What I'll Remember Most About 2011

The only thing I'll remember about 2011 is the fact that this year gave me nothing worth remembering except for the fact that my brother finally got a job of his liking! Goodbye 2011.

The man with the golden voice

My hostel roommate walked in and saw me juggling with a cricket ball while Jagjit played in the background. He wore a mischievous smile and said, “Isi tarah Jaggu dada hamare dilon ke saath khelta hai.”

In hindsight I feel his ghazals did just that — play with our hearts. At least two generations of spurned, broken-hearted or unrequited young lovers would vouch for that!

So the news of his death this morning somehow took me back to that day in my hostel and to many such days we spent idling in the college canteen singing his ghazals one after the other. Needless to say some lovelorn old fool would start it!

Those were the times when you flaunted your knowledge of his ghazals by pointing out the albums which surprisingly had English titles such as Milestone, Insight, Someone Somewhere or Face to Face.

By the time I got hooked on to Jagjit Singh in the mid-nineties, he had already sung most of his greatest ghazals that he will be forever known by — sarakti jaye hai rukh se naqab, kal chaudhvi ki raat thi, ye daulat bhi le o ye shohrat bhi le lo — to name only a few.

Perhaps the only significant addition to his mind boggling repertoire in the later years was his scintillating collaboration with Gulzar that came out in the form of Marasim in 1999-2000. Even that was more than a decade ago.

This thought that Jagjit was already in his late fifties and had sung nearly all of his greatest ones by then occurred to me only today while reading up on him on the Net.

Yet when we listened to him in those hopelessly lonely nights each of us felt he was singing just for us. When he rendered a line like “jaatey jaatey wo mujhe ek achi nishani de gaya umr bhar dohraunga aisi kahani de gaya” it felt as if our pain had found music.

I couldn’t vouch for our counterparts in the metro cities and those who grew up on pop and rock, but for those of us who grew up in small-town India the fact that we in our late teens and early twenties related to the music of a man older to us by more than three decades was a phenomenon in itself.

Not surprisingly Jagjit is credited with bringing ghazals from the rarified strata of the connoisseurs to the ears of the masses.

Though they say there is no dearth of ghazal singers, I believe that this style of gayaki in the Indian subcontinent stood on three legs — two in Pakistan,  Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali, and one in India.

Mehdi can’t sing anymore, Jagjit won’t sing anymore and may the powers keep Ali singing for as long as he can.

PS: I was never too fond of the Jagit-Chitra duets so didn’t mention her though to be honest there are a couple of ghazals where she’s on a par with the master!

An unfinished tale…

Most wives are married to their husbands. Mine is married to my money. Well, that’s not a complaint really, just a statement, or an observation if you like.

The funny part is I like her and even loved her once. But that was before, when we were just friends. Then we fell in love and got married.

Now I just like her. Mostly because she is so honest about her intentions I mean she doesn’t say it in so many words, but makes it very clear. Of course she makes it a point to say how much she loves me but I think we both know what she means. Told you, she loves my money!

Again, I’m not complaining, just stating a fact.

It’s good in a way you know you need someone to spend your money. So I let her do what she does best and I do what I do best – tell stories. How do you think I made all this money?

But I’ll let you in on a secret – I feel no ownership for this money, because I don’t have to sweat for it. All I do is sit at home in my air-conditioned cubicle and jab away at the keyboard of my computer. And the AC is as you know meant to keep you from sweating. So no sweat and a lot of money!

People tell me that writing stories and novels must be such a demanding exercise. Not many people can do it. I tell them “Yeah I am kind of lucky. Not many people can make so much money just by writing.” Although, I bet there must be many people who can write, and much better than those like me who make money out of their writing.

Contrary to what people say, what I do is not demanding at all. Sometimes I feel like a typist who’s taking notes from someone. I feel like a real ghostwriter – someone who takes notes from a ghost. I like to think that the ghost who dictates the stories is not the spirit of a successful writer, but someone who never managed to get hold of a publisher. So I am his (it could be her as well) medium through which this person, the ghost I mean, is telling his untold stories.

Good for him and good for me. It would have been quite a strain on my brain if I had to think up all that I have ever written.

It’s not that I never thought up anything. There are times when this ghost writer goes through a block and clams up. Then I have to put on my thinking cap and I do sometimes come up with nice lines but that is nothing really. That’s just filling in the blanks. And I can’t do that for long because soon my mind is blank and aching and I am left staring at the blank computer screen. Then I go back to waiting for the good ghost to start thinking for me again.

Wait, I think my wife has come back, home I mean. And boy she looks loaded, with expensive-looking stuff of course, after all she was away the whole day, shopping I assume. By the way did I tell you that my wife used to be very pretty? Well, my friends say so and even strangers seem to say it with their eyes that she still is.

But anyway she’ll walk in now, give me a hug from behind and say something as inane as: “I got this most amazing pair of shoes, it’s lovely and costs almost nothing!” And I would say “I am sure” with the minutest hint of sarcasm, which rarely goes undetected.

She’s a brain and a half, an exquisitely smart woman who left me for my money. Sometimes I wonder why she pretends to be dumb saying all these inane, stupid things. Guess she tries to provoke me into reacting.

“Yes baby you were saying?” “Nothing” she says.

Now this word, isn’t it like a transparent glass wall which you realize is there only after you’ve banged your nose against it? By now I have understood that when a woman says nothing it means there’s something and that something she’ll expect you to figure out. How? That’s your problem and you’re damned if you don’t.

“So what else did you buy just the shoes?” I ask in a rather lame attempt to peep around the “nothing” to see if there’s something. But it’s not the right time it seems.

My wife has gone to cool off. She stomped out saying a lot of things and the gist of which is I am a downright insensitive person and that I don’t care about her anymore. Which is true – I really don’t care about her but I take offense to being called insensitive because I am not. I am very sensitive and take it personally if someone calls me insensitive.

Sometimes I really feel I should put an end to this. But like I said I used to love her.

Today is my wife’s funeral. Sad day. It’s raining like crazy and her relatives are still crying. Even the heavens are sad over this untimely death, they are saying. I had to agree with them because I got this sneaky feeling that they are eyeing me with suspicion.

Disclaimer:- Wrote this nearly an year ago in a state of absolute drunkenness in the middle of the night then forgot all about it till I found it on my laptop while deleting old files some days back. This “Unfinished tale” has nothing to do with any person living or dead, least of all me!

Why I don’t support Anna

I’m sure Anna Hazare or his thousands of supporters across the country wouldn’t give a damn about whether or not one man in some corner of the city supports their cause. But I am going to exercise my freedom of speech anyway.

I am not convinced. Fighting corruption? I am all for it, all of us are. But how? By bringing in yet another law?

One of my economics professors used to say no policy is a bad policy it’s the implementation or those who implement it are bad.

I think the same argument applies to the laws. When the existing laws are not being implemented properly what’s the point of bringing another one?

Take the case of the Right to Information Act. This law is meant to check corruption but I am not sure if it has had the desired effect. The common man still has to grovel at the feet of the faceless babus and clerks and wet his beak to get work done.

And ironically enough, there are cases where people have had to bribe even to exercise their right to information. Not to speak of a man who applied to the MCD for an information under the RTI Act and the answer he got was — Tu chutiya hai (it was even reported by the media) !

There goes the power of the anti-corruption tool which was hailed as the ultimate answer to graft when it was enacted.

So what does “Team Anna” plans to achieve with the Jan Lokpal Bill (as opposed to the Lokpal Bill drafted by the govt)?

Let’s say Anna has his way. The witless, rudderless government gives in and agrees to his major demands of bringing the PM and the judiciary under the Lokpal ambit. What then?

Parliament will pass the Bill into a law that will create the post of a “super bureaucrat” with the designation Lokpal. Only it will not be an individual but a panel of members with its own bureaucratic setup.

According to a report, the Lokpal’s office will need at least 15,000 investigators to begin with. I can’t even begin to imagine the mammoth task this office has to undertake and the bureaucratic maze it will spawn considering we are a country of more than a billion people.

And the biggest question that has been haunting me for a while now is who will guarantee the honesty and integrity of the members of the Lokpal and these thousands who will be employed by this high office?

Granted that Anna’s Bill envisages the sacking of any Lokpal member who is found to be corrupt. But who do you go to if your grievances against a Lokpal member or employee is not addressed?

After all even the courts are meant to give justice but does everyone get justice there? Or for that matter the RTI Act does it always help? So who do you go to if the Lokpal with its all encompassing powers of surveillance, investigation and prosecution fails to help you?

Frankly, I am reminded of a flop science fiction movie called Judge Dredd starring Sylvester Stalone. Judge Dredd had all the powers that Anna’s Lokpal will have. But like I said it was a science fiction movie and a bad one at that!

A Macao beyond casinos

Courtesy — This travel piece on Macao was published in my newspaper the Mail Today.

There’s more to Macao than casinos and gambling. Of course you could do all that this Chinese principality is famous for. But you could also do a lot more than just living in the lap of luxury and buying a lot of chips at the dime a dozen casinos.

The only reason I spent some time fooling around with the slot machines in the casinos was because they allow smoking inside. It helped that I won a few Hong Kong dollars while puffing!

But if you are a serious high-roller unlike me, you already know your mind and must have a table booked at the acres of gambling space that every five star hotel seems to have.

Read on if the gambling chips are just one of the distractions you have in mind.

First things first, if you’re an Indian you don’t need a visa to travel to Macao. It’s almost like travelling within the country except you have to go via Hong Kong. And from there it’s just across the channel an hour’s ferry ride away.

It’s a pity that there are no direct flights from India yet to this exotic former Portuguese colony.

The Senado Square.

A ride from the ferry terminal to any of the hotels downtown could take you through many cities of the world. One moment you could be in Lisbon with its cobbled wavy sidewalks, a few minutes later you could be passing through a narrow street of north Calcutta with iron grilled balconies jutting out of multi-storey houses even as Las Vegas looms on the horizon right ahead with its glitzy facades of casinos.

Macao is a beautiful example of East meets West and they even have a word for it — Mackenese. It not only defines the people of mixed Portuguese and Chinese origin here but also signifies a fusion of cultures that is truly international.

For instance, the Mackenese cuisine is a mouth watering blend of Portuguese and Cantonese style of cooking with Indian, African and Latin American influences thrown in – thanks mostly to the  sailors who roamed the continents is search of spices.

This blend of East and West has also given Macao its unique architectural heritage where you could find baroque style churches from the colonial era stand a stone’s throw away from Taoist temples from the Ming dynasty.

Even the road signs are written in Portuguese and Mandarin with the former being the official language despite Macao’s status as a special administrative region of China much like Hong Kong.

For a city that is often called the Las Vegas of the East because of its flourishing casinos, Macao has something to offer for every palette and not only of the culinary kind of which there’s a lot to explore.

But you must work up your appetite before you embark on a gastronomic adventure. Take a walk downtown to Senado Square – the heart of the city — a pedestrian paradise paved with a mosaic of wavy patterns typical of Portugal.

This Unesco world heritage site, one of the most popular tourist haunts in Macao, can take you on a journey to the past with its colonial buildings on both sides of the square and the yellow façade of St Dominic’s church at the opposite end.

Of course the red Mcdonalds signage and the backdrop of modern high-rises will pull you back to the here and present.

The ruins of St Paul's church

Within a short distance from the square lies another landmark of Macao – the ruins of St Paul’s – a 17^th century Jesuit church. The burnt out church of which only the façade remains sports a haunting look despite hundreds of tourists milling about.

Together, these ruins and the famed Senado Square are perhaps the most photographed sites in Macao. These two are among the more than two dozen heritage sites that dot the city state so take your pick and don’t miss any of them. From the Penha church built atop the Colina da Penha to the famed A-Ma temple dedicated to the goddess of the sea-farers and fishermen and of course the mount fortress housing the Macao museum.

If you’re feeling a little peckish by now walk right down the steps of the ruins you came up and into the market place lined with shops selling all kinds snacky items. The best part is most shops allow you to taste the snacks for free irrespective of whether you’re buying any of them.

So go right ahead and pick up an almond cookie fresh from the oven or if you’re a meat lover ask for a slice of the spicy pressed pork on display.

Encouraged by our loveable tour guide Alorino, I had my fill of the freebies walking down from one end of the market to the other. And yes, don’t forget to sample the pork chop bun that is Macao’s favourite snack when you visit the Taipa food street along the Rua do Cunha.

Apart from the street food, there are a host of dining options one more richer than the other in terms of culinary experiences. You could take your pick from local Mackenese and Portuguese to Chinese, Italian and African cuisines.

Among the most memorable dining experiences was at chef Antonio Coelho’s restaurant in the Taipa village, which finds a mention in the Michelin food guide. Antonio being a Portuguese specializes in the cuisine of his homeland.

Sinful!

Amid several rounds of red and white wine from his country, he served a lavish spread of seafood, and meat preparations. But the best he reserved for a special Portuguese desert that he prepared right in front of us in the dining hall. Watching a chef at work is a delight that even a less enthusiastic foodie like me found mesmerizing.

And like a true performer he even showed us the trick of opening a champagne with a sword. Of course he chose one of the pretty girls from our group as an assistant to demonstrate the trick!

Gorging on food and sightseeing apart, one should not miss the other entertainment options that make Macao a complete entertainment destination for a family, which the Macao government is keen to promote to the world.

The variety show Cirque de Soleil, the 3D film show at the Macao Science Centre and the lavishly choreographed House of Dancing Water extravaganza by Franco Dragone that opened only a couple of weeks ago should not be missed.

Godot returns…

There’s this old man who drives his rickshaw in my neighbourhood. He parks his vehicle right outside the gates of the apartment blocks I live in.

He’s got a kind face, a very polite demeanor  and the man is really old, must be pushing 60 — not an age when one should be driving a rickshaw for a living. But that’s our country.

I always take his rickshaw if he is around whenever I have to go to the metro station or anywhere in the neighbourhood and don’t feel like walking.

It may sound a bit pompous but I have often found myself dropping my plan to walk to the neighbourhood market on my off day to help him earn ten bucks more for the day.

Sometimes I feel his wrinkle-ravaged, weather-beaten face sports a knowing smile that says I know what you’re up to boy, thanks for the charity!

But recently, he returned my “favours” and to some extent my faith in humanity.

I was in a hurry and got on to his rickshaw to meet a friend. Normally, I check my wallet before leaving home but that day I forgot.

When I got off his rickshaw my heart sank when I saw the empty wallet — it didn’t have a single penny except for some foreign coins.

The old man read my dilemma on my face and said, “Koi baat nahi saab hota hai. Baad mein de dijiyega.” I thanked him profusely and just as I was about to walk away he did something that I will never forget.

The old man took out a hundred rupee note along with some soiled teners — perhaps his entire earning of the day — and said, “Ye sau rupaye rakh lo saab khali haath mat jao.”

Despite my assurance that i would take out money from an ATM on the way he insisted that I take the money saying what if the ATM didn’t function.

I was overwhelmed by the gesture but a mixture of embarrassment and ego stopped me from borrowing money from a rickshawwalah.

A few days later while returning the fare I wanted to give him an extra ten bucks, but he politely refused and just took what was due for that day’s ride.

It takes a lot for them to be honest and giving compared to people like us who earn in a single day what they earn in a month.

Which is why I don’t grudge the autowallah who borrowed a thousand bucks from me and disappeared.

When I wrote Waiting for Godot a few months ago, I didn’t know that Godot will return one day in the form of a rickshaw walah to return some of the faith I have lost in humanity.

Fizzy trip on a soccer night!

On the night of the Germany-Spain semi-final I was invited by a friend to join him at the German embassy to see the game live on giant screens they had put up for the event.

I was further enticed by the prospect of guzzling free beer, which I was told, would be flowing freely, which it did. Germans are a generous lot, at home or away, I can tell you by experience.

Entering the embassy, the first thing I noticed apart from the giant screen and the huge mostly Desi gathering with a smattering of expats, was an empty bottle of Becks.

Even if a pretty woman were to look into my eyes right then she would have only seen a reflection of the lovely green bottle in my widened eyes!

For an extra-long moment, soccer crashed out of my mind, the roaring crowd went mute and then disappeared, and I was transported to a chilly summer evening in Berlin walking back to my apartment with a six-packer of Becks in my hand.

That was my second day in the city and I was on a little walk to checkout the quiet neighbourhood in the Gesundbrunnen district. At the local utility store that day I made friends with Gunther, the owner, and he introduced me to Becks.

It is among the top five brands of beer in Germany and is exported to more than a 100 countries from its brewery in Bremen. Wonder if its sold in India!

There were other brands at Gunther’s shop like Krombacher, Berliner Kindle, and Oettinger, which incidentally is the largest selling brand in Germany. But seeing my puzzled look he gave a thumbs up for Becks and I picked it up.

A Ger-Man (even women) knows his beer, follow him if you’re new and you wouldn’t go wrong!

From then on it became a ritual. Every other day after wandering about in the city taking the U-bahn trains to random destinations, I would drop by at Gunther’s shop near the Neuner Platz station and he would keep a Becks six-packer and a pack of Marlboro ready for me.

I was forced to switch to Marlboro because my stock of Navy Cuts taken from India lasted three days and Marlboro was the only one I had smoked back home. Later I was to discover that the French Gauloises and the American Pall Mall cigarettes weren’t too bad either.

Back to Gunther, he also graciously agreed to become an occasional guinea pig for my German language experiments, which began with the harmless Guten Abend (good evening) to such complicated lines as “Ich habe ein Becks und ein Marlboro”!

He always smilingly bore my linguistic assaults!

In between guzzling gazillion litres of beer every evening and chomping on tonnes of sausages and millions of Doner Kebaps, I also experimented with the German wines. The Reiseling whites soon became a favourite and also the Dornfelder reds.

But when you’re in Germany and living on a budget, it’s got to be about the beers. The world knows how strongly the Germans feel about their beers even though they probably come after the Irish and the Czechs in terms of consumption.

But just how strongly they feel about it could be summed up like this — if it’s not brewed in Germany it’s not a beer! They even have a 500-year-old law known as Reinheitsgebot or the “Bavarian beer purity law” which states that a beer can only have three components — water, barley and hops (a flowering plant used to lend flavour).

Enjoying a dark beer and a Marlboro at a mountain-top restaurant on the Alps near Munich.

Most beer manufacturers still make a declaration on the bottles of their adherence to the purity law even though its now an open secret that yeasts have become the fourth component in modern breweries.

(Pardon me if it is beginning to read like an academic thesis on German beers!)

Going back to the emotional quotient of beers for the Germans, I am reminded of this incident in Cologne while we were on a tour of some of the big cities, visiting the prominent media houses there.

Cologne has its own special brand of beer — a light brew inexplicably served in small glasses — like every other city and region in the country. It’s called Kölsch. (I could never get the pronunciation of Kölsch or Köln as Cologne is called in German, right!)

While having dinner at a restaurant by the Rhine, our German instructor was telling me about the traditional rivalry between Cologne and its neighbouring city Dusseldorf, which has its own brand of beer called Alt.

He said if you asked for Alt here you might get beaten up or if you’re lucky thrown out of the restaurant and the Dusseldorfers would do the same. Hilarious as it sounds, Mathias said why don’t you try when the waiter comes to take the drink orders, being a foreigner you might get away with just a frown!

As I was preparing to do the “unthinkable”, Mathias being a German did the unthinkable by asking for Alt and sure enough a frown crossed the waiter’s face, which may have degenerated into something worse had he not seen me smiling and then he smiled back realising that my German host was only giving a practical demonstration of the Kölsch-Alt rivalry.

Having throughly beered myself in nearly every big city in the two months I lived in Germany, I am left with only one regret that I missed the Oktoberfest in Munich by a month.

The statue of Goddess Bavaria overlooks the ground where Oktoberfest is held.

Walking by the statue of Bavaria — the patron goddess of the region — overlooking the huge grounds on which this Bavarian beer festival is held, I had made a wish to be there someday when the ground overflows with beer tents!

My reverie was broken as my friend nudged me towards the rows of Becks bottles lined up for the guests. With a heavy heart I drank, saw Germany lose the match and cussed at a rejoicing Spain supporter. “Why aren’t you at the Spanish embassy?” I wanted to say!

Eh?

There are battles I do not want to win

There are dreams I do not want to chase

There are roads I do not want to travel

There are memories I do not want to jog

There are emotions I do not want to wake

There are issues I do not want to make

All I want is to

Win

Dream

Travel

Remember

Shake up

And make an issue out of nothing!

A new name

Too many people are Thinking Aloud on the world wide web, it’s deafening! So I have decided to change the name of my blog.

Coalemus’s Column is the new name. I have this fascination for the Pantheon of Greek Gods. The ancient Greeks had a god for everything from love to stupidity.

Coalemus happens to be the god of stupidity and foolishness! I quite like the idea that even a god could be stupid and foolish and so good at it that he is called a god.

But I am only a human, one who occasionally and sometimes in rather quick intervals, indulges in stupidity and makes a fool of himself.

The Jewish Book of Proverbs says a  fool does not lack intelligence, just ignores and avoids wisdom. He knows the right thing to do but willfully rejects it. A stupid on the other hand is a person in a dazed state of uncaring and inattention.

I fit the definition of both more than once in a day. I am Coalemus!

And those who’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would know where I got the tagline from:)

The city at the end of the earth

Many nights ago when this thought came I was nearly asleep. I dream a lot, even when I’m sleeping and probably had started dreaming when my eyes popped open with the thought — what is the farthest place on earth one could go to?

If this sounds like a metaphorical question about life, the universe and everything,  then let me explain.

It is a purely geographical question. There must be a finite distance one can travel to from point A (say where I live) and point B somewhere on the other end of the globe, which is the maximum distance one can travel considering the earth is round, or spherical or spheroid or whatever.

And so I woke up, booted my laptop and invoked Google Baba, who has the answer to every question! In hindsight, if Google was around when Douglas Adams was writing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he could have easily found out the answer “to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”.

However, not expecting a particularly brilliant answer, I keyed in the phrase “what is the farthest place on earth” and bingo Google Baba threw up a few probable answers.

Lima is the absolute farthest point on earth from New Delhi. (Top) Plaza Mayor (Middle) Skyline of Lima (Bottom left) Palace of Justice (Bottom right) Plaza San Martin.

Reading through the second entry in the search result, it turned out that an American expat named Brandon Hoover living in Jakarta, Indonesia was visited by the same question even before me. I don’t know if he too woke up in the middle of the night to ponder over the question.

Nevertheless, his blog entry made my life easy. He had it all figured out. In fact, he spelt out in five easy steps on how to use Google Earth’s ruler tool to arrive at the point on the globe that is the farthest from where you live.

I’m assuming that Brandon must have been missing his home state Michigan when he set out to find if his adopted city Jakarta is the farthest point on earth from home, but to his amusement he found out that it was barely 9,856 miles!

His blog entry reads: “I previously thought my home state of Michigan was pretty far from here. I was wrong: it’s only 9,856 miles from Jakarta. It turns out Bogota, Colombia is close to being the absolute farthest place from Jakarta at 12,436 miles. (The opposite side of the globe from Michigan is a place 1,300 miles off the west coast of Australia).”

Armed with the knowledge I set about finding the place farthest from the place I live in (though I didn’t dare even telling myself that some day I would visit the place!). The steps are easy in case you would like to find out yourself the place farthest from yours.

• Open Google Earth
• Click on the “ruler” tool (or measure tool)
• Left click on your starting point
• Drag the ruler around the world until the ruler swivels around (therefore finding a shorter route)
• Left click again to mark the place. Voila. Somewhere around 12,400 miles is the farthest place from your starting point. (Courtesy: Brandon Hoover)

After several failed attempts at manoeuvering the ruler I arrived at the place that is the absolute farthest point on the globe from my city. Can you guess the country?

I was stunned to see the name of the place Google Earth was pointing at — Lima, the capital of Peru, which is a little less than 12,400 miles from my city. (Technically the exact point was Hormigas de Afuera, an uninhabited island off the coast of Peru, but I approximated it to the nearest city.)

I interpreted Google Earth pointing at Lima as a divine indication that  my life-long dream — Project Machhu Pichuu — is on!