House to home

When you make the foolish mistake of opting for an unfurnished apartment, you find your life being sucked into a vortex of what resembles a spy triller. There are vast sums of money being thrown away, blonde exotic women who speak strange languages ( the Ikea ladies ) and international intrigue when it comes to the stuff that you ordered being actually delivered and installed. May be I should not be so ungrateful. A fellow expat has been waiting for his internet for a month, and Alice, the highly recommended internet provider mucked up his address twice and just did not turn up the third time. The last time he talked to me, he sounded more like Darth than Anakin.

Anyhow, the guys came in and set up everything. Pictures were hung. The dead skins of Shawn, Liam and Betsy were laid out on the kitchen benches and living room floor respectively. The books were up in shelf and the house was 90% in order.

My most favorite place is the kitchen.

The kitchen overlooks an old Jewish cemetery, which is apparently a tourist spot. Every day, I drink tea with my feet on the kitchen counter and watch hordes of tourists walk through the place. Through out the day, the church bells ring to mark the hour, soft enough to meld into the day. Apparently, one of the famous but not too famous German composers is buried under my window. And across the green stretch of the cemetery is the Jewish school .

The days when I work from home, I sit in the kitchen, sipping tea and sitting on the sheepskin. I have started cooking for myself, and the food is not too shabby. My vases are holding flowers, and I found out where the neighbourhood grocery stores are.

I believe my house is slowly become my home.

Last day in Helsinki

Today is my last day in Helsinki. Today is my first day in Berlin.

Being in Helsinki has taught me to:

Appreciate fine wine

Rediscover some friends whom I always had - distance truly makes the heart fonder

Make some new friends

Use chopsticks

Live in a country where English is not the first language

Move homes on my own

Discover Vintage

Be introduced to Opera

Be introduced to Burlesque

Be introduced to Ice Hockey

Get over my cricket fixation

Be a better cook

Appreciate fine graphic novels

Experience snow for the first time

Try out horse, reindeer and moose meat

Discover salami as a source of nourishment

Discover berries

Appreciate rye bread

I am looking forward to the lessons that Berlin will be teaching me.

Moving

On the 15th day from today, I will pack my backpack with my books, clothes and knickknacks and will board an airplane.

It is going to be a one-way trip.

When I started my new job, I thought transitioning into a new team and role is going to be difficult, and moving cities will be easy.

I was wrong. I am touching wood as much as I can when I type this - but the new team, and because of them, the new role, has been fantastic - helpful when needed, and trusts me to do my job and do it well.

Moving cities, is not going to be easy.

It is not about finding a new place to live - I have moved about in Helsinki. But moving to a new city, I have to find a place where I can go for some great salad and occasional food all over again.

I need to learn which way the wind blows, how cold the winters are, and how high to set the thermostat.

I need to learn the public transport system again, the best places to shop for food, clothes and books. I need to scout the flea markets and vintage shops. I need to find the comic book shops that sell English books.

The most difficult part of moving cities is to make the new city look you over, sort you out, and choose to reveal it's secrets to you.

Snow

I am ambivalent about snow.

I love how it sparkles in the night. I appreciate that it makes everything lighter. It feels like walking on the sand dunes when you walk through fine power, the similarity is remarkable. However, it also smooths over the uneven surfaces that lie just beneath, making you trip and fall when you take a step in good faith. It get dirty after the first few days, and gets grittier. It swallow your trinkets that you happen to drop, to be lost until spring, many months away.

Snow is so perfect, yet so unforgiving.

Back again

Getting back to a blog after a while is a bit like returning home after cheating on your spouse. You know that you should not have stopped caring, but at the same time you feel like you are sticking around because of a feeling of obligation rather than one of passion. However, you do go back in the end, knowing that you need to step up to the plate, and in a long time relationship, there are going to be transgressions, with the opportunity to seek forgiveness.

Tribes

We all want to be accepted.

It is just that, we all want to be accepted by different people, for different reasons.

When we grow up, we want to make our family proud of us. This is something that we share with most mammals. The kids in the litter defer to the adults.

What makes humans different is our ability to grow up and develop a want to make us proud of ourselves.

Some of us get it rather early. Some of us reach that stage in our early to late adulthood, even during our twilight years. Some of us completely miss the urge.

We all live our lives out differently as a result. We develop our own tribes and customs to identify and commune with those who think our way is right. In that process, may of us have no problem in turning away from the tribe that we are born into and finding groups where we belong.

And therein lies the essence of all advertising and marketing. It is about making me want to belong to a tribe that I want an admission ticket to. It is also about making stronger bonds within the tribes that I love.

So sell to me - sell to me my identity; sell to me my aspiration - if you will not, I will not buy your product.

Waiting

It funny that often we spend our lives waiting, among other things.

We wait for shows to air. We wait for work to start and end. We wait for weekends to be here and we wait for decisions to be made.

In summer we wait for autumn, and when autumn invariably moves to winter, we look forward to the spring.

Sometimes it is possible to speed things up, but mostly, the best things in life cannot be hurried, and hence we wait.

And we wait for the day when all waiting will be over.

Miss K and random thoughts

Today was a great day. I met with my friends - Miss K and her mom.

Miss K is all of four years old. She speaks Finnish and Albanian. Her knowledge of English consists of 'Let's go', used creatively. So we talk to each other in English (me) and Albanian or Finnish (her). That however never stops us from having a good time dancing, modelling and singing ( all by her ) with enthusiastic cheering and shopping ( me and her mom).

That was not the first time, when communication happened without knowing the language. I had gone to E's home to spend Christmas one year, and her mom in all her Polish goodness made me put on 3 Kgs in my bones with some of the most amazing carnivoral spread I have ever had. She chatted away with me in Polish, I reciprocated by piling food high in my plate.

There are so many times when you are happy that you have the right words and know exactly what to tell them. But even for the times that we do not know what to say or when to say it, we get by quite well.

And back.

I have been on a blog sabaabtical for a while.

And I have been looking for a job.

I discovered that it is very very difficult to write a blog when trying to find a job.

However, I was able to make some changes in my life.

After 3 years and a few long months in Finland, I will move to Berlin.

After 4 years and a few long months in HR, I have moved to Marketing.

I am excited to work in an extended team that I like, with people that I like.

I am excited to go to a city with whom I fell in love early this year.

And I will be blogging again.

The two paths to glory

There are two ways in which you can advance in your career.

The first, the Dr. Jekyll method; consists of the following four factors happening in your life to varying degrees.

Privilege : You are have the advantages that your contemporaries do not have - it might be riches, connections or better living and educational circumstances.

Luck : Also called the randomness factor. You happen to be at the right places at the right time.

Talent : You have skills in your chosen field, skills, abilities and insights that put you far ahead of the others.

Effort : You are willing to try twice as fast and thrice as hard as the others in your field.

The Mr. Hyde method is constituted of the following four in varying degrees:

Shamelessness : You have no shame, and will do whatever it takes with whomever it takes to get what you want.

Arrogance: You believe that you are the best, and propagate the belief that you are the best long enough and tirelessly enough to make others believe you.

Thievery : You do not mind stealing - ideas, credit, opportunities, fame, glory from others. In fact, you revel in it.

Selective memory: You remember your personal history in such a distorted manner so as to always think of yourself as the hero, the maverick and the visionary.

Lists created over brunch at a Sunday afternoon with inputs from Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim.

Signs of times

It is a past time of mine to take photographs of signs and notices. They are often sources of hilarity and some of them even make you want to meet the person who put up the sign. Somehow in my mind, they will have amazing trivia knowledge about comic books, will get all my obscure pop cultural references and we sing songs of merriment through the streets adhering to the standards of bollywood choreography.

Anyways, on to a few that has caught my eyes lately:

This tells me some awesome things about my colleagues. Yep, the sign was on the door of one of the ladies bathrooms in our office.

Somewhere in Nokia House is a chicca who knows her He-Man and has an amazing sense of humour. Future BFF, where are you?

Now, I am not sure if I want to be buddies with this person, but something tells me I better be, or else....

And if you are a Alto University student, this actually might be an innovative ad for a few swimming lessons, but why take the chance? Do the dishes.

However, the person who wrote the above must be good buddies with the person who wrote this one. Or it might be a frazzled teacher from Alto University. Or both.

Now, this is one sign that will always be close to my heart - this was done by a friend of mine on her last day in Helsinki around her neighborhood. You always made me feel mahtava, Candy.

Window Dressing

What to do when you do not have a lot of money to spend on window dressing your shop? What if you want to attract two very different, but equally lucrative demographics to your toy shop?

You mix and match them, hoping that the result would produce a chuckle in the minds of your customers, particularly the second demographics.

And come up with some thing like this:

And this:





I belonged in the second demography of grown-up comic fan, and am assuming the pink loving little girls also found the shop irresistible.

Insourcing

It is easy to outsource.

It is easy these days to find a company or a consultancy who will come and do what you want them to do, but for a price. But when for larger projects it makes sense to get a dedicated, temporary pool of people to work on it, does it make sense to insource the work.

Insourcing, is much more difficult.

However, insourcing is a surefire way to build more engagement.

May be your best Software Programmer works in your finance department. May be your best UX Designer works in engineering. People take up jobs for many reasons, and develop different skills although their life. Their jobs, however may not really reflect that.

So the next time you are tempted to use pay money to external companies to come and build whatever you want them to build for you, ask around if you can get someone in your company to do that for you.

And if they do a fast and good job of it, reward and recognize them with a fraction of the money that you may have spent on an external solution.

A House and a Home

When I was a child, keeping your home impeccably clean was expected. We swept our house every day, mopped it every other day and made sure that every thing had a place and every thing was found in it's place. There was no excuse for clutter or chaos, and the house was always ready for unannounced visitors, as it is the norm in Kerala.

However, since having my own place, I found that I was not happy with a perpetually impeccable house. I wanted chaos, proof that people are invited and welcomed in. As I live by myself, I invite my friends over to help create clutter, re-branding the process of chaos as parties.

I have had friends of mine, who have never had the chance to break a plate deliberately do that in my place. I have had friends who made new friends, friends who met their soul mates and strangers who became friends during the parties. I have got good advice over a spicy dinner, listened to hopes, dreams and fears over plenty of beer and confided my hopes and insecurities over glasses of white. I have had after-parties and after-after-parties in my apartment. I have had us all drunk and all sober. I have had just one another person and thirty people in these get-togethers at various times.

The logistics of throwing a party notwithstanding, I am very grateful to all my guests whom I was lucky to entertain at home. I learnt about people, places and ideas and used them as sounding boards. But mostly, I just enjoy my time with them as they are lovely human beings.

So if you have ever came to my place for a party/dinner/lunch/game or movie evening; thank you for helping to make my house a home.

Serendipity

Since I was old enough to learn English - which was three years - I have been told that English is my ticket to freedom and opportunities. Apparently, nobody ever reached anywhere just learning my mother tongue. So once I moved to Europe, I did not expect the Indian languages to help me out.

I was so wrong.

I was in Berlin, and one wrong turn meant I was in the wrong street. In my search for the perfect food, I was suddenly in the middle of a residential neighborhood, most of the apartments looking deserted for the holidays. I was not too worried about the dark buildings, as much as I was about the hunger pangs in my stomach. I wanted to eat something good, and I wanted to eat fast.

I walked towards the one source of light, a restaurant which is open at this twilight time, looking like the only place in earth which is open. I went inside, only to stare at someone who only knew German.

Looking around, taking the decorations of the restaurant in, and discounting the nice Europeans who were peacefully dining, I bellowed into the kitchen - "Aare Bhaisaab!" (Hello Brother) - a girl's gotta eat.

Which brought out the owner pretty fast, much to the shock of his German customers and employees. I continued chatting with him in Hindi. A first generation Pakistani from Lahore, he has been in Berlin for the last forty years, his kids married to 'white women'. He questions me on my province, the number of siblings I have, about my parents and grandparents and if I am traveling alone; just like a polite first time conversation in Hindi ought to me.

One sublime chicken biriyani and a free, unasked mango lassi later, I am pointed out my way on the map; and one of the employees is volunteered by the hotel manager to drop me to where I live.

An Audi flag on the moon

There is art and there is art.

Art can be found anywhere. And often when you strip it down to the basics, it is all the same.

How can this,

which is essentially a painting on the contemporary life of the artist, drawn on a wall, essentially different from this?

We did talk about it on our walk to the Slaughterhouse Hill and reached the conclusion that art is in the eye of the beholder.

Even then, some artists are better than others. They take their surroundings into consideration and create smart art, like this:

Yes, on the first look, it is an austronaut. Now, you have to understand that when the artist started working on the mural, there was ( and still is ) an Audi showroom nearby. And like any self respectable auto showrooms, they did have a neat row of flags in front of the dealership. And of course, given that they also dealt in second had cars which were parked in front of the dealership, the entire space was lit with some very strong lights in the evening.

The artist noticed that the shadow of one of the flags falls perfectly on to the wall. So he painted the autronaut in such a way that he holds a shadow flags with the Audi symbol on it in the night, acting as smart art and a commentary on our wealth focused times.

TheTurk and the Bishop

Berlin has the second highest concentration of Turkish people after Istanbul. And for the few days that I was there, they seemed to get along pretty well. To be honest, I did not know how well they got along until I heard this story.

So, lets go back in time a little bit, even before 1989. The wall is still up there, and between the east and the west walls, there is a no mans land.

That was when a turkish youngster came to Berlin. He wanted a home to bring his young bride from Turkey to; he was too poor to find one, so he decided to squat - on a tree by the no man's land. He built a little shack, brought his wife over and they stayed their with their growing family.

Once the wall fell, the government wanted him to leave his home and evacuate. They first tried asking him nicely. Once he said yes, they threatened to throw him out.

He retaliated by cementing his outdoor furniture to the ground. The government had it's supporters, but the Turkish man had his supporters too. They did a bit of searching around and found that the property did not belong to the government. Instead, it belonged to these guys.

The German Catholic Church. That is easy, the government thought, and they went to the church to buy the piece of land from them so that they can evict the turkish, muslim man in peace.

However, the arch bishop's residence, by a twist of fate, was situated just next to the no-man's land where the turk settled down. The bishop had watched that family grow and try to survive year after year from his bedroom windows.

Also, this situation had some theological implications. By staying within the church grounds, the turk was technically seeking asylum.

And you don't kick out someone seeking asylum in the 1980s, especially when you have the dark history of world war two on your conscience. No siree. You try your best to be humane.

So, due to a near miracle, the turk got to keep his home. He and his wife still lives here, just across the road from the Archbishop, and their children and grandchildren visit them during the holidays.

Why do I blog?

So that I can transfer my feelings and thoughts into something that I can come back and look at some day.

So that I can move on, from people and places, and look towards the future instead of living in the past.

So that I can rant, rave and be as passive aggressive as I want to be.

So that I will stop thinking about events that happened, did not happen, and got cut short too soon.

So that I can stick a virtual post-it note to remind myself that world is still pretty great, no matter how I am feeling in one particular day.

So that I will not forget the risks associated with certain choices - the self doubt, the heartbreak, the self loathing.

So that even after remembering the above, if I go ahead, I do it without regrets, without expectations.

So that I can look back and do the trendspotting and smile at myself.

So that instead of writing something to my friends, I can just send them a link to here.

So that some stranger from somewhere will come here and turn out to be a good friend.

So that someone will read this and feel a little less alone.

So that someone will read this and feel a little more wiser.

So that I know myself a little bit more, and love myself a little bit more.

I guess that's why I blog.

I hope it rains on Vappu

"I wish it would rain on Vappu". The doctor said to me.

I was surprised. Granted, she made me wait even though I turned up in time. But the face of the girl who left the consulting room made me realize that sometimes good doctors have to run behind schedule for a reason.

For a person afraid of medical procedures, I have always had great times with all my doctors. Many of my close friends are doctors, and I was lucky enough to be treated by some good doctors since my childhood. The doctor, indeed, was not the average Finnish person you would meet on the street. For one thing, she smiled, even on a miserable rainy afternoon.

Throughout the checkup and the procedures, we bonded. We both joked about the weather, we both asked about our cities of origin, we both drew maps of our countries in little post-it notes to show it to each other. And as always at this time of the year, the discussion turned to Vappu.

I wish it would rain on Vappu.

Seeing my mouth hanging open at her comment, she explained further. "Do you know how many kids are found on the streets each year, just children, thirteen or fourteen years old; unconscious and sometimes not even knowing their own names, children who get only their things stolen from - if they are lucky."

"So every year near Vappu, I hope for the rains so that the kids stay home and get drunk, and then they are passed out in their own home or in their friend's home, not in the streets waiting for police and volunteers to carry them into the first aid posts and sometimes into the hospital. "

"I have heard stories, and it is not pretty."

I did not ask her if she was a mother herself, but what difference did it make? She obviously cared for the kids who she had never met, and possibly never will.

So this Vappu if it indeed rains, I will not feel too badly about it. Instead I will be thinking about the doctor who has seen enough to wish for the rains.

Notes from Berlin - III The SS Art Camp

If buildings had a religion, they all would be Hindus. After certain eras, many of them get reborn - some undergo a step down to ruins, while others step up their standing - the Musee d Orsay is a great example. What was once an old railway station has now become this:

Not too shabby, especially if you house some great works of Degas and Monet, among others. However, the one building that really did the turnaround in it's lifetimes is this squatter house is Berlin. The building was one of the old SS offices which stored a lot of documents on how SS systematically wiped out entire families and communities in many parts of Europe.

So, when the Allies won the war, the SS flooded their basement where all the war crime records were kept. I doubt if the documents themselves were called war crime journals though, they might have originally called them 'Glorious Examples of Supreme Race's Ingenuity' or something. However, given that the entire basement was flooded the Allies sealed the basement when they found they could not salvage the documents. The building was left as a ghostly reminder of a past that was both horrifying and shameful.

That was when the artists and squatter groups started moving in. Now this place does not have an inch of space without some kind of graphics on it. People live, work and sell their works here. There are also plans to turn this into an open air movie theater.

Just because your past was shitty does not mean that you cannot have a fun filled future.