Monday, July 30, 2007

Interrogation Under Pressure

No, Its not about how the US does not torture anyone, Anywhere.

So I cannot for the life of me decide, dear reader, whether the best way to refer to my pal Robin RedBreast in any future posts is Robin R. or R. RedBreast. You remember Robin (Mile High Vipassana). He, of the chirpy demeanour, who when sitting across you at a restaurant table, cracking a joke and shaking with laughter brings to mind a brightly hued songbird hopping happily on a branch outside your bedroom window. Think of that picture and tell me, whats the more fitting appellation?

Robin R. might be more appropriate given that he's from South India, all the way from Thammizh Naadh in fact. Please note the high levels of PC - phonetic correctness - achieved by this blog just then. But then RedBreast is just a qualifier not the name of his village-well. So I guess that can't be the source of his last initial.

So maybe R. RedBreast is better? It has the advantage of following a naming convention familiar to both Western and Indian readers and also fits the criteria of maintaining a degree of anonymity, which is a rather inconsistently observed piece of blogging etiquette. I think its also more visually evocative of that brightly hued bird I was talking about. Hmmm... So unless there's a massive demand for using Robin R. with a similarly well thought out rationale behind it, R. RedBreast it shall be.

And in case you're wondering what caused me to inflict this perhaps surprising question on you...feel free to claim all credit for yourselves, dear demanding reader. In the past few weeks I've been gratified to have received many more comments about my posts, than I usually do. Both on and off the blog. Of course some of these have been actually by me responding to other comments. But then, hamaare Bihar main, ballot-box stuffing is a time-honoured ritual.

But some of you have been rather demanding..."Where's Tokyo Take II" asked someone. "Do another city", said another, briefly giving me visions of being expected to change my name to Debbie and booking the next SouthWest flight to Texas.

This tells you a few things about me -
a) I like getting comments about my posts (on the blog is better than off it, though I'll take whatever I can get :)
b) I'm easily pleased and have a very American attitude where feeling successful about my blog is concerned. (If my readership goes from 1 to 2, well then, I just doubled my readership! Random House here I come.)
c) I sometimes babble under stress

Stress? You ask.

Uhuh. I fully intended to write a Take II on Tokyo and about other cities that have affected me - almost universally positively (probably a function of lowered expectations due to our celebrated Metropolis In The East). However the last couple of days when I've sat down to compose a coda to Cape Town or a panegyric to Paris, my synapses have refused to fire.

Yes. I'm forced to confess. I have a block...not a writer's block for I do not deserve (yet?) to suffer from that lofty aspirational affliction. Just a simple block. And while I've tried to fight it the last couple of days, to write something that might satisfy your ravenous hunger for all things written by me, it doesn't work...The thoughts and feelings refuse to morph into prose. And so I have decided, I shall wait for it to dissolve. By itself. In the meantime, do excuse me while I go listen to Queen vocalizing my distress.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Sappy Sentiment of the month

PLAYING ON MY IPOD

The last couple of weeks, the song thats been playing most on my IPod is Nickelback's If Everyone Cared...I've only recently started listening to Nickelback but really like several of their songs. A lot has to do with the rock-y-without-being-noisy feel of their music and the powerful, testosterone-fueled raspy voice of the lead singer (whoever he is). But this specific song I liked because of its sappy, almost cheesy sentiment that I'd have expected a rock band to shy away from expressing openly :) Its almost venturing into boy band territory. The innocence, almost simpleness of the emotion expressed by the lyrics is rescued by the hard edge in the singer's voice, the muscular guitaring and the assertive rather than plaintive tone in which its been sung.

The refrain which I love for its retro-sixties sentiment goes as follows:

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied

If everyone shared and swallowed their pride

Then we'd see the day, when nobody died


When I initially heard the song, I thought the last line was framed as a question, "Would we see the day, when nobody died?" I still think thats more appropriate and accurate - I'm pretty sure, honesty, humility, and love alone won't end conflicts...but maybe thats just the beleaguered cynic in me...winning out for once.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Tokyo Take I - A Spring Underneath A Fly-over

CITIES I'VE SEEN. CITIES I'VE FELT.

I love cities. Love them. Specially those cities which have been around long enough and have been successful enough to have climbed from the bottom rung of Maslow's Need Hierarchy ladder to a point where they are not just about making money or just getting by but also about something more - something that characterizes them and gives them a personality of their own. I've been lucky enough to have spent time - months, years or even just days in some of nicest ones...and some of the not-so-nice ones. And then there's Tokyo - a city that I've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with, for several years.

Tokyo was the first city outside India that I saw way back in a different century - in the spring of 2000. And Tokyo dazzled me. Everything was new and shiny (the buildings built during the real estate bubble were still pretty young), the airport bus seemed to whizz through the night without a sound. The roads were super-smooth, the people extremely polite, the cabs had doors that opened and close on their own (Woe betide the tourist who touched the door handle; you'd wilt under the drivers' glare like a cherry blossom under the attack of the Monilinia Laxa fungus). Tokyo seemed to give the impression of nature having been comprehensively conquered by man. At least in Roppongi where I lived, everything seemed to have been tamed. Nearly every surface had been covered by concrete and where natural soil was visible, it was buried under small, well tended patches of shrubbery or trees. Perhaps the crowning achievement in my eyes was the infinitely complex flyover system - which were sometimes as high as six or seven storeys, usually had multiple layers and crested and dipped multiple times without touching ground before they got you to your destination.

Roppongi is the main expatriate district in Tokyo, where the gaijin (foreigners) tend to cluster. I lived a block off the main street linking Roppongi with Akasaka, a staid business district where my office was located. I'd been put up in a respectable sized service apartment where the only thing they didn't do was take care of the laundry (loved it).

Roppongi is famous for its raucous night life - sleazy (and some classy) strip clubs, hostess bars and just plain-sex joints - abutting expensive sushi bars, the odd McDonald's and Hard Rock Cafe, and high end clubs like The Lexington - favorite haunt of the hot expat models in the city (They really are pretty hot...I know cos I went there in keeping with my hot-blooded straight male disguise :).

Akasaka was only a 20 minute walk from Roppongi. In the evenings, walking back home from work across Roppongi's main drag, it was pretty common to be accosted by a bouncer (often the only black man on the street), shown a racy photograph and asked in plain hearing of the expats crowding the sidewalks - "Want some hot p***y?" It could really be as simple as that. And many men - including several on my trading desk - took advantage of what was on offer. (Un?)Fortunately my appetites didn't drive me in that particular direction.

In some ways though, I had an easier time with menu choices than my other three vegetarian batch-mates who spent nearly the entire two months eating veggie Subways for lunch and curd rice for dinner - not daring to buy much from grocery shops, where no one seemed to know English and where all the labeling was in Japanese; petrified that what tasted like tofu could just as well be dried sea urchin.

Tokyo also intimidated me...an admission it took me some time to make. In many ways it was too ordered and too strange for me. I found it hard not to cross the street at 3:00am at night when the pedestrian light was red. Or not to count the change that the cabbie gave me (Its considered insulting - though he always seemed to count mine!) Or to not poke some of those dang slippery sashimi pieces with chop-sticks (also considered rude). I remember being especially freaked out the first (and only) time I tried to use the Tokyo Metro and found people standing in neat queues on the platform to get in. The Bombayite in me couldn't handle the concept. I never went back. And growing up in multi-lingual India had not prepared me for Japan's monocultural experience. If you didn't know the language and couldn't read Kanji there was few people you could speak to and few things you could read. It was a curiously isolating , even numbing experience - to walk around in the crowded streets, people chattering, neon signs blazing and still not be able to absorb 95% of it (except usually for street signs). Laptops and the internet - the lonely traveler's saviours - were not ubiquitous then and I certainly did not have access to them.

Finally...Tokyo annoyed me. I found Japan perplexingly difficult to get a handle on - partly I'm sure, because of the language barrier. Maybe people were just being their reserved selves, but the system at times seemed hostile to foreigners in a passive-aggressive way. I spied that hostility in several isolated things - In the fact that at Tokyo Tower they charged tourists more than what they charged locals (yes they do the same at the Taj but then India wasn't the second largest economy in the world at the time). In the way they did not have any English or foreign language signage at this beautiful temple outside Tokyo that I went to with my friends. In Mayor Ishihara's massive popularity and repeated ability to get re-elected when he was known to have isolationist tendencies (7 years later he is still mayor)...Or in the fact that multiple-generation Koreans born in Japan were not automatically given citizenship because their ancestry cannot be traced back to a Japanese lineage. And then there was the widely recognised and accepted chauvinism in Japanese society. One of the Indian swap traders I worked with, joked about how the culture fit him well since it was even more chauvinistic than India.

Why did I care? I don't know - But I decided to snub Tokyo - I withdrew to what was most familiar in a foreign country - no not the local Indian restaurant - but, ironically, the representative symbols of HollywoodLand. So I ate at Subway and the New York Diner, hung out at the Hard Rock Cafe and rented English movie videos to watch, nearly every night. That time spent wasn't a complete waste, btw - I saw some really good movies in really clear video prints for once. I didn't venture out once to electric Akihabara or glitzy Ginza. Apart from one-off visits to Shibuya and Shinjuku and the wonderful Ueno zoo I pretty much stayed in Roppongi.

So at the end of my two months in Tokyo, having not strolled by a single blooming cherry tree, I left, rather gratefully for India. My lasting impression of Tokyo was one of mild claustrophobia caused by feeling hemmed in by the multiple-storey high, multi-layer flyover that ran the entire distance between Roponggi and Akasaka. The flyover blocked out the sun along the entire route and, given that most of my time outdoors was spent walking from home to office and back, left me with a rather industrial cast-in-concrete memory of the city. Not surprisingly I was in no hurry to go back.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Spot the Oxymoron

"There's a very nice Middle-Eastern restaurant in downtown Sunnyvale"

For those unsure of what an oxymoron is - here's a helpful primer - The picture below depicts one.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Is it the Fourth of July Again?

Forget flip-flops, tis the time for drag-heels

My downstairs neighbour who's really a terrific guy (and I'm ready to take on whoever says he isn't) was kind enough to let me know that he was going out to town for a few days. More than a week! May the Travel Gods continue to smile on him.

So I've already taken advantage of the situation in several ways - after my usual curfew of eleven o'clock:
a) Tapped my feet on the floor while sprawling on the bed playing Risk on my computer
b) Sang out loud to the tune of Dido's "Thank You" while washing up for the night
c) Trundled my suitcase loudly through the doorway instead of hefting it over the threshold in my arms like the proverbial new bride
d) Wore my noisy slippers and went click-click CLACK-CLACK all over the house
e) Resolved to wake up at least once in the middle of the night to go, make sure to flush noisily and then thump heavily (oh yeah!) over to the kitchen through the bedroom for a glass of water, rather than tip-toeing through the corridor.

That freak gust of wind you saw blow off the leaves on that tree was me letting out my breath.
Independence Day came a week late - but whats that they say about being better late than never?

PS: Also, decided to drop something heavy at least once each night to make sure the law of averages stays on my side once he's back

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Mile-High Vipassana


My friend Robin RedBreast who's as feather-footed as the name implies told me recently that he doesn't read my blog much because its not personal enough for him. So this post is also for him.

I recently flew to Japan - only my third international flight since about July last year - (believe me I'm not complaining about not travelling cattle class more often). On the flight out to Tokyo, I realised that these long flights can have an unintended side effect which can be salutary or stressful, depending on one's relationship with the truth about oneselves. They can create the conditions for a (sometimes involuntary) bout of introspection.

On a ten hour flight, once you've been forced to switch off the phone, the movies are ones you've already seen or - if its United - ones you wouldn't ever want to, when the laptop battery runs out having lasted only half as long as you thought it should and when you've run through that wonderfully interesting book twice as fast as you hoped you would, there really isn't much to do other than switch on your thoughts. Some people can get lost in music (the iPod's battery can generally last an entire flight) but I find I do a lot of my thinking when the only distraction is music.

There are other uses of an iPod too of course. I use mine to ward off surprise attacks from your friendly-neighbourhood-seat-extroverts. You know. Those people who think that nothing could be better than to have perfect strangers belted into place next to them for hours on end. All the better to get to know them and make-new-friends! Yay! Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly a friendly guy but I find starting a conversation with strangers on flights is rather like the Chinese saying about a rescuer becoming responsible for a rescuee for life. Most people assume that because you said "Hi" to them at the beginning you've effectively promised to engage them in conversation through the rest of the flight. So having been burned by such strangely social souls a few times, I now board planes with my earphones in place and keep them firmly plugged in for the duration even if the iPod isn't on.

Given that the iPod doesn't help me prevent one-ness with my thoughts, I've had a couple of fairly big epiphanies on my international flights. Last year after a 10 day stretch of flying London-SF-London-Singapore-London-SF I found myself sitting up in my business class sleeper bed, staring into space and realising that I needed time off to think about what to do about my job and the absence of any life in my life. Sometimes weekend long clubbing just isn't enough :) It led me to taking 3 months off from work and eventually changing jobs.

This time when my computer unhelpfully died within the first hour and the latest installment of the Tales of the City novels proved to be a fast and slightly disappointing read, I was again left with nothing to do but switch to my iPod...and my thoughts. Thankfully my life's a little more interesting right now so the conversation with myself didn't involve as much of a scolding as last time. The result of the enforced introspection was that as I stepped out at Tokyo's Narita airport I was resolved on a few things...I won't tell you what conclusions I came to about myself and what I needed to change...thats way too personal for me...but will leave you to deduce what you may, dear reader, from the resolutions. My three mid-year resolutions are to force myself to sit down to write even if the story is not clear in my mind (waiting for it to reveal itself has led to a 8 month hiatus!)...to buy myself a silver thumb ring to wear sometimes without waiting for someone to buy one for me...and to start making plans to visit all those places that I want to go to but have been putting off for when I have someone special to see them with. Nothing life changing - thankfully. Of course that may be a sign that the flight-enforced self-discovery needed to go on longer...but for now I'll just take it as a sign that I'm no longer cursed with an interesting life and its attendant melodramatic subscripts.

But Yeah. It is funny how my introspections seem to lead me towards more vacations. :)
Maybe I should take a more serious look at one of those Vipassana courses - the voluntary, on-ground kind...?