Life in a.... Metro

(This post was made on the 17th evening, but could be uploaded only now)


My third post begins with apologies to the maker of the movie of the same name.
I plead guilty. I flinched his title. But the best title was already taken.
Yes, this post, too, deals with life in a Metro... but a different kind of Metro... not the city, but the mode of conveyance. And interestingly, I'm writing this post on board an Indigo flight to Mumbai from Calcutta. (It's bad, you have to buy the food!).
One should start at the beginning: Calcutta — that is where the Metro rail started.
I've been living in that city for about three years now and I am a regular commuter.
The Metro is nothing short of a living being... it has its own quirks and hustle and bustle.
My profession requires me to be a good observer — and I have a few observations. You might find them interesting.
1) The Metro is way too loud. Try listening to classical music on an iPod at full blast and you'll understand what I'm talking about
The doors are always more crowded than the rest of the compartment — either people revel in making life difficult for others or they don't have an iota of civic sense
A ride on the Metro is a pleasure trip — no questions asked. Count the number of such people on any given Sunday. I'm sure you'll agree
Park Street station is on the right — I've witnessed numerous occasions when passengers jump out of their reverie at the mention of that hallowed address and promptly troop to the right, only to realise their mistake and create a mini-melee within the rake
Escalators or slapstick comedy? Ever seen the throng waiting for the “ride” of their lives? Not only do they hamper hurried passengers, they provide a lot of entertainment with their “non-intentional” antics
Smart/unsmart entry/exit: Commuters with paper tickets make it a point to fumble at smart entry/exit points. It becomes even more irritating the station has single smart points as opposed to three or more paper points
Oglers/nudgers/lechs: Does one need say more? Except that such people exist from both sexes.
I guess that pretty much takes care of enough banter for a day. And I really need to put away my notebook as we are about to land in Mumbai!!!

Living with accents

Contrary to popular belief (especially by some ignorant high-school
acquintances), I did not spend my childhood or any significant amount
of time in the UK.
The idea was given rise to in junior high because of the "impeccable" accent I had. My Brit accent, like many other Indians, is thanks to listening to and watching BBC news religiously while I was a child. My immodest self tells me I pick up accents pretty fast, guess all thanks to my teachers in kindergarten who impressed on us the need for a "perfect" accent.

By the time I joined university, I had lost count of the number of accents I had learnt and unlearnt. To me, it was my private game -- picking up accents, surprising others with them, unlearning them and going on to a new one.

However, all my experiments were limited to the Queen's tongue. While my standard accent remained Brit, I was experimenting with different accents of different countries. I enjoyed myself immensely by foxing all with my accent during my Aussie phase.

Sir Geoffrey's "roobish", an Indian favourite, tickled my interest about dialects. They showed my inadequacy with a foreign tongue. While I was able to pick up Boycott's Yorkshire, after a lot of hard work, I gave most others a miss.

Looking across the Atlantic, I found more interesting possibilities in the dialects/accent/tongue at the melting pot of cultures -- the US. It was much easier picking up separate accents, rather than dialects, in the US. Thus began my Transamerican quest.

I had started learnig Deutsch in the meantime and Deutsch Wella television came to my rescue for the "perfect" accent. My TV teacher outlasted my German professor -- I took the course for three months, but still am able to read out everything in German just the way it should be, though I don't understand a word of it.
My first job was with an Indian software major's BPO wing. I was a tech support guy for the world's largest manufacturers of PCs, handling US clients. Their intensive training made sure our accents were "neutral" -- rather American. But I still lapsed into my Brit accent whenever I let my guard down.

All of us at the BPO spoke to each other in our "taught" accents for practice... we were speaking in US English 24/7 --- either with clients or among ourselves.

This accent took its toll -- my Brit accent was lost and we started speaking the US way wherever we were.
I started putting to good use my years of studying US accents at separate places. While this helped me in dealing with US customers, it also gave rise to speculation among some acquintances that I had spent some of my university years in the US. They would never believe me when I said this all was thanks to my hobby of learning and unlearning accents.

The first thing I did after chucking my BPO job was to practice a faux Indian accent --- more specifically a Bong one - I never had before. But even two years of practice hasn't cured me -- the way I speak is a mish-mash of accents and when I talk on the telephone, my US accent
comes to the fore unconsciously!

I guess I'll have to live with it all my life.

With apologies to Matthew Arnold

I begin this blog with my apologies to the poet Matthew Arnold. No this is not about his immortal creation The Scholar Gypsy. Instead, it is a nickname I picked up back at my university (more on that later), and so this is one more boring blog about someone ordinary — me.

Having lived on this planet for nearly three decades now, I guess I'm an earthling who's also one of a Blue Billion. I was born in a cosmopolitan town my parents called home near the east Indian city of Calcutta, home to football, adda, bandhs, College Street, Coffee House, Ray, Mother Teresa and Howrah Bridge (not always in that order).
Ours was a town, which later became a city, but one with big dreams and high expectations. Practically everybody who lived their (and their cousins twice removed) were engineers or doctors. Most of my schoolmates are either engineers or MBAs or both and a handful are doctors. But I grew up to be none of the above. So, I'm a loser by the "standards" we grew up with. Or am I? Let me answer that later.
My dad, a doctor by profession, joined the local steel plant's hospital after his studies, giving in to "family pressures" and giving up his dreams of an academic career or one as an army medic. He had lived in the remotest parts of north India by the time he was 14, thanks to my grandfather being an engineer with the railways. His life in the jungles had taught him a lot — he was a champion trekker and knew more than most boy scouts his age did. And he also knew how to handle guns — in fact he was quite a crack shot. My grandfather, who I never met, also hunted tigers — not for sport, but as a necessity, when they turned man-eaters!
My mum came to this town after marriage — the pampered eldest child of well-off parents, after growing up all over the country. Because she had always been a big city girl, the somewhat serene surroundings of the town then were probably soothing for her, but I guess she was never cut out to be a typical housewife.
Both their families hailed from the present Bangladesh, and though they were never really refugees, thanks to their feudal backgrounds (the genteel class usually had a summer house in Calcutta or some other part of Bengal), they were kind of rootless.
These two people adopted the town as their own and the town rewarded them with respect and affection. Thus was born a family, with servant and dog, where my sister, the gentle elder child, arrived to the joy of my maternal grandparents (the only and best set of grandparents I've ever had) and assorted aunts and uncles. I guess its a great feeling to become an uncle or aunt at the ripe old age of eight, sadly I encountered the feeling much later in life.
But the joy was short-lived. A certain year the rain gods (and the man-made ones) decided to play havoc with the lives of thousands just before the Pujas, Bengal's biggest annual festival. Well, I had arrived, with the sound and fury of nature heralding this momentous event. And thanks to the portent signs during my birth, I'm all sound (heard someone drop a metal tiffin-case in a silent office? well thats me) and fury (not always, but a few smashed wireless phones and remote controls bear testimony to an otherwise "cool and collected" persona).

I guess this part is boring enough. I'm too bored (and sleepy) to continue. But I will, promise. Even if its only me and my extended family who's reading this blog. 'nuff said.
May the force be with you.