Selfie Suicides

This post has been long pending and I am sure numerous people have written on it before but, what the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt. I was having a conversation one day with my cousin, my mother and my aunt about a relative who was sitting on top of a Mumbai local train and got electrocuted. It reminded me of a news report about a person who died the same way, only he was posing for a selfie while on top of a moving train. This got me thinking, how much is a selfie worth?

These days the selling features of a phone are not its call features but by how advanced the selfie camera is. They call it selfie phones. But the question is, how important should selfies be to a person, enough to risk their lives, or even worse, risk other people’s lives? I had read about an incident where two students climbed on to a rock that rise out of the sea during low tide to click a selfie with his friends and did not notice the that the tide came back. They were swept away when a man who lived nearby noticed this and dived. He saved one of the three youngsters but drowned himself. Human nature is such that people constantly need appreciation and acknowledgement. Selfies are a perfect way of demonstrating oneself before the world in the most daring, exclusive and exquisite ways. But is it okay to fall into water canals or drown in rivers or get hit by a train in this pursuit of appreciation? I doubt.

Maybe if we all took a little time off our busy schedules to appreciate the people around us for little things like a new haircut or a new recipe or an assignment well done or maybe just for providing good company people won’t feel the need to go to daring extents to be appreciated. Here’s hoping. J

Cluey Part II : Shantiniketan'er Toto-wala.

This is a longish post but I hope you can make it to the end.
My elder brother introduced me to the term cluey which in one word explained what exactly I felt when I wrote my last post. I think all of us feel cluey about something or the other quite often in out lives and the feeling cannot be better explained. For all of you who haven't come across the word "cluey" before you could take a look at this.
So now that you know what cluey means. I must admit that it is a feeling I experience very very often. A few days back, I had taken a trip to Shantiniketan with my mother, aunt and my cousin. It was quite an eventful journey but this one incident with a Toto-wala is something which ended up having the strongest impression on my mind and has left me feeling very cluey for a long time. So what happened is this. In some places in India including Shantiniketan, a Toto is the faster equivalent of a cycle rickshaw. In small places like Shantiniketan, Totos and cycle rickshaws are actually the only mode of conveyance. On our first day there we spoke to one such Toto-wala (Toto driver) to take us around the next day and agreed on an approximate rate. The next morning, Raju (our Toto-wala) was there before time and as discussed he took us too all the places that had been agreed upon. He was a youngish man in his 20s I suppose. He was soft-spoken and respectful and as you can assume, the parents found him very agreeable. We started at 10 in the morning and everything was comfortable apart from the heat. Raju had to cover almost all of his face with a cloth to tackle the loo. By the time we got back it was almost 4 in the evening and that is when things got a little bad. As you can imagine, after the whole day of driving, Raju probably realized that he had charged insufficiently the day before and when it was time to make the payment he started asking for Rs. 800 instead of Rs. 300 like he had said the day before. Obviously the parents lost it, scolded him and paid him Rs. 600.

Now if you ask me, I think expecting him to be satisfied with 300 after that long trip was not fair at all. Also it should be mentioned here that while my Aunt lost it a little bit and called him a cheater and what not he never spoke rudely or disrespectfully. Just kept saying very sadly, "ete hobe na didi, shotti bolchi. Chalate parbo na ami." ("This is not enough Ma'am. I swear. It wont be enough"). For a moment I thought he was going to start crying. However, I do understand the grown-ups point of view a little, "if it was not enough you should have said so before!". Anyhow they finally handed him 600 bucks and we left. That same day we had a train back home and earlier we had asked Raju if he could drop us to the station. While we were leaving, he called back and in spite of being sreamed at so much asked, "Didi station e jaben toh" (You will go to the station with me right?). The parents were almost about to start grumbling again when I quickly managed to convince them to let him take us. Back at home my aunt kept complaining as to why he behaved like that and he was so wrong and that my mom should have stuck to 300 and not paid him extra. She said they were very clever and only tried to extort as much as possible. Anyway, he came again an hour or two later and dropped us to the station. This time the rate was again pre-decided and he did not say anything more about it till we were turning to leave. Just when we got off and were about to walk away he turned to my mother, joined his hands and said. "Bhool hoye geche. Khoma korben. Kichu mone korlen na toh?" which means, "I am so sorry. I was wrong. Please don't mind."
Now I know that bus drivers and cab drivers and rickshaw puller everywhere are generally known for misbehaving and extorting unreasonably. But all I want to say is maybe not all of them are bad people. Maybe some of them are nice. Maybe we do not know what conditions they live in or the difficulties they face that push them to behave badly. Maybe sometimes we should be a little patient with them and not assume the worst. Some of them are genuinely good people stuck in bad situations.

A Lesson Learnt!

So I am writing a post after a year.. Not that I forgot about my blog but somehow or the other it kept getting postponed and before I knew it so many months have gone by. Anyway, I recently had an experience and I decided to finally write about it.
I met a lady. I had gone to Mumbai and was putting up at a guest house on sharing basis. On my first night there I was sharing the room with an oldish lady. She said she was Gujarati but she lived in Kenya. You must be thinking why I suddenly decided to write about her. Well, to be honest, I was sitting uselessly during internship one day and I suddenly remembered about the blog and was determined to write a post. So I tried to think about something I could write on and this lady popped into my head and it made sense to me.
So this lady, (either she did not tell me her name or I cant seem to remember it for some reason), asks questions. From the time I entered the room she kept asking me a million questions about my life, my work, my family, my affairs and every other possible aspect of my life. Now that might sound harmless to you but in my defense, that was the first time that I had been alone in an unknown city all by myself. The point being I was quite taken aback by the degree of inquisitiveness and was a little scared to be honest. I did not know where she actually came from, what she was doing there and why she wanted to know so much about me.
Since childhood we are taught not to talk to strangers or take sweets from them. And there I was in an unknown city in a room with a stranger who would not stop asking me everything about myself. So my first impression of her was that of pure suspicion and dislike.
Later, the next day she came to me in the morning and asked me, "are you unhappy that I moved into the room?" I was not prepared for a question like that and as much as I would have liked to say, "yes very much so", something inside me slightly softened for her. That night she asked me when I leave for office in the morning and the next morning I was really surprised when I overslept a little bit and she tried to wake me up so that I don't get late. This was just one of the many things she did during her 3 day visit which completely changed the way I felt about her. She was concerned when I kept sneezing and offered me fruits when I did not have anything to have for breakfast. She offered to make my bed when I was getting late and she took care of me like she has known me since childhood. She left three days later and told me before leaving, "Hey, I am leaving today. Won't be bothering you anymore." She left that night and believe it or not I actually missed her when she was gone. She taught me how wrong it is to always assume the worst about people, something we probably do quite often in our lives.