No Land For Single People

Genre and all I have stopped mentioning now.

The world is unfair to single guys, well to be technically correct, a guy who lives alone, as I have realized two months into my experiment of living alone. No, this is not going to be a sentimental rant about loneliness, so if you have moved your cursor towards the Back or Close button on your browser, stop, and continue reading. 

The discrimination against guys living alone transcends across continents and has percolated across myriad sectors. Let's look at travelling here in the United States- on highways in cities, they reserve lanes where single folks are not allowed to drive. Very nicely they call it 'High Occupancy Lanes' and only allow cars with two or more people in it to use these traffic-free lanes. In which universe is two considered a high number? Encouraging car-pooling and all is just excuse, I tell you, they just want the single guys to suffer in traffic and watch couples happily breeze past them in High Occupancy Lanes. It's just rubbing salt in their wounds, a way of saying, "Dude, live with a girlfriend (ok ok, boyfriend is also now legal) and then you can zoom ahead of the traffic". Unfair only it is. 

Think of moving away from this by leaving the car home and take the train to travel and they will again bombard you with the same unfair treatment. You can book one seat on Amtrak trains, but if you want to book a sleeper berth, you have to book two only. Even if you are travelling alone, they will ask you to pay for two people and book a roomette if you want a sleeper berth. If not injustice, what is this? Yes, we know it is nice to travel as couples and have a private roomette to yourself to indulge in various activities but why do you need to rub it in to single guys? Back in India it is better because they let you book one sleeper berth if you are travelling alone, but the injustice against single guys does not stop. It comes back to haunt you in other ways. First of all, Indian Railways has this sadistic pleasure module in their reservation system that will never ever give a single guy a nice window seat or a lower berth, and if by some stroke of luck it assigns one, at the time of travel someone will invariably come and ask you to move from your originally chosen berth to some random upper berth because they have an old uncle or fat aunty who cannot climb to their assigned berths.  

Driving is unfair, trains are unfair, so you decide to fly and the ghost of unfair treatment comes back to haunt you. Every damn airline will operate their domestic flights with a 3-3 seat configuration and long international flights with a 3-3-3 configuration, so if you are a single guy, you have to endure torture of a chatty couple or annoying uncle-aunty or some similar combination of two people next to you. They could have thought of keeping 2-4 seating so that single guys stand some chance of landing up with a pretty fellow single co-passenger but no, that they won't do. They just don't want single guys to be excited and look forward to travelling. 

About restaurants and bars and night clubs being unfair to single guys, the lesser said about it, better. They will let couples in free but if you are a single guy, ask you to pay up. They don't realise they are doing it wrong. It is the single guys who need to visit the bars and clubs so they can socialize and find someone interesting and so they are the ones who should be allowed in free. The couples are supposed to be happy with each other's company. If they need to head to a bar or club for fun, it means their love life is probably rather boring, and the bar should charge them for helping them get over their boredom. The restaurants are not so unfair, but are not completely welcoming either. They will never have tables for one person, minimum will be two, and if you show up alone, the staff will stare at you left and right, and behind, to see if you are hiding a midget partner somewhere or are really alone. (But, I love Denny's. They are impartial. They serve their cheap unhealthy food with equal enthusiasm to single guys and large groups.) 

By the way, all this applies only to single guys. If you are a single girl, well, that's a completely different story for some other day.  

Bill pe Bill

Genre: Humor

Now that the government has agreed to include the recommendations of Anna Hazare in the proposed Lok Pal Bill, several other prominent personalities from the civil and not-so-civil Indian society have decided that they will also come up with their own versions of the Lok Pal bill to present to the government for consideration.

Arindam Chaudhury will present the IIPMPal Bill. Dare to think beyond Lokpal. Everyone enrolling to support his version of the draft will get free laptops and a study tour to Europe. 

Rahul Dravid will start writing his draft of the Lokpal bill and will continue non-stop for five days. 

Chetan Bhagat will publish his version as a book. Three Mistakes Of Lokpal: What Not To Do In Government

Ram Gopal Varma will present a sequel. Lok Pal Ki Aag.

Aamir Khan will release only one chapter of his Lok Pal Bill per year.

Lalit Modi will start a Lokpal Premier League (LPL)

Ekta Kapoor will script a version that will run for seven years and will be called Kkok Pal Bill

When Rakhi Sawant was asked if she will also contribute, she said "Yeh Lokpal hain na, mereko usse shaadi karneka hai. Mereko na usse ekdum love ho gayela hai" 

Although not an Indian citizen, Steve Jobs will be allowed as an honorary guest to launch his version called iPal Bill. After six months he will launch a faster, slimmer version called iPal2. 

Rajinikanth will not present any bill. He himself will be the Lokpal and the entire committee.

What's In A (Re)name?

Genre: Current Affairs

No, this is not about the Anna Hazare-Lokpal issue. Everybody and their pet dog have presented enough and more views and counterviews on it by now.

Apart from cricket, India has another favorite pastime. It’s called Change the Name game. Many Indians, most of them in power, believe that the names given to streets, monuments, villages, towns, cities, even states of the country are not good enough and it is their sacred duty to rename anything and everything that has a name. Initially the argument put forward to indulge in this activity was that it is a sin to call places built by the British in India by the names the British gave, so they should be renamed. Accordingly Victoria Terminus became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Connaught Place became Rajiv Chowk and so on. Not satisfied with just this, came the second round or arguments- that the British “spoiled” the original names of our cities, so they should be renamed to their original pure form. In the process Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta became Kolkata, Trivandrum became tongue-twisting Thiruvanatanthapuram, Bangalore will soon become Bengaluru, Mangalore will become Mengaluru and so on and so forth, in the process wasting millions of rupees of taxpayer money in repainting all signboards, reprinting new stationery and updating all maps and databases.

After renaming of cities was done, someone thought, hey wait, this is not enough. We can go one level higher. Let’s rename our states too. And so it began. The ministers of the newly formed state of Uttaranchal felt the name was not good enough, and in the most expensive Backspace operation in history, decided to tweak the name to Uttarakhand. No, don’t ask me how this is any better. It just is. Because they said it is. Next to grab this opportunity was Mamata Banerjee, (who anyways has a penchant for grabbing many things including attention and cabinet ministry), who came up with the most unbelievable argument in the history of renaming- West Bengal is alphabetically last among Indian states, so its turn comes last in roll call and by that time the audience falls asleep, and to correct this catastrophic problem, passed a bill to rename the state to Paschim Banga (which she pronounces Poschim Bongo thereby making it feel like the name of a tribal village in central Africa) which brings her state’s roll number up to 21 from 28. Huge improvement! Now Uttarakhand becomes the last-in-roll-call. Now it will be fun if they decide to re-rename their state using the same argument. And then Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh should do the same and boom! We are back to square one! And then Paschim Banga can think or renaming themselves further up in the alphabet. This cycle can go on and on and on. And millions of rupees of tax money can be spent on it. Meanwhile does it matter that the state has one of the worst road infrastructure in the country? Does it matter that the Naxal movement has resulted in night-travel ban on the important Mumbai-Howrah rail route resulting in trains being detained for upto eight hours inconveniencing thousands of travelers every day since the last fifteen months? Do these things need attention and money of the government? No, they can wait. More important is ensuring that the state’s name is not called out last during roll-calls.

Before these folks come up with the idea of changing the name of India itself, I will go and search for a new name for my blog because this one comes too late in the alphabetical order, so what if it doesn't matter anywhere.

The Longest Night

Genre: Non-fiction

Its yet another dark rainy Tuesday afternoon, common during Mumbai monsoons and at 2pm just after the lunch break, students in a class in VJTI in Matunga are discussing whether to sit for the next lecture or not, one eye on the heavy rain that is pouring outside. No unanimous decision is reached and half the class bunks the lecture and leaves while I am in the other half that decides to sit for one more hour before leaving, hoping the rain would subside by then. By the time the lecture is over, the rain has shown no signs of subsiding. Rather it is pouring harder, nothing unusual about it, we see days like these every monsoon. Me and Sid are taking a cab to Dadar station when dad calls on my mobile- "Do you want me to come to Dadar to pick you up? The trains may not be running". I shrug off his offer- "No need. I'll go to station and see. If trains are not running, I'll let you know". We reach Dadar station and heave a sigh of relief to see the indicators still showing Borivali Slow and Virar Fast as usual. We get into the First Class coach of 3.20 Borivali Slow and it runs smoothly through pouring rain to the first stop- Matunga Road and then to Mahim. After the usual 30 second stop, it departs and slowly ambles along and comes to a stop in the mangrove-filled area between Mahim and Bandra. 

Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, the train shows no signs of moving. By now some passengers have jumped off the train and started walking on the tracks. Me and Sid discuss "How silly! Why can't they just wait inside rather than getting drenched like this." I call up dad and tell him the situation. He suggests coming to Dharavi overbridge by car and once he is there, I jump off the train and get on to the bridge and the car. We wait. An hour passes. And another. Dad says he is stuck somewhere in Chembur at the other end of town and suggests we do not wait for him and start moving ahead on our own. Now this is a bit worrying. We look around. Everyone has left the coach except us and one other man. We jump off the train onto the tracks, and not wanting to stay back alone, the Bihari man, we call him Gajodhar, also jumps with us. We walk along the length of the train towards Bandra and when we reach the driver's cabin, we realise the extraordinary situation at hand- the motorman has abandoned the train, locked the cabin and left! Now this is something I have never seen or heard happening in Mumbai rains. We walk along with hundreds of other passengers coming from various stranded trains until we reach the Mithi river bridge.

The railway bridge on Mithi river, though not very long, is treacherous. It has no walkway, no safety railings, in fact not even a firm base. There are metal sheets laid between the tracks, through which now we can see the usually quiet and stinky Mithi river now overflowing with water whose speed would put whitewater rafting locations to shame, and this just two feet below track level! There is no option, the river has to be crossed. Volunteers ask passengers to form a single human chain, holding each others hands, to carefully walk over the rickety metal sheets and cross the bridge. We somehow manage to do this, and think the ordeal is over since now we can safely perch ourselves at Bandra station, bot how wrong we are! The sight at Bandra station is one I have never seen before. All the tracks are filled with water upto platform levels and the entire station looks like Kumbh mela, overflowing with passengers occupying every single inch of available space. Now one thing is clear- there is no way trains are going to run anytime soon. We need to find alternate transport. We walk out of the station, hoping to walk to SV Road a few hundred meters away and take a bus from there, but wait! The entire road from station to SV Road is filled with knee deep water, and its dark. Impossible to walk through this. As if this is not enough, to add to our woes, Gajodhar has been following us all along and declares "I am new to this city. I don't know how to reach Borivali. I will come with you guys wherever you are going!"

Me and Sid look at each other and decide to go back to the station. On platform 2, there is one local train standing amidst deep water, powered down but filled with passengers. We tell Gajodhar to wait inside this train as it will go to Borivali while we go to use the washroom. Making sure he is well inside the train, we run away from that platform as fast as we can. Its around 8pm already when uncle finally manages to get through one call to my mobile through the congested network. He says he is travelling by car with his boss and should be crossing Bandra shortly, and ask me and Sid to manage reaching SV Road somehow. We walk out to the bus station. As we are discussing the possibilities, one BEST bus driver decides he will brave out the deep water on the road outside and take his bus to Bandstand! Immediately we hop onboard along with a hundred other passengers and ask him to drop us beyond the flooded street on to SV Road. As promised, he revs up the engines, turns on the headlights and pierces the bus through nearly three feet deep water and stops safely near SV Road where a majority of the passengers get off. We walk to the decided spot on SV Road and wait for uncle. We wait and wait. An hour passes. We see hordes and hordes of people walking and realise the situation doesn't seem good anywhere in the city. Around 9.30pm, uncle comes in his boss's car and we are overjoyed to find dry shelter and a ride home. Or so we think.

The driver decides to continue on SV Road since the highway is jam packed, but traffic cops divert us on to Linking Road citing water logging ahead. So far so good. There is traffic but its crawling at a decent pace. It takes an hour to reach Khar. From here, we are diverted into some small lanes where we get stuck and how. An hour passes but there are no signs of movement. Uncle's boss doesn't live far from here but we have a long way to go. So he suggests we rather get off and start walking like the others and after initial hesitation, we give in. Its around midnight now, the rain has stopped for a bit but some areas have power cut, so it is dark, wet and terribly crowded. By midnight we make our way to SV Road and start walking northwards with the huge crowd. Students, office goers, businessmen in expensive suits, celebrities, everyone is walking together, Mother Nature has brought everyone to one level. Upto Santacruz the walk goes fine but then its trouble. SV Road around Juhu airport is flooded with two feet of water but thankfully there is help at hand. hard working folks from Mumbai Fire Brigade have formed a human chain, have ropes set out for people to hold on to, and are guarding open manhole covers. In one single line, hundreds and hundreds of people slowly cross the long waterlogged stretch. We are hungry, dead tired but our survival instinct keeps us going and we reach Andheri station by 3am.

Once at Andheri, we hope the trains have started running again so we head straight to the station, but no luck. There are trains parked on every platform, packed with passengers, but with no signs of moving. Also, walking further is not possible since the cops have closed SV Road north of Andheri station due to excessive water logging. There is no option but to find shelter somewhere close by. Sid lives in Andheri but far from the station, so the ordeal is not over for him either. Luckily soon he finds a truck driver who is willing to take people onboard and drive towards where Sid lives, so he hops onboard. Me and uncle cross over to the east side and head to a building nearby where one of our relatives live. We walk into the colony, dead tired, in the dark owing to powercut, and find our way up the stairs and ring the doorbell. No answer. Ring again. No answer. Finally we ring the doorbell of their neighbours who wake up startled. We ask them to phone our relatives and wake them from sleep! They do it, and finally the door opens and we get a place to sleep for the night, or whatever was left of it, since it was already 4am. We wake up and head to Andheri station by 10am, and turns out, by then train services north of Andheri is just beginning to restart, although not as per timetable. After a half hour wait, the train we are onboard starts, and slowly but steadily drops us at Malad station, from where its a five minute walk to Home Sweet Home! 

Thus ended the ordeal. The journey that took 20 hours to travel 20 kilometers. Thus ended the night the city suffered as one, came out in the dead hours to help each other and stand united. Thus ended the longest night Mumbai city has seen. The night of 26th July 2005.  

When Will This Stop?

Genre: Current Affairs

So, yesterday Mumbai once again witnessed serial bomb blasts. 1993, 2003, 2005, 2008 and now again. Once again the common citizens of the city have lost lives even as the culprit of the previous attacks enjoys VIP treatment in special jail and the netas of the state "offer deep condolences", their lazy fat asses safely tucked behind a wall of security personnel. This has reached a stage when I no longer feel enraged at the terrorists doing these attacks. The rage is entirely towards the spineless incapable government, of the state as well in Delhi. As someone had rightly said, Civilizations fall not so much because of the strength of the enemy outside, as through the weakness and decay within. 

Now the moment I say this, some smart Alec will come up with the straight-out-of-Civics-textbook statement that "it is we who elected this government, so whatever is happening is our fault, and next time we should ensure we bring the right people to power". True, very true theoretically, but if only things were as simple as that in reality. Did "we" really elect this government to power? Talking of myself, I did not. In the last election, many of us did not vote for the well-known corrupt candidate. We went by the "We want change" principle and voted for an IIT engineer who was contesting the election with the utopian idea of "Be the change you want to see". But what happened? He lost badly and like every time, the same corrupt politician won the election. How? Votebanks. In this "largest democracy in the world", most of the winners are decided much ahead of the election date. How and why does this happen?  

Take an example. Before every election, a politician from a certain party visits a slum locality near my residence and offers the people living there a cash incentive and foodgrains to vote for him. If he did this to me, it wouldn't swing me in favour of voting for him, because for me principles matter more than the money. But does the same apply for my maid who lives in that slum? No. For her, the money matters more than principles. Why? Because she is poor. Why? Because she is uneducated. Can I do something about this? Yes, encourage her to send her kids to school so that they don't get pulled into this same quicksand. In the meantime, how do the existing politicians afford to spend so much money on their votebanks? Because they are shamelessly corrupt and accumulate millions of rupees in bribes. Can we stop this? Theoretically yes. How? By getting a strong anti-corruption bill passed in the Parliament. Will it happen? No. Why? Because the sitting MPs will reject any bill that plugs their "source of income". Why? Because they are in power and they can unanimously do what they want to. Can we remove them from power and get someone else in? Theoretically yes, but practically nearly impossible. Why? Because they have vote banks. Why do so many people vote for corrupt politicians for money? Because they are poor. Why? Because they have not got enough opporunities to get educated. Can we get them all educated? Possible, but a Herculean task. Will the existing government want to sincerely do it? No. Because that would mean digging their own grave. Why educate everyone and make them rise up to vote on principles and get thrown out of power when its easier to "buy" their votes with little money? 

In short, this is a very messy vicious spiral. If India aspires to truly become a world superpower, this spiral has to stop. How to do it is a very difficult question to answer but someone has to do it. Someone who? We, the citizens of India. We need to realize voting is not the only way to bring about change. Do we have that potential to bring about the change? Yes, we do. Incidentally, the people of India showed what potential they have to come together and unite for a cause yesterday itself, in the aftermath of the serial bomb blasts. While the TV news channels were busy shouting out irrelevant stuff about how they were the first to report the blasts and assorted bullshit, scores of unknown heroes, common men and women from across the country, had risen to the occasion to quickly send out accurate information and help anyone and everyone in need, on Twitter. Within minutes of the blasts, hundreds of unnamed citizens had given out their phone numbers and addresses on the social networking site offering complete strangers either a place to come over to stay, a ride back home from work, food, first aid, blood etc. Someone came up with this brilliant idea of collecting this information from the tweets into a Google doc spreadsheet and within one hour there was a list of over 250 people in different parts of Mumbai whom people affected by the blasts could contact for help. This particular document soon went viral and many of you must have noticed it being shared on Facebook too. This is the power of social networking. This is a small trailer of what the citizens of India can do when united for a cause. But to bring about a pathbreaking change such as overthrowing a government, it will not be enough for just the Facebook-Twitter junta of India to unite. It will require encouraging the very large poor and illiterate population of the country too to join in and fight for principles. This will need someone who can bring the whole country together. Something like what Hitler did in post World War I Germany. And in the current scenario, I can think of only one personality in India who has that influence over the entire nation that people will come out and do whatever he asks them to do- yes, Sachin Tendulkar! But I don't see him doing that anytime soon, so we have no option but to wait until that one messiah comes up and unites the entire nation against the corrupt leadership. India needs an Egypt type revolution. 

Until then, keep outraging, take out candle marches, talk about "the spirit of Mumbai" and keep paying taxes on time so that the netas can continue to afford to travel with their security cordons and Kasab can enjoy one more serving of his favorite biryani.