Selling Places

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Saswat writes from NYC:

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Dear Sir,

Was reading your latest blog and upon reading the sentence ".. has no character .. like one of your US cities", I was about to protest but in the next line you mentioned "except NYC .. ". :)

A colleague of my wife (from the omnipresent Thomson-Reuters) from London is visiting NYC and she said NYC is like London on drugs. Of course, I have never been to London. But now I have some strange mental pictures of London being like NYC but without drugs!

From your description of Hyd, I am also feeling an itch to go see it during Ramzan. Of course, NY or London, none of them really compare with the Indian cities.

As I said before, I have real trouble at any place except NYC because this is as close as it gets to Indian cities...


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gps:

I don't even have a passport and I travel very rarely.

But I do have mental pictures of places from reading about them from great authors (other than Travel Agents).

RKN wrote about NYC too. And said it has everything on earth...including many tiny Malgudis. And that he is very comfortable there despite being asked: "Black or Cream?" in a bustling breakfast joint.

And many have said that if you are bored with NYC, you are bored with life.

The self-confessed lecherous Sardarjee also wrote approvingly of NYC.

Soumchak wrote to me after his first visit to NYC that it was as if he came to a very familiar city...he had seen the Manhattan skyline dozens of times in Hollywood Movies.

For me NYC means New Yorker, Thurber, Herald Ross, Dorothy Parker and the once- famous Algonquin Round Table. I read that the Hotel conducts walking tours of the places where those celebrities lived and worked.

Of course, as Saswat says, it is the teeming people that makes it homely. If you remove the crowd it would be as barren as any other US city. Every Indian who visits the typical US city (including RKN) says how boring they are; mostly bereft of crowds in the streets.

I am told that the exception is Boston. My Boston is about 2 centuries old, since I read the Autocrat half a dozen times in as many decades.

And my friend NP says, after a visit there, that it is the student crowd that appeals to him. RKN said the same thing of Berkeley too. There is something charming about youngsters going to school. Come to Hyderabad which teems with schools and colleges and universities. The place is very young. Urchins with school kits being downloaded from the yellow school buses.

And, if you remove the student crowd from KGP, as in winter and summer vacations, it is a dead place. The best time to visit KGP is the first week of April, around Good Friday.

I think I sold KGP to at least two people who never saw it.

One is the Bostonian EFT from MIT. Over two decades of chatty mails, he was pining to visit KGP but was forbidden from visiting India on medical grounds (two decades ago). He had a triple bypass.

In a strange reversal of roles, Americans would now like to flock to Hyderabad on medical tourism, upsetting Obama very much. You name it, and you have it in Hyderabad; from the latest Varian Medical Systems like Lineacs and Rapid Arcs for cancer treatment (in which Arundhuti at Stanford is an expert) and bypass surgeries without hacksaws (keyhole), all affordable to Americans half way round the world.

But of course Edwin is right...if he drinks a glass of water here, he would need a score of saline bottles (with all sorts of molds and fungi). We however are immunized from childhood.

The other gent to whom I sold KGP is a CBS alumnus and friend of Aniket, whom I never met. He wrote a while ago:

"While in Kolkata, I did follow your blog post, though not so regularly as I used to while in Weizmann, where one of the first things that I used to do in the morning was to check your recent blog post. I wanted to do that here too, but family matters kept me busy in one way or the other. Soon you will find an audience of your blog from Lyon, France."


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As for London, It is my home town.

From Class Six onwards (I have been to London to look at the Queen) England was etched in every story and novel. And RKN said he kept his English school text with its misty Tower Bridge picture for 40 odd years.

In my teens I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and was transported.

And of course, Pickwick Papers, Sherlock Holmes, PGW...and latest the Dairy of a Nobody gifted by Pratik.

I have an open invite to visit London...but I am happy with my London. I am sure I was a Londoner in one of my endless chain of rebirths...recycled DNA.

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But everyone loves his city of childhood.

Thurber has his Columbus, Ohio.

After young Rajiv Gandhi's Address to the US Senate House,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOJO3s3n51M

he was asked which city he liked best; and without batting an eyelid, he replied: 'Delhi', to the laughter of all his audience who perhaps expected 'NYC'.

...And I... I like Muthukur...


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