Note: I have since learned that the riots following Dr. Rajkumar’s death were incited by politicians with the help of their cronies, and the actor’s fans didn’t, in reality, have anything to do with it. I apologise for the allegation.

I have regretted most of the time spent outside my office here in Bangalore. The roads are bad (this is worth repeating), the traffic is worse, and there is no public transportation system worth its name (the proposed Metro is going to be operational by 2008 at the earliest, though I feel that’s being overly optimistic), and the city goes to sleep at 9 p.m.!!

The day before yesterday, the popular Kannada actor, “Dr.” Rajkumar, passed away due to a cardiac failure that’s not uncommon for someone of his age. Going by the way the people of this city reacted to it, you’d think that the Chief Minister of the State or the Prime Minister of the country was assassinated. There was violence on the streets (several vehicles were burnt), shopowners all over the city drew their shutters down at 4:30 p.m. fearing the rampaging mob, and bus services within the city ground to a halt. Why, every mode of transport coming into and going out of Bangalore (except the airways) stopped functioning. It was not until this morning that normalcy of life resumed.

My friend, who kindly provided me shelter for that night (since there was no way I could have reached my hotel amidst the riots) knew enough about the people to realize that the bus ticket that he had purchased for travelling back to his hometown would not be worth the paper it was printed on, and took the earliest flight out of the city yesterday, paying such a huge sum that I felt aghast! All because the pusillanimous Chief Minister and the city’s finest couldn’t come down hard on the rioters and tell them that their favourite star may have died but that’s no reason for life in the city to come to a standstill!

IT capital of India? Puh-lease!

I have been in Bangalore for the last three weeks on an official visit, and I can’t help hoping this trip gets over quick! Not that Pune’s roads are a motorist’s dream – far from it. But the traffic jams in this city are much worse than Pune. I suspect, however, that it’d only be a matter of time before Pune catches up with this undesirable trend.

I had once been to Bangkok when my parents had been there and was told that sometimes, it took a couple of hours for the traffic snarls to clear up. Gosh! Thank God these cities are nowhere near that level, but it does get irritating to think that a two kilometre journey on an automobile from my place of stay to the office can take as much as fifteen minutes!

It’s all over – the fight for a principle has lost out against the need for peace of mind; I’ve sold out to the devil who must now be grinning happily.

The guys at Stan Chart started calling me again, and this time, due to other circumstances, I was in no state to fight back. And I gave in to the temptation to buy my peace, exorbitant though the price may be (39k, to be precise). I couldn’t, however, resist the temptation to make the collection agent feel guilty – I thanked him profusely, making sure that my dripping sarcasm wasn’t missed.

Heck, now that I’m writing about it, I still feel the pangs of losing so much money

After a long, long time, I spoke to a friend who has come down to India for a visit from the US. She’s lugging her little boy along with her too. The only sad part is we probably won’t be able to meet when she’s here. That’ll have to wait for a future date I guess…

Of late, I’ve been struggling to remember details of conversations that I’ve had
with friends – what they have been up to, names of some of their friends, what
new job have they moved into, and such. Seems pretty commonplace, until you
happen to know that I have been saying this for more than three summers now.

What’s wrong with the old bean, you start wondering, when things start getting
worse and friends accuse you of being careless and even casual about the
attention you pay to them.

If you do know, drop me a line

I had written a strong letter to Standard Chartered Bank expressing, in no uncertain terms, what I felt about the way I was treated. I ended the missive with the words, “Don’t expect a single paisa from me” or words to that effect. I am not privy to what effect those words had on whoever read that letter, but they seemed to have terminated all kinds of communication with me. Of course, the inevitable monthly statements informing me that my name has been added to the “industry-wide defaulters list” keeps coming to my mailbox. Should I say thanks or what?

I have no further reason to complain. Not yet, at any rate.

Rajan stood watching them play – he, the one who could not run about like them all. He, who didn’t have to pay attention to what his teacher has saying in class because he didn’t need to; he, who could have told you what the largest twin primes less than thousand were even when abruptly woken up. Such was his fate. He resigned himself to watching them. The unexpected happened.

One of the boys looked at Raman, and decided it would be to his own advantage if he were to persuade the others to let Raman join the game. He knew cricket was not a game that kids afflicted with polio could really play, but he thought he would try as well as not since he definitely needed Raman’s help in preparing for the rapidly-approaching exams. At any rate, he had nothing to lose.

He spoke to the captain of the other team. Since they were both good friends, they asked Raman if he was interested in joining them. His eyes lit up as he nodded. They told him he could only be the umpire. He agreed gleefully. After all, being part of their group, even as a non-player was much, much better than not being included at all.

Up at 9. Done with ablutions by 9:30. Clean up rooms, mop: 9:35. Start cooking post food-status-check in refrigerator – 9:45. Shower: 10. Muesli with milk for breakfast: 10.15. Done with boiling potatoes, now onto curry: 10.20. Done with curry, leave for office: 10.35. Work till 11.45. A light snack: 12. Lunch break: 1. Back at work: 2.

Okay, you guessed right – that is my routine. The exact minutes of the hour keep changing from day to day, but you get the general idea, don’t you?

Decided to post this if only to prove that I have this silly streak in me. Ditto for vanity. Not that either required any proof in the first place <g> Hmm, well, this is off the record: I’ve also got a lot of time to kill

The previous post is a real-life account and is no laughing matter to me! If someone were to prepare my balance sheet, there would be a huge, unbalanced figure on the liability column. If you know of any parallels to this, please do let me know with details. I can understand a bank trying to minimise its losses but I never realised that they would go so far as to threaten me in different ways.

The most recent instance was when an officer of the bank asked me to send him an email about my lawyer’s contact number. I did that, and also added a request in the following words:

I also hereby request that agents of the bank, barring people like you, not call me henceforth regarding this.

The guy flew off the handle at the usage of the word “barring”, with a threat that he would take me to court for just that word! I tried to explain to him what the word meant, but he wasn’t willing to listen. He said he was a lawyer himself (where, I wonder…) and he didn’t need me to explain the meaning of an English word!!

Strange world, this!

It all began with a harmless game of banging your vehicle against another. What should have been an afternoon of fun and frolic has now turned out to be my worst nightmare to date. Instead of spending a few pounds on entertaining myself, I could now end up having entertained some lucky chap’s charge-free, two-day shopping spree. Hear me out, O denizens of blogosphere.

Just beside London’s famous Millennium Eye there’s a game parlour where kids of all ages get into a toy ‘car’ for a charge of two pounds. The frenzy starts when participants, occupying their own vehicles, start moving. Their aim: hit your neighbours as hard and as often as you can. All in good spirit of course. Twenty minutes and ten pounds sterling later, my friend Ram and I came out, thrilled to bits and just a bit tired. But since I hadn’t been on the moving Eye as yet, I purchased a ticket (nearly twelve pounds) and went about waiting for my turn for the ‘launch’ while Ram decided to stay on terra firma finding some other means to keep himself busy. As I took in the sights of the City from a height of about 500ft, I touched my pocket as a matter of habit to check if the wallet containing my passport and other stuff was there. To my horror, I realized it wasn’t! The only thing that occupied my mind for the rest of the journey was ‘What would happen if I didn’t get it back? Would I have to contact the Indian High Commissioner? Where is the Indian Embassy in London?’ I decided to query Ram the moment I touched down.

Being ever the hopeful man, he suggested that we first check up the game parlour first to see if the wallet was reported as lost property. When we spoke to the security guy, he asked me the details of the wallet. I described it as much as I could, listed its contents from memory and waited with bated breath. I could have leapt for joy when he returned a minute later clutching my wallet in one hand and a form in the other. I quickly scanned my wallet, and to my immense relief, found my passport and an all-zone travelcard intact. Little did I know the price I would have to pay for not having checked its contents thoroughly.

The wallet safely lodged in my rucksack, we made our way to the nearest McDonald’s and ordered a couple of veggie burgers for a late lunch. The rest of the day went off pleasantly, strolling around St.Peter’s Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge among other places. Later that night, we watched a movie or two and hit the sack after a meal of rice and those wonderful South Indian specialties, rasam and sambar.

The following day was a Sunday and we passed it off in discussion and movie-watching. When the time came for me to leave, I casually rummaged through my wallet and for the second time in two days, nearly had a heart attack: my credit card was missing! This time around, I could act quick. Though I didn’t have the phone number of the bank at hand, I asked Ram to search the Net and find out where I could report the loss. After an anxious half an hour, he managed to get the number. I had to call India to reach the customer service and after being put on hold for a few expensive minutes (I was calling from a BT payphone using an international card!), I was told that my card had been blocked. Breathing a sigh of relief, I asked the Customer-care executive to tell me the latest charges against my card, just to be sure things were all right. Imagine my shock when she said that the current outstanding was a mammoth Rs.68,000! I should have fainted but I came to realize later on I was made of sterner stuff. I immediately explained to the lady on the line that the said charges were not incurred by me and that they were fraudulent. She was apologetic and said that I was liable since I had not reported the card earlier. After a few more minutes of futile angry talk, I gave up trying to get her to do something because she kept repeating the same line over and over again.

A couple of months later, I chose to return home, cutting short my stay abroad citing personal reasons. And no prizes for guessing what awaited me at my office: a bomb in the form of my credit card statement. I suppose the shock should not have been huge but still, seeing the amount in black and white (or in whatever colour they print their statements) has a certain effect on the nervous system, if you know what I mean. I bit my lip and continued with my work since I was sure the bank would do something about it because I’d done my bit with lodging a complaint. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had foreseen the course of events that would follow shortly. Well, okay, I would have, but with a lot of difficulty.

At first, I didn’t hear from the bank. But being bankers, they had their duty to go about and so I received a call on my mobile (In fact, I came to know later, after talking to my parents, that the bank had actually called them a few times before I had returned to India) asking me when I would pay up. I told them I had no intentions of paying any money since the transactions were fraudulent. I remember getting a call once or twice after that and one of them was an open threat; perhaps they thought subtlety would not work with me (thank you Stan Chart).

Whatever their reason, I now felt that I had to get some legal counsel: my nerves were badly shaken by the last threatening call. Luckily one of my friends’ father is a senior advocate and I asked him for advice. He said I had nothing to worry about; since I had not incurred the charges, I didn’t have to pay a single penny (paisa, if you will). I felt reassured now that I had a leading lawyer as my legal advisor.

The bank maintained general silence – if you don’t count the occasional call asking for money – and I presumed, wrongly, that the matter had come to a dead end. The bank, however, had other ideas. I started getting calls from one particular cell phone from a guy who could speak only language – Hindi. I spoke to him for a while and realised that he was nothing but a collection agent and had no particular inclination to help me in any way. He started speaking quite rudely after a while and, what was worse, it was cutting into my work hours. As if things were not bad enough, his “superior”, with whom I was asked to talk on this agent’s mobile, refused to let me reply to his statements and insisted that I had to listen to his monolgue! I was so disgusted I simply handed the phone back to this guy and walked off.

I was also shocked that a so-called manager of StanChart would stoop to the level of calling me a cheat when, IMO, I had done nothing that would have given them reason to label me thus. Since then, this agent – whose name I didn’t even know – started harassing me by calling me almost non-stop. At one point, I got almost two dozen calls in a single day! Incredible as it sounds, it is true.

A couple of days later, I got another call from the bank – this time from a person who sounded more reasonable and more likely to converse in a civil manner. However, he too insisted that I had to pay a sum of Rs.4,000 in order for the bank to take up the case further with their fraud control department. Further, he said, I had made a mistake of not disputing the charges in writing. I was stunned because none of the people I had spoken to so far, had even mentioned such a thing. Very reluctantly, I agreed to pay the sum of four thousand, but not before I went on record saying that my paying this sum was not, by any means, an indication of having accepted the liability.

And that is where it stands now. If a day passes when this problem doesn’t eat away my peace of mind, I am a happy man.