HK ahoy!

Hong Kong is quite a tiny, friendly city-nation with honest taxi drivers (for a change), and a vibrant melange of both, western and oriental cultures. Getting around is easy, shopping is fun and the nightlife nonstop! For the rest, I'd let the few pictures do the speaking...

The view from my room...

My office building - Central Plaza, Wan Chai, the one with golden panels

The Pacific Princess
A princess I'd love to have in my life beside the Indian one...

Off the harbour, across the city...

The old and the new parts of the city are divided by the sea, and one has to either take a rail, underwater bridge or a ferry ride across the sea. I'd vouch for the ferry ride.

Shoppers' paradise

The endless streets are buzzing with activity round the clock, and people spilling out from all directions. Its easy to turn invisible, unnoticed in Hong Kong

The shops around the street are fun to walk around, bargain and buy good stuff for cheap. The chinese shopkeeper women curse you in a manner you cannot decipher, at first instance, but the moment you start walking away, they call you back to buy things at the price you suggest! The transaction ends with a polite give-and-take of 'thank you, come again!'...

Set sail, get going!

Just to put things in perspective...

The tallest building of Hong Kong, and the one next to it....

I'll be back!

Fuck the itinerary. Let’s go home…

It is fun to watch movies. We all would agree to that. It is fun to watch comedies too, you know. Now, let us come to an agreement: whatever the scene may be, if there’s a comic movie playing, we shall all laugh. Whether we get the drift of the comic events or not is another question (not to be answered).

This is what the audience of The Darjeeling Limited agreed to, and signed as a contract before entering the auditorium, when I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago. But we shouldn’t blame the poor audience. Its just that the movie is made precisely to make half the bunch of audience appear absolute intellectual disasters and the other half to be diagonally opposite. The humour is neither too loud, nor tongue-in-cheek. So, the first half of the audience mentioned above tends to miss out the entire point-d’humour and ends up laughing when the second half has almost finished laughing at the laughable scenes. When the former realised they are portraying themselves as a bunch of retards, their guffaws ended in hiccups. The latter then laughed, but not at the movie.

End of the film, and people were either cursing whoever brought them along to watch it, or praising the skilful writing, direction and effortless acting – not that there were many who got to this point though. Good film – do watch it to figure out which one of the deux parties do you belong to...

Fun sequences include the mountain-top ritual when the three brothers present an assortment of hip-and-elbow thrusting moves with their knees and arms bent when they stand on one leg; the sweet-lime girl(s); the dinner table at which two obnoxious German ladies are shouting away to glory and these three Americans are even more obnoxious with their ‘strongest pain killers of the subcontinent’; the shoe-polish-wallah running away with the eldest brother’s single shoe and finally when the three brothers are stranded in the desert with their laminating machine, a colour printer and their itineraries when they were thrown off the Darjeeling Limited. Statutory warning: there are other laughable scenes too. Another warning: not all of the scenes mentioned above are laughable.

Ambition, achievement and boiled potatoes!

I’ve been peeling boiled potatoes, for the large part of the day, cooking one meal after another. It isn’t even so that I’ve been cooking for half the city’s hungry people. Coming to think of it, my appetite can sometimes exceed that of half a city’s hungry people! But this fact shall be discussed in ample detail at an opportune moment some other time.

I’m just pondering over the extent to which my life can swing, when I am spending my days in a largely aimless fashion, not achieving anything significant. And I still feel comfortable, rather happy and content. It may be because of the certainty that revolves around the relaxed phase of these few days. Certainty of the hectic life as it was before, of moving in some direction which could be the right one, and of the so-called accomplishment.

Just about three weeks ago, when the figure-out-your-way phase was prevailing, I’d been impatient and restless to no end. Right when everyone was trying his or her best to reassure me that things were going to get alright, I wouldn’t even listen. Someone had then said, “Perhaps, we should wait a little longer” – and bingo, things did turn alright, and how! It is at these times that one feels one should have a small window into a little bit of our lives to come. It is, on the other hand, at these times that one feels really blessed too.

So, even while life’s heading nowhere at the moment - minus ambition, my days are splurged with leisurely inactivity, a lot of reading, loud music and long hours of peaceful sleep. I am happy not feeling the usual urge to be somebody and get somewhere. "Hold on, keep going, and we shall get somewhere" suddenly sounds right. And listening to someone sure helps!

Just another uplifting experience!

I have made a mention earlier, of the strange ways of the elevator (or lift) at my office, how it shoves itself up at the rooftop following random mood swings, not a shred of which is comprehensible by the human species across sexes. However, I wonder at times, why is it just the men of the office who complain about the erratic behaviour of the said lift (or elevator) all the time, and none of the other two sexes. Not that we have anybody from the third sex around as it appears largely, but I’m just curious. But the third sex is not what I am going to talk about. God promise!

It is something that happened last week, which prompted me to write about the said lift again. But as I think back, this event is not so much about the lift that I’m alluding to, but more perhaps about a timid new liftman who occupied the pilot’s seat in the already cramped cockpit the other day. So, I took the lift to go down three (or maybe four) storeys, as I walked out of my office. Wait a little, oh, wait. I think I was going up four (or maybe three) storeys.

At the cost of sounding clichéd and technologically inept, I would like to point out for the uninitiated, that the lift which transports us upward does so in the opposite direction too. Another fact which is noteworthy is that such lifts are by law, not allowed to perform any movements sideways. This law must have been in force since the time they made mummies in Egypt, I think.

Without deviating any further, I state in all consciousness, that the lift moves either up or down and in no other direction than the two mentioned about ten words ago in this sentence. Hence, it does not really matter which way I was heading, unless one of you had climbed up above it to snap the strings holding this lift up in the air. Therefore, reverting back to the fact, that irrespective of the direction in which the lift was going, I took the lift. As I entered, I noticed the liftman making some strange sounds. I thought he may have been muttering his prayers to the Egyptian mummies. Turns out, he actually was!

Ask me how? I know you won’t, so let me tell you without much ado. I too didn’t know until he told me, that the lift was actually attempting to make some sideway movements, thus breaking the Law of Egyptian mummies for lifts. The liftman, who had just taken charge of this lift for the first time in his life, blurted out assorted abuses to a wide variety of people starting from those who constructed the office building in the first place, to those who maintain it now, and the people who installed the lift in between. The lift was behaving in a weird manner, to deserve this abuse. It shuddered whenever either the liftman, or I pressed a button, and started to move with an upward or downward jerk which was entirely unpredictable. It performed its sideway-salsa midway, which amplified the liftman’s screams.

So far so good, the lift didn’t wrench itself out from the hold of the ropes on which it was hanging, and finally landed at the ground floor with another jerk, making the occupants wonder whether there was going to be a bungee-jump turnaround, way back to where we came from. The moment it landed, the liftman’s screams reached the highest alto, and he shot out flinging the doors open, running around in the lobby of my office building. Alas, there was not a single spectator of his performance and nobody paid any heed to his plaint. Poor chap, he had to return to duty to the same horrifying cockpit, and I could hear him utter sing-song abuses as he closed the doors again.

On my way back upstairs, I chose to take the stairs. Thankfully, the journey back to the fourth storey was devoid of any such unsolicited entertainment. But the fact that I was more thankful to Holy Jesus and his band party was that the lift did not stop anywhere hanging in the air, like it did at an earlier instance. I cannot stretch my imagination to think of what could have happened of me otherwise.

That’s it. Now stop flooding your 250-gram masterpiece up there with useless information and get back to work. Don’t you dare to imagine what could’ve happened if the lift had stopped mid-air. Those who still do, will be entitled to one free trip up-and-down (and perhaps back up) in the same lift on a Sunday afternoon.

Thankyouverymuch.

Truth, at Rs 100 a year

The last time when you looked out of the window of your car, perhaps pitying that child selling books, newspapers and magazines which claim to bring out the truth to you, he was not worried about the pride that you took over the shining state of your country or its economic progress, reading those books and magazines. All he was trying to fix is how would he make sure he and his siblings get their next meal.

So, the next time you feel proud and seek the thrill of being an idealistic revolutionary buying the magazine that boasts of bringing you the truth at Rs 100 a year, posing as the guardian of virtue in a country which is apparently turning dishonest by the hour, make sure you think of that child which you spotted at the traffic signal who was given the very same magazine to sell. Will you still buy it?

Uncommon sense

Found at Alliance Francaise de Bombay. The French, or those who come in contact with them DO possess some uncommon sense, eh?

A taste of India...

Dil le gaya pardesi, koi rokna tha,

Kya hoga hoga hoga, mera sochna tha,

O, kya hoga hoga hoga, mera sochna tha…

On a chilly winter morning, when you suddenly wake up listening to a toddler singing this number with music created by clapping two small pieces of asbestos into each other, it feels that the whole world has come to a stop to listen to what this tiny soul has to say to it. But right then, the kid’s voice is overtaken by a score of other shouts trying to gain mileage over each other, hustling through the squatting-sitting-standing crowds: “Chai masalawali, Chai”, “Garam garam vada-pav”, “Sev-khaman, desi ghee ma banavelu khaman khasho?”

And then, you realise you have woken up on the upper deck of the Flying Ranee, because you do not have any space to move your feet about -- since the entire coach is filled with people – men, women and children like roaches stuffed in a tin can. One can hardly sit, and one cannot even stand up. Wherever you set foot, you end up stamping somebody. Finally, when you reach the loo, you find it stuffed with luggage!

After all the jugglery and hullabaloo, one wonders how such a swarming crowd could stick around together in utterly uncomfortable situations for hours. It is beyond my comprehension, whether it is the innate Indian nature to subscribe to harmony in all circumstances (which to me, appears hypocrite rubbish) or the cowardice of the mob who is willing to toss around negligible trash, but do not have the guts to stand up and speak out about the inefficiencies bred by the system, including their own selves. I dare not ask why!