I read a lot too. I have read all Sidney Sheldon books.

I am experiencing a strange phenomenon in Chandigarh. Here everyone has started to believe that they know more about everything than you do. You could be anyone, been anywhere but they still know more about it than you do. They don't bother to confirm with you, they just know. It happens everywhere and all the time, and now I have stopped reasoning with people here. I let them stroke their ego and lecture me, while I laugh at them in my head. The problem of course, is that you are the only one in on this joke, and it stops being funny after a while.

In the last few weeks, I have been given instructions on; how to do online trading (I have been trading for the last 5 years), how to work out in the gym (the trainer assumed I had never seen the inside of a gym and talked to me like a 5 year old), what jeans to wear for my body (after I had specifically asked for a certain Levi style which the sales person condescendingly told me is not right for me), use of a sunscreen (every time I visit a beautician) and many more. One time someone at the airport started telling me how airports at other countries were better than in India. It was not a discussion or a statement, but a education for me on what facilities are provided at international airports. The person didn't bother to check if I had ever been to one, before making a fool of himself. Another time a salesperson tried to sell me baby wipes when I was looking for a pack for tissues, convincing me that it was the same thing.

While I try to attribute most of it to the know-it-all attitude of the people here in general, but I have to wonder if I look particularly stupid that everyone feels the need to educate me. No amount of self-confidence can withstand this onslaught of unsolicited advice. So after being told everytime that my skin is a mess and so ugly, I do find myself booking an appointment for an expensive facial against my better judgement. Or take that stupid fitness test in the gym, that only made way for more lecturing on how I have let my body go to waste.

Now I mention specifically the people of Chandigarh for this behaviour based on my own experience. It might have spread to (or from) Punjab, but hey! what do I know?

Into the Wild

This was one book I did not want to read the end of. It was the end of Chris McCandless, in the book "Into the wild". I had seen the movie based on this book and was deeply affected by that too and today the book refreshed all those feelings and then some. For those who have not seen the movie or read the book, it is about Chris, a 24 year old guy from a Washington D.C. suburb who traveled around the US and then starved to death on his dream Alaskan adventure. The book talks about the flak Chris got from people about being reckless, arrogant and ill-prepared for his fatal trip. Some of the criticism was justified, and may be even necessary at the time to dissuade other young people from undertaking similar expeditions without thinking about death as a very possible outcome. His death however was not due to recklessness or arrogance, but due to a unfortunate mistake he made in eating a poisonous fungus on the food he picked from the forest.

What stuck me most about Chris in the movie and now with the book, was his selfishness. He did not think about his parents, siblings or friends before his own mission. And it was a selfish mission at that, meant to satisfy no one but himself. I admire that about him. Parental love is such that one owes it to one's parents to out-live them. No parent should see their child die. Besides his parents, he got emotionally attached to a lot of other people on the way, or rather people got attached to him, but he stuck to his resolve and moved away from everyone with no known remorse. Being the kind of person who gets attached to people rather quickly, I find this to be the hardest thing to do.

The book itself is not all about Chris. It talks about other travellers who perished while trying to achieve their dreams of conquering or at least surviving nature's extreme terrains. I am sure more people come out of these expeditions alive than dead, but this book is not about people who survived (except for the author himself). So I can only speculate what the survivors experience when all is done. Do they feel elated at having achieved what they set out to do, or feel underwhelmed that their challenge was not bigger than them? Can they ever stop unless they go far enough to some place that kills them?