Literary Safari

I was walking along the river near 96th Street this week when I saw a woman relaxing on a lawn chair in the middle of an overgrown little patch of lawn, just adjacent to the West Side Highway. While cars whizzed by behind her, she lay there totally on vacation, wearing her fluorescent orange bathing suit, a sun visor, and an enormous pair of sunglasses. In one hand she was cradling a gigantic bottle of water (No dehydration for her, thank you very much) and in the other, a book. The only thing missing was a beach umbrella.

Aaah, what a trip. Literally, that’s what it seemed like to me–that she had taken herself on a trip. Next time I have to spend the day reading and researching something, that’s what I should do instead of buckling myself to my desk and trying to be a “good student”!

As I walked home, I got to thinking about travel. It’s officially summer traveling season and the travel bug is biting many of us, if it hasn’t already. Granted, airline fares are ballooning and road trips are no longer the plat du jour, so fewer people have been traveling so far this year. Perhaps now, more than ever, then, there’s something to be said about simply possessing the traveler’s spirit. Become a traveler in your daily life. Find the vacation spot in your own backyard. Find the ideal bench to do your people watching. Switch off your cell phone. Take a day trip. Or, just go to a quiet place.

Whatever way you decide to be a traveler this summer, make sure you check out these 10 Sizzling Hot Traveling Tips at the online travel magazine World Hum. Rolf Potts has repackaged Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th century essay “Of Travel” into a pithy list for us short attention-span 21st century readers:

1. Make travel a part of your life’s education
2. Keep a travel journal, at sea or on land
3. Seek interesting sights
4. Seek interesting activities
5. Make use of guidebooks and local resources
6. Seek varieties of experience, even within a single location
7. Seek out travel companions that will challenge you
8. Avoid traveling with quarrelsome people
9. When coming home, keep your travels alive with intellectual exercise
10. Don’t flaunt your travel experiences to the folk back home

For each tip, he has selected key passages from Bacon’s essay for us to get a taste of those times and that authentic voice. So clever!

Anyway, happy voyages this summer … wherever the fair winds carry you …

It won’t be published in the US until October of this year, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for AIDS Sutra: Hidden Stories from India. With a foreword by Amartya Sen, this nonfiction anthology will feature pieces by 15 well-known Indian heavyweight writers as they “go on the road to uncover their country’s AIDS epidemic” which is home to 5.2 million cases.

From the Random House UK blurb, a sampling of essays we can look forward to:

William Dalrymple meets the devadasis (‘temple women’), many of whom have become victims of HIV; Kiran Desai travels to the coast of Andhra where the sex workers are considered the most desirable and Salman Rushdie spends a day with Mumbai’s transgenders.

Other notable names: Vikram Seth, Amit Chaudhuri, Siddhartha Deb, Nikita Lalwani, and Shobha De! [full list here]

While you’re here, allow me to point you to a fascinating piece that was published in 2006 in the magazine of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria: “Caught at a Crossroads”. In this feature, Priya Bery and Chapal Mehra examine the impact of AIDS on India’s growing middle class. It’s worth reading.

Is it really possible to bottle the scent of a place? The House of Hermès is trying to do just that — capture the scents of the southern Indian state of Kerala with its new fragrance “Un Jardin Après la Mousson” (A Garden After the Monsoon). The result, after 300 drafts, according to “Liquid Assets” by Phoebe Eaton in the current NYT Travel Summer 2008 magazine is a perfume that is “confected with vetiver and kahili ginger, which isn’t a ginger at all but a white flower that gusts like a rogue hybrid of jasmine, tuberose and gardenia.”

I really enjoyed reading about the process of developing this perfume — the trials and experiments that Jean-Claude Ellen has undergone as he has struggled to “bottle the fantasy” of … well, let’s just scream it, EXOTIC KERALA! India is hot in the House of Hermès, apparently. Its the theme for 2008 and and “silk scarves are vivid with raw pinks and fleshy mangoes, elephants harnessed to carriages and tigers rampant.”

For a bit more on the exotic front, take this passage, which describes the arrival of monsoon. It had me, well, basically flummoxed:

In coastal Kerala, spices have been trafficked since the Romans rode in on the winds of the monsoons seeking cardamom and pepper: black gold. Women wear their saris differently here than they do up north, draping them like togas. And when the first monsoon blows in from the Arabian Sea — and it always seems to arrive during the first week of June, extinguishing the scorching rays of the summer sun and ushering in a joyful verdant renewal — the modest women of Kerala rush out into the rain, ‘‘and the saris cling close to the body. Very érotique,’’ says Ellena. Bollywood films often feature bosomy romantics carelessly cavorting through such torrential downpours in scenes designed to thwart the censors. For this same reason, Muslim boys are not allowed out of the house during the first week of the monsoon.

Umm, is this really true? I feel like I need some fact checkers to either set the record straight or enlighten me.

And, I can’t resist asking: If there was any scent you’d want to bottle, what would it be? I love the experiences that Christopher Brosius of CB Perfume has transformed into perfumes:

A Memory of Kindness: The shining green scent of tomato vines growing in the fresh earth of a country garden

Experience in the Library: English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of one of my very favorite novels, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish

In the Summer Kitchen: Fresh garden vegetables & herbs on a clear summer evening with a touch of smoked old wooden rafters

Rafta Rafta The New Group Through June 21, 2008 Tickets $55 ($41.25 with promo code)

When I was in London last year, there was one West End production that I was determined to see—Ayub Khan-Din’s “Rafta, Rafta” at the National Theatre. Of course, as my luck would have it, the one weekend I was there was when the play was on a hiatus, so I returned stateside without having watched the stage event which was described by the Daily Telegraph as “’an irresistible mixture of bonhomie, bumptiousness and egomania…irresistibly comic.” It goes without saying that when “Rafta, Rafta” made its off-Broadway debut at the Acorn Theatre in NYC earlier this month, I was eager to see how it had survived its journey across the Atlantic.

“Rafta, Rafta” is brought to us by Ayub Khan-Din, he who is best known for the brilliant “East is East,” which shone a spotlight on middle class British-Indian family in the 70s. While “East is East” also addressed themes of race and cultural adjustment—i.e. political issues outside the home, “Rafta Rafta” is much more of a comedy and drama about domestic politics.

Based on Bill Naughton’s 1963 play “All in Good Time,” “Rafta, Rafta” (directed by Scott Elliot who also directed the 1999 production of “East is East” and the original “Avenue Q” production at The New Group) is a comic yet poignant look at the challenges of extended family living in contemporary UK.

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Cool kid alert: Teen entrepreneur Anshul Samar, age 14. This fiesty entrepreneurial spirit will be one of the key speakers at tomorrow’s Second Annual Teens in Tech Conference, sponsored by Sun, Microsoft, HP, and others.

Anshul is the founder and CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc. He has created a fantasy role-playing chemistry board game, Elementeo: “Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction! We don’t want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!” [more]

MSN recently featured Anshul in “Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21” (thanks to newstab posters garbanzobean and anmdavadi). How did he get started? In in his own words:

Entrepreneurship is cool, and so is chemistry! Both have lots of actions, reactions, explosions, experimentation, and most importantly, the joy and excitement of creating something new! Creating a company has been on my mind for a long time, but it was only in the 5th grade when the idea of a chemistry based card game struck me. I must have created and thrown away dozens of prototypes to get just the right concoction of education and fun. … Elementeo is a game where you create compounds, combat elements, and conquer chemistry… A game of battle, chemical reactions, and powerful scientists… And a game that kids, teenagers, college students, teachers, scientists, parents, and grandparents can all play and have fun.

The excitement Anshul has poured into his maiden entrepreneurial voyage (the game will be released this month!) is evident at his company’s homepage which is very much written in his voice … and in this video from Mark Coker of VentureBeat, taken at the 2007 TieCon conference in Silicon Valley.

Here’s to his motto of “Create, Combat, Conquer!”

[originally published at Sepia Mutiny]

A few years ago, I had a beautiful dream about my mother. It spoke volumes to me about everything that she has been to me over the years. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there who teach their children to fly … and to dream big.
—

“. . .and I awoke and it was true.
I saw everything.
I saw sky of roses, houses of daisies, a tree of orange, a book of apples,
and I loved it all and I lived with it for the rest of my life.”
~ Dick Link, age 8; from Begin Sweet World

The dream sticks to my memory like honey to my fingers. I was flying high with my mother. High in the sky. We wanted to get away from the crowd of relatives trying hard to make plans for us. Sitting on the steps of a rotunda building, the two of us waited patiently as they held boardroom discussions at the foot of the stairs. When you come from an extended family made up of 12 aunts and uncles, and 13 cousins, it is always a project to organize activities, outings and events. This was no different!

Mom and I sat patiently on the steps, our feet crossed at our ankles, as we twiddled our thumbs and watched the mouths move. This was going to take a while, I thought as I leaned back and mentally accepted that fact.

Suddenly, Mom nudged me in my chest and grabbed my arm tightly. She pressed me against her and stood up, pulling me up with her. The next thing I knew, her heels were off the ground and she was jumping up into the air, lifting me up with her. I looked down and realized that we were afloat, two birds rising higher and higher. Unstoppable yeast. We were flying.

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In their book Borders and Boundaries, editors Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin write: “As an event of shattering consequence, Partition retains its pre-eminence even today, despite two wars on our borders and wave after wave of communal violence. … Each new eruption of hostility or expression of difference swiftly recalls that bitter and divisive erosion of social relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and each episode of brutality is measured against what was experienced then.”

This statement speaks directly to the premise of Pakistani director Mehreen Jabar’s debut film Ramchand Pakistani, which recently premiered in NY at the Tribeca Film Festival. Based on a series of true events which took place in 2002—during a period where India and Pakistan were on the brink of war—it is the story of one innocent Hindu Dalit family which became a victim of the national hostilities that have permeated Indo-Pak relations since partition. The story begins in a small, dusty border village in on the Pakistan side of the Thar desert. Ramchand (Fazal Hussain) is the willful, naughty son of a Hindu Dalit farmer Shankar (Rashid Farooqi) and his wife Champa (played by Nandita Das). One morning, when Ramchand gets into an argument with his mother, he skips school and goes for a walk in the desert terrain bordering his father’s farm. Without realizing it, he crosses over into Indian territory. His father follows him to bring him back, but it’s too late. Indian patrol officers, suspicious of their motives (“Are you Pakistani spies?”) take both of them into custody.

For the next five years, Ramchand and his father are trapped in a bureaucratic prison system in India, where despite the lack of evidence that they did anything wrong, it is impossible to release them because of a longstanding battle of wills between the Indian and Pakistani governments. The film follows Ramchand’s coming of age in a prison where he and his father share a cell with Indians and Pakistanis, many of whom made the mistake of “crossing over” and have gotten lost in the shuffle.

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