This and that
As July comes to an end, here are some things I’ve been wanting to post but didn’t get around to.
July saw the release of two Hollywood movies we were eagerly awaiting this year. I thoroughly enjoyed Brave. From the trailers, I was a bit worried about it being a rehash of How to Train Your Dragon, but was pleasantly surprised at the refreshingly different plot. But the movie stands out for a reason that only the cricket fanatics among you will related to. Young MacGaffin kept reminding me of Shane Watson:
MacGaffin Watson
On the other hand, Dark Night Rises underwhelmed. It started off brilliantly, but then in trying to do too much at the same time, did everything poorly. One advantage of watching the movies in Amsterdam is that they carry mandatory Dutch subtitles. How is that an advantage? Well, when the movie becomes boring, you can divert your attention to sub-titles and start adding new words to your vocabulary. When it’s a movie involving Batman (and thus inevitably involving death and destruction at an industrial scale), the kind of Dutch words you pick include:
Pleegouders (foster parents), kracht (power), macht (might), oorlog (war).
It’s been close to 30 years since I first ran into English and I still discover new words every time I pick a book. At times the words are highly technical. Like oriel and corbel - latest additions to my vocabulary that are meant to describe peculiar kinds of windows and masonry, but remind me of Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But mostly the new words I acquire describe something commonplace. For example, occiput, the word for the back of one’s head. It’s these words that leave me a little ashamed at my ignorance. Each time I run into a new word, I now try to look up not just its meaning but also its Dutch translation. This doesn’t make the prospect of acquiring a reasonable Dutch vocabulary any less daunting - after all I’ve got 30 years of catching up to do!
For now I am happy inventing little coupletes in my limited vocabulary.
regen buiten? paraplu gebruiken.
[rain outside umbrella use]
The wife chimes in with:
regen regen ga naar Nijmegen
[rain rain go to Nijmegen]
Talking of books, I finally decided to tackle Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum. It’s been a morbidly fascinating and difficult read. It gets a bit disturbing in places, and sometimes you get an impression that the author is deliberately trying to shock. It’s the kind of book that you put down after an hour to catch your breath. Moth and Light Bulb, the 3rd Chapter in the book, is the one I won’t forget for a long time. I am also going to use it as an excuse to post a picture:
Light bulbs but no moths
I had written about Summer being unable to make up its mind last year. This year has been no different. The max temperatures have kept swinging between 18ºC and 28ºC. One day you are looking out at blue skies and opportunistic mosquitos waiting to get in…
Blue sky
Opportunistic mosquitoes
and on the next day you wake up wondering if it was a dream.
Grey sky
It was time for the Hungarian Grand Prix this Sunday. If I see cricketers in cartoon characters, the wife sees cartoon characters in Grand Prix circuits. The Hungaroring circuit reminded her of Johnny Bravo - I agree:
Bravo Hungaroring
July 2012 has also been the month of Olympics. Very little outside cricket, formula 1 and tennis interests me (though I did get drawn to football during the last few days of the Euro Cup) and still I’ve found myself watching a few Olympic events keenly. While flipping through channels after the Hungarian Grand Prix, I came across the Women’s Road Race cycling event and just couldn’t stop watching. Having cycled for more than year now, I could appreciate what the cyclists must be going through. It was pelting down for the large part of the event and Marianne Vos, Elizabeth Armistead and Olga Zablinskaya were clearly leading the rest of cyclists by a long stretch. It was fascinating to watch the three of them compete. All sorts of mind games were being played, all sorts of careful calculations were being employed - do you charge ahead and build a lead or do you conserve your energy for a final assault in the end? The three were neck to neck till the last 300m after which they pedalled like they had been jolted from a deep sleep. Marianne Vos won, and her celebration was raw and emotional. Even I felt a tear well up in the corner of my eye.
Ironical that I should enjoy the cycling event more than the million dollar spectacle that is Formula 1.
That reminds me - I was in class VI or VII when I first made acquaintance with the word ‘irony’. I think the word came up while discussing a poem by Odgen Nash but I could be wrong. What I do remember clearly, is that the teacher found herself utterly unable to convey the true sense of the word. Her final attempt at oversimplifying the mysterious word went on the lines of - “when you say something but mean something else” - but its essence was utterly lost on her bunch of prepubescent, literal minded students. We probably couldn’t get over the fact that just by appending a “y” to iron you could impregnate it with such delicious possibilities.
[The Dutch for iron is ijzer and the word for irony, ironie. I wonder if the word is any easier to grasp for a sixth grader here. At any rate, a confusion between the metal and the difficult to explain word is out of question]
I regret not remembering when the word finally clicked for me. Hardly a day goes by now when I don’t find a use for it. Just the other day when going across the river IJ in the ferry, we saw this “Earth” made up of discarded (?) plastic bottles floating in the river. I think they were trying to raise “environmental awareness”. From where I stood, a chimney, that looked like it was buried in the North Pole of this plastic earth, could be seen bellowing smoke. Ironically, the chimney in the background was the real thing.
Plastic earth
A trip to Nice - I
January this year was the first time we were traveling on a budget airline in Europe. Having heard horror stories of their high-handedness from many colleagues, I was a little concerned about starting our year or a sour note.
Transavia allow one cabin-sized 10 kg bag per person and impose this limit with a great deal of fervour. As the boarding was announced, customers with bigger bags were singled out, asked to measure/weigh the bags, told to checkin the oversized/overweight bags and pay for the privilege. Customers with even a small extra handbag were told to somehow accomodate the smaller bag inside the bigger bag or cough up the extra fees. The responses to these requests ranged from meek submission to outrage. One gentleman was so indignant that he actually threw money at the staff!
Needless to say that this led to a few minutes’ delay. It is at times like these more than any other time that I am glad for a reading habit. I busied myself in a fascinating, recent account of the events that led to the erection of the Berlin wall, while the wife playfully leafed through my passport to see if she could find my first immigration stamp. When she did, its date, 13 Aug 2000, surprised me a little as it was on the same day in 1961 when Ulbricht started “Operation Rose” to barricade East Germany off from West Germany overnight.
13 August
Apart from this little episode, the flight was quite pleasant and we were in Nice on time. We were wearing thick jackets in Amsterdam but in Nice, even late in the evening, we could get by with a light jacket. This being January, the days were still short though. As the bus we took from the airport went past the street-lamp-lined promenade by the beach, we realised that the distant, vast stretch of nothingness that lay beyond it was the sea. We were probably in the right bus, but in our anxiety to reach the hotel quickly, we got down at the wrong stop. We were staying close to the Nice train station so getting to that general area was not a problem. But by the time we made our way to the hotel (partly in a tram, partly on foot), it was already 10 PM.
The gentleman manning the reception at our hotel was extremely helpful. I quite admire people doing the job at that time in the night while keeping their sprits high. A receptionist is many jobs rolled into one - you have to be the security guard, the IT guy helping guests with their WiFi and a tour guide answering questions about local attractions and guiding people to the nearest restaurant serving their choice of cuisine.
Most places near our hotel were either shutting down or had nothing to offer to vegetarians. McDonalds is usually our last resort but we were so tired that the two kinds of fried potatoes with three kinds of ketchups at the neighbourhood McDonalds that night felt like a royal feast (ice-cream with coarsely crushed M&Ms, that followed the “main course”, enhanced the illusion a good deal).
We slept well and woke up fresh the next day.
An ideal vacation to us means lot of walking about in a new city, with breaks for lunch and coffee thrown in. If we are feeling particularly lazy, we’ll probably find a bench in a park (or depending on where we are, by the sea), for a quick nap or to sit down for a short read. Our Nice trip had all these ingredients.
I am not a sea person but I love the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. At pebble beaches, like the one in Nice, the receding waves try to drag the pebbles along with them. The pebbles budge a little, rub against each other and add their murmur of protest to the roar of the waves.
And while my favourite kind of sky is cloudy-with-a-chance-of-rain, the blue Nice sky had won me over in no time.
The shades of yellow, orange and maroon they use to paint the buildings in, compliment the sky. The Mediterranean sun then does its bit to smoothen out the shades till they all blend in.
We also saw many buildings where features were painted on to them. From fake balconies to painted-on statues.
Buildings under construction or reapairs, got an entire fake façade.
But there were a lot of buildings with real things on them too.
We stopped for a quick lunch at one of the numerous street side cafeterias. Unlike our experience the previous night, vegetarian food was not hard to come by.
When we resumed our walk after lunch, we found ourselves drawn to the sea again. The sea in Nice was always around the corner. Within a few minutes we were at an elevated road that looked over the sea below. The public seating built along the road, at first looked like a drain for guiding excess rain water into the sea but turned out to be a nice place to sit and catch the cool breeze and watch the azure sea below.
Very close to this spot was the famous Castle Hill. For a small fee an elevator takes you to the summit but we were sufficiently buoyed by the breeze to tackle the climb via the stairs. The climb rewarded us with beautiful panoramic views of Nice.
On our way back I came across these neglected, cast-iron, flowerpots with cherubs sculpted into them. The overall effect, after years of rusting was quite disturbing. The cherubs’ smiles had twisted into something sinister. Something they’d use to lure the unwary passerby into a room of unmentionable horrors.
Clearly it was time to leave the hills for more walking around (and spotting things that continued to supply more fodder for my morbid imagination).
The stories about imaginary kingdoms and kings we used to read in our childhood, would often have a plot involving the king going on rounds at night disguised as a common man to gauge the public sentiment. Here is what Sarkozy would’ve come across if he were to attempt something of that sort:
The night fell quickly. We had seen a Ferris Wheel near the main town square last night and decided to take a ride. The wife had never sat in one, but the prospect of the view of Nice at night from a good few meters above the ground helped her overcome her fear. It was a gentle ride with a plenty of time to soak in the view and a perfect note to end our day on.
Getting closer
I have had one SLR camera or the other since 2005. Despite flowers being one of my favourite subjects, I had never shot them through a macro lens. That changed today with the purchase of the 30mm f/3.5 Sony macro.
The summer so far has been cooler than the year before. And while that’s still too warm for the tulips, plenty of other flowers are still around:
I had been eyeing a cluster of Foxgloves potted outside a house on the way to our neighbourhood grocery shop. I was about a week too late. Most of them had wilted away when I went to click them today. I am counting down to the spring next year already!
Etcetera
Conversations with colleagues occasionally drift to the subject of India’s language diversity and I find some aspects of it a bit hard to explain. Unlike in Europe where most languages bend the English alphabet to suit them, languages in India typically come with their own script (the ten rupee note I keep in wallet, often helps me illustrate my point) and people are right in wondering how we get by. I sometimes ask myself if India would have been better off without the diversity? It’d definitely be a lot duller but would we be, say, economically better off? I usually (perhaps wrongly) come to the conclusion that we won’t be. Language is just one of the dimensions we love to slice and dice by. In absence of languages, caste and religion would’ve kept us busy (as they do in presence of them).
I remember reading in one of our school texts:
कोस कोस पर बदले पानी, दस कोस पर वाणी
(the water changes every one mile, the language every ten)
I found this recent Economist infographic bring home the point.
We grew up in India using metric system. Our weights were done in kilos, distances in meters and kilometers, volumes in millilitres and liters, temperatures in degree celcius and so on. Europe is metric too. They sometimes chose a different “scale” to represent volumes - I’ve seen 3 cl, 30 dl or 0.25 l on cans and bottles of fizzy drinks but rarely ml - but that’s about the only difference I’ve run into.
A few days ago the wife had come down with fever and had to be taken to the doctor. The doctor asked us if we had taken the temperature at home. We had, and we promptly reported 100. The doctor looked at us blankly and wondered what we meant. It then occurred to me that while in India the dominant system is metric, we grew up with a lot of little inconsistencies. While the weather forecasts give temperature in ºC, we always measured body temperature in ºF! I had no idea from top of my head what 100ºF in ºC was. The doctor took the temperature and reported 38ºC. While I knew that 38ºC in a city will be sweltering hot, I didn’t have a sense of what the temperature implied when used in context of the human body. I was quite surprised that all these years I had been measuring the same thing in different units depending on the context, with no intuition to help me correlate the two.
As I dwelled on this more, other similar inconsistencies kept popping in my head. We deviate from the metric system in our choice of units for measuring area (the area of a house is somehow always given in square feet) and height (I know my height in feet not in meter). I wonder what other inconsistencies I would run into one day.
P.S. In a lot of countries here, the decimal and comma are interchanged e.g. 1,000.50 becomes 1.000,50 but that’s a different matter altogether.
Outside, India is usually dealt with in clichés. It used to annoy me once, but now it merely amuses. Take this recent Calvé ad for instance:
Calvé Cliché
The TV spot is even more over the top - too bad I cannot find it on Youtube.
Football
The very media in India that gives cricket a lot of coverage, often cries foul about how much coverage cricket gets in the media. As someone who moved here right after India’s World Cup victory last year, I was on the side of the media that moans about there being too much cricket. However, having watched the build up to the UEFA Euro 2012 in Amsterdam for the last month or so, I can safely say that cricket in India has long way to go. As the championship drew near, the ads - both on TV and outdoors, started taking a distinctly football themed view of products. Some went to preposterous lengths to invent association with the game - like this football themed McDonald burger:
(EK = Europese Kampioenschappen - the Dutch for European Championship, never fails to remind me of Ek chidiya)
The streets started getting a football-themed makeover as well. Orange, the colour of the Dutch national team, dominates.
Pubs and coffeeshops all over the city show the games live (and make sure that you know about it from a mile away).
The preparations reached a fever pitch a few hours before the Netherlands’ first game today. The streets looked festive and the souvenir shops were selling t-shirts, hats, umbrellas and anything that they could dye the colour orange. It was a bit like the Queen’s Day all over again.
Sadly, the Dutch team lost to Denmark. I maintain a blissful ignorance about football, but even I felt compelled to tune in for the last 15 minutes of the game. I realised that I still don’t get game. With the advent of T20 cricket, every single minute of cricket is of some consequence whereas in a game of football the moments that really matter are very rare. And it’s such a simple game to score and follow - theres no runs, overs, boundaries, wickets and God forbid, Duckworth Lewis method for deciding games truncated by rain. It’s a game that a beer addled brain can follow in the company of drunk and progressively louder friends. May be that’s the whole point of it.
P.S. A few days before the start of Euro 2012, Alber Heijn (our local supermarket chain), started giving football trump cards (or rather Panini voetbalplaatjes) for every 10 € spent with them. I took them as a token of my time in Amsterdam, placed them in a book and forgot about them. When I pulled them out today, I realised that old Penguin Books look exactly like a book that an ad agency would conceive around this time here:
A slippery slope
If you didn’t grow up immersed in a language, trying to learn it after 30 is going to be a perilous undertaking. Dutch is supposed to be very close to English (next only to Frisian). The similar spelling of many commonly used words had lulled me into a false sense of confidence. But I soon realised that it’s going to be a slippery slope. Here is a small account of my struggles with Dutch:
In Dutch the words for salt and sweet differ only by a vowel. Zout and zoet have got us the wrong sort of pop-corn many a times.
The person I was to report to on my first day at work is called Giel. I mispronounced it as Geil. The latter means horny. I was politely informed of my Freudian slip.
Ladies and gentlemen are dames and heren. Notice that the Dutch word for gentlemen has a “her” in it. The plural forms of many nouns here end in ‘en’ - e.g. boek (book) becomes boeken. My mind tries to apply this rule and comes to the wrong conclusion that heren is Dutch for hers. I’ve spent considerably time outside the men’s loo untangling this unfortunate kink in my logic, all the while wondering if I was standing outside the right one.
There are plenty of words that are spelled identically in both languages but represent totally unrelated things. Brand in Dutch means fire. Dozen means boxes (the word for 12 items is spelled dozijn). [It occurred to me after writing the post that English does have firebrand and one of the meanings of ‘brand’ that the dictionary lists is - ‘a piece of burning or smouldering wood’ so I guess they aren’t all that unrelated after all. I take my brand away and give you rook - a chess piece in English that in Dutch means smoke.]
Being bilingual makes accepting differences between two languages as a matter of fact a little easier. But it also means that you are carrying baggage from two languages which trips you up in unexpected ways. I still have a tough time accepting zacht as the word for soft. It is too much like sakht - the Hindi word for hard.
I find that the words that are more likely to be used in daily conversation take a long, conscious effort to learn, where as the more esoteric ones just stick in one glance. The word for binoculars stuck - verrekijker. The word for gears (as in cycling gears) stuck - versnellingen. Both are compound words that had one or more words that I knew already. Verre = remote, kijker = viewer so quite logically binoculars must be verrekijker. Versnellingen has the word for fast (snel) in it and that must’ve helped me make the association with gears. But then the word for emergency stuck - noodoproep - and I think it did so purely on the strength of its amusing spelling. I picked up a small children’s book to work on my common vocabulary, but the first word my eyes settled on was Nijlpaard; literally Nile Horse, but semantically Hippopotamus.
The things I choose to learn unwittingly - Nijlpaard
Best of luck to me trying to weave that into a normal conversation.