Ponto de Vista

Is this bliss or is this bliss? I’m not trying to romanticize the life of this beast of labor or anthropomorphize this dude here but I caught sight of him recently at Warden Road and he was so striking, I had to stop and video him. I swear to you, he looked like he had hit hay nirvana. He was smacking his lips loudly and his eyes rolled back into his head. I think there was no doubt whatsoever that he was beaming to himself in sheer happiness. So I stopped to watch, and soon a small crowd of people had also stopped to smile at the bull and each other. Well, all except the bull’s maalik. Guess he hadn’t gotten to his own fodder, yet. 😉

What do you do when you’re bored?  I often think that if I had a job that was mostly sitting around and waiting, I’d read. Most of our nation is illiterate, though, I know and everytime I see a cabbie or a watchman reading a paper, I get really happy. One recent afternoon, Aalaap and I were wandering around Dadar waiting for a bike to be assembled for purchase when I decided I wanted a nariyaal pani or something cool to drink. We found only mausambi juice and across us, I noticed the rest of the vendors – the banana seller included, had a game of chess going on. Attaboys! 🙂

Thank goodness this is only supposed to happen once in this lifetime. It was such a bad experience I’d be loath to wish it on an enemy! To start with, the registration location (“Badminton Hall”) was ridiculously hard to find and there was a lone policewoman trying to impose order outside. She did eventually let 10 people in at a time. Her directions about what to do inside were literally directions: “Turn right.” What I saw is what you see. And beyond these people were ceiling high stacks of paper. After waiting in two lines (once to receive a “number” – ward? Jaago Re neglected to mention this one) this absolutely rude woman said she couldn’t accept my PAN card as proof of my date of birth (regardless of what their web site says) and if “sir” said it was ok, she’d take the voter registration application. But “sir” flipped past the PAN card and fixated on my mobile phone bill as not being valid proof of address, instead. After raising my voice and demanding his name and ID number (to the absolute unconcealed delight of at least 300 people), I finally got them to accept my application and give me the counterfoil.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that they don’t make the decision about whether my application is accepted or rejected, they’re so used to playing God, they wouldn’t even take it! I was shaking with disbelief and anger about how difficult the bureaucracy makes it for even the people who DO want to vote. 🙁
All around me, people were being turned away for missing documents. There was someone in line ahead of me who’d returned for the fourth time! Why is the correct information not publicly available? And how can these officials be this rude to fellow human beings?

Heaven knows I have a backlog of photos to blog but fresh from a hectic eco/immersion-tourism trip to Orissa, I have a total Oriya hangover that begs to jump the queue. This is a frieze from the Sun Temple in Konark – where our tour guide shouted at us (just in terms of his volume, we figured he was unused to groups of only two!) I loved this dragonesque lion bullying the elephant. My trusty 6500 refused to work much of the time so all my cool photos of flaming Palash & simul, the baby goat I nearly ‘kid’napped, the baby elephant we played with at the Simplipal reserve, the Khairi river, sal leaf forests, the random-ass cups of *salted* tea I was continually served (grr) are all on the Samsung so cannot be posted here. We packed a lot into four days and I think I need a vacation from this vacation.