73 - HEARSAY.

Travelling in a train does become interesting because of the conversations of the most unlikely co-passengers that one gets to hear.  This time my co-passengers, a muslim woman, one Hindu, another Hindu from UP, and five women that were three generations of another bhaiyya family, were choosing copper rings from a vendor, which triggered a conversation among them about gold jewellery.    One of them recounted how Hijras  had visited her home recently, and taken away her gold ring, in exchange for blessings for her newborn grandson. This led to rejoinders from the others about their horrific experiences when hijras have forcibly taken away gold necklaces and silver anklets from the new maternal and paternal grandmothers, by threatening them with dire curses if they do not comply.  Since I am a Zorastrian, their experiences were new to me.  It seems that hijras demand new and expensive sarees, food, slippers etc, from anyone who has a newborn in the family.

As the journey continued, the crowd in the general bogie got bloated to beyond its capacity.  The crowd swelled the most at Lonavla.  A very rich lady, with very very expensive luggage and three minor sons was one among them. The youngest son, about seven, whined on loudly and complained about wanting an AC bogie.  The older sons were quite happy to play with their expensive mobile phones.  And the women pampered the kids and offered them space to sit.  Toward the end of my journey, at Dadar,  a very young girl, hardly eighteen I guess, was selling clips and hairbands, with her three year old,  and since the crowd had shrunk now, she sat with her baby, who kept howling, and only kept quiet when she took out her mobile, an I phone, and let him handle it for a selfie.  So the conclusion is that whether rich or poor,  very young children are only pacified with a mobile in their hand.

Soon, a female chikki seller joined the clip seller and sat on the unoccupied seats.  Since she had kept her bag of goods near me, I picked it up to check out how heavy it was.  I could hardly lift it, it was very very heavy, with chikki packets and jelly sweets.  Striking a conversation, she recounted that she boards the afternoon train and goes up from her home at Badlapur, and s peddles her ware in four rounds, between Pune and Mumbai, upto twenty two hours.

Then a blind beggar joined them and began choosing hair clips.  Although blind, she insisted on choosing a specific colour.   All three, the clip seller, the chikki lady and the blind beggar, chatted with each other until we arrived at CSMT.

Along the journey, I was observing the station name boards, and they were all diamond shaped,  unlike the Grant Road sign that has become oval now.

All the rivers along the train journey were swollen and muddy.  The scenery between Khandala and Karjat is extremely verdant now, with pretty waterfalls along the steep cliffs.  But the Ulhas river is still black, with green oil stains and lots and lots of garbage all over.  As our train passed along Ulhasnagar and Vithalwadi, groups of young men could be seen and heard, practising drums, for the upcoming ganpati festival.  Quite a pleasant sound.

Most of the passengers doze off during the five and a half hour journey.  I make sure that I stay awake to take in the awesome views that the majestic western ghats offer.  The Monkey Hill stop was a real treat this time. There were a hundred monkeys of all ages, jumping up and down a huge tree, coming down to grab the foodstuff thrown toward them. 

 A window seat is everyone's coveted place.  It offers the best views of the western ghats.  If another train passes by, it gives a zoetrope effect,  and the view beyond the passing train is still visible through the windows and gaps between the bogies of the speeding train, very aptly demonstrating the principle of 'persistence of vision'.  At whichever age, a student learns about this principle, he should be allowed to experience the phenomenon with a train journey.  That is what I call 'education'.

Alighting at CSMT and then having to exit the platform and to exit the intercity concourse is very painful. There are three electronic entrances which have people rushing in and it is almost impossible to exit.  The authorities should have an 'IN' and 'OUT' status for each entry and exit point.

A recent addition is a open car moving around the platforms, aka the airport vehicles.  It had this message painted on it,  'This car is for hire.  Asked for a lift and make us happy.  Rs. 40 per ticket.'
Most of the travellers are too poor to pay so much, just to go upto their bogie, or from their bogie upto the exit.  So many beggars are on the platforms and inside the trains, without tickets or the Rs.20 platform ticket.  And no one cares.  Yet the police are stationed at every entry and exit point, behind sandbags, with machine guns pointed at the public.

Somehow, in the melee of people, I manage to head home safely.

72 - ENGLISH VINGLISH, MARATHI SWARATHI, HINDI FINDI......

English is perhaps the only language that has an upper case and a lower case.  After a fullstop, a capital letter is used, and proper nouns too have a capital letter.  In Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, etc there is no need to use capitals. Also the pronunciation of every word is not too predictable.  Very often English words are pronounced incorrectly,  which is not the case with most other languages as the written word can be read as is.

 In India, most of the citizens are not familiar with English speaking and so they tend to translate from marathi or hindi, and then format the english sentence, which leads to hilarious sentences.  So if  the Hindi phrase of  'Aap kaiseh hai?'  gets translated as 'You how are?'

If you do not read good novels and classical stories,  then you are at risk to format incorrect sentences too.  Spellings also go for a toss.  I have been very puzzled after perusing certain items on a menu.  So there is  a "paper sandwich"  correct spelling should have been "pepper",  and the "chess sandwich" meaning a "cheese sandwich".    And these two misspellings were painted on the menu board of the Mumbai university at Kalina.

Everyday I pass the Aditya Birla school lane at Tardeo and feel chagrined to read the signboard that they have displayed at the entrance of the lane leading towards their school.  It reads, 'School children alighting and get off.'  In Pune there is a bench on MG Road which has this painted on it 'siniour citizen bench'.  In a Virar local,. the neon light message reads 'Emergency number of ladies passengers.............'.  One Union Bank branch has this message displayed, 'Account will be freeze in case of non submission of KYC'.

And I fail to understand why the BMC has painted an English phrase in the Hindi script on its garbage trucks,  'clean up'?  Also, the hindi and marathi words for 'please',   'sorry'  and 'thank you' are almost redundant, and everyone uses the english options, even when conversing in a colloquial format or in any local language like gujarati, marathi and hindi.

Very often, the speaker makes a mistake, and the listeners are unaware of its incorrectness, so 'all is well'.

71 - WHY ENDURE ? JAPAN'S IDEA IS A SOLUTION.

Every year Mumbai gets flooded and people suffer.  Then they forget all about the situation when the season changes.  It leads to leptospirosis and death.  After the water recedes, mosquitoes breed and it leads to chikungunya, malaria, dengue, and typhoid.  Besides the ground floor houses that get flooded, suffer sewer water enundiating their homes, furniture and electrical appliances like fridges, TVs, ACs , washing machines, getting defunct.  It is beyond my thinking, as to how they manage to answer nature's call for so many days, when the toilets are flooded too.  I have witnessed a ground floor home getting flooded.  The bedroom had soaked mattresses and the toilet had excreta floating up and into the other rooms.  Sic.  So it should be the priority of the concerned municipality to take proper precautions to prevent the flooding.  But they blame it on the high tide and the insufficient and outdated drainage systems.  Okay, so if everyone is aware of the problems, then why is there no effective solution? 

But obviously the high and mighty in this land are not affected directly and so they don't seem to care about the common man's plight.

National Geographic has done a review of the underground 'temple-like' storage tanks of Japan, that help to keep the city of Tokyo, free of flooding.  In 2001, Tokyo suffered severe flooding due to heavy rain.  And so they built a system of giant underground tunnels, six and a half kilometers long.  Each tunnel is ten meters in diameter and it allows the rain water to collect into this space and then be drained methodically into the Edo river. 

Our prime minister, Mr.Modi, should borrow this innovative idea from Japan, instead of the Bullet train technology.

70 - SOLD !

A baby is very precious only if it is not an unwanted child.  There are so many cases where the girl becomes pregnant against her will, through rape, or for want of a good contraceptive.  So even if she is married, the baby may not be welcome or then if it a second or third girl child, then the family may want to give it away or even finish it off.  Sometimes the baby can be physically or mentally retarded, and the mother will want to get rid of it, she may not be in a position to care for the special child and so will give it away or leave it at the doorstep of a christian missionary home,

My personal experience is that Christian nuns, especially the Mother Teresa charities, care for babies in any condition.  There are centers that allow adoption through legal procedures.  But my personal opinion is that if that process is too restricted and costly, then let a family that is sincere 'buy' a baby.  The money is given to the mother, she does it of her own free will.  At least the baby has a chance to grow in a good nurturing environment.  If the mother is too poor to care for her baby, the baby wil become sick, or be made to beg. 

Some prominent public figures, like Karan Johar, Shahrukh Khan and Tushaar Kapoor, got a baby through surrogacy, some of them  without even getting married.  So, if you are rich, do the rules change?  A middle class couple would not be able to afford surrogacy, so let them adopt, or even if that is too expensive, let them buy a baby, is my personal opinion.

Hindu folklore and Bollywood films have so many stories of babies that were abandoned and then adopted by other foster parents through fate.

Anyone who can be the best parents for a baby should be allowed to parent an unwanted child.

69 - MUMBAI CABBIE

I became aware of how LPG gets filled into a vehicle, only recently.  After sitting in a cab, if the cabbie requests that he has to get gas as the red light is blinking, indicating that the gas is depleted, then one does not have much of a choice. 

If  the passenger is a long distance traveller, then a conversation is mandatory.  Usually it begins with a rueful remark about the potholes that the cab traverses through.   Marol roads are bad,  Parla roads are full of potholes, but Kurla is the worst.    By the time we reached Santa Cruz east, my body was shaken and stirred.  How is it that the entire airport access roads are full of potholes but within the airport premises, the roads are perfect?

This cabbie had just left a passenger at the airport and having received a generous fare and tip, he was in a good mood.  The passenger had wanted to do the rounds of Shahrukh Khan and Salman's homes and then return to the airport, in a round trip.  The cabbie confided that Shahrukh Khan's Mannat bungalow is a very popular spot with selfie seekers and he often takes other state visitors to the spot, but it is such a  anticlimax moment for the visitors, according to the cabbie, because there is only a dirty, barren   wall to witness, with the word Mannat displayed, with which the visitors console themselves by taking a selfie.  Surely, both the famous Bollywood Khans can make visits of fans more worthwhile by offering some refreshments, autographed pics, or CDs etc to these ardent visitors from far off states.  The cabbie said that many of these fans take a detour to Mumbai, and fly in, just to visit star homes.  I wonder what the situation in Hollywood and Down under is, for visitors to star homes?

During the duration of my journey in the cab, the conversation veered towards the sweetmeat shop that I directed him towards, Gaurishankar at Parel.  I could not recall the name, but the cabbie helped me out, as it is a very popular outlet.  And then he went on to tell me that he had diabetes and so could not enjoy sweetmeats anyway.  Originally from Jharkhand, this cabbie went on to philosophise  that life in Mumbai city was very hectic and the main reason for his malady.  He listed all the details of his medical tests and all the various natural remedies available.   I endured a short lecture on the reasons for the high percentage of diseases in modern times.

I refute his claim, there are so many other reasons for any malady.  Especially emotional turmoil and anxiety, caused by 'others', besides environmental side-effects.                                         

68 - ANUSHKA SHARMA and VIRAT KOHLI, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK !

What a pleasant surprise, when I heard in the news that Anushka Sharma scolded a rich, spoilt, bad mannered, uncouth guy, who was littering.  This gives me a reason to be her fan.  As I have mentioned in my previous blogs, the rich don't care if they throw garbage onto the road, and also let their pet dogs poop anywhere in public places, as long as no one pulls them up.

It is so typical for the offender in this case, to troll Anushka and try to save face,  after being publicly shamed online.  This is the only way that such imbeciles can be brought to book and behave well.  Like they say in Hindi, 'ulta chor kotwaal koh daateh'.

Not so long ago, I had suggested to the BMC, that certain areas in this so crowded city are unsafe and ruined by miscreants of different classes, rich and poor.  The rich are too arrogant and get away with so many broken rules, the poor are too indifferent to care.  Many of the bridges over local train rails, have no shops or houses, only slums and chain snatchers, who get away with it with immunity.  Garbage, rubble etc is discarded by anyone and no one cares.  The underground subways in so many areas that have no shops, are dangerous and dirty.  The underground subway at Metro theatre, the one near Haji Ali and so many others.  If a large screen would throw the images of the subway to the public above, such areas would be used by everyone to commute, and not become a haven for loafers, flashers, beggars, urinaters.

But the Mumbai Corporation does not bother to do ground work on the feasibility and solutions to problems that arise in such schemes.

67 - A PAGE FROM AUSTRALIA'S BOOK.........

How do the Australians and the British and the Americans, manage their abandoned cars?

Why does the police in Mumbai and Pune have problems  managing abandoned vehicles?

In Australia, after six months of a vehicle being labelled with a sticker, as 'abandoned',  it is towed away to a scrap yard by the authorities and dismantled.

I fail to understand as to why the owner cannot be contacted through the license plate and asked to take it to a junk yard within a month. They have fun with old discarded vehicles, like junkyard battles, where teams are invited to innovate a vehicle from the old stuff and then challenge others for entertainment.

If our RTO and Traffic police only want to play the blame game, nothing good or progressive will ever happen to solve the problem of the abandoned vehicles.

So what is the use of a license plate?