After seeing my daughter graduate from Woodstock School last week, this week I’m visiting Sun’s engineering center in Bangalore, to meet colleagues – and film them!
I haven’t been to Bangalore since 1980, when it was a sleepy little town. No more! The ride in from the new airport (just opened last week) took an hour and a half, the first part of it very fast on a brand-new six-lane highway. Then we hit city traffic…
Continue reading Visiting Sun BangaloreThis trip began with a mad rush to the airport. I’ve been booking and taking so many flights lately that, not surprisingly, I got confused over the departure time for this one: thought it was 6:45, but as we got in the car and I did my last-minute paranoia check, I realized the flight would take off at 6:15.
Enrico managed to get me to Malpensa in time for a skidding rush to the counter to check in my enormous pink suitcase – it helped that I had already checked myself in for the flight online. I then proceeded almost directly onto the plane, with only a brief stop for an indispensable espresso and a pastry.
During my three-hour layover in Amsterdam I took advantage of my Platinum-for-life status with KLM (the fruit of six years of four flights a year in business class, back during the dotcom boom) to use their lounge, which was unpleasantly crowded but at least had free WiFi.
I think it was also my Platinum status that got me the best seat in Economy class: aisle seat behind a short row so there was no seat in front of me at all – legroom galore! I could even have worked on my laptop, but I didn’t. I watchedAaja Nachle on the video-on-demand system, and read a Montalbano book that I had somehow previously missed.
“snack” served just before landing. The food wasn’t quite what I was in the mood for at that hour, but the greatly reduced and presumably recycled packaging was interesting
A driver sent by Momotours met me at the airport and took me to the same apartment where Ross and I had stayed in December. I slept fitfully for a few hours. In the dawn I heard a strange bird call. Now that I’ve looked it up, I suspect that identifying it as a koel is probably wrong (though the call sounds like that to me). Can anyone tell me what bird this is (it doesn’t appear in the video – I could only hear it, not see it)?
The driver came back and took me to Old Delhi Railway Station, which was soon bustling with travellers. I chatted with a young American couple who moved from the US to Dehra Dun and are running Himalayan hiking tours from the US – they were escorting a group of people just arrived from Tennessee. Indian tourism is booming in all directions!
Another ride on the familiar Shatabdi, with the familiar Shatabdi breakfast:
“Premium white slice” refers to bread. I never butter my bread in Italy, but in India the butter tastes better to me.
The train arrived on time (not always the case), and another taxi picked me up for the ride to Mussoorie. Getting out of the messily booming city of Dehra Dun seemed to take forever; I amused myself taking pictures.
Indian sign painters never seem to think of checking their spelling. A small panel at the bottom rear of a beautifully-painted truck in Delhi was inscribed: “Pewor Brecks”. I had to think hard about that one.
^ Buduram the mochi (shoemaker), Landour, Mussoorie, 1980
When I first went to India in 1977, there wasn’t a lot to buy anywhere in the country. The basics – food, clothing, shelter, transport – were all available, but the consumer goods industry was severely undeveloped, thanks to a government attitude of “Be Indian, Buy Indian”, enforced by high import tariffs and strict foreign exchange controls.
You bought food (and many other staples) at street stalls or open-air markets, or from vendors who came to your door with baskets on their heads – there was no such thing as a supermarket, and very little packaged food. Milk, for example, you got from a local dairyman who brought it to your door, fresh from the cow that morning, in a tin container with a measuring cup. (In cities there were dairy cooperatives which aggregated the output of many small dairy farmers.) You had to pasteurize the milk yourself by boiling.
^ milk delivery in Mussoorie, 2007 – not much has changed
The variety and quality of foods was limited, especially in smaller towns like Mussoorie.
^ subziwallah (vegetable seller), Mussoorie, ~1981
Shops, even in Connaught Place (then Delhi’s poshest shopping area), were mostly dim and frowsy. Once you had exhausted your need or desire for gorgeous hand-woven textiles and other handcrafted items (of which the Indian middle-class consumer already had quite enough, thank you – these things look far more exotic when you don’t live there), there simply wasn’t a lot on the shelves. The branded goods available were few and poorly packaged, nothing like the overwhelming slickness and variety available in the US.
The first time a modern American car showed up in Mussoorie (driven by a US embassy employee) in 1981, children ran up to look at themselves in the mirror-like surface. The two models of car then available in India did not come with glossy paint.
On my recent visit to Mussoorie (which is still, in many ways, a dusty little town), I was astonished to see this:
It’s a retail store for Himalaya Herbals, a line of skin, hair, and personal care products and herbal medicines – very good ones, at prices which are, by my standards, quite reasonable. But Rs. 150 for a bottle of shampoo can be expensive for millions of India’s buyers – they have more money than they’ve ever had before, but still far less than you and I. Companies operating in India have adapted cleverly to this market, for example offering single-use packages at Rs. 1.50:
Food is available in far greater quantity and variety than ever before:
^ subziwallah, Mussoorie, 2007
What’s remarkable in the photo above are the fruits which were not even grown in India in the 1970’s: plums, grapes, apples, pears… I’ve also seen strawberries, nectarines, and out of season mangoes transported from south India to north. India is growing olives and wine grapes, and producing some decent wines (I like Sula‘s rosé).
Though you can still get it from a local milkman, milk can also be bought in shops in tetrapak cartons, UHT-treated for a long shelf life. Amul Dairy was already a national company when I was in school, but in Mussoorie we knew it for butter, cheese, and chocolate, not milk. Note the water buffalo on the carton. Indians prefer the flavor of buffalo milk, which has a higher fat content than cow milk. (In Italy, mozzarella di bufala is considered the best for the same reason.)
There are national chains now: in the above photo, taken in Dehra Dun (the capital of Uttarakhand), you can see Habib’s (beauty salon), Himalaya Herbals again, and Café Coffee Day, one of at least three coffee chains in India today. Barista was bought last year by Italy’s Lavazza coffee company. There are supposed to be a few Starbuck’s outlets in India, but I never saw them. I did see Costa Coffee, another international café chain, in Delhi and Mumbai.
And there are shopping malls and supermarkets (this is in Dehra Dun):
In India’s large and mid-sized cities, you can buy many of the same brands (even at the same prices) that you’d find in any world capital, as well as attractive and well-made Indian brands. On the other hand, low-cost and hand-made goods are still easily available – the shoemakers in Mussoorie still make great shoes, and nowadays have more outside influences to inspire them:
^ mother-daughter cowboy boots, handmade in Mussoorie
As I keep saying: now is an interesting time to be in India…
When we moved to Lecco, we consolidated the contents of our household from Milan with Enrico’s parents’ stuff from their apartment in Rome (they were by then retired to a much smaller place on the seaside in Abruzzo).
In this way we acquired some beautiful furniture, fixtures, knick-knacks, and paintings – all lovely stuff, but… it wasn’t mine, and didn’t reflect anything about my life, nor even our life together.
I did have a few items to contribute, such as these paintings – the one on the left my mother commissioned for Rossella from Iowa artist Killy Beard, the one on the right Mom had done for me by a Thai artist many years before that.
Our ground-floor half bath also displays some of my Asian history (along with our collection of humor books, for those who like to read while enthroned).
There’s a Balinese mirror frame (from my stepmother, Ruth) and two Javanese shadow puppets (Samar, the dwarf protector of the city of Semarang, and Arjuna). Reflected in the mirror is a Kathakali dance mask I bought in India in 1980.
^ During my recent trip to India, at Dilli Haat I bought some leather shadow puppets, if I remember correctly they come from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The figures are (left to right) probably Sita, definitely Ganesh (who else?) and probably Lakshman.
But my favorite is this guy:
Ravana: there were several versions of him, but I couldn’t resist the shit-eatin’ grin on this one.
Finally, as you can see in the photo at the top of the page, I have hung outside a long string of Tibetan prayer flags that my classmate Teeran gave me for my birthday this year. I probably failed to observe the auspicious time and style for hanging them, but at least we are in the mountains!
post script: I later returned to Italy after a trip to the US (or maybe after I’d moved back to the US) to find that Enrico had taken down the prayer flags. “The neighbors asked about them,” he said, “wondering if we were having a party.” Sigh.
Sunday, my last day in India, I hired a car to go into central Delhi, where I visited the Crafts Museum (on the advice of friend and commenter Alice). The collection is very interesting, some of it so beautiful and well made that I had to wonder where one draws the line between “handicrafts” and “fine art.” Explanations were of variable quality – some very enlightening, others non-existent. Poor lighting made it hard to really appreciate some of this fine work, sadly, especially the textiles – and I do love textiles, though I was already overwhelmed by many days of shopping for saris.
When you finish with the museum part, there’s a small courtyard surrounded by booths selling more crafts, some quite good, and the usual dance troupe – seems to be the same family, and certainly the same style, as employed at Dilli Haat.
There is also a museum shop, featuring a clutter of stuff from all over India that you might not easily find elsewhere. I loved the wrought-iron works by tribals from Madhya Pradesh (which I recognized thanks to a placard I had seen in the museum – the shop is devoid of explanation). These pieces feature delicate dancers in a style reminiscent of Native America’s Kokopeli. Human and animal figures are arrayed to form window gratings and other objects unfortunately too large and heavy to take home this trip. Someday. I did buy a little monkey, and another statuette whose provenance I know nothing about (pictured above).
I also bought a collection of plaster figurines from Bengal. I’ve seen these for years at the Central Cottage Industries Emporium in Delhi – and much better ones years ago in Calcutta – but always wondered about them because they seem too breakable to be kids’ toys, yet not artsy enough to be intended as decoration. But, thanks to another helpful museum placard, I now may have an explanation for them – somewhat different from the explanation I’d found for some similar figures at the Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe.
One big glass case in the Crafts Museum holds an entire miniature village, bustling with equisitely detailed and realistic clay figures (about 6″ tall), painted and dressed in real cloth. The attached placard explained that this was the work of a group of clay artisans originally famed for their representations of Hindu deities. The British in India, uninterested in gods, instead encouraged the sculptors to represent real Indian people of all sorts and professions, as souvenirs the Brits could take home to illustrate life in India to their untravelled friends and relatives.
My guess is that the set of figurines I bought is based on pieces originally intended to illustrate the staff of a typical British household in the Raj era, though this modern version makes a few subtle (or sloppy) changes. Let’s see whether we can figure out who all these people are.
From the left:
any thoughts on this? I could be wrong about all of it!
