And so it’s Christmas eve’. I got a project for early on in the coming year, a Christmas card and a conversation on Christmas eve’ while having a Christmas carol playing softly from the card.
Winter came around with military precision on the 15th of December and it was delicious and I was delighted to see one of my predictions coming true and also because I was with my best friend. I spent some time shivering in Delhi and Faridabad. By God, I was cold out there apart from when I was inside the warm and toasty hotel late in the night or next to the warm and toasty heater in Delhi. The hotels – nice as they might be don’t impress me as much as the bathrooms do. The bathrooms – all sparkling and snazzy with glass and chrome and stainless steel and cleanly tiled and with huge square shower heads in glass shower cubicles which make one feel as though one were standing under the warm rain make me sometimes wish wistfully and sometimes with a matter-of-fact determination that I might have a perfect bathroom in an apartment someday. People are fascinated by different kinds of gadgets and machines – for me, I think, it is the pedestrian bathroom and even sewage systems. Back in primary school I was enthralled by the fact that people in the Mohenjo Daro civilization had well planned sewage systems and had bathrooms which drained well and were designed such that they were slightly sloped at an angle towards the drain. I used to wonder then about quite a few 20th century bathrooms designed in colony flats that frequently got waterlogged and were designed so that the floor tilted away from the drain. I don’t have any engineering ability but I’m almost sure that in some lifetime I might have pored over designs and charts and spent time on creating the perfect sewage system.
The main work-related science conference for which I went was held in a huge hall and various auditoriums and I was shivering every now and then even there unless I was busy in focused and concentrated shifts. The RCB and THSTI at Faridabad are set in the middle of a large expanse of land and new buildings are coming up, including apartment buildings for professors and hostels for students and new labs while there are functioning buildings where the current scientists have their labs and office spaces. The land around looks very barren and dry with hardly any greenery. One of the professors was showing me the view from a fifth floor window and a part of the campus looks like it has a huge ravine running straight through it. The labs, which I peeked into can compare to the ones I saw in Purdue (although the problems here are of a different order). I remember going into a Chemistry lab once during my days in college at Calcutta – and that could hardly be called a laboratory. I don’t think anyone had used that lab since 1922. Lots of people at the conference were dressed in just full-sleeve shirts and half-sleeve sweaters. I was a good old Bangali with my trusty monkey cap and a hoodie while travelling around in the open. I was almost missing my muffler. I think I may have grown very old for I did note that more than a few people were dressed in dapper or chic light jackets and braving the winter chill in the open as though it were nothing. The only time I was walking about in an almost-new blazer was for work reasons. The blazer cannot be worn in Calcutta because it’s too warm here and yet over there it felt too light. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve travelled more than I had in my decade-long stint in the US. Many people might not think that this is something to talk about – but I can’t help but feel a wee bit pleased with my rather uncommunicative hermit-self. I quite often question whether my hermit-self is even particularly intelligent. It just seems to be a tongue-tied, mind-knotted hermit crab. God knows though that there is only one reason that the hermit in me has been transformed across the one and a half year and my awkward and clumsy selves have been traveling quite smartly almost every month or every other month for work and for hunting for more work. The calculative part of me has been hoping and praying hard that the work-related travels and networking shall start paying bountiful returns in terms of numerous workshops by the coming year. In this sense, I have been hopeless at practicing the Gita tenet of ‘ma phaleshu kadachana’. I put that into practice for my PhD without even thinking about it. For long months during the last lap I had forgotten even to worry about whether I would get the degree at the end of the journey…but that is a different matter. They don’t call it a Doctorate of Philosophy for no reason even if the meaning has gotten mangled in actual practice in our 'modern' times.
While I was walking about the very crowded Delhi airport yesterday evening, Fimh was trying to get me to grin – ‘look at how many places you’ve gone hither and thither without losing your marbles and look at all the people you’ve talked with over the last couple of weeks for work or for prospective work without losing your top and with your White Light at the back of your mind (that was in reference to MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth…that’s how Fimh is: he doesn’t rattle off poem liners in my head – which would have been weird – but he reminds me of poems I have encountered) and you didn’t even get me irritated’. He was telling me that I was slowly but surely evolving into a human being while I was grumbling that I was taking far too long. I normally experience a child-like thrill at airports and also start experiencing something of a ‘vacant and pensive mood’ while staring at the aeroplanes and gazing at the runway and the vast and empty spaces beyond while playing two particular tracks on my battered i-pod: Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass’ Offering and Kishore’s O Saathi re while calling out to Fimh. But yesterday it was too crammed at the airport for my meditative moments. I played my songs later while on the bus to the aeroplane. At the airport I grimly kept giving myself glares over my coffee and cigarette about whether any of my travels would make a difference and whether I could make a significant difference and be of use to one human being. I was asking myself when I would make that happen. I was barking at myself inside my head but Fimh wouldn’t let me feel grumpy for too long. He reminded me that I’d been in Calcutta, went to Mohanpur for a couple of days for work, was back in Calcutta to attend a workshop as a ‘spy’, was back in Mohanpur, and then there were a few delightful and swinging days in between (when I wasn’t expecting them at all: whoever knew that the difference amongst a lotion and a moisturizer and a face cream could send one into unmusical peals of laughter and there were more moments that I will not elaborate upon here), then it was back to Mohanpur via Calcutta, and then I went to Delhi and Faridabad for work. There have been leads – but I won’t try making any predictions even though I can’t help but pray that a few of the leads mature into actual workshops: the one thing that I know I’m good at and can get better at doing and enjoy doing. I know I’ll keep trying to better myself in a few other ways too even though I’ll never try singing again (I fancy myself to be a mix of a phoenix and a dodo – I don’t think that such a creature is meant to sing).
This was my very first time staying in Delhi for longer than half-a-day and the first time that I actually travelled in the city (apart from the couple of times that I visited Delhi as a school-child and then as a teen for a couple of days and then as an oldie for a wedding and for a couple of other times because my international flight was delayed by a day on both occasions). I travelled around using the public transport system. I must say that they have done an excellent job of the metro service from what I experienced of it. I had no problems traveling through and about the city. I was telling Pupu very recently with a chuckle of how 'smartly' I took the metro service to Faridabad. I even got a place to sit and read careful bits from the only Modesty Blaise paperback novel that I hadn’t read this year. I found it at a bookshop in Delhi for Rs. 250. Now the entire Modesty Blaise collection is complete. I’ve been collecting the Dune series on the cheap too but for some strange reason I seem to be able to gather the books only in backward sequence. I didn’t know when I boarded the metro that they had two reserved coaches for women but got to know about that through the voice-over service. The folks organizing the conference had sent a car to pick me up from the Metro Station and so I didn’t have to use the public transport in Faridabad. I also availed the auto service a few times, in Delhi, for appointments and from the little bits I saw and experienced – the men I encountered were decent, polite and helpful. But I wouldn’t want to push my luck. It may be beginner’s luck. The cab I took from the airport had a very clear sticker about respecting women (and I was wondering about ‘which’ women and whether I would qualify) and I saw official posters ‘beti bachaon; beti parao’ emblazoned on the walls in public places. We don’t have such messages in Calcutta – it most likely means that on an average, a female foetus has a better chance of making a life in West Bengal. The scaredy-cat part of me (which I keep deeply buried) did feel the faint jitters about going around in Delhi before I’d reached the Capital (but that part emerges in Calcutta during late evenings and emerged even in Lafayette too one year and so I try very hard not to pay too much attention to it. If I’ve gotten a bit better at handling blind panic and frenzy – I know exactly whom I have to thank for this. The roads in Delhi are horribly crowded with traffic but it seems that people are still sticking to the rule of the odd/even numbered cars ploughing the roads on alternate days; I don’t know how long that will last and I guess it doesn’t affect people who have three or four cars.
I found out with my brief travels through the city that some of the stray dogs are treated well by the small shop owners in Delhi. The stray dogs look very well-fed and quite a few of them had little blankies/vests wrapped around them in a sturdy manner to protect them from the weather. There was one black and white dog who sported a blue vest who caught my attention and when I gave him almost half of my burger – he very carefully ate the chicken and came over to get petted and I petted him. I scolded him for leaving bits of the bun behind but he was rather unapologetic about that. When a dog butts one with his nose for more petting – one can’t really scold him for too long: maybe he knows that too many carbohydrates are bad for his system. He was limping some and I had mixed feelings about that but he kept nudging me to get some more petting. He seemed happy about the petting and I was content about petting him while talking aloud to him and to the universe and the powers-that-be and I was utterly unconcerned about who might be listening. Another fat dog sporting a smart red blankie, where I stayed, looked like a Spitz but was a mutt and all she wanted was to butt into me with her bum or nose and get some petting. If I called her ‘Pootu’ (I don’t think that was her name but that is how I christened her) – she would run/waddle over to me as though I were her favourite person. So I had a close to meditative time with the four-peds and it goes without saying with Fimh for the bits of time I had by myself. There was a pop social psychological quiz that I came across at some point, many years ago: what’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of a dog? What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of a cat? Remember the words….The interpretations for the pop quiz shall be available in the future. For me the two words were quite apt in their hidden meaning: for dog, I had come up with ‘unpredictable’ and for cat I had come up with ‘solitary’.
I stayed in Delhi at Guha’s place. His parents were not there but their very able and good natured housekeeper reminded me of one of Suvro da’s laments! I figured out very soon that it was a very well-off locality in South Delhi. It also had clear side-walks as I found out during my first evening out to just walk about the place and get some print-outs. But the side-walks in Delhi left me wondering whether they were made for humans or horses. The sidewalks are really more than a foot high so it’s a feat to be able to get up onto them and then get off and then repeat the manouvere when the sidewalk ends in some places. And I was startled to find motorbikes going at fairly medium speeds up on the side-walk since the roads were so busy. I was not pleased at all and yelled a couple of times. But I manouvered the side-walks very safely even while wearing heels, one day, when I’d been out for a school appointment. I managed to meet and chat with one of Suvro da’s old students, Aakash, and he absolutely insisted on treating me to a tremendously tasty chicken patty and a perfect mince pie from Wenger’s in Delhi, which was established in 1926 – as far as I remember, from one sign. It was a good meeting where we discussed work prospects mainly. He actually remembered that I had fought with him over Shiva’s trilogy and Amish on Suvro da’s blog and told me that I was an ‘out-going’ person. I laughed about this wondering what Suvro da might say about that. I actually talked in Hindi in public places and I wasn’t too bad if I didn’t think about it too much or didn’t get frazzled. Nobody smirked when I talked in Hindi and they answered my questions and a few people even made a bit of small talk with me about the weather. I came across a very old Sikh driver, Balbir Singh, who philosophized about life. He mentioned that it was good to learn from other nations and adopt good habits – like road rules – which could make everybody’s lives a little less stressful and smoother. He said that every family of four to six members in Delhi should be allowed to have only one car. That might reduce pollution levels a bit. He mentioned that if one was cheery and tried being nice to other people for a moment – one wasn’t really harming anyone. He told me that human beings should smile a little more often. I do not know whether that was a direct comment directed towards my grim and watchful and unsmiling self – but he was a mix of a taciturn and a talkative driver and it was Guha’s sister who chatted with him and got him to talk and philosophize while we were out to the airport. If I were a true social scientist I would have asked him about 1984 for I had that going through my head in a distant way. I was quiet on the whole and thinking about different things.
Here's Part II.
Here's Part II.
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