[This has turned out a strangely self-indulgent post, one suited more to a private diary than an online journal. I set out to write, on our tenth anniversary of arriving in Germany, an account of these last ten years here, but what got written, almost unconsciously, was a different score, cryptic and inward-looking.]
When we arrived there was no life plan. The move to Germany seemed like an interesting opportunity, although I do not remember trying to express – or even think about – why this was so. It may have been the allure of a new place, something exotic and unfamiliar. The little I had seen of Germany on a couple of previous trips had appealed. At a deeper level there must have been, although I wasn’t aware of it, the realization that I was doing what my father had done almost thirty years previously: take up a “foreign assignment”. But the similarities end there; I had it much easier. I was simply riding on a wave of Indian emigration westward; his move, in the early Seventies, was an exception. My destination was an advanced Western nation that provided a host of benefits; his was to a town in a small West African nation. I travelled with my wife; he had mother next to him and me, a six month old baby, in his arms.
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Month: January 2011
The Shelf
In the last decade there’s been a lot of discussion on e-readers and what they mean to the future of the book. Back in 2000 John Updike, in an essay reflecting on what he would miss about books if they go extinct, wrote about The book as furniture, The book as sensual pleasure, The book as souvenir, and Books as ballast. The debate has continued over the years, its intensity reaching a crescendo with every new advance in technology. More recently I’ve seen, through some blogs of book lovers, early signs of acceptance of the e-reader as an alternative. The practical advantages of the electronic version seem to be, if only slightly, edging out the charms of the much-loved paper-bound form. And if you were to believe the statistics, people with e-readers are reading more books than they did before – a healthy sign for the future of words and sentences.
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Saturday
At the hairdressers I’m assigned to the Turkish woman. In her mid-forties, she wears bright red lipstick, lets her hair hang loose, wears tight-fitting clothes – a light-maroon half-sleeved blouse over a black pant – that make her look more plump than is necessary. There’s a shine in her eyes as she goes snip-snip-snip all over. In about ten minutes she is done.
The owner – der chef, as the women (and girls) in the saloon call him – looks at me astonished as I get up from the chair next to him. He had started earlier, but isn’t halfway through his client.
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Santa tales
“…you get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing.”
– Joan Didion
In the recent weeks, there’s been a lot of talk on Santa. A colleague at work noted, with a touch of regret, that his four-year old already knew Santa was none other than the neighbour downstairs, and that he came in not through the chimney – they had one – but the front door. Another parent was furious: during a ride before Christmas, the anchor on a car radio channel had announced, with all of them listening, that there really was no Santa, it was all made up. Back home the children wanted the truth out; she had had a hard time rescuing the myth.
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The Mumbai weekend
Last January, during a five-week trip to India, I spent a weekend in Mumbai with a couple of ‘blog-friends’. Bunny, an editor at Hindustan Times, picked me up at the airport. It was to be our first meeting, and her SMS, sent from the gate, read: Shortish, messy hair, sleeveless purple and green top, black pants, small blue bag. Later that day Bips, a social worker engaged with a local NGO, joined us near the Gateway of India. It was probably the most memorable weekend of 2010.
We started with a Gujarati thali lunch that captured the essence of a Mumbai visit: there was more variety to experience than you could possibly take in. The dishes, brought to the table at a dizzying pace by uniformed servers, left me exhausted. (All these months later I do not remember what I ate; I see only the anticipation for the next delicacy to arrive, followed by the growing regret that I could not eat all that I wished to.) After lunch we rode South, towards Kala Ghoda, in a ‘Cool Cab’: an air-conditioned taxi, a charming old Fiat that was almost an antique piece. Traffic was inconsistent, clogged and snail-paced in some areas and breezy and fast in others. Bunny made the long drive short with her insights on Mumbai culture and the recent history of local politics. In between, around a bend or in the middle of a street, she would point to a house and refer to a celebrity who lived there: “That’s where Chetan Bhagat lives.” “And here’s Bal Thackeray house.”
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Parmanu 