India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Reliance over Kenny G
Ah, the wonders of technology. My plane touched down an hour ago in Delhi, and my connecting train to Chandigarh is at 7.40 am. So how do I pass the time? Well, I'm sitting in the airport on a sofa near the baggage-claim section, with a laptop on my knees, connected via a Reliance CDMA phone to the internet. A couple of years ago, I couldn't have been online without a landline near me. (In India, I mean.) A decade ago, I couldn't have imagined chatting with people I can call "friends", but have never met, and who read what I write every day from 1000 miles away. Three decades ago, I was in my nappies, and probably wouldn't have had the motor control to handle this stupid dotty mouse.
There are no travellers anywhere around me, just airport staff moving to and fro. One sweeper shouts at another sweeper in Punjabi, and what he says can roughly be translated as "sister****er, I will put it in your a****ole". A humming sound comes from somewhere, like that of a hair dryer, but a large one, as if King Kong has emerged on the tarmac outside from a midnight bath, and is grooming himself luxuriously. And I'm filled with gratitude that there is no piped music here, because if there was, it would surely be Kenny G. When my flight took off from Mumbai, they played a Muzak version of "Last Christmas". When it landed, they were playing a sax-and-single-finger-keyboard version of "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You". Suddenly, we were back in the terrible 80s, and I was nostalgic for the future.
There are no travellers anywhere around me, just airport staff moving to and fro. One sweeper shouts at another sweeper in Punjabi, and what he says can roughly be translated as "sister****er, I will put it in your a****ole". A humming sound comes from somewhere, like that of a hair dryer, but a large one, as if King Kong has emerged on the tarmac outside from a midnight bath, and is grooming himself luxuriously. And I'm filled with gratitude that there is no piped music here, because if there was, it would surely be Kenny G. When my flight took off from Mumbai, they played a Muzak version of "Last Christmas". When it landed, they were playing a sax-and-single-finger-keyboard version of "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You". Suddenly, we were back in the terrible 80s, and I was nostalgic for the future.
