The Rich, The Poor and The Filthy

I recently had a golden opportunity to visit the famous capital of West Bengal. We got there by airplane and were shipped off by taxi from the airport which rocketed past the bad traffic and even though we got sidetracked from our destination, we got back on track and reached the house of my dad’s friend, whose son was getting married (Whew – that’s a long sentence and now I notice that even though I traveled only by plane and taxi, I have used five modes of transportation to describe my experience – no, sorry, no prizes for listing out the five)

One thing I noticed – Calcutta is 98% dirty.

Not just dirty, its filthy. I went to the most famous temple there – The Kali temple, and that was so filthy that I couldn’t stand to stand there. Most of my concentration was on refraining from stepping on something gooey rather than focusing my prayers on the deity. Not more than 10 seconds of praying has passed, before I’m rudely pushed around by the public and I step on a fresh piece of spittle. YUCK.

One clean place I found :-

The adult Calcuttans are very, very nice people. Adults, meaning those who have crossed atleast 35 or 40 years in age. The youngsters, or people who are my age are the most colossal pieces of waste I have ever seen in my lifetime. They have intelligence, money (through parents), Good education, everything – but they are as bad as the hippies described in South Park – maybe even worse. All they do is smoke like all the cigarettes are gonna run out today and drink as if their livers are already shot, so why not another round.

Now, usually, people who drink and smoke are fine with me. I have been to umpteen number of parties where I’m the only guy who doesn’t smoke or drink and most of the people, though drunk, still have really interesting stuff to talk about. But how do you like it when 12 other people (8 men and 4 women, yes – women) are smoking 10 packs each, right in front of you and drinking like there’s no tomorrow, and the worst part is the conversation.

Their entire bloody conversation was about cigarettes and alcohol. ‘Which are the best cigarettes and which type of drink gets you inebriated in no time’, (or drunk, if you haven’t read the GRE word list) etc, etc. The whole experience sucked so bad that I was, for once in my entire life, at a loss for words. I know that a few of you will feel that it is quite a pity that I’m a strict non-smoker and non-drinker, etc, so that I could have joined the fun. But, since I am a teetotaler, I was demoted to the job of sitting there and twiddling my thumbs. The good part was that I discovered I had quite large thumbs, so twiddling was a better experience.

But around two hours later, when they were all drunk, the fun started.

Two guys started arguing about the best beer in the world. One got really angry and said “shut up before I slap your face”. The guys froze and the girls were giggling. Suddenly, a third gets up and says “I shall tell you how to give the best slap in the world”.

Now, this was the same guy who started talking about the best beer in the world, the best vodka in the world, the best cigarettes in the world, you get the picture. So, I take a wild guess that this guy is either working in BEST, Bombay or he is the best person to ask about the best thing in the world for a category. (Although his knowledge of the superlative is usually on things that are truly harmful to your body – So if you want a piece of advice on a good topic, like weight loss; he wouldn’t ask you to do exercises or diets, but he’ll give you the best method to lose 10 kgs in a month, hey, even in a minute – Cut your arm or leg off.)

(Legal Warning : Cutting off arms or legs are done by experts. Please do not try them at home or anywhere else.)

(Some bike ads have the weirdest sense of humor – they give you unbelievable stunts on the ad and they say “Please don’t try this at home” – I mean, where would anyone have enough space inside their home to do a bike stunt – It would most probably be on a road or something.)

Back to the topic. This guy says “I’ll tell you how to give the best slap in the world”. Now this is the third guy. The second guy says – how ? The first guy is interested too – since slapping was his idea.

The third guy smacks the first guy in the forehead.

Now the first guy is pissed – he wanted TO slap, not BE slapped. (Although a smack with your open palm on the forehead is not a slap – it’s a well, err, a smack.) Yet, he uses the same smacking technique to smack the second guy who was intended to be slapped in the first place. (Did you get that last sentence, if not – read it again – you’ll get it.) Now the second guy is in pain, but coolly says to the third guy that the slap is not bad, its quite painful. Meaning, he is so drunk that he is agreeing with the third guy that that’s kind of a good slap. Now I’m not a guy who likes to see something wrong happening and just sits there and watches. I speak out.

So I said “That wasn’t a slap at all. It was a smack. A slap is delivered on the cheeks of the face”.

i.e., I didn’t see anything wrong with the fisticuffs, but I disliked their use of English. So, I tried to put things into place from a scientific point of view.

I realized that that was a mistake when the attention of the three slappers, or smackers in my case, turned to me. Now, I understand that when you’re drunk, nothing matters, but when you’re completely sober and you try to argue with three drunks, you ARE going to lose.

But the third guy comes to the rescue – he says – “I see what you mean” and slaps guy one and guy two at the same time. Then, the fight started. I wont go into details, but the end result was that they poured most of the alcohol on the cigarette packs during the fight that they ran out of both and I was smiling like the gods had made a miracle.

The wedding went well and the food was bad. Calcutta boasts of having a lot of good sweets, but I don’t see how their ‘Mishti-Dohi’ is any different from a good cup of yogurt. I can get more sweets at Adyar than in a shop in Calcutta. Their sweets really are over-rated.

Now, Calcutta has a lot of rich folk, whose children are mostly colossal cesspools. It also has the hard working poor folk who toil away and get a meager earning. Then the last part of the population is the filthy folk, whom I have seen in thousands but would never like to meet particularly, because, well …., they’re filthy.

All in all, I take back my first words of this blog. The opportunity wasn’t golden at all. It was much less than bronze – I could get an aluminium opportunity and have more fun.

A pic of a spider in the hotel room.

[The Calcutta trip - quite not what I expected]

- Abhishek Ranganathan

{If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. - Albert Einstein}