Whoosh… and it’s a year already
When I had just started working for Microsoft in Bangalore some 10 years ago, the office had a nice little tradition of giving you a bouquet of flowers for your desk on your birthday. I had never seen a tulip in my entire life, but strangely enough, it was my favourite flower. As my birthday drew near, I politely requested the office manager that I be given a bouquet of tulips. The flower giving tradition was probably being run on a shoestring budget and procuring tulips for me in Bangalore would’ve tipped the scales firmly towards unsustainability. The request was thus politely declined and I got a bouquet of roses instead.
I passed through Schiphol several times after the incident and got my fill of tulips. Still, they weren’t something you could buy in Bangalore on a whim from your local florist’s shop.
We finish a year in Amsterdam today. There have been many perks of having moved here. Being able to procure fresh tulips from the Farmers Market on the Noordermarkt every Saturday, shares the top spot on my list along with 30mbps internet at home.
A tulip
P.S. The Windows XP wallpaper of yellow tulips would be the first thing I’d switch to after a fresh install of the OS.
P.P.S. African Tulips is the closest I got to tulips in Bangalore. You’ll never find them in a florist’s shop though.
Cricket: a year on
I saw SRT’s tweet this morning but didn’t catch the reference till the wife mentioned it this evening:
Time flies but memories last forever. What a day it was!!! 02-04-2011
Time flies indeed. There we were in a borrowed apartment, on borrowed moments, cheering for the Indian cricket team till our throats went hoarse. I have hardly followed cricket since moving here. I’ve only kept a tab on all the series in which India has played and have been disappointed at the growing tally of losses in the last year or so. It’s as if the team reverted to the dispirited, losing side I used to follow in the 90s.
But it’s been easy to pretend that the Indian cricket team’s losing phase after world cup hasn’t happened. Cricket is neither followed nor broadcast on the ‘regular’ sports channels here. The Netherlands has a cricket team on paper, but I haven’t seen it covered anywhere other than Cricinfo, so the question of cricket stars endorsing products and hogging media doesn’t arise. In fact, it’s quite easy to believe while living here that cricket itself doesn’t exist. The only public reference about cricket I’ve found till date has been this vintage poster in the loo of the Olympic Stadium here:
Vintage cricket poster
(Seeing it reminded me of that scene in The Planet of the Apes where the protagonist discovers the archeological remains of a human settlement that has toys and articles implying the humans’ once dominant existence. I felt the same sense of helplessness and being in a long exile.)
Over the last few months I’ve found myself gradually slipping into indifference towards the game. I’ve never followed football (the dominant sport and spelled ‘voetbal’ here), and at my age find it quite impossible to ‘get into it’.
The only sport that I still actively follow is Formula 1, which is quite ironical because I would refuse to even acknowledge it as a sport till 2 years back. I then got involved with the launch of espnf1.com and started following it actively (it’s easier to build a product when you enjoy using it). Ironically still, I sometimes find myself relating to the sense of sorrow and loss portrayed in the novel Netherland.
To Spring
From a distance, nothing has changed about the trees in Amsterdam in the last 4 months. They remain a skeletal shadow of their summery past.
Amsterdam: bare trees
Amsterdam: bare trees
Amsterdam: bare trees
However, if you stand under one, you’ll realize that spring has already begun working its magic.
Amsterdam: spring begins to work its magic on the trees
The wife pointed out that their reflections in the canals look quite psychedelic.
Amsterdam: trees and old houses reflected in a canal
Amsterdam: reflection of a tree in a canal
The Sunday a fortnight ago was your typical dreary, rainy Amsterdam day. We had been yearning to pick a couple of Van Gogh prints and couldn’t think of a better day to liven up our white walls. The Museum Shop at Museumplein was our obvious choice. On the way, we passed the Rijksmuseum. The trees in the museum’s courtyard — like the clichéd, in your face, early adopters of shiny things from Apple - had already embraced spring:
Amsterdam: spring comes early for some
The Museum Shop did not have Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The painting is now in the collection of New York Museum of Modern Art and so a shop in Van Gogh’s own country doesn’t sell the prints. I find it quite appalling that the print of a 19th century painting should be withheld by what seems like a museum cartel.
We settled for our second choice - Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms for the bedroom.
Van Gogh’s almond blossoms and our bedroom
And to make up for the disappointment, we got a print of Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters. May be that’s what the Museum Shop intended — don’t give them the print they really want, and they’ll pick two.
On returning home, we found cries of birds echoing in our courtyard.
The temperatures here might still be below 10ºC, but spring doesn’t seem to care.
Video update
I am trying to get the blog up to speed with all the traveling we have been doing this year. While I try to find time to process all the pictures and write down the notes, I am posting some videos here. A picture, someone wise said, is worth a thousand words. I suspect that since video was after the wise one’s time, a word limit on videos hasn’t been set yet.
While in Nice, we spent a lot of time listening to waves crash on the pebble beaches. As the waves recede, they try to drag the pebbles along causing them to rub against each other. This makes for an interesting thunderous sound:
The single-coach, yellow trams (and not the Fado singers) are the real prima donnas of Lisbon. We saw many tourists with cameras lurk in anticipation of their arrival just to catch a good shot. We weren’t averse to that behaviour ourselves:
The Gondoliers of Venice sing only in the movies. In real life, they just row, which - with something as ungainly as a Gondola - is a lot of work as it is. That said, you can hire a singer (and an accompanying instrumentalist) separately. The acoustics of the streets and the canals aren’t a letdown either.
And that about sums up the year so far. Not counting the trip to India in Feb, it’s been 4 countries this year. We might just achieve our target of 12.
Kahaani
My Dutch vocabulary is extremely limited. When you are living in a country where the printed words - from outdoor advertising to food labels to TV subtitles — are in Dutch, acquiring new words is never a challenge. The real challenge is retaining them. So I play this little game on my walk to the station — whenever a word pops up in my head in English or Hindi, I search my limited vocabulary for its Dutch equivalent.
I hadn’t watched a Hindi movie in a long time and never one in a theatre here. Partly because very few Hindi movies make it to theatres in Amsterdam and partly because I was worried they’d make me terribly homesick. When the wife proposed that we watch Kahaani, the first thing that occurred to me was that it’d be interesting watching a Hindi movie with Dutch subtitles. But I think the real reason I chose to watch it because the Dutch word for Kahaani (verhaal) popped in my head.
Bollywood might have a lot of drawing power elsewhere, but here in Amsterdam Hindi movies barely last a week. And if they do, the crowd thins down to such a trickle that running costs of the show must be more than what the theatre would earn. I wasn’t surprised when we turned up in the large hall (no. 6) at the Bijlmer Pathé only to find a mere 15 people.
Kahaani - Hindi movie, Dutch ticket stub
Once the endless production house names and the many notes of thanks rolled by, the movie began and from the very first frame I was drawn in. The India on the screen seemed to envelope the world outside. Even with the Dutch subtitles, there was a feeling of sitting in a theatre in India. I felt that when I’d step out after the movie, I’d be standing in Garuda mall in Bangalore. It was homesickness at its visceral worst.
Language is a funny thing. Once you know a language deeply, you understand it without consciously understanding it. You hear sounds and they convey pictures, stories, ideas and emotions. I’ve spent practically the same number of years speaking (reading, writing) English and Hindi. Once an idea has been conveyed in either of these languages, only the idea stays and I tend to forget which language it was conveyed in. So while I watched a Hindi movie, and it managed to elicit a deep, emotional response, I have no memory of the movie having been in Hindi. I remember the story, I remember most of the scenes, but can I say with certainty that the actors spoke Hindi? No. This I find a little baffling.
P.S. Both Dutch and Bengali distort ‘V’. Our protagonist’s name - Vidya became Bidya in Bengali. Had she come to Amsterdam, it’d be Fidya.
P.P.S. The Dutch subtitling of movies is very thorough. They caught the barely comprehensible Kolkata metro announcements in the background in the first scene. And in the scene where Vidya describes her missing husband’s height as being around 5’7”-5’8”, the subtitles used the converted metric unit of 1.7 meters. The wife points out that in addition to English, there was dialog in at least 3 Indian languages in this movie (Hindi, Bengali and Tamil). The Dutch subtitling will never capture that.
P.P.P.S. The Kolkata police jeeps had KP written on them. In at least one shot, it looked like KIP. It brought both wife and me some chuckles because kip in Dutch means chicken. Yup, we are beginning to get a little mixed up.
KIP
A trip to the Vatican Museum
The security screening at the entrance hall of the Vatican Museum is such that you should be forgiven for thinking that you at a domestic US airport. Bags are not allowed inside the museum. Fortunately, cameras are.
The tour of the museum begins with a walk through a long corridor lined with tens of old, yellowing busts of various vintages. When you are looking at busts that are thousands of years old, a cracked neck, a broken ear, or a chipped nose does not come in the way of your appreciation.
Boy warrior?
I was a tad shaken on seeing this one bust:
The bust that reminded me of…
It brought to mind the iconic shot of the Bhopal gas tragedy (I was just 6 then — too young and too far away to make sense of the event).
An adjoining hall with another sets of busts and statues looks a little less dolorous - largely due to the generous quantity of sun streaming in through the beautiful, domed roof.
A sunny corridor of the Vatican Museum
Beautiful roof with sun streaming in
This statue reminded me of Mark Zuckerberg:
Mark Zuckerberg?
(Update: It’s actually Asclepius the Greek God of medicine and healing)
And had this been Nero, it would have wholly resonated with my sense of irony:
Not Nero
Alas, this was just Herm of Hermes.
This section with busts and statues was just a tiny portion of the museum and was followed by corridors with beautiful painted ceilings and floor patterns that looked almost contemporary:
Hunderds of year old designs can sometimes look contemporary
Even while taking pictures, it was very clear to me that the paintings overhead were a lot more detailed than my eyes were capable of seeing from a few feet below. But this realisation didn’t fully sink in till I zoomed into the pictures.
A painting on the ceiling
And here is a small section from the bottom left corner of the above picture:
Detail from a painting on the ceiling
The richness extended well into the third dimension. As we walked along with the other visitors, we found ourselves in a long corridor with monochromatic relief-work all along the ceiling.
Monochromatic relief work on the ceiling
In some corridors they were juxtaposed with colourful tapestries on the wall.
Colourful tapestries on the walls juxtaposed with monochromatic relief work on the ceiling
Photography becomes a bit of an intense physical sport when you are trying to take pictures of ceilings in low light. Just as one corridor would end, a door would lead us into another one — grander and more colourful than the one we were leaving.
Painted ceilings that extended for hunderds of meters
It’s a heady feeling to see the artistic output of several centuries condensed into a few minutes. I found the leap from antiquity to Renaissance most thrilling.
When you follow the flow of the crowd that the museum has decided; so that the visit might conclude in Sistine Chapel, most paintings on the ceiling appear upside down. I had to stand against the traffic to click the pictures.
Yet another very detailed section of one of the ceilings
Yet another very detailed section of one of the ceilings
The long chain of corridors eventually ended in a series of large, airy rooms whose walls and ceilings were covered in elaborate paintings depicting scenes from coronation ceremonies and battles. They seemed to radiate light.
Battle scenes painted on the walls
Then there were paintings on the ceiling, whose perspectives were deliberately chosen by the artists to make your head spin.
This was painted on a ceiling
Some of these paintings are so skilfully done and blend so well into the physical space that you sometimes cannot tell where the painting ends and the real world begins:
Mixing 2D and 3D till you cann’t tell which is which
Some modern works of art were also on display. Their minimalism is a bit jarring. It was as if we had gone back to the primitiveness of a cave painting.
The things that pass for art these days
Or may be the works were carefully chosen to accentuate the effect of what awaits all visitors and the end of their tiring walk…
As I eventually walked into Sistine Chapel, I was so dazed and dazzled that I didn’t notice the signs prohibiting photography. That the signs were on the walls and I was looking at the ceilings all along must’ve had something to do with it too. I removed the lens cap, pointed the camera to the ceiling, composed that perfect shot but before I could press the shutter-release, a burly, balding guard was standing next to me yelling - NO PHOTOGRAPHY PLEASE… SIR. It was an awkward comical moment — all eyes were on me, and the guard who looked determined to prevent me from taking a picture even if it meant physical intervention. I meekly apologised, smiled sheepishly and left the place as soon as I could without it looking a deliberate, hasty retreat.
It was like being at a party where you are treated to a multi-course meal of choicest, exotic delicacies but when it’s time for dessert, the hosts tell you leave.
The wife consoled me with the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. I don’t think anyone could have done a better job of photographing it.
The visit ends in the Vatican post office. As I walked down the spiral staircase, I was happy at having seen so much but sad in the knowledge that the two plus odd hours that we had spent here hadn’t been enough.
The stairwell at the Vatican Museum