Moving to Wordpress

My new blog address is :

vipreetbuddhi.wordpress.com

So long ... 

Eulogy

She passes away..

It was expected to happen. But to have happened so soon was unanticipated. We reached back to Patna after a month of dissapointments and dead-ends on the 11th of September. Today is the 17th ...

When the eventuality was presented to her, she asked the doctor in jest whether she had at least a week to live. She wanted to clean up the house and get things in order before she moved on. Six days were all that were given from above.

She was a gentle woman in a house of hardened men. She was the sound of irrationality, of humanness, amongst men of reason and rationality. We raised our voices and she used to back down. So as her sons grew older, they used to raise it often. She craved a hug, a touch. But we seldom obliged her. In the final weeks, her sighs of relief and comfort as I pressed her aching, immobile legs and arms reminded me of the years lost when we hadnt.

She tried her hand at reconciliation amongst the menfolk. She reminded everyone of the humanness of human relations. We didn't understand what she was talking about. Men probably don't get these things.

Of all her facets, the artist was the one that shone the most. Wood, Metal, Ivory, Plastic, Glass, Wire, Cotton and the Canvas - all were her medium of expression. However, cloth was what she felt most at home with in the later part of her life. Sarees and Kurtas were her canvas. The paintbrushes and the sewing machine were her faithful workmen.

She was a woman content with what she had. In fact, the allure of food or the allure of luxury  were both concepts that she couldn't appreciate. Maybe the real artists never can. Their world is their studio. And our home was exactly that. A studio of odds and ends which found their way into a painting, a mural or a dress. Their owner has abandoned them ...

Ill health was a constant, unrelenting companion for her. A new bride with a toddler in hand, she managed a husband whose kidneys almost gave way when he was 27. His epilepsy and episodic fits were a part of daily life. TB came to haunt her in england when she was 36. Her son suffered from a slipped disk when she was 42 and the referred pain chased him for years until his spine was stretched in place on a stretcher for a month. Cancer reared its ugly head when she was 48. Spondilitis hit her husband soon after, forcing him and her to adopt a regular and aggressive health regimen. In spite of it, her gall bladder gave way when she was 53. And finally cancer relapsed in 2010 and then soon thereafter in 2011.

As we ducked and hid from the inevitable, going through the phases of greif, she remained composed and accepting of her fate. She wished for a quick and painless demise and she was obliged by the one above...

May she help him paint the stars and rainbows now ...

Sharing an apartment ...

Sharing an apartment with bachelors is sharing an apartment with bachelors, whether you are straight out of an engineering school or of a business school.

The cleaning lady comes at 8am, cleans the utensils. The cook comes in at 9am and dirties all of them. The filthy utensils lie all day until evening when the cook returns and selectively cleans a few for the evening dinner. The newly dirty, and the previously dirty ones sit overnight in a clogged sink discussing indian politics.

No one wants or cares to register for cooking gas. Instead, we subscribe to cylinders twice the price and four-fifth the standard quantity.

Everyone likes to download movies and stream movies all the time, clogging the bandwidth for others.

One of us likes to micromanage and tease the cleaning lady for the extra 200 bucks (50 per person charge to us, mind you) of pay.

One of us complains of people being irresponsible and inconsiderate, but chooses to leave his crumpled pile of clothes in the living room.

Some of us wash our clothes only to realize that the clothesline is already full with someone else's damp clothes.

One of us doesn't believe in polythenes (Rs 2 per polybag is expensive it seems), so prefers to throw wet garbage directly in the plastic dustbin for it to rot and stick to the bottom.

One of us wants home-cooked food at all times, some of us want it two times a day, and some dont want to go through the hassle at all.

One of us has a voice of a fog horn and chooses to exercise his vocal chords at 2 in the night.

Payment of water, electricity and other utilities falls through the cracks. No one chooses to take responsibility for after all, there are 3 others who might.

And there is so much more ....

At the moment ...

Life is tough now ... 

There are thoughts, several of them .... 

Can't sew them together in a post .... 

What constitutes life ...

- Watching music videos
- Contemporary non-fiction
- Working out
- Coffee in solitude (in a bright bustling location)
- People watching ....
- Chess
- Crosswords
- Economist
- Movies (sometimes)
- Conversation about existence, social constructs, life ...
- xkcd, abstrusegoose

Where to go ..

I have heard the argument about the richness of the cultures in the east versus the ones of the west ever so often. But, from the perspective of an ordinary working man, looking towards the world to find a good country to settle in, this argument has a lot of bearing.

As I move through life as a working professional, I come across several problems that countries in the developing world will take eons to overcome. Customer service, standard of living, respect, manners etc. are higher order things that are foolish to expect in nations where clean drinking water is not available to all.

Hence I look around to find a country where I might want to spend the summers and winters of my middle age. I have travelled and lived in several developed countries and there is no doubt that the US is the easiest to go and settle in. But why? Well, 'they have a lot of tolerance to outsiders' is the common explanation. But why is that? Well, since they have a very simple, almost non-existent cultural history. Most of the culture is metropolitan, modern which is almost similar to metros in other countries as well. Hence, easy transportability and adaptability. I feel that the argument can be partly tranlated to the other side of the world - Australia and New Zealand.

Europe is a tougher area to adapt in. Precisely because they have social customs that are older, and would require a concious, forced attempt by an outsider to adapt and adopt to. The serenades of Spain, the family bonds of italy, the naked saunas of Finland or the sincere hardworking culture of Germany are things that have no logical reason for existence but have been passed through generations. One can argue that one need not adopt them and just be an outsider who lives in that country. But that just saps the juice out of living at a place. I am looking at a time-span of around 30 years of life in such a location. Not adapting to the system is not an option.

And discussing the east is just belaboring the point. If the culture of europe was not a bottleneck enough, the customs of food and drink of the east coupled with a strong culture of their own are much much more of a deterrent. There are developed countries there as well - S. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. But, it takes a special kind of constitution to adapt to eating raw octopus and snails for lunch. And neither does one wish to raise a family in a country with a questionably healthy (?) and socially accepted appetite for pornography.

The journey more than the destination

Travel is a great antidote of ADHD. Tonight I travel from Hyderabad to Banglore in a bus.

People ask me why I didnt take a plane. Am I cheap? Maybe :) But in reality, and I speak with several years of travelling alone, the experience is like no other. A train or a bus bring you so close to the road with no need to concentrate on keeping the damn vehicle going.

I sit still in my comfortable semi-sleeper chair and compose this post listening to a few music videos on the side. Its not pitch black outside even though there are no street lights on the road since the occasional village houses on the road keep their porch (?)lights on at night.

The road seems so much nicer than the city. As the bus rolled in through the bylanes of Hyderabad, to miserably attempt to fill the seats with any tom-dick-and-harry with enough cash (some probabaly didnt even want to go to banglore), you see dogs and men sleeping on the same pavement. Yes, nothing new, nothing novel. But that is why the road seems so much nicer. You dont see this misery on the open expanse of the road. Even if you do, it passes by so quickly, that you hardly get any time to register it.

What you see is a lot of green and a lot of freshness of the shrubbery. And what you sit in is a well air conditioned cabin from which to observe it. Who wouldn't enjoy it?