M4

Recently, I have been working on a consulting engagement for a Disaster Management Agency of one of the first-world nations; there had been reports of a fraud in flood insurance claims disbursal. While my job involved figuring out how to predict and avoid such a mess in the future, the task also carries digging into the past and identifying the events that led to the current state of affairs, so to say. As I ploughed through transcripts of thousands of conversations, I realized how vastly different the concepts of “devastation” and “homelessness” are between the people of that mighty nation versus the perceptions of our own compatriots here in India. People there seek government grants and insurance claims (funded by taxpayer money) to repair the wall paint in their basements and to replace consumer electronic appliances- clothes driers, room heaters et al.- that have been damaged in a flood. For a large part, the rest of their homes, the superstructure, the rooms and the res...

“Who smokes beedis these days!?” said my friend. “Quite a lot of people that can’t afford cigarettes…” I replied automatically. We were in a corner booth at a quaint, charming place called Koshy’s early this morning. This place is quite popular with the locals for its English breakfast, but I noticed how much the place looked like your typical eatery scene from the pages of an a British novel. It was quite early in the morning and we barely beat the church-crowd by just a few minutes to get a seat in this deli. On this occasion, that strong beedi smell that intruded our senses came from a few night watchmen we just passed, catching up during their morning tea breaks. As we made a quick arithmetic, we realized that those watchmen must be making no more than 4000 bucks a month and probably had quite a large family to fend for. A simple pack of cigarettes (at 200 bucks) is almost 5% of their monthly wage and it was obviously a luxury they can’t afford. Now, I could go on givin...

So, here I come to this famed hub of technology in southern India. The weather couldn't be more different from the original Silicon Valley- the rains longer, the wind stronger and the nights colder out here. What a welcome! A friend had to leave the city almost as soon as I arrive, tossing all our plans out the window. The universe does have a sick sense of humour. The people-oh, the people! There are so many of them that I began replacing "crowds" with "herds" in all my speech. These herds are so much alike- in shape, size, packaging, labelling, tagging and what not. The whole sight and sound of 'em is so alike that not a day goes by without the song "Little boxes" ringing in my ears. And all these people choose the exact same schedule to travel to and from work- the exact same two hours each in the mornings and the evenings. Either they have a masochistic love for spending several hours a day stuck in traffic or they have that l...