My Germany Trip (3)

 Karlsruhe( 2)

This became my pattern for the next two days too – based on trams, sights, whims and random ruminations. I was aware that I was missing out a lot by seeing Karlsruhe this way; the palaces, the zoo, the museums, of the standard template of tourism. I regretted missing out on museums and still do today, but the time available was short and above all I was mesmerized by the tram experience of seeing ordinary people in ordinary settings.

The next morning, after my wife left for her conference, I moved smartly to the Kalstor tram stop opposite my hotel, put a Euro 10 note in the ticket machine and confidently punched the right touch screen tabs – and out came the Euro 6.20 all day ticket with the balance change clinking in the tray for it. Got into the first tram that came along, punched it for date and time, and I was off. Brennschluss! It is a term used in rocket science, for the moment when a rocket’s engines fall off and it becomes ballistic. Or so I think.

The tram curved off at the now familiar Europaplatz and its shopping arcades, and leaving it behind went past office buildings, schools, a church or two, to the quiet and somnolent residential areas. Then came some parks and car-filled road-crossing, and then I saw, obviously in an outskirt area, huge and multi storied non-industrial buildings with discrete signs saying Siemens, and the tram came to its last stop called Siemensallee. Many buildings and huge car parking around them full of parked cars, but nicely interspersed with beautiful trees – not huge and bare and brash in the Yankee style. These looked like white collar office buildings humming with inward oriented activity. Siemens has many products, many divisions and many subsidiaries. It had become the industrial giant it is like most other German industrial giants, during the Nazi war mobilizations for WW II. After the driver’s 5 minutes rest, the tram wheeled round to go back to Europaplatz, again passing homes, schools and churches.

The churches were dull and unremarkable looking, quite unlike the brightly painted, stain-glassed, and even gilded and silvered looking ones we get to see in India, with colourful statuary of Christ, Mary or some saints prominent from the passing roads. May be it is the imperial minded Catholic vs. utilitarian Protestant thing. The tram I was on was taking a rounded suburban route to Europaplatz, stopping at small, quiet tram stops with only one or two people getting on or off. The tram will stop at a tram stop, half for a second or two, and after the automatic doors opened a wide metal plate will slide out from beneath the door frame, and it will cover the small 6 inches gap between the tram and the edge of the concrete platform of the tram stop: so that people getting on or off will not be troubled by the dangerous gap. I soon got to see what a deeply thoughtful measure this was.

In one stop there was only one old lady on a wheel chair with a big dog. As the tram halted, doors opened and the metal platform slid out almost to the tram stop, the lady moved buttons on the electronically operated wheelchair and preceded by the dog moved into the tram, and she maneuvered the wheelchair sideways so as to clear the passage inside the tram door for the convenience of other passengers. The tram driver halted for a bit longer for her convenience, maybe she was a regular and other passengers helpfully moved to provide her space to monitor her wheelchair, and the tram moved off. It took me a few seconds to understand that the lady was blind besides being wheelchair dependent and that the dog was one of those “seeing” dogs for the blind. I watched it all astounded and fascinated. This was civilization indeed. A blind and handicapped old lady, alone with her helpful dog, could move her wheelchair about on the road, get into a tram with it, whose construction and mechanisms were designed to provide seamless convenience for her. A far cry indeed from public transport in India. The dog looked around, protectively but comfortably.

A short distance later the tram stopped, the doors opened, the metal plate slid out to cover the intervening gap and following her dog the blind lady moved out her wheelchair on to the platform. The tram moved off again. I wanted to stand up and clap. But inside the tram the people were cool – it was an ordinary thing here, in this small town in Germany. This was a staggering experience for me, for a dark skinned Indian of the 21^st century. Many weeks later, writing this today, I would still rank this as the single most important insight of my whole trip to Germany. Civilization, for the ordinary citizen. And these same people, thoughtful and gentle and caring, did stuff like Dachau and Auschwitz and all that? The question, ever present at the back of my mind, popped up, as it did many times in the whole trip. There was a church across the next tram stop. I abruptly got off to see it, a thing I, a lifelong atheist, had never done before.                                       

It was a brown brick unpainted structure, with its doorways and windows framed within narrow, tall, severely-pointed arches also made of bricks. Although the doors’ and windows’ panels were of plain glass, their outer frames had brown coloured and minimal ornamental carvings. The narrow, tall steeple had a plain, weather-resistant cross. A plaque told me it was a protestant church rebuilt after its destruction during the WW II bombings. Most Germany is so rebuilt. Restored is the correct word. And not only for churches, but all buildings, walls, forts and ramparts in Germany. It speaks something. I am not quite sure exactly what. The church was unused; wrong time and day of the week of course. I peeked inside. Saw plain and functional arrangements of insides of churches – none of the resplendent gold, and glass and glitter, and statuary and paintings we see interestingly more in Goan churches built by the Portuguese for example. One or two people inside smiled at me. I wandered around inside for quite some time and came out from a side door, and sat on a bench. Trams were passing behind me, beyond the boundary wall covered in tastefully flowering creepers. A sort of priest came out, unparked his bicycle and rode off towards the main entrance nodding his white skinned pink face with blue eyes at me.

I sat on that bench for a long time, beside neatly trimmed green lawns and colorful flower beds shining in the sun and watched the church. The whole Christianity business, started more than two thousand years back and many thousand miles away in Asia mainly by a dark skinned, hook nosed Palestinian Jew called Jesus, had led up to this today? This linear and unornamented church, Castesian and severe, a deeply foreign thing for Asia, was speaking of deep and careful organizational effort  behind it, and of a clearly practical and corporate spirit manifest in everything about it: a far cry indeed from the simple faith and compassion of Jesus of Nazareth. Surely an alien, European animal this, I felt. Jesus would have found it puzzling and pagan, although who the hell was I to speak of such matters? With this disturbed feeling eating my mind I spent most of that day getting off my cosy trams to see whatever churches hove into view.  Somehow this made me watch the people more closely, hoping to see I don’t know what; perhaps some awareness of huge transmutations history and politics can bring about. In one residential neighbourhood I was surprised to see, as I wandered about its marketplace, a middle aged negro man on a bicycle, with salt and pepper curly hair and a lined wizened forehead. He too watched me watching him, both acknowledging to each other the easy oddity of both of us being there at this time and also the many things that bring about such huge realities in this world.

In my next tram, thinking of the knowing looks that had passed between that negro cyclist and me, I sat covertly watching two middle aged white, German haus fraus back from the day’s shopping , sitting in the opposite seat, and calmly chatting and licking ice cream cones. I was deeply aware of my Asiatic, dark skinned alienness. What would they be thinking of me? What would I, come to it, be thinking of some Asiatic, dark skinned Indian man sharing my tram nonchalantly had I been a white-skinned, blue eyed German? Surely an alien person, at best benignly tolerable? And I suddenly understood the whole rightwing narrative of racism in Germany; more, of the whole white “West`s”. The West truly belonged to the white races very deeply indeed and the West is truly far more civilized and prosperous. It is another matter that they would not have got their present prosperity and wealth without their exploited colonial empires. But to a western surely even this understanding would today only produce wrath and indignation – former animal like slaves getting uppity, wanting equality and post-colonial re-accounting and even a re-audit of history!

This disturbance revealed another thing as I sat in a Burger King to have my forgotten lunch. I have read in quite some detail what many scholars, writers, and sociologists of the white races have called The Jewish Question or Anti-Semitism, etc. Even Shakespeare, that sensor par excellence, was grappling with it in his many plays. It is and always has been, after sifting away the chaff, plain and simple racism of the whites really. Even the current cant of clash of civilizations or the West versus Islam etc. since the days of George Bush Sr. led NATO invasion of Afghanistan are more virulent forms of the same modern racism.

That night my wife and I had dinner in a restaurant called Taj Palace near our hotel and chose Indian food which was surprisingly excellent. I had a fine German beer or two as well. Walking back to the hotel I saw that the half-moon was shining in the clear blue skies, and moonlight was glistening on the steel tram rails. I tried and failed to keep at bay old documentary images of kristallnacht celebrations by the not so gentle Germans of the Nazi epoch, maybe even here in Karlsruhe, maybe even on the streets I was walking on. I had in any case noticed that towards midnight when the roads were nearly empty sounds of noisy and fast cars and motorbikes went up noticeably, but maybe this was only because such driving pleasures could be available in those time slots. Life is not all darkness, I told myself. But why was I telling myself this, many times in this trip? Before falling asleep, reading as usual a few pages of Milosz’s book of agonized search for his nativity I read about his long struggle with the contradictions between catholic childhood’s faith and the rising rationality and secular openness of teenage years. It had happened in Poland when Germany had been recently unified by Bismarck and the World War I was yet to arrive.

From the next day I vainly tried to retrieve some structure out of my instinctive and random mode of travel that seemed so rewarding and rich. I must at least see the Rhine – spelt as Rhein in German -- while I was in Karlsruhe. From Europaplatz I took trams with destination panels having Rhein written on them. I got off at stops saying Rheinhafenstrasse, Rheinhafen, Rheinbergstrasse, but got no sight of the river. I remembered that old Durlach was in the eastern side of the city and the river was on the western side, and by now from Europaplatz I could make out east bound and west bound trams. Rappenwort seemed to be the westernmost last stop, and it had a pleasant Harry Potter sound to it. I took a tram to it. It took me to the most rural side of Karlsruhe, with small, single storey houses with sloping slate roofs, huddled close together. The tram passed close to the walls and windows, and the track was winding along a land sloping down perhaps to the river. Small, narrow churches with thin steeples. Very few people around, no market places, no two-lane roads, no two storeyed houses. I got off at Daxlanden and wandered around. In earlier times the narrow winding road would have been ox-carts for the villages huddling along the banks of the Rhine. In winters those villages would have been snowed in beside a freezing river. The only diversion would have been drink and the sunday mass in the church. It was claustrophobic. A sight of the river would have lifted my spirits but I did not see it. Rappenwort was the wooded area, definitely close to the river – I could feel the moisture – but it had no schules for wizards or muggles or anyone else.                                                                             

Another try on a tram took me to a stop called Rehinbergstrasse. Berg meant a fort, I thought.  Fort on the Rhine. This was on a highish table land, and its busy road crossings and many cars spoke of urban activity, maybe of the river port. I remembered from my earlier reading mention of a river port, even an oil refinery! But I did not see anything. May be I should not have been tram-bound. Defeated I returned to Europaplatz and sat on a bench – nice benches every 10 yards in the top market place of the city. I was not to see Rhine at all in Karlsruhe despite many other attempts. I saw it later while in Frankfurt which is ironically on the river Main, not Rhine. Disappointed, I took trams to untried destinations. Each route was a journey into a distinct character of buildings, people and atmosphere of neighbourhoods – each seemed to be telling a story. Time was too short to ponder and piece together the story of each suburb, but I was absorbed, zonked by the details of each area, opening itself outside my passing tram window.

The end stops of each of these branch lines had names like Waldstadt, Heide, Neureut, Knielingen, Messe, Oberreut, Wolfartseier. I went to each dreamily, got off and wandered  around for some time, may be ate or drank something, and returned to Europaplatz. In the process I got to see the market centre of Europaplatz better.  Strategically situated in shop fronts of the main streets were fat, white, male beggars stationed for the day with plastic pouches of eats for the day and 2 litre bottles of water to drink. They begged with bold, assured, corporate demeanours, not abject or at the end of the tether types we see in India. The long market street was lush, colourful, steel-glass-and concrete, rich, aromatic with restaurants and bars, fragrant with perfumes of the genteel citizenry, and music. Many supermarkets had baby pianos and guitars in play pens placed outside their entrances. I saw children sitting at them and banging out some tunes well amplified for the passers by -- somebody also kept an eye on them as their parents shopped inside. It was nice and decent, done in good spirit. Gentle. This word came up again, as it did during this whole trip.

Nice benches every few steps along both sides of road, to sit, gawk, ponder, google, eat and chat – while trams plied gently to and fro. I too did the same, bench to bench. In one place as I sat on a bench I was entranced by beautiful music wafting out of nice and well-bred amplifiers. Looking for its source I saw two men, no longer young, on the street playing it live outside a huge, glittering mall. One man was on a proper grand piano (I think) and the other was playing the medieval European flute ensemble – I don’t know its correct name: it is about 8 to 10 flutes attached together side by side, shortest one at one end and graduating to the longest at the other end, like a big harmonica, if harmonica is the word I am looking for. They were playing something detailed, deep and exquisite – the deep notes of the flutes weaving around the rippling chords of the piano. It sounded classical and yet light – something like Mozart or Chopin, to my gross and untutored ears. They were doing it, of course, to attract customers for the mall but they were also playing with feeling and enjoyment. I walked up to see them better. Both wore cheerful and ironic expressions on their faces, well aware of all the meanings of the situation happening there. I caught the eye of the flute man and clapped silently. He nodded, his eyes merry, and tossed his long hair. Crass marketing for a daily wage, yes, but Germanic – gentle, classical, beautiful. That nagging question came up nagging again: gentle, cultured Germans and their recent past of Nazi, corporate barbarism.

So moved, troubled, I would catch the next tram which will take me away to some last stop, Waldstadt. Many schules (schools), and a rat house (town hall), and a calm, settled, well-off neighbored – all Karlsruhe is well off – and I would wander around like a Martian. Some schools, obviously meant for younger children, had brightly painted outer walls. Some even had huge cartoon characters painted in kid colours – “kindergarten” is a German word of course, children’s garden. These cartoons had cute and “funny” looks, which are supposed to appeal to small children. To my eyes and senses weaned on the sole diet of American funny cartoons these looked, amateurish, stilted, unfunny and vaguely what is derogatorily called “east-european”. The famous German lack of humour?  Does this have something to do with Germany`s historical insulation from the many-coloured cultures of the Mediterranean? Perhaps. But I also understood something else. In the post-Walt Disney explosive mega-world of multinational corporation-bred cartoons, and particularly its animation avatars, the standard of humour is in comparison, infinitely more rich, detailed and artistically extremely exquisite. Yes. Standing in the gentle streets and retreats of Waldstadt, the word that stuck in my mind was: extremely. The American fun-industry bred cartoons carry fun to syrupy, over-evolved, over-digested extremes – it is fun porn really.

Troubled but rapt I would then take the return tram to Europaplatz and sit on another bench, and see a multinational  mix of people, families, ambling around, shopping – Germans, Turks, East Europeans, even burka-clad Arabs, atheletic Africans, Shia Iranians. Germany’s immigration policy, the most liberal in E.U. was visible on the streets. One night I had heard from my hotel window some people speaking a Bangladeshi dialect of Bengali at the Kalstor tram stop!                                                                 

Something would strike me again, say, an Iranian-looking large family earnestly discussing the purchases they had just made – the children looking unhappy and skeptical, the elders giving voluble, unsuccessful  justifications, the women with placatory, resigned faces – and I would be moved to catch the next tram which will take me away to another suburb ending  at, say, Knielingen; and I would again take up my entranced Martian odessey. I would return to Europaplatz, see a cluster of uniformed young women with chiseled, made up faces and sculpted bodies -- shop assistants on tea break -- huddling together in a smoking area, and smoking cigarettes with a vengeance, wonder again why so many educated Germans are smoking so much, and I would take the refuge in another tram which will take me to Neureut this time. And in the tram rides I would see another enigma: many white Germans reading serious looking books, not trapped in their mobile phones like in India. This was as common as smoking, this reading of serious books.

So it went, my waking dream days in Karlsruhe.

On our last day in Karlsruhe google news in the morning was full of an ongoing  army coup attempt in Turkey, of tank battles in Istanbul, of Erdogan on TV denouncing it. All this was not a distant thing it would have been in Bombay or Delhi; here it had a shocking and immediate feel. My wife’s conference was to be over by midday and impressed by my ravings on Karlsruhe she had agreed to wander around in the city on its wonderland trams. The next day, a Sunday, we were to be taken to a day trip to the famous Black Forests of Germany where it had painstakingly regenerated a large patch to restore its “original” glory after centuries of deforestation. I spent the morning scanning the few news channels on the hotel’s TV hoping to understand what was happening in Turkey. In my understanding of things Turkey, after its brilliant promise of Kemal Attaturk days, was once again going feral in the 21^st century, divided since the 20^th century between its Asiatic past and Kemalist European aspirations. Germany had found in Turkey an ally in 1914 and had fought a world war in partnership with it. Both had lost. Germany had after the war regenerated itself on the coat tails of Hitler, while Turkey had seemingly shed its medieval caliphateism and morphed into a “modern” nation with Ataturk. Was Turkey’s modernity, always precarious, unraveling now? Watching the TV commentators, sitting in a hotel in a small town in Germany, it felt like a huge accident happening just next door. Another small news report mentioned that an Afghan immigrant to Germany driven by Islamist ideas went on a stabbing spree in a railway train near Stuttgart, less than 100 kilometers from Karlsruhe. What a trip this was turning out to be!

But the glittering Europaplatz was undisturbed, or it didn’t show anything but its usual decked up, ready-for-the-day’s-business face. This was the final and decisive frontier of business after all, where the current enormous global production and transportation systems of business management finally placed a gleaming, alluring product before the eyes and hands of the customer, so as to entice her to part with her cash while believing that she was exercising her free choice – this was the cutting edge of today’s civilization really. The place was waking up; the live musicians had not arrived at this early, lean hours of business. The piano was playing itself, a ghost in the machine punching its keys and playing a tune of tranquil, limpid waters. Away from wars and coups and bloodshed the market of Karlsruhe was serenely starting another day under clear blue skies where the gentle sunshine was trying to scatter away a thin gauze of high overnight white clouds. Markets are fantastic things, like galaxies.

My wife joined me at midday after her conference and I showed off my expertise in buying two tram tickets of Euro 6.20 each and we got into the first tram that came along; markets can wait. We had opted for Durlach as the first destination for the day; I was chattering away as an experienced tour guide. Having reached Durlach I pointed out the schloss of Turmberg on top of the hill and told its story, and with a non-arthritic nonchalance she wanted to walk up to it. We went up a little way. She too was entranced by the vistas that opened up, especially after days of indoor conferencing. We sat on a rock bench, now both of us seeing the open landscape of Germany.

We returned to Europaplatz by another roundabout route, took another tram which took us south (in German, sud) via our familiar Hauptbahnof and through settled, calm neighborhoods, basking in the sun on a Saturday, the tram twisting and turning with old streets made new, and ended at Badeniaplatz. “Bad” in German means health spa. The whole south-west Germany is full of spas, the health-and-retreat-resorts built around hot or cold natural springs since medieval, pre-antibiotic times. In the 19^th century many of the novels – catering to the wealthy class, before the paperback revolution – were set in and around such spas. The nobility, the gentry, the wealthy, came to spas to restore or repair their health and spirits by spring waters, baths, and steams. They also holidayed, settled family and business matters here. South of Karlsruhe was the district of Baden-Baden the district of spas amidst the old Black Forests. Karlsruhe itself was at the southern edge of Baden-Wurtemburg district. We walked around to see what a spa looked like, at least from the outside. We saw one, in an oldish looking squat building with a brass plate saying in German what probably meant a spa. It was next to a florist and a car-hire company. It bespoke of stream baths and mud packs in cramped spaces. Across the street was a Doner Kebab shop. We took to the tram again. My wife was now beginning to grasp and enjoy the mesmerism of tram journeying I had been talking about, its complete magic of living cinema.

In our next return to base at Europaplatz we found it unusually crowded at the tram stops and found that much fewer trams were plying as we waited for the Daxlanden tram. There was a thwarted, unsettled air. We waited for quite some time along with many other people waiting too. Some were wandering off. The electronic panels at the tram stop were saying something repeatedly, something urgent. We were not the only bewildered people there. One man came up to us speaking loudly in english that today Route 2 and Route 3 were regrettably closed for repair work on the tracks for two days. This was a big blow. We took another tram plying on some open Route, but it was crowded, filled and emptied at each stop, and we could not see much of the outside scenes because of the press of passengers. We gave up on the trams, disappointed.

Our happy plans dashed we were nonplussed and at a loss -- precisely when markets nab you -- and we looked at the nearest alternative, of seeing what shopping was on offer. From dreamtime to malls. One mall entirely devoted to jewelry and it passed muster in my wife’s gimlet eyes. Converted to rupee terms the prices were too high. Another mall devoted to beautiful household objects. Here were truly excellently made handicrafts made by machines. I too had to admit the refined design and workmanship. Made in China, made in Bangladesh, made in India. Look, all this is made back home. I said. So what, my wife answered, we don’t get to see these there, do we? She had a point. She would not let go of an exquisitely sculpted papier mache Buddha head in his Avalokiteshwara mode. Look at its size, I said, it would get crushed in our luggage handling. True, she had to concede. This battle continued, mall to mall, but we landed up buying gifts for people back home, till we stopped to think, look what are we doing here, thousands of miles from home, shopping? Good sense from Buddha made us come out of the magic spell of markets and we resumed normal meandering of tourists. And this took us, naturally, to the centre of Karlsruhe – the main schloss made by Karl William when he founded the city. My tramline dream-world had receded and I was back to the Wikipedia world.                         

All roads were geometrically arterial and led to the huge, green, beautiful garden at the centre of which sat the white, small, schloss, no more than 2 storey high and looking vaguely familiar. No wonder it is said that Americans built their capital Washington DC schlosses on the lines of Karlsruhe’s. The main buildings indeed looked like smaller-scale versions of Washington’s White House, and had more of a charming beauty than the off-putting American pomposity. The diminutive schloss complex was surrounded by huge, green, manicured parks divided into sectors radiating outwards. The effect was wonderful, cultured and – again that word – gentle. Many clusters of people, families, lovers, solitaries, sitting in the parks’ grasses or on benches were dotted about in the vast, vacant schloss garten; no crowding at all. There was a museum inside the schloss. We strolled towards it, half decided about going in, but the mild sunshine, blue sky, and mainly unpopulated green of the garden dissuaded us and we too found a peaceful bench, and silently gazed again at the gentle, beautiful Germany with admiration. The king had meant this schloss to be an oasis, and it still is. People were taking photos, eating picnic lunch, strolling hand in hand or with ice-cream cones, reading books, or just gazing at their middle distance navels in the balmy weather – even those with shorts-n-tshirts or burqas.        

Our peaceful bench was on the outer side of one sector of the park, near the larger circle of dull, ungrand buildings which surrounded the central schloss in an arc – very much like the buildings of the original Connaught Circus in Delhi. These were originally the inns for the Gentlemen-in-Waiting for the king’s audience and beyond this circle of inns was a middle circle road for these inns’ entrances. This middle circle, largely unoccupied except for pedestrians like us, suddenly started emitting fun sounds. We turned to see that a bunch of open-topped, expensive cars were going round and round the circular road, and the occupants were formally well dressed young people whooping and strewing colored balloons. We saw a white veil fluttering behind a bride’s head. The wedding party, obviously post-wedding, was having nice, gentle, and mildly inebriated fun. The expensive cars were not tearing the tarmac and the shouts and yodels were not brash or aggressively loud. Pleasing to the party, pleasing to the watchers. After four or five rounds they went away, and the garten resumed its calm.

Not quite. In the new calm after the wedding party we heard what would have been going on all the time, someone giving a loud running commentary and also having huge laughing, cackling fun while doing it. We must have earlier assumed unthinkingly that it was some sort of public address stuff, meant for the schloss visitors; the voice was loud enough for an amplifier. It was a fat, middle aged German woman with short hair. Sitting alone on a bench she was listening to something on her earphones and was speaking into a small microphone she held, which was connected to a small amplifier box sitting beside her. Her voice was echoing in the narrow space between shops and cafés leading to the main road on Kaiserstrasse. It could have been a football match she was listening to, or a political rally, or even a rock concert. Everyone was turning to look at her and edge away nervously. With her shouts, cackling laughter, and derisive comments (which we could not understand) which made her audience a bit afraid, her red face was shining with glee and her laughing teeth were gleaning white. She was enjoying the effect she was making. To me her exhortations sounded vaguely political, or at least messianic. My wife told me I was imagining this; the fat lady was just nicely mad.

Keeping my fantasy unuttered – that  she was in truth the unbanished spirit of original Karlsruhe of 1715 commenting and gleefully deriding the globalized Karlsruhe of 2016 – we moved away from this feudal environment and sat in one open air café in the Marketplatz on the Kaiserstrasse – which was a huge open square surrounded by tasteful old buildings. It was the original plaza of markets which would have catered to the original schloss and its visitors` inns. It had a small and dowdy-looking pyramid at its centre – no higher than 6 feet – under which the old king was buried. Every tourist brochure speaks of this pyramid as a must visit thing. In its original time it must have been an exotic and even magical oriental thing, fit for a king’s tomb. Today it looked pitiful and dwarfed, a bit like cardboard advertisement stalls in Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi touting sarees and marriage brass bands.

We sat in the cafe’ for a long time as one should in such café’s, watching the shoppers and walkers go by, the sun move down the sky in the west, the urban life unfold in the platz. The afternoon tabloid newspaper someone had left on our cloth covered table showed its front page: the Turkish flag with the crescent moon and a star, and a single word: Coup. I checked in the google news. The coup had failed already.

We had an early dinner for making an early start for the Black Forests next morning. Eating Indian food again while here in Germany would have been cowardly, and the overwhelming meat of German food was by now becoming unwelcome even for a meat eater Bengali. We compromised on Chinese. The main dish of potatoes and brinjals was tasty alright, but probably the cook was from Bihar. The beer was top class, German. Sloping off to sleep I read Milosz as usual. He was exploring questions of his youth, like: was Copernicus (1473-1543) a Polish, a Prussian, or a Lithuanian? Before the 19^th century idea of a nation, how did people see themselves? More: how do we see people (like Copernicus) today who lived before nations were born? Nations are not everlasting things, nothing is. So how should we revise our simplistic and politically unreflective ideas about  who we are?                                                                             (… to be contd)

My Germany Trip (2)

 Karlsruhe 

The morning opened as a crisply washed and clear morning to our well rested crisp minds. Clear blue sky, gentle and clean golden sunlight on buildings and trees (trees dotted the buildings throughout the city), an unawakened low intensity shopping strip across the hotel, and mainly pedestrians and cyclists on the vacant rain-washed roads hunched and hooded against the cold 14^o morning breeze hurrying to their workplaces early. Ah, so this is ordinary, suburban Germany! Clean, beautiful, gentle, well off, but not garish or in-your-teeth wealthy looking. Actually these words sum up all the patches of Germany I saw during my whole trip. There were one or two worrying points, but about that later. Meanwhile through the half opened window of our hotel room we breathed the clean air in this foreign country, gazed at the sights it presented to our eyes, sensed the ineffable mystery of a new land, felt the enigma of arrival Naipaul has spent his whole life writing about. We stood gazing out of the window, rapt.                                           

                                           

To see more I opened the other window. I must have done something wrong, because the whole huge window, 6 feet by 3 feet, bent inward from the top and started falling upon my head. I pushed it back up in panic but it wouldn’t shut – it remained up but jammed, somehow stuck and about to fall any moment. Calamity. Whatever philosophical pretences Indians project for themselves and for foreigners about their deep mystical philosophical stances, in truth the deepest philosophical view of dharma – The Way – we have is close to Murphy’s Law: if things can go wrong, they will, with the added lemma that things always can go wrong. Life, ie, bhavasagara, is fundamentally  fucked up. Pessimism is the polite word for it. May be those early 18^th century Britishers in India driven by their newly found optimism of nascent capitalism had got this part about us right: religious pessimism; although they later got caught up in their wretched  racism against Indian baboons. Of course these reflections of mine are ex-post-facto. Holding the swaying window up somehow with one panicked hand I tried to contact the hotel management, only to discover that the room did not have an intercom to the reception, or to anywhere! I later found that nearly all German hotels have these odd kinks mainly motivated by sly economic calculations. My wife ran out to the lobby to raise alarm, as I held the huge window teetering on disaster.

Eventually a man, white, but vaguely Turkish or east-European, with a middle-management air came to our rescue. I explained the matter. His English was in trial and error stage, so I calibrated.

“Window broken,” I said. “Fix this. Or change our room.”

“All rooms completely full,” he said proudly.

“Then what about this?” I shouted pointing to the swaying window. “We go to another hotel?”

He was puzzled.

“Tziss is for air,” he said.

“For air!?” Was the fellow mad, to top it all?

Totally immune to my worsening panic on the utter fuckedupness of life he moved to the window and held the handle, and I quickly removed my restraining hand holding the window at bay and stepped back cleverly. He turned the handle in some mysterious way and shut the window up nicely with a crisp click. Then he turned the handle another way and the window opened smoothly like normal windows do – around a vertical axis, the way I had wanted to open it in the first place.

“Tziss iz to look outside,” he said now smiling rattily. “To zee the beautiful view outside!”

“Oh”.

Then he shut the window again and turned the handle 180 degree and pulled. The huge window started tilting inward from the top, now moving around horizontal axis – the way it had started falling upon my head triggering the whole catastrophe. To my horror he kept pulling the knob. The window tilted about 6 inches inward from the top and six inches outward from the bottom – and stopped firmly and coolly.

“If you keeps window open, somebody can come inside,” he made running gestures with his arms pumping like a sprinter, smiling dementedly.

 “Really?” What have we got into here?

“Of course, nobody comz inside!” he grinned placatingly making soothing gestures with his hands, but still looking very Dostoyevskian. “That iz only I am talking to explain.”

“I see,” getting the point probably. What we had seen of Karlsruhe didn’t quite support the image of rampaging burglars or dacoits.

Then he pointed to the vertically, partially opened window triumphantly.

“And tziss is so to let air come inside,” he said grinning. “When you go out shopping, sightzeeing.”

He saw that my wronged universe was probably beginning to right itself.

“Tzee, yourself,” he pointed to the handle encouragingly, and shut the window again. I tried the handle cautiously and pulled. The window tilted inward six inches and halted sweetly. I breathed with relief.

“Try the other zide,” said the Dostoyevskian gnome. I did. The window opened normally, in the familiar way. “It iz for your comfort,” he said winningly. He was not looking very Dostoyevskian anymore.

“Thanking you,” I said with deep feeling.

“No problem, welcome,” he waved and went away.

So, with one window open to air and intruders and the other open only to air, at peace again, we had our first tea in Germany, from the tea tray of things kept in the room. The tea was good, like home. We were to know later that most hotels without airconditioning and maybe homes too had such windows. It made sense, just. I saw many similar practical things in Germany in this trip that made sense, just.

Like the breakfast, in the breakfast lounge (no room service of course). It was our first German food of the trip, and was quite a spread. Various kinds of local bakery baked breads, various cold cuts of meats, scrambled eggs, various salads, pickles (gherkins were the best), fruits, coffees – and fried Nuremberg sausages and ham. Why Nuremberg sausages? Hadn’t heard of them, but then I had hardly heard much of things German anyway. Nuremberg, the city of trials of war crimes of the Nazis was all I know of it. The sausages were small, mildly spiced and good. Oh, and many flavoured yogurts (very good). I saw a small tray kept hesitantly next to the sausages and its name card said “sauerkraut.” Sauerkraut, at last! I had read so much about it, the standard food of childhood in Germany like cabbage soup of England since Dickens. It was in my must eat mental list. It is wettish shredded cabbage, fermented and mildly salted. It tastes sour and does the probiotic job and is eaten as a sort of basic salad for sausages. Not very good. I could understand why eating it every day, German school boys hated it, in the novels I had read – as English school boys hated cabbage soup in English novels. Cabbage is good for growing children, it was and is believed; and children want to quickly grow out of it – like most things of childhood. Clean, nutritious, good and sensible, and after the first day, repetitive and boring breakfast. Breads stood out. Every day even the commercially run hotel had women baking different breads with different dough, and breads were of different shapes and taste. Germany freaked out on breads. I liked “bretzel” the best. It is a giant, spoked-wheel-like, pretzel shaped, spiced, tasty bread. I will give it the gold medal. Breads, meats, and wine/beer. This is all that is German food, just. Of all European food Germany`s has the least variation. Why? Because being late starters on the gravy train (heh, heh) of colonization – later even than the Italians who in turn were late in following the British, French, Spanish and the Dutch – they missed out on the bounty of spices? The current historians are coming round to the view that the famed Age of Exploration in Europe was actually driven by the earth shattering experience of taste of Asiatic spices in food, and by the mad lust unleashed by this discovery into the centuries old dull palates of the “pagan” ancient times and the Christian middle ages. The flag, the cross, and even gold etc were later quests really. Again the mediterrandan angle. Forget exploration or conquest for spices, Germany and Switzerland without a Mediterranean shore even  missed out on the normal civilizational contacts in that direction. Later I was to see in the marketplaces that Turkish origin Doner Kebab eateries have pretty much displaced the “German food” restaurants who have, shrewdly, adjusted to this trend.

My wife had to catch the punctual bus of the punctual Germans for the conference while I wanted to go back to sleep. Many other delegates were staying in the same hotel – mainly senior bankers from Asia and Africa, a cynical and humourous lot as I found when I met them later. The conference was being organized by something cutely called European Organization for Sustainable Development. “Sustainable Development” is of course World Bank speak for sustaining the comfortable lifestyles of the white G-8 or G-10 people at the cost of sweatshops of Asia, Africa and Latin America where laboring men, women and children on sub survival wages live in unsustainable homes and habitats and hopes. The sad and wise Afro-Asian bankers were, I found, tolerant of the German hypocrisy and cant and merry about it – mildly joking about “Deutsche Mark, oops, Euro” – having really come all the way to Karlsruhe only to pick up one or two technical tricks on waste-management or forestry. Humour was the best way to bear the German naivete and arrogance. The bus came punctually, the delegates went punctually, and I returned to my room now rendered much fresher by the open anti-intruder window. All I wanted to do was to get back into bed and begin rereading Czeslaw Mislosz’s The Native Realm that I had carried with me as my sole companion-book for this trip and, occasionally watching the clear indigo sky outside the sunlit window, to go back to sleep. In this book which I had first read twenty years back Milosz has explored within his own life the tortuous meanings of nativity and nationality and all that.

I read Milosz, and also dozed for a time. But through the open window I could hear, apart from sedate sounds of trams stopping and starting, laughter and shouts of children at play. Probably no sound in our universe is more mysterious and uplifting. I went to the window. There was a school – schule in German – across the road, with a vaguely Greek or Roman looking building. May be the school day was over and the children were waiting for mothers or elder siblings to come in bicycles to escort them home also on bicycles, filling up the waiting time with as much play as they could wrest from the day. Clean, white, healthy children, eyes shining, faces lit with laughter and mischief. I watched, speechless, fascinated, as trams glided to the stop and glided away with soft pings of opening and closing doors in both directions. These were German children, living out their childhood here before my eyes for their destinies in life! Clean, big, modern cars were cruising smartly. I felt I could spend the whole day at the window watching this uncluttered and ordered life go by. And I understood why I wanted to go back to sleep and to the memoirs of Milosz. After having come thousands of miles to Germany, its infinite and foreign suchness looked huge as a mountain and I felt that my going outside will start an enormous and absorbing encounter. Encounter in the best sense of the word. I was afraid that I would be fatigued. I was wrong. Germany energized me instead.

The first thing to do was to go to the tram stop outside my hotel – Kalstor – and try and understand how the system worked. In Karlsruhe the tram lines (two) are in the middle of the roads and the two outer sides are for cars, buses and others – with a border of bicycle-track on each side abutting the pavements for pedestrians. There are many zebra crossings for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the roads (one can take one’s bicycle inside the tram, space permitting!) well controlled by profuse traffic lights which are obeyed by all. This is so all over in Germany it is said. Karlsruhe’s tram system is more advanced, as an expert told me later, in many ways but mainly because the tram tracks are by design integrated with the national and international rail tracks, so that if necessary trams and trains can connect seamlessly with each others track. So far it has not been necessary it seems. Only the highways outside the city have a respectable volume of vehicular traffic although very tame and girlish looking when compared with Delhi-Gurgaon highway or even Bombay-Pune expressway.

The tiny stop Kalstor had a tiny shelter from sun and rain and an automatic ticket vending machine, which accepted cash and coin of Germany but also all major credit and debit cards of the world. There was a helpful menu of instructions to operate the machine and buy tickets – but it was in German. I couldn’t decipher it at all, as I pretended to read it with a casual nonchalance (why was I being so silly?). The man at my hotel’s reception, which also doubled as its bar (jolly hotel!), had told me to buy a Euro 6.20 ticket which will enable me to travel in any tram or any bus – or any train, should they get suddenly integrated with Karlsruhe’s trams today – for the next 24 hours. It sounded like a bargain and later proved to be so. But right now I was stumped by my illiteracy. Three frail old ladies waiting for their tram were watching me with kindly smiles. Maybe that is why I shrugged theatrically and sauntered off lightly as if all along I was studying the vending machine merely for an academic caprice! An Inscrutable Indian here. But well clear of the tram stop, at a road crossing, I stopped and wondered where to go, and how. I was standing at a pedestrian zebra crossing and I was the only one there. The traffic signal opposite to zebra crossing was red. Obediently I stood unmoving for quite a few minutes while no car or bus or even a bicycle went past either way. German’s are sticklers for rules I had been told. When I was beginning to feel silly in the situation a senior lady came from behind me, pushing a wheeled stroller filled with the day’s domestic shopping and happily skipped across to the light shining red. Germans break rules too! Happily I too started to cross the road and I was midway when the light turned green to rob me of the thrill of breaking a rule in Germany. On the other side sobriety dawned on me and I sought the help of google maps on my mobile phone.

I found I was walking along the Karlstrasse (strasse = street) northward which would hit the Kaiserstrasse half a kilometer ahead at Europaplatz, which seemed to be and later proved to be the main crossroad of the downtown part of Karlsruhe, which in turn was a stone’s throw away from the big daddy schloss (castle) built by Karl Wilhelhm or William in 1715 (Germany has had a lot of illustrious Karls in its roll of honour) around which was built the whole town…. But I was saved from this kind of Wiki perspectives when opening and closing doors of a smallish bakery ensnared me with the smells. I had to go inside, to see the brightly lit, cheerfully painted bakery to look at a mini galaxy of breads and meats and salads – looking at all this was itself like a tribute, eating would have been like a violation of the splendor. I was too full of my first German breakfast anyway. I drifted out spellbound and trudged along towards Europaplatz as planned through google maps. But I was snared again. This time by a biggish sort of park dotted with green, sloping roofed, square rain/sun shelters built on four poles at its four corners. Benches were scaltered around all over in the open. A sign said Biergarten – beer garden – and it was a garden where you sat down and had beer. At this early hour with a cool breeze and weak sunlight only one shelter was occupied, by two large, senior women who communed with each other silently over two generous mugs of beer. I had to get inside the park and sat on a body warming bench in the open. I too wanted to have a 1 litre plus tankard of bier sitting in this well-maintained garten, but it was too cold for a black skinned, breakfast full Asiatic. I just sat, gazed around stupidly, enjoying the gentle sunlight lighting up this gentle town even without a bier.

Along one side garten (3 sides were open) was a large four storey classical looking and old looking building. For a post-colonial dark-skinned any building other than the strictly Euclidean and coldly utilitarian construction is classical – the sort of buildings you see in the historical pictures of European cities, the sort old architects had designed till WW II, or the sort today’s architects fake to imitate and insinuate old culture, old money. The building had a worn out look. A small, old sign over a small gate in the middle said – etched in old stone or plaster – Post Galerie. Post? Post office.  So huge? This was Karlsruhe’s old, main post office! Post offices have – at least for me they do – about the same romantic charm as railway stations. I had to see it.

But it was not a post office at all. It was a huge multi-storeyed mall swarming with people. An open, glass-walled lift took you up and down from floor to floor. One floor – the lower ground floor – was given over to eateries, bakeries, bars and full restaurants and florists. Other floors had all the merchandise all the malls carry as cargo, in all modern cities in the world. The only things you probably couldn’t buy here were cars and airplanes. I saw bicycles, skate boards, body building equipment, mountaineering gear, Chinese pottery, apart from the usual. I saw… I don’t know what I saw. After the bier garten, this was claustrophobic, smothering my senses with excess. I blundered outside in some panic. It was on one side of the Post Galerie on my Karlstrasse as it joined the Kaiserstrasse. It was full of people, standing on both sides of the Karlstrasse; girls were having ice-cream; boys were weaving in and of the crowd smoothly gliding on roller skates. I walked to the end of Post Galerie and turned the corner, and the full splendor of Europaplatz hit me full force.

I was standing on the adjacent side of the Post Galerie and on the ground floor outside, facing the downtown shopping plaza of Kaiserstresse, were the Burger Kings, Macdonalds, travel agents, Western Union and a bank. Thronged with people there were semi-permanent shops of eateries, eateries, eateries – German, Italian, Turkish foods and such. The road in front – Kaiserstrasse, intersected by Karlstrasse – was busy with trams coming and going on both tracks. There were half a dozen tram stops. Electronic panels on each tram stop showed an ever changing menu of trams’ destinations with ETAs in minutes. The stops were full of people, some sitting on the helpful benches, holding full shopping bags, flower pots, babies, ice-creams and dogs. I walked to the junction, with trams smartly negotiating the bends in three directions, and saw along Kaiserstrasse endless vistas of restaurants, Woolworths, Nikes, bars, more Burger Kings. I felt I had to get away, even if temporarily so.

I went to the nearest tram stop and stood before its undecipherable automatic ticket machine and watched people coolly punching its buttons and the machine’s slot spewing out tickets. Trams were stopping and moving off. Do I dare disturb the universe? I stood bang against the ticket machine, like Oliver Twist in Fagin’s kitchen. A girl  bought her ticket and I blurted out in English if she could help me buy a ticket, and held out a fist full of euro coins. She looked worriedly at the panel showing arriving trams and said oh, okay. I want one for Euro 6.20, I said. She picked out the coins, put them in the slot and punched the buttons too fast for me to see. Out came the ticket. She handed it to me and ran to catch a tram that had just arrived, saying get it punched inside the tram. I now held the getaway key to the universe. I got into the next tram that came, stood around to see what others did, and saw them pushing their tickets inside a small box fitted just inside the entry door. I did the same. The punched ticket showed the date and time. I was now moving, inside some tram in Karlsruhe, away from Post Galerie. And I could go on doing so for the next 24 hours! I was moving,I was free!

I did not understand it then, but this simple getaway act eventually turned out to yield a decisive perspective to my whole visit to Karlsruhe – freed me from the inevitable foreclosures of seeing contained in helpful  things like Google, Lonely Planet, Wiki, schlosses and museums, the entire template of tourism. Why only Karlsruhe? This freedom made my whole trip to Germany more personal, more, um, subaltern.

As the fug of my glorious escape in the tram cleared I saw myself sitting on a nice window seat of the half-filled tram, with huge clean glass windows, watching the city glide past. Glide is the word – no duk-duk, duk-duk… pulse of railways – only a smooth sway of being conveyed at a gentle pace. I had no idea of where the tram was going, of course, but I thought I saw my hotel go past, followed by less intense shopping streets and offices of small businesses, and soon I was at the terminus of the Karlsruhe’s Hauptbahnof – the main train station I had arrived at yesterday from Frankfurt! This gave a sense of roundedness to my movement and also of the size of the city.

The tram took another curve of the rails and it was passing residential parts of the city. Quiet sleepy houses, cars parked filling both sides of the streets, leaving only a narrow lane clear in the middle. Trees, parks, benches, well maintained outer walls and pavements. Soon habitation became sparser, occasional houses changed to older traditional sloped roofs with gables and chimneys. The tram passed close to the walls. I could see glimpses of interiors of rooms, the washing hung out to dry on balconies and lawns, flower pots on window sills, rusting bicycles outgrown by the children, houses newly painted or barely lived in, cute letter boxes grown old… life. The tram emptied too, as it neared the end of its route, now both sides surrounded by greenery and trees. It reached the last stop and I was the only passenger left sitting. The driver got off, slowly walked to a small toilet, came out after a few minutes and lighted a happy cigarette. The few houses had the vacancy of the noon. No one was about. Two elderly women were chatting in the balcony of a two storeyed house. They finished their chat and one of them came down to her waiting stroller full of the day’s shopping, waved to the woman looking out from the balcony and slowly moved off. The empty balcony of the adjacent house showed a drooping small flag of Germany, not removed after the German football team which was expected to be the champion had shockingly lost to Italy in the semi-finals of Euro 2016 last week. A tall, erect, old man in white beard with a rucksack on his back slowly walked past. The tram driver waved to him. Two old ladies and a small dog came into the tram. The driver finished his cigarette, turned to see us sitting inside, and slowly moved to his driving seat. I was in a trance. Within 24 hours of having come thousands of miles across the planet from the ever-problematic India, here I was, effortlessly given the opportunity of seeing comfortably from a fine tram the ordinary, suburban, life of white people of an advanced society in Europe! I felt I was given a fantastic privilege. This easy and intimate access was precious – far more than what books, TV and internet could give me. I was hooked by Germany seen thus. The tram moved off again, showing me more of it, immersed in rapt exultation.

Slowly my eyes began to focus better on less ethereal aspects and I began to read street names, shop signs, tram stops, etc. I saw a Goethestrasse. It was to be expected, of course – Goethe. The next street said Mozartstrasse. Mozart, next to Goethe! On an impulse I got out of the tram at the next stop, in a park land residential area, and started walking. The next street read Beethovenstrasse. Marvelling, I walked from street to street reading Haydnstrasse, Bachstrasse, Schubertswtrasse. Which people will name their neighbourhood streets after famous music composers? I moved over some major road crossings and into an institutionalish area and was stumped to see Lorenzstrasse, which joined – appropriately – Einsteinstrasse, passing Otto-Hahn strasse (of the atom bomb of USA in 1940s) on to Gutenbergstrasse and Zeppellinstrasse, Then I saw Siemenstrasse, Nobelstrasse, Marie Curie strasse. Streets named after music masters and physicts! Is there any city like this in the world? This wonderland was, I saw, in and around Ettlingen and it had its old and carefully preserved schloss (castle) too, of course! Quietly energized, I got into the next tram that came along in some tram stop I was standing in. The tram moved on. I remembered out of nowhere at all the fascinating name of a packet of cigarettes I used to see advertised in my childhood days, when smoking was not even an distant idea in my mind: Passing Show. The tram looped back along another arc to the Hauptbahnof again, and further towards the town centre now beginning to look somewhat familiar. This rich pageantry, this was cinema in the most generic sense of the term – this smooth passing of meaningful scenes of Karlsruhe in front of my eyes. A city and all that it contained of the past and the future was unfolding before my eyes according to some deep script of history. And lo and behold, I was approaching the thick market area of the Europaplatz from another direction, the very spot from where I had fled to begin with, but this time with more settled eyes and mind.

It was mid day. The platz was full of people, trams coming and going from all directions, in a city that moves on trams. By now my eye was in and a sort of mode of discovery had been lit in my mind no longer bewildered. Karlsruhe’s trams had led me inside gently to glimpse private lives of ordinary people. The viewpoints of Wikipedia, Lonely Planet, and Deutsche tourism, etc had been left behind by now and  I felt free and well centered in a strange city so distant, so foreign and yet I could do as I pleased!

I was sitting on a steel bench of one of the Europaplatz tram stops, watching people shopping, eating, travelling, chatting, or just sitting in the mild summer sunlight. Many were standing in bunches smoking cigarettes. It struck me that I was seeing much more public smoking in Germany than what I saw in Mumbai or Delhi. Odd, this. The electronic panel announcing the pending arrival of trams showed place names and minutes of ETA. One name entered my newly focused mind, a name I had read back in India before starting this trip. Durlach. Two names actually, Durlach and Daxlanden, in the east and west of Karlsruhe respectively, the former the original site of pre-1715 Karlsruhe of the local king’s dynasty, and the latter in the opposite direction near the Rhine river and the dockland areas. And I saw a tram arrive and stop before me, its destination said Durlach. Free, I just got into it and found a nice seat among all the nice seats.

The uber market place of Kaiserstrasse persisted for quite some time, thinned out, and gave way to business centres, churches, schools, and then thinned out further to show up green areas, parks, and well-appointed residential houses in wider roads, and eventually the tram came to a stop where everyone got down, including me. The stop said KA-Durlach.

On one side was a school and on the other side were auto-parts shops, bars and bakeries. So this is where it had started. The tram track, I saw ahead, curved away to eventually return to mid-town areas again. But the road ahead reached a major cross-road where there was, for a change, much car traffic. I walked along a fine pavement sloping upward. There was a hill with a smallish fortress (schloss) on top – Turmberg – which had been the seat of political and military power since medieval times. There is a small “funicular” train to take tourists up to the schloss, but it was not working that day. In my non-arthritic days it would have been a 15 minute climb up the hillock. There was a nice road too. I walked up along this for a while. And I saw the surrounding neatly worked rural farming land, the original catchment area for revenues of the ruling kings. To my Indian eyes spoilt by the huge scale and grandeur of Indian medieval forts, the Turnberg schloss was puny and unremarkable. I sat on a nice stone bench in the nice sunlight, and looked around. Most of Germany since its medieval times would have been governed, apart from its river and sea port towns, like this, by such kinglets operating their military power from such fortresses. I could also see on the hill a small church which would have, gracefully and disgracefully, legitimized such local kings. Such was Germany for centuries, till its industrial revolution. Why only Germany? All Europe. I could also glimpse what must be the bypass road for the highway going south towards Switzerland. It was full with Mercedes, Volvos, Toyotas, Renaults, of Germany today. Hm.                  

By 1715 as the medieval times were ebbing the king of Baden-Durlach, much influenced by French ideas from across the Rhine river and also no doubt by the rising revenues from custom taxes from rising river borne trade on Rhine, shifted what is so delightfully called the “seat of power” from Turmberg to its present, modern, schloss near Europaplatz on the Kaiserstrasse. This new schloss, much hyped in tourist literature, with a vaguely pared-down Roman architecture, is in the centre of the “planned” Karlsruhe town from which radiate like spokes of a wheel streets in straight lines to all ends of the city. It was the first “planned” city in Europe it seems, and it is said that after independence from Britain America built its capital town of Washington D.C. based on inspiration from Karlsruhe. It is also said that till this day the old timers of Durlach try to sneer at the parvenu people of Karlsruhe with the impotent rage of those superceded by history. The past has not been vanquished. In Baden-Wurtemburg district of Germany, in which Karlsruhe is situated, and also in the neighbouring district of Baden-Baden, right wing political parties have always carried much clout and public adherence – even till post-Brexit EU today.

Back at the Durlach tram stop, with no hurry at all in my liberated mode, I saw a small stall of Doner Kebab for my well earned lunch. Eating a Doner Kebab bun, which is similar to but much superior than a hamburger, I watched a clutch of school children also eating things from the stall probably at the end of the school day – early teenage white boys and girls. The boys in long shorts and hooded T-shirts were mostly in bunches – pink of skins, blue of eyes, and semi-blonde of hair – in the universal spirit of mischief of boys. The girls were less in bunches, wearing very short shorts (so short that cheeks of their buttocks were clearly visible) and T-shirts and their spirit seemed more advanced, and turgid. Such aggressive display of the body at such an early age was puzzling. Many girls were smoking. May be it was the original genetic code – females of the species trundling around as widely as possible among the available choices for best male mating – expressing itself early due to better and assured nutrition. Or maybe it was just fashion, if fashion is ever just fashion.

The selfish genes, articulating themselves, in ever-renewing expressions. What anxieties have been sprouting in the female human genes in Europe so as to trigger such aggressive mating display and behaviour from the 20^th century onward, despite higher levels of nutrition? Industrial labour? World Wars? Decolonisation? With my stomach full of kebab and my mind full of semi-educated thoughts I gave up the idea of catching a train back to the town centre. Instead, I wandered around Durlach, which was an upper class residential area with top end SUVs parked outside top end houses and top end manicured flowers in the lawns and window sills. Rich but understated, mild and gentle – a German, settled suburb. The afternoon ebbed. I saw a wonderful sight of three smiling, young, massively pregnant ladies back from their local super market, sitting and chatting while eating ice-cream at a bench of a bus stop, their stroller trolleys full of shopping waiting beside them like pets. A huge man in workers’ denim overalls with an exaggerated beer belly was hurrying, a burning cigarette in one hand, may be having signed off for the work day at a motor repair workshop, to the bars around the tram stop for his evening tankard of beer. He nodded hello to me. Polite drivers in smoothly humming uber cars braked and allowed me to pass in my random wanderings surely transgressing traffic rules and conventions. I wonder what they saw. A brown skinned Asiatic, surely over-the-hill, lost in the affluent and superior cantons of today’s German civilization? My wife’s whatsapp message said that her day was over and she would be returning to the hotel. My mobile phone clock said 8 p.m.! I had thought from my Indian daylight hours mind that  it couldn’t be more that 5 pm. I turned to the tram stop, calling it a day.                                                                                              (… to be contd.)

Obama coming to India, twice : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Passing Thought: place of places

This is end of December and despite all climate changes fogs are covering Delhi and surrounding lands as usual. In early mornings or late evenings Delhi`s suburbs look like other such Asiatic city suburbs, like Tehran, Cairo, Shanghai. Good for imagination and pondering.

This brings to my mind one guilty thought I have carried with me for years and years. Here it is. When I travel and visit other places in India, like rural areas and small towns of the south, or Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, etc and see the life there, I see and understand and even have a passing fellow-feeling and a sense of belonging. But at the same time I am aware of a sense of something like condescension , as if this particular province is somehow left behind by the central site of the Current Times ; as if these people and places , charming and interesting yes but crucially relegated to a status of lesser , um, significance! And I have always felt ashamed of this feeling.

I have also always wondered why I feel this way. Is it just the well known big -city snobbery , assuming that it itself inhabits the capital of the universe?I have mostly lived in Delhi and Bombay( now Mumbai). Is that it?Is it that tacit assumption of tone and framing in the programmes of Discovery and National Geographic channels as if New York or London are the sites of sensibilities that matter and from which one looks at the quaint world ?

When I visited New York and London I felt the same way about them too! They were impressive and instructive yes, but quaint and somehow equally , well, provincial as Indian hinterlands.

Hinterland. Perhaps this word is the key. In a sense which is very strong in Naipaul`s books perhaps every place where one arrives at must carry this enigma - the enigma of being both a destination as well as an hinterland. For someone born and bred in big cities , without an ancestral village or a "native place", his/her city is a perpetual exile , and in compensation every other place is hinterland.

As the world moves on into unfolding history, everyone is getting exiled and the whole world is getting to be a vast hinterland.

I have not been able to work this out fully.

Perhaps it is nothing more than a little pose of mine, what Shakespeare would have called my conceit and phant`sy.