Religion

After living some years out of the country, I can more easily see how much one encounters religion in India. I really don't see what is all the fuss the Sangh parivar is making. Hinduism is alive and well. You visit hotels, company guest houses, hospitals, auto rickshaws - there are chubby Ganeshas smiling at you. (Ganesha seems to be the favorite of everybody, the designer versions rampant in all sorts of materials from Gold to Chalk is worth another blog). Inside the office too, on the desks, walls, there is invariably a religious picture along with Aishwarya Rai screen savers.

Is it possible that there are other colorful countries like India?

NRI

Hear ye NRI software enginners, you may be living in some rich country, but most of you are definitely not living rich like your Indian counterpart.

Back in Indes

Its ages since I have blogged. I am back in India, not on vacation this time but to
live, and as I go about making arrangements - housing, transportation etc., I wonder if I should write a cultural reorientation piece for the returning NRIs - Hit 0 in the lift when you want to go to the ground floor, try and find the method behind the madness called traffic if you have any aspirations to drive, remember the days when you caught a bus - thats what those hundreds of people on the sidewalk facing the same direction are doing, nothing untoward has happened.

Another interesting aspect is people often start off with the economic condition and tell you how their relative so and so is still in the US, as though they could not, would not believe that someone out of their free will would come back.

Pedigree

Our HR representative passed me a resume for an interview and whispered reverently, "an IIT guy". Never mind the guy from IIT majored in mechanical engineering and somewhere along the line acquired a diploma in computer science and is now interviewing for a software engineering job, where his IIT trained mechanical engineering skills would utmost be called upon to, I dont know, perhaps move a monitor. Another similar breed is those who have gone to school in the US universities, again majoring in all sorts of esoteric things like signal processing, but ending up as programmers. Only thing as far as I have seen that differentiate them at workplace is a more active email box with participation in sundry associations and a bumper sticker in their car that claims they are alumni of such and such university. I am always curious about the awe they inspire, sometime even seem to demand.

Names

My friend calls me a bundle of contradictions. I call myself balanced.