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Today I followed a link to a very weird clip from a 1968 movie by legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. The movie, "Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne" (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha), is apparently set in an imaginary land, and the clip depicts an elaborate ghost dance. Filmed on a soundstage nearly forty years ago, with no lyrics or dialogue, the clip somehow captures my trip to India more than anything else I've seen.
I didn't see any weird ghost dances in India, thank heaven, but the poignant artistry of this low-budget fantasy oddly reminds me of the strange diesel smell in the streets, and the overall surreality of life there. Or perhaps “surreality” is the wrong word, because life in the West, with its electronic comforts and extraordinary hygiene and sanitation, is truly surreal compared with the blunt realities of the developing world.
The clip's special effects, if you can even call them that, are as basic as can be. Yet I doubt that Hollywood, with its Industrial Light and Magic, could produce anything so evocatively ghostly. India is so strange that I can almost believe the dancers are actual ghosts.
When I got home from India in July, I wrote but never published a blog entry called "India Yuck," in which I ranted about how foul the place is. I had been itching to speak my mind after biting my tongue numerous times when asked by Indian nationals what I thought of the place. The accepted answer is to say how beautiful the country is, how fascinating, etc., but the opinion I was too polite to share was that it’s a stinking, poverty-infested, disease-ridden hellhole.
And it kind of is. But it is also beautiful and fascinating, and once my inner princess was safely back in the West I could appreciate India all the more. Because behind all the grime there's an honesty about what life on this earth really is, and although it's painful to acknowledge, the resultant stirrings of my compassion and humanity were sweeter than any artificial high the gleaming First World can provide.
Watching this video and realizing all this made me understand why the most spiritually-advanced people I know visit India as often as possible. They've learned to quell the gripes of their own inner princesses, and can instead look at the thousands or millions of faces they'll pass in their travels and feel the sweet poignancy of compassion.
Here's the clip if you're interested. Pretty freaky, eh?
I didn't see any weird ghost dances in India, thank heaven, but the poignant artistry of this low-budget fantasy oddly reminds me of the strange diesel smell in the streets, and the overall surreality of life there. Or perhaps “surreality” is the wrong word, because life in the West, with its electronic comforts and extraordinary hygiene and sanitation, is truly surreal compared with the blunt realities of the developing world.
The clip's special effects, if you can even call them that, are as basic as can be. Yet I doubt that Hollywood, with its Industrial Light and Magic, could produce anything so evocatively ghostly. India is so strange that I can almost believe the dancers are actual ghosts.
When I got home from India in July, I wrote but never published a blog entry called "India Yuck," in which I ranted about how foul the place is. I had been itching to speak my mind after biting my tongue numerous times when asked by Indian nationals what I thought of the place. The accepted answer is to say how beautiful the country is, how fascinating, etc., but the opinion I was too polite to share was that it’s a stinking, poverty-infested, disease-ridden hellhole.
And it kind of is. But it is also beautiful and fascinating, and once my inner princess was safely back in the West I could appreciate India all the more. Because behind all the grime there's an honesty about what life on this earth really is, and although it's painful to acknowledge, the resultant stirrings of my compassion and humanity were sweeter than any artificial high the gleaming First World can provide.
Watching this video and realizing all this made me understand why the most spiritually-advanced people I know visit India as often as possible. They've learned to quell the gripes of their own inner princesses, and can instead look at the thousands or millions of faces they'll pass in their travels and feel the sweet poignancy of compassion.
Here's the clip if you're interested. Pretty freaky, eh?
For those of you still wondering how we possibly made it home from India back in July, here’s the long-“awaited” final installment of my India diary. Part of it was written at the time, and the rest comes from my laserlike memory, so enjoy.
We spent our last night in Palampur. Correction: we spent our second-to-last night in Palampur -- our last/bonus night was spent at the Delhi airport, as you’ll soon learn. The final night of teachings went very late, so it was great just to stay at Pop’s Picnic Spot itself, right next door. We got three precious hours of sleep before taking off the next morning, with our trusty driver at the wheel.
There was heavy rain in the early morning, and then we got in a fender-bender with a Punjabi lorry driver, which added about an hour to our trip. Along the way, we stopped for breakfast and lunch at the standard restaurants the drivers take Westerners to. Breakfast was not so yummy, but lunch was quite nice, and we ran into lots of our friends whose drivers had brought them there as well.
In Delhi we ate at a wonderful South Indian fast-food chain called Saravana Bhavan, which actually has branches in the US. I went to the one in Sunnyvale, California last month, and it was quite yummy, although quite different from eating in the heart/heat of Delhi. We then got in the car one last time to go to the airport, and I was extremely happy to be leaving India and heading home.
Here’s where the July 8 narrative begins, written by me less than eight hours after that yummy dinner:
I can hardly even begin to describe the heaps of obstacles Ted and I have come up against in the last seven hours. On the all-time obstacle scale, I think we’ve outpaced “Truman getting off the island” and “Snoopy coming home” while falling shy only of “Odysseus returning to Ithaka” and “Frodo unloading the Ring.”
Note that by limiting my saga to only the last seven hours, I'm leaving out Delhi traffic jams, a 12-hour car ride on rural Indian roads, monsoon rains, and a dramatic fender-bender. Feh, I mock those puny obstacles.
Anyway, we were scheduled to leave India on July 8 at 12:15 am, on American Airlines. Having been warned to arrive at the airport three hours before departure, we showed up at 9:10 pm, roasting in the 90-degree temps and 90-percent humidity, and eager to waltz back into the sweet air-conditioned confines of the Western world.
But when we lined up to enter the airport (you need a ticket just to walk inside), we found out our flight was cancelled and that we’d have to queue for rebooking. The line was huge, and I was quite sad and grumpy that we might have to face another night of the diesel-infected Delhi air and endure the cab ride between the hotel and the airport two more times.
Luckily, that particular fear did not come true! I am actually still in the airport, seven hours later, and further obstacles notwithstanding I plan to leave on a British Airways flight in a mere six hours. But I'm getting ahead of myself... let me return to the narrative.
The lines for rebooking were huge, and after fifteen minutes or so it became obvious the lines weren’t moving at all. But we persisted another hour or so, distracted by the occasional false hope provided by the white-shirted airline representatives, who were kindly taking down our destinations and appeared to have a Plan.
No Plan (or plan) emerged, and we started noticing that the number of people ahead of us in line was steadily growing, prompting in me vague thoughts of hidden trap doors, clown cars, and “A Night at the Opera.”
Ted still had a little bit of airtime on his Indian cell phone, so we managed to track down the local booking number for American Airlines. But his battery was run down, and although there are friendly pillars with outlets and designated mobile phone charging stations, none of them worked. Finally Ted tried the outlet in the men’s bathroom, and he eventually got enough charge to start making some calls.
First was the AA local booking number: no answer. Lacking the non-toll-free number for the US booking line (can’t call a US toll-free number from India, silly!), Ted called his father and gave him numbers and instructions for calling AA in the US (the AAdvantage Gold desk, actually, since we're both frequent flyers). The nice FIL managed to reserve spots for us on the BA flight we’re now waiting for, but we’d still need to get some paperwork from AA, and we also wanted to sort out bookings for some of our friends stranded here as well.
Our remaining airtime was perilously low, so Ted went hunting for an Airtel vendor in the airport (they’re everywhere in the rest of Northern India, sometimes several to a block). But the only one in the airport was behind security in the Arrivals area, from which we ticketless departers are rightfully barred. Happily, Ted found a nice security guard who went in for him and bought us a 500 rupee card. Unhappily, we later discovered it bore the fine print “Not for use in India,” as it was a card for using your Airtel phone outside of India.
With only about 75 rupees left on our phone (calls to the US are 16 Rs. a minute), we called my father in Austin to enlist some help. As soon as my dad picked up, I barked orders to take down our cell number and call us back right away, as incoming airtime was free. He did so, and we sent up a nice plan for him to call AA, get the non-toll-free booking number, set up a flight out for our friend Chunzom, and save all our fellow travelers from further woe.
Alas, “free incoming calls’ was not to be taken literally, and 10 minutes on the phone with Dad left us with only 18 rupees of remaining airtime. So when he called back a bit later and patched me through to American Airlines, I only had time to be told there is no non-toll-free number for American booking and to rant about the disastrous mess here in Delhi. Fortunately, Chunzom was already bearing a boarding pass for a different flight tonight, which will unavoidably prevent her from taking the flight the USA booking office gave her: our same (cancelled) flight three days hence. Dad certainly meant well, but I think he failed to ponder the full implications of three extra days stranded in a developing nation.
Anyway, with no working cell phone, we decided instead to use the public overseas calling service in the airport, but when I went there I learned the phone was out of service and the only other public phone was behind security. Thanks, local telco!
...
To summarize:
1. Our flight is cancelled
2. The rebooking lines never budge
3. CORRECTION: The rebooking lines get actually longer from the front end
4. Our mobile phone runs out of power and airtime
5. Public electrical outlets don’t work
6. New airtime card discovered only to work outside India
7. Airport public phone is out of order, with only the working phone behind security
By the time I wrote all this, we were settled in front of the British Airways desk, waiting for the opportunity to check in several hours later. I was all ready to blog out my saga, but naturally my laptop battery ran out, so I’m only finishing the tale months later, from the remarkable comfort of my own home.
Our travel went fairly smoothly from then on. British Airways gave us great seats in an exit row, so Ted had all the legroom he could want. He actually got a little weepy when his food arrived, all safe and clean and microbe free (we suspect it was prepared in Britain, not India).
Our layover was in London, where we discovered that all the other Chicago-bound passengers on our original flight were unknowingly given flights only to London. They thought they were booked all the way to Chicago, but they were all dropped in London with no further ticketing, so we were indeed quite lucky that my trusty FIL arranged our flights for us.
I love the international lounge at Heathrow Airport! It has great food, exciting shops, and, best of all, Boots. There I was able to indulge my Boots fetish with various pharmacy goodies, including insect-bite cream (thanks India!), compression stockings (long flight ahead), and more.
We had a lovely meal at the airport, featuring some delightfully uncooked vegetables, which we hadn’t eaten in weeks. The flight to Chicago was fine but not uneventful, as I had a nasty health problem arise early on. The details are personal, and everything is fine now, but it was just the sort of crummy complication you’d expect after the run of luck we’d been having. The flight crew was very kind and helpful, as was my sister Debby when I got back to Chicago.
Several days later I joined Ted on a business trip to Montreal, where I mostly just slept. I did, however, get to buy my favorite sunblock (since approved by the FDA), and my favorite mustard (not yet approved by the FDA). I also tried the famous maple donuts from Tim Horton’s, which were too sweet for me, and we saw The Devil Wears Prada, which Ted enjoyed immensely. Ted, a clever one, knows that chick flicks often involve lots of cute chicks to look at, so he’s generally quite willing to see them. I, happily, am not jealous.
Anyway, that's the end of the India saga. Dye from various pieces of cheap clothing purchased in India ran all over the rest of our clothes, so nearly everything we brought there got wrecked in some way. But we emerged more or less unscathed. My rear end recovered from that damn ant, my in-flight health problem has been totally resolved, and my digestive system has the smug satisfaction of having kept everything down.
We spent our last night in Palampur. Correction: we spent our second-to-last night in Palampur -- our last/bonus night was spent at the Delhi airport, as you’ll soon learn. The final night of teachings went very late, so it was great just to stay at Pop’s Picnic Spot itself, right next door. We got three precious hours of sleep before taking off the next morning, with our trusty driver at the wheel.
There was heavy rain in the early morning, and then we got in a fender-bender with a Punjabi lorry driver, which added about an hour to our trip. Along the way, we stopped for breakfast and lunch at the standard restaurants the drivers take Westerners to. Breakfast was not so yummy, but lunch was quite nice, and we ran into lots of our friends whose drivers had brought them there as well.
In Delhi we ate at a wonderful South Indian fast-food chain called Saravana Bhavan, which actually has branches in the US. I went to the one in Sunnyvale, California last month, and it was quite yummy, although quite different from eating in the heart/heat of Delhi. We then got in the car one last time to go to the airport, and I was extremely happy to be leaving India and heading home.
Here’s where the July 8 narrative begins, written by me less than eight hours after that yummy dinner:
I can hardly even begin to describe the heaps of obstacles Ted and I have come up against in the last seven hours. On the all-time obstacle scale, I think we’ve outpaced “Truman getting off the island” and “Snoopy coming home” while falling shy only of “Odysseus returning to Ithaka” and “Frodo unloading the Ring.”
Note that by limiting my saga to only the last seven hours, I'm leaving out Delhi traffic jams, a 12-hour car ride on rural Indian roads, monsoon rains, and a dramatic fender-bender. Feh, I mock those puny obstacles.
Anyway, we were scheduled to leave India on July 8 at 12:15 am, on American Airlines. Having been warned to arrive at the airport three hours before departure, we showed up at 9:10 pm, roasting in the 90-degree temps and 90-percent humidity, and eager to waltz back into the sweet air-conditioned confines of the Western world.
But when we lined up to enter the airport (you need a ticket just to walk inside), we found out our flight was cancelled and that we’d have to queue for rebooking. The line was huge, and I was quite sad and grumpy that we might have to face another night of the diesel-infected Delhi air and endure the cab ride between the hotel and the airport two more times.
Luckily, that particular fear did not come true! I am actually still in the airport, seven hours later, and further obstacles notwithstanding I plan to leave on a British Airways flight in a mere six hours. But I'm getting ahead of myself... let me return to the narrative.
The lines for rebooking were huge, and after fifteen minutes or so it became obvious the lines weren’t moving at all. But we persisted another hour or so, distracted by the occasional false hope provided by the white-shirted airline representatives, who were kindly taking down our destinations and appeared to have a Plan.
No Plan (or plan) emerged, and we started noticing that the number of people ahead of us in line was steadily growing, prompting in me vague thoughts of hidden trap doors, clown cars, and “A Night at the Opera.”
Ted still had a little bit of airtime on his Indian cell phone, so we managed to track down the local booking number for American Airlines. But his battery was run down, and although there are friendly pillars with outlets and designated mobile phone charging stations, none of them worked. Finally Ted tried the outlet in the men’s bathroom, and he eventually got enough charge to start making some calls.
First was the AA local booking number: no answer. Lacking the non-toll-free number for the US booking line (can’t call a US toll-free number from India, silly!), Ted called his father and gave him numbers and instructions for calling AA in the US (the AAdvantage Gold desk, actually, since we're both frequent flyers). The nice FIL managed to reserve spots for us on the BA flight we’re now waiting for, but we’d still need to get some paperwork from AA, and we also wanted to sort out bookings for some of our friends stranded here as well.
Our remaining airtime was perilously low, so Ted went hunting for an Airtel vendor in the airport (they’re everywhere in the rest of Northern India, sometimes several to a block). But the only one in the airport was behind security in the Arrivals area, from which we ticketless departers are rightfully barred. Happily, Ted found a nice security guard who went in for him and bought us a 500 rupee card. Unhappily, we later discovered it bore the fine print “Not for use in India,” as it was a card for using your Airtel phone outside of India.
With only about 75 rupees left on our phone (calls to the US are 16 Rs. a minute), we called my father in Austin to enlist some help. As soon as my dad picked up, I barked orders to take down our cell number and call us back right away, as incoming airtime was free. He did so, and we sent up a nice plan for him to call AA, get the non-toll-free booking number, set up a flight out for our friend Chunzom, and save all our fellow travelers from further woe.
Alas, “free incoming calls’ was not to be taken literally, and 10 minutes on the phone with Dad left us with only 18 rupees of remaining airtime. So when he called back a bit later and patched me through to American Airlines, I only had time to be told there is no non-toll-free number for American booking and to rant about the disastrous mess here in Delhi. Fortunately, Chunzom was already bearing a boarding pass for a different flight tonight, which will unavoidably prevent her from taking the flight the USA booking office gave her: our same (cancelled) flight three days hence. Dad certainly meant well, but I think he failed to ponder the full implications of three extra days stranded in a developing nation.
Anyway, with no working cell phone, we decided instead to use the public overseas calling service in the airport, but when I went there I learned the phone was out of service and the only other public phone was behind security. Thanks, local telco!
...
To summarize:
1. Our flight is cancelled
2. The rebooking lines never budge
3. CORRECTION: The rebooking lines get actually longer from the front end
4. Our mobile phone runs out of power and airtime
5. Public electrical outlets don’t work
6. New airtime card discovered only to work outside India
7. Airport public phone is out of order, with only the working phone behind security
By the time I wrote all this, we were settled in front of the British Airways desk, waiting for the opportunity to check in several hours later. I was all ready to blog out my saga, but naturally my laptop battery ran out, so I’m only finishing the tale months later, from the remarkable comfort of my own home.
Our travel went fairly smoothly from then on. British Airways gave us great seats in an exit row, so Ted had all the legroom he could want. He actually got a little weepy when his food arrived, all safe and clean and microbe free (we suspect it was prepared in Britain, not India).
Our layover was in London, where we discovered that all the other Chicago-bound passengers on our original flight were unknowingly given flights only to London. They thought they were booked all the way to Chicago, but they were all dropped in London with no further ticketing, so we were indeed quite lucky that my trusty FIL arranged our flights for us.
I love the international lounge at Heathrow Airport! It has great food, exciting shops, and, best of all, Boots. There I was able to indulge my Boots fetish with various pharmacy goodies, including insect-bite cream (thanks India!), compression stockings (long flight ahead), and more.
We had a lovely meal at the airport, featuring some delightfully uncooked vegetables, which we hadn’t eaten in weeks. The flight to Chicago was fine but not uneventful, as I had a nasty health problem arise early on. The details are personal, and everything is fine now, but it was just the sort of crummy complication you’d expect after the run of luck we’d been having. The flight crew was very kind and helpful, as was my sister Debby when I got back to Chicago.
Several days later I joined Ted on a business trip to Montreal, where I mostly just slept. I did, however, get to buy my favorite sunblock (since approved by the FDA), and my favorite mustard (not yet approved by the FDA). I also tried the famous maple donuts from Tim Horton’s, which were too sweet for me, and we saw The Devil Wears Prada, which Ted enjoyed immensely. Ted, a clever one, knows that chick flicks often involve lots of cute chicks to look at, so he’s generally quite willing to see them. I, happily, am not jealous.
Anyway, that's the end of the India saga. Dye from various pieces of cheap clothing purchased in India ran all over the rest of our clothes, so nearly everything we brought there got wrecked in some way. But we emerged more or less unscathed. My rear end recovered from that damn ant, my in-flight health problem has been totally resolved, and my digestive system has the smug satisfaction of having kept everything down.
On about the third night of teachings in Palampur (July 1, probably), I was sitting in class and felt something crawling on my leg. I couldn't be sure if it was truly an insect, since sometimes the humidity and the mere sense of bugginess are enough to make one's skin crawl. The crawling sensation made me squirm, but I didn't really leap until I felt a nasty zapping right on the patoot.
Yeouch! I didn't know if it was an insect bite, since it was like no other bite I'd experienced. It didn't exactly itch or hurt, but every fifteen or twenty seconds it zapped me. I respectfully left the teaching and headed for the bathroom, attracting attention with my leaps and zappy little cries.
Fortunately I got the attention of our friend Connie, a delightfully cheerful and capable Canadian who is a recently-qualified Registered Nurse. I got over my shyness about letting her examine my rear end (she works as a hospice nurse, so I figure she's already seen a lot on the job), and she took a flashlight out and took a look.
It wasn't immediately obvious I'd been bitten, so she was starting to craft some other delightful theories about my butt-spasm (dehydration! hemorrhoids! yikes!), but a little bite started to appear and the other theories were thrown aside (praise be!). Of course, "mysterious bug bite in India" is not the greatest diagnosis, since I couldn't help imagining dreadful complications, mostly involving necrosis.
I also couldn't help thinking of a brain teaser my dad once trotted out to entertain the whole family in a restaurant (my dad was full of goodies like this while I was growing up). The trick was to decode a telegram, which had been compacted into six cryptic words for purposes of economy:
ANACIN HOSPITAL ADAMANT BITTER ASININE PLACES
( Take your time, work it out. Or click here for the answer. )
Anyway, there I was, jumping from the weird electric bug bite, cursing that damn ant and grateful only to have been bit once.
Connie cleaned things up with my trusty alcohol swabs, and I took two Benadryl tablets before bed. No trace of a bite the next morning, just some vague mental ramblings about Anacin and the rest.
Yeouch! I didn't know if it was an insect bite, since it was like no other bite I'd experienced. It didn't exactly itch or hurt, but every fifteen or twenty seconds it zapped me. I respectfully left the teaching and headed for the bathroom, attracting attention with my leaps and zappy little cries.
Fortunately I got the attention of our friend Connie, a delightfully cheerful and capable Canadian who is a recently-qualified Registered Nurse. I got over my shyness about letting her examine my rear end (she works as a hospice nurse, so I figure she's already seen a lot on the job), and she took a flashlight out and took a look.
It wasn't immediately obvious I'd been bitten, so she was starting to craft some other delightful theories about my butt-spasm (dehydration! hemorrhoids! yikes!), but a little bite started to appear and the other theories were thrown aside (praise be!). Of course, "mysterious bug bite in India" is not the greatest diagnosis, since I couldn't help imagining dreadful complications, mostly involving necrosis.
I also couldn't help thinking of a brain teaser my dad once trotted out to entertain the whole family in a restaurant (my dad was full of goodies like this while I was growing up). The trick was to decode a telegram, which had been compacted into six cryptic words for purposes of economy:
ANACIN HOSPITAL ADAMANT BITTER ASININE PLACES
( Take your time, work it out. Or click here for the answer. )
Anyway, there I was, jumping from the weird electric bug bite, cursing that damn ant and grateful only to have been bit once.
Connie cleaned things up with my trusty alcohol swabs, and I took two Benadryl tablets before bed. No trace of a bite the next morning, just some vague mental ramblings about Anacin and the rest.
Faithful readers may have noticed that I hardly ever blogged from India. To be honest, I really needed the break from all things electronic, so I barely used my computer at all. I did, however, send a few e-mails to family, which I'm now cannibalizing to fill in the blog gaps. This comes from a June 30 e-mail to my sister Debby.
I'm afraid there's not so much more to report around here. I've been kind of tired and have been fighting a cold, though my friend Elly gave me some wacky Chinese pills which seem to be nipping it in the bud. All these pills are making me feel like a character in Valley of the Dolls: anti-malarial pills, dramamine, Chinese meds, etc. I haven't been taking the Pepto Bismol pills before meals [my mother's time-honored travel remedy] but have instead been hyper-vigilant about not eating off of anything that's even slightly wet. This is a little hard, since it's very humid here and nothing dries, but it's working so far. There are lots of great restaurants here (Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Thai), and I know which ones are "safer" than others (though it seems like every day someone else is down with the runs). I'll just keep my fingers crossed.
The teachings from my own lamas have begun. They are in Palampur, about an hour from Dharamsala, so we are commuting every night in hired cars. The roads are a little exciting, but it's going all right. The subject matter is very deep and intense -- important subtleties about the nature of emptiness (the whole Buddhist "things don't exist the way we think they exist" philosophy) -- so it's a real brain-bender. We get back late at night, so we've been sleeping late and sort of sluggish during the day.
Today we bought Ted some pants. The clothing situation was getting urgent -- Ted only brought the jeans he wore on the plane, and we assumed it would be a little easier to buy clothing here, so he's been wearing his increasingly manky jeans every day. But today he bought some pants, and we'll get our laundry done tomorrow. I too am a bit short on clothing, but my non-sweating superpower is still in effect, so it hasn't been too big a problem. I bought several items a few days ago in a panic, and once I got them home I decided half of them weren't actually all that nice. But I can wear the pants as pyjama bottoms (which I needed), and one skirt and shirt are really nice. I'm out about $15 for the whole pile, so it's not too tragic a loss. Ted bought a gold-colored shirt printed with red OM symbols and such, and we're all teasing him that it's the Indian equivalent of wearing I *heart* NY clothing. Even worse, he briefly paired it with a similar scarf, and we joked that it was like adding a Mets hat to the ensemble.
I read Cold Mountain during the flight and the first few days here. I knew that Renee Zellweger was in the movie (which I didn't see), and the whole time I pictured her in the the wrong role. So when I read that Nicole Kidman was in what I considered the RZ role, and that RZ played a character I pictured totally differently, I lost all interest in seeing the movie, which seems to have over-glamorized things (based on the casting). Good book, though.
I also read one of Ted's books, a fantasy novel called Ill Met By Moonlight. It was about young Will Shakespeare and how he got entangled with some local elves/fairies near Stratford, explaining the "Dark Lady" from his sonnets and how the glovemaker's son became inspired. A fun book, if you're not too much of a purist.
Now I'm reading Fever Pitch by the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy -- it's a memoir of his total obsession with football (soccer), and the blurbs on the back promise it's interesting even if you don't care about football. So far so good, and the timing is right, seeing how World Cup fever has gripped this part of the world like any other. It's only my deep respect for the monastic robes that's kept me from snapping photos of young Tibetan monks gathering around a little TV at night to watch the games. (I really must rent "The Cup" one of these days.)
I'm really sorry I didn't get to attend [my brother's extremely informal] wedding -- it sounds like it was really a nice time, and Ted would have enjoyed all the sweets. Here I'm enjoying some banana porridge at our hotel every morning: oatmeal cooked with milk and cut-up bananas. I'm sure it's not helping with my unexpected constipation problem (who saw that coming?), but the porridge is so yummy. Actually, the poop situation is improving, slowly but surely. Ted points out that the oatmeal should be helping, but it looks too much like spackle to me. It's a bummer not being able to eat anything that isn't cooked. Sometimes food comes garnished with lovely looking tomatoes and onions, but I have to remove them and avoid the area they touched.
On the plus side, Elly has turned me onto wacky Indian snack foods, available in all the little stores (more like stalls). There's one called "Haldiram's Nimbu Masala" which is little threads made from potatoes and various pulse flours and strongly spiced with savory masala flavor. Then there's "Haldirman's All-in-One", which seems to be the leftovers from all the other Haldiram products thrown into a single bag. It has little flakes and crisps and pulses and nuts and the occasional raisin, in a wacky mix of spices including the masala stuff but also mango and other sweet flavors. I really wish I'd bought some prunes, as I am reluctant to try the local dried fruits. I wish I didn't have to be so paranoid, but when someone I know gets sick every day, I am sadly reminded of how important it is to be careful.
Thanks all for now ...
I'm afraid there's not so much more to report around here. I've been kind of tired and have been fighting a cold, though my friend Elly gave me some wacky Chinese pills which seem to be nipping it in the bud. All these pills are making me feel like a character in Valley of the Dolls: anti-malarial pills, dramamine, Chinese meds, etc. I haven't been taking the Pepto Bismol pills before meals [my mother's time-honored travel remedy] but have instead been hyper-vigilant about not eating off of anything that's even slightly wet. This is a little hard, since it's very humid here and nothing dries, but it's working so far. There are lots of great restaurants here (Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Thai), and I know which ones are "safer" than others (though it seems like every day someone else is down with the runs). I'll just keep my fingers crossed.
The teachings from my own lamas have begun. They are in Palampur, about an hour from Dharamsala, so we are commuting every night in hired cars. The roads are a little exciting, but it's going all right. The subject matter is very deep and intense -- important subtleties about the nature of emptiness (the whole Buddhist "things don't exist the way we think they exist" philosophy) -- so it's a real brain-bender. We get back late at night, so we've been sleeping late and sort of sluggish during the day.
Today we bought Ted some pants. The clothing situation was getting urgent -- Ted only brought the jeans he wore on the plane, and we assumed it would be a little easier to buy clothing here, so he's been wearing his increasingly manky jeans every day. But today he bought some pants, and we'll get our laundry done tomorrow. I too am a bit short on clothing, but my non-sweating superpower is still in effect, so it hasn't been too big a problem. I bought several items a few days ago in a panic, and once I got them home I decided half of them weren't actually all that nice. But I can wear the pants as pyjama bottoms (which I needed), and one skirt and shirt are really nice. I'm out about $15 for the whole pile, so it's not too tragic a loss. Ted bought a gold-colored shirt printed with red OM symbols and such, and we're all teasing him that it's the Indian equivalent of wearing I *heart* NY clothing. Even worse, he briefly paired it with a similar scarf, and we joked that it was like adding a Mets hat to the ensemble.
I read Cold Mountain during the flight and the first few days here. I knew that Renee Zellweger was in the movie (which I didn't see), and the whole time I pictured her in the the wrong role. So when I read that Nicole Kidman was in what I considered the RZ role, and that RZ played a character I pictured totally differently, I lost all interest in seeing the movie, which seems to have over-glamorized things (based on the casting). Good book, though.
I also read one of Ted's books, a fantasy novel called Ill Met By Moonlight. It was about young Will Shakespeare and how he got entangled with some local elves/fairies near Stratford, explaining the "Dark Lady" from his sonnets and how the glovemaker's son became inspired. A fun book, if you're not too much of a purist.
Now I'm reading Fever Pitch by the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy -- it's a memoir of his total obsession with football (soccer), and the blurbs on the back promise it's interesting even if you don't care about football. So far so good, and the timing is right, seeing how World Cup fever has gripped this part of the world like any other. It's only my deep respect for the monastic robes that's kept me from snapping photos of young Tibetan monks gathering around a little TV at night to watch the games. (I really must rent "The Cup" one of these days.)
I'm really sorry I didn't get to attend [my brother's extremely informal] wedding -- it sounds like it was really a nice time, and Ted would have enjoyed all the sweets. Here I'm enjoying some banana porridge at our hotel every morning: oatmeal cooked with milk and cut-up bananas. I'm sure it's not helping with my unexpected constipation problem (who saw that coming?), but the porridge is so yummy. Actually, the poop situation is improving, slowly but surely. Ted points out that the oatmeal should be helping, but it looks too much like spackle to me. It's a bummer not being able to eat anything that isn't cooked. Sometimes food comes garnished with lovely looking tomatoes and onions, but I have to remove them and avoid the area they touched.
On the plus side, Elly has turned me onto wacky Indian snack foods, available in all the little stores (more like stalls). There's one called "Haldiram's Nimbu Masala" which is little threads made from potatoes and various pulse flours and strongly spiced with savory masala flavor. Then there's "Haldirman's All-in-One", which seems to be the leftovers from all the other Haldiram products thrown into a single bag. It has little flakes and crisps and pulses and nuts and the occasional raisin, in a wacky mix of spices including the masala stuff but also mango and other sweet flavors. I really wish I'd bought some prunes, as I am reluctant to try the local dried fruits. I wish I didn't have to be so paranoid, but when someone I know gets sick every day, I am sadly reminded of how important it is to be careful.
Thanks all for now ...
The night we arrived in Dharamsala (11 hours from Delhi by car), we settled into our grim and spartan hotel (we've since moved) and walked down to Hunted Hill House (our current hotel, home to most of our friends) for a group orientation meeting. There was bad news about some logistical issues, which seemed insoluble at the time (now fixed, of course), and I felt a deep sense of despair, along with total dread about being stuck here for 18 more days. It was an oddly familiar feeling (miserable, exhausted, trapped), and I immediately placed it: it was like the first night of summer camp.
I had a lot of vague ideas of what Dharamsala would be like, but I never thought it would remind me of Camp Blue Star. But that first dismal night rang a bell -- strange, considering I was usually happy to be reunited with my summer friends -- and like camp, my experience of Dharamsala improved immensely in less than a day.
You wouldn’t think I'd still be reminded of life at Jewish overnight camp once the Dalai Lama started teaching, but somehow I am. Part of the similarity is the constant tromping up and down hills (North Carolina, like the Himalayan foothills, is a lot bumpier than Illinois). I am also much more connected with the outdoors than I am at home, since no building is truly closed off, just like camp cabins and recreational buildings. And the general lack of cell phones and technology plays a major role: if I want to find someone, I just have to walk (up and down hills) to find them, and along the way I inevitably run into several other people I know, since at least fifty of my good friends and close acquaintances are here.
And insect repellent. Can't forget the insect repellent.
The break from routine and responsibility is quite pleasant, and reminiscent of childhood summer vacations. I’m using my computer very little, and aside from the two daily teaching sessions there’s nowhere I’m really required to be. And yet there are loads of sagas happening among almost all my friends -- the intensity of the setting seems to be ripening karma at triple-speed -- so it’s definitely not the calm, meditative environment you might be imagining. It’s more like the non-stop drama of summer camp, even though the issues are no longer (1) boys and (2) who's fighting with whom.
There are, of course, some differences. At camp, occasionally some friend or bunkmate would spend a night or two in the infirmary, while in Dharamsala we hear every day about another member of our group who’s "got it coming out both ends." Plus, Camp Blue Star had a lot more Polo shirts than saffron robes, and there was a distinct lack of cows roaming the streets.
That's all for now. Pretty long and detailed for a letter from camp, no?
I had a lot of vague ideas of what Dharamsala would be like, but I never thought it would remind me of Camp Blue Star. But that first dismal night rang a bell -- strange, considering I was usually happy to be reunited with my summer friends -- and like camp, my experience of Dharamsala improved immensely in less than a day.
You wouldn’t think I'd still be reminded of life at Jewish overnight camp once the Dalai Lama started teaching, but somehow I am. Part of the similarity is the constant tromping up and down hills (North Carolina, like the Himalayan foothills, is a lot bumpier than Illinois). I am also much more connected with the outdoors than I am at home, since no building is truly closed off, just like camp cabins and recreational buildings. And the general lack of cell phones and technology plays a major role: if I want to find someone, I just have to walk (up and down hills) to find them, and along the way I inevitably run into several other people I know, since at least fifty of my good friends and close acquaintances are here.
And insect repellent. Can't forget the insect repellent.
The break from routine and responsibility is quite pleasant, and reminiscent of childhood summer vacations. I’m using my computer very little, and aside from the two daily teaching sessions there’s nowhere I’m really required to be. And yet there are loads of sagas happening among almost all my friends -- the intensity of the setting seems to be ripening karma at triple-speed -- so it’s definitely not the calm, meditative environment you might be imagining. It’s more like the non-stop drama of summer camp, even though the issues are no longer (1) boys and (2) who's fighting with whom.
There are, of course, some differences. At camp, occasionally some friend or bunkmate would spend a night or two in the infirmary, while in Dharamsala we hear every day about another member of our group who’s "got it coming out both ends." Plus, Camp Blue Star had a lot more Polo shirts than saffron robes, and there was a distinct lack of cows roaming the streets.
That's all for now. Pretty long and detailed for a letter from camp, no?
I expect the edit this through the rest of my trip, but I thought I'd share now...
Things I’m glad I brought with me to India:
insect repellent
tampons
ibuprofen
Emergen-c packets
a good poncho
hand sanitizing gel
comfortable, rugged closed shoes (for the filthy streets)
slip-on sandals (for inside the hotel room)
bedsheets
a towel (less fluffy would have been better, though)
a blanket
energy bars
small packets of kleenex
earplugs
dramamine
zip-lock bags
a waist pouch
Things I wish I’d brought to India:
grapefruit seed extract
baby wipes
white ankle socks
dried fruit
Things I’m glad I brought with me to India:
insect repellent
tampons
ibuprofen
Emergen-c packets
a good poncho
hand sanitizing gel
comfortable, rugged closed shoes (for the filthy streets)
slip-on sandals (for inside the hotel room)
bedsheets
a towel (less fluffy would have been better, though)
a blanket
energy bars
small packets of kleenex
earplugs
dramamine
zip-lock bags
a waist pouch
Things I wish I’d brought to India:
grapefruit seed extract
baby wipes
white ankle socks
dried fruit
[I wrote this days ago, but I've spent wonderfully little time online and am posting this long after the fact.]
It's the evening of my fourth day in India, and I finally have the wherewithal to write something more detailed than "Not dead."
After a long journey, I am now in our hotel room in Dharamsala, serenaded by the noise from the nearby front desk and main staircase, and enjoying the monsoon-blurred view from our window of the Himalayan foothills. It’s the first big rain since my arrival, and I know that the country downhill is yearning for it, so I won’t mind the splodgy dirt road that will greet me tomorrow morning.
The trip began in Delhi, where we had arranged a soft landing by booking two nights in the legendarily posh Imperial hotel. Ted and I aren’t normally the five-star hotel types, but the combination of “Delhi” and “off season” put the Imperial within our reach. So I’d long been looking forward to being greeted at the airport by a driver from the hotel, whisking us past the squalor of India into a colonial haven.
And it worked as planned, until just after the “greeted at the airport” step. We were in the car, on the way to the hotel, when the driver’s phone rang and he passed it to me. It was “Vivek,” the duty manager at the Imperial, welcoming us to Delhi and then apologizing that our room was suddenly unavailable due to a “special delegation” at the hotel. We were instead to stay at the Shangri-la Hotel, blah blah blah...
Alarm bells! This sounded like a classic scam, detailed in our Lonely Planet guidebook and elsewhere: The taxi driver offers to call your hotel to check on your reservation before you arrive, but suddenly the hotel is “overbooked” and you are routed to some other hotel (the beneficiary of the scam). With this in mind, I was quite brusque with Vivek and ended the call, and then I looked up the number of the hotel in my own files and called it myself to verify that this was all on the level.
I was patched through to Vivek, who reassured me that he really was the duty manager at the Imperial, which I only sort of believed. For gosh sakes, couldn’t the phone be hacked to redirect calls to that number to the scammers’ line? This is India, after all – a country not lacking in technical know-how. We demanded to be driven to the Imperial to get to the bottom of things.
But it was actually the truth, and our room at the Shangri-la was totally swank (for about 25% less than the room at the Imperial), and we got a free meal at the famous Spice Route restaurant, so we definitely came out ahead.
Not too much else to report on Delhi. Hot, blah blah. On to Dharamsala.
It's the evening of my fourth day in India, and I finally have the wherewithal to write something more detailed than "Not dead."
After a long journey, I am now in our hotel room in Dharamsala, serenaded by the noise from the nearby front desk and main staircase, and enjoying the monsoon-blurred view from our window of the Himalayan foothills. It’s the first big rain since my arrival, and I know that the country downhill is yearning for it, so I won’t mind the splodgy dirt road that will greet me tomorrow morning.
The trip began in Delhi, where we had arranged a soft landing by booking two nights in the legendarily posh Imperial hotel. Ted and I aren’t normally the five-star hotel types, but the combination of “Delhi” and “off season” put the Imperial within our reach. So I’d long been looking forward to being greeted at the airport by a driver from the hotel, whisking us past the squalor of India into a colonial haven.
And it worked as planned, until just after the “greeted at the airport” step. We were in the car, on the way to the hotel, when the driver’s phone rang and he passed it to me. It was “Vivek,” the duty manager at the Imperial, welcoming us to Delhi and then apologizing that our room was suddenly unavailable due to a “special delegation” at the hotel. We were instead to stay at the Shangri-la Hotel, blah blah blah...
Alarm bells! This sounded like a classic scam, detailed in our Lonely Planet guidebook and elsewhere: The taxi driver offers to call your hotel to check on your reservation before you arrive, but suddenly the hotel is “overbooked” and you are routed to some other hotel (the beneficiary of the scam). With this in mind, I was quite brusque with Vivek and ended the call, and then I looked up the number of the hotel in my own files and called it myself to verify that this was all on the level.
I was patched through to Vivek, who reassured me that he really was the duty manager at the Imperial, which I only sort of believed. For gosh sakes, couldn’t the phone be hacked to redirect calls to that number to the scammers’ line? This is India, after all – a country not lacking in technical know-how. We demanded to be driven to the Imperial to get to the bottom of things.
But it was actually the truth, and our room at the Shangri-la was totally swank (for about 25% less than the room at the Imperial), and we got a free meal at the famous Spice Route restaurant, so we definitely came out ahead.
Not too much else to report on Delhi. Hot, blah blah. On to Dharamsala.
