Today (May 16, 2012) marks the seventh anniversary of my switch to patent law from academia. This ability to remember these little anniversaries--arguably a predominatly 'girly' thing--is something that I am rather fond of, because it doesn't need any extra effort to remember these dates, but you still get a chance to bathe in nostalgia. If the word 'itch' in the title is clashing with your mental imagery of the soothing foam bath of nostalgia, worry not. The 'itch' was caused by the need for web-mortalizing the seven-year journey in some form, and with each letter being typed here, the 'itch' is actually diminishing. So may be a better title for this blog is "The seven year(s after the sw)itch," but let's not get carried away too much.
The most frequently asked question that I answer when I talk to someone who used to know me as an engineer-gearing-up-for-academia is "Why did you make the transition into patent law?" Coincidentally, even today I had the same conversation with a junior from the University of Maryland. The answer seems simple now. It was the pregnancy. Contrary to the myth that pregnancy may cause 'brain fog,' it actually made me see very clearly what I wanted to do with my engineering degree while capitalizing on my analytical skills and love of writing. It probably helped that an old friend happened to pay a social visit at the right time when I was naturally in an introspective phase, thanks to being first-time-pregnant. During a casual conversation, our friend revealed how he made the transition from academia to patent law. At that time I didn't pay enough attention, but a few weeks later it started to make a lot of sense, as I wanted to stay in the DC Metro area, where the patent law ecosystem is enviable (It is a different story that now I am in the silicon valley, and loving it here). Fortunately, landing the first legal job as a technical advisor in an intellectual property boutique firm was quite painless, and after that, it was just a matter of learning to be progressively comfortable with the law firm culture.
Seven years later, I can confidently state that even the hardcore engineers devoted to bench work should never underestimate the flickers of 'love-like-feelings' if they recognize those accidentally during a 'desk assignment'. I now know that those afternoons of being immersed in multiphysics modeling in between lab experiments during my post-doctoral stint was the prelude to my career in patent law.
Looking forward to many more seven years!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Lost and Found
Raising a human being is an enriching experience. Period. Yes I know it is not always fun, and it can be back-breaking work at times, and there would be moments when you would question your ability and willingness to continue to be available for them 24/7, but I am pretty sure you discover something about yourself in the course of parenting (or grandparenting, or spending time with a kid even if it is not yours--you get the drift).
I meant to write this blog last Sunday, just after coming back from a refreshingly unplanned but uniquely memorable trip to San Francisco. Quite coincidentally, my immediate last blog in May of this year was also inspired by San Francisco (the graffitis of the city). Though I am not saying I haven't been to the city in the last four and a half months (which merely proves the fact that I don't end up writing a blog every time I go to the city), I am probably more enamored with the city than I consciously think I am.
This time the trip to the city was fueled by the desire to dazzle my six-year-old son Gogol, showing off how he can have a rocking time with mom in a weekend while daddy was saving the world (in more practical terms, daddy was offering a workshop at a conference in Europe.) We had two complimentary tickets to the Exploratorium since Easter, which we never ended up using. I thought the single-parenting weekend was the perfect time to utilize the tickets. But I guess we started a little too late in the afternoon, and underestimated the time required to reach there, meandering through all the detours due to the Presidio Parkway construction project. After missing a turn and realizing that we didn't have enough time to explore the museum before it closed, I started thinking of an alternative amusement, because, remember, I was on a mission to 'dazzle'? I had to maintain a calm exterior, as I could sense Gogol was getting anxious, but trying his best to keep it to himself. I don't know the city well enough to decide on the fly where to go. I needed to park somewhere to be able to access my smartphone to search for kid entertainment options, preferably outdoors, since the indoor stuff were likely to close shortly. I took a random turn into one of the side streets. Fortunately, I ended up finding a parking on Lake Street in front of a cute condo (and got a chance to renew my appreciation for my Mini Cooper, which fits perfectly in a tiny parking space between two driveways, and lets me prove that I haven't forgotten parallel parking!), and to my utter delight, the sign "Mountain Lake Park" was right in front of me! Too bad my smartphone didn't get a chance to prove its utility this time around, because I was 'destiny's child' that afternoon!
The park is quite a hidden gem, tucked in the inner Richmond neighborhood. There are tennis courts, picnic areas by the lake (which is more like a pond than a lake, but who cares), walking/jogging trails, and of course, quite an expansive play area for the kids. Gogol was happy. I was happy. I was relaxed enough to indulge in small talks initiated by an energetic and chatty grandmother who was watching her 4-year-old grandkid, fashionably named Rhys (as in Jonatahn Rhys Meyers). He reminded me so much of Gogol at that age--precocious and all. Needless to say, there was an instant wavelength match between Gogol and Rhys, and parenting (and grandparenting, in case of Rhys' grandmom, whose name is, let's say, Ann) became easy.
After a while, Gogol came down from the play structure to have a little snack break, while Rhys was still up there. All of a sudden I heard Rhys shouting, "That little boy needs help!" I thought Rhys himself was the little boy. Who was he talking about? I looked up and saw another toddler, even younger than Rhys, was sort of stuck on a mini deck of the play structure, and couldn't come down by himself. I rushed. Almost at the same time another gentleman, who happened to be the baby's uncle, also rushed in there to the rescue. Then came running the mom and the dad of the baby, gasping and panicking. The baby was brought down to safety. We learnt that he managed to walk all the way from one of the picnic areas to the playground while nobody was watching!
After the baby's family left, Ann, understandably a proud grandma, exclaimed, "Now isn't Rhys an alert boy? He understood that the little kid was in trouble, and he himself is only four years old!" I nodded in agreement. I was genuinely impressed. Feeling encouraged, Ann started talking about Rhys and her own son, Rhys' dad. I didn't mind listening at all. Ann described how Rhys's dad was a naughty boy himself, giving the young Ann her share of scary moments.
"What does he do now?", I asked. "Oh, he is just twenty one, still trying to figure out what to do in life," Ann said.
And then there was the awkward moment of silence. Both of us realized that Ann had inadvertently disclosed something that she herself was uncomfortable with. To be twenty-one and to be the father of a four-year-old son--somewhere the math doesn't look good. I saw the fleeting sorrow followed by a steely determination in Ann's eyes. So what if her son became a father perhaps before he was ready for it! Her grandson is still brilliant, and she would do whatever it takes to raise Rhys the proper way. I think Ann and I connected the deepest at that moment--without uttering a single word.
The rest of the afternoon was like a dream. Ann suggested that we go to a dessert cafe called "The Toy Boat." She was my newly-discovered friend and city guide. While Rhys and Gogol walked hand-in-hand, I learnt that Ann used to live in the DC area, when she was young, just a few miles from Greenbelt, where we lived till 2008! There were more things in common. She too worked at a law firm, and she too loves used book stores. We walked quite a few blocks to go to The Toy Boat. The store was not quite what I pictured in my mind, but the retro appeal of the all-American store bang in the middle of a heavily ethnic neighborhood grew on me soon. Rhys and Gogol rode on the mechanical horse and shared ice cream. I bought myself a coffee and treated my tour guide Ann with a lemonade. She sang songs from her childhood movies, inspired by the decorative toys (figurines of various movie characters) on the shelves and posters on the walls. The rest of the patrons at the cafe were being totally amused by the pair of odd couples that were us! It was truly magical.
Rhys and Ann left for their home after a while. Before going, Rhys declared, "I want a playdate with Gogol." Ann and I smiled at each other, and told him that we would try. Gogol is now mature enough to know that was not going to happen, because he didn't see Ann and me exchanging email addresses. But he chose to be silent for Rhys' sake.
I bought Gogol an old-fashioned magnetic toy. We walked back to our car. We didn't need to ask anybody how to get back to Lake Street. We got to know that part of the city by heart. We may have lost our way to the Exploratorium, but I was moved enough by what we found that day. I had to capture the memory in writing.
Good luck raising Rhys, Ann. Who knows, may be we will run into you guys again. Mountain Lake Park is not going anywhere.
I meant to write this blog last Sunday, just after coming back from a refreshingly unplanned but uniquely memorable trip to San Francisco. Quite coincidentally, my immediate last blog in May of this year was also inspired by San Francisco (the graffitis of the city). Though I am not saying I haven't been to the city in the last four and a half months (which merely proves the fact that I don't end up writing a blog every time I go to the city), I am probably more enamored with the city than I consciously think I am.
This time the trip to the city was fueled by the desire to dazzle my six-year-old son Gogol, showing off how he can have a rocking time with mom in a weekend while daddy was saving the world (in more practical terms, daddy was offering a workshop at a conference in Europe.) We had two complimentary tickets to the Exploratorium since Easter, which we never ended up using. I thought the single-parenting weekend was the perfect time to utilize the tickets. But I guess we started a little too late in the afternoon, and underestimated the time required to reach there, meandering through all the detours due to the Presidio Parkway construction project. After missing a turn and realizing that we didn't have enough time to explore the museum before it closed, I started thinking of an alternative amusement, because, remember, I was on a mission to 'dazzle'? I had to maintain a calm exterior, as I could sense Gogol was getting anxious, but trying his best to keep it to himself. I don't know the city well enough to decide on the fly where to go. I needed to park somewhere to be able to access my smartphone to search for kid entertainment options, preferably outdoors, since the indoor stuff were likely to close shortly. I took a random turn into one of the side streets. Fortunately, I ended up finding a parking on Lake Street in front of a cute condo (and got a chance to renew my appreciation for my Mini Cooper, which fits perfectly in a tiny parking space between two driveways, and lets me prove that I haven't forgotten parallel parking!), and to my utter delight, the sign "Mountain Lake Park" was right in front of me! Too bad my smartphone didn't get a chance to prove its utility this time around, because I was 'destiny's child' that afternoon!
The park is quite a hidden gem, tucked in the inner Richmond neighborhood. There are tennis courts, picnic areas by the lake (which is more like a pond than a lake, but who cares), walking/jogging trails, and of course, quite an expansive play area for the kids. Gogol was happy. I was happy. I was relaxed enough to indulge in small talks initiated by an energetic and chatty grandmother who was watching her 4-year-old grandkid, fashionably named Rhys (as in Jonatahn Rhys Meyers). He reminded me so much of Gogol at that age--precocious and all. Needless to say, there was an instant wavelength match between Gogol and Rhys, and parenting (and grandparenting, in case of Rhys' grandmom, whose name is, let's say, Ann) became easy.
After a while, Gogol came down from the play structure to have a little snack break, while Rhys was still up there. All of a sudden I heard Rhys shouting, "That little boy needs help!" I thought Rhys himself was the little boy. Who was he talking about? I looked up and saw another toddler, even younger than Rhys, was sort of stuck on a mini deck of the play structure, and couldn't come down by himself. I rushed. Almost at the same time another gentleman, who happened to be the baby's uncle, also rushed in there to the rescue. Then came running the mom and the dad of the baby, gasping and panicking. The baby was brought down to safety. We learnt that he managed to walk all the way from one of the picnic areas to the playground while nobody was watching!
After the baby's family left, Ann, understandably a proud grandma, exclaimed, "Now isn't Rhys an alert boy? He understood that the little kid was in trouble, and he himself is only four years old!" I nodded in agreement. I was genuinely impressed. Feeling encouraged, Ann started talking about Rhys and her own son, Rhys' dad. I didn't mind listening at all. Ann described how Rhys's dad was a naughty boy himself, giving the young Ann her share of scary moments.
"What does he do now?", I asked. "Oh, he is just twenty one, still trying to figure out what to do in life," Ann said.
And then there was the awkward moment of silence. Both of us realized that Ann had inadvertently disclosed something that she herself was uncomfortable with. To be twenty-one and to be the father of a four-year-old son--somewhere the math doesn't look good. I saw the fleeting sorrow followed by a steely determination in Ann's eyes. So what if her son became a father perhaps before he was ready for it! Her grandson is still brilliant, and she would do whatever it takes to raise Rhys the proper way. I think Ann and I connected the deepest at that moment--without uttering a single word.
The rest of the afternoon was like a dream. Ann suggested that we go to a dessert cafe called "The Toy Boat." She was my newly-discovered friend and city guide. While Rhys and Gogol walked hand-in-hand, I learnt that Ann used to live in the DC area, when she was young, just a few miles from Greenbelt, where we lived till 2008! There were more things in common. She too worked at a law firm, and she too loves used book stores. We walked quite a few blocks to go to The Toy Boat. The store was not quite what I pictured in my mind, but the retro appeal of the all-American store bang in the middle of a heavily ethnic neighborhood grew on me soon. Rhys and Gogol rode on the mechanical horse and shared ice cream. I bought myself a coffee and treated my tour guide Ann with a lemonade. She sang songs from her childhood movies, inspired by the decorative toys (figurines of various movie characters) on the shelves and posters on the walls. The rest of the patrons at the cafe were being totally amused by the pair of odd couples that were us! It was truly magical.
Rhys and Ann left for their home after a while. Before going, Rhys declared, "I want a playdate with Gogol." Ann and I smiled at each other, and told him that we would try. Gogol is now mature enough to know that was not going to happen, because he didn't see Ann and me exchanging email addresses. But he chose to be silent for Rhys' sake.
I bought Gogol an old-fashioned magnetic toy. We walked back to our car. We didn't need to ask anybody how to get back to Lake Street. We got to know that part of the city by heart. We may have lost our way to the Exploratorium, but I was moved enough by what we found that day. I had to capture the memory in writing.
Good luck raising Rhys, Ann. Who knows, may be we will run into you guys again. Mountain Lake Park is not going anywhere.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Of Cities, Street Arts, Copyrights, and Patents
There is something about the big cities. I love my suburban life-- the glorious bloom of red roses in my Sunnyvale garden, the manicured landscape around my Palo Alto office. But the mid-week visits to San Francisco on two consecutive days (to attend a conference) stoked some lazy areas of my brain in a very unique way that my daily pretty suburban routine couldn't do for quite some time now. I started writing this blog in mid February. But the gestation period was getting unpredictably long. The blog baby was not quite ready to come out. The blogger mom was letting the baby stay in indefinitely out of sheer laziness. The vibrant graffitis of San Francisco acted as the Pitocin that finally induced my labor. So here it is...my blog about the strange bedfellows--street arts and intellectual property.
I have encountered the world of street art in various different contexts in the last few months.
First, there was this very innovatively named documentary,"Exit through the gift shop," (ETTGS) that my husband recommended so vigorously, that I had to watch it--and I am so glad I did. This was in early February, i.e. before Justin Timberlake introduced himself as "I'm Banksy!" at the Oscars. I had no idea that ETTGS was nominated for the Oscars in the best documentary category, so it was a really pleasant surprise, and I love Justin Timberlake for thinking outside the Chirlie Sheen box for a comic touch. ETTGS is directed by the enigmatic British street artist Banksy, and it is about---you guessed it--street artists. The documentary explores the intriguing and complex love-hate relationship between street art and mainstream fame. The part that triggered a huge bout of nostalgia for me was when it showed the walls in Washington DC famously adorned by the modern legend of graffiti, the Borf. I used to pass by those walls everyday during my commute to DC till 2008. There is also a documentary called "Borf!", which is now on my ever-growing must-watch list.
One of the street artists that ETTGS featured is Shepherd Fairey. I didn't remember the name Shephed Fairey the first time I heard it. But, like many, I vividly remember the portrait that brought Shepherd to limelight. It was the famous "Hope" illustration, where Shepherd allegedly used a copyrighted photograph of the then-yet-to-be-President Obama. So I could associate the name with the controversial copyright infringement case that I have read about in recent past where the Associated Press and Fairey announced settlement in the Obama poster case. The coincidental convergence of entertainment and professional domains is always quite exhilarating!
I work in intellectual property law. It is probably not as appealing as criminal law or family law for the masses. I was very excited when seasoned TV producer David E. Kelley decided to create a show ("Harry's Law") about a patent lawyer. But to my utter frustration, from the very first episode in January, 2011, the premise of the show changed to criminal law to reach out to a greater audience. I wish someone in David Kelley's legal advisors' team reminded him that you don't always have to show graffiti in a negative way as the backdrop of a crime scene (typically an alley where someone gets mugged and/or killed). Tons of patent applications are filed in the online gaming industry, where the patent filers aim to protect their products (e.g., a gaming controller shaped like a bottle of spray can and equipped with sophisticated tactile feedback mechanisms emulating the experience of creation of a graffiti with a spray can on a wall) that recreate the adrenaline rush that is part of a real-life street artist.
And then there is comic book art, which is not exactly graffiti, but is kind of closely related in terms of art form. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publishes a list of cool engineering jobs every year to reassure the engineers that their profession can be fun too. In this year's list, there was the profile of Hsin-Chien Huang, who is tantalizingly called the "Pixel Provocateur"! He started his career in engineering, but is now one of Taiwan's best-known multimedia artists. His gallery is simply mesmerizing. The IEEE article says, "Hsin-Chien Huang grew up daydreaming about becoming a comic book artist. He invented his own comic strips and doodled imaginary spaceships and military bases."
I will end this blog daydreaming about street art in three-dimension, i.e. street sculptures, possibly using recyclable containers. My son's Green Science robot toys and the fresh perspectives from the Green Tech conference in San Francisco are nicely getting mixed in my inspiration soup! Now that the GPS chip-makers have almost solved the 'urban canyon' signal-loss problem by inventing (and yes, patenting) smart algorithms, driving around in the streets of San Francisco while looking for street art may be fun! Concerned about the carbon footprint of that 'fun' activity, where you have to watch out for the occasional rollerbladers (may be some of them are street artists) appearing in front of your car out of nowhere, crossing the roads at arbitrary points, totally ignoring the crosswalks? But who's calculating! Or, may be there is a way to calculate the carbon footprint of recreational city driving. May be there is a mobile app for that!
I have encountered the world of street art in various different contexts in the last few months.
First, there was this very innovatively named documentary,"Exit through the gift shop," (ETTGS) that my husband recommended so vigorously, that I had to watch it--and I am so glad I did. This was in early February, i.e. before Justin Timberlake introduced himself as "I'm Banksy!" at the Oscars. I had no idea that ETTGS was nominated for the Oscars in the best documentary category, so it was a really pleasant surprise, and I love Justin Timberlake for thinking outside the Chirlie Sheen box for a comic touch. ETTGS is directed by the enigmatic British street artist Banksy, and it is about---you guessed it--street artists. The documentary explores the intriguing and complex love-hate relationship between street art and mainstream fame. The part that triggered a huge bout of nostalgia for me was when it showed the walls in Washington DC famously adorned by the modern legend of graffiti, the Borf. I used to pass by those walls everyday during my commute to DC till 2008. There is also a documentary called "Borf!", which is now on my ever-growing must-watch list.
One of the street artists that ETTGS featured is Shepherd Fairey. I didn't remember the name Shephed Fairey the first time I heard it. But, like many, I vividly remember the portrait that brought Shepherd to limelight. It was the famous "Hope" illustration, where Shepherd allegedly used a copyrighted photograph of the then-yet-to-be-President Obama. So I could associate the name with the controversial copyright infringement case that I have read about in recent past where the Associated Press and Fairey announced settlement in the Obama poster case. The coincidental convergence of entertainment and professional domains is always quite exhilarating!
I work in intellectual property law. It is probably not as appealing as criminal law or family law for the masses. I was very excited when seasoned TV producer David E. Kelley decided to create a show ("Harry's Law") about a patent lawyer. But to my utter frustration, from the very first episode in January, 2011, the premise of the show changed to criminal law to reach out to a greater audience. I wish someone in David Kelley's legal advisors' team reminded him that you don't always have to show graffiti in a negative way as the backdrop of a crime scene (typically an alley where someone gets mugged and/or killed). Tons of patent applications are filed in the online gaming industry, where the patent filers aim to protect their products (e.g., a gaming controller shaped like a bottle of spray can and equipped with sophisticated tactile feedback mechanisms emulating the experience of creation of a graffiti with a spray can on a wall) that recreate the adrenaline rush that is part of a real-life street artist.
And then there is comic book art, which is not exactly graffiti, but is kind of closely related in terms of art form. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publishes a list of cool engineering jobs every year to reassure the engineers that their profession can be fun too. In this year's list, there was the profile of Hsin-Chien Huang, who is tantalizingly called the "Pixel Provocateur"! He started his career in engineering, but is now one of Taiwan's best-known multimedia artists. His gallery is simply mesmerizing. The IEEE article says, "Hsin-Chien Huang grew up daydreaming about becoming a comic book artist. He invented his own comic strips and doodled imaginary spaceships and military bases."
I will end this blog daydreaming about street art in three-dimension, i.e. street sculptures, possibly using recyclable containers. My son's Green Science robot toys and the fresh perspectives from the Green Tech conference in San Francisco are nicely getting mixed in my inspiration soup! Now that the GPS chip-makers have almost solved the 'urban canyon' signal-loss problem by inventing (and yes, patenting) smart algorithms, driving around in the streets of San Francisco while looking for street art may be fun! Concerned about the carbon footprint of that 'fun' activity, where you have to watch out for the occasional rollerbladers (may be some of them are street artists) appearing in front of your car out of nowhere, crossing the roads at arbitrary points, totally ignoring the crosswalks? But who's calculating! Or, may be there is a way to calculate the carbon footprint of recreational city driving. May be there is a mobile app for that!
Monday, January 10, 2011
Tangled
Call me crazy, but I do 'see' these weird connectivities between things that are unrelated on the surface, and get enough motivation at least to blog about that, if not do anything better with that vision :-) A friend recently started knitting as a hobby, and I started thinking about blackberries (OK, OK, iphones and android smartphones too).
You have probably heard about the term, "Renaissance Mind." Sometimes it is a very gratifying qualifier, but other times, it is just an euphemism for focus-less-ness. In the article titled, "10 Ways to identify a renaissance mind," writer Tammy Cook poins out, "Renaissance Minds (RMs) are divergent rather than linear thinkers." She elaborates, "Divergent thinkers, such as our lovely and unique RMs, tend to think more along the lines of Tinker Toys. Each thought ([a] "connector") sparks 2, 3, or more other thoughts...which then tell 2 friends, and so on, and as you can see it quickly becomes a tangled web of great ideas and creative thoughts."
I can't always vouch for 'great' ideas, and 'creative' thoughts, but tangled web I do know.
So how did that tangled web connect knitting with smartphones? I was thinking how, sometimes much to our family members'/friends' chagrin, we lug our 'work' with us when we carry the smartphones with push emails (and/or web connection). Decades ago, our grandmothers and mothers used to do pretty much the same, when they used to take their knitting kit to wherever they went. We have all seen a busy mom multitasking, knitting a sweater sitting on a park bench while wacthing her kid play, or, two girlfriends happily chatting and knitting together. I guess it was not money-generating 'work' for most of them, but I bet the ones who took up knitting as a source of earning, had all the more reasons to take their 'work' with them everywhere.
We have stress balls in the "Office health kit". Our grandparents had worry beads (Komboloi)..only most of them called them the prayer beads. We have shredders. They had termites. We are not that different.
P.S. The multi-directional inspiration flow of in full action! One friend starts knitting as a hobby, I get inspired to write a blog, and another friend gets inspired by the blog to try her hand at knitting! Sharing a picture of a tangled creation of Paromita, which she generously shared with me.
You have probably heard about the term, "Renaissance Mind." Sometimes it is a very gratifying qualifier, but other times, it is just an euphemism for focus-less-ness. In the article titled, "10 Ways to identify a renaissance mind," writer Tammy Cook poins out, "Renaissance Minds (RMs) are divergent rather than linear thinkers." She elaborates, "Divergent thinkers, such as our lovely and unique RMs, tend to think more along the lines of Tinker Toys. Each thought ([a] "connector") sparks 2, 3, or more other thoughts...which then tell 2 friends, and so on, and as you can see it quickly becomes a tangled web of great ideas and creative thoughts."
I can't always vouch for 'great' ideas, and 'creative' thoughts, but tangled web I do know.
So how did that tangled web connect knitting with smartphones? I was thinking how, sometimes much to our family members'/friends' chagrin, we lug our 'work' with us when we carry the smartphones with push emails (and/or web connection). Decades ago, our grandmothers and mothers used to do pretty much the same, when they used to take their knitting kit to wherever they went. We have all seen a busy mom multitasking, knitting a sweater sitting on a park bench while wacthing her kid play, or, two girlfriends happily chatting and knitting together. I guess it was not money-generating 'work' for most of them, but I bet the ones who took up knitting as a source of earning, had all the more reasons to take their 'work' with them everywhere.
We have stress balls in the "Office health kit". Our grandparents had worry beads (Komboloi)..only most of them called them the prayer beads. We have shredders. They had termites. We are not that different.
P.S. The multi-directional inspiration flow of in full action! One friend starts knitting as a hobby, I get inspired to write a blog, and another friend gets inspired by the blog to try her hand at knitting! Sharing a picture of a tangled creation of Paromita, which she generously shared with me.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Fourth Player
My 'driveway moments' used to be in three languages (English, Hindi, and Bengali) until the summer of 2010. Now there is a fourth player.
Urban dictionary defines a driveway moment as "the inability to leave one's car after arriving at the destination because of the riveting nature of a story you're listening to on the radio." I think NPR came up with the original term, so they limited it to 'a story' and 'on the radio.' To me, the term has a broader meaning...anything that you are listening to while driving (or being driven) has the potential to create a driveway moment, including a radio program, a song played on air or from your own CD/music player, an audio book, a voice message, or even audio-based course materials that you listen to on the road. Come to think of it, a driveway moment can include a real conversation (with a co-passenger or on the phone) that started while driving, and didn't quite finish when you reached the destination. But I already see that I am being carried away with just defining a term (I bet the legal professional in me is to be blamed), so let me swerve back on track.
The fourth language that I am talking about is my new-found love, Spanish. I took an evening course on Beginners' Spanish this summer. It was just a series of eight three-hour-long sessions (of which I missed one due to the Japan trip in July)--and I do hope to enroll in the intermediate level course at some point--but I still feel like a new window has already been opened for me. Every little Spanish that I can follow now, be it on a Spanish radio channel, on a website, in a sandwich shop or at a tourist attraction, thrills me like a child. One of Kaiser Permanente's innovative "Thrive" series of ads that claims that learning a new foreign language (among other things) exercises your 'flabby' brain, appears to have a whole new meaning now. Medical studies have shown that learning a new foreign language and keeping at it can prevent or at least delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, as Catherine Forsythe's blog post reports.
And the more immediate benefits and rewards of being able to communicate in or understand a new language come in surprising little packages. Who knew that being able to exchange simple written notes in Spanish with the cleaning lady can be so exhilarating! These days, many a times I leave notes in broken Spanish on the dining table for my cleaning lady, who makes life so much easier (and tidier) for me every Friday. The notes cover everything from "Clean the inside of the oven this week, please!" to "Please take this piece of cake from my son's birthday." When I come back, I see her return-notes, which are mostly "!Gracias, señora!", but the notes never fail to make this señora contenta...totalmente!
Another immediate reward came in the form of airport announcements. In late August, I was stuck in Atlanta airport for five hours while coming back from a very refreshing East coast trip visiting friends and family. I was indignant to reach home, and was getting frustrated. But one of the things that kept me amused was trying to decipher the airport announcements in Spanish. I was intentionally trying not the listen to the English version of the announcement when it was being played for the first time. Instead, I was listening extra carefully to the Spanish version that followed. When you have to understand what's being announced in order to know what's going on so that you can make your plans accordingly, then automatically you pay the most attention. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I understood basic Spanish to a reasonable extent, because I did cross check the accuracy of my understanding by listening to the repeat of the same announcement in English. You can't take a chance when it comes to going home, after all!
Speaking of the East coast trip, I have to share this amazing article that I got to read during the lazy, beautiful ride on Amtrak, en route to New Jersey from Washington DC. The article, titled, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The article talks about whether our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts for the lack of ways to express those thoughts. According to the article, "Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." The author of the article, Guy Deutscher, offers the following example to elaborate. "Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin."
Spanish also forces you to 'disclose' the gender of not only a person (or any living thing for that matter), but of inanimate objects too. I am not a linguist by any stretch of imagination, but I had a hunch that probably all of the so called "Romance Languages"--and the list includes Spanish--have this linguistic gender-dependence, and Wikipedia sort of confirms it.
But, at the same time, Spanish is rather biased in terms of describing the gender of a non-homogeneous group of persons/things. For example, if someone wants to ask you, "How many siblings do you have?", it is sufficient to ask "How many brothers do you have?" Nobody is stopping you from asking, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?", but it is not a must. I guess every language has its quirkiness. That's what makes them endearing.
Well, Spanish is not called a "Romance Language" for nothing. Let's say I will cruise through my mid-life without the proverbial 'mid-life crisis'. Still, this pre-mid-life (or is it mid-life already?) romance of mine with a foreign language is nothing short of an invigorating affair. If you must know, Love (el amor), and Romance (el romance) are assigned masculine genders in Spanish, but 'a romantic affair' (una relación amorosa) is assigned a feminine gender! Now feel free to draw your own conclusion!
P.S. my sis-in-law reminds me (after reading this post), that in Hindi, "Pyar" (love) is masculine, but "Mohabbat" (a more intense version of love) is feminine :-)
Urban dictionary defines a driveway moment as "the inability to leave one's car after arriving at the destination because of the riveting nature of a story you're listening to on the radio." I think NPR came up with the original term, so they limited it to 'a story' and 'on the radio.' To me, the term has a broader meaning...anything that you are listening to while driving (or being driven) has the potential to create a driveway moment, including a radio program, a song played on air or from your own CD/music player, an audio book, a voice message, or even audio-based course materials that you listen to on the road. Come to think of it, a driveway moment can include a real conversation (with a co-passenger or on the phone) that started while driving, and didn't quite finish when you reached the destination. But I already see that I am being carried away with just defining a term (I bet the legal professional in me is to be blamed), so let me swerve back on track.
The fourth language that I am talking about is my new-found love, Spanish. I took an evening course on Beginners' Spanish this summer. It was just a series of eight three-hour-long sessions (of which I missed one due to the Japan trip in July)--and I do hope to enroll in the intermediate level course at some point--but I still feel like a new window has already been opened for me. Every little Spanish that I can follow now, be it on a Spanish radio channel, on a website, in a sandwich shop or at a tourist attraction, thrills me like a child. One of Kaiser Permanente's innovative "Thrive" series of ads that claims that learning a new foreign language (among other things) exercises your 'flabby' brain, appears to have a whole new meaning now. Medical studies have shown that learning a new foreign language and keeping at it can prevent or at least delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, as Catherine Forsythe's blog post reports.
And the more immediate benefits and rewards of being able to communicate in or understand a new language come in surprising little packages. Who knew that being able to exchange simple written notes in Spanish with the cleaning lady can be so exhilarating! These days, many a times I leave notes in broken Spanish on the dining table for my cleaning lady, who makes life so much easier (and tidier) for me every Friday. The notes cover everything from "Clean the inside of the oven this week, please!" to "Please take this piece of cake from my son's birthday." When I come back, I see her return-notes, which are mostly "!Gracias, señora!", but the notes never fail to make this señora contenta...totalmente!
Another immediate reward came in the form of airport announcements. In late August, I was stuck in Atlanta airport for five hours while coming back from a very refreshing East coast trip visiting friends and family. I was indignant to reach home, and was getting frustrated. But one of the things that kept me amused was trying to decipher the airport announcements in Spanish. I was intentionally trying not the listen to the English version of the announcement when it was being played for the first time. Instead, I was listening extra carefully to the Spanish version that followed. When you have to understand what's being announced in order to know what's going on so that you can make your plans accordingly, then automatically you pay the most attention. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I understood basic Spanish to a reasonable extent, because I did cross check the accuracy of my understanding by listening to the repeat of the same announcement in English. You can't take a chance when it comes to going home, after all!
Speaking of the East coast trip, I have to share this amazing article that I got to read during the lazy, beautiful ride on Amtrak, en route to New Jersey from Washington DC. The article, titled, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The article talks about whether our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts for the lack of ways to express those thoughts. According to the article, "Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." The author of the article, Guy Deutscher, offers the following example to elaborate. "Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin."
Spanish also forces you to 'disclose' the gender of not only a person (or any living thing for that matter), but of inanimate objects too. I am not a linguist by any stretch of imagination, but I had a hunch that probably all of the so called "Romance Languages"--and the list includes Spanish--have this linguistic gender-dependence, and Wikipedia sort of confirms it.
But, at the same time, Spanish is rather biased in terms of describing the gender of a non-homogeneous group of persons/things. For example, if someone wants to ask you, "How many siblings do you have?", it is sufficient to ask "How many brothers do you have?" Nobody is stopping you from asking, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?", but it is not a must. I guess every language has its quirkiness. That's what makes them endearing.
Well, Spanish is not called a "Romance Language" for nothing. Let's say I will cruise through my mid-life without the proverbial 'mid-life crisis'. Still, this pre-mid-life (or is it mid-life already?) romance of mine with a foreign language is nothing short of an invigorating affair. If you must know, Love (el amor), and Romance (el romance) are assigned masculine genders in Spanish, but 'a romantic affair' (una relación amorosa) is assigned a feminine gender! Now feel free to draw your own conclusion!
P.S. my sis-in-law reminds me (after reading this post), that in Hindi, "Pyar" (love) is masculine, but "Mohabbat" (a more intense version of love) is feminine :-)
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Where the Sun Rises
July 10, 2010 has been the longest day of my life. 40 hours long, numerically speaking.
We boarded our flight back to California on July 10th at 5:30 PM at the Narita airport in Tokyo, and landed at San Francisco at 11 AM...still July 10th, still more than half of the day left to catch up on some sleep. I can't sleep at all in a flight. When the plane was touching down on the runway at San Francisco, I was thinking, awash in fresh memories of a perfect vacation amidst a hazy half-awake jet-lagged trance, that exactly 16 hours ago, we were strolling in the Shinjuku-Chuo Koen ('Koen' means park in Japanese) at 11 AM on July 10th in downtown Tokyo, being amused by the co-existence of an open-air public gym (for grown-ups, not the kids' gyms that you see in every park) at stone's throw from the serene Meiji Jingu ('Jingu' means shrine) in the park, and being surprised by the sight of a few makeshift homeless shelters bang in the middle of the otherwise manicured greenery surrounded by the dazzling skyscrapers. Japan is full of interesting contradictions and oodles of things to observe and internalize. So a visitor is never bored.
I consciously did not log on to Facebook (other than a few momentary digressions) during our vacation week. But if I were to post a status message in Facebook summarizing my experience, it would most likely have been something like, "It is a really beautiful country full of pretty and welcoming people. Efficiency, punctuality, and service are at an entirely different level in Japan. You can survive in Japan knowing only English. Throwing in a few Japanese phrases here and there doesn't hurt. And yes, it is an expensive place."
Sapporo: Getting our feet wet in all things Japanese...
Our first destination in Japan was Sapporo (in the Northern island of Hokkaido), famous for its eponymous beer and the 1972 Winter Olympics. My husband Bikash had a conference at Sapporo. We had a very brief layover at Tokyo airport en route to Sapporo on July 4th. We were a bit nervous about whether we would be able to catch the connecting flight, because, we had to clear immigration and customs at Tokyo as our port of entry in Japan, and the United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was almost half an hour late. The queue snaking towards the immigration counters was frighteningly long. But the speed at which the queue moved, and we got done with our immigration--fingerprinting, photograph-taking and all--made us totally impressed with the famous Japanese efficiency. Clearing customs and checking our luggage in for the connecting flight were also done in a jiffy, smoothly managed by a young airport crew comprising a noticeably high proportion of young Japanese women, leaving us with enough time to relax at the gate for the flight to Sapporo. If I absolutely have to whine about anything about our first impression of Japan, it would be about the level of air-conditioning at the airport. I guess we are used to expect a rather cool temperature setting in the American airports. Japanese people, like the Indians, seem to be more comfortable at a warmer ambient temperature. May be it is an Eastern thing. May be the philosophy is what's the point of creating an artificially cooler ambiance temporarily when you have to face the hot and sticky summer outside anyways. Summer is uncomfortably hot, specially in the central and southern parts of Japan on the Pacific side.
The taxi ride from the Chitose airport in Hokkaido to downtown Sapporo, where our hotel was, was more than an hour long. The sight of a driving range just outside the airport reminded me that golf is huge in Japan. And so is baseball, at least as a spectator sport, evident by the prominent hoardings everywhere. We also spotted Hollywood movie stars lending their faces to sell everything, the most frequently-sighted ad being Leonardo DeCaprio looking vaguely mysterious in a car tire commercial! I couldn't help but draw parallels with Bill Murray's ageing-American-movie-star-shooting-for-a-Whiskey-ad-in-Tokyo character in "Lost in Translation," one of my favorite movies that had genuinely intrigued me about Japan. As soon as the taxi picked up speed in the expressway leaving behind the more industrialized areas, the billboards were replaced by rain-drenched lush green trees and vines on both sides of the expressway to ease our tired bleary eyes. June and July are the months when the rainy season peaks in Japan.
We reached our hotel in mid-afternoon. From the moment we stepped out of the taxi, we encountered countless courteous staff members at every step of the way, bowing down and uttering "Arigato gozaimas" ("Thank you very much" in Japanese) almost too frequently to make us feel rather self-conscious. I could not shake off the feeling that I hadn't done anything special yet to deserve that kind of a royal treatment. It takes a little while to get used to the fact that customer service is ingrained in the cultural DNA of the Japanese people. We never experienced anything short of superlative customer service in our week-long stay in Japan, split between 4 nights in Sapporo and 2 nights in Tokyo.
Ohayo Sapporo...
The next day, our first 'morning' in Sapporo started really early, 2 AM to be precise. Our son Gogol's body clock was yet to reset, and he was wide awake at 2 AM. We wanted to entertain him with cartoons on TV. But alas, there were only a handful of channels on the TV, and there were absolutely no cartoon channels. I was surprised. Aren't the Japanese the gurus of cartoon? What about the famous Japanese "anime"s and "manga"s? Apparently, cartoons are more popular in comic books and video games than on TV, and Japan is not big on cable/satellite TV anyways, especially outside of the real big cities like Tokyo (Bikash shared his global network engineer's professional knowledge with me.) Thank God we packed Gogol's Nintendo DS. That kept him busy for some time, before, to our utter delight, the horizon started to light up behind the mountains beyond the Sapporo skyline. It was not even 4AM! Sun really rises early in Japan.
Sapporo is a paradise for hikers at all skill levels, and we couldn't be happier to head out early for a neighborhood hike by the side of the Toyohira river that flows invitingly just outside our hotel. Gogol flaunted his Japanese skills by saying "Konichiwa"(Hello) and "Ohayo"(Good morning) to early morning recreational anglers, mostly elderly men, and brisk-walkers, mostly elderly women. I later learnt that average Japanese men live till 78, and average Japanese women live till 86, and there are more than 30,000 centenarians in Japan. It is a country of healthy people.
By the time we were heading back to the hotel for breakfast, we spotted men and women streaming out on the streets on their way to work, on foot or on bicycles, most of them formally dressed. It was Monday morning. Though I have to tell you, the Sapporo morning scene was nothing like the sea of workforce that we witnessed in the later part of our trip in downtown Tokyo around the Shinjuku train station, that apparently serves more than 3 million people daily! We joked in Tokyo that it looked like a penguin colony, as the formal suits were primarily of binary colors--black and white. Formal dressing is almost ubiquitous in Japanese workplace irrespective of the kind of job that you do. Not surprisingly, we spotted countless tailoring shops and even ready-made formal clothing stores both in Sapporo and Tokyo.
Tourism spiced with social observation...
We didn't do any research regarding what to do before coming to Japan. The plan of not planning worked out beautifully, as we got to make random decisions, picking things-to-do from the many brochures stacked in the hotel lobby, and got to rejoice the outcome each day. Among the touristy things that we did in Sapporo, including hanging out in the Odori Park at the heart of the business district in Sapporo, shopping and dining in the Sasukino shopping district, and visiting the beautiful lush Botanical Gardens maintained by the Hokkaido University with a breathtaking rose garden and an enviable taxidermy collection, Gogol was the happiest visiting the Maruyama Zoo. The zoo was really impressive, as we got to see some Hokkaido natives, such as the Tundra wolves and flying squirrels. That Japan is a fairly conservative society was evident in the design of the rest areas inside the zoo. There were dedicated closed-door rooms for the nursing mothers in the rest areas, and the doors of the nursing roosm and the ladies' bathrooms reached down to the floor to seal the users' modesty. Gogol rightly pointed out that the zoo was the only place where he saw of lot of children. The famously declining birth rate in Japan is acutely visible everywhere (see this article). The national statistics of an average of 1.2 child/couple has a lot to do with Japanese women choosing to marry and bear children later than ever in favor of enjoying a rewarding career. It almost became my hobby in Japan to study the body languages of working women to have an idea of how powerful and comfortable they seem to feel. As expected, the Tokyo women looked a lot more confident. But in a smaller city like Sapporo, which I believe gave us a truer glimpse to the overall socio-economic reality of Japan, the one or two women who looked like they were enjoying a power dinner with their male colleagues, did stand out among the plethora of women who were just 'playing their part' in looking attractive in fashionable clothes, and/or performing efficiently in the routine sorts of work, relatively speaking. However, I have to add that I strongly felt that, just like Indian women, Japanese women are going through the coming-of-age phase, taking strong strides towards playing meatier roles outside of home.
Doing touristy things in Sapporo also included visiting the famous Hokkaido Jingu in the Maruyama Koen. It is a Shinto shrine, where we got to witness the confluence of the more ancient nature-worshipping traditions of Shintoism with the relatively modern and perhaps a bit more ritualistic traditionas of Buddhism. You can write down your wish in a scroll, and tie it on a rope in front of the shrine. Gogol added his wish among the thousands of other wishes. His wish was to see his pet goldfishes healthy when he would get back to California after his vacation.
Serene Serendipity...
While walking back to the underground metro station from Maruyama Koen, we caught a glimpse of some very intriguing statues behind the criss-cross of the immediate foliage. We were too curious not to explore what was there, and it turned out to be the most precious serendipitous discovery of our entire Japan trip. We found an uphill trail that led to the top of Mount Maruyama. The trail itself was not that arduous, but what gave us goosebumps were the numerous statues of Lord Buddha sprinkled in the virgin wilderness lining the trail, each of the statues different from the others, showcasing the vivid imaginations of the worshipper-sculptors. The statues were not sophisticated works of art, barring a few. But the most remarkable thing that we noticed was that all of them had at least a piece of ritualistic cloth, looking like a baby's bib, covering the torso area, which is kind of surprising, because we are used to seeing mostly bare-bodied Bodhisattwa statues. I later read that the statues are of Kannon Bodhisattwa, who is sometimes considered a female incarnation among some Buddhists in Japan. Hence, the urge to cover the torso of the statues, I guess. I remembered that we used to periodically visit the Asian-art-focused Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian museums when we used to live in Washington, DC. Seeing the statues in their original setting, rather than in a museum, made me feel as if I was riding an organic time tide that was transporting me to the ancient times. I thought anything additional to this experience would be a bonus--I was already bathing in the much-sought sense of wonder that brought us to Japan in the first place.
Megapolis...
As intriguing as Sapporo was, Tokyo did impress us with its own brand of charm. I have seen some huge metropolises, but Tokyo screams Megapolis! Yes, the greenery was missing, but there was some harmonizing design symmetry visually palpable in the city that made even an asphalt jungle looked pretty, despite its enormous size (here's a link to Bikash's Tokyo photo album). I guess the city was largely rebuild after the world war II with a very careful vision of how it should look like when it rises again. The measured architectural aesthetics of the hotel lobby itself (we stayed at the Hilton at Shinjuku) drew us in. Again, the hotel attendants were bowing down left and right, but by this time, we were relatively used to that gesture. The view from our hotel window on the 23rd floor compensated for the meticulously furnished but undeniably compact floorspace of the room. Finally in Tokyo, Gogol had access to multiple cartoon channels, but he chose to hang out at the window sill, and when Gogol was asleep, I saw Bikash setting up his tripod by the side of the window to capture the city's night glory. The lady in the family was too happy to see the guys in the family being smitten by the city, forgetting all about their respective electronic addictions.
The Mountain and the Valley...
On our second day in Tokyo, we decided to head out to Mount Fuji and Hakone on a conducted bus tour. We had the most entertaining tour guide, who I should thank for many of the demographic and geographic statistics that I have sprinkled throughout this blog (so, if he was wrong, I am wrong too). Mount Fuji is 12,388 feet high at its summit. Our bus took us up to the fifth station (at a height of 7,500 feet) en route to the summit, where the paved road ends. We were literally walking through the rain cloud when we got down from the bus to walk up to the rest station. I felt so nostalgic, thinking about our trip to Kedarnath (in the Himalayas) back in 1992, where we did a 14 kilometer hike on foot through rain and shine with my parents and my siblings. I ended up buying a bunch of picture post cards, and wrote a little note to my parents on one of them. It was the pen-and-paper version of my private 'tweet'...didn't matter even if my parents didn't get to see it instantaneously. The tour guide said there is a post office at the summit of Mount Fuji, which is still operational. Would have been nice to post my post card from there, I guess. But this time, we had to be satisfied with just the view of the summit, and perhaps with a dream of coming back to scale all the way up sometime in future.
Next stop was Hakone, the famous historic town nestled in the volcanically active Fuji-Hakone-Izu national park. It was still raining hard. But the rain endowed Hakone with such an out-of-this-world emerald hue that I forgot I usually don't like rain that much. We had a nice lunch at Hakone, and then went on to ride hanging cable cars (they are also called 'ropeway' in Japan, just like in India) across the mountains to go to Lake Ashi at the center of the Hakone valley. The cable car ride was interesting not only for the views that it offered from the elevation, but also for the co-passengers that we got to share the ride with. We met an American-Mexican couple (the husband lives in Mexico, and the wife in Arizona), who were vacationing in Japan. They said they spend most of their together time vacationing outside of either America or Mexico before they can sort out the immigration thing.
A dragon-shaped boat ride on Lake Ashi was the last activity of the day, before we went back to the tour bus. In a brilliant stroke of tourism-business-wisdom, our conducted tour gave us the option of going back to Tokyo in the bus, or taking the bullet train ("Shinkansen") from Odawara station to Tokyo. The train ride came at additional cost and inconvenience, as we had to arrange our own transportation from the train station to our hotel, while the return journey by the bus was at no additional cost, and included door-to-door service. It was raining pretty hard. On a regular day, opting for the train would have made no sense. But when you are in Japan, you can't go back without stepping into the Shinkansen. So we took the train, and finally reached our hotel exhausted and drenched. But what is travel if you do not do a few crazy touristy things! That was our last night in Japan. We topped off the night with a fantastic traditional dinner at an authentic Japanese restaurant. Let me tell you, if you thought Sushi is the staple food in Japan, then you will be in for a surprise, when you actually visit Japan. It might be a small country, but it sure knows what variety is..in food, and in everything else.
On our way back, while admiring the intricate Origami art collection at the Tokyo airport, I kept thinking that, Japan, with its abundant beauty and complex culture, has sure whetted our appetite for more trips to the Orient.
We boarded our flight back to California on July 10th at 5:30 PM at the Narita airport in Tokyo, and landed at San Francisco at 11 AM...still July 10th, still more than half of the day left to catch up on some sleep. I can't sleep at all in a flight. When the plane was touching down on the runway at San Francisco, I was thinking, awash in fresh memories of a perfect vacation amidst a hazy half-awake jet-lagged trance, that exactly 16 hours ago, we were strolling in the Shinjuku-Chuo Koen ('Koen' means park in Japanese) at 11 AM on July 10th in downtown Tokyo, being amused by the co-existence of an open-air public gym (for grown-ups, not the kids' gyms that you see in every park) at stone's throw from the serene Meiji Jingu ('Jingu' means shrine) in the park, and being surprised by the sight of a few makeshift homeless shelters bang in the middle of the otherwise manicured greenery surrounded by the dazzling skyscrapers. Japan is full of interesting contradictions and oodles of things to observe and internalize. So a visitor is never bored.
I consciously did not log on to Facebook (other than a few momentary digressions) during our vacation week. But if I were to post a status message in Facebook summarizing my experience, it would most likely have been something like, "It is a really beautiful country full of pretty and welcoming people. Efficiency, punctuality, and service are at an entirely different level in Japan. You can survive in Japan knowing only English. Throwing in a few Japanese phrases here and there doesn't hurt. And yes, it is an expensive place."
Sapporo: Getting our feet wet in all things Japanese...
Our first destination in Japan was Sapporo (in the Northern island of Hokkaido), famous for its eponymous beer and the 1972 Winter Olympics. My husband Bikash had a conference at Sapporo. We had a very brief layover at Tokyo airport en route to Sapporo on July 4th. We were a bit nervous about whether we would be able to catch the connecting flight, because, we had to clear immigration and customs at Tokyo as our port of entry in Japan, and the United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was almost half an hour late. The queue snaking towards the immigration counters was frighteningly long. But the speed at which the queue moved, and we got done with our immigration--fingerprinting, photograph-taking and all--made us totally impressed with the famous Japanese efficiency. Clearing customs and checking our luggage in for the connecting flight were also done in a jiffy, smoothly managed by a young airport crew comprising a noticeably high proportion of young Japanese women, leaving us with enough time to relax at the gate for the flight to Sapporo. If I absolutely have to whine about anything about our first impression of Japan, it would be about the level of air-conditioning at the airport. I guess we are used to expect a rather cool temperature setting in the American airports. Japanese people, like the Indians, seem to be more comfortable at a warmer ambient temperature. May be it is an Eastern thing. May be the philosophy is what's the point of creating an artificially cooler ambiance temporarily when you have to face the hot and sticky summer outside anyways. Summer is uncomfortably hot, specially in the central and southern parts of Japan on the Pacific side.
The taxi ride from the Chitose airport in Hokkaido to downtown Sapporo, where our hotel was, was more than an hour long. The sight of a driving range just outside the airport reminded me that golf is huge in Japan. And so is baseball, at least as a spectator sport, evident by the prominent hoardings everywhere. We also spotted Hollywood movie stars lending their faces to sell everything, the most frequently-sighted ad being Leonardo DeCaprio looking vaguely mysterious in a car tire commercial! I couldn't help but draw parallels with Bill Murray's ageing-American-movie-star-shooting-for-a-Whiskey-ad-in-Tokyo character in "Lost in Translation," one of my favorite movies that had genuinely intrigued me about Japan. As soon as the taxi picked up speed in the expressway leaving behind the more industrialized areas, the billboards were replaced by rain-drenched lush green trees and vines on both sides of the expressway to ease our tired bleary eyes. June and July are the months when the rainy season peaks in Japan.
We reached our hotel in mid-afternoon. From the moment we stepped out of the taxi, we encountered countless courteous staff members at every step of the way, bowing down and uttering "Arigato gozaimas" ("Thank you very much" in Japanese) almost too frequently to make us feel rather self-conscious. I could not shake off the feeling that I hadn't done anything special yet to deserve that kind of a royal treatment. It takes a little while to get used to the fact that customer service is ingrained in the cultural DNA of the Japanese people. We never experienced anything short of superlative customer service in our week-long stay in Japan, split between 4 nights in Sapporo and 2 nights in Tokyo.
Ohayo Sapporo...
The next day, our first 'morning' in Sapporo started really early, 2 AM to be precise. Our son Gogol's body clock was yet to reset, and he was wide awake at 2 AM. We wanted to entertain him with cartoons on TV. But alas, there were only a handful of channels on the TV, and there were absolutely no cartoon channels. I was surprised. Aren't the Japanese the gurus of cartoon? What about the famous Japanese "anime"s and "manga"s? Apparently, cartoons are more popular in comic books and video games than on TV, and Japan is not big on cable/satellite TV anyways, especially outside of the real big cities like Tokyo (Bikash shared his global network engineer's professional knowledge with me.) Thank God we packed Gogol's Nintendo DS. That kept him busy for some time, before, to our utter delight, the horizon started to light up behind the mountains beyond the Sapporo skyline. It was not even 4AM! Sun really rises early in Japan.
Sapporo is a paradise for hikers at all skill levels, and we couldn't be happier to head out early for a neighborhood hike by the side of the Toyohira river that flows invitingly just outside our hotel. Gogol flaunted his Japanese skills by saying "Konichiwa"(Hello) and "Ohayo"(Good morning) to early morning recreational anglers, mostly elderly men, and brisk-walkers, mostly elderly women. I later learnt that average Japanese men live till 78, and average Japanese women live till 86, and there are more than 30,000 centenarians in Japan. It is a country of healthy people.
By the time we were heading back to the hotel for breakfast, we spotted men and women streaming out on the streets on their way to work, on foot or on bicycles, most of them formally dressed. It was Monday morning. Though I have to tell you, the Sapporo morning scene was nothing like the sea of workforce that we witnessed in the later part of our trip in downtown Tokyo around the Shinjuku train station, that apparently serves more than 3 million people daily! We joked in Tokyo that it looked like a penguin colony, as the formal suits were primarily of binary colors--black and white. Formal dressing is almost ubiquitous in Japanese workplace irrespective of the kind of job that you do. Not surprisingly, we spotted countless tailoring shops and even ready-made formal clothing stores both in Sapporo and Tokyo.
Tourism spiced with social observation...
We didn't do any research regarding what to do before coming to Japan. The plan of not planning worked out beautifully, as we got to make random decisions, picking things-to-do from the many brochures stacked in the hotel lobby, and got to rejoice the outcome each day. Among the touristy things that we did in Sapporo, including hanging out in the Odori Park at the heart of the business district in Sapporo, shopping and dining in the Sasukino shopping district, and visiting the beautiful lush Botanical Gardens maintained by the Hokkaido University with a breathtaking rose garden and an enviable taxidermy collection, Gogol was the happiest visiting the Maruyama Zoo. The zoo was really impressive, as we got to see some Hokkaido natives, such as the Tundra wolves and flying squirrels. That Japan is a fairly conservative society was evident in the design of the rest areas inside the zoo. There were dedicated closed-door rooms for the nursing mothers in the rest areas, and the doors of the nursing roosm and the ladies' bathrooms reached down to the floor to seal the users' modesty. Gogol rightly pointed out that the zoo was the only place where he saw of lot of children. The famously declining birth rate in Japan is acutely visible everywhere (see this article). The national statistics of an average of 1.2 child/couple has a lot to do with Japanese women choosing to marry and bear children later than ever in favor of enjoying a rewarding career. It almost became my hobby in Japan to study the body languages of working women to have an idea of how powerful and comfortable they seem to feel. As expected, the Tokyo women looked a lot more confident. But in a smaller city like Sapporo, which I believe gave us a truer glimpse to the overall socio-economic reality of Japan, the one or two women who looked like they were enjoying a power dinner with their male colleagues, did stand out among the plethora of women who were just 'playing their part' in looking attractive in fashionable clothes, and/or performing efficiently in the routine sorts of work, relatively speaking. However, I have to add that I strongly felt that, just like Indian women, Japanese women are going through the coming-of-age phase, taking strong strides towards playing meatier roles outside of home.
Doing touristy things in Sapporo also included visiting the famous Hokkaido Jingu in the Maruyama Koen. It is a Shinto shrine, where we got to witness the confluence of the more ancient nature-worshipping traditions of Shintoism with the relatively modern and perhaps a bit more ritualistic traditionas of Buddhism. You can write down your wish in a scroll, and tie it on a rope in front of the shrine. Gogol added his wish among the thousands of other wishes. His wish was to see his pet goldfishes healthy when he would get back to California after his vacation.
Serene Serendipity...
While walking back to the underground metro station from Maruyama Koen, we caught a glimpse of some very intriguing statues behind the criss-cross of the immediate foliage. We were too curious not to explore what was there, and it turned out to be the most precious serendipitous discovery of our entire Japan trip. We found an uphill trail that led to the top of Mount Maruyama. The trail itself was not that arduous, but what gave us goosebumps were the numerous statues of Lord Buddha sprinkled in the virgin wilderness lining the trail, each of the statues different from the others, showcasing the vivid imaginations of the worshipper-sculptors. The statues were not sophisticated works of art, barring a few. But the most remarkable thing that we noticed was that all of them had at least a piece of ritualistic cloth, looking like a baby's bib, covering the torso area, which is kind of surprising, because we are used to seeing mostly bare-bodied Bodhisattwa statues. I later read that the statues are of Kannon Bodhisattwa, who is sometimes considered a female incarnation among some Buddhists in Japan. Hence, the urge to cover the torso of the statues, I guess. I remembered that we used to periodically visit the Asian-art-focused Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian museums when we used to live in Washington, DC. Seeing the statues in their original setting, rather than in a museum, made me feel as if I was riding an organic time tide that was transporting me to the ancient times. I thought anything additional to this experience would be a bonus--I was already bathing in the much-sought sense of wonder that brought us to Japan in the first place.
Megapolis...
As intriguing as Sapporo was, Tokyo did impress us with its own brand of charm. I have seen some huge metropolises, but Tokyo screams Megapolis! Yes, the greenery was missing, but there was some harmonizing design symmetry visually palpable in the city that made even an asphalt jungle looked pretty, despite its enormous size (here's a link to Bikash's Tokyo photo album). I guess the city was largely rebuild after the world war II with a very careful vision of how it should look like when it rises again. The measured architectural aesthetics of the hotel lobby itself (we stayed at the Hilton at Shinjuku) drew us in. Again, the hotel attendants were bowing down left and right, but by this time, we were relatively used to that gesture. The view from our hotel window on the 23rd floor compensated for the meticulously furnished but undeniably compact floorspace of the room. Finally in Tokyo, Gogol had access to multiple cartoon channels, but he chose to hang out at the window sill, and when Gogol was asleep, I saw Bikash setting up his tripod by the side of the window to capture the city's night glory. The lady in the family was too happy to see the guys in the family being smitten by the city, forgetting all about their respective electronic addictions.
The Mountain and the Valley...
On our second day in Tokyo, we decided to head out to Mount Fuji and Hakone on a conducted bus tour. We had the most entertaining tour guide, who I should thank for many of the demographic and geographic statistics that I have sprinkled throughout this blog (so, if he was wrong, I am wrong too). Mount Fuji is 12,388 feet high at its summit. Our bus took us up to the fifth station (at a height of 7,500 feet) en route to the summit, where the paved road ends. We were literally walking through the rain cloud when we got down from the bus to walk up to the rest station. I felt so nostalgic, thinking about our trip to Kedarnath (in the Himalayas) back in 1992, where we did a 14 kilometer hike on foot through rain and shine with my parents and my siblings. I ended up buying a bunch of picture post cards, and wrote a little note to my parents on one of them. It was the pen-and-paper version of my private 'tweet'...didn't matter even if my parents didn't get to see it instantaneously. The tour guide said there is a post office at the summit of Mount Fuji, which is still operational. Would have been nice to post my post card from there, I guess. But this time, we had to be satisfied with just the view of the summit, and perhaps with a dream of coming back to scale all the way up sometime in future.
Next stop was Hakone, the famous historic town nestled in the volcanically active Fuji-Hakone-Izu national park. It was still raining hard. But the rain endowed Hakone with such an out-of-this-world emerald hue that I forgot I usually don't like rain that much. We had a nice lunch at Hakone, and then went on to ride hanging cable cars (they are also called 'ropeway' in Japan, just like in India) across the mountains to go to Lake Ashi at the center of the Hakone valley. The cable car ride was interesting not only for the views that it offered from the elevation, but also for the co-passengers that we got to share the ride with. We met an American-Mexican couple (the husband lives in Mexico, and the wife in Arizona), who were vacationing in Japan. They said they spend most of their together time vacationing outside of either America or Mexico before they can sort out the immigration thing.
A dragon-shaped boat ride on Lake Ashi was the last activity of the day, before we went back to the tour bus. In a brilliant stroke of tourism-business-wisdom, our conducted tour gave us the option of going back to Tokyo in the bus, or taking the bullet train ("Shinkansen") from Odawara station to Tokyo. The train ride came at additional cost and inconvenience, as we had to arrange our own transportation from the train station to our hotel, while the return journey by the bus was at no additional cost, and included door-to-door service. It was raining pretty hard. On a regular day, opting for the train would have made no sense. But when you are in Japan, you can't go back without stepping into the Shinkansen. So we took the train, and finally reached our hotel exhausted and drenched. But what is travel if you do not do a few crazy touristy things! That was our last night in Japan. We topped off the night with a fantastic traditional dinner at an authentic Japanese restaurant. Let me tell you, if you thought Sushi is the staple food in Japan, then you will be in for a surprise, when you actually visit Japan. It might be a small country, but it sure knows what variety is..in food, and in everything else.
On our way back, while admiring the intricate Origami art collection at the Tokyo airport, I kept thinking that, Japan, with its abundant beauty and complex culture, has sure whetted our appetite for more trips to the Orient.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
My life is time-shifted. And DVR is the greatest thing since sliced bread. For someone who is more interested in explaining the physics b...
-
“Don’t mess with Texas.” We spotted the road sign right after our car crossed the New Mexico border and entered Texas near El Paso. We sti...
-
When three different people, who are not related to each other, independently use the same word--"Overachiever"--in a span of five...
