Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Golden Gate's 'Beauty Mark'

This Friday, I went cycling with my cousin who'd come down from LA - we started off near Fisherman's Wharf and rode all the way along the Marina, over the Golden Gate, and down to Sausolito - its an 8 mile trip with a couple of uphills and a lot of downhill (once you get over the hump of the GG Bridge)...stopped at a Starbucks in Sausolito before taking the ferry back to the Ferry Building (quite appropriately :)

We chose perhaps the worst day possible to do the trip - it was cold and raining - and we got drenched three times over the course of the day - but it was also very empowering - now that I've done it in lousy freezing weather - I can do it anytime.

While I've only biked over the Bridge once before, I've driven across it many many times - but even now, crossing the bridge feels like a bit of a special event. The Golden Gate's attraction is a little difficult to understand if you haven't seen it - and perhaps even if you have (if you're a philistine :) . it requires a certain ability to buy into mythmaking in addition to just a basic appreciation of beauty. At one point its claim to fame was being the longest single-span bridge in the world - but there are newer claimants to that throne. So today you could see it as just an old red coloured bridge...But I think its so much more - I love it for its simple elegance, easy symmetry. For its incongruous red colour that stands out against the blue water and the greenery on either side but that also seems to make it look like a natural (rather than man-made) part of the scenery. I think the view of the Bay without the Golden Gate would feel rather like a well-formed sentence without a full-stop...it would feel incomplete.

Its probably one of the few instances where humans took a beautiful natural setting, imposed structures that they needed for their convenience and in doing so actually (unwittingly?) enhanced the panorama. Thats quite an achievement really and a pretty rare one. Go ahead and google images of the ugly structures on SF's other distraction, Alcatraz, to see what I mean....or heck, just take a look out of your own bedroom window!

Because it was raining, there wasn't much of a view from the bridge which is really why you would want to do this trip in the first place...and that's perhaps why I noticed for the first time Golden Gate's 'beauty mark'. It is its equivalent of Enrique Iglesias' now-departed mole...or of the mascara dot that doting newly-minted Indian parents - believing their kids to be perfect - sometimes put on the baby's face to ward off the Evil Eye.

Its just two small blink-and-you'll-miss-it sign-boards but the concise text is powerful, disturbing and poignant. The signs show a picture of a telephone to use in case of emergencies...not the kind that Alistair Maclean manufactured in GoodBye California - the US President is kidnapped by a gang and held hostage on the Golden Gate - but a much more individual, personal crisis. The Bridge is the site of multiple (unfortunately successful) suicides every year - and the hotline is to give people a last chance to be literally talked back from the edge.

I cycled on...the signs left me feeling vaguely disturbed...I find suicide and its associated despair and deep sadness difficult to understand and a little scary. But I was also glad that the city was trying to extend help to those lonely, despairing persons who stand on the bridge contemplating and seeking mortal rather than spiritual salvation. According to Wikipedia, "beauty marks were particularly highly-regarded during the Renaissance and it became commonplace to create false beauty marks" if you weren't born with them. SF has done something similar with the Crisis Counselling signs - except that these signs despite not being congenital, in their motivation, are true beauty marks.

Monday, January 22, 2007

I think I'm falling in love...

...with the IPhone. I really thought I could resist it but after checking out the demos on their web-site I don't think I'll be able to stay away when it comes calling :( See for yourself - its looks brilliant - http://www.apple.com/iphone/phone/

Of course, I can see several practical problems with the phone. All that finger scrolling is going to mess up the screen pretty quickly.

And I hope they're building scratch resistant screens for the nailcutter-ly-challenged denizens of the fashion world.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Urban Pools of Meltwater

"While there have always been meltwater pools. There are many more of them covering a far larger area of ice....This meltwater is now believed to keep sinking all the way down to the bottom, cutting deep crevasses and vertical tunnels called 'moulins'. When the water reaches the bottom of the ice, it lubricates the surface of the bedrock and destabilizes the ice mass raising fears that the ice mass will slide more quickly towards the ocean"
- Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore was talking about innocuous looking pools of melted ice (meltwater) that have been spreading across the surface of Greenland. The adjoining picture is NOT Niagara Falls; its meltwater flowing into a deep moulin. How deep is the moulin? Well, the tiny black dots at the top of the picture are actually people.

While ice-sheets already formed on the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans are also breaking away and melting, this does not raise sea levels. Meltwater on the Greenland's landmass is significant because it may help huge chunks of land-based ice to slide into the sea which WOULD raise the sea levels.

I believe that metaphorical meltwater pools have also formed in urban Indian society...that has an equally large potential to change the climate in India - in this case, the social one. Unlike global warming, this climate change is likely bring positive change to most people's lives (even if they don't think so themselves :)

The meltwater pools can be found in places like Buzz in Delhi where young couples dance, smoke, drink and kiss in abandon every weekend night...or for example in Mocha in Bombay - where packs of barely-teened girls and boys spend horrendous number of hours and huge amounts of deep-pocket money on melted-Lindt hot chocolate and green-apple flavored hookahs.

The signs of climate change are everywhere. Here's a few examples:
a) Rising divorce rates (specially amongst the under-35 age-group) - Ask yourself how many divorced friends your parents had and how many divorced wonderful friends you do
b) Falling rates of pre-marital virginity. The perceived virginity rate in the eyes of parents is probably still at its 1960s level - I know many many couples who've lived-in in India but almost no parents who knew about it :)
c) The laissez faire attitude...fancy way of saying live-and-let-live...of most of my friends and relatives to my coming out. "But even then, why do you have to move to the U.S." I was asked a couple of times. Or the increasing number of gay nights in Delhi - at last count it had doubled to 2! - each, I believe, well-attended.
d) The increasing number of kissing scenes in Hindi films - even Ash did it...yes Amitabh, she did it and even if its cut from the theatre runs of Dhoom2 its probably already on Youtube for eternity. I do think though, that Ash kissing-in-movies is like Microsoft bundling IE with Windows - its a free gift that people didn't expect and thats designed to put wannabes like Mallika Sherawat (or poor Netscape) out of business

Sceptics will argue that there was always a tiny Page-3-population that lived like they were in Malibu rather than Mumbai - I think the difference is that:
a) The people swimming in the thawed meltwater pools today, are overwhelmingly middle class - not the upper-class people Shobha De famously wrote about
b) They don't regard themselves as social revolutionaries unlike the 1960's (1970's in India)
Flower-Power generation - the increasingly blase attitude towards sex, divorce, marriage etc is truly subversive - one that is likely to infect contemporaries in smaller towns, as well as younger siblings, kids and nephews/nieces who are now growing up. Quiet creeping revolution is more difficult to put down than bus-window-shattering protests

I, of course, selfishly applaud the omens of a new social climate - it may allow me to have a dating scene based in Delhi/Bombay before I'm 80 and can't dance anymore.

But there are others who should be worried. Human action has led to the drying up of the Aral Sea (Yeah really - the whole sea literally evaporated into thin air) and left shipping fleets stuck in the sand (see adjoining picture).

Indian conservative political parties - the ones that tend to riot on Valentine's Day - may find themselves similarly left stranded by the wayside along with their Ice Age ideas - if they don't change with the

Friday, January 19, 2007

The One About Rhymes That Won't Stop Running Through My Head

I've been in a bit of a strange mood the last couple of days - difficult to describe - I guess melancholy comes closest...a lot of change seems to be ahead in the next few months and maybe thats what is driving it. I usually find articulation of my moods through song lyrics that then I end up listening to on my IPod or humming incessantly - here's a few that have been preying on my mind the last couple of days:

From George Michael's Older - he's one my favorite artists - wish he'd clean up his act

"Strange
Baby
Don't you think I'm looking older
But something good has happened to me
Change
is a stranger
Who never seems to show"


From Linkin Park's In the End - my brother gifted me an mp3 CD with this song that I've come to love

"I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter"

The lyrics refer to a failed relationship but in my mind can refer to anything that you take too seriously at the expense of all other things. I definitely want to get far but hopefully will never be at the point where the deep sense of regret in these lyrics applies to me :)

Thankfully I also have in my IPod's arsenal a set of songs that help me climb out of my melancholy moods - lyrics that I've found always help are from Tim McGraw's Live Like You Were Dying:

I went sky diving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds
On a bull named FuManChu.
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
And gave forgiveness I'd been denying
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dying

Makes you think about how you're living your life huh? :)

Monday, January 15, 2007

Why Scaring The Pigeons is a Good Thing

Sometime back I wrote about how I thought the alliteratively titled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was one of my favorite new shows on TV. Disappointingly, the show didn't quite live up to its promise - and being unashamedly fickle about my TV viewing I have a new favorite - Showtime's rather innocently titled "Dexter".

Dexter is probably the darkest show on TV - certainly the darkest show I've seen on the small screen...Its about a sociopath who works as a forensic specialist in Miami's police department
and who channels his urge to kill into murdering other sociopaths. For those who think he sounds like any other superhero in Marvel comics, you've gotta see the show to understand how horrifying and fascinating Dexter the character and Dexter the show is.

I love the show and not just because its so dark but also because it raises a serious, but completely overlooked, animal rights issue. As a kid, Dexter, hones his skill as a budding psychopath, by murdering small animals (like dogs). There is a serious disconnect about how we care for kids and equally cuddly, equally innocent small animals that bring us into their circle of trust. We warn little kids to stay away from strange adults but encourage pets as well as semi-wild fauna like pigeons, squirrels etc to trust strange humans - kids and adults alike. And so, across the world, there are probably hundreds of quasi-domesticated small animals being massacred by mini-Dexters everyday...and nothing is being done about it

Take the example of pigeons...Almost any self-respecting historical monument in the world has several score pigeons floating around - strutting, fluttering, clustering around delighted tourists who throw down pieces of sourdough or baklava or corn depending on which country they're in and how cheap they are. These pigeons are so used to being around people and strangers that they'll trot up to just about anyone...they're perfect sitting ducks (sic) for any cute sociopathic Dexter/Dmitri/Dhritrashtra that scampers along. The show doesn't talk about Dexter visiting Trafalgar Square as a child like the kid in the picture, but you can be sure that if he had, there wouldn't have been quite so much cooing going on there, as there is today

The fact is, its not safe for these pigeons to trust humans. Given the centuries of indoctrination that these birds have gone through, there's a dire need for a comprehensive Pavlovian education program to get them to not trust humans again. And any animal rights activist worth their iodized salt should be doing his/her bit. It can be as simple as volunteering to spend a couple of hours every weekend to jump out at these silly birds from behind bushes while screaming bloody murder (IMPORTANT NOTE: but not actually committing it) to scare the guano out of them. Over time though, I think, more innovative methods might be more effective - ummm - like scattering electrostatically charged pop-corn that shocks any bird that pecks at it.

I spent one summer afternoon in May doing the jumping-out-the-bushes thing to scare some particularly blase pigeons on the lawns in front of Ghirardelli Square. I can vouch for the effectiveness of the method - it cleared the lawns of both pigeons...and people (including my fickle friend :( over a 100m radius within the first 30 minutes. I must admit, the lack of understanding with which my work amongst pigeons was greeted was rather discouraging. However...like Steve Irwin with crocodiles...I shall continue harassing them for their own good

Monday, January 1, 2007

Its going to be a Happy New Year


Sometime on the morning of the 31st, I got this phone call from one of my bestest favouritest friends in India - completely sloshed - and very happy - she called to tell me I was one of her favourite people too...It was a great way to start the day.

She also told me that she was taking responsibility of ending my singleton status - but given the 'high spirits' she was in at the time, I'm not going to hold her to it. :)

And then I brought in the New Year with old friends and some new - we had a surprisingly good time at Chevy's downing margaritas (we ended up closing down the place) - and then watching the fireworks from the wharf. And for once I had witnesses to the fact that there ARE fireworks that look like smileys. Yesterday there were several of them. Here's a picture to prove it.

And if the new year is anything like the last day of last year - Its going to be a very good year.
Here's wishing for many smileys next year for everyone - ones that light up faces not just the sky.