Off-Spinners and Ghost Houses

"Cricket to us was more than play, It was a worship in the summer sun. "
-Edmund Blunden

Every Saturday and Sunday on the Oval, a huge grassy green in front of Bombay University and the High Coutry, hundreds of locals get together and play dozens of games of cricket, almost continuously from about 10 am until sundown. At the edges of the park, club cricketers put on their starched whites and play official matches (one of them, when I was watching the other day with my friend Dani, was wearing a Steelers cap, but had no idea what I was talking about when I grabbed him and asked him about it) with referees and stuff, but for the most part it's informal, really cramped (and somewhat dangerous because of the fast-moving errant balls), but a lot of fun to watch.

It's called "The Oval" and a lot of famous cricketers, I'm told, including Dilip Vengkarsar, a famous Indian batsman (hitter) grew up playing there. Cricket grounds are called "Maidans". Trivial Matters, another Bandra-based blogger (he's got much better pics than I do, but then, he's got a better camera than I do) posted a fantastic entry about the Oval and the Mahalaxmi Race Course with some cool photos. Check it here.



I won't go into the rules of cricket for all you despicable Americans who don't understand it, but suffice to say it's become dear to me. I can pinpoint the moment. I was watching the West Indies vs. India match in the ICC this year (that's a big int'l competition, though not as big as the World Cup or the Ashes, which is going on right now), and towards the end, when the Windies were down by about 50 with 3 wickets, I turned to Vana and said, "This is a close game!" to which he replied, "Oh, Robbie, no it isn't... You see, they have wickets." What he meant was, since Windies had enough guys remaining the hole, they could start batting less conservatively, hitting more boundries, without worrying too much about getting their fly-balls caught. It was at that point that I understood the deep strategy involved in cricket, and it reminded me of baseball's complicated number-game (counting pitches, batting order, slugging percentages, intentional walks, etc) and how much I love keeping box scores at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, even though I don't follow baseball nearly as much as a lot of my friends do. That, however, is partly an act of protest against George Steinbrenner and his fiendish empire, Jim Leyland's disloyal opportunism, and other such villainy, but alas, it's another story.

Here's a ferocious bowler:


A hapless batter...



A rising star...



And a team of champions...



Very relaxing place, the Oval Maidan, and one of Bombay's most charming sights.

The other amazing place I've been to is Janki's grandmother's house in Malabar Hill, which is a tree-filled, classy area near the governor's mansion, across the back bay from downtown. Janki's house is, undoubtedly, a bhooth bungalow, a ghost house. I've shot it in sepia as proof:



It's an enormous old mansion built from the ruins of Janki's family' ruined shipping fortune. Thirteen people live there, plus a dozen or so servants, and some of them are ghosts (I met a few). There are grand arches with vines, but no munkies, and chunks falling off now and again...



There is a catering company that fries up potato chips and chalabas in the hallway, on a landing, for about 14 hours a day, and the light shines down the hallway...



Rickety old balconies...



There's much more to this house, and lots of stories and feuds to go along with this, but I don't want to write too much about it because it's Janki's thunder, and not mine to steal. Let's just say that any of you Hopkins writers out there who have read her stories about Bombay and the house and its charm and mystery -- they're all true. We have to make her write a novel about it someday.

Up next, Tandoori Thanksgiving and the Theives' Market. Stay tuned.

McDonalds Home Delivery and other Perks of Bombay

There's a number you can call in Bombay and say, "I'd like a Big Mac delivered to my office, and make it snappy," and a young sikh shows up at your door with a fanny, pack, a flannel shirt, and some delicious fast food for your lunch. That number dials the phone in the local McDonald's, and that young sikh is this dude:



What he brought me a few days ago was not your typical Big Mac. It was the MacMaharaja chicken burger. For obvious reasons, Mickey D's does not serve beef, except in Pakistan where they're antagonistic like that (back in the day, Muslims used to parade cows past Hindu temples on the way to the slaughter house... it was pretty cool...).



I also ordered a McVeggie burger, which I'm told is inferior to the McAloo Tikka Veggie McBurger, but I wasn't feeling that adventurous. Would I like fries with that? (the guy actually asked me that on the phone). I would.



The verdict is this: Fries were excellent, crisp and salty, but the McVeggie was rather bland. It had a mayonnaise sauce on it that had no zap to it, and my lettuce was wilted. The McMaharaja Chicken fared better, but the meat was nowhere near as high-quality as the breast stuff they put in Wendy's or Burger King burgers -- it was more like the chicken patties they used to serve us in the Allderdice lunch line: thin and moist. Overall, McIndia beats American McDonald's, but isn't as good as McSpain or McMorocco, both of which I have enjoyed in my international fast food sampling.



Next up is the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), which used to be called Victoria Terminus because it is modelled stone-by-stone on London's train station of the same name. Around the time that those rascals in the Shiv Sena party turned "Bombay" into "Mumbai," they changed the name of this station into the name of a 17th century Marathi king who nobody except Indians has heard of (gosh!) but who is automatically awesome, because he was known as the "Rat of the Deccan" by the Brits. The building is Venetian Gothic Revival, which I know because I read wikipedia.



"Another side of Victoria Terminus..."


And inside. Get a load of those interlaced vaults!




This is a fun shot... It's one of the many "Goods Carrier" trucks. I put one with Hindi lettering in that last post, here's the English version...



And on Saturday evening, I stopped by the Gateway of India, a massive stone arch built to commemorate the landing of some King back in the 1920's, I think. I don't feel like looking it up on wikipedia right now, but you can, if you want.



The people line up to hop on ferries that go to Elephanta Island and other destinations. Last week they lined up to see Brangelina, when they took a break in their busy paparazzi-choking schedule to visit some other parts of Bombay.



Here's the gateway by night. Very pretty. I had some delicious street food right near here, but blogger is limiting my pictures-per-post number again, so I'll blog about that later...



In case any of you care, I've added a THIRD blog to my repertoire. I don't run this one, I just contribute to it sometimes. It's called mumbaidailyphoto.blogspot.com. It's interesting, and run by my friend Karilyn, who works with me at Dasra. Check it out.

Happy Thanksgiving! Yinz have no idea how much I wish I had been home. Well, actually, any of you who have ever seen me eat may have had some idea.

Bombay, Clockwise from the Top Left

Prima in Indis
Gateway to India
Star of the East
With her face to the West

- "that old song"

As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Bombay now, living in a northern suburb called Bandra, which, if you know Pittsburgh, is a bit like Shadyside, and if you know New York, is a bit like Park Slope, Brooklyn. It's filled with trees and upper-middle class people and boutiques and bars. I live right in the thick of it, on Linking Road, right near a big college called National College of the University of Mumbai. There are young, lively-looking students milling about the street food stands in the mornings and drunkenly running over the homeless people who sleep on the sidewalks at night.

But Bombay, oh my, what a town! It's like New York and Baltimore combined -- dirtier than both and louder than both, but with grand buildings everywhere, great people all around, and an arts and cultural scene that's sort of hard to find, but I'm making some headway. Like Baltimore, neighborhoods change every five blocks, from shi-shi to slum, but the change, like everything here -- the smells, the poverty, the noise, the crowds -- is more extreme. I'll try to highlight that here in my first post about the big city. Should be one of many -- there are tons of other things I want to blog about, like the public transportation system, the food, some musical events, my own neighborhood, etc -- but blogger limits the number of pictures I can post, I think. This entry took a really long time. So, without further ado, here is Bombay, clockwise from the top left...

(a) fishermen playing rummy on Sunday, their only day off during the week. no one working-class in India takes Saturday off... they would starve, but sunday is sacred. this photo, like all the photos in this series was taken in the koli fishermen's slum, just down the road from the famous gateway of india (see below) in the eastern part of colaba, a very hip neighborhood in south bombay named for the koli fisherfolk, who were bombay's first inhabitants. (b) a "goods carrier" truck labelled in gaudy hindi... you see these trucks all over bombay, painted in really loud colors. they are the equivalent of mack trucks. (c) a narrow alleyway in the koli slum. (d) sunday badminton.





(a) the colorful junk boats at sassoon docks... photography is technically illegal here, which is why the pic is a bit awkward. (b) prawn shellling at sassoon docks. (c) more sassoon junks.




(a) and (b) cafe leopold, a tourist trap on colaba causeway that used be a british tea house in the days of the raj and was notorious as a black market hangout for pimps, thieves, drug dealers, smugglers, and passport forgers. it has been around since 1870, and was glorified by gregory david roberts in his novel "shantaram," which i'm reading right now. it is not, however, an expat bar. when i suggested going there to a fellow expat, she said, "only tourists go to leopold. you're not a tourist, are you?"



(a) flute peddler on chowpatty beach. (b) krishna cola stall on chowpatty beach. (c) carnival atmosphere, chowpatty beach on a sunday night. (d) same as (c).



MUCH more to come...

The South I've Left Behind

I'm no longer in Tamil Nadu. I complained to my boss that I was a tad lonesome and that I hadn't spoken to anyone who speaks English in weeks and weeks, and asked permission to come to Bombay for a long weekend to see my friend Janki, who happens to be here visiting her Indian family. "Yeah," he said. "Why don't you come for a month?".

So I'm in Bandra, a lovely suburb of Bombay, and, incidentally, the new happening neighborhood for young people and bars and all that, but all that will have to wait. Right now, I need to catch up some images I meant to put up like 2 weeks ago, but haven't had time to post.

First off, this is what South Indians do during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights...



Yeah, you got it. The set off fireworks in back alleys and they are extremely loud and they start doing it around 7 am. I didn't sleep for like 4 days. It was like a warzone.

During Diwali, I was living in a computer-skills training center outside of Madurai, the self-proclaimed "city of temples," right in the middle of Tamil Nadu. The biggest temple is the Sri Meenakshi Temple, which is dedicated to the god Shiva and his boo Parvati. It has four towers, all covered head to toe with intricately-painted idols. This is the largest, the south tower.





And this is Vana, the Tamil Nadu field guy for Dasra, with his wife Kalai and one of the neighborhood babies. They live on a little lane in Madurai, and I recently hung out for a lazy Sunday afternoon there, while the kids ran around playing.



Vana, baby, and Vana's daughter Ratchinya:



Cricket in the lane... I later joined the game, batted a century, bowled 4 wickets, and was borne on upturned hands around the neighborhood by a mob of ecstatic fans.



And as many of you know, I am learning an instrument over here called the veena or vina, which is a bit similar, to the untrained ear, to the sitar, but the veena is used only in South Indian "carnatic" music, rather than North Indian "hindustani" music. The veena has seven strings, four of which are used for melody, plucked with the index and middle fingers, and three of which are used to keep rhythm, plucked as a drone chord at certain set intervals with the pinky finger.

Learning veena is the closest I've ever come to meditating. Here's why. The rhythmic structure of the music is called talum, which basically means that certain beats of a given talum are emphasized (for example, in one eight-beat talum, the 1st, 5th, and 7th beats are stressed, meaning that I have to hit the drone strings on those beats), and there are over 170 different talums. My guru, K.S. Subramanian, a Wesleyan-trained ethnomusicologist who runs a carnatic music institute called Braddhvani in Chennai, knows all the talums by heart, and can play them, with melodies both fast and slow overtop, completely effortlessly. He says that I have to internalize the talums by repeating them over and over again, the same way hindu saints learn enlightenment by repeating mantras over and over again. So I sit and I practice, I burn incense (among other things), I try to concentrate on nothing but the rhythms, and it's pretty awesome. Look out, George Harrison. There's a new quiet eastern spiritualist available for Baltimore-New York-Pittsburgh area rock bands.

Here's Subramanian, rocking out in front of the Shaivite shrine in his living room:



And here's me, struggling to play long after my leg has fallen asleep, because the veena is huge and ungainly and you have to rest it on your knee...

My other blog...

Hey all,

I've started another blog (don't ask me why) that focuses on my work experiences, particular field visits, with Dasra.

So if you're interested in what I'm doing daily for work, check it out here:

http://dasra.wordpress.com

Peace,
Robbie

Ghastly Porridge and Other Eatables

Say what you like about Indian food -- it's delicious, it's really spicy, it makes me have to go to the bathroom -- one thing that it certainly lacks is inter-meal variety. At least in South India, I eat the same dosas, chutney, and samba for breakfast as for lunch and sometimes even dinner if I'm not careful. I'm ashamed to admit it, but anywhere I am that's the least bit touristy, I jump on the "continental" breakfast items like Mark Foley on a congressional page.

One solution I've found, for breakfast, at least, is to eat what Indians call "sweets". I go to a bakery and buy something like this butter bun with crystallized shredded coconut, and eat it with a coffee...



My teeth don't really appreciate it, but whatever. They don't really appreciate the amount of soft drinks I have to drink as well, because I have to have packaged beverages because I can't drink the water. Once, i tried a Slice...



But Slice, dammit, doesn't taste like Slice here. It's not carbonated. And it's mango-flavored. Arguably, it's better than American Slice, but about my personal comforts, people?

Here's a pretty awesome street snack that I've been eating. Vadas are like little latkes, only in ball-form. They're potato-onion-spice nuggets, and they're delicious.





And then, when I was living in a computer skills training center outside of Madurai a few weeks ago, my neighbor and hostess Dr. Daizy showed me how to make puri, which along with naan, roti, baroda, chapatty, and dosai, is one of the starch staples of many Indian meals.

The dough is just wheat flour with some oil and salt, rolled into a ball, then flattened with a pin. Then you submerge it in boiling sunflower oil...



And 8 seconds later... BAM!



This week, I've been in Nagapattinam, a fishing region south of Chennai that got particularly badly hit by the tsunami. I was working with an NGO called ROSE, and despite the wrecked communities, they still get incredible fresh SEAFOOD:



The place we went to, technically a "hotel," although better described as a sort of canteen, was the real deal. A typical village fish-shack. The walls and roofs were thatched. Here's Vana and Kartick, one of the ROSE staff, gettin' they eat on...



Then they serve you, on the traditional banana leaf, a fish curry with rice, but also several pieces of masala fish fry. The masala (which just means "mix"... You might say that I, with all my diverse interests and qualities, am a masala. But you might not, I don't blame you.) that they used was made of chili powder, coriander, and garlic, and it tasted surprisingly like Baltimore's own signature allspice, Old Bay. I ate at this "hotel" at least 6 times while in Nagapattinam.


And finally, this blog entry's digestif. In 1947, when Ghandi visited Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, he brought his own food with him. All he ate, being on a strict, purifyinh, Hindu-mystic diet, was goat curds. He offered it to Mountbatten, who tasted a spoonful and declared it "ghastly porridge."

Indians today still mix curd with their rice as a sort of stomach-settling after-dinner snack. I don't really like it, but I try it every now and again ("When in India..."). It tastes like unsweetened, extremely sour yogurt. Mmmm...