I know what my obituary is going to say if I die anytime soon:
"May he find in death the peace he never found in life."

My life is like a very bad channel, lots of static. I know Germans who know noise as the disturbance in a channel, but not as an audible menace. Lucky them. Not really, I am sure they have a German word for undesirable sounds. I really need some peace. Not peace of mind, that I can never get. I need general peace. I live 50 metres away from the Pan-Island Expressway, and it's tragic to say the least. In consolation, there is a very nice garden between the Expressway and my hostel and there are lovely songbirds chirping there in the morning.

Singaporeans, many of them are very superficial. Not that it is bad all the time, but when some guy who decides to buy a motorbike that causes more noise pollution than it does air pollution and run it down the Expressway to work everyday, it is something that you just cannot live with. Yet I do, rather, I have to.

I am meeting a local Singaporean for lunch tomorrow. It's a guy, named Ivan. He is not Slavic, many Chinese people here have names that just are not common in their country and culture. I wouldn't observe this as a trait of the Chinese, because there are Robin Dhamankars and Healthy Shahs and Roger Guptes in Mumbai itself. Nevertheless, I prefer an Ivan to a Zhou Hanfeng, it's easier to store in my database that is not phonetically compatible with Chinese names.

Today, Baj, Cyph and I went to Mos Burger again. Maybe it is Cyph and my Nihonophilia, or maybe it is because Baja needed something new to eat, but we really are digging this joint. The best part of it all is that they have a vegetarian burger, so I don't have to get puzzled looks from people like I do when I ask people to cook my spaghetti without the chicken and give me tomato puree instead of the usual beef sauce. I tell them I am a Hindu, but then they tell me Hindus can eat meat, which is true. I have tried telling people that I am a monk, but then they look at you even more weirdly, which is quite funny. So I just tell them, forget it man, don't ask questions, no meat, no seafood, just vegetables and fruits.

It seems that Cyph and I really enjoy making Singaporean jaws drop to the ground. Though there have been people like Gotam and Prabs who told some local girls that they had three wives back home, we stick to more plausible lies to extract fun out of taking these nice people for a spin. Like telling people that Indians getting IT training since primary school being the reason why Indian IT professionals are so good. One female in Temasek Polytechnic I know once explaimed in a Communications class that she was the heir apparent of a small princely state near Nepal. Her tutor, some Aussie who knew better, decided to play along, this female was suddenly bombarded with questions so as to how her kingdom was run, and whether she lived in a palace and what not. Poor thing, she had a hard time removing the dunce cap that she had put on her classmates' collective head.

It can be offensive sometime, though. Cyph gets it all the time. I mean, ok, he is a little too fair even for a chitpavan, but I mean, there is no universal law that Indians have to be tanned, is there? So when Cyph writes nationality Indian, some morons ask him if he is British. As if that wasn't impolite enough, some folks refuse to accept him as being Indian. I mean, Cyph tells me that some New Yorkers thought that he looked more Greek than Indian too, but I guess they put it across lot better. "Woa, you can't be Indian! lah" is something no Indian wants to hear. Rohan and I have experienced this. The director of Procurement and Logistics attended a dinner for interns and he says, "Are you Pakistani? We have an office in Karachi.." and I am like, "Oye! Bacche ki jaan lega kya?" Rohan told me that someone mistook him for a Bangladeshi and that was the most embarrassing moment of his life.

People attach a sense of pride and belonging to the places they have been born and brought up in. Some people change these loyalties as they forge relationships with new places. Some people are too nomadic to be from one single place. But the last two are the ones who suffer from massive identity crises, from what I have observed. A Bengali friend who never lived in Bengal and can hardly read or write Bengali is reading all the Bengali authors she can, in English, though. All my friends, Chinese, Indonesian, the various Indian communities seem to feel a need to reach out to their roots, not that they are far away. People try to be American in Mumbai, but once they are out of Mumbai, most of them wouldn't hear a word against Mumbai. The need to be a Mumbaikar, or Marathi or Indian arises acutely when one is out of Mumbai, Maharashtra or India, it seems. Maybe the need to live arises only when one is dead. But unlike a plane ticket back home, there is nothing here. I guess I will look for peace while I yet live. Maybe I will retire early and move to Tibet or Ladakh. Maybe I will buy land in Thal and set up a mango farm. Life is a cruel paradoxical sequence. To get peace one has to endure noise. To get relief one has to endure pain. Why?