TWO STATES ;)

Hey friends, I wish all of you the best in 2010. May you have mannnnyyy boy/girl friends, lots of money and time to buy books, food, movies and clothes :)may married friends be blessed with soft obedient children ;)and yeah, happy new year again :)
I was in Rajasthan for the new year in a thermal power plant. If you really wanna know what it was all about, kindly read my previous rants :)Cut off from people, good food, rice and sambhar for ten days. Thanks to bread and jam. It helped me shed three kgs in ten days. So, this is now size zero rice-less and priceless Preeti for you :O

Then one of my friends was back from the US, remember Jumbili who had night mares about the horse biting him ‘there’(click here for flashback)?? Yeah, that’s the one who has come back for a vacation. So Jumbili wanted to have a ‘feel’ of Chennai and her sister Bangalore (now no wisecracks as to what he was feeling for 20 years at C+B before leaving for MS, that question is beyond the scope of this blog space). So yeah, we travelled by bus from place to place. He was nothing like a typical NRI , who curses the weather as though it were his ex-girlfriend personified(I guess he is still straight, though I have my own doubts as one Mr Adam keeps calling him and talks for :)..anyways..), grumbles about pollution and population and definitely not a mineral water freak.

Scene 1: Chennai, Sunday noon, Mt Road
We were alighting a bus when This Jumbili was standing in a queue to get down . I never really knew what queue meant especially in ticket counters, ration shops restrooms etc and definitely was alien to it in a bus. I guess people feel so restricted, suffocated and deadly inside a bus (people not to be blamed, courtesy weather and temperament of bus driver and conductor) that they want to explode out of it first thing their stop arrives. Its like sperms fighting and finally the king sperm emerges first. Yeah, sperms have random kinetic motion, not in a queue. Jumbili told me he did not feel welcome back here as back in US he had discipline and humanity as the basic qualifications of any person.. Huh, what to say guys?

Scene 2: Chennai bus again
Now here I was bestowed the job of preventing a fist fight between Jumbili and the bus conductor. At a signal , Jumbili asked the driver to switch off his engine for the 120 second long wait. For which he said that diesel is Govt’s money not his. He started giving statistics regarding how his two-minute-engine-on on a continual basis is blasphemous to the environment, financial prospects of India and lots of other above the head concepts. So, the driver rose not-so-gracefully from his seat and rolled up his sleeves. I had to intrude and prevent what could have been a free show and even a bigger hit than 3 Idiots.

Scene 3: Shoe shop, Bangalore
One of the shoe shops said “grab two pay for one” so we tried to do some grabbing and realized anything that we chose was not less than 700 bucks (not branded mind you). Agreed, these are advertising skills or marketing strategies but not all people are so foolish to buy a torn-strap-slipper for a fortune. So Jumbili felt that people are no longer honest to themselves.

Scene 4: Auto man, Bangalore
In Bangalore we have this wonderful meter system unlike Chennai. So the rate is 7 Rs/km. We happened to meet one auto man who said his meter is wrongly calibrated and we should pay him Rs 120 (though the meter cost would have been somewhere around Rs.70 to 80). So Jumbili told him to take Rs 120 but he wanted the meter kept ON to really check the calibration ( A Power Engineer from US definitely cant stand faulty instruments and will go the extent of repairing it, as they feel it is their personal property). So the clever and dexterous auto man switches off his meter at half way through to our home. Jumbili gets irritated and says he wants it on. The.auto man says the battery got discharged and signed a verbal deal with us saying he wont accept a single rupee if his auto does not start working once we reach home. We reached. Meter conked. Auto man stared giving shy smiles. Jumbili said he wont pay. Hell broke loose and finally we gave in, not because 120 Indian rupees meant nothing to him or he wanted peace but because the smell of masala dosa from our home caught him off guard and he wanted to attack it soon.

Then he started all about reckless drivers, lack of lane ethics blah blah blah. But I just said I love my India, however she is and I love my people however they are, as I am no different and very proud.