Of late I’ve been exposed to a lot of different types of people ranging from the village simpleton to the razor sharp minds from the big cities. Some of them are completely unable to communicate in English, and when faced with anything that seems to test your comprehension in “English” they are bought to their knees even though they may have understood or rather, comprehended the meaning of something better that supposed “native” English speakers such as me. The same lot are geniuses at math, leaving tortoises like me far behind. There are those who know absolutely everything that’s relevant to any given subject there are those who are disinterested and even those who are uninterested. And then there are those who do not know that Nike is a brand. God, I know that coming from a village of people who work the soil and tend animals you may have never seen high end fashion label stores like Gucci and Versace, but can you not know that Nike is a shoe brand or that TOI is India’s leading English language daily? Ok, I may be a little presumptuous with those two but how in the name of God most high, can you not have heard of at least one English language daily, the Mid Day, the Hindu, the Statesman, one of those? India Today, Outlook, something? Oh please, do you actually live under a rock in that village of yours?
I’m taking the example of one dude here and trying to generalise but when I found out that more that a few were from the villages, it really struck me how bad we really are and how fortunate I am to have lived in a city all my life, being exposed to a more modern lifestyle compared to this lot. I’m not belittling them here, they come from a completely different background with a different set of sensibilities and mannerisms, they have grown up seeing the earth and respecting it for what it’s worth, a completely different experience to my own. For someone like me, the earth is simply a giver of food in one form or another, a repository of material for buildings and furniture and a place to accept all that we’re done with and want to rid ourselves of. As for the village folk, they’d probably be better at reading the signs of decay in a tree, know how to start a fire in the wilderness, know how to use the earth for what it’s worth and they’d think twice before mistreating her.
After a civil exchange of words with a certain KC, I was reminded of what India truly is, a collection of villages, that’s where the real India is, and that India is connected to ours by the largest transporter of men and goods in the world, the behemoth called the Indian Railways. I’ve always looked at those long blue serpents billowing smoke from their fronts, as the means that connected us to “them”, the filthy, uncouth residents of some obscure village with a name that’s too difficult to pronounce. My, how I was wrong! The village folk are not dumb, without them, there’d be no rice in those ceramic jars that I have at home, and there’d be no meat on the table, no fish for the crow to steal.
I’ve lost track of what I was saying and where this post was supposed to go, so I’ll give it a rest now.
Till next time, adios!
PS – There was a debate (Face The Nation) airing live on CNN-IBN about the issue of homosexuality in religion (remember that Jobin and me can come clean now, it’s finally legal!), but alas, I moved to writing this. I tried this channel because of the obvious American connection but sadly, I was let down yet again. There’s none of the refinement that you expect from an international news channel, all you get is the typical Indian attitude of screaming to be heard and discussions with fragments of sense in each sentence but none on the whole.
It’s been a rather tumultuous period of late with having to pick one of either the GRE or the CAT, a masters in a technical discipline or a post graduation in an altogether different stream, and I picked one, which one you’ll find out soon enough but if you know me better, you may already know the answer to that one.
This post is not going to be about that decision, this is about one of the weirdest dreams that I’ve had since college ended. This involved of all people, Simranjit, yes, Simba and that black and gold highlighted motorcycle of his. The sequence of events that led to this strange situation that I’m going to describe seem rather hazy, lost in the fog that mires most of our dreams, but this part, I do remember clearly simply because of it’s sheer shock value. I was riding the man’s bike down the stretch of the Sion-Panvel highway outside the Tata Power station at Mankhurd, which is strange in itself, because I have never been in the front seat of a bike before. Then I reached what looked like the eastern end of a flyover at Belapur but was actually in Vashi, some shortcut to college it would seem. After getting off the curve leading out of the highway, I was confronted by what looked like the end of some dirty hutments, where the toilet blocks normally are. The blocks themselves were painted in that sad cream-beige colour with the cement grilles serving as the only ventilation and source of light for the occupants inside. The stench that emanated from there was needless to say, worthy of covering your nose. So there I was, with the man’s bike and there was no way forward, the road was a dead end. There was a little nullah, a trench dug into the ground to carry liquid to the nearest holding pond or some other means to get it there, that ran on the outside of the toilet block, towards the centre of the huts and in the general direction of college, I presumed. For some reason, I decided to scale the outside of the block to get to college.
Not wanting to leave Simba’s bike there, I had no option but to carry it with me. I know that sounds outrageous and even impossible, a figure like me, carrying a bike with one hand and using the other and two pairs of toes to hold on to a little ledge in the outside wall of a toilet block, all to avoid getting drenched in biological effluents (Slumdog) and to get to college in time. Well this is my dream and I can do what I want to, so I did carry the bike in one hand and it was surprisingly light, the body even gently swaying back and forth from the handlebar as I held it tight. Three steps into the escapade, I got cold feel and had to go back. There, of all the people I could meet, it had to be a man who I took to be Simba’s father as he asked me what I was doing with that bike. On telling him my plight, he offered to help me get across the toilet block and past the slums. We shared the almost non existent weight of the bike and tip toed across the toilets before we came to a clothes line that someone had strung from their hut to one of the windows on the toilets.
That literally became the end of the line for the old man as he moved the full weight of the bike to me and with both hands holding the clothes line, he disappeared into oblivion, into the black interiors of the hut that was the source of the line, leaving me with a bike in one hand, the other holding on to the flaking paint on the outside of a toilet block, perched precariously over a stream of human effluent.
What that means, I cannot fathom as I’m no good at interpreting dreams, I’ve dreamt stranger stuff but just in case you want to know, before dreaming this, I was reading Shantaram and had reached the part where he’s in Afghanistan, crossing some mountain range in pitch darkness on a narrow path on the outside of the mountain, just as I was.
Make what you may of it!
Peace, adios!
Posts
All Comments
