Shilo When I Was Young

Unexpected Song

2011-12-15T18:57:00.000+04:00

I walk out of the office at 10.30 pm, rather tired and dispirited, as one would be. In the lift lobby, I hear music pounding from the roof - JWT's having some species of jamboree on the roof, I saw them setting up earlier. I consider crashing it, but catch sight of myself in the fancy glass wall and reconsider in a hurry. When the lift arrives it contains a picturesque man, only slightly unsteady. When I get in he asks me confidentially: is this going up or down? Down, I say kindly, but with a private grin. I am suddenly and strangely cheered by this sign that it's a good party upstairs. Downstairs I find two girls in full carnavale mode handing out something or the other to people coming in. I assume they're part of the JWT theme. But when I pause to take a picture I learn that the person accompanying them works for Lowe, who are having a rival party down the road and are here poaching guests for good-natured, though mysterious, reasons.

The private grin is now very much out in the open. In fact, my evening has suddenly become so wonderfully nuts that I feel as effervescent as if I did go to one or both of the parties. It's one of those moments when I remember what I like about being in advertising. Nobody parties like an agency. And nobody else chooses a Monday night for a Street Party that proclaims "1 Night, 3 Bars, Free flow".

Right now, I'm sitting on the train with an invitation in one hand, my phone in the other, a manic grin on my face, writing this. It started as a Tweet, migrated to a Facebook status when Twitter proved inadequate and finally fetched up here when I realized even FB did not have enough scope!

You'd think the invite would be tempting but even my dead body wouldn't go to a party looking like I do now. As you can see from the picture!

Princesses – the tech specs

2011-11-22T12:00:00.000+04:00

My niece's world is currently ruled by the various Disney princesses. My world has consequently been er...enriched?... by new versions of the fairytale princesses I knew when I was a kid (Disney was still in its Mickey-Donald phase then, so I had the Andersen-Grimm non-musical version). The rant about Disney leaching out the uncomfortable life lessons - and therefore the soul - of the stories is another post. This is just about the princesses, the ones in the written fairy tales. The male leads didn’t get much attention; most of them are pretty much one-dimensional (as my niece has subconsciously registered - she mixes them up freely in her games). Which would explain the other important feature of the fairytales: eternal love is usually accomplished in a single look. Here they are, seven of the princesses as I see them, with a handy watchability guide for the movie version:

1. Cinderella wallowed in soot and self-pity and needed a fairy godmother to help her go to the ball. The ugly sisters should have shared the prince, he would have had more fun in the long run.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 2

2. Sleeping Beauty slept through it all. She didn’t seem very upset about being kissed awake by a trespasser. The Disney movie resembles the story in only three points - malevolent witch curse, death by spindle and wakened by kissing. The other 70 minutes are different and not too bad.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 7

3. Snow White was the sort of idiot who took food from strangers and her prince was a necrophiliac who kissed girls in coffins.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 2

4. The nameless one in the Frog Prince was a spoilt and unscrupulous brat who would promise anything just to get her way. Then she came up against something even slimier than herself. Also, this is one story that the Disney version has vastly - and I mean, vastly - improved.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: Probably a lot but have only had to see it once so don't know.

5. The Little Mermaid… no, I can’t be rude about her. Good fairy tales can stand up to the kind of critical appreciation you apply to Shakespeare, and this is one of them. You can see it as a simple parable about not hankering after what you can’t have. But it’s also a complex illustration of poignant darknesses – an Anne-Boleyn style sacrifice of the self to ambition, the fatal attraction of unequal, unrequited love, the fate of the second woman in a certain kind of relationship. It could also be a whole thesis on the inadvisability of giving up that much of your fundamental self for a relationship. Needless to say, the Disney version has none of the above subtext whatsoever.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 2. Be warned that it has spawned sequels involving the mermaid's daughter and mother.

6. Rapunzel, I like! Apart from anything else, there’s something very cool about your fate being decided by a cabbage. This Pantene princess had spirit. She let a man into her room secretly and provided the means herself. And after the wicked witch blinded the guy, she said screw you wicked witch and went after him anyway. Disney's fairly recent interpretation of Rapunzel, Tangled, is a great version, too.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 7

7. My favourite is Beauty. This is the only one that is a true romance and necessarily has a more detailed male lead. Beauty had work to do – she was not strictly a princess. She had chores, a job and human affection for people other than her prince. She found herself put on a difficult path and stuck to it, being brave when she had to be. She gave the beast a chance, unlovely though he was in face and character and unashamedly so. And before you could say Stockholm Syndrome, the beast let her go with no conditions attached. She returned of her own free will. They lived happily ever after.
No. of times you can sit through the movie without losing your mind: 7

The grapes of wrath

2011-11-10T16:07:00.000+04:00

Recently I made myself unpopular by spurning a bottle of Grover’s La Reserve as “singularly undrinkable”. What I meant of course was that I didn’t like it, but in the manner of wine-drinkers dangerous with little knowledge, I made it a problem with the wine. That’s just the tip of the personality disorder.

I can’t remember when wine, for me, went from being the thing you drink at Christmas in the wrong glasses to being what you drink, period. For that matter, I couldn’t tell you when or why my “hard drink” of choice became rum and coke or gin and tonic. I’ve never been a vodka person. Then one day it was all about wine.

I didn’t even have the excuse of being in the thick of the “wine revolution”; it just happened. Suddenly I had wine racks and bottles that meant more than “red or white”. I spent ages in wine boutiques picking them out. I courted eviction by rearranging bits of my landlord’s kitchen so I could store them properly. I worried about them in Dubai’s summer humidity. I changed my food habits to accommodate them. I did a lot of research and became insufferable on the subject, especially after a few glasses of it. I got caught up in it all for a while, until the sheer number of moving parts tired me out.

When you thought you’d finally grasped the grapes, you discovered unpronounceable Hungarian varietals. Just as you got some insight into the intricacies of France’s wine-growing regions and untangled them from the broader strokes of Napa Valley, along came an Argentinean Malbec, a Spanish Rioja or a German Riesling. Australia is even larger than France and New Zealand may be small, but it’s prolific. Then India joined the fray. When South African and Lebanese friends threatened to stop inviting me, I decided to give it a rest. They gave really good parties.

There was also the constant guilt that no wine enthusiast will admit to, the feeling that if you really liked the taste it had to be sub-standard. Whenever I started feeling particularly affectionate towards one – a certain South African Pinotage comes to mind – I would abandon it in a hurry without looking too closely at my reasons. Come to think of it, that bears close resemblance to other parts of my life as well, so perhaps I shouldn’t try shoving it off on to all wine-drinkers.

I now work with the fundamental truth of “I like it, I like it not”. The fancy language work I can do all on my own, and with a glass of water if necessary. Sometimes I just drink the syrup that somebody’s uncle made from apricots. I’m a better person for it, too. Occasionally, the snottiness I imbibed with the more difficult Bordeaux and horrifyingly mature Burgundies gets the better of me and I annoy a few friends, as above, but mostly I’m very relaxed, scrupulously agreeing with whatever my hosts think of their wine.

My fascination with the deliciously metaphorical concept of terroir has endured, though. And wine glasses, I love them, particularly the large works of art in which ruby liquid can swirl like dervishes, releasing entire Impressionist landscapes. I love that bouquet, the first multisensory tasting. A fresh bottle of wine is the calm of my flat before a party, warm light on wood, the pure sound of Leonard Cohen on my Linn before it turns into something louder, tea lights burning in a Zen holder that makes them look like they’re floating in the air, just as I am suspended in the solitude. This then, is probably the attraction for me. The rum and coke is always a noisy night out, but wine is personal. All the more reason, I suppose, for keeping my judgmental reflections to myself.

#ThankYouSteve

2011-10-06T08:05:00.008+04:00

That's one of the trends going around on Twitter this morning, asking you to tweet if you're holding an Apple product.

Well I am, as I have ever since I started using a computer a million years ago. As with any important relationship, I object to many things about Apple. I am constantly irritated by the foibles that I may or may not have thought were cute at the start. But I have no desire to leave, nor any fundamental doubts about them. Beneath the appearance obsession and the posturing that they've lately taken to doing, it's still about the good product. I own both a PC and a Mac. I've messed about with Linux. I've owned a Windows phone, an Android one and an iPhone. A Sony mp3 player, as well as an iPod. When all is said and done, I think the Kindle is way better than the iPad for digital book reading – but that's about it. And so I say a heartfelt "Thank you Steve".

There could not be a better orbituary for the man than the old Apple ad.

"Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits, the rebels
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes,
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them
Glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do
Is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough
To think they can change the world
Are the ones who do."

Written by Craig Tanimoto or Rob Siltanen or Ken Segall, or all three together, depending on where you get your information from. Anyway, they were all in the creative department of Chiat/Day and it was 1997. One of them also named the iMac.

Discovering Japan

2011-09-23T12:31:00.014+04:00

This is my new alarm clock. I’ve been looking for it for years – always wanted an old-fashioned one that looks and sounds like the one in the cartoons. I found it in one of the Japanese novelty stalls that sprout in the corridors of malls from time to time. It’s not that this kind of clock is not otherwise available, but the idea of paying 200 dollars for something that forces me to get up in the morning makes me ill. This one didn't cost too much more than a designer coffee, in spite of being designer green. While paying for it, I said (only half-jokingly) to the girl who was presiding over the ceremony that I hoped it would still be working next week. She drew herself up to her full height and said “it’s made in Japan ma’am.” She was so offended, she threw in a free battery! Okay, then.

I also got this. It looks and feels like a Canon lens, but is actually a thermos coffee mug. I bought it for my brother.

After the purchases, I tore myself away with some difficulty from an Angry Birds hand-held fan, a tiny portable speaker made of old newspaper, an iPhone cover in the shape of a red-faced macacque (in relief, complete with hanging tail and fur; it would look like you had a monkey hanging off your ear), an umbrella rolled inside a Japanese-girl totem pole and another, battery-operated one that changed colour as you walked. And a keychain that said “My other keychain is a fridge magnet”. The novelty merchandise from Japan is the most entertaining, creative and frankly mad stuff I’ve ever seen.

Those I’m spending Christmas with this year can consider themselves warned.

The picture of the alarm clock is something I got off Google Images (from here) because I forgot to take a photo of mine and didn't feel like waiting till later to post. This is exactly what it looks like.

Pity party

2011-08-18T18:46:00.002+04:00

I’ve been suffering from the aftermath of a strange evening out. The two new friends I went with are nice. In fact they’re a lot like my other friends. And I generally like the Saturday night vibe, bright lights and dancing and glittering places crowded with beautiful people. The place was even on the riverside – partying near water usually makes me even more effervescent. And yet the evening was the absolute pits. I finally gave up on the excellent band and the happily packed dance floor and pushed my way outside. I stood outside and watched people ebbing and flowing out of the bars and clubs along the quay with a dismayed sense of unbelonging. I saw many versions of myself from ten years ago and noted them with detachment. For the first time in my life, I ruined a night out for the others and caused the party to break up early.

The fear I felt then stayed with me through the following weeks, colouring all the other more immediate ones. I was scared my mind had wrinkled and dried out, that it would never more be capable of anything new, that lightness and sense of humour were gone for good, the effervescence flat. What frightened me most was that I’d looked forward to the evening, wanted to go out and was happy until it actually got underway. I didn’t understand it. It felt like I suddenly had a terminal disease.

But today I visited a blog I follow, read the latest post and realized it wasn’t me at all, at least not in that way. What I had wanted that evening was conversation, contact. A different kind of bar, to be with rude people who make callous jokes about your misfortunes so you can fall about laughing, to trade insults and be silly. That particular Saturday, I'd actually gone out looking for a Sunday night. That’s all it was. What a relief.

I suppose the real moral of the story is that it was a mistake to watch Bridesmaids before going out. It’s the dreariest movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Gold Gargoyle for the Most Entertaining Thing, Ever

2011-07-08T09:26:00.003+04:00

No ifs or buts, no doubts at all. Samosapedia. Click and read. you won't be able to stop and it'll take all the hours in your day. And even your boss will count the time well spent.

Gold Gargoyle for Entertaining Reviews of Hindi Movies

2011-07-07T14:07:00.003+04:00

goes to Item Number. And it's not just because she's listed my blog either.

Excerpt from review of Delhi Belly:
"My mother, may still consider taking me home and feeding me, but not before giving me the look, if during road rage I hung out of the car screaming chutiye!! at an auto-waala, but if my choice of words were to be "fuck you" in a calm non-hostile fashion and from within the confines of my car to a fellow honker, I’d probably have to park on the side and reason out with her as to where did she go wrong with her upbringing. Let’s get over it, I say."

Full review here.

Street of dreams

2011-07-03T15:11:00.011+04:00

Yes I know – I’m going on a bit about Singapore on my blog. I’ll stop soon. Right now I feel like I’m on holiday every time I go out. I had yet another surprising-Singapore moment today (whoever thought up the slogan was a genius). Walking down Orchard Road – having been disappointed by yet another bookstore, this time in Centrepoint Mall – and passing for the hundredth time an outdoor bar in this heritage-y sort of building, called, er, Outdoor, I thought I’d check it out. I turned the corner and it turned out to be a whole heritage street, not the courtyard I’d expected!

In the foreground of the photograph (does not begin to do it justice) you can see cafe tables, but further down, they're all private homes. I didn’t want to take any direct photos of the houses; it seemed intrusive. It’s called Emerald Hill Road and it’s lined on both sides with these buildings in what I think of as the shophouse style. There must be a more formal term (I’m hoping perhaps fellow blogger Tiny Island or one of her readers will know). They’re all impeccably maintained. Many of them have three storeys and gardens with two cars parked in them. The Merc + BMW package. One house had picked a vintage Maserati over the BMW and another one had chosen a Mini – and I haven’t seen either in a better setting. It was a magical street, pretty beyond belief and absolutely quiet, though I was mere yards from Orchard Road’s raucous Sunday evening crowds.

And I redouble my participation in the Singapore Land Authority bidding process in the quest to find a shophouse, black-and-white row house, barrack-converted-to-terrace or suchlike to live in. I will not rest until it’s been exhaustively proven to me that my bids for picturesque and inconvenient state property are pathetic losers. I was so close just three weeks ago. So close.

Wings of fire

2011-06-30T16:42:00.006+04:00

Seletar Flying Club is at the end of a long drive, some of it on roads that are also runways. There, among the hangar-like offices of airplane companies, around the corner from a casual parking lot for private planes, on a grassy verge by the fence that runs along the airfield you’ll find the Sunset Grill, a bunch of scarred tables and chairs under a yellow plastic awning, where you go prepared to get your hands dirty. And your nerve-endings mauled.

When I say chicken wings, don’t think of those little stubs shiny with sauce. These are whacking great pieces of chicken. That come in 36 levels of spiciness. We ordered Level 3 (we chose Level 4, but the waitress’s eyes widened with alarm so we hastily dialled it down). The first bite was a shock, the second one a recurring nightmare. From the third on it was really an adventure sport. The spice was sharp, with a tangy aftertaste, quite unlike Indian spiciness, which has a sort of rounded edge to it, perhaps from the turmeric, tamarind or curry leaves. The chicken was crisp on the outside, wonderfully juicy on the inside. It was brilliant. It should be listed in the tourist brochures along with the chilli crab. I must mention, though, that the other things on the menu we tried were uniformly execrable, except for the brownie, which was excellent.

The wings rounded off a day at the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Singapore distinguishes the natural reserves from the parks by a rigorous lack of gift shops, rides and food courts. It could be because fewer tourists go there but it also serves to centre all your attention on the reserve itself. On one viewing platform, my niece suddenly said “look there’s a fishy”. We started to explain there wasn’t enough water for one, when we spotted a slimy thing flapping about in the mud. While giving her inordinate credit for the discovery, we were riffling through the trivia in our brains, trying to place it. A fish that lived in mud. Jumping from puddle to puddle. Hopping. Skipping. Mudskipper, we said almost simultaneously. There turned out to be hundreds of them, looking like something out of Dune. There were also black crabs, grey lizards, brown birds, unbelievably noisy insects. And crocodiles. There were warning signs everywhere.

In the part where you could walk on the ground, we suddenly spotted a long, low, grey shadow coming steadily towards us with that peculiar menacing gait, short, thick legs swinging purposefully. Worse, it was approaching in a direction that would cut us off from the boardwalk. We were stuck on a narrow path, with water on either side. This time my brain’s trivia archive had no trouble offering myths and facts in rapid succession: Crocodiles can run faster than a horse. I can run faster than a tortoise. They can jump 20 feet. The trees around us were not that high, or even climbable. They react to movement, not smell or sight. I didn’t know what to do with that particular fact. Given a choice between a shark and a crocodile, I would take the shark. I didn’t know what to do with that fact either. And I wished my brain would shut the hell up and let me think.

Meanwhile my brother had noticed it was a large water monitor. We relieved our sheepish feelings by laughing at another group that didn’t notice it until they were almost on top of it. They must have cleared 20 feet easily. But since we’d scared ourselves silly, we couldn’t quite do the water path anymore. So we went hunting for chicken wings.

It was a good day. And I only just got the clever bit about serving wings at an airfield!

The cars that drove us

2011-06-28T13:11:00.011+04:00

My Dad’s first car was a 1958 Standard Super 10. The previous owner was a senior police officer, so my Dad tended to get waved through checkpoints and suchlike on his frequent road trips. A few years later, KLT 9006 became MEO 5860 when he moved to Bangalore, got a wife and a brace of kids. It also changed from black to white. “The Standard”, as my Dad refers to it, remained our car until I was sixteen. In and around Whitefield, it was iconic, practically a surname.

It’s gone everywhere and ferried everyone – long-distance journeys, school runs, doctor and vet runs, birthday parties, picnics, railways stations, bus terminals and airports at all times of the day and night (it got its windshield broken in a riot on one of these trips), social occasions in all corners of Bangalore,. And of course the mechanic. As our best friend said (they had a Standard Herald of similar vintage): “Until the Maruti came we didn’t even know that cars were supposed to run continuously, without needing constant tending.”

We knew how and when to pour water in the radiator before we were tall enough to see into the engine. We knew about batteries and distilled water and fan belts. We knew how cars worked; we saw it with our own eyes. And where today’s cars have a neat package of basic tools, my dad had a whacking great toolbox and a pile of rags that was essentially bandages and plaster. “Palani’s workshop” in Ulsoor where we had gold-card, frequent-flyer status is now a Diagnostic Centre.

The next car was The Tank, a granduncle’s 1978 Ambassador that we bought after he died. My brother and dad drove it from Calicut to Bangalore in pouring rain, the trip immortalised by my brother’s article in Autocar India. In between, there were assorted hard-bitten Mahindra Jeeps and a Hindustan Trekker that came via my Dad’s job. One of these was my first driving experience. I had to practically stand on the clutch to get it to move.

In 1999, my Dad got his first new, straight-out-of-showroom car – a Maruti Omni. This one did a lot of long-distance trips, too. A second Omni came with air-conditioning and power windows. Now there’s a Hyundai Santro, his first automatic, which I think is the favourite car after the Standard. He certainly treats it like a pet dog.

He learnt to drive in government jeeps on the treacherous hill and forest roads of the Nilgiris. He has fascinating stories of rogue elephants and stray horses. Cashew farming in southern Kerala, fish farming in paddy fields, potato projects in Kodaikanal (“doesn’t taste like my potatoes”), oranges in Kotagiri (“not as sweet as my oranges”). At the time, the agriculture department was also responsible for the welfare of tribal villages – this consisted of giving them the benefit of agricultural research, cultivation methods, seeds and conservation, but also seemed to include wider, less defined support services including rescue from and/or condolences for marauding elephants. I wonder what happened to all this. It seems more desirable than turning forest tribes into handicraft factories or tourist attractions, but I suppose time marches on and all that.

The “Super 10”, as my brother and I call it, had been running for 31 years when we sold it. Apparently it still is, there has been the occasional sighting. My Dad is 73 and has been roadworthy (more or less) for about 47 years. At the end of this month, he needs to get his license renewed. We all have our fingers crossed - his driving license is not just necessary to him, it's also in some fundamental way important to us.

Photos: One is our car, as you might have guessed. The other is the original brochure for a 1958 Standard Super 10.

The House That Built Me, Miranda Lambert, 2010

We wish them tailwinds

2011-06-23T09:41:00.012+04:00

Samim Rizvi is the first Indian and the third Asian in the Race Across America (RAAM), "the world's toughest bicycle race". I'm told the 3000-mile distance is a third longer than the Tour de France, but the cyclists need to finish it in half the time. It runs from the west coast to the east, the route offering several hills to climb towards the end of the race, and mountains in the middle.

I'm following the official team blog for Samim, and I read each day's update with disbelief and awe. The level of endurance and sheer mind-over-matter-ness required is incredible. They - rider and crew - are snatching two or four hours of sleep on roadsides, in the back of cars and only the occasional motel bed. They're cold, uncomfortable and disturbed by trucks going by. Then they wake up and carry on, appreciating sunrises, updating blogs, being energetic and discussing larger issues of water scarcity. Samim's recent average speed was 10.58 mph over the Rockies. It's been six days and he's still going.

Where does it come from, this "ultra endurance"? How does that mind work? A passing volunteer told Samim's crew that it was spiritual, not physical. I suppose that's one way to put it. It's a feat, in the full sense of the term. I first met him on the inaugural Tour of Nilgiris (TFN), where I was deeply impressed by his grit. But now that daily 100km that he used to finish long before the rest seems like a little ride in the park. He considered TFN part of his training.

The RAAM cyclists are approaching the Mississippi river as we speak, which is the two-third mark and considered the deciding point for the cyclists. Some have already passed it. The lead rider - Christoph Strasser - is doing an average of 15.6 mph. So far, he's cycled 2675 miles in seven days. This is how he's feeling about it: “Ah yes. Good, good. I feel good. Everything is good.” And: “A little bit sore, yeah... the legs, the knees of course, the feet... Everything is within the normal range for such an event.”

Yes, RAAM is a race with winners and prizes, but it's mostly a race against yourself. Just completing it within the specified nine days or less is undisputed victory. I have no doubt that Samim will get there, saddle sores, taped-up ankle and all. Meanwhile, Christoph, who seems most likely to get the prize, has 300-odd miles to the chequered flag. I guess in horse-racing terms, he's in the final straight, though his is rather hilly. Am reading a Dick Francis racing-world mystery. At home, in bed, resting and drinking soup because I'm feeling a bit under the weather.

The secret meadows of Singapore

2011-06-13T07:59:00.000+04:00

Singapore Zoo: 69 acres
Jurong Bird Park: 50 acres
Labrador Nature Reserve: 25 acres
Admiralty Park: 66 acres
Singapore Botanic Garden: 155 acres
Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve: 214 acres
East Coast Park: 450 acres

400 acres of primary rainforest. Four nature reserves. 17 reservoirs. A ridiculous number of rivers. In short, field and fountain, moor and mountain are all present in abundance. Side by side with skyscrapers, housing estates, malls, restaurants, hotels, roller coasters, the metro, one of Asia’s largest airports, and of course the residences, offices and tool storage spaces of the 21000 people employed by the Parks Authority. When you’re freshly expatriated to Singapore, your most frequently asked question is “Where do they find the space for it”?

In the time it takes you to reach your local supermarket in Mumbai, you could get to Indonesia. You could be wandering casually in the bird park of a morning when you’ll discover that your phone is on international roaming because Malaysia's that close. And Singapore's that small. How does a tiny island have so much luxury of land? The official greenery alone covers almost half of Singapore, and then there’s the stuff that’s just lying by the roadside.

Turn off a thoroughfare in the city centre and you're likely to find yourself on quiet, Top-Gear-style roads winding through little green hills dotted with venerable black and white mansions lolling about in acres of their own. Walk casually through a cobbled passageway in busy, touristy Chinatown and you’re wrapped in silence, on a path lined with the gardens of quiet homes. You could be walking purposefully past the imposing edifices of banks at the centre of Asia’s financial hub or in the glass-walled places where the purveyors of finance are eating steak, and suddenly you’ll be opposite a cricket green, where people in white are playing a gentle game to languid applause from a white verandah. Take a different route to the supermarket and you’ll come upon a stand of prehistoric creepers with leaves so large, they hold puddles, not raindrops. It’s all very Harry Potter. And quite delightful.

Why can’t other places do it? Life is so much better when it’s tree-lined. It’s not that there’s no development here – you notice the occasional ominous board on a patch of wild green announcing an apartment building or “community” in the making – but there are clear tree-and-garden rules that make all the difference.

Half a day in the life of a copywriter

2011-06-11T15:16:00.004+04:00

Today I was required to “come up with” a children’s story to explain investments, stocks and shares to three-to-eight-year-olds. My response was that the request was outstandingly loopy even for a generally crazy industry, but a brief is a brief and it had to be done. It was also urgent, of course - rule of thumb is that the more difficult a thing is, the less time you have to do it in.

I sat there muttering at my monitor for a while, thinking how stupid to have to explain investments to my niece, for example. Then I remembered that her level of comprehension startled me on a regular basis so the enterprise stopped looking crazy, but I still had no idea how to explain the stuff so it might interest someone that age.

I spent the next hour exploring one route after another and rejecting them on the basis of boring me to tears. It ended with me feeling monumentally crabby so I went out for lunch. While I was struggling to get myself to want salad instead of penne carbonara, there suddenly popped into my head the sweet voice of an animated piggy saying “I’m Peppa Pig”. It’s one of the shows my niece watches all the time (and my favourite among them). By the time the announcement in my head had completed its litany of “This is my little brother George, this is Mummy Pig and this is Daddy Pig”, I had cancelled lunch and was racing back to my computer. Over the next two hours I wrote a happy Peppa Pig episode of my own, with the names of the characters changed to the ones I was supposed to use and sent it off. It went on to break platinum records with the client and everyone lived happily ever after for the rest of the day, only slightly inconvenienced by a gnawing in the stomach region.

In the essence of time

2011-06-09T07:54:00.001+04:00

To write something for myself (includes personal emails because mine always end up being fat novels), I need what I think of as pure time.

First, a little while to slow down and quieten, wander aimlessly, watch YouTube videos, daydream or otherwise lie fallow. Then uninterrupted time to start writing. This needs to come in at least one-hour blocks to be of any practical use. And just one innocuous interruption sets me back extravagantly. Then there’s the editing. And sometimes you don’t like what you wrote so it has to start all over again. So much quality time is hard to find in the week, let alone a day.

I’ve been uncomfortably aware that if I didn't want to change the name of my blog permanently to "Things I haven't blogged about", I was going to have to find a way. So I decided to write on my commute, on my phone. (The notes function on the iPhone looks like a ruled, yellow notebook, has comfortable writing space and an effusively user- friendly keypad. It can be emailed to yourself when you're done. There is no end to the magical mystery rewards of this phone.) In fact, I’m doing that right now – I'm standing in a crowded train, typing comfortably with both hands, having amused myself in the pre-blogpost-writing days by learning how to ride without holding on to anything. Unfortunately it’s not that long a commute, nor does it always coincide with my wanting to write. But it’s something to put on my blog until I finish the many real posts that have been in the making for a while!

The title is one of the priceless things that appear in ad agency briefs from time to time. In my spare time – when the work I have is so boring I don’t want to do it – I compile them. New ones are added much oftener than you’d think, but none has so far topped this from a long-ago brief: “Tone of voice: Enchanting and mysterious”. It was for a sale ad announcing massive discounts on printers and scanners.

Europe eludes me

2011-05-14T21:17:00.004+04:00

I’m in the middle of planning a holiday with childhood friends, brother and sister-in-law. After or before meeting up, we plan to have separate holidays doing different things, so there’s much excitement and argument in the air this weekend. In the course of this, I opened a folder called “Holiday Stuff” to get some Norway information (a holiday minutely planned, but sadly aborted a few years ago) for my sister-in-law and was startled at how much there was in it, and not just about Norway. Looking through the many crowded files, a pattern emerges.

Two-week holiday in Spain. Appointment made and kept at the Spanish Consulate in Abu Dhabi, but visa unused. Tickets, Dubai-Barcelona-Dubai, paid for, then cancelled. Three-week holiday in Denmark and Norway. Flight booking, Dubai-Copenhagen-Oslo-Dubai, confirmed and cancelled. Ticket for the Flam Railway, unused and unrefunded. Email from a fjord cruise saying “Dear Ms Menon, we are pleased to confirm your booking.” Followed by something to the tune of “we don’t normally provide full refunds but as you’ve cancelled well in advance we’re happy to make an exception”. Weekend in Vienna. Another attempt at that one. Eid break in Rome. Another Eid break in Tuscany. New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam, Santorini, Ibiza. The Edinburgh festival. All researched, booked, re-confirmed and cancelled, with military precision. As I said, Europe seems to elude me, for some reason.

Well, not "some reason" - it was always work*. I can list the projects and clients that ruined it last minute. And I’m back in that kind of industry, in that kind of position. So my superstitious misgivings about planning a holiday too much in advance is founded on solid fact. Unfortunately, if you plan to travel in the high season, you have no choice. One must just wait, watch and hope. And maybe comfort oneself with thoughts of lastminute.com to Bangkok or Bali or even Goa for a long weekend, since I don’t need visas in advance for any of them. As you see, I’m a veteran contingency planner. For example, I know with absolute certainty that the contingency I plan for won’t happen. Another one will.

*I'm baffled by the fact that I actually managed to make that four-week US trip! The only unusual factor there was a visit to my cousin on my father’s side. Hmmm. Maybe the contingency plan for the contingency plan should be to burst upon these unknown and unsuspecting cousins from that side. Apparently the three thousand cousins that I already have (as in, those I know and am in touch with) are not enough.

Origin of the species

2011-05-12T06:52:00.000+04:00

Solving the mystery once and for all of where bicycle helmets come from.

Nutmeg Grove, 2009: Installation in front of Orchard Central, a mall in Singapore, by Michele Righetti. Very beautiful. If you're too lazy to click on the photo and read, here's the gist: It's a highly magnified nutmeg seed, made with stainless steel sheets and car paint.

Hello, goodbye

2011-05-11T22:13:00.005+04:00

Each time I’m forced to fly Air India, I hope that it will end with me writing something effusive in my blog titled “The Return of the Maharaja”. Sadly, this is still not that day.

My flight involved a six-hour transit through Chennai and they wouldn’t check my luggage through, so I was burdened by a giant suitcase the whole time. Here’s what you do while you wait in Chennai International Airport: nothing. The check-in area, the only place you have access to, is a chaotic game of musical counters, made even more interesting by baffling signage, unhelpful staff and a single stall serving bad coffee. This last should be a federal offence in Chennai.

There were about six and a half seats in the whole place, so I pushed my trolley to a corner, sat on the edge of it and relieved my feelings in aggrieved Facebook status updates. I’d once spent three pre-dawn hours in transit at Chennai Central Station and it was a painless experience. How is the same government not able to fix the damned airport?

Later, I broke off my reading to note that several Gulf flights were leaving and wondered why there didn’t seem to be as many labourers going from here as from other Indian airports. (A few hours earlier, in Bangalore Airport, I’d stood at the glass watching the departure of EK 569 to Dubai, seeing the familiar Emirates tail into the sky in a ceremonial farewell. The last flight of the Concorde was nothing to it.)

When they started with the flights going east, there seemed to be about 7000 flights a minute to Singapore. Most airlines had the normal mix of passenger types, but Singapore Airlines was wall-to-wall elderly parents. It’s a telling customer testimonial – when your children or parents are travelling unaccompanied, you choose the best not the cheapest. Their counter was properly sign-posted, luggage was screened efficiently and their lines moved quickly. Somehow they’d managed to build a little outpost of Changi Airport with the same resources available to everyone else. I was entertained by the old folks for a while, here a dad demanding to know where a mom has kept the tickets, there a mom tightening a piece of ridiculous ribbon on a suitcase, everywhere a couple of parents arguing over who was wrong last year about something unimportant. In between, I felt sad that I was leaving my own behind.

The Air India queues were full of people fearing they’d traded comfort, convenience, efficiency and politeness for a much cheaper ticket. In the event, we did them a disservice. The food was good, seats were comfortable, the plane seemed new and the service was above average. It’s still an apology for the airline that JRD Tata ran and the maharaja flew, but it’s not bad.

The execrable flight from Bangalore to Chennai that set my low expectations was the old Indian Airlines. They were always the worst airline outside of domestic USA and haven’t changed. One of the stewardesses was actively rude. The snack trays were thrust in our faces. The snacks themselves seemed to have been made by the same person who makes the coffee in Chennai airport. They boarded well before the time printed on the boarding pass from a different gate to the one we were told, with little notice and no apology. I asked why and I was told snottily: “Oh the captain decided to leave early”. The plane seemed like the oldest flying ATR in the world, but the flight was mostly empty so I could sit where I could see the propellers, my preferred position in this kind of plane. I don’t know what I think I can do if the engines suddenly stop or catch fire, or why I believe they should do so at all, but that’s the way the nutty cookie crumbles.

Time from Bangalore to Singapore on Air India: 15 hours
Time from aerobridge to exit in Changi Airport, including immigration and baggage claim: 30 minutes
Walking out of the airport with an employment visa in my passport and a job waiting for me: Priceless

Lost in a dangling conversation

2011-05-04T12:03:00.012+04:00

Cast:
1. 22-year-old colleague in Dubai, highly conscious of her above-average IQ, and Lebanese from AUB (I add this because it speaks volumes to those who know). Ostentatiously scruffy in head-to-toe Diesel.
2. Me, much less decrepit and sociopathic than now, but well on my way up the hill. In high heels, make-up and bling.

Me: Sitting at table in food court reading while eating lunch. Absorbed in book.
She: Interrupting. “You’re always reading crime fiction.”
Me: “Yeah, I like crime fiction”. Polite smile, one eye on book, hoping to convey through body language that I don’t want company.
She: “It’s great that you read, though. I can recommend some good books”.
Me: “Ian Rankin is a good book”. Ponder the implications of the “though”.
She: “Most people who read waste their time because they’re reading the wrong things. You should read some classics to really get an idea of what books are about.”
Me: Speechless.
Then, weakly, “I’ve read them”.
She: “Reading this shit, you might as well be watching TV”.
Me: Speechless.
Struggle with impulse to brain her with said shit. Think that watching some TV would improve her greatly.
She: “If you find the classics too heavy, start with the modern classics. Midnight’s Children. It’s about India, it’s by Salman Rushdie.” She pronounces it like the fish.
Me: “I’ve read it”.
Heft the Rankin a little to see if it’s heavy enough to kill. Count the number of classics I can think of that are far lighter than any of Mr. Rushdie’s extravaganzas. Lose count in a flurry of dismay when she sits down. She produces pen and paper from her bag, and starts writing names.
She: “Zadie Smith is good too”.
Me: “I’ve read it”.
She: “Vikram Seth, Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon…”
Me: “I’ve read them”
Admit to myself that I’m done with them, though. Though. I never finished the third Martin Amis. Might read Vikram Seth again, though. Though. Try to remember how Suitable Boy ended but can’t, which is weird because I did finish that one. Renew my silent vow to never, ever go near the Pynchon again, even to save my life.
She: “…Terry Pratchet…”
Me: “Terry Pratchet?”
She: “Yeah it’s Sci-Fi. That’s Science Fiction.”
Me: Speechless.
Wonder why one would pick Terry Pratchet over Arthur C Clarke if introducing someone to sci-fi. Think deep thoughts about the teaching philosophy at AUB.
She:”… John Steinbeck, Rainer Maria Rilke…”
Me: “I’ve read them.”
Realize with a shock that a proud little quotation I just used in a presentation attributed to "Anon" is my own creation, combining Khalil Gibran and Rainer Maria Rilke. Try to work out which bit belongs to whom, and how widely the presentation is likely to be distributed.
She: “I suppose you’ve read Harry Potter?”
Me: “Yes”.
Feel like I’ve won a prize in Wheel of Fortune.
She: “Then you should read Lord of the Rings – the movie was based on a book you know”. Hands me the paper and stands up. “You’re welcome”.
Me: Too relieved at her absence to register the last part of her speech until she’s out of reach. Stare dumbly at the list for a while. Reach for the pen she’s left behind and correct the spelling of Tolkien.

What happens to the dogs in a tsunami?

2011-04-01T06:28:00.003+04:00

In case anyone was wondering about orphaned pets, traumatised livestock, or stranded wildlife, watch this. Of course IFAW does much more than remember to feed Pinky and Caesar, but that's the main reason I've been contributing to and following their activities for some years now (ever since Hurricane Katrina). Lost dogs make me feel worst of all. It was nice to know that if all of us were swept away or buried or otherwise exterminated, and Oscar was the last one standing, some Indiana Jones with a bag of Pedigree might rappel down from a helicopter and rescue him.

Life with a three-year-old

2011-03-29T18:44:00.002+04:00

My niece believes I've been imported solely for her edification so she's reluctant to let me out of the house. I ease her into it by letting her participate in the dressing process. She lays out my make-up and hands it to me like a chatty surgical assistant. She comments at length on my clothes and puts on my jewellery to see what it looks like. Then she picks out my shoes and dusts them with my powder brush. It adds at least half an hour to the process but it makes the day go so much better. And a one-person fan club who firmly believes you are “so pretty” is a relief when you’re seeing a new grey hair every day.

She has wondrous toys that we would have killed to get, but her favourite* consists of two jam jars full of ordinary glass stones of the decoration-in-flower-pot variety. They represent, variously or together, people, money, food, cars, houses, laptops, phones, groceries, luggage, furniture and, after she’s been spending some time with her father, aeroplane parts. She’s lately learned about the presence of mascara in the world, so it also becomes that sometimes. The stones form the jungle, the lions and the princess lost among them. There’s always a princess. It becomes Swiper, the thing he’s swiping and the chorus that says “Swiper, no swiping”.

She seems to learn a new polysyllabic word every day, though none of us knows how. One day she’s struggling to work out how to slant the lines of “A” and the next, she’s writing her name easily (according to my brother, the Indian government would now consider the household 100% literate). She came home from ballet class and taught me the “arabeck”. In return, I taught her the Surya Namaskar; she had fun doing it but couldn’t pronounce the name, so promptly rejected it.

It bothers her when I disappear into a book and she’s lately taken to hanging around the bookshelf and picking out “books without pictures” (which necessitated a hasty shifting of some books that do have pictures to higher shelves). She turns the pages, getting increasingly frustrated by the rows of black type that mean nothing to her, understanding even less why I prefer that to playing with her. Sometimes I suddenly remember that she will be sixteen one day with no time for tedious old aunts, so I shut the book and play anyway.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to do anything without a running commentary, I haven’t invented so many exhausting games at such short notice since I was that age myself, I can’t go out, work late or sleep in without feeling guilty, my reading has slowed to one often-missing book a month and my powder brush is permanently out of commission, but every time she’s happy to see me, I feel like I’ve won an award. And I’ve never won so many awards in my life.

Aunts and uncles – much like grandparents – have unshakeable belief in the unique glory of their nieces and nephews (I have several and I think they’re all geniuses, including the one that’s only 10 days old). So I could go on forever but will stop here.

*Favourite at the time of starting this. At the time of publishing, it was a pack of cards. By now it’s probably something else.

Things I haven't blogged about

2011-03-27T18:41:00.006+04:00

1. The tsunami that decimated parts of Japan with the completeness of Hollywood special effects passed uneventfully over my blog. And I only used a Facebook status to record my observation that newscasters use superlatives for everything so they have no words for something like this. When a fashion faux pas is devastating and holidaymakers forced to sleep in an airport are tragic, what do you call a 30-foot wall of water that comes in so fast that the most prepared nation is helpless? Of all the videos of the flooding, the most poignant one for me is the one of the little town where you can hear the warning sirens, the repeated, urgent recordings that are probably saying “run for higher ground”, but there’s no time, no time at all. The sea is already there. In a few seconds, the cars have started to float. In six minutes, the water is up to the roofs, the sirens quite literally drowned out. But I believe that it happened to probably the only country capable of coming back from it stronger and better.

2. I even left underided the efforts of the US to find some way to muscle in on the tragedy, and the equally futile candlelight campaign on Facebook. The only thing more unhelpful than holding up a lit candle is passing around a photograph of one.

3. On another part of the emotional scale, the joy of watching the BBC series on the South Pacific also went unrecorded here. It was great to know there is somewhere a coral atoll not open to tourists, white beaches left to birds and turtles (and the occasional TV crew). The volcanoes still moving in Hawaii, the islands rising and falling, the strange fish that eats coral and craps sand, the earth’s continuous shift and shuffle form a reassuring big picture. Also on the subject of big pictures, my brother’s obsession with giant TVs paid off in this case because it did full justice to the glory of all that high definition cinematography.

4. I haven’t written my usual cafe piece on the Coffee Club in Orchard Fountain Corner, “my cafe” in Singapore. It sits cheerfully at a busy crossroads, open on all sides, with a clear roof high above. Behind it is a row of restaurants leading to the metro station, across from it is the Singapore Visitors’ Centre. On either side stretch the shady pavements of Orchard Road, lined with temples to the Gods of retail. The clientele changes through the day, like coloured lights. Yet everyone seems to hang out for hours. It’s always busy, friendly, unexpected. They’re playing Bach today, and when it’s played in the open air, threading between the noises of the street, it becomes somehow hip. I walked in after a gap of two weeks, one waiter smiled a bright hello, another said “Cappuccino and water?” and a third, seeing the glass full of ice, reminded him: “No ice”. They have the best cappuccino ever.

Some other things I haven’t written:
- An ode to the iPhone
- A whinge about the sudden breakdown of hair and skin, in an anticipatory deterioration into 40
- A witty piece about life as a freelancer-on-contract, with restful benefits of only being on the fringes of office life
- A warmly informative article about salt water aquariums, the strange preferences of captive anemones and the surprising discovery that fish seem to have personalities
- A travelogue about the Singapore metro
- A frankly self-indulgent ramble about the fact that the cashier in the Seven Eleven at Queenstown Station recognizes me now
- A word portrait of the Jurong Bird Park

Oh well.

Out-walking the blues

2011-03-25T20:20:00.002+04:00

One disenchanted evening, I was feeling the bewilderment you feel when strangers have been rude to you for no reason. It was the last day of my longish freelancing stint at this place and apparently they didn’t think I merited the courtesy of a goodbye*. I was leaving an empty office, alone. Ad agencies never say thank you or sorry – it’s part of the ancient covenant – but I’ve grown to expect at least a “nice knowing you”. It is nice knowing me, especially on a short-term basis.

More than a little pissed off and fighting some epic self-pity, but not very hard, I took the stairs and found myself singing Yesterday When I Was Young, starting a train of thought that added one more, darker layer of blue. Outside, there was much thunder and lightning and an exuberant breeze, weather that always makes me feel good, so I stood undecided on the covered pavement that led to the station. The breeze was already tugging at the blue fog and I didn’t want to disappear underground. I checked my iPhone map and found that it was only a five-kilometre walk to the house. The route stuck to the main thoroughfares, so I could hop into a cab if the threatened rain came down.

I set off down Scotts Road, under the big trees. The neighbourhood was calming down, offices shutting for the night, and apartments correspondingly lighting up. Soon my iPhone told me to turn right, where the bright lights and brighter-eyed buzz of Orchard Road dimmed even the spectacular tropical lightning. (Or maybe it only seemed spectacular to someone used to the dry skies of Dubai and the more-temperate-than-anything-else Bangalore). As I cantered past the glossy window displays, I was pleased as always in my circle-of-life sort of way that there were clearly people wanting to buy Steinway pianos and the Loewe TV that cost five times more than a Samsung. Music played and glasses clinked at Black Angus, and I turned again to merge with the mighty Taglin Road.

It grew quieter and darker, the light receding to pools under streetlamps, until the silence of the sleeping embassies left the night to the cicadas and to me (and of course the security guards outside each gate). It was an uneasy walk for a while, the bits of rainforest that litter Singapore dripping moisture around me and thoughts of marauding raptors surfacing rather more often than was comfortable. The experience was anointed by the sudden appearance of a painfully thin girl with an afro whose high heels echoed behind me for a brief distance and then vanished. I suppose one of the intermittent cars was a taxi.

Eventually I saw the busy junction of Alexandra Road up ahead, and on the basis of being in the home stretch, I turned off the map, thus enlivening my walk by getting unaccountably lost. The landmarks seemed to be in the wrong places and no matter which way I turned, I seemed to fetch up at a previously unknown Ganges Avenue. My map seemed to have become equally confused in this Bermuda-trianglesque spot. Perhaps it was only confused about why I couldn’t follow a simple set of directions in words of one syllable.

Since I was lost, it started to rain and the taxis were all full, so I had to shelter in a bus stop with all the other weirdos of the night. But when a bus arrived, I noted with joy the route number that stops right in front of the house, jumped in and congratulated myself at length on my resourcefulness. When I was at liberty to look around me, I saw wondrous sights, including a Hotel Miramar that I’d never seen before in my life. You guessed it, I boarded the right bus going in the wrong direction. I hopping off in a hurry, crossed the road in the rain on what may be Singapore's only uncovered pedestrian bridge, and caught one going the other way.

This time, I spent the ride standing at the door in a near-empty bus, peering suspiciously at passing signboards. I can’t think of any place else in the world where the bus driver would have let that pass without comment. I only relaxed after a train came shooting out of the ground alongside to join the elevated rail, because I finally knew we were going in the right direction.

I started out at 8:30pm, did an hour's very brisk walking and finally got home well after 10 because of the attendant adventures, but I was in a rollicking good mood by then. Mission accomplished.

*The omission was amply corrected the next day when I went in to tie up loose ends, so all was well in the end.

Two days in Dubai

2011-03-15T15:36:00.003+04:00

A friend of mine is going to be spending two days in Dubai next month and is collecting opinions on what she should concentrate on. By the time I’d finished my reply to her (getting more homesick all the time), it had turned into an itinerary on a Word file. So I decided to post it here and see if anyone wanted to add to it. Also, I haven’t posted in a while, so on the basis that something is better than nothing, here's my mail to her, as is.

TWO DAYS IN DUBAI

DAY 1: OLD DUBAI

A lot of history is along the Dubai Creek, but the weather might hamper your enjoyment of this. It’s probably too hot now for strolling from place to place. In winter, it used to be one of my chief activities. Anyway, at this time of year, I would suggest choosing air conditioned haunts in the mornings and setting out after three for the creek area towards late evening and sunset. That’s how I’ve listed stuff here, but of course you can mix it up as you choose!

Mid-morning: Jumeirah Beach Road

1. Jumeirah Mosque
It’s very beautiful and I recommend the guided tour.

2. Magrudy’s bookstore
A little way down the same road as the mosque (take a cab), you’ll find Magrudy’s Mall, with the bookstore. It’s an indigenous brand and apart from imported books, also encourages local publications in English. You’ll be able to find interesting Arab-character books and other fun stuff for Rohan, some local history for yourself if you’re so inclined. Chat a bit with the staff and they’ll help you. There are other big bookshops too in several malls – Borders in Mall of the Emirates and Books Plus in Lamcy Plaza have good collections.

3. House of Prose
If you’re still feeling chatty, walk to the next building, Jumeirah Plaza. Hunt around on the ground floor undeterred by the strangeness of this particular mall until you find a little bookshop in an unlikely corner. It looks like a library from the outside. It’s a second-hand bookstore run by a deeply interesting American called Mike McGinley. I first discovered his shop in Muscat - where he started out - and by the time I’d moved to Dubai, he’d also set up a store here. He’s one of the original musician-hippies of Haight Ashbury, has been in the Middle East for ages, been everywhere, done everything, read every book and heard every piece of music. He’s a wonderful person to talk to for perspective on a place that is defined mostly by people who have never been there or never bothered to get to know it.

Sidetrack:
- Near the mosque, there’s a big building called THE One. Funky interior stuff, from furniture to candles – good browsing and somewhere to escape the sun for a while. It’s a brand that was born in Dubai, used to be a client.
- If you want to pick up cold meats, cheeses, preserves etc from different parts of the world, take a cab down the road after the bookshops to Spinneys supermarket (Umm Suqueim branch).

Lunch suggestion:
Reem Al Bawadi: Lebanese restaurant much further down the same road. Very good food by Arabs, for Arabs, and a very comfortable place to sit on your own (have done it lots of times). Landmark for taxi: HSBC

After three in the afternoon

1. Bastakia, in Burdubai, near the creek (one of my favourite places).
- A restored settlement, wander around the interconnected houses, cobbled paths, the classic barajeel (wind towers)
- Includes the Majlis Gallery (used to be good for gifts and stuff worth seeing generally), XVA Art Gallery, XVA auditorium and the XVA Café (good food)
2. From there take a cab to the Dubai Museum (very close, very walkable in good weather), must see.
3. From the Dubai Museum, walk through the side roads to the wooden souk, which is a beautiful old market, with wooden carvings and lanterns. It was closed for renovation briefly but I think it’s open now. The merchandise being sold there is dead boring but the structure is achingly pretty.
4. When you walk through the souk, you’ll come out at the abra station on the creek. Jump into an abra and go to the other side of the creek – the Deira side.
5. Wander through the spice souks there to see much exotic Arabian-Nights-style incense, spices and things we’ve never heard of.
6. Across from the spice souk is the gold souk. Take a quick walk through, simply because it’s fascinating how much gold there is on display and how casually it’s treated.
7. Outside the souks, stand for a few minutes by the creek where the big dhows are – these are old-style wooden boats that still travel between East Africa, the Middle East and India carrying goods.
8. There's stuff on either side and behind these souks that you can explore if you have the energy.

Night

1. Hope you’ll have company to be able to and go out to see some swanky parts of Dubai in the night.
2. A suggestion if you’re on your own: The evening musical fountain show on the Dubai Mall promenade (another of my favourites).
- It’s free and runs every half hour from 6 pm, but if you can catch the 7:30 one set to opera, that’s the best.
- You can see it from the railings along the promenade. But a better option is to have dinner in any of the lovely restaurants, bars, cafes around the lake, either in Dubai Mall or across the bridge in the Downtown Souk and watch the shows from your table. It’s a great experience. And you can stay there for a while, reading, writing or watching the beautiful people, all rewarding experiences.
- Dubai is very safe if you’re not being silly (infinitely safer than Bangalore in all conditions), so it’s okay to be out late in restaurants on your own.

DAY 2 (MORNING): NEW DUBAI

The Dubai story is incomplete without seeing some of new Dubai.

1. DO NOT miss Burj Khalifa. The At The Top tour is expensive but very worth it.
2. Take the monorail on to the Palm Jumeirah simply for large landscape experience, check out the Atlantis Hotel (don’t do anything in it, stupidly expensive) and return.
3. From there, take a cab to the Dubai Marina, stroll along that promenade, check out the boats and have lunch at any of the nice restaurants there. If you’re lucky to be there on a street market day, you’ll lots of fun stalls where people like you and me are selling things they made.
4. Take the metro whenever you can, it’s great.
5. Any one of the big malls - it's educational.
5. You’ll probably be driving down Sheikh Zayed Road anyway, so you’ll see the financial district in passing.

DAY 2 (EVENING): THE DESERT

You can’t not go out into the desert, so book a Desert Safari and go on it. They usually set out before sunset - dune bashing, followed by dinner on the sands, which includes belly dancer, shisha, cups of kahwa, the works. It’s extremely touristy but it’s necessary, trust me. Pick a good safari company – timeoutdubai.com is a trustworthy source of information.

Other things if you have time:

- Sharjah Blue Souk
- Madinat Jumeirah and/or Downtown Dubai
- A dhow race: As far as I remember, the boat racing season is Nov to May so there’s a good chance there’s a race on. For goosebumpy sense of history there’s nothing like a line of traditional wooden ships with giant white sails, racing at high speed.
- If you do end up in Meena Bazaar (round the corner from Dubai Museum), check out the Pakistani fabric. My favourite store is called Bareeze.
- The Saeed Maktoum House/Museum, same general area as the museum: Historic building that used to be the house of the rulers and is now a museum. It doesn’t have much to see, but what there is provides an overview of the history of the place, old currency, trade etc.
- Near the Saeed House is the Heritage Village – provides craft-style gift shop delights.
- The Ras Al Khor mangroves with migratory flamingoes. It’s a walk into a really tiny patch of wilderness right in the middle of the city and leaves you with a strange sense of bewilderment.

Food
- Please, please eat Lebanese food while you’re there. There’s nothing like it when it’s made well, and it’s almost never made properly outside of the Arab world. Make sure you have it at a good place, though. Some suggestions:
o Al Hallab – Branches in Mall of the Emirates, Dubai Mall
o Reem Al Bawadi – branches on Jumeirah Beach Road and on Sheikh Zayed Road
o Automatic – branch in Jumeirah Plaza
o You'll get other recommendations: everyone defends their own favourite Arabic place hotly.
- Food is something that Dubai does well, so you also get very good Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Mexican, Spanish and Italian food at different price ranges. So do not be lured into wasting your time here on Indian food.

Black Swan

2011-02-22T17:46:00.004+04:00

Natalie Portman does a brilliant job. Unfortunately, the director doesn’t, which is a pity because the concept of Black Swan is a good one. Professional ballet dancers work very, very hard. They deal with immense physical pain and have to develop the complementary mental endurance from early childhood. When the mind is trained to put in this level of commitment, it could easily start responding to everything with the same intensity, with all the attendant danger of going into overload. Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, is a rabidly committed ballerina who gets the prima ballerina slot she wants so badly, but at a very high cost - her mind crumbles under the pressure. The movie follows her into her breakdown.

At least, that’s what it wants to do, except that said breakdown is illustrated with a parade of horror-film gimmicks, making for many cheap thrills (I very quickly took to hiding behind my hair when she stopped in front of a reflective surface), but paradoxically lessening the real horror of her decline. A lighter sprinkling of those moments, a subtler build-up to the finale, and it would have been a classic. As it is, it’s just Scream in tutus. Add an obsessive mother treated to appear borderline psychotic, a boss who preys on his prima ballerinas and a mostly one-dimensional supporting cast, and Nina is reduced to an out-of-the-ordinary psycho in the manner of those strange kids in Blair Witch 2. Instead of taking you down with her, it makes you a mere spectator.

Maybe the movie is meant to be a spectacle rather than a tragedy, but there’s nothing in the posters or the write-ups to suggest a simple horror flick. My sister-in-law and I jumped quite a bit at the first manifestation, rather dismayed that we'd picked this kind of movie for a night show. The preview of Scream 4 that preceded it should have been our first clue, but we were too busy eating popcorn and agreeing that we should have smuggled in chicken wings.

The bits with actual ballet in it were very good.

Yoga School Dropout by Lucy Edge

2011-02-18T06:57:00.004+04:00

In a nutshell: Go ahead and read it, but without expectations. I had lots and was disappointed, but was also intermittently entertained.

It could have been called Bridget Jones Goes to India – that’s obvious from the blurb and is mostly why I bought it – except it’s not nearly as well-written. And the author has the most irritating habit of asking questions and not listening to the answers. Much of Yoga School Dropout is like being stuck on a long holiday with a tiresome companion.

Her reading covers a narrow field, leading to the yoga bits being two parts hokum. She didn’t seem to look around her much, either. One example is the fact that she spent two weeks in Kerala and never seemed to make the connection between yoga and Ayurveda. Her overriding need for calm and “flow” might have been met very early in the book if she’d stopped off at any of the Ayurvedic spas there. But if she had, I wouldn’t have got all the details about the visit to Kerala’s favourite Hugging Mother, so I should be grateful to her short attention span.

This last and others like it are the most interesting parts of the book. It goes to several unsuspected places in India, and some famous ones shrouded in suspicion (Osho’s ashram in Pune, for instance), all of which is deeply absorbing for an Indian. It also provides a fascinating inside view of the motivations and journey of the spiritual seekers who are such a regular and mysterious feature of the country. We used to notice them as teenagers, huddled on railway platforms around piles of backpacks, or flapping along pavements in dusty Indian flip-flops. They were invariably white, mostly pilgrims from the West. In the manner of teenagers, we referred to them dispassionately by a very politically incorrect term. Based on the cast and characters of this book, the kid who coined it showed a penetrating insight into the phenomenon.

Two important questions remain unanswered though:

1. Why do they brave the considerable inconvenience of India just to shut themselves into ashrams with fellow “Westerners”? (That’s the term she uses. It includes Australians. You would fetch up in Australia if you went far enough West, but then you’d also eventually reach India. Perhaps it denotes the yogic circularity of all things.) Someone she meets actually asks her this and her answer is that perhaps the Indian yoga schools don’t offer familiarity, which continues to beg the question, really.

2. Why do they seem to leave common sense behind when they enter upon this transformational quest? The “real Indian” is not a simple, yogic soul, full of enriching goodness. He or she is generally looking for a chance to jump the queue and pick your pocket on the way.

She’s wasted good material on formulae – she does herself and her friends in a Bridget-Jones-by-numbers style, and India in imitation-Paul-Scott, though I don’t think the latter is consciously done. The research is sloppy and the dialect rather painfully stereotypical (Indians have wondrous subject-verb-object combinations, the French in Auroville speak as if they’re on the sets of Allo Allo, and so on). The fact that sambar is referred to as “samba” throughout, I’m inclined to attribute to an accident with an automated spell-checker, but you never know.

The book started out very promisingly and deteriorated only mid-way, so the problem might well lie in the advice she got from her writing mentors. Judging by the acknowledgements, there seem to have been a lot of these; we all know what committee decisions lead to. There are frustrating glimpses of the real book – here-and-gone characters, and almost-there insights cropped out of the cutesy frame – which make my inner editor rage a bit.

“Eat healthy, exercise and socialize” – Part 1

2011-02-08T21:10:00.002+04:00

You’ve been hauling yourself to the gym every day for two weeks and are feeling good. Then someone says on Facebook that you’re looking “prosperous”. Deflation, discouragement, drop out. The main moral of this story is that if you weren’t friends with them in school, ignore the friend request, but also consider this: how engaging is the gym that it can be influenced so easily by a random opinion?

I’ve met very few people my age who don’t want to start exercising. They join gyms, sign up for classes, and drop out almost immediately. I’ve had four gym memberships. I’ve started aerobics, Pilates, kick-boxing, body sculpt, circuit training, holistic weight loss and boot camps of many varieties, including one called Bollywood Booty Kamp. I’ve bought a stability ball, two sets of free weights, several kinds of resistance bands, skipping ropes beyond counting, and books on everything. They were none of them used very much, not even the books. We defaulters put it down to lack of will power and self-discipline, and try, try, try again, never thinking that the problem might also lie with the activity we’ve been conditioned to choose. The gym is a chore, not fun.

Some other problems I have with gyms:
• They have no point: You walk on a treadmill for hours with no change of scenery, lift weights for no reason other than to get better at lifting weights, sweat away at the complicated steps of some group class only so you can lose weight.
• They’re indoors: I went through a stress-related breakdown some years ago and the counsellor wanted me to get out of the gym and walk outside, since that is healthier for the mind.
• They are joyless and inward-focused: Sign in, locker, warm up, machines, warm down, shower, locker, sign out. It’s like the caricature of a communist factory.
• They’re hotbeds of bad advice: Unrealistic goals. Foolish applause when you overreach yourself (it’s bad enough that half your Facebook friend-list will show up to tell you they’re “proud of you”, without it being reinforced by awe-inspiring strangers). Encouragement to start a crash diet, so you can be tired and enervated all the time. Fitness myths of all kinds.
• They’re mindlessly competitive: You compare your lonely statistics against someone else’s equally solitary achievement and win no prizes.

Against this, there is the fact that most of the friends who took up a sport, or an outdoor activity such as running, walking or cycling have had no trouble keeping it up.

I should mention here that I’m not talking about people who are in serious training. I’m addressing those like me who just want to feel fit and look good. We are the ones who line the roads to clap for marathon runners, triathletes and people who cycle 100km a day, but have no desire to do it ourselves. For people like us, gyms are not the best choice for what they purport to do, but – like Microsoft Office, big-brand breakfast cereals and Starbucks – have somehow managed to become not just the default option, but the popular one. They seem to have changed the very world they exist in to make themselves the most acceptable choice.

If a store made you uncomfortable, a restaurant gave you a hard time, a nightclub was boring, a dry cleaner ruined your clothes or a mechanic cheated you, you wouldn’t go back to them. And yet, you return to the gym over and over again, in spite of its repeated failure to work for you.

CONTINUED BELOW (Yes the title of the post is explained eventually)

“Eat healthy, exercise and socialize” – Part 2

2011-02-08T21:08:00.004+04:00

Now that I’ve established that gyms are evil, I will give my sisters and brothers in fattitude the benefit of my own experience.

Eat healthy
Balance your meals, eat a proper breakfast, drink enough water, watch the sugar and be mature about your portions most of the time. That’s all it is, really. Enjoy your food, your way. If you don’t like raw vegetables, don’t make resolutions to eat salad. Just learn the right ways to cook them. Forget the fanatics and remember that your grandparents ate cooked vegetables and lived healthily ever after. When reading fitness magazines and articles, take away only as much as you can usefully carry. Their five carefully calibrated meals are impractical when 11 am and 4 pm are prime meeting slots. But while you can’t be slicing pears at the conference table, you can drink green tea instead of coffee.

Exercise
Find an activity you like doing – walking the dog, walking around the mall, cleaning the house, DIY, tossing a ball, playing with your child, badminton, dancing, whatever – and then do it often. As you go along, you’ll find yourself ramping it up, since energy begets energy, and you will get the recommended amount of exercise. Stop obsessing over weight-loss (unless you’re dangerously obese, the world doesn’t magically change when you’re thinner) and just enjoy feeling fitter. Be active, be patient and never mind what that super-driven, skinny colleague thinks of you; you never liked her anyway.

Socialize
You can’t make sustainable changes when you’re feeling bad about yourself; it’s feeling good that motivates you. In the long-term, happiness is a much better goal than weight-loss, and one really does lead to the other. Go to the movies, read, Watch TV, browse, converse, keep your mind active too. A flabby mind is as bad for you as an obese body. Go out to dinner with friends. Have large Sunday meals with family. Eat dessert. Keep in touch. Do things that open your mind and laugh yourself thin without knowing it. Really.

“Eat healthy, exercise and socialize” is the motto of a friend’s dad. His daughters treat it with the mirthful irreverence with which all right-thinking children greet the tenets of their fond fathers. (“Even if you’re bleeding all over the floor, he’ll ask you “Have you been eating healthy? Did you exercise? Have you networked today?””). But it is an excellent formula for a good life.

I’ve only recently distilled all this in my own mind, so the systematic application of it hasn't been going on very long. I’ll keep you posted.

Fairy godmothers for our times

2011-02-04T17:57:00.000+04:00

Most trashy romances have at least one episode involving dress-up, where the heroine has found a magical dress, her hair is right, she doesn’t feel fat and is the belle of the ball. In fact, this part is often more passionately expressed than the hero’s entrance. (Helena Rubenstein demonstrated consumer insight decades before the term was coined when she said: “In the factory we make cosmetics, but in the drug store we sell dreams”.)

It’s the fairy godmother that makes Cinderella’s story, not the faceless prince. The subsequent fitting of the slipper and happily-ever-after was just the knock-on effect of the real turning point when Cinderella discovered her “look”. These were some of mine:

A hairdresser named Beatrice: I spent years fighting my curls, hating them, aided and abetted by hairdressers who tried to teach me impossible acrobatics with hair dryers and brushes. Then I accidentally found the best salon I’ve ever been in (for the record, Cut and Shape in Dubai). The hairdresser assigned to me went into raptures over my hair, others came by to wonder and exclaim. One of them told me that people “spend fortunes to get that look”. It was news to me that I had one at all. I was dissuaded from having the elaborate procedure I’d come in for and shown instead the basics of looking after curly hair, celebrating it, even. I walked out a different person. Both Bea and I have long since left Dubai, but my good hair days go on and on.

A shop called Be: Having spent the formative years worrying about my hair, I had no time left to develop any clothes-sense. So I just wore what my friends were wearing. Except that they were all either statuesque or waiflike, and their choices sat awkwardly on my decidedly Dravidian body type. I resigned myself to the fact that my clothes were always wrong, until I checked out a new boutique in the neighbourhood and there it was, that look thing again. The sudden access of freedom that came from finding my style was like the first time I had the courage to take my feet off the ground in a swimming pool – it was more like learning to fly than swim. They shut down long ago (perhaps I was their only customer – I’ve certainly never seen anyone else wear my clothes), but their work was done.

A girl called Jerusha: I was preserved in cotton wool till I was about sixteen, which didn’t prepare me much for teenage social life. I didn’t know about dancing and dating, the rhythms of a party or cross-gender repartee, to name a few. Pat Boone, Abba or the Beatles were fine, but Madonna, Wham and Top of the Pops were closed books. And talking of books, academic excellence and having read almost everything by Jane Austen and Wodehouse were hardly conducive to party conversation. Then, in walked my neighbour who not only knew all the important things but didn’t seem scared of them. Non-judgmental and intrepid, she passed on her knowledge and approach to life, changing mine. She’s still around, family now in fact, so her good work continues. And years later, another girl called Smita took up the job of updating and supplementing her work.

A man named Nicolas: Entering my life some twelve years later and definitely not non-judgmental, my differently oriented cabin mate combined high standards on the look front with a designer’s respect for individualism. His frank opinions and equally unreserved praise gave me the final ingredient – confidence in my own judgment.

Once the fairy godparents had finished with me, I was reluctant to waste it mucking about with glass slippers and now prefer going on happy single holidays instead. But here’s the thing – I look good doing it.

Cherai Beach Resort

2011-01-27T15:49:00.011+04:00

It’s five in the evening, the tide is coming in. We leap in the waves and are baptised by salt water, again and again. We laugh, fight, cry and enthuse, cocooned by a shared illusion that time makes no difference, age is immaterial.
Every year or so we endeavour to find our ancestral home in other places, the extended family gathering in a two-day simulation of long-ago leisurely summer holidays. The strange thing is that we do find it; somehow the patterns that were established then reproduce themselves. It’s a combination of collective memories and the fact that each of us has felt the same influences, even if in different ways.

But each “family meet” also brings poignancy, because we’re the last ones to know. My nieces and nephews will establish their own patterns - nice ones probably - but the images of the houses we came from, the timbre of the voices that touch a chord deep in the gut and even some of the food will go out with my generation. As always I’m haunted by the urgent thought that it’s up to us – me, actually – to record the stories, gather the recipes and hold it all in trust for the kids. I don’t know why it seems so important, but there it is.

Earlier that day, we sat at long tables beneath stirring coconut trees, deep in the satisfaction that only fresh fish, perfectly made, can bring us. The voices that surrounded us came from our childhood, and a boat rocked beneath us, like a cradle in transit. Meanwhile, water lilies bloomed outside our doors, picturesque backwaters lapped at the fences and a pink dolphin lay unaccountably dead on the beach up ahead.

Encounter with a rude runner

2011-01-21T19:10:00.000+04:00

I ran into him recently. Or perhaps I should say he ran into me; I merely walked into it, unawares. Sunlight was slanting at the right angle through the leaves, the sky was the correct shade of blue, the trees had breathed out a fresh consignment of oxygen and I had hit that point in my exercise where one feels like a well-oiled machine. Then he came jogging up and told me that “only old people walk” and that at my age, I should be running. I patiently explained that walkers are not lazy runners, that I hate running and love walking, that the health benefits can be accrued either way and everyone must do the exercise that gives them pleasure. In response, he started to give me tips on “transitioning” to running. When he urged me to use an upcoming marathon as my goal, he confirmed what I’d suspected all along – he’s a run-for-a-causer, close cousin of the candle-light-vigilante, so he wasn’t going to relinquish his righteous ignorance easily.

I explained much less patiently that re the marathon, I couldn’t imagine anything I was less interested in, except maybe skiing. He gave me a pep talk on saving the planet. I asked him sweetly how him running a marathon was saving the planet. He side-stepped the question like a good evangelist should, switching to a discourse on carbon footprints. I reminded him that a marathon involved ambulances, TV and refreshment vans, sponsors’ vehicles, track-keepers’ cars, police motorcycles, thousands of little plastic water cups and the garbage trucks that presumably needed to come after. He called me a cynic and said that India needed more believers. I told him India’s problem was too many believers. And added that I could argue for the Olympics, so he should just move on. And set a good example by moving on myself.

I wish I’d thought to ask him what he meant by “old people”, considering the oldest cyclist on the 900-km Tour of Nilgiris was 60. But I did manage to out-holy him a few days later – I met him buying bread and found that he drove one kilometre to do it, whereas I had walked two. Idiot.

Closing time

2011-01-09T18:14:00.001+04:00

My concert finished fairly early so I decided to take the Metro home rather than a bloodsucking cab, with a (more and more likely to be) surly cabbie. Mostly, I took it just to celebrate the fact that I could and found myself unexpectedly on the last train to Jebel Ali.

I got on at Burjuman and had a long ride ahead of me. (As with everything else, the deeper you go into Burdubai and Deira, the more “real” the city becomes. The Burjuman station is properly confusing, crowded and large. Also, it’s underground, which gives it the right sort of air.) That late train was surprisingly full – of the girls and boys who work in the malls, gym instructors, lifeguards and RTA police going off duty. At every stop, hoardes of chattering young people got on, having thrown off their invisibility with their uniforms. The train was abuzz like at no other time. Some people were greeting old friends, others were making new ones. Several, who weren’t working the next day, were brandishing barbecue materials and inviting fellow passengers to parties.

News of upcoming sales was passed around, as were job vacancies and apocryphal tales of employer iniquity. At least, I hope they were apocryphal, but this being Dubai, you never know. Formidable policewomen dissolved into groups of girls discussing mascara and heckling the new male recruit on the last shift at the next station. Four boys in a corner, any of whom may have helped me buy shoes at some time, were discussing increasing the repertoire of their band. Another group was engrossed in various kinds of reading material, crosswords and Sudoku, looking up only to greet yet another member who got on at some other stop. In their midst, a stunningly beautiful Somali girl stood emptily in a private patch of silence, probably living the other kind of Dubai dream.

A couple stood at the partition between two coaches, too shy to look at each other much but not too shy to hold hands. The policewomen derived much entertainment from this, but were kind-hearted enough to do it privately. The faceless checkout girl was clearly memorable to the coffee shop supervisor who was looking out for her at the Dubai Mall stop.

Walking home from the station was fine along the main road but got uncomfortable when I entered the Greens, because somebody in their wisdom had decided the streets needed mood lighting, and the mood is Hitchcock. But I soon realised that the silhouettes of serial killers were caused by people walking their dogs and the ominous car parked in the shadows had a blue light on top. And as I passed it, the polite, uniformed nod from within held all the security of the noonday sun.

A few more steps brought me to the chatter and lights of the restaurants and supermarket, but I left them behind too and came to the path by the silly lake. I can understand people from Northern Europe not connecting stagnant water to mosquitoes, but there’s no excuse for all the Indians who must also have been part of it. They didn’t even have to invent any solutions – I just spent three days at a resort in Cochin where they’ve used fish to great effect to keep the mosquitoes down. My first thought when I saw all the picturesque water there was the hope that my mom would have remembered the mosquito repellent. She did of course, but I didn’t need it at all.

Anyway, silly or not, the lake is undeniably pretty. Whispering rushes, flowering trees, an imported (I’m told) bird or two muttering drowsily in its sleep, wooden bridges reflected in water, the brightness of the stars undimmed by city lights. Positively ill with atmosphere, as Bertie Wooster would say. I’m not even sure there wasn’t an imported cicada or two out there. It’s all artificially created, but there’s nothing fake about the chilly desert air or the clear desert sky. At night in the Greens, all the paving and topsoil can’t hide the fact that it was built on desert and not long ago. In fact, I myself remember the time when it was sand. It’s a strangely reassuring thought.

Where's the food, dude?

2010-11-10T23:56:00.002+04:00

All my previous years in Dubai were spent in and around Burdubai, which, in the words of a colleague, is “basically India’s cleanest city”. Now I live in The Greens, which is not only at the other end of the city, but on the other side of the world. It’s too far away for even the most enterprising of Karama’s delivery boys, which means I can’t just decide I want chicken curry and expect to have it brought to me in half an hour. It’s still Dubai, so there’s always some Indian food on offer, but one token Indian restaurant catering to all tastes is not the same as being able to choose between specialists from Chettinad, Madras, Hyderabad, Calcutta, North Kerala, South Kerala, Malabar, Mangalore, Goa, Delhi, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Kashmir, and infinite varieties of something called pepper chicken (which crosses the borders to exist in several Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Chinese avatars as well). And it’s not just a paucity of good Indian takeout – this applies to all kinds, including Arabic. The single version available close by is purely nominal. Maybe that’s why everybody around the pool is skinny. Maybe it’s called the Greens because you’re expected to only need two leaves of lettuce and a grape. Dressed with a teaspoon of Diet Coke. Maybe by living here I’ll finally attain size zero nirvana myself, but it’s far more likely that I’ll end up becoming a very good (fat) cook. It’s amazing how willing you become to season a cast iron skillet if you can’t just stroll across the road for a dosa. And when getting readymade batter involves a 45-minute metro ride, grinding your own becomes positively convenient. It’s the first time I’ve bought a food processor before a wine glass. There may of course be a more sinister reason for this - that there is a significant difference between being 28 and 37. Sob.

Plugging someone else's blog

2010-11-09T22:32:00.004+04:00

I really like this post. And this blogger, for that matter. I've already given it some publicity on Facebook so why not do it here too?

Indianizing the Facebook "Like" button

Excerpt
In India, we do things differently. And in keeping with the rich tradition of orally imparted knowledge and MMS scandals, we rarely like to write things down, and that is why when we go to “foreign”, we spare no chances in pontificating, elucidating and prognosticating on the Great Indian Difference. In India, we have history. In India, we have ancient culture. In India, we have the world’s most unhealthy kind of vegetarian food. Etc. Of course, elderly Indian gentlemen with NRI children play it both ways, hitting forehands down the line glorifying Western infrastructure and orderliness while slicing backhand drop shots edifying the sanctity of Indian chaos when the audience is melanin-challenged.

Read the rest

The first swallow of summer

2010-11-04T19:20:00.003+04:00

India never had a recession. Sure, we all called it that and all of corporate India used it as an opportunity to cut costs, but we were actually very, very lucky. It’s only now, in Dubai, that I’ve understood what recession really means.

Over that first weekend I heard stories of companies going bankrupt by the hundreds, promising entrepreneurs left stranded. Of jobs lost overnight and lives abandoned wholesale as people scrambled to get out ahead of the foreclosures. Stories we’ve heard from a distance, but now made real by the fact that these were people I knew. But there were also other stories of those who made it through, which of course never make it to the media. My friends didn’t say much about their own struggles, merely summing it up as “survival mode”.

Several chance meetings in the following weeks produced startlingly effusive greetings from people who used to be mere acquaintances. I got the uncomfortable feeling that they were seeing my return as a vindication of their decision – or compulsion – to stay.

I left two years ago at the crescendo of Dubai’s boom. The city I’ve returned to is only just starting a tentative new tune after the old one faded to silence. My very first thought was that it felt more like Muscat than Dubai, the brash confidence that was the stock-in-trade quite conspicuous by its absence. The cafes are quieter, people are kinder, the traffic is more manageable. In the place of the old giddiness, there’s a certain grimness of purpose, a cautious optimism that one wouldn’t have thought was in Dubai’s DNA. The most interesting impression I’ve got in the first three weeks of my second innings here is that Dubai is not diminished by adversity but the better for it – I think the recession will turn out to be the best thing that happened to this city.

But I have to say that walking down the Beach Road one day, noting the empty tables on a Saturday evening, I smiled with relief at a car parked outside a nondescript gate. It was a Lamborghini with vanity plates, key in the ignition, engine running extravagantly, left unchaperoned in the arrogant certainty that nobody would dare touch it. Now that’s more like it!

Morning has broken

2010-09-27T13:07:00.003+04:00

The best time in our house is breakfast time. We're all foraging for different kinds of food, and reading different newspapers, sharing whatever bits we think are amusing. Woman falls out of train into sea and survives. Columbian police arrest drug dealer's parrot for giving warning of their approach. Woman gets roughed up by neighbours because her dog poops in front of their house. Obama's not coming to Bangalore because he's afraid of the techies. If there's no interesting news, we amuse ourselves by checking how many exaggerations the Times of India crams into the same story the Hindu has reported with great restraint. Occasionally, arguments break out as we all have widely differing views on whatever the main headline is, but they usually end abruptly in a quest for a five-letter word for boredom or an Italian composer. This last is my mother who is deeply addicted to the Guardian Quick Crossword. My Dad will promptly make up a word that fools nobody (he often thinks I'm still eight). In between, we blame each other for the failure of the vegetables we painstakingly planted or take credit for whatever fruit the garden has recently produced. We hotly debate the merits of some new block of flats that none of us is going to buy, earnestly study the dog adoption listings for a pet we're not going to get, and, if it's a Sunday, my Dad will search the matrimonial ads for a bridegroom I'm not going to marry. We interfere with each other's plans for the day, get in the way of the maid and are generally friendly to each other. Of course, conditions deteriorate as the day progresses and dinner is usually the worst time, but that does not stop us from inflicting our company on each other. Looking back, this seems to have always been the pattern in the household, more or less. You'd think that by now we'd have taken the hint and gone in for TV dinners.

Writing for pleasure?

2010-09-15T23:35:00.000+04:00

Some days words don't come easy. Other days they don't come at all. Now and then I feel – as everyone does – that I'd like to go back and try the road not taken. Then again, I feel like that's the road I'm on, and wish I'd taken the other, well-travelled one. Noise is alternatively comforting and oppressive. Silence does that too. Rules are hard to follow, and difficult to renounce. Fear follows hard on hope. Faith is the hardest thing to do. Some days it's half-full. On others, half-empty. Sometimes the glass isn't even there.

"Writing, particularly fiction writing, is an act of quiet terror. You are alone all at once with your genius and your ineptitude, and your errors are as public as possible," as Gene Weingarten says in "The Hardy Boys: The Final Chapter", an old article in the Washington Post (it's a great read for those of us who grew up with the Hardy Boys. Or Nancy Drew, for that matter).

Writing a book is ridiculously hard work. The reckless number of debut novels unleashed every month baffles me - who are all these people and how are they doing it?

An Indiranagar sub-culture

2010-09-08T10:52:00.002+04:00

It's Cafe Coffee Day on 12th Main. I'm sitting with my laptop open, typing desultorily and waiting for a friend to join me. At the table next to me three people are doing business. I know this not from their conversation, which I'm not paying attention to, but the tones of their voices. After a while, I look up and see that they're discussing the new logo of their company. I can see the screen clearly and I automatically critique the logo in my mind. It's not much longer before I feel impelled to lean across and present my credentials and opinions. The upshot of this is an offer from the guy to introduce me to publishers for my book, and a freelance project.

Over the next few weeks, at various other cafés, more freelance projects and job referrals come my way from others engaged in trying to turn early mid-life crises into pots of gold. It seems this town is full of people who work better in cafes than in cubicles. There are far more of us than I'd thought. We followed the prescribed path from birth. We got the reasonable education, no hitch, became reasonable adults at eighteen, no question, found the reasonable job, no sweat. We moved smoothly from good company to better one with scarcely a break, climbed steadily with reasonable reward. We stayed firmly on the rails for 15 or 16 years until the Great Pointsman in the Sky (or the evil one below) fell asleep or something and we found ourselves suddenly thrown off, bruised and unreasonable. The early troubles we should have had suddenly come due, we take our belated gap year and give ourselves the career angst we skipped.

Most of us are still walking beside the rails, half ready to leap on should another slow train arrive, but we're getting more unreasonable by the hour. Most of us will return anyway to some cubicle or the other, refreshed by the break. But the 0.1 per cent who don't, will, in between dodging the bouncing cheques, invent the next Mac or Google, found the new Tata or become another AR Rahman or Chetan Bhagat. I don't know yet which category I will belong to, but it's an exciting time here in the recycle bin.

Happiness is an Iftar tent

2010-08-25T17:53:00.000+04:00

Another Ramadan. As always, even far from the Middle East, it sparks the hope of change, similar to the irrational expectations of the New Year. But unlike New Year’s Eve, this is a non-stressful marker that brings acceptance rather than regret. (It probably helps that it doesn’t involve alcohol and other enablers of things that are good ideas at the time.)

Perhaps it's just that Ramadan is a reminder that the moon will wax and wane, in spite of us, as surely as the tides turn. Eid will come, and then Diwali. Soon it will be a fun Christmas and then, with the assurance of a recurring nightmare, will come New Year’s Eve.

But right now, there is still the small benediction whenever someone says Ramadan Kareem. There are hummous, fatoush and fatayer, tall fruit juices, small goblets of Turkish coffee to take you into the night and friends to share it with. Gazing peacefully at the fruity smoke on the warm air, I remember that a man is only a man, but a good shisha is a smoke.

So far, so good. Played, not sung.

2010-07-28T16:52:00.005+04:00

When you're asked to review the debut album of someone you knew when you were young, it's in danger of being even more subjective than usual. It took several bouts of listening to be sure that the feelings came from the music and not nostalgia. Since there's no way of separating myself from it, this "review" goes on my own blog rather than the independent space it was supposed to be for.

A/J's So Far So Good is, in the artist's words, a celebration of “clarity gained from chaos.” That's the sort of line that works very well in sleeve notes, but music is a personal experience so I'm not even going to attempt to match his reasons to what I hear. A distant memory of a guitar that accompanied campfire Hotel Californias died swiftly, unregretted. In its place is a clear, young sound, very now, very here, resisting classification, stirring a pleased surprise. For example, what A/J's guitar does with Vande Mataram (one of two tributes on the album) is to patriotism, what sufism is to religion – the pure soul of the thing, when it's not tethered to tenets. I don't know the technical musical terms for it, so I will use my own equivalents. The grammar and syntax of this album are flawless, the punctuation meticulous, the language learnt in good schools. The style is original, and the voice, true, though slightly hesitant as it would be in a first album. This is a musician with considerable creative energy, just discovering his music, and the excitement of his journey is infectious.

An instrumental album creates another pitfall for the amateur reviewer: the music becomes about yourself. Listening to it online, where each song is accompanied by a brief note on mood and visualization, I was surprised to learn that Jaisalmer was about snake charmers and fires burning because for me it was a Harley Davidson on a desert highway. I was equally startled to find that The Journey Begins was about trying to see waterfalls in darkness because I saw water in darkness too. The intricacies of Derailed that seem to leave a message just out of reach of the consciousness and the unplayed notes of private, domestic joys in Mady's Tune both seem to my unguarded mind to be underscored by the irrevocable rhythm of a departing train. Did the artist intend it – who knows?

For the first time in two years of surrendering incipient audiophilehood to an iPod, I wish my Linn was set up properly for this album.

A/J: So Far So Good, Ashaanti Records, Bangalore, January 2010

Note to Bangalore’s drivers

2010-07-27T13:56:00.000+04:00

- Think one move ahead. Just one, that’s all I’m asking. If you’re going straight, don’t get in the lane turning left and then honk at the cars in front when your light turns green. And for God’s sake stop changing lanes in the middle of an intersection.

- This will also prevent you from looking more than usually stupid by honking at buses that have stopped at bus stops. That is what buses do. If you can’t work out earlier that you need to get out from behind them, you just have to wait until they’re done instead of telling the driver things about his sister.

- What is it about your upbringing that makes you speed up and squeeze moronically around a car that’s already more than half-turned into the road?

- If there’s a long line at a green light, it means that it will take a while for the cars at the back to move. And when they do, it can only be at the speed of those in front. Yes it’s frustrating when you can see the green light up ahead from your high perch in your SUV, and I don’t want to sit through another red light either, but honking at me continuously for half a kilometer of crawling is not only rude, it shows you up as having the IQ of a gnat.

- When there’s heavy traffic, vehicles going in one direction are sometimes marooned at the intersection when other lights turn green. This is not a personal insult. And trying to go around and through them only makes the snarl worse. Why is this so hard to comprehend?

- To the blue Honda on the ring road this morning: If you want to drive at 30kmph, please do it on the service road, not the fast lane. Yes there is one. It’s the one you were on this morning. I am the person who rolled her window down and abused you in Kannada.

- To the dangerous red Santro at the other end of the spectrum who cut me and several others off at the speed of light: Don’t think I haven’t noted your number and called it in.

- To the white Scorpio who sat in my boot for about five kilometers and then overtook through a crowded bus stop: Ditto.

- Also, bus stops are not lay-bys. When you park there to drink tender-coconut water, the buses have to stop in the middle of the road. And there’ll always be a motorcycle unwilling to wait 20 seconds who will ride ahead and get tangled up with alighting passengers.

- On the subject of which, here’s a question for the motorcyclist on Sarjapur Road: Do you believe you’re immortal? Is that why your helmet sits on your mirror, preventing you from seeing that there’s a car in the lane you’re weaving onto? The next time one of you tries to overtake from the left when my left indicator is on, I will swerve and sacrifice a door or two just to see you crash and burn.

- Question for the cyclist I've seen more than once at the Kundanhalli traffic light: Do you think road rules do not apply to you? You may be greener than Othello and the favourite child of the conserved Earth, but the next time you jump a red light, I will not brake. I wish the fire truck you held up today hadn’t.

- To the giant BMW with no license plate that was casually parked right across my turning: It was me that left the rude note on your windscreen. I understand that if you have the wherewithal to own a 7 Series in India, you probably own the Government, the RTO and the internal revenue as well, but if you do it again, I will say it with a tire iron.

Ewww...

2010-06-27T13:43:00.000+04:00

...there's a creeping, crawling caterpillar on the gatepost! But so pretty.

Deep water

2010-06-09T12:20:00.000+04:00

We knew it as the “pond near the Eucy grove” and it was very handy for picnics, general teenage high jinks, setting for first love etc. The eucalyptus trees have long since become houses but the “pond” is flourishing like a green bay tree. It seems it is actually a lake spread over 18 acres, has a name and a place and is being restored.

I've tried to retrace old paths there in the past few months and was surprised the first time to find the lake neatly fenced in. At the time I took it as a sign that it was shortly to be filled in and built over. But I found out yesterday that the fence has been put there by an exemplary group of residents from the gated community nearby who’ve taken it upon themselves to raise a staggering sum of money and save the local water body.

On those same walks, I have noted that the gated community in question is more attractive than most, but have always regretted the flower farms and vineyards that Palm Meadows’ villas now stand on. This regret is automatic now, coupled with the weary feeling of futility that becomes a tedious addition to the emotions of those who return to this city. (An old friend who returned recently from a long stint in the US messaged me about a reunion: “Meeting up at some place called Rendezvous or maybe it was called Vous or Chez-vous… not sure exactly, I'm used to restaurants being named MTR, Koshy's, Bheema).

Now I must gladly acknowledge the sterling work that Palm Meadows residents have been doing with Sheelavanantha Kere for about three years. Click on the link to read all about it – a heartening story of real change by real people. I will do my bit to support the cause and chivvy as many others as I can to join in. It is a great thing that they’re trying to do.

But tI can't help a stray thought or two. That these bite-sized portions of picturesque land used to belong to large farms, one of which I grew up on, others that my friends did. That the lake may have never needed saving if it hadn’t been endangered by rapacious development. That if you’ve walked past fields of asters in full bloom and smelt the grapes ripening on the vines in April, the restoration of the lake seems a bit of a pyrrhic victory.

Deep Water, Jewel, Album: Spirit, 1998

Sorry, Commander Glusica

2010-05-22T18:29:00.005+04:00

My contempt for most of the Indian news channels reached epic proportions today, watching the coverage of the plane crash. I watched the story unfold over an hour or so in the morning, and what they said at the top of the hour, they contradicted at the bottom, simply because they just wanted to talk - ignorantly, incessantly - whether they had any knowledge or not. It was all irresponsible mob mentality, confusion of facts and ghoulish rubbernecking rather providing useful information - hotline numbers were not broadcast until several hours after, nor were the names of passengers. It's night now, and there's been no mention of the crew at all.

The cameras actually followed a woman being wheeled into the operating theatre. She was in shock, could not speak and added nothing to the news report, if you can call an orgy of speculation news. There was sharp contrast between the visuals of rescuers grimly carrying away charred bodies and the squeaky sounds of excitable newscasters poking at "experts" trying to get somebody to place blame somewhere. The "facts" that were being presented changed from one channel to another, even the immutable ones such as the number of people on board, the nationality of pilot and the names of the few survivors who were talking on screen.

The worst of all was the swooping down on the nationality of the pilot. I happened to be online when one newscaster finally had the courtesy to pronounce his name properly, so I typed it out into Google. Commander Zlatko Glusica - apart from being an experienced pilot who's flown this route many times, contrary to what they'd spent all morning trying to get us to believe - happens to have had three children. I'm sure it's fun for them to have their bereavement crowned by the barely disguised witch hunt being conducted on TV. The most racist race on earth is eager to find the "foreign pilot" guilty by virtue of his foreign-ness. Because, of course, all Indian pilots are vested with Vedic superpowers that can not only control the bursting of a tyre from the cockpit, but also extend runways and fill up gorges in nanoseconds through sheer yogic will.

Even if investigations show that it was, after all, an avoidable pilot error, today's TV channels are still in the wrong. 160 people died, the names in the passenger manifesto convey sad stories of whole families wiped out, of a lone parent clearly left behind on one or the other side of the flight - the solitude of Dubai's annual summer migration made permanent, of young men suddenly gone. But very little hush or respect was evident in the broadcast press, not even of the fake variety. There ought to be a law.

Holy shit

2010-05-13T23:03:00.000+04:00

One of the first things I heard when I returned to Bangalore was that the glorious Indiana beef burger of my youth was no more. They now served only the lesser patties. Then I started to notice the absence of a beef section in Chinese restaurants. One day I succumbed to a craving for Mac Donald's and was upset enough to walk out when I found wall-to-wall chicken. Recently I found that another Bangalore institution no longer had their signature beef fry. The present state government is a party that has Hinduism as its platform, so I assumed that a policy of religious tyranny was at work. This was confirmed earlier this year in the rigorous efforts to push through a blanket ban on buying, selling or eating beef. It's being vigorously appealed but logic works in mysterious ways here so who knows whether one will shortly need to sneak into a backroom with blackout curtains to eat steak.

Hindu friends who are very religious are arguing that the cow is a sacred animal, so there's nothing wrong in protecting it. They and it are very, very wrong. The issue is not about protecting cows. When you start turning your personal religious practices into law you become Saudi Arabia. God does not come into our national anthem, we have no pledge that puts religion on the same plane as patriotism. Also, India has as many kinds of Hindus as there are Gods, and many of them eat beef. Even more important, India is not just a Hindu country.

The increasing number of idiots who've set themselves up as guardians of "Indian culture" are ignorant of or ignoring the fact that there is no such thing – each community has its own culture, and these are beyond counting. The only thing that could be called Indian is a certain unique richness of diversity, which seems to be on life support and in its final moments right now.

I smile every year when Americans are careful to say Happy Holidays rather than Happy Christmas, but we could take a few lessons from that. On Christmas Eve in Dehradun, I heard not a single carol in the shops. All I saw was a BJP rally in town, the saffron lotus hovering ominously above Rajpur Road's Adidas showrooms and cappuccino machines. I don't think the timing was a coincidence. And it made me uneasy that there was no sign of mosques or anything Muslim – if they were around, they were hidden, which is uncomfortably like the churches and temples in the hard-core Islamic lands. My country is a secular democracy, and if it's going to turn into a Hindu supremacy state, it makes me fundamentally homeless.

The temples in those parts were faintly menacing. I think it was the metal trident and flag over them, the rather militant symbols that seem to feature prominently in most Hindu agitations. The buildings were white or unfinished grey, and almost empty of ornamentation inside. The Gods themselves seemed roughly hewn. Being conditioned to the voluptuary leanings of the other half of the country, that sparseness felt like deprivation. The further south you go, the more luxurious temples become. The idols wear silk and gold and are washed with milk and honey. Every inch of their houses is carved or painted. The air is heavy with camphor and incense, the floors are slick with flowers and lamp oil. Even the smallest, poorest village deity has a velvet throne and a blinged-out carriage when it chooses to go walkabout. The cold, white atriums of the Gods here feel inhospitable and the echoes of devotees in the emptiness, dreary. But I was put in my place very neatly when a Punjabi colleague said he didn't like the South Indian temples for the same reasons that I like them.

For now, beef fascism or no, I'm glad I live in Bangalore – there is a temple on every street corner, but also equally visible churches, mosques, gurudwara and fire temple. If you wake before dawn in our house, you first hear the matins from a church of unknown denomination, then a muezzin's call from farther away, and that's followed by the chanting from the temple down the road. They have equal, independent airtime and are all equally annoying in their loudness. It's a brief glimpse of an India that could be, the country that's forgotten in the pages of the constitution because nobody read the manual.

Trivia

2010-05-07T18:29:00.002+04:00

I was clearing out my handbag today, having decided to minimize and move to smaller bags and save my shoulder some wear and tear. This is what I found:

A Chinese lipstick case given to me by my mother
A wallet given to me by my father
An unbreakable steel mirror brought by an ex-boss from Korea
A Montblanc pen I got as a birthday gift from an aunt
A Shaeffer pen that was a farewell gift from a long-ago employer
A phone that was a birthday gift from my brother and sister-in-law
Another phone, ditto
A pocket compass that was a present from the sister-in-law’s brother
A lip salve sent by another friend – more a sister-in-law, really – from California
A bling keychain that was a wedding favour sent from Canada by a former colleague
Attached to that is one that another ex-boss brought me from Brazil
Attached to that, yet another one an ex-boyfriend brought me from Arizona
Attached to that, a really grubby one that was part of a highly successful project I worked on, which I consider a talisman
A monogrammed card case from a friend in Philadelphia
A pack of heart-shaped post-it notes that an anonymous admirer (or class clown) left on my desk this Valentine’s Day
Sundry notebooks, membership cards, packs of tissues, assorted jewellery, a dishwasher and a pick-up truck

And it seems there isn't one that I can give up, except for the post-it notes. Conundrum.

The first strand of grey

2010-05-07T17:58:00.000+04:00

The birthday milestones passed unheeded. As a friend wrote, I never seem to know what age I actually am. (I still don’t know without some elaborate counting). The number of years don’t seem to mean anything at all. Wrinkles – pshaw! Gravity – whatever. But grey hair… OMG. And so, it seems I’ve discovered what my greatest vanity is; how weird that it should be something I generally pay very little attention to.

I was entirely unprepared for the horror, when I saw it in the well-lit, magnified mirror of a hairdresser. It triggered an unreasoning panic and emergency stock-taking of the “youth squandered! achievements nil!” kind.

My memory is already mostly gone – I never remember to do things (one of my colleagues recently told me I needed a wife. This is an uncomfortable corollary of the time a friend walked into my apartment when it wasn’t inspection-ready, looked around for a few minutes in growing delight and said “but you’re a guy”). On the plus side, of course, there are some stupid things I’ll never do again. Then again, they were fun at the time. Screw wisdom, I’d like the pigments back.

One of my best friends from college just joined my office. How strange to be sitting down to lunch 20 years later, peering into each other’s lunch boxes and offering to share food. Now we talk about travelling with children, staff meetings and how we only register our own aging by the fact that our little brothers are over 30, but I notice we laugh just as much as we did. And what a relief to talk unreservedly to someone in an office that, after nearly two years, is still the big dark. How nice to speak in the same voices, to recognize mannerisms and verbal shortcuts, just as if I didn’t have one foot in the grave.

But it’s all downhill from here. I feel it in my pre-osteoporotic bones.

Most of all, I dream of bread

2010-04-20T17:34:00.006+04:00

I’ve been on a fairly rigorous diet for what seems like years (exercise alone isn't cutting it - health and energy are all very well, but I want results I can see). Anyway, my favorite pastime these days is comforting myself with thoughts of food. On today's menu is hot food that tastes really good cold, the next day:

Sausages
Pizza
Biryani
Kababs
Keema, especially on hot buttered toast
Noodles
Cheesy pasta
Moussaka
All bakes and casseroles
Potato fry
Sprouts cooked with chillies and onions
Any leftovers that can be sandwich filling: fish in all forms, onion chutney, sautéed vegetables, chicken/mutton/beef/egg curries, liver fry
Stewed apples
Fried bananas
Custard

You can see why the diet was necessary.

Scapegoats, IPL and a little light terrorism

2010-04-19T22:04:00.004+04:00

I was planning to take break from sweeping criticism for a while, but as with all good intentions, that didn’t last very long.

First, one bomb went off in the vicinity of Chinnaswamy Stadium. Then another, near one of the gates. A third was found and defused a little later at another gate. Somehow the police commissioner deduced from all this that it was okay to continue with the scheduled match. Granted they were small ones (though I doubt the people who were injured feel that way), but are we so stupid about cricket now that we will literally bet our lives on it? Or is it just another instance of the rampant corruption in this city? The police had apparently “taken over” the stadium 24 hours before the game for security reasons, but they didn’t have the grace (or savvy) to apologise to the public or even look shamefaced; they just moronically reiterated how small the bombs were. One can only assume that Bangalore’s such a soft target that the terrorists don’t send their A Team here. The organizers of IPL are wisely taking the other matches elsewhere.

Talking of IPL, I caught bits and pieces of some of the games and felt affection for the inevitable urchins perched up in trees to get a glimpse, rickshaw pullers and marketing executives in deep discussion, thousands braving the unprecedented heat to watch. I felt that anything that brought so much excitement into the lives of so many should not be reviled, and cancelled my post on the horrors of being caught in the cricket season in India. But I’ve revised my opinion yet again in the light of the lawless antics of the IPL owners. Front page after front page has been dedicated to the unfolding drama, as if nothing else existed in the world, as if the highly influential players in this game would actually face consequences. We’re all going along, though we know as a nation that it won’t happen. Shashi Tharoor was the first scapegoat, after a satisfyingly irrelevant witch hunt full of multiple divorces and damsels in Dubai. Soon there will be others, and there the matter will end.

Just as my harangue about the pathetic system gathers momentum, though, I notice that the footpaths in Whitefield are being properly, even decoratively, paved, and drains have been dug, which means that this year the monsoon won’t create the usual mudslide. Beautiful, flowering trees have been planted along the road and shrubs, on the median. The garbage collectors are arriving on schedule every day, and when a transformer burst in the middle of the night recently, the technicians showed up at once. I’ve lately heard several stories about police and ambulance arriving within minutes at the site of an accident and no money changing hands at all.

So, as Wodehouse would say, the moral of this story is being withdrawn and presented to a panel of experts. The race between good and evil in government is a perpetual photo finish.

Losses

2010-04-16T20:41:00.002+04:00

This is a memorial post on a stranger's blog, written soon after the funeral. I'm not entirely sure why I'm re-posting it, except that it's a well-written tribute from a grieving grandson, and though I don't know the actual person he's talking about, I seem to recognize the grandmother. I lost six of them.

Latest pet peeves

2010-04-12T22:14:00.004+04:00

Call waiting: What is the point of this? It’s rude and disrespectful to interrupt someone to take another call. But if you don’t, the second caller thinks you’re ignoring them. Isn’t it a lot more informative, not to mention civilized, if your phone is engaged when you’re on it and it goes straight to voice mail?

Lift hustlers: Do they really fear the lift will leave without them? It’s not a Mumbai local train, you know. It can be held open until everyone gets in, so there’s really no need to trample everyone in your path to do so.

Red-light creepers: Is it now a loser thing to actually halt at a traffic light? My driver used to do the creeping forward thing too. He’s stopped doing it now, but I think it’s more about humouring the mad woman in the back rather than understanding (or caring) that the white bit in front is for people to cross on, not the starting line for a green-light race.

Footpath riders: I don’t care if you’re a bicycle or an ice-cream vendor – if you’re not walking, get on the bloody road.

Starers*: I’m not an escaped circus animal. I am not the Taj Mahal. I am not even the best-looking woman in the vicinity. Move on before I punch your eyes out.

*I have to clarify that it's both men and women. The whole damned world. Men, women, children, stray dogs, the odd cat, some cows, a coffee machine... hmmm, would I need to see someone about this one?

You know you’ve been in the outsourcing industry too long when...

2010-04-09T13:44:00.004+04:00

… you can tell the time in so many time zones that you get confused when you have to call your colleague in Chennai
… you know when daylight saving has begun on the other side of the world
… you know the current weather in at least one small town in the US
… you know the dollar value of your salary up to five decimal places
… you nod knowledgably when someone mentions football, until you realize they’re talking about soccer
… you can pronounce Guadalajara, Arkansas and Navajo correctly, but you struggle with Kundanhalli, so you call it Whitefield
… you know they speak Tagalog in the Philippines, but you don’t know they speak Kannada in Karnataka
… you know all about Thanksgiving, but Ugadi is a closed book
… you’ve heard your name pronounced so many ways that you can barely remember the right way to say it
… you think of them as periods rather than full-stops, painlessly erasing at least 20 years of British conditioning
… you find it easier to say “zee”, and the red-liner in your head has been reprogrammed to register words without them as errors
… you do not see it as rude to leave your own dinner party to “take a call”, and nor do your guests
… you’re not unduly enthusiastic about the “work from home” option, because there’s nowhere that you don’t work
… you expect to find something new in your inbox no matter what time of the day or night you check your mail
… you check your mail at all times of the day and night

The scourge of the candlelight vigil

2010-04-07T22:25:00.000+04:00

Recently, the world was full of exhortations to observe Earth Hour, and switch off all “non-essential lights” for an hour. In Bangalore, where there’s a power cut practically on the hour every hour, a sizable part of the population has no electricity at all and many, many roads have no street lights, this is not just a joke, but a cruel one.

It’s the equivalent of the Bus Day that someone tried to do a month or two ago. The posters are still stuck on the buses, mocking the crowds that struggle to fit into inadequate bus shelters perched on ill-maintained footpaths. The buses themselves are large and plentiful, but there’s nowhere to catch them from.

For these things to work, they need to be relevant to local conditions. Why not a no-paper-cup hour or no-printing day or no-paper-bag week or a no-chucking-garbage-out-of-your-car lifetime? How about the government takes a break from dictatorial, not to mention seditious, beef bans and introduces a conservation mandate?

They could insist that large companies have a certain wattage of solar power for every 300 employees. These offices usually have the space for the solar cells and the money for the batteries. It could be made mandatory for apartment blocks and gated communities to have solar-powered outdoor and common-area lighting. Home buyers could be given tax benefits to sweeten the extra costs that will no doubt be passed on to them.

Large office blocks should have windows that open so that air-conditioning can be switched off for a few hours in the day during the very pleasant Bangalore winters. Under-utilized PSU labs could work at finding a marketable DIY kit for rainwater harvesting, so individual homes don’t have to rely on contrivances that end up as maternity homes for mosquitoes.

And since the powers that be are taking care of Earth Hour for you, why not use your energy to go out and cast your vote? The recent local elections were held on a Sunday, but turnout still didn’t cross 45% in the so-called elite, educated areas of the city.

Gandhi’s descendents won’t leave their air-conditioned cocoons to be the change they say they want to see, but the first whiff of melting wax, and they’re there in swarms looking righteous and giving sound bites to TV cameras. What exactly is the point of a candlelight vigil? Apart from making you feel and look good without the inconvenience of having to actually do something.

Candid camera

2010-02-25T14:27:00.001+04:00

I entered my usual café and walked straight into a Tamil film crew in the middle of shooting a series of scenes, including the quintessential Indian film close-up of the hero lowering his sunglasses in awe to get a good look at the girl.

Apart from the main players – the director, cameraman, still photographer, crew, actors, hair-and-make-up, actors’ keepers, two production people and the unfortunate soul who was “continuity” – there were about fifty others who didn’t seem to have prescribed roles. Some of them seemed to be just roadies. Others hovered with the watchful tension of vultures above a kill. One of these suddenly won himself a place in the inner circle – a light went out and he was on the terrace correcting it at the source even before the director had finished hurling abuse. He won what seemed to be the signal honour of wielding the clapboard. And lost it after two takes by not paying attention.

From the little bit I saw being shot over and over again, the hero, having coffee with a friend on the verandah, spots a girl through the window and asks a waiter to pass on a message. I initially thought there was no heroine present, and that the follow-up would happen elsewhere. But then she suddenly turned up, so maybe was being kept in a covered basket till then. Tamil heroines seem to have shrunk alarmingly; this one was more size zero than Dravidian goddess. Also noticed that the hero was rather vain about his hair and the director was a pleasant person, infinitely patient with the extras. He needed to be, since it was an unrehearsed performance. Surely they’d cut down on a lot of shooting time (and wear and tear on the director) if they invested a few days in rehearsals? Those of us watching take after take, unconsciously assuming the roles of so many assistant directors, saw it when they had the take and sat back with a sense of achievement when the director called it a wrap.

I watched with some nostalgia (made sweeter by the knowledge that I’d never have to do it again) for the days of shooting humble 30-second commercials with people who were anything but. It was nice to note that certain things had not changed. Film crew trailers are recognizable from a distance. The clapboard is still the same old one. There is no vernacular equivalent for “Roll camera”. And the correct response to this is still “rolling”, no matter that all other conversation is in Tamil.

The director had the uncomplicated confidence of established genius and he was being borderline respectful to the actor so I’m guessing they were both famous. Unfortunately, my waiter did not know their names, him being Bengali (his reason, not mine).

It’s amazing how the regular patrons refused to be discouraged by the considerable inconvenience – they perched on ledges and borders of flower beds, moved good-naturedly whenever requested to get out of the frame, shared tables with strangers, or – as in my case – willingly sat at an orphan table surrounded by cables and lighting paraphernalia. And the waiters never forgot me perched up on the precarious platform. That’s why I love this place.

Since I was well situated to talk to the light boys, I did eventually find out the names of director, actors and movie, but won’t mention them in case there are implications of some sort.

Saj for the soul

2010-02-21T16:03:00.001+04:00

After a few bad experiences with hummous at various places around Bangalore, I have steered clear of Arabic food here. But a Lebanese restaurant in easily accessible Indiranagar that also serves shisha is too hard to resist. It proves to be worth the risk. Mezzeh is a lovely wooden-roofed bit of Beirut on top of a building in Bangalore. The impression is heightened by the fact that the roof next door contains a giant bird cage, bird room really, full of parakeets and hung with little clay pots, and the one behind contains a table tennis table. The hummous and labneh are good. The music is Arabic Lounge. The boy preparing shishas over there is clearly Egyptian. The excellent shisha bears witness to this. Most tellingly, other Arabs are eating here. Sitting here with the treetops and esoteric roofs of Indiranagar before you, it feels as if the sea is right there beyond that line of coconut palms.

It seems I turned native at some point in the 10 years I spent in the Middle East. I blame Oman. And my Lebanese colleagues in Dubai. Mezzeh made me at first tearful and then retrospective.

After an hour of sitting here, I know it’s not so much the Middle East I miss, but the person I was then. I miss the absolute trust in the eyes of those who handed me briefs, the confidence with which I took them. I feel the lack of daylight on my desk, in every sense. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with the troughs of a high pressure job but I could do with some of the highs. Surely I’m too young to not have highs at work? And life is probably too short to allow yourself to be eroded by the long-distance politics of the outsourcing industry to a point where a plate of hummous makes you emotional. I think that as an exercise in root-cause analysis, the hour was well spent!

One thing about Mezzeh, though: it’s expensive.

The green, green AstroTurf of home

2010-02-19T14:12:00.001+04:00

I know lots has been said on this blog about the transformation of Whitefield but I need to do one more. It’s for the readers who grew up there or visited it often enough to know what it used to be like, so they’d know what I’m rabbiting on about (and why).

Recently, I wandered around the stores, and assuming the local wares are an indication of what the neighbourhood wants to buy, the things I found were wondrous. Within an easy walk of where all of us lived, you can buy a three-season tent, rock climbing equipment, a high-tech crossbow, a Bianchi or Cannondale bicycle. Then you can get Calvin Klein t-shirts to match.

You’ll also find French wine and, to go with it, a range of goat cheeses, Roquefort, Camembert, Brie and so on. If you want to cook whatever you caught with your cross-bow, you’ll find fresh parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. For music while you cook, pick up Bang and Oluffsen speakers or accessories for your iPod. Shower later? Here’s a designer shower head that costs more than your bathroom.

If you don’t feel like cooking, you can choose between Italian and Chinese in every conceivable price range. There was a time when you had to drive 20km for the latter, and go to Italy for the former.

If you’re a local bride, you can find all your outfits locally, with shoes, bags and jewellery to match – and never feel like you compromised.

If you’re a kid, you can buy seventy-five thousand types of toys, including a giant (and really cool) roboraptor without even crossing the magic line that divides home turf from I-told-you-not-to-go-so-far-you’re-grounded territory.

Most bizarre of all, you can buy a catcher’s mitt in Whitefield – a full size one, not even Little League. I haven’t been to the Inner Circle ground on Sunday mornings for a long time, should I assume they play baseball there now?

Mac not so much?

2010-02-15T18:33:00.002+04:00

A friend's latest article brought to the front a suspicion I've had for a while - the Apple glow is getting a bit low-voltage.

Not when I have to go through three extra steps to do one little thing on my PC. Not when Vista refuses to recognize that a file in a "recently opened" list has simply moved to another location not off the face of the earth. Nor when I have to restart, safe mode, safe mode with networking, remove battery, marinate, saute lightly with onions and press F(***)8. Certainly not when my Windows phone is putting me through a regimen of counter-intuitive antics when I just want to tell a bunch of people I have a new number.

But at other times, especially when reading comments on Wired or yet another cocky blog, I feel something which is not unlike the irritation of the first wife who knew the guy when he actually was rather cool, rather the mid-life-crisis git the new girl's on about.

I still would never get into a Mac vs PC argument - as far as I'm concerned Windows is a temple to mediocrity, pseudo creativity and committee decision-making, all the things I consider most hazardous to my health. But what the article threw up is a much more damning comparison - Mac vs Mac.

The original Apple lived up to itself. Take the designs. Technology dates really quickly, and Apple designs matched that. In fact, some of these designs were deranged, but they didn't care. This I think is was what was so cool about Apple, the Mac ethos that deserved cult status. They used to be "gloriously daft", to paraphrase Richard Hammond in a recent episode of Top Gear. He was talking about a Lamborghini Gallardo. You can buy a debugged, technically perfect, non-dating Lexus (for example) but that's not what it's about.

Apple seems to have gone Lexus, Steve Jobs has gone CEO. The 1984 spirit is lost in pseudo-creative contrivances and pricing just for the sake of it (at least that's what it looks like). There are no incomprehensible amorphous shapes. Nobody in Apple is creating a ridiculous mouse that evokes a belligerent designer saying "well, I like it and I'm not changing a thing, so you can just fuck off". The lowercase i replaced the uppercase one, and Apple is poorer for it.

I found the iPhone bulky, and awkwardly sized, as if it was launched too soon and driven by marketing rather than engineering. The iPad seems to be neither here nor there. It's an expensive Kindle with no design advantage. A netbook that won't play Flash. A very mobile laptop substitute that cannot do more than one thing at a time. Who is supposed to buy this to do what? It's daft in the worst way.

For a while now I've been half considering a netbook for the size advantage. I checked out several but thought I'd wait for the iPad. Though that didn't end well, I'm still staunch enough to wait some more, in case they bring out an alternative.

Finally, as with everything, it comes down to comfort level. I just really like working on a Mac. It makes me happy.

Who made valentine a saint?

2010-02-15T12:12:00.002+04:00

Boredom is the mill of God, the one they claim grinds slowly but exceedingly small. Waiting is the wing-man of boredom. It’s the most soul-destroying activity there is, and it’s not an activity at all. It’s a powerful non-thing, like nerve gas.

I have waited. In airports, bus stations, at home by the window with my life packed in a suitcase in my head. For a day, a week, a year, two years, three. For a farewell or a return. For promises to be made or kept. And it corroded me, lowered my resistance, laid me open to every passing virus of the mind. These were new illnesses, a different kind of isolation that comes of being in a long-distance relationship. Dangerous drop in self esteem caused by prolonged disuse, novel injuries from a new type of infringement that nobody could be called to account for because it had no name and indeed, no being.

So it could only go inwards, warping and brittling whatever it found. The repairs have taken years. A lot of it had to be cut out and thrown away. Replacement parts had to be sourced at great trouble and expense. Now, it’s all sparkling new, even better than before. So the value’s gone up and it won’t lend itself to tawdry Hallmark festivals, which brings us back to… boredom. It grinds slowly but exceedingly small.

Mile sur mera tumhara 2.0, the buggy version

2010-01-27T15:19:00.003+04:00

In between bouncing from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and clearing away the bodies of people who told me not to take it "so personally", I knew I really needed to write a dissertation about it on my blog. An insightful one. Funny. Incisive. With biting wit and slaying sarcasm. Except I watched the video twice and sputter sputter, sputter, spit.

But that's a good thing because there's no way on earth I could have bettered this commentary: Mile Sur Mera Tomorrow? Fail

Click on the link. It's really worth it.

Has it been that long?

2010-01-22T22:39:00.006+04:00

Or maybe the question is: "Has it only been that long?" Got this in my Hotmail inbox today and it was interesting to read the last three bits. This was my first email account (actually the only reason I still have it) and also gave me the my "web name" of shilo70, which has totally stuck!

Thoughts in a bookstore

2010-01-13T21:31:00.008+04:00

Looking through the “Indian Writers” part of a bookstore (a section that seems to grow larger every month), I stopped muttering to myself long enough to register something I hadn't quite noticed before - there is a lot of Indian pulp fiction out there and that is a very good thing. It’s a sign of the market coming of age that there are different kinds of Indian writing in English and they are all of them prolific. It's several worlds removed from having the one Vikram Seth or Arundati Roy who had to be all things to all people.

The problem that lingers, I think, is that the rest of the world has yet to catch up. All Indian writers that are marketed right are treated with the same tone by the same kind of reviewers. Sacred Games is a case in point. Chetan Bhagat got the write-up in the New York Times that Vikram Chandra deserved. I believe that the increasingly hysterical Mann Booker Prize has a lot to answer for, too.

Often, good Indian writing - the books that are Indian only incidentally, or those that are so fundamentally Indian that they need no decoration with henna or scenting with sandalwood – these, like the independent Indian movies, cross borders quietly and make their mark among those who know. In the big picture, the whole publicity thing probably doesn’t matter.

So I’m left with one burning question and giant peeve – do Indian publishers not believe in editors or proof readers? Especially in a time when anyone with a keyboard can and does write, why isn’t this considered essential? I’m finding basic grammatical and structural errors in more and more books. A delightful read like The Zoya Factor was spoilt by weird grammar glitches that an average sub-editor with a hangover could have corrected. It drives me crazy. People have argued with me about preserving the integrity of “Indian English”. Bollocks. RK Narayan is the quintessential Indian English, and I have yet to see bad grammar or wrongly used words in his books.

I just finished reading a singularly execrable book. “What Would You Do To Save The World?” is essentially the story of a real beauty contestant, told through the thin fictional veil of a “Miss Indian Beauty” contest. With so much good material to work with, it could have been a Devil Wears Prada (the designer of the cover may have believed that, too, from the blurb). All that emotion, manipulation, the discomfort of a doctoral student making herself jump through frilly hoops for a tiara, frustrated at not understanding her need for it, the fact that the accolade is inevitably tawdry even with the real diamonds, a faded institution struggling to mean something to somebody against the backdrop of a country already torn by too many ideological paradoxes and a world that prefers to get that sort of fix from reality TV. Hell, in the hands of Rushdie, it could have won a Nobel! Instead, the book can’t be bothered to go higher than the level of a mediocre newspaper feature.

I’d decided not to trash any more books on my blog because of not wanting to give the universe ammunition for when it comes to payback time, but this one is wantonly bad. It makes me feel homicidal, not just the waste of good material (which after all, is just opinion), but also the fact that it's almost semi-literate in places.

Talking of payback, at the other end of the bookshop (and spectrum) is a terrifyingly eloquent Zadie Smith, to name just one, who makes me want to simultaneously stop writing and write more, the hit of pure joy and fear at the edge of a cliff with a glorious view. There’s a difference between talent and gift, and I may have the wrong one, but I’ll never know until I know, and at that point it will be too late. Someone may read my book and say “In the hands of PD James or Ian Rankin or Donna Leon or Ruth Rendell....” but just as I write that, I realize that none of them would produce this book. So it seems not to be derivative, then. At least that’s something.

Joy to the world

2010-01-03T20:24:00.007+04:00

The Songtsen Library, 11km outside Dehradun, turned out to be exactly what I had had in mind when I started planning this holiday, which is something that almost never happens. I could do a lot of tedious description, but I think the pictures will be do a better job.

Surrounded by academics and travellers, and others who belong in a Leonard Cohen song, it felt like living on a small campus, my first-floor suite like my own flat. At times, when Joan Baez was singing Diamonds and Rust and I glanced casually up from my writing, it felt as if I was back in my flat in Muscat. In fact, since it was oriented similarly with the windows facing the sun rising over the hills, it always took a few minutes after waking to reorient myself to the present.

The gardens fell away to the thickly wooded Sahastradhara River Valley. The flowers were profuse, the people quietly welcoming and the unnumbered Lhasa Apsos frolicking about were friendly (these could have been three or four or just an optical illusion. It was hard to tell in the mist, compounded by the fact that most of them didn't have names).

My first evening here, I went down to the fence to enjoy the sunset, feeling a deep relief at the quiet beauty. I watched the darkness and mist fill the valley, until the outline of the hills faded out, and only the sky was left, clear and cold. The stars switched themselves on, one by one (coinciding with the half-hour load shedding on the ground), and the waxing moon showed up shortly after, way too bright for a mere crescent. It deepened the dark, intensified the cold, and sharpened the outline of the hills once again. And along with them, the dark shapes of bushes, trees and sundry undergrowth. Then, having been reading Jim Corbett and being possessed of an unreasonable imagination, I retreated hastily to where there were lights and tea, and humans. It was only six-thirty in the evening, but it felt like ten, so I prowled around the kitchens until dinnertime at seven. In yet another of those reminders that the Earth is round, the chef here turned out to have worked at Rice Bowl, the old Bangalorean institution on Brigade Road. Apparently, the restaurant belongs to the Dalai Lama's sister; I'd always assumed it was Chinese-owned, and rather tactlessly said so.

Once I'd gotten into a rhythm, I would only stop working in time to watch the mist and star show from my balcony. In any case I wouldn't have returned alone to the rather lonely viewpoint unless I could have got one of the dogs to accompany me. But small dogs have a lot of cat-like qualities and won't go anywhere inconvenient or uncomfortable unless there's something in it for them. I did manage to buy some man's-best-friend-ness with a chocolate biscuit, but it clearly didn't run to wandering outside in the cold.

Looking at my photographs now, there's still a sense of unreality to the whole thing, not least the fact that this perfect place was came my way because of a perfect stranger. There, cushioned within the blessed diversity of many nationalities and the anonymity of being just one among many, I got a lot of work done. Mealtimes were enlivened by cameo conversations, nearly always with someone new. These ranged from being silly with the merriest Germans I've ever met over the ways of fictional murderers and the possibility of any such making it to the Nobel list, to satisfying the bloodless curiosity of a librarian about a book in the making. It occasioned no awe or wonder or any singularity whatsoever, that I counted my holiday well-spent sitting at a laptop in a library all day; or that two hours of walking did not need to lead anywhere.
The Dalai Lama's vintage-ish Mercedes displayed on the Library lawns.

A hill station that's flat

2010-01-03T20:05:00.001+04:00

After the hill-surrounded, green-valley-overlooking Songtsen Library, Dehradun town was horrible. A lucky conversation with my friend in town gave me the local name for the iconic clock tower, which was where I was headed. When I got off the bus, I was told it was round the corner. I unerringly went around the wrong corner, but decided to keep walking anyway to see where I would fetch up, and Dirk-Gently-style, ended up where I most needed to be – in front of a Barista. I hailed the sight of it with immense relief, exhausted by the blaring traffic (noticeably chaotic even to someone from Bangalore), open drains, ugly buildings and non-existent footpaths. In more than an hour of walking, I hadn't taken my camera out once.

The day before I left, my sister-in-law had warned me that Dehradun was entirely flat, saving me the added trauma of having to find out the hard way that the nip in the air was all there was to remind you that you were at the feet of some the greatest mountain ranges in the world. I had kept telling people that Dehradun would be like Ooty, doing the charming Nilgiri town a major disservice in the process.

Once, this place must have been like all the other colonial hill stations. The guidebooks and columnists are trying to pretend it still is, just like people keep calling Whitefield a picturesque suburb of Bangalore when all that's left of it is a cottage or three that hasn't yet been sold to a developer. (Important lesson learnt: If you want to know about a place, never ask someone who went to school there: the good old alma mater nostalgia cancels out all sense of perspective)

There's a cantonment area somewhere, which must have been nice, as all of them are. There must also have been Anglo-Indian and affluent pockets (I fervently hope), with roses climbing over cottage walls and the kitchen gardens that the girl on the train was talking about. But as with everywhere else in India, perhaps the world, gated communities called LA City and Greenview are working hard at removing the green from the view. There was a mall-like object far out of the city and I puzzled over its existence so close to a centre for Tibetan monks, until I explored a road beside it and came upon an "IT Park", of all things. I threw some garlic at it and ran away.

This, I suppose, is Progress and, indeed, why should the people who live here be left out of the consumerist orgy just because visitors want an "unspoilt getaway"? It's what's wrong with the times, not just Dehradun. Soon the only real holidays will be in the resorts enthusiastically creating debugged versions of the originals.

Once I'd seen the Barista, I was properly oriented to the instructions in the guidebook I'd deliberately left behind in Bangalore (since this was not supposed to be a tourist visit). So I kept walking until I reached the historic Ellora Bakery, where I bought several jam rolls, an old favourite that the even older bakery in Whitefield has stopped making in favour of ill-conceived croissant-like confections. Refreshed by the fact that I had high-sugar, fatty foods for future reference, I walked some more, noted the strange profusion of jewellery stores and dismaying lack of a restaurant that sold something other than butter chicken, and returned to the Barista for the rest of the afternoon. The friend for whose sake I'd come into town was mysteriously missing, but I'd found the me-shaped hole in a café and was very pleased with the day's work.

In the days that followed I made several short trips into town – I was situated outside a little village that lit dung fires at night, so, while their shop sold cream biscuits and bread, I had to commute a bit for anything else I wanted – and noticed calmer, more civilized parts of Dehradun from the bus window. Still, it's not really anywhere anybody would want to go on holiday. If you don't live there, it's just a transit or refuelling stop.

The bus was a smallish blue thing that you flagged down at the end of the village road. A few days of commuting later, I was negotiating with an orangemonger at Dehradun bus stand when the bus arrived, and I expected philosophically to have to catch the next one. But when I turned around with my bargain fruit, I found the bus waiting patiently for me. I remembered dimly that that's what rural bus services were about, and, in return, dug up the skills required to make space for a third person on a seat that was hardly big enough for two.

Barista, Rajpur Road, Dehradun

2010-01-03T20:01:00.000+04:00

I visited this coffee shop quite a bit, mostly because it had a bookshop attached. Also, since I was surrounded by chai, I was automatically craving coffee, in spite of the fact that I'd long stopped drinking either.

Most of my fellow patrons seemed to be yuppie couples visiting from the capital or well-heeled parents of boarding-school-going children with said sufferers in tow. Now and then, there were people more difficult to place and some who were technically foreigners, but, I realized sadly, less foreign to me than the Indian peers around me there. There was a group of young men in the corner one day who had that certain something about them that said "motorcycle expedition". It was nearly an hour before I registered that the certain something was a pile of helmets. A lone cyclist consulted a map over a cappuccino. A few extremely well-dressed women settled their embroidered shawls delicately at a table near me – this must have been the 'Dun elite out for coffee; no tourist is ever that elegant. By about four in the evening the teenagers would arrive with their soothing, non-life-threatening problems. At least, it seemed like four. People kept looking at my new phone, so I stopped taking it out and therefore hardly ever knew the time. I woke when the sun rose, lunched when it was high in the sky and, if out, started for home when the shadows started to lengthen. It was very restful.

The grapes of wrath

2009-12-10T16:07:00.002+04:00

“All the kings horses and all the kings men/Made Humpty happy again.”

2009-11-22T15:28:00.013+04:00

A TV show has changed the ending of Humpty Dumpty so their blood-thirsty little viewers won't be scarred by knowing his real fate. What makes it really sad is that this was the BBC. On this side of the Atlantic.

The world is getting more ridiculous by the hour. And imagine when this inevitably stunted generation actually grows up and takes over. There are days when you wish you had Calvin's transmogrifier and you could turn yourself into a member of some other species.

Women’s magazine vs fashion magazine

2009-11-19T20:37:00.006+04:00

It may not be obvious to the indifferent eye, but there is a definite difference. Women’s mags give you advice on a hell of a lot of things – singledom, wifehood, men, sex, weight loss, mothers, mothers-in-law, dinner parties, decoration, causes, quilting and breast cancer. They also tend to have an endless supply of quizzes. Fashion mags, as the name suggests, have a more single-minded agenda.

October and November issues in India are often wedding specials, but while Femina, for example, might also tell you how to be a good guest or what to serve at your sangeeth, a Harper’s Bazaar would stick to discussing optimal lehenga length, whether zardosi or crystals is more au courant, and most fashionable venues this year. And they show you fabulous examples of all the most expensive versions that you can then worry your tailor or event planner with.

The only name I can think of that effectively straddles both worlds is Marie Claire. As far as the editor’s pages of the Indian versions go, Shefalee Vasudev definitely writes the best one. In fact, one of the important things that places it far above other women’s mags is the high standards imposed on the writing. The lack of this is one of the reasons I won’t pick up a Women’s Era in a waiting room until all other sources – including trade weeklies, decades-old Reader’s Digests and financial papers – have been exhausted. But, in spite of the fact that I admire Marie Claire, I don’t often pick it up.

That’s because I’m a fashion mag person. These are specialists, and nobody is more so than Vogue. It is a pure and serious temple to one (very well-dressed, not to mention well-heeled) God, a ruthlessly catholic worship of style in all its forms, unsullied by any practical or rational considerations whatsoever. This is the only magazine I have religiously bought for years. In fact, I sometimes only know it’s a new month when there’s a different issue on the rack in the grocery store. I recently stole last October’s anniversary issue from a doctor’s waiting room; I’d missed it and it’s rankled ever since. (It’s okay, I went back the next day and substituted last month’s Marie Claire).

So I was deeply excited to hear about The September Issue, the documentary about Anna Wintour, the captain of the mothership. I scored it from my dealer today and am now settling down to watch it.

The non-parent hypothesis

2009-11-19T19:13:00.000+04:00

Contrary to popular representation, it’s not the babies that do it. I can hold babies by the dozen and feel only the same warmth I would towards a puppy. A little less, if truth be told.

It’s the uncoordinated little ones. Crowding into each other backstage, ruthlessly costumed. Taking on whatever comes their way though everything is larger than them. Recklessly committing themselves to dubious heroes and imaginary friends. These definitely tug at unsuspected umbilical cords. But, interestingly, this emotion seems to be uterus-optional. I did an impromptu survey in my office and found that a lot of the childless men my age and older felt this too. And again, not with babies, but the older ones. Which is another reason not to believe anything you read.

Maybe it’s because of my age and the fact that if it had been some other doorway I went through, I may by now have been the keeper of something in this age group, but I think it’s more fundamental than that. As friends and family become parents, I feel more and more disadvantaged, perhaps as a mere graduate might feel among PHDs. It is increasingly clear that it’s an essential rite of passage, the not doing of which makes one in some way weaker and insubstantial.

Pat generalizations like “the ticking clock” as usual miss the point. The nonsense about unfulfilled wombs is just that. No mere biological function, no matter how transcendental in the moment, can transform you. When you come down to it, it’s not being pregnant or giving birth that’s the life-changing experience, it’s becoming a parent. Emotionally, fatherhood is not less momentous than motherhood. (There are other examples of this strange social focus on the small step rather than the giant leap – the hoopla around losing your virginity, when the irrevocable crossing is actually your first real relationship; the fuss over the wedding, when the true growth lies in the building of a life together.)

So why is this on my blog when I know that it will probably start a rabid search for “suitable boys” in some quarters and inspire much needless heartache on my behalf? Perhaps a little bit because this blog has become an almost compulsive force, but mostly as a rebellion against popular culture that has made it taboo and pathetic to express such things. It should be perfectly acceptable to acknowledge that you feel the lack of a whole world of important experiences.

I have a non-smoking friend who had the habit of asking for a cigarette after a few drinks. I used to object vehemently enough for her to never do it around me. Two years ago, she did it by accident and looked at me in consternation, but I just told her it was okay because she’d become a mother by then. I felt that that made her better equipped to choose for herself, and the elder sisterly sense of responsibility I felt (still feel) was irrelevant. I should be able to talk about that here, just as I can to her, without the tedious emotional and social baggage.

Instead, I’m expected to hide behind the responses dictated by magazines and sitcoms. Well, I refuse.

The Lebanese effect

2009-11-11T21:27:00.004+04:00

No matter how much I may have chafed at the fact that the Lebanese are “so appearance-obsessed”, these are some of the things I miss about being surrounded by them:

- Extravagant compliments several times a week on the lines of “gorgeous hair day” or “stunning shoes”, making the effort not only worthwhile but necessary.

- Hairdressers who can tell from one glance out of the corner of their eyes what is very, very wrong with your look. And the fact that a) they understand fully that this is not a mere concern but a life-altering tragedy and b) they can fix it.

- The perfect manicure. India wins hands down on the pedicure but you really wouldn’t want to put those hands down where someone might see them.

- The nicest clothes in all sizes – because no matter how big a Lebanese woman is she will not brook compromise in the matter of dressing. You won’t catch her hiding in a large kurta and stretch pants.

- Shoe salesmen who understand completely that you will never, ever be able to buy the 2000-dollar Manolos but would like to try on five different ones anyway.

- The cuisine. I have to admit they are right – there is nothing in the world to touch Lebanese food. To any Bangaloreans reading this I have to say that the stuff being sold here is an abomination.

- The Mediterranean ethos – Give them a plate of hummous, a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes, and they can make a little corner of mellow sunshine anywhere, any time. They carry it within them.

- Elaborate, impeccable chivalry in lifts, doorways, parking lots. This used to make me laugh, but the truth is that you could be looking your absolute worst and still end up feeling like a visiting supermodel.

- The fact that a mass of curls and too-high heels do not merit staring. You would actually have to be a visiting supermodel to get this.

I complimented my boss on her bangle today and also remarked that it was unusual to see her wearing one. She said that she’d noticed someone touching up make-up in the loo and remembered that she was a woman too and should really make more of an effort. We laughed and I said that that went for me as well. I laughed again later that day when I caught sight of myself in a window – the Lebanese colleague and friend who used to share my office would have been seriously worried, assuming he even recognized me in my unfinished state.

As I came to the end of this post, I heard, with a rush of startled sentiment, someone talking Arabic in that familiar dialect. At the table behind us, three Levantine boys were lounging elegantly with their shishas in the way that only they can do.

Shashi Tharoor, Twitter and other kinds of cautious optimism

2009-11-07T21:33:00.008+04:00

Last week, it was the 175th anniversary of the landing of Indians in Mauritius, mostly “indentured labourers who overcame unimaginable privations and succeeded”. India sent a Dhruv helicopter as a present. Elsewhere, efforts were begun to have Kerala's snake boats perform at the 2010 Oxbridge Boat Race. India voted for the Palestine resolution at the UN Human Rights Council. A few weeks ago, an Indian locomotive was flagged off in Benin...

I know all this from Shashi Tharoor’s Twitter feed. Along with about a hundred thousand other Indians, I only discovered his page during the cattle-class brouhaha, and then became an avid follower. Now I even get it on my phone. Several times a day, I’m distracted or delighted by a glimpse into another world. If nothing else I get a random thought from someone who’s better read, more travelled and far more informed than I, which are not always things you can say of a politician. I wish more of them were out there willing to talk about their days – simply seeing what they choose to tweet about would be such an insight into their ways!

The Times or the Hindu tell me that people are being murdered in their beds, our cities are on red alert, people are starving, someone’s starting something inadvisable in the name of religion, and the Karnataka Government is ignoring the plight of flood victims in favour of some spirited infighting. I need to know all this, but it’s also a relief to be able to balance it with some positivity. This, then, is the attraction of Shashi Tharoor’s tweets – hope. In small, 140-character doses, on an everyday scale. It’s a side of Government you rarely see because hope does not make for banner headlines (unless it’s the big, dramatic variety, as in “America’s first black president”), and the purveyors of news usually don’t bother with it.

His tweet after a meeting in London covers it: “We live in a world of opportunities, not just threats”. He’s in Bangalore today for a Tweet Up very close to where I work, but unfortunately three in the afternoon on a working day is not a convenient time at all.

Photo courtesy: Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) flagging of a Benin Railways train being pulled by an Indian locomotive | TweetPhoto

10 years after Kargil

2009-11-04T09:01:00.001+04:00

About a month or so ago, we watched the remembrance ceremony of the 65-day war in the Himalayas. We would have anyway because we’re all fans of military ceremonies, but this time there was also the fact that we knew one of the names inscribed on the memorial. My strongest memory of him is of a laughing boy on a terrace telling us about army life, making light of hardship and homesickness. Later that night I searched for the letter written from the border a few months before the fighting broke out. As usual I had taken too long to reply, I was setting up a new life in Muscat, had a lot to do, put it off. And the next note I saw with his name on it was a post-it on my desk from the office manager with the news that Captain Vikram Menon had fallen in Kargil. We were four cousins born in 1973 and then one afternoon, just like that, we were three.

I still have correspondence pending. People I really care about but haven’t mailed, for no clear reason. Missed calls I haven’t returned, others that I haven’t made. Facebook friends I need to actually get in touch with. My friends’ parents just down the road that I want to visit but inexplicably haven’t. Their grandparents. Birthdays I’ve not acknowledged, though I always remember, every year. Meet-ups I’ve ditched or not set up. Simple, casual conversations that I haven’t had with the people I see every day. I draw my tired thoughts around me and huddle within, and all the while, time is passing swiftly by.

I didn’t find the letter, but I haven’t looked everywhere. It will turn up, and when it does, I can finally hand it over to his mother, about nine years later than I meant to.

Asatoma satgamaya

2009-10-17T01:08:00.005+04:00

And so an American president signs a bill after lighting a lamp in the presence of a chanting priest. The little ceremony was strangely touching. But it still left me with an unease so deep and fundamental that I can't spot the reasons for it. I think one more thing was eroded today. It feels as if all this is probably good for this generation and the next, but ultimately bad for the human race. But, as I said, no coherent thought emerges, just unfocused foreboding.

Everything I do, I will do tomorrow

2009-10-16T12:30:00.003+04:00

I’ve set aside time every day to work on my book, so of course my blogging has become alarmingly prompt and prolific. I’ve also caught up on most of my correspondence, am well up on my YouTube watching and have added to my store of random internet trivia while “doing research” for a book that is not hampered by facts in any way.

Procrastination is the second half of the two-for-one deal that is the writing gene. My best poetry is written under the pressure of a deadline for something else, holidays are planned when I have other urgent priorities, and wardrobes are organized when I’m already late for an appointment.

I have another top-class distraction now – a delightful sitcom called The Big Bang Theory. I’ve been tiresomely recommending it to everyone I meet. It has filled the void left by the fact that both Friends and Seinfeld have been watched until memorized and Grey’s Anatomy in its sixth season has dwindled from medical drama to merely drama. Book and blog can now only get written on the days when there’re no new episodes sitting on my laptop. My Torrent pipeline (one half of which is probably reading this) is almost Columbian in the fix it delivers.

Mercifully TV itself is not an attraction. I don’t so much watch it as overhear what my parents are. This is quite a good way of keeping up with the more popular serials and the news without having to actually sit through them. The only time I consciously plug my ears is when Barkha Dutt is holding forth in her “We The People” slot – this is so that my mom’s viewing pleasure is not ruined by periodic explosions of venom from my room. I do make occasional forays into Ten Sports when there’s high profile football, Formula I or some other sporting event that happened to catch my eye on the Yahoo homepage. These usually have the best commercials too – when you don’t watch them every day, they’re fun.

I had a list of things to accomplish in the first half of the year. They weren’t. Instead, a lot of others (that should have been there) got done. I didn’t get a driving licence but I did join a gym. I still don't get enough sleep but I’ve stopped smoking. I didn’t hit the halfway mark on my book but I finished painting the table I’ve been meaning to for years.

This characteristic becomes rather inconvenient when it’s annual appraisal time at work and I have a list of achievements that are significant but have no relation to the goal sheet I submitted last year. I’ll just have to do some creative match-the-following. Just as soon as I finish transferring a drawing of a complicated Inca sun on to a perfectly fine t-shirt for embroidering with sequins at a future, unspecified, probably very distant date.

Unholy glee

2009-10-13T23:03:00.003+04:00

Some months ago, I was sitting on the steps of the Taj at closing time waiting for my driver to show. When I finished saying goodbye to my friends, four young Brit women accosted me with “You’re Indian right?” I shrugged and looked around as if to say “I and a hundred others”. They clarified: “No I mean you’re Indian Indian, not someone who grew up somewhere else and visiting?” I reassured them. Then they said “So tell us where is the real India?” I smiled and replied “In the brochures”. It didn’t produce an answering smile so I wondered if the accent was really some obscure Middle-American one. I asked and they were definitely from the UK, so I assumed – quite rightly as it happened – that they must be on some sort of “spiritual journey”. I asked them to describe the place they meant. It was the brochure but I’d already used that line and it hadn’t gone down well, so I decided to give them some good copy to put on their blogs.

Think of India as a music store, I said, with every kind of music there is. When you enter the store, it’s all playing at once, so all you hear is discordance and cacophony. You need to walk around a bit, get used to it. Then you will begin to hear individual styles and instruments and you’ll find something you like that you’ll want to take away with you. But the important thing is that the store cannot tell you what you are likely to want, you need to figure that out yourself. There was more on the theme but my closing gem was: You can either see the muddy pond or the lotus blooming in it. Similarly, you can look at the lotus as a flower or as the seat of a goddess. You can see that goddess as good or evil. India is up to you. In fact, the place you seek is already in you – you just have to locate it.

I was going good when a compatriot of theirs with the full complement of the national sense of humour and a fine sense of carpe diem rescued them, saying he lived here and was having an after-party if they were interested. He told me in an aside that if I dropped the lotus motif, I could go too. But my car had arrived so I declined politely, wishing him success in his endeavours. I was going give the tourists some yogic parting advice but was foiled by the Guardian-reader pointedly holding the door of my car open. It was a good end to a great evening.

Schrödinger's cat

2009-10-09T17:01:00.004+04:00

“What the hell does one talk about on a first date?” is a hard enough question, but it’s not as bad as working out what can only be called a pre-date. Since the crucial teenage years were marked by frizzy hair and the (erroneous) belief that I was fat, my education in that direction is rather stunted. This is probably why boyfriends have mostly entered my life through neutral, non-threatening portals such as work, study or friend-of-a-friend gatherings. It must be admitted that that is where I’m at my best. Friends first is the only formula that works for me (maybe more so now that the fat is quite real). And I’ve never lost a single friend, my poor efforts at staying in touch notwithstanding; my break-ups with the said boyfriends seem to have simply consisted of returning them to the friend state.

I’m absolutely useless on first dates. I feel myself seizing up or getting silly and there’s precious little I can do about it. Being of an age where everyone I know is keen on setting me up whether I want it or not, I have a lot of opportunity to see myself like this and I don’t like it at all. Email beginnings are fine of course – I’m a writer after all – but they inexorably lead to the face-to-face moment of truth, which probably creates much Jekyll-and-Hyde confusion for the party of the second part.

In the cafe I currently patronize, I’m always surrounded by teenagers in various stages of hooking up. I should envy them the hair and the poise, except it’s certain that most of them must be feeling fat and frizzy inside. So what I really admire is their ability to bell the cat nevertheless. Not only did I squander my teenage years sitting very still under a bushel, but am also wasting the present ones doing the exact same thing. Instead of proper dates, I opt for elaborately casual meetings that I have to invent terms for and end up never knowing whether I’m coming or going. And pretending that it doesn’t matter.

What it comes down to is that I’m not a first-impression person. Like a good pot of stock, I need ages of simmering to bring out the good stuff (have developed an interest in soup lately). The good thing about not being a teenager any more is that I’m perfectly okay with that. Perhaps I don’t need a date so much as an imaginary boyfriend. Shilo, when I was young…

There’s a much better piece in the Times by Sathnam Sanghera on the subject of dating in your thirties.

Schrödinger's cat, the detailed version.
Schrödinger's cat in the version I like best. A snippet from the Big Bang Theory.

Moving on

2009-10-01T22:56:00.006+04:00

Being the sort of person who always reads the manual, I did a lot of research the first time I decided to quit smoking. There are three things wrong with all the quit-smoking programs I read online:
1. They give you rational reasons for quitting. But nobody ever smokes for rational reasons, so surely you’re unlikely to quit based on them?
2. They assume you’re trying to quit because you’ve come to hate it as a non-smoker would.
3. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach. Nowhere did I find anything I could relate to. The reasons they listed for smoking didn’t apply to me, The methods for quitting seemed to my argumentative mind to be inadequate. (E.g.: Finding something else to do with your hands is too much like a bluff just waiting to be called). So I only took as much gold as I could usefully carry – the list of withdrawal symptoms.

The rational parts helped after I went through the actual quitting part, to keep me safely smug. But as it happened, smugness only went so far and crumbled completely under the onslaught of a lovely café in the rain and remembered pleasure. So, not effective finally.

Then I read an unusual article on the subject in The New Yorker. In it, David Sedaris wrote: ““Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth…he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life. This, I thought, was how I would look at it. Yes, there were five more Kool Milds in that particular pack, and twenty-six cartons stashed away at home, but those were extra—an accounting error. In terms of my smoking, I had just finished with it.”

It made me understand fully what I meant when I told people that I knew I would stop one day so I was going to enjoy it fully while it lasted. Now, a year later, I have half a pack of cigarettes in my dressing table that’s several months old. There was no dramatic renouncing of the habit, not even conscious thought. The cigarettes that are gone from there were simply my last ones. My lighters still lie scattered around, I see the pack every morning when I dress. But there is no wrenching here, no panic. Most of all, there’s no denial. I acknowledge that I want it and love it, but choose not to anyway.

I stopped one cigarette at a time. I didn’t smoke the first one, then I didn’t smoke the second, then the third, fourth, fifth, the next pack, the one after that. I didn’t walk gingerly through it either – I met smoker friends for drinks, continued to gather outside the office and have tea with smoker colleagues. I kept the crutches close throughout, but the packs of Nicotinelle and candy remained unopened. Eventually I gave them away.

Sitting here now, at another lovely café in the rain, I can see the cigarette shelf behind the counter with “my” pack in it and I feel nothing, not even nostalgia. All that’s left is a professional evaluation of how careless the display is, all that beautiful packaging wasted by poor lighting and bad positioning. The only nostalgia I feel is for a job that I was very good at but practically killed me. Much like the cigarettes in there, I suppose, Except that that never matters. As another smoker writes: “I am convinced that smoking will kill me, but I am not sure this particular little cigarette will.”.

Weirdly, the first time I tried to stop I had the full complement of the emotional withdrawal symptoms listed – it was very, very traumatic – but none of the physical ones. This time my body reacted violently, but there was no heartbreak, so perhaps I really had come to the end of my “quota”.

I will always be a smoker, though, whether I use the feature or not. I’m glad of it.

Stargazing

2009-10-01T20:18:00.001+04:00

Away to one side of the driveway, coconut palms grow deep in tall grass. In the middle is a gazebo, even quieter than the path. On the other side, a clutch of potted plants gives way to a little hut and a trailing vine. If it weren’t for the small signs saying “Nursery”, “Crafts” and “Café”, these could have been farm buildings. Further down there are craftworky things and interesting clothes hanging in small doorways, a staircase leading to a pastry shop, the original house and garden. Lake View Farm has found a great way to keep from turning into flats or row houses.

Hidden down yet another pathway is Tranquilitea, a tiny tea shop with big arm chairs on an open patio. They sell a startling range of teas grown in the Nilgiris and make a mean crepe. Sitting there is a delight. You just sit. And sit. Drinking in the green quiet with your tea.

And when you walk about later, spend too much on a pair of earrings bigger than your face and wander round the back, you look over a hedge with surprise into a lovely leafy neighbourhood, probably the very first of Whitefield’s “new” settlements. This is no cookie-cutter gated colony, but individual houses built on separate plots that together had been another farm called Taralaya.

I stood there and thought only that I would like to have a house in this nice place, quite unable to picture the farm of my childhood. As I continued to gaze hungrily over the wall like Rapunzel’s mother, little pieces started to resolve themselves. I noticed a sapota tree, then a few more and then many, everywhere, realizing without conscious thought that our orchard was not all cut down.

A cow lowed somewhere, somebody’s Alsatian barked, and I pictured it suddenly. Far away to my right, a house, in front of it, a rose garden, and behind, a kitchen one where my Dad grew strawberries that my brother and I picked illegally before they were ripe. – my distrust of strawberries probably stems from there. Straight ahead, a haystack we were not supposed to climb but did anyway, and beyond that, cowsheds where I saw a cow giving birth. I was of course not supposed to be there. To the left of those, poultry sheds, the business end of the farm. I don’t remember any lawlessness there, so they probably didn’t interest us much. Hens are dull. Or perhaps they were just well-guarded.

I came slowly by degrees to the place where I stood – I think I was almost exactly at the place where a brave but foolhardy dog named Max was buried after being bitten by a cobra he followed into a hole and killed.

Hard upon it came the thought that the place used to be riddled with snakes, which was why my parents never went in much for picturesque leafy hedges, and I stepped back hastily. It’s still a nice neighbourhood, though, and I would like to live there. With seven snake-spotting dogs.

Sigh

2009-09-24T20:13:00.011+04:00

There’s a strange thread on the Bangalore Bikers Club forum. An otherwise sane and thinking human being has asked for pictures of “Bangalore Biking Cuties” to add to a presentation about cycling in Bangalore. (In his defense, he did not invent the… well, cute phrase, but just ill-advisedly used something that was said elsewhere.) Naturally, it has led to some of the said cuties protesting the term. Yet others have defended it saying, among other things, that “the men in this group have always been respectful towards women”. What one has to do with the other is hard to work out.

A friend of mine has responded with well-worded reasoning, so I should just provide the link to it and shut up, but in my self-appointed role of Last Word of/in Wisdom, it’s really hard to keep quiet.

My first reaction was blank horror on behalf of Joshine Anthony who cycled all 919 km of the Tour of Nilgiris in 2008, including a 7000-foot climb. I’ve talked elsewhere on this blog about gender condescension in a sports context. No matter how good the intention, referring to women cyclists like this just implies that it’s a secondary wing, introduced at best as a concession, and at worst to add a bit of colour to the proceedings. It’s an injustice to serious cyclists.

Purely from a communications point of view, how much more effective would that message have been if it was something like: “Need representation from the women cyclists”? Well, you may only be asking for photographs, but you probably would have also got involvement – perhaps new ideas, women willing to participate more actively, to go with you to make that presentation to corporates, to use their networks too for the common good. Now you’ll have enough photographs, sure, from the cuties and from those who will be big enough to rise above the pettiness, but that seems so meagre compared to what it could have been. There will be women who will get involved anyway, some because insensitivity is not a solely male prerogative and some because of, again, rising above. But it will not start the transformation that it could have.

And surely concepts like respect need to be approached with circumspection, not bandied about carelessly? In my experience, those who feel it tend not to feel the need to state it. Not one of the 20-odd men that completed the same distance in TFN ’08 gave the slightest indication that they thought of Joshine in any terms other than, simply, a fellow cyclist. This is very different from telling her, for example, “I respect you Joshine for being a woman cyclist who completed the tour”.

If the male cyclists were referred to as Bangalore Biking Hotties, then calling the other half cuties would have probably been okay. If it was used ironically, that would have been fine too. But I think this is another of those things that you either get or don’t. It cannot be taught, be we never so strident.

Just checked the thread again, and saw that several women are now pointedly supporting the cause, and drawing their skirts away from the protesters. Perhaps one person's sensitivity is another's needless political correctness. I still stick to my point, though.

Facebook: The glue of small things

2009-09-10T12:08:00.002+04:00

Elizabeth Bernstein is the latest among several columnists worrying that her online social network might destroy her real-life one, with complete disregard for the illogic of that.

I think blaming Facebook for the fact that you or your friends may not take the time to actually meet is a particularly grand abdication of personal responsibility, even for a time that has made that into a fine art. And about the people who don't have time to keep in touch but have the time to update their pages - well, if they didn't want to call you, they would have found other things to do anyway.

The example in the article of someone being upset at being de-friended by his ex is just bizarre – isn’t that the natural thing to do when you’ve just ended a relationship? I’ve hit the “remove friend” button to celebrate far smaller endings! A jiltee keeping too close an eye on the activities of the jilter and other kinds of stalkers are not new. Going online is just another way of doing it. As for intrusion, you can choose not to see people’s quiz results or photo albums and who gets to see what on your page. You’re not really at the mercy of anything, so all the angst is a little overdone.

One of the points in the article is that people can get more aggressive and indiscriminate when they’re typing than they would face-to-face. This is true in some cases, but it’s also worth noting that someone whose social abilities break down before a keyboard probably didn’t have too many of those to begin with. The couple who bickers on an FB wall are likely to do so in your living room too. The person who updates his status with flossing details would probably also share this information to your face, as would the one who wants to talk about last night’s dream. These people were always in your life – you were forced to listen to them at work, in the supermarket, at the bus stop, on the train, in the gym, lift or lobby. Now you also hear them online. The difference is that you’re free to ignore the status updates. In fact, if you didn’t log on every thirty seconds, you wouldn’t even have to know they’re there.

FB probably doesn’t bother me because I have a stunted social conscience and tend to turn off social contact like a tap when I’ve had enough of it. But apart from that, I frankly enjoy it! When your siblings are scattered around the world and your closest friends are far away, Facebook is a magic window. I’m at a point in my life where most of my preferred phone numbers have area codes and time zones. I can’t make an international call just to tell someone what someone else said this morning, nor is sharing everyday trivialities over email a good idea. It’s the worst thing about long-distance relationships, a hollowness that comes of never having enough small things to fill it. To me, this is what the status update, wall post or photo comment is about.

Perhaps the reason Facebook inspires so much love-hate press is because - ironically - it's a pretty accurate representation of our "real" social world, and it makes us uncomfortable to see it in all its ugliness.

Joe

2009-08-23T22:04:00.003+04:00

In my fairly long but strangely unchequered career, I've been lucky to have had mostly mentors rather than bosses. But even in a line of giants, Joe stands out.

Recently, I stood up in front of about 70 people and made a presentation. It's not the first one I've made, so it was not a big deal, and that was exactly what was special about it. It's a long distance from the person I was at Joe's first appraisal of me seven years ago. He looked calmly at a defensive writer and said "I agree you don't really need it when you're a writer. But if you want to grow into something more, you have to be able to talk." Then he told me the crucial thing I needed to know: "Making a presentation is not about showmanship. It's just about telling a group of people what you know or believe in." And changed my view of my job, what I could do and how far I could go. He introduced me to ambition.

He grew up in Africa, went to graduate school in San Francisco and is Lebanese at heart. He had a parrot in his office that adored him like a dog and brought a happy German Shepherd named Pablo to work occasionally. His opinion is brutally frank and his compassion, disarming. He's eccentric and moody, but his scrupulous sense of fairness is only matched by his self awareness. I have co-worker friends who for some reason were not considered "my people", so I know that life with Joe was not all joy. But I was very squarely under the mantle and so felt no growing pains for six years, though I was making gigantic leaps as a person.

His annual appraisal of me consistently included the emphatic words "too nice", which graduated to "stupidly nice". My essential nature and first responses have not changed. I still find it hard to correct someone I like but because of Joe I do it anyway. I still shy away from confrontation but I will speak up against injustice. I still want people to like me but when I have to I will nevertheless go ahead and do things that will get me disliked. I was taught well.

Most of all, Joe gave me a role model, a template and manual that I refer to a million times in my working day. He only asked that we did the best we could and enjoyed ourselves doing it. He inspired absolute trust, which for a creative team, translates into having the confidence to take risks. He knew that his team's loyalty was the index of his success, their triumphs, his own.

That seems clear and logical, but when you're in the fray and surrounded by the loud and the hasty, it is easy to forget. Away from Joe's guidance, work is a particularly nerve-wracking episode of Survivor, but I brought with me four magic words that work without fail in any situation: "What would Joe do?"

The best thing I've read this week

2009-08-22T19:28:00.005+04:00

Approach people w/
happy curiosity, it will
disarm them.

This was written on two Post-it notes left inside a book. On "Forgotten Bookmarks".

Favourite random things of the week

2009-08-19T12:36:00.002+04:00

Favourite Quote
“The more colourful you are, more the possibility of you being respected as a living animal on Kerala roads,” says a cyclist friend who did a trip in full cycling regalia from Kochi to Athirapally Falls (approx 165 km) along Kerala’s homicidal highways.

Favourite Eavesdropping Situation
The table next to me seems to be engaged in either a chemistry-free date or chemistry-ridden interview. It’s been 30 minutes and it’s still unclear. Aha, it’s neither – it’s a “proposal” meeting and he may have just blown it by not responding to a joke she made, and then paraphrasing it back to her as his own. Then again, you never know: maybe she finds it endearing.

Favourite Bit of News
A call-centre taxi driver was returning home on his motorbike after work – and got run over by a call-centre taxi.

Favourite Find on the Net
“With the Backing of the USDA, One Lady Seeks to Remove One Man's Elephant that he's Loved and Owned for Over 25 Years.” Read all about it.

Favourite Bit of Unease
Listening to Obama’s election night speech again today, the lustre seemed to have dimmed a little. At the time it seemed a sincere speech – well-written, yes, but not too much so for a good orator – and more importantly, it seemed humble and understated, two traits alien to US politics. But listening to it now, it seems too crafted, too much a product of the ultra-evolved communications industry for comfort. Words are powerful in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. Godmen and other confidence tricksters have known this since the first caveman managed to get a group of other cavemen to hunt his mammoth for him.

It’s the illusions I recall

2009-08-11T15:22:00.001+04:00

I heard a rumour that my old school is soon to be shut down. That’s my only school – I entered it for kindergarten at two and a half and left it with high honours at 15, class monitor, house captain, school prefect, prizewinner, teachers’ pet but nevertheless a very popular know-it-all, who did not yet know that that would be the last time she would enjoy certainty of victory.

It was a rural school, many students were the first ones in their families to be literate. There was a strong teaching ethic that had nothing to do with the syllabus, and a deep influence on the small community that Whitefield was at the time.

Around the time I entered high-school, the small private concern had entered a disproportionate stretch of glory. We became a centre where other schools came to write their school-leaving exams. We shone in state-level sports and cultural meets. Our name was heard in high places and our school band went to greet visiting government luminaries. Our chief guests grew more distinguished every year. Our teachers were volunteered as polling officers and advisors on textbook committees. We were the preferred guinea pigs for Education Board types, so new perspectives entered our classrooms now and then, usually in the English classes (or these are the only ones I remember). In later years, I studied with some formidable teachers of English literature but it was those visiting academics who really shaped the way I read and write, opening windows where none had existed.

Other shutters were removed too, quietly and forever. There was (still is) a school for the blind across the road and some students from there were sent to study in ours, a lesson in self-sufficiency long before it was fashionable to think of the disabled as differently abled. My mother was one of the group of teachers in my school that crossed the road and learnt Braille to make this happen. Most alumni my age will remember at least one blind child in class. One of these children is now a very senior official in a bank, another is a translator in the UN. It still bothers me when someone hurries to assist a blind person with what they believe is compassion but is really presumption, and am gleeful when the helper is shaken off impatiently. Then there was “moral science”, which was a secular teaching of principles of the “honesty is the best policy” variety. Religion only entered intellectually in the language text books through poems or stories from the major religious groups.

But I went to last year’s School Day celebration and found a mere facsimile of the place I remember. “Moral” overwhelmingly means Hindu now. Eid is a day off. Christmas is a foreigner. The Guru Granth Sahib is a mystery. Even the Buddha gets no air time. The strange parochialism that is being celebrated across the country has permeated into the staff room where teachers have long been required to wear saris, leaving no room for diversity in the form of a skirt-wearing kindergarten teacher named Lillian or a music mistress called Miss Dunn swathed in awe-inspiring frocks. No blind children play football with the sighted ones. Professors do not take poetry classes for 14-year-olds on teach-the-teacher visits.

It seems the school I knew is long gone anyway, I’m just glad it existed for a while. I have to admit though that the tartan band uniforms are much better than ours used to be, as is the band itself.

The rumour turned out to have got it wrong - it wasn't the school that was ending but the tenure of the head mistress. She used to be my maths teacher, one of the strong influences of my school days, and with her goes the last of the old guard. I guess I have no more reason to visit the school, for school days or anything else.

Dubye?

2009-07-24T21:24:00.013+04:00

There is much ghoulish anticipation of Dubai’s total collapse; an unmistakable note of glee runs through every report. The imploding of impossible dreams is always good value, the bigger, the better. And nothing is more orgasmic than being able to say “I told you so”. There is, in fact, an orgy of this in progress, forgetting conveniently that Dubai is not all, or even largely, crystal-studded water bottles and “My other car is also a Porsche”.

What happens when all the waiting staff, gas station attendants, valet drivers, office boys, grocery store workers, nannies, busboys, bellboys, groundskeepers, grooms and security guards return, needing jobs, to Manila, Jakarta, Dhaka, Colombo, Kochi, Lahore, Banjul and Bratislava?

What becomes of the taxi driver who was in Dubai so that his son in Pakistan could go to college and “become a gentleman”, and another one from the other side of the Waga border who had “five daughters to marry off”? The maids who are saving to pay for the first brick and mortar house their families have known, the elderly van driver who spent his whole life in the Middle East, brought up an extended family and still had five years to go “to make money for me now"? Most people in Dubai have heard at least one similar story.

Zooming out a little, what will Kerala do, since its prosperity owes more to “Gulf money” than policy? What about Bangladesh where the amount of migrant money put into community development is apparently higher than the government can afford to allocate?

And what of the others, the ones who may have nowhere to return to? The emotional refugees from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the people who built real lives in Dubai, permanent lives, and only talked of "home" in requiem for a life that was gone. I took a lot of taxis so I heard many moving variations on this theme, but the wistful tales of snow in Peshawar, rain in Gambia, recipes for Koshari and the abominable Molokhia, even one poignant rendition of Amar Sonar Bangla, are nothing to the single line from a taciturn Palestinian: “My country is imaginary.”

A more expansive compatriot of his driving a taxi in Chicago told me: “But you always have India.” I replied hospitably that there’s room in India for everybody, if it should come to it.

Railroad crossing?

2009-07-13T23:14:00.008+04:00

A friend forwarded a video of a train-related thing, which led, as YouTube videos do to an hour of watching others in the category. All that has led to one burning question - how can you be accidentally hit by a train?

They are loud: hundreds of metal wheels scrape on metal rails. They're heavy: you can feel the earth shake before you see them. Apart from that, there are bells, lights and a horn that you can literally hear for miles. (I can hear one right now, sitting in my room. The railway line is one and a half miles away). So, how?

In one video, a truck was halfway across the tracks and you could hear the brakes of the train screeching for ages before it hit it anyway. Another one is a hushed report of a guy driving across the tracks right in front of an oncoming train. This time the bad train was especially culpable, as far as I can tell, because he was "a father on his way to his son's birthday party." It doesn't matter if he was a drug dealer on his way to kill an old lady - the fact is he didn't look both ways. When I stopped watching, the newscaster was talking of an investigation into how many times the horn was sounded. Maybe they'll also check if the headlight was in fact on. And if the insects in the shrubs were breathing too loudly and drowning out the sound of a 10,000 ton diesel engine.

I leave you with this. For pure wholesome entertainment you can't beat provincial American news:

August 15, 2008: 61 years of freedom

2009-07-12T14:27:00.004+04:00

To really feel Independence Day, you have to be in school. Or have school-going kids or be with people who have such. Nobody else seems to pay much attention to it. My mother was chief guest at a school today for their Independence Day celebration. Her description made me as sharply nostalgic for my days of marching in my house in the parade, as I suspect it made her for her days of organising these events. This is the only chief guest I know of whose speech was actually addressed to the students assembled before her rather than into the middle distance. In a nutshell, she told them what it meant to be born into an independent country and that what they got out of it depended on themselves, not anyone else.

I went to register myself at the local election office a few days ago and found:
- Government officials have turned polite, efficient and punctual.
- Government information is no longer guarded by malevolent spirits and three-headed beasts – it's freely available on detailed websites.
- Government procedures are still shrouded in mystery, myth and legend, but less bad-naturedly so.
- Someone I studied with earns 4% of my salary. She has the same degree I have, the same general socio-economic background. But she was handicapped briefly by a traumatic marriage, which would explain some of it.
- The economic surge seems to have sharpened and widened the gap between the haves and have-nots rather than otherwise.

If it's just me noticing it more now, it's not because I'm freshly repatriated but because I have a car. It's the first time that I'm not dependent on public transport in India but I know the deadness of waiting for the bus, the tiredness that comes from constantly adjusting to circumstance, accepting the certainty of uncertainty, the large swathes of time swallowed by the mere mechanisms of life.

This train of thought was taken up again during the run up to the elections and the recent budget session in the parliament. There were so many candidates or spokespeople this time who held the right kind of education, spoke English in familiar accents, and felt as they ought, but the more reassuringly familiar they got, the uneasier they made me. We complain on our blogs and editorials but we are the urban elite, we already have the tools to function. We don’t need representation as much as the crowds in the suburban bus stops at the mercy of public transport, the small farmers at the mercy of the monsoon.

India is still largely a country of people who cannot read the expiry dates on bottles of medicine and bleed to death in the corridors of badly run government hospitals. Of millions of lives as unaffected by the recession as the boom. Of travesties, divisions and farces of all the more dangerous kinds. Our banks have one mode of customer service for my father and another for the labourer building the house next door, as does every other institution. Government warehouses overflow with subsidized rations that do not reach the poor they are meant for. Government schools have single-digit pass rates since political parties prefer to invest in wasteful religious and parochial sentiments rather than education. Kids sleep on the verges of highways and old people huddle in doorways in the rain. And, ominously, very little of the technology flowing into the country reaches the real core of India’s economy – agriculture.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this country that I appreciate even more now that I’m freshly repatriated. It angers me when people demand western standards of this, that and the other, and consider that the only yardstick. It makes me furious when someone's capabilities are judged by the quality of their English. Making India better is not about being like anybody else but about being the best we can be. Unfortunately, we warrant a lot of the criticism, court it, even.

We've come a long way in 61 years, there’s no doubt. And once India’s lower middle class and poor have uncorrupt representation and real attention, we can start to call it progress. Giving IT employees a new flyover to decongest the roads is important, but on its own, it’s just icing on a barely baked cake sitting in a faulty oven in a place without electricity.

My driver is surprised when I apologize for keeping him later than usual, and I feel like apologizing again for a much bigger thing that I cannot even define, but guilt without action becomes merely another luxury.

World’s greatest entertainer gets world’s most boring funeral

2009-07-08T00:52:00.002+04:00

I just finished watching what should have been the ultimate celebration of the phenomenon called Michael Jackson, but turned out to be a paint-by-numbers, made-for-TV funeral service for somebody. Except for the words of a few friends and the tears of his daughter, it was so devoid of soul that not even the expected “We are the world” at the end could drum up any magic. A slick choir, a predictable preacher and safe hymns. Windows-wallpaper lighting effects, some automated slides and a few sound bites. There was no connection between the man in the pictures and what was being acted out in front of the screen.

He cut across practically every culture in the world but his epitaph was spoken from an insular soapbox. He revolutionized the music video but his last one was an AV that any trainee editor could have put together in a day. It surprises me that it makes me so furious, but I feel as if a final, irrevocable injustice was done. He never got to make his come-back tour - this was it, his last concert, and they kept him off the stage. The King of Pop should have been moonwalked off it.

They should have probably called the Brits in for this one – the Diana memorials were (are still being) done impeccably. No matter what you think of the reason for it, the event itself is always moving and eloquent and all those other words that the TV channels are already brazenly, shamelessly using for this one.

First impressions

2009-07-04T20:23:00.006+04:00

I have a habit of opening up a new Word file and typing out whatever thought has just struck me, so I've ended up with a lot of rogue files with unhelpful names containing bits that were supposed to be turned into something greater, later. Today I decided to collate and organize them. I found this piece in a file named, tantalisingly, "I strongly recommend the yacht". It was written soon after I started my new job.

September 2008
When you're a manager whose only work is managering, how do you quantify your job? You haven’t got a list of things to complete, just a vague address of somewhere you have to be at the end of the year, and figuring out how to get there is supposed to be what you're there for.

And what did I do today? I talked a lot at a meeting on internal communications – officially not my concern – where I was invited to provide outside opinion. I put three people in touch with each other to further another’s training idea. I lent my weight to someone else's meeting. I advised a team member on how to deal with a difficult co-worker. I then spoke to that co-worker's manager. I interviewed one person, read the samples of work she sent in and requested a second opinion. I read three other resumés and set up interviews with two of them. I had a brief conversation with my boss. I approved two leave applications. I posted on the company’s blog by way of cranking up the participation from my team.

I replied to two comments on that post. I downloaded and learnt how to use various proprietary tools. I attended one training session. I sent a few thank you mails in reply to people welcoming me into the company. I spent some time wondering how to deal with those that palpably don't and concluded that that was their problem, so no action required from me. I read a lot of Powerpoint presentations. I cautiously opened an Excel file and poked gingerly at a toolbar or two. Apart from this, my mind was abuzz, gathering information – both volunteered and otherwise – and processing it, making plans and rejecting them. But mostly trying to understand 14 people in whose very quantifiable achievements now lie mine.

I called a job status meeting. I read a quality audit. I read some of their work. I listened a lot. Then I wrote an operations report stating their achievements in August and what they're going to in September. This is all a lot of work but at the end of the year what do I say I did, when the usual measures – the job lists, training plans, forums, commendations and project trackers – record others' progress?

Meanwhile, they need my help and they'll get it, in spite of themselves if necessary. As the she-Shepherd said to Izzy Stevens: “You show an aptitude for my discipline and I have a lot to teach. So you decide how important it is for you to hate me.”

Now, nine months later
Some of it is so prophetic I could cry, if I wasn't laughing hysterically instead. And I've gone completely off Grey's Anatomy after the stupidity of the recently concluded Season 5, though I'm still very aware of the fact that the next season will begin in a month.

I usually take my blog very seriously, not something to be used as a garbage bin for every random doodle, but I have to warn those who read it that my next few posts are going to be from those stray files. Probably inspired by P. J. O'Rourke's "Age and Guile" (Review: a thoroughly interesting book).

Traffic

2009-07-03T18:29:00.002+04:00

I had a road mishap today – accident is hardly a word for it. Of course there have been some scrapes and even an episode of road rage once (by the party of the second part, not me) but this was the first time any visible damage was done to the car. On my way to work this morning, a scooter leaped without looking and knocked out what I thought at first was a light, but later found was the plastic cage the light is protected by. So this was my first experience of the Great Indian Crowd Trick. Even before I got out of the car there were people around it. Someone pointed out the fallen piece and gave me some masterful advice on the extent of damage it represented. And such was the authority with which he spoke that I actually wondered for a second if he had any. But it was merely a superior quality bystander.

Luckily, the mishap took place under the watchful eye of a traffic cop so the usual exchange of acrimonies was dispensed with, as was the tradition of extortion by the crowd. As soon as the plastic bit was rescued from under the wheels of a passing bus and dusted off, it was clear that nothing was wrong with it apart from the fact that it wasn’t attached to the car. It was found (by another bystander) to fit back into place quite easily. The attendant scratches just joined the hundred others that Bangalore’s traffic has already inflicted. (A mechanic said: “Bangalore after all, Madam, let’s wait until there’re a few more then we’ll do all together.”) So when the policeman asked me if I wanted to file a complaint, I looked at my watch and said no. The Greek chorus approved and told me why.

Interestingly, this happened right in the middle of Whitefield Bus Stand but I didn’t recognize a single person in the group! I think the policeman knew who I was, though – he seemed more than ordinarily relieved that I didn’t want to return to the ‘tation for paperwork, as if he knew I had just saved him a visit from my Dad baying for justice and blood.

Generation 2.0

2009-06-30T22:45:00.013+04:00

I suspect I’m dealing with a weird kind of generation gap right now. More and more, I find myself among writers who don't really proof or edit their work. More unnerving than that, they don’t seem to have the fear of the fatal oversight, the typo or bit of clumsiness you might spot in a printed document when it’s too late to change. My theory is that everyone below a certain age has grown up (professionally) in a world where it’s more important to get it out there than get it right. There’s no need to spend too much time debugging the first attempt because the next version will be along in a second.

Or it's a work ethic thing. I used to believe that 14 years in advertising didn't leave you with very much, but that’s not true. In the creative department of an agency, there’s no place to hide. Even now, most agencies store a copy of every project with the signatures of those who worked on it. Your mistakes will find you. You’ll get a chance to fix it, but that’s all. There’re no Excel sheets to cover you, no hiatus while your boss makes graphs and action plans. You learn a very important corporate lesson without the expensive training in five-star banquet halls from people with famous names – accountability.

As the recently concluded Cannes Advertising Awards are being debated or celebrated in the advertising world, I have a few long-overdue Gold Gargoyles to give out:
To the creative director who made me rewrite a paragraph 37 times.
To he who returned a smug 100-word masterpiece saying: “Very nice, now say it in 30”.
To she who made me sorry I was born for the tiniest little debatable misuse of an article.
To another, who said in response to the most common defense: “Is your benchmark your client or the people who get published in the New Yorker?”
To every one of them, for saying, at one point or another, of some particularly cherished piece of work: “This is shit”.
To the unknown copywriter in The Copy Book who gave me my most valuable piece of editing advice: “Kill all your darlings”.

But this little glory hallelujah to advertising becomes null and void after just a cursory glance through the ads in the newspapers. They’re not proofing or editing anymore, either. So I guess we’re back to the generation gap, then.

99% becomes the new 100%. Then it’s 98, 97, 96 and before you know it, 65% okay is perfectly acceptable. It's all very effortlessly fashionable. Perhaps having personal standards is now passé, and I'm the one not getting it.

Finding Neverland

2009-06-26T16:11:00.002+04:00

I stepped out of my room this morning to find my Dad watching a policeman on TV saying that Michael Jackson was dead. It caused a surprising rush of emotion. It’s been years since I put any of his CDs into my player, I don’t have MJ on my iPod, but his is the defining sound of a whole generation of music. My generation.

Suddenly his songs are on the radio and they are the beat of young feet attempting impossible dances powered only by glasses of juice, teenagers in oversized jackets with padded shoulders messing with make-up and love. Dangerous. Old times, utterly forgotten until now, old friends, some of whom I have totally lost touch with, Facebook notwithstanding. But the moon is full and here come their ghosts again – Liberian Girl. Beat it. Billie Jean. We Are The World. Bad.

The opening strains of The Girl is Mine on the car stereo actually brought a lump to my throat. I felt weird about that until I reached the office and realized I wasn’t the only one. I’ve heard confessions all day of learning breakdancing, owning Thriller boots and sporting scary MJ haircuts, of upturned collars and braided coats. Two minutes ago, I finally managed to get on Facebook briefly and so many status updates echo my own.

He was bigger than himself, a project rather than a person, an anthem more than a song. Everything he did was uniquely his own, whether you liked it or not, which is why he spawned lookalikes and movealikes from the stages of Vegas to the back streets of Bhatinda. In the dime stores and bus-stations, people are probably talking of him. One entire part of the Tamil film industry must be in black mourning today.

As with all those in the bright lights – I would guess moonlight rather than sun, as far as MJ was concerned – we saw good side, bad side and terrible side. Those are hard to tell apart when your only source is the media. The words “icon”, “legend”, “end of an era” will rattle around the news and radio stations of the world for a week or so, or until the funeral, whichever comes first. The anti-newsers will write editorials saying “oh what a circus”. Someone will write a Shine On Crazy Diamond for him. Other celebrities will call him a “gifted artist”, some may go as far as “wonderful human being”. The crowds who gathered to spew hate during his courtroom appearances may well be the same ones carrying the tearful “Heal the world” banners.

The only thing we know for sure, firsthand is his music, and I hope we’ve heard too much of that to argue or to judge. He was Michael Jackson, indisputably. But what did he see when he looked at the man in the mirror? He went through so many transformations, what did he want to see? Did he see it last night?

As a friend said on Facebook “Wherever he is, I hope he finally got the nose he wanted”. Perhaps he’s turned back into that kid with the afro from The Jackson 5, and it really doesn’t matter to him now if he’s black or white.

Many songs by other people have got mixed up in this little tribute. That’s just emotional turbulence tossing up things that are not tied down or stowed away in the overhead locker. It’s hard to express the way it makes me feel, the depth of it. This is the first really big musical end, the Elvis moment, of my time.

The princess rants, continued

2009-06-09T16:51:00.007+04:00

I’ve been having a running argument with a friend on Facebook, all because of this one article that she posted. She liked it, I didn’t. She has good points but I hold stubbornly to mine that constantly being on the defensive implies guilt and uncertainty, both uncalled for.

The author’s stand seems to me to be highly coloured by certain (probably involuntary) fascist aspects of the “women’s movement”, for want of a better phrase:
1. Women worthy of respect have to conform to specific non-“girly” rules, which is as appearance-obsessed as the point of view it affects to despise.
2. The professions most worth aspiring to are those that were historically male bastions: lawyer, doctor, entrepreneur
3. Women have to try harder just because they are women just to impress other women
4. Everything, but everything is judged in comparison, not as it is.

It's a tyranny of discrimination nearly as bad as the other one. I agree there was a time when it was necessary to go too far, but the pendulum wasn’t quite allowed to continue swinging until it found equilibrium. I have three nieces below the age of six and I resent much of the article on their behalf and for their sakes.

If anything, girls should be taught that being female is merely a fact of birth, like your family or the colour of your eyes. It's not your only identity. Your achievements shouldn’t be judged by it ("woman president", "woman CEO"), nor should you be strung up for having failed the “sisterhood” if you're an underachiever. You can be girly or feminine or boyish or butch, or whatever the current media label, or none of them. What type of woman you are doesn’t matter, what counts is what kind of person you are.

I hope my nieces will know that they are free to respond to the world as people. To ignore the media, both for and against, and think for themselves. To not argue with fools who start stupid discussions that begin with "all women" or "all men". To laugh at a sexist joke if they find it funny without it in any way affecting their power of perception. I hope they understand that the world will chatter incessantly but they are free to let go of all expectations but their own. To be women or ladies or girls without feeling a driving need for aggression or apology.

Only one important thing is wrong with the pink princess franchise – her inherent helplessness. The princess does not do for herself. Fate, fairy godmother, prince or a singing teapot always has to intervene for her. The other things – obsession with beauty, for example – are only secondary to this very dangerous message. For the rest of it, they’re just fantasies, no more cause for socio-cultural angst than Superman or Tarzan.

Then there’s this genius who wrote 1000 plus words in the New York Times, no less, about women bullying women in the workplace. Apparently the gentler sex is usually the kind, caring custodian of the careers of all other women in the world, so any deviation from this is an aberration worth reporting. What is this - a Bene Gesserit breeding program?

More stuff about me as usual

2009-05-31T16:17:00.011+04:00

Someone said "Benson Town" to me today and I realized that for me Bangalore is all about those parts of the city. The old British and Muslim bits. Frazer Town, Coles Park, Langford Town, Victoria Layout, Whitefield, Bangalore Cantonment and several more of that ilk, all radiating outward from MG Road. And they're all marked by friends or food or most probably both.

There was the tilli man on some deep, dark road. "Tilli" is spleen is some street language. He sold the most amazing fried tilli on the pavement by night, his fire light glinting off bicycle rims behind him. By day he was a cycle shop. Then there are kebab shops of all descriptions, running the gamut from standard issue chicken to exotic camel. Weirdly, camel kebabs are a lot harder to get the head around than the spleen of unidentified creatures.

I don't think I could find the tilli man now if I tried but there are still the beef rolls at Fanoos in Johnson Market. It still starts to rain just as you place your order standing on the road. I had Suleimani mint tea here long before the Middle East was a glint in my eye. My best friend and I once walked through the vast butchers' enclosure to see if it would affect our dedicated non-vegetarianism. As I recall, it just made us hungry.

For dessert, there's a kulfi counter on the corner between two very busy roads, with great kulfi that, I was told recently, actually has bits of cardboard in it. The news only serves to make it more interesting. A place on St Mark's road gives you lychees or apricots or strawberries with ice cream. Another one on Residency Road has Hot Chocolate Fudge, with or without nuts. The HCF that was the acronym du jour of our teenage days was in later generations superseded by DBC. The giant Death By Chocolate was on the Corner House menu in our time too but it wasn't the signature item. It's interesting that it changed – perhaps we weren't yet comfortable with the concept of excess as a birthright.

There was a hole in the wall in Russell Market that sold tea in the small hours. It was perfect after clubbing in the cold winter mornings. I wonder where a city that now has to stop partying at 11 goes. In the day, you went to there for everything from regular groceries to car parts of shady origin to glass chimneys for antique lamps that your philistine children kept knocking over. My Dad visited this market after about 20 years and what used to be their regular shop-keeper actually recognised him.

With my life centred around these parts of the city, I've never really crossed the Hudson Circle divide into the much older Karnataka territory. There are coffee shops there that the venerated Kannada writers wrote in, "tiffin rooms" where the freedom movement was plotted, bars where even today Kannadiga intellectuals argue over squat glasses of dubious dark liquid. It's high time I visited.

Maybe the Hudson Circle just divides the beef eaters from those who don't.

Picture have no relation to what I'm saying, they're just some of the Bangalore icons on the drive from Residency Road to Whitefield.

"Hobby" is a dumb word and even stupider question

2009-05-26T12:56:00.001+04:00

My new thing is painting furniture. I have begun with my own study table. As with most things in our house, it has a history and is older than I am. My mother got it when she was in school, shared it with her sister for a while and then handed it down to me when I was in school. I can’t remember whether my brother and I fought over it, but it seems probable since we did so over everything else in our shared room. (It was a time of a single tape recorder, so a phenomenal number of fragile tapes became collateral damage in the bitter battles for airspace.) Anyway, I asked my mom if she was sentimental about her table and she said not in the least, so I set to work on it.

Painting wood is not exactly flinging water colours on the nearest bit of paper. It involves preparing the surface first. It took an entire Sunday afternoon. Stripping veneer and sanding are work. Real work. Especially when you have a fifty-year-old surface with three layers because previous DIYers were not exactly conscientious about preparation. I found out that one of them was the above-mentioned brother, which is strange because I don’t remember receiving the requisite application in triplicate to mess with my table. The Line of Control was clearly crossed one time when I wasn’t looking. That happened all the time, both ways.

Being me, it began ambitiously. I was going to reproduce a painting by Vaco that I really like. I downloaded it and built a properly scaled grid over it so I could copy the design out faultlessly. Then I remembered that I would also need to reproduce the professional paint job, so I changed my design philosophy and did my own thing with flat colours. I call it “The Seeing Eye Sees And Having Seen, Moves On”. The catalogue copy will explain it all; the comma may be especially significant.

Enamel paint is semi-transparent and apparently needs to be “flowed on with a full brush”. So I made further downward adjustments to my ambitions. When I checked on the net later, it seemed as if most 14-year-olds know this already. Well, they didn’t teach it in school in my day. Another thing I wasn’t taught is that if you forget the masking tape and you notice two days later that some paint's trickled down the side, you can’t just take it off with turpentine – it’s not nail polish. But on the subject of beauty products, my years of experiments with eye shadow have given me a very steady hand with the finer brushes. It’s also given my some highly effective, though unorthodox, things in my workbox, such as ear buds and cotton balls.

My masterpiece has really become a practice project in how to do the thing. I’ve identified two other pieces in my room for fame and glory. One of them will not occasion much comment (apart from, maybe, “do you know how much that veneer cost me?”), but the other might involve some dispute with the owner.

My first attempt at painting furniture actually went rather well, mostly because my Dad has a full workbench and lots of advice. The brushes were my own (left over from the time I went through a clay-pot-painting phase), but I need to replace his sand paper.

The table’s not finished yet, though the painting part is over. I found a great rubbing technique that involves some complicated antics with pumice powder and linseed oil, which is supposed to turn glossy to matte. If not, I can always learn how to strip paint and start over.

Zip a dee doo dah

2009-05-17T12:30:00.004+04:00

Squirrels outside my window. There are about a million of them here and they're absolute pests. They chew everything they can get their teeth into, build nests in the curtains and generally cause mayhem and dismay. But so cute.

A whiter shade of pale

2009-05-17T02:32:00.007+04:00

My maternal grandmother died when I was five so my only memory of her is a blurred image of what I now know must have been the funeral pyre. Over the years we've heard a lot about her and she has always sounded pretty spectacular.

For one thing, when she started travelling abroad on her own after her children were grown, she would have been in her fifties. That's not even middle-aged in our world, but in her era it would have been considered late autumn, time for one last blossoming – grandmotherhood – and winter definitely in the air. My Gran just caught the next plane out.

She did Europe on a shoestring years before the first Lonely Planet on the subject. A person who had never travelled embraced it with gusto. All this I knew from the stories. Tonight I heard it from her – my aunt gave me two letters that she had preserved. One of them was about the first visit to London in September 1970, and the other covered Brussels and Amsterdam soon after.

They recorded her first encounters with a washing machine, canned meatballs and a martini. That she walked from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace and back because "the taxis are expensive". The wonder that an Indian in the seventies felt at the vastness of Selfridges, the fact that "in the West" small towns and villages enjoyed the same amenities as the cities. In the Netherlands, she'd "seen many pretty girls and none of them wore make-up". In Belgium she noted that "most of the tourists are American". In England, she was awestruck by the fact that the Englishwoman she stayed with worked from "morn till midnight" because "she has no help at all". Though India provided a lot of household help, it did not have melamine crockery, Revlon lipsticks or foreign bras then, so she bought these for her daughters and nieces.

Her style of travel writing strung events together on an invisible thread of thought rather than any compulsion of mundane logic. Descriptions of St Paul's, apple trees and the Surrey countryside tumbled together, high art was mixed up with a prosaic bit about having to haul luggage at Heathrow. There was a bipolar swinging from breathless excitement to inconsequent worry. Over it all floated an everything-will-please-me-because-I'm-on-holiday adjustment to the flow.

I recognized it all. At two in the morning I was staring in shock at the place where my voice comes from, the source code written before I was born, before my parents even met, for the many, many emails sent on my own travels.

I didn't know there was anybody else in my family who had this urge to send back despatches with copious detail about where you went and what you did, talking about taxis and telephone booths, being naive about the people you met, and thrilling to the fact that something was exactly as you'd read about in some book.

Her accounts were long and chatty but there was much that she didn't say about a deeply personal roller coaster ride of glee and fear, and a swelling delight in the fact that she could. I looked out for a long time at the dark trees, feeling weird that I knew this.

Interestingly, she also said that "in the air-ports now they check your baggage and yourself because of the recent hi-jackings". I didn't know it had started that early, nor that they used to hyphenate those words.

Hay fever

2009-05-10T08:46:00.006+04:00

It’s a Saturday afternoon in April. Driving out of Whitefield, the light is clear, the fields – yes there are still a few – are green, the lake is blue. A breeze rises on the bridge and rocks the trees around the old airport. One of those freak winds is pouring out of Wind Tunnel Road, so the raintrees in the satellite research centre are raining leaves and pink needles down on us as we pass. The gulmohars have suddenly asserted themselves orangely , the jacarandas are noticeably purple. The creepers on the walls of old houses are in full bloom. Everywhere the air is full of yellow petals and the pollen that is Bangalore’s trademark in health care circles. It is summer in my city, both old and new.

These come together at an unfamiliar restaurant on St Mark’s Road where I meet two old friends for lunch. The last time we met was at our graduation, but contrary to all rules, the lunch was fine. One of the lunch companions had been one of my two best friends all through college. Now, all through lunch, I constantly feel not so much an absence as the presence of one more chair at our, the echo of another laugh far away across the Atlantic. Just as when she and I reconnected in Philly two years ago, there was an echo of this laugh all the way from Seattle. Spritzers and starters, sandwiches and grilled fish and I am on the road again. Heading down Church Street looking for the used-book store and missing all three storeys of it for the second time, I spare a thought for my driver who must have the most mind-numbing job in the world.

By five-thirty I am wandering into Mocha, a little shisha break between lunch and dinner. I’ve only been here twice over the last four months but they greet me as a regular. At 6 pm, the place is filling up fast with the pre-pub, pre-club crowd. I begin to feel guilty about taking up a table and ordering nothing but endless glasses of Moroccan tea, but I'm clearly being considered sacred because I’m writing. As in so many other cafes, the staff are showing an unsolicited respect for my pastime. But also, this is Bangalore, where someone releases a book on the hour, every hour, so they never know who I might turn out to be. If I ever publish my book, the acknowledgments list is going to read like a Time Out directory.

I notice some of the (very) young girls looking at me and I can see in their eyes the same ambition I had at their age to be the “cool” woman sitting on her own and writing. I want to tell them all that glitters is not what it’s cracked up to be but am safe in the knowledge that most of them will take the other road. As the crowd empties, it’s time for me to go too, to meet other friends at Empire, a Bangalore institution in a standing-room-only part of town that the complaining IT immigrants seem never to know. Ten years after I last ate here, the food is exactly as it was, no nasty surprises, no disappointments. Our voices come from a place that does not age, the conversation is eternal.

It’s an early dinner so I arrive home before my parents have had theirs, bearing gifts of fried sheep’s brains. I find them talking to my cousins in Providence on Skype. Right now, I can’t remember my age or what year it is, time is sublimated into a vacuum, in spite of the visible fact that the niece I held when she was two days old has now been around for almost as many years. It is summer in my city, as it was then.

Mission impossible II

2009-04-30T17:45:00.003+04:00

Lately, I haven’t been able to find the impetus to update my blog. I compose posts in my head all the time but they never get written.

It’s more than a year now since I’ve had to write for a living. I spend my time among Excel sheets and Powerpoint presentations. I find myself using management speak more and more, without making the effort to replace those words with some that actually mean something. If I’m not careful I will turn into Dilbert’s pointy haired manager who has no knowledge of his team’s “ground realities”. And today, when I’ve sat down to write, the muscles are rather stiff.

Anyway, I hereby return once more to updating my blog regularly, if only as an attempt to ignore a weird erosion of my self that seems to be out of my control.

I paused there for a bit because the café changed the music and after the years of Middle Eastern conditioning, it’s still a bit of a shock to hear a remix of Hava Nageela in a public place, both that it’s being played at all – over a muezzin’s call, incidentally – and that it can be turned into something you can dance to.

Perhaps that's a new post, coming soon to a blog near you.

Travelling light

2009-04-30T10:49:00.006+04:00

Different management exercises over the years have returned the unanimous, ironically unchanging, verdict that I’m an "excellent change agent", the ideal person for drumming up enthusiasm in the office about something new. This is because I have a high level of indiscriminate curiosity and a crawling restlessness that plagues me and mine when things have been the same for too long.

It also means that I am unperturbed at arbitrary changes of desk and other crises of convenience and filled with unholy energy when things go wrong in the middle of critical events. It is almost solely responsible for my reputation for being good-natured under pressure. It's hard to see how all this would help or hinder the people who report to me, but I definitely recognize it early enough in others to divert to productive things, so some good must come of it.

My last job needed me to fly away now and then to meet another team, do the same work in a new place, a ritual which kept the demons quiet for an unprecedented six years. Fortunately, my current job also offers some opportunity for change of air; I was told apologetically at the start that a portion of my team sat in another city. And so I recently went on my first business trip to Chennai: I took the fast train at dawn, an auto rickshaw from the station to the office and returned by the night mail the same day.

It was an inspiring departure from the style of travel to which I'd no business getting accustomed, but in many ways also exactly the same. The step by step releasing of latches and bolts as I approached the point of departure and the complete letting go of the soul as the train pulled out. The sudden, comprehensive frizzing or flattening of the hair when I arrived, no matter how prepared I was. The group dynamics in the visitee office. The way my time was efficiently disposed to the last second. It was all familiar.

As was the almost tangible urge to just get off at some other station and keep going for a while. I used to stand for a moment below the airport departure boards before a journey, like some people do at altars or idols, silently seeing myself on that flight to Amsterdam or Sao Paolo, Turin, Almaty or Baku.

Looking out of the train window, thinking of lounges and limousines, I was glad that I had had my fling with the bling when I did, because the corporate world’s generous days must be over now. Sales conferences in exotic locales, brainstorming at beach resorts, unlimited-hospitality office parties… these are all gone, if not for good, then definitely for a long time.

I voluntarily got off that business-class gravy train, but on some days it’s hard remember why. There's a sizeable difference between being the omniscient, omnipotent creative director of a revered global account and just another manager among many in a company that has 400 employees on my floor alone. The difference is especially keen in times of client wrangles – time was when my mere presence was enough to effect a truce; now all the words I speak are not enough unless endorsed by someone else. Then I remember that I had had to earn that status. And it needs only a few seconds' thought to bring the swings and roundabouts into focus, a deep sense of grateful relief that helps the heart drag the ego of the ex-god out of bed the next morning.

At 11 pm, I walked into Chennai Central, only slightly under the influence of the almost mandatory farewell drink, and my coach was at the other end of what seemed like the longest train in the world. As my high heels started to feel like needles I realized that I loved this gritty commute that my business travel had become.

As always, the "excellent change agent" trumps the ex-god ego. That is the secret of my success – or lack of it, according to some (widely discredited) sources.

Travelling Light, Cliff Richards, 1974