Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

My memory is fading. This has to be written down. 30 years is not an awfully long time, but nothing has changed more than the way we buy and listen to music. A brief personal history starting with the radio:

My earliest memory of a music-playing device is that of our old family radio in our bedroom. I don’t know how it came to be in our house. It was either a hand-me-down from grandma, something that mom brought along when she got married or dad’s first big purchase as a bachelor. Like an old family dog, it was just there. Come evening, and it would be switched on and I’d eagerly wait for it to “warm up”. A green light in the top corner would gradually come up, followed by sound.

There weren’t many radio channels in India in the ‘80s. The radio was permanently tuned in to Vividh Bharti. There were a handful of advertisers and the same ads would play in more or less the same order in the evening (I had the order memorised and was quite proud of being able to guess the next ad before the last one would finish – the parents proudly attributed it to the regimen of soaked almonds in the morning). The programming itself was what you’d expect from a country with strong socialist leanings. There were the evening state-sponsored news bulletins with news of inauguration of power plants and dams, visiting dignitaries, NAM summits, losses and victories in hockey and cricket and weather reports. The entire bulletin would be read in the monotone of a bored school headmaster. Then there were the short radio dramas (Hawa Mahal, whose jingle I can still hum) and some miscellaneous music programming mostly featuring songs from old and new Bollywood films.

The radio was capable of tuning in to both Medium Wave (MW) and Short Wave (SW) transmission. SW was rarely used. While the MW static was pleasing and an integral part of the texture of the sound, the SW static – a confused mess of hiss, whistle, and crackle – was almost disturbing. I later found out that the radio had a spot behind it for connecting an external antenna. Since we never had one, it was almost impossible to get a steady lock on an SW channel.

I don’t know what became of the radio. It gradually fell out of use and one day stopped working. I remember we once unscrewed the thin wooden cover behind the radio to find a fascinating world of dusty, cobwebbed vacuum tubes. One of them had gone bad and a spare was either not available or very expensive. The radio probably went for a pittance to the neighbourhood junk-recycling man on his bicycle (raddi wala).

I think I now understand the fuss audiophiles raise over their valve amplifiers. There was a certain warmth about the sound from that radio which I haven’t experienced since then. Or perhaps it’s just impossible to separate the various associations of a child of 5 – the security and warmth of being with both the parents at night, that mandatory glass of oversweet, warm milk before sleep, the hum of the fan on hot, summer nights and the sound of the radio.

Ponte Vecchio looks like a structure that you’ll only find in a fantasy novel or in a video game.

That feeling of being at an imaginary place persists even when you are walking through the arched corridors near the bridge.

But when you are finally walking on the bridge, it feels like you are passing through a busy bazaar in India. Except that people with striking resemblance to Einstein might make an appearance.

I had carried along my new-found obsession for shuttered windows and old façades from Rome. Worse, I wasn’t content merely clicking them and tried to draw them in my pocket diary while waiting for lunch (with disastrous results). I guess when you are in the town where Michelangelo grew up, photography feels a bit passive – even a betrayal of sorts.

The corridor that led us to Palazzo della Signoria (where a replica of Michelangelo’s David awaited us), was lined with easels and painters practicing their craft. Some had left their tools and gone away. We saw some confused artists running around and wondered if they were dodging harassment by local police.

We knew we were seeing a replica of David but that didn’t make it any less awe-inspiring. For reasons that I have forgotten by now, I couldn’t get myself to photograph it and was perfectly content clicking random things around it. I do remember being very happy.

We spent the remaining day walking and enjoying random surprises that the streets of Florence kept springing at us.

By now the cathedrals were giving us déjà vu. On seeing one, the wife asked if we had seen it before and I said, “well, we must’ve, but in Rome”.

I was reading Huxley’s Devils of Loudon during our visit to Rome and Florence, and I couldn’t help but think of Urbain Grandier on seeing this door engraving.

Something about Ponte Vecchio drew us towards it again. It was the perfect note to the end our visit to Florence on.

At 90€ for a round-trip per person, the train ride from Rome to Florence doesn’t come cheap. But the lure of seeing Michelangelo’s David won and on a cool November morning, we found ourselves in Florence.

Here’s the first set of pictures of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. I don’t think I’ve seen something this intricate at this scale. I’d probably not be saying this if Taj Mahal wasn’t a distant childhood memory but whenever I visit next, I know what the Taj will be up against:

There was something about the marble of the cathedral’s floor that caused me to stare at it mesmerised:

The figures in the fresco painted on the dome, sometimes create a head-spinning illusion of being 3-dimensional figurines looking down on you:

Whenever I see an old couple now, The Beatles’ ‘When I am 64’ starts looping in my head even if the couple in question is decidedly older:

My most enduring memory of the Cathedral is that of its walls bathed in sunlight…

…and these bicycles parked outside

While the building we live in is a modern one (completed sometime in 2008 and can be still be seen in all its under-construction glory on google street view) the houses in the neighbourhood are not. Most of them are at least a hundred years old, a few even older. Among them stands a quaint theatre (marquee lights and all) that we’d always walk past, but never enter. Yesterday, that changed. The theatre, among its selection of movies, had two movies that we’ve been wanting to see – The Artist and Carnage. The former was sold out but we were just in time to secure two tickets for the latter.

The theatre started screening movies in 1912. Entering the building is like going back a few decades in time. The theatre is an odd juxtaposition of the old and the new. The show timings are written in chalk on a blackboard pinned to the wall near the box office, while the person issuing the tickets uses a Windows machine with a modern ticket-selling software. There are no popcorn and coke stalls but there is an attached bar and a restaurant.

The hall where Carnage was playing was small – 50-60 people small. The screen was quite small too – 1/4th or 1/3rd the size of your typical modern-day multiplex. There was an air of intimacy about the hall and most people looked like they were not just regulars, but patrons for decades. Bringing in a glass of wine was allowed and a cup of cappuccino was fine too. The rows of seats in theatre these days are on individual steps of a giant staircase. Here the floor was an inclined plane. As the projector came on for the pre-movie ads, you could see motes of dust doing their Brownian waltz in the beam of its light. From our last row seat I could’ve stood up and have a giant shadow of my head projected on the screen. It felt as if a grainy, B&W newsreel from 1940s would start playing any minute. But the quality of the projection defied the ambience. The images were bright, sharp and most likely high-definition digital. As the 4:3 trailers made way for the 16:9 letter-box movie, two black shutters covered the unused portion of the screen. The sound might not be Dolby or whatever European equivalent is used in theatres here, but it was clear and, more importantly, at just the right volume.

It was refreshing to not be told to switch off the cellphones. They were either respecting the building’s desire to feign oblivion to this late 20th century invention or admitting the maturity of the audience.

The movie was brilliant too. This conversation; perfectly ordinary anywhere else, was made special by the fact that we were watching this movie in Amsterdam:

NANCY
Those tulips are gorgeous.

PENELOPE
It’s that little florist way up on
Henry, you know? The one all the way up.

NANCY
Oh right.

PENELOPE
They fly the bulbs in straight
from Holland, twenty dollars a load.

At which point a faint chuckle ran through the hall.

Tickets for tomorrow’s 3 PM show of The Artist have been procured. We cannot think of a more apt place to watch a 2-D, B&W, silent film. Fate has dealt us a kind hand. I only have to remind myself that we had started 2009 with Amir Khan’s Ghajini to feel grateful.

Concerned colleagues had warned me about the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Amsterdam. I was told that people burst firecrackers from their roofs and in the streets. If they are too drunk (which on New Year’s Eve they inadvertently are), they throw them at you. And the air smells of burnt gunpowder. I thought to myself that it sounded exactly like Delhi on a Diwali night. I was wrong. The celebrations here were ten times bigger.

31st Dec was a typical wintery day in Amsterdam – dank and dreary. Perhaps to liven up the day, people started bursting firecrackers at 3:00 PM. Once the sun set, it was impossible to have a moment when a cracker would not go off somewhere. Sadly, the tales of unruliness were true. We witnessed at least one instance of rockets being fired from the window of one house into the other across a street, had a small firecracker thrown frighteningly close to us, saw a building burning far on the other side of the river and heard the dreaded fire engine siren several times.

We have a shared terrace on the 7th floor of our building. Someone had stuck a hastily scrawled missive on the door to the terrace with this curt message:

Geen vuurwerk (which translates to – no fireworks)

That meant that we could happily watch the show the city was putting up for us from a safe distance. It was still a long way to go before midnight, and while the terrace gave us a great vantage point, it also exposed us to the elements. We eventually retreated to the warmth of our apartment and decided to enjoy the fireworks from our window (which is more of a glass wall that looks onto the river). We weren’t disappointed.

Come midnight and the ships docked nearby started blowing their horns. The fireworks, which were already going strong by now, picked up further.

Their ephemeral reflections in the river made everything magical.

We saw some strange fireworks.

We were quite mesmerised by the variety that wouldn’t go off but just drift in the air like kite-lanterns. At least two of these rammed into the scaffolding of the under-construction building in front of our house but thankfully caused no damage.

Within 20 minutes, the air was so thick with smoke that we could hardly see the fireworks across the river. Just then, a ship which had docked minutes ago, started its onward journey through this man-made fog. It looked ghostly:

I am going to remember this night for a very long time.

P.S. It’s been raining here for the last two days or so and all the paper left by the firecrackers has turned into squishy, red pulp that is probably going to coat the footpaths and roads forever.

P.P.S. Further evidence that some high-caliber fireworks were involved in the New Year Eve’s celebrations

P.P.P.S. Christmas trees stripped of their ornamentation have started appearing near the various garbage bins across the city. It breaks my heart to think that just a day ago they were standing in a bright, warm corner of some house, covered in baubles, lights and surrounded with happy laughter of children and pets and are now vying for space in cold, wind and rain with rotting garbage by the noisy roadside.