Preserving Them All – One Keystroke At A Time

The ICC T20 Women’s World Cup officially kicks off tomorrow. The problem is – and I risk sounding politically incorrect here – no one cares. I’ve not met a single woman who knows or cares about the women’s cricket teams. It might be flimsy to base my assumption on that small anecdotal sample, but given that I don’t see the media scamper for rights to women’s cricket, surely there cannot be much interest? I am not saying that cricket should be a male bastion but simply pointing out that a separate tournament with just gender as the differentiator cannot be sustained. What we probably need then is tennis’ equivalent of mixed-doubles?

We woke up early, feeling remarkably fresh and rested. Our breakfast on arriving at Leh had been at the guest house owner’s cozy little drawing room. This morning we decided to give those legs a little exercise and ventured out looking for a breakfast place. We settled for a small restaurant called Gesmo that had begun operating just 2 weeks ago. Their menu had practically every major cuisine, and; quite remarkably for a setup their size, they even ran a small bakery that churned out delicious cookies, cakes, rolls and croissants.

Somehow during our visit to Ladakh last year, we had missed out Shanti Stupa (longish story involving tired lungs and closed food shops during a ‘bandh day’ so we’ll leave that out for now) and thats where we immediately trooped to after breakfast. After walking through lanes surrounded with closed shops and deserted neighborhoods we found ourselves staring at the face of the hill atop which the Shanti Stupa is. You can either take – as wikipedia informs me – “a series of 500 steep steps” or take a road that snakes around the hill and drops you within a few yards of an uphill walk to the Stupa. Gesmo must’ve put somthing in our breakfast, because against our usually sound judgement, we decided to go up the steps.

After what seemed like an eternity, the Shanti Stupa began to loom before our eyes. While the pristine, white stupa impresses you, the surroundings of the stupa leave you spellbound. The snow-covered mountains all around the stupa, the low-hanging clouds playing with sun to create an everchanging patchwork of shade and light far in the valley below, make you wonder if you are standing at the portal of Heaven.

On our way back we chose the easy walk down the road over a shorter but a little more strenous climb down the stairs; though at this stage we would have ideally preferred to turn into a ball and simply tumble down the hill. The afternoon was cold and cloudy and streets as deserted as they had been during our walk to the Stupa.

Hot food and a short nap are the best cures for cold, weary bodies. Though your snug blanket seems like the best place in the world to be in, a sense of guilt at frittering away your time in your room while you could be out gawking at mountains, draws you out again. This time we hit the main market to buy a few knick-knacks and somehow found ourselves chatting with this old man selling all things Apricot.

We purchased a packet of dried Apricots from him and tried bargaining with him in English.

100 Rs
That’s too much – 80 Rs?

Kya? Kitna? Urdu main boliye.
What? How much? Say that in Urdu please

Assi Rupay
Eighty Rs

Assi? Bahut kam hai.
Eighty? That’s too little

Phir Nabbe?
Ninty then?

Chailye Nabbe de dijiye
Alright, ninty will do then!

It then occured to me that what was Hindi to me, was Urdu to him. The two languages are not as far apart as sometimes their scripts and the tensions between India and Pakistan make them out to be. I was reminded of this essay that a friend had forwarded a long time ago. Or perhaps it was this essay shaping my thoughts here.

Also, notice that we suck at this bargaining thingy – not that we wanted to drive a hard bargain with an old man trying to make ends meet.

We had remembered a small café from our last visit that sells ‘proper’ coffee. Coffee in Leh usually comes in two varieties – bad and very bad. The main recipe in both cases involves powdered Nescafé dunked in fat-rich milk saturated with sugar. The best you can do is ask for sugar to be excluded, but they’d still insist on calling it a cappuccino. This little café offers no cappuccinos, lattes or espressos, but it does serve very good (and fresh) French press coffee. With very little looking around we found it again (its name eludes me now, but i’ll try and find out. Update: It’s called ‘Cafeteria’. Doh!) The terrace of the café offers a beautiful, panoramic view of the Leh Palace and the mountains surrounding it. It was still too cold for people to be sipping their French press coffee at the terrace so we settled for the next best thing – the second floor with windows wide enough for me to stick my camera out and take some pictures in the fast fading light.

Within days of returning from our last visit to Ladakh, I had started keeping an eye on the temperatures there. The moment the maximum temperatures in Leh began to touch double digits, we decided to pack our bags for a quick vacation. The tourist season in Ladakh begins with the opening of the roads from Manali to Leh – which usually happens around the 3rd week of May. The weather in April is too cold; and as we discovered, too mercurial, to visit Ladakh. On the other hand, the town is a lot less crowded. And although only a handful of shops are open, it’s easy to find restaurants serving good, multi-cuisine food.

We flew to Leh from Delhi after spending a day there. Now Delhi at this time of the year is nothing short of a blast furnace. While flying from Delhi airport during summers I had seen travelers to Jammu holding thick jackets, pullovers, mittens and mufflers, and shuddered at the thought of having to even touch all the winter wear in the sweltering Delhi heat. This time I wasn’t a distant spectator but an active hoarder of all wintery clothes. Ironically, for someone visiting Leh in non-peak season, we couldn’t get window seats – thanks to a large contingent of tourists on our flight. As we flew closer to Leh, from the furtive glances at the window from my aisle seat I could vaguley make out tall snow covered mountains. When we landed, the temperature outside was 4ºC. The mountains surrounding the runway, the azure sky with patches of drifting clouds and an ineffective but bright sun made for a mesmerizing view. We stood there soaking in the scenery while buses after buses loaded the passengers and took them to the terminal barely a few meters away from the runway. The bus ride is a security measure (the airport is used by the Indian Air Force so you wouldn’t want passengers straggling away) and a convenience (walking uphill to the terminal after landing in the thin, oxygen deficient altitude of 11,000+ ft can take a herculian effort).

We were at the same guesthouse as our last visit. The garden where I’d spent considerable time clicking flowers during our last visit, was nothing but a bare, barren patch. It had been readied and seeded for summers but at the moment nothing grew here. The only exception was a lone, young, apricot tree at the entrance which was decked with delicate, pinkish-white flowers.

The rooftop restaurant at the guesthouse was closed. The loos upstairs hadn’t been assigned a gender yet.

The calendar outside the restaurant kitchen was stuck on October’09 – even time freezes in Ladakh once it starts snowing. In my mind this restaurant’s utility lies more in the views of the Stok range that it offers than the food. The former was still being served fresh. Though again, it was a very different view from our last visit. The range was covered in snow, and menacing clouds obscured the tallest of peaks.

Even people born and brought up in Ladakh take it easy when they return from the plains. Half a day of rest is mandatory while anything between 24-36 hrs is recommended for occasional visitors. Consequences of hurrying things up could be anywhere from headache, nausea, fever to even loss of consciousness. That said, we knew from our trip in August that even after those hours spent resting, you never quite acclimitize. It takes much longer than the 5 nights we were to spend here for the body to fully get used to such high altitudes. We slept through most of our first day.

Temperatures in Leh dip quite sharply after sunset. Not even two layers of heavy blankets would stop us from shivering. Since electricity supply in these parts is not very reliable, the guest house didn’t provide any electrical heating. Though they readily made available this LPG powered, industrial-strength room heater (aptly called Superheat).

And on cue there was a power cut. As we sat huddled in the ruddy glow of this somewhat noisey and very picturesque heater, it was not hard to wonder if we had done the right thing by visiting Leh in April.

p.s. The heater was turned off after a mere 20 minutes of usage. The huge LPG cylinder that powered this contraption scared us a little. And given the general oxygen deficiency we didn’t want something else competing with us in the same room.

…from yet another memorable trip to Ladakh. I am sure the mountains will haunt me in my dreams for days to come.

Quite literally.

What would become of our civilization if suddenly, electricity, gunpowder, gasoline and steam engines stopped working? Dies The Fire imagines such a world and forces you to think about how dependent we are today on things that were unimaginable just a few hundred years ago.

Sadly the book runs out of things to say around the half way mark. You are thus forced to endure such minutiae as what sort of food the American protagonists fantasize about in a world where farming the old-fashioned way is the only way to put bread on your table. Then there are detailed descriptions of the Celtic Wiccan rituals; and yes, the food consumed there. Repetitive battle scenes where finer points of using longbows, broadswords, bucklers, targes and other medieval weaponry are illuminated all while explaining how difficult it is to fight when operating under the medieval gear of chain mails, hauberks, visors, vambraces and other assorted wearables.

This seems to be a standard strategy of American fantasy authors for beefing up their works to the level of thickness that is deemed respectable for books of this genre. Take notes from history books and encyclopedias and somehow weave the details into the story. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the story kept moving or if I were living on Venus – for a day of mine there would last 200 Earth days. I am probably being harsh here. But then what do you expect from someone who is ploughing through the 10th book of the Jordan’s Wheel of Time series?

I’ll leave you to reflect on this gem here:

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper – newspaper left stains, they’d discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days.

Frankly, in a post apocalyptic world, I would have taken to washing (or since we are talking high fantasy here – laving) by now.

This passage I came across recently in Yeats Is Dead, struck a chord:

“I think books are wonderful”, the woman said, evidently bent on conversation. “If they had never been invented and somebody thought of them now, they would be the greatest thing ever. I can’t think of anything that has given so much happiness to humanity. Or could do, except maybe a pill to make us live longer. Books are so simple. No batteries, no wires, no earphones. Absolutely silent, don’t interfere with anything else, you can take them anywhere with you, into bed, into the bath. And they can’t be broken. You can lie on them, sit on them, prop the door or the window sash open with them and you still can’t damage them.”

Add the ability to buy them second hand, and this is precisely why I think books will win. Nothing comes remotely close to the simplicity of a book.

From the 4th floor balcony of my (old) office at Kasturba Road, you could see Chinnaswamy Stadium. About 5-6 times a year they would turn the stadium lights on. Ususally for a day and night ODI but more often than not for testing. I am talking pre-IPL/pre-T20 days of just three years ago here and I already sound like someone’s grandpa reminiscing about a bygone era. I’d marvel at how bright the floodlights were and how they would make the clouds overhead look luminescent but that 4th floor balcony is about as close as I went to the stadium. Cricket matches were meant to be watched on TV. The unruly scenes I had witnessed at the only rock concert I had attended at Palace Grounds had made me even more wary of crowded places. Why rub shoulders with the hoi polloi when you can watch the cricket in the comfort of your home – a cup of hot tea in one hand, the TV remote in other – looking like a minor Indian deity. In short, I kept my distance – like a sailor who is thankful for a lighthouse but must keep his safe distance from it.

Then India won the T20 World Cup in 2007 and ushered IPL in. I watched from a distance again. Sure I was intrigued, even interested in this new phenomena but cricket still remained something you watched at your home. The first IPL opener happened in Bangalore and I watched the opening ceremony from a Barista at Indiranagar (from home to a cafeteria, some progress eh?) and chased the rest of the match on Cricinfo at home. Quite a few matches followed the opener – a good many of them in Bangalore but I never wavered in my home over stadium approach. The second IPL was in South Africa so the question of catching a game live never arose. By this time however, everyone seemed to have watched a match at stadium. Friends; who knew about as much about IPL as Chirs Gayle knows about synthesizing Buckminsterfullerene, had been to at least one IPL match. Even my wife, who doesn’t get too involved with cricketing matters, had somehow managed to tick this one item off her list.

This year I was determined to make amends. But sometimes there is a sea to be waded between being determined about something and actually accomplishing it. What caused me to set sail was my manager’s generous offer of two free corporate tickets to the Bangalore – Rajasthan match. There was also the promise of being able to watch two all-time greats – Anil Kumble and Shane Warne – lead their teams. Some of my fears about crowd management and basic facilities at the stadium had been allayed by this article by George Binoy at Cricinfo. Still, years of inhibitions are not all that easy to let go of. The ship was cruising but it still carried a considerable cargo of scepticism.

Loops not notes are the building blocks of modern music. The 19th century composers had their ‘theme and variations’ for days when they were feeling lazy. The modern composer has canned, fast-food loops. Every third song you hear these days gives you that ‘where have I heard it before’ feeling. Here’s a recent ‘déjà vu’ – what do the tracks “Gadbadi Hadbadi” from Rocket Singh and “Nenjathilae” from Pirivom Santhipom have in common? The composers zeroed in on the same loop to begin their song:

1. Gadbadi Hadbadi (Composers: Salim Suleman)
2. Nenjathilae (Composer: Vidyasagar)

We were a snooty lot at St. Stephen’s college. While other colleges had ‘canteens’, we had a Café. One of the first things you encounter there as a vegetarian, are the cutlets. They are served with a small helping of inedibly (or at least that what your taste-buds conclude at the first encounter) sour chutney. Then begins a journey which ends with you liking the chutney so much that you begin to wonder if you should be asking the chef for the recipe. It’s a rite of passage a bit like college life itself. Entering college after more than 12 years in the same school is a bit unnerving. Your first reaction is to want to flee! But then days go by, you begin to soak in the new routine in a new environment and importantly, you make new friends. Then at some point in time, you actually start enjoying college so much that when you look back at those days a few years later, it is not without the touch of a degree of mistiness in the eyes.

I say this because all of this applies to a certain bookshop at Bangalore – Gangarams. I go there to buy stationery (which has happened just once – when we were looking to buy hand-made envelopes to put our wedding cards in) or computer books (which happens quite often). You take the staircase all the way to this huge room on the third floor with rows of tables on which the books are kept with their spines facing up. Only 2-3 tables are relevant for someone looking for computer books. You patiently browse and try to locate what you are looking for – O’Reilly publications get a significant chunk on one table, Manning another, Microsoft Press and Apress take up the remaining significant area. Pragmatic press books make an occasional appearance on, what I call, the O’Reilly table. Chances are you won’t find what you are looking for, so you’d ask one of the ‘helpers’. They’ll give you a significant look and reluctantly amble to that old machine running DOS, look up the book’s coordinates and fetch it for you. It is easy not to be intimidated – because the place somehow has an air about it that reminds you of your college library – complete with curmudgeonly librarians. Within a few visits however, a switch inside you begins to flip. You actually begin to start liking the place! The old-worldly pace, the reluctant but often effective helpers, the portly middle-aged proprietor of the shop telling someone on the phone about having to import a book from Singapore thereby justifying the ludicrous exchange-rate defying price the customer at the other end would need to pay for it. But most of all, you learn that magical incantation which gets you 10% off the book’s price!