Bangkok Diaries

Monday 4th dec
Thais are a perfect example invalidating my childhood theory that people close to the equator are black and vice versa. And the girls have the most beautiful legs which they flourish so casually that you can’t help notice them shopping in malls, traveling in the sky train, walking through Siam centre, roaming in the streets, learning to swim in Pattaya, shopping in Mo Chit weekend market……

Tuesday 5th dec
Soggy sugar boys
Thai food has only two characteristics, it’s soggy and it’s sweet. The first one usually implies a third characteristic, solid food is almost always cold. Solid food by the way is not their style, they not unlike South Indians soak their stuff in loads of water but unlike them they use some other fluids as well. Fluids extracted from such common species as the fish and prawn to the not so common octopus and jelly fish like creatures.

Thursday 7th dec
Traveling in the taxi to the office today, I had this sudden realization that although there was a huge traffic jam, there was not a single sound of honking. Can’t really place it correctly but had this feeling some days back traveling by the sky train. Scanning the city landscape standing besides the door, I was almost shocked to remember all of a sudden that the train was full of passengers….although the only faint voice I could hear was that of my friend’s mp3 player, which was playing too loud for my comfort.

The Thai people are a bit too polite and non-argumentative. They won’t haggle with you in the bazaars, which makes life really miserable for people like me who derive a greater amount of pleasure in bargaining than in the ownership of the loot.

Saturday 9th dec
For some strange reason you start to wonder why four fifth of all the airport employees are female. Coming out of the airport you see the people on the street are overwhelmingly of the fairer sex and how fair!! Their universities have a higher number of girls, all the shops are manned, I mean womanned by females, and all occupations except taxi and tuk-tuk driving are a girl’s business. So it didn’t come as a surprise when I was told that male infanticide is a common practice in Thailand.

Saturday 9th dec
What do you do when you are a vegetarian in both the literal as well as the figurative sense of the meaning and land up in a country like Thailand which is predominantly non-vegetarian? You can basically do nothing much. You survive on French fries and hotdogs without the sausages in them and goes without saying, you are highly opinionated on issues of moral conduct. Makes me wonder about the different thought processes guiding people in deciding about doing something which in their opinion is probably inappropriate but still quite a few people do it.

Sunday 10th dec
Distantly remember back in engineering college a sage like voice declaring that you can’t consume a non-vegetarian diet daily, the anatomy of Indian humans have not really evolved to digest such food. How ignorant can such a person sound to someone who has lived for even a week in Thailand? In Bangkok a vegetarian living in KritThai Mansion would typically burn around 1.35 times the calories he consumes by walking miles in search of the elusive stuff. The coefficient increases as you move away from the location specified earlier.

Sunday 10th dec
Had my first hot water bath, the last few days were spent wondering if the Thais do have the concept of ‘hot’ at all. Must admit they had almost convinced me of their complete avoidance at creating anything hotter than the ice that they use more abundantly than water. An exception and a delectable at that would be the females in the country. Any attempt at describing their sculptured figures would betray the very purpose.

Sunday 10th dec
Thai people have an atrocious accent, the Thai girls validate the saying that girls must be watched and not heard. This is all true when they are speaking Thai, and not unlike all generalizations this one has its limitations. The same Thai girl whom you would secretly thank for having the politeness for speaking in a low voice will pleasantly surprise you when she says ‘extra cheese’ or ‘River Kwai’. The Thais speak English in a curiously elegant manner. They can’t pronounce certain phonemes and lay extra emphasis on certain others, making their sentences a treat to the foreigner’s ears.

Monday 11th dec
The trip to Thailand has forced me to revisit some of the most fundamental questions I used to raise in my childhood. Like how on earth can girls wear skirts in winters and not feel cold. But this question pales away in comparison to the graver ones bearing greater economic and socio-political significance like, why on earth would one like to buy things which he would never have the opportunity to use. The case in point being the large inventory of warm clothing displayed in each and every shopping mall of Bangkok. Thailand as explained by the marketing director of our client company has only 3 seasons, hot hotter and hottest. Fortunately we landed here in the hot part of the climatic cycle. The climate is pretty much like that of Ahmedabad in springtime. So am feeling quite at home.

Tuesday 12th dec
The incredible ability of Indians to adapt to alien conditions never stops to amaze me. Here we are, not even a week in Thailand and seems like we have adopted the new place as our own. Even the alien language which most of the times is the greatest hurdle now sounds so familiar, the special case in point being that of Deuri, one of the frontiersmen in our group of twenty. Now I am not sure if it’s his addiction to the T.V. but every morning Deuri gets up at 8 to watch his favorite Thai sitcom followed by some Asian games update and matinee stuff. By now he is updated on all the plots and subplots of all of his sitcoms and is quite content with the limited set of channels. Makes me wonder why the hell the Thais so bad at are spoken English, when a good chunk of their economy relies on tourism!!

Tuesday 12th dec
Traditional Thai music, an oxymoron!!
The music scene in Thailand is quite vibrant, live music in the bars, on the television, on F.M. radio and on the thousands of cheap mp3 players. Perhaps that’s the reason why so far I haven’t had any opportunity to listen to traditional Thai music. Not unlike India the music here is no different from the contemporary factory finish stuff. If you place two televisions with back to back music playing on the Thai MTV and Indian MTV the difference will be extremely difficult to spot from a distance. Everything is the same, right from the style of the music to the smallest detail like the haircut of the singer. By the way a more striking similarity between the two countries in the broad category of commercial works of art, and which came as a rather pleasant surprise was the desi nature of advertisements on T.V. The ads are really creative and have this universal appeal with a local and rustic touch, but the only problem is that these commercials won’t show the product even once during the entire act!!

Wednesday 13th dec
In the entire light hearted story that life generally is, suddenly out of nowhere comes that agent of devastation which pierces your soul so deep to paralyse you emotionally. For me these agents of emotional instability are those recurring dreams. Nobody invites them, despite the contrary myth that you dream about things that you think before sleeping, doesn’t apply to the damn recurring kinds. And you can’t forget them at will. And I should warn you against naturally assuming that the dreams are of the macabre kind, they are not. On the contrary they more likely to be labeled beautiful by someone else, its just that they are too emotionally powerful. The emotions which one normally doesn’t feel when he is awake and sane, the ones which a person with my kind of humor will find rather amusing.

The situation worsens; the feeling drags on if you are alone and have nothing to divert your mind to. And it couldn’t have gotten worse today, getting up in the middle of the afternoon to find myself alone in the hotel room with just a stupid television set to give me company. Well here it comes, the knock on the door. The cleaning lady comes in and I am forced to take my lazy self out of the room. What a relief!!