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 14.02.2010
 
Dearest Kitty 02/11/2010
 
The cover never did excite me. Neither did the title. For a 12-year-old drunk on Ned and Nancy, Fatty, Bets, Buster and the like, these were important criteria. But then, that was when my school was right opposite what was then actually a fine library for children. The city central library opposite National High School. Now it is dead and buried. I carry the burden of its bitter-sweet memories. 


The book, like many other things, stared its way into my life. The cover was brownish with a black and white photo of a smiling Anne and that legend below: Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. All that appealed to me was the word diary.I had always had one in which I wrote in all seriousness 'my edicts' (did you ever think a history lesson on Ashoka's edicts could affect somebody so much? hehehe) and really bad rhyming poetry. 


I remember everything about reading it. I remember waiting for amma to go to office and then immediately springing up from my seat, putting on the radio and grabbing it. It was one of the first books that made it physically difficult for me to stop reading it, when I had to eat or when I had to go to school. I even read it in class, hiding it behind a textbook. This, despite not knowing a thing about holocaust, not knowing who Jews were, not being able to pronounce in my head all the different names. In my mind, I only saw Anne as myself like thousands of other children did probably. I only saw a young girl, imprisoned in a 'secret annexe' behind a bookcase, having a sweet romance with a young boy and having some slight trouble with bad Germans. Somewhere at the back of my mind was what our history teacher HVR had told us about the holocaust in his first class. To a conservative, shocked group of young girls and boys, he had described men and women being marched naked to barracks to be killed later. And that was all that I knew.
And All that mattered to me then was that I was Anne Frank and Anne Frank was me. Stuff for daydreams.


Thankfully, I revisited the book two more times, years later. It was later that I felt the bookcase in my hand, understood what Otto Frank meant when he said, the rooms might appear spacious to you now, you visitors, but when we were there, there was fear living with us and saw with Anne what she saw from the attic -- a patch of blue sky, some blooms and some white birds. And go to Auschwitz as Anne several times.  


So it was that when I came to Amsterdam, it had to be Anne Frank house that I first went to. And feel the bookcase for real. Be in Anne's room. Climb the narrow stairs. See the attic. And find absolutely no words to write in the visitors book.


Oh, I had one too. My Target Diary. Who was my imaginary friend. Whom I used to call in cheap imitation of Anne's 'Dearest Kitty', 'Dear DD'.  And it was a boy. With whom I shared all my little lies, convincing myself and him that they were the truth. It was what I considered my sweet revenge against the world. I did write the truth as well occasionally. Oh I was a messed up little kid in many ways -- I would build a fabricated portrayal of myself in the diary.. all the good that happened to me were just that -- good; but all the 'bad' that happened to me were the EVIL world plotting against me. But I still had my DD with me; to console me; play with me and be my pet dog, soulmate and romantic boyfriend.
When I first acknowledged these memories and actions to myself, I felt quite unique and extraordinary. Does this happen to everybody? Am I special? Only after years (of which three were spent studying psychology) did I realise how normal they were. How very ordinary. And that realisation spinned me back into DD's whorl from where I wanted to but could not escape. If you really let yourself go, and I mean 'let yourself go' in its most deepest, most primaeval sense, like I did with my DD, you end up inside yourself, struggling to come up for air. But once you rescue yourself from it, you can never go back. It has been a firm 'Goodbye DD' for a long time now. The Anne in me rests. 
Picture
Picture
the narrow stairs up to the annexe
Picture
bookcase and secret annexe behind
 
Guilt. Pleasure. 02/11/2010
 

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)


P.S: Since the Deccan Herald website links NEVER seem to work, henceforth, I will post my articles as well in the blog under the 'Published Articles' category :)
 
Open door 12/31/2009
 
Last year around this time, I copied a friend's idea and wrote a post listing all the events and incidents that taught me something. I had no intention of repeating myself this year but my hands are itching. Aren't we all suckers for lists? Some like me list out EVERYTHING and promptly forget about it and make another one. Some make lists and go on a great guilt trip after that. Some are sticklers. They actually make lists and do what's on it. The New Yorker has a fascinating abstract on making lists http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1977/09/19/1977_09_19_032_TNY_CARDS_000323032
I envy those who have a subscription and can read the entire thing. As I am sure most of us don't, you and I both will have to make do with lists of lesser beings like yours truly :P 
I am going to list out what I term in my mind butterbeer moments of what has been an extraordinary year for me. (For non-Harry Potter fans: Butterbeer is a warm, fuzzy drink that wizards and witches drink; a drink that is supposed to warm its way into you, heat up the cockles of the heart and all that). Be warned.
This is going to be a highly self-indulgent, quite pointless personal post. So here is where you exit. 

* This is technically not in 2009 but since it is part of the application to Erasmus I sent, it has to go in here. Watching my English lecturer Manu grab a A4 paper and write a hyperbolic reference for me in slanted, fast handwriting, without pausing for breath. It was so hyperbolic that it could not have been anything but sarcastic.

* Staying online for a whole day in anticipation of a live chat with Atif on January 25. Was glad to know the teenager in me was alive and well.

* Waking up from a disturbing dream in which I dreamt that Siddharth was crying and discovering that he was indeed crying when I was dreaming that dream.

* Seeing the mail from Bettina telling me about Erasmus scholarship in the middle of work in DH on March 9. Hands shaking, rushing to the toilet to call Siddharth who was in Chicago.

* Middle of the night in April, listening to Nusrat, reading a random chapter from Wasted Vigil and crying for no other reason but for having nestled against beauty.

* Seeing Samaara for the first time. She had so much hair!

* Having had a perfect birthday after a long time in a restaurant called 'roll over, it's noon'.

* Sitting in the bus in Chennai. 40 degrees C. Worried to death about visa problems. In sheer despair because of Papa's illness. And a strong surge of strength from somewhere deep inside me. Music tinged. I always suspected a core of steel. Does flash against the sun sometimes.

* Writing to Gumby about how much Coke Studio stood by me when I was feeling alone and getting a warm reply.

* Listening to my grandfather's voice after a patient wait of nearly 15 years. Sometimes, heard melodies are sweeter.

* Sitting in a long cold corridor in Vidhana Soudha, not even having the strength to pray and watching the sunset from behind dirty white curtains.

* The shiver that ran down my spine when Atif raised his head and his hand, closed his eyes and ended the alaap of Mai Ni on a high note. Literally. Thanks Srivani for understanding what I was trying to say. It still gives me the shivers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTybbAri_3g

* Being desperately hungry and thirsty but forgetting all about it while flying over Denmark. Which looks exactly like a broken porcelain plate from above -- just as Bryson had described it.

* Pleading for a sip of water in the train from Copenhagen to Aarhus and getting a warm smile and a whole bottle in return.

* Hans Henrik's first class in the journalisthoiskolen -- the room with the brutal architecture, the man with that brutal charm, my absolute brute excitement at being there and the completely un-brutal hot chocolate :D

* Walking and walking and walking in search of a forest that was supposed to lead to a beach. Not finding the forest but coming upon the beach suddenly.
P.S: This has an epilogue. Another day, I walked and walked in the forest, found several rabbit paths but never the beach.

* Several mornings of weak tea, digestives, huge blob of sun, breezy curtains, Atif and me.

* Serendipitous youtube sojourns. And having had the time for all this.

* Feeling absolute warmth from friends who were strangers till just half a year ago. So inadequately put when put like this. And so reconfirming of my faith in humankind, love and other such soppiness.

* Having got out safely without getting caught by the Stockholm politi for ticketless travel on the metro. Whew.

* Eating pulao and chicken with strangers, yapping in Kannada in a cozy flat in cold rainy Stockholm and feeling completely at home.

* Sighting a light pink-stoned cottage on the edge of a slim river with red, orange, golden yellow and pale ochre bursting around it. Home if there is ever one.

* Fish, friends and fire in my belly in the Incuba Science Park canteen.

* Getting up in the morning to a pale eerie blue light, purple sky and pure white everywhere else. Snow.

I will end with the best lines I have heard this year: Thanks Yamini.

Five mysteries hold the key to the unseen: the act of love, and the
birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the
presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in
song. These are the occasions when the bolts of the universe fly open
and we are given a glimpse of what is hidden: an eff of the ineffable.
Glory bursts upon us in such hours."

(Salman Rushdie)

And if those bolts don't fly open, go near and open them gently the coming year.


















 
 
Time is ticking and soon, I will be saying goodbye to this little town for ever. I have no desire to return. I usually don't get any overwhelming desire to return to a place. The only exception is London. Aarhus has provided me the most precious of things -- time. I have had enough time to not only gaze at sunrises, sunsets and mull over how weeks can pass without a single glimpse of the sun but it has also given me time and energy to wrestle my way inside myself. No, I am not launching into a boring I, Me, Myself monologue, be assured. It has also provided me something else. This blog's all about this 'something else'.

Real life conversations about India, my Indianness (whatever that is) and the growing fascination with all things Indian provided me with much bemusement and hilarity. Everybody it seems has either already visited India, is in the process of going, or really wants to go. A triumph for the Indian tourism campaign if you ask me.

Like my lecturer keeps telling, show not tell. See, I am studying and studying well; I even remember what the lecturer says :)
So, I just present some conversations. I am not making any judgements. What you make of it, is not my business. No, it is. I want to hear what you make of it. :)


Scene I:
Me, groggy. In the common kitchen waiting for kettle to boil for my morning tea.
Dash, my Danish flatmate trying to make conversation.

He: Teach me a swear word in Indian! (half-bemused, half-appraisal glance)
Me: In Indian? What's that?
He: Isn't that the language you speak?
Me: Er.. no. Indian is well, me, not my language. (That sounded incomprehensible even to me.)
He: But, but, you are from India!
Me: Yes, most assuredly I am.
Pregnant accusing silence. And then glum reply.
He: So what do you speak?
Me: There is no language called 'Indian'. I speak a language called Kannada.
He: Canada?
Me: No, Kannada.
(Resigned, Indians-are-crazy look)
He: Teach me then.
Me: Nimmajji tale
He: Nimaaaji teeel
End of attempt at small talk.

Scene II
Second attempt by Dash to make small talk after a few days. This time, I am preparing breakfast, he is eating his.

He: So, you are married eh?
Me: Yes
He: Is your husband rich or poor?
Me: Eh? Neither.
He: (Going into Indians-are-crazy mode again) But I know India has lots of rich and poor people.
Me: Yes, yes. It has lots of people who are neither as well. (I go into I-don't-know-how-to-explain-India mode)
He: So, umm, err.. your marriage was arranged yes?
Me: Actually, I fell in love. (I decide to answer him in single sentences.)
He: Really, you were not forced into marriage then?
Me: (Evil grin) Yes I was.. that's why I have run away and am now in Denmark.
He: (Has stopped eating that miserable brown-black rogbread)
Me: No, just kidding.
(short history lesson about forced marriages ensues.. unnecessary here. Suffice to say, bored Dash enough to change topic.)
He: So how is the weather in your city?
Me: Much like here (at the time of this conversation Aarhus was a pleasant 28 degrees C with lots of sunshine..something like how Bangalore would be in September)
He: So, how come you are so brown?
Me: What has that got to do with weather?
He: If the weather is like here, you should also be white!
Me: (stunned into stupid grin) But it is a matter of genes and race
He: Uh oh.
Second attempt at small talk ends.

Scene III
Me, groggy morning tea routine again. Dash, groggy rogbread routine.
He: Do you listen to music?
Me: Of course
He: Indian music?
Me: Yes, and Pakistani.
He: Can you play the sitar?
Me: I wish!
He: I know Raveee shuunkar plays.
Me: He does.
He: I went to the Indian restaurant yesterday. (smirks) Indian music was playing.. aw-aw-aw... was that Raveee?
Me: (I have had it). No that was not. Dash, Indian music is not just about Ravi Shankar... and what you heard is called 'alaap'.. the beginning of a classical song. (My tea is ready and I realise how inadequate I feel when I have to explain Indian music to somebody from scratch. So I do not attempt to.)
End of final attempt at small talk from both of us.

Scene IV
Me, exhausted and shivering in the cold at an abandoned bus terminal in Copenhagen. Only other waiting passenger, a handsome Hungarian gym instructor who began learning English (or so he told me) two months ago.
Hungarian: So you are from Indeeeaaaa
Me: Yes, (wide smile)
Hungarian: Me want to go India once.
Me: (Wider smile): You shoooullldd
Hungarian: But India so far away and huge, huge yes?
Me: Yes, huge, huge.
Hungarian: Food with lots of kuuuurrriiiii yes?
Me: (Flummoxed) pardon?
Hungarian: Kurriiiii, Kurriiiiii. I eat Kurrriiiii once in Budapest.
Me: Sorry, I cannot get you at all. (The image of a lamb gets firmly implanted on my totally fatigued mind and refuses to budge)
Hungarian: (actually wrings his hand) Oh my Engleeesh! I know Hungarian. But nobody speaks yes? I speak German. But my umm.. clients want Engleeesh. That's why I learn. You know kurrriiiiii.. kurrriiii Indian food?
Me: (Lamb moves, bulb switches on): Oh you mean curry?
Hungarian: (Beautiful smile) Yes!
Me: (Relieved sigh at getting past this kurious hurdle)
Hungarian: Indians have stuuuthis yes?
Me: (oh no) Pardon?
Hungarian: umm....sthuuthis? you know word stuuuthis? many levels of stuuuthis in India yes?
Me (aiyooooo): No, am so sorry.. I just don't know the word.
Hungarian (hurt child look): rich stuuuuthis, poor stuuuthis yes?
Me: status?
Hungarian: Yes yes (child with chocolate look)
Me: (Back to I-don't-know-how-to-explain-India mode). (Short history lecture. Hungarian listens with apparent interest. And then offers me chocolate.)
The chocolate was worth it all, yes?

If I have energy left over, more conversations in the next blog. Adios Amigos. :)
 
 

Last week, I attended a classical guitar concert. Why am I blogging about it? You will know soon enough. Or perhaps you won't. I don't.

Staying in Aarhus, which is in its heart and soul a European village, is  being bombarded in my head several times about how urban Bangalore is. If R K Narayan lived in Denmark, this would be his Malgudi. I look outside the window every morning at 7 am and ACTUALLY see the sun rise. The world begins in the morning slowly, gradually, like how it is meant to be...not in the frenzied, go-away-morning way I am used to. The newspaper 'comes' at only around 10 am. And there is no scramble for it.

I live with 13 other Danes, my housemates. I notice their little fights, their little jealousies, and also their forgetting all that is petty and coming together to cook elaborate community lunches and dinners. And do you believe it? They actually sit around in the evening, play chinese whispers, trivial pursuit and monopoly. Yes, just like that. With lots of giggles for accompaniment. And invariably there is some un-loud music playing faintly in the background. The television, with its two-and-a-half channels remains switched off.They also bake bread.

Here, being provincial is not a crime, it perhaps might be a virtue. I still don't understand the Danes enough to take a stand on this. And so, in banks, you see people stroll in with bunches of parsley and fat broccoli sprouting out of their eco-friendly shopping bags. Wearing pink slip-ons. Supermarket aisles have toddlers  with running noses happily let loose. People cycle to work, to the pub, to a formal reception, to everywhere. I have met several strangers while walking to the college who I keep seeing here and there. And smile at. Everybody it seems really can know everybody. A few hundred yards from the place I live, there are woods just like Frost described famously. They are lovely, dark and deep. And many times, two roads or more too diverge.

But I wanted to write about the guitar concert! How did I find out about it? I was walking back from the supermarket, when a little notice stuck on a pole caught my eye. It did not scream; it just plainly informed that an 'international' guitar festival is on at Aarhus and the Prague Quartet will play. Now I know nothing about the Prague Quartet but something about those words reminded me of 'Equal Music' and such free associations in my mind are times when serendipity is waiting to knock. So I let it inside. The only urbane thing about this whole business was that I bought the ticket online.

So on the evening of the concert, which was to be held in a centuries' old theatre in the old town of Aarhus, I set out. I actually love my propensity to get lost. It has shown me things I would otherwise have never seen. But I digress (like always).

That day I didn't like it all. I had got lost again and it was getting dark and foreboding. (All this lovely European village business ceases to be so lovely when night sets in. Then, it is just a dark, lonely stretch of road lined with trees with no one to turn to, to ask for directions.) I kept on walking gingerly when I spotted two men strolling along. I ran up to them and asked them about the theatre. "Oh! We are going the same way..come with us". So they escorted me to the old theatre. We were guitar buddies you see.

Inside, no one was younger than 50. Or so it seemed to me. And no one had heard of the 21st century. I was in jeans and T-shirt. The rest of the thirty-odd people were in their best evening wear bought in 1760. One was even wearing a top hat and his coat had tails. There were only discreet murmurs to be heard and this was in the lobby where one would imagine, you could speak to your heart's content. (Just to put this in context, imagine standing outside Inox before you are let inside Theatre no. 4)

The concert was to begin at 8 pm and so we were courteously let inside by a fully-dressed usher. It was a theatre that could seat around 200. We were thirty. It was 7.45 pm. The stage was around 6 feet by 6 feet. There were four chairs and four stands to keep the music notes. And absolute silence. At sharp 8 pm, the quartet, four genial looking men from Czech, strided in, bowed elaborately and spoke nothing. Began playing.

I am no western classical expert but their expertise, their joy at playing the instrument and the way they made love to the guitar was transporting. They could squeeze a village bonfire dance out of those strings, they could just as easily turn maudlin and make you think of long lacy curtains and a woman in a bonnet looking out of a window, waiting for her lover to come home. They played so well that thirty clapping hands echoed long enough for them to do two encores.

And how did they do the encores? They bowed and bowed and they sprinted to the green room, sprinted back, bowed and bowed again and sprinted to the green room and sprinted back and then sat and played!!

And when it was over and I was going back in the bus, there was the perfect ending. The bus driver turned round and said, 'so, did you enjoy your concert'? (While going, I had asked a bus driver for directions. Turns out, it is the same bus driver who drops me back home as well.) My face split open with glee. I nodded my head vigorously and looked out at the dark, sprinkly sky, a sky that has reaffirmed my faith that more than 100 stars exist in the galaxy.

 


Picture
Before they came
Picture
While they were there...
 
Wordly wise(r) 09/08/2009
 
The Danes are apparently the happiest people on earth. They won't ever let you know that. And you won't know if you look at them and if you haven't read your newspaper's foreign page ever. You can go on looking at them surreptitiously (like I did) and wonder what makes them so happy. They won't stare back and strangely they don't seem to mind your staring either. (The English would have minded and I have realised it much to my chagrin when I used to do the obviously-not-so-surreptitious staring on the London tube.)

When you read stuff of this sort that generalises the emotions of a country as a whole, small as the country may be, and the generalisation is as simple and as pat as it comes, it sits in your head like the ghee you rub on the kadai before making dosa. It is the defining base for all your thoughts about the people of a state. For me, the Danes are happy, Lahoris are hospitable, the English are Wodehousian, the French are stylish, the Germans are aggressive, and you get my point. Indians? Well, that’s for another blog :)

And when you sit in a class with a redhead Finnish girl on your right and a beautiful almond-eyed braided-haired Kenyan on your left, listening to a German speak in the softest of tones; the kadai is rid of that ghee all by itself. And the dosa begins to crumble.

Having proclaimed to be a world citizen several times, when you come within kissing distance of the 'peoples of the world', it is frightening to discover how far away one is from being a true world citizen. Years of mistrust of such aforementioned generalisations prove to be true. And years of sneaking belief in the same generalisations also prove to be true.

All those misconceptions and myths then float swiftly, like muck, to the surface. And then they get splished and sploshed into your new knowledge. The 'who am I' question, no, not the rhetoric, existential one but the more prosaic, rooted one pierces through all this thickening flotsam like a sharp diver and raises its head. It is as if the brain has rubbed its hands together and is polishing a brass plate where is written that I am an Indian, I am a Bangalorean even (see, the plate is getting shinier) and I am helpless to prevent it from doing so. But then you let that plate hang where it should. World citizenry, you realize and begin to accept, is reinforcing and forgetting your identity at the same time.

And so you re-enter gingerly into the flotsam. And begin clearing the muck.

Honestly, I did not start out to say all this. I started with the Danes and their happiness. At the risk of generalisation again, I say they are generally happy because they are secure in their own world. A friend says they are 'koopa mandukas in a well full of gold'. She may be right.
Ironically, I am studying globalisation in a town where national language and national identity seem so deeply ingrained that the rest of us can only peer at it and wonder. And it looks like it will be long before the world manages to shake and stir this core like it has in many other countries. We are Danes, we speak Danish, we are happy eating our kartofler and rogbread, (no, we won't call it potato and rye bread), playing our board games and getting excited about ice-kicking competitions and drinking cartloads of beer. And if you actually ask them why they are considered to be so happy, I can bet my last kroner they would um and ah for about 10 seconds and with a straight face give the standard explanation they give for all their eccentricities -- 'it is the beer'.
 
No. 75, M G Road 07/31/2009
 
When Shantanu Datta, then resident editor of Indian Express asked me in his staccato, point blank way what I saw in Deccan Herald  that I wanted to quit Indian Express (he meant THE Indian Express, THE upholder of truth, THE national daily), I had no answer. (I was 21 and I didn't have answers for many things. That's well, another story.)

I haven't yet figured out what I really saw in Deccan Herald that September (when I got the offer letter after a typical Deccanesque two-month wait) and what I kept on 'seeing' for the past nearly nine years. I only had vague notions to go by. DH was then actually 'Karnataka's leading daily' and this I knew. I had always been an Indian Express fan more so  because it used to carry full page movie advertisements on Fridays and I used to sneak to the sound studio on the third floor of our house to grab a copy and scan them feverishly for Aamir Khan's pictures. But my father always insisted on making me read DH. DH was even then boring :P but it was reliable. If anybody wanted to confirm whether day after was a government holiday, nah they didn't reach out for Express. DH it was. Exam timings have changed? DH again. Though in a house of more than 45 people, it was hard to find the paper by the end of the day.

But I digress. I had had a fun 24 odd days of internship in DH and that had kinda familiarised me with the place. But that did not prepare me for my first day, which happened to be ahem Karnataka Rajyotsava. I, with a 21-year-old's naivete, expected gaiety.What I got instead was the strangest welcome where the big boss (let's just not take names ok..those who know will know :)) warned me in conspiratorial tones that DH is full of schemers and people who indulge in politics and I should guard my back. And then I was put on the 'State Desk' where there were on that day only two people, one of whom took one look at me, deciphered that  I could understand Kannada, fumbled with some 'computer sheets' and thrust a barely visible printout of a Honnali datelined story on an Ambedkar statue installation at me.  

My last day happened to be bang in the middle of the week, a Wednesday. I, with my 30-year-old's naivete, expected sobriety. What I got instead was well, gaiety, first at a lunch with chairs fit for kings :), and then a half-mad photo session when I was desperately trying to talk on the phone to a royal-sounding 'Chandralekha', figuring out tax exemption and smiling at the camera. I still haven't seen the photos. And then of course, a proper escort right to the edge of M G Road by two dear friends. (Now you two, stop thinking I am being mawkish.I am not. And I do think chocolates are overrated.)  

In between these two days, there have been several bright, lighted, dimmed and dulled ones. What I did see, rather felt in these many days was a butterbeer kind of comfort -- DH was boring, solid, not-so-reliable; it was also like a comforting duvet, an escapist, indulgent cave, an un-guilty addiction. Yeah, I know,  it does not sound like an office. But that was how it was for me. All good things come to an end and am so glad they actually do and that's not just a proverb. I am no Snape to squeeze out memory as a white film and fill it in a vial. I can only list out what's floating on top of the muck that is my head.  

* DH before the so-called 'modern front office' had a playgroundish feel. With a lever kind of thing that you had to push to enter. Will never forget this one.

* The 'first' editor was the biggest enigma in the office. He was, if you will, DH's very own Aditya Chopra.

* What a draw the canteen was for us poor starved souls from Express...I had even smuggled in two friends once. And you had to buy coupons for 10 p 15 p etc from the 'front office'.

* The 5 'o' clock break was one of DH's best traditions, which is sadly sadly not really so exciting anymore thanks to change in shift timings. The factory siren, and then the 'collecting' of state desk people to troop out in unity, the old canteen's school benches and that mad evening when everybody tried to squeeze into a single bench and in a particularly boisterous moment, a particularly sensitive girl was pushed and pushed to the edge and then went thud!

* The solving of the mystery of our then Bhadravathi correspondent's great insistence in excruciating tones of servility to take a poor quality photo of a blood donation camp -- it was his photo! He was lying on the bed donating blood! * The many excellent imitations of Gundu Rao, practiced to perfection by several. * The story of Pothan Joseph's ghost

* The great trio of Seetharam Kesari, Narayan Swamy and Gayathri Nivas (sorry guys, without taking names, this was no fun) shouting at each other and the rest of the world every evening, unfailingly, all three in three different pitches (gayathri's exasperated high pitch, narain's booming low pitch, and seetharam's quivering nowhere pitch). All tense, harassed and overworked but enjoying it nevertheless. That was very obvious.

* The big fascination for the internet desk (this was before all desks had their own internet..) I routinely used up all the charm I had to send one mail a day to Siddharth.

* The 3 to 10 van driver who saw ghosts near Konankunte and enjoyed regaling us poor souls with tales of women in white stopping his gaadi.

* The  night when the same driver drove with such energy that the aforementioned particularly sensitive girl was thrown from the seat facing the road to the one opposite...a full arch.

* The midnight feasts -- once from Pizza Hut, several times trips to the seedy Savera, the chaiwala...

* The mystery of the spiralling staircase. Why is it there? Who has climbed the entire length till now?

* The shoe and sweater allowances. Loved them.    

Actually there are several more but one should stop somewhere, shouldn't one? As always, would love to hear what memories of DH float in your heads.          
 
Coke ka nasha 05/27/2009
 

Actually nobody around me is quite able to understand exactly why I am so excited about Coke Studio. Harumph. It is NOT a rave party destination. And yes, it could have been worded better.
Anyway, Coke studio translation: In a studio setting in Pakistan, musicians from various backgrounds (pop, soft rock, eastern classical) jam together live. This is then telecast. The entire exercise is sponsored by Coca Cola and hence the name. Brainchild of Rohail Hyatt, a former band member of Vital Signs, Coke studio was a big hit in its first season. It saw folksy strains, western rhythms, eastern alaaps (as the website mentions in solemn political correctness) all meshing together with mind-blowing results. You have to hear it to believe it. (www.cokestudio.com.pk). Now it’s back for a much-anticipated second season and yes, I am getting back to explaining why I am so excited.
Apart from the obvious reason of Atif Aslam jamming with classical musician Riaz Ali Khan this season (I CANNOT wait to see Atif in the studio) the other big reason is I just love to see my favourite singers sing.
And if you have ever seen great artistes performing in the studio (their very hearth so to speak), I don’t have to tell you what kind of an immensely sensual experience it is. I have very grainy memories of flautist Vijay Raghav Rao composing in our studio way back and all I remember today is a lot of people crowding around him admiringly after a recording, masala dosa packets lying around and a strangely serene smile leaking out of his rippled face. Come to think of it, I don’t even remember if this memory is true or garbled.
What I do remember clearly is watching a recording of Rafi singing in a studio. I even remember when it was telecast — just before ‘Filmfare Awards Live’ in 1992. Rafi has one of the most endearing smiles for a musician and astonishingly, this smile was constant throughout the 10 or so minutes of the recording they showed. Try and smile that genuine smile, (while singing a half-alaap perhaps) in Rafi’s vocal range!
Then there is or rather was the young Ravi Shankar. His mischievous eyes dart here and there, just like those magical hands and he has the grin of a filmstar who knows he is terribly good looking and audiences are lapping up his charm :) I am sure he felt like that as well. Balamurali Krishna was what you would call the Dravidian version of Ravi Shankar. He too darted around, not just with his eyes but with his entire well-dressed, well-fed self; looking up and down, left and right and everywhere else for inspiration/admiration.
Now that Coke studio is set to air, I am left wondering what today’s star singers/musicians would look like in the throes of performing pleasure. Does Yesudas do those fluttery quick hand movements in the studio as well?  Does Amjad Ali Khan squeeze his entire face while playing, as always? Does Sonu Nigam close his eyes while singing those excruciatingly emotional lines? (Aside: For onlookers’ sake, let’s hope Kumar Sanu does close his when he ‘sings’.) 
Why the hell is Coca Cola not thinking of a Coke studio in India?? How would it be if SPB jammed with, say, Amjad Ali Khan’s sons? Or Rakesh Chaurasia is paired with Kailash Kher? Mohit Chauhan with Yesudas? Brighter ideas anyone?

 
 

Have you ever found the right music for the right book? The two or three times I have, it has felt as if the notes crawled into the book and the words stretched out into music. After a while, I cannot think of one without thinking of the other. It's happening nowadays with this book I am reading -- Aatish Taseer's 'Stranger to history'...a journey through Islamic lands. And a journey I am holding hands and going along, thanks to Yamini who decided it was "my kind of book".  And so every night, at 10.00 or so, I put on a combination of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rahat, Kailash Kher, Fateh Ali Khan (of the Gwalior gharana), Ali Zafar, Ali Azmat and Atif Aslam, slowly, quietly, switch off most of the lights in the home, lean back on my blue cushions and go on this journey. I have stilled all my speed-reader instincts for this one. This is one journey that encompasses humanity, universalism, or the lack of it, empathy or the want of it and places that have swallowed yearning whole. Speeding along will not work here, will it?

Right now, we have crossed over to Iran from Mecca and a "sun-bleached Tehran" fell over me the whole of yesterday night in waves -- racy dreams of winding my way through my imagined streets of Iran (or was that Syria) calling out to my mom who was just, just a few feet in front of me but never was able to hear me.

I will remember these nights.  

P.S: 'Equal Music' went very well with Beethoven symphonies; and snatches of 'A Suitable Boy' merged seamlessly with 'Zubeidaa'. And those are the ones I remember. I would love to hear about others.