Category: General

A few months ago, picking up an old-new notebook from my stock of pillaged office stationery, I was surprised by my own handwritten quotation on the first page.

Remember to touch base. Base is where you were before you became lost.

I copied it onto a Post-It that is now stuck on my monitor, but I didn’t look for its source until today.

It actually comes from ‘The Rules of Life’ by Richard Templar. I read this book in 2004 during a phase of self-improvement although I don’t remember being impressed by it.

Maybe it was prescient that I wrote dwon this particular ‘rule’ then only for me to find it now when the advice seems much needed. Coincidentally, last week whilst rummaging through boxes in the attic, I held the book in my hands, considering whether to read it again before putting it back.

Before Facebook and Twitter destroyed our ability to focus for longer than 15 seconds and to read more than 140 characters, blogs were kings. To me 2Blowhards was one of the best. Reading the authors’ thoughtful and inspiring posts, mostly about arts, was a pleasure. Their blog also impressed on me their peculiar salutation of ‘Dear Blowhards’.

I lost the link to 2Blowhards after 2010 when it was ‘frozen in amber’. For almost a decade, my searches with the misremembered and inadequate ‘Dear Friends’ were vain. But a few days ago, I stumbled upon it in the archives of my blog on the Wayback Machine.

I came across this mask vending machine on a very rare errand of 2020.

This CNN video showing the opening of the net fishing season (“ouverture la peche la senne”) in Rodrigues brings back childhood memories of how the family traded in fish.

Catches from the “battages”—the fishing sorties—usually reached us late in the evening. We then had to clean and pack the fish quickly before they could be put on sale in the shop freezers. Too young to handle the sharp knife used to gut fish, I was mostly a spectator. But my older brother had to contribute to this unpleasant task, which often lasted into the early morning hours.

Later when I was about twelve or thirteen, I helped my brother-in-law Bambi in his octopus trade. Once or twice every week, he set up station to buy octopus. Sat on a low bench, with a weighing scale on the floor in front of him, he waited for the fisherwomen to return from their hunts.

One by one, they came with their catch. Together with Bambi, they checked the weights on the scale. When they were in agreement, it was up to me to pay the women and to record the transactions. To save time, Bambi unceremoniously dropped the octopus on the floor behind him before calling over the next person. The motions were repeated as in a ritual, as more fisherwomen joined the queue. By the time all the weighing and paying was done, the floor was covered with slimy octopii reaching up to our ankles. Now, other employees would clean and prepare the octopii for export: gutting, cleaning, packing, and storing them in cold rooms.

Even if octopus trade was serious and haggling was fierce, the exchanges between the fisherwomen and us remained friendly. The trading sessions were filled with banter and laughter, the kind of gaiety you would imagine of islanders.

Since our first days in Tahiti, I had been obsessed with getting a perfect picture of the abandoned hotel at Tahara’a. But in the blink of an eye, time had passed, and our two-month stay was coming to an end. And a combination of temperamental weather and other holiday occupations limited the time I could allocate to photography.

Eventually I got two pleasing photos of the hotel.

One is taken from the hills of Arue in the afternoon light, and the other, from Lafayette Beach on an early morning.

The hotel has had many names over the years, but I like “Hotel Tahara’a” the most.

In Tahiti you feel like you can capture a great photo by just pointing your camera in any direction and pressing the shutter button. But for these ones, I had to climb up the steep hillside of Arue.

Yesterday morning driving from Arue along the northern coast and down the eastern coast to Taravao took us exactly 50 minutes. We were headed for Faratea — situated just before the town of Taravao if coming down the east coast — where local motor clubs had organised a drag racing day event.

With forty participating drivers and many cars on display, the event promised to be interesting, but we could watch only a few runs before we had to return to Arue.

Like earlier, we drove along the eastern coast and, even at a leisurely pace, were still able to make good time for our next engagement in Papeete.

Yesterday we walked around Papeete to see the colourful murals decorating many of the buildings in the capital. We had noticed them on a quick tour on the night when we landed in Tahiti.

Growing up in Mauritius where more than half of the population are of Indian descent and being used to Indo-Mauritian customs give you a sense of familiarity with India. Countless travel shows and documentaries, and the ability to google any information you need about the country further reinforce the sentiment. My trip to Hyderabad and New Delhi earlier this month taught me that India was much more than I had imagined.

When you’re there, India is about having spicy dishes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; it is about being bewildered by the cacophonous and chaotic flow of cars, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and pedestrians, and wondering how anyone managed to navigate that; and, it is about watching your Indian hosts use English to converse because India is so vast that they do not even speak the same  language and that it will never be possible for you — a foreigner — to know India fully.

But India was not all new experiences. The hospitality, especially, was reminiscent of life in Mauritius: the casual way the hotel receptionist offered to walk three miles to the mall after her shift to make a purchase for me, the fact that our hosts kept turning up at 1.30 p.m. when we had agreed to meet at 12.30 p.m., and when we became worried about missing our flight because they insisted on making a detour for us to visit Taj Mahal followed by a night tour of New Delhi and a stop at the famous Haldiram’s for aloo paratha and butter milk.

Eleven years after my previous visit, I got to spend three amazing days in Rodrigues.