Dreaming of Ladakh

Ladakh is a place of distances. Not just because of the time it can take to get from one place to another, but also because it’s a place that can challenge you to expand your mind.

It’s a place of varied vistas — snow, rock, dust, greenery, sand, water. And everywhere, mountains. And the expansive sky.

Once you leave the main settlements — towns like Leh and Kargil or villages like Nimoo and Alchi — Ladakh often feels boundless, perhaps as vast as the universe. But it’s a companionable vastness; a bit like being in a pub full of friendly strangers.

On some journeys you’re sandwiched in a snaking convoy of olive green; army trucks carrying people and supplies across the region. On other roads you can go for an hour or more without encountering another human. Sometimes, it’s unclear where the road is and you decide it’s wherever your vehicle is!

Often, it all feels very profound. The immense never-ending sky, the chortens, the monasteries perched far up the side of a mountain, the ever-present five-coloured prayer flags snapping in the wind, lines of prayer wheels, the Indus or one of its tributaries meandering alongside the road. So much so that you begin to believe that in a moment or two the meaning of life will be revealed to you and that eternity is around the corner.

And then, around the corner, is an egg yolk-yellow road sign that declares ‘Be gentle on my curves’. 

But as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in a 1878 essay titled El Dorado: “Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

So, it’s best to suspend all thought and luxuriate in Ladakh. In its people, food, history, culture and those vistas that bridge distances. 

Lessons?

Sleep was elusive. But daybreak was still some way off. And counting sheep has never worked for me. So, I let my mind wander. And as it flitted from thing to thing, I found myself wondering “have I learnt anything this year.” And then, I drifted off into Somnus’ embrace once more.

In the morning, I found myself returning to the question: “What have I learnt this year.” My instinctive response was “not much.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I had learnt — relearnt rather — a few things this year. Most of these are rather mundane, the sort of mental and physical housekeeping that fills our lives. Two ideas stand out though because they were reinforced this year. There’s nothing original about them, but they are my top lessons of the year.

Know where you are: It’s important to know where we are. And it’s desirable to know where we’d like to be. And I don’t mean this in a cartographic or geographical sense alone. This is not to say we should keep evaluating ourselves or our lives every moment. But it is useful to take stock once in a while. And if we find that where we are is where we’d like to be, I guess that would be as close to heaven as we can get on earth.

Change doesn’t have to be sweeping: Change may be the only constant in life. And occasionally, drastic change may be required. Much of the time though, the aggregation of marginal gains can be just as revolutionary. Small continuous improvements or changes can achieve much — often unnoticed — without the trauma and uncertainty that typically accompany a forced, sweeping move. The key is to keep responding to our environment, making the tweaks required to make things better.

Finally, learning is not a destination but a process, a journey. As is relearning. 

Form with function

I’m not an expert in design. But I’ve always believed that design should be about form and function. Though I’m also fine with function being a heartbeat ahead of form.

It is, of course, helpful if the things we use are pleasing to look at. And it certainly helps with product differentiation — and a company’s sales figures — to design things that are attractive. But should this be at the expense of the product doing what it is meant to? 

Something that looks fantastic, but does not do what it is supposed to with a minimum of fuss is, in my book, not very useful.

Some weeks ago, I received a Fabindia gift card, which was a thoughtful gesture since I use the company’s products. In fact, I’ve found these gift cards to be the perfect present, particularly when I know the recipient enjoys the Fabindia aesthetic.

These gift cards were rectangles of elegantly designed thick-ish paper, with the card’s value printed on one face. On the same face, the date on which the card was bought and the date on which it expired — usually one year from the date of purchase — was either handwritten or stamped with an ink stamp. And on the reverse were the ‘terms and conditions’ for using the card. It was all very straightforward: with a glance you knew how much each card was worth and exactly when its validity would end.

But the FabGift Card, as it’s called, I recently received is very different. It’s a carton that’s slightly larger than a matchbox, and comes with a little ribbon loop. You pull on the ribbon to open the box and inside is a credit-card sized rectangle of cardboard topped by sliver of buttery paper with the Fabindia logo. One face of the card has a design with the FabGift logo worked in and on the other is a five-point list of ‘terms and conditions’, a number and barcode and a scratch strip (that I later discovered hides a code you need to enter when you use the card).

It looks very nice and compact. 

There is one problem though. You have absolutely no idea how much the card is worth and till when it is valid. The ‘terms and conditions’ declare it can be used for a year from the date of purchase. But then you have no idea of the date on which it was bought. So… 

The only way to figure out how much the card is worth and when it expires is to ask the person who gave you the gift or to go to a Fabindia store and get the staff to unearth this information for you. Rather complicated! 

It could, perhaps, be argued that we really don’t need to know much the card is worth or exactly when it expires, since we know it’s valid for a year. But I believe this information matters. 

Most of us aren’t going to rush off to the Fabindia website or a store and buy something the moment we get the card. Chances are we’ll put it away, intending to use it later. But with memory being a slippery character, we could forget about it or forget when we got it. However, if we know exactly when it expires, setting up a specific reminder becomes so much easier. And it’s always useful to know how much money there’s on the card so we can plan our shopping expedition. Also, knowing how much is on the FabGift Card and till when it’s valid means we can even gift it to someone else. 

I initially wondered whether I’d received a one-off or customised card. But from what I can discern, this is the new incarnation of the Fabindia gift card. 

Of course, the card’s new avatar does have some advantages. For one, it possibly offers a certain flexibility in terms of how much can be loaded onto it and it can be used both in stores and on the website. It’s also probably easier to manage for the company. 

I assume — always a tricky thing to do — that the gift card’s redesign process was so focused on form that it glossed over function, the card’s utilitarian aspect. However, I suspect that Fabindia can fix this if they want to. Something as simple as repurposing the buttery paper insert to display both the card’s value and validity and inserting this at the point of sale will probably work. The question though is whether Fabindia will do it.

Looking back

 

There’s much that is fascinating about Kerala. What I find — or should I say used to find — especially captivating though is how many of the state’s traditional retail spaces were designed.

Visiting Kerala in the 1970s and early 80s, and living in Trivandrum from the mid-1980s, it was refreshing to see these unfussy, classic buildings. With their tiled roofs and verandahs that offered protection from the sun and the rain, and often a place to pass the unrelenting hour, these buildings brought a certain character to their neighbourhood.

 

Not all were old, tiled buildings — there were more recent, art deco-ish structures that sprouted among the more traditional-looking ones. But they all radiated a certain charm, despite the odd monstrosity.

Especially alluring were the doors that some of these buildings had: Numbered planks of wood that were — at closing time — slotted into a groove and pushed along till they clicked into place and formed a wall of timber. All held together by an iron rod or bar, secured with a padlock.

 

But change is almost inevitable; arguably the only constant in life. And by the late 1990s, there was much more concrete and mirrored glass across Kerala’s retail landscape.

 

Today, many familiar names remain, but in new clothes and sometimes in new locations. And here and there some holdouts linger, with their tiled roofs, jigsaw-puzzle doors and glass jars, enveloped in the faint aroma of time.

Inside the novel factory

A version of this was in Outlook

For over half a century, the ‘Gulf’ has been Eldorado for the people of South Asia, particularly Kerala. As the narrator in Al Arabian Novel Factory reflects, “God blesses some small Arab country with petrol dollars. And then a tiny sliver of land far away gets to enjoy some of those blessings… There was a long and lonely road between the two lands, and it could tell many stories of sacrifice.

It is these stories of sacrifice, toil, humiliation, deprivation, loneliness, despair and alienation of the ‘Gulf Malayali’, and the wider immigrant community, that Benny Daniel — who writes as Benyamin — chronicles in much of his writing.

Over the years, especially in Malayalam, there have been books and films on the Gulf immigrant experience. But few of these capture the granular details of immigrant life in the region with authenticity. And it’s these granular details that Benyamin writes about with authority, perhaps because he was, himself, a Gulf Malayali for over two decades.

With almost a score of books across genres to his name, Benyamin explores a world that is familiar to Kerala, but also alien, especially the darker side of that world. He received widespread recognition with his award-winning 2008 Malayalam novel Aadujeevitham, translated into English as Goat Days, and soon to be a Malayalam film. Since then, he’s returned regularly to his known turf  — facets of immigrant life in the Gulf and the complicated relationships that entwine the locals and the ‘guest’ workers who keep Arab nations ticking.

At first glance, Al Arabian Novel Factory seems to have a simple narrative. Pratap, an Indian-Canadian journalist, travels to a West Asian country known only as the ‘City’, ruled by an authoritarian regime. He’s ostensibly there to helm a research project. But his real objective is to reconnect with Jasmine, his onetime lover, who lives in the City and is an elusive but constant presence through the book. In the City, his life tangles with the lives of his team members and also with the tortuous journey of A Spring Without Fragrance, a mysterious manuscript written by Sameera Parvin, a radio jockey who once lived there.

But appearances can be deceptive: Though a standalone novel, Al Arabian Novel Factory is also a companion volume to Benyamin’s Jasmine Days (Mullappoo Niramulla Pakalukal in Malayalam). Positioned as Jasmine Days’ sequel, it could just as easily be a ‘prequel-sequel’ hybrid. So intensely interwoven are the narrative strands and devices that connect the books that it does get a little convoluted at times.

Both novels though, are set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, with this one focusing on the period immediately after. It captures the immigrant experience, but the immigrant here is mostly the comfortably off one. The sort who sings praise songs for the City’s despotic ruler while hosting a workshop on ‘socialism-driven freedom in Kerala’; the immigrant who is a ‘socialist’ at heart, but lives a capitalist life. 

Translated from the Malayalam by Shahnaz Habib, the book also tackles other themes including freedom of speech, thought and action; minority rights; and women’s rights. And looming over everything that happens is the all-seeing City, a character in itself. Habib’s translation is always competent and occasionally exquisite, capturing the nuances and cadences of the original; I must confess that I could occasionally visualise the original Malayalam line as I read the English version.

Sometimes, in factories, things can go out of kilter and so do things in this novel factory — not seriously awry, though. The narrative tends to meander occasionally. Also puzzling are some sections, particularly those in which Pratap behaves somewhat naively despite his journalistic experience. You could attribute it to the pangs of love, but one method he explores to trace Jasmine is far-fetched, stupid even, if not downright dangerous. Perhaps it was intended as a narrative device, but it seemed rather off. 

What is disconcerting is the depiction of some female characters. They’re portrayed as unaware of and uninterested in little beyond their immediate surroundings and passions. Knowing the many informed, opinionated and worldly-wise women around us, even among the demographics presented in the novel, this characterisation seems baffling. This, even as several male characters, at times, appear misogynistic.

Perhaps, it is all a pointer towards one of the book’s takeaways — that we are all flawed beings. Or that glittering facades often hide messy secrets and disguise dreary, grasping lives where self-interest reigns supreme. As Pratap says: “I have always been curious about the City, how it rose out of dust like an enchanted land in a fairy tale.” More than anything else, Al Arabian Novel Factory reminds us that there are no fairy tales.

The bells of St Clement’s

It seemed appropriate. Commemorate the anniversary of my father’s passing in a place associated with aviation — something he devoted much of his adult life to, while in the Indian Air Force (IAF) — that was also a place of reflection and spirituality. St Clement Danes, the central church of the Royal Air Force (RAF), in London was the perfect spot to be in.

I stumbled across St Clement Danes several months earlier, on the website of the RAF Museum, and realised that I’d passed the church several times without noticing it. Perhaps I’d overlooked it because of the scaffolding that cocooned it then. Or perhaps it was its location on an island, buffeted by streams of vehicles, just where the Strand and Fleet Street meet.  

Inside, though, the sounds of modern-day London fade and the hush enfolds you. On a sunny early spring morning, it’s a glorious sight — light pouring in through the windows, including the magnificent stained glass one behind the altar; the white vaulted ceiling with its gilded flourishes; the radiant golden ceiling of the apse; the slate floor inlaid with several hundred unit, squadron and other formation badges stretching up the nave to the altar; colours and squadron standards displayed in various places; and the gleaming pews with cartouches (of various Chiefs of the Air Staff) fixed at their ends.

A church has stood on the site for centuries; with the first one reportedly established by Danes living in the area. The present building, by Sir Christopher Wren, was completed in 1682, but was terribly damaged during the Blitz. By the late 1950s, St Clement Danes was restored and became the RAF’s central church. It is also believed to be the church referred to in the English nursery rhyme “Oranges and lemons/ Say the bells of St Clement's.” And indeed, the church’s bells do ring the tune through the day.

On the floor, as you enter the nave, is a ring of badges of eight Commonwealth air forces around the insignia of the RAF. And one of those eight badges is of the Indian Air Force. Other references to India can be found across St Clement Danes, especially in the unit badges laid into the floor. There is, for instance, the 152 ‘Hyderabad’ Squadron, with a turban in its insignia. According to the squadron’s tribute website, 152 was the gift squadron of Hyderabad and took as its badge the headdress of the erstwhile Nizam of Hyderabad. Formed in 1918, the squadron was disbanded in 1919, but reformed in 1939 and operated in India between 1943 and 1947.

St Clement Danes also remembers those who lost their lives while serving in the RAF through the Books of Remembrance that start from 1912 and continue to the present. Around the church are memorial boards for RAF personnel who have died on various operations and plaques with the names of those who have won the Victoria and George Crosses.

As I emerged from the church, to the rhythms of the Strand, it was impossible to miss the statue of William Gladstone, flanked by those of Arthur Harris and Hugh Dowding, wartime leaders of the RAF. Pausing for a moment in Gladstone’s shadow, I told myself that I needed to ask my mother if she and my dad had ever been to St Clement Danes when they lived in the UK. I never did. And seven months later, she too was but a memory.