I read the menu. I was about to order the palak paneer, chunks of unfermented cheese in a mildly spiced spinach sauce. Then I saw it. There was 'Brain Curry', and there was no backing down. "Excuse me," I asked "what is the Brain Curry?"
The waiter shrugged, then attempted to jolt his memory and hesitantly described "It is a gravy, made first with tomato sauce and some masalas." Fabulous, we've determined that the dish falls within the broad parameters in which hundreds of barely-related meals are called 'curry'.
"No, I mean the 'brain'. What is it?" He shrugged again, curled his lips and shook his head. A great mystery, no doubt. "The BRAIN" I said, smacking upon my own in frustration. "Is this thing?" I asked impatiently, cradling my cranium, shaking my skull with my hands to draw his fleeting attentions thence. "This thing we are supposed to have in our heads?!" I sputtered as his eyes glazed over yet again.
He missed the insult. "Oh yes, is brain!" he recovered, eyes bright with pride.
I concealed my exasperation to speak with the utmost clarity. "OK then, I'll have the brains."
"You are wanting brain curry?" he asked, eyes squinting askance.
I thrust my arms out over the table and groaned "Braaaaaiiiiinnnnssss", then set my stare upon him in anticipation of his next witless remark. It was to the point.
"Brain curry?"
"YES...and a chai."
"Chai? You want Indian tea?"
You have to be fucking kidding me.
By this point the rest of the staff was taking some interest in my dining. I was the only customer, an odd foreigner with a pile of stained notebooks asking to be fed brains. The manager and other waiters, all Punjabis, took frequent breaks from listening to their unusually tolerable pop music to watch me scrawl in my notes. Sometimes they even ventured over to my table to read over my shoulder, only to be thwarted by my poor penmanship and the oblique manner in which I typically malign Indian cities. After a considerable wait, my Rajasthani waiter arrived with my chai.
Though I may as well have asked a blind Cambodian orphan in semaphore, I queried "Excuse me, from which animal is the brain?" He did not comprehend. I decided to break it down into multiple-choice. "The animal: is it sheep brain? Goat brain? ...Chicken?" This was still too much. I rephrased the question as a true-or-false. "The brain: mutton?"
"Yes sir! Mutton!"
Mutton is one of those English words, like possible, that Indian culture has somehow endowed with ambiguity. Its meaning is more or less "could be sheep, but I'd wager on goat." This was Ajmer. I've walked its streets. The mutton was definitely goat.
After further delay, a small metal dish was brought to my table. This made sense. I could not expect goat brain to be very large, because goats are fucking idiots. The dish was filled in a light brown slop. Roughly half of North Indian cuisine consists of various substances - chicken, cheese, potatoes, peas, ping-pong balls, refrigerator magnets - drowned in a brownish slop. I tasted the sauce first. It was curry. Everything is curry. Curry is an almost Orwellian word. Curry is the apex of the disassociation of language from meaning. All one knows is that there will be sauce and there will be spices. In India this is as redundant as calling a dish "banana fruit" or "bread food". A curry of eggplant here bears no relation to a curry of eggplant there, yet there is no name to distinguish these; there is just Eggplant Curry. Indian Restaurant menus, with their meticulously categorized offerings and minuscule gradations of price, are but a mockery of a gastronomical order, an ancient-ciphered hieroglyphic codex to be vainly examined by the gourmand. As a Mesoamerican scholar might say "This cryptic frieze is only known to be of Olmec origin" so too did I ponder "Indeed, this is a curry."
As I delicately sipped quarter-spoonfuls of this concoction, the Punjabis huddled in conspiracy around their audio system. They switched CD's and the melody became familiar. I thought little of it. Punjabis are generally the most internationally-minded of the Indian peoples; these men simply seemed to have a broader taste in pop music. I took my fork and pierced a small, nondescript chunk of yellow matter from within the depths of the curry. I took a moment to savor it but it remained unremarkable. I poked around my tray and began to suspect I had been given paneer curry in a kind and secretive act of Sikh hospitality, the contemporary American tune chosen specifically to ease my mind.
Disappointed and unsure how to proceed, I resolved to finish my meal in dignity. I forked a larger bite and directed it into my mouth. It was definitely brain. As I began to chew it squished palpably against my tongue, not oozing with juices, but merely soft and compressible like certain types of shellfish or other non-muscular animal organs I've tried. The texture, though unexpected, was unobjectionable. I had expected a more rubbery experience. The flavor was not too bad either, almost bland. I found I needed to coat bites with curry to make them more flavorful.
The truly disconcerting part of the meal was not its flavor or texture but its movement in the mouth. With each motion of the tongue and grinding of the molars it became more and more clear I was feasting on brains. As the brain piece tumbled in my mouth it began to unfold. Though I had not seen them, the intricate tucks and folds instantly recognizable as the anatomy of the mammalian brain began to unravel between my cheeks, flopping behind my gums, unfurling themselves like a damp carpet onto my taste buds. One by one my teeth tore apart the distinct nooks of the goat's mind. With one bite I severed its critical thoughts ("goat!"); with the next its uncanny sense for clambering upon rocks. I squashed and ground the matter and neurons that taught it to move in herds, to fear the stick ("biiiiiig stick"), and to leap on hind legs for bashing skulls.
At last, pressing a paste of cerebral cortex to my cheek with my tongue, I recognized the music. "I want to make love right now na na... Wish we hadn't broke up right now na na". I was eating goat brains to Akon. The Punjabis watched from the stereo console with shit-eating grins. This was an elaborate mockery, a pantomime of cross-cultural ridicule.
Piece by piece the brain disappeared into my undeterred oral cavity. A large mound protruded from the cream. I rolled it with my fork. It was a single chunk of brain and as sauce dribbled off from its underside it revealed to my eyes the curled labyrinth of snaking and spiraling brainflesh on my plate as clearly as in a textbook or a pickled jar. As I began my lengthy chewing of this specimen I wondered "To what extent do goats have memories?" Months among the Hindus stirred in me strange questions. Am I consuming the mind of a conscious being? Has this goat's soul been reborn or is it waiting for me to finish the last of its physical shell? Will my grisly devouring of its brain earn it some karmic reward, a lift from animaldom to perhaps being a humble street-sweeper or rural peasant? Is there some newborn baby across India unaware that I have pieces of its former consciousness stuck between my incisors?
The brain was almost gone and Akon wailed "You're so beaaauuuutiful...so damn beautifuuuu-ulll". Another Akon hit. The Punjabis' mirth at my expense was to extend to an entire Akon album.
The food could have been worse, and I was actually beginning to enjoy the relative restraint of auto-tuned R&B after months of screeched Hindi gibberish over too-fast basslines, cheap digital simulations of jangly Indian bells and stringed instruments, and poorly Orientalized euro-synth keyboards. Then, all of a sudden Akon's soothing robotic drone gave way to the frantic ostentation and outrageous lyricism of the hip-hop guest verse."... I'ma spend them grands but after you undress, not like a hooker but more like a princess". The pin on my cultivated self-restraint in the face of absurdity was pulled and I exploded in laughter, spewing curry all over my plate. The Punjabis rushed to my side, fearing the brain had done me in. I still rocked with laughter as a dabbed clumsily about with a napkin. "I'm all right, I'm all right" I reassured them, "it is because I laugh at the song. He is funny man." The Punjabis nodded and returned to their station. They rewound the track to hear the verse again. They were determined to understand it, as Punjabis consider themselves to be very funny men.
The brain was gone and I slurped at the last of the curry, cleansing my palate with mineral water and buttered bread. The Punjabis, now occupied with a large ledger and several calculators doing their daily accounting, left me to admire my conquests and rest upon my laurels. Sipping water, cooling myself from the heat of victorious battle in this gastronomic Coliseum, I was treated to the voices of the Empire's finest musicians. Almost as a tribute to a worthy foe, Akon sung "She's so dangerouuuusss, that girl's so dangeroouuuuuu-usss".
Dangerous? Danger? Bitch, please. My name is Ghostface Killah Gautama Buddha Maximus; Cow-Slapper of the West and Commander of the Army of the Just; a son in the Cobras' Lair and a brother in the Killers' Manse; and I will eat of Danger and shit of Victory, in this life and the next.
Nov 24, 2009
Nov 23, 2009
Return To The 300 Temples (The Dirty Version)
News story of the day: a study has revealed that prisoners in the jails of Tamil Nadu state almost all gain weight in prison where they are given a balanced and nutritious diet. It's official: living in India is worse than living in an Indian prison.
Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.
Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.
I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.
After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.
Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.
When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.
Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.
Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.
The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.
As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.
Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.
Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.
I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.
After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.
Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.
When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.
Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.
Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.
The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.
As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.
Tata Roulette And The Bus Of Death
I take a lot of day trips. Firstly because I like to get a change of scenery and visit places off the beaten track, and secondly because I enjoy the lengthy bus rides which combine an excursion into the tranquility of the Indian countryside with a near-constant risk of violent death.
The title of this post is misleading. There is no one single Bus Of Death. Each and every bus is a rolling box perfectly equipped for mass homicide. Where the rear-view mirror should say "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear", it instead reflects a haunting message that reads "redrum...REDRUM." You could just take two and a half hours of barely-edited footage from an Indian bus and title it "Saw VII: Kota to Indore". This is especially true of routes along secondary highways, which are usually about one and a half lanes wide are are trafficked not only by the customary ramshackle slew of motor vehicles but also by creaking bullock-carts and plodding pregnant cows which need to be overtaken, resulting in a continuous game of Chicken with oncoming trucks and buses that is usually resolved in a blare of horns in a matter of only feet or inches.
Fearing that my delicate foreign senses would be offended by the cramped conditions in the main compartment, conductors usually invite me to sit on the bench in the driver's cabin. I happily accept their offers and relax in the space and safety of what I've come to think of endearingly as the "forward-firing ejector seat." The bus to Osiyan had an even more special feature: a large metal platform in the cabin that served no discernable purpose and pressed uncomfortably against my legs. I was grateful though for this minor discomfort as the edge of the platform would do a fabulous job of dispossessing me of my feet and my shins, which would otherwise become flailing hindrances to my projectile motion through the front window.
India is one of those many countries that is so accustomed to not having the capacity to solve problems that addressing problems without in any way solving them has become part of the national culture. It would be poor form to do nothing, so things are sometimes done that are worse than nothing at all. For instance, when there is a dangerous obstacle on the shoulder of the road causing a narrow space unsafe to pass in, local people helpfully mark these obstacles by placing piles of rocks in the road itself. If this were a country with landmines they would be marked off by spike strips.
Trucks and buses in India always have an idol on the dashboard, surrounded by small posters of Vishnu, Krishna, and so on stuck to the windshield. The idol is often a local town god you've never heard of, covered in beads and wreaths of flowers. Stepping onto this bus I saw the idol was Ganesh. You don't want to be on a bus devoted to Ganesh.
Ganesh is the elephant-headed god of luck, and is perhaps the most popularly worshiped of the Hindu gods. In a country so overpopulated that a person's skills or goods are almost guaranteed to be redundant, it is no surprise people perceive simple luck as the key to success. People who are especially devoted to Ganesh are dangerous: they believe they are favored by Chance. This obviates the need for Skill, Foresight, Acumen, and Caution.
So I saw this idol to Ganesh and I knew instantly our driver was consciously putting our lives in the hands of Fate. We were to play a game of Russian Roulette where the bullet would be a Tata truck and the revolver reloaded every minute. Fate, aided by the iron-willed determination of our driver in the face of oncoming traffic, granted us a heart-pounding but rapid passage to Osiyan.
Osiyan itself was not nearly as exciting as getting there. It's a smallish town out in the desert notable mostly for the age rather than the grandeur of its temples. I was excited to see a collection of 8th and 9th century temples mostly intact. The first, a large Hindu edifice to a god also worshiped by the Jains sat high on a raised platform. A local trader, who had nothing better to do because he lives in Osiyan, took it upon himself to give me a tour complete with a religious education.
Never put too much stock in a religious man's explanation of other people's religions. He strongly insisted that Jainism is a branch of Hinduism, while Jains are quick to assert that they're more like Buddhists ("but different religion!" they always add). The trader, whose name was Sarim, provided proof of his argument by stating that Jains worship five Hindu gods (one was Lakshmi, I forget the other four). "Well, five out of thirty million sounds like a pretty big difference" I quipped. "Just one is enough!" he replied.
The temple was interesting if not opulent, with a pleasant use of mirrors inside and ancient carvings outside. We went out on the roof and Sarim directed me immediately to the Kama Sutra carvings, which is what Indian men assume foreign tourists will find most interesting. Though this is frequently correct, it is a textbook case of projection if there ever was one. However, the erotic sculptures had all been defaced...literally. Armies in the 11th and 17th centuries under the commands of Mohamed of Ghazni and the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, respectively, had chiseled the faces off in keeping with the Muslim prohibition on the depiction of recognizable human figures. "The Heretics," as Sarim had thus far exclusively referred to Muslims, "they smash the heads". The result was a bizarre montage of figures in explicit acts of coitus, naked bodies and huge genitalia fully intact, though they had been gruesomely decapitated and were fornicating under the watch of other faceless, multi-limbed semi-human monsters and celestial entities. Little did I know that the people of ancient Rajasthan were avid readers of Japanese comics.
Sarim giddily honked on a pair of sandstone breasts, then ran his finger over the missing face and his expression turned dour. "It is always these Muhammad peoples" he muttered. "No fine works these Heretics."
We then went to the Jain Mahavira temple, which I was enthused about because Mahavira, the Buddha figure of Jainism, is the one part of the religion that seems to to be grounded on planet Earth and his teachings form the backbone of Jain ideology. This temple too was ancient and its main idol was a magnificent statue of Mahavira made of sand and milk and encased in gold 2000 years ago (and irritatingly off-limits to photography). There was a group of Gujarati Jain pilgrims in the temple, playing music and praying in copper crowns and cloth masks while the resident monks made formal offerings. I went to the back of the temple to peruse a montage of the life of Mahavira, which I expected to be a welcome relief from tales of 5-million year old tirthankaras. It was of course more complicated, as in addition to the life of Mahavira himself it mostly detailed the fantastical lives of the previous incarnations of his soul over the aeons, which found their coda in Mahavira's mortal life, attainment of ultimate truth, and ascension into the heavens.
Next I popped quickly over to some minor old temples and discovered why few people come to see Osiyan.: the age of the temples does not make them any less small and unremarkable. I also saw a deep, lushly-planted baori (step-well) and made my way back to the bus stand, where I was quite surprised to see a pair of peacocks chilling on the roof of a pharmacy. I had assumed that peacocks were like psychedelic turkeys or little blue emus, a bird only in the Linnaean sense of the word, but it turn out the bastards actually have some spring and can hop and flap their way up to a rooftop in only one or two steps. I eagerly wished to travel seven years into my past so that I could be smaller, kinap a peacock, take it to the top of a tall temple, and hang-glide Zelda-style about town as it squawks and flaps madly to carry me to obscure ledges filled with treasure. Then I realized that seven years ago I was sixteen and much the same size I am today so I was forced to discard this dream into the same sentimental rubbish bin as my scheme to travel India on a motorbike with a pet monkey poking out of my backpack.
my bus back to Jodhpur departed at sundown. I noted that the idol on the dash seemed to be a female fertility goddess. Good, I thought, the driver must be a family man. He wants to live. Above the idol was a row of colored lights that turned on periodically and sometimes began to flash rapidly. Seeing my interest (there was nothing else to look at in the dark except the lights of oncoming trucks) he explained that it was attached to a radar gun and the lights signaled the presence of an object directly ahead while the flashing indicated the speed at which a frontal collision was becoming imminent. I watched this device anxiously for much of the two-hour trip, and observed its frantic flashing in the face of a stream of approaching headlights. It was only late in the journey that I thought to count the cycles of flashes and time the intervals between their flashing, when I determined that the lights were actually just on a set pattern and were merely the typical bright crap that Indians like to decorate with. I felt foolish for believing him, but it was a convincing joke - collisions are imminent all the damn time. "Ha ha yes, is one pattern!" he laughed after I jovially accused him of his deceit.
Ha ha indeed. It's funny because every 45 seconds we almost died.
The title of this post is misleading. There is no one single Bus Of Death. Each and every bus is a rolling box perfectly equipped for mass homicide. Where the rear-view mirror should say "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear", it instead reflects a haunting message that reads "redrum...REDRUM." You could just take two and a half hours of barely-edited footage from an Indian bus and title it "Saw VII: Kota to Indore". This is especially true of routes along secondary highways, which are usually about one and a half lanes wide are are trafficked not only by the customary ramshackle slew of motor vehicles but also by creaking bullock-carts and plodding pregnant cows which need to be overtaken, resulting in a continuous game of Chicken with oncoming trucks and buses that is usually resolved in a blare of horns in a matter of only feet or inches.
Fearing that my delicate foreign senses would be offended by the cramped conditions in the main compartment, conductors usually invite me to sit on the bench in the driver's cabin. I happily accept their offers and relax in the space and safety of what I've come to think of endearingly as the "forward-firing ejector seat." The bus to Osiyan had an even more special feature: a large metal platform in the cabin that served no discernable purpose and pressed uncomfortably against my legs. I was grateful though for this minor discomfort as the edge of the platform would do a fabulous job of dispossessing me of my feet and my shins, which would otherwise become flailing hindrances to my projectile motion through the front window.
India is one of those many countries that is so accustomed to not having the capacity to solve problems that addressing problems without in any way solving them has become part of the national culture. It would be poor form to do nothing, so things are sometimes done that are worse than nothing at all. For instance, when there is a dangerous obstacle on the shoulder of the road causing a narrow space unsafe to pass in, local people helpfully mark these obstacles by placing piles of rocks in the road itself. If this were a country with landmines they would be marked off by spike strips.
Trucks and buses in India always have an idol on the dashboard, surrounded by small posters of Vishnu, Krishna, and so on stuck to the windshield. The idol is often a local town god you've never heard of, covered in beads and wreaths of flowers. Stepping onto this bus I saw the idol was Ganesh. You don't want to be on a bus devoted to Ganesh.
Ganesh is the elephant-headed god of luck, and is perhaps the most popularly worshiped of the Hindu gods. In a country so overpopulated that a person's skills or goods are almost guaranteed to be redundant, it is no surprise people perceive simple luck as the key to success. People who are especially devoted to Ganesh are dangerous: they believe they are favored by Chance. This obviates the need for Skill, Foresight, Acumen, and Caution.
So I saw this idol to Ganesh and I knew instantly our driver was consciously putting our lives in the hands of Fate. We were to play a game of Russian Roulette where the bullet would be a Tata truck and the revolver reloaded every minute. Fate, aided by the iron-willed determination of our driver in the face of oncoming traffic, granted us a heart-pounding but rapid passage to Osiyan.
Osiyan itself was not nearly as exciting as getting there. It's a smallish town out in the desert notable mostly for the age rather than the grandeur of its temples. I was excited to see a collection of 8th and 9th century temples mostly intact. The first, a large Hindu edifice to a god also worshiped by the Jains sat high on a raised platform. A local trader, who had nothing better to do because he lives in Osiyan, took it upon himself to give me a tour complete with a religious education.
Never put too much stock in a religious man's explanation of other people's religions. He strongly insisted that Jainism is a branch of Hinduism, while Jains are quick to assert that they're more like Buddhists ("but different religion!" they always add). The trader, whose name was Sarim, provided proof of his argument by stating that Jains worship five Hindu gods (one was Lakshmi, I forget the other four). "Well, five out of thirty million sounds like a pretty big difference" I quipped. "Just one is enough!" he replied.
The temple was interesting if not opulent, with a pleasant use of mirrors inside and ancient carvings outside. We went out on the roof and Sarim directed me immediately to the Kama Sutra carvings, which is what Indian men assume foreign tourists will find most interesting. Though this is frequently correct, it is a textbook case of projection if there ever was one. However, the erotic sculptures had all been defaced...literally. Armies in the 11th and 17th centuries under the commands of Mohamed of Ghazni and the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, respectively, had chiseled the faces off in keeping with the Muslim prohibition on the depiction of recognizable human figures. "The Heretics," as Sarim had thus far exclusively referred to Muslims, "they smash the heads". The result was a bizarre montage of figures in explicit acts of coitus, naked bodies and huge genitalia fully intact, though they had been gruesomely decapitated and were fornicating under the watch of other faceless, multi-limbed semi-human monsters and celestial entities. Little did I know that the people of ancient Rajasthan were avid readers of Japanese comics.
Sarim giddily honked on a pair of sandstone breasts, then ran his finger over the missing face and his expression turned dour. "It is always these Muhammad peoples" he muttered. "No fine works these Heretics."
We then went to the Jain Mahavira temple, which I was enthused about because Mahavira, the Buddha figure of Jainism, is the one part of the religion that seems to to be grounded on planet Earth and his teachings form the backbone of Jain ideology. This temple too was ancient and its main idol was a magnificent statue of Mahavira made of sand and milk and encased in gold 2000 years ago (and irritatingly off-limits to photography). There was a group of Gujarati Jain pilgrims in the temple, playing music and praying in copper crowns and cloth masks while the resident monks made formal offerings. I went to the back of the temple to peruse a montage of the life of Mahavira, which I expected to be a welcome relief from tales of 5-million year old tirthankaras. It was of course more complicated, as in addition to the life of Mahavira himself it mostly detailed the fantastical lives of the previous incarnations of his soul over the aeons, which found their coda in Mahavira's mortal life, attainment of ultimate truth, and ascension into the heavens.
Next I popped quickly over to some minor old temples and discovered why few people come to see Osiyan.: the age of the temples does not make them any less small and unremarkable. I also saw a deep, lushly-planted baori (step-well) and made my way back to the bus stand, where I was quite surprised to see a pair of peacocks chilling on the roof of a pharmacy. I had assumed that peacocks were like psychedelic turkeys or little blue emus, a bird only in the Linnaean sense of the word, but it turn out the bastards actually have some spring and can hop and flap their way up to a rooftop in only one or two steps. I eagerly wished to travel seven years into my past so that I could be smaller, kinap a peacock, take it to the top of a tall temple, and hang-glide Zelda-style about town as it squawks and flaps madly to carry me to obscure ledges filled with treasure. Then I realized that seven years ago I was sixteen and much the same size I am today so I was forced to discard this dream into the same sentimental rubbish bin as my scheme to travel India on a motorbike with a pet monkey poking out of my backpack.
my bus back to Jodhpur departed at sundown. I noted that the idol on the dash seemed to be a female fertility goddess. Good, I thought, the driver must be a family man. He wants to live. Above the idol was a row of colored lights that turned on periodically and sometimes began to flash rapidly. Seeing my interest (there was nothing else to look at in the dark except the lights of oncoming trucks) he explained that it was attached to a radar gun and the lights signaled the presence of an object directly ahead while the flashing indicated the speed at which a frontal collision was becoming imminent. I watched this device anxiously for much of the two-hour trip, and observed its frantic flashing in the face of a stream of approaching headlights. It was only late in the journey that I thought to count the cycles of flashes and time the intervals between their flashing, when I determined that the lights were actually just on a set pattern and were merely the typical bright crap that Indians like to decorate with. I felt foolish for believing him, but it was a convincing joke - collisions are imminent all the damn time. "Ha ha yes, is one pattern!" he laughed after I jovially accused him of his deceit.
Ha ha indeed. It's funny because every 45 seconds we almost died.
Nov 20, 2009
Blue City Blues
My woman done left me
My caaaaamel toooo
The buuuus ride was bumpy
The buuuu-uuusss ride was long
The laandscaaape was saaandy
The skyyyyy was bright bright blue
Crossed the desert to Jodhpur
And now I've got those Blue City blues
Got lost in the ooooold tooown
A big mess of..... ALLeyways
No street signs I found
I triieeeed, OH I tried to steer by buildings
But they're AAALLLLL painted BLUE
Oh sweet LAAWD can you help me
I got them Blue City blues
I sit on a roof
A-waitin' for food
I look at them taaallll boxy houses
And I said to the Lord "LORD I must be dreaming
I must be losing my mi-ind
I see THOUUSSSANDS of giant Lego bricks
Grey, cream, and BLUUUEEEE
And a huge stone FORT them ol' Raaajputs built
To give me Blue City blues"
I walked to the FOOOOORRRRTT
But got lost a-gaaiii-aaiin
A gay Indian begged me to just FUCK HIM then and there
But I ain't got no friends a-nowhere
All I've got....OHHHHH ALL I"VE GOT
Is them Blue City blues.
Hey lovely lady, I see you over there looking at the sky. You've got the blues in you too. Let me just play you a little tune. I ain't got no saxophone. Sold it for spiced tea and opium. Makes the pain go away. So I'll just sing you my melody...goes a little something like this...
AAAaaaaabbwwaaada bwwaadaa bweee boom.
Aaaabwaadda bwadda bweee-eeeee. Baddabadaba baabba.
Aaaabweeeeda bwaaada bweeee.
Baaa daaa daaaa
BWAAAAAAAABAAADAABAAABWWAAABA
Aaabwaaadabwaddabwee
Oh, OH sweeet MAAAmaaaa
Why don't you just.... sliiiiiide on next to me
I'll make you QUEEN of MY KINGdom
Take you to my paaaaa-lace
Ha, well it's a musical palace, baby, just a little guesthouse
Small, but easy on the eyes...just like you
OOooohhh come in to my CAStle
And end our Blue City blues
Come in to my AAaaarmmss
And ennnd my blue-ball'ed blues
Now baby you just lie there, real comfortable-like, while I rub in this lotion, tell you a story about Jodhpur.
You see, sugar, Jodhpur was built in the middle ages as a new capital for the most powerful of the Rajput kingdoms, Marwar, the Land of Death. Makes your spine tingle. Mmmmmmm....speaking of spines, your back is so smooth, honey. Let me massage that sweet caramel. Now, the Maharaja Jodh Singh founded Jodhpur and built a massive castle on the sheer cliffs above the city. Four hundred feet over the walled city, the hundred-foot walls encase palaces, reservoirs, and garrisons, making it an impregnable citadel for over six hundred years. When you get to the gates on foot, the walls there are twice as high. There's an audio tour and...sugar don't fall asleep, let me tell you about the audio tour. The audio tour is spectacular, a tour de force in historical narration enlivened by quotes from Kipling, spoken recollections by the present Maharaja and his family, trumpet fanfares, larger-than-life anecdotes, and a narrator who delivers his lines with near-Biblical drama..."The Meherengarh fort stands as the ultimate symbol of military strength and honor. Its halls and ramparts ring with the echoes of history and legend. In all the centuries no cannon has breached its walls...no elephant has ever battered through its gates."
There's a palace inside, a masterfully decorated tribute to pleasure, refinement, and power. It's the way a man should be for his woman, strong but gentle. You've got some tension built up in those shoulders. Baby you need that strong and gentle touch. Nod your head if that feels good. I knew you would. The palace walls soar mightily, while the lattice windows are carved as delicately as the lace in your bra....*Snap* You won't be needing that.
Somewhere along the way the Maharajas built a new palace. You can see it there, the graceful giant on the hill across town, lit up for all to marvel at on this breezy night. The blue city lies nestled, sprawling between these hills, a million people under their watchful gaze. Within the old city the many-floored homes and workshops form shadowy, blue-edged canyons, with the flow of humanity cutting between its walls like water slicing through ancient gorges. You'll see the new palace is far outside the walls. It has no weapons of any kind. Maybe it's a sign of hope, that we can all live together the way we should, no more killing, no more fighting our brothers. Baby, you feel what I'm saying? We need to make love, not war.
Oohh foooooooxxxy woman
My heart's aching for you, woman
Life, life it's been treatin' me so bad but you're smellin' so damn good
Let's loosen up that belt there
Run my hands on that beeee-hiiiiind
Gonna unFASTEN that skkkiiiiirt now
See what I can fiiiind...
Blue panties between your legs now?
Just...gonna...TAKE these.....foooorrrr my piece of mind
Oh baby your sooooft skin
It don't neeeed no cotton blues
Just MOOOVE with me sweeeetheeaart
And put an end to my....Blue City blues
My caaaaamel toooo
The buuuus ride was bumpy
The buuuu-uuusss ride was long
The laandscaaape was saaandy
The skyyyyy was bright bright blue
Crossed the desert to Jodhpur
And now I've got those Blue City blues
Got lost in the ooooold tooown
A big mess of..... ALLeyways
No street signs I found
I triieeeed, OH I tried to steer by buildings
But they're AAALLLLL painted BLUE
Oh sweet LAAWD can you help me
I got them Blue City blues
I sit on a roof
A-waitin' for food
I look at them taaallll boxy houses
And I said to the Lord "LORD I must be dreaming
I must be losing my mi-ind
I see THOUUSSSANDS of giant Lego bricks
Grey, cream, and BLUUUEEEE
And a huge stone FORT them ol' Raaajputs built
To give me Blue City blues"
I walked to the FOOOOORRRRTT
But got lost a-gaaiii-aaiin
A gay Indian begged me to just FUCK HIM then and there
But I ain't got no friends a-nowhere
All I've got....OHHHHH ALL I"VE GOT
Is them Blue City blues.
Hey lovely lady, I see you over there looking at the sky. You've got the blues in you too. Let me just play you a little tune. I ain't got no saxophone. Sold it for spiced tea and opium. Makes the pain go away. So I'll just sing you my melody...goes a little something like this...
AAAaaaaabbwwaaada bwwaadaa bweee boom.
Aaaabwaadda bwadda bweee-eeeee. Baddabadaba baabba.
Aaaabweeeeda bwaaada bweeee.
Baaa daaa daaaa
BWAAAAAAAABAAADAABAAABWWAAABA
Aaabwaaadabwaddabwee
Oh, OH sweeet MAAAmaaaa
Why don't you just.... sliiiiiide on next to me
I'll make you QUEEN of MY KINGdom
Take you to my paaaaa-lace
Ha, well it's a musical palace, baby, just a little guesthouse
Small, but easy on the eyes...just like you
OOooohhh come in to my CAStle
And end our Blue City blues
Come in to my AAaaarmmss
And ennnd my blue-ball'ed blues
Now baby you just lie there, real comfortable-like, while I rub in this lotion, tell you a story about Jodhpur.
You see, sugar, Jodhpur was built in the middle ages as a new capital for the most powerful of the Rajput kingdoms, Marwar, the Land of Death. Makes your spine tingle. Mmmmmmm....speaking of spines, your back is so smooth, honey. Let me massage that sweet caramel. Now, the Maharaja Jodh Singh founded Jodhpur and built a massive castle on the sheer cliffs above the city. Four hundred feet over the walled city, the hundred-foot walls encase palaces, reservoirs, and garrisons, making it an impregnable citadel for over six hundred years. When you get to the gates on foot, the walls there are twice as high. There's an audio tour and...sugar don't fall asleep, let me tell you about the audio tour. The audio tour is spectacular, a tour de force in historical narration enlivened by quotes from Kipling, spoken recollections by the present Maharaja and his family, trumpet fanfares, larger-than-life anecdotes, and a narrator who delivers his lines with near-Biblical drama..."The Meherengarh fort stands as the ultimate symbol of military strength and honor. Its halls and ramparts ring with the echoes of history and legend. In all the centuries no cannon has breached its walls...no elephant has ever battered through its gates."
There's a palace inside, a masterfully decorated tribute to pleasure, refinement, and power. It's the way a man should be for his woman, strong but gentle. You've got some tension built up in those shoulders. Baby you need that strong and gentle touch. Nod your head if that feels good. I knew you would. The palace walls soar mightily, while the lattice windows are carved as delicately as the lace in your bra....*Snap* You won't be needing that.
Somewhere along the way the Maharajas built a new palace. You can see it there, the graceful giant on the hill across town, lit up for all to marvel at on this breezy night. The blue city lies nestled, sprawling between these hills, a million people under their watchful gaze. Within the old city the many-floored homes and workshops form shadowy, blue-edged canyons, with the flow of humanity cutting between its walls like water slicing through ancient gorges. You'll see the new palace is far outside the walls. It has no weapons of any kind. Maybe it's a sign of hope, that we can all live together the way we should, no more killing, no more fighting our brothers. Baby, you feel what I'm saying? We need to make love, not war.
Oohh foooooooxxxy woman
My heart's aching for you, woman
Life, life it's been treatin' me so bad but you're smellin' so damn good
Let's loosen up that belt there
Run my hands on that beeee-hiiiiind
Gonna unFASTEN that skkkiiiiirt now
See what I can fiiiind...
Blue panties between your legs now?
Just...gonna...TAKE these.....foooorrrr my piece of mind
Oh baby your sooooft skin
It don't neeeed no cotton blues
Just MOOOVE with me sweeeetheeaart
And put an end to my....Blue City blues
Nov 19, 2009
India Haiku, Vol. 2
edit: forgot to type some, added them.
Vast India,
home to one billion souls;
A touch excessive
Is this a street,
market, barn, or sewer?
All of the above.
Child, I am deeply
aggrieved you lack candy. No, I
don't have ten Euro.
A veiled woman
walks up broken stairs, bowl
of bricks on head
Rudyard Kipling,
greatest observer of India.
Nah, he a bitch.
Solar-powered
desert vehicles; I dream...
No more camels.
Retired Frenchmen:
leave India. Take your wives.
Go drown in brie.
I witnessed it
with my own eyes: four goats
tied to moped
Oh Rajasthan!
After countless centuries,
still mostly sand
Sixty rupees?
Taj Mahal snow globe, with leak?
Thanks but no thanks.
Baa baa black sheep
Have you any wool? If not,
I'm eating you
In the desert
a nose twitch, strong now, a sneeze.
Gross clumps of sand
Attention rapt,
I turn. She offers bangles.
I misheard.
Personal space,
hygiene, silence, and Reason,
I miss you
Hey good lookin',
what's your spicy cookin'?
Oh, sounds dreadful.
Cutting through smog,
scent of incense...correction:
opium
Hey girl, your six
yard sari could be our
six yard bedsheet.
Hold up, did you
see that? That just happened.
What the fuck.
Vast India,
home to one billion souls;
A touch excessive
Is this a street,
market, barn, or sewer?
All of the above.
Child, I am deeply
aggrieved you lack candy. No, I
don't have ten Euro.
A veiled woman
walks up broken stairs, bowl
of bricks on head
Rudyard Kipling,
greatest observer of India.
Nah, he a bitch.
Solar-powered
desert vehicles; I dream...
No more camels.
Retired Frenchmen:
leave India. Take your wives.
Go drown in brie.
I witnessed it
with my own eyes: four goats
tied to moped
Oh Rajasthan!
After countless centuries,
still mostly sand
Sixty rupees?
Taj Mahal snow globe, with leak?
Thanks but no thanks.
Baa baa black sheep
Have you any wool? If not,
I'm eating you
In the desert
a nose twitch, strong now, a sneeze.
Gross clumps of sand
Attention rapt,
I turn. She offers bangles.
I misheard.
Personal space,
hygiene, silence, and Reason,
I miss you
Hey good lookin',
what's your spicy cookin'?
Oh, sounds dreadful.
Cutting through smog,
scent of incense...correction:
opium
Hey girl, your six
yard sari could be our
six yard bedsheet.
Hold up, did you
see that? That just happened.
What the fuck.
Nov 18, 2009
PHOTOS and other news
Big news, people. Ghostface Buddha now has a photo gallery!
The gallery is a Flickr account, linked at the very top right-hand side of this page, where you can also quickly check if there have been any updates, and admire a single image that will sit there for an arbitrary period of time, hinting at what wonders lie beyond the hyperlink.
Alas, due to many misfortunes large and small, the majority of the photographs from the month of October have been irretrievably lost, most tragically those of the Pushkar Camel Fair, but also from most of Uttar Pradesh except those salvaged from Facebook. I have however been stepping up on the photography of late and hopefully this trend will continue. The gallery now contains rescued images from the Varanasi area as well as increasing numbers of photographs from the last few weeks in Rajasthan.
I have captioned some but not all of the images. I have tried to be basically informative and occasionally witty, but there is only so much you can say about pictures of sunsets or whatever so I haven't been too fastidious about explaining everything...."this is a picture of the same throne room....viewed from the other side!"
For those of you not familiar with Flickr, it is a fairly versatile and elegant photo storage mechanism that allows much higher quality and better organizaton than hosting directly on this blog would permit. The main "snag" you might encounter when browsing the gallery is that unlike other photo sharing sites you are likely familiar with *cough*Facebook, clicking on an image will not skip directly ahead to the next in the batch. Instead you will see in a box to the right two thumbnails of the images before and after the one you are currently viewing. Should you so desire, it is possible to view higher-quality versions of the image than the default one displayed by clicking on the teeny upper button that says "All Sizes", which is also where you need to go if for whatever reason you wish to save a photo to your computer.
In other blog-related news, as the audience of this site has grown somewhat broader than I anticipated and as the right-hand side of the site was becoming increasingly clustered with the proliferation of archive links, etc., I have been working on a basic site navigator bar you will see above, that will allow you to jump around the page more easily. This may or may not be working completely correctly yet (because I haven't written my own HTML in about seven years). I've also tweaked some of the colors and content to make things slightly more readable.
OK that's about it. Enjoy the photos. I'll be coming back with a post about Jodhpur as soon as I finish up the last three articles I'm supposed to have done for work. I have to find something valuable and informative to say about riding camels that isn't just bitching about how they smell. It's going to be a long night.
The gallery is a Flickr account, linked at the very top right-hand side of this page, where you can also quickly check if there have been any updates, and admire a single image that will sit there for an arbitrary period of time, hinting at what wonders lie beyond the hyperlink.
Alas, due to many misfortunes large and small, the majority of the photographs from the month of October have been irretrievably lost, most tragically those of the Pushkar Camel Fair, but also from most of Uttar Pradesh except those salvaged from Facebook. I have however been stepping up on the photography of late and hopefully this trend will continue. The gallery now contains rescued images from the Varanasi area as well as increasing numbers of photographs from the last few weeks in Rajasthan.
I have captioned some but not all of the images. I have tried to be basically informative and occasionally witty, but there is only so much you can say about pictures of sunsets or whatever so I haven't been too fastidious about explaining everything...."this is a picture of the same throne room....viewed from the other side!"
For those of you not familiar with Flickr, it is a fairly versatile and elegant photo storage mechanism that allows much higher quality and better organizaton than hosting directly on this blog would permit. The main "snag" you might encounter when browsing the gallery is that unlike other photo sharing sites you are likely familiar with *cough*Facebook, clicking on an image will not skip directly ahead to the next in the batch. Instead you will see in a box to the right two thumbnails of the images before and after the one you are currently viewing. Should you so desire, it is possible to view higher-quality versions of the image than the default one displayed by clicking on the teeny upper button that says "All Sizes", which is also where you need to go if for whatever reason you wish to save a photo to your computer.
In other blog-related news, as the audience of this site has grown somewhat broader than I anticipated and as the right-hand side of the site was becoming increasingly clustered with the proliferation of archive links, etc., I have been working on a basic site navigator bar you will see above, that will allow you to jump around the page more easily. This may or may not be working completely correctly yet (because I haven't written my own HTML in about seven years). I've also tweaked some of the colors and content to make things slightly more readable.
OK that's about it. Enjoy the photos. I'll be coming back with a post about Jodhpur as soon as I finish up the last three articles I'm supposed to have done for work. I have to find something valuable and informative to say about riding camels that isn't just bitching about how they smell. It's going to be a long night.
Nov 17, 2009
Out Of The Sand, Into The Sandcastle
After three days roaming a shadeless desert without sunscreen, the only burn I have is a friction burn on my thighs from the ceaseless agitation of my loins against camel back, leaving my skin in those regions feeling like I slid down a rope too fast in gym class. I swear upon the names of the ~1,000,000 Hindu gods that I will never ride a camel again until they devise a way to mount a cushioned gyroscope to the saddle.
Around the time we approached the outskirts of Jaisalmer at breakneck speed, passing the common sights of an urban periphery such as high-voltage power lines, military police checkpoints, and random piles of cinderblocks our driver loaded a ghastly-looking, heavily-scratched Indian pop CD depicting on its face two Rajasthani puppets dancing while a silhouetted caravan of camels crossed in the background. As this digital monstrosity began to play, I thought about how far civilization and technology have come from the days of wandering in the desert to produce such a device, and as the disembodied puppet voice wailed cacophonously over the same abominable Indian drum machine used in every Hindi pop song since 1973, I looked out the window, saw a pair of fat tourists taking digital photographs of a pig sifting for banana peels in a pile of spare rickshaw motor parts, and concluded that Progress is a lie.
Jaisalmer, a teeming metropolis of noise and commerce to the villagers who flock here for work and trade, is in fact a charming and fairly relaxing Indian city. Excuse me, an Indian squirrel just stole the last bite of my honey sandwich. Guess whose species is going on the nemeses list.
Anyways, Jaisalmer is a quaint medieval desert town of 65,000 people pretty much in the middle of nowhere that depends largely on its convenient location for an Indian Air Force base from which to carpet-bomb Pakistani soldiers guarding their half of the sand. Rising from the center of the old city is Jaisalmer's fort, also known as the Golden City because it is constructed entirely of yellow sandstone. It is actually closer in color and texture to the cheese filling in a Ritz Bitz cracker, and looks like it has been crumbling because people have been justifiably scraping bits off to go with their popcorn. In fact the fort is crumbling primarily because of poor conservation but also because the Maharawals of Jaisalmer, being Rajput kings, spent centuries getting in wars which Jaisalmer tended to lose. It's no surprise that they lost. Their kingdom consisted of some 100 tiny villages in what even they admit is a "sandy waste" and a capital city that had a population of 7,000...in the year 1900. During their epic defeats of the middle ages in which the soldiers of the fort ended up resorting to mass suicide their army probably consisted on 17 dudes sharing a camel and a bunch of scarecrows. In the palace armory, along with the usual assortment of swords, shields, daggers, and ungainly firearms, is an example of a warrior's bow and arrow...from the early 20th century. Dynastic war fail.
In any case, despite Jaisalmer's historical ineptitude it is very beautiful. As it is located in a part of the country boasting neither "inhabitants" nor "resources", it is spared most of the unpleasant effects of modernity that plague other Indian cities. The fort stands out on the hilltop against the pristine, cloudless sky like the gods' own sandcastle, and from below you can just make out traces of the bustling life within. The fort is not just a monument but part of the city, with thousands of people living within its old servant homes. A short climb up through the many winding gates leads into the heart of the city, where the Maharawal's palace hangs overhead, looking over a tight maze of narrow streets, crumbling mansions, and ancient homes and temples. Homes and shops are built into the sandstone bastions, with restaurant kitchens sometimes built around 14th-century cannons sticking out the window and fabric shops with holes in the roof from long-ago sieges.
At one corner of the fort is a claustrophobic labyrinth of seven Jain temples. I knew this was going to be good. When I got there I discovered that somewhere along the way, due to crowded conditions within the fort, the Hindus and Jains decided to share the temples. The result, which combines the Jain penchant for obsessively ornate carving on every available surface with the Hindu penchant for images of wacky deities, is astounding. Connected to each other by barely-noticeable passages and twisting staircases, each of the temples contains a dazzling array of carved art, where hundreds of marble and gold statues of calmly seated Jain tirthankaras rest in shrines adorned in intricate scenes of Hindu gods with varying numbers of body parts belonging to different species playing music, dancing, carrying animals, and having sex. In the midst of all this, as Jain priests make offerings of holy paste in their inner sanctums, Hindu priests only feet away offer incense to their gods and circle about counting hanging bats on the sculptures as a measure of good fortune. Revealing an unusual familiarity with Jain and Hindu mythology (for a tourist), I was invited deeper into this shadowy warren of the gods where foreigners are rarely led and had the meanings of each of the multitude of statues explained to me in excessive and mind-boggling detail. I left baffled but satisfied.
Back out on the streets I reveled in the atmosphere of Jaisalmer. Not only can you happily breathe the actual atmosphere, but the ambiance is quintessentially Indian, almost a parody of itself. A platoon of poorly-mustached soldiers, half named Singh, attempted to maneuver a broken-down army truck while groups of splendidly-mustached old desert men in pink and orange turbans sat around drinking chai, only to briefly restore the engine and have it fail again when they were forced to stop by a barricade of contentedly digesting cows sitting in the shade beneath the last fort gate. Walking down the street, the merchants tried with all their energies to entice me to their shops. A wild-eyed dealer of arts and antiques gesticulated feverishly and implored "FEAST YOUR EYES, YES, FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS CAVE OF WONDERS, THE FINEST ANTIQUES IN ALL THE INDIA, FOR YOUR VERY SELF THIS DAY." A massive-grinned man with a metal pot balanced on his head followed me through the alleys playing a Rajasthani violin and enthusiastically saying "yes, very nice" at random intervals before unleashing a hyperactive and unmelodious burst of sound from his instrument and then suddenly shifting back into song.
I climbed into one of the bastions to eat at a restaurant that offered Tibeto-Mexican fusion cuisine. It was not good.
Finally, after a visit to the Maharawal's equally sand-colored palace I descended to the lower old city and sat on a rooftop, dreaming wistfully of the desert and gazing into the sky...
How many hump-backed livestock change?
Why are camels so deranged?
Where were you when we were getting high?
Clumsily walking through the sand
Moving slower than Gondwanaland
Where were you when we were getting high?
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova in the sky
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova
A camel-spit supernova in the sky
Around the time we approached the outskirts of Jaisalmer at breakneck speed, passing the common sights of an urban periphery such as high-voltage power lines, military police checkpoints, and random piles of cinderblocks our driver loaded a ghastly-looking, heavily-scratched Indian pop CD depicting on its face two Rajasthani puppets dancing while a silhouetted caravan of camels crossed in the background. As this digital monstrosity began to play, I thought about how far civilization and technology have come from the days of wandering in the desert to produce such a device, and as the disembodied puppet voice wailed cacophonously over the same abominable Indian drum machine used in every Hindi pop song since 1973, I looked out the window, saw a pair of fat tourists taking digital photographs of a pig sifting for banana peels in a pile of spare rickshaw motor parts, and concluded that Progress is a lie.
Jaisalmer, a teeming metropolis of noise and commerce to the villagers who flock here for work and trade, is in fact a charming and fairly relaxing Indian city. Excuse me, an Indian squirrel just stole the last bite of my honey sandwich. Guess whose species is going on the nemeses list.
Anyways, Jaisalmer is a quaint medieval desert town of 65,000 people pretty much in the middle of nowhere that depends largely on its convenient location for an Indian Air Force base from which to carpet-bomb Pakistani soldiers guarding their half of the sand. Rising from the center of the old city is Jaisalmer's fort, also known as the Golden City because it is constructed entirely of yellow sandstone. It is actually closer in color and texture to the cheese filling in a Ritz Bitz cracker, and looks like it has been crumbling because people have been justifiably scraping bits off to go with their popcorn. In fact the fort is crumbling primarily because of poor conservation but also because the Maharawals of Jaisalmer, being Rajput kings, spent centuries getting in wars which Jaisalmer tended to lose. It's no surprise that they lost. Their kingdom consisted of some 100 tiny villages in what even they admit is a "sandy waste" and a capital city that had a population of 7,000...in the year 1900. During their epic defeats of the middle ages in which the soldiers of the fort ended up resorting to mass suicide their army probably consisted on 17 dudes sharing a camel and a bunch of scarecrows. In the palace armory, along with the usual assortment of swords, shields, daggers, and ungainly firearms, is an example of a warrior's bow and arrow...from the early 20th century. Dynastic war fail.
In any case, despite Jaisalmer's historical ineptitude it is very beautiful. As it is located in a part of the country boasting neither "inhabitants" nor "resources", it is spared most of the unpleasant effects of modernity that plague other Indian cities. The fort stands out on the hilltop against the pristine, cloudless sky like the gods' own sandcastle, and from below you can just make out traces of the bustling life within. The fort is not just a monument but part of the city, with thousands of people living within its old servant homes. A short climb up through the many winding gates leads into the heart of the city, where the Maharawal's palace hangs overhead, looking over a tight maze of narrow streets, crumbling mansions, and ancient homes and temples. Homes and shops are built into the sandstone bastions, with restaurant kitchens sometimes built around 14th-century cannons sticking out the window and fabric shops with holes in the roof from long-ago sieges.
At one corner of the fort is a claustrophobic labyrinth of seven Jain temples. I knew this was going to be good. When I got there I discovered that somewhere along the way, due to crowded conditions within the fort, the Hindus and Jains decided to share the temples. The result, which combines the Jain penchant for obsessively ornate carving on every available surface with the Hindu penchant for images of wacky deities, is astounding. Connected to each other by barely-noticeable passages and twisting staircases, each of the temples contains a dazzling array of carved art, where hundreds of marble and gold statues of calmly seated Jain tirthankaras rest in shrines adorned in intricate scenes of Hindu gods with varying numbers of body parts belonging to different species playing music, dancing, carrying animals, and having sex. In the midst of all this, as Jain priests make offerings of holy paste in their inner sanctums, Hindu priests only feet away offer incense to their gods and circle about counting hanging bats on the sculptures as a measure of good fortune. Revealing an unusual familiarity with Jain and Hindu mythology (for a tourist), I was invited deeper into this shadowy warren of the gods where foreigners are rarely led and had the meanings of each of the multitude of statues explained to me in excessive and mind-boggling detail. I left baffled but satisfied.
Back out on the streets I reveled in the atmosphere of Jaisalmer. Not only can you happily breathe the actual atmosphere, but the ambiance is quintessentially Indian, almost a parody of itself. A platoon of poorly-mustached soldiers, half named Singh, attempted to maneuver a broken-down army truck while groups of splendidly-mustached old desert men in pink and orange turbans sat around drinking chai, only to briefly restore the engine and have it fail again when they were forced to stop by a barricade of contentedly digesting cows sitting in the shade beneath the last fort gate. Walking down the street, the merchants tried with all their energies to entice me to their shops. A wild-eyed dealer of arts and antiques gesticulated feverishly and implored "FEAST YOUR EYES, YES, FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS CAVE OF WONDERS, THE FINEST ANTIQUES IN ALL THE INDIA, FOR YOUR VERY SELF THIS DAY." A massive-grinned man with a metal pot balanced on his head followed me through the alleys playing a Rajasthani violin and enthusiastically saying "yes, very nice" at random intervals before unleashing a hyperactive and unmelodious burst of sound from his instrument and then suddenly shifting back into song.
I climbed into one of the bastions to eat at a restaurant that offered Tibeto-Mexican fusion cuisine. It was not good.
Finally, after a visit to the Maharawal's equally sand-colored palace I descended to the lower old city and sat on a rooftop, dreaming wistfully of the desert and gazing into the sky...
How many hump-backed livestock change?
Why are camels so deranged?
Where were you when we were getting high?
Clumsily walking through the sand
Moving slower than Gondwanaland
Where were you when we were getting high?
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova in the sky
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova
A camel-spit supernova in the sky
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