Walking the Vinyl Track

(This was published in National Geographic Traveller India, November 2012)

“This will change the way you listen to music,” the note read. When I unwrapped the cheery red record-player that came with the message, little did I realise that the birthday gift from my husband would became an obsession. I didn’t know that we would spend the rest of our weekends of the year 2009 hunting for rare albums, quirky cover art and our favourite artists on vinyl.

While LPs had made a comeback and were available freely in large format music stores in the city as well as online, it was worth its price in gold and a luxurious indulgence for audio aficionados. While we loved music, our pockets didn’t run so deep and although we did pick up a few new LPs, something wasn’t quite right. Two of our brand new LPs turned out to be defective. There seemed to be a strange dissociation as we picked LPs from shelves stocking Blu-Ray DVDs, new indie CDs and pulsating Drum and Bass Mp3 collections. LPs seemed like gawky misfits in their specially proportioned shelves in these neon-lit digital music havens.

And a few hours of research on the internet sent us down the roads our audiophile forbears had walked and the alternative second-hand universe of vintage records. The little record player became my ticket into the dusty underbelly of the city with its cavernous warehouses and alleyway stores.
We dug out second-hand LPs in flea markets across India, from the back alleys of Mirza Ghalib Street in Calcutta to the dusty multipurpose antique stores in Bangalore’s Avenue Road. From the colourful hippie shops of Thamel in Kathmandu to the twisted alleys of Chor bazaar in Bombay, we dug our way through stacks of old vinyl records or forced/cajoled/bribed friends to trawl the selfsame markets with our serpentine lists in hand.

There was something that drew us to the LPs almost immediately. Both the husband and I loved music in our lives and although we weren’t experienced audiophiles, there was a certain purity of sound in a vinyl record that you couldn’t miss. The analog-era richness and warmth was so well...natural. Some LP lovers insist that listening to LPs was akin to having the band performing live in front of you and while I’m not entirely sure of that, listening to an LP is a visceral and involved experience entirely different from the commonplace plug n play digital sound. The soundscapes are different, the associations are different and above all the way we listen to music is different. A record lover is a more vibrant butterfly compared to its modern ipod toting worker bee.

Many of our records had their sleeves restored with duct tape and scratches and dust lines removed by multiple wet wipes. They became a substitute for postcards from kind friends who had been subject to the endless sessions of Floyd’s Medal and Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine (our earliest findsin a decrepit warehouse in Daryaganj sold to us by the enthusiastic Mr Syed Akbar Shah, an enthusiast and an eagle-eyed connoisseur of rare old LPs, who travelled the country in search of records old, forgotten and lost that had the habit of showing up in the unlikeliest spots). We would get emails at odd hours and would snatch calls over skype during our work day and manage to convince the friend in question as to what genre we liked, which group of artists we preferred and which era we pandered to. A few weeks later the selfsame friend would arrive with a brown paper wrapped LP. Needless to say he or she would be welcomed with much fanfare. 

As our pile of LPs increased from a measly two to a more respectable dozen, both the husband and me would itch to come home after a long day’s work and plonk ourselves on the floor with a drink in hand and go through the ritual of unveiling the well-worn record from its sleeve, giving it a quick wipe, placing the needle on the correct groove and drowning in the mellow sound while we lovingly caressed the sleeve and admired its incredible artwork.

However, a general passage of time dulled our initial enthusiasm. Our trips to Chandni Chowk and Daryaganj reduced and by the summer of 2010 we were back to our iPods and the LP player lay in a corner, dusted off for use on occasional weekends.

But all of that changed after a holiday in Melbourne in the winter of 2011.

Melbourne was the second leg on a grand vacation spanning Malaysia and Australia. We had travelled for a good week and a half around Malaysia through luxurious suites and isolated forest resortsand by the time we reached Australia, we realised that the holiday fund had dwindled substantially. Here we were with eight days to kill, little money to spare, and a city full of pricey art galleries, theatre shows, big-ticket music concerts and cutting-edge restaurants.

I quoted Bruce Chatwin to my husband: “Walking is a virtue and tourism is a sin.” What better way to learn a city than to see its underbelly, to sniff its stinks and discover the music on the streets? Armed with a day pass on the Melbourne Tram network, a much-thumbed copy of Lonely Planet Australia, regulation sunscreen and a couple of packaged meat pies, we were ready to take on the city.

Our first stop was Queen Victoria Market—a heritage site and bargain hunter’s paradise rolled into one. We wound our way through racks of faux crocodile boots, dubious Chinese herbs, tacky cowboy hats, artisanal cheese stands and boomerangs. Fate struck. My husband and I had been walking our separate ways, but suddenly bumped into each other at the entrance to a stall selling second-hand records.
I had been drawn into the shop by the sensuous black and white sleeve of Madonna’s iconic Like a Virgin album. In addition to being one of my favourite albums from the 1980s, it reminded me of many evenings spent with girlfriends dancing ourselves silly to ‘Material Girl’ and ‘Like a Virgin’. My husband, on the other hand, picked up Miles Davis’ A Kind of Blue in nearly mint condition. As we jostled each other, excited by the piles of LPs, the owner looked at us with a bemused expression. An elderly man with twinkly blue eyes, he gave us a great discount and also handed my husband a pamphlet. “Well mate, if you like your vinyl, that’s the best kind of tour you can go on,” he said.

The fold-out pamphlet-map had been created by Diggin’ Melbourne, an initiative started by a bunch of vinyl enthusiast, store owners and resellers. The simple Q and A listed on their home page made their conviction for the medium obvious.

“Q: Do they still make records?

“A: Yes—they still make records, they still make turntables, and yes—new bands are still putting out records. To some people the idea of putting out this kind of map may seem a little pointless. But if you’re reading this you know the score. Vinyl will never die.”

Our trip was suddenly given a whole new purpose.

The next day, we started working our way through the musical byways of Melbourne.  We set out for the artsy and bohemian Brunswick Street in the suburb of Fitzroy. By the mid-twentieth century, Brunswick Street, with its low rents, had become the street of choice for immigrants from Europe. With them came open-air Mediterranean cafes serving good coffee and wood-fired pizzas. Music venues, graffiti, vintage clothes stores, edgy pop art boutiques and record stores followed in the subsequent decades.

But instead of getting to the cool Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, we found ourselves in an altogether different part of town in the distant suburb also called Brunswick. Not only were we lost, we also ambled along with different agendas—I wanted the record store and vintage shops, but my husband wanted some food. A florist came to the rescue, pulling out a sheaf of maps to show us how far we had strayed. She gave us a flower for good luck and we clambered back on to the tram.

When we got to Fitzroy, we were thrilled to find that Brunswick Street was everything that the guide books and Internet had promised. The pavements were filled with chic people dressed in alternative fashion while the sound of jazz bands practising for an evening gig. Between drinking the best cider I have ever tasted, nearly inhaling a delicious crisp pork belly in apple sauce and shaking hands with a crazy man who wanted a few dollars for bestowing us with good wishes, we found what we had come all this way for–Dixons Recycled.

Established in 1976, with outlets all over Melbourne, these guys call themselves the ‘original second-hand specialist’. The store had something for ever whimsical buyer on a budget. Neat rows of records awaited us tagged according to their condition, rareness, album art and assorted other categories. We figured that if we’d been brave enough to buy battered records from Shah Music Centre in Daryagunj in Delhi, we could take a chance with Dixons’ lower-quality discs and gain in quantity what we’d compromised in quality. Who knows when we would find such a mind-boggling variety of LPs again?
Soon, our arms were piled high with the classic albums we had first heard on tape and later possessed on CD: Simon and Garfunkel’s sound track for The Graduate, The Best of Cream, Santana’s Greatest Hits, U2’s Joshua Tree, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. Substantially poorer but much happier, we put our Diggin’ Melbourne map away for another day.

That day dawned sunny and warm after the debaucheries of New Year’s Eve. The first day of January was perfect for a walking tour around Federation Square and the colourful gates of Chinatown in the city’s central business district. Shorn of office crowds, the lanes were deserted, like unopened oysters full of hidden promise. While the city slumbered, we walked through a glorious sunny afternoon and a mellow dusk creating our own stories under the awnings and empty promenades along the Yarra River, the alleys of Flinder’s Lane painted with careless, colourful masterpieces by some of top street artists.  Since rents were high in the CBD, some of the stores on our map had vanished. Others had been transformed into strange animals. One second-hand vinyl shop along Elizabeth Street had become a specialist Japanese supermarket selling odd edibles and even odder pink Hello Kitty-themed bric-a-brac.

Then, as we were walking along a crowded intersection along Swanston Street, we realised that we had dropped our Diggin’ Melbourne map somewhere along the way.  Terrified at the prospect of losing our lifeline to the city, we retraced our steps, peering into dustbins where we had emptied plastic takeaway coffee cups, sifting through the public ashtrays where we had stubbed out our cigarettes, carefully circling every bench and every clump of grass we had trod upon. As we descended into the dumps of despair, we saw a familiar piece of paper fluttering round and round a lamppost. We were on the road again.

After discovering that at least three stores in the vicinity of the CBD had shut down, we stumbled upon the sign and ponderous stairway to Collectors Corner. ‘From the dirt cheap to the ridiculously rare’ is what they claimed to stock. The no-frills space was filled with piles of vinyl stacked in cardboard boxes. We spent so much time browsing and querying that the once-friendly owner soon lost his smile and growled at us till we left the place—but not before we had got ourselves a rare twosome: The Best of the Mamas and Papas and From the Mars Hotel by the Grateful Dead. Gratified by the loot, lulled by the evening nip and stuffed by grilled crocodile in a friendly cafe in Chinatown, we were nearly done with our tour and our time in the city.

We had seen the city through squares on our map. We had smelled a city of slightly stale dust and old paper in vintage stores. We tapped our feet and clapped our hands as an ignored street band belted out some great music.  It seemed that elves had come out of the crevices and taken us on a tour of a parallel city of forgotten music. We had relived our rock-n-roll preteen years, our waspish teenage love for grunge, our pretentious jazzy early twenties and our fun, indie, peculiar whims of the years that followed as we indulged in some good ol’ vinyl love in the land down under. 

Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

(This was published in BLink on 19 April 2014)

(The trailer of a documentary about Colony Collapse Disorder that is causing bees to die en masse in different parts of the world)

I moved from Delhi to Bangalore last April. This month has had different associations in all the cities I have lived in. From the delicious coolness of the blustering norwesters or the Kal Boishakhis of Calcutta to the abundance of flowers in the spring-summer warmth of Delhi. And then there was the sudden heatwave of Bangalore. The famed good weather seemed to be a myth in my early days in the city as blazing sunny days were followed by occasionally cool evenings punctuated by a few drops of rain and the constant drone of bees. The bees became my markers for summer and for my new abode in the city.

However, even before I could muster together home remedies that might work in case of a sudden sting or dream about the batches of fresh honey that one could get from the hive when the collectors arrived, tragedy loomed large. Affected by a distressing global phenomenon, these bees weaved their way drunkenly into mine and the 40 odd apartments within a 20 feet radius of their hives. Like malfunctioning robots they would collide with doors, windows and neon tube lights and die in a rather anticlimactic end for this industrious creature. These sad suicidal insects made their way into my house in hordes every evening, only to collapse to the floor in their death throes. Further research revealed that the slow depreciation of trees in the erstwhile garden city had given rise to this malaise. Affected by deforestation and increasing pollution, the energetic honey bees were slowly starving to death. And Bangalore is just another point on the map of the world where this phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD is becoming increasingly common. There just aren’t enough flowers left to feed the bees and our cities do not provide kind homes for these winged pollinators. Instead of natural perfumes, they are subject to the fumes of factories, mosquito fogging machines, the excessive pollution on the city roads. This is just another sign of a barren future straight out of dystopian novels that looms large. This also brings to mind the apocryphal quote by Einstein, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” 

As much damage as the loss of bees would do to the ecological balance, honey disappearing from the world would also be an equally irreplaceable loss to culinary larders, medicinal cabinets and cosmetic remedies as well as mythology, history and language itself. 

H-O-N-E-Y: the very word drips with a dulcet melody. A perfect choice as a term of endearment for loved ones, the word is a metaphor for sweetness in both real and abstract terms. Many aeons before sugar, there was honey. The same rich golden bottled goodness that sits pretty in our larder today in its myriad organic, mass produced and single origin forms has been around for millennia. Represented in ancient cave paintings as well as prehistoric Egyptian, Mesopotemian and Indian texts, early man was quick to learn the culinary as well as medicinal benefits of this natural ingredient and used it liberally in his daily life. Regarded as the mythical elixir of immortality as well as a good omen that would find a place in temples and tombs alike, honey is often referred to as the food of the gods and even finds resonance in our own culture with close kinship to the fabled amrita that emerged from the churning of the Ocean of Milk. 

As I broomed away a pile of corpses on yet another morning, my heart filled with sadness and I decided to appease the gods by bringing out as many potted flowering plants as I could fit in my little balcony in order to offer some recompense for my kind. I also decided to pen this little obituary as well as celebrate the lives of these little worker bees. And what better eulogy than a feast? And it seemed befitting as the byproduct of their industry was a superfood that made our world a sweeter place. And so it seemed apt to adopt a diet where everything I ate and cooked was marinated in, flavoured with, drizzled upon and doused in golden honey. This special ingredient added that extra zing in my Sunday roast where the whole spices and root vegetables soaked up its sweetness and came together in a perfect medley of flavours. Honey, bananas and ice cream brought alive visions of homemade banana splits and childhood evenings long past. I replaced tea with my grandmother’s magic brew, hot water, honey with a dash of ginger, lemon and whole pepper that had held its own against heaving chests and wintry congestions over the years. I would dribble honey down a stack of freshly made pancakes for breakfast and be transported back to simpler days when happiness was all about devouring these honeyed goodies accompanied by cups of fragrant Darjeeling tea and great conversations. I layered food memories with kitchen experiments as I tried to add a little more honey in my life. Some worked, some didn’t and through it all the bees buzzed around me alive for a fleeting moment in the light.

The Supernut

(A version of this article appeared in Food Lover's Magazine Dec-Jan '14 issue)

 “When an almond tree became covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. 'What vanity,' they screamed, 'what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!' The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. 'Forgive me, my sisters,' said the tree. 'I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart.”

― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis

 It is perhaps the abundant heart of this tiny kernel that has transformed the almond into a talisman down the ages. The ancient Romans would shower their newlywed couples with almonds, believing it was a symbol of fertility and there are numerous references to the almond in the Bible as a symbol of plenty. Interestingly enough, these symbolic attributes were ascribed to a nut that was equally a thing of nourishment as well as the raw material for a deadly poison, making it a study in opposites. The bitter wild almond upon processing creates the toxic cyanide. The poison retains a unique smell that has tickled the acute olfactory senses of wily old ladies as well as hardboiled sleuths alike. Their knowledge of this signature scent of bitter almonds have allowed many a Miss Marple to solve a cases and save lives with a series of well-timed sniffs.

At some stage of human history, the sweet non-toxic variety of almond was discovered giving rise to the ubiquitous nut that quickly became a part of our daily food intake. From the flaked almonds in the morning muesli to the chopped nuts in the brownies and cakes, to the luscious paste of almonds in Indian gravies, this versatile genius with its creamy and nutty flavour combination became a perfect addition to drinks, savoury dishes, desserts and even liqueurs. From almond chocolates to rich Mughlai pasandas, from the delicate French macarons in rainbow hues to the sticky ghee-laden badam halwa, the possibilities were as calorific and artery clogging as they were endless and divine. And then there was marzipan. Wedding cakes, Princess cakes, Christmas Cakes and a child's delightful birthday cake would be robbed of elegance, imagination or style without its almond candy icing.

One could dedicate a whole book to marzipan and how it breathed a new life into the art of confectionary. In the days before stodgy fondant, marzipan rolled over desserts made them happier and prettier. This pliable mix of sugar and almond meal could be nudged into a whole variety of shapes and textures that could top off plain looking cakes and toffees and make them the stuff of a child’s sweetest fantasy. Marzipan characters have been the highlight of many a birthday cake and often more exciting than the more flavourful interior of the confection. My memories of a zoo cake for my eighth birthday complete with its menagerie of giraffes and zebras and my exquisite 1st wedding anniversary cake with its blue roses, will be my foremost memories of marzipan love.

The mystique of almonds goes beyond its identity as the star of the pantry. The almond-shaped eye is an aesthetic representation of geometric perfection. It is the evocative beauty of the pink and white almond blossom immortalized by Van Gogh’s exquisite painting that exploded in the tapestry of my mind in all its colour, light, shade and magnificent glory. Amsterdam will forever be denoted in my mental map of the world as a little blue and white shaped patch of almond blossoms.

Almonds will always be the magic stuff that emerged from the Kabuliwalla’s bag of goodies. It will be the nut whose name will be pronounced in a strange rich accent. It will be the nut that forever connects hime with his home. It will be the soul food that lessens the loneliness of this world-weary traveller by giving  him an unlikely companion -- a little girl called Mini who reminds him of all that he has left behind.

A thing of beauty and terror all at once, the almond is life and death -- a dream ingredient in every dessert chef's arsenal, the chief ingredient in the poison capsules worn by spies, terrorists and dangerous cult groups. It is the nourishing must-have in a new mum's larder and a vegan's substitute for nearly everything, an almond deserves every bit of its superhero status.