Living on the edge

As a kid in 1993, I was all ready to go to Powai lake for a school picnic. Except that the bus never turned up. My teacher told us gently that the picnic was cancelled because the bus never showed up. My childish imagination could not fathom why the bus wouldn’t turn up on one of the most exciting days of my life. Excitement was limited to school picnics those days.

I waited in the classroom the whole day, waiting, wondering, hoping that the bus would show up. My mother had packed a few packets of chips and biscuits along with plenty of water and some juice. I sat on the last bench and finished the food, not in the sunny environs of Powai lake but in the sombre classroom.

There is something eerie about waiting the way I waited that day. I was waiting for the bus. My teachers were waiting for my parents to come take me home. People wait for different reasons.

It was 10.30 am. All the kids went home 4 hours early. Yet, I kept waiting because no one came to pick me up from school. My parents were in office. Mom in Churchgate and dad at the airport. Finally, my aunt came to pick me up at 12.30. I was among the last kids to leave school that day.
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Two days. 25 bomb blasts between two cities. How do you deal with the fact that one of the people around you will enter a train with a bag but get off it sans the bag? Or somebody who just parks a car off a bustling street and walks away from it, as if he never drove it?

Two years ago, I was at a restaurant that (arguably) served the best Gujarati food in my side of the world. It had newly opened and my dad and I went there to try the food. It was the very same day I was supposed to leave for Chennai. Halfway through the meal, I got a call from a friend who told me there had been blasts in Mumbai. They never stopped. There was a series of them and they killed over 200 people in the city. 200 people who left their houses in the morning, full of hope and courage, purpose and ambition, never returned or returned with maimed limbs and dented ambitions.

My mother had gone to office that day and she was not back. She never carries a cell phone so there was no way of reaching her. That day, I remembered a day, 13 years ago in 1993, when I kept waiting for a bus to take me to Powai lake, a bus that never turned up. She managed to reach home at 7 in the evening, two hours before we left for Chennai.

In India, the death of a person is more probable than the fact that he lives.

A Room with a view–II

Hong Kong is a loud and brash city, with huge sign boards announcing the imminent triumph that any activity associated with China invariably assumes. This time, it is the Olympics, slated to begin in August.

The Chinese would never pass up an opportunity even if it means putting up signboards on the way to the Hong Kong airport. Large yellow boards with black writing in boldface.

The city itself is just buildings–tall ones mainly, lit in different ways. If a city has to look beautiful without the small or even sprawling horizontal bungalows that cities in the West have, then the only way that can be done is by lighting them up in different ways.

If you were to enter Hong Kong at night, the sheen of the light will dazzle you. The roads are mostly empty but in any case, it does not seem like the roads are made for traffic jams. They are made for fast moving consumer vehicles for that is exactly what the city is–a shoppers’ paradise.

I will never forget the view of the Victoria harbour from my room on the 26th floor of the hotel where we were put up. It was not the lights but the sheer drop that fascinated me. It would have been fun to just drop, letting gravity take over, for once.

It was raining in Hong Kong and it continued to rain the entire time I was there. The most powerful tycoon who is also the richest man in Hong Kong is Li-Ka-Shing who was in the news recently after he sold off his stake in Hutch Telecom to the British giant, Vodafone. Shing owns a flourishing property business, a supermarket chain and several other businesses in Hong Kong alone.

I had been to Hong Kong 15 years ago, as a kid but I could remember nothing from that visit. Back then, it was still a British colony though natives told me that not much had changed since it was given back to the Chinese. My dad had given me a $ 5 HK bill from back then, which I still had and I used it at one of the duty free shops while on the way back.

I came away, minus one red sweater and the box of Ginseng chocolates that I had picked up in Seoul earlier and wishing for 2 more days.

A room with a view-I

My first memory of Seoul will always be petite Korean lady asking me to fill the medical form. Everyone else that I had gone with had already gone ahead and I was stuck between the Korean lady, who kept saying,” this. Fill.” I filled it out somehow and she accepted it, gleefully–a duty well-done.

After we came out of the gigantic Incheon Airport ( Incheon is some distance away from the main city. It took us about an hour to reach the main city), we were met by a lady called Mrs Yogi park. Yogi is a Korean who married an Indian, whom she met when she was in Japan to study Japanese. It must be an interesting marriage, I remember thinking. The first few years would have been full of Do this. No. Free. Take. Monosyllables.

Today Yogi can cook theplas, speak Gujarati and understand three other Indian languages.

As we went to the hotel, we could see Korea and its indigeous products–the Samsungs, Daewoos, the Hyundais and the Kias. Landing a job at one of these is like landing a job with our very own Infosys Technologies. Secure and comfortable.

The Koreans work hard. They eat breakfast at 6.30, a time when several Indians including this writer are still asleep. They get to work by 8 and they work late. The women are pretty and stylish as they hurry to their workplaces. They look neat, scarves, hair, polished shoes and make up, (firmly) in place. And oh yes, the mobile phones. Samsungs, Anycell, LGs.

North Korea is not very far away from Seoul. Only about 60 km and they have the de-militarised zone (DMZ) where people can go for a fee.

Ginseng is seaweed. You will find places like Namdaemun market (where we went but also other places) that sell chocolates made of sea weed. The market is open all night and my friend and I had gone there to haggle for umbrellas. Somebody had told me to get umbrellas and I found interesting ones, too. But it didn’t go beyond..this, cost, how much? less, no, fixed, no less. And then the grim Korean man sat down and refused to budge even though there was no one else in the shop. Somebody told me later that Seoul was among the top five in the list of most expensive cities in the world.

We stayed at the Westin Chosun, which was at the very least swanky. The very day we reached there, we visited the Namsan Tower, a television tower like tower that is very tall (uh. It’s a tower. Looks sheepish). I remember that place because I had to walk barefoot there–the sole of my shoes decided that Korea was too exciting a place so it went off on its own. Consequently, I was left with no shoes in a city with wet roads. I pretended I was a Jain and walked with sheer disbelief on my face over all those well-shod people.

For a lot of people, visiting a new country means hopping from one shop to the other, going through the same tedious spiel of words that I went through while in the search for an umbrella. More often than not, it is the women who belong to that breed.

We were supposed to go to a huge department store called Lotte Mart but ended up going someplace else which was equally huge and sold everything from electric bicycles to delicate pearls. That’s when I got the chance to taste sushi, Korean pastry and something which Koreans gift each other on birthdays (I forget the name.) I remember finishing all the food at 1.30 am as I sat in my hotel room that night. I rubbed my hands in glee and then went off to sleep, like a happy, purring cat in the room with the splendid view.