Istanbul-June-2022

 Wow, what a town! Right from the minute I stepped off the plane and walked through the airport I could tell this was going to be a good one. Clean, efficient, no crowds, nobody trying to run you over as you wait at baggage claim, wait is that my bag I see amongst the first off the plane? What did I tell you about this being a good one?

I asked the woman at the foreign exchange counter what I'd get for my dollars but her response was too shocking to print here. So I got some cash from an ATM, called an Uber, smiled to myself when I divided the tariff by the exchange rate, and off we went, to Beyoglu, one of the nicer neighborhoods in the European half of the city. 

Driving here feels like home. Thanks to my Google Fi (if you have plans to travel abroad, do yourself a favor and get this) phone service, I was able to follow along as we negotiated the turns and interchanges for the better part of 45 minutes. 

My Airbnb turned out to be everything I dreaded - the pictures always lie! But a funny thing happened when I reminded myself how much I was paying for this. I'm a cheapskate and proud of it. Beauty, as the big man wrote with his quill, lies in the eyes of the beholder. I started to appreciate the fact that this was an actual room with walls, a bed, a window and even a closet. So what if the socket dangling from the roof was missing a bulb? A table lamp provided soft lighting.

I decided to eat my first meal at the place recommended by my host. It was a short climb from where I was staying. Hilly neighborhood, I thought to myself. Ever the optimist, I found a bright side to this: I would be walking down these slopes after my meal, which is a lot better than if I had to do a post-prandial ascent. 

The food was excellent - probably the best chicken soup I'd had in a very long time. Together with the bread they put out, this could have been a meal by itself. I'd already ordered another dish so I dug in and was determined to prove to myself that I hadn't gone overboard in the ordering dept. I had.

On the walk back I noticed a couple of stray cats who ignored me as they went about their business. My host had a dog so I counted that as another blessing as I'm averse to the feline species. Stray cats, while not ideal, were better than cats in the house. 

Later in the day I ventured out to discover a bit of the city. Public transport in Istanbul is the crown jewel in the city's  services. Between the buses, the trams, the trains and the ferries, you can pretty much get to any place by stringing together a couple of these modes -  if one doesn't take you all the way to your destination. And they all work off the same prepaid card (appropriately named istanbulkart) which makes getting around a breeze once you figure out how to top up your card (this is the tricky part - locating the english option amongst a slew of languages can be frustrating). 

Thanks to Fi, my google maps was working and it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the tram station, of which 4 minutes was climbing down 200+ steps (I counted). Hilly terrain, remember? Was my airbnb perched on top of a hill?  I seemed to be descending in elevation no matter which direction I walked in. Kinda like those gradient descent algorithms except I was the one doing the crunching. As I climbed down those steps, watched this time by no less than 9 cats, some hard facts started to dawn on me. 

Fact #1: Istanbul is a city built on several hills (7 I believe is the official number) so no matter where you go, you will be traversing an incline. I don't care how great the public transport system is but if you do decide to use it, there will be some walking, er climbing, involved. In some places the inclinations are so steep that they don't even bother with roads and simply use stairs to connect one street with the next one below. If you have a bum knee or a weak ticker, you might want to play it safe and take an uber. I pretended I had neither and huffed and puffed my way through.

Fact #2: Istanbul loves cats and they are frickin' everywhere! Yikes! I wondered if all those bygone generations of sultans had been born again as cats. Sort of the islamic version of reincarnation. In which case my progress through the streets of Constantinople was being monitored by royalty from the Ottoman & Byzantine empires. I couldn't help feel a tad self-conscious. Should I walk like an Egyptian? 

Black Cat Awaits My Descent

Fact 3: They make it real easy for you to practice islam. There's a mosque on every corner and if there isn't, there will be one soon. A dome and one minaret are standard issue for any mosque with the more important ones boasting two, three, four, even six minarets. 

The only guided tour I signed up for was to visit the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia. These two imposing structures face off against each other and while the first was suitably impressive, my vote goes to the second for its stunning architecture especially when you consider its age (built in 537AD, it served as a church for a 1000 years before it was converted into a mosque for the next 500 or so years and then into a museum in 1931, which is what it would have been today if Erdogan had not redesignated it back as a mosque in 2020 ). 

The Blue Mosque

The Blue Mosque gets more foot traffic judging by the strong toe jam odor that hangs in the air. Our guide was a school teacher who did this on the side to augment his income. He told me that his income had dwindled to a third of what it was some 15 years ago. I fact-checked his numbers and sure enough was surprised by Turkey's whopping 80% inflation rate! 

Hagia Sophia (Exterior)

In keeping with the 'no human idols' rule of mosques, The Blue Mosque is striking in its barren interior. Contrast that with the artifacts inside the Hagia Sophia some of which were obscured when it reverted to a mosque. If I were a religious man, I'd probably connect with the almighty a little easier surrounded by artifacts, but that's just me. 

Hagia Sophia (Interior)

The Bosporus Strait, which separates the Asian and European parts of the city, gives Istanbul a panoramic feel that does wonders for  your soul (and your pictures). You can hop on a ferry and just keep going back and forth between the two continents like an absent-minded empire builder of yore. 

European Side With More High Rises

Asian Side With Lower Slung Profile 

Or you could be a little more targeted in your approach and take the ferry to the Princes' Islands - a series of islands of which BuyuKada - literally means 'big island' - is the most popular. I did that and spent several hours biking around the island, gorging on the seafood and topping it off with ice cream. I have spent many a day pursuing less satisfactory things in my life. 

The food tasted every bit as good as it looks here. And the prices were ridiculously low thanks to the almighty greenback.

I got my fill of the city during the 5 days I spent there. The taxi that my airbnb host had ordered to take me to the airport, showed up at 5:30AM just like they said they would. At that hour of the morning we had the roads to ourselves as we cruised to the second of the two international airports - this one on the Asian side of town. Istanbul was a lovely city to visit I thought. The people were friendly even though they mostly kept to themselves and barely noticed you. The food was of a quality that made you weep. 

In a few hours the city would ramp up to its normal level of hustle and bustle, transporting the hordes up and down and across and back again, on the trains and trams and buses and ferries, in a seamless display of what urban living should be. And yet if you consider what economic destruction the fascist regime had wrought over the past 20-some years, you couldn't help but think Istanbul was like this beautiful but neglected woman, all decked up and nowhere to go. Never before have I seen first class infrastructure just idling its time away. 

If one could transport this place to another part of the world, say Bangalore which complements Istanbul in so many ways, can you imagine what productivity gains could be had? I would of course leave the cats behind. They just wouldn't get along with the stray dogs that roam the streets in namma bengaluru! 

Mumbai-June-2022

Visited the old haunts in South Bombay. The drive from MIG Cricket Club where I was staying, took me over the Bandra-Worli sea link, an exciting prospect as the link didn't exist in my time. 

As the miles flew past, I caught glimpses of signs that brought back memories of what Bombay was composed of -  Worli Seaface, Haji Ali, Pedder Road, Hanging Gardens, Chowpatty, Brabourne Stadium, Queens Necklace Marine Drive, Nariman Point, 

the Air India building in the distance with its logo on top - the parade of these landmarks is suddenly interrupted when the cab hangs a left at Madame Cama road, cuts across the maidan, MG Road, to Kala Ghoda, and then finally the Gateway of India and the Taj. 

Still standing after that horrible attack by Kasab (yes we are on first name terms considering how long they dithered about what to do with him) and his partners in crime. As a reminder of that frightening incident, the Gateway of India is no longer this wide open space that invited you to stroll right up to the edge where Bombay ends and the Arabian sea begins. 

Instead, there is an ugly railing 6 feet high, forming  a 100m perimeter around the monument. It took me awhile to figure out where the opening in this metal barricade was. An endless stream of people walk through a metal detector that is constantly beeping. The security personnel at the entrance act as if the beeping is due to a malfunction,  and show no interest in any of the people who were setting off these alarms. 

Everyone in the courtyard inside the barricade seemed to be taking selfies, positioning themselves with either the Taj or the monument. A few enterprising hustlers flashed albums containing portraits of people posing with the monument as if to suggest that the lowly selfie could be improved upon by dropping a mere 30 bucks. What if the guy made off with my phone, I thought. Patting myself figuritively for my presence of mind, I declined the offer and fidgeted with my phone camera settings before taking a few selfies. Next stop, Leopold Cafe.

Found the place pretty quickly and recognized Regal cinema as I rounded the corner onto Colaba Causeway. Blocks of vendors selling clothes, bags, jewelry, perfume - everything that invited the women to stop and consider the possibilities, even as the men kept filing past without breaking their stride. 

The famous Leopold Cafe turned out to be this very average Irani-restaurant looking place with cramped seating arranged around columns that partially hid some of the diners so you could see someone's food and their hands but not the rest of them. In a nod to the terrorist attack you are greeted by a woman who stops you in your tracks and waves a metal detector around your crotch before motioning you in. 

The "draught beer" I ordered came in a bottle, but before I could point out the error, my waiter held it up to me so I could verify the degree of "chilledness", prior to him opening it. This is a customary ritual in restaurants in India, intended to allay your suspicions and gain your confidence in the level of professionalism exhibited by the establishment. In this case it even managed to distract from the minor detail that I had not ordered beer in a bottle.

The menu was uninspiring, but having made the trip there I wasn't about to bail and find another joint. To be fair, the tandoori chicken I ordered wasn't bad and when I had picked the bones clean, my fingers were a mess from all the maneuvreing. I motioned to the waiter to bring me a finger bowl - by now I had fetched and dusted off the old restaurant script from the far corners of memory and proceeded to draw from it, making little rapid movements with my fingers, the universal gesture for a finger bowl- so I could get the grease off my hands. He smiled superciliously and shook his head. No finger bowl in Leopold, please! "An Irani restaurant that didn't even offer a fingerbowl?", I thought to myself, downgrading Leopold another notch.

I walked back along MG Road, past Regal, and saw Jehangir Art Gallery across the street from me. Something came over me and I was awash in a flood of memories in that instant. 

This was where I brought my new bride, assuring her that the place would honor her request for eggless dishes. I wanted to show off Bombay to this new arrival from Chennai, and the art gallery seemed a good symbol of the cultural heights that Bombay scaled. I could see her face and mine, all those years ago - she was not quite 22 and I was 28 - laughing and walking through those doors for lunch. 

A lump caught in my throat as I was brought back to the present with the realization that we had gone our separate ways. A lot of life had happened since.

I walked right past the Army Navy building (my place of work at Grindwell Norton) before I realized it was now home to a department store called Westside. 

My co-workers had included the woman at the switchboard who connected incoming and outgoing calls and doubled as a receptionist; rows of secretaries and typists interspersed with parsi men in scraggly beards who pored over ledgers; Rumy, the accountant with the quick reparte, who  accused me of flirting with the younger secretaries - loudly enough so they could hear it and feign shock and surprise; Polly, yet another friendly bawaji who made himself useful to the firm in ways that I could never fathom. 

Anglo-indians, parsis, tamilians and a handful of maharashtrians made up the Grindwell workforce. And then there were the IIT/IIM hires like me, brought in to inject a shot of professional management that would catapult this sleepy grinding wheel manufacturer into the 21st century. 

We reported to a layer of top management that was creaking at the joints and had worked their way to the top from the mailroom, as it were. 

But this was pre-Excel (The PC would not be invented for another 3 years) so all we could do was dictate letters in flowery language, urging the regional sales teams that dotted the length and breadth of the country to do more, and threaten them with visits whose intended purpose was to identify and root out the deadwood. Reality played out a little differently as these regional managers wined and dined us and spun yarns about growth and future orders so that we went back to HQ and wrote glowing reports of our trips to top management. Nothing like travel to improve your perspective.

I walked past a building that  had been cordoned off with construction barriers and scaffolding hugging its entire facade, even wrapping around the sides in case I dared getting a glimpse from an unsuspecting angle. This was the building that housed IMRB, a market research firm where my wife (at the time) had started her career. I found her that job. All I had to do was walk in, ask to speak to the boss, introduce myself  to Thomas who turned out to be from XLRI, and get him to promise to interview my wife. The rest, as they say, is history, four decades of it. I knew Grindwell had long moved away to a larger space  in the northern suburbs. I guess IMRB had too. Then again, so had I.

I was suddenly taken by the urge to get out of there. I no longer wanted to wallow in the past. I did stop at Churchgate station to  look at the trains rolling in from Borivli and Virar. I had commuted to work on this line from Mahim, where I lived as a paying guest with my aunt, when I was still single. I decided to skip VT station  where my wife and I used to get off the train from Ghatkopar. If you've seen one station, you've seen them all, I told myself. 

The Uber came almost as soon as I called it and I was soon whizzing past the familiar sights on my way back to Bandra. This time we took the inner roads, through Dadar, Kings Circle, Matunga. Sion. Eastern Railway I thought. We passed VT almost as soon as I got in the cab. Those terrorists had hidden out there, firing a fusilade of bullets, before being gunned down to the last man. 

We passed Voltas House, where I joined as a graduate trainee fresh out of IIT, the first job that I and my buddy Bulls would take up. We attended classes in Airconditioning & Refrigeration, taught by a senior member of the management team, a gentleman from Andhra Pradesh who loved the subject and knew it cold (no pun intended). 

2 months into our training, Bulls and I decided this wasn't for us so we hightailed it to Telco (Tata Motors) in Pune. It was only when we were crossing the western ghats that it dawned on us we hadn't informed anyone at Voltas about our decision. Ah to be young and irresponsible again!

I took pictures of the pricy real estate of Bombay, huddled together with dilapidated buildings that had never ever gotten a lick of paint from the day they were built. 

Balconies were closed off with metal grills  even if they were 17 stories above street level.  I guess there was no telling what ingenious scheme the thieves would fashion to break into these apartments if you omitted the metal grill. 

The cab hung a left and we passed through Dharavi, Asia's largest slum and home to over 1M people who live and work in the unorganized sector there. I tried hard not to let the sights get me down but couldn't resist staring at the squalor, much like passersby craning to take a peek at the scene of a gruesome accident. I needed a shower and a drink.

Cloud 9 bar (MIG cricket club)

I'm sitting in Cloud 9, the bar in MIG. Bunch of old, out of shape guys, nursing their concoctions while waiters dressed in ties and monogrammed shirts hover in the vicinity, looking miserable, unwilling bit players in this colonial charade.

Most are drinking whisky. You can tell the regulars by the second glass which contains the next round, positioned reassuringly beside the one they are working on.

This second glass serves as a source of inspiration for voicing bold proclamations that surprise even the speaker. When the last drink arrives, the tone shifts to a more mundane delivery as the inevitability of reality weighs heavily on the night. But it's all good,  since one must defer to the law of nature which promises another sunrise if you do your part by going to bed.

As I prepare to make my own exit after the customary two rounds, my waiter places another round before me with a triumphant expression. 2+1 he explains, lifting my spirits as I come to terms with my good fortune. "Free" never fails to hit the spot.

Driving to the airport to catch my flight to Delhi the next day, the image of Voltas House popped into my head. It occurred to me that the decision to quit Voltas was the first in a long line of career decisions I had made, seemingly without much consideration, as I followed the bidding of an inner voice.

And here I was. Should I feel regret? When I recount the career paths chosen by my peers both here in India and abroad, I can't help but conclude that it doesn't matter what path you take! So long as you have enough to live a comfortable life, the rest is mere details, important not even to you. 

The Bombay I left behind 40-some years ago, comprised a rich tapestry of human connections involving me. Almost all of that had been washed over by the passage of time. Sure, new connections had formed in their place but they didn't include me. So all I saw now was this bustle of activity. Like watching bees making honey in a jar - except I wasn't one of them. To bee or not to bee, if I may repurpose Hamlet's quandary as my own. 

The value of connections, of relationships, was sharply apparent in that moment. This is what people are most proud of or lament the lack of, when they take stock of their lives. Nobody mentions missed promotions or falling short of some monetary goal. I felt a sudden desire to hug my wife and kids. 

Bangalore -May-2022

 My visit to Bengaluru is coming to an end. The three weeks I spent here this time aound is by far the longest I've stayed. Longer than all those times when I rushed home because my Dad's health had taken a turn for the worse. He would always get better and I would breathe more easy, taking in my surroundings for a day or two before saying my goodbyes and heading home. "You didn't think I was going to croak, did you?", my dad would ask with a laugh. 

Those trips were different from this one in a multitude of ways. Starting with the airline - Air India - that I always ended up flying despite the fact that I hated everything about the experience. I was a sucker for the lure of a "non-stop" flight to Delhi or Mumbai even though I had one more leg from there to BLR. That domestic leg was always delayed a couple of hours, adding to an already long layover, but I seemed to block out those memories when it came time to plan another rushed trip. But the price was right and I was cheap so it made for a predictable, if doomed, alliance. 

Between my mom who was diagnosed with early stage dementia and my dad who managed to look heroic in the ICU, I spent most of my time with Manju, our driver and self-appointed long lost "son" of my parents, as we commuted between the hospital and home, stopping at pharmacies, liquor stores and CGHS (Central Government Health Scheme), that last one a particularly unpleasant experience because they always found a way to send you back to fill more forms. CGHS held out the promise of reimbursement for medical expenses so it felt like something worth striving for even though the pickings were slim. 

The evenings were spent with mom, watching yet another cricket match as she knitted away to oblivion, stopping only to discover some fatal flaw in the wollen production which, called for undoing the handiwork and starting all over. She never asked me how Dad was doing and showed little interest in visiting him at the hospital. And this from a woman who was devoted to him and had spent her entire life tending to his every need. If I had been paying attention - I wasn't - I might have realized I was getting a glimpse of the ravages that dementia would visit upon her in the coming years. 

Fast forward five years and I have just sold the house after appeasing the local authorities (BBMP, Subregistrar's office, and a few others I am determined to forget) who must bless every real estate transaction (I'll spare you the details). If you are one of those who learn from others' mistakes, remind me to tell you how I did it. 

I had budgetted two whole weeks for the sale deed registration but I had apparently overestimated the Subregistrar's appetite for inflicting pain because I was actually clutching the bank draft which represented the sale proceeds, in four short days. As if to rub it in, I was told by way of explanation that " India is a digital economy now".  Motherf*****!!!!!

So I hung out with DJ, my BIL, who is a recent addition to the hordes of dreamers all over the world who believe that with enough practice at the driving range, you can actually get better at the game of golf. He drove us unfailingly every day to the KGA golf club, a trip that should take no more than 7 minutes anywhere else in the world, but takes closer to 25 here. 

But I didn't care. The money was in the bank and I had all the time in the world to marvel at the surprisingly effective "rules of the road" that the local drivers had managed to distill through a process of trial and error, reminiscent of the rigorous discipline that is the hallmark of the experimental method in scientific research. One of these rules can best be explained by comparing it to a "charging violation" in basketball. 

If player A has "position" when player B (who has the ball) runs into him, a foul is called on B. In India, if your vehicle gets to a spot on the road before another vehicle, you have position of that spot. The fact that you strayed into oncoming traffic does not weaken your case. Like basketball, driving here is still considered a non-contact sport so everyone slows down to a crawl as they patiently navigate all manner of vehicles, pointed in all manner of directions. The best part of all this is it works. Well sort of. In case you're wondering about the cops, you'll find them at random intersections, keeping a watchful eye for drivers not wearing seatbelts. Seatbelts! When the attainable speed limit is 20 km/hour, seatbelts and airbags seem like an amusing extravagance. 

Its raining hard as I write this. The monsoon is another of those things I had forgotten about after I left Mumbai and India. The urgency with which it rains here leaves one standing still under the closest shelter if you happen to be out and about. Along with a small army of other folk, since this is a land where, no matter where you go, there they are! The rain is almost always accompanied by rolling thunder. It's quite a production. And it happens like clockwork every evening. I'm headed to Pune and then Mumbai after this, just in time to usher in the southwest monsoon in those parts. Hopefully I'll get out before those pictures of people wading through waist deep water on their way home start making the evening news. 

Between  a greater appreciation for why things here are the way they are, an improved tolerance for things beyond your control (that's pretty much everything), a distinctly better looking golf swing (I have before and after video to prove it!) and a rekindling of memories I never knew I had, this has been the first fun trip to this city in a long while. With the house sold and both my parents gone, I'm not sure when I'll be back here again. But whenever that is, I'll be sure to give it a couple of weeks.