Mahabalipuram

My reasons for coming to the small coastal town of Mahabalipuram (sometimes called the equally, if not more ridiculous-sounding Mamallapuram), were manifold. First, there were municipal elections in Madras this weekend, and before they happened, there was a lot of to-do about how chaotic they were gonna be. The government even deployed about 100,000 army reservists and retired policemen to quell any potential violence, but there were still instances of "booth-capturing" between the AIADMK and the DMK, which are the two rival Tamil parties, which used to be one, but split sort of bitterly in the 1970's. So I came here to escape that drama. Also, I've finally got the stomach-thrashing I expected from food cooked in the local water (I'm gonna call it "Ghandi's Revenge," after Rajiv Ghandi, who was assassinated here by the Tamil Tigers in the early 1990's), and I needed some R&R. It's been good for me. And finally, I have no work to do until Monday because the weekend has been one big holiday, even for NGO workers, also because of the elections.

Mahabalipuram is a true tourist town... It's the first time I've not been the only white person in a mile's radius for about two weeks, now, but that has meant high hotel prices (in India that means like $7 a night) and constant tourist cat-calls from local shop owners.

It's also a town of many faces...

Cattle faces...



Masseuse faces...

Mahabalipuram is a center of "Ayurvedic" massage (everything here is some kinda "-vedic," for example - Dhruv told me that in school he learned this really cool set of multiplication algorithms or "mantras" that he called "vedic math." I'm not sure exactly what it has to do with the Vedas, the Hindu Holy books, if anything at all.), which means, as far as I could tell after my hour-long full-body rub, that a smelly middle-aged guy rubs you with WAY too much oil, doesn't get any of the cricks out of your neck that you ask him to, and sends you home for a shower. Still, it was pleasant enough. Never had a full-body massage before.

There are lots of stone sculptors. This town is known primarily for them. They all sculpt the same things -- Hindu gods and a few animals -- but they are really high quality and sometimes impressively huge in size. You can get a king-sized Ganesh the Elephant God statue that requires helicopter airlift to get it out.



There are also several "colleges" of sculptors where the locals train to be expert chippers and chisellers, even though they all claim to be 7th- or 9th-generation born artists. Here are some ornery-looking geezers in a student-run cooperative gallery. I bought a small figurine of Saraswathi, who we'll meet later in this post, playing a veena, which is like a south Indian sitar, and which I'm going to buy at some point in the next few weeks.



Later I went on a walk to visit the rock-carvings and cave-temples that dot the hills just outside of town. It's actually like one big park, and all the carvings are from about the 4th century A.D., and they were really spectacular.

Here's an example, along with the dude (Allanda was his name, or something that sounded like that) who weaselled his way into being my tourguide in exchange for me going to the damn sculptor's college and buying a figurine...



This isn't a carving, but it's called "Vishnu's Butterball," and it's pretty cool...



Here's a shrine to Ganesh inside one of the carved temples...



Here's the temple...



Here are 10 incarnations of Vishnu, the Creator and Healer, who is, incidentally, my homeboy...



Here's Shiva Nataraja, which means in Hindi "Shiva Cuttin' Rug," of whom I am a devotee...



more carvings...

And here is the "monkey temple," which is on top of a hill in the middle of the park...



I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "But Robbie, where are the damn monkeys?"

And the answere is they are here, on the road to the lighthouse...



MONKEYS:








Allanda, after showing me the monkeys, one of whom tried to steal my water bottle (he was dealt with swiftly and mercilessly), took me on a long walk back to the studio, which included lots of butterflies...



And passed by this pleasant scene, which shows a little schoolhouse, where children come to pray and learn in the morning with the help of Hindu teachers. The red and yellow dyes are auspicious, I'm told, and the trident is a symbol my boy Shiva the Destroyer and the Virile.



In front of it was a shrine to Saraswathi, goddess of learning. The red dye on top is meant to be taken and painted on the body, which solves the mystery of where Hindu forehead-dots come from. You can all breathe freely now.



And then there's the Shore Temple, which is the most famous site in Mahabalipuram. It's an example of Pallava architecture, also from the late 4th century, and I heard a rumor that there are 6 or 7 more like it under the water a little ways out to sea.





Statues of cows along the outside walls...



The other big archaeological site is the Five Rathas, which are five amazingly-carved temples shaped like chariots. They are all carved from one enormous piece of continuous sandstone...



This family thought I was cute...



The Arjuna Ratha (Arjuna, from the Mahabaratha, yeah, you know him... his chariot)


After seeing all that junk, I was tired, so I watched the stars come out on the beach, which is dotted with lots of very picturesque fishing boats, not unlike the beach town I visited in Portugal





Some of them donated by Catholic Relief Services after the Tsunami. There are other boats, in other villages near here, that were donated by American Jewish World Service, my current employer/sponsor...



And then, some grilled prawns at a seaside restaurant. Seafood here is TASE-TEE. Wish I had the appetite to eat it. Damn you, Rajiv Ghandi.



Washed down with my new favorite drink, fresh-squeezed lime juice with a touch of sugar, mixed with soda by the waiter at your table...



Delicious.

The Rest of Madras

Just thought I'd post a few images of people who I've met and seen in Madras. The above picture, though blurry, is the result of the many times when, walking down the street, I get stopped because I am white and in a very friendly way, people like to say hello. Sometimes people just smile or laugh and want to shake my hand. It's like congratulations for the way I stand out.

Here's some more little kids, with a view of the Chennai central train station:



Here are some boy scouts, urging friendly driving (sign says, "No Hurry! No Worry!")



Here are he people I work with at Jeeva Jyothi. Well actually, Prasanth, the guy who is holding his nose, is the only one I work with directly, because the other two don't speak very good English (I can't remember their names). They're mostly just goofballs... They laugh a lot and I see them almost exclusively on coffee breaks...



This is my current breakfast diet, puri masala or puri bazzhi, which is a sort of pita bread with stewed potatoes, peas, and carrots, topped with coconut chutney...



The close-up:



And here is Dhruv, demonstrating how to cool one's cup of filter coffee, which supposedly is famous in South India, but actually isn't all that good. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by La Prima espresso on Saturday mornings in the Strip District. Either way, here goes:



ta-daaa!

Chennai (or Madras, whatever you say...)

For all of you still wondering, I landed safely in India, despite losing around 28 hours to travel and time changes combined, and I ended up in the less-than-charming town of Chennai, which was once called Madras, but now isn't, thanks to the Hindu nationalists. The market next to my hotel, which is in a suburb called Perambur, is what you are seeing above. I wanted to put that there just to give Chennai a little bit of a break -- it's one of the worst cities I've ever been in.

It normally looks like this:



The air is completely choked with pollution, there is no end to the honking of car and moto-rickshaw horns, it is deathly crowded, deathly poor, and always at least 90 degrees and humid. But it has its moments.

The reason I am here, rather than in Madurai, which is wear I will cool my dogs and get semi-permanent digs, is THIS MAN:



No, he's not holding me prisoner or anything. That is Vana, who we affectionately call "Vanarajan" (it's funny in India, believe me), my boss at Dasra, the NGO where I've been assigned to work by ajws. We are working with another NGO at present, called Jeeva Jyothi, which is based in Perambur and which focuses on ending child labor in India, and I will be here until Wednesday, at which point I will head to Madurai, then come back next Sunday to Madras, where I will stay until Diwali, because at that point it apparently gets hectic on the trains. God knows when that even is... (ahem, Gods know when that even is... sorry -ed).

Here's the office for Jeeva Jyothi...



And here's a book-launch I went to with Vana yesterday. Speaking at the podium in front of the camera is the Indian Communist Party's Women's Advocate, whose name (nor speech, because it was in Tamil) I didn't catch, but who got a great round of applause from the women watching. She was talking almost entirely about domestic issues, apparently, about avoiding abuse in the house and women asserting themselves to their husbands, and not so much about the more macro issues of women in Indian politics or education. Again, this is just what I garnered from Vana. I don't speak Tamil. ...Yet.


women watching...



The book Jeeva Jyothi was launching was a report on the status of their work with women in Chennai. It, too, was in Tamil, so I couldnt read it, but my job is specifically to help them edit a similar edition, only this one is on children's issues. The organizers of the NGO speak passable English, but it isn't passable in the international policy-making and money-donating world, and I am applying the skills I learned while drunk at the News-Letter office every Tuesday night for two years in college to saving the world.

But enough about my work, because I may even start keeping a separate blog about that.

Here are some things I've been eating:




that lovely-looking banana leaf of food is just called "meal". You can get it at any Indian vegetarian restaurant, and you mix it all together and eat it with your hands, and it is delicious. I have no idea what it was because I ate it the first day I was here, and no one was there to help me by telling me what to eat. I think it had spinach in it.


That's vegetable biryani (the rice stuff) and chicken kebab, which was actually just a chicken leg with veggies cooked to the outside of it. Everything is very spicy here... they don't have those convenient one- or two-little-red-pepper labels on the menus. Sometimes they don't even have menus.


That's lollipop chicken (wings, only more delicious) and rice with daal, which his yellow lentils cooked to perfection.


that's Dhruv, my temporary roommate, who also works for Dasra, but he is usually is based in Bombay. He is buying a custard apple, which I later ate, and which has a creamy, pulpy inside that tastes like sweet cream. It was delicious dessert.


and this is me chewing beatle leaves, which taste like a cross between mint and detergent, and make you spit brown. it's all the rage after dinner, though, and you all know I'm not one to miss out on the rage.

I went on a long walk today, with many train and moto-rickshaw rides interspersed, and I can tell you, it's not hard to see why even Lonely Planet had a hard time making Madras sound nice. It had its moments though, and here are some things I noticed, both good and bad.

Tamil is a very beautifully-written language. Here is the block-letter form:



Here's cursive:



Here are some bad-ass campaign signs, hand-painted on the walls that surround the streets. We're in the middle of local elections, which I may, at some point, try to fathom, but I haven't yet figured them out...





Here is the flagpole from the Fort Saint George, which is the oldest British outpost in South India. I took this picture because I was told that the flagpost is made out of the mast of 17th-century British sailing ship, and Mountain School taught me that the reason why there are none of the "White Pines, Silver Birch...giants of our northern woods" remaining in the Northwest is because the British kings had them cut down and made into masts. So basically, this flagpole is really a New England tree. Think about how crazy that is.



Here's the British East India Company's china, which they ate off of while getting lairy in the officer's mess...



The museum of fine arts, closed to viewers...



Some kiddies, playing in front of a cannon outside the Government Museum of archaeology and natural history...



Some vishnus, inside the archaeology wing...



The Governor's Museum was actually really nice... Very breezy and with a nice garden full of ruined old carvings.



I could not resist this shot of the garden next to the "anthropology" wing, which was also closed, but the colors of the women's sari's along with the color of the building was too nice to pass up. A fleeting moment of Madras beauty.



...tempered quite quickly by a shot of the shantytowns along the filthy, filthy river...



I took a walk in the gardens on the sprawling campus of the Theosophical Society of Chennai. It was the only place in the city where I got any quiet at all. There is rumored to be a 400 year old banyan tree there, and I wanted to sit under it and write in my journal, but this guard wouldnt let me into the particular part of the gardens where it was planted, because that part is closed on Sundays. So I took a picture of this banyan tree, which I hope is enough for the banyan-fanatics among my blog readership (they call themselves the Banyan Canyon, they sit in the back eating funyuns, and have a website called www.banyoncanyon.com), because I'm not going back to that place. It was a hike. Also, I truly hope that this is indeed a banyan tree. I'm no botanist:



Lots of theosophical coconut palms:



And it all led, in the end to this glorious, run-down, vine-eaten bungalow, which reminded me of a book by, I dunno, Naipaul, even though I've only read about 20 pages of A Bend In The River, and I don't think there were any bungalows in there, I just imagine they are something he would write about. Nice image, right?



More soon, and I always love your comments, folks.