About a week ago when I
started off with this book, there was a cyclonic depression that developed in
the Bay of Bengal. The city of Chennai, about 300 miles from where we live has had an unprecedented downpour and the city is flooded. The city’s lakes have overflown, storm water drains have choked and the sewage
drains are overflowing, causing the otherwise drought ridden city’s urban infrastructure to crumble down. The Indian Air force
has been summoned to ensure that the casualties are reduced and the city
survives the deluge.
Relatively speaking Bangalore,
experiences its seasons very mildly.
Situated, probably equidistant, from the bay of Bengal and the Arabian
sea and elevated at about 360 feet from sea level, the weather here is just
beautiful.
We are a country blessed
with abundant sunlight and we do not appreciate a sunny day like many other
‘English’ speaking countries do. The sun, for us, is always scorching hot and makes
us tan. In our country where 'fair and
lovely' skin whitening cream sells like hot cakes tanning is known to cause
serious self esteem issues.
Ah … here I digress.
I was telling you how Bangalore feels beautiful
at this time. It is getting a little nippy, but then a sweater and a monkey cap
is all we need to keep ourselves warm.
Small talk about the
weather is just so un-bangalorean. Because we know, not too many cities in our
country are blessed with weather like ours for most time of the year. So we would rather count our blessings and
pity the rather unfortunate ones.
Our small talk is usually
about traffic. It is rather always about
the traffic. Because the infrastructure for our public transport system is
still being built, and money is so abundant with the multinational companies who
have set up shops in our city that as a part of our benefits package we get
chauffeur driven cars to come to work. It
is beside the point that about 90% of those who come by these chauffeur driven
cars earn nothing more than the chauffeur himself does, if not much lesser. But what they
do is so crucial to the MNC’s day to day running that they would much rather
ensure they are at work come-what-may and therefore send them a chauffeur
driven car to get to work on time.
Our cabs are no
limousines. Most of them are second hand
or third hand hand-me downs that have been dumped
because they are no more road-worthy.
But then our roads are not any more worthier. With a little under the table money at the RTO ( Road traffic office or something like that ... ) you can easily get a road-worthiness certificate.
Our chauffeurs are nothing
like the Jeeves in P G Wodehouse novels. Or was he a valet or a butler ...
anyway chauffeur, valet, butler… does not matter as long as you get the drift.
As I was saying our
drivers , chauffeurs … they are betel
leaf chewing, beedi smoking, toddy
drinking ( mostly off –duty) macho men from
the most poverty stricken rural parts of the country. When on duty these frustrated souls sometimes swear, spit and hit ( other vehicles, cows
or people ) inorder to get their indispensable passengers to the work place on time. If they get late by
a few minutes, their salaries are proportionately cut.
When that happens at a large scale, then the rural Indian
economy suffers. And that is not at all good. This actually is the fundamental theory behind the urban traffic chaos.
Our public transport
system is still being built and in some places being rebuilt. So then it is no
surprise that our roads have to carry the load of cars and vans who ferry their very crucial passengers to their work place.
When incessant rains lash over
the bay of Bengal or the Arabian sea we do experience our showers. Sometimes
light, sometimes heavy. But irrespective of whether they are light
or heavy, our fragile roads built with fragile materials bear the brunt.
Our roads are currently in
such a state that if you were a damn good photographer you could take close-up shots of our potholes and they could
pass off as the arial view of the grand canyon shot from a
helicopter.
I call up my cousin in
Chennai to check if all is well, what with all these floods and water logging. Her's is a very demanding job. She works for
one such company where she maintains the daily feed and updates from the websites for a client
who is America's leading cosmetics brand. Their online portal has recently been launched. They recently published a press release that said they 'plan to penetrate aggressively into
the Asian markets with a focus to capture 6-8% of the competitor's marketshare by the end of this year'.
Which essentially means that atleast 6-8% of housewives from Kanpur to Kualalampur, Behrampur to Beijing and Tiruchy to Thailand will soon be made to realize it is too downmarket to use anything from freshly ground turmeric powder to raw papaya fruit peels picked from their
backyard for a facial scrub and would soon go on to buy the latest 'acai berry
facial pack with anti-aging properties' made from hand picked berries grown
in the amazon rain forests. Atleast that is
what the Television ad that repeatedly blares during the commercial breaks between the afternoon soap operas
has been trying to convince them. If the cost seems to make them or their husbands have second thoughts, then it has reassured them that afterall they are ‘really worth it’.
My cousin from Chennai whose daily job it is to track their sales and ensure technical support for their portal says that the
BCP ( business continuity plan) has been invoked through a world wide call tree yesterday and her counterpart in Manila will be taking charge tommorrow. For someone whose Monday blues start normally from Friday evenings, she is ecstatic about this unexpected holiday.
It is on days like these that
we, Bangaloreans wish we had rains like our coastal cousins.
On Sunday evening when we, Bangaloreans are going through their our monday blues, In Chennai, they are worshipping their weatherman. He appears on television channels in his safari suit with a long stick in his hand pointing to a black and white satellite picture showing the storm clouds looming over the Bay of Bengal and grimly announces that they would cross the city in the next 24-48 hours. Yippee ...take your own sweet time, you hear the chennaite screaming with joy.
When it is monday morning the
schools will be closed, the colleges will have postponed their exams indefinitely and
the IT/ BPO companies that are so essential for the survival of the US economy will have invoked their business continuity plan.
Invoking BCP means the minions in other alternate
locations like Pune, Poland or Philippines are doing a 16 hour work day and picking up
the workload so that the likes of our Cosmetics giant who contributes to the health of US economy feels none of the effects of the deluge
caused by the depression in the bay of Bengal that has brought one of its
offshore location’s daily grind to a complete standstill.
Those working 16 hour days in Pune, Poland or Phillippines will hardly complain. They know Chennai will generously reciprocate the next time when there is a shoot out in Pune or a typhoon in Philippines.
Things like that happen all the time in third world countries.
Here I shall pause as I
need to pick up my cup of ginger tea and onion bajji that may soon get cold, given the weather.
And then I will get a little serious and write the
book review of Hanya Yaganihara’s grim book 'A
little life' that was in the booker shortlist for 2015 which I finished just
this afternoon.
They grey overcast sky,
the incessant drizzle and the depression
provided the perfect backdrop for the novel. I could not have chosen a better time to read / listen to the book.
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