ONE MAN. ONE YEAR. ONE SUBCONTINENT.


Jan 31, 2010

Lab Report

Introduction

Research has established that Indians are capable of squeezing hundreds of individuals into a train carriage or bus, and that other forms of transportation are often similarly overloaded (G. Buddha, 2009). Unfortunately for the state of science, to date little research has been directed to quantifying the number of persons Indians may fit in a jeep. The most popular jeep-like vehicle in India is the Tata Sumo, a 4-door off-road vehicle.

Research Question

How many Indians can fit in one Tata Sumo?

Note that here it is necessary to define the phrase "fit in". By some Indian definitions this would encompass individuals hanging on top of or from the sides of the exterior of the vehicle. Colloquially, however, this definition is rarely applied to jeeps as in the field jeep operators are less apt to permit this means of transport as are bus, train, and rickshaw operators. The distinction also arises of whether or not the doors are open, as jeep overcrowding has been shown to sometime prevent the proper closure of the side doors and rear hatch (henceforth "the doors"). In this experiment we shall use the definition suggested in the unpublished paper "Vehicle Door Closing In The Indian Field Environment" (G. Buddha, 2010), which is as follows: a vehicle door shall be considered closed if it is functionally closed at the 95th percentile of maximum theoretical closure; that is to say, if the door is ajar no more than 5% of its total swinging arc.

The question we wish to answer therefore is "How many Indians may be transported by a statistically significant distance while confined within a single Tata Sumo with its doors ajar no more than 5% of their opening arc?"

Hypothesis

Allowing for the extraordinary cramming abilities of Indian transport sysems, and the apparent designed capacity of 8 passengers, we hypthesize that no more than 17 Indians can fit within a single Tata Sumo.

Materials
20 Indian rupees
1 Tata Sumo

Method

We shall purchase passage aboard a Tata Sumo. While aboard the Tata Sumo, we shall periodically count the total number of passengers therein.

Data

Table 1.1: Number of Passengers Within Tata Sumo
Column A = Observation #.
Column B = Number of passengers.

Col. A...............Col. B

1....................12
2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,15
3....................17
4,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,21
5....................23
6,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,25
7....................26
8,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,24
9....................25
10,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,26
11...................20
12,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,18
13...................15
14,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,7
15....................0

Analysis

The total number of passengers almost immediately exceeded our estimate. For the duration of the journey after departure and before entering the limits of the destination city, the data shows there was at any time in excess of 20 people in the jeep. The figure peaked, on two occasions, at 26 people.

Conclusions

We are forced to accept that our hypothesis was greatly in error, and that Indians may cram at least 26 people in a jeep.

The design of our experiment has, however, revealed a number of flaws. Though we have now critically revised our knowledge of the capacity of Indian jeeps, we have failed in any way to satisfactorily establish the true maximum level of Jeep cramming. Due to the frailty of the human observer, no attempt was made to experimentally add more Indians to the jeep.

We are also forced to acknowledge that the observer was not himself an Indian, and thus may have introduced a confounding variable. We speculate that as the ratio of Indians to total passengers approaches 1, the total capacity of the jeep approaches infinity. More research is clearly needed.

Though we have failed to arrive at a complete understanding of Indian jeep dynamics, we have demonstrated the potential scope and urgency of further experiments. The field of Indovolumetrics is as yet a young science, but no doubt holds great value in mankind's everlasting pursuit of knowledge.

This article will appear in no peer-reviewed journals, because Ghostface Buddha has no peers

Jan 30, 2010

Money, Caves, Hoes

I have been trying to acquaint myself more fully with the Hindu faith about which I am constantly writing. I recently started reading the great epic poems that Hindus read as scripture. I just started the Ramayana, and near the beginning is an episode in which the woman Sumati, blessed by a sage, "gives birth to a fissiparous mass that became 60,000 babies." Even since ancient times it seems not a single goddamn thing in this country was ever meant to make any sense.

India makes even less sense through the sticky haze of waking up at 5am to catch a bus out to some caves. Imagine my confusion upon reading the following in the newspaper: recently a professional kabbadi player died in a hospital in Maharashtra. What is kabbadi, you ask? Kabbadi is a sport much like the game of tag, except the person who's "it" has to catch the other players within a single breath, and he proves that it is a single breath by shouting kabbadikabbadikabbadikabbadi as he runs. Take a moment for it to sink in that this is a professional sport. Now prepare to jettison any understanding of India you may have gleaned from this excercise when I tell you that after this kabbadi player died, 300 people rioted in the hospital and set it on fire. This country never ceases to bewilder.

Some three hours trapped in a hot bus did little to enhance my mental acuity, and as soon as I entered the epic, unmistakable gorge housing the Ajanta caves, I promptly walked in exactly in the wrong direction and found myself staring at the site's electrical substation. "Hmmmm," I thought,"funny there isn't a proper trail around it." I had to poke about the edge of the bushes a bit before being convinced I had taken a wrong turn, and the realization was sealed when I saw about 250 children on a class trip marauding in the opposite direction. Oh goody, goody, goody.

The Ajanta caves are a series of man-made caves carved directly into the side of a cliff at a dramatic U-shaped gorge just below a waterfall. For centuries, this remote spot contained the subterranean refuge of many groups of Buddhist monks. Though there had been hermits and monks nosing about here earlier, Ajanta truly became magnificent in the early centuries of the first millenium, when Indian Buddhists decided to embrace the idea of art, and produced a breath-taking collection of wall-paintings and sculpture within the caves. Indian sources typically extol the excellence of the paintings in particular as "the zenith of Indian art", while some Western sources I have read call it "the finest collection of ancient art from any civilization."

The paintings are remarkably well-preserved, primarily because they were forgotten. Shortly after Ajanta reached its peak, Hinduism was bouncing back with a vengeance and the caves were abandoned by the monks and left to be overgrown by the riverside forests. Then, in the 19th century, a group of British company officials out tiger-hunting stumbled onto the top of the gorge and saw the massive entranceway to one of the larger caves, went in looking for bears or whatever, and found themselves staring at murals that had been sitting there in the darkness for over a thousand years.

Now of course the place is far from undiscovered, and features quite prominently on the schoolbus circuit. Fortunately, realizing the futility of getting middle-schoolers to refine their tastes while out on an excursion, their teachers are quite content to shepherd them all into the most famous 'checklist' spots first, make a cursory walk of the site from one end to the other, and leave. It was as they were leaving that the dreaded horde of intellectually understimulated youth inevitably descended upon me. They were mostly engaged in roughhousing, and particularly in picking on this one kid whose skin tone was several shades darker than the rest of the class. He was shoved around and bumped into me. He began to apologize when he was yanked away and some gap-toothed doofus with his spittle practically hanging from his lip saw me and yelled (because I was all of two feet away) "This boy is Akon!" What?

"This boy is Akon!" he repeated, dampening the front of my shirt in his excitement. "He is from West Indies!" I took another look at the kid, and he most certainly was not from the West Indies. If I had to venture a guess, I would say he was from...India. Then, finally it became clear. "HE IS BLACK!!!", Saliva Boy shouted, and his classmates burst out in laughter. Great. Here we are, some 3500 years after the invading Aryans basically invented the caste system to keep Darkies in their place and still the fact that this kid has Dravidian genes in him and darker skin makes him a punching bag. Sometimes, no matter where you go in the world, you still catch glimpses of a terrible society founded on the worst aspects of our nature, tenaciously clinging to seemingly hopeless human behavior under the surface of supposedly modern civilizations. India has long been behind the curve on treating people well. Ancient Brahmanical Hinduism has a distinct taste of "our habits are henceforth holy law!" It's no wonder that contrarian religious sects have been springing up here for thousands of years, and that India is the cradle of at least three major egalitarian religions.

On the other hand, the encounter confirmed one of my pet theories: Indian people literally know nothing about Black people except for the West Indies cricket team, Akon... and in a distant third, Barack Obama. Seeing that my efforts to end the picking-on were to be in vain, I unsettled the offending children a bit by insisting that in the West only girls listen to Akon. "You're listening to girl music" is a pretty effective weapon against boys of a certain age, whereas the older ones were surprisingly easy to shame by pointing out that the Akon-Snoop Dogg collaboration "I Want To Love You" concerns fucking a stripper, and then explaining what a stripper is.

This episode aside, Ajanta was an amazing place. Every one of the twenty-something caves revealed new treasures, whether a mural of processions of elephants or a complete prayer hall with an enormous symbolic stupa in the apse. The paintings at Ajanta get all the glory, but the sculptures were quite fabulous too, especially in the last cave which has an astonishing giant sculpture of Buddha lying down to sleep before dying and ascending to ultimate enlightenment. I had suspected in the morning that spending all day looking at paintings might be a touch dainty even for Ghostface Buddha's eminently refined tastes, but the incredible quality of the works and their breathtaking setting above the gorge made it a most invigorating adventure. I returned on the long bus back to Aurangabad, and took my leisure.

It is not within the scope of this blog, thanks to my fifth amendment rights, to explain how exactly this happened, but I found myself later that night walking into a white-tablecloth hotel restaurant with no shoes or belt on and my top three shirt buttons undone, and then spent five minutes trying to debone bits of chicken with my spoon. It's a marvel I actually get anything done.

The next day I once again woke up in the dim light of an unreasonably early morning and....I'm sorry but I just got distracted by two insects trying to start a family on my monitor. Anyways, I went to Ellora, and let me tell you: there are cave temples and then there are cave temples. Ellora has some motherfucking cave temples. The caves are all along a lengthy ridge, and actually belong to three different religions, with Buddhist caves at one end, Hindus in the middle, and Jains off in the distance. They all held the place sacred, and over the course of a couple hundred years had something of a monastic slapfight trying to outdo eachother with the magnificence of their excavations.

I can imagine the scene now: a Hindu monk and a Buddhist monk meet while drawing water from the stream.
"So, how's that monastery going?" the Hindu inquires.

"Oh, quite well," the Buddhist responds, "it helps to be guided by the true faith."

"True faith my ass! Our gods were forming the world before your Buddha's tenth-previous incarnation was even in diapers! And besides, have you seen our Kailash temple? Looks to me like faith is leading us to the greatest heights!"

The Buddhist sneers. "Well, while some people are busy chiseling away at rocks, some of us are a bit occupied achieving ultimate enlightenment."

"Ultimate enlightenment?!?! You shall be reborn as a dog, you...dog! The wrath of Durga be upon you!" the Hindu sputters, spilling his handful of coconut slivers as his dripping sweat smudges the holy paste on his forehead into a formless splotch of vegetable matter.

"Please desist; you harm only yourself. Anger clouds true vision" the Buddhist recites, with a slight, smug curling of the lips.

"We shall see who is harmed when I call upon the flaming bow of Shiva! you little caste-less cu..."

At that moment the argument is silenced by the arrival of a Jain monk at the stream. "Still rehashing the same old trifles, I see" he says while plucking a hair from his scalp.

The Buddhist and Hindu both turn, their quarrel for a time forgotten. "Dude, put on some fucking clothes."
All three of the religions performed amazing feats at Ellora, and if you weer forced to give out medals the gold would have to go to the Hindus, but that's really not the point. The twelve Buddhist caves range from the austere cells of iconoclastic Hinayana Buddhists to massive, multi-storey Mahayana monasteries, self-contained with cells, shrines, meeting halls, and everything else a flourishing religious community in a giant man-made cave would need. There is even one cave carved in the form of an echoing Buddhist cathedral.

One thing you quickly notice at Ellora is that, apparently, renouncing the world does not compel you to renounce sculptures with big ol' titties, a feature that is seemingly second in importance in the Buddhist caves only to the figures of Buddha and the Boddhisvatas themselves, aglow as they nearly monopolize the light shining through the openings of the caves.

After the twelve Buddhist caves you get to the Hindu caves. Here, predictably, is where shit gets weird. The collossal sculptures that typically adorn these caves feature a full array of Hindu themes, from demons abducting buxom maidens, to many-armed gods rescunig buxom maidens, to the heroes of the epics resting in glorious victory while accompanied by an assortment of buxom maidens. By the time I reached the 29th cave and saw naked, pointy-nippled breasts at three times life-size, I began to suspect that consciousness was not the only thing the monks were habitually raising.

The Jain caves were pretty much as you'd expect Jain caves to be: smaller, more obsessively decorated versions of Hindu caves. It should be noted that based on the profusion of divine penises and nutsacks in evidence, these caves probably belonged to Degembara Jain monks, which is likely why they were shunted off to the far end of the ridge.

Though many of the caves could easily be attractions in their own right, together they are an overwhelming collection of sculpture. Even among such formidable competition one cave clearly stands alone against all contenders: the Kailash temple.

The Kailash temple is not, strictly speaking, a cave, as it is open-ceilinged and you can look straight up to the sky above. So, what is it? A hole? No. It is a full-size Hindu temple -a larger than average Hindu temple, in fact- sitting in a courtyard completely surrounded by what look like cliffs. The whole affair, temple, courtyard, and all was carved out of monolithic rock in the hillside. I'm trying to find how to make this clear...it is a large temple, carved entirely from a single chunk of rock, sitting in a large open space completely surrounded by the sheer sides of that same rock from which the temple and courtyard were themselves carved. Even the presence of the sky here is of man's creation. Though the sun shines down on you around the temple, you are walking through one vast, two-hundred year excavation. How many times am I going to end up saying this...India makes your jaw drop.

After 34 caves, (and about 26 the day before), a certain cave-fatigue begins to set in, especially when you are taking thorough notes on each and every one for your employers. You begin to feel a little dehydrated, the pungency of bat poop seems to increase fourfold, and one begins to regard sunlight as a temporary convenience to be held onto tightly while it lasts. So now I return to the bright surface-world of the Deccan, blinking like a mole, and set my regained sight on continuing my adventure. See ya next time.

Jan 29, 2010

Inspectah Deccan

The central, inland portion of southern India is a large, hot plateau known as the Deccan. Being located right in the middle of everything, it has an incredibly convoluted history of different parts of it falling into the hands of just about every local dynasty and foreign invader imaginable. It's like Central Europe, but worse. Since most Western people can't tell a Hohenzollern from a Hohenstaufen, I will spare you all detailed accounts of the Chalukyahs, the Adil Shahs, the Vatakas, and so on. The point is, if you're anybody that matters in India, you have to get involved in wars in the Deccan, and no matter what happens it will end up being a bigger pain in the ass for you and your kingdom than you anticipate. Much in the same way, Ghostface's invasion of the Deccan got off to an inauspicious start of being left stranded by the roadside by a heap of rubbish somewhere in Mumbai the night before a government holiday on which the railway union was expected to strike. And much like the kings of old, GFB has no time for ill omens and marches onward to war.

I made my camp in the old town of Aurangabad, the sleeping dog of a city that once ruled over nearly all of India. It takes its name from Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughal Emperors to rule a mighty kingdom. You could hardly tell now that Aurangabad has ever had any kind of glory. The most impressive monuments in the city limits are a handful of fake grottoes as one might find at a cheap casino and a sloppily-painted mosque that has neither domes nor minarets. Yet, in its day it was the capital of the Mughal Empire at the height of its territorial conquests, the court moved here from Delhi so that the unfailingly warlike Aurangzeb could better conduct the incessant, draining wars that marked his tenure as lord of the Deccan.

Aurangzeb, even on the scale of Indian despots, was both excessively belligerent and a general asshole. Aside from overthrowing his own father (Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal) and having most of his vanquished brothers quietly disposed of, he made a number of incredibly stupid moves. For starters, he was a hardcore religious fanatic and decided that if people insisted on continuing to be pagan Hindu swine, they could at least pay a hefty tax for the privilege. He also ordered the decapitation of the Sikh guru of the time, with the result that the Sikhs immediately became extremely militant and predictably anti-Mughal. Then, he also had the brilliant notion that since he had the largest armies in India, he could fight pretty much everyone at the same time. Though he stretched the Empire to greater breadth than ever before, he used up all his resources and pissed off just about everyone, so that when he died the Empire immediately fell into shambles and was left a pathetic shadow of its former self. He was also a rabid iconoclast, and had seemingly half the temples in India desecrated, which did a lot to make sure pretty much every non-Muslim in the country despised him. In short, Aurangzeb was a brutal, artless man, and in Aurangabad it shows that he left nearly nothing of value behind for posterity.

Not long after his death (but before everything completely went to shit), his wife died and his son decided that the Emperor's wife ought to have a tomb befitting of her dynasty. Remember, of course, that the previous Emperor's wife got the Taj Mahal. The decision was then made to construct an imitation of the Taj Mahal outside Aurangabad. The result, called the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, looks like what you would expect if you found the first gut-scratching, pit-stained contractor knocking back cheese fries at the local Hooters and asked him to build the Taj Mahal using two postcards and a diagram on a greasy chilli-dog wrapper as blueprints. It's not that it's a terrible building. As just any Mughal tomb it would be quite impressive, but it is so obviously a copy of the Taj Mahal, and so obviously inferior that you can't help but laugh a bit. Yes, it is marble (partially), and vaguely the right shape, but it has an unmistakable appearance of cheapness to it. Where the Taj has inlaid stones the Bibi-ka-Maqbara has plaster. The minarets are painted in imitation of stone, and the domes on the roof are all kind of smooshed together. In fact, the whole building looks kind of narrow and squashed, like a Taj Mahal clenched betwen Allah's own butt cheeks.

Believe it or not, there are not one but two failed Muslim capitals of India around here. Just down the road is the crumbling old fortress-city of Dalautabad, the site of on the most idiotic, farcical political decisions in history. During the 15th century, Muhammad bin Tughluq was the Sultan of Delhi and ruled most of India. Sound familiar? Even for an Indian despot, he was warlike, brutal, and a general asshole. In due course he got himself embroiled in various wars in the Deccan, and found it expedient to move his capital southwards to the mighty fort at what became Daulatabad. What he didn't do was first check if the location was suitable for a city, but we'll return to that oversight soon enough. The Sultan, intent on moving his court, was not satisfied with merely relocating his administration. Instead he ordered the entire population of the city of Delhi to pack up their things and join him on the thousand-kilometer march south with hardly any preparations.

Thousands of people died on the march, and many more were reduced to poverty when they quickly tired of hauling their possessions along with them. They couldn't stop or turn back, because Muhammad bin Tughluq was not a man to tolerate dissent quietly. By the time they finally crawled into the site of the new city, most despaired of ever seeing their homes again. But they did, because Daulatabad turned out to have almost no water supply, and just when they finished building the doomed city after two years, the Sultan ordered them to box up all their shit and walk back to Delhi. This part of the Deccan just seems to bring out the worst in royal mass-murderers.

All this to build a city around a spectacular fort the Sultan was convinced would be the key to his complete mastery over India. I had to see it.

You pull up to the outskirts of the ruins and you notice the standard crumbling fortifications, though in this case they look particularly sturdy and well laid-out for deadly crossfires. I was willing to agree with various Europeans of the day who said it was among the strongest in India, though I failed to see what was so special. Then, noticing what an 80-year-old librarian could spot with her glasses off, I saw that the walls of the fort formed a wide ring around what was clearly an extinct volcano in the middle of the city. Oh. Passing through various temples and military facilities inside the walls, I passed through a second set of equally formidable walls. This fort was not fucking around. And just inside this wall lies what is surely the most ridiculous, paranoid, and perverse citadel on this green Earth. Behind the wall is a deep moat, its waters now about 50 feet below the edge of the precipice on which I stood. On the other side of the moat was not another wall, but some 200 feet of sheer-vertical, solid stone cliff face of a fucking volcano. Now you can cross on a narrow iron bridge, but back in the day the only way across the moat was down a staircase to a very low, narrow bridge to stairs going back up the other side. As if this weren't dangerous enough, the moat was so engineered that a system of dams could be opened and closed to raise the water in the moat and leave the only bridge some 15 feet underwater. Now, you can't just swim across when people are shooting at you, particularly not when on the other side is not a bank to crawl up, but THE SHEER STONE SIDE OF A FUCKING VOLCANO. Oh, and by the way, in their off time the garrison was apparently fond of breeding a battalion of man-eating crocodiles to fill the moat with.

Now, assuming you crossed the crocodile-filled moat to the narrow opening in the walls of the volcano on the other side and somehow got a foothold at the base of the citadel, you would still have to climb to the top of the volcano in order to secure the stronghold. There is of course, only one, easily defensible, way to get up the volcano. Perhaps a steep, narrow staircase carved into the side of the cliff? No. That wouldn't be twisted enough, for I have concluded that Daulatabad's cartoonishly wicked defenses are the work of men as concerned with entertaining the sadistic pleasures of their own ingenuity as they were with military necessity. To get to the top you have to go into the side of the mountain, through a winding, pitch-black tunnel and up a number of stairs. I probably shouldn't even bother mentioning at this point that the only (deliberately inadequate) sources of light were the long shafts which the defenders would drop rocks and hot oil through; their schemes were far more devious than those obvious measures. Of all the defensive contrivances, in my view the most wicked, a device of sheer spite meant only to enliven the laughter of the victorious defenders (as they drink wine the next night out of their victims' skulls, no doubt) was after rounding a corner in the utter blackness they placed a single, unnecessary step. Just one. One step for an army running terrified through the darkness to suddenly turn the corner and all fall right on their faces with a clang of weapons and armor. Shit is fucked.

Some ways beyond this dastardly step are a series of proper staircases, which of course are of completely uneven height and depth so even to this day it is a little prickly to climb in the dark even without being in the middle of the war. Now suppose you have run up these stairs and you finally see the light of day shining through a doorway. You rush towards it, letting loose the cry of battle, and you suddenly find yourself falling because the blinding 'doorway' is in fact an opening in the side of the cliff and you've just run into the open air, which you are now traversing at an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 in the direction of a very deep moat and some very angry crocodiles about 100 feet below. Behind you, your best friend has no time to mourn your loss because he, ahead of his time, has discovered what the phrase "Indiana Jones boulder trap" means.

Finally, should the defenders be forced to abandon the passageway for whatever reasons -tying their shoelaces springs to mind- they could light a giant brazier at the mouth of the tunnel and almost instantly use the principle of suction to fill the passage with an impenetrable wall of heat rushing through the darkness. They could also spread toxic gases into the tunnel this way, but this was probably overkill, and they would have to pick up poisoned vultures along with the rest of the corpses the next day, so the other defenses would have to do.

I did not breach Dalautabad at the head of an army. Rather, I was trailing one; an army of 5th-to-9th graders on class trips. It was just Republic Day, and the remainder of the week thereafter is traditionally a time when Indian schools go on their (attendance mandatory) excursions to witness History and Culture firsthand. As you well know, schoolchildren hate history, and the only thing they like about class trips is going outside and making a complete shitshow on the bus. Oh, how I pine for the days of wandering in loud, obnoxious cliques of boys through some area of tremendous cultural importance, making life as irritating as possible for the girls we secretly wanted to perform poorly-understood sex acts with. Indian children do not behave quite in this manner. First of all, this is India, so replaces the word cliques with swarms. Now, increase the student-to-chaperon ratio by a factor of about 5, and completely subtract any interaction between the sexes. This operation should leave you with several hundred merrily chatting girls trotting about in cliques, harmlessly engaged more in gossip than in Culture. Then you have the boys. The equally large host of boys channel their budding -more like erupting- levels of testosterone almost exclusively through testing the strength of their vocal cords in echoing chambers and by forming fast-moving uniformed wolfpacks that descend upon all persons of interest (i.e. foreign tourists) and ritually word-vomiting all of their English and quite a bit of their Marathi for each other to ravenously poke at, bursting into crazed, drooling laughter after devouring a particularly choice morsel of their classmates' steaming-fresh verbal puke.

It was in this setting that I was taking my notes on Daulatabad's defenses, and soon discovered just how easily such devious mechanisms come to mind when directed against a close-at-hand object of derision easily substituted for the enemy. Oh, you like shrieking, kid? Let's see how much you like it when a bowl of hot magma falls down your throat! Yeah, yeah, it's really quite fucking hilarious when you all start shaking your butts in my photographs. Let's see how funny it is when you wiggle your asses over to that harmless piece of flooring...I mean THE TRAPDOOR TO MY RHINO PIT. I looked inside myself and knew that within every man lies Evil, waiting only for prodding of Nuisance to come out.

I ascended the hill, which after the tunnel would have been a simple matter of walking up a winding path up a very steep hill while people shoot at you, but by that point if you got through you'd probably have the defenders fleeing from you in final desperation, or just because you're on fire. The views from the top were stunning, looking out into a huge sky over a seemingly endless expanse of the hot, brown hills of the Deccan. And then I went back down, carefully avoiding the various deathtraps and swatting in the general direction of fluttering bats.

Over the next two days I engaged in a brutal campaign of conquest taking me to the cave refuges of Ajanta and Ellora, but I will tell of that another day. I shall do with the chronology of this narrative what I wish. Indeed, even the great Hindu bards who sung the timeless epics skipped from scene to scene, imparting a tale of great wisdom, where the sequence of words depends more upon their true meaning in the context of this vast tale we call life than upon in what order the original events transpired. What I'm saying is that this post is getting long and Ajanta and Ellora are both about caves.

Shortly after departing Ellora (that place, dear reader, of which we shall hear soon enough), I arrived in the little town of Khuldabad. It's a rather forgettable little Muslim village with a sprinkling of ruins and a small, unimposing shrine to a long-dead Sufi. What I came to see, however, was just outside the tomb. In a small, half-walled enclosure lies a low and simple grave, no more than a foot high and topped only with soil and a handful of blossoming flowers. It is the grave of Aurangzeb, who in his piety demanded only the simplest of burials, paid for by funds he raised selling little white hats he knitted. The megalomaniac, in his zeal, stumbled upon a fragment of humility and it now marks his last, for all of history. I looked at the little grave, in this near-random little town way down in the Deccan, where Aurangzeb desired to be buried by the side of his teacher, and almost felt a little sorry for him. The British viceroy (of course the British) had built a modest marble lattice around the tomb, but otherwise it was a most mystifying lack of distinction or extravagance from a man whose terrible ways tore apart half a continent and brought his own kingdom to ruin.

Thoughts to live by? Perhaps. I'm still thinking of how to build a subterranean catapult for coating a spiked ceiling with middle-schoolers, and whether or not I need a gutter if the bodies get...leaky.

Jan 26, 2010

Slumdog Chamillionaire

After a day unexpectedly spent portraying an anonymous airport visitor in the future Bollywood smash hit Advertisement for Horlick's NutriBars, it was a rather severe change of scenery to once again wake up in the early morning, not to return to the glamor of Bollywood, but to venture into the heart of Mumbai's slums.

There are over 2000 officially recognized slum communities in Mumbai, housing some 55% of the city's population. For a city with 16 million people, you do the math. I'd been in contact with an NGO that regularly takes visitors on trips into the slums (for a fee directed towards charitable works), and it was they who led me, two Dutch people, and an easily-upset Israeli idealist through Dharavi, the largest slum in the whole of Asia. In an area between two train tracks, covering less than 2 square kilometers, Dharavi is home to over a million people.

You may be expecting me to say something like "The people of Dharavi cling to a threadbare existence, languishing in poverty and the greatest suffering imaginable." Not so. One of key points my guide stressed early on, as I now will, is that in reality slums are not as they are in many people's imaginings, giant camps of destitute and shiftless waifs whose lot in life it is to lie around their homes in misery because there's no employment or food or water. What they wanted to show, and which I can completely confirm, is that though the slums are certainly very, very poor they are fully functional, even flourishing communities.

Before going on it would be important to say in what ways Dharavi is an exception. For starters, the Mumbai slums have a higher average income than those elsewhere in India, not least because the exorbitant costs of the city force many people with comparatively respectable incomes to live in slum conditions. Secondly, Dharavi is unique among Mumbai slums in that it has its own major economic engine, a startling industrial feat, whereas other Mumbai slums are purely residential neighborhoods. Nevertheless, I was told (with figures to back it up) that despite Dharavi's uniqueness in these respects, we should not extrapolate that other Indian slums are necessarily the putrid hell-holes one might imagine them to be.

Oh, and yes, Dharavi is the slum where they filmed some scenes in Slumdog Millionaire (which I haven't seen). I was shown a giant pipe alongside which the protagonist apparently runs. I was also told that some infamous scene involving a toilet vat of some sort was actually constructed on a film set, and that the substance the boy jumps into was chocolate peanut-butter, "because no camera crew would film in shit."

Before going to the slum we stopped next to Mumbai's famous "dhobi ghat", a large grid of some 700 laundry-washing tanks where thousands of garments from across the city are still washed by the traditional method, namely dunking the item in water and then repeatedly bashing it against a rock. This is how I get most of my laundry done, and probably explains why I occasionally find a button missing. It was a little odd that we were not the only people there to watch a throng of dripping-wet men in sagging wifebeaters that revealed their glistening, ample chest hair in the act of vigorously whipping other people's clothes against cement walls. I would certainly not say it the scene had a particularly noble aesthetic, but everyone else seemed to be fascinated by the operation while I looked on with about as much wonder as you would if a tour guide took you to your local dry-cleaner's. Oh, how fascinating; just a moment please, I need to see if Habib here has got my slacks. I must say though that like everything about Mumbai it was an impressively large and artificial version of the commonplace.

And Mumbai is definitely large and artificial. We traveled northwards on the flyover avenues for over an hour before we got near the slum. Our guide then told us "Because Dharavi is shaped like a heart, and is located in the very center of the city, many people call it the Heart of Mumbai". I consulted a map. In the hour in which we had passed endless apartment towers and entire neighborhoods of creaking old mill-tenements, we had gone from the southern tip of the city to a point at the base of the peninsula, about a third of the way up the map, and this was the 'center' of the city. North of us lay hours more of the same. I'm telling you, even with half the city's people packed into slums and much of the rest in high-rises, a city of 16 million people is a very big place. And let's not even talk about the satellite cities and suburbs.

We arrived on one edge of the slum and saw a patch of swampy ground. "The area now the slum used to be land like this too, but by 1950's so much rubbish was there the ground was almost solid, so the poor people came, added more rubbish and some cement, and built the slum on top." The slum, quite literally, is built on trash.

Dahravi is built on trash in a figurative sense too, because trash is the fuel of the slum's startlingly efficient economy. I had heard about this, and imagined the situation to be much like that of a Costa Rican novel I once read, in which an entire community of dirt-poor people live off of a giant, festering pile of rubbish. This was quite different. The people of the slum (and slums in general, our guide claimed) had proven incredibly resourceful. At first we walked down a concrete-paved street that honestly looked no worse than an average side-street in Delhi, which is to say kind of gross, but hey. We were in the "industrial" part of Dahravi, but I saw no signs of factories. We then came across a long line of Tata trucks in the street, and workers were unloaded hundreds of sacks of plastic rubbish and carrying them off into alleys. This was the first glimpse we got of a recycling industry in Dahravi that apparently turns over $700,000,000 in profits a year. That's right. Seven hundred million dollars a year.

We followed into the alleys and soon the "factories" appeared everywhere. Everywhere we looked there were people hard at work in two- or three-story buildings in various specialized forms of rubbish recycling. We passed a number of factories that were occupied by men sitting in giant piles of plastic junk, sorting it by the quality and general type of plastic to be sent to other factories for further processing. I should add here that all these factories are locally-run ventures of the slum residents themselves, not some Dickensian enterprise with a fat cat from downtown stroking has jiggling belly as he laughs at how much money he can make by putting up his workshops in the slums. In the next street I saw a place where the floor was completely covered knee-high in empty computer cases being stripped of metal parts. Across the street, the plastic CD drive cases were being stacked up, and the screws were being carried off in canvas sacks on people's heads.

Around the corner, large steel grinding machines of the kind one sometimes finds at municipal garbage drop-offs were being cranked to crush the sorted plastic into itty little bits. We entered a doorway on this street and found a workshop where some ten people were engaged in making these machines. Tired of purchasing such equipment from the manufacturers, it seems residents of the slum had infiltrated the original factory for some time, become acquainted with the engineering, and returned home triumphant with a working knowledge of the assembly of such machines, which were now being produced for local use at a tidy profit. The guide saw me examining one of the other contraptions, a bulky lathe-like device being used to fashion parts. "They built these machines too" he said "some of the people here are now quite expert in metal engineering."

We crossed another street and climbed to the roof of a warehouse filled with plastic pellets, the little colored bits of plastic about half the size of a grain of rice that are the final product of Dahravi's recycling. From there the pellets are sent out by color-specific orders measuring in tonnes to giant moulding factories in the city. From the roof we beheld, as you may suspect, a memorable panorama. We could see the limits of the entire slum, and piled up in every alleyway and rooftop of the industrial area were meticulously categorized heaps of junk. Below us were hundreds of 20-gallon aluminum paint cans. On one nearby rooftop there was a ten-foot pile of yellow plastic buckets, and so on all around us, making the entire district appear buried in garbage. The most remarkable thing of it all, was that this slum was buried in garbage in such a way that it was a good thing.

Of course, when we're dealing with the processing of garbage not everything is good. We went through an alley to a building that was emitting rather foul-looking puffs of smoke. It was the paint-can factory. Here the paint cans were stripped of their labeling, beaten back into shape with hammers, and finally whatever paint residue remained inside was removed by burning. Those who worked in the factory essentially spent their every working day inhaling hot paint fumes. They tend to develop serious illnesses after not too long. Further on still we were in an aluminum smith's shop. Piles of aluminum garbage were being melted down in a roaring furnace. With beaming pride and great flair, one of the smiths whipped away a tarpaulin that covered a large cubic pile of something. Once the cover was removed we were stunned to behold a gleaming rack of aluminum ingots ready to be shipped to factories around India. A teenage boy waddled up with a sack between his legs and opened it to reveal rough lumps of pure silicon, which can be added to aluminum as per order to increase its strength. These people seem to have it all figured out.

And all of this, remember, just comes from trash picked up around the city and fed via a network of distribution points all leading towards the slum. It's not just Mumbai's trash, either. The slum has such reputation amongst Indian industry that rubbish is shipped there by truck even from other states, who in turn happen to receive phenomenal amounts of crap dumped from shipments carried across the waves from China and the United States. I may have seen some of your trash here in the slums of Mumbai, where trust me, they are making very good use of it.

You might be buying goods made from materials recycled or even manufactured here too. We passed on small, dark bakery in which the working boys were busy handling a 500-kilo mound of soft, sugary pastry dough. They were then fashioning it into "poof pastries" that are sold throughout India, and even in major supermarkets in the United Kingdom. Later in the afternoon, when we traversed the leather-tanning district, I was completely and utterly delighted to hear that the workshops in these alleys were turning the big, stinking piles of fresh animal hides into Dolce & Gabbana handbags. I don't mean fake Dolce & Gabbana handbags, I mean Dolce & Gabbana actually has contracts with these people. Forget giant sweatshops. Check you handbag labels. If it says "Made in India", maybe I could show you to a random hole in the wall in a Mumbai slum where a bunch of fuzzy goat skins with the meat rotting inside them are waiting to be made into next year's signature collection.

We toured the industrial area at length because this was regarded as the marvel of the slums, but we spent a lot of time in the residential areas too, and while they were not festering, shit-strewn camps with perpetually fly-covered babies crying in missionaries' laps for all eternity, one would certainly not refer to the area as having ideal living conditions. Having received some form of recognition from the government in a landmark 1995 Slum Law, they do receive full government services, though as our guide put it "some of the services can be poor." He said this while lifting a bundle of dangling electrical wires for us to pass under. "Careful. Sometimes there are small accidents." We walked then to a little cottage industry, as it were, of which he was immensely proud. We were within the confines of the Muslim part of the slum, which had been segregated along religious and ethnic lines since the 1993 Indian religious riots. In the workshop, carpenters were fashioning little ornamented niches out of various kinds of wood. "Birdhouses?" one of my fellow visitors asked. "No!" our guide replied exuberantly. "You see these Muslim people?" he asked while waving over a bunch of hunched, whittling carpenters in kufis, "They are making Hindu shrines!"

Continuing on through the residential part of the slum was quite an assault on the senses. It was unrelentingly dark and consisted entirely of alleyways. By 'alleyways' I don't mean just any alleys. What passes for a main street in here and may be lined with local grocery stores and tobacco shops, will be no more than two feet wide, and will certainly not go in a straight line. We winded through the blackness, our shoulders bumping into walls, our feet studiously avoiding the open sewer (my companions were clearly less accustomed to and more perturbed by this feat than your humble narrator), our heads ducking under swaying electrical lines, and generally making big clumsy fools out of ourselves every time we encountered somebody needing to pass in the opposite direction. And that was the main streets. We went off into the side streets, which at least had a covered gutter, because the gutter occupied the entire width of the alley. You could only pass through the street by leaning one shoulder forward, and coming across a stranger meant both of you pressing your bellies on the walls and shuffling your butts past each other. Along the way we peered into the open homes, which were well-built concrete structures looming above the narrow alleys high enough to make the whole area appear subterranean. Each dwelling was at best a ten-by-ten meter single-room apartment for the entire family (ten-by-ten feet was much more likely), for which they had to pay a considerable monthly rent often as much as one family member's entire salary. We were left to imagine what a "good" apartment in the city would cost, and were told that this is why not only the rural poor were forced to move into the slums, but also a large number of people with "respectable" jobs in shops, offices, and government agencies.

The smell of the slums, it must be said, is truly unique. In no other place will you find such a density and pungent diversity of foul odors, from carcasses to vats of dye, burning paint, refrigerators being drained of freon, scrap cotton smoldering atop clay ovens, the wet stench of lingering rubbish, giant baskets of broken plastic being melted, to the fiery aroma of strings of chillies being sliced open in a vegetable shop right next to your face.

My fellow visitors soon displayed a particular fascination with the issue of toilets. Through their dogged inquiries I learnt that there is a much-improved situation where one six-stall community toilet block now serves only 1500 people. My companions were predictably aghast. "Well Indian people usually can make themselves go only one time a day" explained the guide, "But yes, before work the morning queue can be rather long."

We then walked more and more, through the Maharashtran neighborhood, the Tamil neighborhood, and into the potter's district. I'll spare you the details; they were making pots. A young woman inside tried to entice us into buying some, and her English was quite good so I spoke to her and asked where she learned it so well. "At the community center," she responded "I am also trained in the use of some computer software." I just had to ask which ones. "I specialize in AutoCAD, but of course I also know..." Well, I'll be.

We learned a great deal about the health and education systems as well. In short, there are a great number of admirable and affordable private schools and clinics run by local businessmen and NGO's. The next generation, a rather squealy lot, is being taught in English rather than Marathi or Hindi, and fees are so nominal as to fade into insignificance. Government schools have a rather bad reputation, and government hospitals even worse. "Most of the 'doctors' at the government hospitals are medical students gaining experience..." Our guide went on "The full doctors usually have a private practice most days, so they just take the government's money and show up very late, if ever, to their duties at the hospitals...this is why the private clinics are better for almost every matter. This corruption is in so much of society."

Indeed, the corruption is everywhere. Indians are convinced they live in the world's most corrupt country, and you can't blame them. Police officials on 500-dollar monthly salaries live in beachfront mansions, and politicians bicker all day about meaningless trivia while they cover their real "employment" of peddling influence and lining their houses with crystal chandeliers. I just read that almost one third of the national parliament currently have criminal cases pending, including robbery, conspiracy, and murder. And that doesn't even begin to mention those who are just getting away with it completely, let alone local politicians. Maharashtra is an especially corrupt state due to the presence of the extravagant Mumbai mafia that controls the country's massive drug trade as well as other rackets, and have many top officials in their pockets. A month ago a number of top Mumbai cops were caught on video attending a mafia don's New Year's bash. Predictably they offered up pathetic excuses like "I will prove the man in the video is not me." Absurd, but what they really mean is "I may find a way out of this yet!" Nearly everyone agrees corruption is the ultimate source of the nation's woes, why it lags so far behind other countries like China with which it should compare, but nobody sees a way to change it. "To change something you must be in politics, and succeed in politics you must be corrupt. It is the only way."

Near the end of the tour we emerged finally into an open space, and into a rubbish dump, which appeared to serve also the purpose of a public park in these cramped quarters. Ahead were tall Soviet-style apartment buildings built only a few years ago by the government as a slum-relief scheme. Few people from the slums, who were entitled to the properties free of charge, reside in them though. It seems they much prefer to rent the apartments out (for a happy profit), and continue dwelling in the slum proper, where the women are especially fond of sitting around all day on their stoops and gossiping with their neighbors. Leaving their tight-knit community, even if it means a modest high-rise instead of a concrete box by the garbage dump, is not a price many are willing to pay. As a whole there is not much of a drive to "move out of slums"; they just want the slums to get a little better. As I looked around at the smiling, laughing faces and tried to decipher what I could of what was clearly jovial Marathi smack talk being yelled across the rubbishy plaza, I could understand just a little of the attachment the people felt to their homes. One of them started talking to our guide (who seemed to know just about everybody), then looked at me and made some remarks. "She is talking about you" my guide said. "I can see that" I replied, rather curious what this woman from the Mumbai slums had to say about me. "She says you look like Roger Federer."

And with that I left the slums. This fucking world.

Jan 25, 2010

Bollywood Dreams

There I was, walking the streets as innocently as an infant fawn grazing in the meadows, when I was approached by a man yelling "Hey man! Hey!" Knowing this could hold little promise I duly ignored him. "Hey! You want to be in Bollywood?" I stopped in my tracks. "We're shooting for Bollywood tomorrow. I need some good-looking Western people as extras. I am missing one Western guy. Are you interested?" I was intrigued, but looked at him rather skeptically. "Here is my card. You may google me if you want" he said to allay my suspicions. "Also you can ask my Swedish girlfriend" he offered, referring me to that most trusted authority: random White people.

Before I tell you why I agreed, first you have to understand what I agreed to. Bollywood, as you probably know, is the massive Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai that turns out about as many movies as the rest of the world put together. To many, Bollywood is synonymous with massive, elaborate dance scenes where the performers bounce around and lip-sync in Hindi amongst a vivacious cohort of apparently anonymous sycophants whose purpose in life is spontaneous, synchronized dance. Not so. A proper Bollywood movie is this and much more, usually stretching to unbelievable durations (especially if billed as "epic") so as to properly accommodate all the ingredients a Bollywood hit requires. These are, in no particular order:
A sickeningly sweet romance in which true love prevails but nobody ever makes out.

Slapstick comedy.

Celebrity cameos.

Action sequences from the "jumping in slow motion over a low, flaming obstacle" school of stunts.

An elaborate dance sequence in which the protagonists' camps encourage the leads to continue in their transparent games of "hard-to-get", frequently involving scarf-whipping, booty-shaking, and most of all wrist-twitching.

Labyrinthine plots with tangents that lead nowhere.

Ear-bleedingly heartfelt duets.

And, of course some occasion on which 75 cocktail waiters are so overcome by unexpected joy that they burst into turban-tossing, hip-swinging choreography at the chaste display of affection by complete strangers
I saw this offer as an offer I couldn't refuse, an opportunity to expose Bollywood as the fraud it really is. Bollywood conceals a vast national secret that I am sworn to bring to light, even if I must take the ultimate risk. The well-ordered phalanxes of unidentified people bobbing about in their robes and saris high in the tea fields where our couples romance are in fact the agents of a nefarious conspiracy to conceal the truth: Indian men can't dance for shit. If you were to catch a glance of Indian men dancing (and you would be hard-pressed not to), you would find that not only is it highly uncoordinated, but rather stupid-looking and generally just bad. Even in the throes of unexplained mirth on the streets, close examination reveals that the dancing, which is almost always an all-male afair, closely resembles that listless shuffling of the feet and rotation of the shoulders and torsos characteristic of European bars. The only difference is that while many Europeans (and hapless Americans) maintain at least some kind of dignity in this lackluster performance, the Indian man feels the need to demonstrate to the world that despite all appearances, he is actually dancing. For this he rather overcompensates by raising his arms high into the air as if he were hanging from a railing, waving them around a bit, and pointing his fingers slightly downwards and wiggling them so that it looks like he is trying to tickle a mountain goat's feet. The truth is out there. Do you want to believe?

I should also admit that I have ulterior motives for being interested in Bollywood. My future wife Aishwarya Rai is a Bollywood superstar...nay, a Bollywood angel, and doing a little work in Bollywood can only help us to tighten our bonds of love. Yes, I know she somehow got mistakenly married to that Bollywood star Abishek Bachchan asshole, but he can be...taken care of.

So, it was with these things in mind that I agreed to be a Bollywood extra. The guy took down my name and told me to be ready and waiting in Colaba at 7am. He repeatedly asked for my assurance I wouldn't flake out on him and then spoke in the most flawless, current English speech I have heard in months. "If you bail on me I'm fucked, man. There aren't any Whiteys walking up and down here at 7 A.M.!"

I made it quite clear that I had every intention of attending.
He asked "Do you know McDonald's?"
I paused for a moment as if to mull it over "...I believe I've heard the name."
"Meet there."

When I appeared at McDonald's early in the morning I found a small, bleary-eyed troupe of Westerners waiting with me. There were six of us in total, an unusually balanced gender ratio of three and three. I had half-expected my presence to be necessary merely to justify the presence of Bollywood's improbably ubiquitous white girls, who have a tendency to be prominent extras in just about everything, as if the entire female population of Pasadena had packed up and moved to India with the dream of dancing in the first row of extras in a Hindi music video or toothpaste commercial. A rather self-important looking scamp pulled up with a taxi and a motorbike and had us pile in. We didn't quite fit, so I was treated to a 18-kilometer ride through Mumbai work-morning traffic on the back of a motorcycle which was being driven about as carefully as a stolen crotch-rocket in Grand Theft Auto IV. We were finally deposited outside, of all things, an IMAX cinema next to an industrial park. We had gotten there fairly early, and were thus treated to the luxuries of waiting around the loading dock as a crew of carpenters assembled a handful of props and a large wooden frame which I soon realized was going to become a green-screen. Oh hell yes.

Besides myself, the other extras were a pair of Brits, a pair of Germans, and a Swedish girl. We soon learned that we were to be acting in a commercial, though nobody told us for what. They also told us, to our unanimous relief, that we would not be expected to dance, but presumably do other "extra" things like sit around, walk casually across the background, and pretend to drink coffee. The morning thus became a business of sitting around and doing nothing as we waited for our time to sit around and do nothing. After some time we were ushered into the IMAX. It was a large, ultra-modern multiplex with a cavernous multi-story lobby. Being almost alone in an empty, unlit movie complex gave us all rather eery feelings, and most of the extras retreated to a partly lit corner of the coffee bar, while I wobbled over to a padded bench in the Oriental restaurant and took a nap.

As I drifted in and out of sleep I heard a faint rumbling sound, and saw members of the crew pushing little airport-style carts with luggage on them. Then two guys walked past carrying a large and convincing imitation of one of those big blue airport signs that tells you which way to go for baggage claim and such. They started setting up on the side of the lobby nearest the cafes and shops, and indeed from the narrow viewpoint of the camera and the aid of strategic obscuring props the shining columns and shops of the theater lobby made a very convincing slice of an airport terminal. Then for some hours the crew labored with the incredibly complicated process of setting up the proper lighting with enormous screens, filters, and blinds being used to both illuminate the space brightly while also maintaining the illusion of mixed and realistic light sources. Finally a team of men struggled in carrying what was definitely now a taughtly-stretched standing green-screen. I knew where I wanted to be.

While all this was going on, a trio of very stylish Indian girls were escorted past us. They were undoubtedly Rich Chicks and had quite an air of self-importance and expensive tastes that would have suggested they were fashion models if they were taller. Almost as soon as they had arrived, their heels clicked off around the corner and they vanished. The Indian extras had also started to trickle in while we were waiting. It was clear that many of them did this all the time, and took themselves very seriously. One circle of plump, fashionably-attired women extras spent the entire duration of set-building applying their makeup, while on the other hand the Western extras looked like we had just rolled out of bed and did nothing to amend this but roll ourselves back into naptime.

The size of the crew had reached critical mass. There were at least 50 technicians, laborers, and other crewmembers buzzing around the set. Most of my dealings were with the assistant director, the extras-herding dude, and occasionally the director himself. When the set was almost complete the extras were summoned. I was paired off with the Swedish woman and entrusted with a cart of luggage and a handful of used airline tickets. My partner was forced to spend the rest of the day lugging a heavy backpack on her, while I merely had to handle two strips of paper and a stack of empty luggage on wheels. It was delightful. The extras-handlers then starting assigning us positions and routes. Come on green-screen, come on green-screen. The assistant director took me and led me all the way to the foreground, immediately in front of the camera and told me that I was to act against the green-screen. YES.

So, for the longest sequence in the commercial I was placed in the very front, and was told to push my luggage cart (with Swedish woman alongside)directly across the field of view of the camera towards the green screen with very precise timing so that the lead actor could slip directly behind me. I was then to consult my tickets (which informed me I was in Singapore flying to Mumbai), feign conversation with my partner, and gesticulate towards the green-screen as if searching for my flight on a ten-foot digital announcement board. It couldn't have been better. With the utmost grace I pushed my cart, made faces of concern, and made large, sweeping gestures towards the board. Meanwhile the lead actor casually weaved behind me as the other pairs of Westerners and a few young Indians pushed carts on their routes, and a large majority of the nonplussed Indian extras who had spent so much time on their makeup were relegated to go to the distant background and just stand there as humaniform objects, because apparently it takes a large number of extras to make somewhere look busy on screen.

In the course of my Bollywood debut I got only one directorial note, which was "More pointing at the screen, please, yes, very good, a little more pointing." In comparison, the lead, whose task it was in this scene to casually cut a path through the airport while looking oblivious and munching on some kind of snack that looked like a long Rice Krispie Treat, got such notes as "again, but with more spring in your step. More spring."

By the way, tall-heeled wingtip shoes are in, for both sexes.

The scene was over, and so was the height of my Bollwood glory. We sat around again while the crew rapidly converted the escalators into another set. It truly is remarkable how little of a building one needs to alter to make it a set, because if you're only using one camera angle you don't need more than one visual cone that doesn't look completely obviously like an IMAX theater lobby. As soon as they were permitted to do so, the male extras all put on their designer sunglasses and started taking extremely serious photographs of each other. Then, to my rather pleasant surprise, the cutest of the white girls (the British one) appeared in a short, body-hugging, bright-red uniform dress and a sexy hairstyle, clearly co-opted on the spot to add a dash of coveted paleness to the critical role of Hot Flight Attendant. She was soon followed by the three mysteriously disappeared Indian girls, who were also in matching uniform and had definitely been recruited as "special extras", designated hotties. I was fairly certain I knew the general plot of the commercial now. Behind them came out a fourth Indian girl who was sulking because she had lost her spot at the last second to an unexpected English girl. Bollywood is a cruel mistress.

The second scene was a homage, if you will, to a classic trope: the oblivious snack muncher rides up an escalator while a quartet of sexy flight attendants lean sensually against the banisters while they ride up behind him. As nobody else was to clutter the escalator, me and Swedish girl were forced to accept our position among the crowd in the background, but at least I got to push my cart across the entire scene.

There was a third, incredibly tedious scene in which we were essentially made to stand in line to be composited against a green-screen shot of hanging nutribars, and then it was over. We were never given the free lunch we were promised, but I was given a crisp new 500-rupee note for my troubles, while the dozens of Indian extras were given nothing but the illusion of brushing with glory. And they had come so close.

Some of them had come within feet of Ghostface Buddha.

For those interested, the advertisement should be airing around the 20th of February, but possibly later. If you don't have the ability to spend all day watching Indian television, various members of the crew suggested they would be posting the work on YouTube. The product is "Horlick's Nutribar", or some other spelling thereof. If I find it anywhere, needless to say it will be posted, along with a sensible and modest commentary by its star (Ghostface Buddha)

Jan 24, 2010

The Big Mango

First, a discussion of the latest news. As I mentioned there is some sort of crisis involving both Pakistan and cricket. Bear with me. Here's what happened: after a great deal of rigamarole over security clearances and other such nonsense, the Indian Premier League finally ended up listing 11 of the top Pakistani (world-champion)cricketers for auction to Indian club teams. We know what happened next, but not why. When auction day finally came, a great number of players' rights were bought, but not a single offer was made for any of the 11 Pakistani players, leaving every cricketer present from that country to face a sudden and humiliating silence before departing empty-handed. As far as petty sports bickering between neighbors goes, it was already a pretty good snub, but cricket is some serious shit in Asia, and by the end of the day people in the streets of Pakistan were - I kid you not - burning the chairman of the Indian cricket league in effigy. Were cricket not one of the centerpieces of diplomacy between two countries whose relations otherwise tend to involve exchanges of mortar fire on 6000-meter glaciers, this would be some of the funniest shit I've ever heard.

Another story. It seems that the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (a major international Kashmiri mujaheddin outfit) has shocked Indian security agencies by...wait for it...purchasing some 50 paragliders from Europe and allegedly training its members in airborne suicide bombing. While I certainly don't want them to succeed in killing anybody in this manner, I just can't wait to see them try. I can just imagine a determined jihadi gracefully soaring his way downwards towards a packed festival at a Hindu temple along the Ganges, being blown off course by an unexpected gust of wind, and being sent spiraling to a splash in the river, followed by a loud boom, an upsurge of water, and a rain of fish giblets flopping onto awnings in the vegetable market and rebounding with a *pffwapp* off the faces of unsuspecting cows. Even the mullahs would have to ponder a bit whether this qualifies as a glorious martyrdom.

Back to my own life in Mumbai though, which thankfully has yet to involve suicide bombs or outbursts of gunfire, but has involved the usual dangerous darting across traffic - in front of a fully-loaded armored personnel carrier.

I'm staying in Colaba, which is the southernmost tip of Mumbai and ground zero for all things absurdly British. Not far away is Oval Maidan, "India's Central Park", essentially a big long field swarming with amateur cricketers, some of whom take themselves incredibly seriously and amble about the finer parts of the field in their all-whites with a paid referee in a silly white sunhat. What horrors the Empire wrought. The first building I stumbled across was the unmistakable Gateway of India, a ridiculous triumphal arch leading down into the sea with mock-Gujarati ornamentation and a massive inscription commemorating the arrival in India of the King and Queen of England in 18-whatever. Hardly able to remove this imperialist pomp without turning away thousands of tourists a year, the local authorities have, in the name of Indian (and more importantly, Marathan) nationalism, responded by erecting a touchingly bellicose statue of the Maratha prince Shivaji waving his sword in the general direction of the arch through which the last British troops left India in 1949. Never mind that Shivaji died like 250 years before; obviously it was this same indomitable Maratha pride that freed Bombay Mumbai, and indeed the world, from the yoke of British tyranny.

Many more edifices in the same vein followed. Most impressive, bewildering, and outright laugh-worthy of all was the train station formerly known as Victoria Terminus and now known by some impenetrable Marathi gobbledygook honoring Shivaji or possibly another guy with the same name. You just look at the station and have to ask yourself "what the fuck were they thinking?". Is that a cathedral? With a pagan Roman goddess on top? Did someone repair a medieval French cloister with leftover windows from a Mughal brothel? Why is it that color? Did they vandalize a Gujarati brothel too? Is that gargoyle a tiger? The British in this period, you see, held the comical belief that centuries of exquisite Indian architecture were trifling, but held a handful of great ornamental ideas that would be vastly improved by using them as flourishes on gigantic ill-formed piles of brown and gray Victorian brickwork. The endearing result is that much of southern Mumbai looks like it was overrun by a bunch of pompous and puritanical but chronically intoxicated fops with a child's understanding of Indian culture. Oh wait, it was.

Somehow from the old Victoria Terminus I ended up on an interminable (shit, is that a pun? whatever. blow me.) ...an interminable walk across central Mumbai through various long, tedious, and dirty bazaars in the Muslim quarter, where I was dismayed to discover that Mumbai actually does allow cows. I suppose I should give the residents their due for in the most part the citizens realize that cows have no place in the damn streets, at least until they can learn to behave. Moving on. I ended up, somewhat to my surprise, a good 3 kilometers from where I intended at a place called Chowpatty Beach, where Mumbai people come to enjoy the sand but wisely stay the hell out of the water. The exception seems to be young men in tight shirts who rent jet-skis to zip across Back Bay, though I feel that if they are so desperately in need of churning up wakes in that kind of fluid they may as well just tie a Happy Meal windup car to a balloon and set it going across a slick of laundry detergent in an unflushed toilet in the privacy of their own home.

Chowpatty Beach is, however, at the foot of Malabar Hill, a hilly little peninsula that has pretty much always been the swankest part of downtown Mumbai, and is now practically covered in high-rise luxury residences demonstrating the astronomical amounts of money made, hoarded, and conspicuously spent within the confines of the city limits and its navel-gazing, outrageously wealthy elite. I tromped through finding nothing too remarkable at ground level. Eventually I came almost to the end of the peninsula in my attempt to find a path leading to the neighborhoods above the cliffs and suddenly I was surrounded again by what looked like a rather traditional Hindu area sitting on what has got to be some of the priciest real estate in South Asia. I descended a curving step-alley with little neglected Hindu shrines and found myself upon the edge of what was clearly a sacred tank. I walked around to examine it and found to my very, very great surprise that here in the shadow of cutting-edge apartment buildings and construction cranes was a site of no less venerability than a holy tank mentioned as a resting-place of Rama in exile in the Ramayana. India, man. You just never know.

After returning to the beach and taking a very lengthy stroll down Marine Drive, the brilliantly illuminated curl of skyscrapers and art-deco mansions around Back Bay which they still colloquially call "the Queen's Necklace" for how it shines at night, I concluded a most tiring day.

I rose the next morning with a certain amount of resignation. My plan for the day was a trip across the huge Mumbai harbor to Elephanta Island, which is only reachable by boat. I fucking hate boats. I'm not hydrophobic or anything, I just hold an extremely firm opinion that boats suck because once you're on a boat you really have no choice what to do with your life except continue to be on said boat, which is itself tragic because as I've said, boats suck. This most harmonious circle of reasoning only reaffirms the perfection of the natural laws which have been defiled in such violating fashion by Man's embarkation in dreary vessels across the seas.

Nevertheless I endured the nigh-Odyssean hour-long crossing with tact and was amply rewarded when I made landfall upon Elephanta. Elephanta is known as a very old and remarkable site of Shiva worship dating back to the 5th century (yo, that's old) , a time when the reinvigorated Hindu faith was in full artistic swing at the climax of its thereafter-unstoppable comeback against Indian Buddhism. The name 'Elephanta' was given by the Portuguese (who briefly held Bombay - or Bom Bahia as they christened it), referring to a massive stone statue of an elephant they found on the isle. The statue is no longer there. What happened to it? If you made the obvious guess and went with "lifted wholesale in the 19th century and relocated to either a museum, garden, hall, or court named after Queen Victoria", congratulations, you can probably earn a degree in British History. (For what it's worth, it's in the Victoria Garden in Mumbai). Aside from the elephant, the Portuguese found a series of impressively large man-made cave temples cut straight out of the hillside, which they promptly delighted in vandalizing, no doubt spilling merry quantities of red wine, musket balls, and pork gristle about as they did so.

The caves are all dedicated to Shiva in his various metaphysical forms (whose names I have almost entirely forgotten). One wall featured a particularly violent-looking Shiva as Demon-Slayer, while a shrine nearby housed an unusually large lingam - that's Shiva-phallus to you - which people continued to pay their respects to. A favorite panel of mine was that of Nataraja, Shiva as the "Cosmic Dancer", seen here in an exquisite dancing pose with an unlikely number of arms and fine craftsmanship. Nataraja is one of my favorite Hindu deities as I find Shiva's cosmic dance to be one of the most eloquent metaphors yet devised to explain the intricate interplay of energies and forces that essentially defines our universe. Most impressive of all, however, was the gigantic 6-meter tall Trimurti bust in the center of the temple. And what a bust it was. Trimurti, you see, is Shiva with three faces representing his three most fundamental aspects. So this is a 6-meter statue of three giant faces, like a smaller, Hindu Mt. Rushmore, and is known around India as well as that fabulous heap of presidential faces is in the US. "3 faces?" you say, "bahh! Mt. Rushmore has four!". Oh, but you overlook: There is of course a fourth face that we just can't see because it's facing away from us, and furthermore, there is a fifth face but it transcends human understanding and isn't depicted in sculpture. So there. Also, it could be said that Mt. Rushmore could be greatly improved if Thomas Jefferson were holding a lotus flower and Teddy Roosevelt had a fucking snake draped around his neck (I'm sure he'd approve).

Once again I tediously set off by boat across Mumbai Harbor, and having failed to attract the ire of any cyclops well-connected with maritime deities, I managed to get back in only about 12 goddamn years.

This morning I rose at an unseemly hour for a great adventure: the night before I had been recruited as a Bollywood extra. About which much, much more anon.

In the late afternoon, recuperating from a demanding day of Bollywood, I set out to see the sunset at the tomb of Haji Ali, a Sufi mystic who for whatever reason was buried in marble tomb on a rock in the Arabian Sea just off the West coast of what is now central Mumbai. You get to the tomb by a long, narrow stone causeway over the ocean which is completely swamped with water when the tide is high, and completely swamped with hideously injured, trance-miming beggars when the tide is low. Though it was Sunday and by no means a particularly busy time to visit, the causeway was utterly choked with visitors both Muslim and Hindu who were making the trip out to the rock because it's a beautiful place to watch the sunset, and generally a wholesomely good time. The tomb is yet another of these incredibly unlikely and captivating places in India that force one to consult an old Arabic astrolabe or some shit to prove you're still on planet Earth. The falling turned the lime-green walls glowing gold while thousands milled about eating hot snacks cooked on carts right on the rock, listened to the trance-inducing qawwal music, prayed in the tomb, frolicked in the waves crashing on the rocks, and just stared off into the sun. It was a lovely place to visit and I may return tomorrow.

Knowing what I'm likely to see in the next day, I might just find that I need to.

edit: corrected historical dates relating to Shivaji which I had misplaced by some 120 years.

Jan 22, 2010

But Seriously, Mumbai

Good

Fucking

God...









...I actually like Mumbai.

The beginning of my stay in Mumbai was far from promising. As usual, my tale begins with an Indian train. An Indian train that was nine hours late. Now, I am accustomed to long journeys across this country and assume that every transit connection I make will be absurdly tardy...I gave myself a four hour cushion for this one. I'm a little at a loss for words though for how to describe being on a train from Delhi to Mumbai for 29 hours. Befitting its destination, the train was severely overcrowded to the point that the 8-berth section of the carriage I was in held no less than 15 people piled on top of each other and their luggage in the conspicuously narrow beds, while others spread out newspapers and slept on the floor and in the aisle. Just around the corner, some 10 people were sleeping in the entrance of the carriage while men and children stepped over them and even - I swear - were standing astride the sleeping figures while urinating onto the floor of the passage beyond as the lavatories were themselves being used to shelter groups of huddling figures. And this was the situation in the reserved carriages. I caught a glimpse of the unreserved carriages as the train pulled into New Delhi station, and can only describe what I saw as some sort of human tessellation, with people contorted in all sorts of inhuman positions, filling in every gap in the volume of the carriage. I at least had an upper berth in the reserved carriages, which by unspoken rule can not be invaded by strangers. However, my luggage, which certainly could not go in the designated luggage areas under the lower benches because there was at least one person sleeping under there already. I thus spent the following 29 hours completely immobile, perched in a comparatively generous 10 cubic feet of space like a jar of strawberry preserve on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.

Let me reiterate that the train was nine hours late. This is barely comprehensible. In the United States, nine hours was sufficient time for me to drive from say, Washington DC, to any major urban area in New England. Bored to the point of twitching madness (as I had by then finished both of the books I brought for the journey), I began to do some calculations. Now, consider that this train was nine hours late, and that furthermore, there are services in India that cover three times the distance. It is thus completely plausible that a train be 24 hours or more late to its destination. I reflected on this, and noted that a number of practical and metaphysical dilemmas arise from this possibility. Consider for instance, a train called the Fuckthis Express that is 24 hours late, while a train departing the following day on the same route (also, therefore, the Fuckthis Express) is precisely on time. Imagine the confusion were the already pathetic platform announcements to inform passengers
"Your attention please, train 0666 Fuckthis Express from Bullshitabad to Fuckfacepur via Fort Suicide is delayed by 24 hours, 15 minutes. The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted."
"Your attention please, train 0666 Fuckthis Express from Bullshitabad to Fuckfacepur via Fort Suicide is now arriving at its scheduled time."
Now, there is a prickly question...what if the latter train overtakes the former? How does one know which train is which? Presumably you would have to wait longer to get on the earlier train, but how many people would step onto the first one that arrives and be shocked to discover another person with a valid ticket for his seat? But this, admittedly is a trivial question in comparison to others that arise. Consider further - and here it will become clear I have been reading too much Isaac Asimov - the problem of having two instances (time-beings?) of the same train arriving at a single-platform station at the same time, destined as it were, to occupy the same sliver of spacetime, like a time-traveler who commits the egregious error of traveling to a time and place he has already been. What I'm saying is that Indian Railways poses a grave threat to our conception - or even the existence of - our reality, and should be banished to a temporal prison in another universe.

Aside from making me think about these things, the train's lateness was primarily offensive to me for practical reasons, namely that it deposited me at a "suburban" station some 20km north of the city center on the edge of a slum at 2 o'clock in the morning. It was a rather unenviable situation, to say the least. You may be thinking that I was concerned about robbery. Not so. I was concerned, and rightly so, that I was about to be subject to extortion. The late-night cabbies somehow roused from their slumber at the approach of a well-heeled foreigner who was no doubt anxious to get the hell out of there. I managed to negotiate a less extortionate price that allowed me to keep my shoes, and began the long slog down Mumbai. The smell was horrendous, a vile, acrid smog that shocked me despite having recently arrived from the cesspool of Delhi, where I now hardly notice the flavor of the atmosphere. Heading south, the smell got even worse, and I realized that at least it was because we were crossing the small river that divides the principal island of Mumbai from the mainland, a stream that I read described as "one of the foulest watercourses known to science". Indeed, even high on the bridge across it, the mere act of breathing became a horrid, fecal inhalation. The cab continued on its way and I began to grasp the scope of Mumbai's sprawl. I was traversing merely the core of the city, forget the endless "suburbs" (as they call them), and it was mile after mile of dense bazaars, post-industrial hells, towering luxury apartments, until finally I somehow managed to direct the driver into the correct backstreet of the Muslim quarter, in a neighborhood so dubious my driver took considerable goading to go further, as he was convinced that I had directed us to a surprisingly bad area in a generally good part of the city in a devious scheme to rob him. We pulled up, and the hotel manager informed us that the place was full, my reservation surely discarded in light of the fact I was now TEN HOURS LATE. The driver then took me around the massive Muslim district to a number of hotels that were all full, until finally we found one that allowed me to spend a typical half-week's budget on a six-hour flop, because accommodation here is expensive, and especially when they know you are exhausted and don't have a goddamn clue where you are. Six hours later, I was kicked out to begin my search again, and eventually actually found something reasonable and desirable.

Having run the arrival gauntlet, I took a nap, and then set out on exploration, and found that I liked Mumbai immediately.

Mumbai is everything Delhi isn't. After weeks huddled in unheated hotel rooms and drinking cup after cup of chai to face the North Indian winter, I found myself ordering a lassi. The streets downtown were clean, and though the traffic was certainly of great volume, it moved with relative order. Palm trees swayed in the breeze beneath shell-white skyscrapers and in front of the comically awful Victorian institutions that dot the city center. There are sidewalks, and pedestrians are only in the middle of the street when they need to cross from one side to the other (oh, the things I marvel at now). There were even -*gasp*- street signs, and I could for once navigate with relative certainty instead of having to use the position of the sun in the sky like a wandering Bedouin. I could even find my way around town at midday, when the sun offers no clues and I am usually forced to examine the Westerly orientation of the local mosques.

This one deserves its own paragraph. There is not a single rickshaw. The next one needs a paragraph too.

There is not a single cow.

I took advantage of the warmth immediately. I will confess that in recent weeks my personal hygiene has been rather...cursory, owing to the fact that hotel rooms in the north were miserably cold and I had no desire to get beyond the minimum amount of water on my person, as there was no refuge from the wet ensuing chill. I took a luxuriant shower in my Mumbai hotel, fully lathered myself in soap and almost burst into song at how happy I was to be somewhere with decent weather. I began cleansing myself, as one does, and my skin instantly began to assume a lighter hue, as great sheets of dark, filthy dead skin slid off my body in such quantities that rubbing my hands along the sides of my torso produced worm-like concentrations of filth, which I wiped off in an operation that reminded me quite oddly of rolling a pie crust.

Let it not be said that I conceal anything from you, dear reader.

Downtown Mumbai is exciting, expensive, and fun. There are great restaurants and useful shops. Street peddlers are restricted to designated "hawking zones" (which would be even more awesome if my lodging wasn't in the middle of one). Mumbai is like a tropical version of lower Manhattan, filled with venerable buildings of various heights, from fading repurposed tenements to soaring 21st century towers. Thousands of black and yellow taxis ply the streets, and the residents of the city possess that same lack of interest in anything and everything beyond the confines of their city that so characterizes New Yorkers. The parallels continue: the first affordable restaurant I could find after almost 24 hours without eating was a shwarma joint. If you picked up the city (shorn of its slums) and dropped it in, say, the south of France, it would undoubtedly be one of the world's great tourist destinations. Even the tourists are different. Agra and Rajasthan are full of fat, waddling European geezers with air-conditioned buses, money to burn, and brainpower to expend in its entirety on figuring out where to find elusive bronze statues of Ganesh (*cough* everywhere). Delhi and the north are full of the world's supply of (usually American or Israeli) pseudo-hippies on their way to study yoga at some white-people-ashram in Rishikesh or Varanasi. The overwhelmingly British tourists of Mumbai are, on the other hand, delightfully unashamed imperialists, who come to seek their pleasure sipping on expensive cocktails and marveling at how wonderfully the British Raj managed to civilize the subcontinent single-handedly by constructing edifying Neo-Gothic buildings and playing cricket.

I have much more to say about Mumbai, but I also have much more to do. My visit here is far from over, and I am sure I will have many things to report, including my thoughts on the current "Pakistan cricket snub" crisis (ohhhhh boy!), and the fact that Bollywood is a massive national coverup. You heard it here first.

Jan 21, 2010

Mumbai

Holy

Fucking

Shit

Jan 18, 2010

Operation Jungle Storm, Pt. 2

Part 1
What would the next days bring? Only time would tell...

The next day brought a tropical rain storm and I spent the entire day huddled in my thatch-roofed cabin reading a history of the Indian Uprising of 1857. Party over here.

The day after, however, I awoke to find a beautiful blue sky. After rain and endless days of fog, it was the the first time I've seen the sun in this young decade. I went for a walk, aimlessly wandering the rural roads that of the spread-out village. A pair of young children invited me to their house and their mother produced a selection of local Tharu specialties. Best of all, the Tharu eat pig, which I haven't had for months, and I was given a small strip of pork coated in a spicy brown seasoning. The meat was tender and the spices reminded me of the smell of summer barbecues across the ocean. I couldn't place what exactly. Was the seasoning the same as the hot dip I used to eat in my grandmother's house in Mexico, or was it closer to the fragrant, viscous steak sauce coating overcooked meat in a little restaurant in the small towns of the American South? Either way, as I sat alone surrounded by the fields of yellow flowers blooming beside rice paddies shimmering in the warm sun, that bite of pork at the same time grounded me in the reality of the nomadic life that had brought me to the Nepali jungle and transported me magically back home, though I don't even know where home is. Maybe home isn't a country or a house, but the taste of seasoned pork after 10,000 kilometers wandering far away from everything I've known.

One thing you instantly notice about Nepal is that there are animals everywhere. In India of course you find cows wandering the streets and will often find a goat tied to someone's stoop or a cage full of chickens sitting in the muck at the side of the road surrounded by empty paan packets, cigarette butts, and piles of burnt potato chip bags. In Nepal, or at least in the towns of the Tarai, one can hardly walk without tripping over a loose chicken. Everywhere you turn, there are buffalo grazing on mounds of hay, children struggling to pull goats out of their neighbors' vegetable patches, and piglets darting across the street in their little, pigletty panic. Buffalo are still used to haul stuff around town and there seem to be an infinite supply of puppies slipping and sliding their way over the mighty peaks of foot-high furrows. In Thakurdwara, the larger clearings where many households have their fields are looked over by wooden watchtowers, where guards in the night keep an eye out for intruding rhinos and other hassles. At harvest times, I was told, if you hear someone shouting in the night, it is probably a man chasing away a deer; if you hear an odd munching sound followed by lots of people shouting, the harvest has attracted wild elephants.

I strolled for hours on the little dirt roads around town, chatting up the villagers as I went. As usual I was quite popular amongst the local children, but I noticed (it would be impossible for me not to) that I was a veritable superstar for Thakurdwara's young, unmarried women. They would beckon me over with smiles and waves and speak to me in very poor but enthusiastic English. Typically two or three of them would then halt the conversation every minute or so, start conferring with each other in Nepali on matters of English grammar, and then they would all turn to me with beaming smiles and their spokesperson would ask me something to the tune of "you have girlfriend?", "you are marriaged?", or "you like Tharu girls?". Ghostface Buddha is of course a shameless, shameless flirt and I enjoyed this treatment greatly. I later found out from Gautam and a French lady tourist at my lodge that the entire town knew where I was staying and the single girls were spreading the news of my comings and goings amongst themselves, prying anybody in the tourist trade likely to have business with me for information. By the end of the day, if I was retracing my steps past a house I had already visited, a pretty young lady would come rushing out of the house with a plateful of hot food and insist I eat in the family garden. When I got back to the lodge much later that night, the staff asked me what I would like for dinner, and all I could do was lie down on a table, touch my bloated stomach and say "I've eaten seven times already." Having been interrogated by many of these same girls, they understood.

During my wanderings I had eventually stumbled upon the village market, which locals call "the temple" for the simple reason that on one side is the village's temple. That's right. Thakurdwara is such a rustic little village it only has one Hindu temple. Past the temple in a patch of forest where the undergrowth had been cleared, villagers from across the Tarai were setting up little market tents beneath the towering trees for the next day's festival. The Maggi festival is the largest event of the year for the Tharu, combining a New Year's celebration with temple visits and market gatherings. I perused the tents, curious what villagers from other towns in the region were coming here to shop for. The answer, apparently, was bras. There were hundreds of tiny tents selling all sorts of little crafts and specialties, or harder to find goods such as CD's and fake Reebok hats brought from the larger cities for the fair, but nearly every stall had a selection of brassieres hanging from its tentpoles. Indeed, I observed, there was nowhere to by a bra in Thakurdwara, and who knows how hard to find they must be to find in villages even further from the market towns and highway. Of all the products of Western civilization, the bra is perhaps the one that has caught on most universally among the people of the Indian Subcontinent. While most of the women are still in saris and many even still wear veils, it is not the least bit uncommon to see a bra hook protruding beneath the traditional undergarments. I know little about the relative merits of different types of female underwear (save from an aesthetic standpoint) but surely there must be a practical reason for this craze. In any case, the bra-sellers of the Tarai were fixing for a day of good business.

Finally, as my legs grew weary of ambling about the countryside I turned towards the lodge, passing the previously described gauntlet of admirers. As I passed by the gate to the national park headquarters, familiar voices called from the fireside. It was three members of the conspicuously nubile Park Ranger Force. They expressed indignation that I had not come to visit the day before as I had promised. I provided the excuse that, objectively speaking, the weather had been a godawful torrent and I certainly could not have been expected to walk two miles through a thunderstorm to assist them in feeding the infants at the crocodile-breeding pens (oh, how I regret missing that opportunity). They accepted this excuse and pleaded for me to cross over the electric fence (elephants have a tendency to cross through there in spring on their way to the fields, sowing havoc in the neighboring army camp while they're at it). "You want chai?" They asked. Though I did not phrase it with this much detail, I replied that if I had one more glass of chai that afternoon, sugar would probably start pouring out of my ears. They conferred amongst themselves for a moment. One of them said goodbye with a knowing look. Two of the others smiled, waved, and excused themselves to their duties with the crocodiles or whatever. It was conspicuously vague. The last remaining one opened the gate and beckoned me come to the fire. "You learn to me English and I learn to you Nepali," she said, inching closer towards me on the log by the fire.

You know what they say about wildlife rangers: they have a lot of game.

The next day the Maggi festival began in earnest around 4 in the morning. I, for one, was asleep because it was first of all it was 4am, and secondly I certainly was not going to hike out past the village to jump in a freezing river. One cold, wet New Year's dunk per annum is quite enough. I rested heartily, until I was awoken around noon by the approaching sound of drums and singing women. I fumbled my way into some trousers and went outside to survey the clamor. A circle of middle-aged women had formed nearby, clapping and singing, while a man played the drum and a handful of other men danced. The center of the proceeding was a man in the Tharu approximation of drag. On his lower body he wore a bright long skirt, to the great amusement of the Tharus, which he twirled in the custom of the local girls. Above the waste, however, he wore a sweater and a woolen hat and looked remarkably like Dave Chapelle's crackhead character, and danced head down, twirling the folds of the skirt without the slightest trace of dexterity or enthusiasm. While the locals and the two other tourists at the lodge were gobbling this up, I was unimpressed. I was apparently a greater connoisseur of drag shows than the average Tharu and, turning my nose up at the lackluster spectacle, I returned to bed.

Later in the afternoon I made it out to the "temple" where the fair was in full swing. The patch of forest swarmed with people buying, selling, visiting the temple, playing carnival games, gambling, and above all playing the fucking flute. The atmosphere was congenial and rather hokey, like an American state fair transplanted into the jungle, with flutes and bras everywhere, and a great number of recently killed chickens dangling from ropes. The most popular game seemed to be some variation of horseshoes involving throwing a ring over a grid of little tin boxes, followed by a game of cards which Santoosh assured me I shouldn't bother trying to understand as only Nepalis seem to like it. There was also a large, round wooden construction like a giant bowl in which daring drivers amazed the crowd by driving their motorcycles and even a tiny car in loops high on the banked surface...but enough of that; back to the flutes.

I heard the flutes from miles off. Strange, as bass usually travels farther than treble, but clearly these flutes were fashioned with demonic arts that negated the usual rules of acoustics. I got to the fair and found that cheap little flutes were being sold by the thousands, mostly to children but also to grown men, none of whom took the slightest interest in covering any of the finger-holes to produce an actual note, and many of whom positively delighted in producing the shrillest, loudest, most terrible sound possible. This wasn't the first time I've thought the piccolo, like a handgun, should only be sold to licensed buyers, but now that opinion of mine is firmly set in stone and it will probably be one of the things I am yammering on about when I am a doddering old man, along with holographic nipple piercings or whatever else will be outraging me about the youth in 2057.

The day after the fair, it was time to leave. I rose early in the morning and reluctantly began to retrace my course towards Delhi, sustained only by a zealous urge to get back faster than I had come. I passed the Karnali bridge, and the clouds had risen into puffs at the top of the gorge, allowing light to filter through with clarity and shine on the steep, forested river banks through which the river rushed as though the Himalayan peaks were but a few steps into the receding mist. Not far past there, we were stopped by what I assumed was an army checkpoint. Wrong; they were Maobaadis, Maoists.

The lightly fortified Maoist camp was right there for all to see off the edge of the highway, and the armed rebels stopped the bus, but without any rancor. The conductor, familiar with the routine, began to fish out a nominal sum of money for passage, but the Maoists politely declined. Instead, they said, they wanted us to load the roof with a pile of firewood for the next Maoist base, which would be accepted as our payment, and they let us on our way.

Over the next five hours, we stopped countless times to pick up stray passengers and luggage, often at infuriatingly short intervals. Nepalis seem to expect door-to-door service from their buses. When a bus pulls up 50 yards away and starts loading passengers, a Nepali may wait for this whole scene to finish and the bus to drive those 50 yards and stop again for him. The day dragged on. About five kilometers from the Maoists with the firewood we were stopped again, this time by the Nepali soldiers. "Any Maoists about?" they seemed to wonder, without really caring. It's peacetime in Nepal, but the Army is making a great show of its authority where it has control, without lifting a finger to dislodge the opposing Maoist authority kicking its heels down the road. I noticed that these soldiers weren't from the army per se, but from the paramilitary police. Fuck the police.

More towns and more random stops later we ran into the real army, and they held us up for longer. It was becoming tiresome. Half an hour further on, I saw ahead a crowd of people holding a rope across the highway. Great, more Maobaadis I thought. Nope, my neighbor told me, these were Khaobaadis. Khaobaadi is a truly delightful term. Where 'Maobaadi' means 'Maoist', 'Khaobaadi' refers not to a political persuasion but to general brigandage and means 'Eatist'. This concerned me somewhat, as I was clearly identifiable as a foreign tourist and would be likely to have money on me. My neighbor reassured me that these were not like the mountain bandits who take your money at gunpoint. In fact, he told me, Nepalis had become so accustomed to roadblocks, strikes, and forced 'donations' of every kind, that now people just block the roads for whatever damn reason they feel like. In this case it turned out, the "Eatists" were taking their nickname to its logical extreme. They were Tharu villagers celebrating the second day of Maggi, and were blocking the road and demanding money so that they could take their families out for a picnic in the afternoon. This only pissed me off more as we idled for the conductor to negotiate a price, and the Khaobaadis, in a meaningless mimicry of their Maoist brethren, printed a receipt for our donation, in case we ever needed to show the Central Picnic Secretariat our right of passage. I fumed. If it were up to me, I would have put these Picnicists' ideological resolve to the test and driven the bus at full speed towards their flimsy rope barricade to see if they were really going to put their lives on the line for the revolutionary cause of tuna sandwiches.

We were stopped 20 kilometers later, again by the Army, doing a fucking marvelous job of maintaining the rule of law along the highway. 10 Kilometers further on, men in uniforms again waved us over, and we stopped again for a handful of smiling Maoists to unload their firewood and trudge off into the woods with their load. Why we had to deliver wood to a guerrilla camp surrounded by trees I will never know.

By this point the bus had become unbearably crowded, and the introduction of a fully-grown goat into the aisle did nothing to improve conditions. The goat stalwartly refused to move to the back of the bus, inciting a confusion of pushing and shoving. From right beside my head I heard a sudden, chaotic sound, and turned to see that the little tan handbag the girl across from me had been cradling was in fact a live chicken. The chicken panicked in the commotion and began squawking loudly, shaking its head in all directions and flapping its wings in fear. The small girl struggled to control it. It eventually wrested itself free, the girl only capturing it by its string-tied feet, and the chicken squawked madly as it flopped about in her lap. Before her older sister could intervene to regain control, the chicken had flapped its wings squarely in the face of a neighboring baby, immediately turning that child to a shrieking panic, which soon swept over the myriad Nepali babies on the bus. In the meantime, two men had lifted the flailing goat and were carrying it at chest height while the conductor and several passengers yelled, and the goat was summarily ejected from the crawling bus, its owner hopping out after it.

Asia.

Finally we arrived in Mahendra Nagar and I still had to cross the border. For this purpose I enlisted a horse-drawn "tonga" to cover the distance quicker. Within minutes, the overexcited horse began to buck violently, the cart bobbed like a seesaw with a fat bully jumping on the far end, and the bench collapsed from beneath me, sending me tumbling to the floor of the wagon. Not only did I feel that intense, unwarranted embarrassment of the man who has through no fault of his own fallen through a broken chair, but I also severely pulled the entire left side of my back in the fall, which still hurts. Another ridiculous fucking injury in the line of duty.

I'm back in India. Immediately after crossing the border I noticed how shitty Banbaasa was. It was full of rubbish and smelled like crap. Some rather unfriendly bus drivers herded me onto the direct line to Delhi, a local, all-night bus with metal seats that gave me one of the worst nights of sleep of my life, in a line of work in which I routinely sleep in horrible conditions. We arrived at the horrible main bus stand of Delhi at 4am, in a lousy, wet cold, and I was forced to take a rickshaw from the periphery into the city center in a fog so dense even flashing tail lights disappeared after 30 yards. It's time to go South for the winter. I'm beginning the longest tour of my journey, a sweeping exploration of months across South India, and I'm starting in the belly of the beast. I'm going to Mumbai.