Whats the price?

Price of the bike – ₤120
Price of a helmet – ₤25
Price of detachable mudguards – ₤20
Price of head and tail lights – ₤25
Price of a visibility jacket - ₤5
Feeling of exhilaration and joy derived from beating the bus back home in rush hour traffic...yeah you guessed it right...PRICELESS!!! :)

Compromise or Sacrifice??

Academically, financially and socially woman have come a long way and I am thankful and consider myself lucky to be born in a generation which is reaping the benefits of the distinct change in mindset of a vast majority of people in our society. Never once did our parents ponder over the idea of favouritism towards their sons over daughters! There are still huge sections of people who are stuck with the same depressing attitude but I will discount those people from consideration for now and pretend they don’t exist.

Taking into account all the progress and achievements one would assume women should be on top of the moon and no worry should bother her, at least there should be considerably less number of worries to trouble her. Apparently the mental state of a majority of women today doesn’t paint the same picture. She is more likely to be chronically depressed as opposed to women a couple of generations ago. Well it came to me as a surprise though. It could very well be that conditions which were once regarded as commonplace miseries are now given a name and identified medically/clinically. But the reason that came out of most studies carried out in this field on woman aged 25 to 35 is something which is more relevant to our lifestyle today than of our mothers and grandmothers. We are becoming more and more career oriented and want to fulfil certain aims and aspirations before plunging into motherhood. My mother at my age already had 2 children, but for me the thought of having a child is not amongst top of my priorities at this point in time. I am sure lot of women my age feel the same way too. But is it creating an untold misery or vacuum within us which we refuse to recognise? I wouldn’t be too sure but that’s what our doctors/psychiatrists seem to think.

Extract from a book called Affluenza: "Above all, it makes them (read women) and their society downgrade the huge importance of caring for small children – almost everywhere I went, the role of mother had a status somewhat lower than that of street-sweeper." Well that sounds like too much of an exaggeration but sadly there is some bit of truth to it after all...even though bringing up a child is probably the single most important thing for a better society, it still remains something that is given least credit and perceived as the most thankless jobs around. No wonder women want to accomplish something beyond the usual or work that extra hard before embracing motherhood to ensure their sense of self-worth and feel good about themselves!

Bringing up a child is no laughing matter, it is a responsibility that lasts for a good couple of decades to state the least. In my opinion I think it was a relatively easier decision to make 20-30 years ago when most often than not the father was the one who played the role of providing financially for the family while the mother took up of the role of the nurturer, who got involved with every new step that the child took. Today even if both husband and wife are equally competent at their respective careers, it is still expected that the mother be the one to give up her career to look after the child. I totally acknowledge the fact that there is no substituting her when addressing a newborn’s needs, but what after the newborn is not a newborn anymore? What when the child is weaned after which both mother and father are equally equipped physically/biologically/emotionally (??) to take care of the child? Why is it invariably the mother that has to sacrifice her career and settle for something less demanding professionally to spare her time for the much needed task of being there for the child? Children most definitely need all the time and attention from their parents, but most often than not the bulk of it having to come from the mother is quite unfair to her, though that is how it has been and continues to be...It doesn’t come as a surprise that women today are stuck in a dilemma and put off having a child for as long as they possibly can! In the bargain they probably end up stretching it a bit too far by bottling up their maternal instincts way beyond how nature has designed them.

My husband once jokingly mentioned humans should consider following the honey bee pattern, where there is a queen bee which breeds and every other bee is just as equal as any other irrespective of being a male or a female. That would pretty much solve our problem of who has to give up their career and look after the baby :) Well if only human emotions were as easy to deal with and alter as per our convenience, life would be a lot easier but at the same time a tad boring too I suppose! :)

Truly religious

I am currently reading a book on a subject which I have often found myself debating with me in my head; it is called "God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. To put it down really short the author of this book encourages atheism and quite literally ridicules blind-folded belief on something or someone who is purely a creation of imagination and faith alone. Well, this has given me the final push to get my act together and feed something to my starving page :)

Personally it has to be one of the topics that I have come to enjoy debating with my mother on a regular basis. She is probably the one subjected to my frequently irritating “whys” and “hows” and “why nots” most of all! Unfortunately her reasoning for going to temples, lighting diyas in front of pictures of her favourite gods, chanting a few minutes of prayers everyday in the morning amongst other things, were not convincing enough for me to follow them with the same religious devotion and faith that she does. After a long and tirelessly fought battle we both have come to an agreement where I don’t pester her with my tedious questions on the things that she follows and she doesn’t question me for the things that I don’t follow. So for now it is a happy understanding between us both!

All said and done I am not proclaiming to be an atheist here. There are still a number of questions that we have no answers to and in all likelihood we may never find those answers in our lifetime. But that does not discount the probability of the answers not existing at all. Our ancestors spent generations believing world is all there is to the “universe”! Thanks to the bright minds of our generation and the ones before, we now know that earth doesn’t even account for one billionth or trillionth of the universe. We know there is a lot more but we still don’t know anything about most part of the “lot more”. So rather than attributing the unexplained and unexplored to something superhuman or supernatural, I would like to pin it down to our ignorance and lack of resources to understand it at present.

We find solace in attributing things that we do not understand to god, which according to me signifies both our naivety and at the same time our heightened level of ego. Naïve because we are ready to believe in something which is purely imaginary and has no evidence. Egoistic because we are not ready to accept there are things that are at present beyond our brains capability to understand and would rather credit it to miracles and supernatural doings.

Being naïve and egoistic doesn’t bother me much, I think its very human! :) What troubles me is the number of factions into which our world is divided into on the name of the various religions that people believe in and consider it their moral duty to demean the ones that they do not follow. Religion to me should just be a set of guidelines for every good and ethical human being to follow, to lead a life that is fair and peaceful for oneself and for the people that constitute the society he/she is a part of. It could very well be an extension of the legal framework. Religion should advocate free will while law takes care of the things that need to be enforced for our own good. Murdering someone is illegal; going out of your way to save a persons life is religious (every small act can go a long way, taking an accident victim to the hospital, making sure your organs get used by someone in need of it desperately rather than burying it in the ground or burning it in the woods are just a couple of things that can change someone’s life forever). Robbing someone is illegal; taking the troubles to return valuables you accidentally found to its rightful owner is religious. Not caring or providing for your child is illegal (child abuse), working at a charity or sparing some cash off your monthly expenses for a charitable cause is religious. Well, one can go on and on but what my point here is religion should be something that brings joy to another person and you derive pleasure from that even though you might have undertaken some pains doing it. Though I am not an expert on teachings of any religion in particular, I am sure they all pretty much say the same things. Wonder where these clashes and killings and fear and terror on the name of religion came from?

I have often heard of theories about spirituality providing peace of mind to our ever wavering mind and its power to channel our thoughts in the right/positive direction. To my mother chanting slokas everyday does the trick and to me spending time with my dog, taking him for a walk and playing with him works. For someone else it could be listening to music, playing an instrument, watching a movie, an hours workout in the gym…it could be just about anything! We need to identify these differences and stop lumping people together on the name of Hindu/Muslim/Christian and so on....

Scary Tales of Bombay ??

I had about 10 phone numbers noted down, equal number of addresses and 100 instructions before I left home. Well, I was leaving for Mumbai for a days work and that was enough to get everyone paranoid about what was in store! Daddy had “virtually” walked me through the routes of the places I was supposed to go to; thanks to Google Earth it makes it possible to walk down any lane in any part of the world sitting in front of your computer at home :)

For some reason Mumbai has been maligned by everyone to such an extent that people who do not live in the city get jitters just at the thought of having to go there. The first time I went to Mumbai was sometime when I was 7-8 years old. I hardly have any recollection of that visit, except for the fact that it was colder than Chennai in December and some of the buildings were really tall. It took me and my sister a good five minutes to count the number of floors of a building in Nariman Point and we were mighty impressed with it! Even after moving to Pune a decade ago our visits to Mumbai have been far from frequent. We have always discouraged our relatives who came visiting us from going there for ‘sight seeing’ and instead lured them to settle for the wonderful hilly alternatives that we have around Pune. Off late our travel to the city have been mainly restricted to seeing off and receiving people at the airport and that too by hired taxies, so there was never a chance to get a first hand experience of the city. This time I wanted to change that and explore as much as I could with the limited time I had in hand.

My train from Goa which was delayed by an hour arrived at Dadar colliding with the rush hour train timings on a Friday morning. In spite of that I decided to stick with my initial plan to take a local from Dadar to Churchgate. I have heard so many horror stories of people getting robbed in the locals; I literally hugged my bag close to me all the time that I was in the train. Surprisingly my journey ended quite uneventfully, but I was left pretty impressed with the way people went about their business in the trains. No matter how crowded it was some people found time to read books, many were busy chatting and there were quite a few of them enjoying ‘radio mirchi’ on their mobiles. The rush could be a deterrent for outsiders but my fellow passengers didn’t show a single sign of unease or discomfort. And yes I took Daddy’s advice and steered clear of the doorway otherwise I would have landed up on the platform of the next station flown out of the train with the flood of people wanting to get down :) Thankfully for me I even found a seat for myself after a couple of stops! After collecting some documents at Churchgate, I was ready to experience the Mumbai taxis. Contrary to the scary tales of crowded trains, I had heard generous praise for the taxis beforehand. It was time to reinstate whatever I had heard from other people and I managed to do just that. It must have been a 10 km journey but I was charged a very reasonable 50 rupees. The first thing that came to my mind immediately at that moment was an auto-rickshaw driver in Panjim (Goa) who demanded flat 40 rupees for a distance which we later covered by walk in 15 minutes! Though the taxi rate was extremely reasonable, the less I talk about the ‘skilful’ driving the better it is. After 5 minutes into the journey I preferred to keep my eyes shut. I finished my work pretty early at the next halt and it was already time for me to get back home. Since I had quite some time left in hand, I decided I would put the Mumbai buses to test as well. I did a few enquiries to find out which bus I would need to take and where I will have to get down. Within 5 minutes of waiting at the bus stop the bus I was to board arrived. Wouldn’t call the condition of the bus best of all, but the punctuality and frequency of the BEST buses had me impressed for the third time on the same day. I arrived at Dadar and it was time for me to get back to Pune.

Maybe it was a lucky day for me but I was genuinely thrilled that everything fell in place so smoothly. I was left wondering what was it that people worry about so much when they have some work in Mumbai. I would still not recommend any of our guests coming to Pune to visit Mumbai as a holiday spot but my apprehension otherwise about the city is totally gone. It felt like any other city in India except for the public transport, which was way far better and I have no arguments in my mind about its superiority. I have another visit scheduled next week and have already started making plans to visit a few relatives after finishing my work using the BEST transport system that I have come across :) Full marks to Mumbai for that!

Coming back home

I had booked my tickets three months in advance and ever since had been counting each day for the day when I was to land in India. Coming back to India means so many things to me. The long conversations I had with people back home about the hundred things I would be doing when I get to India filled my wait with anticipation and eagerness! There is just nothing that compares the joy that one can derive from meeting all the loved ones after so much time. The next most alluring factor of coming back home is of course the food. My mouth starts to water just at the thought of the amazing variety that we get at home which is simply unimaginable for me when I am living on my own elsewhere. More specifically when you come on vacation, the food is always made to cater to your tastes and the amount of pampering one gets showered with is bliss and it takes me straight out of this world and makes me feel as though I have landed in heaven!! :)

Another friend of mine too landed here just about the same time when I did. She too had been away from home for quite sometime and shares pretty much the same sentiments that I do. There was one thing that she mentioned while we were conversing which got me thinking. She said she finds it difficult to understand all the fuss a lot of people make when they come back to the country after staying for a decent amount of time outside. People end up carrying a bottle of mineral water everywhere they go, complain about the traffic as if they knew nothing about it and can’t stand the rush, the weather, pollution or the stinking roads. I can very well relate to how my friend feels. After living here for most of my life, just a year outside is hardly going to change my perception about India and definitely not going to make it more or less repulsive or attractive to me. Thanks to having lived here this long, my immune system is rock solid and I am confident I wouldn’t fall sick at the drop of a hat. As far as the traffic is concerned I don’t expect a miracle there either, I know there would be a major chunk of people breaking the signal, driving on the wrong side of the road and honking at each other full blast for no reason. And how can I forget to mention the bureaucracy. I had my share of it the first day I landed here when I had to make an affidavit, the less I talk about it the better!

It annoys me when I hear people acting pricey when they come back to India after having experienced “greener pastures” elsewhere. But then no one can deny that there are so many aspects where our country can do so much better. I am not ready to say I love India in spite of all its short comings. The unruly traffic gets onto my nerves everytime I step outside, the tendency of most people to treat any part outside their home as dustbins is a pity and the forever increasing population is scary. Just a little bit of discipline from everyone concerned can take us miles ahead, but I guess there is no one interested in doing that little bit that is under our control. We would rather place the blame on things that are not in our hands.

I am not in favour of people showing a 360 degree change in attitude when they come back, but I will risk some bashing from my friends and admit that I do not love India for what it is, but would rather love it for what it can be! Anyway for now I will just continue to enjoy my vacation and have all the fun! Will store the talk about problems for later :) My mom has already called me three times to get to the dining table and the aroma coming from the food is irresistible!! :)

Train-ing for a better future

“After sunrise the humans all travel one way and at sunset they all travel the other. The progress is slow and congested, there are endless blockages, queues, bottle-necks and delays causing untold frustration and inefficiency. If it is obvious that space is so restricted, why is it that all members of this life-form insist on occupying perhaps 50 times their own ground surface area for the entire time they are in motion or not in motion, as is normally the case? They all go in the same direction, travelling to much the same destination and yet they all deliberately impede the progress of each other by covering six square metres of space with a large, almost completely empty tin box! A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport. There are hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly under funded and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic.”

The above paragraph is an extract from the book Gridlock by Ben Elton. I am sure a lot us will be able to identify with the scenario mentioned above. At some point or the other we have all been stuck in traffic jams and in many of our cases it could even be an everyday affair. It is a fact of life that once a person attains a reasonable degree of financial stability one of the first investments (if I may call it so) made is to buy a vehicle for ones own use. The same person who would have once been very accustomed to taking a five minute walk to the bus stop from home and spending another 5 minutes by foot from bus stop to office will find it almost impossible and unthinkable to take one step outside his home without his vehicle. That’s the way of life and that’s the secret recipe to many for obesity and all other ailments related to inactivity. It seems more like an irony that we try to save an average of ½ an hour to an hour everyday and end up spending many hours more in the gym to lose the extra weight which we shouldn’t have gained in the first place.

I have very much been party to the set of people indulging themselves by buying a car immediately after earning a bit of surplus cash. Within a very few days of landing in Uncle Sam’s land I made a mental note of how things work there. Firstly, the country is huge and if you have to travel anytime less than 1 hour to get to office, it means you live close by. Secondly, you can hardly see any buses and trains are something which you only hear about. Thirdly, the price at which you can buy petrol is something which you can no more than dream about in any place other than the middle-east. I didn’t need to look any further for excuses to get myself a car. Yep in midst of all this I blissfully forgot about a lot of other options I had. There do exist trains in the US and there were residential areas which were connected to my office by train, but then none of the friends I knew well lived there, so staying there was not under consideration. Second option I had was to car pool with other people that lived close by. But then there were obstacles to that as well. You see not all of us, though working in the same office, go to office at the same time. I might prefer to go at 8.30 while another friend of mine wouldn’t be a minute later than 8.15 in the office and then there were the rest who couldn’t be bothered to wake up early enough to get themselves to the office anytime before 9.00, though there were exceptional cases when people had to be in the office as early as 7.00. Anyway car-pooling too was out of question. And finally, why should I share my morning with someone who doesn’t even share my taste of music. So there you go, you just can’t avoid having a car all for yourself, in spite of how often your 8.30 turns out into 8.45 and sometimes 9.00 due to traffic congestion. No matter how much you need to spend on the parking slots everyday or on the regular maintenance of your ‘oh so efficient car’ there is no giving it up! From a wider angle, who cares about global warming and climate change, something that is always talked about these days. I am sure nature has its own way of dealing with things and what can I do to change anything that is pre-destined. How can I stand between the supreme forces and things that ought to happen?!!

Less than a year ago I landed in UK to pursue with my studies again. Unfortunately it turned out that here too I couldn’t afford the luxury of not having to travel too far to get to my everyday destination. But this time around I have to admit I was in no luck as far as surplus cash goes. So I decided or rather settled to using the public transport. I have to make quite a long journey and the trains here seem to do a good job where frequency and connectivity is concerned. So life is made a little bit easier. To my surprise after a period of time I have started enjoying my trips to my college and back. For one, there are no traffic jams though there are occasional delays, like say of 2 or 3 minutes which is nothing compared to those frustrating waits in the traffic for ½ an hour or more!! The best thing for me is the peaceful sleep I get when I am in the train; I don’t need to bother about the bulging traffic or some reckless driver who is very likely to make me a part of an accident for no fault of mine. Not just sleep I can even get some of my work done too while I am travelling. And for music, I have my mp3 player which takes good care of my specific tastes and the state of mind I am in.

Well, many would put it down to me not being able to afford a car at this point in time, but I would like to believe I have come to appreciate the better options that I have at my disposal and hope not to revert to my previous way of living as far as everyday travelling is concerned. I know the change in my attitude would not have been possible in the absence of an efficient public transport system that we have in place here. I only wish sanity prevails and we wake up the hidden “sophistication” to develop cheap and efficient public transport in every part of the world, which is what the doctors prescribe for a speedy recovery of our planet :)

Think Globally Eat Locally

Recently I have bumped into quite a few news articles relating to International Whaling Commissions and their efforts to persuade Japan to cease from hunting whales for commercial purposes. It kind of got me thinking in the lines of certain issues which have always bothered me.

A number of times in my life I have been involved in heated arguments with many of my friends on whether there is any merit to being a vegetarian or is it just another egoistic view of human beings assuming protective stewardship for all the other species on earth. To me it had always been a very emotional topic which meant I often got into very subjective means of defending my stand as a vegetarian. Over these years, I would like to believe I have matured in my thoughts and have learnt to look at it with a more practical and wider perspective. For one I am not a vegan, so a major part of my diet, may it be my morning coffee or the ever so delicious yogurt, comes from an animal and of course there are those occasional delights from the bakery (most of them having egg as one of their ingredients) which I am yet to learn to say no to. I am not trying to say that it is ok to be a vegetarian who includes diary product in her diet and deplorable to go any step further. On the contrary I believe there is hardly a difference between me and a non-vegetarian when it comes to considering welfare of the animals in question. Ultimately the dairy cows that yield milk are going to end up in the slaughter house and same is the case with the chickens too. Till such time that I can train my taste buds to be a vegan I would always try to endorse only those products which assure high animal welfare standards when they are alive. No more do I look at my fellow non-vegetarian friends with spiteful eyes, but have come to accept the choice each individual makes for their own set of reasons.

Now taking this argument one step further; which of the animals that thrive on this planet are fit to enter our dinner table and which of them are not? Just the other day I was chatting with a friend of mine who was in China. She said she was appalled to see the variety of animals that find their way to becoming culinary delights in the country. Right from a cockroach to a dog there is none that gets spared. The obvious reaction from most people would be cockroaches are yucky and hardly palatable, but it is up to them as to what they want to eat, but a dog!! How could anybody be so cruel?? A similar reaction is elicited when we hear that the Japanese consider whales and dolphins a delicacy, the French have a thing for horses, Australians have a special place in the kitchen dishes for their national symbol kangaroo and the Africans wouldn’t mind hunting down the last zebra and giraffe to satisfy their tummy. Oh well, come to think of it I doubt if there is any part in the world where the culinary choices made are considered acceptable fully in some other part. This is not just limited to regions it very well extends to religions too. A staunch Judaism or Islam follower would be found dead rather than eating swine and a strict Hindu wouldn’t dare to dream of having the holy cow for his dinner, while for many in Britain and US, food is quite unimaginable without pork and beef.

Until recently I used to have really strong reactions when I heard of people who eat dogs and dolphins. It was hard for me to believe, how could people with a conscience and ability to think, be so brutal and kill such cute and adorable animals. Similar to my change in opinion regarding the non vegetarianism issue, this opinion too has metamorphosised. Firstly no one animal is greater than another, so a pig or a dog or a rabbit, I have no say in deciding who is better off going down in order to become someone’s dinner. Each and every one of these animals mentioned above are all sentient beings having almost equal degree of awareness of pain and are known to show behaviour to avoid painful scenarios actively. So before the British people start thinking how inhumane the Japanese are, they would do better to think if they are any different in the first place. As long as these animals are treated in a similar way no country has a right to raise its finger on another on the basis of which animal it is that has to lay its life under the knife.

The ideal situation would be to stop using all animals for our selfish needs and the first step in that direction for me would be to become a vegan. But till the time we continue to use animals for the countless purposes that we do, the least we can do is actually realise their importance and give them the much deserved respect at least when they are alive and quit playing dirty politics of trying to portray one country as demon and another as angel!