The World According to Sroyon

I ❤ London

2012-01-29T00:28:00.011Z

T-shirts on sale at Piccadilly Circus.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t own one of these. I look for exactitude in my T-shirt messages, and no one sells T-shirts saying I kind of like London.

The Breakfast Club

2012-01-22T09:28:00.008Z

In keeping with the format of a previous restaurant review:

I like breakfast, and I like yellow. No reason, then, not to like The Breakfast Club – this cafe in Islington.

They have quirky interior decor, and a chalkboard where they scrawl thoughts for the day. Such as:

Look at this cafe / Look how it shines for you / And everything you do / And it’s all yellow

or the more succinct:

Sex, drugs and bacon rolls.

Colour Pencils

2012-01-16T11:48:00.007Z

London, 7:46 am

2012-01-15T01:01:00.004Z

Our house is on the north bank of the Thames; Greenwich is just across the river.

The twin domes are of the Old Royal Naval College. Behind the college (though you can’t see it from the photo) is the Royal Observatory, designed – as architect Christopher Wren said with engaging honesty – “for the observator’s habitation and a little for pompe.”

The Royal Observatory is of course most famous for being the ‘home’ of the prime meridian. Our house is very close to the meridian – at 0°0'47"W, to be precise. I would have liked to say: I cross the prime meridian when I step out to buy milk, but that is not exactly true. The nearest convenience store is also in the Western Hemisphere. But only just.

Minimalism

2012-01-08T03:52:00.018Z

I have finally fixed the dice. (This is a random post generator link on the sidebar; it had vanished after I switched to the new template.) My achievement of the weekend.

It is one month since v3.0 was unveiled. I am happy with the new look, though I can’t say the initial goal of minimalism has been realised. But for lovers of minimalism, here are three of my favourite anecdotes on the subject.

1. Spartans

The Spartans were renowned for being men of few words. Indeed, Spartan is almost a synonym for minimalist, and the word laconic derives from Laconia, the principal region of the Spartan state.

Herodotus (The Histories, Book 3.46) tells us that when the banished Samians reached Sparta, they came before the magistrates and, as was customary, made a long speech to show the greatness of their need. But the Spartans answered that they had forgotten the beginning of the speech and could make nothing of the remainder. After this the Samians came a second time with a sack, and said nothing but this: “The sack wants flour.” The Spartans replied that they need not have said “the sack”; however, they resolved to give them aid.

2. Physicists

Wikipedia informs us that British physicist Paul Dirac was notoriously taciturn. After a lecture he gave at the University of Toronto, a member of the audience remarked that he hadn’t understood part of a derivation. There followed a long and increasingly awkward silence. When the host finally prodded him to respond, Dirac said, “That was a statement, not a question.”

3. Mathematicians

My high-school book on number theory had the story of how Mersenne’s conjecture was demonstrated to be false. In 1644 the French monk Marin Mersenne stated that the numbers 2ⁿ – 1 were prime for n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127 and 257, and were composite for all other positive integers n < 257. Mersenne admitted that he had not tested all the numbers, but owing to the notorious difficulty of integer factorisation, his conjecture went unverified for two and a half centuries.

In 1903 F. N. Cole made a presentation to the American Mathematical Society with the rather bland title, On the Factorisation of Large Numbers. Cole’s ‘lecture’ went thus. He approached the chalkboard and in complete silence proceeded to raise 2 to the power of 67. He then carefully subtracted 1, arriving at 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. Cole then moved to the other side of the board, wrote 193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287, and worked through the multiplication in longhand. The two results were equal. Cole returned to his seat, not having uttered a word during his hour-long presentation.

It is said that this is the only lecture in the history of the AMS where the audience applauded.

If I were Cole, I would have arranged for T-shirts to be sold outside the lecture venue:
M₆₇ is composite.

Sunshine Nonsense

2011-12-30T01:14:00.012Z

Preserve us from Thy Wrath, O Ye Mighty, we prayed to the Celtic Gods of Thunder and Rain, as we booked our train tickets for Edinburgh. ’Tis fated that in December the Northerly and Tempestuous Land of Alba shalt be Cold and Blustery, but spare us from the Rain, for verily doth it Interfere with Sightseeing.

And the rain gods must have heard us, for indeed we had very little rain in our three days in Edinburgh.

But our quota of fair weather ran out on the bus trip to Loch Ness. Scarcely had we crossed Dunblane, when the clouds blotted out the sun and the rain came down in sheets. “Aye, that’s more like proper Scottish weather, that is,” cried our bus driver. “None o’yer silly sunshine nonsense.” And he pressed down on the accelerator and swerved to avoid a minivan.

Initially the rain seemed like a bit of a dampener. But I came round to the view that the Highlands are at their most awe-inspiring

under brooding skies

in falling rain

when the trees are bare

and the waters of the loch are storm-tossed and steely black.

My Brush with Vaishnavism

2011-12-21T11:37:00.007Z

A Hare Krishna devotee waylaid me on Oxford Street the other day.

He had a stack of books with the title Bhagavad Gita. I was looking at these in passing and wondering how come they were so thick (the Bhagavad Gita is a slim volume), and this proved to be my undoing. Because he caught me eyeing the books, and before I knew it, I was in his power.

The conversation was a short one, for I prefer to give religious recruiters a wide berth.

Hare Krishna devotee: Can I ask you one question?
Me: Please excuse me. I am in a bit of a rush.

And I melted away into the crowd of shoppers.

I need not have said, “I am in a bit of a rush,” and in fact I wasn’t in any rush at all. Nevertheless, I thought if I’m rebuffing him out of hand, the least I should do is give him a reason to feel superior.

But for three days now I’ve been wondering what his one question was. The revenge of the Hare Krishna is truly insidious.

Three Languages

2011-12-14T22:49:00.011Z

Thai

It was my supervisor who told me about a Thai tongue-twister which, when transliterated, reads mai mai mai mai mai, but which in fact consists of five distinct words pronounced in different tones. Apparently it means ‘New wood doesn’t burn, does it?’

And this naturally led us to consider the possibility of an entire language consisting of a single syllable spoken in an infinitude of tones and registers.

I think our conclusion was that whatever other attractions such a language may have, we wouldn’t fancy using it to draft an intercreditor agreement.

Finnish

I read a novel recently, with the improbable title of A New Finnish Grammar. I will now proceed to quote from it liberally, because it is not everyday that you find an author who writes so passionately about language.

On the noun:

In the Finnish language the noun is hard to lay hands on, hidden as it is behind the endless declensions of its fifteen cases and only rarely caught unawares in the nominative.

On memorising words:

With some difficulty, one by one, I was taking in Koskela’s words. In the pauses between them, I heard them die away. I watched them floating down into the landscape of the city around us, so as to note where they fell, so that I could go and collect them later: a belltower would remind me of a verb, I wasted a whole ship on an adjective and entrusted the all-important subject to a tram. The pastor’s thought was scattered throughout Helsinki, and I could reread it every time I pleased.

On obsessive practice:

I would shut myself in the sacristy and study every word I’d put down in the notebook, declining it in all possible cases, conjugating each verb in every voice I knew, down to the most tortuous forms of the passive, the conditional, even the past potential. [...] Those syntactical digests were my defence against an enemy who was attacking me from behind. I had no tanks, no bombardiers, and each day surprised me on a different front, drawing me into the open, far from reason’s hiding-places, towards a chasm of gloomy, giddy thoughts. It was then that I needed all fifteen Finnish grammatical cases, the four forms of the infinitive, not to mention the negative pluperfect to keep my mind engaged, to drag it clear of that carpet bombing.

Beautiful, no?

Japanese

I learnt the word naruhodo on a snorkelling trip in Japan.

I had taken an underwater photo of a senior colleague, and I was quite pleased with the result. Back on the beach I showed her the photo. She said, “Naruhodo.”

Now at the time I did not know what the expression meant, and I was too proud to ask her. But I assumed it meant, “This photograph overwhelms me. Your talent makes me go weak in the knees, and I love you with a passion that is inextinguishable.” For it really was a pretty good photo.

When I went home, I checked. Naruhodo means ‘I see.’

Windowsill

2011-12-10T08:54:00.017Z

A long time ago, I had resolved that when I had my own flat, I would name the furniture.

For the last 16 months, I have had my own flat – or, to be more accurate, a shared flat, my own flat and a shared house, in that order – but I haven’t put my plan into action.

I could start with the windowsill, which I am rather fond of.

Will the Sill sounds somewhat uninspiring; considering the windowsill is my little corner of Japan, maybe I should call it Yuudai the Madodai.

v3.0

2011-12-08T06:34:00.009Z

Thanks for all the makeover suggestions and sorry for having disappeared without warning – I briefly went private while I was tweaking the new look. “Like a changing room, curtains drawn,” as a friend put it. And what with one thing and another, this took longer than I anticipated.

v3.0 is not as minimalist as initially planned: I figured there were some page elements I like too much to get rid of. Moving some of it to a static page was an option, but that is just hiding clutter, not getting rid of it. And mysteriously, I can’t get the dice (a random post generator link) to work on v3.0, but I will try my best to fix this.

Hopefully you will like the new look. But if you don’t, feel free to stare wistfully at this.

Edit, 8 January 2012: The dice are now back.

Makeover

2011-11-28T01:29:00.012Z

Next week I plan to give this blog a makeover. The idea is to make it more minimalist. For instance it now has text in three colours (not counting black); I intend to get this down to one. We want to move away from purple prose and other youthful follies, and towards a layout more befitting of lists, aphorisms and proofs of Euclidean geometry. (Is there such a thing as an excess of minimalism? We may be about to find out.)

There is much to be said for minimalism, though for obvious reasons its greatest adherents – like Master Yun-Men (A.D. 949) – tend not to say much. Among other things, it imparts an aura of profundity – an effect I have been aiming for since early infancy.

Take for instance what is reportedly the first coherent sentence I ever spoke (to a visitor who called for my father): বাবা বাজার গেছে (Father has gone to the market.) Simple, beautiful, direct. And untrue (my father had not in fact gone to the market).

So in the meantime, if you have any suggestions – features that should go, features that should stay, new features, font suggestions – please do let me know. Minimalism has its place, but it should never extend to the comments section.

Notes from a Concert

2011-11-23T00:28:00.015Z

Email

It all started about two months back, with an email from Nirmalya: Dylan and Knopfler are playing in London in November. Interested?

And what a piece of news and I said yes of course I am yes book it now yes and dream come true and loved them since I was little yes like crazy and yes I said yes I will Yes.

...Well, you get the idea.

Photo

Yes, we were standing that close.

Dylan at 70

But first, Dylan at 24, and six minutes that changed rock ’n’ roll.

Forty-six years on. Naturally, nothing this revolutionary was expected on Saturday, and nothing revolutionary occurred.

Dylan’s voice

Has changed beyond recognition

The three-note growl, they call it

And his band were too loud for my liking

Why we still bother with Bob Dylan live

I wasn’t expecting musical perfection, or to witness a seminal moment in rock history. I went for a reason as unworthy, and as simple, as this: to see Bob Dylan in the flesh.

But it was more than that. The last song of the evening was Like a Rolling Stone (for Mr. Dylan has no truck with encores). “How does it feel? How does it feel?” a thousand people shouted back at him, and for that one song alone, it was worth it.

My first Dire Straits album

was Making Movies, which I borrowed from a friend. It seems odd now to reflect that even fifteen years ago, original tapes of older music were hard to come by, at least in Calcutta, and were passed from hand to hand like rare and precious objects. In trying to record it, I accidentally erased most of Side A, including Romeo and Juliet. It would be months before we could locate another copy.

My first Dylan album
was a greatest hits compilation, also borrowed from a friend. I was listening to it late at night, louder than was strictly necessary. At first I didn’t know what to make of it.
My father walked into the room just as Dylan was launching into the chorus of Mr. Tambourine Man, and politely asked me to turn down the caterwauling. I wasn’t your typical rebellious teen – far from it – but I made up my mind, then and there, to like Bob Dylan.

Ayan on the tube

On the way home, Ayan remarked, “I’ve just been to a concert featuring two legends of rock, and you know which song is stuck in my head?”

It was this one, of course.

Asian Fail

2011-11-14T21:32:00.013Z

This quote on OHinNY instantly reminded me of Pratiti – I was her Statistics tutor for a year, and each time she left more than four marks unanswered in an exam, she would moan that she would fail (I have written elsewhere about her nerdy habits, so I will not elaborate).

I have been blogging infrequently of late because I spend most of my spare time studying for my upcoming Japanese exam. In August, just before I left Tokyo, my Japanese teacher persuaded me to sign up for an exam one level higher than my actual level. This seemed like a fun challenge at the time, but there are several factors I did not take into account:

In London I only read Japanese when I open my textbooks, whereas in Japan it was all around me.
Here there are only two people with whom I can converse in Japanese – a Japanese lawyer (the only one in our London office) and a Buddhist priest whom I have befriended.
I don’t have a teacher, and self-study requires a lot of discipline.
For the level I was foolhardy enough to sign up for, they recommend 300 class hours; as of September, I had about 80.

It doesn’t help that my attitude towards the exam fluctuates every day, sometimes every minute. Some examples:

I’ll give it my best. That way, even if I fail, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I tried.
This is hopeless. Let’s go on Facebook.
I left office after 11 pm every day this week; I can cut myself some slack.
That is an excuse. We don’t do excuses.
Effing kanji.
Do I really need to memorise the characters for 航空書簡 (Kōkūshokan = aerogram)?
This is so awesome! I love studying!
I’ll study tomorrow.
I can’t fail. The humiliation!
Let me take out my textbook. I’ll show them!
Effing kanji.

The upshot of all this is that I rarely blog, I don’t make fun weekend plans, and still I study much less than I could.

So now you know. In three weeks’ time, an Asian will take an Asian exam, and he will fail. Only, it won’t be an Asian fail. It will be a fail fail.

I Want My MTV

2011-11-03T10:48:00.007Z

While revising old chapters in my Japanese textbook, I came across a comprehension passage in the chapter on Expressing Wishes and Desires. I scanned it, just in case you like looking at foreign languages like I do, but my rough-and-ready translation is below.

Things I Want

We asked various people what they want most of all.

1. I wish I had time. I go to office, work, come back home, and the day is over. The day is too short. I wish there were 36 hours in a day. (Woman, 25)

2. I wish I had my own bank. If I had a bank, I could take out money whenever I wanted and buy things I like. (Boy, 10)

3. I wish I had a potion which would make me young. When I was young, I did not study much. If I could be young again, I would study hard and get a good job. (Woman, 60)

4. I wish I had ‘humour’. If I make conversation, my wife says, “You will be busy tomorrow, won’t you? Go to sleep early.” The children tell me, “Father, we’ve heard this story about three times already.” I wish I could be more interesting. (Man, 43)

5. I wish there were another one of me. I have to go to school every day. If there were two of me, while one ‘me’ was studying, the other ‘me’ could do things I like. I wish there were two of me. (Girl, 14)

I remember learning this chapter back in July. My Japanese teacher had me frame sentences of the form “[noun] ga hoshii desu,” which means “I wish I had [noun].” This form is only used for things. It should not, for instance, be used to say, “I want to go to Iceland,” which in fact I do want.

And the funny thing is, I could not readily think of anything that I want, and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

So, what do you want?

Gift Wrap Wrap

2011-10-23T22:11:00.002+01:00

The souvenir shop for this exhibition had gift wrap with prints of prize-winning photos. My friend thought they would make for good posters, and bought one as a gift. I suggested that she buy another gift wrap to gift wrap the gift wrap. But she ignored my suggestion completely.

It is my fate not to be appreciated in my lifetime.

Lotus

2011-10-16T15:43:00.008+01:00

I like water-bodies, and I like dim-sum. No reason, then, not to like Lotus – this Chinese restaurant in the Docklands.

So you think a floating restaurant is gimmicky? Well, I like gimmicks too!

For Poor People

2011-10-15T08:54:00.006+01:00

I was filing emails at work yesterday when I found this:

At first I thought it was just another email to cheer up people who are working late. But 11 March 2011 was the day of the Tōhoku earthquake. Many people, that is, even more than usual, were stuck in office because the trains were down.

Truck on Lake Road, Kolkata

2011-10-03T22:04:00.002+01:00

Are you a struggling mathematician? Do you find you are unable to prove theorems? Or worse still, when you do prove them, do you find that your proofs are unsound?

If so, help is at hand.

British Humour

2011-10-02T06:39:00.004+01:00

Sign on perimeter wall, Westferry Road, London:

I don’t profess to be an expert on the subject, but I thought the whole point of British humour is that you don’t talk about it.

Life in General

2011-09-22T18:38:00.002+01:00

The weekends pass really quickly, but then the weekdays pass quickly too, so I don’t complain. Look, it’s almost Friday!

Recycling of False Tooth

2011-09-12T23:31:00.001+01:00

A Guidebook for Sorting Recyclables and Waste of Minato-ku, the ward where I used to live, somehow found its way into my luggage and travelled with me to London. I was reading it yesterday – such is the exciting nature of my weekends – and while a garbage disposal booklet is not exactly a page-turner, I found it strangely fascinating.

There are precise guidelines for disposing of every conceivable household item, and then some. For instance:

foamed nets for fruits (wash first if it is dirty, put in a transparent or semi-transparent bag when disposing)
hangers made of plastics (you can dispose of them as recyclables even if the hooks are metallic)
lighters (put out after using up the content, putting it in a separate bag from other incombustible waste and writing “Danger” on it)
motorcycle (find a store showing “Motorcycle Recycling” logo or its designated collection agent)
corrugated cardboard (paste one ticket of 10 liters to 2 mandarin orange box sized cardboard, bind with string and take out)

There are also separate sections such as Please, join the group collection and Why not check the furniture recycling display?

My favourite, though, is Recycling of false tooth.

False tooth can be recycled and utilized for social welfare. After cleaning and sterilizing in boiled water, etc., wrap it in rather thick paper and put it in false tooth collection box installed at each Regional City Office. Metal part of the collected false tooth will be donated to Minato City Social Welfare Association and UNICEF.

London, 8:20 pm

2011-09-09T22:05:00.005+01:00

Working late is seldom fun, but I am sometimes thankful for the nice view from my window.

Or to paraphrase an earlier post: he doesn’t have a very exciting life, but he does have an office with a view.

Londonising

2011-09-08T08:50:00.005+01:00

This week I relocated from Tokyo to London. I had lived in London for six months before the Tokyo stint, but it seems six months in Tokyo has reconditioned me in subtle ways.

On the plane, a Japanese flight attendant woke me up to ask, “Would you like a drink?” From my vacant look and incoherent stammering – this always happens if I am awakened suddenly – it was obvious that I hadn’t comprehended. She repeated the question in Japanese, by which time intelligent functions had kicked in. So I replied in Japanese that I would like a Coke, please. And she looked slightly perplexed that someone – evidently a foreigner – could speak Japanese but not English. For the rest of the flight, she solicitously spoke to me in Japanese only.

Unlike the Tokyo Metro, the London Underground, for the most part, has no mobile coverage. But coming from Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line, there is a 23-minute overground section between Hounslow Central and Barons Court. In this span, someone’s phone rang. I wheeled round in shock because in Tokyo this would be a gross breach of etiquette; then I realised no one else had raised an eyebrow.

On the tube-station escalators, I was standing on the left, as they do in Tokyo. I saw some people standing on the right, and said to myself, “Hah, tourists.” It took me a few seconds to realise that of course it was I who was standing on the wrong side. In London, for historical reasons, the convention is to stand on the right.

And most recently, when leaving office last night, I pressed 1 on the lift and got off one storey above ground, because Japan follows the American convention of floor numbering.

The reconditioning process will probably be complete in a week or so, whereupon life will become smoother, but I feel I will have lost a tiny whit of my coolness. Thankfully, I have vast reserves to fall back on.

Ranking Japan

2011-09-03T11:35:00.003+01:00

Ranked lists and shopping are both popular in Japan, so I suppose it was inevitable that something like ranKing ranQueen would come to pass.

The philosophy behind this Tokyo chain store is simple and compelling. Let us say you wanted to buy nose-hair trimmers. Now why would you settle for just any nose-hair trimmers? You would want to take your pick from the three best-selling nose-hair trimmers in Tokyo. So, analysing sales data from various department stores and research companies, ranKing ranQueen sells only the 3, 5 or 10 best-selling items in a mind-boggling range of products. And not just the usual stuff like best-selling DVDs or mobile phones: think tooth picks, pasta sauce, party masks, bottled tea, hula hoops.

The Japanese fascination with ranked lists extends to tourism, as evidenced by the array of Top 3 lists. There is even a tongue-in-cheek list of Japan’s top 3 disappointments (sandai gakkari), which includes the Sapporo Clock Tower.

I was in Sapporo recently, and of course I had to go and see the tower. I must say that while it wasn’t the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life, I wasn’t disappointed either. The building is quite fetching in an understated way, the chimes are melodious, and the compound has shady trees. Which brings me to the question: If you expect, indeed hope, to be disappointed but are not, have you or have you not been disappointed?

Today is my last day in Japan; I fly back to London tomorrow. I have loved my six months here.

Ito-ya, Ginza

2011-08-28T15:42:00.004+01:00

No one does stationery quite like the Japanese. And here, at Ito-ya’s flagship store in Ginza, there are nine floors of it!

I was tempted to quote Firdausi (If there is a heaven on earth / It is here, it is here, it is here). But in truth, my feelings about Ito-ya are more akin to those of the haiku poet Bashō on beholding Matsushima:

Matsushima ah!
A-ah, Matsushima, ah!
Matsushima, ah!

Notes from Okinawa

2011-08-26T17:31:00.015+01:00

Some anecdotes from a diving and snorkelling holiday in Akajima in the Okinawa prefecture, with friends from work.

We saw flying fish from our dive-boat, and this excited me as much as anything we saw underwater. There are no two ways about it: animals that can both swim and fly are cool.

Our diving guide spoke only Japanese. Before each dive, she would brief us about the dive plan, attractions and dangers. I could follow most things she said, but I wouldn’t be able to understand something like “establish neutral buoyancy,” or “the sting of the blue-ringed octopus is potentially fatal.” My friends, who are Japanese, were happy to translate, but it hurt my pride to ask them for help.

After each day’s diving, we gathered in the dining hall of the dive shop to fill our dive logs. It had an extensive library on local fish, coral, shells and reptiles. Everything was in Japanese, but fortunately the encyclopaedias had taxonomic names in the Latin alphabet. So the exercise went like this: each plant or animal we had seen would be identified (occasionally after some debate) by reference to an observer’s guide, then someone would look it up for me in the relevant encyclopaedia, then I would google the taxonomic name to find the common English name and copy it in my dive log. This was almost as much fun as the actual diving.

When cycling to Nishihama beach, the most famous beach on the island, we came to a fork in the road. Shun said “Go right.” I asked him how he knew, and he said “Just feel the beach.” It was undeniably a Quote, but I am not sure whether he could in fact “feel the beach,” or had looked at a map beforehand. His credibility took a hit the previous day after he claimed that he fought an octopus underwater.

We dived about ten days after a typhoon, which is when the water is apparently clearest. On top of that, we enjoyed cloudless skies and an upwelling, which make for excellent diving conditions. Underwater visibility was an incredible 40 metres. Experienced divers were shaking their heads in disbelief, saying they had rarely seen anything like it. Shun, who knows how sad I am to be leaving Japan, said it was Japan’s farewell gift to me.

Shinkansen

2011-08-17T16:13:00.008+01:00

I love the Japan Railways Shinkansen (bullet train) network as much as I love the Indian Railways, but the two could not be more different. Indian trains may be late or may make up time. The average annual delay for the Tōkaidō Shinkansen – including all delays due to human error, earthquakes, typhoons and snow – is thirty seconds.

Shinkansen leaving Kyōto station

Shinkansen simply means ‘new main line’ but it is a poetic word. It just sounds... fast.

There are three types of trains on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line. The slowest (only in relative terms, for it has a top speed of 285 km/h) is called Kodama, the Japanese word for echo. The next faster is called Hikari, meaning light. And fastest of all is the Nozomi, which means wish or hope.

Got Milk?

2011-07-24T14:53:00.006+01:00

Let’s say you went to a store and wanted to find out if they have milk. Most people would ask, Do you have milk? In English, framing a negative question (Do you not have milk?) is generally considered impolite.

Japanese is the opposite. You would ask, Gyūnyū ga arimasen ka? (literally, Do you not have milk?) Using the negative form is more indirect and polite, showing that you are prepared for a negative answer.

Singlish takes yet another approach. As Wikitravel notes:

[T]he local dialect with its heavy Chinese influences may appear brusque or even rude, but saying "You want beer or not?" is in fact more polite in Chinese than asking if you want beer, after all, the person asking you the question is offering you a choice, not making a demand.

Tokyo, 4:25 am

2011-07-18T06:49:00.005+01:00

I am in Japan only for another 48 days. I will be sorry to leave.

Chiyoda-ku Area Street Map

2011-07-17T14:34:00.004+01:00

There is something oddly touching about the translation.

This is Language Log

2011-07-13T04:54:00.009+01:00

The folks at Language Log use an amusing phrasal template in some of their posts:

This is Language Log, not X Log.

where X is a seemingly unrelated and often obscure topic.

This is usually employed when, after briefly discussing X, they introduce a linguistic angle. It is used often enough to be familiar to regular readers, but not so often as to be annoying.

As far as I can tell, it was coined by Mark Liberman way back in July 2005, with the innocuous This is Language Log, not Cycling Log. But then Geoff Pullum took the ball and ran with it as only he can.

Here are some examples.

This is not an exhaustive list; just a few of my favourites. But this is The World According to Sroyon, not the Let’s All Obsess Over Language Log Blog.

木

2011-07-03T09:14:00.008+01:00

In the last class, my Japanese teacher reviewed my performance so far, and defined future goals. Her ‘strengths and weaknesses review’ was particularly entertaining. My weaknesses, according to her, are: (a) I am weak in kanji and (b) I have too many hobbies.

(b) of course is something neither she nor I can do anything about, but (a) can be remedied. So my targets, as set by my teacher, are to learn 300 kanji by November 2011, 500 by June 2012 and 1,000 by November 2012.

The Japanese writing system is a combination of three scripts; sometimes all three are used in the same sentence. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic systems with about 50 characters each; kanji is a logographic system with over 2,000 characters in common use. To make matters worse, a single kanji may, depending on context, mean different things; some common kanji have ten or more possible readings.

So far I have got by, knowing only hiragana and katakana. This enables me to read station names, signs written for children, my Japanese textbooks, foreign words written in Japanese, and most things on a restaurant menu.

Kanji is fiendishly difficult, and I am in Japan for only two more months after which I will probably never need to use Japanese. In view of this, a less harsh critic may have forgiven my kanji deficiencies. But my Japanese teacher is not a less harsh critic. Hence, the targets.

Kanji, to me, are like trees. I cherish their existence and I think the world would be a poorer place without them. I appreciate their beauty and their wealth of secret meaning. But apart from a few, very common ones, I cannot recognise them. When I see a kanji, I appreciatively say to myself, “Ah, a kanji,” and I leave it at that.

But last week, we started on a systematic programme of learning kanji. And pleasingly, the first one she taught me was 木, pronounced ki or moku, and meaning – perhaps you have guessed it already – ‘tree’ or ‘wood’.

Hokkaido

2011-06-23T10:32:00.014+01:00

The Himalayan town of Leh sits at an elevation of 3,500 metres above sea level. The extreme conditions and the rarefied air can pose a health risk, so all over Leh there are warnings and advisories. We saw one such warning sign at the 257 Army Transit Camp, where we stayed when we went trekking in Ladakh last year.

“Do not try to be Gama in the place of lama,” by unspoken agreement, instantly became our motto for the trek.

Of course, we had no clue what Gama means. We wondered if it was a Ladakhi word for blasé, or a person who drinks very little water, or a foolhardy person, or just a plain idiot. Internet searches produced tantalising leads but no real answers. And throughout the trek, we repeated the phrase at every opportunity and it cracked us up every time. (The mystery was solved months later, when someone read Kaushik’s blog post and emailed him with the answer.)

A serendipitous slogan like that can make a trip even more fun. It is almost impossible to pin down what makes a good trip-slogan, but there are some general principles. The trip-slogan has to be brief. It must of course be about the journey or the destination. You have to encounter or come up with it during, or while planning the trip. Rhyme and humour work well, as does a certain quality of mystical inscrutability. Note, however, that the trip-slogan is not to be confused with the trip-quote. The trip-quote can be equally memorable, but it is more common; instances include Tewary’s azad panchhi quote, and Saha’s famous musings (in Puruliya) on Man’s Purpose on Earth. The trip-slogan is rarer, so not every trip will have one, but that is part of the appeal.

A friend and I are planning a trip to Hokkaido in August. We haven’t yet booked tickets, and it is not even certain whether the plan will eventually work out, but I emailed a Japanese colleague to ask about Hokkaido, and he wrote:

You should remember the famous key word "Hokkaido ha Dekkaido" which means Hokkaido has very big size.

If Hokkaido ha Dekkaido is not a trip-slogan, I don’t know what is.

11 Nights

2011-06-13T16:21:00.021+01:00

While 11 does not quite have the zing of 1001, it is at least of the form 10ⁿ+1.

Saha once did a (discontinued) series called The Craziest Places I Have Slept In. Some day, I will do a similar series of posts myself. But meanwhile:

None of the places where I spent the last 11 nights were particularly crazy, but each is interesting in its own way.

1.	An economy-class seat on a Boeing 767-300 (Tokyo-Bangkok and 9 days later, Bangkok-Tokyo): 2 nights
2.	Friend’s room (Singapore): 1 night
3.	Friend’s couch (Singapore): 1 night
4.	Friend’s flat, futon on window-ledge (Hong Kong): 3 nights
5.	New Road Guest House (Bangkok): 1 night
6.	The Peninsula (Bangkok): 2 nights
7.	My flat (Tokyo): 1 night

[1] was not cool. I sleep soundly on all moving vehicles, except airplanes. On my flight back to Tokyo, I got an inkling why. We ran into some turbulence over the East China Sea, and oddly enough, I slept well while it lasted. Planes are too smooth; to really sleep well I need the sensation of motion.

[2] and [3] are actually in the same flat. My friend was away for a day, so I commandeered his room. Then he came back and I was relegated to the couch.

Even aside from the innate coolness of a futon on a window-ledge, [4] was incredibly nice. The flat is on the 22nd floor. When I woke up, I could see skyscrapers and mountains. Or, if I was facing the other way, a slightly messy living room.

[5] and [6] are an interesting contrast. Our firm had an event in Bangkok, and they booked [6] for 2 nights. I wanted to spend an extra day in the city, so I made my own arrangements. [5] and [6] are only a few hundred metres apart, but the difference in room rates is many thousand baht. New Road Guest House’s page on hostelworld says:

We have listened to our customers and are beginning an integrated pest management program. Bed bugs be gone!

At the Peninsula, bed bugs are not an issue.

Temple Street

2011-06-09T11:17:00.007+01:00

Long-time readers of this blog may recall a post about street chess at Gariahat. Now the median strip of a busy thoroughfare may be an interesting place to play chess, even a very good place, but according to Time magazine, it is not the best place. For that, you must go to Temple Street, Hong Kong.

The author of the piece did a singularly good job of conjuring up the sleaziness and disrepute of Temple Street:

Toward dusk, stall holders lay out their counterfeit wares, fortune-tellers set up their tables, and—in the square outside the street's eponymous temple—the xiangqi players unfold their boards and take on all comers.

Who could fail to be moved by that? So, when I visited Hong Kong nearly seven years after reading the piece, Temple Street was high on my list of places to see.

And it was a fascinating place indeed. The Time correspondent did not exaggerate the allure of Temple Street (OK maybe just a bit, but a little exoticism never did any harm). It is the kind of place that makes you cast sharp backward glances and check that your wallet is still there.

But I will say one thing about the honest merchants of Temple Street: whatever minor shortcomings they may have in other respects, no one can accuse them of beating around the bush.

Friendship

2011-06-07T18:19:00.004+01:00

“I must say, you have the coolest friends ever!”

“Really? I actually think your friends are cooler.”

“Wait, I have an idea.”

I saw this sign on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong. The dialogue, of course, is fictitious.

Subway Phonaesthetics

2011-05-28T09:48:00.008+01:00

Out of all the subway systems I have travelled on (Calcutta, Delhi, London, Istanbul, Tokyo, Kyoto), I think Tokyo Metro has by far the nicest sounding announcements. My favourite is the announcement for Aoyama-itchōme. I love the gliding vowels of Aoyama flowing into the geminate ch of itchōme, the ‘long vowel’ ō and the gentle, abbreviated me.

I made a recording today, and if it doesn’t sound as nice as I just made it out to be, you can blame it on the audio recording on my camera.

This is the romaji text of the announcement:

Tsugi wa Aoyama-itchōme. Aoyama-itchōme desu. Norikae no go annai desu. Hanzōmon-sen, Toei Ōedo-sen wa onorikae kudasai.

A literal translation would be as follows:

The next one is Aoyama-itchōme. It’s Aoyama-itchōme. Transfer information: please change here for the Hanzōmon line and the Toei Ōedo line.

Of course, the translation fails to convey some information, especially the level of politeness and formality expressed in the Japanese announcement. Politeness can translate in interesting ways. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about a Japanese maths professor who used to tell his students, “Please let n be an integer.”

A ploy to encourage reader participation: What is your favourite subway announcement? And do you like it for the sound, the associations, or something else?

Books Kinokuniya, Shinjuku

2011-05-19T15:43:00.003+01:00

Well, in Japan, so is everything else.

Speaking in Tongues

2011-05-15T08:07:00.013+01:00

There are more things in Shinjuku than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Fascinating things can be found in the unlikeliest of places, like in the TOEFL and spoken-English learning materials section on the seventh floor of Books Kinokuniya.

Besides the usual books and DVDs, the shelves also have speakers simultaneously playing various audio CDs for learning English – some for beginners and some for advanced learners, some for tourists and some for businesspeople. So while one speaker blurts out random words and phrases – ‘sidewalk’, ‘square’, ‘as always’ – others play disconnected sentences. I stood there and jotted down a few.

The fitness industry has seen rapid growth in recent years.
She was puzzled by the strange message on her answering machine.
Is there a post office nearby?
Although the economy is improving, the exchange rate continues to fluctuate.
Stan was happy to hear some pleasant news for a change.
This ice-cream has a strawberry flavour.

Each one of these could potentially be Famous Last Words, or the Central Creed of a Modern-Day Religion, or any number of profound and quotidian things. But – and this is the beauty of it – before you can meditate on the infinite possibilities of any one sentence, the speaker has moved on to the next, and three other speakers have played other sentences in the meantime.

After a while, the speakers began to exercise a hypnotic effect on me, and the spell was broken only when a shop assistant politely informed me that closing time was in five minutes.

* * *

Last Friday my Japanese teacher told me, Sroyon-san wa conjugation ga jouzu desu ne. (You’re good at conjugation.)

Seldom have I received an odder compliment, but it cheered me up like anything. I should get a T-shirt saying, Don’t mess with me. I can conjugate.

* * *

When learning Japanese, I first memorised a number of useful phrases by rote; more general vocabulary and rules of grammar and syntax only came later. So it would often happen – and it still happens, though less frequently – that I would say something in Japanese and the other person, thinking I am a fluent speaker, would reply with a long, fast and complex string of Japanese which left me totally baffled.

Of course, children don’t learn languages like that. They don’t speak well-formed sentences with adult inflection before they form at least a basic idea of what the words mean and how they fit together. Or at least, most children don’t.

My friend Arjun’s childhood is rife with entertaining incidents. One evening, his mother’s colleague came to visit. Arjun was watching an American soap in another room. At one point on the show, one of the actors said something that created quite a stir. The sentence somehow stuck in Arjun’s head, and the dramatic effect it produced in the soap impressed him favourably.

So Arjun Sarkar, four years and six months old, walked into the living room, looked his mum’s colleague in the eye, and told her, “Your husband is sleeping with another woman.”

It did indeed create a sensation. His mother dragged him away and gave him a spanking he would never forget.

Yasaka-Dōri, Kyōto

2011-05-10T15:38:00.002+01:00

Fair enough.

Backpackers Hostel K’s House, Kyoto

2011-05-08T01:41:00.008+01:00

I could not have asked for more amusing roommates at my Kyōto hostel – one is a programmer and the other is a physicist. And last night we were all in an exceptionally philosophical mood. I don’t know whether it was the large quantities of beverage we imbibed after dinner (coffee for me, tea for the physicist, beer for the programmer), or the fact that we had spent much of our day strolling down Philosopher’s Path. But for whatever reason, we were waxing philosophical on everything from manga to plasma turbulence.

And after touching lightly on such topics as fish-eye lenses, tea-cosies and Eurobonds, we moved on to singing the praises of our hostel. It is cheap, friendly, conveniently located and immaculately clean. The staff understand the needs and aspirations of backpackers. They organise free movie nights and walking tours. The information board at the reception has all kinds of useful information – not just the usual maps and time-tables, but also Calendar for this month’s shrine flea markets, Legends and folklore of Kyoto and It’s Raining! Where Should I Go?

But what endeared us most to Backpackers Hostel K’s House, Kyoto is that they provide lots of things for free, which are as follows:
• Tea
• Coffee
• Wi-Fi
• Alarm clock
• Books, maps and DVDs
• Padlocks
• Board games

When we had drawn up the list, the programmer remarked, “What more do you need as a traveller?”

“In fact,” said I, going further, “what more do you need in life?”

We all nodded in solemn agreement, but it was well past midnight, and – as I mentioned earlier – we had all drunk more than was good for us.

Bookshelf

2011-04-29T18:05:00.025+01:00

The mountains, islands, beaches and historic towns around Tokyo provide many weekend travel options for the careworn city-dweller. Every weekend for the past few weeks I have been darting off somewhere, so I thought it would be prudent to temporarily limit these excesses.

With these motives I decided to spend all of yesterday, which was a public holiday, indoors.

The experiment, I was swiftly convinced, does not bear repetition. To such depths of boredom did I descend that I thought of taking a photo of my bookshelf, and blogging about it. Why any reader would wish to see a photo of my bookshelf, much less read about it, is more than I can say. But others have done it before, so why not me? And if I cannot ramble in the mountains, I can at least ramble on my blog.

When I left Calcutta in August 2010, I took only four books with me.

I would have taken two more – the two volumes of Rabindra Rachanavali that contain Lipika and Kshanika. But that would have left an incomplete set at home, which is unacceptable.

The first book I did take was Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel (3) – a parting gift from Myshkin’s friends. They believed – and rightly so – that in the new career on which I was about to embark, in the unforgiving world of commercial law, this philosophical tome would stand me in good stead. The philosophy, such as it is, is summed up in a blurb on the back cover: To err is human. To cover it up is weasel. The Weasel Zone is where your co-workers, bosses, salespeople, CEOs, human resource executives, family and loved ones reside – “the giant grey area between good moral behaviour and outright criminality.”

The second, Ghostwritten (13), is the book I was reading at the time. It is by David Mitchell, but more about him anon.

The other two were books I had read already. I took Europe (15) because it is my favourite travel book in the world. And I took The World of Psmith (28). If I could take only one book with me, I would have chosen The World of Psmith.

The other books have been acquired since then. Some I purchased, some (1, 7 and 11) were gifts and some (17, 19 and 20) were freebies. You can tell that 17 is a freebie because I would never willingly buy a book with a title like that. The sheets of paper sticking out of the book are my Hiragana and Katakana practice sheets.

Many of these books were purchased from Foyles, Charing Cross Road, which narrowly edges out Daunt, Marylebone as my favourite bookstore in London. What Am I Doing Here (6) was bought at a second-hand bookstore in Bath.

Three books (9, 23 and 26) were purchased online. Saha bought them for me, because I did not have a UK bank account at the time. The books were delivered to Saha’s office; his boss saw Species of Spaces and Other Places (26) on his desk, and thought (wrongly) that Saha is an intellectual.

Two of these books have Footnotes: Searching for Order (25) – a history of plant taxonomy from 370 BC to AD 1705, and Modern Legal Drafting (20), which is an altogether more amusing book than the title would suggest.

I could go on to systematically write anecdotes about every book on the shelf, but there is a limit to the reader’s patience (and mine). Not all the books deserve a special mention anyway, but there are two which certainly do.

Last Chance to See (2) made me seriously think about becoming an environmental lawyer. If one day I chuck everything up and take to spending most of my waking moments hugging trees and engaging in similar pursuits, you will know that Douglas Adams is to blame.

And The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (14) by David Mitchell is the reason I am in Japan. Our firm gives us the option to work for six months in one of their international offices, and when I indicated my preferences, I was reading this book.

The preferences I gave were Tokyo, Prague, Amsterdam and New York – in that order. When I showed her my list, a Czech trainee told me, “If you get Prague, and if you go there and tell them it was above New York in your list, they will put up your statue in Wenceslas Square.” Had she told me this before, and had I not been reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I may now have been in Prague.

Funny things, books.

Kyoto

2011-04-26T15:40:00.006+01:00

What does Kyoto mean to you? When you think of Kyoto, perhaps you think of Zen gardens, moss gardens and tea-houses? Or maybe it calls to mind temples and carp pools? Geishas and cherry blossom? Nintendo?

Here is a conversation I had with a lawyer friend of mine, and this (though I have mentioned it before) is why I love lawyers:

Me: I have a six-day holiday next week.
Friend: Nice! Are you going somewhere?
Me: Probably Kyoto.
Friend: Ah. The protocol place.

A Beekeeper and a Song

2011-04-17T13:36:00.004+01:00

Takao san, less than an hour by train from Shinjuku, makes for a pleasant day hike away from the madness of Tokyo. If you are looking for a challenging climb, Takao San, at 599 m, is not the mountain for you. But it has ancient cedars, wildflowers, waterfalls, secluded shrines, a variety of wildlife and – legend has it – resident tengu (goblins from Japanese mythology).

Climbing always makes me think of a beekeeper and a song.

We met the beekeeper in Wales. Four of us – friends from university – were mountain-biking near the town of Machynlleth when we went off the trail and got lost. After going miles without seeing another human soul, we came upon a bee farm and next to it, a cottage.

The cottage was inhabited by a ginger-haired young man who ran the farm, commercially producing honey and at the same time studying bee biology and behaviour. Saha and I told him we were lost, and he explained how to find the bike trail. But before that, in a five-minute conversation, we told each other the story of our lives.

Saha and I are from similar backgrounds – we went to school and university in Calcutta, and joined law firms in London. The beekeeper grew up in Machynlleth, which has a population of just over 2,000. He went to university in Cardiff and now, in a beautiful and remote valley, he observes bees and harvests honey. And helps lost bikers find their way.

We told the beekeeper we were planning to climb Cadair Idris. It is not far from Machynlleth and quite a popular climb, so we were surprised when he said he had never climbed it himself. We asked him why, and he said, “I like being at the farm.”

And it made me think of a Kimya Dawson song, and that is why I will forever associate climbing, beekeepers, and these lines from Hadlock Padlock: I wonder if this climbing that you city people do / Ever leads you to a place with such a pretty view.

Karaoke

2011-04-09T02:45:00.006+01:00

Thirteen finance lawyers – seven of them Japanese, two English guys, two Singaporeans, a Chinese girl and me – after work on a Friday night (or more accurately, Saturday morning), in a Karaoke Box in downtown Tokyo. And which is the one song that everyone knows?

Hey Jude? Knocking on Heaven’s Door? Smells Like Teen Spirit? A seminal moment in musical history, an evergreen classic?

The answer is simpler and funnier: Backstreet Boys. I Want It That Way.

Politeness

2011-04-06T14:44:00.009+01:00

Omikuji instructions at Sensō-ji, an ancient Buddhist temple in Asakusa:

Long-time readers of this blog may recall that Buddhist temples and I go back a long way.

Hasselblad

2011-04-03T16:49:00.010+01:00

When I went to Ueno Kōen this weekend to see cherry blossoms, I wasn’t expecting to see something even more beautiful – for, truth be told, few things are more beautiful than cherry blossoms. But as I stood on the shore of Shinobazu-Ike trying to take photos of tree branches silhouetted against the setting sun (not with much success), I noticed a girl trying to shoot the same scene with a medium-format camera. Curious, I decided to take a closer look (at the camera, not the girl). And then I saw it was a Hasselblad. With a Carl Zeiss lens.

I had never seen a Hasselblad before, but I knew about the marque. It was my father who first told me about Hasselblad, before I was even old enough to use a camera, and he spoke of it in hushed, reverential tones. Not everyone is a fan of the waist-level finder which is a standard feature of the Hasselblad medium-format (the inimitable Cartier-Bresson, a lifelong Leica devotee, once said, “If the good Lord had wanted us to take photographs with a 6 by 6, he would have put eyes in our belly.”) But for many photographers, Hasselblad is the Rolls-Royce, the Moët & Chandon of medium-format cameras.

So I asked her if I could look through the viewfinder. She agreed immediately, and extended the camera towards me.

Now my Japanese, while good for asking for directions and ordering at restaurants, is not yet good enough to convey what, to me, the Hasselblad stands for. Still, what I saw at first did not impress me much – the image looked blurred, and the contrast wasn’t great. But then she adjusted the focus ring. The branches which I had been trying to photograph, dark and crisp against the orange sky, swam into focus. The world became a more beautiful place. And at that point, words became unnecessary.

Shunbun no Hi

2011-03-21T06:54:00.004Z

Today is a public holiday in Japan – Shunbun no Hi or Spring Equinox Day, a day for the admiration of nature and living things. It is not yet time for Hanami, but in the parks and cemeteries of Tokyo, the first cherry blossoms have started to bloom. To celebrate Spring Equinox, here is a photo I took last Sunday at Hama-rikyū Onshi Teien, a surrealistically beautiful garden in the heart of Tokyo.

Bicycle Parking (OR Why I love the Japanese)

2011-03-18T02:06:00.006Z

The Japanese have a reputation for being exceedingly particular. I appreciate this quality immensely; maybe I am a bit like that myself. But sometimes, they surpass themselves.

I keep my bicycle in our hotel’s bicycle parking lot, and they assigned me a number and a stand. I found this amusing, not least because there are few bicycles and plenty of empty stands. A few days back I got a letter from the front desk saying that my stand was broken, and requesting me to move my bike to another stand. I could see nothing wrong with my old stand, but I complied.

A few days later, I got another letter.They also attached a copy of the previous letter “for my reference”.And lastly, they attached a diagram.

Now perhaps you have been following the news for the last week (or perhaps, like me, you have been watching MTV), but Japan has not been going through the best of times. Thousands of lives were lost in the Tōhoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami, thousands more were left homeless. There are power shortages and fuel shortages. Fears of nuclear radiation are spreading across the nation. But Japanese hotel staff still find time to write detailed instructions – incredibly detailed instructions – for parking a bicycle.

Shibuya, Ginza

2011-03-12T17:42:00.007Z

Oh. For a second I thought they were real.

These cats, however, were definitely real. Wearing frilly collars, they perched on a street sign while scores of people milled around taking photos. In Tokyo I see more inexplicable things every day than I have seen anywhere else.

Which is why I wander the streets quite a lot. Maybe one day I’ll run into the girl who loves to levitate.

8.9

2011-03-11T12:36:00.002Z

OK, no more flippancy about earthquakes.

Eventful Days

2011-03-10T13:38:00.005Z

There has seldom been a dull moment since I touched down in Tokyo. On Monday it snowed, taking everyone by surprise. Tuesday was my first day at work in the Tokyo office. Around lunchtime on Wednesday there was an earthquake. This occasioned much less surprise than the snow. And today, on the walls of Tameike-Sannō underground station, I saw what could only be a depiction of – of all things – the Taj Mahal.

Sunday: Extract 7

2011-03-06T16:11:00.002Z

Sorry, no Extract 7. I missed the midnight deadline, plus I am getting bored of this game now. Before you jump in and point out that Extracts 2 to 4 also appear to have been published a day late, allow me to explain.

Saturday: Extract 6

2011-03-05T13:19:00.004Z

Extract 6 is from Conversation:

OK, enjoy Tokyo.
—Random stranger in Aoyama, Tokyo

This is the sixth of seven posts in the Extracts series. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Friday: Extract 5

2011-03-04T09:05:00.005Z

Extract 5 is from the internets:

“Everyone,” she repeated through slightly clenched teeth, “has to be counted.”
—Globe and Mail, Census in India

This is the fifth of seven posts in the Extracts series. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Thursday: Extract 4

2011-03-03T23:34:00.005Z

Extract 4 is from Packaging:

With a great breakfast inside us, we feel we can do just about anything: change the nation’s eating habits, revolutionise farming, and look sexy while line dancing.
—Rude Health Daily Oats Porridge package

This is the fourth of seven posts in the Extracts series. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Wednesday: Extract 3

2011-03-02T16:24:00.007Z

Extract 3 is from Work Document:

Although financial markets have shown some degree of stabilization and economic recovery has continued in 2010, the recovery has been fragile and uncertainty about future developments of the market remains.
—Base Prospectus for a €30bn EMTN Programme

This is the third of seven posts in the Extracts series. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Tuesday: Extract 2

2011-03-01T23:30:00.009Z

Extract 2 is from Public Sign:

Please refrain from smoking in this area as the children can see and smell you.
—The Little Unicorn Childcare Centre, Canary Wharf

This is the second of seven posts in the Extracts series. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Monday: Extract 1

2011-02-28T00:29:00.012Z

This is the first of seven posts in the Extracts series. Every day, I will post a one-sentence extract from something I have read or heard in the course of that day.

The extracts will be from different sources. I will choose them at random, so they will not necessarily be intelligent, memorable, informative or funny. Even by the consistently puerile standards of this blog, this is an exercise in puerility. In the comments section you can, if you want, post extracts from what you have read/heard today.

Extract 1 is from Book (Fiction):

The municipal stadium was deserted—not a single living dead to be seen.
—Nicolas Dickner, Apocalypse for Beginners

Work Visa

2011-02-23T01:52:00.006Z

Tourist visas are fundamentally cooler than work visas. A work visa declares that you are a wage-slave, while a tourist visa says that you are – not to put too fine a point on it – a tourist.

Having said that, descriptions on work visas are generally quite flattering. Mine, for instance, is a UK Tier 2 work visa, which means that I am “a skilled worker who fills a gap in the workforce that cannot be filled by a settled worker.”

But I got a Japan work visa yesterday, and it is so inconceivably cool that it makes gap-filling skilled workers look pedestrian. It says that I am a – wait for it – Specialist in Humanities/International Services. That’s right! A Specialist in Humanities-slash-International frikkin’ Services. And if that were not enough, I am authorised to “engage in service, which requires knowledge pertinent to jurisprudence, economics, sociology or other human science fields or to engage in service which requires specific ways of thought or sensitivity based on the experience with foreign culture.”

What I will in fact be doing in Tokyo is securitising the hell out of everything and helping rich companies get richer. But the visa makes me sound like a paragon of rectitude and goodness, reforming economies and defending human rights and generally spreading light and joy. It almost makes me want to live up to that ideal, but somehow I suspect I may not have it in me.

The least I could do is to dedicate my blog, such as it is, to the service of mankind. And here I am, writing a post where I essentially do nothing else but gloat about a visa.

Excess Baggage

2011-02-20T01:50:00.008Z

I am moving to Tokyo for six months, and the law firm arranged for some of my belongings to be shipped in a big metal trunk. The trunk was shipped yesterday while I leave two weeks later.

Packing the trunk was an interesting exercise – I had to sort my stuff into Things I Need in the Next Two Weeks, and Things I Don’t Need in the Next Two Weeks.

So what went in the trunk?

Books
Things I’ll need only in Japan (like a plug adapter)
Things I use infrequently, but which are important nonetheless (like my sleeping bag)
Things for seasonal use (like my sandals – not my footwear of choice in London in February)
Some things which (I realised) I don’t really need at all.

I was pleased to see that there wasn’t too much of that last category. This is not because I am exceptionally austere; I just don’t like superfluity.

I did not have a lot of luggage when I moved from Calcutta to London, and in the six months I have spent here, my worldly possessions have not increased by much – I’ve bought a t-shirt, a casserole, a pair of walking boots, an overcoat, a backpack and several books. And a plant, which I am leaving behind.

The trunk they sent was huge. I had guessed it would be, when HR very apologetically told us that it will hold ‘only about 82 kilos’ (everything I own taken together weighs about half that). But when it arrived, it surpassed all my expectations. I could ship myself in that trunk, if I wanted. I would even have room for a book to read on the way.

Istanbul Top 10 (with 9 missing entries)

2011-02-04T10:29:00.008Z

Over a month has elapsed since my Istanbul trip, and much water has flown under the Galata Bridge. But I thought the trip called for more than one throwaway post. And perhaps the delay is not such a big deal after all: Istanbul has never been a city in a hurry.

The plan was to do an Istanbul Top 10 post. Over the incredible period of one entire month, I made a list, added and deleted bits, reordered it, wrote and rewrote the entries, to the point where I was sick of looking at it. This morning, I decided to take drastic steps. I struck out all the bits I didn’t like, an exercise which left me with an Istanbul Top 10 with 9 missing entries. This, at least, can see the light of day.

2. The Bosphorus

If you stroll aimlessly around Istanbul, you gravitate involuntarily towards the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn – just as in south Bombay your wanderings lead you inevitably towards Marine Drive. As Lonely Planet puts it, “Divan Yolu and İstiklal Caddesi are always awash with people, but neither is the major thoroughfare in İstanbul. That honour goes to the mighty Bosphorus Strait.”

We spent many hours here – I suspect you could spend a lifetime and still not tire of it. We watched the anglers dangling their lines from the Galata bridge, ate grilled fish sandwiches on the waterfront, marvelled at Constantine’s sea walls and at the elegance of the yalıs – the old wooden mansions on the water’s edge. At Beşiktaş, we spotted jellyfish and bioluminescent life forms in the water (Phosphorus in the Bosphorus, I called it, and the Quaker winced).

But my most memorable Bosphorus experience was on the ferry ride which goes all the way up the strait – from the Sea of Marmara in the south to the Black Sea in the north, zigzagging between the European and Asian shores. There are short stretches where no houses, boats or other modern constructions meet the eye – all you see are waves and hills and seagulls and fog, and the view cannot be all that different from that which greeted Byzas and his men when they arrived in 667 B.C. to found a tiny trading colony called Byzantium. Or, if you believe in the old stories, from what Jason and the Argonauts saw on their quest for the Golden Fleece.

Nested Lists

2011-01-24T21:26:00.005Z

My critics have on occasion accused me of obsessively making lists. Much as I would like to deny it, there are times when I am forced to acknowledge that the allegation is not wholly without basis.

Of late I have been making more lists than usual because I am going on a long holiday and there are twenty million things I need to take care of before I leave. On Sunday I was running through a list I had made last week: Things to do over the weekend. And two of the items were:
• Make a list of things to take to India
• Make a list of transactions to be handed over

I had made a list of what lists I had to make!

Sunday Comfort Food

2011-01-23T19:53:00.004Z

Scarborough Fair potatoes, seasoned with (what else?) parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

The parsley is from Morocco, the rosemary is from Israel, the sage and thyme are from Spain, but they were all bought at Waitrose Canary Wharf. I love the food section of Waitrose.

I must admit the recipe is not an original one; I found it online. (Without the internet I am nothing.) My only improvisations were adding caramelised onions and grated cheddar.

Hometown

2011-01-16T22:35:00.008Z

I now know enough Japanese to make smalltalk (on limited topics) with my teacher. The other day we were talking about our hometowns (Kōbe and Calcutta) and she asked me, “Karukatta wa kireina machi desu ka?” (Is Calcutta a kireina city?)

What do you say to that? The Japanese word kireina means both ‘beautiful’ and ‘clean’. Calcutta is a beautiful city, but even its greatest admirers would not call it clean.

It is not uncommon to hear negative comments about Calcutta and Bombay, often from people who have never visited these cities or bothered to look under the surface. Calcutta is my favourite city in the world, but when people speak ill of it, I usually adopt a superior, condescending attitude, rarely bothering to contradict them, much less launch a passionate defence. Perhaps this is because Calcutta is my hometown; perhaps it is because I am cool like that. But sometime back a classmate from college said negative things about Bombay, and I got uncharacteristically worked up and made some rather caustic remarks. I must have been in a bad mood that day because usually, when someone criticises Bombay, I tell them my favourite Bombay story.

When Sarbajeet was interning at a law firm in the summer of 2007, he had to go to a company’s office for a due diligence. The firm gave him the taxi fare, but in those days we were poor and a taxi ride was a lot of money. Sarbajeet naturally opted to keep the fare and take the local train.

Sarbajeet was carrying a laptop which belonged to the firm. When he was boarding the train at VT, in the crush of people trying to get on the train, the laptop bag slipped from his shoulder and fell on the platform. Sarbajeet himself was swept into the compartment by the crowds, and with throngs of people behind him fighting their way into the train, it was impossible for him to get off. He watched helplessly as the laptop lay where it had fallen and the train started to move.

At this point, someone picked up the laptop and started to run alongside the train, shouting, “Yeh kiska laptop hai?” Sarbajeet frantically shouted that it was his, and this man, this complete stranger, running full tilt to keep up with the train, threw the laptop into the compartment where it was passed over people’s heads to a shaken but deeply grateful Sarbajeet.

Ask anyone who has stayed in Bombay for an appreciable period of time, and they will always have a story to tell. Because Bombay is like that – an unpredictable city, a crazy city... I’ll say it then: a great city.

Ferry Cross the Mersey

2011-01-12T00:15:00.004Z

Last Saturday I happened to be on a large bus full of people – some young and some old, speaking different languages, hailing from different parts of the world. But this was the Magical Mystery Tour bus in Liverpool, so our motley crowd had one thing in common – we had roughly similar tastes in music.

As we were passing the River Mersey, our guide mentioned that the river had a prominent place in pop music. He said, “Besides giving its name to Merseybeat, the river is also mentioned in a number of songs, notably Ferry Cross the Mersey, made famous by...?”

“Gerry and the Pacemakers,” fifty-two voices answered in chorus, and I knew I was among friends.

The 59th Street Bridge Song

2011-01-05T16:09:00.007Z

I just spent a three-day weekend at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge are cool places. People cycle around town and punt on the river and park Austin Sevens on the Senate House roof. They wear T-shirts which say, “Do NOT ask me about my thesis.” But what struck me most was how quiet these places are compared to London, just as – when I first moved to London – I was struck by how quiet it is compared to Calcutta.

The thing about a fast city is that, well, it is fast. And if you work in a law firm, the pace is positively frenetic. It is almost an experiment in practical philosophy – when you frequently work fifteen-hour days, you learn surprising things about yourself. You learn a little more about what makes you happy, what makes you sad. In a particularly busy week, when free time means a half-hour interval after you return from work and before you go to sleep, you learn what your priorities are. You learn about the incredible awesomeness of weekends.

You also make interesting adaptations in behaviour, and pick up new skills. I can now carry out a credit card transaction while talking on the phone, I can read a book while walking and step onto a moving escalator without taking my eyes off the page. I no longer behave like a complete idiot at supermarkets and airport security. One day, in the course of an hour-long lunch break, I managed to buy a sandwich, sushi and an overcoat, eat the first two, and still have half an hour to sit in the park and watch people go by. Of course, the desirability of being in a situation where you have to pick up skills like this is debatable.

When I was small, I would read whilst eating, and this was a perpetual bone of contention with my parents. They argued that it was unsocial, that it was an injustice to the food (and to the book), and that, on a more practical level, I would spill gravy on the pages. Now I have a better appreciation for what a luxury it is to do just one thing at a time.

Istanbul

2010-12-26T07:35:00.005Z

On the shores of the Bosphorus, they once built a city beyond reproach.

Now the successors of Suleymān the Magnificent clamour for EU membership, and on their trams they put up warning posters such as these.

I thought it was a warning against wearing scary masks on public transport (or perhaps a reminder that what seems like a devil with horns on the 9.45 to Zeytinburnu may in fact be a chubby businessman with a juvenile sense of humour). But apparently the sign says Please give priority to passengers who are alighting.

Music, Food and Drink

2010-12-22T00:46:00.007Z

My friend Saha once made a list of ten things he likes about London. As may be expected, the list was misguided and pretentious, and my own list – if I were to make one – would look completely different. Except for one item: Buskers on the Underground, which featured at no. 8.

At peak hour at Bank station, with hundreds of lawyers and bankers hurrying past, Simon and Garfunkel assume a special significance: Slow down, you move too fast / Got to make the moment last...

* * *

An eatery in Central London claims to have invented this snack which they call a ‘shwrap’, but which is basically unsliced Mazikushi. The packaging says:

Eating shwrap promotes peace and harmony, increases brain size and makes you more attractive to the opposite sex.*
*Or same sex – clever shwrap can determine orientation.

As if being blamed for tsunamis was not bad enough, gay people are also getting a limited choice of shwrap.

* * *

On Friday evening after work I had this conversation with my friend.

Me: I had a tough day at work. I came home and decided to drown my sorrows in drink.
Friend: What did you do?
Me: I ate a liqueur chocolate.
Friend: Nice. Manly thing to do.

CARTOONIED

2010-12-16T00:31:00.005Z

Language Log had this hilarious post last week, called A doubtful benevolence: Mark Twain on spelling. I was reading it today at work, and by the time I got to the part about sicisiors, I was laughing uncontrollably and causing heads to turn in consternation.

Nearly as hilarious is the passage where Twain talks about a Good Spelling prize that was awarded at his school, and it reminded me of a funny story from my own school days.

My friend and I went for an inter-school spelling competition, and we had a round where a scrambled word would come up on the screen. The teams had to hit the buzzer and come up with the right word (sometimes there was more than one right word, but any one would do).

One of the words on the screen was CARTOONIED. This can be rearranged to form both COORDINATE and DECORATION, and these were evidently the words they were looking for. My friend hit the buzzer a split second after the word came up, and said, “Carotenoid.” And the person who was conducting the competition didn’t even have the word on his card, and they had to check a dictionary to confirm that the word actually exists, and I will never forget the look on his face.

We didn’t win the competition that year – we came a close second – but that one perfect moment was worth more to me than a first prize.

The Age of Convenience

2010-12-14T22:29:00.005Z

I like people who, for no apparent reason, opt to do something the hard way. I don’t mean people who achieve heroic feats like climbing Everest without oxygen. For complex personal reasons, out of sheer bloodymindedness, or just for fun, ordinary people doing ordinary things sometimes reject the easy way out.

There are examples even on my blogroll. In his carpentry workshop, Tommy makes things out of wood, using lumber which he mills himself. Randall Munroe doesn’t allow ads on his website. When most of us chose soft corporate jobs, Anuj started out practising at the Delhi High Court, and if there is a harder way to make a living in the legal profession, I don’t know of it. My father types with two fingers – though (a) he is not on my blogroll, and (b) he doesn’t do it out of choice.

I rarely fall into this category myself because I am lazy. But in school I once solved all the problems in a Trigonometry textbook using nothing but Euclid. For a web site which I designed last year, I initially wrote the code from scratch, i.e. on Notepad, and I had fun doing it.

These days Sarbajeet and I work late and usually have dinner in the office. So we cook only on weekends, but on the other hand, we never cheat – which is to say, we never use ready-made sauces and pastes. Some of the more elaborate dishes occupy us for an entire evening: just shopping for mushroom bourguignon took us the better part of an hour.

Saha takes photographs on black-and-white film, on a camera with a dysfunctional light-meter. He took one of me a few months back, on Baker Street with a camera-strap round my neck and a fuzzy double-decker bus in the background. He had asked me to “pose, but not look like you are posing.” I hate it when people take photos of me, and usually I hate the results even more, but this photo is one of the few exceptions.

Saha had it developed in India, and this – not the photo itself, not the fact that it was taken on black-and-white film and developed by hand – was what I liked best: it arrived in an envelope which said “Thanks for indulging. - Saha.”

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

2010-11-30T11:50:00.006Z

Our firm allows us a fixed number of days off every year, but in recognition of the fact that “some individuals may like to be flexible with their holiday entitlement,” they also allow us to buy or sell holiday entitlements up to a limit. The price of a holiday is the same whether you are selling or buying, and it is a function of your salary.

Most people – that is, most normal people – would be satisfied to go along with this arrangement. But these are finance lawyers we are talking about. I know of people who buy holidays, and years later, when they have been promoted and have a higher salary, sell them off at a higher price.

In fact, since an employee’s future career progression is indeterminate, and since the salary even for a given level is revised every year, I think I see the possibility of a futures market in holidays. Hmm...

In related news, a Google search for <"life, liberty and the pursuit of" -happiness> produces some interesting results: Life, liberty and the pursuit of broadband; Life, liberty and the pursuit of nachos; Life, liberty and the pursuit of catgirls.

I’ll only buy a book for the way it looks / And then I stick it on the shelf again

2010-11-26T20:16:00.003Z

“It’ll be freezing out there! Go someplace warm, like Spain or Greece.” “It’s way too late you idiot. Ticket prices will have gone through the roof.” “Oh, but it’s a shame not to spend Christmas in London.”

And last but not least, our vacation destination has a system of issuing visas on arrival, which may well be perfectly reliable and legitimate. But I am paranoid about visas and things, and visa-on-arrival looks decidedly shady to me. I am convinced we will be turned back at the airport.

But despite everything, the Quaker and I booked tickets yesterday. No doubt, he has his own reasons for wishing to visit a faraway city at the coldest time of the year. For me, it all comes down to a book. Or more particularly, a book cover.

Fox in the Snow

2010-11-17T18:31:00.004Z

We are now well into November (in case you haven’t looked at a calendar lately) and London has become decidedly cold. This morning in the lift, another trainee remarked, “It’s so cold! I don’t know how you can come in wearing only a jacket. Brr.”

I did not know that people said ‘Brr’ in real life.

* * *

Last night I saw a fox, just outside our housing complex. It was strolling along the street, as cool as you like. I knew there are foxes in London; I just wasn’t expecting to see one in a locality as irredeemably urban as Canary Wharf.

There are not many things that can make me smile when returning from work at well past midnight, but this did.

Genevieve

2010-11-07T18:52:00.010Z

The early history of automobile legislation makes for diverting reading. In the United Kingdom, the Locomotive Acts passed in the latter part of the 19th century stipulated that self-propelled vehicles must be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag, to enforce a walking pace and to warn others of the approach of a self-propelled machine.

In 1895, John Henry Knight built Britain’s first petrol-powered motor vehicle and while driving it through Farnham, Surrey, was stopped by the Superintendent of Police and charged with using a locomotive without a licence.

On 30 July 1896, the House of Commons debated the speed limit for light locomotives (vehicles with an unladen weight of under 3 tons, i.e. what we now call ‘cars’). Many members considered that 10 miles an hour would be sufficient, but the reckless Mr. Chaplin had other ideas:

On the other hand, 14 miles as a maximum he did not think was at all unreasonable. [Cries of "Oh!"]

The Locomotives on Highways Act passed that year finally repealed the notorious Red Flag Law, and on a wet Saturday in November that year, thirty vehicles set off from London to Brighton to celebrate the event. This tradition still continues in the form of the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, the longest running motoring event in the world, open only to cars built before 1905.

On Saturday, the cars lined up on Regent Street in all their glory. The grand old ladies, who bore names like Miss Elizabeth and Genevieve, were the cynosure of all eyes, but as is my wont, I was taking photos of the people.

Abira Out Of Context

2010-10-31T19:46:00.004Z

Abira often comes down from Bristol to spend the weekend in London, and I like it when she’s here. Among other things, she makes these odd comments which illustrate the pleasantly random nature of our lives.

This weekend:
Let’s keep it. Who knows when we might need an eye-drop?

Last weekend:
Abira (on the phone): *laughing*
Sarbajeet (on the other end): What happened?
Abira: Strawberries and a book went flying.

Two weekends ago:
(Peering into corners of the kitchen of a house she has stayed in for over six months): My God, there are, like, tube-lights everywhere!

Three weekends ago:
In fact, now that I think about it, my phone looks strangely like a bidet.

K. 626

2010-10-26T00:25:00.006+01:00

Last Saturday I went to the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear the Belmont Ensemble performing Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor.

It is difficult, in any setting, not to be moved by the austere beauty of the Requiem. As the voices of the choir swelled and filled the church – the trembling supplication of Requiem aeternam, the liquid run of Kyrie eleison, the towering majesty of Rex tremendae majestatus – I would like to tell you that I was moved to the very depths of my soul, swept away by lofty and powerful emotions. But to be honest, my thoughts were on food, and a summer afternoon in Calcutta five years ago.

The day after our third semester ended, seven of us had hit the streets with a camcorder – the plan being to eat at our ten favourite places in the city, all within the span of one day and a budget of 250 rupees, and to make a film while we were at it.

Golbari – one of our favourite haunts – was closed at the time because their workers had gone on strike, but we could not imagine leaving it out. So the film had a shot of a red traffic light at the Shyambazar crossing, and then a shot of us walking solemnly past the entrance of Golbari, heads bowed. The background music was Dies Irae from Mozart’s Requiem.

Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophets' warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
(and so on in that vein)

I am known to have a penchant for melodrama, but this was over-the-top even by my standards.

Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John

2010-10-22T06:30:00.005+01:00

Last week, in connection with an ongoing transaction, I received copies of a trust deed by post from New York. Inexplicably, the package also contained a training booklet for Republic salesmen. So I was reading the booklet at lunchtime (because I’m sad like that) and it says:

Saying hi and smiling at friends and family comes naturally. Just think of customers as new friends you’ve yet to meet and acknowledge them with the same genuine enthusiasm. When a customer enters the store make eye contact, say hi and smile!
Note - Don’t be disheartened if your customer doesn’t acknowledge you in return - remember we’re unique in our approach and they may not be expecting it.

I thought – well I thought several things, but now that I try to write them down I can’t quite find the words, and the thoughts don’t seem all that interesting either.

* * *

London has several Durga Pujas, and we were trying to figure out which ones are worth going to. One of them advertises itself as The Only Durga Puja in Tooting.

That’s quite a USP.

* * *

We are having Career Development Meetings at the firm to discuss which areas of work we are interested in. One of my preferences is Corporate 30L, better known as Private Funds. And already the jokes have started. “Hey I heard you are in Debt. Have you got Funds?”

There are nice people at the law firm and I like working with them, but by god, they make terrible jokes.

Festival People

2010-10-16T02:54:00.005+01:00

I haven’t really been in a writing mood recently, but I’m always in a mood for posting pictures. These are from the Thames Festival which was held last month.

Law Firms and Language

2010-10-06T23:07:00.011+01:00

Apologies to my readers (if any remain) for the unusually long interval between posts. The last two weeks were pretty crazy, work-wise, but I’m learning to fit more into my day, so things are looking up. To make up for radio silence, I bring you not one but two posts, clubbed together as a single post on the basis that they both qualify for the labels Law Firms and Language.

* * *

My friend Sarbajeet works in a building just around the corner, and we often exchange emails in the course of the day. The emails are about trivial everyday things – forwarding discount coupons or making lunch plans. As such, they are typically quite short.

But we both work at law firms and we send these mails from our work IDs. I found it quite amusing that, on an email exchange which goes something like:

–Dinner at home?
–Think so.

the legal disclaimers and confidentiality notices tacked onto the emails by our two firms run to a combined total of 2437 characters.

* * *

On one of the transactions that I am currently working on, we exchange a flurry of emails with our clients everyday around noon, just as I am beginning to feel hungry. If this goes on, one of these days I’m afraid I’ll slip up and address an email to Merrill Lunch.

Chamaedorea Elegans

2010-09-22T23:20:00.004+01:00

Our flat has a new resident.

She doesn’t have a very exciting life, but she does have an east-facing window.

Agenda: Doughnuts

2010-09-14T20:38:00.003+01:00

Two trainees from the Capital Markets group in our firm traditionally volunteer as “Doughnut Boy/Girl”. Their role is to pick up and distribute doughnuts and other snacks to everyone in the Capital Markets group (i.e. the 24th and 25th floors) on every second Friday.

Today I got a Microsoft Outlook meeting invitation from the other doughnut volunteer (Date: Friday 17 September, Venue: Waitrose). With it she had sent a note saying, “Sorry for being a geek, but if it’s not in my calendar I won’t remember!”

How I love lawyers. :)

Debt

2010-09-10T20:55:00.003+01:00

The London office of our law firm has a number of practice areas, and each has several groups within it. I am in Capital Markets, and my group is called Debt and Equity Capital Markets. The group mainly deals with the issuance of bonds and medium term notes and advises in respect of equity offerings. It is popularly known as DECM, or more simply, Debt.

A bunch of us joined the law firm together, and so our conversation often revolves around which practice area/group we have joined.

If one more person, just one more person, makes a “Are you in debt?” joke, I will stuff a Eurobond down their gullet.

One Month

2010-09-07T01:17:00.002+01:00

...since I left Calcutta. Long separation from the Arsalan Mutton Biryani is slowly sapping my superpowers.

Llyn Cau

2010-09-03T20:43:00.007+01:00

Most people who climb Cadair Idris camp at the base. It is in fact forbidden to camp on the mountain, but we are responsible campers who leave no trace, and we have a general disdain for organised campsites. Besides, we wanted to test the truth of the legend. So we pitched camp on the shores of Llyn Cau.

Llyn Cau is a classic cirque lake, not far below the summit of the mountain. With its crater-like shape and stark surroundings, it is a truly awe-inspiring sight.

It is not, however, a hospitable place to camp. Wild winds and crosscurrents rip across the lake, and the nights are bitterly cold.

Around midnight, Saha’s two-man tent – a rather flimsy affair – collapsed under the onslaught of the winds. We hastened to fix it, but it was a moonless night, the winds were fierce and erratic, and our fingers were numb from the cold. We soon realised that it was a hopeless task, and four of us huddled into the other two-man tent.

But while we were grappling with the tent, all of us had noticed a peculiar thing. There was someone with a flashlight on the opposite shore of the lake.

Once we were safely inside the other tent, as the wind howled and moaned around us, we began – inevitably – to talk about the light. The other side of the lake, where the light had appeared, was steep and rocky. Walking along that shore would be tricky even in the daytime; pitching a tent was out of the question. So it could not possibly be a camper. Besides, we knew for a fact that there were no other campers on the lakeshore, or indeed on our entire route. A shepherd then? But what lunatic shepherd would be out on that perilous slope, on a night such as this?

Then someone told a story about a serial killer who stalked hikers in the wild and slit their throats at night, and we realised that further discussion would only spook us further. We drifted off to an uneasy sleep.

The next morning we were already laughing about it (as perhaps you are laughing now), but each of us admitted to being pretty scared at the time. Each of us also admitted to disturbing visions of a serial killer creeping up to our tent in the dead of night.

Interestingly, everyone had a slightly different mental picture of the killer. Saha had pictured a handgun-wielding killer, Indro imagined him brandishing an axe, and the Quaker visualised a slasher with a knife. My version involved a huge brute clubbing us all to death with a baseball bat, with no one to hear our screams.

We checked the other shore in the morning, and there was no trace of a campsite.

Cadair Idris

2010-08-28T00:37:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow we set out for a country where ‘w’ is considered a vowel, and where sheep outnumber humans four to one. Our plan involves, among other things, mountain-biking near Machynlleth, wild camping on the shores of Llyn Cau, and climbing Cadair Idris by the Minffordd route.

Cadair Idris literally translates as ‘the chair of Idris’. Idris is a giant of Welsh mythology – a stargazer, philosopher and poet. In olden days, bards would sleep on Cadair Idris in the hope of poetic inspiration. And legend has it that anyone who spends the night on the mountain will either die in the night, or go insane, or wake up as a bard.

It will be interesting to see what lies in store for us.

Pollination

2010-08-21T20:20:00.009+01:00

It’s August, and the annual pageant of pollination is being played out at Kew Gardens.

While some plants rely on insects for fertilisation, others see them as dinner. The bee and the housefly have been trapped respectively by a Cape Sundew and a Venus Flytrap.

Clearly, the fly did not heed the warning.

Walking Boots

2010-08-17T18:44:00.006+01:00

All my life, at least until I entered college, my parents took care of all my expenses. In college I managed to support myself for the most part by doing internships and giving tuitions. After college, for a year, I had a research stipend which allowed me to live comfortably if not luxuriously.

All my life, I have never owned more than three pairs of covered shoes at a time: formal shoes, trainers and football boots. I have trekked in the Himalayas in trainers, and maintained – not without a touch of disdain – that only people who were not surefooted enough needed to buy specialized walking boots.

And now, for climbing a puny 2,930 ft mountain in Wales, I bought myself a pair of walking boots.

This is what happens when you are gainfully employed.

10 Turner House

2010-08-15T23:38:00.007+01:00

While going through some old photos, I found these two pictures of my hostel room where I spent five very colourful years of my life.

The flat where I stay now, 10 Turner House, is much fancier than my hostel room, but because I stay with college friends, life here is proving to be not all that different from hostel life. Same communal spirit, same mess.

Last week one of our indoor football sessions proved fatal for a wooden giraffe that had hitherto adorned the living room: a stray kick snapped its slender neck. And as I made breakfast this morning, I was witness to the amusing sight of Rahul Saha searching for the TV remote. “Dammit, I can’t find the remote. *looks under the sofa* But I have found a packet of biscuits.”

In other news, I am trying to figure out whether retired corporate lawyers are genuinely relieved to have reached the end of their careers, or whether they just like to scare starry-eyed novices. Last week an ex-partner of a law firm told me, “I’ve been a solicitor for 39 years. You get less for murder.”

City Daily Photo

2010-08-12T00:56:00.005+01:00

The week before I left for London was such a whirlwind that I did not have time to say goodbye to Calcutta in the way I would have liked. The idea was to post one photo of the city every day for a week, along with explanatory notes or background.

A wonderful photoblog called Mumbai Paused, a tribute to another great city, inspired my idea. I think Calcutta too deserves such a photoblog, one which portrays the best and worst of the city, and portrays it with kindness, understanding and humour. It need not be updated daily, and if the project is too demanding for a single person, it could be run by a small team; four people each posting just three photos a month would give us a site that was updated thrice a week. If someone reads this post and starts a photoblog about their city, nothing would give me greater pleasure.

As for London, the London Nature Photo Blog is an excellent niche blog of this sort, and London Daily Photo is general and has a lengthy City Daily Photo blogroll, but I still haven’t found one for this city which is as good as Mumbai Paused.

London

2010-08-08T08:13:00.003+01:00

Just before landing, I set my camera’s default white balance to Cloudy. I think that is a reasonably safe assumption to make.

Writing About Food

2010-08-05T00:27:00.004+01:00

The editorial board of our college magazine used to do restaurant reviews for every issue – a flimsy pretext for going out and gorging at various food joints of the city. When we sat down to write our first restaurant review – about a Chinese restaurant called Eau Chew on Ganesh Chandra Avenue – none of us had any prior experience at writing about food.

It did not take us long to realize that describing food was not as easy as we thought. One by one we shrank away and swore we had not skill at that. And while the rest of us were discovering that we were hopeless at describing food, Anuj made an equally important discovery: that he was bloody good at it. From then on, by unspoken agreement, writing restaurant reviews became his exclusive prerogative.

It is true that Anuj’s grammar often makes me want to claw my eyes out. His deliberate distortions of spelling call to mind the worst excesses of the French Revolution, and his approach to punctuation is completely arbitrary: he omits semi-colons and misplaces apostrophes with gay abandon. But even his harshest critics cannot deny that when it comes to writing about food, the man has few equals.

We have reviewed many eateries in our time. Gradually, the concept of the restaurant review even took more complex forms. For Tea or Coffee, we visited our favourite tea bar and our favourite coffee shop, and pitted them against each other. Sweet Retreat was a city-wide search for that elusive ideal, the perfect sandesh. And Piggy’s Day Out, which featured in our farewell issue, was a day-long five-course meal at five different restaurants: Read on to learn how you too can stop healthy living and be a pig.

For some reason, we never got round to reviewing the divine suta kebab at Adam’s on Phears Lane. This tiny shop tucked away in an obscure alley in North Calcutta makes kebabs with beef so tender that it has to be tied onto the skewer with string, or else it will disintegrate while being roasted.

I have taken many food-lovers to Adam’s, for it is almost impossible to find it without a guide. The first time they taste the kebab is always special. I watch tensely for the change of expression, the blissful smile; I could not be more tense if it were my cooking that was on trial.

Last Friday was Priyanka’s first visit to Adam’s. She took the plate with the reverence which it deserves, inhaled, and put the first spoonful into her mouth. And she said: “Mm. It tastes like beef-flavoured butter.” And my first thought was: this is a phrase that Anuj would have been proud of.

Facebook Suggestion

2010-07-31T20:57:00.004+01:00

Well, I should think so.

Condescending Software

2010-07-25T20:29:00.007+01:00

FileZilla, the FTP client which I use, is configured to close the connection if no data is sent or received for more than 20 seconds. After two retries at 5-second intervals, it gives up.

I was uploading some files today and then I got distracted by something else on the internet. In the meantime, FileZilla timed out and gave me a rather cool message.

For the record, I type at 82 wpm.

Edit: Tommy has informed me that the message is in fact generated by the FTP server (i.e. only passed on by FileZilla).

Weighing Machines

2010-07-22T17:19:00.005+01:00

Aravind Adiga, in The White Tiger, describes the weighing machines that are a common sight on Indian railway platforms – the ones where you insert a coin and lights flash and wheels whir and there is an almighty clanking and then, in something of an anti-climax, the six-foot tall machine spews out a little cardboard chit with a picture of an actress and your weight in kilograms. Adiga claims:

Two kinds of people use these machines: the children of the rich, or the fully grown adults of the poorer class, who remain all their lives children.

The generalization is more catchy than accurate. These machines are used by many, many people outside of Adiga’s two categories. And sometimes, they are even used for purposes other than weighing oneself.

When we were interning in Bombay in the summer of 2008, Lahiri returned to our hostel one afternoon with a thick bunch of cardboard chits in his hands and a manic glint in his eyes. I pressed him for the story, for I knew there had to be one (there always is when Lahiri is involved).

With many an expletive and animated gesture, Lahiri told his tale. It turned out that he had wanted to weigh a suitcase. The weighing machine at Grant Road station struck him as ideal for the purpose, and he accordingly directed his footsteps thither. It was but the work of a moment to hoist the suitcase onto the platform and insert a one-rupee coin into the slot. After the usual spectacle of flashing lights and whirring wheels, it spat out the ticket: 16 kg.

It was then that Lahiri made his big mistake. Wanting to be sure, he inserted another coin. Lights, wheels, ticket: 3 kg.

In a deranged frenzy, he fed in coin after coin into the machine, and each time he got a different figure. When he finally ran out of one-rupee coins, he had accumulated at least twenty tickets ranging from 2.5 to 17 kg.

Lahiri wanted to use the arithmetic mean to estimate the suitcase’s real weight, but there were a couple of outliers at the lower end of the range, so I suggested that we eliminate them using Chauvenet’s criterion before computing the mean.

So, to Adiga’s two categories, we may add a third: Obsessive-compulsive interns who want to weigh a suitcase, and have way too much small change.

Future Historians

2010-07-19T21:22:00.005+01:00

From The Fall (1956) by Albert Camus:

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. For us too, perhaps, a single sentence will suffice. They stayed online late into the night, doing nothingmuch.

Hemis National Park

2010-07-15T21:33:00.007+01:00

The most spectacular thing I saw on our trip to the Bethuadahari forest last April – indeed, one of the most spectacular sights I have ever seen – was a mammoth Couroupita guianensis in full bloom.

The tree is commonly called the Cannonball Tree, but its Tamil name suits it much better: Nagalingam. The flower’s reproductive organs – the reduced style and stigma, and the hood (a prolongation from one side of the staminal ring that arches over the ovary) – give the combined effect of a Shivalingam with a snake’s hood poised over it. (You can see this clearly in this photo by Emblatame.)

The flowers have large, fleshy petals and sprout directly from the trunk. The trunk of the tree we saw was thickly clustered with flowers, and the ground was carpeted with fallen petals, and the air was heady with their perfume. Mrunmayee said it looked like something out of Avatar.

Back home, my animated description of the tree left my mother unimpressed. If I didn’t walk around with my eyes closed, I could have seen the same tree in Calcutta, she said. I was skeptical: surely, I could not have overlooked such a striking tree in my own city. “There is one in the south-east corner of the Governor’s House compound,” she said. “Go and check.”

Being reluctant to admit defeat (not to mention jobless), I actually went to check, and there it was. Before the week was out, my mother had espied three more Nagalingam trees at various places in the city.

I like trees in the abstract, but regrettably, I know little about them. Which is to say, when I see a tree, I appreciatively say to myself, “Ah, a tree,” and I leave it at that. But I can’t help feeling a twinge of envy for people who can spot and identify trees, and who, even while strolling through a city street, sometimes remark upon an unusual tree, or point out a commonplace one and mention some interesting attribute.

But on the Ladakh trip, I discovered that I am not bad at spotting animals. Our trek took us through the Hemis National Park. It doesn’t exactly teem with wildlife; at an elevation of 3,000–6,000 m in a rocky landscape devoid of greenery, that is too much to expect. Unfortunately, we could not spot the famously elusive Snow Leopard, but we did see some other animals, and I was rather kicked that I managed to spot many of them before anyone else in our group did.

1. Lizard (of some sort), the very first animal I spotted on the trek. It was basking on a rock, absolutely motionless, and I was able to get shots from several angles.

2. White-Capped Water-Redstart (I think). We saw lots of sparrow-sized birds, and this was one of the most colourful.
3. Unidentified bird.
4. Red-billed Chough. In the lower legs of the trek, crows and ravens were the most common scavenger birds. Then shortly before Tachungtse, we crossed some invisible line and above it, Red-billed Choughs and their yellow-billed cousins held sway. They were completely fearless, flying all around the campsite and coming right up to us at dinnertime for scraps.
5. The Lammergeier or Bearded Vulture. Even when we were at 17,000 ft, the Lammergeiers were high above us, circling, always circling. Fortunately, no tortoises fell out of the sky.
6. Robin Accentor. If you look carefully at the photo, you can see the falling snow.
7. Bobak Marmot. They gamboled all over the mountainsides that ringed our campsite at Tachungtse, and boxed with each other in comical fashion. They seemed to have little fear of humans, and would let us get surprisingly close to them.
8. Mountain Vole: It scampered across our path and retired under a boulder whence, with beady eyes, it watched us click photos and tramp past.
9. Oriental Turtle Dove.
10. European Magpie. A striking and beautiful bird, and of course, the real villain of The Castafiore Emerald.
11. Blue Sheep, which is neither blue, nor a sheep.
12. Common Redstart. It sat on a steeple at the Hemis monastery while I tried to focus on it at the extreme telephoto end of my zoom lens. Then, just before I clicked, it took off, and presented me with a rather dramatic photo.

Pushing the Limits

2010-07-08T18:58:00.004+01:00

Kaushik’s says in his last blog post that “Sroyon has an interesting history of pushing the limits of the Buddhist faith, but it’s best if you ask him about that.” Since no one has asked me yet, and since it is an amusing and instructive story, I will answer that myself. It’s an old story, and it involves the Buddhist temple whose picture you see below.
When I was three, we lived not far from this temple. Every afternoon, the maid would take me there for a walk, and we would always reach just before the service started. The service consisted of people chanting mantras. In time with the chanting, the head monk would bang a huge drum. Everyone in the congregation was given a little drum, which was played with a drumstick and which made a loud clattering sound; and with this little instrument they would all keep the beat. But not me.

I found the stately pace of the head monk’s drumming too boring, and considered it my duty to liven up the proceedings. So, instead of playing it in time with the head monk, I would fill the intervals between beats with loud and rapid clattering. But – and this is the remarkable thing – they would still hand me a drum every day, and no one would snatch it away or conk me on the head.

I do not think there is any other religion in the world that would have tolerated this.

A Life Long Companion

2010-06-30T19:12:00.003+01:00

There are some things in our house which I love simply because they are old, such as our 14" colour television (circa 1987) and the Hornby Dublo train set (circa 1958). Then there’s our Eveready brass torch which is only three years old, but looks like it’s straight out of the late 1970s.

Ten inches long, weighing in at nearly half a kilo with its three D-cell batteries, it is a nuisance to travel with, but I take it on all my camping trips. At Leh airport, even though the torch was in my rucksack which was going in the hold, the security people made me take out the batteries. They probably thought it was a weapon of mass destruction, and who could blame them? But of all its likeable qualities, the most likeable of all is its cardboard case, which has artwork such as this.

It warms the cockles of my heart that in this world of cut-throat competition and slick marketing, this sort of graphic design has managed to survive.

Photomontage: Meghalaya

2010-06-26T17:48:00.008+01:00

Now that you’ve imagined Meghalaya, it’s time for pictures.

Around Meghalaya

The sacred forest at Mawphlang

Living root tree bridges at Cherrapunji