Frequently Incoherent Ramblings

"Do you want Cucumber Salad or Spicy Potato Salad with your Veggie Wrap, sir?".

I get asked this question every time I go to my favorite Desi fast food place in Dallas. My reflex response to this question used to be "Well, who the heck really cares, just give me the darn wrap". Oh well, after hearing the usual "But sir it is included with the wrap" reply a few times, I have softened up and invariably end up munching the actually not-spicy-at-all Potato salad or the very mundane Cucumber salad with the oh, so delicious veggie wrap.

"It is included, sir" also rears its head when I am traveling. For instance on more than one occasion I have been on flights in India which are so short in duration. For example, the 40 minute Mumbai-Baroda flight. Take the 10 minute for take off and 10 minute for landing out of that and the flight attendants have 20 minutes to get the meal service out of the way.

Never mind the fact that my sister in Mumbai has just fed me my evening snack and my Mom will have a hearty meal waiting for me in a short while, when the flight attendant comes around and asks "Veg or Non-Veg, sir?", I invariably co-operate in pulling off yet another "feed everyone in 20 minutes" routine. Hey, but what the heck - it is included.

There is definitely something about food that comes as part of something else you have paid for. It is like you feel, you've earned it. I mean honestly, how many people have you seen refuse an Airline meal? I have seen very few. If you're asleep when the meal service came out, you almost feel left out when you wake up and see everyone else with plates on their tray tables.

I had to get my Multiple entry visa to the US stamped again in January when I was in Mumbai. I had availed of the "lounge facility" by paying an extra Rs. 150. The facility included a place to sit before the interview, a locker to put your stuff, a bus ride to the American consulate with a jump in the queue there and of course a choice of Tea/Coffee and Sandwich/Samosa.

I was about an hour early for my 11 am appointment. As I took a seat and awaited my batch to be called out, I heard the officer calling out the 10 am folks to proceed. "But, what about 9 am sir", a voice shouted out to him. It was the guy in a brown shirt who had just entered the lounge. The officer looked at the guy strangely and asked him to cut the queue and come with him since he was already an hour late and there was a chance that the consulate would not admit him. It could take weeks before he could apply again, if he didn't get there pronto.

"Wait 5 mins, sir", the guy with the 9 am appointment said to the astonished officer. Before the officer could react, he quickly grabbed himself a Samosa and a Chai.

But, of course. It was included.

So is America more or less secure since the Tsunami struck?

Yes, I too thought it was an absurd question. But a number of network TV, Cable TV and Radio talk shows brought up this question and got guests/panelists to analyze whether America had missed an opportunity to "mend fences" with a part of the world that it had to, well, mend fences with. Indonesia had recently become a hotbed or terrorism and some of the panelists put forth the view that the Indonesian portion of the promised $350 Million that would get to Aceh would help defuse some of the hatred towards the US. Others disagreed and declared that America had missed an opportunity to "win the hearts and minds in the Muslim world" by its initially small aid announcements that progressively got bigger.

If the neighbouring house or the one down the street burnt down and I ask myself how I would be affected in the long term if I helped the people in it and modulate my offer of help accordingly, what is so wrong with that? Surely, what matters is that I am helping out, right? And I might even turn out to be the highest or second highest donor when all is said and done. Surely, the people who live in the house will see that and appreciate my gesture. And besides how else could I make them my friends?

Plausible perhaps. Except, wasn't this about the people in the house? Since when did it become about me? And should I be keeping a balance sheet when starting out to make friends?

The likes of Larry King, Chris Mathews and even Diane Rehm were getting their guests to spar over this grotesque question issue on Prime Time TV and Radio. A few other people were busy in the mean time.

Like a 7th Grade Social Studies teacher who wrote to a friend of mine in Minnesota and asked him how her class could send hand made gifts they had made to show solidarity with children in Southern India.

Or take the case of a 12 year old in Colorado who went through his businessman Dad's Contact list and went on to raise $50K towards relief efforts by picking up the phone and calling all his Dad's friends and business contacts.

Last Sunday, Sunita and I ran into a gentleman who was easily in his 70's who stood vigil at the Randall's in Houston to sell cake pieces in exchange for a donation. And we've all read and heard about all those many employees of Corporate America who pressurized their companies enough to start matching programs to match their contributions, thus making them bigger.

This was a familiar story all across America and unprecedented levels of giving ensued. More than $500 Million has been raised by private donations. The many million people who helped raise that amount did not ask themselves whether they would be safer because of it or whether they would be better because of it or get something back for it in any form. This was compassion at its best - free of selfishness, greed or vested interests.

They gave because they wanted to reach out to a fellow human being in the time of need. It didn't matter that the human in question was on the other side of the earth. Today, there was a bond.

And America is already safer.

What is the big deal? I asked myself. After all, all the other guy did was to cut him off. This produced a reaction in my friend, which I felt was over the top – he decided to make a rude gesture and honk. Why get so animated over this? I could not understand what my friend was getting riled up about. We were on the road in the UK, a few months after I arrived there as a student and this was my first brush with Road Rage.

A few years later, after arriving in the US, I heard of the word “loser” being used to describe the losing team in the finals of a long and arduous competition like the Baseball World Series. I was used to the word "Runners Up" until then. However, 163 regular season games and several months of playing brilliant baseball right through later and after providing delight to their fans all season long and coming up just short in a grueling seven match world series competition, the team receives this as a reward - "Ladies and Gentlemen, may I now call upon the losers of the World Series to receive their 2 minutes of commiseration on not being the winners!". Hello! Didn’t this team like beat everybody but one team till now?

Over the years I have also heard of the word “Poor white trash” to describe those who dwell in trailer parks or are homeless. Coming from a country where the number of poor far outnumbers the number of rich, I found this reference a little baffling. I have since come to realize that it is not so much borne out of a lack of compassion on the part of the society in general here but a frustration at the inability of the trailer park types to get up, shake off their lethargy and “win”.

So what has all this got to do with Road Rage?

Perhaps the people swearing, honking, making rude gestures and even sometimes chasing one another to "get even" were mere symptoms. Could the illness itself be more chronic? The illness of bottled up frustrations perhaps?

After all, we live in an extremely unforgiving, cut throat world. And one cannot isolate competition to certain spheres of life and not let it permeate your being in other ways. Competition leads to a lot of good as it spurs people to achieve more than one would when left unchallenged. But, alas competition also produces winners and losers. And a society that scorns upon losers in its quest to produce winners.

Being a winner could mean different things to different people – to some it could mean tasting success in the stock market, to others it could mean being the star at the quarterly board meeting, or being recognized at work amongst peers and emerging at the top of the ranking that decides compensation reviews, it could mean securing the highest GPA at college or something as seemingly mundane as winning the round of golf against one’s overly competitive buddies.

However, on average, how many winners does a normal day produce, I ask myself. One has a sneaking suspicion that there are more people who don’t win than those who do in an average day. While we would like to think of ourselves as people who take the “disappointments” in our stride, frustrations do have a way of coming out and we subconsciously seek ways of venting them from time to time.

And in the absence of too many opportunities to do so, the guy who is going too slow in front of you on the road or the guy who cuts in front of you without warning is good a guy as any to use as a punching bag. Or if it gets really bad, how about mouthing off at a Customer Service Rep who cannot get your overcharged phone bill sorted out? After all she is paid to listen to you and hearing your complaints is her job.

I had persuaded myself, naively as it would turn out, that Road Rage was a problem confined to the West. After all my recollections of Roads in India was that of controlled chaos. Traffic rules had a way of evolving out of necessity. If you see a truck coming at you, unless you’re in a bigger and sturdier truck, get out of the way. If you’re a cyclist, accept your limited leverage and stick to the extreme left of the road (India drives on the left hand side of the road, for most part at least). Numbers prevailed – for instance if you’re on a two wheeler, yield to four wheelers.

You knew your place in the pecking order and similar rules of thumb existed in other spheres of life. There was no point trying to question how things worked for nobody would listen to you, so occasionally you would get frustrated, say things like “what will become of this country” and when things inevitably remained as they were, you would move on with life. This led to an equilibrium of sorts, however delicately so at times.

On my recent visit to my hometown of Baroda, I was returning home after meeting my favourite teacher at high school in an auto-rickshaw. A fairly mundane ride beginning at Makarpura Teen Rasta right in front of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan School where I had spent the best part of 13 years of my life followed. The Rickshaw driver was a gentleman in his late fifties probably.

We crossed the Lal Bagh Railway Crossing on to the Rajmahal Road. Many years ago, Raj Mahal Road passed in front of a very vibrant Laxmi Vilas Palace where the royal family for decades, prided itself on being in charge of a culturally progressive, artsy and intellectually evolved city. Today a large section of the palace estate has been earmarked for commercial and residential construction.

We made a left and were now on our way towards the Vishwamitri flyover. With no radio to distract you and with my mobile charge running low, I had not much to do but be lost in my thoughts as we meandered through the streets of the city I had grown up in. Suddenly the rickshaw came to a screeching halt and as I looked through the dashboard, we had missed hitting a white Maruti 800 by about 1.4 inches.

The gentleman driving the Maruti decided to get out of the car - bringing to a standstill all traffic. Before I had a chance to realize what was happening here, the man in his late 30's, slightly pot bellied and with his wife and a couple of others in his entourage in tow, confronted the rickshaw driver and standing a foot away from him said in Gujarati with the odd word of broken English thrown in: "Didn't you see I showed my right indicator? Are you blind?” The rickshaw driver, also slightly heated up at the time, pointed out that he had the right of way (is there such a thing near Vishwamitri Bridge I wondered) and the turning party needed to wait for a break in traffic.

At this point, with a captive audience watching him in anticipation, Mr. Maruti 800 decided enough was enough. After all who the heck is a 50 something rickshaw driver to tell him the rules? Wasn't he the one in a car? How could he take a retort from the rickshaw driver quietly? Maybe Mr. Maruti 800 lacked the sophistication of the new yuppie class that was emerging that spoke better English than him. He might not be driving a Scorpio like them. He might not even hang out at the Baristas and Inox like them. So what if he watched ZeeTV and not CNBC India. But as far as this confrontation went, he clearly should be the one calling the shots.

He grabbed the rickshaw driver by the collar and mouthed off a series of expletives, and finally challenged him to a fist fight to prove who the stronger party of the two was. I decided to then step in, I wasn't about to play the Hindi film hero and save the underdog in this duel. I simply persuaded the rickshaw driver to not indulge Mr. Maruti any further and added some weight to my good natured advice by saying I was getting late. Much to my relief, the rickshaw driver relented and eyeballed the Maruti guy on his way out, not before he heard a few more challenges to his manhood.

We then uneventfully made our way back to my apartment on Vasna Road. As I paid the rickshaw driver a little more than the rate he quoted, he was profusely thankful. I finally said the words "Drive carefully". He said he appreciated my concern but just as he reached to pull the ignition rod on his left to breathe life into his Bajaj rick, he said something that disturbed me "Sir, if I was only 10 years younger and a little stronger - I would have taught him a lesson he would never forget". He then pulled out of sight through the apartment gates.

Road rage had arrived in India. More significantly, it had arrived in my home city with several local flavours of bottled up frustrations mixed in. Class, age, wealth and appearance played their parts in shaping up how it unfolded.

The steeped in history and heritage, Laxmi Vilas Palace giving way to a commercial property was an indicator of how the delicate equilibrium of the past based on old socio-economic equations was giving way to a consumer culture that was taking down several barriers and creating a fresh set of them.

The rage that is taken out on the roads of the west had made its way to India. And India also presents unique and creative ways of those frustrations to come out. To name but a few:

Local train rage (when the 6.30 Virar Local is running 30 mins late).
Movie theater rage (if the electricity goes off during the screening of Veer Zaara).
Cricket match rage (when India again manages that famous “defeat from the jaws of victory” act).
Rajdhani Express Food rage (when the food is too cold in the AC Chair Car compartment).

The possibilities are limitless.