Simon Gandolfi in the city recently. Pictures by Bishwarup Dutta

His back hurts, his palms are sore, his skin is calloused and pimples have erupted on his behind. Not surprising, for this 77-year-old writer from Herefordshire in the UK has been on the road for four months on a motorcycle. Simon Gandolfi, crime writer-turned-travel writer, is still raring to go and will be on the Indian roads for another two months.

The grandfather of six took 11 months to travel from Mexico to the tip of South America, covering 66,000 km in a Honda 125, after his wife apparently got tired of having him hanging around the house.

“I never argue with her, and so I went from Mexico to the tip of South America,” says Gandolfi. The book An Old Man on a Bike came out of the trip.

In India he started from Kanyakumari, with stopovers at Kodaikanal, Goa, Calcutta and some northeast cities.

In Hispanic America, Gandolfi could speak to an old shepherdess or a multimillionaire Mexican with equal ease because he was fluent in Spanish. But that’s not happening in India. “Language is a barrier here,” says the author who had been to India 40 years ago. “I had done the India-Pakistan-Afganisthan route. Forty years ago, you would find one old man in a remote village who could still speak English because he had worked for the Raj. Today, you are restricted to a narrow band of English- speaking affluent people. I can’t talk to the poor,” the author regrets.

Osho effect

She was 11 when she left home, spent a decade meditating, evolved into a fashion designer dressing up celebs, only to quit one day and immerse herself in paint.

That’s Pratiksha Apurv, the niece and disciple of Osho. She was in town for the 52nd National Exhibition of Art at ICCR recently, showcasing her oils on canvas. “It’s about the seven chakras in the body. It begins with sex, the base chakra and transforms to superconsciousness, which is the crown chakra,” says Pratiksha (picture alongside), who was among Osho’s disciples who followed him to Oregon.

She uses bright colours and serene lines. “My experiences with Osho and my meditation” are her inspiration, not formal training.

Magic of cartoons

A Mohun Bagan footballer thought he had learnt enough tricks to rival P.C. Sorcar, Senior. One day, he showed some card tricks to fellow-footballers and told a visitor to the club: “See, I can do all that Sorcar can.” His condescension seemed to provoke the visitor, who took the pack and sprayed it across the table, asking gently: “Can you do this?” P.K. Banerjee, who was present, still exclaims at what happened next — each of the 52 cards was a Jack of hearts. The visitor was Protul Chandra Sorcar himself.

Banerjee was reminiscing at the launch of a commemorative postage stamp on Sorcar’s 98th birth anniversary. If the department of posts had taken the praiseworthy initiative — better late than never — the Sorcar family had done its bit. There was a bonus for every visitor to Star Theatre, who was handed a booklet in which had been compiled cartoons of the magician. Works of local cartoonists like Chandi Lahiri, Piciel, Sufi, Kafi Khan, Saila Chakraborty and Rebotybhushan find place between the same covers as cartoons from France, New Zealand, England, the US and China.

The trick that seems to have fired most cartoonists is the one where Sorcar hacks a woman into two. The Sunday Dispatch, London, has the girl, bust floating away from the waist, threatening Sorcar, her employer, that she’d from now on be “on a 50:50 basis”. Another London paper, Daily Express, has a viewer calling BBC and complaining that the girl sawn by Sorcar on TV may be back in one piece but his TV set remains cut in half.

(Contributed by Anasuya Basu, Mohua Das and Sudeshna Banerjee)