The back drive

My college has long driveways leading up from the main and back gates to the main porch. There are these short elevated stone platforms lining the entire stretch of the two drives for students to sit on. These drives, as they have come to be called, are arguably the backdrop of nearly everyone’s most enduring memories of their time in college. I do believe that these drives made all the difference in giving my college the kind of personality that came to be associated with it. The back drive in particular was the zone of simply letting go. It is shadier than the front drive because of the older, bigger trees there and it used to get filled up quickly with people during any kind of leisure break or unpopular classes.

My best memories of college are sitting on that drive and having the most engrossing conversations with my best friend, or sometimes just watching the world go by with a book in our hands. We were a part of a bigger group of friends and it was common for us all to sit out a few hours of the day on that drive. We were also always within earshot of the other groups of people around us and we would often see someone from somewhere else laugh out loud at something funny one of us had said, leaving the funny person feeling terribly pleased about her comic skills or hear someone else continue a song one of us had started to hum. I remember this one day when one of the many stray dogs that our college had adopted had a long loud sneezing bout in the middle of the drive. Everyone on the drive had gone completely quiet to watch him and cheered for him once he stopped. He sheepishly ran away from our sight, not knowing how to receive the sudden attention. I remember being able to sit back on that drive and letting go of all the small big worries that came when graduation started seeming more like a tangible reality than a distant hurdle and being able to slowly accept circumstances at one severe low point in my life. Most of all, I remember all of us being completely at ease with and totally unapologetic for the people we were and having a lot of fun together, perhaps much more than some of the others we knew. Some of the sweatshirts of our college had “God is a woman” written on them and that probably defines the highly charged air we breathed within the college walls.

Today, with a few years of Real Life having happened to me, I realize just how important that experience was. My friends from college are still some of the nicest, most motivated, interesting and happy people I know. It is hard to imagine that somewhere during all those hours spent giggling and discussing the most trivial of issues, we grew up emotionally. In the spirit of the person I was back then, I will not apologise for being judgmental now and admit that I now know of so many people who did not get that kind of growing experience for whatever reason that might have been and are now adults who have just not grown up, and that is not in an endearing “keeping the inner child alive” kind of way but are characterized with being annoying, stubborn and unable of processing new thoughts.

When I go to my college to teach every Saturday these days, I can still sense the unbridled energy and draw heavily from it to keep me going through some of the occasional difficult days the rest of the week. All of this is probably also a lengthy justification to myself on why sometimes I am such a wimp and think “Ah good, she’s found a friend” and choose to not say anything rather than point out that the class is being disturbed when that quiet girl in the corner talks to her friend with a wide grin on her face.

Revisiting the past

We are back from a trip to Hampi, which ranks high in my "Places marked for consideration of permanent settlement" list. I fell in love with it during my first trip there with my friends two and a half years ago and had jealously looked at all the European backpackers who had set up camp there for a couple of weeks to a few months, bicycling around the ruins with their Lonely Planet in tow, leading the life I had dreamt of for myself.

This time, I went with my significantly better half to show him this little town that had me thus besotted and to get his views on its qualification to the aforementioned list. Hampi effortlessly did her bit and I am happy to say that she's been given the thumbs up by the Mister too.

It is the way in which everything comes together - the history, the architecture, the abundance of places where you can sit down and have a splendid cup of tea, the friendly animals on the road(dogs, cows, cats sometimes) that, depending on the way you are hardwired, you come precariously close to abandoning any plans of a job and a career in your current field and turning over into a history junkie for life at Hampi. If the above list doesn't do it for you, one meal at the Mango Tree will at the very least, leave you with a slightly more positive outlook towards everything.

My back hurts a little from last night's difficult bus journey from Hospet to Bangalore and I have been slow at digesting all new information today thanks to all hopes of even a few precious minutes of sleep being chased away by the monstrosity that was the stretch of road for the first few hours of the journey. We are talking slowly today and have trudged through the day with difficulty but we have already promised ourselves one more trip to Hampi at the next possible opportunity.

(Photo by Trambak)

In a fit of midnight madness...

...I tried my hand at fiction. Below is the result, it hasn't been titled yet:

She ate the piece of chicken as noiselessly as she could. She tenaciously went at the last bits of meat near where the bone bends as they wouldn’t come off easily. She washed it down with cold buttermilk before picking up the stainless steel cup that contained one round scoop of badam halwa. This was a lot more food than she had prepared herself for. She took large bites and swallowed quickly. The last few bites came close to being painful as she could feel the butter in the halwa clogging up her throat. But there was no time to deliberate those trivial discomforts and she searched with her fingers along the surface of the cup to make sure there were no difficult lumps remaining. She could have turned on the light - they wouldn’t be able to see her from the first floor - but she chose to be discreet now that she knew her way around the house rather well.

Five months ago, she had reluctantly left home, the warm familiarity of her sisters’ loud laughter and angry abuses to get on the bus and land here to look after the new-born baby. She had spit out her rage that evening in one long convulsive tirade against her parents and her sisters when it was decided that she would go take up the job of the ayah that their neighbor had informed them of. The five of them had sat mutely watching her burn herself out in her fury, as she cursed their neediness and their self-righteous selfishness that had made it necessary for her to go to the city to earn what to them would be her hefty salary.

As she quietly made her way to the kitchen sink to wash the dishes and remove all evidences of an insolent midnight feast, she looked around at the large living room, and the shadows left by the big bookshelf in the familiar, warm darkness. This was her main work zone during the day, where she spent most of her time feeding the baby and cleaning up after him and creating silly little games for him all by herself. She came back to her room in the corner beyond the dining area, where she ate her meals of roti, dal and vegetables sitting cross legged on the floor twice a day.

Decent folk, she thought, before getting on to the bed, but they need to know that a girl – she needs her chicken curry.

We like them hairpin bends

Today, I waited for that final piece of furniture we had ordered for our living room to be delivered. Now that it is here, it feels just like it did when we placed that elusive last piece onto the 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle I used to solve in my summer holidays along with my mother and cousin.

A lot of life altering changes have taken place since I last posted. First of all, you will start noticing the nonchalant use of ‘Our’ on this blog. Secondly, I am back in Bangalore. Thirdly and a little more obviously, I have changed jobs.

I will always remember that snowball fight we (this is a different we – it consists of me, my flatmate and my neighbours) had on the 13th of Jan, my last night in Birmingham. We were afforded that opportunity thanks to the heavy snowfall in what turned out to be the most severe winter the country experienced in more than 20 years. That was my second snowball fight within a span of ten days and everyone believed they owed me one last experience of knowing how it felt to have a tightly packed fistful of snow landing on my nose with unforgiving force as there was no telling when I would next see that much snow again. I am convinced they also secretly believed they deserved an outlet for having to see off somebody who would wake up with the smug assurance of getting to see the sun every day. I would have probably reacted in exactly the same way if I were to spend a few more months sinking my feet into 2 feet of snow on my way to work and back everyday in that perpetual dim greyness.

This winter has been an experience in understanding orders of magnitude, among other things. While I had managed to know what it took to keep myself safe and warm during the last two winters, all my winter clothing proved to be acutely inadequate when the temperatures went more than 5 degrees C below the average winter temperatures. I even had frostbite on my toes while I was indoors, inside a sufficiently heated apartment! (This is unlike the indoor frostbite I suffered in the previous winter when I was living in what was a virtually unheated apartment that belonged to an ass of a landlord for which I was paying through my nose.) As absurd as it may seem now, I remember days not so long ago, when I used to crave to know again what it felt like to feel uncomfortably hot.

Cut to a month later and I find myself in a Kancheevaram saree on the hottest day in Bangalore in 25 years. And then I realised I didn’t like the heat either.

Apart from highlighting the extremes in temperature and adding my half a cent to the evidence of a messed up ecology to generations in the distant future who might find this blog hidden below a heap of cyber debris, this is meant to be a post to help me take stock and move on.

So here’s bidding an official goodbye to the plants in the balcony, to the purple orchid in my window that I ‘killed with too much love’, the lovely apartment in the city centre, to the canal that flowed beside it, to Victoria Square, to gorgeous Louis, my neighbours’ half Korean, one quarter English, one quarter French baby boy who gave me the most beautiful smile on the day I left, to being addicted to Top Gear, to being a banker in the UK at a time when the word evoked unbridled hatred, to being a doctor’s flatmate and listening to real stories of human lives being saved over dinner, to ploughman’s sandwiches for lunch, to accumulating copper coins with every cash transaction and carrying an unwieldy wallet, to impulsive train rides to Banbury and London, to scones and crumpets, to jacket potatoes, to mulled wine and finally, to all the snow which must have now melted. I loved it while it lasted but as I have said earlier on this blog, it is swell to be back home.

The last few months have seen me go through changes at a rate that is unusual in the normal course of events for a regular person. Looking back from the other side, with the dizziness behind me, I am now in a position to say that I am grateful for changes of all kinds that have sometimes just happened to me with me not being in a position to control anything about their timing or effect. They help provide reference points from which I can identify who I have become. There is also of course, all the learning that comes with change, even if sometimes, you are too dazed to register anything beyond the trivial lesson that when a snowball comes straight at you, all you have to do is duck.

Once among the clouds, atop a white hill........

G,

Remember that day when we were so proud to have successfully dismantled my little cane chair without breaking any of the parts? You responded with just the right degree of urgency and seriousness that the six year old me could expect from a playmate and helped me do a thorough job of it. And I am told the six year old me had extemely high expectations of people.

Today, everytime I get told that I don't come across like an 'only child', I look back fondly on our shared sunny, quirky, magical childhood. I grew up assuming that everybody has a cousin their age living within get-told-off-by-parents-and-run-to-crying distance. When it eventually dawned on me that I might just be one of the lucky few to grow up with the privilege, I was thankful for it. Even if I wouldn't have you know about it then as we were too busy pinching each other's necks and inventing new names to call each other.

If there is something I treasure about my childhood memories - it is the reassurance of knowing that I had you to laugh with, to seethe at my wounds, to conspire with, to get it, to share made-up stories with, to spend summers with and most importantly, to care. And isn't it fantastic that this feeling has endured through it all - through that impossibly difficult age when we wondered about our acceptability/popularity indices to now, when we begin to know the permanent from the transient, to what I know will be always.

During all our singing lessons, I know you weren't particularly thrilled to be told that our pitches matched rather well. One day you woke up with a different voice and several feet taller and that was the end of us standing together and singing for guests at home. I miss that, you know - especially because of how revolting you find the idea.

This is to tell you that you are more precious and important to me than you can ever know. I haven't been the best of sisters and am actually using the occasion of a highly bollywoodised festival to let you know this, and publicly at that (but does two count as public?). But I think you know it comes from the heart. I also know that while the title seems like corny gibberish to the rest of the world, you know exactly what I'm saying.

Love,
Your proud sister.

P.S - did you notice how I'm not trying to get you married off to a nice girl here as I always threaten to?
P.P.S - My brother's a gentleman, he's funny, wise, smart and humble. And oh, he owns two BMWs.

oops.

In Adjectively Candid-land

The end of the rainbow

I have met way too many disgruntled Indians here over the last few months. They are all disgruntled with India. I'm certainly not taken by surprise at the fact that they do not slip into fond reveries and break into a song about a golden land when they hear their country's name mentioned. Clearly, if they have taken the huge and difficult decision of setting up their home in another land and even adopting another country's nationality, I would expect them to have some very significant reasons driving the decision. But what I did not expect to see is an over-simplification of reality only to justify the decision.

Quite frankly, I'm now bored of hearing things like "So what if taxes here are high? At least you can walk on the roads without fear at night" or "Things work here, unlike in India". There are two extremely exasperating problems I have with statements like these. Firstly, the people saying this are very obviously out of touch with the whole concept of India. They talk about India like it is one stretch of a poorly lit road with potholes. On probing them a little more, you would find that the people saying this are usually the kind who have travelled very little beyond their own hometowns in India. I have also found a lot of them to be fiercely regionalistic, which I think is ironic, not to forget annoying. Secondly, it baffles me how the UK is supposed to be the land of milk and honey, and how their adopted land delivers on every count where their own land failed. I would completely agree with any arguments that give credit to this country for what it really is. However, when I bring up the topic, what I find again is a messy maze of mutually contradictory opinions. They like living here but guard a strong sense of disdain towards people who belong here. I don't even want to get into the widely prevelant ridiculous NRI/Indian diaspora credo of how Indians are morally and intellectually superior to those of every other make. The very people who exhort to me about why I must pounce on the magnificent opportunity of 'settling down' here for the rest of my life are the same people who mock the food, culture and people who are indigenous to their preferred country of residence.

Sometimes, I honestly try to understand the thought process behind these kind of opinions. I know that the 'system' back home can sometimes have profound effects on the life of the individual. It doesn't take a massive effort of imagination to figure out that one corrupt judge or one vengeful policeman or a callous medical practitioner can do irreperable damage and make anyone affected by the injustice loathe the system that made it possible for these excesses to take place. Nevertheless, I have realised that most of the India-bashers here are those who have simply not had the opportunity to take out of India the best that it offers or have simply looked the other way when the opportunity presented itself. They haven't really been affected by any such significant incident, or at least they have not told me about it. I find their opinions strange because I have begun to realise how significant the Indian identity is in who I am and that I really do like that part of me.

Take my recent 17 day trip to India, for example. I was in Bangalore mostly, but visited my ancestral towns of Hassan and Chickmaglur and made a quick dash to Mumbai in one of the weekends. While we are at the topic of my trip to India, I think it is an opportune moment to talk about a major life-altering happy development in my life. Yes, one bright sunny afternoon, he proposed to me and I said yes ( actually I said "Thank you" and he said "Why are you thanking me?" - but that is a different story - we did say the right things eventually - it was splendid!). Coming back to where I was, to use the simplest of arguments, I think the mere fact that we come from a big country with a billion people in it teaches us things you cannot ever fathom on a fairly small sterile squeaky clean nation. I'm really not referring to any country here - I'm comparing India with any country that is not as big as India and where it is possible to have rules that its citizens obey. Now, I could be the one sounding biased, but I do think that because we interact with people a lot more on a daily basis in India due to sheer population density, we find it easier to reach out and connect with people spontaneously and not have a tedious is-this-the-right-thing-to-do algorithm running at the back of our minds everytime we come in contact with a new person. Moreover, in most major cities of India, we have the valuable experience of coming into contact with people with whom we have very little in common if they happen to come from another part of the country. This in itself presents a lot of scope for great conversation and even more so, as you set about discovering things that you do have in common. I cannot think of a more useful life skill to pick up while growing up. We also have the advantage of being familiar with most major world religions. So, even when we move out of India, we are not alien to any religious customs or traditions as chances are, we would have witnessed at least glimpses of what we see of religious practices elsewhere while living in India. This serves very well in being sensitive and informed and avoid the embarrasment of making a gaffe in this regard. These are the kind of personality traits that are usually liked in people from anywhere. I'm not saying that Indians have an exclusive claim over these traits - only that there is an easy opportunity to pick them up with very little effort. You don't get this kind of learning everywhere and it took me a journey out of India to realise this.

I love my fiancé's stories of Kolkata - of its sergeants and its trams and endless idiosyncracies- and I love learning about sentence construction in Bengali. I relish every single Tam bram story my best friend has told me and the subtleties of Tamil pronounciation that she describes. These are merely two of the million other grand experiences I have had only by virtue of being Indian.

I've finally figured out what I'm going to say the next time an Indian here asks me "What's the big deal about India? What do you get there that you don't get here?". It is easy, I'll say "An interesting Indian to talk to". Honestly, I'll need all the advice that my wise friends can offer to fight the urge to really blurt this out one day.

A winter like no other

Just when I started enjoying the nip in the air, the heavens sent us a full blown snowstorm. This is what the city centre in Birmingham looked like today, after yesterday's non-stop action. But Brum looks pretty in white, don't you think?

Today, while talking to a friend, I realised that 'ghar' is a mimetic word. When you say it, there's a vibration that starts at the windpipe and goes inwards and resonates and something hurts a little bit somewhere there. Or maybe it's just me.

The blog post I never saw myself writing when I created this blog

On Sunday evening, I made masala dosas. My flatmates really liked them. They asked for more, that's how I know it. I don't know about other flatmates but it needs to be said that my flatmates do not belong to your average I'll-say-whatever-it-takes-to-make-you-cook-for-me strain. They are both brilliant cooks and are never too tired or lazy to cook a wholesome meal. So when they pay me a compliment for my culinary (ahem) skills, I usually blush and take a bow.

This evening (today's Tuesday), when I went into the kitchen to make myself dinner, I decided to use up what was remaining of the filling I had made for the masala dosa. Then, it struck me, out of nowhere, that I could make aloo parathas with that same filling. This meant that I had met with two incredible successes in three days in front of that same electric hob : 1) The incident of the crisp masala dosas 2) Discovering one smart cooking related idea. I finally let the happy sigh that was inflating inside me escape and decided that this must surely be the point where life starts to take a turn back towards the ordinary in the way I've known it to happen ever so often. But that was only until I tasted the parathas.

They tasted unmistakably like the parathas that were served for breakfast at my hostel in Mumbai on Tuesday mornings. Why that is so significant is because our entire weekly schedules revolved around those parathas back then. I know people who will still be able to write tearful odes to those pieces of savory bread. It was a few seconds before finishing up the mint chutney with the last crumb of the paratha that it dawned on me - we were served masala dosas on Sundays in the hostel! And here I was thinking I would generously pass my idea on to future generations as my original cooking tip. Clearly, I won't be able to call this idea my own even though I don't know for a fact if Mr.J and Co. beat me to discovering it.

I don't think it is at all likely that anyone still studying in my institute in Mumbai reads this blog. But I'm sure those parathas are still to die for and I certainly don't mean any offence to Mr.J. This was just plain idle hypothesis- he knows what that is. I already resent that I won't be in Mumbai on a Tuesday when I visit this time around in February.

An Anatopism

I had never really understood the reason for classifying raags as morning and evening raags and the concept of associating them with attributes almost as if they were personalities in Hindustani classical music until today.

During the course of the two glorious months this summer that I had completely to myself in between jobs, I decided to dabble in music once more and exercise those vocal chords in a good way. Luckily for me, I had a friend who also believed in the concept and decided to sign up for music lessons with me. It was also one such other lucky coincidence that a telephone number written down barely legibly on someone else's visiting card led us to whom I believe, with all the faith I am capable of, to be the best music teacher in Greater Bangalore.

Since my friend and I had only about two months before we had to head back to two different continents, we enquired if a crash-course in music could be worked out for us and were told that it certainly could. Our teacher spent less than five minutes explaining how the speed at which she would teach us would only be constrained by the speed at which we could learn and proceeded to give us our very first lesson by introducing us to raag Durga. Soon, the lessons became part of a routine and among other things, we rediscovered the poetry in taking down notes in Hindi and Kannada depending on the day's lesson. More significantly, we achieved what even our teacher considered to be progress.

Since our teacher is not one to pause to revel in crossing minor hurdles, she decided to train us towards a mini public performance as part of an event her students organise every year on the occasion of Guru Poornima. As the event drew nearer, raags were assigned to each of her students and there were endless rehearsals, mostly for the benefit of the 'senior' students who would be performing for the better part of an hour. We were given a composition called 'Koyaliya bole' set to raag Malkauns (an evening raag if you must know). On the day of the performance, we were introduced as 'the students from the UK who are brave enough to perform on stage after having trained for only a month'. We went on stage after deliberating if we should ask the compere to clarify that one of us is going to be working in the UK and the other is a graduate student in the US and after deciding against it as that would not make the audience any less judgemental. We also had our nerves to deal with the pressure of just having been described as 'brave'. There is no recorded version of that performance but from what I recall, we had sounded better in several of our rehearsals than we did that day. Nevertheless, we were not insufferable (nobody fainted or anything).

This evening, in my room in Birmingham, I listened to the CD on which we had recorded one of our rehearsals of 'Koyaliya bole'. The song is about the cuckoo heralding the arrival of spring and has in it a quick and lively succession of notes that can convey to an audience that doesn't understand either Hindi or the genre of music that the piece is about spring time. While usually the song cheers me up and reminds me of my two minutes under the spotlight, today, it did not have any of that effect. The irony of listening to a song about an exquisite Indian spring in a grey snowy wet English winter then struck me. You could nearly feel the notes from the music system freeze in the frosty evening air and lose their way rather than resonate and uplift as they did a few months ago. Well, the song is not really anachronistic because even if it seems like a distant dream, technically, spring is coming which is what the song affirms. But I guess the song is not meant for a continent that is subjected to a season of cruelly short spells of negligible sunshine before the season when the sun finally commiserates and decides to smile brilliantly.

I am sure there is another raag for icy winter evenings.

More London

The first time that I visited London during my stay in England, I was plain relieved. We lived in a quiet little suburb outside Birmingham called Solihull and the initial excitement at discovering peace and quiet and the simplistic esthetics of red brick houses began to wear off quickly and was replaced by a deep craving for the chaos of a metropolis. The only two places I have lived in are Bangalore and Mumbai and it is only natural that total silences and sparsely populated neighbourhoods make me feel unsettled. The one thing that I didn’t quite get used to in Solihull till the very end was how all commercial set-ups closed by 5 pm and how the roads wore an eerily deserted look by 6 pm, except of course, on Fridays. My first visit to London coincided with the Thames River Festival and it was all that I had been pining for- lively, crowded, noisy and stretched till late into the night. I was also lucky then to have two very enthusiastic sets of friends, both card-carrying (the Oyster card I mean :p) Londoners, showing me around town.

Ever since that first visit, London became my biggest addiction and my panacea to all my troubles- from severe stress to a little boredom. Looking back, I am now glad that I had the chance to discover London and its different avtars in my several trips. I have stayed in Woolich Arsenal, a relatively new residential locality in Zone 5 where a majority of its residents work for the financial organizations in Canary Wharf, in the Halls of the London School of Economics near the Tower Bridge with a dear dear friend from college just when she was about to graduate, in Watford, a picture perfect suburban locality where all the houses had a front lawn and a driveway and finally, in an apartment in a tiny lane near the London Bridge tube station after the friend from college had moved out of the Halls and started work (sigh! how quickly these things happen!). I did the touristy bits- the London Eye, the Original Bus Tour and the River Cruise with my mum when she visited me in the UK and I was pleased to see mamma dearest being as smitten by London as I was.

My most enduring memory of London is walking across the Millennium Bridge after attending the midnight mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve. I remember how the huge metal spider on display outside the Tate Modern (part of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective on show at the modern gallery) looked surreal and wondering how they got the lighting just right for the voyeuristic pleasure of the few pedestrians who would walk by it after sun-down. The other memory I have of my visits is of running late for my return train/bus in every single one of these trips since I had to reluctantly drag my feet out of London just before leaving it. And I mean running in the literal sense - with the different sets of friends I visited helping me with my luggage; we ran by the Thames near Westminster Pier, we ran along the London Bridge and we ran on the platforms of the Marylebone station just so that I could catch the last train to Solihull.

Here’s to London- the city that was my happy-place for 6 months. And just in case there’s any of my friends from London reading this- you know how I nod understandingly when you complain about how London is not as great as it seems to an outsider and how life there can get to you? Well, that’s just me pretending- I still completely fail to understand how everyone is not as big a fanatic about the city as me! Woolich Arsenal- England's ammunitons
factories during World War 2 were located here.
The factories have now been smartly converted into
apartment buildings with the original structure intact.

Graffiti in London- none of which I understood

From the London Eye

From the balcony of the Tate Modern

The Tower Bridge

Learning the ropes

I know I haven't really used my blog as an emotional dumping ground the way a lot of people I know have done with their blogs. But I'm making an exception today and therefore decided to shout out an "achtung!" right at the very start so that you are clear on the content that's coming up and can flee right away if this kind of thing induces any kind of inflammation, watering of eyes or other allergic reactions in you.

The only reason I'm doing this is to clear out my head and because even I think my friends need a break from listening to my small-big issues when I know for a fact that a lot of them have plenty of their own to sort out! I still want to take a moment here to tell my friends that you (you all know who you are) are all stars and are an incredible source of respite and joy. I know that my friends know how much I love them for it but I'm not sure they know just how proud I am of them.

There is something about the twenties that makes it such a tough period to go through. I, for one, think that it is all the things that I was not able to forsee about life at this age that makes it abstruse. For example, what I did not know while growing up is that when you reach your twenties, everybody around you (who is not in their twenties) assumes that they have a right to size you up and not even be discreet about it. I don't know if this happens with most twenty and odd year olds or if I have an exceptionally raw deal on my hands here- but I find that in any social situation, questions that were earlier considered too personal to be asked by mere acquaintances can now be asked of you by total strangers. Whatever happened to discussing the weather, politics and cricket! On one fateful day, they get replaced by work, marriage and fitness and you will need to have ready convincing answers to questions pertaining to these topics to save yourself the misery of listening to clichés carelessly passed off as advice.

Then comes the tougher part- in that critical change that takes you from being a dependent in the governement records to a productive tax payer, there are whole new dimensions to your personality that develop, which make you feel like a stranger in your own skin at times. And when it comes to such changes from within, it takes a while to understand and accept that you may have the most wonderful entourage- and I'm using the word in the Facebook sense- but there isn't really anyone else but you who can help you deal with it.

I do not mean to paint a melancholic picture of what is universally acknowledged to be the most magical part of the average person's life. God knows, I have always longed for the kind of independence I now enjoy. And the changes and responsibilities that initially seem daunting begin to look exciting on getting used to them. But then there are times when I realise just how significant an impact some of the decisions I take now can have on the way the rest of my life shapes up- and it is at such times that I cave into the pressure and get into melodrama-mode because I do not know if I am able to judge the consequences of my decision well enough. It also seems like it is just us girls who feel the compelling need to express how hard this can be- the guys seem to handle it rather well- but then I know they have their moments too, they just occur less often and can be made to snap out of it more easily, which, of course is a marvelous thing. But there are times when I really wonder if the kind of decisions we need to deliberate over and a greater burden of social conformity makes this harder for women. I don't think there's just one correct answer to that question.

I have begun to digress now. Since this post was for my benefit just as I had mentioned earlier, it seems like it has served its purpose and now would be a good time to end it- also Alanis Morissette is playing on my playlist and like she says "And what it all boils down to/ Is that no one's really got it figured out just yet".

Getting high on masala chai

Well, I’m back from the UK and it already feels like I was never away. I’m also just back from a short but very memorable trip to Kodaikanal with my colleagues.

The timing of our trip was not exactly perfect what with the perpetual showers and a constant thick cover of fog over what were considered to be the best sights around. Despite this, we ended up enjoying our brief stay in Kodai and I was busy relishing some of the many little pleasures of traveling in India that I sometimes pined for while in England- like having endless cups of masala chai and paying for them in Rupees.

It is surprising to see how my idea of what is symbolic of India and to some extent, our national pride has changed ever since I have come back. My idea of these themes and objects now coincides with what a first-time tourist or an Indiaphile who has never visited India would imagine them to be. This is not because a mere 6 month stint abroad makes me think like a firang but more so because I am now probably able to see what India is that not many other countries can be.

Even a few months ago, I was annoyed to see how India was depicted as this strange, exotic land that is a destination for spiritual fulfillment for dummies in The Darjeeling Limited. But now, I see nothing wrong with this description- I would probably only explain to the uninitiated that this too but not solely, is India.

I now see nothing wrong with a tourist defining India by the box of spices in the average Indian home, the stray animals on the road that have a sophisticated sense of traffic etiquette, the colours, the cacophony of dialects, the scary traffic, Bollywood and whatever other stereotypical image there is of India (but no, not snakes and snake-charmers- I take exception to that one – it is surprising just how many people are still told the “India is a land of snake-charmers” story and how many people buy it!) I now see all of these things as catalysts in making the experience of living in India a very entertaining mind exercise. I do not know if I am right in thinking so but I am now of the opinion that we use our creativity and judgment rather well while living in an environment where we take nothing – rules, penalties, liberty- none of it for granted.

India, in some ways seems like the punk district of Camden in London, in standing for the alternate as against the regular- with the exception that we are regular people leading regular lives which just happen to be in essence unusual, without anyone really trying to make a statement. This is why I would recommend India to anyone who is looking for a holiday that is going to play havoc with their idea of the quotidian. The more practical side to it is that it just happens to be a huge landmass that can offer starkly diverse experiences and it is all easily available with a single visa and a single currency.

I can see that my outpour of nationalistic sentiments is eerily close to sounding like a copy for Incredible India . I think I might have fallen prey to the “saare jahaan se achcha” syndrome, which I suspect affects every true blue Hindustani returning from his/her first trip abroad- which is why I cannot be blamed for this post.

Front seats for the sunset

Dreamy. Disoriented. Small.Charmed. Confounded. Captivated. Disturbed. Overwhelmed.
That is what going backpacking around Europe with my friends felt like.

Our itinerary was: (departure- 1st November) London- Brussels- Paris- Nice- Monaco- Venice- Rome- Vienna- Salzburg- (Linz)- London (arrival- 12th November).

There were several times during the trip when we found ourselves before a spectacular view when we weren’t really expecting it. It is one thing to know that you are heading towards a highly celebrated site but something else to turn a corner or climb a bridge or exit a metro station to suddenly see something so strikingly beautiful that everyone falls into a reverential silence before it. These silences and the gasps we let out were, to me, the essence of this trip.

Apart from the sights that worked their magic instantly, the trip was also one effective lesson in history, music, art, religion, politics and architecture. Sometimes, what we learnt about the lives of artists and composers and their times left us as stunned as did seeing an architectural wonder. We also have our cynic-sense in place and could partially see why a particular travel book describes Continental Europe as “that pile of elegant decay”. We did have our minor let-downs and the tourism-oriented marketing at some places did seem excessive. Despite any such flip-sides, I don’t think a trip to Europe can ever be anything less than extraordinary regardless of how and when it is done. All it takes is to see how an everyday occurrence as a sunset can seem like a grand opera in the backdrop of art and history and it becomes clear what the fuss is all about.

While the sights and sounds form the foreground of the trip, the researching, the unending debates while setting the itinerary, the reading of maps and figuring out the public transport systems and living in youth hostels, the great food we stumbled upon in places that inconspicuously happened in the background was equally significant in terms of recall-value. There is something about being a backpacker that makes it easy to talk to strangers and to other backpackers with itineraries that are more chaotic than our own. In almost every journey, our co-passengers shared with us stories of their own favourite fulfilling-yet-crazy trips after they discovered we were among the mavericks who holiday in their country in the wrong season. And very often, we would be asked “So where will your next holiday be?”. I was initially surprised that anyone was even suggesting we attempt another trip like this one, especially as it had been as more work than holiday with the visa application procedure and the bookings that sometimes wore us out. But then I now realize that my appetite for travel has just been kindled and it is a good state of mind to be in- to be planning for the next trip at any point of time. It places the business card, the deadlines, the worries and the task lists in perspective.

Il fait beau sur la France!

This is Padma Sharma blogging from sunny Nice in France.

That is the most I can manage to get across with a French keyboard and after two days of talking in French. More shall follow when I return to good ole Brum.

P.S: I am heading to the beach now :)

Somewhere Else

Well, there’s only one way to say this. I fell in love with a little Welsh sea-side town called Conwy 15 days ago- and hopelessly at that. The river Conwy flows through this town that is surrounded by purple-red flower-laden mountains and a grand 12th century castle runs along the town's perimeter. This basically means that from any given standpoint within Conwy, you are bound to find a picture postcard-like view before you that you want to capture and permanently freeze in your mind. Somehow, writing about my visit seems like it isn't the right way to save for posteriority the memories of the trip. When I write, it feels like I am trying to organize memories in convenient packages, just like those cans of processed food with their customary levels of preservatives that occupy miles of shelf-space in super-markets. And just like those cans, I know that anything I write will simply not have the intended effect.

This, my friends, is Conwy:







(pictures courtesy Trambak, Suryadip and Dam- muchas gracias guys! :))

P.S: I should have written this earlier- just that I did not have access to the internet at what is now "home". I am in the UK on work for the next five months. I would appreciate it if anyone has any suggestions on places that must be visited and things that must be done around here. We have been making our own plans too for almost every single weekend we'll be spending here- but then any local knowledge always adds significant value to what the maps and travel guides tell us.

Making a point in 90 minutes

The only thing about me that has remained constant in the last one year has been the fact I have been reading regularly, irrespective of the extent of work load, the state of my mind and errm..my heart, the temperature, the migratory cycles of the local feathered population, the phase of the moon and other such variable factors. Since I would like to remember the details of some books that I have read recently, I have decided to blog about them for a while now.

The book “90 Minutes at Entebbe” by William Stevenson comprises of two main parts. The first and more significant part narrates the build-up to and the actual execution of one of the most well-planned and successful rescue missions carried out by a government in a foreign territory viz., the mission carried out by Israel in 1976 to rescue over a 100 of its citizens who were held hostage in Uganda by hijackers. The second part contains the transcript of the discussion that took place at the United Nations Security Council during the proceedings against Israel for alleged violation of Uganda’s sovereign rights in the course of the rescue mission.

The book states, while describing the process of planning the rescue mission, that there was one particular incident that convinced all the parties involved in decision-making that Israel must switch gears from diplomatic negotiations with the hijackers to direct military intervention. This incident involved the hijackers releasing all passengers of all nationalities on board the Air France plane that was bound to Paris from Tel Aviv but hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda, save the Israelis. Through this act of the hijackers, what had been an international crisis affecting several countries became solely Israel’s national concern. This act of the hijackers is said to have brought back to Israel’s collective consciousness, the memory of ‘Selekzia’- the term used by the Nazis to separate Jews from the rest of the crowd before sending the former to harrowing concentration camps.

This, the author seeks to establish, enabled the Israeli government to identify its immediate concern- that of saving the lives of its citizens, regardless of the consequences on its standing in the international community. The result was Operation Thunderbolt- an operation in which a fleet of 4 military aircrafts, in conditions of complete secrecy, took off for far off Uganda to bring back all the Israeli citizens on the midnight of 4th July, 1976 after a brief combat that left all the hijackers and some Ugandan troops dead. The deftness with which the mission was handled can be understood from the fact that the eccentric Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, could not help praise the efficiency of the Israeli troops even as he was fuming about the loss of lives of Ugandan soldiers that this mission had caused. Incidentally, the exact role played by Idi Amin in this hijacking incident is not clear throughout the book,. There are parts where he comes across as sympathetic to the cause of the hijackers and others where he seems to have made a genuine effort at negotiating on behalf of the hostages.

There is a sense of irony that comes across towards the end because it is clear that Israel, through its meticulously planned and boldly executed rescue mission that lasted for only 90 minutes, made its stance regarding foreign policy and terrorism more eloquently than the Israeli diplomat could during the proceedings that lasted for days on end at the United Nations Security Council. While I was at my seat’s edge while reading about the mission and was taken aback by the precision with which it was executed, I was bored while reading the arguments put forth by the diplomat before the Security Council that come across as lukewarm and unconvincing (to me at least). On reading the entire transcript of the arguments, I could actually understand the cause for some of the ill-will that Israel had to face from other nations at the end of the hearings at the Security Council.

I completed this book in a little over a week while reading it in the morning in the bus on my tryingly long (sigh!) journey to work. Since I cannot help but think about work on my way there, I think this led me to look at the entire rescue operation from an efficiency of execution angle and left me admiring the planning skills of the Israelis. This does not, however, mean that I admire Israel’s military activism, since I have looked at things from an admittedly narrow perspective here. The book did make me wonder if, for a country to become exceptionally efficient militarily or economically, it takes the strong emotion generated by the memory of an incident (the Holocaust in this case) that has affected the individuals of the population at a personal level, only by dint of he or she being part of the bigger group. This also occurred to me when a colleague recently mentioned how it is widely believed that it was the shame of the memory of defeat in WW2 and the eagerness of the Japanese to wipe it out that contributed to Japan’s miraculous turnaround in the post-War years. This, too, seems to corroborate the notion that the psyche of a group is reflective of that of the individuals that constitute it. But then again, there could be a Fallacy of Composition at work somewhere here. It is possible that what may come across as a bold and domineering country in terms of its policies is made up of simple-minded individuals who can be satisfied with a good life and are not keenly ambitious for anything else. There must be millions of pages of printed matter out there about the role of the constituent individuals in influencing the mind of a group and I need to get my hands on some of it. Any recommendations will be deeply appreciated!

It was fantastic!

One year after coming back home from IGIDR, it is surprising to look at how my perceptions of the two years spent there have changed.

As soon as I had arrived, when anybody asked me how my experience in Mumbai was, I would say that it was good for the most part but add a qualifier to convey the fact that it was not all easy and pretty. I would occasionally talk about how, when we all started off, all the people there were the diametrically opposite personalities of each other and that we took time to get used to having each other around and some more time to find friends. Sometimes, I complained about how I was always sleep-deprived because of the amount of work there was to do and at other times about how the institute is isolated from the city and there was not much scope to explore Mumbai.

But now, when I occasionally talk about the place, all I can say is that it was simply, wonderfully, abso-blooming-lutely, fantastic! I probably have only distorted memories of the time spent there. I am now immersed in work and memories of IGIDR comprise only of bits of the kind of conversations and incidents that can only occur within the confines of a university campus that is away from civilization. This is probably also the memory I will guard in my mind for the future.

I couldn't help typing this out when I realised it has been exactly one year since I came back. This is especially for all those friends of mine who are still studying or about to graduate- take it from me, you people will be talking this way about the places you now complain of. Yes, I know, how bizarre!

..and the Bheja Fry for me, thanks!

(I'm still vegetarian...the title is just me trying to be witty)

There was one particular aspect about the movie Bheja Fry that I found simultaneously heartening and realistic. The protagonist of the movie, Bharat Bhushan, is an incorrigible dimwit, a smug bore, a cuckold and yet, there is just one relationship that has remained intact despite all these personality disorders. The man has a "bestest friend" who completely shares the former's passion for watching cricket and empathises with his love for Bollywood music and his tendency to display his meagre singing abilities at the most inopportune times and places. I particularly enjoyed watching the chemistry between the two characters when they are completely tickled by each other's pitifully dull jokes even as they are trying to help another man who is in serious trouble.

I found this depiction refreshing because, for once, two men were shown to be thick buddies and there was no sacrificing of loves or lives by either of them to make the audience understand just how deep their friendship is. The said best friend is not just a lame sidekick to the protagonist whose only role is to make the male lead look good, as is the case in most of our fillums. On the contrary, Bharat Bhushan is full of praise and admiration for his friend's abilities as a tax officer while the friend does not really reciprocate any of this reverence.

The reason I am even writing about how two grown, uninteresting men are shown to be friends in a realistic manner in a movie is only because I think that very rarely do we get to see something like that. Bollywood, over the years, has slaughtered every kind of relationship between people and stuffed it up with its own fluff comprising of imaginary and in some cases, ghastly emotional upheavals and excessively complicated situations. The relationship between the male lead and his best friend has been vicitm to this kind of treatment very frequently. Given this context, I was surprised to see how the two friends in the movie are like some of the people I see and know. In everyday life, for a lot of people I know, to go out and help a friend in need while there is an important cricket match being aired on TV is the ultimate testament to one's concern for the friend's wellbeing . There have been other movies, such as Dil Chahta Hai that have succeeded in depicting warmth and bonhomie among male characters without leaving the audience cloyed by the end. But these are only the exceptions and not the norm. Well, at least it looks like there is some hope of watching men in movies discuss cricket or Bollywood and give each other imperfect advice and spend less time saving each other from getting electrocuted, drowning, being thrashed by 12 dark-skinned and bald men etc.,.

That leaves us with the question of the relationship among saheliyaan in movies- but let's not even get into that just yet!

My Biggest Regret

(A State of Mind Update)

The One thing
That tops the huge list of things
That vie for space
In that encumbered zone in my mind
That specializes strictly
In Brooding, Over-analyzing and Enervating Myself
Is the fact that I have not travelled
As much as I should have, by now.