I along with a lot of fellow Indians were shocked and disgusted at what happened (rather is happening) in Australia to Indian students. It was indeed an outrageous incident. And the Indian media was ready to jump in and go ahead with an all-out attack on the Aussies. That was reasonably expected behaviour considering the trigger-happy nature of our media and their undying thirst to proclaim – “Your channel brought this to you first”.

Now while this is happening; I wonder how many of us looked in the mirror and pondered how racist we too are. How comfortable are we with people from other countries living amongst us? Let alone that; how comfortable are we to have people from other states living amongst us? The honest answers would be in different shades of gray. But as I see it; in the overall picture every one of us has some racism inside. As we put pressure on the Australians to protect our citizens; it would also be good to think about how we can make ourselves better. After all ‘Adhiti devo bhava’ shouldn’t be limited to tourism department ads.

I read a comment in one Aussie newspaper the other day that summarizes my thoughts pretty well – ‘Every country in the world is racist, but most are experts in acting that they are not. The best we can do is to improve our act.’

Update: Read Jug Suraiya’s post too. Totally agree to what he’s said.

I rarely travel by train, mostly because of the difficulty in getting the tickets, the inconvenient timings and the thought of going to Bangalore railway station in rush hour traffic. But apart from this, it is probably the most comfortable cost efficient way to travel to Trivandrum. Especially ever since they (re)started charging big bucks for flights.

The beauty of a train journey is that you observe life around you. In a bus its more like, sticking an iPod in your ear, wondering why you never get the seat next to a girl, praying that the driver stops soon rather than testing your bladder control. Don’t know why, but the whole set-up for socializing is missing in a bus journey. Train is different. You seem to feel more comfortable to strike a conversation and you get to know a lot about your co-travellers, even without a word being uttered.

On this Onam trip to Trivandrum from Bangalore, I had this very interesting but typical gang as my fellow passengers. Passenger A, was the typical mallu hero. He comes from this small town near Trivandrum, now making it big in a big-shot company in Bangalore. He likes to tell his tales, his tales of glory especially when there is a girl next to him (Aw! Sounds eeriely similar to me :D ). Very quickly he takes on the protector role of Ms. Passenger B. For a moment Ranjith (who was travelling with me) and I, thought both of them had come together, then thought maybe they were college mates, then maybe old friends, then as their conversations progressed came to know that they had first laid eyes on each other on this very train. Passenger B was smart too. She made good use of the situation. In no time, poor Mr. A was running around getting water bottles, pushing heavy luggage, ordering food etc. etc. And then they started talking about Bangalore traffic and why you don’t get train tickets and yeda yeda. So attention had to shift.

There is always one pretty girl on the train who seems to be not concerned about the world around her. We had our own Passenger C to play that role. As soon as she came and sat, she pulled out a book and started reading it with vigour as if the fate of the world hangs on whether she completes the book in time or not. The other people in the compartment are unimportant subjects when it comes to our lady, but at the same I’m pretty sure she’s well aware that the glances of all the males in the compartment tend to converge on her. At least I’m sure about my case, since she caught my glance a couple of times hehe. Alas, the queen went to her hive too soon and in the morning as I woke up from my middle berth the lady was already out. :(

Then there was Passenger D and Passenger E. Mr. D is a perfect artist interested in watching classical French films (without subtitles by the way) and is also intelligent enough not to waste a single rupee as he knows how to use torrents. Mr. E doesn’t seem to be interested, but definitely now has great knowledge of the technology behind torrents, 70mm movies and why Heath Ledger doesn’t deserve an Oscar and some obscure French guy does.

Mr. F is an ‘almost’ fresh graduate out from an engineering college in Kerala. The first people he talks to are us and we start the regular flow of questions -

and in no time it is proven that I know all his friends and he knows all mine!

Then there were two guys absolutely bored. They gossip about old college mates, discuss world matters, ponder about the future of software engineering, wonder whether Chrome can beat Firefox.. more or less putting on a show that they know what they are talking about and at the same time ensuring that others (specially the pretty girl) are noticing them. But then all of a sudden, all topics come to an end. Nothing more to do, they start to observe the people around them. And as they make fun of others, and while one is planning on how to structure his next blog on these observations, they come to know… all these things they told about everyone else, every single one of the traits they can find in either themselves or their close friends. ‘They’ are ‘us’. God sure seems to have used the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V technique a lot when he was programming our genes. Good one my Lord! A true microcosm of people I know, didn’t I say trains were cool?

I saw this list of 100 things one must do before he dies, posted by my room mate in his blog. I remember creating a list like this when I was in school and saved in an email. So I went searching around and to my surprise I managed to actually find it. The list was much smaller than I thought, it had just 23 items. So here’s my ‘bucket list’, inspired by that incomplete list and also his post.

The list of 50 things I need to do before I die, in no particular order…

1. Fly in an airplane
2. Fly an airplane
3. Be the CEO of a company
4. Watch a Formula one race live
5. Drive in the autobahn at over 200 kmph
6. Get a job, build a house, get married
7. Drive a Mercedes
8. Go to Norway
9. Direct and edit a film on my friends.
10. Visit the Taj Mahal
11. Build and maintain a website
12. Take an MS
13. Say ‘I love you’ with all my heart!
14. Learn to whistle any song
15. Own a SUV
16. Go skydiving and parasailing
17. Donate to charity regularly
18. A candle light dinner with a girl I know
19. Cook for my friends
20. Walk in alone into a room full of strangers and be comfortable.
21. Watch all movies in the Imdb Top 250
22. Find a way to say a big ‘Thank You’ to my parents
23. Gift my mom a Saree she’ll like
24. Program something that is useful and give it away for free.
25. Win a prize in a lucky draw
26. Learn a foreign language and speak it fluently.
27. Learn how to say ‘no’
28. Exercise regularly
29. Publish a book
30. Do a cross country drive across India
31. Be responsible and mature :)
32. See Paris from the Eiffel Tower
33. Hold snow in my hands
34. Go to the moon
35. Capture a beautiful spontaneous moment on camera
36. Buy a digital camera
37. Appear on TV
38. Get my caricature done
39. Play in the rain, like a kid without worries
40. Shave off my moustache and keep it like that for at least a month
41. Visit Venice and Rome
42. Make myself believe programmers are cool! :)
43. Ride a roller coaster without holding the handle.
44. Learn to accept without doubt that not everybody thinks I am nice!
45. Learn how to talk on the phone, when I’m in a crowd.
46. Follow my heart
47. Be a vegetarian for a year
48. Drink beer at the Oktoberfest
49. Visit Australia and New Zealand
50. Make my own bucket list

No marks for guessing that the items crossed off are already done! :D

Around five months back I met one of my old friends after a long while. Friends as in, we were what you could call “best buddies” right from kindergarten till high school. After that we went our different ways, didn’t stay too much in touch and had met him just once or twice in the past 6 years before the above encounter. Well, he has this habit of not being in touch for a long time, precisely in intervals of six months according to him, and then pop out of nowhere. Seeing someone you knew pretty well, after a long time lets you feel all the striking changes that has happened to her/him. And I could see a lot of drastic changes in him, physically and mentally.

Well this came up during that long conversation over coffee that day. He had this notion that when you get away from people who know you well, you change much more than what you want yourself to change. And this guy was doing law school in Calcutta, far away from people who knew him too much. And boy did he change! Anyway I didn’t give it too much thought, as it was just an obvious thing. But now I was just thinking about this. It’s so true the other way round too. If too many people are around you who know you too much, its difficult to change, even if you badly want to. Admitted, I have changed a lot from those days in school, but that is just the natural change with age and experience. Nothing has radically changed with me, and as he put it I am that same old Loyolite he said bye to 6 years back, just that my mustache got thicker.

So many things depend on people around us, how we want them to perceive us. May not be true with everyone, but I think this is the case with every common Joe around us. Well I have been fortunate or unfortunate (depending on how I want to see myself everyday I look into the mirror ;) ) that I have been surrounded by people whom I know well wherever I have been. Even in college there were a bunch of guys who were my schoolmates, who brushed off their knowledge about me to my other peers. You sort of get into a fixed “wire-frame” after that. You feel weird yourself, when you try something different, behave someway different because people expect you to fit into that wire-frame. And when pieces don’t fit in, it tends to be “Why is he doing that?” which translates to “Why am I doing this?”. I don’t know, I have been experiencing this phenomenon forever. Let’s see, even after I took up my job, the two people who sit right next to me are my college mates. They in turn have brushed off some info about me, involuntarily to my colleagues. And again the “wire-frame” is in place. Then I went on to live for a while in Germany, there too were more than a couple of colleagues, who were really much more than colleagues to me, to fix that wire-frame on me.

Not that everything depends on what others think of you, but the effort needed to make a change in this scenario is much much more. And also not that I hate being surrounded by people who I am close to me. Well yeah, I take back the word “unfortunate” that I said previously. I feel I am really lucky that there are these people who help me cushion my transitions. But on the other hand, in my friend’s case, having nobody around let him do a total restart, let him do things differently, because nobody cared a damn and because nobody knew what he was before. But it’s like I am living up to the wire-frame, unable to wiggle out of it. It’s like the frame is moulding me.

Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s bad, only time can tell.