Eerie feeling. Inside the first airplane. Cloud world. Snatches of Hindi film music in the coach, shacks and shanties outside the tinted windows. AC inside. And I am an expatriate in making. Strange how poverty also has a hold on you. Maybe because it is so ingrained in the landscape that you don’t notice it and don’t feel sad about it till the point comes when you realize that you are not going to come face to face with all this for a long time. And now this constant background, this retinal screen is being torn out and soon will be replaced by something entirely new. How will I perceive this loss of the familiar?

Now I am being maudlin and sentimental. Perhaps I already sense that discovering and adopting a new landscape for home is not going to an easy task. Maybe this is anxiety speaking. Anxiety of how it would all be, how the future will work out, this old fear of the unknown. But it is a good fear, a curious and good kind of fear. Then something else to think about is, how to live in a supremely materialistic society? How would be the ethics changed?

Midway in the journey. Frankfurt, Europe. Any difference in how this airport feels? It is larger and feels less like a hospital, unlike the Bombay airport. I suppose sunlight and being more clean is one reason why it feels that way. Also it has some nice architecture. Yes more use of glass and steel, not my favorite materials usually, but here they are used with some control, not in a garish overwhelming style as a few buildings I have seen previously. One can map cultural differences, values and divides, by just studying the architecture of a place. Steel in India is not something organic, it usually tends to be a monstrosity transplanted and crudely grafted into the landscape giving it a spent look.

After all that rush it is good to be silent now. I am observing accents now. German sounds a less harsher than what I read about it and then imagined it to be. Reminds me of another of those old wishes I have been harboring, to be a polyglot. I should something about it sometime soon. Perhaps I shall begin with French given that I had already taken two years of it. Ah! An announcement in French, I could make out ‘sil vous plait’. I also saw my first expressway as we were landing, it is quite neat I think. Let me take a walk and write down what I see.

Kids in a play pen, up and active, are playing with complete abandonment. One kid is on a dummy horse and rocking it. I think he presently is a Don Quixote frame of mind! I overhear a lady speaking in rapid Telugu, about some modalities of living and some distant cousin’s son’s upcoming marriage. The contrast between this lady and the kids is interesting to watch, one of conformity and the other of mad freedom.

Waiting helps open up space and sometimes into this space, ideas flow in.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The name of a song I heard five minutes ago. To pass time I am listening to music. This is over the Atlantic. It is quite cold inside the cabin. It is sleep time actually being 9.45 pm back home in India. But then I perhaps shouldn’t be referring to as home. Some questions such as ‘what is home?,’ are difficult to answer. I am talking now just to pass time.

Before I left K wrote to me about the travails of his new living conditions, where his apartment mates found the classical music he was listening to be a terrible and meaningless noise. This is an interesting question; why do the perceptions to a certain kind of music differ so much? Is it social conditioning? How much of it is internal or purely individualistic? Is there any culture which can be called ‘better’? Hard questions to answer.

What K saw was an extreme form of ‘low’ cultural conditioning, wherein those people’s definition of music was circumscribed by Bollywood junk, most of which is plagiarized from music elsewhere. How can one judge the quality of a musical experience? A mystic would say, ‘just listen and when you become the listening in your entirety, a giant ear say, you have arrived at your true music.’ All true music opens up a space within you, it grows in a loom, on which you can weave your own tapestries.

Written on Aug 7 - 8 2000 (when I left for America) Found on Feb 7 - 2004 (as I am going to India)