talks in train

I got to meet this lady in train when I was traveling to Hyderabad last time. She had done PhD in Sociology and she was fun to talk to. (Nobody else would have discussed globalization and advantages and disadvantages of globalization in India in such a great length, so I assume she enjoyed talking to me as well.) It’s really difficult to get into some interesting conversion in train. Everywhere you look around, you’ll find people reading some stupid magazines or yawning endlessly. Even if you try to strike some conversation, sooner it gets so boring that you would wonder why you started it in the first place. It’s darn boring to travel alone. But if you ask me, it’s even worse if you get trapped into wrong kind of conversation.

But last time it was unique experience. We had very passionate discussion about current issues. It made me stop and think about my attitude towards life. How detached and untouched I am with the things happening around me! There are so many things happening around, but I don’t care for anything, unless it’s going to affect my salary. I am least bothered about world outside my boundaries.

I don’t know what foreign debt or foreign investment is, what is liberalization, who WB and IMF are or how privatization would affect us. I can hardly make myself understand what our economic policies are. It gets kind of annoying when one gets into all these economics jargons. I just want to know how good or bad my company’s shares are doing in the market, so that I can predict if I am going to get hike or not. I am not interested in knowing what kind of problems our farmers are facing, how Import liberalization would kill small industries or how MNCs are ruining our basic economic
infrastructure. Forget about these economic transformations, I am not even bothered about bomb-blasts happening around me. In fact, we boost of the fact that such things don’t affect India anymore and life gets normal in Mumbai within few hours. Farmers are killing themselves because of lack of water, but I am not worried as far as I am able to buy chilled water. I can feel that things are not going right, but I am more worried about bugs in my piece of code.

After all I can always blame it all on politicians…. But how long I can do this?