Wachau!!!!!

When they told me about it, I giggled desperately. How do you not giggle at a word that sounds like a shootout scene in a Rajnikanth movie? But then I was fascinated. The idea of a valley on the Danube, where fruit trees leaned over the road, their heavy heads meeting over secluded bicycle paths, was an alluring one. This valley had sustained life for more than 10,000 years, without a break. Not even forty kilometres long, the valley, they said, was peppered with medieval castles, roman ruins, stone age settlements, renaissance monasteries, baroque churches, early gothic shrines, 16th century houses with ancient wooden gables. And through it all flowed the Danube.
I've seen the Danube in several parts of its journey so far.
In Vienna this is a contented river, flowing happily along, supportive but not interfering, like a good friend you've known for years. When you go to see it, it is delighted to see you, but not effusive.
In Budapest this is a different river altogether. It is darker, broader. The city is defined by it, divided into two almost equal halves by it. Distances here are measured between bridges. The Danube in Budapest is ancient, cosmopolitan, and very non-messable-with.
In the Wachau the Danube sparkles its way around plump, low hills. The water is a soothing green, with none of the icy blue of the Rhine or the rushing white of the Alpine rivers. It is fringed on both sides by vineyards or forests, the forests growing so thick in parts that the lower reaches are colored a deep rust red from lack of sunlight.
The words 'the good life' take on a new meaning in the Wachau valley. Yes, the villages are every bit as charming as advertised, their old houses and cobbled streets were filled with the sound of church bells as I clattered by on my rented bicycle. We stopped in the bright white sunlight to eat apples and pears in the shade of vines laden with grapes. The bicycle paths were flat for the most part, with occasional steep inclines and declines into tiny villages, and the path was clearly marked for the whole fifty or so kilometres. We visited ancient ruins on wooded hills (unfortunately the ruins have been tourist-ed out of any of the atmospheric quality that ruins in India have; that undefinable quality of unknown hands having touched the rock where your hands rest, and of real lives having been lived there, with real fights, and jokes and quarrels) For instance, in this valley is Durnstein, where England's Richard Lionheart was imprisoned. On the way back home to England after the crusades, Richard seems to have thought that it was a good idea to insult the Austrian flag. He was promptly kidnapped and stayed, cooling his heels at Durnstein until England paid thirty kilograms of silver for his release. Richard was promptly sent home with a warning, and a few years later, Vienna Neustadt was mysteriously financed and built out of nothing.
We stopped for lunch in adorable villages, where we ate huge, delicious meals and drank cold beer, and four hours later were hungry again. We waved at other bikers, who waved back, mellowed by the incredible weather, the ridiculously good food, and perhaps by the unreality of it all.
Perhaps this incident will explain the 'unreality' part of it. As we pedalled through the fruit orchards, there were carts with a sign that said 'obstverkauf' (fruits for sale). On the cart were bags of bright red apples, bottles of homemade peach schnapps, grapes and marmalade. A price list (a euro for a kilo of apples) was tacked up to the cart. There was a box for the money. And there was not a human being around for miles. We could have taken the bottles, the apples, and the cart for good measure, if we had wanted. Or stolen enough fruit to feed a country by stretching out our hands as we cycled through the trees. But we paid, and bought more than we needed. Because when you're in Utopia, that's what you do.

A Delicious Little Detective Story

For some reason I find myself blogging more about music and TV than international politics and the environment. Does that make me frivolous? Or merely honest? Ah, well, I won't self-diagnose. I'll leave that to the experts. Enter Dr. Gregory House. BRILLIANTLY played by Hugh Laurie of the piercing blue eyes, and the straight-faced delivery of some of the funniest lines i've heard on TV in the recent past. ('You're going to the Galapagos islands? Why?- 'To visit family. My uncle is a giant turtle.') or try this one, when House is looking in his boss' (Lisa Cuddy, as played by a painfully fit Lisa Edelstein) drawer for the painkillers to which he is addicted, and is caught in the act by his one and only friend, oncologist James Wilson. 'What are you doing here? Where's Cuddy?'- 'In this drawer. It's a rescue mission.'
House is special to me for many reasons. It's the first show I've watched entirely online (not one episode on a regular TV), and also it will always remind me of some great online TV watching sessions with some of the best (and most unexpected) friends I've ever made. But over and above these (boring) personal reasons, House is one of the most intelligent dramas to hit the screen in living memory. Its protagonist is a mean, cantankerous, evil, withdrawn medical genius who gets his kicks from playing God with his patients' lives. Hugh Laurie takes the character from the two-dimensional and transforms him into someone real, live, and breathing, down to the pain lines on his face and makes him someone we all love to hate. And in the process, makes a fairly formulaic medical drama into some REALLY entertaining TV. Without him, the show is nothing. (The supporting cast is very efficient, and provides an excellent background blah blah, but it's House we all tune in to watch).
The character is based on Sherlock Holmes (something I am proud to say I noticed even before someone pointed it out). Holmes-homes-house-House, get it? Watson-Wilson, there's even a shadowy character called Moriarty, who is House's alter-ego in much the same way the original is Holmes'. He lives in 221 b, and is addicted to vicodin, a painkiller (remember Holmes and the cocaine?). He also plays the piano (Holmes preferred the violin) and makes a living by following tiny clues to their logical conclusion, his speciality being the ability to see things that others miss, and make sense of seemigly inconsequential details. (sound familiar yet?)
And for my last reason for loving House: the soundtrack. It introduced me to a song I cannot get enough of at the moment: The Who's Baba O'Riley is the greatest track I have heard for a looong time, from the synthesised opening chords to the violin solo at the end. Here's what Wikipedia (which is a whole different story altogether) has to say about the song:
"Baba O'Riley" was originally written by Pete Townshend for his Lifehouse project, a rock opera that was to be the follow-up to The Who's 1969 opera, Tommy. Townshend derived the song from a nine minute ARP synthesizer demo, which the band reconstructed. "Baba O'Riley" was going to be used in the Lifehouse project as a song sung by Ray, the Scottish farmer at the beginning of the album as he gathers his wife Sally and his two children to begin their exodus to London. When Lifehouse was scrapped, many of the songs were released on The Who's 1971 album Who's Next. Baba O'Riley became the first track on Who's Next. The song was released as a single in several European countries, but in the US and the UK was only released as part of the album.

Drummer Keith Moon had the idea of inserting a violin solo at the coda of the song, during which the style of the song shifts from crashing rock to a klezmer-style beat. Dave Arbus, of East of Eden, plays violin. In concert, lead singer Roger Daltrey replaces the violin solo with a harmonica solo. The Who have produced a live version of the song with a violin, provided live by Nigel Kennedy, during their November 27th, 2000 concert the Royal Albert Hall.

And finally, as a special treat, here's a video of House, set to Baba O'Riley. How perfect is that?

And before you watch the video, one final joke. Holmes and Watson are out camping. Some hours into the night, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
"I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes" replies Watson.
"And what do you deduce from that?"
Watson ponders for a minute.
"Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. What does it tell you, Holmes?"
Holmes is silent for a moment. "Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has stolen our tent!"

Chuckle. Enjoy the video. And hoot if you agree.

Of Grace Kelly and Ice Cream Sodas

Guess what I'm humming these days? A super-successful single by a Lebanese-born, London-based, curly-haired, Freddy-Mercury-and-Queen-inspired, sexually amorphic singer with dyslexia, training in opera, and a high note that could fracture glass. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mika. His real name is Mica Penniman, which he changed for (justified) fears of the massacre that would ensue if the general public were allowed to pronounce it. His first single? 'Relax, Take it Easy.' Followed by 'Grace Kelly'. In January 2007, he came top of BBC News's Sound of 2007 poll. In March 2007 he appeared on the Jay Leno. In April, the Guardian decided they were intrigued by him, and that is how we met.
Mika is unadulterated pop. He is the essence of Freddy, Queen, Bowie, the Scissor Sisters, and various other dramatic pop icons distilled into one dimunitive mop-haired singer wearing tight jeans. (and this probably explains why all his songs sound vaguely like something you've heard before.)His songs are this close to being over-the-top, and generally parodies of themselves, but somehow he pulls back at the last minute. Maybe its because they're not cynical, his songs. They may belong to a genre (intelligent pop) that has been given over to cynicism and self-parody, but somehow he brings freshness to a brand of songs that never had it to begin with.
Take 'Grace Kelly'. This is a song about identity or the lack of it. The melody is apparently based on 'The Barber of Seville' (I don't know, haven't heard it yet, though I will soon). The song is about people who reinvent themselves to be popular (sound familiar yet) and I for one, found it a deeply distubing little molotov cocktail wrapped up in an ice-cream soda. 'I could be wholesome/I could be loathsome/I guess I'm a little bit shy/Why dont you like me?Why dont you like me without making me try?' Here's what the Guardian said about this little jewel of a song. 'The song asks two basic questions - who am I, and what do I have to do to be successful? It could be a knowing song about ambition and the music industry, it could be a song of straightforward desperation, it could be both. Like most things about Mika, it means what you want it to mean.'
Still here? Watch the video. And welcome to the world of earworm. Oh, and don't forget to let me know what you think.

Whose War is it, Anyway?

The American Way of Life is non-negotiable" -- President George Bush (Sr.) at the Earth Summit on the Environment (Rio de Janiero, 1992)

How many terrorist attacks has the US actually had on its soil? One. In all its history, ONE. How many Iraqis die because of the US 'war on terror'? 655,000. How many Iraqi troops? 30,000. How many U.S soldiers? 3,123. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHOSE WAR IS THIS, ANYWAY?
And for Afghanistan, (yeah, remember that country?) I can't even find a reliable estimate. If someone out there has one I'll be very glad if you sent it in.
Is this the most-underreported story of 2006? What do you think?

Fox Attack!

So, John Kasich. Now that guy's in a class by himself. Check out a segment from his show, 'the Heartland', on, (you guessed it, Fox) called 'Jesus and Judas', in which Kasich and his guest, (the director of a Nat Geo docu which said that Jesus and Judas were friends) had a shouting match while a priest looked benignly on.



Here's my favourite part:

Kasich: Okay, doctor (who is he calling doctor?) you have the Da Vinci code, okay, which was inspired by the gnostics, okay, then you had a book that came out (...) called I think the Jesus papers, okay, and this books says that Jesus didn't die on the cross, i mean, that he got punctured and everything, but he didn't die. I mean, you know, insanity. It seems to me that there is a basic attack on some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Why is this happening?

Kasich then goes on to basically attack poor James Barratt, turning pinker and more slack-jawed with every word.

Barratt: There were more than thirty gospels and in the early days of Christianity they were basically competing for supremacy..
Kasich: You're dead wrong. If you believe that Jesus' best friend was Judas, it's not the case, Sir,
Barratt: But what are you basing it on?
Kasich: This stuff is nonsense. We're going to have to stop it there.

Now that's good TV.

Paati...

The first time I met Paati, I was twelve years old, and riding an old yellow school bus. The bus was the one that I took to school every morning and every evening, and if I had to pick one place not to receive the revelation of the meaning of life, that would have been it. It was a rickety, creaking, huge monster the colour of particularly fresh excrement. It smelt of generations of children who had been rolling around in the same playgrounds, children who had been sick, children whose idea of a game was to stick their eraser up their neighbour’s nose, and then make them lick it off. Children who grew up, and sent children of their own on the bus.
The bus was supervised by an old mountain of a woman, who sat in front, taking up two whole seats. She was always dressed in silk sarees in the colours of food: the flagrant yellow of turmeric, the rich, self-satisfied purple of brinjal glowing in the reflected light of a wood stove in a shadowy kitchen, the wicked red of chillies dried in a relentless sun, the yellow of three-day old lemons, handed out at weddings for good luck. Her hair, (of which we firmly believed she had only three strands carefully combed over a smooth, shining oval scalp) was the exact color of the sacred ash that was generously applied on her forehead. Her palms were thickened with the beatings she had faithfully delivered to thousands of tiny passengers, her feet calloused from walking up and down the rough rubber carpeting of her beloved bus, and her name was Paati. Grandmother. At the end of every month, when the receipts were handed back signed Yogambal, we would all stare confusedly at it, wondering who this Yogambal was who signed Paati’s cards. All children were frightened of her, and she hated all children. It was a perfectly symbiotic relationship, and everyone understood everyone else.

We Killed the Little Green Men

Remember those probes NASA sent into space in the 70s and 80s, looking for life in outer space? 'Take me to your leader', et al? Well, turns out that they may have found the leader, and have killed him/her/it by mistake. And all his/her/its followers too. Apparently they were looking for life forms supported by water, like most of the ones we have on earth, and forgot to consider that some things may be different in outer space. So by pouring water on Martian soil and heating it, they may have drowned and baked any life that was hanging out on Mars. I can just see one little martian saying to another 'I KNEW there was a good reason we didn't like the neighbours...'. pffft. sizzle.

Shoot me now!

A Guardian story about a 16-year-old German boy who died of alcohol poisoning on Thursday night has me thinking about the wonders of booze and the role it plays in our lives. You can read the story here. There are two things in particular that strike me as interesting:

1. The boy was underage. German law says that wine and beer can be served to anyone above 16, but you need to be 18 to drink hard liquor. The boy in question died after drinking 50 tequila shots.
2. This article, and others on the subject, seem to suggest that stricter regulation is needed, from the government, and from club managements.

Europe is already one of the hardest drinking regions in the world: 11 litres of pure alcohol a year per head, according to TIME magazine. This figure was at a high in the seventies, because of a cultural bent in Europe to drink during the day. It fell after that, only to climb again in the nineties, because of a change in drinking habits. More young people are drinking more in smaller periods of time. And let’s face it, it’s hard not to see why. Alcohol is cheaper than most other forms of public entertainment, it’s a great ‘social lubricant’ as someone described it, and for a generation obsessed with sex, it’s almost a surefire of overcoming social and mental inhibitions. (On a somewhat related note, I was interested to learn how ladies’ nights when drinks are free for women, pay for themselves. A bartender friend once told me that they make a loss on serving free drinks for women. The money comes from the men who flock to the place, drawn by the idea of dozens of drunk, available women.)

In Britain, one of the countries with the worst records for teen drinking, 29% of girls, and 26% of boys from the ages of 15-16 admit to routinely drinking more than 5-6 drinks in one night. And that’s just the ones who remember doing it.

In my midnight meanderings around Vienna (under the influence or not), I’m frequently struck by the responsible drinking habits of most young Europeans. The ones I spend time with, (and I’m willing to admit that they don’t represent a norm) spend hours nursing a single beer or a glass of wine. (This sometimes drives me to distraction: if I have a beer in front of me, the damn thing just demands to be drunk, which usually means that I spend many hours nursing an empty glass.) According to my friends, this is mostly due to the money factor: most of us don’t have much of it. Also sometimes we have to get back home to study for the next day, and being smash drunk doesn’t really help in a situation like that. What I’m trying to say, is that in a couple of months, most people drink maybe three, four times a week, but get seriously, there-are-two-of-me-in-the-mirror, the-floor-feels-like-the-bottom-of-a-tiny-boat-on-a-rolling-sea drunk maybe twice or thrice.

Of course, some might say that’s enough. After all, this unfortunate child (and he was a child) didn’t die because he got drunk repeatedly. It only takes the once. And most nights, you will see at least one ambulance screeching into an alley to cart away someone clutching his sides and depositing his wiener schnitzel on the bored-looking paramedic’s shoes. But the core question for me is, who takes responsibility?

The club? But on the same philosophy that says companies don’t need to take responsibility for the environmental and social damage they cause, because they are profit-making ventures in a capitalist world economy, can we really expect a club to cut back on profits by serving fewer drinks? Why should they do it? In this case, certainly they should have checked whether the boy was over 16, but the same thing happens to hundreds of young people just over eighteen.

The government? In a world where the state is increasingly losing control over people’s private lives (look at abortive attempts to regulate internet access) and our lives are increasingly being lived in a dimension that is outside of state and church control (which I firmly believe and will continue to believe is a good thing), can a government really be expected to take control of a citizen’s drinking habits?

One exception to this rule should of course be drunk driving. People who have been drinking must, and by force, if necessary, be stopped from driving any kind of motor transport. Drunk driving is a risk to people in an essentially public space, which must be governed by the same set of rules which apply to everyone. (In this case the rule being that you must be able to walk in a straight line with one finger pressed against your nose before you can climb behind the wheel of something with the power to kill. Of course, by this logic, most truck drivers in India should have their drivers’ licenses revoked.)

The parents? 51% of parents in Britain say they do not know where their children are going at night. Many parents do not know what their children are seeing on the internet, who their real friends may be. This is not, contrary to what some interesting elements have suggested, due to a breakdown in traditional family roles (read women going to work) but due to a paradigm shift in the way our societies and our lives are structured. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the tight cores around which our lives used to be organized are disintegrating and radiating outwards.

Peer pressure is something we all live with. Those looks of incredulity when someone says they don’t drink, those invitations to ‘have one more, on me.’ But the only person who can decide when to put the glass down, is the one with the drink in his hand. Not the alcohol company, not the club, not the government, not the parents, not the girlfriend, not the social worker.

In the end, what was that young man thinking around his 10^th shot of tequila? (After that, we may safely assume that he wasn’t thinking of anything much at all.) Was he thinking that this was a cool way to spend an evening, that his recklessness would make him popular and more accepted? Or was he thinking that he wanted to stop, and didn’t know how?

(picture courtesy www.plig.net)

That Surreal Sunday

In the wilderness of regular weekends and assignments, hysterical giggles and stale beer in smoky pubs ( don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy those too), sometimes comes a sunday so luminous that it merits a blog post all to itself. And while it wasn't exactly a religious revelation, it was completely surreal. It all began on saturday night, around 11.55 pm. We (S and I) were lounging around in our hostel room in Budapest waiting for the rest to come back and take us out. We had already played two games of foozball (well, that's how it sounds anyway!) and I had been soundly beaten at both, and now we were eating day old yoghurt with plastic spoons. The phone rang. 'We're too far. You guys come out and join us. Take the left near the synagogue onto ustica ter, a right on palvas verne, and the small underground pub on your right.' We stared at each other, got our jackets and went for a walk instead, looking for a pub that was located in our own dimension. We found one called 'Mylord' which should have been a warning, but we went in anyway. And yeah, not exactly on our dimension. So we spent Sunday evening in a gay bar, being treated very well by very nice gentlemen who were clearly wondering what it was we were doing there.


Sunday morning we decided we owed ourselves a treat, and ran off to the famous Hungarian baths. 2000 years ago a wily old hermit set up a clinic treating people with the medicinal waters of the Danube, and was awarded a sainthood for his pains. So on Sunday morning we lined up to be anointed.
May I please say here that four hours lying in dense, mineral-laden water, heated to just the perfect temperature, staring up at deep blue tiles, surrounded by 1920s decadence, and glass roofs, is not a shabby way to spend a Sunday? Not to mention the saunas, the freezing water pool, the massage jets...and all for the princely sum of 10 euros? (I only hope they weren't saving the money by skimping on the cleaning..)
The plan is that you loll in the baths for about twenty minutes, jump out into the freezing water, run into the sauna, sweat all your toxins out, jump in the swimming pool, roll back into the baths, stagger into the freezing water, run into the sauna, wheeze for a bit, and then sink gratefully into the water jets........by the end of it, i was singing ABBA songs with a silly grin on my face.....and yeah, I did get to see rather more raddled old white European flesh than I strictly would have wanted, but hey, that was nothing a little counselling won't cure....
How to get there: From the city centre, cross the bridge connecting the Central Market and the Rock Cathedral. The Gellert Spa is at the foot of the hills. It costs about 7800 florints per person.
Where to Stay: The Domino Hostel in the city center is a great place to stay if you're a penniless student. If you're not, I don't know what you should do. I am a penniless student.

That Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley

A concept formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist. Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences.
—John Seabrook, "It came from Hollywood," The New Yorker, December 1, 2003

Why a valley?

Because if you graph people's emotional reactions to a robot, they will generally increase (become more positive) as the machine's similarity to a human being increases. However, at the point where the robot is nearly lifelike, a certain creepiness or even downright revulsion takes over and the emotional response collapses. If the robot could be made 100% human-like, then the emotional response would, of course, return to the favorable range. That emotional crash at the not-quite-human stage is the uncanny valley.