Mountain fortress, during office hours

(Published in Business Standard on February 22, 2014)

Making fun of the Swiss is so easy that it’s almost unsporting. Uderzo and Goscinny did it beautifully in Asterix in Switzerland, in which Swiss people are shown constantly dusting and cleaning, checking their cuckoo clocks, being very careful with money, and drunkenly throwing each other in the lake for committing the sin of losing one’s bread in the fondue. That’s many of the best known stereotypes all together right there.

And the Swiss do, in fact, lend themselves to stereotype, perhaps more than many other nationalities. Here are some: They are unfriendly. They are averse to signs of human life after 10pm (don’t be flushing your toilet). They call the police if you park in their spot. They love complex bureaucracy, hate litter, wear shorts with long white socks, are suspicious of outsiders, and are fiercely into their 700-year-old direct democracy. They must lose many man-hours voting on referendums like ‘Should we give our hysterical, extremist women the vote’ (yes, but only in 1971) ‘Should we ban those towelhead minarets’ (yes in 2009) and ‘Should we stop accepting every dusty, worthless Tom Dick and Harry who wants to come live here, even if they’re from the EU’ (yes in 2014). There’s cheese in every one of their dishes. They yodel as they walk. They can’t sleep if the company books are off by a centime. If you try to get financial information out of them they will poke you in the eye with a fondue fork and then throw you in the lake.

And yet, they founded the Red Cross, maintain strict neutrality, accept all kinds of refugees seeking political asylum, and by the way, are not nearly as close-minded as you would think. You will find young Swiss people travelling in the remotest, most malarial corners of the world with a smile on their faces. Who can blame them for seeing the world and deciding that their beautiful little corner of it should be preserved as is?

The six or seven Swiss people who give a rat’s ass what the world is saying about them spend a lot of time battling these unfair prejudices. I feel for them, because as of today, once the world is done weeping with laughter, it will have something to beat Switzerland over the head with for the rest of human history.

It’s that thing that happened at the beginning of this week—the thing where an Ethiopian Airlines flight was hijacked by its own co-pilot when the captain went to the loo, and then the hijacker diverted to Geneva and threatened to crash the plane unless he was given asylum, and then the Swiss Air Force, alerted to this incident at 4am, said, The Italians and the French will have to deal with this, because our office hours are 8am-noon and 1.30pm-5pm.

Here’s how a country known for its mountainous impregnability, its 26,000 bunkers and fortifications, its roads that double as airstrips, its population that has compulsory military service, gets kaboomed by its own orderliness. Every newspaper in the world has run a derisive story on how to invade Switzerland: Do it outside office hours.

The Swiss Air Force doesn’t work around the clock for a very good reason: budgetary shortfalls. F-18s and F-5s and pilots don’t grow on trees, you know. On the upside, they’ve been planning a new fleet of Gripens for a while now, scheduled to roll out in 2020.

That is, if the referendum they put out on that purchase passes muster. It’s not looking so good at the moment, because they did a polled recently, and found that 53% of Swiss people don’t approve of them Swedish planes.

My family and other animals

(Published in Business Standard on February 8, 2014)

India may as well give up rat racing with China, because China has done something we can’t even imagine: it has become insect-free. I know this because I was recently woken at 7am by a high-pitched, perfectly constant scream, straight out of that movie in which people who have been replaced by aliens point out people who haven’t yet by pointing at them and screaming—I think it was Body Snatchers? Just like in that movie. It caused me some concern because we were on holiday in Goa, where all the raving aliens tend to stick to the beaches.

Vibrating like a tuning fork, I staggered into the garden. The morning was dewy and fragrant. Steaming tea and Tiger biscuits were laid out under the chikoo tree by the pool. Hibiscus and bougainvillea blooms nodded in a gentle breeze, and jewel-like birds glittered among the branches. It was a paradise in which ear-splitting screaming really stood out.

It turned out to be my three-year-old niece, Lia, who has lived most of her life in Shanghai. Why is she pointing at the ground and screaming, I asked my sister. “Because there’s an ant,” she replied. “She’s not that familiar with ants.”

While I was trying to process this information, the niece began to jerk and flail around like a tiny short-circuiting appliance. She had gone from screaming to some kind of panicked shamanistic chanting. I listened carefully. She was repeating “Soufflé the border me, shuffler dabba demi” and other variations on the theme, very fast. “We don’t have too many flies either, in Shanghai,” said my sister wearily. “This is a lot of unfamiliar wildlife.”

Luckily neither Lia nor her six-year-old aunt Meera had trouble with regular wildlife. There was a wild-eyed kitten that spent its time either shooting around the kitchen with back arched and fur and tail standing straight up, or slaying dead leaves, slippers, and its own tail like a deadly predator with some motor control issues. Lia and Meera adored this kitten on sight, and decided that the best way to befriend such a clearly unstable creature would be to poke it tenderly in the eye while shrieking endearments at it. The kitten quickly learned to give them a wide berth, even though they tried to force fish down its throat.

The frogs were not so lucky. They jumped for their lives, even up upon wall-hung picture frames, but the two little angels shook them down like a kind of supercute assassination squad and followed them around. The frogs were so traumatised that one was discovered shivering inside a ceiling lampshade it could not possibly have reached without lethal amounts of adrenaline. I think it starved and prayed up there for three days. There were also gekkos, which Lia loved because she was told that they eat insects.

It turned out that she had been worried that insects eat people. Her parents said they didn’t (skirting some counterproductive truths involving end of life etc), but she felt that they must eat small people at the very least. She demanded that her father make her a bridge of towels to help her cross over the carpets of ants she was sure were snapping at her flesh.

But it’s amazing how kids learn. By the last day of our vacation Lia had gotten a little more used to insects, and was now only pointing and making a high whooping sound, and singing Shoo Fly with a little more control. It’s a shame that she has to go home so soon. It would have been nice to have her in Delhi a bit longer: I think she’s ready to be introduced to cockroaches.

Money for jam

(Published in Business Standard on January 25, 2014)

So the revolution is upon us in Delhi. And it’s about time, much as people who read and write on laptops, and have enough money to holiday, might dislike the idea. We all secretly know that we make fun of Arvind Kejriwal’s scarf because it is in the style of the millions of ordinary men you see riding to or from work on their bicycles in the winter. That scarf makes him look as if he’s one of them, and this congruence is deeply scary to people who feel that power should stay, as it always has, in the hands of the sorts of people who make fun of the sorts of people who dress like Arvind Kejriwal. It’s like having to accept a salaryman at the billionaire’s table. While it’s impolite to say so, you know you have little in common with him and don’t actually think he deserves to be there. (At least that’s what I imagine billionaires think when a salaryman joins their table.)

Anyway, the men who wear scarves around their ears rather than their necks, who were once merely unreal extras passing about silently and sometimes invisibly in the movie of our lives, the men you send off to the store when the storekeeper says ‘Send a man’, have suddenly become extremely visible and also rather noisy. And as they coalesce from inconsequential outlines into very solid forms, it’s clear that there are many, many, many of them. So many that we can no longer go on pretending that they don’t exist or matter and shouldn’t be trying to get above their station. It appears that they’re marching up to our table, and we’re either going to have to shift up or give up the seat entirely.

Those of us who have laptops but are fans of the revolution, must prepare to face the music.
So, while the streets prepare to run merrily with blood, I’m emulating the musical quartet in Titanic, who see the end coming but, by god, are going to go down flying the flag. So they just stand there on the listing deck, fiddling their hearts out, doing their thing because that’s all they know how to do. They probably feel quietly heroic doing it, embodying the poignant transience of beauty and life in the fearful maw of the sea.

So, in the same spirit, I’ve applied polish to my fingernails for the first time in my life this January. They’re scarlet, which makes a convenient, easy-to-identify target for the revolutionaries. For the first week or two I had painted them black, but then my mother said that she felt as if a crow had flown in to breakfast with her. My mother is direct like that. But that’s not why I replaced black with red. I replaced it because I had to wear a red dress to do a tango performance. If the polish didn’t tip the revolutionaries off, tango dancing should do the trick.

And since music is what gives a sinking ship dignity, and should be tuneful, I’ve taken to getting together with a few other amateurs to plinkety plonk some songs out on various instruments. We all work (some of us more than others) but none of us can be accused of having a scarf around the ears. We sometimes sound like a bunch of deaf foghorns, but we sometimes get it right, or close enough. Plus, there’s always a bottle of whiskey, and sometimes a fireplace. Never was a foundering ship cosier. If we could sell our own songs someday, that would be money for jam. On the other hand, what’s the point? You can’t take it with you when you go.

New Year 2014: Do or dye

(Published in Business Standard on December 28, 2013)

This friend of mine who has just had her ears operated swears that she now hears a constant concert of crickets singing inside her head that keeps her up at night. I found this very funny until I became aware of a whooshing sound inside my own head that is growing louder by the day. I’ve figured out what it is: the Doppler effect of yet another year blasting by.

When I was ten years old, time moved so slowly that it seemed certain that I would get old and die waiting to turn twenty. Things improved in my twenties, when I was too busy being confused and depressed by the world to actually notice the passage of time. The thirties, on balance, sucked so much that the universe slowed down the rate at which time passed in order to fit in all the suckiness. The forties, I’m happy to report, have thus far been fantastic, which is probably why time has suddenly begun to move like greased lightning. Time flies when you’re having fun. Now I’m told that it might be all because of my hair.

You can’t tell from the monochrome author illustration that appears above this column, which makes me look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining without the star appeal, but I have much more white hair than your average forty-something-year-old. At least this is what I have to assume when I look around me at the oceans of average forty-something Indians who continue to have lustrous raven locks. It’s not that I have a distinguished streak here and there; more than half my hair is grey, and the other half seems to have fallen out along the way.

There was a time when barbers would ask me whether I was having my hair streaked white. I didn’t know that was even a thing, but it was apparently all the rage, and not only among ten-year-olds in a hurry to grow up. People approved of the naturally aged look.

In the forties you’re too busy having fun to notice that everyone has suddenly changed their minds about things like acceptable hair colour. Last weekend I innocently entered a hotel restroom to mind my own business, when a lady of indeterminate age accosted me. She actually postponed entering a bathroom stall and relieving herself in order to tell me that I was “very brave.” When I asked why, she said, “You don’t dye your hair.” Then she added, “You should dye your hair.” She was clearly using the word “brave” in the sense of “extremely stupid”.

When people make helpful suggestions about how to fix my physical appearance, such as that I should thread my moustache or pluck my eyebrows or suck in my tummy, or wear something else for chrissakes, my heels grow small little steel spikes that dig deep into the ground. It’s like my superpower. I’ve never dyed my hair, I told her, and I’m unlikely to start now. “Dye your hair,” she said grimly. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

There was a time when I did not receive vague threats from hair colour aficionados in hotel bathrooms. I miss that time. That time has marched on, apparently all over my person. 2013 whooshed by faster than 2012, but if the Freelance Lady Stylist of the Bathrooms is right, 2014 will be gone even faster, and it’s only going to go downhill from there unless I make a hair appointment stat.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all our readers, and also to those of you who only look at the pictures. I’m going to ask the art department to colour them in.