know expect that Indian driving schools teach awareness - or anything else for that matter. The learner I was following the other day, didn't pause when he reached the T junction, but just kept on going, cutting the corner in a wide sweeping motion. If I'd attempted that trick when I was learning to drive, my instructor would have yanked the wheel and the hand-brake at the same time. Not gearing-down into first, and then stopping at a junction was a sin that you only committed once. As for cutting corners, trying that little stunt could fail you on a test. I was always taught that you had to turn at right angles - having looked both ways first of course.

So in any event, as I was staring at the rain sheeting down outside, watching the small Tatas and Santros inching past my Scorpio and thinking, any minute now, a minibus is going to come along and scrape my paintwork or bash my mirror, I knew what I had to do. I grabbed an umbrella, went out into the deluge and moved my car another two feet up the road - and hoped that nobody else would park their bike carelessly close during the remaining hours it was there.

Originally published on Blogger on 19th August 2008.

Winningest

2009-09-04T03:51:00.002+01:00

I can almost picture Frank Muir, Patrick Campbell and the other Call My Bluff panellists trying to bluff each other with this one:

Winningest. A small spa town on the Bodensee much favoured by Hitler and Eva Braun during those final months of the war when Hitler was questionning whether it really had, after all, been such a good idea to go to war or whether it wouldn't have been preferable to take up basket weaving instead.

Winningest. knee-length chain-mail coat worn by Flemish infantrymen during their unsuccessful campaign against the French in 1342. This was the first time that Belgian soldiers wore chain mail jerkins and also the last. Although they successfully deflected French arows, the wieght of the chain mail caused the Belgians to sink in the marshy ground where they were easily picked off by their French counterparts.

Winningest. Winning most often; the most winning or charming.

And the answer is... the chain mail coat. Actually, no, it's the third one; the adjective used to describe something or someone who has most often been a winner. I was going to use this blog entry to launch another attack at people in India for taking another perfectly good English word and completely ruining it. Michael Phelps, according to Indian papers over the last few days, has become the winningest Olympic athlete, and as you do, (or as I do), I sneered and pooh-poohed and shook my head and wailed, "why-oh-why-oh-why?" until I checked the word on-line and saw that it dates from 1970 and not from 2008, on a sub-editor's desk at The Times of India (India's worst Daily) in Bangalore.

So that's rather taken the wind out of my sails but then again, it doesn't say where the word originates from and it sounds as though it could, quite conceivably, have come from a 1970 sub-editor's desk at The Times of India (probably still, even then, India's worst Daily) in Bangalore. I suspect the word is American but wherever it's from it just doesn't sit happily on a page. Whatever next? If he's the winningest, Michael Phelps must also be the swimmingest Olympian in history, and quite possibly, one of the longest-armed - or longarmingest - athletes to boot.

And why stop at swimming? You could have the gymnastingest, equestrianest, shot-puttingest, marathonest and decathlonest as well. The scope is huge and I suppose really, adding an est to the end of words, at a time in our evolution when words are shrtnd rthr thn lngthnd, may not be such a bad thing and might even be a gr8 thing. Remember where you read longarmingest first.

Originally published on Blogger on 18th August 2008.

A rat a day helps you work, rest and play

2009-09-03T04:56:00.003+01:00

One of the beauties of adding the India news links to the column on the right, is that you're never very far away from a completely idiotic - sorry, idiosyncratic - story from India. A cursory glance this morning reveals this lovely little story about eating rats.

"Rats are a major source of protein" says Vijay Prakash, a government official and rat-snacking advocate in the State of Bihar. "The only issue," he continued, before being led back to his padded cell, "is how people react to rat meat, but I think it will not be a problem."

I think we can probably resolve this quite easily. Hands up, who'd like to eat this:

And hands up who'd like to eat this:

Oh. I see. "Waiter, two deep fried rats pleased and make sure the tails are nice and crispy."

Originally published on Blogger on 14th August 2008.

Bananas!

2009-09-01T04:11:00.003+01:00

"Niharika, there's a lady with bananas on her head." So the cry goes up every couple of days when our friendly, but expensive, banana lady comes calling, and my amused daughter runs to the door to see her. That basket of hers weighs a ton as well. She's no spring chicken and it took me some effort just to help her lift the thing off her head. Goodness knows how she manages to carry it all day long.

All the same, there are only so many bananas a man can eat and now that she's become a celebrity by having her photo taken, the price seems to have gone up. The other day she was asking 30 rupees for what was probably no more than half a kilo, and I know for a fact that I can buy a kilogram in Ulsoor for 20 rupees.

Nonetheless, with the best interests of the Distressed Banana Sellers' Widows' Guild of Karnataka at heart, (to say nothing of her physiotherpist who must regularly look at her, shake his head and mutter, "worst case of banana-neck I've ever seen...") I bought a hand and then helped her on her way.

Originally publsihed on Blogger on 13th August 2008. Sadly, we've moved into an apartment block - Sriram Stepford - since I wrote this and therefore don't get the chance to buy bananas from Methusala's grandma anymore. Photo from allposters.com.

Street performers

2009-08-11T05:21:00.005+01:00

They announced their arrival in our street with loud drumming and clattering on a tom-tom and tin plate: three street performers from Chhattisgarh - a girl and her two brothers - who somehow eke out a living performing rope-walking acts on the street.

The wooden frame supports, the balancing pole and rope were carried by the older boy. His younger brother carried the smaller tools of their trade - the vessels to be balanced, a tin plate, a steel wheel rim, pickets and a hammer carried in a plastic washing-up bowl - and the girl, the star performer, carried a multi-coloured blanket fashioned from innumerable scraps of cloth.

The performance began with the younger boy banging on the tin plate whilst his brother set up the tight-rope. During this time, their sister sat crouched under the blanket, as if - by his banging hard enough on his plate - her brother would lure her out and onto the rope to perform for the people who were by now gathering from nearby houses.

The frame and tightrope in place - an exercise that took altogether no more than five minutes to put in place - the girl hopped up onto the rope and walked the length of it holding her heavy balancing pole. In the middle she stopped and swayed violently - and deliberately - from side to side.

Just beyond the rope was a wall studded with shards of glass. I think that her brother had erected the rope far enough away from the wall to prevent his sister from falling onto it had she slipped. I also believe that this was pure chance on his part and not part of his calculations. Had she fallen towards the wall, instinct may still have inclined her to reach out for support.

Thankfully, apart from some of the balanced cups on her head falling off as she was putting them in place, there were no mishaps. This tin-cup balancing was the next part of the act and that was followed by one perambulation with a tin plate under one foot and then finally, one walk-through using the bicycle wheel frame. I should think the whole act lasted no more than five minutes as well and, when it was over, the younger boy came round with a cup collecting money.

Some of the crowd melted away at this point in time - as street-performer crowds do everywhere - but someone gave the boy five rupees, another one two rupees, another one a single rupee coin. I gave the girl a hundred rupees and as her older brother was packing the supports and rope away he asked my wife for another hundred. "If you can give a hundred," he said, "you can give two hundred." Actually, he's right. I could have given an extra hundred but on this occasion I didn't. And his request is really no different from the approach taken by almost every single charity in the UK - including the three that I've worked for. You learn early on that your current donors are your best supporters and that it is more cost effective for you to ask them to give again, rather than recruit somebody new.

But what a dismal response to those three performers' act and as I said to Shilpi, it would surely make more financial success for the performers to position themselves somewhere where there are more tourists; somewhere where foreigners with easy money would put their hands into their pocketrs and pull out a 100 or even a 500 rupee note and not miss it at all. But I suppose that those self-same areas are patrolled by guards or policemen who would just as likely reward the performers with a cuff round the ears and certainly a percentage of their take.

And so instead they patrol the back streets with their battered accoutrements and their sullen, care-worn expressions.

Originally published on Blogger on 12th August 2008. I've lost the images that originally accompanied this article so here's a Bangalore street performer from 1928, borrowed from the Columbia University website.

Tied up in knots

2009-07-28T08:45:00.002+01:00

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?

2009-07-22T07:12:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-21T10:06:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-17T06:53:00.003+01:00

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…

2009-07-15T04:32:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-13T06:52:00.003+01:00

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?

2009-07-12T05:25:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-10T06:13:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-08T04:20:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-07T10:10:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-04T12:30:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-03T03:23:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-02T07:44:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-01T04:53:00.003+01:00

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.

Membrane Separation Process

2009-06-30T16:09:00.005+01:00

No, not the brain activity which occurs whenever I meet an Indian government official, rather the catchy little title of a new volume by Kaushik Nath. Membrane separation processes are largely rate-controlled separations which require analysis for complete understanding. Read that sentence again. Nope, me either, but that's what it says on the flyer.

So I know that Mr Nath has written this book because his publishers, Prentice Hall, have told me so; they've sent me a direct mail shot - my second piece of direct mail in as many days - and just in case the whole membrane separation is just going to be too messy for me, they've also advised me of another publication by Amiya K Jana. This one is called Chemical Process Modelling and Computer Simulation.

Now why I should be mailed details of two incredibly complex technical/scientific books is completely beyond me. This also, to the person who, nearly thirty years ago this summer, vowed never to read another science book in his life and completely gave up on Physics, a subject which he'd hated and which had been thrust upon him at school. Grade 4 CSE was what I achieved for my physics paper in the summer of 1979 and if there is anybody reading this who still remembers CSEs in British schools, they'll know what an apallingly low score that grade 4 was. It was a mark of some pride to me that I managed to get a grade 4, whilst a friend of mine who'd actually revised, achieved a grade two. I mean, you were awarded a grade four if you wrote your name on the examination paper; three if you spelt it correctly.

But I digress. What I mean to say is that Prentice Hall of India could probably not have targeted anybody less likely than me to buy either of these books, even though - in what I take to be a last desperate move to make Mr Nath's book sound appetising - the publisher says that "the book has a sufficient number of examples and exercises, thus making it student friendly." Hmm, nice try but I don't think so.

As I mentioned the other day, direct marketing, whilst not exactly in its infancy in India, still has a long, long way to go. Maybe they were just testing whether the address (largely spelt correctly) was a bona fide one; something that they would be able to adjudge correct or otherwise by the number of returned mailshots.

In any event, having received the mailshot, I dropped Prentice Hall a line. This is what I wrote:

Dear Sirs

As the completely non-technical and non scientific director of a technology company in Bangalore, I was fascinated to receive your direct mailshot advising me of the publication of Mr Nath’s latest work. Whilst I appreciate that the book is primarily aimed at undergraduates (because it says so on the flyer), I’m guessing that there must be some relevance to the work I’m currently doing or else you wouldn’t have mailed me, even though it’s been twenty three years since I graduated (and that in an Arts’ subject too).

I’m guessing that I probably need to go in at a slightly lower level – perhaps a little more membrane and a degree or two less separation – and certainly a book with lots of pictures; ideally some that I can colour in. Does it come with crayons?

You also sent me information on another book concerning chemical process modelling and computer simulation. I have a very similar title published last year called Chemical Process Muddling and Computer Stimulation, and I think your book probably re-works an old theme so I won’t be interested thanks. Nevertheless, do let me know about the Membrane Separation thingy.

Yours sincerely etc etc

Let's see if I get a response.

Originally published on Blogger on 23rd June 2008. I'm still waiting for a response.

Village idiots

2009-06-28T02:03:00.003+01:00

Maybe it's because HSBC claims it's the world's "local bank" that it treats its customers like village idiots.

Yesterday I received a direct mailshot from the bank. India's not big on direct mail, largely I suspect, because nobody can ever find the bloody addresses. In the west we have postcodes. They do here too, but you also generally need to give somebody a landmark. So your address might read: Golden Enclave, 2nd Cross, 10th G Main, Government Layout 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560027 and then a little instruction: "opposite the water tower, just left of the bakery... no, no, not there Dumbo, I said left of the bakery..."

The mailshot ran:

Dear Cardholder

We at HSBC are committed towards building lasting relationships with our customers by offering them maximum value through our products and services.

We have noticed that there is a fee-related outstanding amount on your HSBC credit card. As you are a valued customer of HSBC, we have reversed the outstanding fees on your credit card as a one-time service gesture.

What's more you will get a 10% cash back if you spend more than Rs 1,000 on your HSBC credit card before 30 June 2008. The maximum cash back amount will be Rs 500.

However, should you choose not to use your credit card before 30 June 2008, your sanctioned card limit will be withdrawn in toto for security reasons.

In case you no longer have the above mentioned card, please complete the attached form and return it to us in the enclosed Business Reply Envelope to receive the credit card.

Yours sincerely

HSBC Card Products Division.

Well first of all, when I took the card out, there were no fees mentioned and as soon as a fee did appear I called the customer service department where somebody apologetically explained that there had been a mix-up and I wouldn't be charged anything. At that point in time, most of the charges were reversed but they've slowly been creeping up and I've just as steadfastly been ingnoring them. Mind you, HSBC in India is the same bank which charges you when you make a cash deposit.

As for building lasting relationships though, they would appear to only last for as long as the customer uses the card. The message here is, use it over the next fifteen days or we'll prevent you from using it at all.

Interesting too, that the enclosed form with all my details printed on it, encourages me to replace my card for one where "the first year annual fee... will be waived [BUT] normal annual fees will be charged from the 2nd year onwards."

Originally published on Blogger on 21st June 2008.

Afghanistan

2009-06-27T10:23:00.003+01:00

Pretty depressing news from Afghanistan where the casualties seem to be mounting. When we were in England recently there was a lot of hand-wringing and "why-oh-whying" as the 100th British Armed Forces' death in that country was announced. Now I see the figure has risen to 106 and the name of the first female fatality has just been announced.

History tells us that we (the British that is), don't fare particularly well in Afghanistan, and I wonder how long it will be before the cries to bring the troops back home become louder. At the moment there's certainly an element of stiff upper lipism and hearty back-slapping cameraderie but that will all wear a bit thin as the casualties mount. As far as I know, all the casualties so far have been amongst professional soldiers. They're paid to do a job that can involve them in warfare and so death is an occupational hazard; they know that when they sign up, and what they're getting themselves into.

Nonetheless, each life lost is a tragedy for the soldier's family and friends; another name to go down in the annals of British history perhaps but another heavy sacrifice all the same. In time there'll be a medal as a keepsake, perhaps a certificate, a parade through the streets of London and then, a few years from now, appeals by British ex-service charities to help Britain's forgotten soldiers. If we're lucky we'll probably be treated to case histories of soldiers who've lost limbs and eyes and then gently asked to send in twenty pounds or take out a monthly standing order.

There's a horrid inevitability to Afghanistan and, much like Iraq, the longer we're there the more the British public will a) forget why we went in the first place and b) start shouting more loudly for an end to it all.

Indian newspapers barely mention either Iraq or Afghanistan, although the wife of a local politician who allegedly hanged herself in Delhi, has several pages in most newspapers for the third day running. Quite right too, the local population possibly thinks, Afghanistan and Iraq are none of India's business and we had quite enough of Kandahar and Kabul when Lord Roberts and his troops were galloping backwards and forwards in the late 1800s.

I keep an eye on what's happening via the BBC News website and thank goodness for the internet (and particularly the likes of the BBC and CNN) and the wider world it brings us. I must send them an e-mail though. There was nothing on their sites about the hanged MPs wife in Delhi.

Originally published on Blogger on 19th June 2008. The news from Afghanistan does not get any better and as of today, 169 British personnel have now been killed on operations there since 2001. 33 year old Major Sean Birchall (pictured) of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, killed by an explosion on 19th June, is the latest fatality.