Adam's Ambles

Diwali blows up

India  does not lack for loud noise: honks, Bollywood blaring out of stereos like the screechy Fred and Ginger number from hell, TVs turned all the way up in hotel rooms, conversations yelled with no concern for who might be listening.

Diwali makes the rest of the Indian calendar sound like a hushed exercise in monastic silence. Like any festival, Diwali pokes holes in the social conventions that form society’s skeleton. And in India those conventions are many and strong. So when folks let their hair down, they do so Captain Caveman style. These are some notes I took from Diwali eve in Madurai. The first of these, it goes without saying, was written while in a foul mood:

"Indian men laugh like schoolgirls and barking dogs and empty bottles of Kingfisher (beer) with abandon. Their eyes glow for something past themselves tonight, but they all move in packs."

***

"Fireworks glitter where the stars should be. Butter lamps flicker on an apsara's breast."

***
"A French couple sits on the roof of the Hotel Supreme with me as fireworks go off with rockets' red glare over the Temple of the Fish-eyed Goddess. The girl has flowers braided in her hair."

***
In three weeks of traveling in India I haven't seen a fight. Two almost broke out on Diwali eve. In the icy coolness of the Hotel Chetnoor bar, which has to be the dimmest lit lounge in India, men watched with a sort of grim expectancy as a customer pushed with almost monotonous force, as if his anger bored him, against the arms of a manager. The guy he was trying to fight sat back, also seemingly bored by the confrontation. Outside, clouds of drunk men (and anyone drinking that night was male, which might have accounted for an odd sense of both increased tension and, frankly, homoeroticism in the air; guys were definitely making eyes at each other, looking for either a fight or a fuck) walked with the universal shoulder thrown out, ready to throw down at anyone who bumped them.

This was not the India I knew, a country that is chaotic, yes, but rarely threateningly so. Overhead, a loudspeaker attached to a clothes emporium blared, in a maddening repeat cycle: "HAPPY DIWALI. HAVE...A HAPPY DIWALI!"

I had entered one of these tailor shops earlier to buy a dhoti after being turned away from the afore-mentioned temple of Meenakshi for wearing shorts. Clad in my sarong, my face roasted from weeks of the Indian sun, I fit right in with the thousands of pilgrims perambulating throughout the temple.

In fact, I realized, I more than fit in. No one was giving me any strange looks as I approached the large sections of the temple reserved for "Hindus Only."

Sense and sensibility fought a brief, losing war with curiosity, and I entered the inner sanctum of Shiva.

Some background is required here. Madurai's central temple is dedicated to Meenakshi, the afore-mentioned "fish-eyed goddess" (the description essentially means 'perfect eyes' in classical Tamil poetry), who was born with three breasts. According to prophecy, the third breast would melt away when Meenakshi met her future husband, an incident that did not occur until the woman/goddess met Shiva while trekking through the Himalayas. The Meenakshi Temple is dedicated to these two deities, and every night their icons are placed in the same room as priests sing lullabies and burn incense. Then curtains are drawn, lights dimmed, and according to legend, the gods make love that regenerates the universe; Meenakshi's nose stud is even removed before bedtime so it will not irritate her husband.

I had entered Shiva's half of the temple, and was feeling a bit nervous, but Shiva is the breaker of all rules. I figured he wouldn't mind me breaking some of the ones here, especially since the non-Hindu guideline is a particularly southern Indian tradition rather than a general Shaivite guideline. The actual shrines to Shiva were large and impressive, although not significantly different or more awe-inspiring than those shrines in the temple's outer sanctum.  I considered, for a bit, trying to see Meenakshi herself, but decided against it.  This was her temple after all, and while Shiva delights in ignoring rules, Meenakshi is a local goddess of a local people; I decided to respect her strictures.

Instead I wandered through the massed Diwali firecrackers of Madurai at night, the city sounding like Beirut on a bad day. That night I took an second class (read: village class) train to Kanyakumari, the southernmost city in India, the very tip of the country's upside down triangle. The interior of the 2nd-class compartment was the crowded cliche of every third world train you've ever seen; I slept by shifting some bags out of a luggage shelf and stretching my legs onto a door sill.

Kanyakumari was lovely; it remains one of my favorite places in India.  It's a quiet, friendly place, with a small, beautiful temple dedicated to the Virgin Sea Goddess, who men must approach shirtless under the sweat lick of tropical moonlight. I basked in the salt air and candlelight, let it lather my skin, and wandered to the spot where the three oceans of India, the Indian, Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, mingle in a foamspout of surf.

In an internet cafe, I watched an older American in a Vietnam service baseball cap and John McCain button argue with an Indian about the Republican party.  He wore a bald-eagle emblazoned t-shirt: "Pray for Peace; Prepare for War." Later on, he devoured some curry in a local vegetarian restaurant and seemed to enjoy himself immensely as the Diwali firecrackers went off like cluster bombs.  I imagine he, like the kids outside, gets a kick out of blowing shit up.

More pix

Just a few this time, mainly of Diwali and Kanyakumari, all available here.

Philosophy at the edge of India

RAMESWARAM – One does not go past here.

To do so would be to cross the Black Waters, to leave the sacred embrace of Mother India, and one who does that immediately falls past the lowest rungs of caste, below the status of the lowliest burner of corpses.

But Rama did. Because Rama must, because it was his dharma, his duty, to save his wife Sita from the demon king Ravana on the island of Lanka . So Rama came here, to Rameswaram, to the southern limits of India as prescribed by the Shastras and the Vedas, with an army of monkeys and jungle bears. Here the mighty prince knelt in the sand and prayed, until the grains on the beach melted into glass, until Lord Ocean agreed to calm his waters, and the monkeys and bears and even a squirrel, who Rama blessed by passing three fingers over its back (marks the chipmunk bears today), worked together to build a bridge to Lanka.

In his palace, Ravana asked his closest counselors about his chances of victory against the blue-skinned prince of Ayodhya (a holy kingdom’s name if ever there was one, a kingdom that inspired the title of the Thai domain of Ayutthaya).

Assured, his advisors said. Thou art invincible, his generals said.

Only Vibhishana, Ravana’s brother, spoke his mind. “Brother,” he said, “the cows give sour milk and the temple offerings turn into foul smelling smoke instead of sweet incense. Reptiles and insects infest the holy altars. Fathers bury their sons, dogs mate with cats and the crops wither in the field. You have sinned by stealing Rama’s wife. You must give her back.”

Enraged, Ravana banished his brother, who defected to Rama’s army. To this day that decision remains one of the most controversial in Indian classical ethics, for many gurus argue the only thing worse than performing an evil act is betraying one’s family, no matter how evil the family is. Some sages laud Vibhishana’s actions, but another, commenting on a speech made by Ravana’s son to his estranged uncle, wherein the nephew excoriates the elder for betraying his brother, says the accuser’s words should be “Written in letters of gold.”

I won’t relate the entire climax of the Ramayana, one of India’s great classical epics, here, but rest assured: Rama wins. He rescues Sita. And in gratitude, Rama – who was actually an incarnated avatar of the God Vishnu – decided to offer thanks to Shiva. He ordered one of his monkey generals to bring materials for a lingam, a Shaivite phallic shrine; the monkey decided to do his master a turn better and  uprooted an entire mountain in the Himalayas. But he took too long to return. So Sita piled some sand into a handmade lingam, which Shiva smiled upon and Rama prayed to. Man, become God, worshipped God at the edge of India. And a temple was built around quite possibly the holiest sand phallus in the world…

***
I was walking past Dhanushkodi, the string of fishing villages that clings to the world’s end, into the long finger of sand that scratches at the Gulf of Mannar and the teardrop shaped island of Sri Lanka – the Lanka of Rama’s day – thinking to myself, “Two kilometers my ass.”

That’s what the taxi man told me – “Two kilometers to Adam’s Bridge, no problems.” Four kilometers later and there was still no sign of the bridge that bears my name, a streak of sandbars and coral reefs that is all that remains of the span Rama built to Lanka.

Things weren’t all frustrating, though. The wind blew hard across the dunes, which shifted their dust to the jetstream’s mold, and cooled my chest. The waves tumbled like a Laundromat off shore, and the water was clean and clear, as if you have to travel this far, to the very edge of India, to find an ocean that doesn’t serve as a village toilet, to breathe salt air that hasn’t passed through mounds of rotting trash and piss-soaked streets.

I’ve heard North Dakota has been experimenting with the tourism slogan, “Where the sky and the land meet.” Dhanushkodi could trump Bismark by adding “the ocean” to that equation.

My “two kilometer” jaunt took me two and a half hours. When I reached the end of India, it was as if the country had prepared a perfect cast of its characters. A sari-clad woman slept under a fishing boat. And old man smiled at me. Two Brahmins and their sons, their foreheads shaved and their sacred janneu threads draped over their naked chests, prayed in what could have been the exact spot Rama petitioned Lord Ocean to smooth his angry tides.

And then, because India could not let me see her borders without reminding me of where I was, some kids came up to me asking for “one rupee” and “one pen.” There’s a surreality to standing on the lip of existence and finding beggars.

“Hey guys,” I said cheerfully to the Brahmins, whose confused expressions indicated a lack of English comprehension. “Can I get a ride in your jeep back to the fishing village?” I made the request again in a made-up ridiculous sign language, but they seemed to get it, and nodded their assent.

The way back was a lot quicker, if not as dramatic as tracking over the dunes at the ends of the Earth. Instead, the Brahmins shared biscuits with me and I smiled as one of them cradled his son in his large arms, the boy giggling a high laugh as effeminate as the gold studs pierced in his ears.

Back in Rameswaram I entered the Ramanathaswamy temple, which is spaced in concentric squares around a central shrine that contains the sand lingam Sita scraped out of the beach so many years ago. I glimpsed the shrine, although it was too far away for me to make out much but a small hump of dark material, flickering orange and dark-shadowed under the spiraling lights of votive butter candles.

Past four enormous corridors that form the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, an illustrated version of the Ramayana was hung in a series of posters on the temple walls. I thought back to a conversation in Trichy with Abi, a friendly Keralan pilgrim.

“Sir, do you have any questions about the temple?” Abi asked me. We had been chatting for a bit, and I was impressed with his obvious intelligence and friendly personality, so I decided to take a risk.

“I have a question about the Ramayana, Abi,” I said. He nodded. I took a breath.

“Why does Rama, the biggest good guy in Hinduism, shoot Vali in the back?”

If Indians raised eyebrows, Abi’s would have gone into his forehead. I had asked a direct question about one of the glue-iest moral sticking points in the Ramayana. To whit: to gain the alliance of the monkeys, Rama helps Sugriva, the younger brother of King Bali, usurp his own sibling. When Vali and Sugriva engage in a wrestling match, Rama shoots Vali when the latter’s back is turned.

This is not just immeasurably cowardly by the Hindu laws of chivalry, it also violates everything Rama stands for: namely, the rule of law. Vali is the elder brother and king of his people by all rights, yet Rama kills him for his own gain. And Rama’s explanation for his actions is lame; at first he says he owes no excuse because he is a man and has only killed a monkey. Later, he says Vali should not have married Sugriva’s wife when he became king, but the divine prince does not explain why he chose to shoot the monkey lord in the back.

Abi paused, sighed, and gave my question a good long think. Finally, he said, “Rama had to do this to win the vanaras (monkeys; lit: forest people) to his cause, without whom he could not defeat Ravana.”

“But Rama is fated to defeat Ravana.”

“Fated with the help of the vanaras,” Abi added.

“But still fated. And that doesn’t change the fact Rama violates the law he is meant to uphold by killing Vali. I think that’s why he shoots him in the back.”

Abi chuckled and stroked his chin. “But Rama and Sugriva had an agreement. Rama had made a promise to help Sugriva gain the throne, and Rama cannot break his word.”

“Look,” I said, “Britain promised to help America in Iraq. Does that mean Britain should have participated in the war?” I was playing to the strong Indian opposition to America’s Arabian expedition. Abi laughed again and conceded the point, but insisted a promise made by Rama had to be kept; after all, how could God break his Word?

Choosing family over individual ethics. Keeping a bad promise instead of doing the right thing. I’m learning daily lessons in Hindu ethics, which sometimes seem bound by codes of obligation rather than guidelines of morality. But this is a shallow analysis. Hinduism does place a great value on the community and social bonds, and in so doing, sometimes seems to cultivate a higher sense of good than we in the West often achieve.

As Abi and I walked out of the temple, I asked him what he did in Kerala.

“I work in finance, and as a stock broker,” he said.

I made a face. “Must be tough times.”

He laughed again. “Yes. Your economy has a habit of taking others along with it.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, sincerely. An economic repression in America eats at my salary and my parents’ retirement fund; here it can cause food and petrol riots and starvation panics.

Abi looked at me. “I don’t understand how you can maintain a system where the individual feels no obligation to anything but himself. Surely someone must be able to see that freedom, utter and unregulated, unbound by a sense of duty to your fellow man, is going to result in disaster?”

I had nothing to say to that. I thanked Abi for the many grains of wisdom he had left me, and we parted at the bus stand as the night rushed on.

Pictures!

I've finally posted some more on facebook; they can be found here and here. Enjoy!

Looking for Our Lady

The Tamil Nadu countryside, when unmarred by rubbish and litter, is a wonderful slice of God’s green Earth.

It’s difficult to appreciate from a bus, as these are bumpy and crowded and the sides of the main highway are invariably scarred by trash. Trains provide a better perspective, as they often cut through miles of open, rice-paddy strewn horizon, but by its nature rail travel is fast and linear, and shooting through anywhere on a straight line reduces the attractive details of a place to a blur, or at best, a quickly glimpsed vignette.

I’ve found it easiest to love this place from the seat of a car, although I’m sure a bicycle or my own feet would give as good perspective (if not a measurable level of convenience). For two days in a row I rented a car and driver to access some of the more remote regions of the state, both trips culminating in pilgrimages to houses of worship for different faiths that still share a common focus: the ocean.

Kumbakonam is like a thousand Indian towns of a similar size – bad traffic, bad roads, sweating, crowded claustrophobia and stalls and stalls and stalls, but set off and pierced by a forest of medieval, and even ancient, temples. In the Nageshwara temple, a gentle Brahmin sang to Shiva in his form as Nagaraja – Lord of the Serpents – before handing me and a giggling crowd of children blessed handfuls of smooth milk rice studded with black peppers.

I hired a taxi here to take me out to Nagapattinam District, a coastal area that was Tamil Nadu’s worst casualty of the 2004 tsunami; some 7,000 people were killed and thousands more were left homeless by the wave. The drive out to this damaged place was almost surreally beautiful. The sun broke out over roads that have been pitted and ruined by the heavy downpours accompanying the present monsoons. Gold flecks of light glinted off the puddles left in truck-made ruts, reflected with pleasant sterility off the white mundu (sarongs) worn by Tamil men, slowed down into thick, misty searchlight beams broken by the ragged fringe of palm canopy and flowed over a patchwork quilt of rice paddies and manmade reservoirs.

The intense light and the answering intense greenness of the land were accented by humans and human edifices: salmon flesh temples and watermelon pink and green uniforms on strolling schoolchildren, deep purple saris, the dark flash of a faded red bangle on an old woman’s black wrist, and every now and then a sound in the rural still: goat bleat, child scream, a tossed off firecracker making a Beirut-worthy report as kids prepare for the Diwali festival.

Nagapattinam itself is a mid-sized city, notable for the smell of dead fish and an outlying warren of thatched huts that sit over a muddy spill of tidal flats. The straw-colored homes look poised to be pulled into the ocean with the smallest provocation. An Indian tourism website recommended a beach near here, but I had a good look around; the only beaches were used as trash dumps, run-off catchments or free toilets. Sometimes all of the above.

The driver maneuvered his way through the small roads that run through the outskirts of town, over floodplains dotted with huts that resembled duck blinds, and we passed through more coconut and cashew groves until we reached Velanganni, home of the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health.

It’s a huge, white and blue cathedral, founded, like so many churches seem to be the closer you get to the equator, on the faith of a brown person who envisioned a white woman. Like Our Lady of Guadalupe, Velanganni and Our Lady of Good Health came to be when a rural child – in this case, a buttermilk boy – saw a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, or perhaps, this being India, her avatara. It comes down to much the same thing (although I’m sure some Catholic theologians would disagree): a personalized image of devotion that the masses can directly adore.

And if you can argue that there is a philosophical gap between a manifestation of Mary and a Hindu avatar, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me there’s a difference in the way this Christian icon and a Hindu deity are worshipped. In the front of the basilica is a large, pew-laden hall dominated by images of the Crucifixion and The Last Supper; here worshipers genuflect and whisper in Tamil and Malayalam, the language of the state of Kerala, where 20 percent of the inhabitants are Christian.

But it is the back altar that attracts the mass of worshipers to Velanganni. Here, Our Lady of Good Health sits in a stream of reflected light, adorned in what is practically the same golden sari worn by the mother goddess Devi. As in a Hindu temple, worshipers pay small amounts of rupees for priests, who could be playing the part of Brahmin in any Hindu mandir, to take small amounts of flowers and adorn the image Our Lady. Coconuts are smashed, their husks tossed aside and their milk smeared on Our Lady’s brow. Worshippers do not mumble their prayers in a Catholic hush; they speak openly and plainly, until they come unto the idol, at which point they stare intently into the eyes of the statue, locked in silent communion, a darshan by another word. Here I saw an old lady both kneel in an utterly European display of penitence, but stare directly into the face of her God in an unmistakably Indian demonstration of devotion. Having finished their prayers, the priests give worshipers a part of their offerings that has come within the divine presence of the sacred icon, a practice that directly reflects the Hindu custom of receiving prasad – blessed offerings – after they have been given unto a temple deity.

I wandered around the smooth tiles of the basilica barefoot – this is India, and any house of worship must be approached with the feet unshod – the stone cool under the moonwashed evening. A man approached me and introduced himself as Das.

“Will you stay for 6:30 mass?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do and need to be on my way back to Kumbakonam.”

“What a pity. Your good country, sir?”

“U.S.A.”

“And is this your first time in Tamil Nadu?”

“No, I was here four years ago.” I paused, wondering if I should continue down my train of thought, and did, hoping I wasn’t scraping open an old wound. “Just before the tsunami.”

“Ah.” Das’s eyes briefly glazed and quickly glinted again. “It swept away everything,” he said, gesturing towards the shore, just beyond a series of pilgrim guesthouses that had lain directly in the wave’s path. At least 2000 people, here to celebrate Christmas, were drowned in Velanganni in 2004.

“My shop was taken away as well,” Das said.

“I’m sorry. Did the wave reach the church.?”

“No. The church was spared.”

“Do you think because it is holy?”

He shrugged his shoulders. Das has faith, but perhaps, like me, he has a hard time imagining a God who takes thousands of lives in a natural disaster but spares His House.

I wandered through a museum in the back of the basilica, filled with offerings – of gold and silver – from devotees of Our Lady. If a man had a bad leg which was healed, he sent a small golden image of a leg; a married couple mailed in a silver heart locket; newly minted doctors, having just passed their medical exams, even sent in tiny gold and silver stethoscopes. This, I thought, is an almost medieval act of faith: God hath given me something and I must give something back, like a divine accountancy. In the back of the museum, past the glass cases of offerings of precious metals, Jesus strode through painted murals preaching the holiness of poverty and rejection of material wealth.

My driver dropped me back off in Kumbakonam, from where I boarded a bus to the junction town of Trichy. Sitting next to me was Mani, a 21-year old university student.

“Why are you here in India, sir?”

“Just holiday,” I said – a white lie, in my book.

“And you are with your good wife? Or a group in Trichy?”

I laughed. “No Mani, by myself.”

“By yourself!” His eyes widened. “But sir! How can you…”

Mani was going home from Chennai to be with his family for Diwali. For a traditionally-raised Indian, to be disconnected from home, friends and family, to be utterly alone, is anathema. It goes against the laws of caste, which provides a place for all beings in a structured whole; it goes against the practicalities of village life, where community is paramount over the individual; it goes against the organic connectivity of fate, dharma, duty and the unutterably complex web of social interactions that makes India India, a country that has preserved itself for thousands of years while we in the West reinvent ourselves every decade or so.

But to Mani, I just said, “Its fun. Sometimes. Traveling by myself.” I paused, and sighed, a breath that can mean sadness, exhaustion and contentment all in one.

“I’m used to it, anyways.”

Coffee and conversation with the Chettinars

Mr. Alupetty – an alias I’m inventing – sat back in a Burmese teakwood chair, pulled his white mundu  (sarong) between his legs, stuck his pink tongue between his remaining teeth and asked me why the world was ending.

 

“How can the most powerful financial system in the world be losing money like this? How could your investors and bankers not have seen this coming?”

 

I think I had an answer – a lame conglomeration of CNN-esque analysis speak related to the financial crisis – but the questions seemed rhetorical. Mr. Alupetty was clearly breeding responses to them inside his own bald head. He does this with any sort of question and debate, dashing measured pauses into the rhythm of a conversation like the empty beats of a song, then tying off the ends of the rhetorical void with some well-thought out analogy or anecdote.

 

But in matters of finance his dagger instincts for the debate are honed, and he requires few drawn-out breaths to make a point. Mr. Alupetty is, after all, a Chettinar, one of that class of Tamil merchants who established trade routes and banking dynasties between South India and Indochina old enough to make Goldman Sachs look like a wet behind the ears toddler.

 

We were sipping coffee in his magnificent mansion in the dusty village of Kanadukathan, which, from the road, is another nondescript Indian intersection town. Outside: cow patties, auto rickshaws, coconut trees, a gopuram-topped temple and a goopy, algae-thick sacred tank – the features of any Tamil community from here to Kanyakumari.

 

But then you notice the fine carvings, red terracotta shingles and almost Chinese slant to the roofs of some of the larger houses. Their embellished statuework – more at home in a temple than a townhouse – creeps and peeks over yellow stone columns. Here, plotted between the chai stalls and bullock carts, is a cluster of some of the greatest of the 11,000 Chettinar villas that sprout across mid-eastern Tamil Nadu like baroque mushrooms.

 

And inside, as India tootles her horn and screams bloody chaos a few meters away, you are invited to sit in a grand foyer under Belgian chandeliers, drink coffee from 19^th-century British tea sets and be shaded by Italian granite stonework whilst sprawled in the afore-mentioned chocolate Burmese teak.

 

“But your Mr. Obama, yes, he seems to have the right idea on

India,” my host said by way of non sequitir. That morning The Hindu, a daily national newspaper, published an interview with the presidential candidate wherein he promised to make India a foreign policy priority for his administration.

 

This may well be true, but the interview itself (despite a newspaper teaser promising, ‘specific answers on India was full of the lame banalities that constitute most American political discourse. On outsourcing, and I’m paraphrasing, Barack said

America needs to, “Participate in the global economy while protecting American jobs.” On visas for highly qualified professionals (a big deal in India, with its masses of software engineers and doctors): “America needs to take advantage of immigrant talent and reward immigrants who come to America legally, which will create prosperity that all Americans can benefit from,” etc.

 

By promising everything you can promise nothing at all, simultaneously creating a fuzzy expectation that anything is possible, but if it isn’t, nothing specific was guaranteed anyway.

 

America does have a genius for democracy.

 

I kept a lot of this to myself, but told Mr. Alupetty, “Obama needs to say certain things—“

 

“—To one group and certain things to another to be elected,” he finished for me. Clearly, Mr. Alupetty was no stranger to the vagaries of democracy and governance either.

 

His family certainly isn’t. Behind us was an open courtyard, splashed with buckets of gold sunlight and flanked by a forest of smooth red columns. Behind each column was a picture, black and white, of one of Mr. Alupetty’s ancestors, all dressed in Duke of Wellington jackets, knee-pants, white hosiery and buckled shoes, swords by their sides and turbans topping their heads. A Health Minister for the British Madras Presidency. A chancellor at Chennai University. The Education Minister for the state.

 

Today this clan of businessmen is scattered across the world: Singapore, Malawi, Bangalore, America. Mr. Alupetty claims an an impressive lineage, but then, the Chettinars have never lacked for influence: one of their own, Harvard MBA Palaniappan Chidambaram, is the current finance minister of India.

My host commented on this with a smile, but his happiness wasn’t rooted in Chettinar pride. It was rather the satisfaction that the most qualified individuals held the most important jobs in India. You could call this elitism – filling elite positions with the talented. That of course would be unacceptable in America, where the truly important jobs require not someone with skills, but someone we’d be comfortable talking to. We’ve traded leadership for companionship, and while I can respect the egalitarian ethos at the heart of this philosophy, it clearly doesn’t make for qualified policy craft.

But Mr. Alupetty was nothing if not fair. “Still, most of our Indian politicians are just former actors looking for attention in their retirement.”

 

“Like Vijayakanth?” I said, referring to this chubby ex-thespian-turned statesman, who has been dominating the Tamil political scene for the past few months. About a week ago his supporters had brought Chennai traffic to (more of) a standstill when they held a typically Indian political-rally/small riot in the streets. I walked off my paralyzed bus and tried to find an empty street and a taxi while Vidyakanth supporters, decked out in yellow, red and black, danced in the street, screamed shrilly (Indian men, and these were all men, have a curious habit of yelling in feminine falsettos when excited) and pissed (literally) in the road.

 

“He (Vijayakanth) is a person who speaks frankly,” said Selvan, a polite young Tamil I met on the top of the ruins of Tirumayam fort. “People like him for this.”

I had read fairly glowing coverage of some of Vijayakanth’s speeches in local newspapers, and if they were frank, they were only frank rehashings of the same promises made by any Tamil politician: protect Dravidian pride. Resent the Delhi government. Fulminate against Brahmins, the highest caste, and appeal to the class warfare instinct (this, in it’s way, is another example of anti-North Indian-ism, as caste was originally instituted by invading light-skinned Aryan warriors who used the system to segregate themselves from the dark-skinned Dravidians; to this day, Tamil Nadu has a very low percentage of Brahmins compared to the north of the nation). Use the Sri Lankan conflict and the plight of Tamils there as a political crutch when all else fails.

“That is the appeal our politicians will make to the people when they are out of ideas,” said Mr. Alupetty, “solidarity with the Sri Lankan Tamils.” For a Tamil politician, Sri Lanka serves much the same purpose as Palestine does to Arab leaders – a sideshow of support for co-religionists (or in this case, co-ethnicities).

 

Never mind that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – better known as the Tamil Tigers – have been the subject of protests by civilians within the area they control more and more like a police state in north Sri Lanka. Never mind their forced recruitment of child-soldiers, or the way they have broken truce after truce when the possibility of co-habitation with their Sinhalese neighbors has been a reality (and in fairness, the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government has hardly played the role of saint in this conflict either).

 

Never mind the Tigers suicide-bombed a shipment of civilian relief the other day so they could retain their grip on the influx of goods into their territory. Never mind a Tiger assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 (the first “Black Tiger” suicide operation); Tamil politicians can always win votes by expressing camaraderie with the Tigers.

 

This, when you consider it, is incredible; imagine if an American politician from Irish-American Boston supported the IRA after it assassinated an American president. I said as much, using that exact analogy, to Mr. Alupetty.

He grinned, those snaggleteeth surfacing again. “I do not speak the same language, eat the same food, have the same skin color or worship the same God as a Kashmiri. The same can be said of someone from Assam, or Karnataka, or Punjab and Haryana. But we are all Indian. If we can share this country, surely the Sri Lankans can share theirs.”

His Punjab and Haryana comparison made me think o the improbability of a Sikh (the Punjab is the Sikh homeland), Dr. Manmohan Singh, rising to the current prime minister-ship of India. In the 1980s, the Punjab was rocked by the Khalistan (Land of the Pure) separatist movement. Revolutionary Sikhs wanted an independent homeland and based themselves in their holiest place of worship, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. In response, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Operation Blue Star: the storming of the Golden Temple. The order was carried out by a Sikh commanding officer, which is rather like asking a Muslim to lead an assault on the Kabba in Mecca. A few months later, Gandhi – like her son, Rajiv – was assassinated. By her Sikh bodyguards.

Now a Sikh -- a member of a community that has been consistently oppressed by Hindu and Muslim rulers, that has risen up in violent rebellion and silent protest countless times in the past, that has lynched and, more often than not, been lynched, that is the subject of tasteless “dumb Sikh” jokes across the country despite serving India, in business, the military and civil service, in numbers far disproportionate to their demographics – runs the country. It is improbable.

As improbable as a man named Barack Hussein Obama running a (fingers crossed) successful campaign against a Vietnam-era POW during a time of war.

I finished my coffee and thanked Mr. Alupetty for his time and talks.

“Anytime. Do come back. And look up my daughter and her husband in Washington DC when you are home. Although she is in Amherst now, completing an MA. She hasn’t qualified for a greencard yet, so she must remain a student constantly to keep her student visa.”

I nodded, thinking of how I’ve stayed a student as well, in my own way, for a long time, inhabiting in my own state of limbo. It can be very frustrating sometimes, but at moments like this, when it allows me to share coffee with a man in his mansion in a place I’ve never been or heard of, I truly enjoy the sensation of floating.

Of honking horns and pee

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom(a movie that was banned fromm filming here because te Indian government found it, a bit understandably, racist), there’s a great scene where Indy, the girl (yeah, I forgot her name) and Short Round are floating down a river after jumping from a plane in an inflatable raft and sledding down the Himalayas (one of the best childhood movie moments ever, by the way).

 

The girl asks Indy where they are. Dr. Jones gets up with a start and, having spotted a Brahmin, says one word: "India.” And he says it with a mixture of surprise, weariness and dare I say, an impending sense of trouble.

 

Every time something terrible happens to me here, I find myself muttering, in the same tired tones, “India.” And despite having only been here a week, I’ve had some real “India” moments.

Why do they happen so often?

 

India is famous amongst travelers for possessing a certain, hard-to-beat level of ‘difficulty.’ To be fair, this may largely be because India is as tough a destination as most wanderers can hack; I can’t say for certain, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a fair few African countries and former Soviet Republics that are just as, if not more infuriating, than India.

But when you’re feeling the strain here, it can be its own special kind of hell. Before I go on, I want to stress: I love this country. It’s an incredible place, one that I will always want to return to, a land that never ceases to inspire some of my biggest travel ‘highs.’ With that caveat established, I’ll add that loving India, for me, means loving her warts as well, and these can be some truly nasty fungal outgrowths. They come, in my opinion, from the compressed humanity of a billion souls, hundreds of languages, a labyrinthine bureaucracy, a love of rules we (Westerners) consider petty and a flaunting of behavior we tend to consider horribly rude.

 

A few days ago I went through a 24-hour period that encapsulated all of the above. The morning began with me finally getting around to buying a sim card for my cell phone. I trotted down to the phone shop. The man behind the counter looked at me, wobbled his head, and said, “I need your passport, sir. Photocopy. And your address. Or a receipt from your hotel.”

 

India, I thought, in my best Harrison Ford, and headed back to the hotel. On the way, my ears were shattered into several levels of temporary deafness by honking horns. The developed world over, people honk their horns at intersections that lack traffic lights, and as the concept of defensive driving is non-existent, use horns to indicate they are about to pass. Oftentimes in India drivers eventually slip into the habit of using their horn to indicate they are engaging in the most minor of vehicular activities; changing lanes, for example, or speeding up, or passing a tree, or breathing.

 

The bigger your vehicle, the more likely you are to consider yourself king of the road, and ere go, lord of the horn. The whole Indian love of hierarchy exacerbates this large-vehicle-superiority complex, but reaches its ultimate height of obnoxiousness with the widespread use and manufacture of air horns. I don’t just mean, ‘Wah-wah’ air horns; we’re talking the sort of deafening trumpet boxes they install on ocean-going container ships. Motorcycles use horns that’d normally be affixed to SUVs back home; the SUVs have bus blarers and the buses can shake trees with their blast. And of course, the louder the horn, the more likely the driver will be to constantly use it.

 

In Pondicherry, by the main hospital, is a road sign with a crossed out horn, a silence zone. I noticed this because I jumped up and looked at the sign, just as a police car honked in my ear as it drove past me.

I have a fond, fond fantasy. It doesn’t involve a tropical beach, or great food, or women. No; it is a simpler dream of having the psychic power to break every horn wire in India, and watching the country carry on in blissful traffic silence. Just for a day.

 

Anyways, I digress; I got buzzed by several horns walking back to the hotel, where I got a receipt and my passport and photocopied the whole shebang, including my visa page, figuring this would be required as well. When I returned to the phone shop, I was pleasantly satisfied to find out I was right – the visa pages was required.

 

“And your address page, sir,” said the merchant.

 

“There is no address page,” I said (well, not counting the one I hadn’t filled out). “That’s the whole passport info page.”

 

He grimaced and looked through my entire passport, fortunately not noticing the blank address section, wobbled his head (have you ever seen the infamous Indian head wobble? It can mean anything; in this case, confusion and frustration. A small serving, I might bitterly add, of what I was about to be dished for most of the day) and finally agreed I had, indeed, photocopied my passport. He put all the photocopies together and had me sign every Xeroxed page, plus an application page. Hah, I thought with galling naiveté, I have beaten you this time, Indian bureaucracy.

 

Actually, I didn’t have time to finish that thought, when the clerk said (with, I suspect, smug satisfaction), “And a photo, sir?”

 

“What?” My inner smile crumbled and my outer face must have hardened.

 

“Photo.” Wobble. "Photo!”

 

“Why do you need a photo of me to give me a sim card?” I asked. It is futile to ask questions of Indian regulatory authorities, but I would argue the human psyche cannot function without a degree of explanation for the woes it endures; I was only being true to my species.

 

“Sir, you are needing a PHOTO.”

 

“Oh, Christ,” I grumbled, stalking off, muttering “India,” to myself.

Several closed stores and honked horns later, I had not found an open photo studio, although frustration was available in plentitude. I was losing a half day’s worth of research for the sake of having a number for emergencies. Finally, a studio appeared; it was, of course, near my hotel. My mugshot was taken in front of a lush backdrop of a palm-lined beach.

“Coming back for pickup five o’clock, sir.”

I looked at the one-hour photo advertisement prominently displayed on the storefront, decided to think better of arguing (you pick your battles here. Or you go mad) and headed for the bus station.

 

The usual silliness ensued; I asked where a bus was, was pointed to one end of the terminal, asked where the bus was, was pointed to another end, was honked at, asked for directions from a tourism information booth, was sent back to the original spot, asked the bus drivers there and was pointed to a completely different location. Horns honk, possibly because the dirt is red. Eventually, through a series of impatient hand waves and exasperated head wobbles, I am directed onto the right bus. The seat, needless to say, is far too small, something I grew to expect when I worked in Southeast Asia

but am still surprised by here; Indians are not particularly tall, but they’re not particularly short either.

I was on an “Express” bus, which meant we stopped at frequent intervals to pick up and drop off passengers (on the bright side, the driver honked his horn. A lot). I’ve gotten good at falling asleep anywhere, and did so here, to my pleasant surprise. Then we alighted at my stop. It smelled of piss.

Smells are like smoke; they’re not just a thing in and of themselves, but an indication of something more. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire; where’s the there’s the rank, stale whiff of urine, there’s toilets. Or not, as the case may be, and the in India, the case most certainly is. People pee everywhere here – particularly men, but I’ve seen women pop a squat in public as well. If there is a wall, it is a urinal; if there are people about, so what? If a foreigner is sitting on the beach, why not stand behind him, hike up the sarong and wizz into the sand? This is not the behavior of simple vagrants either; I’ve seen businessmen with briefcases give a roadside ditch a golden shower.

I’ve been to many developing world countries with poor plumbing infrastructure, but using the bathroom in public is not socially acceptable in any of them. I don’t know if the above is a side-effect of India’s crowded population, but it must be said: even in  Java ( the most densely populated island in the world), I never saw so much ‘public relief,’ as it were.

This is one of those things that really gets me muttering “

India.” I just described the above obsession with rules as regards to getting a sim card, but how am I to reconcile this reverence for structure with the basic, gut level chaos that is honking, pissing India? It doesn’t make sense in my mind and the honks (Honk) annoy me and the (HONK) piss infuriates me and (HONNNNNNNKKK) while I tear my hair out over this rejection (WONKA-HONKA-WONKKKKK) of guidelines I consider basic, I’m told I need a passport photo (MEEEEEEEEEEEEEP) AH STOP IT STOP STOP EVERYTHING BE QUIET!

Yes. Well. And that, folks, is what India occasionally does to you. A land of rules you don’t understand, and the constant breaking of rules you hold sacred.

I can’t finish this post without mentioning a fact of life here every traveler grapples with, and one I’d rather not be too flip about: beggars. They’re very common here, and can be a bit aggressive as well, and the fact is not all of them are wanting, or as wanting as they seem. In backpacker enclaves self-styled sadhus ask for money from young travelers on a naïve spiritual trip; in cities women pass babies amongst each other to look more pathetic; when a friend bought one woman milk, she scowled at him and stalked off. Many temples support a population of beggars, which is seemingly charitable, although it makes visiting any holy site fraught with guilt complexes. And it is almost impossible to give to every begging soul here. You end up giving to some who seem particularly pathetic, and withhold from others you either don’t trust or have been too inured to care about. As Jonah Blankputs it in “Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God,”this isn’t charity, its accountancy. I am guilty of the above as well; my rule, inspired by Blank’s book, is to only give money to those with an obvious physical handicap or deformity. And even I flaunt this rule, as recently as today, when a begging hand was thrust in my face on the train and I didn’t look up from my book. I know this seems heartless – maybe it is – but you learn to not look up from your book when a begging hand wanders under your nose every ten minutes or so.

 

But then I did look up from my book. And I saw a boy with terrible burns and melted skin walking away from me, holding his ruined arms out to other impassive passengers. And I cursed myself under my breath, with far more vehemence and bitterness than I’ve ever muttered, “India.”

Temple times

(Sorry for the lack of pictures in this post, which would make it a lot easier to follow, but I don’t have wifi anymore and can’t directly upload images).

At the risk of oversimplifying the appeal of a place, I don’t think many people would disagree with me if I said the outstanding physical thing to see in Tamil Nadu is temples. ‘Temples,’ of course, is an oversimplification in and of itself. By temples I don’t just mean houses of worship, but the collected, preserved and maintained aesthetic – sculpture, painting, architecture, even music and literature in the form of hymns and puja – of one of the world’s living classical civilizations. Tamil Nadu’s Temples are also a peek into that part of the psyche Tamils reserve for the ‘sacred,’ and in this case, the sacred has an all-encompassing universality that makes temples, by extent, a glimpse of the Tamil mindset in general.

Or am I going overboard? I don’t think so. I’ve waxed rhapsodic in previous posts about the sustainability of Tamil culture over the millennia, and while there are a lot of institutions and phenomena that can claim credit for this – not least the intellectual energy of the Tamils themselves – I’d say one of the primary (physical) areas Dravidian civilization has been able to preserve (and sometimes, reinvent) itself is the temple. At the least, you’d be hard pressed to find similar spaces that are so easily tourist accessible.

Spaces I’ve been visiting for the past few days: specifically, Chidambaram and Tiruvanamallai (I’m giving myself a pat on the back right now for spelling both of those cities without looking it up). Both cities are essentially temple towns, their tourism potential revolving around visits to their primary places of worship. This being the Shaivite south of India, the temples are erected to Shiva, and in this case honor him in two of his elemental forms. In India, there are five elements – the Western Earth, Air, Water and Fire and the local ‘Space.’ Chidambaram is the Shiva temple associated with the last element and in Tiruvanamallai he is revered in the form of fire. Both temples are huge; one of the features of South Indian temple architecture is, as T. Richard Burton puts it in “Hindu Art,” ‘gigantism.’

The best examples of the above are gopurams, the gateways to the temple, sometimes topping 50 meters, and by far the most impressive exterior element of Tamil Nadu temple design. Gopurams typically erupt in sculptures of Gods, Goddesses, demons, etc, a fantastic pastiche that marks the transition from this world to the abode of the Gods, which, for devout Hindus, is exactly the area you enter when you cross the temple threshold. In a lot of Tamil Nadu, the boundaries between sacred and profane are further delineated by candy-striped red and white pillars. Inside the complex there is typically a columned hall (often called a Thousand Pillar Hall), a tank of water where worshippers can purify themselves (so far, every tank I’ve seen has been polluted and thick with fish) and multiple minor shrines; to Nandi (the bull mount of Shiva, an idol that resembles the Golden Calf loathed by Jews and Muslims), Ganesha and/or Murugan.

The latter two are sons of Shiva; Ganesha is the elephant-headed God who, ha ha, rides a mouse, while Murugan is a peacock-mounted God associated with war. Mounts, wives, number of arms, etc – it all seems academic, but this is how Hindus keep track of their enormous pantheon. I try to think of it this way: when it comes to the great Monotheisms, i.e. Christianity, Judaism and Islam, we all interpret the one God our own way. Some see a benevolent, forgiving Allah, some a fire and brimstone Christ. The huge variation of gods in Hinduism provides a physical personification of the metaphysical pick and choose we engage in naturally when dealing with a single deity. If you don’t like Shiva as, for example, Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance (which is how he is worshipped in Chidambaram), you can identify with him as Bhairvara, a dreadlocked, black-skinned demon warrior who wanders India with a skull attached to his hand (some sadhus still carry skull bowls in honor of this incarnation of Shiva).

At the end of the day, all of those Gods and Goddesses are not worshipped simultaneously. Rather, a Hindu picks the one they can relate to the most, and that representation of the holy becomes their connection to a sense of spirituality. Then again, if you feel the need to pray to a deity that is appropriate to your situation, that option is also available – say, a family man in crisis who needs the blessings of Rama, the ultimate husband and provider.

Like I mentioned before, in Chidambaram Shiva is worshipped as the Lord of the Dance, and that isn’t some kind of side reference to Michael Flatley. This Lord is rather the master of the cosmic dance of creation; as Nataraja, Shiva dances one cycle of the universe to an end and ushers in a new one. According to the Vedas, the holy scriptures of the Hindu faith, time proceeds in epochs: the Golden Age down through the Silver to the Bronze to the Iron, the Age of Kali, or Kali Yug, when caste is ignored, marriages broken and profit the overweening motivation of man. If you haven’t guessed, all of recorded history has occurred within the Age of Kali. Devotees of Shiva as Nataraja believe their lord will end this age by engaging in a frenetic dance of destruction and creation at 4pm one yet-to-be determined afternoon.

In one of his four arms, Nataraja holds the fire of annihilation; in another, the drum that beats the rhythm of rebirth. One hand makes the gesture of benevolence and gratification, while the other points to a dwarf representing the ignorance of the balance Shiva maintains, trampled underfoot by the Dancer of the Ages. This depiction of Shiva is maintained throughout the Chidambaram temple complex, but like all ritually un-pure non-Hindus I was not allowed into the inner sanctum of the God. In some temples in the orthodox south, even non-vegetarian Hindus may not glimpse the inner heart of the temple; in this religion that holds reincarnation paramount, what kind of soul would risk consuming the reborn flesh of their ancestors? So I only peeked at the inner sanctum from the outside, catching a glimpse of the 21,600 tiles of its golden roof – one for every breath a human takes in a day.

Instead, I wandered past lion-topped columns, symbols of the Chola royalty that patronized this spot, peered at temple priests who only shave their heads on the left side, creating a lop-sided effect, and luckily walked into the heart of the fire puja. The last ceremony began with an army of drums, bells and nageeshweram, a clarinet-like instrument that resembles an alpenhorn. Crowds gather in front of a shrine; children are placed on their parents shoulders and men both push and shove their way to the front and make space for their wives and girlfriends (I can’t tell you how typically Indian, and confusing, this is. In this country you constantly feel as if you’re caught between being jostled by an angry mob and conversely, treated like royalty as people fall over their feet to accommodate you).

The temple priests lit multiple fires, sometimes small candles, sometimes huge, oil-doused torches and swirled the heat of the flames in front of the images of the deity while the smoke rolled back onto the crowd. Worshippers jostled to make darshan, or eye contact, with the holy image, establishing a line of sight and direct communion with God. Periodically, the ceremony would peak as the flames jumped especially high, and hundreds of devotees would raise their clasped hands above their heads. I’d love to be able to write this better because the above doesn’t capture the immediate thrill of the event, or the context: this is a fire ceremony that has continued, unchanged, for thousands of years, the closest I may ever get to witnessing an actual ancient festival without a time machine. I’ll finish by adding: sometimes, the image of the God doesn’t seem as such, at least to the foreign observer. In the case of Shiva, the most common icon of worship is the linga, phallic stones that represent the God’s creative power. You find linga everywhere in India; in Tiruvanamallai I made a sort of phallus pilgrimage by visiting eight famous lingam that are spaced in intervals around Mt Arunachala (where Shiva himself is supposed to manifest as an enormous lingam of fire). The simple linga in and of itself is a reminder of India’s past; it’s squat, unembellished image and obvious associations with fertility speak to an older time, when the Gods and the boons they granted were of a slightly more gut level nature.

I rant about Semester at Sea

Most Americans would say the greatest threat to our international credibility is George W. Bush, and I would pretty much agree with this assessment, adding that the possibility of a President Palin and shows like the Real Housewives of Pick Your Major US Metropolis are close contenders for the title.

But there’s an oft-ignored, imbecilic entity out there that, I believe, has the power to violate our already much-tainted national brand to a degree similar to that of the War On Terror, our health care system and the Star Wars prequels.

I speak, of course, of Semester at Sea.

Otherwise known as “My Floating Super Sweet Sixteen.” Actually, the MTV reference isn’t completely off, as they filmed a Road Rules season around SaS back in the day. That’s probably because some keen producers figured out SaS is essentially a way of packaging the worst stereotypes of MTV culture into a floating frat house and having said international relations fiasco visit several of the world’s major ports. Drama definitely ensues.

I’m writing about SaS because they have apparently docked in Chennai and I ran into some of their students making the rounds in South India yesterday. Before I go on, let me add this caveat: the first time I encountered SaS, in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2001, the experience was extremely positive. As in all things, there are some goodies who get on that boat (and why not? A semester at sea is an appealing idea, and I considered the program during my undergrad days), and I was lucky enough to hang out with five or six of them, students who were genuinely interested in South Africa, its culture, history, problems and progress.

Since then I’ve bumped into SaS four times (wow), and the experience has been uniformly negative. So you know, they visit each of their ports for a only a few days at a stretch, which is more of a recipe for sailors on shore leave then engaged dialogue with a foreign country. The breakdown of my experiences with SaS since 2001 goes like this:

*South Africa, 2002: During my second volunteer tour in Cape Town, the SaS students photographed the township kids we worked with like they were animals in a zoo, made noises about the poverty and proceeded to get trashed in Cape Town’s poshest clubs.

*Vietnam, 2003 (?): I wasn’t directly here, but friends of my dad (and possibly dad himself) had worked to arrange a private lecture between SaS students and some of the most respected living authors in Vietnam, a chance many Vietnamese students would kill for. Some of these writers are veterans who were eager to engage the children of a nation they had fought in the interests of reconciliation. Result? A handful of students showed up, and those who did were listless, unresponsive, rude and, I’ve heard in at least one case, drunk. Add to this the ‘Road Rules’ episode in Vietnam where the ‘challenge’ for the students was to spend 800,000 dong (about $60) in a day, an egregiously rude display of American wealth in a country where that amount of money could easily feed a family for a week. One student (who was probably kicked off by the producers for being a good human being) did do the sensible thing and donate his money to an orphanage.

*India, 2004: OK, the SaS kids weren’t so badly behaved this time around. But they were still ashamedly clueless – I remember the ones I met had no idea India  had just undergone one of the most important elections in its history. This might – might – be acceptable amongst tourists who are just on holiday. But these are supposed to be students who are learning about the countries they are visiting and their current affairs. Can you imagine foreign students who are supposed to be studying American history and politics landing in Seattle  this November not knowing who John McCain and Barack Obama are?

*India, last night.

The embarrassment started early enough. My waiter sat me down next to a group of six early 20-somethings. I said hello; they introduced themselves as being from the SaS boat. Then they resumed their conversation. Very. Loudly.

Pause for internal sigh. Let me make this statement, and appeal, to my countrymen. Americans: We talk loud. I am guilty of this behavior as well. It’s a thing we do. Under the best possible light, our loud talk is a symbol of our youthful American optimism, our national sense of self-assuredness, confidence and willingness to face the world free of the strictures and traditions of the past.

But when most of the world hears us blather on about personal details in a setting wherever everyone else is quiet, we come off as a bunch of overbearing pricks. Case in point: when the girl across the aisle from me said, in a piercing college girl drawl that echoed around the dining room:

“I so did not let you come in me.”

I won’t say it got worse from there, but it certainly didn’t get any better. Here’s some other choice tidbits:

“Why does everyone here speak English?”
“Because we’re the most powerful country in the world, Liz!”

“I’M ALL ABOUT THAT!” (Re: getting beer and drinking it in the hotel. In five years, the same guy will have cut his white fro [or worse, kept it] and be saying the same thing about closing some terrible package of mortgage loans to people who can’t afford them).

“So this Indian guy was staring at me. And I was all like, ‘What? What? What are you gonna do, dude?’” (Throws out arms in the universal frat boy symbol of hostility. Best irony of the night: this guy was Indian, from California).

I asked them about their trip, and one of them told me SaS was currently blocked from docking in Mauritius because of previous students’ bad behavior. He said this as if he were bragging.

OK: Really?!? This is the face of American study abroad: getting barred from countries for being bad guests in them? For fuck’s sake. It’s not like America is riding an image high these days. It’s not like we’re universally beloved as a people. How is SaS helping this situation by allowing students to act like – or accepting students who act like – total twats?

Right: because SaS basically takes on anyone who can afford its ludicrous fees (between $10,000-30,000).  Ere go, the atmosphere on that boat seems to be as bad as any other luxury cruise line around the world; the only difference is, this cruise wears a weak fig leaf of academic endeavor, a lie that is quickly put paid to as soon as this navy of bad American youth clichés disembarks anywhere around the world.

SaS enages in the opposite of travel. Travel (soapbox rant coming) is the exposure of the self to things that are new and challenging and rewarding. These kids were snapping pictures of something new and retreating back into the bubbles of their college lives. In a sense, SaS is anti-travel; it doesn’t bring its students away from the US. It brings the US, in many of its worst forms, to the rest of the world, all under the guise of free-spirited wanderlust, which has itself been packaged, focus-grouped and commoditized into a mockery of all the good travel can accomplish. Is it wrong to have fun while traveling? Of course not! I do it all the time. But if you’re not learning about and engaging the place you’re in – and yes, I’ve been guilty of this as well – you should go to a kegger and buy takeout from some ethnic restaurants, because that’s the extent of the international engagement I’ve seen exhibited by Semester At Sea. Actually, not even, because God forbid SaS students risk the joys and potential health risks of street food. The ones I’ve met act like a bowl of noodle soup or a thali is arsenic on a plate. I don't think SaS is a bad idea, but I hope in the future the program ups its admission standards from 2.75 GPAs and a 300-500 word essay so the students on the ship are more like the ones I met in 2001, as opposed to the twists from last night.

Right. Next entry: I promise, I’ll write more about India..

Uphill battles

Back in the day, the site of this:

 

Would fill me with a sense of Indiana Jones-esque excitement. “Whaddya gonna do today, Adam? Explore some freakin’ ruins! Yeeeah!” Today the site of all those steps, and knowing I would loathe myself if I didn’t climb them, evoked this inner monologue:

 “Oh, balls.”

What can I say; I’m becoming an old man. And look, it’s not like I wasn’t psyched to delve into Rajagiri and Krishnagiri, hilltop fortresses of the Marathas, Mughals, French and, finally, British. I just knew it was going to take ten kinds of hell out of me to reach the top.

And you know what? Inner voice was right. I wore myself out going up those rocks. Thanks, inner voice.

The twin ‘giris’ are a few kilometers past the small town of Gingee, which is unaccountably pronounced ‘Sinjee,’ a lesson learned the hard way after wandering around the Pondicherry bus station asking for “Gin-jee” and receiving no few confused head wobbles whilst no doubt looking like a half-mad derelict. Eventually, I was set in the right direction, pronunciation and bearing wise.

The bus ride to Gingee proceeded in two phases, like an adolescent growing into adulthood: ugly and beautiful. The ugly part was a string of Tamil Nadu crossroad towns, each one connected by good road and acres of ‘snow,’ the un-degraded, ubiquitous rubbish of plastic bags. This problem is hardly unique to South India, and there are issues that I’m sure local residents find more pressing, but this is my observation: plastic trash is a hideous eyesore and it doesn’t seem particularly difficult to me to create a) large receptacles for waste collection and b) a public backlash against littering. It took all of a generation to set people against tossing their waste out carelessly in the West; surely the Tamils, stewards of an unbroken cultural tradition that prizes ritual cleanliness, can manage the same in a similar amount of time.

The beautiful phase (which was still marred by litter) began when God apparently decided to play sprinkle the marbles on the green flatlands, marbles in this case being enormous grey, brown and red boulders. They clumped in protrusions that wouldn’t be out of place in the Australian Outback, and lumped into large hills and small mountains that resembled giants’ cairns. It was a transfixing and wholly unexpected sight after the dusty flatness of the plains.

The natural path between two of these lumps is today’s modern highway, but back in the days of warring states the same route fell under the warding gaze of Krishna- and Rajagiri. Today both forts exist in a state of respectable excavation and quiet isolation; the structures are neither flooded with temple touts or tourists, but rather peace, monkey chatter, golden sunlight and strong breezes.

Since I only had time to properly delve into one of the forts, I chose, randomly, to explore Rajagiri. The approach to the hill was scattered with banyan groves, fearless monkeys and Tamil women engaged in the hard labor of cutting grass and lugging rocks off of new archaeological digs. Said works have unearthed a few supporting structures like a granary and gunpowder magazine that are admirably intact, in the structural sense, and unconscionably marred by graffiti, to the degree almost every inch of human-accessible wall in the granary proclaimed something in the vein of ‘Kumar loves Vindy.’ I noticed this phenomenon all across India during my last visit and have to say the problem goes beyond a few scratched sentiments; defacing national heritage seems quite popular here.

I wandered around these outer buildings for awhile, purposely avoiding the task that I knew lay ahead of me. Namely, climbing this:

 

Did I mention it was really, really hot? Remember how I complained about the sun not being present in one of my previous posts? Well it was out today, sometimes hidden by clouds and welcome soft-kiss drizzles of cool rain, but as often as not beating down with a blood roasting vengeance.

Sweating under that assault, I looked up the hill. It looked down on me, and I set up Rajagiri.

Let’s not dwell on the ugly details, like my pathetically frequent stops to rest and the time I curled into a particularly comfortable niche in a boulder and fell asleep on the trail, to the bemusement of Indian tourists who were also making the trek. Suffice to say: I pushed, pushed until heart thumped against skull, stopped, smelled the roses, pushed again. At one level area of the path I walked by a small shrine that was manned by a skinny sadhu (itinerant holy man) who, upon seeing me, approached with an enthusiastic blessing in his eyes.

For those who haven’t traveled in India, getting blessed at shrines and temples is one of those things that just kinda happens, and is as common as eating a curry. Sometimes this is because a sadhu or pandit (priest) is genuinely eager to share their faith with a traveler, and sometimes it is because they figure they can squeeze a large temple (which may or may not go to the temple; either way, the intent is hardly holy) donation. The process, which I undertook on Rajagiri, is much the same: mumbling holy man approaches you, says prayers, anoints your head with tikka powder or turmeric or some other cosmetic, says another prayer and waves donation dish in your face. This time around – and maybe it’s because I needed to feel this, or maybe the mountain worked some magic – I did feel like the blessing had more to it than a 5-rupee donation. The sadhu led me into a tiny shrine

 

where I was led into a dark back room. A small oil and ghee (clarified butter) fire was passed under the nose of the deity, then placed in front of me; the sadhu told me to pass my hands through the fire onto my face. Fire, for many Hindus, is both a medium that runs between worshippers and God in the forms of incense smoke and candle light, and an abstract representation of the divine that is otherwise sculpted into specific ‘roles’ and representations of the universe, ie Shiva playing the part of Destroyer, Vishnu undertaking the task of Preservation, Lakshmi administering wealth, etc.

I held the warmth of the divine close to my face, and continued up the hill. On the top, I was joined by three Tamil schoolboys who led me around physically (over the structures that crown the hilltop) and linguistically into some of the basics of Tamil.

It’s a prettier language than it sometimes sounds like (i.e. when yelled by thousands trying to outshout each other, which is often the case in Tamil Nadu). A rainbow stretched from Krishnagiri (which has no steps – eep. Thanks for picking Rajagiri, inner compass) onto the main body of a large temple. I asked the boys the Tamil word for rainbow and it came out pretty, something like, “Vanadai.” We picked over the ruins and rocks and bathed in the general sense of accomplishment that comes from Going Up a Thing.

On the way down I was blessed by the sadhu yet again, leaving me with a red and yellow stripe over my forehead for much of the day. That decoration gave no small amusement to the kid who was selling samosas at Gingee bus station and latched onto me with charming determination, updating me on the presence of my bus and the delicious-ness of his food every few minutes in exasperated Tamil. He really was a cute kid,

 

but God was it depressing to watch him pause, put down his wares, give me a universal ‘wait’ gesture and buy, with his own money, a hot drink that he sipped with the same exhausted enjoyment of the painters who drank pints of Carling in my pub in London. I don’t get exposed to it enough to remember sometimes, but today I was and the lesson always is: child labor is unambiguously wrong.

It was a pretty photogenic day as you can see, and the rest of my pictures, including my new requisite India traveler profile shot with a tikka smear on my head, are posted here on my facebook page. Hope you’re all well.