Siddhartha Bhasker's Blog, page 3

Durga Pooja in Bokaro

If you are asked to think of a city that comes to mind for Durga Pooja, you will say Calcutta. If you are a Bengali, you might add an Oh as a precursor and an exclamation at the end. I met many of my colleagues here who are going to the city for Durga Pooja. This act of hero-worship in the form of city worship can sometimes take the focus away from the character actors. And one character in this Durga Pooja was my little town of Bokaro. Don’t worry if you cannot recall hearing about this town, you might have forgotten your general knowledge classes. There is a steel plant there.
Calcutta or no Calcutta, the Durga Pooja celebration in Bokaro is memorable for those of us who have witnessed it in our childhood. Bokaro is divided into sectors like Sector 1, 2 and so on. And each sector has subsectors like 1A, 2B, and so on. Each of these subsectors has its own pooja pandal. There is a total of twelve sectors in Bokaro and on average each sector has four subsectors which make it forty eight pandals to visit in four days: chhashthi, saptami, ashtami and navami. Twelve Pandals a day!A difficult task even though Bokaro is a small town! You can roam around the whole town on a bicycle in one day. But the spirits were not small, at least when we were children. Each day of pandal hopping was preceded by a planning session, first with friends on the cricket field and then at home with parents. News about pandals spread like news about an actress’s personal life, full of spice and cooked. One friend might suggest going to Sector 12 pandal because his father had had a glimpse of it while traveling on the scooter and it is a replica of Titanic. Other would say that the pandal at Sector 9 is a replica of a dinosaur. I and my siblings would gather all this information in the evening playing sessions and come home with news for my father. He would have his own set of spiced up and cooked stories. Finally after a discussion when my father would be having his tea, we would narrow down on the plan and then off we went as darkness descended.Some pandals would be a matter of scale. Large pandal, a big idol of Goddess Durga, a big mela on a big field and lots and lots of people. The crowd was so big that my younger brother was lost two of three times when he was small. Different types of toys, spicy food, big jhoolas and an occasional serendipitous meeting with a known family from the colony or from the school. These pandals would take a lot of our time and we would be able to visit just two pandals on days like these.Some pandals were exquisite. Managed by Bengalis, they were the classical version of the more pop-like large pandals. Bengali music would be playing. Crowds were thinner. There were toys and food but they are not the primary attractions. The pandit was ever-present. A small stage for the children to perform drama or dance or recite a poem. Here we would meet our teachers!Some pandals would be insignificant, yet would be on the itinerary of all the children so that could increase their count. These were those pandals in poorer localities who could not gather a large fund. Here there was peace and tranquility. Sometimes we would spend a lot of time in these pandals just soaking in the aura. The roads would be filled with cars and scooters, families crisscrossing each other while visiting Pandals. It was a time of fun and frolic. Pandals would occupy us all day, first in our conversation and then later when we visited them. I don’t know how it is in Calcutta but it got to be really really good to beat the fun we had. Sometimes character actors can give performances that overshadow the heroes!

Tea and biscuits: A divorce of complements

I am teaching a class of Microeconomics to undergraduate students. We often talk about complements in the class. That is the goods which are used together. Now all of us know that tea and biscuits are complements. No guest in India is given tea without a plate of biscuits accompanying it like a middle-class wife accompanying a husband to a park. And in many houses, the guests are even allowed to dip in the biscuit in the tea just like the wife may dip into the husband's bank accounts. Or they may be into each other in the bed, you can think whatever way you like to think.
A fundamental lesson we learn is that if the demand for one good in the economy decreases, the demand for its complement is also going to decrease. We have all heard of the state of the biscuit industry in India. Parle G, the most loved biscuit brand in India is seeing a loss of sales. People are being laid off the biscuit industry. Theoretically, the same should happen to the tea industry. But for some reason, we don’t hear it about them. In fact, if some figures are to be believed the production and export of tea in India are increasing. So what is happening?Have we decided to stop dipping biscuits in tea? And just provide the guest with hot tea along with the gossip of the society. Are Parle G biscuits too costly for the middle class? Even at the road tea stalls, you could find an uncle who rides a rickshaw dipping biscuit in tea. Has that man been earning so less so as to not be able to afford a packet of Parle G biscuit that can be eaten with the tea? We may be witnessing a divorce here. A divorce of complements. Tea and biscuits are separating from each other. Men and women alike are tilting more towards tea and getting rid of biscuits, for some reason which behavioral economics has to explain. If I was the finance minister, I would say that millennials have started dieting and hence they have decided to give biscuits a let go. They just sip tea.Something of a cultural shift may be happening as well. The practice of serving biscuits with tea may not be preferred by the Millennials anymore. Maybe it is getting old fashioned just like Orkut did. As for the uncle in the tea shop, his real incomes may have decreased so as to shift to another good which could be lesser priced than a packet of biscuits. Will the biscuit industry bounce back? For the Millennials, it would have to come up with some marketing gimmick so that this class could find a new way of consuming this good. One can marry again after a divorce. The biscuit industry needs a remarriage. Maybe they could come up with ads which make biscuit a favored commodity while browsing your mobile. Or biscuits with Netflix! Something of that sort, a marriage that the Millennials like.For the lower class, when the economy does bounce back, the uncle could get back to the Parle G biscuits in the tea stall. But how will the economy bounce back? The demand can only increase if the real incomes increase at a good pace. Greater employment generation is needed. This is a complex problem which I would leave to the macroeconomists to ponder about.So for those of us who had in our childhood, dipped a biscuit in tea, watching some of it melt inside while we savor the rest, it could be a sad ending. An end of an era, I would say. Let's see how the biscuits bounce back.  

Something

Something has to be written about. Something has to be said. Like Einstein discovered gravity. Something can be done. Something has to be eaten. Or something has to be beaten. Many times we are onto something. Or something is on to us. But what exactly is this something? If we would know, it would cease to exist. It would not be something anymore. It would be a precise thing.

Something is our saviour. Who the hell can be precise all the time! Find something to do in the night. Like, write something. Or write about something. Because if there is no something, and one cannot be a precise thing, the one becomes nothing. A very dangerous proposition.Something has to be tweeted. Just because there has to be that something. A president of the greatest nation keeps tweeting something or the other. And then others tweet something in response. I know this is not something you wish to read, but I have to do something. Write something.There are two sides to something. The left side and the right side. If you are on the left, you have said less than something. If you are on the right, you have said just more than something. Or done less than something or done more than something. People have a feel of the side you are on. You have a feel of the side you are on.I have an idea that the world runs on something. If there was no something the world would stop running. It would just become a snapshot, a photograph of the time when something ceased to happen. Imagine you are never going to do something. Always going to do a precise thing. Or worse not going to do anything. Be a nothing. You would just be a photograph and nothing else. The something is the spice in our life. It gives us a direction. Some direction. Something.The best part about something is it helps us to hide. Hide the precise things we just do not want to do. Like children do not wish to listen to their teacher. They start doing something. Like a wife does not wish to entertain her husband. She is onto something. Like a politician does not want to say the truth. He speaks something like Einstein discovered gravity. People think that it is the precise things that give them an identity. But they are wrong. It is somethings. You are nothing without your somethings. The mystery a woman inspires is because of something in her. The strength a man has is because something he must have done. The world runs on something. The world gets its identity because of all this 'something'.The enemy of something is science. Science wishes to explain all the somethings with precise things. It has become so successful over the last few centuries. But to its peril, the more somethings it explain, the greater somethings it generates. Like when Newton discovered gravity, something must unite gravity and the other three fundamental forces. Something must be happening in our milky way such that it has a particular shape (not sure if this has been precisely defined). Something must be wrong with the black holes that they are hell-bent on proving Newton and now Einstein wrong. One something solved gives rise to so many other somethings which we have to deal with. Goodluck science.One precise thing you may have guessed if you have had the free time to reach so far is that precisely I have a lot of free time to write about something. I hope you do not generate any other something about me. Goodnight.

Momuahh

I was coming back from Delhi today. Night had fallen. The only thing one could see were cars on roads and an occasional bridge. For the more inquisitive, you could see a hand inside the car or a head-nodding on the driver’s seat. Cars on Delhi roads look as if ants are moving around in a colony. One after the other. There is absolutely nothing interesting in cars on roads. Even people, who are generally interesting, become boring when they sit in cars. What can one do in a moving car on a Delhi road!I felt a deep urge to smoke a cigarette. I have stopped carrying packets nowadays because then you smoke a lot. So I asked the driver to get me to a cigarette shop. He stopped and I moved out to a nearby stall. In our country, a cigarette shop is very much visible to the one who smokes. You see a shop and you will know if they sell the stick. Something about it will tell you. So I was sure. So was the driver. I bought one and then I saw it. A momo shop.
For a while, I forgot I was smoking. I went over to the owner. His Hindi was composed of answering every query in one word. I asked him what kind of momos he had. He told me non-veg. Then he added paneer. Then I asked him the price for non-veg. He said Rs. 50. I ordered one.Imagine an oasis in the desert. That was the momo shop was for me then. On a road full of horns, cars, street lights and filth on the sides. The dryness, the hollowness of our current lives, all symbolized together. Even cigarettes don’t feel good in such conditions. It feels as if you are blowing out a sandstorm. Tasteless, odorless, feeling less. Unless you see a momo shop.The best thing about momos for me is not the momo itself. It’s the sauce. I don’t know how these guys prepare their sauce and why is it that you always find that kind of a chili taste in the momo sauce and not anywhere else. As he put piece after piece on the paper plate, I heard the noisy road and the ants crawling around. He handed me over the paper plate as he poured the sauce in the other plate. It looked all brown. Or there wasn’t sufficient light. Anyways, instead of eating a momo, I tasted the sauce first. And immediately, I realized that this will make my day.Slowly, in the car, I devoured all the momos. They were always enamored with the sauce. I cleaned up the sauce as well. And till then I was huffing like a dog. The chili had done me in. It had occupied my taste buds and was punishing me for having too much of it. This is like love. You get fucked in it, yet you can’t stop wanting it. The driver was kind enough to give me a drink of water. That soothed things a little bit.If you haven’t had momo for a while do have it. It’s soft and melts in your mouth like a delicious little ice-cream. It’s spicy and tasty. And when you dip it in sauce, do remember me. A momo is nothing without its sauce. Just like a writer is nothing without his readers. You are my sauce and if you have reached till here, I am dipped in you. And yes, the ingredients for the sauce. You can tell me if you know!

On order in chaos

There is chaos all around us. Chaos at our workplace, chaos at our family, chaos in our minds, chaos in the city we live in, the state we are a part of, the country and chaos globally. Most people do not like chaos. They are always planning to bring order to things. The office affairs are managed with the change in top order. The chaos in the family could dissolve with outside intervention or breaking family ties altogether. Chaos in our minds needs therapy. Chaos in the state is the responsibility of the state government and the police. Chaos in the country is chaotically solved in the parliament and chaos globally is taken care of in the global forums.
The question I am pondering over is when is it the right time to bring order in a chaotic system and what kind of order should it be? Recently one of the states of our country which has been bleeding since independence is being brought into some sort of order. It has been subjected to a fixed and clear change in laws. The people in power wish to give it an order which they feel will improve the conditions of the state. There are debates all around the world on whether this ordering of the state is correct or not. Will such an ordering to an already troubled and chaotic system bring in peace and quiet? Or, will it deepen the trouble in which case the order would have given rise to further chaos.A similar thing happens with a mentally ill mind. Suppose a person is suffering from schizophrenia. The mind of such a person is chaotic and troubled. As per the norms of a certain section of the society, an order has to be brought out in such a mind. A kind of Aristotelian order. If the person does not follow that particular order, then the person could be sent into systems where they will be forced to follow the order. Will such a strict adherence to order improve the person or get them more trouble? I hope you can see the similarities between the two examples here. How do we go about ordering then?The answer to the when is as soon as possible. Which means if you know there is chaos and trouble, the effort should be made immediately to bring in some sort of order. People may differ on it but this is my opinion. It is the 'what' that is the big question here. What kind of order will a troubled system accept so that it can improve itself? In my opinion, the answer should come from within the system itself. Not from coercing of the powerless by the people of power in terms of a certain order but by letting the troubled system make an informed choice. If the 'what' comes from the system, then, in my opinion, the system is going to respond positively to the new order. Otherwise, the system will give a negative response and chances are high that it may end up in more trouble and chaos that its previous form.   So in case of the state, it is the people who should be given the chance to get away from the chaos and the trouble. Forcing and ordering in my book will lead to further chaos. In the case of the troubled mind, it is the person who should be given a chance to choose the order they wish to accept. Such a process can take a long time where the state or the person will have to make certain compromises along with the compromises of the people in power. Nothing can come out of this world if we are not ready to compromise. But to put it more clearly, the veto should lie with the state or the person and not with the people in power. That, in my opinion, is the best chance of getting some sort of order in a chaotic and troubled system.

Mindless rumblings on the mind!

Who understands the mind? The poets, the writers, or the artificial intelligence program? What do they understand? Well, I cannot compile their findings, but it is clear that nobody understands the mind in a complete way. We just know it in figments. A poet can talk about the intricacies behind pain or workings of love. A writer can describe its effects on society. An artificial intelligence program can work out an algorithm. But none of them can tell you what your mind will do, let’s say three days from now. They probably can’t even tell you how your mind comes up with what it comes up with. What a puzzle to be solved, the one who gets it first will be the next Zuckerberg, or probably his baap, in terms of fame and money!

If you are a loner like me, the things that will most intrigue you are your thoughts. When you are with people in social surroundings, you are not in touch with yourself. Your attention is pulled with all the things happening around. When you are with yourself, the mind is alone and all the mental attention is garnered by your thoughts. You don’t have an avenue to get lost into, except your own mind. It is strange how people make opinions of other people. What people think of other people unless it comes out of a standard test, comes from their experience in their previous encounters of similar kind of people or what they would think of themselves had they been in the shoes of another person. Which means that if you meet a new person, then based on the characteristics you notice, you would either map that person to the closest similar person you have met and if that is not possible you would form an opinion of the person based on the opinion of yourself had you been that person. Now the above paragraph is speculation, which I nowadays believe in. But imagine why we have so much drama in our lives. If all of us got the other person right, there would be no drama at all. There would be a perfect understanding. Just because what we think of the other person does not come from our true experience of the other person, but from our own experiences leaves so much room for error. And this is what gives writers their true raw material.Now if we could know the mind, it looks like these kinds of issues would be solved. We would know exactly how the other person thinks and so we will at least make an informed choice. But I postulate that the mind is such a tricky beast that it could go recursive. That is if you know the present state of mind, it would go a state further and change itself. But this is again speculation.Experiments in behavioural economics have shown that is generally good to have clear objective tests to judge a person than subjective tests. A popular book also talks about making simple checklists to perform your activities than make them complicated. The idea is to reduce subjectivity. Greater the subjectivity, greater the room for the mind to play its tricks.      Recently quantum physics is being used to understand the decision process of the mind. Good progress has been made and the experiments yield some interesting results. It is clear that classical theories are incomplete and further advancements are needed. If decision making follows quantum laws, I would be very happy to know what to do when I am alone. You see, in that case, I may be able to tweak this beast to things I really wish to think about than to just wander around aimlessly and judge the past with new lenses!

Rough cough and a little spice of cold and fever

Well yes, the title is gross. But when I am suffering so much, a little disgust in you will make my heart lighten up a bit. After all, sharing reduces pain.
The weather in Sonipat has suddenly changed this month. It’s as if God’s appetite to fry living beings and eat their soul was miraculously filled in the month of June itself. When the temperature was more than forty-five degrees. So in July, he gave us some respite. With occasional rains and the sky color of dull yellow all the time. So when God was done with our soul, it was the turn of the little beings. The bacteria and viruses. Somehow, I don’t know how, because I am not the kind of person of travels a lot or meets a lot of people, these little beings entered my body. And since then they have been giving me a lot of trouble.

The first impression that I get when I start coughing is that probably I have been smoking a lot. So the numero uno victim or the villain is a cigarette. I reduce it’s consumption, first to zero and then it increases steadily. After a few days, when my lungs are still making noise, it becomes clear that smoking may not have to do much with it. Slowly you start feeling cold and then feverish. That is the worst part of it. Fever is the Voldemort of this suffering. When it comes, it’s all dark. All you want to do is take medicine and sleep.
An oft-neglected symptom of this problem is the cacophony of noises the nose and the lungs make all day long. You could be reading a beautiful article or story, or you could be writing something. All engrossed in the perceived beauty of the symphonic collection of words. And suddenly your lungs decide to break this trance. They start with a cacophony of sounds which make you shiver a little. In Hindi, we have a term called the ‘Phata hua baans’. That is what it sounds like. After satisfying your lungs and listening to its protestations, you go back to what you were doing. And the beauty is all lost. It is now just a collection of words. The symphony is gone.
I left biology long ago but if I can remember correctly, cough is a way our body fights with these viruses and bacteria. When the enemy is hell-bent on causing you harm, you have to fight it out with the means given to you. That is all fine, I guess. Just that if the fight could be a silent one, everybody would win.
People whom I meet, good people, tell me to go to a doctor. I am going to do it today after struggling for around two weeks now. I have never gone to a doctor for a cold and cough. In my mind, they are too small a problem to trouble the doctors with. In our country, we have doctors in every home, without a degree, who are experts in these kinds of problems. But this time, as if I angered their gods, the cold and cough have decided to stay and take me to the people who are their nemesis. Just to prove a point, maybe.
I could never believe I would start disliking the kind of weather we have here at Sonipat at present. It’s cool and overcast most of the day. It doesn’t rain much and so one does not need to take the pain of carrying an umbrella around. It’s perfect weather unless you have visitors that I have. I hope the next time I face this weather it does not remind me of the cacophony of sounds I have been hearing sitting alone on my desk.
There should be something good about cold and cough. Just like there is with everything. I am thinking very hard now. Maybe something. No, not really, stay away from them.

Khichdi: a name for our news websites

Today after a long time, I visited the Times of India website. I was looking for some good book reviews. Instead I found in front of me a colorful magical screen with alphabets and numbers scrolled all over and advertisements teeming like Diwali bulbs punctuated in between. In the book review section there were hardly any good reviews of fiction books. Instead the slight movement of the mouse over the colorful screen brought out a fresh set of options as if one had come to a market and was browsing for fresh vegetables and each vendor had a fresh set of options.

After that I went to the Indian Express website. It was colorful too but less populated as compared to TOI. Again I kept searching for book reviews but nothing was impressive. What could one say about the design of these news websites? One could say they are like one big Gujarati Thali one gets to eat in Ahmedabad where all varieties of vegetables are presented to you for consumption. But those thalis are tasty and there one has good choices. There is a better word of it in my mind: Khichdi.
When I was in the first standard, we had a teacher in the Christian school called Prasad Sir. Prasad sir, in addition to striking us with a stick had two other favorite topics of discussion. One was lizards. He was fond of talking about lizards to school kids who had no interest in them. He used to live alone and probably his only companion in his room were lizards, hence the love for them.
Other was Khichdi. Whenever a student tried to stitch together an answer in English, a language we were still trying to learn to speak in, he would make the same old statement: ‘ This boy (or girl) has made a khichdi of the answer. Do you students know what a khichdi is? A khichdi is a type of food where you can mix anything. Put rice, dal, water, juice and any type of vegetable, you can still eat it. You can put tomatoes, brinjal, anything you like. It makes a khichdi. Your answer was a khichdi. Do you think you can make a khichdi with your answer? Oh I forgot, you probably can also mix a lizard in it. Are you trying to make a khichdi here?’
The student had no idea what he was saying. But we had to listen, specially the student who was not sure if he/she would be caned next for making a khichdi for the answer. His/her only savior was some fool who would giggle from the back and Prasad sir would catch him/her and put his favorite stick to action.
Anyways, coming to the point, the news websites like TOI look like a khichdi to me. They can put any news (if you call it that) into the colorful screen and it would still be the TOI website. No harm done. From the love life of Hollywood stars to yoga lessons to lessons in investing to some stupid shit here and there, one can find all the bullshit on these websites. Except proper book reviews!
You would love them if you love Khichdi.

Goodbye, you smiling yellow devil.

Yahoo messenger will no longer stay. It has grown old and got lonely, people getting on to younger versions of social media like facebook, gtalk and twitter. But like any old person, yahoo messenger has had its own life stories. Stories of its youthful and joyful days. I was one such person witness to its youth, which faded away rather rapidly.
When yahoo messenger arrived, it was the only thing for us. And it was a big thing. You could instantly connect to someone on the other side, have a chat while you were sitting on the clingy old chair in a cyber café or a steel chair at your undergraduate institute. There was no facebook or twitter to connect instantly and one must remember that the next best thing we had was the yahoomail.


The usernames were funny. Some user names were traditional, names with numbers. Others were innovative. Some usernames instantly gave you the gender, some the location, some the date of birth. The nomenclature is still followed with gmail and skype usernames. But there was something in usernames which caught your fancy and you started thinking about the person on the other end. Who could the person be and what would be their characteristics? My first username was pseudosid. I was preparing for IITJEE exams and had recently read about pseudo forces, forces which are not present in reality but have to be mentioned in the force diagram (something like this, can’t recollect exactly). The idea behind my name was that I was not really present in front of the other person but present only in the virtual form, sid being the short form of my name.
ASL plz. Which meant you had to give your age, sex and location. Conversations started with this. Or some witty line which one could conjure up hoping the person on the other side would appreciate its literary ability. For many Indians, as my brother indirectly pointed out yesterday, yahoo messenger provided the first taste of talking to foreigners. Indians could talk to Englishmen and women, or Americans. What a delight for somebody staying a small town with hardly any experience of metro cities let alone foreigners. Some Indians also vented their anger against the Pakistanis while talking to them.
A phenomenal feature of Yahoo messenger was Yahoo chat groups. Here in pre defined groups, users could chat with each other. All kinds of groups were present and people had their own motivations of joining a group. But as young students burdened with scientific knowledge and marked the cream of the nation, without being given ample opportunities to interact with the opposite sex, my group of friends sole aim was to find beautiful girls and impress them. Basically in a land called Bokaro or Kharagpur, both places where getting a girlfriend was like watching a comet to pass by, waiting and waiting for it to happen, yahoo chat groups gave an opportunity to break the shackles, show some finesse and get a girl.
An interesting incident crops up in my mind related to this, something which is not uncommon. It happened at the boys hostel at IIT Kharagpur. Yahoo messenger was commonly used and trying to get a girl friend was in vogue. One of my friends was shit deep in trying to do this. Everyday he would give us a narration of his daily activities in the night talk sessions. Ideally the stories should have been of classes, instead they were of his activities on messenger. He would speak about entering so and so chat group and impressing so and so girls, getting their phone numbers. Our initial reaction was of belief and appreciation. Later things started getting frustrating.
So one day, some of his friends got beautiful female usernames and entered the chat rooms he used to frequent. He was as usual online and ready to chat. Now this guy was no cassanova. He was a normal ex sincere student, who could easily pass in as a wannabe. It showed in his chat history as well. Nonetheless they started chatting with him pretending to be females giving him imaginary stories. In between these chats (he lived at the first floor and they on the ground), they would also call him for a sutta session (from the outside) and he would shout out loud ‘I am busy chatting with a friend’. They would giggle at this and keep chatting.
Yahoo messenger provided this kind of an opportunity for fun. It could forge deep friendships like between the imaginary female friends and the boy. It could make you fall in love like this friend of theirs fell into.
‘She is beautiful. I am sure of it, the way she chats.’ He told them one day.
‘But you got to see her picture.’ They said.
‘Girls don’t share their picture so easily, you dumb.’ Saying this he went into a deep state of meditation thinking by himself as his friends looked for his next words.
Finally it had to happen. He was desperate to see a picture and meet. They were bored of chatting with him in this virtual world. So they made up a story of her marriage and her unavailability on the messenger from that day. They stopped using the usernames anymore and he got depressed. Afraid at his depression,  they broke the story to him while he was philosophizing about love and life. He was angry and ashamed. They were laughing with joy. The story spread like wildfire around the hostel and outside. The next thing to come out was he said ‘I knew it since the start. Do you think I would never know!’
Many little memories are attached to yahoo messenger. Sad that it has to go! Maybe that is how things are, moving. One can only bid them a warm farewell.

Don't fast..Tiger Zinda hai

Today I was travelling to Delhi from Sonipat in a Maruti Suzuki Ritz. The road which connects to the Highway is always crowded by freight trucks which ply to and fro from Sonipat and Rohtak to Delhi and beyond. All trucks and other small carriers have something written on them. It will be interesting to know the writer who comes out with the lines. One of the first trucks I saw had written on it ‘Don’t fast…Tiger Zinda hai’. I hope the writer meant to convey to the vehicles trailing them not to drive fast. Still can’t get the significance of Tiger Zinda hai but my guess is the writer or the owner of the truck would be a fan of Salman Khan.


After getting on the National Highway, it’s a long road to Delhi. Recently I read a novella titled ‘Delhi is not far’. There is also a saying in Hindi ‘Dilli abhi door hai’. This kept coming into my head even though we were around half an hour from Delhi in the traffic.
There were a plethora of colors on the road. White and grey cars, green tempos, orange buses, red maruti’s, brick colored trucks, black motorbikes and so on. India is a colorful country and our roads do not disappoint us.
The truck owners or the writers seem to be deeply religious. I could make out prayers to different Hindu gods inscribed on them. A lot of them had ‘Use dippers in the night’ written on them. Some of the trucks were not only carrying white sacks, they also had bored looking men sitting on them. The driver, it seems was making money transporting both the living and the non living.
The Google maps of my Uber driver stopped working in between. He asked me to show him the directions on my mobile. He did not realize how technologically disinterested I am until I told him clearly my mobile does not have the google maps app. Rationally speaking as well, I do not need it.
My car was making a continuous ‘oooo…’ sound, the intensity of which increased with speed and decreased when brakes were applied. Looking out of the window, one could see the road, the vehicles and the development happening around. So many buildings and societies are coming up or are already allotted on the National Highway. It is clear that houses here are in demand. There are also many dhabas on the road. Smiling pictures of dhaba owner welcome you have a meal at their place. There is no guarantee though that the consumer will come out smiling when we have had our food.
While returning back in the same car, I noticed the driver of a green tempo lighting a cigarette. He was a young man about 20 year’s age. For once, he took both his hands of the steering wheel to light the match. The cigarette was lighted and he smoked it like a king sitting on a throne. In one of the other big cars, there was only one person who was driving the car. I tried to reason out if he owned the car or was an employed driver. He was wearing a white shirt and had a turban and a full moustache. There was no watch on the hand. Initially I assumed he was just the driver, but had to change my mind later after careful look at him.
Aur kuchh mile na mile, roasted corn (called Chhali) is available in abundance on the National Highway here. After every minute of ride, one can come across the boards of Chhali. Sometimes Salman Khan and Aishwarya smile out of the paintings. I am sure many travelers on the highway would love them. I have not had any of these Chhalis, even though they entice me.