India Trip Reports: Part 2
Life at home, BSNL, Annapoorna and Youtube rabbitholes....
Part 2 of the India trip reports. Part 1 here. An inevitable outcome of this is that it looks like there’s going to be a Part 3 since this has bloated into a 2200 word kraken report.
Given that I was to be in India for 2 whole months, a big chunk of it was to be actually spent in the metaverse of work across slack, zoom, teams (because we cannot figure out one thing to stick to) and the occasional bluejeans calls. This, of course, raised some pertinent questions that needed to be answered:
What would be my work schedule to sync up with my team in Thailand (in some cases other parts of the world)
How would this new schedule sync up with the meal plan of the household
Will the internet infrastructure at home, courtesy BSNL, work?
A new schedule 🕗
The first and second questions were easy to answer. Thailand is an hour and thirty minutes ahead of India. In Bangkok, I normally start my work day at 8.30 a.m. which allows for a couple of hours of deep-work before the fragmented chaos of slack + outlook + zoom + teams + bluejeans starts. This translated to 7 am India time. I compromised to a 7.30 am IST start.
Still, super early.
Right?
It’s all relative. My parents live in their own time zone which by my estimation is at least an 90 minutes ahead (if not more) of rest of India.
It all starts in the morning. In my dad’s unwritten ‘rules of life’, the first rule is:
The supreme art of war is to rise before your enemy’s risen
I am only mildly exaggerating here. Mornings are war time. Waking up in my home, you will become aware, as your eyes open, of a life already in overdrive. There’s clatter of pans, religious incantations running in the TV, the smell of coffee in the air, things being cut and ground, conversations, water being filled in the bathroom, doors being opened and closed and a general air of being in the middle of war theatre. The time, if you were to look at it, would be 5.30 am. Roosters are still sleeping.
This purposeful competitiveness to beat the rest of India continues through the day. While others in the country are prodding around with breakfast consideration, my mother is cooking full meals. At 10 am, while lazy bed-heads are finishing their breakfast, lunch is being consumed at my home. Tea is ingested at 2.30 PM, dinner is complete by 6.30 PM and the house shuts down by 9 PM.
Now, if you overlay this with Thailand timezone, things work perfectly. My schedule for the two month India remote work was thus:
Wake up at 5.30 am. Do my hour of morning coffee + helping Amma with veggies and some pre-cooking
Walk for 30 minutes around the apartment in circles often getting embarrassingly outpaced by some senior citizens with manic morning energy
Shower and start my work at 7.30 AM
Work through the morning until lunch at…..10.30 am (noon in Thailand)
Work again from around 11 until 5 with a break at around 2.30 for tea / coffee and some chat
This left me with a large evening which I spent walking furiously around the apartment (with Lex Fridman, Tim Ferris or All In podcast running), watching movies with my parents, doing KYC documentation or visiting annapoorna for dinner
BSNL 🌴
Now, about that third point I made earlier about internet connection. More specifically, the BSNL internet connection.
I have a love-hate relationship with BSNL.
On the one hand, I love it because my mom worked there for decades (the only place she ever worked) and it feels part of the household. We’ve lived in P&T quarters and stayed at multiple BSNL IQs when on holiday all over India (including the most memorable one in Kolkata bang on top of Dalhousie circle). I’ve walked through aisles of phone switching circuitry in the exchanges and played pixelated games in boxy computers in their offices.
BSNL offices feel like a place time forgot - the old buildings, the slow pace of life there, friendly colleagues (of my mom), the tea that comes in the evening, the chatter, etc.
All of this would be fantastic if BSNL were a retreat, like Auroville, for people to relax. Unfortunately, they are a service provider. As a customer, BSNL is about as relaxing as the security check in a crowded Delhi airport. When I am using BSNL, therefore, there is a race going on between my benevolence and annoyance.
Perhaps I let my concerns flow through the phone prior to the trip. In turn, fearing that the world would come to an end if her son couldn't attend a zoom session with his colleagues, my mother decided to upgrade the plan with BSNL to a faster one that provided 100 mpbs speed with 200 gb of data.
I am happy to report that things did mostly go to plan. Except for a period of few days when calls started jittering and video calls became a no-go. And then one day, the internet dropped completely. We eventually found out that some cable was broken somewhere. The beauty with things going wrong with BSNL is that you are pretty much at the mercy of things eventually righting themselves, much like life in some ways. Ultimately, it did get fixed in about 24 hours and the internet came back more so to my mother’s relief than even mine.
She still takes BSNL service levels personally. I wonder if I ever will feel this much kinship to a company I work for. Probably not.
Amma’s classes 🏃♀️
Talking of internet, there were actually three avid users in the household which was keeping the system stressed enough:
Me with my constant calls and occasional video calls
My dad streaming on TV, having cut the cable for more than a couple of years now
Amma’s with a schedule of classes that puts my most hectic days to shame
Amma has discovered a new lease of academic, spiritual and social life that closely resembles a high powered CEO. Think Jeff Bezos’s schedule but with cooking, sanskrit classes, singing classes, daily visit to the local temple, sanskrit revision with friend, making bakshanams, more sanskrit revision, group chanting, visits to reception / weddings, sharing food with friends in the apartment, etc.
Despite me working from home, Amma was the busier of the two of us and sometimes looking at her schedule I felt tired. In fact, as I write this, she has finished level 2 of her sanskrit exams and is fretting (like the studious first-bencher that she is) about the mistakes she may have made (she scored a full 100 in level 1 incidentally).
Looking at her, I feel embarased about my laissez-faire lack of ambition. Here I am plotting early retirement so I can do all of the nothing I can, while she has a day that begins at 5 and pretty much runs full steam until 9 pm in her late sixties.
If only I am half as engaged and committed to things as she is at her age, I would be more than happy.
Amazon India 🧞
I’d forgotten how incredible the selection in Amazon India. My commerce (non food, non grocery) in Thailand has almost completely shifted from online to offline in the last two years thanks to two factors:
Lazada being the first circle of hell when it comes to finding things you want with confidence
Access to a million offline stores nearby (like I mentioned in part 1).
But coming back to Amazon India, I found myself in the remarkable position of being able to enter any need coming into my head into the Amazon search box and finding it. Not unlike many south Indian home stories, it all started with a bad cooker whistle. Amma wanted to find a replacement in a shop. Given that my entire philosophy of life has been a quest to maximise the effort to result ratio, I instead searched for it on Amazon. And, much to my surprise, found it.
Here’s a list of things I found and bought from it in the two months while in India
The aforementioned cooker whistle for a specific pressure cooker model of a specific brand of certain litre capacity.
Samahan
A brass Ganesha for gifting
Supplements including magnesium, vit b and vit D3
A cover for a specific new remote that came with the new TV
A USB C to USB 3.0 adapter
Hit Anti-roach gel to eradicate pests - supremely effective and highly recommend, btw.
A crisper tray for the existing fridge that was broken
And in nearly all of these instances, I’ve made a couple of search queries at best, clicked on perhaps 4-5 results (except for the gift example), read a bunch of reviews and made a decision. All of these instances, the product was exactly as advertised, delivered the next day or in a few days at best without a single failure of product or timelines. This is some next level magic and we should be appreciating this a lot more.
On the other hand, early in the trip, I ordered a TV from Flipkart for my dad. It took nearly 8 days and a few calls to Flipkart customer service to reach (after a promise of 3 days) and the installation took another couple of days.
@Amazon when do you plan to launch in Thailand?
Annapoorna 🤤
Moving on to another addictive institution starting with A. Knowing that I was going to spend several weeks in Coimbatore, one of the quests I had was to answer a long-held philosophical question of mine, “How many times a man must eat the Annapoorna vada sambar before he gets bored.”
I have a long history with vada sambar as a dish thanks to my dad. The story goes that I was introduced to it as a teeny 3 year old and would crave for vada sambar from Indian Coffee House. In any case, if there is a health weakness I have (is there just one), vada sambar is in the top three with potato chips and tasty beer.
Now, there’s vada sambar and then there’s annapoorna vada sambar. Having grown up in coimbatore, annapoorna is pretty much an itch you can’t get rid of. Also, growing up with a father who lived about a quarter of life there, it is pretty much like an addiction. To say that my father is a massive Annapoorna fan is like saying Rafael Nadal is a decent tennis player. My father is a 21 grand-slam loyalist of annapoorna.
Let me be clear. Things my father loves in prioritised order:
Annapoorna
Family
Coimbatore
I am joking, of course (am I?). It is very rare that I go out with my appa and we do not eat something at Annapoorna.
Anyway, long story short. I ate 22 times at Annapoorna in this brief trip (almost nowhere else) and ate vada sambar 20 times. This in itself may be an event worthy of therapy (or a cleanse) but my conclusion, as expected, was that a man can never get fully bored of eating the Annapoorna vada sambar. This is like a cocaine addict proclaiming that one can never get bored of cocaine.
Festival food 🧨
Indian festivals are about three things:
Food (lots of it)
Arcane rituals
Toiling womenfolk
It’s also about meeting people and having fun but that’s very secondary.
Food, especially during the festival season in India, is an endeavour that occupies a lot of your time. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that about 30% of all waking time spent during this period is somehow related to food.
First, it was Diwali and this fueled my mother to start boiling oil to murderous temperatures. Things are ground, packed, fried, squeezed and smashed. Eventually, there were many stainless steel dabbas filled with sweet or savoury things that were like a big fat middle finger to any notion of eating healthy. Often, there are second and third batches to be made basis feedback from ‘discerning’ men-folk who know what’s missing.
A considerable amount of time is then also spent on packing and distributing these Diwali bakshanams. Little packets and boxes of various hues make their way like a supply chain of clogged hearts that scamper across homes. Everywhere in the country, a whole new stream of deliveries emerges of sweets and savories that travel from home to home until they enter someone’s stomach and deposit themselves as the standard Indian paunch.
At home, you ration and make detailed plans on how to finish all of these items. Just as you’re gasping from all that time, effort and just perhaps because your blood is now considerably thicker, another festival rolls around the corner.
“Oho, Karthigai is here and I need to make Pori balls,” says the mother and off you go procuring Pori and the process of boiling, rolling, mixing, etc. starts all over again. Steel dabbas, that have just breathed free, are filled up again.
When it comes to food, India has zero chills.
Youtube Rabbithole 🐰
Youtube is a wondrous place. It is also crazy af. Staying at home, I was exposed to a new bubble on youtube that was mostly TN and Indian politics. When I say politics, everything is politics in India which in itself is a depressing phenomenon. Movies? Politics. Books? Politics. Companies and corporations? Politics. Science? Politics. Now medicine is also political.
In this, we are tracking the father of making everything political - the USA. I saw political commentary and abuse around Jai Bhim, about some man kicking actor Vijay Sethupathi in an airport, about vaccinations, about Chennai rains and so on. Most of them were making up explanations on the fly. Some were outright conspiracy theories.
Talking of Chennai rains, it was just another november and another instance of Chennai pulling off a David Blaine to disappear under a sheet of water. Political parties blamed each other. Social media warriors blamed corrupt builders for having destroyed the lakes. Some spiritual gurus blamed astrology (so many gurujis with amazing hindsight predictions here).
Many shots of roads under water, buses submerged beneath flyovers and brave motorists wading into hip deep water were shown. It made me realize how the more things change, they stay the same. Here we are in the world, talking about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, arguing whether web 3 is a VC created fake construct, while a man paddles out into the water from the first floor of his submerged house to buy some milk, presumably.
My home, and pretty much all of my extended family, has a pretty right-leaning bias and so I mostly kept my political opinions to myself. I have realised over years that there is no upside to fighting over politics. Opinions typically don’t change and you only end up with a bad taste in mouth.
The one positive development was that I fixed all OTT logins for my dad and this meant that he spent less time on this negative and constant political rabbit hole and more time on movies across the platforms. Any day better the toxic land of Indian politics.
More to come in part 3:
Parrying unsettling questions about Thailand from maamas and maamis in Coimbatore
Mumbai trip, BARC and the excitement of Parag Agrawal (son of the soil) becoming CEO
Omicron and ruined Bangalore plans
Return to Thailand
Could be worse,
Tyag