Rain, Rain, Go Away - Keebo's Diary - 10

After a very long battle with the Sun God, poor Bangaloreans are now under the captivity of Rain Gods. Thanks to the hottest summer in 85 years and Amma’s strict instructions to stay indoors, I spent most of my summer vacation at home (baring the evening fun) and now thanks to the Rain gods my evenings are also indoors.

I am not sure if it was our apartment association’s decision or not but during the peak summer, quite a few of my apartment residents decided to teach “Sun” a lesson by assigning him lot of work - like drying clothes, drying  red chilies / papad / pickles, drying mattresses soiled by toddlers, generating electricity (some solar energy) and host of other things. In fact, I saw that some foreigners were also invited and we asked the Sun to TAN them. Tanning reminds me something about Appa, Appa says - he looked like Anglo-Indian as a baby but one hot summer he got an irreversible tan and then he became Afro-Indian (chuckle from Amma and Anna whenever Appa tells this incident makes me think if there is any truth to his story). Anyways, we residents have been successful in our mission and Sun ran away from Bangalore. Nowadays, on rare occasions when the Sun does show up, the heat is not as bad as it was earlier. I think it was important to be strict to teach Sun a lesson and I now forgive Amma for all the disciplinary measures that she had enforced to potty train me, I guess she was right !

Problems are like “susu” it keeps coming every now and then. After the problems with the  Sun, the Rain gods are creating havoc in Bangalore and we residents need to stand united to solve this problem as well. I tried singing the rhyme “Rain Rain go away” but didn’t work and now having done my bit, I look up to the elders to do the magic. The least I want is - no rains during evening time or convince my parents to allow me to play in the rain..

Talking about Gods and thanks to Aachi, Ramayana fever has hit Anna and me. We love watching Ramayana every day and I am eagerly waiting to see how Sita will be freed from the clutches of Ravana. In the serial I saw quite a few Gods and I see that none of the Gods have hair on their body. I re-verified this fact with the idols in our temple and my observations seem to be correct.. but any idea why is it so ? In fact a clean shaven monkey god is quite strange, I haven’t see a single clean shaven monkey in real life.   Amma gave me a stare when I asked her this question and Appa simply smiled (more of a wicked smile),  I even asked Google using the google voice search and google gave unrelated answers (Mr. Google, your voice search is not Indian Child accent friendly, fix it !)…whatever, I will ask Aachi or Naani.. as they seem to understand God related aspects better. 

Apart from watching Ramayana, these days the bedtime stories are also little events from Ramayana and Amma is our Valmiki.  By the way, she had told me that Ravana has 10 heads but today I saw in the serial that he has only one head. Tonight I will ask Amma about such a big blunder in her version…Amma you better have an answer !

Mind the Gap

Indians don’t mind the gap,  look at any queue in India and you will not find much gap between two people. You still don’t believe me ?? then have a look at the Mumbai local trains, proximity of the same gender folks is beyond imagination and if you took the context of crowd out of this equation, such proximity would be termed public indecency….in fact I am not sure if it is even legal to be that close. It is not that we Indians like to be physically close to strangers,  it’s our population to be blamed and guess what.. London seems to be following us. The train and platform speakers keep shouting - “mind the gap” but damn.. nobody is listening !! the population in London seems to have exploded, there is no time to mind the gap …whether between the train and the platform or between travelers. 

I have travelled to London after close to a decade and the changes are quite evident. Leave EU supporters of Brexit  have one valid reason for sure – growing population.   Also, when you are travelling in London there are more chances of you hearing people speaking in Hindi / Tamil / Hinglish / Tinglish than English and I am not exaggerating, it is all for real.   Brown people are everywhere and in fact, people seem to prefer “brown” over “white” even when it comes to bread :-)

Also, when it comes to driving, Londoners seem to have turned erratic though some amount of lane discipline still exists. In the last couple of weeks, I have heard of 3  incidents where buses have knocked down pedestrians and/or cyclists. Pedestrians are also not disciplined, they no longer cross only at Zebra crossing or when they have the walking man signal ON…cars, buses, cyclists, people… they are all moving in all directions. By the way, walking man reminds me that how come no women has raised this as a gender equality issue? why not a standing lady and a walking lady for signals ? Come on girls, stand up for your rights :-) Anyways, the traffic on roads, lane discipline and the quality of roadways cannot be compared to that of Indian cities or town, India has a long long long long way to go …not even sure if we will ever reach there. I strongly feel that only way to help Indians using roadways is to implement weird ideas like the one Mr. Kejriwal did in Delhi

Speaking of the changes, I noticed that the scooter used by London kids has “2 wheels in the front and one at the back” exact opposite of that in India. I don’t know if it is just a stupid innovation or if there is any merit to the design, I always thought the back tires bring stability to the ride. Whatever it is .. I am glad that it is still a real scooter and not some app that kids can download on their tablets.

One has to speak about the weather in a western country and especially London. I can bet the climate in London is more moody than your wife, it keeps changing  every hour – at times she is sunny, most of the time in tears before giving you long n cold stares. Whatever be the weather the restaurants / pubs has good crowd in the evening and if the weather is good one can sit out in the sun and socialize. The latest fad to have hit London is Tank Beer. I haven’t had it yet but I have heard a lot about it from the locals

Before I close, a special request to Indian wives in London, if you find a long blonde hair sticking out of your spouse's suit or jacket then trust me ….your guy is clean .. somebody just didn’t Mind the gap :)

Maid in Bangalore !

Our happy family with a reliable caretaker was struck with a catastrophe recently. After being around for close to seven years our caretaker, Raju, moved on.  We are happy for him and I am assuming that we are being of some help to him as he works towards building his future. Post Raju, we are struggling to get someone as good as him.  Well this post is not about Raju, I am sure Keebo will write about him in his diary !

The profile of a servant in India has changed a lot and in Bangalore the servants now have online profiles,  they have their work experience listed and they do have recommendations/testimonials from their previous masters, etc etc.  I am not against this, it is actually a great thing but it does come as a surprise to me. The transition from Ramu Kaka days to independent contractors seems to have happened in a jiffy or maybe I missed the transition period !

With change being the only constant in this world, we also started scouting for profiles online.  I registered with some of the startups who help with maid services (earlier they were called Agencies but with Mr. Modi’s yet another initiative “Startup India Standup India”, everyone calls themselves Startup). Anyways,  we realized there is a waiting list for Maids as well. The waiting period is high as 6 months and in some cases the request was not even registered.. saying – “we have enough backlog to support new requests !!”..  Looks like this particular service sector has no recession !

In the last few months, we managed to get few profiles through friends/relatives. Not a big surprise but the fact is apart from their salary these folks come up with their own job description, leave policy, work timings, and also decide their bonus numbers.   Some of the interviews were interesting, posting one of them below

Wife: have you taken care of kids before ?
Maid: What does your husband do ?
Wife: Well.. that is unrelated. You tell me .. if have you taken care of kids before ?
Maid : I don’t work at places with Home maker husbands. It is not safe !
Wife: Ok no worries. My husband works, he is not a home maker
Maid : Does he have work from home option ?
Wife (in her mind) - Damn ! i am already doubting my spouse ….

Maid Rejected

After enough search we got a caretaker whose previous job was to take care of a dog while the dog’s master was away. This person was selected based on some strong referral but she quit, maybe we barked more than the pet dog ;-). Now,  we have a caretaker who has kept us on probation for 2 weeks (note - we are on probation not the caretaker) and he has agreed to join if he likes the job and us…..it can't get better than this :-). 

Well I am hoping our caretaker or maid issues soon gets settled and for this we are considering to get our abode vaastu certified or check with some parrot outside Meenakshi temple or maybe get some “maid-shanti” pooja done,  you never know what the root cause is ;-)