The occasional light expression

The Grieg concert hall should be your landmark in ‘downtown’ Bergen if you get airdropped by culturally boorish aliens in the middle of Norway. Edvard Grieg is both a local and international legend, famous for ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’, a very evocative piece (listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIYT-MrVaI) which reminds you of ancient green lands, royalty, and a magnificent Court.

Bergen downtown itself  is a 20 min busride from the airport. a straight road with lovely multi-level wood houses on either side. Downtown itself is a dozen blocks this way or that, but impresses nonetheless, with the architecture (sans bluster) that the Scandinavians are famous for.

Met my old friend from back in Minnesota, Christoffer Baldersheim (a freshly minted Psychologist from the University of Bergen) after almost 8 years, and took a nippy walk to his apartment quite next to Grieg concert hall.  After quaffing the remaining graduation wine Chris introduced me to a unique Scandinavian concept - SNUS!

SNUS is an intense blast of tobacco stored in a mini teabag of sorts, super popular in Sweden and Norway, nearly banned in the rest of Europe. The tobacco is potent, and saltily so, and goes best with a drink or coffee, if you aren’t used to it.

Bergen is ultimately a university town, a gateway to the fjords, a heritage site, and a quintessential European small town, with enough globe trotting Norwegians, and enough globe trotting tourists passing through it (noticed enough Japanese, Turks, East Europeans, Japanese and Chinese, other than the usual mainland Europeans).

The Architecture of Bergen is classic Norwegian, lots of individuality, lots of lovely woodwork and stonework, and a relief from the steel and glass that often grates my eyes in Bangalore.

The touristy ‘center’ of Bergen is the Bryggen area (Norwegian for Wharf), a World Cultural Heritage site, and the kind of place that sells miniature trolls and ‘I love Norway’ t-shirts, and supposedly fresh produce (which the locals assure me, is only for ‘fresh’ tourists). The Bryggen area also has a Hollywood connection. I’m told that some of the Narnia scenes were shot here, in the middle of the patchwork wooden buildings, which have been built and rebuilt (Bergen has experienced an oddly large number of fires in its history) since the Middle Ages.

Right next to Bryggen is the city center, a nice little agora with a view of lovely mountains on one side, and a church spire on the other. The center usually has bands playing everyday through summer, and i managed to catch a Navy band, in full glory. Its a great place to see people see other people, grab a snack and coffee, and bask in Bergen’s rare sunny days.

If you keep walking around Bryggen you are assured to see a lot of ships headed towards the fjords, or ships just docked and hanging out by the water, and families having drinks and dinner on their little or giant boats. For land lubbers like me, it was heart warming to see the variety of boats and the outdoors lifestyle on the water.

Bergen has a lovely mountain top, which Chris and I finally managed to get to after a long leisurely walk through the city. The walk is a great way to know the city from the inside, and see the less touristy residential areas, and get a deeper feel for how the Norwegians live.

The walk cuts through long winding roads, a bit of forest, and residential neighborhoods, and you see odd sights like the Monkey Howling tree, a pretty looking and dangerous embrace of thorns.

The views from the top is definitely worth a walk. A quick look from the top tells you exactly why Bergen is Norway’s second biggest city. This is a small town with not more than a quarter million people, but an industrious and occupied small town, with enough business, education, and tourism to keep it humming.

There’s a touristy tram which you can always take up the mountain trail and back, but the walk up is rewarding in a way that makes you tired and satisfied at the same time!



Bergen also has interesting museums including the Industry Kunst musem (Kunst = Art), a great collection of silver jewellery designs, furniture, and apparel. Enough to whet your appetite for the larger and more famous museums in Scandinavia.

Bergen is also certainly the MOST expensive country in the world. $7 for a half litre bottle of water. $6 for 3 buns at the local 7/11. $5 for a black coffee. Never mind the rates of alcohol and cigarettes. $75 for two regular pizzas and a bottle of coke. I’ve joked with people that coming from India, i’ve had to convert from Norwegian Krones to US dollars to make things seem less expensive!

Ultimately, Bergen is a great destination if you want a relaxed tourist experience and introduction to Scandinavia. It has stunning landscapes, beautiful people who know how to work hard, stay fit, and have a good time. Great views, lovely to walk through, and a far cry from the hustle bustle of other major European capitals.

Helsinki is different. An amalgam of technology, art, culture with the texture of Europe and the taste of a future-Earth. I started my Helsinki journey in late June with the perfect companion - a lovely new hard science fiction novel called The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, probably now Finland’s most famous sci-fi writer.

In a way, Helsinki has a cognitive link to Japan - in terms of street fashion, and technology, and gaming. I felt i was likely to see a TRON inspired outfit here rather than elsewhere in Scandinavia. The fashion seemed strongly inspired as much by the high priests of Paris as by death metal and Gothic influences - strong bold expressions of the Finnish passion for being on the cutting edge.
You can see it in their DNA to produce giants like Nokia (however fledgling now) and more recently, Angry Birds Games, and the various electronic and board games that are very much a part of Finnish culture.

Helsinki’s architecture was the first thing that stuck me en route from the airport to city center. I felt like I was in Russia, with standard block apartment buildings in yellow and gray. And I got closer to the city center though, the landscape changed again, to more classic buildings, high rises, and quirky architectural expressions. Helsinki seemed to have one architectural link with Russia and one with the rest of Scandinavia.

Kamppi Mall is sort of the magnetic center of Helsinki, where trains, metros, Finns, and tourists of all forms converge. Kampii connects you to the three different parts of Finland: Helsinki, Espoo, and Vaanta (Helsinki airport is technically located in Vaanta) conveniently till late night. (point to note especially for party folks living further away from downtown). I didnt find much of interest in the mall itself, but did like the coffee at Wayne’s Coffee and the selections at the Ben & Jerrys.

Kampii has interesting sculptures outside and a wall for artists to come and paint on, i managed to see an artist working on a section as I walked by. A quick walk from Kampii leads you to the main shopping district, where the Forum and Stockmann malls gently guide tourist flow.

A splendid landmark is the old and classical building of the Central Railway Station station. I could imagine it proudly standing during the Second World War, and many harsh winters. The major bus connections including to the Airport are accessible from right outside the station, which is a welcome relief for geographically challenged tourists like me!

The 3 Helsinki museums i managed to check out were the Ateneum, The Kiasma, and the Design Museum. All of them are highly recommended for students and dilatanttes of Art, Design, Architecture, and the creative fields!

The Ateneum Museum, just across the station is the largest collection of Classical Art in Helsinki. At the Ateneum, i spent a good afternoon at the special exhibition on film and photography work by Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, two legendary constructors of Finland’s modern image (their film ‘Finland Calling’ is a mesmerizing black & white piece). I also saw the Magic of Lapland, an exhibition on the portrayal of Lapland (the inner indigenous part of Finland) since the 1800s (with funky art on bark and 3D models of swamp creatures).

The museum additionally had a photo and audio installation ‘All that Speak the Language Minus 30’, on the rare Inari Sámi language, which only has approx. 300 native speakers in Finland - arranged in a beautiful photo montage with background audio. The museum also features an extensive permanent collection of European and international art, and Japanese woodcut, including works by Gaughin and Van Gogh, and famous pieces like Hugo Simberg’s Wounded Angel.

The Kiasma Museum, with Commander-in-Chief Mannerheim’s statue welcoming you is however, the grand museum in Helsinki, and a must-visit. The highlight of Kiasma during summer has been ARS 11, a series of pieces of contemporary art from Africa. The themes cover the genocide in Rwanda, the evolution of Nigeria, vignettes of crossings and immigrations through Africa’s deadly borders into Europe, urban and environmental conflicts. Around 300 works by 30 artists have covered Africa across 5 levels in the museum, bringing forth different lenses of history and collective memory and subversive takes on Africa.

ARS 11 starts with a floor to ceiling near-garment by El Anatsui, constructed with bottle caps and metal waste. Sammy Baloji’s video Memoire (here on Vimeo) is an abstract dance in the Katanga Mining Area, once the heart of Congo’s industrial renaissance, now a concrete heap.

We Wish To Inform You That We didn’t Know is a powerful video and photo installation by Alfredo Jaar about the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, with survivor interviews interspersed with politicians’ words, especially Clinton feigning ignorance about the massacre. Moments of Beauty by J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere chronicles 60 years of culture, architecture, and fashion from Nigeria

Another powerful piece is Silent Symphony by Mary Sibande, where a black woman wears royal Victorian dresses and turning rules of segregation upside down. I found it quite evocative.

Below are glimpses from other exhibits. You can read more on the ARS11 site.

The Design Museum is tucked away in the Design District of Helsinki,  a collection of shops and areas that showcase Helsinki’s design sensibilities. (Helsinki is the World Design Capital, 2012). The Museum had an extensive exhibition on the work of iconic Finnish design Kaj Franck and his students over the decades. I loved the samples on display, which were collections of Franck’s defining work with the companies Arabia and Nuutajarvi, now part of the iconic firm Iittala. In particular, i found his use of different colors in glassware fascinating.

Helsinki is a great city to explore on foot. I headed out everyday in different directions and found that each turn takes you to someplace vintage, someplace touristy, someplace hidden. The Cathedral is worth a visit, a beautiful building with a large public space around it. The walk to the top of the Cathedral was worth the view. I walked around the Cathedral and harbor area - here you can see some of the other famous structures including Parliament house, and old churches which almost seem like they could have been from Bavaria or Russia.

Night time brings out an entirely different creature in Helsinki, a creature which loves to be outdoors at midnight and party on in an infinite summer night. There is a huge number of nightclubs within the radius of city center and enough food places to keep revellers sustained in the wee hours of the morning. It is common to see solo performers and musicians as with the rest of Europe, but Helsinki is more likely to also have ad hoc groups simply hanging out with a few bottles of beer and playing good electronica.

The harbor area of Helsinki is quite charming, a nice long walkway leading towards the water.
Soumenlinna is a maritime fortress with historical significance for the Finns, a quick boat ride away. More than the fort itself, the island is quite a charming walk, like a deserted yet amiable ghost town, perfect for lazy afternoon beers and conversations and walks through Hobbit homes.

A quick bus ride away from city center is the city (almost suburb) of Otaniemi in Espoo, home of the world famous Design Factory at Aalto University (named after the famous architect Alvar Aalto). The Design Factory is a passionate place for multi-disciplinary collaboration between designers, engineers and business folks. The University itself is located in a lovely green belt, and if you’re up for a good walk, check out the Laajalahati bird sanctuary at the edge of campus.
The Design Factory is also home to the Summer of Startups, sort of a YCombinator to encourage entrepreneurship in Finland. This year’s 10 selected teams included one from Russia and IN Mobile Labs from India, a testimony to the Finns’ global embrace in the search for the next big idea.

I crashed dorm-style with my two good friends Ankit Kumar and Ashish Agarwal, both recent grads from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur whose startup was selected for the Summer of Startups. Ankit and Ashish are gracious hosts, excellent guides, and super cool intellectual ninjas who know how to party - I had a fantastic time in Helsinki courtesy these two gentlemen.

I also managed to attend a high energy pitching session for the startups by Aape Pohjavirta, entrepreneur and Founder of Ympyra, a radical education startup.

As much as I loved all cities i visited, I would love to go back to Helsinki and explore the many hidden layers and facets of this futuristic and charming and very special city.

Last week I went to see “I Hate Luv Storys”, a movie taking inspiration from superhits like Love Aaj Kal and touting itself to be the latest offering in the different-from-past-century-love-stories genre. IHLS and their ilk are trying to differentiate themselves from run of the mill love stories through some specific tactics and plot devices. These include taking potshots at contemporary Bollywood, reminding the audience of Bollywood love story cliches, singing songs that deride traditional love stories, and actors and actresses whose online and offline persona is oh-so-2010, detached from their Bollywood past, attempting to stand tall in the global landscape of modern Bollywood movies.

Well, I HATED the movie. Sure it has eye candy value, pretty stars and reasonable acting, fantastic locales and dresses, and the odd joke or two about lesbians and gays, about contemporary Bollywood, the occasional humor by first time side actors (Jai’s best friend is as plain speaking as Pratik Babbar’s character in Imran’s first movie), but the essential question kept bugging me as the movie plodded through: Where’s the bloody plot? Where? Under Imran’s chocolatey-goofy looks? Inside Sameer Soni’s strange expressions? Simply put, there is NO plot to speak of in this movie. Its almost as if the entire movie is targeted towards some kind of context-less, robotic, teenage and youth audience whose goals in life include making fun of everything contemporary and past, and living life in the moment with branded entertainment and clothes.

Even then, the movie would have made sense if it didn’t fall step by step, in the second half, into the very cliches, the very platitudes, the very hackneyedness that it tries to criticize and question in the first half. In the second half the director simply ran out of things to do, and forced a strange New Zealand angle, making Sameer Dattani look even more forced and pathetic than in the first half, making Imran and Sonam stare at each other inscrutably and making the audience almost heave a sigh of relief when he finally proclaims his love in the end, in the most cliched manner possible.

I would go so far as to say that I felt my heart yearning for the very classic contemporary Bollywood movies this movie tries to spoof/criticize/whatever else it does. The first few scenes of the movie are a montage from DDLJ, Hum Tum, and various other Khan classics, and I daresay, you realize how golden those movies are, when IHLS finishes. IHLS is so dull it makes Rajneeti, with all its hamming and cliches stand head and shoulders above it.

Now i need a good tightly scripted, gripping movie to cleanse my palette of all this pink bubblegum BS

After 4 years with Oracle (and the brief stint with PeopleSoft before it got acquired), I have moved to Yahoo for a new gig in User Experience Design. I started off last week and am based in the the very conveniently located Inner Ring Road office in Bangalore. I will be working on a couple of properties including Yahoo’s next generation open advertising platform and some emerging market areas. I’m hoping to retain some of my learnings from enterprise user experience but at the same time immerse myself in the consumer Internet space with a very open mind. So far the office’s been good, there’s an experienced and enthusiastic product and design team here and the India office has a nice casual vibe.
I hope to also blog more about my experiences in this space.

This July, I finished reading two excellent sci-fi pieces – Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular and Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi graphic novel – Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Both novels are freely downloadable from the above links. (Quite a stellar business model - fans like me are very likely to buy most of their books at some point).

Both books have been as refreshing as a splash of cold fresh spring water - made me feel how constrained my own vision of the future may have been. They also made me reflect on the smallness of the typical techno-utopian vision for the future shared by technologists and designers alike.

Postsingular is a novel breathtaking in its expanse of thought and scale of execution. You will find nano-scale intelligence and malintent, Californian street kids and geeks figuring out the Planck frontier, crossing between dimensions, futuristic interfaces and political marketing and a sweet twist on the traditional view of Nature and Gaia and post-human intelligence. I’m a fan and am waiting eagerly for Rucker’s next novel ‘Hylozoic’.

I also mentioned my inspiration via Rucker and Postsingular in a recent presentation on Design Inspirations from Science Fiction at Dcamp 2.0 Bangalore which I recently organized through UPA Bangalore.

It is around 730 am in the morning and I am headed towards Bangalore International Airport to catch a flight to Nagpur. The experience thus far has been reasonable enough - the Airlift shared cab was waiting for me on time on Old Madras Road, my Tata Indicom wireless connection (despite some serious troubles in activating it) seems to be giving enough signal strength to blog live and Outer Ring road seems a lot less maddening at this time of the day.

Where is the Bangalore ecosystem headed - its a question I ask myself everyday. On the one hand (now don’t start off with Roosevelt’s assertion about wanting to meet only one handed economists) it has the trappings of a network hub with the necessary knowledge infrastructure, talented and creative people, a pace of life which is still slower than Mumbai and Delhi by a healthy factor (some might argue that geographically the main Bangalore region is not more than a few Mumbai or Delhi suburbs), and a fairly aggressive consumer spending base not just through IT professionals but also otherwise. On the other hand having experienced the absolutely anarchic traffic situation, the 11:30 pm curfews, the mundaneness of the MG Road area, the soulless and relentless construction and the blase attitude of may of this city’s residents, I tend to also wonder if Bangalore is a blip, a brief burst on the horizon which fades away into the sunset with a one liner in history textbooks.
Anyways, I need some coffee soon in my system …

I’m starting my second year of blogging with a resolve to blog more often, blog on topics dearer to me, get a good spam filter, and start more interesting conversations within the blogosphere…

Yesterday night I attended a Landmark Forum session at St Joseph’s school. The usual forces were at play - buzzing Landmark graduates, no coffee/food, disoriented and generally happy or confused guests, more buzzing Advanced Course graduates, and Gopal Rao, the charismatic Landmark Forum patriarch, who has been doing this work in India for 19 years now. Gopal is a bit less physically charismatic than Praveen Puri, but both are quite powerful individuals.
One line by Gopal stayed in my head - “Life is a series of conversations….”. For some reason, i was reminded of reading J. Krishnamurthy, who i’ve always considered some sort of a Nietzschean shaman.

About 10 days back, I had a minor crunch on my front Swift fender from a speeding TVS fellow near Rammurthy Nagar. And a major loss of gravity and heartburn when I saw the frame sticking out near the left headlight.

I gave the car to the good repair folks at Mandovi, who told me they would pretty much replace the left front panel and repaint the car. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the past week waiting for her to arrive, waiting, waiting, waiting….

When I stood in front of my gate waiting for the car to arrive, I had a palpable sense of anxiety, excitement, fear, and that giddy feeling that one gets when there are pheromones in the air. And it was then that I felt - perhaps men do ‘feel’ something about their cars : )

As I drove to the neighborhood supermarket and slowly found my brain and hands and feet connect those many neurons required to drive safely in India, I felt this very simple joy. It was the simple joy one gets out of washing hands and brushing in the morning, or standing in a balcony and feeling the night breeze - that sense that all is right in God’s green earth. I felt peaceful, reflective, and generally content.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of my favorite psychologists and the author of some wonderful books on Flow and Creativity and Happiness has a nice note on how car driving creates a strong sense of flow and control in one of his articles…
“During flow, we typically experience a sense of control — or, more precisely, a lack of anxiety about losing control that is typical of many situations in normal life. This sense of control is also reported in activities that involve serious risks such as hang gliding, rock climbing, and race-car driving, activities that to an outsider would seem to be much more potentially dangerous than the affairs of everyday life. Yet these activities are structured to provide the participant with the means to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible. Rock climbers, for example, insist that their hair-raising exploits are safer than crossing a busy street in Chicago, because on the rock face they can foresee every eventuality, whereas when crossing the street they are at the mercy of fate. The sense of control respondents describe thus reflects the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control.”