Cutting Chai with Arun Krishnan - Opinions

At their best, statues are not an embarrassment to the people they are attempting to celebrate. At their worst (or even at their most normal) they do an immense disservice to some of the greatest personalities of our times.

Take the example of the statue of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Circle. The statue places Mr. Columbus in a highly unflattering light.  Before we saw this statue, we formed our own mental images of the fearless explorer, and like little children showered upon him the attributes we normally reserve for Batman, Superman, and for times when Mr. Columbus was angry, The Angry Hulk. Along came the statue. Now, it is impossible for Mr. Columbus to take on the demeanor of a superhero because it is impossible for a man to look dignified, brave or clairvoyant when a pigeon is taking care of business on his head.

There’s also the matter of the skirt. I have found that unless you are on Times Square, it is very difficult for people to take you seriously if you are a man dressed in a skirt. Rare is the mind that says Ah, look at this warrior dressed in a skirt, one of the bravest men of our history. Far more likely is a reaction that while recognizing your achievements through a few cursory platitudes, categorizes you as a historical novelty along with the bowler hat, the bioscope or the Macarena.

Lastly, the statue reduces the lifetime achievements of a complex man like Mr. Columbus to a single expression for all time. Mr. Columbus was a multifaceted man who could at one moment charm Queen Isabella, and at another whip an unruly crew of sailors into order. Because of the statue, he ends up coming across like a pensive customer who was on a perpetual lookout for the appointment from Time Warner Cable.

There are of course exceptions. By striking completely impractical poses, the Statue of Liberty and the otherworldly façade of the angels on the Grand Central Terminal take us away from our current world and place us in friendlier, more ethereal times. But these are the exceptions, and not the rule.

How then should a great figure of our times choose to be commemorated for all time? The King of Poland provides a worthy example to emulate. In 1683, John III Sobieski fought off the invasion of the Ottoman Turks,. He had his achievement celebrated with the first bagel in the world, fittingly in the shape of a stirrup.

It was truly a memorable idea, the result of the dazzling clarity experienced at the moment of triumph.  The King of Poland had ensured that his every commemoration would never be confined to a single moment. Instead, it would take the form of a gratifying ritual, one that the hungry of the world would participate in every morning.

And we thank the King of Poland in a far more genuine way than we would ever express our gratitude towards a statue. For it only when our stomachs are filled with the roundness of a bagel, that we begin to work write or simply, feed the pigeons.

I purchased a vacuum cleaner last week. There were no indications on the packaging that any form of assembly would be required. Needless to say, I felt quite betrayed when the opened box revealed not one whole vacuum cleaner ready to take on the world of dirt, but rather three separate parts.

I inhaled deeply, moistened my upper lip and with great concentration, put the parts together. I was ready to send out Facebook updates celebrating my achievement,  when out of the box fell a screw. I spent fifteen minutes looking for a place to insert the screw. Eventually, I narrowed down the search to two candidates, both at either end of the cleaner. I chose to go with the part nearer the handle, because my sixth sense told me that it wouldn’t be right to hammer in a screw.

Even though I studied Mechanical Engineering, I have never been good at assembling things. In my engineering school, we were presented with the front, side and top views of complex objects like cranes, automotive engines and houses. We were tasked with coalescing these separate views into a coherent three-dimensional object. I never succeeded in this endeavor, though I did tell my professor once to be careful of the hook in a crane, as it could poke her in the eye.

In the face of such acute ineptness, my strategy for getting through Engineering School was simple. First, I failed the exam by submitting a blank, or equally useless, a paper filled with my answers. I stayed behind for a second shot at the exam, while my classmates went on to newer and more complex challenges. During the “repeat” exam,  I told the examination supervisor that I had diarrhea.  With a look of alarm, she or he inevitably rushed me to the bathroom, where a former classmate of mine would be waiting in hiding to sketch out the answer.

Despite my numerous failures, I remained optimistic about the future. I had always though that my inability to visualize separate parts and bring them together was in large part because we were dealing with complex objects like cranes and bridges. Surely when it came to more normal objects like beds and tables, I would a jedi master, a beacon of knowledge for the less abled.

Sadly, this has not been the case. I put together a bed from IKEA last year. At the end of the process, there was an entire steel bracket left over. There was also no place to screw in the headboard, and when I bent down to look for it, a hook poked me in the eye. My friend came over to my apartment. He kicked the bed gently and it fell apart, which is what I guess happens to beds without brackets.

In this assembly mad world, I have survived by banking on other people. If I see someone on the street, who is idle for more than twenty minutes or if I run into the superintendent of my building, I stuff their pockets with money and beg them to assemble my furniture.

But the life of a bad assembly man is not easy. The other day, a young student asked for help. He was assembling a bookshelf.

-It should take five minutes for a Mechanical Engineer like you, he said.

I looked at the instruction manual. It seemed to be written not in a literal tone, but more in an aspirational sense like Marx’s Utopia. You can hope to achieve this state of a bookshelf someday, it said to me. I turned the manual around for further illumination, but the other side was blank.

I looked from the window on to the street below, but it was empty.

-Do you know in which apartment the superintendent of the building stays, I asked the student. I have diarrhea.

I love the flow of pin stripes. When I was younger, they ran down the length of my arms. The white lines were as clean as flossed teeth, while the black stripes lent me their personality, both colors existing together in perfect racial harmony.

I lived in SOHO, a neighborhood in New York City that is two miles from Curry Hill, five train stops to the Indian neighborhood in Journal square and God only knew how far to Jackson Heights. In those days,  I spent my time at places like the Café Faneli basking in the glow of lamps that had once lit the faces of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, and now threw shadows on my cigarette pack and the large silver key on the table.

Now I am older.  I see  gray strands of hair in the morning. Once or twice every month, I grit my teeth.

When this happens I walk down the street from my Jackson Heights apartment to the Avenue of Promises. There, I turn right. I bite into the street food of my childhood, the bhelpuris and the shevpuris, the patties and the dosas, the gulab jamuns and the kulfis all bathed in the fragrance of a sea breeze very far away.

I hold my spoon in midair so that it is like a beak seeking a new pleasure.

As the red tomatoes, the green chillies, the muddy tamarind and the entire spectrum of colors pass coalesce into a heady white, my contended soul presses on a lever that closes my eyes, and produces a blackness that is comforting and complete.

Because my upstairs neighbor felt an uncontrollable need to share the pulsating bass of his house music with the world at large, I moved from Brooklyn to a street covered by a canopy of trees in Jackson Heights, Queens. Save for the odd pigeon, it appeared that nobody in my new neighborhood felt compelled to express themselves in rhythmic bursts.

Imagine my grief when on my first day here, I heard a pulsing sound ripple through the floor of my upstairs apartment. It felt like the initial stirring of an earthquake that was too lazy to awaken and become a true force of nature. After all the money I spent on the move, the rumbling sound festered within me like an open wound. It bubbled venomously whenever I heard a skateboarder on the street or cast my ear on the eerily familiar workings of the Queensboro bridge.

Where could this sound be coming from? Could it be that there was another aspiring DJ on the top floor? This couldn’t be for there was a God. I also ruled out the possibility of three hobbits being chased by an army of angry orcs—after all as my company drug tests over the last three years reveal, I have been clean. I pictured a heavy housewife who kept moving furniture with the agility of strong forest deer.  Thinking of her didn’t make me angry. It made me feel ambitious, for I envisioned that there too would come a day when I like her would not have to leave the cozy confines of home for the angular interiors of an office.

One evening, after a particularly insistent thunderstorm, I could contain my curiosity no longer. I walked up the stairs.

There were two young children. Like most children, they liked to run. One of them strained at the door with the nervous energy of a dog on a leash. To snatch away the joy of movement from so young a life would be an unforgivable sin.

I walked down the stairs (in my new neighborhood of Jackson Heights, the stairs that go up also come down). The house music in Brooklyn was from the darker regions of the nether world. These footsteps above pulsed with the discovery of life. And that wasn’t such a bad thing.

It is Friday, and so why should you have to continue reading the tripe I have been putting out rather freely? Now for something nice you can take into the weekend.

Here’s the beginning of one my most favorite scenes of all time. Gussie Fink-Nottle, completely (and unknowingly) drunk is distributing prizes to the students of the Market Snodsbury Grammar School. It’s excerpted from Right Ho, Jeeves, and reminds me how much fun one can have with language. See you Monday!

“Today,” said the bearded bloke, “we are all happy to welcome as the guest of the afternoon Mr. Fitz-Wattle—-”

At the beginning of the address, Gussie had subsided into a sort of daydream, with his mouth hanging open. About half-way through, faint signs of life had begun to show. And for the last few minutes he had been trying to cross one leg over the other and failing and having another shot and failing again.

But only now did he exhibit any real animation. He sat up with a jerk.

“Fink-Nottle,” he said, opening his eyes.

“Fitz-Nottle.”

“Fink-Nottle.”

“I should say Fink-Nottle.”

“Of course you should, you silly ass,” said Gussie genially. “All right, get on with it.”

And closing his eyes, he began trying to cross his legs again.

I could see that this little spot of friction had rattled the bearded bloke a bit. He stood for a moment fumbling at the fungus with a hesitating hand. But they make these head masters of tough stuff. The weakness passed. He came back nicely and carried on.

“We are all happy, I say, to welcome as the guest of the afternoon Mr. Fink-Nottle, who has kindly consented to award the prizes. This task, as
you know, is one that should have devolved upon that well-beloved and vigorous member of our board of governors, the Rev. William Plomer, and we are all, I am sure, very sorry that illness at the last moment should have prevented him from being here today. But, if I may borrow a familiar metaphor from the–if I may employ a homely metaphor familiar to you all–what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts.”

He paused, and beamed rather freely, to show that this was comedy. I could have told the man it was no use. Not a ripple. The corn chandler leaned against me and muttered “Whoddidesay?” but that was all.

It’s always a nasty jar to wait for the laugh and find that the gag hasn’t got across. The bearded bloke was visibly discomposed. At that, however, I think he would have got by, had he not, at this juncture,unfortunately stirred Gussie up again.

“In other words, though deprived of Mr. Plomer, we have with us this afternoon Mr. Fink-Nottle. I am sure that Mr. Fink-Nottle’s name is one that needs no introduction to you. It is, I venture to assert, a name that is familiar to us all.”

“Not to you,” said Gussie.

Every morning, I look forward to buying coffee at one Of New York’s bagel carts that stand guard at every intersection in the morning. The coffee itself is not exceptional. It is old and has aged bitterly. The milk and sugar barely manage to conceal its dark bite that snaps a person back to alertness with every gulp. It is just what I need every morning.

But truth be told, it is also the experience of buying the coffee that awakens the mind before it gets muddled in the predictable routines of the day. The old man selling the coffee doesn’t reduce the purchase to a transactional experience. Instead, he sells coffee in three acts.

Act One involves a warm greeting that bucks the formality of the English language. The “My friend” of the coffee man does not have the dreary creepiness of John McCain. It is ebullient and rings with the sincerity of the Hola Fidel Castro might have uttered if he had chanced upon Lenin.

In Act two, the coffee man makes an observation about the world at large. These range from the satirical (Do you know that New York has opened a new airport, he said after an airplane landed in the Hudson) to the poetic (In this weather, he said referring to the rain, It is better to be a blade of grass.) His comments are intimately connected to the beats of the a city, which can otherwise be muffled by the veils of white tablecloth at a restaurant or diner.

Act Three can consist of two immigrants exchanging that most American aspiration to Have a Nice Day. However sometimes the pressures of the real world can creep into this act with the insistence of cream cheese. At such times, the coffee man tells you that the New York bagel cart proprietor begins his day at 2:00 a.m., an ungodly hour where even the birds haven’t started thinking about worms.  Indeed every action of  the coffee man is stained with the necessity of work. One day, he told me that he played music on the weekends. I pictured a man of leisure with a straw hat and a glass of cool lemonade. This vision persisted till he told me the next week, I have to play again this Saturday. These “stupid people” getting married had inconsiderately extended the feeling of 2 a.m. for the coffee man into the weekend.

Last week,  the coffee man was exceptionally dejected, and looked solemn like a bagel without raisins. I got an order wrong for one of my regular customers, he reproached himself bitterly. His sincere regret served a telling moral as I entered the office. It told me that even if our work isn’t exciting and doesn’t involve landing planes into the Hudson, it was important that we do it thoroughly and well.

To the driver making a turn: Stop.

Be careful.

Is it really necessary for you to drive over that pedestrian? Here is a fact. When a person is underneath a car, he finds it very difficult to rise and get back on his feet, no matter how many times he has read The Bible or even Karl Marx’s Manifesto.

Think.

Is it necessary for you to touch the pedestrian in the knee with your bumper? It is not a sensuous feeling.

Of course you are in a hurry. What could be more important than you getting to yoga class on time so that the world can gain a semblance of mental peace? But realize that the pedestrian is not an ill meaning person who has stepped into the outside world just to get in your way. Like the chicken in the joke, he too wants to get to the other side. That is why he is walking. Let him proceed.

Slow down. Do you see that puddle? Now, you do know that immutable law of Newtonian Physics that states that fast moving vehicles will splash innocent bystanders when moving through static pools of water. Why would you want to muddy that person when he hates facing his dry cleaner as much as you do? Yes, it’s true. Nobody likes to relinquish their entire salary and walk on the street with a pointy hanger.

Don’t worry about the cars behind you. Let them honk. Rest assured – your car won’t be carried off in the stream of sound created by their restless palms. With the giant iron grill that has no doubt killed many a deer, your car will comfortably stand its ground even when the Hudson cuts loose from its banks during the Apocalypse. Don’t worry. When all is said and done, it is your car that will inherit the earth.

These are all of the things I feel like shouting at car drivers at city intersections. Unless of course, I am in the car. Then, I just wish that the pedestrians would get on with it.

Nobody likes the layoff season. Even though the summer has been cold, the carpets at the corporate offices were damp with sweat. People were summoned into forbidding rooms with somber nods of the heads. When they left, they looked crushed as through the organization chart had broken off at the top (where it is at its most slender) and fallen on their spines.

I entered the room tentatively.

-You look very tense, said my boss.

I nodded scratching the portion of my neck where it felt especially vulnerable.

-Is it the situation in Iran? he asked.

-No, no, I assured him.

I was more surprised that anything.  My boss was the second person that day who had brought up the situation in Iran. Earlier that morning, my landlord had posted a “Evicted” sign on my front door (he is a narrow minded person who can’t treat a person behind on a month’s rent with the same degree of magnanimity as a person who has fallen behind twelve months of rent).  I had broken down upon seeing the notice. My landlord had asked me if I was Mourning for Moussavi. He appeared surprised when I told him No.

-Are you sure the Ayatollah isn’t behind your nervousness? my boss asked.

-Maybe, I replied smartly. I had blamed the Ayatollah for an asthma attack when I last took my sick leave. I didn’t want to overplay that hand.

-You know I see you on Twitter and Facebook all the time. I thought you were signing up for all those pro-freedom groups in Tehran.

-Of course, I replied

-Good, good, he nodded. That’s one reason we decided to keep you. We need employees who are globally conscious as we grow. He fondled a globe on his desk sensuously as though it were a ring on his finger.

-It is a sad situation in Iran, he continued. It’s so difficult to see people deprived of the basic human right of freedom.

-Undoubtedly, I said. Say, can I take half an hour this afternoon to go for a walk in the park?

-No, my boss said. Don’t you have to be at your desk?

I looked at him gloomily like a protester gazing at a baton. Outside the window in his corner office, the sun shone on the green lawns. Red balloons floated in the air. A child licked greedily on a chocolate cone. A tug boat floated down the blue river. Grass grew with the color of green.

I logged on to Facebook to register my support for the Iranian people. They had it far worse than I ever did, but now I really empathized with them. I typed fervently as the clattering of the keyboard in my cubicle drowned out the repressed voices of freedom.

It rained twice in New York City last week. First it rained for three days. Then it rained for four days. Every morning, New Yorkers have woken up to a gentle tapping sound, as if a smattering of cats were having a dance party of the terrace.

At first, the rain appears to be an act of cosmic injustice. Hedged between a powerful winter and an invisible spring, the extended period of rain dips unfairly into the short summer and takes away from New York’s residents, the feeling of blue. A New Yorker steps out of the apartment carrying a lingering resentment that rustles against the skin with the prickliness of a raincoat. But then a refreshing realization flows down the cheeks. Stepping into the rain is not unlike moving from the TV to the writing desk. The after stage is every bit as enjoyable as the former – the problem lies with the letting go of a comfortable inertia.

There are some good things about the rain.

The rain allows a New Yorker to say, “There is no drought.” No matter where you stay, this is a good thing to proclaim. Of course a drought in Manhattan is quite unlike one in Africa or Asia. In 2001, there was a drought in New York. People had to ask for water at restaurants and there were restrictions on watering your lawns. Needless to say, both the patrons and the grass survived the drought. At the time of writing, most of New York’s reservoirs are running at near-full capacity. In a world soon to be dominated by water wars, gushing reservoirs portend an era of contentment for the city of avenues.

The rain keeps the city clean. In the movie Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro says, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” It is the least dramatic line of the movie. This statement is not a prophecy. It is a plea towards the New York City Department of Sanitation. For the Taxi Driver saw then what I have seen over the last ten years – that the city’s Department of Sanitation is a modest one consisting of two mops and one very angry looking man. After the recession and budgets cuts, this arsenal has no doubt reduced by at least a mop. In such dire circumstances, God steps in with rain to clean the streets of the stench of rotting meat, old milk and the ablutions of the homeless. God does this even though She or He does not have bailout money. God is magnanimous like that and I guess that’s why God is God.

The rain dampens our worst excesses. Submerged in the rain, my neighbor does not enter his backyard every morning to start of the day by playing LITE FM. Now don’t get me wrong. LITE FM combines two of my most favorite things – easy to understand lyrics and frequency modulation. But it is still a nice feeling to wake up to the sounds of a chirping sparrow (no offense to you Seal, but I do Know You by Now.)

But it would be nice to get back to the hot days of summer when people are angry with humidity instead of rain.  This is no idle wish. I know well how a New Yorker can be rendered powerless by the cruel rays of the summer sun, under which even normally reliable hallmarks of stability like Houston Street appear frail and brittle. In the summer, the streets smell of the city’s misdemeanors, and the songs of Seal shimmer through the air.

But all of that is ok.  For the after smell of the moment when a rat’s soul descends to heaven is an important part of what makes New York New York.

Friday brings deliverance. After reading my posts for the last four days, here’s something nice to read and take into the weekend. See you on Monday,

From Swann’s Way (by Marcel Proust)

I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.