Is staying put the better idea?

A walk through the Trafalgar Square, a view from the Brooklyn Bridge, stealing the vista at the Beverly Hills or working with the big brand IT companies in the Bay area, not to mention the objective of earning salaries in dollars or pound sterling’s.

“Tell a techie that you would pay well and send him onsite (abroad), he would let you slice a part of his body and agree to be your slave for the rest of his life,” said a friend in an IT company jokingly.

But now, the seesawing of the stock market and the threat of the currencies losing their value gives us the sneaking suspicion that life at home is much better than a stint in any of these countries. After all, the only threat in Bangalore is the threat of afternoon showers or when someone fails to notice the craters on M G Road footpath and lets a few lose change from their shirt pockets roll down. That is, if you are not the kind of techie who reads stock market numbers and get antsy about recession.

Brethrens sweating for the IT brands may not completely agree with this, but there is
something about the basics of our lives — from the cheap and healthy food to other inexpensive necessities—which makes them immune to the slump economic forecasters have often warned us about.

Home sweet home

The best thing being home is that you are fine with the small comforts and the very fact that they are small would ensure their presence in your life, recession or not. Your cot facing up to a window that always reveals the greenery outside. Besides the fact that green cover in the city could be ripped apart in the name of ‘development’, or for some strange reasons you lose your home, the bedroom and the cot, these are pretty much guaranteed to be there elsewhere even on a worst  recession. Going abroad, especially to places glorified by the camera lenses and clever angles of the photographers, would be a nice thing on days when we suspend disbelief seeing a healthier stock market and a robust currency market.

Now though, Uncle Sam is coughing up sick blood and old Europe is in the deathbed of debts. If you are over-awed by the beauty of French country side, the fearful slide of their stocks in the threat of Greece and Spain going bankrupt must make you enjoy the marginal comforts that have somehow remained immune to the threats of “double dip” recession.

Notwithstanding ‘Zindagi na milegi dobara’ and the reverberation of Spanish in the country, Rafael Nadal and the magical footballers, Spain has been in danger of defaulting and those reading the bad news would not be persuaded by the fiestas that are becoming popular in Indian shores.

The beauty of the Nordic countries, their relative advancement and peace may have lured many in the past, but after Norway carnage, the lustrous vista of Scandinavia appears more eerie. It is lesser said the better of the old empire, whose house was burning literally as rioters turned looters on the streets of London. In many ways, the riots were a nightmare for developmental economists who associate growth and wealth generation with lesser crime and disorder. In their haste to find reasons for such blatant disregard for law, some British intellectuals have been blaming immigration.

This was just when Britain needed time to recover from the fury and embarrassment of the phone hacking episode. In its long history, who would have thought a Scotsman’s invention would make the News Of The World News of the Other World? Having played a role in the removal of Sir Paul Stevens from the Mets, the episode would have indirectly sown the seeds for this riot. Credit be to our citizens, our dear old city had seen nothing closer to the mayhem in the Burrows even during the most trying times such as the low intensity blasts.

And, do we even think of Japan for a visit? Now? First we need to learn how to survive earthquakes and learn how not to panic as buildings shake and the world look impossibly distant from the 50 story building. Then the radiation risks.

They say the same about cell phones boiling our brains like eggs, but so long as the scientists dispute each other’s findings and do not show anything concrete to back their theories, we would be glad to crouch over our cell phones and forget the world. The same cannot be said of real radiation.

So what other place than home looks more welcoming?