Navrai Majhi

If I get a chance to prepare the playlist for somebody's wedding sangeet, one sure entry would be Navrai Majhi - the English Vinglish rendition. I have taken some fancy to that track. I like the way it is composed. It retains the traditional feeling with the Marathi lyrics and granny's voice; and blends in smoothly the modern touch that the Hindi lyrics and the accented verse give it. The shehnai and dhol in between bring in the complete wedding feeling. The words are meaningful and create a kaleidoscope of emotions - a father's sentiments at the thought of seeing off his daughter, the excitement during a wedding, the blessings, the speculations, the hopes, and the expectations. All of this so nicely contained in four and a half minutes.

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Escalator Antics

I went to watch a movie the other day with my mother and sister. On our way out, I spotted an interesting dessert counter placed very strategically. It was meant to attract everybody's attention as they walked out of the theatre, and so it did mine too. My sweet tooth got the better of me and we all sat down on a bench nearby to savour kulfis. After I was done, I behaved like a brat and insisted on having another one. I felt like a complete brat when my sister went and got me another kulfi. I'm the elder sibling, hello! Nevertheless, I am glad I sat there for another round of kulfi. For if I hadn't, I'd have missed a very amusing set of incidents.

Now visualise this. The bench I sat on, faced the escalators. A couple of bites into the kulfi I spot a man ascending the escalator with his toddler. The child was a replica of the father, only with a ridiculous amount of very curly hair on his head. The father's hairline had long receded. While I fixated on the similarity of the child with his father and imagined how he'd look when he grew up with all that hair the duo reached the landing. The father walked nonchalantly and his son even more. As if he had come up with a plan, the child promptly turned towards the descending escalator and moved on. The father kept walking till a few seconds and then casually glanced around only to find his son on his way down the escalator. All his nonchalance evaporated into thin air as he ran panic stricken after his child. A couple of seconds later I spot a boy in housekeeping uniform bent over the moving railing following the father and son. He had bent over with a duster and by virtue of the automatic movement was cleaning the sides and in-betweens of the railings. He looked like a corpse taking a ride up and down.

Halfway through my kulfi I see a couple ascending the escalators, again with a toddler! The couple was engrossed in some discussion. The child was on his own. He seemed to be enjoying the tow. Children seem to enjoy just about anything anyway. As the trio reached the floor, the parents were still in the midst of a discussion that seemed to be of utmost importance to the future of the world. Involuntarily they stepped off the escalator but forgot about their son. He did not know the tricks involved in using these devices of modern world, and is he to be blamed? So he just kept moving with the escalator belt and got launched off it on to the floor when it was time. It seemed as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The amazing thing was that he landed safely, and the garrulous parents, oblivious of the stunt, went on. As I turned my attention to my kulfi again, the housekeeping boy was back; still bent over, but coming upwards this time. It was a task for me not to guffaw! I finished the kulfi quickly and we finally went down. The housekeeping boy crossed us on the other escalator for a second, this time bent over on the other side with his duster. 

Some dress on the window of some shop had caught our attention, so we decided to browse a little. As I looked through a shelf of garments I suddenly realised that the shop had glass walls and I was facing THOSE escalators again; and before I knew what was going on, I see a little girl - bringing in some gender diversity in the prevalent madness - walking up an escalator that was moving downward. She did this in a very systematic way and looked like a pro. The next second I see a little boy doing the exact opposite on the next escalator. They seem to have worked up a synchronisation and as they reached the same spot on their respective escalators they began to chat. They probably had a script ready too. There was no adult in sight. Their parents seem to have abandoned them or perhaps these children had abandoned them - which could be a greater possibility given their smartness and theatrics. By the time we came out of the store the escalator kids had moved on to a different level in their game. They were now leaning on the railings and moving upward or downward sideways. They also kept changing sides very often to keep the game interesting enough. The only obstruction in their game was the housekeeping boy who was relentlessly bent over, still.

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(nir)Aadhaar

Yesterday I spent around an hour and a half just to complete the enrollment formalities - iris scan, finger print scans, photograph etc. - in order to initiate the process of obtaining an Aadhaar card for myself. There is a makeshift Aadhaar centre set up in the club of my apartment for the residents' convenience. Given that I had no distance to travel, no incomplete forms, no missing documents and, most importantly, only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, just what explains the hour and a half spent for something that ideally should take not more than 5-7 minutes?

The delay was caused because of a series of events. There was an elderly lady in the queue when I reached the counter. She was being made to place her fingertips to record her fingerprints. The machine records the percentage of clarity, and a minimum something is essential for the record to be valid. After several attempts, the lady had to finally give up and her application was processed with just 5 or 6 fingers' prints. There was some similar problem during her iris scan. The scanners were so talked about before the Aadhaar movement had begun. Unfortunately, they are not sophisticated enough and thus not sensitive enough to scan the prints of those whose bodies have borne the wear and tear of time. The gentleman just ahead of me was mocking all this, saying the lady's old age had wiped off her finger prints and made her iris un-scan-able. It was annoying after a while but it was no point asking him to stop and think if this happened to his own mother, because the lady was, in fact, his mother.

The Aadhaar process is infested with numerous loop holes which can be easily amended and eventually make the process flawless and much less time consuming. To begin with, the software that has been designed to record data is not compatible with Indian names and titles. One can type one's name correctly in English, but be prepared to find it distorted or misspelled in Hindi. My surname will appear in a way that I myself will not be able to pronounce. I can, in fact, type in Devanagari script without any difficulty here on my blog. Why was it such a huge task to design a proper software, I fail to fathom. Besides, my surname is not something which is unheard of that it becomes so difficult to type correctly. I'm not so miffed just because it was my surname in question. A lady named Amrita spent 15 minutes trying to get her name spelled correctly in Hindi. This is neither an understandable nor excusable error in India. The enrollment form that we fill out initially is not required at all. We might as well feed in all pertinent data online and then verify it at the time of processing alongwith our identity proof. It is a sheer waste of paper. The receipt that we get is printed on normal A4 sheets and then torn in half manually; one is retained by the enrollment in-charge and the other given to you. Why couldn't they be provided with perforated sheets? The enrollment in-charge struggles with a foot ruler to tear of the receipts in two halves. The finger print and iris scanner are not too sensitive, as illustrated by the elderly lady's case. The photograph is taken just for the heck of it. You may not look like yourself at all. The icing on the cake is the fact that will take anything from 3-10 months or probably more for the card to arrive. 

I am not too sure what purpose the card will solve. I felt a surge of insecurity creeping in as my bio metrics were recorded. I wouldn't know if someone misused them. I have not got my bank account synchronised with it. From a much hyped programme with a humungous fund earmarked for it, that had the likes of Nandan Nilekani and Wipro Technologies associated with it, I expected something better.

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