Me Against The World

Tamil Nadu is beginning to wear on me. Perhaps I've mentioned this already, but...THE WEATHER IS TERRIBLE. My clothing gets so clingy that taking off three-button shirts has become my introduction to yogic exercises. I'm also getting slightly bored of the interminable series of temples I'm visiting. It's partly my own fault, a scheme to crank out lots of location articles and get paid, but really Tamil Nadu, don't you have anything else to mix things up a bit? I guess this is what happens when you intensively travel around a single cultural region for any period of time. In Rajasthan I got bored of the daily slog of visiting castles in the desert heat. At least Tamil Nadu doesn't have any hills. You could call it a tradeoff of sorts. In places like Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu which are renowned for particular types of things, you just have to accept that you're going to see a lot of castles or temples, camels or Tamils.

My temple fatigue was already starting to set in by the time I finished my first temple visit in Tiruchchirappalli (and yes, that is a real name). The sole distinction of that city's temples are that they are located on a curious pile of golden boulders in the middle of the city and that the builders have done a remarkable job of crafting fake "cave temples" by building on top of rocks and making you enter through a dark, windowless passageway filled with vaguely archaic music and statues of gruesome creatures. Even after bribing the priests to take me into the forbidden Shiva sanctum I can't really say I was very moved. Really, I could stay home and get the same experience from hanging out in a friends' basement and watching him play World of Warcraft for five minutes, or until I kill myself, whichever comes first.

After an episode getting lost in Tiruchchirappalli's small Muslim ghetto for a short time and accidentally dispersing about half a crab's worth of fried crustacean onto my neighbors' table at a restaurant, I was going to take a bus to the nearby town of Srirangam.

Srirangam holds the distinction of possessing the largest Hindu temple...pretty much anywhere. The outer wall encloses a courtyard of 60 hectares. That's 600,000 square meters. It's so big in fact that at some point the people of Srirangam decided they couldn't be assed to walk all the way out from the center of the temple, and proceeded to build most of their town within the outer two courtyards. Now you have to penetrate as far as the third wall before the temple ceases to have zebra crossings and bus services. From the top of Tiruchchirappalli's rock temple you can see over to Srirangam and notice a number of temple towers popping out from the trees on opposite sides of town from each other. What you don't realize is they are all towers of the same temple, and it's the town that's in the temple and not vice versa. Some of the towers are awesome structures, and from strategic rooftops you get a marvelous view of them lined up in different color schemes and sizes, shrinking until they reach the golden dome of the sanctum sanctorum.

You may have noticed I said I was going to get a bus to Srirangam. I got on a bus, but it was the wrong one. I was quickly notified of this, and the conductor had the bus slowed so that I might jump off, which I did. Now, jumping from a moving vehicle is never an entirely safe idea, and this bus was going just a wee bit too fast. I focused on the cardinal rule of jumping from moving things, which is to jump out parallel to the way you're already moving, otherwise when you land you will be perpendicular, while your body continues to move on a parallel axis, which is not good. I also focused on the second important consideration: making sure there is open space where you are about to be skipping along. Obviously, you don't want to jump into a pole. Now, while I was so cleverly accounting for all these factors I forgot one thing: I'm in India. Just because I'm at what I call the side of the road doesn't mean that I'm at what someone else is going to decide is the side of the road. I also didn't look behind me, where, about two feet closer to the pavement than the bus I was leaping from, was...another bus. WHACK. I already described the immediate results here.

I shuffled off in my tattered trousers to the restaurant which I had so recently repainted with crab innards and washed off in the sink, then caught a rickshaw to my hotel and somehow communicated to the hotel boys to run off and get me a selection of bandages and other medical supplies. As I sat in my room controlling the bleeding with scraps from a giveaway turban, I had an epiphany.

All along I've believed I've been in a war against Indian beasts -my numerous combats against cowkind and their animal lackeys need no retelling- but I've been forced to realize that my war has also always been against Indian machines. Like my forebear Tupac Shakur, it's Me Against The World.

Yeah, me against the World. Watch the fuck out. I'm not saying the outcome is certain - the odds are stacked high - but now would be a good time for you to start looking into personal spacecraft.

No machine is any less devilish than its animal counterpart, and they shall all be vanquished forthwith.

Trains, those laggard mules of the rail, plodding along at the slowest serviceable pace and halting stubbornly at whatever interval suits their hulking iron fancy...

Buses, the uncomfortable, sweat-stenched and indignant camels of the road...

MP3-enabled cell phones, the screeching, raspy parrots blasting the Procrustean din of Indian pop music across the aether...

Megaphones and amplifiers, the bastard offspring of perpetually crowing cockerels and 800-pound, priapism-afflicted gorillas trembling the Earth through sheer volume and inanity...

Rickshaws, the hungry, scrapping dogs of the street, biting one another's flea-ridden flesh for rights to the freshest walking carcass of a customer...

Shit-slow cybercafe computers, monkey-like entities capable of near-human intelligence that use this power to squeak "Hey! Let's throw some poop!"...

And grainy televisions, perpetually tuned to second-rate Bollywood dance tunes and WWF pro wrestling, the nefarious bovine menace of the whole electronic world...


ALL SHALL FALL BEFORE MY WRATH