Malaysia photos and How I know I'm descended from peasants...

I still entertain some hopes of writing about the Kerala trip in the near future, but I promised myself I'd go to bed before 1am today, so just a few random things for tonight.

First, as some of you may have noticed, I posted photos from the trip to Malaysia on flickr a couple of days ago. Though I'll say more about the trip later, Michael and I flew into Kuala Lumpur on a 2am flight from Chennai. We got in around 10am and made it to our incredibly awesome hotel in time for an amazing buffet breakfast were most awesome trip yet began...Anyhow, that you're interested, I leave you with photos for now :-). The photos are divided between Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi, the island resort that we went to for one day. My closing comment in this micro-post about Kuala Lumpur is that I have a profound appreciation for $100/night 5 star hotels and strongly recommend that any of you who coming to SE Asia check one out if possible - particularly if you could generally never afford a 5 star (certainly the boat that I'm in).

I feel like I had a bunch of whitty comments to make, but my brain appears to be shutting down early, so I'll stick with some commentary about drivers/servants/etc.

So first, I have a new/long-term driver now to go along with my very own car (below). His name is Shrikant and he's married with two kids (boy and girl). He's been driving for 20 years and speaks amazingly good English for a driver. He worked at the British Consulate here for a while, so that might be part of it, but it's hard to believe he picked it all up in 8 months. Anyhow, first I want to talk a little about pujas. As I understand it, pujas are basically blessings/rituals that Hindu's do to ask for protection and good luck from various gods in reference to things they interact with on a daily basis. So if you're a student, then you'll do puja on your books. If you're a factory worker, then you'll do it on your machines and so on. There are two days in early October where apparently a large portion of India does annual pujas for these sorts of things they interact with frequently. Cars being a typical example for drivers. So my driver did puja for my car last week. This essentially involves cleaning it very thoroughly, then decorating it a bit and performing several blessings on the car. Each blessing seemed to end with some sort of edible plant being smashed open - I believe Shrikant used a pumpkin and a shelled coconut - and the blessings involved burning a small bit of incense on said plant as you walked around the car blessing each side. Driving around Chennai for thes two days, you saw a large number of cars/auto rickshaws with some puja on them (flower garlends are particularly common). One of the last steps is to drive over a lime stategically positioned under each wheel - Skrikant asked me to do it, so it took a comically long time for me to figure out how to start a manual transmission car (Shrikant told me after a minute).

A few minutes on youtube came up with this video of a car puja which is at least somewhat similar to what Shrikant did with the car.

I'll try to remember to get a picture of Shrikant and the car at some point. He seems like a pretty good guy.

This brings me to how I know I wasn't cut out to be rich or aristocratic: I simply can't really figure out how to interact with servants. I currently have a part-time cook/cleaner who speaks limited english and a full-time driver who speaks really good english. I tend to interact more with the driver and also have basically direct control over the variable amount of time that he's away from his family on any given day. This coupled with the fact that I know he has kids makes me feel guilty whenever I know I'm going out after work and am dragging him along.

Good example is tomorrow where I'm planning to go out for dinner/drinks and don't expect to be home until after 10 or 11. In an effort to be considerate, I told him that tonight and said that I could head into the office a little late tomorrow if he'd like to spend some time at home. Then I suggested 11:30 (usual time is closer to 10) and asked if that was okay with him...which is probably good from a consideration for others standpoint, but I ask whether things are okay with him a lot even though he's technically my employee - should I be giving him veto power over my schedule/plans? I'm not sure if this makes much sense to anyone other than me, but this whole dynamic of servant-type employees is just hard for me to grasp. I suppose that's how I know I must not be descended from aristocracy - or I'd feel more comfortable conforming his life to my schedule? Other than potentially inconveniencing myself, the downside with trying to be this accomodating is that it makes it easy to be taken advantage of...It's also worth noting that my driver does get overtime when he works more than 10 hours in a day (from the company) in addition to whatever other overtime stuff I pay him and the money I give him for meals on weekends/late evenings.

In case you're wondering why I didn't feel this guilt complex with my previous drivers. It didn't bother me as much because they didn't really have family in the immediate area, so I knew I wasn't keeping them away from their kids.

I suppose a related point is that I need to just be willing to deal with the sketchy/dirty auto rickshaw drivers sometimes when I go out late, but coming home from work with my laptop, its incredibly helpful to have a secure place to stash my computer...

Anyhow, so ends my musings and I really need to head to bed...(1am again...)