Come again to Copenhagen

All eyes or to be more realistic many eyes and ears had been focused in the direction of Copenhagen during the last two weeks. I would feel left out by not making a statement about this much talked about “Climate Summit” as it had a grand closing yesterday. The climate summit was not surprisingly given contradictory ratings by various countries as some terming it an unprecedented outcome while other saying it a good start and a few terming it an outright failure. Probably they have to come back to Copenhagen or maybe Mexico to take this further.

What does it really mean to us lesser mortals? We quite do not understand the difference between 2° temperature rise and 1.5° rise and how can a nation control that. It is particularly difficult for someone like me to perceive this extremely relative affair concerning temperature. I feel cold at 15° while my friends live comfortably at -25°. I guess it will be prudent to leave this complex issue of climate change and global warming in the able hands of the scientists and the leaders as their spokespersons.

But there is a thing or two we could all chip in to make this world a better place for us, our coming generations and other forms of life with whom we share our planet.

I feel particularly sad to see people waste paper. I equate paper with deforestation and destruction of the habitat of the animal kingdom... if there were to be a kingdom. This is something we need to consider with sincerity. We can start by using both sides of the sheets and when it comes to free leaflets and pamphlets we need to rethink before we pick one up.

A few years back I was involved in the making of restaurant in a five star hotel. As the operations took over the restaurant and started to prepare their staff for service, we got to hear a few very important instructions going out to the waiters. "Serve water as soon as the guest takes the table" was one and "try to sell more" was the second. We have to add one more bottle to the already huge pile of plastic while it is difficult to believe that such a state of the art property do not have reliable water filtration installed!

We all can help in the recycling process by separating the different category of trash. We human generate a huge amount of trash every day with our mindless lifestyle churning out bottles, cans, cartons and other forms of plastic and paper every moment that we are awake.

And finally we can make a statement by buying only what we require and not what we desire…….. Well, As much as practically possible!

Bins in the roads of Dubai

adieu

The New Year is synonymous to change as we bid goodbye to the old and welcome the new. This year I am very nostalgic about the Bajaj Scooter as we bid farewell to this icon with a heavy heart. The scooter has been a part of the life of every Middle class Indian and even if they did not own one.

The Message from the president said: “We have sold the last of our Chetak scooters and Bajaj Auto will not be building any more of these classics. Bajaj Auto has"retired" the Chetak tooling and closed the plant……”

I remember those teenage days as I first learned to ride a scooter and it wasn’t easy to synchronize the clutch and the gear and the accelerator. A smile crossed my lips as I thought of the college days when a friend wanted to try the scooter and nobody was ready to ride his pillion. I had volunteered and he managed to get us airborne followed by a nose dive to the amusement of all others.

A few years later I moved to Delhi and I had my own scooter, a Bajaj chetak and it was my companion as long as I lived there. I have very fond memories of those days but I also remember quite vividly the two near death experience on the Delhi road. On one occasion a Blue line Bus pushed me so hard that I got quashed between the bus and the pavement fortunately I was unharmed but my chetak took the pressure and developed a crack right in the middle of the chassis. Living up to its name on this occasion as it was named after “Chetak” the legendary horse of Indian warrior Rana Pratap Singh.

The Bajaj Chetak was a very popular homemade motor scooter produced by the Bajaj Auto Company. The original design was based on the Italian Vespa Sprint. We can still recall those days when waiting lists for Bajaj scooters stretched into years and people were willing to pay a premium equal to the original cost to possess one of those. This became the symbol of resurgent India and was a popular wedding gift in certain parts of Indai. I remember people trying selling their allotment at a premium and some trying to get hold of foreign quota to get their hands on one.

Bajaj’s long-running advertising campaign ‘hamara Bajaj’ will continue to find resonance in the ears and minds of the people of our generation while the young generation will never know how much the life has changed after the economic liberalization of the nineties!! And will never see the scooter being tilted on one side and kick started to glory…..

Watch the video here

Celebrating Christmas

Over the past four decades that I have been roaming this planet Christmas had been part of my life bringing new flavors in new ways and had rediscovered this most celebrated Birthday everytime. My early memories are of more traditional celebrations in my first school “The Holy Cross School” which was run by Christian missionaries. In Kolkata the Christmas day is known as “boro-din” a popular belief that the days starts to become longer and night shorter from this day. This day is ear marked in all Bengali’s calendar as a day to go out for picnic. Our college campus which is on the bank of the river Ganges and adjacent to one of the oldest Botanical garden in the country used to have hundreds to visitors mistaking it to be the botanical garden, which turns into a family park during holidays.

In Bahrain I have some very dear Goan friends and we had great time together during the whole week leading to 25th and without a doubt had the best Christmas of my life. But all in all this day has always been a day for celebrations!

I am sharing some of the lovely pictures that I have received by emails and unfortunately cannot stand by for the authenticity of these information but they do look marvelous.

The Capitol Christmas tree in Washington, D.C.

Christmas tree display rises up the slopes of Monte Ingino, Italy

 

A Christmas tree is projected onto the exterior of the Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka,Tokyo.

Illuminating the Gothic facades of Prague's Old Town Square

In Venice 's Murano Island renowned throughout the world for its quality glasswork

Moscow

In the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal

St. Peter's Square in Rome

In Singapore

Against a backdrop of tall, shadowy firs, a rainbow trio of Christmas trees lights up the night (location unknown)

When Spring Returns

This weekend the dark clouds gathered around the global economy once again and this time it was on concerns that two of Dubai - owned companies may default on their debt obligations. Watching the news develop in the television stations a thought crossed my mind … “How happy we were there”.

I was transported to another world when I read Oscar Wilde’s “Selfish Giant” for the first time. The statement “How happy we were there” remained closed to my heart and popped into my mind every now and then.

This time it was not so much for us as we had reached Dubai as matters had already started to get sour, though I would have loved to live there. There has been hundreds of thousand s of families who had to leave the land of their dreams. The economy was buyout many people lost control over their lifestyle started to live beyond their means. They were sitting on the edge spend their past , present and future income with an illusion that they are immune to the global economic downturn without realizing that a strong breeze could throw them off balance. While some developed cardiac problems when hit others departed abandoning their earthly possessions. The state does not have personal bankruptcy protection and that prompted many to leave behind massive amount of unpaid credit card and personal loans. Many of them left behind their much loved new cars in one of the many parking lots. About 6 months back the government auctioned about 3000 sparingly used cars but there are still many and I guess new ones are joining the ranks like this one that I spotted in the expensive airport short time parking lot.

But this place was not fair to the people who actually built the city. The wages were as low as 1000 dirham while the bosses at the developers were at times taking home as much as 170,000 dirham a month. While the rentals for the apartments skyrocketed every effort were being made to drive the laborers, taxi drivers and other low income groups to outskirts keeping the city only for the rich, famous and the tourists.

Hope the city will embrace everyone rich and poor with open arms when spring returns to its gardens.How happy we are here! They will cry out to each other once again.

A few unrelated Current Affairs

We are scared to turn on the news stations these days and we wonder every time we switch it on about where has humanity gone and what value does a human life have today? We are dying in hundreds without any reason or fault of our own. This week there was this gore incident in the Philippines, where political rivals have killed 60 opponents and buried their body in a mass grave. Just for having different political views or was it the usual struggle for control?

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the Mumbai attack. For us it is only a day to remember those people who lost their lives for just being there … wrong time wrong place for them. But for the families of those 165 people, it had been 365 days of painful existence.

Then there are two wars (would rather not call them war) being raged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The question is whether to increase the number of troops and if that will do any good. In brief they are putting more life at stake. My question to them is why do you struggle so much and waste so many lives to kill the end product. Why don’t you cut their supply lines of the number of arms and the extremist? While the extremists are usually homegrown, the arms & ammunitions are supplied by the developed (so called) countries.

Ireland has witnessed a couple of stray incident this week and that is not a good sign according to me.

Is there a deterrent for a suicide bomber? I wonder what punishment could be given to them if they could be apprehended!

As a child we learnt that when a people die they go to heaven and would point up to the sky. Many a stories have been written where the child asks for his dead father and mother points to the sky and assures that he is watching them from there. Today one American Astronaut Randolph Bresnik, who is in the International space station, is eagerly waiting to comedown to meet his child who is born while he is up in the sky. Things do change, don’t they?

Please do not get upset with the proportion of bad news. This is usually the proportion that we witness in the media today.

Simplicity in Glitches

As a kid we used to have radios, the SW/MW kind of gadget and a few years into our childhood we met the first TV set. It was a black and white television set with a selector which could tune into 6 or 8 stations the selector came with an extra ring which was used to fine tune. In addition to that was the off/on and volume knob and all built into one. The radio used to have exactly similar set of control to tune in to a station or control the volume and a knob to switch between short and medium wave and I cannot recollect the existence of FM (frequency modulation) in those days! And the telephone was a solid black piece of equipment and well connected (with wires off course!).

Life was so simple then. Whenever one of those gadget failed transmit we immediately knew the cause. If it was not the power source it was the antenna connection unless the station is having trouble with transmitting the program. In latter case we a sweet voice would invariably come up apologizing for the interruption.

But now life is quite different! We have tens of gadgets in our house and each one of them has hundreds of controls options. Powered by nano technology, literally every household item has a micro processor chip installed and a few programs that run on that (No wonder the IT professionals and programmers are so much in demand). If we are not watching the Television we are watching a DVD or listening to some music or may be on the play station if not surfing the internet. But there is one uncanny similarity between life then and life now. Whenever the gadget stops working I have no doubt about what has happened… whether it is the phone or laptop or the TV or anything else ………. It has HUNG itself! But the good thing is that they are not humans, a simple reboot brings that back to life!!

All is not lost

Last week while I was being driven around I had noticed a building with big neon sign announcing that it housed the “Jarir Book Store”. I had decided on that very moment that I will have to visit this place, and I will have to do it sooner rather than later. Yesterday when I reached home after work, I was very disappointed to find that someone e has occupied my parking. So I decided to venture out in search of the Book Store…. in quest of knowledge, so to say. But with my level of road sense it is never easy to find a new location and as I lived up to my expectation. Fortunately for me there is a roundabout very close to my house and so I could first go straight, and then right and finally left, every time coming back to the roundabout to change direction. After taking a few turns at the signals I could see the neon sign I have been so desperately seeking to find. At that moment I thought of giving a “Land Ahoy!” cry but restrained myself somehow. But all was not as smooth as I had to enter through the exit gate making “please excuse me gestures” to the car who was trying to go out through that exit. I was helped by a parking attendant giving signals with his hand quite similar to the boys who helps the pilot park his airplane. He actually wanted to wash my car to make a few bucks (they are usually an exploited lot and have to survive doing such odd jobs). He started to speak in broken Hindi and was very amused when I replied to him in Bengali and in the brief conversation that followed, I told him that my ancestral home was very close to where he is living now and it’s unfortunate that it is not accessible to us.

I went up to the Book store and was pleased to discover that it was more than a simple bookstore. They had everything starting from laptops to school text books and there was a big section dedicated to arts and other hobbies.

After spending a good one hour among those interesting products and picking up a city map and a few other stuffs, I proceeded to the checkout counter. I was running a bit dry on cash and wanted to pay using my credit card. To my shock I could not find it in my wallet and after settling the bill I almost took my wallet apart to find that particular piece of plastic. But it was not there... it was no where!! All sorts of thought started to overtake my thinking capability. I shuddered to imagine how much I would have probably lost if someone decided to use my card.

Then I remembered that last time I had used that bit of plastic was exactly 10 days ago, the day I landed in Doha and that was in a “Subway” outlet. Fortunately I did not take any wrong turn on my way back and manage to reach the “Subway” quite quickly. I went inside and asked “did I leave my credit card here?” and gave my name.” To my utter relief he retrieved it from the safety of cash box and handed over to me my lost and forgotten mate. I felt like giving them a hug….. As I drove back home I wondered if I would have got it back had it been another country… another time … So all is not lost in this world!!!

But as I reached home I found my parking spot still occupied. I found a spot a block away and as I prepared to hit the bed I realized that this is life……. Kabhie khushi kabhie gam … (joy and sorrow goes hand in hand)

These images have no relevance to this city and are borrowed from the WWW.