Learning (a) Disability

My car driver is a young Muslim man in his twenties. He smokes a lot, hates Telugu, and is suspected of stealing petrol, either in kind or by using the AC when we are not around. He is tech savvy and brings his own UCB dongle loaded with a wide variety of music, including, hold your breath, “Summer of 69”. But he needs that compulsory three hour break on Friday afternoons. All said, lets come to the point.

Salim is getting married. I being his employer have the  privilege of certifying him to the marriage broker. Being better among the worse, I endorsed him positively. That was a month back.

He had plans to take a week off on marriage. And one light afternoon, his plans somehow crossed my mind. When asked he said something I would not have expected a Muslim to say: “my granny asked for too much money”.

Salim found nothing wrong in the status quo – “Everyone does it. We will start a business.”

Religion dictates Muslims to practice Mehr, practically the inverse of dowry – the groom’s family has to pay up. Now, I have seriously started suspecting his Friday afternoon breaks.

Guesstory

We love to anticipate. You must have read this remarkable article about Starbucks’ entry to India: http://wapo.st/zht8bA

When Indian fashion jewellery major “Bodylove” decided to open their first series of stores in the United States, we too wondered what they will offer to suite the taste of the Big Apple. And our survey and experts came up with this awesome list of suggestions:

• Cool n Funky: For the fashion conscious – Platinum eyebrow nails, with complimentary Ribbed Gold lip rings. Also available on special request – miscellaneous unprintable piercing jewellery.
• Underground: Targetting the rich liberated juvinile, real Gold plated guns with silver bullets
• For the Gamers: Gold plated football helmet with “This ain’t no soccer” embossed
• Dirty stuff: Various unprintable clothes with gold buckles and weapons dedicated to the Gods of the Blue
• Nirvana: Gold plated dispenser needles, with complimentary snuff spout
• Stake: This one’s a surprise entry – a model of a golden F-16 Hornet with 2  lines written below: “Duniya ka Theeka” written in Devnagiri script, and “We love America” in English
• And lastly for everyone: A celebration of pure racism – black and white … er… Gold and platinum striped special edition of the star spangled banner

Oh yes! We all knew great America is all about racism, guns, drugs, and paedophiles.

Smoking – 2

Continued from here

And, it took the novice in me just a month to become a regular. The bitter smell becomes less detestable with every passing day. Cigarettes smell different in the mouth than passive smoke. The dizziness from the kick becomes less intense as the addiction progresses – but too smoothly to be realized by the addict. Choking is replaced with a mild pleasing sensation, lower down the throat (anatomically – the trachea), just before the smoke enters the lungs. Holding the smoke longer in the lungs gets more nicotine absorbed – resulting in an even better high.

Their cheap price and easy availability makes cigarettes one of the easiest addictions to maintain, even for adolescents. The smell too can be well controlled making detection tough by parents. Regulars tell you that just chewing gums and gargling is not enough. Smoke adsorbed on your clothes and hair have to be patted off.

My consumption remained small during my higher secondary days, and I did not get into a dependency yet. Till at IIT, hostels made me all by myself. Numbers varied – from two on a day full of classes and labs, to fifteen on a exam day or a dull boring one. Dependencies increased: spanning from thought processes to bowel movements!

Addiction in all forms have some similar characteristics: people see, question, try and fall. And then hang on despite all the graphic consequences. The alibis for the addiction are reinforced every time, with innovative fervour. By the time I had started to work for a living, I had already tried in vain, multiple times, to decrease my numbers. Setting a limit is typical for many smokers. Nothing is usually acheived – I would allow one exception on a busy day, and then another, and after a fortnight realize that I am back to square one.

I attempted to quit multiple times. The oaths held for a day – or at most two. And then with smokers all around – I gave in, trying out just once. Smoking after a gap actually feels great. Lower levels of nicotine in your blood makes the kick more intense and numb than usual. And this starts the vicious cycle all over again.

In January 2006,  just after I moved to Noida, I was going through yet another quitting paranoia. And with no smokers among my colleagues – I made it to a week without a butt. With my pledge to start a family on the cards, I decided to stick to my promise. And here I am – almost six years without a fag. You cannot taper off your addiction – you have to stop abruptly.

Lastly, I must say – smoking feels awesome! But better not try it, even once.

Hyderabad

This is my second stay in Hyderabad. Thanks to my wife and daughter, this time I really got to know the city.

Hyderabad is one of the least xenophobic cities in India. In addition to the native Telugu speakers, the presence of a large Urdu speaking population creates an all pervading balance. Tolerance after all is a learnt phenomenon – not  seen in two types of people. Those who could not learn it. And those who cannot. The first is of course caused by extreme  statistical homogeneity. The second is called xenophobia. Hyderabadis are none of them and this makes settling here  much easier. Albeit, peace in recent times has been injured by some divisive political hunters.

Chandrababu Naidu mapped Hyderabad to the global IT map about a decade back. While fortune has since turned tables on him, the IT revolution has made a profound global impact on Hyderabad, at least on the names here. Cyber, Tech, Silicon and International comes up in almost all contexts, be it localities, malls, residential societies, hotels, restaurants or schools. But they seem to follow the old adage: “What’s in a name …. “. If you see foreigners, the whites I mean, in other parts of India, a good bet is that they will be tourists. In Hyderabad, chances are that they live here with their families. They huge presence of  global technology giants is the only reason, since the rest of the parameters of living fail to impress.

This uneven city’s infrastructure is mostly makeshift. There is no standard common man taxi service like the bigger metros, although costlier private ones are available in plenty. Pesky autoriskshaws also ply, usually too overloaded to board, each wearing a meter which was never used. The dirty government bus services frequently – and recent additions have been cleaner AC services. Hyderabad does not have a Metro but it seems to be coming up – as I often  see hoarding boards declaring acquired land.   Most of the city’s roads are of low to moderate in quality. There are  a lot of  flyovers already in place, and some waiting for the right political moment to be inaugurated – sometimes for years altogether. The elevated fraction of Hyderabad is inhabited aptly by the rich – the politicians and film stars. And obviously the roads are nicer.

The traffic police is usually very touchy about vehicles registered in other states. You may buy your innocence with that  occasional bribe, or more legibly by paying a life-time road tax for your vehicle. The toughest problem you will face while driving in Hyderabad is the result of the compulsive obsession of the random pedestrians to cross roads. They appear any time and everywhere, even on flyovers, ignoring  vehicles, or may be the road altogether. Some are gracious to show some heavenly hint of a raised hand which they believe will magically save them from anything untoward. Few who care to notice you display a signature jerk, another heavenly gesture hinting at their intention to cross over. They repeat the gesture with an increased frequency … until you are past them, or give in. Among my other niche driving experiences has been a guy  who was tying his shoelace in the middle of the road – exactly the middle of the road. You cannot just blame the pedestrians for being irresponsible. All the city’s roads are devoid of any fenced divider which will discourage this, or enough footbridges or pedestrian crossings which will encourage good habits. Though wearing helmets is most probably banned in Hyderabad, you will find a very few bikers flouting it.

The new state of the art airport has a surprisingly innovative name and is connected to the city by a ring road with as much innovative a name. No wonder us Indians are so obsessed with idol worship,  in  Hyderabad idolatry reaches epic proportions.  Tollywood idols or  politicians often have followers immolating themselves at the slightest pretext. The explanation is most often: “You people will never understand!”.

You will have two water supplies at your apartment. The strange tasting borewell water is meant for common use, and the treated Manjira water is always in short supply. Most apartment have gas banks and nice piped gas supply. Power outages are frequent, and there is a very predictable one in the early morning hours in my locality. The backup generator in my society takes about 15 minutes to get started – the same time the security takes to wake up the guy who turns it on.

Malls are the most common hangouts in Hyderabad, and till date we have liked Inorbit the most. Hyderabad probably has the highest density of jewelers in India. Pearl is the specialty which outsiders buy more often, while relatively massive gold jewelry is more popular locally. The sludgy and stenchy Hussain Sagar Lake has a number spots of public interest along its necklace, though most of these are prohibitively over-visited. The Hyderabad zoo has relatively healthy looking animals, if you compare them with the Delhi Zoo, for instance. For some reason, most of the zoo visitors are from poor Muslim households, and there will be a flood of Burqas around you. The zoo has a nice drive-in and ride-around options. While a 70 km drive to the airport and back is the best long drive available, a relatively unspoiled visitors-delight is the Osman Sagar or Gandipet, accessible from the same road.

The Old City around the Char Minar is an old world delight. It is already very congested – and Ramzan makes it even more congested. 24 hour makeshift stalls, six rows of them, come up on the narrow adjoining streets, selling everything from jewellery  to chocolate wafers,  sherwani-s to beef korma. It was raining lightly the evening I went there, and it was an utterly overwhelming experience, deserving a dedicated description which I am yet to complete.

Our driver being a Muslim makes it much easier to communicate with him. A young lad in his early twenties, he knows the city like the back of his hand. But everything comes at a cost – he is overtly religious, and requires a compulsory break on Friday afternoons. The service workers available for household work are mostly Telugu people and it is only gestures which comes to our rescue in dealing with them. Some speak very accented Hindi, which is as good as my Telugu. We have experienced six of them in six months. While most of them work exceptionally costly, fast and dirty: one used to steal, another was lazy, and another was a mentally unstable clean maniac – once cleaning my fridge with sand paper.

Non-vegetarianism is more prevalent here than in most parts of India. The ethnic Telugu cuisine – tangy with tamarind, spiced with curry leaves and hot with Guntur chillies is a treat. People here have an affair with salt, like Bengalis with sweets. This may be the reason of the huge number of “Salt Monster” Ads I see around the city. My real culinary delight came from the cuisine influenced by Hyderabad’s Islamic past – the fusion formula for the Biryani, with some  Telugu influence. There are plenty of restaurants serving every pocket – but be sure to expect a mild Telugu flavor in almost everything. For a pure Islamic preparation try the awesome dish called haleem, available only during the Ramzan in Muslim localities.

The terribly dirty NIMS is the most reputed hospital in the city. Try the Private OPDs in the afternoons when  you will  find  senior doctors of repute. The cleaner Apollo is more frequented by techies and Middle Eastern medical tourists, where you should be ready to pay extra for their jazzy advertisements.  Other than the salt monster, another noteworthy fact is that every second hospital in Hyderabad is a Dental Hospital. I am yet to know the specific factor which makes people living here so prone to tooth diseases, although I suspect it is salt. Too many dental colleges may be yet another reason.

Having stayed in Delhi for the last five years — I was relieved to be in a place where you may use public transport without getting molested, or graze someone’s car and not risk being killed on the road. Yes I am talking only relatively.  And again talking relatively, I do miss the grandeur of Delhi. There is a small town smell in the air.

Birthdays

Birthdays are, by design, progressively depressing. But there are some flaws in this design, lovely colorful ones.

The earliest shards of birthday memory I can reconstruct are that of distributing chocolate eclairs to my kindergarten school mates. Probably my fifth birthday, I was instructed by my parents, just to show a note written in my school diary to my class teacher. She read it, smiled at me – and I was made to stand in the middle of the classroom while the rest of the class sang “Happy Birthday to You”. I do not know why it felt so humiliating!  My parent’s instructions also told about the eclairs hidden in my bag of which I was oblivious till then. Since there were goons on the school bus who would have otherwise looted it.

Those days, every birthday came with repeated platitudes from parents to behave well for the  day, so that I behave well for the rest of the year. Since the same demand came every year on a New Year Eve as well as Poila Boisakh, one birthday I asked them to come clean. “Please point out which one was the real beginning of the year.” As if I could not afford to behave myself on all three. Punitive measures followed, I recall.

On my tenth birthday – my eight month old sister could just sit upright!

My eleventh birthday wasn’t sweet. We were writing an arithmetic test – when all of a sudden the teacher appeared from nowhere and dragged me out of the class. I had my notebook, inadvertantly left open over my bag. I wasn’t copying, honestly. Not that I did not cheat, but not in that subject! I spent the whole period weeping outside the classroom. That day, without reason,  I hated my brand new uniform for all that.

There was this propensity to send me out wearing brand new clothes on a birthday. As I grew older, I started taking stances: first stopped carrying chocolates – and then stopped wearing anything conspicuously new. There were studs at school who would otherwise taunt me as mamma’s boy. To align myself with the new found definition of smartness, I ceremonially stopped carrying tiffins to school, on my fourteenth birthday.

One of my dad’s friends, a great connoisseur of photography, used to click images of me on every birthday. It all stopped on my fifteenth, and I thought it was my acne, but all that is another story.

My mom was already complaining about the strains of adolescence I was showing.  From chocolates, the sops and treats had moved to more grown up stuff as I brushed adulthood. Jhumur used to show English movies – and had a bar as well! By my eighteenth, I had already started smoking and even tasted alcohol.

Birthdays happen with a bang at IIT. A rickety latch can barely save you from a barrage of sadist hooligans attacking with military precision at midnight. Even doors get smashed, before everyone, you don’t remember how many, deliver “bumps”. Lest “pain in the back” ends you up in the infamous B C Roy Hospital, there have been instances of people packing pillows into their pants in an effort to avoid the vagaries of the ritual. Hiding in a junior’s room is also a temporary solution – but it only delays the inevitable. You get all of it, with interest. Material loss starts with having to offer a fag of a costlier band, continues with a providence for a round of dirty drinking, and may require you to stretch even higher in search of truth.

Cost of treating increased dramatically as I started working. Costlier brands of smoke and Scotch became norm. Costlier restaurants came into fashion. This is when your vegetarian friends come to your rescue.

On my twenty seventh birthday my to-be wife presented me something for the first time: a T-shirt. I was yet to propose her, and lo! By my twenty-eighth I was already married. My sweet wife arranged a get together with close friends – managing everything from marketing to cooking the meals, from inviting the guests and making the house over.

By then I had realized, “With great happiness comes great responsibility”: I had quit smoking – for good.  My thirtieth birthday just followed my sweet little daughter – then only days old. By my next birthday, my liver, long overtaxed – got a respite. I pledged alcohol to be only social.

I turn thirty three today. As you get older, your thought slows, and you age even faster.

Smoking – 1

I tried my first cigarette when I was 16.

Done with the secondary boards, I had changed my school to do higher secondary. We had moved to a new locality as well. New tution classes needed me to move and mingle around my home town. A new wave of friends of all flavors flooded my life. Blame the biochemistry of my age or the sudden vacuum after the gruesome boards, I felt fatally attracted towards all things forbidden.

I started taking the liberty of staying out longer in the evenings – and ardently participated in the evening congregation of guys, appropriately called thheyk ( ঠেক ) in Bengali slang. It is a daily meeting, somewhat secretive, to discuss all the new discoveries of your burgeoning adolescence. And perform some experiments. Rights to admission are reserved.

Some of my new friends were regular smokers already. And one evening, Chhotka, his pet name, offered me to try a puff. I disliked the very smell of  tobacco smoke. And I liked just two thing about the whole arrangement of smoking – the smell of gas used in the lighters, and the smell of an igniting matchstick. But I was too excited and decided to try something new.

My first attempt was that of a perfect novice: I dragged in a mouthful of smoke and just blew it away – without any inhalation whatsoever. It was greeted with giggles and even sneers from some regulars. The process left me noxious – with an awful smell in my mouth. “Why do you do this?”,  I wondered. An hour of spitting and some chewing gums later, I went home that night.

Despite my doubts about its exoticism, I fell in to his persuasion the next day, and we started the exercise early. Why persuade? The expectation was that once I too become a regular I will share back as well. The guideline was like this:

“Drag mildly into your mouth, and then into your lungs. Dilute the smoke with more air as it goes in.”

“And keep the filter dry … yesterday, you had sucked it wet”, he raised the most common problem with sharing a smoke.

I tried my best, but it went horribly wrong. The violent choking that followed left me coughing breathlessly for the next 5 minutes. The laughing pro-s agreed:  “First time you inhale, that is expected”.

But once the choking subsided, I felt my first nicotine high. Kicks from most alkaloids have similar characteristics when encountered the first time – relaxed muscles and mild dizziness. And perhaps dilated pupils. It elevates confidence and all of a sudden I felt a lot more at ease with my new friends that evening – as if  I had earned some certification.

I was feeling like an adult already.

… Continued to here  …

PS: Just my experience; I do not glorify or vilify smoking

A little rain cloud

Three years ago …

A ring on my mobile phone woke me up in my Noida apartment. It was four in the morning and I was alone. My wife had been staying in Kolkata, with my in-laws for the past two months.

…  A strange fear crossed my mind, before I answered …

It was a short call, and keeping down the phone I called a cab. By the time the cab arrived, in 15 minutes, I was ready, with my baggage of bare essentials. And I cruised to Delhi Airport in the next 30. A mild drizzle followed me …

That was my  first instance of  buying a ticket from an Airport counter … There was a long wait for the flight – actually about an hour – but it felt way too long. Two quick phone calls followed – making me more nervous as I boarded. And I switched my phone off at the command of that overly made up hostess …

… I had not bothered to choose a seat … so check-in counter allotted the worst of the lot … a middle seat just in front of the emergency exit … one with a fixed back … A very long 30 minutes later …. stooping to my front I tried looking out of the cabin window…  Little patches of clouds stretched out from beneath the aircraft … all the way to the mighty Himalayas on the  left …  It was the rainy season … but I was flying over the heavens … watching a perfect sunrise over the highest mountains on earth … live …

…. A sudden jerk brought me back to reality … from the painful, neck-stiffening doze … the flight had just landed …

I tried turning my phone on … and it was the longest  I have known for any phone to turn on … now signal was playing truant … I tried calling a few times …. in vain …   that same hostess had come down to me by then … lecturing on the how unsafe my act was. I felt like throwing that worthless phone on the her painted face.

I deboarded … and finally, on the pick up bus …. the phone crooned, receiving a message … and … I opened it …

… I felt a lump in my throat, my vision blurred  … and I realized I was crying! My fellow passengers inquired… consoled … patted …. my haggled, unbathed, unshaved, uncombed self …

“A little rain cloud has showered bloom in our lives.”

“Mehuli is born: I am a father!”

Thrashing the Androids

This is  not about the lovely phone you are planning to buy, or for that matter, breaking it apart. As an aside, let me tell you: boring Engineering texts define thrashing as a form of resource contention, when all resources are engaged in switching from one task to another. And that is the only work that gets done. It may be possible to get Google’s famous mobile operating system into such a contentious state – but in reality I do not know the exact steps.

Fortunately our story of thrashing is more punchy and realistic. This is a story from a land of semi-robotic humanoids, called Androids for ease, ruled by a set of fully robotic humanoids. Everyone worked to survive. And like everywhere else in the known sad world, there was always so much to do and never enough time to complete any single task at ease.

By the power of the Blue Chip, every unit deserved the right to honorable manufacture, service, and disassembly, and in between: the right to be provided ample opportunity to explore its assignment, create a design, solve the problem, and then execute it like a love story in poetry. Discussing challenging questions, learning new concepts, and basking in the sheer beauty of original design was the specification. Even the dream of a plan provisioned for everything, from accessible battery recharge to heat sinks, first grade spare parts to free servicing.

But this is Ad-Hoc-Land: like routines never invoked, designs turn out to be just dreams meant to be shattered. Plans are made just because they are part of the protocol. The recharge chords are always in short supply. As such batteries are barely able to maintain their minimum charge.  Most of the available power is used up in transmitting status messages. In the absence of spare parts, wear and tear is getting aggravated by the repressive conditions. The human half is half human still. It still finds sheer joy in solving differential equations. But the poor chap’s joy is  marred by the maniac calligraphic requirement – the answer should be  correctly written in good handwriting. And to pour water over the whole circuitry, there is a probable short circuit in the local remote control, making it to spurt random messages. Even before an Android loads a module fully, it gets referred to another. And then another. And so on. Sending back a status often presents the problem of encoding a circular linked list festered with null pointers. In the near future this threatens to exterminate the human half of this race.

Already circulating rumor messages say that the full fledged robotic rulers of the system are on a secret mission. The narcissists want more of themselves. Everything else has to be eliminated: by charge starvation, damaged power points, low voltage or just doctored remote controls.

Full fledged humans may not be able to realize the pain Androids feel. Only Androids can.

NB: This article is arguably figurative, although may consumed ‘as is’ – especially by those supporting the concept of  machine psychology.

NB²: Bazinga!

Rajdhani Express

Indian Railways has come of age. The Rajdhani trains have got a good facelift: the train in which I was travelling, for instance, has been sold to the National Stock Exchange. Gone are the dirty orange and butter yellow, or dirty white striped coaches. Everything is draped in NSE colors – from the coach exterior to panels above the seats, to the common area. Even the window panes are not spared – though it is done quite nicely I would say, you may see through them from inside. I might have missed any NSE details in the toilet, though for different reasons altogether. Not that the flux of money bothers me, it is actually good sign. Had it touched more than just the coaches, I would have been happier.

But in India some things do not change after all – mostly the overall train riding experience. The experience is broadly categorized as “bad”. Although many things have changed over the years, Modern forms of bad experience have taken over more archaic ones.

Let’s start with the worst of the lot: toilets. The infrastructure has definitely improved, since you can no longer see the tracks through that dirty hole. Flushing too has become push-button. But the cleanliness of the people using it hasn’t changed at all. In the morning, I had to hike 2 coaches to find a usable toilet. And that too after being barked at by an occupant who had ‘locked’ it using the same latch that opens from outside. I don’t think this basic design flaw is listed anywhere as unsolvable.

And now over to fellow travellers. Not that I hate customized ring tones, but repeated howling of “jai ganesh jai ganesh ….” at the top volume at midnight was not exactly a heavenly experience.  Especially when you are trying hard to sleep under the dirty and probably lice filled blanket, protected by a thin supposedly newly washed sheet. The religious agony aunty, who has taken a theeka of resolving everyone’s family issues, worked till late night. She always talked like they used to make trunk calls in old films.

Talking of films: gone are the days where the past time was just a portable cassette player playing the recent chart busters. The coupe next to ours was occupied by a young couple who has been watching Hindi movies, one after another, after another … ad inf, on their notebook computer. The volumes were moderate but I kept marveling at their exclusive thoroughness and attention to detail: from the cheap jokes to the lengthy dhinchak songs. Some jokes and even songs got repeated at the lady’s request. The new world modern looking Bengali couple seemed to be a connoisseur of 90s popular Hindi movies as I recognized from one of the songs. They had not even started their dinner when the guys came to clean the plates. I am pretty sure, the I would have become eligible to write a review of The Inception had I put in so much effort.

And to add to this was something disturbing you cannot even blame. An infant of a few months kept me at the edge of my sleep, all night. The mother tried her best but without avail. Not all were bothered by this however. Surely not my good old Keralite friend who snorted off all night and was up at six sharp, he boasted later.

Smoking is banned on trains for more than decade now – although with zero compliance from the passengers. People do it at will, in the toilets. I used to encounter a faint smell of tobacco smoke every 15 minutes.  Also illegal is opening doors on a moving superfast train. A desperate young hero repeatedly sought attention of a high school girl by standing firm on the wide opened door, when the Rajdhani was cruising at may be 80 km per hour.  Indians in most cases, just love to break the law. And in other cases, as we all know, they have to break it. Either way, why not love what you are doing!

I later encountered the door guy, hale and happy, but thought he might be doing the door stunt for a reason. He had a sphere of body odor around him: anyone falling inside is liable to lose consciousness. Fortunately I encountered just the Event Horizon.

I am pretty sure the Railways (yes, my tax money) pays a lot more to the contractor than what shows. The cheaply paid train staff provides you service of the same value they earn. This varied from relatively minor mischiefs like not giving you a newspaper if you do not ask for it, to minor mistakes like not checking is the flask contents are still hot, to utter felonies like presenting a non-vegetarian meal to a vegetarian. The poor guy would have sold back the remaining newspapers back to a vendor, or kabari. Or he was just being lazy with the flask. Or he was suffering the genuine mistake of another staff member in the veg-non-veg goof up. They also perform a customary ‘begging for tips’ exercise once your ride is about to get over.

Our Rajdhani was heavily delayed by widespread dense fog over Northern India. And of course by the delay in the incoming train. The outsourced train staff did not have allowance for provisions, the Rajdhani stops for a few minutes at any intermediate station, and no vendors are allowed on the Rajdhani. And all that simply meant that passengers had to skip a meal. There were no options left.

A perfect finish.

NB: Although truth is the main course here, some sauces and spices are fictional.

Chinkileaks

Leaks of America’s secret cables have swayed the world’s media. Less known are these leaks from the Chinese embassy in New Delhi.

Greetings to the Politburo!

Let us start with a good news. Indians call us Chinki-s. And so do they call the inhabitants of the Chinese territory they claim as their “North-East”. It seems that they secretly ‘know’ it is ours!

Long back when China was illiterate, we have tamed our huge population, with our Chairman’s favorite – bullets. Now that illiteracy in China is extinct, we can do that with our strictly controlled media and internet.
Its a lot different here in India. Although only a third of India’s population is still illiterate officially, we have a fair hunch that it is more widespread, given the cheap gimmicks that Indian politicians perform to get support – a concept they call Democracy. People are controlled mainly by false promises –  one of the basic foundations of India’s Democracy. Media is free from Government’s control, but is largely controlled by money to iterate between the zillion scams unfolding everyday. Nothing is followed up till the end. Indians profoundly believe that after all, its the journey that matters, not the destination.

As you will be knowing, the Indian state claims to be non religious – the government’s activities are not determined by religion (as opposed to China’s irreligious – the Communist party is officially so), there is not a single politician here who has the ‘gun mein dum’ (yep, sounds like Mandarin, but means courage locally) to claim himself as an atheist – not even the mainstream communists. Religion and religious favoritism form the core of India’s politics. And to add to this confusion, there are multiple sections within the prominent religion, sworn foes to one another, always fighting over “Chairman knows what”! In the stead of leaders leading the people, Indians have a bunch of jerks fanning their most immature sentiments. Leaders leading them where? Good for us: nowhere!

There is one metric in which China will love to lose the first spot to India. In the next fifteen years, India will be the most populous country in the world. Some fools here – even those without turbans, think it is a great feat. While we managed to strictly imposed our binding one-child policy, India’s two-child policy is non binding. Even their prominent political leaders flaunt ten children. And they will be completing this so called feat with an interesting demographical statistic. The capital and the adjoining north-western states already  well known for their low sex ratio – caused by rampant sex-selective foeticide and infanticide. People in these areas see their newborn children as a means to earn money –  by a proudly held custom called Dowry. The girl’s side pays the boy’s side a huge sum of unaccounted money for no bloody reason at all! By the way, this custom is termed illegal from the very inception of the Indian state. But like everything bad, it is passe as custom. We are still utterly confused about how such lawlessness can thrive so perfectly.

Back in China, we groom bright children to have good education and end up in the Communist Party’s important posts. And so we have Engineers and scientists among our ministers and important state officials. In India, a typical politician would be an illiterate convict who would be a blood relation to someone else already in the government. Your good characteristics do not determine your political destiny. In fact, it may work as a disadvantage. With personalities towering over ideologies, India aptly deserves a monarchy.

In China’s communism, government workers have learned (arguably the hard way 🙂 ) to be hard working. Indian people vie for Government posts to get a reprieve from working. The so called right to strike have made our communist namesakes here our unofficial  agents. In the name of seeking worker rights, they have managed to make India utterly unproductive.  State run hospitals, banks, and manufacturing units are known for their profound inefficiency. The rich, powerful and informed keep away from them.

India also provides protection to the so called backward communities, and reserves a certain portions of government jobs for these people. In the India social chemistry, this translates to communities competing with each other for being recognized as backward!

All of India’s sporting feats are out of individual brilliance. The role of the State being a big zero. Had they been Chinese we would have groomed  them  to world champions. Almost all funds meant for development of sports, and even international sporting events are looted openly. Something which would have won the looter a firing squad in China.

Let alone Beijing and Shanghai, India’s huge cities do not compare even close to our second grade ones. Most cities are heaps of filth, wrapped with bumpy roads, covered with slums, with the unruly traffic signals, bugged with beggar syndicates.

Our dear friends on the Western frontiers are continuously providing support to destabilize India. But it seems Indians do not need this spoon feeding, they are already helping themselves.

And last of all, things here are not improving soon – Indians are not interested in changing anything.