a Bangalore beyond business-class

Caveau de la Huchette: Click through to the WSJ Magazine articleMany businesspersons will travel from India to Paris to seek opportunities for their products in things that fly, at the Paris Air Show. Many will combine business with the pleasure of hiking in Parisian streets. But last week I came upon an article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine (WSJ Magazine), that points down, down below ground, to the tunnels and caverns and catacombs interwoven beneath Paris. Down there is adventure, to the degree of your choosing, and history as far back and as deep as you are willing to go. It is safe to wander there, the places being free even of rats, though an occasional wanderer has been foolish and has died there, but many more have died, of course, on streets above. Will I like it there? I'll find out, beginning safely with the jazz in Caveau de la Huchette.

They have a fine mayor in Paris, they say, and the man is in office since 2001 and his current term lasts until 2014. He is more popular than even the president, but they say that popularity over Mr. Sarkozy isn't much to trumpet to your town. The mayor of Paris brings also to my mind the mayors of New York City, Giuliani specially, and the Daleys of Chicago, and Hazel Williams, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, whom I saw last year in Liverpool when I went to watch a memorial service for Lennon. When she rose to speak Liverpudlians gave her a genuine applause, and a fond shrill whistle. I'd been walking the town the last two days and I'd seen enough to know that she deserved all praises. But her term isn't long like the terms of Daley of Chicago, or of Bertrand Delanö of Paris. Hers is a short one-year term, like that of the mayor of Bangalore.

Bertrand Delanö, Mayor of ParisExpectations are low of the earthy lady who sits in the mayor's chair in Bangalore. She has been a month on it, and in eleven months, by the time she has read the mayor's job profile, she'd be gone with her term ended. Expectations are low because she hasn't been much to school, and Bangalore, it is argued, is now home to the world's top professionals. The interviews with her are in that tone. Do you know the problems facing Bangalore? She knows, of course. Garbage, street dog menace, water supply, she has said. That has made me happy, but is it very difficult to address the first two at least? Isn't a single diktat and a tough follow-through enough to clean a city and dispatch the dogs? Can it not be expedited in three months or less?

What about the larger issues? Of people pouring into the city daily, and the number of cars daily sold? Should we start building high? Have you considered the population of Bangalore in 2020? 2050? Have you imagined how the concentrations will be regrouped when the metros begin to run and the flyovers are all built? It was unregulated unbridled private enterprise that brought Bangalore to this height and this mess. That spirit hasn't waned and if you don't run in step with the entrepreneurs the gap between the lush private campuses and the systems that interconnect them will be starker still.

In the last week I read in the papers that the Municipal Corporation will not collect garbage from the areas where taxes are not paid. The news brought to mind a term Edward Glaeser uses in his 2011 book, Triumph of the City. He mentions externalities. An externality happens outside your neighborhood but still affects you. Garbage uncollected next door will bring disease also to you. Anyway, at the moment the Corporation isn't collecting garbage from anywhere. I learnt something new when I read the interview. A mafia is in control of the garbage removal business. And I wondered: using muscle is the core competence of our leadership. Can they not break a gnat of a garbage mafia? Then it hit me that I don't know where the mafia operates from. Is it operating from the inside?

We have some work to do before we go beyond merely the size of London or Paris or New York City. And it is work for us, the citizenry. If we want to be a city like those cities, can we be citizens like theirs? Can we throw up great leaders as they have? Shouldn't we start right now?

Paris, ho!

The Little Black Book of Paris

I've been active, but I have little to report. After a spell of vagabonding I am again going to work and am staying until late, and when I am home I am content to read a bit and sleep. Can I not make notes of the things I see on the street? Of the things that strike my senses? Well, I didn't write down that the traffic at nine last night was no less than the traffic in the morning, and we reached home nearly at eleven. Not also that I have a sore throat; that the days are chilly and they are also warm; and so wet the buildings are soaked and miserable behind plants that sport a snobbish afterglow having necked nightlong with the rain. The streets rock me, but not in the way the young mean it.

A friend once asked me why I don't write out of my experience in business. Ha! to him. And a blogger group is asking members—I am one—to campaign through blog posts for regulation of chlorine-use in water treatment. Anna Hazare will be in Bangalore for two days from today and I may go to hear him and watch the crowds tomorrow. I am not moved myself but I am grateful that the young are gung ho. Ho! to them.

I'm going to Paris mid-June, to attend the Paris Air Show. The travel will begin with dinner hosted by a customer in a place that needs guests to carry the customer's invitation-card along with ID. A new business acquaintance from Italy will introduce his board of directors so that we may consider a partnership. A French businessman who visited us today will give me dinner on a boat with his boss. He has offered to give me a helicopter ride to demonstrate the working of the night goggles in a chopper. I'm not tempted; machines depress me; but business is important; so I've accepted his invitation.

After business is done I will move to an ordinary hotel on rue Danton, near the big spots. I chose the hotel for the name of the street on which it stands. The weather should be good. I have ordered on Amazon for the Little Black Book of Paris, and for the Streetwise Paris Map, both to go loafing with me for three days from morning until very late. I'll carry also A Moveable Feast and my M9 LEICA with three lenses.

A Week in Manhattan

The Trump Tower backyard on Fifth Avenue

There is such human heat in Manhattan, which I sensed in the main in midtown this trip. There in midtown I walked several times to Times Square and savored the energy, some half from tourists, and more than half from New Yorkers. It is a heat that Manhattan keeps unto itself, and reaches the results of its enterprise to cities round the world. The boroughs round Manhattan are not touched by the action, though, or at least it so seemed to me in the glimpses I got in the night on arrival and on the afternoon of departure. So you may say that hot Manhattan hasn’t a halo; rather, it has a shadow round it that is severe—no umbra; no penumbra. It is all right. I shouldn’t say these things, not right after a splendid week walking the streets of Manhattan.

I needed to see right away the store of Apple Computer from Cupertino which has rooted its spiritual center below ground on 5th Avenue, at the SE corner of Central Park. Above ground stands a transparent cuboid with the bitten apple in its center, and it suggested to me another version of the holy Kaaba, one for geek believers, and in the working hours of the workweek the density of visitors in this Apple Store outnumber those in all other establishments in the place—save the theaters, but theaters fill up only during show time. I went in—down, actually—and because I needed nothing new to buy of Apple, I bought merely a sleeve for my iPhone 4 and watched customers unwrap their purchases like they were chocolate boxes and start them up with help from the young evangelists and evangelistas.

Not merely New Yorkers scorn traffic lights. Visitors learn in an hour the art of ignoring the red while keeping out of trouble. In New York, time is treasured as much by the native who has much to do, as by the tourist who has much to see, so they both tear about the streets and you hear the horn constantly, sometimes angry, sometimes anguished and, many times, murderous. Americans who visit us in India tell us no one uses the horn in the West like Indians do. But I should say the drivers in Manhattan are a serious second. It is all right. What is a society—as in a relationship—if there isn’t some rancor in it?

I heard it more than once between young Indian couples, man to wife once, woman to man another time, after dashing across a Manhattan street: “paagal hai kya tu?” Are you mad? And in the walk on 46th, from Sixth Avenue to the Fifth, I watched the jewelry stores get sleeker, until, by the time I reached the Fifth, the stores had gotten real swanky indeed. On the street I passed Jewish people in black with curls falling from their temples and I smiled at their language in which even endearments sound like arguments.

But people are mostly happy, even when it rains, and they are just as content getting wet as cozying up in cafes. And how people work the cameras in Manhattan! Almost all that digital weight would be on the Internet, and how the Info Highway would be sagging on account of it! In Times Square, for instance, people were taking in the ambience exclusively from the three-inch camera screen. Like the camera had taken the place of the pair of spectacles. In the middle of that square surrounded by the Hard Rock Cafe on one corner, Nasdaq on the corner across, and super-supersize hoardings, and a red staircase which looks like an open auditorium for a bandstand but wasn’t, and the ABC News office on which news streamed (unseen, unread) of the allegation against the IMF Chief, said to be committed in a hotel very near, and the ticket counters for the theaters—in the middle of all that stands unused and unvisited the Recruitment Office for the US Military. Who imagined that young people in this happy state of mind, here in Happysthan, would sight and walk into that booth and join the army and freeze and broil in Afghanistan? A lone guard stands there, big and strong and handsome and ignored among Americans who without exception revere their military.

Missing Saigon

Saigon's Nortre DameAll about town I was looking for a sense of bloody battles, for lingering spots of debauchery that lie with billeted troops, for a feel of tanks rolling in, for the American Consulate and for other terraces from where the superpower scrambled out of Saigon. In the War Remnants Museum, and in the Reunification Palace, I searched the faces of the (mostly young) Americans, looking for remorse on faces of people who weren’t even born when their nation was engaged in war there. Now, back home, I’m squirming like I’ve been a voyeur.

I went to the former house of the late Ambassador Henry Lodge and looked in the rooms for the air of brutal politics. Only four other visitors were in the building, which is now owned privately by a Vietnamese, who allows visitors to walk about the house as in a museum, and shows a short video on what the Vietnamese call the American War. The visitors were young Americans learning to cook Vietnamese style, making rolls this afternoon.

While watching the video my thoughts turned inward to a memory in black and white from when I was four and on my way to the kindergarten, when another kid only a little older than I—who was squatting beneath a tree cobbling a slipper—stopped me and asked me to go home because school is closed because a great man, the President of America, has been killed.

The war was ended by the activism of masses of unarmed, conscientious Americans, so, even if America lost, Americans won. In the War Remnants Museum, the American faces in which I searched for remorse were nevertheless somber. While on the ground the heart broke for the Vietnamese peasants and soldiers and the children and the aged, and the jungles defoliated by Agent Orange, the pictures on the walls on the upper floors broke the heart a second time, this time for the American kids—fresh-faced kids with the looks of Hollywood stars, doomed in trenches and watery terraces and alien jungles. They didn’t deserve the war as much as the Vietnamese didn’t, so how is one to estimate whose tragedy was the greater? Theirs who lost 58,000? Theirs who lost 3 million?

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Graham Greene’s Thomas Fowler says of the Notre Dame which terminates the Dong Khoi Street that it is hideous. I liked it, and sat at the Coffee Bean and watched it over a cappuccino. Some young men were shooting a lovely little lady who posed for them astride a scooter; I went over and took pictures of them all; they turned round and shot me. The next day they were shooting two girls, one in pink ao-dai, another in black western.

Photoshoot before Saigon's Nortre DameFrom the Cathedral the Dong Khoi street runs all the way to Saigon River. It is a shaded street, and must’ve been lovelier in its avatar as rue Catinat. Now it is taken by cafes and hotels and restaurants and art shops selling paintings depicting young Vietnamese women in ao-dai and the conical hats, in the fields, on bicycles, in rickshaws, and sometimes in gardens, enveloped by the autumnal foliage of temperate places, making leisure under conical hats. The favorite is of a lady in purple ao-dai alighting from a carriage onto cobblestones, in the moment the toe has touched the stone and the heel is still high—the picture was on every storefront.

From the window of Vietnam House, on rue Catinat, where I ate lunch, I could see the Lhuong Sen Hotel, which offered buffet lunch & breakfast, sauna, jacuzzi, pool, and, of course, foot massage and body massage. So much on offer, and yet none went in, and none came out, at any time I looked in the pauses between courses, all the three days I ate there.

A short walk from there, the Ben Thanh Market was desolate also, but for a very few, white people pinching cloth and rolling beads on strings hung on stall-fronts. It is a clean market, also where they sell fish, where as I watched a lady washing fish in a tub also thoroughly rinsed her face in it. The main aisle is wide and attractive, where they sell nuts and such, and further on, the sideways are so narrow the clothing on one side brush the dresses on the other and walking through them is as going through a car wash, a dry wash in this case.

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A cool place to rest the feet after a walk in the 34-degree sun was Gustave Eiffel’s Post Office, on one of the curved benches at the entrance, exchanging looks with a clear complexioned Ho Chi Minh sporting a face beaten neither by weather, nor by war—just kind, and friendly, and good looking. The hall is pleasing. Even if people flowed constantly it wasn’t crowded. Slender steel columns are topped by gilt capitals on either side of the hall. Green arches connect the capitals broadside, an arch for every counter, and the vaulted ceiling rises from another set of gilt stucco bases rising from the capitals.

It was even cooler over drinks on the nineteenth floor, the Club Floor, of my hotel. The sun was an orange and yellow splash on the Saigon River, whose skin was wrinkled and unmoving. The Prudential Building was tall and proud on the left, and the Park Hotel was very tall also, on the right, at about the spot where, in the film Indochine, a nice Citroen dealership showed briefly behind Catherine Deneuve when she crossed the street to the Continental. Down below, about the foot of the hotel, the tiled tops of colonial buildings were squat among lawns that looked like neat green mats.

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Gustave Eiffel's GPO in SaigonI’m home now, reclining this moment on my couch with Vietnam for the connoisseur and National Geographic’s Vietnam and Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, upset with myself for having returned seeing so little of an exciting place.