23nd April, 2005 AD
9:00 AM: We’ve finally reached here after 10 hours of discomfort, hooliganism, and drunkenness - a ragged, shabby, and motley collection of city slickers with ambitions of making a difference in this world by painting the mountains red. The hotel reservation seemed to take forever. The only reason the desk clerks didn’t get murdered today was that the mob was too tired and listless to realize that kitchen knives can come in quite handy…
11:30 AM: The geyser in our bathroom is not working. It took us 30 minutes to discover this and the plumbers 45 minutes to set the darn thing right. Consequently, I am the only one to miss the bus going to a place called Kempty Falls. (Kempty Falls has become Empty Falls for me, haha…sorry bad joke.) Kempty Falls, as I understood it later, is a once-pristine place where people often suddenly start acting like juveniles. Left all alone, I take a lovely, magical walk through the woods. I didn’t miss the Falls after all.
5:30 PM: Mussouri Town reminds me of Karol Bagh. Once, it must have been a pleasant town with broad walks, elegant houses, thickly forested hills, and the smell of pines. Then, thirty years ago, the city father got together and said, “Let’s earn some quick money - and make the town dirty. A few landslides wouldn’t hurt either.” Since British names like Henley-on-Thames and Newcastle-upon-Tyne interest me, I have decided to rename Mussouri as Karol Bagh-on-a-Hillside.
10:00 PM: Now here’s something about which I have to write an account. It’s a Yuppie tribal ritual called Dance Party. Since I have anthropological pretensions, I decided to take down a few notes of observation. The Dance Party is much like the ritualistic dances of the ancient/primitive tribes with two notable exceptions:
1.The Yuppies don’t dance a fire or idol or anything.
2.Instead of tom-toms, they have a wild thing that screams out music at incredible levels
Most men wear plenty of clothes and go easy on the deodorant. The women wear plenty of war paint and go easy on the clothes. When the music strikes up, all the yuppies start flailing their arms and legs, gyrating like patients of St. Vitus dance, while the Yuppie tribal leads look upon them with admiration and pride. It is a most remarkable sight. I saw a middle-aged woman trying to dance to the music with - shall I say - comical results. In normal society there would have been nudges and winks, but out here nobody noticed - they were all too happy and drunk as fiddlers.
It’s remarkable how we carry many of our genetic predispositions. I mean, dress these people up in goat-skins and give them clubs, and they were doing exactly what our ancestors would have done thousands of years ago.
I would have stuck around to take down some more anthropological notes, had I not been afraid that the decibels levels of that Wild Thing Playing Music would puncture my eardrums.
As I left, it also occurred to me that Charles Darwin might have been right about our ancestry…
11:30 AM: The geyser in our bathroom is not working. It took us 30 minutes to discover this and the plumbers 45 minutes to set the darn thing right. Consequently, I am the only one to miss the bus going to a place called Kempty Falls. (Kempty Falls has become Empty Falls for me, haha…sorry bad joke.) Kempty Falls, as I understood it later, is a once-pristine place where people often suddenly start acting like juveniles. Left all alone, I take a lovely, magical walk through the woods. I didn’t miss the Falls after all.
5:30 PM: Mussouri Town reminds me of Karol Bagh. Once, it must have been a pleasant town with broad walks, elegant houses, thickly forested hills, and the smell of pines. Then, thirty years ago, the city father got together and said, “Let’s earn some quick money - and make the town dirty. A few landslides wouldn’t hurt either.” Since British names like Henley-on-Thames and Newcastle-upon-Tyne interest me, I have decided to rename Mussouri as Karol Bagh-on-a-Hillside.
10:00 PM: Now here’s something about which I have to write an account. It’s a Yuppie tribal ritual called Dance Party. Since I have anthropological pretensions, I decided to take down a few notes of observation. The Dance Party is much like the ritualistic dances of the ancient/primitive tribes with two notable exceptions:
1.The Yuppies don’t dance a fire or idol or anything.
2.Instead of tom-toms, they have a wild thing that screams out music at incredible levels
Most men wear plenty of clothes and go easy on the deodorant. The women wear plenty of war paint and go easy on the clothes. When the music strikes up, all the yuppies start flailing their arms and legs, gyrating like patients of St. Vitus dance, while the Yuppie tribal leads look upon them with admiration and pride. It is a most remarkable sight. I saw a middle-aged woman trying to dance to the music with - shall I say - comical results. In normal society there would have been nudges and winks, but out here nobody noticed - they were all too happy and drunk as fiddlers.
It’s remarkable how we carry many of our genetic predispositions. I mean, dress these people up in goat-skins and give them clubs, and they were doing exactly what our ancestors would have done thousands of years ago.
I would have stuck around to take down some more anthropological notes, had I not been afraid that the decibels levels of that Wild Thing Playing Music would puncture my eardrums.
As I left, it also occurred to me that Charles Darwin might have been right about our ancestry…
posted by If I tell ya, I'll have to kill ya at 10:05 AM
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