Life in Europe

As the clock is ticking, the time to return back home is coming nearer. I feel like sharing my experience of being in Germany which has indeed been quite important in my life. In a series of few blogs, I would try to summarize my opinion and insight about the people; I have been living with since last 2 years. I am a little bit amazed; to see how quickly these two years have passed. In a nutshell, these can be claimed as the most calm and soothing years of my life, yet full of happenings and packed of action on daily basis. I feel like I had just arrived in Germany few months back, when the world cup 2006 just started. It seems like a co-incidence that I am packing my bags exactly when the next major event in football, i.e. european championship is going on with full swing. Football seems to be like opening and closing ceremony of my stay here :-)
I have lived a completely different life here, something which gave me enough time to understand world, and even more importantly, myself. If you ask me what happened to me in these last two years, I would say nothing important, really. Rather shocking is the fact that even for most of friends and colleagues back in India, things have not yet changed so much. On even stranger note, everybody is just now seems to be gearing up to get married, change job, build house etc. It feels like as if time in India had been waiting for me !

My experience in Germany and Europe has been quite diverse, yet very repetitive in nature. I visited almost all popular destinations of Europe, except UK and portugal. To my surprise and rather a bit of disappointment, as I continued my journey, I felt more and more of commonness rather than difference in people and culture across this continent. Thanks to a rich Roman heritage, I hardly feel any difference in buildings and architecture when I browse through my gigabytes of photo collection. Most of the time I can’t recall which building belongs to which place. And about people, well its impossible to tell who belongs from where, unless they show a very specific pattern in their style and characteristics i.e. hair color, build, dressing senses.
Despite being so harmonious in culture, Europeans retain their acute vividness in terms of language, people’s thinking and their social interaction in life. I would rather like to classify people by their region, instead of their nationality. After historic implementation of European Union agreement, Europe has now having very fragile boundary between countries and mostly you don’t notice when you cross a country while travelling; unless you really see the signboards and equipped enough to differentiate between Dutch and Danish and Deutsch! So friends, here I present the first of these blogs, which is about the country I like so much… i.e. who else other than meine Leibe Deutschland, Germany ...... Lets talk about the Good Germans !

The good Germans

I would like to name this starting blog after one of the not so popular, yet very important movie which hollywood has ever produced for Germany. So far, hollywood director's favourite theme about Germany has always been the second world war. Perhaps they are always eager to cast a blond German speaking evil guy, who looks more like a machine than a man, as their main villains in world war related movies. Mostly, these movies always end up showing how bad Germans had been, and how stupidly arrogant they were to loose wars after wars despite their obvious strengths. I am not trying to be a judge of historical facts here, so I cant comment about what happened wrong and what was right. But from my opinion, audience around the world would always like to see their own national hero fighting against an imposed war from a bad foreign guy and finally win the game despite all the odds.

Germans, sadly, have always been at the fore front of bearing this projected hatred, as far as the world war II is concerned....

Wouldnt that be interesting to know that where this entire civilzation of cold hearted warm blooded dumb soldiers, who dont know anything except to follow the orders of their superiors to shoot and kill, has disappeared in recent Germany? Has this nation changed so much during last 60 years that all of such species of people are virtually vanished from their own soil, dear to them as their holy Fatherland? Where has this strong Germanism gone which had causes so much fear and hatred around the world; that all of the world's major powers came togather to defeat a single country and its not so important allies? Has that evil Germany along with its barbaric Germans been completely swiped away from the face of the earth?

I think not..

As far as I believe, it never existed even before...

I believe the Germans were only as bad, as at some time, the Britishers or French had been. Germans were the last civilization of the modern world to wake up and stretch their muscles, to claim their own pie of colonizations. English, Spanish, Portugese, French, all of them had been equally cruel and fanatic when they expanded on their journey to capitalize the whole world. Germans probably were sleeping at that time. But when the woke up, much of the world had already been looted up by these great and greedy naval powers. Had Germans been quicker to start 50 years back, modern world could have witnessed a completley different political power map. But unluckily, till the time they realized it, the world of colonization was already at its fall, and the so called great Nations of the world were very very afraid, that they might not get tossed away from the same evil, that they had created centuries ago. They came togather to fight a single nation and its not so confident allies, and the rest as they say was...

The history....

Coming back to this movie, those who have seen this, probably might have felt how the Germany was crushed to its knees after the world war was over. Those who havent yet seen it, would probably like to know that this movie revolves around the post worldwar Germany, in Berlin, where everybody was interested in taking out what little has been left with poor war-torned and ashamed nation. The story revolves around a American journalist, George Clooney who is somehow related with the wife of a poor German Rocket Scientist. The Russians and Americans are very interested to find this scientist to develop their own Missile programs. In his short role, our spiderman Toby Maguire potrays a typical German chap who is confused and doesnt know what to do with what the War has brought to his country...

Overall, a touching movie, but probably not so entertaining....

Germans, as other europeans, are as human as anybody could had been. They have been as sympathetic, tolerant, peace loving and dedicated as most of the other civilized nations. In fact it is pretty interesting to see that during my trip across Europe, I found Germans always to be more civilized and organised than any other country. Yes, you feel a typical coldness in their behaviour, yet they have the most of the human quality which anyone could expect in a nation.

Otherwise what could have justified the immense productivity of a small country like Germany, which makes it Number 1 exporter of the world, even as of now, surpassing USA, China and Japan. How could a small nation, reduced to almost rubbles, has become so much powerful in 60 years that it still produce worlds finest and costliest machinery, chemical and heavy industries ?
Isnt it fascinating how they did it, while even after 60 years if independence, we are still struggling to adjust our fiscal deficits and curb inflation ?

The things I like most about the Germany are also the things which people hate most about it. Germans are very mechanical, practical, sometimes too much immersed in what they do, and feeling too responsible for what they do. The sense of duty is followed very strictly, and still Germans treat their parents and ancestors as their role models. The country has a very solid foundation which was built by a dedicated and hardworking generation, and which would continue to propel the growth of the country for coming years.