Bite-sized musings from over the week.
The chances of bumping into a Goethe Institut German-class buddy at the airport is extremely thin but not zero, as I found out on Monday. R was taking off to Germany for his Masters. It was only in August this year that I bumped into another German-class acquaintance when flying to Dehradun. If the odds of all rare events in my life are lined up, this combination should be somewhere on the top of the list.
—
The hotel toiletries pack includes a set of four earpicks wrapped snugly in a plastic cover, which is then wrapped in another, thicker plastic with a sticker marketing the hotel's name. This arrangement strikes me as the motif for all the excesses we commit daily here.
—
I find it infinitely amusing to walk down the streets of a foreign land while listening to Tamil "classics" from the 80s. There's a spring in the step as Poongatru plays. I don't miss home or anything but there's a feeling of having implanted a piece of home into the sidewalks of a small part of Bangkok.
—
There are a few greys in my chest hair. The bathroom mirror reminded me soberingly of that scene from Lunchbox where Irrfan's voiceover talks of how his bathroom smelled the way his grandfather's did, an allusion to Saajan's halting thought that perhaps he was too old for eloping with Ila. I caught myself meditating on the day I'd find my bathroom smelling of old age.
—
Watching Thor Ragnarok dubbed in an unrecognizable South-East Asian language with Thai subtitles on the hotel telly is my personal peak of language shenanigans. A day before, Gary Oldman was bellowing in Thai in a baritone that suited him not one bit.
—
All rich cities are alike. All poor cities are poor in their own way.