While living in Bangalore, my relationship with my neighbor was contained in a 'Hi' while waiting for lift or while stretching to collect the daily milk from the doorstep (both just extend their heads only, beyond the door - not to reveal the bare body!), or while placing the garbage bags next to the door to be picked up by the garbage collection agency the next day. This kind of a limited relationship has it's own merits and demerits. First merit is ,one has the freedom to choose the way one want to live their life. Nobody interferes with other's life. The negative side being 'lack of help' from any quarter when you are facing a crisis. In Kerala, my home state, it is a totally different story. One of my friend in his blog 'On the Malayalee' has written about the attitude changes of a Malayalee, when he is in his home state.
I must say that, a Malayalee in his home state is forced to (bound to) abide by certain norms of the land. When at home town, you are invited to all the functions in neighbor's and relatives homes. If you do not turn up, it becomes a big complaint which is enough to create a family feud. Added to this, one has to run around for admissions of their kids, paying the bills (still in many places the e-payment facility is not enabled or the concerned person is not aware of it), get the car serviced, book the gas cylinder and follow up several times......
I am at Kerala during the past one week, after my middle east tour. During this past one week, I had to attend one wedding, travel to Chennai in train (as the air tickets have become exorbitant). In the train, unfortunately the A.C duct was focused straight on my bald head, and immediately after coming back I am down with fever. Yesterday my niece, underwent a brain surgery, and just because they are generous in telling me not to come, as I dont have any role to play, I avoided going there with a fever, instead decided to go to the nearest church and pray for her. Yesterday night it rained cats and dogs here and today when we woke up, our house is surrounded by rain water. Now my ordeal of finding out somebody to clear the drainage starts!. Blogging is one way of escaping from unpleasant stuff!. Today morning I spoke to my cousin over the phone, and he is attending two weddings today. One is his friend's daughter's and the other one is 'his mother's, sister's, daughter's, husband's, cousin's, daughter's. Poor chap. My fate is still better.
Luckily I am self employed, and because of that I need not ask for leave to anyone except myself. Even then sometimes I used to loose my cool, thinking about the opportunity cost of my time spent on these trivial stuff. Very often I thank God, for not being in a 9-5 job. How would I have managed these conflicting aspects of like commitment to work Vs commitment to the extended family...which extends beyond your comprehension.
Another sickening aspect of life here is, everyone is interested in you and your affairs and at the same time, nobody is genuinely interested in your well being. There is a limited feeling of sadism inherent in the majority's hearts. They are always in the look out for comparisons of other's lives with their's and their kith and kin's, to ensure that nobody lives better than them. In case that happens, they are not at peace till they do something better. This is the underlying root cause of the gold loving malayalee, who lives in mansions, drives expensive cars, sends their kids to medicine or engineering only by paying huge capitation fees, generating tons of third rate engineers who do not understand the basics of engineering, flashes 3G phones, wven when 3G networks are not available in India yet, and listens to English news, even when they dont understand it. This is a abridged list of idiosyncrasies of the malayalee when in kerala.
Dont mistake me. There are exceptions as well.
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