Category: Life Ordinary

  • Sikkim Day 1 – Uninstall Driver.. please

    As my friend Partha Jha (who has made it a habit to get into my vacation posts) would agree, there are many ways to see kim. ‘Off for some GangTalk’, said my status message on 15th, and that’s where it would start. That’s also where we end the silly wordplay, almost. 🙂

    Two flights took us over 2500 km from Bangalore, and landed us in Bagdogra in West Bengal, the nearest airport, about 120 kms from Gangtok, an estimated road journey of 4 hours, that began at 3.30 pm. At the airport, we noticed this father’s touching concern for his daughter’s health – never too early to start exercising..

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgaaYZsi8g

    We crossed Siliguri, and stopped at a roadside shop for some much needed nutrition. Sivok served us a decent chaat and chai. That’s the name of a place, by the way. 🙂

    The climb began slowly as we uneventfully crossed Rambi (no Stallone jokes okay!) and Teesta. There was a minor roadblock at Malli, at the bazaar, but thankfully all was well in a few minutes. Darkening sky, mountains looming in the distance, the lights of the dam construction on the Teesta river, twisting roads, small roadside temples, perfect time for a small nap when suddenly the car stereo began playing ‘Ek Haseena thi’, from Karzzz. I asked D if she had anything in mind, and she told me not to drive her crazy at the beginning of a vacation.

    The drive was quite a learning experience, as D and I now know ‘Kamini ki dastaan’ (the lyrics of the song above), and the Bachna ae Haseeno title track completely. There were a couple of others too, but for my own good, my brain seems to have cordoned off the area. We heard these about 5 times each, as they mimicked the looping mountain roads. Just when I was about to sing along and scar the driver for life, some primal instinct made him turn it off.

    At Rangpo, where Sikkim began, the driver asked us to answer with a nearby town’s name if the cops asked us where we were from. When I asked him the reason, he said they were strict about not allowing in people from Nepal. D and I looked at each other to confirm our features and skin tone, and nodded to acknowledge the driver’s supreme intellect. We pretended to be asleep when we stopped at the border, in case we answered in Nepali accidentally.

    To distract him from playing more music and havoc, we quizzed him on the various places in Gangtok we planned to visit, and he confidently gave us the respective distances from our hotel. It turned out later that the joke was on us – he was the one distracting us from his utter lack of knowledge of where the hotel in Gangtok was!! That meant that we took an extra hour to reach Mintokling, our campaign headquarters. Sometime during the journey, we were informed that due to heavy rains, our Day 2 plan of Nathula, and Tsongpo lake would not happen. Since we had one more day in Gangtok, we asked for the Day 2 and 3 plans to be interchanged.

    Mintokling turned out to be an excellent place to stay, and we were thankful for its small restaurant. We ordered dinner, starting with momos and including a special Sikkim dish to go with the rotis. We confirmed that the dish had a gravy, and were met with an enthusiastic “yes, thick gravy“. The small detail that wasn’t mentioned was that the ‘thick gravy’ was enclosed in a super momo structure. A branch of peace was offered in the form of dal, and we left it at that.

    The day ended on a high, as I found 2 Malayalam channels on the telly. It is somehow comforting to hear many people speak one’s language, when one has had an eventful day like the one above.

  • Backlash

    “Ooh, seventh anniversary coming up”, says I, my eyes straying over the dates.
    No response.
    “Seven year itch..”, I remind her.
    “For now, you scratch my back and I, yours”
    “Isn’t it more to do with affairs behind your back?”
    “Easily solved if I scratch your eyes out first. I’ll promise to watch your back”

    until next time, start from scratch?

    PS. Back in a fortnight 🙂

  • This connect…..

    Perspectives. The ones that will only make sense to yourself. I experience a lot of that – both ways. Cryptic ‘humour’ that I come up with, a book that I read. Maybe one has to be ready to receive that perspective. I used to wonder what the drawings at gapingvoid was all about until recently. One change in my own outlook of life and it all started making sense.

    Sometimes I think I might get it, but it slithers away. Like Road, Movie. I did enjoy the ride, but I don’t think I got the perspective the maker had. But it perhaps doesn’t matter,  because I may attribute something to it and derive a value that the maker had never thought of. Maybe that’s why many artists become popular years after they go hmm, underground, or up in smoke. Maybe others gain that understanding required for the perspective, or maybe the artist is no longer around to dispute the understanding 😉

    Perhaps that’s all what the search is about. The one kindred soul who can just feel the same way about the particular experience as we do. A smile, a tear, a look, a hug, a connection. But of course, then the greed sets in, expectations abound, permanence is sought, and heartburn happens, for after all, not all of us are lucky enough to lose baggage in transit. 🙂

    I’ve been really stuck to the eklektic station on live365. And I like the playlist so much that I felt I could perhaps get away from collecting music if I had access to it all the while. It seemed vaguely analogical to the idea of having no baggage when one is connected to a higher consciousness that provides bliss all the while. 🙂

    Its one of the things that makes Twitter work for me. A stream of collective consciousness. Somewhere in that huge crowd i can be invisible enough to continue sending and receiving perspectives and wonder exactly how the other person’s perspective was arrived at, all this even without a conversation. I can also stop myself from seeking validation. No baggage… technically, if I don’t count the RTs 🙂

    Oh, all that I know,
    There’s nothing here to run from,
    And there, everybody here’s got somebody to lean on.

    until next time, sole searching for a read that didn’t make sense? 😉

    PS: Like with most things web, shared perspectives too have an extreme dark side. Read about the Chinese Cyberposse, who track down and punish people who they think have committed a wrong.

  • Social Obligations

    Sometime back, I had this conversation with Surekha. Let me give you the context. I subscribe to a lot of sites on Google Reader, and therefore find a lot of links that I want to share. I end up sharing them – on Reader itself, where i can also ‘Like’ it, on Twitter, rarely on FB, many times on delicious. I also use many of these links for the posts on my other blog. Surekha’s  observation was that I was stingy with praise. I, as is my wont, proceeded to defend myself. I said that since my sharing had multiple layers and filters, the very fact that I shared it on Twitter was a praise in itself. She called me elitist (which, after a recent post, is almost as insulting to me as being called a vegetarian :p) 😀 From where she’s looking, she’s right, and its a valid perspective, though I wouldn’t admit it then. 😀

    It made me think about how I share links. Now, I’m not sure if this is retrofit rationalisation or an inbuilt mechanism. In my chat with Surekha I had mentioned that my varied interests meant that what I considered a ‘Good Read’ might be a lousy read for someone not interested in the subject. I wonder now, if my binary kind of approach to things (0 or 1, extremes) coupled with my objectivity fixation makes me just share something without an opinion, so that the person who reads is without the baggage of my bias, good or bad.

    Sometime back, after watching the stream for a while, and reading opinions on a subject, I asked Mo, “post this generation,do you think anyone will know there is a ‘don’t like it,don’t use it’ option? wouldn’t they feel obliged to comment? :|”.  I felt that, what blogging started, microblogging has accelerated. From books and places and events to personal traits – not just of celebrities, but of other users’, everything finds its way into the stream, the digital version of the collective consciousness. To corrupt the current Videocon line “We is the new me”. Our ‘stream world’ and all its inhabitants seem extensions of ourselves, a huge canvas of vicarious living. Do many of us feel obliged to share our opinion in real time, some kind of pressure to constantly contribute, and so we comment on everything we can lay hands on?

    In this sharing blitz, do we spare a thought for the object of our comment? Specifically people. With real time, opinions are being formed in minutes. Yes, everyone is entitled to one, but does it also mean we become trigger-happy? When we stick labels, when we judge, do we think of the effort/thought/perspective of the person at the other end? (those on Twitter, think #mpartha, #princesssheeba…I must say, i confess to some silly work on the latter) As we have more listeners, do we feel obliged to pass judgment and evolve into what others would be impressed with/like? Is that why people change when they become popular on say, twitter? It happens in real life too – this modeling of self based on the audience, but in real life, its difficult to enter the streams of thousands of people. With each of us getting a microphone, I wonder if we have entered ourselves unwittingly into a new form of rat race, in which the casualty is compassion and consideration for others?

    until next time, this is an opinion too 🙂

  • Bad Tease?

    battees

    The Riddler presents…. I was asked whether I’ve stopped writing 55s. Maybe I was waiting for an occasion. Actually, look at the occasion in another way, and you’ll find it adds up. If you didn’t get it, maybe this is just another bat tees post. If you did, don’t make a joke of it, okay?

    until next time, add your 32 bits 🙂