Don't hate the player

We meet such interesting people in our lives. I have always been fascinated by the fact that there are 8 billion people on this Earth. 8,000,000,000. That's like a nauseatingly large number. In my more misanthropic moments, I am known to prophesise a systemic global genocide of 7 billion of our wonderful brothers and sisters and restart civilization all over again with a more manageable number. But that's just me being elitist I suppose.

One such character is from the city where I am supposedly based, and I say supposedly because I haven't seen my roommate in nearly two weeks and don't think I will for another two. We were just moving into the city when we went out to search for a mattress maker in the alien metropolitan with bustling streets. We found one such shop, a small one mind you, but the young guy in charge was a talkative one. And he talked of the time he was flown to this wonderful island and asked to make mattreses for a king. How there were a team of nearly 15 mattress makers sweating it out in the playgrounds to create masterpieces for the nearly 500 rooms of the king's palace. In retrospect, I suppose the young garrulous craftsman probably mistook some hotel for a palace but I like the fantasy he wove for that half an hour of my otherwise insipid and very real life.

Another time, I was yet another stereotypical tourist visiting the foreign city of Singapore and being taken on a tour of the city by this rather enterprising guide. His name was Oriental with many onomatopoeic words but the nick name he used to introduce himself was Go. And every half an hour, he would announce his name with much gusto and repeat it multiple times and pump his fists into the air. A funny character. I looked at him and wondered about the life he lead. How many times he would go to same places. Say the same things. Crack the same jokes. Do the same things. He never seemed bored though. And he certainly wasn't boring. Go Go Go Go .... And I was particularly impressed that he wasn't even perturbed when a matriach of a certain Indian family travelling along with us kept refering to him only as Gopal. She was quite a character though by the way.

Recently I was off on my office retreat which was in exotic Phuket. Being in the organizing committee, I arrived a couple of days early. The first person I met at the airport was a man handling a part of the gigantic transportation. His name was again quite complicated to pronounce but he relieved me when he asked me to call him by what I assume is a necessity for the foreigners, a nick name. His name was YoYo. And YoYo was in his early thirties, unused to the concept of shaving, unkempt hair and smoked Marlbaro lights, like the rest of Thailand. And he was quite the cool customer for apart from this transportation operations, he also owned what he described to me as a beer bar. Where I assume, and this is a hypothesis, that one gets beer. Actually he later clarified that it was a small restaurant and he even invited me to come there and try the local fish. I quickly declined the offer stating I was a pure vegetarian. He sighed in disappointment and offered to treat me to chicken then. I explained to him that from where we come, chicken was very much a non-vegetarian dish. He was shocked and asked me how I lived and what I ate. I replied abashedly vegetables, animal products and eggs. He laughed.

There is this eccentric person who is sort of heading the project I'm in currently. He is eccentric for a multitude of reasons. For one, he is this Italian who looks huge. Looks huge. Looks like a person who used to play sports but lost such fantastic pleasures when he sold his soul to the corporate world. He sleeps for 2 hours a day. On a good day. He is extremely flirtatious and hits on anything that moves, can move and might move. And the hypothesis on the sports would be extremely well-founded because he has been a footballer, a professional swimmer, a judo, and karate expert and a national ski jumper. He joined B-school with a scholarship and a handsome stipend only to come out with a hundred thousand debt - he blames it on trips to Moscow and Lima. He was also in the army and has driven a tank. He enjoys cigars but most unfortunately, he is probably the only Italian who is allergic to alcohol. Alas. He's getting married soon enough to his Chinese girlfriend in St. Lucia. La vita bella.

One day, I will be interesting too. I will be someone who was a new-age pirate in the Mediterranean who fought sharks with his bare hands. Or a standup comedian in the dark suburbs of Morocco making money on the side by being a spy for the Umbrella Corporation. Or a wizard who befriends a manticore using his hypnotize spell and using it against its master, a warlock. A psychiatrist. A hitman. A football coach. A magician. A levitator.

Who am I kidding. I am never going to be anything more than an engineer who beame a consultant and a mangament consultant and then this entrepeneur who started a novel hardware company called "Fish and" with his long time friend and partner-in-crime which then becomes a multi-trillion dollar empire and then buys this country and names it...

Sheesh.

And T, biscuit, peace and parakeet.

Game on,
H