Life and other weird things

The wife has taken a one way ticket to her hometown, and having nothing better to do, decided to pen down (figuratively speaking) a few lines about what has been going on.

I came back a few weeks ago from a trip to the US. Wait, correction. Came back from a trip to Texas. Which, as everyone tells me, is different from a trip to the United States of America.

What I saw there was, predictable, different from anywhere else I've been before. In a way, I was fortunate that the first sights of the US had to be Texas. I saw the good and the not-so-good things all in one shot - and in widescreen technicolor. Because, if anything in life is big - it's Texas. Now I can't pretend to be an expert on life in the USA, this being my first visit there - but after what I saw of the place, it's difficult for me to imagine anything bigger and more rich in abundance than Texas.

My ride from the airport to my hotel in Houston was about 70km, and in all that distance on a fine sunny Sunday evening, I saw just one person on the road who wasn't in a car. He was a beggar at a signal with a sign which said very succinctly 'I am hungry. Need money.'. Every other human being was cocooned in his or her car. It was surreal, like being in a scene of the 'Rise of the Machines'.

Everything what I encountered there was so different from India that it would take days to note. The roads for one. Massive. Once I was on the road the other side seemed somewhere in a galaxy far far away. Once in a food court in a mall, everything seemed to be 3 times the size I was used to. But then again, having only traveled well in Europe and South East Asia I am not really used to seeing Coke being handed out in 24 oz cups(almost a liter).

The supermarkets were full of 'stuff', as George Carlin would put it. Too much stuff. And the weirder thing was, people were buying them. People who were so obese that they had to use motorized vehicles to move in those huge complexes.

That was the most part.

Now for the good bits. Made a visit to the Johnson space center near Houston. Everything progressive about America is in that one facility. Ingenuity. Hard Work. Enterprise. Science. Technology. The drive to be the best. I saw the room from which the first moon mission was launched, way back in the late 1960's. The thought that people using slide rules and computers with 1 MB RAM could send a man onto the moon and bring him back was a thought that gave a tremendous adrenalin rush. Only today, I read in an Indian newspaper that India 'plans' to put a man on the moon in some years from now. Hello people, it's been done more than 50 years ago. And in the same paper I found an article about how India produces the highest or second highest number of engineers in the world. Ironic. Everyone I saw in the Johnson Space Center seemed PROUD of the place. And rightly so. Which other nation had the grit and determination to do what they did ?

Next, went to a small town outside San Antonio called Bandera, which calls itself the cowboy capital of the world. It was there that all my preconceived notions about Americans went out of the window. The people in that small town (population - 957) were so warm and so amazing, that they had me at the word go. Hard working people, who build their own houses, prize their culture and love their music. The next time I hear the phrase 'American's have no culture', the speaker gets a mental hammer on the head from me. Of course there's culture there. And a very attractive one too. Cliched as it may sound, it bears repeating that television paints as biased a picture of America abroad as it does of India. Of course I met people there who thought Indians spoke 'Indian'. Equally true is the fact that I know many Indians who think that Americans have no sense of value and their favorite hobby is to marry and divorce every few years. Both these views are, of course, a load of crap. I was fortunate enough to land in Bandera on Mardi Gras, where my kind hosts introduced me to what seemed like half the town. I met real cowboys who talked with me like they knew me for years, and met librarians who were so proud of what they did that it brought a lump to my throat.

Most importantly, I met some great people on the professional front. Heard a CEO speak live for the first time. And was duly impressed. Met people at work from various countries and appreciated the difference in cultures of people from all corners of the world. Never had a chance to chat up with a Bolivian, a Canadian, a Portuguese, an Englishman, a Swiss, a Frenchman, a Chinese and a New Zealander, among others, all in one room.


So all in all, it was a great trip. Great learning, which I am hoping I will remember for a long time.

Now back to fun.

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On the last day in Houston, caught Martin Scorsese's latest work - 'Shutter Island'. A great film, if not the master director's best work. Leonardo Di Caprio is definitely the Robert De Niro of this generation. The movie is a 'picture perfect' (pun intended) example of a psychological thriller. It's been long since I watched a film which can scare the audience just with the clever use of music and silence. Yes, Scorsese does have his moments of blood and gore in a couple of scenes in the film, but those are the most forgettable. The originality of the portrayal of a diseased mind is what you remember at the end. As trends go, I can predict that Leonardo will never win an Academy Award till he makes an utterly second rate film (like Denzel Washington's Training Day). Once he does that, people in LA will wake up with a jolt realizing it's time to give him an Oscar. I hope that day comes many years later, and we can keep getting to see his inspired performance till then.

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Watched Norman Jewison's '...And Justice For All' this evening. One of those under-rated great films. Al Pacino acts an unusual role - one in which he is clearly not in control of a situation. An idealistic lawyer, who believes in the things he fights for. The film is an ironic look at the US justice system, or indeed, any justice system in the world - where corruption and systematic injustice results in innocent people landing up behind bars. Pacino puts up a brilliant performance of a person pushed to breaking point after seeing everything he knows pushed off the brink. The ending of the film, like so many other great films (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Pushpak, Taxi Driver) is not really an ending. It leaves it up to the viewer to imagine what happens to the protagonist, in whose future the audience really feels interested in - thanks to a clever screenplay and effortless acting. In short - an amazing film to watch when you are feeling a bit thoughtful about life.

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Now, back to work.