A year of adventure

We are completing an important personal milestone - one year in this country. The clock has been ticking fast and we have settled down pretty well. It's time to pause and take stock of the year.

We have come a long way from the day we decided to move out of Boston. We adopted a new country as our home, encountered a new culture, found new jobs, travelled a bit, bought cars, bought a house. Along the way we learnt valuable lessons in life, a few of which I am listing below:

• A return ticket can be cheaper than a one way ticket.
• Comprehensive car insurance can be cheaper than simple third party (collision) insurance.
• Costco is not necessarily the cheapest place around.
• Six inches of snow can bring down a country for six days.
• You can be driving for ten years, but can still fail a driving test.
• And finally my personal favorite: You can qualify for a mortgage, but you can still be a credit risk for a bank current (checking) account.

As you grow older, you tend to cling on to familiar things. You are surprised less often and tend to stop processing information. This whole moving experience has been one big adventure with lots of little surprises in store. Here is to more of these surprises!

The first vote

I follow politics quite religiously just like any average desi guy. I have lived in three different countries - India, US and now UK - but I have never voted in an election (school and college elections do not count). Until today that is.

This unique record of not voting is purely due to my nomadic lifestyle. I went to college in India at age 17, away from home. I think there was one national election and one state election in those four years. I had to go home to vote and since I did not take this right seriously, I must have skipped the travel.

Then I ended up in US for eleven years. I was on a visa there, so I could not vote. Quite a few number of elections were conducted in India. But it is just hard to include elections into the twenty other criteria used to time a trip to India. So I kept following Indian (and US) politics, but never voted in those prime youth years.

When we moved to UK last year, I learnt to my pleasant surprise that wife and I eligible to vote in UK parliamentary and council elections - by virtue of us being on a valid visa in UK and being citizens of a Commonwealth country (I should admit that this is the first time that being part of the Commonwealth turned out to be useful). This allowance seems rather generous - after all no other Commonwealth country, not the least India, would let UK citizens living there to vote. But who am I question this?

So wife and I filled out a form to register to vote in January. There happens to be an additional benefit to being in the electoral register - apparently it improves your credit history. Since we moved here just after the parliamentary elections in 2010, we have to wait five years to cast the big vote.

Fortunately, we get a chance today. In addition to the not-so-interesting council elections, we get to participate in the big referendum - the first one in UK since 1945 - the Alternative Vote referendum. In a nutshell, this is a referendum about whether to let people specify their preferences among all the candidates and use it to choose someone with at least 50% preference. The "No to AV" campaign, lead by the PM, has cleverly turned this into a referendum on the unpopular deputy PM, who is being blamed for everything from high petrol prices to the bad British weather. So going by the opinion polls, it looks like the current system is going to continue.

Never mind I am not electing a PM today. Never mind this is a one sided election. Nothing will stop me from heading to the polling booth tonight. I am sure you won't find someone walking out of the polling booth with a smile bigger than mine.