Leipzig

PM Raghunandan’s four weeks in Leipzig passed in a flash for our Indian guest journalist. The chief reporter of the Deccan Herald experienced the Festival of Lights, interviewed the mayor and zoo director and even came to terms with the German autumn cold. On Sunday, the 33-year old will fly back to his hometown of Bangalore.

“How cold is it today?” Raghu asks me frequently now. Nine degrees, seven degrees – he shakes himself; he’s never experienced such cold temperatures. He joins us for the Festival of Lights on Sunday evening on the Augustusplatz; a cold wind whistles overhead and keeps blowing out the candles. The Leipziger are bundled up in anoraks and hats. Raghu is also wearing a jacket, but it’s designed more for Indian cold weather. So, we soon seek refuge in the Gewandhaus, which is open to journalists this evening.

Unthinking, I ask a friendly older gentleman from the visitor service about his memories of that fateful day of 9 October 1989. Unexpectedly, the man is overcome by strong emotion, tears come to his eyes, he cannot speak, must turn away. It is a scene that tells my Indian guest more about 9 October 1989 in Leipzig than perhaps those 20,000 people outside with their candles.

In the editorial office, we wonder why we so rarely see Raghu these days. He loves taking long walks through Leipzig and exploring it all on foot. “In Bangalore, you can’t run around much, there’s too much traffic,” he explains. Leipzig by contrast is nice and quiet, so few people are out and about, the air is clean – for my colleague it is like a genuine health resort. When he returns to the hotel from his marches, he has seen many new things, which he then searches for information about on the Internet.

During his last week in Leipzig, the guest journalist once again has a densely packed calendar of events. For example, he meets with Mayor Burkhard Jung and zoo director Jörg Junhold for interviews for his home newspaper. Both speak English so well that the interviews can be held without an interpreter. The journalist addresses an issue with the municipal leader that bothers him about Leipzig: that many institutions have no English information or websites and even the website of the City of Leipzig does not always contain a detailed English version.

My guest is now able to say tschüss, danke and bitte in German. The word bitte confused him at first; he tells me it sounds like the Hindi world beta. Beta means son and he was first wondering why so many people were calling him “son.”

At the weekend, I invited Raghunandan to join my family at an Indian restaurant downtown. While the hot dishes brought the sweat to our brows, Raghu asked the waiter for more spices. “Nothing here tastes typically Indian,” the 33-year old bemoans, “it’s all Germanized.” When he goes out to eat on his own in Leipzig, he usually orders boiled potatoes, for the vegetarian worries that something containing meat might end up on his plate. He has also gotten into the habit of eating bread. “We only do that in India when we are ill,” he explains to me, “then the doctor advises us to eat white bread.” However, he thinks the prices in the supermarkets are quite high. For a package of bread containing six or seven slices, he pays about 1.50 euros; in India it costs only 15 cents.

Actually, we also wanted to travel to Dresden. In 1865, Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, who would later become a very famous landscape gardener in India, was born in Lohmen near Dresden. Krumbiegel was the director of the Lal Bagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, which, I’m told, “you can visit when you come to Bangalore in April.” To our surprise, however, no one in Lohmen can tell us anything about the town’s eminent son, so we forgo the visit.

Raghunandan is looking forward to returning home, to his six-year old son and eight-month old daughter. He plans to send any stories about Leipzig that he hasn’t been able to finish yet from Bangalore to the LVZ.