The city of the non-conformists

Ahh... What can I say? Everything about San Francisco is so atypical. A windy city built on crazy slopes of mountains that drop down to the Pacific must be pretty rare in itself. Add to that, the incredible variety of its residents. It doesn't seem like an American city in any respect. It's just some collage of cultures, like someone went crazy with scissors and an atlas. I heard from my hosts that no Walmart, Target or Shaw's and their ilk of supermarket chains were allowed within the city limits. Suits the city. Anything aimed for the mass markets would stick out like a sore thumb here.

There are so many images of the city that spring to mind all at once. The buzz of the street performers and their audiences in Fisherman's wharf, the roaring Harleys that wound their way up the crooked streets, the noisy trams clattering their way across town packed with eager tourists like me hanging on and the sobering sight of the massive span of the Golden Gate Bridge and that of the restless ocean beating away at the bridge's base to name a few. The curiously Chinese China Town of San Francisco was another strange addition to the sights and sounds of the city. Then there were the sea lions at Pier 39 oinking away, groaning, burping and bumping each other off the buoys much to the excitement of their tourist spectators. A guide told me that these things were the third biggest tourist attraction in the USA after the two Disneylands. Consider that, the first two multi million dollar investments on a man's imagination brought to life while the third nature's clowns just being themselves. I can't really say what was so captivating about these weird looking and funny sounding creatures but they were just so naturally entertaining.

The picture postcard houses and the towering buildings that looked so out of place on streets which were at implausible angles and curves made the city look like some abandoned experiment. The experiment that was successful in so far as to make it all it stick together but no one seems to know what it's original intention was! All I can say, it's a wonderful, weird city and I am counting on some more visits to it in the future.

The thinly veiled secret to happiness

I have been trying to figure it out for a very long time. I work the same job as my pals and don't bitch about my low salary, poor annual rating or the lack of growth opportunity in the company. I live in the city as my pals and don't whine about how lifeless a city it is and about how all the hot chicks are in either Delhi or Bombay or about how the other guys are really having a rocking time in Bangalore. Basically I live the same life as theirs yet I find no sincere need to cringe about what I have even though admittedly it is not a lot!

I put it down to one and one reason alone. In spite of my tall claims about how I thirst for change, about how much I love travel and writing and adventure, there is only one thing that I truly love. And that is pure, undisturbed sleep. With my US posting and a tiny apartment all to myself, I find myself indulging in this passion even more deeply. When I am sleepy, I don't even care what kind of a bed I am sleeping on or where it is located. All I care for a pillow. Yeah, I don't even need a mattress. I spent months sleeping on a wooden board with my pet pillow in my hostel days just because some considerate friend of mine had puked on my bed-sheet after drunken revelries and I wasn't driven enough to get it washed. The only thing that I need for a good night's sleep apart from a pillow is a filled stomach. Food content is immaterial as long as it is edible. And that is all the work I really need to do.

So there you have it, the secret to instant contentment. Learn to love your sleep more than anything else and do just about enough to keep your stomach filled. The latter part also shouldn't be too strenuous if yours is the only stomach you are taking the responsibility of! All right folks, I hear ya shouting loud and clear, "What a LOOOSSERRRR!!" [:-D]

Night out on the town

I have never been to a discotheque in India and have never even wanted to. There were other pals of mine who would salivate at the prospect and beg for any opportunity to get into one of those crowded, noisy, flashily lit up places that seem to be central to most people's idea of living it up! For me, they seemed to be such a unattractive place to be: being forced to listen to the kind of music I hate while getting jostled by strangers. To top it off, going single into a club really reeks of desperation and that is one thing in life I have had no experience of. I figured that it was not my kind of game.

So when my cousin told me last Saturday that we had two options of hitting Boston's night-time circuit - A : Go bar-hopping or B: Land up in a lounge or a disc for the entire night, I instantly chose option A. But Hurricane Hanna put paid to that plan with her torrential rains through Saturday evening and we were forced to choose B if I wanted to do anything that weekend. We chose a club/lounge called "Mantra" (run by an Indian, though I saw very few inside) in downtown Boston and I made my debut in the zoo of the creatures of the night. I knew myself to be a introverted, quiet kind of guy who'd rather hang around a deserted city park and drink in a quiet little bar than head for the more 'popular' parts of town. Well... I was wrong, completely and absolutely wrong.

With the aid of a couple of pegs of rum consumed before entry, the place literally swallowed me up. The thumping music danced in circles around me, teasing me to match up to it. The strobe lights and the hallucinogenic graphics on the giant screens were just so perfect for the occasion. A bevy of bewitching beauties swaying to the music awaited wherever the eye turned, their looks and figures toned to perfection and I found myself agreeing to my cousin that the only guy who could be really happy in here would be a single guy, because he had effectively the entire menu to choose from (On paper, at least). Sure enough, the best looking girls were part of some group or the other, never for a single second unattended, and the other girls that looked to be on the hunt themselves were, at least on my first experience of the nightclub scene, were trying too hard. That needy look on a girl's face really kills off any possible sense of attraction for me, though for most it may be a big turn-on. 

A few really pretty faces would occasionally steal a seductive glance before focussing back on their group, and the locking of gazes that spoke much more than a million words could have conveyed were to be the real high points of the night. Whether these moments would progress into something more substantial by the end of the night was the whole point of the game. I finally got what was so alluring about night-life and I really took a liking to it. This trip of America is turning out to be a real eye-opener! I keep discovering unexplored portions within what was until recently my very familiar mind.

Only in America

I am only 23 and I have already bought my Dream Machine. And what might this Dream Machine be, you ask? Well, it's just a digital radio-clock made by Sony. I figured that I needed one to enhance my American experience. I remember countless Hollywood movies when the grumpy lead stirs out of his/her sleep to slap off the buzzing alarm on the top of the glowing digital time display. Also goes to show that in this country, they actually trust the power companies to supply electricity 24/7 which is why they let their clocks run on electricity from a power socket. This is a country of uninhibited self promotion. Even a poor old alarm clock has to project itself as a "Dream Machine" to ever hope of finding its way off the shelf and into the hands of the discerning consumer!

I was out with my cousin to a tourist destination called Castle Rock north of Boston last Sunday. It's a grand old rock on the coast of the Atlantic and surrounded by some of the prettiest houses I've ever seen (though for me all it takes for a house to be pretty is for it to have an open view of the sea). All I expected to see was a spectacular view of the Atlantic and it's rocky coastline. But fate it seems had better things in store for us. A tantalising photo-shoot was in progress at the rocks that enclosed the Castle Rock. A stunning blonde model in a bikini was posing amongst those rocks with the ocean as the backdrop for a fashion photographer, probably getting her modeling portfolio shot. As she struck a heady mix of innocent and provocative poses, my cousin and me, like all hot-blooded young males on the hunt would be, were transfixed! And when the first phase of the first photo-shoot ended, and she headed for a drink to refresh herself, I noticed a couple of kids maybe 8 or 9 playing by the shore only about 12-15 feet away from her. Then I realized that this was not some secret exotic location but some kind of a week-end family hangout too! There were numerous families who had come to this same place for some quiet get-together time as the kids thrilled at the sight of the ocean did their stuff while their parents earned some kind of a break from entertaining them.

And the model with all her posturing could take nothing away from the glee with which the kids jumped up when the occasional big wave crashed into the rocks and doused them with spray. It's as if they were still insulated in their own cocoon of innocence, unaware of all that surrounded them. A young kid fished alongside with his father on the rocks behind the model and they did not even turn around. There were fathers who seemed to be content at being with their families not even gazing in the direction of the photo-shoot and there were also men who were pushing their families ahead of them so that they could just grab an undisturbed sneak peek. For all the hue and cry over censorship and issues of supposed moral degeneration that we grapple with back home, it was fairly evident that for all men, it should come from within and just cannot be forced from without. Free a person to do whatever he wants to and in most cases, the desired scheme of things will be the end result.

The great big ruse

This past weekend, I was at my aunt's place and in the midst of a commercial break for a cooking show, the conversation took a dramatic turn for the serious. We (my aunt's family and me) talked about the fallacy that is democracy. Democracy we said was what kept a smile on our face as we basked in the notion that we were at an equal level to the Prime Minister, while the powerful and the mighty robbed us blind. What after all is a vote? Will it make any difference at all to the massive forces that shape the grimy underbelly of every democracy as politicians make a wonderful show of the importance of the common man every 5 years to ensure a life of comfort and easy pickings for themselves over the next 5 years.

Democracy seems like a joke, an exercise in worthlessness and misplaced self-importance. Self-importance or the much maligned word 'ego' is central to the idea of democracy. It is this insane belief that one vote can determine who sweeps into power and proceeds to fulfil his promises that makes villagers from the furthest villages brave the sun and forgo a day of work just to line up at the polling booth. We the educated are really busy sneering at such simple mindedness. These are the times when I feel that knowledge is a really bad thing. When we learn too much and begin to see the world in its myriad shades of grey, the cancer of cynicism gnaws away at the last remaining positive gut feelings. We the supposedly 'educated' elite rapidly lose sight of the fact that one is a crowd, in fact one is an army.

Democracy is fuelled by the unlimited power of a man's dreams. Dreams which say that he is one and equal with all his fellow men if not better and is a stakeholder in all that he can see. The dream is misleading all right but that is the greatest gift that could be given to any man, the ability to dream. Not all may be able to flesh out their dreams in the end, but it's their possibility of becoming true that make democracy such a beautiful concept. Much as I hate Ayn Rand, there is one thing on which I'll have to agree with her. There is nothing more spectacular than a man standing his ground all alone, oblivious to the world's insistent pressures to conform, intent on his craft. Democracy is the only political system that allows every man a genuine chance to reach into that glorious part of himself. If all the world's merely a stage, democracy sure brings along the best freestyle performers.

And I try, and I try...

I find myself in this kind of a bind all too frequently. It's been a week since I returned from my first visit to California and my first glimpse of the Pacific. My head is swimming with images from that trip, my ears have recorded the unique soundscapes and my fingers are literally swelling with all the tales that they want to type out. 

But that's where the problem lies. I'll probably need another blog just to get down everything I want to about San Francisco and California. It's always like that for me when I return from any place that has long been on my wishlist and has now swamped my senses. It was like this for Benares too when I returned with a thousand vivid situations for my writing to exploit and all I have on record is a single paragraph for my blog. A similar task beckons tantalisingly again and I find myself overwhelmed once more by the magnitude of what awaits me. As I psyche myself upto the point when I actually write something about what has been the best trip of my life, make do with the extended album of images from the link below!

http://picasaweb.google.com/anuranjan.roy/SanFranciscoTrip#slideshow  

Salvation through chicken

It would be one of those dreary winter evenings of Kurukshetra. I would be ambling my way through the brick passages to the mess as slowly as possible. That's because I knew that the dreadful combo of oily sticky 'bature' and paltry 'chole' awaited me. Then I would catch a glimpse of Suman a.k.a Baba-ji emerge out of the darkness into the patch of light cast by the volleyball floodlights clutching a plate topped with masala from the mess. That'd bring an extraordinary spark of life in me. That'd mean "Chicken night".

You see, Baba, my pal and Mechanical batchmate from Nepal was our resident chicken expert. Indeed he was probably the only one in our college gang that could tell a knife from a frying pan. We were indebted to him for the infinite number of times that he had saved us from death by inconceivably bad mess food.

I'd follow him, a rat to his Pied Piper, right to his room and find the rest of the gang already salivating at the prospects of what was to come. I wouldn't even be pissed off at their not informing me, because there was an unwritten rule : "Where there is chicken, there is Roy" and so they'd know that there was no way I was going to miss any event that involved chicken. In all fairness, I was the only guy who'd actually lend a helping hand to Baba, unlike the others who used all the time in which the chicken was cooking to take pot-shots at Baba for his "inner woman" and stuff on those lines. There was a solid reason why he was called Baba. It was because like the weather of the Himalayan kingdom from where he had descended unto Kurukshetra, he was always ice cool and impervious to the multiple prongs that my gang tried to poke him with.

As the chicken slowly absorbed the taste of the masala and gained its fiery character stoking the furnaces of our hunger, we'd beg Baba to go easy on the spices. We even managed to swiftly deposit half of his estimated chicken masala outside in the bushes once or twice for the sake of our young lives. But Baba had to have his own way of getting back, so he'd always end up making something that would literally smoke our brains out. We took what we got and we loved it huffing and puffing though we might be.

The top competitors for the title of "Prize hog" would be me, the skinny rag from India and Rajeev, the chicken incinerating monster from the Pacific nation of Fiji, thoughtfully nicknamed "Fiji"! All possible damage done, the gang would sneak out onto to the two chairs and beds kept outside in the common verandah. There we'd sit passing a measly Navy Cut or two around and gaze at the stars in silence. Not that any of us was in a poetic mood at all, it was just that we were stuffed to the gills with chicken and rice and our thought processes were already stewed in Baba's masalas. Now that all of us are thrown out to the farthest corners of the world, we do fall back on the memories of these nights as the epitome of what college was to us. Back then we were just a bunch of guys stuck in the moment, stuck in it together, not exercising their minds at all and therefore intensely at peace with the world.