Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

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.

2011 has been the most memorable year of my life. Over the last few years, an increasing sense of stagnation had been setting in. Moving to a new country has sorted that out. I’ve got a fresh perspective on life, met and worked with people from diverse backgrounds and traveled to more countries than I did in the last 10 years. I am ending the year a tad happier, a little wiser, a bit calmer and a lot more content. In short, 2011 restored that childlike sense of wonderment that is perhaps the first casualty of the daily grind of life.

May 2012 bring knowledge, wisdom and beautiful music to everyone’s life.

PS I picked up a new camera shortly after Christmas. It’s a Sony NEX 5N.

I recently finished reading Aldous Huxley’s The Devils Of Loudon. While the main subject of the book was the chain of events that culminated in the burning of Urbain Grandier at the stake, there were plenty of insightful asides that paint a vivid picture of the life in a 17th century French commune. I found this passage morbidly fascinating:

M. Adam and his fellow apothecaries sold Perpetual Pills of metallic antimony. These were swallowed, irritated the mucous membrane as they passed through the intestine, thus acting as a purgative and be recovered from the chamber pot, washed and used again, indefinitely. After the first capital outlay, there was no further need for spending money on catharitics. Dr. Patin might fulminate and the Parlement forbid; but for the costive French bourgeois the appeal of antimony was irresistible. Perpetual Pills were treated as heirlooms and after passing through one generation were passed on to the next.

We now look at the medeival doctors’ understanding of the human body; their bloodlettings, clysters and humors, with a sense of pity mingled with horror. Considering we began figuring out anitbiotics less than 90 years ago and that we were still discovering vitamins till as late as 1941, I wonder how much there is that we still don’t know. More importantly, will the generation 200 years from now look at our present medical practices and shake their heads in disbelief at our ignorance?

But they’re three!

It’s been a grim 3 months. While M. A. K. Pataudi, Shammi Kapoor and Jagjit Singh were icons we shared with our parents, Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie were the icons of our age. Nothing makes you feel older than the passing away of your icons. I don’t want to be in a world that I don’t share with Tendulkar or Rahman. I’ve been having this bizarre vision of having been put inside a sealed, transparent glass casket and left to float in outer space. That would be nice.