The Diligent Flower Lady

This week, heavy rains have lashed Chennai, the city where my parents live. All the reservoirs in the state of Tamil Nadu are overflowing, and rice paddy fields have been submerged in the flood. A lot of other regular activity has been suspended, due to the rains.

Despite the rain, the old lady who delivers flowers showed up in the morning. Each day, my mother buys a small string of marigolds or jasmine from her. (It is common in India to adorn pictures and statues of gods as part of daily prayers.)

The flower seller apologized to my mother and said that she wouldn’t be able to show up tomorrow because of the rains. Before leaving, she gave my mother some extra flowers for the next day.

"I am surprised that she made it in this weather," I told my mother.
"She must have bought the loose flowers yesterday," my mother explained. "If she doesn't deliver them, the flowers will wilt and she won't get paid. That's why even in this pouring rain, she's going from house to house delivering the flowers."

I learned that this lady used her meager capital to buy loose flowers. At night, she wove them into long strands and cut them into small strings. The next day she personally delivered them to each customer's home.

"What do you pay her?" I asked.
"Two rupees daily."

For her efforts in home-delivering fresh flowers seven days a week, this flower lady earned Rs 60 from each customer. That is less than US $1.35 per month.

A Bird in Hand

I met R. Sri Kumar when he received the Distinguished Alumni award from IIT Madras. He is the recently retired head of Karnataka police, who's taken up social transformation through e-Governance, and he believes that a lot can be achieved by combining simple project management principles with crowdsourcing.

His address to the audience was a call to action to each and everyone to do their part, for self-motivation. Towards the end of his address, he narrated the story of the Boy with the Bird In Hand.

He said he had picked up the story several years back, when he was sent on deputation to KSRTC, Karnatka's state bus corporation. In his four years with the corporation, he slowly steered it from huge losses towards profitability. And in order to achieve that, he had to visit as many employees as he could, and engage them in discussions.

Mr. Srikumar adapted the story for his purposes. When he was called upon to address groups, he used this story to drive home the point that it was up to each employee to turn the bus company (KSRTC) around.

Soon, he became known as the guy who narrated the bird story. Apparently, bus conductors and drivers would come up and request that he narrate the story to their colleagues, even though they had themselves heard it before.

Indeed, it is a story that bears repetition, even if you have heard it before. Here then, is the story that Sri Kumar narrated to the audience at IIT Madras:

Once, in a village, there lived a wise swamiji (ascetic) who always spoke the truth. Not only that, everything he said also came out to be true. The villages had enormous respect for the swamiji and revered him for his wisdom.

In the same village, there also lived two boys, brothers, who loved to play truant and stay away from school under any pretext possible. Their mother, who saw through their lies and excuses, kept telling them that they should be more like the swamiji.

This constant nagging by his mother got to the elder boy. He decided that when he got the chance, he'd show up the swamiji. And sure enough, one day the two boys found an injured sparrow by a tree. The elder boy got an idea. He was going to put the swamiji in a situation from which he couldn’t get out by speaking the truth.

"Here's what I will do," he told his brother. "I will place this bird in my hand, and cover it with my other hand. Then I will ask the swamiji whether it is alive or dead. If he says it is dead, I will open my hand and show that it is alive and that he had not spoken the truth."
"And what if he says it is alive?" asked his younger brother.
"Then I will simply crush the bird dead first, then open my hand and show that he was wrong!"

The two boys ran to the swamiji's place taking the injured bird with them.
"Swamiji, we have a question for you."
"Yes, son."
The elder boy had the bird in one hand and covered it with his other hand.
"What is in my hand, Swamiji?"
The swami took a closer look and said "It's a frightened sparrow, son."
"And swamiji," asked the boy, "is the sparrow dead or alive?"
Right away, the swamiji sensed that the boy was trying to trap him.
"Son," said the swamiji, "it's in your hands."


And that, Mr. Sri Kumar feels is ultimately the message everyone should take away. Whether it is the Karnataka State Bus Corporation, or our own company, our school, or our neighborhood or any part of our society, how things turn out is in our hands.

Why are you crying?

Late one evening in Haridwar, my wife and I were enjoying a walk on a bridge over the Ganges. There were no crowds at that time, and we got to enjoy the fast-flowing river in peace. There was a food vendor in a trolley preparing Indian and Chinese items, and the aroma was rekindling hunger. It had been 3 hours since dinner.

The food cart on the bridge was well lit and looked clean, so we ordered a plate each. The food was great, but I couldn’t enjoy it because standing just 5 feet from the cart, in the dark, there was a woman in her twenties who was sobbing visibly.
"Why is she crying?" I eventually asked the food vendor.
He was dismissive. "Oh, her. People like her come to Haridwar all the time and are crying." His body language and tone indicated that I should simply ignore it.

But it was difficult to ignore her. After we had eaten, I asked my wife to check on her.
"Miss, what happened? Why are you crying?" my wife asked the young woman in Hindi.
"I am hungry," she said, and continued to cry.
In India, we have been hit up for food a few times, so we had a routine of sorts. Our rule was to not give out money, opting to buy them food instead.
"Okay, I will buy you a loaf of bread," my wife told her.
"Nahin Chahiye." I don't want that.
We also had a Plan B.
"Will you have fruit? We will buy you bananas." A dozen bananas costs the same as a loaf of bread.
"Nahin Chahiye." The tears continued streaming.
Now we were out of options.
"What do you want?" my wife asked her.
"That," she said, pointing to the food cart.
"Chow mein?!"
"Yes," she said nodding.

My wife looked at me. The request was a bit unusual, but understandable. The aroma of Chinese cooking would have been torturous to the woman. We had both just finished a plate each, and it didn’t seem right to refuse her.

I pulled out a few rupees and walked back to the vendor. "Please make her a plate of chow mein," I told him.
He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. When he accepted my money there was an almost imperceptible shake of his head. I know what the shake meant -- You-guys-will-fall-for-this-every­-time is what he wanted to say.

Maybe so. But he made great chow mein, and she was hungry.
"He will now make a plate for you," my wife told the woman.

I was slightly surprised because the woman didn’t thank us, or even look at us. She walked over and stood next to the cart. But she had stopped crying.

A Married Man in Thiruvannamalai

I heard this story from the district collector of Thiruvannamalai district in Tamil Nadu whom we met on a visit to the town. The collector is the highest administrative post in a district. Anyone visiting Thiruvannamalai is sure to hear stories about the powers of lord Arunachala, and about the imposing hill there that dominates the town and is attributed mystical powers, and about the foreign devotees who throng to the place. I am narrating the following as I heard it from the district collector, without embellishment.

After living in the district for nearly a year, and hearing so much about Arunachala hill, the collector decided that he'd walk up the hill himself. One day, he hired a local young man to be his guide and porter and they walked up, with the young man carrying the collector's bag.

They reached the top, looked around and started descending. The collector was happy that he'd done the hike. He was also very impressed with the polite young man. The collector was paying him Rs 50 for his services, but he wanted to do more for this helpful porter.

The district collector had the discretion to offer low level janitorial jobs as sweepers to women in need. Hoping that he could help out this man, the collector asked, "Are you married?"
"Yes sir, I am."
"Would your wife like a job?"
"She has a job, sir."
The collector was curious.
"What does your wife do?"
"Sir, she is a doctor. She is an M.D. in America."

The collector was taken aback at this. How could this young local porter have a wife in the US? So, while they continued walking down the hill he asked for the full story. Here's what the local porter told the collector:

In the same Arunachala hill that they had ascended, there lived an ascetic, a swamiji. He didn’t speak much and tried to avoid people. But lots of devotees believed that he had spiritual powers and sought him out, including numerous foreign devotees. The ascetic didn’t care for any followers and would in fact hurl stones hoping to deter them. But the more he shunned his followers, the more followers he had. However, the ascetic liked this porter.

One day, there was a white lady who was following the ascetic.
"Swamiji, whatever you tell me to do, I will," the lady told the ascetic.
The ascetic decided to test her. "You have to marry whomever I tell you to," he told her. She agreed without hesitation.
Then the ascetic turned to the young porter who happened to be around. "Hey boy, how would you like to marry this lady?" he asked.
The porter looked at the while woman and said he would be happy to.
And so the ascetic instructed the white lady to marry the porter. She agreed and went ahead and married him.

It turned out that she was an M.D in the USA, and a staunch follower of lord Arunachala of Thiruvannamalai. The porter and the lady had a child, whom she was bringing up in the US.

Every year, for 3-4 months, she came to Thiruvannamalai and stayed with her husband, the porter. The rest of the time, she practiced medicine in America and brought up their child.

When the wife was in the US, the young man earned his living by working as a porter and guide for those who wanted to go up Arunachala hill. That's how the collector had met him.

Day Laborers in Jodhpur

I was out wandering in Jodhpur one morning. It was just past eight in the morning when I crossed Sanjin Gate and entered the old city. The big square there that was full of men, standing and waiting. There were no women only men waiting. It was easy to see that these were day laborers waiting for work, and I decided to stay and watch since I had time.

Seeing me standing there, one man came over.
“Where are you from?” he asked, making conversation. He spoke in a mix of Rajasthani and Hindi and I could only follow him partially. Another man, his hair tinged with orange due to henna, also walked over.
“You are not looking for laborers, are you?” he asked. Before I could respond, the first man said, “Maybe he too is looking for work!” and they both laughed good naturedly at the idea of me doing physical labor.

Spotting me talking to the two of them, some thought that I was looking to hire people. Many laborers rushed over. Suddenly, I was surrounded by over a dozen men, desperate for work. They hurled questions at me in Hindi, and it was a little scary.
“What kind of work do you have?”
“Tell. What is it that you want?”
“How many people do you need?”
No, I am a tourist and I am just watching, I explained. Most of the men lost interest and walked away.

Every few minutes, someone in a motorcycle would come up to the square. Men rushed towards these motorbike hirers. There would be a quick conference that lasted just a few seconds, and a few men would be selected and they’d start walking away from the square. The actual mechanics of the selection was never clear to me.

The man with the orange henna hair stayed with me. He was in his late twenties, wearing a short pant and a shirt, both of which were very dirty. He was walking around bare feet, no shoes or sandals when he worked.
“Is there work in Bombay?” he asked me. (I had told him that I had come from Mumbai.)
I told him that from what I knew, it was very difficult to get work there as well.

There were about 200 men in the square. “Will all of them get work?” I asked.
The man, surprised by my naivety looked up as if to see if I was joking. “Not even half of them will get work today.”
“What will the rest of them do?”
“They will go home. What else can they do?” It was a simple case of over-supply and thus a hirer's market. Those who hired the laborers got to pick and choose. Though I have never been a fan of labor unions, it occurred to me that a little bit of organization among the men would help them all.

I then asked the man what the daily pay was.
“200 rupees per day.”
“Has it been 200 for many years?” I was curious if laborers also got an inflation adjustment.
“No, it was increased recently. Five years ago, it was 150 Rupees. Then it became 180 and now it is 200. Sometimes, we can even get 250 a day. And this is for the common mazdoors. If you are a skilled worker, you can get 400 or more per day.”
“Is it for 8 hours of work?”
“Yes, 8 hours. We get tea at 11 o'clock, then 1 hour for lunch, a few minutes in the afternoon and work till 6pm. It is tough, but we are happy to get work.”
“Why don’t you look for regular employment? Maybe in a shop somewhere.”
“They won’t pay us well. If you don’t get at least 3000 a month, it is very difficult. Even if they pay 2800 a month, it is not enough. That’s why we look for daily work.”

“Is 200 rupees enough to get by?” I asked him a leading question.
In reply, he pointed towards a woman in a colorful dress was walking by with a big bundle of wood balanced on her head. “Even firewood costs five rupees a kilo. Just to get the stove going! And you know what the prices of dal and atta and vegetables are.”
He was silent for a few seconds. “Actually, 200 rupees can be quite enough," he said. "There are some men who are even able to save some money daily after all expenses.”

Gesturing towards the laborers in the square he said, “But most of the men here, they drink it away. Me, I have 4 children at home. So I give a little money to feed the children.” He then laughed. “The rest, I drink away.” He emphasized that by taking his thumb towards his mouth.

The Seller of Pirated-Books

The illegal but very open business of selling pirated books fascinates me. I think it is terrible that the entire publishing industry (authors, editors, publishers) is being subverted by the makers of pirated editions. But I seem to be in the minority here, because all these roadside sidewalk vendors are doing very good business. The authorities who should be cracking down on it are ignoring it, and people who should know better are buying the books.

I met one young vendor in Matunga in Mumbai who was surprisingly open about his business. Amidst all his shrink-wrapped pirated books, I spotted an original non-pirated hardbound version of the latest Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol.
“How much is that?” I asked more out of curiosity than a desire to purchase.
“Oh, that is an original copy. I can only sell it for 590 Rupees.” That was quite a bit more expensive that the pirated books which typically cost 50 Rupees or less.
“How about that one?” I was pointing at Chetan Bhagat’s latest book – 2 States. My wife and I had been to the author’s book launch in Mumbai just the previous week and I was surprised that it had already made its way to the roadside vendors.
“The cost is 95 Rupees. I can give it to you for 85.”
“Is that an original copy?”
“Yes, it is.” He then explained to me that the pricing was such that making pirated copies was not immediately necessary.

The publishers, Rupa & Co, have cleverly priced it at 95 Rupees, an amount the buyers didn’t mind paying. When it comes to books priced at 300 Rupees or more, many of the same buyers don’t seem to mind buying pirated copies instead.

The vendor then went on to say, “That is a very new book. It takes 2 months to make the copies and get them to us.”
“Where do the copies of the books get printed?” I asked because I have always wondered.
That was the only time he hesitated and didn’t give me a straight answer. I let it go.

“Are you from Bengal?” I asked him, because I thought I detected his accent.
“No sir,” he said. “I am from Bihar.”
“You have a very impressive collection of books,” I said, which was true. Though they were all pirated books he seemed to carry a good cross-section of the bestselling books from India and the US.
“I have been in the business for 9 years now,” he said. “So I know what sells and I stock only those.” On his own, he then said that he could name all the Chetan Bhagat books, in the order in which they had been published. He named all 4 as proof of his claim. He said he also knew all the books by Robin Sharma, and all the other bestselling authors as well.
“If someone wants children’s books, I can give them those. If someone wants a stock market book, I know which books to offer even if I don’t have what they are asking for.”

“How do you know about all these books? Can you read English?”
“No I can’t. But I know the covers.”
He was obviously a smart man. Thinking that a working knowledge of English would help him I asked, “Why don’t you learn English? Are you not interested?”
“Very interested, sir. But I have no time. I set up my shop at 10am and I am here till 10pm, sometimes 11pm. I work all seven days of the week.”

Lessons in Hotel Management

R. Panwar looked to be very young, but he was the hotel owner. We had ended up at the SK Hotel’s restaurant in Gangotri because we desired a change in our breakfast fare. His restaurant had a huge menu compared to the typical options we found in most other restaurants throughout Uttarakhand.

That is also where we ran into the owner, a very young-looking man named R. Panwar. He was very customer-oriented. He invited us in and said that he could make anything on the menu. True to his word, he was able to make for us eggless western pancakes (not dosas, he assured us) which he served with ginger tea.

The only other group that morning was a group of three young French-speaking backpackers who were finishing up their breakfast. Panwar’s restaurant doubled as a shop that also sold food for those trekking to the Gomukh glacier.

His inventory included every imaginable brand of soda cans, trail mixes, Barilla pasta, pasta sauces, Iced tea, Red Bull, noodles, Pringles and numerous other East European cookies and biscuits I didn’t recognize. Anyone from the US or from Europe would have been able to find the things they missed from back home. His shop was extremely well-stocked. Gangotri is literally the end of the road, but from everything that was on sale, we could well have been in a big city.

When I asked him how he came to become the owner of this hotel, he narrated his life story.

He said that he had no background in the hotel industry. He had joined the army after school, as a temp. He was hoping to become permanent in the army. He hadn’t liked it there, though the pay and the food was good. An old man in the army, who had seen what happened to those who served in it for too long had advised him to get out before it was too late. Heeding that advice Panwar left his army job.

Since he had learned how to cook in the army, he had started working as a cook in a hotel in Gangotri. He observed, studied the business and talked to the tourists. In a few years, he became the manager. He made friends with tour guides, who steered visitors to his hotel. In time, he borrowed money and slowly worked his way up to owning one hotel.

You have to listen to what the tourists say and look for what they want, he said, imparting his lesson in hotel management. He had paid special attention to what the foreign tourists wanted and had provided that. Business picked up steadily.

“Even though the tourist season is only 6 months, I am able to save 5 to 7 lakh (rupees) each year,” he volunteered proudly. (That is about USD 10,000 to 14,000.)

With the money saved, he had recently opened one more hotel. He got out a map and showed us where it was.
“Why did you build the hotel in Chinyalisaur?” I asked him. It was a town I hadn’t heard of, and it was over 150 kms from Gangotri.
“I considered opening in Uttarkashi. But it already has too many hotels. The Chinyalisaur area is only now being developed. The Government has just opened a GNBV guest house there. I have built one right next to that, hoping that the tourists will come. It’s a really beautiful area.”
“Who runs your new hotel?” I asked him.
He said had appointed a trusted employee as his manager there.

It was getting to be time for us to leave. So I asked him one last question, something that I am always curious about. “How do you ensure that your employee, your new hotel’s manager, doesn’t cheat you and keep some of the money for himself?” I asked because in India we rarely received receipts for many of our hotel stays and I could never be sure who ended up pocketing our money.

That’s when Panwar gave me the Indian Hotel Owner’s version of speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick.
He said that he had full trust in his employee and that these people (he called them paharis – mountain people) were by nature very loyal and honest. They didn’t cheat like the “city people.” But he was also holding on to six months of back pay for his employee. And he had his father or his brother, who stayed near the new hotel do surprise spot checks late at night. They would compare the number of rooms occupied to what the register showed. And if they found even one instance of cheating, then he lost an entire six months of pay. Thus Panwar made sure that cheating a little wasn’t worth the big loss of pay.

We paid up and I wished him the best for his new hotel and left.

A Matter of Trust

Chris, the guy from whom we rented a condo put me to shame. He put me to shame with his implicit trust in us.

On Monday, after landing in Kauai, he was one of the 10 or so people we called looking for accommodation. We went to his property in the town of Kalaheo to see if he had vacancies. He was full, but offered us a place in Poipu instead. Poipu was a seaside town eight miles away and a much more upscale area in the island. He asked us to follow his truck and so we drove following him.

He showed us one large unit that he hadn't planned on renting out, which he said we could have. He said there were two problems – the dishwasher was not working, so we’d have to hand-wash the dishes if we used the kitchen. And one faucet in the bathtub leaked a little, so we had to put a towel below while we showered. For these “inconveniences”, on his own, he knocked 50% off the price that we had seen in his website. We loved the place (much bigger and better equipped than our Chicago apartment back home) and so we took it up on the spot.

“Oh, we can do that later,” he said, when I asked about registration and paperwork. He showed us where everything was, shared a couple of housekeeping rules, handed me the keys and rushed off to play tennis with his buddies.

He didn’t have our credit card number or even our names. All he had was the cell phone number from which we called him.

And based just on our word that we’d stay for four nights, he had handed over to us the entire upstairs portion fully furnished (1100 sq feet) with a kitchen, a dining room, a living room including a wrap-around balcony.

What surprised me was how many things there were. It was a place that had been furnished with care and attention to detail. There were 2 TV’s, at least 2 DVD/VCR’s, a full dining table set, 2 phone handsets, lots of good furniture, several wall hangings and at least 10 fans and numerous lamps. The kitchen appliances were of excellent quality. I found bookcases full of books and CD’s and video cassettes. Dozens and dozens of them. Many were still shrink-wrapped, unopened. (One example: I saw a coffee-table book titled Bathrooms, which had photos of over 100 beautiful bathrooms in it.)

His unquestioning trust that we'd take care of all of this shamed me a little because I know I probably couldn’t trust a stranger if all of that was my stuff. In Zen Buddhism there is a teaching about making sure that one doesn’t get too attached to one’s own possessions. Your possessions shouldn’t possess you, they say. Our absent-landlord Chris embodied that completely. I am pretty sure that he doesn’t even know all that he possesses.

After two days of staying there without hearing from him, I began to get agitated. We hadn’t still paid him a penny. It was as if we were living in someone else’s fully furnished home. So I called him up to ask about where and how to pay him.

“Oh, when you are ready to check out, just leave the money or the check on the kitchen counter. And leave the keys there too when you leave,” was all he said.

And that’s exactly what we did.

A Scottish-American success story

On yesterday's flight back from Kauai, the lady sitting next to me was petrified of flying. She was 74, had been born in Scotland and had then immigrated to the US 51 years ago and was living south of San Francisco.

I learned all this before the flight had even taken off from Lihue, and it dawned on me that she was chatting away as one way to alleviate her fear of flying. I later saw that her other way was to order a $6-gin-and-tonic to calm her nerves.
“I have been through so much in life, and flying still gets me,” she said, shaking her head. She said that she had been through childbirth (thrice) and had been held at gun point at her own home (once, for 45 minutes) but flying was what really terrified her.
“But in a way, I see this fear as a good thing,” she said, putting a positive spin by psychoanalyzing herself. “I am 74 and I am still afraid. That means that I have more to live for, so much more I still have to do.”

After we were airborne, she said she was very proud of what her youngest daughter had accomplished. This daughter had started to slowly turn deaf in her early teen years. And then, for a couple of decades the deafness was practically total. Undaunted, the daughter had gotten degrees and even started her own company with a couple of other people. And then, thanks to the miracle of modern technological advances, at the age of 39, her deafness was cured.
“It doesn’t work for everybody, but my daughter is a poster-child for cochlear implants!”
This daughter had sold her company to a bigger firm for “many, many millions.” The timing had been perfect. Two weeks later, we were all hit with this recent economic crisis. She felt that there was no way anyone would buy the company in the current economic situation.

She talked of growing up in Scotland with very little. She was dismissive of what everyone calls smog in the big cities nowadays. “You haven’t seen smog until you have seen what it was like in Lanarakshire in those days. It was because of all the coal burning.”
Because her parents had struggled financially, for the first 23 years of her life there hadn’t been an indoor toilet where she lived.
Clearly, in the US she and her husband had done very well. Her husband was sitting somewhere else in the airplane. I learned that she and her husband owned not one but two timeshare condos with a guaranteed view of the ocean in Poipu, a very upscale part of Kauai island.
“I actually think it helps to have had so little when growing up,” she said, because she felt that it helped her value and savor what she now had more.

“And now I have a home with five bathrooms. And you know what?” She paused for effect before continuing, “I absolutely love having all of them!”

No Handouts Please

This happened last week in Pinang. I was traveling with my parents in Malaysia.

One evening, right after sunset I was walking back to our hotel from an internet cafe. My parents were there waiting for me to go to dinner.

That part of Little India in Georgetown has had Indian descendants whose ancestors go back 200 years. The music shops were blaring Tamil movie songs, and there was the smell of cooking from all the street vendors. It had just stopped raining and the temperature seemed perfect.

On Lebuh Penang, I noticed a grocery shop adjacent to Ananda Bhavan restaurant. I decided to go in to get some bottled water.

A barefoot young woman in her early twenties in a light blue salwar approached me outside the shop. It was getting to be dark, but I could see that she was of Indian descent. In her left hand she was carrying a few packets of something that she was trying to sell. She spoke to me in Tamil.
“En pullaikku kaadhu kethakudhu aiyya. Konjam vangunga aiyya.” (My son cannot hear. Please buy this, Sir.) I had no interest in buying whatever it was that she was selling, so I shook my head no and entered the shop. When I walked out with the bottled water, she was still there.
“Konjam vangunga aiyya.” I pulled out a small Ringgit note from my pocket to offer it to her.
“Aiyyo, kaasu vendam aiyya!” (I don’t want your money, Sir!)
I tried reasoning with her. It looked like she was selling packets of incense sticks.
“But I don’t want those, miss. What will I do with them?” I said, offering her the note.
She looked at the money and looked at me. Then she shook her head, turned and walked away. I walked back to the hotel.

It is because of her moral stance that I remember her. I regret that I didn’t try to find out what she was selling instead of trying to give her a handout. Whatever it was, it would have cost only a few Ringgits and would have made no difference to me.

The Ambassador of Cojusna

Moldova, July 2008

The man on the bus in Chisinau, Moldova spoke no English. He spoke in Russian, but we understood him mostly because of his pantomime. My wife Rupal had asked him to let us know when the stop for Esilor Road showed up. He managed to convey that he too was getting down there, so he’d be sure to let us know.

The reason we were heading to Esilor was that we had read in our guidebook that from there we could take a maxitaxi (a van which served as shared taxi) to the small town of Cojusna.

We had gone to the tiny country of Moldova purely on a whim. On the map, it looked very close to the cities we were visiting in Ukraine, and the lesser known ex-soviet country sounded intriguing. But once we got there after having spent a few days in Lvov and Odessa in Ukraine, we found that Chisinau was in fact quite similar to places in Ukraine, the bigger neighbor. Looking around for something more authentically Moldovan, we decided to go visit a vineyard or two. Moldova has a small but niche wine business.

Our first choice was the vineyard tour of Cricova, which is already relatively well established in the tourist circuit. The tours to Cricova, however, required advanced booking (we didn’t have time) and are somewhat expensive unless one is a serious wine aficionado. The Cricova tour caters to the well-heeled crowd, people who are happy to be ferried around in air-conditioned comfort stopping in the boutique shops for ‘wine-tasting’. They then purchase a case or two (shipped direct to their home address) and while entertaining guests back home, they’ll try and impress them by casually letting drop that they ‘picked up this wine from a neat little vineyard they found in Moldova.’

Instead, we decided to check out a lesser known place that the guidebook mentioned. Cojusna was said to have smaller vineyards, which sounded perfect for what we wanted to do. If we took a bus from Chisinau and then changed over to a minivan (mashrutky), we could get there by ourselves.

When our bus reached the right stop, the man made sure we got down. He then pointed up a road and said, ‘Esilor.’
‘Cojusna. Minibus?’ I asked, speaking only in nouns so that he would understand.
‘Cojusna?!’ He broke into a bright smile. In sign language he let us know that he too was headed to Cojusna. He asked us to go with him, and so we walked along.
“Arabic?” he asked me. People often mistook me as someone hailing from the Middle East when I neglect my razor for more than two days.
“No, Indian,” I said.
“India! Cinema!” he said.

It has happened in quite a few places, but it always amazes me that of all things, people connect India with its movies. And this time I was hoping to avoid something that had happened to us in Turkey. Two years previously, on the very outskirts of Istanbul near the northern-most point of the Bosporus where it meets the Black Sea, an old man had spontaneously burst into an off-key rendition of “Mera Jhoota Hai Japani” (a popular Hindi song) when he learnt that we were from India.
“Come, let’s have some coffee,” he then said pointing to a café. We had just met him a minute ago. Suspicious that he might have some ulterior motive, we politely declined and walked away. I still remember his crestfallen face which makes me believe that I had refused a genuine gesture of camaraderie. Perhaps we should have given the old man the benefit of doubt, but in my defense we had read a lot about touts in the Istanbul area.

To this man going to Cojusna I said, “Indian cinema. Amitabh Bachchan.” I was mentioning the Bollywood megastar sure that he would recognize the name. But the name didn’t even register a reaction. It wasn’t clear that he had even heard of Bachchan.

Then I remembered my exchanges with Moroccan shopkeepers. While we were traveling in Morocco, bored shopkeepers would shout out as I passed by. “Hello, Indian?” They were always young men in their late teens or early twenties. I would nod yes.
“Baazigar! Shah Rukh Khan!” they would then shout. The movie Baazigar seemed to have been extremely popular there. I would stop and nod, though I had no interest in buying the things that they had on sale for tourists – carpets, T-shirts, colorful ceramics. They were happy to chat anyway. “India number one!” they would say.
“Morocco number one,” I’d reply, returning the compliment. That always pleased them immensely, and they’d place their right hand over their hearts and bow a little, their way of accepting my compliment. This exact same exchange was repeated over two dozen times in the few days, no matter which city’s souk we traveled through – Marrakech, Fez or Meknes.

Remembering all that, I tried the same thing with this person in Chisinau. "Cinema. Baazigar. Shah Rukh Khan," I said. But that too didn’t ring a bell. Neither Amitabh nor Shah Rukh Khan produced even a glimmer of recognition. He thought for a while, seemed to be straining to recollect, and then he said, “Mithun!”
“Mithun Chakravorthy?” I asked, somewhat surprise. Mithun too was a Bollywood hero, but arguably, he wasn't quite in the same league as the other two stars. I hadn’t even thought of Mithun Chakravorthy in perhaps over a decade. I very rarely watch Hindi movies, so I wasn’t sure if he was still appearing in movies. The man from Cojusna nodded vigorously and beamed. We both smiled, acknowledging this rather esoteric shared pop-cultural experience though our lives and backgrounds were very different.

We had reached the place where people were boarding minivans for Cojusna. He pointed to the right white van and asked us to get on. This was a mashrutky, a shared taxi services that runs on fixed routes. But there were only two seats left, and so I asked him to get on. He absolutely refused and insisted that we take the last remaining seats. “That’s okay. I will wait for the next one.” We could understand him though he was speaking in Russian. Ever the ambassador for his beloved Cojusna, he let us board and as we pulled away, he waved us goodbye.

5 Centimeters short

As we traversed the southern part of China, going east to west from Hong Kong by plane, trains and buses, I was struck by how many young people approached us (on their own) and tried out their English.

We met Winnie, who is in her third year in college on the train from Guilin to Kunming. It was an overnight train, and it was the morning after when she came over, sat across from us, smiled at Rupal and myself and started talking. We were not very far from Kunming.
She wanted to know where we were headed. We told her our itinerary. She was going with her boyfriend (who didn’t speak English) and a small group of other travelers to the same places. Her mother had to work, and couldn’t join them. To me it seemed that more and more of the Chinese middleclass, with their new-found money thanks to the booming economy, were taking vacations.

Winnie, who said she was majoring in “English translation” hadn’t traveled too far beyond Guilin. I was trying to downplay our travels, afraid that it would seem boastful in comparison, but she was very curious and asked us a lot of questions about the places we had visited.
We also told her how much we liked China and how friendly we found its people. And then she surprised us with a tough question.
“Which country has the most un-helpful people?” Both Rupal and I looked at each other, struggling to answer that one.
Cop out responses like ‘They are all friendly people,’ or ‘It depends on who we end up running into,’ didn’t satisfy her at all.
“But who is least friendly?” she persisted.
We still wouldn’t name any country. None came to mind, really.
“What about the Japanese people?” Winnie asked us. She was leading us. We were less than a day’s journey away from Nanjing, and I knew that the two nations had had a turbulent past.
“The Japanese people we met while traveling there were very reserved,” I conceded. She smiled and nodded, satisfied.

“Once you have a job, which places will you visit?” Rupal asked Winnie.
“Hong Kong! I will go to Hong Kong for shopping!” I thought it a little ironic that a girl who lived in the hinterlands of China (“the manufacturer for the whole world”) wanted to go elsewhere to buy things.
“And I will go to America, maybe.”

In the morning light, the most striking feature of the landscape we were rolling past was the greenness of the countryside. Mile after unremitting mile of paddy and corn fields. The fields had been cut and leveled right up the small hills, all to feed the huge population. Our talk then turned to the Summer Olympics, which were less than a week away.
“You are not going to Beijing?” Rupal asked her.
“No. I have never been to Beijing. Very expensive.” She paused and then added, “Many girls from my college were selected for the Beijing Olympics.”
“You didn’t want to go with them?”
“Yes, I wanted.” Winnie passed her hand in front of her face, making a circle around it. “But you must be very beautiful.” To me, she looked attractive, but I guess the officials who were selecting girls from all across China had exacting standards.
“Also, you have to be 1.65 meters tall. I am only 1.6meters.” She smiled ruefully.

Before we got off the train, Winnie wanted to have her picture taken with us. She called her boyfriend over to take the photo. The shy guy didn’t speak English, but he too wanted his picture taken with us. In a short while we all arrived in Kunming. At the station, we asked her to write ‘Dali, tomorrow, lower berth’ in Chinese on a piece of paper. We used that to buy our onward ticket.

The fortune teller of Xi Shan

One evening last week, we were wandering in the Xi Shan (western mountains) near Kunming. We had time to kill since were taking the 11pm overnight train to Dali. After checking out of the hotel and leaving our bags with them, we had made a day trip to the mountains nearby, a popular tourist destination.

“Hello. You are teacher!” A man seated in a low stool, with some astrological charts spread out in front of him was trying to get my attention.

“You are teacher,” he repeated. “I am fortune teller!”

I was stunned. Not because he had called it correctly (he had not) but at the risk he was taking. I knew he was guessing, but it was crazy that he would play such poor odds in the hope of landing a customer. If I was the fortune teller and saw an Indian guy wearing glasses in a foreign land, my first guess would be that he was in the IT field, that he worked in some office with computers.

“She also teacher,” he said, pointing to Rupal. This guy was 0 for 2. Even if I had any desire to have my fortune told, I wouldn’t go to someone with such an abysmal record.

I shook my head No, to indicate that we weren’t teachers. In fact, at the moment, both of us had no profession, being gainfully unemployed, trying to live out our possibly juvenile notion of trying to get by without working at all.

The man smiled, acknowledging that he had been wrong. He quickly turned his attention to the Chinese tourists, who were, presumably, more tolerant of charlatans.