26th Nov 2008 : A tale of two cities : Bangkok and Mumbai

26th Nov 2008 started off as a very normal day. Piya, Deep & I were vacationing in Thailand ... it was supposed to be our last day in Bangkok as we were scheduled to fly back to India on 27th early morning. Our agenda for the day was to see the Royal Palace and the temple of Emerald Buddha ...

 

Piya took this picture as I got the news from a colleague on my mobile ... 

At the temple we got the first shocking news for the day ... PAD Thailand ( not to be confused with Pad Thai which is a dish I rather enjoy !!! ) activists had taken over the Suvarnabhoomi International airport and it was now shut down indefinitely. We had no clue how and when we would be able to leave Thailand.

Back at the hotel in the evening we were watching BBC & CNN to get updates on the airport situation ... when we got the second shocker of the day ... terrorist attacks at multiple locations in Mumbai and scores shot dead.

While personally we were directly and immediately more impacted by the Bangkok situation our thoughts were obviously more focused on what was happening in Mumbai. Needless to say the Mumbai events were far more tragic and have had far reaching international repurcussions. However a comparison of how the two situations panned out throws a lot of light on the state of administration, governance and the "spirit" of these two cities.

In Mumbai the politicians, administrators, army, police and other support agencies worked in tandem. All the terrorists who were armed to the teeth were flushed out from their hideouts within 3 days. Daily life in Mumbai was restored to normalcy within a couple of days. Mumbai citizens saw to that and proved that it takes far more than a bunch of terrorists to make any dent on the spirit of Mumbai.

Bangkok was a study in contrast. The government first requested the police and then the army to move the unarmed PAD aka People's Alliance for Democracy activists out of the airport premises. Both simply refused ... so much for governance & administration !!! The citizens also could not be more lackadaisical about the developments ( I just could not comprehend why ... coming from a city where everyone has an opinion on policies & politics ... here was a city where the citizens who mould its character and "spirit" were stangely detached and just did not care - even though the country depends so heavily on tourism ). There was simply no pressure from the general public on the government to clear the airport ... and the situation simply dragged on for days with thousands of travellers stranded. 

PAD was demanding that the Prime Minister Somchai should resign, being the son-in-law of the infamous ex-PM Takshin Shinawatra he was nothing more than a puppet ( clearly dynasty driven politics is not unique to India ). While I suspect their demands were justified I'm sure there must be better ways of protesting than closing down the primary international airport of their own nation for weeks.

After an additional 5 days of unplanned stay, on 2nd Dec we managed to take a flight out of Utapao which is an airstrip 5 hrs drive south of Bangkok ...

 

Darkness outside and chaos inside the Utapao airstrip terminal ...

 

Ironically, there was a makeshift "Relax Zone" outside the Utapao terminal building to soothe the frayed nerves of passengers. And finally, our Jet Airways flight from Utapao to Kolkata is announced !!!

Zardari Palin Sin(gh)drome

 

To be recited in the tune of the nursery rhyme "Pussy cat, Pussy cat where have you been ?"

Zardari and Singh

Where have you been ?

"We've been to Washington"

To chat with the queen Palin

Zardari, Zardari tremendously tharki

What did you do there ?

"I went all Mushy, forgot protocols, flirted shamelessly"

And desperately tried to hug her !!!

Singh, Singh wanna be King

What did you do there ?

"I coached Palin on Economics 101 and Nuke 123"

Till I was assured she had her concepts clear !!!

In chorus by Indo-Pak diplomatic aides

Zardari and Singh

What did they do together ?

Zardari sucked up to Singh, called him King

And named him father of modern India !!!

Then they opened bottles of whiskey, got drunk ...

And decided to postpone the Kashmir discussions to next year !!!

Two Indias : A visible divide

I wonder if in any other nation there is such a stark urban-rural divide as there is in India. The visible chasm between the top 500 cities in India and the rest of the towns and villages is enormous.

In an earlier post I'd touched on the repurcussions of such a gap and the influx this causes into our big metros ... but till recently this gap was only a perception in my mind. It was only during a recent visit to a village ( and this was not even deep rural ... only about 50 km from Pune and an hour's drive ) that I got to see this divide first hand.

India Rural :

 

At the Paud village I took a few snaps of the village center and a shop where I tried to buy a bottle of mineral water ( without luck ) ... 

India Urban :

 

The Big Bazaar in Pune on the other hand stocks 8 different brands of mineral water ( including Evian if you have the moolah !!! ).

Mamatidi paints in Singur

She paints oblivious 

Like Emperor Nero played the fiddle 

While Rome burned

Is this her political death knell ???

Time will tell ...

Tata Nano : Singur to Maharashtra ?

Mamata Banerjee is at it again. Just when the first Tata Nano was being readied for the October launch she had to throw a spanner in the works. Where was Mamatadi when the project was conceived 6-7 years ago, why was she silent all this time and what made her suddenly "wake-up" + "take-up" the cause of the farmers ??? Obviously this is nothing but a desperate gimmick to stay in the news.

I understand she is demanding 400 of the allocated 997 acres be returned to the farmers unless the government doles out a significantly higher compensation to the farmers. The government has already paid the farmers INR 12 lacs per acre. Agreed that the land rates have gone up since ... but the rates would not have gone up without the Nano factory in any case. Land for such projects is always bought at prevelant rates during project commencement and its not possible to keep compensating owners for future price hikes !!!

The irony is that no one gains from this :

a) West Bengal as a state loses as no other big project / investments will come to the state in the near future if the Tatas withdraw now ... even if they dont this whole issue will be a huge disincentive for anyone considerig setting up shop in WB.

b) The farmers may get some short-term gains if there is a compromise ... but in case the project moves away from Singur the local population will surely lose out on long term development of the region.

c) The Tatas of course lose time, money and business opportunity ...

d) Mamatadi herself suffers credibility erosion for taking up a Lose-Lose-Lose ... cause. If only someone could drill some sense into her !!!

Not in a mood to relent ( and rightly so I think ) Tata Motors is already formulating Plan B ie. moving production base to a more hospitable state ... and many have already extended an open invitation. Wont be easy to uproot a factory and transplant it ... but knowing the Tatas they will do the right thing for the long-term rather than try to buy a short-term compromise.

West Bengal's loss could well be Maharashtra's gain.

Matka Phod @ Mumbai

"Matka" is quite a deceptive word ... there are 3 entirely unique connotations I myself am aware of :
a) In most IITs & IT-BHU ( I can at least vouch for the latter coz I went there ) "matka" is the mildly derogatory term for M. Tech students ... derogatory coz the assumption is that one should naturally be doing MS in an US univ instead.
b) In Mumbai underworld parlance "matka" is a particularly infamous form of gambling originally started by a gentleman named Ratan Khatri. IF you are curious to learn more please go here.
c) Then of course there is the straight "matka" ie clay pitcher. This in conjunction with "phod" ie smash ( the other more colourful meanings of phod and its derivatives like phad, phadna etc could be the subject of a future discussion !!! ) becomes "matka-phod" which many young folks in Mumbai ( also refered to as Govindas ... no connection with the bollywood Govinda ) become obsessed with during Janmashtami. The objective is to phodofy the matka which is suspended high in the air by forming a human pyramid ... the group doing it the fastest wins the prize ( which goes into lacs ... hence a big deal !!! ).

Today is Janmashtami and the original plot was to go out into the streets of Mumbai ( specifically around Dadar ) to see the Govindas in action ... but the Olympics closing ceremony and the India-Srilanka third one-day fuelled the inertia already triggered off by a particularly heavy Sunday lunch :-) and I happily lounged in front of the TV all afternoon switching channels to get as much of the action as possible.

The Beijing olympic torch at the Bird's Nest stadium 5 seconds before closing. Was the best ever olympics for India finishing 50th with 3 medals.

With Sri Lanka at 94-6 one would have expected a cake walk for India ... Jayawardane & Thushara put up a good fight to get the match quite close though in the end we won easily. Here's a Thushara run-out goof up ... luckily Yuvraj got him out the next ball before he could do any further damage.

Bangalore store visit

Was in Bangalore oops ... Bengaluru ( when will the new moniker catch on ??? ). Logistically a very painful trip ... The new airport is in the middle of nowhere ... 2hrs drive from to/from the city ... Same time as the mumbai-bangalore flight !!!

The choice of location was clearly driven by greedy politicians who have conveniently grabbed acres of adjoining land for peanuts. The airport is surprisingly small - was expecting it to be significantly bigger than the existing one.

One of the agenda items in Bangalore was to check out some traditional retail grocer / chemist outlets.

There was this store where the owner was nowhere to be seen ... looked like he'd entrusted his business to a cat which was cheerfully perched on the weighing machine grooming itself.

Mumbai life : a different perspective

I've been buying my vegetables regularly from Gorakh for the past year ... Ever since I got to know he's from a village near Varanasi. That's our common ground and reason for bonding. Its from him that I got a new perspective about life in mumbai ...

"Saab, barah saal se mumbai me hoon. Aaya kyonki gaon ke kheti me paisa nahin banta hai. Abhi gharwaali kheti dekhti hai aur mai yahaan se kuch paise bhej deta hoon. Toh guzaara chal jaata hai."

Gorakh sells average of 1500 bucks of vegetables a day with a margin of about 10% ie 150 bucks a day and 4500 a month. He sends as much money as possible to his family back home and visits his family once a year. Is the money worth living away from his family for years ... I probe further ...

Bare subsistence ( if the monsoon is good ) is what his village farm allows which is just not enough to pay back the loans piled on by his family over the years. Thats what keeps him in Mumbai ... an effort to repay loans taken from the local moneylenders at ridiculous rates of interest. Its a vicious circle as the interest on the loans exceed the principal originally borrowed.

Brings to mind the cases of farmer suicides across rural India. Gorakh's biggest fear is that he will be evicted out of Mumbai when the local political parties call for periodic eviction of "North Indians".

Life in Mumbai to Gorakh is a ray of hope ... a reason to live.

UPA wins the trust vote

UPA won the trust vote 275 to 256 with 10 abstaining.

The horse trading over the past few weeks has stripped indian politics of any last remaining vestiges of respectability.

To me what emerges from all this fracas is the coming of age of manmohan singh as a very savvy politician with the ability to take big risks - after all this trust vote could have gone either way ... No one could have predicted the relatively big margin.

Also this gives the congress another ally in SP so it need not look to the left for help come next election - which by the way could come fairly soon. It won't be an easy task to keep the current loose "unholy" alliance together for long.