An Evening with Rock Legend

A short trip to the east from here is the town of Montreux. Situated at the foot of the Alps, it offers some of the most breath-taking sights of the Lake Geneva. For the lens-enthusiasts, it’s a dream come true. Travel a little distance up in the mountains, and they say you can see the entire Lake Geneva. We couldn’t really do that this time around, but there will be plenty more chance.

What makes Montreux really special is its culture in music and its association with two rock legends. Deep Purple made the town famous with their song “Smoke on the Water”, which tells the events of 1971, when a Frank Zappa fan with a flare gun set the Montreux Casino on fire. Don’t worry, the casino was rebuilt and is in a fantastic condition now, we saw it! The song goes something like this…

“We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline / To make records with a mobile - We didn't have much time / Frank Zappa & the Mothers were at the best place around / But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground / Smoke on the water, fire in the sky”

The second rock legend associated with this little town is none other than Freddie Mercury of the band Queen. The band recorded an album in 1978 in Montreux. Apparently, Freddie so was taken in by the beauty of the town, that he bought an apartment overlooking Lake Geneva. The band later bought the Mountain Studios, where they recorded their later works including the final works of Freddie in the album Made in Heaven, released much later by the remaining member of the band. In 1996, a bronze statue was erected facing the lake as a tribute to the legendry singer.

The town also hosts the famous Montreux Jazz Festival every year in the month of July every year. What started as purely a jazz festival in 1967 has expanded over time to include every imaginable music style. The repertoire of musicians that have played at the festival over the years includes the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Zappa (of course!), Queen, Van Morrison, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, BB King, Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Keith Jarret, Miles Davis, Santana, Steve Miller Band and many more. The festival today stretches over two weeks of absolute delight. So that’s gonna be one more trip for me surely.

(Check out the pictures we clicked. All pictures courtesy my dear friend Aditya. Check the following link for more pictures - http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/tarunchow/MontreuxJan07)

My room

On second thought (which has unexpectedly decided to pop out of thin air after a gap of about 24 hours), I have decided that I will indeed try and describe my room. See, I was looking at the picture again and realized that it’s not very easy to define depth for the viewer in this limited two-dimensional medium. So here goes…

The room must be about 15ft by 8ft. Don’t start to make any mental pictures just yet, coz this includes the bathroom. There is a study table that is quite big and sufficient for a student with my academic intents. There is a small drawer cabinet to keep your files and mostly things that u never know where to keep. (This is almost tempting me to tell you my theory on drawers and all that you can tell about people just by looking into their drawers. But that can wait for another day.) I am actually contemplating if the lower drawer, which is quite big in reality, should be used for dirty clothes. But I guess I will decide about that when the chair-back cannot balance any more clothes on it. The cupboards are actually quite nice and can store a lot of stuff. Especially given the size of the whole room, I think someone has done a pretty good job with them. It’s the fridge that I haven’t quite been able to explain to myself. In my opinion, it should be strong contender for the International Design Award for Ergonomical Errors! The door isn’t tall enough for the lifeline of student living, the 2L Pepsi bottle. And if u put a box the size of half a kilogram of barfi on the inside shelf, the damn thing refuses to close altogether. The shelves themselves are only two in number and have a width that can put a measuring scale to shame (you know the plastic ones we had back in nursery school). There is obviously no freezer. And possibly at under 5 ltrs (I’m being kind coz I’m pretty damn sure it is no more than 0.5 ltrs.), it is the smallest ‘cabinet’ I have ever laid my eyes on.

Next is the most prominent furniture in the room, the bed. Beds always made me wonder what it is about them. You could take two exactly similar people in height, weight, creed, colour, religion, nationality, and any other criteria that you might find relevant, and give them two exactly same beds. Leave them for a few couple of weeks to sleep on them. Exchange the beds now and make a video of the night. Trust me you will end up with a movie Mr. Bean would have loved to act in! Anyway, the bed here can be qualified as comfortable as long as you are lying in one direction. I can bet my ass that our good friend Manish Bhatt could cover the full width if he as much as lay down straight with his two ‘muscular’ arms on either side! Which gives a person of my ‘lean’ physique just enough space to be able to shuffle in a series of synchronized movements and turn myself over and still be on the bed. The whole process requires the highest level of precision, comparable to that of an Olympic gold medalist in artistic gymnastics. And talking of artistic gymnastics, have you ever wondered how makers of the television commercials for Hamam soap have over the years managed to maintain the sanctity of the bathing man, covered all over with so much lather that you can’t tell if it is the same person from the rest of the commercial, frantically rubbing all over his upper body with a big smile as if he had just had the most satisfying sex ever after Adam & Eve. Well don’t even try it in the shower in my room if you ever come visiting! You could land yourself some serious injuries in trying to mock the most ‘satisfying’ shower sold to us by the dream merchants. And for the last warning before I close, just be careful when you bend down to rinse after you brush sleepily in the mornings. You have a margin of error of 5mm, a little closer and you will bring down the cabinet on top, a little further and you could be spitting on your feet!

Am I really in heaven?

In Geneva finally… and the first thing that I notice is that its really not as cold as most people made it out to be, including ‘Google GOD’! It’s kinda pleasant really. The temperature is probably in the range of 2 to 4 degree celcius. And of course everything is heated, so you don’t quite feel whatever cold there is. Probably when I get to Lausanne…

So I take the train to Lausanne. Feeling all lonely and rather depressed for actually having left everything that ever mattered back home, I am also all anticipation for seeing the lovely countryside that I have always imagined Switzerland to be. It’s not that easy to concentrate on passing fields when you have just spent the last 16 hours flying. Actually, 10 hours flying and 6 more sitting around and waiting in lines at the various airports you have just visited. I am struggling to keep myself awake. Which is generally the case with me whenever things start moving, car, bike, airplane, train… heck anything, and your body starts to gyrate in a rhythmic to and fro movement. Freud had it right, it all has to do with those formative years. Did I ever tell you that when my brother and I were very young, 2 or 3 probably, it wasn’t always easy to put two kids to sleep together given that we were just a year apart and demanded equal pampering. So how did our parents manage? Simple. They took us both and took us on a scooter ride. And sure enough, we were both deep in sleep in record time. And this worked even in the extreme Kota cold, which the discerning reader will know is about as much as what is described above.

But hell, what is a Freud in front of the beauty of Switzerland. So I try my very best to defy the Freudian truth. And I almost managed to do so too! Just that I was in Lausanne before I could realize the train is moving. Don’t blame me! The last time I traveled in train was from the silicon valley of India to the capital. It takes 42 hours in scheduled time and a couple more coz someone surely pulls the chain in between, which generally results in a big argument between the TT and the supposed ‘culprit’ whether it was legal to pull or not. And the legitimacy of the said action is determined more by the physique of the errant in question. I could have left my whole family back in the last station and still paid heavily for it, and possibly got locked up for a day too! So with that in the back of my head, I am looking forward to some peaceful scenic gazing. The train moves out of Geneva city, which takes a few minutes. In a couple of minutes the TT is here to check. I am waiting to see if anyone pulls on the chain! (Hell, where is the chain anyway? I should make sure I find it.) The scene is beginning to get greener outside. And then we move into another station and pass right through it. My eyes are trying hard to defeat my resolve. Hey, did I just fall asleep? Nah… I ’aint that easy! Oh, another station and we pass right through again. Hmmmmmmmm… Zzzzzzzzzzz (ooops)! Ah, things are indeed getting pretty outside. Hmmmmmm… What, another station? Are they really so close to each other or am I missing something here? What??? Lausanne?????????? Already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that brought my first rail journey through the Alps to a tragic end.

The whole thing took under forty minutes. About the time the TT would have taken to get out and find the culprit who pulled the chain. And here I was, at my destination already. So I grudgingly pick up my heavy luggage again and start walking out of the station, mumbling abuses within myself. A taxi looked like to be the best option. And given that a lot of them are Mercs, it should be worth it. But it was as if the lord of disappointment had decided to have a field day on me. Even my taxi ride was over in precisely four and a half minute. And that’s not all… what is that Hindi expression, “Jale pe namak”? I had to pay 15 swiss francs for my promiscuity with the dream machine (for the uninitiated, a swiss franc is around 39 rupees!). Never again!

But the best was still to come. For long I have joked about living in this imaginary ‘pipe’ every time we talked about going to new places. Guess I finally got mine. There is nothing more to say. Here’s a picture. I have no words except that I pay 504 francs for this, and that my first reaction on entering the room was “what the f*** have I got myself into”!