Ottawa is a bit single-dimensional when compared to Montreal. There are software designers, there are hardware designers, there are optical design engineers -- and precious little else. Admittedly, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Still, cubicle to home, home to cubicle, that's the famous Ottawa litany. I once lost my wallet in an Ottawa suburb. It was returned the next day by a software designer, an Infosys-Nortel chap, no less. So you see, when I said there is little else than software and engineering in Ottawa, I was exaggerating only a little bit. Ottawa's taxi drivers provide a nice little sub-culture, a departure from the monotonous hi-tech one that seems to permeate almost everything here. They are to a large extent an immigrant population -- Indians, Lebanese, Somalians, Iraqis, Ethiopians, Caribbeans and a few East Europeans. Generally, taxi drivers make good conversationalists. It is obviously in the nature of their job. There is something reassuringly informal about a conversation in a taxi. For one, there is nothing forced about it. Even that most forced of queries, the one about the weather, assumes a natural air when you are in a taxi. It is brought about by, I think, a sense of non-permanence, the subconscious feeling that you are between origin and destination, a temporary departure from anything that could possibly tie you down. Not entirely dissimilar to why people keep coming back to cinema houses to see endless song-and-dance sequences in Hindi movies. The last reasonably long dialogue I'd with a taxi driver was probably one of the funnier ones I've had in some time. It struck me as something worth sharing. Here's an almost verbatim reproduction: Mohammed is from Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. Most Somalians, surprising for a country beset by drought and factional fighting, are a jovial, happy-go-lucky lot. There's a bit of Goa in their culture. I had called for a taxi just outside our building. Mohammed bade me a cheery 'Hi'. "Krishna?" The upturned eyebrows reminded me of Courtney Walsh. There was the same transparent sincerity. I replied in the affirmative and got in. "You from India, right?" asked Mohammed, "I think I drive you before." "Yeah, I think so too," I said. "You have good movies, Hindi movies," he said. I'd heard Somalians talk about Hindi movies before. They seemed to have a lot of places that showed Bollywood films in Mogadishu. So I smiled and nodded. But his next line took me completely off guard. "Rrekkha, Hemamalini, Raj Kapoor, and oh yeah, Asha Pareeekh!" Raj Kapoor you can understand, Hemamalini maybe, but Asha Parekh in Mogadishu? That was stretching reality a bit. "Rrekkha, what a body, and Asha Pareeekh.... ooh!" That was the first time I heard Asha Parekh being talked of in such glowing terms. I imagined a thousand Somalians crammed into a movie house watching her. I felt a bit weak. Not letting me dwell on that, he said, "And the billion-dollar man, Amitaaabh Bhaajjan!" "These days the women," he continued, his voice rising in disapproval, "the women, all modern dresses, copying Western habits." "Yeah," I said, "it's impossible to tell one actress from the other." "But, still, no kissing!" he said with a degree of vehemence that suggested there was hope yet. "We have same cultures, your women, shy, you know. We like song and dance, same as you." I pondered on the possible wrong conclusions you could draw from watching Hindi movies. But maybe he had a point. "I don't know why these young people [the modern Canadian teenagers], they take their girlfriends to bars, they stoopid." "They have no culture," he said. "We used to take our girls home, we get an Indian movie. You know, nice music. The girls, they like that. We watch English films, when we guys get together. You know, action -- James Bond... But with girls, you watch Hindi movies. "English movies, you watch for sex, kissing you know. Hindi movies, you watch, you look into the eyes of the actress, wonder whether the actress fall in love with you. Rreekha, ohh, dose eyes... Mohaabhat, mohaabhat, dil, dil...." I grinned broadly. "Yeah, these teenagers, they dumb. They take girls to pubs, get into fights," he went on. "A few days back, I was driving this girl back home. She was crying, her boyfriend got into a fight with someone. I tell her, you are stoopid. Why not sit at home and have a nice supper with your boyfriend?" "Yeah," I agreed. "It is pretty stupid." He turned into my apartment driveway. After a temporary diatribe on today's youth, he had returned to his jolly self. "Okay... you take it easy, have a good weekend," he smiled, and I paid him his fare and got out. Now I have begun to see Hindi movies in a new light. Maybe, after all, there is something in all that running around trees. And it took a man from Mogadishu to open my eyes. Q for the day: Krishna Kumar prefers Montreal to Ottawa and Calicut to Montreal, so what will he write on next? Tell us what you think of this diary
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