Durga Puja in Kolkata...

This has been one wild wild week. I mean sure, people have been in party mode for a month or so already, but Durga Puja was ...The One. (Thank you HBO for 8 continuous days of The Matrix trilogies) If anyone's interested the story behind the goddess Durga is here.

All over Kolkata, people have been spending whole fortunes building statutes of the goddess Durga. Of wildly varying quality and mostly in the same pose:

A many armed daeva carrying an assortment of weapons standing radiant and victorious over a great lion busy devouring a blue(or green) skinned man. Beautiful and frowning with righteous rage in the best classical Greek tradition. (I spent hours staring at the marble thingamabobs at the Louvre, I know classical rage when I see it ;p)

They've got one at almost every open space larger than a small house and it was quite a sight to see. Wednesday and Thursday (our 2 precious holidays) went by in a blur. I seem to recall (hazily) hours of sitting at the Kalighat flat (See Notes #1) gorging on ham and cheese. Drinking herbal tea. (Thank you Yvonne! You make excellent tea. Yes Beyhan you drink the tea WITHOUT sugar)

Making intelligent conversation. I find it enormously entertaining to make English conversation with the Japanese. Can never quite get enough of talking to Saori and her Japanese accent ;p. Of course talking about international politics really gets the juices flowing too. My old buddy Aaron would have REALLY appreciated it.

Man...I LIVE for this sort of thing (as opposed to gyrating wildly to music loud enough to bust your eardrums at 2 am in the morning...I think I'm getting old...hey wait! I never enjoyed that!).

It was at this time I truly got to know the inhabitants of the concentr--I mean flat at Kalighat. I mean I KNEW they were there, but they didn't drop by Gurusday often enough for us to know them that well. Excellent people, every last one of them.

Wednesday night we did Dandi. As with anything that AIESEC India had a hand with, it involved ear-splitting music at the wee hours of the night, paying a whole lot more than I budgetted for and always some interesting episodes to spice my blog with.

Dandi is a dance with sticks to (Surprise Surprise) loud music where once a year boys and girls get to meet each other. 25 rs for a pair of sticks (boogers), 30 rs for a 500 ml bottle of water and 100 rs for entrance fee (No free drink....can you believe that?). The management of the Dandi were really ripping us off! This time though, I was prepared. Industrial grade ear plugs....bring it on baby! Yeah!

Dancing involved banging your sticks together in some sort of rythmn either alone or (perferably) with a partner. Polly showed her enormous physical strength by breaking both sticks.

Enjoyable? Well Yes. Would I do it again? Hell No! I left early together with Saori and Polly. After escorting them home I scooted back home and called it a night.

The next night invloved a ceremony called "immersion". The landlord of our apartment in Tollygunge had a family Puja statute of Durga in his house and invited us to join his family on a lorry to the Hooghly (or the Ooogly as Max says it ;p) river where the statute would join several hundred others in the river.

The bumpy unsecured ride at the back of a shaky lorry with a 50 kilo statute (also unsecured) and 12 other people could be an epic unto itself (This excluded a special drummer boy & his drum hired specifically for this occasion). The activity going on in the back of the lorry ... well ... I'll let you judge.

Beyhan was chasing Yvonne and tried all ways and means to get close to her on the truck. Unfortunately, I was in the way. Literally. Yvonne was using me as a human shield, which of course meant WE were close together. Actually I was holding onto the side of the truck and couldn't move and SHE was holding onto ME. Nuts.

Of all the things in the world, caught in the middle in every sense of the word between a rock and a hard place. Beyhan is still pouting. C'est vraiment pas ma faut!

Notes:
(#1 )

1. AIESEC in India helped us find our quarters when we arrived in Kolkata. There are two major locations (termed trainee flats) which housed a number of international AIESEC trainees who were living and working here in Kolkata.
2. We (Me, Maxim & Beyhan) lived at one location in Gurusday road shortly before moving to Tollygunge.
3. Gurusday contained :) Sly & Jeroen(Netherlands), Keika (Japan), Mihaela "Micky" & Daniela "Dani" (Romania), Ted (Hongkong), Yi Xiang "Lucy" (PRC), Alvarro (Chile), Dorota & Adam(Poland), Emre (Turkey)
4. Khaligat sardine-d :) Agnieszka & Konrad (Polska), Saori (Japan), Yvonne (ROC), Mauricio (Puerto Rico, I think), Polly (HongKong), Some lady from Italy ... the one with the cheese.

Hmm...what can I say? Life seems to have fallen into a rut. Partly my fault I guess, I'm not exactly a party guy.

Mondays to Fridays, I work from 0930 hrs to 1945hrs. By the time I get back to Tollygunge, it's almost 2100 hrs. Pop by Mr chicken-roll to make myself happy.

(I have to take a picture of him and his chicken roll stall someday ... that guy reminds me of PCK complete with curly hair and a huge mole on his cheek)

A quick session on the internet in a cafe until 2200 hrs (when it closes). These days I study Hindi and Japanese till 1230 or so before retiring for the night. My reasons for studying Hindi I can understand. I am, after all, in India...but why on earth Japanese? I guess it might come in useful since the client company we are developing software for is Japanese.....

that and the fact that since almost half of the Japanese is Kanji, people who read and write Chinese have a definite advantage here. (I should have taken Japanese classes when I was younger. I had the option to take it up as a third language when I was in secondary school but I passed it up. Oh well.)

Last weekend I reached my nadir at last. I spent most of Saturday on the internet (racking up a huge bill in the process). Studied till midnight.

I blew Sunday studying.
(Yes ma, you heard right, I spent a whole Sunday studying Hindi and Japanese)
I must say, studying is a MUCH cheaper way of passing time than other activities I could name. After I was finished, my head was all tight and tingly, kinda like the first time I studied French, felt like my head was about to explode like an over-ripe tomato. Well, at least my French has improved.

Anyhow, I can write simple Hindi and Japanese sentences already. At least my efforts have not come to naught.

Mes co-locataires have abandoned me. Oh woe! Maxime's girlfriend has come from Canada and Beyhan's off somewhere chasing a Taiwanese skirt. We always knew she was coming some day, but Melody Seguin appeared in our lives with an abruptness that was quite disconcerting.

Oh well, I can't walk around half-naked anymore. (Beyhan, if you ask which half, I will reach out and strangle you with my mouse-cord!)

There's going to be a nation-wide strike on Thursday. We get that day off but have to work on Saturday though. TCS employees! Strike on saturday and we'll have a looooong weekend!

P.S. Please don't be disturbed if some of my future posts are in Hindi, Japanese, French or a crazy mix of all three d'accord? I am practicing.

Oyasumi tout le monde!

Photos Photos Photos!
All 45 megs in my collection for Kolkata! Check it out at my multiply blog (http://fba90130.multiply.com/photos/album/1).

I even managed to export all my blogspot files over to the new site! Nice...

I think I'll use this site sometimes...

Moving over to that site. It's so much fun.

Dear friends,

I have another blog to fill up with my assorted acerbic comments! Yay! You will find it at http://fba90130.multiply.com/. There are so many fun features and useful tools in this new blog that I am tempted to move over there. Unfortunately, I am the kind of sloth that loathes change (isn't it ironic?), so we shall see.....we shall see. Uploading of photos and music is so much easier over there....so maybe I'll use it as a photo repository.

The festival of the gazillion gods are upon us....

We have now begun the festive period of the Puja, when Indians all over India celebrate the multitudes of gods they have in their mythology. At last count, they number 30 crore (or roughly 300 million) , so you can see, they spend quite a lot of time celebrating.

Last weekend, they celebrated the God of Manual Labour. There were dancing on the streets and people trying their best to make more noise than the traffic (no mean feat I can tell you). Reminds me of people celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

So there I was standing outside entrance of the Guild of Electricians and Property Movers (at least I think that's what they were called ...they're labourers that move filming equipment for movie studios) and that was as far as I cared to go. There are quite a few movie studios here in this area...maybe I can make a few extra bucks as a movie extra ...I'm pretty good at playing corpse #5 or kungfu fighter #2 or innocent bystander #4 hehe.

They're going to have a bus strike (again)....

India has as many guilds/unions as they have gods. Maybe more, and every bit as noisy and vindictive as their gods. Luckily for us TCS employees, the bus-strike does not involve the company buses ferrying us to and from work every day. I guess they need ANOTHER holiday...noticed they take turns to go on strike.

Ah well when the 5 day holiday comes around half on India would be on leave, and the other on strike.

Let us begin this post with a few moments silence for my dearly departed hair **SOB**.
Friends and family, I am now in the deepest mourning for my hair because I forgot the cardinal rule of life in India #1: NEVER make assumptions about the quality of anything you buy in India.

On the first week of my arrival in Kolkata, I went to a barber on the street and got a pretty decent haircut for 30 rs. Sure, there were cockroaches in the basin (I entertained myself watching it trying to crawl out and slipping down the side). Sure, the barber took his time with the haircut (took about 2 hours I think). He managed a haircut which I found highly satisfactory (even better than the peter-and-gays hanging around Supercuts in singapore and a heck of a less expensive too).

The landlady of our flat in Gurusday had a family business emergency in Delhi and needed funds urgently. She sold the flat in Gurusday (70 lakhs! less than 300k SGD)and we were again busy scrambling for a place to stay. Luckily, AIESEC came through for us and we got a nice place in the far southern reaches of Kolkata at Tollygunge. It is a nice place. Cool enough to not need air-conditioning...a little far away from the citycenter but it had ALL forms of transport that India had to offer. (Metro, trams and 2 bus depots...one CTC(private) and one government owned).

Ok to the point: I needed a haircut and I saw this barber charging 10 rs. I took it, assuming that the results would be roughly the same. Now I look like a recruit from Nee Soon BMTC. There is no orange bag big enough for my head this time.

On the other hand, now EVERYBODY thinks I'm Japanese. Even the Japanese.
Sayonara watashi no kamigata..."--

The rest of Agra was a load of fun, but you had to be kind of AIESEC-ish to appreciate it.

Hey AIESEC, I don't mean to put down AIESECers but I find them to be terribly clannish.

Anyhoo... if a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a small novel.

Blog a la Triin...we had fun. End-of-story.

But I must say though, I found the Taj very well built for something that old. The "government" guide we hired tried to put a very romantic face to the whole story. Of course after the whole thing was over it didn't stop the sleazy bastard from cheating us.

One of the Moghul (Mongols) emperors of India tried very hard to have children, but failed although he had many wives. Mumtaz gave him a whole basketful of heirs. She died trying. She made him promise to take no more wives after her and to build the Taj. He delivered to the letter. I fail to see the romance in this (although it could very well be that the Emperor truly loved his wife as he could break his promise very easily after her death).

Yours truly...the Master of the Orange Bag.

The long road to Agra...

AIESEC's International Conference this year was to be held at Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. People from all over the world (including Singaporeans) gathered to hold fairs, meetings and conferences.

I have been away from home for some months now. The promise of seeing some Singaporean faces at Agra was reason enough for me to take some time off, despite a 22 hour train ride (each way) and a 2350 rs train ticket (ouch, I'm still hurting).

Max and Alvaro elected to stay home and watch HBO, and so on Thursday 1100 hrs, Beyhan and I boarded a train at Howrah station along with a few Indian AIESECers. Lucky for us, we were on a 2nd class air-conditioned sleeper train. The Indians elected to stay in a non-airconditioned cabin, but how they survived the 22 hr trip, I will never know.

The journey was for most part long and uneventful. We spent great amounts of time sleeping, chatting (sometimes with the passengers, those who could speak reasonable English) and watching the countryside go by. Occasionally we WOULD see something interesting (Elephants, towns, farmers and something else....)

For the first 4 or 5 hours on Friday morning, I was absolutely fascinated by the view from my compartment window. The window was made of scratched yellowed plastic, a light drizzle partially obscured the countryside occasionally like an old "noir" film. "The Legends of the Fall theme" issuing from my Zen Touch completed the romantic feel perfectly.

Beyhan kept his head buried in his Delphi 6 technical reference. He wouldn't know romance if it came up to him and bit him on his arse. ;p.

Word of advice to anyone on a long train ride in India: Bring your own food. There are no complimentary meals on board and while porters hop on board every stop to sell food and drinks. These are really fairly expensive and tastes like crap. To top it off, none of the food sold has any nutritional value whatsoever.

The highlight of our train trip to Agra happened on Saturday evening.

National Geographic time!

I always knew Indian men were more casual about bodily contact than any other races. Back in Singapore, it wasn't uncommon for two men to walk around holding hands. In India, the butt-squeezing was a bit of a shock...but I adjusted eventually, by putting my arse carefully against any wall I could find. What we saw on the train takes the cake and wins the jackpot.

A large family boarded the train and were seated in several compartments near ours. Since they wanted to take their meals together as a family in one compartment, seating arrangements were fairly cramped.

Some people had to shared a seat. Guy A got comfortable and treated Guy B like some kind of human chair. B had his legs wide open and A was some kind of sqooshed up against B's groin. Ok, so this was a little wierd, but still acceptable.

The family was having a nice time chatting merrily and laughing. B reached out and very casually put his hands into A's side pockets, working towards his groin area.

Man...

We couldn't actually believe what we were seeing, and yet noone was even in the slightest way disturbed by the scene that was unfolding in front of us. I will give some allowances for differences in culture and all, but if ANYONE EVER tries that, he is going to eat my knuckles. That night, me and Beyhan slept with our backs to the wall. ;))

Ibneh...they're ALL Ibneh....