koii dost hai na raqiib hai

koii dost hai na raqiib hai

teraa shahar kitanaa ajiib hai

Soon it is going to be three months that I have stepped into this new country and this how I can describe this place today. The line above is borrowed from a poem which has been immortalized as a gazal by the famous singer Jagjit Singh. For those who are not conversant with Ürdu I would like to translate it into English.

Your city is quite a strange land where there are no friends neither are there any enemies… now Raquib is a word which cannot be truly expressed by saying enemy. Enemy poses a threat to you and might hurt you or inflict deadly blow. While one’s raquib is the man who is loved by the girl you have fallen for. This can be a cocktail of a competitor and an opponent. … so it is quite an intense word ... isn’t it!

I am having such a feel about this place because I find people here are too busy with their own life and their circle of trust. I still haven’t figured it out if this is a big city syndrome or a small city effect. At first it was while I was searching for an apartment to rent, it was so difficult to even get an idea about which locality I should concentrate. It was a bit stressful at one point but then asked myself ... “did you see anyone living on the footpaths on your way to work or back?”

I said “No”.

“So why do you worry!”

Reassured I went up to the face book and posted a link of another song Ek Akela Is Shaher Mein´” which sings about a lonely man looking for a home in a big city!

(Face book is another strange place that brings distant people closer, every day people are making new friends or getting connected to old friends but unfortunately I do not see any one chatting to each other once friendship has been restored.)

But this time I got an assuring response with an extract from a Gazhal……. “Main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e-manzil magar, Log saath aate gaye aur kaaravaan bantaa gayaa.” (I set out alone towards my goal, but others kept joining me on the way and a caravan was been formed).

So this is my life in poetry my friends!


This a U-tube link to the song for anyone who would like listen to it.

The Republic Day

Today is a day of national celebrations… our Republic Day. India was declared a Republic on 26 of January, 1950. This day has inspired me throughout my life…. So here I am dedicating some time to my much neglected Blog Space. Probably I needed the inspiration as much I needed the time!

Poster of Incredible India in a foreign country makes us proud

There is a strange relationship that a child shares with his mother. The same is true between one and the motherland. Since childhood the Independence Day (15th August) and the Republic Day (26th January) has been very special to us. On these two days we used to hoist the national flag in our house without fail ... We were taught that each and every citizen had the responsibility to hoist the Tricolor in their house. The flag had to go up before the sun rises and come down at the sunset before it gets dark. While the schools and Governmental bodies used to have permanent flag poles we at the household always used to improvise.

I have some fond memories from my childhood days. We had to leave the bed early in the morning in spite of it being a holiday and put the flag up. Then we used to get dressed and accompany our father to the parade grounds. Even though the ground was very close to our house, we used to go by the Jeep, as these were a very formal official affair. The time for the flag hoist used to be 8 am when Chief Minister or the governor used to pull the flag up and there was a shower of rose petals which was wrapped within the flag. As a child we used to get very excited watching the petals fall and the march past by different divisions of the Armed forces and the Para military personals and all saluting the flag when they marched past the podium. The best part was the armed forces band.

There used to parties in the evening but we only got to see the invitation card and never got to go and see how much fun it was!

Happy Republic Day to All of you out there … Let Peace Prevail in our country.

This New Year

Best Wishes for 2010 to all my friends and your loved ones.

The absence of both the eves from my home turned this New Year’s Eve into quite a boring state of affair. These days I am the whole and sole moving creature in my home and moving so fast at work that it leaves with neither time nor the temperament to jot down a few lines for my blog. Initially I had decided that I would welcome the New Year in a deep state of meditation sitting in the serene posture of Buddha. That did not happen but instead I found myself reflecting on the changes I witnessed in my lifetime. Thoughts were drifting and swaying in all direction till I started to think about New Year greeting Vis-à-vis sending cards and letters.

The world of this small-town boy was finite and very small as I grew up. We had a few friends but fortunately they were real to the letter “l” (pun intended). We would meet at least once most of the days and we could touch, feel them, hug them and even fight with them unlike the virtual and at times artificial friends that we have these days! We never used cards to wish our friends for Christmas or the New Year. Occasionally we used to send one to the class teachers! Parents did use postcards to write to the relatives and most of the time privacy was not an issue and if it was, there was always an envelope.

The world started to grow bigger during the college days. Having moved far away from home I started to write letters regularly and that was the only affordable channel of regular communication. During festivals we had exchange of letters among cards with childhood, school mates and pen pals.

Life took another turn as we graduated from college and stepped into the more materialistic (real) world. Handwritten letters started to make room for printed cards that required only a signature before it could be sent to post. With the personalized message missing, it was the beginning of losing touch with dear old friends while making lots of new acquaintances at the workplaces and in the tinsel town.

Come mid nineties and our world changed again and this time it became extremely small while remaining massively BIG. We were ushered in to the world of the internet. All of a sudden old friends and old flames started to appear back in the horizon. Friends separated by thousands of miles became closer than ever, responding to each other over enthusiastically within moments to receiving an email. Tagged along came the chartrooms where friends were waiting eagerly for the most important event of the day... the Big Adda (chat) at the cyber coffee Shop.

By this time “the obituary” was already written for the era of “hand written” letter and “Seasons Greeting card” was fast becoming part of the history. At the same time we were getting used to receiving emails informing an E-card waits for me should I decide to follow the given link. They were coming in huge numbers around the year celebrating every occasion and commemorating the “Friendship day” many times a year.

We turned another corner by the time we stepped in the latter half of last decade. The emails and the e-cards started to disappear as fast as they came in. While friends decided to abstain from writing meaningful emails, our fellow human beings from Nigeria took that task to ensure that there was no dearth of spam mails in our inbox. On one side the E-card sites have started to charge money trying to reap what they had sown while on the other hand it was the advent of the social networking sites that provided new platform to celebrate festivities with family and friends. Writing a simple statement of what was in my mind was sufficient to wish all of the friends. The ultimate level of achievement in efficiency and energy conservation!

The phone calls, SMS and emails have taken away the waiting for the joy of waiting for the mailman/ postman. If they come they get only the bills and sometimes periodicals. But I have one “hand written letter” that arrives by post once in awhile. That is because there is this only one person with whom I still have written communication and we both cherish it. A little while back I received a letter which has arrived here via Dubai and now it is my turn to reply!

A pile of post that came in today

Only one handwritten letter

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.