‘What are you doing here when everyone’s trying to get to Dubai?” said the customer service staffer at a data and voice services provider, to my wife.
My wife just smiled and did not reply, as she was tired after waiting for a long time to try and get a plan for our smartphones and get connected to the online world. Getting a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card is not easy anymore in India and around the globe, especially with terrorists running crazy everywhere.
The woman at the front desk photocopied pages of our passports and the OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card and said a representative would come to our apartment to check whether we really lived where we said we did.
She did not say it so many words, but the verification was to make sure we were safe and would not misuse our online presence. Even as our online identity is important to us to communicate, do business and socialise, people use it for nefarious purposes, especially those who live in the deep, dark world, and because of them governments everywhere are wondering whether we ordinary folk have too much freedom and whether our rights of privacy should be curtailed and whether we should be monitored online for our own safety and for the safety of the society.
We are living in a rented apartment on the outskirts of Bengaluru that was given to us by my wife’s school as our accommodation and the original owner of the flat is somewhere abroad.
It is just off the highway on the way to the international airport in an area that is very quiet, with lush with vegetation and colourful flowers where black butterflies with exotic markings flutter about.
The day I landed, our curious cat crept and sniffed at a green vine that was moving, in our tiny patch of garden. Hysteria, of course, ensued when my wife discovered it was a grass snake that had dropped down from a papaya tree. After a security guard scrutinised the area and declared the patch of green safe, I checked on Google later and found the snake was not venomous but its bite leaves a stinging sensation. It was unclear what the bite would do to our Arabian Mau that we had brought along from Dubai.
While in Dubai nannies take care of the children of busy couples, here housemaids take care of the pets and walk and provide exercise and the daily outings to dogs of busy working couples, but they never pick up the poop of the pooches that gook up the sidewalks, despite signs all over the place to keep the place clean.
Workaholics everywhere
It seems like everyone is a workaholic in Bengaluru (or Bangalore, as the Brits had named this pensioner’s paradise, where the weather is lovely, 22 degrees Celsius for most of the year, with frequent drizzles as in London). The city still has areas that smack of the colonial past such as Cox Town, named after Alexander Ranken Cox, the last collector of Bangalore’s civil and military station, Frazer Town, Cooke Town, Wheeler Road), since it became the leading IT hub of Asia. Bengaluru is India’s third most populous city and has unfortunately turned chaotic ever since the rampant development following the influx of international IT companies. The City Traffic Police has given tips and dos and don’ts that may seem familiar to Dubai motorists: Do drive slowly in rain or fog; Do not weave between traffic lanes; Do not decorate your vehicle with garlands and buntings.
The service provider rep came to our door on Sunday, a weekend holiday here. He scrutinised our passports, took our photographs, except my wife’s, asked me questions that he tapped into a handheld device, and left.
We now have finally arrived.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi.
