Architecture for Atonement.

Friday morning, and the cold fog snuggled the city of Vienna like a damp comforter when I was woken by my alarm at 6.00 a.m. It was much too early for my jet-lagged body, which was still on Boston time six hours behind.
In the airport taxi twenty minutes later, we checked in at the Air Berlin counter for a discount carrier flight to Berlin. Thankfully, I slept all the way.
The best way to describe Berlin is not so much that it is a city, but a forest interspersed with roads and buildings. Having some extra time before our meeting, we drove through the woods to the Holocaust memorial, which is one of the most amazing pieces of installation art I have ever seen.
From the street outside, it looks like a whole lot of concrete slabs around four feet high, evoking a graveyard. It’s only when you wander in to the rows between the slabs that you realize that you are going down into a valley, and that the slabs are actually of vastly different heights. Soon you are lost in between the rows of concrete, and the sounds of the city fade until you have to strain to hear the noise of the traffic. The feelings of emptiness and the uniformity of concrete give you the impression of being in a prison of sorts. If ever there was a piece of architecture that made me reflect on the extreme edges of the human condition, this was it. The cold weather only added to the emptiness, the growing thought that all the variety in life had been stripped off layer by layer like an onion, and what remained was an empty, underground parking lot. I felt mostly serene, but there was a nagging part of me that wanted to just lie down among those stones and never get up.
We had morning tea around the corner at a beautiful café adorned with black and white photos of old movie stars. The establishment provided a wide open view of the American embassy, ring by metal and barbed wire with sandbags piled high and young marines with crewcuts casting a weary eye from the comfort of their guardpost towards the big bad world outside. They followed our progress carefully, as we dragged our suspicious looking suitcases across the pavement and into the café.
It looked like the beginning of a joke…An American, a German and an Indian walk into a café…

Truffles and Christmas punch in Vienna

If it is Wednesday, it must be Vienna. Actually I had not been to the Austrian capital in seven or eight years, but Wednesday afternoon I took the British Airways flight out of Heathrow. My colleague from Boston was with me, and it was an extortionate 65 pounds for a London taxi from St. Pauls to Heathrow airport. I usually take Heathrow Express, but with two people it was nearly the same price in a taxi.
In Vienna, we stayed at the Meridien, a swanky hotel that was also excellent value. This was the first time I have stayed in a hotel where the minibar and the broadband internet were both free!
The Vienna of 1997 was a very different place than the Vienna of 2005. I remember a city of late night cafes, cheap eateries, and people dressed up in Mozart costumes standing on street corners and handing our fliers. I also recall remarking that there were only pink-hued Europeans everywhere, and no ethnic minorities. This time it was different. Chinese and Arabs and people of many hues wandered the cold, wintry streets. We ate at an amazing little traditional Viennese restaurant serving only Austrian wines and spirits. I had never heard of Austrian red wine before, but it was excellent! We eschewed the late night cafes in favour of the Meridien bar, where Amir-bhai the Bangladeshi bartender served up an excellent Singapore sling. This one was topped up with soda, but was every bit as good as the one in London the night before.

Sometime during the second sling, I considered the possibility that perhaps Vienna was in fact much the same between 1997 and 2005, and it is I who have changed in the interim. The Ravi of old was a newly-employed wage slave with a 25000$ outstanding college loan, and the Ravi of 2005 was a thirty-something professional with a positive net worth.

Thursday after our client meeting, we had yet another traditional meal, this time lunching at the Offenlach in the old town. Desperately short on sleep, I hurried back to the hotel for a two-hour nap before the evening festivities. My firm had organized a Christmas party at the Freyung market, and we joined our local colleagues for some Christmas hot rum punch with clients. It was a delicious contrast between the freezing outside weather, and the wonderful hot punch. We found ourselves joining our Austrian colleagues for dinner, and after a long walk arrived at a modern looking restaurant, which turned out to be Frankie’s American Bar and Grill. At this point I rebelled. No way was I going all the way to Vienna and eating American food! I took my two companions and left the larger party behind, and we ended up around the corner at the Gleischeloss, the oldest restaurant in Austria, built in 1442. They actually had autographs of Beethoven and Mozart on the walls, in addition to a few other famous people! The atmosphere was great, the company excellent, and the food was traditional Viennese, exactly what I had in mind.
To top it off, on the way to the Freyung market, I had found a small shop selling whole white Alba truffles, which are the most delicious and aromatic mushrooms known to man. Back in Boston over the weekend, we had a small dinner at my epicurean friend Blade’s house on Sunday night, washing down the wonderful Truffle pasta with a Nebbiolo red wine also from Alba, the same town near where the truffles were dug up from. The wine and the pasta deliciously complemented each other like the siblings that they were.

Face to face with my misspent youth

On Tuesday morning last I took the American Airlines flight from Boston to London. A daytime flight in first class is the most civilized mode of travel eastward from North America to Europe. After less than six hours, the plane arrives in London around 8.30 p.m., just in time for a late dinner, a few drinks, and a good night’s rest before the next day's work.
I met an old friend for dinner downstairs at the One Aldwych hotel. The meal was pleasant but unremarkable, and afterwards I sat in the hotel bar alone with a Singapore Sling (my current liquid favourite). Speaking to the young bartender, I discovered that he lived just across the street from my old flat in Willesden Green in north London.
If London is where dreams are realized, then a bedsit in Willesden Green is the place where you begin the dozing that comes before the dreaming. In January 1995, I had arrived wearing a thin raincoat, dragging a small suitcase with one broken wheel, and with three hundred dollars in my pocket to start life in London. In this young bartender, I saw the Ravi of ten years ago.
If we met a younger version of ourselves, how would we get on? There would be some curiosity. Perhaps we would ladle some advice to the youth with so much potential. But ultimately, we don’t want to know that person too well. We have long since scrubbed away the imperfections of the past in our minds, and only remember the hero that inhabits our body as a young man. Gouging the surface of this perfection with the realities of misspent youth, would disturb the fragile détente we have established with our heart.
This young man who will next weekend fly to Spain, drink too much and make an ass of himself at his friend’s apartment on the beach. This ignoramus who will spend the next five years working hard in a pointless job without reward, before realizing he should have moved to Wall Street to begin with. This shy youth who will not have the confidence to ask for a date the spring blushed girls who set his dreams ablaze. The hundred and eighteen things this young fool will learn the hard way, and which we could have sat him down and given him a list instead titled “Life’s great shortcuts”. No, it will simply not do to short circuit his life.
If you distill Hindu philosophy, the astonishing conclusion is that God is nothing but our future self. Consider that we are in a long cycle of birth, death and rebirth, striving to improve ourselves, until one day we reach Moksha (or release) and become one with God. It must then follow that the only thing that separates us from God is time.
Conversely, when God looks at humanity, he sees a young version of himself, with all the imperfections and incomplete knowledge and the struggle that is life.
In other words, coming into contact with our younger selves will bring us closer to God, because we then see the world as God sees it – imperfect, sometimes even cruel, but with infinite creativity and potential.
Perhaps this is why we must have children.