Public Transport

There is a quietly pulsing part of San Francisco that I just love.

It exists in the wide spaces between post burning man decompression parties at one end and determinedly hipster soy lattes at the other. To find it, walk out the doors of those raw vegan cafes, walls resplendent with jute bags holding grain. Look past the overgrown hair, cute laptops, and caffeinated hand gestures of all those earnest, embryonic iPhone millionaires.

Slip through a costume shop, seductive pink wigs and all, and ignore those girls clustered around a joint. Avoid the unwashed dreadlocks of the amateur poet (and professional consultant) as he sits scribbling aphorisms on napkins for his admiring date. Try not to disturb the couple playing chess in a corner, the tension in their eyes evidently flowing from a source very distant from the game.

Forget the morning bike rides along the bay and into the mountains that will take your breath away, and not because of the cold. Smile vacantly at the young mothers pushing their strollers past a sequence of coffee shops, each brimming with ‘character’, overflowing with bagels. Push away images of a tiny garage hosting an art exhibition, a student concert and a blossoming love affair all at the same time.

Go beyond the activism and the flag waving – always rainbow, sometimes green. Stare through the crowds in an otherwise cookie cutter pub… girl boy girl girl girl boy dog boy girl girl…yes you did see that and no you can’t turn that way again.

Escape those distractions and walk to the intersection at 24th, past the street musician with the badly tuned guitar, and also the one with the ethereal sounding violin. Skip down the stairs that smell of ammonia, of drunk nights, of agony and ecstasy and half digested food. When you hear the tone, you have reached your destination.

8 car train in 3 minutes.

Moving house

It takes time to understand the soul of a city. A certain quiet, patient affection and the desire to explore that which is not obvious. Its a sensual, intimate process – like exploring a human body, caressing a human mind. Linger long enough and both reveal themselves, and sometimes you will fall in love and find that you are home.

So perhaps I have simply not cared deeply enough. Or possibly I have not looked long enough. Whatever the reason, the suburban town I’ve lived in for two years now is as strange and unloved today as she ever was. Hugging a university that beats with vibrancy and life has led her only to retreat further within. Even the metaphor rings false, failing to capture the blandness and superficiality that this little piece of California stands for. A beige snake eating its own tail and the choice of a cliche is the real description here.

I suppose it takes something extraordinary for the whole to be so much less than the sum of its parts. For the interesting, rich and successful to come together in a tepid, pasty porridge of good school districts and farmer’s markets. All busily fighting a grim battle against the east, against unpleasantness and against public transportation (for are not the sweaty hordes outside just waiting for this chance to invade?). Appreciating the soul of Palo Alto (there I said it), is like trying to connect deeply with the business class lounges at Detroit airport.

This is the strangest place I’ve lived in.

An ode to twenty something self indulgent angst

The bird outside my bedroom window
Will not stop crying.
Screaming a name
A knife through the onion sharp night.

An avian Romeo and Juliet, writhing worm tragedy.
Breeding lousy metaphors
Between shards of shattered silence,
Like so many murmuring mosquitoes.

On a night like this,
The moon is always too bright
Stars too glittery
Lives too taut
Words too awkward

Rhythm and rhyme
Harmony and productivity
Are tuneless ariettas.
Eight minute plays
That end too soon,
or go on too long.

But edgy, chipped free verse?
Origami poetry?
Unmade beds?
Grainy videos and 3am cereal?
They work –
Tracing out a jagged discontinuous line,
A sort of naked, neon truth.

Apparently there’s a gentle flowing river out there
Comfortably clichéd
Refreshing, blue, with rounded pebbles
Upon which yellow sun drops dance
Where life is clear, healthy, organic, simple.
Indeed, insultingly simple.

————————–———————
Or as bahadur shah zafar said (because you can hardly get more self indulgent than that)

“My heart is not happy in this despoiled land
Who has ever felt fulfilled in this transient world”
————————–———————-

One day in the life of…

Mornings are for coffee,
sunshine on wet hair.
spicy mayan medium,
ritual that prepares.

NYT Op-Eds,
India v. Kiwi
blogging gossip
oh email baby : )

Section One
xkcd
Introduction:
hey chat with me?

Eleven is for culture,
carol ann duffy.
apricots and peanuts,
ultra modern history.

Cellphone cinderella,
dinner? let you know…
one Loleta arepa,
oh and make that to go.

Noon is for daydreams,
last night in the city,
Mid distance stares,
serenity.

Introduction:
It can be seen…
(Friedman’s an idiot)
Word count: Eighteen

California winter
wretched rainfed sky
falafel by the fire
happy sigh

Evenings are for voices
Old stories, one more time
Meandering conversation
syncopated time

Sweet dreams are made of this
Cardamom, ginger – cups of tea
Witching hour wordplay
Oh lingering phd

Mumbai

I grew up in Delhi, very much a child of our capital, at ease with all its faults and all its irresistable charm. In the summer I would visit my grandparents, in Almora, in the hills of the Kumaon. And sometimes I would travel to Bangalore, two days in a train, and be plunged into a world and culture that I loved and hated. One moment the city would feel like home in a way even Delhi never did, the next it would be a strange land full of foreign tongues and the heavy, overwhelming scent of religion hanging in the air.

Mostly though, the years passed and I lived and studied in Delhi, and formed images of the world I had not seen from stories and movies. From the words of friends, from urban legends, from pictures on Orkut, from gossip and daydreams. Cities mostly – thats what caught my imagination – as they do for anyone who has grown up in one. There was New York, made so familiar by countless movies, episodes of Friends, and later by 9/11. There was beautiful, soaring Sydney – beloved by new wave Bollywood directors, a city you fell in love with watching Dil Chahta Hai. There was Paris, a sort of unattainable high watermark of culture and elegance, a sexualized, sensualized, aestheticized town – equal parts art, women, cheese and crepes. And in India there was Bombay.

Somehow I managed to spend 25 years in India without ever walking into Mumbai. And yet Bombay is a city I saw every day. It was in the news, on the front page, on the back pages, the business pages, page 3 and everywhere in between. It was in Sportstar, Stardust, Outlook. It was what everyone saw as the face of urban India, modern India, young India. There was only ever one candidate for India’s first city. Bombay’s insouciance, its reputation for carefree enterprise, money, hedonism and variety gave it a cosmopolitan, global, confident air that even Delhi lacked.

Then there was cricket. Cricket in the nineties belonged to Mumbai – everyone knew that. We all watched but if any city had a claim on the heart and soul of the game it was Bombay. And if you, like I did, devoured books on the history of Indian cricket with their stories of Hazare and Shivaji park – well then you knew the game had always belonged to one city.

Every hindi movie I saw would throw together a few actors and songs in order to clothe a set of vignettes about Bombay and it was no good wondering why Delhi virtually never featured – quite simply movies meant only one place and it was silly to pretend otherwise. So Mumbai, for all of us in school and IIT who had never been there, was this glorious, glamourous world of beautiful women, of melodrama, of colour.

And those books. It didnt matter who – Rushdie, Seth, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Keating, Naipaul – if they wrote about India, they wrote about Mumbai. They would write with affection and nostalgia and suppressed irritation (well thats the most Naipaul can bring himself to do). Full of inside jokes and no doubt pitch perfect adjectives describing their muse, those books would tantalize, leave you curious and wondering, and gently close a door leaving you on the outside. Try reading Satanic Verses, Sacred Games, even Inspector Ghote without having seen the city they wander through.

I could go on, but you get the point. Its been over three years since I graduated from college in Delhi and my friends have migrated to the parts of the world – ending up in those same cities which captured my imagination as a child. New York for those in this country. And Mumbai for those at home. Somehow though I never managed to go there myself – save a few hours spent earlier this year – only enough time to fall in love with a cafe by the sea.

Its an aching sadness therefore, to see images of places I have never seen and yet always seen, burn. Over the last few years the Shiv Sena, Congress, and Raj Thackeray have done their bit to chip away at the cities soul. An exercise in blasphemy, rendered bearable by its futility. This time perhaps, things will never quite be the same. To watch the Taj burning is like losing the last strands of a dream in the morning.

Updates

I think I’ll leave this be till May 16. Thats when they decide whether they want to keep me. Successfully pulling Bayes Nash Equilibria out of a hat is whats needed here. Sort of the academic equivalent of a charming smile, a sense of humour and expressive eyes

Thai Curry

The break – well its not been so much because I’ve got bored of this blog but rather because even sleep has been at a premium these days. Stanford is currently holding me in the palm of a giant hand, fingers gently – but inexorably -squeezing. The march of a hundred deadlines, and one qualifying examination, heralds the sort of impending doom that makes you wonder exactly why you’re bothering.

And yet somehow, no matter how objectively gray your life might be any point in time, theres always something tiny that brightens things up far more than it has any right to. So a couple of days ago, sitting in a dreary office at nine thirty pm while a party goes on back home and undergrads (and luckier grad students) pack their bags for Cancun or Hawaii or Vegas…sitting staring at a flickering screen running a LaTeX editor, starving because you’ve missed lunch…into those depths of despair comes a guardian angel. A Vietnamese man selling Thai food out of a truck on a campus where all else is closed, serving up hot green curry for 4 dollars, adding a pair of chapatis on the house. And you take his food gratefully, return to that miserable office and for one brief hour afterwards you feel warm and happy and forget that eating Thai food out of a box in a deserted building should be no ones definition of heaven.

This is not the sort of memory that I’m going to look back on in a years time with any fondness, but thank goodness that we have this capacity to find pleasure in virtually nothing. Frankly its all that keeps you from just walking away sometimes.

Groceries

Saturdays in suburban Palo Alto are an occasion to indulge in that most pleasurable of American experiences, going to pick up groceries. The one thing I missed about Stanford while in India (apart from the outdoors), were the glorious, sweeping expanses of Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Milk Pail. Back in Delhi, you don’t miss the roads, the fancy cars, the people, the copious hot water, the cheap electronics (well maybe the cheap electronics a bit). But you do miss the food.

It’s a sort of decadent, overflowing waterfall of options…a thousand different strange and wonderful snacks vying for your attention, food at every stage of the cooking process, from organic raw to microwave and eat. Long aisles lined with elegant wine bottles, and the frosted pastel colours of Arbor Mist. Sauces of every possible type with literary descriptions to match, weird and wonderful cheeses, vegetables freshly sprayed with ice cold water and scores of cereal boxes (all with an agenda, from stopping breast cancer to helping high school students play sport). Pick your cause, eat your cereal. And then there are the waffles, strudels, pancakes – the breakfast triumvirate thats helped me through many a night staying up till 4. We aren’t exactly starving in India, and certainly I’m struggling to find something to replace the wonder that is aloo parantha with coffee, or the ridiculous excesses that are vodka golgappas, but the closest I come to decadent luxury in the United States is when I gaze happily at all the food, wondering what to buy this week.

Of course its more than just the things you buy. Its also people watching, culture watching. Whats the latest white american fad of the month? Care for organic? Free range? All natural? Local produce? Low fat? High protein? Holistic? Vitamin boosted? Would you like your food tasty, seductive, tempting? Or do you want the kind that will take care of you and your waistline, the kind that grew up with the right morals, never hurt animals, took care of the environment and brought joy to farmers living not more than ten miles away from you. Why not give that luscious, blueberry pie a try? Look how it speaks of untold pleasures and whispers promises of not doing more than five calories worth of damage.

Then there’s the checkout counter. A chance to take a long hard look at the insane underbelly of US popular culture. People Magazine, US Weekly and OK!, bringing astonishing revelations to you every week. I’ve never actually seen anyone buy one of these, but its vastly entertaining just looking at the covers stacked beside you as you wait in line. Did you know Angelina Jolie has a mystery illness? Incredible weight loss apparently. But that’s just the People Magazine opinion. US Weekly seems to think she’s pregnant. Is OK! right in claiming she’s getting secretly married? Or is Brangelina finished as People seems to believe? Did Lindsay Lohan pass out while driving? Or was she holidaying in Peru with an unknown Italian rockstar. The quantum nature of celebrity lifestyles is one of the last remaining mysteries of our times.

You shake your head clear and prepare to leave. The last thing you’ll see (particularly if you happen to be in Walmart) is the not so wonderful part of the American dream. A fifty year old, tired woman working at 11 at night, creased crumbled clothes, asking if you’d like paper or plastic. Or an even older homeless man just outside, barely able to stand and leaving you wondering why you’d need to do this living in the world’s richest country? Step out of the elegant environs of Whole Foods and hit rock bottom at Walmart and you begin to understand why the latter is hated so much. In rich, suburban California they like to keep their poverty at arms length and Walmart just doesnt cooperate sometimes.

There’s also the Indian store, but thats a whole different post in itself. Perhaps next time.

EE364

california suburbia,

crickets dancing on the lawn.

three am pancake suppers

jon stewart laughing on.

 

aimless facebook people watching

turkish radio, catchy song.

convex sets and danish cookies

would a little catnap be so wrong?

 

about this time chicago’s waking,

delhi’s making evening plans

bangalore is stuck in traffic,

if only cvx ever actually ran.

Car trouble

Recently I bought a car. And while its very nice, and potentially incredibly convenient, it has been the source of a vague feeling of unease ever since it arrived. I had not the slightest clue why until suddenly today, driving home, a horrific thought struck me. What if, perhaps, maybe, just possibly, this car is – to use that favourite debating analogy – the beginning of a slippery slope? What if things start with a car and a house off campus and suddenly, before you know it, you’re speaking of H1Bs in a ridiculous delhi-american accent and developing extraordinary right wing views on everything Indian? You wake up one morning in Cupertino to find yourself flaunting the plumage of that well known species of silicon valley fauna, the bay area desi.

These are thoughts to keep you tossing and turning all night!

Now since I have plenty of friends I have no desire to lose, who do speak of H1Bs even if they don’t (yet) have accents, I should hastily point out that much of the last paragraph is in jest. Yet even so, starting a PhD (as opposed to a short master’s degree), has meant confronting a peculiar problem. Well at least for me, and it is sharpened every time I go back to India.

It is the need to think of someplace as ‘home’, and to confront the rest of the world with this idea of my origin being an intrinsic part of my identity. Sadly if you choose to think of the other end of the world as home, then you’re always a stranger, a visitor; forever looking in through the windows, never walking through the door. It means saying your name the right way and suffering as people around you take three attempts to even approximate it. It means never eating ‘ghar ka khaana’ because even your own house isnt really home. And it means hanging on to adolescent scraps of your past (such as maggi chai), which you should have outgrown but cling on to because you’re not sure what you want to replace it with. All tiny little things, but naggingly irritating.

And yet to not do so – to not hold on desperately to where you come from- is to give up so much of who you are and what you like, to give up a couple of decades of growing into someone. It might seem hard to imagine all of that could disappear but a look at many first generation immigrants in the bay area can be rather disturbing in that regard. Don’t we all know people who are nowhere’s children, cocooned in a make believe, semi-Indian world here and yet incapable of going back again?

So what do you do then…if you’re fascinated by politics do you succumb to watching an exhausted Hillary act bitchy and Obama play Kennedy? And give up trying to find out whats happening in New Delhi, what people are arguing about, whats eating up newsprint today? Or do you keep trying with RSS and e-papers and all those other rather unusable forms of information? (Really the only saving grace is reading Indian blogs – far and away better than newspapers). You could, I suppose, try and do both, and give up on the research instead :p

Parenthetically, its quite tragic that the likes of Kiran Desai and a billion others have decided to beat the immigrant, expatriate, ‘indian in america’ identity question to death in their quest for artistic fame. With a thousand books and films, they’ve created the stereotypes and cheap, plastic frameworks that make it hard to articulate ‘identity’ questions, even to yourself, without sounding cliched.

One more time

You know those times? Saturdays and long weekends, you’re well fed with a steaming cup of hot chocolate next to you, and the world is your oyster? Those are the times when blogs get created and perhaps in an earlier era diaries would get written. Anyhow, this is one such day and one such blog and we can but hope that it lasts longer than that cup of chocolate.