I have also decided to post an “Indian sign of the week” entry in my blog. This is mostly because my collection is growing and I have nothing to do with the pictures so why not entertain you? India is chock full of hilarious signs that bring together the strangest conglomerate of Indian English words/idioms/awkward typos/offenses/etc. The greatest part is that these signs are not intended to be humorous. Let’s start with this one (courtesy of BRO/photo taken in Sikkim):
Over the break I went to Kalimpong/Sikkim/Darjeeling/Calcutta and it was absolutely awesome.
Being in the first three places made me feel like I was in another country. We even got out passports stamped upon entry into Sikkim. And how cool is it to be in Darjeeling during the current momentum of the Gorkhaland separatist movement. Gorkhland flags were flying high across the area along with proposed maps. And we even stumbled across a handful of protests/prayer services. I wonder if they will get their state…I would be more empathetic to the cause if the proposed state had a slightly cooler name…seriously Gorkhaland? This trip really forced me to expand
my narrow definition of India. I’ll def. write more in detail but for now just wanted to post some pictures. What a sensual experience…the scenery, food, people interactions were all very moving. I can see why spirituality (particularly in the form of Tibetan Buddhism here) flourishes in these places. One cannot help but be moved by the beauty and grandeur that is nature. And nature is in your face in Sikkim. I couldn’t help but reflect on life there. Environment really is critical to this process…granted we can create our own stimulating environment but it’s nonetheless nice to have some stately powerful mo
untains to get you going every morning.
Now that I am back, I am craving momos like no other. Yummy. Momos, pancakes, and bagels/cream cheese would make my life in Jaipur just grand right now.
Pushkar and Ajmer are two significant Hindu/ Muslim pilgrimage sites within 11 km of each other. The area draws flocks of devotees each year…and Pushkar seems to draw flocks of backpackers each year as well. I expected Pushkar to be like any other Hindu religious city that I have seen in India and imagined it would be teeming with devotional commercialism and middle class Indian devotees…like Vrindavan, Haridwar, etc…with never ending lines of street shops selling flowers, prasad, malas, murtis, etc. But in Pushkar, the number of backpacker clothing shops and falafel cafes way outnumber the typical shops seen outside mandirs in India. Some bohemian intellectual prob. popularized it in his writings back in the 80s. Indian spirituality is hot yo.
The town is centered around one lake so it’s easy to orient oneself. 50 some odd of us Americans arrived in Pushkar in the early afternoon. Isa and I decided to take a nice stroll around the town and cover as much as we could before dinner. Okay so fine, Pushkar is somewhat stereotypical as there are people capitalizing off of bhakti and literally at every ghat there are a minimum of five men claiming to be pujaris and pestering you to tie a thread to your wrist for a nominal donation of your discretion. Isa and I rock at the death stare (which is critical to survival here) so we didn’t get bothered much. We did our best to venture into gullies that didn’t scream touristy to get a bit of the local flavor. Just in time for the sunset we found ourselves at a ghat where the locals seemed to hang out. Here, we got to watch the magnificence that is the sun set in Pushkar only to rise elsewhere. And all the while we got to listen to a folk music father/daughter pair performing in the background. Fabulous evening.
Followed by cultural show night number one. Learning a new language is humiliating enough but the AIIS Hindi teachers have us be performance monkeys as well by means of “Hindi Shivir.” I was involved in two acts: a play mocking Bollywood through a spoof of the Abhi/Ash wedding and a parody of Sholay’s Mehbooba. The Advanced group likes to do it big and yes, that’s right…at the end of our play an actual wedding band marched into the hotel lobby. Seriously. How cool. We were planning on concluding with Om Shanti Om and opening up the dance floor so the shaadi band was a fantastic surprise.
The next morning a handful of us took an early morning hike to the Savitri mandir. Physical exertion for a purpose is all the more meaningful and I feel like it’s always more exciting to do darshan if you have t
o work for it…otherwise it’s so easy to take walking into a mandir and seeing yet another murti very casually and nonchalantly. Okay, so the Savriti mandir wasn’t that impressive on it’s own accord but it’s hilltop location and pre-requisite hike made it more exciting. Savitri and Gayatri were both wives of Brahma and they each have their own hilltop mandir in Pushkar. And Puskhar is of note because it is home to the only Brahma mandir in India. I have mixed feeling about idols like I do about movies based on books. A novel leaves much to the reader’s imagination and as most of us have experienced, a movie can take away some of the joy in self creating images of characters. So seeing the idol of Brahma in a way restricted his form for me. Maybe I feel this way with Brahma in particular because he is (for me at least) by nature intended to be a much less tangible deity then say Krishna or Rama. On the same token as someone who sucks at meditation, having an idol before me to facilitate concentration is extremely effective. I have nothing against forms/idols/symbols/objects that bring one closer to God…power to them. And hey maybe that is why Hindus have a plethora of idols to choose from - so that one can find a form that one can easily connect with….For instance it’s common to find mothers worshipping the child Krishna as opposed to the adult Krishna because a mother can likely relate more easily to offering unconditional love and devotion to a child figure than a peer.
We had some free time on Monday so Michael and I hopped on a bus to Ajmer. This way, we thought, we could compare the experience of two foreigners entering the crowded dargah during Urs versus 60+ of us trying to maneuver ourselves in the complex the next morning. I know Sufi traditions are not reflective of “mainstream” Islam as some people with overt religious/political agendas like to claim but I’m pretty sure I saw all sorts of devotees at the dargah. All sorts of devotees who prob. ascribe to all sorts of categories including “mainstream.” It was neat to see the significant number of Hindu devotees as well. Frankly, I can’t always even tell the difference sans the help of some blatant external markers. We didn’t get to stay long because the place was extremely crowded and we had to make it back in time for the Mehbooba performance.
Speaking of Mehbooba and thinking of Donovan’s cross dressing as Helen…when Michael and I were waiting outside the dargah during the male only time period I saw a hijra make his way to the entrance where he was immediately denied entrance. What ensued was a brief argument in which the hijra was able to claim successfully his male identity and thereby the right to enter the dargah during male hours. We all have several identities that can operate in their own separate compartments or simultaneously and it’s neat to reflect on how we change the persona we choose to identify with on a situational basis. I haven’t read much academic scholarship on Gender Studies in South Asia but experiences like these lead me to evaluate the (in)validity of the binary gender taxo
nomy that we are so conditioned by and take for granted so often.
That night after dinner/cultural program part 3 we went out for a Pushkar speciality – the “special lassi.” Several of the food items on menus in Pushkar have two categories: “regular” and “special.” The “special” items have a little treat that some use as a spiritual agent and since we were in a spiritual city, the agent was readily available and yes, legal. So a handful of us enjoyed the night on the rooftop at Birdspice? Café.
The next day we returned to Ajmer Sharif and the experience was more or less the same with the added bonus of more stares, less conversations, and the fact that people all up on me in the crowded dargah were friendly faces this time. There is something comforting about a crowd and letting go of one’s own volition. The idea of being an individual part of a whole crowd whose movements are but grand composite movements of the individuals that make it up is neat. Strange I know, but your mind goes to such places when you literally can’t control the direction of your movement and are in a hot/sweaty place.
So I don’t need an alarm clock anymore because a lovely bird decided to build a nest in a nook in the wall right next to my window. The birds chirp ALL day and wake me up every morning. I try to pretend that I am sleeping in the wilderness and up close and personal with nature. This tactic works for about 10 minutes before I realize there is a fan spinning above me…back to reality. Anyhow, it’s a nice yaadgar of my DeSoto home because there too do we have birds’ nests that pop up in the least convenient places. For instance a nook in the archway to our house’s entrance….so maybe chirping is not a problem, but perpetual bird droppings covering our front porch and greeting our visitors is. For now, I’ll take birds over the various other lovely urban India animals that could be frequenting close to my room J
So it’s four weeks later and I finally ventured into the Sindhi Colony that I live next to. When I moved into Jaipur and found out where I was living I had all these romantic notions that everyday I would meet with people in Sindhi colony and overtime become this welcomed presence in the area. I thought my summer project would be a piece of cake. But it took me forever and a day to make the 5 minute walk to the Jhulelal Mandir to start meeting people. So today I had a whole free day and went to the mandir/dharamshala where I met a lovely 15 year old girl named Khushi. She spent an hour chatting with me and asking the cutest questions…she was intent on figuring out how to categorize me and my American friends if there really is no “caste” in America. We walked around the dharamshala and the pandit kept catching us eyeing the meal being prepared for a family event so he warmly invited us to lunch. Imagine sitting around a bunch of 10-15 year old kids speaking in Sindhi. Based on my familial experiences, I’ve always associated Sindhi with elderly people…why? All of my cousins in India prefer Hindi as the lingua franca of the home and it’s only the grandparents that speak in Sindhi. And as for family in America, English is the bol chaal and I only very occasionally get to hear Sindhi being spoken when my parents are trying to be confidential or if I am at a Sindhi Association function and I’m standing next to a group of elderly people. I’ve always had this perception that Sindhi is a dying language and my grandparents sure do lament the language as if it is. I’ve also had the feeling that it’s an extremely complicated language and that’s why it’s okay I can’t speak it - so hearing young people speaking Sindhi made it harder for me to distance myself from the language. After lunch, Khushi took me to her home to introduce me to her mother. This girl gave me so much love. Seriously she was pouring so much love into me that I almost felt like I was going to burst. If you’ve read the Celestine Prophecy then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that I felt like our interaction was one of the rare ones that results in the intensification of the energies between two people.
So while I was on my Sindhi kick and I still had some momentum, I took a rickshaw to the Amrapur Darbar where there was a huge Sindhi mela going on in honor of Sant Tehuram. I didn’t stay long because it was very crowded and people were pre occupied with devotional rituals so I couldn’t really talk to anyone. There wasn’t much written in Sindhi script…mostly everything in Devanagiri. Not surprising. What is surprising is that there’s a shop down the block from my home with the name written in Sindhi lipi! Due to assimilation pressures it’s getting less and less common to a)find written Sindhi and b)find Sindhi written in the persio-arabic script in Sindhi Hindu communities.
After both of these experiences, I needed a change in scene so I went next door to the Café Coffee Day in Ganpati Plaza. This place is a Starbucks type establishment. I love people watching. So I camped out at a comfy couch and checked out the upper class Indian dating scene over a veg sandwich and a coffee. It’s really neat to see how people romantically interact across cultures…and within one culture across classes. As I’ve noticed at CCD and Au Naturale (the AIIS hangout because of the awesome free wi fi!!) dating here seems to entail choosing an agreed upon location at which both parties meet at a fixed time. The rest of the details I’ll just have to leave out of my public blog…okay not really, at the end of the day we are all just people right? And the emotions humans have transcend superficial cultural divides to some extent. So yeah there might be some variance in expressions as per cultural sensitivities and conditioning but as far is love is concerned, it’s universal.
At night Elizabeth and I watched Jab we Met. Chelsea is a bollywood buff and has a nice collection of dvds. Really it’s awesome because it’s like we have a Blockbuster at home!! The movie was typical and if you have seen the songs, then you perhaps can also not believe that the movie actually uses village people as scenery….anyhow, it’s been nice to catch up movies at the Institute as well because I really haven’t seen that many. The way I always justify three hours of my life spent on the crappy ones is by claiming that the movie (and my 3 life hours) was Hindi practice!
Check out www.couchsurfing.com. If not now, then after this post. It’s such an awesome initiative through which I have met some really neat people/had some cool experiences. For instance, Neha. She’s a journalist with Times of India and for our first meeting she invited me to come along with her while she was covering a story on Jaipur Foot. So we got an awesome behind the scenes tour of the administration, the factory, and clinic. Jaipur Foot is a NGO that aims to empower and dignify physically disabled individuals through by material means of artificial limbs/wheelchairs. The NGO explicitly states that their work is not charity in the sense that this idea would perpetuate a superiority/inferiority complex. The organization’s primary beneficiaries are those who do not have legs. Coming from the states where the government has gone to lengths to provide facilities to handicapped people and living here in India where life really is a free for all and not much is done by means of public initiatives to assist handicapped people, it was encouraging to learn of Jaipur Foot. JF offers high quality artificial limbs and necessary rehabilitation free of charge to their patients who come from all across India. They’ve also held limb restoration camps elsewhere across the continent. JF appears to have started as a Jain inspired endeavor but its services and effects (in no way visible to me) are limited to individuals from a certain class/creed/religion. Isabel and Elizabeth were also with me and we noticed that there were far greater male patients and learned that is only so because males in this country are generally the victims of accidents resulting in leg loss more so than their female counterparts. Anyhow, now I can’t help but notice JF’s yellow bicycle wheelchairs all around the city!
My weekends have been fun – I went to Amritsar the first weekend and my mom and sister visited me the next weekend. There’s a big group of UT students in the advanced group and some of us took a trip to Vrindavan over the long weekend. In celebration of July 4th we lit fireworks on Thursday night on Jolie/Donovan/Andrew/Alex’s terrace. I love the ease with which one can purchase and light fireworks in India – Alex pulled out his harmonium and we sang the Star Spangled Banner. It was the most patriotic July 4th I had celebrated in the past couple years because I’m usually out of the country in the summer and not with other Americans.
On the way to Vrindavan, we stopped to check out the Bharatpur royalty’s summer palace in Deeg. Here I started to notice a trend in the status of historical monuments in India…the garden was more well maintained and preserved than the structure itself. The palace was beautiful but unfortunately falling apart as was the awesome palace/fort we saw in Bharatpur on our way back from Vrindavan. The princely collection of the Bharatpur royalty was extremely impressive and included sculptures from as far back as the 1st century. Walking around the museum/palace with Cristin and Jacqueline and seeing the laxity with which all of these artifacts were being “preserved” was a mix of appalling/humbling in a sense that I am not sure I can articulate. I recall checking out an exhibit on Chola bronzes at the Dallas Museum of Art and it being suffocating in comparison – everything was climate controlled, guards everywhere,art intellectuals making poignant comments… In a weird way, seeing all of these “ancient” artifacts so in the open and un-obsessed after was more liberating than saddening.
So the temple at Krishna’s janm bhoomi really does share a wall with a mosque. I saw it. I had all these romantic notions that the shared wall was a symbol of Hindu and Muslim unity…until I found out that Aurangzeb built the mosque to block the road to Gokul…I guess I’ll continue to appreciate the fact that both places of worship are still standing. And the lassis are as delicious as people say they are. My favorite part was listening to this elderly Krishna bhakt who had situated himself on an obscure ledge in one of the gullies and was playing a simple string instrument made out of a gourd and singing a Krishna bhajan. Attached to one of his feet was a string of bells with which he kept the rhythm. The music came together quite splendidly. It was just beautiful.
