Pune and Punatics

Punatics, the people of the city of Pune, India, are as a rule proud, no-nonsense and steeped in culture and history. And we hate living anywhere else. The average Punatic will complain about the ridiculous state of the roads, debate on whether the local public transport service can indeed be called a service, bemoan the exponentially rising land prices, grieve the continuously shrinking green-cover, nostalgically hark back the days when it was a haven for the superannuated, but will refuse to migrate. (And will always believe that their obvious showing-off of verbal "skills" will go unnoticed, and at the same time hope that it will be appreciated too, but more on that somewhere else).

There are much better sources for gauging just how crazy we are about our hometown (P. L. "PuLa" Deshpande's is definitely the most celebrated one), but I will have a go nonetheless. You see, despite both my parents being born and brought up here, my Punacy has been a hard-earned one, since I was dropped 400 km south (as the stork flies) in Belgaum, in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. It took me a few years to get to my hometown, and a further few more before being accepted as certifiable. I certainly feel that I may be able to provide some insider info...

There are quite a few good things that Pune has to offer. The climate is pleasant (as compared to Bombay), the people are nice (as compared to Delhi) and, on a lucky day, you might actually come across a rickshaw-wallah who is willing to take you where you want to go. Of course, on every other day, it will be the rickshaw-wallah who comes right across you, out of nowhere, from that tiny lane whose entrance was never suspected because it seemed to be blocked by the bhel-wallah under the peepal tree. Assuming, of course, that the "rick" was not taking a blind u-turn, since that's what they are seen doing most of the other times...

Now, we have already touched upon the public transport.. system, let's call it. Since Pune has developed radially (unlike Bombay's rather straight-line growth), the bus-routes are extremely confusing. A bus seemingly headed in the general direction uptown may actually turn downtown before you know it, causing you to scream at the conductor (that's the guy who gives you your ticket for the ride) to stop the bus. He screams back at you for not "asking before getting on". Meanwhile the driver has slowed down the bus, and you are expected to jump off in the oncoming traffic outside; leaving the conductor's question unanswered and your ex-co-passengers to face the music (he isn't called a conductor for nothing...). Of course, if you have survived the jump-off-from-a-moving-vehicle and manage to look up, you will see your bus taking another turn in the general direction uptown...

Asking for directions in Pune is actually quite simple though. A typical milestone is a branch of the "Bank of Maharashtra". Unfortunately, a Bank of Maharashtra really is a milestone, you'll find one for every two kilometres in the suburbs. Directions in the main city, the old part of the town, are quite simpler. You only need to know the difference between "Raviwar Peth" and "Shanivar Peth", need to know how they are differentiated from "Rasta Peth" or "Nana Peth", or, for that matter "Navi Peth". Being an old city, founded somewhere in the 17th century, Pune has its share of very old and famous temples, which also serve as interesting landmarks. They also exercise your tongue, with names ranging from "Maati Ganpati", "Modi Ganpati", "Patrya Maruti", "Khunya Muralidhar". The best part is, believe it or not, people actually know exactly where these places are, and the average road-side vendor will spell out the directions without looking up from his newspaper. Of course, he won't look up from his newspaper even if he were serving his customers...

Another breed of people who are aces at giving directions are cycle-wallahs. For the uninitiated, these are the blokes who ride bicycles to wherever they want to go. And riding a bicycle in Pune takes plenty of skill, let me tell you that. This is perhaps necessitated by rule # 1, which states that the cycle should not have brakes in working condition. The other rules are actually basically corollaries of this, and are made up and learnt as you go. I wouldn't advise you to start off your bicycling career in Pune...

What you can start off in Pune is riding two-wheelers. These are the vehicle-of-choice for the vast populace. Of course, in the streets of Pune, a two-wheeler is also the weapon-of-choice if you happen to have those leanings. There are more motorcycles ("bikes") and scooters, and their cousins, the scooterettes, found in Pune than anywhere else in the world. This may be a direct result of the aforementioned public transport. Perhaps its a conspiracy between the automobile producers and the Municipal transport corporation. Whatever it is, it provides a unique experience to the citizen, and makes a Punatic what s/he is.

You may want to drive a car in Pune once in a while. There is such a thing called adventure sports, after all.

The streets are much less fun these days, however, with the rickshaw's twice-removed cousins (they were actually put into production after the rickshaws, but they certainly seem two generations older...), the six-seaters, having been banished to outside the city limits (which change every day). I remember they were deported thus once before, but managed a successful comeback, only to be exiled again. Alas, the good old days are only a memory. You will find these outside the corporation limits, and since that's where most of the industry is (manufacturing, software, biotech, the works...), you might actually get to travel in one of these six-seaters sooner or later. That's when you'll realize that the Punatics are capable of the very British quality of understatement. I have once got on one such, after it already had ten other souls inside...

There are several other USPs for Pune. There are those that consider the city to be the "Oxford of the East". Having completed my education here, (and having never seen Oxford..) I wouldn't want to give my biased opinion, but I can certainly ascertain that Pune has always attracted students from all over the country, and also from other developing countries (mostly African). There must be several reasons for this, perhaps one being that the city is only about a hundred miles south-east of Bombay, but you'll never hear a Punatic admit this...

So, that's your Pune 101, presented by a typical Punatic. Oh, by the way, did I mention that close to Pune's airport, there is a famous world-class asylum for lunatics...

To begin with, some musings written two years ago...

Monday June 28, 2004

I finally got MS Office installed on my notebook PC today. I had bought the PC on the 1^st of April, so it’s taken me almost 3 months to get a simple decision out of the way. I wanted to buy it a long time ago, actually, but the fact that it would cost me more than $300 was putting me off. I would have looked like the biggest fool around for buying something which half the world uses pirated copies of. Not that I don’t look like the biggest fool anyway. Maybe that had something to do with my decision in the end. That and the fact that a friend’s friend works in Microsoft, so I could get him to buy it for me… it cost him only $50. Yeah, maybe that was the final reason, the coup de grace. Is that right? Is “coup de grace” the correct phrase here? You would think I’d know this, what with my four-month stint at l’Alliance Française de Poona. But then, I don’t remember too much about Chemical Engineering, despite my four-year stint at learning it. Real short-term memory, eh?

I am now getting used to typing on a laptop. Not an easy job, what with me fretting over how hard I press the keys all the time. Especially the perennial fall-guy, Enter. That poor key (and the Esc one) has to suffer at the hands of every user anytime something doesn’t happen in the expected way. Or even if it does. Or when someone really wants to emphasize their acceptance of something. As if a more strongly pressed Enter would be equivalent to a “Yes-to-All” or something. Never ceases to amaze me. I could actually write a complete book about keyboard habits and what they tell you about what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual. I really could, I am that paranoid, you know. Maybe that reflects in my keyboard habits. It’s really interesting how the psychology of an individual is reflected in the tools s/he uses. Now I have only used computers and vehicles so far. And a lot of computer software that requires you to log-in using a username and a “secret” password. A password definitely tells a lot about the individual and what goes on in his mind (I am quitting being a feminist and am going to refer only to the masculine pronouns for the rest of these scratch-notes). So, a password tells a lot about what goes on in the person’s mind, or was going on in his mind when he set the password. Some real interesting ones, noticed over a career of two years as a software engineer, and offering a very good insight into the state of the person’s mind, have ranged from “mywife” to “lifesux” to “thedominator” and “j8h3x0i4”. I mean, “mywife” is either very romantic or very henpecked, not sure which. Someone who likes to type “lifesux” at the beginning of every day must really believe it does. Poor guy must be having a hard time. As for “thedominator”, I think you will give a knowing smile when I tell you that that’s the password of a system administrator, a very egoistic sys-admin, at that. One of those whom you have to take out for a cup of tea and bow your head in obeisance every time you see him, to get your program installed on the system. As for that weird combination of alphabets and numerals (weird combination of alpha-numeric characters, if you will), it can belong to either of the following two types of individuals. One, those that take the “IT guy’s” instructions too seriously to include these numbers and characters in the password and ends up with a password that needs to be carried in the wallet at all times, thus completely beating the purpose; or Two, someone as paranoid as me. So you already know what kind of passwords I might be setting. Don’t ask me how I know the others. They are not mine, that’s the truth. My passwords tend to have a capital N in them, an N in the upper case. Why? Just because. It actually started with my first password at work. I was still too big an X-files fan to forego any opportunity of emulating Fox Mulder. So my password was going to be “trustno1.” Except, the company’s password policy stated that I should have at least one upper-case letter in my password. For some reason, I chose N. I have no idea why. At least, I don’t remember why. Maybe later in the day, when I’m recounting these stories to the unfortunate grandchildren, I might hit upon it. Maybe not. It’s this short-term memory thing again.

Anyway, so it turns out that all my passwords ended up having an uppercase N in them. And since the company policy also states that I should change my password every two months and that I can’t re-use any of my last ten passwords, it gave me plenty of room to be “creative”. It’s actually quite difficult to be really creative in a “process-driven” company like the one I work in (in my first project, even the commenting in the code was of a specific fashion!!!), so any opportunity you get, you take it. Meaning I managed to phrase a lot of common words together, making sure that there was one (and not more than one) N in them. I actually can’t remember all the passwords of my career (this short-term memory blah blah), but I am sure I will encounter one of them again, when I re-think a certain phrase and it turns out to be one of those “last ten” that the company keeps track of.

Later on, more precisely when I came to America, the size of my small and secluded world of capital N’ed passwords expanded exponentially due to the happenstance of having to log into my client’s computer network. Add to that, I had all the other passwords for email accounts, and for the website from which I was buying the phone-cards to call home, then the quintessential Amazon.com password. Plus there were the passwords for all the software applications and systems that I was supposed to work on every day, and each of these would have a development region, a testing region and a production region. In short, a lot of passwords to remember and a lot of creativity to be exercised. At that stage, I resorted to the same path that every creativity-starved Hindi film-maker treads on: reuse and rejoice. Use some part of a previously tried and tested story, make it slightly different and voila, a “new” entity. Of course, I did add some creativity to it. I decided that each of my passwords would have a part of my name and a part of the system whose password it was. Like the password for a website that allows you to meet your friends etc (called orkut.com) became kauskut. I know it sounds a lot like the usual new-government promise to cut costs, but it did help me in remembering it. Although I admit kausamazon did not exactly make me feel like the male chauvinist pig that I am (making me sometimes believe that “mywife” isn’t so bad after all). It did help me in my chief endeavor to remember those darned passwords though. Even when it was time to change them, as is frequently the case with passwords as already discussed, I could easily come up with an eminently unforgettable substitute. And I have for all of the ones mentioned above, so if you are thinking of trying to log-in using any of those above mentioned passwords, I’d advise you to waste your time at predicting (or “forecasting” if you will) the weather or hunting for aliens or any other such relatively plausible activities.

So, finally, why do I spend so much time writing these musings? Was I really so inspired by the statement that this “free association writing” brings out innermost thoughts, till then un-imagined? Or is it that I simply try to show-off my writing “skills”. I don’t really know.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Enough for the day. I will try to make this a one-per-day feature, just to see if I can continue to manage to keep my acquaintances out of it. Perhaps I will. Hopefully I won’t.