London

Londoners are a quite humorous and hospitable folk. If at all we see anywhere the fruits of capitalism trickling down, we witness it in abundance here. My brother’s barber, I was told, drives a BMW. An electrician who came in to fit his dish antenna, owns a villa in Spain, which he rents out when he is not living there.

The property prices have sky rocketed to such an extent, that Londoners purchase expensive houses, furnish them and go about finding a person to live in them, while they themselves dwell in modest habitats. And I was left wondering as to why these prices might have soared?

Well, one of the likely answers I stumbled upon, was when I was on a tour of London, atop a double decker bus, with it’s top sawed off. And it made quite a pretty sight. There was this guide, guiding us through the city, hollering at the top of a bus, telling us that the authorities claim their pound (5 pounds to be precise), when they let the buses through to ply on the London roads. She showed us a property owned by a lady. Now, we have this very old lady, living in a fabulously large house, bang in the middle of London, with acres of garden around her. She uses some of the rooms to store a lot of old priceless paintings. Probably she has this property handed down to her through generations. Must be quite a few years since it was purchased. Wonder why she does not invite anyone to live in it. The mortgage, if at all, must be killing her.

There is this another gentleman who has his house nearby, quite a large one, and also a large garden around it, who has not had to sell any of his land so far, and he charges upto a thousand pounds in rent per minute, for any business wanting to occupy his premises. With so much of land being cornered by so little folk, there is no wonder the prices hit the sky.

Another curious aspect of the city is it’s taxis. I had always thought that the taxis in Mumbai must be the oldest ever. But I found taxis in London even older than Mumbai. Probably these must be the first automobiles ever built. This obsession of Londoners, to preserve the old, has gone to too much of an extreme. We still have people here who use horses as their means of transport, and they still donn the same old dresses. But I guess we see them only at a predetermined hour.

The architecture too is weird. The windows closest to the ground are large, and they grow scantier in size, and more in number as the house approaches the sky. And it’s not because the houses are tall. Not many of the houses I have seen are more than three storeys high. I have been unable to fathom the reason for this. Perhaps the masons lost interest, or grew plain lazy as they neared completion.

We have another square (Trafalgar is it?), where there is this gentleman who has been elevated to so great a height, Lord Nelson I presume, that common folk cannot lay their sights on him. I was told he won some battle, and was honoured in this fashion by Londoners. Some four lions sit patiently down there, staring in all four directions. But I am pretty sure he is not going to climb down. Then there is this statue of another person, who is sitting on a horse and riding in the direction of his death. I wonder if he knew what awaited him. He was beheaded at the end of the road, I was told. Riding away to his destiny, eh?

Then again, we have bridges that are split in half, which open up when a ship wants to pass through. It was perhaps sliced in half as some ship, with a high mast, passed through. So they built another one between the towers above this bridge, and retained the original one as a folding one. Some curious cigar shaped buildings dot the London sky, owned by a Swiss firm who’s into insurance, looks like a missile wanting to take off. They could probably have an ad, showing their building, with a subtitle “waiting to take off”. (I wonder if I will get any commission out of this, if and when implemented. The London entrepreneurship is biting me). We have another large wheel, something similar to a giant wheel, which turns too slowly, and we are allowed only one round in it, sitting, rather standing, right besides that famous river, The Thames.

These people are so stubborn, that they have not allowed even Americans to own their own embassy. It belongs to the Crown, they say. And the Queen needs an invitation to get into the city of London. Strange, I say, what?

But overall, I have not seen so green a city as London. The quaint little houses, never more than three stories tall. No iron grills on windows. Well laid out roads, footpaths on all roads, disciplined traffic. Clean toilets, and public transport buses. Well documented underground, well stocked superstores, uninterrupted electricity. Hmmm, London sure is good. :) Perhaps they need to work on M25 to make the average London motorist, a harried human, a happier lot.

talldarkman