New Orleans Jazz Fest The Beat Goes On
When Hurricane Katrina called on southeast Louisiana on August 29, 2005, it didn’t knock first. The wolf-wild winds simply huffed and puffed and destroyed more than 350,000 homes. Almost 2000 people lost their lives in the actual hurricane and in the subsequent floods. New Orleans didn’t escape. Unlike the immovable house of bricks in the fairy tale, the city’s metropolitan area was battered then lost under fifteen feet of water, resulting in over 200,000 homes and apartments being damaged beyond repair.
The Royal City of Mysore
It was a wonderful weather when we reached the city of Mysore in Karnataka state of South India. The city wore a somber and sleepy look at thirty past six in the morning. The pavement vendors and hawkers were busy selling mysore mallige jasmines. Yeshtu beku.. mulaana..maara..? How much you want, a foot or meter length of flower chain? Though it was only a week ago that the city’s grand event of Dussera festival was over, the pomp and fervor didn’t appear to have decreased in any way. We traced the address of my cousin Suresh who works in CFTRI, a premier food research institute. It was a home far away from home when we reached his house. After a decade and half we made it again. The tour schedule was immediately sketched and not a minute was wasted. We planned to cover the farthest places in the first leg. Shravanabelagola, Hassan, Halaybeedu, Belur, Nanjangud, Chamundi hills, Lalitha Mahal, Krishnaraja sagar, Srirangapatna, Wodiyar Palace, Zoo, were listed out. For elders, Shravanabelagola hill would be challenging to climb on small frictionless steps and due to the risk of slippery path, the visit to the abode of Gomateshwar was dropped. Suresh took me around the massive corridors and through well maintained lawns of the Cheluvamba Mansion palace that houses the CFTRI.
The Poetry of Peru
I had spent nearly three months in Buenos Aires and couldn’t wait to get out. Originally enamored by the modernity and architectural charm of the city, the striking beauty of its women, the passion of Tango and a literary tradition that included the likes of Luis Borges, I had quickly fallen disillusioned with a place I had heard deemed as the “Paris of Latin America.” Coming from New York—where no man or woman appears the same—Buenos Aires seemed all too homogenous. While most Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) trace their roots back to different parts of Western Europe, almost everyone in the city was white. Furthermore, the people I had met didn’t seem particularly fond of Americans, a sentiment shared by much of Latin America especially during the Bush years, and yet, Buenos Aires reminded more of America than any other Latin American country I had been to. Men often went out to clubs dressed in shirt and tie and flashing business cards, women armed in high heels and stylish office attire upturned their noses as they passed by, high-culture types sat around daintily drinking cafés con leche at outdoor corner cafes. The city seemed to be in love with capitalism and the dance of the dollar, and eagerly trying to distance itself from the rest of Latin America.
Paris érotique
The Great Big Nothing
If someone told you to fly half way around the world and spend thousands of dollars to look at nothing, to see empty, you might think they are crazy. You would probably even tell them so. But, I have experienced the nothing and I have felt the empty and it was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
This is the experience of being in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, thought to mean the driest of the dry, but often referred to also as the “The Great Big Nothing”. It lies in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. It used to be a great big sea millions of years ago, but now it is a vast, flat expanse the size of Switzerland. It is one of the only places on earth where you can see the horizon 360 degrees around yourself. Wherever you stand you can feel as if you are the centre point, but, simultaneously, as an insignificant dot in something far beyond yourself.
Passenger to Frankfurt
When I came to Germany a few months ago, a friend arranged for me to receive a gift subscription to the renowned (if rather highbrow) newspaper called the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This was an ideally-timed gift, because I had just begun teaching political science at a high school in Dortmund and though I had studied poli sci back in the day, ‘ the day’ was rather longer ago than I could properly remember, and there were all sorts of major elections going on in Germany that I knew very little about.So I gratefully delved into the paper every morning and one day hit upon an announcement for a program called Jugend schreibt proposed by the paper, which invited teachers to participate in a writing workshop with an entire class. In this generously devised program, all participants would get a free copy of the paper for a year, and articles written by talented students could even get published in a special weekly page appearing in the paper. Hmm, I thought – this sounds like just the kind of opportunity I would have loved as a teen, except that the New York Times either a) never offered such an incredible program or b) my teachers were too burnt-out to participate, so I went ahead and registered my class, asking them only afterwards what they thought of the idea. Luckily, they approved unanimously, and so I traveled to Frankfurt last weekend to participate in a workshop with teachers from all over the country. This was fascinating in many respects. Not only did I get to go on a tour of the facility where the paper is printed daily, and see the enormous rolls of paper used, and the maze of buzzing, thumping machines that print, copy and even fold the pages, but in the evenings I had the opportunity to chat with teachers from the former East Germany, who told me what life was like for them after the Wende, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, and about their adjustment to working in the West.The only somewhat bitter pill I had to swallow as a political science teacher was when I discovered that my kids were NOT supposed to write about politics, economics, or current events, because it would be counterproductive for them to vie with the journalists paid to cover these events. Well, what ARE they supposed to write about, then, I asked myself indignantly. There are, in fact, plenty of topics they can cover – features and reports on people with interesting stories and professions, for example. The two prize-winning students from last year (who each won the tidy sum of 7200 Euros towards their college expenses), had written an ironic piece about a tour at a snooty French perfume company and an insightful story about a man who left his terminally ill wife, respectively, so that the stories really do run the gamut. The two students were delightful, funny and poised. The young lady who won, Theresa Lieb, explained that there had been no inconsiderable amount of rivalry with her brother, who had snagged the prize the year before. The young man, Maximilian Koenig, affectionately joked with his sister, confessing that his secret mission in writing was to distract the clever eleven-year-old from reading the trashy but insanely popular German teenie magazine called Bravo. All in all, I can envision my students having the talent to win, but I am not sure about the drive – all the teachers who had any experience of the program voiced their frustration at the fact that the kids would go only so far in their work, yet then not supply some extra details or do some extra research shortly before their piece would have been published, simply abandoning their efforts midway. Even the prize winners confessed that the daily reminders of their teachers spurred them on, and I almost choked on my coffee - I mean, is there no such thing as a self-motivated student anywhere anymore, if even the best ones, the crème de la crème, still need to be prodded out of their adolescent lethargy?Once I had resigned myself to the idea that there were still plenty of worthwhile topics for the students to write about, and that perhaps I might be able, through sheer force of will, to persuade my students to make use of their talents, I was able to drown my sorrows in the three different kinds of mousse au chocolat (white, dark and milk) which were available daily for my delectation. Furthermore, I was able to squeeze in a visit afterwards to a friend in Freiburg who was celebrating her birthday, and we chopped and diced in her kitchen as in the old student days, except that the results were far more refined than the spaghetti-with-tuna-and-olives on which we used to subsist: this time around it was lamb’s lettuce and an exotic carrot soup with raisins as starters, followed by scrumptious salmon on a bed of leeks, accompanied by a mellow golden chardonnay. Hopefully what I gained in weight I have also gained in knowledge, but whether or no, I have at least been able to render homage to fine writing, if only via the title of this piece…!
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