I was speaking to my friend Manju the other day, and she was asking about my new life in a new city. She asked me to blog about my thoughts on Ernakulam. Being one of the few people I have found more fanatical than me about my hometown, Trivandrum, her demand was that I do some match fixing and say that Trivandrum is way better :) . Well I’ll try my best to be neutral, so here it goes.. My thoughts on Ernakulam compared with the other cities I have stayed in for some length.

What I like most about the city is that it is really close to the sea. That scores a big plus in my books. There are plenty of places were you can stroll along the sea-shore or enjoy the sea breeze or just sit there – I can watch the sea for endless eternity. These are things I really missed in Bangalore and Plochingen. This doesn’t score a point above Trivandrum though – plenty of places there too to do the same things.

Plus there are plenty of shopping areas around here. That’s not high on my list of priorities, but it does help. It presents itself as a very bubbly city, which is great for me. It may not be a Bangalore in this respect, but definitely good enough. Both Trivandrum and Plochingen are laid back cities, which also works, but at this point of my life.. hmm.. I prefer ‘bubbly’ over ‘laid-back’ :).

What I really don’t like is the traffic here. Horrible. I survived Bangalore and I thought that was worst I would see. Ernakulam beats all that – with 1/5th of the vehicles of Bangalore – now that’s an achievement! And the driving culture here is even worse. I don’t think I’ve seen it this bad in any other place I’ve been to. I am now even more scared crossing roads – nobody ever stops here!

Another bad thing is that I find a lot of people here imitating cosmopolitanism (if there’s a word like that); despite the city not really being what you would describe as cosmopolitan. It all ends up looking very artificial. I don’t know – KFC-s, Baristas and multiplexes seem like a mismatch here. Maybe that’s just a feeling that’ll go away.

Overall I think the city will grow on me, just like the other new places did. It’s just as good as the other places I’ve stayed in. What makes a city unforgettable are the number of friends you have there and I had a few in all those special places I’ve stayed in before. I guess I’ve already started that process here. So maybe, it’s just a matter of time, before I fall in love with this place too!.

Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods – The Strange Rise of Modern India, is a brutally neutral perspective about India from an outsider’s point of view. It is not another fanboy account of India and its spirituality, neither does it make a punching bag out of my country. But despite my inner self telling me that most of what he said was true, the patriot (fanboy if you may) in me wanted to refuse to believe some of the stuff in the book. I was half way through the book as my train pulled into Trivandrum Central…

It had rained non-stop for 4 hours; that was ample time for the entire area around the railway station to get flooded, again. There wasn’t a way out with water everywhere. My dad had come to pick me, but there was no way that he could drive up to the station, unless our Maruthi could instantly transform itself into a hovercraft. So he parked up 1 km away on higher ground and waited. I was getting restless so I decided to wade through the water and walk to the place. So laptop on one hand and a heavy bag of clothes in the other, I started the painful journey. I soon realized that it was such a stupid thing to do, but by then I had already passed the point of no-return. One broken slab somewhere, and I would have atleast fractured a leg. Thankfully nothing happened and I found our car after half an hour of swimming in the city center.

Driving back, I now had no doubt about what Mr. Luce had said about our government. It really is a mystery how our country runs. The ‘water’ problem of Thampanoor (the railway station and surrounding areas) is legendary. I’ve been hearing about this since I learnt to put 2 and 2 together. With all this technology around and Trivandrum even trying to be twinned up with Barcelona (ha!) its just amazing that our administration is not able to solve this pre-historic problem. I have read about many a project trying to fix this problem, spending millions of rupees, but to what end? 15 minutes of rain (no, I am not exaggerating) and Thampanoor becomes a lake.

I’ve always been of the opinion that its not right to keep blaming the system for every flaw and doing nothing ourselves as citizens. But there are somethings that the system has to work out by itself. This is just a prime example. It’s so sad, so much public money went to the drain (pun intended) for no use. Maybe its true, as Luce implies and as one of my colleagues quipped, if the problem is solved, how will the government ‘servants’ fill their pockets? No more flooding = no more projects = no more money to steal.

For the love of my city, someone with power please do something. I feel powerless, except to shout. :(

A few years ago, I had an email conversation with my friends regarding life in Bangalore. Most were of the opinion that it was just too trashy and mundane a life and that the main reason for that was the city itself. I had more or less concurred with those thoughts there. But many days and months after, I think I’ve slowly started coming into terms with Bangalore.

I come from a sleepy suburb of the small city of Trivandrum, with all its old world charm. Compared to Bangalore, the hustle-bustle, the traffic and the noise is almost non-existent there. So I was brought up, being used to a bit of peace and quiet. The transition to the metro life of Bangalore was quick, and it wasn’t a very easy one. It was like you had gone fishing beside a serene lake and then suddenly getting kicked into a Metallica concert.

One thing Bangalore gave to me (and a lot of us) is freedom – financially and otherwise. Used and misused it, and in the meanwhile enjoyed it a lot. It gave me new meanings to life and allowed me to see things in other dimensions. I appreciated all that but still it never felt like home. I could never imagine a settled life here. There was always a feeling that I was a stranger in a strange place.

But that was some time ago, and time changes perspectives. I spent last week in my dear own Trivandrum celebrating Onam with my family. It was good, but strangely for the first time really, I started badly missing Bangalore – the congestion, the traffic, the crowds and everything associated with it. That was when the realization came that I had indeed accepted Bangalore as my new home. Bangalore has now become the routine, and Trivandrum the (welcome) aberration. They say home is where the heart is… I guess I have learnt to give some part of my heart to Bangalore… 3 years down the line.

If you know me well, you would have quite easily made out my love for my home-town and how vocal and emotional I can get when it comes to it. Also I recognize the hoards of problems faced by the city. Despite being the political nerve-centre of the most politically active state of the country we never had leaders that have stood up for us. Now I guess we have a chance to change that.

I was elated even when the rumours spread that Shashi Tharoor is contesting from Trivandrum. I am not a big fan of the Congress/UPA policies, but as a Trivandrum-ite we need someone like Dr. Tharoor to lead us to change. It will not be easy for him to coast to a victory despite the credentials he has. But I do hope he pulls through. Trivandrum needs that chance and I hope all Trivandrum-ites think about it and use their vote intelligently. And I think they will do it. After all we did elect the maverick V.K.Krishna Menon when he stood as an independent candidate way back in the 70s.

One more thing : Whether you are not going to support Tharoor or not, do exercise your power to vote. It is your fundamental duty. If you believe all this is beyond you, you don’t even have the moral right to criticize the “system” as we always do. Do our duty first then think about blaming the netas.

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?