- excerpt from "Summer in Algiers" by Albert Camus
For a city as middling as Vizag, "City of Destiny" might seem like an over ambitious epitaph especially to the world weary traveler who knows better than to depend on such claims. Nothing much to mention about it, really, perhaps except for the ersatz structures that vie for your attention at every vantage point. Standing between the ocean and great hills, its love for symbolic gestures that shift between extremities reflects itself with better taste when one finds himself looking over the horizon from the hills that line the coast either overwhelmed or entirely unimpressed.
The average tourist is better off at eccentric Goa or the metropolitan Chennai where a plan and a guide will satiate the need for novelty and sport taken heed to by a well versed tourism industry from having catered and obliged to the wanderlust of men for so long.
On the other hand, it is perhaps the empiricist who has much to gain from the inundating sensuality of the nature upon which all attempts at "development" has had but a little effect. The sensualist, the wanderer will find all his modalities satisfied here. Without a beginning or an end, this stands perfectly for the road that would you get somewhere eventually if you walked long enough. It owes nothing to anyone, indifferent and welcoming at the same time.
Any course that one chooses to take to explore the largely incognito city (that has a knack of presenting itself as very au fait) will bring him to the same end. The choice broils down to whether it is a complete purging of the senses one is looking for or a skimming on the surface. Either way, he won't be deprived of the promises it has to offer. It is place where one moves between highs and lows (literally). There is little history one can associate with, but an abundance of places reminiscent of the past. One can enjoy the most pedestrian attractions here for less, like getting on a tugboat for a little fare for a half an hour's ride on the mostly shallow harbor and buy souvenirs from the most "tourist-y" beach that (unsurprisingly) isn't located very far from the tour. A submarine from the WW-II is another popular landmark that is a favorite and later in the evenings, among a number of couples could sit on a park on the beach and watch a movie under the open sky. From the market places where one could wander to the occasional stall selling old books that smell of fragrant tobacco, to the ascent on the hills where one moves further away from the briny odor of the sea and towards the sky that opens up to the one who makes the climb. And unlike many other cities upon which even the skies seem to delimit themselves, the starry skies and clear moonlit nights reveal the inexpugnable verve of nature where it chooses reveal itself at the fullest.
On the best days (the best time would be summer,of course), the punctual sun reveals the resplendence the nature here is capable of. It is an exercise that pays off best in the dawn, if one had the time and the patience (the two traits one needs to truly love) to watch the vast sky that canvases the ocean lift its drowsy pink lid over the dark green ocean that gradually freshens up with it to the perpetual summer blues as the day shuffles to the noon, when the horizon disappears and the invisible hands that had worked through the ante-meridian hours pause to take a break (or to perhaps admire and reflect on the glistening masterpiece that stands in display). Then, when the harsh sun begins to soften with the ocean breeze and the fishermen who have learned to fish ashore start coming out with their wares, the sky turns to the end of the spectrum - the darkening yellow growing an intense pink as the shadowy grey rises up against the cerise sun that melts into a pool of amber upon the rippling ocean that rises up to a warm greeting towards the midsummer night's moon.
W one doesn't find so remarkable throughout (and getting back to the theme) - when the wave of abundance has swept over - is the gratuitous attempts of man to dominate his surroundings. Houses and buildings, tall and small that have of late seemed to have multiplied themselves in a manner that pores do dominate every view that one has of the landscape. A hum of activity and the reverberating drum of bulldozers breaking through the rocks is what one to gets to hear over the roar of the ocean. It is in such moments, the industriousness of activity that one finds the mysticism dispelled, the peoples as detached as anywhere and the realization of a transitory, changing life. Of how the days go by unnoticed, melting into one another and in the baseness of everyday, infinity is realized.
If everyday was what one looked at, while in Vizag, there would be nothing to it, really. Ambitions are realized in bigger cities, knowledge within institutions. But the truth is, the abundance that one finds oneself surrounded with - the dreamy mountains standing with their head above the clouds and the memory-less oceans they look out to - is not a distraction from the frugality of obvious lessons it has to offer. Rather, they stand as a testimony to its greatest and perhaps only, lesson (an objective one,at that) - patience.
This reflection comes from love, and in conjuring the best of the city that dissipates gradually from my mind and turns back into itself, to its occult revelations kept reserved for only those in the inner circle - I let the mountainous ramparts close themselves and the ocean tide over its secrets in my mind as reaches up to the moon, to return to the keeper of memories...
Like Rilke once said "The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you."
Any course that one chooses to take to explore the largely incognito city (that has a knack of presenting itself as very au fait) will bring him to the same end. The choice broils down to whether it is a complete purging of the senses one is looking for or a skimming on the surface. Either way, he won't be deprived of the promises it has to offer. It is place where one moves between highs and lows (literally). There is little history one can associate with, but an abundance of places reminiscent of the past. One can enjoy the most pedestrian attractions here for less, like getting on a tugboat for a little fare for a half an hour's ride on the mostly shallow harbor and buy souvenirs from the most "tourist-y" beach that (unsurprisingly) isn't located very far from the tour. A submarine from the WW-II is another popular landmark that is a favorite and later in the evenings, among a number of couples could sit on a park on the beach and watch a movie under the open sky. From the market places where one could wander to the occasional stall selling old books that smell of fragrant tobacco, to the ascent on the hills where one moves further away from the briny odor of the sea and towards the sky that opens up to the one who makes the climb. And unlike many other cities upon which even the skies seem to delimit themselves, the starry skies and clear moonlit nights reveal the inexpugnable verve of nature where it chooses reveal itself at the fullest.
On the best days (the best time would be summer,of course), the punctual sun reveals the resplendence the nature here is capable of. It is an exercise that pays off best in the dawn, if one had the time and the patience (the two traits one needs to truly love) to watch the vast sky that canvases the ocean lift its drowsy pink lid over the dark green ocean that gradually freshens up with it to the perpetual summer blues as the day shuffles to the noon, when the horizon disappears and the invisible hands that had worked through the ante-meridian hours pause to take a break (or to perhaps admire and reflect on the glistening masterpiece that stands in display). Then, when the harsh sun begins to soften with the ocean breeze and the fishermen who have learned to fish ashore start coming out with their wares, the sky turns to the end of the spectrum - the darkening yellow growing an intense pink as the shadowy grey rises up against the cerise sun that melts into a pool of amber upon the rippling ocean that rises up to a warm greeting towards the midsummer night's moon.
W one doesn't find so remarkable throughout (and getting back to the theme) - when the wave of abundance has swept over - is the gratuitous attempts of man to dominate his surroundings. Houses and buildings, tall and small that have of late seemed to have multiplied themselves in a manner that pores do dominate every view that one has of the landscape. A hum of activity and the reverberating drum of bulldozers breaking through the rocks is what one to gets to hear over the roar of the ocean. It is in such moments, the industriousness of activity that one finds the mysticism dispelled, the peoples as detached as anywhere and the realization of a transitory, changing life. Of how the days go by unnoticed, melting into one another and in the baseness of everyday, infinity is realized.
If everyday was what one looked at, while in Vizag, there would be nothing to it, really. Ambitions are realized in bigger cities, knowledge within institutions. But the truth is, the abundance that one finds oneself surrounded with - the dreamy mountains standing with their head above the clouds and the memory-less oceans they look out to - is not a distraction from the frugality of obvious lessons it has to offer. Rather, they stand as a testimony to its greatest and perhaps only, lesson (an objective one,at that) - patience.
This reflection comes from love, and in conjuring the best of the city that dissipates gradually from my mind and turns back into itself, to its occult revelations kept reserved for only those in the inner circle - I let the mountainous ramparts close themselves and the ocean tide over its secrets in my mind as reaches up to the moon, to return to the keeper of memories...
Like Rilke once said "The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you."
