The child inside of us

Why do we like children?

I like kids because they are cute. First of all. But the larger reason is that they are so upfront about most things. Comfortable with their vices.

Scenario I - Two kids playing with a ball. They will fight for it with all their heart. One will sit on the other till he/she relinquishes the object of objection. Scenario II - You playing with a kid. Making funny faces, trying to make it laugh. The kid does not think it funny. Will make no pretense. Will raise hell and high water if you don’t let it go when it wants to.

Children are endearingly selfish. They know what they want, are not afraid of taking action on it, no matter how silly the desire may be - candy floss or your attention. They are huge attention-seekers too.

They are miniature us with no-holds-barred. We love to see them go at each other with such unbridled enthusiasm. We figure let them have fun while they still can. But somewhere, children are endearing to us because we live our vicarious desires, especially the baser ones, through them.

On the other hand, some of the most annoying grown-ups I have met are the ones who have not outlived the child inside them. The ones who still think that their wishes should be uppermost on the minds of all around. The ones who will ruthlessly engineer events around them to get what they want because they actually believe they deserve it.

A child is all that we love with gusto. A ‘childish’ man we abhor.

Selling my soul, while helping you find soul-mate

I hope you guys are noticing some of the advertisements that Google has been throwing off-late at my blog.

Flirting and Teasing Tips - Meet Beautiful Women. Never Feel Lonely Again.

How promising. And what a brilliant piece of advertising. Beautifully laddered.

MaverickMoneyMakers - Goofy Southern Boy Teaches You His Online Money Making Machine.

My toes are curling at the thought.

Man Seeking Woman - Meet like minded people and find your soul mate - Register free today!

How cool is that.

The bigger question to ask here is why these ads are finding their way to my blog. An even bigger point of curiosity for me is, why aren’t any of you people clicking? I don’t see any hefty google pay-cheques in the mail.

Have we become so jaded as a society that even promises of meeting beautiful women, making an endless amount of money and finding the soul-mate, fail to excite?

What do we really want?

I, for one, want some dollars, courtesy Google. Please do click.

Peace-time love

They were in love

Oh, it was anguish

It was candlelight

It was music and heady perfume

And traveling for two hours just to spend one together

It was long phone calls

And silly fights

Beautiful words and stolen kisses.

And then came the day

When he didn’t feel the need to bathe

And she didn’t feel the need to wax

They love each other more deeply now

Anguish firmly replaced by

Formless pajamas and a five-day old stubble

Sun, Shanghai and S

I am glad I got the chance to work with a woman. There is this notion one has about women bosses. They tend to go overboard in their zeal to appear efficient, no-nonsense. This one has the perfect balance. Yin and Yang. She is the most soft-spoken person I remember meeting in a long time, and she cuts to the chase too. Cultural barriers are inside people’s heads. This lady cottons on to my thoughts, before I utter them.

So, a lot of really great things happened yesterday.

Sun happened. Spring came to Shanghai and my happy feet contracted the delicious disease. I tapped my way to office. To the beats of everything from Atif to ABBA, Shanu to Simon. With jacket carelessly flung over arm.

Random people smiled at me. On the subway, in the supermarket. Here’s the thing about the Chinese, they don’t smile at you of their own accord. They maintain distance, protocol. The Great Wall of China. Although people here are always staring at me. As a Brazilian colleague, recently drawled - Yeaaah man, they are always staring at you, and they want to touch you and they want to take pictures with you and...it’s crazy.

My sympathies to him. I may not be quite the tourist attraction that he claims to be, but people definitely do stare. Only non-chink for miles, in the Yellow Sea. Imagine being Paris Hilton at a Nobel laureates' convention. Or Albert Einstein at a rave party. Well, on second thoughts, he would have been quite in the Einsteinium there. The point is, I look like a freak. And that these descendants of Confucius smiled at me, without provocation. It was like the aura of happiness surrounding me penetrated their reserve.

I succeeded in my mission of befriending a Chinese woman. I drafted a plan of action, did some ‘target-setting’, practiced a few ‘opening lines’. They worked. I am trying to seduce her into showing me places around during the weekend. Don’t judge me, it’s mainly for the conversation.

Past deeds bore fruit. I met an Indian in office, a senior guy. First of all, we spoke in Hindi. Bliss. Secondly, while talking I happened to mention that I was working in the Andheri office for some months last year, sitting in the adjacent cubicle to this person, who happens to be his boss. A look of awakening dawned on his face and he immediately started rummaging through his cell-phone. And came up with a picture he had taken of a ‘quote’. Written by blue felt pen on a bit of chart paper in terrible handwriting. You guessed it and if you didn’t, go do some syllogisms. That quote was one of the many I had put up in my cubicle; he, on one of his visits, thinking it was interesting, had taken a picture of it. Okay, okay, not quite the Slumdog saga, but it felt good. To see one of your whims having made this journey across the continent. With me in tag.

Sex and the city. While sex in this city is more or less off-the-charts, I did manage to find a DVD set of the series, seasons 1 to 7, for 20 Yuan. Quick calculation. INR 140. F*** me.

Too much stimuli is there. Coming soon is an account of the Chinese woman’s obsession with her skin, me being all too painfully aware of it since the unit I work for is called - Beauty Care. Along with some tid-bits regarding the way the Chinese government manages PR through its newspapers, and how, if things were left to it, the much touted India-China story would have the ‘India’ part determinedly scratched off.

Scent of a city

Shanghai. It looked just like Gurgaon at first glance. The ride from the airport to downtown was marked by a feeling of deep satisfaction as all things fell into place.

It’s still early days. Been raining off-late. Cold winds. The works.

But I like it. The city is convenient. It didn’t take me any time to adjust to its beat. The beat itself is not distinctive. Shanghai is like one of those world-cities. Center of finance and business and what not. Or maybe I haven’t discovered the finer notes yet.

The Chinese are inscrutable. They look unapproachable. Serious people going about their business. Like they have the weight of the entire world’s manufacturing on their petite shoulders or something.

Ouch.

So anyway, although they look like Sir-when-I-ope-my-lips-let-no-dog-bark-Oracle, they actually are the sweetest people on earth. If you ever are in trouble and there’s a Chinese near, have no fear. Talk about the ‘State’ being different as different can be from the people it governs.

About those errant notes, by the way. I tried to discover them. I undertook a 2 hour walk, one way, to The Bund. Beautiful. In a surgical sort of way.

While I like the comforts of Shanghai, nay, I adore the comforts of Shanghai - where the streets have signs and no one knows my name, I do have a few questions. I wonder what brought those disfigured beggars at the Bund Tourist Canal to Shanghai? Was it the dream of a better life? Or are they native Shanghai-nese and have nowhere to go? How did they get disfigured? Is it similar to the racket that runs in Mumbai? How do the guys incessantly peddling their wares to exotic looking foreigners - from fake watches to portraits - make ends meet? Are they making enough money from all the people they dupe, o-so-sweetly? Which are the areas of Shanghai where the not so white-collar live? Have they lost their jobs yet? What do they have to say about China’s recent declaration on a news channel - China refuses to acknowledge the recession?

I want to see the underbelly of the city, any city. I don’t just want to go to the Bund, marvel at the array of retina-blinding-white-neon-golden-lit-branded-displays at People’s Square, restrict myself to traversing the criss-cross of super-super highways and architectural marvel that is Shanghai. I want to get into the brain, the heart, the soul of a city. Walk across its dirty gullies, be privy to the shameful secrets that it tries to hide so religiously.

Say my name, Shinlee Xihou

They can't pronounce my name here.

That pleases me. Makes me feel exotic.

On another note, need to get better shoes.

Mirror mirror on the wall..

Met an old friend today. It’s that time of the year when west-gone birds come home to roost - for a bit, what with Christmas vacations and all. Old friends have a way of bringing you face to face with a self that you barely recognize now. They remember things you used to say and do, things which you yourself have forgotten. They surprise you at times with their acute observations, their little windows into your soul.

Most of all what surprises you is how you used to be. Am I the same, slightly ditzy, seemingly carefree thing now that I was then? Life was that simple? Or is just the rose-tint of nostalgia that makes it seem so…so endearing?

So we got discussing about this and that. A girl we both know, me - on the fringes, as one of the most staid and conservative people ever, is getting married. She met the guy on a flight. She is a Southie - steeped-in-the-wool, he a Catholic. People never cease to amaze. Another woman, who met her now-husband through Orkut came up. She met him via a common birthday community.

Almost makes me feel conventional. One may question the almost bit. Engineer-IT-MBA. What’s not conventional? On the other hand, have come to believe that convention really does not exist. It is just a façade. Everybody has a funny, irregular, mould-breaking story to their lives, which is at most times hidden from public view. But yes, the eccentricities-oddities, well-hidden though they might be, definitely do exist. Perhaps just a scratch of a nail below the thin ice.

One thing has definitely changed about me. I used to revel in my oddness. I used to like being ditzy, irregular, forgetful, crazy, irrational at times, impulsive. Unapologetic. No longer. I have spent the last year ironing all of them out. Trying to get discipline and sense in. Caution. Responsibility. Look-before-you-leap kinda thing. It’s there in my writing even. The style, the content. Suddenly it’s a different set of attributes that seem desirable.

The face I saw in the mirror today, when I met him and the day I met those two, was somebody else’s. What is it? Growing-up? B-school? Life?

Use Detergent/Wear Sunscreen

I met a woman the other day. And asked her about her favorite ads on television as a way to get some more ‘insight’ into what she was all about. Rather what her ‘attitude towards shopping’ was all about. Yes, that is of paramount importance to me nowadays.

She thought for some time, while I waited with a cultivated look of pleasant encouragement on my face. After some time, she said she liked the Pepsi ad featuring Mahendra Singh Dhoni best.

I laddered.

She described the ad. Minister ka beta. Line mein ghus jata hai. Dhoni kehta hai. Pyaas honi chahiye.

Why does she like the ad. What does it mean.

I laddered some more.

She said. Zindagi mein aage badhna ke liye pyaas honi chahiye. Yeh baat humko achhi lagi is ad mein.

This amazingly complex country.

In a village called Etaunja in Uttar Pradesh

Lives a woman, like every other woman

She goes out in ghoonghat

And runs the home with a measure tape

But she watches and she dreams

Thirsty dreams of unfettered flight

Aspiring India of the glorious ambitions

Your children go to school in collars of impeccable white.

The double O

First Love -

Is something else

A shrine to an innocent self

First Love -

Which when comes your way again

You brace to get overwhelmed - again

First Love -

Her walking into the room

After all these years, and it’s like the Mona Lisa

Overhyped. Overrated.

Yes, Emotional Atyachar

Dev D is the perfect movie. A coming together of people bursting with the juice.

The music oozes passion. Not only does it not stick-out like a sore thumb, it gives the movie direction. And Emotional Atyachar is well - the new anthem. The movie itself is brilliantly put together with pace changes and contextual lighting. Minimal dialogues. Raw.

Mahie Gill exudes sex appeal and energy. Kalki Koechlin is like a cat. Graceful and mysterious. And Abhay Deol. What can one say. Tortured. Absolutely.

The actors fit into their roles like cork in a champagne bottle. They are brilliant actors, no doubt. It’s mostly clever casting though.

Dev epitomizes obsession. Paro passion. And Chanda survival-instinct.

I am as taken by the characters as by the people who made them. So Anurag Kashyap encouraged Abhay Deol to drink while filming. And to land up on sets right out of bed. Hung-over. Mahie Gill broke a few doors, the hand-pump, somebody else’s hand and sprained her own ankle during the course of the movie. Chanda’s character was auditioned extensively, actors were give the orgasm part to read out. Kalki K didn’t know Hindi very well. But she spoke French and Tamil fluently and hence the final scene turning out the way it did.

There are movies and then there are movies. This one was a pleasant surprise. Watching it makes one wonder how it would be - to create your labor of love, to see it taking shape in front of you. To hit upon inspiration, to get others impassioned about your vision. To see yourself vindicated as the curtain falls. To lose yourself in front of the camera. To overcome the fears - of ridicule, failure and commoditization.

One of SRK's many quotable quotes - I leave behind a little bit of myself in each of my movies, and I fear that one day I will have nothing left.

Technicolor Dreamcoat

It struck me today that I am a boss-person. I get inspired by people around, maybe more than the work.

My room is a mess. There are things lying around. The bed is never made. Newspaper strewed. It still looks pretty damn neat. It is Wadala Sheraton, all said and done. How bad can it look. Like Aishwarya Rai having a bad hair day.

I don’t like the Sheraton though. It’s amazing how people have raved about it so much. I don’t want to live in a sone ka pinjra.

So trip to China happening sometime next month. Will like that. They have gorgeous hair. Should find out what the secret is. Can’t be good genes. Cant only be good genes.

The Chinese are secretive people. Inscrutable is the word. Plus they have the Mandarin. Must be a very narrow group of non-Chinese who can tell the Lee from the Loo.

I see people all around me trying to maintain the work-life balance. In fact, I am one of the last few to join the bandwagon. This says something about young people fresh-into-their-careers nowadays, does it not? And all of these people are ambitious, make no mistake. Coming of age, methinks. Of sensibilities.

'Sensibilities' seems to be my most oft-repeated word off-late.

The gist

It stares me in the eye
Like a sarkari office peon certain of my imbecility
I turn away
Chewing on my lower-lip in concentration

This question that comes up at times
The answer that I struggle with most times
Give me this day my daily bread
Also tell me how I should be

Should I stash my woes behind the daily dose (of laughter)
Or treat this life as pursuit for nirvana
Check for expiry dates and tell-tale signs on birthday gifts
Or maybe believe. Just believe

A goal. A goal. Should I set one
Or just drift along till I see someplace to anchor
Believe all men are born equal
But then why do so few rule and many others - just root

There is no - to be or not to be
Am and want to be
But what, and why, and how
That is mainly the question.

God in Gucci

I have discovered that when you boycott something, or proclaim disdain for it publicly, it is actually because you like it more than you care to admit, to the world, and sometimes, to yourself.

Like perfume. I never buy and rarely wear perfume. The only perfumes I own have been given to me by friends. Why? Because I don’t care to smell good? Wrong. Because smell to me is the most inebriating of senses, the most powerful, the most heavenly.

Smell is an obsession. I associate everything with smell. A sliver of a long-forgotten smell is like the key that opens long-locked doors inside my mind, the lubrication that gets those rusty hinges to swing.

The smell of my sister’s baby skin in the days when she would still let me hug her, the stench of Salt Lake City when I was a hot-headed-wear-heart-on-sleeve kinda punk kid, the cold remembrance of the air conditioning at Sinhal classes where I was easily the most painfully-shy, short-skirted, fifteen-year-old in her own ditsy Neverland, the perfumed nail-polish and the musty odor of second-hand Sweet Valley Highs from then, when I was quite the bimbo, the skin cream we all love to hate on my lips for the first time - the feeling’s gone, but the smell remains, the ghastly gobhi-aaloo when I would wake up feeling homeless and lost - remembering the smell of my mother’s love, the Vodka in plastic cups - brilliant hazy nights and freshly-laundered rosy mornings. And lately, the roses that smell of Hugo Boss.

The list is endless.

I love smell so much that I don’t think there is any smell in the world good enough for me. And so, I never wear perfume.

The same goes for love. People who say they don’t believe in love, in fact, believe in it so much that anything less than the over-powering, all-consuming, absolutely-exhilarating emotion is not acceptable - is not love.

The Energy Crisis

A friend recently, while narrating his trysts with the good ol’ arranged-marriage-beast, ended with - I like a little bit of passion, energy. It’s not that I want her to agree with me all the time or say only nice things. In fact, even when she says - You are an asshole, it should compel me to think - Am I really?

A tale of many cities - A tale of just one city

You know you are in Kanpur when

1. You go to a mall, the city’s best and biggest, itching to spend some money and the only stuff you find to spend it on is some really oily dosa and half-boiled corn
2. A walk on the main road at 2 in the afternoon is punctuated by vulgar comments and some really vulgar comments
3. There is no transport that looks palatable, except if you want to make your journey with some suspicious looking characters in ten-seater tempo-vans. I dare you, especially after having had a sufficient dosage of the afore-mentioned vulgar comments
4. Every T,D and H (and by that I do not mean Tall, Dark and Handsome) dons a leather jacket
5. On the subject of leather, you see carts and trucks piled with leather shavings. You see towering tanneries dotting the landscape fortress-like
6. There are more educational institutes and coaching classes than tanneries
7. There are more chemists and angrezi dawakhane than educational institutes and coaching classes
8. There are more angrezi sharab ke theke than chemists

Like my Senior from Savories, I too fall in love with cities. I fall in love with the time having spent there, with the people.

That special Kanpuri accent, actually central-UP accent. Enunciate every word. Not like your Dilli-rajdhani that eats up half its words and blurs the edges of the remaining.

Nahi Bhaiiiyaa. Har ek shabd ko dabake boliye. Haan. Bilkul aiise hi. Kya samjhe?

For the first time in my life, I don’t feel I will be taken to be an outsider because I speak with the newspaper-wala and the dukaandaar and the traffic cop and the thanedaar in Hindi. Hindi is the local language here. (In Delhi, you don’t speak to anybody. I don’t know if they have devised an advanced technique of robbing you just by speaking to you).

Then there are the paan-walas of Kanpur. I saw a board which said - Ladies Paan Center. Go figure.

Oh, the milk-trains. UP and Bihar are not called the cow-belt for nothing. So everyday thousands of men from villages make their way to the towns and cities with their pitchers of milk. I saw a train the other day and the entire length of it had milk cans hanging from outside its windows.

Yes, I have lived in many cities and each one has a place, in my mind, in my memories.

I do feel like an outsider though.

I always will. In any place in the world. Except one.

These others, they mean nothing. I keep coming back to you and you draw me into your steely embrace. You make me feel like I belong. I admire your sensibilities - your ability to absorb, your ability to bear, your temperance, your infinite aspiration, your tendency to flatten everybody into nameless entities - the great leveller that you are, your resourcefulness - you never disappoint, your devilish dual nature - you want to crush people into oblivion and yet and yet, you want them to crush you, you want them to prove their mettle to you so that you can elevate them to the dizzying heights of achievement.

You know you complete me.

Just the Bees

Today I got some dope on bee-keeping. It is quite a profitable business apparently.

What got me thinking and I am wondering why I haven’t thought about it before, is how the bee colony behaves.

So there is one and only one queen, The Queen Bee and all she has to do is reproduce. The male bees, also known as the drone bees, they, well, assist. The worker bees, tens of thousands of them, as the moniker suggests are the ones that do all the work - they go out and get the nectar, they make it into honey by ingesting and regurgitating that nectar a thousand times and they look after the young larvae. They also protect the hive since they possess the sting.

What is strange are the group dynamics. So there can’t be two queen bees in a hive. If such a situation does develop, it will result in fighting and wide-spread destruction. While jealousy, ego-clashes and the like are quite the norm among humans, imagine bees behaving like such divas.

What is even more interesting is that the bee society is a matriarchal one. They worship the queen, because she gives birth. It is the highest calling. If she goes amiss, the hive disintegrates. They all pack-up and leave.

As an aside, the flowers give their nectar freely in exchange for some pollination.

This post has taken on a life of its own. Ideas are flying as I write. I am thinking, every other creature on earth is quite blatant and unashamed about the fact that the prime motive of their lives is to procreate, to spread the seeds of their species as far and as wide as possible. Humans are the only ones that look to the arts, philosophy, intellectual stimulation and love as being central to their existence. Humans are the only ones who search for a purpose and a calling and some higher plane. Then again, humans are the only ones that desecrate the process of procreation and dishonor the provenance of creation - the woman.

The Dark Edge

You like the wistfulness
Of blurred memories
They are like sweet nectar
To your rotten soul

You plant the seeds
Of fear in my belly
Fear of moving outside safe havens
Safe, or so you tell me

But your swan song is past
So be gone with grace
And when I look in the mirror
I don’t want to see your hideous face

Interesting Times

I am seeing a lot of unconventional advertising nowadays. Maybe because I have started noticing more, or maybe because the agencies are getting more creative, the companies/organizations are getting more risk-loving and the consumers are getting bored - the need of the hour is clutter-breaking advertising.

Let me start by saying I am not talking about television media.

So what have we? The newspaper that you read everyday for one. Boring, you say. Advertising in newspapers is old hat. Even the shady neighborhood gymkhana does it. Then picture this. You pick up your TOI and it’s as if half the front page has been wiped out. So you get to read only half the sentences and headlines, see half the pictures. It’s not a 100%. What is? Only Tropicana.

Look out for more such creative print ads. I have spotted a couple of others, but there is no way I will be able to describe the impact here. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Then there is Viral. Usually these are quite humorous since you are not paying through your nose for every second that the ad runs. So there is this IDBI Fortis Wealthsurance one which makes ample use of the fact that Rajanikanth is baap of all and no one, I repeat, no one has that kind of fan-following.

This is only the tip of the ice-berg. Digital marketing is exploding in ways unimaginable. Whether it is about catching surfers in a cyber-café, or having voice alerts that talk about giving you a pizza free if not delivered within 30 minutes when you type in ‘Pizza’ into Google search - there are myriad ways of catching attention.

And now, one of my favorites - OOH - Out of Home. The ‘Red Ribbon Express’ was an initiative undertaken in 2007 wherein a train would travel the length and breadth of India for 180 days, housing in it - exhibitions, counseling and medical centers, auditoriums and carrying with it people who would disembark at the stations and cycle into the towns and villages to stage skits and plays on Aids awareness. I hear that this concept has been used by companies as well.

And I end with this. Brand - Hobby Ideas.

Flower Power

I met a couple of NGOs today. It’s fascinating how the system works. There are innumerable such people who start these NGOs. Say, one is named - Jagrut Mahila Samiti. They can be working for infinite number of causes - nutrition during pregnancy, fight against domestic abuse, education etc. They sometimes also set up ‘Self Help Groups’ - SHGs or ‘Swaym Seva Samoohs’ as they are called in Hindi. They are the intermediaries between women who want to get involved in some enterprise and the banks that lend them money. They get targets from the government authorities and get paid a sum as per performance.

An SHG is a collection of 10-20 women. They get an account in one of the nationalized or Grameen banks. These Grameen banks have their offices in shabby little rickety buildings, but they do amazing work. They are usually affiliated to some nationalized bank.

When a group is set up, the women all pool in a fixed amount of money every month. The bank also loans them some amount of money after a period of time, if it sees that the women have been depositing money regularly and their bank balance is healthy. After a while, it loans them a bigger sum of money and waives-off one-third of it.

The women also charge each other an interest internally in case one of them wants to borrow money for something urgent from their joint deposit.

The problem is not the lack of governmental initiative. That is firing on all cylinders as I see it. There are two other major problems. One, when the money is loaned out, there are enough people in the system to demand a commission. Around 20% of the hand-out gets dissipated through that channel. The second problem is that the women don’t use the money for business i.e. they don’t invest in ventures that will give them a steady income for years to come. They use the money for short-term gains, at most, buffaloes.

On a lighter note, this NGO woman I met today had set up a Mahila Forum in some village in UP which would go and beat up the men who perpetrated domestic abuse on their women. Apparently they became extremely powerful in the village; the men would quake in their boots at the thought of them.

By the way, Happy New Year to all who are reading this. May you find all your answers.

The Cow Belt

I was in Pondicherry last week and am in Kanpur now. Every day, I go to a couple of villages and see how rural sales happen. More importantly, I see what the rural way of life is. Strangely I feel at home. But that’s another story.

Villages are no longer what they used to be. Lives have improved in the past few years, is my first impression. Roads have been built, they are being built. Places that used to be inaccessible in the monsoons due to huge tracts of muck, are now not so. There are schools - private schools and government schools and there are colleges on the highways. Although a person would have to travel around 20 kms to study in one of them. There are organizations that provide teachers to schools on a contractual basis. There are hand-pumps, which have made the bore-wells obsolete in many places.

There is easier access to loans. Quite a few banks around to lend money and waive off some part of it too. The disadvantage here is that, while earlier stringent checks would happen before the money was released; now sometimes, due to reduced red-tape, the Presidents and Secretaries of the Panchaayats pocket it.

Don’t get me wrong. There is huge scope for improvement. There need to be more schools, colleges, more awareness of what these children can do with their lives after that. Better sanitation facilities, more exposure for women, better reach to towns around. Pukka houses, better farm equipment, more emphasis on health and hygiene. The list is endless.

But in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh, as I zip across the many many lovely dancing-in-the-sun-daffodillian mustard stalks, the cabbage patches and the pumpkins on the roof-tops, I think to myself - these people aren’t woe-begone and destitute, I have seen worse. I have seen worse expressions on the faces on those kids who lunge at every car at the traffic signals - to sell something or wash windows or simply beg. That haggard look of malnutritioned-grief or cunning which comes from living and surviving on the streets. Children with injection marks on their arms, children with broken bodies - possibly broken by the local gundas who push them into begging, children who scavenge in the dumps for their daily meal.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.