Roman Holiday part two

 

 

 

 

The story is coming up!

A Roman holiday

 

 

 

 

Buyology

Our real needs are raped by their association with buying something to satisfy them

In the depth of our hearts, where once hopefully, at the beginning of civilization there was a reservoir of stillness and connectedness, there has emerged a buzzing , gyrating train station.

Trains run in a blind metal ecstasy satisfying one manufactured want to another. And not once can we feel

the sacred silence .

If I was scatterbrained, organizing challenged, messy and careless, not even the fanciest wallet with Many categorized pockets would change my personality or make me organized. My true being of careless existence will win. Yet my credit card will shit the requisite amount paid for perceived change in the leather company's balance sheet.

The Bangalore Central happiness sale is on, a hoarding told me.  Happiness , I strongly suspect lives

in that huge reservoir now drained.

 

 

(I'd like to publicly apoologize to Matt Lowenstein for my Soviet style rant)

Religion

Sometimes I feel like religion is like chinese whispers played over generations. An enlightened man starts with the word love and it goes through many degrees of faith and politics and ends up being heard as hatred .

A house with a hundred rooms - Switzerland and other stories

To get to St Moritz is a long drive from Basel and you drive through Davos , Zurich and all the other hubs where the wealthiest settle to escape paying taxes in their own country.Suddenly,  in a surreal situation your car drives in to a train and the train takes you up the mountains. This time you are late as the train comes every half an hour. The guard says he is already three minutes late and he cannot delay the train further by one minute so our poor car can crawl into it quickly.  

En route I find myself, (as I seem to have developed a talent for planting myself in places so far away from my own world) , in a beautiful Swiss Café with a gorgeous Ukranian waitress .I chatted with four Swiss people there while eating pasta Napoli with tomaten and drinking water fresh from the glacier. Their stories are incredible. The man who had a house with a hundred rooms but worked as a chef in a low profile restaurant earning a minimum wage.

 

The temperature is – 6 degrees Celsius and outside the beauty of the Alps  is so intense it hurts your eye.

 

Welcome to Switzerland.

 

When you are sledging down the steepest slopes on the Alps, you can't see what's coming and you are going full speed . You are caught between the need to concentrate and the need to gobble the extreme beauty of the mountains as the setting sun gingerly paints their peaks a glowing orange. You are on an Alpine slope near St Moritz in Switzerland where Hollywood comes to unwind, where old women are dressed like in a 1920's movie with fur coats and hats.

You take it all in  , sleep over it and and wake up to an amazing breakfast of freshly baked fluffy croissant, a  nutty  traditional bread, exquisite cheeses, coffee and juice.

C of course cooks the most exquisite food in the world, far better than anything I have had in any restaurant I went to in Switzerland and Italy. The description of this would merit another blog post , A typical tradiitonal Swiss  farmers breakfast which is a simple but gorgeously delicious meal of roast potatoes and fried eggs- Rosti.

 

There are no simple Swiss farmers anymore.Not counting the virtual Heidi who blows you a kiss on the train to baggage claim in the Zurich airport.  Ive been here long and haven't met a single  cow yet. The youth of this country are rich from the spoils of their parents generation. The recession seems to have barely pricked the surface of this rich country given the bustling luxury stores at St Moritz.

 

I hear stories a lot. There is a woman , lets call her m , who is petrified of going broke. Her father is easily one of the richest men in the country..She inherited money from relatives which makes her richer than her father. . She works as a nanny because she is afraid of being broke. Her divorced mother thinks 60 000 euro a month as alimony is a  pittance and can barely buy her one handbag.A legal dispute is on. 

 

 I spent most of my time in Basel and went on short trips to the hills, to Rome and to Zurich.

Basel has small town charm , the two parts of the city are connected by a bridge over River Rhine. The centre of town is charming , museum studded and on sunny days a small lively street market props up . A stray musician plays the violin arranging for my typical romanticized vision of an European town.

Zurich is larger but similarly constructed around Lake Zurich and has a landscape studded with beautiful church towers that change to modern industrial buildings as you go further away from town.

The streets around the centre seem to have a small but interesting art scene with many shops exhibiting sculpture and painting for sale. C says the nightlife is surprisingly hot for a city so small.

Although C complains that Switzerland is too perfect , it is interesting for me to see a world that works, where you don't worry about leaving your bag  on the tram floor because no one will steal it. I have developed an unjustifiable trust in some western countries. With no offence to anyone, Italy is excluded from this list. For the basic necessities of life and a little more, the state is accountable. The streets are clean. The public transport is reliable. The government can afford to not be corrupt about basic things and concentrate on the bigger things.

At the Zurich railway station you pay the equivalent of 100 rupees to get in but the toilets are surely the fanciest and the most spacious I have seen in a public space.

Sometimes, my Indian upbringing means that I have a subconscious dread towards toilets in public spaces. The Edinburgh park toilet swept me away with its clean floors, nappy changing stations etc but Zurich was even better.

In Rajasthan , I have seen toilets with layers and layers of aging shit garnished with fresh shit and watered by pisss. in public loos.

 

Sorry my dear reader, The Alps are beautiful ,the chocolate is out of the world...just think of that to get the previous image out of your head. And I promise to put up pictures soon.

(I've slightly changed the stories of the people I have talked about to protect their identity)

Switzerland

Christmas card outside my window. As soon as you reach the airport and take a train to baggage claim, The ghost of Heidi pops up on the window and blows me a flying kiss.

I can hear the sound of cows and cow bells. 

No ,I am not kidding. The swiss seem super serious and host international treaty making sessions but apparently they can be silly in  a fun way.

Perfection and punctuality to an extent that it hurts my Indian eye. 

Dubai

--
Dubai 's view from my plane was as expected long golden snakes of light , row upon row of identical houses , some flashing a turquoise rectangle of a pool.
swimming. The airport is sparkling , plastic and recessionarily vacant. I have 11 hours to kill, a reclining chair , a laptop and very little enerrgy.

3 Idiots

Three Idiots had me smiling throughout. And rolling of the floor in laughter occasionally.
The story of three boys who try surviving in a highly competitive engineering college ,
It has its dollops of romance, sorrow and now because of the ever increasing need for Bollywood films - a message. The message in this case is that that engineering colleges should not be factories producing fodder for companies but encourage scientific thinking and individuality. We had Aamir Khan looking hot despite being twice the age of an average college student helping birth a child with a vaccum cleaner.
When I say I like Bollywood movies for the joy, I don’t mean it condescendingly. Discrepancies in plot,unrealistic situations where a student speaks of a professor as a rapist and a minister as a (rapee) in a school function and doesn’t end up expelled aside, I love this movie because it is funny. And I think it captures Indian boys of that age quite charmingly.
( As you probably figured this is not even pretending to be a review of the movie) . 

This Bombay

On the local from VT to Kanjurmarg , the general compartment, crowded with people of many kinds, a paralyzed man, a woman with child etc
I squeeze through the crowd , three stops before my stop so I can reach the door . My plastic bag scrapes against the face of a woman. I smile and say sorry.She flashes a warm smile.
It's the end of a long day for most of them. 10:30 PM. Yet no one loses their temper. Everyone smiles. Everyone helps trying to make space for a child on a ledge.
I don't want to exoticize or romanticize.
This is not always so but 80% of the time, everyone is nice. At a time when everyone is angry about everything, I can't help admiring this Bombay.And smiling.

Street

 

And you blog again

You go to the Commercial street auto stand after stocking up a war’s supply of patience. You take your auto and drop your friend at Basvangudi as always. Then it is time to be vulnerable because you are alone at it is 10 PM , late where I live.

The lechometer comes into action – the mirror inside the auto that shows not a trace of the road behind or anything else that might be of value to a driver except perhaps wank off material.
Wank off material is the woman behind , who in this case is wearing a blue shirt , grey jeans and a long black sweater.

You wonder if you should move out of his sight. Then you will be too close to the edge of the auto and stray flying hands from passing bikes can access your mammary glands. (This has happened before).
The same goes for the other side. In the centre, you are in perfect view for him to see.

The auto seat becomes your world. The world is a war zone.
You rationalize it. What if this had been a hot man at Zenzi. Maybe you wouldn’t have minded.
You wonder where the auto driver’s left hand is. It’s not on the autos steering thingie.

Maybe you are a classist bitch. Why should a man staring at you bother you ?
Why should it threaten you?
Just earlier in the day, a man follows you just outside that gated apartment complex , that haven of safety- home. He keeps saying ‘’ Nice bums’’. You turn around to face him with the angriest expression you can manage. He continues telling you he wants to fuck you . You slap him. Instinctively. You are not a violent person. You get so scared at your own reaction. You quickly walk away and slip into a cyber cafe.
You worry that he is humiliated and he will gather four to five of his friends to attack you later. After all, you live in this area.
That was in the morning. It is night now. You are back home.
And by the time you are home , you think it’s pointless to blog about it because you’ve done so in, 2006,2006,2006,2006,2006 and feel this way every other day.

Not this , Not this

It’s always been difficult for me to find the geography of my own life in literature. Urban, upper middle class , mostly Bangalorean . Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti captures the city that is in a maddening flux in some parts ,stagnant and seething in some parts and in some parts traditional as it would have been fifty years ago with sensitivity and a nuance I haven’t read in writing about Bangalore before.

Sophie Das is 25, has moved from the quiet hill town of Shillong to transcribe Hollywood movie subtitles by day and have moral tussles with her land lord about hanging underwear, spend time in pubs with her boyfriend Swami and navigate the weed bed of wealth in the malls, streets and homes of the city’s privileged.
Then there are her friends. The dubious Ringo Saar whose job is to bash up people defaulting on loans, Anu who gets through life doing nothing and keeping a boyfriend and convincing him to move to Australia where the roads are clean.
Shiva, who could be those few people we know who keeps tipping the parallel narative that connects the lives of urban youth into conversations. The South Bangalore gang that hacked a 21 year old man of a rival gang to death, a man who forced his wife to drink acid, how the shit of the rich determinedly travel to the open sewers of the poor.

Her colleague Shanti Gouda lives on the metaphoric other side of the city – lower middle class and working her way up , subtitling English shows for money but refusing to enjoy their vulgarity.
We meet the police men who tell the city’s migrants only half jokingly that in Karnataka they must speak kannada. And the rich Punjabi father and son duo who get out of their air-conditioned car to bet up a local auto driver in their perceived right to exert their masculinity.
Sophie is a witness to other people’s tragedies, forced to make a comment or two. A child dies in a mall, but when a brutal and unexpected murder ends it all for Sophie she imagines finding peace in her mountain home away from what she calls India . It is at this stage in the novel where it feels like Hasan clumsily put together news reports from Bangalore’s recent past and used these events as a backdrop for Sophie’s angst.

And yet, her dull and cold family home which she believed could never change has its own share of , if placid, fissures. Her sister is on a teenage trip towards boys and gold earring gifts while her parents’ relationship is not what she imagined it to be.

The elections are on , their politics suddenly revolving around a visit by Bob Dylan with every party wanting to capitalize on it in a rock loving town. Sophie chases her ideas of a man she has been fascinated by, if not in love with for a while . Nothing however is yielding enough for her to stay.

I can feel Bangalore in Hassan’s prose..it’s fissured class dynamics, , its confused youth , its gourmet shops , its butter and ghee shops , its migrants and its malls.
It’s not Amitav Ghosh’s Sunderbans or Arundhati Roys river polluted with world bank loans or Rushdie’s magic realism. Its most of our lives..


Those of us who went to college here know pretty well how to irritate sales girls by making them help us test lots of expensive perfumes that would cost 1/5th of our first salaries, walk into expensive branded stores and try on purple dresses just because our Tibetan market skinny jeans and what could be easily from Mango t shirt, coupled with our ‘’neutral’’ accents made us pass off for those who could afford such shit..
''She squinted at cubbon park (on a map) and tried to picture them separated by it- Sophie and her friends on the right half of this centre drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Shanti’s mother and great grandmother on the left half , selling breakfast to lewd lorry drivers.’

Haji Ali

 

 

 

 

Tonight I could write the saddest lines ( with apologies to Pablo Neruda, the great poet)

Tonight I could write the saddest lines


Write for instance that

‘’The smog is shattered and the orange haze hangs heavily above

the hoardings selling insurance’’





The beedi smoke spreads , the autos cough out

some soot





Tonight , I can write the saddest lines.

Through nights like this , I held him in my palms,

Pressing his many buttons, feeling every romance

he held , every new acquaintance that was pregnant with a impending friendship





I dialled 100. The Bangalore police cannot find him,

My Bombay boy.



He loved me, Sometimes I loved him too

I broke him, I repaired him too

How could one not love his great wealth of

Sentiments, of his contacts to reach ceos

Within seconds





To hear the distant wind in a now hostile city

And to know that in him he carried Bombay,

Its dirt , its trains , the goat cheese tarts at terror struck hotels



And to know that he is gone now,

He is another’s, perhaps a driver of an auto,

A college student.



What does it matter that my care could not keep him.

My memories have been dismantled and he is not with me.




In the distance, coolies are banging and a few birds left in Banashankari

sing . My soul is not satisfied that he is gone



Maybe he was meant to go, dismantle a metropolis,

Stray fucks, strayer press conferences on what the rich hold dear





The same asthmatic smog molesting the same green city

I of that time no longer am burdened.




It is good that he is gone, that is certain

But maybe, I want him.



He will be another’s. His teenage poetry sms,

The invitations to coffees , the chatter with prs in high heels





Phones last so short, forgetting is so long



Though this is the last pain my phone makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for him


I am sorry for the drama, though. I found him in my drawer..eventually....

Railgadi

On a train from Bangalore to Pune I find myself in an compartment with three men constantly on the phone as if bounded by duty, hmming and occassionally smiling slightly BUT NEVER saying anything . They talk for more than an hour..if I can use the word talk at all.

They are all talking to women ..I can hear the giggles and the enthusiastic narrating of stories.

In other news, man oppossite me, old, wobbly, beaten and yet not well over 50 or anything brags about having shot tigers in Thane when it was still a forest and says that he shot a python in the head and saved its fat because it heals wounds.
Random.

Gokarna

 

 

 

 

sea