Credit Card Analytics

My bank has just sent me an analysis of my credit card spending habits. They have taken my expenses over a year, broken them into categories and provided me with an excel spreadsheet. My banker is obviously suffering from a delusion of mistaken identity and is behaving like an ill mannered husband. It may well be possible that my bank has hired too many specialists in esoteric areas like data-mining and data-warehousing who have been let loose in the realm of customer communication.

I hated the sight of the spreadsheet. It is the kind of thing a woman would look at in a masochistic mood, just after a breakup or an intense bout of depression. I threw the offensive paper into the dustbin which was unfortunately retrieved by my daughter in a rare moment of orderliness. She thought I had mistakenly thrown away the bank document and kept the envelope in my bag, something that I have been known to do.

She gave a loud hoot of laughter and said my bankers understood my psychology so well. She started to read the expenses under the various headings and wanted to know the difference between expenses on apparel, “department store” and “accessories”. I explained in Venn diagrams that the department store was the union set of apparel and accessories with cosmetics thrown in. She was happy about the low spend on car and healthcare both of which are irritant expenses which are normally handled by cash. She happily noted that our travel expenses had not reduced since the last year despite the recessionary condition.

A credit card is still used in our country for travel and leisure activities and not essentials. A woman primarily uses it for those instances of impulse buying when we shut down logic and give in to the mood of the moment. In a culture where the seven deadly sins are droned into our minds, only the tax man and marketing analytics experts want to learn about such decadent consumer behavior.

The Metro

The metro will be operational in Gurgaon - the suburb of New Delhi where I reside, from Monday the twenty first of June. I have been anticipating this day with unabashed glee. I can see the overhead metro trains from most of the windows in my flat and the station is ten meters from the gate of my condominium. It is so empowering to have comfortable, fast and safe public transport at one’s door step. If a person like me, who has a car and driver, can feel so joyous, I wonder what kind of celebration one shall be watching in the days to come.

I have watched the metro line being built for over three years. I have navigated my car through the debris on the way to work and on the way back. The journey that used to take forty minutes started to stretch to twice that time. I have seen swimming pools being created in beautifully cordoned off roads where the metro workers forgot to leave gaps for water drainage. The walls of the mighty farmhouses on both sides of the tracks were pushed back to widen the roads, some trees were uprooted and transplanted and others remained so that we could zigzag our cars through them. The metro workmen built many a divider between the two sides of the road which would be broken down by the Delhi wallah who had to be true to his pugnacious reputation. Unlike the stations in Delhi, we watched escalators being installed in Gurgaon which made Ma extremely happy. In a few stray cases of site accidents during construction, a few died and others survived as the columns and cranes crashed onto the road.

I was holidaying this summer when I chanced upon a full page article in the International Herald Tribune which described the Delhi Metro as being one of the best maintained and most profitable metros in the world. It charges the lowest fares internationally, transports the largest number of people, is clean and operates punctually. In my mind, the Connaught Place or Rajiv Chowk station is a great architectural conception and the best metro station I have seen. Judge it not by the artwork or glossiness but the size of the station and its ability of not making one feel claustrophobic despite the number of people in it. The Delhi metro has managed to simplify what could have been a rather complex transportation system by speaking the language of the people. The security at the stations is exemplary and there are no bottlenecks in the process. www.delhimetrorail.com

Thanks to you Mr.Sreedharan and your team for making this dream possible. I will be watching the trains go by with pride as I stand in my balcony and will be saluting you.

Caste System

My parents had an “inter-caste “marriage in 1959 which caused quite a furore. Rumour has it that my snobbish Brahmin grandparents refused to drink even the water served by Ma at the initial stages. Soon enough, my Ma’s grace and cooking had them literally eating out of her hands. Forty years later, I went a stage further to marry not only someone from another caste but also another region of the country who did not speak my language. I was amazed to see a multitude of people from relatives to savvy family friends ask me “What caste is the boy?” I had no idea and neither did he. I accused everyone of being a hypocrite and suggested we burn all the intellectual books in the library in a gust of youthful bravado.

It is the same bravery that is beginning to set women free in our country where the national newspapers carry coverage of at least one case of “honour killing” a day. Today’s paper described how the daughter of a whole-sale vegetable dealer and her “cabbie” boyfriend were electrocuted and beaten to death in Delhi last night. The locality could hear the kids who were only 19 years old, screaming for help for three hours. People who tried to intervene were beaten and the good cops arrived in the morning to pick up the corpses and feed the news to the media. We even had a chief minister of an Indian state defend “khap” or “gotra” in the context of marriage. For those who are uninitiated these are sub sects within a caste.

I learnt about this concept when I was a child. The marriage of my beautiful, refined, gentle and rich grandmother to my grandfather did not make logical sense in an arranged marriage context. I asked my father why such an alliance was made. In a moment of weakness and exasperation he explained that if a daughter is married into a family whose sub-caste or "gotra" is higher than her parental home, the parents earn lots of brownie points from heaven and their chances of their souls gaining salvation rise. Such was the barter of my grandmother.

I am constantly asked by foreigners both at work and as a tourist whether the caste system is alive in India. The answer is complex and cannot be answered in the negative or affirmative. Lots of people don’t care and aren’t aware of their caste and yet there are so many who will kill their children or sisters with their bare hands for the sake of it. Aren’t we an amazing country where same sex alliances are legally permissible, unlike many a developed country of the west, and yet the caste system is alive and defended by the powerful?

MotherTongue

She looked up from the form she was filling and asked me, “Ma, what is my mother tongue? I need to fill it in the college form.” I told her that since her mother was a Bengali, she should write that as her mother tongue. She thought that a surname which definitely originated from Uttar Pradesh did not add up to Bengali being her mother tongue, so shouldn’t she write Hindi? I told her that was her father tongue and not mother tongue to which she exasperatedly said there was no such word in the dictionary or the form.

The term mother tongue was devised to enable sociologists determine the language in which the person is most comfortable. Certain Bengali poets say that the language in which a person dreams is the true mother tongue of the individual. I have never recollected any speech in my dreams, they are usually driven by imagery, but perhaps I am a less evolved being. If one has had a childhood romance in one’s “para” (locality), school or college, the romantic duo will probably speak the local language prevalent in the environment at that time. However, if one ends up choosing a partner in an environment like a professional program or work place where everyone spoke English, and one is too old to learn a new language for the sake of love, the subsequent progeny of such couples grow up in a predominantly English speaking environment at home. The children communicate with their grandparents and imported maids from the family village through a medium of broken native language and signs until the latter adapt and learn the language chosen by the child.

My Hindi is passable but despite six text books during the West Bengal Higher Secondary Board, which also included a book on Sahitya ka Itihaas, I mix up genders when I speak. This is not very good when I am trying to tick off a person with high speed diction because the person usually takes umbrage to gender changes at each sentence and misses the point of the lecture. At the same time, while we can speak Bengali well, my brother and I cannot read or write the language. This kind of situation arises when the family moves to multiple locations to meet challenges at the work place. The children learn the language of the state in which they study which in our case was Marathi.

While some kids like mine suffer on mother tongue issues due to inter racial genes, other kids in India speak a sad medley of local languages because they scarcely spend time with grandparents and relatives and are brought up in locations far away from where the family originated. Sociologists who may examine such forms should understand that the data captured isn’t very accurate.