A blog at last, this time on the Idiot Box

Well, well, well, a blog after a really really long time. The last time I blogged was when I was in the US before my better half joined. After she joined, as is to be expected, I got no time to blog Then after we got back (finally an overseas journey together), days got really full, as is actually the case with most days in India. I can bet that one manages much more work in the same or less time abroad than in India for whatever strange reason. Maybe its the work culture or just the amount of time we spend on unproductive things like waiting in traffic just to get to office, whether its your car (self-driven or other-wise) or company provided transport or the amount of time we Indians break for tea in groups, the fact remains that productivity tends to be low.

 Anyways, all this digression was to justify that I really did not find the time, so then how did I find the time today. Well, for a change I actually fell ill, with my body temperature hovering around the 102 F mark, it was pretty scary. But, what this meant was that I simply had to stay home and today that I am feeling much better, I thought its time to post something on my blog, which has remained static for a long long time.

Over the past 4 days, during periods that I was feeling relatively better, I tried to catch up on some reading. Finally finished “The Black Swan”, a truly amazing book about learning to expect the unexpected, but for once after a long time I became a true blue couch potato, flipping channels with a gusto, which if observed by a third party, could easily be coined as “surfomania”. I watched the Indian team lose in the most pathetic fashion in the World T20 Championship. But most of all, I took in a liberal dose of something that none of you would expect a person of my age to take in. I actually watched quite a few soap-operas with their boring daily episodes, made-up and bejewelled women in which, every alternate dialogue has to be interspersed with some kind of blaring music. So, after all this long prologue, I intend to devote this post to this topic of television serials.

It is truly amazing how much the idiot box has gripped the imagination of our nation. My parents generation nowadays, actually adjust their schedules according to the daily-soap time-table of various channels. My brother-in-law who happens to be in the the sales deparment of one of the vernacular channels, tells me that, soaps are actually tailored to the taste of the viewing public, since all that matters in the Channel rat-race is something called TRP. What this has resulted in is a proliferation of serials which are generally dumbed-down. Maharashatra and especially the Mumbai-Pune region is blessed with a huge history of drama. This region is thus blessed with a lot of very talented artists. It thus seems to be simply unfair to ask this talented bunch of artists to act in soaps whose story-line is not just thin, but at times so vague that one wonders what is the message that the director is trying to convey. Most of these soaps carry on for years on end. My parents were telling me the other day that there is a tele-serial that is running now for close to eight or nine years. My brother-in-law tells me that the channel guys  actually hasten or slow down the pace of a serial depending on the instantaneous TRP. Kindly note that most of what I speak here is about the channels in my vernacular language, since I was able to watch only these (or was forced to watch these, since most of the times, the remote is not actually in my hand :-)).

So, you have a channel that shows some kind of reality show 4 days of a week. Two of these are devoted to a show on music, where the partcipants sing various songs. Now, there have been six schedules of this show and the same songs might have been sung ad nauseum, but the channel insists on having this show, which means either people like this show too much or the channnel is simply unable to produce better programming. The serials are extremely loud. There was a serial where people used to die and then for no strange reason become alive again. Talk of spreading superstition in a country that still has its educated population believe in things like horescopes. There was a serial that I recently followed very closely. The serial, thankfully lasted only about 2 years (thats short by Indian standards). The characters were very well developed and the script-writer had somehow managed to keep something hidden and mysterious from the audience till the very end, but the end was a total anti-climax. Apparenty, the protagonist in concern had to grow up away from his parents and siblings due to some vague state of his stars at the time of his birth. To me it was unfair on the part of the writer and the director to give this type of message after having the audience glued and rivetted to the idiot box for close to 2 years with his immensely talented cast and well-developed characters. To be very frank, this dabbling with the super-natural by means of various miracles or thru' characters that seem to forsee the future seems to a common thread in a quite a few serials irrespective of channel.  I sometimes wish I could go back to my child-hood days when there was only one channel and we used to laugh heartily with a serial called “Yeh Jo hai Zindagi” and identify with the earthly characters of “Hum Log” and “Buniyaad”.

In my opinion, for a country like India, which even in this 21st Century of the internet, is still grappling with issues like “honor killings”, what is needed is a liberal dose of whole-some entertainment, with a decent sprinkling of programs that will inculcate people's scientific temper.

Otherwise, India will embrace technology like a fish takes to water (look at what cell-phones have done to the country), but will use it for devious purposes. Making a computerized horoscope, having language and caste-specific matrimonial web-sites are just some examples that come immediately to mind.

Television is an extremely powerful medium, and has unusually survived the onslaught of the Internet and will continue to play an important role in a country like India where the penetration of the internet is limited. I wish the channels self-censored themselves and give us more meaningful programs that will not just entertain us but also inculcate amongst the masses a sceintfiic temper that will help create a more rational India.

Public Transport In USA

Well, another weekend in cold Michigan and another blog. I was going to write another one on a book that I finished recently, but then my brother who is a student in the United States and follows my blog suggested that I write about the public transport system in the States.

It so happens that weekends tend to be boring, especially if you are alone and so my relatives here in the States suggest I visit them, which is a perfectly valid expectation, more so because, I come here at most once a year (at least have done so till now, barring the last year) and that too not for a very long duration. So I repeat its a very valid expectation. Now, by quirk of fate, I always seem to join companies that dont ever have offices in large cities. So Rheine, Greenville and now Kalamazoo are all relatively non-descript places that my companies required me to visit and stay for a significant duration of time (significant is anything greater than 1 month). Believe me there is nothing wrong with the places, for barring Rheine, Greenville and Kalamazoo are not that small, but all of them are more than an hours drive from the nearest significant big city, so to go anywhere, one has to first go to the nearest significant place. So for Rheine, it was Cologne or Muenster, for Greenville it was Atlanta and for Kalamazoo, I am learning it is Detroit.

Anyways, thats not the point of this blog. I was hoping to travel to Pittsburgh to my cousins place, which is like a good 5-6 hours drive from Kalamazoo and I was just exploring my options short of renting a car, since I am a little bit flustered about driving in the snow. So I was checking the flights and to go to Pittsburgh from Kalamazoo, one needs to first go to Detroit. So if one has grown up in India, one says "Ok, so can I take a bus to Detroit (something like Pune-Bombay)?" So you look around and find that the bus takes over 6 hours for a journey that would take normally less than 2 hours by car. Then you ask, can I take a train, well yes you can, but that is like a 3 hour journey, but there are only like 3 trains in a day, and you are like whoa, there is a bus every 10 minutes between Pune and Bombay, innumerable trains all day etc. Anyways, so you can't take the bus, you might take the train, but you will need a lot of planning and the train station and the Airport are not close, so then whats the best solution? You ask your American colleagues, what they would do and they say, " Well, I would rent a car and drive to Detroit and then fly". Then I ask them if I have to rent a car to drive to Detroit, I might as well rent a car and drive to Pittsburgh, the whole idea was to make the journey without renting a car. In short, to do something significant in this country, one just has to have a car (rented or bought).

Having gone thru' this, I start fondly remembering my Europe days. Remember, that I was staying in Rheine, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I mean the place is charming in its own little way (maybe I am nostalgic), but yeah, the beauty of the place was that it was small and it still had everything one wished for in a radius of 5km. You could wake up one fine morning and decide I want to go to Bremen for a lark. Just walk to Rheine station, tell the guy at the counter in your broken German , you wanted to do so and he would come up with a print-out with multiple options to get there, some taking longer times than the others, but then there were always options. You simply bought a ticket, which on weekends was valid for 5 people on any slow train in Germany till 3:00 am the next morning. If you just followed the options given to you,  there was almost 100% guarantee that you would actually get to Bremen at the time mentioned in the print-out. I often wondered, how they scheduled their trains with such precision and was amazed at the reach of the network. Sitting in Germany, I could go by train to quite a few EU countries, be it Austria, Netherlands, Italy, France or Switzerland and could buy a ticket sitting in Germany. It was just amazing and the system worked with clock-work precision. Sometimes the connections you had were in 4-5min and all you had to do was to change platforms (that much delay is not considered delay in India, in fact 30 min delay is not considered delay in India, the announcers at times will not even announce it). Whats even more amazing is that, there is a train-station at most major airports and airlines gave you a Rail-to-fly option, where you could buy a train ticket in the air-fare and travel to your international airport, by train. I guess, these are some of the benefits of paying high taxes in Europe, but it makes things so very convenient for new-comers.

I often wonder, why the US Government does not spend the stimulus money on developing a powerful rail network. Come to think of it, the fantastic highways of this country (Auto-Bahns are better, but the reach of the US highway system is amazing and the quality is pretty good too), were built during the Great Depression and still doing a great service even now, so why not spend this stimulus money on a Rail Network, that would create jobs and would at the same time make this fantastic country more accesible.

Anyways, I hope to travel more often by train in the US than on flights or in a car during this life-time of mine. Till then, I wish I could visit Europe more often, enjoy the many interesting places that the continent has to offer and travel on its fabulous train network more often. I also wish our own Indian trains got faster and I am able to visit Bangalore from Pune in less than 12 hours.

Nine Lives

Its been three weeks in the USA and given that its extremely cold outside, there is not much to do on the weekends and as such I have been able to catch up on some reading. One of the books that I read during this time is "Nive Lives", William Dalrymple's latest book.

India, its history, its recent rise as a potential economic power and prophecies of it becoming a super-power have been subjects of many books in the recent past. But here is a book that goes slightly off the beaten track and attempts to describe the role of the sacred or the place of religion in the lives of people in the sub-continent. Dalrymple, goes off to do what he does best, write a travelogue describing the lives of nine deeply religious people from across the sub-continent in a very impersonal, objective and matter-of-fact way. His objectiveness is particularly evident when he describes obscure practices and rituals of Tantriks and Bauls, which at times involve animal sacrifice, sex etc. These practices do not come out to the reader as wrong or right or gaudy, but just the way they are, with the author trying to explore the genesis of such rituals.

In the process of writing the book, the author once again travels the length and breadth of the sub-continent.

Sindh, Kangra/Dhramasala, Kerala, Karnataka, Bengal, Gujrat are some of the places the author visits. Stories span various religions from the extremely ascetic Jainism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Tantric sect of the Hindu Religion to the Sufism of the Sindh and are mostly set in small-town India where the place of religion and the sacred still plays a very important role in the lives of people. During this process the author visits some of the most unusal places and talks to some people that we folks living in Urban India and working in air-conditioned offices cannot even dream off.A crematorium in Tarapith with skulls and Tantriks being just one example of what I am talking about. It just goes on to show us folks that there is a world out there that we dont even know exists.The author also hints in some of the stories how religion and some rituals like the "theyyam" in Kerala, enable the dancer to transcend to a certain extent the barriers of caste.

So what did I learn from the book.Given that, I am not that pious or religious (I had hinted about it in my blog on Shegaon), but given that I am to a certain extent spiritual, I think the book demonstrates the power of the mind and ability of the mind to transcend the material and that human beings are capable of the unthinkable provided, they are able to train their mind and the thoughts that emanate from it.

 

In general, I think the book is a great read, but to be expected by a writer who gave us some amazing books like "In Xanudu", "The City of Djinns", "The Age of Kali". It is a travelogue from the author after quite a while. I would say that Dalrymple is certainly one of the best "Travel Writers" of recent times and I whole-heartedly recommend "Nine Lives"

USA again

Well, well, here I am back to the United States of America after a slightly long hiatus. A duration of close to 1 1/2 years, this time to Michigan. To be frank with you I have visited the US almost once every year ever since I graduated in Jan 2000, and its amazing how much things have changed and yet strangely enough have remained the same.

So whats changed, politically lots of things have. After 8 years of George W. Bush, the United States of America now has at its helm an African-American President. The year I landed here first (Jun 2000), getting thru' US immigration Customs and the Security Check was a piece of cake, it would hardly take any time. Now one has to stand in queue, remove your shoes, your belt, laptop and what not. If you are "randomly" selected you might as well be frisked in detail. Over the years the craze for coming to the USA has reduced considerably. IITians nowadays seem to get great jobs in India itself and seem to be staying back home. In the 2000-2003 time-frame, you felt so much welcome here and lots of people who came would seldom want to go back. Nowadays, one hears lots of reports of people being deported. One thing certainly has changed and this is very apparent since the last time I came, is people talking politics and jobs. This is something I had never experienced in all the nine years I have visited here. People in America never seemed to discuss politics. Out of 10 conversations you would have in India amongst Indians about 7-9 conversations are likely to go in the direction of politics. That number was pretty small in the US, but I find that its going up considerably, or it just might be Michigan, where unemployment is a record high with the "Big 3" not doing so well.

And, what has not changed. I think, life on the whole still seems to remain the same. Big stores, Big cars , big people and until you actually talk to people you wont realize you are in the midst of a recesssion. Public transport continues to be just as bad. I was to go for a meeting to Detroit, which is a less than 2 hour drive from where I am currently visiting. I was just checking my bus options and the 2 hour drive by bus was going to take a whooping 6 hours. I remember going from Pittsfield, MA to New York by a bus. That was a 2 hour journey as well, but it took close to 4 1/2 hours. Add to that another 2 hours to go to Jersey, where I was to visit my uncle and a total 3 hr drive suddenly became twice as much. So, this thing has certainly not changed one bit.

One thing thats striking is the stoicism of the American people. Inspite of being thru' such a rough recession, people continue to be nice and I hope they continue to stay that way.

Anyways, that was a small post from yours truly after close to two months. I have been here 2 weeks and should be around another 6 weeks. I will try and post more especially since the weather outside is so bad (below freezing) and I have nothing much to do on weekends other than catching up on some reading or blogging or watching TV (which by the way was just as bad as it has been all these years).