Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Dolce vita!


Caught Russell Crowe in action in Rome....or rather a pathetic apology for him. A gladiator with a tattered gown, whose only sustenance for the day was a haggard cheroot which he kept drawing on whenever he could take a break from being killed.

A sobering snapshot just outside the awesome Colosseum. A reminder of how history pays, even today. When the boy in the picture had his fill of the sword and moved away, the man turned towards us and offered to get killed by us too. The kill would have cost us ten bucks. We move away, deeply insulted.
This is how Rome reinvents history, in very public spaces where Euro-wary tourists attempt to take back home vignettes of one of the world's bloodiest arenas. Sinatra would have loved the situational humour.
Elsewhere in other remote and forgotten corners, you find illegally-staying-on Bangladeshi hawkers littering pavements like discarded confetti. In one of the world's most culturally alive cities, the disowned migrant exists in a closed-out corner where neither tourist cameras nor the long arm of law can reach. The law knows they are there, but doesnt bother too much: the big city feeds on their horribly underpaid services for peddling its time-machine-ness.
But then there are the smart ones too: we come across one such, a Pakistani Big Boss who runs an umbrella store in one of the streets leading to Roma Centrale. Almost all of them under his employ are fellow Asians and living on in Rome illegally as unlike other European cities, the policia here leaves them alone. Every morning, they fan out across the city, selling everything from umbrellas to salted acorns, returning home at night to the memories of families that exist in an unreachable corner of the world.
You search in vain for their smiles, but find instead only the dark misery of a bottomless cavity.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Madam:
I read your story on Italian education in The Hindu. I am planning to go to Italy for a vacation and want to see if I can enrol in any university there.
I am a B.Tech Anna University. What university do you suggest?
--Sukanya Kalidasan