Only in.....

So...there are reasons for and against visiting any country. With India, there are strong reasons for and against. On the plus side, India holds a seemingly endless handfull of trump cards to cancel out any negatives. Most of those cards fall in the suit of "Only In India". Tami and I can see the difference most tangibly in how much we write and how many photos we take here compared to other countries. If you've spent time here, you have some idea of what I'm talking about. True to form, the past month has coughed up an unbroken string of such "OII" moments. Just yesterday I was walking down an alley here in Mysore and I saw this booth out of the corner of my eye:

I continued walking for fifteen or twenty paces wondering if I really saw what I thought I saw...so I went back, looked at the sign and asked the man sitting on the floor if "setting bones" was his actual business. "Yes! Bone setting...and massage!" Okay . . . .

It happens all the time here. This morning I went out to buy yogurt for breakfast. It was early and the streets were quiet but just down from our corner I saw a tight cluster of maybe 30 men gathered around someone along the side of the street. As I approached I could hear the call and response between a man's voice and a high-pitched, muffled boy's. Occasionally a drum played by another boy and a high-pitched whistle punctuated the exchange. I looked over the shoulders of the crowd and the ringleader was evangelizing about something as he exchanged folded pieces of paper for money with the onlookers. Par for scenes like this, the men and boys stared motionless with wide eyes. From what I could gather, the man would get Rupee notes of a given denomination and a young boy hidden at his feet, under a wicker basket, covered by a rug would call out the amount that someone had handed the man...all without seeing the bills. At the end, the spectators who handed over cash would read the papers which may have been something like fortunes...but I don't know.

I already mentioned the pilgrammage Tami and I joined in Tiruvanamallai. (Tami wrote a full blog about it.) There, every month on the full moon, hundreds of thousands of Hindus come to join in a 14 kilometer walk around a holy mountain. They start late in the evening just after the moon rises and the crowd flows all night and into the next day. Indians are pretty serious walkers and, in a collective setting like this, they hustle. We were both exausted and sore by the time we finished sometime before dawn. That all the pilgrims walk barefoot on rough, pebble strewn asphalt made the circumambulation sincerely humbling.


The masses start by gathering and performing different rituals at the temple in the center of town. Thousands gather at the main gate (tallest one at the far side in above photo) and the atmosphere feels for all the world like something straight out of the Middle Ages. After the appropriate amount of fire oriented devotion, they troop off through the neighborhoods to the edge of the city. All along the way the route is lined with ancillary temples big and small and old and new. Almost every pilgrim veers off the road to perform prayers at these.


As you might expect, there are also all manner of wacky participants of different natures. There is a legion of beggars, food and chai sellers, a few free food stations provided by larger temples, performers (among them a handful of blind musical groups), booths selling religious paraphenalia and videos and dvd's of various gurus preaching the gospel, palm readers....and on, and on. The guy with this van was one of a few we saw who had a computer mounted in a console that apparently told your fortune.

The whole walk took maybe five or six hours but those were some of the most interesting hours I've enjoyed. Scenes like this are not common (or expected) for a guy raised in a small, Midwest farm town. On the future "to-do" list is a repeat of this walk on the full moon of the final month of the lunar year (usually November or December). At that time, on the main pilgrimage of the year, the local holy men erect a huge, ten-meter tall "wick" on top of the mountain, saturate it with three thousand liters of oil and set it on fire.

Death Defying Circus

A couple weeks ago, in a small hill town called Kumily, we saw a traveling daredevil show where motorcycles and small cars raced around inside a big, wood and steel frame cylinder. Spectators stand a few rows deep on a ledge along the top and look down into a 25 foot deep x 40 foot wide cup. The motos and cars ride up the walls using centrifugal force.

I'd seen one of these shows with just motos back in 1994 and was duly impressed but I would never have believed you'd get a car - even a small car - up the walls of one of these narrow bowls. They start off the show with one guy driving a moto round and round at high speed....and HIGH SOUND - (They run a straight pipe right out of the cylinder for added thrill effect. This gets the crowd's attention.) What really got my attention was the way the entire structure swayed and shook as the moto raced below us. I was also more than slightly terrified by the fact that a rickety rail was all that separated us from the flying racer in the event anything went wrong. At first I wouldn't get within a full pace of the rail.
(You can see the blurred image of the moto in the center of the photo right on the top seam of the wall.)
As the show progresses, they run two, then three motorcycles up in the cylinder at the same time. Each rider tests his skill and the crowd's ability to keep calm by performing stunts - riding no-handed, crossing legs over the bike, standing one-legged on the seat, riding hand-in-hand with two bikes alongside each other...all the while the racket and shaking feeling like we were standing inside a dreadful machine shop.

Periodically, they stopped before their next number. Near the end, when they brought out the "big guns", I saw one of those things that ellicted a, "you have got to be kidding me" from my own mouth. A young boy of maybe 4 or 5 years had been standing with the drivers. Nonchalantly, he opened the passenger door of the car below on the right and climbed in. Moments later, everyone else mounted a bike or got in a car.....and off they went.

For the next several minutes, two cars and three motorcycles raced around the cramped bowl. One trick had a moto race along parallel on the downside of a car. Don't ask me how they did it but he stood on the upper peg of his bike, lay across the hood of the car and joined both outstretched hands with those of the car driver reaching from above. As if negotiating all that wasn't enough, one of the car drivers (the one with the child inside!), crawled up and drove around standing upright outside of his window using his feet on the wheel. This show cost us 20 Rupees each . . . about 50 cents, American. I'd gotten my money's worth and then some.

For those who wanted a final thrill, the other car driver, also standing outside his window and driving with feet, raced along right at the rail at the top of the bowl. Indians with 10 Rupee notes in their hands leaned over the rail and this guy . . . this James Bond of India . . . reached over at high speed and snatched them. I handed over two.

What's in store for you?

Every day in India offers the potential to see something you've never seen before. A while back in Tamil Nadu, we visited a huge temple dedicated to the god Shiva in Chidambarum. Inside, we came across this fortune telling duo - a man and a parakeet. People desiring a look into their future sat for a card reading.

On command from his human partner, the parrot would come out of his cage. He'd then follow more directions pulling cards from a shuffled stack.

After enough cards had been 'drawn', the bird returned to the cage and the man proceeded with the reading. Nice show.

A National Institution

If you've spent any time in India, you know chai (what we Americans call tea) plays a role in Indian culture unlike any drink we have at home. Yeah, we drink coffee or Coke to get our caffeine but, like most things in the US, the process is more about convenience and speed. In India, getting and drinking a tea is a time-honored process that takes a skilled preparer and a patient...but entertained...customer.

We went to this guy every morning in the Tamil Nadu city of Pondicherry. He worked at a corner stall on the street and you COULD NOT walk past without stopping to watch his act. All the chai guys put on a show and this guy's was as good as any. His chai was excellent, too.

Get the milk boiling and swirl in the tea leaves...

Run the brew through a sock strainer...

Add a little sugar...

Give it a vigorous mixing....

And pour without looking.....

Edible artistry.

Relax, buddy...

A couple weeks ago I ranted about some of the headaches of traveling in India. Those events and my reaction were true but...India's a big place. Time and cumulative experiences, especially good ones, can modulate the lows so your overall impression is a lot more positive. I am back here for a third time, after all, so India must have plenty going for it, its innumerable pains in the ass notwithstanding. I also needed a reality check about how soft we got in Southeast Asia. Traveling's comparatively quite easy there and returning to India, I suppose, will always hold the potential to be a shocker.

As of today, I think we've been here for a month..and en total, it's been pretty amazing. In that time we've seen two Unesco World Heritage listed monuments...

joined in an all-night, full-moon, fire-filled pilgrammage around a holy mountain with a couple hundred thousand barefoot devotees of the god Shiva...

seen two, rural, all-night performances of traditional Hindu dance and music ceremonies...

toured spice and tea plantations...

spent a week exploring one of the largest intentional communities (i.e. communes) on Earth...

been "blessed" by an elephant....

looked out on the Bay of Bengal one day and on the Arabian Sea ten days later...

I'm sure there's more.

The big lesson at this point has been, "Don't fight it, man." That should have been obvious and it's a prime metaphor for life in general. If you don't try to roll with what life (in this case, life in India) gives you, you're going to expend a lot of energy trying to change a reality that is infinitely larger than yourself. You're also going to miss out on a lot of amazing things along the way.