How Dreams Become Real

Think again when someone asks, "how do dreams become real?"

And, I think one suggestion can be- if your night sleep is broken, do not curse or become miserable, just get up and switch on your music player and preferably play a list of some folk songs. Go back and try to catch up with the rest of your sleep.

The Pete Seeger's "A Link In the Chain" is a thirty eight song album, and I hear an Angloman singing one of its songs while he descends steps and a passageway; his voice echoing because of the side walls. It was a usual cloudy day in Manchester and it was a surprise to see good old bald Mike, the office admin handy assistant, humming the tune, and soon bursting out into the whole song. The spotless grip on pronunciation of words and control on the tune made me an immigrant Indian engineer think, "yes, this is the way a song should be sung. See how perfectly he sang it. What a treat!"

The clock had struck seven approximately, and the Indian engineer found himself waking up fully and finally in another solitudal bight morning which belongs to Dahod. The waking up clarified that it has been years since the engineer has spoken to Mike. The latter half of the sleep had Mike and this real-definition music video as a dream. Nevertheless, the morning dream did give a nice high. The dream had made it a day even before it had started, for it was too real, and it would cover up for the rest of the mundane routine day ahead.

The Tin Soldiers

Anthropology or ethnology are not my specialist areas, but would like to share an observation. Please correct me if I am wrong.

It was one of those rarely sun-lit mornings in Manchester, a United Kingdom city, I took one of my regular buses - available in plenty – to the Oxford Road train station which would further take me to my workplace. It is usually a nice journey with lots of college students in their prime jogging and bouncing around. For office goers like me perhaps it is a regular one. To break or maybe spice this transit, for momentary population like us, there are a few morning newspapers, mostly available for free. They would run on either subsidies or sponsorships, or both. It was another regular day and I bought a rather more expensive newspaper for a change - don’t remember whether it was ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The Times’.

It was year 2006 then, and the Iraq war issue was at its peak, and requests and noises, one may also say ‘hopes’, to bring their troops back home pretty high in the whole Island nation that time. Reading gives you more clarity, and this article hidden somewhere amongst many did so, for it gave some numbers in form of statistics. That about 1K of the soldiers deputed are in Iraq. About 10K sporadically distributed for the UN all over the world, and 60K still in Germany after the world war two.

The sun's shine had brightened; unusual for that day.

A german friend, later, in my office tells me, “Yes, I have heardh so tuh, zey are stationed close to my villaze” “and now with, some time haz passe by, zey are up line to be cithizen. One of zem officer told me he juszent feelz brizish anymore afzer living for zo long in the zerman zoil."

What is an EIA?

It is not surprising that many would ask what an EIA is.

The answer is simple - EIA basically expands into “Environmental Impact Assessment”. A self explanatory term, is a big paperwork and many-a-times a bureaucratic hurdle where the project agency itself quantifies your human project’s impact into the larger environment where it is intervening.

The paper news of ET, Gujarat (the most ambitious of the Indian states), version reported that now the time required for carrying out EIA’s has been increased from 13 months to 18 months. The current total investment of about 25,000 Crore Rupees - which if directly converted to US Dollars is about 5 Billions USD, and in terms of spending equivalence is 50 Bill USD. Most are tourism or trade development related projects. And the delay has sent the developers of the state, they are who have stake in it, run helter-skelter in various government offices to find relaxation from this new clause.

Well, everywhere in the world, the Great EIA is known to be a mere paper exercise conducted and thereafter checked by people or companies or their consultants like you and me. The farmer or the fisher man who understands his own natural habitat and protects it since ages is nowhere in the damn picture. It is now left to the people, incompetent people (in all fairness and allegedness in the case here) who haven’t lived in any natural environment in their own lives. How can one conduct EIA properly if the word environment itself is not clearly understood to them?

Projects struck here may amount to 100Million USD only, and their crudest manifestation can be pictured as some ten thousand people grouped together like ants digging a hole and building something in some 10 hectares of land for next three years.

Surely, nothing like this or collective many may affect the environment, because environment or nature is much larger than humans itself. What one human can do is to cheat the other, or cheat oneself for making his petty ends meet.

One example of an EIA is in a protected reserve along the A92 road in the beautiful eastern highlands of commercial Scotland, where the intervening agency was forced to improve their noisy underwater drilling technology to a noiseless one, so fishes were not to be impacted. Since the bridge was to be built it has to be built -but, please do it quietly. British people are sensitive to construction noise, so are their fishes too.

Untouched parts of Scotland are as similar barren as of Gujarat in India, and both want to attract monetary investment for their local prosperity, and this is how some parts of the world are goin’ to be. No one at these places is ready to hug mangroves and fishes.

Men on the morning TV

Missed the baasi (baa-see) supply of hourly letterman I always get in the morning at seven here. Courtesy ‘Star World’, thanks, I love it even if it is not live; it is relevant. Well, it was late at eight, and my dog kind-of satisfied, after he took me out on our regular morning walk. It had lasted for nearly an hour, and also since we had started late today, we had to face this agony of missing the show.

My Tata sky has about twenty news channels roughly, and you can flick them in one order. Thanks to digital technology available now. First one is DD, then the hindi ones, followed by the english news channels. While the hindi channels had regular Sallu and Dhoni being interviewed, the English ones showed what the CNN and BBC showed - a Live Obama 'state of the union' speech! Now there was something sinister about it. I can say this because I am just a simple observer, not any political commentator, living in today's globalised world. People attending the speech in the hall, clapped after every sentence the American president had sort-of completed. Nothing made sense to me, except some vague stuff he talked on job market in America, trade and Afghanistan and Eye-rack.

Well, I write this blog just to remind myself that Obama is America's president, not mine. Bhaiya, you can keep your CHANGE, I need more to survive in today’s world.

One evening in a pub

While they both were having their pints and I having mine.
You say – I will be alright – say – yeah – everyone else – you know what I mean….... text …. I mean ..… no reply ….. no answer ……. duck duck duck ….. many times ….. rhythm in ……. duck duck din duck duck din ….. (this pause lasts for say five minutes) … no man …….. after chattering for 5 – 10 minutes, they have been silent for more than 15 minutes …… the woman goes to loo, the man sits here alone - and I think I should help him, look at his face and oh, he doesn’t looks pitiable at all. Plus he is thumping his leg to the music, some stoopid pop song of which I can make out only one word and that is beautiful, which she just keeps repeating….. asshole takes out his cell phone – oh, I should take out mine too …. ok let’s leave it to them and stop. and look outside the window and try to feel as if I don’t care. Oh no, feel.. hey that guy went out to loo but the woman looks sentimental, angry, …... lets leave it here, and try concentrating back to the window. Concentrate? What the fuck……. Just be yourself, calm down, put your phone on the table, expect your phone call from Cervantes, and most important enjoy – what if you got only a window.

Dispensable expenses and lal-batti

(Rewritten)

A cause can be common in two quite different cultures, but the reasoning of the cause would never be.

The exposé by a British newspaper on the issue of public money misuse by their parliamentarians as extravagant personal expenses has sparked off an interest amongst the intellectuals here in India as well.

With this cue, they lament the same issue applicable to an Indian mantri. Hardly realising that he* is the most important man, elected by the aam admi or gaon wala, who doesn’t really cares to know why not their elected leaders should live lavishly. Maybe, he wants him to actually enjoy his victory of next five years. The elected is an important man, therefore has the dispensable Lal-batti on his car; whether the road is crowded or not.

*author's apologies for use of masculine

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.

POWER POLICY – jugglery of words

No, nothing about the Indian elexions this april here, but this bijli ki samasya in this country. The UPS box behind me wheezes with a half 100 volt power supplies, while the lightning crackles with the same rhythm, every five minutes left or right I see cracks in the sky.

In the UK, where 'the energy' is critical to their functioning and they say is under continuous threat from Russia, and sustainability concerns now in the market, I remember a newspaper advocating shift in the way energy is consumed there; said- “New generation power plants in the country”.

Here I had just read in today’s newspaper- “New power generation plants in the country”.

Just a swap of words I guess.

Determinator

Movie screens are amazing. They show you exactly how the 'Terminator' evaluates an unknown object or a stranger which suddenly appears in front of him. On the left corner a single row of equalizer type lights blink in sync with loud beeps, and a harmless laser beam is thrown on the object. A few seconds later, all the equalizer lights are green, and underneath appears the text 'FRIEND'. The Terminator draws his guns back into his holsters.

So, if you are as you are, a feeble human, without any weapons, appear in front of Mr. Terminator, he will quickly judge you as his friend. Simple ! But what happens when you encounter this specie called 'Determinator'? He/she is an adult human, wears ordinary clothes such as a jeans and a shirt, works and lives in the same society as you do. And then when a stranger suddenly appears in front, the invisible antenna feeds an input signal into the subconscious, and the back of brain starts evaluating - black or white? - rich or poor? - speaks English or not? How much rich? Beep Beep...No answer. Not a friend.

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.

Kanoon Ke Kitne Roop

Filmistaan in India taught me that the law has 'long hands'; in USA it maybe 'claws'; in UK no Hollywood no Bollywood only 'Clause'.