My YMCA sojourn

This is a post that I was intending to finish and put up on the blog a long time ago. But, for various reasons, mostly bordering on the lazy, I haven't gone about completing it. This is the first half of it, I shall soon go down memory lane and add some more character sketches.


One of the advantages of staying at the YMCA was that since I was occupying the dorm with four other people at a point of time, I got to meet people from various nationalities. The international-ness of Singapore really came to the fore here since every couple of days I would meet someone new, from some country that I had only read about or imagined to be so and so without actually being there physically or interacting with any of its people.It helped that the YMCA attracts a large number of tourists looking for a stop over in Singapore and then moving onto more 'touristy' locations such as Indonesia and Cambodia. It was also a good thing that I've been in this dorm for the past 28 days now, occupying the same bed from Day 1. And so, this being the eve of my departure from the YMCA premises, I thought this would be the best time to recollect all the people I've met so far in my brief sojourn.So here we go, I'll try and see if I can remember them all. If I do forget someone then it means that either the interaction with that person was too brief to register an impression or the person was just not interesting enough. For privacy or whatever's sake, I won't be taking names:

Old Swedish guy: Now I met this Old Swedish guy who quite surprisingly has a Bengali name and a Bengali dad who hailed from Calcutta. Now as much as this came as a surprise to me, even more odd was the man's behaviour. With the keen wolfish like stare that reminded me of Hannibal Lecter, this chap had an ego that tried to compensate for the minimalism of Sweden's land mass.When he first introduced himself and spoke about his line of work, it seemed a little complicated to me but then he mentioned that he was a researcher and his area of focus was the impact of IT and outsourcing on the economic and social fabric in developing nations especially South Asia. He also mentioned that he was in Singapore on research work and had an 'office' in the Management University opposite the Y. But something about him kept striking me as odd, maybe it was just my cynical mind, whatever be the case, I ended up Googling him just to be sure that he wasn't a psycho killer or a paedophile on the run from Sweden. However, he turned out to be just what he had mentioned, a prominent researcher and also a Harvard graduate. Hmm, that was impressive. What was not impressive was his tendency to drawl on and on about the quality of social life amongst young people, especially young girls in the city. According to him, the girls here didn't socialise enough with the members of the opposite sex and lead isolated lives. He was of the opinion that they were more pragmatic than emotional, worrying more about college and work than about boyfriends and heartbreaks. He also mentioned that he had an Indian girlfriend, Bengali to be more specific with whom he was having a bit of a tumultous time.He kept assuring me that Bengali women were a complicated lot and how one never knows where you are with them. One morning, while I stepped out of the Y on my way to the MRT station, I caught him walking in, all bleary eyed and dishevelled hair, his shirt hanging out of his belt as if he'd been lying drunk somewhere and enquired. He mentioned that his tiff had now blown out into a whole hearted fight and he was none the worse for it. I wished him luck only to be reminded of the difficulty of dealing with Bengali women. The next day, still in the eye of the Bengali storm, my Swedish friend took an early morning flight to London on some urgent work. When i had met him in the lobby for the last time, I had suggested that he go to India instead to try and pacify his girl, but he had snapped back sharply saying that since I knew nothing about the affair, I was not in any position to suggest anything. So that was the end of that.