Brobdingnag chronicles

Gulliver is not the only guy to have visited Brobdingnag. I have been there too. In fact this message comes to you directly from Brobdingnag, the land of gigantic things. You would have thought that Gully was off his rockers when he talked of this land of big creatures. Obviously everything would look swell to a shipwrecked and miserable guy who's just been given an extra large mug of coffee. But he was not as far off the mark as you would imagine.

This place is similar to every other land I've set eyes on but for one thing - size. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about let us consider a coffee outlet here called Starbucks. Their smallest cup holds about a gallon of coffee. And it comes with only one straw. A B'dingnagian light meal usually leaves me feeling like a piece of lead and a cup of water here fills the bladder twice over. A small mall can accomodate everybody from Fiji. I even heard a bloke at a university called Stanford call it a small place and the campus is actually spread over eight thousand acres. Obelix would surely have gone 'These B'd'n'gians are crazy. tap! tap! tap!'.

But the most shocking feature has to be the automobiles. While the rest of the world faces an energy crisis with crude selling at two Iraqi heads a barrel, folks here still drive around in monster trucks. They probably use gas to wash their cars. Public transport is unheard of and roads only get smoother and wider by the day. Discomfort of the lowest degree is intolerable. These people remind me of the pea princess, the one who woke up sore because there happened to be a pea below her mattress. Well, they better watch out because the path they are driving down leads to a bed of nails and they dont want to arrive there with soft bottoms.

Thats where we Bangloreans score over them. Admittedly we dont boast of such luxuries but we've heard of the ant and the grasshopper story. So we've been brought up on bumpy, congested roads. Blood comes cheaper than oil and the sight of a large car makes our stomach turn. To us, the day vehicles go bust would only be a blessed release. In other words, we are future proof !