Going under canvas

The Universe recently realised that I'd been blogging since 2004 and decided that it was time to make it worth my while.

So today my blog post won me the coolest thing I've ever seen. Actually, it won me one of those yesterday, when another blogger and I were picked to go on the seven-day Tour of Nilgiris. To do the blissful job of writing frequently and copiously what we want about it, as we like, on our own blogs.

But today, two of those cyclists of Santa Clause took us to Wildcraft, deep in the wilds of Jayanagar (though not on bicycles) to pick up the tangible prize – a three-person, three-season tent!

Rajesh Of The Store actually opened it up and pitched it to show us how (a good thing too; I read the manual later, and no spawn of man is likely to gain shelter that way). As with all people whose work and play have come together, he was so involved that even I learnt how to pitch the tent. He also volunteered instructions and tips on wind, cold and heat, and interesting titbits calculated to keep me awake in it, such as "keep away from fire, it can burn down in 24 seconds". I secretly noted that it's probably worth braving another trip to Jayanagar so I can ask him all my dumb questions about trekking in snow, without fear of ostracism.

Once he'd got it up and ready, the four of us just looked at it in silence for a minute or so – each of us feeling that same urge to a) leap inside to see what it's like and b) pack it up, strap it on and go climb a mountain, ford a river, cross a jungle and sleep under the stars in a deep, quiet meadow.

I can't explain the feeling when you see it all standing up, especially when you've done it yourself (it is such a work of art that I was able to pitch it all by myself the second I got home).

My Dad is delighted with it and wants to pitch it properly outside to test it. As you can see in the photograph, he feels none of the inhibitions we had in the store, and has lost no time crawling into the tent, while keeping up a running narration on the difficulties of the canvas tents he used to pitch. Well I have some experience of those myself, all heavy wooden poles and skin-lacerating ropes and giant pegs that fought back violently.

I love my tent.

I can hear the bells

When Polly Evans said “It’s not about the tapas”, I took it to mean that it was about cycling through the Pyrenees. I felt again, vividly, the burning in the calves on the climb, the fearful joy of the descent, the open air, the unshadowed sun.

Then, an old cycling companion met the bug again and turned into the grown-up version, startling rattlesnakes regularly in California complete with helmet and puncture kit. His enthusiasms tend to drag me along for the ride, so I was fascinated to find that cycling had gotten a lot more… well, complicated, for lack of a better word.

Then came the day when I wheeled another friend’s bicycle out of the garage (rescued it, really, from a dried-bougainvillea grave; the owner hadn’t touched it for a year). The familiar tick-whir, tick-whir touched off a thrumming that came clear and sweet across the fifteen years it had been since I last rode.

“Ride out to find out what it is to be free. New times, new feelings, discovery”. It’s the oldest jingle I remember, for a motorcycle whose name I’ve forgotten – Discovery, perhaps – and it was a war cry, an ache, the anthem to which I learned how to ride. It’s true that my bike facilitated a certain amount of truancy and lawlessness that would have been impossible otherwise, but it was always about the open road, the unique pleasure of cycling.

And that, in the final analysis, is what the Tour of Nilgiris is really about. It’s a seven-day bicycle ride across the misty green Blue Mountains, starting out on Christmas Day and ending 919 km later where the New Year begins. The personal quest of a small group has grown into a 40-member tour, with a list of sponsors (including, quite appropriately, Nilgiris Supermarket) and a medical team that almost rival the Cricket World Cup, but the fundamental heart remains in the right place.

Also, it’s not enough anymore to say: “I want to ride up yonder mountain… coming?”. There needs to be a reason, a rationale, a message. It’s a practical necessity. If Edmund Hillary had been talking to corporate sponsors he could hardly have left it at “Because it’s there”. Why, that’s not even enough for one slide! So TFN is alright because a) the heart, as I said, is fine and b) their “go green” message is sincere, and who better to preach than those who practice it?

The idea is not startlingly new, just a good one, slightly forgotten.

In the beginning, there was no TV. Before God said “Let there be multiplexes”, there were wooded trails, muddy ponds and bicycles. Whitefield was less than a suburb and India was not even an emerging market (I hear we’ve fully emerged now; if we were a baby turtle, we’d have just begun the perilous journey to the sea), so we spent our time outdoors. Apart from cycling for the sake of it, we also cycled to school, to the shops, to the club, to each other’s houses… so why not to work?

TFN’s view on the subject is “If a bunch of ordinary cyclists of differing age groups can do 919 km over rugged terrain, surely anyone can cycle 10 km to office and back each day?”

Not everyone will do the entire 919 km. Riders can join in and drop out at any stage of the tour. Unsurprisingly, they got a huge response and had to make a “next time” list. There’re probably enough participants for two "next times". Everybody wants to do a tour of the Nilgiris, and since cycling takes you so close to your surroundings, the romance of the ride fits perfectly with the charm of the old colonial hill stations, the sheer beauty of those hills.

I remember several childhood holidays there, blowing my breath out into clouds and thinking to myself that the quality of the cold was different. Just strolling along the edge of the golf course in Wellington was exhilarating, imagine cycling through the hills.

I can feel the pressure of the handle bars beneath my hands and the texture of the road rushing beneath the tyres, as the bike coasts round curves in a land where you seem to breathe in the endorphins directly from the air.

The thing about cycling is – once you know, you never forget. That's a quality the Nilgiris share.

Democracy is coming?

“I guess it’s time now for us to decide whether we want to continue to be an Ancient Civilisation or a nation.” The last line of my uncle’s mail and the link he sent in it suddenly resolved a vague train of thought that started in Victoria Terminus, the first of the attacks on Mumbai.

There have been so many bombs in the recent months that we’ve gotten used to that sort of news now, though not inured to it. But this was different. Terrorists don’t hold out and fight back. Nobody walks into VT with machine guns. Rabbis don’t become hostages in Mumbai. Leopolds is a relaxed evening. Colaba Causeway is a casual stroll. The Taj and the Oberoi are… inviolate. There are many accounts of guests hearing the noise but assuming it would be sorted out. Well, of course. It’s what I would have done too – you’re at the Taj, after all. I think it was the cold dismantling of emotional institutions, more than anything else, that made this particular one stand out.

Though I have only contempt for the practice of labeling everything “9/11”, the spurt of real fear when I first heard the news echoes what I felt that Wednesday evening, standing at a bar in Muscat with a similarly TV-less friend, watching in silence as the Trade Centre collapsed. They have since showed it over and over again, until the visuals have lost the sting. That cannot change the enormity of the moment, when you knew the world was going to change, something was going to give.

I don’t know if we will come through for ourselves finally, whether our collective Indian consciousness will be able to look up from writing editorials, memorials and letters of complaint, and actually do something, but we’re definitely going to come closer than we ever have before.




Pictures were taken from a forward I got. I have no right to them whatsoever.

Democracy, Leonard Cohen, Album: The Future, 1992

Magic beans

Article published in Little India ("Largest Indian publication in USA") in May this year under the title of "My Paper Google", and yet to be paid for.

I rushed to my laptop in a panic while cooking something complicated, to look up "blanching". And ended up very annoyed because I got onion peel on my precious keyboard. Much later, I remembered that I've had a sort of paper Google for years which tells me all I could possibly want to know. And it's survived worse disasters than onion peel.

My mother got this battered blue book when it was new, a present from her cousin in the early years of her marriage. When I left home to set up a kitchen of my own, she gave it to me.

It's a combination of old-fashioned recipe book and surprisingly modern how-to manual on setting up a new life. In the section called Basic Kitchen Aids" – which I read six months after I needed it – I recognised my mother's organised kitchen and therefore the things I had unconsciously bought anyway.

There is also crucial cooking-for-dummies information. The ounce to teaspoon conversion rate, for example. And how to tell a "moderate oven" from the other kinds. Descriptions of different cooking methods, alphabetically listed. What to do if you've over-salted a curry. How to rescue something that got burnt at the bottom. Fascinating tit-bits (of purely academic interest until very recently) such as: citrus fruits dipped in warm water are easier to juice, an egg-shell added to boiling bones helps produce clear stock without skimming, a wet knife slices hard-boiled eggs neater.

There is even a brief but illuminating bit on throwing parties. The advice ranges in tone from the understanding but implacable tenets of my great-aunts: "No matter how shy you are do not forget that they are your guests and you are the hostess" to the eminently practical voice of my mother's sister: "Serve a dish you are confident about so you can enjoy your own party".

The recipes are interesting (now and then I recognise something that has been the staple in our home all my life), but being an indifferent cook – if at all – they have spent more time on my bookshelf than in my kitchen. I've read the book cover to cover of course, but only because I read everything, compulsively.

"The accumulated experience of many a home-maker has gone into the contents of this book" says Rachel Alexander in the preface. She used the current word for housewife 34 years ahead of its time and seems to wear confidently her title of chairman. Possibly she was too busy being one to bother with the mere semantics of chairperson. She belonged to a magnificent generation.

The names in the acknowledgements belong to strangers, but they call up reminiscences like photographs. I spent many childhood summers with one great-aunt or the other and – as the most easily persuaded of the grandchildren – have accompanied those energetic old divas on a million duty visits, tea parties, ladies' lunches, fundraisers and the like. In my early teens I was even occasionally despatched alone as the representative. (I wonder how I could have turned out so socially recalcitrant, but perhaps my rabid introversion is because I've finished my quota of niceties).

It is called "A Guide to Efficient Housekeeping and Good Cooking" and was published in 1973 (a month before I was born) by the YWCA-Chennai as a fundraiser.

The cover shows age, but the book is neat and poised, the papers never askew or unkempt. After a lifetime of wear and tear, the spine is still straight and the spirit, indomitable. Whenever I open it, the pages susurrate like starched cotton sarees rustling around tea-trays on verandahs.

To the great dinosaur park in the sky

I break my inexplicable silence to say a sad goodbye to Michael Crichton. He wrote many, many books and I've read most of them with relish. Only two were about dinosaurs but that's who he is to me – the dinosaur guy to a dinosaur fan. In memorium, I will lift the equally inexplicable book embargo in my life and re-read Jurassic Park this weekend. And it will still be the gripping, thrashing chase it has been all the other 50 times.

I'd always hoped that another book in the series would come out at some point. But now I'm left with the same hollowness I felt when I came to the abrupt, premature end of The Salmon of Doubt and Sunset at Blandings, the recognition that the only minds that could satisfactorily complete them are irreversibly gone.

Maybe it's actually the great publisher's party in the sky. How horrible.

The Goddess of Learning

Saraswathi Puja has moved with the times; it now acknowledges digital as well as printed sources of knowledge. And since these are also the tools of my trade, they did for the Ayudha Puja as well.

Puja-room doors, I learnt recently, are a formalized, thriving industry. There are shops, even entire streets, dedicated to them. You can buy a whole door or you can buy decorative bits, as my parents did, and create your own around the antique wooden figurines that you’ve never quite known what to do with. But you can see why it’s such a big business. The door lifts the little puja-room to temple level, giving the space within a sort of sacred weight.

The Goddess seems to have stepped up service levels because it’s barely two days and I’ve won a blogging prize already – and real money too, not a poxy plastic pen-shaped trophy.

I continue to learn many things every day, very little of which is fit for public consumption.

Getting by

My posting has become erratic of late and the reasons are as follows:
a) Relocation
b) Learning a new job
c) Getting used to commuting to work again
d) Getting used to sitting in an office again
e) Not belonging to any social group yet
f) The changing moods of BSNL
g) Inexplicable sleep deprivation (technically I’m getting enough sleep, except I’m not).

I’m not only not writing, I’m not reading either. Haven’t read a single book in a month. This is significant when you consider the fact that it used to be almost one a day. A month! And that includes comics, children’s books and re-reading of Harry Potter. I’ve only read magazines. This is how the other half lives.

Also, after all these years of complaining that copywriting stifles my own writing, it turns out that writing all day, every day keeps it alive. Now that my job does not involve writing, I'm practically illiterate.

Mostly, I need to get out more, maybe go trekking in the Hima-layers.

License bekaa?

The Regional Transport Officers' coven (Karnataka chapter) has decreed in their wisdom that a valid passport is not proof of citizenship, let alone birth. You ask what higher proof of identity there is. Well, apparently, your school leaving certificate is more important than your passport. More important maybe than the fact that you were not only born but are alive and present to prove it. In spite of the fact that the piece of paper has not been invulnerable to corruption. Perhaps the left hand of the Indian Government should consider an orientation programme for the right hand.

The Knight Bus

The air-conditioned, well-sprung, pain-free bus service is officially called Vajra Vahini – apparently it means hi-tech bus – no doubt in honour of the BPO salaries that created the niche for it. It is also listed as the Red Bus in the complex filing systems of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation. But it's known and revered on the street simply as "the Volvo".

Tickets cost three times more than the regular. For that, you have the privilege of cushioned seats, civilised handrails for the occasions when you need to stand briefly, scrupulously clean interiors, blindingly polite drivers and conductors. They're always in a good mood because they're not yet blasé about being in Business Class. The drivers' arrogant handling of the automatic foreign machine and the conductors' carefully casual wielding of the electronic ticket dispenser are touching. And the pride is infectious.

It's the sort of bus service where you say good morning to the driver when you get in and thank him when you leave. It's the sort of journey where you take out your iPod or laptop and sit back in the certainty that you will arrive on time, your high heels intact, not a hair out of place. You might emerge from a musical daydream to notice that traffic is backed up on the bridge ahead but it never occurs to you that you might be late because of it. Strangely, you never are. The "chosen one" attitude of the driver and conductor seems to work in mysterious ways.

On the other end of the public transport food chain are the private buses, by and large just piles of highly coloured scrap metal held together by grease and willpower. The equally greasy purveyors of the service hustle for custom at every stop, as good humoured about their lot as the Volvo lords with theirs. The fare is so low that the only seat you're likely to find is a precarious perch on the noisy engine and you might be sharing that with a clutch of live chickens. If you're misguided enough to take out your iPod, you'll spend most of your journey satisfying the curiosity of your fellow passengers.

The utterly ragged flower-seller sitting next to me suddenly produced a mobile phone and made a business-like call. When she was done she looked thoughtfully at the laptop bag and asked me if I was "IT". I admitted that yes, I did belong to that bizarrely jet-lagged tribe. I then confirmed that yes it is morning in America when it's night here. She wanted to know how long this had been going on. I did not feel up to a geography lesson so I blamed it on the British. She came, inevitably, to whether there was a husband waiting at home. And opened her basket to offer me the last remnants of her day – a small circlet of tuberoses - to wear for him. Yes I'd gone for the advisable rather than the truthful.

This is why I sometimes deliberately leave the sanitised, climate-controlled IT corridor – to reassure myself that India is still outside, a little bruised, browning at the edges but still fragrant. The local time is 9:30 pm. The outside temperature is 23 degrees. Celsius.

I think maybe I also do it as an acknowledgement of a time when Whitefield was not economically viable for the government and it was the private buses that filled the bloody great gaps. Not only were they more frequent but their service continued late into the night, long after the official "last bus" had gone – essential when you're a trainee in an ad agency.

The Volvo passed us somewhere on the home stretch. By then the fragrance of India had given me a raging headache.

The Knight Bus

In the lee of the jihad

The evening breathes deeper. The air grows still. The setting sun floats lightly on the water. All along the pier the tiny abras are quiet. On the other shore, the large dhows stir comfortably. Silence soothes the glass facades of the office blocks across the creek. No tourist cruises or merchant barges mar the last minutes before Iftar. In this pocket of time, the world becomes what it should be. Voices are gentle. Hearts are untroubled. Minds are reflective. When the muezzin calls and the single canon shot announces the end of day, the weathered men in the wooden boats will lay out their fruit and invite anyone passing to share the breaking of the fast. At street corners and in convenience stores, there will be free pastries and water for all. All across the city, the tables will fill up and the darkening sky will be sweetened by the convivial fragrance of shisha.

Last year was my ninth Ramadan in the Middle East and the magic of the holy month was still as fresh as the first one. In the hospitable lands, God was a kind stranger with a pot of coffee and a bowl of dates, religion was the liberal curiosity of children.