Back to Square One

After living outside India for a considerable time, going on vacations to India are always special and memorable. Usually, I go twice a year to India usually around Holi and Diwali but this year, I went after a complete 1 year. The reason is that in the last years, I used to be always gung-ho and filled with energy and excitement to go to India but after spending 4-5 days, I started feeling like getting out of there. After reaching India, all that energy and excitement evaporates somewhere. Things get complicated, illogical and impractical situations start coming up, people start bothering everywhere, I get restless and impatient in all of this and the weather does not help at all. But on this trip, it was different !

This was I guess the first time that I went with a more open heart and had decided to take everything in good spirits. I promised myself that I will not loose control of myself over how people and things work in India. Instead, I will try to enjoy it and try to blend in. And boy, I did not let myself down. Maybe the reason for all this was that since the beginning of this year, I had been contemplating on moving back to India, for good. Of course, I have no problems here and my life cannot be more easy than it is. But I guess I have started to miss the chaos of life and starting to feel that there is no fun in having no problems in life. That does not mean life is served here for me in a golden platter. I will still have to shove off the snow from the driveway with my hands come winter but all this is nothing as compared to the life in India.

And so coming back to taking the trip more positively, I will pen down a few instances. The first two days were tough and I had to try very hard to not let my blood reach its boiling point. Nothing disturbs me more than seeing a guy driving his car on a road with absolutely no traffic but still not in a particular lane but in the middle of two lanes using the lane division paint as a trail to reach some kind of nirvana as destination. I mean how tough it is to drive in a single lane is always beyond my comprehension. Then there are these over smart guys who will not stop and wait in the rightmost lane to turn right at a traffic crossing on a red light like many others waiting but will take the adjacent lane and will come all the way to the front right at the red light to block the traffic which has to go straight. I guess we Indians living a life with absolutely no real achievement at all get the kicks in performing such stunts just to feel good about ourselves, to get a feeling of achieving something great in life about how smart, tough and intelligent we are. The girlfriends or wives sitting in the car, feeling so proud of their partners in performing acts of such high caliber like one feels after winning a Bharat Ratna. Anyways, it took me 2 days on the road but after that I started taking it positively and taking it like a Wii video game and got myself busy in concentrating on reading the truck shaiyri in traffic jams. I think nothing can beat that. One gem from the back of one the trucks read:

neki kar, joote kha

maine khaye, tu bhi kha

The next thing which tests my patience and anger is seeing people consciously littering on the streets but when you go to their house and throw a toffee wrapper in their drawing room you are being judged as uncivilized. I retained my composure by not preaching anyone but doing my part of picking up others stuff wherever possible. Even in the car sitting with a packet to collect everything which would have gone out the window by my cousins and being ridiculed each time. I still took it positively ignoring their taunts. While waiting for my turn in Q at a jam packed KFC in a mall, one fine lady did not even bothered to wait at the back and by completely ignoring the Q like we were totally invisible, went bang at the front to place her order. I still did not mind and reminded myself of fast forwarding myself from 1950s to 2011. It is even more amusing at a temple, gurudwara or a mosque where people will push you, kick you, break lines to get their shoes back from the shoe collection place but will appear to be absolutely devoted, calm, composed, compassionate when inside praying to God. Sometimes, I totally fail to understand people. I simply enjoyed the total mismatch between the news on TV channels about fake and adulterated khoya and the amount of sweets being sold and bought in the market by the same people who go hawwww and haiiiii after watching the same news. I did not fret about people who came to our house to give Diwali gifts and then gossiping and bitching about the people they are going on the next stop to give the gifts. In fact I tried to enjoy the gossip and in fact spared myself watching shitty soaps on TV to keep me entertained.

I can go on and on giving awesome experiences and the list will never end. BUT, no matter how complicated it is, how impractical and weird it is, how biased and with double standards it is in India but it is still my HOME and that is the bottom line. I can keep living here and keep writing such posts or I can go back to India and take everything like a sport by doing my part and in the process if I can influence even 1-2 people around me to change, I think my decision of going back would be successful. I am sure I am sure there will be like minded people back there and who knows maybe in 50 years from now people will start learning from us like they did hundreds of years back from our civilization!