Hooray for Bollywood

Been off-line for awhile. This being our home stretch (in a quite literal sense) we've been moving and seeing things at a brisk pace. We were in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) recently. Mumbai is the main home of the Indian movie industry usually refered to as "Bollywood". They make a lot of films in Bollywood - upwards of 800 a year, I believe. For reasons I don't fully understand, the makers of films in India like to have non-Indians appear as extras. This is so common that the Lonely Planet guidebook even has some pointers on places you might get "discovered".

One recent day, Tami and I were walking into our guesthouse and a man asked us if we wanted to be extras. Tami hesitated b/c she had to replace her camera that had just died. I thought, "Why not?" and arranged to be picked up the next morning at 6:00 a.m. From the very first, it was clear that this was not going to be a...glamorous endeavor. You see, three or four blocks up the street is the Taj Palace, the nicest hotel in Mumbai. We saw Westerners of all stripes coming and going through the Taj's noble portal every time we passed. No, to find his Euro/North American faces, the casting agent came instead to the small cluster of guesthouses (some might call it a ghetto) frequented by backpackers. I guess when you're in the background it's not so important that you have long straggly hair or haven't shaved in weeks (as did the Argentine who was with us). They just want folks with round eyes and light skin.....that, and they only want to pay 500 Rupees a day (about $15). Whatever, it wasn’t about cash. The 500 roops didn’t even cover our room. I figured it might be worth some laughs…and it was….for about two or maybe three of the nineteen hours.

I and a couple other sleepy looking scruffs piled into a small bus with about a dozen people of various national origins but all uniformly European. No one talked except for one, probably over caffeinated young woman from Buffalo, NY who announced to her friends that it was “croissant time”. Where she got one in Mumbai I do not know. Our shuttle driver sped off through pre-rush hour Mumbai with speed being the operative word. We bumped and turned and jostled on roads I’d have driven at half the speed and that in a sports car. He clearly had a deadline and in this case the operative word, I hoped, wasn’t going to be dead. We only got stopped by one cop. I watched the driver not so slyly slip him a handful of bills and we were rolling again in less than two minutes. It took us a full hour to cross Mumbai, 100% of the way by surface streets. It’s a BIG city. At last we wound our way through a very stinky little slum then a line of trees and finally out to the edge of a broad beach.

All the accoutrements I would have expected were there – generator truck, props, cameras, lighting equipment, tents, etc. It was a real production. The “white folks” first stop was at our canteen setup. Breakfast on the beach was a decent way to decompress from the terror of the breakneck Rally of Mumbai.

Most of the people just nibbled but I dug right in and piled my plate high. Something instinctive told me that there were no guarantees when I’d get a chance to eat again and thank heavens I did. With about 150 people trying to coordinate shooting on a beach, take after take pushed lunch from noon to one to two and so on. Almost all the extras were moaning with hunger (and boredom) by mid-day. The “stars” had their own little table with snacks and tea and coffee but it was made clear to a couple of the riff-raff that we weren’t supposed to touch it.

They hustled us through breakfast to "wardrobe" where we were fitted in whatever passed for the Indian idea of beachwear for westerners. The girls got a lot of floral print things that hid skin and the guys got shorts and singlets that made us look like strongmen from the early 1900's.

Work commenced. It turned out we were shooting a "two-fer" that day: one commercial for Sony Handycams and one for an Indian bank - both themed with families at the beach.

It was also fun to see the production assistants run and jump...and splash...to get the shots. I'm glad I don't do this for a living.

The best part was undoubtedly hearing the director shriek at his assistants on the loudspeakers in his mix of Hindi and English. As the tide receded from the prepared set, "WE'RE LOSING THE F*CKING PANNI (water) MAHESH! IF WE DON'T GET IT THIS TAKE YOU CAN KISS YOUR OPENING SHOT F*CKING GOODBYE! CELLO!! CELLO!! (go!, go!)"

My role was supremely easy. I got placed next to the lovely Genvieve from Montreal. Our background roll was to make conversation and look like we were having fun at the beach. Not the easiest fifteen bucks I've ever made but certainly not the hardest.

Che's the one

It's not official but, after months of casual observation, we have a winner in the most common person to appear on T-shirts and posters in India. I've walked past many Gandhis and several Kurt Cobains. Every now and then you see a vestigial Britney. A close runner-up would have to be a WWE wrestler named John Cena. Yet, taken as a whole, even the whole WWE stable including The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin and some guy with an "H" in his name, their numbers still aren't enough to outpace the ubiquitous Che Guevara. From what I've seen around south Asia, for whatever reason, Che's the icon you have to have.

Quiet Game

A couple weeks ago we were walking down a street and we came to a sports stadium. The gates were open and I saw players running around on the field so I went in to take a look.


A soccer game was going on and the stands had a good crowd.


The play on the field was fast but...oddly quiet. I watched. I looked back at the stands. No one was talking - they were signing.

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.

Can't I just enjoy my milk?

Last night a man barged into our conversation as we drank spiced milk at a corner stand. No "Hello", no "Excuse me" - he jumped straight to, "Which country?" (as in..."are you from?") Sometimes it's tough to maintain patience. Sometimes simple courtesy can be a stretch. Reflexively, the corners of my mouth stretched back into a tight grin and my eyes rolled. Guys like this seek any engagement they can scrounge to use as an "in" to sell you something. Usually, the less they have to offer, the more willing they are for any entree. They often sidle in close, ignoring boundaries of personal space that Americans take so much for granted that you don't even know where they lie...until someone crosses them. My hand instinctively goes for my money pocket when I sense it. This guy had stepped over the line. Before I had a chance to think about what was coming out of my mouth, he was backpedaling, "Why you is angry with me?" Tami and I both hesitated and she opened with an explanation of the protocol of public interaction.

He had us.

So...instead of him working through the usual litany of, "How long you are in India?"...."What is your profession?"..."What is your good name?"....etc; he was perfectly happy to learn about how Americans don't like to be rudely interrupted mid-conversation. He knew that was just a different path to get to his (and our) inevitable destination: he had a rickshaw and wanted to know if he could drive us around the following day.

A blind person could see it coming. As I did, I could only shake my head with the same tight grin and endeavor to conclude our discourse. Still sticking to the standard script, he tried to salvage some dignity by thrusting his hand toward my stomach. (Indian men, for whatever reason, feel compelled to want to shake the hands of foreign visitors. A day rarely passes where a hand doesn't unexpectedly jab out at me as I walk down the street. After you've spent enough time here, you'll understand why I always try to avoid the handshake. Sometimes, though, that hand comes in close enough that you reach out purely out of self-defense.) That's pretty much where I was with our friend on the milk corner. So I grasped his hand....and I noticed two things one right after the other. His hand was unnaturally soft, like a woman's. I quickly glanced down and saw not one but two small thumbs resting on the back of my hand right at the base of my index finger. Amazingly, both nails were filed into the typical, long, rounded "v" common to male Indian digits. With that, he turned and disappeared into the crowds and traffic, no rickshaw to be seen.

Back In India

We've been back in India for about ten days. For this being my third visit, I'm flabbergasted by how tough it is to get accustomed to being here yet again. The stenches are impossible to ignore. I keep finding myself getting angry about open sewers or curbs that reek of urine. The Indians have had years...decades, if not centuries now to deal with the filth. But it doesn't seem to change. I can only speak from the experience of my past visits - the first just over fourteen years ago. It has not gotten any better. As other countries "progress" economically, they build better things. For better or worse, China scraps out old, barely functional neighborhoods or roads or buildings and they replace them with cleaner, more comfortable, higher capacity upgrades. As the Indian economy grows, they just build more and more of the same ill conceived junk. Yes...the odd corporation builds a modern, high-tech campus on a remote greenfield site; the few wealthy families build extravagant, walled villas on farmland outside the cities or they stuff more and more brand new, big SUV's . . . on the same crumbling and constricted roads. Otherwise, the whole place is just as annoying and difficult to negotiate as ever. Either they don't want day to day life to get any easier or they just don't know that it can be better. It certainly is hard to believe anyone would choose to live this way.

Last night, we moved into a guest house and the sheets were so dirty we washed them ourselves. (Not the first time.) That was a perfect capper to our day-long odyssey from Chidambarum. Our departure from there began with the obese, toothless, domineering manager screaming at me to wait until his irritating boy flunky inspected our grimy, mosquito-ridden room to see of we'd harmed anything. Yeah, right....

His controlling pushiness was in keeping with his behavior when we checked in the prior afternoon. Then, he asked if I had any pens like the one he'd given me to sign the register with. It wasn't enough that he'd pointed to one of our small bags, was told it contained food then allowed his flunky to hector us mercilessly for part of our lunch. Now he wanted pens from me? He and the boy were so spookily persistent that Tami and I went to unprecedented lengths to try to protect our belongings while we were away from the room. In two (+) years on the road, I don't remember taking such measures to make theft difficult for potential pilferers. I lifted the backpacks onto a high concrete ledge on one side of the room then tied them in a web of cord. Before we left, we took a photo with a digicam as a reference to see if they had been tampered with. Traveling with peace of mind, eh?

So, as I tossed the room key on his counter and turned to walk down the stairs, his protestations grew from his customary bark to a literal scream. I thought, "what the hell???" Yeah...we scratched paint on his precious, rickety chair or left (yet one more) stain on his sickening walls. "Bye, bye loser." Moments such as this can constitute the occasional satisfying triumph of traveling in India. He and his staff had done plenty to bully us and, for whatever reason, he felt he had to push us around one last time before we left. (Yes, we could have not checked in at all but the psycho behavior didn't start until after we handed over our cash.) Situations like this are exactly what is meant when people say traveling in India is tough. Being here can feel like a never-ending battle not to get screwed or belittled.

All the way to the train station I kept glancing over my shoulder to see if any of his minions were following in pursuit. We submerged into the hubbub of the bus station and I celebrated with a tea. Several buses a day supposedly run the 70 kilometers (42mi) from Chidambarum to Pondicherry so we thought our transit was simply a matter of getting on, turning on our IPods and enjoying the ride. Not hardly.

Although there were many buses, almost none had their destinations written in English. (Tamil script looks like elf writing to our eyes.) We had to ask repeatedly, "Pondicherry?" This being India, whenever a bus pulled into the lot, its doors were immediately mobbed with scores of riders fighting to board. With our 50(+) lb. packs, we never stood a chance. Even more disheartening, the couple times we were able to get on a bus we thought was going our way, the driver or conducter would shoo us back off - ostensibly either because the bus was not in fact going to Pondicherry or because it wasn't leaving for a long time - both lies. One time I asked a driver if the bus was going to Madurai. He said, "No, Pondicherry." I told him that was great, we were going to Pondi. He immediately backtracked and said I couldn't board because the bus wasn't leaving until 12:30 and waved me off to find a different one. A short while later I noticed people boarding the same bus and taking seats. We got on but the conductor this time blocked the way and said the bus wasn't going until 1:00. I said I didn't care but he still wouldn't let us on. The real reason for that was our big backpacks. Every single bus gets absolutely stuffed with humans and our packs represent one more headache for workers whose jobs, from all appearances, offer litter more than an unmitigated stream of headaches.

That's their problem, though. Our problem was to get the hell out of Chidambarum. After a solid hour and a half and scores of buses coming and going, we were finally guided onto a coach by two students. Before the conductor saw us, we wedged our packs and ourselves into a back bench (there are no luggage areas on these buses). As we paid (for three seats) we were informed that the bus was turning west 20km short of Pondi in the junction town of Cuddalore. We'd have to undertake this process again there. Awesome.

Luckily, Cuddalore has many more buses continuing to Pondi so the crush of humanity was more manageable. We quickly found a bus and seats ... then we waited for the bus to fill. For a good 45 minutes in the midday heat we waited until every square inch of standing room was packed. You can learn new meanings to words like thirst and claustrophobia traveling in India.

Without any further complications, we arrived in Pondicherry and prepared to exit the bus....or so we supposed. Because we had our packs, we thought it was best to wait until the other passengers fought their ways out the doors. Our hesitation backfired, though. Before we could step down, the throngs below were heaving to get on so they could get a seat. It was ridiculous. Even though it was obvious that we needed to get off, no one would stop pushing us. I had no choice but to push back...and gravity was on my side. I'm describing human interaction that is void of all courtesy - just a notch below being dangerous. It was like this during my first visit to India and it's still like that today.

If that wasn't bad enough, the next instant gifted us with another of India's charms. I heard Tami yell and turned in time to see her whack a man with one of her small bags. I didn't have to guess why. As soon as she told me he groped her, I gave him a solid stiff-arm in the back. That, or nothing I yelled could get him to turn around. He obviously knew exactly what he did and was too embarrassed to face confrontation in front of dozens of Indian men and women.

With our adrenaline high, we set out looking for a room. It's festival (holiday) time in the state of Tamil Nadu right now and rooms can be hard to come by. At the best of times getting a passable room in India can be frustrating but right now it can make your hair a shade grayer. We dropped the packs in front of a restaurant and Tami waited while I went looking. Out of fifteen guest houses I saw two rooms that would make a prisoner of war cringe and one that just might have been preferable to sleeping on the filthy sidewalk. Everything else was full. We finally gave up and took a rickshaw into the center of town to search there. After a few more strikeouts we found the place where we are now. It ain't great but at least the sheets are clean.

More later.