India Trip musings

Since this trip was my second this year, I did not find any glaring differences like the way I did during my last trip to India, which was done after close to 2 years. But, here are some of my usual India trip observations:

1) The one thing I noticed during this trip (and something which I did not notice during my earlier trip) is this new habit of putting up huge banners for weddings (thankfully, there was none for my sister's :)). I did not see this in Chennai but saw it everywhere else, particularly in Madurai. And the richer the bride/ groom was, the bigger the banner was. We used to have paper posters pasted on walls for such occasions before but they were very non-intrusive in the sense that unless, you take an effort to notice those posters, you might easily miss them. I guess those posters have grown over a period of time and now have become such despicable banners. The content in the banners actually are even more disgusting - basically, what our photographers used to do with our wedding albums have made their way to those banners. Typically, you would see the photos of the bride the groom and in some cases, all the family members. And if you are really rich, you try to get these banners placed at the most strategic of locations in the city. To place these banners in front of the wedding reception hall is atleast tolerable but to have them at strategic locations in the city, is simply unpardonable. I was seriously thinking of lodging a complaint through my father against these new kind of 'encroachments'

2) Though this is my 4th trip to India, I have never flown into Madurai. I have always flown into Chennai and then taken a train or a taxi to go to Madurai. So, flying into Madurai remained one of my long time dreams. And I finally was able to fulfill that dream this time around. Of all the flights that took me from Seattle to Madurai (my route was Seattle--> San Francisco -->Singapore -->Chennai-->Madurai), it was the Jet airways flight from Chennai to Madurai that was easily the best, as far as comfort went. The service was excellent. Of course, it did help that it was a short flight and also, I was all excited as I was going to meet my family & friends at the airport. It was on this flight that I had my only brush with a celebrity (if I can call him one) - Solomon Pappiah, the noted patti mandram judge who belongs to Madurai, was in the same flight that I traveled in. Nobody seemed to have identified him and unfortunately, I was not even seated close to him bcos if I had been, I would have surely started a conversation with him.

3) On my onward journey, since I had close to 8 hours of transit in Singapore, I enquired about going into Singapore to take a peek into the country and then came across this site which had details about the free city tour for transit passengers like me, that Singapore tourism was organizing. So, on reaching the airport, I registered myself for the tour which is 2 hours long. It is a sweet little tour where they take you on a bus into the Singapore city and show you the important monuments of the city. The tour also includes a boat ride on the Singapore river, from where we get to see the skyscrapers of the city from up-close. Overall, a must-to-do thing if you have more than 4 hours of transit in Singapore. The only stat that I carried from this tour is the length & breadth of Singapore - I cant believe the whole country is just 23 kms by 42 kms big. And since the day I was in Singapore was Singapore's national day, there were extra crowd and decorations all along the city.

4) While I was in Chennai, I went to the GRT hotel and for the first time in my life, watched a BMW (and a 5 series at that) on Indian soil and I was all excited about it, which was when my friends told me that BMWs are a common place in Chennai now-a-days (my friend from Bangalore added that he has even seen couple of Ferraris in Bangalore). As if to prove the point, after my dinner at GRT, I went to the nearby Residency towers to meet some friends and guess what I saw there?! 2 more BMWs and one of them was even better - a 7 series. It was then my other friend enlightened me about how all these high end cars can be seen on the Chennai roads only during late nights and on the weekends when the traffic is relatively mild. So, if it were the Corollas and the Citys that got me excited during my last trip, it was the BMWs and the Mercedes' that caught my attention during this trip.

5) The wedding went on very well. Big crowd, much more than what we expected. But what I wanted to write here is how exhausted the process of organizing a wedding makes us. Prior to my departure, all my friends who had undergone the experience of arranging the weddings of their siblings talked in length about how tired the wedding would make us, particularly if you are from the bride’s side. (Like one friend told me that, when he went to bed on the morning of the day after his sister's wedding, he slept for nearly 30 hours at a stretch). But inspite of all this, I was completely unprepared for what actually happened. I can easily say that I have never felt so tired in my life before. I mean, when you go on hikes, you do get really tired but you recover pretty quickly (usually a night’s sleep is sufficient). But here, the after-effects were felt till the last day I was in India. And all this, with me who just went 5 days before the wedding and had very minimal work to do, like handing invitations to my friends’ families. I just could not imagine what my parents should have gone through in arranging a wedding of such a magnitude (more than 3000 people attended in 2 days) within a span of 3 weeks. My mom, in particular, looked like a super mom to me, for having pulled off the wedding preparations in such a short period of time :)

6) An India trip musing post would be incomplete without a mention about the traffic that we experience back in India. Though I did experience the full force of the Chennai peak hour traffic (I rode my bike from Velachery to Sathyam theaters, at 8:45am on a weekday), I wanted to write more about the understanding between the drivers back there. As many of them do not obey the traffic rules, they have this unwritten agreement between themselves while driving on roads. For example, we all would have seen this - when vehicle A is trying to overtake vehicle B and the driver of B which is going in the front helps the driver of A out by signaling whether it is safe to overtake or not. Now, they have gone one step further and have found a signal for doing it - the driver of the vehicle in the front uses his right indicator to indicate to the driver of the bus trying to overtake to indicate if it is safe to overtake. That I thought was pretty cool and one of many reasons for the relative harmony on the highways, inspite of drivers liberally flouting the rules.