Medieval Living?

Swiss Nuggets: Observations on Switzerland following a long-weekend visit



Bern’s town center, the street plan and the architecture, have been unchanged for five hundred years. It is a UNESCO world heritage site. I was half expecting a twee little museum piece; a backdrop for touristy snapshots, that has been all but abandoned by the locals.

I was surprised and delighted to find a city center throbbing with local life, with grocers, designer boutiques, discount shoe stores and newsagents all spilling out from a very well maintained fifteenth century layout, a bit like a first-world version of Chandni Chowk in Delhi or Crawford Market in Bombay.

City scapes

My strongest childhood stereotype of Switerland is from Asterix, where the Swiss diligently clean up behind the Roman orgies, where they decide to carry Obelix home after he drinks too much and passes out in the snow because he looks "messy" just lying there.




Going off stereotype, I was expecting Swiss city-scapes to be as pristine and pretty as the pictures on chocolate boxes. While some pristine and pretty cityscapes do exist, like the tourist friendly city center in Lucerne, there is also plenty of urban grit.

The graffiti along the train lines in Geneva and the tram lines in Bern can compete with London, Chicago or Bombay. There are practical but uninspired suburbs ringing the beautifully preserved city centres. There are also ugly American style strip malls sprouting neon advertising signs are being planted in chocolate box country side, despite some architects protesting.

Reality bites..even in Switzerland.

The Lions of Lanka

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The most visible minority in Switzerland are Sri Lankan Tamil refugees.

They include Giritharan Thiagarajan, the head chef at Vatter, an excellent vegetarian restaurant in Bern, who was delighted to meet fellow Tamils visiting his restaurant.

Wikipedia thinks 40,000 Tamils live in Switzerland. Giritharan thinks the number is 80,000…and he might be right. To put that in perspective, the sovereign nation of Liechtenstein, Switzerland’s eastern neighbour, is home to about 34,000 souls.

The Lions of Lucerne

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The cuckoo clock piece is untrue, so is the myth of brotherly love.

If anything, the Swiss myth of nationhood is martial: Switzerland is the only country in Western Europe that still has universal conscription. Hence the reputation for being excellent mercenaries, hence the Swiss Guards around the Pope resplendent in Michelangelo’s glorious metrosexual colours, hence the Swiss Army knives.

Hence the magnificient Lion of Lucerne, to remember the 700 Swiss Guards who fought to the last man against a bloodthirsty mob at Tuileries in 1792 while Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette escaped from the palace.




My wife and I were travelling with our six and three year old daughters. We chose not to inflict this story of futile heroism and cynical royalty on the kids, and decided the visit the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss transportation museum, instead.

Cuckoo

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Since I had a great time in Switzerland, I must come to my gracious host's defence. The famous words quoted above are not true. The cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria, in southern Germany.

Amateurs talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics

Here's the Economist on the last lap of the Obama-McCain campaign in Pennsylvania, a vital swing state.

...Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen...

...The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organised. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed...

There's the glimmer of an interesting theory here: winning elections is not about policy, performances, or even mud-slinging. All that is just noise that keeps the commentariat busy. The real business of winning elections is about logistics, keeping the show rolling on the ground. Politics is about Sales, not Marketing.

This may also be the real reason why the Congress, India's Grand Old Party, is now a shambles. It's not the failure of Nehruvian socialism or any such grand theory. It's probably about the about the slow tactical melting away of the grass-roots organization, of the Congressman in each village, of the great sales organization that was built up during the freedom struggle.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".