Kai Friese at Bidoun:
In 1973, I was ten years old, my best friend was Ashish Deshpande, and our favorite activity was dreaming. In our favorite dream, we would acquire a large airplane and fly away in it. We researched our dream-scripts in the pages of Hamlyn’s Pocket Guide to Aircraft. For some inexplicable reason, we selected the Fairey Gannet, a spectacularly dowdy machine, as our transport of choice.
It was an odd plane, with two counter-rotating propellers on its nose. And it is odd, now, to remember such nuggets of childhood memory so clearly. But what seems really odd is that we actually used to do this, settle down to spend an afternoon dreaming.
Ashish and I shared another daydream, which later became a wager: that our fathers would become Brain Drains. We wanted them to get jobs in the West and take us away from Delhi, from India, forever. I still have the sketchbook on the back of which we both signed the deal: “If you go first, I pay Rs 100.”
Neither of us had a hundred rupees. But I never stood a chance. Ashish’s father, Sharad Uncle, was an underpaid research scientist who did unspeakable things to cats at the Patel Chest Institute. But he had prospects. Whereas my father had already flown away-to India. He was a peculiar German, who had come to study at the Delhi School of Economics and stayed on to earn a comfortable living in the Press Department of the West German Embassy, fighting Communism (or at least, the Press Department of the East German Embassy). What really killed me was that, before I was born, he had worked for Lufthansa in New York City. So why in the third world were we stuck in Delhi? Sharad Uncle and Baba were like counter-rotating propellers. I still owe Ashish a hundred bucks. More:
March 13 marked the death anniversary of Lee Falk, creator of The Phantom aka Kit Walker, the Ghost Who Walks, the man who cannot die. In Outlook, Kai Friese reprises the legend:
Some thirty-five years ago[1], the Indian publishing firm of Bennett and Coleman introduced the Phantom comic books that would fill the misspent afternoons of my boyhood. The first four frames were usually given over to the terse phrases and fragments of the perennial recap that was soon consigned to memory as I raced wide-eyed through my purple-clad hero’s latest adventures: thwarting gangsters, rescuing women, keeping the jungles of Africa safe.
It was a quieter, gentler time. I lived in a somnolent neighbourhood of Delhi called Bengali Market (after its largest establishment, Bhimsen’s Bengal Sweets). My father drove home at noon on weekdays for a lunchtime siesta. And my friends and I belonged to a cargo cult.
Those were the days of import substitution. The products of phoren that washed up on our shores were worshiped as much for their packaging as their contents, and we sniffed the suitcases of foreign-returned relatives like shipwrecked enologists. The material culture of middle-class Indians was built on a modest range of overseas products that had been marooned and indigenised as the government’s import restrictions took hold. A car was an Amby—the Ambassador, a 1950s Morris Oxford replicated by Hindustan Motors; a television was a black-and-white Telerad of East German design; a camera was an Agfa Isoly; a chocolate was a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. As for fizzy drinks, well, Coke was it (though even that would be banned in 1977, to be replaced by the state-sponsored Double Seven).
And a comic book was a Phantom.
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Kai Friese, editor of India’s leading travel magazine, Outlook Traveler reports from the Lohit Valley in Arunachal Pradesh [via Outlook]
I’ve been yammering on about the beauty of the Lohit Valley in Arunachal Pradesh ever since my first visit in 2002. Lohit became my favourite district in the country, Tezu my favourite small town, the Mishmi Hills my favourite mountains etc etc. I made three trips in four years, partially—ok, largely—fuelled by an obsession with finding the wreck of a WWII Dakota. But that plane has been landed, another three years have passed and now I’m back without an assignment or a quest, nervously squiring my slightly sceptical wife on our first holiday to my personal Shangri La.
We stay in my friend Jogin’s quarters in the terai town of Tezu, a compact three-room sarkari ‘SPT bungalow’. That stands for ‘semi permanent type’, apparently—a sobriquet I’m tempted to adopt myself. We were both assembled in the 1960s. At night we have a small fire in the garden under the twinkling embers of the galaxies. I love going to bed under the chintz-patterned machhardani, with big furry Chinese acrylic blankets in electric blue and cherry red. Waking to lal chai and sunlight on the peppermint green mock-Tudor Assamese IKRA walls.
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