The insoluble pancake

I’m back in Paris. I returned from Mumbai on Tuesday morning. This afternoon, I made my usual circuit around Paris to make sure that everything is still there, that everything is as I remembered it. I ate an entrecote and drank wine, had a heavy chocolate dessert and cafe, went to bookshops and saw a film. Paris is still Paris, whew. But I have left a lot unwritten about India.

Last weekend, you see, I attempted to break out once more from the pleasant campus of IUCCA and see the land. To see the country. I hired a car, and, of course, a driver: one does not drive on Indian roads, even if one has been to Marseille. Oh no. I had decided that I would visit the ancient cave-temples of Ajanta and Ellora, a few hundred kilometers north of Pune. From what I could gather, this was certainly the sight to see near Pune, if one could get there.

A few hundred kilometers might sound like not so far away, but on Indian roads, this is very far indeed. Leaving Pune at 7AM, we reached Ajanta only by 2pm in the afternoon. My driver was a very gracious man of incredible driving skills (my gosh! we didn’t hit that truck!). Despite our numerous brushes with large slow moving vehicles I didn’t once feel threatened or frightened, kind of remarkable really. At certain points in the drive, I became sleepy. What normally happens in those circumstances is that one’s eyes begin to feel heavy, and heavier, you begin to feel more and more relaxed, almost on the point of sleep and the BEEEP! You are startled awake to see directly before your eyes beautifully painted truck tailgate with the words ‘HORN OK PLEASE’ written on it in large colourful characters (and usually ‘India is great!’ beneath that). Repeat this process about a hundred times.

After about sixty kilometers from Pune, there are no more roads. Or rather, the beautiful four-lane motorway that brings goods and people to the countless factories around Pune comes to and end, and there is in its place a small road, one lane in each direction. Every kind of vehicle imaginable to man is allowed on this road, and I was certain that over the course of the next two days I saw most nearly all of them. Horses and carts, carts and cows, rickshaws, trucks, scooters, motorbikes, trucks, men with carts. Men on horseback. All of these my driver skillfully dodged, accelerating fearlessly on blind corners and steep rises.

How to describe the countryside? After the endless built-up expanses of Pune, desert: dry empty land, scrub, hills. But this was the only stretch of land that was truly empty, and it seems to be only ten or fifteen kilometres. For the rest of the journey we were never very far from houses or villages. And that’s the very strange thing too about India: no matter where you find yourself, in whatever remote part of the country you are in, there is always, always someone walking by the side of the road. I often wondered about these people. Where were they coming from? The last house was many kilometres behind us. Where were they going to? The next village along was not that close either. At one point we saw a long line of people dressed in bright orange robes striding purposefully through the dust. These people, it turned out, were pilgrims making a trek to a temple which was at least a hundred kilometres distant.

Then of course there were the villages — for the most part, a chaotic jumble of shacks and narrow streets, always teeming with people. At night, as we passed through one village after another, it seemed that many places had almost no lights at all, despite the fact there were many people in the streets and shops. The odd bulb here and there cast a dim glow, or car headlights swept across the buildings for an instant like a lighthouse rays, but there was nothing else. In many rooms facing the streets I glimpsed people sitting singly or in small groups in darkened rooms, silently waiting. Once again, I found myself wondering the purpose of all that.

Of course, the poverty was astonishing. How hard people have to work to gain their livelihood. People with hammers compacting burning asphalt on the roads. Families firing bricks on open kilns under the burning desert sun. People welding in the middle of the street. People knocking down buildings with (practically) their bare hands. And of course all that stuff to be moved and hauled with carts and animals or of course incredibly overladen trucks. Everything I saw seemed to be this dizzying mixture of intense activity and lassitude; and nothing seemed to have a time where it started, or finished. From the start of the trip at 7am until I crashed onto my hotel bed at 10pm in the evening I could see little difference in the numbers and quantities of people on the roads and in the streets. For those that worked, the work continued without end. I remember standing in a vacant lot at 9pm on a Saturday evening and watching an endless stream of traffic on this road a hundreds of miles from anywhere in particular. I thought absently of Europe, and Europeans, their privileges and how different their Saturday night would be from the one I could see around me now.
Technorati Tags: voyages, india

Restored to life! I’ve been practically immobilised the last few days thanks to an unpleasant cold. I’ve slept at some times for more than twelve hours each day. I suspect it was something that I caught on the aeroplane… but I hadn’t expected that I would cross continents to be floored by … a cold. But I feel better today, finally.

I’ve spent many evenings in my room with the windows open (but the with mosquito netting in place of course) drifiting in an and out of a slightly fevered sleep. The ceiling fan slowly turning. It’s strange, but at night the campus of IUCCA is full of all sorts of unusual noises, birds laughing at each other, long mournful train-sounds like the sort of thing you might hear on a Tom Waits record. It is a sound like a long long horn, one chord, and then the sound of many wheels on rails passing somewhere in the distance. A sound only equalled by the sound of a ship’s fog-horn I think.

The campus here is a few kilometers distant from the centre of town. Once one leaves the main gate of the University, everything changes: gone is the verdant oasis of Pune University, and suddenly you enter into the complete chaos of the city. The total chaos.

I am sure a lot has already been written about road conditions in India. I don’t really have a point of reference. Naples, maybe. But it is different here. Every imaginable vehicle is allowed on the road, including things which aren’t strictly vehicles (a vegetable seller pushing his cart is perfectly acceptable for example). Most of the vehicles in Pune however are two or three wheelers: scooters, motorbikes or rickshaws. Rickshaws are essentially like the goods-carrying ‘ape’ vehicles ones sees in Italy but fitted out as taxis. One essentially moves very slowly very close to the ground in a vehicle powered by a two-stroke engine which isn’t really capable of overtaking any vehicle with a larger number of wheels. In a rickshaw, one is certainly very close to nature. But it’s certainly the easiest way to get around if you don’t have any locomotion yourself and don’t mind a life of adventure.

I have made a few trips across Pune by rickshaw. One zooms through traffic with a view framed in front by the back of the head of the rickshaw driver and either side by what’s visible from under the roof of a rickshaw — half a bus, truck tyres, the feet of motorcylists. One has to be careful in selecting rickshaw drivers: not all of them have ‘the knowledge’ and circuitous trips are not uncommon. Today however I was surprised by the first destination I arrived in after hailing a rickshaw — the petrol station. Returning to Pune University from the centre of town required more petrol than he had…but only minutes after leaving the petrol station we slowly ground to a halt in the dust at the side of the road. What was happening? The rickshaw driver sadly showed me his hands which were stained with oil which seemed to be coming from his steering column. Breakdown! I had to change rickshaws.

This morning I saw an elephant on the road. It was at that point that I realised that I was really somewhere else, in a different country that I had never visited before. I’m here in India.

I was being driven with a group of colleagues between Mumbai and Pune; I will be in Pune for the next two weeks to teach in a school on observational astronomy. We will observe some part of the sky, there is a research project to be done, some interesting objects to observe. The telescope is a two hour drive north from here, in the mountains. We will spend a night there, under the stars.

How to describe an arrival here? India is unlike any place I have every visited before, different in scale and sensations and taste and colour. Arriving at the airport in Mumbai and finally leaving the terminal building, the first impression one has is that of odour, of smells, a rich, heady mix of scents which is unique and not at all unpleasant. There are the palm trees and lush vegetation. But unlike in Honolulu, one does not sense the ocean, although it is not far away.

Our hotel was only short drive from the airport, and we arrived very late at night, so I only glimpsed a few things from the windows on arrival, once were past the concrete and brick of the airport – incredible small decrepit building which looked like they were built to last perhaps a few years. People sitting the dirt at the crossroads, in the dark, eating and talking. All the cars and rickshaws, something from the 1950s. The rickshaws are essentially indentical to the ‘ape’ they have in Italy — they are small three-wheeled vehicles with a two-stroke engine.

At the hotel, impossibly, it was already 2AM although in France it was only 9pm in the evening. For me, this is a well known-effect of travelling by airplane, of continents crossed without effort, no time for transition. My hotel room was in a well-worn state of affairs, but that did not perturb me. Upon our arrival there, a smiling man in a red turban opened the door for us. No simling man in a red turban has ever opened a door for me before.

The next morning, this morning, I looked out my hotel window and found the lanes and alleys around our hotel suffused by a rich yellow light, sunlight filtering through the smog of Mumbai. I glimpsed crowded, dense streets, but it was already time to leave. Our two-hour drive from Mumbai to Pune was astonishing. It’s true what people say about the chaotic nature of driving in India, but I feel strangely unthreatened by it. It has none of the aggressive character that it does in France, for example. The nearest point of reference I have is Naples, but all this is Naples times a millon, in sheer scale and energy. And the vast variety of transports too…

The outskirts of Bombay contained some of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Imagine kilometer after kilometer of slum housing, grey buildings crowded together, each hardly larger than a garden shed, narrow streets, all this stretching to steep forested hills in the middle distance, with heavy clouds hanging overhead. Not a single trace of colour in all that. Imagine all of that, then at the same time, imagine a million billboard advertisements for luxury housing and cell phones and computers. India is moving directly to a post-industrial society without ever actually industrialising. Of course seeing all this, seeing many in incredible poverty, makes one think again about how relatively fortunate one was in one’s choice of life and birthplace. Things of course that one is not able to choose (and Ireland in the 1970s wasn’t exactly the most luxurious of places to be born into but still).

I will write more in the next few days; now I am too tired to continue. I should say something however about the immense good nature of all the people I’ve met here since I arrived, their hospitality and good grace. And the excellent food!

Technorati Tags: voyages

There’s a festival of Aki Kaurismaki’s films at the Champo, and I’ve managed to see four features there in the space of a week. I like very much his works even though until now I had only seen his ‘blockbuster’ hit, ‘The man without a past’, which enjoyed considerable success (unfortunately I saw this when I was in Italy, so I saw the version which had been dubbed into Italian, quite bizzare, Finnish people speaking perfect Italian). His films just don’t come to the cinema very often, even here in Paris.

So one Thursday night a week or so ago I found myself once more settling into comfortable red cinema seats of the Champo for Kaurismaki’s “La Vie de Boheme”, based on a hundred-year old novel by Henri Murger. The first image we see is one of a rooftop in Paris, a jumbled frieze of chimney pots and slate. I realised, belatedly, that this film would not be in Finnish, but in almost all likelihood would be in French — as indeed it was. It was film that Kaurismaki had wanted to make for years, a project that he’d had in his mind for the better part of a decade. The story of starving artists in the city of lights, trying to realise the eternal dream of every sensitive soul throughout the world to come and live in Paris, to create great works of art that would resonate down through the centuries. Er…but…Kaurismaki’s artists will never quite get there, it’s clear.

This much is clear from the start of film. Marcel, a writer, accepts the offer of the barman at his local brasserie to read his text. It would be fine, he says, to hear the voice of the street. Baf! Before we know it he pulls from his bag a manuscript larger than the latest Thomas Pynchon novel. And probably even harder to read.

We are introduce to the other “artists” in short order, a composer Schaunard and an artist, Rodolfo, played impassively as ever by Matti Pellonpää. There are many wonderful set pieces in the film: after once again collectively hitting rock bottom, Schaunard invites his friends around to eat (they are all of course in a state of constant hunger). On their plates they find a frankfurter wedged between a day-old baguette. Ouch! But next they are treated to a performance of Schaunard’s latest composition, for piano and child’s police siren, which ends by him triumphantly banging his head against the piano keyboard. Rodolfo is the sensitive soul. We see him painting by his open window, Paris spread out before him, attired in black beret and black necktie, holding an easel in his hand. All artists are like this in Paris, no? His paintings, it has to be honestly said, are not exactly paradigm-shifting. The worst one is certainly that of his dog, Baudelaire. Rudolfo and Schaunard speak French with a strong foreigner’s accent (tell me about it), not in the least because neither of them, in real life, understand the language at all. They learned their lines phonetically.

All three of them live in less than salubrious conditions, in the kind of conditions that all “artists” were supposed to live in. Cold water walk-ups. It turns out that Kaurismaki didn’t film in Paris at all, but in Malakoff, to the south. It was only outside town that he could find a place which resembled what he imagined in his mind this Paris of “La vie de boheme” to be. Today, all the locations that appear in the film no longer exist. Kaurismaki’s story seems to take place some in the 1960s, the buildings have that edge to them, there is that feeling of things which have been well worn in.

In the second part of the film, Rudolfo falls in love — always an interesting proposition in Kaurismaki’s films, where the expression of sentiment never comes easy. He falls for a French girl, Mimi. He returns home to his apartment one evening and finds her sleeping on the stairs at his door; she has nowhere to stay for the night. He graciously gives her his bed and tells her that he will go and sleep ‘with friends’. The next morning, we see him waking up in the cemetary. After all this, the film has a very unexpected and surprising ending, given that the tone of the first three-quarters of the film was so light. We are a little shocked.

And the lights came up at the Champo, and in the cinema with us was Evelene Didi, the French actress who played Mimi. She talked to us about working with Mr. Kaurismaki, how they shot the film, about Kaurismaki’s image of Paris. In once scene, there is a departure from a train station, a long goodbye. But it was too expensive to really film at the train station! Instead, they improvised: clouds of steam were provided by the staff chef boiling water in every available pot and pan. Meanwhile, shadow heads and hats in a cut-out panel sliding across the wall signals a departing train. Bizzarely enough, it works…

Despite the unexpected ending, I found “La Vie Boheme” to be one of Kaurismaki’s most hilarious films. What I appreciate most is the straight, deadpan delivery of his actors; no-one ever smiles, which can create a somewhat surreal feeling at times. Evelene Didi told us that upon meeting Kaurismaki for the first time, his first commandment to her was that she was absolutely not to smile! In it’s way, this makes everything even more funny, like in Chaplin films (of which Kaurismaki is a big fan). Fine. I am going to go now and gaze wistfully now across the rooftops of Paris. But I need a dog.

Technorati Tags: cinema, kaurismaki