The City Life.. and travels beyond

Chilling out in Ko Samui

2012-01-19T14:29:00.002+05:30

The green patches of land, encircled by a wide expanse of blue was my first sighting of Ko Samui, right from the air. On ground, we arrived at a cheery little airport that instantly put you in the holiday mood. We collected our luggage smiling (and truly, how many airports can you say that about?)

Samui is a nice big island with wonderful beaches tucked on all sides. We had decided to stay at the quieter Bophut beach. Our trip happened to coincide with the New Year, and the first evening was spent boogying away at Samui’s most popular beach in Chaeweng.

The next morning, it began to rain. And rain it did for most part of the stay. Luckily, Samui is famous for its spas and we made good use of the weather to get pampered indoors at the Zazen Resort Spa and the Anantara Spa next door. We ourselves were staying at the Ibis Hotel chain, a lazy booking brought about by lack of enthusiasm to search for a truly boutique place. It was quite comfortable, had its own beach and served its purpose.

The rains let up most evenings, leaving us some time to explore the island. One evening was spent by me walking around Chaeweng beach shopping area while D decided to learn some Thai cooking at the famous Samui Institute of Thai Culinary Arts.

Another evening was set aside to explore the neighbouring Fisherman’s Village, filled with restaurants and shops.

One day when the sky was merely overcast, we hired a bike to drive to Lamai beach and that gave us the freedom to make random stops, including one for lunch at the breathtakingly located The Cliff.

What we however could not do thanks to the rains was a trip to the Anthong Marine Park to try a hand at kayaking, snorkeling and a bit of trekking.

Samui was a good trip - plenty of food, lazy strolling around, excellent massages. What more can one ask for..

Bangkok Diary

2012-01-18T11:32:00.003+05:30

The trip to Bangkok was planned on the basis of it being the easiest to book within the short timeframe we had to plan a holiday. And Bangkok is certainly easy on the tourist. It has good tourist infrastructure. There is a lot to do but nothing stops you from just chilling out.

Where we stayed – In the Sukhumvit area, close to the Skytrain and Metro. Bangkok has really bad traffic. So choosing a location that lets you commute through public transport can make a big difference. Sukumvit is also close to the malls and has a lot of food joints.

Our actual hotels were the Baan Sukhumvit at Soi 18 and its sister concern at Soi 20. The former is larger and much nicer than the latter. The English owner of the place was friendly and helpful.

What we did – Since this was my frist trip, I wanted to do all the tourist sights. So an entire day was spent ferry-hoping to catch the Grand Palace (massive – takes a couple of hours to get around), Wat Pao (of the reclining Buddha fame) and Wat Arun (Intricate work on the walls)

The rest of the time was spent in checking out some of the malls – Siam Paragan and Central World for branded stuff and MBK for the low end and tourist stuff. Unfortunately, since we were not there in the weekend, we could not see the famous Chatuchak Market that everyone and their grandma had recommended.

D also did a walking tour in Chinatown, following the LP’s recommended route, while I was doing the shallower pastime of window shopping.

Where we ate – Bangkok has great food places and really good street food. So most crowded restaurants turned out to be a good deal. We also wanted to rot in luxury one meal and chose to go to the Vertigo and Moon Bar located on the 62nd floor of a tower in the lumpini gardens business district. The choice was between that and Sirocco and we picked this one because the name was cuter. The views were great, the crowd watching satisfying and the food nice.

Did we get massages (of the legal kind) - Not really. Since Ko Samui was dedicated to the spa visits during our holiday, we did not. But it is definitely economical to get one.

Hot tip - Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) was carrying a TV on the flight back to India. Apparently it is priced very very competitively. So even if you are not in the market for a TV, you need to buy one just to sell it and make a neat profit when you get back home.

Ringing in 2012

2012-01-12T16:10:00.001+05:30

How do you know you had a happening New Year’s Eve?

Be in Ko Samui, Thailand – Yes

Be in a party on the beach – Yes

Watch lanterns floating onto the sky – Yes

Hear and see firecrackers at regular intervals – Yes

Sit around a table on the beach sand and get cool neon fake glasses to wear – Yes

Start dancing after a while to the thumping music – Yes

Watch fire eaters do some stunts – Yes

Greet the new year by hugging D and watch the magic around - Yes

Happy 2012!

Declutter

2011-12-26T12:13:00.003+05:30

The last time I shifted houses was because I got married and the one cupboard I allotted to D was just not enough to keep the house looking sane. I had bought a chest of drawers to empty my stuff from that the one cupboard, but we still ended up having stuff lying around in the generously sized 1 BHK we were sharing.

So to a new 2BHK house it was. The first few weeks, my legs actually ached from all the extra space we had gained (Only Mumbai people can know what it means to go from 650 sq ft to 900 sq ft carpet area. Everyone else would probably laugh).

It has now been close to two years and a couple of months ago, I got the nagging feeling that we had two many things piled up on our second favourite clutter spot – the dining table. Freshly ironed clothes, handbags, a shoebox looking for a spot, newspapers and so on. This was partly on account of the fact that the folks were visiting and the first favourite clutter spot – the guest bedroom could suddenly not be used to stow junk away out of sight.

Yet it made me think if I really wanted to go back to the time when we had to pick our way through stuff scattered on the floor. And if we would have to find a bigger house in an expensive city.

That’s when I decided that I was going to reduce our possessions by 25%.

The good thing about being a corporate slave is you can come up with percentages that are randomly chosen. It seemed like a good number though – not pushing us into the hermit zone with barely enough to get by and yet enough to create space and provide a sense of achievement.

The process began slowly about a month ago. Item number 1 on the agenda was to stop buying stuff till we got rid of some stuff. Quite commendable given my shopaholic tendencies.

In the meantime, I attacked the biggest culprit – clothes. Clothes are one of the toughest things to throw away. You know for sure that there are a few items in your wardrobe that predate you by a couple of crucial kilos. No matter how pessimistic you are about the economy, your job, your life and so on, the one thing you are optimistic about is going back to being your thinner self.

I convinced myself that if I threw out the old clothes then I could go shopping for new ones if I ever lost weight and that would be a good incentive to lose weight.

I began to look for a worthy charity till mom pointed out that charity begins at home and told me to just give everything to the bai. I had been doubtful if her daughter who is half my height would fit into my tops. It turned out that we share a shoulder size. Bai was quite teary eyed when she thanked me (surprising since I have regularly passed on sarees but she has never been quite so moved. Talk about motherly love).

Filled with a warm glow, I have gone back to culling out more clothes. Last evening was spent in trying out favourite t-shirts and tops that highlight my burgeoning paunch. Now another pile awaits the bai’s daughter.

The next on my list are the electronics cupboard and the book shelf. The first one has built up through sheer neglect – headphones that no longer work, electronic phones that don’t work either and so on. Books, on the other hand, have been survivors of failed culling attempts in the past. This time, I am planning to give them away to a library so atleast I know they have found a good home.

This set off a much needed round of decluttering at work. After clearing out several piles of important looking papers that largely comprised the company strategy for 2008, training materials from 2009 and so on, I have discovered enough space to move my mouse.

The biggest decluttering at work though, will have to be my mail box. I have mails from 2010 which I had been undecided about at that time and which stayed on. Now, I have mercilessly started deleting mails on which I have been clearly copied in as irrelevant-but-just-in-case person #5. I have started dealing with daily mails before the day-end. As for the exploding archive of old mails, I have been sorting through 30 or so in a day.

My ambition is to have only 10 mails in my inbox at any point. This seems like a tough order and going by my progress, an impossible task. Yet as Farhan Aktar says in ZNMD – ‘Koshish karma hamara kartavya hai’ (it was used in a cute way in the movie)

So if there is a New Year resolution for 2012, it is ‘Declutter’. Now that I have got a headstart on it, I am hoping to see it through next year too.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2011-12-22T15:58:00.000+05:30

Rating - Read

The Sense of an Ending is a rather short book and can be quickly finished in one sitting. Or one can savour it, slowly letting Barnes’s thoughts sink in. I followed the second option, mostly because I am sleeping even earlier than usual and also because the book is so absolutely shorn of needless meandering that you need to pause a bit and savour.

The story is told by Tony Webster, a sixty something retired British gentleman, with a daughter, an ex-wife he is still friends with and a life that can be defined as normal. Tony recollects events from his youth, centering around his friendship with school-mate Adrian and then with his one serious girlfriend, Veronica. Somewhere in the middle of the book, we flip to the present. Tony’s view of his past has been shaped over the years with his own bit of editing and recomposing memories but as it catches up slowly, he (and the reader) is forced to reexamine his version.

The book kept me thinking long after I had finished the last page. Primarily about how we may be snipping at our memories till, usually, we come out quite decent. (Not such a surprisingly thought given that I have sometimes caught myself editing my recollection of particular incidents).

The fluid writing and the observations make for a good read. Not surprisingly, it was this year’s Booker winner.

Take it straight down with a dash of lemon or nurse it over a couple of days. Both ways work.

Right on Queue

2011-12-19T17:43:00.001+05:30

There is something fundamental in our genes that do not allow us to queue. I would not be surprised if Indians originally came up with the concept that a straight line does not exist.

Nowhere is this deep inability to queue in greater display than airports, the mother of all queuing conventions. We queue up just to enter, and then to collect boarding passes, through the security check, to board, to disembark, collect our luggage, with mini queues tossed into the mix if one wants to buy food, shop or use the washroom.

It is almost like someone is wrenching our souls and not merely making us queue up.

With such a traumatic situation, it is not surprising that we break queues more than we keep them.

Like the time, a fat gentleman swaggered to the web check-in counter, with his chest pumped out in pride. He waved a crumpled bit of print in front of the airline personnel and asked for his boarding pass to be stamped. When he was asked by the airline employee to join the long queue of passengers who had already done a web checkin, I could see his jaws drop. As if he could not believe that the rest of us had crawled out of the primordial ooze and managed to discover printers and the internet.

The thought of joining a queue when there had been a hope of a welcome shortcut, was too much for him to face.

Especially since it is not easy crossing over to THE OTHER SIDE. The side where you form a queue and spend the rest of the time looking over your shoulders to defend your spot. Several times of doing this, and you not only develop peaky eyes but also manage to form the perfect lecture in your head to launch on any errant co-passenger.

This lecture is unfortunately mis-directed sometimes.

We were all queuing to enter the Delhi airport. (As an aside – I think the Delhi T3 is just so impossibly glamorous that even the usually recalcitrant Delhites are too scared to not queue up). A lady with three massive suitcases and a small child came to the head of the queue and requested to be let in. The smartly dressed lady at the head of the queue angrily launched into her pre-prepared lecture. Except in this case, it would have been nice to let the young mother go ahead.

Though I sometimes suspect not all young mothers or mothers-to-be are that deserving. Like the one who rushed past my 60+ dad at the security check. Dad began his pre-prepared lecture only to be informed harshly by the lady that she was pregnant. He quickly apologized and stepped aside.

(It got me thinking. When did we begin to assume that the world owes us one? Shouldn’t we be polite to people who are doing us favours?)

By the time we board the flight, things are usually pretty rough, with everyone clustering around the ticket checker. I usually find myself right at the end when the cluster has been cleared. Despite this, I have always managed to find space to stow my luggage overhead. Then I wonder, why the rush to get into the closed (and weird smelling) confines of an airplane.

Getting out and collecting luggage is of course a free-for-all. If you are silly enough to actually not have any body part touching the baggage conveyor belt, then be prepared for someone sneaking into the 1mm gap between you and the belt.

Maybe it is not enough to have a training programme for just airline employees. Maybe we should have one for passengers too called ‘The straight line does exist’

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2011-12-16T16:59:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

I had borrowed my parent’s copy of The Help long before the movie had made an appearance. However, it was only after watching the movie that I got around to reading the book.

The Help is a pleasant read, focusing on the lives of a bunch of white women and their black servants, in the southern town of Jackson, Mississippi. Segregation and the class system are rife . Skeeter, a white plantation owner’s daughter harbours an ambition to be a writer. Tall, with frizzy hair, she is way behind her peers on the husband-and-kids boat. While maintaining a search for The One (prodded in no small measure by her mother), she wanders into working on a novel. Recruiting the help of her friend’s maid, Aibeleen, Skeeter begins to write about the details of black helps in white households.

It is a dangerous time to be undertaking an enterprise like this. Martin Luther King’s star is on the rise. The southerner’s rascist ways are under stress. Yet a lot of white people are hoping to hold on to status quo and would be enraged to know about the creation of a novel like this that could well be another nail in the coffin.

The settings are grim. The author, however, deliberately avoids letting the story to fall into a dark chasm. Instead there is a wry observation of the way things are (sometimes even at the cost of only a superficial glimpse of the risks the maids run)

The movie was a clever retelling of the book, snipping out large back stories and cross -pollinating episodes but keeping the essence of the book.

If you do not expect something terribly serious, filled with gravitas, then this is a good read and the movie is a good watch.

One too many Michael Connelly

2011-12-16T16:54:00.002+05:30

Despite my minor grumbling about my last Michael Connelly, I had rated it a 'Read' and began another one a few weeks ago. In Lost Light Harry Bosch has retired from the police service and decides to reopen an unsolved mystery. He is egged on by an ex-colleague, who is now on a ventilator. The story is told in first person and interestingly enough, it makes Harry less unlikeable. Though it does make the story telling more boring. Overall, I had mentally downgraded Harry Bosch to 'Read if you have the time'.

Notwithstanding, I then began Nine Dragons. However, halfway through I gave up. I was simply not keen on knowing if the insufferable Harry Bosch had saved his daughter from the Triad (it is not a spoiler alert if you have read the back page and the first two pages and have half a brain to put two and two together).

I put the book aside, took up another book and felt really light. No more Michael Connelly for me

For a while, maybe? Methinks, I overdid it.

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

2011-12-08T14:42:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

There are fewer signs of true love than someone letting you read a book they are halfway through simply because you are unwell and need the cheering up. Sis sent me River of Smoke to help me pass time (Why could not I have read something else, you ask. Oh well, being unwell comes with its share of pampering and tantrums).

River of Smoke sort of takes off where Sea of Poppies leaves. Not in the sense of picking off where the cast left as much as in following the opium thread. The first book, based entirely in India, centred around the cultivation and processing of opium. This book brings us to Canton, where the opium is being sold and consumed. Deeti makes an early appearance. Pauline and Neel, who both end up in China appear as secondary characters. The main storyline revolves around Bahram Modi, a Parsi trader who is profiting from the opium trade along with various British trading firms.

The story slowly builds on the events as the Chinese go from being a link in the opium trade chain to an adversary who has finally woken up to the ill-effects of opium.

This book is also filled with little details that soak you in Cantonese China and its streets full of traders of different nationalities. Even as the big picture moves on, it is the little things that hold your attention – descriptions of 80 course meals, Bahram’s own personal motivations to carry on the trade, Neel’s struggles to be a clerk and so on. Ghosh does not hurry through to finish the story. Instead he stops, potters about a bit smelling the roses and then gently pushes along.

Just the kind of book one would like to read with time on one’s hands.

I can’t wait for the final part of the trilogy to come.

Going Solo

2011-12-02T17:59:00.004+05:30

The Beginning -

When it became obvious that D would not get vacation time and mine was going to expire, we sat down to consider our options –

Option #1 – I spend my holidays chilling out at home, while cribbing every evening to D about how there were too many places to see and so little time and I was rotting at home (Yeah, the supportive wife-speak)

Option #2 - I travel to places D has seen before

Clearly, for the sake of both our sanities, Option #2 made sense.

So I picked Turkey and began to do the arrangements. The logistics was simple enough. I wanted to be with a group and I needed something organized at short notice. I had planned enough travel trips in the past and had a couple of days here and there of travelling alone, so I knew I could manage quite well by myself.

But boy, the guilt of leaving behind a spouse while travelling alone can be quite overwhelming. I was almost hoping that somehow the actual travel dates would not come and just my looking-forward-to-the-holidays time would continue. However, the day did come and I was off.

A couple of days in Turkey and I had suddenly rediscovered why travel is my passion (next to reading of course). All guilt disappeared while I took in the sights and sounds like someone who had just finished serving a life sentence and had not seen the skies and grass in years.

The highlight –

D loves to travel too and luckily our interests coincide. We both like visiting historical sites and dig good architecture and good food. So being on my own did not mean doing stuff I would have never done otherwise. Except for the one evening when I wandered in and out of bookstores on Istikal Street, avidly browsing the collections and chatting with the locals to find out what they read.

However, travelling solo makes you talk to people around you. I had never travelled for such a long period by myself and it was clear that I had to talk to strangers if I wanted any kind of social interaction.

The first day, I tentatively chatted with an elderly and dignified looking Pakistani couple. Someone from Pakistan’s bureaucratic circles on the way back home after a conference at the UN. True to South Asian form, the sweet lady ‘adopted’ me within 15 minutes of meeting and showed it through little touches like discreetly checking if I was back on the bus after a stop.
The next day, I found out that the only other person by himself on that day’s tour was a Chilean MBA student who was on his way home after an exchange programme at my B-School. I was amazed by how small a world it was!

Gradually I began to chat with everyone.

A couple of Singaporean women my age, turned out to be great fun, sharing my sense of humour. I have since continued a FB friendship with them. I had interesting conversations with an alert 80 year old American lady of Ukranian origin, who was travelling with her talkative daughter. Also with another 80 year old Canadian man, travelling with his extremely talktative 60+ wife. I envied them all their energy and health (touch wood).

I spoke to a bunch of Aussies and Kiwis, just starting their first jobs and was impressed to see what a clear view they had of life. I spoke to Belgian women who politely asked how I managed to travel alone and who turned out to be extremely well travelled themselves. A South African couple who held hands and laughed together after nearly 15 years of marriage. A yuppy-looking Californian who had quit his job to travel. A Canadian of Indian origin contemplating whether to sell off his ancestral property in Goa and showing me how far from home you get when you are a third generation immigrant. And of course, all sorts of Turkish people.

The more I spoke, the more I discovered how similar we were, and then how different we were. One thing did strike me though. My conversations revolved around work, travel, areas of interest, politics and so on. No one asked me if I was married or how many kids I had. Which would have been the main topic in conversations with your average stranger in India (the other option of discussing cricket is out since I don’t follow the game)

Staying Connected

The end of each day found me tired and I was in no mood to hear strangers tell me new stuff. I needed to unwind, chat with D, digest the information I had received and drop a mail describing my day and read up on what was on offer the next day. In other words, I finally found out why Steve Jobs is such a God for having got the IPad into our lives. (As these things turned out, Jobs passed away just when I was discovering my IPad)

D and I had long chats everyday without spending any money. That probably made travelling alone easier. As much fun as it is to chat with strangers the whole day, it was even more fun to describe my day to D.

I also researched on the net, mailed my parents, sincerely read the pdf copy of Lonely Planet which I had downloaded, watched a chick flick on a homesick day and began to read a book.

Would I do it alone again?

Probably yes. The trip was reminder that I need to travel to just energize myself. So while travelling with company is my first choice, travelling alone ranks over staying at home and watching TV.

I would pick a place where no one looks askance at a woman travelling alone and where strangers can provide decent conversation.

I am not sure if I can travel totally alone, without even the fig leaf of a group tour. But it would be an interesting experiment to try some day.

Neither Here nor There by Bill Bryson

2011-11-22T12:45:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

Bryson is one of the authors I love to reread. His travel books always work as a pick-me-up and many a time I have dreamt about travelling and writing like him (As have many others I believe. When I surfed a site on travel writing, the first warning they gave was that a miniscule few get as lucky as Bryson).

This book follows the author’s travels through Europe. Bryson starts with seeing the Northern lights in Norway and goes in a zig zag manner to finally reach Istanbul. Clearly it is not a guide book meant to tell people where to go in each country and city. It is a tongue-in-cheek observation of the locals. Bryson heaps praise when deserved but his ‘WTF’ observations are much funnier and there are loads of them.

As always, a funny read by a dependable author.

P.S. Maybe I should correct ‘dependable’. Ever since he started writing on non-travel topics, I think results have been mixed. I have still not been able to move beyond the first few pages of his ‘Shakespeare’

The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver

2011-11-22T12:41:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

I have mentioned this series before in my blog but I never thought I would put up a post on this. This for the simple reason that only books I complete find their way to this blog. Since this belongs to the category of books I only dip into, I did not anticipate I would finish reading all the essays in the book. However, being confined to the sick bed for a whole day with just one book can work wonders in making progress even with a book of essays. This makes me wonder if I should take a holiday where all I do is stay in bed and finish reading all the books in my bookshelf. But I digress.

I had earlier read a few stories from this series from some other year and realised most of them centred around the depressing topic of death or illnesses. Luckily this one had mixed essays and none of them too morbid either. My favourite one was Michael Lewis’s ‘The Mansion: A Subprime Parable’ that details the story of Lewis’s family renting a mansion and relating it to how American greed was surely a contributor to the financial collapse.

A Year in Provence

2011-11-22T12:39:00.001+05:30

Rating - Read

After my introduction to Peter Mayle as an average author, I watched the rather pleasant ‘A Good Year’ and noted that the movie had been based on Peter Mayle’s book. So when I happened upon this one, I decided to take a chance.

The book is an autobiographical account of the author and his wife’s first year in Provence (and no doubt helped spin off other books based in the South of France). Like so many people the two long to live in constant sunshine, and unlike so many, actually buy a cottage that comes with a winery. Mayle faithfully chronicles each month’s activities – the weather, what the locals do, the progress in their house’s remodelling and so on. The observations are funny, yet show a real love for the neighbourhood and surroundings and a genuine interest in becoming a part of local life.

We learn about the famous lunches that almost always lasts a couple of hours and includes wine, the lack of punctuality, the strong work ethic (when they actually decide to do a job for you) and the weather which is not always sunny.

The book is a pleasant read and launches you into one of those daydreams where you hope to live a relaxed life in the midst of greenery, cultivating grapes or some other vegetable, knowing fully well that you would probably never go the Mayle way. Mayle’s strength lies not so much in concocting detective stories with wafer-thin plots but giving an account of things as they stand.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

2011-11-22T12:36:00.001+05:30

Rating - Read

Shoba De (or someone equally silly) had mentioned somewhere that every woman should have known a guy like Heathcliff sometime in her life. Curious, I decided that the book mandated a rereading. Besides, now that I am in love with my IPad and can download classics free of cost, I am quite motivated to read the ones I had read back in school and the ones I have never read.

So I read the book and at the end of it my reaction was (pardon my language) ‘What shit’. Who in their right mind would want to have met a psychopath like Heathcliff!

That apart, the book itself is quite interesting. It is set at a time when locals intermingled and inter married depending on their class and the world outside was a place to be visited if you had the means and the need. The story is told through Mr Lockwood, who decides to rent a house in this cold and depressing northern village, with a keen intent to rejoice in his isolation. He soon realises the need for company and get his housekeeper, Ellen Dean, to tell the story of his neighbour and landlord, Heathcliff.

The story takes everyone back by twenty – twenty-five years. Heathcliff is an orphan, taken in by landowner Earnshaw. Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine finds a kindred soul in Heathcliff’s free spirit, similar to her own. However, when it is time for marriage, she goes with the sensible choice of her time and marries Linton, from the only other family in the same class. Heathcliff is jilted and has his revenge by marrying Linton’s sister. Meanwhile, Earnshaw is dead and his son Hindley is wasting away after the death of his wife, post-child birth. Heathcliff usurps Hindley’s wealth. Catherine has a child and so does Heathcliff. Hindley, Catherine, Linton and his sister, all die one by one.

The stage is set for Heathcliff to continue seeking revenge on the next generation, which is when Mr Lockwood becomes a casual bystander. The story continues as the saga of a man, driven by love and malice to wreck so many lives.

The settings match the story – the village is covered in dense snow most of the time, there are windy cliffs nearby and one needs to be hardy to survive in good health in the area.

The writing, character development and the story are all captivating. There is no doubt that Heathcliff is a special character indeed and fascinates for being so unapologetic about his intent and action. Yet, suggesting that every woman should have known such a character shows a tendency towards masochism.

From the Holy Mountain – William Dalrymple

2011-11-22T12:34:00.001+05:30

Rating - Read

This was my travel companion for the Turkey trip. As I have probably mentioned before, I like reading books either set in the places I am visiting or those that give a historical context. The book’s subtitle says ‘A journey in the shadow of Byzantium’. While not strictly about Turkey, it still covers a huge swath of land that saw early Eastern Christianity.

Dalrymple sets out to trace the journey of John Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow. Moschos was a Byzantine monk from the late 500s who travelled through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Egypt, in the process documenting a lot of life back then.

For most of us used to pictures from Western Christianity, this is a fascinating journey. During my last year’s trip to Egypt, the Mediterranean looking Jesus was a bit of a surprise. Despite knowing that Christianity had its origins from thereabouts, actually seeing a non-cherubic baby Jesus is quite an eye-opener. This fascination continued in Turkey as well. Thanks to the book, I also began to notice the subtle features of frescoes that showed the transition from earlier religions to the monotheist Christianity.

Dalrymple traces Moschos’s journey but as can be seen from the list above, most of these are not easy countries to visit. Even in the relatively easy countries, the areas visited are not especially safe. Dalrymple gives a current day context to his travels. More often that not, it is quite depressing to read how current day politics and religious priorities have contributed to the slow decay of oriental Christian sites.

Some of the stories, both current and historical are wonderfully bizarre and provide much entertainment. Where the rituals have survived even now, it is amusing to note how much of oriental superstitions prevail in a religion more famous for western superstitions. Djinns and other such characters are happily believed in and the pope is a central villain for most of the orthodox types (One of them even sincerely urges the Catholic Dalrymple to change before it is too late).

And other books

2011-11-22T12:30:00.001+05:30

Rating - Read if you have the time

I have been quite lazy about updating my reading list and begin by clubbing a couple of books meant for ‘timepass’ reading

By the water cooler by Parul Sharma – A breezy read about two girls who quit their jobs with an ad agency to move to the corporate world. The heroine (whose name I now forget) learns about office politics, taking responsibility and falling in love. Her friend learns about organising a wedding and finding her true calling. Excellent if you are taking a two hour late night flight and can’t sleep but can’t tax your brains either

My friend Sancho by Amit Verma – The premise is quite interesting. Journalist hero ends up being present at a staged shoot-out that has killed a possibly innocent Muslim. Instead of further exploring how such situations come to be, the story turns out to be a love story, with the Journalist hero pursuing the innocent man’s daughter. Cute read but it could have really been so much more.

Puskhar Camel Fair 2011

2011-11-14T14:54:00.021+05:30

We knew we were entering Pushkar when we saw a bunch of policemen diverting traffic that comprised doddering state buses, eager tourists in air conditioned cars, masses of locals footing it and the camels looking serene in the midst of all this.

The Pushkar camel fair is an annual melee that attracts people from all over Rajasthan. People walk through the deserts and villages with camels, horses and cattle and camp in Pushkar’s fair grounds. At the end of ten days, the animals would have been bought and sold. On the side, the stocking of vessels, clothes and knickknacks for the year would have happened. Everyone goes back home, ready to come back the next year.

It was sheer coincidence that we had ended up in Pushkar at this time of the year but what a good thing to have happened.

The driver dropped us off at the outskirts of the town. We made our way past the crowds and reached the Rajasthan Tourist Information centre (No doubt set up to cater to the burgeoning tourist crowd, who were luckily outnumbered 1 to 5 by the locals...yes, yes we were tourists too). The helpful volunteers handed us a brochure listing all the delights that were in store in the coming days.

A quick scan revealed that the camel dance competition had already taken place the previous day. We were disappointed but could not stay so given the huge rush of colour and action around us

Clutching our brochure with its map, we tried to figure our way around. It became amply clear after a while that the map's creator had used his artistic license. Where we expected a vast, paved main road, we noticed a tiny muddy road stuffed with people.

We managed to make our way through the crowds to our first stop, the Brahma temple. Pushkar’s avatar as camel trade hotspot is only an aside. On regular days, people come to visit one of Pushkar 400+ temples and famous ghats. The Brahma temple is especially special since there are very few temples to a god who has been cursed by mythology to remain temple-less

Sadly when we saw the crowds, we decided to quickly abort the visit and instead go in search of food

This also took us through a crowded street

But food has always been a bigger draw than religion and we stuck at it. Raju’s restaurant was tucked away on the first floor. Raju (or his Man Friday) made us scribble out our orders. After this unorthodox start, everything else went smoothly – the food, the calm above the streets and the undisrupted view of the ghats.

Fortified, we explored the ghats and noticed the stern sign issuing orders on decorum to ‘foreigners’ –

Lest you think that Pushkar is all work and no fun, there were also posters like this –

(Gleeful boys no doubt waiting for the belles to show up)

And this

Doesn't the gentleman in the middle look like the dictator of a minor country? Surely, the first gentleman is being sought by Interpol for some crimes?

Taking in all these little features of Pushkar, we finally reached the mela grounds where all action was afoot. We hired a young man's cart to take us through the camp

The sight was unbelievable. Tents, animal and people stretched for miles ahead.

Our young driver updated us on various aspects of camel trade. (If you are curious – a camel costs between 30000 Rs and 50000 Rs). I loved the cute designer motifs on this one and was nearly tempted…

There are also designer camel accessories –

Our day in Pushkar came to an end with a kabbadi match between locals and outsiders

The crowds could not have been more attentive or enthusiastic had it been IPL. D and I were drawn into it as well, and watched from the sidelines cheering along with the locals.

We were ready to keep going on but these darn timebound travels do put a stop to such plans.

Maybe next year?

p.s. We heard an advertisement on radio on the way back to Jaipur. Stuck innocuously between two romantic Shah Rukh numbers, the male voice laughed and said ‘In reel life, you can survive gun shots, but in real life can you?’ Then sobering, the voice continued ‘Bodyguards are of no use when bullets hit you’. Finally the radio ad concluded with ‘use so and so brand bullet proof vests’. Surely we were in the same country..

I’m not twenty four…I’ve been nineteen for five years by Sachin Garg

2011-11-14T08:30:00.003+05:30

Rating - Do not read

When I signed up for BlogAdda’s book review programme, I had dreams of laying my hands on free copies of books. I knew they would be unknown authors, but then a book is a book, right?

Er..wrong.

Atleast if this one is anything to go by.

I have been hearing for a while that Chetan Bhagat has spawned a new generation of writers who appeal to the humongous group of people who can speak English but just about. Sachin Garg is clearly one such author. I have no qualms with Bhagat-repliacas and I agree that anything that makes someone read is worth writing.

However, there is a difference between writing stories that appeal to the average Joe and just bad writing. Simple–to-read sentences should not translate to bad grammar and bad spelling, both of which find a place in this book. At the very least, the editors should have cut out repetitive sentences.

The protagonist, Saumya Kapoor, is a B-School graduate (not again) who is posted to a factory in Northern Karnataka thanks to a HR mix-up about her gender. Saumya gets there, learns about safety issues in steel factories and falls in love. This sums up the story.

In the first half, Saumya sounds like the kind of flaky character that could have been dreamt up by men who have always seen Delhi University girls from afar but never actually had the luck to get to know one. Saumya spends a lot of time shopping or talking about shopping. Then spends a lot of time visualising how she would impress everyone with her sexiness.

After Saumya lands up in the steel factory, the story picks up. The author puts his personal experiences to good use, though the series of gruesome incidents that happen are given lesser space than Saumya’s shopping stories.

Finally Saumya is made to fall in love with a Hugh Grant-look-alike who is high on drugs and alcohol. (Again, author’s fantasy scenario on what sort of guys DU girls dig?). Saumya reforms him and turns him into a ‘good boy’.

The most interesting part of this book however is the bit where Hugh Grant-look-alike and Saumya sleep with each other. Has Chetan Bhagat finally reshaped the Indian youth’s moralities? Is it now considered ok to sleep with someone before getting married? Infact, is it ok to sleep with someone just because you love them and not because you are going to get married to them shortly? If this book is representative of today’s lower middle-class youth, then perhaps there is change afoot. Methinks it is an interesting sociological theory to be examined…

When you think about it, the story is really not bad. However, if this is what is being consumed by thousands and thousands of people, then it would be a huge favour to the nation if someone did a good job of editing the book.

p.s. This is the author's second book. What else can I say!

Jaipur

2011-11-13T11:29:00.002+05:30

Given how intensive a ten-day trip of Rajasthan can get, we had long decided to tackle one place at a time. Mount Abu and Udaipur are accessible by train from Mumbai if one does not mind the 14 – 15 hour overnight journey. Jaipur, on the other hand, requires some planning to get a good deal on the tickets. We did it over a three-day weekend.

Where we stayed –

Practically everyone in Jaipur has an ancient lineage and an old haveli which they have converted into a hotel. We stayed at the Deviniketan, which was quite well rated on Tripadvisor. We quite liked the non-fussy Admiral Singh who runs it and its central location in C-scheme, which is 2.5 kilometers from the Old City.

What we did –

Jaipur has phases to it. The nearby Amber area was where it all started. The Old City in Jaipur came next and then the rest of the city developed.

It is easy to hire cars to do a rushed tick-off tour of all the places in one day. However, we preferred to savour each place. This meant on the first day, we managed to get through exactly three places in the Old City – City Palace, Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar.

All three places have helpful audio guides and also regular guides with published rates. The good thing about audio guides is you can do the tour at your own pace. The downside is that the numbers are not clearly marked and that makes for a bit of running around trying to figure out where the next number is located.

The City Palace had some delicate carvings on the buildings and gave an overall feeling of being quite large. Inside, the two things that impressed me most were the clothes museum and the armoury. Some of the clothes were so large, you rather wondered about the size of the kings who wore them. The armoury had all kinds of weapons from them – state of the art I would say.

Hawa Mahal is quite pretty and amazing, mostly for the wonderful jaalis through which the queens watched the world go by.

Jantar Mantar, on the other hand, was a bit of a mental challenge. The place was filled with all sorts of astronomical instruments. It did not help that by the time we got there, it was nap time and we had just finished a heavy Rajasthani lunch. I was ready to snooze (which I shamelessly did for half an hour in the lawns under the trees). After that, trying to figure out the latitudes and meridians was a bit painful. I wish we had taken a human guide who would have simplified it for us, instead of taking an audio guide.

With just these three, we called it a day, without having visited the Birla Mandir, the Birla museum for personal effects of the Birla family (modest, wouldn’t you say?), any of the normal museums (which was a pity) and the sunset from a temple filled with monkeys.

The next day we went to Pushkar via Ajmer. Ajmer has a famous Dargah that is super-crowded. Pushkar has a famous brahma temple. Personally, I could have lived without seeing those. However, we were lucky that the camel fair was going on and that made the trip worth it (separate post on that)

On the last day, we set off early to see Amber Fort. Though the place was already crowded by the time we got there and we could not take up the elephants to go to the top of the fort and had to stick to our car.

Amber Fort is a good place to potter about with an audio guide. The first challenge is getting hold of one on a crowded day, since they have limited number of machines. The second is figuring out where each number is (it is worse than the Old City). The third is getting around the disjointed quarters accessible by numerous stairs and ramps placed in random order. It was great fun though. The complex was large enough to absorb all the tourists and you could have enough privacy to let your mind wander to what it was like back in the days of the yore.

We could have seen Jaigarh Fort after this, but got lazy and just decided to act like decadent tourists, spending a bomb on a luxurious lunch.

What we ate –

The Rajasthani lunch at LMB on MI Road is so filling that at some point, your stomach no longer registers the food. But a good experience.

Devi niketan was located close to Four Seasons (not ‘The’ Four Seasons) and Little Italy, where we got a chance to see how the upper middle class locals ate (dress up mostly in fancy Indian clothes and go out in large groups)

The splurge meal was at the terrace in the Rambagh Palace, run by the Taj. After the hustle and bustle of three days, it was shocking to be somewhere this quiet and classy. Not to mention, the palace itself gave us a glimpse of what it was to have been rich and owning those views.

How we got around –

We took autos to the Old City and within the Old City, one can even take cycle rickshaws. For Amber, a car is required.

Where to shop –

Jaipur is a shopper's paradise. MI road in the Old City has everything to cater to the tourists. You can pick up textiles, lac jewellery, silver jewellery, blue pottery, jhoothis and other stuff here. However, if you have the patience to go to the specialists, then here is a list to get started with –

Johari Bazaar – Jewellery and furniture and tie & dye

Sanganer village – blue ceramic pottery

Maniharon ka Rasta – Lac Jewellery

Pahar Gunj – semi precious stones and silver jewellery

There is also a state emporium run by the Rajasthan government opposite the Ajmer Gate, if you don’t want to bargain.

Of course, after all this research we did the tourist thing and let ourselves be lead into one of the many shops that have tie-ups with the travel agencies.

Turkey Factsheet

2011-11-02T15:20:00.004+05:30

Travel, both work and personal, has meant a long break from blogging. So I get off to a restart with my Turkey trip factsheet.

The trip to Turkey turned out to be a solo visit, thanks to D’s lack of vacation time. At any rate, he had been to the country before and was not keen on visiting it again yet. This meant that my itinerary was shaped to some extent by my desire to stick to a large group rather than travel alone. I contacted Backpacker Co. who did a very average job of putting together the trip. The itinerary worked out well but their service could have been better. Their partner on the other side, Fez Travels, was quite efficient and came recommended by the Lonely Planet.

This is how it went –

ISTANBUL – Spent 3 days here while going and 1 day on the return. Istanbul is a fascinating city – a crossroads of sorts where the new jostles for space with the old and where the European veneer hides an Asian heart.

Tourists normally stay in the old city, close to the central Sultanahmet area which hosts the Hippodrome, the Hagia Sophia, the Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque. You need one day for the old city tour. I did it with a group (Plan Tours) but it is quite convenient to do it alone. There is a good tram network that stops all the sites and I noticed audio guides were available at most places.

I spent one day on a Bhosphorous Cruise (highly recommended), which was combined with a visit to Dolmabache Palace (Can be skipped if there is no time).

I went for an evening to walk around the Istikal Street in the newer parts of the city to check out the local population and tourists browse through stores stocking contemporary brands.

One evening was spared for the Turkish Hamam experience (must do) at the 500 year old Cemberlitas Haman.

An acquaintance was kind enough to meet me for dinner at The House Café in Ortakoy, located on the Bhosphorus. It is mesmerizing to sit by the Straits, taking in the wonderful Turkish food. If one wants to spend more money and check out Istanbul's hip nightlife, popular nightclub Reina, also on the banks of the Bhosphorus is the way to go.

On my way back, I spent a whole day in the Eygptian Spice market and the Grand Bazaar buying various gifts and souvenirs. Both are worth exploring just for the bustle and worth buying in, if you are upto some solid bargaining (think half price).

I stayed at Hotel Polat Demir on the first three days. The staff was friendly and it was close to a tram stop. However, the air conditioning made noises and spewed dirt on all three days of my stay. This would not be my first choice for stay. On the last day, I was at the Q-Inn and quite liked the place. It was close to the Tram stop, walking distance from the old city and the bazaars. No noisy air conditioners either. Besides I have come to realize that the old city is full of hilly ups and downs and if you are not located on flat ground, just walking around can be painful on the knees.

GALLIPOLI – Since I was on a tour from this leg onwards, I had little choice on the places to visit. Though except Gallipoli, I would have definitely visited other places.

Gallipoli is the site of the infamous landings by the British and their allies in an attempt to access Russia via the sea route, during WWI. Many Australians and New Zealanders lost their lives here and it has become an important stop for these nationalities during their Turkey visit. I realized later that many Indians had also lost their lives there. Yet, unless one is a WWI buff, the detour is quite unnecessary.

We stayed the night in Cannakale, a small little town which I might have explored had the hotel been located somewhere centrally. The Iris Hotel where I stayed was comfortable and a good place for a night’s rest.

TROY and PERGAMUM– Ignorant me did not realize till I began planning for the trip that Troy is located in Turkey. There is nothing to actually see in the site, since it is full of broken walls which are still being excavated. Yet the idea of actually standing in Troy is fascinating and you can almost see the wooden horse in the green fields that now cover the spot. Besides it is UNESCO World Heritage site

Pergamum, on the other hand, is filled with beautiful Hellenistic and Roman ruins. We spent all our time on the top of the hill (reached by a quick ride on a cable car) which covered the famous temple, library and amphitheatre. Unfortunately, we did not have the time to see the Asclepion, the famous ancient medical centre from which the serpent sign for medicine originated.

EPHESUS – This is again filled with Hellenstic and Roman ruins and is only second in importance to Pompeii given the scale of excavations. A whole town lies, right from the wash area in the front, to the streets that lead past public toilets, libraries, rumoured brothels and amphitheatre. The special entry ticket to mansions of the Roman rich men was worth it. Ephesus is simply marvelous in its scale and the crowds spoke volumes about its popularity. Our meek-voiced guide gave up trying to keep the group together and offered snippets of wisdom to anyone who cared to ask her questions. An audio tour would be a good choice here.

We also stopped at the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World. Only 1 pillar of the 127 original ones stands today and it is a bit difficult to imagine the scale of the original temple. A visit to the Ephesus Museum helped us get perspective on some of the ruins.

We stayed overnight at Kusadesi, a vibrant little town with a lovely promenade and brightly lit restaurant area. I was at the Ozelick Hotel, facing the promenade but quite ordinary otherwise. A lot of people also stay in Selcuk, a smaller town.

PAMUKKALE – Pamukkale has been a medical centre since ancient times, when the ill and feeble came for a dip in the thermal spring atop the hill. A series of ruins exist here as well. But the star attraction is the cotton-like calcium terraces through which hot water springs flow. The sight is quite ethereal and not something that one would see normally. Pamukkale, alongwith Cappadocia, would be on my list of ‘sights which you can see only in Turkey’. Not surprisingly, both are UNESCO WH sites

I parted ways with my group tour here and took an overnight bus to Cappadocia.

CAPPADOCIA – The region is famous for volcanic rocks that have been eroded to pillars and mounds over the centuries. Early Christian monks made their homes in these pillars, inhabiting the caves that had been formed by the erosion of the soft Tuff rock, protected by a layer of the harder Basalt.

The tours are split into Northern and Southern Cappadocia tours and you usually do one on each day. I did the Northern Cappadocia tour, which included the famous Goreme Open air museum with its beautiful frescoes from early Christianity and the Pasabag Fairy Chimneys that make you pinch yourself to see if such things indeed exist.

The Southern Cappadocia tour includes a visit to underground cities. Being slightly claustrophobic, I decided to forgo the visit. Besides I was getting a bit tired of being on my feet daily.

There were numerous treks that one can do through the valleys. The highlylight of my trip was the hot air balloon ride. It is expensive (mine cost USD 200) but a wonderful experience akin to being on a magic carpet.

I stayed at the Cappadocia Palace hotel, an old Greek house converted into a cheery little hotel. This was based in the town of Urgup. A lot of people stay in cave hotels in the town of Goreme.

Cappadocia is not known for its efficient planning and organization unlike other parts of Turkey and it is better to reconfirm everything twice and assume people will mess up things. This way you won’t end up with your baggage having been dropped off in some other hotel or you getting off in Goreme when your hotel pick up is actually at Urgup.

GENERAL NOTES –

Turkey has amazing food. Most hotel breakfast buffets have all sorts of cheese and you can just live on them. The kebabs are amazing too but better to stick to kebabs for only one meal a day since they can get quite heavy

Best time to visit is actually before and after the peak season of July, August. I went in end-Sep/early – Oct. It was rainy one day in Istanbul but otherwise the daytime temperature was usually 22 – 26 degrees C and the nights were around 15 – 18 degrees C.

Book for the Cappadocia balloon tour in advance. Or else you won’t get the first slot for which the pick up is at 5 a.m. Later slots mean you can’t see the sun rise and you get late for your day tour.

It is quite convenient to take domestic flights. Buses are good but the price differential between flights and buses should not really matter unless you are on a budget.

Souvenirs – The delectable Turkish delight made of nuts. Olive oil, apple tea and cheese are also good buys. If you are in the mood for expensive stuff, there are carpets, leather jackets and beautiful silver jewelry to be had. I saw some beautiful lace table clothes at the Cappadocia sights but unfortunately did not buy them and could not find them later on. Keep your shopping for the last day so that you are not travelling the whole of Turkey with fifteen boxes of Turkish Delight.

WiFi - Every hotel had free WiFi and that made all the diffrence to the trip. Thanks to an IPad, Skype and WiFi, staying in touch was no problem.

Turkey also has some wonderful beaches and if I had had the time or company, I would have definitely chilled out for a couple of days in one of them. Worth including in the itinerary.

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

2011-09-26T11:54:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

I became a devoted fan of Murakami after reading Norweigian Wood (as did many others, going by the fact that it was Murakami's best selling novel). Till then, I enjoyed his writing, but not quite enough to actually admire it. Now, I was interested in knowing the person behind the writings.

And what a person he is. I had somehow envisioned Murakami as an old and wise Japanese guy, with withered hands, wise eyes, long white hair tied into a pony, and a thin, frail, mien. A man who slowly and sincerely wrote in a notebook, sitting in a house located in a picturesque place in Japan, while wearing a slightly flashy traditional dress (Even as I write this, I realise I sound like one of those people who think that everyone in India does the rope trick and has a pet snake).

Anyway, assuming he was more likely to be the type who carried the latest notepad and wore normal everyday clothes (considering the Japanese are considered to be 10 years ahead of the rest of the world), what I did not expect was to learn that he was passionate about running.

Murakami makes it quite clear, that he is first of all a writer. He runs in the time he has, over and above his writing and is not a professional runner at all. But for an amateur runner, he does very well. Having started running in his 30s, he has taken part in several marathons and started participating in triathlons sometime from his 40s. Every year, he does a marathon in the winter and a triathlon in the summer. The book covers his training while preparing for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Murakami talks not just about this race, but also about the preparations and the various races he has participated in, the feeling of doing long-distance running where you are competing mostly against yourself, the sincerity and discipline that is needed to keep going and the feelings that come during a race. In between, he also digresses into life in general, and his writings.

All of it is interesting reading despite being about experiences which an average bloke is unlikely to have in a lifetime. Murakami goes about quietly cataloguing the hours he puts in, the people he runs with, the places he lives and works in. I especially liked reading his descriptions of his body, as a machine independent of the author’s mind.

Presumably runners would be able to identify with it a lot more than I can. Infact, the book was bought for D, who participated in a half marathon for the first time last year. Yet, non-runners like me have been brought closer to the strange world of plodding on and on.

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

2011-09-26T11:50:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

Michael Connelly was one of the authors I had been recommended during my search for a good thriller/mystery novel.

As books go, this is a good read. Detective Harry Bosch is called to investigate the bones of a small boy, found scattered in Hollywood Hills. The bones are twenty years old, if not older. Bosch takes up the investigation, despite the general reluctance of the top team. After all, this would be a case unlikely to be solved after so long, and would not justify the time and money spent. Bosch persists and goes through with the case.

Detectives are in fashion just now. I watched the popluar TV series, Dexter, with both eyes glued to the screen (Though, the protagonist is less detective and more serial killer). I keep occasionally surfing through the CSI series. I have come to expect that most detectives in novels would be the brooding types. So to stand out from the clutter, the writing has to be good, the story interesting and the protagonists likable.

Connelly does a good job of the first two. The chapters flow smoothly from one to the other. The pages turn rapidly as you hungrily wait for the next stages to evolve – always a good sign in a novel of this genre.

Where Connelly could have done better, was with Harry Bosch. Imagine an office where you work solid hours, say from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and can be considered hardworking and dedicated. Now, imagine if you had a colleague who clocked in at 7 a.m. and clocked off at 11 p.m. and sent messages on the blackberry on the time in between. Suddenly you look like someone who spends all her time having a personal life whereas you colleague seems to be single handedly pushing the economy through.

Bosch is a bit like that. One can’t complain about him working so hard. But it is annoying to notice the manner in which he tells his partner about things, only after they have happened.

Still, I would pick up another Connelly. He is pretty good at the detective business, the minor annoyance in his protagonist notwithstanding. So if you are looking to experiment with detective stories, try this author.

The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle

2011-09-26T11:46:00.002+05:30

Rating – Read if you have the time

It was one of those early mornings in the airport. You are up bright and early to catch a flight. Your mind is unfortunately still on snooze mode. So you ignore the free Economic Times and Business Standard filched from the newspaper stands and go in search of ‘light’ reading to avoid actually having to scan the news till you are mentally ready for it. Thus I ended up in the bookshop and coughed up the money for this book.

The cover had a judicious sprinkling of phrases like ‘breeze of a read’, ‘feel-good book’ and also stuff about ‘leaves you thirsty for a glass of Bordeaux’ and ‘savour over a vintage rose’.

Light page turner about wine-theft. Exactly what one would call light reading. In the event, I sincerely read my newspapers on the flight and did not get around to reading this book till much later.

It is a simple enough story. Rich and brash Hollywood lawyer has his wines stolen. His insurance company, facing a claim of 3 million dollars, hires a private eye to investigate. Private Eye, promptly hotfoots it to France and spends the rest of the book drinking lots of good wine, eating lots of good food and checking out places, accompanied by his sophisticated French colleague. The book rolled nicely from one meal to the next and from one wine to the next. The culprit is caught in a manner that was absurdly reminiscent of my Famous Five days (albeit with some adult-world touches like a reigniting romance and a face-saving diplomatic solution). Not to mention the description of French food and places is always worth a read.

Perfect when you want to drift into a post-lunch siesta on a holiday.

Social Network

2011-09-20T18:31:00.002+05:30

Last weekend, my time on social networking sites skyrocketed. Clearing my mailbox, I came across atleast two invites for Google Plus.

At this stage I must point out that I am not an active Facebook/similar stuff user. I just do not have the urge (yet) to update the world about spotting a crow outside my house or buying a yacht. So I was among the last to sign up for Orkut and Facebook (FB) and I am yet to get myself a Twitter account.

When I saw Google Plus though I got a bit excited. All the talk about ‘limited invitations’ and ‘beta testing’ made me feel like a tech pioneer and seemed like a chance to improve my mental image of myself. Exactly the effect that the marketing guys at Google were aiming for.

So I promptly used up some of my 150 invitations quota to invite various friends and family to Google Plus. Actually, I think gmail did it for me by default. I did have a pleasant time though, classifying people as ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘people who should see your snaps’, ‘people who can give you a ride on their yacht’… you get the drift.

The instinctive organiser in me just loved this. When done, I turned to FB only to find that FB had finally woken up to privacy issues and had adopted Google Plus’s approach to user classification. Normal people would have straightaway given up after having just spent some time on a classification exercise. However, the organizer types would know that this was close to approaching Nirvana.

Compartmentalising people again!! Bring it on, I say.

So another couple of hours went by. Except in the case of FB, I actually have over 200 friends. (Short digression – I am quite sure I don’t talk to 200 people even over a period of one month. How did I end up with 200 ‘friends’, leaving aside the fact that I must have invited around 30 when I was on a particularly competitive streak to up my ‘friends list’. Actually how do people end up with 700 or 800 friends).

By the time I was finished, I had lost track of whether someone in my friends list had also ended up in my restricted list. Anyway, for good or bad, atleast I had definitely restricted viewing rights of a few people. Despite my inactive usage of FB, I still seemed to have a trail of comments and pictures that I was not happy to share with one and all.

The one good thing about the classification was that I could see comments/status updates and so on for atleast 50 people instead of the usual 5 people I normally saw. Despite categorizing my traffic, I was actually getting more not less. Yippee! If I had to classify myself in a FB user category, then I would unhesitatingly put myself down as a ‘lurker’.

I love looking at people’s photos. It is fascinating to see how the erstwhile fat acquaintance has suddenly blossomed into a svelte diva or even better when the opposite has happened. It is fun to see pics taken at ‘Bollywood theme parties’. It is nice to see pics of cute babies without the obligation of actually cooing over them. Infact, sometimes I must say I don’t like the growing privacy talks. How else does one entertain oneself on FB if all I could see was the snaps of my good friends which I can anyway get via mail or a photosharing link? (Which of course is ironic considering I did not want a few people to see my snaps online. But as they say in FB 'It is complicated')

I also like the variety of videos or articles I get exposed to. No one in my immediate friends circle would have updated a link of a fat kid dancing to Salman Khan’s numbers. But a long-ago colleague did and I could secretly chuckle at it though I would have acted all uppity if someone had asked me about the link.

I like the fact that people whom you would not have interacted with much, have interesting things to say and you make a mental note to talk to them sometime in the real world. I like to see what my young cousins from a different generation talk about (even if I am probably just seeing an edited, sanitized version)

And the really good part is that you can ignore stuff which you don’t like.

Unless you do a slight goof up in your classification. Like I did when I put an acquaintance into three different lists. Resulting in roughly 50 updates on her Farmville story. (Another digression – I have never tested out Farmville but how does one get hooked onto bringing up a fake cow in an online world. Isn’t that what people in sci-fi stories do when they are travelling to a distant galaxy and have no hope of seeing an actual farm or getting an actual pet ever?)

The takeaway from my weekend has been that Google Plus’s idea of ‘circles’ is great but I am not sure if that is good enough to move away from FB. Especially now that FB has ‘lists’. Looks like despite being invited to test the beta version, I am still going to migrate only when enough other friends have.

Your neighbourhood Thorpedo

2011-09-14T18:56:00.000+05:30

I swam one round of freestyle.

Then one more round of breaststroke.

2 parents, 1 husband, 1 sister and 1 bro-in-law, all watched suitably impressed. They could not have been more impressed had I been swimming across the English Channel, and not merely the 5-feet deep pool in the family resort we were visiting.

Learning how to swim was indeed a pat-on-the-back achievement for me.

Going back in time, this is how it all came about.

*Begin flashback*

Age 1 – So petrified of water that I used to exhaust everyone trying to escape to corners of the tiny bathroom filled with a frustrated mom and maid.

Age 3 – I had made my peace with the fact that I was expected to bathe everyday. For the routine head-baths, the mom (and only the mom) would be permitted to keep her hand over my eyebrows for a couple of seconds while I scrunched my eyes close for 30 seconds.

This clearly indicated to the parents, that their progeny was unlikely to become a national swimming champion anytime soon. Besides, even today, unless you live in a fancy apartment complex, or belong to a sports club, it is not easy having access to a good pool. So swimming was not seen as a must-have skill.

Age 22 – Moved into fancy apartment complex (albeit in the back of the beyond) and waded into a pool for practically the first time ever.

My flatmate and I had decided to learn swimming and had signed up for classes.

Three classes later, said flatmate was floating from one side of the pool to other. I had not even managed to get myself to float horizontally, clutching to the wall.

The project was clearly doomed to failure. Besides, the early morning weekend timing was just not conducive to two 22 year olds

Mid-twenties – Move to Chennai. Resolve all over again to learn to swim. Sign up in Anna Univ.

Turn up in the pool. 1 me and 3 instructors, none of whom felt the need to get into the pool. Instead all of them shouted out instructions from the side of the pool, the last one being ‘Madam, you can shop for more ‘covered’ swimming dress’. Apparently the normal bathing suit that did not meet frumpy standards set by aunties was not modest enough.

I left

Mid-twenties – Get membership to fancy club, being less-small fish in small office pond et al. Meet the world’s best swimming instructor.

I managed to attend 10 of the 15 classes but in these 10 classes, I learnt not only to float but also come as far as doing the freestyle stroke, albeit without the correct breathing technique.

Enthused by these results, I immediately began to practice fervently. Always by the side of the pool, ready to clutch a wall when I ran out of breath.

Now, I officially declared to all and sundry that I could swim.

Early – thirties – Move to Bombay and fine a decent pool. Aim to learn breathing.

Five classes later, I realized that the pool was more crowded than the Dadar railway station.

Ditch

Early thirties – Try snorkeling at Dahab.

Under the mistaken impression that with a snorkeling mask, I would be able to swim everywhere. After all, breathing was my only problem, right?

Er..wrong. After nearly an hour of standing of swimming around the small jetty, I eventually gave up. D, who was watching out for me from the jetty, probably saw more fish.

Age 33 – Move into an apartment complex with a pool. Find a teacher who seems halfway decent and is willing to schedule classes at my convenience.

So I began to go. 2 – 3 times a week and not for daily classes. In order not to get petrified of the progress I was making. It is funny how scared you can get when you are actually making progress. Because that means you are one step closer to swimming by yourself to the deep end and that is a very scary thought.

For the best part of two months, I kept at it. Till I could finally finally actually do freestyle and breaststroke.

*End flashback*

Now that I know the basic strokes, I have realized a few things
- Learning how to swim requires persistence (though understandably most people don’t take ten years like me)
- Knowing how to swim and being able to swim like a pro who rescues drowning people are two very different things. It turns out that a lot of people are more former than later.
- Like everything else, getting better at swimming requires a LOT of practice.
- Some people are naturally gifted in the water but for most others it requires a constant overcoming of fear.

I am hoping that someday I can move from the safety of my pool to an open sea, and try snorkeling again. It is going to be a big challenge handling my fear of so much water.

But, yeah, it felt good in that resort, showing off to the family.

Here we go again

2011-09-13T10:18:00.001+05:30

On the way to work, I was listening to one of those mindless RJ chatters on radio. The RJ was introducing a work by Shishir Kunder, a Bollywood director/producer. Then added with venom coursing through the sentence ‘of course Shishir’s only claim to fame is being Farah Khan’s husband’. You could almost feel the smirk on the RJ’s face.

A smirk which would have disappeared fast had I been able to grab her through the radio waves and give her a tight slap.

I just don’t get it. What is wrong if the wife is more famous/successful than the husband? Somehow, it is acceptable for the man to be the more successful partner. It is assumed that the wife will be content with consolation-prize statements like ‘behind every successful man is a woman’. Turn the tables, and everyone, including women, is laughing at the man.

Does that mean that men will inherently have to marry someone dumber than they are so that they are not outshined?

Does that mean that women will have to marry someone smarter, with better education and more career prospects, so that they don’t outshine their partner?

And despite all this careful planning, if the woman ends up more successful than her partner, then is their marriage doomed to failure?

If a female RJ in a city like Mumbai, who caters to a huge urban population, can come up with these statements, then it shows a dim possibility of us moving to a more equitable society.

On the other hand, it is always possible that RJ may just have been desperately trying to get a few laughs in her not-so-funny chatter by throwing in some stale jokes.

Lost and found

2011-09-11T15:23:00.002+05:30

When I was in class 9, the following things happened simultaneously –

The government phone company decided to introduce metering. No longer could you pick up the phone and speak in the happy comfort of knowing you were being billed for just one call till you put the phone down. After every three minutes, one would be charged for a new telephone call. So a one hour call was no longer one call, but was charged as 20 calls.

I became a total teen and discovered chatting on the phone

Clearly these were not happy things to happen together. My mom saw the massive phone bill, had a mini-coronary and put a clampdown on phone conversations. Which meant that I would have to wait till the folks went to bed before going yakkity-yak (not too difficult considering everyone snoozed off by 9 or 9.30 at the latest)

My partner in crime was NG. NG was in school with me and she lived close by. We used to come home together quite often, hang out after school and sometimes in the weekends. But mostly we indulged in the meaningless chatter that one can do non-stop during one’s teens. I can no longer remember much of what we talked about. The one thing I have remembered over the years is that NG lived with her sisters and to me, her supply of them seemed quite endless. There was one, who was in her early thirties and kept an eye on the brood while NG’s parents worked overseas. There was one who was working and seemed all grown up, though she was only 26 or so. Another, who by virtue of being in college, seemed to be the coolest person I knew. A couple of sisters were working in other cities or doing their masters. Like I said, she had an endless supply.

Then I changed schools, moved into a hostel and promptly lost touch. I was used to moving and usually accepted that a new school meant new friends and old friends would turn into pleasant memories. Besides, we did not even have email then, forget Facebook and had to depend on a rickety common hostel phone, not one’s very own cellphone. It was very easy to lose touch with someone.

So almost eighteen years went by. Every once in a while I would think of NG. I remember visiting her massive apartment complex one day a few years after we had lost touch. I could not remember which flat she lived in, and just asked the watchman if he knew the house with the multiple sisters. Not surprisingly, he said no and thought I was some kind of weirdo.

Then lo behold, from nowhere NG got in touch with me a few days ago on Facebook. Turned out she had been in tech wilderness and had signed up for an account just recently. NG was no longer the pony-tailed girl with sparkling eyes and the awkward big teeth that I remembered. She had morphed into a prof in the U.S, was married and had a kid and looked totally confident , attractive and grown-up. This is not too surprising considering both of us are in our thirties now.

It was fun to get back in touch. We spent more than an hour online, catching up on each other’s lives, the conversation never pausing just like in the old days.

I don’t think we are going to go back to being the talk-on-the-phone pals we were. That phase in long gone and time and distance means there is little chance of beginning to build a daily presence in each other’s lives. Yet, I have been feeling quite happy all this week just to know where NG is and that she is no longer lost to me.

Social networking tools, take a bow.

P.S. when chatting with NG, she mentioned that she had spoken to me once when we were finishing college. Strangely I have no recollection of that despite the fact I remember absolutely meaningless things like one of her older sisters was a fan of George Michael and had some wonderful posters of his (this was before the world knew he was gay. This was before I knew what gay meant).

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

2011-09-09T17:55:00.002+05:30

Rating - Don't read

I am not sure if there is a word to describe the male-equivalent of chick-lit (boy-lit?) but if there is one, then Hornby would fit into the category perfectly. This is not to say that I am demeaning Hornby (especially for those who would consider calling something as chick-lit as demeaning). Hornby has a lot of stuff that is clearly not boy-lit but he does stand out at his ability to provide the male version of relationship issues (read High Fidelity).

Another thing that Hornby is extremely skilled at is providing description of wasters. My first brush with this skill was with the wonderfully funny About a Boy.

Juliet, Naked is a combination of sorts of both these books. It tells us the story of a middle-aged, educated couple Annie and Duncan. Both have spent 15 years in a backwater called Gooleness where they had initially arrived as bright, young people passing by. Duncan is obsessed with the work of Tucker Crowe, a rockstar who had a limited artistic career but managed to gather a small group of loyal fans on the way.

The story is mostly told from Annie’s perspective. Fast approaching the end of her child-bearing years, she begins to question her relationship with Duncan, his obsession with Tucker Crowe and her own dead-end life in Gooleness. She ends up communicating with the reclusive Crowe, who provides her with some life perspectives from the backwaters in which he has accumulating ex-wives and kids and wasting away his time.

The book is unfortunately a bit of overkill. Each character cannot utter a sentence without having a full-blow analysis of the thought process behind it. Besides, there is a slight sense of been there-done that. You feel like telling Annie that it is ok to go through some sort of mid-life crisis, but for heaven’s sake stop brooding and move on or shut it.

Which of course is not a good attitude to have as you flip through 200 pages. Yet, I could not complain really. I was on holiday in a floating cottage. I had raided the library of the resort and was reading a free copy of Hornby. So what if the book was not upto expectations. Anyway you did not want to use more than half a brain in these situations.

In the final analysis, I would say – if you want to read Hornby, try the other books I have mentioned here. And Hornby is a good writer of non-fiction too if you like reading, music or football.

Funnily enough, my brush with Hornby has always involved some sort of holiday. I began to skim through High Fidelty on a road trip to Goa. I came across The Complete Polysyllabic Reading Spree on another trip to Goa and bought it from a second hand book seller who was happy to chat and give me a long account of his travels (and for being a good listener, I got the book at a deep discount). And now Juliet, Naked from the libraries of Poovar Island Resort. Is it that people who like to travel also read a lot of Hornby?

Strip Jack by Ian Rankin

2011-09-05T16:19:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read (if not this novel, then something from this series)

My current aim is to find mystery novelist who is engaging. P.D. James was a favourite but her recent work just does not compare with her old stuff. I never took a liking to Ruth Rendell. I like Elizabeth George’s writing, but don’t like the usual pointlessness of the endings. So I have been trying and discarding various authors. After this book, it looks like Ian Rankin may just get further custom from me.

The story has the usual mystery/thriller settings. A popular and much-loved MP, Gregor Jack, is caught in a high-end Edinburgh brothel on the night the police decide to raid the place. Jack’s woes multiply when his wife disappears a little after. Inspector Rebus starts peeling Jack’s life and the circumstances surrounding the raid and the disappearance of Mrs Jack.

Strip Jack is advertised as an Inspector Rebus novel (I guess fans of Ian Rankin know this character as a part of a series). It was my first ride with Rebus and he comes out pretty Ok. Somewhat similar to P.D.James’s Adam Dalgliesh – tied to police work, taking it slow and easy when it comes to relationships, astute and broods a lot. Since Dalgliesh is one of my favourite detective characters, I took a shine to Rebus also quite quickly.

The story is set in Edinburgh, familiar landscape for the author. It is interesting to wander with the author within the city as also into the Scottish countryside. It is also strange to see London appear in the periphery somewhere, instead of taking centrestage.

The writing, like the main character, is sort of P.D.James but not entirely so. It holds your interest. Rebus’s wisecracks, wit and puns could have been annoying, but thankfully they stop before they are overdone. The interaction between the detective team is especially interesting, given the friendliness woven with the one-upmanship that would happen in real life.

When I was younger, the ending of a thriller always used to be a big thing. Now, I am past the stage where I look for a big ‘oh my gosh, I did not see that coming’. When the ending comes, it is nice to know it all ties up logically on why things went the way they did. By that count, Rankin handles the ending quite decently in this novel.

For anyone looking to explore a detective series, this seems like a promising author to check out. (Unless of course I am the last person to read Rankin – which is entirely possible).

P.S. I have been told to try out Michael Connelly and Lee Child. Other suggestions most welcome.

Our kind of Traitor by John Le Carre

2011-09-05T16:10:00.005+05:30

Rating - Read if you have the time (and get John Le Carre)

I don’t get John Le Carre. I have really really wanted to. I have tried The Tailor of Panama and discarded it. I began Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and discarded that as well. Both over a span of 8 – 9 years. Friends, whose tastes I respect, tell me Le Carre is the cat’s whiskers when it comes to spy thrillers.

So I had another book due to be read now (I am, if not anything, optimistic that a good author will usually capture me at some point. I just need to keep dipping into a book every once in a while to see if I feel differently. See my last post on Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth)

Our kind of Traitor was yet another attempt to read Le Carre. It went off well in the sense that I finished the book. But I groaned my way through it, steadfastly reading even if it took me 2 – 3 weeks, with other books thrown in between.

The story is simple. A young and pretty English couple comes across a Russian family when they are holidaying. Before they know it, they have been pulled into a potential defection and a spy network. They have to decide if and how they will cooperate with the British authorities and help the Russians.

Le Carre is a famous name in the world of spy thrillers and if you are a Le Carre fan, then this book would possibly appeal to you. I found the story stretching on just a bit too much and incidents taking way too long to hold my interest. What I did enjoy was the long and loving description of watching a tennis match at Roland Garros, with Roger Federer playing. The author is clearly in love with Federer and anyone who has seen Federer in action will wholeheartedly agree with the descriptions.

Maybe I need to check out Le Carre again in 4 – 5 years.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

2011-08-29T12:37:00.006+05:30

Rating - Read

The first time I read Jhumpa Lahiri, it was right after her ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ had become famous. The book had opened to rave reviews, Lahiri won the Pulitzer, and she was also very attractive to boot. Everyone was reading her. I read the first story which tried landscaping a relationship no-man’s land and did not get it at all. I dismissed her as yet another Indian writer who was riding the India wave.

So, when R gifted me Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, I let it rest in my book cupboard for a few years. Late last week, on a lark, I brought it out of the back row and dusted the top and killed a couple of tiny bugs that crawled out. I sat down to read.

And read. And read. Interrupted by office and some welcome visitors.

Lahiri’s oeuvre had changed very little. This collection of short stories was also about Indian Americans, specifically Bengalis. Perhaps it was I who had changed in the more than ten years that had elapsed and could appreciate all the nuances that had gone into the stories.

The stories are all about the second generation of Bengali immigrants, touching upon their lives and the life of their parents seen through their eyes. The challenges faced by the parents, who had moved to the land of dreams, largely on their academic merit and who still try to clutch at their roots is portrayed quite well. The second generation, which is more American than Bengali, but still ill-at-ease with sharing their entire truth of their double personalities with their parents, is also captured nicely.

The writing flows smoothly and sometimes is a little melancholic. The observations are quite spot on and don’t miss the smallest things. The characters are not stereotypes from Bollywood movies and even in the generic issues of each generation; there is a broad spectrum of people and problems.

I finally finished the book yesterday in perfect settings yesterday – a rainy Sunday with nothing to do and a wind howling outside the window by my comfortable sofa.

One of things I have learnt in my reading life is that it is just not the right time to read some books. Either you are too old for it or you have still not grown into it. Which is why, I am glad I kept my copy of this book (and of course R – because you gifted it!).

Well worth a read.

(SPOILER ALERT. Following bit for people who have read the book)

The last three inter-connected stories were pretty good and I was waiting rather eagerly for the end, prepared for both a happy and a sad ending. What I did not anticipate till just before it came was the natural disaster playing a role! Given how much this kind of ending has been milked, it just fell too flat for me. Perhaps if I had read it when the Tsunami killing off people still had novelty value, I would have been more impressed.

Night in Bombay by Louis Bromfield

2011-08-26T17:39:00.003+05:30

Rating - Read if you have the time

I happened upon this book in an airport bookshop (which by the way, contrary to general opinion, can actually yield some interesting stuff). It was a Penguin publication, originally from the 1940s and which had been republished recently. The title was tantalizing enough and the backcover promised a view of the 1940s Mumbai with its mills and its parties and so on. I could not imagine a time when the mills where not dilapidated buildings waiting to be taken over by builders to be sold at exorbitantly high prices. I promptly bought the book.

As such things tend to turn out, the mills only got a passing reference in the book. Still, there were enough other references to the Taj Mahal hotel, Juhu Beach and Malabar Hill to give me a peek into how these areas were back then. (Not too different as it turns out. Just that the skin colour has balanced out. The money quotient remains the same)

The story starts off with the arrival of rich American heir, Bill Wainwright in Mumbai to handle some business matters. Bill is hoping his wild past is finally behind him and this trip is a chance for him to show himself that. Bill meets his ex-wife Carol and his old friend Buck Merrill. The trio rapidly ends up in a love triangle. In the background are various interesting characters – a down-on-her-luck Australian woman, an ugly and mysterious baroness, a rich and perpetually tipsy Indian Maharaja, a slimy Parsi suitor, a hardworking doctor and his beautiful dancer wife.

It has been a long time since I have read a story where the Indians are not well-rounded characters but some sort of stilted stereotypes – either noble like the doctor or vicious like the Parsi suitor. (This strangely enough was not particularly annoying now that we are largely past the time when the general assumption was that all Indians were buddies with snakes and spent their spare time doing handy rope tricks.)

Ironically, the story itself was vaguely Bollywood, what with a love triangle, sacrifices, just desserts and so on. Some of the characters are fairly well developed, especially the peripheral ones. You expect them to come in and out and provide background prop, but they end up evolving over time. The pace is also fairly taut. The observations can sometimes by startlingly true, though not necessarily flattering. The writing may get melodramatic at times but keeps you engaged throughout.

The book is good for a read on a relaxed weekend.

Incidentally, googling revealed that Louis Bromfield won a Pulitzer.

The strangest thing though was that he started out by being a writer but spent the latter half of his years pioneering scientific farming practices and gaining recognition for that. Sort of like he started out being a F1 driver but spent the later half of his year studying newts in Minnesota or something like that. How does one move from doing two seemingly disconnected things at different ends of the 'interesting' spectrum...?

Show me the money

2011-08-22T14:36:00.009+05:30

For the longest time, I carried around a wallet gifted by my friend, C. The wallet was a vast improvement over the one I had procured by raiding my parent’s cupboard of gifted-items-to-be-passed-along. C’s wallet had plenty of space for storing my various credit cards, debit cards, store cards, coins, I.Ds and so on. The only issue was that it folded three-way, making all my bank notes crumple spontaneously the minute they were deposited in the wallet. An issue definitely, but not enough to assuage the guilt of buying a new wallet (not that I have ever been bothered by guilt when it comes to practically any other type of shopping).

Eventually when C’s hardy wallet began to show enough wear and tear, I delightedly began to keep an eye out for a new one.

Easier said than done.

My favourite leather-goods shop, Adamjis, did not have something which I particularly liked. Most of the other places did not either. So slowly, the activity was pushed to a recess of my mind.

Then I went back home and raided my parent’s cupboard again (one is never too grown up to do this). Voila! There it was – a smart, black, leather ladies wallet. It was long, meaning notes did not have to be folded. It did not have as many card slots as I would have liked, but I figured that my poor shoulder would get a break if I did not lug around so much stuff each day. Swapping wallets was the work of a moment.

As it happened, a few weeks later I found myself browsing through the Samsonite sale when the clouds parted and the heaven above placed a wallet right in front of my eyes. It was one of those moments when you know you have found your one true love – angels began to trumpet, everything felt slightly pleasant and hazy and dropped into background. The wallet alone glowed…

It was longish, so I did not have to have crumpled notes.

It had plenty of compartments, so I could keep various denominations of notes separately.

It had plenty of card slots. So all the cards which I was beginning to miss by now could come back in.

It had a section at the back where I could tuck in bills for dry-cleaning and other stuff which I usually pick up on the go

To top it all, it was quite sleek.

Look –

(Pics from the Samsonite website)

I did not even feel the earlier guilt. How could one? In the face of perfection.

It has been a few weeks now and I make it a point to pull out the wallet ostentatiously at every occasion. The only minor quibble I have is that the card slots in the front are slightly reduced on account of the buttons. I would say that was put in deliberately to ward off evil eyes.

This is my secret cheap thrill for the time being.

Chick Lit fest

2011-08-16T15:33:00.006+05:30

This time, during my visit home, I decided to indulge in my favourite brainless reading – chick lit.

Before we go on, I must clarify that chick lit is not the same as romance. The latter, I could somehow never really digest. Handsome dark heroes, who catch their innocent (or stupid), blue-eyed, blonde heroines in the grip of passion is not my thing. However, give me a lazy day, with a brain too fed up to process too much and I am happy to read a mindless woman-centric story.

This time, I borrowed the latest novel in the Shopoholic series. I was introduced to Sophie Kinsella through Undomestic Goddess. This book told the story of a burned-out female lawyer who is forced to get away for a while from the heat at work. She somehow ends up working as a cook cum housekeeper in the house of a nouveau riche couple. The story is about how she blunders through the job, falls in love with the gardener and makes her peace with her career. It was mostly light and funny and provided an excellent escape outlet for anyone who has ever daydreamed about stopping to question her job.

Then I moved on to the Shopaholic series. The first book was quite funny too (especially given my secret shopping addiction. Not as drastic as the protagonist but enough to sympathize with the glint-in-the-eye that comes from knowing there is a sale in your favourite shop). Unfortunately the series became progressively worse. There is a limit to how much you can stretch the shopping addiction bit. Surely everyone grows up after a while.

Which is why Mini-Shopaholic continued in the same vein of being quite unconvincing and trying to find the funny moments as the shopaholic’s daughter begins to shop.

If you are in a mood for Sophie Kinsella, then try Undomestic Goddess and Shopaholic

The next pick was Nanny Returns, the sequel to the supremely successful The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. The first book told the story of Nan Schuester, an educated college graduate who works as a nanny to Grayer, the progeny of the successful New York couple stereotype – rich father who works in investment banking and the trophy wife mother who puts up with all kinds of nonsense, including her husband’s affairs. The book provided an interesting insight the dark side of the Upper East Side world, a world that looks absolutely fascinating in various movies and sitcoms. Infact, I would classify the book as regular fiction given that the book was never superficial despite its easy-to-be-lost-in-stereotype premise and was based on strong field experience.

The sequel unfortunately is not quite as well written. The premise here is interesting. Twelve years have passed and Nan is no longer the wide-eyed innocent young girl. She has a business of her own, is married and is back in New York. She ends up meeting Grayer and sets out to help him and is once again plunged into the dark side of the glamourous finance set. The book has been updated for current events – MMS scandals, privileged kids, the mayhem in finance and so on. Yet, halfway through the book, I was bored and just ended up abandoning it.

The two books vetted my appetite for a rereading of my favourite chick lit, Bridget Jones Diary by Helen Fielding. One of the things I realized about the earlier two novels was that I really did not like the movie versions. The Shopoholic heroine was dumb and old-looking. Scarlett Johansson was nice in the Nanny Diaries but somehow I could not picture her going through the story in the sequel. On the other hand, Rene Zellweger added to the Bridget Jones character and was brilliant as the average-IQ, thirty-something singleton who goes through life hoping to fall in love, having a good set of friends, changing jobs, handling menopausal parents and so on.

So in between my other reading, it has been a few pages a day just before going to bed. I fall asleep chuckling over the mundane yet quirky life of Bridget Jones.

The gang

2011-08-09T10:39:00.002+05:30

One of the toughest things about growing up is the challenge of making new friends. At school and college, there was a ready pool of people in the same age group. I just had to figure out who I could get along with and then hang out with those kids. The first job had plenty of comrades from my own college. If anything, I was spoilt for choice with students from other colleges joining in as well. A couple of years later though, it became obvious that people were changing jobs, moving cities, getting married and my circle of friends was only shrinking.

For the first time in my life, I was faced with the prospect of actually not having enough people to hang out with.

I am not a particularly shy person. Having been through six schools when growing up, making friends was a cinch. The issue was who to make friends with. I seemed to be going to work and coming back home to an empty house. Most people I was friendly with at work had moved jobs and the rest seemed to either be preoccupied with their own lives or on a completely different wavelength. Most women I could have shared a house with were all married or getting married.

I moved back home to Chennai to get some sort of a change. Unfortunately, work colleagues were nice but had gotten worse in terms of hanging-out value. Luckily, being home with the folks provided a welcome change from spending the evenings watching the idiot box.

Still what self respecting 20-something can depend solely on parents for conversation and entertainment without having the ‘LOSER’ tag slapped on the forehead. Besides, it is just plain impossible to have your parents substitute for friends.

My excess time and energy were channelized into various attempts at exercising – aerobics classes, tai chi classes, gym and so on. Eventually I ended up joining Salsa classes.

I am all for dancing. Put on solid Bollywood and Tamil dance numbers, and I am one of the early ones on the dance floor. Salsa was a whole different ball game. The music was unfamiliar. You had to move your hips and hands in an exaggerated manner. I was totally humbled by the difficulties of learning the dance. Yet, it was good fun. The teacher was quite enthusiastic despite the class’ extremely amateurish attempts at being Enrique Iglesias.

So I hung in there. Slowly a few faces started getting familiar with a twice-weekly viewing. Some of the folks had come with other friends of theirs. Some, like me, were there by themselves. We began greeting each other and making light conversation. Till the day came when P invited us all over for a birthday drink to a nice place in the neighbourhood.

I landed up, wondering how it would turn out since I had never hung out with anyone other than my ‘friends’. ‘Friends’ defined as people I knew from school, college or early days of working. It turned out to be good fun. I felt terribly guilty for not having bought a birthday present and made amends quickly by contributing for the cake. I did not really speak to everyone, maybe just P and a couple of more people. I did remember having a good time that evening.

Soon, we began to hang out more and more frequently. Till one fine day, we realized that we had become a ‘gang’.

When I look back, I realize that everyone in the gang had their own little story on needing friends back then. P and J were already good friends but were more than happy to find a big gang. J was getting out of a bad marriage. EX was rediscovering life in his late – 40s after having spent a lifetime dedicated to work and a tough personal life. C loved dancing and was looking for a diversion from the routine of marriage, a job and two kids. S was trying to woo P but the gang seemed to provide a nice cushion for the ups and downs of romance. Other people also came and went but somehow the core gang remained as it was.

It was a very motley crowd. Our age ranged from the late – 20s to the late – 40s. Our educational backgrounds and job profiles could not have been more different. Our social and economic backgrounds were not particularly homogeneous either. I guess we all just loved doing new things and hanging out with people and shooting the breeze.

The gang could be depended upon to provide weekend entertainment, and sometimes weeknight entertainment too. We soon became a travel group, exploring nearby places. We were shopping companions. We readily checked out new restaurants. Everyone joined in crazy but fun activities like doing a hash run or doing a car rally in a dinky, old Maruti 800. The gang provided endless support when something was bothering someone. Or something bad happened to someone. Like the death of a spouse or a bad breakup or a big family issue.

It has been over five years now (or maybe longer). I have moved cities, gotten married and can no longer enjoy the day-to-day companionship of this bunch. Yet, I make it a point to meet up whenever I am in town and spend the rest of my time persuading one or all of them to visit me.

The gang taught me that getting out of school and college need not necessarily spell the end of endearing friendships. You can still make friends as you grown older. You can make friends with people seemingly different from you. And you can stay friends despite the distance and the differences.

One of them sent a friendship day mail in the weekend. Normally something that the cynical me would have laughed at as yet another Archies initiative. Yet thinking back of how it all began and where it has gone so far, I had to admit it was something to be celebrated.

Happy Friendship day

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

2011-08-08T15:25:00.003+05:30

Rating - Read if you have the time

Thanks to an attempt at exchanging books with voracious reader friends instead of just buying them all the time, I ended up reading this book.

The Colour Purple starts off well enough in its straightforward and unapologetic story of a young black girl in post-civil war America. The first few pages statesmatter-of-factly that the protagonist, Cecie’s, ‘Pa’ has been repeatedly raping her and has given away the two children produced as a result of this.

From here the book slowly begins the story of Cecie. Cecie’s forced marriage to Mr (the name is never told) primarily for the purpose of looking after the latter’s children. Mr’s love for his glamourous, singing diva mistress, Shug Avery. Cecie’s one love in life – her sister Nettie and the disappearance of Nettie.

As the tale continues, Shug Avery begins to help Cecie grow as a person. From accepting her lot in a non-confrontational way, Cecie starts to pay more attention to her own needs. On the way you meet a lot of interesting characters like Mr’s son Harpo, who dithers between treating the woman he loves with respect and treating her like filth as his father is wont to do. Harpo’s wife Sophie, is one of the book’s most charming characters – someone who is born into a world where black women are second class citizens but strongly believes otherwise. Sophie’s brothers and sisters also have uncharacteristically tremendous amounts of self respect.

I liked the beginning. The lackadaisical manner in which Cecie observes her own life, as if all the injustice and violence is happening to someone else and not her, strangely makes you empathise with the character. Ironically, only as Cecie begins to take control of her life, the book begins to falter. The author takes on too many things and it comes out a bit too pat.

A quick Wiki check tells me the book has won a lot of awards and has been popular enough to be made into a movie. For good reasons too. Some stories, no matter how many times you have heard them before, need to be retold again and again. Yet, as a book, I would say it is good but not brilliant.

Green Power

2011-08-05T15:00:00.002+05:30

I have long considered carrying a camera along with me to capture candid moments. The temptation is usually strong when I see some ridiculously misspelt word in a slogan or shop name. Now though I think I may actually end up doing so.

Simply to capture the little spurts of greenery in Mumbai.

The chawls near my house all have faded flower pots neatly lined up in the tiny balconies of the crumbling façade.

The big houses facing noisy Peddar Road, have a row of greenery in special stands installed outside their windows.

In the crowded Lower Parel area where concrete and construction rules, I spotted a small, lovingly tended plant next to a tiny front door as a sea of traffic did its best to kill the plant.

Looking out of a restaurant window, I noticed plants lined up on the concrete compound wall of the adjacent building.

For a city whose denizens do not think twice about spitting everywhere and throwing trash everywhere and whose real estate is so valued that the concept of balconies is going the way of Dodos, I am amazed that there is space in people’s homes and hearts for a little bit of greenery.

Sometimes Mumbai totally surprises me.

Twenty three years too late

2011-08-02T11:53:00.002+05:30

Have you been through geography classes that involved endless hours staring at an India map?

Colouring the mountains, the fertile plains, the rivers and what not?

Trying hard to remember exactly which were the states that went into the North-Eastern bit?

In one such Geography class, a ten-year old me was seated in front of yet another map.

This time of West Bengal

Marking out the districts in the state.

I diligently coloured and named all of them.

Then doubt began to gnaw my mind.

If Calcutta (as it was then called) was supposed to be the largest city in the country, then why was the district of 24 Parganas larger than Calcutta?

Clearly after a whole month of classes, the concept of districts being distinct from cities was not something I had caught on.

And so I sat with a completed test paper on my desk, hovering over the map. Till I finally decided to just create a new district called ‘Calcutta’.

Of course the paper came back with a big red mark provided by an exasperated teacher.

Today I read that Kolkata (as it is called now) will start functioning as a district.

Call me visionary?

Better – A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

2011-07-25T16:27:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

I first came across Atul Gawande a few years ago when I picked up a ridiculously discounted The Best American Essays of 2003 from the Landmark sale. (A slight detour since I will never finish my growing collection of the The Best American Essays and review it here but its existence needs to be broadcast. This awesome book is released yearly and is a collection of really good essays published in various magazines and journals that particular year in the U.S. The topics can be wide in range or circle around a particular theme. Either way, the reading is great.) Gawande’s essay on learning how to be a doctor was funny and touching.

So when I happened upon this book, I promptly bought it.

It is quite interesting to read about a field which you constantly see only one side of – as a worrying patient. The fact that for doctors this is a profession and they would have professional concerns the way the rest of us do had never actively crossed my mind. The book was a wonderfully guided tour into unchartered territory.

Gawande groups his essays around three topics.

The first part, Diligence, is an eye-opener on how the small things can save millions of lives. The essay about doctors washing hands between patients, the continuous improvements that hospitals keep trying to do to get doctors to wash their hands, the historical figures who were ahead of their times in identifying the absence of handwashing as a source of spreading infection..all of this makes you think about the larger place a very simple act can have in the world.

The next part on Doing Right has essays on doctor litigations, maintaining professionalism and dignity of patients when they are naked/nearly naked and so on. The most moving essay in this part was on doctors who work in administrating the death penalty. A philosophical discussion on how as a citizen you may want some people to really be given the injection, but then as a doctor you are betraying your profession’s fundamental principles to save people. I got wondering how it felt for a normal human being to have to deliberately kill another human being.

The final part is on Ingenuity, which includes a piece on the amazing ways in which underequipped, understaffed hospitals in rural India cope with a flood of patients. From having berated government hospitals, it made me think about the few good men (and women) who do the best knowing that they cannot possibly do the theoretical best for their patients.

Tucked in somewhere was also an interesting piece on why C-sections are now used more commonly compared to the 60s in America. I thought all the arguments made perfect sense.

Infact his arguments throughout the book are well-presented, well-thought out and though-provoking. Gawande does not always have answers to questions but it is nice to hear the questions that doctors face. Besides, for a book that dwells into the complex world of people saving lives, the issues are seen logically and somewhat, gently. Not to mention, Gawande is an engaging writer.

This was probably my first unputdownable non-fiction book (not counting the masala-filled Barbarians at the Gate and similar near-fiction stuff).

The culture of fear

2011-07-21T10:46:00.001+05:30

When the first news of the bomb blasts at Opera House, Dadar and Zaveri Bazaar hit, I faintly remember having a feeling of déjà vu. I had already gone through the motions before – of staying at home, checking where immediate family was and asking them to come home, of answering SMSes and calls from family and friends checking to see if we were OK.

It is now, much later that the impact of the blast is slowly beginning to sink in. I went to a mall to catch a movie on Saturday and took a long time to enter parking. As I was waiting for my turn at the vehicle security check, I noticed that the boot of the slightly dilapidated looking vehicle in front of me was wedged tight and the security guy was struggling to open it. For a second, I visualized the boot blowing up and releasing flames filmi-style. Of course, life continued in its ordinary course.

Or maybe I should not say ‘of course’. I should say ‘luckily’

And I absolutely hate to think that I have to say ‘luckily’.

We live in peaceful times. In a country that has no civil war going on. And which has its border fights, but nothing that threatens to turn into WWIII or even a regional war.

Yet, why do we have to live in such fear?

It seems very normal now for malls to be frisking each person and checking each bag. It seems common to walk past detectors all the time. What was confined to airports once upon a time, is now a part of daily life. It is accepted that we will go through elaborate motions of security.

For what?

The blasts have laid open the fact it is not these motions that we go through that protects its citizens. It is a whole lot more. From the press that has been going on, it is clear that the elaborate infrastructure arrangements which were promised to Mumbai in the aftermath of 26/11 never came to pass. The elite force that was created for the city’s protection, cannot be called elite given the treatment they have been given. And finally, the whole intelligence set-up apparently still cannot catch possible security targets.

Yet, we have the powers-that-be rushing to the scene (buffeted on both sides by plenty of security cars) and looking properly grim and giving the same assurances. Do they even mean what they say? Do they even care that the ordinary Mumbai citizen now walks around with fear clutching his heart?

It is a really sad state of affairs.

And I, Mumbai citizen, am very very angry.

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

2011-07-18T19:45:00.008+05:30

Rating - Read

For anyone who has not read Amitav Ghosh, I can confidently say ‘stop reading. Log onto a book site and order him. Resume reading’. Ghosh must be among the best writers when it comes to weaving tales backed by really strong research. Everything sounds authentic and you sink into the stories he paints for you, pulled in by the wonderfully vivid descriptions. Everytime I read Ghosh, I am transported to his scenes and often find myself startled to emerge into the here and now.

Sea of Poppies is no less. The tale is set in British India around the time opium was being grown in large belts of Bihar around the Ganges. Deeti is a high caste opium farmer, watching the days go by with her opium-addicted husband unable to provide enough to even repair the roof of their house. Zachary Reid, a free American born of a black mother and a white father finds himself raising from carpenter to second mate in a ship. Paulette, daughter of a French botanist, becomes an orphan and is taken in by a kind British burra sahib, Mr Burnham. Her Indian nanny’s son and her childhood friend, Joru is aiming to become a sailor. Burnham establishes his strong-hold on the opium and coolie business, assisted ably by his Indian advisor. Raja Ratan Halder, a zemindar comfortably ensconced in age-old traditions is beginning to realize the might of the British raj. In the midst of all this is the Ibis, having finished her time as a slave galley and now being outfitted to carry coolies to Mauritius.

Each of these threads slowly begins to come together to form the first part of the trilogy. The book jumps from one thread to the next but at no point do you feel that any thread is less interesting than the others. You greedily consume the story of Deeti but as easily move to find out what is happening with Raja Ratan Halder.

Someone had mentioned that the language of this book is tough to comprehend, and unquestioningly I had also ignored this book for a while. What a fool I was.

The book’s strongest point lies in its language. The English characters speak a version of English that generously borrows from the Hindustani language they would have dealt with at that point in time. Sample this - ‘there is a roti in your choola’, a Hindi transfiguration of the English expression ‘bun in your oven’ to suggest a character could be expecting. Even though a lot of these words would have been utterly bonafide English usage back then, knowing Hindi made the reading a lot easier. The Indian characters speak in Bhojpuri or Bengali but we get the translation of this. The lascars, the most interesting bunch of all, speak in a sea-language that draws from a whole range of languages and is utterly charming.

The characterization feels real and is an eye-opener on how people were back then. What happened when someone tried to interact with someone from another caste, how the burra-sahibs viewed Indians, how the English-speaking Indians viewed themselves and maintained their ‘caste’ while kow-towing to the British, how the British viewed themselves in relation to the opium trade. More importantly, none of the characters succumb to a caricature of how they should be. Each character is his or her own while maintaining the broader background from which he or she comes. The interactions between each of the characters also maitains this broader background.

The book sets the mood for the next book in the series, River of Smoke (which I now can’t wait to get my hands on).

If are an Amitav Ghosh fan, then you must have already read this. If not, now is a good time to start.

p.s. Thanks to Z for reminding me of this book’s existence and lending it to me.

Sleeping beauty

2011-07-15T15:27:00.000+05:30

It was one of those intense moments of self-awareness.

Sis was telling about her work-from-home job and I eagerly asked her ‘so do you nap in the afternoons?’

The spark in my eye was discernible for a mile around.

‘No’, Sis mentioned nonchalantly, nearly causing me to fall off the chair.

‘But why?!!!! You work for someone in the U.S. You work from India. You take a short nap in the afternoon. No one is the wiser’ I worked out the logic for her.

‘Er..because I don’t like to sleep in the afternoons. Remember, you are the one who enjoys sleeping’ she replied

Voila. Just like that the truth that had been starring me in the face, was released.

I love to sleep.

Mind you, when I say I love to sleep, it does not indicate a life of sleeping-in on weekends till noon or oversleeping and waking up with a groggy head. It simply means, when it is time to sleep, I sleep.

I do not stay up too late partying or watching TV. I sleep.

Weekend afternoons are not spent cleaning the house or reading a book or watching reruns on TV. I just sleep.

I get my 8 hours of beauty sleep in the night and then an hour more in the weekend.

The evidence was visible from early on. As a baby I was apparently a pro at going off to sleep and then waking up well after the sun had risen and the birds had started twittering etc. My naïve parents were fooled into thinking that it was a cinch managing a baby and soon enough, along came Sis. Ironically, Sis turned out to be the type who would wake up at 5 a.m. and insist someone play with her.

Sometime around the age of two, I insisted on getting my own bed so I could sleep with arms outstretched, instead of being squeezed into a bed with the whole family.

From class 9 to the end of graduation, classes got over in the afternoons giving me enough time to catch an afternoon nap. If the occasional school activity kept me busy, I still managed to squeeze in forty minutes before tea time. Days when I did not manage even that, saw me surly and red-eyed.

B-School was a much bigger challenge than anything I had seen though. Most people gave up on sleep in order to get acceptable grades and still have a decent social life. It was not unusual for people to work all night and then doze in classes.

Not me. Early on, I figured out how much sleep I was willing to sacrifice for grades. The answer turned out to be ‘none’. In the first year, the compulsory courses ensured I had to skip the post-prandial siesta occasionally. But in the second year, I chose my courses wisely. In the only one that was held between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., I nearly lose a grade point for having inadequate attendance.

As for late night studying, that was unheard of unless one meant 11 p.m. Friends soon learnt to walk past my room making as little noise as possible during these sleeptimes.

Unfortunately, since then, the precious noontime siesta has not been a part of my life except on weekends.

Come Saturday afternoon, I draw the curtains, prop up my pillows and carry a book to the bed. Then as the effect of lunch takes over and the sun becomes a hazy light beyond the curtains, I gently slide further and further down the pillows. Finally, my eyes are closed, I am drooling on the pillow and snoring like a Hippo with a flu. D usually tiptoes around me at these times, having learnt very early in our relationship that waking me was unnecessarily putting his life in peril.

Given the mounting stack of evidence, one would have thought I would have started putting down ‘sleeping’ as a hobby early in life.

Interestingly enough, no. I always assumed sleeping meant this much to everyone.

Till my sister shook me up by revealing the scandalous truth that she was rather indifferent about it.

Strangely enough, learning the truth has had quite a happy effect on me. Perhaps a younger me would have felt guilty about enjoying something as inactive and non-intellectual and unchallenging as sleep. The older and wiser me though relishes the fact that here is an activity that involves zero effort from me, is a pleasure to do and can easily fill time when bored.

Weekend naptime, here I come. Zzzzzz.

The Girl who stirred the hornet's nest by Steig Larsson

2011-07-08T17:00:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

The first book in the Millennium series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, introduced us to the series. It was a stunning novel. Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist, is a 20 something girl, who has been under legal guardianship most of her life due to an incident from her childhood. Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist looking to lie low after his story and credibility on an investigative journalism piece are ripped apart. Enter Vanger, an aged, wealthy patriarch wanting to solve the mystery of his grand-daughter’s death from long ago. Lisbeth and Mikael paths cross each other and they become allies/friends/what you will.

The whole set up is in Sweden and the book immediately immerses you into tongue-twister names which you have rarely heard before. The pace is quick and heart thumping and the violence, unabashed in its full glory.

When I finished the first novel, I could not wait to get my hands on the next one, The Girl who Played with Fire. This book is a continuation from the next novel and dwells more into Lisbeth Salandar’s background and the reader is exposed to some stunning discoveries. In parallel, Blomkvist takes on an investigation on sex-trafficking. Given the topic of Book II, the stories are fairly heart-wrenching and stomach-revolting. The violence is more gruesome, if that is possible.

Which is why despite wanting to find out what happens in the final part of the series, I decided to take a break from the series. In retrospect, I really needn’t have.

Book III, The Girl who stirred the Hornet’s Nest, ties up loose ends without unleashing fresh bouts of violence. Most of this book goes into providing a background of Swedish law, security police, governance, parliament etc and what needs to be done with Salander. Coming from the Indian culture of accepted corruption and the casual misuse of power, I found it increasingly hard to believe that the option of the Swedish establishment punishing an old crime rather than hiding it away could even be considered in the book. The book eventually ends with the answer to the question ‘Will Lisbeth get justice’.

The series on the whole is definitely a must-read (a no-brainer given its position on best seller charts). What I liked about the series was

- set in Sweden, a country I have not seen as a backdrop in novels
- a female protagonist who is incredibly strong and quick-witted and whose character feels true despite the low probability of actually meeting someone like that in my daily life.
- plots that keep your interest going with some detailed fleshing out
- no apologies for the kind of violence that the stories narrate. Most of them are based on crime statistics.

The points all tick off well, but most importantly the mix is served neatly.

What the @#&*

2011-07-07T10:05:00.004+05:30

Anyone watching any English channel regularly must be familiar with the censorship of ‘bad’ words that go on. The English subtitles provided in the channels all miraculously swallow up words like ‘fuck’ or replace ‘crap’ with ‘shit’ (or maybe it is the other way around).

I am most amused by this editing. Who is supposed to benefit from this I wonder?

Clearly it can’t be for kids. I certainly hope not considering some of the serials subject to this include ‘Dexter’ – a gripping tale about a serial killer who kills other serial killers. Which kid is watching this! Or for that matter which kid is watching the cynical ‘Family Guy’ or ‘How I met your Mother’ where the lead characters deal with relationship issues and one of the characters lives largely for sex.

On the other hand, surely we adults don’t need the policing.

Most times it is amusing. Like when ‘sex’ is replaced by ‘love’ in sentences like ‘It is just about sex, isn’t it?’ As you can well imagine, the whole context of the scene changes when you do the substitution.

Sometimes, it is plain annoying. Try watching a Guy Ritchie movie where the volume dips everytime an obscenity is used and your head will spin from the rapid changes in volume.

Of course, like everything else in our country that defies logic, after all this careful policing, we have five year olds singing the hit number ‘Bhaag DK Bose’.

Makes you go 'What the @#&* ' ?

Number9dream by David Mitchell

2011-07-06T15:24:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

Number9dream tells the story of Eiji Miyake, a nineteen year old Japanese village boy, who comes to big-city Tokyo in search of his father. Back in her youth, his mother had been the mistress of a rich man and had ended up abandoned, with twins and an allowance. Eiji and his now-dead sister Anju were brought up by their maternal grandmother, his mother being too unstable to raise kids. As he approaches his 20th birthday, Eiji decides to find who his father is.

Eiji knows practically nothing about his father and starts the search from the building occupied by the lawyer who handles his father’s affairs. As Eiji moves along in his search, he gets involved in all sorts of experiences. He gets a job and a place to stay. He gets mixed up with the Japanese mafia equivalent, Yakuza. He moves to another job. He finds a girlfriend. He experiences the kindness of part-strangers. As the book nears its end, Eiji moves towards embracing his reality as best as he can

The book by itself is a largely neat read. Eiji’s experiences take you through various aspects of Japanese society and boy is that country interesting! The book’s selling point is however not meant to be its storytelling alone but also its structure. Like its famous cousin, Cloud Atlas, this book also follows an interesting structure but does not pull it off quite as well. Each chapter in the book alternates between Eiji’s primary goal and some other event happening to Eiji in his mind or in reality. For instance, the first chapter jumps between Eiji’s imagination of how he meets his father in rather bizarre circumstances, and his actual confinement to a coffee house, too scared to even enter the building in which his father’s lawyer is located. The chapter on the mafia was my favourite, loaded with Kill Bill-style imagery.

This is one of those books where you go with the flow and let the author lead you between the various strands, enjoying each strand for its imagination.

If you are new to David Mitchell, I would strong recommend you start off with Cloud Atlas. Then, you can come back to this one. I dithered between a ‘Read’ and a ‘Read if you have the time’ rating but decided the entertainment value is adequate to give it the benefit of doubt and move it to ‘Read’.

Sausage and Fresh basil Pizza

2011-06-30T11:39:00.006+05:30

My brush with cooking has at worst been a disaster and at best, satisfactory. This is largely on account of inexperience and finding a million other things more interesting to do than being tied to the kitchen.

Then, I got incentivized. Two things happened. First was a resolution to go closer to my cultural roots when it came to eating. Thus began Saturday morning breakfasts of idlis and dosas and adais and now, pesarattu. Since I just had to soak all the ingredients and the bai did the necessary grinding, chopping up onions etc, this was a breeze. After the first few times, we have even learnt how to make a dosa in less than 5 minutes. (The good cooks can refrain from laughing at this point…)

Second was sheer boredom from eating plain old dal and sabzi that the bai churns out on a daily basis. A mid-week non-roti routine is now beginning to take shape. Most times the bai makes pav bhaji or paratha or some such non-roti food. Once in a while, I have wielded the spoon myself (largely caused by useless programming on Star World on weeknights. Bring back How I met your Mother to the 8 p.m. slot, I say)

This week, finally one of those experiments met with great success and after the stories of my non-cooking, this deserves some recording.

It all began with seeing an episode of Castle which had the lead character eat a sausage and fresh basil pizza that looked yummy enough to be grabbed out of the TV screen. There was some basil and cheddar cheese leftover in the fridge after the previous week’s experiment with pasta (which we will avoid discussing). I had got whole wheat pizza bases and now we had found the exact thing we wanted to eat. D promptly picked up the other ingredients in between rushing around to office and other places. I trawled online, did not find the exact recipe I wanted and decided to strike out on my own with a combination of recipes (Feeling exactly like how Columbus must have felt back then, navigating strange territory with primitive tools)

Ingredients

For the pizza (serves 2)

2 whole wheat pizza bases (ours were a bit larger than quarter plates)
Tomato sauce (recipe follows)
Sausages (we picked up smoked pork sausages that were pre-cooked) – to the amount of topping you would like. ½ packet should be more than enough
Fresh basil leaves – ¼ cup
Cheese – 1 cup (we used Cheddar but I presume Mozarella is standard)
2 tsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

For the tomato sauce

½ kg tomatoes
1 onion – chopped
5 garlic – chopped
1 tsp chilli power
1 tsp oregano
2 tsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt to taste

Preparation

Tomato Sauce –

Boil the tomatoes in water for 10 minutes.
Remove from stove, cool and take off skin, deseed and grind coarsely
Fry chopped onion in olive oil till light brown
Add chopped garlic and fry for a half a minute more
Add chilli power, oregano and salt
Finally add the tomatoes

Now comes the part I picked up from enthusiastic cook HaAThi. I covered the frying pan and let the sauce simmer till the water had evaporated. This took about 20 – 25 minutes.

It is useful to let all the water boil away since a watery sauce makes the pizza base soggy.

Pizza –

Step 1 – Remove sausages from casing and cut the sausages into circular pieces. Shallow fry in some olive oil till it gets brown.

If you have got pre-cooked sausages, then you can skip the shallow-frying

Step 2 –

Chop the basil leaves into long shreds. I found an easy way to do this online but unfortunately lost the link. Anyhow – you arrange the basil leaves one on top of another and then roll up from stem part to tip. You have something that looks like a cigar now. Chop breadth wise. When the basil unfurls, it is automatically in long pieces

Step 3 -

Coat the pizza bases with 1 tsp olive oil each.
Divide the tomato sauce into two portions and apply to each pizza base on the oiled side
Strew half a cup of cheese over the sauce (I actually grated directly onto the base instead of grating separately into a cup and then transferring. Much quicker this way).
Arrange the sausages on top of the pizza.
Sprinkle the basil leaves
Add the rest of the cheese on top

Step 4 –

I have a microwave cum oven. So just followed the directions to use it as per the oven’s guide book. Which was 600 MW + 220 degrees.

If you have a normal oven, apparently the way to do it is to pre-heat to 400 degrees and then put the pizza in and bake for 7 – 10 minutes at 400 degrees.

In my case, I kept the first pizza for 7 minutes and it was a bit overcooked.

So I kept the second one for 5 minutes, with the intention of increasing the time if needed but it turned out just fine and yummy.

Step 5 –

Do the victory dance. Proclaim that perhaps the time has come to sign up for Masterchef. Disregard all previous evidence (here, here, here and here) and say that you are an intelligent cook who can synthesize various recipes and tips and come up with the perfect pizza. But secretly thank god for smoked sausages since it tastes good on practically anything.

Hiking up Daulatabad Fort

2011-06-27T20:29:00.002+05:30

My first visit to Ajanta-Ellora was a rushed day trip, fitted in between some demanding schedules to maximize time. A bunch of us arrived by overnight train into Aurangabad and after dragging our half-asleep selves into a car, managed to visit both Ajanta and Ellora in the course of a day. However, there was not enough time to ‘peep into’ Daulatabad Fort. I am glad I did not consign Daulatabad to just a quick dekko.

This time around, with D in tow, we had a proper weekend to explore the region and Daulatabad Fort got its own special place in the itinerary.

We had been warned that the Fort involved some climbing and so we smartly scheduled our visit for the morning. The weather was perfect – rainy weather, without the rains and the humidity. This helped us a lot during the day because despite being tired, we never felt hot, sweaty and bothered.

The Fort has a fairly longish history, with various rulers having used it over the years and adding their own special contribution. The structure as it is now began evolving with the Yadavas in 1180s, was hijacked by Allaudin Khilji, and under Tughlaq was capital city for a brief while in 1320s.

The best way to discover the fort seemed to be to ramble around and explore the small buildings, tanks, passageways et al and slowly meander to the top. We picked up one of the cheap ‘guide’ books that gave a map of the area and named all the structures and sometimes even gave a brief history/description. This turned out to be a useful buy since we could move at our own pace without a guide and still not be lost.

The entrance was quite impressive with a whole range of cannons. From there, we could see a couple of water storage tanks that looked absolutely beautiful. The surrounding greenery was a strange combination of manicured lawns and the general forest. Near one of the tanks, we could hear really loud peacock calls in the wild and managed to spot one jumping onto a tree (I did not realize peacocks could do this).

From the tanks, it was onto the Bharat Mata pavilion. The open courtyard was flanked by beautiful, broken pillars with intricate work and you could hear your voice echo all around the courtyard. In one end was a sincere but amateurish statue of Bharat Mata, erected by the Nizams of Hyderabad (who last owned this place) when Hyderabad became a part of independent India.

The small, well-maintained lawns made an appearance again and would have been a lovely spot for a picnic, but for the few monkeys hanging around.

Next stop was at Chand Minar, built in the Iranian style and looking quite unostentatious.

From here, the actual climbing bit slowly began. Through a series of easy steps, we passed a couple of grand doorways and landed up at ‘Chini Mahal’. The remanants of the China Clay tiles from which this place got its name could still be seen. It was supposedly a jail for royal prisoners, but did not look particularly fancy to me. Slightly further up, mounted on its own special platform was a cannon with a ram head, that could swirl and target for miles around.

At this stage, we reached the moat. The moat was one of the Fort’s many defence mechanisms and had two bridges – a metal one created in the early 1950s to replace a crocodile-leather wrapable bridge and another stone bridge at a lower level that could be immersed by raising the water level when enemies came. Needless to say the moat was once filled with blood thirsty crocodiles but now was a slimy green with an island of mineral water bottles.

Crossing over to the other side and through some passages, the next defence mechanism came into view. A tricky and pitch-dark 50-mtr passage that could lead unknowing travelers to immediate death if they took the wrong turn. Luckily an alternate route had been built in the bright sunlight and we could avoid the ancient traps.

Up and up we went, climbing various steps, entering darks rooms to climb even more steps..this could have been like being in Harry Potter but for the hordes of tourists scurrying their way busily past the sights and sounds with the single goal of reaching the top and ticking the Fort off their ‘to-do’ list for the day.

We did not scurry so much. Unfortunately it was as much on account to pause to take in the greenery and birdcalls and the structures, as it was to catch our poor urban-bred breath. Older people, women in high heels, men carrying babies in their arms, all of them walked past us while we pretended to enjoy the view, huffing and puffing.

Eventually we reached the topmost layer of the fort. The only standing structure here was Baradari, a roomy 12-arched remarkably well-preserved structure built by Shahjehan. The wind was quite nice and brisk and we pressed on. Though this was the top and we could see our car as a tiny white dot somewhere on the ground, we were still not at the very top. After the Baradari, we went past an old cave where some holymen were said to have meditated, past an old cannon and to the pinnacle – where the Indian flag is hoisted on Independence Day.

What was meant to be a 45 minute walk had turned into a 2 hour climb. It is probably one of the best short-hiking experiences I have had. The fort was engaging, the views around pleasing and the walk, tiring in a pleasant manner.

Definitely worth a visit.

IPL watching by a cricket non-fan

2011-06-17T12:23:00.002+05:30

If I remember it right, I was the one who suggested watching IPL live. This is pretty ironic considering I know amazingly little about the game. However, I had heard from all and sundry that IPL belongs to the (to paraphrase Tata Steel’s ads from yore) ‘We also play cricket’ school of thought. Besides I had emerged fresh and unscathed from watching an exciting India World Cup final. D and the Ma-in-law, both cricket fans, the latter more so than the former, were only happy to agree to the plan.

When we landed outside Wankhede stadium, we were all waving our hands breezily. The ticket said ‘no bags, no camera, no food, no drinks, just come in your clothes and all the money in your bank’.

After reading between the lines, I concluded that binoculars were not prohibited. I was not questioned by anyone except for the lady at our twenty seventh security check before entry. I pointed to the rules and then pointed out that her predecessors did not find anything amis. I was trying to look like the serious cricket fan who did not want to miss the intricacies of each ball. Though secretly, I was hoping to watch in close-up, Nita Ambani jumping again into Harbhajan Singh’s arms or such other exciting events.

Our first stop was for food. After dropping some of the inheritance we would pass onto potential heirs here, we moved on to spend the rest at the memorabilia stall. I got a flashing headband of Mumbai Indians, the home team. D got a loud noise-making device that ensured that I stayed out of ear range during the match. Ma-in-law desisted. Later on, we realized why.

Mumbai Indians were playing the Deccan Charges. We were really early – 6.30 p.m. for an 8 p.m.match. The binocs were put to immediate use ogling at Ishant Sharma.

By the time 8 p.m. came, the seats were filled, the dinkchak dance music was loud, the cheerleaders had begun their routine and the stadium was throbbing with excitement. I was waving the free Mumbai Indians flag like mad. If only to create some breeze in the stifling heat of the stadium. Despite being located so close to Marine Drive, there was not a single suspicion of a breeze and I was convinced that I would slowly bake in my seat.

The game began and the first over was bowled. At this point, I paused sufficiently long from all the food I was stuffing into my face, to express my surprise about the batsmen changing sides! Before I could launch into a theory of how IPL was corrupting cricket to introduce some downtime for ads and cheerleaders to dance, D and Ma-in-law both hit their hands to their heads. Oops, apparently that is a regular cricket rule. Clearly, my ignorance ran deeper than I thought.

Which also explained, why after the 5th over, once I had taken a close look at Nita Ambani, memorized all the dance routines of the cheer leaders and become too sick to eat more food, I started to feel bored.

Time paused in front of my eyes. Each ball looked like an eternity. I began to think of bad jokes like ‘why call it an over if it is never going to get over!’ (pause for proud, self-congratulatory chuckle). I started to make mental lists of what I wanted to with my life, where I would like to go on holiday, what other furniture we needed in the house and so on. In between, I took in Malinga coming over to our part of the world to field, and the audience going wild with their calls of ‘Malinga Malinga’. The man could have waved, but no. Just a wee shrug of the shoulders (a photo of which I took in my mobile approx ten times to get as much out of this episode as possible).

I had almost decided that I would go home when the interval came. I jumped out of my seat and ran to the food stalls. Immediately there was fresh air, a cool breeze and the welcoming sight of food. (It was incredible, the amount of food I was able to eat). Once fed, I figured the match was anyway half over and it couldn’t last much longer.

So back to the second half. Deccan Chargers playing surprising well. Or rather Mumbai Indians batting like a bunch of school kids just learning to bat. Wickets began to collapse left, right and centre. This lead to a rather morose crowd. What with the music having been switched off to comply with Mumbai rules, the match became rather lackluster. The only person in the whole auditorium who looked rather pleased with the state of affairs was Ma-in-law. Turns out she is a closet Deccan Chargers fan.

It was quite evident that the Mumbai Indians were going to lose and they could have very well done the decent thing and gotten all out in 15 overs. But oh no, they wouldn’t. We had to wait for the entire twenty overs to reach the ending that had looked inevitable from the 2nd wicket. By this time it was already well past 11. I suspect though, not everyone shared my view. I could see most people (including D) perked up a bit when there was a shower of runs in the last few overs.

The crowds began to pour out on Marine Drive the minute the match got over. The competition to find a cab began.

I had carefully saved up my expensive memorabilia and now, after more than a month, can safely conclude that it has gone into the clutter that is threatening to overrun our house and make us consider moving to a bigger place.

On the whole, it was a rather good experience. Earlier, when people used to discuss cricket, I used to merely nod along. Now, I have made it a point to drop ‘so when we were watching IPL the other day…’.

Not bad at all.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

2011-06-16T15:42:00.002+05:30

Rating - Read

Whenever I go home and spend a couple of days with the parents, I automatically regress by roughly twenty years. I act immature, eat lots of food, and spend the whole day reading and sleeping. This also means that I usually promptly put down the book I am reading and switch to ‘easy to read’ stuff and there is no better ‘easy to read’ stuff than Agatha Christie. The prolific author represented a growing up milestone where you shifted from books about kids solving mysteries to books about adults solving mysteries.

While I have graduated to darker and more insightful mystery novels, Christie never fails to thrill. This time at home, I read a whole bunch of short stories, some of them featuring the famous ‘Mr Harley Quinn’ (a character that still makes me feel uneasy with its ethereal presence). Back in Bombay, I googled for her most famous novel and a lot of sites threw up the above name. Surprisingly, in all these years, I had never read the book.

The novel is vintage Christie and vintage Poirot. The plot revolves around a rich man, Roger Ackroyd, being murdered in his own house. Just before he is murdered, he finds out that the wealthy widow he had been pursuing has committed suicide. He also finds out that the widow has killed herself out of remorse from poisoning her husband and having to live with the consequence. The house is full of relatives, friends, domestic servants and so on. Poirot, who has retired in this village, steps in to assist the local police force to solve the mystery.

Christie works on her usual device, planting clues in a manner designed to mislead you. She does this masterfully till the murderer is finally revealed.

I will not write much more about the story itself since that would risk revealing more than necessary.

However, I must say that I noticed something in the book that I had not noticed in my naïve youth. When Poirot takes on the case, he is careful to suggest to the Inspector-in-charge that the latter shall get all the glory that will come from solving the case. I have always remembered Poirot as rather proud of his abilities. I never quite realized that even he had to deal with the politics of his circumstances. Ah, I am older and wiser and read between the lines.

The other interesting point was how much Poirot sounds like a Belgian created by a non-Belgian. Having interacted closely with the French, I have started noticing their penchant for saying things in a French way. This usually includes awkward grammar and the French pronunciation of an English word (eg ‘Idee’ for ‘idea’). Poirot, (though admittedly not French) has perfect sentence construction and the only French he uses come in full sentences. Not that it takes away the charm of his character but again, I am older and wiser I guess.

On the book itself, I am not sure if this is her best book since over the years, at different ages I have been impressed by different books of her. It is definitely one good read and a perfect book for a rainy day when you have decided to stay indoors.

Talk time

2011-06-13T15:52:00.005+05:30

If anyone had the good fortune of watching last night’s premier episode of ‘India’s Most Desirable’, then they must have gone to bed in good spirits after rolling on the floor laughing.

One look at host, Simi Garewal’s face and you knew that a lot of entertainment value would come simply from that. Simi was talking (and sometimes even laughing) throughout the episode but you never saw her actually move any muscle on her face to achieve this! How incredibly botox-ed could she have been to look like a cyborg on a beta-test.

This episode featured Ranbir Kapoor (“RK”), among the latest brood of actors to climb the Bollywood star chart. The gossip goes that this episode was a tit-for-tat to erstwhile girlfriend, actress Deepika. Deepika had suggested on an earlier talkshow that RK was a playboy of sorts. Apparently the Kapoor family machinery decided that they had to restore the ‘achha ladka hai’ image of RK.

And how!

The talk show turned out to be a prepatory session for something like ‘Rakhi Sawant ki Shaadi/Swayamvar’

First was the section on RK’s family. In a nutshell – a dad trying hard to play the image of ‘jolly go lucky’ father and a mom to beat all Indian moms with the ‘my son is the best' obsession. The end result was a long rethink about Ekta Kapoor's portrayls of mother-in-laws as possessive and devious. Perhaps not as unrealistic as one would imagine.

Onto the section on RK’s hobbies – a little ditty played on the guitar from Simi’s hits. Simi cooing delightedly (and eerily without actually moving her mouth).

Next onto the astrology section (Come on, we are traditional, we are Indian). Imagine Mallika Shehrawat in ‘Hiss’ as the snake lady. Now imagine if she had just finished consuming a whole deer and had saved it up for digestion later. (Pythons are known to do this).This is how the astrology lady looked. Python-Astrology lady gushed about RK meeting the love of his life soon and getting married in a couple of years.

Finally onto RK’s descriptions of what he would want in a girl and what kind of a boyfriend he would be.

At this point, I was sitting with my mouth wide-open. When I am about to be given insights of an upcoming actor, especially one who is reasonably talented and has a movie background, I fully expect to hear something about what he thought of his profession and his art. Instead I was watching a matrimonial ad of the type that would never make me click 'yes' on shaadi.com

No normal 28 year old should allow his mom and dad to spend so much time talking about what a great boy he is and what a brilliant husband he will make. Imagine an upcoming star doing this on live TV. One needs to be seriously deranged or seriously lacking good advice to do this.

I was past laughter and onto serious gag zone. So regretfully, I turned off the TV despite an innate curiosity to see what came next. Oh well, there is always next Sunday.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

2011-06-09T14:22:00.005+05:30

Rating - Read if you have the time

Neil Gaiman was introduced to me through his collaborative book with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. Another avid reader friend had recommended Good Omens and I promptly bought it.

Bit of history – I used to be in total thrall of Terry Pratchett for a while. Unfortunately after around ten books, I stopped enjoying him. I suspect I never actually got over him which explains why I own practically every book of his from the Discworld Series (I don’t have such a representation of any other author in my book shelf). So when I read Good Omens, I sort of liked it while I could not quite make up mind about it and figured that maybe Neil Gaiman was responsible for some of the more non-Pratchetty insights. A chance encounter with Amercian Gods in an airport bookshop and I had coughed up the necessary money.

The book’s premise is fairly simple. What do Gods who have slowly died from human memory do to stay in existence? What if they were competing with other new Gods? What if there was a war among the old and new Gods.

The setting is modern America and the old Gods are the ones who had come over with each wave of immigrants. The range varies from Horus to our very own Indian Ganesha. This being America, the new Gods are media, television and something along those lines. A newly released convict, Shadow is recruited for the oncoming war by old God Odin, masquerading as a human named Wednesday. Wednesday and Shadow go around lobbying other dying Gods to start and join the war. Shadow, meanwhile is haunted by his dead wife Laura. Through the course of the book, Shadow wanders through various towns in America, meets several old Gods, walks the ‘backstage’ space of the world and has a series of adventures before finally realizing the truth about the war.

The book’s theme is not particularly unique. Gaiman’s writing partner Pratchett did it much better in Small Gods and I am sure there are enough other books on this topic. Gaiman uses the theme to give us a bit of everything – history of the old gods, discourses on the state of affairs in America, some sci-fi type scenes, a lot of hard hitting murder and horror. All of them intelligent but none of them particularly thought-provoking. Add to it, you keep asking questions like ‘Did the Egyptians actually travel to the U.S. when Horus was still in fashion’, ‘Is Ganesha really a dying God in America’ (I would not think so given that most NRIs seem to be more religious than locals). ‘Why doesn’t Jesus figure in the book? Isn’t he a current God?’, ‘Can a physical war between old and new Gods actually kill off any of them considering the book’s basic premise is that the Gods exist because of their place in people’s lives’.

Overall it is an Ok read. I liked the beginning and the end and the book influenced me enough to have nightmares during its darkest bits. The book began to drag in the middle. Much patience was needed before I could get to the end. Mostly I stuck at it because I quite liked the taciturn central character, Shadow and wanted to see how he ended up.

I am not sure if I am going to read another Neil Gaiman in a hurry unless someone tells me American Gods was not among his better books and I really ought to try a different one.

Can we kill Chivalry now?

2011-05-25T12:22:00.001+05:30

There are three or four of us in the lift – me and three men.

The lift races down. We stand in the polite silence.

We reach the ground floor.

Suddenly the Chivalry Tango begins.

The three men try to press themselves to one side of the lift to let me out first.

I have tried standing in the furtherest corner of the lift, behind someone, and still they do the Tango.

Everytime I feel like yelling ‘but will you just stop now’

Back in the days of yore, when women were considered delicate creatures with inexplicable female problems, a code seems to have been defined on how to treat women. This included opening doors for them and laying out coats in puddles so they did not wet their flowing dresses or their expensive shoes.

In today’s day and age is it still relevant?

I think not.

Women have come a long way. We work in equal opportunity jobs, we have incomes, we plan vacations, buy properties, open bank accounts and do pretty much everything that men can do.

So why this pretence at treating us like China dolls?

It is not logical and if anything, a bit presumptuous and sometimes, patronizing.

I can open my car door myself thank you. Infact since I may be driving, I would rather that you were belted up in the passenger seat.

I don’t know if this persists because of some sort of age old code that men pass on to each other about treating women well. I do know that it also persists because sometimes women themselves like to be ‘treated like a lady’

I just hope they remember that once upon a time being ‘treated like a lady’ meant not having the vote.

Taking away the chivalry code is bound to leave a vacuum in appropriate social behavior. Why not replace it with a new rule, one in which we agree to treat everyone with some kindness and a little bit of understanding?

Can we all open doors for arthritic, old men who suffer the indignity of fiddling with tricky knobs?

Can we let a young father managing a toddler and carry-on bags ahead in the airplane boarding queue?

Can we give up our bus seat for a college going boy with a plaster cast?

In all the above situations, substitute a woman, and it is still kindness and understanding, not chivalry.

So, can we kill chivalry now?

India by Sanjeev Bhaskar

2011-05-10T15:21:00.001+05:30

Rating – Read if you have the time

The first time I went to the international side of Delhi’s spanking new T3 airport terminal, I was bowled over. Especially by W.H.Smith’s wonderfully arranged book display. Which explains why I bought books even though I was about to fly out of the country for a week and travel part of the journey on low cost airlines with strict baggage restrictions. I was simply buying books for the sake of buying. This book and Bill Bryson’s latest on Shakespeare were on a 1 for 1 offer, and that is how I came to own this one.

India has been well covered now from a lot of angles. Economic developments, social changes, travelogues, personal accounts, pre-independence, post-independence..you name it. In that sense, Sanjeev Bhaskar enters a very crowded space. However, he uses his Indian origin tag and his professional comedy background to try and make the best of it.

Imagine you are teenager who just cannot get your parents. As you grow older, you come to appreciate and perhaps, understand them. To your delight you realize that they have more than kept up with the times, and infact have a Twitter account. Bhaskar’s relationship with India seems to be something like that. From a young child who was possibly not particularly impressed by his visits to India as a child and now, making peace with the country and starring wide-eyed at the changes that has happened in the last couple of decades, Bhaskar makes for an enthusiastic observer and writer. What he lacks in depth or in too many original insights, he makes up with a keen approval of practically everything he sees. Even as he does that, he also notices the funny and absurd things in the minutiae of life and gently pokes fun at all of them.

India was written while filming a BBC documentary in various parts of the country. It covers the usual suspects – IT professionals in Bangalore, Royalty in Rajasthan, Houseboats in Kerela, Big money and Bollywood and slums in Bombay and so on. The most personal part of the book is his visit to Punjab in India and Pakistan and revisiting the ground his extended family covered as they migrated from the latter to the former. The stories that Bhaskar comes across are moving and make you think yet again of the mindless violence and wasted lives from those days.

India is a light and easy read, to be used as a buffer between more involving ones.

p.s. I am not really sure what the book’s title is (funny thing to say about a book, huh) given the multiple sentences in the cover. The most comprehensive version would be – BBC, India with Sanjeev Bhaskar: One Man's Personal Journey around the Subcontinent

Shor in the City

2011-05-09T09:43:00.004+05:30

Shor in the City is a movie that evokes mixed feelings. It has so much going for it and it has some truly brilliant moments. Yet, the movie does not sit together in a way that makes your heart strings tug for any particular character.

The premise is interesting enough. It captures the lives of a cross section of Mumbaikars in the midst of that truly Mumbai festival – Ganpati.

We are introduced to three small time ‘publishers’ who print illegal copies of popular bestsellers. Apart from dabbling in publishing, the three also hang out together and indulge in activities that sometimes border on the dangerous. They do it in the good natured manner of people who are not really sure about the serious consequences their actions can have. Heading up this gang is Tilak (Tushar Kapoor in a cool haircut but looking as stiff as ever), newly married and fast domesticating.

Sendhil Ramamurthy plays Abhay, an NRI returning home to set up a small business. As he finds his way around Mumbai, he acquires a hot model girlfriend and at the same time learns about ‘protection’ provided by small time gangsters to carry on a business.

Savvy (Sundeep Kishen) is an aspiring cricketer, worried about being selected to the Under-22 Mumbai cricket team. The selection is also crucial for his girlfriend to reveal his presence in her life to her parents and forestall objections from them about his marriage-worthiness.

Various other small characters weave in and out of the story till all of them find closure of some sort on the final Visarjan day.

The movie has a lot of captivating scenes. Some of them push you into over-the-edge tension territory. Others have you laughing out aloud. In some, you are stuck by how well Mumbai’s character is captured, almost as if you are walking on the city’s streets and observing something yourself.

The problem is that though a lot of the scenes by themselves stand out; the whole movie is not strung well together. The pace picks up and falters. The stories are intertwined but the speed with which each twine cuts into the other, leaves you little time to develop empathy for any particular character. You really want to feel for the characters but are just not given enough material to.

So in the end, the one character that does stand out and is shown in many of its shades is the city itself. Possibly the genesis of the movie’s story explains why. The end credits inform you that all the incidents in the movie were inspired by newspaper stories. A regular reader of Mumbai Mirror or any local Mumbai newspaper can believe some of the incredulous episodes in the movie.

Worth a watch if you have lived in this city long enough to appreciate its quirkiness or if you are an outsider wanting to get a feel of some parts of the city.

My notebook

2011-05-05T17:47:00.000+05:30

I finally bought my little notebook.

Long ago, I realized that my penchant for making lists meant that I was constantly noting down all the stuff I needed to do, wanted to do or had to keep an eye out for, on various scraps of paper. The scraps of paper would invariably disappear alongwith all my bright (alteast they seemed so to me) ideas. So I got a little notebook to carry around and note down stuff.

It turned out to be brilliant.

I started a page with various songs I had to download. A song caught in the in-flight entertainment programme. A song on radio while driving. All of them went into my list and would faithfully be referred to when I had to download music into my IPod.

I began to write down all the books I wanted to read. Books reviewed in Business Standard’s excellent column by Nilanjana Roy. Books reviewed in blogs. An entire sci-fi list which a friend recommended. Every time I went to Landmark, I could pull out the notebook and I was ready to go.

Lists of shopping to be done for the week or in the long run.

Lists of home décor ideas.

Somehow everything I wanted to remember, I could write it down in a page in the notebook and it was safe there till I needed it.

Expectedly, the notebook ran out of space.

I bought another one but it turns out that not every book is amenable to being carried around in your bag or to writing down stuff.

My new one was efficiently pre-divided into little segments, was on ruled paper and small but bulky. I could not bring myself to write down stuff on it.

All my thoughts and lists on songs and books began to look like stale office memo lists.

It was one of those moments that I realized that being a list-maker and being in need of free form could co-exist together. Weird.

So the habit disappeared of noting down stuff gradually disappeared and a long period of wandering around with the vague feeling of ‘what was I trying to remember’ happened.

Today, finally I hit upon a store with lovely little notebooks.

My new book has got an unusual orange cover, it has a band that keeps the pages together, is light enough to be carried around everywhere and when I inaugurated it with making a list of all the little changes I wanted to carry out in our living room, the words just flowed.

I am back in business.

Hunger games by Suzanne Collins

2011-05-02T19:22:00.003+05:30

Rating –

Part I - Read
Part II and III - Read if you have the time (and are curious)

Before I actually got around to reading the series, the book was recommended by three avid readers (coincidentally all of them had read the same physical copy I think). All of them gushed about Part I and I was immediately keen to get started.

The series actually falls in the category of Young Adult Sci-Fi. However, I have enjoyed Young Adult sci-fi in the past (read the Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman for a good yarn on astrophysics, cosmos and God) and I must say they can throw some good surprises at times.

The first part (titled Hunger Games) begins with an introduction to a reality show called the Hunger Games, set sometime in the future when North America is a country called Panem and is no longer a democracy. Panem is run by the rulers based in Capitol. The Districts, all of them slaves to the Capitol and living in a state of poverty and desperation, are forced to participate in the games. The actual games involve two representatives from each District killing each other in an ‘arena’ till only the victor survives. If this is not bad enough, it turns out that the representatives are children. The protagonist, 16 year old Katniss Everdeen finds herself as a competitor and the book deals with the game and its results.

The concept developed in this part was engrossing enough to keep me going to the next part.

The second part (titled Catching Fire) extends the story further. Another set of the Hunger Games is played, with the rules designed to be a reprisal for the acts of the previous games. By now, having digested the concept, the writing’s merits began to show and I can’t say I would have given a full score on that count.

The final part (titled Mockingjay) happens in a larger political set up, an outcome of both the previous games. As with any concluding book in a series, the pace is fast and you are curious to know what happens in the end.

Young Adult fiction usually involves walking a fine line. Especially when the story is rather gruesome and carries interesting messages on power play, manipulation, survival. The audience is old and intelligent enough to grasp the basics of these concepts but the stories cannot be too psychologically disturbing or challenging (though this one did border on the former). The Hunger Games series manages to walk the fine line. Which means it is not fleshed out the way a book for adults would have been but the basic concept is interesting enough for an adult audience.

Atleast it showed in the way D kept hovering over me to check if I had finished the last book when I managed to borrow it from a friend last weekend.

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon

2011-04-29T16:46:00.001+05:30

Rating – Read if you have the time

This book was gifted by a friend. This meant that I had not heard about the book or read a review somewhere. This can be a scary gift if it comes from people who don’t know you or who don’t like reading (Once I was gifted Paulo Coelho’s Brida. Ouch.). It can also be a good thing when someone whose tastes you like, gives you the book. Even if they have not read the book, you know they would not have picked it up unless it sounded promising.

The book begins in a very promising manner. Young Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten books, a place where books that have faded out of circulation are kept. Each visitor to the cemetery picks up a book which they are supposed to protect for life. When I read about the cemetery, I thought it was a brilliant concept and waited for the story to develop the concept more fully. This explains why the rest of the book was a tad disappointing despite being a reasonably well-spun out tale.

Daniel chooses ‘Shadow the Wind’ by Julian Carax. Needless to say, someone is out to destroy the book. He starts digging deeper into the story behind the book and ends meeting various people, all of whom will become part of the giant puzzle on what is really going on.

The book is set in post war-Barcelona of the 1940s. The descriptions of Barcelona are lovely enough to make you look wistfully at Thomas Cook ads. The segments on the war are however, not too informative or insightful. The characterization is above-average, with a few characters like those of Fermin, really standing out.

The plot is reasonably predictable as one crosses the halfway point. When one can already guess what is coming in the end, it is the little twists and turns during the ride that keeps interest alive. This book managed to do it well enough for me to stay up late one night to finish a particular segment. I cannot say the same about the whole book.

The World According to Garp by John Irving

2011-04-29T16:39:00.006+05:30

Rating - Read

I have long been fascinated by the title ‘The World According to Garp’. It is one of the very few titles that would have made me want to pick the book off a shelf and atleast read the back cover and the first few pages to see if I wanted to read the book. Since this one was on Librarywala, I could not do the usual tests but nevertheless I went for it. The book turned out to be good.

The central character, Garp, is born to a single mother who goes from being a nurse to a famous feminist author, without really having targeted that path. Garp’s literary skills exceed those of his mother and he spends most of the book trying to reach his potential or being a famous author (and sometimes the two are very different things). During the course of the book, he marries, has a family, goes through loves and losses. All of this of course sounds like the standard family drama, except that the characters are preoccupied with completely non-standard stuff.

Garp’s mother never understands why people are so taken up by physical intimacy and her book flows from her thoughts on this. It becomes a cult classic and is taken as a bible for many a young woman beginning to embark on the path of feminism.

Garp has a more balanced, infact, open view on the topic. His neurosis is being obsessed about his family and his constant worry about keeping them safe. He is talented at writing but struggles to reach his full potential. Much as he loves his mom, he fails to understand why his mother is a feminist icon or why she accepts the role. He does not respect or comprehend most of the women who becomes his mother's followers but develops a lifelong friendship with her devoted transsexual ex-footballer follower. His is an open marriage, yet his rage at one particular affair of his wife's leads to big consequences.

Garp’s world is complicated in a way that he can help sometimes and which is beyond him at other times. And that is what makes the book a good read. The whole book just rolled on from one piece of absorbing action to the next. There were a few dialogues interesting enough to be read out and shared.

Book updates

2011-04-29T16:37:00.001+05:30

I have long been attempting to write brief notes on books I have been reading. Not just the ones which blew my mind but anything at all. Since most of the friends who read my blog are also avid readers themselves, hopefully I update them on what I thought of my last book before I forget all about it.

I am going to use a three point rating scale –

Read
Don’t read
Read if you have the time.

Obviously, the Read category can include all time great authors like Marquez and lesser authors who have managed to get one book right (see review that follows). While I am not happy about bunching them together, for the sake of simplicity the scale stands so.

Here is hoping I remember I resolved to do this.

Eat and be merry

2011-04-26T17:17:00.002+05:30

My mom still tells me the story of the day she decided to let me continue playing without summoning, coaxing and the pleading me into having a meal. She had already clocked in hours persuading me to eat. I would be so preoccupied with playing, and so utterly unenthusiastic about food, that each meal would be a battle of wits. Eventually one day an experiment was carried out. I would be left to my own devices and would be fed only when I was hungry. Morning turned to noon to evening without any signs of hunger at my end. A panicked mom eventually gave up and got back to the old routine.

Whenever I hear this story, I always ask myself ‘who is this kid and do I really know her?’

The present me needs to be fed roughly six – seven times a day. Breakfast before work. Mid morning snack around eleven. Lunch promptly at one. Mid-evening snack at four. Mid-mid-evening snack at six. Finally dinner at eight. Any delay and the stomach growls in the most threatening manner. Luckily most of the meals comprise reasonably healthy food.

Come weekend or any meal during a holiday and immediately the main meals of the day are consumed with the roving greed of a food reporter who needs to get through three restaurant reviews in a day.

Given a choice, my meal would comprise one or all of the following – cheese-jalapeno nuggets, rice and sambar and chips, curd rice with potatoes cut thin and fried, tamarind rice with chips and/or potatoes cut thin and fried, risotto, white sauce pasta with chicken bits. For dessert, the list is limited to only cheese cake, rasagolla, caramel custard and crème brulee.

Clearly the child is the not the mother of the woman.

As far as food is concerned atleast.

Which is quite a pity because till twenty five I had the metabolism of an Olympic swimmer. I was skinnier than average and looked gaunt quite often. By the time I discovered the delights of Italian cooking, I was already twenty two and only a few more years were left before the cheese started going directly to the upper arms and thighs.

If a time machine were ever to be built, I would probably go back and knock some sense into the little kid who refused to eat her meals.

I realized though that I do have a future me in my life who is trying to knock some sense into me.

My grandmother discovered the joys of eating varied food only at fifty. She now scoffs every time we turn away an extra helping of rice or meat. At eighty plus, she is luckily in reasonably good health but has to follow a strict diet imposed by high sugar levels and blood pressure levels. She simply cannot understand why all of us don’t consume copious quantities of food when the doctor still allows us to do so.

She clearly does not realize that unlike her, who used to be constantly engaged in physical labour just preparing meals and taking care of her house and kids, all of us only exercise our fingers the whole day long tapping away at the computer. Not to mention, in her day, high-calorie foods only appeared during festivals and functions. It was not like she could go out for a cheesecake every weekend.

Still, there is a lesson in it.

So lately, the goal has been moderation. Even when all the favourite foods listed above are present in a meal, I try not to go overboard. Plus, I indulge because I feel like it, not because the food is available. And if a day/week has been tilted heavily in favour of rich food, the other meals are kept light. Finally I have decided that half an hour of walking a day is better than making grandiose plans to join the gym and also learn tennis and actually not do anything (but that is another story).

While clearly I cannot make up for lost time, I can atleast enjoy the present before the future hits me.

Sing a song

2011-04-20T14:49:00.002+05:30

Being a child of the 90s, I have had no great illusions about the quality of songs back then. Infact I will be the first to admit that the only reason they are still played today is because people from my generation are currently high spenders and if a little nostalgia is required to humour us, so be it. Hence, the cheesy ‘Saath Samundar Paar Kiye’ at all discs without fail every time there is a Bollywood night.

However, as anyone from then knows, Saath Samundar Paar Kiye was not the worst of them.

In the last couple of weeks, I have discovered more gems.

Has anyone seen/heard the title song from ‘Chandni’?

It has a middle-aged, pot bellied Rishi Kapoor wearing the signature loose sweater he began to wear in his downturn years. It has an approaching-middle age Sridevi doing the cute-as-a-button act. However it is not because of either that the song is unbearable. That credit goes to Sridevi’s singing which somehow never manages to cross over from tuneless to melodious. I am not sure who had the inspiration to get her to sing but singer she ain’t. A ‘trying really hard to be girlish’ voice tries desperately to grapple with the pitch. In the end, the pitch runs miles ahead, leaving the female voice just plain screechy. Viewers who sit down to watch such songs without a remote control on hand can only be pitied. Like me.

The next song is from my favourite nominee for the ‘most nasal voice’ award. Kumar Sanu spawned an entire generation of singers, reaching a zenith with Himesh Reshmiyya, who figured that if he could, so could they.

However, having digested Kumar Sanu’s voice a long time ago, I could focus on the visual of the ‘Nazar ke Samne’ song. Anu Agarwal looks very tense and stressed as a supportive Rahul Roy leads her to the exam hall. One would have assumed that she was going to write her GRE or IAS exams. Turns out not. Anu Agarwal is appearing for a typewriting exam. Not to demean typists but honestly woman, a typewriting exam? Surely that can be done without much eyelid-batting and whimpering.

Finally, the ‘gazab ka yeh din’ song from QSQT. Juhi and Aamir both looking deliciously young, wander through a forest with a couple of lightly loaded rucksacks. The song itself has always been a favourite and years later, it still retains its melody and freshness. It is the run up to the song that had me gasping in astonishment. Juhi turns out to be a spirited girl, who goes out of her way to keep chasing and flirting with a shy Aamir Khan (gasp. Where is the modesty for a 90s girl!). Then she manages to lose herself in the forest, get chased by a bunch of baddies looking to rape her, runs through the jungle replete with wild animals and just when you think she is going to come to a sticky end, manages to meet Aamir Khan. One would have been traumatized to say the least after the fairly biblical tragedies. But nay sir. She is up and about the next day singing the famous song and darting coy looks at Aamir.

It may not be the most real version of life as we know it. Still, it is a lovely contrast to the whimpering Anu Agarwal and cutesy Sridevi

KL Kalling

2011-04-15T12:54:00.003+05:30

Kuala Lumpur is an easy city. The transportation network, the signboards and the non-fussy people make it easy to start acting like a local who knows her way around from the moment you land.

‘Easy’ was the key word for the brief break I had been looking forward to. KL has its tourist hotspots but nothing so breathtaking that you would drag tired feet to tick off a checklist. So the agenda was going to be a very relaxed one, guided by our whims and instincts.

D has fewer holidays than me this year, leaving me with plenty of time to tick all the places that he has seen and does not propose to see again. So P was roped in for my first all-girl holiday in a longish time.

P and I began exploring the city with a Roti-Canai dinner at the Indian part of town. The locals, especially the women, looked like their attire had not evolved since the 80s. Trying not to gawk, we joined the crowd, relaxed and eventually began to discuss dishes with a local who shared our communal table.

Satiated and energized, we wandered onto Central Market, which abounded with overpriced tourist trinkets that we were happy to ignore. The highlight turned out to be the adjoining ‘Kasturi Walk’ which had a local band, with a super-cheerful lead singer, performing Malay and English songs.

Next stop was Petaling Street in Chinatown, where the hawkers displayed amazingly well-made fake Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags in narrow and crowded lanes. We walked a bit to soak it all in and then called it a night. We had an early start to the one thing on our agenda we definitely wanted to do – going up Petronas Towers.

Petronas is a bit of a let down when you first spot it in the day. It looks like any other glass and metal structure with just a little bit of height to boast about. However by the time we returned to our hotel (the centrally located Concorde Hotel) in the evening, the two towers were lit up like a glittering and classy space age building. The other buildings around had faded into darkness and Petronas shone like a beacon. We could not wait to be a part of its magic.

The next morning, jet-lagged and sleepy, we reached Petronas five minutes before opening time to see a crowd that looked like Dadar station at peak hours. It was no surprise when five minutes later we spotted a board stating that the tickets for the day were sold out. Petronas permits roughly 1200 visitors on the sky bridge everyday and while we had been warned that this quota usually got over by 11.30 a.m., we were not prepared to be turned away at 8.55 a.m. Disheartened, we wandered past the KLCC Suria mall that was slowly stirring to life and the aquarium that showed no signs of waking up. Finally we decided to head to Masjed Jamek to get started on our sightseeing.

Masjed Jamek has a pretty North Indian look-alike façade and a rather serene environment. Unless you are Muslim you are not permitted inside the buildings and have to be satisfied with a tour of the compound. And if you are female, you are politely told to pick any burqa (all dark blue) and a headscarf (throwing me into palpitations over potential infections, allergies and lice I could catch) that the mosque provides. Both of us were rather taken in by the elaborate outfits we had to don and suppressing big grins, did so. When we finally reached a slightly private spot in the compound, we must have spent a good half hour laughing at each other and taking snaps.

From here, most of KL’s wonderful historic buildings were quite accessible. We walked down the road, taking photos from various angles till we reached Merdeka Square, where KL’s independence had been declared. The Square was big, green and a wonderful spot to sit and watch the world go by. Which we did till the sun began to get too hot for comfort.

Then it was onto the cool confines of KL’s famed shopping malls. For the next couple of hours, P and I were in shoe-shopping bliss and emerged, with happy smiles and a shopping bag each. Post which, P decided to check out the aquarium and I chose to head back to the hotel and read my book.

We were meeting a couple of my friends in the evening. S and F had just moved to KL and were discovering the city as much as were. After quick dinner at one of KL’s many mall-based food courts, we headed to Jalan Ramlee (a.k.a Ramlee road) for an evening out. And somehow ended up in what must have been a small, concentrated form of Pattaya stuffed into a night club. Partly curious and partly depressed, we watched the hoardes of dolled-up women try to chat up a customer for the night. When we had managed to finish our first order, we beat a hasty retreat to the totally touristy but wholly reliable confines of Hard Rock Café and spent the rest of the evening listen to a short, old , Chinese man belt out Beatles in the most wonderful voice ever.

The next morning, we had only a couple of hours before the long journey to the airport. Petronas was closed that day. Both of us decided that if it was not going to be Petronas, then Menara KL it would be. Menara KL is slightly shorter than Petronas but on a higher elevation and with a viewing bridge at a much higher floor. It turned out to be a brilliant move. We could see the whole of KL spread out under KL Tower's feet. Most of all, we could see Petronas in all its glory, piercing the skies with the twin antennae. Petronas does grow on one...

From there, it was the reverse loop back to the airport. I could have easily gone on for a couple of more days, checking out the rain forests, more malls and perhaps a side trip to Batu Caves.

Atleast I got the three days I did!

Getting the cup

2011-04-05T15:10:00.002+05:30

I have never been a big fan of sports. The occasional tennis finals are taken in. Especially during Federer’s peak when I used to love the way he gracefully sailed through the air. Football finals also make it the calendar. It is highly entertaining to watch macho men run behind a ball, pushing each other around like little boys. On the other hand, I have been happy to ignore cricket. It is just too long. The people don’t move around much. Unlike football or tennis, cricket does not make interesting TV unless you really understand the technicalities of the game.

However, an India-Pak match or the World Cup finals is an entirely new ball game (aha. Unintended pun). It is about raw emotions flowing through the body of an entire nation. This means that I am quite happy to be swayed by the mood of the fellow citizens and give up my sitcoms on Star World for an evening.

As it happened, we were away on a company programme that weekend. The bosses had wisely decided that it would be suicidal to continue the seminar into the afternoon and had instead generously organized the match screening on big screen. There was beer, snacks and a wide variety of noise creating devices like whistles and mini-horns. To this melee was added a DJ whose only job was to play thumping songs like ‘Jai Ho’ or ‘Chak De’ during ad breaks and reruns of key scenes.

By the time I joined the action around 8 p.m., the match was in full flow. I always knew we were a cricket obsessed nation but I had never experienced it in its full form till that night. People were sitting on couches or even sprawled on the carpeted floor looking intent and serious. Every eye was tuned to the flickering screen inside the dark room. Every time some hit a four or a six, a whole bunch of people would jump onto the middle of the room and do a jig to the DJ’s song. Then everyone would go back to their positions. As the match progressed and every run brought India closer to victory, the atmosphere became more charged. A couple of people left the room, unable to handle the stress. A few people refused to get up lest a change of their sitting position caused a cosmic change in India’s fortunes. Yet others shouted instructions to the players on screen to stay calm and steady knowing pretty well that the TV would not carry voices in reverse to Dhoni’s ears. One of the guys fell prostrate in front the screen whenever the umpire ruled yet another ‘not out’ decision.

Finally, the dancers got out of their seats for every single run to do a jig. It was not so much for the joy of a single run, as it was to simply release the stress. Then the final fantastic ball was hit and India won. Mayhem reigned. Everyone erupted into loud cheers of joy. The DJ did not have to play his music since the screen and the viewers were making enough noise of their own. A couple of people looked slightly teary eyed. Colleagues, who never saw eye to eye at office, hugged each other in joy. People took the Indian flags which had been plastered around the room as décor and began to wave them high and mighty.

It was almost like each one of us had hit that last ball and personally lead the team to a cheery victory.

I checked back with D who had been watching the match at home in Mumbai. He had watched the closing ceremony and hotfooted it to Marine Drive to join the throng of people who had began to pour out onto the streets. Later I read that it was 5 a.m. before the impromptu party ended.

I think I finally understood by what people mean when they say cricket in India is a religion.

Origami learnings

2011-03-30T12:08:00.004+05:30

A friend’s friend organized an Origmai workshop a couple of weekends ago. I promptly signed up. It seemed like a good way to meet new people while indulging my creative side.

For those who don’t know, Origami is the art of making stuff using paper. You work with a piece of paper and keep folding it (never cutting it) till you arrive at the end result – a box or a flower or a bird or anyone of the many patterns enthusiasts have invented.

After three hours of making boxes, birds and flowers, I realized

- the only new people I had met were two ten year olds. Interesting kids but not quite suitable for sustained conversation

- An afternoon of Origami is fine but was clearly not going to become a long term hobby. Seriously, how many cranes can you make before you wonder where you are going to store all of them?

- My life has changed so much since I was a child

The last one of course hit me the hardest.

While working with great concentration on folding papers just right I thought about the last time I had worked on any kind of arts and crafts. And the last memories seem to date back to school.

Back then, arts and crafts was part of school work and as a matter of routine, I had to embroider hankies, weave crochet bags (with a lot of help from my mom) and make TV covers with cross stitch work. Over and above the school work, I also made a lot of stuff, mostly birthday cards and anything which our parents would not throw money at us for (which was basically everything other than food, necessary clothes and education). So a Christmas tree made from shoe boxes, papers and a hanger appeared once. Clothes for my doll with old/leftover cloth kept me busy for hours. At my most ambitious, I even cut an old denim skirt to make a shapeless waistcoat for myself.

The first time I had enough pocket money to buy a birthday card, I promptly abandoned handmade cards and proudly began to give people store-bought stuff. My face shined with the pleasure of what wealth could buy.

Shortly later, I also learnt that time was not as infinite as I thought it was. School had plenty of holidays when time used to stretch on for hours and I could fill it up with every single thing I wanted to do and still have some hours left. (Back then, TV was very unexciting and parents were not too fussed about having their children jump from one hobby class to the next). By the time I reached college and had charted out a rather ambitious study programme for myself, it became clear that I had to choose my activities wisely.

The choosing has gone on for a long time now, with the time vs money equation gradually altering in favour of less time and more money. Currently, all my activities usually revolve around household chores, planned social interactions or chosen hobbies.

Yet there I was, in an Origami class, looking at two ten year olds proudly display the very things I could make at their age – a windmill, a flower, a balloon – and sorely missing something.

I am not quite sure if I can ever go back to the spontaneity of my childhood but have been thinking that maybe the time has come to change a few things. So, springs the plan to try and not preplan my weekends to the last minute and instead try to leave a few hours open. Also, I think it is time to rediscover the creative streak from childhood and the next time I want something, think about whether I can make it instead of just adding it to my shopping list.

Waiting to see how this goes.

Winter wonders

2011-03-25T15:52:00.006+05:30

Considering I have spent most of my adult life working in only two cities – Chennai and Mumbai, the wardrobe choices are fairly simple. In summer, you wear clothes that show your arms and legs to any possible breeze that may escape your way. In ‘winter’ you cover the arms and legs. Its always cotton though. Because ‘winter’ as everyone from these two cities knows is a dip in the temperature to the late 20s. The kind that would be called ‘summer’ by people from less-informed countries closer to the Arctic Circle.

These temperatures also mean that my winter wardrobe consists entirely of things I have bought over the years for my winter holidays a.k.a. two sweaters and a muffler/scarf and an old jacket borrowed several years ago from my dad which he had acquired for his U.S. trip.

Then one fine day in January, I was sent to our Hong Kong office for a three week stint. January in HK is apparently one of the country’s coldest months where temperatures can go down to 10 degrees and a chill wind can hit you in the shade. Again, for people from the Arctic Circle, this may not mean anything at all, except perhaps the beginning of summer. For me, it was like being on a winter holiday, except I had to work and wear formal clothes.

The first day, I methodically wore my shirt, pants and other stuff bought from a last minute visit to M&S and then my sweater, the suit jacket, my muffler and the outer jacket.

The next day was pretty much the same.

By the third day the temperature had dropped to 6 degrees and there was a light rain. I was still wearing the same sweater and jacket. The bleakness of the day outside was no match for my own bleakness. I had realized that for the next three weeks, I would wear the same sweater to work and people would have no idea that I actually changed clothes everyday.

This would have been sad enough in most places but in HK it was worse.

Women in HK don’t dress for reasons of modesty or weather protection. Every morning, they wake up and ask themselves ‘What personal style statement would I like to make today?’ Then probably spend the next hour grooming themselves. How they managed to screw their eyes open early enough to indulge in this activity was beyond me. I had to wake up fifteen minutes earlier than usual every morning to wear my multiple layers. Even that made me grumpy. I did not want to compete with the locals but I did not want to stand out either in a negative way. Heck, even my male colleagues were wearing different coloured scarfs to add a personal touch to boring suits.

With so many good justifications on hand, I landed up in the mecca of discount-rate shopping – the Novotel outlet close to the airport. HK was conveniently going through its winter sales. I spent most of the day wandering through Mango, Espirit, Benetton and their brethrens in a state of bliss. At the end of the day, I had acquired a lovely and hardy Timberland jacket to replace Dad’s old jacket. And very judiciously (even if I say so myself), stopped my shopping at a couple of sweaters and a couple of tops. HK, I was ready.

The next morning, the weather had improved to a sunny 11 degrees. I began to wear my new clothes and my mood also improved. This is when I discovered one of the nicest things about winter clothes – layering. You can wear the same clothes in various combinations and come up with a new look every morning. Wearing the sweater inside a short sleeved top, knotting the scarf a different way, putting on a formal jacket instead of the sweater on the same top – the combinations were endless. It was so addictive and so much fun that by my third week I was managing to wake up atleast half an hour earlier than usual to throw together some things.

My visit was however, drawing to an end. I landed back in the middle of Bombay’s ‘winter’ with temperatures of 26 – 27 degrees. I began to sweat profusely right at the arrival terminal, with the single sweater I was wearing. It was clear my flirtation with layering had come to an end.

I was back to wearing trousers-shirts and cotton salwar kameezes. Yet, not all was lost. Inspired, I have been making more regular use of accessories – pendants, earrings, even a couple of brooches I was gifted a while ago. Even better, throwing on accessories requires a mere five minutes of my morning.

My 'judicious' winter shopping seems not so judicious now as they lie in cupboards filled with moth balls. Though I cannot deny for a minute that the experience was definitely worth it.

How to cook Chicken Biriyani

2011-03-22T14:51:00.002+05:30

1. Gather around the ingredients – 1 onion, 1 tomato, 6 pearls of garlic, 1 inch ginger, 1 tbsp corriander leaves+ mint leaves and grind everything. Separately wash and slice 250 gms chicken. Wash and soak 250 gms of basmati rice (or what you think looks closest to basmati rice in your kitchen)

2. Heat 5 tbps oil + ghee combo in cooker. Decide to fry long-sliced onions in them to use for garnishing later on.

3. Get impatient and remove half fried onions. Put it in a separate pan for frying

4. To the oil in the cooker, add 1 inch cinnamon stick and 2 cloves. Watch it splatter onto your hand.

5. Jump around and wash hands. Notice long-sliced onions are burning. Dispose off into bin and begin to focus on the main biriyani itself.

6. Add the vegetable paste to the oil in the cooker. Add 1 tsp chilli powder, ¼ tsp coriander powder, pinch of turmeric and necessary salt.

7. Fry till oil separates

8. Add chicken. Fry for a couple of minutes

9. Add rice. Fry for a minute

10. Add water = 2.5x rice quantity

11. Close cooker. Put whistle.

12. Chill out and watch tv

13. After 1 whistle, put stove on sim for 4 minutes

14. Turn off stove.

15. Chill out and watch tv for ten minutes

16. Open cooker. Notice rice is soggy and has expanded to enormous size and looking like Kerala rice. Realise maybe it was not basmati rice after all.

17. Put lid back again. Struggle to get handles on top and bottom of cooker to meet. Give up. Light stove again

18. Chill out and watch tv till you hear a blast

19. Run to kitchen to notice cooker lid is near the fridge and half the biriyani is on the ceiling

20. Eat the remaining biriyani. Yummmm….

21. Burn off calories by cleaning the kitchen ceiling for the next hour

Home art

2011-03-21T14:31:00.000+05:30

I imagine being in the business of making brochures for residential properties must be quite a satisfactory one. The builder provides you with the basics of what the house is going to be and probably adds a Shah Rukh Khan movie type dialogue ‘Beta, now let your mind soar to the skies’

Which is probably why all the brochures I have seen so far are along these lines

1. The property invariably seems to be located in so much greenery that you can’t be blamed for mistaking it is going to built in the middle of Hyde Park or Central Park.

2. The road in front of the house is usually a three lane highway, with a modest two cars going in either direction.

3. The building is gleaming from far like a spaceship freshly landed on earth

4. All the residents, not one or two but all, are white. As if mysteriously a whole village in Scandinavia decided to move to the spaceship located in the middle of Hyde Park.

The building insides don’t disappoint either. Breathtaking lobby, lifts that you would want to be trapped in forever, glossy stairwells, classy interiors.

It is the kind of brochure that makes the reader want to whip out the chequebook and sign the dotted line and wait for the weekend to roll in, so that one can make the journey to buy a part of Valhalla.

The weekend jaunt unfortunately is always a reality (or should I say realty..har har) check. One takes in the unpaved approach road, the noisy slum nearby and immediately thinks 'God-knows-what-else-was-imagined-in-the-brochure'

At this point one would expect that the eager brochure-reader cum Valhalla-buyer must be crying tears of agony at being so cheated by an illusion more powerful than the ones that appear in Indian myths.

But no.

Usually, the real estate agent has also mentioned the expected price per square foot, a number which is even more in the realm of imagination than the brochure itself.

Personally, I usually reach out for the brochure and toss it into a bin with more satisfaction than the artist must have got designing it.

Then I go back and hit the net for my next brochure.

The Girl's Speech

2011-03-17T18:45:00.002+05:30

Last weekend I watched The King’s Speech, a movie which would have been truly enjoyable had I actually watched it. A sizeable portion was unfortunately lost in the added chatter that was religiously provided by the mother-daughter duo sitting next to me.

The daughter must have been about seven or eight years old. As soon as the movie title appeared on screen, she began her questions.

Mama, what movie is this?
Mama, who is this?
Mama, why is the king stammering?
Mama, why is the lady upset?

In the first five minutes, I fully expected Mama to tell the daughter that they would discuss the movie once they left the movie hall since it was not polite to talk during a movie.

Expectation turned to hope and then desperation. Mama was actually providing detailed answers to each of these questions.

By the time Colin Firth’s speech therapy began, I was seriously in need of some therapy too, with a headache from trying to tune out the conversation that was happening by my side.

The daughter was clearly quite precocious given how well she followed the movie. She was also not shy to ask questions on points she did not understand. In any other context, I would have probably praised the mom for taking the effort to explain everything patiently and which had clearly helped her daughter be more involved, observant and curious about everything.

But Gaahhh!!

Isn’t being considerate to the general public no longer part of a good upbringing?

JICYDK

2011-03-13T14:01:00.002+05:30

Here is an extract of a conversation exchange I saw on my 14 year old cousin’s Facebook page

“its cool n i accept it..!! but fr ur info wats der in dis to put as a DP sir ?!? its an osm pic.. but nt fr a DP.. n i guess i said dat to my bro.. so..”

I read the statement.

Then read it again.

I read a lot and can proudly say I can get through different styles of writing quite well. However, the spellings compressed into half their original lengths and their strange acronyms were clearly beyond me.

Eventually I guessed that ‘osm’ perhaps stood for ‘awesome’

Then I did a Google and landed on a link for internet slangs and figured out that DP meant ‘Display Picture’

Mystery solved but the link has opened up a whole new world of internet lingo. Looks like there is a completely new language out there.

English is so passé.

IJAF people.

p.s. Obviously I have been learning some acronyms.

Getting to the top

2011-03-09T19:38:00.001+05:30

Yesterday, there was news about a proposed revision in the new Companies Bill which states that in case of any board having 5 or more independent directors, atleast one director should be a woman.

This was dolled out on Women’s Day as spectacular progress in the march towards male-female equality.

Frankly I am all for quotas. I appreciate the fact that certain sections of the society just don’t have the same kind of access and privileges that other parts of the society has on account of legacy issues that have existed for centuries. I am quite ok with college seats reserved for backward communities. I am ok with panchayat seats reserved for women. I am also ok with women progressively getting higher representation in the parliament (The way politics works in our country, it is not like there are too many well qualified, honest, deserving male politicians who will be replaced by female novices).

However, in this case it is a whole new ball game. Will this reservation actually achieve much?

Which brings me to the question, what do independent directors actually do? I remember reading the annual report of an Indian airline company a few years ago. It listed movie luminaries among its independent directors. I nearly fell off my chair wondering exactly how they contributed to the running of an airline. Sure, they were brilliant in their own fields, but seriously!

If they really don’t do much, then perhaps this would amount to mere tokenism. And that won’t do us much good.

If, hypothetically, the quota were extended to actual executive board members, then would it still make much sense?

An entry level job is a fairly equal opportunity role. At that level, it does not matter if a slightly less qualified person gets the job.

On the other hand, an executive role in the board is a job that requires someone who has experience and exposure. Unfortunately, even with the best of intentions it will be difficult for a company to work with an executive board, some of whose members may not really yet be ready for the job. We simply don’t have enough women to go around today.

More women at the top level is not a problem that can be solved overnight by legislation. It is a long term issue that requires recognition of the fact that women are intelligent and capable; however they need support to get to the top. The support is needed on account of the simple fact that we live in a world that is biased and tuned towards men.

The good news is women in my generation and the following ones are already making strides. More women are passing out of colleges. More women are entering the workforce. So perhaps it is not that women are losing out by not entering the race at all. It is more what happens during the course of a working career.

In the last ten years of working, I have noticed that women are the ones who are considered as the primary stakeholders in bringing up kids and running a home. Legislation cannot change society’s attitudes in one day, but legislation can certainly help.

Especially during the crucial child bearing years when a lot of women drop out from too little support at home and too much pressure at work. Not to mention the usual overwhelming male work culture that treats women who attend PTAs or stay home to look after a sick child as corporate world's greatest evil.

Effective child support systems, especially by offices themselves would help. Flexible hours, part time work and work-from-home would help. Sure a couple of years will be lost from handling too little responsibility but atleast women are still in the race.

A bit more radically - maybe legislation to start changing men’s roles in society could help. If men were given three months childcare leave, same as women, then perhaps they would be more engaged at home as well? (Am assuming at some point enough men will take up the offer to ensure that is not odd that men take time off to look after their own kids)

Will these change the ratio at the top? I can’t see so far into the future where there will be more women than men at the top but I can atleast see a reasonable dent being made in the balance.

The simple joys of a weekend away

2011-02-28T10:07:00.003+05:30

I am back, refreshed and happy, from a weekend away with the family.

This is what my routine was like -

Saturday – Reach Mahua Bagh, located close to Murud. Enter 25 acres of greenery and a handful of cottages, with just a tiny village nearby to remind me of civilization.

Eat yummy lunch.

Nap.

Pluck green mangoes from the bunch hanging onto our balcony

Read book on the hammock in the garden

Go for a walk to the sea.

Sit on the rocks, soak feet in the water and let the breeze play with my hair.

Return via a fishing village, with feet occasionally getting damp in the water.

Check out the home grown plants in the garden.

Gobble up gooseberries by the dozen straight from the plant. Tiny, plump, fresh gooseberries hanging in light green bunches. Gooseberries that don’t have to be washed before I plop them greedily into my mouth.

Eat yummy dinner

Play cards with the whole family

Sleep

Sunday - Wake up to the sound of the ocean and the bright light streaming through the white curtains

Have a round of intense badminton. Ignore the slight ache in the right shoulder from the utter lack of practice

Yummy breakfast of parathas stuffed with fresh methi plucked off the garden

More cards

Light game of throwball in the shade of the mango trees

Yummy lunch with veggies, again from the garden.

Nap

Gobble up tea and homemade carrot cake while watching bro-in-law playing with the four well-behaved dogs on the farm

Leave.

…

Veggies from the garden, the sea, trees and quiet, exercising for fun – I could do this everyday…

A Tale of too many books

2011-02-18T17:15:00.004+05:30

Every book lover has a dream scenario. It is usually a variation of the same theme – rows upon rows of books lined up against walls. My variation includes the grouping of books by categories, the shelves being painted white, and a sunny, comfortable window seat in a room ready for me to recline and read.

My reality had a tiny, wooden, open bookshelf that had long ago reached maximum capacity. Books were lined up two deep to begin with. Then they were wedged a little tighter together. Then two piles began to grow on the topmost rows to such levels that they could have qualified for a circus balancing act. Finally books were just tucked into any space that could be spotted.

Just as the number of books began to increase and overwhelm the shelf, my mood began to get sourer and sourer. This was a bit puzzling because I have always loved owning all those books. Then I realized that I now hated the fact that I just could not find anything to read in the mess.

I had earlier made a modest attempt at trimming my collection. I made a solid set of rules about which books were to be culled (pirated books, books never to be reread, books never to be read and so on and so forth). Of course, I had also decided to exercise some judicious discretion. Much discretion later, I had about eight books I was ready to throw away.

Then I had set my sights on a larger bookshelf – a lovely wooden structure with glass doors that would provide a large and loving home to our books while keeping the dust out. Scouring the likes of Lifestyle, I realized that such a shelf in a decent budget was as close to reality as Santa Claus.

Thus, one fine evening, I finally took a hard decision (Had I been in B.R.Chopra’s Mahabharata, thunder would have sounded and lighting would have flashed). I would put away some books in the cupboard, abandoning my long-held philosophy that books are meant to be displayed.

The division was done in a simplistic and non-emotional manner. Books I was yet to read were kept in the bookshelf. The rest went in. No tears were shed over the fact that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ would be left huddled in a dark space.

When the task was done, I was a bit shocked to see that practically one-third of my books had never been read/ completed. I had not quite realized that I had a veritable bookshop of my own. I mentally decided to go easy on buying books till I had made a reasonable dent into this one.

The decision has been successful in the last three weeks it has been operational. My very first book, a long ignored copy of Bill Bryson’s ‘Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’ was a wonderful read.

I have also noticed that it is handy to be able to see books I usually just dip into, like comics or books of essays or of poems.

Unfortunately, my resolution not to buy books for a while has already been broken. A couple of days ago I spotted Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey, read a few pages, fell in love with it and bought it.

Evidently, good intentions and a temporary reorganization are not going to solve my storage problems.

Much thought later, I have made more easy-to-stick-to resolutions
- Popular reads I am unlikely to want to own, will be borrowed from Librarywala.com
- More active exchange of books with friends considering most of them are prolific readers themselves
- Try and begin reading on my brand new IPad (hurrah to D for getting me one!) so that I atleast stop buying physical books

But then these are for some other day.

For now, I am just content knowing I can finish a book in the middle of the night, walk up to my bookshelf, examine the unread titles without setting off a minor avalanche and then snuggle right back with a brand new book.

Dumb and dumber

2011-02-17T14:30:00.004+05:30

Progessing (albeit rather slowly) through D’s Alfred Hitchcock collection, I began to get perspective on how female characters are treated in Hitchcock’s movies. The last two I saw were ‘Birds’ and ‘The problem with Harry’. In both cases the women are not simpering fools who sit by the sidelines waiting to be rescued. Infact, they act like how normal human beings, who are a bit enterprising and sometimes clever, would act. In one, the heroine chases the male lead to a small town and acts rather brave when things begin to happen. In the other, both the female leads keep their heads in a sticky situation and take an active role in shaping their love lives.

Compare this to the last Tamil movie I saw and I feel like hanging my head in shame. ‘Robot’ was a movie that was wrong at various levels but one of the points that irked me was the absolute stupidity of the heroine. The narrative starts off by establishing that she is a doctor. You delude yourself into believing that atleast this time, unlike in Shankar’s last movie ‘Sivaji the Boss’, the heroine may display more I.Q. than a piece of wood. Alas! That is not to be. Within ten minutes, she goes on to prove that she is a brainless twit and has no spunk whatsoever. The rest of the movie continues along those lines.

I am not sure if it is just our directors who think women are stupid or if it is the audience which expects women to be stupid in the movies and hence directors are forced to write such roles? Why can’t we have a baseline intelligence level for women in our movies?

Or perhaps it is just an extension of the fact that our male characters are not particularly smart themselves. (Look at the scientist character in 'Robot'. He spends a goodish amount trying to teach a robot 'feelings' and then suggests the plan of the heroine seducing (!!) a robot).

Given the average Indian male loves his dream girl to be slightly dumber than him, this really does not leave much room for women to appear intelligent as well, does it?

P.S. This issue has been irking me for a while. I thought of gathering more examples of Hollywood vs Kollywood portrayal of women but figured out it would become an academic exercise meant for well-researched publications. Besides, I would have never gotten around to completing the post ever then.

Being woman

2011-01-03T21:33:00.003+05:30

Here is a very good video that echoes a lot of my views and gave me new perspective on being a woman and having a career.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook on why we have only a few women in corporate world..and what can be done at an individual level to correct it.

Alumni party

2010-12-29T17:31:00.003+05:30

Saying Hi
Meeting people you have not met in a long time and jabbering away excitedly.

Running out of things to say in roughly five minutes and moving onto the next person

Eventually ending up spending most time with the five friends you have anyway been in regular touch with the last ten years.

Looking good
Noticing that most men have lost their hair or acquired a paunch or both

The guy in the top five heartthrob list ten years ago is now in the top five paunch list.

But then new top five candidates have emerged..

Party time
Being fully prepared to dance and drink the night away

Realising that alcohol is now banned on campus and exactly ten people are interested in dancing leaving you looking like some Prabhu Deva wannabe

Finding out enterprising batchmates have sneaked in drinks and noticing that the other nine people on the floor are providing such enthusiastic company you really don’t care about the fuddy duddies seated elsewhere

Eating
The night canteen has extended its menu to unbelievable levels including a patisserie outside

Turns out though that the top most popular dishes are still bread burjee and cheese Maggie noodles

Quickly reverting to the ‘eat as quickly as you can’ mantra before ten others wipe the food clean from your plate.

Staying up
Realising that you have stayed up till 5.30 a.m. on campus not for project deadlines or exam cramming but just to gossip the night away

When actually there is no gossip since most everyone is married, has kids and a stable/boring life.

But then you can always rehash the gossip from ten years ago, find out stuff that you never knew and be totally horrified/thrilled.

Yup, it was a good tenth year reunion

Kung Fu fighting

2010-12-27T16:51:00.000+05:30

On the second and last night of our desert camping trip in Egypt we finished dinner and then sat around the fire drinking hot cups of tea and listening to Waleed, our driver and Zamoukha, our cook put up an awesome concert with spirited singing accompanied by a short single sided drum which they called a tabla. At some point, D and I were forced to get up and dance along with W. We did not really mind since W and Z were super-enthusiastic and were singing not just for the mandatory tourist tip but also for themselves.

With the whirling around the fire, we thought the festivities had come to an end, but we had not accounted for W and Z’s plans. Z decided that a neighbouring camp seemed to be having a good time and decided we would all go there.

After a lovely 15 minute walk over the desert sand and rocks in the platinum moonlight, we arrived at the camp. Three Chinese couples were seated around the fire progressing rapidly towards inebriation. Two locals were singing loudly. Z jumped in with his tabla and W also joined. After a while, Z decided that it was time for the visitors to sing and suggested that the Chinese go first after which the Indians would sing.

My heart sank.

Earlier in the night, after much prompting by Z I had sung two lines while D watched proudly.

Let me detour here a bit. D likes a lot of things about me, all of which I like about myself too. But the one thing that stumps me is that he thinks I can sing. My own mother who can stretch the truth by saying I am fair (leading people to expect Kareena Kapoor complexion vs the reality of Bipasha Basu complexion), has admitted that I have a reedy and shrill voice. My sis thinks I could become a good dog whistler at my ptich.

Yet D thinks I can sing and when the situation for public performance presented itself earlier in the night, I had figured a couple of lines would not kill anyone if it made D happy. D himself is way too tone deaf to do anything beyond intoning the mangled lyrics like a newsreader. So I pulled off a solo.

Unfortunately, now we had moved beyond the privacy of our driver and cook and were with a whole gang of other people.

The Chinese enthusiastically took up the challenge (obviously like in all other things) and sang not one but two group songs. Simple group songs have a way of turning a bunch of bad voices into a decent one collectively as long as everyone sticks to the tune. The performance passed muster and there was much applause.

I squirmed wondering how to get off this gracefully, when one of the Chinese women began to wave her hands in a collegial competitive manner and said something about China being great. Then went on to do some Kung fu punches to indicate they were kicking butt.

Sigh. Pride and honour makes a fool even of a cautious person.

So I sang. Since the only songs I listened to often are beautiful, high pitched numbers, I did not know lyrics to stuff that would suit my limited range. Anyway, the first para of a Kailash Kher number was duly performed and a shrill shriek pierced the night air.

Z and W began to clap and others joined in politely. After which Z and W safely took over the mantle of providing our camp’s contribution to the party and my services were not pressed for.

Relieved I went back clapping along and when the time came to dance around the campfire, I was more than enthusiastic and eager to let my above-average dancing skills take over.

The fallout is a stern resolution to learn four lines of some simple song. I am still figuring out the choices..

Egypt travel - Factsheet and tips

2010-12-27T16:10:00.002+05:30

We are back from our Egypt vacation with sand in our eyes and tombs appearing in dreams most nights. Egypt is so stuffed with history that the only way to go through them in the 2 weeks one can usually spare is to visit all the highlights. Here is how we did it

Cairo – Spent the first two days here. One day pyramid hopping and the next Islamic Cairo and Coptic Cairo. I was prepared to be dazzled by the pyramids but the latter I had known nothing about and was suitably impressed. We saw the sound and lights show at the pyramids which was not all that impressive.

Cairo is more crowded than Mumbai and has more traffic as well. So it is not a place to linger around and walk about. See the sights and get out. One good thing though is that shops are open until 11 p.m., so if you want to walk around in the night after the day’s sightseeing is done, it is a great place.

We also went to the Egyptian Museum but did it on the last day of our Egypt trip after seeing all the other tombs and temples. This was a good idea because by then we had a sense of who’s who and what’s what. We also did all our souvenir shopping at the famous Khan-el-kalili bazaar on the lost day to save on lugging around stuff during the trip.

We stayed at the Talisman De Charme in the downtown area. Charming and cozy hotel but the area was crowded. I would have preferred to stay in Zamelek area. We did have dinner in Zemalek and managed to see what the yuppies of Cairo looked like.

Aswan/Abu Simbel – We flew out to Aswan from Cairo to visit Abu Simbel and then board the Nile Cruise. Abu Simbel is a one day trip from Aswan and has to be done along with a convoy of other vehicles that leave either at 4 a.m. or 11 a.m. (Obviously we chose 11 a.m.). It is worth going just to see the giant statues of Ramses II seated majestically in front of the temple.

Aswan’s itinerary included a visit to the dam on Lake Nassar (world’s third largest dam and largest manmade lake respectively), unfinished obelisk and the Temple of Philae. The last one was located in a lovely island and the temple itself look quite pretty. Possibly because it was our first temple in Egypt.

Nile Cruise – The cruise takes 4 days when you go from Aswan to Luxor and 5 days if you go from Luxor to Aswan. We decided to take the shorter option and it was not a bad idea since we got a LOT of time to just hang out at the ship anyway. The stops on the cruise were at Kom Ombo and Edfu. Both nice places but not something I would have seen if it had not been part of the cruise. The cruise also arranged for the guide in these places as well as for Aswan and Luxor. We went on Movenpick’s Radimis I, which was pretty good.

Luxor – We spent a day here. Which was a big mistake since as the mother lode of all temples, it requires atleast two days to do justice to the place. The Nile splits the city into two – the West Bank which was the ancient necropolis and is now being rapidly vacated so that the tombs can be an open air museum and the east bank which is the living city.

The west bank contained the Valley of the Kings, the valley of the queens, Hatshepsut’s temples and so on. The east bank contained the Karnak Temple, Temple of Luxor and the hotels, town and so on. We also saw the wonderful sound and lights show and attempted a balloon ride which did not happen due to poor weather conditions. We stayed at the Steigerberger which was smart and well-located

Abydos and Dendera – These two temples are not usually included in tour itineraries but they turned out to the best temples I saw in the whole trip. They were fairly well preserved and one could see the colours on the carvings. Worth a detour from Luxor.

Dahab – There are three famous beaches in the Red Sea – Hurghada, Dahab and Sharm-el-Sheik. Since we wanted to see Mt Sinai as well, the choice was between the last two. Dahab is more laid back and that seemed to suit our style fine. Not to mention we stayed at the Le Meridian which was an awesome property with a private beach and cost much lesser than one would have expected. Dahab is an awesome place to lie in the sun after all the history and walking around. Plus has good snorkeling and diving.

Mt Sinai – This place is loaded with religious history. We visited the Monastery of St Catherine, which had a lovely collection of old Christian iconography. From here, D did the 3 hour easy climb to Mt Sinai. The place is a day trip from Dahab and Sharm.

Desert Safari – Egypt has 5 oasises, the best being Siwa and the next being Bahariya. Siwa was too far to finish in the 3 days we had, so Bahariya it was. From Bahariya we went on a two night camping trip covering the black desert and the white desert. It was absolutely stunning to see the changes in the desert landscape and eating under the stars listening to our cook sing was a good experience.

All this took us 17 days. We could have combined Petra/Jordan with this as a lot of people do, but eventually dropped the idea due to lack of time.

If had just a week and wanted to cover all the historical highlights, I would have done atleast the following –

Cairo – Pyramids, Egyptian Museum, Islamic and Coptic Cairo, shopping at Khan-el-kalili (3 days)
Aswan – Abu Simbel, Temple of Philae (1 day)
Luxor – Valley of Kings, Valley of Queens, Hatshepsut’s temple, Karnak Temple and Temple of Luxor, balloon ride, sound and lights show (2 days) and day trip to Abydos & Dendera (1 day)

Egypt is a highly tourist oriented town and hence a few special things go into the planning

Trip planning -
December is a good time to go but is obviously crowded since it is the peak tourist season. If you start planning and booking in advance, you can still stay in the good places and get the better guides.

If you are planning the trip yourself, it is necessary to be mindful of logistical constraints. Egypt Air flies internally and there are days and times when it won’t ply from city to the next. This needs to be taken into consideration while planning the itinerary. Also the cruises start on specific dates, so you need to be mindful of that. St Katherine Monastery is not open on Fridays and Sundays.

Tour guides are needed everywhere you go or else you will just end up wandering around blindly, clicking snaps. It is easy to find references and book online. Our guide in Cairo, Rasha was pretty good. Our Abydos & Dendera guide John was also good. We wish we had used him instead of the one provided by the cruise at Luxor.

Most cities are like any other cities around the world and have internet, atms, stores for buying prepaid SIM cards and so on. You can easily stock up in Egypt if you have forgotten to carry anything along.

It is good to read a couple of books on Egypt before or during the trip to get a sense of (1) the general timelines of who ruled when and (2) the gods. We got into the groove reading Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt by Robert A Armour. LP provided the rough timelines of dynasties which came in handy. For Abu Simbel, since guides were not allowed beyond a point, we bought a book that told us about the carvings on the walls inside and carried it along during the visit.

Carry along -

Egypt is dry, dry, dry. Take plenty of strong cold cream along (Nivea Crème works very well) and also sunscreen to reapply regularly. I ignored this advice on the first couple of days and paid with rough, red and itchy skin for the rest of the trip. Also, important to keep drinking water regularly (no tap water ever. Only bottled water)

Carry toilet paper with you everywhere and be prepared for dirty toilets.

Carry lots of small change everywhere. We found our 5 and 10 Egyptian pound notes flowing out like water to taxi drivers, bellboys, waiters etc. Our 1 pound coins came in handy at the toilets.

Always check where you are going to have your meals on any trip. If you think there is going to be no decent hotel around then better to pack a food box along. On a couple of occasions we had to subsist on biscuits because the shops at the location had only chips and biscuits.

It is a good idea for women to wear clothes that don’t show much skin. Egyptian women go around fully covered and hence tiny shorts or spaghetti straps tend to stick out like sore thumbs and attract attention from the local men. At the minimum, stick to jeans/trousers and half sleeved tops.

Egypt can also be cold in the winter with nights reaching 10 degrees in some places. We carried along a sweatshirt, sweater and jacket each.

The days can be bright and sunny. Sunglasses and a cap come in handy.

Wear comfortable shoes. There is a LOT of walking around to be done in Egypt. And like me if have been totally slothful in the recent past it may be a good idea to get some exercise before the trip. A lot of days we walked for around 3 hours totally but sustaining that day after day and not being too tired to skip some parts would require some energy

Desert special – apart from the above, the desert requires a bit of additional packing –

Temperature variations in a single day are huge. So layering clothes is a good idea. Apart from the winter clothes mentioned above, I also had gloves and a woolen cap. For the day, I had a scarf to tie around my hair. It is too windy for a cap and the sand gets into your hair real fast.

It is good to check what kind of tent is going to be used and ask for covered ones if needed. Ours was just two walls erected at right angles. So absolutely no privacy to change. However the experience of sleeping under the moon and stars was worth it.

Good to wear floaters and socks instead of shoes since sand tends to get in and stay in shoes. Also good to have toilet paper handy since toilets are usually just a quick dash to the back of some handy rock outcrop.

Egypt is definitely one of those must-see places and thanks to all the planning (mostly by D), we had a pretty good time.

Turning 21

2010-11-25T19:17:00.008+05:30

Recently a cousin turned 21. As I began to write her a greeting that sounded sensible without being aunt-ji type advice (and I must say I did not do quite well) I began to think about what things were like when I turned 21.

Obviously I had no clue that life would change within a few years when my academic life ended and worklife started, when I began to live in a home of my own instead of the supervised environs of parental home and hostels and when everyone around me began to test what serious relationships were like. In retrospect, my early 20s was probably the time I actually discovered the ‘real world’.

The change from school to work was the most traumatic one I must have had. In my final years at school, I regularly got good grades. Work was a whole different world.

I could understand that some people were brighter than me and did better at work than me. I was at a loss to explain how some people with obviously lesser intelligence than me shone too. It took me a long time to work out that the parameters by which you are judged at work was very very different from the near black and white evaluation you have at school. You needed to be not just hardworking and sincere but also street smart, networked and have a whole host of skills that never came in books.

Not to mention, the lack of ‘intellectual’ challenges at work also perplexed me. After the exciting world of cutting-edge valuation techniques gleamed from international text books, most of my time actually went into photocopying, working on presentations, inputting annual reports into the risk system and other such tearful tasks.

The question loomed – was I in the right field at all? And within this field, was I in the right role? Was I in the right organization? With absolutely no idea of what to expect from the real world, I was shooting in the dark and incidentally, so were a lot of my friends.

In the 5 – 6 years after we all started work, the batch’s professional profile changed quite a bit. When we left campus, pretty much all of us sounded like high- flatulin MBAs ‘who wanted to work in intellectually challenging careers’ in investment banking, consulting or top IT or marketing companies.

Five years later, people had fanned out. Some had decided they needed to work on a bigger scale and decided to do a second MBA overseas. Some moved into entirely new fields like economics, developmental work, research (one guy from another school even started his own music band!). Some left their jobs and started their own companies. Some had stayed in their own fields, but moved to less ambitious positions and organizations that did not require 15 hour days and politicking like mad. It was as though all of us had been released from the B-School/parental/peer ideal of a top job and come to realize where our strengths, skills and interests lay.

It turned out that unlike our parents, at twenty-something we had not got stuck in the job we would do the rest of our lives. We could change roles, change organisations, change fields and infact even just sit at home to think for a while, without too much of an impact on our CVs or financial status. At junior levels, jobs were so plentiful that the worst that could happen was that you would have to start again with lower-brand name firm. And you were paid peanuts in any role, so the difference in working in an ad agency vis a vis working in a consulting job was not going to hurt for a few months. At any rate, it was worth taking the risk of making changes to find what you really wanted to do.

In the midst of all this existential angst on work, I had totally ignored personal life. Not that I did not care for relationships. However, the way I saw it, my parents would find a suitable prospect and one fine day I would get married. That of course, did not come to pass.

Happily enough, I was not the only one. My generation was lucky enough to push the definition of an ‘old maid’ slightly and change the perception to ‘independent, single woman’. Instead of the giggly, ‘I have a crush on you’ type school girl relationships, everyone began trying their hand at the more serious stuff. And learnt a lot on the way.

Like work, it turned out that you had to figure out what kind of Prince Charming would fit you well to have a shot at the happily ever-after.

Probably the most important change that happened in my twenties was my relationship with my parents. I had finally gotten over my teenage fixation of blaming my parents for everything and being equally dependent on them for most major decisions in my life. Instead we began to drift towards a new territory of an adult-adult relationship from a parent-child relationship. This meant that they had to accept some of the difficult decisions I made and I had to accept that I would have to disappoint them in some ways.

It was not just me. Parents all around were upset when their brilliant child who had gotten a great-paying job out of school had decided to quit and join an unknown start-up. Parents were upset that their children had chosen to marry outside the community or to postpone marriage indefinitely. They were reluctant to cut the apron strings, and when they were ready to do so, they were apprehensive about whether we were mature enough to take our own decisions.

As I said, I was discovering the 'real world'

But boy, was it also fun!

Finally we had the money and the time to enjoy it. We could go on Saturday morning shopping binges and Saturday night party binges without the guilt of spending our parent’s hard earned money. (The thought of saving money did not enter my head till I turned 27 or 28).

We were now responsible young adults, but we were only responsible for ourselves and not even to a spouse, forget children.

We could have a house in which mattresses strewn over the floor replaced sofas as seating, mealtimes were entirely dependent on the sleep/work/party cycle, lighting could be from the cool low hanging paper lanterns rather than the elegant, refined lighting of our parents’ homes.

There was always someone who had a relationship to be discussed and analysed and having ‘girly talks’ was a lot of fun.

We knew that no matter how bad things were at work or at relationships, one could get out and look for something new. There was no pressure to bring a semblance of permanence to our actions. Our options seemed wide, wide open.

One of the interesting things I have always heard about the West is how kids take a break year and ‘find themselves’ when they leave school. Of course, that concept would probably be laughed at in India. Looking back, I realize that we do not entirely skip the phase, especially when one is from a reasonably well-off middle class home in an urban centre. ‘Finding yourself’ is just what you do in your twenties.

Interesting times..

Delhi dazzle

2010-11-15T19:05:00.001+05:30

Delhi is a city I have always loved to hate. The scary reasons exist of course – it is not safe for women, people can pull guns at you or worse, pull the trigger at you and all other things associated with crime and violence that come with people having too much power.

Yet perhaps the one reason I don’t particularly like Delhi is that it is so Delhi. This is, understandably a very superficial and highly offensive thing to say. Unfortuantely, this is also a serious drawback as I can see it. Everybody speaks with a slightly nasal ‘haan-ji’ accent. Everyone on the road is aggressive, despite the super-wide roads. Everyone dresses up in a similar manner. Everyone is into the whole ‘my house is bigger than yours. My maid drives a better car than yours’ competition. Somehow, Delhi never gives me a sense of diversity when I walk in its streets.

It also does not help that with my Mumbaiya Hindi (telling auto guys ‘station hoke jaana hai’ is so Bombay), my dark skin and my usually sober clothes, I stick out like a sore thumb in the city.

So everytime work takes me to Delhi, I safely tune out the city and sit in the car waiting to be ferried to my next destination. The one friend I have in Delhi, I explain away as a product of having lived outside of Delhi most of her life.

Yet my last trip made me look at the city with new eyes. I suddenly sounded all arty and French, going on about the ‘light’. The November sun was casting a soft yet sunny glow on the whole city and everything looked majestic, calm and peaceful. Newly cleaned up CP’s beautiful white buildings shone. Humayun’s Tomb and India Gate looked like entryways to magical worlds. Suddenly the roads did not look aggressive. The people looked gentler in the gentle light.

If all of this was not too much of a change in perspective to handle, I also got punched right in the face by Gurgaon when I went to watch ‘Zangoora’

Oh Bombay, Bombay, how your glory has been swiped from under your feet by Gurgaon!

Zangoora turned out to be the ultimate Bollywood Musical. The sets were fantastic and state-of-the-art. The story was wafer-thin and was in place just so everyone had a reason to dance to the Bollywood numbers that kept coming in regular succession. The cast did all the Shiamak Davar steps one would like to see. Sure the dancing was sometimes off. The hero did have an annoying voice which did not entirely compensate for the rippling muscles that put in a display when he took off his shirt Salman Khan-ishtyle.

I sat enthralled, tapping my foot to every number while thanking the stars that my friend managed to get the last few tickets (The show has been sold out since it opened).

So the last trip has been an eye opener of sorts. I still don’t love Delhi but atleast it has got a nice roundness to its personality now.

Aha moment

2010-11-01T11:04:00.004+05:30

Coming to office on a Monday and finding out

1. Your colleague is on leave

2. Your secreatry is on leave

3. There are too many deadlines to be met and it is a short week

4. You are dependent on too many other people to meet these deadlines

Then you rummage your drawer for a pencil and find a single creamy, crunchy, chocolatey Oreo cookie from a packet from last week.

Suddenly the little stress spot on your shoulder disappears..

Festival time

2010-10-26T18:52:00.003+05:30

One of the big debates I have been having in my mind of late is how do I celebrate festivals and what traditions do I follow.

I am agnostic, wearing towards atheist. I totally admire the concept of a god at a personal level since it clearly helps you grapple with issues too large for you to understand (eg. The death of a close friend’s child. The only way they got over those days was to assure themselves that maybe god meant for things to be this way). Or how much faith can help a person (like a friend’s uncle who found battling cancer just a bit easier thanks to his belief in religion).

I also admire the concept of god for society as a whole since it really is a sort of carrot and stick that tells you to behave decently and be nice to others (or else here is your passport to hell, mister)

However, when you have intellectually decided that the concept of a god is really a bit of a crutch and a bit of direction-setting for the society, then it is difficult to cross the threshold back to being a believer. A threshold which I desperately tried to cross back to when a close friend was hit by a serious illness a few months ago. A threshold which I always thought I could easily cross when it came to it. Yet, I could not do more than utter empty and meaningless prayers from childhood, perhaps just to calm myself down.

Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that the bridge to my belief in god has more or less been burnt (who knows, it may be resurrected someday), more practical questions arise.

The most important being, how does one celebrate festivals when one is in a no-man’s land? These things never concerned me much when I was single since really it is no fun celebrating a festival all by yourself and I never even attempted to do that. With D in the picture, there is a quorum to have some celebrations at home now.

I love festivals. I love shopping for new clothes and then wearing them. I love getting together with the family. I love the smell of the feast being prepared in the kitchen, the desperate urgency to string together mango leaves and tie them to the door before the brief pooja starts, the removal of lamps from storage so they can be cleaned and lit. In short, I love all the cultural trappings associated with festivals and I have some very happy childhood memories of them.

And festivals are about both – religion and culture. Unfortunately the two are so intricately mixed up that it is difficult to separate one strand from the other. Is it possible to decorate a statue of an elephant-god, complete with a colourful umbrella and yet not feel slightly hollow about the act?

This is not a big concern when we are with the larger family. The rest of them, while not devout, are atleast still believers and can actually pray during the pooja. So it is almost like somebody else is renewing their faith and I am just celebrating with them.

The real issue is when it is just D and me.

D happens to be agnostic as well. Like me, D also loves the festival food and the celebrations. Yet, can the two of us, by ourselves, sustain the motions of a celebration without touching the religious core of the day? How do we separate the cultural from the religious? Some actions – good food, decorations, new clothes – can be easily put down to culture.

There are other actions that are not as clear. Is it religion or culture that dictates you light lamps at god’s altar? (We still have a mini-alter tucked behind the water cooler, having inherited a god’s picture each from our parents) Can you lamp lights at an altar knowing it is a mere picture and not the supreme being that the day revolves around? If you don’t light the lamps at the altar, is your celebration even complete?

These are clearly difficult questions and the answers are going to take their time coming. Or perhaps they are not difficult questions at all since millions of Indians go through the cultural motions of festivals without consciously thinking about the gods they may be invoking.

For now though, it is Diwali next week and time to shop, eat and have a blast with the family.

p.s. This is not a theological debate on the existence of god. That is a separate issue that may appear some day in this blog.

Smelling good

2010-10-25T07:57:00.002+05:30

When Axe first came up with its deodorant ads showing wimpy, loser types suddenly becoming the centre of attraction to hot, sexy women, I was appalled at the blatant objectification of women.

I also laughed out loud, because the ads were indeed quite funny.

Presumably a lot of others did as well, because suddenly it seems like we are on a deluge. One day there is Neil Nitin Mukesh walking down the street, with pretty young things flinging themselves at him. The next day there are billboards of a siren clad in what can only be called a minimalistic saree advertising a men’s deo.

Looking at all these ads, one may easily reach the conclusion that deodorants are magic potions, the application of which will lead to the Ladeez being attracted to the user like steel filings to a magnet.

The truth, as we of course know, is that deodorants are merely personal hygiene products that men use (or atleast need to use) to stop smelling like a bunch of old socks. The Ladeez may not appear, but atleast the rest of the world will not disappear.

So Axe got it first and got it right. But really, can the rest of you read the above explanation on what deos are meant for and come up with some sensible ads?

Sure, some products need the hot models.

SUVs for example. You can't very well say 'buy this, you enivronmentally-unfriendly jerk with loads of money'. Instead perhaps 'buy this, you environmentally-unfriendly jerk with loads of money and the possibility that someone may look at your car and hopefully you'.

Deodarants need them as much as anti fungal creams (oh look, no itchy red scratch marks on any of the three chins beneath my bald head. Bring on the PYTs)

Can all the creative people who design the Amul ads lend a hand here?

Being sharp

2010-10-22T18:35:00.003+05:30

As a child, I carried a pencil box to school that contained the following :

1. two pencils, one of which was usually only long enough for my child hands
2. one eraser
3. one ruler (when I grew slightly older)

As one can note, the sharpener is missing in this cozy family snap.

The sharpener used to be kept in a shelf along with other items in the wonder world of stationery that we could occasionally peak into but never enter. The world contained strange and fascinating objects like staplers, scissors, and glue in a bottle and later in a tube (not the glue sticks that come now).

When it was time for my pencils to be sharpened, out came the sharpener and lo behold! I was prepared again to fill pages with my crawly handwriting.

I suppose my parents thought it would be too dangerous to give a small child a sharpener. Though I am quite sure that the one or two times I tried putting my little finger into it to see if my skin would peel off, nothing really happened.

More practically, they must have figured out that keeping the sharpener at home and out of reach ensured that it would be available when needed. In the midst of getting your child ready for school on a Monday morning, discovering that the pencil needs to be sharpened and there is no sharpener in sight, probably tops the list of moments that can turn one from a loving parent to a raving lunatic.

I have to admit that as a kid, I had a tendency to lose anything. Especially when given the warning that I better be careful with it.

With most parents perhaps using a similar line of reasoning, only a few lucky classmates brought their sharpeners along. In case of an emergency (both pencil points breaking), you would request a favour of the lucky ones. They would make a big show of sharing the sharpener. When one classmate got a really fancy sharpener from Dubai, that was the size of her fist, all our pencil points must have broken several times in a day.

I am not sure exactly when the sharpener finally found its way into my pencil box. By the time it did, I was anyway too ‘old’ to use pencils. I used fountain pens and sometimes (wow) even ballpoint pens.

It was a long time before I started using a sharpener again. I realized the need for a pencil at work and began to use one frequently.

Generally, the secretary keeps all the important stationary like the staplers, stapler pins, paper clips, scissors etc. I wander over to her desk when I need something.

The sharpener – that is mine, mine, mine.

I keep it in my drawer at my desk. Everytime I need to sharpen my pencil, out it comes with a flourish and then I watch the light brown peels start curling up within the plastic lid on top.

Then I go back to work, with a little smile, ready to spread my crawly handwriting on another new page.

Games People Play

2010-10-14T18:53:00.008+05:30

I finally found it!

After years of searching, I located Boggle. This was a word game the Sis and I used to play every time we went to visit some cousins. For various reasons, that only a ten year old could have come up with, I always used to feel quite superior to the said Cousins. Until their collection of board games would appear. Then I would turn green with envy.

We played quite a few board games at their place and I particularly remember Scotland Yard and Boggle.

Over the years, I have been trying to locate Boggle but for some strange reason, stores never used to have them. This was till I went to the toy store next door last month.

As usual, I asked (optimistically with no view to actually hearing a ‘Yes’) – “Do you have Boggle?”

“Yes” the spirited salesman muttered.

Buying the game and paying for it was the work of a moment. All the way home, I clutched it close to my heart. Something like what people do when they are carrying state secrets about their person. Though unlike them, I was also skipping a bit.

D and I have spent several evenings now playing Boggle. Despite my super levels of confidence in my ability to win at word games and the prior experience at having played the game, D has been beating me solidly. Think in a short while I will have to stop pretending that it is beginner’s luck for D.

Luckily, we are better matched at Chinese checkers. I picked up the game in a last minute discovery in the supermarket and it turns out that just like me, D used to play this when he visited his cousins. We had a few tender moments bonding about how much we had in common. Then we got down to the serious business of fighting about the actual rules of the game vs rules we were each used to. (Talk about baggage from your past... )

So I have been on a regular trip to childhood quite a few evenings the last month. I must say that after a tired day at work, it definitely beats flopping down in front of the TV to watch the 25th rerun of Friends.

Gone shopping

2010-10-12T15:06:00.001+05:30

When I got my first ever salary, I bought gifts for my family, started investing in my retirement plan and saved the rest in the bank for a rainy day.

Or so I would have liked things to be.

As it turned out, I was one of those monstrous people who you see in the movies – the sight of money turns them into Mammon worshippers who spout dialogues like ‘I have money, I have a bungalow, I have a car etc etc etc. What do you have?’

The other party replies sanctimoniously ‘I have a mother’. This was a good thing, considering mothers back then were like Nirupa Roy who would have such a blind spot for their ill-behaved children that they spent long hours greiving in private rather than giving the offspring a tight slap and asking them to shape up.

My mom turned out to be not so much Nirupa Roy when I confessed that I had blown up most of my salary on shopping. She was more the tight slap variety. Metaphorically speaking.

Anyway, we digress. As the equation stood

Credit into salary account in month end = Shopping till earlier of (next month, money ran out)

My shopping expeditions included things I had always longed to buy, usually books and CDs. However, what I did not see coming was clothes and make-up forming a large part of the spending black hole.

After several years as a student on a budget, my formal wardrobe comprised the two sarees I had worn for my interviews (and never to be worn again till I turned fifty or such appropriate age for saree wearing) and four salwar kameezes stitched for summer training. Naturally, I had to buy clothes since it turned out I had to appear presentable in office every single day of the week

Not to mention, the only personal grooming that one did in school involved a trip to the parlour every time people on campus started mistaking me for a passing orangutan. The intricacies of painting one’s face were still unfathomable.

So it began.

I could have gone through the whole boring ‘try your clothes before you buy them’ routine. Or I could have eagerly run past the aisles grabbing clothes with one hand and waving a credit card with another. I chose the latter. I think what I was largely thinking was that I could buy any outfit since
- I would lose enough inches around the waist
- I would go to the gym, start doing weights and have toned arms
- I could sit at a certain angle and let only the nice part of the dress show

Clearly not the criteria one should use to build a dashing wardrobe.

Before I figured out that human weight usually follows a one-way street, my upper arms will never look slim and there are no angles to make bad clothes look good, I had spent enough money to fund a small house to keep all those clothes.

Eventually, I was wiser, but poorer.

Of course, with clothes one could easily argue that buying is not necessary to learning these crucial facts of life. Mere trials would do.

With make-up however, there is no other way but to drop the big bucks. You need to kiss a thousand lipsticks before you find the one that makes you princess charming.

So I tried.

The band of ‘dusky-skinned’ heroines was on the rise and all I had to do was to take cues from them on what shade might suit me. This was till I caught Bipasha Basu sporting a burnt-orange lipstick that would have definitely made me look like one of those glow-in-the-dark toys of yesteryears.

With that guiding factor lost, I plunged into buying shades of lipsticks titled cigarette smoker, where is the lipstick?, there is something on your mouth, South Indian slut etc. Finally, from the sheer laws of probability one of the colours worked. A couple of months later the company stopped making that shade.

With the last bits of the discontinued line that still survived on my dresser I managed to match it with other brands. Till date, I continue the practice of shopping for the next tube before the previous one is completely exhausted. In a fire, I would probably grab the lipstick and run out of the house.

Similar experiments were repeated with foundation leading to snaps where I look mummified, pasty-faced or like a sad survivor of an oil spill. Eye shadows meant to bring out the smoky, smoldering look have ended up with the ‘raccoon lost in the woods’ look. The lesson learnt from this rampant experimenting is that basic make up works at most times. The rest is just too much money for too little returns.

After all these years and this much spending, am I the nattiest dresser around?

Not really. Most of the effort has always gone into ensuring that I am not bottom of the barrel, with the occasional wow look thrown in. But not a week passes by when I don’t notice a woman wearing smart clothes, with the right accessories and make up that makes her face glow. And when I do spot such people, I can feel the slight stirring at the pit of my stomach, urging me to go out, buy better clothes, better make-up, better accessories and aspire to a smarter me. But then, I just tell myself what I learnt in shopaholics anonymous.

Anyone who dresses worse than me is a slob. Anyone who dresses better than me is just too vain.

Endhiran review (or why you should not watch it)

2010-10-04T11:02:00.008+05:30

Warning: Lots of spoilers.

Average Hair Count on each theatergoer’s head at the beginning of Enthiran – 1000,000

Dr Vasigaran or Vasi (Rajini in another age-reversal get up) is a robot scientist who has spent ten years of his life building an android-humanoid (i.e. life like) robot. He is assisted by two imbecile lab assistants who are completely unmindful of the fact that they are privileged to be part of a team developing cutting edge stuff in robotics. Instead they act like two disgruntled code-writers in software companies doing time-pass at work and looking out for jobs.

Vasi’s lab is located in what looks suspiciously like California but emerges into Mount Road in Chennai. When the movie opens, the robot is kicking the two lab assistants (hmmm, hence the job dissatisfaction?). Apparently this is the humour element in the movie, since the two lab guys get beaten up in the movie quite frequently by the robot.

Hair count as one begins tearing hair in frustration – 999,000

Vasi’s robot ‘Chiti’ is created in the image of Vasi and is ready to be tested in a real life environment. Enter Sana (Aishwarya Rai looking quite shapely after ages), Vasi’s super pretty and super dumb doctor girlfriend. Sana takes Chiti home and in two minutes manages to get into trouble with the neighbourhood goons. Sana the HUMAN BEING stands helplessly while Chiti the ROBOT uses his initiative to create havoc. Encouraged, Sana gets into a standoff with some more goons and pleads to Chiti ‘Do something’. Er..don’t robots normally need precise instructions like ‘Take the bad guy’s weapon and kick his ass’? Besides, however did she get through her days before Chiti appeared, considering her penchant for getting into trouble?

From the strong Ramya Krishnan character in Padiappa and the Jothika character in Chandramukhi, women in Rajni movies have morphed into these wimpy eyelash-flashers who whimper helplessly most of the time. If Shriya in Sivaji was bad, watching Ash Rai being saved by a Robot in a proooollongged rape scene makes you want to cry.

Hair count – 700,000

Anyway, after Chiti is exposed to the world of women who exist only in the movies, Vasi reveals Chiti’s purpose. Chiti is to be given to the Indian army so that robots can fight in the place of real soldiers. So basically we find out that a robot, designed to kill human beings has been roaming the streets at will.

Hair count – 600,000

Enter Evil Scientist Bohra (Danny Denzagpo looking suave). Bohra's robots all look menacing just in case we have not already figured out he is the bad guy. Bohra has taken a hefty cash advance from an international Terrorist Placement Agency which has asked for several human looking robots. Bohra's robots are unfortunately not ready for this lucrative market. So he conspires to get hold of Chiti and sabotages Chiti’s attempts to be recruited by the army.

A frustrated Vasi, instead of going back to altering Chiti’s software, decides to teach Chiti ‘feelings’ in less than a month in order to be eligible for the army. The expected happens and Chiti falls in love with Sana (Aha, I always knew Ash Rai's plastic smile could only be a turn-on for robots *smug smile*). Vasi destroys Chiti out of rage and jealousy.

Hair Count – 400,000

Bohra recovers Chiti from the garbage dump – oh yeah, Vasi’s method of destroying Chiti is not deactivating him but hacking him into pieces – and loads Chiti with the ‘Bad taste’ red chip. This makes Chiti go after Sana despite her really bad wig. Chiti converts all the robots in Bohra’s lab into his lookalike, kills Bohra, kidnaps Sana and sets up a house with the intention of living happily ever after.

Hair Count – 200,000

After a couple of stupid attempts by Vasi to disarm Chiti and a stupider robot dream sequence where Sana tries to seduce Chiti (what can one say…), the climax begins.

Hair Count – 100,000. Gosh looks like we can all use Sana’s bad wig.

The climax turns out to be the paisa vasool part of the entire movie. It is a stunning spectacle of mankind’s mastery of graphics (we may suck at robotics but we surely rock when it comes to graphics!). The army of Chiti robots form various shapes and ward off attempts by the Indian army to capture them. At the end of twenty minutes, when Chiti is finally subdued one sits totally stunned by the spectacle.

The red chip is removed from Chiti and Ash’s wig has also become better and is no longer attractive to Chiti. Peace reigns. Chiti dismantles himself while giving a long sermon

Thud thud. Gosh the head hurts without hair to cushion its banging against the wall.

The movie could have been a lot less insulting to the viewer's intelligence if Shankar had handled the whole man vs machine conflict better. Rajni the scientist seems to conveniently keep forgetting that his robot is a machine and needs to be treated accordingly - not slapped around or scolded like some recalcitrant kid. Seriously, a Phd from Carnegie Mellon, a post doc from Stanford and you expect us to swallow this?

Rajini's superstar image is partly to be blamed. After all Chiti may be a robot, but he is still Rajini. And hence he becomes a superman instead of a supermachine. Perhaps if writer Sujata had been alive, the movie may have been dumbed down to suit the average viewer without losing its credibility entirely.

I would sincerely suggest the following to Shankar to ensure that the movie has a longer run at the box office.

Try some serious editing – say about two hours of the movie. Now stitch together the following scenes

- Vasi and Chiti in the car and Chiti with the policeman (that bit was funny)
- Couple of song sequences, especially the one in Peru
- The entire twenty minutes of the climax

I guarantee I would watch the movie again if these were the only things in it.

What say?