ದೇಶ ನೋಡು ಕೋಶ ಓದು - Part 2

...Continued from Part 1. You can read it here

The more things change…

Along with the days building up to the journey itself, the first few days are quite surreal! Back home, it was a place where I had spent almost my entire life - so everything seemed familiar and relatively easy - shopping for stuff, arranging documents, speaking to cargo handlers, arranging for foreign exchange, banking and so on - we even had our vehicles to move around as per convenience - so the days leading up to the move were exciting but not as challenging. The real difficult thing was convincing people that this move was necessary, especially the in-laws ;) - they felt that we were going in exile to some far away forest land and living like hermits maybe! I never thought seeking permission to travel would be such a big thing as it was never an issue with my parents. So, after the long convincing was done, we visited all the familiar places, binged on the delicacies we thought we will miss the most, met people close us and bid farewell to them. The travel day was fun as well - airport check-ins, lounges and inflight entertainment kept us entertained. As soon as we landed, we had a person waiting to drive us to a temporary accommodation and so we were dropped off in our temporary home without too many issues.

The big moment of truth is really the morning after. No amount of pre-preparation can really prepare you for what is going to hit you! Waking up in a completely new place and realising that everything has changed! You don't have any familiar things anymore - the currency has changed, time zone has changed, weather conditions have changed, sun is out at such odd time that you never considered possible, language has changed, there is no hand faucet in the toilets anymore, people drive on the other side of the road, seem to be more crazy about football than cricket, the food is not as spicy and you have to rely on public transport as there isn't a car anymore. Even fanta orange was not orange coloured ;) It was like day 0 and we had to start from the scratch - figure out a place to live, figure out about contractual and administrative obligations, figure out where to get the basic stuff from, arrange for utilities like water, phone and electricity and set up the house- and all this on top of figuring out the new workplace and way of working. We were given a clean canvas of Google maps with no starred places nearby! We had to build a completely new normal around it and start marking our stars.

The initial days are when everything seems different - most people you see greet you with a 'bonjour' by default than the more familiar hello. Google translate and maps became our most trusted companions as we started exploring the new city. Grocery shopping, which used to take us less than twenty minutes back home became almost a tedious one hour task - we found ourselves holding out the translate app on product labels / menu items to understand what they really meant most of the times! Things started a get a bit comforting when we eventually figured out stuff like the familiar vegetables, fruits, and the global food chains with their familiar food like the McChicken meals and the barbecue chicken pizza! It was a challenging first month - but we somehow managed to find our feet in the new city! I must say that I was really helped by my lovely wife during this whole process - she took to the new place like fish to water. Although we both did not know either of the the official languages, her familiarity with many things like household stuff, exotic food, cuisine, etc and more importantly an eye for detail and quick decision making on household stuff really helped us get settled down faster! I dont know what the in-laws were worried about! Maybe my parents should have worried more! The people here were very welcoming as well - One thing that struck us the most was how friendly and polite they were - they smiled more often, greeted you when you looked at them and at the same time, no one tried to over-impose themselves, all the while giving us our pace and space to get comfortable!

As we started settling down and finding our ground, it gave us an opportunity to travel and observe the first world countries in more detail. I always had asked myself this one question while I was back home - Why were we still called 'developing' economy and what made a country 'developed' / 'advanced'? Of course, I know there are a lot of macro-economic indicators and measures which can quantify a country as developed / not but now that I was actually here, I wanted to see how development did look like to a layman eye? Did it mean that the infrastructure was completely ready? Did it mean that there was no crime / beggars? Did it mean that there was no corruption or politics and the bureaucracy functioned like clockwork? Was it the fact that all services were digital and there was no more need for paperwork? Was it the trusted healthcare?

The more they remain the same!

Once we started making sense of the changes and started to observe more closely, things started to make sense. We realised that things are not really as different. Fanta orange might not have been orange coloured anymore, but it was still the same sugary slow-poison that junkies thrived upon :) The infrastructure was great, roads and railways were densely developed so that we could completely rely on the public transport for daily work - however, there were still breakdowns, strikes and maintenance works. There is this high speed train that I need to take occasionally to reach another office (in a nearby country altogether!) - it just takes one hour to cover the 110 km journey, but it is known for delays that people usually make fun of it in the same way we made fun of our public transport / local trains back home. On one particular occasion, we were stranded on the train by more than four hours due to a service breakdown. Although train delays were not new to me, this incident made me realise that it was not really a 'developing economy' issue only. As for crime and poverty, although the general population is well off and there are minimum wages and employment benefits for every kind of work, I could still see there were refugees and immigrants in many of the European city centres. Crime, incidents of violence were not as rampant back home - but it was still there to cause the occasional outrage among citizens for the way in which it was carried out. With governance and administration, I found that there were 9 different forms of government for a country that was one fifth the size of my home state, let alone the country! It was able to function with a care-taker prime minister for almost a year! As for the politics and corruption, I found that there were similar issues like language imposition, minority appeasement, diversion of funds, etc - but ofcourse not at the level at which we witness back home - just stray incidents here and there that came to light! It is just that there were good, bad and evil humans everywhere - maybe the mix changed from one country to another!

So, what did developed really mean to the people? Maybe the economics has a proper answer and since we are all taught these kind of stuff in school, we kind of believe in them. From observing people, I am still discovering the answer to this but from what I know so far, it seems that people are generally happy and content with their way of life in developed countries. The national identity numbers are reliable, serve as enablers to the government and people trust the government that their sensitive data will be protected. It really helps that there are not a billion of them to feed anyway! The towns and cities are planned such that green spaces are maintained, there is enough space for roads, footpaths and bicycle tracks wherever applicable. People know that their taxes are put to good use. And instead of blaming the system, they participate actively by being part of it and are ok to pay their taxes than evade it. Even with infrastructure and transport, although there are maintenance days and downtimes for public transport and strict traffic rules and taxes for private cars, there is a very reliable system in place and people can trust it to work for most of the times. The police are not someone to fear - but are the friendly people whom you can approach for any issues. Waiting in line is considered as ok as long as there are rules on how to go about it. Even the tedious bureaucracy and paperwork is accepted as they know the benefits of having these procedures in the first place. And the main thing - people trust the government to take care of them when they are sick and old and their healthcare system is top-class. Hence, the priority is to have a balanced life rather than run after money and build the retirement funds in fear of having no one to take care (maybe this point applies to just the socialist Europe and not the whole of western world in general). There was dignity of labour as well, again due to the minimum wages and benefits. We were just amazed by how much people seemed to enjoy their life outside work - cycling, taking long walks in the park, pursuing their hobbies like swimming, painting, dancing, etc, drinking beer at pubs/ terraces - just unwinding and relaxing during the long summer evenings!

I was really lucky enough to find some really nice and like-minded people at work and got to learn a lot about the local way of life interacting with them. Although the native languages were different, the emotions which make all of us were really the same and even thought-process were similar. Even these different languages had some subtle quirks here and there which you start to enjoy once you figure them out. I still cannot claim I can speak any of the languages myself, but I have learnt enough to know that there are indeed two different languages and can identify who is speaking what! For someone who has never been exposed to these languages before in my life, I consider that as a good start! As for the way of working, I found that apart from a few things here and there, corporates still worked the same way everywhere! Politics, greed, jealousy, favouritism, Monday morning blues-you name it - these were all universal phenomenon. And as was the case in all my workplaces before, coffee and lunchtime conversations, offsite events/ unwinding sessions after work, making jokes (usually about the higher management), Dilbert, subtle office humor, etc were still the ones which kept the offices running!

A year goes by

Living on the earth is expensive... But it includes a free trip around the sun. I have taken more than 30 such trips in life till now, but the last year was completely different compared to others before in a new way. I really got to see sun in so many different angles like never before. Living in the tropics, the sun always rose in the east and set in the west. Although this is still factually true, there were some very short days in the winter when I saw sun rise and set in the south and it was a completely counter intuitive experience for a directionally sensitive person that people preferred south facing compared to east facing! With the ever reliable European rail, I got to roam around a lot of countries as well, which I had only dreamed about for the last few decades. The real highlight of the trips was when we were able cover the globally strategic and acclaimed cities of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Zurich in a span of one month - all this without having to take a single flight! Yes, the train even crosses the ~50km English channel via the Chunnel !

These were just intial experiences. These impressions might and will ofcourse change with new experiences. Something which felt really new and different in the first year when we were here, has already started to feel routine now - like driving on the right, footpaths on most streets, etc. Maybe I might come back in few years to write a post on how nothing is actually different or maybe not. Do you people have any developed-vs-developing stories that made you realise that it was indeed different? If yes, I do request it to share it on comments / message me as it can help me to relate to my experiences and learn. I hope to continue this desha nodu way along with the kosha odu in the years to come and hopefully come back to write more often about my experiences. And of course, eventually go back to my home country with these new experiences and help to make it a real 'developed' country in all senses, not just tagged as one. I wish this happens soon!

ದೇಶ ನೋಡು ಕೋಶ ಓದು - Part 1

Knowledge is indeed powerful and the pursuit of the same can be a journey of a lifetime. The yesteryear philosophers in my state narrowed this pursuit very simplistically to two things – ದೇಶ ನೋಡು ಕೋಶ ಓದು (desha nodu, kosha odu - roam the country, read the books). It actually seems too simple – but the more I think about it, the more accurate it seems to acquire well-rounded knowledge - mix the knowledge from books and written soruces with the knowledge gained from experience of travelling and meeting people. Reading through loads of archives helps our brain to acquire the bookish knowledge while traveling lets you experience the same knowledge contained in the books in person, thus making us wiser. If I think about my personal experiences, I do realise that it is indeed the books and travels which has helped me in my learnings. Ever since I was in kindergarten, I have liked geography, so naturally I was more inclined towards the desha nodu way of learning. As a kid, I used to look forward to the long road/train travels and kept a log of the places / stations that we visited in my dairy. It still brings back memories of those travels and experiences when I read through those pages! One of our favourite pastime as kids was to be engrossed in either an atlas or a map and look up countries, places, roadways and train lines. When we got a dial-up modem internet in our house, Wikipedia used to be my favourite site where I used to spend a lot of time reading about places, their history and culture. With ADSL and faster internet came the mighty google earth - I was completely fascinated by the level of detail which it made available to a normal person just at the click of a button! Me and my brother spent countless hours on google earth as we clicked through streets, houses, stadiums, train stations, airports and what not - exhausting all the costly bandwidth in the process!

Although we had the atlas, google maps, etc to keep us company, growing up in a middle class family and school/college schedules meant that we could not have real travels around the world - they were few and far in between and remained restricted to my surroundings in south India. I still remained a kosha odu person. For almost 25 years of my life, the northernmost place on the earth that I had been to was Dakshineshwar (a small town on the banks of river in West Bengal). And the irony* in that statement was evident for a geography lover like me, I used to wonder if that would ever change. Some of my closest friends Tosi and Gunda moved to the United States almost a decade back, a time when everyone of us were finding feet and getting independent in life. In fact, for the first two years after they moved, we used to eagerly wait for the mails that Tosi used to send us, chronicling his life in a new country and how he dealt with being a student and eventually finding a job and settling down in the US. When the rest of the us who stayed back met and talked, we used to always discuss those mails and the way he described his experiences. Most of our gang's opinions about the culture and way of life abroad in developed counties was based on the stories they used to tell us. It really shaped our world-view. As part of my consulting work, I used to work for clients worldwide, creating maps of early adopters for a telecommunications client in far south NewZealand to analysing buying ice-cream buying patterns for retail stores in the northern part of United States. Through the course of such projects, I learnt a lot about the people from these countries, their culture and everyday way of life… and with all these stories, I had formed an image of how these places looked like in my mind… all the while wondering if I would ever get a chance to actually visit them!

Tourist versus emigrant

Like every wannabe globetrotter out there, even we (my wife and I) had Europe in our bucket list. Now, no encyclopedia can be ever complete without the mention of this small continent called Europe - at some point or the other, almost 90% of the world was colonized by Europeans and they have had a great influence on shaping the history of the world. Although I knew about its historical significance since high school, the real desire to visit Europe came from one game which Ultra and I used to play on our computer during graduation - NFS 5 (Porsche unleashed). The game featured some of the famed roads located in European countries like Germany, France, Switzerland, etc and gave us an opportunity to race Porsche cars on these tracks. A significant amount of college days was spent playing that game, virtually driving those porsches on Autobahn, Normandy, Pyrenees, etc, and then reading up on the car models and highways / mountain paths/ race tracks across Europe. This was the early 2000s and there was no real deadline set in mind when I actually go visit these places. It always remained 'someday in the future'. Around latter half of this decade, with the new found economic independence, we found that so many in our social circles were holidaying in Europe and posing pictures with some philosophical captions, it seemed that taking a trip to Europe (especially backpacking and living in hostels) was the new cool in-thing! By then, we already had a fair share of our trips outside the country - some neighbouring tropical and relatively similar third world countries which had a bit of an exotic feel but mostly similar to our own in aspects of weather, food and local culture. But Europe seemed so exotic with lot of adventures and experiences to offer travellers. Ultra was already there for two years doing his masters and a visit was long overdue - maybe around the time of his graduation. So, we started looking up web-sites for travel deals in order to plan our European holiday!

In middle of all these travel preparations, came an opportunity to work in Europe and stay for few years. My wife and I were thrilled and scared at the same time! Travelling to Europe was definitely exciting but we still had to consider the relocation. When visiting a place as a tourist, we always have a normal - we have our lives, jobs and family back in our home country. We know the normal is always back home. We know the vacation is temporary, so the stakes are not as high. We could have one bad experience here, one not-so-great hotel there and still take back nice experiences. But moving meant so many things to consider - packing for the whole year, finding the right accommodation, arranging utilities, help with local language, shopping, tax, finances, etc. We would have to build a new normal right from the scratch. For some people, moving is not as big a decision as they find our country too judgemental. Don’t get this the wrong way - but people do find my country (especially the southern cities) a bit intolerant! I have had friends who have at some point complained that my city is a bit conservative. Especially, if someone is an non-local living an independent life or for couples who marry out of their own caste, there are a lot of people who quickly pass judgments! Although it is not directly on your face, the undertones are still there which is why someone who has experienced this would definitely have no problems emigrating! We had no such complaints. We had a big gang of our friends and relatives around us and did enjoy the company immensely. So, moving away from all of them was still a hard decision to make. However, in the end, we knew that the travels and stay out of our comfort zone, would give us more self-realization and would definitely help us expand our thinking horizon, thus we decided to go for it....

PS:
1. Daskhineshwar : Town on the banks of river Hoogly in WestBengal, India famous for the Kali temple. Irony is because the word Dakshin in Sanskrit means 'South' and it was somehow the northernmost place which I had been to in life

Continued in Part 2 here