Take me to Vienna

8811 kms.

          If I drive without stopping even once, Google maps assures me that I will reach Vienna in 4 days and 20 hours. This is one trip I’d go on in a heartbeat because Vienna is the city that holds the key to my heart.

          I started thinking of Vienna as more than just another of the many cities that populate the world when I started reading Eva Ibbotson. My love for her writing translated into a bigger love for a city I’d never seen, such was the power of her words and love for the city. Back when I first read about it, visiting Vienna was just a far away dream, out of reach for me, maybe because it isn’t on the “must see” lists of most people, it just made a place for itself on my bucket list.

          Then about 2 years ago when I decided to go on exchange and looked at a list of all the places we’d be visiting on the Eurotour, my dream of visiting this Hapsburg capital, this city of love and music did not seem as far fetched and without it, I began counting the days till I’d be there.

          Was it the rushing back of the knowledge of places I’d read about as memories from a distant life? Or was it the pure joy of actually realizing a wish or dream come true? Or was it our wonderful tour guide whose narrations about the places we saw bringing them back to life? I don’t know what it was but any of them or all of them combined to present before me a golden day, the kind of whose memories when thought back on later in life make you sigh contentedly.

          Looking up at the statue of Maria Theresa, the empress “who made Austria great”, on either side of which the Museum of Art History and Museum of Natural history respectively are situated, I could almost see Ruth from “A Morning Gift” visiting both of them throughout her childhood and returning to the Museum of Natural History when years later to seek asylum from the Nazis. I saw her again when we were shown a typical Viennese house built around a courtyard with a tree in the centre just as hers was and imagined it having been hers.

          I saw Ellen from “A Song for Summer” when we went to Demel’s famous Kaffeehaus where she’d enjoyed Vienna’s best coffee and éclairs. I saw her going to watch a Rosenkavalier gala at the State Opera or the Staatsoper when I was at the same place, going to watch La Boheme.

          Nearby I imagined Tessa from “Magic Flutes” at the Klostern theatre working for the International Opera Company without pay simply because she wanted to serve music.

          My Vienna special moments were mostly an amalgamation of what I remembered from the lives of Ruth, Ellen and Tessa. Maybe that’s because knowing them, having reading them over 15 times each I’ve started carrying parts of them inside me and in this incredible city I became a part of them as they of me and learnt what they knew all their lives living there. Maybe now it’s hard to tell where their memories end and where mine start.

          The one special discovery that I have a claim over in this city is of a little side street called Blutgasse or Blood alley which I immediately stored away for melodramatic moments in future stories.

          Even after all this there is still so much that I have to go back to this city to see and to do- see the Spanish Riding school with the Lippizaner horses, sit on the Prater Giant wheel in the Prater park, take a walk along the Danube, catch a glimpse of the river Wien after which the city is named.

So Vienna my love, take me to Vienna

-Nirmitee Mehta

Behind the Quill

               “Rita Skeeter reached into her crocodile bag and drew out a long acid green quill and a roll of parchment…”.That quill, known as the quick quotes quill, transformed a normal sentence like “Testing...my name is Rita Skeeter, Daily Prophet reporter” into “Attractive, blond Rita Skeeter, forty three, whose savage quill has punctured many inflated reputations”. This rather self obsessed quill that had a knack for spouting out eloquent sentences fascinated me ever since I first encountered it in ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’.

          Getting one, albeit a non magical one, was a rather serendipitious moment for me. Here I’d like to share it with all you quill dreams readers.

          During the course of my exchange program I went on a lot of tours. At this time last year I was on a Eurotour with over 50 other exchange students. It was on the Italian leg of the tour when we visited the beautiful city of Siena that I first encountered the quill. I was browsing through the shops for souvenirs and when in a stationary store I stopped in my tracks when I spotted it…the most beautiful pen I had ever seen. I stood admiring it for a few minutes and then rushed to share this find with my friend Volimte.We ooh-ed and aah-ed over the simple beauty of the quill before deciding that we could not go without having it for ourselves. She bought a green one and I a lovely deep pink one. For the rest of the day I was bursting with joy[no exaggeration] reveling in the bliss of having bought the most beautiful pen in the world.

          The next morning when I was looking through my things in my bag, I couldn’t find it but quickly put it down to the fact that I’d perhaps forgotten it in the bus the previous night and figured it would turn up when we got back on the bus for the day’s journey. It did not despite my searching long and hard and I spent the entire day distraught and worried about having lost it so soon.

          Later at night one of my friends came to my room. He’d heard me talk about losing it and immediately thought back to the stuff he had found while on bus cleaning duty. He’d gone back to look through the stuff and having found the quill, came looking for me right after. I squealed and couldn’t thank him enough. It was so gratifying to get it back.

          I thought back to this memory the other day when I wrote with it for the very first time[yes a year after buying it].you see, I couldn’t find a cartridge that would fit in so I chose the old fashioned route and dipped it into an inkpot, writing the way it was meant to be written with.

          And sometimes, that’s all you need to start writing………..

By Nirmitee Mehta

A Feeling called Serendipity

          The dictionary describes serendipity as an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. What it does not do, however is describe the feeling behind it, the excitement when you’ve made a serendipitical[new word. I made] discovery and the joy it gives to you .How long after its over, you can look back to that golden moment where it seemed like time was standing still just for you, because that’s part of the magic of serendipity, it does not rush. The moment arrives gradually and takes its time leaving you to go to someone else who needs that bit of magic.

          Incidentally how the quill came into being in the blog name and symbol is also a story involving serendipity but I’ll dedicate an entire post to just that another time.

          The idea of doing a blog post about serendipity came to me the other day when I stumbled upon a blog called Green ink that had an interesting book-related quote on the upper right hand corner that got me thinking.[FYI :Book People=Awesome. Always].So then I read a couple of her posts getting completely mesmerized in them.. Then I stopped an started reading from the very first post and stalked the blog for a few days until I was done reading them all :D

          What captivated me was the easy writing style that was clear yet dreamy…the fact that it was so well written and there were so many things written about. I’ve found a blog doppelganger who gets why I love showers anytime of the day and loves hummus as much as I do among so many other things.

          You know how in books or movies, characters find the most amazing places out of the blue? For the die hard “How I met your mother” fans, how Marshall comes across the best burger in NYC shortly after moving to the city? I had a similarly themed experience one afternoon when I was touring Berlin. My friend Sharkanada and I were wandering through the streets, taking more photos than we’d ever want to look through later when we spotted it, the chocolate shop from heaven. Calling it just a shop however would be an understatement and an insult. Hundreds of varieties and forms of chocolates. Huge chocolate monuments-of the Titanic, the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin bear, the Reichstag building sculpted out of the most mouthwatering chocolate[or schockolade as Germans call it] ever!

The first floor held another surprise-one in the form of a chocolate restaurant where we indulged in the best hot chocolate in Berlin and in large portions of chocolate desserts.

Though I returned there twice after that, those visits didn’t have the special feeling the first one did, when we found it inadvertently and spent a perfect afternoon.

          Moments of serendipity, I think are a lot like love, you don’t go looking for them, it is when you stop looking that you find them in the most unexpected places.

-By Nirmitee

An ark for the future

Whenever people give advice on writing, be it in books, movies or real life, one thing always said is “write what you know”. One woman according to what I read adhered to it to the extent of making her husband gag, blindfold and tie her up just so she could write about a kidnapped person’s thoughts and experiences more realistically.
Looking at it differently, if everyone just stuck to writing about what they know, boundaries would never be pushed, the science fiction and fantasy genres would lie empty other than the pieces written by magical beings themselves (they exist. DO NOT try to convince me otherwise). Part of what I think a writer’s job is, is to think and imagine the what’s and how’s the rest of us cannot.
Maybe the secret is writer and reader journeying together into realms unknown. Maybe that’s what authors do when they don’t have many actual experiences in that field….the writer learning of and living in the world he has created and reader being patient with his thoughts and believing the writers words. So lets the two of us try that and go on a voyage looking for what might happen if the Noah’s ark situation occurs once again in the future, say in 2012 since so many doomsday theories surround it.
It is October 2012 and due to global warming, the threat of polar icecaps melting is imminent. The world is witnessing fights in every single communication forum-louder and more forceful than ever before among presidents, celebrities, businessmen, neighbors each trying to justify why they need a place on the ark group of spaceships more than the others.
One hears of a fan buying his favorite actor a seat on it (with 5 star luxury available of course!) and being promptly berated by his family for wasting money that could have bought every one of them places at that price. The omnipresent subject of discrimination[racial or otherwise] makes its way into this controversy as well, making way for more people coming onto the ark. There has to be a couple of people not just from every ethnicity, country and religion, but also especially in the case of India someone from every state and caste on it.
The question of taking 2 of every animal species does not rise, what with so many people clamoring to get a seat. Instead genes of every species will be taken along and once optimum living conditions are obtained they’ll all be cloned. This makes the animal activists indignant and they plan to remain behind to share the fate of their fellow earthlings-in the nude.
Come November and most of the small islands are submerged and have completely disappeared. The larger ones like Sri Lanka and Madagascar partially so with their inhabitants fleeing to landlocked countries.
As December 21 approaches….things get more chaotic and the future murkier making it harder for me to predict what happens next. Maybe since it is doomsday and nothing will work according to plan, right after taking off, the spaceships will malfunction and hence all signs of life on earth will disappear. Or maybe…...there will be enough ark spaceships for every one of the 7 billion people on the planet. And even if that does not happen, we’ll start a completely new colony in space like the Jetsons [loved that show!].
Take that world politics! You can’t have wars when you don’t have countries anymore.
But for what really will happen…..we’ll just have to wait and watch won’t we?

By Nirmitee Mehta

{Disclaimer-The writer of this piece has not seen the movie 2012 and does not plan to either. Hence any probable references to the plot of the movie can by accounted for by the simple explanation that the makers had gone into the future and stolen ideas from her brain.}