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.