Dire warnings…

It’s not often that I find a place so repulsive that I wish to make a public statement regarding its unfitness for a visit. However, this is one of those times.

Dehradun was presumably a beautiful place. Ruskin Bond did quite like it. But today, it’s probably a place best avoided unless you’re immediately taking a bus out to Mussoorie. The city is filthy, dusty (my hands and hair are caked with dust), and full of rude autorickshaw drivers who are bandits (they’re worse than any I’ve seen anywhere in India!). Oh, and there’s absolutely nothing worth seeing.

Delhi Musings

When Lonely Planet issued dire warnings of touts in ConnaughtPlace, I cast it nary a glance. As a pukka Hindustani, I believed I was unlikely to be caused much grief by them.

But boy, was I ever wrong? Every travel agency claims to be the sole official representative of the Indian government, and has a couple of seedy looking characters trying to dupe you into their office. These people are easy enough to shake off (though one of them was alarmingly aggressive).

However, what I hadn’t bargained for was that perfectly respectable lookign people could be part of this racket. I was standing on Connaught Circus trying my ludicrously poor map-reading skills out when two blokes came along unbidden and showed me the way to get to where I wanted to get to.

After thanking the two nice young men profusely, I carried along in the suggested direction. But, these two blokes decided to walk alongside me:

‘To Bhaiyya, aap kidhar se hain?’ (Brother, where are you from?)

‘Hindustan’, I replied brusquely, having caught on to their game.

‘Hindustan to bada desh hain. Aap kaun se kone se hain? Humari tourist office hain na, isliye hum aapki madad kar sakte hain’ (India is a big country. Which corner are you from? Y’see, we’ve got this tourist office, and can help you in Delhi.)

I decided to get rid of these people by seeing if the Indo-Pak peace process has had any effect.

‘Theek hain, main sarhad ke us paar se hoon’ (I’m from the other side of the border – common parlance for Pakistan).

‘Oh aap Pakistani bhai hain. Jaaiye, bhaisaab’ (Oh you’re a Pakistani brother. Carry on, brother.’

While it’s laudab;e that a Pakistani is allowed to walk aruond Delhi unmolested, it is rather depressing that it doesn’t stop them from annoying their own countrymen.

Other Random Musings

1. I have never in my entire life head so much foul lanugage in such a short space of time. ‘Behenchod’ (Sisterf***er) seems to feature in every sentence, and serves the role of a noun, adjective, and verb from what I could perceive. And everybody – from the well-dressed young chap in the 3-piece suit to the gaggle of noisy 10-year olds on the bus – is in on it!

2. Either everybody else in Delhi suffers from some debilitating physiological disorder, or I’ve become a quasi-firang. Everybody around me seems to be dressed for a cold winter with scarves, caps, jumpers, and even fleece jackets. I, on the other hand, am sweating in my shirtsleeves.

3. A sucker is born everyday. I just saw a bunch of firang tourists profusely thanking an autodriver for taking them to the India Tourist Office (if you read the small print on the sign board, it’s run by ‘United Travels’ and has nothing to do with the Government of India). Some people will never learn.

P.S.: Scribbled on 18/02 in a Cafe on Connaught Circus, Delhi, shamelessly sitting next to a coochie-cooing couple.

P.P.S: The female half of the aforementioned couple is cute.

Edit: I guess lots of you aren’t aware of the fact that ‘Paki’ is one of the most racist swear words used in the UK. And yes, us Indians – in the eyes of the aforementioned racists – are ‘Pakis’ too. Because of that and the slightly pejorative tone taken in some of the comments towards Pakistanis that could offend my Pakistani readers, I have disabled comments for this post. I apologise if it seems rude, but I feel it would be best to do so.

Traveller’s blues

To the fine folk who visit my blog regularly:

This may be the last post I’ll be writing in a while. I’m in a bit of a blue funk right now, and find myself incapable of thinking cheery thoughts – or thoughts, even. Ah well, here goes, then… Hope I get out of this here funk sooner rather than later!

Living in a country without speaking the lingua franca is never the most pleasant experience. Travelling can be even tougher, when one has to figure directions out. It gets even worse when you happen to be me. The Warriers have never been, since the dawn of time, a race capable of sniffing directions out like one of those bloodhounds you always hear of (assuming bloodhounds sniff directions). Philosophers, yes. Saints, quite possibly. But intrepid adventurers we never have been and never will be.

When I first flew in to Germany, I decided to save the ten quid that I would have to shell out to get a Berlitz German phrasebook – an act of parsimony I shall forever regret. But I never regretted it more than when I was to fly to Glasgow from Duesseldorf.

My RyanAir ticket – curse their black hearts – informed me that I was expected to be among those present for the ritual sniffing of one’s genitals by the Alsatians from the Bomb squad at an airport called the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen. Flughafen, I assumed, was the operative term. All I had to do prior to boarding the airplane, I assumed, would be to go to this airport in Duesseldorf called Flughafen – a task within the reach of even one as inept as me.

In fact, I observed that the authorities had been kind enough to draw a (rather ugly) facsimile of an aeroplane to indicate the direction to this Flughafen airport. It was, therefore, with a song on my lips, that I alighted at the railway station conveniently attached to this airport that was called Flughafen.

Five minutes into the airport, however, I began to smell a rotten fish – an aroma that made me hark back to the Shastri Nagar fish market. (I didn’t actually smell a rotten fish, except metaphorically). It was a confused self that walked towards the helpdesk.

I decided to try my pidgin German out.

‘Hallo, ich bin Ryanair flight FR8789.’

The chap at the counter could not repress a laugh.

‘What? You’re a Ryanair flight? (Oh so that’s what it meant)!’

‘Er…no, I…want.. to… get… Ryanair…flight…to…Glasgow!’

I spoke in loud, slow and ringing tones – accompanied by feverish movements of every appendage of my body. Though I have never understood how this would make things any better, and why people do it – but I can’t help myself doing it.

The chap at the other end of the table, watched me do the cha-cha-cha with thinly veiled amusement, and spoke,

‘Well, you’re at the wrong airport, mate. Ryanair flights use the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen’

‘Another airport named Flughafen?’, asked I, shocked that they could do something like this in one city.

‘No, Flughafen is the word from airport’. said the bloke, rather like a chap measuring a lunatic for a straitjacket would.

It was then that a line I read long ago in the Lonely Planet came back to hit me – ‘In German, it is not just the proper nouns that are capitalised.’

I asked the chap, reaching a state of panic, ‘So, where is this other Flughafen?’

‘Just about a hundred kilometres from here’

‘What!!?? Then why do they call it Duesseldorf?’

‘Well, the question you should ask yourself is why you choose to fly RyanAir?’

‘Er..because its cheap!’

‘Well, now you know WHY its cheap!’

And all this while, I thought it was cheap because they used slave labour to fly the airplanes. (Later, sources assured me that this was also the case).

It was thus a chastened self – cursing my parsimony for not having got that Berlitz phrase-book – that travelled to Berlin.

P.S: Attempts to confirm that this was a deep-dyed conspiracy hatched by George W Bush, Tony Blair, and Ahmed Chalabi expressly to discomfit me have now come to nought.

Eurotrip -Part I

As I have tirelessly reminded my (pitifully few) readers over the past few weeks or so, I am just back from what I euphemistically call a Eurotrip. However, if any one of you has watched that timeless classic, it was absolutely nothing like the movie. Though I did rather loudly claim that my Aryan ancestors left the Caucasus because they could not stand the sexual licentiousness of those of my ancestors who ultimately moved to Europe, I did not do anything to reclaim as my right some crazy European sex. However, I did buy a book titled ‘The A-Z of being Single’ – not that it has anything to do with crazy European sex. (If you didn’t get a word of what I just said, watch Eurotrip!)

In any case, it was a bright, pleasant Glaswegian morning when I got onto the BA Connect flight to Paris. I was expecting a large, spacious airbus with young, pretty hostesses to take me to the city of romance. But what the (&&(*&*( at British Airways gave me was a small tinderbox of a plane that was once used in World War II by paratroopers – which additionally stopped at a place called Birmingham where they charge you 4.5 pounds for a single burger. Oh well, it’s cheaper than the exorbitant rates charged inflight.

Two more uncomfortable hours later, I was in Paris – the sex, romance and tramp capital of the world (er…make that the sex and romance capital of the world. Calcutta is still the tramp capital of the world). A few minutes later, I learnt three things:

a) The French don’t speak English.
b) The French don’t like speaking English.
c) The French in the Lonely Planet Guide was insufficient to get me to the toilet, let alone a place called Porte de Bagniolet somewhere in the middle of Paris.

However, sign language was to be my saviour all the while I was in France. That, ‘Pardon, Monseuir. Parle vous Anglais, sil vous plait?’, ‘Merci’ (if the answer to the above was yes), and ‘Nik ta mer’ (if the answer to the first question was no…I’m kidding!!!)

I went up to the ticket counter and signaled – using complex movements of my head, arms and legs – that I wished to get a train to someplace where I’d find the famed Paris metro. It worked, and the woman skinned me for 8 euros before giving me a ticket.

Where one arrives when one gets off the train which starts at Charles de Gaulle airport (pronounced nothing like how a normal person would read it) is another station called Gare du Nord (which I think means station of the north, assuming they misspelled North).

The French make one concession to those of us who are stupid enough to not have learned a word of French. They coloured the metro lines – and red, blue and green are presumably the same everywhere in the world.

However my requests for where I could find the ‘dirty green’ line were met with puzzled stares.

In any case, we managed to find our way to the Youth hostel, stopping to ask for directions only sixteen times along the way. The Youth hostel, we learnt, was located just outside the Peripherique, which is a kind of ring road around Paris. The significance of this seemingly trivial fact is that the law outside the Peripherique bears several similarities to the law of the jungle. I realized that as soon as I saw some African bruddas drinking their beer noisily on the footpath, all the while directing strange looks at the two foreigners who’d stepped off onto the streets.

!Digression!

An interesting observation I made about my bruddas in Paris was that they dressed exactly like my bruddas down on 8 mile road. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if one of them began to rap freestyle and scream, ‘De 811, nigga, and the 313, nigga – dis is de free world, muddafucka’ while brandishing his gat. International black subculture, I guess – they all look so bloody cool! Being cool seems to come as naturally to Africans in the West as saying ‘Where is the party yaarrr? This pub is jhakaasss, b***c***!’ louldly, and dancing like hippopotami come to us Indians (those of us from down south being particularly proficient at the last).

And we wonder why we don’t get any! 

!End digression!

Since it was just about six in the evening, and because France wasn’t Britain (where everything except places to get drunk in and stab your neighbour close down at half past five), we decided to go to the Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower

If I were the chappie that ran the Eiffel tower (in a manner of speaking, of course, as the Eiffel Tower generally prefers to stay put), I would have called it the Eiffel queue. A few minutes after I had got the mandatory snap of me in front of the tower, I had managed to squeeze myself into the queue, in between a Romanian family having a family row (unfortunately in Romanian – nothing is more entertaining than a family row in a language you can understand) and an Indian family that was trying to break the queue and squeeze along to where their parents-in-law had ‘caught a place for them’.

The Indian family managed to achieve the impossible, leaving me all aglow at the thought that wherever in the world one was, nobody is as adept at breaking simple, easy-to-follow rules as an Indian.

After about thirty minutes of waiting, I managed to get out of the queue waiting to buy tickets to enter the Eiffel Tower and into the queue of people waiting to enter the Eiffel Tower after having bought the tickets. Another thirty minutes later, I had managed to progress onto the queue of people waiting to enter the lift to get to the first level.

We spent a moment contemplating the price tags on the garishly lit (and overpriced) ‘official’ souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower – which cost merely twice as much as the equally garish unofficial souvenirs sold by the Indians, Algerians and Africans outside the Eiffel Tower. That and a few more photographs later, we joined the queue to get on to the lift to the second level.

A few (more breathtaking) photographs at the second level later, I decided to go upto the top level, asking my cousin (who has vertigo) to wait for me here for a few minutes. I spent thirty minutes waiting to get onto the lift to the third level. As soon as I reached the head of the queue, I realized that this was, in fact, the queue to get down to the first level and the queue to get on to the third level was the mass of human beings at the other end of the tower. But never let it be said that the Warrier soul is one that admits defeat. For I stood in the ‘real’ queue for three-quarters of an hour, arguing with an American chappie about which one of us could take the cold better.

American: ‘I’m telling yaa, in Arizona where I come from, the temperature goes all the way down to the twenties and thirties.’

Me: (scoffs) ‘Ha! In India where I come from, the temperature never goes above the forties – and the nights are often in the twenties. In fact, in Edinburgh where I live now, the temperature sometimes drops below zero.’

The American stared at me incredulously.

‘Edinburgh warn’t that cold, y’know!’

‘Ha, that’s cuz you went in the summer. In the winter, it was -5 degrees Celsius.’, I retorted, and thought for a minute if I should add a bit about how I felt my most private parts turning into ice.

‘Whassat?’

‘-5 degrees Celsius. 5 degrees below freezing!’, said I, proudly.

‘5 below freezing? That’s 27 degrees, dude!’

I realized he was talking in the Fahrenheit scale!

Bah, Americans!!!

I ultimately managed to get all the way to the top and was happily snapping photographs of the river Seine, when I observed this young Indian couple on a honeymoon lovingly carving their names, ‘Divya and Devasahayam’ on the railing. I could not help but think, ‘Ah, now all you’ve got to do is piss on the railing, mate – and you’ve recreated Fatehpur Sikri in Paris, thank you very much!’. But I did not bother to intervene till I saw the idiots begin to carve ‘INDIA’ in big letters across the railing.

That was too bloody much – the fecking philistines! (as an Irishman would have said it – assuming the aforementioned Irishman knew the word philistines)

‘Excuse me, you may wish to consign your names to infamy, but can you please spare our country the ignominy?’

‘What?’, said the man belligerently.

‘Stop carving MY country’s name on the Eiffel Tower. I don’t want them to think that all Indians are mindless idiots who deface monuments.’

‘None of your business’, said the man.

‘I’m calling that chap over there who’s supposed to be looking after the monitor. Enjoy yourself with the French gendarmerie. They are about as gentle as the Indian police.’

The man immediately apologized and disappeared, probably thinking deep dark thoughts. I wonder if he wrote ‘India’ at the other end of the Eiffel Tower, as the arsejackers in the picture here have.

An hour and two queues later, I joined my cousin at the second level and we began our walk down the Eiffel Tower, sick as we were of waiting in queues for lifts. After this, we decided to eat at an elegant little Parisian bistro where I ordered some godawesome steak and learnt the nuances of French pronunciation from a decidedly insane waiter who spent 60% of his time smoking cigarettes and the other 40% dancing about the tables – I would have protested, but what with strikes being as much the mood of the moment in France as it has always been in Kerala, I didn’t – though I almost missed the last metro of the day thanks to fifty minutes spent waiting for the bill (or the check, as my cousin seems to call it! 😛 )

To be continued, if junta don’t find this stupefyingly boring

Je vais en République Française

I realize that I have left the story of my close encounters with the rowdy kind incomplete. But I am currently in the midst of a hectic trip accross Europe on a shoestring budget.

I was away the last few days pinching pennies and admiring the natural pulchritude (not of the two legged female variety, you perverts) in the Scottish Highlands, and hope to write a travelogue down before I forget it all. I visited castles, lochs and bridges. I drove accross scenic beauty spots. More interestingly, I walked accross a very drunk Inverness at one in the morning, searching for toothpaste, during the course of which:

(a) I was mistaken by some poor drunk souls for Ali Baba – at least I think I was, as I quite distinctly heard them referring to Ali Baba as they expressed an ardent desire to speak with me. Though I could have set things right by telling them that I was actually thief #39 in the story, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

(b) I had a long conversation at the taxi rank with another drunk soul, who could not stop thanking me for having defeated England in the one-day series. Though I could have set him right by telling him that it was actually eleven completely unrelated chaps who performed the deed, I thought he was happier assuming I was directly responsible for England’s well-deserved humiliation.

(c) I had another long conversation with two Englishmen from London at a pub, during which we discussed Kashmir and Northern Ireland, and how they wished they were not English and could actually visit Northern Ireland without being shot at and murdered.

Upon returning to Edinburgh, I spent a night experiencing (after a long hiatus) the Edinburgh nightlife yesterday, during the course of which:

(a) I watched an Arab do a pole dance. Thank you, Mohammed – I am still trying to erase the unsavoury memories from my head.

(b) I watched as a group of overweight Fijians at the next table magically transformed into rugby players from New Zealand as they tried to – unsuccessfully, if I may add – hit on a friend.

(c) I paid £3.60 in a parking ticket machine, only to realize that parking was free after ten in the night.

So it is a rather sleep-deprived young Warrier that shall attempt to wake up in less than four hours in order to catch a flight to Paris.

I have spent half an hour thinking of how I could describe my feelings at going to arguably the most beautiful city in the world. My grandiloquence has, however, failed me. The verbosity that so characterizes me has deserted me like a fickle mistress. All I can say is – YAYYYYYYYY!!!

Assuming anybody is interested in my travel plans (though I doubt if anybody is – however, since when have I NOT bored people with things they would rather not know), I’m travelling to Versailles, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, before returning home.

After which I set out another short trip to set fire to the birthplace of my old tormentor (from my schooldays), William Shakespeare.

After which I plan to expose to the world the gruesome details of the treatment I received at the hands of a poriki.

After which I face the ire of my supervisor.

Phew!

So, as they say in Deutschland, Fick Deine Mutt… er… I mean, Guten Nacht!

Falling off Goatfell – The Arran Trip, Part II

Falling off Goatfell

We landed in Arran in due time. A few lingering suspicions I had of whether I had actually docked in France by mistake were dismissed when I realized I could understand what the blokes on the shore were mouthing (unless of course the French had seen sense at long last and decided to switch to English).

Arran is a huge island, and does not have as many roads as a lazy city slicker like me would have liked. However, since it is huge, walking everywhere is not an option either. This leaves one with two options – of getting onto an overpriced bus, or selling your soul to raise the funds to rent a car.

Since I didn’t know if I had one of the latter, I decided to clamber onto a bus to travel to a place called Corrie. It was as I settled down on the bus that I realized that the buses were marginally less comfortable than the trusty 100 year old steeds they use in Chennai, and the roads were as good as the euphemistically named IT highway is after a storm.

I also realized that the bus driver suffered from the delusion that he was at the wheel of a Jaguar. He was convinced that the only way he could give his passengers their money’s worth was by giving their collective stomachs a good churn. He was aided and abetted by the twists and turns of the wonderfully surfaced road.

As we neared Corrie, any thoughts I had entertained of making terrible jokes about Poories in Corrie had all but vanished. All I wanted was a quiet corner where I could relieve myself of the contents of the stomach. The coffee was fighting with the ham and cheese sandwiches for an out, and all of them picked my esophagus as the staging point for breaking out of my body.

One of my friends tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Are you sick?’, she asked, rather unnecessarily.

‘No, I usually turn green on a whim. It amuses me to no end.’ Bitter words, no doubt. But there are times when a man is amenable to stupid questions, and times when he is not.

‘I just thought of a funny joke.’, she went on, unaffected by my remarks which were meant to bite like an adder and sting like a bee. ‘You’re a sick individual in the normal course of things. But now you’re a sick person who is incidentally feeling sick.’

I turned to her with an expression that had disgust, disdain and annoyance written on it. I was about to make another scathing remark which would have shut her up (for thirty seconds, at least), when the bus went up in the air after climbing up a steep incline a little too fast. Belying the driver’s expectations, the bus did not stay airborne but descended to terra firma with a resounding thud. And the lemonade that I had sipped the day before joined the party that the coffee and the sandwiches were organizing in my esophagus.

My friend looked at me with sudden concern. ‘You’re going to puke, aren’t you?’

I nodded weakly, in the hope of garnering some womanly sympathy.

‘Please turn away. Don’t puke on me.’, said she, brutally.

If I were an old man, I would have said, ‘They don’t make women the way they used to in 1950.’

But I wasn’t (and am not) an old man. So I turned away, thinking dark thoughts and hoping for the depredation of all womankind.

Cut to: Goatfell Mountain

It had been fifteen minutes since I had let the coffee, the sandwiches and the lemonade make their way back to the womb of the nature that created them. As the climb got harder and harder, my backpack seemed to get inexplicably heavier and heavier. In a few minutes, I was almost climbing on all fours.

I shouldn’t have carried those three cans of beer, goddammit!

In keeping with the spirit of the previous post, I summarize herein the lessons learnt during the climb to, descent from and fall on Goatfell.

• If somebody asks you to carry three cans of beer, don’t listen to somebody. In fact, go a step further and tell somebody that he’s talking through his hat.
• If the somebody happens to be yourself, kill somebody. The world doesn’t deserve somebodies of this kind. *searches frantically for a noose or a few capsules of cyanide*
• Snow looks nice and feels nice to the touch. But that doesn’t make having snow stuffed down your shirt an enjoyable experience.
• Snow is slippery. But do not avoid the snow to walk on the adjoining wet, icy rocks. Ice is slipperier (a message to the purists here – if Lewis Carroll could say curiouser, why can’t I say slipperier. So there!) than snow, and falling down on a rock hurts more than falling down on snow.
• If you’re five feet and seven inches tall, weigh around 63 kilos, have black hair, Indian, and called Siddhu, don’t go mountain climbing. There are several other pursuits you will be significantly better at – like, for instance, being a roadside romeo and whistling at passing pulchritude, sleeping, or drawing Nazi Swastikas on bus stop windows.

A trip to Arran – Part I

The isle of Arran is supposed to be somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. I am not sure exactly where, so don’t ask me where it is if you aren’t either. That’s why God created Google Earth.

Irrespective of whether I am sure of its exact coordinate position or not, the fact remains that I did spend the weekend there. Two days during which I speculated if I was closer to France than I usually am, twisted my ankle six times, developed a convincing, almost arthritic crick in the knee, and slept in a pub, on a dining table, on two different buses, in a bus stop, and on the deck of a ferry.

By this time, the reader has probably left – being, as most normal people are, completely disinterested in the weekend activities of a somnambulist. But if you haven’t, (and in case you’re reading this, you haven’t) let me hasten to explain that Arran is an island which is supposed to be a miniature model of Scotland – the island contains, among others, thick forests, waterfalls, a 2000 foot mountain, crazy bus drivers who think they’re driving roller coasters, and rubbish bins exclusively for dog poop*. In fact, the only thing I couldn’t find were large numbers of friendly Scottish drunks looking for someone to talk to about how Englishmen are evil incarnate (something one expects to find as a matter of course in every Scottish city).

Part I – The Trip to Arran

The day that I got onto the bus to begin my trip to this little isle dawned fresh and beautiful. It didn’t appear all that fresh and beautiful to me because sleeping just two hours results in one having a rather jaundiced view of things.

After drawing a small Nazi swastika on the condensate on the bus stop window (and hoping to alarm some pacifist or idiot into thinking that it was time to wear yellow stars around their arms again), I got onto the bus and staggered to the most comfortable seat I could find.

It was then that I found that I had forgotten to zip my fly up. Finding oneself with an unzipped fly when almost completely surrounded by women is probably the kind of thing some people actually enjoy – strippers, streakers, and miscellaneous other perverts.

But, being none of them, and on the contrary, being a nice Indian boy, I found myself in a highly uncomfortable situation. After having settled into the most fetal position I could possible contort myself to settle into, I slept fitfully – dreaming all the time of most unpleasant occurrences. All of which involved me accidentally stretching my legs.

Two hours later, I found myself being woken up by a few rather impolite jabs, and being pushed into a ferry.

And talking of coffee served at the lounge where one waits for a ferry (not that we were, but let’s assume we were), I had an argument of great pith and moment with someone over why it is alright to leave a coffee cup on a chair if one cannot find a dustbin anywhere in sight. As I walked away after having lost the argument, I decided that this unnecessary attention to detail is probably why Asia looks all set to supplant Europe in the world stage. You wouldn’t find an Indian or a Chinese bloke spending hours looking for dustbins when the whole world is at his disposal (pun intended).

As I watched the ferry move slowly towards Arran, I began to wonder if that landmass that I sighted yonder was France. I turned to a friend of mine, who happened to be contemplating similarly deep thoughts, and spoke
‘Hey, is that France that I see out there?’

She laughed. I am often used to girls giggling at my witticisms, but this didn’t sound right. Girls, when they giggle, do not often sound sarcastic. And neither do they look like she did just then.

‘We’re sailing to the west of Scotland. How on earth do you expect to find France here?’

I was perplexed for a bit. West, according to me, was a perfectly natural place for France to be, unless it had moved since I heard from it last. After all, I’d been led to believe all along by my geography teacher that France was a western country.

But before I could say that, realization dawned upon me. Us Warriers are not perplexed for long. I turned towards her and said, rather snappily, ‘Ah! We’re on the Pacific then!’

A long silence, punctuated by hyenasque gasps, followed, as she held onto the railings trying not to fall over. Dashed inconsiderate of her, I must say.

‘No, you idiot! This is the Atlantic! And what you think you see is Northern Ireland.’

I was not convinced and decided to consult a local, as Scotsmen are unlikely to double over with laughter when one asks them a question of great pith and moment. I found a local yokel leaning over the railing, smoking a meditative cigarette.

‘Er, excuse me, mate, but are we on the Atlantic Ocean?’

‘ARRh…nayy, we aRe on the fiRth of <some word that has slipped my mind for the nonce>. If we tRavel another hundRed miles, we would be on the Atlantic, aye! And that theRe is the isle of ARRan. ’, said he, enunciating each ‘r’ loud enough to wake the dead.

Ah! I knew we weren’t sailing to Ireland. It had to be the isle of Arran.

I turned to my friend in triumph. ‘See? See? It’s not the Atlantic! We’re at the confluence of the Pacific and the Atlantic. And the firth of whatever it is called is just Gaelic for the Pacific. Almost everything is called a firth of something or the other around these parts’

(Cut to: Fifteen minutes later)

A long geography lesson punctuated with condescending and funny remarks which weren’t remotely funny (though the other hyenas seemed to think otherwise) culminates.

Lessons learnt:

1. Do not argue with a woman. You’ll lose.
2. If the captain says you’re sailing to the Isle of Arran, believe him.
3. The Atlantic is closer to the firth of whatever it is than the Pacific.
4. The firth of whatever it is is not the Gaelic word for the Pacific.
5. I should never have passed my geography examination in school. Somebody made a big mistake.

Will our intrepid hero be thrown to the sharks for his ineptness in Geography? Will he fall off the Goatfell mountain, and add to the multitude of goats that have already fallen off it? Will he continue to write such arrant nonsense? All this, and lots more, in the next episode of this breathtakingly boring travelogue.

*Vilasrao Deshmukh must have, at one time, been mayor of Arran.

A tale of two countries…

As this author pens this piece, he realizes that he has been terribly inactive on the blogging front for the last couple of weeks. But I must hasten to explain that it is because I have had to be terribly active in the real world – something I’m not particularly keen about, but something I have to do to justify the faith that the European Union has (mis)placed in me.

To get down to actually writing (and trying to figure out if I still remember to write in languages other than Java), here goes…

The Glaswegian, myself and (part of) an unfortunate Englishman

Around three weeks ago, a young Warrier packed his little all and scooted to a not-so-little place called Glasgow.

Glasgow was, to sum it up, rather a disappointment. But then, living in a place like Edinburgh prejudices you against most places (unless of course you’re visiting El Dorado or Shangri La).

But that doesn’t take away from it the fact that Glaswegians are terribly interesting people. If one were to be a little more unkind, one would use the word ‘weird’ – but being the nice, well-bred and sweet young man that I am, I will not say so.

Standing by a bridge in Glasgow at two in the afternoon, I asked my Nigerian friend to snap a picture of me and an English friend of mine. As I primped myself to look even more dashing than I usually do, I did not notice a slightly inebriated-looking middle aged man walk towards us.

But the inebriated-looking middle aged man did notice us. Before I could say a word (or two, for that matter), he put his arm around me, pushed Ian (the English chap) out of the frame and plastered a very drunk grin on his face. It was a laughing self that posed for the camera with the old soak. The normally reticent Ian was too shocked to say much, but merely looked a little more perplexed than he usually looks.

After my clearly amused friend had snapped a picture of us, we assumed the old soak would go along to whichever pub he haunted at this early hour. But the friendly neighbourhood Glaswegian had different ideas. Energetically shaking me by the hand, he asked me,

‘Where ya from, mate?’

‘Er…India…’, said I, for I had still not overcome my initial surprise.

‘Welcome to Glasgow, mate! We’re SO glad to have you here… Have a great time in Glasgow!’

He asked Deji, the Nigerian bloke, the same question, and welcomed him equally effusively – the ridiculous grin still in place.

And then, he turned to Ian, who looked like he would have much rather preferred to have been in a cave in Afghanistan hunting for bin Laden, butter knife in hand.

Ian is as English as the English get, if not even more. The ‘Englishness’ of his English accent would probably put the Queen to shame – what with his erudition oozing out of every syllable. He is, to cut a long story short, the kind of chap who’d never have caused Queen Victoria to raise a cultured eyebrow and snort a nasty ‘We are not amused!’ (though Queen Victoria would have been equally likely to bellow an uncultured ‘Off with his f***ing head’ if faced with our Glaswegian hero.)

‘Oh, rather, I’m from England, what what?’

It was the work of a moment for our hero to wipe the grin off his face. He glared balefully at Ian and said,

‘You’re a ruddy Englishman! Go away, f*** off!!’

If Ian had looked perplexed til then, he now seemed a trifle shocked – as shocked as he ever gets.

‘I say! What?’, was all he could come up with.

The Glaswegian continued, ignoring Ian’s protests that he could not possibly f*** out of Scotland at such short notice.

‘You!’, he said – the grin back on – pointing a stubby finger at me, ‘and you’, this time looking cheerfully at the Nigerian, ‘are invited to the pub – free drinks on me. You’re visitors to Scotland!’

Ian had by now lapsed into silence, and was probably wondering when the Glaswegian would pull a carving knife out to expedite the process of his f***ing out of Scotland.

The Glaswegian turned to him and said, ‘NO Drinks for You, mate.’

And then, with a parting wave to us, and a muttered ‘go back to England’ to Ian, our cheery Glaswegian took leave of us.

And he never did tell us what the name of ‘his’ pub was…

I’m leaving on a short tour of London during my mid-semester break next week. It promises to be a fun trip – what with six of us haunting the old metropolis for three whole days. But unfortunately, before I can leave, there are pressing issues such as an assignment that I have to deal with. So the next week will presumably be spent in writing in a little-known but much-hated foreign language called Java. So, until then, adios amigos…or as the Scots are wont to say, Cheers Mate!!

A Scottish photoblog

Weekdays being what they are, I did not have any time at all to get down to penning a blog. But since my weekend begins on Friday and I don’t plan to get up before 12 tomorrow in any case, I spent hours toiling over my first photo blog on The Blog of Small Things

This photoblog takes the reader/viewer through the whole of my last Saturday, which was – to put it very mildly – a great day!

So, please do scroll down and look through the images I have painstakingly compiled, and maybe read the corny captions that I’ve penned.

(Of course you can leave, but you won’t, will you? Huh huh?)

Till then, comment allez vous monseuirs et mesdames. (Pleeease!)

Long legs, irascible bus doors and other such ramblings

It’s been a long time since I have last put pen to paper, or to be more precise, fingers to keyboard. (Though many of you may argue that since the monitor plays the role of a paper, the metaphor that I have constructed is inaccurate.)

That was primarily because of what one could term an acclimatization period that I had to go through. After spending the lion’s share of one’s life in a place, one finds it tough going for the first few days one spends in a new place – among unfamiliar faces in a completely unfamiliar environment. Faced with situations which one never has had to face before – primarily washing one’s own clothes and cleaning one’s own room, not to mention ‘cooking’ cornflakes and coffee. 😛

So the first couple of weeks that I spent in Singapore could be termed hellish. I had been through the furnace. If today, Messrs. Shadrach, or for that matter, Messrs. Abednego and Mesach *, were to walk up to me and tell me what a hard time they had playing squash with Satan in the fires of hell, I would look them strongly in the eye.

I would tell them,

‘Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego, you have merely been through the fires of hell. That’s child’s play. Ask any KC Tech passout.’

And then with a light laugh, I would continue, ‘Have you had your heads half crushed by the doors of a bus in Singapore, just because you stood too long at the door staring at a cute wench in the miniskirt? Did you almost get torn apart by a VERY angry man for jumping the queue for a taxi – a queue that you believed did not exist? Did you have to wash your own clothes in a washing machine full of fluff? Did you ever have to realize the hard way that airline seats in Executive class have this thing below you which rises up and kicks your ankles if you press the wrong button at the wrong time? Did you ever drink porridge and smack your lips in satisfaction, just to be told it was a frog’s intestine that you’d just imbibed?’

A mortified Shadrach would trace little patterns on the floor with his feet. Mesach and Abednego, chastened by the perils I have faced, would apologize to me for bothering me with their troubles.

And my blog readers (assuming they haven’t forgotten the existence of my blog during the long silence) would throw slippers, stones and money at me. (Throwing the first two allowed, if you throw item number three as well. US dollars preferred.)

One of the best things about Singapore are the legs. Long legs. Curvaceous legs. Legs in shorts. Legs in micro-minis. Legs, period! A few trips on the MRT is likely to result in a severe case of eye-strain.

(MRT, for the uninitiated, the fancy acronym they use for a train that has doors and lets people in. And if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, the doors try to crush you into custard. Scoff if you may, but believe me, they can.)

One of the worst things about Singapore are the rules. You can’t spit! And once you’re told that you can’t spit, you just desperately want a good long spit. I spent 21 years in India fighting with a friend who liked making his presence felt by creating a ring of paan masala around wherever he stood.

And I have spent the past two weeks appreciating how much fun it would be if I could do so.

Last I heard, dogs who try to mark their territory by urinating on street lamps receive fifty lashes on the backside. That holds good for dogs of the two legged variety too.

Talking of urination, urinating onto a tree by the side of the road isn’t explicitly banned. But, when you live in a country where you’re likely to see the same people everyday, you wouldn’t really want them pointing to you every morning and exclaiming loudly, Nee wann piss treesh ne 63 64. 98 go go Shiee Shiee

(Which roughly translates to – here comes the orang utan/Indian who pissed on Trees 63 and 64 in Singapore. He just has 98 more to go before he’s made his presence felt on every tree here.)

No, that’s not the worst bit. The worst bit is that I shall from today be scoffed upon by my readers for not practicing what I preach. That’s because regular readers of my blog (assuming there are a few) would remember that I had once told them about the virtues of watching porn when in doubt. But I shall not (and more importantly, cannot) practice it here. (I hope however that most others have taken this most elevating maxim to heart.)

And now I turn to the little icon on the right hand side of my screen. And I see my worst enemy look at me. The little clock there screams at me – lazy *&(&(, you still haven’t done any work, and half the day’s behind you. It reminds me of the dangers of falling below a 3.5. It reminds me how I could create history of sorts by being the first person to be thrown out of SMA. It evokes in me the possibility of being remembered for posterity at the coridoors of SMA – maybe they’d put this portrait up and students would point to it and say, oh this is the bloke who scored a 3.4.

I would join the ranks of Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and an old classmate of mine who attended classes at the neighbourhood wineshop more often than he dropped into class.

But I digress. What I wished to say was, Bye bye, sayanora, and a few hundred other words to the same effect.