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.

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.

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”
————————–———————-

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

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.

This blog has seen very little activity of late, and I’m reliably assured by numerous well wishers that this has been no great loss to the cultural capital of our generation. This is of course, precisely the encouragement one needs to write once more. Its the same sort of self destructive creative impulse as has driven the birth of modern day cinematic masterpieces such as Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag.

Obligatory self deprecating cynicism having been completed, there is a story to tell. A couple of days ago I found myself sitting in the midst of a quite charming movie theatre, all the necessary creature comforts at hand – comfortable seat, popcorn, something to drink. To the proverbial fly on the wall, all would have seemed well – unless that is, said fly happened to look into my eyes, where she might have spied a look of quiet desperation. The sort of despair that comes when resignation has set in, but the pain has not yet numbed and memories of happier times still remain fresh and clear. A glance up at the huge screen would have explained much of this suffering. Just about then, the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was dancing out of a closet, clad in a frilly little white dress that looked like something a ten year old would flatly refuse to wear to a friend’s birthday party. And watching the lovely Carrie, her three other eternally youthful friends. Like a sort of ghastly schoolgirl house party being held 40 years too late. The truly ironic part of course was that they all loved the dress, which for a movie obsessed with fashion would seem to be rather a gigantic mistake to make.

But the unique experience of watching Sex and the City from a male perspective has been documented elsewhere. Read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker for instance. And to be honest, I was never going to get it, something only reinforced by the fact that I had been trying desperately to watch Kung-Fu Panda instead (and it must be said, it takes a special kind of genius to make a movie about a kung-fu master who’s also a panda bear, weighing hundreds of pounds, living in ancient china, serving noodle soup for a living and with a duck for a father). If you love the panda bear, I guess you can hardly complain about the realism of a 50 year old female character who is apparently still irresistibly attractive to male super-models half her age. Of course once you’ve gone and watched it you can either shut up and avoid being teased mercilessly. Or you can choose to reclaim the night so to speak, and write about it instead.

Going to see Sex and the City was fascinating though, more for the folks filing in with me. There seemed to be primarily two kinds of people watching. There were the groups of girls, hunting in packs of three or four, all excitedly dissecting season six of the TV series. Then there were the women who had dragged alongside squirming men to watch with them – boyfriends or just an unfortunate and available surrogate (as I was). I believe there is a school of thought that holds that there is an exquisite pleasure to be gained from watching that movie with a cringing male companion or two. Anyhow, it was interesting to observe that all the men sported identical expressions – a sort of shifty, ‘I’m not really here and I hope I don’t see anyone I know’ look. And afterwards, in conversation with their female friends, all the usual suspects. Feigned interest, over-compensating rants, grudging admissions to not having completely died in there, and a heartfelt concern for the the retrogressive portrayals of the fabulous four. Incredible how many critics and male viewers alike (see Lane again) would have apparently loved the movie had it only been about a different flavour of liberated woman. In much the same way as all of democrat America is now busily convincing itself that really, the reason Hillary Clinton did not win was not that she was a woman, but simply that she was the wrong sort of woman.

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

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.

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.

Like many of my contemporaries, I’ve lived my life so far as the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Lucky enough to go to an undergrad university that opens doors because of what its called (independent of anything that might be taught or learned), I have since proceeded to drift determinedly from one place to another. Things kicked off with some initial jumping up and down as I pondered whether to become, what in IIT Delhi lingo was called a ‘Consulteer’. That morphed into a near escape from philosophy at oxford. Finally I ended up in a masters programme in engineering, funded largely by research on India’s population (don’t ask – this is grad school).

The masters degree was enjoyable, but one particularly miserable winter spent watching the rain drip slowly off eucalyptus trees in funereal Escondido Village was enough to generate a sort of black, unadulterated dissatisfaction with life and unhealthy amounts of soul searching and angst. The natural reaction was to go back to India and engage in save the world activities instead. This involves a few clearly laid out steps^

1. Pick a cause. I chose energy and environment. Why? As a certain professor of mine used to say – “There is no good reason for anything”*
2. Pick an NGO (a non-profit). Make sure its beautifully located in a big city. This is because the best grassroots work gets done in New Delhi or Bombay and real change always comes from the top.
3. Find a nice part of the moral high ground, pitch your tent there and practice a patronizing smile. Once you’ve got the smile down pat you can use it to great effect on management students, consultants, and of course i-bankers. The smile is often accompanied by the words ‘how interesting’ when you ask what they do, but if you’re really good you shouldn’t even have to say anything. Plus if you ever go on to become a PhD student you can continue to use this on those same three groups. So the investment pays off.
4. Become strongly left liberal. Of course it helps if you truly believe the ideology you espouse, but its not particularly important, and would probably make you something of a minority. A few simple rules make this part easy. Anti big-dams, pro tribal rights, pro reservations (an Indian variant of affirmative action), feminist (bonus points if you’re male and still go around claiming to be feminist), anti ‘war in Iraq’, anti Indian military action in the North East etc etc. I think you’re allowed to be libertarian though, so long as you’re pro social security of some kind for the downtrodden.
5. Dress appropriately. Kurtas and jeans are ideal for most days, though theres some leeway. If you’re female, carry a jhola. Indulge in kajal. And remember that bright colours are good.

I never quite made it to the perfect kind of NGO, having joined something that suspiciously resembled a big think tank / environmental consultancy instead but came close enough. Then found myself drifting again – this time into a PhD degree – more save the world stuff, to be precise ‘energy and climate policy’.The point however is this. A few days ago I decided to go skiing or, more accurately, to learn skiing. And as I cut my way down a gentle green at Kirkwood, gathering a fair amount of speed and coming to a smooth stop using my well honed technique (namely falling down extremely hard on my back and missing someone else by inches), I realized that there’s this common thread running through all these career shifts. Its this moment when you look around and hear everyone talking earnestly about something, and you listen to yourself say the same things, and you realize you don’t believe yourself, and the guy next to you doesn’t believe what he’s saying and even the paper you’re discussing is rich with the inner skepticism of the authorial voice. Its a much milder phenomenon in the sciences but its not non-existent, especially when you’re working on an epsilon importance problem and having to make it sound like a matter of life and death. If you’re in the field of climate change its particularly bad since you’re constantly having to battle the sinking feeling that no one is going to make major lifestyle changes, carbon emissions are not going to drop to stabilization levels and if there is light at the end of the tunnel it lies in either being wrong, getting lucky, or toughing it out and surviving as best we can. You can’t say this of course and so reams of paper are spent discussing targets, and options, and wedge based reductions and costs and being optimistic in general.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t doing anything life changing and wouldn’t know it if we were. So this constant need to play up the value of research or work to gain funding, tenure, recognition, admission to b-schools, and so on is really rather silly. With which deep insight I shall return to my work. Its forgettable, certainly not life changing, very possibly wrong but still satisfying while it lasts and better than average. Definitely worth a PhD and funding for a number of years no?

*NB: As you can imagine this particular teacher never had any trouble answering questions in class.

^Ok, so this is hopelessly cynical and obviously only half true. But it is half true.