Monsoons Mundane?

August 31st, 2011



Although I am experiencing a monsoon season for the first time, I knew to expect some inclement weather (d’uh) so there were going to be days of hanging around in my room escaping the precipitation. Thankfully I was able to acquire 70-80 movies from some fellow travellers but one cannot watch films all the time. I have been reading a lot, more than any other time in my life, which is a good thing. I read an 1100 page Tom Clancy novel followed by Gregory David Robert’s 950 page Shantaram (which I recommend) in a span of about a month and a half (lightning speed for me!).

I did recently stumble along in one book though. It’s considered one of the top 100 books of all time so when I found it in one of the “Internet cafes/Xerox centre/book store” places, I snapped it up. The book was “Catch 22”, a tale of World War II bomber pilots who were stuck in a predicament where if they went on bombing missions they were likely to be shot down and die. To avoid flying missions, if they proved they were insane then they would be sidelined for medical reasons. However, you’d have to be crazy to go on such risky flights so the fact that they were pretending to be crazy to avoid the deadly missions in fact proved that they were sane...a Catch 22.

Well I ran into my own Catch 22. I have been swapping books with the manager of one restaurant, Sporting Heroes. It turns out that Madu had already attempted the book, this very copy that he had traded in before I bought it, and he said he got half way and gave up. I ran into the same problem. I didn’t find the book that interesting enough to finish it but since it is in the “Top 100 Books of All Time”, I wanted to finish it...however, I eventually surrendered and . Ironically I then switched to a book that Madu gave me, appropriately titled “Cut and Run”!

Totally unrelated...just A funny sight one day...the lifeguards must have been having lunch:

Reading aside, I wanted to have a few activities that felt productive in some way (not that reading isn’t kids!) and came up with a few solutions.

The first was to try and pick up how to play a guitar. I had no visions of becoming a rock star as musical dreams have previously been removed from the equation thanks to my experience of playing trumpet for 6 years in high school. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I was too bad of a player, in fact I shared First Trumpet position in my last few years but it was only thanks to brute force, repetitive practice. I was overshadowed and humbled by a fellow classmate, who was admitted to the school based on his flair with the horn and whose father was the conductor of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra! He ripped through the “Flight of the Bumblebee” in a chapel service in front of the whole school and I knew I’d never reach that kind of level.

But over the years I have a number of friends who play guitar, ranging from capable to lead a campfire song to playing in bands or solo for money. My ultimate goal would be the former.

While I was in England last year I stayed with my cousin Sid and his now fiancée Sonia. Sid, being a member of the “can lead a campfire song” group, gave Sonia and I some lessons with her strumming the new guitar he gave her for her birthday. We learned a few chords and attempted to string a few of them together in a sad attempt at Oasis’ Wonderwall. Perhaps Blunderwall would be a more appropriate title. We both also learned the resulting pain in building up calluses on the fingertips. But just a few weeks after we began, I flew off to India.

So one day back in July I scootered into the small city of Mapsa and after asking for directions from at least four separate individuals, I finally located the music store. I explained my situation to the young salesman and he pulled down a used Rolf acoustic guitar and handed it to me. Not recalling much from Sid’s lessons, I asked him to strum it a bit for me. He stated that he didn’t play but he knew some chords and the guitar sounded just fine to this newbee. Costing about $50, I bought the Rolf and decided to also invest in a digital tuner over the cheap, blow a C note type whistle. I figured I needed all the help I could get!

My axe:

I downloaded some guitar lessons from the Internet and have started working my way through them. Of course I had to repeat the callus building process but that didn’t take too long. So far I haven’t progressed terribly far and I’m just working on connecting open chords together but it’s been a fun, almost daily, activity.

If only I knew how to play it:

I’m a firm believer that when travelling in a foreign country that it’s important to learn a few basic phrases such as “Hello”, “Thank you” and even “How are you?” and “What’s your name?”...oh, and the crucial “Can I have another beer please?” Since I’ve been in India for many months, it’s time to step that up a notch.

India is a country of many, many languages, with 35 recognized regional languages. But if any language could be considered the national language, it would be Hindi (and English is a close second). I’ve seen figures stating that there are around 150-300 million Hindi speakers in the world, 4th or 5th (depending on your source) after Mandarin, English and Spanish.

I had bought a Hindi book back in March but had hardly touched it. The first half dozen pages introduced the alphabet, which is called Devanagari script, in an overly confusing manner. There are individual characters for the 11 vowels and 30+ consonants however there is some “joining” of letters that is sometimes done.

Consonants inherently have an “a” sound (as in “alert”) so the symbol for the letter “k” is “क”and is pronounced “ka”. However the book did not clearly explain that you only use the vowels when they sit alone or start a word. Otherwise, there’s a way to join them to a consonant character in order to change the way the consonant is pronounced. For instance, if I want to say “ko”, the letter “o” is “ओ” but you take the “ka” symbol (“क”) and change it to “को” (adding that vertical line after it with an accent at the top). Clear as mud? I thought so. To get a handle of the 40+ character alphabet, I made some little flashcards. Writing these symbols took a little work but I have to admit that it was kinda fun learning a new alphabet.

Some of my Hindi tools:


My Hindi homework:

One last parting note: my favourite Hindi word so far is the word for “milk”. In Devanagari it is written as “दूध”. Phonetically it is “doodh”, with emphasis on the “oo”...pronounced just like in the movie the Big Lebowski!

One of my better "waiter/Hindi teacher" Sanjay:


नमस्ते! (Namaste!)