A different perspective.

Naka-Bandi by the 'Brake - Inspectors'

Rush hour! Pushing their way to enter the gate first!

In Mumbai for a week, as I stepped out of our building, I could hear a loud commotion nearby.  It was the usual fight for parking space.  Oh what a way people bicker and squabble for a mere 2 square metres of space in the city.  Later, travelling by my favourite BEST bus, the squabbles were of a different hue. The passenger did not have the change and the war of words escalated above the din of traffic. 

Well coming back to our village life, what is it that gets these peoples ‘goat’? 

The other day there was a loud squabble in the empty plot of land close to our farm. The area only has some jungle trees on it and one woman was busy raking the fallen dried leaves and tying it into one massive bundle. Apparently the land did not belong to her, so when the owner happened to pass by it, there was a bitter argument because she ‘stole’ the dried leaves.  Well, I guess in some countries, people would be happy to have their dried leaves raked and cleared up for free.

Why?  Can't I help myself to a sackful of dry leaves!

Parking in the path of the traffic, halting your vehicle in the middle of the junction to carry on a conversation with a passing biker, stopping a bus in the middle of a narrow road while all the passengers embark at a leisurely pace -  which has us fuming when we are caught behind, none of these things ruffle the villagers. But let a neighbour's cow stray into their field, let a few hens escape their pens and scratch around on someone else’s land and you can see trouble brewing.

I think the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence!

The other thing I noticed here was how possessive people are about the large used-gunny-bags which are meant for 50 or 100 kgs of stuff. When we first came here we did not have any such bags, and we kept needing them – to bag the bananas to save them from the monkeys, to haul some farm produce ...so on and so forth. So we had to source used ones from the hardware store. After we started getting the cow-feed in bulk, our collection of bags steadily increased.  And we noticed that people always return the bag if they borrow it. The arecanut dealer comes to collect the produce with a large bundle of empty bags, and should he need to borrow some from us, he turns up the very next day to return them. Whenever we take any of the farm produce to the local dealer, after weighing the stuff, he hands over the money along with the exact number of empty sacks. Now coming to think of it, I surely must have annoyed a lot of people here by not returning their bags until I realised how important it is to do so.

Years back, before mobile phones made their entry, I was working as a Computer programmer(in that era of Cobol programming, Batch processing of Data), and Vivek was working as a Sales Engineer.  I would sometimes call Vivek at his office and often get to hear ‘He is not in the office, he is out in the field’. Today, more often than not, he leaves his mobile  behind when he out working in the farm.  And to the calls that he gets sometimes, my answer is almost the same ‘He is out in the field’.....really! And yes I seriously do ‘Cloud Computing’ now – I can gaze for hours at the gathering and receding clouds and deduce an algorithm to figure out whether it will rain or not! 

So it is a learning experience all the way – a new way of life, a different perspective in every way!

Batch Processing - of Summer Surplus

Python (?) Programming!