Today was a long day of running around doing travel guide stuff. I'm all wiped out.
In such times, what could be more refreshing than a Bollywood video? Here's a good one called Kajra Re from a movie called Bunty Aur Babli (2005). Ever since I saw the clip on TV a few nights ago, the song's been stuck in my head.
Selling and making wine is seen as a growth industry in India. All you have to do is to pick up just about any issue of a magazine or a newspaper's lifestyle section to be confronted with claims that more and more wine is being guzzled like crazy.
The reality is completely different. Wine can hardly help being a growth industry since there's so little of it drunk. As the Outlook article below states, "per capita consumption [of wine] is a mere six ml, compared to China's 300 ml." It's not just that a tiny proportion of the population drinks wine. It's that the tiny proportion of the population that can 1) afford such luxuries and 2) cares to drink actually drinks wine. Imported wine remains very expensive, primarily because of duties (although they are going down somewhat), and the wineries in India are still by and large quite new, with all the growing pains that that implies.
But all that being said, there are more and more domestic wines being bottled every day. As our humble service to you, we thought it would be fun to review all the Indian bottles that come through our door.
First up is a wine from Grover Vineyards, whose winvery is right here in Bangalore. We had their 2006 Santé Shiraz, priced at Rs. 275 (about $7) and bottled in 2006. The label actually listed a price of Rs. 225, but the clerk told us that it had mysteriously gone up. We didn't protest too much, but we hadn't tasted it at that point.
This is not good wine -- too sour. The label claims that there are those wine clichés of "black pepper and blackberries" inside, but if there were, the sourness keeps them well hidden. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 4. Do not drink, except in an emergency situation.
When we got back to our apartment in Bangalore, we found that this little monster had been hooked up to our refrigerator and placed on the cupboard above it. Before we left, the boxy thing had just been lying unplugged on a shelf in the storage room. Sometimes we'd look and it and wonder if we should have been doing something with it, but its bulk meant that we just left it sitting there.
All the thing does is what its name implies: massage the sometimes wildly varying local voltage into something more constant and easier for large appliances to deal with.
I hate the stabilizer. It extends out from the cupboard, so the doors have to stay open a little. Even worse, it makes fast-paced noises that are somewhere between noisy typing and a bug zapper that's just killed a bunch of gnats. As you can see, this model dates from long ago, and I doubt that more modern versions are as annoying.
Now I'm wondering I should have my laptop charging using one of these things. Probably I should, but since it's gone a year without one, I'm not in a huge hurry.
So I got in early yesterday, a day in which I spent several hours thinking was Tuesday but that was of course Wednesday. Where does all the time go? Oh yeah, it goes into crossing one time zone after the other.
The jet lag wasn't too bad -- around 6 am, when I got back to the apartment, I told Don that I thought that sleep was surely just a plot by "them" to make sure no one ever gets anything done. I felt great, despite sleeping very little on the plane. (There may have been a little napping in the afternoon . . . )
I'd have gotten home a little sooner if it hadn't been for one of the things I hate the most in Indian airports -- the dreaded luggage cart.
Hidden within that herd of carts is the slowly moving baggage claim belt. When you finally see your bag, it's an adventure getting close enough to actually grab it by its handle. The carts are free, so just about everyone takes one, even people with just a couple pieces of luggage, and that means that the luggage is sealed off from its owners by a hedge of shiny, hard-to-navigate metal.
If I ruled the airport system of India (scary thought), the first thing I'd do is make the carts cost money (maybe 100 rs., with half of that refundable when you return it). Most important, I'd make the area immediately next to the moving belt a no-cart zone.
[Those signs saying "We Are Being Watched" are encouraging airport advertising, not Big Brother. We did have a lot of time to read them, it's true.)
300: campy, bloody, entertaining.
Hot Fuzz: I liked it, but what happened in the middle? I think I was resting my eyes then.
Practical Magic: Nicole Kidman had pretty hair and a very large house.
Hello Everybody, I'm at O'hare waiting for my (slightly) delayed flight to get going. It's not very exciting in Terminal 5 (no restaurants and hardly any stores are available after you pass through security), but at at least I'll be on my way soon. Or soonish.
Once I arrive in Bangalore, I'm looking forward to fresh lime sodas, being in India during the monsoon season, but of course most of all seeing Don again.
Unlike yesterday's, these photos really are from Varanasi. It's from the dining hall of the hostel we stayed at in Varanasi. Somehow I think all these times could have been boiled down a little better -- and I wish I'd taken time to avail the "Hot Drinks Time" -- all 15 minutes of it. At this place, room service would have been a problem in any case -- I don't think the stripped-down rooms had any phones. 
[click for a close-up]
The hostel may not have been very fancy, but the view seemed like one of the best in town:
As I mentioned below, I'll be flying back to Bangalore on Monday. Don's there already, taking in the always changing cable choices (Ugly Betty, US edition! Jewel in the Crown! Battlestar Galactica! A million more nature specials about tigers and crocodiles and snakes!) and getting used to Bangalore, Monsoon edition.
In the meantime, I thought I'd pull from the vault some of our classic (i.e. old) photos I didn't get around to posting last time.
Here's a sign from one of the many dreadful, backpacker-style restaurants in Varanasi Udaipur. If you stay near the ghats, these places are by and large your only option for hanging out. Handily located on the roof of a backpacker hotel, they usually feature a simple menu of badly prepared "continental" cliches like fish-and-chips and pasta stuff (there's lousy Indian too!). Still, they are a nice place to get a good view of the city around you.
Because Octopussy had scenes filmed in town, these restaurants show the movie on an endless loop at night. Some mix is up a bit with other flicks, but not nearly enough. I think a few Bollywood movies would be a good addition. Or anything, really.
[Update: Sorry, Varanasi! It's Udaipur that got the James Bond treatment.]
I thought this article about "The Hindi-fication of a Typeface" was interesting. It's about a type designer in Australia and the font he designed for a museum show about Bollywood. The comments to the post include a couple about "ethnocentrism" and other faux pas. I don't love the typeface (the random capital letters bug me), but it's hard for me to see the harm in it. 
I've got soft spot for this and other "Hindi-fied" typefaces, which seem to appear a lot in English-language signs and billboards throughout India. Obviously, they're always used in a jokey fashion, and a little of them goes a long way. The words are usually hard to read. 
But it isn't just Hindi that gets this treatment. In Bangalore I also saw Chinese-ish typefaces, which mostly appeared on restaurants and on beauty parlors (there are a couple really good examples around St. Mark's Road). Seeing these signs made me homesick for the U.S., since Chinese restaurants here use similar cornball typefaces. (That's where this example came from.)
When I get back to Bangalore in a few days, I'm hoping to find a few examples of English typefaces that have been Kannada-fied or Tamil-fied. I think I've seen some, but nothing specific comes to mind. A little help? And for the grand championship, are there any non-English signs that ape typical English-language typefaces?
P.S. Here are the photos by Jonathan Torgovnik that appeared in the exhibit. They're worth a look.
I've been back in New York now for about two weeks. Our big news is that we'll be heading back to India in about a month. Until that time you can expect a few posts, but not too many.
After getting back to the United States, I spent a few days with my parents back in Wisconsin. I kept taking lots of pictures of trees and clouds, in part because they both looked so different that what I'd been looking at in India. It also seemed very cold to me -- it was a cold spring, even for Wisconsin, but I might also gotten used to the Indian sun. The above photo was taken from my old bedroom window. My parents are farmers, and you can see where the fields start behind the backyard.
And below is the town square of my hometown of about 2700. It's grown a lot since I've been gone, but most of the newcomers live in developments on the other side of town. Anyway, it looks a lot different from an Indian village of the same size, that's for sure. For instance, no cows, and not too many people just walking down the street.
"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
G.K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat", via Terry Teachout
We've both been back in the United States for about a week at our respective families. One has no internet, and the other has dial-up only, so expect slim posts for a while at least.
In the meantime, watch the above video for Basement Jaxx's song "Romeo." It might be old hat to some of you, but I was amazed when I saw it for the first time yesterday. I found it when looking up stuff on Ramoji Film City, the film studio/amusement park outside of Hyderabad where the video was shot. Part of the fun is seeing how all the Indian musical number conventions mash up with a very western song. For more on Film City, here's the New York Times's take.
A hearty welcome (as they say) to everyone visiting here from Boing-Boing. As the tagline says above, we're a couple of Americans staying for six months a year a while in Bangalore. I'm a travel writer, and Don works in publishing. While we're not working, we're usually traveling, trying to cross the always-busy streets here, inviting stares, breaking things, buying tablecloths, eating dosas, that sort of thing.
Here are a few older posts you might like:
I thought this was really cool. It's a drum and bell machine I saw at Bangalore's Bull Temple. You can see the motor to the left and how it's connected to the drumsticks. It wasn't going, unfortunately -- would be fun to see it at work, and to see how you adjust the speed of the drums and bells.
As you can see, the machine was in a cage to prevent curious people (and monkeys!) from getting a rhythm going at the wrong times.
If some hipster band in Brooklyn or Berlin or Rio knows what's good for them, they'll try to get their hands on one of these ASAP and use it on their next album. Maybe someone already has . . .
Here was a sight that made me a little scared. This is a huge billboard in front of the Vijaya Bank building on M.G. Road. All those specks are flying ants! I managed not to run for my life and instead just kept on walking. Maybe I shouldn't have been so scared -- now that the bees are abandoning their hives because of cell phones, we can look to the ants to take up some of the slack and start pollinating.
Don and I are both due to fly out of Bangalore and back to the United States next Friday. If this time is anything last the last time, I predict that next week will be light on posts and high on silence. Although I intend to keep posting even when we're out of India, at least for a while, I thought it would be good to start thinking of some things I'll miss when I'm gone.
Over the weekend we went to the wonderful Jain basti (temple) in the town of Sravanbelagola. More about that later, but first here's a shot of the enclosures that covered some ancient inscriptions on the hill. We thought it all looked like some sort of Dutch or German art installation -- the red and blue parts sticking up hold summaries of the inscriptions. And those are German tourists in the background, so it all fits.
In my year in India, the monsoon remains just about as confusing as it was to start with. We've had a couple rains since we got back to Bangalore at the start of the month, and one of our acquaintances said the unusual rains were something called the pre-monsoon. They would have to be very "pre", since the monsoon won't arrive in Bangalore until June.
The storm today was impressive. All the afternoon was hot, and the skies kept getting darker and darker. Finally by about 8 o'clock lightning began to spike down. We were up in a restaurant on the 10th floor, so it was fun to watch the lightning appear to the west. And finally the rain came. Standing water appeared in the roads almost immediately, and the temperature dropped way down.
The rickshaw driver who took us home from the restaurant said that all this rain was because of the tsunami. Wha? There is a tsunami in the South Pacific at the moment, but that doesn't make any sense. He must have meant the deadly and terrible tsunami of 2004. What could that have to do with it? I have no idea.
And that's why I keep asking people about monsoons and the weather. Just about every answer is interesting.
We just got back from a big road trip that included several days at the Jungle Lodge's K Gudi camp, south of Mysore. We didn't see any tigers, but we did see a leopard, lots of deer, and many gaur, the world's largest bovine. The bulls are hilariously big -- the cows are the size of blown-up brahmin dairy cows. My favorite sighting were five wild elephants swimming in a small lake. Here there are exiting the lake after deciding they had had enough of all our photography. 
And here is a gaur, looking shy but muscley. 
Now's the part where the blogger apologizes for light posting, except I'll just skip that and say that I'm in Hyderabad at the moment, working on a travel guide. I'm dusty and sleepy and a little bitter that my hotel isn't as nice as either of the two Taj's I toured this afternoon. Of course, I'm not exactly paying Taj prices, either. (Note for rich people out there: the presidential suite in the Taj Krishna is really amazing [your own pool!], but only you can decide if it's worth $1200 a night.)
I love exploring cities, but sometimes I really wish I could skip that part of the learning curve where I flounder around trying to figure out how to get from point A to . . . just about anywhere. Hyderabad has what might be a unique water feature -- an enormous tank (water reservoir/lake) separating Hyderabad itself from its suburbanized twin, Secunderbad. from the newer suburban town of Secunderabad. I spent lots of time today walking along the eastern edge of the lake, Hussain Sagar, thinking I'd reached the southernmost point, but actually nowhere near. Luckily there's a big 50-foot Buddha near the south, so in the future I'll be desperately keeping Buddha's head in sight if ever try to walk anywhere in this very hot city again. Walking is NOT very popular in the parts of town I've been in so far -- it was basically just me, the beggars, and a few random students. Undoubtedly the old city part will be a little different.
Tomorrow will be devoted to sight-seeing. I'll be the one taking pictures of the admission windows and their ticket prices, asking people questions about opening hours, and rushing through the things on view.
