Beijing offers loving images with temptation

The cold blue morning in a quiet sleepy Kunming looked mystical as the two of us - I and my tireless traveler friend - were about to board the big plane to Beijing." Whew!" my friend whistled after we finally settled. "Beijing is big. Just you wait and see!" I could not wait any longer. This was after all my first trip to Beijing!

A silky soft rock was playing in the background of a tourism filler on the LCD screen inside. I looked at the thick sea of clouds as the plane was taking off. Slowly the long lost mysterious tunes in tremolo, fading in and out of an almost inaccessible Peking Radio that I often got on my grandfather's vintage radio set when I was a child, started ringing in my ears. A time lapse.

"Can't you travel light?" my friend indulgently smiled at me while walking across the huge lounge at Beijing airport. Minutes ago I had told him how inseparably associated China was - in my mind - with names from my adolescent memories - Mao Zedong and Edgar Snow, Dwarkanath Kotnis and Henry Norman Bethune, Lu Xun and Chin Ching Mai

We were whisked out from the airport by our journalist friend - another indomitable companion from our own city and the man behind this trip - who had been waiting to take us to his flat at Huixin Dongjie.

Soon it was a drive through a maze of flyovers and willow-lined streets - past swanky hotels and highrises with a constructivist backdrop of protruding steel and iron scaffoldings for newer constructions. Huge McDonalds and KFC billboards that slipped away on both sides made the thoroughfares look jazzy. "Man! I am really in Beijing !!" I thought to myself.

And suddenly the cityscape took me back to my own city more than three decades ago - a city of murky lanes smelling of fresh gunpowder and crooked walls carrying stenciled graffiti of Mao and excerpts from the Red Book.

But of course those were different times. I opened the lens of my handycam. The first images! And I was gripped by a strange feeling of not feeling like a stranger in Beijing.

The feeling stayed through the following days.

The prescribed trips to the "must-see" places were interwoven with our casual walks through the nooks and corners of everyday life - food-joints and sidewalks, malls and subways. Across neon-lit intersections were glow-signs blinking - like waves breaking into the slipstream of a huge global economy - Walmarts, KFCs, Ikeas, Toshibas, Hitachis, IBMs, Dells, GEs, H-Ps Beijing looked big, strong and bright. Dense shopping malls looked like video installations on the move. I held my breath and went on gleaning images in my mind. And on my camera.

And again images of yet another history with its strange habit of storming through unexpected corners of an old city were tempting me.

From the sparkling kids romping across a sprawling Tiananmen Square that looked like a sunbathed Seurat canvas - to the many smiling and greeting strangers warmly asking "Indu Ren?" - and the spirited artists who took me around a colorful 798 to give me a feel of today's art scene in China - to the mute grandmas, a look of worry wrinkling their freckled brow, patiently selling tiny red flags as souvenirs in the half-lit subways - to the handful of shy painters sketching me at a midnight Bar Street and being sketched by me in return - it was yet another Beijing unfolding itself in graceful love.

Yes, the times they're a'changin But there are things that are beyond time and change perhaps

I came here as an artist to glean images. What else could I give in return! Images of love with love.

I failed to feel like a stranger in an enormous city named Beijing.

The author is a cartoonist and filmmaker based in Kolkata, India. The sketches are by him.

(China Daily 08/22/2008 page11)