Three men in a van ... and a woman too!

The whiteness of where I live is such a contrast to the multi-tonal mosaic of Southern California.  Heck, some of the whites are so tanned that they look even darker than me!

A view of downtown Los Angeles
from the daughter's apartment

The shuttle van driver was on time.  As he started driving, of course, I began my small talk with him.  It is so wonderful to understand life from the perspective of one whose daily life is very different from mine.  The small talk quickly revealed that he, too, had an accent that indicated he was from somewhere else.

"Hey, is that a little bit of an Iranian accent in you?" I asked him.

He smiled.  "No, Armenian."

"I was close. Neighboring country." I ought to know, given that I am tenured in the geography department ;)

He came here when he was a child, when the family immigrated just before the USSR came tumbling down.  I didn't ask him if they would have stayed back in a free and independent Armenia.

"I hear there are white supremacy groups in Oregon.  How do they treat you when you are a person of color?" he asked.  He was so articulate that I was sure there is a backstory to why he was being an airport shuttle van driver.  I didn't ask him that either.

We reached the hotel where he was picking up more passengers.  Two visiting Germans.  This kind of a spontaneous and serendipitous mixing of people from diverse parts of the world is one I miss in my life in Oregon.  The foreigners that the friend introduces me to, when they arrive here for short work visits, are welcome additions.

Other than the Germans occasionally struggling to think about the correct English word, we four had a great conversation the rest of the drive.  The driver talked to them about German soccer clubs.  "We are not into sports" the German male politely replied.  Vintners, from the Mosel region, who were here to market their wines.  He gave me his business card and asked me to check out their wines if our stores carried them.  Though I don't drink, I wonder if I should buy a bottle and then email him about it.

"My family still has vineyards in Armenia and they make their own wines too" the Armenian-American said.

"Ja, ja, Armenia is one of the oldest wine regions of the world" the vintner said.

I had no idea about Armenia's wines and history.  I had to later read up in Wikipedia in order to get an idea of what the German and the Armenian were talking about.  I tell ya, if only people realized how little I know about this world!

"I went to Varanasi.  I have never seen a place like it" she said.

I am from India and was born in a faith that cherishes going to Varanasi, yet I have never been there.  And, with personal connections to the city.

"The traffic in India is crazy" she said.  "There are no rules but everything works like magic" he jumped in.  "It is synchronized driving, like synchronized swimming" he added with a smile.  I like that characterization of India and its traffic conditions.

Like how the Passover Seder ends with a prayer of "next year in Jerusalem," I wish for a Varanasi visit some day soon.  For now, I will continue to observe life from here in Whitelandia!

Is China's "cheap" manufacturing worth all that?

Back in 1987, when I joined graduate school at Los Angeles, I could not understand why the "natives" were complaining about the air quality there--the lack of it.  They thought the air was dirty and, to me, it seemed just fine, thank you.

Soon, I, too, started complaining about the smoggy haze.  The creepy color that enveloped the region was visible to one's eyes even as planes descended over the airspace in the daytime.  And then going to foothill communities like Glendora and Azusa and feeling the muck in the air was not what I liked to do.  (So, why did I keep going there? Long story!)

Over the years, Los Angeles has cleaned up a lot.  But, then my frame of reference has changed, and changed dramatically thanks to breathing remarkably clean Oregon air for more than ten years now.  (Well, except during those horrible grass seed season weeks!)

Intellectually, I understand there is an element of the inverted-U-curve relationship that seems to be the pattern as countries develop--development is accompanied by a rise in environmental degradation, and then after a level of affluence, there appears to be enough resources to clean up the air, water, and soil.  Emotionally, it is easy to question the need for the degradation in the first place, and the intellectual answer is equally easy: the degradation can be avoided if we are willing to pay for it.

After the Rodney King verdict, when I witnessed rioting in Los Angeles

The news reports and commentaries on the death of Rodney King stir a whole lot of memories.

As a starving graduate student at USC, I lived quite close to campus, which is not any hot piece of real estate.  After living in an apartment complex that was only a few blocks of a walk to the campus, I moved to significantly cheaper housing more than a mile away.  I didn't understand, until much later, that it was also a drug-crime infested area; oh well, that is a story for another day!

There were many moments when I used to wonder how the neighborhood I lived in could possibly be there at all in the phenomenally rich country that the US is.  Of course, a trip to New Orleans and walking through some of the neighborhoods there quickly straightened me out: my LA neighborhood was much better than some of the places I saw in LA's New Orleans.

To cut a long story short, the rioting took on crazy dimensions.  People in buildings up and down the street were rushing here and there in their pickups and cars and coming back with shoes, tires, television sets, and anything they could lay their hands on.  One guy told me to go to the Pep Boys store that was round the corner and grab whatever I wanted.

The building manager, who was a Japanese-American (his stories will be for yet another day!) advised me, in his halting English, that I should not even peep out of the window.  I thought it was good advice, and turned the TV on.  Every local channel was covering the riots big time, and then in one I saw my neighborhood.  A view from a helicopter above.  I could see my own building.  That was when the seriousness really hit me. 

Two days or so later, when things had calmed down enough, I biked down the usual path, on Hoover, to the campus.  Odd shoes were scattered all along the road--people were rushing that they couldn't be bothered to stop and gather the spills, I suppose.  I passed the Pep Boys store, which had some awful black coating from the fires. 

I reached the campus, where the perimeter was heavily patrolled by university and city police.  I remember trying to talk to one officer, who simply brushed me off. 

The entire riot was surreal.  But, even more surreal was the original event--the beating of Rodney King, which was captured on camera.  It felt to unreal that real cops would really beat the crap out of a guy like that.

As the riots continued, I do remember watching on TV Rodney King uttering those now famous words: "can we all get along?"

It was so profound.  Such simple words with such heavy weight in those dramatic moments.

A few months after that, I think, when I was an intern at a public agency in downtown LA, I was one of the few people who rode the Long Beach Blue Line in its trial runs, and when they were filming publicity campaigns.  From the train, I could see the Watts Tower and I was reminded of the narratives I had read and heard about the riots in the 1960s.  Another reminder that even as things change, they remain the same?

A few years ago, I drove by those old haunts. Every building, including the apartment complex where I lived, looks so much more spruced up and bright than ever.  Perhaps no more riots?  Wouldn't that be an achievement?

From the Neyveli "hill" to Cotopaxi. The mountain man, I am

With the exception of the ten weeks that I lived in Calcutta, and the few months in Madras, for the rest of my life I have always lived close to mountains.  And, in Ecuador, I enjoyed the Buena vistas of the peaks and hills even more than I have anywhere else.

In Neyveli, where I spent the first 17 years of my life, it was not mountains that resulted from millennia of geological activity though.  Instead, the sandy hills were the overburden cleared in order to get to the lignite buried under the surface.   

But, to a kid that I was, it didn’t make any difference how old those “hills” were.  All I had to do was to walk up a little and spot the light brown hills.   And be transfixed at the sight of huge machines spreading the overburden and the hills gaining height.  It almost felt as if those hills down the road and I grew up together.  Of course, as an older person, and a tide wiser, I worry about the tremendous impacts on the environment such a strip mining caused, and continues to have.

Almost every summer during those school days in Neyveli, we went to visit with the grandmas, whose respective villages were about forty miles apart.  While Pattamadai had unimpressive hills far away in the horizon, Sengottai had the lovely hills of the Western Ghats.  From the rooftop of grandma’s home, the hills were always inviting.   

As a kid, I always hoped that our train journey would extend beyond Sengottai because of the tunnels through which the train passed on its way to Trivandrum.  

The undergraduate years were at Coimbatore, where too hills were always visible from the campus and the dorm.  It was only a couple of hours of a bus ride to go up those Nilgiris with tea estates and verdant trees and shrubs, and end up in Ooty and Coonoor.  

In Los Angeles, whenever the rains cleared up the smog, it was an amazing treat to look at the San Gabriel Mountains and immediately understand the powerful dynamics that draw hundreds of thousands to Southern California every year, many of them settling down for good in the region.  After a few years there, and past the Grapevine, I lived and worked in Bakersfield which was at the southern end of a valley with mountains ringing around on all sides but the north.  What a pleasure it was to see the snow dusted Tehachapi Hills from the bedroom window!

It has been almost nine years in Oregon and hills and mountain ranges are a daily aspect of my life.  A few days ago, I had driven to the massive Fern Ridge Reservoir lake just a few miles from home, and it was one of those fantastically clear skies where it seemed like one could see forever into the distance.  And, all of a sudden, I spotted the Sisters—as much as I am ignorant about details on the physical geography and the flora and fauna here, I am confident it was those peaks that I saw.  I parked the car, and stood there for a long time, and gained a new insight into why people all over the world worshiped mountain peaks.

Against, such a background of mountains in my life, I thought I had died and gone to heaven in Ecuador.  The city of Quito itself is all ups and downs, and buildings dominate the hillsides by the valley.  Mountains all around.  And many of them volcanic peaks.

When I went to the monument that marks the equator, La Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the world) it only seemed that the mountains made the monument that much more beautiful.   

And from there, I went with a five other tourists for a short hike around the crater rim of Pululahua.   During the short, and sometimes steep climb, I paused to take a look around.  The valley of Quito was off at a distance, and various hills were strung around like a necklace to celebrate the equator.

It was a sheer 300-meter drop into the lush green crater down below and a part of me worried that I would slip and fall.  But the better part of me prevailed and enjoyed the scenery, and was humbled by the powerful forces of nature that carved out the landscape, and continues to reshape this beautiful pale blue dot.

The guide book pointed out the need to schedule this trip early in the day, because otherwise the clouds roll in.  And what a sight it was to watch the clouds literally roll in through the gap, as if somebody was pumping in dry ice from the other side.

I stood mesmerized looking at “Taita”  (daddy) Imbabura and “Mama” Cotacahi.  Imbabura from across the waters of San Pablo.  And later the snow capped summit of Cotopaxi.

As the vacation drew to an end, and as the plane started its descent into Portland, I saw Mount Hood through the window.  It was so reassuring to look at this familiar peak, and I wondered whether it was Taita or Mama!

Portlandia: where young people go to retire :)

Pretty funny, actually

"Hard" times for the porn industry :-)

It used to be a "chest" thumping claim that there was no recession in the porn industry. That it was nothing but "growth" year to year. Not anymore. This time, even the porn industry is "shrinking" and is "busted"; quote of the day:

Pornography in general has become “like potato chips, everywhere and cheap, to be consumed and tossed,” says Ms Hartley. It’s not the same as in the golden age when she joined. “The industry will shrink and stay shrunken,” she reckons.

The theatre of the absurd

Global warming and illegal immigration are two controversial political issues. I suppose it was only a matter of time somebody linked the two into a farcical argument, like how The Onion would. Only thing is, well, this letter in the Statesman Journal is no satire!
Wholesale immigration to places like Los Angeles is a prime contributor to "global warming." Fifty years ago it had the world's largest fishing fleet, largest vineyard and aircraft industry, and was first in agriculture production in the U.S.
That's gone now, and replaced by the world's largest matrix of vehicles, roads, and waste water systems.

Olympics, jingoism, and the "wisdom" of crowds

I think the only time that the Olympics ever interested me was, well, never!
Strange events, almost scientifically sculpted and robotic athletes who are as professional as they can be. And then all the flag-waving, which essentially means that it is not about the sport anyway.

Matt Welch has a fantastic autobiographical piece on the 1984 Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles. It needs to be read in its entireity. But still, it is way too good for me not to excerpt the following:

Then Shane Mack struck out looking on a curve ball.

It was as if the Goodyear blimp had deflated in one second on the centerfield grass. People were either stunned into silence, or (as in our case) muttering bitter obscenities at the world in general. Then came a horrifying sound from somewhere behind my left shoulder. It was a grown man, a grown American man, and his two kids, clapping, and saying, in perfect English, "Hoo-ray Japan!"

My eyes nearly burned clean out of my skull. The Hulk, John McCain...they had nothing on the white-hot American rage I felt at that moment. I wheeled around, fangs bared, glared at this pleasant-looking man, and yelled: "SHUT UP, YOU...COMMIE!!!!"

The genie was seconds out of the bottle when I began to feel regret. A crowd of furious Americans, who had been taking our cues for several innings now, immediately erupted into a "YEAH!!!", then began to chant: "COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!!" Dodger Dog wrappers went zipping by my ear in the general direction of the offender. Confronted with a potentially violent mob of Angeleno nationalists, the alarmed fan fled the facility, ushering his two young kids to safety.

My friend was psyched. I, in the words of Bob Dylan, "became withdrawn." Harnessing (or having the illusion of harnessing) a crowd of thousands turned out to be much more frightening than fun. Going plum loco over an exhibition baseball game felt, well, loco. And taking the side of a snarling overdog against a hapless and vastly outnumbered minority suddenly felt like the opposite of how I ever again wanted to approach either social dynamics or political thought.

The ride home with my friend's dad was totally silent, as if we were keeping our lips sealed about some terrible crime. In the following days, I noticed everything began to look different. The crowd-whipping antics of Wally George were no longer funny. Republican politics in general, particularly the flag-waving, lefty-baiting strain, became revolting overnight. So did knee-jerk, anti-Ronnie Ray-gun rhetoric. Religious settings of all varieties—Southern California was then going through a big fundamentalist revival—became intolerable exercises in peer-and-God pressure. People who I had internally dismissed as outcasts at school I now externally sought after as friends. People whose approval I once craved were suddenly ridiculous to me. I started gravitating toward any book that challenged the accepted wisdom of a topic I thought I knew, starting with baseball. And any time I found myself in an overwhelming majority, my first question became, "What if we're wrong?"