Alex Ting of Miri

Alex Ting is a small, stocky sixty-year old who lives in Miri, Malaysia. He drives a large van-taxi between Miri and Bandar in Brunei. Three weeks back, my parents, my brother and I happened to need a ride between the 2 cities and we got in touch with him.

We landed at the Miri airport and looked around for our ride. Suddenly, this little fellow came running up and went, “So much luggage”.

My dad was a little shocked at his rudeness but managed a “Will it be a problem?”

“No”.

And he waddled along to the back of his car and pulled out 24 eggs and an enormous bunch of this local fruit called the rambutan.

In a few minutes we were all piled in with our luggage and the exotic cargo and were on our way. Miri is known for its handicraft, tribal heirlooms and the like, and we had intended on buying some. My dad asked Alex if he could stop for a few minutes at a handicraft shop.

“Handicraft. All you Indians – you buy handicraft. Masks, funny things. It is useless. Why you Indians buy handicraft?”

My dad replied without a moment’s hesitation, “So that when I am back home in India, I remember Alex Ting.”

He let out a squeal of excitement and I can swear that his ears turned red. He drove us to the handicraft shop and bought a bunch of trinkets completely forgetting his anti-handicraft lecture just minutes back.

We continued driving under the hot equatorial sun. The inordinately large bunch of rambutans sitting in front of us started to look incredibly inviting. When we stopped at the border-post between the two countries, Alex pulled out the rambutans and conspiratorially handed them over to the border security. It turned out that the fruit were Alex’s “travel insurance”.

It was late in the evening and we were rather close to home when Alex pulled into a petrol pump. With a shout that sounded distinctly like “Wakata Wa” he jumped out of the van and went to fill his petrol. Two minutes later, I was jolted out of my half-sleep by a yelp and the image of Alex running towards the restroom. It turned out that he had held the pump in the opposite direction and had managed to douse himself with gasoline.

Eventually, we got to Brunei. As Alex dropped us off, my dad politely asked him if he knew how to find his way back. Alex dismissed my dad’s offer of help with a “Ya. Sure la”. And just as we were going to leave, he popped out of nowhere and went “Show me, La”.

Alex Ting is a small, stocky sixty-year old who lives in Miri, Malaysia. And there is no one who drives a taxi quite like him.

The Boyz are on the web

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I just started a group blog with the Boyz at Cap1. We promise to keep you entertained.

http://theboyzzz.blogspot.com/

Keep commenting. Keep coming back.

Kram

Memories

He was born in 1924 in a small town in India. He worked hard to get the advantages of a good education and all the opportunities which come with it. He went to college and studied Physics. He completed his Ph. D at the Indian Institute of Science. He worked at the BARC for a few years and soon became a senior researcher. Back then there were 2 computers in the world – one of them at the Pennsylvania State University. A professor at Penn State noticed the raw talent in this young researcher from India and invited him over to the US. He flew with his wife across the world on a plane which had to re-fuel every 2 hours. He researched and taught at the Pennsylvania State University. He came back to India for a while and then returned to Penn State. He taught there until he retired.

He is now 80. I spent a weekend with him and his wife 8 months back. He took me to his lab and showed me his research. Some optical instruments, some sliced rocks, many things I couldn’t recognize.

I met him today. He and his wife had just come through a harrowing 12 hour drive. Their car had broken down on the way. They tried to fix it at a mechanic’s shop but couldn’t. They had to resort to renting a car and driving it the rest of the way. I was glad to meet him after so long. I said hello and shook his hand.

Later on in the evening, we were talking. There were a number of people all around. I slowly realized that he did not recognize me. His wife told me that he was slowly but surely losing his memory and that he got confused in a crowd. He quietly listened to her. He must have been embarrassed but he didn’t show it. He told me about how life changes once you get old and how hard it is to cope with things no longer being the same.

He is a grand old man I have grown to love. At the end of my days, I will be glad if I have even a semblance of his dignity. I wish that my mind continues to be the captain of its sinking ship.

An inebriated haze of Edge parties and Edge countries

Last weekend saw me at 2 parties – 2 very, very different parties.

Friday was an edge party. We tend to have “desi” (Indian) parties quite often where I live. Although my friends are most interesting and the parties are absolute blasts, one can’t help but wonder that one is not doing enough to integrate. I guess a friend of mine put it rather well when he said, “I want to be an American in America or an Indian in India.”

Saturday, I was in Pittsburgh at a grad student party where I knew almost no one. I met a Danish grad student doing his Ph.D in Computer Science. We were talking about the education systems in our two countries. I was telling him about how competitive things were in India. How everyone wanted to become an engineer or a doctor to have a chance at the good life. How all the good life meant was not worrying about how you were going to support your family. He was a little drunk and this got his mind racing.

“In Denmark, every student who applies to college is given aid. No questions asked. Can you imagine? Every student. You just apply and they go - Here is 800 Euros a month. Do what you want. So people do whatever they want. I dread the day when all you guys who really worked hard to know your stuff come and kick us out of our jobs.”

I guess in today’s global world, opportunity isn’t everything

We went on to talking politics and inevitably, war. After some Bush-bashing we got around to our own countries. I was distressed at what I saw as a capitulation of the Indian government to towing Bush’s line and was railing away at our government.

He started talking about Danish politics. When the war in Iraq broke out the Danish government proclaimed their support for the US forces. The solitary submarine of the Danish Navy was sent to the Arabian Sea to patrol the waters. Once it became obvious that the war was coming to an end, the submarine was dismantled, put on a plane, flown back to Europe, re-assembled and navigated back into the Danish port.

“All of us knew it was a farce, yet we stood on the shores and cheered madly. What else could we do?”

At least I can dream of a day when my country will be a serious global power. I wonder how it would feel to know with a certainty that your country would never matter.

Wow!

I was at the after-party of a cousin’s Arangetram (the first solo Bharatanatyam performance of an artiste) in New Haven, CT. It was a small group of 25 odd people ranging in age from 8 to 80. This little group was stuffed with talent - 2 violinists, 4 Bharatanatyam dancers, a cellist, 2 guitarists, a pro singer, 2 Mridangam players, a flutist, a banjoist and a clarinetist – many of them professional. I was feeling rather miserable about my lack of ‘talent’ and was shrugging off polite queries regarding what I could do with a grumpy “I can be geeky and play with numbers.”


Be that as it may, the only person I had eyes for that night was P – a professional Bharatanatayam artiste from New York who was gorgeous in a way only a dancer can be. I had told her how awesome I thought New York was and how I’d love to live there. I had been quietly “crushing” in a corner and planning out my first pick-up line in a year, when my aunt told me to be the good host and drop P off at her room in the nearby Bed & Breakfast where she would be staying.

Me: “Which room is she staying in?”
P (who happened to just walk up): “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Me: “Uhhh.. blurgh..”
P (grinning): “If you want to move to New York, you have to learn to be faster than that”

There are girls and then there are women. : )

Afterword: She had to take the early train the next morning to watch the last day of the Ashes test. How many of you just found your dream woman?

Reverse Engineering

Standing in a queue yesterday, I slipped into one of those casual conversations with a complete stranger which sometimes turn rather pleasant. I got talking to a Frenchman who runs a vineyard back home. He was complaining about how the French economy was in the dumps.

Nowadays, most topics of conversation seem to take second place to India and soon I was doing most of the talking. He happened to have holidayed in Pondicherry, the former French principality where, coincidentally, I was born, so we got talking places and culture and ashrams and spirituality.

He told me about an English friend of his who is an Indophile who has a rather good deal going. He is a disciple of the renowned Yoga guru Shri Shri XYZ and spends months in the Himalayas learning the art under the guidance of his holiness. Every 5 months he takes a 2-week trip back to Britain where he conducts exclusive yoga classes for his celebrity clientele - rock stars, sportsmen, models, the whole menagerie of the privileged. He earns enough in 2 days to afford a month of the good life in India. When the strains of Western life start to wear on his sense of spirituality, he returns back to the mountains and his hippie girlfriend.

And our parents thought that they were giving us a ticket to the good life by making us engineers.