“I'll Give My Heart Only Once”!!!

Virtue Is Life And Love, Not Convenient Convention of Cowardice!!

 She visits for a chat, a rare even considering she has pointedly avoided attending the couple of ceremonial occasions, both before and after. So I am naturally a little unsure of how friendly this visit is and how much is it an agenda or more. It could be a chapter for a thesis, for all I know; or as it turns out it is also a diplomatic mission disguised as a friendly casual visit while she is in the neighbourhood. If it has also provided a chapter I don't know - but at the end of the visit(s) I care more about if she has benefited at all. That of course depends on her capacity to benefit, and that depends on how open the youngster was at all in mind and at other levels of consciousness. Chances are she has been allowed to think she need not learn, especially from someone so disapproved of by the clan, and in any case has no idea her mind was never open a chink in the first place but to establishment.

 She once remarked that she refused to follow the family trend of science (- over a dozen first rate scientists and a few medical practitioners and engineers thrown into the bargain, the family could conduct a university or a research institute all their own between themselves -) because unlike science all opinions of every person in class are equally valid in humanities and literature, and she enjoyed the debates in class. I disagree on both counts - arguments in science do happen, and are more satisfactory because there is reason and it comes at some point to a conclusion, while it is also untrue that all opinions are equally valid in humanities or literature.

 She finds an occasion soon enough and declares that she has "decided that she would give her heart only once". 

 I refrain from asking her if she has ever experienced what giving heart is, if she has ever experienced what it is to be drawn at heart, or if she thinks it is a matter of picking up an object physically and giving it over and not asking for it back, or of not illegally working two jobs, or something. I doubt she is capable of giving heart, or of experiencing it at all within. 

 Most women experience it when they have children - they fall in love and know that they can never get over it. Some people - men, women, children - experience the heart's emotions deeply, of love and of ecstasy, of tears and of attachment. Some are capable of loving, truly, and not as a matter of behaving well diplomatically depending on how one wishes to have relations. Some people are not capable of emotions of heart, for one of the few reasons - selfishness, childishness, an innate inability to connect - or just plain anti-love persona that is more interested in analysis or even only in destruction. She I suspect is a bit of the first two, a little selfish and a lot childish, but mostly an inability to connect or rather a pathological need to stay a little apart. 

 It is obvious that if anyone has experienced loving anyone, then one knows it is not a matter of rewarding virtue, or of punishing a fault, or of making a decision - unless when one talks of "giving heart" one actually means something else. One does need to be fair and sometimes diplomatic, too - but that has little to do with love or heart. The correspondence of the two separate spheres can go either way. 

 I ask her instead how she decides to pick one of her friends to be a best friend - what do the others do to not deserve it? Perhaps this might give her a clue, that is if she is capable of realising she can learn. She admits she cannot so choose. This should lead to logical conclusions both ways - one, choosing an object of love and deciding to give heart is more, not less, difficult; and two, love happens just as a best friend happens, one cannot claim virtue of how and when it happens. 

 I ask her next if she realises she is talking about satie tradition (- since giving your heart only once as a matter of strict virtue amounts to giving up life if anything goes wrong, and either living an outward life with little or no possibility of joy of life or giving up bodily life as well -), and she is perplexed, remarking "isn't it banned long ago, no one does that any more" - not realising what I was saying. I begin to get the view of how vast the gap of our minds is. I explain patiently that first, the banning was not automatic, it had to be achieved (and here they misspell the name of the person who did that); and second, banning does not stop things, as was evident as recently as mid-to-late eighties; and finally, third, this is not just about a physical burning to death, this is about doing it slow and lifelong, by deliberately making a decision of for ever shunning any possibility of giving another chance of love and happiness to oneself. 

 I ask if this is what she would wish for someone - everyone - else, is it only for women, or only for herself. She is beginning to be a little overwhelmed, and corrects her original claim by hastily changing it to - one at a time. 

This is getting ridiculous, now, of course. First, few do otherwise, because this is the only way most people can. It is easier and safer, to do so. Two people to love involves an enormous complication in terms of even fairness, let alone any other question. And this is apart from the original point again - if one can so control it it is not heart or love one is talking about, in all likelihood. Why the need for euphemism, falsifying and complicating the whole issue? 

 In fact most people are lucky if they love all their own children equally - some are so partial to one and so obviously against another that it is a wonder they do not see the disastrous consequences, in lives and futures of not only the children but generations affected by this. The loved and pampered child learns to be selfish, the neglected and unwanted internalises it and is unsure about loving anyone, and the repercussions spread like ripples of a huge stone thrown carelessly in a quiet lake. 

 Often, as in this case, this behaviour of the parent transmits through generations - the whole clan might specialise in picking one favourite and dumping all stress and unwantedness on the one picked to be at the other end, and the favourite is usually the one that serves some selfish end of the parent while the other goes on and on trying to achieve and to wordlessly claim some little attention by virtue. It never comes, and it takes a long time to comprehend that no amount of virtue or achievements will bring it - it will only serve to spur more flicking of lashes by the parent one is trying to get to notice oneself - and that one deserves to relax, to love and to be loved, and it is not one's own fault for not being loved the way another sibling is - and that that other sibling is not more virtuous but merely privileged, for no reason; and finally that this was in fact unfair and bad behaviour of the parent who did this. 

 I see all this in a flash, and put it aside, since it is beyond her capabilities - she is not talking about heart and love at all but using those words as euphemism for marital relations whether within marital bonds or not, in short about physical part of sex.

 Yes, I tell her, most people do go the monogamy way, it is the least complicated and the most safe way for all concerned, but we know from traditions and from ancient texts and even (from sheer keeping one's ears and mind open and non-committal) from today, that it is not made either compulsory nor the only way of virtue, for either gender, in our tradition, our culture. It is merely far more complicated to be polygamous, for either gender. To be equally fair to both - or all - partners, and not only to show no preference but to have no preference in heart, is what is required in a situation where one one has more than one partner - again, our tradition frowns on or penalises the avoidance of responsibility, and prescribes a marriage in absence of an ability to keep away from someone, if it is possible to marry. If not one keeps away, but no in between is either approved or gets the woman - women - concerned punished automatically by prescription, as in most other cultures. 

 And for all that a monogamy of a man who marries within a short period of death of a wife is not much of a virtue - he has merely declared the status of either wife as provision of her financial needs to the extent he can or pleases for satisfaction of his various needs that won't wait for any grief to subside, if indeed he had grief for anything other than his own various inconveniences at all. It is not only in the world of arranged marriages that this occurs - although it might be a bit faster with various parents eager to get the guy and often proposing before the thirteen days of funeral ceremonies are over - but even in the world of dating, with married daughters consoling the mother and encouraging her to go out with girls while in the same time period a bereaved male would have gone far beyond the need to be encouraged. 

 So much for monogamy - it is supposed to be a system that is better for social relations that get complicated and also for health of the society, but serial monogamy takes the first one out and as for the latter neither heart nor marriage are needed to have matters go wrong in that sphere. 

 But there are more urgent matters to be considered here in talk with the stupid young girl, and I go on fast to the real point - that while it is all very well if everything goes well but what if not? And I don't wait for her to reply, I go on to tell her, that she cannot play with her own safety, security, her life, just for the sake of a convention of virtue. She has to balance the need of commitment with the need of protecting herself - often no one else can, when it is a man in her life that endangers her - and if necessary, cut short and run; and also, what prevents other women from doing so is precisely the convention of virtue that she was preaching at - a pride of monogamy, even "serial", for it is normally understood that it means for "his lifetime" or at least that she would not take the first step out but wait for him to leave her or murder her - or, as it happens often enough, both.

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 Women were being murdered sensationally for dowry or for affairs of husbands and newspapers were full of them as we were growing up, and I always wondered how more women got married under the same circumstances anyway, what made them so sure it won't happen to them as well - did they learn karate, or have protectors ready to kill if something did happen and let the in-laws know of it, or what? 

 Imagine if women were murdering husbands around - by using what means they can easily, and there are many - would men marry so readily in such circumstance, without fear? If they did marry out of need for household and personal life, would they love so readily and easily as women do nevertheless, or would they be unable to love? 

 In the first case the answer is less obvious than the second. Women not only tend to distance themselves from other women who are victims - 'I don't know how it happens to others, it never did to me' - but even tend to turn around and blame the women who are victims, along the lines of colonial subjects and slaves that often turn around and absorb the ethos of the rulers, the masters, and blame the whipped slave for his skin taken off for little fault. This in turn makes it easier for them to be victims in turn, of course, but they do not see the way out - taking a stand, fighting back - and prefer to go for the security of siding with the masters instead. 

 This happens irrespective of what the crime against the women victim, and irrespective also of if you knew her all your life, thought she was virtuous in every way, and saw the crime being perpetrated too, and knew the perpetrators were wrong - it is still more comfortable to blind yourself to the reality and truth and tell yourself either that it was her destiny or that she must somehow have been at fault. It somehow is not good enough to so much as admit there has been a crime against someone who had a right to life and to dignity, and that something should be done by someone. 

 Subsequently such murders became more common and a statistics - whether due to better reportage or due to more happenings, who knows? Fact is no fathers or brothers came forth to avenge the murdered relative ever, and in fact in a few cases when the murder was not proved they offered the guy - the brand new widower - another daughter, a sister of the questionably dead one. That these cases were known personally and so reported by word of mouth did not reduce the horror or authenticity in any way, on the contrary. 

And yet people go on waxing emotional about festivals and occasions that are supposed to emphasize the importance of fathers and brothers for women. And, too, women would rather get along with those males at any price, even if they have been battered by them to the extent of being blinded or handicapped in more ways than one. Women who go with the conventional virtue would rather distance themselves from other women victims including sisters, whom they cannot defend anyway, but they could have them "subdued" using a male. And they do - frequently enough. 

 Well, there are some, few, women who had marches taken out to protest against all these all too frequent murders and got a few - too few - punished, got a few laws changed, and more importantly got some awareness of the wrong as wrong be acknowledged, even if it was out of shame and even is such shame backfired on the very name of women's rights or equality or liberation or so on. 

 Now there are young women wearing trendy trousers and small shirts and smart sandals and sitting in malls and talking loudly about how they don't believe in women's liberation - until I ask them if they are aware that in that case they have to be barefoot, married, pregnant and washing dishes for a household of twenty before eating, not opening their mouths in public to speak, much less work at IT jobs and wear trousers and be secure and unmolested as a matter of right while there are males all around who might not mind molesting them as their, male, right by birth. As indeed they would in many places in the world.

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 No kitchen works without fire, I tell this young visitor, one preaching about subjects she knows nothing about - and yet the instances of women dying of "accidental" kitchen fires happen only here. It is all very well to either give benefit of doubt in each individual case or to tell oneself that little fib conveniently, but face it, these were murders - as are the female infanticide and foeticide (not for any other reason than for not wanting a daughter) that again are difficult to prove individually but evident statistically. 

 In other parts of world there is starvation or guns, and here we have a convenient kitchen "fire accident with stove". That those happen sometimes only gives an excuse for the murderers to hide behind. Or why has it been always, always the young brides or even mothers of very young babies, but never a mother-in-law, never an old woman, never but never a male of any age whatsoever that are victims of these "stove kitchen fire" accidents? 

 Some of it is of course due to our "traditional" dresses - of which only saree or pawdaa / lehengaa (ankle length traditional skirts with usually good amount of fabric rather than slim fitting, and more often than not silk in former case, while possibly not silk but then elaborately worked in latter case with embroidery or mirrors) are really our tradition, and the other so called Indian dress which really is borrowed from foreign lands closer than Europe - which are not only loose but have plenty of fabric that can catch fire in a matter of fewer seconds, as evidently proven many years - nearly two decades now - ago by research in the labs of Indian government. 

They showed the results on national television then, before the era of cable channels proliferation, and prescribed wearing trousers in kitchen - it was easier to save a victim in the latter mode of dress than former varieties. Perhaps a frock or a skirt and blouse are just as safer, but they were not going to go so far against the sensibilities of some people who would accuse them of wanting to expose our women.

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But more than anything else what kills women often - whether they give up the body or they decide to stick on and live a death or they get murdered - is this idea, this very notion of virtue. 

"Give heart only once" can only really amount to give body only once, to not willing to even consider another alternative than a suicide, to abhor any thought ever of another partner, and partly this is understandable - who would want the hurt, the devastation, that multiplies with a break up and only gets worse with the social ostracising, the males sniffing around to find an easy prey, the general society shunning you as worse than infectious ward of a hospital? 

But this, this idea of virtue, is precisely what is responsible not only for the woman in question wanting to stick on and go on being brutalised, it also amounts to her relatives who could shelter and protect her instead throwing her back to the same brutes who then end up murdering her, an inevitable chain that begins with the idea that a non-virgin is fine and proven when male but garbage (usable for males, of course, only not with admission of honour) for the other half of the world. 

Women end up burnt alive because there are other women ready to shun them and virtuously proclaim - "I will give my heart only once", and in turn end up on the garbage heap themselves when fate so takes a turn. For if they run they are pursued by wolves in human male shape, and they dare not turn and face them for fear of being mauled, which they don't escape anyway. 

It is not that women are not murdered elsewhere - or that perpetrators get punished always. No, but it is only that trying to escape for life is not considered an act against virtue, nor is living and finding happiness again condemned so automatically as to make them stay and get murdered or commit suicide by preference for sake of virtue.

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 This Life is as much a gift of the Divine as is Love in your hearts - and when you give it up for a bunch of cowards you are not free of the guilt either. Even Bhagawadgeetaa advises fighting to the best of your abilities and last of your strength for the right against the wrong. Virtue is that which supports and enhances Life, the gift of Divine, and celebrates Love, another precious gift; not burning yourself alive either physically or metaphorically for sake of those others that won't protect you or your daughters.

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Jellyfish

Small Aims, Ignoble Acts –

 The wedding is over, finally, after three days of public ceremonies. There might be private ones going on but since those are for the inner circle, that is, those who are actually wanted and generally together, people who were roped in to show faces to the public are out. The bride and bridegroom were royal for a few days, they are more human now living as a married couple with his parents and the others in the family. The facades have been maintained carefully and with success on the whole, and if people have been maligned behind their back some have been blissfully oblivious. 

 One such oblivious woman was pawed by a sister-in-law, in presence of (and presumably with consent of or even delight of) her mother-in-law, to the unannounced and undeclared purpose of "seeing her jewellery" - the younger one could do little taken by surprise and unaware then of the implications of the public show of their assumed right to examine her anywhere any which way they pleased, and rearrange her apparel as they pleased. She stood quietly and then just as quietly, determinedly, rearranged it to her own way, right there, while they possibly disapproved of the temerity of this younger woman. The younger one is over fifty, but unless she learns to be just as rude or lethal in more subtle and devious ways, she is helpless. She despises such ways and has to constantly fend off or be stung. 

 Once she was at a beach with some cousins and they were stung by transparent electric-blue threads wrapping around their ankles, most unusual in that part of the world at least till then. It was difficult to get the blue threads out and it took some time before she figured out it must have been jellyfish, something that looks so beautiful when quietly swimming in its own depth but so hurtful when encountering another species, such as humans. 

 This pawing elder sister-in-law is no different - she probably is considered charming somewhere, but she has certainly not imbibed the civilisation or culture of the still British colony she has lived in for a quarter of a century, and this is perhaps why she is happier visiting and parading as the virtuous one who keeps the old ways. If it is necessary to ask for any permission of a younger relative-in-law before pawing her and rearranging her stuff, she would scorn it conveniently - just as she would inform her new blond daughter-in-law not to consort with the one who goes in for the lib stuff; if she is not completely successful in the last one it is only an incentive to spur her efforts to keep the two younger ones related to her by their marriages apart from each other, so they do not make a union to defend themselves against her power over them. 

 The other one in the scene, the common relative, probably had more than one reason to have her not so young daughter-in-law pawed - one of course was about having her powerless in public and fuming, unable to be rude without notice, - and if she had been able to defend herself she would be looked at innocently and called touchy and rude at the very least, for certain - but the other was more insidious, that of having the pawed one's jewellery credited to herself (if the pawer was so interested in looking she went on touching and pulling and rearranging it is a wonder she never asked where it was bought and so forth - which amounts to having been told it was given by the common relatives), which is convenient way of getting credit and retaining power and so on. 

 The pawed one is disgusted but has little power herself - she is uninclined to play such games and her logic is of little use against the need of the husband to believe in his mother, and any more attempt to disillusion him would give him a heart attack or a blood pressure danger. The old woman knows and could not care less, about the supposedly her own son and his health or happiness. Any danger to him would bereave the woman she would love to see on street without shelter. 

 So the younger one is alone, cornered, successfully isolated from human contact and support. The old witch leaves no opportunity, no stone unturned to remind her of who is in power, who pulls the strings, who can deprive her of everything including dignity of her very person in public at public occasions without any finger pointed to her old self. She shows off the bridal wear she was given as gift by the pawer (for the happy occasion of having acquired the new blond daughter-in-law), she is wearing it at the wedding of her own granddaughter.

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 Another not so young daughter-in-law, a little younger than the pawed one, is impressed by her in spite of herself and seeks to get over it in various ways. She probably is given some handle, some backdoor information, that she tries to use - without success. She goes on then about the philosophy taught to her by someone, mentioning the text. The intended one gets the message and the picture in the background as well. She is disillusioned about having been recipient of a friendly approach. 

 The pawer makes a joke in public about taking the place of the husband of the pawed one, and is angry when retorted this time by the so far silent one to the effect that it is only in a chair in a public hall - she pretends shock and loudly proclaims her own innocence of what the pawed one means, and thereafter makes no effort undone to let everyone know she not only is not speaking to her but taking away anyone who does speak to the outsider.

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 The ceremonies go on undisturbed on the stage and people who take part are called as and when they need to. Down in the audience the life continues in a more human way than at a similar occasion conducted more formally elsewhere - while some people watch, others chat and go around to find friends or relatives they wish to meet, taking advantage of the occasion. 

 Here is where the various power games are played of course - who is allowed to speak with whom, who is spirited away when not allowed to speak to the one demonstrably being punished for being out of line, who is making a public show of being intimate friends while not interested in meeting the same person ever without a public show to account for, who is making a show of a gift for an occasion that is in fact paid for by the one being given the gift in public, .... on and on the Machiavellian maneuvers go. 

 A very close branch of the family is absent, and never so much as mentioned. If they were invited or not, whether they felt slighted by a lukewarm invitation - no clue whatsoever. Most of the guests are predominantly of one large branch of the family and the old woman in bridal wear, the grandmother of the bride, happily leaves her own in-laws unmentioned, unless they are working for her, silent, poor and meek. She has her scheme of the world fixed, and this one large branch rules over her and gives gifts while she rules over others. It has little to do with qualities of personae and more with other factors - chiefly about who she thinks is in power and whom she would allow that power.

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 The couple that was maneuvered into showing face and allowing the elaborate pretense of everything-is-well-and-we-are-bosom-friends is spurned privately when they offer to host an invitation, the young bride has been extremely rude on more than one occasion to them and while she is not averse to having them roped in to show themselves publicly she would keep her stance of repudiating any advances of a normalisation whatsoever. They give up the attempt at an invitation to the new couple and declare they don't care if the bride wears the ceremonial occasional gift they brought, in fact they would be quite happy is she did return the expensive object - she hits on the brilliant idea of wearing it and taking a photograph to thwart both the possibilities, so they are neither honoured by her wearing it for the occasion nor can claim it back and use it. She might throw it away or give it away after this but she knows they would not have it back, and the expense has been made clearly irrecoverable and useless as well as spurned. 

 They have been spurned successfully after having been roped for the show, and silently let know they can neither maintain a distance and their own peace nor have any relationship or intimacy - they are not on par with the old woman's in-laws used for work, is about it, but used and thrown away until next occasion they certainly are.

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 The bride had publicly declared that anyone claiming to have any non-rational experience "had something to do with their brain" - not clearly stating that she meant something wrong with the brain, but allowing the inference very clearly, and ready to deny it if asked, while pouncing on the one who would ask. Now for three days in public and certainly much more in private she has not only consented but happily gone along with the very religious ceremony, and she would be happy to explain it was for sake of others, not caring this exposes her as a fraud openly. Hypocrisy is not new to them - the old grandmother had advised the grandson be not tonsured but only have a lock slightly shopped, fashionably, on his occasion of a ceremony. So they distribute the sweets often from a popular temple in another state but throw a worshipped photograph of a great persona under feet to show the unwanted (roped in) relatives their stance without a word.

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The old woman had insisted on giving the ceremonial "gift" to the unwanted younger couple publicly, as a traditional "price of taking the traditional part in the ceremony". She instructs them to get what they would like and offers the younger couple for the purpose the money they had given her to enable her to spend for the ceremony, the whole being convoluted beyond possible pretense of honesty. The younger woman has been slighted once too often and this is not the occasion nor the manner of when she would accept the first gift from her mother-in-law. She makes it clear they do not need to make the convoluted money transaction, and the money they gave in the first place was for the purpose of the old woman to enable her to give gifts to her various other more fitting recipients - the bride, other grandchildren. They - or at least she - won't accept frauds.

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The memory of the jellyfish is still vivid in memory. That was a real jellyfish, accidentally thrown to the shore and defending itself, perhaps merely looking for food. Human forms of those that are cephalopods in spirit are not so easy to defend against or to get over. And besides, they are ready as soon as one recovers, to sting again.

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Too Late For Everything –

Once It Was Called Garden City

 It used to be quieter, once upon a time, when it was mostly local people and a few science research institutions and mostly parks and trees. It was even then known for a cooler climate and gentle surroundings, but humanity goes for living wherever people find necessities of life - water and fertile earth, in older days; jobs, today. The quiet town remained so for a long time, until a few factors came together in time and met here and blew it up. 

 India deciding to be liberal economically and releasing the stranglehold of government on industries was one, and the IT factor with internet and www was another - the two put together allowed a lot of people in India and companies from the around the world to find each other desirable to work with and find a suitable place - and this one was more or less perfect. Cool, quiet, not crowded then, not troubled by any local politics factors (leftists, militants, Naxalites, racists) making it impossible for talent from elsewhere to come and stay put and make a life - temporary or otherwise - in the town here. If this was not enough there was even a then quiet pub culture, before it had exploded and become another social phenomenon. Those working late at night could go relax with a drink, and that helped the international companies feel at ease. What else would the foreign visitors do away from home! 

 So the building industry boomed first, with new buildings coming up and land being bought around at rapidly escalating prices that had a high acceleration curve - hotels, flats, houses, offices, everything was needed more. Multinationals arrived in droves and so did various potential employees from all corners of India - and even abroad, since various NRI young people found it more attractive for the first time to return to settle in India - and the town grew and grew. The roads still had bumps and taxis were mostly rare, with autos ruling the roost, often being arrogant and rude in refusing local passengers, looting for the ignorant foreigners to dupe them into shopping at the various outlets that had names to fool those very wealthy people - names that copied the names of reliable government shops - and pocketing what commissions those fraudulent outlets offered. Travel within town became unpleasant, what with the bumpy roads, the kerosene that was commonly used in not only trucks and auto-rickshaws but even some private vehicles used by middle-class owners. Air was too foul to breathe and people risked health in going out. 

 Soon, the pubs were not enough, and nor were quiet old style pegs at the pubs - the young were exhilarated with never before imagined levels of income and the flow went into not only brand name clothes and shoes and the newly available stereos and home entertainment systems, it had to spill over into parties to show it all off, and newer sensations for the parties to make them one up on others. Some NRIs were heard at mornings at gyms, neither whispering nor loud in expressing their shock and the goings on at the local scene, at the regular swinging they saw here, and their inability to join in due to commitments they had back over there. This certainly was a turnaround. 

 The prosperity made its demands heard soon enough, with foreign clients displeased over how long it took from airport to city to various IT offices. The city - the town had now definitely grown to be a city - could not afford to displease them, since the new phenomena of health-care tourists were far too valuable to lose. Often a person in need of an operation could travel, have the problem taken care of, and travel within India for a few weeks as well, all for the price of the same operation back home - and with no loss of quality in health-care in the equipment, medicine or doctors but much improvement in terms of personal care by nurses and so on. So the medical tourism was booming and unthinkable to lose. 

 The city pulled up its socks and got on to making roads and reducing pollution, and finally deciding on a venue for the huge new airport that had been in the offing for well over a decade, with indecisions about the venue due to political factors. The pollution was reduced effectively with public education and a little help from the govenment to the vehicles - auto-rickshaws especially - and it was only a recalcitrant or out of the state truck or so then on belching smoke, and then pretty soon those too reduced because public shame does what laws don't often. So now it was time to begin building the much needed infrastructure - roads, airport - even as some old politicians vented steam against the IT industry from time to time for not "benefiting the poor" or some such blah, not because they meant it but because they had probably not had any slice off the IT pie. 

 Soon enough the momentum gathered and while many dates were declared for the finishing of the approach road for the new airport, soon enough (that is, in a decade or so) it looked as if the airport would finish sooner than the road to lead to it from the city. Which would have been ridiculous, since it would then be necessary to operate a full jet service from the new airport to the old one to get to the city. So the private builders of the new airport were obstructed with the various permissions and inspections and so forth that the various branches of the government could co-operate with each other in not providing too soon, and the builders being foreigners were steaming through every pore instead of trying the regular back channels of getting things done. Finally the road was completed in the sense that vehicles could ply to and fro - and the city had brand new bus and taxi services plying exclusively to the airport, which were so enthusiastically and quietly embraced by the people that the numbers and services had to be extended. Those who had predicted the new bus and taxi services as too expensive and doomed to failure had reckoned without the people's need for good services, for value for the money paid. 

 Meanwhile even as the new road and the traffic were getting used to the still going on road building and various far too few over-and-under-passes for traffic, and the widening that was still going on, one problem no one had thought of was becoming critical every day - no one had thought of the people who lived along the road and used the various road services, such as buses or other vehicles other than their own, and hence often needed to cross the road, walk along on the side, and so on. Those in the city were adept at managing since they were used to the traffic, although the traffic thereby became not quite so much of a highway as a goods train traffic - slowed and stopped according to the needs of the cross traffic, the pedestrians crossing everywhere - (allowed or not), and the policemen often switching off traffic lights under the illusion that they could do a better job personally, and hence making a thorough mess of it further. 

 But the highway went further into the rural areas with fields on both sides and there being no barriers constructed on either side to prevent any stray crossings nor any provisions anywhere along the highway to allow people to cross with either over-bridges or underpasses (the latter could be worse, but useful for animals and old and handicapped) there were accidents every other day, and the villagers blamed it on the high speed traffic that would not stop when they saw anyone crossing - and so they jammed the road by stoning the vehicles and crowding on the highway, which was duly reported in newspapers. So that then became a mode of protest for any reason at all - latest being prices of tomatoes dropping low and so the farmers jamming the road with a few truckloads of tomatoes dropped on the highway. 

 The drivers, not necessarily only the professional but even the owners, are another story. Still mentally in the times when they would bicycle around various obstacles such as stones or animals or puddles, they drive any vehicles they happen to be driving the same way exactly - so you suddenly find a bus veering left without warning and stopping for a bus-stop and then veering right back all the way right to the fast lane - which is always occupied by trucks, buses, and even auto-rickshaws, anyone who in fact cannot speed for his life - while the other buses do not wait for this one to move on but try to go around it to stop ahead of it, and so on, while other vehicles play the game too - no one would let anyone else go if they could help it, and everyone tries to take every half inch available on the road, by shifting into another lane or ahead or laterally, even. 

 Motorbikes go round every vehicle to fill in the gaps left by other vehicles and if they bang on your car they wonder why you are upset, you are not dead are you? Tempos do their best to take out your mirrors - serves you right for driving an expensive car, you are not even a powerful official or a politician that could threaten them - and they succeed often enough; what can one do, thrash them? The owners of the vehicles claim they have no provision for the driver doing anything to you, you can do what you like with him; and the driver pretends to be poor and old, while secretly he is exultant to have punished you and jubilant you can do nothing to him, actually he owns a three floor house that is nine times the size of your own tiny flat. So you let him go and wash your expensive much loved leather seats with Lysol, just in case. And shout at your driver for competing with the stinking guy and then making him sit in your car. 

 Meanwhile, thousands of trees have been felled along the roads to widen them, and the once upon a time so called Garden city is on the way to becoming a desert with fields and orchards converted to tall building complexes for flats and offices and malls - that being the latest need of the city, of the young uprooted population that needs somewhere to go during off hours, to meet people and to relax and to see a film and shop, even. Further along the highway the fields and orchards are giving way to vineyards that will serve no need of anyone at all other than losing consciousness further, but no nutrition for either rich or poor. 

 Someone asked how I liked it here. Perhaps the answer was rare, since most people that come from outside do like it, and why not - they are young, just graduated from somewhere in the country where it is too hot in summer and possibly very cold in winter as well, and now they have come here for a very lucrative job and get company of peers while losing parental grip on their day to day life. I am not in any of that category - including those of pub or disco goers, or club either. I have nothing for me here, I said to him. It is life in a limbo, while I have been still waiting patiently for life to begin.

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