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Around San Francisco With Maya: Civic Center

When I lived near Paris, I didn’t go to see the famous places until the very end. I vividly remember the hectic schedule that I put together to see the Louvre, Les Invalides, Musee D’Orsay, Jardin Luxembourg. You name it and I probably saw it in those last few weeks. With the exception of Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. We both knew at some level that things would never be the same between us again and this girl and I were going through this frenzy of doing things together for the last time.

Here I am, twenty years later, near another beautiful city and I haven’t really seen it except for the Golden Gate, Crooked Street and Golden Gate Park. That is a little exaggeration, because I have seen a few other places, but nevertheless, the city has largely been a stranger to me. In the past few months that we’ve been coming up to the city with Maya, we’ve finally started to get to know San Francisco better.

The day began with Maya wanting to have croissant and milk, her favorite breakfast when we come up to the city. She then wanted to go play at Dolores Park. Summer is almost here and that means San Francisco is beginning its second winter. The wind was shaking the trees like some storm was heading our way and it was cold. Shanthala elected to stay indoors a little longer and so, Maya and I took the public transit and headed to the park. Once we got there, we found that the play structure was sealed off, torn down for renovation. We stood there wondering what to do when we saw an old tram approaching. Papa, lets just get on the tram and go, she said. So, thats what we did.

We got off at some random stop when Maya thought it fit to get off. We wandered the streets a bit and Maya said that she wanted to ride a tram into the tunnel and then take the stairs to surface from the tunnel. Instead of doing our usual run up to Embarcadero, I decided to jump off the tram at the Civic Center. Maya had seen the City Hall from the car a couple of times and so she was eager to see it up close.

We followed a sign titled United Nations Plaza to the surface from the underground. What a beautiful sight greeted us!

The sight seemed straight out of some European city. Maya squealed her delight and started running up and down the wide, pedestrian mall. And her delight turned to squeals when she spotted the fountain behind us.

Signs of how little I know of the world I’m immersed in becomes apparent once again. The entire place is covered with aspects about the UN. Quotes from different people about the need for UN, date the UN charter was signed, a pillar for each year since the UN wS founded with a list of nations that joined that year and so on. I thought that all this was in keeping with the name of the plaza.

Almost seventy years ago, between April 13 and June 26 of 1945, 50 allied nations met in San Francisco with the aim of setting up a global organization that would help resolve conflict through peaceful means. The US along with 50 other allied nations and various non-governmental agencies crafted the UN Charter, here in San Francisco, creating the UN. So, the plaza we were on was not just another dedication to the UN. It was where the UN was founded!

The plaza was mostly empty except for a homeless man sitting by the fountain. Gulls and pigeons were the only other animals that seemed to have more than a second’s interest in the place besides us. Maya ran round and round the fountain, chasing the birds or just watching the water. The fountain is not particularly pretty or memorable.

Back in 2003, the fountain was almost demolished. From a newspaper article published in 2003:
It’s become an intolerable situation, and we don’t have additional resources to continually clean it,” said Alex Mamak, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works.

 

Department crews clean out human filth and hypodermic needles every morning, only to find a new mess the next morning, Mamak said.

Something happened after that time because the fountain is still here and looked quite clean. The only droppings I saw were the birds’.

After exhausting the novelty of the fountain, Maya headed towards the Civic Center, passing a large statue of Simon Bolivar on horseback and a monument called the Pioneer Monument.

Along the way, pillars framed the mall upto Bolivar’s statue with each pillar dedicated to a year when one or more nations joined the UN. One of my memories from history lessons from school is that only 4 nations were not part of the UN, one of which was Switzerland, a nation long famed for its neutrality. So, what do I see on the pillar dedicated to the year 2002 ? Switzerland.

As we approached the City Hall, Maya spotted a children’s playground and took off running. I stayed behind, trying to get different shots of the City Hall.

After lunch, Maya, Shanthala and I headed to Embarcadero where Maya spent a considerable time playing at another fountain, the strange looking structure called Quebec Libre. Constructed by a Quebecois sculptor called Armand Vaillancourt, it is a structure that Shanthala immediately considered ugly, grotesque and an eye sore. It seems to be an opinion shared by others. One critic called it, “Stonehenge unhinged with plumbing troubles” and another described it as “the funeral of beauty in art”. One blog recently bemoaned the logic behind spending $1000 a day to pump water through the fountain.

But, Maya was oblivious to all of this. There was water and she could get wet. That’s all that mattered as she ran along the pathway that took her into the heart of the fountain, with water spilling all around her.

The afternoon turned out to be quite beautiful and warm. Thanks to Maya, we were enjoying a mild summer day in the city that is considered by many to be the city to visit in the US.


 

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A Long, Strange Trip: The Start

Like swallows flying south in winter, we fly to India as the year end approaches. Each year for the past three years, we’ve marked the end of one year and the start of another this way. If we mark this phase as India, the grandparents mark this time of the year as Maya.

We book the tickets well in advance, usually by June or July. The time can’t seem to pass fast enough and then we’re on the plane, filled with equal parts of thrill and dread. The dread is mostly about how Maya will fare during the long flight and how we’ll cope if she gets unhappy. The first year we went with Maya, she was not even one and I was a tad apprehensive about how she would react to the air and the not-so-sterile environment of the land of her parents (she did fine). Traveling with infants in their first year is the easiest, we heard parents say. They’re too small and will sleep most of the time. The second isn’t too bad, but the third and fourth are the worst, the kids seized by the restlessness of their age and the long time in cramped quarters making for a parentally lethal mid-air combination.

After my mostly successful flight and first week with Maya last year, I dreaded this year’s travel even less. I figured that with her age, she had better ability to  reason and understand the situation than before. We started prepping her in advance, telling her that she couldn’t get upset on the plane, that the stewards  and stewardesses on the plane would get upset with her and we couldn’t travel any more after that, that she had to listen to her pop during the flight. For all  that, she’d be rewarded with good times with grandparents, our friends’ kids and magical India. She nodded and started chanting this mantra every time she  saw a plane.

I travel alone with Maya a week before Shanthala joins us and the lack of a backup adds to my concern. My difficulties would begin once we landed. I knew that I had to synchronize my jet lag with hers, sleep when she did and be awake when she was. The first week is also when the long flight with recirculated air and lack of sleep leaves us more vulnerable to upper respiratory infections and gives cause for our stomachs to be upset with us. The first year, Maya puked a few hours after we landed, throwing up everything she had consumed during the past 24 hours or so. Shanthala’s mom put it down to stomach distension due to the long flight. This year, I was more worried about how to keep her occupied. There are no cousins she interacts with, no children near my parents’ house that we know. Here in the US, she goes to a park practically everyday leaving us with only a few hours of dark to keep her occupied. In India, there are no parks for her to play in near my parents house. The two parks nearby are closed during the day and the playgrounds are in a sad state of repair. I only worried about that first week, for after that, the ever-practical Shanthala would be there to help. Also, Maya clings more ferociously to me during that first week, when the foreignness of her ancestral lands and jet lag confound her.

For every such part of dread, I’m filled with equal parts of thrill. Bangalore has always held a special place in my mind. From my childhood days, my mind would fill with anticipation of new toys, watching the latest English movies (for years I watched the newest adventures of James Bond in Bangalore) and eating at fantastic restautants. And now, my mind is excited with thoughts of good food and good times, and the excitement over new toys has yielded to an eagerness to visit the book stores (Strand, Blossom, Gangarams and more). Walking down the MG Road promenade always made me feel grand, like a kid in a toy store, even though so many things have changed there. My mouth watered at the prospect of eating the excellent Dosas and other South Indian delicacies at select restaurants. While the Bay Area has a surfeit of Indian eateries, none can do justice to the South Indian eats, especially the quality of Dosa, Sambar and Chutney that I’m used to at Bangalore. Even the most mediocre of restaurants in Bangalore produced better South Indian fare than what we get in the Bay Area. I wanted to drink Sugar Cane jiuce, coconut water. I hallucinated on the quality of the Indian desserts that I would be able to feast on, my sweet tongue lolling in anticipation. And the thrill of seeing family and some of our closest friends, of nights spent talking about everything and anything.

At a friends’ place here in the US where there are twin girls about 10 years of age and a boy of seven, Maya has a glorious time. She vanishes with the kids once we arrive, leaving me time to chat with the adults. I thought that she’d be the same with our friends’ kids. One of them emailed me regularly about eagerly she was waiting to play with Maya. The last two times, she hadn’t bonded too well with all the grandparents. With her being almost three, I thought that this would fare better too. So, overall I predicted that this trip would be even better than the previous two that we had taken with her.

So, what could possibly go wrong ?

An Irish Perspective On The Journey

Our winter escapade to India is not unusual among Indians, at least amongst those without children or their school-going variety. I think Indians of my generation and socio-economic class are blessed amongst the immigrants. We were welcomed with mostly open arms in the US, provided an excellent path to make this place our permanent home and respected in the community because we were in the computer industry. Unlike immigrants of the past who landed here and started at the bottom of the unskilled job market, we arrived as skilled immigrants, starting fairly high in the socio-economic totem pole and usually heading upwards that ladder. We arrive in a place that has a surfeit of Indian restaurants and Indian grocery stores. Movie halls play the latest Bollywood flick, Holi and Deepavali are major organized events in several places nearby and we even have a choice of temples (for the observing Hindus) to visit. That is not to say we don’t have our share of existential angst, but compared to other immigrants, past and current, we’re fortunate in a myriad ways.

The striking contrast between us and other immigrants of the past is brought home every time I hear the Irish ditty, “Kilkelly, Ireland“. The Irish fled their homeland in droves, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million leaving during the worst period of the infamous Irish Potato Famine, between 1845 to 1855. Unlike the independent India we came from, they were still subjugated by the monarchy in Britain at that time, with the Irish famine probably analogous to the horrific Bengal famines. They set sail, usually from the harbour of Cobh, on a journey mostly to North America, that took 45 days or more and cost anywhere between 55 shillings and 5 pounds. The cramped, insanitary conditions killed so many people, that these ships carrying Irish immigrants were dubbed “coffin shps”. One description of the conditions on board such ships reads:
Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children of all ages huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart; the fevered patients lying beside the sound, by their agonised ravings disturbing those around. The food is generally ill-selected and seldom sufficiently cooked in consequences of the insufficiency and bad construction of the cooking places. The supply of water, hardly enough for cooking and drinking, does not allow for washing. No moral restraint is attempted; the voice of prayer is never heard; drunkenness, with all its consequent train of ruffianly debasement, is not discouraged because it is found profitable by the captain who traffics in grog [watered-down Rum] [2]“.

“Kilkelly, Ireland” one of the most moving songs I’ve heard, captures the longing for the absent faces in the form of letters sent by a father, living in Kilkelly, to his son who has immigrated to the US. Each stanza of the 5 stanza song marks ten years. The song, written by the Americans Steven and Peter Jones, is based on the letters sent by their great-great-grandfather Bryan Hunt to their great-grandfather Bryan Hunt.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 60, my dear and loving son John
Your good friend the schoolmaster Pat McNamara's so good
  as to write these words down.
Your brothers have all gone to find work in England,
   the house is so empty and sad
The crop of potatoes is sorely infected,
   a third to a half of them bad.
And your sister Brigid and Patrick O'Donnell
  are going to be married in June.
Your mother says not to work on the railroad
  and be sure to come on home soon.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 70, dear and loving son John
Hello to your Mrs and to your 4 children,
  may they grow healthy and strong.
Michael has got in a wee bit of trouble,
  I guess that he never will learn.
Because of the dampness there's no turf to speak of
  and now we have nothing to burn.
And Brigid is happy, you named a child for her
  and now she's got six of her own.
You say you found work, but you don't say
  what kind or when you will be coming home.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 80, dear Michael and John, my sons
I'm sorry to give you the very sad news
  that your dear old mother has gone.
We buried her down at the church in Kilkelly,
  your brothers and Brigid were there.
You don't have to worry, she died very quickly,
  remember her in your prayers.
And it's so good to hear that Michael's returning,
  with money he's sure to buy land
For the crop has been poor and the people
  are selling at any price that they can.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 90, my dear and loving son John
I guess that I must be close on to eighty,
  it's thirty years since you're gone.
Because of all of the money you send me,
  I'm still living out on my own.
Michael has built himself a fine house
  and Brigid's daughters have grown.
Thank you for sending your family picture,
  they're lovely young women and men.
You say that you might even come for a visit,
  what joy to see you again.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 92, my dear brother John
I'm sorry that I didn't write sooner to tell you that father passed on.
He was living with Brigid, she says he was cheerful
  and healthy right down to the end.
Ah, you should have seen him play with
  the grandchildren of Pat McNamara, your friend.
And we buried him alongside of mother,
  down at the Kilkelly churchyard.
He was a strong and a feisty old man,
  considering his life was so hard.
And it's funny the way he kept talking about you,
  he called for you in the end.
Oh, why don't you think about coming to visit,
  we'd all love to see you again.

The money sent home, a family taking root so far away, a family seen only in one or two probably blurry photographs and the longing, oh! the longing, expressed with such eloquence in just “what joy to see you again”, does violence to my heart each time I listen to the song. I hear my father’s voice when I read the lines: “You say you found work, but you don’t say what kind”. He always wants to know more about my job than I find the patience to explain.

Now you see why I think we’re blessed. With cheap telephone and the advent of video chats, families separated by many oceans can still see each other and a journey is not just affordable, but far more comfortable and short.

Back To Our Adventure

So, what could go wrong ?

The first shoe dropped two weeks before we were to leave, Shanthala’s backup was diagnosed with cancer. So, she had to cancel her trip. I pondered for an instant if I should cancel the trip too, but coupled with my fantasies of Maya playing with older kids here and my desire to not rob this time from the grandparents, I decided to journey alone with Maya. I secretly realized that I may have to give up visiting any bookstore. I like to spend an hour or so at each store and I knew that wasn’t possible with Maya in tow. She’d probably be patient for about 15-20 minutes. But I hadn’t given up hope completely.

The second shoe dropped a few days after that when my parents informed me that they had moved houses, from their current location in a fairly central part of the city to a remote hamlet, far from the city. Their move took me by complete surprise. It is considered a rural area, my father said, so the landline is a via something the local telephone company calls wireless local loop. Do you have any Internet connection, I asked. We have something, he said and my heart sank. Go to a place where there is not even an Internet connection ? That was so last century, I thought.

From Bangalore Airport, it took about 2.5-3 hours to travel to my parents’ new place. Not wanting to risk traveling in the middle of the night to a place I hadn’t even seen, I scrambled to make arrangements to stay with a friend immediately after we landed. How was I going to meet my friends and relatives ? I flinched at the thought of sitting for a couple of hours each way in the car with Maya. Travelling in a car in Bangalore’s congested roads was like chinese water torture, who knew when the car would stall ? What about eating at all those places that I had been fantasizing ? Could I even walk down M.G. Road ?

With a steely heart and iron resolve (which I hoped wouldn’t rust), I boarded the plane with Maya. The only one facing the whole thing as a real adventure was Maya.

Time Passages: The Music Of Al Stewart

“Two broken tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind”

Two of the most beautiful lines that I’ve heard in all of my musical journeys. Can you believe a song, a rock song at that, that grabs you like a thriller from the first lines and doesn’t let go till the end, almost eight minutes later. And the song has a beautiful, sad ending like a great epic. And the song is the chronicle of the Third Reich’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the beginning of its end, told from the perspective of a Russian foot soldier.

Or how about this song, “The Running Man”, that chronicles the life of a hunted man (a Nazi ?), running from the hunted, that starts with:

Before the phone hits the receiver
You’re halfway to the door
The voice said ‘get out while you can,
There’s just ten minutes, nothing more’

Or a song about the French Revolution called “Palace of Versailles” that starts with:

The wands of smoke are rising
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal
The kings have all departed
There servants are nowhere
We burned out all their mansions
In the name of Robespierre

Probably no other rock artist has set history to such beautiful music and woven such compelling historical tales as Al Stewart.

I was introduced to his music in Paris. When I went to meet a friend in one of the company apartments, I heard this beautiful music coming from one of the rooms. I asked what the music was and who lived in that room. I was told that the guy who lived there was a snob who had the most expensive and gorgeous sounding music system in all the company. Snob or not, I wanted to know what the music was. I knocked on the door and entered his den. A guy sat on the floor, sprouting a moustache and an attitude. I introduced myself and asked him what was playing. He said, “Al Stewart”, disdainfully. The song that I heard was “Roads to Moscow”, the song whose lines I quoted at the start of this post. The album was “The Best of Al Stewart“.

I remained in the room listening to the rest of the music and a few months later, the snob and I were good friends. We’d spend hours listening to music. I was coming to Paris from my years spent in small towns of Southern India where western music was hard to come by. And what did come by was the mainstream stuff, stuff that I had grown tired of, stuff that was unmemorable a week or a month later. I was in search of something less ephemeral, more soul grabbing. Deepak introduced me to a lot of new music, music that went under the genre of progressive rock, of groups such as Yes, ELP, Rush and King Crimson. Of all of them, the only two that remained are Al Stewart and Camel.

Al Stewart has a pleasing and distinctive voice to accompany his distinctive musical stories. Hear it once and you can recognize it again quite easily, just like Mark Knopfler’s guitaring. His musical journey began with a guitar and this voice, singing folk rock songs of intimate portraits gleaned from his life. Stories of girl friends – won, lost and love still searching – of friends and their lives, of street life and characters like history teachers. Here are some lines from one of his early songs, In Brooklyn:

‘Oh I come from Pittsburgh to study astrology,’
She said as she stepped on my instep,
‘I could show you New York with a walk between Fourth Street and Nine.’
Then out of her coat taking seven harmonicas
She sat down to play on a doorstep sayin
‘Come back to my place I will show you the stars and the signs’
So I followed her into the black lands
Where the window frames peel and flake
And the old Jewish face behind the lace
Even now trying to get to see what’s cooking
Just John the Baptist in the park getting laid thinking there’s no-one looking
And its eighty degrees and I’m down on my knees in Brooklyn

Interestingly, his first single, in 1967, included guitaring by the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page. His albums also featured good instrumentals such as “A Small Fruit Song” from his third album, Zero She Flies. At one of his concerts, he joked that jazz is what happens when a musician continues to play even after they don’t know what they’re playing, this despite his third album containing an 18 minute track that chronicled his love life. The song reads like a rock version of Raj Kapoor’s “Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din”. Wikipedia credits the song as being the first mainstream record release to include the “f” word. I like how the song ends:

Of all the girls I ever knew
some loved and some denied me
And all the words I ever said
have been no use to hide me
And all the songs I ever sung
each one of them untied me
And all the girls I ever loved
have left themselves inside me

Wikipedia has this to say about this stage of his career: “Stewart was a key figure in a fertile era in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the age. He played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono pre-Lennon, shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the legendary Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.”

Things began to change with his fifth album, “Past, Present and Future“, released in 1973. Six of the eight songs from that album had historical roots from melodies about the second World War to a portrait of the American president, Warren Harding, to one about the prophecies of Nostradamus. This was the first album to be properly released in the US, though it didn’t receive much airplay on commercial radio stations due to the length of its best songs.

Two albums later came the meteoric “Year Of The Cat”. Al Stewart is mostly known to everybody for this album. He says that this was attempt to construct a chart-busting album. “If this didn’t work, I don’t know how to create one”, he said. It had fewer historical songs than say “Past, Present and Future”, but the three that it did were gems: Lord Grenville, On The Border and Flying Sorcery. The title track is among my all time favorites, along with Roads to Moscow. His description of the woman in the title track is brilliant and unique:

She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a water colour in the rain

as is the the starting of the song:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

It is a song that speaks to the senses with lines of incense and patchouli, blue tiled walls, drum beats and rhythms.

The rest of his albums never quite achieved the popularity of Year of the Cat though they possessed gems such as Merlin’s Time, Running Man, Song On The Radio and Palace of Versailles. He mostly disappeared from the mainstream radio scene. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to put out albums. His last album “Sparks of Ancient Light” was released in 2008. The highlight of the album was the song “Shah of Shahs” about the last days of Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. He sings:

After these processions comes the sweeping up
The rag and bone possessions, an old tin cup
The army trucks have hauled away the newly slain
The angry crowd retreats, but they’ll be back again

And the prisoner in the palace does not understand
The ingratitude around him after all he’s done and planned
But if this the way that it must be then he’ll be damned
If he will let them take away his perfect dream

….

He cried inside the limousine and at the airport too
Where the soldier knelt before him and kissed his shoe
He flew across the desert and the open sea
While they tore down all his statues and his legacy

And the victor greets the newsmen with a strange and stoic style
They take a hundred thousand pictures and in none of them a smile
But this is just the way that it must be now for a while
he’s only come to bring another perfect dream

Luckily for me, he still tours, performing at small, off beat but popular stages. He is back to being a folk artist again, singing his popular and not-so-popular tunes with a just a guitar. He’d sometimes be accompanied by his then collaborator, guitarist Laurence Juber. Almost twenty years after I first heard his song, I saw him perform live. He came to the Bay Area twice within a year and we saw him both times, driving nearly two hours each way the second time. His concert was charming despite the lack of orchestration because he also spoke well, with understated, wry British humor.

In the music shops of Paris at that time I lived there, only a handful of his albums were available, all very expensive. So Deepak and I purchased an album each, Year of The Cat, and its followup, Time Passages. I had to wait till I came to the US to buy some of his other albums. After collecting seven of his albums, I thought I had enough. For a while, he vanished from my music scene as jazz and Mark Knopfler supplanted just about everything else.

Then Maya was born. A child can begin a journey of rediscovery. One afternoon, looking for some music with an afternoon mood, I played Lord Grenville and Year of the Cat to Maya. She was hooked to both songs and for over two months now, they continue to be the songs she takes to her afternoon nap. I’ve introduced other songs such as Time Passages, Almost Lucy and Palace of Versailles, all of which she likes. Roads to Moscow is one of her favorite bedtime tracks. Last night, she evan began humming the chorus of the track. As I listened to Roads to Moscow, to her humming and watched the joy in her face as she listened to the song, my thoughts harked back to my history with Al Stewart and I drifted into those Time Passages.

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Al Stewart picture from flickr, courtesy of ac4lt.

A Short History of Haiti

THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news last night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next? Poor Haiti is cursed.”

Read this short (about 500 words) history of Haiti to get a little more context of this poor country. I’d written earlier about Haiti, about how people pay money to eat mud.

Here is a link provided by NYT on contributing to the aid to the country.

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