Bean me up!

-Within the first five minutes of my auto voyage into Bangalore, as a settler, I was stalled at an endless traffic jam. The driver of the car beside me took out a tiffin box and shoveled spoonfuls of upma into his mouth. An over-full drain relentlessly spilled out its contents on the other side of the road
-Ten hours later,I went out into the market to get myself the essential settler’s kit of mattress-bucket-mug-pillow. I thought I would be the only one looking for stuff like that…I spotted at least five more. Every day I spot at least one person on the street with a tub/bucket/mattress

-My home is right next to a mall. It takes me five minutes to cross the 10 m wide road
over to the mall (any given day, any given time)

-You can find Harry Potter, The World is Flat and The Google Story with every road side vendor selling pirated literature

-You pay 10 months advance on your house-rent, no matter what the degree of resemblance the apartment might share with a rat-hole

-The probability of you spotting a ‘pirated DVD” platform vendor is one ( anywhere you go)

-In Bangalore you have 15 options for Italian food, 5 for Greek, 10 for “Mediterranean”…Plus some 20 for “Boutique”, 10 for “Fusion”…

-Many auto drivers are of the prototype “the Lone Ranger”- they would rather explore this wide world on their own. Some are enlightened-many self-actualized

-Everyone knows what a Sangria is and also where the next party (serving free flavored vodka shots to the women) is happening

-The first time I visited Bangalore alone I was in love. That was almost ten years ago

Death of a Salesman

Revisiting works I read as an adolescent seems to be taking up most of my 'book time' these days, but the returns are always rewarding.
When I first read the play I must have been 18...I found it very sad and I couldn't stop wondering why someone would be so full of angst that he hasn't made much money (those were the days of lost ideals you see...)

I am not sure how many of my friends at college (where I was at 18) understood it either, where it was even staged as a semester-play ( in Hindi as "Ek Sapney ki Maut"?)... Somebody must have I guess, if they were moved enough to stage an almost professional version of the play... but the chap who played Biff Loman went on to become a MBA in real life...

Now I read it as a Salesman myself...

The portrait of the Salesman as a man who has believed his own advertisement is a little off-target (having been written by an intellectual with a third-person view) but his struggle with failure seems so true.

Locked in with a society which would never admit its failures, the Salesman struggles to keep himself afloat in a sea of lies that he hopes to sell to the world and to himself. His only ambition is acceptance into a mythical realm of winners,which he hopes he could grasp by the successful sale of lies...

But the very act of sale is a lie...to sell the lie you have to believe the lie yourself-the lie that a sale of a lie is a shot at immortality.It doesn't take much to see that there is no glory in the sale-two large pegs can tell the Salesman that...but once he is into it there is no turning back. Nor are there second chances...

The tale of the Salesman's family is worse. They inherit the lies and take the baton even as they see the lies fall apart. Their doubts will soon be blown away by the society they live in. The wife weaps cries of freedom at the grave of the Salesman on the payment of the mortgage...a sign that the race with no end is on again.

My Penguin book's introduction says that someone called the play, on it's opening night, "a time bomb under American capitalism"

This was Arthur Miller's reponse- "...or at least under the bullshit of capitalism; this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator... waving a paid up mortgage at the Moon, victorious at last..."

Got to go now! Client on the phone!