Working From Home (WFH)

If some widespread pestilence had compelled me to work from home 25 years ago for a long duration, how would I have reacted?  With immense happiness, no doubt; for one single, stupid reason. Simply because all those absolutely redundant and most unproductive conference calls would have vapourised. Those where one logged in with a sickening feeling,  could say one's name to mark presence pretty much like a kid does in the class room and then hit the `mute' button forthwith.  Only to un-mute it after an hour, without any guilty feeling of deprivation of knowledge.  Actually, there was an even chance that one would have unwittingly avoided some impairment of knowledge because one meticulously shunned the proceedings. This benefit usually accrues if certain types of people participated in the call and they invariably did. And all those no-content, all-trash short meetings that surfaced every hour in the office would have vanished as well.  

Surprisingly many people whom I interviewed for this piece this week, expressed similar sentiments about the plethora of meetings, conference calls etc which prove to be routine impediments to a productive day at work.  Nothing seems to have changed for the better despite the passage of time.  Someone even told me that a few managers today keep the phone engaged for up to an hour at a stretch, just to get relief from annoying,  unscheduled conference calls.  It is another matter that Zoom and Skype have evolved to deny people a similar escape route.  Perforce you have to make an appearance with a serious, thoughtful face on the screen and are obliged to pretend to listen to a truck load of bunkum, because you can be seen and are subject to scrutiny.

Come to think of it, WFH has been in vogue for many jobs and households are used to this for many years.  With all those professions where the primary work is in the field or duties involved working the phone or computer all the time and the practitioner goes to an office for a few hours once a week to file some reports, show the face to the boss and convince he is alive, therefore deserves the next pay cheque.  Such households are probably silently smirking about the new WFH regime, wondering what the heck is new about all this. Women in such homes are probably the best candidates to mentor and provide psychological succour to all those clueless and harassed wives of today, who find themselves suddenly married to their husbands' jobs also besides their husbands, full time at home.  As my dear wife says, such wives deserve all the empathy because not only have they lost their freedom to air themselves a bit for shopping, pow-wow with friends and kitty parties, but are also coerced to baby-sit the husbands apart from real kids.  Multiple jeopardy, at one go!!  House work increases manifold because everyone is at home with heartless and hefty demands while women folk lose whatever little leeway they had.  

Many respondents clearly preferred the current blissful state of affairs, WFH.  No commute (big relief in almost all the cities), they said and lot more productive days because there are no disruptive meetings (mercifully, nobody to meet), no frequent chai-coffee breaks (one has to make one's own coffee or tea at home, so carefully avoided), no chit-chats and gossip (wives seldom entertain such trash).  Even other folks at home tend to carefully side-step those who are staring into their computers all day with severely screwed up visages and have massive, forbidding head-phones attached in order to keep intruders away. Of course, it is entirely possible that the husbands are watching You-Tube clips or even a TV show, but then why fiddle with something if that can be left well alone for the common good?  Other advantages are, there is no need to waste time in grooming yourself much, no pressure to dress up for office.  Unkempt looks are fashionable now and also convey the message that you are working so hard from home, you do not have time for routine chores. 

There are some problems, of course.  Not everyone is equipped to handle work from home.  Space, presence of too many suffering and therefore, volatile family members, inappropriate home location etc become irritants and issues, which prevent a good day's work being executed. The WFH candidate ends up ruffling too many feathers, with major long term consequences.  Some managers find it tiresome to co-ordinate meetings (one should assume they are the unavoidable and useful ones, otherwise why would you go seeking a meeting?) with all the constraints, real and imaginary, of the participants.  A few people believe there is always the risk of getting immersed in work and losing track of time, thereby work-time encroaching family-time. This is disastrous on a normal day, but with the wife already bristling under pressure due to WFH, such an outcome is not in the interests of the well-being of the home-worker.  

Then there are the others who would not do WFH for a day more than dictated by the current stifling circumstances. They miss the workplace magic, the buzz in the ambience, the constant interaction with colleagues, the lunches and coffees with buddies etc. The extra perks that landed on their tables, like commute by Uber, dinners if you work beyond 8 pm and the like are powerful incentives to be at the work place, especially if you are a solitary reaper and no-one is waiting for you at home. For many such people, this working-inside-a-vacuum feeling is not very appetising. 

A technology wizard rightly points out the serious danger of home wi-fi networks being vulnerable to malware which can infect the corporate networks; and, privacy of customer data can also be compromised in an unsupervised WFH environment. How far can companies go to keep an eye on the employee working from home or monitor him otherwise without the rest of the household going up in arms against what they would see as terrible intrusion into their homes? 

In the midst of all this, I happen to stumble upon one curious case of an individual who was doing the reverse of WFH.  She was cooking and sleeping in the office.  Nothing to do with Covid.  Her apartment was involved in a fire accident and she had to temporarily switch to some temporary residence to continue living.  The organization was good enough to accommodate her needs and she was a Living At Work specimen for a few months.  So, I realised that occasionally it works both ways.  But imagine some hundred employees asking for accommodation and food at the office simultaneously for legitimate reasons.  

As usual, the bottom line is if people working from home are going to be compensated for all the additional expenses they incur as well as the hardships they impose on the other family members in this process.  A few companies have already commenced sending some moolah their way, but I am not sure that practice is going to be universal.  If the money is good and people are happy, would companies start getting out of rentals and sell their furniture and equipment to settle for WFH permanently?? Moot point, as my dear wife decrees and no further debate on that, since she usually tends to be right.

 

Back Being A Virtual Back-bencher

For some strange reason, I had deluded myself into believing that my epoch-making statement would be received with euphoric excitement by my audience of `one' - my dear wife.  But it turned out to be the dampest of squibs and she betrayed no visible signs - of either euphoria or excitement.  You see, for decades she valiantly tried to nudge me into upgrading myself academically and professionally by getting a good MBA, but I got nowhere with that.  It turned out to be one more front on which yours truly failed her.  There was this complete absence of motivation in me for, nay well-nurtured antipathy towards, anything that smacked of further structured academic effort. This thorny issue remained a constant source of chagrin for her.  So, when I recently declared breezily, `I am a Harvard Alumnus now', she just glowered at me menacingly, with all the cumulative disdain she could muster.  Forced into providing a meaningful explanation, I went on to clarify that I just completed an online course of Harvard (available for free, of course) on the subject of 'Humanitarian Response To Conflicts And Disasters'. A rather impressive choice, any impartial bystander would agree.

Retired people who have managed their egos well in life would readily agree that the impact of the pandemic on their daily lives has not been anything phenomenal.  Because most retired people were home-bound anyway with some routine outings for airing themselves.  Some friends have snidely confided in me that the virus has just reinforced the well-entrenched dictum of most retirees' wives that retired males are meant for home, pottering around aimlessly for hours.  The splendid rationale is that such people had whiled away their working days outside home, so now is the opportunity to make up.  Whatever it is, I found that I had some more disposable time on hand, out of the total highly disposable time in a day and had to explore something to avoid being bored. When I chanced upon this website offering free online courses from various global universities, I fell hook, line and sinker and took the bait.  Why did this commendable effort not impress my dear wife??  Because it was not real Harvard,  there was no competitive jostle to get admission and it was free for any walk-in!!  Doesn't cut it with academicians like her, with very high standards.

 

The earliest realisation I had was that I had no patience for the video presentations of the professors and practitioners teaching the course.  They seemed to take forever to say what they wanted to.  Anyway, my preference for the written word over the spoken one was very clearly established historically. People look at me as if I have sprouted a few horns when I honestly confess that I enjoy reading Shakespeare's plays more than going to the theatre to watch them enacted. This may have something to do with the terrible acting, rotten acoustics and the worst possible ambience one had to suffer during most of the shows of my early days.  So, I found it far easier to read the transcript of the course presentations (which was displayed alongside the videos very obligingly) and understood them better, in half the time of the videos. My dear wife mumbled in response, `once a weirdo always a weirdo'!  Well, teachers justifiably would want the first go at the students to explain the stuff before the latter can resort to independent knowledge gathering from other material.  But, given my penchant, I throttled the voice of the presenter by muting and read the stuff. If you are fast with reading, you don't have to be impeded by the slower pace of the presenters. Also, you don't have to lose the thread or content because the presenter's diction or delivery is not in tune. Anyway, with due respect to the professors in the videos, it is not Vyasa or Valmiki or Homer presenting; nor was I  following Mahabharat or Ramayana or Iliad. There was no halo around the canopy of any presenter to dazzle, you see!  So, I kept to reading instead of listening and was none the worse off.

When the online system frequently insisted I provide comments on the segment completed, I felt like the veritable back-bencher of yore in college, nursing simmering discontent about the rigmarole of the examination routine.  That, mingled with mild pique at being forced to take a test to prove you have grasped stuff. When I complied with the diktat, my views were dictated by barely concealed cynicism towards organizations which were established with the noble objective of protecting the innocents and vulnerable from marauding warlords, but have consistently failed abjectly for decades. Also by the disenchantment with many of the NGOs which tend to gobble up big chunks of the contributions/funds received for administrative expenses and spend the remaining pittance inefficiently for the needy.   Consequently the tone of my comments varied from being critical to caustic from a pragmatic perspective, while recognizing the fact that all the aid organizations were involved in discharging an unenviable duty to tend to the millions of refugees from all the conflicts around the globe.  A very tough ask, indeed.    

The course did also give one a great insight into the functioning of governments of the countries involved in sectarian wars, disasters and self inflicted conflicts when it comes to management of the aid funds.  Especially, the irony of the perpetrators of all the violence and inequities as well as the originators of all the problems of the refugees being given a central role in the distribution of the aid!!  And a peek into the role of the volunteer aid organizations, which always seem to lack expertise and become the training ground for novices. A clear case of too little being done too late, but without these interlopers, even the tiny bit of good being achieved would be lost.

There were a few social media troll-types among the students, who harboured extreme opinions on various inputs from co-participants.  They pounced on a solitary word, even if they were stripping it out of context, and went at the source hammer and tongs belligerently.  For instance there was this chap who must have been an army veteran of sorts and took umbrage at any statement against any army unit, indulging in malpractices in the management of aid funds.  To him it didn't matter what army it was, even a sectarian warlord's bunch of thugs, and he bristled as if his own colleagues were vilified.  The whole thing was just amusing for its lack of maturity and balance.

Because the whole exercise was informal all the way and nothing serious was at stake (for me, I mean), there was no compelling urge for one to master everything.  It was easy to move quickly from one section to the other, without the need for completely absorbing minute facts and figures, so long as one digested the key material.  Result, a ten-week course got completed in four and the teacher at home was not amused, when she heard that. She looked at me as if I were an erring infantile and tried to make me go back and do the `entire' course again, despite my swearing I had done that. I had to prove myself by answering a few questions and did feel like a kid, in the process.

This type of learning is like any quiz. The early exercises are easy enough and keep your ego in tact and expectations inflated. Then they throw all the curved balls at you and try to take you apart with the tough ones, exposing your lack of understanding of the subject and preparedness.  But such progress is par for any course and should not deter the determined ones. So I am soldiering on. The next course I have enrolled in is about Responsive Cities.  Very soon I realized how far out of my depth I was. I was bamboozled in the third week by an exercise meant to redesign a sea-front area as a mixed use residential, commercial, official, cultural and entertainment centre.  With all the permutations and combinations possible, it was a load of fun, but I had huge difficulty in moving the pieces around for lack of proficiency with such things.  

Having completed that redesign, I am not even interested in finding out how good the outcome was in relation to the rest of the class. Why go for self-inflicted wounds?  I do have a good excuse, I am not an architect or engineer, so mine was dictated by common sense.  And common sense is bound to fail!

Ideally.......

The word `ideally' is possibly one of the most absurdly abused and terribly ill-treated in the English lexicon. If it can express its anguish standing on its hind-legs, it would probably collapse in a pool of gut-wrenching emotion and tears, before it completes the heart-rending story.  Story of being used very loosely, almost being bandied about, to describe various situations which don't even have nodding acquaintance with the ideal world.  If one thinks about it, this comes about because things, people and even thoughts which populate the ideal world differ drastically from person to person. Meaning there are so many ideals and sometimes the spectrum is so woefully stretched.  This is bad enough to confuse us but then the word is also used when people do not really mean `ideally' but something close to `preferably', thereby taking the downgrade a few levels further.  Where is the ideal stuff and where is petty, personal preference??

The other day, we were at a carnatic music concert and heard continuous chatter from the row behind.  One gentleman was behaving so demonstratively in his interventions with his wife during the concert, as if he considered himself a connoisseur a few rungs above the rest of the audience. I suspect this attitude he reserves for dealings with the spouse exclusively, because he can not find many kindred souls, who are either so sympathetic or so tolerant to put up with his kind of bombast.  After the singer concluded a song, this gasbag told the wife 'he should have ideally sung Devadi Deva instead of that one'.  At another point he opined that the singer should have ideally done raga Arabhi instead of Thodi.  It was clear he was stating a matter of his own personal, narrow preference, based on what he knew better, but forcibly made it part of the big ideal world. My dear wife, when we came out, said with a wicked grin `Ideally, I would not have married him even under severe duress; and if I was guilty of that grievous crime for reasons beyond my control, ideally I would have dumped him forthwith'! Agreed, completely.   

This word `ideally' will be repeated umpteen times on the day Indian cricket team  is announced for a match.  Probably about 1.3 billion times.  We are all inborn pundits of the game, have very strong opinions on its every little aspect and are compulsively driven by a burning desire to spout opinions, to boot.  So we hear so many 'ideal' combinations for the team tumbling out into public domain. `Ideally Jadeja should have played instead of Ashwin' or `Ideally Pant should have been the wicket keeper instead of Saha'. Given that there are eleven players in the team, about seven usually select themselves and for each of the other four slots there are at least multiple alternatives for each, one can imagine the permutations available.  That many mind-boggling ideal selections would be talked about for the next few days.  Then there would be expert comments like `Bumrah should have ideally started from the other end' (that would have been uttered just before he took three wickets on the trot in four overs to embarrass that expert) or Rahul should have ideally played in the middle order (again, he would have scored a century opening the innings).

  

Contextually, nowadays you hear a lot about what the ideal government should have done ideally to stanch the Covid spread.  This is a classic case of defective hindsight propping up dubious arguments. Nobody, absolutely none, had a clue as to how the contagion would spread and behave in India. Nor do we hear of any sizable country going that way in the quest to beat the virus. But now we hear seemingly intuitive guys, with `assumed'  foresight (not one could have correctly divined where that one mosquito circling in the room would touch down even after it squats on his own nose!) venturing forth righteously thus. 'That is why I said long back ideally we should not have had any lock-down; we should have ideally let the contagion spread so that herd immunity would have resulted'.  Now, there is no real data to shore-up this point of view, but proponents would still want to claim that ideally we should have done what Sweden did, no lock-down at all.  That Sweden is obviously a far-cry from the ideally suited comparison here for a thousand reasons is nowhere in the zone of reckoning for these seers.

Another of the government initiatives going through the churn nowadays is the ideal financial package. Ideally, govt should have put cash in the hands of every Indian who needed that.  But the government has contradicted that by going with what they think is ideally the best way, to give part as cash/kind and the rest as a loan for the family or small business to have money at their disposal for a fresh start, without unduly straining the government finances. One thing we all know for a fact is the ideally people prefer cash to loans at any level, since only one of them involves what is called repayment.  We have not heard the final ideal solution in this matter yet, the jury is still out. We will have to ideally wait awhile.

Everyone and as Boycott would say, his mother-in-law are now saying ideally the migrants should have been allowed to travel back to their home states at the beginning of the lock-down. The troubling visuals of hordes of migrants walking on highways and train tracks, burdened by kids and luggage, should make all of us  agree that this was not how it should be actually, forget about ideally. Rational individuals would believe that with the pestilence hovering over as a threatening cloud, ideally the migrants should have been kept in their shelters, properly cared for in terms of food and medical facilities in the cities because cities could handle the pressures better. This process was supposed to give precious time to the completely unprepared state governments to set up shelter, food arrangements, medical support etc to deal with the inevitable virus surge when the migrants return home.  Apart from reducing exposure for everyone to higher risks if a lot of people were moving around earlier.  Many parts of the ideal scenario did not work well in the cities for various reasons and due to the failures on multiple fronts.  And the ugly results are out for everybody to see now.  All of us need to ideally hang our heads in shame, but I know better; that won't happen.

A very common sentiment one hears in the stock market is `Oh, shucks, I should have ideally picked stock X over stock Y.'  I cannot tell where `ideally' comes into play in this gamble because one is expected to pick on the basis of facts and take the consequences, remembering this is not always a game of science.  There are a lot of imponderables in this, which can skew the results away from expectations.  If the idealist in you is tending to punt or speculate without basis, then this is ideally another case of cribbing in hindsight.

Very recently I came across statements about ideally an aid project to operate in a disaster situation,  running the entire operation on the pillars of neutrality, impartiality and independence. There is a lot said about how these principles, once adhered to, would ensure that the deserving people get the aid and funds were spent most usefully. But it is also very clear this has not fully worked in many aid projects. Actually we know it does not, even in a simple food distribution exercise involving some 200 people. So why would the principles work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Balkans or Rwanda, Syria -- all complicated places riven by local conflicts, exacerbated by political meddling by other countries??  Ideally what we need to do is inject a good dose of pragmatism in the principles in dealing with such dire situations.

So, we should ask what is meant when we loosely say `ideally' in very mundane contexts?  It would be apparent that it means different things to different people in the same context, because comprehension levels as well as expectations are different.  Actually there is no specific hint of anything ideal in such routine perceptions and statements and we find out -- surprise, surprise -- that`ideally' just translates directly to `actually what I like'.

After this my dear wife and I have decided that philosophically we will not ideally use the word `ideally' anywhere, if we can help it!!

Takeaways After 30 Days

God promise, I did not plan to venture into a sequel to the previous Covid blog post. But the problem is, there has been an absolute dearth of material flitting through the mind, which has been bludgeoned numb by the onslaught of virus related discussion all around. But do not fret, folks; I am not going to add to the information overload all of you are suffering from -- me too -- regarding Covid, with lane-wise, street-specific statistics. Just wanted to share some tit-bits my antenna has picked up over the past month about what is probably happening out there, when most people are happily or unhappily constrained to stay leashed to their homes. I am certain that all these nuggets, which are way out of common people's reach, are at least new, if not useful, to you. No, no need to thank me.  You are welcome. The least I can do. Just read on.

Trust me, in some cities and towns, certain types of movie songs have been banned out of sheer fright and as a matter of absurd precaution.  Ones which go like Aa jaa sanam, Aajaa re aa zara, Aayiye meherbaan in Hindi and Anbe Vaa, Nee enge en anbe, Vaaraayo en thozhi in Thamizh, (this is a very long list, but I hope you get the drift) which could even remotely be misinterpreted as an invitation to you-know-who, have been banished. Anyone who is heard to even badly hum such a song (even if it is a totally different one but comes out like one of these, thanks to the singer's/hummer's skill or the complete lack of it) runs the risk of being labelled a traitor to the community.  This serious antipathy has spread wings so fast that it is more infectious than the virus itself and can be equally injurious to health, I am told.

Old fogeys in various communities have been frightened out of their wits so much by a specific piece of intelligence filtering in. That the virus seems to have a very sharp search engine, multiple times more powerful than Google, which seeks and effortlessly culls out data relating to benign senior citizens minding their own sedate business. In the absence of clinching evidence as to wherefrom such data is being pulled out by the virus, panicked elders are going out of their way to achieve a complete wipe-out of all information regarding their birth dates and the like from systems supporting passports, aadhaar card, PAN, whatever.  Even birth certificates and SSLC books are being demolished. After the virus is gone, it might take another life time to reinstate all such data, if at all possible, in various Government offices. But the immediate goal seems to be to significantly diminish the threat of mortality.  They reason that if the virus gets them, this latter work would be redundant any way.  They firmly believe that if the virus does not know one is a senior citizen, there is less danger.

Swiggy, Zomato and assorted delivery companies were jolted by their discovery of a startling trend two weeks into lockdown - that the demand for Chinese cuisine evaporated into thin air, without a trace.  No, not because Indians have been offended by the inept way China handled the virus outbreak.  We have tolerated much worse from them for decades. But some vague research paper from a remote corner of Mongolia has apparently concluded (no proof has been provided, as usual) that the virus is very fond of  Chinese food, especially of the Wuhan denomination, as well as bodies used to it. That is the reason for that country and province being preferred as the originator of the contagion.  This obviously is too simple a rationale for Trump and the like, who are looking for more sinister designs behind the origin of the virus.  The same research paper also stated that the next preferred cuisine for the virus was Continental, meaning Spanish, Italian, French, etc. This has been borne out by the trajectory of the virus, taking it to Europe first and then to US which is partial to all those types of foods and many more.  Obviously the spicy, tangy Indian food is not a hot favourite in this milieu, which explains its less aggressive tangle with our country so far; even though the `curry' served in Britain seems to have a better appeal.

Another secret paper published inside White House has firmed up the theory that the hotter climes of South Asia have been able to dodge the virus significantly better, more or less.  Some experts have also expressed this opinion.  Keen to avoid a repeat when the virus comes visiting again later for the next round and to demonstrate his prowess as a `thinking' leader, Trump has stumbled on serendipity. He seems to have ordered Pentagon to try and violently tilt the axis of earth such that USA ends up relocating geographically to South Asia, catapulting all of us to USA.  The huge expense for this rather intricate project is being justified, it seems, with the following incontrovertible logic.  That with this fundamental shift, USA can stop worrying about H1B visas and all related administrative headaches since the whole of South Asia will be in the erstwhile US anyway, with or without visas.  And it is a bonus that the wall and Mexicans can be forgotten for ever.  `I am smarter than all of you', the President seems to have boasted after he pitched his idea to his appreciative staff.  It doesn't look like the fact that he will be China's neighbour has dawned on him yet.  I was not prepared to take this whole thing seriously, but my dear wife, who is a keen 'fan' of Trump's, swears this must be real, given that the harebrained contents of the plan seem to be very much in character.

Heavy drinkers -- drunkards seems a slur, even in these trying times -- are, at the best of times when booze is available aplenty, nervous people.  When supplies in the open market have dried up and even the open market itself is absconding, this tribe has become desperate in the extreme.  They are out to forage whatever stock is available wherever and to that end, are using all their extensive networks for research and execution. A teetotaler friend recently told some of his cronies that he had some spare booze left from some celebration.  Almost overnight, he started getting calls and messages from perfect strangers at all ungodly hours. God knows how they got the contact details, but this category of people acquire high grade resourcefulness when they are in an acutely deprived state, I understand.  They were asking the friend to confirm that he was a genuine contraband dealer and he could supply to specific locations in the city, in bulk at twice/thrice the market rate.  The friend is now more stricken with this infliction than he would have been if the virus visited him.

Women folk at home are sick of the men doing binge watching of whatever Netflix and Prime can throw at them, regardless of the language.  Women would have been happier if men made themselves a tiny bit useful with chores at home, but no such luck.  Not only that, the latter want to replicate the multiplex experience and do this by rearranging sofas/recliners to get the feel of the Gold Class, switch on the aircons and start ordering the women to start supplying eats and drinks at their seats.  Reports are out that the wives are viciously getting back, resorting to playing the national anthem frequently, disrupting the show and making the men stand up when they least expect that. 

During regular working days, habitual liars got away explaining their late home-coming from a round of pubs with a vague `Oh, had a couple of long conference calls'. This group seems to be in serious trouble. Wives are asking how come such conference calls have ceased suddenly during WFH times, when logically they should have been more frequent. So, nowadays men are hiding away in balconies and terraces, pretending to be on phone calls while watching movies on laptops, with earphones tuned in.  We are waiting for 'discovery' time and a report on the consequential pandemonium -- only a matter of time.

I am sure a lot more is going on and it is impossible to cover everything, you will agree.  We just hope the virus recedes soon and we are all back to some semblance of normalcy.  Amen.

The Scourge Is Here

Disclaimer:  The intent of this blog post is not to scoff at Covid or belittle the collective efforts of the country to fight it.  In such seriously depressing times, if a few people can smile through all the weariness, the objective would be achieved.
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Ours is a country where a cacophonous and high-decibel argumentativeness, often acrimonious,  characterizes everything from parliamentary debates through TV news to street-side bargains and household discussions.  Amartya Sen has done a stupendous job of portraying this part of the Indian psyche in his book.  Even democracy is equated unabashedly with the ability to bludgeon opponents with larynx power in public spaces. And we Indians are experts at looking for ways to cut corners, dodge regulations, identify or innovatively create (Jugaad?) rat-holes to hide away from authority, while scooting from responsibility and accountability.  I know that is too much of a generalisation, forgive me. Most of all these are predictably blatant, self-serving efforts, with a few exceptions here and there.  So, nothing one comes across in the media about people's responses and reactions to Covid itself and to the government's efforts to fight the virus, however bizarre and asinine, should surprise anyone.  We Indians are like that only and will never shy away from switching on our headlights and drive against the traffic on highways because such absurd behaviour is ingrained in us and is our birthright.  Even if it results in a chaotic mess and public disaster time and again.

So, an average Indian should not lose his equanimity even when members of the state assemblies and government ministers mindlessly choose to attend soirees and bashes, hosted by dim-witted celebrities who have recently returned from a wild `phoren' sojourn in Italy and France.  Completely ignoring the country's Prime Minister and government screaming from roof-tops that people should practise social distancing, cease community activities and stay indoors as much as possible.  Or when self appointed, godliness-infused spiritual agents, surely based on direct diktats from God Himself, organize massive congregations in public spaces to sing and pray for reprieve from Covid.  Or when thousands of purblind herds of followers ignore all common sense and attend such gatherings.  Or when the Chief Minister of a state government vigorously bans in the morning through a government mandate, all gatherings of ten or more people and directly proceeds to preside over a pompous wedding with a thousand people attending, in the evening.  For us, this is par for the course and all we feel is deja vu!!

Comic relief in this distress comes from multiple directions.  One old classmate of mine from a village near Thirunelveli in Thamizh Nadu called a few times to ascertain what Bangalore was doing in terms of taking precautions.  Being highly pro-active with marked political leanings, he wanted to implement similar measures in those communities.  But given the agrarian nature of the population, working from home was not a concept suitable to their setting.  Nor was the idea of self quarantine/isolation of people returning from foreign trips appealing .  Finally he agreed to stay with simple measures like looking out for people falling sick, social distancing, avoiding community galas etc.  He ended the final conversation with a weak joke that his concern was that they were probably the closest in the country to the Chinese submarines and warships -- possibly infected? - in the Indian ocean.

I was fondly hoping that some authentic looking American scientist (we don't trust the local ones, do we?) would advocate the theory that smartphones and their damning accomplices like WhatsApp, Instagram etc can be certain carriers of the virus, if people are engaged with them long enough.  For a brief interregnum, the government came up with a reasonable but partial alternative deterrent in the form of the one-minute advisory, beginning with a cough, whenever one made a call on the phone.  Having to compulsorily listen to that, many people deferred their calls and if the first call went unanswered, refused to redial.  And the smarter counterparts did not call back either, having got allergic to the same advisory.  My dear wife neither got calls nor made many and said she was put off by the idea of hearing the advisory in the same unappetising voice, as if she would have been happier if Arijit Singh and Shreya Ghosal had recorded the same as a song!  I am sure this month's phone bill will be considerably less for many households.

And today, I heard one Dr Thomas Cowan, who convincingly links the last few major virus outbreaks to increasing electrical signals on the earth and above.  His theory (may be someone else's, which he is propagating) is that the Spanish flu in 1917 was the result of the introduction of the first wave of radio signals, which invade our bodies and result in cells decaying and getting discharged as a contagion.  Thus, at the end of the world war, there was a massive surge in the number of radars etc which brought about the next outbreak and so on.  The final nail on the coffin is, if this is indeed true, that the current Chinese virus (let me make Trump happy) is the result of the humongous increase in electrical signals from, guess what, G5.  I was floored when he finishes by asking if we can surmise where the biggest G5 drive is concentrated.  Yes, Wuhan, in China.  Creepy, isn't it?

A week back, all of a sudden, there was a great proliferation of masked faces in our community and one could not even say hello with certainty because recognition was rendered difficult. They all looked similarly simian with the protruding mask.  Unless you got within two inches of the individual and did a nose-rub Maori style, there was no way of fixing the identity -- and that would have been violative of social distancing norms.  If they hailed first, voice identification was also sub optimal because the mask significantly corrupted the voice.  So, for a few days now, I am enthusiastically waving in the general direction of everyone, a la the Pope, and keep going.  But we should be grateful that the masks are not all in a single colour.  They come in various bright colours, otherwise would have been very boring.  God bless the mask makers.

Amidst all the hullabaloo, there was a very serious discussion in some group about the need, not even desirability, of keeping golf courses open -- the logic was that golfers can go to courses just to practise social distancing and the exercise is a bonus.  There was collective angst and frustration because courses were closed and people could not take out their anger on the poor golf balls, which never once reacted in a negative way but ended up some 45 degrees away from the intended spot, thereby showing their displeasure.

Some other hilarious take-aways from this situation, according to aggrieved anti-virus campaigners -- are that everything imported from China for the next few years, including metro rail coaches should be boiled in hot water for appropriate period of time before being commissioned; the other alternative is not to import anything from China, thereby imposing a cost on the country for exporting the virus (Trump will eventually say this and gladden a lot of hearts, I think);  many of the usually entertaining politicians like Rahul Gandhi, Mamta Banerjee have been very restrained and almost silent in the face of the virus and that is probably the only positive emerging from the situation; all domestic pets seem to be terribly upset that everyone is staying home all the time and are probably planning to take people out for walks once in a while, leashed or otherwise; the expression of anger/disappointment at IPL being postponed, as if that is almost the end of the world, even if not caused by the virus.

I am only hoping that the tribe of TV anchors and all those bawling, truculent people who occupy those boxes on the screen are treated as extremely dangerous in this current context and kept in isolation for 5 years, to protect the masses and also the virus (so that some sample survives for research purposes)!!


     


 

   

Went On A Cruise!

For at least one decade, my dear wife and I have been unwaveringly unanimous - very rare indeed - in declining all invitations to join groups of friends on a cruise.  Visuals in commercials of the huge cruise ship and the oh-so-blue ocean in the commercials were good, but not tempting enough, so we stayed away.  Only because we thought that a cruise could wait till we are closer to the wheel-chair phase of our lives! When, finally, we disembarked from our first cruise a month back, our judgement got a thundering affirmation.  If you are the reasonably active kind, cruises can wait.  We consciously chose a short 5 day cruise from Miami to the Caribbean islands of Turks & Caicos and Dominican Republic, to limit the cumulative boredom that we could absorb.  There are quite a few enjoyable things about the cruise, but a longer one would have probably stifled us too much.  Juxtapose that with the fact that there are very strange people who stay afloat on cruises for months, across continents.  God bless them! And we even heard the story of a widow who prefers to criss-cross continents on different cruises for months, without getting to anything remotely looking like a home on shore.  A very different breed indeed.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the most physically draining activity on a cruise is to get out of the bed in the morning and reach the deck where the activities, especially the one exercising the food-pipe, are concentrated.  A day's routine for many individuals/groups seemed to be "breakfast-sunbathing-drinks-lunch-pool-tea-bar-dinner-back to bed"; but there were those whose days stretched to 16 hours of the above routine, thereby indicating it was far from monotonous for them.  We guess our types were the wrong ones on the ship because these chaps knew what they wanted to do on board and stuck aggressively to their plan, having fun all the way.  One common denominator for all these groups was that they all had purchased a Drinks Package for the cruise, which gave them access to sufficient quantity of liquor, any time of the day, during the cruise.  Just so that the usually recalcitrant kids did not complain, they bribed them with the Soft Drinks Package; consequently, there was this particular brand of absolutely noisy peace on board, as the drinks flowed liberally.

The only other phenomenon that assumed greater proportions than drinking was of course, eating.  Let me put things in perspective by saying that out of the 24 hours in a day, there was not a single hour something was not being put out by the cruise's chefs for people to gorge on.  The completely captive audience, perennially looking to fill up some unidentified crevice in an already over-burdened stomach with something more, was an eager and willing partner in this tango. I would say that about three quarters of the cruisers were members of the brigade striving to stuff their face all the time.  About 15% were those whose spirits were willing to participate in this gluttonous orgy but their bodies rejected the overture due to lack of capacity. The residual lot managed to retain their innate discipline, ate what they had to and looked distastefully at the massive spread of food as well as those who were having a hearty go at that.  My dear wife succinctly described the scene as a non-stop buffet for 5 days, where food was aplenty, plates were on hand and payment had already been made - whether you eat or not. So.

For all that, we found the vegetarian selections to be limited and repetitive.  One night, at the formal dinner, for want of anything else I asked for a strawberry bisque, which was listed as a starter.  What arrived was a dessert, masquerading as a solid soup/starter.  Not bad it was, but it sort of turned the sequence of my dinner dishes on its head and I was almost ready to leave the table after the beginning.  There seemed to a sizable group of chefs of Indian origin and for that, there was an awful spread of Indian/Asian food.  These chefs somehow gave me the impression that they did not want to indulge in pow-wows; they probably thought I would ask for idli, dosa or curd rice.  They thought right!!

We kinda estimated that about half the cruisers were happily obese.  Either they were life-time cruise hoppers on an eating binge or were just avidly practising their art on the ship instead of in their homes.  When we were next to a group of such gifted people, we felt like midgets in the midst of giants and shrank ourselves a bit to make way for them.  To think that a few ounces of extra flesh on my body is a frequent subject matter for discussion at home, brought a wry smile to our faces.  The question we tried to find answer to was do obese and fat people actively seek out cruises, because the whole cruise system seems to lend to their way of life of huge amount of eating and very little exercise??     

If we were entertaining any stray thoughts of sailing alongside some whale or shark or for a stellar show by a school of dolphins, we banished that within a few hours of boarding. Nothing showed up for long hours, except a few sea birds which probably had lost their way. We will never find out. We wondered where they park themselves when they get tired, unless they could land on the waves like sea-planes do. The obvious answer is they never tire of flying, probably.  We got excited whenever we saw a few coast-lines and by looking at the ship's position, guessed the land parcels to belong to Cuba or some other Caribbean island. Few stray vessels showed up and other cruise ships crossed us in inky darkness, reminding me of that famous quip by PG Wodehouse about `ships crossing in the sea at midnight'.  Having said that, it was tremendously peaceful to just watch the ocean slip by for hours and the changing colour of the sea depending upon the depth, stuff lying underneath, the sun etc was just fascinating.  With a book, one can sit in the state-room's balcony and shut out all the hubbub on the main deck, if necessary and we chose to do that often.

Strangely, we did not hobnob with anybody for considerable lengths of time.  No friends were made.  Was it due to our desire to keep away from crowded locations and raucous groups or did others shun us because we were looking like the weird ones??  Compare that with a train journey in India, when overnight we effortlessly make friends of strangers and food get exchanged four times in a few hours!!  So, why is a cruise different?  I am sure there were a few others like us on the cruise, but they must have been hiding from us too!  The answer is that there were no berths to share and everyone was in a room, however cramped it was.

Some enjoyable parts of the cruise involved a trio of young violists from Belarus, who were fantastic and kept us engaged for a couple of hours each evening, without repeating too many songs.  Also, an Australian singer, who had a great voice and sang songs from the past that we could identify with.  What more, he asked for requests and all ours were belted out with fervour.  And what more, he acknowledged us among that decent crowd.  Good stuff.  And our valet for the 5 days was a smiling Balinese man, who grinned broadly the first time he saw us, pronounced my name faultlessly and did a `namaste' in true Indian/Balinese fashion.  Felt very good and he became a good ally for short conversations about his beautiful country and people.

Fifth day on the cruise, at breakfast, I looked forlornly at what I had on my plate - the same omelette and hash browns I have had for the previous four days.  I recalled ST Coleridge's lines `Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink'.  So much food all around and somehow I was feeling constrained in choice!!  A sense of relief and pleasure swept over me when I realised that was our final meal on the cruise and in a couple of hours, we would be disembarking.

Will we go on another cruise ever??  My dear wife thinks yes.  But with a group of friends and on a cruise where a lot of vegetarian food is available.  I may be able to live with that. 

Until then, `land ahoy' it is for us.



  

Vocational Behaviour Patterns

As keen observers of our cacophonous environment and turbulent life as it swirls around us, as most of us would want to pride ourselves, we should be familiar with the unmistakable traits of people plying their individual trade or vocation.  It is not as if I woke up from slumber today and decided to do behaviour-analysis of specific tribes of people we exist with.  This is the cumulative experience-driven gleaning, aggregated from decades of observations, distilled with care and canned for casual reading; never to be mixed up with a diatribe on people of different vocations.  The intent here is not to hurt anyone, but just to hold a tiny mirror to some sets of people.  So, please drop that cynical and critical prism you generally look through and frown; just chuckle, laugh or ignore, as you please.

Have you noticed that delivery people of any stripe, religion, caste, creed, colour and denomination, regardless of whatever exalted or humble company they work for, always arrive at your door-step at an inopportune time??  When you would rather have them somewhere else, say, a few kilometres away??  The general high-handed assumption with which these deliverers start their work is that you have ordered the stuff, so you are duty-bound to wait at your address, ignoring everything else in life and just focusing on the impending delivery.  The companies will graciously mention a period, say 9 am to 7 pm, long enough to  deny you the freedom to do anything else except wait for the tryst.  And you know when the delivery finally shows up - at 6.50 pm, to enable the company to gloat on on-time delivery, `always'. If you need the stuff badly, you have no choice but to stick around; if you move away to the bathroom or neighbour's house, it is very likely that the deliverer goes on to the next victim and your delivery is re-tagged for 9 am to 7 pm the next day, make for one more day of entertainment and excitement for you.

The other salient features of deliverers are (1) Pressing the calling bell at home thrice within 4 seconds with alacrity, to show their impatience with waiting - the gall of it -- disdainfully disregarding your own waiting for hours (2) Never showing up in the mornings when people generally are up and about and ruthlessly disturbing you during the afternoon siesta. And they are always in a hurry, perhaps answering their sworn calling to go to the next chap and wake him up too (3) Waiting till you climb up two floors after doing a chore on the ground floor of your home and then ringing the bell with obvious glee at your breathless discomfiture, having to descend again (4) Calling you when you are 10 kms away and asking you to reach post-haste so that you can sign for the debit or credit card, for which you have been waiting for one week; and yes, he can wait for 90 seconds, nothing more. (5) Perfectly knowing well that you are retired, captive audience at their disposal, asking you for approval to enter your residential complex with 20 other deliveries to do; then incredibly disposing of all the other deliveries before finally coming to you.

What about auto-drivers? The moment you approach one, the curtain opener is invariably his spitting whatever is in the mouth - colourful or otherwise - out on the road, just a foot or so away from you.  I received edification from a seasoned and tough auto-driver dealer that we should not assume this act is just a casual, innocuous one.  This sets the contours for the forthcoming negotiation/possible ride and cautions you that the next spit may not be a foot away, unless you are reasonable in dealing with his own inherent unreasonableness.  Most auto drivers seriously believe they are God's gifts to people, doing a big favour to commuters by taking them anywhere and their behaviour generally reflects this attitude.  The fake bonhomie with which they welcome arrivals at a railway or bus station stems from  the warped belief that each one is new to the city and is a solid candidate for mindless fleecing.  The moment they become disenchanted in this pursuit, they turn rude and recently one chap even manhandled a person who refused to deal with him.  This is not to say, there are no good specimens among auto drivers.  There are some, kind, polite, helpful auto drivers, but you seldom meet them!!  They seem to carefully hide themselves from us.

A true-blue newspaper deliverer will always give you Deccan Herald instead of your favourite and usual Times of India twice a month; and twice a month one of the four papers you buy will go missing completely without any pretense of being replaced. The agent's excuse always is that he has new campus recruits to the highly demanding job and the intern/trainee deserves time to learn.  Until then you better eat up the paper that is served.  Also, if it is raining, you can count on the guy dropping the paper in obviously wet areas, such that you get some 60% of the news, if lucky.  The rest is a soggy, unreadable mess.  Once, when I complained to the deliverer, he nonchalantly dismissed me saying `Sir, this is all old news.  Go online and get the latest'.  And he rode off, looking at his smartphone as he rode, leaving me speechless.

During our childhood, a security guard's profile was such that he was at least above average height, had a good enough physique to deter random guys from creating small scale mischief; he was typically a retired guy from the army.  Nowadays anything goes and we see security guards who are five feet tall, scrawny, weighing about 50 kgs and one wonders if they can even stand up to budding and aspiring bullies, leave alone midnight marauders.  A security guard is not one, if he does not nod off during the working hours and if you watch one periodically for a few hours, you can catch him blissfully asleep, ignoring the hordes of mosquitoes which swarm around him.  Just to delude everyone including himself that he is on duty, he manages to tap the bamboo stick a couple of times on the ground at a reasonable frequency.  I guess it reassures himself  but keeps people in the immediate vicinity more awake and alert, especially the older ones, who are sleep-deprived anyway.  At the end of the day, so long as no untoward incident takes place, everyone is happy and a bunch of such young kids are probably just about the deterrent required.

Then there are the house-keepers, who inexplicably keep moving things from their original positions (where you want them to be) during their elaborate dusting performance every single day, at least by a few inches, prompting you to readjust after they are done.  This minor, probably involuntary,  revolt either gives them the satisfaction that they control the placements or convinces them that they are doing their jobs.  A maid or gardener, who does not 'kill' the same relative frequently, just to get a day off, does not qualify to be a gardener or maid. A gardener who arrives to trim the plants protruding into the balconies on the higher floors, will never arrive with the required ladder; even if it is a monthly chore he has been performing inadequately for years.  He will reach with the scissors, sickle and other contraptions, then doubtfully look up at the balcony he has known had existed for time immemorial, look around to find a jugaad-like solution and then go to retrieve the ladder which should have come along in the first place.

Many of us have grown up with teachers amongst us.  Some of us might have encountered multiple teachers at home, in each generation.  Like yours faithfully, whose grandfather, father, many uncles and aunts had all been Principals, Professors, Headmasters and teachers.  And then came the teacher of all teachers, my dear wife.  So much so, that the arduous responsibility of being a student or learner at home squarely and heavily falls on the few souls, who decide to be non-teachers.  A teacher seldom casts aside the teaching mantle, even when he or she is not in school.  The rest of the family learns to cope with constant questioning because the teacher believes teaching through catechism is the better way.  Even before one finishes the explanation to the previous question, the next `why' or `how so' pops out quickly, making the most prolific of speakers struggle for breath and words after some time.  If the answer or clarification does not provide satisfaction, while thankfully you are not asked to kneel on the floor or stand up on the bench or get out of home, there is no mistaking the fact that the teacher is unhappy about your shortcoming and a corrective session will follow down the line, involving a serious monologue.

Sometimes the home-teacher's instruction could be contradictory, leaving you confounded as to which way you should go.  My father was a real guru for all of us and a lot of our learning came from just observing him.  But sometimes he used to get testy about some action of mine and I had been frequently admonished not to talk back at elders, even if some questions are specifically asked of me.  Point taken, I used to assume the stoical position of a statue, cast in concrete, all respectful and stubborn silence, during the next grilling session.  Then I was accused of being akin to a thief caught in the act and having nothing to say in self-defence and was encouraged to at least mumble something in response.  I learnt not to fall for this taunt because once I responded, things go back to status-quo-ante, with me being admonished again for talking back!!  He never solved this distressing and vicious tangle, by laying out a clear process for such situations.  Didn't matter because, after half an hour, he was playing cricket with all of us and all else was forgotten.

My current in-house teacher is very kind and patient and I never get reprimanded for my acts of omission and commission.  But I do get the feeling that some teaching is always going on in the background, consciously or otherwise.  I try to learn as much as I can but I think I am yet to make the grade in terms of learning with my dear teacher-wife!