I saw you on the TV!

Its the morning after the TV program went on the air..

Not just any program but one in which they record histories of several people who have come from other parts of the world to live in Spain. Last night's program included my own story. Elsewhere on this blog there is an account of how producers of the program called 'Destino España' or 'Destination Spain' came to spend a day with me and shot several hours of film. This was then reduced to a seven minute segment to be included in the program last night on Channel 1 of the national Spanish network.

Well, arrived the hour, midnight and about ten minutes late, the program started. Everyone who knew me was aware of the time and the date of the program and we did not know exactly when in the program my turn would come.. We need not have worried as it turned out that my piece was first up, which meant that those of us who are early sleepers could get off after about the first ten minutes!!

The seven minutes passed in a flash, and we felt that it was so short after the long period of filming. Seeing it later at leisure on the internet it appeared much longer. We had absolutely no prior knowledge of what it would look like. In the event the IM Communications team did a very good job and the action flowed smoothly including all the main stories. 

The stories about the photogenic nature of the Spanish cities and landscape, the celebrations in the street when they thought the world was going to end with a collision involving Hailley's comet,  and the one about the Sikh clothesline on the moon have all survived the cut. I find hilarious and laugh at the encounter with our friends at a local bar (La Dolce Vita). MariCruz tells the story of my ability to grab the attention in any situation. She cant resist the 'This Indian is with us' to get the girls in a Tourist Information Office to concentrate on her questions!! What, me worry?
The video can be seen from the Spanish TV's Destino España website. Click here.

The first phone call from friends and family comes about five minutes after the program ends even though it is 1 am, well past most people's bedtime.

Now its the day after..and virtually everyone we meet on the street, looks at us (Marisol is also very much part of the whole video sequence) with a knowledgeable look, as if they know us a lot better. There are smiles and people stop us to say that they had seen us on the TV program last night, how much they had enjoyed it and that they loved the program. We play a guessing game of 'yes', 'no', 'maybe' as we make eye contact with everyone we pass.

There is a continuous stream of emails from our friends who have seen the video and liked what they saw. Some of these mails are from people we knew more than thirty years ago! They have managed to look up our emails from the Internet.

We have sent out links of the website where it can also be seen but of course the dialogue is all in Spanish, which will make it impossible for the Indian side of the family to understand the conversation.

We may have to construct a video with subtitles in English.

Basking in the sunshine of the attention...lets hope it remains good.

Travels of Marco Polo

Almost eight centuries ago Marco Polo wrote (or perhaps dictated in a prison cell) his accounts of his marvelous travels to all parts of the world. In many schools these accounts are essential reading, however my own schooling never came across his works. That is until now..even though I have long ceased to attend regular schools, nevertheless I thought it was time to read the potentially exotic accounts of MP.

I managed to locate a Vol 1 of the travels translated by Henry Yule and with commentaries by Henri Cordier from about 1920, at the Kindle store on Amazon. This first part of the travels deals with the long travel route from Turkey to Mongolia and finally the court of Kublai Khan in China.

Its a strange writing style, with brief chapters often no more than one or two paragraphs. However this use of few words by Marco is more than compensated by the copious notes provided by Mr Cordier. There are interesting anecdotes about many of the cities that Marco travels through and often Cordier points out that Marco never went to a city that he is talking about. As one would expect about description of long stretches of central asia with an endless list of small towns, there is a lot of dull descriptions and Marco tries hard to report at least one interesting event or monument in each place. On the whole I think he could easily have given the central Asian areas the miss as they were nothing but vast spaces of sand and rock and dilapidated towns and cities (with perhaps one or two exceptions) and concentrated on the few centers of civilization.

Two or three reports are amazing

One of them relates to the story of the three kings who are supposed to have come from the east when Jesus Christ was born. Apparantly there were tombs in the city of Saveh (In Persia near Teheran, also known as Sava or Savah and described by many as a heap of rubble) where these kings were supposed to be buried and there were local folk tales relating to the events at Christ's birth. Later the history tells us that the bodies were removed and the relics brought to Europe.
One of the local tales reveals that the three kings brought three gifts to test the personality of the newborn messiah. The idea was that they would offer frankincense, myrrh and gold to see which present would be chosen. If Jesus Christ was to be considered a king then depending on which present he chose would reveal if he was God, Physician, or an earthly King. However the test became confused when all three presents were accepted.

In return the kings were given a wooden box, which the kings did not see the contents of until they  had returned home. It supposedly contained a stone, and believing it to be of no value they threw it away into a well. They say that a lightening or a ball of fire descended from the sky and set this stone alight, and the kings realised their mistake and recovered a part of this stone, which remained burning for centuries in a church with a sect of devotees who always prayed to this fire. Perhaps Marco got confused with the other fire worshipping communities of Zoroastrians and Magians, that may have existed in his time.

Another story relates to the palace of Kublai Khan, who apparently had people who would be entrusted to find six hundred of the prettiest girls every year, and the Khan would sleep with six of them at a time, changing to a new set of six every three days!! Nice one Kublai Khan.
And then there was the masterstroke of paper money that the same Kublai Khan invented. Made from the bark of a tree, totally black with a royal stamp, this money was used more or less like money today with (as I understand) one crucial difference, that the only way to get this money was by exchanging your valuables like gems and gold for this money at the royal mint!! MP says that with this little provisor virtually all the gold and gems in the country ended up in the royal treasury!! 
No wonder he could afford all those ladies ;-)

The highs/ups and the lows/downs

Its been a strange few days..last Thursday morning (today is Sunday) we woke up with 3 Centigrade and deep winter. Friday morning saw the thermometer showing 20 degrees and people were on the beach in force and some were even swimming.
Saturday and Sunday continued to be scorchers and its time to start believing that summer has arrived early even though we have just begun Spring (22 March). But this happens every year when a few days of good weather gets us chucking winter clothes into storage and begin to don sleeveless shirts and shorts. Then a few days down the line suddenly normality reigns and we end up with colds and coughs.
To change the subject a bit, spare a thought for our favourite Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar who last week reached the impossible landmark of scoring a hundred centuries in International cricket, something that no one has come even close to doing in a career, but (yes sometimes there is a niggling but) the Indiam team lost the match and that too to lowly Bangladesh! After the win at home agains England and debacle of the matches series in Australia I am beginning to think that something is going on that does not make sense. The Indian team has been having a lot of ups and downs.
And now for something completely different (Monty Python) .. today Manjeet (#1 son) pointed out something about the Ferrari Formula 1 cars  and the standings of the drivers after today's hectic race in Malaysia. What he stated is (and I quote)
'Alonso:35 points (top of the driver standings), Massa: 0 points (tied last).. and it's the SAME CAR!'
Figure that one out!  Come on Massa - start racing!

Destination Spain

Spain's state television RTVE had been calling me during the last nine months to see if I would be interested in participating in a program which is quite popular here in Spain. The program called 'Destino España' goes out every Tuesday night and shows several foreigners who live in Spain. A seven minute video of each participant creates a  brief sketch of their lives and tells their story.

For one reason or another, usually because I was not available on the dates that the TV network were recording in our area, I had not been able to participate until now, but finally this week everything came together and Marisol and I prepared ourselves for the recording session which would last virtually all day. The two network men, Alberto and Pep, showed up punctually at half past nine and the action began.

Alberto was the one who would talk to me and ask the questions, and I was told to always look at him and not at the camera when talking, while Pep would run the camera which looked like it weighed a ton. How he managed to keep it on his shoulders through the whole day is beyond me. We hit it off right away, which was fortunate as it made for a very enjoyable day.

We had discussed a rough outline of the items we would include in the program, so we started more or less straight away. First on the list was me tying my turban, which Marisol and I had some misgivings about. However a chat with Dad in Delhi convinced me that it should not be a problem. The turban tying was followed by a little religious ceremony which included reading a few verses of our holy book ´Guru Granth Sahib´. There were quite a lot of questions and answer sessions about my childhood, the student years and how I met Marisol and the rest of our lives. They wanted to know all about our choice of coming to live in Spain and how we were getting on.

After a few shots of the family photos and Marisol´s art objects at home, we took to the streets around Laredo. First on our schedule was the tunnel which links Laredo to an old attempt to build a port on the far side of a big hill. And soon it was time to head for the beach and a rendezvous with someone who was going to show me how to ride a cart with a sail known formally as kart land sailing. The TV folks had asked me if I wanted to do something during the day that I had never done before and I had scratched my brains for something interesting. Finally decided on the cart sailing which I had seen on the beach and thought would be kind of fun.

Unfortunately there was very little wind, something unusual for Laredo where it is usually quite windy specially on the beach. However not to be thwarted we resorted to a few helping pushes which gave me enough of a momentum for a few video sequences. I was also strapped with cameras front and back so that they could record my view of the ride.

By this time we were ready to keep an appointment with a few friends at a local bar. Many of our friends, amongst them several who actually came to India on my 60th birthday, had agreed to meet at a given time to participate in the video shoot. Still I was pleasantly surprised to find about twenty five of them gathered to greet me and to say nice things! A few drinks, some snacks at Manu's bar La Dolce Vita, complete with Montse's famous toast (arriba, abajo...) and we were ready for lunch.

After lunch we walked the streets of the old town, recording the main tourist points such as the old gates in the medieval wall, the main church, the port and the houses where the Queen Isabel and her daughter the famous Juana la Loca are supposed to have stayed. Astoundingly the year in which this happened was during the life of our first Guru, Guru Nanak Dev Ji! I gather that this is not a very commonly known fact around this town..

To finish the program we headed to the top of Laredo's own hill known as Atalaya, which has panoramic views of the town, its beach and the surrounding areas. As we shot the closing scenes it occurred to me that our families had gone far and wide and that we were connected from Australia to the United States, and that it is quite far fetched from my childhood to where I have ended up. I recalled the often quoted tale invented by someone with a gift for comedy, about the US Moon mission, that when they arrived on the moon and after the famous '..a giant step for mankind' , they found a clothesline with a Sikh's clothes hung out to dry!!

We are everywhere..

Now everyone around the town knows that I am going to be on this program sometime soon..

Beings of Light - an installation created by Marisol Cavia

I have to say that every new artwork that Marisol creates, invariably involve the use of, and hence the purchase of something unusual. In the past she has required rat traps (sourced in an Indian market), hair pieces that weighed more than twenty kilos each (sourced in China) and thousands of sewing needles (also obtained in China). By the nature of where she obtained these items, they had to find their way to her studio through transportation on planes, in the luggage, and it is uncertain what the customs authorities would have made of them had they made careful examination of the luggage that contained these items.

In the latest work from Marisol, called Beings of Light, she has once again opted for the use of some equally unusual components. Rubbing shoulders with photographs and textile is a child's pram and a translucent balloon of  serious size. She describes the work as a representation of the aura that emanates from and surrounds all beings. The work was created to be exhibited in Leon, and she has stated that the inspiration of this work came from the colours and light that one sees inside the Cathedral of Leon, when the sun shines through the spectacular coloured glass windows of the Cathedral.

She explains that the aura which she has captured through the use of a program that processes images (of people who agreed to have their images included) snapped through a digital camera, appears in the form of all kinds of colours which change as our feelings and thoughts change. The colours are associated with characteristics which are often described in works on the topic of aura, and the installation shows many of these aura photographs together with a display of the characteristics for some of the colours.

The installation is in two parts displayed side by side. The first part depicts the aura of a newborn child and it shows a pram from which a white balloon emerges which has associations with pregnancy and childbirth as well as the emerging aural energy which being white represents purity and innocence. The balloon is back lit from the recesses of the pram which gives the piece its 'light'. The second part consists of the photographs of adult auras which are displayed captured in glass jars, whose covers give off halos generated by the clever use of lighting. There is a digital display of photographs as a slideshow and a cloth that has been covered in a variety of colours with words describing the characteristics of each colour. A brief explanation informs the viewer that the colours used come from the Hindu festival of  Holi, which is a celebration of life and is held the springtime in India.

In Leon at the well known Vela Zanetti Gallery, her installation formed part of an exhibition of work by a group of London based Spanish Artists known as SAL (which stands for Spanish Artists in London). Needless to say the pram and all the elements of the installation had to be transported to Leon from her studio in Laredo, about two hundred miles away. Later the same exhibition was moved to Laredo at the Sala Ruas, for which all the work in Leon had to be packed into the back of a small car. It helped that we had experience of travelling on Ryanair and often had to pack our cases with careful use of space.

Public response to her work has been interesting, since this kind of conceptual art is not so common in the communities where it was shown. People of all ages made positive comments. Young people found the use of the unusual materials intriguing, while adults appreciated that the work was different from the traditional view of 'art' and that one had to think about the concept to grasp its significance fully.

Later this year Marisol has another exhibition planned. If her past work is anything to go by, it should be interesting to see what she comes up with next.

Carlos and Liliana come for a short visit

How much can one pack into a single day?
Apparently a lot if you are Carlos and Liliana, who came for a whirlwind visit. They were with us for less than two days, but a catalog of what they managed to squeeze into this time is phenomenal.
They started in Guildford in Surrey, England. They whirled around to Stansted Airport and checked in for a Ryanair flight to Santander. The usual preocupations on a Ryanair flight, overweight, reorganisation of contents of bags to avoid having to fork out exhorbitant amounts of money, rushed to grab a seat and finally arrived in Santander.
We picked them up and we rushed straight to Kiko's birthday bash. Friends, food, wine, dancing and around midnight we headed home and rest. Next morning assembled artworks for the exhibition to be inaugurated later in the evening at the Ruas gallery. Two phone interviews with local radio stations, lunch at the Marine company restaurant, a little rest, then off to start the exhibition. Speeches by politicos, Marisol and the visitors, lots of people on a freezing night, lots of networking and art talk, wine and food, followed by a large group moving to a bar for more wine and tapas. Again arrived home after another late night.
Next morning after breakfast, drove off to Bilbao to take in the Guggenheim museum, a coffee and we said goodbye.
Phew now we can relax for a few hours!

Dreaded sales in the cold climate

There is something quite deceiving about January sales. For one thing its frighteningly cold outside (In Europe at least) and people are looking for any excuse to go into a shop, which may have heating. Secondly there is an animal instinct, probably not fully documented but more pronounced in females of our species, which homes in on any shop whose windows exclaim '50% OFF'  with the words 'upto' and/or 'On selected items' in very small script.
In my case I have the additional problem in the form of my skepticism that famous brands tend to put out 'sale' merchandise which they might not sell normally and hence give their 'sale' prices a look and feel of a bargain. This (skepticism) has grown ever since a Macy's salesman told me that I should not be fooled by the difference between the original and the sale price. I had dared to tell the man that the sale price had seemed comparable to the normal price of the particular product I was interested in. He further confided that in the US no one buys anything unless it was on sale, so Macy's seemed to have sales all year long, with the sale price being what one would find normal.
There are exceptions. Here where we live the small shops that sell clothes and shoes etc have good sales and you can see that the same items which were available before, have now lower prices as part of the sale. Perhaps the sales are more genuine the smaller the outlet. The other day we went into a small Habitat outlet in Bilbao, and sure enough they had some items on sale..but mostly these were out of season items like Xmas cards and small gifts which after the Christmas rush are now going to be not in demand. Fair enough I say, however we now have enough cards for the next two Xmas and New Year cycles and a quantity of small frames to line all the walls of the apartment with photos. Its a bit like having people over for lunch and making so much food that the hosts keep eating for weeks afterwards.
I exaggerate, and recently our lunch guests have absolutely devoured every last bit of the Indian food that Marisol dished up for them. The Indian lunches are becoming a bit of a reputation and all our friends are perhaps waiting for their invitation. The dining room being small this can only happen for a few friends at a time. The ingredients may soon run out and we may have to make a trip to London to stock up again. Perhaps we have to learn a few recipes which only require local ingredients so that we can sleep easy that the Tandoori Chicken Massala is not about to run out!!
Local ingredients are in plentiful supply, since the economic crises has singled out the groceries supermarkets as the one business that is booming. Every conceivable chain of supermarkets now has a big store within a few hundred meters of our home. Some whose owners are freezing up north in Germany and France. How can a population of perhaps ten thousand have so many supermarkets, I ask myself. How much turnover a large buisness needs to have to make it viable?
Lets say that Telco (perhaps a subsidiary of Tesco?) employs twenty people..I would guess that the employee costs are perhaps as much as half a million Euros a year.What would be an employee to turnover ratio? perhaps 10 or 20 or more? A guesstimate would be 5 to 10 million turnover and there are ten of them.
So a total of an average - 75 Millions which means we are spending 7500 per person? An average family is spending 15000 Euros per year on groceries? NO WAY. Even if I got the figures wrong by a factor of 2.
Anyway these are times of crisis, perhaps when the economy improves, these stores will be in a good position to cash in. I doubt that this can be their buisness model.. And we did not count all the small shops like fishmongers, butchers, fruits etc etc.
I am glad I dont have to compete in this sale business, could be depressing to run a business.