Everything in Spain is accompanied by intense drama. And even the eurozone's 100 billion euro bail-out plan with its accompanying fears of 'outside control' can't dampen the sheer physical force that rages almost every night at the back of Casa Patas, an otherwise innocuous-looking restaurant in Madrid.
Sitting at the foot of the small wooden stage in the dark auditorium with a glass of Torres wine, I am witness for more than an hour to a passion-soaked evening of flamenco, the Spanish form of music, song and dance that is really a brazen, ecstatic display of human expression.
Flamenco is essentially from the Andalusian region in Spain (from where bull-fighting also originates) and usually consists of cante (singing), toque (guitar-playing), palmas (handclaps) and baile (dancing). At Casa Patas, I am stunned by two things in particular.
Accompanied by the guitar of Bettina Flater (who in turn is accompanied by a violinist and a cellist) are two singers Loreto de Diego and Naike Ponce.
It is the blonde, dreadlocked Ponce's siren-like singing that hits like a storm. She sings with a wail and expression as if she's making penance for all her sins. It's the sound of world sorrow and I can't help but be struck by how her singing is close to a heart-rending sufi marsiya -- a qawwali song of lamentation.
And then, there are the two bailaores (dancers) Karen Lugo and José Malldonado. The dancing is a violent, swaggering display, with kicks to the floor (that make me worry that the stage might collapse) along with turns and swayings that seem more a force of nature than an artful skill.
{{/usCountry}}And then, there are the two bailaores (dancers) Karen Lugo and José Malldonado. The dancing is a violent, swaggering display, with kicks to the floor (that make me worry that the stage might collapse) along with turns and swayings that seem more a force of nature than an artful skill.
{{/usCountry}}Lugo is dark beauty and when she flicks her head up in mid-flow, I imagine catching the sweat from her temple on my knuckles. Malldonado, in his grey, three-piece suit reminiscent of the gentlemen in Goya's portraits, is a bull incarnate, his hair wet with perspiration as he kicks and twirls up a storm to the beat of the hypnotic handclaps by the singers behind him. So it is with shock that I realise, when I meet Lugo and Malldonado backstage to congratulate them, that they're two youngsters, laughing and having a post-performance drink and not in a permanent state of fury.
The night at Casa Patas convinces me that even if Spain is battered by the current mess it's in, it will have flamenco. And that's not a small comfort at all.
Getting real
Madrid has three main football clubs: Athletico Madrid, CF Getafe and, well, Real Madrid. Standing on the sideline of the pitch at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, however, I realise why for most people on this planet, there is only one club from Madrid: Real Madrid. Inside the giant 85,454-seater stadium, I'm breathing the same air that was breathed by one of the all-time greats, Real Madrid and France midfield genius Zinadine Zidane.
In fact, I am told that Zizou breathes the Bernabéu air quite often as a regular in the Real Madrid veterans team (which defeated the Manchester United veterans team on this very ground last Sunday), not to mention also as the club's sporting director.
I scan the blue seats that cumulatively lift the horizon in the fish-bowl stadium to see if I can spot a bald-headed, soft-speaking gent who has given up head-butting anyone. At Realcafé Bernabéu, the restaurant inside the stadium, I ask the Irish waiter serving us lunch whether he's seen Zizou.
"Well, I've served him at that table a couple of times," he says, pointing at a spot not too far away from where I'm sitting, as if he was giving me directions to the washroom. After a beer and trying one spoon of the prawn tartare starter -- essentially a clump of raw prawns set on ice -- I decide to skip lunch and rush to the Bernabéu store next to Gate 59 and pick up a Zidane Real Madrid jersey that I'll probably wear twice a year in Delhi even though I've given my heart to the Madrid club's arch-rival Barcelona FC (about which in a later column).
Keep an EAGLEs eye
We are greeted at the innovation centre of one of Spain's biggest (and untarnished) banks, BBVA, by Lan Huang, a senior analyst and in charge of business development, Asia-Pacific. Interestingly, she's from Hong Kong. But it's BBVA's executive director, South East Asia, Carlos Gastón López, who gives us the lowdown about the state of the Spanish economy and how BBVA has managed to remain unripped.
"We are a conservative bank and we focus on emerging markets in a patient way," he says in a room that could easily have been a university classroom. "We prefer to wait and enter at a time and a place when the time is right. And (he doesn't say it, but I can hear him say 'unlike other Spanish banks') we work with complete transparency as we are answerable to our customers and stakeholders." BBVA's research team created EAGLEs (Emerging And Growth-Leading Economies) in 2010, a set of indicators used to identify key emerging economies expected to lead global growth every ten years. Based on various factors including absolute growth, rate of growth, a fixed time horizon (ten years) and incremental GDP -- EAGLEs is a far more adaptive index than other measurement tools.
Does EAGLEs put India on BBVA's radar? López doesn't ho and hum. He plainly says no. So according to BBVA which is the 'hot country' now? "Turkey," says López, and proceeds to explain why over the next 20 minutes.