Spanish Riding School

Among the domesticated animals, cattle, fowl, sheep and dogs (food, clothing and companionship) may provide the basic necessities of mankind but they do not denote ‘Travel’. After all, a man does not live by bread alone. He also wants to travel and visit exotic places. (And write travelogues thereafter)

However, traveling has always been an expensive hobby and so a horse also became a status symbol. (Its modern equivalents like scooter, bikes, cars, yachts, helicopters, planes too are status symbols now.)

In ancient times, it was a Royal prerogative.

In India, we are brought up on the stories from Ramayana and so are quite familiar with Ashwamedh yagna performed by Rama.

As we grow older, we read about the high regard the other cultures had for the horses in their own fashion – Greeks building the Trojan Horse as a gift to the temple, or King Richard III uttering his famous words “a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse” or Alexander building a mausoleum for his beloved horse Bucephelus and naming a city after the horse, or an Omar Khayyam dreaming of a ‘winged, white horse’.

We were NOT dreaming of ‘white, winged horses’ that winter when we were culture-vulturing in the downtown Vienna in the typical touristy fashion – sampling a palace here, a cathedral there and some parks in-between as a side-dish.

We wandered in a palace and saw a long line of tourists in front of a ticket-window.
 

We have well-honed tourist-skills and can smell an attraction a mile off. We have a well-tested ‘funda’ that longer the queue of tourists better will be the attraction.

So, acting on our ‘horse sense’, we attached ourselves to the end of the queue and then asked other tourists what the queue was for.

They gave us strange looks, but answered politely enough that it was for the show of ‘Spanish Riding School’.

I had read about the show, but had not thought it worthwhile to attend. After all, hadn’t I seen umpteen numbers of circuses? What new tricks will the horses be showing anyway?

 

However, judging by the popularity of the event, we decided to attend. We managed to get only ‘standing’ tickets. However, one does not look a gift horse in the mouth. People, who managed to get ‘sitting’ tickets, showed a supercilious, ‘cavalier’ attitude towards the standees.

We had to stand for almost one and a half hours during the show, but it was worth it.

 

Our first sight of those noble Lipizzaner horses made me realize why men value horses so much. They are a dream.

This link will give you all you want to know about the Lipizzaners.

http://www.lipizzaner.com/

The show too did not disappoint us. It is more of a ‘horse ballet’ rather than a horse circus.

No wonder owners love their horses so much.

Suddenly a childhood memory surfaced in my mind. I must have been very young because it is one of my very first memories.

I was going somewhere with my mother in a ‘tonga’ (horse-drawn open carriage) when the old ‘tonga-driver’ said to his horse ,

“sajni, halu halu chal, nahi to gardi mein chingarega.”

I found nothing wrong with this sentence. In fact, I thought it pure, chaste Hindi, but my mother was trying to control her laughter and not succeeding at it. Every now and then, she would burst out in fresh paroxysm of laughter, which she would suppress by pushing the end of her ‘pallu’ in her mouth. However, being a kind-hearted lady, she took good care to see that the tonga-driver did not hear her laugh.

I was a sensible kid, so I did not ask her what she was laughing at in the tonga, but I asked her later.

“My dear, in that sentence only the conjunctions (nahi to, mein) were Hindi. All the other words were Marathi. That is how Marathi Muslims speak.” she explained.

Now, looking back on the incident, I too find that sentence extremely funny, but I also remember the driver’s concern for his emaciated, old nag. To him, the nag was perhaps as valuable as Chetak was to Rana Pratap.

As we were watching the show, these thoughts were swirling in my mind. I also remembered the wonderful movies with ‘horse’ scenes.

Who can forget the thrilling chariot race from ‘Ben Hur’ or the Ascot race from ‘My fair Lady’, or the ‘Black Stallion’ or those wonderful ‘wild west’ movies?