You’ve Come a Long way, Baby

The early 80s was the time when chicken corners became popular in Trivandrum. The boom was pioneered by Taj Chicken Corner and Tushara Chicken Corner in Palayam. The format was amazingly simple. You go in; they serve you a plate of fried chicken (4 decent-sized pieces), a small bowl of curry with neck and stuff, some sliced onions, a pickle and unlimited number of wafer-thin chapattis. The chicken was delicious and spicy, unlike the stuff-dipped-in-batter peddled by multi-national chains, and was priced at Rs. 17 or 18 then, I think.

The first time I went there was with a cousin and a friend (all 10^th std. students from St. Joseph’s HS), and none of us were aware of the abovementioned format. Once we sat down, we were given an idea of the system by the waiter, who then promptly served us the chicken pieces, etc. and we had a real go at the chapattis. The bill came and that was when we realized we were short of money. You see, we had this single Rs. 50/- note, which was good enough in those days for three people to eat chicken in most places, but fell slightly short at the chicken corner (reason why I think the price was 17 or 18).

We thought for some time, and then my friend had an idea. We knew the guy who was running a place called Chin Lung, the sole Chinese restaurant in Trivandrum at that time, down the road. My friend went there while we both waited, convinced the guy to lend him Rs. 10, and we all got away without washing dishes.

Chin Lung used to serve regular Indian Chinese fare – chop suey, fried rice, sweet corn chicken soup, etc. There used to be a Chin Lung in Brigade Road in Bangalore too (maybe it is still there), though apparently there was no connection between the two. Anyway, Chin Lung disappeared somewhere down the line and the city lost its only exclusive Chinese restaurant.

All these came back to me because of Taj and Chinese food. The Taj here is not the Taj Chicken Corner but the Vivanta by Taj Hotel at Thycaud, where they opened a new Chinese restaurant called "Chinapolis" recently.  In the years since that Taj Chicken Corner-Chin Lung episode, I had the opportunity to get acquainted with authentic Chinese food and came to really enjoy it. So, when I heard of the new place, I immediately went there, despite being a bit apprehensive due to an earlier not-so-enjoyable experience at the Taj’s regular restaurant buffet.

We, my wife and I, were the only guests in the cavernous dining hall (another guest came in later, thus making it three). Chinese tea was served along with some pickled vegetables and for some reason, Korean kimchi. The menu had a decent look to it, though chicken dishes stood out. We ordered a dim sum, Shanghai pork ribs, mapo tofu (doufu) and a flat noodle dish. The dim sum was excellent, with big prawns in them. The only issue I had was with the pudina chutney they brought along with it. If an Indian person wants to try out Chinese food, let him/her eat it the way it should be had. Why do you have to offer pudina chutney? Next thing you know, the dim sum will have dal and coconut in it and guys will be eating it with sambar. I hope they don’t go down that slippery slope.

The ribs were succulent and I really yearned for a cold beer, but I didn’t go down that slippery slope as I had to drive home. Then the mapo tofu came. Looked pretty much the real deal, but upon tasting I realized something was missing. This is a very spicy dish but what they served was quite mild. I could, however, taste some Chinese pepper in there. So, I called the waiter and asked for some ground Chinese pepper. He didn’t have a clue, went in and came back and said they didn’t have it. Maybe they’re using some packaged sauce instead of freshly preparing the stuff, I thought. Anyway, it was reasonably good and we enjoyed it. The noodle dish could have been better.

A few guys came by while we were eating, asking about the food and the service, and we truthfully told them we were enjoying the lunch. Towards the end, a Chinese chef poked his head out a couple of times, looking at us gingerly, not sure whether to approach us or not. Eventually he came and as it turned out, he was the actual cook and that explained the authenticity. He talked in heavily-accented English and we told him everything was good, but the mapo tofu ought to have been spicier. He became animated and explained why he didn’t add too much “Szechwan” pepper (which I had earlier requested the waiter using the term Chinese pepper). This pepper gives a numbing feeling and apparently many guests didn’t like it. So, he just added a bit for the sake of keeping it real. He told me that the next time I should just sent the word in asking for more Szechwan pepper and he will make the real thing. And, that is what I will be doing; perhaps even ask him to conjure up a dan dan mian (not in the menu), if possible.

I wrote all this just to highlight how far Trivandrum has changed in the last 10 years or so. There is a place in Trivandrum now (other than my house) where you can eat mapo tofu! Unthinkable a few years ago. The city is slowly beginning to get a cosmopolitan feel to it, not least fuelled by the presence of the well-travelled techie crowd from the Technopark who have high disposable incomes. Besides this Chinese place, there are many multi-cuisine and other restaurants spread around the city. Café Mojo at Kuravankonam (good) and Curry Chatty near Mettukada (good food, poor service) for multi-cuisine fare, Casa Bianca at M.P. Appan Road for Italian (good, when the foreign owner is there), and Cherries and Berries opposite Cotton Hill School (waffles) come to mind. There is a Hyderabadi place near Technopark (Dakhani Degh) and various places selling North Indian food besides the much-hyped international chains selling their banal stuff.

There is a place called “Spring” in Nanthancode where you can buy almost any vegetable. They even have asparagus (very skinny ones for my liking), artichoke, daikon radish, lotus roots, pakchoy and small cucumbers in addition to fruits from around the world including persimmons. They also have packaged tofu, Canadian maple syrup, ajwa dates and other such exotic, expensive items. At the deli in Taj, you can buy baguettes, croissants and quiche. Supreme bakers sell reasonably good marshmallows. And, the other day I even saw Lee Kum Kee sauces at the Nilgiri’s store.

The social and cultural fronts have also become quite enriched. We have a couple of literary festivals – the Kovalam litfest and the Hay Festival - and a major international film festival, in addition to smaller cultural feasts organized by the foreign cultural centres of France, Germany and Russia.

Many local people are slowly waking up to these changes. Some time ago I happened to talk to the owner of one of the biggest gold jewellery shops in Trivandrum. The person asked me what I did for a living and I told him I used to be a techie, blah, blah and the conversation naturally veered to the topic of Technopark. He was under the impression that all IT-related development was happening in Cochin, and that there were only a few thousand people working at the Technopark here. I told him that as far as I have heard from friends, there are at least 30 to 35,000 people working there and he appeared dumbstruck.  Mind you, he is one of the top businessmen in Trivandrum and one of the richest. So, there is a certain level of ignorance among the populace of the changes happening around them. I feel we are at the threshold of a great leap akin to what Bangalore witnessed at the beginning of the IT boom in the late 80s, early 90s. Whether we succeed in avoiding the infrastructural and other pitfalls of Bangalore will be the key to our city’s proper development. Let’s hope we make it.

You’ve come a long way, baby…

 P.S. While singing the paeans of my lovely city, I can’t quite ignore the humongous elephant in the room. That is the garbage issue. This is a grievance common to most cities in India, but we were not one of them. There was a time when Trivandrum was the cleanest city in the country. There was time when we had proper garbage collection. There was a time when corporation guys used to go around spraying stuff to kill mosquitoes. There was a time when people swept the street in front of their house and carried their own shopping bags etc., etc. Let’s hope our retarded corporation rulers and the let’s-carve-up-the-real-estate State government find a solution to this issue pretty quickly. It’s been frikkin 10 months since they collected garbage and I have 6 sacks of plastic waste behind my house.

Emerging, Submerging...De Vannu, Da Poyi

Kerala, as we all know, ‘emerged’ when Parasuraman threw his parasu (axe) from Gokarna to Kanyakumari. Why Gokarna? Why not from Ratnagiri, or Porbandar? He must have had his reasons. Some guys, however, didn’t see eye to eye with Parasuraman on his tomahawk-launch land-grab. They took their parasu to Kaliyikkavila and slashed all the way south to Kanyakumari, and then to Kasaragod and cut off all the way north to Gokarna, essentially thumbing their noses at Parasuraman. To be fair to those guys, Parasuraman, unlike Sardar Patel, didn’t have any clue of linguistic divisions. Otherwise, why would a 200-odd kilometre stretch of Tulu and Kannada speaking land be a part of Mallu-land?

The fact is that Kerala had already ‘emerged,’ though the exact date of the axe-launch is not available. At least, that is what I believed until I saw the words “Emerging Kerala” recently. This suggested that we, after all, haven’t ‘emerged’ and it is still an ongoing process.  So, what’s cooking? Were all those parasu stories, well, just stories? Are these people ridiculing the beliefs of millions?

From what I gather, this is again a new-age land grab. Like the 64 brahmin families Parasuraman brought from outside, this time around we’ll see Arabs and others being offered land and other sops to stay put. We don’t know if weapons are going to be thrown around for the sea to recede or whether existing land will be carved up. What we do know is that someone is going to take a hatchet to that green cover we have, or whatever is left of it, pretty soon. Incidentally, no one mentions about the local population, their needs, their lives; neither Parasuraman, nor our new lords. 

-----------

We often lament about the lack of do-gooders in our society. Accident victims bleeding to death in front of hundreds, people not helping others in distress, etc. Well, guess what? There are still a few of these good Samaritans around, though they only come out of the woodwork once in a while. Recently one such guy came out of nowhere. My guess is that this is the guy who always drives in front of me at 20 km/hr speed while blocking both lanes. He is the guy who follows the Kerala rule of “line driving,” which states that if there are two lanes in one direction, you drive on the dividing line so that both the left and right side mirrors (folded) of your car are equidistant from that line. He was so aghast at the thought of seeing an F1 car zooming at speeds above 40km/hr through Kawdiar that he immediately pulled a rule out of his posterior sphincter and filed a PIL against it. The government was stunned and dropped the idea. It didn’t matter that no one, not even unhealed cripples sitting on boards with wheels, traverse that stretch below 100 km/hr.  

-----------

Cabotage: A thick creamy soup made from cabbage and potage, originally developed by the Kerala government to fool, sorry, feed the public during famines (“Let them drink soup,” the government was supposed to have said when told that the people didn’t have potable water to drink).

Cabotage law: This law states that any ship arriving at a physically existing (Cochin) or never-to-exist imaginary port (Vizhinjam) is allowed to dump 10 lakh TEUs of cabotage soup into the sea as long as the ship’s captain and cook are Indians and there is a rave party in progress on the deck.

The government decided to relax that law to allow foreign captains also to join the party as long as they are not Pakistanis or Chinese, and they have a three-year relationship with a native.

-----------
Other recent events that entertained me:

- The impromptu romantic evening of candle-light dinners gifted to 600 million Indians by the government, which deliberately switched off the power grid, in a bid to increase the population.

- The dope Hazare giving up on his fast-unto-death stunts.

- Another hartal, which is essential in cleansing our air, as vehicles don’t run on that day, and kids and workers get a day off.

 

- Our CM declaring that his government is taking a scientific approach to garbage. I think he was talking about using gas masks to approach garbage and go around it. He will also throw in a pair of gumboots for good measure.

- And our Olympics – when are we going to see reason and import some African athletes?

 

Trivandrum Monorail – “To be or not to be a Paara”

When god speaketh, man shuts the f$@k up-eth. That is the norm. But unbeknownst to god, there are a set of people called rationalists who ask for logical, plausible explanations. These people raise uncomfortable questions, which usually bring any discussion to an abrupt end with, “that is our belief, you can’t question that.”

Recently, railway god E. Sreedharan spake and spake and spake a lot to his devotee chief minister. And then he spake and spake some more.  And everybody bowed and prayed. He spake about the wisdom of building a monorail for a growing city like my hometown. And, everybody nodded in agreement, “sorry lord, we forgot your advice on widening the roads in Trivandrum and using the existing railway tracks and buses. A thousand apologies.”

The railway god apparently had no recollection of ever saying such things. Do gods get dementia? He now wants to build something bigger and better than a monorail. A metro, perhaps, as the city is growing. On the other hand, I guess Calicut only needs a monorail as it won’t grow. What about the other two cities “larger” than Trivandrum? Malappuram, if you believe the stats, is the Shenzhen of India – growing from a hundred thousand to a million and a half in a few years. At this rate, it could be a megalopolis pretty soon. Obviously, the people there deserve a modern “maglev”. We are yet to hear god’s thoughts on that.

This god-speak, however, raised alarms. And surprise of surprise, a dissenting voice came from the devotee group itself. Mr. M. A. Vahid, a ruling party MLA, boldly came out as an atheist and suggested, without naming names, that somebody is trying to torpedo the project. There were some mute denials from the government. And I patted my back for predicting this – see Did you just Wink?.  

To be or not to be a paara, that is the question on the railway god’s mind now (paara, പാര is a Malayalam word used to describe someone who slyly tries to #$ck up something). He definitely seems to have an axe to grind as far as Trivandrum is concerned. I could never understand the deification of this guy (or anyone for that matter). He didn’t invent or create anything from scratch. He used existing technologies and equipment to build something for which a blueprint has been in existence for 150 years. The world’s first frikkin' metro started running in London in 1863, for (railway) god's sake! The Delhi metro is reasonably good and he should be complemented for good administration and execution of a project. An Indian world-class, if you may, like the Trivandrum “world-class” International Airport or the CWG village, (see Our Standards) which are a big improvement on existing facilities. That’s about it.

In the meantime, the stink continues in Trivandrum, with our Mayor-ess Ms. Moonlight and our MP Mr. Moon Tha Roor throwing muck at each other. Interesting times ahead.

The Stink Came First, Therefore...

The New Indian Express has a section on spirituality in its Sunday magazine. I usually skim through it for my weekly dose of humour. This week (June 17) was no exception, but the first paragraph of one article got me hooked completely and I read and re-read it a few times in the potty. Later, I found that piece on the web, book-marked it and read it on my computer. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. I am aware of the profound lack of profundity in such treatises, and that is what humours me most of the time. This time I was struck by the usage of the word ‘therefore’, which crops up after a long, rambling “reasoning.”  

I am reproducing below the part that boggled my mind. (Yogi Aswini. “Celestial Sound That Perfects All.”  The New Indian Express, 17 June 2012: p9.)

The first corporeal manifestation on earth after the Trinity’ birth was in the form of sound. Om (Aum) was the first sound. It arose from the damru of Lord Shiva. Before sound (creation), there was eternal silence and absolute stillness. It was from here that the journey of an individual began. Therefore, sound can be termed as the first dimension perceived in physical creation. From sound emerges the dimension of colours; from colours emerges everything that we see in the physical creation, including our physical body.

I tried to deconstruct the paragraph, but mostly failed. The words corporeal manifestation bugged me for a while. Dictionary entries of corporeal include: having a body or a physical form; that can be seen and handled, etc.  This was the first time I heard of seeing a sound. So, sound has a physical form?? Hmm. Let us skip controversial entries such as damru and all and go straight to the next sentence.

Before sound (creation), there was eternal silence and absolute stillness. Now, this is being stated as a fact. And I found myself struggling not to fall off the commode, “of course, eternal silence! How could I miss that?” The next two sentences, however, had me totally stumped. Where and what is the connection with sound, and who is this individual when he says, “It was from here that the journey of an individual began.” And before I had time to digest these concepts, the sentence “Therefore, sound can be termed as the first dimension perceived in physical creation” appears out of nowhere, suggesting a logical conclusion from the preceding drivel.

What he essentially said was, sound came first, therefore sound came first.  

It (use of therefore) doesn’t work like that.  “I farted, therefore it stinks.” Now, that is a proper way of using therefore in a sentence. If you are doing it after gorging on really spicy channa masala, beef ularthiyathu and beer, then you could elaborate on the premises. “I washed down some nice spicy channa and beef with beer which made me fart and therefore it stinks; royally.”

I slept on it and then the lord appeared to me in my dream and said, “Son, the stink came first.” I thought he was making fun of me. “Everything will be clear to you when you wake up.”

I woke up and walked out and then it hit me – the stink. It was omnipresent, omnipotent and believe it or not, corporeal. It hit me physically. I realized everybody in my city (and perhaps the whole country) worships it. The mayor-ess definitely does. The Chief Minister and the MP too have their own ways of appeasing it. It is there in the piles of raw waste in Big Bazaar bags, etc. placed religiously at various auspicious spots, where pious folks keep coming and leaving their offerings in an unending flow and show of piety. It is there in the railway stations and tracks. It is there in the carcinogenic fumes rising from smouldering plastic and Styrofoam piles, where the devotees make sure that the flames stay lit eternally. It is there in the Amayizhanchan canal that cuts through the city. It is all-pervasive! I bowed before it and I apologized to the lord for doubting his words. Therefore, stink can be termed as ….blah, blah…. “You farted, didn’t you?”   

Gateways, Monorail, Tender, Amakudari

Over the past few years, there was one thing that struck me while going around Trivandrum. Our obsession with gateways, and I have been trying to guess the reason for this obsession.

I remember my mom’s ancestral house in rural Trivandrum which had a small gateway –the kottiyambalam- built onto the compound wall. Nothing fancy - just a simple door with a wooden bolt opening out to a small ledge with places to sit on both sides, and steps leading down outside to the pathway and the railway track about 50 feet away. As kids, we cousins used to sit there and wave at passing trains and then as teenagers we sat there and smoked and drank. Sadly, the kottiyambalam is just a memory now. In its place, rather near where it stood, stands a regular iron gate stuck in a concrete wall (which replaced the mud kayyala). The kottiyambalam as such is experiencing a revival in Kerala with rich blokes incorporating it in their designer homes. But, I am not talking about those gateways.

I am talking about the gateways that are there or are being built at the entrances of government buildings such as hospitals or this or that directorate. There is one being built in front of the Corporation Office, two in the General Hospital and one at the entrance to the Eye Hospital. Then there are the existing ones like the one at the Medical College entrance, the DME office, the Science and Technology Museum. There is one thing common to all these. These are all equally ugly, serve no purpose and are a colossal waste of money.  Well, at least that was my initial reaction. Then on deeper analysis I regretted doubting our government. Guess what? The government has a vast checklist of priority stuff, which it goes through before making any such spending decisions. It roughly looks like the following:

       Item         Status

          Poverty                  Alleviated

          Roads                    Built

          Schools                 Constructed (some even have pools during monsoon)

          Water                    Supplied

          Garbage                Removed

          Healthcare            Universal (the general wards in the aforementioned General
                                        Hospital even have some broken toilets!)

          Criminal gangs      Wiped out

          Crime                    Unheard of (ever since said gangs were wiped out)

          Corruption             Being institutionalized (oops!)

And the list goes on and on.

The government honchos poured over this checklist and saw that everything was good. “OK guys, now since everything seems to be taken care of let’s use the spare money to build some gateways. Y’know, concrete, fake traditional stuff and use colours that are in vogue now among mallus –pink, parrot green,” they decreed and lo, we have gateways.

P.S. The monorail saga continues – Recently the railway god paid a visit to the Calicut monorail site and gave his approval. He said it was viable in Kozhikode and probably agreed with the government proposal for a global tender. It warmed the cockles of my heart and made it tender. He is ready to give approval to any two-bit town that needs a monorail as long as there is a global tender. I am not saying that Calicut is a two-bit town. It’s every bit an 8084, 8-bit town like the other two “huge” cities in Kerala.  I’m digressing. The point is about the global tender. Here was a man who just a few weeks ago bullied and blackmailed the government against a global tender for a metro. He said the metro would get JICA funding only if it went through him. Nobody asked anything. The media, the politicians, the academicians, no one. Zip, nada. Why was that? What if, say, Hitachi had won the bid? Would JICA have refused? I don’t think so. Still, there is an explanation for his actions.

Japan, despite the overall good image, is not that transparent in many of its dealings. It is not corrupt in the way we experience it here. A common man need not bribe a government official to get a certificate or some such thing in 99.9% of the cases. Corruption there is more at the higher end, institutionalized and subtle. Companies and government are all in it together. Bids are rigged. Everything is shared. Everyone is happy. Worked for quite a long time too, but has run into trouble with globalization. There is a practice called Amakudari in Japan where senior bureaucrats join private companies after retirement. Gratitude for favours received. This is the word that popped up in my mind when I read his threat on not receiving funding from JICA. Here is a powerful retired guy in a private position and the Japanese could relate to that.

And, for him, he got what he wanted for his former company and didn’t care one way or the other about global tenders for other stuff. Stuff he is not interested in. The worrying factor for me here is the total lack of spine from anyone in questioning some of the things he said including the double standards in global tender. He is definitely a rare specimen in our country (people like him are dime-a-dozen in any reasonably well-run democratic country including Japan), did some great things and deserves the accolades, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is sacrosanct. His comments (or at least stuff that the media have attributed to him) related to the maglev and high-speed trains are ridiculous to say the least. He is for building the high-speed rail and said that Japan will give its 700-series shinkansen to Kerala. Of course they’ll give it. And you’ll pay for it with the money they lend you so that their corporations stay afloat while you drown in debt for eternity. All for the benefit of a few rich people who may or may not travel in such trains.  Incidentally, Japan built its first bullet train line between Tokyo and Osaka, which are Intel Core i7, 64-bit cities unlike our 8-bit ones. Ideally, the left should have questioned this absurd idea, but they don’t want to be seen as anti-development, it seems. They appear to have lost their you-know-what somewhere and they are not even aware of it.        

Xmas Star, High-speed Rail, Lit-fests, Nurses

The other day I was walking out of my gate with my two sons. A guy passed us by, looking intently at my face, and then retraced his steps and asked me my name.  I looked at him for a few seconds and gave my name. He followed it up with “Are you Christians?”  I said no. “Hindus?” Again I replied in the negative. He seemed to be a bit confused whether to go on to the next religion in his list or not. You see, I have this secular, religion-neutral name common to mallus born in the 60s and 70s and he was not sure whether that name worked for Muslims, etc. I decided to help him out and said, “I don’t believe in any imaginary being or in any religion.” He seemed offended by my answer and told me that my response was uncalled for, I have no right to ridicule god, and how did I think we were all here, blah, blah. I cut off the blahs and told him, “Look pal, you’re the one who came to me and asked me my religion. So, if you don’t like what I have to say about it, get lost.” He mumbled that I was right on that point and went away. He must have been a member of one of those Jehovah’s Witness or some such cultish group attracted by the Xmas star still dangling from my porch.

Anyway, the point is, religion is always in your face here in our country. Kerala used to be slightly better, but even here it is getting out of control. So much so that, even the Marxists have inducted Jesus into their pantheon of revolutionary leaders alongside Marx, Lenin, Che, et al (they also have Kim Jong-il, which I find interesting). Most of what Jesus did would fall under the communist concept of things and some fair-minded priests have acknowledged as much. Note to capitalists: Jesus ‘distributed’ whatever bread he had to the thousands who followed him. He didn’t tell them, “OK guys, this is how you make bread. Now, go and find yourselves some wheat and get to work if you don’t want to starve.” It didn’t matter how many bread molecules each person got. All that mattered was that they got something.

Well, now since Jesus is in there, the next logical step for the Marxists would be to incorporate Mohammed into the scheme of things. That is not going to be easy. For one, you can’t have any imagery (google “Jesus and Mo” for a weekly take on deep religious thoughts and some images). The maximum you can do is replace the sickle with the crescent, which would go well with the cross that replaced the hammer.

When did we reach this stage of fear of religion? The last and only person I could remember saying anything was C Kesavan, a former chief minister who died more than 40 years ago.  He was supposed to have said “good riddance, that much less superstition” on hearing about Sabarimala temple being gutted by fire. He probably knew, by virtue of being the CM, the ‘secret’ of the divine fire makaravilaku and would have wanted to save the many that die in stampedes every year trying to watch that fire.    

Now, you have women sitting on the street named after C Kesavan, inhaling photochemical smog, making offerings, flavoured with exhaust fumes and garnished with dust, to a goddess in a temple situated 4 kilometres away; all as part of the biggest congregation of superstitious women in the world. Now, you have obscure mullahs threatening to make $hit-fests out of lit-fests prompted by the devious media. Oh, for a C Kesavan!

A brief look at the ongoing theme of rail-related humbug in Kerala: The govt. has decided to go ahead with the high-speed rail and the pods. There was a report that Japan even promised their 700-series shinkansen for the high-speed rail project. Wow, I hope they are giving it for free. The only thing now left for Japan will be to offer to pay for the tickets of travellers. I'm sure our railway god can get that and more from JICA. To give you an idea of the shinkansen ticket price in Japan - a one-way ticket from Tokyo to Osaka is about 12,000 yen (Rs. 7,600), whereas a cheap airline ticket is about 9,000 yen (5,700). That is more than what an enslaved nurse makes a month in the enlightened, progressive, red communist Kerala. Let’s hope we all strike oil in our backyards (don’t have a backyard? tough luck.) and become rich like the Arabs to keep up with this govt’s dreams.   

Talking of dreams, I like this government’s slogan “athi vegam, bahu dooram,” which can be loosely translated as “at great speed, going a long way”. And that is what they are doing –at high speeds; going far, very far away from realities.  

P.S. It will be good fun to keep track of the money trail in these dream projects - the consultancies, the feasibility studies, the real estate deals… yummy!

Our Standards, Western Standards, PODs for Trivandrum, etc.

When you travel abroad and get to actually see how other countries (not necessarily first world countries) address issues related to urban infrastructure, garbage or mass transit, you may be tempted to think, “Hey, if these schmucks can do it, definitely we too can.”

Well, I have to cut you off from that reverie right there. You can’t, even if someone bribes you with a billion dollars. There have been times when I was also lulled into believing it is possible after seeing newspaper headlines like “Kerala to be garbage-free”. I remember one such announcement 4-5 years ago by the then LDF minister, which had all the required jargons – ban plastic, intensify this, enforce that, follow-up there, suck up here, etc. Recently, this government also launched (is it re-launched) a new, fresh drive. I hope to see the next LDF government to re-re-launch the drive in another 4 years.

There is a reason I think this, and many other things, will not work here in Kerala or India. And that reason was elucidated by one man some time ago. His name is Lalit Bhanot. Now, here is a dishonest man who gave a brutally honest opinion. His response to a pile of doo-doo on a shower floor in CWG village was, “Everyone has different standards about cleanliness. The Westerners have different standards, we have different standards.” I immediately liked this guy. We, as a people, have this extraordinary tunnel vision to see only the good parts. We have Photoshop built inside our eyes to brush away the piles of filth around our glitzy apartments and malls. We have nostrils that are immune to stink. We find it difficult to throw a piece of paper from an ATM into the trash can provided (explains why we are not good at basketball). We work in the IT field, live in swanky apartments, wear jeans and t-shirts, and have nice cars which we use to drive down to the nearby Akkulam lake and dump our $**t into the lake (personally saw it; didn’t have the time to get down and kick the $**t out of her). The politicos and other worthies who lead the annual cursory cleaning efforts pile up everything and burn them in front of TV cameras, leaving behind half-burnt piles of plastic, Styrofoam and carcinogenic fumes that the TV cameras don’t see, while creating a space where people come and dispose off more of their filth.

I was involved in a clean-up operation with our residents association. My idea was for a group of us to go around and sweep up the garbage and get the corporation to take it away. The first part was vetoed immediately. “No, no, we’ll just get a few migrant laborers and they will do it.” Don’t want to get our hands dirty; don’t mind making our land dirty –seems to be our motto. It took a few days for the guys to cover the entire area and in between I fell sick. Well, the streets were clean (though it didn’t stay like that for long) when I came out next but I was shocked to learn that the garbage was not taken away by the corporation. Instead, they paid some guys to take it away, who probably dumped it in the highway somewhere. If there were some soft object nearby, I would have banged my head against it (no point in hurting my head). That’s when Mr. Bhanot’s view really sunk in and I realized the futility of trying to explain why moving a pile of crap from here to there IS NOT cleaning.

So, if any of you guys have grand dreams, just forget it. Sit back, enjoy the ride up $**t creek, accept our inner scumbags and stop blaming our politicians and officials. Remember, they are also us. FIFO – Filth In, Filth Out. 

P.S. Monorail, maglev saga continues. The latest idea is Pods for Trivandrum. I didn’t even bother to read the report fully. Our CM would have loved it, as it will give him another opportunity to save millions of rupees for the people of Trivandrum. Y’know, we already have pods. A few people get in, give the destination and the pod takes you there and you pay the fare. It is called a frikkin auto-rickshaw. Some tweaking is necessary with the rates and the software installed in the morons who drive it, but otherwise it is perfect.

The guys who dream up these things have peapod-sized brains filled with slush and two brain molecules - one to control their mouth and another to control their anal sphincter. And they disgorge the same stuff through both holes.



Maglev, Trivandrum Monorail, Railway God and Confucius

A picture is worth a thousand words (in some versions it is 10,000 words). This saying, I found out after painstaking research that involved googling it, was an American creation slyly attributed to Confucius to make it sound convincing. I was reminded of this quote when I saw some impressive pictures of cities in Kerala. Stunning high-rises, coconut trees and shimmering backwaters! The only problem is that these pictures are worth only about 250 words (or 2,500, whichever you prefer), or only about a quarter of what Confucius meant. None of these pictures show the streets, the grounds, the earth on which these buildings stand, for obvious reasons. It is not a pretty sight. But, I assume that is what tourism hyperbole is all about. Confucius, if he comes back now, would be shocked to learn that fishing nets from his country are being used to catch foreign tourists in a distant land.

Recently I read a comment (about Gurgaon) that you have to keep your eyesight angled up by about 40 degrees and you may be tempted to believe that you’re in some 1^st world city. A similar comment was made by a Japanese guy to me many moons ago.  He said that Trivandrum looked better than Hawaii from the air. But then there was a pause, and in typical Japanese fashion, a lot was left unsaid. An American would have probably said, “yea, we got down and that was when the $hit hit the ceiling literally.” You can’t walk 10 metres or take in a panoramic view without being jarred by piles of garbage, ugly buildings, and eye-piercing colours. When did purple and parrot green become our state colours? I missed that revolution. There was a time, in my youth, when we used to (ignorantly) call any colour that is not white or its derivatives as “pandi colour”, a derogatory reference to the colourful Tamil scene. I don’t feel that way now as far as Tamils are concerned, because now I realize that such colours suit them, and their personae. Likewise, their rhythm, the beats, and the sound. Those look and sound fabulous in Tamil, but don’t work in Malayalam. Still, Tamil being the bigger cultural entity around seems to have had a bigger, detrimental impact on Kerala in the last decade than I had imagined.  (And, if I ever get my hands on the Asian Paints guys, I’ll kick them till they turn purple.)

Well, I lost track. I wanted to write about garbage-free Kerala. But then, it is a futile exercise. There was a garbage-free Kerala plan initiated by the previous government 4-5 years ago, which was thrown into the trash can after the first few days. The new plan is also destined to take the same route by the look of things, with a slight detour where a CIAL-like entity will make some money in the process.

Couple of follow-up news regarding Trivandrum monorail and railways.

Our CM has become such a visionary he has become almost Palin-esque (Sarah Palin – An US politician who said she could see Russia from Alaska) in his vision thingy. He could, sitting in his perch in the Cliff House, see all the way to Kaliyikkavila in the south and all the way up to Thalapadi in the north, to which he plans to extend the Trivandrum monorail. He is not even winking any more.

While the CM was at it and thinking up ways to carve up the state booty among corporate sleazebags as quickly as possible, the railway god revealed his plans for using maglev at Kochi. The news report quoted him as saying this technology is widely used in Japan. Now, that was taking it a bit too far even for a god, especially, in this information age. The only maglev system commercially operating in Japan is a contraption they developed for the Nagoya Expo, which they are continuing to use over an 8-kilometre stretch at great loss. The only other and oft-quoted example is the one in Shanghai that connects the city to the airport. Again, not a metro system. He said the maglev can run at speeds above 500 km/h. Now, how that is beneficial in a metro system with stops every kilometre is beyond my comprehension. But it is god’s words and you have to take it as it is.

Today you see the news that the Japanese maglev will be used for the high speed railway system in Kerala. Again, the system this guy is talking about is not operational on a commercial basis. The Japanese do have a test line in Yamanashi and have touched speeds well in excess of 500 km/h, but the way he talks about it is similar to the earlier-mentioned saying attributed to Confucius by the American. Enhances the credibility. He and the media, however, seem to be ignorant of this big world-wide internet webby thing. Interesting days ahead.