3 weeks notice

Been three weeks now since I landed and it has been an up-and-down thing till now for me back here. India, as is to be expected, is loud, crowded, polluted, hot, sweaty, unpredictable and all that, but it is also indescribably endearing and comforting. Something about habit and the ease of finding something to do I guess.

A number of journeys, by bus, train and car, and also a few by auto and on foot, and still there is much more to see, obviously. Different places have been eye-openers in different ways. Bangalore with its near ultra-modern, by Indian standards of course, cosmopolitanism, in its nerve centres and hip places, and the backwaters town look of its backstreets and alleys, has in itself been a revelation. (I have had a coffee for Rs.100 and also an entire meal for Rs.10 - go figure!)Pathetic the absence of enough English markers but pretty neat in terms of arrangement - the parks, the places to see, the simple city structure and the neatly folded Eicher maps - though the universal cry is for infrastructure. Chennai has been good too but not much in the form of exploration yet - that will come by-the-bye.

Met loads of people too, all interesting, all with a story to tell, all the time. From the suave smoothness and intellectual acumen of IIM professors to the dynamism of people closer to my age who want to be, and are already, the happening people, to the local autowallah and watchman, watching bemused as the world they hadn't heard of except in stories from beyond the seas, scarcely credible, takes shape in front of their eyes. The languages that roll smoothly from the different tongues, the accents, the tones and the stories they tell, the sweat that oozes from out of some pores and the whiff of an imported cologne from others, the simple aspirations and the grand ambitions that crowd all those busily knotted foreheads, all this and more - a hundred years, they say rightly, will not be enough.

The rest, of course, in detail, later.