Sin City

Forget about the trucks carrying giant billboards proclaiming "Girls direct to your room in 20 minutes!" on the roads. It's such an ugly thought that it brings last night's dinner right back up.

A few hours spent in Vegas will teach you not to give your heart out to that angelic little face who talks ever so sweetly to you at the casino table. It's only a matter of time before she tries to fix a rate with you.

The free ride that the cabbies offer to the scores of strip-clubs seem as interesting as a trip to the meat factory.

Money is meant to be burnt away for a number of pleasures, but it's just too gross to shell out any cash for a certain few activities. An opinion which seems to be shared by very few in the city of Las Vegas.

It's your first night out in this town and you know that none of the options discussed above are meant for you. Instead you go into the smoky, strobe light streaked interiors of a regular club/disc/lounge (Though a regular club in Vegas terms is really a spectacular club for any other city in the world). It's a vast cavern throbbing with music and psychedelic colours. Taut, shaped to perfection bodies groove in the space all around. You grab a Captain' n 'a Coke from the bar and take a look around. There's a group of girls right next to you and you sense that there's something in the air. Smells like a exquisite woman's perfume.

Within an instant, right in front of you in a lil' white dress is a pretty young blonde inviting you to dance. A quick confirmatory glance tells you that you'd be a raging maniac to take more than a second in making your decision.

"So where're you from?", you ask.

"I come from Oregon. And you?"

"From Bawston!", you say in the worst possible fake Irish accent.

You dance with her, entranced by her nymph like fluidity. A toss of her golden hair, the fleeting gaze of her blue eyes, the occasional smile, the twist' n 'twirl of her skirt all drag you deeper into this sensual paradise. A beauty induced state of hypnosis and wonder produces a rhythm that is impossible to disregard.

You think to yourself that maybe this was the reason why you were so resolutely single and commitment-phobic all your life; it was for these few moments of guiltless bliss. And then she whispers into your ear, "I think you're cute. You really needn't worry so much about touching me!"...

Welcome to Las Vegas. Welcome to Sin City!

The namesakes

For long I took secret pleasure in the fact that my name was uniquely long and rare. Anyone who'd possess the capability to memorize it would definitely remember it for the rest of their lives. In a world tired of Amits, Abhisheks and Rajeshes, a Anuranjan stood alone and unique. The only other Anuranjan I had ever seen was a Anuranjan KT, a member of the JCT Mills hockey team back in 1994-1995. Not exactly my ultimate ideal but at least he was on TV. So there were two Anuranjans, one on TV and one growing up to be on TV. Or at least so I thought.

The first tremor came when I got an invitation to join the "My name Anuranjan"(sic) community in Orkut. I promptly turned it down. I mean what's the point of joining a community with 2-3 people anyway? I go on it to find there are 11 guys by the name that I hold so dear on Orkut alone. Most of them seem to be from Bihar too, barring the Rajasthani who started the community. Never mind then the millions of non-tech savvy Anuranjans around the country. 

The uniqueness of my identity bruised, I turn to Google "ego search" to establish that at least I am the most important Anuranjan around. I type in just my first name, and I have to scroll through 12 pages to get to the first page that even mentions me. And shame of shames, it's not my blog, or my writing contest win that is featured even so deep down the unimportant links list. It's a YouTube video of me making somewhat of an ass of myself playing golf (A momentary lapse of reason from my trip to California). Boo hoo!

Shattered in spirit, I look at all the other Anuranjans who have stolen my limelight. There's a Dr. Anuranjan Bisht, who's a MD in Psychiatry in Nevada somewhere. He must be handling casino crazed clients from Vegas then. There's a Anuranjan Jha, who is/was a Ph.D student and now works in Silicon Laboratories in Austin, Texas. He's the lucky ***tard who got the 'anuranjan@gmail.com' ID. My venomous stares at him then. Then there's a female Anu Ranjan, some kind of socialite in Bombay who's all over the place having celebs 'party' at 'her place' and attending 'Anti Pakistan artist' meets. Yes, I don't know what that extraordinary class of artists means either!

But there's one Anuranjan who seems to be more like my long lost brother from the Mahakumbh. His name is Anuranjan Pegu, and he says that he is a graphic designer. His synopsis of himself is what confirms my blood relations to him. It goes "Anuranjan Pegu - The king of vague". Now that's an interesting one, that is!

Ball economics

Opposite my house in Calcutta is a apartment building and the central passage leading to the stairs in these apartments is bang opposite my garage door. It so happens that the dimensions of this restricted passage are just ideal for playing plastic ball cricket and such a golden arena never lies unused. Kids play their hearts with fluorescent yellow plastic balls, whose garish colour is probably justified by their better visibility in the permanent shade of the passage. A full blooded shot straight down the ground leads to the balls slipping beneath the wire gate at the approach of my garage before clattering right into our garage sneaking below the solid iron gates guarding my brand new Pulsar and my uncle's car. 

This being Central Calcutta, the haunt of mythically super-capable thieves, one lock is never considered enough. There are at least 3 different barriers to unshackle or to key open, so the kids knew with a patient acceptance that the balls that went into our garage stayed there. The balls would be normally be gathered by my cousin and piled up inside a bucket within our garage unwanted and unappreciated. Then on a bright sunny winter morning I decided to play the benevolent Godfather.

I observed from my third floor room on the roof that the set of kids who were the most regular set of players were in action. I went to the garage, opened the garage gate with a grand flourish and walked out with a bucket full of fluorescent yellow balls. The kids abandoned whatever petty argument they were engaged in and congregrated around me, an awestruck glint in their eyes. I turned the bucket upside down and their playing field was a sea of plastic balls. Within seconds, I saw the biggest boys in the group had gathered nearly all the balls, some holding more than 4 while the little ones or the weaker ones gave a long, pained look with their hands empty. I told myself "There you see, that's why capitalism never works! There's always someone overfed and someone underfed." 

In a month's time, my garage bucket was full of plastic balls again. This time I decided on better control. I walked out with a stern expression on my face and told the kids "Listen guys! I don't want to see you fight over these balls again. Take them but ensure that they are split equally." And to my shock, the smallest in the group piped up something to the effect of "These are such old, poor quality balls. We'd rather buy some good new ones!" So came my next lesson in rudimentary economics, "Communism doesn't work either!"

Ho hum, what a conundrum!

My apologies, Las Vegas

I haven't even left for Vegas and here I am eating up my own words from my first post about Vegas. A single website has already told me that Vegas is much bigger than just gambling and strip clubs. I just jotted down 3 awesome car museums cum showrooms to go to. There are super insane roller-coasters or wild rides to get on, so that's another thing that floats my boat. Not to mention the spectacular exhibits/shows over which I am having a tough time making a choice. Plus in the hectic 2 day schedule, I am cramming in a trip to the majestic Grand Canyon too. Boy oh boy, what a weekend is to follow! And my apologies in advance for any misconceptions that I had about the city. It's best to own up right now that I was wrong in my assumptions, yet again!

Procrastination works

31st December 2008: It was afternoon when I left office and a severe snow-storm was lashing Massachusetts. My bus to Boston laboured its way through the storm on RT-24 in the wake of a snow truck and I reached Boston at about 3:30 in the afternoon, an hour and a half longer than I would on a normal day. My non-refundable, non-transferable bus ticket was for a bus at 3:00, so it was as good for nothing. The South Station bus terminal looked like a Indian railway platform for a change as huge queues snaked from the various bus service counters. Hundreds of dreams of spending New Year's at New York hung in balance and the tension was showing. Folks were irritable and the persons at the bus ticket counters maintained a deadpan expression when asked about the next bus out.

I found that the longest line was at the Fung-Wah bus service counter, because it was the cheapest way to get to NYC by far. As for being a cheapskate, I found that I had lots of company. The line stood perfectly still with no indication of any kind of movement. The two Chinese woman at the window were steadfast in their denial of any knowledge whatsoever about the next bus out. They laughed and joked with the persons at the front of the line, but it seemed to be a rather poor attempt at comedy. Their customers apparently weren't getting the drift of the jokes. All around me, I could see and hear calls go out to girlfriends, boyfriends, cousins etc about how irritating this infinite wait was. Angry voices and sharp comments about the nature of the Chinese bus service began  to permeate the air. The two women at the counter were hardly getting any time to laugh as the unrest in front of their window grew. Me, I stood as calm as a Buddha amidst all the hubbub. Neither did I call anybody nor did I even give a thought to questioning someone of relevance. I was too lazy to even participate in the bitching that was gathering momentum around me.

As the minutes turned into hours, the line in front of me dissipated as people grew tired of waiting. Condemned to spend New Year's at Boston they left ruing their gloomy fate and colourfully cursing the snowstorm. When there were about 50 people in front of me a couple of hours ago, now there were only two. Irritated as I was, I wasn't enthused enough to even think of an alternate plan. 

All of a sudden, there was activity in the chambers of power. A few hurried exchanges of words in Chinese later, the guy in front of us actually got something which looked like a boarding pass. My turn at the window came and as I reached for my wallet to shell out for a new ticket. But it seemed that my non-refundable, non-transferable bus ticket for the 3:00 clock bus was now going to get me onto a 6:00 bus out to New York. Shame on you, people who said that the Chinese were stingy souls. I got to be in NYC before midnight.

So was re-inforced my belief that doing nothing is exactly the thing to do. Don't crib, don't question, don't make an attempt of changing what's around: Just stand there like a rock until moss threatens to grow on you. Watch the world fall apart all around you, and in a little while you'll have your way!

A sliver of India

After a monstrously long post, let's try a really short one. I was on the bus from Boston to Taunton calling up my friends to kill time and yapping away in Hindi. Buses are not the most popular means of transport here anyway and as usual the number of my co-passengers numbered in single digits. I wonder how the bus operators make a profit out of running a 56 passenger capacity bus but never getting more than 7-8 odd passengers. Nonetheless not my concern as long as they have the cash to waste.

Sitting right behind me was a typical white Latino dressed in what else but huge baggy pants, oversize jacket, pierced ears, soul patch beard, inverted cap et al. He along with his black pal were right out of a hip-hop video and talked between themselves in the manner you'd expect such a pair too. When I got off at Taunton with the rest of the passengers, this guy casually wished me "Jai Sri Krishna!"

I nearly jumped out of my skin at such an unexpected turn of events. Not only because "Jai Sri Krishna" is an Indian greeting but that it is also a very very typical Gujarati greeting. I had heard it out of our local panwallah's mouth in my childhood and responded in kind. To hear it in the southern part of Massachusetts and that too from a Latino was really off the hook. It turned out that the guy's girlfriend was an Indian and I am guessing a Gujju too! Next time, if I hear the bus driver play Garba music, I shouldn't be too surprised.

Minority

[A humble request to consider the meaning of the whole post as a single write-up, rather than pick particular portions which seen alone may seem notably scathing. I DO NOT want to be mistaken for a VHPite/Bajrang Dali by someone who is so disgusted at half the length of this article that he/she quits reading it.]

Let me state up front that I am no cow-lover. Hindu I am, but not particularly a devout believer in the divinity of the bovine species. I like to have beef once in a while and the only reason I do not eat it regularly is that I like chicken or mutton better. I live in a very overcrowded area of central Calcutta, a very conspicuously Muslim majority area. The lanes are narrow and always busy so any noise or activity on the street is very much like a extra piece of furniture choking the space in the living room. On the streets of my locality, I am very much of the 'minority' group which forces me to feel a insecurity that is accelerated by the visual domination of the 'other'.

Bakri Eid (Eid-ul-Adhaa) is the feast of sacrifice celebrated with great fanfare in my locality and indeed by Muslims around the world. The sacrificial animal for the occasion is ideally a goat ('Bakri') which is a pretty expensive animal for the amount of meat that it provides, so most of the not so well off Muslims in my area prefer to sacrifice a cow which statistically speaking offers much more meat for the rupee. On the days preceding the day of the festival, crowds of Muslims lustily cheer as they herd the cows to be sacrificed down to the house where they'll never see the outside of again. I look at the glee on the children's faces running behind these doomed animals and hope that their happiness is only for the festivities at hand. But at the back of my head, a warning light is flashing. So when their critics say that these people take a special pleasure in killing, they must be not so far off the mark.

I've had a long, bad day at office and I get to go to sleep at 2:00 in the night. At 4 in the morning, the shrill sound of the muezzin's Azaan shatters the peace of dawn and my well-earned sleep. I sit up groggily and grind my teeth at the mechanical requirements of offering namaaz at such an impossible hour and at the nature of people who blindly follow what they've been told is the only way to Allah.

I was in office the day when unanticipated violence of a ridiculous intensity broke out. I watched horrified on my office canteen television as the police lobbed teargas shells right in front of my house and a mob of masked Muslims hurled glass bottles and bricks back at the law enforcers. Buses and cars were set alight and the heart of the city was sent into lockdown mode by marauding rioters. The army had to be called in to pacify the situation that day and I had to stay over at my friend's place in Salt Lake for safety's sake. All for what reason? That Taslima Nasreen, who had once written a supposedly blasphemous book was being allowed to live in Calcutta. A mere critical comment could not justify such a violent reaction especially in a civilized democratic nation. It is one of the important features of modern society that a person is free to speak his mind and cannot be manhandled into subscribing to a particular school of thought. I look at the "Taslima, go back" still spray-painted on the wall opposite my front gate and seethe in anger at the failure of the Indian state to provide this most basic of human rights. No God or religion should be taken so seriously as to warrant such wanton savagery.

A gang of young guys wait every evening on motorcycles at the traffic lights where my house's lane intersects the Lower Circular road. Any girl who gets off at the bus stop near the lights is subject to their less-than-wholesome comments and in worse cases, especially if she is dressed too 'smartly', she also gets the unwanted escort of a couple of guys trailing her on a bike all the way to her house. I clench my fists reminding myself each time that this need not be my fight, but if it were one of my cousins coming down the lane to pay us a visit, I can't really guarantee that I'd hold back. I curse under my breath thinking that while the guys dress in the most modern of fashions, the girls aren't allowed to venture beyond the 'burqa' and those who do are considered to be "asking for it".

It's Friday and the roads are jammed from people reading their 'namaaz' on the already cramped roads of central Calcutta. I thought practice of religion should be confined to a personal domain such that it does not inconvenience others. Apparently not! No one it seems would dare to tell them otherwise as it would serve as an incitement for 'volatile' situations.

Add to this, the frequent linkage of the word Islamic with the word terrorism in most of the dominant news stories, a sad but unavoidable truth and I start to think that the Muslim baiters of the world must be right when they say "Wherever these people are, they refuse to integrate with their hosts and are nothing but trouble. They have historically been the aggressors and wrong-doers, and it's time someone paid them back. They cannot be trusted as they'd slit the throat of a man as easily they'd of a cow (Remember Daniel Pearl?)." A very strong case indeed for the hawkish right wingers be they Christians or Hindus.

Yes, I do have strong reservations against what at least some hardened interpretations of Islam preach and certain unjustifiable privileges extended to them as per every party's vote-bank retention policies. But for a quick reality check, I run through a quick-list of some Muslims that I've personally known.

Beginning with the guy from whom I used to regularly buy chicken from back in Gujarat. It was his job to slaughter a chicken and I hold no grudges against him for not weeping copious tears over every fowl that he 'murdered'. That'd have been a very embarassing situation indeed and would've brought an abrupt end to all the chicken delicacies made by my mom for which I'd easily take a life. We engaged in idle talk while the meat was being diced and packed. We talked mostly about cricket and a common friend that we had. It wasn't ever the pally-pal kind of talk between us but I'd bet my life on the fact that the fact that killing chickens for a living wasn't making him any more violent or less violent than I was.

I know of many Hindus who'd gladly eat beef and haven't seen the inside of a temple for ages (Yours truly amongst the guilty party), but on the other hand I don't know any Muslim who'd eat pork or miss his Friday namaaz. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I treat my religion with a casual disregard so does it mean that anyone who pays attention to the minutiae of his religion is a slavering, intolerant fundamentalist. Actually, it reeks of intolerance on my part to make fun of someone's deep albeit rehearsed faith. Another popular bone of contention is that many temples play the "Allah tero naam" bhajan of Gandhiji, but there is no mosque that does anything remotely Hindu in nature. I say it is a matter of pride for us that we are agreeable to mentioning another God's name in our premises and it is a shining example for other religions to follow in.

To touch another fear being perpetuated by the right that Islam is one all powerful wave that is going to root every other culture/religion out of existence. I was on a train from Calcutta to Bharuch, and my co-passenger was a young Muslim of about my age. He spent the entire journey lamenting his inability to convince the parents of his girlfriend back in Calcutta to give him their daughter's hand in marriage. It seems that his girlfriend was from the Bohra community, a very progressive group within the Muslim community in all matters except about marriage outside the Bohra community! Another girl was a co-passenger incidentally a Bohra Muslim herself explained to me how Bohras were different from Sheikhs and how X community was different from Y etc. The Islamic green is hardly the uniform green that is seen on the Pakistani flag. Islam has its own infinite set of rules, their interpretations/implementations, reforms and acceptance/rejection of those reforms just like any other of the great religions of the world.

Do I really believe that the shopkeeper in my lane who dreams of educating his son to be an engineer really wants to stab me in the back because I am not a Muslim? Does the fact that Mohammad Ghazni destroyed the Somnath Temple centuries ago help give me pleasure when I see a very old mosque is taken down in the name of my religion and of the violence that followed (from both stupid, short-tempered sides)? That was such a long time ago when the world was so unlike anything which we see today. Don't we already carry enough grudges of the recent past to stop thinking of something which happened 700 years ago? Can it really be true that all the Muslim classmates and childhood friends that I have had who were as normal as any other person that I have known, were exceptions to the iron-clad rule that Muslims are irreconcilably different from the rest of us?

Eve-teasing is a cultural phenomenon born out of thousand of years of animal like evolution before the modern age of mankind, so ascribing it to a particular philosophy is nonsensical. I've studied in the north of India and I am convinced that religion or attire of the victim has almost nothing to do with a roadside Romeo's behaviour. Mob violence or general unlawfulness comes from a complicated combination of socio-economic causes and trying to blame it all on a theology is extremely short-sighted. A lack of opportunity to suitably engage themselves in meaningful tasks leads to the brief spike of violent madness that was witnessed in Calcutta that day. The problem has a lot in common with Maoism, Nazism and the million other violent ideologies that raise their ugly head once in a while. There has to be a complicated solution to this complicated problem, but the world is still desperately in search for it. If there was any quick-fix solution to avoid the misleading of youth by use of fabricated 'facts', it's value as a gift would be much much higher than a more conventional gift to the world like say a cure for cancer. Because hatred and mistrust is much more corrosive than cancer, and it is the easiest of diseases to spread.

The real point of the whole discussion is the total lack of trust between any two parties. Whenever there is a significant number of one school of thought/race, there is this insatiable friction. There is always a minority oppressed or threatening depending on which side of the fence you are. The inability to blend or the unwillingness to blend is an accusation being bandied around by every two-bit hate mongerer in the world. The loonier Muslims think that the 'kafirs' of the world are out to get them and the only way out is to raise the grand flag of their retrograde version of Islam around the world. The loonier whites of the world think that the white race is the master race of the world and all others are but designated slaves (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/). The communist revolutions around the world think that the only way to equality and justice is through the barrel of a gun. Our very own Hindu right wingers (http://hinduunity.com/bajrangdal.html) think that Nehru and Indira Gandhi were closet Muslims and that German/European scientists stole all the secrets of ancient Hindu science to jump ahead in the industrial revolution. It's time for the Hindu revolution it seems! Hitler is worshipped as the greatest human being EVER by far more people than you'd believe (http://www.adolfthegreat.com/). And if you feel that only Allah is the one God who is getting vehemently preached, please take a look at a few sites in the name of Jesus Christ (http://www.jesuschrist.com/). I have been trawling the nether regions of the world wide web of information and the bitterness spewing out of random little pages has left me no option but to rant against it on my blog.

I wish I could put all these loonies in one giant loony bin to fight themselves to the death leaving the rest of the world in peace. But the sad thing is that they are not really seperate from the rest of us. They are observing pretty much the same things that the rest of the world is observing but adapting them to their perverted point of view. They play upon a very natural fear amongst us all of being taken over or annihilated, a remnant of our animal past, thereby many a time earning our tacit support. We seem to missing the point that we have long drawn past the stage of "Kill or be killed!". Yes, it was the maxim that has brought us thus far, but it cannot apply so rigidly any longer. How about giving "Live and let live" a whiff of a chance?