It's a widely-accepted and readily verifiable fact that most things in India make no sense at all. The roads. The fondness among males for dying their hair orange. Most television adverts. I woke this morning - on Republic Day, a celebration of the nation and its beginnings as a proper democracy, a commemoration of emancipation from enslavement which gives rise every year to demonstrations of patriotism all over the subcontinent - to the sound of 'The Last Post', issuing mournfully from a bugle in the road outside. Yes, that's right, the people of India had thought it best to celebrate their ideological freedom and rebirth with a rendition the Remembrance Day - Remembrance Day - standard from the country they used to call king. Wrong, surely, on more than a million counts. Raising my eyebrows for the umpteenth time this week, I turned over and went back to sleep. India!
Seriously, I needn't give those eyebrows such a regular workout, because irony is almost entirely lost on a normal Indian. Or maybe they've just perfected the deadpan. You try outlasting the nearest taxi driver in a sarcasm contest after he has quoted your five times the going price for a trip to the station and you'll quickly realise he is utterly, tragically in earnest. Even the most convoluted bureaucratic procedures are treated with absolute seriousness. Every night, we've made it a ritual to meet up and exchange horror stories about the incomprehensible mess that is your average transaction with any Indian behind a desk. Getting small things done - even finding the place where one can get small things done - can take all day. Stephen, an Irish friend of mine who is also a freelance zoologist, has had more than his fair share of Indian bureaucracy. It took him a week after he arrived in the city, and countless letters and forms, to gain access to the Zoological Survey of India, where he will be performing vital working putting in order some of the enormous stock of specimens the museum has accrued. Apparently, in their average levels of organisation in this field, India is approximately 100 years behind the rest of the world. In one day, he informs me, shoved in a jar and presumed to be identical, he found eight different species of ghecko, four of which were completely new to science. Stories of this sort are usually met with the popular travellers' response, an expression of wonder, disbelief or exasperation...India!
He's been 'working with' these guys for about two weeks now. Every day at 10:30am, with commendable levels of optimism/frightening levels of delusion, Stephen saunters gaily down the street to the Zoological Survey. Ah ha, what is that I hear you huff so Britishly? Is 10:30 am the time to be starting an average working day, especially such vital work, attempting to restore India's international credibility in the field of zoology? Well, ideally, yes. Actually, I think Stephen would quickly skewer any opportunity to start work at 10:30am with a flick of his scalpel, to prevent it squirming away. He provides the conservative estimate, nightly, that in his whole time in Kolkata, the office workers have never appeared before 11:30am. The working day, typically, ends at 4:30.
But hold! An unlikely figure is hurrying down the road at the ungodly hour of 10, to single-handedly restore our faith in Indian dedication to the task. It is the security guard, never missed a mornin' in twenty years, guv'nor. Surely, then, this figure can redeem our beleaugered hero from his misery, and give him a much needed boost in his attempts to tackle the immense backlog of work which the Zoological Survey, through general laziness and incompetence, have carefully accrued over many years. Surely, there is hope! Actually, no, there is no hope whatsoever. It turns out that the manager of the Survey must arrive and sign out the key to the security guard, who can then unlock the door, before science can proceed on its trailblazing course. Every night, as Stevo drinks his whisky, his hands tremble more and more.
Laziness, indeed, isn't totally to blame, though it is endemic. The problem is that there are so many people to employ that most of them, once employed, just sit around doing nothing for the day, at least at street level. Three men do the work one would do in Britain. When you walk into a restaurant, there will be 3, maybe 4 waiters, sitting and staring, and it is an effort to recall even one of them back from whichever imaginative regions they were roaming for long enough to order a chai. Nobody even reads a book. No doubt in the info-commerce scrummages of Bangalore and Hyderabad, people are beavering away with admirable dedication, but I'm sorry, I just haven't seen enough of it so far. Perhaps this indifference to one's job has seeped up the system into the scientific laboratories. The laziness, though, wasn't my point. The upshot of having so many people to employ is that huge paper-chains of bureaucracy have been created - merely see the account of my visit to the Asiatic Society in the previous blog entry for an example - in which everybody knows their step, and possibly the one above and below, but nobody at all can tell you anything about the complete picture. Some guys must have been receiving people at their desks for years, filing and issuing the appropriate bits of paper, without really having a clue what, for instance, the name of the company they work for is, or what it is that this company actually does. If all the man-hours were correctly employed in, for instance, putting in place a system of waste-disposal more sophisticated than 'the cows will eat it', India would be cleaner than, I don't know, our back room (the one that is locked until visitors come).
It seems that a position and its powers are everything. In these paper chains, those above are called 'Sir', and those below call you 'Sir'. Phil, a clever American chap and my very English friend Roger distilled the Indian methods of powerplay into one basic tenet - ritual humiliation. If anyone can make you look small, they hold the upper hand. The blow could be as petty as insulting your cooking - something I witnessed in an Indian house very recently where the housekeeper was treated like dirt - but they all count. A man behind a comparatively big desk will lose his rag very quickly with an attendant, who is sent scurrying off down gloomy corridors on another pointless errand, perhaps to fetch some bloody pride. I'm sorry, I'm typing this out for the second time after the local internet crashed, so if I seem slightly exasperated, you'll know why.
You have to understand that the mood of the foreign traveller fluctuates wildly over here. At best, you are merely bemused, revelling in the freedom of living in a place where a smile or a shove will get you so far; at worst, you are cursing the day you ever set foot inside the Foreigner's Registration Office, attempting the inoffensive task of obtaining a pass for the north-east. This means that, probably, for negative point I've outlined above, India has a great and unique pro. It is, for instance, possibly the only place in the world where you can watch jazz legend Herbie Hancock perform for three hours with Wayne Shorter for the equivalent of about one quid fifty. This I did, with a Norwegian friend of mine and his English girlfriend. What else have I done? I woke up at 8am one day, on the spur of the moment, to go and find someone to play football with on the Maidan. I came across one game, consisting of about 30 middle-aged Indians haring around a pitch with apparently no touchline. Someone would just boot it and off they'd go. The quality of the play was utterly appalling and I quite fancied my chances. Only problem was that I was wearing sandals - they were the most solid shoes I had, an improvement on flip-flops. I put on some socks to complete the illusion, which fooled no-one. Got into a scuffle with a fat old Sikh who decided to give the foreigner some of the John Terry treatment - it was quite liberating to scream some of the foulest things you know at somebody, knowing they have utterly no comprehension of what you're saying. We made it up and they invited me back the next day, but, alas, the urge to wake up before 10am had deserted me.
What then? I've been staying in dorms at the Paragon, a local hotel which has been popular with travellers for thirty years, and made some really good friends. Got to know a load of the Koreans, and was very sad to say goodbye to them. Buying a guitar was the best decision I've made so far out here, it's very good for building bridges. Only problem is it's bust again. A few days ago, I ventured to Raipur to visit Dixie at her NGO offices. I'll let her tell you about what the place is like in her blog, but suffice to say that on the way back I had another train-related mishap (kicked the guitar off the bunk in my sleep). Actually I had a lovely few days, good to get out of this city, which is comfy and tends to sap your time. Dixie is staying in the region of India with possibly the fewest tourists - we amassed crowds when we went for a stroll, and were given free chai. Dixie's housekeeper, a certain Saros, is a living legend, and her employer and his silent cousin are also very nice. We sat on the roof one night and played the guitar, and everyone had a sing - you see what I mean?
Back in Cal, I went to visit the College Street market, which houses apparently the biggest collection of books in Asia. It's quite a surreal experience to debate the relative literary merits of George Eliot and Shakespeare with an Indian shopowner as part of a haggle. India! Won't say too much about that because I'm planning to take Dad there...
That's right, in approximately three hours now, Beech Senior will touch down at Dum Dum airport, Kolkata. I've a rough itinerary to take up the first few days, but to be honest I want to keep it loose, give him a flavour of what travelling is really like over here. Might even let him say a few words in the blog. We'll be heading down to Orissa, a predominantly tribal region of India, possibly the location of the elusive 'Old India' so many tourists seem to be seeking. I'll let you know. Until then, Indians beware, the Beech boys may be utterly lost in a street near you...
Friday, 26 January 2007
Friday, 12 January 2007
Back to business
Right, time to fill in some gaps.
First things first: if you want to hear amusing and graphic descriptions of burping waiters and marauding goats, please visit Dixie's blog, dixieontheotherside.blogspot.com. She's funnier than I am, and besides, she has a much better memory for the specifics of bodily functions.
It's the fifth of January. Our two protagonists are (sob) soon to be separated: Dixie is going south tomorrow, to work in Chattisgarh for three months. And how did we celebrate our last day together? By visiting a graveyard. Actually it was a lovely spot, with row upon row of tombs belonging to British officers or their 'virtuous' and 'artless' spouses and daughters - Hindus, of course, cremate their dead, so a graveyard is quite a rarity in India, especially one so calm and sad. Struck by a particularly beautiful epitaph, I had whipped out my journal to take it down when, very suddenly, something else became much more important. The nearest toilet was a desperate five-minute mince down the road.
Ha ha! Dignity (fully) restored, I rejoined Dixie in the graveyard and we briefly doubted the moral correctness of playing cards over somebody's eternal resting place, and did anyway. Then, continuing our attempts to forego the comforts of the West, we perused a Borders-style bookshop and took Assam tea and lattes in the upstairs cafe. Dinner that evening featured no burping waiters but a wealth of undercooked chicken instead.
And, on the 6th, the time came for us to say goodbye! Please, stay strong, everyone. We got up late, for old times' sake, and packed with heavy hearts. The day's excursion was to Dalhousie Square (renamed, wickedly, after the three renegades executed for attempting to assassinate Williams Dalhousie). Bizarrely refused a picture of the place, we dodged the trams and taxis to a local lake/cesspool. After sulking our way back downtown to pick up our bags, and then sulking our way to the station, it was time to leave. I saw her off at Platform 19, where we kissed publicly a lot more than we were respectfully and even legally supposed to. In honour of
mum I ran alongside the train as it took off, and endured the bemused gazes of a platformful of Indians on the long trudge back.
Sudder Street has quite a few characters. Besides the profusion of three-legged animals there's a blind man who sings like an angel around town every night, a couple of deaf lads who make jokes to each other about you in sign as you sit eating at their stall, and your usual share of burned out hippies. In my dorm there lives an weird old American woman called Maggie. She might seriously be anything from an incredibly wrinkled 40 to an incredibly wrinkled 90. As far as I know she's as old as time itself. This decrepitude unfortunately doesn't extend to her flirting - she keeps pinching our cheeks, me and Roger, and calling us 'lovely lads' in her croaky, undead Californian twang. You have to be very careful if she mentions her foot - there is a story that goes along with how she injured it, but it's not worth the effort of listening, not even the first time round. I think I will hear the terrifying sound of her snoring in the night for a long, long time.
That night, I was staying in the Hotel Maria - in a dorm, for a paltry 70 Rs. a night. I've since moved down the road to the Hotel Paragon, which is ten ruperts more but has a nice roof where you can sit and read a book/escape Maggie. I've made some great friends, English, Irish, French, Belgian, and am on nodding terms with about a million Koreans - a big volunteer party. Last night one of the Frenchies was leaving. Rafael his name, and he's so bloody French he should have accordion music accompanying him wherever he goes. We all had celebratory chai on the roof, before the Koreans took over.
And that, I suppose, is it. There was the advert, which was a lot of waiting around and a few moments of pure Indian farce, in organisational terms. They made the classic mistake of employing shepherds and their flock to make up the backshot (this is on the Maidan, in the very centre of Kolkata city), and I'll never forget the irate director screaming 'Will somebody move those fucking sheep?' down the microphone. Yesterday, I finally managed, after several days of trying, to get into the Asiatic Society, after several days of trying - it seems they open when they feel like it. It consists of a huge library and musuem, an endless corridors and dark offices and clerks sitting around covered in dust and reams and reams of paper. As a visitor to that library, I personally used up two or three acres of rainforest. I entered the building, signed a ledger, was sent upstairs to the library, then sent up to the third floor to get permission to enter the library and sign a ledger, then back down to the first floor to deposit my bag and sign another ledger, then into the library and into the office of the chief librarian who issued me a temporary pass in order that I might actually be able to read a book after I had, yes, signed a ledger. It was like something out of a Kafka novel, a nightmare vision of bureaucracy gone mad. And getting a book was no mean feat. You must browse the catalogue, fill out two forms indicating title, author's name, catalogue number, time of requisition, your name and your pass number. Anything from ten minutes to two hours later, a librarian will shuffle up to you with an old, wood-worm riddled tome. By this time, you have already gone mad and are chewing on your shoes.
There has been civil strife in 'Cal'. Something to do with land assignation. Whatever it is, some people are very unhappy, and on Monday a mob marched through the streets forcing shop and restaurant owners to close or be trashed. In other parts of the city, there are riots and violent demonstrations, even a few lynchings. In the newspaper yesterday, I read the testimony of one little boy, who watched his father pleading for mercy before a mob kicked him to death and threw him on a fire. It seems he had criticised the action of tearing up the roads, taken in order to stop government troops from entering the suburb. Chastening stuff, anyway.
But life on peaceful Sudder Street ambles on. I am in one of the three internet cafes, soon to be at work once more on my application for MA funding. I get the feeling I may be guilt-tripped into doing charity work while I'm here, but for the moment I can be lazy and selfish and use Shakespeare as an excuse to hide behind - he really is a writer for all occasions.
First things first: if you want to hear amusing and graphic descriptions of burping waiters and marauding goats, please visit Dixie's blog, dixieontheotherside.blogspot.com. She's funnier than I am, and besides, she has a much better memory for the specifics of bodily functions.
It's the fifth of January. Our two protagonists are (sob) soon to be separated: Dixie is going south tomorrow, to work in Chattisgarh for three months. And how did we celebrate our last day together? By visiting a graveyard. Actually it was a lovely spot, with row upon row of tombs belonging to British officers or their 'virtuous' and 'artless' spouses and daughters - Hindus, of course, cremate their dead, so a graveyard is quite a rarity in India, especially one so calm and sad. Struck by a particularly beautiful epitaph, I had whipped out my journal to take it down when, very suddenly, something else became much more important. The nearest toilet was a desperate five-minute mince down the road.
Ha ha! Dignity (fully) restored, I rejoined Dixie in the graveyard and we briefly doubted the moral correctness of playing cards over somebody's eternal resting place, and did anyway. Then, continuing our attempts to forego the comforts of the West, we perused a Borders-style bookshop and took Assam tea and lattes in the upstairs cafe. Dinner that evening featured no burping waiters but a wealth of undercooked chicken instead.
And, on the 6th, the time came for us to say goodbye! Please, stay strong, everyone. We got up late, for old times' sake, and packed with heavy hearts. The day's excursion was to Dalhousie Square (renamed, wickedly, after the three renegades executed for attempting to assassinate Williams Dalhousie). Bizarrely refused a picture of the place, we dodged the trams and taxis to a local lake/cesspool. After sulking our way back downtown to pick up our bags, and then sulking our way to the station, it was time to leave. I saw her off at Platform 19, where we kissed publicly a lot more than we were respectfully and even legally supposed to. In honour of
mum I ran alongside the train as it took off, and endured the bemused gazes of a platformful of Indians on the long trudge back.
Sudder Street has quite a few characters. Besides the profusion of three-legged animals there's a blind man who sings like an angel around town every night, a couple of deaf lads who make jokes to each other about you in sign as you sit eating at their stall, and your usual share of burned out hippies. In my dorm there lives an weird old American woman called Maggie. She might seriously be anything from an incredibly wrinkled 40 to an incredibly wrinkled 90. As far as I know she's as old as time itself. This decrepitude unfortunately doesn't extend to her flirting - she keeps pinching our cheeks, me and Roger, and calling us 'lovely lads' in her croaky, undead Californian twang. You have to be very careful if she mentions her foot - there is a story that goes along with how she injured it, but it's not worth the effort of listening, not even the first time round. I think I will hear the terrifying sound of her snoring in the night for a long, long time.
That night, I was staying in the Hotel Maria - in a dorm, for a paltry 70 Rs. a night. I've since moved down the road to the Hotel Paragon, which is ten ruperts more but has a nice roof where you can sit and read a book/escape Maggie. I've made some great friends, English, Irish, French, Belgian, and am on nodding terms with about a million Koreans - a big volunteer party. Last night one of the Frenchies was leaving. Rafael his name, and he's so bloody French he should have accordion music accompanying him wherever he goes. We all had celebratory chai on the roof, before the Koreans took over.
And that, I suppose, is it. There was the advert, which was a lot of waiting around and a few moments of pure Indian farce, in organisational terms. They made the classic mistake of employing shepherds and their flock to make up the backshot (this is on the Maidan, in the very centre of Kolkata city), and I'll never forget the irate director screaming 'Will somebody move those fucking sheep?' down the microphone. Yesterday, I finally managed, after several days of trying, to get into the Asiatic Society, after several days of trying - it seems they open when they feel like it. It consists of a huge library and musuem, an endless corridors and dark offices and clerks sitting around covered in dust and reams and reams of paper. As a visitor to that library, I personally used up two or three acres of rainforest. I entered the building, signed a ledger, was sent upstairs to the library, then sent up to the third floor to get permission to enter the library and sign a ledger, then back down to the first floor to deposit my bag and sign another ledger, then into the library and into the office of the chief librarian who issued me a temporary pass in order that I might actually be able to read a book after I had, yes, signed a ledger. It was like something out of a Kafka novel, a nightmare vision of bureaucracy gone mad. And getting a book was no mean feat. You must browse the catalogue, fill out two forms indicating title, author's name, catalogue number, time of requisition, your name and your pass number. Anything from ten minutes to two hours later, a librarian will shuffle up to you with an old, wood-worm riddled tome. By this time, you have already gone mad and are chewing on your shoes.
There has been civil strife in 'Cal'. Something to do with land assignation. Whatever it is, some people are very unhappy, and on Monday a mob marched through the streets forcing shop and restaurant owners to close or be trashed. In other parts of the city, there are riots and violent demonstrations, even a few lynchings. In the newspaper yesterday, I read the testimony of one little boy, who watched his father pleading for mercy before a mob kicked him to death and threw him on a fire. It seems he had criticised the action of tearing up the roads, taken in order to stop government troops from entering the suburb. Chastening stuff, anyway.
But life on peaceful Sudder Street ambles on. I am in one of the three internet cafes, soon to be at work once more on my application for MA funding. I get the feeling I may be guilt-tripped into doing charity work while I'm here, but for the moment I can be lazy and selfish and use Shakespeare as an excuse to hide behind - he really is a writer for all occasions.
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
For me and my Cal
Hey guys, quick post. Spent my first week as a twenty-two year old in 'Cal', as the hip young things around here call it. Been working on my Shakespeare funding application, sleeping, drinking, writing, altogether having a pretty good time. I've discovered a whole new way of living, incredibly cheaply, by eating on the street. Today, I've spent about 28 Rs. on breakfast and dinner. That's about 35p.
Met some cool people - lots of English here, actually, and, regrettably, some Welsh. Yesterday I was in a TV commercial, lots of rich folk from Mumbai ordering us around, but paid us 500 Rs. each! That's Hollywood, baby.
Hope everyone's well.
Met some cool people - lots of English here, actually, and, regrettably, some Welsh. Yesterday I was in a TV commercial, lots of rich folk from Mumbai ordering us around, but paid us 500 Rs. each! That's Hollywood, baby.
Hope everyone's well.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Sir, can I take your picture?
Right, had a quick flick over the last post to see where I was up to and realised how extremely boring it was, and after several comments from 'friends' I've decided to jazz up my blog for the New Year. So here it is, the new all-singing, all-dancing, er, blog (such a crap word). Let's see if you can spot where the forays into fantastic fiction blend into the mundane everyday realities.
On the 27th December, having traipsed with oh-so-silly optimism to the Root Institute, we ended up at Barma's guesthouse - it had a name, Mamta, but we didn't use it because our host's personality was so dominant it didn't seem proper to speak of it without mentioning him. The guesthouse was made of SOLID GOLD and hovered TWENTY FEET from the ground. It was a bit of a hassle getting in and out.
By the way, did I mention the mouse? The tiny, cute little mouse that decided over the Christmas period he would seek some company during those long, lonely nights? I was quite prepared to make friends, but when I returned to the room in Varanasi Yogi Lodge, after the phone call with the parentos, I found Dixie crouched on the bed surrounded by most of our stuff. 'I think it's behind your bag'. Ashen-faced, she motioned towards the corner. The French people staying in the room next door, linked by a grill up high in the wall, must have thought they were dreaming when they heard battle commence (scuffle-scuffle 'You can climb, you bastard!' scuffle-scuffle) though I was out of the room at the time and only heard Dixie's wide-eyed accounts. I must say, I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious, even when we were on our knees stuffing plastic bags into the cracks in the floor with a spoon. I'm only saying this now because Dixie has left the internet cafe, no doubt I'll get a cuff for my troubles when she reads it. The dangers I brave to tell people the truth.
In Bodhgaya, we spent a shameful amount of time lost in the carnival dimension of cards. We even went online, in order to find more card games to play and pass the time. This...well, boredom...was ensured by the fact that we couldn't get a train to Kolkata until New Year's Day. Instead, then, we had to celebrate in the decidedly staid surroundings of the Japanese Buddhist Temple. They had a big bell, everyone rung it, it was great. The evening was enlivened somewhat by a very touchy-feely, but nice, Indian chap called Sabi. Drunk beyond all sense of empathy, he led us back to his one-room flat and crashed in on his sleeping wife, in order to introduce us. Happy New Year!
But good old Barma, attentive to the point of neurosis, who pretended not to hear when you said you didn't want to order breakfast, who wheezed across town to bring back beer, who smarmed all over the place until the corridors were covered with a thick, gooey substance I think is called hospitality. Between the constant work of fending off his solicitations, we staggered away from our guesthouse to the Mahabodhi Mahavihara temple to relax, surrounding by thousands of prostrating, humming, groaning monks.
One the morning of the 29th, we rose at the unlikely time of 8am and, sailing past a crestfallen Barma, proceeded down Bodhgaya Road to the International Inter-faith Prayer for World Peace, stopping for only three or four games of cards over breakfast along the way. The ceremony, which featured addresses from a Christian Bishop, a Hindu priest, a Muslim elder, a Buddhist super-monk (I think that's the proper term), and, easily the most passionate of the lot, a fiery Jain lady. Like Hitler she screamed and gesticulated, through the mask which Jains wear to prevent them harming flies by swallowing them. No rabbi. The service was only partly spoilt by a noisy Indian attempting to talk to me about his business all the way through it. On our way back, after dinner at an excellent Tibetan restaurant, we stopped for another drink. Bought a few local streetkids some Pepsi, which they sat at a table and drank, obviously a completely new experience for them. Played cards with some others.
A sidenote on the very important issue of momos. These dumpling-like Tibetan/Nepalese creations were our mainstay during the long, tepid afternoons and cool evenings of Bodhgaya. Consisting of a filling surrounded by a kind of pasta-pastry, steamed or fried, they were good, solid food, unspiced. You can have them in soup, with veg or beef (beef!) or chicken, with dip. You can eat them on the roof. You can do anything with momos.
On the first, in the evening: Kolkata. Or that's what we thought. Caught a rickshaw from Bodhgaya to the nearest station, chugging through India's premier bandit-country at around 8pm when it was already pitch-black. Oh, how I wish we'd waited, and not put our faith in Indian Railways. The train to Howrah Station, Kolkata, which was supposed to leave at 9:50 pm, ended up pulling out of Gaya at 5:30am. Yes, for those of you who expect me to do the work, that's a delay of seven hours and forty minutes. We spent the intervening period with a group of equally-disgruntled Europeans, begging them to play rummy, whist, poker, anything, please, we just need another hand to come in! And then, just as we were about to reach Kolkata, the train EXPLODED. Exciting, eh?
Kolkata, then, is pretty damn cool, fortunate because I'm probably going to spend a month here. A city of wide, European roads and colonnades manned by cut-throat merchants and apathetic restaurateurs. Yesterday, on my birthday and our first full day here, we sauntered onto the Maidan (lit: 'field'), a large central grassy area housing numerous cricket and golf clubs, miraculously preserved from the predatory property developers. Cattle graze and horses roam in the shadow of skyscrapers, amid the numberless thocks of bat-on-ball. After chatting to some local schoolchildren, we wandered up to the Victoria Memorial - still staunchly referred to as the 'VM' despite efforts to Indianise the street and monuments names of Kolkata - and signed autographs for local Scouts. In fact, most of the streets are still referred to by their original British titles. Evidence of the Raj is everywhere, from the old administrative buildings, hopelessly begrimed and in an advanced state of disintegration, to the proud legacy of achievement in soccer. A deeply artistic city, central Kolkata teems with bookstalls and music-shops. Tonight, in fact, we intend to catch some live music in English in one of the many venues down Mirza Ghalib Road/Free School Street.
For my birthday celebration, we almost watched an Indian blue movie before realising our mistake and scarpering to another cinema. And twice, that's twice, we went for coffee at one of these swanky, European-style places for rich, hip young Indians. It's a whole different way of life out here, man, and I'm throwing myself into the thick of it. Seriously, when Dixie goes I'm going to live in a bucket for a week as penance.
Before I go there's just time for a special shoutout to a certain David Eggboro. Having been informed by Charlotte of the gloating that took place when I mentioned only her in the Christmas blog, I'm taking this opportunity to say that I like you both equally. Actually, Charlotte has just lost points through her cruelty, so if you play your cards right Eggie you might even become my third best friend outright after Shackleton and Joel. Sorry, Stevie.
On the 27th December, having traipsed with oh-so-silly optimism to the Root Institute, we ended up at Barma's guesthouse - it had a name, Mamta, but we didn't use it because our host's personality was so dominant it didn't seem proper to speak of it without mentioning him. The guesthouse was made of SOLID GOLD and hovered TWENTY FEET from the ground. It was a bit of a hassle getting in and out.
By the way, did I mention the mouse? The tiny, cute little mouse that decided over the Christmas period he would seek some company during those long, lonely nights? I was quite prepared to make friends, but when I returned to the room in Varanasi Yogi Lodge, after the phone call with the parentos, I found Dixie crouched on the bed surrounded by most of our stuff. 'I think it's behind your bag'. Ashen-faced, she motioned towards the corner. The French people staying in the room next door, linked by a grill up high in the wall, must have thought they were dreaming when they heard battle commence (scuffle-scuffle 'You can climb, you bastard!' scuffle-scuffle) though I was out of the room at the time and only heard Dixie's wide-eyed accounts. I must say, I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious, even when we were on our knees stuffing plastic bags into the cracks in the floor with a spoon. I'm only saying this now because Dixie has left the internet cafe, no doubt I'll get a cuff for my troubles when she reads it. The dangers I brave to tell people the truth.
In Bodhgaya, we spent a shameful amount of time lost in the carnival dimension of cards. We even went online, in order to find more card games to play and pass the time. This...well, boredom...was ensured by the fact that we couldn't get a train to Kolkata until New Year's Day. Instead, then, we had to celebrate in the decidedly staid surroundings of the Japanese Buddhist Temple. They had a big bell, everyone rung it, it was great. The evening was enlivened somewhat by a very touchy-feely, but nice, Indian chap called Sabi. Drunk beyond all sense of empathy, he led us back to his one-room flat and crashed in on his sleeping wife, in order to introduce us. Happy New Year!
But good old Barma, attentive to the point of neurosis, who pretended not to hear when you said you didn't want to order breakfast, who wheezed across town to bring back beer, who smarmed all over the place until the corridors were covered with a thick, gooey substance I think is called hospitality. Between the constant work of fending off his solicitations, we staggered away from our guesthouse to the Mahabodhi Mahavihara temple to relax, surrounding by thousands of prostrating, humming, groaning monks.
One the morning of the 29th, we rose at the unlikely time of 8am and, sailing past a crestfallen Barma, proceeded down Bodhgaya Road to the International Inter-faith Prayer for World Peace, stopping for only three or four games of cards over breakfast along the way. The ceremony, which featured addresses from a Christian Bishop, a Hindu priest, a Muslim elder, a Buddhist super-monk (I think that's the proper term), and, easily the most passionate of the lot, a fiery Jain lady. Like Hitler she screamed and gesticulated, through the mask which Jains wear to prevent them harming flies by swallowing them. No rabbi. The service was only partly spoilt by a noisy Indian attempting to talk to me about his business all the way through it. On our way back, after dinner at an excellent Tibetan restaurant, we stopped for another drink. Bought a few local streetkids some Pepsi, which they sat at a table and drank, obviously a completely new experience for them. Played cards with some others.
A sidenote on the very important issue of momos. These dumpling-like Tibetan/Nepalese creations were our mainstay during the long, tepid afternoons and cool evenings of Bodhgaya. Consisting of a filling surrounded by a kind of pasta-pastry, steamed or fried, they were good, solid food, unspiced. You can have them in soup, with veg or beef (beef!) or chicken, with dip. You can eat them on the roof. You can do anything with momos.
On the first, in the evening: Kolkata. Or that's what we thought. Caught a rickshaw from Bodhgaya to the nearest station, chugging through India's premier bandit-country at around 8pm when it was already pitch-black. Oh, how I wish we'd waited, and not put our faith in Indian Railways. The train to Howrah Station, Kolkata, which was supposed to leave at 9:50 pm, ended up pulling out of Gaya at 5:30am. Yes, for those of you who expect me to do the work, that's a delay of seven hours and forty minutes. We spent the intervening period with a group of equally-disgruntled Europeans, begging them to play rummy, whist, poker, anything, please, we just need another hand to come in! And then, just as we were about to reach Kolkata, the train EXPLODED. Exciting, eh?
Kolkata, then, is pretty damn cool, fortunate because I'm probably going to spend a month here. A city of wide, European roads and colonnades manned by cut-throat merchants and apathetic restaurateurs. Yesterday, on my birthday and our first full day here, we sauntered onto the Maidan (lit: 'field'), a large central grassy area housing numerous cricket and golf clubs, miraculously preserved from the predatory property developers. Cattle graze and horses roam in the shadow of skyscrapers, amid the numberless thocks of bat-on-ball. After chatting to some local schoolchildren, we wandered up to the Victoria Memorial - still staunchly referred to as the 'VM' despite efforts to Indianise the street and monuments names of Kolkata - and signed autographs for local Scouts. In fact, most of the streets are still referred to by their original British titles. Evidence of the Raj is everywhere, from the old administrative buildings, hopelessly begrimed and in an advanced state of disintegration, to the proud legacy of achievement in soccer. A deeply artistic city, central Kolkata teems with bookstalls and music-shops. Tonight, in fact, we intend to catch some live music in English in one of the many venues down Mirza Ghalib Road/Free School Street.
For my birthday celebration, we almost watched an Indian blue movie before realising our mistake and scarpering to another cinema. And twice, that's twice, we went for coffee at one of these swanky, European-style places for rich, hip young Indians. It's a whole different way of life out here, man, and I'm throwing myself into the thick of it. Seriously, when Dixie goes I'm going to live in a bucket for a week as penance.
Before I go there's just time for a special shoutout to a certain David Eggboro. Having been informed by Charlotte of the gloating that took place when I mentioned only her in the Christmas blog, I'm taking this opportunity to say that I like you both equally. Actually, Charlotte has just lost points through her cruelty, so if you play your cards right Eggie you might even become my third best friend outright after Shackleton and Joel. Sorry, Stevie.
Monday, 1 January 2007
Everybuddha's talkin' at me
If I haven't written in too long, or if this blog entry isn't particularly interesting, the reason is that for about a week we've been treading (holy) water. It's the 1st January and I'm in Bodhgaya, the place where Siddhartha Guatama sat under his Bodhi tree and gained enlightenment, and centre of the Buddhist faith. The pervasively Buddhist atmosphere has, it has to be said, made for a sedate last few days of 2006. But let's begin at the beginning.
Christmas in Varanasi was unusual to say the least. For a start, a felt desperately ill for most of Christmas day. On Christmas eve we did indeed bobble uptown to the St. Mary's Catholic church, and it did not disappoint in providing the jarring juxtapositions I have come to expect from anything and everything in India. Set in a fold-away stable in the front yard was an incredibly tacky version of the nativity, featuring a Christ-doll and manger at least three times the size of the most imposing wise man. The tiny Mary doll looked distraught, as you would having just given birth to a nipper of those dimensions. I suppose he is the son of God, after all. 'Let us adore the Lord' buzzed a neon sign.
On our approach to the church, having already asked about nine million inhabitants of Varanasi to give our rickshaw-wallah a hand in finding the way, we spotted a big wheel - a fairground big wheel - and our hearts sank as we realised he must have misunderstood our requirements entirely. In fact, no, this is an Indian church at Christmas - a theme park, where the young and hip go to hang out and show their faces, regardless of faith. The church itself was even more alarming. Imagine the Royle Family attempting to out-do their neighbours in tacky Christmas decorations. You could hear the buzz of the neon flashing fairy-lights from outside the gates. Amusingly, the Indians seem to have got Western religious and commercial Christmas iconography entirely mixed-up - hence inside the building, in front of the altar no less, there was a montage featuring a certain very conspicuous and very unreligious figure climbing a chimney with a sack of toys on his back.
With a sense of disbelief, we approached the star-spangled steeple and removed our shoes, a Hindu custom which has been imbibed into Indo-Catholic religious ritual. For a Catholic merry-go-round I mean church, the nave was surprisingly bare, containing only a handful of statues and pictures of the 14 stations of the Crucifixion. Stoically, we resisted the urge to laugh out loud when the Indian-style carols commenced, complete with table drums and bhangra beat. But the service was in Hindi and involved a lot of standing up and sitting down on the floor, so we left after about half and hour.
A sidenote on the concept of respectfulness in India. While it is considered rude to bare the soles of ones feet to any religious figure or figurine, the Indians think nothing of standing up in the middle of hymn or address, marching down the aisle and - standing not five feet away from the altar - taking a facial close-up of the Bishop or turning around to video the entire congregation. This kind of behaviour is endemic throughout India. If there is an audience with some luminary or other, young and middle-aged men will crowd the podium taking photographs, quite happily obscuring the view of onlookers (who will look slightly pissed off but say nothing) until, at length, they are satisfied with their shot. The other day, we caught a man at a historical monument videorecording the informtation signs dotted around. It's the same thing with plastic litter, which any self-respecting Indian will throw onto the street or shove through a fence without a second throught. V.S. Naipal puts it well when he talks of India having grasped Western technologies without yet developing a social conscience or terms of usage in anything approaching a Western sense (though there is certainly such a thing as a moral consensus). Perhaps these odd protocols of right and wrong, however, aren't confined to new equipment. As we left, I caught a senior clergyman openly yawning in the corner of my eye.
Christmas morning, then, was spent in bed, feeling sorry for myself. I think I must have caught a chill as we veered lazily from street to street on Christmas Eve, looking for anyone who'd even heard of Jesus. I was partially revived by the stock of tropical fruit we devoured in honour of Hawtin family tradition - sorry Beeches, I hardly thought I could impose upon her our established rituals of crankiness, talking loudly at cross-purposes and arguments over the telly. I have, however, taught her New Market (God bless Granny Nell). As afternoon seeped away we struggled back to the Phulwari restaurant and then, feeling very Christmassy (nauseous), on to the Suchhi cinema - this time to endure only one half of an American z-list Streetfighter rip-off named 'Dead or Alive'. The 'star' was that well-known martial-arts expert, Holly Valance.
We ducked, then, the last half of the picture (they still have intermissions here, and a good idea too I think) and went instead to catch the great nodding-off from a boat on the Ganga. It was fascinating to watch the evening rituals - involving singing, the burning of incense and offerings of flowers - from the river itself, at which all of the religious adulation is directed. As darkness fell, we lit candles and set them down in the river, in little banana-leaf baskets with orange flowers. Side by side, they floated off into the night and were lost to view. The last part of the day was spent watching a fire-dance at the Phulwari, our new local.
On Boxing Day, we resolved to make it out early to Sarnath, the site of the Buddha's first sermon. We left the hotel at, er, 11:20am. To be honest, not much to impress here except a huge stupa, one of those great concrete nipples supposed to house remnants of some holy person or other (Not, I think, the Buddha in this case). Sat amid 26 yodelling Koreans at the Sita for what was a surprisingly relaxing evening meal, and then slipped away from the Ganga for the last time at Varanasi for the - halting, heartening - phone call from the family.
As I waited for the folks to stop getting the phone number wrong, I fell into deep conversation with Raj at the Yogi Lodge, the lover of Shakespeare, Milton et al. He told me the story of his life to date, a saddening tale which demonstrates - for all who need it - that the caste-system, despite having been officially abolished, still holds India in a vice-like grip. Jump back two years: Raj was a successful Taekwondo teacher and BA graduate, loved and respected by all in his locality. 'You could have asked for Raj, and people would know who you meant', he told me (not very impressive if you asked, for instance, his own mother, but you can guess his meaning). Things started to go wrong when he fell in love with one of his students, a member of a higher caste. Knowing of her family's disapproval, and fearing the worst as community disapproval tightened around them, the couple fled to Delhi to marry - on the 25th December, 2005. Outraged, her father filed a kidnap charge and Raj was arrested (it took, he says, almost all of his small but respectable savings pile to buy himself out of trouble). Deciding that he was defeated, Raj took steps to end the relationship but found he was not out of the woods yet - grief-stricken, the girl threatened to commit suicide in his home (automatic imprisonment for himself and all his family, under Indian law), and even (unsuccessfully) attempted to hang herself. And this was not all. Raj found that his old friends had deserted him, and his students had defected. He was forced to leave the area and give up his job, his reputation tarnished forever. This is what I referred to earlier as a definite 'moral consensus', much stronger than its English equivalent. In his way, Raj must be seen by many as the Mr. Wickham of Varanasi - and the world of courtships, marriages, gossip over here is still closer to Jane Austen's than our own.
From Varanasi to Bodhgaya on the early morning train, and here we have relaxed/languished ever since. When we arrived, smack-damn in the middle of the largest tourist influx of the year, expecting foolishly to walk into a meditation course, the place was overrun by Buddhist monks. The flow of saffron-coloured robes has slackened a bit, but I get the distinct impression that Bodhgaya must be pretty much like this year-round - there are now seven Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhist monks, for instance, in the internet cafe right now, all displaying the healthy love of gizmos and computer technology common to the people of Xanadu.
Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until Kolkata before I can give you a proper description of Bodhgaya - suffice to say, it's been a very different experience to the rest of India so far, probably because the Indians themselves are in the minority. Our train out of Bihar leaves at 9:50pm (Indian time, so add on half an hour or so), and we've still to eat and make the trek to Gaya station. Anyway, it's a chance for us everyone to have a breather. Happy New Year!
Christmas in Varanasi was unusual to say the least. For a start, a felt desperately ill for most of Christmas day. On Christmas eve we did indeed bobble uptown to the St. Mary's Catholic church, and it did not disappoint in providing the jarring juxtapositions I have come to expect from anything and everything in India. Set in a fold-away stable in the front yard was an incredibly tacky version of the nativity, featuring a Christ-doll and manger at least three times the size of the most imposing wise man. The tiny Mary doll looked distraught, as you would having just given birth to a nipper of those dimensions. I suppose he is the son of God, after all. 'Let us adore the Lord' buzzed a neon sign.
On our approach to the church, having already asked about nine million inhabitants of Varanasi to give our rickshaw-wallah a hand in finding the way, we spotted a big wheel - a fairground big wheel - and our hearts sank as we realised he must have misunderstood our requirements entirely. In fact, no, this is an Indian church at Christmas - a theme park, where the young and hip go to hang out and show their faces, regardless of faith. The church itself was even more alarming. Imagine the Royle Family attempting to out-do their neighbours in tacky Christmas decorations. You could hear the buzz of the neon flashing fairy-lights from outside the gates. Amusingly, the Indians seem to have got Western religious and commercial Christmas iconography entirely mixed-up - hence inside the building, in front of the altar no less, there was a montage featuring a certain very conspicuous and very unreligious figure climbing a chimney with a sack of toys on his back.
With a sense of disbelief, we approached the star-spangled steeple and removed our shoes, a Hindu custom which has been imbibed into Indo-Catholic religious ritual. For a Catholic merry-go-round I mean church, the nave was surprisingly bare, containing only a handful of statues and pictures of the 14 stations of the Crucifixion. Stoically, we resisted the urge to laugh out loud when the Indian-style carols commenced, complete with table drums and bhangra beat. But the service was in Hindi and involved a lot of standing up and sitting down on the floor, so we left after about half and hour.
A sidenote on the concept of respectfulness in India. While it is considered rude to bare the soles of ones feet to any religious figure or figurine, the Indians think nothing of standing up in the middle of hymn or address, marching down the aisle and - standing not five feet away from the altar - taking a facial close-up of the Bishop or turning around to video the entire congregation. This kind of behaviour is endemic throughout India. If there is an audience with some luminary or other, young and middle-aged men will crowd the podium taking photographs, quite happily obscuring the view of onlookers (who will look slightly pissed off but say nothing) until, at length, they are satisfied with their shot. The other day, we caught a man at a historical monument videorecording the informtation signs dotted around. It's the same thing with plastic litter, which any self-respecting Indian will throw onto the street or shove through a fence without a second throught. V.S. Naipal puts it well when he talks of India having grasped Western technologies without yet developing a social conscience or terms of usage in anything approaching a Western sense (though there is certainly such a thing as a moral consensus). Perhaps these odd protocols of right and wrong, however, aren't confined to new equipment. As we left, I caught a senior clergyman openly yawning in the corner of my eye.
Christmas morning, then, was spent in bed, feeling sorry for myself. I think I must have caught a chill as we veered lazily from street to street on Christmas Eve, looking for anyone who'd even heard of Jesus. I was partially revived by the stock of tropical fruit we devoured in honour of Hawtin family tradition - sorry Beeches, I hardly thought I could impose upon her our established rituals of crankiness, talking loudly at cross-purposes and arguments over the telly. I have, however, taught her New Market (God bless Granny Nell). As afternoon seeped away we struggled back to the Phulwari restaurant and then, feeling very Christmassy (nauseous), on to the Suchhi cinema - this time to endure only one half of an American z-list Streetfighter rip-off named 'Dead or Alive'. The 'star' was that well-known martial-arts expert, Holly Valance.
We ducked, then, the last half of the picture (they still have intermissions here, and a good idea too I think) and went instead to catch the great nodding-off from a boat on the Ganga. It was fascinating to watch the evening rituals - involving singing, the burning of incense and offerings of flowers - from the river itself, at which all of the religious adulation is directed. As darkness fell, we lit candles and set them down in the river, in little banana-leaf baskets with orange flowers. Side by side, they floated off into the night and were lost to view. The last part of the day was spent watching a fire-dance at the Phulwari, our new local.
On Boxing Day, we resolved to make it out early to Sarnath, the site of the Buddha's first sermon. We left the hotel at, er, 11:20am. To be honest, not much to impress here except a huge stupa, one of those great concrete nipples supposed to house remnants of some holy person or other (Not, I think, the Buddha in this case). Sat amid 26 yodelling Koreans at the Sita for what was a surprisingly relaxing evening meal, and then slipped away from the Ganga for the last time at Varanasi for the - halting, heartening - phone call from the family.
As I waited for the folks to stop getting the phone number wrong, I fell into deep conversation with Raj at the Yogi Lodge, the lover of Shakespeare, Milton et al. He told me the story of his life to date, a saddening tale which demonstrates - for all who need it - that the caste-system, despite having been officially abolished, still holds India in a vice-like grip. Jump back two years: Raj was a successful Taekwondo teacher and BA graduate, loved and respected by all in his locality. 'You could have asked for Raj, and people would know who you meant', he told me (not very impressive if you asked, for instance, his own mother, but you can guess his meaning). Things started to go wrong when he fell in love with one of his students, a member of a higher caste. Knowing of her family's disapproval, and fearing the worst as community disapproval tightened around them, the couple fled to Delhi to marry - on the 25th December, 2005. Outraged, her father filed a kidnap charge and Raj was arrested (it took, he says, almost all of his small but respectable savings pile to buy himself out of trouble). Deciding that he was defeated, Raj took steps to end the relationship but found he was not out of the woods yet - grief-stricken, the girl threatened to commit suicide in his home (automatic imprisonment for himself and all his family, under Indian law), and even (unsuccessfully) attempted to hang herself. And this was not all. Raj found that his old friends had deserted him, and his students had defected. He was forced to leave the area and give up his job, his reputation tarnished forever. This is what I referred to earlier as a definite 'moral consensus', much stronger than its English equivalent. In his way, Raj must be seen by many as the Mr. Wickham of Varanasi - and the world of courtships, marriages, gossip over here is still closer to Jane Austen's than our own.
From Varanasi to Bodhgaya on the early morning train, and here we have relaxed/languished ever since. When we arrived, smack-damn in the middle of the largest tourist influx of the year, expecting foolishly to walk into a meditation course, the place was overrun by Buddhist monks. The flow of saffron-coloured robes has slackened a bit, but I get the distinct impression that Bodhgaya must be pretty much like this year-round - there are now seven Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhist monks, for instance, in the internet cafe right now, all displaying the healthy love of gizmos and computer technology common to the people of Xanadu.
Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until Kolkata before I can give you a proper description of Bodhgaya - suffice to say, it's been a very different experience to the rest of India so far, probably because the Indians themselves are in the minority. Our train out of Bihar leaves at 9:50pm (Indian time, so add on half an hour or so), and we've still to eat and make the trek to Gaya station. Anyway, it's a chance for us everyone to have a breather. Happy New Year!
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