Lessons learnt

Some memories just cotton onto the brain for some inexplicable reason and no matter what new information replaces old information from then on, they just cling on. Old as they are, they must have found some corner of the brain where there is no substitution of cells, call it a kind of old age home for memory cells if you will. Right there is a little event that seems to have guided my life from then on.

This happened way back in time, back when we had only Doordarshan, the state run TV channel on air. News was something which my parents watched without fail and we kids would sit along hardly making able to make anything of the weighty issues and incidents being discussed on screen. The main news would be followed by the Parliament News which was an even dryer and less interesting news segment to us kids but I'd stick around just until the initial video montage of pictures taken outside the Parliament House was over. I liked to see the pictures of the Parliament house and the statues of the famous leaders that flashed through with the Parliament News music piece playing in the background. The news reader favourite lines seemed to be something about a zero hour (an interesting name for an hour to my curious young mind) and about how the House had to be adjourned by the Honourable Speaker after opposition parties stormed the well of the House (again I innocently wondered what a well was doing in the middle of the house, didn't they have taps or something). 

Anyway, getting back to the news snippet that I set out to discuss in the first place which came up in the main news. The news reader told me in his deep baritone that Kumar Sanu, the famous playback singer from Bollywood had donated some crores to Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. This after a long time was a piece of news that was digestible to my infantile intelligence (at least back then, I was actually an infant). So I piped up "Out of so many crores of rupees, I wish he had given us just one crore!"

My parents seldom in agreement about any single thing on earth looked at me and went ahead in unison "Why? Why would we need one crore?" I didn't speak further during the news program but pondered over the question put to me by my parents. Sure, we could use one crore. There were all these video-games and comic books that were waiting to be bought, and then there were the radio-controlled cars from America that I so coveted. A bigger house wouldn't hurt and nor would a full cricket kit to last through the long summer evenings. At least we wouldn't have to pretend that the guy who brought the stumps was not out when he had clearly nicked the ball. I could very well take his pampered place in the playground hierarchy. Our refrigerator could be packed with rows of chocolates and ice-creams instead of the occasional treat.

Then again, I thought to myself, "Come on. Really?" 3 of my closest friends had video game systems but they were my best friends long before video games were an attraction for me to go to their house. Our flat was big enough for all of us to live in comfort, had enough walls to scribble on and was just the right size for me to bawl out mom's or dad's name when I took a tumble from the bed & they'd come rushing in. The real fun of comic books was to wait for a chance to come across a new one at a friend's place and then fight over who would get a chance to take it home. Owning them all would take the fizz out of that. The guy who packed up his stumps and went home at his slightest whim was definitely not the most popular guy on field, pampered though he may be and I wasn't actually eager to take his place. Once I had eaten a stomachful of chocolate and ice cream at a friend's birthday party and my stomach had hurt like never before.

My needs and wants have changed a lot since that day long ago in the past, but the lessons I took away haven't. Sure, everybody could use a little more of the money thing, but at what cost. Is it worth stressing yourself out or deviating from what is right for something that you thought was really needed to ensure a comfortable existence and then find that it was not worth the stretch. Yes, there are many things in life worth the stretch but not one of them can be bought with money.

Paradox

We were roaming the Wall Street area of Manhattan during Thanksgiving Weekend 2008 when one of us had the wish to see the site where the WTC towers once stood. We had already been told that there was nothing much to see, but we went anyway. Only a minute's walk from the Trinity Church on Wall Street and we had reached the giant hole in the ground where two 110 storey buildings had once stood. More than 3000 Americans died that fateful morning of September 11th, followed by hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan in the ensuing wars. Hatred and intolerance dug their claws deeper into the flesh of mankind by that single incident, bleeding away the last drops of goodwill that there existed between two different ways of life, all due to the madness of the powers-that-be.

In an open square right next to the boarded and enclosed site where the WTC Memorial is coming up, stood a Peruvian man playing his flute next to his van. He was one of the many street performers that entertain the denizens of Manhattan but he had a performing venue of special importance as people came here to pause and reflect on the pain of the past, instead of just rushing on to the next subway train to Brooklyn or Queens. The sound of the flute surged through the microphone and flowed out of the speakers enveloping the area with a soothing power that only music has. The majesty of the Andes suffused the cramped lanes of Manhattan with an imposing calm totally unbecoming of a city packed with millions of people and the din caused by their daily routines only through the power of his flute.

The real irony however was that this beautiful music was from the land of the Incas, probably the most violent of all ancient civilizations. Human sacrifices, public slaughter of captive enemies and blood thirsty deities were part and parcel of their daily lives. Yet a thousand years since their glory days, the Incas lived on in a crowded square in Manhattan, their music this time a balm to these scarred souls, the latest victims in the never ending story of mindless human violence. 

At journey's end

The city of Detroit itself has nothing much to remind the visitor of its erstwhile status as the car capital of the world. The buildings in downtown Detroit range from really ordinary to shady looking places which are on the verge of collapse, worthy of an industry whose inability to support itself reflects in the upkeep of its buildings. The new GM Renaissance building in its swanky, gaudy glory on the Detroit river waterfront is an even stronger reminder of the days that the manufacturers of Motown wanted to return to but probably never will.

Ford's manufacturing facility at Dearborn, Michigan (known as the Ford Rouge factory) is its oldest functioning plant in operation since 1910 a little south of Detroit. It continues to churn out F-150 trucks, one of the few models whose sales are keeping the company afloat as the other two of the Big Three have already filed for bankruptcy. They have a theatre in there which runs a 15 minute film on the history of the plant. The grainy black and white images in the ultra modern theatre tell the tale of Henry Ford's revolutionary dreams to set up a plant which would churn out that unique contraption called the motorcar at a desirable price and at a speed worthy of keeping up with the soon-to-be insatiable demand for it. The iron ore went into the steel mill and the final car was assembled & ready within 94 minutes on this plant, the first significant use of a moving assembly line. This factory on the banks of the Rouge was where the modern industrial world was born, and given a ride out into the world by the Ford Model T. To this group of sheds in a little town of Michigan, we owe all the technological wonders that inhabit our world today.

I had crossed an important milestone on that day as I sat watching the show in the darkened theatre. When people reach Mecca after an arduous trek through the desert or step into the holy cave of Amarnath after negotiating the deadly mountains on the way, they would've felt a similar kind of awe. For someone who has always harboured a passion for all kinds of motorized transport to the point of obsession and is a fanatic devotee of modern technology, this was the centre of the universe - the magnificent river at its very source.

The forgotten

Being poor, I imagine, is no fun in any country but nothing could be worse than being poor in the USA. In this land of excess, where alongside neat, little houses with perfectly manicured lawns is parked a boat bigger than the house itself not to mention the two motorcycles and 3 cars, being poor must be really hurt like hell. The streets of Manhattan teem with angelic waifs floating away in the trendiest of boutique fashion, but also on the sidewalks sit broken men and women, with tattered clothes and placards begging for food. The same wind which blows astray the strands of hair on the face of the pretty fur-coat clad girls sashaying down New York's shopping districts also seeps its cold fingers past the ineffectual newspaper stuffing that the homeless use in an desperate attempt to sustain their morbid existence. And now and then, when old enough and tired of the pointless exercise, they just lay down and die out on the cold stone pavements or in the meagre shelter of a trash lined alley.  

It's easy to label them as inefficient and lazy in a country where every person had supposedly equal rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happpiness". The homeless, as the desperately poor in the US are euphemistically called, may be all that they are accused of and more, but I find that their condition invokes an unique emotion in me, a mixture of pity and horror. Pity because no human being deserves to be in a condition like this, where they move from shelter to shelter or street to street scrounging for their next meal like street dogs back in India, shivering away the last bits of their miserable lives. Horror because they represent the human spirit in what is its most terrifying broken down manifestation. 

There are a lot of charities though which do the praiseworthy job of finding these people shelters, their children foster homes and give them food so that they don't starve to death. Despite all of that, one thing is chillingly clear. These are people who have dropped completely out of the race to make something of their lives, from whose hearts the last birds of hope have flown away leaving it in a permanently bleak winter. Some of them may have lost out due to their total lack of ability but there are some who are there due to their inability to run fast enough or being unable to muster the will to dust themselves up after one of life's many pushes sent them crashing out of the race. They are the forgotten people, no-hopers who stand aside wheezing and looking on in blank resignation, surviving solely on the wayward scraps that the running hordes toss their way until one day the scraps run out.

CEO insecurities

I have never been much of a brazen careerist. The intricate system of designations, promotions, incentives and performance appraisals designed to reward the best perfomers is of minimal interest to me and bores me to death. Yet when it was announced that my company was planning to change its CEO by the end of this year, it got me thinking.

The post of a CEO is as high as a person starting as a regular employee can get on the basis of merit, right at the top of the corporate ladder. There are MDs and Boards of Directors too, but they are the equivalent of the President in the Indian political system, symbolically important but not directly influential enough as far as executive functions go. The CEO is the most prominently powerful position that anyone could want to be at.

When a person finally gets up there in that rarified air, what would he be thinking? Would he pat himself on the back for making it to the pinnacle of a 4 billion dollar company and feel proud of being master & commander of 1.5 lakh employees or be merely jealous of the CEO of some behemoth like Google which could buy out his company just for the heck of it?  I wonder how important the CEO of a steel rod manufacturer feels when he is face to face with the CEO of a company like Apple whose factor of coolness is at least a million times more than the poor (figuratively speaking not literally) steelman. Or when someone like Richard Branson shows up with the hottest supermodel dangling from his arm on his private jet, while he himself flew in just plain old luxurious but not luxurious enough Business Class on the "Airline of the year" from 2 years ago. On the other end of the spectrum, does Bill Gates wake up everyday wishing that he had less money and fewer anti-trust cases to handle? 

Every CEO must be proud of having made it but surely they must be wondering whether they made it high enough or far enough to be exactly where they want to be. I know this reads like just another vigorously convoluted excuse for not working too hard in office, but it is what it is! 

Adventure comes home

I was in class 11 by the time such an opportunity came about. My dad had been away quite a few times on work-related trips, and my mom too on earlier occasions but they were always scheduled in such a way that one of them was at home. Being the youngest amongst my siblings had this duality of being pampered and overprotected at the same time. My brother was working somewhere in North Gujarat at that point of time and my sister had just joined Architecture school so for the first time I had the TV to myself without having to engage in bitter arguments.

Then my parents had to go away (for reasons I forget) for a couple of days leaving me home alone. You'd think that would have been an easy task but from the thousand and one instructions left behind it looked like they were leaving in the midst of a jungle, not the same set of apartments where we had lived for close to 12 years now. One instruction however was sweet music to my ears. Since I was alone and presumably 'defenseless', I was allowed to have my school friends stay over. So I began to put the phone to good use and began calling up friends by the dozen within minutes of my parents leaving. Their parents however proved harder to convince than I had assumed as far staying over was concerned, probably suspicious of what mayhem putting so many teenagers under one roof would lead to. But for two of my friends, everyone was okayed to spend the day at my place but evening would require them to touch home base. All the same, I still had unlimited TV, cricket and video-gaming privileges and two of my closest friends for company. You can't ask for everything in life!

For the next couple of days, the world was our oyster. We probably ran the TV non-stop for that period of time watching the raunchiest music videos on air without the covertness normally required, hooked up the game console & played until our arms ached, fell back to watching some live sports while flitting in and out of the house for a game of cricket and random scouring of the town streets for eye-candy riding our scooterettes in a manner that assumed that the absence of my parents had rendered us death-proof. Friends dropped by, one after the other cycling through the house as and when they felt the need to escape the stifling nature of their parent afflicted homes. We collectively drooled over the stunning Ashley Judd in "Double Jeopardy" as it played on HBO in the morning and then again on the re-run in the evening. B-4/8 was less of a flat and more of a pleasure palace for that period of time. Sid, Santosh and me were the resident princes while all others were our royal guests. School incidents, juicy rumours of link-ups and graphic descriptions of the attributes of female beauty were the hot topics of the day in this open door discussion forum.

The orderliness and the neatness of the house was the first and expected casualty to this influx of visitors. More disastrously, the hordes of hungry teenage boys had cleaned out the refrigerator disposing of my mom's cooked food which was supposed to see us through 3 days within the first day itself. In Maggi noodles lay our salvation and so it was that we came to live off Maggi and eggs for the remaining days. Food was definitely our secondary concern, a small price to pay for the extraordinary freedom. We did try to fry some bhindi (okra as it also called) for dinner but without an iota of culinary skill in all of our collective bones, we ended up with a gooey mess which we made an unfortunate decision to 'spice' up with red chilli powder. This gustatory disaster was accompanied by a power cut, and I could find only one candle & wished that I had listened more carefully to my mom when she was jabbering away. So it was that on the final night before my parents returned, under the light of a single candle we were crying tears born out of eating what was undoubtedly the greatest torture I have ever subjected my tastebuds to. But we were also full of glee, trying to pin the genius of this experiment on one unfortunate donkey's tail instead of on three.

Every once in a while, I have felt the need to pull away from the regular run-of-the-mill life to feel refreshed. However on the rare occasion having a totally familiar environment all to yourself under unique circumstances has its own very strong merits.

The deerhunter

By then the race was in progress for a few hundred miles starting from the concrete channels of Michigan and onto the open spaces surrounding the equally empty freeways of Ohio.  The I-90 did not seem like a popular highway early in the morning of Monday, Memorial Day. That was a good thing for the 3 participants in this struggle for cross-country supremacy as my small but peppy Korean blade, a silver Kia Rio, a newish Ford Focus in white carrying a Latino family and a lumbering typically blue Ford F-150 truck were eager participants in this game of on road one-upmanship. As it turned out, none of us were destined to win this face-off. It was won by a white Dodge Challenger, that spoilsport of a cop car.

All 3 of us  had slowed as soon as we had seen him on the horizon poking his nose out of a split in the divider but obviously someone had been keeping a tab on us for a while. The cop car just hopped onto the highway right behind me and begin flashing its psychedelic lights sounding that game-ending wail. I pulled over onto the side of the highway muttering under my breath and waited for the inevitable tap on the window. An Ohio highway patrolman in all his livery walked upto my car and then proceeded to give me the most extraordinary reason for a ticket. This incidentally was my first run-in with the law (and hopefully the last) and I sure couldn't have predicted anything on these lines.

Slapping me with a $160 speeding fine, the cop said "Sir, you were doing 80 in a 65 zone. We had to issue a ticket because a lot of deer are being killed by speeding cars in this area."

I was aghast but I couldn't bring myself to ask the one question that I should've put to the cop

"Sir! Do I look like a killer to you?"