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...

Gay Old Post-Modern Pondy

Sorry about the poor quality of the above photo. Blogger is freaking out because of how slow my internet connection is.

A side trip from Mahabalipuram took me to Pondicherry, about 100 km down the coast, and the former capital of the French colonial interests in India. In the early days of the British East India Company, the Brits and the Frogs fought about fifteen skirmishes referred to as the "Carnatic Wars", in which the French would capture one British garrison, realize it was full of gin-drunk, foul-mouthed sailors with the rickets, then give it back, then allow the same limeys to take a French outpost, and when they found out that it was full of wine-drunk, foul-smelling sailors with the runs, they would give it back. Quite silly it was, just like most colonial squabbles, except when you realize that people died and the gravitas hits you like wow.

I know what you're thinking, again. You're thinking, "what's with the title of this post, Robbie?" And the answer is this. Pondicherry ("Pondy") is gay in way all things French, like baguetteries, promenades, and Dominique Villepin, are gay. That is, sprightly, leggiere, full of carelessness, air, and the untrammeled scent of fresh petunias. But the "post-modern" part, that's because I came to Pondicherry mainly to buy some stationary from the Sri Aurobindo Hand-Made Paper Factory, so that I can write home to all of you about my travels in style. Get it? I traveled somewhere for the express purpose of describing my travels. That's post-modern, isn't it? It's meta, at the very least.

Several things you should know before we start. First, my camera ran out of batteries very early in the day, so I don't have a lot of pictures, but the ones I have are good (my camera is a lot like the gas meter on my '89 Taurus wagon, "Gold Torro" -- it shows me full until the tank is half-empty, then dips like a George W. Bush approval rating when I least expect it).

Second, Pondy is ruled by these two freaky people, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Aurobindo is a spiritual philosopher from Calcutta who locked himself in his room in Pondy for 35 years writing books that argued for a fusion of yoga and the natural sciences, but also that man is a "transitional being," that all of his creations are falling apart and destroying themselves, and that the only hope for human kind is to encourage the presence of the Divine on earth. I dug that philosophy. Kind of like Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael", minus that stupid talking gorilla, plus some Stephen Hawking meets Siddhartha Gautama. The Mother is a Frenchwoman who came to Pondy in the early 20th century and started telling children's stories around town and shrieking about the beauty of the universe and life and love. Think of her as the gorilla. Somehow these two hooked up and started making philosophy together, and their house is now called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (temple), and hundreds of devotees come every day. There were a bunch of granola-eating French ex-pats there, meditating in front of the philosophers' burial samadhi, but I wasn't allowed to use my camera inside there.

Other than that, which was sort of a cool perk to the town that I didn't know about, Pondy looks like a fading European resort town -- sort of reminded me of Cascais, Portugal, with the rocky coast and stained-paint buildings...



Here's a nice clay goods market...



A French bungalow...



The promenade...



And the undisputed best part of the trip, happened here. I apologize in advance for how much I look like a pirate in this picture. Some Australian lady took a better picture of me and she's gonna send it along shortly. Anyway, I was walking down the street near the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and I hear this jangling sound behind me. But you hear all sorts of things in India, so I didn't turn around until it got really loud. So I turn around, and look what I see...



An elephant with a necklace made of bells!

They took him to a sidestreet hindu temple and we all got to feed him grass and bananas and the parents in the audience handed their small children up to ride the elephant while they shrieked and cried in terror. He had swastikas painted on his ears, too.



And I finally made it to the paper factory, where I snuck in and got a tour from an eager paper worker, even though the factory part was closed...



There's the Sri and the Mother on the wall near some paper-cutters...



And at the end, the factory worker guy took a handful of chemical-treated cotton and jute, put it in a little hand-press, and made me this thick, soggy, pulpy piece of raw paper. He said I would have to let it dry for two days before it was usable, but that seemed like a bit too much commitment to me. I threw it away.



I did, however, but all this beautiful paper... both stationary and journals. So I'm having a contest. Whoever leaves the funniest comments on this post gets a letter on my beautiful handmade paper stationary. You have to leave you address too (or email it to me) so I know where to send it.



Let the posting begin!

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.