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January 24, 2003
Tempo of Life in America
A person from the South Asian cultural milieu transplanted at a mature age into the value system of North America, starts feeling awkward like a Don Quixote, anachronistic like Rip Van Winkle or like ‘Mirza Ghalib on Bunder Road’ in Khawaja Moen’s famous TV play, or awestruck like Alice in Wonderland.
One of the first things that wavers and wobbles him is the tempo life. Everyone and everything seems to be on the run. Hardly anyone strolls, everyone jogs. Drivers of motor vehicles consider it perhaps their bounden duty to travel at 10 to 20 miles above the already high speed limit of 65 mph on highways. Flow with the traffic, you are advised; but the traffic on freeways does not flow, it just flies low.
The cyber space technology has spurred the tempo life to a level unprecedented in human history. One may now exchange messages with a friend thousands of miles away several times on a single day. Hailing from the “slow moving East”, we can still enjoy the beautiful couplet of Daag Dehlavi:
Koee jhoot ki hud bhi hai nama’ber
Abhi ka abhi mein gaya, agaya?
Time being of the essence of all activities here, people have come to view even distance in terms of time. For instance, if you ask someone where he lived, he would say, “An hour from here”. In terms of space, this means that his residence is at a distance that can be covered in an hour’s drive by car.
You cannot use such terms back home. If you told someone that you lived an hour from Saddar, he would spend some time trying to figure out what you meant and then give it up as an impossible riddle.
Even if he knew the system of describing space in terms of time, he would not know how to measure time by the speed of a man on foot, on bicycle, on tonga, on bus or driving his own car; then, in which direction and in what type of weather. You may cover by car say twenty miles to the east of Saddar but you may not be able to cover even half of that distance if you go west wriggling through a chain of traffic jams in the narrow streets of that direction.
In case it rains and the roads become flooded you may have to wait several hours before venturing anywhere. If you are the adventurous type and consider it more fun driving through the knee-deep water, you may end up with a dead engine and floating in the featherweight Suzuki car, reminding you of Ghalib’s couplet:
Raow mein hai raksh-e-umar kahan dekhiyay thamay
Nay haith baag par hai na pa hai rekab mein
Driving is no fun in this country either, particularly when one has to drive at least thirty minutes each way to and from work. Being a land of vast distances, a person spends on an average five years of his life on road! A car is therefore an essential item of daily use in this country, and it has to be in perfect running condition to remain on the road.
The vintage cars one sees on the roads here have new engines and new body parts. No wonder, one finds them running at 70-80 miles an hour in the fast lane. If you have a collision on the highway and are lucky to come out of it alive, your car may not fare as well. It might become history.
Speed is the prime feature of life here. This, despite the fact that on the road, death is often the price of speed. Even in the current courtship etiquette, a polite, hesitant boy may be regarded as a ‘waste of time’ by his date. There is a premium on speed in gender relations too. The trend favors twenty-five relationships and three marriages.
It is getting so nowadays that a pedestrian can’t go through traffic. All you have to do is just be calm and collected. A daring pedestrian decided to go through the traffic - he was calm, but it took several hours to collect him.
This is, indeed, a country on the run. Everything seems to be running. Movement is taken here as the prime indicator of life, progress and also health. The faster the movement, the more throbbing and thriving is regarded life. People do not go out here for a walk but for a run. Morning, noon, evening or night, you see men and women of all ages running at jog trot on footpaths or in parks. That gives the runner a robust, healthy heart. Yet, instances are not wanting of persons having had heart seizures in the middle of an ‘invigorating jog’.
At a road crossing, when the indicator says “Walk” to the pedestrians, it means run. If you take it literally and start strolling across, the indicator light will turn to a flashing red hand, meaning don’t cross. This flashing red hand would come even before you have covered half of the distance.
This may strike to us as incongruous but to the people here it is quite logical and in line with the general movement and speed of things. Fast-food chains, such as Macdonald’s or Burger King where food is served almost immediately on order, keep expanding all the time. Credit is also given to them for as fast expanding the girths of their customers.
Speed being crucial to all activities, the bureaucracy, which by its very nature is slow in action, is tolerated, if not abhorred, by the people as an unavoidable evil. The bureaucracy doesn’t let pass any opportunity to let its personality (nuisance) be felt by the people. Take the post office for instance. If you want to mail a gift parcel to a friend, you are made to stand in a queue for half an hour or more before handing it over to the clerk at the counter.
The lady at my neighborhood post office counter took a good half an hour discussing the ramifications of her relationship with her boyfriend before she gave me the unwelcome news of the sharp increase in postal rates. Her confidential tete-a-tete had gone on and on with the lady ahead of me who had come to send a parcel out. I was the sole captive audience in this talk show. My wait, however, did not enrage me, nor did it subject me to an intolerable ennui since I found myself in a familiar ambience having served back home as a bureaucrat for a good or bad 36 years.
The e-mail facility, which has hit badly post office income, has done away largely with the communication of personal messages by letter. The days of the anxious wait for the afternoon mail are almost over. The mailboxes are now stuffed mainly with unwelcome bills and junk mail. The expression “post haste” has lost its meaning.
Yet, I am still a devotee of the personal letter, written at a relaxed pace and charged with the friendly emotions of the writer. The e-mail communications sound like telegraphic messages -devoid of the personal touch. Some times, when you send a letter to a friend or relation, you receive back, to your disappointment, a brief reply via e-mail. Then there are friends and relations (I have no dearth of them) who are averse to even responding to your letters. When I miss their replies, I recite the following couplet:
Nama-ber tu he bata, tu nay to daikhay houn-gay
Kaisay hotay hein woh khat jinkay javab atay hein.
The nama-ber here is too busy fighting for an increase in his/her emoluments to even bother about my concern over the dereliction of etiquette by my friends and relations.
{Please write to the author at: arifhussaini@hotmail.com or by post (!) at: 4385 Rocky Point Rd., Anaheim Hills, CA-92807}
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