its been 2/3rds of a year us having moved back to India. some of what people told us: "your life is over, you won't be able to travel like this there" has come true; some of what we were afraid of has splashed over the top of our expectations and bewildered us, broke us out in sweat, and left us literally gasping with our tongues hanging out like dogs. I notice I have written a lot less here during all of this, precisely because. and now Tony is dead, killed himself (?) and Tony used to write regularly. most people are stunned to hear of his suicide because they thought he had it all; why did he want an escape from the dream life. I am saddened because I thought he had figured it all; what then did he fail to come to terms with. there's this video on youtube (yes, we continue to watch more than a few of those almost everyday, even now) where he talks about going into a deep depression for days because of a bad hamburger. if I had seen that before, I'd have thought he was kidding around. but now, what do you say to that now? in the same video he talks about being really affected (saddened) by a quote by Orwell: "a human being is like a tube to stuff food into...". the full quote from Goodreads is below.

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”

apparently this struck a nerve with Bourdain because he ate his way through the world for a living - he stuffed food into himself. Ironically, Tony was one rare chef and food enthusiast who provides an answer to what Orwell finds curious: Tony is one rare foodie who has become a 'statue', and yet one whose words and actions will be remembered long after his burial. what's sad then is that Tony took this quote and derived some sense of futility out of it, some sense of being an inanimate, useless, food stuffing, tube. when he was in fact the polar opposite of that. what was remarkable about Tony was not his understanding and appreciation of good food, but his curiosity of why and how that food, and by who. his ultimate interest always were the people. and he possessed (or curated) such 'extreme empathy' (new yorker's words) for people all around the world, of all shapes and colors and ideologies, that in that he was almost super human. much higher above than all the food he ever ate. I admired him for that. I felt like he and Michael Palin were/are similar in that, to some extent.

Tony was a cancerian by the way, a few days (and many years) before my birthday. and he used to say "be humble".