Bahrain and 2012

Didn’t it feel so good to be back? Duh!

It felt so darn good to be back that I stepped outside my new place at Budaiya, stretch out my arms, look up in the sky and say “It feels so good!” Bahrain was moved, and it answered my display of immense ecstasy with a couple of tear gas shells. I guess Bahrain wanted me to cry along.

Well, mom had other plans. She yelled at me to come back and help her tape the edges of windows and doors. I gasped at the amount of masking tape we had in stock, much like how they stack up toilet rolls in hotels. I looked out and saw kids and adults rushing to their homes; shouts of “INCOMING!” (Call of Duty, Unreal tournament, and the likes) flashed across my mind.

In case you are rejoicing with the fact that I’m living dangerously and my days are numbered, nyaa…I stay in a secure compound with a huge fencing and two guards. But being a demonstration-prone area, tear gas shells are as regular as the movies on Set Max.

I looked at the thick wads of smoke entering the compound walls. A year ago the same wad of smoke would have had me screaming, “Yea baebay! Hookah round the corner!”

This is an entirely new experience in my surrogate motherland. Gone are those days when the only thing you had to fear while venturing out was stumbling across Mr. Vinod* Sir. And those crazy Saudis driving drunk through the streets on the weekends. (*FYI He’s a person who plays with your sense of touch.) Being in Bahrain now is like sitting in a boat with no oars. Already there’s nothing to do here…just plain nostalgia. Even that’s off boundary now.

Hey but don’t mistake Bahrain to be in as much chaos as in that Linkin Park’s From the Inside video. Just that I happen to stay right in the middle of where they love to riot. My folks moved here right in the nick of time.

But no worries, I’m having my sort of weird fun anyways. Yesterday I did my age-old ritual of sneaking out two pegs of dad’s scotch (Nine years, I kid you not!). As soon as I downed it, there was a Boom! sound and the vapours of tear gas started filling up my bedroom. Now you might have heard that Kathakali dancers can laugh and cry at the same time. Trust me, that sh*t ain’t easy. This could be the hard yet short-cut technique of learning it though.

I’m slightly perturbed by the fact that this is a memory of Bahrain I’ll have to etch in my mind, but hey, at least the tear gas helped me get back at writing (I don’t even want to think what would jump-start the next writing spree, tomahawk?!)  ‘Cos I’m an optimist, I always see the glass half-full, especially when it’s filled with scotch.

So here’s wishing you all a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year! (Sincerely hoping that the Boom! I hear on New Year’s is of fireworks :P)

Bah...needed an update!

Another bus story

(P.S.: The following note may contain explicit comments that are used in day-to-day life. Uncorrupted minds, please don't report this!)

I was travelling once in a double-decker bus in China. It was a long ride; I fished out a novel to kill time. A few stops later, four kids rushed above and took seats behind me. I smiled at them and they snickered back.

“Ni Hao” I meowed to them (That’s hello in Chinese).

“Hello” they replied back. First setback to the first impression.

They: “You from Indu?”

Me: “Yea, I am Indu. You in school?” (Indu is what they call Indians there)

They: “Ya, ya…”

Me: “Which class?”

Silence.

Me: “Level? Standard?”

Still no answer.

The conductor approached them. They told her the destination and she said the price; that being less I decided to pay for them, just for kicks (please don’t make conclusions!). They were all the more cheerful; one kid sat on my lap and asked “Why you black?”

Aah you racist sonuvabitch! “Why you no eyes?”

Not good enough, but if I said anything else they wouldn’t understand. They continued chuckling.

“Why you fat?”

Shux, two of my shortcomings and they had to catch upon that. “You know kung-fu?”

“Meiyo, meiyo!” (No, no!)

“I know Kalari. I kill you with my two fingers!” To which they roared laughing. Money and respect, both gone. I had to get back at ‘em by all means.

“OK, I meiyo Chinese. You teach me Chinese numbers.”

“1 is ee, 2 is ueh, 3 is aa…” Sounds like when I gag myself during tongue-cleaning.

“Ok ok you want to learn Indu?”

“Ya, ya…”

“To say hello…say maa chudha.”

“MAA CHOODA!!!” All of them resounded in unison. Their noise attracted other Chinese, who now took a keen interest in learning my Indu language. These kids spread my teachings within minutes; imagine around 10 - 12 people in the backseats yelling out how to say hello! Evil or not, this is fun! I wanted more of it.

“You like Indu girls?”

“Ya, ya…”

“Tell me how to say you are beautiful in Chinese.”

“Ni hen mei li!” (Guys, especially Bangaloreans, I’m doing you a great favour, so next time, when you hit on one of those Chinkis in Forum Mall, thank me!)

“OK, when you see Indu girl, to tell her I like you because you are very beautiful, you should say Mai(they repeated)…tumhaare….bachche…ka…baap…banne…waala…hoon!” (courtesy Satish)

They, alongwith a few others, practised for a while. Amidst giggles, I was speculating the fact that I was only adding fuel to trigger the otherwise inevitable Indo-Chinese war! When they repeated“baeche ka baep”  I couldn’t control and burst out laughing. They understood it was all a prank and pounced on me, taking my book and wallet in the process. They fiddled around with it for a while; I didn’t mind ‘cos the wallet was empty.

The bus halted at their stop. They gave me back my belongings and said “Xhi Xhi (Thank you), babye…” I too bid goodbye and checked my wallet for my PAN card and driving license. Surprisingly, there was money in it. I had a rush of thoughts. I became confused; was it civility for them not to accept money from others, or was it because they took pity thinking I was actually penniless?  Did my ‘good’ deed get rewarded; hmmm...it’s only a reward if they had put extra money…lemme check, nopes, exact as the bus fare!

The protagonists!

I didn’t arrive at any conclusion, so I plugged my earphones and coincidentally…I was listening to Metallica’s ‘The Unnamed Feeling’. 

When my eyes bled red

This was prompted by my epic 30-hour long workathon. In office terms, workathon (¯ wûrk-úr-thöng) relates to a lesson in “How to stay up seamlessly doing stuff you would never give a crap about”.

Apart from drinking truckloads of coffee/Red Bull, one way is by playing some game like YooNinja on your Android or IPhone (You recently bought a costly Nokia? Do you use feathers for writing?) This game involves a fast ninja running through obstacles with two blades behind that kill him if he stops at any moment. It basically reminds me of myself on the treadmill with the trainer behind – but yea, good focus and sharp reflexes pump energy into your eye muscles.

Another is by taking power naps.

Three power-naps of 15 minutes spiked my state of consciousness. That experience is trippy-like. The moment you shut your weary eyes (which thank your brain for doing so), the dreams switch on like a movie resuming after a pause button. As you haven’t exactly arrived at slumber, power-nap-dreams seem more surreal, and the memory spookily remains after you wake up. Moreover, these are the best times to verify the concepts of Inception.

During one of my trysts with phantasmagoria, the past haunted me. It was a lecture by my Math teacher in Bahrain, Dr. Paul Williams Ambrose - on how he managed time between teaching at school and tuitions, tuition-book corrections, school-book corrections, coordinator-work, church and playing drums in Pakistan Club (Yea, they never found a Pakistani drummer) – “Such naps are applicable to two situations; one of course when you can’t afford to sleep and two, at a time when you just want to doze for a bit and restart afresh, like in the afternoons.”  

He was used to taking 5-minute power-naps; considering the energy he had, it was equivalent to taking steroids recommended by Marion Jones. As kids, most of us took it as some sort of old Tamil-folk wizardry, given his white hair and beard, (no, don’t picture Gandalf, more like Narendra Modi) and the poor placard outside his flat having to bear the sheer weight of all his 11 inscribed degrees, let alone his name of 21 letters.

I had a Chinese dude for assisting me – he was in charge of helping me out. When my eye-shutters got heavy, I looked at his face. I wanted to discern whether he was sleeping or not – so that in the meantime I could rest my sorry eyes and share the blame in case anything went wrong – but in vain. It was the one moment I seriously hated their race whose blinking made no sense since their eye-lids were just millimeters apart.  I had a throbbing urge to blurt out wang-ba-dan (a**hole) or tu-ne-lo-mo (mofo) just to test his drowsiness – but the underlying fear in every non-Chinese when they see a Chinese arose in me – that inevitable moment when he would jump, make that “Huaaa!” shriek and do some supersonic karate-chops on me. I also could have instilled fear through my Kalaripayutu heritage, but I am too physically inept to generate any sort of uneasiness, though there is a ‘slight’ chance I might have also forgotten to inherit it.

And it was a small issue. We could just simply change some scripts, rename the file and paste it back. But the Chinese dude was relentless – for the dear of his life he wouldn’t let me do it without the permission of higher Chinese authorities. I chuckled for a while, “You are joking right?”
“Naw…v needo perrrrrmishun!”
“For this baby stuff, c’mon why notify them the problem?”
“Naw perrrrmishun, naw do anything!”
“Are you crazy? It’s 5 in the morning, our deadline is 6 and all you care about is to get permission from Mainland China?”
“Yes yes!”
(Raising my hands in the air)”AAAARGHHH!”
“Waat haapen?”
“OH…THIS??? THIS IS HOW WE YAWN IN INDIA!!!”

The yawn went something like this...he might have missed the point, right?

For a while I thought he was one of those rare less-educated Chinese retards (you seem to suck in superiority complex when there’s dearth of sleep) who was afraid I was going to mess the whole system up. Just out of feeble curiosity or more of a want to mock, I asked him till what he had studied. He said he was preparing for CCIE. I gaped at him; it was the hardest certification for a network engineer and nay, this guy wasn’t stupid. It was the strictness they maintained in following orders, the Chinese dictatorial way. Chaainees law mus follo ALL TAIMS…oh my, I failed to see the deeper meaning.

The torture was relentless, not only due to the prolongation, but also for doing something  entirely-so-worthless, like preventing TATA from losing out lakhs from a corrupted billing server (the thing responsible for billing your calls). On the contrary, if it hadn’t worked, the bills wouldn’t have been generated, and I would have been actually promoting ‘free’-dom of speech for my countrymen (at least for 5 million of those using TATA SIMs).

We should certainly be given capers as uniforms, reasons being;

1)     We are supposed to work like supermen and for mind-numbing long hours to save the asses of corporate honchos (Superman, saviour, caper – kapeesh?)

2)     The work timings are when the sun hates to wake up; even the snoring security won’t take notice.

No, I didn’t get this idea because I haven’t been cured from the wardrobe-malfunction disease. It’s because I’m trying hard to think of a second time I could wear the crappy Kochi Tuskers tee other than a Netherlands World Cup match (be it football or cricket) or the next IPL season. Who am I kidding…I lost my money.

OPERATION 'GO PINK'!

(This is a comic take on a rather worrying topic; the dip in the female child according to the 2011 census. It’s also a trial at a different writing form; this time, a puerile play.

P.S: Do pardon the prison language; couldn’t put scholars as protagonists. And why lose the f*ckin’ liberty? Oops!)

SCENE 1
(It is a murky setting of a prison premise. Two convicts, one numbered A11 and the other B22, are seated on the floor, one facing the audience and the other sideways, to their left. Multiple footsteps are heard, followed by the sound of unlocking a key and a creaky door opening to the full. Enter a new convict, numbered C33. He sits next to the one facing the audience. The door creaks similarly shut.)

B22: What are you in for?
C33: Rape…of my maid. You?
B22: (Sarcastically) Rape. Of a minor.
C33: Yowza! My sins are less grave bro…at least I ain’t a pedophile.
B22: You might wanna rethink that, considering she was the only ripe one in my village.
C33: Dang! That sucks dude…what aboutcha? (Looking at A11)
A11: (After a brief silence) Murder…of both the unfaithful wife and her faithful boyfriend.
C33: Double-yowza! Caught 'em in action eh?
A11: Yeha…(with a slight smirk) got them fairly inactive in two neat blows.
C33: Brrrr (No he didn’t have a Coke, you corny jerks!)…how many years are we talkin’ about?
A11: Life.
C33: Oh ok…uh wait, WHAT??!! That’s text-book injustice yo!
B22: No douche-bag, he didn’t mention it was HIS wife. He himself was being two-timed. Or three-timed?
C33: Oh I get it, you mean including that poor sucker right, the husband?
A11: I just chose the wrong day to surprise her.
B22: And the other prick chose the wrong day to score with her.
C33: You did give ‘em one hell of a surprise bro…her buggy hubby shuda bailed you out man. (Pointing at B22) How many have you got remaining?
B22: Me? Two left outta five.
C33: Haha, you do realize she’s legitimate now right? Shucks, you cuda avoided the ‘pedo’ tag!
(B22 returns a grimace)
C33: So I guess we are all un-guilty eh? Now coming to think of it yo…we all have the same god-damn problem man, except you man (pointing at A11), yours is some classic f*cked-up sh*t, but more or less, the issue is the same…that is the opposite sex. We are all deprived of that resource man…think about it, if there were more girls out there, would any of these happen? We are forced into doing all this sh*t man!
B22: So watcha saying? Start a family and reproduce only girls, and make that a role model?
C33: Naw…I mean yaa..somewhere around that line…except we convince every family in those backward settlements to keep that girl child man, she’s gonna save someone from becoming a rapist or a pedophile…more girls tomorrow, lesser crimes yo! We jus’ need to balance out the fish in the pool!
B22: Crazy as it may sound…I think you got a point.
C33: Wicked! I say we plan this thang, and once we get out of dis place in 3 years, we gonna start a revolution man…
B22: Yea let’s start by giving it a name. Something like Go Green…Go girlie colour, Go Pink!
C33: Awesome yo!
A11: Errr…that’s already taken, it’s something related to breast cancer…
C33: Who’s talking to you, Mr. Life-Sentence? We dig this sh*t, we come after 30 years to show ya what we accomplish!
(Act drop)

SCENE 2
(It is a newsroom. Several look busy; the news-lady adjusting her hair and reapplying her lipstick, the cameraman adjusting his equipment, couple of people browsing through the cues and cross-checking with the prompter, peons clearing the area, and the make-up men applying their final touches on the very two convicts belonging to the first scene, but looking very aged)

News-lady: Today we have for our viewers something very special; an interview with the very two activists who pioneered OPERATION ‘GO PINK’ and made India a better place for women….we are very proud of you sirs! What do you have to say about your achievements?
B22: Well it has been a slow process… (blabber…too lazy to type)
C33: Yea ‘twas my idea basically… (chatter… running outta ideas)
News-lady: The next bulletin is an exclusive feature of the paradigm-shifts that the revolution has brought about. Let’s have a look at the most important of them all.

(Gallant music starts playing)
Reservations have been banished! Women constitute a significant number of parliament seats and government positions! Sex-related crimes are at all-time low! Female trafficking though continues on a larger scale… (bluh blah bleh)
Thus we bring our special bulletin to an end. Thank you sirs!
(End of music)

In other news…the headlines are as follows;

Wikileaks lost whatever significance it had in India. It simply couldn’t withstand the competition from gossip.

BBC India buys rights to use Bollywood music in their pursuit to adapt the news-telling of ‘Star News’ and ‘Aaj Tak’ after declining TRPs.

M.S. Dhoni bares it all in this month’s issue of Maxim: Women's edition!

 Shiv Sena protests against the calamitous increase in the number of male strip bars in the country.
(Act drop)

SCENE 3
(It’s the same setting as the first scene. This time, only an old and heavily-bearded A11 is present. After a brief moment, enter B22 and C33, but not as visitors as promised, but again as convicts!)

A11: Aah, look who’s here! The revolutionaries are back in their den!
B22: Mock all you want, ‘cos even if you do a Shawshank, you will swim back through all that slush rather than facing the world out there!
A11: You guys screwed that much?
C33: We neva foresaw this yo...eva since they passed the ‘Unforgivable’ act, guys have bin pourin’ into the cells.
A11: WTF is that?
B22: Any man who once confesses to a mistake is liable to be punished under any circumstance irrespective of when the mistake occurred.
A11: You saying there’s no time-line?  You have been convicted again on counts of your earlier crimes?
C33: Yea bro, as the saying goes, women never forgive.
A11: That isn’t a saying.
C33: Says the guy who’s bin isolated for a generation.
A11: It’s you two who should isolate your sorry asses…o villains of manhood! The new inmates will so wanna barbeque ‘em! Hell even I might get a quotation!
(Both B22 and C33 stare at him)
C33: Don’t gimme any more cold vibes yo, we have already bin skinned mentally.
A11: When, the interrogation? (B22 nods) By whom, female officers?
C33: Yeha, they unleashed their fatal tool...nagging! I wuda rather got beaten up or faced the ice-torture man...I can even count my remaining brain cells!
A11: Gosh! You actually had brain cells?
(C33 frowns)
C33: So we have learnt an important lesson right? Any gender bettering the other is a problem for the latter?
A11: Pshaw yehaa….it just shaved 30 years off your worthless lives to savour it!
(C33 turns more indignant)
B22: At least you were right about one thing. This whole fiasco seemed cancer-like…the hens overwhelmed us like treacherous cancer cells.
A11: No…it’s a campaign for breast cancer awareness and is held every…
C33: SHUTCHA PIE-HOLE, MORON!

(Tableau)

[In order to allay my fears of feminist-attacks, this is a tongue-in-cheek post. Not convinced? ;P !]

The Patriarch

(Err..I agree I've been employing the melancholy theme for quite a few posts, but this one's lyka food-for-thought, specially for those affected by the urban modus vivendi)

“Hello, son…”

“What happened, Maa? Tell me quickly. I am busy.”

“How come you are so busy all the time? Why can’t you…”

“Stop ranting, Maa…I am driving, seriously…what’s the matter? Now don’t tell me you called to ‘hear my voice’ and things like that…”

“I called to tell you that your dad's depressed as of late.”

“What? Come on, Maa…I know this is one of your ploys to make me come meet you…”

“I am done arguing with you, come if you care. Otherwise, carry on with whatever nonsense you are doing!” CLICK!!! She shut the phone rather hard. He was unsure if he heard a sob in that process.

“Yeah right…Dad and depression…pshaw…like that’s possible.”

He was stuck in traffic. He was on his way to the dentist for a check on a fiddling toothache. His car stereo was down, and he didn’t have enough credit on his smartphone to surf the net. With nothing else to do, he thought on.

“Hmmm…Mom was kinda over-dramatic. More than her usual tantrums. Is there really something to worry about? I know Dad’s way past his prime, hoary and feeble, and so are his friends. All he gets to do is sit comfily all day watching television. With the kind of shows being aired and Mom’s dominance over the remote, anyone would undergo brain-damage!”

Earsplitting horns compelled him to budge his car a few metres.

“Battling the blues…that’s one extremely tough exercise. The few months without a job; those were terrible times for me. I kept pondering about the future and the choices at my disposal. I consistently reviewed myself to figure out where I had gone wrong. I isolated myself from the rest of the world, literally! I had yearned for someone to share my woes with, but due to some preconceived egotism, I never did. I mean, we wouldn’t want anyone to portray us as weak, right? But what’s Dad got to be so gloomy about?”

He stopped reflecting for a moment. Voices from the past, mentioning that he was similar to his Dad in aspects of habit and attitude, resounded in his head.

“Dad must be encountering the same sorta situation…he’s bored out of his wits, no longer a person of importance, and has been dethroned as the patriarch. Hence he’s showcasing his ire on Mom, taking cue from the gobs of fights he’s been having with her. He’s being punished for prolonging cordial terms with his friends, not making a sincere attempt with his own wife or children. A trait I have inherited, and which I should soon cease.”

His last tooth knocked him a reminding pain, and he stuck his finger into his mouth to press it down.

“Maybe that’s why they call it the wisdom tooth.”

He looked at his watch. Only ten minutes had passed since the call. He reprimanded himself for not spending time this trivial, let alone think about his parents.

“We tend to bullshit that we don’t have time…this ’lack-of-time’ is a self-evocative white lie with dreadful implications. The truth is we try to keep ourselves unnecessarily occupied, and the alternatives for that have only increased over the years; be it the television, endless parties with friends, reckless gaming, oodles of hours over Facebook… we coerce ourselves to seek for entertainment forever. In order to kill time, I was, and I am, killing my relationships akin. Why blame it only on Dad, as a son there was round zero effort from my part.”

He was now in fact thankful that the stereo was damaged, that he was unable to use the net, and that he was caught in traffic. All that basically took for him to be with himself. Along with the newly-sprout wisdom, a blanket of guilt smothered him.

He dialed his wife and told her to pack the bags. “We are going home tonight, dear…” Before she could ask anything, he cut the line.

He was unsure if his wife heard his sob in the process. 

Part 3: My China Diary

“I AM SORRY ‘COS WHAT I MEANT WAS I AM SORRY!”

I undertook the bravest (considering how brave ‘I’ could possibly get!) and unforgivably the stupidest of my adventures in China. Few friends from my high school are learning medicine in Wuhan University; the place Wuhan being 1200 km away from where I was residing, Shenzhen. My training period was supposed to be till December-January, but due to a financial crunch we had to continue training in India. So the news had come as a shocker; we were informed just one week before departure. Much like the no.1 postulate in securing a B-Tech (Thou shall leave everything to the last moment), we had a lot of unaccomplished ‘must-do/must-visit’ things in China. Eventually I was left with this drastic decision to make; a solitary trip to Wuhan. I was guilty conscious, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the fact that I had come all the way to China, and if I still didn’t manage to meet them, it would sting me later. But hell, I hadn’t even seen the Great Wall ‘cos of the remoteness! (Now now, before you gasp, let me ask you, have you ever seen the Taj Mahal? Well knock knock, China is a whole lot bigger!) Many conflicting arguments rose in my head…”You have been in bare touch with them!” “But that’s ‘cos they were in China!” “Is it necessary to risk it all?” Bah. All crap. I was going.

When I reached the station, I thought again, what’s the worst that could happen to me? Stripped off my passport, wallet and mobile? Lost in a place where none knew English? Hmm…oh no, oh drat. I wanna go back! But I was already right in front of the counter. The ticket lady looked on.

“One ticket – Wuhan”

“只有无座票可用。你要吗?”

“Oh…heh…err…yes yes, that one only!”

“154元。出发时间下午5:45。”

Now 5:45 is a time description and 154 had to be the price. I flashed the currencies and she paid the remaining amount. Hey, this ain’t so hard after all. I proceeded to search for the train. There were digital clocks that also mentioned the train standing at the platform. I was critically on time and as soon as the clock struck 5:45 p.m., one of the trains started moving; I took a wild hit and jumped into my bogey. It was the general compartment, and I noticed most seats were occupied, and many were standing. In panic I probed my ticket for the seat number, and didn’t find one. Realization hit me brutally; what the chinki meant was there were only standing tickets available! I looked again at arrival time; 7:00 am…hmm…over 12 hours standing?!?! The longest I stood was 4 hours for a Malayalam movie (Kangaroo) ticket! And that ended in disaster!

Two night-outs of shopping and clubbing, and I was onto the third one. My eyes were crying for some shut-time. The very thought of 12 hours ached my legs. Many looked at me as an alien who left his spaceship and chose to travel by their train. I remained silent and braced myself for the agony ahead. After a while, many fond memories started appearing out of nowhere; college, school, family…it was like death was fast approaching!

There was this comic salesman who kept walking up and down the bogey corridor. And he was beginning to piss me off. ‘Cos everyone were amused by him while I couldn’t understand, and I had to adjust every time he made a move. Besides I was wearing these huge-ass Woodland shoes; the soles kept stomping others’ feet. Now there was something like ‘ke-bu-chi’ or ‘bu-ke-chi’ (I wasn’t sure which) that meant ‘I am sorry’. I chose ‘bu-ke-chi’ and kept on saying that when the trudging occurred. But that was received only by colder snares and occasional swears. I wondered what was wrong with these people! It was only after reaching the destination my friend made me realize that the innocent exchange of ‘ke’ and ‘bu’ had an immense change in their respective meanings; I was saying “You are welcome!” all the time their poor feet underwent torture!

Hours later I could feel my knees dismantling by themselves. With an overly helpless look I asked one of the Chinese if he could give me a little space. As expected, he didn’t understand. I didn’t have the energy to do Dumb-Charades. But he all of a sudden got excited that I didn’t know Chinese, and passed this message to his neighbours. After a while it became the talk of the bogey. He offered me some place and a couple of Chinese moms even gave me fruits (My mom had said Never take stuff offered by a stranger, but here there were just too many strangers!) Couple of gals* who knew English came forward and chit-chatted with me; they gave me their QQ** and their mobile no.s (that was to date the easiest yet most excruciating way to get a gal’s no.!) They asked my age and I took a second useless dig at Chinese; I ended up saying I’m 11 years old. Point is: I was struck by their hospitality; maybe I had gotten myself into the luckiest of bogies…but would a foreigner in an Indian train be treated with so much of kindness? Only if he were to be robbed after that. What more, a cold storm hit that area and the temperatures fell below 12^oC. Perfect timing, oh weather gods! Draped with only a shirt, I shivered my teeth out. The Chinese had seen this coming…maybe their meteorological department employed the Oracle; anyways most of them had spare sweaters. Looking at my misery, one elderly dude gave me his jacket. I was dazed by the generosity; I would have changed my nationality then and there if an embassy existed on the train!

*Chinese gals define the way God meant to make a woman; so friendly, so forward and reservation-less (well, that depends upon how you define reservation). Though they may not be visually extravagant, they sure do know how to look cute. It’s high time the Chinese’s outlook altered the Indian male’s mind-frame that goes something like: “Oh she’s so beautiful, I can never have her, but hey, I sure could stalk her!” (No? Do pay a visit to Brigade Road, Bangalore next New Year’s eve!) And the Indian female’s attitude: “Damn I look better than half of the girls out there, now I have to have an ego!” (Please, no male Vs female chauvinistic arguments here…the above-said traits do exist, let’s hope not in abundance) Perhaps it’s ‘cos they possess matching degree of beauty, ergo the chinkis lack ego!

**QQ is the Chinese duplicate of Facebook; but it’s fully equipped with a messenger plus video-chatting module. It’s also used for high-profile business video conferencing, but mostly for hitting on girls! On registering you will get a unique QQ no.; so if you want to add a friend, you will need his/her QQ no. So if you are able to interest a chinki, she will certainly give you her QQ no.; you have to be a storm to get her mobile no.! In the clubs, we would chant “I QQ? You QQ? We QQ!” for hours to get one…guess travelling by their trains is a slightly better option! 

FAQ: Can I try and use it from India? Yes amigo, go getcha QQ today and charm those chinkis! Oh also one more piece of advice, don’t try to be too conspicuous or to-the-fore with them, or else you will be walking with a 2 metre radius Laxman-rekha!