'Tis the Season to be Jolly

One of the things we have in common with the Europeans I have known so far is how we associate Christmas with family. Generally I start counting down months, weeks and days to Christmas after my birthday in June but this time the only thing that makes me look forward to the day is the hope of seeing a white Christmas.

I was never the kind who missed home or people but this season in this strange new world is surely bringing out the sentimental side of me. I used to think that in Europe I would see what Christmas really is since it frames the context of almost all Christmas-y things I read and songs I heard when I was small but my experience of Christmas in Europe has so far been absurd.

Europe (subsequently America) is responsible for most of the images we have about Christmas but in this place Christmas is everything but Christmas because the Europeans have rejected Christianity (or so they think). Therefore Jesus Christ is totally missing in action! So to most Europeans it is a holiday to be spent with family. This realisation made me question what Christmas means to me. Or to people I know. So I asked around and there was something they said which is similar to what makes this season special universally. Christmas to us truly is family time too. The difference lies in the fact that there is Jesus in most of the things we do around this time. Like how we observe Advent (yes, Malayalees do that too) and give up things we like till Christmas day (in anticipation of Baby Jesus’ arrival as the mothers put it), the going around in groups singing carols in the off-est of tones to collect money for the Crib, games and other activities in Church. But from what I see and what I have heard from people it also has mostly to do with being with family.

Growing up, this season to me meant going to my grandparents’ place for the main days of Christmas, plotting with all the cousins (21 on my mother’s side) on what to do after midnight mass, how all the aunts start pushing us to get dressed for mass at 9 pm when mass begins at 11 pm, how despite starting to get ready at 9 pm we end up reaching church 15 minutes late when the Church is only a 5 minute walk away, how all the aunts who reached half an hour early for Mass realize that we came late so that we would not have place to sit in the Church and can sit outside either talking or dreaming of going home after mass and  have meat, alcohol sweets and all those things we had given up for Advent. Not to forget the fireworks that lights the skies of Kerala on Christmas night.

This is going to be the first Christmas I will be away from everything that I associate with it. Maybe what I am going to miss the most is the typical Malayalee Christmas breakfast which consists of Paalappam and chicken/mutton stew or maybe being in the kitchen while all the aunts are busy preparing these things among many others for the big lunch which follows that is undoubtedly the biggest meal we have in the year.

I can’t help missing home, family and friends for Christmas but like I go to Prague every time I miss Bombay, this Christmas I will be spending time with a family in a village (my substitute for my grandparents’ village) and see how they do it with an invisible Jesus figure.

This probably is going to be the last post on my blog this year. Ever since I got remotely interested in numerology and came up with my own theories regarding the specialness of the number 9 and all numbers that added up to it I suspected that my 27^th year would be special and well, this year did indeed turn out to be magical and eye-opening for me. Through the course of this year I learnt how important it is to keep friends close, be in a group, to accept that you do deserve all the love they give you, to begin to let go of painful memories of an awful relationship, to accept that there will be plenty of bridges to be crossed, to see beauty in the moments spent with someone while crossing one of those, to cultivate love instead of waiting to fall in it, appreciate kindness and work towards being happy.

Hope the new year brings everyone joyful surprises and here’s also hoping that the promised bizarre things happen to that one person who has always read my posts and who loves Christmas and Christmas carols as much as I do.

Merry Christmas you guys!

Of Cakes and Ettiquettes

This post is sparked by a puzzled expression followed by an innocent question that my European friend asked me the other day. “Do people in India bake cakes?”

One day I woke up and realized that Christmas is round the corner and something had to be done about it- something that was typical of my household during the season. Considering being the baking assistant to my mother all my growing up years was my favorite Christmas memory I decided that I would bake cakes for the small family that we have set up here for Christmas. What followed was a long day of shopping that included buying everything from a cake mixer to desiccated coconut. Surprisingly my first attempt at baking was not unsuccessful at all. Not only were my cakes edible they were soft and considerably well-tasting J

So when my friend came home that evening we discussed the cake while he was having it at which point I expressed my disappointment that it did not taste like my mother’s at all. That is when the puzzled expression came. “You mean to say it is normal for you guys to make cakes at home, I mean do Indians do that?” Honestly I did not know how to respond to that. I wanted to say “Of course! We have Christmas too.” But then I was hit with a flurry of thoughts.

1.      Cakes and all those things are obviously something we learnt to make from the lovely colonials so of course we have been baking them for a few centuries!

2.      It was unfair of me to take for granted that a European would understand that.

3.      It did not make sense to say “We have Christmas too!” when cake making was never really specific to the Christian community in India. The Parsis, for example have been doing it much better than us for a long time and…

4.      Well, we are a largely globalised world, so if I can manage to find things like escargot in Mumbai city then why not something as common as cake, which for the information of all Europeans you find in even the smallest village in my country.

At this point the conversation was manoeuvered to another topic. I am not quite sure how it began but it is about an action that every Indian is familiar with if not performing it themselves. Until recently I did not even know that there was a name to it. It was then that my Muslim flat mate told me that they called it ‘bosh’ and I vaguely remembered that my Oriya brethren had a name for it too which I just cannot recall. Anyway do let me know if your community has a name for it and if so what it is. This act is simply making a hand gesture (if you’re Indian you know it) when you accidently touch something with your foot. Basically you touch with your hand what you have accidently stepped foot on, bring it (your hand) to your lips and then on your chest.

Like a true European my friend asked why we did it. It might not occur to a European or a true Indian post colonial child that the question does not make any sense. Why do we do it? Well, it is not good to touch anything with your feet. Especially not books, the popular explanation for that being that you do not want to insult Saraswati- the goddess of wisdom and learning. You are also not allowed to rest your feet on a table which is used for the purpose of serving food.  Again, the popular explanation for it being that you ought not insult Anna devata. Oh, there are plenty of explanations we will come up with as a result of having dealt with such theology based questions for centuries. But then again, leave aside the explanations for they are varied and serve no purpose (I think). What we must see is that this supposedly ‘Hindu’ practice is spread across all religions in the Indian subcontinent. The Muslims do it, so do we Christians- not the Bombay ones (yes, I have a slight disdain for them because they tend to be too non-Indian). The interesting part is, no one teaches it to us. I am not sure about my Hindu friends but I think I speak for them as well when I say that as children when we go to our places of worship or pooja we are taught by our elders many of the etiquettes that have to be followed in these places. But there are so many more, like this particular action that I am talking about, that we pick up, may be not from our parents but our friends like in my case. And they become so much a part of our general way of going about that we are not conscious about them at all until a non-Indian/Asian or an Indian ‘intellectual’ makes us aware of the futility of it.

Are these actions not quite peculiar? Maybe the action has become so natural for us that we do not feel “sorry” when we touch things with our foot anymore. It could be possible that in a way we are paying reverence to Saraswati and Anna devata unconsiously. OR maybe we ought to think what it is about our culture that makes it possible for such actions to survive centuries of colonialism, modern day secularism and the new wave of post colonial sentiments and still be performed by a varied population at large.

The Centipede Dilemma

"Your blogging career has come to an end" he said this morning while walking to the university. "What? It has just begun!" I said feeling annoyed. But he was right you know. Something happened recently when I went to Belgium for a week. But before I get into the details here's a story to set the premise for my dilemma.

One day a frog happened to come across a centipede. The sight of the smooth functioning of its hundred legs left the frog dumbstruck. He exclaimed "I find it difficult to manage my two legs sometimes how do you do it with more than a hundred of them?" It was a simple and honest statement of admiration but it made the centipede conscious of his ability. Since then he was never able to walk without his legs getting tangled. 

Now imagine a scenario in which let's say you are a practitioner of the Art of Living and after months of living the good life you happen to get the golden chance of meeting Shri Shri Ravi Shankar in person and spend some time with him. Let's say during that time spent Shri Shri tells you that he has been keeping a close watch on you and has taken note of the way you practice his ways. What would your reaction be? Happiness? Yes. Profound happiness. For a while. And then what? Then you become conscious of what has just happened and all you want to do is do things to impress him (maybe?) or maybe you get so paralysed with being conscious about it that you simply become unable to do the exact thing that was effortless to you.

And that is exactly what seems to be happening to me. Here I was happily blogging, mainly for the purpose of letting my friends know about things I found peculiar here and then Belgium happened. Let's just say that the Shri Shri, Jesus Christ of my universe who I went to meet mentioned that he had read my blog and even briefly discussed a few parts from it. At first I was paralysed with happiness. In my mind I kept telling myself "He has read my blog! He has read my blog! He has read my blog!". After a day of mulling over the far more important things we talked about, the same thought came into my mind and this time with a completely different tone.  I felt like how probably Adam and Eve must have felt when they realized they were naked after committing the original sin. This time I felt paralysed with shame. He, who is what he is because of the way he thinks, acts, writes and guides, he had read my blog. My silly silly blog. At that moment how I wished I had wisdom and wrote insightfully with more finesse and class. 

It has been almost twenty days since I met him. While the rest of the things in my life are going according to the scheme of the larger framework I find that I am unable to go back and look at my blog let alone re-read the post that he had read.  And probably I would have put off writing any more posts till I had something eye-opening and mind-blowing to write about, something I wouldnt be ashamed of if he happens to read my blog again (which might have taken years) if my dear dear friend had not remarked this morning that my blog writing career had come to an end. 

At this point I have only two options. Either wait to get enlightened and then disperse pearls of wisdom or write a couple of lame posts to get over the Centipede Syndrome. You know the choice I made :-)   

What James Blunt said. That. And a Few Other Things on Orientalism.

The thing about an average Indian is that when we think of Europe the places that come into our mind are England, Germany and Switzerland. We know they are not the only countries in the continent but we tend to remain ignorant about the others. Maybe it has to do with many of us having relatives in the above mentioned countries that we know have a considerable number of Indians living there. My very lovely Czech Republic happens to be one of the countries with hardly any Indians. In fact in a world that Indians are taking over population wise I came across only 3 Indian couples in Prague when I stayed there for a couple of days (all of them were Malayalees :) definitely something to discuss in a future post). It is only understandable that if the capital city has so very few spottable Indians how many will be there in this small town of Pardubice. As a result of this I am what they would call ‘exotic’ here.

At first the whole concept of being exotic was vague to me. This town has a university that has a few students from Africa, America and India. So it is not like people here have not seen those of darker shades. But a trip to a Moravian village (namely Radvanice) over a weekend opened my eyes to what ‘exotic’ actually is.

Here’s something about India. In my country, at least in the last century, people have developed a warped sense of beauty. Fair skin, skinny body and length of hair are some of the top most criterions to be met in order to be seen as beautiful. Having not been blessed by most of these qualities I had never imagined myself to be ‘beautiful’. But having lived in Europe for just two months I have begun to think otherwise. I have had random women come up to me only to touch my hair and say “Your hair, very beautiful.” Oh, and not to mention those who said I had beautiful eyes, skin colour and what not. It felt very good at first till I began to understand what is really happening. When I went to Radvanice I was told that my friend and I were the first Indians to step on the soil there. Many people there had never seen Indians in real before. Personally, the funniest incident was spending time at the local bar towards the end of which 3 elderly men came up and sat right next to me and started touching my hair and saying it’s beautiful. That’s when it struck me. I was reminded of one of those pictures I found floating around on Facebook recently. You can see it below. To these people I am the white child in the picture!

It then brought to mind the many many colonial narratives on the ‘exoticism’ of Indian women I had come across. It was disappointing at first. They did not think that I was beautiful because I was beautiful. For them I was beautiful precisely because I was ‘exotic’. So then I began wondering if I was actually beautiful or not. I realized that the very fact that I was pondering over such a thing was disturbing. I looked in the mirror carefully. I saw two things at once. I saw the average looking Tess in India and I saw the beautiful Tess who had come to live in Europe. And the only thing they had in common was the set of eyes, the small flat nose with a purple nose stud, and the lips. Everything else was what my environment and its people had given me. It just rendered the question “am I beautiful?” futile.

Let us move on to the other interesting things I understood after being in Radvanice. The parents of our host, two of the sweetest people I have come across in this country so far, had so many doubts about India. And very genuinely and apologetically asked us questions like “Is India full of elephants?” and “Do you still travel on the roof of trains?”. And it was not just them. I have come across many people here who are under the impression that India is four hundred years later still the way the early colonialists described it. Did I mention my parlour lady who on learning that I am Indian asked “Why wear you no bindi?" More than anything else these questions amuse me and definitely make good points for discussions in lectures. The problem however remains that the West knows us through what has been written and documented through films on us and you can imagine the kind of images these documentaries produce- sickly looking starving people, battered woman, naked children and yes, as one of the guys at the bar exclaimed “you India- Slumdog Millionaire!” And somehow we are responsible for this too. Pick up any brochure on Indian tourism. You will find on them pictures of elephants, camels, ‘native’ women in colourful attire, etc, etc, only reinforcing the image the West gave us. So maybe we have also unconsciously begun to see India as the land of snakes and elephants? We are selling them our exoticism and they are buying from us the bullshit they gave us in the first place. Technically speaking this is a strange situation but in all honesty it is funny too. So next time when a foreigner asks us “Do you still travel on the roof of trains?” let us answer them the way my friend answered that particular question- “Not just roof, we also horizontally hang by the bottom of the trains.” ;)

P.S.- If your knowledge of English music is even worse than mine (and that’s saying something) then it is for your understanding that James Blunt’s most popular song is titled You’re beautiful. Therefore the significance of the title of this blogpost.

~*~ *~ where MAGIC begins ~*~ *~

Because an entire post is dedicated to it, it must be obvious how amazing this place is. Located in one of the alleys that lead away from the Old Town Square in Pardubice is this bar called Klub 29. I have been to this place only a few times but there never has been a time when I came out of it not feeling at least 20 times happier than before.

Klub 29 is attached to Theatre 29 where they say amazing musical and theatrical performances take place but since I have not had fortune of being an audience to either of them I am not in a position to talk about it. So let me steer back to talking about Klub 29.

Other than the fact that this is where I discovered Jagermeister (my eyes are getting twinkly and yeah, I'm only learning about these things now) there are many factors that make this place one of the best in this town.

Factor 1: It has the ‘place next door’ ambience with informal furniture and casual décor. Nothing in this place reeks of artifice or unnecessary nonsense. Well, to be honest other than the beautiful fact that this bar is not stuffy and loud like how many bars tend to get, there is not much about the general looks of the place that sets it apart from the rest but then, that is where the ordinary part ends. I shall now proceed with the other factors listing them according to the level of their greatness in an increasing manner.

Factor 2: To begin with it has two good bartenders. Coy and sweet but always at your beck and call. Wilhelm and Bára (not sure about the former’s spelling). They give you sound and honest suggestions on what to try if you are in doubt.

Factor 3: It has the most number of varieties of Coffee beans to choose from. Yes, this is a coffee-cum-alcohol place, which is something I have never seen in India. So if you are a fan of good coffee this is the place for you to choose from the many kinds from different parts of the world. The one I tried today was from Salvador and it was interesting (pardon my poor geography but before I googled it up I did not know where the place is).

Factor 4: JARIN (pronounced यारिन). He is the owner and without a doubt the life of the place. It is no wonder that people love coming here. You cannot help it, you know, when this man gives you a reason to love this place so much. You will always see him taking turns sitting at each table spending time with his customers. Today we were the lucky ones who he chose to bestow his presence upon. He gave us the best Slivovice we have had so far. Also he demonstrated his elaborate coffee making process through the “vacuum press method”, if I remember right, by bringing a very interesting looking device to our table and dedicatedly brewing coffee in this apparatus that looked like had just been stolen from a chemistry lab. In the picture below you will see the master at work.

Factor 5: Oh, I did not mention the best part, did I? This place is where magic happens J  I am not joking. Be assured. You will never leave the place without having a story to tell. Good enough a reason to come here?

"I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed..."

Moving to Kochi from Orissa 13 years ago made me Bollywood crazy. Having spoken Hindi all my life till then I felt the lack of “Hindiness” when I moved to the southern city where hardly anyone spoke the language let alone watch Hindi movies. Moving to Bombay after 5 years of living in Kochi de-Bollywoodised me. I guess it had to do with being once again in a Hindi-speaking environment and well, Bombay gave me an overdose of Bollywood which made me value it less. After having come to Europe I find that I am once again leaning towards it although my interest in it had virtually died. I find myself helpless when faced with the beginning of autumn and the turning of leaves into yellow, red or brown. It already looks beautiful. How can a once-Bollywood-crazy person like me not feel like picturing herself as Rani Mukherjee singing Tumhi Dekho Na from Kal Ho Na Ho with Shahrukh-I-hate-him-Khan?

Coming back to the point, I started thinking of all the times Bollywood entered and left my life depending on where I was and how I was situated. It occurred to me that Bollywood was only one of the things in my life the importance of which evolved over time and many moves to different locations and situations. Another one of those that comes into mind is religion. I was born Christian and still am a Lamb of God J. But this feeling of being Christian was not something I grew up with. The way I was brought up, going for Sunday Mass was, to put it crudely, the only Christian thing we ever did. In fact in a place where I was the only Christian person other than my siblings I used to feel strange about being a Christian. On one hand I was proud of being different from the rest and on the other I secretly felt ashamed of being different from the rest. Why you may ask. Let me give you a simple example. This is a conversation I very vividly remember from when I was probably eight.

Friend: What did you do on Sunday?

Me: I went to Church

Friend: How often do you go to Church? And where is it?

Me: It is very far from here but we Christians have to go every Sunday.

Friend: So your God is Jesus, na? Why do you pray to a naked God? (Yes, the phrase used was ‘nange bhagwan’)

Me: He is naked because he was stripped off his clothes by bad people.

Friend: But if he is God why did he let it happen?

Me: I don’t know.

Friend: Our gods are very strong. They destroy bad people.

My friends had cool gods, you see, beautiful, exquisitely clad and invincible. And they had plenty of them. I had only one. And he died on a cross. True, he came back to life but why did he have to die in the first place? Yes, these are remarks taken from what could probably have been among the first ‘religious debates’ of my childhood with friends.

At one of the last masses I attended in Orissa before moving to Kochi, my friend- a Christian, another rare creature in my realm of non-Christian friends, brought to my notice that we belonged to a group called Catholics. The word rang a bell. I had heard it somewhere; it sounded cool. But then, I thought, if there were Catholics there had to be non-Catholics too. Who are they? And what makes them different from Catholics? At this point I was almost 13 and I cannot imagine a Christian of that age brought up in Kerala, Mangalore or Bombay not knowing who Catholics are. So there, that was my childhood. I grew up knowing way more about Jagannath, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Vikramaditya and Krishna bhagabaan than I knew about Jesus, Mary or Joseph (at that point God and the Holy Spirit being strange entities mentioned only during mass).

Then came the move to Kochi, a city with a 75% population of Christians. Seeing that I was the only un-Christian being in my circles I took it upon myself to dive deep into Christian knowledge. In 3 years I knew my Bible and I almost became a Bible-verses-spitting self –appointed preacher. The militancy gradually wore off in the next 10 years but I never ceased being a ‘believer’.

Before I came to Europe I thought I knew what Christianity was. Since I had for the longest time wanted to study Indian Christianity I thought it wouldn’t be so difficult for me since I was a Christian myself. I could not have been more wrong. This I started realizing only when my PhD guide and I started discussing what things like faith, doctrines and belief meant to Indian Christians. He prodded and pried my eyes open into seeing what European/ Western Christianity is. It was strange. And indigestible. I don’t know if I can empathize with it still. I explained to him how I understood things and most Christians I knew shared the same understanding giving him specific examples of why and how we practice certain things to which he responded in peals of laughter. He was amazed and fascinated by this odd belief we called Christianity and said that to the western eye it would seem absurd if not blasphemous.

So if a practicing Christian like me, who everyone around believes to have a lot of bhakti, can harbour the kind of beliefs that she does and still be seen un-Christian, what can be said of the few million Christians in India not all of whom have had the opportunity or even disposition to engage in any religious thinking whatsoever? It now begins to make sense why those missionaries said that even the Christians in India are ‘heathens’. We still are and probably will remain so. You see, it takes a lot more than the promise of eternal life to drive the Indian out of you. And now as I sit and wonder what is it that I need to explore academically in order to learn to do good research I realize that I am my own subject and maybe the scores of books written by our very own Mallu priests on the Indian Church may not be able to give me half the answers that my very own experience can. I now understand why they said research is not just academics. 

La vie Boheme

It is funny how most things I end up liking are related to food or anything that goes into my mouth. Yet again, I have found something that I really like and would recommend to people coming to this side of the world at this particular time. Burčák (pronounced बुर्चाक) . It is something that is in the process of becoming wine. I doubt there are many like me who prefer their drinks to be sweet but if by some accident of fate you do belong to this category you will simply love the sweetness yet the stinging sourness of the drink. The interesting thing is, it is a very healthy drink and as the locals say, over this period of when it is produced and sold you should have as many litres of burčák as the number of litres of blood in your body! So there, I am- one down and four to go :D

Autumn is supposed to have arrived early this year. For a Mumbaikar living here, it is really cold, you know. But I cannot begin to describe how much I am loving this weather- my favorite part is being able to wear fancy coats and knee-high boots which a majority of us Indians have only seen in movies. Probably I like this weather more because this is exactly (or a little bit colder) than Mumbai winters and don’t we just love our Mumbai winters? Yes, I keep going back to my Mumbai memories all the time. There is something about that city. Or probably it is that I am trying to hold on to or rather find something that I am familiar and comfortable with. And I found one such thing here that at the end of last week. Something strange, the Holy Spirit if you may want to believe, led me to a Catholic Church on Friday evening. I felt I needed to do some field work here considering I am studying Indian Christianity- therefore needed insights on European Christianity. The Mass was in Czech so I got several minutes to plan many many mundane things that I wanted to do in the forthcoming week. As my eyes wandered all over the place one image caught and arrested my attention. It was an image of Mother Mary. The first I saw in my stay here so far.

 It has been more than a month since I came to Pardubice. There are plenty of new things I have learnt about myself after coming here. Of course that is helped by my roommate/ friend who picks on every thought or word that I utter and makes me think about it. Yeah, it leads to bickering of all sorts at every possible moment but the exploration of these thoughts, needless to say is very useful. So that evening I was inspired to think why this  religious image was inducing in me a non-religious feeling of being comforted at the mere sight of it. It was definitely not some holy and pious sentiment that made me feel so. I waited for mass to get over so that I could follow people into doing what I assumed they did in Church in India after mass which is go to all these small alters and kiss the feet or touch the feet of the statue or the photo. Nothing of that sort happened. People slowly walked out while some remained. I waited for the Church to get empty so that I could do it in peace and solitude and not get stared at for being a heathen Christian who had come from a god forsaken part of the world doing ungodly things in Church.

You see, for me and many of my family and friends, going to Church is seen as a thing you do- not out of religious sentiment (of course that is involved too) but simply because it is something you have always done and will keep doing. So where non-religious sentiments are involved, how could I refrain from doing one simple thing that I had practiced ever since I was a little girl whether or not I cared about God? How could I walk out of Church without kissing the altar of Mother Mary? Anyway, I did precisely that and walked out of Church with the feeling that I did what I was supposed to do.

The whole situation made me think of what we Indian Christians had made out of Christianity. Are we the children of what the colonials once called Heathens? Yes. Are we Christians? Yes. Do we have the faith? Yes. Is our understanding of our faith anything close to what a missionary in the seventeenth century would have wanted it to be? No. Will a twenty first century European be able to make sense of our faith? No. These questions do not make any collective sense, do they?

Calling going to Church that Friday evening “fieldwork” was meant to be a joke when I initially thought of it. For months I had been studying Indian Christianity theoretically and seeing its practical applications in the Indian context. But that one evening in Church is where I had my first brush with the world of difference between what Christianity is and what I as an Indian see and practice Christianity.

The Highs and Lows

The last ten days have been nothing short of an emotional journey for me. There were the much awaited lows and the least anticipated highs.

So I have never been the kind who misses people (except my sister) but in the past few days I actually missed quite a few of them for the first time in my life. I missed Candice when I was terribly hungry one day (She’s my partner in greed). I missed the fact that I could not make random calls to people like Jane and Bless and break into songs. And ya, well, I am not going to list the names of the other people I missed. Since my evening walks provide me with ample amount of time to ruminate over my thoughts I was wondering if it had anything to do with me missing the whole Indian feel around. No, it is not going to be solved by making Indian friends here. No. No. I think when you go to a place abroad to live there for a considerable amount of time, you are at first awed by the fact that you are in a new place altogether, then you are awed by the many things that make the place ‘great’, and then after it all dies down and you get accustomed to it all, you long for what you left behind, probably not the people or the place but that feeling that you actually belonged to that place and felt free to do anything under the sun there compared to this new place where you are still exploring and trying to make friends who share interest in certain activities that you like too.

So the missing part was the only low. Now the highs J It has to begin with O, ‘whose job’ it is to take care of me and the other international students. He kept me entertained one entire Sunday by first taking me for Mass (which I had requested him to) to a Protestant Church after which he and his girlfriend invited me home for lunch. Now I had only experienced Indian and Arabic hospitality before and I used to think no other people could surpass that. I had also heard that the European way of being hospitable was different and we Indians might not fully appreciate it. That day spent at his girlfriend’s place made me think otherwise. They were exactly the way any of my Indian friends would have been had they called me over to their place. So what’s all this fuss about European hospitality? Needless to say I had a nice time and watched a Matt Damon movie after a long time.

The most important event of the week has to be that I have moved into an apartment now. Yay! So I don’t have a bed, table or cupboard, yet, but hopefully over a short period of time my room will start looking less ascetic.

Lets now come to my favorite part which happened yesterday J I went to Prague, on my own (till recently not something I did if I was unfamiliar with the place). Looking at the magnificence of the place and the beautiful historicity that I was drowning in I swear I felt like I was in a different dimension altogether. I remembered where I was exactly a year ago and what was happening in my life then. Comparing where I was, to where I had come, and how I had arrived at this point in life, I cannot help myself from being relieved about certain things that happened in the last one year. It might be too early to say so but I am glad it was worth it J

Plus, I am happy I stay in Pardubice and not Prague. Pardubice is smaller scale therefore nice, unlike Prague the streets of which looked as intimidating to me as the posh Palladium at Lower Parel. There is also one piece of advice to everyone who wants to visit Prague. DO NOT judge Trdelnik, the sweet thing I mentioned in my last post, by the shit they sell in the Old Town Square here. Probably it’s commercialized therefore tasteless and served ice cold. I will be updating on good places to have trdelnik once I find them.

So there it is. Another week well spent in the Czech Republic J

Sugar, wine and Trdelnik

Sugar rush. That is probably what made me enjoy the wine festival last night. Hosted in the quaint town of Pardubice, the place that feels like a second home already, this festival was something we all were looking forward to in the last few days. Yeah, there were not many wines to be tasted as I had imagined, nor a lot of varieties of food but the combination of the meat, fresh out of the grill, really nice music and interesting performances was enough to make this night one memorable affair so far. I must however mention this amazing sweet baked stuff I got addicted to. Trdelnik. Simple, sweet and a no-nonsense dish. In other words, if Trdelnik was a guy I would have dated him!

So I think I am slowly beginning to get the hang of this European life. For instance, a weekend neither existed for me nor my friends who have jobs with the oddest of work timings and weekly offs. Here, they take their weekends very seriously; in fact, the town becomes empty after Friday. One wonders where it is that they take off for the next two days. I have had only two weekends here so far but the lack of whatever it is that I did every weekend in Mumbai makes me feel sad. Because there is nothing really that you could do here on a weekend, unless you are in a group which in my case has not happened yet.

In a way it’s good for me I guess because after being trained for 5 days on how to think and why to think by Mr. D in the department of Philosophy, the rooms of which are my safe haven, it feels nice not to do anything on a weekend and catch up on the movies I missed. On my today’s list is Raanjhana and Ayaalum Njanum Thammil.

Coming back to the wine festival, yesterday at the venue I felt for the very first time a sense of surge. I cannot explain it. Probably it is how people here make you feel. Going to a gathering and talking to random strangers are something that the socially awkward me would have never done in Bombay. It feels quite easy to do all that here. It calls to the fore that aspect of your personality which is not overly guarded or inhibited. Because I am not used to making friends so instantly I guess I would have to wait to see if anything actually comes out of it. I am hoping it does because among the lovely people I spoke to yesterday there was this girl who was a hair stylist who promised to give me a hair cut at half the price and a gay couple. Which girl does not want a gay couple friends? Having them would sort out all wardrobe problems in your life right? Is it not what Sex and the City has taught us? I wouldn’t know, I have never seen it. But that seems to be one of the stereotypical ideas the annoying series is propagating.

My late night jaunts have come to an end. Not because it is not safe but because people here like turning in early, which is nice. And I was encouraged to do so by this guy O, whose job it is to make sure that we foreign students are taken care of, a job he probably takes too seriously.

Things in the second week are slowly falling into place. There seems to be a routine to everything now and God knows how much I wanted a daily routine. Those beer sessions in the evenings sometimes, the fetching of dinner late in the night and the cool breeze on the walk back- things just feel good right now J

First Impressions

So after months of planning, weeks of shopping, days of worrying, I finally braved myself into a brand new world. It was not an easy process. Not only was I sad about leaving my people and the city that had been my home for 8 years behind, my family and friends left no stone unturned to make sure that I would cry till my eyeballs dropped. Sappy things followed. There was a “scrap-book” made containing pictures and important memories of the last 8 years. There was quite a social gathering of family and friends who saw me off at the airport. And well, the unfortunate realisation that I am quite a sappy person who loved it all and secretly cried in the smaller-than-a-matchbox toilet on the plane to Turkey.

The moment I set my eyes on Prague (henceforth Praha) I knew that I had indeed come to a city of dreams. No, I did not see much of it but the little I saw was enough to make me dream of the days I would spend walking the streets of the city, feasting my eyes on some of the best historical treats the world could offer. But thanks to the umpteen number of perfume shops at Istanbul airport I had a migraine and all I wanted to do was sleep and not wake up for a couple of days.

I had finally arrived at Pardubice. There is only one word I can use to best describe it at the moment- peaceful. It slowly dawned on me, the realisation that sometimes even sitting at home and doing nothing in Bombay could be stressful- something which my best friend, Jane, said so often. It was not until I was removed from there that I felt calm enough to focus on something. So that is how it came about that I got ready to experience the European life the European way (whatever that means!).

There were a few things which I found funny at first. I don’t remember many of them but the first thing that comes to mind is how they pay their bills in restaurants when in a group. For someone who was used to splitting bills equally with everyone at the table this was quite unique. The waiter went to each and everyone at the table to tell them how much they individually had to pay. I began thinking how absurd this would be in Bombay but then there was really no point in comparing, things are the way they are, and do not necessarily require a reason.

Food and drinks! It’s weird; everything is so cheap here, yes, even by Indian standards. And the cheapest probably is alcohol. A simple strawberry shake costs twice as much as a glass of wine. And meat that comes in all shapes and sizes is a constant threat to my intention of losing a miniscule amount of weight in Europe. Thank God for the lovely weather that motivates one to take long long long walks.

Today marks the end of my first week in Pardubice and today I had my very first dose of European rain. Although there was no muck and although it looked beautiful it lacked something very vital that I always associate with rain- the scent of the earth- the kind that is in the air when it rains for the first time in India. And for the first time in days I missed Bombay. I stepped out later to hunt for dinner only to be stopped by two guys from Afghanistan and Iran whose only intention was to ask me “You India? Kaise ho? I love Bollywood... I love my India…come Kebab corner…I give you spicy food”. After profusely thanking them and deftly slipping away I had dinner after which I managed to do something I had always dreamt of. I walked a lonely road amidst the woods and after making sure that no one was around started singing loudly. Perfect end to a perfect day!

So that’s it for now. Ahoj!