Still in Kochi

Still enjoying Fort Kochi, a town that is inherently interesting and enjoyable. Perhaps too many tourists, though thanks to them there are so many guest houses, restaurants and cafes. You can’t have it all ways. But the kind of tourists seems to be wealthier and older than in most places in India, which influences somewhat the prices. There are still enough backpackers to ensure that there are also cheaper places to stay and eat. Prices go as low as 250 Rupees or less for accommodation in dormitories. I would not stay in such places. I have a pleasant, though non-A/C room with attached bathroom. It’s clean and in a good location, close to the main tourist area, but on a quiet street.

I’m having trouble sleeping at nights due to the heat. I sleep best in the early morning. Then I wake up refreshed as if I’ve had a full night’s sleep. It’s true that I often have naps in the daytime. It’s always been a puzzle to me why hot weather makes it impossible to sleep at night but is conducive to sleep in the daytime.

When they are open, I have breakfast at the vegan dhaba – just about the same breakfast I have at home: granola (actually muesli) with chopped fruits and coconut milk, together with a cup of coffee. The fruits usually consist of pineapple, papaya, pomegranate and maybe apple. I refill my water bottle there too.

I have lunch in mid afternoon in any one of various restaurants, then have a snack in the evening – a chaat, a sandwich or a dahi puri or something.

In the afternoon to early evening I walk on the promenade by the beach and sometimes sit on the rocks. There’s always a pleasant breeze blowing from the sea. There are cultural activities, but these are of the kind specifically for tourists.
I’ve enjoyed taking many photos, just with my mobile camera, while here.

Kochi 2

There’s a nice little vegan dhaba around the corner that’s run by two Japanese women. Yesterday I arrived just a little early for lunch and so had to eat there a second breakfast; a kind of muesli that was was more like a bowl of smoothie. There I got talking to a young English guy called Joseph who was in India for the first time. He’d just been writing his diary. I was telling him about the many Malayalis who come to Israel and the Gulf countries. He’d read an article about the mistreatment of foreign workers in Dubai, and said that after reading it he’d decided to cross Dubai off his list of destinations. I said that if I started like that I would need to cross off Israel, where I live, and India, which I often visit, and there would be no end to it. He hadn’t heard a thing about the latest political developments in India and said that he’d stopped watching the news.

I had a better meal there today; a miso soup and plate of mixed vegies and beans; good and worth the money. The place is frequented by foreigners, as far as I can see. A young Indian man stopped by on his bike and asked for some juice – maybe papaya? The woman told him they didn’t have any. So he asked for a smoothie, and she also said she didn’t have any. So, a little flustered, he walked out. I wonder if my understanding of the situation was correct? If so, it may be that she had weighed him up in a certain way. He hadn’t sat down to read a menu, as other people would, but walked right up to the counter. Maybe she decided that he was really there because he’d seen a pretty foreign girl seated in front. Probably her reaction was based on some previous experience.

Yesterday I was seated at a juice bar, Kochi Walla, just next to the field where all the young guys play informal cricket games, all day long. Five guys were seated there, as usual, chatting away the evening. Their motor scooters were parked out in front. A man walked by wearing an immaculate white vesti and kameez. All the young guys politely got on their feet and greetings were exchanged. I decided this must be a local politician – someone they all evidently knew and felt required to show respect to. Next door there are a couple of small municipal buildings; one called the “village office”, which is a bit strange, for a city, and another which seems to house an anti-drugs program, as there lots of scary murals about the damage caused by drugs, on the surrounding wall.

Enjoying Cochin

I arrived on Monday morning in Kochi, a direct flight on Arkia. The plane was full of middle-aged to elderly Israeli tourists, many of whom appeared to be part of organized tour groups. A few young people; two or three Malayalis returning home. But it was an easy flight. Arkia, unlike what seems to have been the arrangement a few months ago, took a route that skirted Saudia Arabia, heading down the Red Sea as far as Djibouti, then turning east. So it was longer than in could have been. But since it was a night flight, it didn’t make any difference. While on the plane and waiting for departure, I booked a room in a guest house. Although this wasn’t necessary, I think it makes a better impression with the immigration people if one has an address to give upon arrival. The room wasn’t great; full of mosquitoes, and cockroaches emerging from the bathroom grate at night. By the second day I found something more suitable, though still inexpensive.

In Fort Kochi this is at about the end of the tourist season. Southern India is beginning to heat up. I was once here in August, during the monsoon time, and it was more pleasant. But early morning and from about 4 PM the temperatures are fine. Today, I went out at lunch time, intending to visit the nearby Indo-Portuguese museum, but finding it closed, took a longer walk, shaded by my umbrella. The latter I bought in Kumily last year, but it was made in Aleppy, not far from here. As Dorab says, in India it’s always a good idea to carry an umbrella, because it is good against both the rain and the sun. And Indian umbrellas usually have a silver underlining against the rays of the sun.

I walked along the road that goes down by the ferry port, hoping to find a small cafe I had remembered from my earlier visit, but it seems to have gone. I found another, the Los Angeles cafe, which, despite its name, was very nice. I had a vegetable thali (supposedly a complete meal tray) and a glass of lemon iced tea. It was a tourist style variation on a thali, really – with papad, pickle, sabji and a whole grain, but quite good and nourishing. Here in Kochi the main speciality is fish and shellfish, but these are off the menu for me. It’s quite easy to be a vegetarian and now even a vegan however. Trying to be completely vegan is something I have not bothered with much in India. But here, besides the traditional vegan options, many restaurants offer more eclectic vegan portions and desserts. And I’ve discovered two entirely vegan restaurants so far.

Along the road by the ferry, there are many old homes with courtyards overlooking the sea, or rather the inlet between the mainland and the island. I snapped a couple of photos of these along the way home, as well as some of the graffiti on the walls siding the streets.

The Guardian today has one of its Long Read articles about India, “How Hindu Supremacists are tearing India apart”, which seems to give a good account of the troubling slide in secularism that worries everyone not subscribing to the ideology of the BJP. But so many quite ordinary people do. Just as in Israel, in the UK, in Italy, the US, and so many other places, inquiring into the views of one’s neighbors can be very disappointing. As the article points out, the danger in India, may be still greater than these other places, given the country’s existing propensities for civil unrest and its shaky union between so many disparate cultures, languages, religions, castes and ethnicities. The Muslim minority in India constitutes 180 million people.

While here I have been reading some of the writings of Paul Bowles, who I only recently discovered. “The Sheltering Sky”, his writings on travel, and now “The Spider’s House”. He’s an intriguing writer, with a fascinating life story. He was acquainted with some of the significant writers, musicians and artists of the 20th century. It was Gertrude Stein who persuaded him to go live in Tangiers, where he settled and lived for decades. I read a little of his travels here in Kerala today. What a different style of travel from today! He carried with him eighteen suitcases. He describes how at a border check between two Indian states, the customs officers were concerned that he was planning to sell clothing. “Why would I want to sell my clothes?” he asked them.

I think that the kind of travel writing that he describes has completely gone by the wayside today, and perhaps some people would say, good riddance. Especially that of white people discovering Africa and India. Amitav Ghosh’s book, “In an Antique Land”, was perhaps more interesting; a post-colonial traveler whom the “natives” (Egyptian villagers) saw as coming from a still more backward place (India). But that book too was published almost thirty years ago.

Bowles is a sensitive traveler. His novels are very well written, and obviously distance themselves from the views of their sometimes racist protagonists. To what extent, Bowles’ own views might be out of date, I’m not sure yet. Certainly, all writers are a product of their times; and earlier times usually equates to less enlightened than our own (though sometimes we’re proved wrong about that. But amusingly, it’s much easier to pick out the imperfections of earlier times, and much harder to notice the flaws in the mannerisms and ways of thinking of our own times. I’ve lived long enough to know that much.

Cabinet reshuffle

Looking in from outside, it’s interesting to read how in post-colonial Britain, Sajid Javid has been replaced by Rishi Sunak and that Alok Sharma was promoted to business secretary.

Linux on my Thinkpad

I am pleased with the transition I made from Windows to MX Linux on my Lenovo Thinkpad T470p. It’s a beautiful machine, but much better now that I no longer have to use Windows 10 in it. I am back in the operating environment that I know and love and don’t need to make any compromises. I have used MX Linux previously, on lower-powered and older machines, but although I know that I could easily run a fancier distro under my 32 GB RAM, I wanted something that I already knew would be stable and that I would probably stay with. Initially I tried installing MX with the Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma desktops, then reinstalled and tried Budgie. I liked Budgie best, but it’s a bit buggy, so I’ve gone back to XFCE. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with any of the others, but XFCE is the desktop that MX Linux comes with, and MX seems to play best with it.

Regarding software, as usual, I have added the tools that I use: Cherrytree Notes, Bluefish, Filezilla, KeepassXC, Osmo, Scribus, Calibre, for now. All of these are multi-platform and available also for Windows, so even for the few months I was working under Windows, I was able to use almost exclusively free open source software.

I installed XnView as a photo manager, but then I had a pleasant surprise when I found that GThumb has grown into a program that can handle most of my everyday needs, such as cropping, resizing, color correcting. Last time I checked, this was not so, and I’ve reluctantly used XnView for years since. Though it is free, and very nice, it is still proprietary software. On Windows there is FastStone, which is under a GPL3 license.

For my cloud needs, I have NextCloud for personal files. This works fine (though it doesn’t start up automatically, for some reason). For the office, I unfortunately have to use Google Drive. Here there is a problem, because Google provide no native system for synchronization on Linux. (They initially promised, and people have been screaming at them for years in the Google forums, but it hasn’t helped – it just ain’t gonna happen.) I tried to use the Gnome 3 and KDE Google Drive solutions (which was the reason for my mentioned experimentation with these desktop environments). The verdict: Gnome’s Online Accounts is still too slow to be of much use. KDE’s Google Drive synchronization is currently disallowed from authenticating by Google. I tried next to use a proprietary solution, Expandrive, because it is supposed to work like Google Drive File Stream. But, for Linux at least, this is completely Beta software (and expensive). I had an email from the developer, but he didn’t reply to my feedback. So I’m using InSync, but just for a single folder where I keep some active files. My hard drive is not large enough to contain all of the files we have on our Google Drive, and previously Insync somehow made a horrible mess, mixing some of our personal home documents in public folders – it took hours and hours to correct the mess and I don’t want to go there again.

Regarding support under Linux for the Thinkpad T470p, as far as I can see, everything is supported, almost out of the box. For battery management, there is a specific external module for the TPL battery management system that I needed to add (acpi-call-dkms). This keeps the battery charged up to a certain threshold in order to help preserve the life of the battery. The machine still seems to drain the battery more quickly than under Windows, however.
The only thing that I have not yet installed is the drivers for the finger print reader.

The trackpoint

I once before owned a very cheap Thinkpad, on which I also replaced the Windows system with Linux, but I never really got the hang of using the trackpoint. Now I’ve decided to try to get used to it. I have always hated touchpads, and usually the first thing I do is disable them and use an external trackball (which I much prefer to mice). I suspect that I’m less dexterous than most people and always look with admiration when I see people effortlessly using their touchpads. It could be age, but I remember how even in primary school the teachers would tell me I was holding the pencil too heavily.

But the trackpoint is something special. There’s no way to accidentally create havoc with it, as I always do with with touchpads. Still, getting accustomed to the trackpoint is no easy task, though I do recognize the advantages. The experience reminds me of when I first began using a mouse, after working for years with WordPerfect under DOS. It felt really strange. But there’s something about the trackpoint that brings me closer to the machine, and encourages me to use keyboard functions more. For example, in LibreOffice, to select a large block of text that spans more than a page, I would normally use the mouse (or trackball), but trying to accomplish that with the trackpoint is simply horrible. So I looked up how to do use the keyboard instead and gasped how easy it is (you simply hold down the shift key while moving the arrow buttons – doh – I bet everyone else already knew that). Giving up external pointing devices is quite liberating. No doubt those who work completely in Vim or Emacs, and don’t need to use any pointing device whatsoever, feel this even more strongly. Having used a pointing device consistently for about 25 years, I’ve simply forgotten how it felt beforehand.

The Sheltering Sky

Reading The Sheltering Sky of Paul Bowles. It’s interesting and well-written. The characters are racist and sexist, of course; I haven’t a clue whether that reflects the views of the author, because we aren’t intended to admire them.