Karnatakarnage

I received my first marriage proposal today. The girl was pretty cute. I'd call her a ten. Ten years old. I had to turn her down though. My heart belongs to someone else. Someone else being Bollywood actress Amrita Rao. One day, Amrita, one day.

Stray thought. Here's one thing that separates India from the West: televised snake worship.

So I'm still in Karnataka and, well, it's hard for me to say this, but Hassan is probably a worse shithole than Faizabad. It exhibits all the qualities that make Faizabad such a horrendous place, but lacks even the few architectural sights that justify Faizabad not being immediately reduced to a smoldering crater. One of my guidebooks uses the phrase "like Beirut on a bad day." The primary achievment of Hassan's history is not being picked up wholesale by an irritated Hindu god and being cast into the sea. The electricity in Hassan is a joke, and the water supply...well let's say that if Hassan's drinking water is the British Fleet in 1812, then your digestive system is Fort McHenry. The scarlet regurgitation of curry provides the rockets' red glare; torrents of half-digested lentil flour, the bombs bursting in air. Vomit under the flickering fluorescent lights of the neighboring bus stand alone gives proof to the night that your guts are still there. And indeed it seemed a miracle to awake each morning and hear the grumble of a hungry stomach; it may be in tatters, but the star-spangled banner yet waves.

In Hassan you actually have to try pretty hard to spend more than a dollar on food, and you're still getting ripped off. There are more restaurants than there are dishes on the menu. Just for laughs I asked a waiter what they had for offer. He replied "dosa, masala dosa, onion dosa, dysentry dosa..."

A guy walked up to me and asked if I wanted any drugs. I said that I did. He asked which one. I said "Cyanide." He said he'd never done that one. I said I hadn't either, but Hassan seemed like a great place to try.

I took a shit on the street in Hassan and the Department of Public Works paid me for resurfacing the pavement.

A woman spoke to me. "You are from far away?" she asked. I said that I was. She first began to quietly weep, then sobbed into her trembling hands. " Far from here...it must be so beautiful..."

I bought a can of paint and put up a large sign reading "Hassan is the ugliest town that has ever existed in India." Appearing from nowhere, an old man walked up and silently painted over the words "in India." The people of the city gathered to watch until he was finished, and then with a poof he was gone, leaving only a pile of one-way bus tickets in his place.



You go to Hassan because it is between three other places, and these places aren't even that great. I visited the towns of Halebid and Belur first. "Halebid" apparently means "the dead city", because the Sultan's army utterly destroyed it to put the Hoysala Rajas in their place. It could more aptly be called "the brain-dead city" because apparently nobody has anything better to do than follow you around and try to sell postcards of places that aren't even in Halebid. Halebid's main attraction, a medieval Hoysala temple is actually quite nice. It was one of my sculpture-thon days, and this temple certainly has a wealth of exquisite art, but unless you've somehow gotten really into Hindu sculpture, your reaction would probably be "oh, well this is quite...cozy." Belur was more of the same (which is to say very nice but not jaw-dropping), but at least there the village has enough of an economy that people actually rouse themselves from their wallowing to turn cows away from their vegetable carts.

The other place I went was called Sravanagelabola (pronounced "Sravanagelabola"). This reveals another difference between India and the United States: in India when you go to the Deep South things become harder to spell, while in the US the deeper into the South you go, the harder it becomes to find anyone who can spell. Sravanabelagola is famous for being the site of two hills, one of which is topped by the world's largest monolithic statue, which I am happy to report is a 60-foot standing male figure on whom you can clearly see plants creeping up his legs because he is certainly not wearing any pants.

The story behind Sravanagelabola is actually pretty cool. In the 4th or 5th century BC, the king Chandragupta Maurya supposedly met Alexander the Great, became inspired to conquer his own half of the world, and became master of India's first and largest land empire, encompassing nearly all of what we call India today. Then at some point he converted to Jainism, and some time later decided to renounce his kingdom and followed his guru to a cave on one of the hills of Sravanagelabola, where they both gave up all possessions and fasted to death. The place thus became a sacred point of pilgrimage for the Jain community of South India. As it happened, hundreds of years later, while a local dynasty was switching back and forth between the Hindu and Jain religions, a Jain king came looking for some huge statue, couldn't find it, and decided to have it built up on the opposite hill, and now every twelve years millions of Hindus and Jains convene to cover this naked body in just about every substance imaginable.

The statue is actually very impressive, both in size and for its artistic expression, but its surroundings were a little dissapointing. I had expected the statue to be boring but presiding over magnificent views from atop a mighty mountain. It was quite the opposite, the statue is magnificent but the views are lacking. A temple was built around the statue, so now there's a wall blocking the view both in and out from the statue's base, which somewhat undermines the point of having built the statue up on the top for all to see from miles around. Now from far away it kind of looks like a very large man is sitting in a box. You have to actually get within the temple walls before your jaw drops. If I were in charge I would bulldoze the temple around it. And then I would be pelted with shoes and drowned in a lake. Also, the "mountain" is just a very large, bald rock you have to climb up barefoot. I don't know who developed the rules of sacred etiquette in ancient India, but they obviously did so while standing on a carpet, because they doomed billions of future souls to burn their goddamn feet skittering across hot stone floors all over Asia. In my personal opinion, the gods would be much happier to have me exploring their temple with sandals on than to have me bouncing around the courtyard like some sort of jester, hissing "fuuuuuuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck" as quietly as I can with every deranged hop. Some people say I have a dream job, but I ask of you, when was the last time you came home from work with second-degree burns on the soles of your feet, hmmmmmm?

Ever finding ways to cash in on terrible ideas, the local trinket-vendors have come up with an amazing racket: they walk up to tourists and offer to sell them socks. Genius. "Socks, twenty rupees!" one vendor shouted at me. I told him I had already been offered socks for ten. "Ten rent" he said. I didn't catch his meaning. The other vendor intervened to explain "Ten rupees rent socks, twenty rupees buy."
"You rent socks?" I asked.
"Yes! Ten rupees only!" they chimed.
"That's fucking disgusting."
I bought a pair of fresh socks in a sealed plastic bag for twenty, as the burns developing on my feet were at that point already tender-feeling and an unusual shade of pink. When I got back down to the bottom of the hill at the end of the day I astutely sold the man his socks back for ten rupees. Why didn't I just rent if I only wanted to spend ten rupees? Think about it. I got the clean socks. A busload of elderly French tourists ambled towards the bottom of the path, gingerly touching the stone with their toes as I they removed their shoes. "Excusez moi," I ventured, "you can ask those men for socks."
"Ahhhhhh, merci!"
"You're welcome."

So in summary, this is what I've learned in southern Karnataka so far: Halebid and Belur have thousands of very nice little sculptures, Sravanagelabola has one awesome sculpture, and Hassan is a pile of shit. We shall see how my visit to Mysore expands our knowledge.

I returned to Hassan and spent the entire evening at the same hopeless internt cafe, secretly hoping the power wouldn't come back on and allow me to continue my uploads, because they were still playing Linkin Park. Then I wrapped my burnt feet in sweat-covered t-shirts, hobbled into the main street of Hassan with a makeshift diesel flamethrower, and burnt the whole bitch to the ground. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?" the locals screamed, tearing at their hair and weeping in motionless buses. "THAT FUEL WAS OUR ONLY WAY OUT."