Disclaimer - All the content in this post are based out of my personal experiences. If I have quoted something wrong in my post, please let me know, I am very much ready to correct them or remove this post.
As I write this post, I am listening to the song "River of dreams" by Billy Joel. The topic I am trying to write about is called as " Change is easy .. how gadgets are a reflection of your personality ".
Honestly speaking, I am only interested in the first part of the phrase "Change is easy". Well how gadgets are a reflection of your personality. I shall reserve it for sometime later in the post.
So let me tell you something about myself. I am Sandeep, born and raised in Bangalore, lived 26 years of my life in Bangalore, before relocating to Singapore a year back. All these years I have spoken either English, Hindi or Kannada. I never made a sincere effort to learn any of the languages of the neighboring states namely TamilNadu or Kerala. I do not know why, but I guess its a mistake I made.
When I relocated to Singapore a year back, I saw Tamil was one of the languages widely spoken over here. Immediately I realized my mistake of not learning Tamil whilst I was in India. At least I should have been fluent in speaking Tamil (my bad). I asked few people over here, who had relocated few years earlier than me, whether they knew Tamil. (They were not from TamilNadu though).
They immediately replied, English se kaam chal jayega, uski koi zaroorat naheen ( You can get most things done knowing English no need to learn Tamil). It made my whole idea of learning Tamil a little more tentative. So I completed 8 months in Singapore without even learning a Tamil word.
Then in the month of April my parents came to Singapore. I intended to show them a few places in Singapore and travel along with them to Malaysia for 7-9 days. I went to Langkawi and then to Kuala Lumpur.
Actually few people who had visited Kuala Lumpur before (from India) told me, there is a problem of availability of food over there (esp Indian veg food which I later found out to be utter rubbish). My parents and me are vegetarians so we took bread and jam to KL, hoping to consume them in case of any difficulty in finding veg food.
But to be honest, I ended up at restaurants serving Indian food and people in these restaurants spoke Tamil. Though I could converse with them in English, I realized what a blunder I committed by not learning Tamil. I am not telling its an absolute mandate to learn Tamil to converse with them, but I am telling out of sheer respect for the language Tamil and for the people of TamilNadu who have set up shops in KL (far far away from home) who embrace every customer (esp Indians) with a warm smile without thinking about which state he is from.
How do you feel when you have climbed up a lot of stairs to reach the Lord Murugan temple at Batu Caves and an equal amount of effort to come down and finally end up at a restaurant where you eat the same rice and sambar on banana leaf with your bare hands, the same way you used to eat a 1000 miles away in India.
How do you feel when you are roaming around the streets of Little India in Kuala Lumpur with no clues on where to go, searching for veg Indian food, in the hot scorching sun, sweating down your spine, just to end up at another Saravana Bhavan restaurant over there.
Belive me its bliss, its like home away from home. My respect for Tamil, for the people of Tamil Nadu just grew exponentially and my hatred towards myself for NOT LEARNING Tamil just doubled.
And at every restaurant the people serving food asked us where we are from. When we said from Bangalore they politely replied back (with a smile of course) saying I am from Trichy, Chennai, Salem etc etc.
Where ever in the world we stand as Indians first.
So I thought, though it was late in the year 2011, to make a resolution, I have decided to make a sincere effort to learn to speak Tamil in this year.
Yep CHANGE IS REALLY EASY. My ignorance to the resolution I made above, is the change in me. And its really very easy. Just took a few encounters with few interesting people to remind me that Change is really easy.
My increased respect for neighboring states other languages, people , culture of India is the Change in me. ( I always had the respect, it just increased exponentially )
So now lets come to the gadgets part of the post.
Honestly I am not interested in being a contender for the Dell laptop. I only wanted to share my story to a bigger audience via this contest. If people who have read the post till this point and felt a pinch increase in their love for their neighborhood states/people/language, then I would be the most happiest person. ( Is that a change in them ? If yes then, change is really easy, nothing else to prove. )
And let me tell you about the gadgets I took during my trip to KualaLumpur.
I only used my laptop to book my flight tickets to KL and a camera to take some pictures. Rest throughout my stay in KL I ended up asking people for all the instructions, I did not have any GPS to navigate me nor any compass to tell me which direction I was headed to. And I was not alone, I was with my parents. I roamed around many a street in KL without actually knowing any direction and ended up either travelling by taxi or MRT or by bus back to the hotel and in the process meeting few interesting people (few of them who spoke Tamil of course).
So life is kind a fun WITHOUT all those gadgets. And yes, I do not have a smart phone, I still have a phone which cannot play mp3 nor am I able to browse. I have a prepaid connection luckily which was able to recieve incoming calls from Bangalore while I was in KL.
Believe me in the absence of any device which lets me listen to mp3 I end up humming the song "Ode to my family by The Cranberries " or " Soldier of love / Sha la la la by The Beatles " most of the times and yes, its fun.
May be with those gadgets, I could have saved time or found out about few more streets or roads which were or rather are obscure to me. Well next time !
This entry is explicitly for the Change is easy contest on the Indiblogger the winner of which takes away this super cool laptop, details of which can be found over here
http://bitly.com/inspiron
Cheers, Sandeep
PS:: You may be wondering, If I am not interested in contending for the Dell Laptop why have I posted the Dell Inspiron URL at the end of my post. Its because, I am scared that my entry will be thrown out of the site for Non Compliance. I do not want that to happen. So complying.
PPS:: Why Billy Joel - River of dreams, Well I was about to go to bed, when all of a sudden got this thought of writing this entry for change is easy. So the song sounded apt to listen to while I write this.
There may be spoon, fork, chop sticks to eat food. But nothing comes close to eating with bare hand. Similarly nothing comes close to roaming around empty handed without any gadgetry. There is unmatched fun, because you start somewhere, end up somewhere. Having gadgets makes such encounters predictable and uninteresting. You end up knowing there is a restaurant at this location, but sweating it out, in an unknown place, for a veg mid day meal seems to much of fun (to me atleast). Gadgets will come and gadgets will go, but there will be always a special place for minimalism.
I also see a flip side. Over here I see people carrying lots of gadgets, but I dont see them going anywhere, I mean I assume they spend fair amount of time within city limits with the gadgets [you can classify them as my colleagues at workplace], but I also do get to see backpackers, who still carry a printed map asking people trying to find out where is the nearest backpackers' inn.. Aint this funny ? Why do these backpackers do not carry gadgets with them.? Like a navigation system which gives out street view etc etc, and does a laptop fit in within a backpack? I really do not have an answer for that and I do not want to risk my laptop by putting it into my backpack.
My sincere apologies, If this post seems irrelevant, given the current context.I do not mind if my post gets disqualified or thrown out, I never intended to be in the race in the first place :)
