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At the departure lounge of the HAL airport in Bangalore that night of September in 1997, my friend from school Kavitha R.N. looked thoroughly weighed down. RN, as we fondly called her, had three unwieldy bags to take care of and a brand new “softie” husband who was taking her to Santa Clara, US. To her great consternation, an extended family of 25-odd people had come to the airport to bid her goodbye. One of them had even written a poem about how happy he was about her going to the “States”, which he thrust unceremoniously into her already busy hands. Another put a marigold garland around her neck while a young boy gave her a bouquet. Her aunt made her swallow some sugar. The buzz around her was electric, to say the least, and the conversation was all about which cousin of hers was next in line to marry and which were the best hunting grounds to find suitable US grooms.

To me, her discomfort was obvious, as was her state of mind. She was muttering about how embarrassed and annoyed she was but her eyes told a different story. They had already spotted freedom. Nothing brought out this sense of “journey to liberation” into sharp relief as much as Bangalore’s great exodus to the “States” in the 1990s did. A successful Kannada movie released in 1995 and set in San Francisco poignantly depicted how the American dream could corrode minds and distance hearts. The movie’s title, America! America!!, said it all. But such cultural depictions of ground realities were rare. People hardly fathomed the possible perils of this ambitious voyage—the goodies they were discovering on the way were too blinding. As often happens with change, what led to it and what came out of it was discovered much later, mostly in hindsight.

The country was liberated economically, politically and socially in the 1990s, but freedom blossomed most inside minds. This was most visible in Bangalore, which itself transformed without ceremony from a boulevard-dotted “garden city” to the glitzy torchbearer of this change. It is hard to determine whether it was the youngsters who were glowing in the reflected glory of a city thrust into global limelight, or it was the city that was preening because of its youth, who literally led the charge into the new millennium. It was perhaps possibly both. What was palpable, though, was the change in body language and thought processes not just of an entire post-reform generation, but also of their parents, aunts and uncles, soaked and dyed for years in pre-reform tight-fistedness and conservatism. Several things happened simultaneously that culminated in 1990s’ Bangalore making the American dream its own. Cable television, the Internet and the opening up of the markets led to a giddy consumption craze that was both fed by and mirrored in the decade’s movies, music, television and advertising. Whole classrooms of students about to complete class XII in school felt liberated enough to chant “yes, we can”. Silicon Valley triumph tales were sliding off tongues that were unused to uttering names such as San Jose and Santa Clara.

People who had resigned themselves to spending lifetimes in rented houses and travelling by autorickshaws became the dreaded nouveau riche, deliriously smug in their spanking new Marutis and Cielos, not to mention declarations in “Kanglish” of plans to buy a “flat-u”. For young Bangaloreans, IT was the magic word that turned stone walls into doors; for their parents and extended family, it was the road map to deliverance—the best way to notch up social status. All they needed was an offspring whose life story could be narrated at weddings and family functions as “Computers madthaiddane” (he is “doing” computers).

Most were happy to be described as such and more than willing to undertake this journey. If the odd soul or two did demur, they would have to have a core of steel to ward off the intense peer and family pressure. Thus, somebody like me, who detested physics and mugged up integration sums to pass my class XII board exams, nonchalantly took up tutorials for the Common Entrance Test (CET), with grand plans of studying engineering (electronics or computer science…the others were infra dig) and somebody like my friend, Seshadri, limerick king and impromptu Kannada poet who dreamt of writing “one suspense novel every year”, ended up in Sunnyvale, US, with an MS, two children and a house.

The majority believed that this three-point formula—study engineering, get a “software” job, and then go to the US either on work or to study—would not just take their family into the software hall of fame, but also grant them individual liberties, both cultural and economic. And indeed, it did. These were the subliminal trips, the mental journeys that were both the result and the cause of the actual physical voyage to the US.

The narrative though was thoroughly unlike that of the Swinging Sixties. If the flower children were all about rebellion and celebratory capriciousness, the yuppies were about being practical and ambitious. The world wasn’t a marijuana- induced “mayanagar”, but a gritty, real place where money should be chased. As far as the yuppies were concerned, this climb up the social ladder was both desirable and legitimate. So it was that at the heart of it all, “States” actually spelt m-o-n-e-y. Whether they recognized it or not, the older generation fully supported this enterprise, sometimes visibly, sometimes silently. And you couldn’t blame them. For families that hadn’t seen any wealth for generations, these were heady times.

The youngsters though were clever in various other ways. They didn’t let go of their tradition but they were self-assured enough to work around it and if need be, underneath it. The most striking example is that of drinking alcohol. In conservative middle-class homes of Bangalore (from where came the majority of the “softies”), drinking was not exactly in vogue and in many cases, even strictly prohibited. But drink beer you did (and pronounced it to rhyme with “heer” as b-e-e-r), and boozing was really the surest way to arrive. Of course, you never got so drunk so that you couldn’t get home at a decent hour (after gobbling up fistfuls of mints). The flower child might have stood up to his dad and demanded to know why he was against alcohol, but the yuppie never crowed about it, nor did he question his parents. It was vital that they be on his side.

The young men and women would give their parents the slip and go on dates, but would not say no to an arranged marriage a few years later. The “boy” would work in the Bay Area but he would gladly take leave and come home to take a Kannadiga bride from his sub-caste. Of course, there were exceptions—and there will always be.

This was also why for many girls, the journey was much shorter. All they had to do was marry a US “softie” to arrive. For many of my friends, it was the ultimate liberation—you could live away from in-laws, wear what you wanted and booze! For the girls’ parents, it was an achievement to marry their daughter to a “softie” and pack her off to the US, complete with the kind of farewell that my friend got and carefully packed saarina pudis (rasam powder) and thokkus (tamarind pickle).

While the 1990s’ children undertook many such journeys, physical and otherwise, their parents were on a trip of their own. They were living vicariously through their children and often making up for their own lack of spending opportunities by overindulging. What’s more, soon it would be time to actually take that flight to the US, pose for pictures in front of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, patently uncomfortable in “Punjabi dresses” (as salwar-kameezes were then called), sneakers, and baseball caps, not to mention the triumphant return journey bearing Mars bars, Hershey’s Kisses, some colourful umbrellas, “scent” bottles and teddy bears. The American voyage became their identity, and so powerful was this identity for many from the pre-reform generation in Bangalore that it continues to hold sway even in 2011.

Which is why at a wedding recently, a distant aunt was introduced to me as the one “who is going to the States this September”. Some journeys never end.

Published in Mint-Wall Street Journal on 13.08.11.http://www.livemint.com/2011/08/12204047/Society--The-8216States8.html

Berlin, a former mayor claimed famously in a television interview in 2004, is poor but sexy. For Berliners, long accused of possessing the Berliner Schnauze (snout) which dubs every Berliner a rude, snooty and cranky fella, this was a much nicer stereotype to live with.

The phrase became such a hit it made every junkie in punk-haven district Kreuzberg glow with renewed pride. Since enchanting or enthralling doesn’t quite sit with Berlin as it would with Paris or London, the mayor’s quote indeed gave tourist brochures a catch phrase to describe a city that’s hard to define and harder to fully comprehend.

For Berlin is a haunted, scarred city where the ghosts of the past and cranes of the future nudge each other constantly. It is not by accident that the German capital has been labelled by many as an ever-changing architectural exhibition. Uniquely for a European city, Berlin undertook massive construction in the 1990s in a feverish attempt to build a shimmery “new” capital. So you had a complete transport network constructed to connect East and West Berlin; renewal projects in the historic Museum Island, a Unesco heritage site, and snazzy steel and glass structures looking sombrely down on Checkpoint Charlie, once the most famous crossover point from west to east and now the city’s only “touristy” spectacle.

But it hasn’t worked.

Berlin, happily, does not look “new”. If anything, history has become more defiant in this city pockmarked by World War II bomb-blackened church domes, grey, square and ugly (there’s no other word for it) Communist apartment blocks from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) era, some of which have been gentrified into fashionable boutiques and art houses, abandoned spaces and memorials—some seen and some unseen. Because its past has been traumatic, not once but over and over again, knowingly and unknowingly, ironically and accidentally, the “haunted geographies of the land” are all too obvious. Like the 2ft-wide foundation of the Berlin Wall you come across every now and then in the city.

Or the dazzling Sony Centre with its uber modern Japanese-inspired steel dome at Potsdamer Platz—which was once a “death strip” no-man’s land where death routinely triumphed.

That’s another German characteristic very evident in Berlin’s startling architecture—the eager attempt to forget; the determined attempt to move on, yet still hostage to the inevitable pull of memories, horrific and compelling. Which is why Hitler’s bunker has to be searched for under the hot sun; there are no touristy directions to it, no commemoration of any sort. Just modern apartments above it with people going about their everyday business and a cursory board stuck on the ground, saying, well, if you really want to know, this is where Hitler’s bunker was.

The recently renovated “Topography of Terror” documentation centre and the still under-construction memorial to the Berlin Wall are both vast spaces that further communicate this conflicting social desire—to remind oneself as well as to forget a violent past that has fused inexorably into the present. The predominant colour is a dull grey; the mood is one of acceptance; and the effort is to present as minimalistically as possible the nation’s traumatic history. But this kind of minimalism has failed utterly to mute the guilt and horror of it all, if that was ever the intention. It has only further scratched the wounds raw.

As my German host narrated in a sidewalk café serving Spanish tapas, the city was the capital of five different Germanies—the 1871 German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany, and now the reunified Germany, and it has been the space where German “supremacy” and fierce nationalism was showcased, destroyed and showcased again. Scholar Rudy Koshar wrote that Berlin represents the “unstable optic identity” of the nation. My host laughs self-consciously and calls it a collective national guilt that still colours German education and thought.Which is why it is not surprising that the Holocaust memorial designed by Peter Eisenman stirred such contrasting emotions when it was finally unveiled in 2005. Typically, before the memorial came into being, the space designated for it was an eyesore, a vast empty plot covered with a fence full of political graffiti both opposing and supporting the construction.

I know of no other city that speaks of space and constriction in the same breath as Berlin does. A 19,000 sq. m memorial in the heart of the city, with the landmark Brandenburg Gate a few paces away and the almost hidden Hitler’s bunker just beyond it, the over 2,700 unmarked grey stone slabs in varying sizes scream more poignantly than anything else in Berlin. At its unveiling, the architect had hoped that the “memorial would blend into the background of the city” and be used both as a short cut to a way home or to walk in and around and through it, in contemplation. Of course, it doesn’t blend. It is starkly visible—physically and metaphorically—but if you allow it to, it does hollow out space in your cluttered mind.But it is clutter of a different kind that the “new” hip Berlin is thriving on. Downtown Berlin has been invaded by students, artists and other “creative” types who have given this Berlin an edgy and exciting cultural ethos—from thriving punk and techno to serendipitous art galleries housed in former GDR blocks, to “guerrilla” fashion boutiques (enterprising artists stealthily taking over tenant-less places).

These independent fashion stores specialize in quirkiness really. And since they are “guerrilla” they are always now there, now gone. They are set up mostly by struggling designers in the bohemian neighbourhoods of Berlin such as Mitte and Kreuzberg. The designers sell their stuff for a few months and then disappear without a trace. Ah, the serendipity they promise! It is the quest that makes the purchase at these boutiques so special.

With cheaper rents than other European cities, Berlin has become the city to live in for such risk takers. Add to this the cultural mishmash, music and art forms of its growing immigrant population and the proud tradition of street graffiti, and there is another Berlin brewing here. In fact, Berlin is said to be the most “graffiti-ed” or, in graffiti lingo, “most bombed” city of Europe, giving its street architecture a contemporary edge that no mere odd-shaped building can.

This is not your everyday “I love Alice in Chains” graffiti—it is invariably intensely political and, as my host says, without a hint of humour. “They are artists, they are reclaiming the city.”

As with everything else in Berlin, its graffiti too has a history. Kreuzberg, everybody’s favourite neighbourhood, used to be the heart of the American sector, surrounded by the Berlin Wall on three sides and bursting with Turkish immigrants, rebellious punks and everybody else, it seems, with a can of paint. And it had loads of free unclaimed space and little policing. So it became and remains the city’s premier canvas.

But after the fall of the Wall, graffiti rapidly moved eastwards. For these street artists, it was as if a new untouched, whitewashed world had opened up. The earlier unmarked Stasi-controlled East Berlin was soon captured by celebratory brushstrokes and angry squiggles. Though officially it is still vandalism, most Berliners look at graffiti with indulgence rather than annoyance. Which explains the popularity of the “graffiti festival” that is often held in the hallway of a former Kreuzberg hospital and helps you comprehend what Berliners mean when they say their city is constantly being remodelled by somebody or the other.

Perhaps more than the city’s much loved mayor, it was author Karl Scheffler who got Berlin right. Way back in 1910, he had this to say: “Berlin is a city forever condemned to becoming and never being.”

Published in Mint-Wall Street Journal on 26.02.11 http://www.livemint.com/2011/02/25183112/A-city-of-infinite-ghosts.html

No, I didn’t take the cable car. I saw no snow. Obviously then, I didn’t ski. I didn’t exactly get any ‘mountain top breathtaking view’. Nah, didn’t buy watches either. Eating Swiss chocolates and cheese were the only concession I was willing to give for being in Switzerland. And it paid off.

Never on my list of must-see places, Geneva is the kind of surprise you get when you go there not expecting to see heaven. It is then that you are willing to ignore the clinical affluence of the place, steer clear of its famed haute couture and wander instead into an eye-poppingly green park. First you hear the laughter; and then you see cliques of youngsters dotted all over the park, some just giggling and a few others trying to play the bass guitar. A few feet away, completely oblivious to this exuberant din, are very formally dressed men (whose age I am conservatively estimating to be between 80 and 90) sternly planning moves on a giant chessboard installed in the park. Their completely un-mock seriousness in playing the game makes it obvious that they belong to Geneva as much as we hapless tourists don’t.
After I get the third nasty stare for trying to get a little too near to the massive chessboard (I wanted to kick the pieces around) I decide to give them a wide berth and walk down further with the limp sun, the still wet grass and the cool breeze enough to offset all kinds of stares.

The park is below one of Geneva’s best known monuments, Le Monument de La Reformation, which  was built in early 20th century along a 16th century rampart beneath Geneva’s old town. It is a dedication to the famous four Geneva reformers — Knox, Calvin, Theodore de Beze and Guillaume Farel. All four look down sternly on the aforementioned sterner players of life-size chess. This is the best place to lie on the grass, leisurely lick a fat tub of creamy yoghurt clean and breathe in life.

That’s the thing about Geneva. Its air. It's so shockingly pure that it makes you want to take great gulps in and store it somewhere; to be summoned up when the next auto farts black smoke into your face. Truly green, Geneva, it seems, has as many parks as it has international organisations. It is also home to the Red Cross Museum that not only traces the history of the humanitarian organisation but organises fantastic photo exhibitions regularly. It is a stark, dark place though; long corridors full of carefully filed and indexed archives, grainy world war footage and exhibits about suffering and valour. Your nose expects a musty smell, but since this is Switzerland, what it gets instead is the smell of thoroughly vacuumed carpets. 

From here, you can either choose to duck inside the typically officious-looking UN headquarters (squat and square building, lots of flags, inscribed lettering) or take the leisurely tram back to the quay. Walk along the promenade, which offers you stunning views of Lake Geneva, one of western Europe’s largest lakes with its trademark fountain that throws water some 400-odd feet into the air. Why is a fountain so fascinating? Is it because it mirrors our own lives, constant and relentless till somebody switches it off?
The promenade is also a great place for making further inroads into your observation of human nature. It is almost as if its long stone benches, the accompanying gardens, the quiet gazebos next to the pebbly brooks, are all designed to encourage you to do just that — observe how our fellow beings tackle life and wonder why tourists are enamoured by a silly clock made of flowers.

Better still, don’t wonder. Don’t read up about Geneva before you land there. Give randomness a chance and it might lead you to a suburb just outside the city where uneven streets criss-cross each other, Mediterranean style houses look down on cute (there’s no other word for it) gardens and where you instantly smell a general air of bohemia so unlike the Swiss that you turn into the tourist you don’t want to be. Carouge was apparently a township that was gifted to the King of Sardenia in 1754. He wanted it to, well, look Mediterranean. So he got architects to give the town a ‘chessboard design’ (the official website tells me) and wooden houses with compact gardens of their own.
The suburb still retains most of that striking architecture though the houses have now mostly been converted into old-worldly but fashionable cafes, antique galleries and curio shops. 

And then, just when you think you have had enough of such serendipity, you are enticed to climb what feels like 800 steps up Geneva’s oldest cathedral, to just look at its ancient, corroded tower bell. For your efforts, while climbing down the precariously spiralling stairs in near-complete darkness, you are gifted with a single slant of sunlight that cuts through you. Perfectly, diagonally. 

Published in Sunday Herald on 09.01.11
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/127454/old-world-charm.html

It was a dark, stormy night. The alley was narrow and twisted; the bridge led nowhere, the water beneath, thick and murky, was midnight blue. We were lost. And worried. And happy. And nervous.
And giggly. And we were in Venice.

Sometimes the worst cliches of a bad novel play out in life and lets you discover a few un-cliched truths. Like being as geographically challenged as I am can be liberating in at least one city in the world. And that getting lost can translate to finding yourself.

Drifty, dreamy Venice does that to you. It seamlessly merges fact and fiction; all that you have read about this magical city is true. Both the good and the bad. Oh yes, there are lots of both. Venice's tourists are so many that they have scared the locals into hiding. Or so it seems.

This much-written about city has all the trappings of a beauty uglified by PR brochures. There are meant-for-tourists lanes, showy, tacky and overcrowded. At every corner on these lanes, you will meet an open-mouthed backpacker clutching a map in one hand (quite useless in Venice, but we will come to that later) and eating a fake gelato with another. They abound in Venice. Fake gelatos that is. And fake Murano glass art. And fake Venetian masks. Never mind the dour stickers on the display window of every second shop warning tourists against buying "Chinese glass". One pleads in broken English: "Buying Chinese glass kill Murano."

Then there are 'real' Venetian lanes. Like there are stunning real masks and beautifully intricate glass art. But it takes a practiced eye to spot them amidst the clutter.

That really is your cue to get yourself adrift on this little island, which feels more like water than land. The buildings seem to bend down too...perhaps they are in search of their feet mostly immersed in the water? I did tell you that Venice makes you dreamy, didn't I?

It also makes you dizzy. No vehicles are allowed to ply here. Nope, not even cycles. So you walk like everybody else. How democratic! And yes, leave that map behind. It is of no use in Venice's mostly unnamed streets which invariably lead you to a dead-end or to another narrow unnamed street which you eagerly take to er.. end up in the street you originally started walking from.

There are basically only two directions in Venice -- one pointing 'per' (towards) San Rialto, the 1,000-year-old ornamental bridge and another 'Per' San Marco, the island's central piazza. But, but. These two signs are everywhere and in many places, pointing towards opposite ends! And worse, mischievous graffiti writers have added their own authentic-looking 'Per San Marco' and 'Per San Rialto' signs!

In Venice apparently, mailing addresses do not contain street names. They only have some cryptic-looking numbers and district names. Poor postmen! The New York Times also informs me that Gondoliers take a tough three-month navigation course. And many fail the first time round.

I am thoroughly unsurprised. What surprised me though was what getting lost does to you. Especially if it is progressively getting darker and lonelier. You tend to look at your hands and feet deeply, as if you will discover a map hidden there somewhere; weirdly, you become acutely conscious of your short-sightedness. Don't ask why. You keep spotting bridges and buildings that look familiar but are not; you feel eerily aware of the stillness of the night. (Yeah, yeah just like in those badly written novels.)

And then it all fades away. The fear, the anxiety, the worry. And warmth and a strange happiness settles in. Like how the real Venice is lost to most people, you too are really, truly lost. And that unshackles you. You hold hands tightly and start looking out for the moon; for the odd shapes the sagging buildings make, for the sound of the water lapping lazily, for the lone gondola floating away serenely.

And then you keep walking. Now you are sure you will end up finding.

Published in Sunday Herald on 10.10.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/103557/uncliched-truths.html

The Europeans might not share the same world view, never mind the EU, but mention Brussels and eight times out of ten, you will see a lip curl, or an eye roll and lots of nudge-nudge snigger-snigger. The other two times, you probably met either a flag-holding Belgian or Hercule Poirot.

Apparently, Brussels' image woes are so bad that it routinely wins the tag of “most boring European city” in online surveys. That mother of Preen, Paris, is half an hour away by speed train while that mecca of bonhomie, Amsterdam, is not too far either. Brussels is thus most often ignored by the average tourist determined to ‘do’ Paris and then breathlessly ‘do’ The Dam as well. The odd offbeat tourist who does visit Brussels for a day or so, more often than not, is directed by the tourist office to a miserable little statue of a peeing boy, astonishingly Brussels' most famous monument ‘Mannekin Pis'.  Or he is told enthusiastically to visit one of Brussels' many sidewalk cafes and have a bowl of mussels, which at best is an acquired taste and at worst, tastes like mushrooms that died two weeks ago in the freezer. And of course, it doesn't help at all that Brussels is the capital of the EU —the city seems to be resignedly bearing the brunt of the Union's reflected un-glory.

All this sadly means most tourists miss out on the dark delights of Brussels. Belgium is right on top of the heap when it comes to production of chocolate and we are talking fine chocolate here, not your Mars and Snickers bars. Chocolate with aroma; chocolate that is neither too sweet nor too bitter; chocolate that neither flakes nor hardens; chocolate that melts exactly when it kisses your tongue; chocolate that inspires such an unabashedly maudlin paragraph.

Of course, the French and the Swiss claim they do it better (whether or not French and Swiss chocolates are of better quality is another matter, their PR machinery is definitely sharper). But there is no other place in the world except the compact city of Brussels where you can take a leisurely walk in the quaint, cobbled historic town square, full of gilt-edged enormous neo-classical structures and encounter some of the world's finest producers of chocolate.

First stop, the justly famous Leonidas, one of the greatest Belgian chocolate names. If you are wondering why a Belgian chocolate shop sounds like a Greek ship company, don't blame yourself. It was began by Leonidas Kestikedes, a young Greek who came to Brussels to take part in the ‘Universal exhibition of Brussels' in 1913 and hence the name. He won not only the bronze medal for his handmade chocolates at the exhibition but also the heart of a Belgian lady and decided to settle down in Brussels. Originally, the chocolates were sold in small tea rooms through the famed ‘guillotine window' (windows that slid up and down), remnants of which barely exist in today's Brussels. In 1935, the actual company was established by Leonidas' nephew and today, there are Leonidas outlets every few metres in central Brussels and it still remains one of the largest chocolate producers of Belgium and yet, one of the very few affordable ones for slurpy-tongued hungry-eyed poor mortals like me. Here you can buy pralines by weight and extraordinarily cute house-boxes full of chocolates.
 
Walk a few metres and you will reach Galeries St Hubert, said to be the first “covered shopping area of the world". Simply put, the shopping mall of the 19th Century. A complete charmer of a neo-classical building, all stately grace and golden elegance, it will make you wish every modern glass and steel shopping mall went retro. Here is housed the famed Neuhaus confectionary, still sitting snugly where it was originally started in 1846! Again, Neuhaus has a fascinating history.

Founded by a Swiss immigrant Jean Neuhaus who originally began the store as a medicine shop that sold the odd candy, it was later inherited by Neuhaus' grandson who is credited with inventing pralines. The chocolatiers have regal status today and hold the ‘Royal Warrant'. Meaning they are the suppliers of those fine chocolates that the Belgian royalty undoubtedly enjoys. 

Walk into the blinding sunshine from the marble-cold mall and you will reach the Plac du Grande Sablon. If the name of the square sounds grand, the chocolate producers that surround it are grandiose. Here you will find within kissing distance of each other, flagship outlets of world class chocolatiers Marcolini, Wittamer, Godiva and Valrhona. All these companies zealously guard their cocoa secrets. For instance, Valrhona creates vintage dark chocolate from cocoa beans of a specific year's harvest from a specific heavily guarded plantation; Marcolini is famed for its use of completely natural ingredients like real vanilla.  If you have a thick enough skin, walk into these shops even if you cannot afford a single praline; there are often free tastings and in some of them, you can even watch the chocolates being hand made right in the shop.
 
I did walk in, thin skin and all. Tasted the pralines for free. Smiled sheepishly at everybody and walked out, finally and humbly accepting that chocolate is my lord and master. And that, like Belgium's very own Poirot, I should stop resisting and drink creme de menthe every evening.

Published in Sunday Herald on 22.07.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/90397/dark-delightful.html

I had a strange reluctance to write this piece. Travelling and reading. Two most intensely personal, exhaustingly selfish pursuits. One never knows whether one can really put down what happens when the two fuse (do they, can they?) and worse, one has no clue whether the person who cares to read what is put down will connect somewhere, if at all.

Two things have to be made clear here. By travelling I don’t mean taking the four-day bus tour of the Golden Triangle. By reading I don’t mean the flight safety booklet or that ‘Stardust’ you picked up at Warangal junction just because the train had stopped for longer than you liked.

And I definitely don’t mean travelling with aunts and uncles and a brood of kids. I agree, there is a lot of reading to be done here outside of a book. Which brings us to a boring aside of a confession. I cannot read a book while I travel; that is while I am actually moving from place A to place B. I am the kind who reads after reaching. When there is movement, there can only be music. But I do carry a book with me. It gives me a strange sense of security. When there is any unease, I can duck and hide into it. A book is your very own tortoise shell. Always handy. 

But there are millions who do. First up on my mind is a friend who matter-of-factly said she reads even while she walks (to her college that is) as if that was the most natural thing to do. “It passes time and if the road is mapped out in your head and does not have too many bumps, it is comforting.” Those were her exact words. And she has even read Alice in Wonderland while walking! Just think, I would have definitely stumbled into a rabbit hole myself if I ever attempted this.

There are those who buy Lonely Planets by its weight and swot it by heart by the time they reach Prague or Tokyo. And there are the kinds who believe that when they are travelling, they should read travel literature. Which is quite stupid if you ask me. Most travel literature is wonderfully happy experiences, full of joyous endings, amazing discoveries, written in descriptive splendour. You will only end up feeling miserable and envious because you lost your way in a smelly dingy alley in London while your exuberant writer had effusively described London as being infested with magical rabbit paths or when you clearly don’t feel as spiritual as the author when the Ganga comes into sight in Varanasi.

If you ask me, I would rather read fiction set in the place I am going to. I wish I had read Alexandar McCall Smith’s brilliantly evocative mystery series — ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’ before visiting Edinburgh; or one of Kurt Wallander mysteries that are getting so popular in India before stepping into Stockholm. I have read William Darlymple’s City of Djinns twice in the hope of falling in love with Delhi the next time I go. I haven’t. Yet. And there are so many books set in London and New York that most book lovers feel eerily at home in these cities.

There is another way to do this. Go travelling in search of things to read. There is nothing more pleasurable than finding yourself in a new city, a map sitting snugly in your pocket, mind open, bright sunshine and the prospect of browsing through second hand bookstores in the hope of serendipity.

That is why travelling is reading and reading is travelling.
Have you noticed the irrational warmth that eccentric bookworms feel for one another? Or that flash of grudging liking that solitary travellers convey, and to be sentimentally literary here, “when they pass each other in the night”?

All are signs of acknowledgement — of indulgence; of a primordial love for the self and funnily enough, a kind of convivial tolerance for humanity. These two magnificent pursuits are always merging, in a hazy, hard-to-define way. Travelling is reading the world and yourself and reading is travelling around the world and into yourself. But for this to really occur, you should be willing to love yourself fiercely and love humanity equally strongly. Both need what an author whose name I now forget calls ‘imaginative generosity of the heart’; both are curiously passive activities that require all your heart and soul and energy and passion to make them worthwhile.

Unfortunately, this cannot be explained further. For one, I have not understood it completely and I hope I never will. For those who understand, explanations are unnecessary. Bon Voyage!

Published in Sunday Herald on 14.02.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/52439/book-rack.html

There ain’t any guilt any more. Only pleasure.  And status updates.
 
Come now, think. Are you feeling all pleasurable inside because you licked off a pot of hazelnut cream? Feeling full, tickled, embarrassed and gross? Yes, we know what you will do next. Login to Facebook and assuage all those feelings by a simple status update. “I just licked clean a pot of cream.” Friends will rush to like it, some will give banal advice, some will put up smileys. End of pleasure.
 
Aren’t we all guilty as charged?
 
Even Michigan researchers agree with me. Their new research on ‘guilty pleasures’ suggests that when we are actually doing what pleasures us, our brain, unsurprisingly, is only thinking of the pleasure and not its moral overtones or undertones. It is only later when we think back on our action that we associate with it feelings of guilt or embarrassment.
 
Consider for an instant that in a moment of abandon, you completely enjoyed a Himesh Reshammiya number (now, admit it, you were hooked to Jhalak Dhiklaja.) While you were singing along, you were only happy and satiated. It is only later when you tell your friend how much you hate Reshammiya’s singing that you start feeling ‘guilty’ for having experienced the pleasure of singing along to that catchy number. From that moment your brain ‘remembers’ your guilt even though originally there was none.
 
Fashion and celeb magazines looking for fillers have quite neatly murdered the impact of the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’ by asking all and sundry to list out their guilty pleasure reads, guilty pleasure movies, guilty pleasure foods blah blah, day in and day out. The phrase has become so clichéd that when you ask people what their guilty pleasure is, they list the most innocent of acts like eating an extra piece of chocolate in the night, listening to ABBA, reading Jane Austen, taking unplanned breaks, skimming through fashion blogs and taking “slightly over-budgeted” holidays as pleasures that make them feel guilty. I swear I am not making these up. Since when did humans become so morally uptight that mundane overeating and inane indulging started to make them feel guilty?
 
When I asked around for more such guilty pleasures and chided people for acting so innocent, somewhat more interesting ones tumbled out. (Nobody minded spilling out their secrets but nobody wanted to be identified – its ‘guilty pleasures’ after all!)
 
A  friend says her guiltiest indulgence is “sitting in the toilet for you-know-what for ever”. She says her pleasure at prolonging this holiest of rituals is almost “sensual”. Another says his guilty pleasure was fantasizing in lurid detail about making love to a cousin. My another acquaintance says his first thought was to confess about trawling the internet for porn. “But then, I don’t feel guilty at all doing it. So that’s not guilty pleasure, is it?”
 
Nope, it is not. Such not-so-guilty pleasures abound. The majority of them are either food-related or sex-related. Sometimes, it is stealing a smoke when parents are around and sometimes it is stealing money to buy alcohol. But mostly it is dreaming of making love to somebody, watching “outdoor porn” whatever that is, scanning agony aunt columns for sex-related queries, masturbating, dreaming of and I quote, “an incense-filled room full of wind chimes, with a lovely hunk massaging my entire body with purifying oils” or eating pot noodles raw, midnight fridge raids, chocolate, chocolate and chocolate.
 
Oh yes, there is a third category as well. The not-so-guilty but oh-so-gross pleasures category. Under this come confessions such as “getting a thrill by removing goo from my ear and smelling it”, “sniffing my underarms to smell the sweat and liking the smell” “going stealthily into the bathroom every morning to eat aspirin and toothpaste together because it was a delicious combo”, “picking my navel while watching TV” and “plucking my chest hair to pass the time.”
 
Such pleasures so inspired eight women from St Louis in the US that they actually got together to write a book of essays titled “Guilty Pleasures: Indulgences, Addictions and Obsessions.” The eight women remain anonymous but share intensely personal stuff in their essays and cover a wide range of indulgences from sleeping with married men to taking anti-depressants to extorting money from parents. The women call their effort ‘an anti-self-improvement book’!
 
But like always, the Germans can be relied upon to come up with a slightly weightier (more sinister?) interpretation of the concept. They have a military-sounding word for it too, no offence intended! ‘Schadenfreude’, they call it. There’s no exact translation but roughly it means ‘malicious joy’ or pleasure felt at the misfortune of others. 
 
Now, that’s more like it. If you tell me, the person who sat next to you on a bus irrigating his nose inspired hate in you for no apparent reason but the fact that he was torturing his own nose and you felt hyena-like laughter bubbling inside you when he missed his stop, I would call that guilty pleasure. More seriously, this is perhaps what prompts a collective roar of approval when a matador is pierced in his stomach by a charging bull or inspires shouts of support you hear in the background in grainy YouTube videos showing the Taliban stoning a young woman.
 
Orhan Pamuk in his delectable autobiography ‘Istanbul’ describes a feeling not dissimilar to ‘Schadenfreude’ but more akin to the Latin phrase ‘delectatio morosa’ or ‘the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts.” He narrates how he would cheer himself up when he was all of six, by imagining he was killing people. He coolly recounts how he would lavish affection on a cat, only to strike it cruelly the next instant and emerge from that moment with a bout of laughter that would make him so ashamed that he would shower the cat with love again. Did I hear sadism?
 
You don’t exactly need a scientific study to trace the root of such joys. But studies have been conducted and they confirm that our brains are basically shit stations. When we see others going through ill-luck, we feel happy about ourselves. And scientists add that this happens more with people who have a low opinion of themselves.  Worse, the joy multiplies (and the pleasure centre in our brain actually ‘lights up’) when we see misfortune visit those whom we envy.
 
It takes a Mahatma Gandhi to turn this concept on its head and add a dash of piety with his famous advice to feel blessed by looking at those who are worse off than you rather than envy those who are better off than you.
 
Gandhi might have given a pious twist to this guilt business but it is to Oscar Wilde’s advice that human nature actually responds to. In his iconic work ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (which is by itself a paean to pleasure and guilt), Henry, Dorian’s friend and guide counsels the hero with this classic line: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
 
There. That’s why it is remarkably easy for me to confess my very own once guilt-ridden pleasure. I confess to always, always keeping an eye out for men’s eyelashes. The longer they are, the more curved they are, the more pleasure I get. It is an obsessive but now guiltless pleasure. After all, Wilde did tell us all what to do, didn’t he? When you give in to the temptation, the guilt is assuaged.
 
He would have approved of status updates.

Published in Sunday Herald on 30.11.09
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/38391/guilty-pleasures-forbidden-fruit.html