Its a Small World After All...

SELAMAT Hejsan! Namaskar and welcome to this blog, our attempt at providing you your monthly dose of humour, philosophy, tech-dom and general randomness!

A term often overused these days is "globalization". Talk about globalization, and I start to wonder whether the term was coined keeping me in mind. Confused? Allow me to explain. My family has strong UP (theoretically Uttar Pradesh, practically Ulta Pradesh) roots. Whatever I do know of the family tree, my ancestors seemed to have left the Shava-Shava of Punjab and taken a liking to UP (though that doesnt prevent us from going gaga over shava even now), obviously hoping that it lives upto its acronym and progresses in the direction it intuitively should. The story goes that they went on to become the stereotypical hardcore UP family, of the dal-roti fame (WARNING- gals who let out a sigh of relief thinking making just dal and roti will 'patao-fy' me, BEWARE. I cant handle yellow dal). Rampur (why do I always feel the need to mention that the nearest big city is Bareilly?) had the privilege of being my birthplace (and hence get mentioned around in blogs!). But thats about as straight-forward as it got. From this point onwards my history takes a distinct turn to start sounding more like geography.

If ever there were a fantasy league for shifting homes and cities, I would rank pretty high on the stack. After being born in Rampur, my initial perceptions and impressions of this world were formed in Yamuna Nagar, Haryana. The Haryanvi water did to me what it does to most. Manne 'Hatta-Katta' bana ditta ji! Trucks galore, winters a-more, Haryana was a delight (or so I assume considering at that age our memory wasn't exactly a Cf card). But within two years, we were off to Thailand, and I was too young then to comprehend why men react the way they do on hearing Bangkok (I still had to google 'Bangkok+famous for' to truly understand what Bangkok holds in store). Memories, childhood, and Thailand constituted another three years, and we were on the move again, back to Yamuna Nagar. This time I was old enough to truly take in the beauty heralded by the place. But alas, by the time I could start calling this place home, low and behold, the travel bug hit us again. The journey of life had found its next station, Indonesia.

My father works in the pulp and paper industry, thus its not very often we got to stay in a proper city. Its always been at townships, and so was the case here. Of the 17000 islands large archipelago that Indonesia is, a very smart person decided to entrust the island of Sumatra to be home to the world's largest paper mill, and hence Sumatra was the island providing us the first glimpses of the country we would be staying in for the coming 12 years at least.. So a place called Kerinci became my home for the better part of my childhood, and 5 beautiful years at this small and simple town, carved a niche in my memory.

Apparently, such a long duration did not go down too well with the capital city of Indonesia, and before we knew it, one of the biggest cosmopolitan cities of the world had beckoned to us.

J.A.K.A.R.T.A! Its always been the rather underestimated brother of its more talked about neighbours. Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, even Bali for that matter, have always stolen its thunder. Which in a way is why it has managed to still keep its charm intact. My career path foundations were laid in Jakarta, and after completing high school, it was all but natural to make travel my companion once again, and head out for another phase of life.

As the general pattern had been thus far, life took me to a bigger and more renowned city than the previous one. The place which had for me been nothing but a city in the nearby Southeastern region; that city which had managed to hold its own and become the economy of south-east asia; that economy which epitomized Asia. SINGAPORE (fondly known to me as Lah-Lah Land). I had arrived (and by the looks of it, to stay for at least seven years!).

So, what do we gather from this? Twenty years, six different homes. Six different cities, tens of flights taken to these cities. Tens of flights to these cities, hundreds of miles travelled. Darn, if only there existed a lifetime frequent flyer card! At least I now know where my love for aeroplanes comes from! "What a nomad" is what I hear you say? Well, nomadic or not, life has been a journey for me thus far, true to its literal sense! A long journey that has had temporary stops at stations, adding flavours of the places, and forming the Southeast Asian multi-cultural package, sitting in some part of SE Asia, writing this out to you. 

But do you know what has been the one constant thing through all this? Its been my roots, my Indian-ness. Allow me to welcome you, our readers as we pay homage to our mother land, call ourselves Desis, because that is what we are, notwithstanding our current pardesi locations! Presenting to you freshly cooked articles from our PARDESI DHABA!