Through Sartre’s Nausea

One of the book I had found tough to read in grey surrounds of England is Sartre’s “Nausea”, which I finally completed in Ahmedabad recently; perhaps because it was still brighter in my close confined room here than the gardens of Surrey. The rounded rectangular orange-whitish ticket for London underground used as bookmark indicated the date as 25th Oct 07, and so I realise it had been some time since I started with this book. Through this book, many times I felt Nausea too, but in my head. The humanist constantly battered by the realist is an interesting thing to look here.

Sartre's maiden published work, looked very personal to me and led me closer to understand why he must have declined accepting 1964 Nobel prize in literature, with the argument that he has every moral reason to do so.

Make sure you have enough brightness around before you pick up this book.

Kaddu v/s Tomatoes

A two kilo kaddu costs fifty paisa in an Eastern Bihari village where it grows. Fifty kilometres off, not so much a well off place but a district town centre, the same thing costs 10 rupee. In the same town, tomatoes cost ten rupees a kilo and most people cannot easily afford either. Overnight distance across in Uttaranchal where the same tomatoes come from, the farmer will give you the tomatoes for free because they are going to rot anyways. So, people in both places eat most of what they grow, they keep their habits intact, and therefore build a cultural culture. However, inside them also builds up desires for mobile phones, cars, electricity and so on. In London, the very next day the same tomatoes and kaddus sell for 100 -200 rupees, but, from somewhere else. And, while all this happens, people queue up in government offices (note: 50 kms from the same villages) and wait for the relief of meagre 2000 rupees for the floods that happened last year.

So what the main cause of this problem ? Lack of access and infrastructure clearly one reason. But then whose job is it to build the simplest thing - the road?

People (waiting at the government office): Whose? The government’s! It’s their Road and building department (RnB) who is supposed to make roads.

Sir, you are an executive engineer from the RnB – why are the rural roads in such bad condition?

Answer: Hmm, but the rural roads specifically are taken care by another department called ‘rural roads depeartment’.

But sir, what about the conditions of your roads?

Answer: No! they are fine. We get instructions and we build them. I know from Patna, we are low on budgets.

Me thinking – If the peoples get better roads, although it will be much easier to visit back, the migration will become easier. They can come back home more frequently. Usually from Punjab, where they can work as farm labourers growing wheat and Makka we Indians are proud of.

Ping Pong is Coming home

Thank you Boris (recently elected London Mayor) for the belly grabbing laugh I missed for years. See below his speech after he returned from Beijing with the Olympic flag...
VIDEO

An expensive hobby - Photography

Got a camera, live in the UK, and look like an Indian? * Well, then you could be a terrorist. Nothing serious if you are not one of those spreading hate, and not really meant to be prosecuted as one, but it is highly likely you will be generally questioned on the basis of this little doubt.

The incidence was a slight wrong coincidence when my mind assumed that the cluster of lights leaking through the coarse voids of a dense shrub looked beautiful, and then on top, a heavily improbable coincidence that the cop car zoomed past. The two cops, well communicative, and nicely spoken told me it was nothing personal and they want to be really polite (!), but in the recent climate, and under the terrorism act which has some number 41 to it, they are bound to stop and question me. We talked a little, he took my details with my full cooperation. Surprisingly he didn't ask me to show the picture I took.

Or, the other coincidence can be just me, just me, an individual who always has this luck, whether at home India or the foreign UK that he gets caught and questioned by the cops... Kyon bhai kya kar rahe ho!

*Just found out . Looking like an Indian is not an issue anymore. Anybody, even the local Brits are stopped from taking random pictures.