My Favourite Things

This blog has moved

2009-10-03T18:04:00.002+05:30

My new blog address is http://ashwinraghu.wordpress.com

See you there, and thanks for reading!

Equal

2009-07-02T19:42:00.003+05:30

A year or two ago she had begun telling her son the things she used to tell her husband. Unlike her husband her son looks her in the eye when she is telling him things, and when he finds something she has said funny or interesting - an exchange at the shop or with the slow-motion watchman downstairs that she had waited to tell her family about - he smiles and laughs readily, his eyes locking with hers.

He is all of twelve years old, and untouched by the prejudices that never leave his father (not after making friends with the cosmopolitan, successful parent-couples at the boy's school; not after sitting down with her to watch snatches of the new Indian-English DVDs of Konkona Sen or Rahul Bose or Irrfan Khan that she brings home now and then, where the couples have lives in cities like theirs and they have balanced back-and-forth arguments). His prejudices don't leave him because his prejudices were bred - she sees this when she sees his family, when she sees her own family. But seeing doesn't make it hurt any less. Her son listens to her with interest when she tells him about catching up with her schoolfriend on the phone last night, then maintains his gaze as he tells her about who is on top in the IPL or the English Premier League. In doing so he treats her as a companion, an equal in a way that her husband never has, never did right from the beginning.

When the women in the building complain about "young boys and girls simply hanging around together", about how they sit in the coffee joints and stay back at class saying they are doing project-work and group-study but "who knows what they are really upto", she listens quietly - just as she does when her husband comes home some evenings and makes declarations about this or that. When her son prefers HBO and Friends to his father's fleeting exhortations to watch "good Indian programs", she does not mind, because in the HBO movies even though there are bedroom scenes unsuitable for children the man and woman always look each other in the eye, and the woman's voice when she is talking to the man is as steady and as confident as when the man talks to the woman. And when the apartment-ladies start substituting their own growing-up children for the ones they see mixing at the tables of Coffee Day - and that is where such discussions always lead - she thinks of her own son, in a few short years becoming old enough to be part of the groups of "boys and girls simply hanging around together": she pictures him at a table sitting with a group of soon-to-be adults, and when a girl is saying something he will look her in the eye and listen to her just as he does with his mother at home. Then she pictures him older (how will these pre-teen features, this innocence and softness play out on his face when it sets?), at a friend's house or office cafeteria meeting a young woman with whom he will discuss his days and dreams just as he would with any of his male friends.

From across the table he is telling them now about someone nicknamed Kaka, "the biggest transfer fee Ma in football history!" She glances at her husband - he woke up early to watch the World Cup football semifinals two years ago - but he is staring out the balcony sipping his tea. She turns back to her son as he continues telling them the football news, looks him in the eye, and hopes.

Wick

2009-06-19T15:03:00.005+05:30

The wick was so long that it had doubled over on itself, the free end falling on the wax along one side of the candle. He held the two-inch flame of the lighter to it, at the base where the wick met the wax. The flame rose up along the line of the wick, changing it from white to black as it moved up to the point where the extra thread had fallen over. But the flame of the just-refilled lighter was too strong, and the wax along the side of the candle at the free end of the wick caught too, fastening that end to the wax. Now there were two flames from two ends that had made their way up the wick, stopping just short of meeting at the head of the curve.

A slight cold draft that crept in through the gap beneath the hinge of the shut window blew the two-pronged flame about. It was seven o'clock and he wanted light at least till ten. The wax was burning too fast - the unsteady double-flame heating up more wax than necessary - and there were no candles left. Earlier the man had brought to the room a smoke-stained quarter-bottle filled with a liquid half-way to the top with a thick thread sticking out of it, but he'd decided he would rather lie sleepless in the dark than have to smell the hovering smell of burning kerosene all evening. He remembered the pair of scissors picked up a few days earlier; he took it out of the pouch, a little cardboard box not more than two inches by four with gay colouring and Chinese lettering on it. He took the thing out of its packet for the first time - it was a folding-type scissors made of steel that you had to feel at the fulcrum to figure out which part unfolded first. The blades were joined together, the little rings for the fingers folded one above and one below the pair of blades. He prised the rings apart, in a semicircular motion around the fulcrum one to the right of the blades and one to the left. Now it looked like a pair of scissors. He ringed his thumb and fore-finger through the scissor-rings and tested the blades through the air a couple of times, opening them out and biting back down.

He blew out the light of the candle, the two-pronged light whose swaying from the wind had by now caused melting wax to stream down two sides along the candle's length right to the bottom. In the moonlight that came in through the dirty glass window he snipped using the brand-new pair of unfolded Chinese scissors that had sold for ten rupees at the shop, near the top of the curve of the wick but on the side that used to be the free end, isolating it. Then he snipped once more, shortening the stray wick's length so that it wouldn't catch again. With the cigarette lighter held a little further away this time so that only the tip of its flame would touch the main wick he lit the candle. The wick was slick, it caught on quickly and economically. A single flame: enough to last till ten tonight. He folded the satisfying little apparatus back into its card-board box and replaced it in the black pouch, then turned back to the book he was reading.

Manvi

2009-06-12T14:11:00.001+05:30

Always she held her words back, even as her eyes danced at the conversation going on around her. Someone would ask her a question, then her eyes would narrow: her reply would be in halting English and approximations.

She was at the cafeteria one evening with Rohit, they talked to each other in Hindi; her eyes danced even as she spoke.

At lunch she would point to each dish of our thali to find out what it was: What kind of vegetable is this? What do they put in that? The poriyal might be explained satisfactorily; the koottu would prove more inscrutable, leaving an uncertain look on her face. The sweet dish came separately to the table at the end. "Puuranpoli!" she exclaimed looking at it, "We have this in our place also."

Someone had opened up Google Earth one day, tracing Marina Beach and Besant Nagar Beach and trying to find the office. "Will Chattisgarh be there in this?" she asked as soon she figured out what the others were upto. The map was zoomed back out until the whole of India was visible on one screen, and there was SRI LANKA, PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN and the names of some of the states. "Near M.P. ..." she murmured taking control of the mouse, lips pursed up and eyes narrowing. She zoomed in, to mostly barren grids and a message that read "Google is unable to provide further information", until she found a place marked Raipur where the message was replaced by a few white boxes against a red-brown background, clumps of green, and thick lines of grey. Three or four of the team sat around in chairs or on the desk of the cubicle legs dangling; Manvi scrolled the page. Then she exclaimed, "Look! This is the route we used to go to school!", moving the cursor up and down a grey line as she spoke.

For the weekly telephone call with the client the team would gather in the meeting room; when their turn came they would deliver their work status in clipped, monosyllabic words that gave away nothing, a form of communication that the Manager had mistaken for professionalism. Manvi often came in hassled and late - she was one of the newer members of the team but had been given a difficult assignment - just in time for her turn. When she spoke her voice would have the same lilt that was there at lunch-time, thoughts darting and eyes searching the air for words. Team would look on unsure; Manager and Team Leader would glance at each other - this is the sort of openness that leads to mistakes, their expressions would say. Not that she paid them any attention, leaning into the speaker-phone child-like cadences continuing. It was marvellous.

At times people would forget she was there and the conversation would slip into Tamizh. This never seemed to faze her. Instead she would watch gestures and body language intently, and delight in recognizing the words she knew: "Haan, saaptachu!" She wasn't more than 21 or 22, she looked even younger. "My family, we didn't even know where was Chennai. But the job was here, so I had to come..." What all had she left behind?

Her assignment forced her to work long hours, long enough to have to have all three meals at the cafeteria. Sometimes during the day she would be flopped onto her keyboard head in hands - she had to stay late again last night, someone would explain. When she stood up her face would be streaked with kohl and tears.

At least they make chaat here in the evenings? I said to her one evening as bhel and pani puri came to our table. "Ya, but it's quite different from what you get there... see, they've put meetha and all in the pani", she grinned widely as she popped a puri into her mouth. Then her mobile phone rang, and she stared at the display for a few seconds. When she answered her voice had hushed. "Haan ji...?" it whispered almost - the only time I heard it that way - and she moved away to take the call.

She came up one day and said she was leaving. "I'm getting married next month. My parents have fixed the engagement." Congratulations! You'll be moving back to Raipur? "No.. he's an Air Force Pilot, he's posted in Rajasthan, close to the border it seems." You must be excited? "It's still a shock for me... When such a big change happens suddenly..." the girl for whom everything here was change trailed off.

Manvi left that day. She had a train to catch the next morning. I pictured her in a square block of flats in a military township somewhere. She of the schoolgirl cadences and dancing eyes would be once again far from home.

Trail Head

2009-06-09T11:03:00.005+05:30

In Thal the machhli signs start appearing again on the item lists on the front walls of eating-houses. The river comes through an expanded section of mountain pass, and it forms a pebbly beach on one side twice its width level with the water's surface. The water flows gently here, now in the dry season at least, and the fish served in the eating-houses in a small plate of good-sized chunks with the thin line of bone like gut in a tennis racquet that attaches to the thinner scales that run across the top of the chunk is fresh catch, and in the summer when the glacier of the Ramganga fifty kilometres and many mountain passes North has begun to melt and brings down all the mud frozen underneath it with it and turns the river fierce and turns it a light chocolate brown the Ramganga that flows through Thal is still gentle and the water still clear enough to see the boulders underneath, and on the pebbly beach migrant workers put up temporary homes of blue and black tarpaulin and live.

The migrant workers replace the bridges that have grown unsteady for the jeeps that go to Munsyari with new ones, and carry the many-twisted ropes of iron that will hold the bridges up five metres to a man in a long line of men snaking their way up the road to the site of the bridges. They build the dams across the river from which electricity is harnessed and delivered through the lines that run parallel to the river's flow and run up mountainsides and cut dramatically across valleys to supply power to the Northern Grid for Delhi and Lucknow and Chandigarh to use while the towns and villages of Kumaon stay dark at night except for the weakening white light of solar lamps one per home whose blue-and-white-celled panels sit on the roofs of houses along the road that the jeep takes from Thal to Munsyari. Outside every house on the closest tree a bale of hay is suspended from a little distance above the ground so that when it rains the water drains through to the ground and the hay will dry fast, and on the sloping roof of cleanly-sliced grey stone next to the solar panel there is a small dish antenna marked 'DISH TV' that is watched over the whir of a generator filled with diesel or an automobile battery filled with clear water in the evenings for half an hour when the man of the house is eating his dinner.

For a while going up from Thal the road adjoins the river and goes against its current. It climbs up and up as it winds its way through mountainsides making the channel down below seem smaller and smaller and framing it deeper and deeper between the slick bare-faced rocks at the mountainsides' foot that at some turns the water crashes into before moving on downstream. Sometimes a path of boulders and dry earth goes down from the tarred jeep road and if you peer outside the window and you are sitting at the right window you see the little path descend almost to the water's surface, and then a bridge of three unbelievably long tree trunks placed side by side and stones over it to steady your step as you cross, and on the opposite bank you see a path of boulders and dry earth snake off up around a hill to rice fields and two or three houses. Then the jeep road starts descending and you know you will come soon to a valley where there is a little town with jeeps waiting to ferry passengers and a check-post marking the end of a forest division and the beginning of another and the machhli signs start appearing again on the item lists of the eating-houses.

With a milestone indicating that Munsyari is still 50 km away the road turns away from the river onto an adjoining mountainside and from then on apart from tiny strips of bright green fields of rice on the rare gentle stretch of slope the mountains are dry and brown then overgrown and green but either way they are steep and there are no houses and no villages and no people except for the migrant workers sleeping in the shade by the side of the road and a giant mud-red road-roller with 'INGERSOLL-RAND' printed on its side parked further up. Two hours later the circular signboards indicating the altitude have gone from 2122 M above MSL to 2240 to 2473 to 2700, and at the turn to the sign saying 2700 a tea-shop appears and the jeep stops and the jeep-driver gets down and it is all out of the blue.

When the road reaches the top of the mountainside and begins to climb down to the valley below you see a milestone that says MUNSYARI 5, and you realize that the valley is Munsyari and that there are a larger number of shops and houses and buildings than you expected there to be this far away. This is the town to which the boys of the villages north of the valley all the way up to the border with China must come to if they choose to continue into Higher Secondary School, and the villagers come down to every two weeks with big empty rucksacks that they fill with rice and dal and oil bought from the market shops because Munsyari is the last town where everything is guaranteed to be sold at M.R.P. They then wear the filled rucksacks on their shoulders and walk up the stony paths backs bent from the weight back to their village returning the same day if they are close enough or the next day if they are not. In Munsyari there are two internet browsing centres with dial-up connections and there are boys milling outside but the lines are down right from Almora two hundred mountain kilometres south and until the lines go back up again the boys who will or will not go to Higher Secondary this coming academic year do not know either way.

When you go down to Selapani in the adjoining valley where the jeep road ends you go past bridges and check-posts belonging to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and the jeep driver and the man you meet at Selapani at the head of the trail are talking in whispered tones of the possibility of becoming instantly rich from finding a certain kind of grass rumoured to grow wild further up near the border that is smuggled across into China to be used to make sex-medicine and sells for 4 lakhs a kilo or 6 lakhs a kilo depending on which man's word you take. From Selapani when you start walking the rest of the way up to Milam with the river by your side, what you hadn't realized until you'd looked at the rusting iron map fixed at the trail-head is that you have taken so many turns away from the Ramganga at Thal that now the river down below is the Goriganga a full three inches parallel from the Ramganga on your folding-map, and it is the Goriganga whose path you will follow upstream to its snout at the Milam Glacier where the ITBP and men wearing caps that say Indian Army from Haryana and Maharashtra and as far south as Namakkal are patrolling constantly where the summer has begun to melt the ice making the Goriganga at Selapani the light brown colour of milk chocolate.

Brian Gale

2009-03-01T23:58:00.001+05:30

At office one morning retorted Brian Gale,
"So send out a note, after the meeting,
ungrammatical and unintelligible!"
and into laughter they all burst forth.

Public Transport Mayhem

2008-11-19T14:52:00.004+05:30

A flutter was caused at around eleven forty-five on Edgware Road, Central London last night, as up to eight people were witnessed jogging after a bus.

A statement issued by London Transport this morning -- ostensibly to pre-empt calls of wayward halting at bus stops -- called the incident an "uncommon case of driver error."

Samuel Winston, Evening Standard can reveal, was one of The Eight. "I needed to be in Holborn quickly", explained Winston.

At a City Hall press conference this afternoon Mayor Boris Johnson said "I will do everything in my power... to assure the people of London using the public transport system of our city we are doing our utmost... to ensure that such incidents are never repeated in the future."

The driver training requirements of First and Arriva, the bus companies contracted to run services in Greater London, are due to be reviewed next year. But should such an infraction have been allowed to happen in the first place?

A Trip Hazard warning has been pasted at the errant stop as a temporary measure. There are no immediate plans, an Arriva spokesman has said, to review its buses' Sat Nav system. A 'MIND THE GAP' sign however, painted in yellow along the road adjoining bus stops, is an option that is moot.

Incidents such as this, critics will say, only serve to reinforce the growing feeling in this country that our quality of life lags behind that of France.

Notebook

2008-11-01T16:03:00.003+05:30

He received it late last year: the date is written on the first page, in a cursive hand in thick, blank ink: 16th November, 2007. He was not the kind of person who could become attached to a material object – he was one among his friends who did not mourn the loss of handling cassettes and CDs; he liked, he said, the efficiency and convenience of MP3 – but it fit nicely into his waist pouch, so he took it when he travelled.

There were notes from that weekend she gave it to him, first few clipped sentences of a hand that had kept a diary as a child and teenager but had long since preferred to pen thoughts onto the computer (or as Drafts on cellphone if it came to it). In "Notes" after December there was the email ID of the girl from the hostel he had spent an evening chatting with, the full postal address of the elderly man whom he had hitched a ride with through the mountains once, written in their own hand. Fading coffee stains on some pages, from jotting notes on long afternoons sitting down to a quick cup before setting off again. Moments transcribed then forgotten about, thoughts stowed safely away. He flipped through to September now before finding a blank page.

In time he had grown fond of writing in it. Entries became longer, arrows ran back and forth through some of them. Paragraphs are still fleshed out on computer – cut-and-paste and all that – but two weeks ago he was telling her that some thoughts – "those bursting, in-the-moment ones" – he preferred to record in this diary, even when he was in his room using the laptop. He liked that he had to hold it close as he wrote, on a bus or train, or in a dark room in a new city, the palm holding up its tiny dimensions as the fingers tightly clasped the ball-point pen spilling across the page. He even began to see what his friends missed in MP3 that they had with cassette covers and CD jackets - with his diary he could turn the pages, feel their thickness, sometimes running his hand across a page he had just filled…

In a month or two his year would finish, he would go back home, and he would reach the end of this notebook too. He thought of this moment, the diary reaching its end just as his year was, notes from that first trip a few weekends after leaving home to, perhaps, notes made straining the eyes on the journey back to Madras in a couple of months' time. He felt sometimes he would look back on this year, his twenty-sixth, as the year he came of age. And this little black notebook, sitting on the table in his tiny lodgings or tucked into his waist pouch when he travelled, always at hand, was there with him through it.

The View from Delft

2008-10-19T05:37:00.005+05:30

On a window in the neighbouring block a Germany flag hangs unfurled; a few windows to the right one floor up a Spain flag: it is the Euro final today. The Netherlands scored seven times in their first two matches; each time there was a goal my friend was saying, everyone in this building and the one in front of us would step out onto their balconies – hundred or a hundred and fifty people you'd imagine, all dressed in orange – and release orange paper-rolls into the air, and cars passing below would honk wildly. The balcony stretches down either side, straight unforgiving lines of concrete and drain pipe to the left and to the right, on the seventeenth, top floor of this building. From here the world is hemispherical, panning out like a ship on the horizon: a full one-eighty degrees view, from a hundred and fifty feet above the ground.

Arms of cranes and windmills streak the distance. Chimneys rise up from the ground. A cluster of skyscrapers is barely made out, a few degrees to the left the containers and cranes of a harbour: Rotterdam port and its business district are only some sixteen kilometres away. The chimneys are at regular intervals: tall and menacing with smoke clouds suspended over them, farther away growing smaller before fading from sight; interspersed among them a rash of cranes, and warehouses laid flat on the surface. The windmills – discernible in the foreground – are designed efficiently, their arms like wings of an aeroplane made of some slick-white aerodynamic material devised in a laboratory, contrasting against the gray of the cranes, the chimneys, the skyscrapers in the distance.

A little to the right an equally-tall building aligned perpendicular to ours blocks out a small chunk of the view: its side is built of corrugated sheets of dull blue, the railings of its balconies and panes of its windows metallic strips of bright yellow. These housing towers are all around: ten-, twelve-, seventeen-storeyed monsters scattered out into the near distance. A row of single-room flats opens out to the long balcony on each storey, each with a wall-to-wall window with a dark green curtain across it drawn to various degrees, so that sometimes I see the head of a cot or an acoustic guitar leaning against a plastic chair in the four rooms I pass to reach 913. I have come to Delft at intervals over the past eight months, in different seasons: each time the view is different! Spring is in full flower now, the view is softened. The tower blocks rise through thickets of trees, the severe organisation of streets around the supermarket below tempered by a sudden, previously unseen lushness of leaves. The tall trees behind the building – barren until this trip – have formed a rich canopy across the width of the avenue. This neighbourhood is built on ground raised above water, where the streets sometimes turn out to be also bridges; there the greenness of the leaves form deep reflections in the water. On the grassy slope leading down from the pavement ducks will gather around to peck at your food; surrounding the rectangle of water the architecture of the houses and apartment blocks is brutally modern, so much that the ducks seem out of place. The Albert Heijn supermarket next door is housed in a warehouse, the avenue past it is segregated into lanes: trees, tram, pedestrian, bicycle. Unsettlingly after a while, the trees are invariable in height and girth, and the avenue is always empty.

I experienced my first snow here, from this room. As I made my way to Delft on the Thursday morning there was the slightest drizzle at Rotterdam on the railway platform, but I refused to believe it was anything more than some sort of hail - it was late March already and it hadn't snowed in London (or here) through the winter; I forgot about it even as I got on to the train. Then later that same day it snowed, visibly and incontrovertibly: I caught my first glimpses of it in the gap between the dark green curtains; on the balcony the snow flakes not falling to the ground but being propelled sideways by cold gusts of wind. That weekend – like my previous time in Delft when the winter was just beginning – the wind howled all night and sometimes all day. Only the glass window separated the room from the balcony and the open skies two feet on. The sun would set by four in the afternoon, the darkness would illuminate eerily: clouds were rendered a haze of orange by the artificial light; all around us like a giant industrial township the lights remained switched on through the long night. On those days I only ever left the room to go to Albert Heijn next door to buy groceries or to The Game in the centre among the canals to buy coffee. It was the Easter weekend; by day and by night the streets were empty. The tram stop was a minute from the block; as I waited stood up close against it the wind howled and beat against the fibreglass of the shelter, even down here at ground level. Only the feisty were still making their trips by bicycle, lone hooded figures hunched over a handlebar pushing against the wind. Off the tram at Delft Station I would reckon my way through the canal streets, usually in the dark, clasping an umbrella that would zip away to the water if I slackened grip on it for even a second. The Game stayed open through that Easter weekend; I went there again and again on those four days, then took the lift back up to the seventeenth floor and sat by the large window to watch the snow.

Just before noon on Saturday there was a halt in the snowfall, we stepped out of the room. The sun was out now, lighting up beds of white on the rooftops of houses, parked cars, Albert Heijn. The thick white powder had gathered around the trees lining the canals in town. We stopped to gather up a fistful or two, to hurl at each other and into the canal. The spire of the cathedral reached up into the now-clear blue sky. We drank coffee and ate apple pie sitting by a wall-to-wall window at a cafe next to the water. Delft was beautiful that day. On Sunday evening as I waited outside the bus stand to go back it snowed mightily; the bus forty five minutes late. Cars, buses and people moved cautiously, each one's wariness of its surroundings rendered apparent. Even in the rich sanitized world where everyday life is tackled at a high degree of safety and comfort some days and nights must be surrendered to the weather gods.

I cannot see the spire of Delft's cathedral or the Dutch-style houses from here unless I go to the end of the corridor and peer behind this building, outside the hemisphere. Here in this part of town the buildings are as much built of brick and mortar as assembled from metal sheets; it is where immigrants and students live; here – only here – you say hello and make conversation with people on the lift in English. The canal streets and the houses with flowers in their window are the "pretty part", here two tram stops away the "ugly part"; we have referred to our whereabouts using these terms, like the words weren't adjectives at all. If don't get off the tram at de Hove Passage it passes further through these parts: more immigrant enclaves, the accommodation shabbier and the crime rates higher, where the Indians running shops and Kurds making kebabs go home to at night; looking over it from here hidden under thick foliage, tucked away and out of sight.

The treetops have stopped glistening; the light is fading, there is less than an hour to sunset. In the middle distance beyond the edges of Delft there is a swathe of green across lying low, a no man's land bordered by windmills rotating furiously. The land looks marshy, waterways – inlets from the North Sea that must feed the canals in town – dotting and crossing it. Above, clouds of smoke hang over the chimneys, stationary, thick.

Due right is Den Haag, The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is - nearer than Rotterdam, its skyscrapers more numerous and distinguishable. The tram in the opposite direction goes there, and even all the way to Scheveningen on the coast, where Radovan Karadzic is being held. We took the tram towards Scheveningen one afternoon. A steady rain poured down on the streets adjoining the station in Den Haag; we ate soggy bajjis at a Surinamese eatery; then watched it rain from a cafe two or three streets down. We turned back towards Delft, abandoning the plan of going to Scheveningen that day; I saw pictures of it my friend had taken on a previous trip: the beach was pebbled and sand-less, the sky was grey. Once the overnight bus from London was several hours late; we entered via Belgium at dawn and travelled through The Netherlands in the daytime. The windmills by the highway with their sword-like arms we passed up close, skyscrapers appeared without warning and had warehouses next to them, as suburbs and towns merged into each other the industrial, functional architecture of my view was everywhere, relieved only by the sudden church spire. Around noon I knew we were finally close to reaching when we passed Feyenoord football stadium – Rotterdam's main team – with the big Phillips screen outside; I found myself picturing neo-Nazi groups who I have heard congregate there during home games.

The mosque is in the foreground a little to the right, only a few hundred metres along the tram line in fact, a plain white building with a grey-blue dome and no adornment or signage otherwise. The Netherlands in this part of the world has among the more volatile relationships with its Muslim inhabitants and its immigrants in general: it is impossible gazing at the mosque not to think of this. Or to look out at the tree-lined streets below and Rotterdam harbour in the distance and not be reminded of instances walking through them: of the dulling stares and sometimes outright glares, of being ignored on the road asking for directions, of people on railway platforms placing a firm hand on their luggage – and gesturing to their companions to do so – as you're walking by, of being told – barked at – to "stay home". There were days and nights when I took the slow lift up to 17 and entered 913 through the door behind me and felt intensely, physically relieved.

Up here I feel perched, invisible to the streets below; on a floor of international students fifty metres above the ground. A figure in the neighbouring block has stepped out onto the balcony, surveying the landscape and bracing into the wind. The sun has set over the treetops. The cranes and the harbour are in darkness now. Over the far edge of the hemisphere to the West there is a sliver of fading light, the evening's last rays filtering through clouds. Only we have this view from Delft, this harsh view to behold.

The Middleman

2008-09-26T01:39:00.003+05:30

I am forty nine years old.
For twenty I have lived in London -
in a pawn shop on Edgware Road,
and a flat nearby.
Documents written from the right I can write from the left,
And arrange flight tickets for you! to Damascus, Beirut, Amman.
I drink tea with my friend Hussain - he does not speak
much English yet, just the odd phrase.
Other day he called me
a middle-aged Middle-eastern middleman.

Public Signage in the Peak District

2008-09-08T05:17:00.008+05:30

"Penalty for not doing so £50" "Immediately afterwards, inform the Local Police" The most well-written public notices you will see! And a few pictures from Headingley and Lord's.

Morocco

2008-09-02T22:07:00.004+05:30

Hisham two doors down has lived in London for most of his life.

"I usually smoke here in the back garden so my Mum won't know. If you're Moroccan it's not really ok for anyone other than your friends to know that you smoke cigarettes.

"There are places that you can go to, like an hour from my hometown - you go in a taxi - and you can buy hashish there, fresh. People just grow it. I know someone who grows it - the police? my friend just pays them. You only have to give them money.

"I saw a cop near the beach when I was there this time. Usually you don't find cops on that stretch of the beach so I was wondering what he was doing there. The cops, it's like if they find a guy and a girl alone in places like at a beach they'll ask you if you're married, and if they find out that you're having an affair then they can force the couple to get married. So anyway, a couple of minutes later I saw this cop walk by holding a guy like this" - hand-on-collar motion - "walking him back to the road... and a girl following a few feet behind them. They were probably kissing and stuff there... You can't really do that in Morocco, you'll get in trouble.

"Me and my friend were in his car once, and we saw this girl he knew on the road. We gave her a lift, she was sitting in the back of the car, and the girl's elder brother saw us. It was hell at home after that. All just for giving her a lift!

"You can't really bring girls home, like even friends. But if these are girls you've grown up with, like a group of kids that you've been friends with from really young, and your Mum and Dad have seen them when they were kids, then maybe they can come home and things.

"We lived with some of our relatives in flats? In Morocco how it works is, if your family has a plot of land you build flats and then divide it. Like we built flats and our family and my uncle's family lived on the first floor, my grandparents lived in a flat on the ground floor, and the rest of the flats you sell to other people. The third floor flat was empty, that's where I used to go, like sneak up to when I brought a girl home!"

"My friends are all getting married man. I went to four weddings this time... and two of my friends got married to each other, so that's five friends in two weeks! It's the age for me and my friends to get married, like 25, 26, 27? ...My Mum's been on my case this year!

"About half the young people, they find a girl, and they're seeing each other before they get married. The other half, they have them chosen by their family? ...it's fifty-fifty. And if you're seeing a girl, you can't just go to the girl's parents and tell them that you want to marry their daughter, you go with your parents to her parents' house, and sometimes - like my friend last year? - you gotta act like you don't really know each other, that you just met each other somewhere through a friend or a relative. My friend, he'd been seeing his girlfriend for a while and then they decided they wanted to get married - he had to tell his girlfriend's parents that he'd been recently introduced to her by his aunty."

So the aunt kept up the story? "Yeah, yeah, yeah, she did!"

Simpatico

2008-08-29T02:26:00.004+05:30

The Japanese guide and his thirty-strong flock were following me this morning, right from the main entrance to the palace to the front rooms with their round-arched windows through which one could see the city below and its clusters of white houses, to the central courtyard that was simpler than imagined, a perimeter pathway around a rectangular bed of water shimmering in the sunlight. There I tried to find a corner to stand in, to look above and away from the sea of camera-clicking, chattering heads, towards the balcony, empty of people, and the embroidered gable along the sloping roof. At the entrance by the row of orange trees Ferdinand and Isabella, names remembered from history textbooks, 'took back' the keys to Spain; where Boabdil, the last of the Nasrids sighed the Moor's last sigh as he handed it to them and walked away from this fortress at the top of the hill. Of this palace Menocal writes, "This was their triumph, a serendipitous echo of the alternating reds and whites of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, a testament to their own vision of their loneliness as the last Islamic polity in all of what had once been the great Umayyad caliphate."* I walked around a lot after the 32 dropped us off down the hill, by the river along the hill below looking straight up at it, through Albaycin up the adjoining hill of yesterday stealing glances behind me, to a bench at the foot of the hill. Alhambra stands there, an elaborate signature in red and brown carved into the mountainside, framed by the white ranges of the Sierra Nevada.

The hour's nap wore off the lunchtime beer - beer that had made it easy to stay whimsical; standing outside the cafe looking at the time wondering if Maria or Jozef will be home, the feeling that vaguely hangs over the last day of this trip, like the Sunday before school re-opens after the summer holidays, becomes plain and present fact: It is time to leave.

Maria asked me last night if I liked Andalucia. Yes, very much, I said, it is the first time in Western Europe that I have looked around and been able to be reminded of home. "Yes, yes", she cut in enthusiastically, "the guy from Colombia who stayed with us last week? He said the same thing, that this is the first place in Western Europe that reminded him of his own country." For me it was true: the lottery ticket seller who sets up a bicycle-stall on the side of a street and shouts out his wares, the loudspeaker from the back of a small van during election time, the way middle-aged husbands get the attention of their wives in public when there are people around, not by calling out their names but with two claps of the hands. How when you stop and ask for directions the man will also tell you which street not to take and wants to know why you are going to that village. Even the clothes men wear, buttoned cotton shirts with familiar checked patterns tucked often without a belt into dark-coloured trousers. In looking out from a balcony or a hill in Andalucia at the tops of buildings clustered in the neighbourhood below, with their small minarets and domes on the posts of walls, like looking out at the tops of buildings clustered in a neighbourhood in Hyderabad. The way clotheslines are tied from television antennas on the flat terraces of houses, and brightly coloured clothes flutter in the hot breeze. The houses in Sevilla, as my aunt exclaimed, really do look like houses back home.

It is said -- and accepted as a fact of human nature -- that a place is really about its people. This is not a fact to disagree with. But how then does one explain this 'feeling' about a place that comes from just the place, from the limited hours or days that one spends there, often without really talking to anybody else?

This feeling is to be cherished all the more for its circumstances: you are cast in this new place on a random evening or afternoon for a very short period before you up and leave to the next (or, eventually, go back home). At the moment of arrival you could be sleep-deprived or tired or wanting a bit of familiarity - all unlike how you'd pictured your moment of arrival (you had assumed you'd be at your alert, interested best). And simultaneously have to handle mundanities that you wouldn't ordinarily take into account: look to offload luggage that is beginning to feel a little bit heavier at every passing street corner, hoping that shop a few streets earlier hasn't closed yet or having to walk forty minutes to find food, standing in front of Mezquita and realize just as you're entering that your socks (and feet) are damp and smelly and that there is nothing to be done about it till the end of the day. You cannot speak the language, and you look different from everyone else (so that it becomes common that every pair of eyes as you walk down a street or sit down to eat is studying you). You are not only a tourist but also a stranger, and it makes no difference to Cordoba whether you were there or not - you might have been looking forward to your day there but it is just another day in its life. Nine days is a supremely short period of travel compared to the average backpacker one crosses, but I discover that it is time enough to find things that do not happen within the window of a weekend travelling: to experience hours and afternoons like this, when you long for a dose of familiarity or at least anonymity, and to find that since you are alone there is nobody to distract you from it when it happens. This feeling about the place that comes from just the place must show through these things, these isolating things; when it did, even amidst the foreigners walking past, it made that feeling about Cordoba and Sevilla that much more of a thing to cherish.

Sevilla's "old quarter" is still a living thing; the city's Mudejar architecture (the Muslims and their influences that remained in Andalucia after the Christian reconquest were called Mudejar) still inspires it. In many European cities and towns the old towns are extremely well-preserved but often they have seemed just that, preserved, like a precious relic that is then showed off, painted up, often in due course acquiring chic property value and fashionable folk moving in. Sevilla's old town, in so far as it exists in this usual sense, seems to blend into and lend to the city that has grown around it; the elements that gave such a city a character and expression in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries live on actively, in the way its buildings are till today built and its public spaces still constructed. "Many people, origin Muslim" Olmo said that evening, arching his hand behind his head to indicate eras past. Though the Mezquita has long since been converted into a cathedral Olmo and Marcos refer to it as 'the mosque'; Many street and place names have retained their Arabic roots - "Si, si", Olmo and Marcos say turning to each other when I mention this, "even the family names." Do you still feel a connection to it, that culture, today? "Si...", Olmo started as he considered his answer for a few seconds, "our houses? still we build in Arabic style. It is where we grow up. Eh... aceite oliva, olive oil? We got it from the Arabic people. Olive oil produccion, very important for us."

My first trip to this part of the world was the things that are most readily associated with Andalucia, in the flesh: the bullring, the guitar, the flamenco dancer. These too were not cultural curios to be found in designated places, but a visible part of their city - pictures hung on cafe walls of local bullfighting heroes; posters for the coming season stuck on lampposts by the road; the matador's regalia in the window of the Sestreria and the brightly-painted pointy-shoes used as footwear in Marcos's house; posters announcing guitar lessons on the streets; the guitar case strapped onto the back of a man in workday clothes getting onto a bus; the outline of a classical guitar painted in black on a whitewashed wall.

Yet a place is about its people.

Olmo is from a village called al-Aroja ('the Red') near Cordoba. "The name is the colour of the earth there", he said. "Typical Arabic, of Andalucia". Olmo has thin, curly black hair, the colour of his skin is closer to brown; in Spain his features might be called Moorish. Sara is from Caceres near the border with Portugal, she told of spending summers of her childhood in a beach-house on the Costa del Sol, where her dad would sit outside in the sunshine and paint. "Landscape? Natural?" I asked. "Eh... impresionistas?", she replied (the way the word rolled off her tongue is to remember), "One day he will be famous. I just know it!" Maria and Jozef sometimes slept nights in the beat-up pale blue Fiat they picked me up in in the Sierra Nevada mountainside, when they went to village festivals to sell their jewellery. "In Carmona no secrets! Everybody know everybody!" Sara said, lamented, of her father's village near Sevilla. There are more places in Andalucia I want to go to now than when I started this trip, places I heard of not from reading or pictures or a map but from a story someone told.

That night at Cordoba after I'd exchanged goodbyes with Marcos's housemates -- I was leaving early the next morning -- Olmo came back to the living room in a few minutes. He sat down with the clay-like ball and the lighter, and said something to Ernesto to translate: "He wants to share a last one", Ernesto turned and said, "As a...", he searches for the word: "...simpatico, with you. You understand that word?" Yes, I nodded and smiled.

So we sat around for a while longer, breaking down sentences, acting out words, looking to each other to translate, partaking and passing on. That night I felt that my trip could have ended there, then; I would be content.

I leave the map with Maria, invite them to London and to India, and walk to the bus station just in time for the hourly bus to the airport. She is happy to have it: they are hosting more people this week, and now it has the route back home from town, traced with a pencil. Soon it will be in someone else's bag, as they head out to see a new place on a sunny afternoon.

* The Ornament of the World - Maria Rosa Menocal

The thing

2008-08-06T13:52:00.002+05:30

Before I catch the bus to Granada this morning Marcos, Ernesto and I go up to the roof of his apartment building. It is only the sixth floor but it is high enough to see over much of the city around us, this old town of white houses and red-tiled roofs and central courtyards. They are pointing out parts of town I haven't even stepped into, "There is so much more you must see in Cordoba". I wish I could stay, but I don't have too much time left on this trip, and I want to visit Granada as well. "I have to come again", I say. "But you will go to another part of Spain then. That is natural".

Three hours later I arrive at the Estacion de Autobuses de Granada, the bus station from which I left to Malaga a week ago (it seems much longer now), and call Maria and Jozef, who had responded weeks ago to my initial couchsurfing request, "Yes, sure you can stay with us! Come anytime. Here is our phone number." They are a young couple from Poland, "We came to Granada for a week three years ago and haven't wanted to live anywhere else after that." They make jewellery, Maria is saying, using beads and stones that they buy in Madrid and anywhere else they can find it, and drive around Europe selling it at markets and village fairs. Jozef drives a pale blue, dusty fiat. We pleasantly discover a little later that we are the same age. At their house she picks one out of many Granada city and region maps filed away in the cupboard -- "we host travellers as much as we can, whenever we are at home" -- marks the road to town on the map with a pencil, and I am on my way.

Granada is built on hills like the other cities but it resides in much steeper hills and dramatic slopes, mountainous. Along the foot of the hill there are rows of Moroccan shops and tea-houses, and a narrow, crowded road that winds its way slowly up. The paths leading up from this ring road are a combination of narrow roads and steps, both options steep, a climb rather than a walk. At every lamp-post or electricity box there are flyers posted, sheets handwritten and then photocopied advertising rooms or houses for rent, "Habitacion Libre, en el Realejo" ('Free room in Realejo), presumably for students, "Solo chicas"(Girls only'), and now and then in English too, "Creative scene", one ad says, "Looking for one guy to move into our house next year." Along one side of this warren of streets the ground climbs sharply, then reverses its incline and drops down, to clear out an arcing view of a series of red-brown buildings and fortifications near the top of the adjoining hill.

There are trees growing around and between this set of buildings like a thicket, so there is no surveying view of it from here. But the way each of the streets on this hill falls away is different, so each street affords a different shot of it, each shot adding to a fuller picture. These streets give way to a narrow main road, along which there are bus stops; number 32 passes, 'Alhambra Bus' printed on its side. At a small traffic intersection some way up the main street there is a broad, paved road that goes up the side of this hill -- mountain -- a steep valley on the other side. Maria has suggested I walk up this road through the Cuevas barrio ("it has cave-houses and there are nice views").

**

At a bench twenty minutes up, a guy with a discernible Australian accent says hello, apparently we'd been on the same bus from Cordoba this morning. He has nothing on him but a page-sized map, which he holds open in his hands but isn't looking at.

"Did you like the thing in Cordoba?", he asks.

I wait as he tries to remember the 'thing' he is referring to.

I ventured a couple of seconds later, "you mean... the mosque? Mezquita?"

"No, the other thing. You know, outside the city? We were on the same bus to there too."

"Oh the Madinat al-Zahra?", I ask. The ruins outside Cordoba. "We were on the same bus to there too?"

"Yeah."

I ask him how long he'd been in Spain (two weeks), how did he like it (it's ok...), how long has he been travelling...

Since last year. "I spent some time in Africa, then the Middle East, then Europe..."

"...it's been ok, Europe has been a bit same. The Middle East was good." He continues, "I usually stay in hostels. In the Middle East they give you houses. In Africa I was camping mostly."

"Where are you from?", he asks. "India. This trip has been about a week."

Been to India yet? "Yeah, just for a week. I was stopping over from Nepal.", he says.

"Yeah, it was different", he adds a couple of seconds later.

Where was he from? Australia, Sydney. Name was Tim. We talk a little, mostly about cricket.

He looked in his late twenties. "And where are you headed next?", I ask.

"Another two weeks around here, and then I'm going to South America for a few months."

"And when you go back, you'll study, or work, or...?"

"Don't know really. Too early to decide" he says, looking around a little wearily. "Maybe go back home and look for a job, save some money, I don't know...", he trails off, glancing at the map in his hand.

"Have you been into the thing yet?", he asks.

This time I knew which thing he was referring to; he nods in the direction of Alhambra, in front of us. "Not yet, I've saved it for tomorrow" I say.

We both fall silent for half a minute.

"Yeah, let's see", he says then, seemingly about nothing in particular, with a hint of a sigh.

Gezellig

2008-08-01T04:22:00.008+05:30

The brightness outside is a squinting contrast. More visitors are entering Mezquita as it becomes later in the afternoon, and I am glad I have avoided going in with these groups for company. A large block of steps on its perimeter leads up to the mosque at the highest point - it is another way of finding your way to it once you are at the walls of the town: by taking the ascending direction whenever streets intersect. On the other side of the Mezquita the land falls away sharply: it is when you realize that the slight ascent wandering through this maze of streets has led you to the top of the hill. The Guadalquivir flows by the walls down below, a natural barrier; Mezquita at the top is the centrepoint to which everything, the curve of the streets, the density of the houses, even the increasing concentration of souvenir shops, is built towards, the town woven into the landscape it resides in. Walking along the top step around Mezquita, the wooden, dark green blinds of the windows on the upper storeys of the houses facing it are drawn all the way down. The step is wide enough. These are signs, I decide, and settle down to a nap.

An hour later one must search for coffee, determined to avoid the (overpriced, surely) tourist cafes in the vicinity. It is about four o clock, firmly siesta time, a couple of hours to go before I meet Marcos after his class. I set off to find a cafe outside these immediate streets. Their names are simply the names of people, without "street" or "road" ("calle") to qualify them. A new street is thus the name of a person, this neighbourhood is Pedro Lopez, Sanchez de Feria, Magistral Gonzales Frances, each letter of the name printed in black on a square white tile set on a whitewashed wall. Who were they? Did they once live in one of the houses along their street? The roofs of the houses are flat, the terrace parapeted so that it can be used as part of the house: on it there are television antennas and clotheslines. (My aunt in London said after this trip, "The houses there, don't they look just like the houses in Coimbatore?") There is no traffic now, some streets end in dead ends, others twist to form tiny, cut-off squares, all streets on which only residents pass. Although I would still like to take the odd picture I put my camera away. By all evidence I am the only person here who is looking around; it is a quiet afternoon, people are sleeping in their homes, the ones that pass on the street perhaps on their way home for an afternoon nap. I must try to be as less intrusive as possible.

An hour later I am outside Marcos's university building -- I had met him there last night, today I have found my way to it without looking at the map. A young woman in pigtails is standing nearby, waiting for her class to start. She smokes a cigarette and is drinking coffee out of a small plastic cup. We strike up a brief conversation. She tells of working for a few months in a year, and of taking the rest of it as it comes.

"I work four month" she says, pausing after saying each word to translate the next one. "Turistic". "As a tour guide?", I ask her. "Si si, tourist from Sudamerica." And the other months? "Mmm... sometimes I study, in the university, sometimes I travel, sometimes I live with my friends..."

"And the money, from four months?", "that is enough for the year?", I ask her.

She considers that for a couple of seconds. "Hmmm... si." "I survive", she adds with a happy smile.

And there is nothing else for you to consider before choosing this?, I want to ask. This girl is young, in her early twenties, but many others I have met who have answered the "what do you do?" question similarly, like Marcos or his friends at the bar last night, were older, in their thirties. No other 'factors', no roles of social hierarchy to play, no unspoken-of responsibilities to keep? Our language barrier prevents me from sharing my questions -- and besides, how to frame questions like this adequately, the way I am thinking it, to someone here, someone who isn't from there? Surely there are rules of engagement in every society, unspoken codes for youngsters and adults, men and women to live by -- just like what prevents me from being able to communicate ours to them, maybe I will know how it is here only if I was from here and have lived here. Right now, all I can do is be struck that whatever these codes are in Spain, they do not seem to get in the way of people choosing to live this way. By that token, it is a charmed life.

Marcos has told me yesterday -- and laughingly reminded me several times since then -- that I must cook dinner for them tonight; he is keen to get to the supermarket before it closes at seven. I mention the girl outside the university to him, "Why didn't you ask her to come?", he asks. I laugh at that, but he is all seriousness, even a little pained that I haven't invited her. "That is how it is in Andalucia... you just meet someone, then you ask them to join you." I remember the long conversation him and the girl selling trinkets outside the mosque, whom he had never met before, had yesterday. "I don't know how many people you should cook for", he says. "People will bring their friends. Maybe five, maybe twenty."

A stream of people came that evening while I was in the kitchen, the men's greeting a handshake and a large "Como esta?!", the women's a kiss on either cheek. Most are in their late twenties or early thirties. Many are Marcos's friends, some are friends of friends that he has never met before. He is meeting Ernesto, a friend through couchsurfing, after two years, just back from working in Tibet as a tour guide for a few weeks (when I asked Ernesto what he did, he said "Well I have been travelling for a few years now..."). I meet Davide, whose room I occupied last night, the one who is also a musician. One or two others who are old friends of Marcos's: they also work only in the summer, as tour guides in Barcelona or Madrid. And Bosco, whom Marcos introduces as being perfectly bilingual having spent his teens in New York City. Marcos is telling them about his time in Mumbai as I join them in the living room.

There are close to fifteen people. One of them adjusts the light so that it is not too bright. A conversation is raging on. Bosco is the life-saver, turning to give me translated gists at just the right intervals. There is beer, but it is just there, its drinking is not pursued actively; Chorros is doing the rounds, originating at different points around the room, some partaking, some passing on to the next person. In Spain marijuana is quasi-legal, and quasi in a most Catch-22 sense: Bosco quite delights in pointing out the inherent contradiction, roughly You can grow your own (as long as you don't get caught smoking it). It is everywhere in Andalucia, the waft of marijuana and hash never too far, on the street you're walking down, from tables at roadside cafes, in the bar on that small street last night where it was being freely passed around (not to mention the potted plants lovingly cultivated in this house's balcony). I smelled it more here than even in The Netherlands (where personal consumption is permitted and there are shops to buy it from). They say the law is an ass - here in Spain it certainly sounds like this law was written by one, but it must also be said that its enforcement seems sublime, not in letter but purely in (good) spirit.

The conversation now, Bosco says, is about the elections coming up this weekend. "There are nationalist parties, Catalan, Basque, Galician, they all have strong support. In Andalucia the nationalist party is not so strong, but in this election it looks like they will do better than before. They are saying they will take a tougher stance on immigration." How do people feel about immigration? "Well people are mostly ok with it but people are scared; how many people are coming, they want to know. But now the nationalist party is sort of pandering to those fears, trying to gain support."

"The reason the nationalist party in Andalucia is not so strong is language. We speak Spanish - it is different from the way they speak Spanish in the north but still it is the same language. Catalunya, Country Basque, Galicia... they all have their own language, that is why their own nationalist parties are stronger. In Andalucia we speak Spanish, and I think we connect more to the idea of Spain as a country because of it."

Between breaks in their conversation, in those moments when no one is speaking and the look in everyone's eyes is as if they are thinking about the last few minutes, the only sound is of the saxophone in the background, the volume turned low but the playing ferocious. The racks of music CDs with handwritten labels in Davide's tiny bedroom where I stayed in last night, Olmo the flamenco singer, the poster on the wall of the man playing the trumpet, the CD that Bosco passingly popped into the player earlier this evening just as people started to arrive... there is music in this house; I love it.

Most if not everyone in the room are from here, the south of Spain, Cordoba, or Sevilla, or like Olmo from a village nearby, and it strikes several times that they are. A subject discussed animatedly is a proposal to build a new airport outside Cordoba, which will put the town in the flight path. I say to Bosco quite without thinking that London is having a similar debate about a new Heathrow runway: "It's a little different don't you think?", he says to that. "London already has five airports. Cordoba... is not London." Opposite me a woman holds forth, passionately. I cannot understand what she is saying, but there was one sentence in the middle that I was able to make out, Esta es nuestra Cordoba ("This is our Cordoba.")

There is a Dutch word, gezellig, roughly translating to the warm feeling one gets in a gathering of fellow beings. What is the Spanish word for it? I cannot think of an equivalent in English that might capture this. But that's ok, sometimes it is nicest when the ineffable stays ineffable.

At one thirty or so in the morning people begin to leave. Many I could not converse with -- or only indirectly with Bosco as interpreter -- but we shared something, food, time. As we part ways the smiles we exchange are a little larger, the handshakes easier, the kisses planted fuller. They leave in ones and twos, until the living room is empty, and its couch is mine for the night. I picture them on their scooters, riding carefully over the clacking cobblestones.

Mezquita

2008-07-19T02:07:00.006+05:30

Breakfast this morning was at the cafetaria on Marcos's street, it was like breakfast many mornings in Spain: tostada a tomate y aceite, toasted bread with crushed tomato spread on top and a bottle of olive oil placed next to the dish on the table. ("The best olive oil in the world, in Andalucia", Marcos said before sprinkling it liberally over his bread.) Followed, of course, by the perfect black coffee that never fails to infuse with alacrity. Ten thirty is the first bus to Madinat al Zahra, the site of a palace city built by an early Islamic ruler. It is on a hill six kilometres outside Cordoba. There are three or four construction sites by the road as the bus leaves the city, but we come upon fields soon. The scourge of arriving by road in new places here, however historic, is that you must shut your eyes to the warehouse supermarkets and housing blocks that are the inevitable first signs that you are reaching your destination; Cordoba though has stayed small, urban development has not built its concentric rings around the town. In a few minutes we leave the Avenida de Madinat al Zahra and begin a gentle ascent up a hill -- stoney outlines on the hillside near the top. As the bus turns it is possible to look back towards Cordoba and its minaret centring it, visible clearly, and try to imagine what the view of the city might have been like to those who rode or walked up the hill to a newly built Madinat al Zahra.

The road passes through a few plots of farmland but mostly uncultivated fields of grass. The main entrance to the complex is much fun (and surely proved quite the deterrent for those who dared): down a long passageway first, a one hundred and eighty degree turn, then onto a maze-like pathway that greets you at right angles four times in quick succession. Inside, only the bases of the building blocks are left, the columns break off mid-way, others have large cracks along their sides. The mosque is bareboned, only its plinth is clearly outlined, on a small plateau on the hillside looking out towards Mezquita. In the main building only the central room has reasonably survived. While the colours of its arabesques are faded and the intricacies in the reliefs are damaged or flattened, the arches along the hallway identify it as a court in this once-palace. Outside, a particularly evocative series of steps upto the hall remains; up these steps the king and his entourage would have ascended on horseback, returning, maybe to ceremony, back from victory in battle, subjects who lived and worked in al-Zahra lining the route, or perhaps the king returning one evening from praying in the Mezquita, already a couple of hundred years old.

It adds to Madinat al Zahra's poignancy in ruin that there is nothing around it but bare hill, few buildings. In the heat of the afternoon sun Cordoba in the distance seems far away, distanced. The ruins look lonely, the buildings as though they have been pulled back under the ground in heaps (in fact the site is still being excavated), all but a naked blueprint laid to rest.

The bus returning to Cordoba drops us just outside the walls of the town, near where I was walking around yesterday. The sun is blazing but it is not siesta yet; the bridge that I crossed last evening to step inside the walls bears a different look, there are more people outside walking more purposefully, there are a few tourists, it is a working day. The Mezquita is only a few streets away, it is possible to find it in this maze of tiny up-and-down streets without knowing the way by simply following the turns down which there is more activity. There are the rows of souvenir shops on the immediate two or three streets near the Mezquita, but these shops are restrained, the trinklets are not in your face as you walk down the street, but safely stowed away behind glass cupboards inside the shop.

Mezquita does not announce itself; from the outside, there is nothing in the plain stone walls to suggest that it is anything other than a large old building. Around the pathways near the main entrance a garden has been created, with a few tall trees that provide shade. The wooden church doors through which you enter seem a little incongruous. The floor inside is concrete, there are round pillars in rows along both axes, of a faded granite that is cool to the touch. Two layers of arches are built between the pillars, painted an alternating white and red ochre. The stained glass built into the ceiling is unmistakably church-like - like many in Andalucia this was a mosque that was later converted into a church. Near the corners where I am standing the glass lets sunlight into the dark space, and illuminates a few arches suddenly.

Closer to the centre there are church pews, rows of modern wooden chairs. Among the round arches there are the pointed, Christian arches built in. There is much gold around the nave, and paintings of the crucifixion hung on the walls along one side. All along the centre of this building a white, Italianate cathedral has been built in. It is in distinct contrast to the reticence of the arches, as if a superimposed structure, whose jutting columns can be mistaken for an elaborate scaffolding. "Our mosque is beautiful", Marcos said yesterday. "But it is a pity. There is a big cathedral inside it."

Across the roof there is much stained glass inlaid that lets light in, in slivers angled down to the ground; around it and on the other side space and atmosphere is taken up by the inevitable tour groups, and talkative schoolchildren on a field trip. Still Mezquita is big enough, and there are parts of it, closer to the near corners, where there is no line of sight to the brightness and glitter of the church nave, and I am out of earshot of tourist chatter; where the space is finally like how it once might have been, dark, cool, and quiet, under the hallunicatory rows of red and white arches.

This is our filmoteca

2008-07-18T03:51:00.003+05:30

It is seven in the evening when we finally leave the house; Marcos has a class to attend at seven thirty for a couple of hours, for me to wander around in the still-bright sunshine. His university is inside the walls, we pass the Mezquita only a few streets away ("In Cordoba everything is centered around the mosque"). Marcos's house is only a short distance from the fortress, as we approach it he points to the wall; Cordoba was originally a Roman settlement, "the wall is the town's history, on the wall you find Roman, Muslim, and Christian".

Cordoba is nestled by nature. The mountains form a natural fortress and a protective cradle around it, and, like Sevilla, the Guadalquivir runs around the city, and forms a moat around its fortress. When you approach the moat from outside, you are at a point where you must ascend a series of steps to cross a thick stone bridge, when great big walls stare back at you from fifty feet across the river bank. Yet this statement of magnitude is restrained to just the walls of the fortress, because inside, in the narrow streets where pedestrians must stand up against the walls to give a car space to pass, things are small, the street is quiet, and it winds up and down slopes, turns and twists to reveal other streets, an intersection with a small square, a bench with a soft lamp glowing over it.

The sun has softened considerably, the cafe just past the wall has not opened yet after closing at three in the afternoon, people on the street go about their day's business quietly. There are a couple of buildings that now serve as hotels, and on one or two streets a quiet concentration of shops and cafes, but these streets are still primarily where people live. The houses are built close together and a series of houses will share walls, one house marking out its external boundary from the next only by a differing combination of colour along the lines of its windows and on the walls themselves. An old lady walks down the street back to her house. Are these the streets along which you will hear songs sung from the windows? I come to a square outside a building that says Auberge de Juvenil ('youth hostel') on a board outside, near the empty bench a man in a uniform wheels away trash, mostly fallen leaves, to a small van at the corner. I sit here for a while.

I meet Marcos outside his college, an old building with its paint peeling, with a plaque by its big wooden doors, Facultidad de Philosophias y Lettras. It must be the last class scheduled, this late in the day; there are hardly one or two other students coming out of the building. I look inside when the gate opens and they come out; the way inside is cobblestoned, leading to a courtyard. "Olmo, he studies in the Faculty of Electro-Mechanical, his faculty has a new campus, it is outside the town. And if he goes in the morning, he is just there, you know, on the campus till the end of the day. Mine is here, near the mosque, and near my house also, in this quiet place... it is a part of Cordoba. I like coming here."

We go to dinner, to a small restaurant a couple of streets away, still inside the walls that I am now seeing by night, when Mezquita has closed and the trinket seller sitting on its large steps has gone home. The entrance to the eating house is small and deceptive, for inside the seating area is a large, bare room with high ceilings. Two or three waiters in white shirts and trousers carry steel dishes to tables. Here Marcos orders us Tinto Verrano, the red wine drink served in a tall unadorned glass tumbler, Chorizo, the spicy sausage in a tomato gravy that I have seen at every cafe, and Flamenguin, a light-coloured dish the consistency of a batter. "This is the basic food in Andalucia", Marcos says when the Flamenguin comes. "It is bread. When it becomes hard, a little bit old, we soak it in water, till it becomes like this." It has tiny bits of tomato and meat sprinkled on top. It is cold, not warm, and light. "It is simple food", he smiles, "food that you eat at home."

We're back out on the quiet streets. It is night and there is hardly anybody around. Marcos keeps thinking of streets we can detour through: "Oh I will take you here", he will say suddenly, breaking out of thought. On one street I take a peek into an Arabic tea house with latticed windows in front, inside a small dark room with intricately embroidered cushions against the walls. "Maybe it is for tourists but still it is very nice", he says. "We can come tomorrow." The shops have downed their shutters, only some bars are open. "Oh you must see this street," he says again. Like all the others it is winding and narrow, but against the dark the lights are on in a few large windows, groups of women sitting inside. "Prostitutes. But all very old!" I look in through the window. Indeed, all the women sitting inside look in their sixties and seventies. Strange. A street or two away there is a large old building whose open gate leads to a front courtyard with, like all the others, potted plants hanging out of balconies. "This is our filmoteca", Marcos says. I follow him to the front door as he picks up a pamphlet with the schedule for the month. I take one too. "You know the movie The Good, The Bad, The Ugly? The guy who whistled the tune for the movie...", Marcos whistles the tune now, "...his name is Curro Savoy, he had come to the filmoteca!" "Yes he is Andalusian... he had come here to give a talk. After the talk, we could ask him questions and chat with him. The whole thing was great fun because there were only three of us in the audience."

A few buildings down we pass the gate of what looks like a house, "I must meet somebody, she is here", Marcos says as I follow him inside. We go around the building to the back, there is a Bar sign outside. Inside is a medium-sized room with a fire burning at one end, and people standing around talking. There is soft music playing and gentle yellow light, and now and then the girl standing near the fireplace begins to sway to the music. Marcos seems to know most people here, and is going to each of them in turn and striking up enthusiastically. As I stand here a little unsure of what to do other than get myself a glass of beer, the lady whom Marcos has just finished talking to comes up. She asks me how I've liked Andalucia, tells me about her struggle to learn English, talks about her work. She is a researcher in a chemicals company, she has worked in the field for a few years. "But after this summer I think I will not, anymore. I would like to do something else." Like Marcos most people here are in their thirties, men and women. As appears to be the norm everywhere, in cafes, on the streets, marijuana and hashish are freely passed around. Through this backdoor groups of two and three people arrive and leave; each group standing in their own circle, but everyone walking over to each other to chat. This is unlike a public bar, and more like a private gathering. "I am meeting them after a long time", Marcos tells me later. "Many have been away from Cordoba for some time. Some of them are going away again actually, next week, to study." "I like coming back to Cordoba", he says. "It is good to go outside, but when I come back I like living here."

It is past midnight when we get back home. I am tired, and try to choose between making notes about today or catching up on sleep for a fresh first morning in Cordoba tomorrow. On the wall across from the bed the man with the trumpet looms, on the table the handwritten cd labels are just out of reading sight. It is strange to be in a new country and new city and occupy the bedroom of someone who lives here. But somehow it all fits perfectly right now. I write two pages in my small diary with many sentences that end in exclamation marks, and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

Fifty Three Degrees, 2005!!

2008-07-15T02:45:00.006+05:30

I had called Marcos from Sevilla this morning; my couchsurfing luck is turning, kind people are showing up in my inbox at the last minute, giving their phone numbers and extending invitations to stay with them when in their city. Marcos will even come to the train station, he asks me to wait right outside.

I love the minutes, hours or days I spend in a new place when I do not have my bearings yet -- a couple of streets exiting a tube station, a neighbourhood you've only heard of before, a new city before you figure your way around. It is a bit of a blur (a blur in the best kind of way). Given enough time, I tend towards plotting my location, and begin to keep track: now taken the left from the road with the traffic lights, now perpendicular to the street with the movie theatre, now parallel to the main street where all the shops were, and slowly becoming conscious of deciding whether to go right or left next. But standing outside the railway station in Cordoba that afternoon, I could afford consciously not to. Marcos is here in five minutes (he picks me out from among the Cordobans easily enough), we fall into conversation as we walk towards his house. My first impressions of this place then are of it in the background; for once it does not matter which way town is, which side of the road I will have to stand on to get a bus, where these streets go.

Almost as soon as he introduces himself Marcos says "I have just come back from Mumbai. Yesterday." He has spent twenty days there; and for the next few minutes he fairly brims with what he saw and how Bombay was (Cordoba seems small and quiet and is in Europe). We walk along slowly, him wheeling his bicycle along. Twice he comes across people he knows on the street -- old friends he hasn't seen in a while, he says later -- and stops to have a five- or ten-minute conversation. So Cordoba is that kind of town, you think, where you walk by people you know on the street. Then he tells me he was born in Cordoba and has lived most of his life here; maybe it is how all hometowns are.

Is there anything better than meeting a local once you are in a new place? When I entered Sara's house in Sevilla that evening the tone of my trip changed; what was bus routes and walking down strange streets became entering one of those houses with the round arches and courtyard that I kept getting peeks of, mentioning three days spent on the coast became Sara telling me about spending childhood summers on the beach, passing a Burger King outside Mezquita in Cordoba would become Marcos talking of how his small town has changed over the years. You are transported to the thick of a place for the time you are here, listening to stories and going to places that only those who live here can show you.

Yet there is no getting away from the fact that you are an outsider, someone who is there to look around (putting it a little bluntly). It is a feeling I get constantly, on this trip as well, "Doesn't this little corner seem 'authentic' and 'real', where there are only locals", you think to yourself, but at the back of your mind you can't escape also feeling (and seeing) "Aren't you the outsider here though, the one with the backpack, and the camera in the pocket, the odd one out, who has just stepped inside a neighbourhood's community cafe, who people are looking up at and are wondering what this person is doing here." It seems one of travelling's ironies that the more 'authentic' or 'real' an experience seems in a new place, the more telling your presence as an outsider in this new place is.

"I work for four or five months in a year", Marcos is saying. "Rest of the time, this year I am studying in the University, sometimes I travel... it depends." He points out the Roman walls of the city as we pass, his house is right around the corner from here he says, just outside the walls. He puts his old, worn bicycle in a roomful of old, worn bicycles by the landing of his apartment building; we take a rusting lift up to the sixth floor. "We must go to the roof. You can see the whole of Cordoba." He has not been far from talking about Mumbai today and asking questions, already he has thanked me twice: "I just come back, now I can speak to Indian person about my experience." It is touching: his English is limited (and my Spanish non-existent), every so often he starts to say something, then unable to word it further, attempts to communicate it by expression, eyes bright, dancing, hands drawing pictures in the air, coaxing, a smile sometimes, a slight, curious frown creeping into his expression at others. In the house he goes immediately to the kitchen to make lunch while I sit with his housemates Olmo and Lucia. Every two or three minutes he comes to the living room and begins to describe something enthusiastically; I know he is talking to them about it from the way he starts off with "y Mumbai?" ('and Mumbai?'), and the words that he's forced to hold back when he is talking to me come pouring forth. Olmo and Lucia listen intently.

They insist I feel at home here, and must feel free to eat the pasta using my hands. "No, really, you can, please", Lucia says. I tell her that we eat 'this' kind of food with a fork or a spoon, and 'our' food with our hands. "Even when you are in India? Why?", she asks innocently; I don't have an answer. After lunch we are lazing on the sofa, the TV flipping through channels on mute. The living room is separated from the terrace by a huge wall-to-wall window, sitting inside we can see the heat. "In the summer it is impossible!", Marcos says, pointing to outside the window. I remember reading a few years ago that it had crossed fifty degrees in southern Spain. (Amusingly they seem to be proud of it, in one shop selling souvenirs I saw bright red-and-yellow thermometers that said ecstatically, "Sevilla, Fifty Three Degrees, 2005!!"). For me it hasn't been like this since back home; for the first time since then I am sweating walking down the road in the morning, but for the first time since then it is the weather I know. Olmo is deep in concentration holding his cigarette lighter to a small, black clay-like ball, she watches the television; all is quiet. The sun blazes outside. Lounging in our chairs after our late afternoon meal, the blinds now adjusted to shade us from the intense sunlight pouring in, it seems like a natural time to ask them about siesta. "How much is it followed?" I ask. "It is, still", Marcos says, "For example, you do not telephone someone's house in the afternoon, from three to five, or six. You must call later."

I leave my bag in a tiny bedroom with cds and cassettes with handwritten labels piled high, a guitar case next to the cupboard, a big poster on the wall of a man playing a trumpet. Normally I would've gone out considering I had just arrived for one and a half days in Cordoba and there is daylight outside; today I stay. I go back out to the living room. Lucia gives up sooner, saying it in Spanish and asking Marcos to (barely) translate. Olmo doesn't do that: we talk in a mixture of single words and gestures; and break out into smiles each time we discover that a word is common to both English and Spanish, me going "yes yes!", him "si si si!" at the moment of illumination. I ask them if Davide -- whose room I'd put my things in -- is a musician. "Yes, also" Marcos says to that a touch enigmatically. "Olmo is a singer", he says and turns to Olmo, who just smiles and nods. Olmo then plays something on the cd player. A lone male voice calling out. It is unaccompanied by instrument. He says a while later, "This, flamenco tradicional. Only vocal. Afterward, the instruments come." When the song finishes there is a short silence, then the next begins. "They origin in India, Rajasthan no?", he looks up. He sings a phrase that has just passed in the song, some inflections are familar, there is the tinge of hindustani. "This... like Indian", he says. Then he sings another part: "This, like Arabic music". "El gitanos, the gypsies, their history is in the music." "What is he singing about?", I ask him. "It is religious. Christian. But different. Of Marie Madre, like a cult". "Is flamenco popular?", I ask. "It is more popular outside Spain than here!", Marcos laughs. "No, but this kind of flamenco, young people in Spain don't relate to. It is something we hear always, just around us. From when we are small children." He says after a pause, "You should have come two weeks later. It will be Semana Santa, you can hear people singing this on the street. You can hear it from the windows."

Acqui, acqui!

2008-07-14T00:21:00.004+05:30

At twelve thirty on Thursday afternoon there is a train running from Sevilla to Jaen, cutting an arc on my map across northern Andalucia. It goes to Cordoba, and along the way it stops at the following stations: Lora del Rio, Peñaflor, Palma del Rio, Posadas. This train is called the Andalucia Express. I have to take it.

The terminus at Sevilla is entirely modern, the platforms roofed high by arching fibreglass. But it does not matter; when I find my coach and a seat by the window, it makes me think of the moment when the train will sail out of this modern platform, into Sevilla province and the afternoon. In my notebook I have written:

I am on the Andalucia Express! What a name for a train! This train stops at five or six towns or villages on its way to Cordoba, whose names on the platform I look forward to seeing, and flirt with the possibility of getting off at one that catches my fancy. Because buses are cheaper in these parts of the world this is my first train ride in months... how exciting it is to be on a train again!

Now I must look outside the window.

**

We pass villages -- just a few streets of houses -- painted white, the windows framed by paint the colour of sandalwood. In some houses, the windows have a brick inlay along their frames, in the now-familiar round arch formation. How simple these arches are! On some buildings, along the overhang of the roof, the same thick sandalwood colour.

In twenty minutes we are at our first station, stopping for less than a minute along the mostly-empty platform to pick up four or five passengers. The station is Lora del Rio. "Acqui, acqui!" ("Here, here!"), an elderly man shouts to someone up the platform, probably his wife, as he peeks into our compartment and sees empty seats. He waits for her to reach, then they both climb in with the satisfied smiles of being the first to spot the last empty seats in a coach.

There are more whitewashed houses now, entire villages of them, in rows and clusters one below the other on the side of a hill. The villages are always built along the side of a hill, so that in one view you can see all its houses, its lines of clothes hung out to dry in the bright sunshine, the spire of its church, the minarets. Inside the coach the old man who got on at the previous station is now standing at the centre. He seems to have made a statement or asked a question to no one in particular: in the beginning two or three people respond, then for a few seconds everyone on the coach is talking to each other. Now a young man in a sports jacket has joined him in the centre of the coach, and an audible conversation continues, maybe speaking in a language I don't understand, but each voice curious and different from the other.

The land is much more fertile here than the craggy, dry landscape on the coast. Just-cultivated strips of brown soil, goats grazing in enclosed pastures, the fencing old and worn thin. There are rows and rows of a dense bushy plant; and clusters of tiny yellow flowers on the ground along the tracks. There, a palm tree.

We stop briefly at our next station, Peñaflor. A signboard on the platform shows the time, 14:11, and the temperature, which has risen and risen outside the air-conditioned coach to 35 °C (at eight o clock this morning it was zero degrees). This section of the route roughly follows a river by its side, sometimes it is a hundred or a hundred and fifty metres from the train, sometimes we are right by it, the track following its course. It is not wide; its waters are a dark green and motionless in the heat. We reach a station and a settlement of maybe fifty houses: Palma del Rio. We have passed two or three stations called 'del Rio', identifying the village as being by the river; but the river itself is not identified by name, it is simply 'the river' for those who live near it.

While the Andalucia Express like the railway station in Sevilla is modern with nothing to distinguish it from elsewhere in these parts of the world, it is a Regional ("Ray-hee-o-naal"), which means it stops at small places along the way, in stations that haven't given way to modernity as much, and practices that seem anachronistic in Western Europe: at each station, the conductor, a young lady with short hair and a ready smile, still signals to the station-master by hand and shouts out to the driver that they are ready to depart, and uses a punching machine to validate your ticket before returning it to you.

Now we are at a station called Posadas: the station house's paint is peeling at places, brick showing through on the sides. There is a row of orange trees by the tracks. A number of young people, probably students, have got on. Along the way there are still tinier stations that we pass without so much as slowing down. Which train stops at these stations?

For perhaps the first time in my life, I wish I could paint. Then I would sketch these white houses, and the whitewashed buildings around them, in clusters on the hill, and the single palm tree, just the way I'm seeing them now, and it would mean more than any photograph I click on my camera.

A slightly tipsy man is talking to the ticket-lady as she goes about her work, following her up and down this coach full of people. She retorts to something he says, and the whole coach erupts into laughter. Not for the first time (or the last) on this trip, I wish I could follow Spanish.

A voice on the speakers announces the next stop: Proxima barada, Cordoba.

White villages outside Seville?

2008-07-13T02:00:00.006+05:30

I wake Sara up to say goodbye, and leave the apartment with the round arch at its door and orange trees in its front yard early the next morning. Alcazar was just opening for the morning, the fortress whose high walls have never seemed too far off these last two days. I couldn't make up my mind about Alcazar - it has a beautiful central courtyard elaborately carved and woodworked in an Arabic style that is largely untouched, but there are paintings of major and minor Christian royals occupying swathes of wallspace; the gardens seem to be appendages that you are never sure if you should take seriously: the stone landscaping looks like a homage to classical Greek ruins, and somewhat of a non-sequitur to the palace. The courtyard inside the palace is crowded and noisy at ten thirty in the morning -- if weekends are for tourist busloads, weekdays are for schoolchildren dragged on field trips -- you move in line, to the next spot in front of you that clears, part of groups of people, soon you have unconsciously fallen in step with a tour guide (or a school teacher). The thing is I am still smitten, by Casa Pilatos, quiet and elegant, thinking about its courtyard. I follow the direction arrows around Alcazar through to the exit, into a large square.

In Sevilla streets begin and end in public squares. Some squares are big, like this one, the kind that represent a city, with streets from all sides leading to it, long sturdy blocks of wooden benches to sit on and a sculpture in the middle of a fountain spouting cool water in the heat, and smart shops lining it on all four sides; some are small, part of a neighbourhood, like coming upon a clearing in the woods of those narrow streets, to a street which ends in a quiet church, a small square with a few orange trees and a single bench in front of it. The small streets leading out of squares wander off in whimsical directions, some arching out unexpectedly, some narrowing down to become even smaller, where pedestrians have to stand even tighter against the walls to let cars pass. The side-walls of houses are pressed up against their neighbours', the grills of their balconies black against the yellows and oranges of the houses. If I'm lucky, someone is entering or leaving a building just as I'm passing, to take a peek inside as the door opens or shuts: a glimpse of a short front corridor leading to a room-sized courtyard, round arches on all four sides, a large potted plant or two in the corner, stairs on one side leading to rooms upstairs, blue-on-white ceramic tiles lining the four sides, its cursive patterns flowing like Arabic hand on the wall.

In the large square outside the entrance to the fortress there are some tourists now, gathered on benches around the small fountain, and men in hats who have pulled up their horse-drawn carriages on one side, waiting for customers. "Hi there, do you speak English?", asks a confident voice. "Yes?", I say turning to a man of about forty five holding a folder with sheets of paper and pictures sticking out. "Would you like to take a tour of the white villages outside Seville?", he follows up, in a crisp, Americanized twang. "Thanks, but I'm leaving town in an hour", I tell him truthfully and walk along.

Sevilla's magic is all over it, it paints the town. It is clearly a city that has continued to be prosperous since the middle ages when its greatest identifiers, La Giralda, Alcazar, Torro del Oro came up. There are buildings of different eras since - many churches with their very distinctive architecture (much unlike Gothic-style churches in countries north of Spain) that came up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when they would have been built with lots of new-world money from its colonies; buildings that are probably a couple of hundred years old that typically now serve as official premises of some kind; and then new ones, like the handsome structure at the park near Sara's house -- she said it was built for Sevilla's World Fair (that took place in 1929) -- and even apartment buildings like Sara's that are no more than thirty or forty years old. None of these seem out of place or not in sync with the other; it is like there is a fountain from which those who have contributed to building Sevilla over the centuries have taken from and still take from. There are curves, in the round of the arch above a gate, in the patterns on the ceramic, in the frame of a doorway. Everywhere the building is colourful, lavish in expression, full of elaborations and intricacies; with the distinctive round arches and minarets, a fountain that clearly had its origins in Sevilla's Arabic period.

I find my way out of this set of streets around the fortress and get back to Avenida San Fernando, to a dull roar of voices that sometimes rises in unison. Further up the road there is no way through, an election rally is in progress, a group of a few hundred, some with banners, almost all men, one or two of them rousing responses through their loudspeakers. I track back a little and take a new set of roads around Avenida San Fernando, and cross to the bus station. "Hola Señor!", the old man who looks after the luggage greets me. By now we are old friends. I pick up my backpack, say goodbye to him and take a bus from where I arrived two days ago, to the railway station twenty five minutes away.

Ensaladilla de Gambas

2008-07-08T03:21:00.002+05:30

There is finally a positive reply on Couchsurfing -- I had sent my requests late, only a week or two before leaving, and at the start of this trip I had resigned myself to hostels until the last two nights at Granada (from where a couple replied immediately with an invitation) -- earlier today I stopped at an internet centre to check email on the off-chance, and lucked out: Sara from Sevilla has replied, and offered to host for two days. I find Felipe Segundo, the street name on the paper I have written down, two stops by bus from the bus station. There I find the building number, then go to a small cafe next door to finish dinner before going to her house.

It is around eight o clock, at the café people are gathering to watch Sevilla FC play a Uefa cup match against a Turkish team. Through warm-ups and team formations this little place has filled up, although I’m the only one eating. It is a European quarterfinal and the team whose home ground is right down the road -- Sara tells me later -- is playing; those gathered at the cafe, like the staff who wait for the coffee to drip from the filter into the cup placed underneath, watch.

At the house I meet Sara and Juani, I leave my bag there and we go out soon after. On Felipe Segundo every cafetaria and bar that I passed on my way here has filled up. People spill out onto the pavement; all are watching the football. "So everyone supports Sevilla FC?", I ask. "And Real Betis. In our city it is fifty-fifty." Sara is from a small town called Caceres, in the East of Andalucia, when she talks about her hometown her eyes light up. Juani is from Huelva, "It is a small place in a corner of Spain. Nobody knows it," she says rather self-deprecatingly by way of introduction. "Your football club, Recreativo Huelva, yes?", I ask, and her eyes almost pop out of her head. We grin; I remember Recreativo as one of the other teams that used to be involved in Star Sports's La Liga Match of the Week, the 'other' that used to get whipped by Barcelona or Real Madrid or Valencia. I don't mention that to her though.

We are going to Carboneria they tell me. I have come across the name before: when I had emailed people on Couchsurfing one had replied saying "Sorry I have people already, but when you are in Sevilla if you want to see our authentic music and dance you should go to Carboneria. Visitors go there but locals respect the place too." Near the large wooden door there are in-house posters of past performances. The walls are not even or polished, the rugged, jagged edges of the stone poke through the whitewash. The roof beams and benches are trunks of wood. It turns out there is an hour before the night’s performance begins, there are not many people here yet. This place has a rustic feel, and slightly dingy, like it is in the back of a building. Beer does not seem right tonight, no, Carboneria wants something more... solid. Maybe the Tinto Verrano? Sara suggests. It is an iced drink of red wine with soda, something of a national beverage in these parts where the temperature can hit fifty degrees in the summer. But, she says, when one is in Sevilla one must drink Agua de Sevilla -- Water of Sevilla. She delights in telling what goes into it: "it is made of rum, whisky, gin and vodka", counting each one off on her fingers as she's saying it, as her friend grins and nods her head vigorously in agreement.

By the time the performance starts Carboneria has filled up, eighty or perhaps a hundred people packed in, sitting and standing. On the small stage, in the backdrop of a collage of posters for music and flamenco festivals, three men sit leaning slightly forward, one with a guitar, one with a flute, and one man who uses the wooden floorboards of the stage and the crispness of his handclap to begin and to drive each song. A tall, muscular woman in a glittering orange dress is in front of them, as she begins to dance, the man starts to sing.

Happily, no one here buys Agua de Sevilla by the glass -- it is on half of the tables around ours and at the bar -- it is only procured in pitchers, large quantities of strong drink. Past midnight when the crowd has thinned -- and I am the only remaining non-local -- the music has become more impromptu. The musicians have short exchanges between songs to decide on what they will play next. A lady who was sipping a drink at the bar comes up on stage; while the gypsy dancer is more arresting, this lady in the shirt and jeans is more beautiful, with a sensuous figure and black hair flowing past her shoulders. From her first twirl on the tiny stage the crowd responds with vigour, shouting calls in time to her twirl, her clap adding to the polyrhythm, the men's claps more urgent, demanding of response, the rhythms are quickened now, cries of "olé!" from the tables below...

The taxi into which we gather ourselves outside -- the ground beneath our feet staggered too much tonight to walk -- drops us off at the beginning of Sara's road by the park; now we must stagger the five minutes to home. The day is crashing to an end, my head is spinning, but for a day like this, it does not seem an unsuited way to end. Unsightly maybe.

**

Next day starts late, three in the afternoon late; Aguas de Sevilla has taken its toll. The sun is shining brilliantly, especially in the Parc de Maria Luisa down the road from Sara's house. I walk the short distance to the streets near the bus station where I arrived yesterday, to go to the bocadillo shop I saw then. Its entrance is shaded behind the row of orange trees on the street, and you face the counter as soon as you enter. It is a plain shop, with a minimum of things in it. In the shelves by the counter there are large blocks of different kinds of meat, some processed and sausage-like, some raw, pale pink. Next to it are two big blocks of cheese. The price list on the walls has a single heading: Bocadillos, under it, y Queso ('and cheese') is common to all the items on the short list, beside it, the names of each of these meats. There are two men buying lunch in front of me, when they place their order, either verbally or by pointing to a block of meat, the man wordlessly takes it out from the shelf and places it on the counter. Then, using a machine (or a tool) whose action is not unlike that of a guillotine, he shaves a thick slice first off the block the meat, then off the cheese. The long bread is opened along its median and the slices are placed in between, their ends sticking out on all sides. Nothing else is added to it, no suggestion is made either: no "toppings", or "extras" can or will come in the way. It is probably to do with the foreignness of white bread to our food (even when bought to make a meal of at home), and also something to do with the way it is sold permutated and packaged as a staple of junk food pretty much everywhere in these parts of the world, but it is difficult for me to imagine a sandwich as traditional food; today, I'm seeing how it can be.

But even a good honest lunch cannot extinguish a hangover sometimes: I am only in the mood to amble now, I will go to the Alcazar tomorrow. Past a large square with benches and sculptures, at least ten streets with names like Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Madrid leading off from it, through Zaragoza past a small shop selling guitars, up a small street with many boutique shops but also a young man sitting on the ground by the pavement singing and playing chords on his guitar. Here I stop to watch for a few minutes. Weekday afternoon has turned to weekday evening, a steadily-increasing crowd of mostly office workers are now out (although it is difficult to imagine how anyone can work inside an office here -- it is easy to start thinking in a place like Sevilla that every person around you must also be ambling about dazed by orange gardens and streetnames). At the end of the street a lottery-ticket seller has set up a cycle cart and is calling out his wares. The tram, that remarkably noiseless vehicle, is fairly crowded with passengers. I sit at a bench near the square a few metres from the cathedral, and watch the tram go by every twelve minutes.

Mostly because I don't feel upto anything else yet. Again cursing the traces of this hangover that has still not completely disappeared, I head back towards Sara's house as the sun sets, deciding to stop off for dinner on the way. I had lost most of today to a late start, but I would make sure end the day well I reasoned, finding myself facing up to a tapas house five buildings from home. It is a lovely place inside, high ceilings and only a few tables in the large floor space. Each table has its own corner, some people standing in groups glasses of wine or beer in hand, an upright barrel forming their table, some eating quietly at tables, one or two standing at the counter smoking a cigarette and sipping beer, all left alone. A corner table is unoccupied, there is a long list of items on the menu, each with three prices listed according to the size of the dish: Racion / 1/2 Racion / Tapas. I put the guidebook to use presently -- in my toothless Rough Guide to Andalucia (must stick to Lonely Planet) there is a surprisingly detailed food glossary at the end -- and translate each dish on the menu before making my choice (the waitress grinning widely as she came up to my table and figured out what I was doing). I asked for Ensaladilla de Gambas, a salad of finely-chopped vegetables -- carrots, beans -- and tender, crisp prawns, mixed in a light cream. I ate it with pieces of bread -- this time I knew to ask for pan -- and a small glass tumbler of cerveza -- there is only one tap, one variety of beer available, no need to specify a brand. And then I went back to Sara's house for sleep.

If there is ever a single reason to come to Spain, it can quite possibly be for Ensaladilla de Gambas.

Torro del Oro

2008-07-06T16:34:00.001+05:30

Everything inside is made of wood, proud logs of deep, dark maroon wood. Great rumps and thighs hang from hooks over the counter, like dressed up carcasses. The man who makes the coffee is also the butcher, after he places a cup in front of me he goes back to chopping the meat on the table into large chunks. The high chairs at the wooden counter are mostly occupied, the two old men next to me are discussing the newspaper spread out in front of them. On the wall there are photographs: some in black and white, some in colour, of matador and animal, its horns in survival position, him holding the cape close to his body, like a fan about to be unveiled. There are close-ups of bullfighters, shot just before he goes into the ring, eyes intense in approaching combat, droplets of sweat just beginning to form on his forehead, clinging to his skin. Next to it there is a picture in black and white of four or five men sitting on wooden chairs drawn together in a semi-circle. One man cradles a guitar in his hands, the others lean forward, all looking up at the woman next to them, a strong-looking woman with sharply defined features. Then there is a close-up in profile of one of the men, eyes lost in thought. No one is smiling in these pictures, not musician, not bullfighter. They are about to make music, she is about to dance, he is about to step into the bullring; the snapshots are of the inward moment just before.

The old men next to me are joined by another, they ask for a bottle of red wine, which the butcher pours copiously into large glasses. Everyone sitting at the counter has a lit cigarette in their hand, the cigarette idling away for the most part as they focus on their coffee or their thoughts, the smoke drifting up into the legs and thighs of meat suspended over the counter. I empty my cup and leave the cafe, once again into bright sunshine.

**

Back up the main road past the garden there is a busy intersection, a tour group of American teenagers, office workers, a class of school-children waiting to cross the road, cries of "Anamaria!", and "Ey, chica!" piercing the air. From here I can see a tall minaret with church bells at the top, La Giralda and the cathedral are only a few streets away. Down the road from the intersection, there are the tall walls of the Alcazar, sprawling, extending half the way to the river, so that Sevilla's fortress is not more than a hundred and fifty metres from the water. The buildings along the avenue by the river Guadalquivir, like those visible on its opposite bank are large and prosperous. The palm trees planted along the two levels of the terraced promenade are well-tended, of uniform height, regal. The lines of palms converge at the Torro del Oro, a single white tower that forms the nucleus of this section of the riverbank, near which boats are docked. Six-lane traffic of cars and scooters zips by behind; the road by the water, like the beach road in Almeria and Malaga, the pride. Every so often, somewhat incongruously, an elaborately-decorated horse-drawn carriage that seems to have escaped the gentler surrounds of Santa Cruz or the small streets around the cathedral finds itself trotting off from the traffic light, the driver of the car stuck behind it wearing an impatient scowl on his face.

On the other side of the road there is a row of three or four souvenir shops. From this side the usual share of souvenir tack is visible, up close the postcard rack has, by the over-pigmented photographs of palaces and courtyards with 'SEVILLA' in multi-coloured letters below, black-and-white pictures of flamenco dancers in the midst of a pirouette, small prints of posters for an Extraordinaria Corrida de Toros ('Extraordinary run of bulls') in Sevilla in 1947, photographs from a music festival. Inside, these motifs of flamenco, bull-ring and guitar are repeated across t-shirts, posters, bookmarks - perhaps not as fortuitous as coming upon a real flyer being handed out for the evening's flamenco performance or bull-fight, but interesting, evocative souvenirs all the same.

I spend a few minutes there, and left the shop happy, knowing what I'd bought for whom. Torro del Oro is behind me, I was walking in the opposite direction, I turned again and again to look at it. Its white, pale, thick stone stands upright against the water flowing by. It once served as a lighthouse to boats on the Guadalquivir, when the city must have been smaller and the river ran freer, and people on the last leg of their journey would look for its single beam from up this twisting, turning river in the dark of nights to complete their journey safely. It is made of stone, sturdy and symmetrical, a single colour and texture, consistent. Its base, perhaps two hundred feet high, upon which a further, smaller tower capped by a round green dome stands, looks like the rook on a chess board. Torro del Oro is the rook, quietly giving strength by its unmoving presence. It is a sense of permanence, that things can stand the test of time, that it is possible to hold steadfast against oncoming winds.

I pass the compound of Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza, Sevilla's bull-ring. It is a quiet afternoon, there is an old man outside selling postcards and keychains, but hardly anyone else. Outside the stadium on the walls is a poster with a list of dates for 2008 and seat prices, still a couple of months away. Past the arena a street turning left takes me off the avenue; just around the corner is an old shop. It is dimly lit inside. The glass window in the front behind which things are displayed is slightly unclean. The sign above it says Sestreria, behind the glass, there are velvety jackets, pointy shoes, and embroidered, richly-coloured corset-like vests. Maybe they rent out to toreros who cannot afford to buy the regalia yet. The walls of the bull-ring, visible from here, look new, painted a luminous white; this place with the vests and the jackets is old, like it has been around since before the arena. The street is full of shops (including one called 'India', its display window filled carefully with strange colourful things), but hardly any people, and the shops in their absence of customers look innocent. The road turns now, unconsciously I am headed towards the cathedral and the Alcazar again, towards what would have once been the nerve centre of this city.

**

There is still light, past seven thirty in the evening, the bright March sun is only now on its way out. In front of me is a building about five storeys tall that looks like it is used as offices now; there is dirt and soot on its maroon and beige facade. The grill on the balconies is wrought iron, curving patterns of hearts and flowers and twists, like italicized script. Another building's dome is a stricter interpretation of something Dali might have done (maybe he took inspiration from here, who knows). I sit on the steps outside the cathedral, La Giralda behind me, the Alcazaba looming, the fortress's high walls only a few metres away. A man at the corner plays his violin. Although Sevilla's mosque was later brought down to make way for a cathedral, Peter and his son Ferdinand, Sevilla's first Christian kings after Muslim rule, let it stay, "the policy and practice of the Castilian monarchs had been not to destroy the monuments of the Islamic past but to appropriate them and write over them lightly."* They instead decreed it a church, and the rulers themselves continued to use it for prayer. Even later on, when a more radical time conspired to bring the mosque down, the minaret that crowned the mosque, now called La Giralda, was ordered by the Castilian king to stay; the story goes that he could not bear the thought of seeing it pulled down. This minaret is still standing, in the centre of Sevilla's cathedral.

A tram glides silently down the tracks in the middle of the road. The air is filled with the slow, tearful notes of a man playing Air on the G string on his violin. There some old men have stopped to watch him play, until the end of the piece.

*The Ornament of the World - Maria Rosa Menocal

Barrio Santa Cruz

2008-07-04T05:20:00.005+05:30

On electric posts in the centre of the road banners flutter, with a sketch of a bull tumbling over, a blood-red arrow piercing its hind: "Toros, Sevilla 2008." The bus station is new, the shelter outside with a row of eight or ten buses pulled up built probably twenty or thirty years ago; its fresh coat of paint is restrained, its white and yellow just like the white and yellow of the houses on the neighbourhood streets that our bus passed. Like the house in the fields this morning, the side of the station building has four round arches; behind the buses, a single tended palm tree. I deposit my backpack in a sparsely-filled luggage room with an old man smoking a cigarette (he talks enthusiastically for a minute or two, like many I encounter here undeterred that I do not appear to follow what he is saying). I am unencumbered by only a small rucksack of essentials, it is a bright ten in the morning, the street outside the bus station is lined with orange trees.

Its leaves and fruits hang over parked cars. A few old men trudge along the pavement beside it. The fruits hanging down from the branches are copious, tens and tens of them, full, ripe for the picking. They are not very high up, probably ten or twelve feet above the ground; these men who walk along the pavement underneath, why are they not reaching out to pluck them? Will it seem strange if I do?

The bus station is surrounded by these small quiet streets with pavements lined by orange trees, buildings white or a pale shade of yellow, here and there an arched doorway to a small shop selling cold drinks and bocadillos. Across the main road there is a garden. At its centre is a compound whose walls are the colour of sandalwood. There are castle-like crenellations on its high walls, and tall palm trees visible inside. Vines grow along one wall. Around a small fountain nearby the benches are tiled with ceramic, cursive blue patterns on a white background. One or two old men sit reading a newspaper, another sits on an adjacent bench alone, glancing at his watch and looking around. There are orange trees along every path, oranges just above your head as you're walking, oranges fallen to the ground. At one end there is a whitewashed house, lines of sandalwood-coloured paint on the perimeters of the windows and along the roof, like decorated borders on a large picture frame. Behind this house a smaller fenced-off garden lined by a row of shrubs, a crowd of tall palm trees rising above it.

It is a small area, Jardin de Murillo, I must have walked through it atleast three times then. The restless man is occupied now, his long-haired lover is here, for their mid-morning tryst. At the end away from the main road a street of large three-storeyed houses overlooks the garden; I go up the lane that empties into it. It is paved not with asphalt or concrete but with a patterned mosaic, immediately the impression is of walking through an enclosed, intimate space. The houses on either side are not more than fifteen feet across from each other; the two- and three-storeyed buildings are alternatively white, yellow, maroon, ochre; yet never in shades that call attention to themselves, dignified. A flyer outside one announces Cursos de Guitarra ('guitar courses'), Academia de Paco Padilla. The streets are narrow, and narrower streets branch off from them to the right and left, all taking eventually a downward slope back towards Jardin de Murillo. Leaves and branches of trees are spread over the front of houses; creepers run down walls; potted plants on tiny first-floor balconies; in this neighbourhood of tiny streets there is the wisp of the garden that sits beside it.

One such narrow, curving street opens out to a small square. I find Plaza Pilatos on the map, near Jardin de Murillo. A site is marked out at this spot, the key below says "Casa de Pilatos. Mansion most representative of noble Sevillan families."

It is a strange, eye-catching mix of styles: the large courtyard is decked with marble sculptures of the European Renaissance, while the building surrounding it would not be out of place if it were cast as stately rooms in a Mughal palace. The round-arched courtyard is in the same palette of colours as the houses in the neighbourhood, with intricate, kaleidoscopic patterns woven into its arches and ceilings. At one corner of the courtyard a man is standing on the lower steps of a ladder cleaning and polishing the relief set against the wall. His job is intricate: the bristles of his brush must catch the undersides of the relief, his hand learning the pattern embroidered on it. Outside, the garden is geometric and its pathways are strictly defined, but this is offset by playful touches: little square tiles inset into the flooring, each one sketched with a plant, a flower, a hunter drawn just like Shikari Shambu. Creepers of vine hang loosely and copiously down the walls, the potted plants in the balcony are not unlike those of the houses outside.

This is a house long inhabited by royalty, but what is most endearing about Casa Pilatos is it is a building of lineage that -- unlike counterparts of Renaissance or Georgian or Victorian origin in Western Europe -- is not all grandiosity. It is grand yet not heavy, it wears its features easily; while it is quiet inside, it is not a hushed reverential quiet, rather its air bears the easy quiet of the neighbourhood of which it is a part. Outside, in the square, there is an old man with a small hand-cart selling caramelized peanuts. The one-euro handful is handed over wrapped in a cone of magazine paper. A few people are out now, some stopping at the small shops that are only the size of the front room of the houses they have been converted from. The peanuts are sweet; my step slower. I read the nameboards on the doors of houses and the names of the streets. This neighbourhood is called Santa Cruz, it is just lovely. Where it ends and joins a main road, there is a cafe. It has been three hours since I arrived in Sevilla; I had meant to get coffee soon after the bus journey, but I have been captivated from the moment I stepped off the bus. I step inside the cafe happy. I could do worse than a cup of perfect brew, to savour the rush of this new place that I still feel in the midst of.

Blood and Sand

2008-06-26T00:14:00.006+05:30

At five thirty in the morning the little hostel with the communal fridge in the kitchen and cushions on the living room sofas is quiet, sleeping. I leave making as little noise as possible, anxious not to wake the blanket now stirring mysteriously in the bunk bed above me.

It is still dark outside, the air smells faintly of the beach. A man is switching on lights and cleaning some machinery in his small shop facing the street. Near the main road, a cafe is open, two or three men stand inside gazing at the counter as they wait for their coffee. On the main road, a car now and then speeds past, its occupants no doubt have to get to a nearby town or city not too long after sunrise to conduct their morning's business. On my side of the street, the bus stop is crowded for this time of day, and most, while dressed for work with a bag of some sort in their hand, stare expressionlessly at the road and look out into the darkness for signs of an approaching bus, still not fully awake. In the side streets that lead off from the main road, more small establishments and cafes are opening; the cafes are not much more than a niche in the wall ten feet by ten with a lengthwise counter, upon which a man wordlessly places steaming glass tumblers of coffee. Those inside are only standing (it is too early in the morning to be sitting), and there are only men for customers. This is a working part of town, around me are the goings-about of people who must start their day earliest, even before sunrise. The air is cool and tropical, people's footsteps are quiet, workmanlike, purposeful. This morning in Malaga is familiar, it is like waking up early and walking down the street in my town or my city, like the morning back home.

The bus to Sevilla leaves at seven as promised, there are only four passengers on it; I settle in with the reading light on and coffee bought from the station cafe, where the shifty-looking characters that seem to hang around bus stations everywhere were just emerging, still zombie-like from sleep. It is still dark as the bus winds its way through the invisible city, and straightens itself out onto the black highway. The sun has risen late these few days, only by eight o'clock. There is steady traffic in both directions. Vehicle headlights make out the black outlines of hills around us, but not much else is visible. The highway, as ever, speeds past.

The first light of the day, the pale glow of the minutes before sunrise, reveals a different landscape; there are mountains on either side in the distance, but it is as if we are on plain ground, the roll of the hills underneath almost imperceptible. The bell-towers of churches are like minarets, the bells nestled between round arches at the top. There is one every so often, just by the side of the road. Other church towers have pointed Gothic spires, and clusters of houses around them. But here in this landscape of palm trees and whitewashed brick houses with latticed windows the pointed spires seem out of place, standing proudly but oddly, as if built in cleared space in the centres of villages to stamp their mark. Out in the fields there is a lone white house with four white arches on the verandah. Vehicles pass, much fewer now than before; there is no one walking along the side of road or out in the fields; the white house and the village in the distance still asleep. In the one hour between the start of this journey and sunrise now -- like boarding a night train and waking up the next morning knowing on the first look outside the window that you are somewhere else -- it feels like we have come far inland. The coast could pinpoint where I was, I only had to run my finger along the waterline on the map to find it. Now, inland, I could be anywhere in Andalucia... maybe this is just a quirk of perception, but leaving the coast feels like travelling into heartland.

I want to re-read the parts in my book about Sevilla, the "lovely orange-tree-filled city the Almohads had made their capital", whose palace was "an evocation of the fortlike palace at the top of the rocky mountain retreat of Granada"*. Sevilla's Alcazar was inspired by the Alhambra, which itself had been completed in Granada only a couple of generations before. Although the Alcazar was built by a Christian king, Pedro, it was built firmly in the style of the Muslims who had ruled Sevilla until fifty years before that. The land we're passing through this morning, the church bells between the round arches, the minarets that frame the village churches, these are not the palaces and cathedrals that the book speaks of, but is their story similar? I remember the orange trees as the mountains gave way to plains in Alpujarra a couple of days ago, what will they be like in Sevilla? I think of the bullring and the streets in Blood And Sand, a movie I watched as a kid and remember for a long crush on Sharon Stone; images of Sevilla from it, just like the images the book creates in passing mention of its orange trees, are fleeting.

We are in what looks like the edges of a town or city now. I close the book I was reading. I put the unopened map back into my bag, I have no intention of looking at it now. I will be in Sevilla soon.

**

*The Ornament of the World - Maria Rosa Menocal

The Future Is Here

2008-06-23T20:07:00.002+05:30

Last night the caretaker at the hostel suggested I go to Frigiliana, "a typical Arabic village in Andalucía" he called it. I must first go to Nerja, a town on the coast an hour and a half east of Malaga, and from there on to Frigiliana. The bus leaves from Malaga at two in the afternoon, the temperature has risen steadily through the morning to a brilliant thirty degrees now. As we leave the city it picks up passengers at two points on the coastal road, so that it is almost full leaving Malaga. The water is a bright blue, the views of the sea are picture perfect, and it comes dramatically into view each time, the road taking another turn around a hill to reveal another cliff.

The hills roll right up to the sea, forming convenient inclines for building rows and rows (and rows) of terraced apartments with large balconies and a view of the sea for all. Urban development is of almost-unbelievable proportions along this road, summer villas that are either complete and have 'For Lease' signs at the start of their approach road, or being built as construction equipment bulldoze foundations into hillsides. This on the seaward side of the road; sometimes, on the other side too, if a little farther inland, there are done-up villas in gated compounds - the hills provide a view of the sea from this side too. Then there are single houses, some with domestic animals lolling nearby, roofs uneven, bedsheet-like cloth overhanging it to keep the sun out, none of the colourful neo-Arab decoration, maybe a lone round arch giving away its provenance, these houses clearly predating (and passed on by) the property developers. These rare unadorned houses, the ones without the obsessively uniform sheens of paint or fancy brick gabling, are the only remaining clues to what this stretch of the Mediterranean coast was actually like.

The first sign that Frigiliana too would be an extension of what I see on the coast is the presence of a shuttle bus that says "Nerja - Frigiliana" waiting at Nerja's shiny new main road, and a queue of middle-aged mostly English-speaking couples in beach clothes and newly acquired tans waiting to get on. The bus driver is friendly and handsome, and clearly in proud possession of a freshly minted English for tour guides certificate; he warmly welcomes us on board on the speakers. Frigiliana is only six kilometres inland from Nerja, soon our bus is winding up low hills, dotted with villas doused in glossy, high-quality white paint, the compound walls embellished at each corner with low tower-like structures in the shape of minarets. The village-limits of Frigiliana are announced to us in big letters (in English) on a white banner across the width of the road, "Frigiliana - The Future Is Here." Pavements are spotless, the houses are newly painted with shiny front doors and perfectly designed outside spaces. Every few hundred metres there is a cafe with chairs and tables outside. The bus stops on the side of a bridge from where you can see all sides of this "village"; I ask the driver as I am getting out about the next bus back to Nerja. "In half an hour." So I have half an hour here, and step out into the much-agreeable sunshine. There are more cafes, and kiosks selling cigarettes and magazines; all around, this "village" and the hills rise above the bridge, newly built villas everywhere - each with just enough Arabic element in their garish facades to allow the prospective buyer to make-believe he is buying into a slice of Andalucian landscape. Right in front of me, I am confronted by The Last Straw: among the spotless villas with the half-a-million-Euro price tags, is one stone building that looks "old", its dated compound walls have been allowed to stand. This seems odd, what could it be? A white cloth hoarding fluttering outside explains it: this is Frigiliana's "museum", retaining the building that houses it in its close-to-original form is its "authentic" element. Below the word 'Museo' the banner advertises a website, "www.andalucia3culturas.com", and its USP, Three Diverse Cultures co-existing in One Place, below it. This is the building in this "village" that will allow the prospective property-buyer to make-believe he is buying into authenticity ("There's even a museum, the building is exactly the way it used to be you know, and it's just down the road from our villa!").

The upside of this land-as-upscale-property-development is that there are frequent bus services in and out - God forbid the beach-slipper-clad vacationer from an upmarket West London borough is made to wait too long in this heat. On the two hours sitting in the bus getting back I do the best thing I can think of to distract myself from my surroundings - music on earphones and cans of beer, by way of two prompt buses I am back in Malaga in the evening. At the bus station I buy a ticket on the next morning's bus to Sevilla. I have spent three days more or less on the coast, and for all its beauty, today I saw a coast that is thoroughly sold out. What was hinted at in Almeria, with its rows of six-storey apartment buildings by the beach, is fully fledged along the coast east of Malaga: one maddeningly long strip of beach resort. Later on in the week in Cordoba I would meet a guy called Ernesto, he was from Marbella, on the coast near these parts. "Yeah..." he trails off when I ask him about his hometown, "unfortunately my town is now a tourist beach." Frigiliana is disillusioning, so early on in my trip, amidst a swathe of coast whored into a real estate trap when I am looking forward to coming upon an Andalucian village. Tomorrow I will leave the coast and not revisit it during this trip, on my map there is Sevilla, Cordoba and Granada, and all those unnamed miles of villages and bus stations in small towns in between, so I know I will get my chance.

SOL BACKPACKER

2008-06-21T05:30:00.018+05:30

Bernhard writes his address in my notebook, I write mine on a piece of paper, eat lunch and go to the bus station. Thankfully the bus station in Granada is outside city limits; I can leave the city without entering it.

There is an hour for the next bus to Malaga to leave, to spend in the large cafeteria, for another perfect glass of dark coffee. The counter runs from one end of the hall to the other, it is brisk with activity on either side. Men in simple white uniforms place glass tumblers under coffee filters, work taps of beer, ask people standing at the counter what they want. Men and women from the kitchen bustle past, carrying armfuls of food, plates piled with sandwiches with slices of meat sticking out, vessels of sausage-like meat and gravy. Just below the counter there is a row of large stainless-steel containers topped to the brim with different dishes, so that it is possible to point to what you want to eat without knowing what it is called. The old man at the counter next to me pays for his tapas and beer not out of a wallet but from a set of currency notes folded up and kept in his shirt pocket. People walk up to the counter and crowd along its length, signalling to catch the server's eye. Once they have got their food they brush past to a table - there is no obsessive queueing or deliberate display of courtesy, so ubiquitous and damned-if-you-don't in England. Here a waiter or a shopkeeper has not always mouthed Thank You or Have A Nice Day, but the times that he has it has seemed natural and spontaneous, and not for reasons of codified etiquette. It is how I have known it to be at home; it is how it seems to be here.

On the Granada-Malaga motorway there is a back-up of traffic on this Sunday evening, and the sun has set by the time we reach Malaga. The Mcdonald's next to the station becomes a shamefully lazy choice of dinner. I take bus number 3 from the station and get down two stops away. I am trying to find the only hostel address I have taken a print-out of from the internet -- Rough Guide shockingly lists no budget options -- whose small confusing text I attempt to decipher presently:

From the Train and Bus Station Station, take the bus number 1, 3, 16, 19, from Heroe de Sostoa, which is adjacent to the Bus and Train Stations. Heroe de Sostoa is a one way Street, therefore, there is only one Bus Stop. Get off at Obras Publicas Bus Stop(in front of Lidl Shop), which is just a few stops. When you are there go to the left and look for calle la caramba(between Bazar Africa and Modessa) From there go Straight up Calle Caramba, and you will see that it turns to the left. Do not continue left, stay straight onto the the narrow alleyway in front of you.Take this to the main street, Calle la Hoz, and make a right on calle La Hoz. walk 50m. till Calle garceran, on the left, (between Modas Maria and Bar Dominguez) don t leave Garceran till you see Pepsi Bar Juben.Ferraz is between Pepsi Bar Juben and Centro Veterinario Huelin, on the left. (It is not the first Pepsi Bar, but the second close to the beach. We are in calle Ferraz Number 11, 100 metres from the beach. If you have some problem ask for Mercado de Huelin (Huelin s Market), when you are there calle garceran(the second to the right in the cars direction from Bus stop) down the sea, Don t ask for calle ferraz is a small alley. Ask for Garceran and go down the sea, don t leave Garceran till you see Pepsi Bar Juben in Garceran street, Ferraz is an alley between Pepsi Bar Juben and Centro Veterinario Huelin, on the left.

I find it after half an hour of searching dark empty main roads and side streets -- no one I ask has a clue -- in an alleyway off an alleyway, a house that says SOL BACKPACKER on a name-plate on the front door as if it is the name of the person living there, and no indication of the building's function otherwise. In the large room downstairs there are six or seven bunk beds. Upstairs the caretaker is thrilled that his newest guest is from India; he gives me a receipt of payment and locks the front door for the night ("you have come just in time"). On this floor there is a living room with sofas and cushions and a television set, and a shelf of books and showpieces. There is a large dining table in the kitchen, and the tallest fridge I have seen. It has a note stuck on it that says, "Please, use what you want from this fridge, and leave what you don't for someone else. Gracias!"

**

I step out at eight the next morning. "Unfortunately you will be in Malaga on a Monday", the caretaker at the hostel said last night - Malaga's Alcazaba ('fortress'), and many of its other sights will be closed. Still there is the castle above it that will apparently be open, and I want to get there early in case there are crowds later. The air is nippy; the morning has started already, there is a quiet bustle on the street. People are going to work, some on the morning shift have begun. It is interesting to watch a place at this time of the week; the nature of my own Monday morning means I end up seeing places on weekends. Parents are taking children to school, there is a primary school somewhere near the hostel. Here a man clearing the streets, there two construction workers carrying a ramp. Inside offices with glass fronts people are at their desks, shuffling papers or staring at a computer screen. Seeing a place now is very different from seeing it on a Saturday evening or a Sunday afternoon - the start of the week is when we are focussed on the practical aspects of our lives, earning our livelihood, going about getting things done... walking through a town in Andalucia now, on Monday morning, is catching a glimpse of it like that.

What also appeals in a new place on a Monday morning is that there are few tourists around (you are the only one), and, of course, entertaining the smug thought that the weekenders would have had to leave last night, and those who live here have to go to work -- and I for once don't have to do either. At the cafe I step into for breakfast there is only one other customer, busy (and vocal) at the slots machine in the corner, trying to coax a good omen out of it to begin his day. The two staff, one behind the counter and one arranging tables, are also glancing at the news on the television. There is a report showing pictures of Nicolas Sarkozy -- maybe he is visiting the country -- there is some discussion and a throwaway comment or two exchanged between the two at that. Then there are pictures of candidates campaigning for the coming elections in Spain. This starts off a more involved and animated exchange, and expressions that are probably universal to any set of people discussing politics anywhere: a finger pointed accusatorily at the television when the (smiling) face of the politician appears, disagreement and shakes of the head at the voice-over, cynical snorts of laughter. I am looking alternatively at the two of them and at the television; the man behind the counter looks at me and says, "Elecciones, eh?", and I can only nod and smile. He sees that I don't follow Spanish and so holds back, otherwise he is poised to tell me just what he makes of it all.

The area around the cathedral and the fortress is smartened up, the plaza below the Alcazaba surrounded by boutique cafes with terraced seating, and even horse-drawn carriages for hire at the end of the street. But right now its tables are all unoccupied, only a Japanese couple there taking pictures with their camera pointed up at the Alcazaba; the visitor's quarter is still quiet. The way to Castillo Gibralfaro at the top of the hill goes up one side of the fortress's walls; as you walk up this hill you feel all the time that you are rising above the city. The climb is steep all through. The path faces out to the sea, the view spanning out more and more. Near the top there is a bench and a clearing looking down on Malaga's waterfront. I pause here, to sit at this bench for a while, for a view of the sea and the town along it, and write in my notebook.

Modern man-made harbours, T- and I-shaped. An unending queue of small and medium sized boats docked against them, all with tall masts. Endless clusters of high-rise apartment blocks by the water (all charged premium for the living room windows with the spectacular views of the Mediterranean). The Moorish fortress of the Alcazaba on this side, the towering dome of a cathedral beyond it. The high-rises are easier to spot from here, but the smaller, older buildings are between them, painted different shades of orange, windows fitted into their round arches. Between the harbour and the tall apartment block in front of me is an arena, a perfect circle, its ground the pale yellow of sand. On the main boulevard leading to it is a row of palm trees. The traffic is surreally out of earshot, as if the buses and cars are going by silently. The sea sparkles in the mid-day heat. Above the water a plane descends towards land; behind it, slightly misty even in the bright sunshine, mountains, all around us, curvy, rocky mountains, like the ones we passed through yesterday, mountains that make this town, me now, feel secluded, protected. The ebb of the hills and the faint mist veil its whitewashed villages, Albunyol, Berchules, Bulbion. The heat of the sun after the steep walk up feels a little dizzy. A man is walking across the sand in the bull-ring, the water shimmering blue behind him.

Buzquistar?

2008-06-19T13:49:00.007+05:30

When I packed my bag and came downstairs Bernhard was there already, showing the lady at the reception his map, asking her if she knew what altitude the roads reached, and would there be snow along the route. "It will be very pretty", he turns to me and says. "There must be some nice villages along the way." I had planned to ride with him along the highway route until Adra, from where I could get to Malaga, but this early morning talk of snowy mountains is besotting, and so is the map with the squiggly fluorescent dots again spread out on the counter: I couldn't resist asking, could I go with him all the way to Granada? "Sure."

The promenade and the road by the beach is the pride of cities along the coast in Spain. Almeria is a modest place, but its beach road is immeasurably wide, as if triumphantly heralding urban landscape to those who get to it across the glittering sea. The pale shiny asphalt, the industrial constructions along the harbour, the lines of palm trees standing tall all remind me of Barcelona's beach road, and is exactly like the one in Malaga that I would see later on. The palm trees against the long stretch of beach sand give the illusion of an oasis in a desert. Riding past in a car with the windows down and twenty-seven degree sunshine outside, it is very fetching indeed.

Soon we cross city limits, peering out at the Alcazaba, the city's Moorish fortress looking out at the sea and watching over the city from its hilltop. The rounded, dry hills stretch right down to the shore. Their sides and tops feel the heat of the sun, there is no vegetation to give them cover - their edges have been shaved off to make way for our highway. Now and then the sea shines into view, the sun almost blinding it. A few kilometres out of the city there are vast green-brown sheets erected over swathes of land on both sides of the road. This is the intensive tomato cultivation that the Costa del Sol paragraph in the guidebook is referring to. From the elevated construct of the highway, the tops of the plants are just about visible, hidden away in the dark under the muddy opaqueness of the sheets, in stark contrast to the brightness of the day. On the seaward side of the hill, cranes and large-scale construction equipment are visible. We traverse acres and acres of this tomato cultivation, the sheets everywhere around us. Here too the road never strays far from the waterline, but the sea feels far away. This is kilometre after kilometre of agricultural land industrialised severely.

I am looking out for a sign that says La Rabita, at which we will leave the coast and head inland, towards the mountains. The circular signboard on the road has 120 printed on it, our car's speedometer hovers at around that speed. Bernhard is comfortably also chatting and peeking at the map. This is the first time I am in a car on a highway in Europe, and endless lanes with every car and truck at high speed is a little alarming still; it seems incredible to me that (like Bernhard) one can drive on a highway based on the naive assumption that every other motorist on the road will drive predictably. The speed limit is 120, as a curve in the road approaches, there are signs with 100 and then 80, asking you to slow down. Bernhard seldom does; sometimes he is driving well over the limit. "In Germany on the autobahn there is no speed limit ja?", he explains. "Many people drive at 200 or 230, but then if you are in an accident, the police will not help you, they will say you were going too fast." The police? Surviving an accident at those speeds on a road seems like a knife's-edge possibility to me, leave alone being able and well enough to have a conversation with highway patrol after the fact. But clearly it is different in these parts of the world, it is something Bernhard takes for granted on his roads. Out of the corner of my eye I catch large trucks zipping by as Bernhard chats on and gestures to the map, blissfully unperturbed.

We soon see the sign to La Rabita that we are both looking for, and the car slows to turn off. We are off the motorway, the sea a fast-vanishing peep between the dry hills behind us. The road becomes narrower, the car slower, the ascent steeper, the heat starting to cool exactly the way it does when you leave the plains and get on to the winding ghat road up to Ooty. Now I am in a car heading up through the Alpujarra region in Andalucia, its villages and secrets scattered and concealed on the map that I have once again opened out for both of us to see: we were heading up towards the mountains of Sierra Nevada.

There is more vegetation on the hills now, still dry and clustery but not bare, as if the intensity of the heat on the ground has thawed just a little. This road is smaller and quieter, away from the whiz of the cars and trucks on the highway. The roll of the hills as they converge and merge all around is not drastic, the angle friendly enough to ascend on two legs. It is a rough surface of brown with liberal clusters of bushy green; looking out from here you can see snatches of the mountain road as it crawls around the mountainside, luminous grey strips that flash into view. Now and then there is a lone building, only its upper part visible through the trees that have grown around it, a house of brick painted a pale shade of yellow, the wooden handle of dark-green blinds visible at the top of its window, a patterned red-tiled roof overhanging the building slightly and forming a shade, its chimney narrow with a cap at the top shaped like a small pyramid.

We do not pass many vehicles on this winding road through the hills, the few cars I see are old and dusty, often their rear open-topped and extended like a small truck and piled with goods, a few blocks of timber, some green that is probably being taken somewhere to be used as fodder for animals, an equally dusty-looking man driving it. The first place marked on our map, Albunyol, approaches; many of its shops seem shut, a group of seven or eight men, some old and skin slightly withered and wearing hats, stand around where there is some shade. As we slow down at their corner to turn, they all turn to stare at us; Bernhard waves out at them as we pass, they are unmoved, their eyes following the back of our car silently, until the road turns again and out of sight.

For half an hour we drive steadily north, heading farther away from the sea and closer to the green-coloured region that is the Sierra Nevada National Park, beyond which there are no roads. Bernhard has marked out villages right below this area, so that we will skirt the boundaries of the reserve, where the altitude of the mountain road will be highest. The region we are driving through now is not densely habited, here and there a cluster of white buildings, from the distance reflecting the bright sunshine and shining brilliantly as if there is a halo resting on it, up close bearing the distinct matte finish of whitewash. It is closer to mid-day heat now, even in the increasing altitude: the straw-coloured window blinds of the houses are pulled down partially or fully, men outdoors -- there are only men -- are wearing sunglasses. We come to a small bridge, past it there is a settlement of a few buildings. A sign says Berchules, on the side of the road watching us approach is a rough-hewn man of about fifty. Bernhard stops beside him to ask for directions to the next squiggle on our map, Buzquistar. The man peers into the car. "Buzquistar?” he says, frowning at the two of us. He looks first up the road thoughtfully for a few seconds, begins to speak and gesticulate, then changes his mind and turns the other way, to down the road behind us, and proceeds to explain our route in what must have been great detail. I look alternatingly at Bernhard, who is showing signs of growing increasingly perplexed - his Spanish, he has told me, is just about passable. When the man has finished, Bernhard turns and cries "That is too much information!” and reverses to turn about on the road. "But the people you ask, they are curious ja? Sometimes they have asked, why do you want to go to that village? There is nothing to see there."

So we turn around from Berchules and take the road going left, hoping it is the right way. Around a few curves suddenly there is an unexpected straight long path, like coming on to the straights on a twisting race track. The curve of the hill has given way to a plateau, the view pans out wide; the sweeping mountain range has thrown itself open, to reveal the sides of its white rolling peaks, dusted by snow.

Bernhard points to a road sign shaped like the spokes of a wheel and arrowed inwards: this is an ice warning. Because these mountainsides are wide and flow into one another there have been no dramatic drops or steep valleys to give us perspective - it is like we have ascended it almost inconspicuously. The warning sign on the road is the first indication that we are so high up. Now, the walls of buildings have become fatter, many slathered with cement or mortar for reinforcement. Here at the top they will have to keep out the cold and retain the heat; these houses, no wealthier than their downhill counterparts, are smaller but sturdier, the walls of the houses made of thick stone.

Just above Buzquistar there is a spike in the map, a single road goes up from here to Bulbion. We drive the six kilometres up, to Bulbion where the road ends and there is no option but to turn back. As we stop the car and step out, the snow-clad mountains and inaccessible depths of Sierra Nevada national park are in the near distance, just out of reach.

We rejoin the road that forked at Buzquistar. After a couple of kilometres it starts descending, towards the thicker line on the map that is the thoroughfare to Granada. For a quarter of an hour we go steadily downwards, then small, short trees with bright green leaves begin to appear on the side of the road, the fruit hanging first in twos and threes and then in tens and tens. Orange trees! We stop for a minute here, to take a picture. Here the terrain is more hilly than mountainous, and more habited. On the walls of small buildings in the fields by the road there are scrawled messages. It turns out that my week here is the week leading up to nationwide elections next Sunday; all through the coming week it will be a part of the landscape of the cities and towns I see, on billboards by railway platforms, on banners held up at a public rally in Sevilla, on posters stuck on the walls of streets everywhere, a name and a campaign slogan that even I will soon come to know by heart: MARIANO RAJOY, PP: MAJOR CAMBIO ES POSIBLE ("Major change is possible"). Here, though, in these sparsely populated hillsides, there are no posters or photographs of smiling candidates, and the words (two word exhortations that begin with 'No!', "NO Autonomia!"*, "NO Impuestos!"*) are not politician spiel; they are written by lone hand, painted on the walls of broken buildings by the side of the road.

This is graffiti, but it is different from all the graffiti I have seen in Western Europe on roads and under bridges and by railway tracks. This graffiti is not street art, nor stylised self-expression; in those large scrawled letters painted on peeling white walls of farm storehouses and pump rooms in the Andalucian countryside, it is simply someone shouting out wanting his people to listen. This is graffiti. Seeing it this way is liberating.

We have descended the mountain quickly, and join the motorway. Carretera de Granada is fast, on both sides there are only the dry hills of the mountain range - some hills last hardly a few seconds, we seemed to speed past them. Bernhard has been here before, long ago, as we approach the outskirts of the city he points out to a fortress at the top of a hill. I glance in the direction but quickly look away - it was why Granada was my last stop, I do not want its image in my mind already. Today, I have come along for the drive. I would ask Bernhard to drop me off now at the bus station outside town and take a bus straight out to Malaga. I want to save the Alhambra and its city for last. In the days leading up to it, I would try to see as much of the rest of Andalucia as I could.

*I didn't know the meaning/context of these words until I looked them up later, but the intent seemed clear enough. At least one wall did not require translation: "Perros Pastor!".

Patatas!

2008-06-18T13:39:00.002+05:30

It has not been so bright since I left Madras. As we were descending I could see the black tops of mountain peaks sticking out through the clouds. I asked the man sitting next to me if they were the Sierra Nevada, he came to Almeria three or four times a year he said, he had a friend here; but he didn't know what mountains they were. The airport is right by the sea, as it came into view it looked vast and empty; there are only one or two planes docked at the far end, and nobody else around.

Inside the terminal building at Passport Control it was two long lines of British holiday-makers; as my turn came at the counter I held everybody behind me up: the middle-aged passport officer looks peeringly at my visa stamp and the front of the passport, then runs his finger down the page of the now-familiar booklet of black-listed countries. When he doesn't find a match he turns to his colleague to exchange a somewhat anti-climactic look. They give me another stern once-over over the rims of their glasses, then look at each other as if to say "what shall we do with this?", to which the colleague shrugs and makes a gesture with his hands, then continues to briskly dispose of his line of passengers. By the time they had made up their minds to stamp my passport and hand it back to me, there was no one else left in queue.

They eventually let me through, as they have every time, an airport rigmarole that has never failed to play out to herald arrival in every European country I have visited so far. I walked the short distance through the waiting area and out of the airport, and grinned squinting at the bright sunshine: it is the beginning of my nine days in Spain.

--

Behind the bus stop the runway is a thin strip between the airport and the sea; it looks deserted. Outside, apart from the taxi drivers sitting in their cars looking out idly at each other there is no one around. It is as if the plane has snuck up to a corner of the coast half an hour ago and dropped me off here. For thirty minutes now no bus has passed this stop outside the airport. I ask the woman next to me about it, the only other person waiting: "In Almeria this is normal." The odd taxi and passenger car rides past. A few minutes later she turns and asks, "Taxi, fifty-fifty?" There does not seem to be a bus in sight, the blazing sun and empty surroundings somehow only seem to preclude its arrival; we take a taxi to the bus station in town.

The bus station, just like the newly paved highway exiting the airport and the traffic roundabouts entering the city, looks spruced and efficient. On the roads leading to the town's centre there are cranes and scaffolding and dust everywhere, buildings taller than the existing ones coming up, construction material spilling onto the pavement to tiptoe around. The centre of town is old buildings refurbished into banks and offices with glass frontages, and Rafael Nadal grinning widely on posters asking you to open savings accounts. Everything looks new, this town has an air of having struck gold a generation or two ago, when it suddenly found itself invested with much attention and fresh coats of paint.

I take a bus that goes towards the Fuerteventura neighbourhood; there the hostel is at the end of a street just off the beach road. Opposite to it is a small football stadium, with a single stand at one end that can seat perhaps five hundred. A match is in progress, with only a few tens of people watching. The steps up to the pitch are right behind the team area and the substitutes bench, I take a peek inside: a coach with a considerable paunch is gesticulating wildly. The hostel is the last building on a quiet street, the window in my room looks out on a few empty plots of land. It is three in the afternoon; I had three hours of sleep last night, and the crisp "cafe solo" -- an intense black decoction of coffee -- at the airport cafeteria today to hopefully counter its effects hasn't worked. My lead-up to the start of this trip has not been ideal, but with more than a week for this walk-about -- a first-time luxury -- I can afford a nap this afternoon.

I wake up a few hours later, well into the evening but the sun still shining through the window, and go down to the beach. There is almost no view of it from this side, blocked by tall apartment buildings lining the beach road. Its promenade is just like the streets in town, new and spotless. There are people out for a walk, some walking their dogs, a few couples, some groups of kids kicking along a football. Families with elderly parents pass, out for a casual stroll but the mothers and grandmothers dressed carefully and neatly, glancing at how the other women walking by are dressed, and hoping they will notice them as they pass. The children are running around noisily but they too have been smartly dressed up: In Almeria an evening walk along the beach is also an occasion, just like it is back home.

I leave the beach when the goes sun down. I am only in the mood for a quiet dinner in my room tonight, there is a small grocery store near the hostel to buy it. A boy and a girl, both fourteen or fifteen, are manning the shop. I have found slices of cheese and a small bottle of tomato salsa in the shelves, but am unable to locate the bread. I go up to them to ask, but do not know the word for it - I have only been able to communicate there is something else I need. "Jamon?", the girl suggests. Jamon is ham. "No", I say, then shrugging at her a little helplessly. "Queso?" she asks. I have already bought cheese; "No", I say again. Why do I know the words to these things and not to bread? She and the boy look at each other and exchange a grin; she is tickled. "Aceite?" she shoots at me; I don't know what that is, but I am somehow sure it isn't bread. "No", I say again, to which she giggles a little louder. Now it is a game; she shoots them faster:

- "Cerveza?"
- "No"
- "Bacon?!"
- "No"
- "Patatas!!"
- "No!!"

The girl and the boy are by now erupting with laughter at each "No", by the end I have joined in. "Pan?", the boy then asks, and it clicks. "Yes! Si!", I say, "Bread... pan!", slapping my palm against my forehead to show them that I indeed felt silly, only to trigger another, final, burst of laughter.

In the hostel someone has checked into the room's other bed, a man who looks about fifty-five studying a large map spread out on the table in front of him. He motions for me to come and take a look almost as soon as we exchange introductions. Bernhard is from Germany, he is driving through the south of Spain for two weeks. He rented a car last Thursday at Valencia and has driven down towards Andalucia, carefully tracing with his finger a route down through its eastern side. At Nijar he stops momentarily, "last night I was here", then continues until Almeria on the south coast. On the map he has placed flourescent-yellow dots with a marker pen around the edges of an area shaded green, not far from the sea. In the morning he was going to drive first along the coast heading west, then on a road inland to the Sierra Nevada. "You can come with me if you want, I can drop you off at Adra", he says, running his finger along the highway by the sea. "Along the coast it is on the way to Malaga."

Today in London

2008-04-15T19:06:00.002+05:30

Down the street outside the house, a man walked by carrying a double bass, uncovered, open to the elements, holding it with both hands by its neck and hoisted over his shoulders. It was a light-coloured wood. I watched it go by until he was out of sight.

A young Chinese boy walked past me, basketball in hand. He was wearing red Air Jordan shoes, a t-shirt that said Be Like Mike, a sweaty Bulls towel over his shoulder. He looked about sixteen. Did he grow up during Jordan? He's a little young; he probably started watching basketball after Jordan, and that's all his older brothers still talked about.

The Monday After

2008-03-10T23:38:00.004+05:30

It feels ridiculous to be here today, sitting in an office, on a Monday, only a few hours after the most involved trip of my life, a morning on which I see a small girl walking to school and still hear another screaming "Ey, chica!" from behind her, on a day of rain and cold and gale-like wind in London, when my mind's eye is filled with the brightest sunshine on the most beautiful, evocative buildings, when I am so filled with fresh images and sounds and thoughts, of whitewashed villages on hillsides, and palm trees, and Alhambra. Or of the evening a few days ago, sitting in a corner of a dingy room unevenly lit, with rows of benches and a sloping roof, and people drinking: this could so easily have been back home, an improvised space with an asbestos roof at the back of a wine shop just outside town. Except for the front of the room, where three men sit on three upright wooden chairs, and one man sings songs that sound a little like a folk song from back home, a little like a song that you can imagine being sung in a caravanserai in the Arabian desert. He thumps the ground with his foot as he sings, and claps his hands between phrases. A man with a flute and a man with a guitar sit on either side of him, and all of them, and all of us, watching a gypsy woman dance.

Ladbrokes

2008-02-26T06:15:00.001+05:30

Nima had noticed the slip of paper on the table in my room. I'd bet Holland would beat Romania in a Euro 2008 qualifying match - It turned out that I lost my ten pounds on it, but I kept the slip with the handwritten wager because it was my first and because I liked the thought of finding it one day stashed away among other pieces of paper. "The horses, eh?", he asks. "No, just the sports", I reply. "You should teach me the horses. There's a Ladbrokes around the corner". He was up for it.

I had met Nima on a trip to Cardiff last month; the planning had been too last-minute for most people on Couchsurfing, but luckily on those two days Nima did not have anyone else staying over. He was a student in Cardiff; he worked two jobs saving up for long periods of travel -- this time to go to South America next month. His Iranian passport was full of entries from strange wondrous countries, and I loved the moment of confusion before figuring out that it, too, read from right to left. He was in London now for a Uruguayan visa, I gratefully returned the couchsurfing favour. I met him at my tube station that evening after work. As we walked home he started telling me a funny story of his visit to the Embassy that morning, one in which the Uruguayan Ambassador mistook him for someone else and welcomed him to the premises as he would an important guest, and an appointment which ended with the Embassy staff begging him to accomodate her country in his still-tentative itinerary, "You must go to Uruguay too." "They haven't seen an application in a while," he joked. Probably; that might explain the Ambassador's reaction too. I asked him about work, when I was in Cardiff he had been working extreme hours saving up for this trip; one of his jobs was as a bartender, and I remembered then that the other was at Ladbrokes.

"I'm not supposed to bet here", he says with a purposely wicked grin as we entered the Ladbrokes on Kilburn High Road. "But it's ok, they don't know."

For a long time, when I read these words in a small story in The Hindu's sports pages, next to the bigger stories that would deliciously heighten the anticipation on the Sunday before Wimbledon or on the first morning of an Indian tour, I didn't know that "William Hill" and "Ladbrokes" and "odds" even had to do with betting (Bet was a term I knew though, this was a time when you made three bets in a week with older, obviously idiotic cousins). My understanding of the numbers was vague. While I came to decipher that if there was a 2:1 and a 7:2 then the 2:1 was usually the better player or team, I didn't know what those numbers were there for. So what I associated with Ladbrokes or William Hill (Was he a real person saying things before matches?) was just that - small stories in The Hindu that also added somehow to the anticipation of the cricket you were coming home half-day from school for.

When I entered a William Hill for the first time here a few months ago, I loved it immediately: even from the door, you can see the grid of televisions on the wall all tuned into sports; inside, there are comfortable chairs to sit in and watch. It is the one establishment on a high street that you can duck into to escape the cold or the rain, sit down, and not have to buy anything. And once inside, you could agonize over tantalizing questions: Can Liverpool win away this weekend? Will Torres score? Will India beat these odds in the First Test? I hope they win.

So I've gone in once in a while, checked the website occasionally for good odds, lost more than I won. But it's fun. I haven't bet on the horses though. I know nothing about horses and the intricacies that are no doubt involved in placing a good bet; it seemed foolish to gamble on something I had no idea about. But I was and am curious: Nima liked to bet on horses, at the same time he was on the other side of the fence and observed people in that process.

We were inside standing at the sheets of listings on display on a high counter along the sides of the shop. Nima points to the listing for the next race. It is at a course called Kempton, he reads the odds below the names of the horses and points to the horses' recent results, at the bottom of the page. By the counter there is a clutch of small red pens and sheafs of paper, "Ladbrokes" printed on top like a letterhead and regulations listed on the other side. The next race is at 7:10. 'Formidable Guest', he scribbles on the slip. "The names, eh?" I say. The names of the horses were, I remember, the only thing I looked at in the Racing headlines -- an especially memorable one is Onnu Onnu Onnu -- in time it became one of those little things in that enjoyable daily routine of reading everything in the sports pages. "All kinds of names man", he says to that a little wearily, in the tone of a man who has to listen out for far too many eccentric christenings every day to find them curious anymore. He asks me to pick three horses, one for each of the next races, and writes them down. I go to the counter, and copying what he'd written on his slip, added, hesitantly, 'Tricast' below it. "You want that Tricast, yeah?", asks the lady at the counter. "Yes", I nod knowledgeably, trying to remember which one Tricast was.

In between races, when we're waiting for the next one to start, when we've stepped out for a cigarette, we talk about the people who've come in to the shop when Nima was working. Like the man whom he saw at the shop everyday, betting a lot, and apparently losing a lot. Nima made him aware of the option of signing a Self-exclusion form - if he signed it, he could get himself barred from using a betting agency for six months. The man filled the form that day and left; two weeks later, he came back asking Nima if he could place just one bet. It was against the law if the shop did allow him. The man left that day, Nima hasn't seen him since.

He tells of a woman who came everyday, bet a lot, lost a lot, won a lot. She was a call girl, she came to the shop between shifts. And of the cocaine dealer who came in every few days, and placed large, irrational bets on the horses and the greyhounds. If he lost, he wouldn't care. If he won, he'd ask for a receipt. How black turns to white.

I ask him if people lose more than they win. "Yeah", he replies. "A lot more than they win."

Back inside, there is still five minutes for our race to start. The odds for Noah Jameel, the race favourite, have lowered. "Lots of people betting on that one." The other screen is tuned into virtual racing. These are computer generated "races" on big screens and fake horses running on a fake racetrack. The first time I saw it at a Ladbrokes, I couldn't actually believe it; the idea seemed then, as it does now, ridiculous. I ask Nima if they are as popular, and followed. Yes, he says, just as much. Near me, a man is standing gaping at the pixellated figures moving across the screen, visibly egging his virtual horse on.

Horse racing, real live horse racing, is an activity one thinks of as a sport. It is stark however, when it is played out in a betting shop. There are television cameras at the starting line and even excited commentators, but around the horses and jockeys and support staff there is not a single person around. These races were happening at night, and in these barren arenas, they played out under glaring lights that accentuated the dark. There is no one to cheer a horse on (except these men around me hoping to multiply their money), no visible joy around the jockey when he has won, or sadness when he has lost. It does not seem to make a difference. The only other times I have watched horse racing is when ESPN was showing one of America's Triple Derby and I happened to switch the TV on. Of course there was betting, but you could also see achievement, emotion, pride in those close-up shots of jockeys and owners, in the crowds... those events seemed to mean something to someone. Here, on the screen that says Kempton on the right hand corner, there is a 6:56 race, a 7:10, then a 7:23. At the finish line, the camera, its job complete, is quickly cut off by a screen showing results and odds even as countdown to the next race begins; winner and participant forgotten by all except those now queueing up for their winnings. I turn to the other screen, there the virtual horses have names too, and they too are running to tick-tock schedule: a 6:59, a 7:15, a 7:28.

Nima gives me tips on combining bets. And what to do with those terms, Double, Either Way, Tricast. "But always look at the race's Class", he instructed. We schemed a nifty little combination bet on the football that evening (we lost). We stayed for a couple of more horse races, tried permutations on our betting slips, generally cursed our luck that evening. I was no expert now, but at least I could find my way around walking into a Ladbrokes on the street when it had started to rain and I had time to kill.

He gives me final tips as we're leaving: "I've seen people lose a lot of money man, don't do more than 50p on a single bet." "Don't play all the time," he adds with a laugh but only half-jokingly. The caveat is probably unnecessary. There have been one or two ill-predicted football bets, but I haven't looked at the horses at a bookie's after that evening. While it is still fun to ponder over who might score a century in the next Test, the horse racing bit has always felt more like curiosity than interest. "Play only when you're free and you have a couple of hours." Maybe.

In time I learnt what those numbers represented -- eventually an older cousin will explain it to you, a stinking smirk on his face that you actually didn't know ("See da, on this guy if you put five rupees you will get eight rupees back") -- and I began to figure out that small story in the back page. But as I discovered the morning after coming to London, it was those early, unknowing associations that were stronger; when I saw the red and white Ladbrokes sign for the first time, it evoked the exact same feeling I had when someone here spoke of Test Match Special. There are times when I look at the odds for the next football match pasted outside a Ladbrokes or a William Hill as I'm walking or cycling by. At other times, like when I am inside a bus, I cannot, do not, see the odds. All I can see is the signage, the name of the place on the board outside. And just for a moment there is a flash, a jumble, of all those early associations of cricket and tennis and childhood.

Is William Hill a real person saying things before matches?

Abbey Road

2008-02-13T15:48:00.001+05:30

I took a different route to work today. I wanted to ride through leafy St.John's Wood. Down my street, Carlton Vale, straight across the traffic light and up Carlton Hill. And then I saw a road sign, almost startlingly, one that I least expected. A sign at a Carlton Hill intersection that said Abbey Road. I looked past people walking to the bus stop, looked up the road on either side, and grinned. I had no idea that Abbey Road was around here. In fact I wouldn't have minded if there was no Abbey Road at all anymore, superimposed by development or something, and thus now existing only in its most famous moment, for posterity, on an album cover from 1972.

I went down Abbey Road's far end, taking me further off my route, past creepers and stately individual houses, and outside one of them, a man in a white lab coat who had that manner of working in the kitchen about him. St.John's Wood is a rich neighbourhood, and there must be hired help, a rarity in London. Paul Mcartney, after all, still lived in St.John's Wood, I'd read it in the free tabloid on the tube the other day, there was a picture of him sipping coffee the morning of his visit to the courthouse for that divorce business of his, and a caption, "Mcartney enjoys a quiet cuppa at his neighbourhood cafe in St.John's Wood."

I rode past a couple of dignified looking cafes now, a posh grocery store, more stately mansions all brick and straight lines, past a pub to another intersection. At each intersection, I looked at the black-on-white road sign, that said simply, like any other: Abbey Road. I wondered where 'that' crossing was. For some reason, I imagined four chaps and a mate with a camera there right now, laughing and setting up their own Abbey Road picture. I looked up the street to see if I caught the black-and-white of a zebra crossing somewhere, wondered where 'it' was, I'd only have to ask a shopkeeper, he'd point me to it without batting an eyelid because he probably gets asked the same question several times a day, and then decided that I wasn't going to go looking for it. They probably have a plaque up there or something, one that would in two-and-a-half sentences explain it all away. I won't go looking for it because I'd rather just ride down Abbey Road to work this morning, and look up at each intersection, each pedestrian crossing, and look around, and wonder if it was this one.

And then I'll look into the car that's waiting at the traffic light. Maybe Paul Mcartney is in there, glancing at the zebra crossing up ahead with a smile on his face. Or maybe he's not looking at all.

Rain

2008-01-28T01:34:00.000+05:30

As I stood outside my house this evening, my next-door neighbour opened his door and peered out at the sky. "Just came to check if it was raining", he said when he saw me. "The report says it'll rain tomorrow, and tuesday ("toos-duh") too, hopefully Wednesday is better", he says and goes right back inside. It is dark, about six p.m., and cold and windy. My neighbour is seventy five years old. I'm sure he wasn't planning on going out anyway. Still he came to check, to seek out the rain and feel morose about it even if he is sure he will be firmly indoors for the rest of the day.

Because that's what they seem to do here. Where I work, I sit on the first floor by a wall-to-wall window. Almost every day, one of my colleagues will walk past me to the window and study the sky (while pretending to wait for something at the printer). "It might rain", he will say, which will cause three other men around me to look first outside and then at him worriedly, as if he has uttered something unknown and scary to them. Most of these men are in their late forties or fifties; I try to calculate how many times before this scene would have played out, considering I have heard the same conversation just about every weekday. In a few minutes, another man will make the trek from across the middle of the floor to the window, the others straightening slightly in their chairs as he approaches in anticipation of the exchange to follow. By now it has started to drizzle, but only just, the first signs of spray. Sitting at my desk, I can barely see it. But this colleague will paste his face to the window in an all-out effort to detect whatsoever evidence of precipitation. No doubt he will soon find what he is looking for, when he will turn and say with a pout, "It's raining", in the manner of a child who has been refused ice-cream and chooses to bottle it up rather than wail about it. "Oh, dear", one of the others will say (at which point I always turn to check if the person has said that with a straight face. He always had.). And then they will all turn back to their computers quietly, as if stumped.

A couple of friends from Madras and I were talking about how there is no smell of impending rain here, no mann vaasanai that, since as a child, has led you to get up and go to a window or the front door, to watch. The rain I know has sounds, of thunder, of raindrops thumping the ground with a frequency that you keep track of unconsciously to tell you how heavy it is outside, of cars and buses honking in the suddenly reduced visibility in otherwise bright sunny cities. And images, of men on mopeds with their headlights on and their daughters riding pillion squinting through the droplets of water getting into their eyes and weaving their way through spray and slush. Of tarpaulin sheets providing shelter to the fronts of bakeries and the tea master inside doing especially brisk business, and of lingering customers' palms cupped around a steaming tumbler staring out into the road, much wetter and dirtier than I have seen anyone here get in the rain but who still do not grumble beyond a solemn bayangara mazhai to the man at the counter as they step inside. The smell of the earth as it is beginning to rain makes you want to taste a couple of drops hitting your tongue, not something I have ever felt to do here. On these streets, as soon as the drizzle touches the ground it is on a defined construction path, trickling off down the road in a straight line and disappearing into a drain a few metres away.

In the four months I have lived here and by all accounts a state of things year round, the rain has often been lighter than even a drizzle, not enough half the time to even warrant your umbrella. 'This pissing rain', I have heard more than one person refer to it as. The effect of it is most often one of minor inconvenience. And because you are never without it for too long, you never seem to be given the chance to look forward to the rain either. Its probably what makes it this way, the people here and their relationship to the rain in their city: it is a minor inconvenience that never leaves. Now I can put my finger on that vague, gnawing feeling about the rain here that I have had since I came: nothing changes because of it (except for a collective opening of umbrellas). The rain I know has a cleansing effect, the trees, the roads, the mornings seem to wake up refreshed after a spell of rain. Rain in London is a constant companion, but its coming and going is unnoticed, easily ignored, sterile. It is rain without many of the things that were inherently romantic about rain.

The Bananas

2008-01-17T07:41:00.000+05:30

This evening, I stopped at Church Street as I cycled back home from work. The street market was just closing up for the day, men were taking down the tarpaulin-like roof of their stalls, loading unsold goods back into their vans; the fruits-and-vegetables men sorting through cartons and backing their van up throwing empty crates back in. I stopped to buy something at the store behind the stall; I didn't find it there, and walked back out. In front of me on the pavement were two boxes. A forty-year-old woman, probably Vietnamese, was sorting through them and picking sets of bananas out. There were other people on the street, some shopkeepers outside their stores waiting for five thirty so they could shut shop, some passersby going to the Tesco supermarket down the road, people going back home from work; they all walked past it. I went up next to her, when she saw me approaching she gave me a busy, beckoning look, towards the boxes. "Are these to take?" I asked, trying to interpret her expression, and also trying to figure out why they'd been left there on the side of the street like that. She nodded vigorously as she looked through them. "These are perfectly good bananas", she said, shaking her head. I looked around, the fruits-and-vegetables men had left "perfectly good bananas" here like the woman had said; discarding them, apparently, is easier than taking them back and getting people to buy them the next day. So they'd left them on the street, two boxes, two hundred of them, maybe more.

She packed two bags full of it. "Take", she said to me. I managed to fit about ten of them into my bag. I was in the process of arranging them for space in my bag; another man was there. "Take, take!" he said when I looked up. He was Middle-Eastern. I smiled at him telling him my bag was full. He was choosing the best bunches to put in his bag, I'd closed mine and was picking one out of the box to eat. More people walked past. "I don't understand this man", I said to him as he plucked two more bunches out of the cartons. He just laughed.

I crossed over to the other side of the road, watching the cartons to see if anyone else who was passing by picked up any. In my five or six minutes of standing there, no one did. I went into the supermarket as I needed to buy some stuff. In the queue at the counter, the man in front of me had a number of purchases, and I had to wait about five minutes for him to get everything billed. Among the things in his shopping basket was a bunch of bananas. I wanted to tell him then that there were bananas to take right outside, on the other side of the road where the fruit stall sets up, he needn't buy these. Then I thought about the people walking past the cartons outside. I stopped myself from actually telling him. I wasn't sure it would've mattered.

Where I link to many pictures

2008-01-10T00:14:00.000+05:30

After too many Sold Out tabs on football club websites, and much anticipation and reminiscing about years ago watching middle-of-the-night snooker on ESPN, this weekend approaches:

This isn't the only brilliant piece of photography I have for you today :D Some pictures from the last couple of months, from the warmer climes of Barcelona:

Of a cold Christmas day in Paris, and about seven times colder atop the Eiffel Tower:

And pictures from around London.

Sunday by the river

2008-01-03T08:02:00.000+05:30

It is nine thirty on a Sunday morning at Southbank, on the walkway by the river. Still early on a day the sun has risen at only half-past seven. The children and their parents, the honeymooning couples, the families of Indian tourists are still a couple of hours away, when it will be slightly less chill (here they will say "when it is a little warmer", but I've since learned to appreciate that as merely euphemism). Early in the morning, I can look diagonally across the Thames from the promenade without the thrives of people around me posing for photographs in its backdrop; the view of Big Ben now seems a little bit more my own. The footbridge overhead that leads to Charing Cross is empty; there are few people on it now. Soon, tourists and locals will walk cheek by jowl along it, the locals eager to get outside in these last few weekends before winter, the tourists eager to make the next batch that climbs into London Eye.

This stretch of the bank is always spectacular for me, by day and by night - the wide Thames with its smart riverboats, a train floating silently along the tracks on a bridge above the water in the distance, to Waterloo station just behind me, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey on one side and St.Paul's on the other and, best of all, knowing Tower Bridge is just around the corner, where those boats curving into view are coming from. All flashes of London that are so ubiquitous that we have seen images of them a million times before this, but something that I find has only added to the pleasure of seeing them each time for real. In the skyline, in the financial centre known simply as 'the City' rising around St.Paul's Cathedral and in the Canary Wharf business district behind Tower Bridge, there are cranes and skyscrapers. The view from the Southbank isn't only of a London of pictures and postcards, it is equally of a living, breathing city. Where I'm standing, the promenade is wide and balustraded in wrought-iron splendour, and inviting to walk along. The buildings you pass, the National Theatre with its dashing sculpture of Laurence Olivier outside, the British Film Institute and its Mediatheque, the Royal Elizabeth Hall, are modern, even a little industrial looking. Yet there is a lightness of touch to the Southbank that never leaves it: maybe it is the strolling evening couples with her arm wrapped tightly around his, or, from the Charing Cross bridge, hearing a girl under a streetlamp on the promenade singing and playing guitar late one night, or just relishing the thought of sitting down in the afternoon sunshine at the rows of tables and chairs that spill out on to the promenade and sipping coffee or beer. My images of the Southbank during the day compete with those from the night, and if I ever had to choose between the two, I would feel a tinge whichever way I chose.

Yet today is different; Sunday morning on the Southbank, as I was discovering that day, had its own ways of coming to life.

Past the Charing Cross bridge, a large man arranges rows of tables, and brings out signs from his van, "Poetry", "Maps", "Plays". His daughter and he throw me a glance before cutting across my path, attention focussed on setting up shop, their three rows of the Southbank Book Market. An ice cream van painted in bright, childish colour is just arriving. It marks its space out, reversing with a screechy 'this car is backing up' warning. If you walk towards the book market later in the day, they might silently beckon you to their stalls, trying to divert your eyes away from the neighbouring table of books it has drifted towards. It is not time yet for either of them to begin selling their goods, to offer you something, or invite you to come and take a look. A few metres away, a gaunt, rather rough-faced man has set down his boxes and is carefully painting his face a bright blue, his eyes bracing themselves widely, making sure to avoid stray paint from the strokes of his brush getting into his eyes. He is only about half finished, and glances up as I pass him, before his eyes drop and his attention goes back to the brush. A few metres away, an old man aligns a wooden block to stand on and sets up a railing around it. But unlike the men at Speaker's Corner, his job is to stay silent, unmoved, face and clothes painted unerringly black, for children to turn to their mothers and ask earnestly, "Is it a statue?", for adults to glance at and perhaps drop a coin into his hat as they walk by.

These are the men you aren't meant to see like this as you walk down Southbank: the spotted, patchy, deathly-white skin of the hobo before he pins his hat and glasses onto the backboard and disappears underneath his shirt collar, to become the headless man, the invisible man, who will later give you a few laughs and you will take a picture of. Or the man who hurriedly sucks on a cigarette before covering his hands in fake fur and tucking his body away beneath a rug, a white furry wig and one eye painted brown around it, his dog costume for the rest of the day. Like his colleagues, each one's territory a few metres apart from the other, he must finish his preparations and slip into disguise before the strolling Sunday crowds arrive.

Around me the cafes are just opening as the man inside one cleans the coffee machine. National Theatre's Box Office now has someone behind the counter. At the ticket office below London Eye, the first tourists are queueing. I haven't been up yet as I figure it will be a nice thing to do at the end of my time here. I want to walk around the small streets of this city first; it will mean more then when I look at it from above. Today I am here early to see a collection of Dali paintings and sculptures in County Hall, at the start of the Southbank promenade below Westminster Bridge.

It is twelve thirty when I leave Dali Universe and step back out into the real world again. There is sunshine and there are people, families with handycams pointed up at London Eye, waiting for their turn into the capsule. The ice cream van has begun selling. The South American buskers have begun singing and thumping their bongos under the bridge. In the bowl-shaped tier under the Elizabeth Hall, muralled with graffiti and fitted with platforms and railings, teenagers on sports bikes and rollerskates show off their stunts to each other with deliberate nonchalance. A man who looks like he could be ninety plays harmonica for a few ex-servicemen, who watch with a combination of grim admiration and respect. I pass a man with a goatee and an acoustic guitar looking straight out of a honky tonk, strumming away. Invisible man and Dog man are busy now, posing for pictures with people's children, shaking their hands. Every few metres on the promenade, people have stopped and gathered around to watch someone.

There are also those that people walk past. A healthy-looking man is dressed in full revolutionary regalia, a sword in one hand, ball and chain in the other, gun in his holster. Most people pass him without a second glance - just a few feet away someone is turned out as a mummy making kids squeal; this man in the funny boots is clearly not as much of a draw . He taps his fingers impatiently to the trumpet music as he looks around at the others, all busier than him today. Now, when no one is watching, his clothes are still putting on the act, but his eyes aren't. He glances downwards sharply for a moment, in the direction of his near-empty bowl, before returning to disguise when he senses someone coming and regains his triumphant half-smile.

Some distance away, the man with the guitar is still there, playing the blues softly, surveying the scene around him for a moment before looking back down at his fingers curling around a particular chord. Now, as when I passed him earlier, he has no audience. Unlike the painted faces further up or the bawdy trumpeteer duo under the bridge shaking to their Latin groove, in Southbank on Sunday afternoon, this guitar man is neither a visual nor an aural spectacle. I sit at a bench a few feet away from him and turn around to watch him play for a few minutes. There is still nobody watching him, or stopping to listen. But he does not seem to care. He smiles at the flourish of notes with which he ends one tune, and then he begins another.

The Church and the Curio Shop

2007-12-01T04:45:00.000+05:30

We're walking back down towards the railway station, luggage on our shoulders and biting cold at three in the afternoon. We've said bye bye to the only person we came across here who spoke any words of English, the young proprietor of the cafe we found refuge at for the half hour before our train came. On the road, on the main street through Walcourt that curves down from Grand Place to the railway tracks, there is hardly anyone, the shops shut because it is Sunday, people staying warm in their homes.

We say our last few Bonjours to, a little earlier, the couple eating lunch at the table next to ours at the cafe and now, to a man with a dog who walks past us. Here, you quickly learn to say Bonjour to anybody you pass on the street, not because you suddenly like saying it, but because you must, it is a sign that you are not unfriendly. In this heart of French Belgium where we saw only one other person who didn't look like them (It doesn't seem like the town sees too many), a pastor appointed to Walcourt's church from Burkina Faso (!) who came up and spoke to us (and he spoke French, the language the locals speak), it is a sign that they are looking for from these foreigners.

But people are friendly, and civil. And scarce. Walcourt is small, the kind of town which has one or maybe two shops of each kind.

Behind us is the church, towering, utterly contrasting with the scale of the town itself. Great steps lead up to its entrance. We went inside this morning. It is immensely turned out (as my friend said looking around, "You've got to love Catholic extravagance"). What was immediately remarkable was that this was a real living church, untouched in comparison to the Sacre-Coeur or Saint-Denis in Paris, or St.Michael's in Brussels, churches that are perhaps considered "greater" than the one I had just entered, but as a result of which, walking into them you are greeted by a sight of tourists in shorts walking around with cameras, barriers erected to block public access to parts of it, brochures in various colours in shelves along one side, and a notice every fifty feet asking you for "suggested contribution 5 Euros". And while I'd still feel awe at the scale and the adornment of it, too much of its aura was lost; inside every one of these great churches, I've felt shortchanged of the atmosphere that, standing before it and gawking at its construction from the outside, you imagine must inhabit a space such as this. Today, service begins, and as always when I'm listening to exhortations from a priest in a language I don't understand, my focus wavers, and my eyes wander unhurriedly. This place is massive, built with handsome stone, the stained glass lit up so brilliantly that you are sure there is electric light somewhere up there, the orchestra resonating when it plays. Old women who have been waiting for this moment all week go up to the lectern and address the pews. When a section completes, there is a hush, and a chorus of voices sings words in Latin, ineffably heightening the atmosphere. I gawked at this church too from the outside; nothing took away from that feeling once inside either.

When I took a walk around Walcourt later, I could see the church from anywhere, it is there like a lodestar. It is built on top of a hill with ramparts stretching around and away from it. When you look around standing there on the mount, you realize it is a wonderful, still-standing illustration of the time and the reasons for which the town's main installations were built this way -- walk to the edges of the mount and you find that this is the highest hill around, with a view of anything that is going on for kilometres around you -- from here, looking around into the descending distance, it is not too difficult to imagine guards and nightlamps flashing coded messages and a stealthily advancing enemy.

Last night, just like the day, was cold. While the lady at the bed and breakfast was nice, and she wanted to ask us a few curious questions, and I wanted to talk to her, we find that we are simply unable to communicate with each other. Interactions with people are few, and lonely. Darkness descends much earlier than the night. There is nothing to do then except stare out the window of my room, wondering what goes on in those houses with chimneys down below.

Now, we pass the curio shop we went into the day before. It is open. Yesterday, the lady excitedly pointed to the agarbathis next to her scented candles when we exchanged greetings at the counter, "L'Inde!" she says, pointing to the rack; "Yes, they're Indian too" we say, looking at each other before turning to smile at her. "Hmmm, Bangalore" I say to my friend as if examining the manufacturer's label, deciding it would be rude not to pick them up after the enthusiasm she has shown in making the connection between us and her agarbathis. We exchange a few words, she in French and we in English of course, actual communication left to giving each other somewhat helpless smiles between half-sentences, look around this little place she has put together in that warm, individual manner of curio shops, and take our leave. Today I peer inside as we walk past, it is a Sunday, the day and the street deserted as Walcourt's streets always seem to be, but there she is inside, busily straightening a clock on the wall and preparing for unseen customers.

Every couple of minutes, a car drives past and right through town, people with maps in their hand pausing at the fork down the road trying to figure out which way to go. It must be nice to explore the Belgian mountainside in a car, with heat to keep you from freezing while you're doing it. Those two women will probably traverse a satisfying part of the Ardennes this weekend. With trains only twice a day and a bus service that, almost funnily, comes to a near complete shutdown during the weekend, there are only so few points on a map you can put a finger on without one. If you had a car you'd probably spend a pleasant hour or two looking around Walcourt's church and stopping at a cafe, before you decide you will head down the road to somewhere else. If I had wheels maybe I would've seen more of this place. And maybe less of it, too.

Surprisingly, there are other people waiting for the train. Both when we got off the train from Charleroi yesterday, and this morning when we came to check when the afternoon one was, we were the only people in the vicinity. The goods train that we saw yesterday on the adjoining set of tracks with graffiti scribbled all over the walls of the bogey -- very incongruously for gentle Walcourt -- is still there, unmoved. Yesterday we got off on one of the two tracks for the single passenger route that served the town. The conductor, looking stern and dressed delightfully, red waistcoat, crisp black jacket, red-and-black hat, blew a conclusive whistle once we did, after looking up either end to make sure nobody was still getting on. We walked past a waiting area-cum-station house set a few metres away from the tracks, with not a soul anywhere. As the train pulled out of Walcourt on a chilly saturday afternoon, it had felt very much like we had been dropped off somewhere. Today, there is a group of backpackers and a pack of boy scouts on their way back from a field trip standing about on the platform.

Inside, the train is crowded. More boy scouts walk up and down the compartments, and there is a noisy football team of kids. At the first stops making its way to Charleroi -- the site of Brussels's feeder airport and a small, grim, industrial sort of city in its own right -- the crowd getting on the train, just as you watch and listen to them, is becoming more urban. Commuters move down the aisles, nobody particularly meets your eye. Only minutes after getting on to our train, it is clear that we have left Walcourt behind. Just as I did when I was walking back down to the station through the main street, peering in to the curio shop, I remembered the last two days -- the man at the cafe, huddling in the cold last night at a place that felt entirely foreign, the woman at the bed and breakfast, the inability to exchange two sentences with anybody and be understood -- and was left with a somewhat incomprehensible feeling about it all. I found myself wondering, because of all the other places I want to go to, if I would ever make another trip here. And maybe that is part of what made all of it, even the everyday little occurrences and exchanges, a little more poignant: I might never come back here again.

Two Sculptures

2007-11-17T07:27:00.000+05:30

Two works I stumbled upon on the streets recently that I loved:

The first one is called Young Dancer, found it on a rain-washed morning passing through Covent Garden, which is the heart of London's opera and theatre scene.

The second is called Two Pupils. Apparently, homage to the Royal Military School which was here (Chelsea) at the start of the nineteenth century, and the orphans of the armed forces who were its pupils.

I stood around for a while here, taking pictures, and the best part about this one was, you see the moment of pleasant surprise on the faces of people walking by when they notice it.

The day I passed Birdlip

2007-11-12T04:47:00.000+05:30

At seven in the morning, I barely got on the bus as it left Victoria Station; a bit of a sprint becoming inevitable in the last five hundred metres to ensure my boarding. But once inside, things immediately start looking up: this bus has massive windows, daylight is just appearing, and I am looking at a three and a half hour bus ride through the English countryside -- after we get out of the urban conglomerate of London, that is -- towards a region called the Heart Of England. I would alight, as they say, at a town called Cheltenham, I'd picked it out of a map on the bus company National Express's website.

The bus driver announces on the P.A. system that the first stop was to be Heathrow. There, in about forty minutes, the bus emptied of all the commuters, and only about twenty-five people remained. A matronly looking woman and her family got on, and she enquired sweetly about the driver's breakfast this morning. They were followed by three English women -- you could tell from the jaded tans that they wished they looked more South European -- on their way back from Tenerife, they said to the driver even as the conversation between the three of them never broke stride. As we drove out of Heathrow, the driver got back on to his microphone, he was much more at ease now and, as I was to discover, talked entertainingly for a couple of minutes. We should expect to call, he said, at Cheltenham by ten thirty, but might be delayed due to the traffic out from London to "the races". I found out later that he was referring to horse racing that weekend. It is apparently a big event in these parts; later in the day as I walked around the tiny village of Winchcombe, I could see through to the living room in a couple of the houses I passed, both televisions were tuned into the race. On the bus, somewhere in between briefing us on the traffic and weather conditions on our route, our driver also sends out messages of support to Lewis Hamilton on his championship-deciding formula one race that weekend, and the England rugby team on the morning of their World Cup final. This guy was fun. I had stationed myself in the now-empty first row of seats right behind the driver, with a view of the road in front of us.

Outside, vast meadows stretch out on either side of the motorway, with thick clouds of mist hanging heavily down, the first gentle rays of light casting a dim glow over them. Sheep dot the landscape.

The races at Cheltenham later that morning are a blessing in disguise. About thirty minutes later, the driver gets off the main highway to avoid the backup of traffic he has been warning us about, announcing his decision conversationally over the speakers. The tone of the journey begins to change immediately. In the world of Western Europe, the main motorways are so efficiently laid out and rule-driven that it can universalise the time you spend on the road. I haven't driven here, but I imagine that I will have to prevent myself from falling asleep at the steering wheel if I did. Often, other than staying within the speed limit, there is nothing you will need to do, nothing of the sort of things that make driving interesting anyway. I sat in the front row today with the driver's view of the road. The motorway rises high and wide above the landscape it has been erected upon, cutting an ugly swathe and littering your path with signboards and billion-tonne container trucks and displays of lane-change restrictions, stripping a journey of its sense of exploring the route you're taking. Railway tracks can be built into a landscape without taking away from the experience of journeying through it; a perfectly engineered ten-lane motorway can anaesthesize you to the experience.

I was delighted we were getting off the motorway now.

A series of gently curving county roads followed. There are no buildings or houses alongside the road; now and then, our bus eases past cars driven inevitably by a sweet-looking old man with his wife next to him, who I always imagine are on their way to a market somewhere. The sunburnt ladies from Tenerife have finished making their phone calls and have quieted down, the bus driver's hands are relaxed on the steering wheel. Now and then there is the name of a village and an arrow pointing in its direction: Birdlip, Totterdown, Tewkesbury. As we pull into the town of Cirencester an hour later for a rest stop, it feels like this has been the most satisfying way to approach it: on a bus with only a smattering of passengers, winding through the green grass and empty roads of Gloucestershire.

We arrived at Royal Well Bus Station at Cheltenham as promised, at ten thirty in the morning. As we entered Cheltenham, among the avenues of houses there is a small establishment with a board that says Chinese Takeaway and another one a little further down that says Balti House - Tandoori, Established 1971. Standing there incongruously among the handsome terrace of houses, these places look less restaurant and more a house that serves the local community. There is a sense of loneliness about them. I felt this feeling exactly on my first full day in London, when we passed by Richmond Tandoori, travelling by bus through the clearly affluent South Eastern suburbs early in the morning when the shops hadn't opened yet and you could only see the signboards. There were hardly any people on the road, and I had a wondrous, foreign feeling about being here. This isn't Central London, or one of its many multiethnic neighbourhoods, where the sheer profusion of influences and people from every continent can make everything at once seem right at home. This early morning I was seeing a postcard English High Street for the first time, from the upstairs of a red double-decker bus, and the shop sign that said Richmond Tandoori in its simple large white lettering looked impossibly out of place, from a different world. Then, as now, I picture a newly married couple from a far corner of North-West India in the nineteen seventies making their way here, to the lonely outskirts of Cheltenham to set up their business and earn a living, far away from home.

The streets around Cheltenham bus station are pretty. I find myself coffee and a nice table outside facing a mostly empty street. Next door is a large -- for its description -- well-outfitted shop that says Tobacconist and Newsagent. Someone goes in every minute or two, I see them inside gazing at the shelves reading the various headlines, before picking out their newspaper and walking up to the cashier, emerging out onto the street a minute later with the paper tucked under their arm. It is nice to see the act of newspaper buying this unhurried. Today, the big news, the main story, is pasted on a signboard outside the shop, "Tesco Armed Robber Locked Up For 7 Years", with a blow-up of the offending party's mug shot inset. It seems to have happened around here. This is in the local newspaper, and the sense of outrage and indignation that such a crime has been committed -- rather than the tone of inevitability you take for granted in a city newspaper reporting the story -- seems apparent even in the headline.

Every road sign around here seems to point to "The Promenade", so I decide I will take the bait and check it out. What it was was a smart paved street that was closed off to traffic -- usually a sign of tourist-friendliness -- with designer boutiques on one side, cafes and tables outside on the other, and in the middle, a ten foot wrought-iron man with the head of an ox with his arm around a ten foot wrought-iron man with the body of a rabbit. As I look around, from every direction kids are running against their mothers' calls towards these.. figures. I presently continue further on down the street. Past a young man playing all your favourite pop tunes on saxophone.

At the corner I'm on the verge of Cheltenham's High Street, packed with weekend warriors that Saturday morning buying clothes from the stores. But it was the names of the shops lining the High Street that sunk the heart: Boots, Primark, Mark's & Spencer's... all of the chain superstores that you see scattered about in a neighbourhood London shopping zone, all on this one street. They're disappointing enough to see in their soulless glory in London, a big city where, of course, one fully expects to see these things, but you pick a town you've never heard of in a quaint-sounding part of England one day, and it's here just like everywhere else. One is left to only imagine the kind of locally-run locally-flavoured establishments that might have lined this street once.

I get off the high street and wander about for a few minutes, past signs to a museum and a church. The roads are wide with tall trees, the town is quite pretty, but my view of Cheltenham is a little coloured by now, and already I am looking forward to going to the bus station and picking a name off the time-table to go to.

The town is at the foot, so to speak, of the Cotswolds, a series of low rolling hills that stretch, on its Southern side, roughly from Cheltenham in the west to Oxford in the east. I wanted to be in Oxford by the next morning, so I planned to detour my way through the Cotswolds that day while taking the general direction towards Oxford, and stopping off at a couple of villages along the way and spend the night at one of them. I am trying to figure my way around the large multi-sheet time-tables pasted on the glass doors of the bus shelters at the Royal Well Bus Station, with a somewhat apologetic disclaimer underneath saying "We aim to update our time table every six months, but please be aware that this may not be the best way to find a service." Each shelter has a time-table and routes of a different bus company. Private bus operators -- the kinds that have a sign in the bus saying "we also hire our buses out privately" -- serve villages and towns nearby. Buses seemed horrendously infrequent, I saw one route that actually runs once a week, on a Thursday. My traipse through villages of my pleasing wasn't going to be as hop-on-hop-off as I might have imagined it would be. The minimum wait right now for the next bus -- to anywhere -- is an hour and twenty minutes.

Yet there is character here. The only other place in Britain I've been in since I arrived, London, is so phenomenally well-connected, the transport system operates with such ruthless efficiency -- trains leave a station to the exact minute, buses numerous and run like clockwork even through the night. And while I wouldn't have complained if I'd found three buses conveniently leaving the Royal Well bus station in the next twelve minutes that afternoon, I like the fact that this is a country whose transport system can be like this, too, human; and like the three-two-five that makes its appearance only every Thursday afternoon (and that only in the alternate months of summer), quirky. And if I must wait for hours at bus stops surrounded by geriatric Gloucestershirers - all of whom have begun to study me like they have never seen a coloured person before - to celebrate that quirkiness, so be it.

Thus I sat down at a park bench nearby and opened my lunch box.

At one o' clock I am on a bus to Winchcombe. The lady at the bus stop describes it as "quite nice" when I asked her which bus I could take and she told me that Winchcombe was one of the stops along to where she was going, a village with the now unlikely-sounding name of Broadway. I can't be sure, but I thought I saw a hint of a satisfied smile when she saw me getting on, that she'd got me to get on to her bus. Around us, the hills slope lazily. The grass is lush, and every now and then there is a horse or a pony grazing, a rug draped on its back. Perfectly aligned little houses and sloping roofs with streams running alongside them. Curving hill roads branch off from ours. More sheep in the distance. The road narrows just a little as we approach a village. I want to get off here, and as I do, the surroundings have changed, everywhere there are small sturdy buildings of pale yellow stone. The streets are entirely deserted, and as I walk up to the walls and read the inscriptions that date some of the buildings, 1125 and 1273. If not for the cars parked on the road, this could be a ghost village. I was the only person there as far I could see down the road; it certainly felt that way.

At a shop front called Cotteswold Diary, there is a notice from the owners announcing a change of address, adding a note saying "for those of you who like to call in and pay your milk bill, we shall be at home Fridays and Saturdays." Across the road there is a gate and steps leading up to a church, and tombstones in the grounds. They date from the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds; some of the words on the inscriptions are spelt differently. The stone is everywhere, its yellow is pale, its shades and texture weatherbeaten. Signs outside the tiny, strongly-built houses along the road read "Teacher's Cottage", and "Weaver's Cottage". It all seems from an earlier time.

A few hundred metres down the road, there are finally signs of present-day life. A Tea Room that has just been awarded, according to the article pasted outside, the tea-room equivalent of a Michelin star in this year's awards, a post-office with staff behind the counter, and, most pertinently for me, a pub with a sign that says 'Open'. I descend the few steps down to the door of The Plaisterer's Arms; inside, a fire is glowing, and a family is at lunch at a table by it. Three men and the bartender are having a conversation at the bar, and as I sit at one of the three tables and set down my backpack I wonder if I am intruding. I have ordered coffee as I entered, and I decide I might as well take in the atmosphere and eavesdrop while I waited for it. They all seem to be from around here, and while one man and the older man are more settled into their chairs, the third has just dropped by, apparently on a break from his workshift. While the subject is mundane, one's visit to the doctor "downhill" for a bad back, the words are delightful, "I wasn't feeling too chipper last week", and "unbeknownst to me, I had developed..." I listened happily. As their round of drink arrives, the conversation has turned to England and the rugby world cup final later that day. Even the toast at the bar is perfect: "To good health, sir, and a fine English victory this afternoon."

I stepped outside into the afternoon sunshine. This would be a good time for a walk. I turned off the main street and up one road, and almost immediately, it seemed, out of the village and into the countryside. Soon there was a bridge that crossed what was probably a small river a few feet below it, the water flowing gently over the rocks. By it, a triangular damaged road sign that says "FLOOD", has fallen on to the railings. A record perhaps, unintended and thus poignant, of the day it happened. I pass a gate that says "The Old Cider Mill." The houses are becoming more and more spread out and farther apart now, the meadows getting larger. Between two buildings, for one and a half seconds, I see two horses in full gallop across a field. Then they're gone, hidden from view, leaving me to play it over and over in my head.

A couple of hours later, I am back in Winchcombe and trying to spot the bus stop, eager to stop off at another village before it gets dark. The two people waiting, an old man and a pretty thirty five year old woman, weigh the merits of my case enthusiastically. The old man laughs when I tell him I need to get to Oxford "only by tomorrow morning", just three hours away by bus and with more than half a day to get there. "Tomorrow's Sunday son, you won't find a bus till four in the afternoon." Besides, the only bus that will come to Winchcombe that day goes right back to Cheltenham, and I have no choice but to take it. Back at the Cheltenham bus station, I talk to a young bus driver, who tells me the same thing about counting on connecting transport in these parts, but rather more colourfully: "If you get to Kingham and then just miss the six o clock, you're knackered." This man wasn't joking, I duly followed him into his bus. We would travel through more of these hills to the delightfully named village of Chipping Norton, and onwards to Oxford that night.

As I looked out of the window, dusk was setting over the Cotswolds softly, like someone drifting contentedly to sleep. There were many things about the twilight now that reminded me of dawn that morning, the chill, the mist that had settled low over the meadows, the soft orange-ish glow of the light upon it. As we left Heathrow that morning and the fields opened out, there was this inviting quality to it, the kind that made you want to walk out into the distance. In the early evening, as the light begins to retreat, behind the woods and the mountains, the scene also takes on a subconsciously ominous tone, a harbinger of the darkness to follow, and cold that makes it impossible to picture yourself walking out to over there. But the best part about not wanting to go out into the cold is staying inside, and when you're inside a bus like I was that evening, you think about getting off and stepping into a place that is warm, maybe sit by a fire, at a pub like The Plaisterer's Arms, in a little village like Winchcombe.

And some pictures, from Oxford, Winchcombe, and a few more around London.

Talkin' 'bout the weather

2007-10-25T15:47:00.000+05:30

They all said it was coming but I didn't quite believe them - how could I, standing there in the 20 degree pleasantness on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October? Just another week, they'd said, just another ten days before the inevitable slide towards winter. But they'd been saying that for weeks now, ever since I'd got here -- that and their constant, ominous, pessimistic predictions of rain -- and week after week I saw bright sunshine, only the faintest spells of a drizzle and certainly no heavy rain, brilliant weekday afternoons walking to Regent's Park to watch the birds ducking in and out of the glistening water of the lake, evenings and daylight parting ways only reluctantly, and much past seven p.m., granting infinite extensions to my days as I pedalled around this wonderful, foreign place... I was new to London, I'd been here six weeks, this was all the London I knew.

But it did happen, and so suddenly, in exactly the ominous way that they all said it would. In those same tones that I've been hearing at every grocery shop, on the bus, at street corners where people stand around blowing cigarette smoke into their hands, it has, all of a sudden, become "a bit chilly out (innit?)". My habituated-to-thirty-seven-degrees-C self at least saw it coming that evening, and with a rare alacrity I immediately found a shop and bought myself a pair of gloves and a skullcap. Since then, for the last few days, the going has been gritty, suiting up and putting on a suitably grim expression as I cycle through the morning wind and chill, past men in their cars peering out at the sky in front of them, and women at bus stops wearing scarves around their head looking solemnly about sizing the day's weather up.

Now, the way people's eyes meet has changed. There are slight, but still perceptible, telling signs: a mutual drawing-in of the shoulders, a pulling-together of the trenchcoat. Passersby study each other's protective clothing in a manner that approaches concern. A woman rubs her hands together as a man walking past gives her a glance of grim sympathy. Almost as if to say, "We're in this together." I'd been rather amused by how much people seemed to talk about the weather here, but it wasn't funny to me anymore. Not when I knew that as you hurry out of the biting chill into the supermarket, when the security guard echoes you with the same intensity when you say, feelingly, "Its fucking cold outside", even if only for that one moment, it actually made me feel better. There is no empathy between complete strangers as reflexively heartfelt as the shared consequences of cold weather.

At five o clock this evening, daylight holding on for its last few minutes before the temperature drop and the darkness take firm hold, I cycled back home in the wind. The evening was early, I was in the enjoyable process of deciding what to do with it, my spirits were up. I turned onto my street from the main road and looked up. Sometime when I wasn't looking, the leaves on the trees have changed colour. I've never lived in a place where this happens, and nothing -- not pretty pictures of faraway places that you set as wallpapers on your computer screen, nor poetic-sounding words you read -- could have prepared me for this. Dramatic yellows and purples and reds and oranges -- and those fiery, fleeting shades in between. I saw some flowers I haven't noticed before. A picture of how my street might look in winter pops into my head, I imagine how fetching it will look, and especially if it snows.

Autumn was a foreign word to me until now, and my first days of autumn have definitely been, as the Romans say, a bit chilly out. But I want to suit up and go to Regent's Park again. Autumn in London is very beautiful.

All Questions Answered

2007-10-16T00:39:00.000+05:30

An ad on the tube :) (Click on it, the text enlarges to a readable-enough size)

And some pictures of places I've been going to.

Change

2007-09-18T03:42:00.000+05:30

I made Daal tonight. I moved into my new place only a couple of nights ago, and went grocery shopping with an almost ferocious determination today, making two trips to the store, once to the supermarket and once to the Indian store (well Bangladeshi at any rate), returning each time with a backpack full of supplies to stock the kitchen shelves. It’s been two weeks since I moved to this city. A walk down the street looking for food in London, any street seemingly, is gastronomic fantasy. Each day, and night, I’ve spent minutes and hours walking by restaurant windows, poring over the menus conveniently pasted outside, often stepping back after taking a look at the prices, but always delightedly pondering the possibilities. The Kebab shop has been glorious subsistence these two weeks. The cafeteria at the office has proved a constant surprise, rapidly changing my notions of what office cafeterias can be like. A salad bar that I’m still exploring the depths of, fish and chips last Friday – my first! – that I ordered with the delight of a child, a wonderful couscous and Tagine last Tuesday.

One of these nights last week after coming back from the office, I walked around not quite decided on what I was going to eat. Four lamb shawarmas in ten days is plenty, and I was happy to look past it, at other options. I walked around for a while, the Italian ristorantes in the area all too expensive and never getting the spelling right, the fantastic Thai place I’d been to just a couple of nights ago, the Lebanese places with their shishas and alfresco tables more suited to a relaxed dinner with company. Just as I was going to give up and go to the supermarket for a packaged dinner, I saw an Eastern European man standing outside the Queensway tube station holding a signpost with a large arrow drawn on it, pointing, in bold lettering, to Pride Of India, just around the corner. The sign was handwritten, making it rather quaint and delightfully out of place. Indian Buffet, it said, Only 4.95. Five minutes later, I was tucking into Naan and several Sabzis, another matter that all of them – each one of them, unfailingly, and there were about six – with potatoes in them. As much as I’d loved the exploring, I’d missed our food, and that night, undercooked rice and overgenerous swathes of oil and friggin’ potatoes in every dish notwithstanding, I walked out of there a happy man.

Tonight, at last, I would get a chance to cook, and while my efforts in the kitchen have always been oriented towards the stock dish – pots of Daal, Channa, Kitchadi – rather than anything you’re likely to see on a Fat Duck menu, at least I could make the dishes I knew to make the way I liked it, the way I’d learnt from my Mom, and have myself a quiet, satisfying dinner. I go to work with a happy familiarity, comforted by the picture of what’s going to be on my dinner plate at the end of it. The house I’ve moved into has three people already living here, and it has a working kitchen. But I can find nothing but massive butcher knives to cut the vegetables, and I proceed to chop the onions gingerly. I wash each utensil as I take it off the stand to use it – they say its unnecessary here, the air’s clean and all that, but, as I’m finding out with many things in a new country, some habits die hard. I spend five minutes looking for a gas-lighter (or a matchbox) to light the stove, and then find a button on the front panel labelled Ignition that fires it up. Ha. Just as I begin to boil the Daal, a housemate comes out (known until I get to know him better as The French Guy) into the kitchen.

- “Pill-mill?”, he asks, looking at the Daal.

- (Say what?) “Lentils”, I reply.

- “Ah.”

Twenty minutes later my dinner is ready – the Daal looks good, colourful with the peas and carrot and beans that you get helpfully chopped and frozen at the supermarket. I’ve taken the chapathis, nay, the Indian Wraps, out of their packets and heated them. The chapathis even puff up off the pan, and I smile at the memories that evokes. I dive into the food, confident in the knowledge that this isn’t Indian food “cooked mild” like all the restaurants here advertise; I have used dhania and manja podi and as many green chillies as I have felt like. I made Daal in Madras not four weeks ago, and tonight I’ve made it in exactly the same way.

It tastes different, though. It is still Daal alright, but it tastes so different. Maybe it was the ginger that came powdered and out of a bottle. The chapathis that had puffed up so invitingly had only flattered to deceive – they tasted synthetic. I didn’t find coriander leaves at the shop, maybe that could have something to do with it? The thawed vegetables tasted… thawed (but maybe the vegetables were just fine). And so I went over all of the variables as I ate, as if trying to rescue my experience with reason. It was most likely the onions, I decided – not streaked purple like they are at home, these were the soft white variety, so mild as to not be able to form that base, or lend that pungent bite.

I finish my dinner feeling rather subdued. In the shelves behind the table where I’ve sat to eat, there are jars of Pesto and Neapolitan and Bolognese that I’ve bought at the supermarket. I even found Paprika and Cayenne Peppers – until now unattainable ingredients in recipes. There is a Mediterannean food shop that I discovered yesterday around the corner from my house, where I spent half an hour looking at the shelves, dazed at being able to reach out and pick up the breads from those parts of the world that I’ve always wanted to try.

But when I make Daal, I want it to taste a certain way. Why else would I make it?

That night as I ate at the Indian buffet, I realized I missed our food. Tonight, I miss home.

Divided Sky

2007-07-03T11:25:00.000+05:30

I often find myself blown away by the different ways Phish plays around with the structure of a song they’re creating. Layers are heaped and caressed upon one another, slight piano notes are flung at it, sometimes speeding towards the main melody in a taper, sometimes taking off from it, on startling tangents and short piercing incursions. It is always building, if not to a crescendo in the usual sense of the word, then towards a culmination point in faraway space, whizzing and sliding its way through. Suddenly, like in the glorious Divided Sky, this envelope of sound that’s careening tantalisingly forth comes crashing down, hitherto hidden cymbals with no semblance of control thrash about, instruments sound like they’re in the process of violent suicide… it all quite simply disintegrates into pieces.

And then this band does something that breaks your heart – they pick up some of these pieces, at seeming random, a ghost of a quaver here, an unlikely crotchet there, and make song out of it all over again.

Over Under Sideways Down

2007-06-26T18:46:00.000+05:30

The subway has a different life, almost. Especially in contrast to the city so beautiful above it. Under the ground and possessed of a blackness that the bright lights only accentuate as you stare into the tunnel, your trajectory is rudely cut off by a curve along the tracks always only a few tens of metres from where you’re standing on the platform, as you imagine the train speeding through the maze under the earth that the two hundred and fifty-odd stations in Paris are connected by. The corridors that people are running through feel sterile, white tiles are the walls of choice – colourful posters and graffiti notwithstanding, you distinctly get the feeling of walking through hallways in a hospital. The fourteen main routes on the subway map are connected efficiently – there’s a train every four minutes on any line during the busiest twelve hours of the day. The many comings and goings lead to a general sense of haste, somebody’s always rushing past you trying to catch their soonest connecting train. For someone who wants to take in as much of Paris as possible and has only six days to do it, taking the subway, as you sometimes have to, means a distinct shake-up of your images – you were at point A, a half-hour of resting your legs and taking it in at a wonderful Parisien garden, let’s say, and then there’s a speeding, black image, and then images of point B, in the neighbourhood of your destination with an ice-cream cone in your hand. It feels disconnected, discordant.

x—x

Everybody is much more guarded underground, people will build a wall of protection around themselves that you will not see if you walk past the same man or woman on the street outside. While there are natural reasons of the subways being crime-friendly for this, you also feel the dank air and the manufactured light descending, quite literally, upon you. You feel it as you walk down from the street, it hits you immediately. At night, when everyone is most on their guard, when the frequency of trains dwindles, before being totally shut down at a ridiculously early 12.30 AM – the twenty-three-hours-a-day local network in Mumbai immediately springs to mind – helpful passengers already inside the train will stand between the doors arms pushing out against them to prevent the train from leaving if they see anyone rushing down the stairs a few seconds late.

x—x

When you’re sitting inside a subway car with your ten, or three, stops to go, you invariably drift to what you end up doing when you have nothing else to do – you look around at people. On the train back from St.Denis to the centre of Paris, that included two mammoth – six feet four at least – policemen (or assault cops really) with three holsters each – three of them – all loaded with pistols of different kinds, apart from what looked like a sub-machine gun hanging down from their waists. This wasn’t anywhere near as out of place as the anti-terror squads – bigger machine guns, dark glasses - around the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, hearts of the city, bright and filled with people. Out in the open, people in summer clothing and gay abandon, the sun shining down on beautiful, beautiful Paris, those cops and their guns were chilling.

AGFA Tapes and Recorded Cassettes.

2007-06-24T17:22:00.000+05:30

I had a small collection of cassettes growing up, carefully put together "assorted" compilations that you painstakingly and lovingly labelled with the singer and song names on the back - those lines on the back of the AGFA 90-minute cassette covers were close together, and I insisted on perfectly symmetrical block lettering - I couldn't afford to go wrong. I never got enough pocket money to "buy" music on any basis, regular or whimsical, until I was seventeen or so - by which time mp3s were slowly but surely taking over anyway - so "real" cassettes weren't something I got too often. As my Dad reasoned, why buy a whole album when you like only one or two songs on it? The money not coming my way anyway, I saw the wisdom in his words, and a recorded collection was the way to go.

There was no English Music on TV, this was pre-cable television in our house – there was a large set of folks in middle-class India who were vociferously against cable television when it made its entry in the early nineties (Star Plus, BBC, MTV and Prime Sports, the original four channels, remember? :) ), that it would be “bad for our children” and that it wasn’t something Indian children were supposed to grow up with. Special ire was directed towards the soap operas – Santa Barbara and The Bold And The Beautiful ran right from Star Plus’s inception, these were scenes of the attractive, arresting of the human species actually kissing in the soft-focus light of daytime TV sets in Indian cities and towns, what would happen to our kids? (Did the men also worry about their wives watching the shows and getting a little too involved in the fantasy, while oh-so-selflessly focusing only on the children? I wonder. They probably did). I even remember teachers in fourth and fifth standard telling us Star TV (as we so charmingly referred to it then) was bad, and “They are going to ban Star Plus.”

And I never could listen to it on the radio growing up – All India Radio’s local incarnations in the metros had pop and rock hours every week, I’d heard from luckier cousins during summer holidays, but not in our part of the world. For me, those tapes – and the Boney M that played on the speakers at Central and Maruthi and Sreepathy Theatre during a movie’s Interval - were my only sources.

I played them till they began to protest, as each of the tapes inevitably began to - I caught on soon enough and made a copy before the current one became unusable. I began to love each of them very specifically - that sequence of songs on side A of the MAY 1992 tape, the one that I made during the fourth standard summer holidays. Hotel California for me wasn't that song that came before New Kid In Town to open the Hotel California album, nor was it the one that played after Tequila Sunrise on Hell Freezes Over. No, it was the song that began to play pre-emptively in my head just as the last notes of Tears In Heaven faded out on my “BEST OF POP SINGLES MAY 1994 ASHWIN RAGHU” cassette. I knew those forty-five minutes on side A like the back of my hand. My cousin, eight years older and a Phil Collins fan, suggested many of the songs to me. But once those songs were on my tape, they became mine. There's something about those random sixty and ninety minute sets of songs that no Winamp or Itunes playlist can come close to replacing the entirety of attachment towards. This was not the 150 songs on one compact disc that mp3s heralded - I staggered when I first heard that, sometime when I’d just started college. I remember thinking “What happens to Pujak now?” Pujak was to many in Coimbatore what Basement Blues was to kids who grew up in Madras in the 80s and 90s. Madrasis I’ve spoken to after I’ve come here have spoken about Basement Blues in exactly the same way that I regarded Pujak growing up, the shop whose big “English Songs” file you consulted hoping it had all the songs written on that piece of paper in your hand. This was preceded by days of vacillating and endlessly re-drawing song lists sitting at home. Eighty hard-hoarded rupees meant enough to buy one ninety minute tape and enough left over to pay the recording guy at Pujak, and ninety minutes meant eighteen songs probably, twenty if I was lucky. Which ones to leave out, which one to start off side B, these were serious decisions to be made, often in consult with aforementioned cousin, already in twelfth standard at the time, he knew everything about music, he at least knew everything I wanted to know about music.

There are some songs on those tapes that I haven’t heard in the fifteen years since, and then I hear again, at a friend’s house maybe, like when I heard Status Quo’s In The Army Now recently. There’s an immediate connection and familiarity as the song begins to play; I just know. This is one of those songs, one I’ve had on a Recorded Cassette.

Review: Ocean's Thirteen

2007-06-18T14:12:00.000+05:30

As Ocean’s men sit around plotting nefarious schemes and making clever, off the cuff conversation, Don Cheadle, in response to a suggestion from one of his associates, says, almost addressing the audience in an old-style kind of way: “We don’t do the same gag twice. Let’s do the next one.”

That’s probably all you need to be cognizant of as you’re watching Ocean’s Thirteen.

Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould, who’s just perfect for the role) has a heart attack after having been screwed over by Willie Bank (Al Pacino, as the campy tycoon) in a hotel deal. The Thirteen then decide that they will avenge this by sabotaging everything, seemingly, for Bank on the day of the hotel and casino’s opening. Not that this gang needed any extra encouragement, but this is the kind of gig that you imagine they can’t wait to get their hands on.

Get their hands on it they did, with the by now expected mash-up of funny, fiendishly-executed big budget adventures that they pull off. There is much hat-tipping to reel and real eras past, and every now and then they do go overboard with the retro thing. But it might be true of the movie itself that it doesn’t just go overboard at times, it happily sails overboard, and then shows off to you what it can do. And when you have a cast as great and cool as George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Bernie Mac and Al Pacino and everyone else all together, why not?

That’s what entirely drives this film, not that plot about the casino and the vault and revenge. Its editors make an art of cutting to the chase, while Ocean’s Thirteen, just like its prequels, winks at you.

This movie is like that cool set of grooves that your friend with a knack of coming up with a good Winamp playlist put together. For me the series is like that – it had its ups and downs like today’s stretched-out-into trilogies inevitably do, but looking back on the three movies now (and yes I know you thought Ocean’s Twelve could’ve been better), that’s how it feels doesn’t it? A cool set of grooves. Nothing but a good thing.

The Economic Times: Madras Plus 14th June 2007

Review: Shrek The Third

2007-06-04T11:43:00.000+05:30

King Harold of Far, Far Away has croaked his last. Shrek, by virtue of being son-in-law, suddenly finds himself next in line. The only way he can avert this is by finding Arthur, the King Harold’s nephew – who of course is quite far away from Far, Far Away, and a voyage is necessary to bring him back.

As in its prequels, a wonderful John Cleese cameo does the job of the Frog King Harold (a phrase played on quite delightfully in the movie when his death is pronounced). Shrek, and many of Hollywood’s animation productions, have made a certain tone of tongue-in-cheek humour laced with pop-culture familiarity – less edgy and more mainstream than what you would see in the Simpsons, to be sure – their own.

My highlight of this film is a brilliantly conceived scene at a bar that Prince Charming goes to, full of seedy-looking characters. The clientele is an assortment of villains, Captain Hook and Cyclops and a room full of others from fairy tale worlds past, each of them having brought their beefs with their own worlds to this one. Prince Charming is crusading to convince them that they have another shot at getting their own back, and enlists them in his scheme to usurp the throne. A joyous five minutes of entreaty follows, in the wonderfully sketched images of a seedy dive alive with the subverted energy of its patrons. This is followed almost inevitably by a song sung in chorus, which somehow always manages to be uplifting.

The canvas, as ever, is made colourful, witty use of. There are hearty doses of clever props and cleverer writing (like the chalk-board at the bar where Charming meets all of the villains, that has ‘Unhappy Hour 3 -7 PM’ scrawled across). But more than once when I was watching Shrek the Third, I cringed at how much was being loaded into the dialogue and the screenplay. On the one hand, characters from the fairy tales we’ve been acquainted with from our childhood, Captain Hook and Pinocchio and Rapunzel, are brought back to life here, creating that warm atmosphere that is created when you recall the stories you heard as kids. But on the other, in the rush to drench these characters and their lines in satire and nonchalance and an astounding penchant for dropping pithy pop-culture references, you’re assured that you will see it stripped of all the simplicity and the innocence that made them and their fairy-tale cousins originally appealing to us.

Shrek in his quest to find Arthur is accompanied by Puss in Boots and Donkey, played by Antonio Banderas and the inimitable Eddie Murphy. The back-slapping dynamic between the three of them flowers in this movie and makes for constant, lively watching. But a surfeit of characters makes sure that the scenes keep shifting, a little too desultorily at times – chiefly to a bunch of Charlie’s angels that include Rapunzel and Snow White. Shrek is such a lovable, poignantly sketched character that this could have been just his side of the story and The Third would have been the better off for it.

The Economic Times: Madras Plus - 31st May 2007

Review: Marie Antoinette

2007-05-28T11:44:00.000+05:30

Marie Antoinette opens with her life-changing 1768 journey starting from a palace in Vienna, where she was still Austrian royalty, across Europe in a horse-drawn carriage to France. She is to “form an alliance” with the French heir to the throne. As I watched these opening scenes, it seemed set for a fascinating couple of hours of that often potent combination of historical basis and artistic interpretation. And Kirsten Dunst as the beautiful young queen-to-be seemed to me casting that was a lot more than passable.

Many of (director) Sofia Coppola’s trademark touches that developed in The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation are immediately on view here: long single-takes that focus on seemingly innocuous non-events, with a lack of dialogue that sometimes turns into an awkward silence. Her protagonist is being shuttled across to a foreign land all by herself to marry a man she has never seen before. She then has to fit in to and learn to live all of the elaborate, often tedious rituals that apparently came with the territory of French royalty in the eighteenth century. The uncomfortable silences are exactly what she needs. Monarch or not, as a young woman and then a foreigner in the royal scheme of things, the skill she needed to use the most was holding her tongue.

The film is set almost entirely in France’s royal palace. The opulence and pagaentry of the time and place is re-created with lavish attention (it was rewarded with an Oscar for Costume Design last year). This often included a quartet or an orchestra as entertainment for the royal Highnesses. But curiously, these lilting, delightful Baroque pieces are juxtaposed with sudden bursts of loud, MTV-era pop music. This is interesting the first time, but became gimmicky and jarring very quickly.

Coppola combines her penchant for long deliberate shots with a drab, characterless portrayal of her subjects and their lives. An obscene amount of time is devoted to depicting how king Louis the sixteenth is cold as ice when it comes to consummating their marriage, and Marie’s frustrating inability (borne, of course, in stony silence) to do anything about it. Night after night after night, we’re shown the two minutes before the King and Queen go to sleep; scenes in which nothing, literally and otherwise, happens. And scenes of the queen getting into the day’s clothes every morning, and scenes of them at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, eating silently, eyes firmly focused on the intricately embellished porcelain in front of them. And minutes upon minutes of random hangers-on around the Palace’s grounds gossiping about the Royal household.

The attempt is made to portray Antoinette as vulnerable and in over her head, never quite sure what to do, and not able to express it. But she comes off, instead, as being almost listless. It’s not that depictions of mundane, everyday scenes cannot come together to create a larger, more significant image; it’s just that in Marie Antoinette, it never happens.

The Economic Times: Madras Plus: 24th May 2007

Review: Spiderman 3

2007-05-18T11:50:00.000+05:30

Spiderman 3 finds Peter Parker comfortably co-existing with his more illustrious alter-ego – he now has a police radio in his bedroom that tells him when he’s needed to don his suit and go out and save the world. His fellow citizens adore Spiderman, and his girlfriend is at peace with his dual identity.

But, as these things must go, a hammer is thrown into the works. Multiple hammers, you realize, with increasing concern for plot clarity. Flint Marko, an escaped convict, walks into a particle accelerator – bad move even for a guy on the run from the cops, one would think – and becomes, in a beautifully cinematographed scene of his physical transmogrification, Sandman, a new villain for Spidey to contend with. As preferred freelance photographer at The Daily Bugle, Parker now has competition in the form of Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace from That 70s Show). Brock also, at some point in the movie’s interminable middle section, ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and occasionally turns into the evil Venom from that point on.

Parker, in the meanwhile, is becoming a little too smug and show-offy in his role as the city’s crime-fighting hero. When he does the upside-down kiss with a female fan – with sweet Mary Jane Watson watching on – you know he’s in big trouble. A love triangle erupts – Harry Osborn, Parker’s best friend and the son of that Green Goblin played so brilliantly a few years ago by Willem Dafoe, is the third in this menage. The ‘New Goblin’ is played by James Franco (who actually had moments in the movie when he eerily resembled Dafoe. Dafoe here is still effective as a portrait up on the wall staring down at his son Harry). What saves this part of the movie for me has mostly to do with Kirsten Dunst – there are shots of her here that I will remember long after I’ve forgotten the movie itself.

As we’ve now come to expect, Tobey Maguire has the same slightly-lost kind of demeanour about his Peter Parker that perfectly, and naturally, counterpoints his Spiderman. But his own changing feelings as a super-hero, probably at the thematic heart of Spiderman 3, deserved better scripting and screenplay than it got here. In an attempt to flesh out a complete story, the plot gets a little – or more than a little – obfuscating along the way.

J Jonah Jameson, the cranky editor of The Daily Bugle, was one of those little highlights in parts one and two, the kind of character whose five minutes of screen time you look forward to. Here, though, in an effort to strengthen his caricature, he’s disappointingly overplayed (and frankly given rather unfunny lines).

The final scene is a grand tag-team battle that takes place on live television, with a sufficiently emotional, searching-for-words newscaster right at the scene. I liked how the scene worked in this reflection of the times we live in. It was a nice touch. Spiderman 3 could’ve used a few more of them.

The Economic Times: Madras Plus - May 11, 2007.

Crash And Ride

2007-05-14T08:34:00.000+05:30

I started to learn to play the drums last year. As fascinated as I was, these classes often turned out to be an exercise in tedium. Almost insanely repetition- and calculation-oriented, I discovered, in all my instrument-playing naïveté, that to sound out that handsome roll around the drum kit on the last bar to accompany that final burst of the electric and go down in a climactic flurry of crashing cymbals and roaring audiences, I would first have to construct (and this really defines the word painstaking) each note into a block that would then have to fit, unerringly, into a four-beat pattern. Dreams of free-form improvising that would help me find hitherto-unknown facets of my musical creativity took a backseat when I found that I needed to bludgeon my brain, and my hands and legs, into repeating one-and-two-and-three-and-four (and from my third lesson onwards, one-e-and-a-two-e-and-a-three-e-and-a-four-e-and-a, but on the advice of my shrink I’m not even going there!) ad infinitum.

What also started to happen almost immediately was that I began to really, really pay attention to the drums in the music I was listening to. Up until that point, I was more actively interested in the colours that guitars gave a song. Now, I was looking out for the basic four-beat drum pattern of the song, how the variations on that pattern were played, how and when the drummer went into a roll, and how and when he came back into the fold. Sounds like a messy business, I know, but very soon, certain things emerged that I hadn’t seen, couldn’t see, before. The vague “noise” that I’d heard before underneath that crying guitar riff were now delicate feather-touches played on the ride cymbal of the drum kit. I now saw that the reason I “like what’s happening” with the rhythm in a particular song was because of how dynamically the drummer varied his notes against the notes of the bass guitar. How, in a funk song, a slapped bass guitar note can have a searing, unexpected result on the ear, against a drum pattern that is always rushed and sounds a little dissonant, a little off. You conjure up an image of the drummer who seems like he’s going to fall over his hands and legs in the process. And I listened, fascinated, to the ebbs and flows and the subtle interplay that resulted between the drummer and the bassist. This became an added ‘layer’ to my listening experience: a layer that, much like an interesting, nuanced sub-plot in a good movie, grabbed me and thrilled me upon discovery.

Sometimes, the drums seemed to be playing a game with me. A crisp snare note is placed at a point where I completely don’t expect it, at a point rhythmically that it’s not supposed to be at, taking me completely unawares. Just as I was forgiving the drum kit for playing that dirty trick on me, it swings to the other end and plays silence (I think it was Miles Davis who said “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the ones you don’t.”) right when you’re waiting for that note that would give closure – or continuity - to a musical passage. This has felt like the equivalent, in stereo, of running hard and straight on a dark road only to find, all of a sudden, that there’s a cliff in its place and you’re right at the edge, just about managing to not fall off.

I’ve found nuances in the crash cymbal -- that brass plate used excessively to rabble-rouse at the end of songs -- that I didn’t know existed. I learned of the variations that can be achieved in its sound depending on where, how hard and with what part of the stick I struck it. How much of its sound do you want to “release”? How long do you want the sound to sustain itself? Not that I ever learned to do this in the flow of playing, but I thought it was very, very cool when a drummer would strike the crash cymbal hard only to move forward lightning quick and silence it with his hand - the part of the sound of the crash that doesn’t get played, that’s like a caged tigress looking for a way out. And how well it can be used as a bridge, as a connecting phrase between one part of a song and the next. The sound of the crash cymbal has always reminded me of one of those wallet-busting firecrackers that are used at celebrations: the one that goes high up into the night sky and bursts into a thousand glittering droplets of colour and light. A perfect hit of the crash cymbal has always brought this image into my head; it’s just that now, I can see each of those individual droplets a little more clearly.

Pictures of Amsterdam and The Royale With Cheese

2007-05-02T22:46:00.000+05:30

I've put up a couple of more picture albums, one of Amsterdam and one of a visit to the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels.

I'll have a link on the sidebar for the pictures from now. ==>>


                             VINCENT
                  You know what they call a Quarter
                  Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

                             JULES
                  They don't call it a Quarter
                  Pounder with Cheese?

                             VINCENT
                  No, they got the metric system
                  there, they wouldn't know what the
                  fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

                             JULES
                  What'd they call it?

                             VINCENT
                  Royale With Cheese.

                             JULES
                  Royale With Cheese.


After the part about the Hash Bars in Amsterdam comes the part about
The Royale With Cheese in Paris. I HAD to have one, if only for the millions
of curious readers of this blog who ask me what the URL means. (I know,
I should have got a picture of the menu too). If all that took was one lunchtime
of enduring the crowds and assembly-line food at McDonalds, so it had to be!

Pictures from Paris

2007-04-21T15:15:00.000+05:30

Pictures from a wonderful six days in Paris.

At the Roof Top Film Festival

2007-03-29T13:36:00.000+05:30

A bunch of people got together to organize this; good fun all 'round. A short piece about it here, for Chennai Metblogs.

World Cup 2007 On TV

2007-03-14T21:10:00.000+05:30

You’ll remember how much of a ruckus SET MAX’s presentation of the last cricket World Cup created – tarot card readers, Mandira Bedi, the whole shebang. For a while, it was fun laughing about some of the cleverer stuff that was written and said because of the easy pickings that the telecast offered. It got tiresome very quickly though. The tiresomeness was soon replaced by an acute irritation when you thought about how all those wasted hours could’ve otherwise been, plainly and simply, cricket talk.

Nothing I saw on the first matchday’s telecast told me that watching this World Cup on television is going to be any different. In fact, with further compromises regards advertising space in the years since the last Cup in 2003, we might actually be much worse off now during the innings – among other things, large banners hide the top quarter of your screen during replays (in a close-up shot the screen’s top quarter is often where you’re watching how the bat comes down). And while it has always happened on occasion, it now seems to have become policy decision to cut to ads right after the last ball of an over is bowled, no matter what state of play the ball is in.

(It bothers me that I’m even talking about this right now, when the cricket and the joy of how much cricket there is to look forward to is all that we should be talking about.)

I’ve already started to react. Almost reflexively. I refuse to let the remote control stray beyond grabbing distance of my right hand. I do not want to hear a single second of the ads between overs – you can turn your eyes away, but you can’t switch your ears off without pressing that Mute button. I realize that I can’t entirely turn Mandira Bedi off; I’m sure I’ll end up hearing her enough times through this World Cup – if only because I’m not in control of the remote (I’m watching the match at a friend’s place, I’m at a pub, etc). I watched some of the pre-match show before the West Indies-Pakistan opener. Not three and a half minutes had passed before I’m on the phone to a friend ranting about how Bedi had inappropriately cut in thrice in those three and a half minutes of conversation in the studio. Thrice! Do I need to be pissed off and raving about this half an hour before my favourite sport’s most awaited tournament is scheduled to start? Shouldn’t I only be licking my lips in anticipation right now?

As such rhetorical questions surged through me, I realized it’s going to be a long, hard road ahead for the cricket couch potato. At 47 days, the ICC World Cup defines Overlong Sporting Event in the dictionary. Watching the coverage through the length of such a bloated tournament can have drastic effects. You’ve got to fortify yourself every way you can.

For a while then, I try to consciously ignore Bedi: I attempt to shut my ear-brain communication off when she’s on air; trying to automatically tune out when my ears sense her vocal frequency. It works at times, and often that’s because the rest of the panel completely ignores her too (while Charu Sharma makes apologetic overtures and looks like he’s not quite sure whose side he’s supposed to be on).

Another two minutes of this, and I decide I’m better off watching just the match. I reach for the Mute button on my remote.

A couple of hours later, I’m watching the live telecast. Ramnaresh Sarwan just launched Danish Kaneria for six. A cartoon character materializes and dances to bhangra music that’s played right over the audio broadcast, and a banner appears in the middle of the screen asking me if I’m “Hungry for another six?”

I think I need to talk to my therapist.

Appears in Hafta Magazine on March 15th 2007.

Review: The Pursuit Of Happyness

2007-03-12T09:46:00.000+05:30

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that blows you away just by how utterly simple and beautiful it is. The Pursuit Of Happyness is one of those movies, a heart-warming story of father and son, human beings, pulling together. Will Smith and eight-year-old Jaden Smith, father and son in real life, bring this to us on screen poignantly, and always with a look-on-the-bright-side lightness. This optimism comes to define, and uplift, the movie itself. And in the process, rising above the difficult circumstances that are integral to its story.

Chris Gardner’s job as a salesman is a false start; with a wife and young son to provide for, he can hardly make ends meet. Tough times are in store. His wife leaves him, and he and his son – who he fiercely refuses to give his wife custody of – are evicted from their home because he can’t pay the rent. A touching, often sad story of the two of them up against life’s odds unfolds. Each time they survive one (just about), you find yourself hoping that their next episode is an inflection that turns the tide for the better. Often, they only find themselves up against another trying circumstance.

Jaden Smith, both as Christopher Gardner in this movie and as Jaden the actor, is memorable: Because of the events around him rocking his world, Christopher is often unsettled, and sometimes displays it, just as a kid his age would. But he does not dwell, and often takes comfort in his dad’s presence, just as an eight-year-old kid would (that Will Smith is his real dad must surely have helped). In turn, Chris Gardner, in spite of the hopeless situation that he sees and the desperation that he feels, looks to Christopher for re-assurance. His son is easily distracted by the present moment, and doesn’t know enough to comprehend just how badly off they might be. He sometimes even forgets that things are looking gloomy, something that adults are able to do much less effectively. “Are you happy?”, Chris asks his son in one scene, “Because if you’re happy, then I’m happy, then things are fine”, taking comfort from the child-like optimism that his son has.

You sense that Gardner always has a fierce ray of hope that never goes away. Will Smith’s performance is moving, and empathetic, you’re rooting for him fervently. He brings many unwritten (and ineffable) facets to his character, and a large part of my being drawn into this movie and then loving it is because of what Will Smith brings to his role.

A friend once described Cliffs Of Dover, that beautiful guitar song by Eric Johnson, as “Kozhandhaikku sollara maadhiri solleerukaan, illae?” (“He’s played it as it would be played to a child.”). The description gave me goosebumps. I knew exactly what he meant. I know I had felt that way too, but had not been able to express it the way he did. Each note from that guitar in that four-minute song is pure, positive energy, utterly simple and uplifting in its sound. I would describe The Pursuit Of Happyness in exactly the same way. This movie is persuasive proof that a story can be told simply, without adornment or flourish, and still fully engage your senses and leave strong, lasting impressions.

Edited version in The Economic Times: Madras Plus - March 10, 2007.

Review: The Departed

2007-03-09T11:35:00.000+05:30

Many of Martin Scorsese’s films have a pre-occupation with delinquent subjects, and the fringes of civilized society. The crime-ridden New York City streets of the 1970s in which many of Scorsese’s early works are set in, and indeed the battleground streets we see in Gangs Of New York set a hundred years before that, lend themselves more readily to portraying these fringes. The Departed, however, takes place in the comparatively genteel, rather pretty looking Boston of 2006. Part of Scorsese’s challenge in this movie is to bridge the much wider gap that this present-day setting poses. He does this expertly.

Among The Departed’s multi-pronged cast is Leonardo DiCaprio, fast becoming a Scorsese favourite in the manner that Robert de Niro did in the seventies. Both DiCaprio and Matt Damon are stellar as young cops in what is a star-studded State police department – Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg are all colleagues. They’re out to bust Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the sufficiently eccentric boss of a powerful Boston crime ring. Each side is trying to find ways to infiltrate the other with one of their own.

In a fast-paced crime drama, Scorsese still showers attention on his characters and his scenes, lingering on them, giving them background, adding weight to their individual stories. He delves into his characters and attempts to tell us what it is that “makes” each of their personalities. In a cast of multiple characters (and multiple stars), he hasn’t delved deeper than he does with Jack Nicholson’s Costello. Mob bosses, one imagines, are not difficult characters to sketch colourfully. You can throw in multiple molls, trigger-happy sidekicks, the blackest sense of humour, and still stay credible. In Nicholson’s Frank Costello though, it’s not just all the colours, it’s just the right shades of these colours (like the collar of the purple shirt that peeks out from beneath his coat). Nicholson has aged naturally, and his wrinkles can, in the right light, make him seem world-weary. Here, he funnels that into an impatient cynicism, and a ruthlessness that he wears cockily. He manages to toe that thin line where his character is requisitely over-the-top (which self-respecting capo de la capo isn’t?!) without him actually going over the top with his acting.

Like many of Scorsese’s films, The Departed has a vastness about it. That vastness can be a deliberate part of the story because of how you’re looking at the subject matter. In Gangs Of New York, for example, you’re always given a more sweeping perspective and a social background of the time. But that vastness is not an integral part of a movie like The Departed, which tells a very specific story. Yet Scorsese simultaneously zooms out of the particular tale he’s weaving and gives you a feeling that you’ve got a bird’s eye view, just from how he’s telling it.

This is a turning, twisting story of good cops, bad cops and robbers, one in which you find yourself changing your mind every fifteen minutes about who’s who. There were a few times when the movie seemed in danger of straying, but each time, it stopped short and justified its meandering with another turn of events. The Departed is, among other things, a gripping game of who blinks first – if you can figure out who’s on which side of the nexus, that is.

The Economic Times: Madras Plus - March 9th 2007.

Touché

2007-03-07T09:43:00.000+05:30

Everybody got five questions. There have been three sets of rapid fire so far. The next round is about Sachin Tendulkar. Dean Jones is up against another set of Prannoy Roy's fish-out-of-water, sound-bytey, sometimes-outright-silly questions.

"Is he a better off spinner or a better leg spinner?"

Jones:"His bowling's crap, honestly."

Oops, I think. But everybody seems to be in good enough humour, or at least they’re not showing it if they aren’t.

“Would you rather he open or bat in the middle order?”

Jones: “Flat tracks, open. Otherwise, hold him back.”

Ricky Ponting a few years ago, before a one-day tournament against India (it could’ve even been the last World Cup, I’m not sure), was asked about Ganguly’s batting. He said “Sourav Ganguly is one of the best one-day batsmen in the world on flat tracks.” I smiled when I read that thinly-veiled afterthought, “Ponting slipped it in, didn’t he?!” As much Dean Jones here probably meant that the team should save Tendulkar to bolster the middle order, I think he implied exactly what Ponting did about Ganguly.

“What would you remember about him most?”

Jones: “When he scored two hundreds against us at 16 years old. And that he's the nicest guy around and deserves everything he gets."

In spite of that last one, Jones is treading on ground we're not used to seeing tread, and certainly not on NDTV at primetime and one week before the World Cup, with Prannoy Roy, probably India's best-known television man, as host and asking the questions.

Roy soldiers on: "Who's better, over their entire careers, Lara, Tendulkar, or Ponting?"

Jones: "Ponting, because.."

Roy cuts in, still keeping that smile on his face, but more than a little testily:"Because you're Australian?” He follows it up with fake laughter.

Jones, looking very serious and solemn: "No, because, in big matches and in finals around the world, and right around the world I tell you, nobody's played more match-winning knocks than Ricky Ponting."

“Is Tendulkar past his prime or is his best yet to come?”

Ah, dolly.

Jones: “Past his prime.”

There’s about one-and-a-half seconds of silence. Prannoy Roy is relieved that he can move on. To Barry Richards.

"Is he a better off spinner or a better leg spinner?"

Richards: "Crap, honestly." He follows it up with laughter, but nobody seems to be in the mood for that.

This is one of those panel discussions in front of a big studio audience. The big studio audience is silent, has been silent for a while. And, there are four questions to go.

“Would you rather he open or play middle order?”

Richards: “I think Deano got it spot on. On flat tracks, open.”

Roy then does something that to his credit was quite seamless (and I guess from years of television journalism he’s perfected that). Barry Richards is up for another three questions, but Roy turns right to Ajay Jadeja (who’s next in line), deliberately and pointedly not affording Richards even the courtesy of an acknowledging smile, and continues. Jadeja, of course, is much less direct, in fact he loves Sachin Tendulkar, and tells India so, and everybody's relieved.

But I'm more interested in that one split-second (and the circumstances that lead to it) when Prannoy Roy cut his session with Barry Richards cold turkey and turned to Jadeja.

x-----------------x

There was a time when England’s idolatry of David Beckham was comparable to this. Remember when that Turkish player who was playing for Aston Villa spit on/kicked Beckham in an England-Turkey international? He’s back at Aston Villa for his next league game, and Premier League football fans want nothing to do with him from then, outright taunting him and making his life difficult. He gets released from Villa and leaves England shortly after.

But England has never been afraid to criticize Beckham, or call out his shortcomings and underperformances for what they were. I do NOT mean to start off a debate about whether Tendulkar is a better cricketer than Beckham is a better footballer. I only chose to talk about Beckham because the idolising and the hyper-sensitivity that we see all around Tendulkar seems to have had a parallel there, if only for a brief period of time.

Maybe Dean Jones and Barry Richards said the kind of thing that we're not used to hearing, but they definitely were being serious, and honest, and this was their point of view... for a nation that loves discussing and analysing its cricket (and its cricket superstars), shouldn't that be enough for us to listen?

It Took Me By Surprise, I Must Say...

2007-03-03T19:02:00.000+05:30

I learned that it was Marvin Gaye’s song long after I listened to and fell in love with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine. I always seem to have had a vague, only somewhat unjustified dislike for Gaye; overplayed numbers like Sexual Healing and What’s Goin’ On in mush scenes of romantic comedies has long since ensured that. So I felt more than a little chagrined that one of my all-time favourite rock songs had its provenance in this syrupy, cloying R & B thing that Gaye seemed to be doing.

When I finally got hold of Gaye’s version of Grapevine, there was some skepticism. In my mind, CCR had this song absolutely nailed – their crisp, no-nonsense delivery was perfect for the occasion (John Fogerty acknowledges his lover’s “plans to make me blue” but what better way to respond than to stomp out an indignant “I bet you’re wondering how I knew” that sounds halfway between informing her that he knows and taunting her?). For once, they also get past their penchant for brevity and let loose, playing ten-odd minutes of an acoustic-y, rough-cut-diamond drum sound, and a thumping, rowdy, bluesy guitar solo that I wished would never end. At every inflection of that solo, I willed it to continue and surge forward, hoping each time that this wasn’t the song’s final turn before it pulled up.

But I guess what I hadn’t counted on was Gaye responding altogether differently. There’s something about the way he sings this song, a sad-but-trying-not-to-show-it quality. When he sings “You know a man ain’t supposed to cry / All these tears I still hold inside”, you hear the lump in his throat, and a self-pride in his voice that your heart goes out to. This seems to me the essence of the song, not the words and what they mean, but the voice that Gaye uses to express them. I can never stop falling in love with what CCR did with the song, but now when I listen to it, through its loud, thumping heartbeat, I sense an absence of something. It’s not an absence that I can define. But for just over three minutes, Marvin Gaye knew exactly how to complete it.

The Shop On The Beach

2007-02-28T13:26:00.000+05:30

There was a shop on the beach just past the footpath that sold cigarettes and soft drinks. I stood there waiting for my cigarette, and watched the woman hand it to me. She was about as old as my grandmother, and spoke about her afflictions with a matter of factness that only old people can seem to bring themselves to. It was close to ten p.m., and the man busied himself closing the shop. He was athletically built, dark, with a thick, cat's whiskers moustache. He had the unmistakable features that belied every policeman in this city. I wondered what he was doing there. Wasn't this too sedentary, selling soft drinks for a living? What had he made his peace with? I tended, no, wanted to think that he had made his peace with whatever it was that had brought him here. In spite of seemingly natural inferences to the contrary, my curiosity pleaded for a happy answer. He spoke to another man, eye on the sky, about the possibility of rain that night. His voice held a tone that bordered on the arrogance of self-perceived know-it-all. What story had he brought with him?

There was something about his demeanour and his appearance and just his being there that quietly but surely conveyed the presence of a past life. It was one of those times when you know your mind is on the verge of a trip around its own imagination, and there is that split second before it actually happens when you sense the anticipation within yourself.

I wonder if we're only deceiving ourselves when we think we're imagining the lives of other people. All that we're really doing is putting ourselves, even if only as spectators, in a world we think is imagined but is actually only a product of all that we know and of all that we know of. Are we even truly capable of imagination?

And then it happened, a ridiculous catharsis, when I noticed he had a limp.

Suddenly, it almost burned in me, not the pity that I did feel for his handicap, but the thought of what it had brought him to. I felt what seemed like empathy. At the same moment, I found myself wondering if empathy was what I should be feeling.

Empathy probably had no business being there.

Review: Music And Lyrics

2007-02-17T12:20:00.000+05:30

Remember that Backstreet Boys video called Just Want You To Know from their new album that was on the music channels recently? They’re disguised in gaudy hair, leather jackets, a beat-up convertible with its top off, and other such charming relics from the eighties’ American music scene. As an ode to 80s glam, the video was sufficiently tacky, and, now and then, cleverly so. Now imagine one of the band members in the video as a real person, and construct a movie around him. What was originally a kitschy, fun four-and-a-half minute music video, enough for some sharp parody and a few fanboy injokes, is now forced to become the story constructed around it, with paraphernalia like characters and love interests and a plot.

Music and Lyrics is a lot like that movie you just imagined. It stars Hugh Grant as Alex Fletcher, a musically empty-tank pop star who gets by performing mostly at college re-unions and amusement parks. At basically any place that has a chance of finding the now-forty-year-old women who were once Grant’s adoring female-majority teen fanbase. Drew Barrymore plays Sophie Fisher, a bumbling, earnest housekeeper assigned to Grant’s digs. By a twist of movie fate, she finds herself in songwriting collaboration with Grant. Both actors, in terms of their respective characters’ personalities, are in familiar territory, and are at obvious ease in their roles. Grant is constantly witty in that very Hugh Grant kind of way. Like those many self-effacing lines that begin to trail off past halfway. Has there been an actor more precisely typecast, time after time, than Hugh Grant? The scenes with the two of them, therefore, in leading up to writing a song together, are probably the most enjoyable in the movie, so much so that I found myself rooting for their efforts when they’d finally finished a first draft of the song and were to play it together for the first time.

Even with that not-uninteresting beginning, this film always seemed like a romantic comedy that could go either way. Grant’s and Barrymore’s quirky wisecracks notwithstanding, the humour and the tone are most often the too-quick, too-cute variety that sit-coms and other films of Music and Lyrics’s kind have long since pushed into tiresomeness.

There are Grant is to write a song for Cora, a teenaged pop nymphette who is a cross between Christina Aguilera and latter-day Madonna. Contrast her as today’s pop music sellout with Hugh Grant as an eighties musician who has sold out. Especially in a movie whose premise is musicians’ lives, this is an intriguing contrast between two of the lead characters. Sadly, nothing is done with it.

Just a couple of times, Music and Lyrics suggests it is in on the joke. And this was in keeping with the movie’s setting, as a lot of the glam appeal of eighties music is like that. That’s what 80s bands with big hair and exhibitionist music now want you to believe, at any rate. In this movie, take the end-credits, for instance. It is a montage of “deleted” shots full of silliness and general fun on the sets of an eighties music video shoot. That montage and the actual video at the beginning worked well. But the movie in between doesn’t quite, and neither does it imbibe its own attempts at parody convincingly enough. Music and Lyrics starts off with an airy likeability but ends up highly diluted.

Babel

2007-02-03T01:22:00.000+05:30

The trouble with movies that have multiple plot-lines playing out remotely is that the viewer knows there’s a common theme or a binding thread, and unless he’s engaged enough by the individual stories, will sit back and wait for it. And when the thread between these stories sits only lightly in evidence, you question the build-up even more in retrospect.

Babel is a set of seemingly unconnected stories, each of which is set in a different part of the world (Yes, one of those). Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are American tourists on a bus riding through a desert in Africa. We are also introduced to Chieko and her set of teenage friends in a city in Japan, a Moroccan family of five living in a village, and a Mexican nanny assigned to watch over two American children. The film switches between these fables randomly, as a rather cumbersome thread begins to reveal itself.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director, tries to give each of his settings a mark of identity, a distinct character amidst its essential randomness. But the results are often unwieldy and a little forced. Attempts to capture the milieu of a Moroccan village, for instance, results in faux-authentic street shots of children running after a bus. Much of the movie had an air of self-importance about it, such as the many stretches filmed in photogenic slow-motion with heavy, intoning music.

The way the movie unfolds suggests it is always building up to a climactic moment, a moment that will shed light on and give a context to whatever we saw leading up to it. There are extended stretches in the film showing us teenagers in Japan meeting in malls, flirting and hanging out with friends. And stretches that show us two suburban American kids at home with their over-worked nanny (who, in case you’re wondering, is trying to get away so she can go to her son’s wedding across the California border in Mexico). In real life, these are everyday, banal happenings. On film, apart from conveying to us that these are random, ordinary people and something ominous is about to happen to their status quo, not enough is done with these scenes so that we begin to care about these characters and their situations.

Inarritu tries to use his everyday snapshots to illustrate a lofty human theme, but never quite pulls it off. In the process, Babel becomes rather like an anecdote that stakes too much on the weight of its punchline. The punchline, then, is put under pressure to enlighten the rest of what we have seen, to justify the movie, in a way. As the last shot fades, we see a dedication from the film-maker on the screen, a sort of moralistic reminder to the audience that Babel’s theme does indeed carry a serious message. Much like a vociferous lawyer in a courtroom, Babel overestimates the gravity of what it is saying, and how it is being said. This is a story, or a set of stories, that is threaded together awkwardly and heavily without having enough to back its weight.

Originally, here.

Reviews: United 93 and The Guardian

2007-01-31T13:45:00.000+05:30

United 93 opens with two deliberately contrasting images: The first is of an airline pilot getting into uniform for another day’s work. The other is of two young men with looks of intense foreboding in their eyes, getting dressed and offering prayer. The film reconstructs the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and shows how hijackers’ attempts to maintain control of the plane were subsequently thwarted by a group of passengers. The plane eventually crashed into farmland, shortly after the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, killing everybody on board.

We also see a lot of what happened on the ground that morning, at air traffic control centers struggling to cope with planes jumping radar and at military units in a state of alert in case of further attacks. The crises at hand give rise to many moments of conflict between these agencies, and United 93 is as much a chronicle of these situations as it is of the events on the plane.

It is on this on-the-ground canvas that the film’s tone and intent is established. During these scenes, you almost sense the film-makers taking a conscious step back and allowing the visual narrative to flow with minimal interference. They seem to realize that the natural drama and tension is adequately conveyed simply by giving us a no-frills version of how events panned out, without too much need to intervene and dramatize. There’s always a danger that a movie centered around a plane hijacking will end up milking its inherent drama for all it is worth. United 93 refreshingly, and significantly, steers clear.

Much of what transpired on board the airplane is pieced together from phone calls that passengers made to their families during the hijack. In the homes of these families, and in the air traffic control and military units that the action keeps switching between, we see footage and hear voices from TVs tuned into live news channels. This is very early coverage of the attacks: that window of time between televisions tuning in to the two planes hitting the world trade center and televisions not entirely grasping what had happened. These snapshots have been played endlessly since then, but almost always as a pre-cursor to the ’larger’ questions and reactions and analyses that followed. By giving them a human, chronological context, United 93 puts these images back in the most immediate context in which they took place.

For a subject that lends itself to statement-making as easily as September 11 does, United 93’s demeanour is admirably restrained. This is a real-life drama whose tone encourages you to buy into the film’s authenticity willingly.

When Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) is asked to take a break from his job as a marine rescuer and play teacher at a Coast Guard training facility, I decided that the stage was well-set. Probably because of the natural intensity that is an inevitable part of such settings, boot camp movies have always provided fodder for engaging movie drama.

Among his students, Randall sees the most potential in Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher), a champion swimmer whose troubled past has somehow resulted in a single-mindedness to make it to the coast guard’s elite. Fischer is possessed with the kind of against-all-odds-and-then-some determination that, depending on how the character comes off in the movie, can either translate into the audience rooting for life’s underdog or descend rapidly into cliché.

In The Guardian’s case, one will most likely be pulled towards the latter. Just as you’re thinking that the film seems to be veering towards credibility, it manages to steer itself yet again in the direction of cliché. Most of the movie is set in a training unit. You would think that the uniformed life provides an ideal platform to “keep it real”, so to speak. This film, rather than doing that, ends up over-produced, its dialogues going for the jugular too frequently, and its sequences a little too deliberately slick. There’s a scene at the pool, for instance, where the team is going through its swimming drills. This is reduced to an Ashton Kutcher photo-op, his freestyle motion carefully in sync with a rap song that plays in the background. Each stroke, but of course, is in time with the thumping beat.

The centerpiece of the movie, at least in intent, is how the relationship between Costner’s and Kutcher’s characters develops. Costner is the seen-it-all veteran who now sees shades of himself in a young Kutcher. While Kutcher is all youthful bravado, Costner is the old-timer who still hasn’t lost any of it, taking care of business with the nonchalance and smug assurance of having been there before. They’re each trying to gain the other’s respect and admiration. But what could have been a potentially insightful exploration into the relationship they forge (and into their individual characters) turns into a series of rather flat episodes of each man simply trying to impress the other.

Kutcher, in this movie, is constantly asking the audience to take him more seriously than the pretty-boy image that precedes him. In spite of the tough exterior that his role requires, the tone of the film does not let him stake his case – and I can’t be sure he would have even if the movie had allowed him to. Zoom out a little and you find that Kutcher’s battle of trying to reach above his pop image epitomizes the movie itself. As a portrayal of the life of coast guards, The Guardian wants us to take it seriously. It occasionally tries, but is not able to get too far away from its big budget roots. Halfway through the film, you may find yourself wondering – and quite rightly too – why everybody seems to talk in punch lines. A film dedicated to a creed of people whose motto is, according to the end credits, ‘So Others May Live’ certainly deserves a less glamourized, less Hollywoodized portrayal.

Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, and a bit of an Oscars rant

2007-01-30T09:59:00.000+05:30

The insatiable appetite of the world’s film and television audience for Hollywood has allowed me to watch a few editions of the Screen Actors’ Guild awards over the last few years (the latest edition was last night). Each time, what always struck me about the S.A.G. awards was the unmistakable sense of For Us, By Us about it. The thank you speeches will tell you this outright, but otherwise too, there is always an atmosphere that this was a room of colleagues and this was the night they raised their hat to the good work amongst them. As opposed to a sense of the world pronouncing its judgement (or making its opinion known conclusively, at any rate) that the Oscars take on and even begin to mean.

The S.A.G. Awards displays, refreshingly, a relative absence of the media-posturing that is such an inseparable part of the Oscars. The S.A.G. Awards does fall well within the media radar – the fact that I can watch the event in its entirety on television year after year in India reflects that – but it has none of the extreme focus and hype that the Oscars generate. To the average fan of movies made in Hollywood, while the Oscars is a much chewed-over and anticipated event, most awards leading up to the Oscars, such as S.A.G., are of interest purely for indications of who might be favourite to win the Oscar. Hence, while the result sheet at the end of the night will generate much media interest and poring over, the awards show itself is much less of the world’s conversation starter that the Oscars become in the weeks leading up to it.

I love the thank you speeches at the S.A.G. Awards, and I’m referring to the tone of the speech rather than specific instances of what was actually said. Foremost is that the S.A.G. allows winners much more stage-time than the Oscars. Have you noticed at the Oscars that even as winners are handed their trophy and arrive at the microphone, they already seem to be distinctly aware of the fact that their time on stage is rapidly disappearing? It has always bothered me that the Oscars forces its winners off the stage in what is often the moment that defines their life’s achievement. That it won’t give people – the very people it is supposed to be celebrating – the dignity of being allowed to complete their sentences as the world watches. The S.A.G. Awards, on the other hand, being not as high-handed or self-important as the Oscars are, is not above allowing its winners to pause for thought (and breath) without the threat of your microphone being cut off and the hostess escorting you off stage. And you can see that the winners are much happier for it. In fact, it improves the thank you speech, and makes it a much more engaging monologue. The winners aren’t under the pressure of having to reel out the names of the twenty people they want to thank at the grave risk of missing one, all within the thirty-odd seconds they have before the producer starts making like he’s slicing his throat off with his hand.

The thank-you speech at the Oscars is so often hurried. Although watching an absolutely ecstatic actress with an Oscar in one hand switching between names tumbling out of her mouth, thinking of still more people to thank, and starting to cry those first tears of joy makes for extremely endearing television, it becomes more about the drama of it. It’s voyeurism, mouth agape, at the tumult of emotion in another human being, that’s the draw of the Oscars presentation. Take, as a contrast, Forest Whitaker’s speech at the S.A.G. Awards last night when he won the actor award for The Last King Of Scotland. He started off with a short silence trying to figure out what to say, and followed with a speech that came in fits and starts. I like how this was ok, if this is how Forest Whitaker’s speech is, then this is how it is, and there’s no under-the-spotlight pressure of having what you say in your moment of glory conform to television-ratings needs.

The Tenant

2007-01-27T11:13:00.000+05:30

The possibilities were fascinating considering that Roman Polanski both directs and plays lead in The Tenant. Especially in a role that is as fraught as his: Polanski’s character, Monsieur Trelkovsky, through the course of the movie, becomes less and less in touch with reality, seemingly incapable of distinguishing between episodes that actually take place and episodes that he imagines. I wonder if Polanski the director first conceived Trelkovsky in a certain way, and then as he started ‘acting’ the character and getting into his skin, started seeing angles that he hadn’t seen before. Did he see ways that his character (and the movie) could be portrayed differently? Or did he recognize his dual role beforehand and approach the conceptualizing accordingly, allowing the combined output of actor and director to shape and guide the character?

Polanski plays a quiet young single man who moves into an apartment in Paris. Even as he is settling in, he starts to feel that the building and everything about it, his fellow occupants, the landlord, his own apartment and its past, is spooked. Each scene seems real, as if it actually happens, and there are no indications that suggest otherwise. But as we go along, we realize that some of these episodes are mutually exclusive, that if one episode had actually taken place, the other could not have, it had to have been imagined. This is the stage on which a dark, often fantastic story unfolds, with reality and a game that we’re never quite certain who’s playing play out in an uneven, unsure juxtaposition.

The ambiguity of Trelkovsky’s actions is conveyed perfectly. Is Trelkovsky schizophrenic? Are his neighbours actually doing all of this to him or is he imagining the neighbours doing all of this to him? Are there actually people standing inside the bathroom down the corridor from his apartment, expressionless and motionless, for hours, or is he a victim of his increasingly volatile imagination? Polanski’s performance as an actor is mysterious; his character is in a state of going through the motions as if he doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Trelkovsky never quite seems to be able to explain his own actions; he always looks like he’s questioning himself and how in touch with reality he is. He does not do this in soliloquy that often, in films, provides insightful little dekkos into the minds of characters going around the bend. Neither are these questions in the form of coherent thoughts being voiced aloud. The self-doubt, then, is conveyed through his eyes, in the way he looks at himself in the mirror, and in the reflection against the glass of the bathroom door.

There is no accompanying music in the background almost throughout. The absence starkly brought home how much the ear is used to having these background sounds assist you in settling into the mood of the film. You consequently participated that much more in settling into that mood in your head, in getting into the skin of the movie. There’s a scene in which he’s crossing the road in late evening traffic and is hit by a car. You heard only street noise, and those are the only sounds you’re tuned into. It heightened the reality of the situation, making what you were watching seem more like an actual street and less like a street in a movie, less cinematic and a little more visceral.

There are many instances that suggest that they don’t quite fit, or seem just a tiny bit out of place in the scheme of things. I loved the scenes where he is with his friends, such as when he first when he invites them over to his apartment when he’d just moved in, as a nocturnal celebration involving a lot of ribbing and laughter. At such times, he seems to live in a dichotomous personal world. His aloofness and deceptive quietude are a contrast to how his friends are, all more extroverted and involved and risk-taking. There are no outward indications of this being a contradiction in terms for him – he remains in his removed state all through. In a more microcosmic, staggered way of showing us how this happens, he smokes one brand of cigarettes, Gauloises, in one scene, refusing a pack of Marlboro at the pub, and in the next couple of scenes smokes Marlboro, first not minding it and then specifically asking for it. This is before another scene where he asks for Gauloises. All of this is subtle, in that they never call attention to themselves, they just seem to happen, but then that is exactly how you picture a confused mind’s contradictions taking shape and gaining momentum, an indication of something amiss here, a small change in behaviour there.

What boggles the mind, and is brilliant cinematic touch, is that the ambiguity, the layers that each interpretation of a scene provided, continues right through. Polanski’s character traverses each of these layers discretely, and yet at the same time. How these layers appear and discern themselves, and how one layer develops into another and take on such strong undertone became, to me, emblematic of the film itself.

The degeneration in how his mind is functioning, taking random turns and throwing up tangents, is reflected in how scenes in the movie are conceived, in increasingly twisted ways. The not-quite right aspects of his personality unravel slowly, in a morbidly teasing fashion, in a way that his doubts on his own reality are transferred to you too. But there were many times, not least at the end, when I felt that one thread of the movie tied in perfectly to another one. Every so often, a common motif between two or more threads started to reveal itself. It is mind-boggling that Polanski – and especially given that he also has to constantly imagine himself in the role – intevwove those threads into an atmosphere as bizarre as what we see here. Polanski plays around with your head as much as he plays around with Trelkovsky’s. As both director and actor, Polanski is exquisite as mad scientist in his own and in The Tenant’s mindspace.

New Adventures In Hi-Fi

2007-01-25T00:34:00.000+05:30

You have to be in an active-minded, adventurous mood when you want to listen to new music, music you haven’t heard before. In fact it’s the only time you should listen to new music if you want to give it any respect at all. When you’re playing something you’re familiar with, you’re playing a piece of music that you know you like, and know how it makes you feel. You want to revel in the familiarity of the sound, rather than have the sound intrigue you and force your ear and brain to perk up.

We receive new music in a very different way than we receive music we’ve already heard before. You’re always a step ahead of music you know. We often find ourselves mouthing the opening line of that verse a couple of bars before it actually starts. Or taking that guitar solo four steps ahead of the note it is currently on and then allowing the notes to sound out and fill in the pattern. In a way, we’re looking back at the music. By mouthing the part beforehand, you’re telling your brain that you know the song, and parallelly, you’re filling in the parts of it that you don’t.

The time it takes to ‘know’ a song can vary wildly: you might be rocking to the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction right after your first or second listen, but you can still manage to play that King Crimson album for about the fiftieth time and find entire musical dimensions that you hadn’t noticed before. Does this simply translate to more ‘complex’ music taking longer to become familiar with? ( making comparisons of any sort between songs and bands and genres is a messy business, but I think we can agree that King Crimson’s music is rather more complex than the Rolling Stones’). Familiarity with a song does not need to equal you knowing all of it. Rather, ‘knowing’ a song, to our brains, equates to finding pegs that will provide that anchor of familiarity: the song’s back-beat maybe, or a particular riff. Which is why the first description of a song often tends to be its time signature (when you’re at a concert, how often has the musician said ‘this song is called so-and-so and it’s to the count of five’?). This isn’t because the time signature is the most revealing aspect of the song. Hardly. Saying that a song is played in ¾ time tells you almost nothing about the song itself. A song’s time signature more serves to deconstruct a song than to describe it. But what it does is set your brain up to fitting in the pieces of the song into a structure that it can readily comprehend. Our mind is already looking for that anchor.

What about the songs that we aren’t listening to for the first time, but yet aren’t completely familiar with yet? These are the songs that still intrigue us, and constitute a large majority of our playlists at any given time. Here, we instinctively catches on to the parts of the song that we do know. And when we do find something new in that song, our mind rushes out to grab it. Just for that instant, it is in unchartered territory, and then the mind goes back into its comfort zone of familiarity. There have been times when I’ve had to nudge myself out of this when I’m listening to a song that still holds discovery-potential. We become more easily familiar – and hence slip into that comfort zone faster -- with a 4/4 tune with a strict verse-chorus-solo structure even if the song is new to us. The opposite happens with more ‘complex’ songs. The Crunge off Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy album, for instance, is a song I really like and have heard many times, more times even than many songs that I consider myself more familiar with. Yet its 10-beat time to start with and changing signatures as the song progresses have prevented my brain from allowing the song to settle into me. This is a song that I’ve listened to many times before, yet it isn’t a song that my mind has pegged down yet. In this case, it is more the unfamiliarity of the song – and hence the excitement of discovering things about it that I haven’t pegged down -- that appeals and fuels further listens.

Blood Diamond

2007-01-19T01:20:00.000+05:30

My review here. I haven't talked about the casting too much, and this is a movie that has Leonardo Dicaprio in it, somebody who has gained enough respect that every performance of his is scrutinised in the context of being an addition to his body of work as an actor. It's not that Dicaprio didn't bring enough to his character, he did. But I'm not sure that all of it worked in that jigsaw-pieces way that great performances often are; you start to see the pieces and how intriguingly the puzzle is constructed. Then you see how some of the pieces fit and you have these little thrills when a piece of the puzzle does find its place.

Five Point Someone, Or How To Kill A Decent Enough Premise By Being Maddeningly Simplistic

2007-01-07T02:11:00.000+05:30

I had one encompassing feeling watching the Madras Players’ staging of Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone. The goal of the play, ostensibly to explore collegian angst by telling a story surrounding three boys through their years in college, ended up becoming simply a telling of a (quite predictable) story surrounding three boys through their years in college.

The idea, of course, was that the collegian angst bit would be explored through the story. The focus, though, was more on plot development than on anything else. In the process, the play became a series of snapshots. One moment, the boys are deciding that they will draw the line at a 6.0 GPA and ‘do things’ with their four years. Scenes that follow include a clumsy meeting between Hari and the professor’s daughter. (Yes, a socially challenged geek meeting a pretty girl is expected to be awkward, but must the scene itself, and subsequent meetings between the two, be executed awkwardly?) Another is of the boys lying on the roof of their college drinking vodka and smoking pot. In another, they are trying to pass an exam by plotting to steal the question paper from their professor’s office the previous night.

While all of these scenes follow each other well enough in terms of how the story develops, they forget that the story itself is supposed to only be part of a larger picture that the play should paint. Just like the plot, the thoughts that the boys have are reduced to a one-follows-the-other series of black-and-whites: We shall not “mug” because we must have fun. I will break away from the group because I need to “focus”. And so on. If you’ve ever been in college and pondered over what you want out of it or out of your life in general, the first thing you will realize is that you do not have a series of yes-or-no answers or decisions to your questions. Forget the answers; the questions don’t get framed that conveniently.

All through, there are indications that aspects of each of the boys’ pasts have affected them. For instance, Ryan does not love his parents (they sent him to boarding school), and changes the subject when Hari asks him about whether he has had a girlfriend. But how does this affect him now as a person? What about his character is a product of this? There are no attempts to consider these questions, or even give these questions any shape. Troubles from the past are hinted at and left at that. A case of being purposely enigmatic to suggest a false depth, perhaps?

And while there are attempts to anecdote us into believing that these guys have been through four years at IIT together, as best friends no less (a ‘ragging’ incident when they enter college is what brings them together. The aforementioned decisions to not study, drink and smoke pot follow), there is little that indicates that they have changed over their four years there. Ryan is still the happy-go-lucky rich kid; Alok is still the conscientious responsible “adult”; Hari is still undecided but knows he wants to be like Ryan. How have their four years together changed them as friends, in how they are around each other? How has it changed them as people? It’s not just the three main characters, pretty much everybody is painted with the broadest, most simplistic brush strokes possible, reaching out to the nearest available stereotype, with no attention to detail or nuance.

The play, just like the book, works at one (and only one) level, and does all it can to milk it: the anecdotes enacted on stage (or described in the book) will let us re-live some of the things we did (or wanted to do) in college: Not study! Fall in Love! Listen to Pink Floyd and Drink Vodka! As anything more (such as “At one level, this is the tale of every college student in India”), this work falls well short. Of course, at some stage, you will wonder, like I did, how much of the problem must be ascribed to the stage adaptation and how much to the original work that it was adapted from.

Hollywood Girls And Happy Feet!

2006-12-29T12:36:00.000+05:30

Just started doing movie reviews for Economic Times' Madras Plus. The first piece was out a few days ago, it's a review of the movie Happy Feet.

This wasn't the first press screening I went to though. That was reserved for a film that I eventually did not write about, the reasons for which will become obvious shortly. I understood that a movie called 'Death And Life' was being screened, and was asked to review it if I thought it sounded interesting enough. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on IMDB. There was a thriller released this year called 'Death And Life Of Bobby Z', starring Laurence Fishburne. Sounded good to me, so off I went.

The movie, though, turned out to be 'Dead Or Alive', a horrendous Oriental-American flick that I learned later from a couple of friends (who stunned me by recognizing the name of the movie!) is based on a video game of the same name. Such obvious, crass pandering I have never seen before: Bad acting from busty women and biceped men, sudden injections of bad CGI, sudden, hilarious hints at possible lesbian action, this movie had it all.

The interesting thing was, the theatre was filled with people I later figured were cinema distributors/ theatre owner types -- I'd imagine from the suburbs/towns. I can't imagine this one getting a theatrical release anywhere in Madras proper -- who, when they weren't demanding extra doses of the free coffee, were all talking loudly on their cell-phones and to each other (most in the 70-odd crowd seemed previously acquainted) right through the film. The publicist who organized this little do asked us to stay for a 'trailer' at the end of the movie. 'Dead Or Alive' was now re-packaged, or re-named at any rate, 'Hollywood Girls' (clumsily insert title just after censor certificate, just before the actual movie title comes on!). The trailer was almost entirely a mash of all the kitschy sex scenes in what was essentially an action movie (and the sex scenes were vaguely suggestive at best). And oh, the trailer was played twice back-to-back: the first time had voices in Tamizh and the next had voices in Telugu.

Dylan And The Life

2006-12-22T00:19:00.000+05:30

The format of Bob Dylan World Tours 1966-1974 and the way it is structured is interesting: the only tools are pictures, lots of them, and interviews with people who were close to Dylan during that period. In a work that is based around music, you’re used to expecting the visuals that illustrate it to be a little more kinetic. I was immediately reminded of how many times I’ve thought that there are some brilliant pictures of Bob Dylan I’ve seen in magazines and websites, right from the early part of his career, and many of them pictures of him in off-stage, performance-hat-off situations – I think the word of choice is ‘candid’. All the pictures in this film are shown to us by Barry Feinstein*, Dylan’s official photographer and the eye behind many of those great great Dylan pictures we’ve seen in magazines and on album covers, of a Dylan who is cocky, geeky, boyish. Many of those pictures always managed, at least in the way I remember them, to catch that glint in his eyes and that’s always been the best part about them.

The film’s title is also the name of a Dylan tribute band, and its frontman Joel Gilbert (who fancies he resembles Dylan much more than he actually does) is the director and protagonist of this film. His principal interviewee, Feinstein, lives in Woodstock, which is where Dylan lived and spent much of his mid- and late-sixties. Woodstock as a place is not just mythologized, it also exists in isolation in the kind of images it evokes; you’d be forgiven for thinking that the place existed only for those few months building up to and for the three days during the Festival. Knowing that it has a music ‘history’, if only because one of its vanguards lived there during his most creative period, somehow makes Woodstock a little less… contrived, in my head. Not to say that I think the Three Days Of Peace And Love was contrived, but it’s been portrayed as (and really, all we have living halfway around the world and forty years later is how people have chosen to portray it) too much of a coming together, too much people reaching a ‘higher’ plane, it’s almost as if somebody only has to mention Woodstock and you’re supposed to have these exalted, genuflect-inducing images in your head. (And you only have to watch the movie to realize that the music, while entertaining and even throwing up some career performances, was hardly of a uniformly high quality, I felt distinctly underwhelmed after several of the twenty-odd performances that populate the official Woodstock film.)

Back to the pictures: Often, Dylan isn’t looking into the camera, or in its direction. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem like he even knows the camera is in the room (Feinstein tells us he much prefers shooting pictures of day-in-the-life Dylan than performance Dylan). He wasn’t the “look at me” attention-grabber that somebody like Mick Jagger was; in fact, I’m pretty sure he kept away from the spotlight. Yet he allowed himself to be photographed pretty much anywhere -- There are pictures of him sitting by himself in an empty concert hall, with kids running behind him as he walks by on a street in Liverpool, just so many everyday situations. (Gilbert to Feinstein: “Was anything off-limits to take pictures of?” “Nothing”). I wondered if this could suggest a strange kind of narcissism in Dylan. A more private kind, perhaps?

What excited me about this film as a music fan is that there are always these tidbits that are thrown up at you, curious anecdotes about the music life.

Some that will leave you a little chilled by its immediacy: Like when Feinstein tells you about how he flew to San Francisco to do an assignment for a band called Pearl, one of whose members was Janis Joplin.

“She was very professional. I took the pictures and went to show them to her the next day. And she had died.”

And some like this, when he’s on his way to Al Aronowitz’s house (who he calls the ‘Godfather of Rock Journalism’), in what is one of my favourite bits in the movie:

“.. to visit with Al Aronowitz, the godfather of rock journalism. Al Aronowitz had written an important article in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968 about Bob Dylan’s life in Woodstock. More importantly, he was very close to Bob Dylan in the mid-sixties and also close to the Beatles and he helped arrange the first meeting between the two. I couldn’t wait to get the details.”

Especially in the way he said that last sentence, his schoolboy giddiness is almost visceral, and you can’t help sharing in the excitement.

Aronowitz is almost startling in his honesty; he says about Dylan: “I consider him immortal. I sort of hoped that some of his talent would rub off on me.” (emphasis mine). It was so heart-felt, and it also beautifully conveys the effect a musician and his music can have on people’s lives and how it can give people strength and joy and comfort. These feelings are extremely personal, and oftentimes, musicians don’t understand this, rather, they just don’t know how much their music can mean to somebody. I wish more of them did know exactly how much their music has added to the lives of people who listen to it, because they deserve to.

And then Aronowitz goes on, exuberantly, in response to a question about the Beatles: “The Beatles were sensational, they were so talented and their music was so great... they brought this great feeling to the world.” There is an unmatched authenticity in watching a white-bearded 75-year old man who has known and been part of the scene for so long, and yet the familiarity hasn’t translated to detachedness or lack of enthusiasm about how he felt about it and his experiences in being a part of it.

He goes on, juicily, to describe an evening he and Dylan spent in the company of the Beatles:

“The lobby is crowded, full of cops, and there’s some overflow too, from the suite next door. There’s TV personalities, and all kinds of people waiting to meet the Beatles. There was a bed along the wall of one room, and there was John and the other Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein at the head of the bed. We (Dylan and I) were sitting on the bed. And Bob rolled a joint and I handed the joint to John, and he smiles and gives it to Ringo and says “Just so it’s taste-tested.” John was the ring-leader. Ringo held the joint and, you know, he didn’t know anything about the etiquette of smoking grass, that you pass the joint, because it’s rare, you don’t want to lose any of the smoke…”

“Ringo was the first to get high, he starts laughing, he starts giggling… its infectious laughter! The rest of us are lookin’ at him laughing, and we’re high too. And the rest of us start laughing. And John is laughing so hard, that we start laughing at him laughing.”

Something I noticed strongly in all of these interviews is that you never know when somebody’s saying something completely matter-of-factly and when somebody’s descending into romantic hyperbole. The blurred juxtaposition probably indicates how surreal it was to be surrounded by all of this. Aronowitz, in this instance, was asked “Did the Beatles continue smoking pot?” to which he says “They didn’t stop. They infected the whole world with their... psychedelia.”

Gilbert’s excitement is more subtle. As a questioner, he is staccato and direct. But in between, as he, literally, cuts from one scene to another as he visits and talks to the people he’s chosen to illustrate this perspective of Dylan’s life, you see how much of a big fan of Dylan he is. He talks about a 1967 movie featuring Dylan called Don’t Look Back, telling us in voice-over that “His haunting performance of The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll is what really turned me on to Dylan”.

There’s also much fun to be had during the voice-overs accompanying the introduction of pictures on screen: There’s one of Dylan with a scarf wrapped around his head and neck and wearing sunglasses. Feinstein describes it inimitably, political correctness and tiptoeing-around-references-to-religion be damned: “He looks more like a Sheikh than Bob Dylan the Saviour.”

And when he’s illustrating a picture of Dylan with Jimmy Carter, then a governor, in his Governor’s Mansion. “There was what they call a presidential suite at the Mansion. We went in there and got high. And Carter, governor, future president, says to us ‘You boys don’t get in any trouble now’, and he shut the door behind him.”

The movie is nothing that will make you walk out of your living room at the end of the picture feeling boggled at how much you more enlightened you are. But once in a while, it tells you something that startles you in how it somehow seems to capture the zeitgeist of the place and the time and the people. Or a tiny part of the zeitgeist that tells you just a little bit about how it was and what it was like, You’ll probably walk out happy that you found these tiny little nuggets, treasures really, that you found, maybe in an anecdote, maybe just the way Feinstein said something, or maybe just the grin on the face of the kid standing next to Dylan in that street picture.

* Some would be interested to note that Feinstein was the cameraman for the movie Easy Rider.

The Prince

2006-12-17T01:35:00.000+05:30

Ganguly is back. This, hopefully, is his comeback, italicized like that, and not just a comeback match in the purely literal sense of the word. On the first morning of the first Test against South Africa, India bats first and, accompanied by familiar reactions of consternation, the number six is in quicker than he expects. Andre Nel is being extremely hostile, as he always is, and bowling with that nip, like he often does. He’s bowling around the wicket to Ganguly. First ball is angled in and stays straight, to be defended on Ganguly’s back foot. Nel goes up to him on the deliberately long follow through and snarls, “You’re going to run out of patience.”, heard clearly on the stump mic. Nel’s back with a similar delivery the very next ball, Ganguly doesn’t deal with it as confidently, and Nel has even more to say to him this time. And right at the end you hear Ganguly shoot what we’ll refer to as the Hindi word for a mofo right back at Nel. It wasn’t a retort-worthy thing to say; if anything it’s a little left-handed to cuss somebody up in a language he doesn’t understand. It could suggest that you’re almost, yet not quite ready to look straight back at the other man in the eye. But Ganguly saying it – and maybe even the language that he used to say it – giving it right back to his opponent, was interesting because it was a spontaneous reaction, and spontaneous in an I-won’t-back-down sort of way.

Which is what I loved about Ganguly as a captain. He was arrogant as hell and he wasn’t afraid to wear it on his sleeve. And this isn’t a jingoistic thing, but it felt good that India had a captain – and with it, more importantly, a less ‘soft’ image as a cricket team, maybe even a less soft image as a nation because that’s how important our cricket is to us – who wasn’t afraid to stand up and speak out. Sure, there were many other not-so-pleasant facets to his captaincy, and there sometimes isn’t a convincing-enough way to explain away some of it, but I’m not attempting to counter-balance any of that. There was this incident involving Mike Denness that created a hullaballoo when there were questions about whether Tendulkar had tampered with the ball. Steve Waugh came out and said something about no cricketer being above question and that you pay the price if you meddle with the seam and so on. Ganguly was asked what he thought about Steve Waugh’s comment to which he said – and rightfully too, because Waugh was in no way connected to any of this and really, we had enough of a fire brewing as it was without him coming out and saying something that could fan it – that Waugh should “shut up.” I don’t know if any of our other recent captains would have said that – certainly not Tendulkar himself, he held himself back way too much. Dravid picks his words too carefully, and Azharuddin never gave you the feeling that he was all together when he spoke: hard to imagine him coming up with a comment as pointed as that. And I like how Ganguly kept this separate from the respect and admiration he clearly had for Waugh; I remember he even once talked about how much of a hero Steve Waugh was to him. Yet he didn’t let the respect he had translate into him holding his tongue when he felt he needed to be direct.

I know nothing about the dynamic between Greg Chappell and Saurav Ganguly, except the spin the media’s put on it, or about the dynamic between Ganguly and Dravid for that matter. A long second stint seems unlikely, but I’d like to think he still has it in him for a few last hurrahs. Maybe the brash prince will get the chance to go out the way he wants to. I think we ought not to grudge him that.

The Drama and Artifice of Twenty-20 Cricket

2006-12-05T13:20:00.000+05:30

Originally, here.

India played its first ever Twenty-20 (20-20? 20-Twenty?) international last week, against South Africa. In addition to the general frenzy in the way the cricket was being played, there was a panting fielding captain wired up and answering questions from commentators between deliveries, and in-game interviews conducted by a breathless Ravi Shastri with players in the dugout by the boundary (yes, there’s a dugout too). All meant to leave you with no doubt whatsoever that this new cricket format translates to minute-by-minute television excitement right through. Amusingly, the commentary box seemed to think that they too needed to keep up with the accelerated state of affairs on the field. You thus had Alan Wilkins exhorting the camera to “Bring on the dancing girls!” each time a panning shot spotted the cheerleaders by the boundary, and saying “It’s all happening!” about four times in his first half-hour in the commentary box. And Shastri pointing to the reasonably tuned-in but hardly mad-house crowd and telling us rather too loudly, “The crowd is going absolutely crazy behind me”, just as Zaheer Khan ran in to bowl another ball.

The players however, at least for now, don’t seem to understand what the fuss is all about. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, in response to a question in an in-game interview (they worked in as many of these as they could!) about the team’s approach, gave the game away saying something to the effect of the team playing Twenty-20 now “just for enjoyment”, and that they might take it “seriously” in the future.

Twenty-20 is a captivating extension and exhibition of the dimensions that ODIs have given cricket over the years. But in the rush to make it as spectator-friendly as possible, there are some ‘innovations’ that will make a cricket-lover cringe. The official tie-breaker in a Twenty-20 game is a bowl-out (which actually made its first appearance in the rule book in ODIs, in the 2002 Champions Trophy). Current scores at the end of bowl-outs have been low enough to suggest that this is a legitimate contest of skill, rather than a situation where one team wins by default when the other misses. In my opinion, the reason bowl-out scores are low is that teams haven't started practicing it as much as they eventually will (there is a Twenty-20 world cup in 2007); it is simply a matter of time before bowlers and teams get this down to a T, and reduce it to a farce. But then this isn’t even the point. The point is, a tie in cricket, unlike in, say, football or hockey, happens rarely enough for us to comfortably live with and acknowledge as a genuine result rather than have to play out a tie-breaker to decide a ‘winner’ (A tie in an elimination game, which, pre-bowl-out, went into a head-to-head/run-rate calculation, is still a superior way of deciding who progresses, because one team plays that last ball knowing it will lose if the scores are level, and hence knows it has to score/prevent that extra run to win).

A rule that has been incorporated into twenty-20 is the concept of a "free hit" off the ball following a no-ball (a batsman can get out only running). This, of course, is in addition to the free hit that you get off the no-ball (granted, between hearing the umpire's call/catching the umpire’s hand go up and getting bat to ball, you’re given an almost infinitesimal time to react). Which means the bowler is asked to bowl the next delivery knowing fully well that he can't get a wicket off it. Doesn’t this fly in the face of the very definition of the battle between batsman and bowler that each delivery is meant to be, the individual battles that a cricket match is made up of?

There’s already been much talk questioning the place of one-day internationals in the cricket calendar. It’s only a matter of time before the pendulum swings decisively towards Twenty-20, simply because of its marketability. But more importantly, Twenty-20 achieves, or will achieve, much of what one-day cricket was meant to achieve when it was conceptualized: a faster, limited-time game whose appeal lay in players having to make innovative plays with quick, on-their-feet thinking and decision-making. Somewhat like the inevitability of increased costs due to inflation, the even shorter duration and even faster approach to the game that this new format brings is purely reflective of the thirty years that have passed, between the advent of one-day cricket in 1975 and Twenty-20 now.

What I'm more interested in seeing is whether this will lead to something not as immediately obvious: will Twenty-20 (eventually, and unintentionally) alter the way we look at Test cricket and its place? When, and I do think it’s a when rather than an if, Twenty-20 does replace one-day international cricket, we will have on our plate a game that is of a significantly shorter duration than one-day cricket, and, coupled with its hit-or-miss nature, a format that offers much lesser scope for partnerships and bowlers bowling in tandem for any length of time. The concept of, and necessity for, a set team with strict batting and bowling orders becomes more fluid. This means there is a greater possibility of rotating and resting players and having a bigger roster without affecting the stability or performance of the team (as it might in a one-day scenario). You can now hold as many Twenty-20 matches as commercial interests ask for: a five-game or even a seven-game Twenty-20 series would be exponentially less demanding on players than a standard one-day series is currently.

I'd like to think that players and administrators will then start gravitating towards including a fuller quota of Test cricket on tours. Apart from being fresher because the rigours of Twenty-20 are not anywhere near the rigours of an ODI series, they will start to see that as exciting and as viable as Twenty-20 is, it offers their cricketers, their batsmen and bowlers, such limited scope. By stark contrast, they will also see how much more complete as a cricketing endeavour Test matches are. This isn’t going to happen overnight though: we're going to see a long drawn-out period where the two shorter formats will compete for space. We'll have tours with 3-5 one day matches and 3-5 Twenty-20 matches, apart from the three Test matches. Eventually, forces will dictate that twenty-20 overtakes and pretty much negates the idea of one-day cricket, and, sort of parallelly, this is when we will be drawn towards taking a fresh look at Test cricket. Not just because it is uniquely positioned to bring out and celebrate the nuances that define cricket – it would be naïve to expect a shift in that paradigm simply because of this; its something we’ve known all along really – but because cricket’s other prevailing form is such an obviously slapdash concoction, and we will treat it as such.

Cricket!

2006-11-23T15:00:00.000+05:30

Watched India get demolished at Kingsmead last night by some superb South African bowling, losing in the end by a hundred and fifty seven runs. First off, it was great to see the cricket back on ESPN Star. This is where cricket belongs on Indian television (at least until somebody else can prove they can give us even half-decent analysis and presentation), and anybody whose period of most intense cricket watching coincided with the time when ESPN Star was pretty much the only sports network around will tell you that its just not right for any of these other guys to be doing it. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this relieved to see Sunil Gavaskar in the commentary box!

From primarily being the host who would ask the questions and playing moderator in discussions, it’s great to see how much of a “cricket man” Harsha Bhogle has become. (Ravi Shastri would probably say“He’s gone from strength to strength!”) For quite a long time, I felt that he wasn’t as confident a commentator as he was a presenter – listen to him in any of the packaged highlight shows that ESPN and Star Sports now come up with at ridiculously alarming rates – India Victorious and all that, you’ll see a lot of matches from the mid- and late-90s, Bhogle just cutting his teeth as commentator, and you’ll see what I mean. I even remember reading in a column of his from around that time, where he’d said that, as much as he could, he left the hard-core cricket talk to the analysts, that he would defer to the experts as much as possible, and that he tried to stick to playing host and moderator. Well, he’s come from there to being a great commentator, he’s not afraid to express his opinion even when he’s (and he most often is) the only person in the ESPN box who has no cricket experience whatsoever, and the best part is, he’s managed to retain all of those things that made him a fantastic presenter in the first place, a sharp wit and that sense of spontaneity; he’s married all of this to what is now sound cricket knowledge and the experience of having been around the cricket life year-in and year-out.

There was a very interesting foot-in-mouth moment involving Harsha during the match last evening. South Africa’s Loots Bosman, a young cricketer who’s just made it into the side, had a great stop fielding at point (or was it square leg? I forget who was batting). The camera is on Bosman and Bhogle says “A very unusual name, Bosman, for a coloured cricketer.” He immediately stopped, and quickly changed the subject, going on to say something generic about how it was good to see youngsters working their way through the ranks and making it into the team. But just from the way the tone of his voice changed, you could see that Bhogle had realized what he said as soon as he said it, and you could imagine him looking around discreetly at everybody else in the commentary box just to see if anybody noticed the faux pas. (Truth be told, it was no more than an observation on the rather interesting etymology of the name, but in these days of political hyper-correctness, you wouldn’t blame him for being worried about it being misconstrued, would you?!) I later wondered if he referred to the ‘Loots’ in the name too, which gives Harsha’s reaction, and even more than that, the name, an entirely more intriguing spin, or if he referred to just the 'Bosman'.

Allan Donald later joined Bhogle in the commentary box. South Africa was on top, well on its way to victory, and you could see Donald was feeling good about the state of the world in general. He talked about how the crowd turnout was great that evening in Durban, going on to say “but then India has a certain young man called Tendulkar who can really fill up the seats.” I was immediately struck by his choice of words, that he called him ‘young’. Sachin Tendulkar is 33, made his debut in 1989, and has been playing longer than anybody else currently in international cricket. And this wasn’t one of those tongue-in-cheek remarks about his advancing age or his inching closer to retirement or anything of that sort. It was said spontaneously, and it tells you how, even seventeen years after he first started playing, many people still think of him as that young kid who holds his country, and much of the cricketing world, in thrall. No doubt the image has persisted this much and for this long because of his looks and his physical stature. I’m one of those who thought the French beard worked great on him, and I don’t know if this was one of the reasons for his growing it, but it did make him look older and more mature, maybe it even brought an edgier side to his public image. (And Brian Lara for that matter. Can you ever think of him as ‘old’, or think of him getting close to an age when he’s supposed to consider retirement? I certainly can’t. The image of the proud, valiant prince that he first became all those years back, with the boyish looks and still-captivating eyes, when he was young and a little green, stays.)

Indian Ocean

2006-11-17T14:59:00.000+05:30

Originally, here.

What struck me most about the last Indian Ocean concert I went to was how their music always hits you in a swirl, as if there are multiple sound beams of tabla and bass and drums bouncing about all over the place and you’re standing at the point where it all fuses. As I made my way to this venue, very different from the outdoor airspace of the previous show I watched, I had a niggling question about how the band’s sound would hold up in the much smaller indoor space.

The stuffiness inside the crowded Music Academy wasn’t helped at all by the overstaying emcee, who asked of his audience before the curtain went up, “What is this fusion thing anyway? I can’t understand the term.” I don’t know if the supposed old-schoolism was an attempt to appease the carnatic-purist demographic that one assumes populates the front rows of the Music Academy (a place much venerated as a carnatic music venue), but he certainly managed to sound supercilious doing it.

The curtain did finally go up, and the band opened with From The Ruins. Their sound over those next few songs seemed a little tempered down. The usually strong tabla and snare backbone, which can really give their music that bite on another day, sounded a little flat. Indian Ocean at a live concert (and this is a band best listened to live) is at its most potent when the music has space to breathe, when it can travel and jump around. Clearly, the band that evening hadn’t hit the groove that could set off that kind of acoustic kaleidoscopy yet. Before you knew it, they’d rushed through an adequate but unremarkable Kya Maloom, followed in quick succession by Melancholic Ecstasy and Jhini.

The general propah-ness of the venue didn’t stop Rahul Ram, bassist and frontman, from being his bantering self between songs, although I did get the feeling that he held back even there: while references to “Shivji” were still made, accompanying ruminations on what he might have smoked were not. Before the folksy, up-tempo Hille Re, he asked people, no doubt like he does at every show, to get up off their chairs and dance. He then added, in a lowered voice with a quick look to the sides of the hall (where, one imagines, slink about the minders of the Academy’s decorum and austerity, keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings), and tongue only partially in cheek, “... if they wouldn’t mind you dancing, that is.”

Hille Re closed the first set on a high note, and the slap in Ram’s bass had begun to assert itself. What transpired backstage during the break is not something we’re privy to, but it certainly seemed to have helped. The band looked much more at ease, starting off the second set with a strong Bandeh that had Susmit Sen, their guitarist, stand out with a couple of well-articulated solos. This period of euphony built up quite nicely to what turned out to be their two strongest performances that evening. Boll Weevil and its very funky bass intro actually got Sen off his seat for the first time. I wondered if this turned out to be the harbinger of a change in the band’s demeanour from that point on. They were finally getting as loose as they should be, and the exhale was almost palpable: there were smiles all around as they played and watched each other play. Their cues to each other, stiff and a little staccato until then, now seemed more spontaneous and in the flow. They all moved easier (and I’m not sure how better to put that). A brilliant Ma Rewa followed. It had a five-minute interlude where Amit Kilam, their drummer, stepped down from his throne to play the gabgubi, a two-stringed percussive instrument. Over Asheem Chakravarty’s now-persuasive tabla, Ram, plucking then caressing his bass guitar, alternated with Kilam playing the gabgubi, in the kind of savaal-javaab that a crowd loves to get into. The entire sequence, as these kinds of sequences can be, was showy, but I got the feeling that it was also, for the band, intimate. For these few minutes, none of the four looked at the crowd. They looked only at their instruments and at each other, almost as if they had forgotten (or didn’t care) that they were on stage. An exuberant four-man jam resulted. And you wondered if this was a bit of a sneak peek, if this was how it was when it was just the four of them playing together, in a room in one of their homes maybe, jamming, making music.

This was them at their most comfortable, their most free. Not coincidentally, this was also when they played their best music (A soulful rendition of Kandisa capped the night). For me, that Indian Ocean is a brilliant, brilliant band is beyond doubt: I did see why, but I could only wish they’d started to sense this freedom when they were playing a little earlier on in the evening.

This concert happened on the 12th of November, 2006 at Music Academy, Madras.

Nilgiris

2006-11-04T18:26:00.000+05:30

For a lot of people, their room in the house they grew up in remains untouched, even years after they’ve moved out. They’re probably married and have their own family now, but the room can suggest they’re still living there. More than anything, it tells us that through all of the change and uncertainty that characterizes our lives, this is the one thing that will stay the same, that we can always ‘come back home’. Not taking down those posters of Axl Rose and Wasim Akram in your room is only a visual reminder of that. For me, it’s not exactly the room: like it has doubtless happened with a lot of people, my younger brother took it over and made it his space long ago. Wasim Akram is now The Rock and Axl Rose is Fred Durst. For me, it’s Coimbatore itself. Every time I go back, I take a long ride on the Kinetic Honda that we still have, and at the end of it, there’s nostalgia, and large doses of it. But it’s not just that. By being able to get so close to memories that are now stashed away, I feel I have “touched base”, in a way. Our memories of our growing up are usually rose-tinted, and, unless examined, do not accurately reflect the typically unsure adolescence that many of us had. But now, navigating through our twenties trying to decide what we want to do with our lives, often moving from city to city in search of something we don’t know yet, we can grow farther and farther away from the things that used to be our lives: and our adolescence, our home town, our childhood friends, sometimes even our parents, all begin to inhabit a bubble. A bubble that we can go back to when we need to, because, even if only in our memories, it is the one thing in our lives that will never change.

On a recent trip back to Coimbatore, I waited for a friend outside Nilgiris, the supermarket cum café cum almost-by-default rendezvous point where I spent large parts of many evenings when I was in college. Its primary function as a supermarket was a purely incidental detail: its character was shaped by the clusters of tables near the entrance. You bought your food and drink at the café just outside the entrance. The smokers bought their cigarettes from the stall next to the phone booth near the motorcycle stand. The largely male crowd is huddled around the tables, and standing everywhere. It was a place that we always “landed up” at, probably just like everybody else. The setting was egalitarian, and the crowd was often representative of all the striations that assume such massive importance when you’re in college. It was always a loosely-bound gathering. You didn’t meet there for a specific purpose; you didn’t know how long you would stay. I think we saw all of this as a primer to the kind of freedom we imagined our just-turned-adult lives were heading towards. The easy-going, drifting nature of the place was how we asserted to ourselves that we could now choose to do just that: whatever we wanted, or nothing at all.

Even just by appearances, the place has changed, gentrified almost beyond description. There are well-defined offshoots with separate seating space, a chaat shop, an ice cream parlour, all with signs that say "For Customers Only" above their chairs. There was a time when you could get there at five in the evening, watch the crowds go by, say hello to the many other regulars you met there every other day, and then settle into your chairs comfortably and proceed to shoot the breeze. I remember, very fondly, that it was during one of these conversations that we discovered we shared a mutual obsession for Seinfeld. There was a freedom about that time in my life that I know I won't get back. I probably don’t want to either; its definitions were very different from how I’d define ‘freedom’ now. We lived with our folks which meant many everyday things were taken care of; we were in college which meant that the time until we finished, which was a couple of years away, was taken care of, in that you never thought about the next day or the next month (except in a "scheduling" kind of way: classes, holidays, exams). The freedom to discover and actually be able to choose how I want to lead my life is something I've become acquainted with only over the last year or two, and it's wonderful. Until then, it was mostly an illusion, a romance, something we didn't have yet even though we may have thought we did.

Nilgiris was only a stone’s throw from my school, the school I went to for twelve years. Even though our definition of having a good time in school was less about sitting around at a table talking about life (“life”!) and more about playing cricket or basketball and following it up with Pepsi and a spring roll at the canteen, we all trooped to Nilgiris every once in a while mostly because, for us, it was an act of rebellion. You walked out of school on to the road with your ‘gang’, khaki shirt defiantly ‘untucked’, making sure it carelessly hung and aired itself around your khaki trousers. We would then bask in the recognition the next day when our teachers, with the requisite tone of disapproval, would level vague, ridiculous accusations of insubordination against us simply because we were spotted there when they expected us to get home right after school.

The florist to the right of the parking area is still there, even though the shop looks somewhat different now. I bought my first bouquet of roses here: the first unsure act of outward romance that my 18-year old self was able to summon up the courage for. I still think of that every time I drive past Nilgiris, just as I thought of it that day, crowded in with so many other memories. I remember buying the flowers and glancing surreptitiously up the road in case my uncle, whose office was within shouting distance, decided to drop in for coffee or something. I remember the nervousness, the excitement, and, best of all, I think about how, back then, it was all inextricably linked to everything else in my life: in our teens, the boundaries that defined the major ‘components’ of our lives -- home, friends, relationships, college, interests -- weren’t as well-defined simply because we didn’t think about these things, or couldn’t care to. Life was unorganized and there were a lot of things happening at the same time; you took in as much you could, and you hung on.

I guess I knew the place was changing, that it had changed in a way that it could never be the same for us again when a couple of us went there a few years after the meeting-there-everyday had stopped. We’d just sat down with cups of coffee and a game of scrabble, when a management type came up to us and said that there was to be no “playing games” and no reading there. (This was before the phenomenon of the Coffee Shop made scrabble a legal pastime -- at least before the phenomenon of the Coffee Shop made its huffing entry into Coimbatore). I remember that there was a mixture of anger and indignation – how could they say something like this at our place? A place that, in our minds, always rose above commercial interests (people that bought three cups of coffee and twenty cigarettes only to occupy a table for the entire evening, every evening, weren’t exactly setting their cash registers on fire. We admired their attitude about this). As we were walking out, we rationalized, then tried to be nonchalant: mostly, we were telling ourselves that it wasn’t going to affect us (most of us, having finished college, had moved out of Coimbatore, or were in the process of moving out). But the silence between the two of us after that exchange was telling. At the risk of obvious dramatizing, it was like the bell had just tolled. On a place that will always serve as a frame of reference to who I was a year or two either side of twenty.

I remember most people that I met there over that period: indeed some of them are still good friends, but there were others too, friends of friends whom I probably won’t ever meet again. They peek out in the form of a small photograph that has since become three-fourths concealed by other pictures whose memories and impacts are stronger and more immediate in the collage of my life. I didn’t have a personal relationship (that is to say I probably never had a one-to-one conversation) with many of these guys but I think back to a conversation that we were all a part of, four or five or six eager pairs of eyes leaning forward, trying not to get our elbows stained from all the spilled coffee on that table, and I remember some of them. And even if I don’t remember the words, I remember the expressions on their faces. Faces twitching from the effort of holding back laughter because something funny had just happened. The picture in that collage is of a group of guys sitting on those steel stools at Nilgiris just behind the phone booth, a corner of the world that became ours for those periods of time we spent there, laughing at something.

In Search Of The Perfect Pani Puri. In Madras!

2006-10-31T17:04:00.000+05:30

In spite of the many ‘Kolkata Chaat’ places that have cropped up around the city recently, anybody who knows their Tikki from their Paapdi would tell you that trying to score a decent plate of Pani Puri in this very South Indian city is frustrating, to say the least. Don’t be surprised if they then launch into stories of nostalgia centered around ‘The Most Amazing Pani Poodi’ they had at Delhi. Or Hyderabad. Or Bombay.

One July afternoon, the sun mercifully limiting itself to cameo appearances, a friend and I decided that, if things went our way, we would debunk this myth once and for all: We would start off on a Pani Puri crawl that we hoped, like all good endings, would culminate in a memorable haze of perfect, swirling cold ones.

There was planning to do on a couple of counts: First, it was only three o’clock in the afternoon when we were starting off, and many vendors open shop only in time for the evening rush. Second, we recognized that we needed to maximize the number of Puris we could eat: this would mean a reasonable, but not too long, amount of time between one Chaat Bundher and the next. Also, in the interests of sampling as many places as we could, we decided we would stop at about 4 puris each at a particular pani puri walla.

We start off with Swagat Chaat, an unassuming place tucked away behind a complex of shops in Indira Nagar, Adyar. During one of my characteristic cravings a few nights earlier, I had asked them for a home-delivery of a single triple-plate order of Pani Puri, and after confirming (twice!) that I wouldn’t need any rotis, the slightly bemused Bhaiyya brought home a very satisfying 18-pack of Puris that I proceeded to slurp off. At 3.15 today though, this place had only just opened and the Pani, easily the most crucial constituent of the dish, was still being made. We watched, skeptical about the Pani now not having enough ‘settling time’, as he spiced up the base Tamarind-Water that he had prepared in his pot with confident, unmeasured flourishes of salt, black salt and a couple of family-secret type powders that the both of us regarded with suspicion.

What followed was much better than what we’d expected: the Pani, in spite of not being the most rounded we would taste that evening, had a furious, raw quality to it, no doubt because of the spices having just entered the fray and not having had too much time to blend in. The Puris however were textured unevenly, with jagged edges that got in the way of a comfortable full-mouthed attack. Still, the zing that the Pani gave us was enough to wake our appetites up and got us keyed up for our next stop.

In a bid to be Pan-Indian, we headed down the road to the Adyar Ananda Bhavan in Besant Nagar, hoping that, by some celestial duality that we couldn’t attempt to understand, their Pani Puri would be as good as their Thattae Murukku. Back on earth, we were asked to wait at our table (curious, since the immediacy of the “dip” into the pot is central to a good Pani Puri experience). They proceeded to bring us a plate symmetrically arranged with six Puris, complete with the potato filling and (drat!) a cup of Pani on the side. I give my friend a look that said these guys lost even before they started, and as we proceeded to pour the Pani into the Puri from its miniscule container, our lukewarm first impression was only confirmed.

Stomachs about half-full and not very satisfied after our initial forays, we knew it was time to up the ante. We decided that our next chaat choice would have to be based on reputation rather than whimsy. It was time to engage the big boys in our gastronomic conversation.

Gangotree on Cathedral Road, college hangout and makers of a fine Khaman Dhokla, was our next stop. My soon-to-become-rant about the astronomical price, “Eighteen rupees for five puris! It should be made a punishable offence to price a plate at anything over ten bucks…” was summarily dismissed by a wave of my friend’s hand as we stepped into a blast of air-conditioning at the entrance. There’s certainly not going to be the rustic romance of a crowded galli here, I thought to myself, but as long as the chaat’s good! All the elements were in place: A bag with numbers of large, uniformly shaped Puris that looked just the right colour. A practiced hand right next to the mud-red clay pot filled to the brim with Pani that seemed to simmer. There was also a smaller pot for the Meetha that was diluted in Pani, a touch that I noted with pleasure - most places have the meetha as a thick chutney that they add a spoonful of to the Puri after filling in the Aloo – an abominable practice that makes the sweet stuff overwhelm everything else and stand out like a rash. The combination of Pani and Meetha was the best I tasted that evening, with just a playful suggestion of sweetness In fact, apart from the fact that the puris were a tad too large, was this going to be the best pani puri we’d have this afternoon?

But your conquistadors, in their quest for culinary perfection (or maybe in their quest to just eat more Pani Puri), weren’t as easily satisfied! We made our way to the large and inviting Shree Mithai at Chetpet, incidentally one of the few places in Madras that serves the Vada Pav. The place came highly recommended, so it was not without anticipation that we headed there, the possibility that this might be The One looming large. Their Puris stood out: I noticed that they were made in-house, and were paper-thin and smoothly crunchy, which made them a helpful accomplice, rather than the thick layer of armour that one has to masticate through. The Pani, again in consonance with the Meetha Pani, was just right. This was as good a plate of Pani Puri as any, and not just by Madras standards!

Reminiscing, tongues still tingling, my friend suggested, hopefully only in jest, a similar search for the perfect idly. Now that, in Madras, would be a ridiculous challenge.

Same article here.

The Hammock

2006-10-25T18:03:00.000+05:30

I am sitting at a table on the patio. There is a hammock about ten feet away. The lake is only a further ten feet from it. The odd boat, with the odd tourist waving out at you, passes by. I wish the television inside was switched off. Or allowed to only ever play on mute, simply out of respect for its surroundings. When there are no sounds except for the ripple that a passing boat causes or the chirping of a bird somewhere in the distance, even the sound of my own laugh or chuckle as a reaction to what I’m reading seems a little unbecoming, a little unnecessary. The laugh hesitates, conscious that its sound, in its few seconds of existence, breaks the stillness of this place.

x----------------------------x

It seems to me that the most difficult thing to come to terms with once you start to discover how limitless life’s discoveries and pleasures can be is the realization that you cannot possibly taste all of it. This is the exact feeling I got when a friend of mine described, in excruciatingly loving detail, a one-hundred dish buffet he went to somewhere. I know that this kind of thinking is a little self-destructive; it’s no fun when you’re constantly reminding yourself of the things you can’t do.

Some music has this kind of an effect on me (not the self-destructive bit, I don’t mean that): There is so much happening, so many things to listen out for, that even as you’re enjoying as many aspects of it as your brain will allow itself to take in, one part of you keeps sounding these alerts that say you’re missing these other things about it. The good thing about this happening to you when you’re listening to music is that you can rest assured that the ‘inputs’ to this experience can be re-created pretty much whenever you want to. Not everything is as well-packaged as a song though: there are times when you don’t even know what causes you to react to something in a certain way – you know its because of something in there, mixed in with all of those other things that your eyes and ears and mind are taking in, but you can’t get even close to pinning it down to what it is. And then you realize, in that comfortable, familiar sort of way that comes out of having had the exact same realization many times before, that you don’t have to know. That some things really are best left not just unsaid, but un-thought-out too.

Sometimes, though, it’s a bit of a battle when you’re debating whether you should attempt to explain how an experience was – maybe you’re telling a friend about a movie you just watched or a concert you just attended or a trip you just went on. A part of me is always scared about how adequately I can translate what I felt into words. But what that part of me is really scared about, I suspect, is the possibility that the memory of the experience might end being reduced to the words I choose to express it by. At these times, all you can say (for not being able to express what you felt, in its entirety, well enough), all you want to say (for fear of reducing the experience to words that you know will not suffice) to your friend is to ask them to experience it for themselves. I find this beautiful, and also a little humbling: the whole thing meant so much to you that you don’t want to risk “meddling” with it, or what you took away from it.