Eclipse

A long solar eclipse was visible in Bangalore on Friday, January 15. Since the eclipse was to start at 11 a.m. and go on till 3 p.m., the children's school, like many others, decided to declare a holiday. I can see why. I wouldn’t want to have the responsibility of making sure any of the hundreds of children under my watch did not run out during lunch break or glance out of a window to look at the sun.

We didn’t watch the eclipse. I tried to find out about safe ways of doing so. But where to get the special lenses needed to view this extraordinary phenomenon? I read in the papers that glasses were on sale at Gangaram’s and Sapna Book House for not much money. But I decided not to get them. You can hardly buy pure sweets uncontaminated by food coloring, even in premium sweet shops. Polyester fabrics are passed of as silk in this, the heartland of Mysore silk sarees. Should I trust my children’s eyesight to the promises of a book store that these plastic lenses would definitely shield young eyes from damaging sun rays? I decided to brave the empty chatter of ignorant TV reporters to get our visuals of the eclipse.

My quiet neighborhood was eerily quieter. The silly chipmunks hid somewhere and stopped their endless squealing. The warblers fell silent. And the crows broke into an angry chorus, not unlike the TV pundits on Face the Nation, around the time of the eclipse’s start. Then, they too disappeared.

After the eclipse, my daughter and I played badminton outside. The yellow shuttlecock pinged off our rackets like Tweety to our Sylvester. No real birds braved the last couple of hours of daylight that day.

I remember a really long eclipse years ago in Calcutta. My parents shuttered the windows and sealed shut the curtains with safety pins so that not a chink of harmful sun rays penetrated our home. You were supposed to take a shower after, and throw out all the drinking water at home and fill the containers afresh.

Those were pre-television days, so my brother, sister and I occupied ourselves with board games and went through sheets of playing Hangman. We knew the eclipse was over when we heard boys from a nearby slum bang doors and shout from the streets, "Grahan daan, grahan daan," as they waved baskets over their heads. In Hindu mythology, eclipses are caused when the demons Rahu and Ketu try to swallow and consume ("grahan karna") the sun and the moon, but are foiled by the gods. The alms these street boys tried to cadge off us was some kind of ransom money. I miss the fanfare and mystery that went with eclipses. Now, they're scheduled to the exact second and reported like a cricket match.

On Learning the Language of the Gods

I have had few words to write of late. I have been learning to speak Sanskrit, a language so magnificently rich and dense with meaning that anything I write looks impoverished and has me leaning on the Delete button constantly.

An extraordinarily patient neighbor recently began teaching a 10-day spoken Sanskrit class to a dozen students. Her class is part of a city-wide blitz by Sanskritam Bharati to popularize the language and blast the myth that it is boring and outdated. Apparently, 108 (an auspicious number, indeed) similar workshops are being hosted around Bangalore.

A lot of Western-educated Indians pooh-pooh Sanskrit as being too fuddy-duddy. Given that many Indians have a natural predilection for snobbery and being holier-than-thou, I thought Sanskrit would have great snob appeal. But it is not the Louis Vuitton of languages one would expect it to be.

Sanskrit and Hindi have a reputation for being difficult to get high exam scores in. Hence a lot of returning NRIs who give their children names such as Aishvarya and Agastya come back to steep their children in Indian culture but opt for French as Ash and Gus's second language in schools.

Hindi and Sanskrit at least open windows to Indian culture. But French…? It’s a language only important to ze French. I hate to think of legions of Indians shutting themselves off from the wealth of their linguistic heritage and laboring through years of French at school only so they can finally order butter-soaked food in Paris in an accent that still won’t get them the attention and respect of insufferable French waiters. As some of my French friends themselves would say with hands tossed to the heavens, “Pfffffffffffff!”

I’ve always been curious about Sanskrit. I love the sonorous rhythms of its shlokas, and the compound words that are composed of lots of words coalescing together. Each Sanskrit word is like a gem with many glinting facets of imagery. Like other Indo-European languages such as Latin, Sanskrit has root words through which other words are created when certain affixes are attached to them. Learn these endings and prefixes, and you’re a wordsmith! And Sanskrit isn’t finicky about word order in a sentence, so you can say “She writes a blog” and “Blog she writes” and be perfectly correct.

Having sipped a bit of the language of the gods, I can understand a teeny bit of the powerful poetry of its shlokas. Let me share an amazing shloka that hit me in the face this week:
Samudravasane devi, parvata-stana-mandale.
Vishnupatni namastubhyam,
Paada-sparsham kshamasva-me.

My translation:
O goddess, draped with oceans, and with mountains for breasts,
I bow to you, O wife of Vishnu. And pardon me for touching you with my feet.

This is a prayer to be said to the earth goddess as you wake up in the morning, before you set your petty feet on her glorious body.

Reason #9: It's Not the Cosmopolitan City Everyone TellsYou It Is

The most remarkable places to eat at and hang out in Bangalore are still the unremarkable-looking places with a distinctly small-town flavor, places that have earned their fame by doing what they do exceedingly well.

I’m thinking of Koshy’s, Brahmin’s Café, Coffee House ... where you get served a quick masala dosa and an honest cup of coffee by waiters in crested turbans and cummerbunds. (I haven’t forgotten MTR. I’m trying to. Yes, I’m not embarrassed to admit I don’t care for MTR. See my September 2009 post to know why.)

Or Gangaram’s and Blossom Book Shop, where a guy who’s dusting books can walk over to any part of the store and pull out the exact book you want … something the more polished-looking staff at Crossword and Landmark are at a loss to do, even after eyeballing a computer listing of their inventory.

These are the modest places that make Bangalore feel like the gracious descendant of a cantonment town it was before information technology companies sprang up like warts.

Ultimately, it’s all these little signature places that make the city distinctive, and are in danger of becoming extinct as nouveau Bangaloreans buy into their self-generated fantasy that they’re Silicon Valley (instead of Silicon Halli) and need the upmarket shops and international franchises they’ve seen in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur to make them feel they live in a swinging place.

You can find cookie-cutter franchises like Gloria Jeans Coffee and Hard Rock Cafe in any city in the world. But if you had one day to spend in Bangalore, you’d want to spend it wandering in Malleswaram, not UB City.

A huddle of IT workers drinking Australian beer at a pub does not make a city cosmopolitan. Neither does the trickle of expats from a dozen countries forced to follow their jobs to India and lamenting that this city’s hyped resemblance to Silicon Valley begins and ends at their swanky office campuses.

Bangalore is a reticent town forced to rip off the jasmine in her hair, push out cleavage and throw on some brazen lipstick because out of town people have come courting. I hope the old Bangalore has the courage to re-assert itself.

A New Year - Already?

I apologize for my absence and promise to write more regularly. Yes, that's me writing lines on the board a la Bart Simpson.

The end of a year and the beginning of the new one are intimidating. You're expected to evaluate your milestones and make a pious list of promises for the new year. I wasn't ready to end 2009, and I wasn't ready for 2010.

I didn't get to sit with my computer and myself for several weeks, and then I felt I had to start the new year with a bang that just wasn't exploding with the right degree of gloriousness in my head. Yes, it's easy to postpone writing and then miss it intensely like the phone call you didn't make to your darling.

Truth be told, I have been without a wife (ie., no household help, since our housekeeper went on annual leave.) I steeped myself in Christmas -- sang dozens of off-key carols, decorated a beautiful 7-foot tree that brings a smile to my face every time I walk into that room, baked more than 200 chocolate chip cookies with the help of my lovely daughter (and proud to report that most of them have been gorged), hosted visitors, said my goodbyes to friends moving overseas, got a car fixed up (got carried away and threw in a coat of paint). I guess I am ready to start a new year, even if it got here sooner than I expected.

Since I was still laboring through my gripe list about my lovely Bangalore at the end of the year, I shall finish it. So, here goes. And oh, Happy New Year.