And so I took, just for the sake of blogging-inspiration, the metro a couple of days ago.
I should be killed for digressing but this is worth mentioning. While I had to go from Joka to Tollygunj station to catch the metro, I realised that the cab charges for this goes anywhere between Rs.100 to Rs.150/- A strategic comparison with the sharing-auto fares (Rs.12/- to Shaker Bazaar and another Rs.9/- to tolly gunj in a different auto) gave me a opportunity cost oriented contingency margin of around Rs.100/- (ha ha ! I should cut this mgmt. mumbo jumbo :p)
Anyway thats not the gist of it. The auto chap and the middle aged bald gentleman sharing the auto with me were discussing about the communist rule in West Bengal, how a direct authoritarian goverment rule is curbing progress et al.
Then at the metro, there were more middle aged bald gentlemen (Lots of them in India ! Its almost like an axiom that the middle aged working proletariat gentleman is bald, has a paunch and flaunts a face in a metro as if someone just kicked him in the nuts !! 😦 ) They were discussing the same. In a half-english , half-bengali combo of verbatim !!!
These gentlemen are no doubt Intellectuals , well-informed, and socially aware.In spite of being smelling-of-coffee, jelly-bellied, frown faced, and frustrated uncles thinking they could still steal the occasional stare at the big breasted yound lady stading next to them, with a faint hope that she might give them perhaps a lustful second look)
And so I decided to join in. I guess my credibility commenced with my opening statement that I am from an IIM . Well ! Thank the media, word-of-mouth social groups, controversies, the proverbial 1 crore placement every year 😉 …that the brand strength of an IIM is still intact in educated minds, though not in the job market … lol !
I had to beg beyond the limits of my “wrongly-supposedly-perceived to be intellectual” brain , for them to talk only in English.
One “i think” Marwari gentleman went off like .. “Because of lazy attitutde of bengalis and the non-progresive communist rule, the state is backward. The bueracratic chaps in the state are lazier, drink more, smoke more, gossip more, sleep more, shave less, perhaps scratch their bellies more , and SHAG more” (how the f**k does he know ? :O Anyway yes ! the word was used !!!)
By then we were at Chandni Chowk station! The Bong guy\’s stop. He said something whose duration and related expressions matched Dharmendra’s “Main tera Khooon pee jaoonga”. Also, whose intention was apaprently like Arnold’s”I will be back” ! And I was getting excited to having been witness to a fight after a long time.And just when things were hating up, the belly-scratching Bengali went away. Curse the immoral me\’s bad luck !
[Point to ponder: Like that episode in HIMYM where you suddenly start noticing people\’s mannerism\’s more, I saw that all Bengali looking people were periodically scratching bellies! Shit … its so yucky !!]
At MG.Road station, the Maru man was still there lecturing away on the backwardness of Bengal. And then came a 30-something Professor, a guy who was an exact replica of Sendhill RamaMurthy (the Mohinder Suresh of the Heroes series) He was an urban Delhi-ite, the \”thought of to be cool people\” of India. And now the state-directed criticism was set to go ultimatum level.But this chap surprised me …he was unexpectedly not so anti-
The Maru gentleman was staring away to glory at the young girls who just boarded the train I guess to go back home from their colleges in College Street. He took a break from his eye-candy-seeing to butt in an occasional line about the communist rule, about the supposedly sweet-eating Bengali lazy folks, about the unethical rigging of polls in the state to ensure communist rule, about the use of excessive oil in food leading to excessive farting (he actually used the word \”Bengali farting\” :O …talk of being super-rude) , of the omnipotent stench of fish ,etc.,
We were reaching Dum Dum, the last stop . I was almost brain washed by our destroyer\’s speech. Then the Professor said suddenly, “We all criticise them … but say we are in delhi or mumbai or hyderabad or bangalore etc., can we enter an elite pub on a weekend for a Rs.700/- cover charge, drink imported drinks, dance away/ just sit watching the huge plasma screen TV at the lounge till 6 in the morning anywhere else in India other than Kolkata …! Is there any other place where money is not as much an incentive …. and hence, there is no cut throat rat race and thus, more peace\”
I guess it does have its advantages. The whole Bengal argumentation …. and that being a direct result of mentioning of one Indian pro-middle class concept, low price!!!
Et tu, Ghost-Runner 