...A night to remember - Part1

I am not sure how this trip started, was it my completely obnoxious 'plan' to get up in an hour or may be it was the complete reslouteness of Sarvo to meet a guy whom he had never met before!!! Mostly it was both but lets not dwell on such minor things when ....

Well so at around 11 in the night finally Sarvo and I decided to leave for Nicosia to meet this guy whom I will not name here but lets call him Mr. X. So I picked up a nice hot cup of Filter coffee and Sarvo took his jacket and both of us left for Nicosia with little or no knowledge on why we are headed there. The sole aim of the trip was to meet Mr. X. However there was a small problem here.. we had never met this guy nor had much idea what he was doing here in Cyprus and most importantly we had little idea of where he stayed in Nicosia. So armed with a hot cup of coffee and a cellphone we went ahead for this rendevouz.

The cellphone came in good use as soon as we reached Nicosia, and Mr. X was kind enough to wait on the road to pick us up. Sadly however due to a small communication gap we thought that Mr. X was going to wait for us on the balcony, so we were driving all the while stairing at all the balconies to see if there was someone waiting.. waiving.. or doing something!!! However we were dissapointed to find not a soul on any of the balconies... thankfully Mr.X called up at the right time and we understood that we had missed the house. So turning back we found Mr. X waiting for us on the road and there we reached our destination... but the journey was yet to begin!!!

A little know Chinese proverb goes something like this.."Don't be over self-confident with your first impressions of people.” But at that time I was committing the crime of typecasting Mr. X as one of the hundreds of illegals or just legals who have managed to reach the shores of Cyprus but are currently in lowly jobs living everyday in fear of the immigrations or the police or just the white guy on the street. I should say that I was not much off the target here yet I should be chastised for such a narrow mindset... especially for someone whom I have never met before. So to give you a little background on Mr. X, he is a male nurse working in a hospital who has completed his studies in Banglore. He is working for the past 9 years of which the last 2 he has spent in Cyprus. Finally he is the first guy whom I know in Cyprus who actually owns a Pajero!!!

Mr. X with his hospitality had won my heart the minute we stepped into his apartment. It was no less than what you can expect while visiting a good freind back in India and still there was a sense of warmth that seems to be amiss today in India especially Mumbai. Well so Mr. X and his freind and Sarvo and I sat down to chat finally with cans of beer in our hands and plates full of wafers and dry fruits. We started as would anyone living outside India with our affiliations back home and the different parts of India we belong to and so on. Once the ice was broken the converstion veered to the inevitable plight of the immigrants from the different countries here in Cyprus and how they have managed to ruin a part of Cyprus that will never be experienced by someone who visits Cyprus today!!!

Amongst the few things that we touched base during the short rendevouz, I was happy to know that Indians according to him were well respected in and around Cyprus... so much so that even Pakistanis hide behind Indian identities in order to land some job. What surprised me though was the plight of the health system in Cyprus, Mr. X being a part of the health system had an insider view of how the system worked... and believe me it was not something that I would have wished to hear. According to him there were only 5 specialist doctors in the whole of Cyprus who were the guardians of the publicheaalth care system. This meant that there is just 1 heart specialst in the hwol of Cyprus who performs all the operations and so on. Currently according to him this sole Heart surgeon has gone on a one man strike and this resulted in much chaos, since the hospitals already have a witing list of patients who wish to perform their operation for the next 6 months, so this one man strike makes things worse with patients whose days have come to be operated are loosing out to newer patients and I guess you can understand the situation. Also as per him and I would like to attest it first hand(which I will in some time to come) the general hospitals here are similar to what you will find in India. The patients here are dying on tables outside and there are more patients with not enough beds. A doctor in Nicosia who was asked to perform his suties in the Limassol Genral Hospital left his job just 3 days after he joined the hospital as he could not stand the filth in the hospital. Add to this according to Mr. X the doctors here are not much knowledgable with their first priority on making money. Also any case that gets serious means that the patient is air lifted to Israel where in he can find the proper care and knowledge required to treat him. This in itself is a testimony to how bad the system is. I coud not have had imagined that a European country could have such a bad system in place not to mention a complete lack of doctors. Imagine this a population of more than 7 Lakh (not counting the loads of illegals ) and just 5 specialist doctors!!!

This was not all apparently and according Mr. X( I have not verified it ), the tax system when it was formed in the 1970's the people in Cyprus had little idea how to go about it. So a group of professors from Cyprus came to India to learn and understand how the tax system works. So the resultant tax system is what we find as today. The problem however is that there are many loopholes in the system. This means that an Expat can work in Cyprus only under 3 types of visas- 1. IT 2. House Maid 3. Farm workers. As a result of such an inequipped system, Mr.X works in Cyprus under the visas for house maids(who work in hospitals). Now for one of the freinds of Mr. X who has come under the house maid visa to work as a nurse in the hospitals... the social insurance system is inequipped to qualify hin in any of the available categories, so currently he is without any social insurance.

These things are quite complicated and I am not sure whether I understand it correctly or even if I have the right aptitude to comprehed the situation. Still these are eye openers into the world I could not even imagine existed a few months back. I am not sure whether I am happy or sad or even bewildered to see and hear these things but surely I am gratefull that I am witness to such things that are happening in the world. There are many other things that we discussed in the short rendezvous and in Part2 I will try to bring as much as I remember and as accurately as possible.... untill then have a nice day!!!

Into the Dark

Living in Mumbai untill now I have never experienced what shall I say... a trully Placid environment. It is rare to find a road without cars and bikes at any time of the day and if you do go ahead in the wee hours of the night even then I doubt it would be easy to find a place where the chaiwallas dont exist and the dogs dont bark and crows don't caw and so on...

Well in Cyprus its not just difficult but rather impossible to find a combination of the things mentioned above... yet its difficult to find complete silence here for every once in a while there comes a bike/scooter/car with its silencer tweaked. Silence does ensue after that for a long time and yet I wonder whether the silence is imposed or voluntary or is it the silence of grief or complicity or worse conformity. I then wonder that could this be the natural silence... the silence of the Universe which engenders a gentle awe just like the silence of the stars and the planets or that of the trees and the flowers. Taking the same thought process forward I imagined what would it be to be engulfed in this sea of silence the silence of the nature... which was one of the few dreams I always wished to pursue just like the silence engulfing Christopher McCandless as he journeys to the Arctic in Into the Wild or even the silence engulfing Tom Hanks as he gets marroned in CastAway. There began my journey and no it was not one that was very long nor one where I hoped to get any spiritual Inights but it did provide some fodder for my grey matter.

So one evening at 7, I decided to walk to the closest beach from my house viz. Lady's Mile Beach. Its not long not more than 2kms I think from where I stay so I decided to walk till there especially since that is a place that has no streel Lights and with the stars sparkling and no moon I thought that this should be a perfect time to go for the silence should be complete and yes I should say that, atleast the silence was complete however I could not even imagine how complete the silence can get. I could hear my laces flapping on the shoes and the steel strap of the my watch brushing against my denims. But what amazed me the most was the fact that when everything fell silent all my senses were alert. My sense of hearing as I just mentioned had improved so much that I could almost hear my own heartbeat and the sight I think was playing tricks on me, every moving shadow in the dark put a chill through my spine. I could feel the slight autumn chill in the air and dare I say I felt alive the most alive that I have ever been since the many days I remember. However with this highted sense of alertness, it did not feel as cool as in the movies for the mind starts playing tricks. You start fearing the dark for you never know what lies ahead( as I could barely see a few meters ahead of me in the dark...). This is the time when the worst nightmares get aroused again and this time you experience the whole nightmare with your eyes open...

I visited the beach and did come back home safely albeit with a little perspiration. However this small journey just made me unsure of myself since I am not sure I would like to stay in that heighted sense of alertness and awareness all the time. May be all I wish is to remain in a perpetual state of Intoxication-to be drowned in the conendrum we call Civilization for may be as someone said..."Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences."

A silly millimeter longer!!!

Well now you might be wondering why should my first ever post resemble the title of my blog? A decent question and yet should'nt you be wondering why this name in the first place?

Let me begin by saying and taking away any copyright issues that I doubt will ever exist that the title is a tag line for a brand of cigarretes viz. Chesterfield 101. Now if you know me even a little then surely you would not ask me why this tagline in particular and yet you may wonder why this one specifically, when there are many other cigarrete brands with trully more inspirational taglines out there? The answer for this is, that an innocous line as this says a lot less and yet leaves much to the imagination. For starters this line describes me to the TEE and yet does not squeal to others what I really am, for after all it will be your perspective that will be describing me. If from my perspective you wonder how it is so then shall I say...

When I sleep, I wish my bed was a silly millimeter longer...
And when I dream, I wish my dream lasted a silly second longer...
And when I awake, I wish to sleep a silly second longer...
And when I eat, I wish my cake was a silly millimeter longer...
And when I bathe, I find my tummy a silly millimeter longer...
And when I smoke, I wish my cigarrete lasted a silly second longer...
I just hope that when I die, I don't wish to live a silly second longer...

Now I hope I have justified the title of the blog and keeping in the spirit of this title I would love to share my endeavours, undertakings and happenings(..as well as mishappenings ). I hope to make this blog not just a journal for the milestones in my life but also a place where I can get wild with my Imagination. I hope to do this and much much more and yet I know there wont be many to follow but who cares as long as this post does not become a silly millimeter longer...!!!