"Leave the rest to us"

There were a few (at first glance, about 3 busloads, but when I counted later there were only a half dozen) decorous Scandinavians at the front desk (in front of the front desk? Did that put them in the forefront?) when I came in. Some of them were quite tall. Say, about 17 feet each. It looked like Muir Woods had gone the Birnam way, only with a heavy dose of Janpath linen. I spent some time being polite to assorted kneecaps. Then a voice floated into my ear, and not from above either. A polite smile in a dark suit emerged from the forest of legs around me. “Checking in, sir? Are you alone”? And voila, I was wafted to a different counter where a pretty young lady was sternly commanded to wait upon me. I smiled happily and waited to be handed my room card.

Some time later, I was still waiting. The smile had left. Twitter is not just a social networking site. It is also the appropriate term for the string of inanities emitted by a certain kind of person in the hospitality sector. Look, child, I KNOW you won Ms. Bright Smile in your college beauty pageant (last month?) and I can guess somebody told you that you look cute when you helplessly tuck a curl behind your ear, but this isn’t “Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”, all I want to do is CHECK IN, not give you a massage on reality TV! I realized I was shouting inside my head. What was worse, I could hear it echoing. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall in resignation. Perhaps I should have taken my chances behind the Posse of Patellas. Eventually I was rescued by The Smile in the Suit. With apologies for the delay. “And, sir, we’ve upgraded your room.” Really? Some consolation, then.

If it seems too good to be true, it usually is.

What kind of place takes a geriatric business traveler and places him in … a HONEYMOON SUITE? The plaque on the corridor wall terrified me. As I peeked apprehensively round the door, however, it seemed quite tolerable. Nice large room with lots of windows, decorated in a quiet beige. Then I wandered in. And the bed hit me. At least, the sight of the bed. A four-poster. With a gilded headboard. Fringes and tassels in a hideous floral print out of a cheap drawing book. And ‘elpmeGawd, a ruched CANOPY, a nightmare out of stereotypical Krole Bagh, in a shade that looked like gilded SHIT that would glow in the dark! The only way I could avoid it was by turning a chair to face the window. Which I did.

The worst was yet to come. Back in my room after 8, tired to the point where the Nightmare Bed no longer registered on my conscious, I hauled myself to the door to answer the buzzer. A simpering personage with the mandatory plastic smile asked breathlessly, “Sir, do you want evening service?” I responded with a squawk of alarm and slammed the door in her face. Over-reaction, yes. She was only doing her job, yes. But the whole bizarre scenario fired the wrong synapses in my staggering brain. Great Cthulhu, “evening service” in the honeymoon suite? Let me out of here!

*** ***

It went downhill from there. Too tired to ask for an ironing board, I checked the laundry rates. A hundred and fifty to iron a shirt?!

The room service extension was perpetually engaged. When I got through, a lisping voice took 5 whole minutes to understand my order. “We don’t have filter coffee, sir, we have fresh-brewed coffee.” Several deep breaths. A sandwich, please – not grilled, that takes longer and I’m in a hurry. “Yes sir, coffee and a grilled sandwich.” More deep breaths. You know what, FORGET IT! Just send up an ice bucket and some lemon wedges. Of course they delivered. After an hour. 6 cubes of ice. No lemon wedges.

Eventually, my Large Young Friend who had dropped by rejected the room service menu and rang down to find out how long the buffet in the coffee shop (“lavish” “delicious” etc., if the write-up was to be believed) was open. General confusion at the other end of the line. “I think it closes at 10, sir.” Damn. Oh wait a minute, they may be clueless. So we wandered down. Of COURSE they were clueless! It was open till half eleven. Good! What have we here?

A pasta salad. Where the pasta looked like an industrial installation. An OLD industrial installation, right down to the blotches on the piping. Butter chicken?! On a BUFFET? A quick peek under the cover, and agh! Red and greasy, like someone had bled into an oil sump. We fled. Walked over to the Shangri-La next door, leched at the Rolls Royce showroom. The Silver Ladies now are not the beauties of yesteryear, they lack the flowing lines of running board and wheel casing. They look like tanks that went to charm school. Yet we leched awhile before we passed on to the hotel proper. Then stopped dead in our tracks. Because they had another Rolls parked in the portico. With the hotel logo on its passenger door. They use THIS for an airport transfer?! Maaaan, I am SO going to book their Presidential Suite when I grow up!

We had the buffet there. Superb. Just superb. Except for the little contretemps afterwards, when there was more blood. No, not into an oil sump, I just haemorrhaged from my wallet. But in the final analysis, well worth the pain, that meal was worth at least the loss of a couple of a couple of fingers if not a whole limb.

And so to bed. Another Delhi day tomorrow. (Update: The day started at 6, except that there was no daylight. What, I can’t blame the hotel for that? Says who?!)

Indulgence

 

    They peddle them at traffic lights. In parking lots. Outside Newmarket. Or when you're walking down Free School Street towards the old record stores. Strawberries in little boxes. Not punnets, boxes. Looking oh so pink and delicious, each with its little crown of dark green leaves. But they're lying minxes, these strawberries, because they're sour.

    As a good evangelist in the Cause of Food, I have figured out how to convert them and bring them to the light.

    Wash them, trim off the leaves, chop them fine. Put them in a small bowl, add a heaping spoonful of castor sugar. Stir 'em about a bit and put them in the fridge. Leave them be while you go get a couple of small tubs of ice-cream. Vanilla ice-cream. Not gelato. Put the ice-cream in a large bowl. Stir THAT about for a bit. Take the strawberry stuff out of the fridge, mix it in. Keep stirring till all the melted ice-cream is a deep pink.

    Voila! Real strawberry ice-cream.

    The weekend looks promising.

Validation?

Rob Stein in Cricinfo puts forth a statistical (and sociological, even) exposition of something I observed 5 years ago.

TheAussies.
You can hate them, you can bay for their blood, but by God you can't write them off.

The Garden of Ease

The first thing I saw, after we’d crossed the culvert strewn with brickbats and concrete chunks, was half a human brain lying in the dust.

Gu-what-i?

Three egrets fly in formation past my window, followed by a flight of crows. They must be going home to roost. It’s barely half past three and already dark as a December dawn in Delhi. Earlier, I could just make out the hills ringing the valley, shadows in the winter fog. Now they have vanished in the haze. Darkness flows in from the horizon and laps against my window. Guwahati. Is it just coincidence that it has the same first syllable as Guantanamo? Maybe. After three hours in this hotel room, Guantanamo seems like Ibiza.

If anybody from Guwahati is reading this, my apologies. I was here last year and stayed at an old hotel with 70mm views of the Brahmaputra on one side and on the other, windows that framed a picture-perfect green hillside punctuated with amazing bursts of flowers, the kind of hillside that is supposed to exist only in the paintings of Gauguin and Matisse. I loved it. Even though the only reason I stayed over was a bandh that resulted in my flight home being cancelled, I loved it. It was a two-day idyll out of some Pacific island time-warp.

THIS time, I’m at a squeaky new budget hotel that’s some distance from the city itself. Some distance? The Brahmaputra may not even be in the same time zone! From the window I can see (a) what-might-be-hills-if-they’d-quit-hiding, about half a dozen (b) building under construction, one (c) building completed but still utterly hideous, one (d) water tank, spidery, one (e) dog lying in dust and apparently making a snack of a certain-part-of-itself, one (f) man with his back to me but evidently inspired by aforesaid dog, also one (g) fields full of stubble and miscellaneous weeds like a cheap salad, about 537. Diverse? Perhaps. Inspiring? Like a Mariah Carey video. Why the hell am I here?!

(This is a thought that has come to me rather too often. In a heaving sweaty college auditorium strewn with a few hundredweight of ballot papers, in a little green-painted room by the light of a sputtering candle listening to the creak-clang of a tube-well where there wasn’t one, standing in the sun outside a mill looking at a crowd-turning-into-mob, being practically force-fed parathas with sincere Punjab hospitality while waiting for a judge to turn up in court. The answer, regardless of the occasion, is “Because you signed up for it, sucker”. But those are other stories.)

So here I stand, cup in hand, Room Service won’t take my call. The coffee’s gone, I can’t go on, I curl up in a ball … I have a caffeine addiction. Once I get into a hotel room, I have to, have to have HAVE to, have a coffee. It’s a ritual. Even if the only thing available is that execration from the armpits of the devil, Nescafe sachets. But … the coffee-maker won’t work. Agh. So I sit by the window and I watch the clouds roll by. No I didn’t. I went downstairs and got a coffee from the kitchen. These are nice guys. I mean, what would YOU do if some bald plugugly (dressed in black, yet) strolled through your swing doors and said he was just following his nose? They didn’t throw me out, they didn’t call security. Instead, they smiled, assured me they’d get me some coffee and tut-tutted sympathetically about the broken coffee-maker. (THEN they shooed me out. Politely.)

Then the vending machine ate my money. It just sat there smugly and blinked at me. “Change not available”. Yeah OK, so give me back my money. More smugness. Blink blink. “Change not available”. I took a deep breath and walked away from the machine before I gave in to temptation and broke the bloody glass front.

* * * * * *

Seven in the morning now and the work-day beckons. I can’t say I’m allured, but what the hell, if I have to spend my Sunday earning my pay, I might as well do it properly. Yesterday evening it was tap-tap on the laptop correcting, summarizing, clarifying even though not more than 3 of the 50 people in that hall today will even bother to read the hand-outs. It was not pleasant. Until our local organizer, bless him, chivvied me into the next room where he plied 3 colleagues and myself with Islay’s best and finest. And then led us through the foggy chill to a restaurant where we were served steaming fragrant rice heaped in a shaped mound on a bell-metal plate, with bowls of daal and torkari arrayed around it like petals in a child’s drawing of a flower. Followed by course after course of fish done just right i.e, not messed about too much in sauces and spices. Highlights - mutton lightly curried in ginger, and succulent pieces of the biggest damn aarh (estuarine catfish) that I have ever had. Oh yes. Before the meal we were served a lovely palate-cleansing clear soup with spices, rather like a Thai soup but blessedly free of lemon grass. I asked if it’s a traditional Ahomiya preparation but was told it has no name. Can anyone enlighten me? And for those of you who may visit Guwahati (I’m looking at you, Thin Man), check out “Delicacy”. Well worth a visit.

Heigh-ho, off to work we go. Snow White, wherever you are, prepare to do without Grumpy, Dopey and Sneezy. I’m the avatar for all three of them today.

If I were braver

This is what I want to do. But as Bernard Shaw said, blame it on the lack of courage and opportunity. (Hat-tip - Neha)

WinEter thoughts

I understand only two kinds of wine. Wine I like and wine I don’t like. Which is why I’m not the kind of guy you should invite to a Wine Club gathering. I’ll head straight for the cheese and crackers rather than sip something that reminds me of the taste of iron window-grilles after a shower. (What, you never licked the grilles, say when you were about 5 years old?) The rest will gargle softly with half-open mouths, hold their glasses up to the light and talk about “legs” and “body”. Excuse me? Those are terms I associate with Jamie Lee Curtis, not with glorified fruit vinegar. And at my age, it’s a health hazard to even think of tasting her. (It doesn't help that she once said "In some circles, my Caesar salad is more famous than my body." I LOVE a good Caesar salad. Oh well.) [1]

I like some whites. (I’m referring to wine here, I must hasten to add.) But you know what I reelly reelly like? Sweet wines. Dessert wines. A good port, sherry, most of all a good Tokay. The last is something I can’t afford (hopeful look at the gentle reader, hint hint, and I wouldn’t mind if you throw in some good pipe tobacco as well), but I do still have some Cockburn’s and some genuine tawny (from Lisboa, no less, though aged in the cupboard and not the cask). So this winter, when my friends flock back to Cal for the Christmas vacation, I shall serve them whisky.

And keep ALL the nice sweet wine for myself!

[1] She also stars in one of my all-time favourite films.[2]

[2] YAY! Links AND footnotes, I’m getting back to Serious Blogging!

Blast from the past

The tie is tatty, the suit shines with age. He’s 80 years old and needs regular dialysis. Every time he stood up from the red moulded-plastic chair on stage, he grimaced at the pain in his knees. At the mike, his mouth opened wide to show his tongue licking his lower lip. He seemed to suffer from twinges elsewhere as well; when he raised his hand to count off the beat at the start (always a simple count, not for him the “hwunn, two, HWUNN two THREE”), the arm never rose above the shoulder.

But then he raised his saxophone to his lips. And even now, even five decades and more after he started recording, we were in thrall from the first note. Sweet and true like honey on a winter morning, he held the melody for the 30 men on stage, some of them his comrades since 1958, some who were still in school when his friend and leader died in 1994, all of them united in memories. Manohari Singh – saxophonist, composer, grand old man of the orchestra and above all, comrade-in-arms to RD Burman for nearly 30 years, from the days of Chhote Nawaab­ to the swan song of 1942: a Love Story.

Ranged around him were 13 other stalwarts of the RD legend. Bhanu Gupta on rhythm guitar and harmonica, Ramesh Iyer on lead, Franco Vaz inside the circle of his drums, Kishore Sodha with his trumpet, Shyam Raj alternating between clarinet and tenor sax, Pradipta on the mandolin. It was … eerie. It was my childhood revived. For nearly 30 years now, RD Burman has had a pre-eminent niche in my personal pantheon. But frankly, I was at the concert not for the music but to satisfy my curiosity, to see the men (no women in those days!) who’d made the music. Then they struck up. Nothing very iconic, just the title song from Shaan with full oom-pah. And the hair stood on end on my forearms.

The entire evening was like that. Music straight up, no frills or showmanship, some memories of RDB from the MC, (Ankush, who works for Siemens in Pune but travels everywhere for RDB shows and memorabilia), and total involvement from the vocal audience. The concert was linked to the launch of a documentary on RDB by Brahmanand Singh. Funded by Shemaroo, this DVD release is in the same no-frills style – fixed-cam interviews of the people who knew RD, reminiscences of the way he made his music, intercut with some stock footage and some rare old photographs and recordings. Essential for RDB fans, pretty good even for others who may not share my passion.

The high point for me came right after the interval when, on request, they played the Sholay theme. Even unrehearsed, they were so GOOD. Good music and nostalgia, what a combination. They’ll be back next year – those of them who are still around. I’ll be waiting.

Trafficking

I want a Humvee. Or an armoured personnel carrier. A small one would do. Say, about 6 tons of hard angry vehicle. With the Mother of all Snow Ploughs welded on in front. And then I would drive it around. In Calcutta. WHOOSSHH around the roundabouts. And KERR-RUNCCCHHH into all the bloody taxis and buses and call-centre cars that dawdle around corners picking up passengers or waiting for them. Oh, the mangled metal. The GORE. The bruised bleeding bits of morons who can’t walk 20 steps to a bus-stop. The crash bang tinkle of Moron Mobiles slowly falling to bits. The surrrr-THWUM-budda-budda-budda as the occasional tyre flies off, bounces twice, rolls a few yards, wobbles and then settles onto its side.

And then I would raise the hatch and peer out, blink in a surprised manner, and say “Oh dear, are you HURT? I’m SO sorry, but I never expected anyone to Be Parked on a CORNER.”

And then I would reverse my 6 tons of armour for a bit and then RUN IT INTO THEM AGAIN. AhahahahahHAHA. The joy. The JOY! Take THAT you STUPID SUCKERS!

The morons will still win, of course. Because now all these bleeding-heart empty-skullcase do-gooders are building bus shelters. ON THE CORNERS. The Motor Vehicles Act states clearly that no vehicle should stop within 30 feet of an intersection. Of course, neither the municipal authorities nor the police are bothered about such minutiae. Some Votary Club or Loins International or Mewa Bal will start to raise money for cancer research, find they’re stuck at Rs. 23,109 (and 37 paise, that will clear up the little accounting error that the Chapter President’s nephew left in the books the year we let him loose on the audit). And they’ll say, you know what, this much money will do zip for cancer research, let’s build a bus shelter instead. Right slap bang on a corner, of course.

Which is why a Humvee wouldn’t do, no sir. It has to be the armoured vehicle. Which I can drive STRAIGHT OVER the Bus Shelter on the Corner, oh, I love the crunch of concrete in the mo-o-orning, and bowl away merrily playing “Kashmir”. Over the loudhailer. Of course there has to be a loudhailer. And a horn that sounds like the crack of doom. Oooohhh yerrsss. The horn is very important. VERY. You know why?

Because at 8 a.m. every morning, outside my daughter’s school, there will be 5248 cars all trying to get Right to the Gate before dropping off their little darlings. And ALL of them will be honking away because of course each one of them thinks HE is the only one in a hurry, why on EARTH would anybody stop in front of MY car, can’t they see How Important I Am?! What? Schools and hospitals are supposed to be SILENCE zones? Who the hell reads all that fine print?
Which is why, from my Armoured Vehicle with a Humongous Horn, I shall pull the Honker Version of Crocodile Dundee. (Remember that scene with the mugger where he looks in pity at the mugger’s knife, then pulls out a young scimitar about 37 feet long and says “You call that a knife? THIS is a knife!”)

So I shall wait till EVERYbody’s honking and then Lean on the Special Horn. At about 240 decibels. And after the glass has fallen out of all the car windows and the tyres have imploded and the morons’ eyeballs have stopped bouncing on their stalks, when there is a Sudden Silence broken only by the soft susurration of mortar running off the buildings, I shall switch on my loudhailer. And murmur into it, in a Voice of Quiet Menace – imagine Alan Rickman trying to be nice in “Die Hard” – “Next time you feel like making stupid noises, gentlemen, I shall be right behind you”.

Which brings me to another very good use for the Baby Tank with the Loudhailer. Calcutta is full of Good Souls who are Very Sociable. And Large Aunties who Need their Own Space. And People in an Awful Hurry who Couldn’t Be Bothered About Traffic. And ALL these Types will jaywalk. Across the road, half-way in from the sidewalk (sidewalks? Just because you build them, I have to WALK on them? What is this, a fascist state?!), down the MIDDLE of the bloody road. And I would steal up behind them Very Quietly and then, oh THEN I would Let Rip on the 240 decibel horn. Or maybe play a recording of screeching brakes over the loudhailer. And watch the Waking of the Jaywalker.

You know how, in Asterix panels, people fly right out of their pants when Obelix swats them? And come back to earth in an accordionated heap, followed by the tinkle of descending teeth? That’s how I imagine it would be. Jaywalker, deboned and filleted by Sudden Crack of Doom, flying through the air like Superjellyfish. Pants, abandoned, standing on their own for a frozen moment before gently falling in a heap. Oh wait … would that apply to the Large Aunties too? Eeewwww. The imagination boggles like billy-o.

Oh well. I shall just have to look the other way to preserve my sanity. A small price to pay for implementing the Grand Design.
Right then. I’m off to eBay to look for an armoured personnel carrier at a bargain price.

Non sequitur

Suddenly, I can smell aloo bhaja. Potatoes, fried. Not jhuri bhaja, which is crisp potato shavings, fine strands that crunch in the mouth, flavours added with kari pata, fried red chillies and perhaps peanuts as well. Not the roundels, the potato slices that may or may not be crisp at the edges and faintly sweet if made from fresh potatoes in winter.

No, what I suddenly smelt – sitting in office, windows closed, cup of post-lunch coffee steaming on my table – was the thick limp greasy flabby listless slivers of aloo bhaja that would make me depressed when served by relatives at lunch. Haven’t touched that junk in years. Decades, even. Yet such is the perversity of the human mind, nostalgia nudged me towards desiring those too. All from the memory of a smell.

I’d say that rates as a pretty acute observation of the human predicament. Right up there with Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, which my father considers one of the greatest novels ever written and I found a load of irritating crap (perhaps because I was about 14). You don’t agree? With any of those three assertions? There you go, human failing again. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to do some research on the local availability of aloo bhaja …

Does size matter?

I like some things about the USA. The size of their helpings, for one. The down side is that I usually have to leave some food on my plate, thus missing out on the satisfaction of a plate wiped clean at the end of the meal. My mum was always big on “FINISH what’s on your plate!”. Yes, the usual line about ‘Think of all the poor children who don’t get enough to eat”. And no, I never did see the point of that. For one, I was never sure that there were children poor enough to want my left-over spinach or neem begun (fried aubergine with bitter leaves, very much an acquired taste). Furthermore, where was the supply chain that would take the left-over spinach to the poor hungry kids? As far as I could see, it went into the fridge or into the lady who cleaned the floors (and she didn’t take it home, she ate it ALL right there right then. And stayed reed-thin. So much for justice, thought a fat kid)

It IS nice, however, to be served a humongous platter of dead animals. (Even though Americans seem to serve fries with EVERYthing. Any day now, I’ll get tiramisu with fries on the side.) Except that the American fixation with size (no, you smutty-minded brats, I am NOT going THERE) applies to other aspects of life too. Case in point, the New York Times.

Consider this. A newspaper that has more sections than most other papers have pages. A newspaper where you’re not even expected to take the whole paper, just the sections you want. Or just the sections you can read and finish. Basically, you’re expected to leave stuff on your plate!

I’m OK with that. I only get some selected feeds from the NYT (yes, that’s the way they plan it). But what do I do when Indian papers go the same way? At home, I don’t have to read too much of my two daily papers because 75% of their matter concerns either the Kolkata Fashion Week or the Lakme Fashion Week or the Alternative Fashion Week or … well, SOME event or the other which involves men with make-up and malnourished women. Neither of which interest me. So I usually get to office with the satisfaction of Having Read the Papers. (What, the front page and the sports section DO count as the whole paper!)

But now, in Delhi, a bulging bag hangs on my door handle. ONE paper? Item, the Hindustan Times, Delhi edition. It’s like a young telephone directory! (And less informative? Well no, it’s getting to be a good paper. With some notable lapses, but hey, this is Delhi.) Four sections. Or is it five? How do I even begin to read this? (I know, in the smallest room, but don’t be facetious!) I give up. I’ll watch the news on television!

So I shall have to leave for work with a sneaking suspicion that I am Not Informed about the World. So be it.

But is there any way we could persuade these guys to Give Us Less?

.. to meet the faces that you meet

Charukesi muses on portrait photography.

Which is serendipitous. On my recent travels, a friend told me I don’t take enough pictures of people. So I tried. And now, in the wake of Charukesi’s post, I have questions.

Is it portrait photography if it’s not just the face?

Or if the face is incidental to the context?

What if the person is too far away to see the face?

Or not looking at the camera?

Turned away from the camera, even?

How about a portrait without faces?

I suppose the basic question is whether the subject is more important than the story.

Your views, please (pun intended).

With THIS one below, there’s no confusion. I’m rather proud of it

What if ...

There are many sides to the truth. But if the evidence against the conviction and execution of this man is even half-true, then his prosecutors have a load on their collective conscience that may be greater than most convicted felons’.

Read it. It’s a cautionary tale against pre-judging anybody. It drives home (and indeed quotes) the greatest argument against capital punishment – that it may lead to the state murdering an innocent man. This makes sense to me now, even though some years ago I posted on this blog in favour of the execution of one Dhananjay who'd been convicted of rape and murder.

And it twists my insides to think of a man losing his children to a fire, then being accused, tried and convicted of murdering them, THEN spending 12 years waiting for his death for a crime he possibly didn’t commit.

Update: Krishna, in the comments section, links to The Innocence Project. Worth a look. And another.

Been there, done that.

Or, WHEEEEEEEEE !!!!!

Curious

About a strange (i.e. curious) phenomenon.

Usually, the daily count of visitors to this blog is in single digits. Even I hadn't visited it in some weeks, which gives you an idea of how riveting the content is.

Then why, on the 12th, 13th and 14th of August, did the count go up into several hundreds? (Well, hundreds anyway)
Does anybody know? Did wossername, yes, Megan Fox, mention it on TV?

Mid-air musings

At 38,000 feet above the earth, flying away from the setting sun and losing time with every minute flown, Brazil is a random patchwork of jewelled lights in the gathering dark. Over my left shoulder the plane’s wing cuts through the last glow of sunset on the fleeing horizon. The dimpled stewardess takes a minute to check with the flight deck, then tells me we should land in another 40 minutes. Not that it makes a huge difference – we have four hours to kill in Sao Paulo before our connection to Heathrow. One compadre will peel off to JFK – he has ten hours between flights and I’ve been telling him to spend the time riding the buses up and down Manhattan – leaving two of us to fly across the Atlantic. Landfall over Dakar, then north over the Sahara in daytime. That should be some view.

It’s been a little like “ten little Indians” from Buenos Aires onwards. S* had to fly back to Calcutta to meet a buyer. B* stayed back in Lima for another day, he was doing good business and anyway he had an appointment in Belem. N* will fly back via New York because he doesn’t have a UK visa. And my boss will stop off in London, leaving me alone on my side of the cabin to fly the last leg to Calcutta via Delhi. Can I collect and stow my luggage, check in and make a flying visit to Piccadilly on a late summer afternoon, all in six and a half hours? I’m risk averse, but the idea is tempting.

In my ears, Katra katra gives way to Khali haath sham aayi. Voices from home, and the yearning for my own armchair and a small wriggling armful welcoming Papa home becomes an almost physical sensation. Another 36 hours or so, and I’ll be sipping my Arabica as a familiar voice grumbles happily at me from across a glass-topped table. The captain’s voice comes over the PA and the A-320 begins the long slide down the sky to Sao Paulo. My ears pop. Time to shut down and pack up, but I can stay with Kishore on the headphones. As the plane loses height, the lights of each city sliding under the wing become clearer, brighter. City grids and highways appear, then tiny specks of headlights. The spangles remind me, Pujo is 3 weeks away. I’m headed home. Mmmm.

This daytime flight over the breadth of the continent has been rewarding. Minutes after the captain announced that we’d be skirting La Paz, a huge expanse of water appeared somewhere off to port. If it stays in view from 38,000 feet for over 10 minutes at 900 knots, it’s enormous. Lake Titicaca, on the border between Peru and Bolivia. Two weeks ago in Bangalore, a friend told me that Bolivia, a land-locked nation, has a navy – a bunch of coast guard cutters on Lake Titicaca. I looked close, even used my camera zoom, but couldn’t see any of them. (Like Spike Milligan, who, when he boarded the train to boot camp in 1940, was handed a picture of Hitler captioned “This is your enemy” – “I searched the whole train but couldn’t find him”)

Earlier, somewhere in the Peruvian Andes, I saw a strange barren plateau. Flat for miles and miles without a trace of habitation, then suddenly the edge crumbled into precipitous ridges and canyons. A very high plateau, because the rim was dusted with snow. It looked like a coffee truffle cake with a bite taken out of the middle, the striation of millennia showing in the canyon sides like a cross section of chocolate layers. And yes, the icing on the edges.

Checking in at Heathrow, I was served by a fragile blonde with a German-Polish name tag. She was quick, helpful, positive. He was at the next counter, manned by a person with a sandalwood dot on his forehead and a bad-tempered mouth. Neither man was happy. I told him he should have flown Jet. He said no, Air India is more Indian than Jet. Say what? I shrugged and went off to find the lounge. (And abandoned my plans for going into town – everybody warned me about Friday evening traffic)

Later, in the lounge, we got to talking. When he introduced himself I was sure I had heard the name before. He told me the real reason for the Air India booking. His wife and he never took the same flight, and this time it had been her turn to fly Jet. I googled him. He’s into steel and distilleries, his father-in-law was a well-known Chief Minister and his firm had been named in a land and loan scam in Madhya Pradesh. But he was pleasant, polite, well-spoken. A good public school does have its plus points. When we taxied for take-off, he peered through from First Class and waved. I went up the aisle and peeked into his section. He was seated cross-legged, rocking a little, reading the Hanuman Chalisa. Fear of flying. What can I say, in the light of the Air France crash in July even I had been a little apprehensive about the long haul over the Atlantic.

Day 2, 11 a.m. Lima time. The stewardess serves me a second cup of coffee, no breakfast, thank you. We’re just over an hour from Delhi. Earlier, the mud-brown dirt-pile hills of eastern Iran and Afghanistan looked like a child’s tracks on a beach. I’ve learnt, though, that even if it looks barren from the sky, greenery is visible when one goes down below 20,000 or so. As I look out of the porthole, the hills have vanished and we’re flying over One Big River, tributaries meandering around it like baby snakes around a Big Mama Python. The fields on either side are big, straight-edged. Given the location, this can only be the Indus.

The next time I look down, we seem to be flying over a cloud-field. No wait, is that the sea? Are we flying south of Karachi? Then a speck of human habitation comes into view, a straight line cuts across the picture, and it all comes into focus. Those aren’t waves, they’re sand dunes. We’re over the Great Rajasthan Desert. It seems to go on and on, but that’s because I keep looking. Gradually the patches of green multiply, run together. As we continue towards Delhi, a flotilla of tiny white puffy clouds takes position over the Punjab, their shadows marking a grid over the checkerboard of fields below.

The captain’s Aussie accent comes over the PA. Half an hour to Delhi, and after that only one more airport and one more flight before I reach home.

Between the covers - College Street

Adults are biased towards stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order. Children don’t really care, they just want to know “what happens next”. From this perspective, there should be more children on College Street. Although the maps will tell you College Street runs from Bowbazar to Mahatma Gandhi Road (Harrison Road as was), this is a part of Calcutta that has no discernible beginning nor an end. Every time you think you’ve reached one end of it, three more book-stalls appear under yet another tarpaulin-rigged awning. Side lanes, porticos, lobbies of peeling old houses, in this part of town they breed books like buildings elsewhere grow mold. On a late Saturday morning when the colleges give over early and the book-loving Bengali babu is starting his weekend, this para buzzes with activity like an ant’s nest that’s just sighted an aardvark. Our car inched through the little lane that runs from Harrison Road to the gate of Presidency College. We stopped for strollers, honked at carters, dodged tiny buzzing three-wheeled carry-alls loaded with (what else?) books, then finally gave up and walked the last hundred yards to the door of the Indian Coffee House.

Our story had its beginning in a conversation a week before our visit. An uncle of mine had dismissed the College Street boi para (roughly, “neighbourhood of books”) as a flea-market for crammers’ texts and second-hand potboilers. “Can you find anything in any language that is RARE, let alone interesting?” Out of nowhere, we fixed on Jadunath Sarkar, doyen of Bengal’s historians, as the touchstone. Could we find anything by him on College Street? So it came to pass that 11 o’clock on a cloudy humid Saturday saw us stepping gingerly through puddles, wiping our faces repeatedly under the combined onslaught of humidity and a faint drizzle, glancing with unconcealed disgust at stall after stall that advertised “CBSE-ICSE-ISC text” or “Medical – JEE – CAT”. Was THIS what College Street had been reduced to? Where were the bonanzas that our parents’ generation gloated over, the pamphlet autographed by Toru Dutt or the 1898 edition of the Materia Medica?

The Coffee House lane (Bankim Chatterjee Street) is entirely devoted to textbooks. (What a waste - even during our student days some decades ago, textbooks never figured on our list of priorities.) Yet it makes historical sense. Hindu College in 1817, Sanskrit College, the Calcutta Medical College in 1835, Calcutta University and later Presidency College – these were all started on College Street or just off it in the Potoldanga area. Small wonder that the College Street boi para took root, almost 200 years ago, from the textbook trade. For more esoteric books and for the latest rage, the gentry ordered in from the booksellers in the Chowringhee area. It was only at the turn of the (previous) century that College Street’s booksellers increased the ambit of their trade. And the stories of lost treasures glimpsed in dusty piles on the pavement took root, grew, gave rise to myths and tall tales.

These tales were most often told in the Coffee House, the adopted home of generations of self-proclaimed Bengali intelligentsia. Housed in the Albert Hall (yes, of course there had to be one in the “second city of the Raj”! This one was built in 1876), this was the place to enjoy the best adda, the slowest service and the most tolerant waiters in the world. Poets, economists, politicians, charlatans, they all spent hours and days over carefully nursed cups of coffee and shared cigarettes under the slow revolving fans strung on beams between the upper floor balconies. Every Bengali of note, from Rabindranath Tagore to Amartya Sen, has been a patron. One of the most enduringly popular Bangla songs is Manna Dey’s anthem to nostalgia, Coffee House-er shei adda. Yet like most things Bengalis hold dear, it has been on the brink of oblivion for years. It took a petition from the faculty of Calcutta University and the Presidency College to keep it from being shut down in 1958. Eventually, in 1995, Mudar Patherya led an initiative for essential renovation and again in 2007, Bengal Shelter cleaned and renovated it. Today it is almost chic in its ambience. Of course there are old-timers who miss the smoke-blackened walls and the chipped Coffee Board saucers. But they still serve the most soul-satisfying greasy “mutton Afghani”. I can vouch for this because, of course, we ended our College Street expedition there.

But again the time-line jinks. The book search, yes. We pushed through the crowds on the sidewalk in our search for old books, yet all we found within that tunnel of blue polythene rain-sheets was text-books. And children’s books. And self-help books. We crossed to the other side of the road and found a different world. Piles upon piles of pulp fiction, literary criticism, photography, yearbooks. Obviously this side, along the wall of Presidency College, is more fun. Subol Moitra from Medinipur peeped shyly from his book-walled alcove and edified us about the complicated system of rental and sub-rental that governed the economy of these six by four “locations”. But where oh where, among this rubble of Harold Robbins and Fashion Photography, were we to find anything by the great Jadunath Sarkar? Back to the other side we went, picking our way between reddish-chocolate mini-buses, bright yellow taxis and rickshaws with schoolchildren peeking out from behind the inevitable blue polythene sheet.

From an article by Amit Roy I found that six bookshops opened between 54 College Street and 70 College Street in the 1870s. One of these was Gurudas Chatterjee’s Bengal Medical Library, which is now the venerable institution of Chatterjee & Sons, right opposite the gate of Presidency College. But alas, the harried gentleman behind the counter was positive that they had nothing by Jadunath Sarkar. He could try and get it for us if we left an order, but that was not within the rules of the game. On we went, past an open shop-front that revealed no counter within, just piles of books in the semi-dark, like the Xiqian terracotta army waiting to be brought back to life. Craning my neck to check the shop-signs farther down, I saw “Dasgupta & Co. (P) Ltd.” Why had I not thought of this earlier? For many years Arabinda Dasgupta has been my go-to man when I want a book that’s not available over the counter, but we had never met in person, we had always been voices on the phone. We ventured in and asked for him. Within minutes we were sipping coffee at a small table in a room that seemed to be built with books. If one looked closely one could see an occasional patch of wall or a piece of furniture, but the foreground, background and middle ground consisted entirely of books and nothing else. The bonus lay in overhearing the impassioned conversations on the telephone. “Drugs and Cosmetics, have you sent that to Bombay yet? You should have it by Tuesday morning, call me if it hasn’t reached you.” “Where did you put that Swift on Grammar? Somebody from Raj Bhavan will be here in an hour to collect it.” “Hanif on Accountancy? Yes, we have a couple of copies, but it’ll take some time to get it to you in London.” The total experience, the combination of focussed business and casual erudition, was somewhere between a library and a stock exchange.

Coffee done with, we got down to the serious business of Finding Sir Jadunath. “But of course, I’m sure I saw something by him.” And Mr. Dasgupta shot off to hunt among the shelves, returning for a moment to hand me, as a sort of appetizer or amuse bouche, a collection of essays by F. Max Mueller (I point to India). Within minutes he returned triumphant, bearing a book in a slightly battered yellow cover – Introducing India, edited by K.N. Bagchi and W.G. Griffiths (yes, THAT Griffiths), first published in 1947 and reprinted in 1990 by Dr. Ashin DasGupta, Administrator, Asiatic Society, 1 Park Street, Calcutta. Seeing our brows furrowed, he opened it and pointed to an article on Indian history by, yes yes YES, Jadunath Sarkar! Our quest was over!

But not our expedition. We were led on a tour of the three floors of the shop. Up a spiral staircase of wrought-iron, through old doors under raftered ceilings, and in every room, books and more books. If there is a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this! Books the way they can be savoured best, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopaedia of Body Building lying atop a history of football on the Calcutta maidan and next to an anthology of travelogues from Central Asia, with In search of an equation sharing floor space with an illustrated history of Central Indian tribes. A balcony shaded by a gnarled old neem tree, with a view of College Street on one side, and on the other a wire-mesh window behind which a dignified old gent tapped away at a word-processor but with a trusty typewriter beside him as a back-up. It took an effort of will to leave, but deadlines beckoned. We took our leave and hied ourselves to the Coffee House to celebrate, where Javed Khan, in cummerbund and turban, posed for us after he brought us (as expected) the best mutton afghani and the worst cold coffee possible.

College Street had not done with us yet. As we descended the uneven stairs, we noticed a series of posters on the wall – “Mohamichhil (Great Procession) on –th July”. But that’s today! We’ll be stuck here for hours! Our well-fed saunter changed to a sprint. Sure enough, traffic was halted outside, a posse of policemen in white uniforms were massed along the tram-tracks and the head of a procession complete with banners was visible 50 metres to the south, opposite the University gate. Fortunately our car was parked farther north, our ungainly canter was just fast enough to get to it before the procession started moving and we were able to speed away before the road was closed off. This was one time we didn’t stop to find out “what happened next”. But true to form, College Street had started another story before we had quite finished the one before.

(Stodgy, yes, but I am reliably informed that some version of this has appeared in an on-flight magazine)

Midnight shakes the memory

I was goofing off, replying to comments on Facebook, when I realized that most of the answers that come to mind are lines from songs. So then I got to thinking (and then I got to weeping / I really had a flash this time / Gonna set my watch back to it / ‘cause you know I’ve been through it …) about lines that resonate in the memory (as a madman shakes a dead geranium, and yes, I KNOW that’s not from a song).

What fun. Let’s play at lists. Lines – lines from songs - that you think are great. Or maybe almost great. Or maybe just lines that stick in the mind. (Nothing from Robindro Shongeet, that needs a whole separate volume.) And while we’re at it, cokernuts all round if you get the sources for all of mine.

· How terribly strange to be seventy

· And the flowers bloom like madness in the spring

· Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

· In sooney andherey aankhon mein / aansoo ke jagah aata hai dhuan

· Jee mein aata hai tere daman mein sar chhupa kar hum rote rahein

· I sit by the window and I watch the cars roll by / I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day

· Jo aankh se naa tapka woh lahoo kya hai

· Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath his wisdom like a stone

· Ko jon aar hridoy diye gaaitey jaane

· And the Indian said, Nothing at all

· Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No-one was saved.

· Just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea

· Ei aaNdhaarey, megher-o chhaya-e, akasho paarey

· The arc of a love affair / His hands rolling down her hair / Love like lightning shaking till it moans

· Hum thahar jaayen jahan, usko shahar kahte hain

· To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free / silhouetted by the sea

· Bhuley jaao phike chNapa rong ti tomaye manaye bhari

· It’s the dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand

· I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes

· And how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see

· Borney gondhey chhondey geeti-te, hridoye diyechho dola

· But she breaks like a little girl

· And so it goes, and so will you too I suppose

More to come, I’m sure.

Idea from KM - This Can Be A Meme.

Meh, Mame, May We?

Living in the past

Saturday night at the Calcutta Club. I associate the members there with soulful swaying to Robindroshongeet with their eyes shut (or even worse, half-shut to indicate a kaalchaaraal intoxication), but this was an evening with Amit Kumar. He would have preferred to be known as Amit Ganguly, son of the far more famous Abhas Kumar Ganguly aka Kishore Kumar, but he had to accede to the demands of the Hindi film circuit.

He started with the same musical salutation his father used to start HIS stage performances. Then went on to belt out song after song from his father’s oeuvre. His voice was full, chest-deep, melodious. His pleasure in music-making was obvious. He looked at least 10 years younger than his 57. And he dished out nuggets between the songs, anecdotes about how “amader Ponchu” (Pancham) lifted a mukhda here, an antara there, from sources as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Rajasthani folk tunes. Yes, even within the same song (Raju chal Raju, now which film was that? Dharmendra in a travois behind a white horse - Azaad, I think). He brought down the house with his account of how Sapan Chakraborty had composed a soulful tune for Amitabh Bachchan in “Zameer” – mimicking him, eyes half-closed, teeth protruding slightly – and Kishore Kumar had trashed it right away. “THIS song? For Amitabh Bachchan? Won’t do! What? YOU are the composer, and you have to ask ME what to do? STEAL a tune! Lift it!” And then proceeded to modify a Nat King Cole song (something about falling leaves) to produce Tum bhi chalo, hum bhi chalein.

Right through the evening it was evident how Amit Kumar idolized his father, but what was touching was the way he referred to him as a friend, someone whom he could fight and disagree with but a person who never lost his respect. He sang his own songs too – Bade acchey lagtey hain, Yaad aa rahi hai and on my request, Mayabini from the 1996 album – but his heart seemed to be in his father’s memories. Sumit Kumar, his brother, younger by 30 years, came on afterwards, but sadly his voice just doesn’t make the grade. I left at that point, wondering why for a man who can sing like Amit Kumar does, the biggest hit in recent years is ­Dil mein baji guitar.

What's in a name?

They came all the way from T*****, preceded by missives from the Indian Mission in A****a. Very Big Shots they be, they have shown much interest in your area of work, can you meet them?

So e-mails went to and fro, the most progressive mill with its ISO:14001 accreditation was dusted off and warned to present arms and go woof, presentations were prepared. On the appointed day our man went off to escort them from the hotel. And vanished. Repeated phone calls got a delayed response. The delegation would also be delayed. Having turned up one hour late (1 HOUR? If any of OUR delegations were 10 minutes late for a meeting we’d get a Note Verbale from the local Mission!), they turned out to be interesting. The shaven-headed leader looked like a retired bouncer, though he displayed no bulge in the jacket under the left armpit. He was accompanied by

(a) a Sleek Chap in a grey sharkskin suit, black shirt, no tie, who turned out to be a manufacturer of women’s undergarments (we warned him that our particular fibre would be MOST unsuitable. It itches. Like crazy!). One of my friends from the industry nodded sagely and said “Very interesting!” I desperately avoided his eye for the next ten minutes.

(b) an unshaven lantern-jawed man in a collared T and baggy trousers belted near his ribs, whose function was never quite clear

(c) a representative of their Prime Minister’s office, a sad-eyed little man in a suit, very Keyser Shoze (hey, HE was Turkish, after all)

(d) a Very Large Man who “reprrezaints our fffarming”, obviously uncomfortable in a new suit, who understood no English, slowed down our presentation because he required translation, and ignored the translation as soon as refreshments were served, working his way left-handed through three chocolate pastries from Flury’s

(e) a man with a video camera. He looked like he would go “Pssttt! Dirty pictures?” any moment but didn’t. Instead, he wandered all over the conference room focussing on EVERYthing, including, so help me Cthulhu, the WALLS for a full 30 seconds.

We rolled out our schpiel. They were most appreciative. The Leader peremptorily ordered the manufacturers to send samples over to his hotel room, “ve haff only today, owr flaht iz at nahn thairrty tomorrow”. We perked up, “exports” and “product modification” lighting up in neon thought balloons over our heads. Then they pulled out a little card about 10 inches long with threads wound round it. And asked “So, this mehl ve go to, they mek hemp?” Hemp? Hemp. After the vaudeville act, it became clear that Slick Man wanted hemp because “itt provides sehport”. Support what, I was about to ask. Then I recalled his area of interest and thought better of it.

Sorry, we have no hemp. We don’t make hemp. We don’t know hemp from ice-cream (well, OFFICIALLY!) As far as we know, NObody in this country grows hemp. It’s been banned since 1985, people tend to smoke it instead of making yarn out of it, you know? Ask Arnie over in California, he has the same problem.

Leader Man was most dismissive. “Tzair is hemp in Eendia, Ay haff documents.” May I SEE those documents, please? Another dismissive wave - they’re not here, but I’ve READ them. There IS Indian hemp.

I made a quick exit to my office, consulted The Great God Google. Yes, there IS “Indian hemp”. It’s a generic term. The largest processors are in Canada and (believe this!) California (Arnie, you’re missing something here!). There are NO hemp processors in India. THIS was why you took 3 hours of my working day?!

Silence. Great shrugs. Exit delegation, somewhat sheepishly.

All in a day’s work.