Dark Chocolate

It was going to be the mundane experience of checking out groceries for the week at a store I’ve been going to for years. It generally starts with a perfunctory nod and mumbled greetings by a person at the counter. Then, as I place the milk and bread on the belt, my eyes would be caught by the cover of tabloids that talk about cheating celebrities and their impending divorces. Then, my mind would jump to the internal workings of places that come up with these stories. I’d imagine the brainstorming sessions at these places and the personal lives of people that work at these places. Do they keep a stash of awkward pictures of each celebrity? I’d wonder. By that time typically I’m asked to swipe my card and express my preferences about the milk container going directly into the cart. All this ends with another nod and exchange of good wishes with the stranger before she moves on to the next customer.

It started off the same this time and would have ended as usual if the packet of dark chocolate had not jumped into the bag as it did. “Wow! Boop – it jumped in there as if it knew that’s where it was supposed to go”, she said. She was elderly but energetic and wore her hair in a manner that seemed to suggest that she did not belong in there. “That’s one funny piece of chocolate. Boop – it jumped in there” she said again. “Somebody could write a story about it. It could become big. Like Harry Potter. She made a billion dollars with that.”, she said. This was not the human robot I was used to seeing. “Do you write?”, I asked. “Yes, I do”, she said. “Stories?”. “Poems and songs. My poems were published in the millennium book of poems. I was one of the selected 100 poets.”

Do we have no use for a poet other than to scan items off a conveyor belt?

Why is our society rewarding me, an engineer, but not her, an artist? She is arguably a better artist than I’m an engineer. I would not make it to the list of 100 selected engineers of my time. The answer, unflattering for me, is not that I’m good or talented but that I’m useful. The world happens to need my skill at this point in time. Born in a different time in history, I’d likely have been laying bricks for her house or fixing the wheel of her carriage. Maybe somewhere in the future that we engineers are building today lies a much different kind of society. One where machines autonomously produce our food, build our houses and keep us healthy. What does one do in such a world? History suggests that we’d continue to toil feverishly in that world too. With all the mundane problems behind us, hopefully, we’d be consumed by creative pursuits. We’d stretch our minds unfettered by physical limitations. Unencumbered by the trivialities that go by the name of  making a living. Hopefully, the ones that are rewarded in that world are the ones that see a piece of chocolate slip into a bag and see a story in it. And are unafraid to share it.

Legroom

It was a box full of underachievers. And I found myself sitting on one corner on the baggage stand. Some of us were packed up there, like pieces of baggage ourselves. We sat on the stand made of strips of wood designed for baggage. And in front of us was another such stand filled with more such people. And real baggage. Dull gym bags of fake brands, stuffed more than to their capacity, were fighting battles on two fronts. One with themselves as the poor material tried hard not to give up despite being pushed to their limits by the excessive stuffing within. And one with the other bags as they pushed onto each other for more breathing space.

They all belonged to different people from different worlds. But as they sat there, stifled, one could hardly help but notice how similar they were. Clothes and food and water. That's what most of them must have. Not more than one of them probably had clothes of the same color and size and make. The bags were all unique in many ways. But in ways that didn’t seem to matter here.

It was midsummer and we couldn’t get the fans on the train to work. Somehow, we seemed to be missing exactly the things which we wanted most. Air. And space. Food could wait.

I could see most people in my box from my strategic vantage point. Some of them, I could see clearly. There were meshes between me and the rest. Most of them were either asleep or trying to get some sleep. Clearly, not all of them were sleepy. But, they were trying nevertheless. Under the given circumstances, there seemed to be little else you could do to forget where you were. To stop trying to avoid meeting the eyes of the person in front of you that you just had a fight with.

The situation had calmed down just then. Moments earlier, a huge man was shouting at the top of the his voice at the young lady sitting in front of him. It was partly a misunderstanding, as it later turned out. The guy sitting beside me was her husband. He climbed down to sit beside her as the man who had been sitting there got off the train. Apparently, the huge man had made a deal for that seat and this person wasn't aware of it. The fight went on for a long time. People tried to help at first, but soon, the voices of the 3 people involved - the huge man, the lady and her husband became part of the background noise that everyone subconsciously ignored. The sound of the wheels, the people fighting and some kid crying - just noise to be discarded or put up with as long as the journey lasted.

Once the fight subsided, I surveyed the crowd from high above. Everyone seemed to have settled down - albeit uncomfortably. The 3-seater below me had 5 adults and two kids dozing off on it. Same was the case with the seat in front of it. The ones on the edges were in such delicately precise configurations that a slight change of angle of their legs or shift of weight of their upper bodies would throw them off the seat. The ones who were not fortunate enough to be seated, made the most of the places they got to barely stand. Their priorities seemed to be to position themselves near the windows or doors to get some wind. One middle aged man, who lost his balance occasionally, was managing to have lunch from a tiny steel box despite his position. Another was taking some load off his legs by shifting it to his arms. He achieved this my holding a high metal hook with one hand. The other hand clutched this one tightly and his head rested on his upper arms as he snored heavily.

Some of us were in relatively better living conditions. The baggage stand on which I sat had 3 adults and 3 bags including me. This was not as much better compared to those seated below us as It sounds. This was because we also had to accommodate our legs on those seats. The ones sitting below could freely let their legs hanging. We had to curl them up and frequently keep changing positions to prevent legs from sleeping - which can be quite painful while stretching them is a luxury you could not afford for the next 9 hours or so. And since the seat was not meant for people, you also had to shift uncomfortably where you sat. It is surprising how much of a burden legs can be when you were sitting up there. The rest was manageable, but legs -they were a pain.

Nevertheless, life up there was far better than that of people seated below. And the ones standing could clearly see that.

My position was typical of my unplanned travels. Despite the sight of the overflowing unreserved compartment from the station platform, I always knew that there would be a niche for me somewhere up there. This was not mere wishful thinking. There is always someone lying down on one of the baggage stands while there is hardly any place on the floor for your feet. And as certain as that, there are always standing people who enviously look at the sleeping person and battle in their minds whether and how to ask the person to sit up so that they could sit too. The sleeping one generally faces the wall and strategically places bags around him to make the place look less comfortable than it is. Worthless tricks in front of a veteran like me. I take pleasure in waking these people up from their fake sleeps.

With sights like these and plenty of time to burn I had little to do but ponder. Was this the most efficient configuration? Could you stuff the same people into the same box in a better way? Or was this chaos the best you could do? Did this apparent chaos really have underlying order? Why are some people standing while the rest are sitting? Did they all just start late? Or does each one of them have their share of moments of hesitations to blame? Why aren't the seats being time-shared? Is that practical at all? Could they possibly stick in a television here to distract the people? How does the old woman selling raw mangoes here pay for her ticket?

For a moment, I thought that the solution was to mark seats with numbers and make reservations. But this was the unreserved compartment and, by definition, that was not allowed. What if a railway official stands at the door, lets one person in at a time and chooses a seat for them or a place to stand depending on their age and physical condition? But who is to decide what the right rules are? I guess you could make a case for making the youngest and strongest stand while the weak and old sit. But that was probably happening already. I did not see any very old people standing. The weak and old were sitting indeed. Probably, all rules which are worth enforcing are already hardwired and don’t have to be enforced at all. But forcibly enforced rules still have to have their benefits, right? A configuration that results from everyone acting in their own self interest can hardly be the most efficient? But what exactly is an efficient configuration? Even if you could quantify comfort, would it be something that maximizes the average comfort? Or minimizes the cases of discomfort? Even if this hypothetical golden sets of rules to arrive at the best configuration was found, would it be far too narrow to make any long term sense? The existing system gives people an incentive to start early. But with trains stopping at stations for only few minutes, that hardly matters. The quick and strong manage to get in first. But they, precisely, should be the people who need the seats the least. So, does the system select against the weak? That isn't as wrong as it sounds after all. Selecting against the weak gives the weak a better reason to book their tickets in advance and not travel in an unreserved compartment. But what about the ones who cannot afford the reservation fee? Should there be such a fee at all?

Connected to this compartment are the reserved compartments, the first classes, the AC s and all. Imagining how much legroom there must be in those compartments makes one wonder more than ever if something somewhere is possibly wrong. The reserved ticket costs less than twice as an unreserved one and the unreserved compartment is stuffed to more than twice the density of a reserved one. And they cost lesser to maintain. Do unreserved compartments make more business sense for the railways? Why don’t we have whole trains of those then? Because you need to accommodate people who belong to different strata of the society? So, there is no escaping from tying boxes of varying degrees of comfort together. The only solution possibly is to get more trains to run. But can we afford to underutilize them? This, after all, is just a problem of few people fighting for limited resources. For some air to breathe. And more legroom.

Unfair

Auto rickshaws and their drivers in Bangalore are strange economic phenomena. It is worth getting into some details about their business model. They are supposed to take you from point A to point B and charge a fee for it. The fee, being based only on the distance and the waiting time, is something a lowly mechanical meter can calculate. And it does. But the strangeness of the whole affair comes from the fact that what you really pay is the outcome of a complex mathematical expression in which the fee calculated by the mechanical meter is only one variable. Some of the other variables are the population density of the two points A and B, the average annual income of the people residing in those places (as guesstimated by the driver), the quality of the roads connecting the two points, the driver's impression of how much you earn, the number of people you are with and how much better you are at the game of chicken that commences as soon as it is time to pay.

So, I generally ride the bus.

But the other day, I didn’t have the option. I walked up to a parked auto and asked him if he could take me to point B. He nodded of course. But before he could start, he said "It'll cost you forty rupees." . My anger management techniques constantly fail to work. "What, then, is the meter for?", I asked without making much of an effort at being courteous. To which he replied "The meter charge will be 36 rupees, I'm only asking for 4 rupees more." . I had become somewhat of an expert at this and so proceeded to get off the auto. He offered to take me for the meter charge and so I got back in.

Once on our way, he said very gently "If people like you start behaving like this, how are we to make a living?". I'd have told him that I hadn’t signed up to make sure he made a living. I'd have - if I didn’t know how right he was.

It was an ugly truth indeed. Behind the beautiful illusion of greedy drivers trying to suck up all the blood from their unsuspecting passengers, was the simple ugly truth that most of them probably just broke even. They drive rented autos, pay a high price for fuel, live in overpriced rented houses, pay for the overpriced worthless education, have wives that work as housemaids for peanuts, breathe lot of polluted air and die very soon. Yes, this picture is probably not accurate. I've met drivers who can only be described as leeches. The truth remains, however, that the real problem here is not greed.

So, when he said that, I told him how I preferred to ride the bus so as to avoid arguments with auto drivers. And he said that he wouldn’t have asked me for more had he known how fed up I was with his kind.

I returned to the book I was reading - The Enchantress of Florence. Sikri and Akbar and all the elephants and wealth. That must've been some time. But someone had his leg cut off for stealing a pair of shoes. Such punishments have now been replaced with fines and imprisonment. Steven Pinker, Robert Wright and Chris Anderson would immediately point out how much better our times are.

But in front of me was this man with graying hair who just lost a game of chicken with a youngster and lost four rupees. A tiny fraction of how much the youngster would tip a waiter.

Auto rickshaws are only the things I hate second most to get into. The first being shopping malls in Bangalore. And when I do, again, when I'm left with no choice, I find myself getting very irritated at the crowd. The people, what they do, what they wear, what they read (or don’t read) , what they buy and how much they pay - everything irritates me. I probably have experienced too much of the other extreme and know too much about auto drivers to feel a part of it all. To think that the crowd I see is only riding a wave and not reaping benefits of real hard work makes the jobs of the overspending shoppers seem less respectable than the ones of the haggling auto drivers.

The driver interrupted me as I was enjoying Salman Rushdie's dissection of Akbar's psyche. He asked me where I was from and if I was studying or working. I answered and then asked him about his kids. His two kids were in school. They were living in a different town - probably because the education there was not as overpriced. The elder one was good at school but the younger boy was just ok. He said his kids would never study as much as I had because he couldn’t afford. The ubiquitous vicious cycle. I told him that good education was the only passport to a good life and that he should make sure they understood that. Actually, I'm sure he knew it better than I did.

Obelix & Co

The Romans started buying Menhirs for lot of gold from Obelix. I don’t remember the specifics of the plot but the front cover of the Astrix comic book, for some reason, has managed to stay alive in my head. The picture has Obelix in the foreground in his white and blue striped pants looking important and certainly very happy. In the background is what appears to be a quarry where little busy men are seen chipping stone off unfinished Menhirs. There must have also been a bag of gold coins somewhere in the picture.

Obelix, before the menhirs started fetching him gold, loved to feast on wild boar. He hunted them himself. Once he got busy managing his men and blowing the gold, he hired someone to hunt boars for him. Ofcourse, wealth is hard to conceal. And others started making menhirs too. And yet others started hunting boars for them. Very soon, half the men in the village were chiselling stone and the other half were hunting boar for them.

It was raining heavily while I was standing at the bus stop under the messy hanging flyover in Bangalore. (Why the structure was hanging and not behaving itself like its new born cousins all over the city, I don’t know.) Like all others, the bus stop had colourful ads all over. Advanced web designing. Call centre training. C C++. Advanced diploma in computer financial applications. Need Steel welders (free accommodation provided). Advanced this. Improved that. High value this. Cutting edge that. Wild boar hunters needed.

The village was soon a well-oiled giant menhir making machine. It gulped gold and spat menhirs. The gold percolated. It flowed from the menhir merchants to the quarry workers to the boar hunters. It flowed through tiny cracks. Not so visibly. There were the chisel makers. Chisels need wooden handles. So a crack opened to the lumbers. Lumbers need axes. It flowed further to the village blacksmith. To some mine from there. Back to the boar hunters. Back to the blacksmith. Over to the cobbler. The mason. The tailor…

Some machine. Some parts.

Watch closely and you can see the tiny cracks. It is harder to see gold flowing. A traffic police man has stopped someone. The rain is drowning their voices. But I can see a crack already. The youngster on his new bike doesn’t have the papers. Or probably he does but was over speeding. I see some gold flowing. The youngster is back on the road. The machine is running. Parts that don’t move to the rhythm wear off quickly.

Naturally evolved economies perform better compared to the top-down planned ones. Or so they say. I’m not so sure. They probably produce more menhirs. Probably more gold flows when the machine naturally evolves. But hey, what if the Romans stop paying for the menhirs? No. That’s not the part where we got it wrong. We might never stop making menhirs. But where’s Cacophonix? Where’s his harp? What’s he doing at the quarry anyway?

It is filthy behind the bus stop. And right in the middle is a little shop. Does gold trickle all the way here? I’m not so sure. What are the kids doing out in the rain? And why aren’t they in school? If they’ve been fed, what are they looking for in the dirt? Why are they eating the leftovers?

A nice friend once said that it was alright to accept a bribe as long as it was offered to you and not demanded by you. What a nice thing to say. What a perfectly fair way to cheat! The same message in different flavours has been played to me. By different nice people. In different nice settings. About very different nice things. Menhir merchants, the masons, the blacksmiths, the boar hunters. Everyone. All the nice people. They believe in a simple falsity: It is OK to cheat.

So it was not surprising to see the filth and the shop and the kids. After all, it is the nice people that make up all the nice parts of this machine.

Hair raising...

For a while, few days back, I thought I’d started looking more and more like I did in my kindergarten picture. Over a short period, though, things suddenly changed and I thought I was beginning to look more and like I would 20 years down the line. So I decided to get my hair cut.

I must have looked carefree as I walked in the mild rain without an umbrella and listened to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Children of Zodiac’ but the thoughts of that time about eighteen months back kept coming back to me. I’d walked into this place in my pyjamas and sandals one early Sunday morning with a pardon-me-for-the-look look on my face for a haircut. Only after I closed the door behind me and heard the women burst out laughing had I realised that it had been a women’s nail saloon.

Well, statistically at least, two things as bad as each other cannot happen to the same person in a row. Though not quite a comforting thought, it was good enough to conceal my apprehension as I walked down Bailey street this Saturday morning looking for the barber shop. I had chatted with a friend who suggested this $7 place.

This little house, so little I could see both its exterior walls at once as I stood on the same side of the road as the house, had this neon sign that read ‘Barber shop’. Must be one hell of a humble barber. Wonder if he had a son named ‘Boy’. This place, this little house, was the kind you see in colouring books. Wooden. Sloping roofs. Tiny little lawn. A wooden bench. Little wooden fence. Flowery bushes. 2 stairs led to the door and they creaked as I walked up. I turned the knob. It clicked open. I pushed the door and 2 things happened. Both of which brought back a little of the apprehension that had almost vanished on seeing the board proclaim that this was the place. First, chimes sounded. The sound itself was not unnerving. Was sort of sweet even. But it sounded somewhat like a burglar alarm to me and I didn’t like this at all. Second, the place. This little place looked like a witch’s den to me. Not that I’d seen one before. But this, I guess, is how they ought to look. It was little and smelly. Dull. Stuffed. When I say stuffed, imagine a place with so many little things hung on the walls, so many little pictures stuck in the cracks of walls tables, separators, so many that …well… there were lots of them.

I kind of regained my composure and walked in. A mirror. And a chair. Not bad. Finally something not completely unexpected. This was in the room I had entered. This led to another one. And there was another mirror on the wall on this room. Don’t remember if the old man came just before or after I had called out. I mumbled something about getting my hair cut. Was asked to leave my jacked on the stand. While I proceeded to act according to instructions, he donned this white doctor-like coat. This was kind of weird because the chair was not facing the mirror on the wall and he was standing with his back to the chair. For a moment I pictured myself standing there with my head bent to his convenience while he sat there with his coat on and went on chopping. Trust me. I did. Thankfully, it was to be more conventional. He motioned me to the chair and I noticed a lot of things now. There was Salman Khan’s photo stuck somewhere. Most of the things hanging on the walls were certificates of some kind. If I’d ever make a cheap sci-fi movie, he’d play my mad scientist and I’d use this house for it. The certificates could hang there and they wouldn’t be out of place. He pulled some lever somewhere as I sat on the chair. And the chair, with a little sigh raised and turned me towards the mirror.

I was scanning the contents of the mirror table as he draped this blue clothe on me and put some kind of a tape around my neck. I was thinking Salman Khan would be a good conversation starter while I noticed that the wooden statue on the table looked oddly Indian. Looked like a south Indian Goddess to me. You can never tell. I think Thai Gods look like that too. And some forms of Buddha. This was the second most interesting thing on the table. The first, was a little wooden statue. It was of a barber and (I almost said barbie) this guy. The barber had scissors and comb in his hand and most significantly wore this huge grin. And the poor guy, I could tell, was anything but comfortable. For starters, he had no hands. They were under the blue cloth but it gave the impression that they were either chopped off (by the barber I’d say) or were tied behind him. He had a look of horror and helplessness on his face. I was playing on with silly imaginings of this sadistic barber when suddenly I saw in the mirror that this barber behind me produced something black and long from his coat pocket that looked like a pen knife. Before I grasped what was happening he quickly stuck that thing in the centre of my head upright. I’d have been embarrassed had I let out a scream. That turned out to be a comb. What on earth was he up to? You wouldn’t expect someone to stick that thing upright on your head, would you? And then he carefully pulled the hair around it and stretched it on the comb. ‘2.5 inches’ he said. ‘What?’ ‘You hair’s two point five inches long. How long do you want me to make it’. (Was he building a bridge or something? I mean how would you answer a question like that?) ‘1 inch’ I said. Carefully weighing the possibility of it being ridiculously short against the chance of me having to come back here too soon to blow another 7 bucks. After a brief discussion about how long exactly one inch was and how he wouldn’t want to give me two haircuts and how I should have washed my hair that morning, he began his work.

After I succeeded in disregarding the fact that it was my head that he was working on, it was fun to watch him work. He had this array of automatic blades on the wall to my left and would toss one in the air and catch it like a wannabe bartender. Then he’d run it all over my head. It got boring after a while and I got lost as he used almost every tool in his kitty on my head. Sometime then he also sprayed a lot of water on my head. I said something about the Indian God and we had a brief conversation about that. By the time I realised it, he had parted my hair in a rather interesting fashion. The first thing I did when I noticed that was to turn to my right and see if I was visible from the road. I was kind of worried that someone I knew might turn up at the window to behold the spectacle. And that was because, God knows for what reason, he had parted my hair into 5 regions. The first one was the area right above my forehead. With all my wet hair neatly combed down to my forehead so that some skin was still visible above my eyebrows. The other was the part above my right ear with almost a similar effect. The third was behind my head and symmetric to the first one while the fourth above my left ear was symmetric to the second one. The fifth one… was the killer. He had managed to collect all my long wet hair in one heap so that it made a little pyramid on top of my head. The only thing that matched it in shape better than a pyramid was the upper half of an onion. Yes, that’s right. And I firmly believe that the height of this thing must have been closer to 4 inches than 2.5. I just sat there staring at this thing in the mirror as he carefully went on smoothening all of the five areas. Few machines and few more partitions later, the configuration was undone. Thank heavens. Then he stepped back and, stroking his chin, looked at his work from a distance. He continued to work and I lost interest again. There was a red sheet with some golden metal writing on it that hung on the wall behind him. I thought it was something from the bible. It took a while for me to read the thing in the mirror. When put together, it read ‘Due to increasing prices, we are forced to raise our prices slightly’.

When it was finally done I gave this I-like-it-a-lot nod and he gave this I-knew-you-would grin.

Parallel worlds

(written: March 2005)


Two people I can’t help but notice everyday:

One.

He sells colorfully wrapped stuff. Biscuits, chips and all. The kind of stuff we pay for and don’t bother to count the change. There is this small table behind the canteen on our campus that serves as his shop. He must be in his fifties. Graying hair but well kempt. No one would notice but the pair of clothes he wears is almost certainly the best that he’s got. He’s probably got only a few such pairs. He probably wishes that he were invisible. You can see it all in his eyes. He shifts his weight uncomfortably from one leg to another whilst trying hard to not show the exhaustion. He does not have anything to sit on. He probably needs to save. He won’t look at you in the eye. Reasonable. He doesn’t want you to see what he’s spending his life hiding. His workplace is weird. It is infested with rich men and women. Men and women in their twenties earning probably more than what their folks earned before retirement. He doesn’t understand what they do in those glass lined buildings. He doesn’t understand why these people get paid enough to flaunt those little colorful phones. Every where and all the time.

He probably wishes…only to sit.

Two.

He works on wood. Carves. I’ve seen him carving couple of times. But I see his creations everyday. He runs this shop. 10ft by 15 ft. Its on this nondescript road I take everyday after the infy bus drops me. It has couple of stools and some tables on which he’s showcased his stuff. He must be in his late forties. He has a shiny beard. Think he’s bald. He’s tall. I never noticed what he wears. You wouldn’t want to. I don’t know how many people buy his stuff. Don’t know if he makes enough to pay for the place. But he runs the place. I’d swear that he has no regrets. I’ve never spoken to him. But something tells me that he’d look at me in the eye if I did. He wouldn’t give a damn what I wore or what it looked like I earned.

A stopover

I get good ideas. On rare occasions. One such occasion was when I thought of stopping over at Zurich for 2 days on my way back to Bangalore. Essentially a company-paid-holiday…

The flight from London to Zurich was fairly eventless. Apart from, of course, some drama at the London airport which wouldn’t have ended as nicely as it did if it were not for my friends Prasanna and Akshata who pleasantly offered to see me off at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. They did all the thinking for me as I did the lazing. Since I had had less than an hour of sleep the previous night, I remember very little of the flight. I remember looking out of the window and wishing that I had been carrying my camera. And I remember the announcement on touchdown.

Zurich airport. World’s best I hear. Was not particularly interesting. The part where it started getting interesting was where I got out of the airport. Into Zurich.

The driver from the second cab got off and walked towards me. “Zic Zac Hotel” – I said. I was to get the first taste of Swiss German. A language which if I could understand would have made my life easier the next 48 hours in Switzerland. “Chic Chac Hothel?” he said. What was I expecting anyway? I pick the cheapest of hotels on the web and book a single room with shared bathroom and expect the cab driver at the airport to have heard about it? I pulled out my all-important sheet of paper. A figment of the new-improved-me. Well organized. Practical. Prudent. Or so I thought. The paper in question had all the numbers which could save my life if I were to ever be pushed to the edge. The reservation number for the hotel, my flight details, passport details, numbers of the Infy office at Zurich, Thomas Cook numbers, my traveller’s cheque’s serial numbers, my umpteen money card numbers (you only need address and identification proofs to stuff your wallet with plastic cards. Not money…thankfully). I had about a dozen prints of this on half sheets of papers strewn in my baggage, my jeans, my jacket… They call it elimination of a single-point-of-failure. Thanks to my job.

Well then…I was looking at the address of the hotel and trying to choose the best possible pronunciation for Marktgasse. That was where the hotel was. I tried many variants. The man still didn’t get it. I showed him the address. The print was too small. For a man of his age, he did well. I was asked to get in. “How much would it cost?” “Abouth 50 Franc” I was told. 2000 Indian rupees. I thought I’d try to be friendly and sit beside him on the cab. ‘That’s my seat’ - he told me. ‘You are from England aren’t you? Dhrivers sit on the left in Switzerlandh.’ Oh yeah…ofcourse…I’m sorry…I didn’t realize. I either said that or just mumbled something that must have sounded like that. I took the back seat obligingly. So much for trying.

I tried with better success than expected to hold a conversation. ‘I’m from India’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen snow’. I wanted something to get him interested in this rare specimen from god-knows-where. It worked. And yeah…better than expected. The roads didn’t look any different here. Looked like ‘foreign’ – as hum hindusthani would put it. I asked him about places to visit. Wanted to get some insider information. Interlaken? Lucern? ‘Oh…it’s got mountains and lake you know. A combination you do not see in England’. Like I had seen England.

‘What’s the best place in Switzerland?’ ‘You mean Intherlaakan or Luzern?’ He was among those I would meet who spoke enough English to give you the information you wanted. But of course, you had to make compromises. Ask them open questions and get every thing from them that they knew. With out being fussy about correctness of language or aptness of answer. Like in this case. I wanted to know the best place and he thought I was asking him to compare Lucern with Interlaken. ‘Yes Yes’ I said. ‘Which is better, Lucern or Interlaken?’ Anyone who’s done requirement analysis can relate to this. Thanks to my job.

Very soon we were out of a maze of highways and driving beside a river on a busy city road. They call it a lake. I thought lakes didn’t flow. This one didn’t look like a lake. To me.

Having realized that I was excited about the place, he had got more affable and was now more or less playing a guide along the way. Which I thought was fine as long as he did not consider charging me for the service. ‘The town of Zurich starts here and ends there. You see the tower there? It ends there’. He wasn’t kidding. He added…’Zurich is small. But ith is the biggesth thown of Switzerland. Andh ith is beauthiful. Beside a lake.’ That I could see. It was beautiful indeed. But it was when we cut into the old town that I lost my breath. Narrow stone paved streets lined with houses and shops on either side. Buildings of stone. Either of stone or of the color of stone. Streets were not straight. Not flat. An aerial view would have looked like a piece of modern art. ‘This is beautiful. I had only seen such places on the television’ I told him. I had to tell someone. He was amused. I think.

(You will find a break here. I’ll come to that.)

The place had a rusty look. Like a piece from the past. Like I had been travelling not through space but time.

‘The red building here is Chik Chac Hotel’. It was indeed. I had seen how it looked on the web. Only I did not expect it to be buried in this old town of Zurich on a narrow pathway. I got off and verified the name. The cab driver started getting my baggage out. I wanted to tell him that I’d like to go have a look and confirm my reservation before I could pay him so that he could take me else where if things did not turn out as expected. But that would be too complex an idea for me to get across. I paid and let him go. 51.60 CHF. I was loaded with coins of different denominations now. “Have a nice time here” he said. Oh…am sure I will.

(End of part 1?)

Khan’s restaurant. A neon board read. This was one of the reasons I chose this place. It had an Indian restaurant by. A smaller board read “Zic Zac hotel- real food, real music”. It was an antique wooden door. Quite heavy. And my hand luggage was not the kind with wheels. I tried pushing it (the door) whilst carrying my three pieces of luggage. Thankfully, there was no one around to witness the awkward act.

The moment I opened the door, I was almost certain that that was the back door of a bar. Let alone a reception, I was no where. A wooden room with some high stools and ahhh….a sweeper. ‘That door’ he told me pointing right. ‘Zic Zac Hotel?’ ‘Yes Yes next door’ he said. Apparently, Khan’s restaurant and the hotel shared the same door.

Bad design. Very bad design. I had to carry my luggage up a flight of 20 wooden stairs. Another door. Possibly the hotel’s. Just when I started to push it open, some one opened it from inside. A girl. A very beautiful swiss girl. My 48 hour crush. Nice sharp features and carelessly styled hair to match. ‘I have reserved a room’

‘Please come’

The reception was a dimly lit room. Most surfaces wooden. Two windows on the far wall opened to another narrow street. The carpet was a shade of blue. Dull and unsophisticated. There were few tables and chairs - possibly for the complimentary breakfast. A coke machine at one corner. A coffee machine at the other. All along the walls were framed photographs. Of musicians. I didn’t quite realize it then. Let alone relate it to their catch line. Most of them were real black and white photographs. Displayed as if in a museum.

I pulled out the printout of a confirmation mail that I had got for the booking. The new improved me. There was something about the way this girl spoke. It was a lot like lightning. I could see it well before I actually heard it. That was because, english, apparently, was not what she spoke best. When she had to say something, she would stop to frame what she hoped to be a grammatically correct sentence in English. Then she would carefully play it to me, pausing deliberately at the nouns unsure whether she was using the right ones. That was good. But what wasn’t was that when she was in the process of framing the sentence, she would make this face that would essentially convey everything that she wanted to say. This was bad. Because that gave me all the time in the world to speculate. And I’m dangerous when I begin speculating.

So it happened that when she saw the printout she looked at me I knew there was bad news coming. Why did I let the cab go? ‘There is a problem’ she said. I knew it. ‘We generally check in at 12:00’. It was not yet 11:00. ‘And the room is not clean’. Nor am I. ‘That’s alright. I just need to put my luggage somewhere. I will be out all day’ I said. ‘Can you go and get back at…er….11:30?’ She offered to lock up the luggage. I asked her about calling cards and the railway station. The rough plan for the day was to go to Lucern to meet my friend. She ran over to the window to find out if a neighbouring shop was open. I could buy cards from there. She showed me the way to the railway station on a map.

A map. A population I did not speak whose language. A city. A head on my shoulders.

One of my first follies was going to a cloth shop to buy a calling card. Not my biggest one though.

(another break here)

It turned out that no one on the roads had ever heard of a post office. That was where I had to buy calling cards from. A woman came by. She looked Chinese. ‘Which way to the post office?’ In reply she said “ksdhf skdf skdfh sdkfh” and I realized I had to try something else. I made up some synonyms of post office in english. I was getting nowhere. ‘La Posta’ - I had heard someone say. Thought I’d try. I looked around. No one seemed to be watching. ‘Where is La Posta?’ I asked. Now she got worried. Coz she thought I was asking her something really important. I apologized and left.

Thanks to a rich old man, I found La Posta. The Post office I mean. They called it a post shop and it looked rather like a railway station to me. ’20 Franc card. 10 Franc card’ – the women across the counter told me. ‘Show me something cheaper’ – I made up some synonyms this time too. Didn’t work . I had to buy the 10 franc card.

The little display on the pay phone read ‘Karte Jinsterh’ - or something equally incomprehensible. I had some coins. I was looking for a place to insert them. I tried in vain - like a little boy trying to dismantle his toy car. No one noticed, thankfully. The slot was too thin. More like the one for a credit card….ahhh….so that was what Karte meant?...The display changed to something else when I inserted my card. I presumed I was being asked for the number. I dialled. The women at the other end said something. It sounded like a question to me. I entered the calling card PIN. She asked me something else. I thought the next thing that she would want to know would be the destination number. I entered. ‘Hello’….I heard mom’s voice. Mission accomplished.

The railway station, I heard, was the largest roof covered area in Zurich. It looked a lot like Chennai station to me. There were trains to Lucern at 30 min intervals – I was told.

‘Oh… we are 92% booked today and the cleaning woman is stressed you know’ – lady lightning told me when I got back to the hotel. ‘But I will thry to find a …er….solution’ ‘Solution is the name?’ she asked me. She meant to ask if ‘solution’ was the right word. ‘Yes, it is’ What’s in a name anyway? It’s the solution that I’m interested in. I had to wait there for a while. That was the solution. ‘Can I pay by traveller’s cheques?’ (The-new- improved- risk-averse-me). I saw something coming. ‘Now…that is a good question’ – she told me. (without an interesting answer, I’m afraid – Hugh Grant, Notting Hill). ‘You will have to speak to the manager’. How customer friendly.

The cleaning women materialized as I waited there. Two young girls in black. One looked Chinese (I cannot tell the Chinese from Japanese). The other looked rather English. They checked the status of rooms on a sheet of paper. And ticked off rooms they had cleaned. It all looked very important. With ticks in various shapes and room names highlighted in different colors. Some cryptic colour code. Like a general crossing off targets destroyed on a war map, she ticked off room names. The only target I cared about was Elvis Presley, Room 204. The manager was some music fanatic. Rooms were named after musicians. Mine was Elvis. Target destroyed. Obliteration complete. Thank heavens.

I had half a mind to press the alarm button. But then I’d have to talk to lady lightning and tell her that I was stuck in the lift. That would be embarrassing for sure. I’m glad I decided against it. Because I wasn’t stuck. It wasn’t the lift door that I was pushing. It was the wall. Thankfully, the second wall I tried was the door. High time lift designs were standardised.

The room looked like it lagged the rusty pathways by a good 100 years. Walls were dull but freshly painted. A bed. A shelf. A wash basin. And a television. Windows to the far wall opened to the cloth shop I’d tried buying calling cards from. Elvis was all over the walls. A photograph of his credit card. One of him performing. And one of a bottle that contained water from his swimming pool. Authentic – it said. Impressed.

44 francs for a 2 way ticket to Lucern. Glies was german for ‘platform’. Wish I knew. I wouldn’t have found myself in a fix if I did. The train arrived. It looked enormous. It was two storied. Oh…I see.

The ride was… rather funny. More than 24 hours of no sleep and all the exhaustion felt like a strong dose of sleeping pills. The carriage was almost empty. I dozed off. Somewhere in a suspended state of consciousness, I realized that I was missing some exotic landscapes. I pulled out my camera clumsily. I had succeeded in putting it in the right mode and clearing the haze off the window by the time the view was obstructed by a fantastic tunnel that plunged the carriage in darkness for …er….I don’t know how long….I’d dozed off again. This recurred almost every few minutes. I’d wake up and try to point and click. And then doze off again. By the time I reached Lucern I’d taken 3 snaps. Bad ones. Clicked only out of desperation. Like the warrior who raided the archers to make up for a lost battle…

‘Walk alone the red line’ – the women at the tourist information centre at Lucern told me, handing over a map of Lucern (Follow the white rabbit – Matrix). Déjà vu. Another city. Another map. My friend could not be reached over the phone. So I was left alone with the map. Lucern, how are we doing today? (It was a special day for Lucern. I was to find out)

A river ran through this one too. Exquisite roads. All of them steep. Narrow. Lined by churches, towers, forts, the city walls. Nearly as rusty as the old town of Zurich. I rambled about in wonder randomly shooting pics. Soon I realized I couldn’t place my self on the map. I was officially lost. I ended up in some private property. A house I’d kill for. I took a pic and left the place.

I walked in the general direction towards the river….er…I mean the lake. Some men dressed in weird clothes where playing some music. Probabilistic anomaly. Like hell. I was wrong. I met more. All of them dressed like devils, sorcerers, pirates, Vikings…and playing music. What in the name of the devil…?


It was the annual festival of Lucern. I did not bother to find out what it was called. The streets started getting denser. I was running into people. All the time. None somber. It was something everyone did - I soon found out. Beautiful women wore horns. Men wore wizard hats. Faces of kids were completely painted. Kids played drums. They carried little wooden spears. Coloured paper was strewn everywhere. The masks people wore were simply fantastic. They were scary. I almost yelled at times when they got too close. (Lady lightening would later tell me that she hated this carnival for that reason). The best was yet to come: Music. Great music. The best drums I’ve ever heard. They played in groups. Drums and bugles in perfect rhythm. In a perfect setting - an enclosed square beside a shimmering lake. Everyone was dancing. I amazed myself. Coz I danced too.

On the late train back to Zurich, I started reading Angels and Demons. The prologue was disappointing. Did it have to be so similar to the Da Vinci Code? And Digital Fortress and Deception point…?

Aaloo parata from Khan’s for dinner. The only meal of the day.

Slept well.

I browsed through some tourist brochures as I sipped some bad coffee and had some bland croissant. Ten to Nine on Sunday morning. Another day. I chose the Interlaken tour from the brochure. Lady lightening offered to book the tour for me. She highly recommended it. She made a call and spoke some German. I knew it. Here it comes. Apparently, most part of the Interlaken tour was scrapped during winter. ‘You think I should still take it?’ I don’t think she thought. ‘Is there something else that you would recommend?’ More calls. More German. The answer was found. It was going to be Mount Rigi for the day. ‘There is a problem’ she said. Oh… I’d love to hear. Long since I had one. What she said next instantly transformed the easy Sunday morning mood in the hall. The tour would start in 15 minutes and I’d have to leave right then. Suddenly, the three women (she and the 2 cleaning women who’d been lazing off there) got all excited. (5 minutes to take off and Spiderman has to stick the molten mutant on the spaceship to save the world). ‘You have to take a cab to the place’ ‘I’ll call one for you’ Oh…how sweet of you. Lady lightning almost fell off her chair in the commotion. As she dialled, she told me hurriedly ‘I would go to the room and wear a …er…er…’ ‘Jacket?’ ‘Yes. A jacket’. Of course. I ran up. No time to play the fool with the lift. I put the little black jacket on me. She wasn’t pleased. Oh…how much she cared for me. ‘It would be very very cold. Don’t you have a bigger…er…er….jacket?’ I mumbled something. Asked her not to worry. The cab didn’t come. ‘You can take Sunday morning run’ – one of the other two women told me. I couldn’t believe they were actually having fun teasing me. ‘It will be very cold. You can buy a pullover there’ one said. The other said ‘You come back and you will be snowman’ and burst out laughing. Wish I could decipher that. LL was filling up a ticket for me. She signed her name. It looked like ‘Mariah Carey’. I realized I didn’t know her name. I should have asked her then. When she wished me a good day I didn’t know that I was never to meet her again.

The cab was under a sheet of snow. It had been snowing heavily all morning. When we drove along the lake, the place looked all different. (It looks like new – Calvin, C&H)

There were two buses waiting. I had the ticket. I handed it over at a kiosk. ‘Oh…you are going to Mount Rigi. For the moment you are only one going there’. Huh? Tell me about it. I love problems. I haven’t had one in ages. ‘Well…why is that?’ I asked. ‘It is only partially guided you see…’ ‘Oh…’ Works well with me. She gave me a sticker. ‘Stick this’ ‘Huh? On me?’ ‘Yes’. The round sticker on me said ‘Mount Rigi, the best of Switzerland tours’. ‘This is for the guide to know where you are going’. I felt like a parcel sealed and addressed and stamped. Ready to be carried.

The guide could speak English. Thank god.

The bus rode through Zurich as he gave us some trivia about things on the way. He had some sense of humour. But I was haunted by the thought that he would be saying the same things to all the people. Same jokes. Canned sense of humour. Some job.

We drove through some exotic places. Mountains, rivers, frozen lakes, villages. The villages were beautiful. ‘You will not find many farmers’ he said ‘Farmers quit farming because they do not get a good price for their produce. And because not many women would want to marry a farmer. They prefer shopping to milking cows.’ Pardon me. I didn’t say that.

Very soon things would get more interesting. The bus stopped at the foot of a mountain and the guide took me alone to a building. I didn’t have the faintest idea of what was in store. He bought some ticket across a counter on the first floor. He gave me the ticket and said ‘We’ll pick you up at Lucern at 5:20 in the evening’. But its not even 10 yet. ‘Well…where am I going now?’ He showed me a map (not again). ‘You take the cable car to Rigi Katbald’ ‘and then a cog wheel train to the peak-Rigi Kulm’ ‘and then you take a train back to Veitznau. Make sure you take the red one. And that the name reads ajsdjadjgbju’ ‘From Veitznau you take a ship to Weggis.’ ‘Here is your ship ticket. Don’t lose it’ ‘The same ship would take you to Lucern’ ‘You walk over to Pfistergasse 5 and we’ll pick you up at 5:20’ ‘Here is the list of departure times of all the services. Make sure you don’t miss any’ ’‘You are on your own from here’ ‘Have a nice day’. I will…

Where do I start? The counter. Trust only people with badges on. ‘Where do I have to take the cable car from?’ ‘Here, of course’. I realized that that was some kinda cable car station. I waited. There were 2 young boys and few old men and women. All of them were in skiing gears. What on earth was I going to do there? I was carrying my backpack with passport, work permit and the kind of things which if I lost would land me in jail.

The cable car ride was good. We were soon at Rigi Katbald. All my fellow passengers went off to ski. I was left high (literally) and dry. Let alone the cog wheel train, there was absolutely no one there. I hoped the guy on a bench there could speak English. He could. Apparently, the place where I landed was not Rigi Katbald. I had to walk a bit to reach there. With good reason was I alone on this tour. I got out and walked on snow. For the first time. I loved it. I appreciated the pattern on my sole. I was glad I had thrown away my old, cheap, unbranded pair of shoes for a new, cheap, unbranded pair.

I rented a sledge. The kind with a steering wheel. I couldn’t take risks with the other kind. For miles there would be no medical help. I did a test ride. Making sure I could stop when I wanted to and could jump off if needed. Fine. Was fun. Now for the real ride. Was great fun. But there was a catch. Every time I came down I had to drag the sledge back up and this was taxing. Before long, I was on auxiliary power. Batteries ran out soon after. I bought a drink and returned my sledge. Took some pics and tried making a snow man. Then I took the train to the peak.

Once there, I realized why they closed down most of the peaks in winter. The fog was so thick I could barely see beyond 10 meters. Since I did not have my sledge, I had little to do here. Bought a souvenir. Bought some hot chocolate with a free coupon that came with the tour and took the red train back from the first glies(you should know by now).

It was a slow ride downhill. Very slow. An hour or so. Back to Angels and Demons. Robert Langdon was woken up from sleep. Not again.

I met a woman at the boat station at Vietznau who took my picture. Her friend was in Bangalore. He was some kind of a monk. She lived in Lucern. The boat ride was boring. Every one stayed indoors and had lunch. I stayed on the deck and froze.

Back to Lucern. Felt like home now. I didn’t need the map anymore. I had more than 2 hours to take the bus back to Zurich. Thought I’d window shop. Shops generally had heated interiors. I thumbed through some magazines. Playboy and Penthouse and the like. Ended up buying a shirt. Had some chicken at Mc Donalds. Bird flu was not on my mind. Thought there was time for some museums. I went to the Picasso museum. ‘Are you a student?’ the lady at the counter asked me. ‘No’. sigh…
They wouldn’t take anything other than cash. So I had to leave. I didn’t like his style much anyways (what’s it called? impressionist?).

I found and waited at Pfistergasse 5. And bought another souvenir in the process. The guide was overjoyed to see me. I think he hadn’t expected to.

End of day two. Game over. Not yet. The last round was due.

I lost my way from the railway station where the bus had dropped me. I got off the wrong exit and walked along the wrong river. (who would have expected 2 rivers to flow through a city and have a railway station in common?). A woman, who could speak english the least of all people I’d met, helped me. I walked with her to a junction and then she said ‘You have to go to that red board and from there….er…er….er….’ ‘Find my own way?’ ‘Yes. Find your own way.’ Thank you. I will…

Weak ends

Two little kids lay wounded in the mid summer afternoon sun. Their shirts have been ripped off to reveal dry blood on their lean bodies. They were alive I knew. But I wished they weren’t.

A scene from post-war Iraq? A UNICEF visual? Two unfortunate souls far from people who could help? No. These kids were lying on the footpath on a busy street in one of world’s fastest growing cities - Bangalore. Probably been hit by a vehicle and waiting for the ambulance you’d think. Wrong. If you looked closely you’d see a man nearby trying to stop people on the footpath and direct their attention to the kids. He wasn’t trying to rescue them. He was the one who’d wounded them in the first place to invoke maximum pity in the people he was begging for money. He was blood stained himself. I so very badly wanted to believe that the blood on the kids were his. Only applied on there frail bodies for effect. But one look at the faces of the unconcious little ones and you’d know that wasn’t true.

As people hurriedly rushed along, brushing the man aside, not willing to waste a moment of their invaluable weekend, a billboard in the background proudly proclaimed – ‘State Bank of India is now completely networked. You can access your accounts from any of the 63 branches across the country’. Wow!! We are getting somewhere indeed.

I wonder where.