Back in Bangalore!

I'm back, and it feels good.

Things I will miss about the US in general - driving on those lovely freeways, the smoothies, the fantastic beer, the great scotch, and that Mecca for book-lovers in the Glendale area, the Foothills Branch Library. FBL - it was great while it lasted. I will miss you.

Spending a week in Mumbai with family was great. Even though the weather was a killer, the lazy days doing nothing much felt damn good. Gorging on vada pav and the terrific Mumbaiya pav bhaji was yum. Also the delicious maacher jhol at home, with mom trying to make me go through a month's quota in a week.

Being able to watch football on the telly is another pleasure I've been looking forward to. I missed almost the entire 2006-07 season of the Champions league and the EPL, but it was great to catch Liverpool's victory in the CL semis over Chelsea. Also, very very happy that ManUtd is now the EPL champs beating Chelsea again. Its great to see that big money doesnt always win you everything. Chelsea fans - you are free to rant.

The downsides are also there of course. Its becoming harder to watch the news everyday. Its astonishing the level of corruption in this country, with new cases of "fake" encounters every day. Were encounters ever supposed to be legitimate? I understand that they are a necessary evil in many cases, but the flip side is the fact that many of these encounters seem to have involved victimization of innocents, rather than the guilty. Now we are faced with the ugly mug of DSP (or watever) Vanzara, a criminal of the lowest order plumb in the middle of our police forces.

My first experience on reaching Bombay airport. The visibly inexperienced Indian steward on the Delta flight, had made the mistake of handing out just a single immig form per family, instead of one form per person. Standing in line at Bombay airport, the disgracefully dressed, vernacularly challenged person who was responsible for guiding people to the various booths for other similarly challenged people to process the forms, looks at the single form per family and says - "Cha maayla, kon toh chu**ya", which translates to "What the? Who's the a**hole who gave out single forms". And this loud and clear, without bothering to notice that there are families and women and kids around. Lovely.

Then the gentleman actually processing the forms, suddenly looks past me with his mouth wide open and eyes lit up. I look back to see an American lady in her mid-30's, drawing a lot of looks coz she left one shoulder uncovered. Bang, bang, bang go the stamps on my forms as the immig man tries to make sure she gets sent to his booth! Well, there's my immig checks done.

Not that I want this to turn into a rant, but there really does need to be something done to improve the first experience that visitors have while entering our country.

Well, on second thoughts, thats not the only thing that needs changing. We really need to do something about the beer we get here.