Nose Pickers

Airline staff hovering around ineffectually trying to smile. Paunchy immigration louts into some kind of urgency as departure time draws agonizingly close. Not a chance!

Paunchy lout suddenly abandons my queue and saunters off for a chat with a colleague, both abandon their respective queues, talk, laugh, pick their noses and scratch their cramped and fetid groins. Having travelled extensively, I find that groin-scratching has been developed into a fine Indian art form, and if examined carefully, will actually fall into other Indian talents and legends like music, craftsmanship, corruption and spitting (paan thook).

Nose picking and groin scratching deserve a place in modern Indian history, its books, poems, folk songs, etc, because of their many variations,moods, styles or gharanas and places where they can be practised. The section for reference can be called `The Great Indian Khurrutch’. One day, I intend to make a film on this great national passtime and place it firmly as a permanent part of our constantly quoted `Greater Indian Culture’.

Sorry for digressing, more on the same later. Meanwhile back at the immigration counter at departures, the flight is being announced for boarding and after ONE HOUR in the queue, our friend, the nose-picking immigration officer and groin scratcher par excellence, returns to his desk, belches loudly and indifferently looks through my glare. I could happily throttle the little, sorry, not so little `turd!’

He of course asks the obvious `what is name’. So I give it still glaring. “Vere you going?” So I tell him. “Amsterdam, Munich, Karlov Vary Praha, Budapest, Munich, Bombay.” Blink! Blink! Blink! Adjust crotch, belch! Small one this time with a faint hint of batata vada, stamps my passport and waves methrough.

Immediately, a harassed airline staffer tries to shoo me towards the gate as the boarding announcement has long gone. I tell her to hold on a moment while I go looking for the gentleman in charge of the immigration groin scratchers. Find him in a huddle with some Pakistani types who seem to be getting a hard time for Kargil. I tap him on the shoulder, show him the shambles in the departure section immigration and try and explain to him clearly, simply, and without my normal unparliamently language, that HE and his department are the first and the last contact with the mysteries and pitfalls of this great and vast country of ours and that regardless of all its collective natural beauty, spiritual duality, political venalism, the grace and character of its women… etc.

All this comes to naught after their first encounter with immigration and the airport authority of INDIA on arrival, and their last thoughts of “Never again!” on hanging around departure being given a massive performance of thefine art of nose picking and groin scratching. It is one thing that really makes me ashamed of being an Indian and however blase I get, I can never handle the sheer sloth, slovenliness and inefficiency of our Government staff at airports!

Anybody listening!!! Echo! Echo! Scratch, scratch, belch! Time for some chai, Amsterdam! The last bastion after Goa, for the 60’s flower people; party town! As crowds flow and ebb till 4 am in the morning, helped on by gentle wafts of the weed — everybody is smoking legally! What a civilised country! But as all good things have to come to an end, the same is for Amsterdam. The signs of the Russian Mafia taking over the flesh trade and slowly the drug trade is going to spell fini for the party. A quick train ride to the Hague and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Thirty thousand people milling around a three-storied building like Warren, throwing up surprising halls, stages, landings, cul de sacs, food and drink and of course the jazz.

Considering that 14 bands ofvarious sizes, playing music that stretches from the ridiculous to the sublime, were playing simultaneously, one expected a cacophony and confusion of a monumental kind. Not a chance. The venue was a maze of spaces, each having its hands from plinka plonka, to a massed brass-section and not a hint or whisper of each other: Vikas, Sophie and I wafted from Hall of Niche, letting the music lead us.

As we realised, trying to identify the bands was impossible for us, not being jazz aficionados. The choice was either rushing from floor to floor to catch Al Jarreau or Chuck Correa or a King Pleasure and the Biscuit Boys. Sophie having done her homework, lasted one day running from floor to floor, while Vic and I drifted through a haze of cannibals, music, bodies, oysters.

Bubbly. And after three days, the most lasting impression was of being sandwiched between many bodies in a huge hot hall looking up at Al Green belting out Gospel throwing flowers to a wild and delirious crowd. Sweat streaming down his face inbuckets as he praised the Lord, in his own and distinctive manner.

Talking of bodies, we discovered a beach in the Hague, a real sun-and-sand kind of beach, the water being the North Sea was, of course, freezing to us kaloos from down south, but you could hardly see the sand for the bodies.

What Bodies! The beach was a `topless beach’ as all beaches in Holland are, and the Dutch are among the fittest sun worshippers on Earth. No fashionable anorexia or make-up for them. Just natural, lean, full-bodied people who cycle as a means of transport and they wonder why they are considered unfashionable because they don’t have flat chests! Oh my poor aching eyes! I need a holiday!

Prahlad Kakkar is an ad-film maker