Domain Maximus

(I was in Sri Lanka, by which I mean Colombo, for a week recently. While not the first country that pops to my, or your, mind when one thinks of traveling abroad, I was adequately excited about the journey. A new a country is a new country is a new country is a journey that might lead to a blog post about it. That might lead to travel book contract. Who knows? Anything to get out of Dwarka no?

Also they sell booze in Sri Lankan supermarkets. Just like that. No fatwas or anything. So.)

Sociology

There are good things and bad things about flying from Chennai to Colombo. The good thing is the fact that you land in a foreign country after just about an hour in the air. I find this endlessly fascinating. And a little bit fraudulent.

Perhaps the years of shuttling up and down on the Kochi-Abu Dhabi sector leads one to believe that all international flights should take at least 3 hours. In fact any serious flight, it is somehow ingrained into my head, should take at least three hours. Less than that is infra dig. More than that is glamorous.

Now I know what you are thinking. “But surely you will tell us why it is ingrained into your head like that? This is not Christopher Nolan picture for you to reveal things randomly for kicks. Maybe I should read this post in reverse…”

!ecneitaP !nam etunim eno tsuJ

Thanks.

See, the thing is there is, or at least used to be, this unspoken caste system amongst NRIs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image via Wikipedia

(As seen in the Lounge edition of 16 April 2010. I had a much longer uncut version somewhere. Will post when I find it.)

It might seem presumptuous to judge a country by your experiences as you land for the first time at the airport. But sometimes, airports are splendid barometers of culture. Heathrow, for instance, immediately has you thinking: “What atrocious advertising! Surely, this is the kind of nation that would give rise to Monty Python…”

Zurich’s airport, on the other hand, is all straight lines, simple signage, orderly queues, meticulously timed shuttles, pressed uniforms and insurance advertisements. The message is simple: “Welcome to Switzerland. We have banks. We are very clean. And our very clean trains run on time.”

So sterile and generic is the airport that at one point it felt exactly like Dubai airport in the minimal pre-Burj 1990s. But only with Nordic white people instead of Malabari muscle.

But don’t let that fool you. Switzerland is rightly held in high esteem by tourists of all races, colours and packages. It is the sort of country where you could, if you had the stamina, photograph everything in sight. Even the policemen.

Having had our passports stamped by two splendid samples of the Zurich constabulary, my colleague and I ran to the railway station across the road. The two of us were on a hectic business trip that would have us visiting Basel and Geneva, with our base in Zurich. Read the rest of this entry »

I am back. Again.

Ahem. Hello there. Welcome back.

As you may be aware this blog was away for three months doing authorly things like launching, reading, interviewing, posing for pictures, reading good reviews, reading bad reviews, crying ourselves to sleep and so on. And amidst all the celebrity-ing, Pranab Mukherjee presented a Union Budget. The union budget is pretty much the highlight of the annual calendar for the business journalism business. (Whatay play on words.) Which means the Union Budget is one of those “do anything as long as you are doing something” periods in the office. And boy did we do things. Many, many things.

Of course today no one remembers anything Minister Mukherjee said or announced during the budget. Read the rest of this entry »

Leader of free world

Twas all because of two twee tweets that the tree, bloody twat, broke in twain and wiped me out. I am sure of it.

An international conspiracy, no less.

As some of my tweeple maybe aware, the minutes and hours after Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, for really really truly deeply madly wanting world peace more than anyone else, yours truly madly deeply may have poked an inordinate amount of fun at this decision. The idea, of course, was not to make light of the venerable Obama at all. Take that thought and immediately perish it I say.

I am a total Obama fan boy. The US president is tall, fit, good-looking, immensely intelligent, a wonderful public speaker, a good writer and a terrible bowler of right arm leg-spinners. What does that mean? Exactly, he is the anti-Laxman Sivaramakrishnan.

But being the Bizarro-Siva alone does not qualify one to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. Maybe a Hero Honda “Most Crucial Player Who Assisted In A Turning Point During A Powerplay (Day-Night Only) of The Tournament Award” with cash prize and free bike. But little more.

So I was quite tickled by the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the prize to the big O.

Off I fired a couple of tweets in mirth. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, the night before the solar eclipse thingie happened, I am sitting at the barber shop in Dwarka under the KFC outlet. And I am feeling particularly unsettled. It is my first visit to this place you see.

Style has no language

I have no idea if this true for all men, but I think it is. Guys hate going to strange, new barber shops. When we find a barber shop we are comfortable with, we like to stick with it forever. A hair cutting ‘saloon’, as it is called in any place in the world where there is a local Malayali population, is one of those low-mental-overhead decisions that guys make. We don’t think about it, analyze it or agonize over it in any way whatsoever. Once we find a place that can cut hair, deliver a decent massage and has a reflected TV screen in the mirror in front of us at a convenient angle we are pleased. We drop mental anchor.

And this has nothing to do with the barbering process itself mind you. It’s not like I plan my haircuts or need to have it done in a particularly artistic way. I am pretty sure that if I had the right combination of long arms, flexible elbows and curved mirrors I’d probably just cut my hair myself. And do it in the exact same way I first got it done when my mom realized my dad was old enough to take me to the local saloon unsupervised.

So unlike the missus, who is fraught with the turmoil of choice every time a haircut comes up, I just walk out of the house, entirely in autopilot, settle into a chair and say “Medium short, short sideburns, keep it short in front”. And 99% of the time that is the entirety of my conversation with by barber. For the next half an hour or so I sit coma-like. Like a vegetable and my mind blanks out, leaping from thought to thought to thought in no particular order. Read the rest of this entry »