A Second Coming

Yes I’m back, dear reader, after a too-long hiatus. The reasons for which I might divulge in a future post once I fully figure them out myself, and if at that point they seem even remotely interesting (to me ☺)

I can tell you right now, that the reason was not that I haven’t found anything interesting to write about in the last two months. In fact, I’ve had fragments of six or seven posts swirling around in my head in a very distracting manner over the last few weeks. I’m going to try and get some of them down before the next melancholectomy (I wouldn't trouble myself looking that up in a dictionary).

I want to ask for your indulgence though. I feel out of practice. So do factor that in as you read the next few posts, specially if the words in the sentences stumble over each other instead of flowing together; and if the thoughts seem patched together like parts of a badly knitted sweater with horrendous numbers of dropped stitches. Like an out-of-practice marathoner it will probably take a few practice runs before I find your favor again with a polished post.

I also think I should stop now - before you (and I) overdose on mixed metaphors.

Just wanted to let you know I'm back.

The Young Museum

ADVENTURES IN FOG CITY - SOMEPLACE COOL



One of Forrest Gump's enduring lines for me, was how his Mom described life to him as being like a box of chocolates - "you never really know what you gonna get". That line apparently has now been immortalized on wikipedia here. Anyway, thats how I feel about San Francisco - After three years of living in what is really quite a small city, I regularly get surprised by discovering something new, someplace cool, some gem hidden, someone true.

Last Friday evening, I wandered into this short free, live concert by a 1980s band I'd never heard of before, called Sid Luscious and The Pants at the city's famed De Young Museum. Nestling in the Golden Gate Park, the Museum building itself is a work of art with a wonderful outdoor sculpture garden - I like the De Young because I think they try hard to make art accessible to relative philistines like me and (perhaps) you. I especially love its sculpture garden which I've visited multiple times while venturing inside just once. Mostly as a result of the Museum's efforts, on any given weekend day or night, you'll find it run over by people of all age groups and interests that gives it a cool buzz and a youthful vibe.

Anyway, the band was playing in the museum's large interior court thats dominated by a huge, memorable, piece of artwork named Strontium - an electron microscope image of the crystal lattice of Strontium Titanate. Not everyone likes it, but I felt it was the perfect backdrop for the band which was, gratifyingly, pretty good. C and I caught only the last 20 minutes of the band ...but the novelty of the experience - of seeing a raucous (in a good way) band merrily rip the usual near-reverent near-silence of a museum - seemed to me, a harbinger of a fun-filled weekend.

Out-of-the-Bottle Thinking?

As if the loss of market share and pre-eminent status to Toyota wasn't enough humiliation for Detroit's Big Three. Here's further proof that the world's largest car-makers - who've enjoyed iconic status in pop-culture and in industry for decades - are in danger of forever being relegated to the scrapheap of un-coolness.

The car on the left is the Loremo (Hat-tip to Caderageous) - a "green"vehicle in race-car disguise. Apparently it can get 145 miles (and multiple exclamation marks!!!) per gallon. And its going to be available not 20 or 10 or 5 years from now. Its hitting the markets next year. And it costs only about $22,000 - not that much more than a fully loaded Honda Civic and several thousand dollars cheaper than what my Prius cost me. Click here to learn more about the car.

The Detroit Three can't even complain of being left behind by disruptive new technology - the Loremo is NOT a hybrid (though a hybrid version may be in development). Its NOT a hydrogen car. It runs on diesel - you know that high-tech new-fangled fuel thats powered trucks and tractors for eons. The efficiency comes from "engine efficiency, low weight, and minimal drag to boost the fuel-efficiency". Wow - who would've thought that those things could ever work.

The power of the Loremo is really in the breaking of the mental barrier around fuel-efficiency, the barrier which said that 45mpg was about as good as it gets. The Loremo could be the Roger Bannister of the automotive industry. Now that one car has gotten more than 100mpg - I wouldn't be surprised if every automaker worth their salt comes up with several more super-high efficiency models like this.

Of course, the other potential loser in this case in the long run is the oil industry. While this isn't disruptive technology, its impact could definitely be disruptive. Whats going to happen to all those billions of dollars being spent by the oil industry on exploration and millions of tons of new refining capacity? You'd be surprised how quickly car populations can get replaced in cost-conscious countries - which includes nearly every nation from the US to India and China. The days of ExxonMobil's $40bn in profits might soon be over - a quintupling of fuel-efficiency would definitely slow or reduce oil demand and prices.

Of course - its much too early to celebrate the end of oil (or the arrival of a powerful tool in the fight against global warming) - the Loremo may yet mysteriously develop design flaws or have safety concerns raised about it, or it may be bought out by competitors who may or may not deem it to be a viable project to pursue. But heck - its Friday evening - always a good time to pick up that beer-stein and cheer on an idea that has taken way too much time to arrive.

And one that seems to be the outcome of some great out-of-the-bottle thinking :)

The Joy of Lying to Small Kids

Browsing in a book-store in Florence a couple of months back I came across a laugh-out loud book of cartoons named "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids" by one Andy Riley (also author of The Bunny Suicides as the blurb helpfully told me). The book has one lie per page accompanied by a funny illustration - its laugh riot!

As someone who thoroughly enjoys making up elaborate, unbelievable fabrications in response to irritating questions from kids and sending them happily on their way, I felt I'd found a kindred spirit. I also admired the ingenuity of the author for having found a way to make money out of an activity that I'd always just seen as a lazy hobby. I immediately bought the book for my precocious seven (or is it six) year old niece who was wandering through the bookshop with me, and we had a great time going through it.

Partly in tribute to Andy's genius and partly to further the cause of confusing annoying kids, here's a few more lies I came up with that I think might be good to put out there. Feel free to use any and all of them on any unsuspecting brats that cross your path, dear reader. Also - of course - feel free to contribute.

1. Moths are actually very old butterflies who are too proud to use hair dye
2. The Romans were great environmentalists who fed people to lions to keep them from eating deer (Bambi!) instead
   
3. Babies come when two people send a jointly signed letter to Santa asking for a boy or a girl. Meanwhile Mom starts eating a lot of food and becoming really fat so she can produce milk for the baby when the stork finally brings it over.
   
4. There is no such thing as the moon - its just the sun at very low power, recharging itself until its time to go to school again.
   
5. Sea water is salty, because the United Nations decided to mix all the salt in the sea since there was no other place to put it
6. You never hear that Red Riding Hood lived happily ever after because the wood-cutter who killed the wolf was really an axe-murderer...
7. Have you heard? Santa won't be coming this year because his elves formed a union, went on strike and no toys have been made. You might as well have stolen that last biscuit from the jar!
8. Microwaves make things hot by piping heat in from the Sahara Desert
9. Lightning never strikes the same place twice because Indra/Zeus has really bad aim
10. Giraffes have two or more bumps on their heads depending on how many coconuts have fallen on them while trying to eat the coconut tree's leaves
    

The Surprising Similarities Between Vampires and Bisexuals

TONGUE FIRMLY EMBEDDED IN CHEEK

A few weeks back I found myself in an animated discussion on a now-forgotten subject with a couple of my friends who’re avowed bisexuals. I saw avowed because really, I only have their word that they’re bisexual for proof. All the time I’ve spent with them each has tended to show a marked preference for persons of their own gender. Sure they claim to have slept with members of the opposite sex but have little evidence to show to back up their claims. And no P, being married to someone for 5 years does not automatically mean that you had carnal relations with them – in fact, the case is often the contrary. And there are thousands of nuns, wedded to The One True Saviour, out there who will tell you I’m right.

For some reason that conversation took a turn into how I never see my bisexual friends, specially M, in daylight. Its almost always at night, sometimes on cloudy days or indoors. At that point M did come up with an instance where I’d met him under the glaring sun. But by then, the train of that particular thought had already left the station in the direction of the common ground uniting vampires and bisexuals.

Having given it not a lot of thought, I’m convinced that there are undeniable similarities between bisexuals and vampires. For example, both demographic groups are equally happy partaking of their pleasure with men or women. And then there’s that common tendency to involuntarily co-opt the rest of humanity into their respective groups. Vampires, as we know, have a rather lamentable ability to sign you up to lifetime membership of their club with just a caress of their canines. Bi-sexuals, try to do the same thing using, The Kinsey Scale and fallacious reasoning as weapons of choice, to considerably less success, I should add.

“Sit yourself down Mr/Ms. of professedly mono-sexual persuasion”, your bisexual friend/acquaintance will tell you if they sense you’re in a moment of faltering logic, “And let me tell you why you’re not straight/gay at all.”

This is when the Kinsey work will be brandished, “The Great Kinsey spake thus:

‘Males (ed: insert MCP alert here) do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.’ ”

Followed by the astute use of fallacy:

“And so it must be that everyone’s bisexual. How bisexual they are depends on where they fall on the Kinsey Scale that runs from 0 to 6 with 3 being actively (as opposed to avowedly) bisexual.”

To me it’s a bit like saying there are no primary colours, no red, blue or green, only the colour white. I actually believe in the Kinsey scale and in the existence of a continuum of sexual orientations, but to me the fact that there’s a scale means that it has ends and the Kinsey scale is book-ended by Straights (0) and Gays (6). However, try telling that to an avowed bisexual, and you might very well find yourself staring at bared – hopefully blunt – canines.

Finally, and this is a curious similarity: The existence of both demographic groups is doubted by large sections of the population. There are many, many gay, straight and bisexual people who believe that there’s no such thing as a vampire – that they don’t exist. And similarly there are tons of people (straight or gay, though likely not bisexual) who are more likely to believe in the existence of a unicorn-capable-of-healing-wounds-in-a-twinkle-with-pixie-dust than in the existence of an actual bisexual person. Within every bisexual person, they will say, is a confused gay man/woman. I should point out that as a convert to the Kinsey scale I’m not one of the bisexual-sceptics. I am, though, a vampire sceptic. Which is good, otherwise the fact - that I believe in the existence of both groups - would be a fourth (and surely damning!) point of similarity!

So what does this all mean? What of it? After all, similarity does not imply sameness. It does not. And so for me, this analysis has little utility. But if one is not a vampire-sceptic and not a vampire-wannabe, then the curious commonality between bisexuals and vampires would suggest that checking if one's bisexual friends sleep on (in?) box beds or not, might be a very good idea.

Blasted into Agnosticism? By Believers.

Here's a headline for you - The Daughter of the East has fallen victim to the regions' time honoured tradition of filicide. Benazir Bhutto assassinated by bullets and bombs at a fateful Rawalpindi rally pictured to the left...with the word Shahid chillingly emblazoned below her in a fitting final shot...rendering captions superfluous.

I'm surprised by how sad I feel. I never thought much of Benazir after her two failed prime ministerships. She made a mess out of two precious opportunities that her countrymen gave her - discredited democracy for several years along with her inept alter ego, Nawaz Sharif - and made it easy for the military establishment to take over her country each time. So much so that its taken 7 years of an incompetent, though largely benevolent, dictatorship to bring democracy back in fashion in Pakistan.

But Benazir first came to power around the time that I first started following politics and so she's been part of the political world as I've known it, forever. She was like a slightly crazy aunt that I'd gotten used to having around, periodically noisy but largely irrelevant. Her 15 minutes up, she seemed destined to live out her years in affluence in London...seemingly delusional about her achievements and importance and seemingly paranoid about how just about everyone was out to get her.

Well today, I guess this can be said - She was important and They were out to get her. And though she was an imperfect leader. Though she was smug and self-important. Though she was corrupt. She was also Pakistan's only real liberal, moderate, secular voice of any importance. She was also, I think, courageous. Of all the condolences that poured out on the news, I think Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi was the one that really put that into perspective for me. He said, she was "a woman who chose to fight her battle until the end with a single weapon - the one of dialogue and political debate." And whatever else she was, that is true of Benazir and I think given the way things are in Pakistan today, using only dialog and debate is immensely courageous. I think she came back despite the danger, to get one last chance to redeem herself and with her courage and in her martyrdom, I think she succeeded.

The sad thing is that her attackers have probably succeeded not just in her murder but also in their wider objective of driving Pakistan in a more Islamist direction. An assassination is such a horrible thing. All the possibilities and hopes eliminated just like that in a flash - I hate assassinations. Among other things, I think they're responsible for the rise of rampant right-wing Republicanism in the US (JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King) and of the end of the Israel-Palestine peace process (Rabin)...and the sad thing is its always the extremists who assassinate the moderates because by definition moderates won't do such things. Those unable to win the debate with ideas and inspiration have often succeeded in winning the debate with assassinations. And in causing so much more misery for thousands, even millions of people for years and even decades, before another leader comes along to show the way out.

Through the course of the day, I found my thoughts veering in directions agnostic. I should say first, that I've always believed in God(s). Always. Even as I turned completely, vehemently away from religion, I continued to believe in God and to pray to Him/Her/Them. But today as I thought about assassinations and their intolerable effectiveness, I wondered. Would God, if he exists, really choose to test us by allowing these things to happen? Would he, like a bad soap opera script-writer who builds up a beautiful romance and then kills off one of the audience-beloved pair, manipulate our emotions just to keep us interested in him? And even if he allowed assassinations to happen, wouldn't he make sure that the vision of the fallen leader was miraculously realized? Wouldn't that be the best way to teach a lesson to those b***ards out there - Instead of deepening the misery of the largely-innocent?

Going by history, I have little hope that Benazir's killing will not lead to more turmoil in Pakistan and a move away from a modern liberal path...leading either to years of violence or years of suppression under a tyrannical military or theological regime.

I pray it won't happen. But I'm increasingly not very confident that there's some non-denominational being or beings out there listening.

Rainbows in the Moonlight

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY

UMBRELLAS THAT LIGHT UP THE NIGHT

Of all the words that I wouldn't have expected to find in the title of a rip-roaring pop-hit (or the topic of a blog-post), 'umbrella' would be pretty high up in the list. And when I first heard Rihanna's Umbrella I was mightily unimpressed. I found it slow and difficult to dance to...I found the ella-ella-ellaing in the song juvenile and irritating...and I didn't really know much about the singer (Rihanna) or her previous work.

And then, on an aimless melancholia-fueled drive through a fogged-up Presidio one cold September night, I heard the song play out on Energy (my favourite FM station here). There's something wonderfully isolating and peaceful about the Presidio at night. For those who don't know, the Presidio is a densely cypress-populated oasis of greenery that occupies a generous patch of ground between San Francsico and the Golden Gate. It was once an army base with pretty military style bungalows that now rent out for as much as $30k per month. With many more trees than houses, its a great neighbourhood to drive through when one is looking to get away from the bustle of the city without crossing water.

I bring up the Presidio because, I think it was its quiet, deepened by the fog that allowed me to focus on Rihanna's tone rather than the lyrics...I heard the way she belted out the lines - starting with a slight dip right at the beginning before letting her voice rise through the rest of the line and then leaving it hanging at the top of a crest without letting it actually fall...as if she were letting the words float away from her. Somehow the way the lines were sung, made the rather simplistic lyrics and the promise embedded in them ("You have my heart...And we'll never be worlds apart) feel more sincere, more real. Hooked, I downloaded the song and listened to it more attentively - discovering that what had irritated earlier turned out to be disarming with repetition - awkward lyrics, genius-like sing-along chorus, the warm-welcome -on-a-rainy-night of the last lines "Its Pouring Rain, You can always come into me".

A convert to the song's fanbase since then, I've spent many a happy night chorusing "ella, ella, ella" along with friends in clubs, at house parties and on the streets after last call. In fact its a great yard-stick to judge new-found friends by - if someone can sing-along to Umbrella in public, I'm almost certain I've found a kindred spirit. At least on one occasion the song might have served as a kind of mating call ;) . I now think that the "ella-ing" in the song was a stroke of pop-genius...that assured the song a kind of cult status - so much so that even stodgy old Time magazine rated it in the Top 10 songs of the year (Hmm...Actually thats almost a negative in some ways).

I also think that it was because Rihanna opened my senses to the secret possibilities of the 'umble umbrella that on my second day in Rome - a cold, blustery, miserable wet one - I was able to keep my spirits up...despite the dreary weather and an aching knee injury. That day, I'd planned to see both the Vatican and the Roman ruins around the Colosseum. This being Italy, both the subway and the cabs were on strike...so walking was the only way to see the sights. Hobbled by my knee and distracted by bad weather, good cappuccino, souvenir hunting opportunities and running-group friends with less ambitious sight-seeing plans, I made very little progress.

By six I'd written the day off and decided to check out the Trevi Fountain and then call it a night. It was at the Fountain where I first noticed the quiet riot of colours that the streets had become as the persistent rain forced people to open up their umbrellas. There were hordes of tourists and locals at the Fountain and most carried umbrellas. Almost to the last one, the umbrellas had been dyed in bright solid single colours - that stood out in the rapidly darkening streets. This wasn't like Mumbai or London or even San Francisco - where the rain brings out a funereal procession of black umbrellas. Rome's streets looked like someone had shredded a rainbow and sent its pieces chaotically winding their way through them. Orange, taxicab yellow, red, mauve, blue, lemon green, olive green etc etc - an umbrella of a different colour swirled into sight every other second and then streaked away - running after that over-loaded public bus that was probably the only way its owner had of getting home that night. There were some patterned, multi-coloured umbrellas but too few to distract from the luminous tableau created by the single-toned ones. Such a simple way to brighten up a bad weather day. Its a wonder other cities haven't thought of it!

All jazzed up by the unexpected Technicolour high, I snapped a lot of blurred umbrella pictures with my phone and went back to the hotel - happy to have seen a Roman sight that I hadn't planned on or read about in the guide books.

How One Euro Can Win You Over

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY - STILL IN ROMA TERMINI (Well I was stuck there for 3 hours)

Here’s another piece of advice to potential travelers to Italy from outside the Eurozone. You want to change some money into Euros as fast as you can. Here's why.

After following rest-room signs half-way across the station, up an elevator, through the main section of a crowded restaurant and around a corner I finally found myself in front of…a ladies’ rest-room sign. There were a couple of other confused men standing there. On a hunch I lugged my bags around another corner and lo…there it was…the men’s rest-room sign. Before I could dash in, however, I was stopped by a lady sitting outside. Apparently you had to cough up 70 euro cents to use the rest-room. And not having changed my money yet I was only able to cough up green-backs. She wasn’t very impressed. I didn't blame her. After all a dollar is about five cents less than 70 Euro cents today...and thats without counting the commission that a currency exchange company would charge her.

But, I really had to go. I mean really. It was a bad situation. Let me give you an analogy to help you understand how bad it was. It was like crawling miles across the Sahara to an oasis, dragging three pieces of luggage, throat parched with thirst, oilskin bottles all having run out of water three days before. And when you finally got to the oasis, you found that the pool had been drained of all its water, that had then been packaged into prettily labeled plastic bottles being retailed by the local Bedouin tribe for 70 Euro cents. And thats when you realized that you only had deeply depreciated dollars in your pocket. It was exactly like that…except with the liquid flows reversed. You get the picture, don't you?

Back to the problem of the gated rest-room. I repeated my question about whether a dollar note would do, in the hope that asking again might magically change the answer. But the woman had already started talking to the next customer. It looked like I’d have to trudge back down with my luggage to find an ATM. At that moment I felt a visceral hatred towards my bags. I wanted someone to rid me of them. Just take them away…Oh and maybe give me 70 Euro cents? I just didn't think I could successfully hunt down an ATM and get back without an embarrassing mishap.

It was at that point that I came to another in my series of idle in-transit generalizations about Italy…specifically about Italian commuters. It goes thus: Italian commuters are a generous angelic group of people, blessed by the grace of the almighty (if there be one).

My epiphany happened because I heard the guy, who'd been behind me in the queue, say “Here’s another Euro for this gentleman.” This Farishta (or "angel" for the non-South Asian readers, if there be any) had obviously seen the dismay on my face and perhaps having sensed my pent-up "stress", decided to do his good deed for the day. The lady at the door let me in with a rather sour expression - no doubt annoyed at having played even a small part in delivering customer-delight. I had this resistible urge to go down to the Illy cafe stall and apply for a waiter's position, just so I would have a chance, some day, to do nasty things to her cappuccino before serving it to her.

However I had more pressing issues to deal with. Five minutes later – yeah I told you it was like being without water for three days except just the reverse – I walked out lighter in body and spirit and wearing rose-tinted glasses vis-a-vis Roman commuters, that stayed on for the rest of the hiatus at Roma Termini. Those rose-tinted lens made everyone at the station look great...except the lady outside the rest-room.

But you kind of guessed that already didn't you?

Minor Adventures in Roma Termini

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY

Recently, over Arabic mint tea (love it) and miniature feta cheese pies, I got into a debate over whether it makes sense for me to send postcards while I’m in Italy. I mean really. Who writes post-cards anymore? I never wrote or sent post-cards or other forms of snail mail even when it wasn’t considered slow. So to me its really is an almost alien thing to do. But its important for certain people that I care about. And so, here goes, a virtual post-card all the way from Italy…If I can get myself to sit down again, I might write some more…and might post a couple more.

A large part of my first day in Italy was spent in Rome’s main railway station – Roma Termini. Not exactly a tourist hot-spot. But a good place to observe a slice of daily Italian life and make sweeping generalizations (always a great way of passing in-transit hours, by the way).

I liked what I saw of Italy in Roma Termini. It seems like a fun, quixotic place...can be exasperating if you're in a hurry to get anything done...but if you have all the time in the world then you'll probably be happy to get swept up in its first world chaos.

I was able to pick up a few rules of engagement quite quickly. For example, no customer service query can be resolved without the person actively engaging at least three of his/her colleagues in voluble conversation first. Unless of course, the answer is a no. In which case it is delivered without hesitation or explanation…leaving very little room for negotiation or question. As in,

Passenger: “Can I leave by an earlier train so I can stop lugging three pieces of luggage across the length and breadth of the station, causing multiple near-accidents, sending my shoulders on their way to untimely dislocations and spending my money on intestine corroding coffee; given that the trains seem to leave every 15 minutes and are half-empty anyway?”

Ticketing attendant: “No.”

Passenger: “Oh OK. By the way could you tell me how much a new ticket to Florence would cost.”

Ticketing Attendant: “For sure. Let me just interrupt my bella colleagues over there who’re serving other customers, and confer with them to make sure I don’t give you the wrong price. And while I’m at it I’ll also find out for you how you could go about making mortadella cheese at home, just in case you’re interested.”

The conversation didn’t quite go like that – but it very well could have. Like I said, Italy can be great fun – if you’re on vacation. Which brings me to Rule Number One –

Go to Italy - if going on vacation. And if you go on a business trip, Don't!. Or at least, pack an extra set of worry beads.

Reading Escalators

I have a theory. One that I’ve validated by my time-tested method of making sweeping generalizations based on anecdotal data and unscientific sample sizes. That method was last used with great effectiveness with my theory on tattoos and marrying men.

I think that you can tell the pace of life in a city or country from the speed of their escalators. The most reliable predictors are escalators in the public transport network – the ones in airports and railway stations. In department stores and corporate buildings, escalator speeds can be influenced by the organization’s dynamism and therefore create noise in the sample set. I take special note of the escalator speeds every time I go to a new city. Come to think of it, it might even be verging on a scientific sample size by now. Because thanks to my itinerant work I’ve been able to build up quite a large set of data points.

In New York the escalators move at speeds that would get you speeding tickets in Billings, Montana (Full disclosure – I’ve never been to Montana so I could be wrong about this). In Paris, they move at a leisurely pace meant to ensure lovers - or even plain strangers who’ve just bumped into each other - get at least a few minutes of passionate kissing in, before its time to walk again. In London, if they work, it’s a brisk professional pace much as it is in Bombay, though both are slower than NYC’s. Escalators are zippy in Taipei and in Tokyo and slow down in balmy Barcelona.

In Rome, where I got my latest proof-point, it was clear from the escalators at the airport, that this is a country that likes its siesta. Jet-lagged and exhausted by your 24 hour multiple-stop trip? Exhausted by a late night spent partying? Hell, just clamber aboard an escalator in Rome and get a power nap while it oozes – umm rolls - towards its destination. I'm pretty sure the cartoon on the left was thought up by a manic depressive denizen of Rome.

OK, I exaggerate. Escalators in Rome will get you to where you need to go in a shorter time than walking. Just about. But hey, whats the hurry – Take time to smell the flowers. Or, if you’re on an escalator in the airport, to read the billboards slowly sliding by. Who knows they might actually tell you something useful.

No such luck in Rome though. The billboards spaces were all blank.

So I read a book instead.

PS: It’s the latest piece of non-fiction by Tom Brokaw – called Boom! – about the sixties. Its Pretty Darn Good.

Why Larry Craig Doesn't Deserve the Gay Card

POLITICALLY INCORRECT POST ALERT

So the media storm over Larry Craig’s arrest seems like such an ineffective tempest in a toilet-bowl: it raised a mighty stink but when it ended, still left something unpleasant hanging around. And as far as I can see, the hapless guy was hounded mercilessly into non-resigning, for no good reason. His crimes allegedly being that he is gay, a hypocrite (he's a family-values politician!) and behaved immorally in a public place (sleazy at worst, really).

The part of the controversy that does worry me is that we’re faced with the prospect of having Craig labeled as being part of the LGBT community. Make no mistake, I thoroughly enjoyed the homophobic Craig’s humiliating public repudiation by his own party, on the assumption that he is gay. But now that that’s been achieved, I’d much rather have him stay classified straight, alien or whatever else - as long as its also not-gay. The good news is that he is still denying that he’s gay (thats really what he was trying to tell that cop in Morse Code). So I think we should seize the moment and actively support him in his claim. (btw you can find more Darly Cagle cartoons here)
Frankly, for me the best reason for doing so is that anyone who doesn’t want to be gay shouldn’t have to be and that we shouldn’t want them to be part of our community either. But for many people that’s not always a convincing enough reason. So here’s 5 (no less) other good reasons why we should not give Craig the coveted gay card:

a) He’s a nasty bad naughty role model: This guy’s been shown to be a coward, a hypocrite, a cheater, a sleaze-bag etc etc. At this point he probably wouldn’t be admitted even to Walmart’s Sam’s Club membership program. Why should we be so keen to give him entrée into our fabulous fests, chic clubs and swinging street fairs?
b) He’s from Idaho: I know that’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to deny him membership. I mean his being born an Idahiot is like being born gay. He couldn’t help it. I agree. But taken in conjunction with the first point – I think its grounds for rejection of his application (assuming there ever is one).
c) He’s from Idaho: AND didn’t have the sense to move states despite having the cash and the opportunity to do so. Again, sensibility or the lack of it, should not normally be a criteria for issuing laminated rainbow cards. But what if the guy himself is giving us an option? Like Craig is. It would be like the US giving a resident permit to someone who has no demonstrably useful skills, lists multiple criminal convictions in their home country, and refuses to apply for political asylum despite potentially qualifying for it. I have no doubt that USIS would happily reject the application.
d) Its for his own good and we’re a compassionate crowd: This guy has more baggage than Imelda Marcos packing for a long trip - a likely-soon-to-be-ex wife, five – count them, five - kids, a mug shot and a history of infidelity. And, the guy is old enough to be a contemporary of the Jurassic Age dinosaurs. He has zero chance of finding someone in the gay world who would fall into a relationship with him...unless it also involved being written a check at the end of each night. Craig might not be satisfied in his current marriage but at least its something that he has had a few decades to get used to. Continuing to be straight-classified might save him from being lonely for the rest of his life. And it will definitely be easier on his ego and lighter on his pocket-book. So lets give the guy a break.
e) He doesn’t know how to treat a Fag Hag: For those who didn’t spend the last seven years watching Will and Grace – a fag hag is a gay man’s best friend. She’s typically a woman, usually straight, who gives her fag unconditional love, holds his hand when one-night-stands don’t stand the test of daylight, acts as his beard at office functions if he works for ExxonMobil and basically does everything for him except perhaps change his diapers. And I think at the height of the AIDS crisis some of them even did that. No kidding. In other words the fag/fag-hag relationship is a sacred one. In return all they seem to expect is an album full of happy memories at the end of it. Oh and that when you do leave them alone in a gay club to go home with that one-night-stand that they helped you land in the first place, you’ll at least buy them a drink first.

The only charitable explanation for the longevity of the Craigs’ marriage is that there was/is real companionship between them. If Craig had been ‘out’, his wife would have been his Fag Hag. And if Suzanne really did not know of Craig’s rest-room exploits, she’s likely to spend a good chunk of her remaining lifetime regurgitating memories from the last 24 years and trying to figure out which of those were real involving real emotions. Questioning each romantic holiday, gesture, touch…that happened over a 24 year period. I have a feeling not many happy memories will survive that scrutiny. If the Senator from Idaho maintained his deception over 24 years with his soul-mate, someone who probably cared deeply for him, then he really should not be given the privilege of admittance to our community. Many of us are bitchy and shallow and self-serving, but given an extended period of time, any gay man (or woman) worth his (her) salt will do right by his (her) fag hag (fag stag).

In closing let me just refer to what one of the Senator’s sons said as the controversy was cresting. He said he believed his (step)-father was not gay but that even if he was, it would be OK. It was a wonderful statement of love, support and unconditional acceptance. And showed that Craig got at least some things right in his life. But his son’s statement probably also depressed the Senator like hell. Because it must have brought home to him, that he's spent an entire tortured lifetime suppressing his true self for a bunch of idiots in his home state and in his party who didn’t really care for him and who disowned him faster than you can say 'faggot' when the pants…err chips…were down. While at the same time deceiving the people who actually did care for him and who might’ve accepted him for what he was anyway...if only he'd chosen to be honest with them anytime in the last three decades.

Sadly, I think Larry Craig is right. Through his life, he may have been nominally homosexual, but he’s probably never been gay in any sense of the word. And likely never will be.

I say, hold the lamination presses.

The WalMartization of Liberty

OCCASIONAL RANTINGS OF AN ANGRY ARM CHAIR ACTIVIST
For some reason I’ve been fascinated by democracy for as long as I can remember. Democracy is one, and probably the only, ‘ism’ that I believe in. Yeah OK I know its not an ism 'ism' but you know what I mean. I don’t ‘believe’ in it in the sense of the Neocons who would take democracy to everyone at the point of a sword or (to use a contemporary metaphor) the multiple, deadly tips of a cluster bomb. But in the sense of believing that it is the best system of governance available and given a chance, over time, has a real power to transform societies into better versions of themselves. And since democracy is one of the few things I consider sacred, I’ve watched with extreme frustration and deepening anger as the system in the US has been subverted steadily over the last few years. By the very people who profess to want to spread it across the world.

Over the last few years, so many freedoms and rights taken for granted for decades have been taken away/given up so easily. Suspension of habeas corpus, removal of the protection from institutional torture and randomly mandated virtually no-holds-barred surveillance of private citizens, are a few of the more egregious examples of the infringement of civil liberties by the Bush Administration. The administration has successfully defined the debate on collective safety vs. personal freedoms in terms of a Walmart-like “Always Low Prices” approach. The price in this case being civilian fatalities caused by terrorist acts. After 9/11 the Administration sold the American public on a promise to keep fatalities low as long as it was given a relatively free hand in dealing with the terrorists. And for a long time no one dared ask whether that was necessarily the right metric to aim for. Nor did many people bother to dig up and read the caveat emptor clause that came with the promise of safety. Even now few people seem to be able to do so with the 20/20 vision that should cause them to raise a rip-roaring ruckus.

Walmart’s always-low-priced flat-screen TVs came with several hidden costs – falling quality standards, job losses, and worsening working conditions and protections for its non-unionized workers (The company at one point considered reducing health care costs by making obese workers who were at a higher health risk, leave the company voluntarily by deliberately giving them tasks that were difficult for them to do). While the costs of Walmart’s business model took a couple of decades to become clear, those of Bush’s approach became apparent within a few years – perhaps reflecting how egregiously high the hidden costs are: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, loss of America’s credibility as a leader on human rights issues, increased spying on own citizens, renditions of non-citizens to countries that then merrily tortured them…

The erosion of civil liberties has continued even after the Republicans lost last year’s elections. And the reason it has continued, I believe, is because of the Bourne Ultimatum Syndrome. Don’t get me wrong – I liked the movie a lot and applaud its motives. Its makers seem to have a better grasp of whats involved in preserving a democracy than the Bush Administration. (Now there's a scary thought) The lost freedoms the film picked to highlight included surveillance of private citizens to a degree that would have made Orwell proud, and the loss of the protections against the use of torture. However, it did so in a rather round-about way. Its central argument really is that it is unacceptable for the government to kill American citizens suspected of being terrorists without due process of law. I think it was a clever choice of issues because that is a relatively black-and-white issue for most Americans – at least on an intellectual level. If polled, I'm pretty sure most Americans would oppose it. Whereas if they were asked if torturing terrorists to get information is OK, I think the poll results are likely to be less predictably on the film-makers’ side. So instead of condemning torture (epitomized by Matt Damon being water-boarded during his training) and Big Brother-esque surveillance directly, the makers tried to stigmatize both by associating them with the bad guys (‘overzealous’ CIA operatives) who were killing American citizens (not foreign residents, please note, since that also doesn’t inspire sufficient outrage in the US these days).

While the film-makers’ collective heart is in the right place, their circuitous approach, I believe, is partly responsible for the neocons’ ability to continue their war on civil liberties. The Bush administration has taken a clear, consistent stand that infringements on some freedoms are necessary to make sure that America doesn’t lose any more civilian lives. The response of the liberal left has been to say that these infringements are not good because they don't make Americans safer. That they don't work. In fact, it’s the Left’s argument that has not worked...because the Doesn’t-Work argument isn’t backed by real conviction.

Take the torture issue for example. Its just not sufficient to say we shouldn’t torture because torture is ineffective in extracting truthful information from terrorists. Even a lefty liberal like me can’t help thinking that sometimes you might actually get right information from torturing a terrorist and might in fact save some lives. Most democracies (at least officially) outlaw torture not because its ineffective, but because its just plain wrong. And we need leaders who have the clarity of vision and courage of conviction to put it as simply as that. Because, as the Economist said a couple of issues back, society would over time become inured to the use of torture (or enhanced interrogation methods in Bush-speak) – and then slalom down a slippery slope where using torture in other contexts and against an increasing number of people would seem sensible – why not also torture a paedophile suspected of kidnapping and holding a child in a secret place to find out its location?

The fact is, the real metric for measuring victory against the terrorists should be America’s and other democratic societies’ ability to retain their way of life, and the rights and freedoms that their citizens have won for themselves over the ages. Not how many civilians and soldiers die protecting it. Democratic freedoms are too valuable, for those who want them and those who would take them away, to be gained or retained at discounted prices. Ask the scores of Romanians who died trying to overthrow Ceaucescu and succeeded. Or the Burmese who failed in 1988 because 3000 lives was as high a price as they were willing to pay.

The Economist, in the same issue where it so wonderfully articulated its stand against torture, said it best:

“Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.”

Amen.

One night in KW: Vagina Monologues, 3G calls in Khartoum and the Devil's own role preferences!

REPRISED FROM A PAST BLOG...SINCE I SEEM TO BE ON A TRAVELOGUE TRIP.

Feel free to skip if you've already seen this.

So I had a great day in Key West yday. I'm beginning to see why people like it so much. Its like Vegas in a Caribbean setting without the casinos. Its like San Francisco without the fog and lots more palm trees. Its like Memphis without...actually its not a bit like Memphis :) Life in Key West is a little surreal...and thats why I like it.

If I'd written this blog at midnight yday night I'd have said, after two days in KW, the closest embrace I've had to a living being is with a female python - double ugh - just kidding :) (about both). Here's something I discovered, a python/boa's skin feels like a really expensive leather purse...really it does. And I'm not kidding about that.

Because everything in KW is open till 4:00am - even when there's a total of 20 tourists on the island - like right now - I did not end up posting at midnight. And instead got to meet a veritable real-life celebrity - this nice French guy who set up and made the first 3G call in Khartoum (and all of Sudan). Yes, they have 3G in Sudan! - after all what's the point of carrying out a genocide if you can't swap videos of it with your friends! Save Darfur!!

Before that happened though I was fortunate enough to take in two really great back-to-back drag shows, Key West style. I'll upload the video from one if I can - it had one whole song dedicated to extolling the different varieties of vaginas. Very educational for novitiates like me. The highlight of the second one was the insight it provided into the devil's role preferences. They handed out DVDs of a p*** video...in which apparently, three poor guys get sucked (pun unintended) into Hell through a kinda vortex and get an audience with Satan himself. Petrified, one of them asks if the Devil is going to sc*** them to which the reply is - "No. The Devil is a Bottom". Not surprisingly the DVD is titled The Devil is a Bottom :)

Cape Town: A Home At The End of The World

CITIES I’VE SEEN. CITIES I’VE FELT

The Sights

Despite the many blessings I’ve enjoyed all along - wonderful family, surfeit of friends, book shops in every city my dad was transferred to, and an education system that played perfectly to my, now rusty, ability to learn anything by rote – by 26 I’d still managed to make a pretty good mess of my life. Even if it wasn’t apparent to most people around me. So much so, that when I flew into Cape Town on a sunny December afternoon in 2003, it was a flight from my life in India in more ways than one. My stay in Cape Town marked the beginning of an ~18 month period when everything seemed to go right in my life – with such little contribution from me – that I went from being a non-believer in all things providential to a mere sceptic. Five of those wonderful months were spent in Cape Town.

That summer in Cape Town is pretty close to as good as its ever got for me. I was happily surprised by its very European vibe…and infrastructure…at decidedly African prices. It was the first time I was going to spend a decent length of time in a foreign city when I didn’t have either of the two problems that had bedeviled me previously – no money (destitute exchange student in Paris), or no understanding of the local language (isolated intern in Tokyo). In addition, for once, sunsets at nine o’clock occurred after work-days set at around five or six. And so I had a lot of time to kill and fortunately Cape Town provided a lot of ways to kill it.

Landing in Cape Town, the first thing I noticed was Table Mountain. Not just because it’s a permanent, massive presence looming (benignly, a little like a pet plateau) over the city but also because it is on every other picture post-card, shop name and hotel billboard advertisement. 'Rooms with a view of the Table Mountain' the billboards boasted, as if there could be any that didn’t. Over the following months, Table Mountain did justify this obsession – mostly thanx to its schizophrenic relationship with the local cloud community. Embracing and rejecting the cloud cover randomly on a daily basis, it yielded beautiful ever-varying views...that I never got bored of. It also provided endless opportunities for small talk with strangers in bars...that unfortunately I never made use of.

Gazing at Table Mountain's was only one of the ways of killing time in the city. Lazing on any one of several spectacular beaches that nature has so thoughtfully hewn out of the cliffs that line the Cape’s coast, gobbled up many of my weekend afternoons. Tourist quick-tip - Mornings in the Cape summer are windy. Windy enough to blow away beach umbrellas along with that contented sun-facing closed-eyed look that one gets on the beach. So its better to just club till four in the morning, sleep till noon and then head to the beach to get your tan going.

Late afternoons or evenings, back from the beach, I’d head over to the V&A Waterfront to watch the hordes of street performers or grab an early dinner at one the many seafood restaurants. For those of you who saw Blood Diamonds and cried at the contrived ending (How could you?!) – the Waterfront is where Jennifer Connolly was dining when Di Caprio called to bid her farewell (Spoiler alert! I guess). I had tears in my eyes too – but only because I had an urgent craving to jump onto the next flight to Cape Town and couldn’t since I’m still ad-less on this blog and so have to hold down a job that expects me to give advance notice of vacations.

The City had scads of cafes and restaurants to while time away in. The variety of cuisines and the number of good restaurants to choose from was such, that deciding on where to eat took up a good chunk of time too. I’m pretty sure Zagat food reviewers flying to Cape Town, keep their return dates open - there’s just no knowing how long it would take to do justice to the city’s restaurant scene. The range of cuisines was particularly gratifying to my greedy, easily-bored, foodie self. There was game meat to try out – a culinary safari available at your fork-tips - the menus boasted of items like Boar cutlets, zebra and free-range ostrich steaks, or crocodile tail. I gamely (pun unintended) tried nearly everything except warthog; crocodile tail in case you wanted to know, tastes like chicken. For eating something tamer you still could choose from a range spanning African and European cuisines from multiple countries and every fusion variant in between. One of my favourite restaurants was a pan-African one. It served dishes purportedly from all over Africa…from Zambia to Egypt, and from Senegal to Ethiopia. Hobbled by a single entry South African visa, there was no way for me to use a weekend fly-back to one of those countries to confirm the authenticity of the dishes...but somehow I was OK with taking the restaurant at its word. Instead, I reveled in feeling wonderfully cosmopolitan by just reading the menu.

Other weekends were spent driving or ferrying myself around the Cape where there was tons more to do and see. One particular weekend stands out. It involved driving through the wine-country, less than an hour outside the city: rolling green hills covered with vine-rows, charming old estates you could stay in over the weekend if you had lots of money, and lots of wine to guzzle while pretending you’re only swizzling it. The perfect day was marred somewhat when my then partner R, who’d flown in for a couple of weeks, scolded me for refusing to try most red wines on the philistinic grounds of preferring whites. It quickly became alright again when we lunched at a restaurant whose name I forget, situated on a sun-drenched slope with a fantastic view of the surrounding vineyards. We had to wait despite having reservations – because you really couldn’t expect people to hurry through their gourmet courses, could you? But I didn’t really mind because it gave me more time to laze on the grassy slope and soak in the view. Yeah, lazing was quite a theme with me in those five months…still is actually.

What else do I remember fondly? Well, there was the day spent walking along the winding elevated plank-paths on Boulder Beach. Cute, largely mute African penguins on both sides - huddling in their hole-in-the-ground nests or waddling around companionably with a friend or sometimes just standing still in groups at the water’s edge.

And there was the day spent on Robben Island, Cape Town's Alcatraz - accessible by ferry - where Mandela was imprisoned for decades. The most chilling part of the visit was not the prison itself but the quarry that the prisoners had to work in – breaking stone all day, every day only to have it carted away and dumped in a different part of the island. The quarried stone was never used for anything. The idea apparently was to break the prisoners’ not just physically by making them do back-breaking work but also mentally, by making them do superfluous back-breaking work. Robben Island has the second largest penguin colony after Boulder Beach. Predictably, the prisoners were also not allowed to go anywhere from where they could view the penguins, lest they derive some simple pleasure from it. Talk about a petty, perverted system.

And finally the day spent standing at the southern edge of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope (have loved that name since childhood) trying to tell the waters of the Atlantic from those of the Indian Ocean. There’s some other spot which is actually a little further to the south, but its further away and more difficult to get to from Cape Town. And so, both tourists and locals alike are happy treating Cape of Good Hope as the point at which all roads lead northwards. The topography at the Cape was breath-taking. The land didn’t end in a gentle beach sloping into a gentle sea; but rose up forming high cliffs that plunged into the crashing waves below. A strong, sometimes howling, wind was blowing that day, bending the proteas (natives shrubs after which the cricket team is named), every which way. Coming down from the main cliff, you could see a couple of ostriches, generally hanging out on the small beach. They were accompanied by a couple of representatives of some species of very large rats and a large porcupine with a very impressive quiver. All in all, the scene had a wild, untamed quality to it. There it was. Finally. A visual that at least partly fit my conception of Africa.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...?