Melbourne Mantra

This is the written version of some video I saw, found it really funny, customization and additions have been done for the adoption purposes ;)

I come from India from its capital city, New Delhi. About 1 year back I was lying in the Sun…getting a head massage…eating oranges…while maid cleaned dishes…chef cooked food…chauffer washed the car…and I thought to myself …to hell with this life!!... I am going to the first world. And here I come for my studies to Australia. It’s a shared flat with too many Chinese, in a messiest possible way, paying huge rent in dollars every week. Frozen food, no rotis (Indian bread), no maid, no car, buying fruits & vegetables, daily grocery shopping, cooking my food, cleaning utensils, doing my laundry, cleaning room, public transport …I am living the dream! And given the weather in Melbourne…I am living an erratic dream.

But I have been making efforts to settle down in the grid and be like an Australian. I joined a global business school here, where I believed there would be no demarcation between any races. However, in the first diversity class, everyone was made to sit separately only with the students of their race!!! Truth is that I came to this place to find a better job and all the jobs that are here are going back to India.

I dunno what this fuss is all about. You heard people complaining that there are no doctors in India, coz they are all here. People complain that there are no plumbers, no car mechanics, no nurses in India, coz they are all here. For same reason, there are far less dumb people in India these days. After seeing the level of single students doing their graduations here, however, I hope people in India should not complain anymore. That said, India is quite different than one imagines… no Safeways or seven elevens…no cab drivers…no console operators…no cleaners…no fruit pickers…no bloody Indian curry… whole country is full of computer programmers and call centers. I was passing through a rickety road in New Delhi last year, and suddenly the mobile phone rings of the poor guy (seemingly) sitting in a road-side shack, when I was looking where is mine. To give him some credit I thought the homeless guy would not have a landline and then he suddenly opens his laptop and responds on the phone, “Customer Service. This is Christopher speaking”. I dunno what this fuss is all about created by these people that Indians come here and take our jobs, what a lot of rubbish…we could take your job…sitting at home!!

The other day I was moving around on the streets of Melbourne, and I saw a white guy driving a cab!!!! Really! It was a rare site, and there were these Indian people talking among each other, “These white guys are stealing our jobs!!” In fact, I feel, it’s high time now that an Indian company should start outsourcing to poor Americans. Imagine someone at the other end of the call at customer service saying in heavy American accent, “Thank you for calling Air India! This is Mahatma Gandi”

My siblings were very keen to see me in some big foreign city and get me to Melbourne, used to say that the city never sleeps there and people are always partying, and I came here to find that there are hardly any people here to be awake! When I came to this country and in immigration, they put me to an Australian Test, I wonder if I am so different from these people!! What I mean is…are we so different really?? Half of your public transportation is slow moving vehicles (read, trams); half of our public transportation is slow moving vehicles. You have to wait for 5 minutes to cross the road (as you wait for the traffic signal); we have to wait for 5 minutes to cross the road (as we wait for the traffic to jam). You can throw rubbish anytime while on the streets (as there are so many bins); so can we!! You waste far too much time talking to a person who you think is an idiot at the other end of the call centre telephone call; so do we!! You show sex in your movies, we show men and women running around flowers and trees, yet, we have hit the population of 1.2 billion!!! Apparently, through cross pollination ;).

I can’t think but they put me to this Australian test, the most confusing MCQ, complete the sentence – ‘To be or not to… a) be b) see!!!’ Of course I passed. The officer came to me and said, “you(r) English…you(r) English… is pretty good for an Indian…good on you maite.” I said, “well, you are not doing too bad yourself…for a man with low career prospects and looming pension crises!! by the way its not ‘maite’… its ‘mate’, you asshole.” See…you can’t afford to mess with us Indians!! These Europeans may have ruled us for more than 200 years, but they didn’t expect us to follow them back everywhere…did they? If anyone has been upset by anything I have written above… I don’t give a shit… we Indians have come from the land of ‘Kamasutra’… we can f*** in more ways than anyone can count!