Thanks for the Tip.

          A friend told us how expensive ‘labour’ charges were if one has delivered a baby. Doctor’s fees and ward/bed charges are inevitable; then you pay sometimes nurses, but definitely the ayahs when you leave the hospital. She said: “You have to budget for the discharge-time expenditure. If you give below their expectations, you leave behind sour faces. It’s unnerving.”

          Bai Goanna said, “At least you don’t suffer if you don’t pay them, you’re going home with a baby and not likely to come back. You know, there are places where you have to pay an advance tip – call it speed money--  to get a bed-pan.”

          Strange thing, this tip business. A bell-boy working in a hotel told me he earned more than his salary through tips. His total monthly income was more than mine, I concluded.

“Tax-free, too,” Shri Husband said, to add to my chagrin.

 “Besides the tips, he told me he got books that the guests left behind and sometimes clothes and goodies like fur-lined jackets and hair-driers,” I said.

“Those goodies,” Shri Husband added, “Might be possible, but not probable time after time. Why would a tourist carry along fur-lined anything to Goa. And I thought hotels provided hair-driers.”

Bai Goanna intruded: “You know, if it were such a profitable job, people would queue up to become bellboys, waiters, cleaners.”

When I go to get my hair trimmed, I ask ‘how much’ at the end of the trim and hand over exactly as much money as told.

“No-oo,” Bai Goanna groaned, accusing me seconds later of being cheap. “You have to give a tip. You have to keep some lesser denomination notes to put into the pocket of the person who cut your hair.”

“The pocket?” I reacted sharply. “Do you expect me to fumble around tight jean pockets to push valuable paper inside them? The notes will get crushed. What if the staff is wearing a salwar-kameez?”

“No, baba,” Bai Goanna said with the tone she uses when she’s pretending not to be irritated. You have to put it in the pocket of the apron or white coat that s/he’s wearing.”

Shri Husband clucked, shaking his head, and mumbled: “The things she’s ignorant about.”

Bai Goanna continued, “Gratuities… that’s the correct word for tips, by the way… are expected. They are the norm. So if you don’t tip, you’re considered not just a miser, but eccentric. If you’ve paid the gas-delivery boy the full amount and got the receipt, he waits, staring at you until you hand over that little extra. If you don’t the next time he’ll drag the cylinder and your nice floor tiles will get scratched. No matter how hard the fuel companies are trying to streamline deliveries with technology, tips still work to avoid delays.”

Shri Husband went on simultaneously: “Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, white-goods technicians, all quote a certain amount for the billing. What they actually get is a little bit more. For the transport, for the chai-paani. Tips and bribery are actually the same thing, one’s given after, one before... Money, gifts or favours for job done or to be done. Check arms-dealers, bankers, ministers. Same meaning, different words in different settings.”

When Bai Goanna and Shri Husband talk at the same time, I get confused. “What did you say?” I asked both. “Nothing,” they chorused.

          I’m told by my well-travelled friends that in faraway New York and not-so-faraway UAE, taxis use meters, as they do in Mumbai. After you’ve paid your fare, you have to say “keep the change” as we don’t in Mumbai- unless you’ve lived long years abroad, earned in currencies with steep conversion rates, or want to show the driver/your relatives just how much money you can spare without blinking. In Goa, the fare, the tip, the tips for future trips, are all included in the money quoted/negotiated/bargained before sitting in a cab.

          “What about those behind-the-scenes cooks, operation-theatre helpers, who have no way of getting tips?” asked Bai Goanna and in the same breath answered: “there is a service charge, though.”

          Shri Husband said: “If you want to give gratuity to only the person serving you, then the service charge won’t help. Actually, if the service charge in put on the bill and you pay by credit card, that money will go to the owner of the business, not to the person who served you.”

          In a country where, for fulfilling promises, even gods are given baksheesh of coconuts/ store-bought sweets/ pieces of clothes that are later auctioned, it’s accepted that mere humans will also follow the lead. Some devotees prefer to fast instead of offering gifts, which doesn’t work in any service industry. Imagine saying: “You gave me a great pedicure, for the next three Wednesdays I won’t eat fish.” It works only with god/desses.

          I said: “It’s unfair that counter-staff selling cloth or shoes or giving appointments at call-centres don’t get tipped. Even doormen and postmen get gifts.”

          “Teachers, too,” said Bai Goanna with some feeling. She gives tuitions and regularly gets presents when her wards work hard for their marks. (She in return gives them something for the trouble they’ve taken to get satisfactory results, thus neutralizing the ‘tipping’.)

          We asked a restaurant-owner about tips. He said: “That’s one way the staff can earn more than their wages, no?” We pounced on him, begging him to confess that that meant they weren’t paid fair wages.  

          Tips help you to get birth/marriage/death certificates and all events in-between. That’s why the zipped coins section was invented and, in spite of plastic money taking over our lives, continues to be there in most wallets/purses.

If I pay for a professional service, say at a lawyer’s chamber, and don’t get a receipt for it, can I call that payment a tip? Does that amount get declared to the taxmen? If a professional does free or concessional practice, can it be put under ‘deductibles? Easy to ask questions, difficult to answer.

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Changing Vocabulary.

          In a world of awesomeness, some things perish. Simple words, for example.

          From newspaper reports I gather that police no longer go anywhere. They don’t even run. They ‘rush’ to the sites (of murder, suicide, whatever).

From the same newspapers I gather that all murders are gruesome/shocking. Why type in an extra word is my point. One can just say there was a murder on the beach. Why say it was gruesome? All murders are horrific, no? Just asking.

Now that Goa’s on the terror radar, the state’s on high alert. Mere alertness won’t do, it has to be high.

Rows at gram-panchayat sabhas are always major and members don’t debate, argue or quarrel, they get embroiled in disputes. Courts don’t chide or punish, they ‘slam’ the guilty. Just as the Reserve Bank of India doesn’t lower the interest rates, it slashes them: even it’s by .25 %. Slash and slam, awesome words.

These days, no one drinks liquor or anything at all, they consume it. Vendors no longer request or ask for space in the market. They demand it. Or so my newspaper says.

If I said the Naval Band entertained or amused an audience, it would sound so… so… childish. Regale sounds professional and so it’s used even for kindergarten annual day functions. Jr KG children of YZ Prabhu school regaled parents with their talent, etc. Sounds grand? And misleading.

“Such big words,” I said to Shri Husband, “these reporters use. I wonder whether they know what the differences in meaning are.”

Shri Husband’s response was typically unkind: “What difference will it make if someone says you’re bad at housework versus you’re housework challenged?”

I had a feeling he was referring to me and not to a virtual/imaginary ‘you’, so I sat quietly for some time, not wanting to stir up a -- you know—‘discussion’.

Turning to a sports’ page, I discovered that cricket or other teams don’t lose, they suffer losses. Suffer, ah, much used. People don’t get fever, they suffer from it.

“Some families,” quoth Shri Husband in a sombre tone, “don’t suffer from insanity. They enjoy it.” I’m surprised at his wit at times. Don’t know whether I should refer to it as amazing, fantastic or super.

Some people refer to all women of any age as ‘girls’. Others call them ladies. (Pronounced lay-diss). Somehow the words women and woman are extinct. Doesn’t apply to men. Someone, somewhere should be screaming (not saying) ‘discrimination’.

We don’t repair or mend our clothes/footwear any longer. We either buy (sorry, purchase) new stuff after discarding the old, or restore it. Reusing with the help of imagination and skill is called up-cycling. And giving it to younger siblings/cousins… is just not done. (Ref the word ‘buy’: not many know when to use it. And claim to purchase a box of matches. Who knows the difference in meaning; who cares, eh?

‘I don’t know’ has been replaced with ‘I have no personal knowledge of’.

I, who love languages, have forgotten the difference between ailing, ill and sick. May peace in restfulness be upon my English-Miss.

BTW, students nowadays aren’t clever, intelligent or bright, they’re academically endowed.

“Like,” Shri Husband said unwelcomly for the second time in a couple of minutes. “You’re housework challenged. And unwelcomly is not a word.”

Who asked you, I thought to myself, to read what I’m typing.

“Just saying,” he said. Uncanny, or should I say fantastic, his knack of reading my mind.

I saw a hoarding with the picture of a deluxe/luxury two-wheeler. Dirt-bikes I can understand, but a calling a little city-dwelling scooter a deluxe/luxury vehicle is downright sarcastic. But people who believe in fantastic and amazing vocabulary fall for such advertisements.

Pokey-little flats or small bungalows (another dead word, replaced by villas) are also described as luxury homes. The word flat is nearly dead, substituted by apartment.

          With icons and emoticons making their way into computer-generated communication, describing feelings no longer needs words. So the exaggerations of the written word themselves maybe getting extinct.

Placement of eyebrows to show a scowl, the colour crimson to indicate anger, various shapes of lips and sizes of eyes emphasize various expressions. A tongue coming out at one end means the ‘writer’ is saying something he shouldn’t be, out of turn, so pardon him. These icons are just the opposite of the exaggerations that have entered the lexicon of the 2000s. Like sms.

Sms is evolving into a new language, call it textese or chatspeak. LOL (laugh out loud or lots of love) is a simple example of it. An exaggerated, more common version of the same ‘act’ (of laughing) is ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing). Smiling, in spite of the emoticon showing various kinds of smiles, isn’t part of sms vocabulary. Including numericals into words is a gr8 change. Not just nice, not just practical, but 1deful (wonderful). Nowhere in conventional language is ‘ha ha’ just a laugh and ‘muahaha’ an evil laugh. But you need to know that a plain ‘muah’ is a platonic peck on the cheek.

No amount of words can give the effect of tone and accent. Just how fulfilling a meal was can be described, in India, as good, very good, verry good, verrrry good, very-very good or super. You could loudly add ‘excellent’ for effect. Films can be horrible, terrible, flops, but the word ‘bad’ is no longer in use. Not in the recent past have I read any review that mentions a film as plain ‘bad’. What was considered bad/foul language in my youth is now called abusive/obscene. Changing times, change in words.

IMO (in my opinion), if you won’t change, YOYO (you’re on your own). Viva evolution.

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Oos-Juice.

          If you mentioned ‘cauliflower’ to my grandmother in Palolem, chances were she wouldn’t know what you were talking about. French beans maybe she’d heard of. There was a time when raw beetroot/carrot juice wasn’t possible to make, even in sophisticated urban kitchens. Unless you were wealthy enough to have special stones to crush/grind them to a fine chutney, muslin cloths for slaves to squeeze the pulp through, chrystalware to serve the precious liquid in and important friends to serve them to. In the Goa of my childhood, beetroots/carrots were not easily available. Once, someone had come from far-off Marmugoa/ Mapusa/ Mumbai and brought those tasty, colourful roots with them as a treat.  The excretion of their pigments on the following day caused mild trepidation and a merry discussion, but that’s not the point of this piece.

          Juices -- of only sweet-lime—were for the ill and the old. The idea of consuming foods rich in nutrients not grown around the house was alien to people who ate fish/beef-curry-rice at every meal all year round. Coconuts were eaten raw, scraped, ‘milked’ (for want of a more accurate word), cooked with jaggery, without a care that they might clog blood vessels.

          Juices, amongst the several health-hysteria related concepts we’ve imported from the West, have taken over our lives. Karela juice for diabetes (which means loss of practice for qualified endocrinologists). Cucumber juice for the skin (promises work: beauticians earn more than dermatologists). Palak juice for those with a low haemoglobin count, melon juice for digestive disorders, all sorts of mixed-herb juices for curing cancer/ piles/ alcoholism/ death. Pumpkin juice spiced up with lemon, mint and spices for all-round good health. Etc.

          Breakfasts these days are accompanied by ‘juice’. Orange, grape, mixed fruit, lychee or some other exotic fruit. It’s packaged (with/out preservatives/sugar), stored and poured out of tetrapacks which, when empty, can be used for planting seedlings if you’re eco-conscious. The glass, bud-shaped thingames that were once used for squeezing citrus fruits now adorn drawing-rooms. They share space with lacquer-coated brass paan-containers, rust-spotted nut-crackers with carved handles, ancestors’ portraits, dented copper bath-water vessels used as planters, models of the Taj Mahal, mementoes of conferences attended and plastic dolls.  (Nostalgia curios displayed by the ‘old-times-good-times’ brigade.)

          To keep up with what’s happening in the world of health, Bai Goanna bought herself a juicer-cum-blender.

          “Why can’t you eat the fruit with pulp and fibre?” Shri Husband wanted to know. “It’s good for the colon, you know.”

          “Why waste time chewing? I’m not a cow,” she retorted. “Technology is meant to help me, I’m going to use it.”

          We watched her dice washed cabbage leaves and throw them into the gadget. A couple of whirrs later, she poured the extract into a glass. Two fistfuls of shredded cabbage had been converted into a couple of teaspoons of frothy liquid. In seconds. The pastel green had become many shades darker. We peered into the gadget. Whatever was left of the leaves clung desperately to the little holes in the cylinder/jar. We watched the process of scraping. Gently at first, tentatively, so that the jar wouldn’t get damaged. Then the spatula was used with some force. The little tatters of dehydrated leaves didn’t give up their place(s) around the blade and the sides of the ‘special jar’. Seconds had turned to a couple of minutes. Finally, Bai Goanna decided enough was enough. She put water into the same jar, the lid on the jar, put the switch on and the mess inside got soggier as it twirled around. When it looked frothy, Bai Goanna took all the jar-contents into her palm and squeezed out with the help of tightly curled fingers every drop of cabbage juice from them (jar-contents, not fingers). Spiced with salt, pepper and basil leaves, it wasn’t difficult to swallow.

          Over the next few days, Bai Goanna extracted juices from cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, pomegranates, even apple and ginger combined. With her newly acquired expertise, every visitor to her house was offered a choice of strange looking and stranger tasting drinks. “Try this, it’s good for your health,” was how conversations began. Then followed discussions on low iron, high sugar, low blood-pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, Ayurveda prescriptions, home-remedies and the best ‘juicers’ available in the market.  

          We noticed that roadside eateries had as many chai drinkers as fruit-juice fans. Crushed ice helped increase volume, keep costs low and customers happy. The juices were strained so that not the tiniest bit of fibre/seed/flesh came into the mouth. We discovered friends who patronized upmarket hotels/clubs wanted ‘vodka with watermelon, thanks’ when they were asked what they would drink. Or ‘dark rum with orange, please’. Seeing some of them sip the brightly coloured stuff through crushed ice, I remembered the golas of yore.  

          There’s one thing that I haven’t found anyone do at home: make oos-juice. Sugarcanes (oos we call them) are grown in other parts of the world, but I don’t know whether they are juicily served by the roadside to travellers, drivers, children, salesmen, anyone thirsting for an instant sugar-high. 

          The main roads in Goa have oos-juice stalls located at every other kilometre. The quality, serving measurements and prices are standardised. I don’t know whose idea this was, but it’s a successful one. Those like Bai Goanna who like to make everything at home, are stumped when it comes to oos-juice. It’s easier to make delicate wine and smelly cheese at home than to buy a sticks of cane and press the juice out of them. Strong teeth and gums and jaw-bones help, but even they can’t take out a glass-full when oos-juice thirst strikes.

          The ‘make in India’ teams working on fighter aircraft and submarines could earn some chutta-paisa for their institutions if they invented a domestic-sized apparatus to take the sweet juice out of  cane-stalks. A million-million Indians would buy it.

Starting with Bai Goanna.

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Water Woes.

          In Tambaram, 1982, I depended on a water-train that came in from Karnataka. In Jodhpur, every trickle, each drop was rescued in a plastic mug, carefully monitored so that it didn’t ever overflow. The moment it was three-fourths full, its contents were poured into a big bucket. But the leaky tap, for some reason, remained unrepaired whilst tenants came and went. The landlord thought it wiser that we learned our lessons the hard way.

In Hyderabad, municipal water ‘came’ once a week. We knew the day, but were never sure of the time it would ‘come’. (In times of uncertainty and power-cuts, books are handy for time-pass. As are chatty neighbours.) A friend gifted me a metal drum, painted white, with a lid. I bought a pipe that linked it to the tap. Didn’t help because the pressure wouldn’t allow it to rise to the height of the drum opening. I had to fill buckets and lift and empty them into the drum. Those with underground tanks found that with erratic electricity supply and scanty input, they had to invest in drums, too. The mug-dip model worked best. There was no need for gym-memberships, building muscles was part of my daily routine.

          Sturdy ‘jerry-cans’ were uncommon and precious. In those days, oil was marketed in square tins/ metal dabbas which were useful for storing daals or growing plants in until they (plants not dabbas) rusted.

Whether in Srinagar, where the temperatures caused pipes to burst when the water inside them froze, or Ghaziabad where mismanagement caused water shortages even when the Yamuna was in flood, I learnt to conserve water…

…By using the bucket-and-mug more than running the tap. By rinsing hands/feet over plants. By putting stones in the old, big flush tanks to use less water. By using the flush with care after a couple of uses of the commode. By throwing ‘pocha’ water on the plants. By not doing daily ‘pocha’. By carefully folding and keeping away clothes worn for only a few hours. By not washing the car daily. When water became really scarce, I did no pocha, and the car (actually, motorcycle for a longer period) wasn’t washed. Living in water-starved areas changes one’s levels of sophistication and ideas of cleanliness. Showers in bathrooms were cruel reminders of disparity. Bathtubs were unknown except in palaces/five-star hotel suites/foreign films.

          The water used for rinsing clean vessels/vegetables/rice/pulses was poured into the plants, or, at times when I lived in a flat, the toilet.

          All creatures – stray dogs, destitute beggars, unwanted cattle and monitor lizards that came to squat in the shade of the gate-pillar to seek respite from the heat—were offered water. At least a palm-full.

          In beautiful, tourist-attracting Ooty, I saw women pushing carts of brightly coloured plastic vessels to and from public hand-pumps. One doesn’t have to go far to see that sight these days, a short drive from Goa to Kolhapur helps. If you want to see how equal the genders are, watch what happens when a water-supplying tanker parks near a water-deprived neighbourhood. Men and women fight orally and physically. Sometimes the latter win, alone or in teams. Thirst knows no political/social correctness. The vicious and the bullying are successful.

          Even in times of plenty, when the monsoons have been kind, it doesn’t strike most people that the water provided by the PWD is processed and therefore expensive and wasteful to be used for non-essential/ornamental flora.

But, as a water-loving, garbage-rich, government-dependent patriot, I think: why do something myself if someone can do it for me? Why should I harvest rainwater? Why should I save water? Let the government do it, no?

Better still, I think: let the government have sponsored/subsidized poojas/yajnas in temples, masses in churches, prayers (with loudspeakers, festoons and hawkers selling plastic toys) in playgrounds, to prompt God to do His holy duty. Like other dutiful homebound wives, and some ailing and elderly, I contribute to national prosperity by chanting special, ancient, enchanted shlokas a couple of times a day to get those clouds moving and dripping. I wear lucky rings, too, studded with coloured stones, to deal with badly behaving planets.

I think India should have a law making it compulsory for citizens to do that.

Shri Husband’s aside: “You’re thinking? Must be the temperature/dehydration.”

When the heat makes me uncomfortable and the news about drought-stricken districts twinges me, I pay day charges to or check into a hotel and have a swim. Does wonders to the sweat glands, muscles and conscience (chilled beverages add to the magic). That swimming-pool water comes from tankers, you see, not connected with the thirsting masses elsewhere. Saves me from accumulating paap that might stain my karma.

Law-makers who can and did (over a weekend approximately a month ago) ban 344 fixed drug combinations which give relief and save lives, find it hard to tackle water shortages. Manufacturers of light plastic bottles and those marketing ‘drinking’ water have bank accounts that soak in profits.

I saw something once, four years ago, in Meghalaya. Cheerapunji (locally known as Sohra), a place that gets nearly as much rain as the Amazon forest, suffered from ‘no water’. All the rain that formed majestic cataracts and bubbly streams flowed down the gentle eastern Himalayan slopes bordering Bangladesh, to the plains. From there, it was pumped into tankers that smoked and growled their way up the ghats back to Cheerapunji to be sold to the locals. Commerce is fascinating.

Naturally, water shortages are a boon, if you know what I mean. Through the dry summer afternoons and in between filling up vessels with the rationed trickle that’s coming through the PWD line, I’m planning to read P Sainath’s ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought’.

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How to Become Healthy.

          The other day, I bought an Indian equivalent of the foreign Horlicks. Like Complan, Bournvita and their cousins, it’s meant to bring me wealth.

The moment I declared that, Shri Husband and Bai Goanna laughed. Not the hahaha full of mirth laugh, but the hehehe ridiculing sort.

“Wealth, huh?” Bai Goanna smirked. “Drink the beverage and win a lottery through some coupon hidden in the powder?”

“Nah,” I started.

Bai Goanna stopped me short. She chortled: “The MNC magic has now shifted over to Indian products. Move over chyavanprash, the Art of Living and Patanjali entrepreneurs have come up with several desi varieties of health-foods.”

Shri Husband, ever ready to be in conflict with whatever is spoken:  “And why not?

Not the money kind: health is wealth, remember? Some ancients said that and these days we’re into retro wisdom, so we decided to invest in something that would keep illness at bay.

The Plight of the Professional.

          “Poor doctors,” I said.

          “Oxymoron,” said Shri Husband.

          “Means?” I asked. He uses big-big words when he wants to flummox me.

          “Why are you saying ‘poor doctors’ anyway,” he said. Shri Husband asks back-questions when he doesn’t want to reply to something. It’s more the rule than the exception.

          “The government is making it difficult for them to go abroad,” I said. I’m cautious when I make such statements because he always want to know where I read or heard about it, the facts, the statistics, any reliable source, etc. (Yes, it drives me nuts, but what to do; they say marriages are made in heaven. I’ve nothing to prove it, but when I stated this once, Shri Husband asked: “Who’s ‘they’?” Can’t win with the Great Questioner.)

          So he snatched the news report that I was reading, about doctors being discouraged from leaving India, read it for himself and, in a rare moment of agreement with me, commented: “True, poor doctors. It’s an unfair deal.”

          I was so excited that he’d actually concurred with what I’d said, that I blurted: “Yes, no? Yes, no? Poor doctors, see?” That annoyed him and thus began that day’s cold war. After the mandatory five minutes silence, he started his tirade.

          “I don’t see why only doctors should be targeted to work in rural areas or for lesser salaries or in abominable conditions,” he said.

          “Abominable means?” I asked, getting a horrid look from him.

          Bai Goanna, arbitrator, friend and nose-poker reacted: “Ceilings that leak, toilets with blocked plumbing, rats in cupboards, no drinking water, things like that.”

          Shri Husband, irritation reduced by a degree, snapped: “Also, no basic medicines available for patients, no nurses/technicians or other trained professionals to help out, poor hygiene in examination rooms—if such rooms exist--, rusty trolleys, dim bulbs, ancient wheelchairs, no way to transport ill patients from Primary Health Centres to bigger hospitals…in most parts of India, the scene is grim.”

          Abba, I thought, lecture-baazi shuru. I was correct.

          He pontificated: “…that’s not all, the cost of fees through medical college, the amount of time it takes to gather knowledge, the difficulty of becoming a specialist, the no-reward-for-merit future…”

          “It’s worse than I imagined,” I sighed.

          “And you wonder why they don’t want to be forced to stay in India?”

          “They should stay back and help to improve the situation,” I said energetically, giving another point of view. “They are the upper strata of society, the thinking, elite class, they are the ones who should tackle the evil and let good win. It’s a noble, life-saving profession, no?”

          Shri Husband suddenly went silent. I wondered what I’d said wrong. Bai Goanna broke the silence and said: “It’s the same story with all professions, yaar. Teachers, soldiers, professors, engineers… How can you say which one’s superior to the other? I mean without primary school teachers, we couldn’t have any doctors, right? Without ward-boys and nurses, no hospitals could run, right? Even taxi-drivers are important.”

          “But,” I argued, changing tack again. “The government isn’t saying anything about stopping the others from leaving the country, no? This report says only about making it difficult for doctors to leave the country.”

          Shri Husband added: “That’s true. There’s nothing stopping good plumbers, carpenters, electricians, tailors, physiotherapists, hotel industry professionals, even Information Technologists from leaving the country. It’s unfair to have this pressure only on the medics, just because it’s considered a life-saving, noble profession, especially because quite often the doctors do the jobs of the ward-boys and nurses in many places, in order to treat the patients under their care.”

          What-to-do, we thought, as if the burden of saving the country and its skill bank lay on our three shoulders. Think of an industry and its human ‘products’ wished to leave the shores. Bureaucrats take sabbaticals to do post-graduation in terrorism/culture/liberal arts studies at universities abroad. Agriculturists, nuclear scientists, creative writers, classical singers, Bollywood stars, even priests who conduct Hindu marriage/death ceremonies fly across the oceans when opportunity beckons. Therefore, not fair to the medics. We agreed. Wordlessly, of course; agreements are so rare in my home, we run out of words when we do agree. But when our thoughts match, we sort of know what’s going on in the other’s mind.

          On FB, my second source of information, the first being Google, a very long thread of rants by doctors was interesting. A number of them posted on their own and others’ walls that lay people ‘just (didn’t) understand what doctors went through’ and how the medics worked ’unbelievably long hours with erratic meal timings’. I thought, if one eave’s dropped on the conversations of pizza-deliverers, soldiers, traffic constables and labourers on construction sites, there would be similar opinions. (Come to think of it, would there ever be a ban on migration of pizza-deliverers, etc.?  Which country would want their inexpensive labour? Once upon a time when the UAE was being built, those types exited India in hordes to build roads and skyscrapers, but I can’t think of any country right now that would want persons possessing such ‘skills’. Whereas the medics, they’re always in demand in countries abroad, so it seems.)

          “If,” Shri Husband debated aloud, “Medical professionals including nurses, therapists and technicians are allowed to go abroad permanently, who will look after us, our rural population?” Then countered it himself: “Why single them out? After all, the government spends a lot of money on subsidizing a lot of higher education, in many streams. Poor doctors.”

          Bai Goanna was brave enough to stop Shri Husband’s soliloquy: “You said poor doctors was an oxymoron. Because there are some doctors who become rich unethically. You said something about abominable conditions. You went on and on with this on-the-other-hand talk…”

          And thus began a quarrel afresh on a happening Sunday morning.

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Cross-pollination

          It took us two days from Srinagar to Jammu via Udhampur by bus and five from Jammu to Tambaram near Chennai by train. There were no halts, though we changed trains. A toddler and a dog were part of our entourage, adding to our troubles and excitement. From Bareilly to Goa in a ‘sixties’ vintage Fiat also took five days; nights were spent in homes of friends in towns along the way. Hotels were rare and unaffordable, as was air-travel. Shri Husband and I lived an adventurous life; these are two of the several long journeys we’ve undertaken across the sub-continent in the days before television, bottled water, the internet and mobile phones came into our lives. A ‘hold-all’ carried our mattresses, linen and shoes, and trunks carried our clothes and valuables. Food hampers were stuffed with non-perishable snacks. Water? We got off at platforms and drank it from the taps, never giving a thought to infections. Made us hardy.

The problem was language. As we crossed geographical boundaries, from the desert to the mountains to the coasts, the features of the people (and landscapes) changed rapidly, as did the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the crafts they made. Travel wasn’t possible on Discovery or National Geographic channels, nor through packaged tours.

(“I could,” I said to Shri Husband, “actually, write a best-seller on the experiences, you know, and make a lot of money.” His answer: “Ha.”)

          Today, travel is different and the change visible.

The mekhlas-chadors of the north-east, the lungis of UP, dhotis of Maharashtra and the runda-mundoos of Kerala are converted into salwar-kameezes. The Punjabi-suit (that’s what we called it in my childhood), is known as ‘dress’ in the land of its origin today. All the brilliant weaves that made gorgeous saris in erstwhile eras are now re-designed to make ‘suits’, something that is no longer what only men wear. (To anyone who moans how the elegant sari is getting extinct, I say, Indian men long ago discarded the airy dhoti-lungi for the restrictive but practical pant-shirt. Now it’s the women’s turn to get comfortable.)

Like Bollywood, this fusion-fashion has united the country imperceptibly. In most urban and semi-urban areas, clothes no longer indicate caste or region. Besides cable-television and mobile-phones, the other things connecting this vast country are the lokotsavs.

          At the recently concluded one in Panaji, I found Goans flocking to gobble dal-kachoris from the Gujeratis and Rajasthanis. They (the local customers, not the Gujeratis/Rajasthanis) expertly tackled its sticky, heavy, utterly delicious sweet variation, too.  Embroidered linen, crochet-laced children’s-wear, hand-made leather footwear, preserves, masalas, people were no longer unfamiliar with the wares on sale. An acquaintance spotted the fine difference between a brown cane-basket and a boiled-cane green-hued one. I saw a couple purposefully striding towards a Ferozabad stall that had metal-studded glass pendants on sale. “The only other place I can get similar things is in Italy,” I overheard. One upper-middle-class woman, on my asking multiple questions, admitted that she came from a long distance away to spend several hours each day at the utsav to search for artsy bargains: “I buy a year’s stock of gifts.”

          Birthday return-presents, Diwali-Christmas decorations, wedding reminders /takeaways are no longer necessarily locally made. That’s true the world over. Fridge magnet mementoes showing (Goan?) coconut trees, caps with pictures of churches printed on them, checked chuddies with drawstrings… are all made in Thailand.

          Now that most states in India have ‘labour’ from ‘outside’ because ‘no-one (here) wants to work anymore’, an undocumented change is happening. Businessmen from Andhra starting eateries in Goa are hiring cooks from Manipal and waiters from Karnataka to serve customers from anywhere in the world. The cuisine stretches from Schezuan samosas to wine-flavoured rasagullas to prawn-filled puris dipped in vodka-pani.

          The resultant cross-pollination of cultures in best reflected in language. In the pure form of Konkanni/ Marathi that I learned in my growing years, a ‘polka’ was worn under the loose ‘padar’ end of a sari to cover the chest, and a ‘parkar’ beneath the waist/pleats. The sari has long been relegated to wedding-wear, hence these words are out-of-use in my home. The other day, I mentioned them to my house-help who wears the traditional attire day in and out. She stared at me blankly, uncomprehendingly. I brought out my old clothes and pointed out to her what I was referring to. She giggled and corrected me: “Say ‘blouse’ and ‘petticoat’. Don’t talk to me in English, I don’t understand it.” She has adopted the words ‘blouse’ (pronounced ‘billa-ooss’) and ‘petticoat’ as her own.

          I always pay attention to the views of regular travellers and I don’t mean airline crew.

          I asked one of the stall-keepers, who’s been criss-crossing the country doing lokotsav business for the past many years, which his/her favourite state was/is. “Goa,” s/he said, “And Chennai”. S/he may have said the first to please me, I surmised, but why Chennai? S/he replied, “We don’t get drunks and louts bothering us in these two places.” Whoever says that Goa’s a place for drinking should meet this person. I was then informed me that the one thing  common everywhere was the hera-feri that happened during allotment of stall locations. “Paisa,” she said, “works wonders.”

          “Good to know,” quipped Shri Husband cynically, “that in this world, where terrorists’ bullets and the rise/fall of the dollar are unpredictable, some things remain unchanging.”

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