Of long gone Summers and taking the wrong train

Minmaya!! That was the name he was looking for. He had spent an entire Saturday and a bit more, but yeah, early Sunday or late Saturday, depending on the kind of person one is, he finally managed to roll out the syllables painfully encrypted in the depths of his sub conscious. 2:10 AM.

It was a name from four summers ago, not too long ago, many would say,again depending on the kind of person one is... but he had grown old in the meanwhile. Four years... "Older than I once was, younger than I'll ever be, but that's not unusual" as Paul Simon would say.... The summer of 2007, was preceded by a long winter and a longer more painful spring.

He had decided the summer would be his epilogue to the story of his last one year. A year he made choices, including a choice not to make one. Choices that defined him, more than any event in his 25 year old life. 25 is a nice round figure. He never understood why 25, not 24 and 26 are counted upon as significant take-stock milestones. Was this a result of the decimal system? What ages did the Romans deem significant ?

Mimaya became a little paragraph in his epilogue. A dead end on the JR Tohoku line. A point of must return. He had left Tokyo's Ueno station early in the morning at 5AM. Changed seven crossing the torturous spine of the Japanese mainland, all to reach Aomori in time to catch the 1130PM ferry across the Tsugaru on to Hakodate.
Crossing the sea, gave him a metaphorical finish line. To start a new race all over. To be done with the race he had been running all along. A race he had lost, but like the athletes trailing the winner and runners up, just pointlessly kept running to reach the ribbon which has been breasted and subsequently trampled upon by a horde who already finished ahead of him. Flying didnt give him the same feeling. It had to be a boat. A break in the medium not dimension.
Reaching Kanita three fourths of the way, he felt confident enough to hop on to the train heading north, without asking the ever polite station attendant of the final destination.

It was a little toybox of a train. The kind railways put in at the fringes of their network. Fringes forgotten by people but alive as numbers in the budget sheets of a Rail company. But none the less important to the two people every square kilometer who live in these fringes. People who plan their entire social lives around a timetable at the neighborhood railway platform(yeah not station). Soon, he was passing through cabbage fields (reminded him of Chekov's Soviet), little platforms with people sitting on benches on the platforms not to catch trains, but to catch up on conversations and sunshine. The train, hesitantly gathered speed, knowing surely that she had to stop in the next minute or two and then she gave up hope at the slightest tug at her brakes,stopping to drop off a lady and her unmarried 35 year old daughter here, a milkman there.. He could not see the coastline, but he could smell the sea. A smell not unlike the sea of his home.

It was a good two hours where he sat looking out of the window, acknowledging or ignoring fellow passengers depending on how much he liked them when he saw them on the platform as the train drew in. He never listened to much music on the road..or on the rail. He never managed to finish a book on the road. He needed long pauses in motion to be able to dispose of a couple of chapters. His books always got back badly dog eared from a trip. Not from use, but being shoved into a rucksack which seemed to have enough wiggle room when the trip started, but now was strangely refusing to accommodate.

A little into the afternoon, he rolled into a quaint little town called Minmaya and yeah, it didnt take him too long to figure that he would be going nowhere for a while. A traveller can easily know by the sounds the train makes at the last stop. It's like a collective sigh of an audience after a rather boring lecture one has to sit through more out of politeness than heartfelt interest.
He asked the station attendant(ever polite) in his pidgin Japanese. He always took care to use the pidgin version. He had learnt that the moment, one asks a question in fluent Japanese, one gets an answer in fluent Japanese, and it aint easy for him to keep count once that starts happening.
He got a suitably "yukkuri hanashitekudasai" response telling him what he had suspected.

This was the end of the line. Would you like to stay?
No.
Then why are you here?
Wrong train.
Wrong train he says,haha.Where do you want to go.
Aomori.
Aomori?Haha. Go back to Kanita.Haha.
Well, haha.When does train leave?
In an hour.Are you sure you dont want to stay?Haha.
Well, haha.

And there he was in a little town, a town he would have liked to settle into a quiet retirement like the one the station master was looking forward to..or not. A town, where time was measured not in minutes, but in seasons. Four springs old, three summers ago. He sat on the bench watching the train. She was in a deep unshakeable slumber, like people who sleep with no sign of life.
He knew then, that he would miss the ferry. Five hours in a day is a tough little stretch to make up for when all one has is a Seishyun 18 ticket and a lot of time to kill. He made peace and waited for the train to wake up.

Minmaya.

Looking back, four summers hence,with the benefit of hindsight he realised that reaching Aomori in time for the ferry, would really not have made any difference. His obsession with the prize was strong enough for him to disqualify winners, move the finish line and ....may be he still races against ghosts for prizes long won.

Minmaya was just another bend in the track. A nice little memorable bend from four summers ago.
He uploaded the blog entry, switched off the lights, opened the curtains and faded away with hazy images of deer at sheer gorges, volcanoes with jagged cones, a shop attendant who rented bicycles next to an onsen, who served milk in bottles....and the prize.

Of Dosas in Gandhi Bazar and New Guitars

Chatting with someone on Gtalk while composing a blog entry makes for a rather demanding weekend chore, but when the person whom you are chatting with happens to be someone who happens to be not just another someone, you do make the effort.

The last month has been rather dreadfully boring and I hope there are not too many of these in the near future. I did turn 26 though. I shall spare you the usual drivel of peepuls suffering from quarter-life blues. I managed to keep my reading progressing at a decent chug .

I had started reading Mao Zedong's biography in Japan in the spring, and was midway thorough it when I packed my backs to return home. It was positively depressing to find that my copy was not to be seen after my luggage porter was through putting my baggage into my hotel room in Thailand.(I was shifting my entire set of worldly possessions to India, so I did look like Fedex had outsourced a sizeable chunk of business to me).

So when I found a copy idling in my friend's bookshelf on a visit to his house in Hebbal, I brought it back home to finish it up. I still am to come to a conclusion about Mao and his life and times. There can only be a couple of em...Either Mao was a brain dead psycho or the authors are pushing some serious anti-Chinese propaganda. It is nonetheless a very interesting read.

Next went on to finish John Gribbin's Schrodinger's Kittens. Written in his usual fluid style, the book makes for a very good after-work read.

Still not able to finish Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio after I decided to stop reading when I reached midway.

Put away Stephen Clarke's Merde Actually. This guy knows his stuff. A light,fluffy read(and I dont mean it in a kinda girly way) with a very fluid narrative.

My last read was Pankaj Mishra's very insightful Butter Chicken in Ludhiana...It's about life in the small towns of India during the early 90's when the beginnings of the Great Indian Middle Class was taking root. Makes you want to hit the road with a vengeance.

Planning to start Kawabata's Yukiguni (Snow Country) today.

The Bangalore blasts from the last weekend had taken the wind outta the city's sails on Friday. We have the usual political doublespeak clogging the airwaves and this is compounded with the usual insensitive media persons shoving their version of events into the viewers throats (sigh! miss the good old days when Salma Sultan and Komal GB Singh did their thing in DD).

I did register my token protest by eating in the busiest and the most Bangalorean of all eateries in Bangalore.Had been planning to visit there for a couple of weekends and finally did manage to go there this time around. Vidhyarthi Bhavan was not different from the last time I visited the place with my dad a few years ago

We were greeted by a dude just outta his adoloscence blocking the entrance with his left arm and were asked to wait for 10 mins. Two Kanglish speaking dames(the kind you see outside JNC or Christ College) waited for exactly 600 seconds before charging the sentry with perjury in the peoples' court. "Uncle neevu 10 minutes aagutte andree alva. Nodee 10 minutes aithu?" After a few more minutes of silent name calling by the sentry and the patrons, the sentry magnanimously let the throngs rush in but not before specifically ushering in the dames with a "Aunty, wolage hogi eega". The dames were obviously scandalised at being addressed so.

An 80 year old granny was probably crushed to her death on her way out, but such trivailities pale in significance to what the diners need to be up for next.

You need to be at your cunning best to grab a seat in VB without having aged significantly trying to do so. In fact it should be declared an art form by the state government and an award must be instituted for the same. My friend and I strategised a fair bit considering the sizes of dosas and chutney remaining in peepuls' plates, their age ,past history and high school academic records before deciding that a family of three sitting at the far left corner of the hotel were the best candidates to wait upon till they finished washing down their dosa with by-two Filter kaapis. Continents drifted apart, Halleys Comet travelled a third of it's orbit when finally the family rose, to find their way to the hand wash. I had strategically placed myself to ensure no other diner had the same ideas that we had. After demolishing two masala dosas and chugging half a liter of chutney, sharing a table with two middle aged men with a lot to say about the quality of service from Vodafone we walked out with a quiet sense of achievement.

I bought a new guitar(my second one) from Jayanagar 2nd block and I intend to see that is better used than my first one, which is probably gathering dust in a second hand gear shop in Higashimatsuyama,Japan.

The only tune the poor thing belted out was an occasionally correct rendition of Tujhe Dekha to Ye Jaana Sanam. More on my progress on this front in the next blog.

TC

Cheers

Of Morning Blogs and Fine Weather

A morning blog this one.. being penned at 1000 in the morning. I rarely do that. Most of my blogs get written under the shroud of starlight and moonbeams(OK, the image doesnt sound so romantic, if you factor in a hairy brown skinned guy in his desi chuddies pecking at the keyboard).

Been a long time since I last blogged and there's been an awful lot that's happened since then.

I sometimes wonder how the happening peepuls around blogosphere manage to capture their every waking breath, office argument, heartbreak, toilet break et al in their blogs every single day. If my life were to match up to the blogosphere standards of "happening", I'd be sleeping 30 mins a day, commuting 4 hours a day with a random hot chick who shares my taste for Haruki Murakami's literature, reading Hemingway in office while my boss drones on, run into Sharon Stone in the loo, discuss Einstein's interpretation of religion with the random hot chick on our way back home, make love to her in the neighbours garden and then finally get back home and all excitedly blog about it.

Since February, I've taken a bunch of vacations which involved climbing active volcanoes, staring into volcano craters, camping inside a caldera, hallucinating prime numbers in a wooden cabin in sub zero temperatures, soaking in onsens, memorising train time tables in Japanese font and castle hopping.

A random sampling of the Japanese vacation below.

This was followed up by a rather long vacation in Thailand on my way back to Bangalore..err. .Bengalooru (spelling it that way is supposed to make me empowered and feel like all my problems are solved as the politicos in reams of newsprint have suggested). It involved tagging along with sis to Phuket and Bangkok ,a solo walkathon across Ayutthaya and Kanchanaburi, fotographing monks, tigers and monks with tigers.

Otherwise nothing newsworthy happening at my end unless you would like to know that the corns on my soles have eased up and withered away. I no longer walk like Jack Sparrow.

I have managed to sew up a few reads on the side, which include The Inscrutable Americans(an average read), Dawkin's The God Delusion(high decibel), James Watson's DNA(brilliant stuff) and in the middle of a couple of other books.

Bangalore is definitely having a spell of swell weather off late.The mercury is hovering around the lower twenties, flowers are in bloom, wind speed just right. Good enough to shut up the panche clad uncles in Brahmins Coffee Bar who cant stop saying "Eevagin Saaftwaare Engineergalige yen gotthu? In 1973, naavu May nallu swaatar haakondu waaking maadta idvi Lal Bagh nalli"(What you scoundrel saaftware engineer knows? In 1973, we all wearing sweater even in May for morning walking in Red Garden")

Have taken a decision to volunteer in an NGO on Saturdays for a couple of months. I have decided to follow Calvin's exhortation to lower my expectations to the point where they are already met. Anyway,let's see where that goes in a couple of months time.

Missing my weekend jaunts into Tokyo, and the feeling of elation when I find the right Japanese word to explain my country, body hair ,religious orientation and alleged mathematical genius to 88 year old Japanese on mountain tops..but yeah...already filed in Nostalgia section .

Until the next blaahg.

Cheers

Of Unfinished Blogs,Vagabonding and The First Winter Snow

Winter has set in ,in this part of the world. I've almost lost three toes and four fingers to frostbite, but otherwise I'm doing pretty good.

Been a long time since my last post in November. After many false starts and a bunch of saved drafts, thought I'll push the publish button for a change this time around.

During a welcome break of three weeks in India for the year end, I managed to cover some mileage on the Great Indian Railways traveling to the East coast to my granps' place and then bussed my way through a big chunk of the West coast. Not exactly Jack Kerouac kinda odysseys , but not bad for a nice distraction from the rigours of the life of keyboard pecking and corporate clucking. The Indian Railways never fails to hold me in a spell thats nearly lasted a lifetime. Nothing to beat the aroma of Idlis and chutney(you never get that railway platform chutney anyplace else in the country) wafting through the windows in the dead of the night with the accompanying newly released musical.."Idly, Aaa Idly, Aa Idly, Idly". As kids, moms never let you get a bite of the oily vadas which the blokes peddle, but at 25, life gives you more choices and this is one of them... A plate of Vada in the dead of the night for no particular reason....

I'd spent 4 years of college life in Manipal never really getting the hang of the topography of the neighbouring city of Mangalore and all things Mangalorean. (The topography of the Mangalorean female specimen,of which we did have a glut in our college does not count). Since I had to attend a wedding in the thereabouts, I took off early morn from Udupi where i was based, for a day of pottering around Mangalore.

I got off the bus and took a rick to Sultan Battery ,my first stop for the day. Now, having been the majestic and awesome Bekal Fort in Kanhangad, I was expecting something similar, especially since my guide book, promised "exquisitely baffling architecture". I think this was some seriously twisted deviant, hell bent on ruining people's early morning starts. The Gurpur River is a good back drop for the(well ...almost concrete) structure, but with the number of ciggy packs and garbage around, this wouldnt rank anyplace in my list of to do places.

After a not so good start, things could only get better and they did. I am no fan of religious architecture , but am a sucker for history and there's lots of it in the churches of Mangalore. I went to a couple of em, and each had a little bit of 1500s and 1600s lurking in the Frescoes and the engravings. Could recall a bit from the Bible study class from the fifth grade after staring at em paintings. I visited Aloysius and Rosario Cathedral, even sitting through the Sunday mass in Rosario :) The smiling volunteers in the church, dont make the whole deal too bad either.

The wedding done, I took the roundabout route back to Udupi via Karkala, and stopped at the 1000 pillared Jain Temple, also called Saavira Sthambada Basadi in Moodbidri. It was not crowded when i went in, just a couple of locals and the temple accountant hell bent on extorting a big fee for letting my cam run riot. I keep my lenses and wallet closed . Just an out of the way place, with a nice ambience, but not someplace I'd go back for a second look. Not bad for a day's work eh!

Bangalore was once again the usual ..crappy traffic..honk,honk,honk..

I flew back to Tokyo after a fortnight of leisure. I'd managed to read up a lucidly complex(you'll know what I mean if you read one) Jiddu Krishnamurti book, a book on Hindu Revival by a Belgian,"Decolonising the Hindu Mind" during the time. I am in no mood to read Murakami or Ishiguro or Kawabata at the present moment.

Did read up a couple of Lonely Planet Travelogues and a book on the weirdness and the madness of Tokyo in the last week. In the middle of Kerouac's On the Road and Will Shirers book on the Third Reich.

My last couple of expeditions into Tokyo too were pretty rewarding. I managed to get tickets to a bunch of Sumo bouts and believe me ..It's a must see event in Japan. The ambience and the Shinto rituals make it all the more exotic to the average desi looking for "the real Japan". I've become a pretty big fan and now follow the tournament schedules,leaders and the private lives of the yokozunas with an almost Japanese zest.

It snowed for the first time in a couple of years in this part of Japan. A pic from my neigbourhood below clicked by one of my colleagues at office.

Thats it for now. Was quite and effort typing with the six remaining fingers. Will keep the good work going :)

Ciao&Cheers

Of Moments of Truth....

Railway stations had always fascinated him. This one was vaguely similar to an old picture he had filed away someplace . The picture in his head was too clear to be true. He smiled at the thought of how much of our past is imagined and how much is what we want it to be , rather than what it really was.
His train of thought was broken by the footsteps of a dozen dhoti clad passengers running on to the rusty metal over-bridge to go over to the next platform, mouthing a very rural Telugu in between paan tinged breaths.
The evening sun, had just gone below the horizon. A slight chill hung in the air. It was a window between when he could see the mynas silhouetted against a shade of a indigo sky, with a tinge of orange and the time the antiseptic white street lights are switched on.
The mynas were as he as imagined them in his filed away picture.Equidistantly perched over the electric lines with millimetric accuracy.

The crowd thickened steadily and he instinctively tightened his grip on his backpack. He had an hours time to kill and he walked the entire platform searching for a suitable bench to settle on. All of them were full.. With families excited to be going away on a holiday, with daily labourers and their dazed looks, with a newly married couple thrilled to be holding hands and making plans.

After he had walked back and forth a couple of times, he found on bench with a red veil limply across it. It was probably left unoccupied, because of the veil.. It almost told you with a quiet dignity to find another bench..this one is taken.. He pushed it one corner of the bench and settled in for a long wait for his train to arrive. He didnt mind the wait. He could see in the fading light, the wisdom and the quiet fortitude of the elderly, the burden of responsibility,the ebullience of youth, the joy of childhood. He was completely at peace. He liked the fuzzy feeling of the nothingness and disconnected thought. Miles way from the life of constant confusion that he was going back to.

A feeble voice, yet so clearly heard over the din, reached him. It was an elderly man, dressed in clothes that looked like they had been washed many times over and yet looked neat. He held in his hand a leather case ,that had seen better days. The bag was packed completely and the zipper had popped at the seams. The man asked him, if there were any ladies sitting next to him. When he answered in the negative, the old man picked up the veil and with a tired sigh, he moved it aside to make room,taking care not to drop it onto the dusty floor.

Both stared at the mynas until they were imagining them against the pitch darkness on the horizon.

The crowd was by now jostling around with people tracing random traverses to get from one place to another. He nervously asked the man,where the B2 wagon would stop on the platform.

The old man indicted that it would be stopping just about a few metres from their bench. He relaxed.

The old man asked him, where he was going to. He replied that he was going to Bangalore. The old man, throttled half a chuckle.

" Software?"

"No, Electronics"

"Ah, Ok, Software". A quiet,uneasy silence.

"You are going to Bangalore too?"

"No. I am going to a small town called Chittoor. It's close to Tirupati, about 50 km from the Karnataka border.",he said in fairly good Kannada.

"Oh, you speak Kannada!",he exclaimed, decidedly surprised to hear his native tongue,so far from home.

"Yes, I worked in Bellary for some time. I learnt my Kannada there. Are you here on a vacation?"

"Hmm. Had come over to meet my grandparents, who live close to here. What about you?"

"I am on my way back home from Behrampur, travelling in the general compartment"

"Oh.Orissa?"

"Yes, my son works in the Archaelogical Survey of India, as a junior assistant. He has just been posted there and it is the first time, he has been away from home for so long. I went to visit him for a couple of days to make sure he is alright"

"Oh,that's nice"

"I am a school headmaster in a government school in Chittoor" , "just three months way from retirement",he added with a twinge.

"Must have been difficult travelling in the general compartment."

"We are used to this. We have to learn to."

He imagined the headmaster's son, brought up on a dosage of middle class values. middle class resilience, conservative sheltered thought, poring over dig sites, finding stuff that people world over would come to see and could not help comparing it with his own job of pecking away mindlessly at a keyboard. The confusion, which had cleared amidst the throngs of the humanity just moments ago, was slowly seeping back into the crevices of his psyche.

He felt guilty about earning all that money for a little more than breaking a mild mental sweat in a shiny cubicle in an environment where people complained if the AC setting was 2DegC above or below their liking.

More than ever, he resolved to end up doing what he wanted to do. Get back to the classroom,only this time, on the otherside of the desks within the next few years...
His guilt trips were using up more fuel than ever before off late.

He shook his head and said,

"It's such an interesting job, is'nt it? The ASI "

"A job is a job. He found it after a lot of running around. I spent a lot of my savings to get him this job. It doesnt pay much, but he atleast can do something with his life. "

He tried hard to find the right thing to say. He couldnt find anything much to say and smiled meekly.

"Must be hot in Chittoor"

"Much hotter than Bangalore definitely"

Weather. Signs that the conversation was wearing thin.

He left the old man to his thoughts. The old man wiped his glasses.
A mother shouted at her 5 year old. An old woman carefully adjusted her sari before descending into the tracks to cross over to the other platform.

His train was due in a couple of minutes. Already people on the platform were restlessly stirring, counting their baggage and in some cases their children. A kilometre down the line, where the tracks bends into the paddy fields, a strident beam appeared and was soon followed by a strident hoot of the engine's whistle. He got up and stretched.

He looked down to the old man still staring into a private void.
"The train is here"

"I have a small request if you will care to hear"
"Yes"
"I dont have money for a ticket or food. My wallet was stolen on my way here from Behrampur"
"Ok...",he said hesitantly. The engine hooted out a clear and shrill note.
"If you dont mind, can you lend me 200 Rs? Give me your address and I will send you the money. I dont know anyone in this town and you know how the Ticket Checker is"

The train was now almost at the platform, sending people instinctively behind the yellow line which they normally ignore.

His mind was racing. It was not the 200Rs that worried him. He wondered about many things, like trust, fate, belief all at once. The train stopping and all the people rushing in did not help him.

He took out 200Rs and hurriedly wrote down his address on the paper the man had held out to him.
The man thanked him tersely and walked away.

The train stopped here for only two minutes, a punctuation in its journey across the fertile south. He had to get into the train now. He went in and sat at his window seat pushing his cheeks agains t the cold,rusty grills. He saw the man... or was it someone else headed towards the station exit.

Something told him, sitting on the cold rexin of the Indian Railways berth... all the life experience he thought he had earned over the years of travelling and meeting strange people in strange lands, had not helped him when he was getting conned in a place 50km from where he was born.

But somewhere there was a niggling hope that a cheque would be mailed to him. Like in a Reader's Digest story.

Three years hence, recalling the incident and updating a blog post .. it still rankled. The old man needed the 200 more than he did, no question about that.. He spent more getting his hair trimmed.

Still.. the fact that the letter never came dented his faith in more ways that one.

The old man probably came there to the same station every once in a while, fine tuning his act, adding minute details to make his son. his job and his retirement vivid entities with a life of their own...A sharpened pencil and a piece of paper ready in hand.

Of Nothing in Particular

Hi Peeps.

It's been a long time, and a lot has happened since then. I cant help it, that I am a happening guy. For those of you wondering how incredibly vain, is this blogger, please check out "bad sarcasm" on Wiki.

Been to Nikko a couple of times in the last month. The second time was to check out the Autumn colours a week ago. Apparently half of Japan had the same idea and I ended up stuck in a interminable traffic jam to get up to the woods and the lake from the Temple complex downhill.. I was far better off than people who followed an hour after me. They spent 5 hours, to my couple of hours staring outta the window of the bus. The scenery itself wasn't too bad though.

Growing up as I did back home,hanging outta the foot board of buses, jumping in and out of running trains, deep sea diving without oxygen and parachuting off 30 floor buildings(guess which two I made up :P ) , the announcements in the buses here never fail to tickle me.
"We are now approaching the Irohazaka Slope.The bus will largely sway from side to side. Please fasten your seat belts and secure all baggage. Passengers may experience motion sickness..blah blah". In that goddamn traffic jam, if we moved any slower, we would be going backwards !!! Yuri Gagarin wouldn't have got those many instructions when he blasted off into space... It would probably have been [Thick Russian Accent] "Theez eez Borisz , Hope yzou have tanked up on Vodka and don't forget to pee righd into ze vaccum pump.Dont get too cloze though!! 3.2.1.Blast off"

With minimal observable damage I reached the Lake inspite of the allegedly apocalyptic journey, but not before I flexed my new found Japanese muscle with the pretty "Call Center Lady" sitting next to me. CCL had apparently backpacked in Tibet, travelled in a bus for 4 days from Yunnan.. after dropping out of Arts College. CCL also had a blinding revelation that my thick spectacles were a result of staring at miniature robots, after I solemnly told her that I was an Electronics grad. The specs were a result of staring at entirely different, organic specimens of the female sex, for long hours during my long adolescence ,but obviously I didn't tell her that. After holding her spell bound with my Japanese for a good hour, I concluded that my Japanese was coming on quite magnificently or that I was a stunningly handsome male specimen, if it wasn't my Japanese :P . If you still haven't checked out "Sarcasm" on Wiki, You should do so now......

I stayed overnight in a Pension next to the Chuzenji Lake after spending the evening trying out my new Canon EOS Kiss Digital X. I quickly figured, how much I don't know bout this gizmo...

The next day, I loitered around the Ganmangafuchi Abyss near the temples and came back to Tokyo to check tryout my new contraption in Meijijingumae ,Harajuku, which always has more than one good photo op in store...

Check out the dude with Gold Fish Earrings.

And they lived happily ever after......

I've been reading loads off late... Staying up well into the night. My most recent reads.

-Alan Turing's Bio
-The History Of the Orgasm - Very informative. For the ones with leers on your faces.. This ain't got any pictures :P
-A Nick Hornby Novel- How to Be Good... Classy.
-Murakami's Dance Dance Dance .. Abstract and Dreamy
-Currently reading - Oppenheimer's Biography. Spectacular stuff this. I am half way through and this is easily one of the most lucid works in contemporary writing that I have chanced upon.. It really deserved the Pulitzer it got.
-Got another book on the futility of religion and a Nietzsche which I might not understand at all...

Happy Diwali to all the desis. And to all the non-desis... Look up Diwali on Wiki.

Ciao!

Of the Birth and Death of Indian TV

Japan may be the second biggest economy in the world, but the jingle industry here is stuck in a time-warp and they refuse to stop using high pitched juvenile voices to scream their punclines. The same "Sugooieee ......%*%^&*^&(^(^....aeeeee" is used to sell every product from toothpaste to Automobiles. There are a few ads which tickle the senses but most of it cacophonous non sense.
The talk show hosts are so goddamn over-the-top with the canned laughter and the exaggerated laughathons that even if I undertood the language any better, it still wouldnt make any sense.Check out Lost in translation for a better idea of what I'm saying.

I am actually missing the early Indian Television scene , which I grew up with when I was a kid. I remember, when we first bought a TV in 1986. Those days were extra special with the whole household's routine planned around Chitrahaar,Ramayan, Mahabharat,Samachar,Fauji, Buniyaad and Circus. My fav spot used to be the Sunday evening 5PM with Giant Robot .. Then, ads were never considered the nuisance that they are now, cos most of them made sense and most of the everyday average-Pandus could understand and relate to em. Anyway since DD was the only one channel around, there was not much scope for channel hopping during the ad-sequences. If DD decided to air only ads on Saturday evening, we would have uncomplaininingly watched em:)
We knew the names of every single newsreader ...Minu, Rini Khanna who later became Rini Simon or the other way around, Tejeshwar Singh, Neeti Ravindran,Gitanjali Aiyar,Komal GB Singh,Sunit Tandon. TV has lost that personal small town feeling it had when it first hit India.
The color stripes with that annoying shrill background sound giving way to the DD opening song in the afternoon was the thrill of the day..The DD emblem slowly materialising outta a circular orb, with the shehnai Taa na nana naa in the background.

The oldest ad that I remember is the one with Javed Jaffrey in Cinkara. "Bechara kaam ke boj kaa maara" and then a spoon of Cinkara and he flying thru the glass door. Fascinated me endlessly to see all the glass flying around :)
Then there was the Goodwards gripewater ad. The one featuring the three generations. Very touchy feely ad.
I still like the freshness in the Torino jingles set to that very catchy tune.
-Its a great great feeling,
the taste sends u reeling ..Aah..Torino Orange
and the
Its a new new sensation,
Orange fascination .Aaah..Torino Orange

Then there was the ubiquitous Nirma Ad..
Doodh si safedi, Nirma se aaye..Rangeen kapde bhi khil khil jaaye..Sabki pasand Nirma.

The Maggi tomato ketchup sequences with JJ and Pankaj Kapoor..mouthing inanities like 'Lily, Dont be silly' and 'It's Different' :)

NECC: Sunday Ho Ya Monday, Roz kaye ande.....

ECE: Jyada de ujala, hyaada din chalne waala ECE Bulb aur ECE tube :)

No new fangled "Isme me hain Ultra phenicol penta sodium meta isosilicate zinc chlorate micro granules jo Dandruff ko jad se nikaale " [Shudder], just old fashioned Pappu-Kamala stuff.

Sue me for being an emotional cliche, but I'd rate Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Baje Sargam, Ek Chidiya Anek Chidiya,Purab se soorya uga as the best ever social messages that have been conveyed via the visual media in the history of Indian Television... Simple, subtle , classy...

Anyways, while the Cable TV revolution was a breath of fresh air for the Indian TV scene when it came in, all they seem to air off late is the mind numbing Saas-bahu crap.

Sigh.
Ting Tin Ti Ting.

Of Fireworks and Crowded Metros.

Half of Sunday has already been spent in bed. Breakfast comprised of all of 4 chocolate chip biscuits and am contemplating my options for lunch. The newly opened Indian restaurant is bout 20 min on cycle from my place and the Pakistani joint is bout 10 away. The other option, the cheapest and by far the the most nutritious is to cook a meal by myself,but needless to say it's the most least appealing option.I am tired of surviving on Avalakki ,but yeah with the range of culinary skills at my disposal, I dont have the luxury of ticking off from a list of exotic dishes,what I plan to conjure today.

Yesterday was particularly tiring. We were not the only people who thought that the Asakusa fireworks were a good distraction from the grindmill of our daily lives. The place was like Chickpet on a day when all cloth merchants decide to give away their wares at half price.
We had to walk for a good hour before we found ourselves a 20 cm gap in the line for the couple of us to fit in.After an hour of staring at the sky at a particularly awkward angle owing to the barricades and a few boughs of a goddamed tree obstructing my peripheral vision, we decided to call it a night and boarded the overcrowded trains back to central Tokyo,nursing the back of my neck on the way home,sweating buckets...

Dinner was a doughnut and a Banana-something in Italian-Frappe at a Starbucks in Ikebukuro.

Finished a few more pages of the Bertrand Russell book on the train ride.

Of Lazy Weekends and English Weather

The past few weekends have been not too different from from what my more illustrious countrymen in white flannels have been seeing in the ol Blighty. More or less rained off .

In a desperate attempt to retain a sense of connectivity with the world where I come from aka where every one,including the overweight techie project manager(whose idea of exertion is a stomp on the aspirations and personal lives of the minions working under him) to the doodhwala, knows better than Rahul Dravid, who should be in the team and which shot to play to the ball pitched on middle and leg,swinging in and seaming out, I have been up quite late these last few nights following the progress of the Indian team losing the script of the "How to win a Series Victory in England" manual and occasionally finding a few pages.

Btw , in a moment of quiet reflection, I am sitting back and just wondering if the above sentence was the longest I've ever written in my life.
The story of my life these days..these Moments of utterly pointless mental excursions :)

Anyways watching Cricket in England has its own moments, the sartorially elegant crowd, with everybody from the village idiot to the mayor turning out in their best hats and ties to watch the progress with emotionless blank faces. Compare this with the atmosphere in Eden Gardens or Sabina Park, you know why there was/is/will be so much talk about the British stiff upper lip.

Have been reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy for ages now. It's a pretty heavy tome written in tight English prose. Anyway this is not light reading, and being a Cambridge grad, he has quite a reputation to live up to, so I will not complain bout the rather bland writing style . I must say that, this is pretty informative guide to the Western thought process.
Have Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" next in line.

In other (rather stale) news, I fooled around at the Disney Sea Resort(got hold of some free passes from my manager here :) ) a month ago and went on another weekend jaunt to Karuizawa and pottered around a volcano. The 21 km hike had long lasting after effects
though.. Limped my way through most of the week after.

Have a weekend(a sunny one for a change) of lazy reading and train trips to central Tokyo in store.....Fireworks display in Asakusa tonite.

Schönes Wochenende
Cheers

A long pending blog entry......

Long time , no blog. Guilty as charged....

Seems like ages since Day3 in Chaweng. There were a few more days in Thailand followed by a couple of weeks in India and a couple of weeks in Japan hence. So much has happened since, that the very thought of sitting and bloggin all of that without missing details actually puts one off.

When you sit to recall a really hectic vacation, a month later, chronology is something that's hard to stick to or recall.The memories that remain are not the mundane that you recall at the end of the day, but stuff that's gonna stay with you for a long long time to come.

Some random snapshots from the rest of the days of the vacation.....

I gulped half the Gulf of Thailand and was at the risk of becoming the first drowning incident in the history of snorkelling with a Life jacket on.Frankly I hate any activity that gets me to part with my beloved spectacles, and given that I lose all motor abilities in a water body where my feet do not touch the floor, I am reduced to clenching and unclenching my butt muscles at random frequencies to convince myself that I am still in control of the situation .. but anyways , a visit to the Emerald Lake a while later made up for that. Thailand is really full of nice surprises where sometimes the wares turn out better than advertised. Angthong Marine National park is one of em.....

A long walk on a beach in Lamai,with the occasional gust of sea breeze giving you the chills when you are sweating buckets, and the sun set ambience, sitting on a few craggy boulders, watching the sea mindlessly break itself against the rocks...
Walking on the beach, you have a very thin band to walk comfortably on. If you walk too close to the sea, you go all squishy squishy in the wet sand.. Fun for sometime, but gets to you... You walk too far away, your feet sink right into the sand, no traction, lots of shells to prick your feet.. The beach ..like life...has this small zone .. nice, warm yet cool, compact stretch where you can make the perfect footprint..... And like the beach, Life aint a straight line.......

Another memory that has stayed is a random act of kindness that only travelling can give you a chance to experience. We were waiting on the Pier to catch a boat on our way to Patpong from the Grand Palace, where we asked a bloke in a uniform standing there, the number of the ferry which would get us there. The Thai Navy dude actually paid for our tickets, the next thing we know.... He told us he had a daughter who was 5 years old and that he likes playing with her on weekends....
I haven't met her, but I can almost imagine, how sweet she probably looks......

India was a really draining two week vacation this time round... Covered a bunch of places I`d been meaning to cover..or uncover....
But there are some places, you just just cant seem to reach... However well connected the road,however quick your steed, however strong your will..... Ran into a couple of em.... Another day,another time...

Anyways drinking beer from a huge burette was a first for me.. That was in Leopold in Mumbai. Music was too 1980s to write about.
Usha's wedding and an old boys(and gals) meet in Mumbai was pretty good fun.

Managed a solo climb to Lohagad fort in Lonavala. The view from the top is worth the 9 km climb from Malavli railway station. The trek was something I really needed to do to clear my head. There is a certain catharsis in this whole business of trekking .. It does not solve any problems but gives you a much needed break from em. 18km in 3.5 hours was bliss.
Btw dont go to Khandala if it aint been raining for sometime yet.. Not worth it....

Last weekend was spent communing with nature ,climbing the 45th highest peak in Japan(for those going Thbbt!thhbbt! Snicker! ... Byatches! the inclination is not a function of the height:)) )
Will put up a detailed write up on that in the next blog.

Ciao
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The Thailand Diaries -Day 2 and 3.

Blogging this entry from a Travel Agents office on Chaweng Beach, Ko Samui :)

Yesterday morning, we got up nice and early and went to Wiang Kum Kam, bout 6 km outta Chiang Mai Inner City . This place is a bunch of ruins dating back quite some time....700 years ago..Not exactly Macchu Picchu though.. We were the only foreigners in the place..We went around a few of the ruins and were chased out of one by Soi dogs.. We walked to the Highway after getting hopelessly lost among the deserted Wats.. We finally managed to snare a Tuk tuk back into town after a long trudge in the heat... We went to the same Arabic Restaurant for lunch and we had a long chat with the Pakistani owner, who was born in Amritsar bout the travails of life in the Sub continent. Afternoon, we rode on a Songthaew to Doi Suthep and did the usual touristy stuff on the peak..After a zillion pictures of Buddha in sundry poses, we went back to the room to get some shut eye.
The hotel we were staying had a decent pool,so to do full paisa vasool, I slipped into it after a small siesta... After bout an hour in the pool, went down to the place where on Sunday we loafed aound in that amazing market and found a bunch of stray dogs and some locals loitering around in the street... The market apparently is not a perennial feature...Just a Sunday thingy...kicking myself in the butt for not having bought some of the stuff on display, thinking I could I have done it today :(

Anyways, we retired for the night after a visit to the Night Market,not exactly the same thing as the one on Ratchadamnoen Rd on Sunday...

Decided we had enough of Chiang Mai and went to the Airport early morning today on One-Two-Go Airlines from Cnx to Don Muang airport in Bkk.From there we took a shuttle into Suvarna Bhoomi and we took off for Ko Samui on Bangkok Airways flight. Had originally planned to take the chaper option of going into Surat Thani and then take a Ferry into Ko Samui. We landed in Ko Samui at about 1PM .... Kinda cute airport(if you can call an airport cute that is..)... Its completely open air and apparently run by Bangkok airways..who have the monopoly on this route.
Took a Taxi into Chaweng and checked into Silver Sands Resort... The room is a fan cooled deal..and is horribly hot, but it is made more habitable by the fact that the AC Rooms cost 3 times higher... Anyways the plan is not to spend much time in the room.
Went to an Indian Restaurant for Lunch...and then spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach.

Returned for a afternnon siesta and slept unti 1900... Went out and booked a boat into Angthong Marine National Park..The setting for the movie "The Beach ". Just coming off a dinner in a real cool joint, with a very hip laidback Goan ambience. 4 Margaritas and a Pizza.

Retiring for the night.

Ciao

Thailand Diaries -Day 1

A post from Northern Thailand this one :)

Yesterday i.e 21st Apr,Sat we(Arjun and myself) left Higashimatsuyama for Narita by the 10:45 express to Ikebukuro. After a lunch in the before mentioned Nepali restaurant, we went on to Narita by the 1304 NEX to the airport. We flew outta Narita at 1825 and reached Suvarnabhoomi Airport at 12 midnight courtesy North West airlines. Since we had not bothered to update the airline with our meal preferences, we had to choose between Fish noodles and chicken..Not a difficult choice to make for a veggie :).. However, I managed to wrangle some extra slices of bread outta their pantry. Watched a British movie, Notes of a Scandal, starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett followed by The Holiday, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet et al...Decent stuff both... The turbulence for the first couple of hours was beginning to tell on my bowels..and was more than pretty relieved when we finally managed to skirt the storm.

We went out of the airport to book a hotel room for the night. But the humid hot night air hit us like a wall and we traced our footsteps back into the cooler confines of the airport.
We decided to change our initial plan of taking a night train from Bangkok's weirdly named Railway station on Sunday night and decide to take a flight into Chiang Mai early today morning. I half slept the night on a very uncomfortable bench. Early morning we bought a ticket outta Bkk to Cnx on a Air Asia flight cost us 1620 baht each . A couple of hours later at 0800 AM today, we plonked into a hotel, randomly pulled outta my trusty Lonely Planet. Don't ask me whats Top North Hotel supposed to mean. We checked in after a horrendous breakfast in a "Indian Vegetarian Restaurant" (Yup..That was the name) ...We ordered a Full Thali costing bout 90 baht,obviously famished after the North West meal debacle. My Lonely Planet(not so trusty sometimes) promised "adequate portions", which there were, but the food tasted like it had come straight outta my cookbook.. We left the place in a hurry to take a short nap, which extended pretty much into late afternoon. Finally acclimatised to the heat of Thailand(remember, I am just comin outta a Japanese winter) we ventured into the Inner City, visiting a bunch of Wats including Chiang Man Wat and Wat Phra Singh, the most popular ones, we even managed to find a Hindu Devi Temple on the outskirts of the Inner City.

As the sun set behind the hills of Chiang Mai, we went down Th Ratchadamnoen , where a superb Market sprung up outta nowhere... Today morning, there wasn't a soul in sight on these streets.. This city springs to life after sundown. So we went checking out the wares and bought some trinkets here and there. We returned to the rooms to dump the stuff and set out again at 2100 into the other side of the city walking along Th Loi Kroh. I finally bought the Che Guevara T Shirt which I have been looking for, for ages now. Dinner was an uneventful event in an Arabic Restaurant unimaginatively called Arabia. A couple of Allo Paranthas later, we came to a pub with some live moojik had a cocktail and after this blog entry, am headed straight for bed.
Btw there were these cool Paper balloons which they were playing around with around our hotel. They use a small fire to fill out the balloon and the paper lantern lifts up into the sky, looks darn pretty in the night sky....friend caught it on video.Will post later.
If not anything,the night market makes this place totally worth a visit..
its 1 AM on Monday now.Have a long day tomorrow...
Ciao