The tree with the tresses is the bhaine tree. They make sendhi with it, which is a crude, intoxicant drink. Some nights ago, my son taught me to hold his one-kilometer-beam torch with its base to my forehead, like a miner's lamp, and look into the plantation. Quite soon, I caught a pair of gleaming green eyes from the bhaine—scared eyes, it seemed to me, eyes searching my intentions. The eyes of a dark creature like a bandicoot; it began to slither down the tree, its eyes on the torch on my brow. Then another came after it, and another, and another. Bandicoots up a tree? A crowd of them? Turned out they were civets. During the day you see their excrement on the tracks in the plantation, which you can tell is theirs because they are full of coffee beans. The beans are special when they are processed like this in the civet's bowels, and fetch a goodly sum in foreign markets. Civet coffee sells for the price of wine in gourmet cafés, starting at $30 a cup!

Hard-working Basavanna owns a model plantation neighboring ours, and another some ten kilometers away. He is a religious man gifted with abundant self-belief, which shows in the manner in which he runs his plantation. He listens to no one, and is impatient when one doesn't listen to him. No matter. The proof of his attitude is in the rich green of the leaves of his coffee, the heavy coffee-filled arms of his plants, and the yield he extracts for each acre of his—said to be the highest in our area. For over three years now, Basavanna also manages our plantation for us, on condition that we give him no instruction, ask him for no plan. We have no complaints, are just happy when he calls on us with an always-friendly half-namaste, pressing a palm to the chest, and other greetings and questions regarding our well being.

This is a new model that is working well in Malnad, with planters taking on the management of the holdings of absentee owners from Bangalore who have bought the plantation, some for the love of nature, some for a an exotic alternate location where to enjoy drink and spicy chicken.

Mornings are lovely anywhere in the world, but here on the plantation I have a greater urge to rise before dawn so as to wait for the sun's silver rim to take shape behind Parvathammana Betta, high in the distance. Goddess Parvathi's hill. The temple to Parvathi is tiny and white, and is often lost in cloud. When the sky is clear the shrine is a striking white on the hilltop, which is covered in green trees and the gray and brown of stone. The locals have been telling us the elephants that torment them walk through their plantations and climb Parvathamma's hill and then they cannot climb down. The elephants stand stranded there, until they find courage and take first steps downward. In the morning and in the evening we hear the neighboring planters setting off explosions (dadakees, which are bigger, louder patakees) in their estates to scare off the elephants. The more you scare them, the more uncertain their path. You just listen when the planters tell of their woes with the elephant. It sounds preachy to talk of the loss of the pachyderm's habitat, to ask for a concerted effort to provide it a safe corridor. If you are worried for nature, you should only begin the work for it.

It is four years since we have had our plantation, and I still haven't gone up that hill. We have planned to go there next week. I hope to experience something that I can write for you. Let me see.

I spent the weekend in Malnad. On Saturday I rose a little before dawn and stood by the floor-to-ceiling window and looked up at the pulsing stars. Dark figures of silver oak loomed before me, their tops level with my eyes. At their feet the coffee were huddled and hunched over like ten-thousand bears.

It was that moment in the morning when the night animals had called it a day, and the other animals were snoozing. There wasn't a sound, except for a solitary fellow whose sound came from everywhere—a cousin of the cicada, to tell from his voice—who cried out to all with the fervor of a revolutionary: “rise, rise, rise, rise.” But the ears of all were deaf to him. They hear him too much, and all the time.

I stepped out from the room and went out the bungalow, toward two lights that were on at the labor-line in the distance—yellow lights diffused on muddy white walls. I stood by the one that lit the cowshed. Ganga the cow returned my gaze from where she lay, and, of her two calves, one stood at the edge of the shed and looked out into the dark of the plantation, and the other lay slouched in the inner dark of the shed. They were brooding as always, but more intensely now. The question that hung frozen in the chill air was: will the effects of the economic boom trickle down also to these cattle? Within the remaining lifetime of the cow? Before these calves have grown? Or would they live always like this, as now in this cold, like drudges from the pages of the great Russian books?

While I took pictures of them my ankles and my shin twitched, revealing my constant fear that a snake might rise up on the ground and have a go at me. I've never been afraid when I have encountered the snake; each time, I’ve been stunned into a cold fascination, and I have gazed at them, admiring their bright and brilliant reticulations. But there is ever the fear of how the next snake might present itself. And I have a horror of their hiss—even if no snake has hissed at me until now.

A short while later, I crouched by the plantation's lake, keeping a fearful distance from the hedge, feeling foolish about still worrying about the reptile, worrying that one could be lurking in the green thicket, ready to lunge at me. There was a fast-moving smoky mist over the water, but the mist sailed away by the time I set the controls on my camera. Then the sun reached in and twisted his long yellow hand upon the lake, and there was no more even the memory of a mist.

Over at the edge of the plantation, where the earth had been dug for new coffee, frost had gathered on the webs which the spiders had woven flat on the ground in the gaps between . They glittered in the morning light, and they were dozens and dozens of them: small flat webs like mirrors, scattered on the ground. The worms and insects had stayed clear of them, so the frost seemed to have foiled the scheme of the spiders.

Seeing the spiders I remembered the birds. Are there worms that are evolved, which start out late and outwit the early bird?

The birds had been such noisy busybodies in the morning, but had now fallen silent, and most had flown away to hunt elsewhere. Tiny yellow butterflies played at my feet over the grass. I urged them to go find the flowers, but they ignored me to my face. A lone gray butterfly crashed into my blue jeans and suffered a moment's disorientation before it recovered and fluttered about, not leaving my leg by too much. All life was fair game for a meal in the morning, except me, it appeared, but none seemed perturbed by their circumstance.

I hurried toward the bungalow, suddenly hungry for the “medium-spicy” vegetarian breakfast that my wife would be waiting with. I sucked air with each spoon of the uppittu—so hot it was. “Did you see the turtles?” my wife asked me when I described to her how the mist had swayed as it sailed away upon the lake. I didn't have the courage to tell her—she was born in the coffee belt—that I'd been too absorbed in watching out for snakes in the grass at my feet.

The lake at Nandi Thota

The Raffles Institution shows off its produce. This picture I have borrowed without permission.

It occurred to me that if I view our current affairs like I would a movie, then I'd be entertained by these happenings around me, which would otherwise pull me down into depression.

Kumaraswamy helped Sreeramulu win by not fielding a JD(S) candidate. After his victory Sreeramulu is throwing glances at the JD(U) in Karnataka, agreeing with them that he can revive and reinvigorate their party, and we can guess that if he cannot own the whole of that party, then he'd surely purchase all its strings. He has asked to speak to Nitish Kumar on the subject. If Sreeramulu should join the JD (U), and if Kumaraswamy should stay on in support of Sreeramulu, you'd have three men in a centrifuge bed, which when it stops its flight will send the three men flying. Who will bite the dust? Who will land on his feet? The good? The bad? The ugly?

No, the vision of that doesn't lift my spirits.

I need also to deal with the bad press regarding this superpower that has stalled, having to read of it daily, when it is already hurtful enough to experience the tugging from the slowdown. But I've begun to take it rather well, and, in fact, I was thinking only two days ago why economies should grow so much, and if all the developed and developing nations and their alpha achievers shouldn't cool down a bit. No, please don't laugh at me.

I read a report in the papers that our billionaires are “sick and tired” of our leaden government and are shifting base to London or Singapore. I've been thinking ahead of these rich men, pondering that I should do just the same, and I’m annoyed that billionaires stamp their large feet everywhere, including on the plans of others. The papers seem to sympathize with them, but I ask, of what sort is the businessman who will flee his country when it encounters its first potholes on its growth path? Fair weather friend? Does it matter no more where he made his first billions? Ah, let's both laugh at my naïveté, dear reader.

Let me admit it, I have to beat down at least thrice daily the urge to leave this place. Many times during the day the faces of the probables who'll be chief minister flash in my mind—and I shudder at them. Why don’t a few good men and women who came into business in the last decade enter also into politics? At least a few like Mitt Romney in America, said to be worth $200 million, who is fighting among Republicans for the chance to take on Obama? Romney is willingly having his outward existence and all his innards clawed at by the American media, and the media has also examined his height and weight and gait and demeanor to know whether they're each one of a presidential standard. The man is standing tall through it all, even if a little naked.

I have in hand a piece by an English High Master who rues that Britons shy now from having Eton create prime ministers for their nation, for that great institution is considered elitist, but which was Eton's clear task in its historic past. Look at Singapore, the educationist points to the old colony, look at the Raffles Institution, and see how they are working to produce their next prime minister, and the other terrific leaders Singapore needs for its unfaltering forward march. I envy the high master his worry. Our worries here at home are somewhat short of that class.

In December and January I will not leave Bangalore, for I cannot have enough of this gentle chill in a cocktail with the warm sun, capped by this clean blue sky. The dreariness of the daily commute is somewhat muted, and sitting in the back seat of my car I can laugh at the traffic than rage at it, with music in my ears, which this week has been Metallica and Neil Young and Feist.

And so my thoughts regarding the new posters that are splashed on my path to work are more charitable than they'd have been in another month. Sreeramulu is again elected, and his victory is not a matter of who won, but what won. With him, several things have won again, and the things that are defeated are beaten to near-burial. But I am far from Bellary, and those who elected him took what he gave and gave what he wanted, and they are at peace with each other, and these thoughts of someone like me, for whom politics is no more than a piece for conversation, are a bitching waste of time.

Thinking so, on a morning this week, I decided to join the posters, and welcome with them the triumphant hon'ble re-elected Member of the Legislature to Bangalore. And I quickly realized that this man from Bellary owns Bangalore significantly more than I, and I can no more welcome him than he can tolerate me and the category of the electorate I belong to. So now I see the posters in respectful silence, and I am not at all peeved at myself, or at the world, thanks to this lovely December.

The don's den

With such thoughts regarding the state and strongmen, I watched The Godfather today, Saturday, for the third time in my life. The Godfather died outside in the sun, while playing with his grandson, and with his death Michael was free to take the revenge the Godfather had in a brilliant move put on pause, having pledged with enemy dons that he wouldn't be the first seeker of vengeance. Until the end, in every meeting in his dark study Don Corleone had shown no love for the drugs business, each time he was offered it, whereas he held out a whole lot of love for his family and, among them, the most partial love for Michael. I was moved and inspired by the Godfather, and when he danced with his daughter at her wedding I envied him even, for Don Corleone was so much a man, and such a father, and such a don, and he was so noble in the way he moved and spoke and danced, and in the way he gestured to people with his hands.

How is life in the inner coterie of the Bellary brothers? How moving a movie would their life make? But the brothers aren't the silent type like Corleone, if you consider the shouting they've done in the legislature, and the gross abuses they've traded on the floor of the house. They cannot have a Brando or an Al Pacino playing any of them, even in an Anglicized version. Still, I wonder, how deep does a meeting get in the study of Janardhana Reddy? Would it move my heart, watching the play of long loyalties and the alleged honor among men in his business? Would I draw inspiration from some part of it?

Such wild thoughts! But they say that it is normal for the mind to be choppy on a day like this, when the moon is in eclipse.

End note

On the street before my house, the magnolia are falling. They were a flaming red in November, thick in a canopy over their tree. Now when I step out for a stroll at night they squelch beneath my feet and pull at my soles, like they want me on the ground with them. After I pass the tree the fragrance from my neighbor's sampigé is so sharp, I look to see the smell that has hit my nose. Every day.

The moon has been out and about all week.

SOTA: The School of the Arts, Singapore

I've been walking ten days in the grid Singapore calls its Art & Heritage District.

Just before the start of the district, in the National Museum, they have paintings of nineteenth century masters on loan from Musee D’Orsay, and they will be on show there until February. I went there two days, and during the second visit I joined the guided tour, conducted that day by (I think) a French Lady. An erudite lady. Her manner was to settle on one hip to make one point and to sink into the other hip for the next point, while on her face crinkles shifted most becomingly for smiles and frowns. "I’ll keep van Gogh for the last," she said. Starry Night, with wild stars painted thick on a wild painting, right off the tube. And Cezanne, and Monet, and Rousseau. She told us the simpler things regarding the paintings, to accommodate art-illiterates such as me. But, of course, even one like me wants to know more when they encounter something like The Card Players, for even I could tell that I should search for more in the painting than two eyes can read. The exhibition closes February 2012, and I'm hoping to be back there before then, for another look at that Cezanne.

At the end of the displays, in a makeshift room before the exit, little masters imitated great works using prints of them, under the quiet watch of parents. It was a black room with small, sharp lights over rows of lamp-shades, designed for quiet and concentration, and it all seemed a very good idea, though some parents held out a grim visage while their wards worked.

Across from the Museum, before the corner where Orchard Road ends and Bras Basah Road begins, there stands the high SOTA (The School of the Arts of Singapore) with a vertical garden all round its upper walls, clinging like ivy. (Forgive me, but why does that nice building seem in my memory like a toad set to leap?) Down Bras Basah Road, from Queen Street to Waterloo Street, is the Singapore Art Museum, where this week they had colored elephants in front, in participation with the Elephant Parade, an effort to conserve the Asian Elephant.

Back of these institutions, on Waterloo Street and Queen Street and Victoria Street and also on Bencoolen Street there are other large and small art schools and galleries. Sculpture Square, a small gallery that promotes sculpture on the corner where Waterloo Street hits Middle Road is shaped like a small chapel. The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts on Bencoolen shows off on its front the pictures of its alumni who are now celebrity. And, in the midst of them all, in the unimpressive Bras Basah complex, you see stacks of easels leaned on every storefront, and you can get there the Copic pen which is said to be “available only in America.” It is an old complex; it has been dealing in arts supplies a long time.

What I didn't see is graffitti like you see on European walls—Singapore will not allow them, of course. Can great art come from a city that allows no graffitti, that unguided, unsponsored, rebellious outpouring?

Is art in Singapore like in Paris and New York? Do Singaporean artists starve and struggle in garrets, driven and mad from seeing visions that none before them have seen? Such people were not discernible on the streets in the Art & Heritage District, where everybody seemed well fed—may God bless them. But I saw that more thrives in Singapore than merely the business of commerce—even the Singapore Management University only just concluded a long SMU Season of Arts (August to November).

I returned to Bangalore Monday and am still lovesick for Singapore, and I've a newspaper in hand that has news that proves I'm not to blame: Mercer have just declared Singapore the best Asian city to live in. They've also declared Bangalore the best Indian city to live in, but that bit doesn't move me at all.

See: some more pictures.

This post also appeared on Lonely Planet: Blogs we like

Older posts by me on Singapore

The view from the courts, Bangalore

I had to accompany a lady to the criminal courts recently. She is close to me, and is the wronged party in an incident that happened twenty years ago. A man forged her signature on a document and took a bank loan on its strength and didn't pay back his fraudulent debt. The bank approached her and it was quickly established that they had been duped and the culprit's guilt in the matter was recorded and the lady put the man out of her mind and went on with her life and work and, last month, an officer from the COD knocked on her door and asked her to present herself as a witness in the courts. She is a self-assured lady, but she was shaken a little at having to remember the events of so long ago. I thought I should go with her, though she was her usual confident self when the day arrived for her to appear in court.

The man who committed the crime was alone—tall guy, in white salwaar and a yellow kameez with gold-colored bead-buttons. And brushed-back fair hair. His eyes were placid, always looking ahead, not seeming to see anything. He walked about, scuffing the concrete floor, taking support from a wooden cane, clutching tight its curved handle. He could have been a retired professor, a former civil servant, or a businessman who has transferred his business to inheritors. He could've been any kind of successful man, such was his demeanor, such was his carriage, such were the lines on his clean fair face. He became aware of my watching him after a long while, and thereafter our eyes met and turned every few minutes.

His crime is petty by today's standards. The loan he had deceitfully taken, and defaulted upon, was some six lac rupees. He seemed to have settled the account in his mind long ago, and appeared to be at peace with the sum of his past deeds. My fears were for the lady. What mischief might the defendent's lawyer spring on her, so as to free his client? Indeed, his questions were as frightening as they sounded foolish: "Madam, you would have been signing so many papers daily. Might be you signed this one different?" He asked the question while knowing the court already had a forensic report confirming the forgery!

But the lawyer needed something, anything, to make himself worthwhile for his client. "Madam (maydum), did you sign to help my client, because you had taken pity on him?" But maydum hadn't seen the man until after his crime.

The courtroom was small. The hon'ble judge was a lady with a strict air on a girl's face. She sat on a dais, there was a second chair next to her for a clerk to type into a computer. After a time she asked about me. "He is not necessary," she announced, and I had to leave the room and stand outside and watch the man and my lady from outside, where I stood resting my back on the parapet. My lady had received the old files from the COD, which she leafed through rapidly, and by now the old man was seated right next to her, casting casual glances at the papers in the times the lady halted from leafing to read what she had found. The man had no paper in hand, his lawyer had merged with other people in the courtroom, and the public prosecutor, my lady's support, was flitting between adjacent courts, fulfilling parallel tasks.

It was a busy court. Even as our issue was in session, a posse came clanging into the corridor, two men in chains bound to four men in khakhi. The men were unchained and the cops dropped the metal in a heap right by me. One of the men, a lean swarthy chap with inquiring eyes and restless limbs, lounged next to me. "What is your case?" I asked him after a while. "Letter of credit," he said, taken aback at being asked, at being spoken to at all. And the manner of his answer signaled loud and clear that he wanted no more questions. Letter of credit? I was just as astonished, because the man didn't even appear literate.

My lady emerged triumphant after an hour, and told me I could leave if I wished, because she would have to wait a while to sign the proceedings. All had gone well. She was laughing about the defendent's lawyer. "He says he will note that I signed the papers to favor the man's brother!" That brother was a senior civil servant at the time of the crime.

Today, for no reason but that I must be in touch with her, my wife and I will have dinner with the old lady. I am thinking about the man who has walked free for twenty years after his crime and will probably go to jail now. It is clear where the wrong lay then, but I am not at all sure if that wrong is still wrong after all the time that has passed, and if that frail old man should really go to prison now.

Work goes on at its own pace for the underground Metro, at the Cauvery Bhavan Road, Bangalore

The papers say the shopping was great this Diwali, but my eyes were on other news. A stray dog came on to the F1 track, which news came as-it-happened on the Straits Times feed via their iPhone app. Fans turned rowdy after a Metallica event was postponed at the moment when the performance should have begun, and the embarrassment trended at the the top on Twitter. I searched for Yeddiyurappa’s pulse in the papers but they were cool to him, and I thought, “it is okay, his matters are between him and his gods, and may God bless him.” In the meantime the papers confirmed that more ministers are being herded to the line that goes to jail. Their leader from Delhi—the valiant Advani—came to town, undeterred by a bomb in his path and the deeds of his best men in his “gateway to the south.”

A debate raged regarding a post by an Indian software engineer which appeared in the New York Times. It is a touching account on why he quit India a second time, and this time for good. It is a well-written piece and though it seems a justification for a decision that is personal, it has stoked vigorous debate and, with a follow-on post from the author, some drama as well. "While I wait," he says in the title to his second post, choosing to take seriously some Indian who has said he will hunt him down.

I am not done arranging my thoughts regarding this, reflecting on some good NRI friends, and some (most) other NRIs who tend to lump every Indian who has stayed behind with the India mess. "Why don’t you…" is a prefix with which an NRI who is a senior executive with a multinational customer asks me questions when we meet twice a year and sit for dinner after work. He is not too different from other NRIs I bump into—on the plane, in a conference, in a hotel somewhere, in India, abroad. Why don't I stop Indian corruption? Why don't I build roads and ports and buy more planes? Why can't I remove the beggars at the stoplights? Why can't I be tough like the Chinese in Indian policy making? How can I be so callous regarding Indian food shortages? And this raging inflation? Why can't I install a better Prime Minister? Chief Minister? Any minister?

Once, while some folks were opposing the hosting of the Miss World competition at the Windsor Manor Hotel in Bangalore, I was stranded with an NRI at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. I was young then. Maybe I would have liked to see those women; I don't know. But the NRI had a question for me on the subject: “Why do you want to stop that show? Can’t you see how you are damaging the reputation of India?" I searched his face; the man was sincere. I still haven't an answer for him.

How much effort does it take a man, me included, to move his life from anywhere in the world to the United States? To Australia? To England? To Singapore? What does it take to live in India and take the blows? To accept the challenge to contribute here? Can I lecture an NRI? Should the NRI lecture me?

I apologize, dear reader. I have digressed from that nice post by that software engineer. Please go there. While there, please see how in the logo of India Ink the folks at the New York Times have solved the Kashmir problem with one blot of ink. Which a million guns couldn't do!

BBC: Why I came 'home' to India

The store attendant’s manner roused a suspicion in me that bore itself out ten streets south. It was an inexpensive bag I’d bought from him, to stow some books and papers and the barnacles that travel attracts. The fasteners on it were all male—which liberal spirit is unacceptable in a bag and I walked back the distance ignoring the stoplights and cursing tourists and New Yorkers who walked into me, even with their eyes on me. When I opened the door the attendant wasn’t surprised to see me back, and his smile was again so white and welcoming. The same day, at a camera store on 44th and 8th the attendant tried to sell me a battery and explained without knowledge why his battery in its tacky box was superior to Canon's. When I insisted for the real thing he bid me a very good day but communicated—through tone and inflection—the very opposite wish. I went out like I'd paid a lesser-than-twenty-per-cent tip in a restaurant. I walked into the dented streets and muddled pavements of the neat grid. I went to the Rockefeller Center, to the MoMA store there, and bought an Everyman's edition of New York poems. I'm reading the poems and between poems I'm reading Remnick's anthology of New York stories gathered from the New Yorker magazine. Over coffee and sparkling water at English Todd at The Intercontinental, I opened to Woody Allen’s The Whore of Mensa and laughed and lightened as I read it. Then I read In Greenwich, There Are Many Graveled Walks, and committed myself to reading all the stories in the big book—so I might better understand my fickle emotions for New York City.

I spent an afternoon walking in Greenwich Village. It was a gloomy windy afternoon and there were a couple of mild showers and I carried no umbrella. Mostly, I remember toy-dogs from the walk; even men were walking small dogs which they had dressed in barrel-shaped clothing against the chill. One dog peed on a plaque at the foot of a slender tree, a plaque for a Beverly Hill (1937–2007) who was, the plaque said, a “beloved community activist.” Beverly Hill would have been active when Greenwich Village fought off efforts to take it skyward on a grid-base as they had in the part of Manhattan north of 14th Street. The debate hasn't died, it rages in books as recently released as Glaeser's 2011 work, Triumph of the City. Long live the debate, I say, but, as I see it, it is a relief after a bit to come south in New York and see the sky and some short buildings, and curving roads on which they walk small dogs that pee on plaques for people who made all this possible. I checked now on the Internet regarding Beverly Hill. Her struggle was for the better treatment of dogs and cats.

Man and Boy, American Airlines Theater

I went to a play on Broadway that is set in 1934 in a basement apartment in Greenwich. Man and Boy, is its title, based on Terence Rattigan’s 1963 drama by the same name, and it is directed by Maria Aitken. The entire play happens in that dour apartment. I wondered in the beginning why I wasn’t getting into the play, and shortly Frank Langella came on stage and took hold of me, and the entire audience, and wiped all the other actors clean into his shadows. Large man, rich and powerful and Romanian, a genius and a fine speaker of English who, when he needed it, sifted words out loud and picked one that had the most dramatic effect and gave him total control of the moment. That was Gregor Antonescu , played by Frank Langella. We were in his thrall until the end; even the other performers were all in his sway. The play was only into its fourth day, and in spite of Frank Langella the house was not full. And the billboards in the corners and side-streets of the theater district were nowhere as many as those for Memphis or Billy Eliot or Jersey Boys.

On the next day, Broadway was busy when I crossed it, but it was under a deluge when I returned. The young people of the Occupy Wall Street movement had taken over the Theater District and the police were struggling to make way for indignant traffic. “Get up, get down, there’s a revolution in town,” the kids chanted. I loved them. I’ve joined revolutions in my time; my revolutions always brought me back to the beginning.

Because Indian food in foreign places sits heavy in my belly, and because I can't stomach cheese which is as salt in Italian cuisine, and also being terribly vegetarian, I seek Chinese when I travel, and I came by a modest joint on 40th near Broadway. "No tip", it said on a dozen sheets pinned to the walls and on the front door and all over the glass facade. The food was all right, about as good as an inexpensive dinner can be, but it was a relief regarding the tip. I've been asking why the Americans, in their wisdom, cannot make a flat rate for a tip and make it mandatory across the nation. It seems now that it might happen, I saw it on television in La Guardia. Waiters have organized themselves last week and demanded a mandatory 25% tip to be added to the bill, and they argue that their claim is justified in the slowed economy. Ah, well. America will always challenge me in its restaurants.

Some pictures

Midweek last week I arrived here in the US, and now after a week I'm tuned in to the many accents of this great, indivisible country, after some initial struggle first in San Diego, then in Houston, and on the first day here in New York City.

In San Diego I attended a symposium in a resort by the ocean, and while we listened to the speeches made before us, we heard also the sounds of men and women playing beach volleyball behind us, down below on the outside. A child could be heard crying while the boss-customer delivered a grave message regarding the short time schedules for new projects to discuss which, we, the suppliers, had been summoned—no excuses were permissible for slippages. We could tell by now that the child on the beach had clearly failed at something in the sand and was blaming all the world for it. I anticipated correctly that the two-day symposium would wind down ahead of schedule: There was a tempting abundance of sunshine outside, and the proceedings were declared closed two hours ahead of the time published on the agenda. It was Friday, moreover. The declaration of that intent was accepted in pleased silence by all.

For me, they suggested that I try La Jolla, 4 miles away. I thought to walk but they said no, I must go there by car and once there I could walk about the place as much as I could bear. "Go North on Mission Blvd, take La Jolla Blvd at the first fork, get off at Prospect Street." Once there I walked down, drawn by the ocean, walked down to the even lawns of the Coast Boulevard Park, and crossed the grass to the narrow cement promenade, where I leaned on the metal barricade and lost myself watching the restless bobbing waters below, which were peaceful in the distance, and consumed by a haze on the horizon. A pair of birds flew across, their beak the length of their body, flying straight and without apparent purpose, their leisure matching that of folks on ground. The birds were a handsome couple, and flew with the confident airs of good-looking people.

I am remembering La Jolla in my hotel room in NYC, having returned from a long jaunt on 42nd Street. Rain was forecast and it didn't come, and Manhattan was noisy with happy tourists—and locals rushing home. But of course, it is always noisy in midtown and lower Manhattan.

Back there in La Jolla, when darkness fell, the electric lights that came on were subdued, varied lights of various colors, with room also for the plain white light from the moon above. Subdued also was the noise of slow traffic regulating itself in the absence of stoplights. I walked on the streets that led out of and back into Prospect Street, savoring the silence, marveling at how the more affluent a place gets, the quiter it becomes.

Such is how I felt there in La Jolla in San Diego. In New York, I'm searching for the silence and the rarefied air of wealthier people in an even richer city. I've not found them; the tourists are tripping me up on every street.

Click through to the Amazon site

Big people are saying that the unimpeded march of the iPad is finally met by able competition. “The march has met its match,” they assure. I’ve been cheering the progress of all things Apple, and only Apple, but this pause in a major Apple affair has warmed me. May the best tablet win, and may the winner match my measure, too.

A few weeks ago I put my 13” Air on the shelf and began to cuddle up with the petite 11”, the custom model. She is said to be slower than my last love, but she doesn’t show it. She should have some less resolution but I can’t see it—the infallible ingredient of the perfect affair, the blindness of true love. Our embrace is yet unbroken, and my ardor exceeds my expectations of my 52-year-old self. In this state of affairs, not merely is my 13” jilted; uncared for and untouched hours sometimes is my iPad 2, who stands pouting in the dark inside my bag. She doesn’t deserve this: There is none yet to beat her allure, and there is not one on whom my magazines show as they do as they unfurl on her: The Economist; Time; NY Times; Esquire; and, most of all, Popular Science. Sometimes I ask her to wear a surprise, like the Lufthansa in-flight magazine, and in the last two issues there burst forth from her the colors of Patagonia and the bubble of Buenos Aires. How she sizzled!

But, alas! I cannot read a book on the beauty, and I cannot write for long on her. The feast of her colors and her blinding radiance mean that we engage in intense spells that are not so long as a book demands, or the time you usually give to tap and re-tap and tap again 500 words that satisfy you. No, a book and a long joust of writing ask for a companion who is gray, sober. For me, writing happens on the 11”, and I read books on the somewhat stout Kindle, who, when not in my hands, leans on the taller iPad in my bag.

I should be happy with my small harem, but my eye hasn’t stopped roving, and it is caught now by the brand new Kindle Fire. Are the big people right? Could she be the one? The one love who is more than my last and all my lost loves? Can I enjoy Outlook India, the short office document, and also War & Peace and Crime & Punishment on her? And, O yes, how good is the surfing experience?

I cannot tell for some time. I have been an ardent Apple fellow, but Apple’s favors come slow to India. And Amazon’s Kindle came to India after two models had been used and discarded in America. The Kindle Fire arrives November, first for America, and Amazon’s site does not say which model of her they will send here, and when. Until then, I will read of her with the promising name, and ask regarding her secrets, and steal looks of her in the hands of others, with some doubt and also with much hope, because even if she will eventually not stand up to the iPad she is certainly almost as photogenic. There have been times in my life, like in the days and nights of my youth, when I have been more than happy with just a picture.