Wohlstand in Mannheim

Für unsere Themenrecherche haben wir 30 Mannheimer zum Thema Wohlstand befragt. Wir haben dabei versucht, möglichst viele Altersgruppen zu erfassen. Unsere älteste Teilnehmerin war 90 Jahre alt und unser jüngster Teilnehmer 19. Zu den Berufen der Teilnehmer gehörten unter anderem Lehrerin, Kauffrau, Schneiderin, Sozialpädagogin und Schauspielerin. Einige Schüler, Studenten und Auszubildende wurden auch befragt.

Auf unsere erste Frage „Leben Sie in Wohlstand?“ reagierten 24 der  30 Befragten mit „Ja“.  Die anderen haben entweder mit „Nein“ geantwortet oder wollten auf diese Frage  gar nicht eingehen.

Für die nächste Aufgabe haben wir in unserem Fragebogen die folgenden Wohlstandsindikatoren aufgelistet. Die Teilnehmer der Studie wurden gebeten, die drei Indikatoren zu wählen, die sie für die Wichtigsten hielten.

Einkommen

Wohnverhältnisse

Grundnahrungsmittel

Gesundheit

Bildungschancen

Freizeitgestaltung

Mitbestimmungsrecht

Zugang zu Natur- und Grüngebieten

Die Ergebnisse präsentieren wir in Form von einem Wordle.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/7999214/Wohstand_in_Deutschland_Neu

Unabhängig von der Altersgruppe stuften fast alle Befragten Wohnverhältnisse und Gesundheit als wichtig ein.  Freizeit belegte bei vielen Teilnehmern den dritten Platz.  Überraschenderweise hielten einige jüngere Teilnehmer Grundnahrungsmittel für einen wichtigen Wohlstandsindikator. Einige unserer Teilnehmer haben darauf hingewiesen, dass Einkommen die anderen Faktoren bedingt.  Also haben wir beschlossen,  eine zweite „Wordle“ ohne den  Faktor Einkommen zu erstellen.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/7999219/Wohstand_in_Deutschland%3Aohne_Einkommen

Late Edition

These days I read only the sports section in the newspaper.

Some articles in the ‘main section’ are so irrelevant that one has to ask “Who cares about that?” .What gets my goat is Page 3 with its random assortment of people celebrating a house–warming or a birthday of some relative unknown. (Yes, I bought a goat last year – I don’t like kids much). Almost every one of these ‘celebrities’ appears uniformly sloshed with a vacant dreamy expression in their eyes. Why on earth would a newspaper want to dedicate precious space to the escapades of a privileged few?

My stand on this issue was vindicated when I spotted our former tenant on Page 3, with a name-change and all. Believe me, he is a most ordinary man leading a dreary existence. How he wormed his way in there, I do not know. This was a source of mirth to everyone at home for a couple of days.

However, I did find two relevant articles recently.

One of them involved the marriage ceremony of an eight year old girl. “Ah, you’re choosing a socially relevant theme at last”, you (my dear regular reader) might exclaim, but you are going to be disappointed. For one, the bridegroom had to be propped up on a stick to be visible. The facts that he was rather ugly, slimy, green, had webbed feet and had just been captured from a nearby pond must have added to the excitement among the wedding guests. (Again, you can believe me here, because a man in a dinosaur suit was doing the rounds during my sacred thread ceremony .The kids just went berserk and I even received a Jurassic hand-shake). The poor frog was later released into the same pond from whence he came. Last heard of, he was muttering to himself on the expediency of the whole thing and how short-lived marriage vows can be these days.

The ‘whole thing’ was an exercise to propitiate the rain gods. If I were a meteorologist, I‘d confidently predict rain in that area, and for once, get it right.


The second article I was talking about also involves something green. This time, it’s a parrot. A certain parrot has been banned from entering football grounds in England for repeatedly interrupting a league match by imitating the referee’s whistle. This meant that the players were bemused and unsure for the entire length of the game. I think the parrot just about scored the equaliser for the animal kingdom (in the context of frog above).

The moot point is, how on earth are the officials going to distinguish between this parrot and any other, considering only this one’s been shown the red card. Are other parrots allowed then? And how will they prevent the banned feathered menace simply flying in?

And what does this mean for the future of the whistle? I distinctly foresee referees running the length of the field with a parrot perched on their shoulders.
“Pieces of eight” will then be a cry that will have players quaking in their boots.

Germania!

I have been studying a lot of German lately. Though the language is quite similar to English in many ways, some German sentences are notoriously long and invariably end with a verb. What is even more exasperating is the German habit of splitting verbs, with one half in the middle of the sentence and the other at the end (ok –slight exaggeration).

All this makes for a painful learning experience. The poem below is my cry of ‘Ouch!’

How would it be if a German were to write a poem in English?

“My poor knowledge of English despite
I shall today a poem write;
We shall along with verbs
Hairs also split”

Episode 2

As soon as we got off the train, our eyes fell upon an unkempt looking man with a long beard and even longer hair.

“In six months, magha, we won’t be able to recognize you. You’ll probably be like him”
said Gupta to Rakesh, pointing to the bearded wonder. (How can anyone translate the word ‘magha’? The term of endearment is only rivaled by ‘machan’ in Tamil. The word ‘mate’ doesn’t even come close). Rakesh seemed excited by the prospect.

We started bargaining with the auto rickshaw drivers outside the station to take us to Pahar Ganj, as our bible Lonely Planet had recommended it as an area where we could find cheap accommodation. The drivers kept telling us that they knew sastha hotels in other areas but we put our foot down. So, Pahar Ganj it was.

We didn’t know it then, but Pahar Ganj is what people would classify as a ‘dodgy’ (wink! wink!) locality. Considering the front of the auto was filled with stickers of gods and goddesses, I wonder what the auto-driver thought of us. It appeared that he became more talkative after we told him that Gupta had to write an exam.

“Oh! Paper dhenai hain?” he asked, in a perceptibly changed tone which seemed to exonerate and accept us as ‘good clean’ boys.

If not for offending Gupta, I would have probably said, “Yes, but it’s a foregone conclusion. A hopeless case.” (After the results were announced a month later, Rakesh said very comfortingly to Gupta that he hadn’t passed because he was too good for the institute).

As we rode through the heart of our national capital, our conversation varied. Right from the morbid thought of being mowed down by Delhi’s notorious buses to the best way to nick a brochure from a five-star hotel, we discussed everything. The answer to the five star question being “Tell the receptionist your uncle from Singapore is visiting India soon and would like to know the tariffs”. This is of course a tried and tested method and never fails to impress.

We entered Pahar Ganj and the auto driver negotiated a maze of streets before finally dropping us off at the rather suspiciously named Hotel Anand. I have no doubt that the driver had an arrangement with the owner and took his ‘cut’. To us, that seemed like a fair arrangement as long as everyone got his due share of ‘Anand’.

We registered rather hurriedly and without checking the colour of the water in the rooms above (which turned out to be a healthy yellow).After daring to freshen up, we had lunch at a Dhaba nearby, thoroughly enjoying every aspect of its filthiness, as we assumed all seasoned travellers would. Rakesh and I abandoned Gupta, for he had to ‘study’, and ventured out bravely to explore Delhi.

Travels in the north of India

As I have temporarily run out of inspiration to write verse , I have decided to serialise my experiences while travelling in North India earlier this year . So here we go.

“They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones” says George Orwell in his classic work ‘1984’ whilst describing the ‘proles’ (possibly from the word ‘proletariat’). I felt that he might as well have been describing me as I have often thought my life to be quite uneventful and sheltered compared to some of my friends.
So, what better way to open up the mind and cast away prejudices than by travel?

The Train

Rakesh had resigned a month ago and I, a couple of weeks afterward. Gupta, however was yet to cast off his working–class chains. So, he almost missed the train. Rakesh and I considered ‘punishing the ***tard’ for being his usual un-punctual self by deserting him. We couldn’t, because Gupta had the tickets.

When we boarded the train, we discovered, much to our annoyance, that Gupta’s very expensive travel agent had reserved only two seats for the three of us. Rakesh sneaked away to the top berth and had it all to himself. Gupta and I had to share a berth for the night after a heated discussion on the possibilities of whose feet would be in whose mouth.

We woke up to the cries of “Chai” – I more, out of fear of being scalded by the hot containers which the vendors carried, than anything else.

A train journey in India is one of the most enriching experiences anyone can have. The scenery is awe-inspiring and the train buzzes with life. The sight of a solitary tree in the middle of a field can move even a stone to poetry. Travel by train (preferably window – seat) is a great way to introspect and discover oneself.

Digression aside, we passed most of the morning reading books (I was reading ‘1984’, Rakesh ‘Catch -22’, while Gupta had to be content with his economics textbook).
All of us downed chai after chai in the afternoon while Gupta and I listened to Bob Dylan – Of course, Rakesh had brought his own music as he strongly disapproved of the very broad category of ‘stupid English music’.

One of the first major stops on the way was Nagpur. No, we did not buy oranges there!
Instead we sampled kachoris , while simultaneously avoiding a large number of inquisitive cows – yes, they wanted a share. I kept wondering what the poet Ogden Nash, who wrote
“The cow is of a bovine ilk
One end is moo and the other milk” would say if he happened to see these cows.

We passed some time by thinking up politically incorrect remarks about every state we passed through. We spoke of the great ‘Ghandi’ at Sevagram and at Ballarshah, where we had the worst idlis ever, we made observations on why a south-indian dish had to be crucified so in the north. (Is Ballarshah above the Vindhyas, I wonder? Sorry to bring up the north-south divide but it’s a pet topic).

What was comical was that Rakesh and Gupta tried to smoke a beedi every time the train stopped somewhere between stations, but they were always thwarted by the signal turning green at just the wrong moment. As they pondered a beedi-less day, I jostled with fellow passengers to re-charge my mobile phone. (Of course there was no queue near the re-charge point, for is not the railways a mobile version of India?) .

In the evening, we struck up a conversation with a man from Bangalore (Yes, you guessed it – he was working with an IT firm). He seemed convinced that we had been laid off due to the prevailing poor market conditions (the great depression of 2008 they ll call it in the future). So much for us telling him that we had resigned of our own accord and that we wanted to travel a great deal.

The rest of the journey was uneventful and we reached Delhi sometime in the mid-morning on our third day on the train.

Ode to a dead mouse

A mouse died recently. I am unsure of the cause of his death, but he probably strangled himself among the cables that suspend the elevator in my apartment. He hung there for a few days thereafter , going down when the lift went up, and up when it went down. Talk about being denied dignity in death. What's more, his remains were the centre of a bureaucratic wrangle between the pest control department and the sanitation department.
The mouse has been missing from his gravity defying grave lately. I ll remember him though - whenever I use the elevator . I wonder what I would have told the mouse if I had met him before his tragic end. Here's some verse on our imagined rendezvous.

Out of his hole he did peek
With a very plaintive squeak
I said to him: " Stop being so musical!
You'll soon be de-composing"

Marketing

Like everyone else, I feel sick of having to listen to the same advertisements over and over again on radio , especially if a jingle gets stuck in my head. Such a constant attack on my senses makes me wonder as to how many people are out there trying to convince me what I should be buying today and what special offer or discount I should be availing.
I had this notion that marketing will probably pursue me till the grave (Another one of the things that one can't help I guess ). Therefore, the piece of nonsense verse that follows is about the possibility of a novel marketing idea - products for the dead.

I have decided to call it ' The over-eager sales girl '

I said: "You're making a blunder
I'm already six feet under
And my best friend's a spade "
She said: "Sir, you can still take ghost-paid"