April 2, 2010

Cultural Shock !!!

Hey buddy, lets catch up over a coffee near theatre @5PM!! Ok…and the usual turning up time would be, naah ‘WILL BE’ anywhere around 5:30 n in some cases may be worse…. Unless ofcourse we have given time to a gal, one eventually turns up earlier than the discussed time!!!... gals as usual have the exception of making it late to the meet everytime ;)!!! Well I presume that back home, we strictly believe in the PHILOSOPHY that-“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored!!” …. N we usually don’t leave enuf time for oneselves to get bored to the point of becoming PUNCTUAL :)


If one has made some observations around at workplaces (centers of learning apart from professional course ;) which don’t fall under this category) those who are actually ‘ON TIME’ are those who commute by COMPANY BUS :) n seldom having n alternate (or wanting to choose one) and the rest of the rajas’, ranis’ n to forgot those maharajas’, make their gala entrance at their convenience ……


And here, they adhere to the clock as if life will cease to exist if they get delayed by a ‘moment’, so it means that the above mentioned philosophy if applicable inadvertently proves beyond doubt that these guys here are bored… bored to death!!! :)


It doesn’t mean that I am amidst zombies…. I am amidst ROBOTS :) … these guys are organized, so very organized that they could pass off as the latest A.I. achievement of Japanese - ‘Robots’….. it’s like every damn thing ranging from daily chores to office work, social gathering all n all have been programmed into their brains as if ‘god’ made some extra effort to write-in a few more line of codes in this version of humans :). Recently, one of my colleagues at workplace was enquiring if I wud be free on 3rd Saturday of next month…. I put a dumb face at him, barely would I be able to guess what I might do this weekend or may be the next and this guy was asking about my schedule a month in advance….. later I came to know that he wanted to organize a get together n he was going around finding ‘convenient’ dates….


Everything that we can see around is planned to the precise moment, the bus timing, train arrivals, planes, meetings with people, swimming pool timing, car parking time and even the time at at which a shop closes…. Damn these guys, they close the shop even if u wanted to buy an item :( …. No wonder one wudn’t find many people at stations waiting for their bus/ train; for they know the exact minute when it would arrive…. But there is a flip side to everything and the perfection wasn’t an exception. I got to take a bus at 6:01PM & being from our placepredicted the bus might come a bit early and went to the stop 5 mins ahead of time (with my watch being 5 min fast I was actually 10 min ahead) .... on top of it these guys failed for the first time and at the wrong time….. first up, the bus came 7 mins late and the worst, I had to wait for the entire time at a bus stop without shelter and in freezing temperatures (it was around -9 deg) …… it’s entirely a different part that I was hopping, jumping, running aroung, rubbing my hands and doing all that I could to keep myself warm!!


There is nothing in this world from which we can’t learn anything…..believe in the saying-“Make every experience a worthwhile lesson” …… There are many a things that we could learn from here- punctuality.