Minkey Business

If your life is anything like mine, you’re probably thinking, “The Olympics already? Are they doing them every two years now?” As we get closer, I’m bracing for an outpouring from India and Indians of one of the most bogus complaints that surround the Games: “We’re a country of one billion and can’t produce even one gold medalist in x category?”

Every four years the point is made on social media and in the press over and over until I want to scream; a modulated yodel that sounds something like: “It’s BECAUSE of the one billion that we can’t produce a gold medalist!!” And then an after-mumble that sounds a little like, “Not in a democratic nation anyway.”

It is because of one billion that when Ramappa from a village in Karnataka gets up at 4am, he picks up a sickle and spends all day working in a field, instead of picking up a pull buoy and spending the morning training at the local aquatic centre. It’s because of one billion that one of the greatest endurance cyclists of our generation was, say, a malnourished rickshaw driver in Kolkata who died unmourned of tuberculosis at 30, and not on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, shocking the entire world by going too soon. It’s because of one billion that Shanti, who works at my parents’ house and is so frighteningly strong that I have no embarrassment about handing her jars to open, is not a household name for her world record shot put. ‘Shanti the Peacemaker’ they call her in that parallel Earth where she is a star.

Of course, in spite of my mumbled disclaimer, you could point to China and say that my scream is just as bogus. But China only emphasises that producing a gold-winning Olympian has nothing to do with pure numbers, in that it is hardly a matter of finding him, waiting for him to turn 17 and then hustling him onto a plane to London to run in a straight line for just over 9 seconds.

Developing that level of skill needs stadia, swimming pools, gymnasiums. It needs a culture of sport, and local and regional competitions with high standards. It needs equipment, good food, and educated coaches who constantly update their knowledge. It needs a society that is either wealthy enough to have time and energy for these pursuits, or one whose government is driven enough to mandate them.

Where the numbers argument does have potency is the “outlier” aspect. Sports today is so competitive that only the genetically gifted stand a chance, though less gifted people with frightening amounts of motivation do break through now and then. Not only must you have the VO2 max of a diesel engine, but need a range of bodily quirks that suit the sport at hand. (If the world’s best human swimmers today were any better built for their sport, they’d be breathing out of holes in the backs of their heads.) The bigger the population of a country, the more of these custom super-people it will contain.

But what’s the point of having a lake big enough for world record fish if you don’t have a boat, a fishing rod or even a desire to go fishing? I suggest a different tack for this year, and this year only, since it will be patronising as things get better—and they are getting better. I say we celebrate every Indian win and good showing with a “Wow, in spite of coming from a country of one billion people you went up there and did it. Good for you.”

First published in Gulf News, May 1, 2012

I had an evening appointment across town and no car, so I decided to leave home in the morning and make a day of it. I’d take a bus into downtown Los Angeles, have lunch, shop for music, find a coffee shop and write, and take another bus into Westside to meet a dear cousin who was visiting for a meeting.

I started writing this at a long wooden table in a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. As I thought about my day, I realised there was a thread running through it, one that spoke of some interesting changes in society. (Let’s start with the fact that I quite easily found a coffee shop whose name didn’t start with ‘S’ and end with ‘ucks’, and unlike that ubiquitous brand, also served good coffee.)

Sitting opposite me was a person drinking a vintage brand soda, a product that’s seeing a big revival. Earlier that morning I’d stopped at a bicycle shop I’d visited a few months earlier. The place had boomed, growing from an already large basement to take over the huge top floor as well. They specialised in urban bicycles—fixed gear machines in bright colours that are the rage among teenagers.

Soon afterwards, I got to a chic restaurant that served a starter of “head cheese” and a main course of a Latin-inspired sandwich that featured beef tongue, accompanied by a house-made lime-and-chilli soda. For dessert, I crossed the street to a bakery that sold only cupcakes, a trend of individual hand-frosted treats that shows no sign of going away.

Soon after I took a train to the famous music store Amoeba. When I first wrote about analogue music in this column, record stores were filled with old albums for $3-$10, with only a corner for new LP’s, usually indie bands or classic re-issues—The Beatles, The Who. Today most of the stock in record stores is brand new shrinkwrap, costing from $15 to $30 in an incredible range of releases in all genres.

As I walked to the bus stop after, I peeped into a fancy furniture store and was surprised to see all manner of reclaimed, recycled designs such as cushions made from sacking and coffee tables made from old steamer trunks. That evening we had dinner at a small-plate restaurant, an eating trend that’s very fashionable right now, its emphasis on sharing creating table-sized communities across cities.

A day later, I was reading an article in the May 2012 issue of ‘The Atlantic’. It talked about Facebook and how we were molding the online world in our self-image. We create idealised versions of ourselves, sharing only that which makes us seem deeper, funnier and more interesting than we are. We see similarly edited versions of others—the happy families, the perfect holidays, the smiling gatherings. We see only the piled plates, sunsets and arms around shoulders, not the bills, queues and one-upmanship in between.

Apparently this is making us lonelier than ever.

My day of the vintage, the hand-crafted, the artisanal, and the community-driven made more sense than ever. It’s an aesthetic that’s becoming more common in all areas of our lives. The more our objects and systems become virtual, the more we crave things of matter; well-made, indubitably present objects that have been created with care and attention. It’s almost as if we’re revolting against the lies we create online and are striving for greater authenticity and better connections in the physical world. Sometimes it’s a return to simplicity or an older way, other times it’s for the complex, yet flawed perfection that can come from only a human hand.

First published in Gulf News, April 17, 2012

The date of our great return home has been fixed. On July 31 we leave southern California for good, returning to southern India. Expats from any country know the immensity of this decision. From Dubai, England, Singapore, Australia and across the US, the first question upon hearing we’re going back is, “How do you feel about it?”

From India however, there’s no apparent awareness of the difficulty of this move. The ease with which people tell us to “just come back” or the “about time too”-ness with which they greet the announcement of our return is as if we’ve spent the last six years living out of a suitcase in a motel room; all we have to do is pack and check out.

We’re rarely asked how we feel about returning, about the conflicts and tussles, hopes and worries. I guess it’s hard to acknowledge that we may actually have found a home away from home, and have set down roots that now need to be torn out. That we are giving up a life we have grown to love, a life that’s rarely asked after in any detail even during visits to the homeland.

Another common source of frustration is how the problems of the country are played down when it suits the situation. Suddenly the traffic “isn’t so bad” or the power cuts “aren’t that frequent” and yet when you visit home, everybody around you is moaning about how difficult it is to get anywhere or groaning when the power goes for the fourth time that day. I find this obduracy amusing, but also irritating, as if I’m now some outsider to whom you mustn’t talk about the shortcomings of one’s country. Or as if my returning home hinges on how often the power goes off.

Related to this is the untruth that’s echoed on forums, on Facebook, on Skype calls and in person: the claim that “everything is available in India now”. The truth is that if you have a hobby or specialised interest or simply a certain predilection, everything is decidedly not available in India. Also, it’s not just about physical presence of a product, but ease of shopping, cost, range of choice, entry-level quality and many more things that determine availability.

For example, every day I read about the travails of my cycling buddies dealing with lost or delayed shipments and exorbitant customs duties for even the most mundane of spare parts that they can’t find in India. But just like India is so much more than electricity going off every day, life is so much more than being able to buy a vintage De Rosa steel bicycle frame on a whim. My brother, his wife and their baby daughter recently visited India, where the daughter had her “annaprashan” or weaning ceremony. My cousins, nieces, grandparents, aunt and old family friends were all there. After watching the event through a scratchy Skype connection, I sat quiet for a long while, aching with the sense of how far away we were, and that I’d missed something so momentous.

That people don’t want to hear about your life abroad just adds to this sense of isolation. It’s almost as if they’re afraid they’ll hear that life “over there” is better than life “over here”, but it’s only when you leave home for a long time that you realise that “here” and “there” have very little meaning. After a few itinerant years, it takes very little for one to become the other, and so I end in direct contradiction to the beginning—that maybe this move isn’t such a big thing after all?

First published in Gulf News, April 3, 2012

I was at a Mexican pharmacy and needed moisturiser, so I mimed rubbing cream into my arm and cobbled together the few Spanish words I thought made sense: “Crema de agua”, cream with water. It didn’t work. After much grimacing and repeating, I drew a line on my dry skin to illustrate.

“Ah!” said the pharmacist and brought me an anti-inflammatory ointment. I shook my head and continued to mime, but eventually had to give up and walk down the counter scanning the shelves to see if I could spot what I needed.

Up to now, I’ve never been in a country with so few resources for making myself understood. I spent three weeks in Mexico and ran into only a handful of people who could speak English. Most spoke only Spanish (and maybe Mayan languages), with not even broken English. Also, a lot of towns were off the tourist trail, so many people were not used to dealing with others who didn’t understand them.

Living in LA, which is full of authentic Mexican food, meant that my culinary vocabulary was pretty good. I went in knowing my cabeza tacos from my al pastor gorditas. But my one Spanish sentence (“Your mother is mad”) had limited application, and my numbers didn’t go beyond uno, dos, tres. “At least learn the numbers,” I told myself, but in the haste of deadlines and packing I didn’t get beyond dies, ten.

If you’re going to cycle through Mexico for three weeks, at least learn the numbers. Up to 100. So many times at markets I’d just hold out a palmful of coins, hoping the shopkeeper would take only as much as he or she needed. For larger amounts, I’d hand over the notes very slowly, trying to read body language to tell me when I was done. Luckily Mexico is cheap and, where I was at least, honest. In fact, one vegetable vendor was so amused by my inability to understand her that as I was leaving after paying, she deftly tapped an extra red capsicum into my bag. Most seemed to enjoy the mime conversations, and nearly everyone found it hilarious that I didn’t even know my numbers.

I’m not good with languages, but it’s interesting how quickly you learn when immersed like this. There’s no better way to learn vocabulary than pointing at something you need and having it named for you, rather than improvising scenes at the front of a language class, or worse, learning up lists of words.

And as I noticed with Arabic when in the Middle East, after even a little bit of immersion what was an incomprehensible stream with only a beginning and end, starts to separate into individual words—even if you don’t understand them. When you don’t have a choice, your brain seems to go into a language overdrive and become extra perceptive to the nuances of the speech around you. On a separate note, the Indian accent is well suited to sounding the hard r’s and the soft th’s and dh’s of Spanish. In fact, after I pronounced ‘horneado’, referring to food that’s baked, I was asked if I was a Spanish speaker, and was looked at with suspicion when I said no.

So what about that moisturiser? Well it’s almost identical to the technical word in English, so I probably won’t forget now: humectante. Luckily I found some on a shelf and could point it out. I had it easy though. A few others from our group had saddle sores and needed to buy baby diaper rash cream. No, they didn’t hablo Espanol.

First published in Gulf News, March 20, 2012

“Feet just work!” exclaimed Barefoot Runner, negotiating a steep, rocky slope. She had started the hike wearing a pair of sneakers, but it wasn’t long before she shed them, and made that statement that should have been obvious, but sadly, isn’t.

As soon as the shoes were off, silence descended and there was no more scraping, scuffing and slipping. All we could hear was our breathing and occasional stones we dislodged. I was functionally barefoot too, wearing a pair of “invisible shoes” or huaraches. Sold online, these are simply thin rubber soles that you strap to your feet. Because they’re so light and conforming, they offer a barefoot feel with some degree of protection from rough ground.

About two years ago I wrote about when the Barefoot Runner first got into a pair of Vibram Five Fingers. She’s just worn them out and bought her second pair; a complete convert who hates to walk in shoes with padded soles. In all the miles she’s run, she hasn’t suffered any of the common runners’ injuries she used to get, including shin splints, knee pain and overly sore muscles.

“Your feet know just where to put the weight,” she said of traversing the difficult trail. “And when you cover them up in cushioning they can’t do that any more.”

It was true. There was a section of the hike along a gravelly firebreak at 45 degrees. There was so little purchase it was terrifying. I took even those invisible shoes off and though the stones hurt my usually cloistered feet, control and a feeling of safety returned. Even if I did slip, it was controlled, with none of those wildly windmilling arms to keep balance.

You walk very differently when barefoot or near barefoot. As a child at the swimming pool, I would notice that my friends and I had an unusual gait—a short-stepping, almost mincing stride. I assumed then it was because of the hot ground or a fear of slipping, but know now that it’s just how it is when you don’t have shoes. You take lighter, shorter steps, rolling the feet under the body. In Indian villages, where so many people go barefoot, but not by choice (oh to be privileged enough to actually choose hardship!) you rarely see sloppy walking. Considering how much society looks down on being barefoot, it’s ironic how dignified the gait is, with back straight and head held high and no extraneous movement.

It may be natural, but if you haven’t done it in a while it hurts in the beginning. A lot. You suddenly discover a host of muscles and other painful structures around and above the ankles, and your calf muscles have a lot to contribute to the discussion as well. I haven’t got past this phase yet, but the Barefoot Runner assures me that pain becomes a thing of the past.

Being near-barefoot also makes you really focus on what you’re doing and where you’re going. You can no longer switch off and clodhop, and this is surprisingly fulfilling. But in the end, the hike exhausted me. I spend all my active hours on a bicycle, so the extra movement and unaccustomed demands from the heavy walking left my muscles hurting, my head aching from dehydration, and my body just generally not feeling quite right for a few days.

But those poor feet that I abused so, stepping on stones, sliding on gravel? They was no pain whatsoever after the event. In fact, it was as if they were luxuriating in a post-exercise glow saying, “This… this is what we were made for.”

First published in Gulf News, March 6, 2012

I was in the mood for some ice cream, and was pleased to spot a gelataria. But I got suspicious when I saw a sign outside boasting its “low fat” flavours. I went in and was mildly outraged to learn that everything in the store was low fat.

Ice cream is celebration food. It’s for when you want to set all worries aside and not think about calories and carbohydrates. If you’re going to eat ice cream but are worrying about fat, then it’s not time to eat ice cream.

Writer Micheal Pollan put it better than I could, in his book Food Rules: “There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion. Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.”

This involves not just spacing out these wonderful moments, but not creating depleted versions of special occasion foods with the idea that we can eat them more often—maybe even every day. A large part of the joy of a treat is that you don’t get one every day, that you feel you’ve earned it somehow. Plus, there is nothing joyous about a low- or non-fat version of anything full fat. Non-fat milk tastes and feels horrid and watery. Low-fat yogurt is thin and unsatisfying. Low-fat spreads don’t have a fraction of that almost animal attraction of good butter. And low-fat ice cream? I won’t damn it too much without trying and will go back very soon, I promise.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter what it tastes like, or what that all-important mouthfeel is like. If ice-cream is sold as low-fat or low-carb it’s now health food not dessert. This doesn’t mean it’s good for you, just that its food with the goodness sucked out of it and replaced by righteousness and chemicals. It now stands for that all-American connection of ‘dessert’ with ‘guilt’ and ‘sin’, and not ‘happiness’ or ‘celebration’. It promotes over-consumption since people tend to (and are encouraged to) forget that extra servings of low-calorie food is high calorie food.

Not far from this fat-free haven is gelataria that makes no health claims. It serves only a few freshly made ice creams each with intense flavours you know are natural because you can taste them on every bite, right up to when you clean out the bowl. The creamy pistachio has pleasing grain from the nuts as well as the taste of their papery skins. There’s a stunning frozen yogurt with olive oil and sea salt. The coffee ice creams are bitter from espresso, the fruit ones like clouds of pears or whatever else is fresh that day. With so much flavour and the full fat of high-quality milk, you don’t need to eat much, and indeed this is one of the few American ice cream places I’ve been to that has sensible portions.

The focus on rich ingredients results in a funny flip. You pay more and get less, and yet come away with a greater sense of value for money. The sense of occasion is back, and the realisation hits that things that are “bad” for you—from triple-cream Brie to chocolate mousse to pistachio gelato—are not to be vilified or corrected in labs, but rather, put up on pedestals as if something precious and rare.

Oh, and those jokes at the table about how long you need to spend at a gym to burn off whatever you’re consuming? No longer funny. ‘Eating while guilty’ is hereby deemed a crime.

First published in Gulf News, February 21, 2012

Funnily enough for someone in the information technology field, my wife often gives thanks to her humanities education, specifically her degree in literature. Okay, she’s not a techie—working on the consulting side of things—but even so, what’s her knowledge of Hardy and Donne got to do with use cases and business analysis?

“Communication.” That’s the word she keeps going back to. Frighteningly large swathes of even the most technical jobs come down to people giving each other information, and the organisation and readability of this material has a huge bearing on quality of life for all involved. But creating elegant communication doesn’t come easily. Everything hinges on an ability to step out of yourself and see things through another’s eyes, and act of imagination and an open mind.

“True open-mindedness,” says a friend, “is always traced back to a child with a book.” When children read, she claims, they become the people who pick new things on menus, who look past their dislikes to give things and people a chance, who don’t have phobias of people with different preferences from theirs. They’re the people who are interested and excited when hearing of strange things, of new things; not the ones whose primary reactions are suspiciousness and dismissal.

When I looked dubious about the generalisation, she said, “I know there are open minded people who aren’t readers, but I can bet they’ve been exposed to a range of ideas as a child. Maybe their reading parents. But unless they read themselves, there’s always a wall.”

I believe everyone has walls of some sort, and true open-mindedness is perfection—unattainable. (Open-minded people with a horror of close-minded or intolerant people for example.) But I agree that the most valuable lesson of reading is not the information you glean, the cultures you see, the words you learn, but the very idea of ideas. That there are different, perhaps strange, ways to look at the same thing, and this is okay. That there are weird things to be found in the minds of other people, but this is also okay.

This openness to ideas and the idea of ideas translates itself to many things, and surprisingly, professionalism in the corporate workplace is one of them. How can you be a perfectionist when you don’t know that your creation is lacking? How can you understand what the client needs when you can’t see things from another point of view? Literature trains you to do this: to understand context and background; to step away from the specific lines of the conversation and see the general idea, the overarching theme.

The problem with the attitude of many companies to these abilities is that they’re just the icing. The final, finishing touches on an employee—desirable, but not essential. My wife is frequently frustrated by new clients who focus on the specifics of what she knows—the business area or the software programs. “Those are tools, and tools can be learned”, she says. Things like elegant communication, empathy, good listening and structured thinking are a lot harder to acquire over a couple of weeks on a new project that’s already—inevitably–two months behind schedule.

It’s sad that so many engineers even today come from a black-and-white education system and a culture that looks down on a humanities education—seeing it as the last refuge of the “failures” who couldn’t get into the sciences or at least, commerce. This failing shows over and over again in offices, and as my friend put it, “There’s no such thing as a good software engineer with bad communication skills. That’s just a bad software engineer.”

First published in Gulf News, February 7, 2012

Because the distractions, or should I say attractions, of home prove just too tempting, I’m writing this at a coffee shop an appropriate distance away from our house. The voluntary commute does me good; to the coffee shop to set me in a working mood, and away from it enough of a task that I’m driven to spend at least a couple of fruitful hours.

I’ve picked a place in Pasadena that goes by the name Intelligentsia. It is everything the moniker suggests—industrial-chic décor with exposed piping; bare brickwork here, a deep blue wall there, dark wood everywhere, all of it reclaimed from something grand and imposing. There are those underpowered tungsten bulbs that are all the rage—filaments barely aglow. Water is stored in laboratory glassware, an aesthetic that extends to the coffee making, which is done the “cupping” way, or the manner in which coffee experts taste the product. A paper filter in a funnel standing over a beaker gets swirled with hot water to wash away residues and warm everything that will come in contact with the coffee. The beans are ground to order, added to the filter, and hot water at a precise temperature is poured over the grounds. As the mixture foams, the pourer waits, and then pours the water in circular patterns first one way then another. The entire apparatus sits on a digital scale to ensure she always pours the identical volume of water each time.

The resultant coffee tastes very little like coffee. Well, at least the coffee I know. First of all, it’s not particularly hot, and apparently that’s intentional. Rather than being the dark tasting, largely chocolaty drink I’m used to, this coffee is startlingly complex, with some darker tones, but is mainly bright and fruity, even tangy. For the first time, I thought of coffee as a berry drink, and not as a roasted seed drink.

I’m not sure I liked it.

But it wasn’t my first time there and this isn’t a cheap cup of coffee, so was I merely here to disprove any suggestion that the name of the shop reflected the kind of people who patronised it? Not really. A few days ago, I read an article about one of the suppliers to the chain, an El Salvadorian coffee producer who goes through extraordinary lengths to ensure that her coffee beans are world class. It takes manic obsessiveness, a lot of learning, as well as a lot of hard work, so I thought I owed it to her to go back to Intelligentsia and sample, if not her coffee, at least someone’s epicurean version of the stuff.

According to Intelligentsia , the coffee I chose is from a mid-sized family farm in Columbia called La Loma. Apparently, the cup I’m drinking can be described thusly: “Bursting with red fruits, La Loma greets you with red raspberry, cranberry cocktail and notes of sherbert. The acidity of citrus fruit is in perfect balance with the juicy mouthfeel. The finish brings a pleasant tanginess and notes of creme brulee.”

Writing alongside this performance in a cup, it struck me that the requirements of a good beverage were similar to the demands of, say a good novel; that there be sufficient complexity within, with smooth segues from one idea (or flavour) to another, and that there be an overarching theme and sense of journey. If each sip was a scene, the cooling cup was becoming a different scene every minute. The tanginess was now dangerously close to sourness and I think the show was over.

I’m still not sure I liked it.

First published in Gulf News, January 24, 2012

“Don’t waste your food,” says the parent sternly. “There are children starving in [favourite impoverished area of choice.]”

And so the child develops a healthy guilt about wasting food, but learns that the solution, or rather antidote, to waste is to Dyson everything up on his or her plate. (Hey, it’s time we updated “Hoover”.)

Overeating when food is abundant works well in difficult times. Stuffing oneself through a season of plenty, knowing that winter or a dry season is imminent is a good idea. Or eating oneself silly after a hunt, knowing that downing animals is difficult and dangerous, and may not occur again for a while. But today, when few of us have gone even a single a day without food, cleaning up one’s plate may not be the ideal choice to make.

After all, you’re now eating just because it’s there, so the enjoyment’s gone. And because you’re already full, you can be sure that what you’re eating is either going to be excreted, or stored as excess fat. The eater then either lives with that fat at risk of expensive diseases, or pays more money and buys more stuff—dumbbells, running shoes, bicycles—to burn that fat away.

I’m certainly not saying that food must be blithely pushed away, without a care for where it goes. There are other solutions. One may be to find what the restaurant does with extra food—it often gets given to the poor. Another is to never be embarrassed to take away food, no matter how little. (America wastes a lot of food, but it’s also a country where no one looks at you strangely when you want to take leftovers away. You paid for it, it’s yours. The only problem is that you get Styrofoam to take it away in.) The third, perhaps best, solution is to order carefully and not feel you have to overload the table, either to impress others or to make yourself feel you’re treating yourself well.

It was a paediatrician cousin’s observation about baby feeding habits in India that first got me thinking about this, and relooking at the idea that not eating is wasting. “Parents overfeed their babies,” she said. Even after the baby has had enough and turned his or her face away, parents insist they finish everything in the bowl. At this point it becomes force-feeding, a process that’s not fun for either parent or child. As this repeats itself, the child learns to ignore or override the sensations of satiety, and learns to overeat at every meal.

That cuts astutely to the heart of the eating habits of way too many people I know. Add to this the drilled-in guilt over food wastage, and you have the person who keeps eating at the table long after everyone is finished, taking the last kebabs or asking other people if they’re going to finish what’s on their plates. “There’s just two bites left,” they’ve heard all their lives. “Just finish it.”

I recently had a meal with someone who has a great sense of portion control and is much more sensible with ordering than I am. But all of this vanished when confronted with the possibility of waste. He was so full that he was sweating and looked acutely distressed, and yet kept mumbling, “Mustn’t waste food, mustn’t waste food” as he struggled to shovel in the last morsels on his plate. After the meal he looked ill and uncomfortable, and for a while wondered whether he’d be sick.

He didn’t throw away any food that day, but would you say he didn’t waste any?

First published in Gulf News, January 10, 2012

This ride report was written on a cycling forum for cyclists, but is not very technical. So if you’re interested in seeing what it’s like to ride in a weekend “hammerfest”, click to read my report on the Montrose Ride.