Here is a gentle one to launch my blogging career.
I am discovering - like countless others no doubt - that travel is a powerful muse. The bombardment by various cultures and climates in quick succession jolts one's mind and forces it to dispute long-held assumptions. And the long hours in the confines of an aircraft seat, with nothing but stale air, stale movies and other stale people for company, provides plenty of opportunity for the mind to wander off into reveries that dont have a chance to get started in the comfort of home.
I recently had two experiences in a span of a few weeks that seem vaguely correlated to me. Both involve the misplacement of objects and their recovery. When I was in Beijing in October 2005, I was traveling in a taxi with a couple of colleagues, Ramakrishna and Tom. After we got off at a Pizza Hut ( that revered sanctuary for vegetarians in China), we discovered that Ramakrishna had left his wallet in the taxicab. Ramakrishna seemed cool enough, but I was filled with some unspeakable dread for the plight of my friend. Identity theft sounds bad enough by itself, but to be confronted with the stark possibility while in a strange land with questionable legal recourse! Also for no logical reason, scenes from that movie in which Richard Gere gets caught in a Chinese prison flashed thorugh my mind. Is carelessness a punishable crime in China?
We did the only thing we could do, which was to hurry back to our hotel, where Ramakrishna surrendered himself to the mercy of the concierge. Fortunately, our company makes us save receipts for all expenses including toothpicks. The concierge used the taxi receipt, which was Greek and Latin to us, but just plain Mandarin to him. He was able to track down the cab, and the wallet was returned in 30 minutes time. We were all full of praise for the honesty of the driver, and the efficiency with which the article was returned.
Now change of scenery to the city of St. Louis just 5 weeks later, where I was attending a conference. It was a cold windy afternoon, and people were bustling outside in smart overcoats and hats. I sorely wanted to venture outside and feel the gritty mid-western soul of this once-great city, but I was trapped in the bubble that was the convention center. It was already time to leave and head back home. I checked out of the hotel and took a perfunctory walk to the great arch which was just a mile away. I was mesmerized by its sheer size and presence. On one side of the arch were the downtown skyscrapers. The other bank of the river was populated by rusty old industrial buldings, apparently providing material to be towed by the enormous barges that are the trademark of ole' Miss. A riverboat casino loomed in the background. The shiny steel of the arch, which probably personified the future aspirations of the city, was somehow not in harmony with the grime of the downtown and the factories on either side. I was also more than a little puzzled by the position of the arch. I had always thought that this arch was a gateway that spanned the Mississippi. But to my surprise I found out that it stands on one side of the river. Why this curious pisitioning? Surely, the country that has enough engineering genius to build the Golden Gate could have mustered up the brainpower to build this arch across the river ? Maybe the river is just too wide for such a structure. I could have gone in to the museum and found out the true story, but I was already very late for my flight. The balmy San Diego sun and surf were a-calling.
So I bought a hot cuppa chai and got into a cab. The driver, a young guy with a middle eastern accent, soon found common ground with me to carry on a conversation - he had also lived in Southern California, as I do now. I checked in at the airport and was contemplating calling my wife, when to my utter dismay, I found that I dont have my cellphone in my possession. During the act of getting out of the cab, which involved juggling the bags and the tea and the wallet to pay the cabdriver, I had left my phone! Flashback to Beijing. But only for a moment. This was America. After having lived more than a decade here, I am more in tune with its customs and procedures than even the country of my birth, India. Of course I can get my phone back. I turned to the receipt, and it was just a plain card without even a phone number. The card did not have even a name for the cab company, but I remembered the name from memory. I pulled out the yellow pages at the phone booth, but alas, no listing. I tried the information line, which gave me a number but that number turned out to be a disconnected line. Maybe the cab company was a front for a mafia operation that specializes in stealing cellphones and using them for dubious purposes. It was time to board the aircraft. I was already experiencing withdrawal from the modern addiction to the handheld device. People all around me were acting out the 21st century version of an ancient hunting ritual - they were pulling out their drum and smoke device and saying "Honey, I am on the plane, will call you soon as I land.".
If this story ended here, I'd have lost a phone but found a good storyline - "Authoritarian societies operate with more efficiency". But it is not over yet. This cabdriver found my cellphone in his backseat and used the call log to call my friend Charlie, who was the last person I had talked to before I lost the phone. Charlie emailed me the cabdriver's contact number. After I got home, I called the driver and requested him to handover the phone to - who else - the concierge of my hotel at St. Louis. The concierge then shipped it to San Diego. All this took a day and a half. The score: Communism - 36 minutes, Capitalism - 36 hours.
In both instances, the honesty of the individual was a common denominator. Assuming this basic honesty, it turns out other things maynot form a barrier at all. For example let us examine the language barrier. If the cabdriver in Beijing had found the article a bit later, his ignorance of English and our lack of Chinese would have made things very difficult.... or is that the case..? Suppose my cellphone was lost in Beijing, and the driver followed the same path that the driver in St. Louis took, which is to call the number from the log, he would have reached Charlie - whose full name is in fact Jianzhong Zhang, who would have explained things to him in fluent Chinese, and I would have got my phone back.
So, you see folks, I didnt learn anything about the comparative value of political systems with respect to the lost-and-found. In fact the only lessons to be learned from these episodes are:
1) We should travel less, to avoid such lapses.
2) The hotel concierge is a God-like figure.
- Balaji
PS: Sorry for the long detour about the arch... I got carried away.
