From our window
If you stick your neck out from our living room’s window and look to your right, you can see Amsterdam Centraal Station. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we were still living in the pre-Internet days. The distance to the station and the mopey weather would ensure that any whimsical travel plans fizzled out by the time we reached the ticket counter. But when the train tickets are, to use a horrible cliché, one click away, one easily succumbs to the temptation of booking oneself to some new destination a juicy 3-hour train ride away (that there are direct trains to Paris doesn’t make it any easier).
Yesterday, when the wife opened the living room window to air the house, the breeze carried with it, among other things, the sounds of the announcements from the station! One of the outer platforms has a public announcement system loud enough to be heard outside if you are cycling past the station, but the sound never gets this far (roughly 400m as the crow flies). Theres something thrilling about train announcements projected right into your living room (or we are too far gone).
Unfinished books
I just finished reading Author Author, a fictionalised biographical sketch of Henry James by David Lodge. While I immensely enjoyed it, this post is not about it. The book, probably because it alluded to Henry James’ difficult writing style that made him inaccessible to the common man of his time, reminded me of books I couldn’t finish reading. I am usually careful about which books I choose to read, but occasionally I make an error of judgement and pick up something that I regret. When this happens, I tend to continue ploughing through the book in a hope that it would get better. If it doesn’t, I increase the time I devote to reading it, so that I can get through it faster. I feel a strange sense of guilt at leaving books unfinished. But over the years, I’ve come across a few books that have thwarted my best attempts to get through them. Here is the list:
A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth) - I am not daunted by long novels, but the story in this one moves at such a glacial pace that I began to wonder if I should be doing something better with my time. Besides, the characters and their stories seemed all too close to the people and stories I grew up among. I read fiction to escape reality, not to immerse myself into it. I put the book down after about 200 pages.
The Piano Teacher (Elfriede Jelinek) - This one was completely lost on me. It was too depressing and too graphic for me to persist with it. The original was in German, so may be I had stumbled upon a particularly bad translation. After reading a bit about the book on Wikipedia, I have my doubts:
The novel follows protagonist Erika Kohut, a sexually and emotionally repressed piano teacher, as she enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with her student, Walter Klemmer, the results of which are disastrous.
A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space (Kathryn Kramer) - I came across this book lying on top of a stack of random books at Blossom, my favourite second-hand bookshop in Bangalore, where this sight is all too common. I was looking for a good science fiction novel and made the mistake of judging the book, not by its cover, but by its title. This must be the briefest time I’ve spent with a book before abandoning it - two chapters and I had no idea what the author was trying to say.
Valis (Philip K. Dick) - This is the last novel by Philip K. Dick - an author I usually enjoy reading. Valis proved a little too tedious. Like Orwell’s 1984, the story here is a mere pretence for talking about other things. The other things in this case happened to be Dick’s notes on philosophy and theology. I kept telling myself that I was enjoying the book for a long time but couldn’t get myself to go through the last 70 or so pages.
I hope there won’t be very many new additions to this list. There are two non-fiction works that have been lingering unfinished on my shelf for months now - Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahaneman) and The Tell-Tale Brain (V. S. Ramachandran) - but there’s hope for them still!
The Russian Orthodox Cathedral at Nice
Since our hotel was within walking distance from the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Nice, we had initially decided to leave it for the last day of our trip. That hadn’t stopped us from trying to pay a visit on our second evening in Nice, but a private function was on inside, and a rather forbidding security guard had turned us back from the entrance. We had better luck in the morning the day after and found ourselves standing in the courtyard of this ornate cathedral:
It reminded me of St. Petersburg Cathedral which I’ve seen many times - but only in pictures and movies. The building, despite it’s grandeur, looked delicately fragile. I am deeply skeptical of all religions, and yet constantly amazed at the architectural achievements faith inspires.
P.S. While looking at the pictures closely, I noticed a lightening conductor fixed to the topmost cross. Science and religion might have been at cross purposes, but theres no denying who’s on top.
Befriending water
I’d never thought that I’d go to Switzerland and complain about it being too warm there. During the 9 days we spent traversing the length and breadth of that country, we encountered temperatures upwards of 35ºC. That temperature is fine for sitting at home under a fan, but when you are walking about for hours with sun over your head, it gets a bit much. Which is precisely why the locals in Basel don’t walk about, they simply float in Rhine with the current.
The cluster of yellow dots you see in the water in the picture above, is people with various kinds of life vests, donuts, or anything that’d help them stay afloat, drifting away in the river on a warm summer afternoon.
I grew up in Delhi in a neighbourhood that was plagued with a perennial water-shortage. For the longest time, the supply of water to our house was erratic and Dad would cycle with two jerrycans hanging from the handlebars to fetch water from a tap at a temple nearby. Things improved after a few years and our neighbourhood started getting regular supply of water in the taps but the supply hours were (and to date are) woefully inadequate. Every household would hoard water in an overhead tank to give an illusion of 24hr water supply. You could take a long bath, but you were always aware of how finite the quantity of water was. Given the water situation, swimming was the last thing you’d expect a middle class family to teach the children.
Water is an integral part of life in the Netherlands. It’s hard to visit a city here and not find canals or a river in the heart of the city. Swimming is considered a basic survival skill that is taught here as early as the age of 6 months! Ever since I’ve moved here, I’ve been wanting to learn swimming but since it’s not something I can do in my bathroom or backyard, I’ve been putting it off.
The visit to Basel, especially those walks in the afternoon by Rhine, reminded me that I should make a more serious effort to acquaint myself better with what more than 70% of this plant and our bodies are made of. I’ve signed up for a class at an indoor swimming pool here today. And though for now I am on a waiting list, I hope to get a call for my first lesson sometime in September. I can’t wait to get started!
Calvé - Indian Prince and Princess TV spot
A couple of months ago, I had written about Calvé’s over the top commercial for their latest range of India-inspired (one assumes) barbecue sauces. Back then, I couldn’t find the TV spot online. It showed up recently in an ad break during The Negotiator. I had my camera lying on the table, and I wasted no time in recording it off the TV. Trust me, you’d want to un-see this:
A trip to Nice - II - a short detour to Monaco
Although we flew to Nice, we were staying really close to the train station there. It’s a striking little building you cannot miss. An excuse to take a train ride presented itself pretty quickly.
Monaco is just 15 km or so away from Nice and is connected by a train. On our second morning in Nice, we procured the tickets and ran to catch the train to Monaco. The tickets were valid for a single use anytime during the day and had to be stamped with the date of the journey before boarding the train. Most stations in Europe have these boxes with a slit, into which you insert one end of your ticket for it to be stamped. The box at the Nice station had a tiny LCD, which on encountering our ticket, kept saying something in French about the ticket needing to be “Gauche”. My mind wandered to my college days spent trying to visualise carbon molecules in ‘gauche’ configuration during stereochemistry lectures. The wife, aware of that dreamy, nostalgic look in my eyes, and that of the train’s fast approaching departure time, panicked and grabbed the first uniformed being she saw at the station. The uniformed, officious looking being summoned his most derisive look, took the ticket from me, rotated it, stuck it into the machine and voila! the machine obliged us with the date stamp. Gauche, it later occurred to me, means ‘left’ in French and all the poor machine was trying to tell us was to rotate the ticket anticlockwise by 90º.
15 km is a few kilometres less than the distance I once used to commute in Delhi for going to work one way. The train ride, at a little under 15 km, was the smallest train ride of my life. It was incidentally the prettiest one as well. The train runs along the sea. Pretty beaches and beach towns pass you by. It makes several stops on the way and each station it stops at, stretches the definition of what constitutes a train station.
It was upsetting to see that the glass windows of our coach were badly vandalised with graffiti and scratches. This made it impossible to take pictures of the gorgeous landscapes that unfolded before our eyes during the journey.
The beautiful views were cut short unexpectedly when the train entered a tunnel and arrived at the Monaco station.
We took an escalator to the exit a level above. On getting out, we wondered if we were at the right place. It felt like we were at an old citadel rather than in a city famous for its wealth, glamour and fast cars.
We kept following the stairs and shortly found ourselves in the city proper that we we knew we were visiting.
Wikipedia tells me that Monaco has the highest population density in the world after Macau. Given that India ranks a distant 31st on this list, it was fair of me to expect something akin to the sea of humanity that you’ll find at crossings near Howrah Bridge in Kolkata every evening. To my surprise, we hardly saw anyone on the streets except other tourists like us and a few elderly locals enjoying the crisp morning or walking their designer poodles. Either everyone was recovering in bed from their collective Saturday night hangovers or I was mistaken in confusing population density with crowd. The other telltale signs of this being a densely populated country were there though - the high-rise apartment complexes were built so close together that they all looked like part of a single, large super-structure. A plenty of boats were parked around too.
So yes, it did look a little cramped. Macau, Hong Kong cramped. But you only had to look closer at the nonchalance with which the expensive cars and boats were parked to know that this was a very affluent crampedness that you were looking at.
We weren’t carrying a map of Monaco with us - perhaps to find out if it was possible to get lost in the world’s 2nd smallest country. We walked along the harbour, but the walk soon ended near a parking lot. A staircase nearby led us to another level and brought us to a platform from where one could go swimming into the sea. This being January, the water was still too cold for a swim and a handful of people used the platform for angling. One side of the platform trailed into a road so we continued our walk there. The elevated road had azure sea on one side and a steep cliff on the other.
A cut in the road led us to another staircase which took us down to a small pebble beach. Small waves - their size considerate of the beach’s dimensions - crashed continuously on the pebbles. Not a soul stirred around us and we wished we had brought a picnic along with us. After soaking in the sound of the sea for a few minutes, we resumed our walk on the road above.
The road eventually got us to a huge multi-storied building that seemed to have been carved out from the cliff that been on one side of us. We almost turned back at this point but since a few other people were milling about here, we decided to explore further.
A combination escalators and elevators took us to what turned out to be the Rock of Monaco, which, among other important buildings, houses the Prince’s Palace of Monaco and the Oceanographic Museum.
A few meters from the entrance to the museum was a small terrace, shaped like the helm of a ship, complete with a ship’s wheel and statue of a captain. The illusion of being on a giant ship was very real.
The museum overlooked an apartment complex with a little private harbour packed with yachts.
The area around the museum was a small town in itself. We took lunch at a roadside cafe here.
The Prince’s Palace of Monaco was looked a little plain and unpretentious for a palace. The buildings surrounding the palace had more interesting façades.
A few minutes of directionless walking about, and we found the exit to the “ground level”. Monaco is a city that is built on many levels and walking here can be strangely disorienting.
After exploring the royal quarters, it was time to walk around the Monaco of the common man. This being a Sunday, all the shops were closed - including the official Formula 1 shop. There was a touch of irony in the Formula 1 shop being right next to the Diesel shop.
The air around the streets carried a delicate fragrance, but its source eluded us for a long time. While walking close to the orange trees that lined most of the streets here, the wife realised that it was the flowers on these trees that caused everything around us to smell so sweetly. As if being surround by orange trees right in the middle of a city is not surreal enough!
In every European city we have visited, we’ve come across real-estate agencies that advertise the houses available for sale or rent in their office’s show window. The one agency we came across here, dealt in expensive boats and yachts.
I scanned the ads out of curiosity and the cheapest yacht advertised here was a thing called My Labrador that could be rented out for a cool € 16,000 per week. Across the road from this agency’s office, were parked about the only things resembling a boat that we think we could afford. Some tarpaulin thrown in for bad weather, a little food and fresh water and we’d be happy as a clam.
As the evening fell, we realised that we hadn’t yet seen a sunset at Nice. We scampered to find the nearest entrance to the station. The entrance we stumbled upon, clearly bore no resemblance to the exit we had used in the morning. A long corridor lined with mirrors, reminiscent of the last scene from Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, led us into another corridor where the marble on the walls administered every visitor a Rorschach test.
Two pigeons at the platform were acting in a strange manner. One of them kept burrowing its head inside a small hole in the ground while the other lapped around it anxiously.
Before I could figure a rational explanation for their behaviour - one that didn’t involve me hallucinating - the train arrived and deposited us back at the Nice station just in time for a beautiful sunset.
The Monaco Grand Prix broadcasts on TV will never be the same again.