Domain Maximus

Beirut Panorama. Image via Wikipedia

The most time I’ve ever spent in a single city in the last 22 years, before packing up and moving somewhere, is the four years I spent in engineering college in REC Trichy. Otherwise it has always been brief stints of two or three years before education or employment or pub-lust, has me moving once again to Ahmedabad or Delhi or London.

I am not complaining of course. I think I enjoy this relaxing frequent nomadic-ism that ensures you never get too bored of any one city. Or language. Or food. Or Milan subway.

However this kind of thing does lead to some behavioral quirks.

For instance you are almost always coming across furniture or wall decorations or shopping mall sculptures that you are itching to buy–because it could make your house look like Frasier’s–but can’t because you’ll surely be moving somewhere soon.

You are also constantly somewhat jealous of friends who’ve bought magnificent homes and splendiferous cars because they’ve decided they’re never moving.  This feeling usually bubbles over violently when you see the magnificent wooden bookshelves they’ve installed in their hallways or living rooms. (Also a lot of people in London leave their windows open in the evenings. With all the lights on inside. Just going to the nearest tube station is a tortuous parade of bookshelves and open-plan kitchens and plush sofas and ottomans and wall hangings and such like.)

Personally this also leaves me constantly thinking of myself as a tourist. Therefore I am one of those people who shamelessly strike up borderline-intimate conversations with taxi drivers and auto drivers and waiters. I don’t know if their views of a place are reflective of the average inhabitant’s, but I’ve always had the most amazing chats sitting in the back of battered old car stuck in a jam on Wadala bridge.

For instance the very first day I went to junior college in Thrissur–11th class for you hep folks–I struck up a chat with the dude who was driving my auto from the bus stand near Swapna theatre to my college. The college scene in Kerala at the time was intensely political. There were huge left wing and Congress movements and a laughably small, token right wing set-up. Even before my first day in college I was leaning towards signing up for the commies. Because at the time they seemed pro-poor, anti-religion and corruption-free.

Not to mention all the movies in which Mohanlal portrayed a crusading commie.

As we rattled on in our auto we passed a small procession of commies protesting something or the other. “Are you a leftie?” I asked my driver.

“I am a member of the trade union. But am I friends with all of them,” he said.

“The left is good for poor people…” I ventured, half as a statement, half as a question.

The driver thought for a while and then said something I’ve never forgotten. “They are the same boy. Both of them steal. But there is one difference. When the left win elections only the chief minister’s children go to study in England. When the Congress win elections, everybody can steal a little. Everybody’s children can at least go to an english medium school in Guruvayoor.”

Later I realised that the commies were hardly distinguishable from the Congress hordes at college. But the Congress type tried to convince you to vote for a student councillor with beef biryani. The commies preferred to serve you with fresh cycle chains.

Then there was the cabbie guy in Mumbai who picked me up, late one night, outside a club in Bandra. I don’t remember exactly which one. But I recall it was on top of an ICICI bank, and the dance floor had huge backlit manga cartoons on one wall.

That night there was a huge crowd looking for a ride, but somehow the cabbie gave me the once over and then told me get in. This “once-over” business in Mumbai is utterly revolting. And invasive. I believe I lost my virginity to a particularly slow, excruciating once-over on Marine Drive during my summer internship in 2004. Women have been known to miss their cycles after one.

After a general meandering chat about traffic and cabs and Bandra, I asked my cabbie why he gave me the once-over. He said he was making sure I was a ‘decent party’. I asked him if he was alluding to prostitution. No, he said, he was alluding to couples who made out in the back of a taxi. “I don’t have a problem with that. Children are modern these days. But how can I drive properly from here to Nariman Point if they are doing it in the back? Sometimes they make noise. It is very distracting. And then other taxi drivers make fun of you if they see. Why can’t these boys and girls just wait for 45 minutes?”

We laughed the rest of the way to Wadala. Where I discovered he had a dodgy meter.

And so on to the guy who drove my mini-cab two weekends ago. Mini-cabs are the cheaper, shabbier cousins of the famed London black cab. The London cab, like so much else in London, is fiendishly expensive and best enjoyed from a distance. Public transportation is the cheapest way to get around. But if the night ends too late, or the day starts too early, then a mini-cab booked by phone is useful.

So last fortnight I went with Mr. and Mrs. Pastrami to a splendid and quite fru-fru night club. Which we left shortly because frankly we’re getting too old for this shit. So we went back to Pastrami’s house–yes, with bookshelves and even a fireplace–and threw back a few drinks. The missus, if you’re wondering, wisely decided to sit at home, read a book, watch some comedy and do some baking.

Well past midnight, after the trains had stopped, I reluctantly called up a mini-cab. (The reluctance was due to mental arithmetic that multiplies mini cab charge by 80 to get approx. Indian rupee figure.)

They’d sent a spacious silver Mercedes-Benz that looked at least five or six years old but sparingly washed. The driver was a big, strong, lightly-bearded chap in a jacket and woolen cap. Who looked of vaguely mediterranean extraction.

After some silence we somehow started talking about something or the other. Maybe the weather. I don’t remember.

“So are you married sir?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You went to a club tonight?”

“For a little bit.”

“Alone?”

“Ha ha. Yes.”

“If I went to a club on my own my wife would cut my balls off.”

And then he told me he was from Lebanon. And a big Amitabh Bachan fan. In turn I impressed him with my rudimentary Arabic–hummus, shawarma, tabbouleh, Abu Dhabi, Tahrir. The conversation turned to the topic of unrest in the Middle East.

“Like your country my country is also very beautiful,” he said. “Good food, good nature, good women. No peace. No peace even for five minutes. You have no peace with Pakistan. We have no peace with Syria and Israel.”

I asked him when he’d left Beirut and come to London. At which point he began telling me his story.

When he was 13-years old Israel invaded Lebanon. At which point my driver, let’s call him Rafik, signed up for the Lebanese army. Five years later he fled to the United Kingdom seeking political asylum. The UK let him in but the asylum visa came with a ten year ban on going back to Lebanon. Rafik taught himself to become, of all things, a graphic designer for a magazine publishing company. He married, had children, and occasionally visited his sister who’d found asylum in the US. And then his company decided to shift base to Dubai Media City. Rafik followed but left and came back soon because he couldn’t handle the people, the place and the distance from his family. But by then the economy tanked. And media, as you know, imploded. So Rafik now drives a mini-cab to make ends meet. It is not a terrible living, he told me. Yet he pines to go back.

“I want to go back. I want to die and be buried in Lebanon. You know what I mean? It is my country. This is not home. These people don’t like you. They don’t understand you. Some of them hate you…”

We spoke for a while about racism and home and London.

And then I asked him what he did for the Lebanese army as a teenager. He thought for a while.

“I was a sniper.”

Whoa. I play as many sniping flash games as the next guy. The missus was a proficient sniper during Unreal Tournament LAN games in business school. But I’d never met a real life sniper.

“Did you… did you… kill a lot of people?”

“That is not a good question. We were at war. They invaded. I was a soldier.”

But he no longer hated the Israelis, he said. At least not as individuals. Rafik said that he often ferried Israelis in his cab and some of them were also soldiers. In fact, he said, they’d often swap war stories, shake hands and chat like old friends.

And now, he said, the Shias and Sunnis were killing each other.

“But… how terrible to be made to kill people when you were so young… how do you deal with that…”

Honestly I was expecting a filmy outpouring of emotion. Rafik didn’t say anything.

And then after a silence he rattled off a list of the guns he still had at home: Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles and hand guns. When he went to to the US, Rafik said, he still liked going to a shooting range.

“They are crazy there man. Before 9/11 you can buy a gun from anywhere. Any time. Go to a range. Shoot. It was crazy man…”

“But… what a horrible childhood to have…” I just couldn’t get over the fact that he was a sniper and shooting people at an age when I was merely water-boarding my dad to get a GameBoy

Again Rafik didn’t say anything.

Just before he dropped me at home he whipped out his iPhone and showed me an app.

“Unbelieveable app man. You just press on the picture of a gun and it makes shooting noises. And it is so accurate. You will not believe. It sounds exactly like a gun in real life. Kalashnikov… exactly the same…”

I paid him, added a generous tip and wished him good night and peace to both our countries. He called me brother. And then before starting his car he made a couple of shooting noises with his iPhone guns. And then my cab-driver cum graphic designer cum sniper drove off looking very pleased with himself.

Is there a moral to that story?

The only one I can think of is that I am perhaps much luckier than I sometimes realize.

Image via Wikipedia

(As seen in the Lounge edition of 16 April 2010. I had a much longer uncut version somewhere. Will post when I find it.)

It might seem presumptuous to judge a country by your experiences as you land for the first time at the airport. But sometimes, airports are splendid barometers of culture. Heathrow, for instance, immediately has you thinking: “What atrocious advertising! Surely, this is the kind of nation that would give rise to Monty Python…”

Zurich’s airport, on the other hand, is all straight lines, simple signage, orderly queues, meticulously timed shuttles, pressed uniforms and insurance advertisements. The message is simple: “Welcome to Switzerland. We have banks. We are very clean. And our very clean trains run on time.”

So sterile and generic is the airport that at one point it felt exactly like Dubai airport in the minimal pre-Burj 1990s. But only with Nordic white people instead of Malabari muscle.

But don’t let that fool you. Switzerland is rightly held in high esteem by tourists of all races, colours and packages. It is the sort of country where you could, if you had the stamina, photograph everything in sight. Even the policemen.

Having had our passports stamped by two splendid samples of the Zurich constabulary, my colleague and I ran to the railway station across the road. The two of us were on a hectic business trip that would have us visiting Basel and Geneva, with our base in Zurich. Read the rest of this entry »

Cover of Wolf Hall: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)

Have I told you about my obsession with author podcasts? About how I diligently download as many author interviews as I can onto my iPod and then listen to them many times?

Personally I like to skip the parts where they talk about one, or several, of their books. Instead, I like to focus on the writing process they follow. Do they wake up at 4:30 AM and start typing? Do they carry moleskine notebooks around to jot down ideas? And how did/do they go about researching their books?

The latest addition to this collection is an iTunes “Meet The Author” interview with Hilary Mantel. I haven’t read the Booker prize winning Wolf Hall yet. The book is one of the many I abstained from while editing up Dork. (Fear of “inspiration”, insecurity etc. etc.)

You can listen to that episode, and archives of the “Meet the Author” podcast, here.

My favourite-st author interview show however is the BBC’s excellent World Book Club. Superb interviews with great authors. And extremely accessible. Plenty to listen to online and on the iPod, here.

The latest episode of WBC featured John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas:

Some of the other authors featured on WBC include Annie Proulx, Kiran Desai, Wole Soyinka etc. etc. Splendid archives.

Another superb place to evesdrop on the “writing process” is the wonderful “Writers’ Rooms” series at the Guardian. The last update, however, is dated last July. Pity.

Yes, yes I have finally moved bag, baggage and missus to Delhi and have spent the better part of the last week sneezing in our flat in Dwarka. (Thinking of the mammoth savings in rent I make here compared to my place in Wadala is somewhat comforting.)

But before I launch into blogging-as-usual-from-Delhi I must drop a line about an interesting incident that happened on the Metro a few days ago.

So there I am with the in-laws and the missus on the blue line from Connaught Place to Dwarka. The train is crowd-less but there aren’t any seats free. Somewhere mid-way, after Rajouri Garden I think, the mom-in-law gets a seat. She is wedged in between a Japanese mum with a PSP-clicking child, and a couple of African guys.

One of the African guys get up, my dad-in-law ushers the missus towards the empty seat. But before she can sit the African guy mumbles something and and scrambles his way back to the seat. The dad-in-law is very miffed and begins to say something when we calm him down and tell him to let it go.

Someone mumbles something about “better not take pangas” with “these African types”.

There is much wrathful eyeballing happening all around till both men get up just before Nawadah. Both the missus and dad-in-law take their place. I still stand. One of the guys comes over and says: “I give the old man a seat but he give it to that young woman. Young woman can stand. I want him to sit because he is old. In our country we respect old people.”

He sounds half-offended when he speaks.

I tell him that we respect old people in our country too.

Soon, but of course, we begin talking about India and Nigeria, which is where they are from. “Some things about India we like. Some things we don’t,” they say honestly when I ask them about living here. Turns out both guys are professional footballers with the Ruia Royals, a football team in the local Delhi league. (Anyone who can throw light on this please do. I could’nt Google up anything.) Both of them live in Nawadah and they were just back from a match.

When their station came we shook hands, patted backs, traded smiles and then they were off.

“These African types” were actually very nice people indeed.

I felt very, very sheepish after the whole incident.

Regular nonsense postings will resume from this weekend. Have a fantastic 2009 everyone!

Wednesday was one of the tougher days I’ve had at work. I was multi-tasking on several stories, never a good thing for a writer, and had several Google Docs windows open on my workstation. A farewell lunch for a colleague, who is in her notice period and leaving early December, at The Tasting Room at Raghuvanshi Mills didn’t help with my rapidly overbearing workload. After a well-proportioned Tuna sandwich I ran back to the office to polish off an editorial piece on business education. It was filed an hour late.

A short intro piece to a pictorial cover story scheduled for later this week followed. And I was barely half way through it when I got a call from my contact at a PR firm: “Your request has gone through. They will give you an hour-long slot from 6:00 to 7:00 PM. Dinner is out of the question.”

The CEO of a very important and large international company was in town and I had requested an hour-long dinner meeting with her. This was for our popular weekend profiles page. They had reverted on Monday with a 6 to 6:30 half-hour slot. I told them it was pointless to talk to her for half an hour. And then, two days later, the PR firm had managed to inveigle out an hour long slot. It would be in her suite at the Taj Palace hotel near the Gateway of India as she already had dinner plan that night.

Around five, just as I ditched the intro piece to run downstairs and catch a cab, the publicist called back to say that the interview had been postponed by another half an hour. My meeting would now be at 6:30 PM. I gasped in relief. Now I would reach early and have enough time to chill out at the Taj lobby, double check my audio recorder and take a leak before I met the CEO for our interview.

I found a cab almost immediately and ran over my interview questions in my head for a while. Then I pulled out my Diwali-gift PSP and played the penultimate stage of God of War (on Easy mode of course). As the cab pulled into the road by Regal Cinema I saved it just before the final boss battle, stuffed it back into my messenger bag and then pulled out my audio recorder.

There was a line of two business types in suit jackets ahead of me at the metal detector. When my turn came I handed a security guard my messenger bag and walked through the metal detector. The guard felt all over the bag and then handed it back. I, in a split second, ran through all the jokes me and the missus make about these insipid security checks they do all over Mumbai at malls, hotels and multiplexes. A quick feel, nary a glance and a wave through.

Walking into the Taj lobby is one of the most dependable ways to reduce my blood pressure. The AC kicks in first, then the piped music and finally the shiny, warm, clean, buzzy ambience. I look to see if there is a guy on the piano. I always do this. Its a habit that can’t be explained.

That night there wasn’t. The piano sat quiet.

The next thing I do, without fail, is marvel at the doors into the Zodiac Grill and wonder what lies behind. Who lies behind? What astronomically large bills are being presented and paid? And then, like always, I promise myself that once the book is out I’ll make a million bucks and take the missus there. (She doesn’t admit it but a meal at the Zodiac Grill is clearly one of her short-term life goals.)

I walked around for a bit, made one circuit of the arm-chairs and sofas and then settle into a corner of a two-seater still fiddling with the audio recorder in my hand.

Oh wait, some of you might remember the audio player. Remember that Benq mp3 player I bought so long ago from Abu Dhabi and which some of you readers dissed me for? That very same, now replaced by a mighty 80GB iPod, serves as an audio recorder. It records audio superbly, is tiny and can store up to six and a half hours of recording in serviceable wav format.

In the minutes before every interview I handle I tend to fiddle with the player to calm my nerves. I switch it on, check capacity, then battery, switch it off and then do it all over again. I can never get used to the process of suddenly turning up one evening and probing into the personal lives of CEOs. Most oblige but it can still be a little nerve wracking.

The lobby is not as busy as usual. As I wait, a suitably socialite looking woman speeds down the lobby followed by an older woman who reassures her that “It is okay to wear shorts here baby!”

I recognize no one except for a Mr. Wickmann. (My memory may not be precise on this.) I know his name because of the quaint and subtle way in which the Taj summons people waiting in the lobby. Someone walks around with a little whiteboard, with a name on it, stuck on top of a stick There are two small bells on the stick which jangle as it is carried about. Around 6:20 or so someone comes looking for a Wickmann. Wickmann is a tall, white-haired man with spectacles. The staff member escorts him away somewhere.

The publicist picks me up around 6:35 PM from the lobby and we walk down the corridor that connects the new Taj to the old one. To me that walk is the shiniest part of the Taj. The windows and floors and lights all combine to make it this shimmering tube of light. I noticed little of the walk, though, as the publicist made small talk about the global economy and recession and what our paper thought and so on. In fact the only thing I did notice was a show window. It was empty except for a bottle of Dom Perignon on a little stand in the corner. At the time I thought it was a very poor display for Dom Perignon.

We went up the lift to the sixth floor of the heritage building and then took a left, over a flight of stairs to the CEO’s suite in the corner. I was too strung up for the interview to notice the wooden barristers and ornamentation of the corridors of the old Taj.

Our interview started late but lasted for just over an hour. She spoke about her life in the industry, her weekend pastimes, the Indian market and how she once served in the Israeli army. Then it turns out that she has dual citizenzhip: Israeli-British. I quietly admire the cosmopolitanism of it all and then sip on a black coffee. She offers a few hotel chocolates and biscuits but I refuse.

We get up after I switch off the audio recorder and exchange business cards. We shake hands and then she tells me that she’s off to meet a few local business associates for dinner. We share some small-talk and then I finally leave after a short but interesting interview.

This time when I step out I look around and smile.

The old Taj is quite simply a stunning hotel. There is so much to look at everywhere. The walls, the carpets, railings and art are all pretty special. And I have plenty of memories strewn all over the Grand Staircase. There was that quiz that we came third in a few years ago thanks to a stunning last round on Tata history cracked by yours truly. And that evening, after a horrible training session that may have damaged my brain permanently, when I first thought perhaps I should really write for a living.

I am accompanied to the lift and then down to the lobby by the CEO’s personal assistant. We talk about how beautiful the hotel is, how awesome London is and how we must meet when I am in the city next time. We go separate ways at the bottom. She scurries away to organize something about dinner and I walk back through the connecting corridor back to the lobby.

I stand in the lobby for a second and think of what I should do next. I could go and buy some sandwiches from the Taj deli for later. They are very expensive but you do get good authentic cold cuts. Or maybe I could call the missus down to South Bombay for dinner.

But then she has been feeling guilty about missing the gym for so long and I decide against it. Dal roti at home it shall be. I walk around the lobby a bit. And give myself an eyeful of all the rich and famous. I also note to myself that the flower arrangement tonight looks very lame. Sometimes the Taj places absolutely fantastic arrangements. Not that night. After ten minutes of loafing around, and bidding farewell, I turned around and walk out through the glass doors. I stand on top of the steps, look out to the sea for a brief glimpse and then trot out to a taxi. The publicist then runs up and offers to share a cab and drop me at Prabhadevi.

We leave the premises at around 8:15 PM give or take a few minutes. Two hours later those bastards attacked. That night I see the Taj burn. The fire leaps from a room on the sixth floor possibly right next to the one in which I interviewed my CEO.

I will never, ever forget that sight.

My CEO was located unharmed the next morning. Perhaps many of the other people I walked past and nodded at politely were not.

When the Taj returns to business, as it must, no prizes for guessing who will be among the first to go back into that lobby. I must.

Sniff. Cough. Wheeze.

Quite pleased with this longish cover story in last weekend’s Lounge. Too long to cut and paste the whole thing here. But here is a little amuse bouche of the story and a link to download the pdf of the two-page spread.

Have a terrible cold. So don’t expect anything cheery for a day or two. Or week. Sigh.

—

The telegram is dying

After a century and a half of binding the country together, the messenger of the masses is slowly becoming a remnant of the past

Shruti Chakraborty and Sidin Vadukut

On a recent weekday evening in south Mumbai, the Central Telegraph Office (CTO), a stone’s throw from the raucous Flora Fountain traffic circle, is abuzz with noise—not of customers but carpentry work. CTO, one of the district’s many heritage buildings with solid stone facades, humbly stands in the shadow of the considerably taller Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) office behind it. The MTNL office itself is overshadowed by the even taller and more imposing Videsh Sanchar Bhavan tower next door that houses VSNL offices. The three form a pecking order of telecom offices—from the swanky Tata-owned building at one end to the sad, sorry old CTO at the other.

Finding the telegraph counter in CTO means walking through an unmanned metal detector, past a dark, gloomy foyer, which is being converted into what looks like a modern bank with counters and glass partitions between them, and into a narrow corridor on the right.

There is not a single customer in sight. When asked for a telegram form, there is a moment of hesitation before one of the two employees behind the counter gets up and hands a piece of paper through the slot—it is a telegram application form that doesn’t look much younger than the CTO building itself.

“The telegram business has gone down a lot. Before, we used to send 1,000 a day. Nowadays, we get 100, sometimes 200,” explains a portly man behind the counter with a smile on his face. He counts the words on the filled-in form handed to him, checks on a laminated sheet of paper for the charges—Rs26 for overnight delivery of a 22-word telegram to Delhi—and then he hands back a counterfoil.

But when he checks the billing machine at the counter, he looks a little embarrassed. It was a few minutes past 5 in the evening, the end of a working day, and the Mumbai CTO had only sent 37 telegrams the whole day. Visibly upset, he quickly says: “We will send more today. We are open 24 hours for your service you know. Maybe some more people will come.”

In all likelihood, however, they won’t.

—

You could read the story online here. But I’d rather you download the PDF here. And no there aren’t any jokes in it. So for your daily dose of amusement you may want to revert to the dependable people at Newsmax.

Busy week with many thousands of things to do. But what to do… the need to keep reader amused overwhelms the self…

So let me share the fascinating works of Vilayanur S Ramachandran. (Yes Pastrami, the brain guy. From Chennai. Correct. The very same.)

I am halfway through his first book, the tremendous Phantoms In The Brain, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. But to save you some of the 540 bucks it costs at the Imax Crossword here is, ah my love for you all, VSR’s talk at TED in March 2007. The intro from the TED site:

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Wait wait. Don’t run away. Listen to the man. Listen and drool.