Part Deux

9 months is always a significant number as far the human being is concerned. It's hard to bring up that period of time and not endure any snide remarks. The 9 months that I am concerned is the duration of the second chapter of my USA stint. I was in the middle of devouring steak tips at a farewell luncheon financed by a Pakistani friend when the final confirmation of this changed itinerary came. My flight on Saturday out of Boston stands cancelled and although my mind was somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean already, I must fish it back to this country. Barack Obama took his Presidential oath today and his anti-outsourcing stance seems well on the way to implementation as the guy whose job I am going to take up could not get his US Visa stamped on his Indian passport. Thus a historic day for the entire world bore significant personal importance for me too. Part Deux gives a new lease of life to potential trips headed in the direction of the Grand Canyon, Washington DC, LA, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami and all such heavyweight names to which I could not pay attention during my first stint. The first stint of 7 months was over and my heart was set for home. But now, these 9 months have joined in like an unwanted baby. May I be a man reborn at the end of this trip. It's late at night but there is never any end to my fanciful daydreams of travel.

Only human

It was only a matter of time. I had to give in to temptation and make a mockery of another pre-conceived notion that I had about myself. An aggravating parrot when it comes to preaching "Be different, don't follow the herd" motto to anyone who wanders within my vocal range, I find myself a slave to a product which has made being alternative cool so popular that it is not 'alternative' any longer per se but painfully mainstream. I refer with much indignation to the I-Pod culture of which I (Bitter shame chokes me) have become a part.

I recently bought an I-Pod Touch on a sudden whim. I hadn't even planned on buying one because to me it represents just one more thing that is gone wrong with our yuppie generation. What's wrong, you ask? Well for one, it's a conversation killer. Sit next to an attractive girl on a flight and before you are through your breath freshening chewing gum in preparation of the potential filled time ahead, the damned earphones are out of the bag and nestled inside those pretty little ears. If cold-shouldering has had a more effective technique, I am yet to learn of it! Besides, the Pod also indicates an intolerance for everything around you, be it the sounds, the people and the flow of life that evades your music doped senses. It is an active ally of ignorance ensuring it's listeners don't know-don't care attitude can be sustained. And it is ignorance/intolerance and unhealthy contempt for other ways of life that is the cause of most of the misery in the world today (Think Al Qaeda, Maoists or Nazis).

Coming back to my recent purchase, you'd think that after all these criticisms I'd be miles away from any I-Pod whatsoever! I already owned a video I-Pod; a gift from a cousin of mine and after the initial intoxication with it's coolness, it pretty much lay ignored in my gadget tray. I was so proud of the fact that I saw it's inherent evil and stayed off it. Then I walk into an Apple store a couple of days ago with a friend and a friend's friend. This friend's friend was looking to buy an I-Pod Touch and I joined them, secretly smirking at the ordinariness of his "path-to-cool".  And darn it's coolness, I found myself buying one myself. Damn you, Steve Jobs for making a product that suckered me into possessing it knowing fully well that I was only at the tail end of the Apple sheep herd. The sleeker-than-sleek design, the ultra coolly coloured icons and the super sexy feel of the touch screen really made mincemeat of my intellectual pretensions. As penance for my faltering into "common man" territory, I shall bequeath this gadget of the Devil himself to my sister. If I am able to rise above the ordinary that is...

Homeward bound

After 7 months, an incredible adventure comes to an end. A country that has dominated popular culture for reasons good or bad has become even more familiar from first-hand experience. There are a number of untouched destinations that I'd have loved to brush upon but I'll have to save them for another time. San Francisco, with its windswept beauty is definitely at the top of the heap from my first visit to the USA. The sparking orb of energy that is New York city comes a close second. And in general, the real thrill of exploring a foreign country lies in finding out how folks are entirely different but at the same time exactly alike too. But it's time to go home.

It's time to go back to the bustling crowds and the chaos, where peace and quiet are like distant relatives known only through a family photo from 20 years ago. But all the turmoil is cut off on the outside. On the inside, my mind will be at the greatest possible peace. It's a sense of belonging that completely swamps all other ill-feeling. I guess that's why they call it home.

Monster fetish

A major landmark in the most ordinary townscape of Bharuch was Panchbatti (literally meaning 'Five lights'), an intersection where 4 different roads met at a roundabout. It was the only location in town briefly deemed busy enough to deserve traffic lights. But that misconception of popularity persisted only for a couple of months. The municipality decided quite wisely to re-instate a bored looking cop at the intersection to oversee any traffic misbehaviour at the roundabout leaving the signals unattended and unwanted. Right next to Panchbatti stood our favourite haunt from our school days, the cinema hall Relief.

Class-mates from all sides of the town would find this to be the most convenient of meeting locations and besides this was the cheapest of the lot in our town's cinema halls. Right opposite stood "Basant", the shady, run-down theatre which ran B-movies with their usual  innuendo filled names and provocative posters. Each of the titles were a hot topic of discussion and amusement amongst us friends. But finding out the title was where our courage ran out. None of us actually dared to cross the road and investigate the story for ourselves. We were content to be on this side of the road at Relief Talkies where 'our' kind of movies played.

Relief was earmarked for all the Hollywood movies that ever came to Bharuch. All the most bloodthirsty creatures and action heroes to have come out of any studio in LA made a stop-over at this corner of small town Gujarat. And keeping in mind their clientele at this halt, they all spoke chaste Hindi! It was an experience that was extremely sidesplitting and aggravating at the same time for us the convent educated lot who supposedly had a better grip on the Queen's language than most of our fellow cinema-goers. It was inevitably entertaining in one way or the other. If you haven't seen Samuel L. Jackson deliver a rousing speech in Hindi and then promptly be bitten in half by a super-intelligent shark, you've really missed something. 

All through our school years, starting from early adolescence, this cinema hall would be central in our planning. Parked motorcycles would be our conference rooms as we would plan out the rest of the evening, debating whether it would end in front of the milk shake stall at the railway station or on the grass of GNFC colony lawns after a short burst of cricketing activity. The conversation would taper away whenever an attractive girl swept by to pick up flow again only when she was out of sight. Then it'd be time for the show to begin and for us to enter the dark confines of the hall. It'd be time for an entry into the world of rampaging dinosaurs, lovesick giant gorillas and nubile blondes brought to life by our voluntary suspension of reality.

"I am a believer"

"I am a believer. I believe that there is no point in thinking different because every new idea possible has already been thought of. Of course, there is no sense in going off the beaten path. Is everyone else a fool to stick to what has already been proven to work? Why take a risk when it is known that by playing safe, a life of peace and comfort is ensured. When others say that something is not practical, they must be correct. Surely they know more about you than you yourself do by virtue of being around longer. Passion will not feed a hungry stomach they say and the taste of adventure will turn bitter as soon as you step outside the comfy confines of regularity. Walk with the masses because there is safety in numbers. The restlessness bred by familiarity is only an incitement for you to step into the mine-field of uncertainty and depression that a 'unconventional' career is. Smother your dreams under the very pillow that you envision them on. Don't try to fix what ain't broke."

Read that aloud and tell me if you've ever sounded more stupid to yourself. In case, you are still having difficulty in putting enough faith in your castle-in-the-air ideas, give it one more go "I am a believer..."

Radically unique

It was only the 2nd day of 2009 when I walked down 53rd street between 5th and 6th avenues in Manhattan to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I was under the illusion that I'd be among the handful of people who'd so early in the year want to be in a place whose very name carried the sound of obscurity. MoMA when pronounced right sounds so French-wannabe and elitist, and like everyone else I denounce the elitists while secretly aspiring to be among them. The delusion of being among the last few cerebral inhabitants of this planet was duly shattered when I found a million odd people (Well maybe not, but as good as a million to me) already in the queue to get in. The company that I work for has a corporate art program inside deal going on and for the first time I found myself in an advantageous position thanks to my employer's clout. I walked past the line through the glass doors of the museum only to find that the tickets to Van Gogh's "Colours of the night" exhibition had already been sold out for the day, my primary reason for being there. 

Dejected I dragged my feet over what to do for a little while and decided to give the rest of the stuff in the museum a go. Of course, there were the regular stars like works by Picasso and Monet, and of the popular 'pop art' artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Yet there were some works of 'art' whose only value was in their explanation, which seemed to want to extract a meaning out of the most ordinary of things. An artist scrawls "I'll make no more boring art..." a number of times on a blank sheet of paper. It is framed as is and put on display. A Japanese artist stencils on a series of postcards sent to his American friend during his travels "I WOKE UP AT X:XX AM AT XYZ PLACE" and it becomes an art exhibit! An exhibit called "Lung" is a high tension steel wire strung across the ceiling and threaded through hundreds of flattened Marlboro cigarette packets. Go figure! A pink surfboard like object is at an angle to the wall and it is supposedly the bridge between the real world of the floor and the imaginary world of the paintings on the wall. Ahemm... isn't that profound? There was this film of John Lennon just giving a spaced out look into the camera for a total of 4-5 minutes, apparently a contemporary film masterpiece by Yoko Ono that deserved an honourable display at the start of the music gallery, God only knows why!

Not that there was nothing worth seeing in the museum, in fact there was a hell of a lot to see. The display of tiny portions of a bomb blast scene by a Lebanese artist, each portion a tiny box in the centre of a large white frame reminded of the ripping apart of lives by a single bomb without going into grisly detail. A 4 minute film by a Romanian artist called "Deer-parture" put a wolf and a deer together in a white studio. The wolf doesn't even attack the deer at the end of the film, choosing to lie down instead but the crowd that built in front of the exhibit each time shines a light on our voyeuristic tendencies. It's like everyone was hoping to see the deer being brought down and would not want to miss the exact moment. Some amazing cover photographs for Esquire magazine were in themselves worth the visit. 

However the question that still discomforts me is whether I really liked those things or did I pick a few odd ones out of the lot because I wouldn't want to sound like a village bumpkin unable to appreciate the higher experiments in art. My mind goes back to a favourite Sunday strip of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin enters the scene in a snow covered landscape claiming that all art has become meaningless, form and structure serve no purpose and signs the landscape itself offering it to Hobbes, his pet tiger for a million dollars. Hobbes seriously considers the offer and then goes on to say that he'd have bought it only that it wouldn't go with his furniture. Then comes a disappointed Calvin's killer line:

"The problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's putting on who."

A year to go underground

At exactly the moment when 2008 turned to 2009, I was in a NYC subway train headed towards Penn Station. My friend and I were running way behind schedule for our plans to get to Times Square to find out for ourselves what's so special about a lighted ball dropping a few feet.  Our co-passengers in that carriage were lost in sombre thoughts with likewise expressions on their faces. Much as we wanted to spread the joy around, we found that we weren't quite up to the task. There was a cop in our carriage as was in all the others and on the streets above just to ensure that the New Year revelry didn't get too boisterous on the unsuspecting. Anyway as it turned out, the cop would've had to pull out a gun to force our fellow riders to celebrate. We quietly shook hands amongst ourselves and that was that for our New Year celebrations.

As per the popular notion, it seems that I will be spending the remainder of 2009 riding underground trains or at least being underground since I'd entered into the year that way. But if that were true then it's nothing compared to the deal the folks having a ruddy good time up in the streets were getting. They'd have a year of killer hangovers and regret filled late work days ahead of them. Luckily for them and for us, and also for our unenthusiastic brethren on the train, the 1st of January is just an overhyped media monster. Some of us willingly buy into the hype and others look at it with biting disdain. It doesn't really matter where you are or what you are doing at the very second when the clock strikes twelve or so I think. It's still the same 365 days that lie ahead for you to pull up your socks, and to castigate yourself for not doing so during the earlier 365. Or be like me and poke fun at those who make a big deal of the 1st of January while actually a teeny-weeny bit distressed inside at being a ship without a functional compass.