Joyeux Anniversaire Pour Moi!

Dot gave me a birthday present of a weekend away in Nice & Cannes on the French Riviera - he really does love me, sigh. I'll let our pictures do the talking.

There was food...



...Dot trying very hard not to look like the luxury-yacht-owner really he is,



... palms in Cannes (now you know where Palme d'Or comes from),



...pretty little terasses,



...still water,



...Dot on an ego trip,



...Dot with his flea-market, €5, hundred-year-old reading glasses,



...happy feet (with fat legs),



...happy nostrils,



...French accents,



...lots of loving,



...railway stations,



...le boucher miniature,



...beautiful windows,



...glorious pears,



...views to die for,



...more beautiful windows,



...little toy trains,



...crème brûlée,



...saucy and racy menu presenters,



...more food,



...wise men,



...a bad dye job,



...glamour on the beach,



...glimpses of heaven,



...fruit that looked like it could have been waxed perfect for a photo shoot (may be it was!),



...yours truly, trying very hard to look glam,



...spice markets,



...matrons with canes,



...solitude,



...sex,



...shoes and poodles aplenty,




...the compleat angler,



...forgotten treasures,



....money,





....strawberries,



...streets with no names,



....and then there was the wine.

There were Alexanders in America

The United States of America (the more you roll your 'r's and drag out your syllables, the better it sounds!) - the land of opportunity, dreams, plenty, and whatever else you want to call it. For me, it fit every cliche ever written about it, and still was very unique and wonderfully weird - quite 'aaawsumm', if you ask me! Dot, Nodot and I, spent 10 days across the east coast and south of America in September. We did New York, Boston, Provincetown (Cape Cod), Austin and Houston.

Here are my random observations about America and about me in America:
- You replace the word 'please' with 'hey' or any other random attention-drawing word you like, before you ask for directions or for any help from a stranger - you then just leave and ignore him/her like they never happened.
- Your tip at a restaurant could leave you filing for bankruptcy - and the food needn't have been that good - you just empty your wallets.
- Bostonians have an accent that's a cross between Aussie and Southern American - and they take great pride in it. (This affects our family more seriously than we imagined. Dot gets a little bit carried away with the whole New England thing and keeps saying "Baaahstunn" every two seconds of our two days there. If that's not enough, he even gets a tee-shirt to remind us of it).
- Airplane stewardesses are too sincere and friendly for my (wannabe) snotty British taste and will tell you why their mother's sister had to look after them when they were young, all in the space between the plane taxiing to a halt and you stepping off it.
- Waitresses are also frighteningly friendly but have a rehearsed happiness and reel off the specials like only thambi in your local Udipi joint can (sending a little English hello out to Britney from the Joe's American Grill in Boston).
- The local Walmart is usually the size of England.
- You cannot buy regular whole milk, only a series of percentages.
- Texans may carry guns but they seem more genuine than New Yorkers.
- New York is over-rated.
- Boston is what I imagined New York would be like.
- Ashwin is an entertaining driver - never mind the fact that you could get killed. Seriously though, we owe him bucketfuls for showing us around. Thank you Ashwin - you're a star!
- I didn't ever think I would live to see a whole gay proud town in America - go Provincetown!
- Clam chowder (or chowda) is orgasmic.
- Nodot and me knew before everybody else that Frank Gehry's Stata Center looks very WRONG.
- I hate Sparkies or whatever that horrid place we went to for a Mexican breakfast is called. Their Migas (puréed beans) had me (and not to mention my two consorts) gassing for a whole day!
- I don't think the IHOP deserves the bad press it gets. At least it delivers a pile of pancakes with maple syrup at the unearthly hour of 11pm in a very ready-to-go-to-bed Austin.
- You cannot cross the interstate or any other road. Walking is not even a concept. We had to summon Nodot out of his working day to ferry us across to the other side.
- All the houses are chalet-style with wood slats on the facade - and boy do they fly the American colours (or should it be colors) with pride.
- Taking an Amtrak train from NY's Pennsylvania Station to Boston, was a great idea and the American countryside is lovely.
- I saw more SUVs in NY than in Texas - that said, the Texan ones were beasts!
- The NY metro sucks, but is the stuff of legends nevertheless. Where else in the world do you get a rastafarian singing out the next stop and doing a one-minute news capsule about the tourist attractions that go with it? Actually, probably only in Mumbai.
- It is not humanly possible to not get dazzled and be awed by Times Square at night. The lights, the people - fascinating!
- The view of the Manhattan skyline at dawn from aboard the Staten Island ferry is breathtaking.
- Clothes are cheap! Three pairs of Levi's for sixty quid!! Aaawsumm!
- Visiting the Johnson Space Center in Houston, being in an actual mission control room, being in a real astronauts' training chamber, seeing a real space shuttle made me feel very insignificant and yet very very proud.
- You can replace words in your vocabulary like 'good', 'okay', 'alright', 'yes', all with one exclamatory 'aaaawsum'!
- I like driving an automatic car - it's like go-karting.

Click on my Flickrama section for pictures.

And to the mother ship they went...

We made the 'pilgrimage' to Southall this weekend - a shrine to India in the heart of London's suburbia. We came back amused, entertained and stuffed to the gills (Punjabi pun intended)! The place is a smörgåsbord of all things Indian or rather north Indian. You have the 'Glassy Junction' pub where the signs urge you to 'maujan mannoo', several 'Gold Factory'-ies, the 'Chaudhary Express', dahi puri at 'Chappan Bhog', dental surgeries where the list of practitioners reads like the who's who of Chandigarh, a marriage introduction and welfare advisory service, and shops selling nylon-polyester-sequinned thingummies for £700 (down from £1450 - definitely one for Swast Ani Masta), among other delights. My poor very South-Indian bedfellow was not impressed with the near absence of South-Indian representation until he found his poison - very sweet, very Punjabi lassi - heaven!

This picture sums up our experience, and yes, we will go back for more!


P.S. More pilgrimages to come, especially to East Ham, to our South-Indian roots. More pictures here.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig!

I went home (or what 'was' home), to Mumbai, to surprise my ma on her 60th birthday, and boy was she surprised! For me, it was a mixed bag - it felt fantastic to be back in familiar territory, surrounded by familiar faces, spending time catching up on the changes since I was there last. Strangely, though I do love the big bad and mad city, this time around, I found it intimidating and quite grim. I don't know why, but I feel the need to disclaimer here. I went back this time after little over a year, but the circumstances of my trip last May were different, so in reality, it's more like a year and a half since I've been back. I am not sure the city has changed much, but I think I have. I was always the first to scoff at the nouveau NRIs coming back with thick foreign accents and grumbling about the crowds and filth. Yet here I was, scared to cross the roads, not wanting to take an autorickshaw because it left me exposed to the elements, and complaining about the heat! I even actually missed being 'home' in Oxford!

It has been a very interesting journey for me. I never quite understood why Dot didn't instantly fall in love with Mumbai. After this trip, I think I am one step closer to understanding. I think when you live in Mumbai, you train yourself to shut out the squalor and hordes - it's a survival mechanism. You learn to see only the good stuff, like the 'development' and the 'economic growth'. You know you can grumble all you want but the problems are bigger than ever and are only getting worse. So you force yourself to look at the bright side, make that seemingly endless journey to work every day, spend most (or even all) of your waking (and or sleeping) hours there, and trudge back, trying very hard to enjoy the ride. The salaries are headed skyward and money makes a great insulator. As Nodot once wisely said (among other wise things he usually says), "tinted (car) windows seem to make the hovels and street-crapping urchins seem almost endearing". But what lurks under there is real and not going anywhere.

There are great aspects of Mumbai living I know I won't experience anywhere else in the world, but I'm not ready to go back in a hurry.

We did go away...

...on the Arriva 280 out of Oxford...stopped for an impromptu picnic at Thame and then carried on to Aylesbury, stopping at Wheatley on the way back. It was last Saturday and we had a fantastic time.

Thame's a lovely little town with lots of quaint mom-and-pop shops that are ever so exclusive and pricey. I was thinking about how they manage to sustain their business at those prices, but it's a town that looks like it has a lot of old money. Oxford, while being such an old historical city has very few exclusive small shops and an abundance of chain high-street stores - you see one, you've seen them all. Oxford's large floating student population could have to do with it.

So, yes, we did go away and come back and spend the rest of the weekend enjoying a huge, lazy Easter lunch, refreshing the garden (merci beaucoup R) and playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto. This is the life.