Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

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.

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.

We were in the Ikea store just a few days before Christmas and were quite amazed at the number of things available for decorating Christmas trees. All mass-produced and all very pretty. I saw boxes of snowflake-shaped, string lights lying in the bins they keep near billing aisles to nudge you into making those last-moment, things-I-never-needed-but-will-now-buy impulse purchases. There was a suction cup attached to each light in the string to allow you stick it to a glass window and that had enough of a novelty value for me to buy one box.

[The suction cups have proven to be dodgy and have had to be supplemented with some Sellotape]

The wife was in London to enjoy the build-up to Christmas. She brought a collection of colourful postcards from Tate Modern to put up on the living room wall. The white walls were in desperate need of holiday cheer and I was more than happy to play along. Here is what the collage of postcards on our wall finally looks like:

The problem with visiting countries that have a currency different from your home country is that you’ll always have some change left over at the end of your trip. This pocket diary was procured from a shop at the Prague Airport with spare change from the trip¹ (scans of the front and back cover):

I tend to doodle a lot – especially when I am told to sit down and listen to someone make a presentation. The “information density” in such a setting is too low for my mind to be fully occupied. It tends to wander off into distant lands of its own invention and has to be shanghaied into paying attention to the matters on hand by doodling. Here are some pages from the diary:

My trusted Pilot V5 ran out of ink during one of these sketches. I had to modify the lyrics of Emilíana Torrini’s Fireheads to suit the situation:

It’s not fair to say I wasted ink
in my view I used it all up

[1] This – Prague – trip.