WATER, WATER!

Sheraton Suites Country Club Plaza,
Kansas City (MO):

Indians don't know the value of water, a co-traveller told me in the flight to Washington from Doha, where I bought two bottles of water worth six dollars (make no rupee conversion, or the feeling of remorse will only get worse), and sat in a corner comforting myself with every sip of it. Sadly though, I threw the bottles that I should have treasured for the days to come. I saw, many others did retain the empty bottles in their baggage. My mom had said, carry one, and I'd rejected her idea as a trash. Now I know! I'm discovering what the fellow traveller meant when he said we don't value our water; but take that, with a pinch of salt and pepper (or paper, if you are in a plush American toilet). You'll crave! Oh mom! Water my water!

It's just been a day that I arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, for our orientation seminar ahead of the five-month assignment with the US newspapers, and I'm already a trifle nostalgic about leaving behind my Orange city, the cotton county that I love and behold, my parents who have all their life let me be my own, and my lovely wife, who doesn't always complain about my travelling legs. I'm losing the great IPL, no not the pervert lavish cricket circus, but the crucial 2009 Indian Parliamentary League, the Indian general elections, but I'm certainly about to learn many a new thing here on the fellowship programme. Among all, the world, as it stands today.

We are nine fellows, selected from all parts of the world - Brazil, Egypt, Pakistan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Pakistan, Uganda and India (myself).

Figure it out, almost every country we represent at the 2009 Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship is in transition (some are through bloody transitions), and we are in a land that has just begun to feel the heat of the Meltdown.

As my new friend, Randy Smith, one of the most senior journalists at the Kansas City Star, told me over lunch Friday afternoon, it's only getting worse.

It's some experience to be here in the mad, mad times! For, it has terrible bearing on us back in India. The layoff saga is unfolding there as well, pretext or no pretext. Friends are losing jobs in the newsrooms there as well.

Farmers have been dying in their thousands. Now, the migrants are losing livelihoods. And there are linkages with what's happening here in the US of A.

On the more materialistic vein, well... I've never pampered myself to such a luxury before. The plush hotel rooms, the cushy seats of cars that I'd never heard of; the continental menu that I am only learning to hear, eat and digest; and the eye-catching beauty of Kansas city and her neighbourhoods.

It's already making me nervous: What if it becomes a habit? May be, it's just a thought, and it'll pass by once I get to the newsroom of Sun Sentinel, South Florida when I move to Fort Lauder dale on the east shores next month after out three-week orientation seminar here in Missouri, the central state of America.

Drop the mind here before you go, my father had advised me before I started for the US of A. Made sense. For, I'm here to make new friends, understand a new way of life, meet new people, taste new things and study newer systems, good or bad. And more importantly study how the US farm and trade policy impacts our farmers home.

Yet I must say, India is India. We may not value our water, as my fellow traveller so believed, but we do care for the thirsty.

And we don't use our paper like this (you know what I mean)!

Ah! Where's my water!