How I fell in love with Delhi (yet again)

Happy New  Year!!

In early December 2014, I made my third trip to Delhi, India since I moved to Canada in 1997, and what can I say, I fell in love with this crazy city all over again. Being older (OK, a lot older) now since I lived in Delhi, I was able to move about the city freely this time by myself or with family, thanks in no small part to the wonderful metro train.  Here are five things I loved most about Delhi.

1. Street Food

I came, I saw and I ate.

You have not had street food until you have had it in Delhi and the food scene has gotten even better in the last 10-15 years with endless options.  From the age-old favorite Choley Bhature to the newer fried Momos that come with both vegetarian and chicken options, to tender kebabs wrapped in paper-thin Roomali roti, everything is freshly prepared and super tasty. Yes, you may get a stomach flu or two, make one too many visits to not-so-clean washrooms, and beg for mercy when the spices kick in, but it’s totally worth it in the end.

2. People

At the risk of sounding pejorative, I must say the people, especially the poor people in India, selling everything from misspelled brand-name clothing to local handicrafts on sidewalks too close to traffic for comfort, are the most easygoing and kindest people I have come across. You can bargain with these folks all day long and walk away not buying anything at all, but you will not find them getting the least bit angry or aggressive. That’s certainly not the experience I have had in rest of the world (one shop-seller in Morocco called me ‘Taliban’ for bargaining too much – pretty funny though).

One tip – if you get lost, do not rely blindly on directions you get from the first person you ask. That’s because Indians don’t like to admit that they don’t know, instead they will just misguide you.  However, chances are, if you ask multiple people, you will eventually be guided to the right place.

3. Delhi slang/language

Although I was born and raised in this city, I still get a kick out of the way people communicate with the most choice expletives and colorful slang. There is also a culture of never saying Thank You regardless of the favor received. To a westerner it might seem extremely rude, but that’s the Delhi way for you – straightforward with no formality.

4. Paan

Although I already mentioned street food, the legendary Paan deserves a category of its own. For the uninitiated, Paan is a juicy, usually triangular concoction of a betel leaf wrapped with an interesting array of colorful spices, sugar, minced fruits, and optionally tobacco that is typically enjoyed after a meal as a light dessert/breath freshener. I was very impressed that this city has taken Paan to another level – there were chocolate, frozen (affectionately spelled as ‘frojan’ where I had it), butterscotch, choco-moco (don’t ask me to explain), sandal (again, don’t ask), and many other exotic-sounding flavors that made no sense. The Paan-seller would even lovingly feed you with his own hands (read: shove the damn thing in your mouth).

5. Metro

Delhi’s train service is basically the commuting heart and soul of this large city that is otherwise not easy to navigate. Unlike our GoTrains with no service outside of the rush hours in the GTA area, the trains in this city run all day long and offer great connectivity, which beats driving at 5-10 KMs in the insanity that is Delhi traffic. My favorite train service was the one from the city’s airport to Connaught Place (city central) at a paltry cost of around a dollar and fifty cents.

Delhi is an experience for anybody no matter how you cut it. Weirdness abounds, you will get stuck in traffic for hours, fear for your life every time you try crossing the road and step over all sorts of garbage  – even the locals complain all day long about these things, but the city’s got endless charms to leave even the most adventurous of travelers hungry for more. I love going back, and will hopefully go back soon.

Why are we not in the future already?

I was extremely taken by this article from one of my favorite magazines, Salon.

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/26/the_future_is_disappearing_how_humanity_is_falling_short_of_its_grand_technological_promise/

The article speaks of how we have not achieved our technological potential and may never do so if we continue our current trajectory. It asks an important question — since we are well into the 21st century, why are we not in the future already? Then lucidly answers it — it’s because the profit is not there.

There have been countless movies and novels that have predicted everything from driver-less cars to astonishingly intelligent AI/Robots for our era. These technologies should have gone mainstream by now (at least in the western world), but all we are walking around with are the latest smartphones at best.

Speaking of smartphones, I was at the Square One shopping mall the day iPhone 6 launched and was puzzled by the sea of people lined up at the Apple store waiting since the night before for an incremental upgrade of hardware that many of them already own. I had seen the craziness of other iPhone launches on TV, but this was the first time I experienced it in person. However after reading the above article, I am not so confused, having understood that a new smartphone is the latest and greatest piece of technology most people can get their hands on. It’s really the best we can do.

It’s a pessimistic idea but we will probably never be in the future. Going back to driver-less cars, Google has made them  a reality but are we ever going to drive one? Still not sure how they are going to get around our car insurance companies who are in the business of investigating who is at fault when an accident happens and then deciding whose premium should go up. No such business case exists for a car that is not being manually operated. I am not even sure when electric cars like Tesla that have great benefits for our environment would make it into the mainstream.

I urge everyone to read the article above even if you don’t give two hoots about technology. It’s a more sobering look at where we currently stand in the world, and what we need to do in order to achieve our potential. And self-introspection is never a bad thing.

On Morocco

On Morocco

I just came back from a tour to Morocco, and am still having a hard time sinking in all that I experienced.

Morocco is an overwhelming melange of the old and new, the conservative and modern, and comes full of fascinating contradictions in every aspect of its being, from the landscape (you can go from a ski resort to a desert in about 10 hours), people (they are very friendly but wait till you start bargaining with them), architecture (Arabic mostly but at times I thought I was in Rome) and lifestyle (hijabs and the latest fashion styles go together here). Above all it was the enormous diversity of landscape that left me speechless – from the highest mountains (high atlas, mid atlas, low atlas), to the ocean-surrounded Casablanca, Saharan desert and some parts even had snow.

The tour was jam-packed, covering most major cities and parts of Morocco. At times it was too fast but in the end I was very happy that I got to see so much – Marrakesh, Fez (great place for buying leather jackets) , Rabat, Casablanca, Sahara Desert, and even a Moroccan Hollywood. Seriously there is such a place with movie studios that have turned into tourist attractions (you can visit one for about 7 dollars, but that wasn’t part of our tour), and they have filmed a great number of movies here – Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Lawrence of Arabia just to name a few.

Riding a camel and camping out in the desert was always on the bucket list, but did not know it would end up happening so soon. The Sahara desert was only a rough approximation of what I had imagined, as it looks completely totally different based on time of the day. In the early morning when the sun rises, it develops a deep orange color, turning into more of a brownish color as the day progresses. As the night arrives, nothing prepares you for the innumerable stars you’ll end up witnessing – spending the entire night sleeping under the stars will be an experience I will always cherish.

One aspect of Morocco I enjoyed a lot was the bargaining. I got a great deal on a leather jacket or at least the store employee made me think I did. It was actually a very funny and prolonged episode where sometimes I would steal a glance at him to see if he is ready to accept the offer that I made, then he would do the same, so on and so forth. It was somewhat like flirting, but in the end I don’t know who got screwed 🙂 This episode made me think I am actually good at bargaining, but the souks ((means an old market or something like that) in Marrakesh brought me down to earth where I wasn’t really able to get a deal on anything.

Speaking of the souks of Marrakesh, this place is absolutely crazy from snake charmers, who love to wrap snakes around the tourists’ necks, and get paid for the service, small shops selling everything from fake Burberry wallets (confession: I bought one, plus some other fake stuff) to dates, fresh juices and anything else you can imagine under the sun. I would come back to Morocco just for these insane markets.

And there was so much more – from the musicians you meet at remote highways who play Moroccan drums with such ease (I tried and totally sucked), the ultra-sweet mint tea that everyone offers you, and above all the working class of Morocco who make argan oil, gorgeous tagine pots, teacups, and even fountains with their bare hands. They are amazing.

Lastly, a word out to all the wonderful people I traveled with and met during the trip – you guys are so interesting and cool. Hope we meet again!!

Gone Girl – a story about a crazy marriage

Having dedicated enough time to read Gone Girl the novel (Gillian Flynn) as well as watch its film adaptation (David Fincher), I thought it apt to spend a little more time writing my thoughts on this whopper of a thriller about a seemingly perfect woman’s disappearance and its aftermath. Right from the beginning, Gone Girl explodes with a cool sense of style and attitude, laced with pop culture reference and meta humor, and in-the-know characters who appreciate such humor (Nick Dunne’s bar is named ‘The Bar’, and the police officer, investigating his wife’s disappearance, loves the name for being very ‘meta’). Nick Dunne even happens to be a journalist who writes about pop culture, on subjects like male grooming, how to act/dress like a gentleman (ironic, since Nick himself is a laid back, T-shirt and Jeans kind of guy which tells you how much he believes in his profession), and Amy is a Psychology Major, and a Personality Quiz writer whose quizzes, we learn, dig deeper than your usual internet personality quizzes. The point is quickly established that they are not your typical accountant and engineer types.

The story is told through alternating diary entries from the husband and wife duo, Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott Dunne, her Victorian middle name betraying the New York upper class upbringing. Not just well-heeled, Amy is the ideal girl, coy yet seductive, meticulous yet adventurous, great in bed and very easy to fall in love with (and hate as we discover throughout the story) and let’s just say Nick is not her equal, middle class, self-satisfied and indifferent to becoming a better ‘man’ except for Amy it seems. The only way their being together made sense to me was from an ‘opposites attract’ point of view. The diary entries, written in a voyeuristic, conversational tone, switching between present and past, reveal the now and then of their marriage with shocking directness. The very sentence of the book and the movie, is Nick Dunne, wondering what he would find inside his wife’s head if he were to crack it open, and that’s just the beginning.

In the first chapters we see their love developing rapidly in an almost dreamlike New York social scene, quickly followed by the onset of reality troubles, recession in this case, leading to both losing their jobs, that rupture a marriage which I felt would have disintegrated anyway.

Darkly satirical, edgy and cynical, Gone Girl is the perfect novel (and movie) for the i-Generation or anyone looking for constant shock-and-awe to keep them engaged. I found it difficult to resist its easy (devilish) pleasures – a tale of warring husband and wife that is an absolute blast to watch but would be terrifying to be a part of. Critics of the institution of marriage would go home even more convinced about the needlessness and worse, the nightmare that modern marriages can turn into.

David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network) is the perfect match for material this edgy and stylish. The film version is less complex and less layered than the book, but more fast paced, precise and shocking – one major sequence was so brutal that I began to wonder what really goes on inside David Fincher’s and Gillian Flynn’s heads.

Welcome to my blog

I wanted to name this blog “anythingandeverything” but obviously that was taken, as were all the other names that came to my mind. So faltuthoughts (faltu = useless) it is, where I talk about anything that interests me from books, movies, humor, travel, politics, technology, and maybe finding the location of shangri-la (no, not the hotels, but the city).

Starting a blog always appeared a bit narcissistic to me (I write whatever the heck I want to write about, and expect people to read), but I needed an outlet to talk about the 2 million things that I think about on a daily basis. Please bear with me but I will try to keep things interesting, and hopefully win a few readers in the end.