Excellent Gesture by Hotel Royal Court

 Yesterday when I went to the ground I received this from Rahul - a letter from the MD of Hotel Royal Court, Madurai where we had stayed with the Hyderabad team during our Buchi Babu fnals. It was such a lovely, well worded, thoughtful letter which is almost like a citation, something I will surely preserve.

Such care and thought is rare and it shows how much the hotel management values its customers and strives to mark such moments by making such memorable gestures. In all my years I do keep track of such thoughtful gestures by service providers and can see why some brands command loyalty and love and why some do not. Hotel Royal Court served some amazing food in its buffet, had very courteous service and well maintained rooms and certainly will be my preferred choice when in Madurai.

Thanks Mr Sikkandar Rafiq. We had a lovely and fruitful stay there and we will always remember your hotel and its service fondly. And you will always rank very high in my list of top customer service exeriences. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 Anything about coffee seems to get our attention - certainly mine. I wonder why coffee is always associated with dates and romantic meetings whereas tea (chai) is to do with friends and informal hangouts. I guess it has something to do with marketing. Anyway the story has been written by the author in Japanese and translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot.

The premise of the story is that if we could go back into our past and change something we always wanted to what would it be, who would we meet. So there is a cafe in Tokyo where there is a seat which is occupied by a ghost and which is vacated by her when she goes to the toilet during which time one can sit in her place and order coffee which transports you to the place and time you want to visit. The conditions are many but suffice to know that whatever you do in the past during this visit will not change the present and you must come back before the coffee gets cold. So there are many who believe in this urban legend and come to meet someone from the past - four precisely. One to find out if her lover will return, one to give a letter to his wife about his growing Alzheimer's condition, one who wants to meet her sister who died and another to meet a daughter she never met.

The premise is interesting. The writing style with so many details is not really the kind I enjoy so much. I realised Murakami does the same thing to me - distracts me with a lot of details that I forget the main story. But obviously its a personal opinion because the book is a global bestseller.

Thought for the Day - The Hiding Place of Slippery Ideas

 The many wonderful ideas and thoughts that come to our mind which we fail to jot down because we think we will remember them but forget them soon as the moment passes - real gems each one of them - slip away into this hiding place where they lie. If we can uncover that place we find so many of our flashes of brilliance, of insights which can change the course of our life perhaps!

Each such memory or thought that has slipped away seems so fragile, so fragrant, so slippery and out of reach. So beautiful. 

Black Buck Resort, Bidar

 After many ambitious plans were made and dropped, we decided to make a quick 2-day trip to Bidar's Black Buck Resort which had been on my mind for a while now. The drive was easy - a three and a half hour drive. I booked the cottage with no real idea of how the place would be - it comes to some 10k per cottage. It was Dasara time so we figured there might be some people around too. Anyways since it was considered a tranquil place out in the jungle I hoped for some quiet reading and stuff.  

View of lake from cottage

Sample cottage

Check in time is 130 so we took off at around 9 and weaved our way through heavy traffic on the Mumbai highway - the road near BHEL is in bad shape thanks to the new flyover and the traffic does not abate until way way longer - a sign that the city has grown. Perhaps almost till the ORR. We motored on and I found that even the highway was under some repair or the other so it was a jerky ride.

The road less travelled

Road to nowhere - actually to water

 The only good thing was the number of food courts that seemed to have popped up all along and we stopped at one such place - Patnam restaurant and Madurai restaurant. The latter was open and served some good breakfast stuff in some heavy duty plates. I liked it.

Then to Zaheerabad where we played many matches in our youth and turned off the highway towards Bidar which was some 30 kms, and then past Bidar towards Black Buck resort which shows up on GPS. A village road and then a country road and then in the jungle we find the resort. Its full of langurs, harmless if you let them be. We got Cottage No 5. We dumped our stuff and headed off for lunch where we met Ashwin, Abhi's friend from the colony. The chap from the resort told me the list of activities - boating at 4, sncks at 6, bonfire at 730, star gazing at 8, dinner at 830, birdwalk early morning, safari early morning, city tour at 945 am next day and so on.

The green contraption is a light with spikes

Made the mistake of getting on a coracle ride which was pretty pleasant until he decided to spin it around which was a bad idea - my head spun for a long time. Next time, no such adventure sports for me. Back to the dining area for snacks (pakoda), and then back to the cottage. Plans for a blackbuck safari at 630 am were made and we hit the sack early.

Safari jeep

Black Bucks

Next morning we were up for the safari which was a ride in a modified Gypsy along with a couple of couples and their kids - psychologist Diana and her husband Yohann and their kids, dentists Shefali and Mahesh and their kid. Off we went with Hussain who showed us many birds and named them and drove us some 18 kms to the place where the black bucks live. Quite a sight they were.We clicked some pics and came back in time for breakfast.

Self-explanatory

Bidar fort

A quick shower and off we went to the city tour with our fav co-travellers. The city tour included a trip to the bidri craft shops which were inside the old fort. Diana bought herself some bangles and the guy wrapped it in a newspaper which had her pic from an article in it. Off we went from there to the Bidar fort which is quite large. The Barid Shah dynasty which had spun off from the Bijapur sultanate ruled here. We walked around the fort for no charge and saw the gardens, the old monuments, the remnants of the palaces and then returned to the canteen for some soft drinks. Onward to the gurdwara which was to me a first. Then back to the good old resort and some lunch.

Bidar fort

Barid Shah tombs

I took a walk along the bund that evening by myself and returned in time for tea and snacks. Some telescoping where we saw the moon and its craters and the rings around saturn, a peep at the bonfire and off to crash after a hectic day.

The next morning we had a chilled out morning and left at 10ish. Pretty nice trip. Idyllic. Definitely recommend.

Namak Haraam - Movie

 1973. Came after 'Anand' and has the same stars - Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh playing key roles. Its loosely based on Becket, a 1964 English film which was remade into a Telugu film called 'Prana Mithrulu' and then a Tamil film. Gulzar wrote the screenplay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed it. Kishore Kumar sang the memorable 'Nadiya se dariya', 'Main Shaayar badnaam' and 'Diye jalte hain', Raza Murad played the role of his lifetime and what else can one ask for.

Seen it many times and it still does not fail to fascinate me - two friends, one rich and one poor, thick as thieves, the poor one helps the rich friend avenge a perceived insult by infiltrating the workers union in his rich pal's factory and soon gets overwhelmed by the poverty and hardships and takes the side of the workers which is why he is called the 'namak haram'. The ending is poetic justice. Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh, Raza Murad, Asrani, Hangal...just perfect. 

The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shifak

 Elif Shifak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist who has written 19 books, 12 of which are novels including the bestselling 'Forty Rules of Love'. She is the VP of the Royal Society of Literature. This book is set in Nicosia, the capital of the island which is the only divided city in the world - the North being partitioned into Turkish Cypriots and the South into Greek Cypriots. Shifak places her story such that we explore what happened to the island which once was a beautiful place and everyone lived together like islanders and how the partition tore the people, their culture, their trees, apart.

The novel begins in London where we meet Ada, the daughter of a Greek Cypriot Kostas Kazantzakis, who is dealing with the loss of her mother Dephne, a Turkish Cypriot. The fact that the two, Kostas and Dephne, fell in love in times when the island was being partitioned, being of opposite clans, was itself a thing of conflict. Ada is trying to cope with her mother's loss, her own immigrant status, and her father's withdrawn nature and her behavior shows up in strange ways in her school. That her father lovingly speaks to a fig plant he transported from Cyprus and is preserving it from the cold by burying it does not help her. It is only when her mother's sister Meryem, a feisty widow, drops in to meet them in London does Ada know the story of her parents, of the cafe called Happy Fig which was owned by two lovers, Yusuf and Yiogros, and how her parents love story blossomed in the Happy Fig until the partition of the island with a 110 mile long line by the British army. Her father fled to the the UK and later took his wife there and settled down but they never grow out of Cyprus. When Kostas first meets Dephne after a gap he finds her working with the Committee of Missing Persons and realises that she is assisting the project to find out the bodies of Yusuf and Yiogros which were never found! 

The story is about Ada and her father and aunt coming to terms with their heritage but the book is layered beautifully with the history of Cyprus, its beauty, the war, the partition and how it affected the plants, the food. More importantly the book draws attention to the report of the Committee of Missing Persons which was engaged in finding out where people who were killed in the war were buried so their bodies could be exhumed and given to their families for a decent burial. Elif Shifak narrates the story through the Fig Tree, a cutting of which Kostas takes to London as a memory of the days at Cyprus, Meryem and Ada and Kostas and Dephne. Her research into the life of plants, of trees, of mosquitoes, birds, incidents, anything related to Cyprus and the war make this book a work of love and nothing less than that. Beautifully structured, and very well written. Lyrical prose, powerful message, a deep dive into the unknown history of the island.

An excellent read. Thank you.         

Nauker - Movie

 1979.

These days my favorite go-to when I want to feel good is the 70s, 80s, hit films. Most have simple stories with simpler people and end warmly. Nauker was one such - Sanjeev Kumar, a rich man wants to find himself a good lady to marry so she can also take care of his young daughter. He visits a prospective brides house (actually two sisters) - only he poses as the servant while his servant Mehmood poses as the boss. The idea is to test the character of the two girls - and he ends up falling in love with the servant there - a Cinderella type Jaya Bhaduri. 

All's well and that ends well for everyone except Jalal Agha who loses Jaya Bhaduri. I once met Jalal Agha on a cruise in Goa in 1985-86.