Category Archives: Travel

The Truth About Sets and Props

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Late last week, just as Manish was zeroing in on me after scouring the entire blogosphere to find a guest blogger who could make the rest of the Sepia Mutiny gang look good, a friend approached me with a plan. I was on my first visit to Hyderabad – the rapidly growing capital of Andhra Pradesh – and the friend was trying to convince me to go to Ramoji Film City, a Universal Studios type setup on the outskirts of the city.

“But this is not like Universal Studios at all. It is a functioning studio, not a theme park. No trip to Hyderabad is ever complete without a visit to the film city. It is a happening place. We should go.”

“Happening place? I see you’ve never been to K-Mart.”

“No, but this is happens to be largest movie studio in the world. Sometimes you can even see live movie shootings. Imagine seeing Nagarajuna in action. We are going.” This from the increasingly hysteric friend, who was starting to drool.

So we went. And it was a very disturbing experience. I might have grown up building elaborate temples for film actresses, but I know as well as you that not everything I see in movies is true. Like the blood spurting out of people is tomato ketchup. That the vamps are all drinking Sprite, not vodka. That there is a small possibility the email Aishwarya Rai wrote to me asking me to go check out her topless pictures on the internet may not be from her. All this I know. But then, this trip proved to me, there is so much more to add to that list. Such as the Taj.

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The Magnificent Seven

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Two of Time Magazine’s Persons of the 20th Century were the duo of Sir Edmund P. Hillary, and Tenzing Norgay. Their accomplishment was simply mindboggling. In an era in which there existed the most rudimentary of climbing gear, the two men became the first to summit Everest on nothing but heart.

On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal became the first human beings to conquer Mount Everest–Chomolungma, to its people — at 29,028 ft. the highest place on earth. By any rational standards, this was no big deal. Aircraft had long before flown over the summit, and within a few decades literally hundreds of other people from many nations would climb Everest too. And what is particularly remarkable, anyway, about getting to the top of a mountain?

Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time. [Link]

Tenzing was born in Tibet and grew up in Nepal. He was one of “Chomolunga’s people,” and so it was fitting that he was part of the first summit. Almost every great prize in moutaineering to be won, has now been won. Still, every mountaineer worth a dime aspires to one goal, however impossible it may seem. The Seven Summits. These are the tallest peaks on each of the seven continents: Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstensz Pyramid, Vinson, & Everest. To date, less than 130 climbers have bagged all seven peaks and not a single one has been Indian, which is especially surprising given that India lies in the shadow of Everest. Well Gautam Patil is out to change that.

As an avid mountaineer, Gautam has been invited to present motivational talks at various venues including Sierra Club, REI Company Stores, and Any Mountain Company. He has shown bravery in dealing with people and situations in extreme conditions including those involving death and dramatic rescue operations. Gautam’s professional background is in Technology Product Management in Enterprise Software Products. He is a founding director of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association Inc.

He has already completed Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua and is currently mounting an expedition up the Vinson Massif.

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Tripped up by tingo

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At some point after hearing the fifth K3G remix at the Net cafe in Fez and watching a Moroccan boy who knew and sang all the words to ‘Shava Shava’ doing chair-bhangra (it’s just like car-bhangra, only the entire cafe doesn’t tilt), I became obsessed with the idea of watching Bollywood in Morocco.

I had already selected my target, the Empire Ciné, plastered with posters for Oceans Twelve, Crazy Kung-Fu (which you may know as Kung-Fu Hustle) and several Bollyflicks all starring Priyanka Chopra. Waqt looked like the highest Priyanka I.N.Q. (item number quotient), and so with high standards of scientific precision it was duly chosen.

I had stared so long at the Bollyposters, the only ones not translated in French, and taken so many photos that the local lafange (layabouts) out front craned their heads and stared anew at the posters they ignored every day.

My atrocious and limited French interposed itself between me and my Priyanka fixation like an ill-tempered gendarme with little bits of toilet paper stanching a bad shave. ‘Waqt.’ I said, pointing at the movie poster and tapping my wrist. ‘Quoi heure?’ The man behind the grill patiently wrote ‘8.30’ for me and repeated it in French. ‘Waqt, oui?’ Same answer.

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Sing-sing

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On the ferry from Spain to Morocco, I had my ear bent for several hours by a friendly Moroccan bloke, as they tend to be. It was either that, or coming out of stealth mode and joining the Americans listening to an Aussie English teacher yap nonstop for four hours. The job selects for strong lungs. Between broken English, a smattering of French and German, and long phrases in Mime, the fellow now residing in Germany kept the ferry crossing lively.

‘You… sing?’ he ventured cautiously.

‘Uh… not really,’ I replied.

‘I two Indian friend. They sing,’ he said.

‘Qawwali?’ I asked. The universal gesture of ‘WTF are you talking about?,’ palms upturned. ‘North Indian, they sing,’ he told me.

Why yes, I suppose we do.

‘Prime minister sing. First time!’ he said. Ahhh… got it. Singh. Turban, not pipes. His ululatory fixation now made a lot more sense.

He proceeded to tell me about his friends in Germany. ‘Sing crazy for whiskey!’ Yeah, yeah, Ustad Walker and his famous school of blended malt scotch. He told me with no small admiration that he’d seen a grown man down a full liter of whiskey and show up the next morning with no ill effect. He said that Germany is recruiting Indians because they are the computer caste.

We compared the etymologies of words from Arabic and Farsi which show up in Turkish and Hindu/Urdu, such as kitap (book), maidaan (plaza) and duniya (world). He said he wasn’t religious, ‘religion politics, only makes trouble,’ but was visiting his family for Eid-ul-Adha. He mimed ram horns, slitting the beast’s throat, and asked how you translate Lucifere from French.

The rest of the encounter got weird.

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Intersections

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Yesterday in Sevilla, I saw Christopher ColumbusŽ purported tomb and learned that locally, ‘las Indias’ means the Indies, i.e. the Americas. Only ‘la India’ qualifies as the name of the country. ‘Indio’ means Native American, while ‘Hindú’ is the word for desi, even if you aren’t. That man was confused, confused, confused.

(I also learned that the cityŽs Plaza de España was used in Star Wars Episode 2, but that will excite only a few of you. A scary few to be sure 😉 )

Today I checked out La Alhambra, the Moorish fort built by Berbers from Morocco when they ruled Andalucía. It is a totally wild mashup of Spanish colonial and Islamic styles. Think Spanish tile roofs, square, unadorned towers and boring crenelations on the outside, arches, Arabic carvings and geometric patterns on the inside. Think Spanish coats of arms surrounded by verses praising Allah. Think Dehli’s Lal Qila meets Taco Bell. If I didnŽt know it was done that way on purpose, I’d think the Arabic brush strokes were steganography snuck in by marbleworkers held hostage.

Most major innovation happens at intersections. The 2nd gen process that some deride as ‘confusion’ is actually tremendous cultural innovation. And itŽs preciously short-lived, too– as the wheel of assimilation inexorably grinds away, this Cambrian Explosion too shall pass.

and,

Nothing is entirely original. The aesthetic I instinctively recognize as Indian is Mughal, i.e. Islamic by way of Turkish and Irani influence on Mongols from what is now Uzbekistan. The traditions saffronists claim are ‘native’ to India– those, too, came from some intersection, some borrowing, some adaptation somewhere.

P.S. Nobody looks at a brown man in Spain and guesses American– not even fellow Americans. I had the funniest conversation just now with a white woman who spoke fluent Spanish, and then all over again in Amrikan English. So the converse is true too, sometimes.

Related post: O Henry Continue reading →

Appreciating anew

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Reentry can be disintegrating. I’ve lived London but reminders are for thanks giving: London’s public face, its point of initial contact, is desi, from the cleaners to the flight attendants and ticket agents to the young passport control dude asking fresh questions about my New Year’s plans with a wink in his eye. Did Southall grow up around Heathrow or was it waiting to yield up lovely X-ray screeners barely out of their teens? No matter, there are countries I love for their culture and hate for their food– being vegetarian in Spain means picking bits of ham out of hard, dry baguettes. Good food can only enhance the emotionality of a place, Italy obviously, and I might like Thailand. London Delivers. Samosas, aloo tikkis, paneer wraps, mango lassi at any old cornershop. God shave the queen.

There were raucous desi b-boys in pimp threads and bling bling swigging straight from the bottle on the tube last night. An English couple opposite stared, fascinated and appalled, their dining room gossip secure for the week. Cute Asians in bobs yelled ‘Happy New Year!’ in twee, drunken accents. Uncle types stole courtesy kisses from French strangers. The Eye of London turned Eye of Sauron with fields of slowly drifting sparks, world-ending grandeur, anime. It beat the gracious fountains of fire in Rome, high on a hill above the Piazza del Popolo, set to classical, the best I’ve ever seen. Rome’s crowd was friendlier, dancing arm-in-arm, a big public party; Barcelona was football aggression; but London had an excuse, it started to pour. Continue reading →

An American cannibal amongst the Aghori

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Last week Bong Breaker contended that if there is a post on Sepia Mutiny about “Raw meat” then chances are that it may be one written by me. I hate to be predictable but I hate to disappoint even more. An SM tipster sends us the following article about cannibalism in India from Student Newspaper.org:

As we shared a bumpy auto-rickshaw journey between two North Indian villages, I began to realise that the frail old man I was rubbing thighs with was in fact a cannibal who claimed that babies taste “fresh” whereas the corpses of older people have a “stringy texture like wood”. Gary Stevenson (the name he used to introduce himself) then proceeded to illustrate and justify his preference for younger human flesh through the comparison of superior-tasting lamb over mutton…

Once we were sitting comfortably, Stevenson eagerly whipped out the skull of a young girl that he “dragged out of the Ganges” and carries with him at all times, proudly stroking the smooth bone and proclaiming the cranium to be the finest from his expansive collection. Licking his lips, my congenial cannibal enthusiastically described the sensation of eating his own species: “Human flesh smells like rawhide and tastes like pork. The fingers are the most succulent part,” declaring the practice of devouring corpse meat to be a sacred primordial ritual which still occurs amongst radical Hindu Aghoris in certain parts of India.

Houston-born Stevenson [a.k.a. Kapal Nath], who has come to be known as the “American Aghori”, told me of how he has roamed India for years in search of enlightenment, feasting on the remains of the Hindu dead “as often as possible…” [Link]

I didn’t know that there were any Hindu cannibals. It seems like such a contradiction in terms at its face. At first the only thing I could find was that National Geographic once featured a segment about them and that Wikipedia has a short entry about their ways:

A sect who them selves relates to the order of lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Aghori means non-terrifying in Sanskrit. The sect is peculiar with its rituals and way of life. This extremely shy and secretive community is known to live in the graveyards, wearing the ash from the pyre, use human bone from the graveyards for the rituals.

The sect dates back to around 1000 A.D., and practices cannibalism in the belief that eating human flesh confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging.

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Help a Wannabe-Desi Out

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white india.jpg Verity, at the conservative blog Albion’s Seedlings, says she wants to settle in India and buy property there. However, she’s been told that she can do neither.

My understanding is that with the approval of the Reserve Bank, she can buy property for residential purposes, and Wikipedia claims, “Citizenship of India by naturalisation can be acquired by a foreigner who is ordinarily resident in India for twelve years (continuously for the twelve months preceding the date of application and for eleven years in the aggregate in the fourteen years preceding the twelve months).”

Anyone know more about this than just what a Google search turns up? Continue reading →

An ABCD in Amsterdam

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Work & biz travel has been kicking my butt the past few months so I haven’t been able to uphold my end of the Sepia Mutiny bargain of late.   I was however, in Amsterdam last week (on business!) and had a few moments of (sober) time.  ABCD dork that I am, it’s always fun to look for the little signs of desi influence…

Honors for Desi “pride of place” in the US probably goes to Bombay– it ain’t too hard in most good sized cities to find a Bombay Palace, Bombay Bazaar, Bombay Place, etc.    In Amsterdam, on the other hand, the Desi city that secures branding is Goa – the apropos name for one of the city’s many famous, euphemistically named, “coffeeshops”

It’s well nigh impossible for a desi techie to observe the “bicycle rickshaws” peddling tourists up and down the streets & demur that not all technological progress is, uh, monotonic.

These poor, exploited Dutch cyclists, if only they could afford a noxious 2 stroke, soot-spewing engine to alleviate their burden.

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