The Price of Water

Cities have died after they've dried up their water. How long will Bangalore live? It was once supplied by hundreds of lakes, and at the time its population was a fraction of today's, and now there are many more people and fewer lakes because people have drained the lakes and built office complexes and apartment blocks on them. Each year, when the monsoons arrive, they visit also these buildings in low-lying areas and flood them.

Our neighbourhood gets water from the City Corporation on alternate days, and we were all right with that until last month when the bore-well in our compound that served as a backup ran dry. When we sank that well ten years ago we went down only 180 feet. One has to dig deeper these days. A neighbour of our campus at Electronics City sank a well last month and hit water at 1500 feet. He was so anxious he performed the sacred ritual of breaking a coconut every successive one-hundred feet.

The water-diviner who located a fresh spot in our home was confident we had an inch and a half of flow at 380 feet. He determined that with a small fat round instrument quite like a compass, holding which he strutted about front and back of our home. He located three points, and this one with the promise of water at 380 feet was plumb in the middle of the path to the front door, and he urged us to dig there.

"All right," we said. What's the point in having a neat pathway to a home that's lacking in water? The diviner smiled. "I never fail in my predictions," he declared, smiling and showing teeth that were a match with his bright white shirt.

They were a crew of nine who arrived to dig. The driver and the mechanic were Tamils. The seven others were adivasis, tribals who have migrated to Bangalore from a village 20 kilometres out of Bhopal. They said their language was Hindi, but they were speaking an incomprehensible dialect of it. They had no other language.

They started at 1:00 PM (waiting out the 90 inauspicious minutes of Friday's Rahu) and struck water at 3:00 PM the following day. They did the job in a cloud of rock dust, adding shaft after five-foot shaft to the drill bit as it bore down screeching, thudding, rattling, and also groaning. They worked without face masks, without ear muffs, without safety boots which they should've worn because they carried such weights all the time, but they worked in good cheer with dust thick and deep in their hair and on their clothes, and painted on their faces. When they hit the first reserves of water, grey goo flew into their face, and they went on nevertheless, keeping eyes and mouth clear, wiping them clean when they could.

When they hit the big reserve, and water came bursting up to the height of the rig, they grinned with twice more happiness than we felt. When we thanked them they were shy to accept it.

When the manager of the drilling company arrived to settle the account, and when I congratulated before him the chief mechanic who had squatted before the rig the whole time for two days with his eyes on the shaft and his hands on the levers, the manager smiled in approval. "The owner thrives by this man's efforts," he said. And added that the man married six years ago, and will live only six years more. He said that in Kannada, right before the mechanic. "Che!" I admonished him. "For God's sake, don't say that."

"I'm just telling the fact, no sir," he said, insistent for the last word.

My Spaces in Bangalore: UB City

The terrace at UB City is where I’m happiest hanging out. It is across the street right after the east gate of Cubbon Park, and I pass the place twice daily* while commuting to work.

The terrace is at level 4. It is lined by alfresco cafés and restaurants and there’s an amphitheater in the corner with a deep well that looks toward the UB Tower. Inside the tower are the offices of the UB Group, makers of Kingfisher lager, India's best beer. UB Tower is so like the Empire State Building and you cannot help noting that the spirit of the chairman of the UB Group hasn't soared to the full height of that Manhattan skyscraper—the famous businessman has built only a mini-me. But one is charitable on the terrace at UB City, drinking coffee and beer and wine and taking the best breeze in town. In that ambience, where nice people wearing business-suits and shorts and tees are all mixed together, you cannot help but feel that Bangalore is rising, and you experience a lift yourself.

After a meeting in town, or in the evenings on holidays, I drop in at the Café Noir on the terrace at UB City for a café au lait and a pain au raisin. The folks at other tables order for sangria and pasta and ratatouille and crêpe. After a time I ask for more coffee and some pain-au-something-else.

UB City fronts Vittal Mallya Road. For me the important other stop on that street used to be Bounce, the saloon at street level on the corner where Vittal Mallya Road intersects Lavelle Road. I don't go there anymore, I've learnt to buzz-cut my hair myself.

At Bounce, the staff are almost all immigrants: The reception has sometimes been manned by young women of African origin. The hairdressers are Manipuri and Sri Lankan, and the owners (I think) are North Indian. Bounce competes with the saloons in five-star hotels and charges almost as much as them. The music is techno, a style which from start to end goes nowhere, and makes no side trips. (But it is more tolerable than the somnolent spa music in five-star hotels.) Suresh who used to cut my hair at Bounce is from Galle, and each time there we used to discuss Colombo and Kandy and Sigiriya, the Lankan places I’ve been in.

---

• Not after 2-April-2012, when I stepped down. I go to Electronics City only occasionally now.

see London a bit, perhaps…

Cleopatra's Needle at the Victoria Embankment, London

I’m seeing it for the first time, it is just as I saw it years ago in the opening scene of Lawrence of Arabia. Except, I can now see the stone the staircase is made of, black, with copper-coloured rivets planed smooth. They might be mock-fasteners, but they look very good, sleek like the tall black doors made of English oak.

The journey should begin at St. Paul’s, of course, and the next steps should cover the Square Mile. After that, my heart will guide my legs about the rest of London. “This should be a long relationship,” the heart has determined. “I need some time,” the mind pleads, “let me think this through.”

But they’re excited, each as much as the other.

I began the journey in the crypt, and stopped altogether before the Duke of Wellington’s sarcophagus. A halting start to an ambitious plan to know London. An omen, but I’ll not worry.

Arthur Wellesley was twenty-nine when he fought under General Baird’s command in the Fourth Mysore War against Tipu Sultan. On May 4, 1799, the English stormed the fort of Srirangapattana, having managed to breach it after some eight weeks of siege. Tipu fell that night, and they didn’t know they’d killed him. Seeing in the morning that they’d taken the capital but not the sovereign and they went searching for him and found him under a heap of carcasses. Wellesley was made Governor of Mysore; a child was installed on the throne. The very same Wellesley rode sixteen years later to Waterloo as the first Duke of Wellington. And now, here he lies, before me in this moment, raised a bit, in a stone casket which can pack ten men.

Tipu Sultan was forty-nine when the bullet got him. I’ve often called Tipu to mind when I’ve needed courage. His father Hyder Ali was tall, and Tipu was short, yet he was his father’s equal in war. Before this Cornish granite casket for the Duke of Wellesley, which is even bigger than the faux sarcophagus of Alexander the Great in Istanbul, Tipu diminishes to a dot in me. I linger a while longer and name my emotions; I let them be.

Why do graves of the great move one so? From St. Paul’s I went to Westminster Abbey following St. Paul’s Walk along the Victoria Embankment, pausing in the Park before young Byron in stone, and the bust of Sullivan with the plaintive lady embracing the plinth. A young black man was speaking to Sullivan from a bench a few meters away. I stopped also at the apartment above Gordon’s where Kipling lived and wrote The Light That Failed. It is Saturday and tourists have taken over the Westminster Bridge, and a thin stream of joggers negotiate the crowds. Seeing tourists posing before Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square I realise how useful are monuments. They bring in the tourists and, correctly deployed, they keep them out of the life of the locals.

In line for a ticket at Westminster Abbey, I pass the plaque for Sir Eyre Coote. After Tipu’s father Hyder Ali had won a decisive battle against Sir Hector Munro of the East India Company, Governor General Warren Hastings sent Coote after Hyder Ali. Coote checked Hyder Ali, but never decisively defeated him. The Company took Mysore only after Baird and Wellesley defeated Tipu Sultan.

Most visitors in the Abbey are Latinos and Italians today, and they listen rapt to the audio given them, deeply interested in the Henrys and the Edwards and the Georges. I listen too, but I am more interested in the grave of Mary, Queen of Scots, and I stand tiptoe to confirm the likeness of her mask to Vanessa Redgrave. At prompt number 14 on the numbered map I tire, and long for coffee outdoors though I know there’s no sun there and it could be raining.

But then I come to the Poets Corner, to names I know, and names I’ve known and forgotten, names of people I’ve read, and not read. Names I love for good reason, and names I love for no reason. I grin and I sense the grin looks foolish. I frown when someone rubs her boot on Thomas Stearns Eliot, though I realise she is loving the name like that.

staying present on Tarka Rail

The sun was out. A gibbous moon was out also. It was cold outside the train, of course, and the horses in the meadows had coats draped over their backs. Sheep sat together in some pens and in some others they stood united and grazed. Some sheep had black faces and the rest were white all over but black soil had rubbed off on each one’s coat. Sometimes they were near the rail, and when the train approached them they ran, bobbing their rumps as they went, showing red or blue stamps on their backsides. Happy sheep. They didn’t have a care. Their big decisions had been made for them. 

The horses were ponies, perhaps. The middle-age lady across the aisle would’ve known. She knew many things, which she shared with her husband and he nodded to everything she told him, and they looked out the window the entire journey, and smiled, staying warm and not taking off their beige coats. The woman wore also a burgundy-red bag which had a thin strap and a long stitch. Her smile lines were the same depth as her husband’s. 

They missed nothing in the 39-mile ride from Exeter to Barnstaple, the length of Tarka Rail, named after the otter in Henry Williamson’s book. I attempted the present-mindedness of the couple and tried to take pictures of the Taw river valley that ran alongside us, but I had trouble composing the photographs. Things intruded. The lamps overhead showed as bright parallelograms on the glass of the windows, claiming space in the view of straight hedgerows, strict channels, upright transmission towers supporting miles of straight-running cable with optimal slack, and the angles and arches of bridges. After a while I put away my camera to admire instead the perfect works of man.

It has been more than one hundred years since great Britons like Brunel showed what can be achieved by reducing gradients and curves, and in Brunel’s case with this very Great Western that I was riding on, but nature hasn’t begun to heed such men one bit. It was not possible to say, for instance, whether the stream that curved away would come back, which here it did, after vagrant tortuous runs, and then after a time it went away from under the train and when I began to miss it, it returned from under, grown somewhat, and went far out and away. Just when I thought it was gone for good, it was back, glancing again and again at the rails.

I tried to anticipate where the next moor might fall after this one. I looked for a pattern in every clutch of hills that came up, and as I did the futile exercise I envied the occasional single house on top of quite-high hills. I checked for similarity in geometry among the flats and the many lovely pools. Birds that foraged with sheep rose when our train came by and within moments did an about-turn.

“Sit down, Corrie!”

Corrie (and her mother) were two rows fore of me. Unlike the senior couple across, Corrie didn’t care to look out the window. Sitting down, for her, was to rest her tummy on the headrest, dangle her limbs in the air, and squeeze for occasional relief into the narrow between seat and window. Comfortable so, she was in battle with her brother in the row just ahead of me. “Stop it Corrie,” her mother cried, “it’s not funny.” But to Corrie it was most funny. She laughed gaily as she fought.

Then she fell. And began to wail. And recovered in seconds to soft cooing and went up the seat to rock on her belly again. “Get down, Corrie,” her mother ordered. “Corrie,” she cried again, and again, and once again, drawing the last syllable in a raga with many inflections. But Corrie had a fight on hand that she had to finish.

I shouldn’t have paid so much attention to the little girl. I missed the otters I’d been told I might see if I was lucky.

hunting for metaphor

Clowes Wood, near Canterbury

I went to Clowes Wood hunting for inspiration, which I needed for some text to be sent somewhere in twenty-four hours. But my mind stopped seeing in the “feels like zero” temperature. I tried several things. I lifted hopeful eyes to a low-flying plane but its plaintive drone served only to thicken the mind’s gathering somnolence. I’d walked up to the wood, and I’d walked in the wood an hour, and if a walk hasn’t delivered the writer a result, what can be done? I sat on a green bench and settled my eyes on a thick white tree and watched a breeze get behind the leaves of the vine round it. The sheath of them swelled and heaved, and I tried to see in the tree how it felt to be cuckolded, but, as ever, the tree only hove tight heavenward, to the very tips of its bare tines.

I wondered if I might sight a fox, and saw instead that there wasn’t a bird—not on the green conifers, not on the oaks, nowhere. There wasn’t a sound, not even a buzz from an insect. I vowed to come back in summer to hear the nightjars and to see the glow worms, and started to leave, when I heard my first human voices there—a child and his parents coming in, now when the phone predicted precipitation. Anyway, they were better insulated than I. The child had many questions and his mother had all the answers.

A boy raised somewhere here came to Malnad in the nineteenth century as the young Englishman Middleton, and sheared a string of low mountains of their jungle and planted coffee there. He called his plantation Kadumane: Jungle Home. I’ve spent days and nights there. After he’d prospered he came here to find a wife, and brought her home to Kadumane, travelling the last leg by ox-cart. The following morning, her first in her new home, his bride went out and screamed. Yesterday’s ox had been savaged by a tiger before dawn.

Where lie the roots of courage? The Middletons and the Ibn Batutas of all times fascinate me. Once I’m a real writer I might begin to meddle with their motives.

Still seeking inspiration, I went to The Blean this morning. Whereas many trees in Clowes were conifers whose green hadn’t left them, in The Blean the green was all on the ground: in the shrub, and moss on the exposed roots of trees. I wandered mostly in a section populated almost entirely with silver birch. Learning just now that Coleridge called these Betula Pendula the Ladies of the Woods, I realise they are indeed slender and nymphlike and quite becoming. (So many of them, and so bare.) There were many birds in the Blean, but I couldn’t tell which cry belonged to which bird of The Blean: the robin or the wren, the dunnock or the blackbird, the song thrush or the woodpecker.

How does one shoo a fox away? With a cry? A stick? Just as I thought to presume the English fox to be as shy as our Indian ones, I saw the furry thing. It came up at a fork ahead and stood there, deciding, and as I raised my camera, it trotted down and away, leaving only a blurry trace to speak for me.

Splitting hairs in this Spring Term

I'm back, and with a resolution that I'll try and post every week. There was coursework for the autumn term that had to be turned in by 18-Jan, and now that is behind me. It has taken some adjustment to go back to being a student after a gap of thirty years. I must add that it wasn't easy for me to be a student back then either.

To write my coursework I sat at home in Bangalore, and also I spent a week on the plantation in Malnad—for the silence there. But the more silent a place, the more noise you hear. By day, there was for instance the sound of tractors coming and going in the distance, and the rending sounds of the tractor's trailer falling apart and back unto itself. In the night the crickets took over, starting their din right from sunset. I wrote there, but not so much more than I wrote in Bangalore. Still, it was good experience writing in Malnad. I thought of Tejaswi who shunned the city and did his reading and writing and conducted all his affairs in Mudigere. I am tempted to settle down similarly.

During a break between tasks related to my coursework, I learnt to shear my head.

The last haircut that I had was at Vatican Hairdressing, right before the Cathedral in Canterbury. A comely young lady cut my hair with great concentration (squinting, genuflecting, reflecting on the effects of a snip from various angles) and made something out of my head that I've not been able to achieve for the rest of me these recent years. She made me appear a few days younger. But, with all her focus, for the now-forming baldness on the back of my crown she could only achieve a brush-back. Which made me wonder if it is worth it to pay twenty-odd pounds every month toward a losing cause.

The High Street of Canterbury ends at Mercery Street and the Cathedral, which is where Vatican Hairdressing is. And at the start of High Street, at the West Gate of the old town, there is a Turkish saloon. I have wanted to go in and ask them what the Turkish Haircut is which they advertise on their board on their front, but I've been reluctant to mess with the strong men who work there with old-type razors. At Turkish it costs a third of what it costs at Vatican, but you don't want to go supine for a haircut and have everyone watch you from the street. Turkish Hairdressers have an all-glass front with no curtains. I'm not going to lie down there even if they offer the Ottoman cut. Or the Ataturk look.

All things considered, I thought it best to follow the dictum of the owner of Vatican Hairdressing: Make your hair your religion, he says on his website. With that one line he made my decision for me, brought to mind the courage in the first haircut Gandhiji administered himself, and now I have done my head twice by my own hand. With help from an able Philips trimmer, I've mastered the buzz cut, which I perform at setting 4. I feel such power after this achievement, there's no looking back for me in this regard.

With my head so altered, I'm pretty much ready for the term just begun. The University calls it the Spring Term. It's rather cold at the moment, and snowing like the Arctic snow is looking for a new home.

on a short break…

I'm tied up with a project until 11-January. I'll start posting regularly soon after, so please do come back. (I'm active on twitter, in the meantime, and I send out a tweet or two every day, using my handle @shashikiran.)

Until my next post, then. And cheers! for another New Year that's been gifted you, and me.

The Sounds of Africans Trapped in India

For this episode, Sneha visits the Siddi community, also known as the Habshi community of Karnataka. By legend, these particular Siddis are descended from Mozambican and Ethiopian slaves, brought to India by the Portugese. During the 'Goan Inquisition' they were either freed or they escaped from Portugese ships. This Afro-Indian community is spread along the Gujarat-Karnataka belt on the west of India.

The Siddis still retain some cultural traits of their African roots. Their music is heavily percussive. Yet, at the core, they are Indian, speaking its languages, influencing its culture, and adding fresh perspective to the idea of a multicultural society within this country. It is this Indian, yet inherently foreign sound, that Sneha went in search of.

And I'm looking for Sneha Khanwalkar everywhere. I first listened to her music watching Gangs of Wasseypur. Next, I found her soundtrack for Oye Lucky, which movie I've not seen. Here in this series, Sound Trippin for MTV, she teases music from out of the thousands of sounds of India.

I'm finding love for things Indian that I've had a distaste for, thanks to Sneha. Ah, the things that art can do!

messing with writing, missing Iain Sinclair

The track to town, University of Kent, Canterbury

Last week, I put out a 1500-word piece written by me. A dozen young and exceptional folks peered into the quarters of my creation and shook their heads sideways, which as you know is bad news in Europe. The thing moved back and forth. It could have had a few people less. A sentence stumbled. I gathered up the mess and brought it to my flat and looked over it and turned and smiled wickedly into the cold and gloom outside my window. "Henceforth, anything I write shall be written only for me, to be understood by none but me," I told myself, and went to bed delighted at the notion and woke up laughing in the morning—most unusual, and if my wife were around she'd have worried for something to douse me with. A creation that none but the creator may comprehend has been performed only once ever, by the Creator of creators, and who may dare to rise to His bar? After a fortifying breakfast I sobered up and opened a book on the craft. I'm reading it still, and, in a pause between chapters, this post.

Golshifteh Farahani

How do I spend time in this small town, on this campus hemmed into itself by this gathering cold? By looking to Sedaris, for how he lived it up while in Paris. He didn't go the Notre Dame. He didn't haunt the Closerie des Lilas or the Café des Flores or any of the places where Hemingway and Joyce and the others drank and where Hemingway famously wrote. Nor did Sedaris go to the cemeteries, or down into the sprawling Paris underground where there are the greater remains of the Parisian dead, or Jazz at the Le Caveau de la Huchette. Sedaris merely went to the movies, enjoying the experience, he says, of watching them with the more bearable European audience. On my part, last week I watched Anna Karenina on the campus. And felt happy that Karenin, the husband, is bearable in this very differently conceptualised version. The next two days I went to About Elly, and To Rome with Love. Woody Allen's film has flashes of his brilliance, and I laughed when the man was himself on screen, but I saw that even the great Woody can let slip a poor creation. I nodded sideways leaving the Gulbenkian, the on-campus theatre, but I thought immediately of Midnight in Paris and stayed a fan. As regards About Elly, I decided that I must cultivate Asghar Farhadi, but who struck me more was Golshifteh Farahani, of whom I'd known nothing until this film.

Iain Sinclair at the University of Kent, Oct-2012

I'm a regular at the Tuesday readings at the university, to which the big writers come. Last week it was Iain Sinclair, and I was ten feet from him, and not believing it. When time came to ask questions, to even speak with the great man in the full but small hall, I put the golden moment behind me and hurried to my flat, clutching a just-bought-and-autographed book, seeking comfort in the book than in the writer of it. Which brings me to the question, what kind of a writer am I going to be?

But there's Sedaris, and there's Me Talk Pretty One Day, the essay for one just like me, ever on my mind these days on this campus. It makes me smile.

head in the clouds, seat on the Stour

River Stour by the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

The Stour by the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

The boatman seated me in the middle, and four Americans on my left before him, and five French aft on my right. Thereafter the two were each a world unto itself, so even if I was merely one I was the Atlantic. He handed the French folks two books of translations and started the forty-minute ride on the Stour. He was young, and funny right from the start: my first tour guide in Canterbury. I remembered random tour guides from my past, in New York and Chicago and San Antonio, all who were funny, as much as the young African-American ex-army lady in Mark Twain's home in Connecticut who went ho! each time she revealed something she deemed significant regarding Sam Clemens.

In Frankfurt in Germany the half-day tour guide was serious. In Berlin the young lady packed much humour but she was sure to tell us before we started that she was Welsh. She wore turned down boots with thick fur trims and her (dirty-blonde) hair tumbled way down, as low as most Indian women used to wear theirs until recently. There was not one in our group on our trip from Lisbon to the westernmost point (Cape Roca) of Europe who could make our guide smile just once the whole round trip. She was grim. At home in India the tour-guides I've hired have all been grave, and most of all the one in Jodhpur who held a history book in hand like Jesuits hold so nicely the Bible, and he was upset regarding what he argued was a much-printed wrong detail regarding the manner in which Maharani Padmini was shown to Khilji.

This guide on the Stour was out of breath though he was a broad strapping lad. He was bigger than all the boatmen who passed us by, and some had more tourists with them than he, a full-load of fourteen against the eleven that we were. Perhaps he'd spent the night out, and also he said he'd skipped lunch. He was a nice fellow. I struggled to read what he said, as much as the French did for a time. Soon they dipped into the French in hand; I began to deduce history on my own.

I've been here four weeks, and I'm still not tuned-in to the English of the English people. The Americans were in conversation with the boatman, the women were saying they wished we were all rowing instead of only him, and I understood everything they said, and when the tallest man from the French group asked where a vicarage was I picked up every syllable he spoke, but, of the things the boat-guide said, I picked up a snippet now and a snippet much later. I gathered that one of the earliest torpedoes was built in Canterbury, on the site of the Foundry Pub; his rating of the ale at The Parrot, the oldest pub in town, since 1370; the pretty black Weavers' Cottages that lean over the Stour lost their affluence to the success of the East India Company in the East. "After a time the cottages came to house women whose morals were negotiable," he said, and clarified for the pleasure of his audience, "I don't understand what that means at all, of course."

He was a nice boy. I liked him, specially when he showed the meaning of "legging it." We approached the lowest of the so-low bridges over the river, he rested the oars, lay on his back, and took the boat forward walking his feet on the bottom face of the bridge. That was a surprise that pleased everyone. The women worried constantly that a bridge-deck would knock his head cold. Soon, though, I lost myself in the world overhead, looking up at a gleaming plane (seaplane! the Americans exclaimed) that lingered overhead, which was whiter than the bellies of the seabirds that flew beneath it, whiter even than the clean bright clouds that came over Canterbury Saturday afternoon.

I have always thought it is the city I desire, but here I am, falling in love with a small old town.

Kent: beginnings

The Canterbury Cathedral from the Bus Stop, University of Kent

I arrived in Canterbury into a chill evening, but it was dry, and I went out for a hot dinner at an Indian restaurant. The next days were all sunny even if cool. That served me well, allowing me plenty of walking while I hunted for a year's lodging. On the fifth day I found a place that suits me and for five days afterward I shopped for stuff for it. Now after two weeks light rain comes and goes, but I have a warm place to live in and the campus has many places where to settle with book and coffee. At the lectures it gets warm and one has to peel off their warm clothes.

Elsewhere the country is coping with flooding.

It is lovely in Kent. The campus is on top of St. Thomas' hill, from where are sweeping views to town from walkways, and meadows, and lecture rooms, and from the great high-ceilinged dining hall of Rutherford Block. Most students are about the age of my son, and I, much older, am designated a mature student. Now and then at dinner or at an induction lecture or on the bus I'm with young research students, and they've read so much and know so much, I wonder about "maturity." It doesn't matter what they call me, though, and I surely wouldn't mind if they called me an "older student." I wonder what euphemism they will use for old people ten years from now.

On Tuesday we had a reading by Gwyneth Jones, who read Bricks, Sticks, Straw. She paused during the reading and spoke of the constraints with which she began to write that science fiction story—an 8000-word limit was one. "I don't mind constraints," she said, "I make a game of my writing." But writing is serious work for her, like going to office. She begins writing early morning at her desk and finishes late afternoon, and cannot understand the popular exhortations to writers to write in cafés. She will not get up from writing to finish her washing: "I cannot understand it." Sometimes she works seven days a week, fourteen-hours a day. Gwyneth is sixty. She laughed now and then, freely, like a sixteen-year-old.

The imposing structure that dominates the view of the town below is the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral, with its olden day tragedy that must come to mind each time you catch sight of the building. Here on the sprawling campus chill winds come unhindered from all round and play about these high grounds. I shiver now in autumn, and I'm readying the mind for winter. I am constantly bumping into students from India and Pakistan, and they seem very comfortable—and very happy.

this idle mind in this hotel lobby

Vivanta by Taj,
they call themselves,
and add Begumpet,
so there's no mistake.

I cannot find vivanta
in my English dictionary,
so I am looking to find it
in the hotel lobby.
Early on, I looked for it also
in my long, narrow "Superior Room"
(to which as far as I can tell,
there's here no room inferior)
which looks down into
the street and by it the leafy campus of
something called Eagle Court.

I might have seen it and missed it,
in the manga-type pictures
in the hotel restaurant on the ground floor,
pictures in dark colors that suggest future action,
space-age motion in a
restaurant which is bare but has sleek lines
and neat trims—
and also in this pool of red chairs
in the white space in the lobby.
For some reason this hotel suggests also
office buildings
of Scandinavian cities.

I'm watching real hard now,
looking for vivanta in the
face of the North Eastern woman in the
beige suit, and her colleague the Hyderabadi
woman in the orange sari,
but the women are not seeing action this Sunday
afternoon, like the men
at the travel desk who have been a lot
on the phone in the time I've been here,
and no one has gone to them
and asked to be taken anywhere.

I understand I might not see
what I guess is vivanta
this Sunday afternoon, but I hope I find it
by Monday before I leave,
but I must keep looking,
as I'm doing now,
shifting to stare at orange flowers flanked by
long green leaves with yellow spines
on this round table before me.
I'm looking at their taut petals and
their stiff filaments peaked with
rich brown anthers.
I fear that vivanta's eyes
might arch at me
just as I turn my back to it.

vive la différence?

The Seal of Karnataka State

Chiranjeevi Singh, a much respected and now-retired IAS officer, writes in Vijayakarnataka of persisting divisions in Karnataka, and in its capital Bangalore, which stem from regional and linguistic differences. Though situated at the edge of Karnataka, Bangalore was made its capital on account of the vanity of one man, and as a consequence north and south Karnataka never integrated, and the northerners distrust the southerners, and, among other things, the southerners see the manner of speaking of the northerners as too comic for serious use. In the meantime, in Bangalore City itself, the Kannadigas and Tamils and the North Indians and the Easterners and Tibetans live each in their linguistic and regional silo, each grudging the other community its greater prosperity. Each community cloaks the rest in long established stereotypes.

Like the gandabherunda, rues Singh. Like that raptor in the seal of the state of Karnataka, which has two heads that do not see eye to eye.

Do people ever integrate in cities? How about far off New York, to take an example? I read an essay by Jesus Colon: How to Know the Puerto Ricans. He means the 600,000 of them who lived in NYC when he wrote the piece. He reminds the reader first of past pains suffered by Puerto Ricans at the hands of those who came knocking on their doors, those who came to colonise their island. Colon's countrymen have brought that heavy baggage into New York City. And who have greater past sorrows to bear than the Jews? So much sorrow which they bear among themselves in their homes and in arty memorials? The African American people, maybe? "Almost as much suffering we have seen too," the Irish might say. E.B. White wrote—to humour them—that for the Irish, NYPD is virtually family. Ah, in what tatters the Italians came, and also their Sicilian cousins! And stayed Italian, stayed Sicilian. How much have these peoples integrated in that acclaimed melting pot?

I can't say. But there's good writing by each of them on themselves; and terrific movies, too. And how they ever toss jibes at each other! In everyday life, and in every form of literature! And yet their city holds, and most handsomely.

Folks are pouring everyday into Bangalore and joining those who have already arrived. Today, in the unisex saloon Bounce on Vittal Mallya Road, a Sri Lankan cut my hair and a Black lady collected the charge. The North Indian lady who runs the place bade me wait five minutes when I came in. In the same establishment, in greater numbers than the Sri Lankans were young women and men from Manipur and thereabouts who did other beauticians' tasks, and ran errands. These folks will grow deep roots in Bangalore, and perhaps they will each be their own tree, and the writers among them will set in prose and song their angst and aloneness and rootlessness and their endless quest for identity—they'll supply the pathos which is marrow in the bones of the city.

But, hopefuly, our divided people will always find space in the city to labor and to achieve. Through their labours would they be united. Through their traditions they would ever be separate. It is not a bad thing.

My take: Rajesh Khanna

Image borrowed from Emirates 24 X 7

I've not so far read a mention of Rajesh Khanna's hair. Rajesh Khanna's star began its slide soon as his hair got long. In those thirteen movies that were serial superhits, the actor wore his hair short and trim at the temples and fluffy on top. Then someone changed it; they styled it so his hair was as blown out on the sides as much as on top, and this swollen frame capped a face that had filled out with fame and alcohol and some reluctance toward discipline. Anyway, if Samson lost his strength soon as Delilah clipped his hair, Rajesh Khanna fell off his heights soon as he grew his hair too long on the sides of his head.

Some folks say he chose his movies badly after the thirteen. I say yes, but he also picked the wrong coiffeur.

I was tennish in the time of those thirteen hits. Watching song-scenes from those movies last week I thought through to why I, too, was caught up with the "phenomenon"—as he'd come to be called. To a boy ten years old, a man too engaged in romance would've been disgusting, and I see now, in the reruns of his love scenes, his extraordinary finesse at working a woman. In those days, when the cuddles began I squirmed as much as any other boy ten-years old in this part of the world. In all of Anand, the smashing hit among the super hits, Rajesh Khanna didn't beat up anyone. And yet all the kids loved him most for Anand.

Just his face, I think. Even in the risque parts such as Helen's number in The Train, it was his face more than that dancer's gyrations. I lived in Bellary then, and no one in that town had a face like Rajesh Khanna's. No one had a face like that in Bangalore from where I came with my parents to Bellary, and no one has a face like that in Mangalore where we lived after Bellary. Lovely godly face you wanted on your uncle, on your older brother, on your older friend, on your hero.

So I sulked and fought and refused to eat until I got the guru shirt that Rajesh Khanna wore—it didn't matter that mine was so terribly cheap and tacky, tailored as it was in remote Bellary. I did the same tricks to get my parents to buy me a bulbul tarang, as did most other boys and never got beyond a few lines of meri sappunonki rani kabbu aayegeethu, same as most other boys. I carried the instrument to best friends' homes and if their sisters happened to come over to listen to my performance I produced every sound except which I wanted, and continued to battle with the rickety thing with a plastic plectrum until the girls ended my agony with a most kind and hateful "it's okay."

Ah, the girls. How they loved him whatever their age. I was living in Mysore when he married Dimple Kapadia and in my school, too, as in most other schools, the workday ended when girls came in crying with the news and cupped their mouths after they'd announced the thing, as though the unspeakable had happened: "Rajesh Khanna's getting marrieeeed!" Students and teachers and boys and girls and men and women were all stunned that indeed their hero had been taken.

It's been four decades and the superstar had been clean gone from my consciousness. He returned with repeat news of illnesses, and then I felt sorry when he died, considering how big he was once and how much of my life he'd taken then. I didn't feel nostalgia, though I sat through Anand again, and rather enjoyed watching once more his fresh face and his facial mannerisms that never changed, and his clean crisp kurtas which sat on him as if they'd been invented just for him, and I felt glad and comforted that I'd not made a mistake in loving him so in those days.

diabetic spirit

It turned six,
after my coffee and kharabath,

when they wheeled in the mobile bars,
and parked one right by me.

I watched a Teacher's
and a Royal Challenge
stand tiptoe, and lean, and neck,
and knock their heads.

Tipsy, they seemed,
an arm's length from me,

shying from my gaze, as
I sipped a second coffee—
served in a glass—
strong, and sugarless.

--7:00 PM @ Century Club, Bangalore

Paan Singh Tomar

The Real Paan Singh Tomar

Paan Singh's story is happy until the medals have come in, until the soldier-athlete retires honorably. It changes color when he returns to roots in a part of India steeped for centuries in violent feuding, dacoity, and rebellion even against kings and empires. Paan Singh's life is quickly consumed by that ethos, starting with foulups by his profligate older brother, followed by Paan Singh's inability to recover what his brother has squandered to their cousins and, when neither police not comrades in the military help him straighten his affairs, and after his cousins savage his mother and son, Paan Singh turns daaku.

He goes the whole distance as a daaku, likening his new life to his days as an athlete, when turning back was never an option. He proclaims his own paraak over a megaphone everywhere he arrives, calling himself dasyuraj, king daaku. Which means everything a daaku is: killer, kidnapper, extortionist, and a fugitive, this one with ten-thousand rupees for his dead or living head. A sum that amuses Paan Singh and his 28-member gang: only ten thousand for the Dasyuraj?

Paan Singh Tomar, the movie

But, perhaps, as the movie asserts, Paan Singh's nobler values never left him. He is Robin Hood, stuffing money into the pockets of village headmen after they've fed his gang, into the pocket of the small-time journalist who does his fateful interview—an interview that makes the state resolute against him. He is faithful to his wife; and a loving father. He doesn't himself kill his arch tormentor: a gang member shoots him as Paan Singh vacillates, struggles to work himself up to finish his cousin.

Spoiler: The movie doesn't make much of police officer Chauhan who caught up with Paan Singh and finished his story under flare-lights in the night. Chauhan worked painstakingly to locate the village where Paan Singh sometimes halted and trapped him there. End of Spoiler His is an act of heroism too, arriving first as he did only six-men strong. For officer Chauhan, Paan Singh was only a daaku, a killer, and for the policeman in him, a daaku must go. Chauhan lives today, an old man awaiting a natural ending.

You come away liking Paan Singh very much. You cannot help it, for his character is performed by Irrfan Khan, who never disappoints, and for director Dhulia, Paan Singh is a pure soul that turned sour solely because of the state.

war and peace and time for love

Bangalore: Where MG Road and Brigade Road meet

Last week, in the Tripura Vasini hall in the Palace Grounds, pastors of a section of the Church were in a three-day conference. The Tripura Vasini is a huge affair, possibly the largest hall in that vast place, so I checked on the Internet regarding the conference, curious to know how many pastors had arrived there. Six thousand, the Internet sites that promoted the conference claimed, along with a matching number of wives who took the numbers to 12,000. The key speakers were holy aliens—to borrow a word from US Immigration—and the banner on the façade proclaimed their theme: Pray for Peace.

12,000 men and women of God praying for peace are sure to gain the ear of God for the entire duration of the invocation—so peace, by now, is surely headed our way. But doubt rises. Pastors and priests in small and large numbers have been praying for centuries for peace, and yet we've always lacked it, everywhere where prayers are held. Ah, but the answer is simple, and it is to be found in Bangalore, on the hoarding on the corner where Kamaraj Road meets Mahatma Gandhi Road. On that hoarding is a startling revelation posted by the Indian Army: "The Purpose of all War is Peace."

So, if the prayer of the pastors should meet with an amen, then war will come hanging on its heels, and, when war ends, peace will come for which war was waged.

I spent the weekend in Malnad, so as to have some peace there, in the manner of him who ached for the Lake Isle of Innisfree. It had rained, even if a little late, and in the plantation, trees were trimmed for shade control, and the leaves of the coffee twinkled when the sun came out upon them and they went back to brooding when the clouds took him back. As for me, I stayed indoors and looked out to the trees, and to the hills beyond the trees, sitting now on a lower deck and then on an upper deck. Often, I closed my eyes for inner peace, but only to hear the opera of the jeerundes.

The jeerundes were in spirited performance, being quite tickled by the rain and the wet and the green trees and all. There was a pattern to their performance. A lead jeerunde took up a tremulous but rising tune with wholehearted accompaniment from a thousand co-stars, and, reaching crescendo, the singers fell to a pause with their vocal chords trembling for a time, after which they commenced a reprise, all together sans the lead, in waves that began in a central null and radiated and rose tight and steep to another climax and fell again, to another null, and now the lead came back and took everyone to a fresh, new cycle. So it went. Round and round. Again and again.

Who wrote the piece? What is its grammar? What is its purpose? Entertainment? Instruction? Rain song? Or a brazen communal cry for sex? Does anybody know? I don't know. What was evident was that the song was so blue as a bolero, and it went on all day and all night, and unless the jeerundes were taking turns to perform, they had no time at all for the briefest lovemaking. Why, they hadn't any time to eat.

And they hadn't time for war. Or for peace, of which they gave none to me. Now I'm back in Bangalore, today on Monday, and, of course, the pastors have departed from the Palace Grounds. The mood of aashaada hangs over the place, and in this gray-colored season I'm looking to see where to find some spirit for the week.

some contra thought regarding Iran

Thirty-three years ago, an old man with a long gray beard who was tenuously domiciled in Paris saw finally the news that events he had stoked had come to a head, and so time had come for him to go home. The month was February, the year was 1979, and Ayatollah Khomeini flew Air France to a great welcome in Teheran. I was in engineering school at the time, in the university town of Mysore. We had a couple of dozen Iranian fellow students studying with us. They were older than us, and hard, and rough-featured, and taller, and much, much stronger. Each of them had been through military training, and the training showed.

They'd often get girls to their rooms and all of them owned motorcycles (which none of us had) and in general they appeared as having a great time. That got the locals worked up every now and then and they always talked big of wanting to beat up the Irani guys and on some occasions they tried it too. But the Iranians never stopped doing their thing, always detached, ever unto themselves. If they were enjoying the good life, their uniformly dour faces concealed the fact. Sometimes they fought among themselves as ferociously as bulls locking horns, neither fighter yielding, and the rest of us watching and wondering if the fight was going to end at all—but nothing serious ever happened.

They were happy in their restrained way with the success of their revolution, and seemed to think well of the Ayatollah. A few of them were friends with us and they filled out for us the stories of those days in the newsmagazines, regarding the Savak of the Shah, stories of terror and torture and American complicity. Still, they never fully opened up. Three decades have passed. How has life been for those Iranians who returned from Mysore as qualified engineers to an Iran sans the Shah?

I cannot know, but I was reminded of them last week, when a hundred thousand Iranians gathered in Paris, and sent out a call of solidarity to those Iranians opposed to the regime of now. American leaders flew into Paris to address those hundred-thousand, Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich among them, and Gingrich told the crowd they shouldn't talk of the nuclear threat, or Iranian isolation, or human rights, but that the Iranian people should press for regime change only.

A few Iranian Americans also traveled there, one of them a cancer researcher based in Texas whose reason for joining the event is published by Fox News. She has a touching line to explain her reason. Anyway, the folks want an Arab Spring in Persia, which might well happen. But, I ask, how sweet is life after the Arab Spring? What kind of a nation will a revolution deliver which has been brought about with the meddling of outsiders? Even if the outsiders are otherwise heroes, and worthy of adoration, men such as Guiliani?

Change must happen where regimes have turned against their people. But the folks you bring from outside to mend your place tend to leave it broken worse than before.

the shape of things…

I must write this post on Bangalore, being back after a break of three weeks. The monsoons should have begun their downpour, and the days are overcast, but the clouds above haven't much rain in them. In the meantime the flowers have left the trees, all of them save the mayflowers which came in April, which have lingered in diminished numbers in June.

Back on Bangalore's streets, I am again treated to its posters and hoardings, which feature as always not so much models and supermodels as rough-faced portly politicians whose birthdays their lackeys celebrate by greeting them on high hoardings in a clamorous fashion. The size of the hoardings has been growing over the last decade, and not a child can miss them, and, my son being no more a little boy, I wonder what answer others give their kid who asks, Who is that man, pappa? Is he a great man, mamma? What has he done? These are PG-13 posters, I'm afraid, and much parental caution—and some tact—is required while explaining the deeds of these accomplished personae.

And now the largest and the most colorful among them are those of the wealthy Sriramulu. "It is not just a walk, it is a struggle to save the very state," they cry on every street that matters. Sriramulu has finished an impressive padayatra and triumphantly entered Bangalore, and is planning a repeat yatra on motorcycle for a next edition. During the long walk he has realized that the people of the state are facing a shortage of water, and he has told that to the government in which he was until recently a minister. "Solve it! Or…" His threat is that he will field candidates from his party in all 224 constituencies of the state in the next elections.

Sriramulu has a website. Its banner says: "It's not just willingness to serve the poor, it's a desire too,i believe if you are with me we can create wonders no matter how big the obstacle." Sriramulu is a busy man as you can tell from his text, reproduced verbatim here. I ask you to go look up his website; go, go if you are a Kannadiga; see the size of his contribution while in office; see how engrossed he is in the service of the state.

You'll see that he is 24 x 7 for us; that he is 24 x 7 with us. I haven't seen him ever, but only because I don't count in his equations. I am not among the poor that he is talking to; the farmer is his other priority whereas I was raised only among concrete and pitted asphalt; and lastly, I am not a laborer either, which third category completes Sriramulu's list of priorities for his new and blazing BSR Party.

Neither am I the rich man that Sriramulu so abundantly is.

Underneath this veneer of priorities, however, there are bolder calculations and brilliant equations, all based on the strategic spread of influential castes. His walk has followed his math, which you can see from a slant, and by now a good number of others have had a glimpse of it too. The national newspapers are hushed in their reportage of the walk, 921 kilometers in 52 days, and the newsmen have also taken note that next door in Andhra a regional party has humbled the Indian National Congress. Can Sriramulu pull off a Jagan? is their question, and, "Quite possible" is the solemn answer in the mind. There is minimal protestation against caste politics. Aren't the incumbents doing it? After all?

So, when time comes, why shouldn't I vote for Sriramulu's BSR Party? Now, after I've read his website? After learning of his vision of himself, and of his so noble intentions? Don't I believe what he says there? That so many people hero-worship him? His record that is reported there clinches my vote, my conscience commands me to cast it for him, and my sense of responsibility, to put the state before self, tells me it is absolutely the right thing to do. What is this pull that I feel, then? Envy for the wealth of this one-time street fighter? Envy for his enormous pluck? His power? That he is only forty, and thus the thought of the staggering things he'll do yet, in the long years that stretch before him?

I don't know.

I believe what will happen is what happened the last time, when I couldn't vote with my voter's card, though I went searching with it to three polling stations. The polling clerks and the party volunteers ran their fingers up and down the smudgy printed pages in their hands, sweating in the heat and from the effort, but we didn't find my first name or my last name on any list. I feel relief from the thought that I mightn't be able to vote yet again, and my attitude has me ashamed a bit.

A pensive Paris Diary, Frankfurt, and a suicide

Our first week we spent entirely in Paris. It was our holiday week, and it was sunny all through. We walked all day savoring especially the evening light of June, which ended after ten. Are streets in heaven a better experience than those of Paris? Hemingway famously said you are lucky if you are in Paris when you are young, because afterward Paris goes everywhere with you, for Paris is a Moveable Feast. What has been said of Paris for them who find it only in the latter half of life?

Our second week there was for business and it rained through the entire week. We rode taxis after we rode inter-city trains, and sometimes we traveled the whole distance only in cabs. We were all right. We were always warm, and coffee and pastry waited everywhere we arrived. Business takes good care of the body; the challenge is to take hold of the mind. It was over a business dinner, in Vichy, that I was offered Chateldon, the spring water that Louis XIV received by mule from Vichy for his daily use four centuries years ago—to manage his gout, they say. Also, Chateldon was served at the king's big events. Its taste was thick on my tongue the following day, from having had too much of it.

After Paris, when we arrived in Frankfurt for some more business, it was the weekend, and the sun was out but his dazzle on the River Main—a sweeping length of which we could see from our room—was deceptive, because in the streets it was windy and the chill snaked into the dress. Young people were schlepping beer, a crate a pair, in preparation for public screenings in the city of the match in Ukraine between Germany and Portugal—which the Germans won. Their cries as they passed us by had strains of a growl in them, but the kids were harmless, out merely for an evening of fun in a German way with the German drink. Some kids looked as though they had time left yet to graduate to drinking age, but wouldn't wait the weeks, or the months, or the couple of years still left. Anyway, nothing seemed amiss, save the chill that lingered in June.

So I resorted to the treadmill in the comfort of the fitness center weekday mornings, and watched from its window young and old locals walk and jog along the promenade along the River Main. On Tuesday I took the train down to the very south of Germany, to Uberlingen. Everything was fine until after I changed to a regional express, and waited patiently at Bad Schussenried, a small station where the train paused unusually long. There wasn't much to see save two old men on the platform, each in his own state of geriatric decline. They shuffled about, walking away from each other, reuniting, and repeating the act. After a time they sat together on the lone bench. It was raining in a light and casual and constant drizzle. A good many minutes passed before it occurred to me that something was wrong.

The first to arrive were the firemen. They were in heavy garments which seemed to impede movement, but speed is not what they want as much as the ability to go anywhere, into anything. They went to the back of the train. I looked at the two fellow passengers in my carriage, both old men, both impassive. They were intent on the rain, and had no regard for what was wrong in the back. Then the paramedics arrived, starkly visible in the haze through the glass of the train, in orange vests. The last to come were the polizei, in serious dark blue, announcing their approach with a single up note and a single down note of the siren.

Everybody went to the back and returned in batches to huddle in the tiny shelter the station offered. The old men on the bench watched the huddles that formed and broke. The two old men in my carriage looked on at the rain, but the creases on their faces were deeper now, telling their displeasure at all the delay. I began to get harried myself, and called Bangalore to have them explain my situation to the folks was going to meet.

Two paramedics came into our carriage, with believable concern on their faces. They asked questions in German. The old men gave brief answers. "Are you okay?" the woman in the pair asked me, and thereby exhausted all the English she had. It was the only English I would hear all the way until Friedrichschafen, which place I reached after the Deutsche Bahn folks transferred us to a double bus, and then into another train in another bahnoff ten minutes away.

It was by now apparent that our train has ground down someone on the rails. Without basis, I deduced it to be suicide. Murder seemed improbable in this scene, among benign souls speaking solely German.

The taxi ride from Friedrichschafen to Uberlingen went also in the rain, and I watched it fall on the vineyards that ran on the rises on the right and the slopes on the left. In a while Lake Constance came up and stayed in view a good long time, being so large. The lake had risen up and the cloud was bearing down on it, and, far from them, on the fringes, one could feel the tumult of their union. Several cars passed, and they and the buildings, and the fences, and signposts, and every man-made thing that we passed crouched in the rain. When the elements mate, humans shiver, and the artifacts of humans cringe in step.

"This is not the weather for June," my host told me. We looked out his glassed window, holding black coffee in hand. Half his broad young shoulder was wet from the rain that it took when he walked me under his umbrella from their campus gate to his office; the other half of my shoulder was just as wet. "Normally people commit suicide in winter; but if it rains like this in June then they might do it also in summer. I don't know if others agree," he added, shrugging, curving his mouth, distancing himself from his statement. "It is my opinion."

It rained also on the way back. It was dry from Ulm onward and the fields outside the train window were pretty in the evening light all the way to Stuttgart. When the power lines and Frankfurt train station came up, with its innumerable rails splaying off to a great width, and the bank buildings sleek and tall on its back, it was past nine, and there was still light from the June sun.

I didn't feel the chill because I walked briskly to my hotel to fetch my wife and we walked from there to the very fine Tandoori Taj restaurant for an Indian meal, which has enough spice in it to fetch you back from any depression. The Tandoori Taj faces the garden path that leads to the Alte Opera, which is my favorite spot in Frankfurt, and which is so close to Goethe's home. Often, over espresso before the Alte Opera, I reaffirm my love for Europe.