In thinking about my distant past I'm frequently surprised by the clarity with which certain small details, quite insignificant in the normal scheme of things, rush through the haze of at least 2 decades. It has the same effect of staring down into a valley on a particularly foggy day. Backgrounded by a blurry, vague mist the bushes in the foreground glisten and sparkle with an astounding detail that is completely missed in the mayhem that is the inevitable concomitant of clarity. Similarly my past, so nebulous, so amorphous like a long exposure shot of a waterfall in which water looks more like a continuous fabric than a collection of long quantum streaks, provides a canvas of such assorted medley that the resultant is a whitish, palish sheet of paper on which arise the geometrical flashpoints of my life. My life, in hindsight, conveniently expressed, summarily summarized by the relative perspicuity of periodic insignificance!

How else would I explain the lucid taste of Calcite which still clouds the tongue everytime I take a piece of chalk in my hands; the memory arising from my taking a bite out of a classroom piece at a time in my past that is as lost to my mind as the complete repository of my Bio knowledge. How else would I explain the exactitude with which the parabolic trajectory of the six, which was the result of two and a half paces of dance down the wicket and a mighty heave on the onside, is affixed in the jumble of my mind? How else would I explain the vivid memory of the primordial bliss that engulfed a child of 6 in the company of his mother who is chattering away on a clear spring afternoon under a bright yellow sun on a white concrete roof of a dilapidated signature middle class society building with moisture induced black algae on the outside walls that is punctuated with small mottled glass windows and frank, public private balconies? In comparison, all the important landmarks, examinations, birthdays, marriages, trips etc. appear as if from behind a rain spattered glass window. They are there alright but as their own ghosts; they are all there in the realm of the fuzzy no-man's land between the conscious and the subconscious. Like the indefinite transmogrification of reality in its caricatured alter-ego that resides within the boundaries of somnolence. And I'm never sure that upon trying to extract a particular portion of that gooey mixture, what I'm ending up with is actually a slice of my life or just a phantasmagorical remnant of a confused mind.

I suppose this problem is uniquely my own. Imagination tries to fill in the gaps left by a memory that has been a shameless bum with regards to its own work. I have, without a shred of doubt, the most incompetent, most vacillating of long term memories among all those I've met. But then I don't remember most of them :).

I recently came across this brilliant post on the subject of language by Stephen Fry and since I can never express my own feelings with the clarity and eloquence of the master, I will reproduce a part of his text here. From Stephen Fry's musings on the subject of language:

"I’ve mentioned those French intellectuals the structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more. In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them. We would never notice if the fat and protein rich food with which cows, ewes and nanny goats suckled their young could not be converted to another, firmer foodstuff that went well with crackers and grapes. We wouldn’t go about the place moaning that sheep’s milk was only of any use to lambs, any more than I have ever heard anyone wonder why pig’s milk doesn’t make a good yoghurt. In fact if you suggest drinking pig’s milk or horse’s milk, people look askance and go “yeurgh!” as if it’s the oddest suggestion they’ve ever heard. We take what nature and custom have led us to accept. As Eddie Izzard pointed out, it’s odd that bees make honey: ‘after all,’ he said, ‘earwigs don’t make chutney.’ And take that arbitrary fruit, the grape: suppose grapes didn’t uniquely transmogrify themselves, without the addition of sugar, into a drink of almost infinite complexity? We wouldn’t wonder at the lack of such a thing as wine in the world, any more than we wonder that raspberry wine (despite the deliciousness of raspberries as fruit) can’t, in the proper sense, exist or speculate on why the eggs of carp aren’t as good to eat as the eggs of sturgeon. But every now and again we should surely celebrate the fact that caviar is so fine, that the grape offers itself up so uniquely, that milk products of three or four species have such versatile by-products for us, that the grain of some grasses can be transformed into bread, that the berry, pod or leaf of this plant or that plant can give us chocolate, coffee or tea, and that while the fuzz of this plant can’t go to make a shirt, the fuzz of that unique one canand the thread of this insect can go to make a tie, while the equally impressive thread, in nature, of that other insect can’t be spun into the simplest handkerchief. Is it weird that silkworms exist or is it weird that only the silkworm will do when it comes to silk and only the cotton plant when it comes to cotton? To put it again, in an accidental line of decasyllabic verse, ‘none would be missed if they didn’t exist’. And if language didn’t elicit pleasure, if it didn’t have its music, its juiciness or jouissance would we notice, or would always be destined to find pleasure in it because that’s a thing we humans can do? Out of the way we move we can make dance, out of the way we speak we can make poetry and oratory and comedy and all kinds of verbal enchantments. Cheese is real, and so it seems, is the pleasure of the text."

His full post can be found at:
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2008/11/04/don%E2%80%99t-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/

hmmm... quite a brilliant article and it makes me wonder about those philosophic thoughts which advocate a spartan and austere life, taking the juice out of life itself so that it would never spill on your clothes. Would terming it 'to always err on the side of extreme caution' be right? Is pleasure the most basic human duty? A duty which like all duties is extremely difficult to live up to but whose idea is the idea of a perfect life.

I suppose the fascination; this secret, almost amoral intrigue, the all too well known broad desire of uncertain and unsullied youth which makes it look with slant,unsure, fidgeting but intermittently riveted eyes at the lady in elaborate disrobe on the cover of magazines which invested too heavily in the aphorism, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'; about one of the most controversial books of all time started more with hearsay than with rationality. There it was, tucked away with almost unusual secrecy in one of the damp, dark, dreary passages of the library between other books by the same author which had been unfortunate enough to have not been controversial enough for me to remember their names now with any sort of clarity. There it was, 'Lolita', sinister and inviting in the blackness of its hardbound, evil and guilty in the deluge of its perverse reputation, smug and defiant in the light of its success but classy and confident in the quality of its prose. I had heard about it, I have been hearing about it, I heard that they made a movie on the story and I heard that Bollywood duly followed suit by copying it in one of those mind dumps which starred one of those mind dumps whose father had the foresight to give up the mighty good name of the Srivastavas. Oh! I can imagine how mediocre the movies must have been.

As someone said to me, good books make bad movies. And Lolita is far from being a good book. It's a brilliant book. One of the best I have ever come across in fact. Simply put, it's the testimony of a pedophile/murderer. Oh! how crass it sounds, how viciously unworthy a subject upon which the creative juices of an artist be spent, how overwhelmingly lopsided our emotions regarding the deviant fetishes of one so deranged and how swift our 'fair' implications and judgment. How warped and perverted must the story be! Well, it's not warped and it's not perverted. I'm sorry if it's too hard to believe but it is a beautiful tale of a person who belongs to a group who has had the terrible misfortune of having an interest which happens to have not had found any favor with the majority view of acceptable social conduct. I'm not advocating that his behavior must find a champion in one as vocal and might I say deranged as Ms. Roy. I'm just saying that in a society which is continually expanding its realms of what it finds acceptable, to use a term from Dawkins in this continuing moral zeitgeist where gays are allowed to be happy and gay the protagonist (or antagonist?) of this novel represents that portion which has been dealt a hard hand by nature. Tough luck, you deserve the consequences! we might say and move on. But this book stops where our sense of propriety dictated us to look in the other direction. And it's a worthwhile read. After all, is there is sense to our quest for knowledge if not for widening our horizons of rational thinking and sensitivity?

It's essentially a love story. A tale of unrequited love which sees its highs in vigorous, periodic, closely spaced but almost never narrated sexual encounters and its depressing lows in juvenile indifference and jejune preoccupations unmindful of love's shivering and hesitant supplications culminating in a subdued whimper in one of those agonizing moments which, given the poignancy of the situation and masterful exposition of heart's innocent cries, manages to leave a slight trace of moistness in even the most arid of eyes. Yes it's a heartbreakingly beautiful story and it ends up making you feel for the pains and travails and joys and miseries of the eloquent debauched. Such is the power and beauty of author Nabokov's narration that Lolita's final words ('No') stand as iridescent, incandescent reminders of all those times when one has felt completely helpless in the face of all those resolute but heartbreaking Nos. Except in this occasion while the reader's sympathy should have rested with the corrupted and defiled it instead embraces the corrupt and the defiler. The language is a spectacle to behold and is an added incentive if one is needed. I really am too incompetent and too small to even do justice to the brilliant shimmering blaze with which Nabokov's flamboyant prose is alight. Suffice to say, it's been one of the most satisfying reads. Both linguistically and as a really good story.

My mobile, weary and red-eyed, listless and slightly annoyed, almost in half sleep whispers in faintly audible blues that the divine order of time has just passed the obscure milestone of the middle hours of the day: 2. And there I am, nestled between the warm embrace of a jaipuria and soft hollows of a 'Sultan Fageras', hair unkempt, face weirdly contorted by a prolonged bout of improper sleeping posture, lying face down with the resolve and the dignity of a soldier recently gunned down on the battlefront. And the irritating phone, oblivious of the ruckus it's causing, unmindful of its amplified and distorted resonance in one so comprehensively unconscious, heedless of its own prickly dissonance and smug in its self delusional belief of digital perfection and recorded harmony, goes tee-tuu-taa-tee-tuu-taa. Ah! if only it had not burned a hole the size of several centuries in my pocket, I would have promptly dealt with such insolence in the form of a raised arm, a clenched fist, a sudden jerk accompanied with a muffled bang and hopefully shards of glass and silicon and bruised pride and hushed conceit. That bloody thing!

It's raining cats and dogs outside... metaphorically speaking that is. A literal manifestation would certainly have been reason enough to hurriedly wake up but a metaphorical manifestation of the phenomenon is the best anesthetic ever devised by the devious divinity of the divine. I can hear the cats and dogs slamming down on my window, much like hearing the suicidal tantrums of a very long Chatai from a great distance on Diwali. It looks capitally bleak outside with a bright, all engulfing darkness, a sweltering all pervasive cold, a dry, stifling, itching wetness, a still, inanimate, heavy presence of immobile wind, and the contorted, comic, strained postures of weirdly stretched trees against a backdrop of mercurial, protean, capricious stagnation. The window pane is dotted by the blood of cats and dogs and seems to be trying its best to keep the two worlds separate. The ebullient, jubilant, ecstatic, unchained, primal, unforgiving spectacle much like one of those mysterious tribal ceremonies you see on Discovery or NatGeo or low budget B movies, outside and the subdued, stagnated, controlled, diluted, chained world much like nonfat milk and soy substitutes and mocktails, inside. The one outside is fastened and the one inside is fastened!

I think another hour would do me good.

This Indian trip was memorable for more ways than one. Yes, I'm back in the ever eternal mild weathered and indolent San Diego with more than a month's worth of dust in my hair, incense in my nose, and lukewarm misty memories in my heart. And I cannot wait to put some of my impressions into words because that's what I have been thinking about through most of the flight and in fact most of the trip.

A friend of mine who wants of visit India as soon as possible keeps saying that she wants to do it because it's been such a life changing experience for so many people and I could never take her statement without a hint of incredulity. The exoticism that India represents to the materially worn eyes of a westerner hardly registers to our sensibilities which are often numbed by her superficial harshness. It, then, is not out of place for me to wonder as to how exactly does she expect the Indian experience to change her life. Does she mean it in the spiritual sense, or does she expect the country to put the social issues of our times in a different, maybe even a more important context. India after all is the screaming, wailing, tormented megalopolis of social iniquities, moral encumbrances, and communal apathy. And yet her stuttering swagger into the unknown, however dilapidated, is a source of much joy and hope. Does she expect some of that light to rub on her? And how exactly does that great bowl of seamless integration of suffering and joy, tears and laughter, hope and pessimism, affect one of its own sons? How does that brilliant conglomeration of stupefying paradoxes register on the self proclaimed anesthetized rationality of someone like me?

Oh! how little do we know! How simplistic our arguments and how immature our reasoning? Slightly paraphrasing Heller, in a company of men who seem to lack all discretion, I manage to stand out as the one who lacks more discretion. I won't go as far as saying that this Indian trip has made me revert my positions on several issues but I would certainly say that for a country as complex as India simple abstractions from simple minds like mine are bound to fall upon their faces. After all, India is a country that exists against all odds. And it exists well enough. During the course of its history it has taken the severest of blows and came out stronger. Whatever doesn't kill her only makes her stronger and what is bane for most other nations is the one shining panacea of her ailing existence. India's complexity, it seems to me, is the paramount factor that has prevented her during crucial times. As Shashi Tharoor puts it very well, everyone is a minority in India. This complexity, this benumbing intricacy, this stifling convolution seems to have instilled a sense of patience and tolerance among its sufferers and stung by her own plurality the country hops over one obstacle over another in all its contradictory elegance. She marches on to conquer the moon in a spacecraft that probably began its journey with a ceremonial coconut. Her silicon sons mint money in millions in a country which resonates from the throes of its hugely impoverished lower class. Bollywood churns out significantly more movies than Hollywood selling silver dreams and sanguine hopes to the millions who live in shanties at less than a dollar a day. And of course they buy them happily enough. She is Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Sikh and in fact every religion known to humanity. She is multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural and smells of the spices of a cuisine of such divine variety that it sends the brain whizzing. She is garish and subdued, subtle and overt, loud and serene, spiritual and morally decrepit, rich and famished, ambitious and satisfied, rational and superstitious, orthodox and liberal all at the same time. That's the paradoxical existence of India. As someone said, if you can say one thing about India, the opposite would also be true. These contradictions are living and breathing, alive and kicking in the country. How, then, can you simplify such glorious uncertainties into insipid rationality?

There is so much to like about this India. So much to be happy and inspired about. We talk with clinched fists about religionism and regionalism. People have made political careers out of these and other differences. Here is a thought. India is what she is because of all its constituting differences. We have seen unicultural societies wither away against time. India is a success because she has accommodated them all while she kept paying the price of changing according to the latest onslaught. While the stiff got broken, her malleable existence merely changed form. Her opportunistic survival has endowed all that is beautiful and all that is sad with her. And that's the only country we have inherited. She might be complex and her diversity might be acting as friction in her search for rapid development but that is precisely the trait that makes her what so many of us have come to love and appreciate. Her contradictions and her uncertainties are the most unchanging, unaltering, and reassuring facet of this great civilization.

The television scene in India is actually quite awesome. I know, I know, I can hear the elitists sharpening their claws right at this moment, I can smell their anger induced perspirations as these words come out of my mouth but I won't buckle down under their university-educated snobbery and they cannot stop me from saying what might not really be true but nevertheless is widely accepted here. Television in India kicks ass. My observation is that only the roles are jumbled up. Otherwise everything is quite hunky dory.

India TV which is supposed to be a news channel is Discovery channel incarnate for the average Joe-2-patialas and the Hokey-moms of India. Only recently it was showing the breaking news about a breathtaking discovery of a cave that leads straight to 5-deities hidden in nether-lands. As their camera crew braved the placid waters and unthreatening facade to gallantly go where no man had gone before in search of the darkest secrets, they came across vicious demons like vampire bats, poisonous spiders, and a total of 1 snake. While the blinking, garish, red arrows and red circles told my unenlightened eyes where to look for spiders, bats, and snakes on a screen filled with spiders, bats, and snakes, I munched off half my fingernails in nerve-racking anticipation. Adventure journalism at it's finest hour. Aaj Tak is not far behind with dramatic reenactments which are more dramatic than reenactments, running commentaries on the various serials on other channels, and a breaking news at the rate of 1 every 20 picoseconds. It's more soapy than the regular soaps and more thorough on it's subjects than it's subjects. And other news channels are trying their best to play catch-up.

I think soaps are basically marriage videos. I am just waiting for a dedicated channel which would consolidate it all and run all these serials one after another after editing out the irrelevant portions and dialogs so that we can all watch one marriage after another non-stop. Tulsi getting married to Mihir, Parvati to Mr. X, catwoman to Shri Krishna, Ekta Kapoor to an ass etc. I think that would be the logical next step. Then they can have another channel and compile a 24-hour broadcasts of all those facial close-ups with accompanying doomsday music. People getting shocked, euphoric, foxy, inconsolable, surprised, apathetic, maudlin, jumpy and maybe even orgasmic. The last one would push the TRPs even further.

And the talent competitions are the soaps. There is talent no doubt but there is just too much other stuff going on. You know the kind of thing that is so common a phenomenon to reality television. False emotions, pointless suspense, sensationalistic editing, provocative reactions, dishonest appraisals and much more. It seems to me that the best talent on display on these shows is acting, hence they should cut the crap and start calling them soaps now.

But the crowning achievement of all these super-mediocre efforts are the comic talent competitions. I cannot categorize them into any genre. I cannot view them from any positive angle. They are the common variety of arse-gravy we, as Indians, are all familiar with. They have a humor quotient worse than the worst jokes that used to come in the 'dekho hans na dena' section of Champak. 'Dekho hans na dena' never made anyone laugh and thus fulfilled its own prophecy but these shows go further. Their cheapness rivals the content of those greasy joke books that you used to see on railway station book stalls which either had a big buxomed lady or Kushwant Singh or both on their cover. They are loud, mindless, phony, and gut-wrentchingly humorless. I have felt happier and more invigorated watching snails move and watching glaciers melt. There is more humor in those eternally pessimistic Russian writers who could never stop talking about the Russian farmer whose wife had an affair. Manoj Kumar who spent the better part of his life brooding over country, wife, children, and 'mitti' which produced 'sona', eyeing the world with half his face was funnier. The great Greek tragedy is more comic and Ekta Kapoor is smarter than those scores of comedians who infest these shows with the revulsion of fungi on a piece of moldy bread...

I see that my tone has reversed. Oh well! time to stop

I just finished reading Maximum City by journalist turned author Suketu Mehta but this post is not its review. If I had to put my impression of the book in a few lines: It's a brilliantly researched piece of work, an effort that more than succeeds in bringing to us the dirty truths behind bomb blasts and the ensuing riots of 1993, the fine structure of Bombay underworld with its political and judicial affiliations, the seedy underbelly of the seemingly unending red-light behavior of the creeking megalopolis and its insistent fight for resurgence in the form of honesty, zest, and the will to survive. It's a very good book. But I wouldn't want to read it again. If only I could, I would have reversed my act of reading it. The easiest way by which truth manages to be stranger than fiction is by being more gruesome; and unfortunately for me, I never enjoy reading about the fine nuances of 3rd degree. Like everyone else, there is a pervert in me but it never raises its head to witness brutality. So Maximum City has been a bit of a drag really, especially after Orwell's 1984. John Wright's 'Indian Summers' was a welcome relief. To undo the effects I have started yet again on my absolute favorite, Catch-22 :).

Coming to the point of the post, Mehta mentions that traffic fatalities have actually decreased in Bombay in the last two decades and I would be surprised if that was not the case in every major city in India. It's an unintended fallout of city streets which are more crammed than ever before. The average city speeds have come down and people can basically stop from 20 to 0 in the space of a 50 paise coin. It's difficult to inflict major injuries at 20. It's a nightmare at 0. All you can do is take out your machete and start hacking away but I do not see any particular incentive for doing it either. And I don't see anyone else brandishing anything even remotely similar to a Rampuria. So obviously, fatalities are almost non-existent given the crawling speeds and an unexplainable disinclination in people for road-rage induced homicide.

All seriousness aside, it's awesome, spine chilling fun driving in Lucknow and it's humbling when you try to analyze how the hell everything just works. I am not trying to be an apologist for Indian traffic. I am genuinely amazed by its intelligence. It should not work. It just shouldn't. But it works and it works like a charm. It's a living, breathing organism with the IQ of a Nobel laureate. Forgive me for the comparison but it seems to have the sloth of Yokozuna but in fact has the nimbleness of 1-2-3 kid. Things get rearranged in matter of milliseconds. It's so well internalized you do not appreciate how this complex machinery is working. One small glance, a minute gesture, and the turning car would slow down ever so slightly so that it could turn with a decreased radius and you scrape past. And that small action simultaneously kickstarts a huge chain of reactions where every single one of the 70 adjoining units including cars, motorcycles, scooters, pedestrians, rickshaws, trucks, dogs and cows moves, accelerates, breaks, stops, shifts, turns, honks, swears, barks and moos to account for the new equilibrium. It's brilliant.

Contrary to what people think, I feel that the traffic in India is extremely polite and forgiving and it never makes you feel that you are being done any favor. It's noticeable when one tries to cross a busy intersection. It's impolite and impassable only for those who feel that they will get run over if they wade in. Once you start inching forward and basically hold your ground without making any sudden movements, the traffic adjusts itself to allow you room. It breezes past you from all sides but acknowledges that you have a right to your territory and it never tries to intimidate you out of it. Then you move some more.

After a bit of driving my scooty around in the particularly 'undisciplined' Lucknow traffic, I have noticed another interesting fact about it. There are very little, if not, no sudden movements. A mathematician would have described the multitudes of vehicular trajectories on a Lucknow road as smooth. Continuous and Differentiable. That is another reason why there aren't more accidents. Many more.

I know it's a nightmare for anyone who has to face the inconveniences of such traffic conditions everyday and I can only offer my sympathy but as someone who has lost a bit of touch with ground realities, having spent the bulk of his time in the tamed and monotonous precincts of a foreign country, there is a part of me that cannot help but marvel at the brilliant organism that Indian traffic is. The news is rife with hatred and regionalism and violence. They say that the country is breaking down engulfed in its own seething anger and suffocating corruption. They have been saying the same thing for as long as I can remember. India sags a bit, loses its way slightly, shrugs, corrects itself, and moves again. Like its traffic, it works. Against all odds.

I am really sorry for this long hiatus in posting and I hope that all my readers; nearly both of you; would consider my apology in light of the fact that I became slightly busy in the process of coming to India. I understand that I had lamented about rants and reminiscences in only my last post but I hope that you will understand that this trip has the strongest undercurrents of nostalgia running underneath and that obvious comparisons between U.S. and India by a mind as narrow as mine are bound to leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth every now and then; every here and there.

My father has had a recent transfer to Lucknow from Haldwani so Lucknow is the place I have the pleasure of spending my month in. It is the city where I had spent, as they say, the prime of my years. Starting as an immature 12 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings to an immature 18 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings, I spent the most unburdened part of my life in this city that, to me, has always had the allure of being slightly more sedated, more laid-back and more sleepy than pretty much any other place I have lived in. It had what the French would call 'je ne se qua'. It quivers with the energy of sloth and trembles with the vitality of snores and wakes up under the full bodied noon-Sun yawning and rubbing its eyes and cursing the heavenly cycle for having invented sunlight. It is a spectacularly inept piece of machinery that provides no respite whatsoever to its dwellers. Things might not be as bad as Kanpur or Bangalore but my city has its moments. And I have realized it time and again every time I had to press on the sides of my miniscule scooty to compress it just that little bit so that I could squeeze it into that small gap between that Rickshaw with the Aunt haggling over 2 rupees and that bicycle whose owner doesn't seem to believe in the philosophy that the right of way in India is directly proportional to the size of the engine between your legs. I have a strong conviction that the city has its parallels in John Cleese's Basil Fawlty. It would do all well if not for its residents. But the residents are the headstrong sorts. They would spot every available inch of space with a brick, at least of equal size, if not bigger and when they have finished building over all the free space and when they have zoomed to heights curtailed by government regulations, bribe budgets, and sorry foundations, they would, furtively, encroach a bit of the public road when no one is looking and then they would take out their Hyundaes and Toyotas and Hondas and double up on the road and basically not go anywhere. And no one seems to mind. Placid, quiet, serene, they all seem to have attained nirvana. They are at peace with a city that, in all its commotion, somehow keeps ticking. Ever so slowly, teetering on the brink, it's alive. And I'm really proud of it. Not because it manages to do what every city in India finally does but because buried just beneath the surface, lying dormant, is the oft repeated notion of a rich cultural past and a sober assimilative history. Lucknow has long had comparable populations of Muslims and Hindus. I feel proud of the fact that the city has never played host to any significant religious fundamentalism.

While in college too, I kept visiting Lucknow every year over the Summer holidays witnessing to my ever increasing muted disapproval the 'thinning' of the old crowd as they dispersed in search of greener pastures. I looked scornfully at every new flyover that botched up the pristinely chaotic landscape, every effort at modernizing any shop that I used to frequent while I was a school kid, and every new statue that that stupid, dumb, trainwreck of a woman, Mayawati erected in her honor. Then my father got transferred to Haldwani and I have not really had a decent stay in the city for 4 years if not 8.

So here I am back again after so many years. Things look about the same. Just more tightly packed together. More half finished flyovers and more road side barbers snipping away at more unshaved faces. More bikes with 25 more CCs dodging more cows and more Indicas. More sweet shops with more people working in them than needed and more rules for buying 250 grams of Jalebi. Coupons and tokens and lines and haggling and ultimately no-lines and more haggling. Huge advertisements rising up into the sky as you traverse a completed freeway. They promise you a better life with beautiful cars and beautiful homes and beautiful locales and beautiful girls. And they hide the sky behind. Then you look down and see a mad sea of ambitions and emotions and dreams heartbreaks all uniformly packed into every square inch of habitable area. Not much seems to have changed really. It's nice to be back.