Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India – Pankaj Mishra
In Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra captures an India which has shrugged off its sleepy, socialist air and has become instead kitschy, clamorous and ostentatious. From a convent educated beauty pageant aspirant to small shopkeepers planning their vacation in London, Pankaj Mishra paints a vivid picture of a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. An absolute classic, this is a witty and insightful account of India’s aspirational middle class.
Small and short conversations with different people about their mindset and living style are described in this book. The people includes young women from Jhansi, with dreams of winning a beauty pageant, and naxalites in Bihar trying to initiate a revolution, and a young man from Gujarat speaking of killing Muslims in public. The author has shared all his experiences through this book. Butter Chicken In Ludhiana: Travels In Small Town India is an interesting read with a rich variety of languages and cultures. The stories in this book are full of irony, humour, and violence. There are so many characters portrayed in this book, and Mr Sharma from Ambala stands out.
The lifestyles of both village and city folk are depicted by the author, in this book which narrates the differences between the dreams and psychology of these people. In Butter Chicken In Ludhiana, the author talks about the reason of unemployment, which is caused by small fast food chains in small towns.
As the song goes….Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens…..from the Sound of Music, one of my favourite movies growing up. I must have seen the movie so many times that I think at one point, I could recite all the dialogues and songs, I loved it so much!
My favourite people in the world are my kids and S, followed by my parents. I think I can spend days with them, of course, sometimes each of them do things that infuriate me and irritate me, but I love them loads and can’t live without them. One of my secret worries in life is losing any of them – losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare and I am also the same, but everytime S is late and I can’t reach him, I start imagining the worst. Another nightmare I am still not ready for is for my parents to leave me. I know, logically and practically, this will happen sometime, but I want this to happen later than sooner. I am still not ready to not have my parents at the other end of a phone call!
The next thing I can’t really live without are books, of course! I love reading and as it’s evident here and in my other blog, I need to read as much as I need to breathe. This has gotten me into lots of trouble in school (think reading in class, material that the rest of them had not yet graduated to). I was a very precocious reader, very often reading books 3-4 grades above. In the school library, I remember there was this cupboard which was mostly kept locked. I used to wonder what was in there that they didn’t want us to read and once somewhere in grade 7 or 8, I got the librarian to open it up as I had read all the books in the shelves meant for us. There I discovered adult books. I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 around that age. It may not seem great these days for a 12/13 year old to reach such books, but in those days, given that there was no internet, India was still a socialist economy, people didn’t read for fun. I was that oddball who wanted to read, not because it was mandated by school, but because I just wanted to. We didn’t have access to many books beyond the school library and I remember I used to beg and borrow books, so much that I used to read older students school books (subjects like History, Geography and English) just so I had material to read!
I am so glad BB & GG, especially GG share my love for reading. GG is a lot like me in this respect, she will probably read a lot and widely as she grows up. BB is more a non-fiction boy – he prefers to read what his passions are – which is usually something to do with planes, cars and trains (in that order). I have to push him to read fiction.
Another favourite thing is music. Most days at work, I am plugged into earphones listening to music while working (I am listening to new age music as I type this). I usually listen to Indian music, mostly Bollywood music while at work, but I also like Fusion, New Age and Classical (both Indian and Western). I rarely, if never, listen to western rock and pop. I may change my mind sometime, if GG & BB start listening to such music at home, but as of now, it’s not something that still appeals to me.
Travelling to new places, soaking up on different cultures and learning new things are among the other things I adore. Since BB & GG’s birth, we haven’t done much travel, but the last year or so, we’ve made it a point to visit a new place each trip. Now that they move to secondary school and are teens/young adults, I envision more trips in the future. I plan to start taking them around the region and then the world’s our oyster. We do need to make periodic trips to India to keep in touch with our roots as well as visit the grandparents and other relatives (part of keeping in touch with your roots), but I want to add small side trips each time to a different part of India. India is so vast and beautiful, with so much to offer, that it’ll take a while before we discover the whole country. I have a big bucket list of places to see before I die and should start making a serious dent on that list.
So here you have – a list of some of my favourite things. I’ll leave you with the song which inspired this post, Maria’s favourite things from The Sound of Music
Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies – ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter – transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies’ house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture. Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters that inhabited it.
While travelling, I usually almost always take the aisle seat as I just can’t see myself squeezed into a corner seat for hours together. This means that I rarely see a city while take off or landing.
Last week, on a work trip to Kuala Lumpur, I decided to take a window seat. This is a ridiculously short flight with a total flying time of 45 mins which is why I decided to risk the window seat so I could take some pictures from the air.
As soon as the seat beat sign comes off, the stewardess rush to get the drinks trolley. Even before they finish the drinks run the captain starts the announcement to the crew to prepare to land! By the time they are back to collect the empty drink cans, it’s time to land…That’s how short the flight is. It takes longer to get to the airport, plus the wait and the trip to the hotel than the actual travel. For example our trip last week the outward bound flight from Singapore to KL was scheduled at 10:15. I left home at 7:30, reached the airport around 8:15, then a two hour wait at Changi, followed by the 45 minute flight (which was around 30 mins late), then an almost 60 minute drive to the hotel. So my door-to-door trip was a grand total of 5.5 hours. The total drive from Singapore to KL is 5 hours! Returning back was worse – we were stuck in the Friday evening traffic on the way to the airport and it took us 2 hours to get to KLIA from the hotel in downtown KL. We were on the last flight home, leaving the hotel around 6 and reaching home almost at midnight!
Anyway, here are some pictures I took, while take-off and just when we were about to land…
Another view of the Singapore coastline marred by haze
From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East – William Dalrymple
In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam.
Using Moscho’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elgy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rice and scholarly, moving and courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical insights into the history, spirituality and fractured politics of the Middle East.
In Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra captures an India which has shrugged off its sleepy, socialist air and has become instead kitschy, clamorous and ostentatious. From a convent educated beauty pageant aspirant to small shopkeepers planning their vacation in London, Pankaj Mishra paints a vivid picture of a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. An absolute classic, this is a witty and insightful account of India’s aspirational middle class.
