UK my new home away from home..

I created my blog around a year back and have still not blogged. Guess I have been very busy with life, job and family you know. Plus I am lazy, if I get some free time, gazing out of my window is my favourite pasttime. Right now with no family and work seems to be the perfect time to blog, but what should I blog about ? Well something new which happened to me recently is I moved to a new country and got a new job, so why not blog about my new experiances.
A year back I never thought I would be working in an alien land in a totally different field of work. But thats what life is all about, full of surprises, even the decisions I make surprises me sometimes. But whatever has happened , has happened and the fact is that I am in the UK with my wife and my 4 year old daughter. I donot know if that was a wise decision but that seems to be the reality.

The first thing we realised and had anticipated earlier is that nurturing a kid 4 years old where both parents are working is going to be a tough challenge. No wonder people dont want kids in the UK, infact people in London dont even want to get married. It was all different in India, where we had a full time maid and she used to do all our house hold chores including child care and that too for a meagre amount of money and with a big smile on her face. Here to have kids the first thing you need is lots of money and unfortunately we dont have it yet. Once you have money then you can afford £10 an hour maids. Imagine £10 an hour ! and we used to pay our maid in India £30 a month ! No guesses why the british came to india to rule, each one of them wanted to live like a king here.
Lets talk a little about my office and the people in London. Well my desk is comparatively smaller now than in India and if I stretch my hands a wee bit more I might bump into my colleague, not a very charming thought. Coming to touch, people seem to really dislike the fact that you might bump into someone by mistake. It is simply unacceptable and crime to its highest degree. London has changed(or has it ?), its pretty densely populated now and coming in contact with another person in trains and buses should be quite common. However you have to take utmost precaution not to touch someone expecially if he/she is of the same gender. People simply dont like it and feel that there was some strange hidden ulterior motive in doing it. Londoners still need at least a meter of space around them, and if by mistake you step into that meter you will get that immature five year old's facial expression "Watch it mate!!" . Even my daughter nowadays shouts "Whah" in her parroty voice which makes me jump off my feet. It means "What" in her peculiar Ilford accent, if I stare at her for some time. I guess she too has absorbed the culture of individuality and her own personal space pretty fast. Nowadays we are having a hard time understanding the peculiar sounds she makes, which are supposedly english words. And then there is that eternal generosity and humblesness of opening doors and the "you first please". Sometimes it gets so irritating that it goes into a deadlock and seems like the guy who gets to go first lost the battle of generocity. That's what an english gentleman is supposed to do, open the door for you. I find all these complete hypocrisy in this time and age, becuase when there is real crowd in the london trains all these "you first" stupidity gets trashed in the can, and all are back to the good old indian system of pushing and shoving to get into the train. The only difference is that in India we do that all the time even when its not required and here people do it selectively. The other difference which I forgot to mention is that you need to pay £10 (the astronomical daily peak hour london train fare) to get pushed and shoved around. The rail companies are minting money here.
In fact the companies I think which are making the most money are the bottled water companies .Bottled water sells for £1.5 a litre, which is almost Rs120. In india it sells for R12 a difference of ten times. Another thing which I forgot, you can get these londoners to buy something they want for any price, putting a red banner saying "Sale" makes it even easier.
The last thing which really amuses me is the fact that software engineers in my company come in suits and ties and black leather shoes. Thats the funniest software engineer you will ever see and you can see them in London. Its like asking Tarzan to wear a suit ,a tie and shoes and asking him to swing in the jungle. I still cannot fathom why that is necessary, after all we donot interact with any clients, our sole job is to sit in one corner and program, however boring that is (but thats beyond the point here). Until my bare feet touches the crispy carpet and i can cuddle up in my chair in my soft pair of levis when I want , my creative juices never flow. But I guess people have to change and I am one of them. Even tarzan had to wear shoes when he was brought into the city by jane. Oh I miss my chappal and my jeans and my unpressed t-shirts. It was so easy living a software engineers life in india. Here I need to press my shirts and my trousers every sunday, can you imagine!. Finally I have found a non-iron shirt and am still lookin for that non iron trousers and the shoe which needs no polishing. Thank god some of my colleagues dont wear suits and ties, even I have started doing it.
I guess I have written and ridiculed more than my quota now. Will write about my experiances from the indian angle sometime again.