I think they're on to me. This whole nation is conspiring to prevent me from posting on this blog. Though I am now spared the many hours of toil on my yet-to-be-published travel writings that usually preceded getting anything done on this blog, I keep running into unexpected difficulties. Mainly, it's tough to type up a post when the entire eastern half of the country is facing an electricity crisis. ...They'll stop at nothing to suppress me.
Orissa was the worst offender, outstripping Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal in its precision-timed blackouts aimed against my noble endeavors. But to be fair, Orissa was probably just a bit prudishly embarrassed that I was about to post dirty pictures of it online. I'm basically third-party sexting an entire administrative unit of the Indian Union.
I went to Konark, which is the one thing that captured enough of my interest in that state to convince me to get off the East Coast Railway for a day or two. Konark is the location of a massive semi-ruined temple of the sun-god Arka (elsewhere known as Surya). There's a rather amazing story concerning the temple's latter-day discover. Apparently, the entire soaring edifice was for several hundred years lost under an enormous sand dune until a party of inquisitive Brits decided to dig it up and found one of the best-preserved ancient temples in all of India. I don't buy it. The thing is just way to big for people to stroll past for hundreds of years in a not-that-sandy area without asking themselves "Hey, what's up with that sand dune?"
I think it went something like this: The problem wasn't sand. As soon as you call it 'dust', the riddle is solved. Over the centuries, the "untouchable" sweepers charged with keeping the temple clear of dust did as all Indian sweepers do, and swept that dust off just next to the temple. As years and years of wind blew more sand from the beach towards the temple, nobody actually ever got rid of the dust that was actually there, allowing the sacred plaza to silt up like any Indian storefront. It got so bad that the temple was eventually completely buried and worship was abandoned. One day, many centuries later, some Brits came by and said to eachother "Eh, Nigel, wot's that conspicuous pile of sand?" "Oi don't know, 'arry, let's ask one of these primitive chaps." When the locals informed them it was an ancient temple, they decided "Well, bugger me, let's dig it up then!" and called in a class of English maids from a local domestic servants' finishing school to sweep it all up with little feather whisks into proper dustpans and take the dirt somewhere else. Voila, a temple is revealed, and before you know it some English gents have themselves a knighthood and a pleasant estate near some tea fields with cool weather and a modest endowment of native coolies.
I do, however, imagine that the little English maids that unearthed the structure had quite a time maintaining their composure in the face of the...native improprieties that they discovered. Suffice to say, Ghostface Buddha's photo gallery is no longer PG-rated. You see, Konark is not only a sun temple but also a monumental gallery of large and small erotic sculptures. Even the frank depictions of foreplay would have raised some eyebrows, forget about the threesomes.
The temple now is a bit of a humorous spectacle thanks to the number of picnicking families. I was quite impressed with the parents' ability to select an innocuous facade to stand against for family photos without having to examine the smaller carvings too closely. Soon after I got to the temple, a guide approached me and offered the usual proclamations that without expert guidance I would remain wholly ignorant of the significance of the temple art, and thus leave disappointed and no wiser for my troubles. Usually I just roll my eyes and say something like "Yeah, I would have no idea that that sculpture over there is Durga engaged in combat with the demon Mahavitsu as the gods Gahesh and Karkiteya watch on, recognizing in the noble warrior goddess an emanation of their mother, wife of Shiva." In this case, I was able to just smirk and tell the seven-toothed middle-aged sap "Trust me, buddy, based on what I've seen so far I'm probably the greater expert here."
Some of the sculptures are life-size depictions of unbridled, passionate, no-holds-barred fuckin' in a variety of positions so defiantly acrobatic that the couples involved are at a very high risk of sexually-transmitted concussion. Then again, lots of them are just dragons trampling on elephants. The general message of the sexual sculptures is that lying down, under the covers, with the lights off is uncouth. They also seem to hold the opinion that sex is best enjoyed outdoors, up against a tree, or at least in the shade. Anyone who would deny this is clearly a barbarian. The height of culture, it appears, is to have one's enormous member serviced by 2-3 ladies unburdened by gravitational force or any scruples relating to having nuts swinging against their chins. And who are we to question the wisdom of the ancients? Scripture has spoken.
Mar 31, 2010
I'm The Lord Jagannath, Bitch
On my rapid advance northwards I entered the state of Orissa, and just in time. Shortly after I boarded a train out of the city, Hyderabad erupted into religious riots and federal troops have been sent in to impose a curfew and maintain order. Nobody seems to be quite sure why it started, but the current theory is that it was closely linked to large numbers of young men coming out of that afternoon's Secondary School Certificate exams at the same time as a quarrel erupted between Hindus and Muslims concerning...*sigh* the color of flags to be flown on the streets this Tuesday. When I passed through, the old city was bedecked in countless little strings of predictably green Muslim banners, but the Hindus felt entitled to replace them all with saffron banners to celebrate Hanuman's birthday. Fortunately, I am now in Kolkata, where all we have to worry about is a bizarre scandal involving a half-assed government coverup concerning the ownership of a property where five dozen people just died in a fire. Let's just talk about Orissa.
Orissa is not part of South India but isn't really quite part of North India either. People refer to it as part of "the East", which is typically defined as also including the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. One notices immediately upon looking at a map that these states do not cover the entire eastern half of India, and in fact don't even include any of India's seven easternmost states. Like all cultural regions, it is somewhat arbitrarily defined, and when you say 'East India', what you really mean is 'the shitty parts'. This region is almost entirely an expanse of impoverished rural districts populated by "Tribals" (to use the local term). The whole region suffers from a lack of infrastructure, shamefully incompetent governance, and (unsurprisingly) is the center of India's Naxal rebels.
The Naxals are a weak and loosely organized, yet very tenacious movement of Maoist guerillas who openly or secretly control large swaths of the countryside and its villages. As I write this, the conflict is escalating as the Naxals react to the hardline rhetoric many of the political parties have been adopting. The government is hellbent on capturing the bands responsible for last week's railway attacks and is allegedly pursuing small groups including key rebel leaders through the forests of Bengal, Jharkhand, and Orissa. There isn't a whole lot of controversy about this fight. The human rights activists are pleading not to blow it into a full-scale war say that the Naxals are mostly humble, aggrieved peasants and don't pose any real menace to the state, but this appeal is falling on mostly deaf ears. I for one generally agree with them, but there has been a troubling rise in the execution of "government informants". War, however, is a Bad Thing, and the ill-conceived and half-assedly concealed government offensive is bound to only drive the rebels to greater acts of violence.
I finally alighted from my miserable train in the capital city of Bhubaneshwar to find that once again I had narrowly avoided chaos, but this time it was chaos I would have liked to be there for. The previous day, all of the city's autorickshaw drivers went on strike protesting... *ssssiiiiiggghhhhh again* the proposed establishment of a city bus network. They claimed, correctly, that having buses would hurt their business and suggested the very reasonable compromise of having buses routed only to places that nobody wants to go. The city's response seems to have been "Fuck your business", as the whole point of getting buses was to spare people the expense of hiring rickshaws in the first place. I would have liked to have been there, because by all reports if anyone pulled up to me on the street and hassled me for business, the rest of the rickshaw drivers would have flipped his tuk-tuk and beaten him with shoes for trying to break the strike.
As it turned out, the strike was now over and everyone was free to pester me, drawing up alongside and shouting "Sir, sit here! Sight seen tour! Bhubaneshwar city of temples! More than 500 temples!" I raised an eyebrow at this. "500 huh? Which is the good one?" "....there are many temples..." "Yeah, that's what I thought. Take me to the bus stand."
When I got where I actually wanted to be, the holy city of Puri, I was pleased to hear that there was only one temple anyone cares about, which meant it should at least be interesting. Puri is the eastern of the cardinal direction temples in India. In the middle of the old town some distance from the beach is the temple of Lord Jagannath, perhaps the world's most silly-looking god. Jagannath is now considered a form of Vishnu as "Lord of the Universe". The Hindu religion all too readily reveals the fact that it just absorbs other cults' gods as a matter of convenience and calls them aspects of the gods the mainstream already likes. While the religious art in general adheres to pretty rigid iconography that keeps Vishnu and his like looking more or less the same everywhere you go, they can't do anything about the appearance of the ancient idols from weird pre-Brahmanical subsumed religions. Somehow nobody seems to mind that when Vishnu assumes the form of Lord of the Universe, he becomes a black-faced, goggle-eyed midget with no legs and little silly hands without any arms. Jagannath bears an uncanny resemblance to a South Park character, suggesting particularly a plotline where Cartman would infiltrate a minstrel show. For once I gladly bought up some of the religious kitsch on sale outside the temple and am now the proud owner of several Lord Jagannath commemorative plastic plates.
Puri is best known for its massive cart-pulling festival in which millions of people come to see some very large carts be pulled. In fact, the English word "Juggernaut" derives from these Jagannath carts and English mens' astonishment at crazed Hindus throwing themselves under the wheels of the unstoppable carts believing they'll go straight to heaven. While I was glad to not be here at the same time as a few million Indians and anything slightly dangerous, I must say Puri was a touch boring without the risk of being bulldozed by a giant cart transporting an Alabama slaveholder's cartoon depiction of a black midget.
The one thing that enlivened my stroll in the temple area was running into a strange fellow named Ajit. He said to me "Ajit means 'unconquered'...but what is the true meaning?" I had to confess I did not know. He then informed me that my name (which he somehow took to be something not even remotely similar to my name) meant "like breathing, like air." "Hare Krishna Hare Ram Hai Vishnu Hai Shiv" he said, touching me on the shoulder and adding "I am a religious leader." Oh, good.
"Tell me, what is your feeling?" He asked. I couldn't stop myself.
"I don't know. I feel something...like the Truth is there, but I cannot know it fully..."
"YES! INDEED! Please sit! Tell me, your belief, you believe in the Jeezoo?"
".....No...."
"Ahhh, no, no! The Jeezoo Christ!"
"No."
"But you are Chreeshian?"
"No."
"A Mussalman?"
"No."
"But you know the Jeezoo?"
"Yes."
"The Jeezoo he is the one religion like the Krishna like Buddhi...
"All people know that the God is Truth. They think they have many religion but ha! They worship same God!"
"Yes! Yes!"
"And all religions share one great truth..."
"Come, come with me. I can show you the Truth."
"I know the Truth."
Eyes squinting..."And what Truth is this?"
"They're all the same shit."
".......Ok fine, you are not wanting Truth, young man."
"Nope."
"Maybe you are wanting....things?"
"Oh THINGS, please continue."
"You wanting....mountain grass?" wink, wink.
"But I cannot carry enough grass for my garden!"
"No, mountain grass...mari....oh. No want. You leave now."
I was thus made a persona non grata in the one religious order that could have shown me the Universal Truth, which is really what I was trying to accomplish. I also became a persona non grata at my hotel, where my attempts to weasel out of extra fees by leaning on my established friendliness with the cute manager girl led the rest of the staff to frenziedly report by walkie-talkie that I was hitting on the owner's daughter.
You win some, you lose some.
Except I got her number. GFB never lose some.
Orissa is not part of South India but isn't really quite part of North India either. People refer to it as part of "the East", which is typically defined as also including the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. One notices immediately upon looking at a map that these states do not cover the entire eastern half of India, and in fact don't even include any of India's seven easternmost states. Like all cultural regions, it is somewhat arbitrarily defined, and when you say 'East India', what you really mean is 'the shitty parts'. This region is almost entirely an expanse of impoverished rural districts populated by "Tribals" (to use the local term). The whole region suffers from a lack of infrastructure, shamefully incompetent governance, and (unsurprisingly) is the center of India's Naxal rebels.
The Naxals are a weak and loosely organized, yet very tenacious movement of Maoist guerillas who openly or secretly control large swaths of the countryside and its villages. As I write this, the conflict is escalating as the Naxals react to the hardline rhetoric many of the political parties have been adopting. The government is hellbent on capturing the bands responsible for last week's railway attacks and is allegedly pursuing small groups including key rebel leaders through the forests of Bengal, Jharkhand, and Orissa. There isn't a whole lot of controversy about this fight. The human rights activists are pleading not to blow it into a full-scale war say that the Naxals are mostly humble, aggrieved peasants and don't pose any real menace to the state, but this appeal is falling on mostly deaf ears. I for one generally agree with them, but there has been a troubling rise in the execution of "government informants". War, however, is a Bad Thing, and the ill-conceived and half-assedly concealed government offensive is bound to only drive the rebels to greater acts of violence.
I finally alighted from my miserable train in the capital city of Bhubaneshwar to find that once again I had narrowly avoided chaos, but this time it was chaos I would have liked to be there for. The previous day, all of the city's autorickshaw drivers went on strike protesting... *ssssiiiiiggghhhhh again* the proposed establishment of a city bus network. They claimed, correctly, that having buses would hurt their business and suggested the very reasonable compromise of having buses routed only to places that nobody wants to go. The city's response seems to have been "Fuck your business", as the whole point of getting buses was to spare people the expense of hiring rickshaws in the first place. I would have liked to have been there, because by all reports if anyone pulled up to me on the street and hassled me for business, the rest of the rickshaw drivers would have flipped his tuk-tuk and beaten him with shoes for trying to break the strike.
As it turned out, the strike was now over and everyone was free to pester me, drawing up alongside and shouting "Sir, sit here! Sight seen tour! Bhubaneshwar city of temples! More than 500 temples!" I raised an eyebrow at this. "500 huh? Which is the good one?" "....there are many temples..." "Yeah, that's what I thought. Take me to the bus stand."
When I got where I actually wanted to be, the holy city of Puri, I was pleased to hear that there was only one temple anyone cares about, which meant it should at least be interesting. Puri is the eastern of the cardinal direction temples in India. In the middle of the old town some distance from the beach is the temple of Lord Jagannath, perhaps the world's most silly-looking god. Jagannath is now considered a form of Vishnu as "Lord of the Universe". The Hindu religion all too readily reveals the fact that it just absorbs other cults' gods as a matter of convenience and calls them aspects of the gods the mainstream already likes. While the religious art in general adheres to pretty rigid iconography that keeps Vishnu and his like looking more or less the same everywhere you go, they can't do anything about the appearance of the ancient idols from weird pre-Brahmanical subsumed religions. Somehow nobody seems to mind that when Vishnu assumes the form of Lord of the Universe, he becomes a black-faced, goggle-eyed midget with no legs and little silly hands without any arms. Jagannath bears an uncanny resemblance to a South Park character, suggesting particularly a plotline where Cartman would infiltrate a minstrel show. For once I gladly bought up some of the religious kitsch on sale outside the temple and am now the proud owner of several Lord Jagannath commemorative plastic plates.
Puri is best known for its massive cart-pulling festival in which millions of people come to see some very large carts be pulled. In fact, the English word "Juggernaut" derives from these Jagannath carts and English mens' astonishment at crazed Hindus throwing themselves under the wheels of the unstoppable carts believing they'll go straight to heaven. While I was glad to not be here at the same time as a few million Indians and anything slightly dangerous, I must say Puri was a touch boring without the risk of being bulldozed by a giant cart transporting an Alabama slaveholder's cartoon depiction of a black midget.
The one thing that enlivened my stroll in the temple area was running into a strange fellow named Ajit. He said to me "Ajit means 'unconquered'...but what is the true meaning?" I had to confess I did not know. He then informed me that my name (which he somehow took to be something not even remotely similar to my name) meant "like breathing, like air." "Hare Krishna Hare Ram Hai Vishnu Hai Shiv" he said, touching me on the shoulder and adding "I am a religious leader." Oh, good.
"Tell me, what is your feeling?" He asked. I couldn't stop myself.
"I don't know. I feel something...like the Truth is there, but I cannot know it fully..."
"YES! INDEED! Please sit! Tell me, your belief, you believe in the Jeezoo?"
".....No...."
"Ahhh, no, no! The Jeezoo Christ!"
"No."
"But you are Chreeshian?"
"No."
"A Mussalman?"
"No."
"But you know the Jeezoo?"
"Yes."
"The Jeezoo he is the one religion like the Krishna like Buddhi...
"All people know that the God is Truth. They think they have many religion but ha! They worship same God!"
"Yes! Yes!"
"And all religions share one great truth..."
"Come, come with me. I can show you the Truth."
"I know the Truth."
Eyes squinting..."And what Truth is this?"
"They're all the same shit."
".......Ok fine, you are not wanting Truth, young man."
"Nope."
"Maybe you are wanting....things?"
"Oh THINGS, please continue."
"You wanting....mountain grass?" wink, wink.
"But I cannot carry enough grass for my garden!"
"No, mountain grass...mari....oh. No want. You leave now."
I was thus made a persona non grata in the one religious order that could have shown me the Universal Truth, which is really what I was trying to accomplish. I also became a persona non grata at my hotel, where my attempts to weasel out of extra fees by leaning on my established friendliness with the cute manager girl led the rest of the staff to frenziedly report by walkie-talkie that I was hitting on the owner's daughter.
You win some, you lose some.
Except I got her number. GFB never lose some.
Mar 29, 2010
Hyderabad To The Hyderabone
Hyderabad is one of the largest cities in India. It has a population of over 8 million people, 5 million of whom are at any given time about to run you over with a motorcycle. It should almost go without saying that as a large Indian city, Hyderabad must be completely insane, and it is. While it may be one of the most successful cities in the country thanks to its massive software industry (a.k.a. Cyberabad) and some attempt has been made to run it like a proper urban area, you still have to proceed through the streets seizing upon gaps in the murderous traffic that exist for fleeting periods of time that last shorter than a hummingbird's handjob. The local solution is to have a small army of traffic police who at least prevent disaster at intersections by waving their hands about and looking intimidatingly at anyone with the nerve to creep forwards out of turn. Where there are no cops, it's an utter anarchy of bikes and buses hurtling towards packs of pedestrians scurrying across the lane like a set of highly-evolved bowling balls. When the Indian people around are cursing and wheezing in terror as they run, you know it's pretty bad. I tried to conceive of a way to contain the chaos, but could do no better than inventing a cumbersome blockade made of a giant counterweighted beam with an unbroken chain of live cows strapped to it. This, at least, would make people stop but would present certain practical difficulties, like how to make sure the cows only poop when they're on the ground. Progress is not a vocation for the easily daunted.
But enough griping about urban India. Same shit, different sewer.
One of the first things one notices about Hyderabad while not competing in the devil's decathlon is that a large portion of the population are Muslims. This goes back all the way to the age of those tediously belligerent Deccan Sultanates, a tradition that continues to this day in the person of the incredibly conceited Nizams of Hyderabad, who haven't noticed that they stopped being a semi-independent state 63 years ago. Nevertheless, considerable energy is expended reminding the visitor of such facts as that the Nizam was the only Indian prince entitled to a 21-gun salute in all realms of the British Empire (19-gun princes, obviously, are bitches), and that the Kohinoor diamond, with which everyone in India is obsessed, came from here. Less energy is expended reminding everyone that said diamond got passed around the warring powers of 19th-century India like a stripper at an NFL team's Super Bowl victory party and is now sitting exhausted, used, and suspiciously still in the Crown Jewels in London and nobody's quite sure how much cocaine she just had.
The upshot of monomaniacal royals with garish wealth is that centuries later we get to enjoy all the cool shit they build and softly applaud them for having the noble inspiration to commission themselves expensive palaces. The old city, where a good third of the population seems to be comprised to shuffling black sacks with feet, is full of such delightfully pointless monuments. By far the greatest of its edifices, surpassing the usual gamut of mosques and palaces, is a...thing...called the Charminar, or "Four Minarets", a giant triumphal arch/mosque/tower doodad that soars dramatically out of the heart of the city between eight other massive street-spanning arches, just because. All around the Charminar is the sheer insanity of a thriving sprawl of 17th century bazaars with 21st century traffic running down the middle. Thousands of women, mostly in burkhas, swarm around between shops and carts examining what I sincerely hope is the world's largest concentration of bangles. If there exists a place on Earth with more bangles than old Hyderabad, it's time to reconsider the creative priorities of the human race. I don't even know what they're going to do with all those bangles. They're wearing burkhas. They could be banglin' from head to toe and nobody but their husbands would ever know that the odd look of discomfort one detects through their eye-slits is because they're waddling down the road like an otter trapped in a slinky.
On the fringes of Hyderabad, out between the newest residential constructions, is the older, ruined city of Golconda. This may come as a shock, but there is a Very Historic Castle. And tombs. I don't think I ever need to see a castle or tomb again. But I wondered, as I meandered about the enormous yet uninspiring graves, what would the bloodthirstily pious sultans of old say if they knew that a visit to Golconda and the tombs of their forefathers was now primarily an excuse for the young people of Hyderabad to meet and (by the Prophet's beard, such words are to me like poison at the feast of Eid!)...cuddle?
I spent much of my last day in Hyderabad on a worthless quest to look at its celebrated lake and their new giant Buddha statue, and it sucked. I was at least expecting the statue itself to be good since they went to the great trouble and expense of fishing it out of the lake after the barge carrying it sank (even prophets are at the mercy of deathly incompetent transportation in this country). Anyways, whichever latter-day Michelangelo that directed its post-dunking installation on the lake forgot the minor detail of standing it so that it faces the brand-spanking new park they built to view it from. I shall never know if the Buddha maintained his zen-filled countenance in the face of a sinking ship.
The morning after this pointless endeavor I set out on a venture that I knew was going to suck from the outset. Little did I know that I was in for a hot, bumpy ride on the tranny train all...night...long.
Let me rephrase that.
I had booked myself a 23-hour train journey way up the east coast on a ticket that made no guarantee I would get more than half a sleeping berth. I knew deep down that all the reassurances I found from travelers online that such tickets usually turn out alright would be comprehensively wrong, and that the train would arrive at my destination probably about the same time as the neighboring piece of the Earth's crust. I was relieved when I got on to find that the train was surprisingly empty, save for a few passengers, an entire parade of differently-differently-abled beggars, and a family of mice licking at the edible footprints left in the crusty deposits of spilled lentil curry. I was awoken from my morning nap once by a mouse scurrying up my backpack and over my feet, and countless other times by prodding mendicants. Sleep is one of the few things that Indians don't consider sacred. You will be woken up at any time of day or night to be asked for money, informed that the bus-driver is stopping to take a leak, or asked if you would like any tea delivered to your hotel room. "Oh yes, I would love some tea. I'm feeling a bit groggy SINCE YOU JUST WOKE ME UP, ASSHOLE." I have a theory that by some divine intervention of an irritating minor Hindu god dwelling in a shrine next to an IT firm in Hyderabad or Bangalore, every time you 'poke' someone on Facebook it is transmuted into an actual poke to be suffered by an innocent person somewhere in India.
I was half-conscious, in that turbulent state of disturbed sleep when I became aware of the sound of clapping drawing nearer and nearer in the carriage. Oh great, I thought, hear comes some idiot with his one-stringed fiddle and insect-covered baby sister to sing some godawful tune and look maudlin until I pay him five rupees not to start anew with his tambourine. I was therefore surprised, though I probably would have been surprised under any circumstances, to be prodded awake by a clique of clapping trannies.
When I say "trannies", I'm not entirely sure if they were technically transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, or something else. They define the categories differently over here. In any event, I noticed the juxtaposition of saris and square jaws. This is one of those things that many people evidently find much more magical than I do. Entire forests have been felled to print the numerous books written about the "invisible lives" of the puzzling caste of people who are, for lack of a more coherent definition, sexually different. One of the things they are best known for is showing up at people's weddings, sometimes invited for an arcane blessing but usually on the tip-offs of informers, and then proceeding to dance around until the host gets the message that if some money isn't delivered soon the wedding-guests will be treated to an extended glimpse of what's under those skirts. Invisible lives indeed. But wide-eyed Westerners of the sentimental type just can't seem to stop writing books about them as if they were just discovered after thousands of years evolving in a sealed-off cave. I, for one, upon my first extended encounter with them, was merely irritated and gestured that they should move on, preferably without clapping. I've lived in Amsterdam. You'll have to do a lot more than just put on a lady's dress to impress me.
As night fell and the train reached the coast, the carriage was suddenly inundated by passengers well beyond capacity. The transvestite troupe had dissapeared, but I was faced with the much more unpleasant situation of having to spend the entire night bent up in a half-sized bed which I was sharing head-to-foot with a complete stranger whose little toe was growing out of the top of his foot halfway back to the ankle and periodically threatened to insert itself up my nostril.
It was a hard, bumpy ride on the tranny train, all night long.
In the morning we entered Orissa, the poorest state in all of India, which is to say that it is very, very poor. I was particularly concerned the train would crawl through here hopelessly slow because Orissa and its neighboring states have spent the last week or so having their rail lines blown to pieces in a coordinated Naxalite Maoist offensive against the government. As soon as we crossed the state border, all the passengers abruptly abandoned the train in the town of Brahmapur, which I looked up later and found to have no touristic, religious, or transport-link significance. They just wanted to get off the train immediately, probably because they weren't in the mood for a repeat of the other day's dramatic bombing/derailment in Bihar. The vacancy was almost immediately filled by large groups of Orissan peasants on their way to business in the city on the morning express. For them, as they had boarded just before dawn, it was a day train rather than a sleeper, and they wasted no time in poking at me to demand I cede the quarter-bed I had just finished painfully ossifying in. Then, with the influx of new passengers, came a new (and I must say even less inspired) march of the clapping trannies.
Only a few more hours to the end, I thought. And that's when shit got really weird. The train arrived five minutes early.
But enough griping about urban India. Same shit, different sewer.
One of the first things one notices about Hyderabad while not competing in the devil's decathlon is that a large portion of the population are Muslims. This goes back all the way to the age of those tediously belligerent Deccan Sultanates, a tradition that continues to this day in the person of the incredibly conceited Nizams of Hyderabad, who haven't noticed that they stopped being a semi-independent state 63 years ago. Nevertheless, considerable energy is expended reminding the visitor of such facts as that the Nizam was the only Indian prince entitled to a 21-gun salute in all realms of the British Empire (19-gun princes, obviously, are bitches), and that the Kohinoor diamond, with which everyone in India is obsessed, came from here. Less energy is expended reminding everyone that said diamond got passed around the warring powers of 19th-century India like a stripper at an NFL team's Super Bowl victory party and is now sitting exhausted, used, and suspiciously still in the Crown Jewels in London and nobody's quite sure how much cocaine she just had.
The upshot of monomaniacal royals with garish wealth is that centuries later we get to enjoy all the cool shit they build and softly applaud them for having the noble inspiration to commission themselves expensive palaces. The old city, where a good third of the population seems to be comprised to shuffling black sacks with feet, is full of such delightfully pointless monuments. By far the greatest of its edifices, surpassing the usual gamut of mosques and palaces, is a...thing...called the Charminar, or "Four Minarets", a giant triumphal arch/mosque/tower doodad that soars dramatically out of the heart of the city between eight other massive street-spanning arches, just because. All around the Charminar is the sheer insanity of a thriving sprawl of 17th century bazaars with 21st century traffic running down the middle. Thousands of women, mostly in burkhas, swarm around between shops and carts examining what I sincerely hope is the world's largest concentration of bangles. If there exists a place on Earth with more bangles than old Hyderabad, it's time to reconsider the creative priorities of the human race. I don't even know what they're going to do with all those bangles. They're wearing burkhas. They could be banglin' from head to toe and nobody but their husbands would ever know that the odd look of discomfort one detects through their eye-slits is because they're waddling down the road like an otter trapped in a slinky.
On the fringes of Hyderabad, out between the newest residential constructions, is the older, ruined city of Golconda. This may come as a shock, but there is a Very Historic Castle. And tombs. I don't think I ever need to see a castle or tomb again. But I wondered, as I meandered about the enormous yet uninspiring graves, what would the bloodthirstily pious sultans of old say if they knew that a visit to Golconda and the tombs of their forefathers was now primarily an excuse for the young people of Hyderabad to meet and (by the Prophet's beard, such words are to me like poison at the feast of Eid!)...cuddle?
I spent much of my last day in Hyderabad on a worthless quest to look at its celebrated lake and their new giant Buddha statue, and it sucked. I was at least expecting the statue itself to be good since they went to the great trouble and expense of fishing it out of the lake after the barge carrying it sank (even prophets are at the mercy of deathly incompetent transportation in this country). Anyways, whichever latter-day Michelangelo that directed its post-dunking installation on the lake forgot the minor detail of standing it so that it faces the brand-spanking new park they built to view it from. I shall never know if the Buddha maintained his zen-filled countenance in the face of a sinking ship.
The morning after this pointless endeavor I set out on a venture that I knew was going to suck from the outset. Little did I know that I was in for a hot, bumpy ride on the tranny train all...night...long.
Let me rephrase that.
I had booked myself a 23-hour train journey way up the east coast on a ticket that made no guarantee I would get more than half a sleeping berth. I knew deep down that all the reassurances I found from travelers online that such tickets usually turn out alright would be comprehensively wrong, and that the train would arrive at my destination probably about the same time as the neighboring piece of the Earth's crust. I was relieved when I got on to find that the train was surprisingly empty, save for a few passengers, an entire parade of differently-differently-abled beggars, and a family of mice licking at the edible footprints left in the crusty deposits of spilled lentil curry. I was awoken from my morning nap once by a mouse scurrying up my backpack and over my feet, and countless other times by prodding mendicants. Sleep is one of the few things that Indians don't consider sacred. You will be woken up at any time of day or night to be asked for money, informed that the bus-driver is stopping to take a leak, or asked if you would like any tea delivered to your hotel room. "Oh yes, I would love some tea. I'm feeling a bit groggy SINCE YOU JUST WOKE ME UP, ASSHOLE." I have a theory that by some divine intervention of an irritating minor Hindu god dwelling in a shrine next to an IT firm in Hyderabad or Bangalore, every time you 'poke' someone on Facebook it is transmuted into an actual poke to be suffered by an innocent person somewhere in India.
I was half-conscious, in that turbulent state of disturbed sleep when I became aware of the sound of clapping drawing nearer and nearer in the carriage. Oh great, I thought, hear comes some idiot with his one-stringed fiddle and insect-covered baby sister to sing some godawful tune and look maudlin until I pay him five rupees not to start anew with his tambourine. I was therefore surprised, though I probably would have been surprised under any circumstances, to be prodded awake by a clique of clapping trannies.
When I say "trannies", I'm not entirely sure if they were technically transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, or something else. They define the categories differently over here. In any event, I noticed the juxtaposition of saris and square jaws. This is one of those things that many people evidently find much more magical than I do. Entire forests have been felled to print the numerous books written about the "invisible lives" of the puzzling caste of people who are, for lack of a more coherent definition, sexually different. One of the things they are best known for is showing up at people's weddings, sometimes invited for an arcane blessing but usually on the tip-offs of informers, and then proceeding to dance around until the host gets the message that if some money isn't delivered soon the wedding-guests will be treated to an extended glimpse of what's under those skirts. Invisible lives indeed. But wide-eyed Westerners of the sentimental type just can't seem to stop writing books about them as if they were just discovered after thousands of years evolving in a sealed-off cave. I, for one, upon my first extended encounter with them, was merely irritated and gestured that they should move on, preferably without clapping. I've lived in Amsterdam. You'll have to do a lot more than just put on a lady's dress to impress me.
As night fell and the train reached the coast, the carriage was suddenly inundated by passengers well beyond capacity. The transvestite troupe had dissapeared, but I was faced with the much more unpleasant situation of having to spend the entire night bent up in a half-sized bed which I was sharing head-to-foot with a complete stranger whose little toe was growing out of the top of his foot halfway back to the ankle and periodically threatened to insert itself up my nostril.
It was a hard, bumpy ride on the tranny train, all night long.
In the morning we entered Orissa, the poorest state in all of India, which is to say that it is very, very poor. I was particularly concerned the train would crawl through here hopelessly slow because Orissa and its neighboring states have spent the last week or so having their rail lines blown to pieces in a coordinated Naxalite Maoist offensive against the government. As soon as we crossed the state border, all the passengers abruptly abandoned the train in the town of Brahmapur, which I looked up later and found to have no touristic, religious, or transport-link significance. They just wanted to get off the train immediately, probably because they weren't in the mood for a repeat of the other day's dramatic bombing/derailment in Bihar. The vacancy was almost immediately filled by large groups of Orissan peasants on their way to business in the city on the morning express. For them, as they had boarded just before dawn, it was a day train rather than a sleeper, and they wasted no time in poking at me to demand I cede the quarter-bed I had just finished painfully ossifying in. Then, with the influx of new passengers, came a new (and I must say even less inspired) march of the clapping trannies.
Only a few more hours to the end, I thought. And that's when shit got really weird. The train arrived five minutes early.
Mar 24, 2010
Freedom
I awoke. Everything was a golden brown. I looked around in bewilderment. This was not the same bus I had fallen asleep on. Had I unconsciusly transferred buses? And if so, where was I? I crinkled my nose at a fleeting smell and felt that in the dry, oppressive heat my boogers had fried themselves into sharp chits with the consistency of an Aztec obsidian dagger within my nose. There was no doubt about it; I was back in the Deccan.
I came to my senses and looked around. Everything seemed to confirm that I had passed Hyderabad and was on my way to Bidar, a dusty backwater even in a land of dusty backwaters. Everyone else in the bus was sleeping too, beaten into unconsciousness by the currents of scorching air tearing through the windows of the bus. It was a neccesary misery; if the bus were to slow down, the furnace-like gusts of air would be replaced by flocks of vultures bursting through the windows and squabbling over perches in the luggage racks as they wait to see who's the first to die.
So this is freedom, I thought. Upon leaving Tirupati I had made a decisive cut, a final end to my toils for the ever-ungrateful bastards who henceforth held the purse-strings of my travels in India. I've now reached the threshold of self-sustainabilty so now, I am proud to say, I'm on my own shiat, biatch. One alter-ego has been consigned to the rubbish-bin of history, whence it shall probably be thrown into a gutter or an empty lot to be nibbled on by pigs until it is set on fire in giant trash-burnings that spill into the street and set people's car paint ablaze (that happens here). Only Ghostface Buddha remains.
I woke up some 700km from the scene of my last labor, and took immediately to savoring the taste, the feel, and the smell of Freedom. I squirmed in my seat to try and stretch my muscles after a night on the road, and found that I had I had clearly left the sweart-drenched climate of the far south behind. Only where I stuck to my chair was there any feeling of moisture. Elsewhere, I noticed odd accumulations of salt on my body, crusting up my collarbone and getting knotted in tangles of Brillo-pad tummy hair. Freedom indeed. Somehow I had expected a big sloppy chili dog accompanied by the sounds of a college marching band, or at least a plate of cocktail sausages with little flags in them. As for the smell of Freedom, out in the baking nothingness, all I could detect was the fumes of the bus itself poisoning my charred nostrils with an odor not unlike a napalm-coated village of Communist sympathizers. The smell of Freedom, at least, was just right.
Bidar is such a dusthole that the Indian Air Force has put its training academy there. The Indian military brass are the first to admit that when fast-moving vehicles are concerned in this country, it is best to center them where there is nothing of value to crash into. Even if a trainee loses control and ejects, leaving his training jet to crash into the desolate countryside and kill a passing goat, the military wouldn't even have to compensate the farmer. "The goat would have died out there anyways" they'll argue. Aside from the odd fighter jet screeching overhead, there isn't a whole lot of motion once you get off the main roads of Bidar. I would turn into a small red-dirt alleyway to check for any quaint scenes to photograph, only to find myself on the edge of town looking off a slope into miles and miles of emptiness.
In the town itself are varios attractions including the requisite fort and the ruins of a once-esteemed Islamic university. Right next to my hotel was a park full of the tombs of the Badir Shahi sultans, who were kings here after the Bahmani sultans but before the Adil Shahi sultans, who were in turn conquered by the...whatever. I have a theory about medieval Deccan history. The only reason their culture was able to flourish so greatly in those war-riven times was not despite the era being centuries of bloodbaths, but because of it. A good battle was probably the only form of irrigation you could hope for in ten months of the year. I imagine grateful peasants bowing before the king and saying "Thank you, oh Master, for spilling the blood of our enemies upon the fields, such that it flowed like rivers, whatever those are. We may have wheat this year." I entered the park as usual to poke about the tombs and was miffed to find they charged a little entrance fee. This fee, I discovered, was for the aesthetic upkeep of the park, and by "aesthetic upkeep" I mean "bizarre Barcelona-esque landscaping around the ancient tombs complemented by statues of naked golden babies hugging geese and fish."
About a mile outside of town lies a cluster of large, crumbling tombs (these ones belonging to the Bahmani sultans), some of them in such an advanced state of ruination that their domes look like half of a cracked eggshell. They call the village Ashtur, but I don't know where the village is. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of life around, just a handful of huge tombs, the hot, brown earth, and an endless sky. The air was so still, and the scenery so implacably limitless and monotonous that even tumbleweeds disdained to roll on through. What plants there were to be seen were firmly rooted. I stared at a bush for a moment, entranced by its utter motionlessness, even for a bush. Not a twig stirred in the still silence of the countryside and the bush seemed to roll its would-be eyes at me and say "What? You want me to move? To where? Look at this shit, what's the point?" before grumpily resuming the silence of its timeless, dusty squat. I tromped about from one tomb to another, and found myself most unpleasantly reminded of that other Deccan sensation, the infiltration of dust in one's sandals, from which is created a sticky brown mire where the pressure and sweat of your feet turn the surface of your footware to a wet, grainy, shit-colored morass. I tried to remain optimistic. This was my first day of freedom, after all. I told myself that at least if I was lost and starving out in the countryside I would be able to catch insects to eat by taking a nap with my gluey feet pointed at a termite mound. I almost didn't mind taking my shoes off to enter the tombs. I hopped across the scorching stone floors with great dispatch, only to be utterly dismayed that the hot floors were a blessing compared to the Deccan crabgrass towards which I had so urgently and gracelessly bounded.
As I shuffled back across the stone making little puffing sounds of "Ooo ahhhh ahhh", I was pulled into an open tomb by a curious Muslim man. Oh great, soon he shall kindly offer his services as a guide, I thought. He did, but he was no ordinary guide. He led me over to a leather messenger bag in the darkness and started pulling out reams of documents, grabbing my hands and forcing me to flick through them. He seemed particularly intent on showing me a genealogical table of the Bahmani kings that continued to the present day. Just like Indian royals, I thought, to continue their dynastic pretensions even when they had lost their throne to another line of sultans in the 1500's. He laid the document side-by-side with a local newspaper clipping in which he was clearly illustrated. I began to read. "Descendant of Bahamani kings maintains ancestors' tombs in life of penury." I was there face-to-face with the current head of a much-declined royal household that had once controlled all of south-central India and was now reduced to a snaggle-toothed man whose best luck in life so far seemed to have been being given a free village hut from the Archaeological Survey of India when they evicted his family from squatting in the tombs themselves. I had the vague feeling of brushing dust off a walking exhibit of Bidar's history, and that this history was about to use the sudden revelation of its ancient mystique to ask for money.
I may not have had to pay our tax-loving, freedom-hating, communist, fascist Kenyan Nazi terrorist President a dime in taxes this year, but I did have to give the fucking Sultan of Bidar twenty rupees.
Freedom is dead.
I came to my senses and looked around. Everything seemed to confirm that I had passed Hyderabad and was on my way to Bidar, a dusty backwater even in a land of dusty backwaters. Everyone else in the bus was sleeping too, beaten into unconsciousness by the currents of scorching air tearing through the windows of the bus. It was a neccesary misery; if the bus were to slow down, the furnace-like gusts of air would be replaced by flocks of vultures bursting through the windows and squabbling over perches in the luggage racks as they wait to see who's the first to die.
So this is freedom, I thought. Upon leaving Tirupati I had made a decisive cut, a final end to my toils for the ever-ungrateful bastards who henceforth held the purse-strings of my travels in India. I've now reached the threshold of self-sustainabilty so now, I am proud to say, I'm on my own shiat, biatch. One alter-ego has been consigned to the rubbish-bin of history, whence it shall probably be thrown into a gutter or an empty lot to be nibbled on by pigs until it is set on fire in giant trash-burnings that spill into the street and set people's car paint ablaze (that happens here). Only Ghostface Buddha remains.
I woke up some 700km from the scene of my last labor, and took immediately to savoring the taste, the feel, and the smell of Freedom. I squirmed in my seat to try and stretch my muscles after a night on the road, and found that I had I had clearly left the sweart-drenched climate of the far south behind. Only where I stuck to my chair was there any feeling of moisture. Elsewhere, I noticed odd accumulations of salt on my body, crusting up my collarbone and getting knotted in tangles of Brillo-pad tummy hair. Freedom indeed. Somehow I had expected a big sloppy chili dog accompanied by the sounds of a college marching band, or at least a plate of cocktail sausages with little flags in them. As for the smell of Freedom, out in the baking nothingness, all I could detect was the fumes of the bus itself poisoning my charred nostrils with an odor not unlike a napalm-coated village of Communist sympathizers. The smell of Freedom, at least, was just right.
Bidar is such a dusthole that the Indian Air Force has put its training academy there. The Indian military brass are the first to admit that when fast-moving vehicles are concerned in this country, it is best to center them where there is nothing of value to crash into. Even if a trainee loses control and ejects, leaving his training jet to crash into the desolate countryside and kill a passing goat, the military wouldn't even have to compensate the farmer. "The goat would have died out there anyways" they'll argue. Aside from the odd fighter jet screeching overhead, there isn't a whole lot of motion once you get off the main roads of Bidar. I would turn into a small red-dirt alleyway to check for any quaint scenes to photograph, only to find myself on the edge of town looking off a slope into miles and miles of emptiness.
In the town itself are varios attractions including the requisite fort and the ruins of a once-esteemed Islamic university. Right next to my hotel was a park full of the tombs of the Badir Shahi sultans, who were kings here after the Bahmani sultans but before the Adil Shahi sultans, who were in turn conquered by the...whatever. I have a theory about medieval Deccan history. The only reason their culture was able to flourish so greatly in those war-riven times was not despite the era being centuries of bloodbaths, but because of it. A good battle was probably the only form of irrigation you could hope for in ten months of the year. I imagine grateful peasants bowing before the king and saying "Thank you, oh Master, for spilling the blood of our enemies upon the fields, such that it flowed like rivers, whatever those are. We may have wheat this year." I entered the park as usual to poke about the tombs and was miffed to find they charged a little entrance fee. This fee, I discovered, was for the aesthetic upkeep of the park, and by "aesthetic upkeep" I mean "bizarre Barcelona-esque landscaping around the ancient tombs complemented by statues of naked golden babies hugging geese and fish."
About a mile outside of town lies a cluster of large, crumbling tombs (these ones belonging to the Bahmani sultans), some of them in such an advanced state of ruination that their domes look like half of a cracked eggshell. They call the village Ashtur, but I don't know where the village is. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of life around, just a handful of huge tombs, the hot, brown earth, and an endless sky. The air was so still, and the scenery so implacably limitless and monotonous that even tumbleweeds disdained to roll on through. What plants there were to be seen were firmly rooted. I stared at a bush for a moment, entranced by its utter motionlessness, even for a bush. Not a twig stirred in the still silence of the countryside and the bush seemed to roll its would-be eyes at me and say "What? You want me to move? To where? Look at this shit, what's the point?" before grumpily resuming the silence of its timeless, dusty squat. I tromped about from one tomb to another, and found myself most unpleasantly reminded of that other Deccan sensation, the infiltration of dust in one's sandals, from which is created a sticky brown mire where the pressure and sweat of your feet turn the surface of your footware to a wet, grainy, shit-colored morass. I tried to remain optimistic. This was my first day of freedom, after all. I told myself that at least if I was lost and starving out in the countryside I would be able to catch insects to eat by taking a nap with my gluey feet pointed at a termite mound. I almost didn't mind taking my shoes off to enter the tombs. I hopped across the scorching stone floors with great dispatch, only to be utterly dismayed that the hot floors were a blessing compared to the Deccan crabgrass towards which I had so urgently and gracelessly bounded.
As I shuffled back across the stone making little puffing sounds of "Ooo ahhhh ahhh", I was pulled into an open tomb by a curious Muslim man. Oh great, soon he shall kindly offer his services as a guide, I thought. He did, but he was no ordinary guide. He led me over to a leather messenger bag in the darkness and started pulling out reams of documents, grabbing my hands and forcing me to flick through them. He seemed particularly intent on showing me a genealogical table of the Bahmani kings that continued to the present day. Just like Indian royals, I thought, to continue their dynastic pretensions even when they had lost their throne to another line of sultans in the 1500's. He laid the document side-by-side with a local newspaper clipping in which he was clearly illustrated. I began to read. "Descendant of Bahamani kings maintains ancestors' tombs in life of penury." I was there face-to-face with the current head of a much-declined royal household that had once controlled all of south-central India and was now reduced to a snaggle-toothed man whose best luck in life so far seemed to have been being given a free village hut from the Archaeological Survey of India when they evicted his family from squatting in the tombs themselves. I had the vague feeling of brushing dust off a walking exhibit of Bidar's history, and that this history was about to use the sudden revelation of its ancient mystique to ask for money.
I may not have had to pay our tax-loving, freedom-hating, communist, fascist Kenyan Nazi terrorist President a dime in taxes this year, but I did have to give the fucking Sultan of Bidar twenty rupees.
Freedom is dead.
Mar 22, 2010
DEFCON G
The Oval Office
"Mr. President! Mr. President! We have a-"
"The president isn't here, General."
"Where is he? He has to see this intel immediately!"
"He's behind the house shooting hoops with the girls."
"Damn, he's cool- I'll go get him. Assemble the cabinet in the briefing room!"
The White House Lawn
"Mr. President! Mr. Presi...nice layup, Malia...Mr. President, we have a situation."
"Yes?"
"Sir, I've already placed all our strategic forces on DEFCON 1."
"TELL ME WHY, GENERAL."
"Sir, we've lost track of-"
"My God, not the Jupiter-II...how could they have known?"
"No sir, not the Jupiter-II...worse."
"No......"
"Sir, we've lost our trace on Ghostface Buddha."
"Assemble the Joint Chiefs, summon the cabinet, now tell me-"
"Already done, sir."
"Tell me everything we know."
"Sir, at 0450 our tracking units in the Indian Ocean reported signal intelligence that Ghostface Buddha has abandoned his travel-writing job and-"
"What does this mean, General?"
"Sir, that's the last the tracking units heard. We believe he's still in India, and he's gone rogue."
"Dear....God. Forget the cabinet. You have Green Light."
"At once sir!"
**All commands, phase readiness from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON G. The Turkey is out of the Oven. I repeat, we have Rampant Poultry. The Turkey is out of the Oven. Over**.
**All commands...God save us all. Over and out.**
"Mr. President! Mr. President! We have a-"
"The president isn't here, General."
"Where is he? He has to see this intel immediately!"
"He's behind the house shooting hoops with the girls."
"Damn, he's cool- I'll go get him. Assemble the cabinet in the briefing room!"
The White House Lawn
"Mr. President! Mr. Presi...nice layup, Malia...Mr. President, we have a situation."
"Yes?"
"Sir, I've already placed all our strategic forces on DEFCON 1."
"TELL ME WHY, GENERAL."
"Sir, we've lost track of-"
"My God, not the Jupiter-II...how could they have known?"
"No sir, not the Jupiter-II...worse."
"No......"
"Sir, we've lost our trace on Ghostface Buddha."
"Assemble the Joint Chiefs, summon the cabinet, now tell me-"
"Already done, sir."
"Tell me everything we know."
"Sir, at 0450 our tracking units in the Indian Ocean reported signal intelligence that Ghostface Buddha has abandoned his travel-writing job and-"
"What does this mean, General?"
"Sir, that's the last the tracking units heard. We believe he's still in India, and he's gone rogue."
"Dear....God. Forget the cabinet. You have Green Light."
"At once sir!"
**All commands, phase readiness from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON G. The Turkey is out of the Oven. I repeat, we have Rampant Poultry. The Turkey is out of the Oven. Over**.
**All commands...God save us all. Over and out.**
Mar 21, 2010
One Wish
People have this idea that India is a good place to come to contemplate the transience of all things and transcend one's own thoughts concerning life and death. I, on the other hand, find that it provokes one into contemplating mortality. India is a place where you can suddenly die at any moment for any reason. Here's a list of interesting deaths compiled from today's issue of the Deccan Chronicle alone, not counting the various other stampedes, buses-falling-off-of-bridges, ferry-sinkings, and miscellaneous crimes of passion that have taken place earlier this week.
1) Two killed after being thrown off a moving train by an irritated ticket collector (who has yet to be arrested).
2) Two killed, one injured in axe-murder rampage.
3) One killed, twenty injured after "some miscreants hurled rocks at a bees' nest" in a busy market.
4) Five killed, one injured, all children, secretly poisoned in black magic fertility ritual.
5) One killed after being doused in kerosene and set on fire by a member of the Uttar Pradesh state legislature.
6) One hypothetically killed at a busy train station and/or temple in his dreams and moved to write a newspaper editorial denouncing the inability of Indians to form an orderly line with a statistically insignificant risk of manslaughter.
It was therefore with some apprehension that I today joined a large and irritable crowd of impatient Indian people in a dedicated "Q-ing" building adjoining THE BUSIEST TEMPLE ON THIS PLANET WHICH WE CALL EARTH.
(By the way, this post marks the end of an era, in more ways than one. The first being the world may be doomed, but the other I will reveal in my critical next post...)
Yesterday I crossed out of Tamil Nadu and entered Andhra Pradesh, the huge southeastern state which contains Tirumala, site of the temple in question. The first thing I noticed in entering the general area of the pilgrimage town is the variety of languages on the innumerable buses honking their way along the highway. I saw an Andhra Pradesh government bus and was puzzled to see that it was labelled in some degenerate form of Kannada that had been blended with Tamil and chickenscratch. Then I realized I was having my first exposure to Telugu writing, and much later I realized that the imaginary influence I called "chickenscratch" was the actual influence of Urdu. Oops. Well, Urdu writing is pretty much Arabic and Persian combined with untold amounts of opium, so no apologies.
If I were drawn to cliches, I would say that Tirumala is a veritable Mecca of pilgrim activity, but that would be a disservice to Tirumala, which actually gets more pilgrim visitors per year than anywhere else in the world including Rome and Mecca. Pilgrims flock to the craptacular town of Tirupati at the bottom of the mountain to prepare to visit the temple above, where Lord Venkateshwara (aka Lord Balaji aka Lord Vishnu) grants a wish with his blessings. In a country where people seem to rely on wishes for an awful lot, it is unsurprising that many come here. Of course, I don't buy into wishes. It seems to me that by the time one reaches the later years of childhood one should have noticed that regardless of which benevolent deity/wish-granting force one petitions, one's wishes rarely seem to come true. The merchants of Tirupati have also realized what the pilgrims in general have not, and have built the perfect town for those whom Lord Venkateshwara's blessing fails to materialize. In India, a tirtha is a crossing, a place where heaven and earth meet. Here, Tirumala has its little piece of the heavenly, and Tirupati supplies a marvellous illustration of the wordly. You can go pray to God if you want, but if that doesn't work...well, Tirupati has a lot of liquor stores and a lot of pawnshops.
I rose early in the morning in the vain attempt to avoid the worst crush of pilgrims at a temple so busy it is open 24 hours a day. Allegedly, "At any given time, there will be no fewer than 5000 people inside the temple compound" (which is not that big). Furthermore "On a typical weekday, the temple averages some 40,000 visitors. This figure will be much higher on weekends, national holidays, and during festivals." "100,000 visitors in a day is not uncommon." I visited during the family-trip time school summer holidays. On a Sunday.
First, though, you have to get there, which you do by means of a winding and slightly terrifying mountain road. It's not that the road is bad, it's that the road is too good. The Tirumala temple, also being the richest temple in the world, is so well endowed that it has its own system of access highways, with a separate road for going up and going down, allowing the bursting-full buses to blast up the mountain with no fear of traffic coming the other way, and evidently no fear of careening off a precipice. As the bus swings wildly around the bends in the road, it feels surprisingly like a rollercoaster, an opinion confirmed by the behavior of the children on board, who were either wild with glee or having the most traumatic encounter with Newtonian physics of their young lives.
It's also impossible to notice that a great many people around here don't have any hair, as they have it all shaved off and donated to the deity, though I haven't a clue what the supreme being needs with a bunch of Indian hair. If he really needed hair I think he would at least make a petition to lure more Westerners to the Hindu fold, if for no other reason that the multi-hued Western coiff- with its browns, blondes, and even reds- is a veritable rainbow in comparison with the monochrome locks of the subcontinent.
Dismounting the bus atop the mountain, I got to see what "the richest temple on Earth" really means. Aside from the fact that the inner shrine is literally covered in gold, I was more stunned by the temple administration's achievement which no government entity in India has yet to equal. The temple has infrastructure. Aside from the access roads, which one enters through what is undoubtably the grandest toll booth plaza on the blue marble of Earth, the temple authorities have essentially constructed an entire city on top of the mountain. They have their own bus lines, their own sewage and utilities system (which work), room for thousands of people at massive hotels, shelters, and cottage complexes, free eateries, and even a huge hall of free head-shaving barbers. The holy tank near the temple itself is -get this- blue, thanks to a system of pumps that keeps it from acquiring the toxic green color and microbial stench of every other sacred puddle in this country. There is a massive building just for forming queues for the temple. Hell, there is a qeueing and a free shoe-keeping facility just for the free barbers' complex.
Now, let me state for the record that I had no intention of spending an entire day lining up in metal boxes and jostling with tens of thousands of bare-scalped pilgrims to get my momentary audience with Hindu Santa. No, I had a much better idea. At the very least I would pay for the 50-rupee "special darshan" ticket, a glorified form of cutting. However, at a competitively priced 50 rupees, this was already a popular option with a serpentine trail of shoving, ticket-pocketing pilgrims winding their way into the Dantesque maw of the qeueing facility. But I could do one better. I bought the 300-rupee "super-duper darshan" ticket, entitling me to walk past throngs and throngs of aggravated proles and wait in cramped metal cages with the mere thousands of people who could fork out $6.35 or so to talk to God with minimal interference from the poors.
As I've mentioned, being in any place with lots of Indian people can be hazardous to the health, but anywhere that doesn't have at least two hundred Indian people inside it is not to be found in India. For the most part, thousands of Indians around is just par for the course, but when you have thousands of Indians "waiting" for something, particularly when a line would be advisable, one wishes he could make his wish to God in advance and ask for an exoskeleton.
The temple staff are to be commended for their dedication to safety and having to deal with this crap day after day. They've actually created a system that minimizes the chances of the fatal stampedes that are all too common in these parts. They do this basically by treating the pilgrims as prisoners and segragating them into non-lethal-sized crowds and shutting them in a series of dozens of metal cages, which one has to slowly pass through like a ship traversing a canal full of locks, sitting in a box waiting for the engineers to complete the procedure allowing you to sail onwards. However, if I may mix my metaphors, every time the canal gates open to the next lock, the Indians rush into the next cage like rats from a sinking ship, accomplishing absolutely nothing (because it is impossible to advance or fall back from roughly your deserved place) except ill-treating the meek, demeaning the human race, and shattering any observer's faith in the rational nature of Man.
By the time it's all over, people have spent their entire day (or if you pay the hard cash, just what feels like an entire day) conniving means to force their way ahead of their fellow man. At the bus station for the descent hours later, I watched one bus pull into the station and drive towards the structure at full speed, stopping dramatically at only the last moment, because this would be the only way to actually get the bus parked while impatient throngs tried to get on board. Even this did not stop them. While the bus was still screeching to a halt and women and children were fleeing its dangerous course, young men were hurling themselves at its sides, grasping onto bars and hoisting themselves through the windows. By the time the doors were opened, the bus was already half full. As the remainder of the crowd teemed in (to quote Geeta Mehta "Nobody teems like Indians") the conductor had sharp words for the acrobats, arguing that anyone who could secure a seat in this manner was the least deserving of it and should wipe the smug grins off their faces and let the old ladies sit and... what's that? You said something? GET OFF MY BUS. As the conductor got to me I remarked "Some pilgrims, huh?" and he stopped collecting tickets for some time to hold his head and mutter in Hindi.
Back in the "Q Facility", the teeming was reaching its peak. Indeed, nobody teems like Indians. The Chinese may have the density, and the "Arab Street" may have the intensity, but the Indians have it both in spades. Waiting in one bend of the labyrinth, a few men tried to start a chant of "Praise lord god! Praise lor-", getting knocked off rhythmn by pilgrims shoving them up the stairs, hellbent on their mission to go praise lord god.
An aside - I was at one point taken aside, on account of my "non-Hindu" complexion and compelled to sign an affidavit of my faith in Lord Balaji, to ensure that my intentions for being there were not to cause trouble. I had half a mind to say that if I wanted to cause trouble I would go to a temple where I don't have to pay 300 rupees for a three-hour wait. Anyways, there is now somewhere in the temple archives a sworn statement in these words: "I, ...Ghostface Buddha.................... belong to the ...Narcissist..... religion. Nevertheles, I have faith in Lord ...Balaji... and earnestly and respectfully seek his blessing... SIGNED...GFB..."
People have this idea that India is a good place to come to contemplate the transience of all things... People have this idea that the Hindu religion involves a lot of contemplation. You come to India and you put on cotton clothes and you putter around in gardens, flitting like a butterfly while contemplating your oneness with the dandelions. And there are contemplative forms of Hinduism. There are maths (sort of like monasteries for saddhus) where you can get thrown out for doing anything but contemplating, but these are not the orders to which most Hindus belong. Hinduism is giant lemon-chocolate-peanut-strawberry-coconut-chicken-cucumber-fish-papaya pie of faiths, and the average Western visitor puts a little baby spoon in it and says "Mmmmmmmmmm, I love blueberry cobbler." I'm not saying I'm the all-experienced one here. I don't want any of the peanut-cucumber bites any more than the next Western tourist, but I defy you to find me a Western Hinduphile whose engagement with the religion includes going to a random cement temple near their lodge, ringing a bell and praising God for several minutes, or going to a little street-corner shrine and praying to that deity for their particular aid. Mainstream Hinduism, simply put, is not cool.
Like I say, I'm not above this view myself. I often find mainstream Hinduism outright aggravating. When finally we approached the gate of the temple proper and our accelerated line merged with that of our 50-rupee brethren (I can only assume the free-darshan-seekers starved and were eaten by wolves), the behavior of the devout was such to give this celebrated temple one of the least reverential atmospheres I have ever witnessed. While small groups of shuffling women mustered the concentration to sing hymns to Krishna (that most beloved cuddly-wuddly baby / divine adventuring superhero of a god), the vast majority of the pilgrims didn't even bother to stop in the courtyard but surged forewards to the chokepoint to the next courtyard. The most dangerous place to be was anywhere other than the two crushing lines trying to get to the stone entranceway, as every time somebody imagined another (no doubt much faster!) way in opening, a mad rush of sprinting pilgrims followed. At one point, another opening DID appear, as four or five guards blocked off the crazed surge and a half-dozen temple staff escorted a legless cripple through a special entrance, as he would have been instantly trampled underfoot anywhere else. People began screaming to be let through the special way and the guards rebuked them. "BUT YOU LET HIM IN!" they shouted. "He has NO LEGS", the guards rebuked. "Yeah? Well fuck that! MY legs are TIRED!" the crowd foamed back.
But I digress. I was talking about mainstream Hinduism. The thing about Tirumala, is that it isn't that holy. I mean, sure, it's holy and it has a bunch of legends relating to it, but none that anybody cares to single out. There's nothing like other holy sites boast of, like "This is where God X removed the darkness of ignorance from humanity" or "This is where Goddess Y fashioned the feminine energy, giver of life..." Tirumala is the most popular pilgrimage site in the world because, for some reason, you get a wish. Which gods do you see everywhere in people's homes and businesses in India? Ganesh, giver of good fortune. Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, literally pouring out buckets of gold. I could go on. At any point in history, the foremost and ascendant strains of the Hindu religion have always been a mirror of Indian society (and this is taking the debatable stance of not saying that Hinduism is Indian society), and modern Indian society is largely a crass materialist cult which would make even an American cringe. I won't presume to say how many of the pilgrims there had recently been in deep touch with their souls and how many needed to pray for a high exam score, a raise at their IT firm, an opening at an apartment development that boasts "An aristocratic address to help you scale the echelons of society...", but the number praying for such superficial wishes, I have no doubt, was greater than 0. (And because we're dealing with Tirumala here, probably also greater than 17,937).
A stray thought on this track: if Hinduism had regularized congregational worship, the scale it would reach here would strip America of any right to call its larger gatherings "mega-churches" ever again.
You may be wondering, OK Mr.Ghostface, so when youuuuuuu got your moment with the god what did you in your sublime spiritual purity wish for? Well, I had a number of ideas, some more worthy than others and all of them tempered by my general disdain for wishes. If I'm not going to wish when I break a chicken bone or pray to little fairies or the Christian sky-daddy, I'm not going to start with dear Sri Venkateshwara / Balaji. I finally settled on one fairly noble wish pertaining to this journey, just in case I was somehow suddenly moved to ask the god for something.
Finally I made it into the inner courtyard and from my position in the ruthlessly jockeying pack of pilgrims who were so close they could taste it I beheld a shrine completely roofed, spire and all, in gold. I made the last few turns with little of my own force and was almost lifted off my feet into the gold-paneled shrine itself. I made the final turn, and there ahead of me, in the dark, dark distance was Lord Balaji. I stopped to think "Should I make a wish now?" and got yanked forwards. I saw this happening invariably to every pilgrim. Some tried to stop and pray; others tried a simple "Praise God!" with their hands high above their heads. I was grasped by one of a gauntlet of temple staff and pulled down the wooden ramp in the shrine, being passed from one manhandler to the next. They simply can not allow the pilgrim flow to stop, or some real impatience and chaos would ensue. I could see the pilgrims in their dozens hastening to compose themselves as they tumbled forwards in the gauntlet's clutches and cast a wish to the Lord before being hauled around the bend and out of sight forever. Realizing it was my only chance, and suddenly feeling the need not to wish per se, but to somehow dignify the whole experience by at least addressing the would-be god, I tried to send my wish. I focused on the god and said to him...*bump*. A thrust from behind. A desperate pilgrim tried not to bowl me over. We both recovered. I felt more pushing and then the stern pull of a temple-minder's arm. At the moment I focused again on the wish granter and said to him...*bump**shove**OUCH**shove* "FUCK ALL THIS SHIT!", and I realized that "all this shit" was the world.
...Bit of a prickly wish there. I may have doomed the world. My B.
1) Two killed after being thrown off a moving train by an irritated ticket collector (who has yet to be arrested).
2) Two killed, one injured in axe-murder rampage.
3) One killed, twenty injured after "some miscreants hurled rocks at a bees' nest" in a busy market.
4) Five killed, one injured, all children, secretly poisoned in black magic fertility ritual.
5) One killed after being doused in kerosene and set on fire by a member of the Uttar Pradesh state legislature.
6) One hypothetically killed at a busy train station and/or temple in his dreams and moved to write a newspaper editorial denouncing the inability of Indians to form an orderly line with a statistically insignificant risk of manslaughter.
It was therefore with some apprehension that I today joined a large and irritable crowd of impatient Indian people in a dedicated "Q-ing" building adjoining THE BUSIEST TEMPLE ON THIS PLANET WHICH WE CALL EARTH.
(By the way, this post marks the end of an era, in more ways than one. The first being the world may be doomed, but the other I will reveal in my critical next post...)
Yesterday I crossed out of Tamil Nadu and entered Andhra Pradesh, the huge southeastern state which contains Tirumala, site of the temple in question. The first thing I noticed in entering the general area of the pilgrimage town is the variety of languages on the innumerable buses honking their way along the highway. I saw an Andhra Pradesh government bus and was puzzled to see that it was labelled in some degenerate form of Kannada that had been blended with Tamil and chickenscratch. Then I realized I was having my first exposure to Telugu writing, and much later I realized that the imaginary influence I called "chickenscratch" was the actual influence of Urdu. Oops. Well, Urdu writing is pretty much Arabic and Persian combined with untold amounts of opium, so no apologies.
If I were drawn to cliches, I would say that Tirumala is a veritable Mecca of pilgrim activity, but that would be a disservice to Tirumala, which actually gets more pilgrim visitors per year than anywhere else in the world including Rome and Mecca. Pilgrims flock to the craptacular town of Tirupati at the bottom of the mountain to prepare to visit the temple above, where Lord Venkateshwara (aka Lord Balaji aka Lord Vishnu) grants a wish with his blessings. In a country where people seem to rely on wishes for an awful lot, it is unsurprising that many come here. Of course, I don't buy into wishes. It seems to me that by the time one reaches the later years of childhood one should have noticed that regardless of which benevolent deity/wish-granting force one petitions, one's wishes rarely seem to come true. The merchants of Tirupati have also realized what the pilgrims in general have not, and have built the perfect town for those whom Lord Venkateshwara's blessing fails to materialize. In India, a tirtha is a crossing, a place where heaven and earth meet. Here, Tirumala has its little piece of the heavenly, and Tirupati supplies a marvellous illustration of the wordly. You can go pray to God if you want, but if that doesn't work...well, Tirupati has a lot of liquor stores and a lot of pawnshops.
I rose early in the morning in the vain attempt to avoid the worst crush of pilgrims at a temple so busy it is open 24 hours a day. Allegedly, "At any given time, there will be no fewer than 5000 people inside the temple compound" (which is not that big). Furthermore "On a typical weekday, the temple averages some 40,000 visitors. This figure will be much higher on weekends, national holidays, and during festivals." "100,000 visitors in a day is not uncommon." I visited during the family-trip time school summer holidays. On a Sunday.
First, though, you have to get there, which you do by means of a winding and slightly terrifying mountain road. It's not that the road is bad, it's that the road is too good. The Tirumala temple, also being the richest temple in the world, is so well endowed that it has its own system of access highways, with a separate road for going up and going down, allowing the bursting-full buses to blast up the mountain with no fear of traffic coming the other way, and evidently no fear of careening off a precipice. As the bus swings wildly around the bends in the road, it feels surprisingly like a rollercoaster, an opinion confirmed by the behavior of the children on board, who were either wild with glee or having the most traumatic encounter with Newtonian physics of their young lives.
It's also impossible to notice that a great many people around here don't have any hair, as they have it all shaved off and donated to the deity, though I haven't a clue what the supreme being needs with a bunch of Indian hair. If he really needed hair I think he would at least make a petition to lure more Westerners to the Hindu fold, if for no other reason that the multi-hued Western coiff- with its browns, blondes, and even reds- is a veritable rainbow in comparison with the monochrome locks of the subcontinent.
Dismounting the bus atop the mountain, I got to see what "the richest temple on Earth" really means. Aside from the fact that the inner shrine is literally covered in gold, I was more stunned by the temple administration's achievement which no government entity in India has yet to equal. The temple has infrastructure. Aside from the access roads, which one enters through what is undoubtably the grandest toll booth plaza on the blue marble of Earth, the temple authorities have essentially constructed an entire city on top of the mountain. They have their own bus lines, their own sewage and utilities system (which work), room for thousands of people at massive hotels, shelters, and cottage complexes, free eateries, and even a huge hall of free head-shaving barbers. The holy tank near the temple itself is -get this- blue, thanks to a system of pumps that keeps it from acquiring the toxic green color and microbial stench of every other sacred puddle in this country. There is a massive building just for forming queues for the temple. Hell, there is a qeueing and a free shoe-keeping facility just for the free barbers' complex.
Now, let me state for the record that I had no intention of spending an entire day lining up in metal boxes and jostling with tens of thousands of bare-scalped pilgrims to get my momentary audience with Hindu Santa. No, I had a much better idea. At the very least I would pay for the 50-rupee "special darshan" ticket, a glorified form of cutting. However, at a competitively priced 50 rupees, this was already a popular option with a serpentine trail of shoving, ticket-pocketing pilgrims winding their way into the Dantesque maw of the qeueing facility. But I could do one better. I bought the 300-rupee "super-duper darshan" ticket, entitling me to walk past throngs and throngs of aggravated proles and wait in cramped metal cages with the mere thousands of people who could fork out $6.35 or so to talk to God with minimal interference from the poors.
As I've mentioned, being in any place with lots of Indian people can be hazardous to the health, but anywhere that doesn't have at least two hundred Indian people inside it is not to be found in India. For the most part, thousands of Indians around is just par for the course, but when you have thousands of Indians "waiting" for something, particularly when a line would be advisable, one wishes he could make his wish to God in advance and ask for an exoskeleton.
The temple staff are to be commended for their dedication to safety and having to deal with this crap day after day. They've actually created a system that minimizes the chances of the fatal stampedes that are all too common in these parts. They do this basically by treating the pilgrims as prisoners and segragating them into non-lethal-sized crowds and shutting them in a series of dozens of metal cages, which one has to slowly pass through like a ship traversing a canal full of locks, sitting in a box waiting for the engineers to complete the procedure allowing you to sail onwards. However, if I may mix my metaphors, every time the canal gates open to the next lock, the Indians rush into the next cage like rats from a sinking ship, accomplishing absolutely nothing (because it is impossible to advance or fall back from roughly your deserved place) except ill-treating the meek, demeaning the human race, and shattering any observer's faith in the rational nature of Man.
By the time it's all over, people have spent their entire day (or if you pay the hard cash, just what feels like an entire day) conniving means to force their way ahead of their fellow man. At the bus station for the descent hours later, I watched one bus pull into the station and drive towards the structure at full speed, stopping dramatically at only the last moment, because this would be the only way to actually get the bus parked while impatient throngs tried to get on board. Even this did not stop them. While the bus was still screeching to a halt and women and children were fleeing its dangerous course, young men were hurling themselves at its sides, grasping onto bars and hoisting themselves through the windows. By the time the doors were opened, the bus was already half full. As the remainder of the crowd teemed in (to quote Geeta Mehta "Nobody teems like Indians") the conductor had sharp words for the acrobats, arguing that anyone who could secure a seat in this manner was the least deserving of it and should wipe the smug grins off their faces and let the old ladies sit and... what's that? You said something? GET OFF MY BUS. As the conductor got to me I remarked "Some pilgrims, huh?" and he stopped collecting tickets for some time to hold his head and mutter in Hindi.
Back in the "Q Facility", the teeming was reaching its peak. Indeed, nobody teems like Indians. The Chinese may have the density, and the "Arab Street" may have the intensity, but the Indians have it both in spades. Waiting in one bend of the labyrinth, a few men tried to start a chant of "Praise lord god! Praise lor-", getting knocked off rhythmn by pilgrims shoving them up the stairs, hellbent on their mission to go praise lord god.
An aside - I was at one point taken aside, on account of my "non-Hindu" complexion and compelled to sign an affidavit of my faith in Lord Balaji, to ensure that my intentions for being there were not to cause trouble. I had half a mind to say that if I wanted to cause trouble I would go to a temple where I don't have to pay 300 rupees for a three-hour wait. Anyways, there is now somewhere in the temple archives a sworn statement in these words: "I, ...Ghostface Buddha.................... belong to the ...Narcissist..... religion. Nevertheles, I have faith in Lord ...Balaji... and earnestly and respectfully seek his blessing... SIGNED...GFB..."
People have this idea that India is a good place to come to contemplate the transience of all things... People have this idea that the Hindu religion involves a lot of contemplation. You come to India and you put on cotton clothes and you putter around in gardens, flitting like a butterfly while contemplating your oneness with the dandelions. And there are contemplative forms of Hinduism. There are maths (sort of like monasteries for saddhus) where you can get thrown out for doing anything but contemplating, but these are not the orders to which most Hindus belong. Hinduism is giant lemon-chocolate-peanut-strawberry-coconut-chicken-cucumber-fish-papaya pie of faiths, and the average Western visitor puts a little baby spoon in it and says "Mmmmmmmmmm, I love blueberry cobbler." I'm not saying I'm the all-experienced one here. I don't want any of the peanut-cucumber bites any more than the next Western tourist, but I defy you to find me a Western Hinduphile whose engagement with the religion includes going to a random cement temple near their lodge, ringing a bell and praising God for several minutes, or going to a little street-corner shrine and praying to that deity for their particular aid. Mainstream Hinduism, simply put, is not cool.
Like I say, I'm not above this view myself. I often find mainstream Hinduism outright aggravating. When finally we approached the gate of the temple proper and our accelerated line merged with that of our 50-rupee brethren (I can only assume the free-darshan-seekers starved and were eaten by wolves), the behavior of the devout was such to give this celebrated temple one of the least reverential atmospheres I have ever witnessed. While small groups of shuffling women mustered the concentration to sing hymns to Krishna (that most beloved cuddly-wuddly baby / divine adventuring superhero of a god), the vast majority of the pilgrims didn't even bother to stop in the courtyard but surged forewards to the chokepoint to the next courtyard. The most dangerous place to be was anywhere other than the two crushing lines trying to get to the stone entranceway, as every time somebody imagined another (no doubt much faster!) way in opening, a mad rush of sprinting pilgrims followed. At one point, another opening DID appear, as four or five guards blocked off the crazed surge and a half-dozen temple staff escorted a legless cripple through a special entrance, as he would have been instantly trampled underfoot anywhere else. People began screaming to be let through the special way and the guards rebuked them. "BUT YOU LET HIM IN!" they shouted. "He has NO LEGS", the guards rebuked. "Yeah? Well fuck that! MY legs are TIRED!" the crowd foamed back.
But I digress. I was talking about mainstream Hinduism. The thing about Tirumala, is that it isn't that holy. I mean, sure, it's holy and it has a bunch of legends relating to it, but none that anybody cares to single out. There's nothing like other holy sites boast of, like "This is where God X removed the darkness of ignorance from humanity" or "This is where Goddess Y fashioned the feminine energy, giver of life..." Tirumala is the most popular pilgrimage site in the world because, for some reason, you get a wish. Which gods do you see everywhere in people's homes and businesses in India? Ganesh, giver of good fortune. Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, literally pouring out buckets of gold. I could go on. At any point in history, the foremost and ascendant strains of the Hindu religion have always been a mirror of Indian society (and this is taking the debatable stance of not saying that Hinduism is Indian society), and modern Indian society is largely a crass materialist cult which would make even an American cringe. I won't presume to say how many of the pilgrims there had recently been in deep touch with their souls and how many needed to pray for a high exam score, a raise at their IT firm, an opening at an apartment development that boasts "An aristocratic address to help you scale the echelons of society...", but the number praying for such superficial wishes, I have no doubt, was greater than 0. (And because we're dealing with Tirumala here, probably also greater than 17,937).
A stray thought on this track: if Hinduism had regularized congregational worship, the scale it would reach here would strip America of any right to call its larger gatherings "mega-churches" ever again.
You may be wondering, OK Mr.Ghostface, so when youuuuuuu got your moment with the god what did you in your sublime spiritual purity wish for? Well, I had a number of ideas, some more worthy than others and all of them tempered by my general disdain for wishes. If I'm not going to wish when I break a chicken bone or pray to little fairies or the Christian sky-daddy, I'm not going to start with dear Sri Venkateshwara / Balaji. I finally settled on one fairly noble wish pertaining to this journey, just in case I was somehow suddenly moved to ask the god for something.
Finally I made it into the inner courtyard and from my position in the ruthlessly jockeying pack of pilgrims who were so close they could taste it I beheld a shrine completely roofed, spire and all, in gold. I made the last few turns with little of my own force and was almost lifted off my feet into the gold-paneled shrine itself. I made the final turn, and there ahead of me, in the dark, dark distance was Lord Balaji. I stopped to think "Should I make a wish now?" and got yanked forwards. I saw this happening invariably to every pilgrim. Some tried to stop and pray; others tried a simple "Praise God!" with their hands high above their heads. I was grasped by one of a gauntlet of temple staff and pulled down the wooden ramp in the shrine, being passed from one manhandler to the next. They simply can not allow the pilgrim flow to stop, or some real impatience and chaos would ensue. I could see the pilgrims in their dozens hastening to compose themselves as they tumbled forwards in the gauntlet's clutches and cast a wish to the Lord before being hauled around the bend and out of sight forever. Realizing it was my only chance, and suddenly feeling the need not to wish per se, but to somehow dignify the whole experience by at least addressing the would-be god, I tried to send my wish. I focused on the god and said to him...*bump*. A thrust from behind. A desperate pilgrim tried not to bowl me over. We both recovered. I felt more pushing and then the stern pull of a temple-minder's arm. At the moment I focused again on the wish granter and said to him...*bump**shove**OUCH**shove* "FUCK ALL THIS SHIT!", and I realized that "all this shit" was the world.
...Bit of a prickly wish there. I may have doomed the world. My B.
Mar 19, 2010
The Tamil Temple Town Tour
I have been pulled here out of a sense of duty. Duty and the desire to escape a hotel terrace where my immediate neighbors are playing an interminable shuffle of Abba, Aerosmith, James Blunt, and the guttural mellowness of Israeli light rock. I've spent quite a lot of time decrying the sorry state of Indian pop music, but in the grand scheme of things our Judaic friends really take the cake when it comes to assembling offensively bad collections of beach tunes. You know what else Israel and India have in common? Terrorism. Coincidence? Not very likely.
I've just completed my meticulous tour of Tamil Nadu's major temple towns, which was hardly the most invigorating and varied portion of my travels in this country. But hey, money in the bank; money in the bank. It is out of the aforementioned sense of duty that I confer upon my readers this brief guide to The Tamil Temple Tour.
Madurai
In short, awesome. I refer you to this post: Maximum Hindu.
Rameswaram
Also awesome. Island Getaway
Tiruchchirappalli and Srirangam
Not bad but not great. Me Against The World
Thanjavur
Thanjavur is an appealing temple town, in large part because it has things to see that aren't temples. The great temple itself is quite impressive, and mercifully a different shape from the ones in the rest of the state. One can also visit the needlessly complicated and crumbling royal palace complex, where there are several little museums including a brilliant collection of bronze sculptures.
Kumbakonam
Even on the Indian scale, Kumbakonam has wild and chaotic streets. Its roads are currents of pure anarchy of such intensity it can only have resulted from devotees at its numerous Shiva shrines swearing to the Destroyer upon their eternal souls that they will tear the very fabric of the cosmos asunder, drawing and quartering our pitiful, doomed world between a thousand tugging mopeds. There are many Vishnu temples in the city, a Rama temple, and a memorably haunting shrine to Nagaraja, Shiva as the King of Snakes. What there are not many of is eateries that are open between 3:00pm and 6:30pm, a sinister conspiracy amongst its cartel of restauranteurs to daily starve visitors until they are willing to actually pay for the the steaming piles of rice and insipid slop they serve on banana leaves you have to wash yourself.
Darasuram
Darasuram is just down the street from Kumbakonam, and is most remarkable for being just down the street from Kumbakonam.
Gangaikon...I'm not even going to say it
This conspicuously polysyllabic huddle of cottages would merely be notable as a cartographer's headache if it weren't for its very beautiful, impressive, and out of place temple and pleasant adjoining gardens, where the people of nearby villages come to picnic away from the daily humdrum of rice paddies and buffalo shit. (Still not saying it).
Chidambaram
When I got to Chidambaram I checked into a hotel and was told that I was lucky to find a room. Most of the places were full and this joint only had one room left, as there was a dancing festival on and every other room in the hotel was being occupied by a troupe of dancing girls. "Entirely occupied by dancing girls? Do tell..." I thought. The manager wasn't lying. The place was full of dancing girls, between the ages of nine and twelve. Oh, and when you're dealing with five dozen child divas, dressing them up as celestial beings does little to make them more reasonable.
Nevertheless, I was very excited for this one. Chidambaram is the site of the Nataraja temple, and I do mean the Nataraja temple. It is where Shiva, as Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance, performed said dance, which is also described as being a full representation of the forces and energies of the universe. He subsequently also defeated the bloodthirsty goddess Kali in what must have been the dance-off of all time. Kali probably was banking on the deities assembled as judges to be scared shitless of her necklace of severed heads and vote in her favor, but when you try to bust a move on Shiva, "You Got...Served!" doesn't even begin to describe the response.
The town, it must be said, is hot and ugly. The temple, while impressive, doesn't stand out as the best in a state full of massive, active temples. The idol of Nataraja itself is one of the most superb I've seen, and if you're into dance, odds are you can arrange to be here for some classical Hindu dance.
No matter when you come, and no matter what your feelings on the matter, you will hear shitloads of bells.
Tiruvannamalai
I wish I could say waking up at 4:30 in the morning to climb halfway up a volcano and sit around blinking while a bunch of dreadlock-beehived saddhus with ash on their faces meditated upon Shiva transforming his cock into an endless pillar of fire and becoming the light of the universe would count among the weirdest of my experiences in India, but I'm afraid I can't say that for certain.
What I can say for certain is that the main temple at the bottom of the volcano is also pretty cool. Pretty cool, but not the best. It has an above-average concentration of religious wackos, but its actual shrines aren't that spectacular, save for the fact that this Temple of the Eternal Dawn is dedicated to aforementioned phallic conflagration and is at the base of a memorably-hued volcano. In the early morning, when the rocky pinnacle is lit almost blood-red and the lower temple resounds with eerie chants to the element of fire, one can hardly resist the urge to start opening boxes in hope of finding the Megaton Hammer and kicking some dragon ass. If you're lucky enough to be here at festival time, the priests provoke their own little pillar of fire by immolating a massive vat of butter on the summit, which reputedly requires a 100-foot wick. My opinion is that if you're the high priest of the Temple of Eternal Dawn performing a ceremony on a volcano, you shouldn't be afraid to get your chest hair a little singed. Though to be fair, the average brahmin seems very fatty and combustible.
Mamallapuram (a.k.a. Mahabalipuram)
This town is by far the most touristed on the temple circuit, and distinguishes itself from other Tamil Temple Towns for two reasons. 1) It's on the beach. 2)All its famous "temples" are fake.
If you don't mind hanging out in the sort of place where a local business has to calls itself the Bob Marley Cafe to stand out from the horde of lesser cafes which stoop to playing the music of other performers (such as Ziggy Marley), you will probably enjoy a few days cruising around pretending to be interested in ancient art and savoring that most rare of Tamil commodities: a decent breeze.
Mamallapuram is to this day the most renowned center of Hindu stone-carving, and everywhere you look people are still carving magnificent statues. The little rocky hill behind the town is essentially a fading gallery of boulders and rockfaces where the local artists spent a good portion of the first millennium A.D carving statues, bas-refiefs, and little fake temples just to show off. As the works were carved of the artists' own volition, there is a charming diversity of subject matter, as if the old masters had muttered "You know what? If I get an order to carve one more fucking Ganesh I'm going to put a chisel through my brain. Well, since I'm not busy today...you see that rock there? I'M CARVING A DUCK. WITH ONE FUCKING HEAD."
It's a nice change of pace.
Kanchipuram
I haven't actually been there yet, and I'm not going to. I've had enough Tamil Temples, and as a writer of increasingly staid travel information I have one formidable weapon in my arsenal: "Knowledge in the public domain." Wooooop wooop.
So now ends my little jaunt through this Tamil state, which I have covered more meticulously than is probably good for my health. And so too draws to a close my exploration of the far south of India. I say "Why linger somewhere where it is brutally hot all the time when you can venture to parts of the country that are even more brutally hot, but only right now?"
I shall sweat until a million cows have drowned in the salty brine. Attention North India, I'm coming baaaaaaaaaaacckkkkkk........
p.s. a note to indian/indophile bloggers and websites: stop stealing my photos if you don't want your cows to faintly smell of human urine in the mornings. You've been warned.
I've just completed my meticulous tour of Tamil Nadu's major temple towns, which was hardly the most invigorating and varied portion of my travels in this country. But hey, money in the bank; money in the bank. It is out of the aforementioned sense of duty that I confer upon my readers this brief guide to The Tamil Temple Tour.
Madurai
In short, awesome. I refer you to this post: Maximum Hindu.
Rameswaram
Also awesome. Island Getaway
Tiruchchirappalli and Srirangam
Not bad but not great. Me Against The World
Thanjavur
Thanjavur is an appealing temple town, in large part because it has things to see that aren't temples. The great temple itself is quite impressive, and mercifully a different shape from the ones in the rest of the state. One can also visit the needlessly complicated and crumbling royal palace complex, where there are several little museums including a brilliant collection of bronze sculptures.
Kumbakonam
Even on the Indian scale, Kumbakonam has wild and chaotic streets. Its roads are currents of pure anarchy of such intensity it can only have resulted from devotees at its numerous Shiva shrines swearing to the Destroyer upon their eternal souls that they will tear the very fabric of the cosmos asunder, drawing and quartering our pitiful, doomed world between a thousand tugging mopeds. There are many Vishnu temples in the city, a Rama temple, and a memorably haunting shrine to Nagaraja, Shiva as the King of Snakes. What there are not many of is eateries that are open between 3:00pm and 6:30pm, a sinister conspiracy amongst its cartel of restauranteurs to daily starve visitors until they are willing to actually pay for the the steaming piles of rice and insipid slop they serve on banana leaves you have to wash yourself.
Darasuram
Darasuram is just down the street from Kumbakonam, and is most remarkable for being just down the street from Kumbakonam.
Gangaikon...I'm not even going to say it
This conspicuously polysyllabic huddle of cottages would merely be notable as a cartographer's headache if it weren't for its very beautiful, impressive, and out of place temple and pleasant adjoining gardens, where the people of nearby villages come to picnic away from the daily humdrum of rice paddies and buffalo shit. (Still not saying it).
Chidambaram
When I got to Chidambaram I checked into a hotel and was told that I was lucky to find a room. Most of the places were full and this joint only had one room left, as there was a dancing festival on and every other room in the hotel was being occupied by a troupe of dancing girls. "Entirely occupied by dancing girls? Do tell..." I thought. The manager wasn't lying. The place was full of dancing girls, between the ages of nine and twelve. Oh, and when you're dealing with five dozen child divas, dressing them up as celestial beings does little to make them more reasonable.
Nevertheless, I was very excited for this one. Chidambaram is the site of the Nataraja temple, and I do mean the Nataraja temple. It is where Shiva, as Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance, performed said dance, which is also described as being a full representation of the forces and energies of the universe. He subsequently also defeated the bloodthirsty goddess Kali in what must have been the dance-off of all time. Kali probably was banking on the deities assembled as judges to be scared shitless of her necklace of severed heads and vote in her favor, but when you try to bust a move on Shiva, "You Got...Served!" doesn't even begin to describe the response.
The town, it must be said, is hot and ugly. The temple, while impressive, doesn't stand out as the best in a state full of massive, active temples. The idol of Nataraja itself is one of the most superb I've seen, and if you're into dance, odds are you can arrange to be here for some classical Hindu dance.
No matter when you come, and no matter what your feelings on the matter, you will hear shitloads of bells.
Tiruvannamalai
I wish I could say waking up at 4:30 in the morning to climb halfway up a volcano and sit around blinking while a bunch of dreadlock-beehived saddhus with ash on their faces meditated upon Shiva transforming his cock into an endless pillar of fire and becoming the light of the universe would count among the weirdest of my experiences in India, but I'm afraid I can't say that for certain.
What I can say for certain is that the main temple at the bottom of the volcano is also pretty cool. Pretty cool, but not the best. It has an above-average concentration of religious wackos, but its actual shrines aren't that spectacular, save for the fact that this Temple of the Eternal Dawn is dedicated to aforementioned phallic conflagration and is at the base of a memorably-hued volcano. In the early morning, when the rocky pinnacle is lit almost blood-red and the lower temple resounds with eerie chants to the element of fire, one can hardly resist the urge to start opening boxes in hope of finding the Megaton Hammer and kicking some dragon ass. If you're lucky enough to be here at festival time, the priests provoke their own little pillar of fire by immolating a massive vat of butter on the summit, which reputedly requires a 100-foot wick. My opinion is that if you're the high priest of the Temple of Eternal Dawn performing a ceremony on a volcano, you shouldn't be afraid to get your chest hair a little singed. Though to be fair, the average brahmin seems very fatty and combustible.
Mamallapuram (a.k.a. Mahabalipuram)
This town is by far the most touristed on the temple circuit, and distinguishes itself from other Tamil Temple Towns for two reasons. 1) It's on the beach. 2)All its famous "temples" are fake.
If you don't mind hanging out in the sort of place where a local business has to calls itself the Bob Marley Cafe to stand out from the horde of lesser cafes which stoop to playing the music of other performers (such as Ziggy Marley), you will probably enjoy a few days cruising around pretending to be interested in ancient art and savoring that most rare of Tamil commodities: a decent breeze.
Mamallapuram is to this day the most renowned center of Hindu stone-carving, and everywhere you look people are still carving magnificent statues. The little rocky hill behind the town is essentially a fading gallery of boulders and rockfaces where the local artists spent a good portion of the first millennium A.D carving statues, bas-refiefs, and little fake temples just to show off. As the works were carved of the artists' own volition, there is a charming diversity of subject matter, as if the old masters had muttered "You know what? If I get an order to carve one more fucking Ganesh I'm going to put a chisel through my brain. Well, since I'm not busy today...you see that rock there? I'M CARVING A DUCK. WITH ONE FUCKING HEAD."
It's a nice change of pace.
Kanchipuram
I haven't actually been there yet, and I'm not going to. I've had enough Tamil Temples, and as a writer of increasingly staid travel information I have one formidable weapon in my arsenal: "Knowledge in the public domain." Wooooop wooop.
So now ends my little jaunt through this Tamil state, which I have covered more meticulously than is probably good for my health. And so too draws to a close my exploration of the far south of India. I say "Why linger somewhere where it is brutally hot all the time when you can venture to parts of the country that are even more brutally hot, but only right now?"
I shall sweat until a million cows have drowned in the salty brine. Attention North India, I'm coming baaaaaaaaaaacckkkkkk........
p.s. a note to indian/indophile bloggers and websites: stop stealing my photos if you don't want your cows to faintly smell of human urine in the mornings. You've been warned.
Mar 16, 2010
Gangaikondacholapuram
The History of Gangaikondacholapuram.
Gangaikondacholapuram
There is a mighty temple of Shiva in the ruins of the city they call "the town of the Chola king who conquered the Ganges", Gangaikondacholapuram. Now deserted, all that remains is the temple itself, its precinct walls, and the village of Gangaikondacholapuram.
Gangaikondacholapuram was for a long time the capital of the Chola empire at its peak, when its northern frontier lay in the Ganges basin and it dominated southern Asia. From Gangaikondacholapuram the emperors even launched expeditions of pillage and conquest as far as Burma by land and Indonesia by sea, whose spoils added to the wealth of Gangaikondacholapuram.
Getting to Gangaikondacholapuram
Lying in a small village in the middle of a rural delta where there isn't a whole lot to see besides rice, I was forced to make do with local transportation. I walked into the Kumbakonam bus station and asked "Excuse me, which bus to Gangaikondacholapuram?"
"Gangaikondacholapuram?" the inquiry official asked.
"Yes, Gangaikondacholapuram" I answered.
"Go to Gangaikondacholapuram you take bus to Anniyaikarai then you take bus Anniyaikarai to Gangaikondacholapuram."
"Thanks", I offered, assuming the conversation was over.
"...You want Gangaikondacholapuram?"
As slowly as I could, I uttered "Gangaikondacholapuram."
"Gangaikondacholapuram this bus."
I took the bus and rode it across an unchanging expanse of paddies all the way to Anyakarai, or whatever it's called, a village squashed on an island between two dams in the delta. I braced myself for another tedious inquiry and raised my eyebrow to capture the attention of a passerby who looked like he might know how to get to Gangaikondacholapuram. He didn't. I asked another man "Gangaikondacholapuram?", waving my finger at the the chain of buses struggling to maneuver in the tight confines between the dams. He merely shrugged and said something which I believe means "I only speak Tamil, but Gangaikondacholapuram is that way."
Just then I heard a voice. "Gangaikondacholapuram?" it beckoned. I turned to see who had uttered the word 'Gangaikondacholapuram'. It was clearly meant for me. You don't say "Gangaikondacholapuram" in casual conversation. It was a rickshaw-wallah and he took me to Gangaikondacholapuram without any fuss.
Visiting Gangaikondacholapuram
We arrived in Gangaikondacholapuram in the late afternoon, late enough for Gangaikondacholapuram's famous temple to open after Tamil Nadu's customary sleepless afternoon siesta. "So this is Gangaikondacholapuram..." I mused.
On all sides there was litGangaikondacholapuramtle to be seen except the odd row of coconut trees lining the Gangaikondacholapuram edge of a rice paddy, and the widely spaced briGangaikondacholapuramck and bamboo cottages that occupy the land once part of great GangaikondacholapuramGangaiGangaikondacholapuramkondacholapuram.
Gangaikondacholapuram
Gangaikondacholapuram
$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$
$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$
!!$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$!!
"Captain, sir, we can't stop it! The Gangaikondacholapuram....it's escaped the Gangaikondacholapuramcontainment field! It's in our brainapurams....OH GOD... GANGAIKONDAAAAAAAAAHHHHHGHHGHHHHHH"
"Lieutenant Smith! Lieutenant ondacholasmith...my God... Someone start the override!"
"Which override sir!?!?"
"The Gangaikond.....NO, NO....start the Snoop Doggapuram, the Snoop Dogg override, before it's too late!"
"Sir, yes sir!"
EMERGENCY PROTOCOL 187
GANGAIKONDACHOLAPURAM SNOOP DOGG OVERRIDE
----Tha Gangaikondacholapuramshiznat--
##Poppin, stoppin, Gangaikondacholapuram like a rabbit ##
##When I take the Gangaikondacholapuram ya know I gota ta have it ##
##I lay back in Gangaikond retain myself ##
##Think about the shit, and I'm thinkin wealth ##
##How can I makes my Gangaikondacholapura ##
##And how should I make that Gangaikigga straight slip ##
##Set trip, Ganga get him for his grip ##
##as I kond around the corner, now i'm on a-nother ##
##mission, cholapuram, wishin, upon a star ##
##Gangaikondacholapuram with the caviar ##
##In the back of the limo no demo, this is the real ##
##Breakin niggaz down like Kondachola Holyfield, chill ##
##to the next Episode ##
##I make money, and I really don't love hoes ##
##Tell ya the truthuram, I swoop in the Coupeuram ##
##I used to sell looturam, I used to shoot hoopsuram ##
##But now I, make, hits, every single day ##
##With, that nigga, the diggy Dr. Dre ##
##So lay back in the cut, motherfucker 'fore you get shot ##
##It's 1-8-7 on a motherfuckin cop ##
----------------------------------------
"Sir! Listen, the Gangaikondacholapuram, the override's working!"
"Lieutenant Smith, is that you? Can you speak? Can you say it without..."
"Sir, I can say...I can say...not that town!"
"Try saying something else."
"Thiruvananthapuram."
"No, one with no shared syllables...we have to know it isn't dormant."
"Captain, I'll try my best...Tiruchchirappalli."
"....we did it, lieutenant, we did it!"
"Thank God!"
"No. Thank Snoop Dogg."
Gangaikondacholapuram is a trife bitch'puram. Represent your motherfucking set. Peace.
Gangaikondacholapuram
There is a mighty temple of Shiva in the ruins of the city they call "the town of the Chola king who conquered the Ganges", Gangaikondacholapuram. Now deserted, all that remains is the temple itself, its precinct walls, and the village of Gangaikondacholapuram.
Gangaikondacholapuram was for a long time the capital of the Chola empire at its peak, when its northern frontier lay in the Ganges basin and it dominated southern Asia. From Gangaikondacholapuram the emperors even launched expeditions of pillage and conquest as far as Burma by land and Indonesia by sea, whose spoils added to the wealth of Gangaikondacholapuram.
Getting to Gangaikondacholapuram
Lying in a small village in the middle of a rural delta where there isn't a whole lot to see besides rice, I was forced to make do with local transportation. I walked into the Kumbakonam bus station and asked "Excuse me, which bus to Gangaikondacholapuram?"
"Gangaikondacholapuram?" the inquiry official asked.
"Yes, Gangaikondacholapuram" I answered.
"Go to Gangaikondacholapuram you take bus to Anniyaikarai then you take bus Anniyaikarai to Gangaikondacholapuram."
"Thanks", I offered, assuming the conversation was over.
"...You want Gangaikondacholapuram?"
As slowly as I could, I uttered "Gangaikondacholapuram."
"Gangaikondacholapuram this bus."
I took the bus and rode it across an unchanging expanse of paddies all the way to Anyakarai, or whatever it's called, a village squashed on an island between two dams in the delta. I braced myself for another tedious inquiry and raised my eyebrow to capture the attention of a passerby who looked like he might know how to get to Gangaikondacholapuram. He didn't. I asked another man "Gangaikondacholapuram?", waving my finger at the the chain of buses struggling to maneuver in the tight confines between the dams. He merely shrugged and said something which I believe means "I only speak Tamil, but Gangaikondacholapuram is that way."
Just then I heard a voice. "Gangaikondacholapuram?" it beckoned. I turned to see who had uttered the word 'Gangaikondacholapuram'. It was clearly meant for me. You don't say "Gangaikondacholapuram" in casual conversation. It was a rickshaw-wallah and he took me to Gangaikondacholapuram without any fuss.
Visiting Gangaikondacholapuram
We arrived in Gangaikondacholapuram in the late afternoon, late enough for Gangaikondacholapuram's famous temple to open after Tamil Nadu's customary sleepless afternoon siesta. "So this is Gangaikondacholapuram..." I mused.
On all sides there was litGangaikondacholapuramtle to be seen except the odd row of coconut trees lining the Gangaikondacholapuram edge of a rice paddy, and the widely spaced briGangaikondacholapuramck and bamboo cottages that occupy the land once part of great GangaikondacholapuramGangaiGangaikondacholapuramkondacholapuram.
Gangaikondacholapuram
Gangaikondacholapuram
$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$
$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$
!!$*#Gangaikondacholapuram#*$!!
"Captain, sir, we can't stop it! The Gangaikondacholapuram....it's escaped the Gangaikondacholapuramcontainment field! It's in our brainapurams....OH GOD... GANGAIKONDAAAAAAAAAHHHHHGHHGHHHHHH"
"Lieutenant Smith! Lieutenant ondacholasmith...my God... Someone start the override!"
"Which override sir!?!?"
"The Gangaikond.....NO, NO....start the Snoop Doggapuram, the Snoop Dogg override, before it's too late!"
"Sir, yes sir!"
EMERGENCY PROTOCOL 187
GANGAIKONDACHOLAPURAM SNOOP DOGG OVERRIDE
----Tha Gangaikondacholapuramshiznat--
##Poppin, stoppin, Gangaikondacholapuram like a rabbit ##
##When I take the Gangaikondacholapuram ya know I gota ta have it ##
##I lay back in Gangaikond retain myself ##
##Think about the shit, and I'm thinkin wealth ##
##How can I makes my Gangaikondacholapura ##
##And how should I make that Gangaikigga straight slip ##
##Set trip, Ganga get him for his grip ##
##as I kond around the corner, now i'm on a-nother ##
##mission, cholapuram, wishin, upon a star ##
##Gangaikondacholapuram with the caviar ##
##In the back of the limo no demo, this is the real ##
##Breakin niggaz down like Kondachola Holyfield, chill ##
##to the next Episode ##
##I make money, and I really don't love hoes ##
##Tell ya the truthuram, I swoop in the Coupeuram ##
##I used to sell looturam, I used to shoot hoopsuram ##
##But now I, make, hits, every single day ##
##With, that nigga, the diggy Dr. Dre ##
##So lay back in the cut, motherfucker 'fore you get shot ##
##It's 1-8-7 on a motherfuckin cop ##
----------------------------------------
"Sir! Listen, the Gangaikondacholapuram, the override's working!"
"Lieutenant Smith, is that you? Can you speak? Can you say it without..."
"Sir, I can say...I can say...not that town!"
"Try saying something else."
"Thiruvananthapuram."
"No, one with no shared syllables...we have to know it isn't dormant."
"Captain, I'll try my best...Tiruchchirappalli."
"....we did it, lieutenant, we did it!"
"Thank God!"
"No. Thank Snoop Dogg."
Gangaikondacholapuram is a trife bitch'puram. Represent your motherfucking set. Peace.
Mar 13, 2010
Me Against The World
Tamil Nadu is beginning to wear on me. Perhaps I've mentioned this already, but...THE WEATHER IS TERRIBLE. My clothing gets so clingy that taking off three-button shirts has become my introduction to yogic exercises. I'm also getting slightly bored of the interminable series of temples I'm visiting. It's partly my own fault, a scheme to crank out lots of location articles and get paid, but really Tamil Nadu, don't you have anything else to mix things up a bit? I guess this is what happens when you intensively travel around a single cultural region for any period of time. In Rajasthan I got bored of the daily slog of visiting castles in the desert heat. At least Tamil Nadu doesn't have any hills. You could call it a tradeoff of sorts. In places like Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu which are renowned for particular types of things, you just have to accept that you're going to see a lot of castles or temples, camels or Tamils.
My temple fatigue was already starting to set in by the time I finished my first temple visit in Tiruchchirappalli (and yes, that is a real name). The sole distinction of that city's temples are that they are located on a curious pile of golden boulders in the middle of the city and that the builders have done a remarkable job of crafting fake "cave temples" by building on top of rocks and making you enter through a dark, windowless passageway filled with vaguely archaic music and statues of gruesome creatures. Even after bribing the priests to take me into the forbidden Shiva sanctum I can't really say I was very moved. Really, I could stay home and get the same experience from hanging out in a friends' basement and watching him play World of Warcraft for five minutes, or until I kill myself, whichever comes first.
After an episode getting lost in Tiruchchirappalli's small Muslim ghetto for a short time and accidentally dispersing about half a crab's worth of fried crustacean onto my neighbors' table at a restaurant, I was going to take a bus to the nearby town of Srirangam.
Srirangam holds the distinction of possessing the largest Hindu temple...pretty much anywhere. The outer wall encloses a courtyard of 60 hectares. That's 600,000 square meters. It's so big in fact that at some point the people of Srirangam decided they couldn't be assed to walk all the way out from the center of the temple, and proceeded to build most of their town within the outer two courtyards. Now you have to penetrate as far as the third wall before the temple ceases to have zebra crossings and bus services. From the top of Tiruchchirappalli's rock temple you can see over to Srirangam and notice a number of temple towers popping out from the trees on opposite sides of town from each other. What you don't realize is they are all towers of the same temple, and it's the town that's in the temple and not vice versa. Some of the towers are awesome structures, and from strategic rooftops you get a marvelous view of them lined up in different color schemes and sizes, shrinking until they reach the golden dome of the sanctum sanctorum.
You may have noticed I said I was going to get a bus to Srirangam. I got on a bus, but it was the wrong one. I was quickly notified of this, and the conductor had the bus slowed so that I might jump off, which I did. Now, jumping from a moving vehicle is never an entirely safe idea, and this bus was going just a wee bit too fast. I focused on the cardinal rule of jumping from moving things, which is to jump out parallel to the way you're already moving, otherwise when you land you will be perpendicular, while your body continues to move on a parallel axis, which is not good. I also focused on the second important consideration: making sure there is open space where you are about to be skipping along. Obviously, you don't want to jump into a pole. Now, while I was so cleverly accounting for all these factors I forgot one thing: I'm in India. Just because I'm at what I call the side of the road doesn't mean that I'm at what someone else is going to decide is the side of the road. I also didn't look behind me, where, about two feet closer to the pavement than the bus I was leaping from, was...another bus. WHACK. I already described the immediate results here.
I shuffled off in my tattered trousers to the restaurant which I had so recently repainted with crab innards and washed off in the sink, then caught a rickshaw to my hotel and somehow communicated to the hotel boys to run off and get me a selection of bandages and other medical supplies. As I sat in my room controlling the bleeding with scraps from a giveaway turban, I had an epiphany.
All along I've believed I've been in a war against Indian beasts -my numerous combats against cowkind and their animal lackeys need no retelling- but I've been forced to realize that my war has also always been against Indian machines. Like my forebear Tupac Shakur, it's Me Against The World.
Yeah, me against the World. Watch the fuck out. I'm not saying the outcome is certain - the odds are stacked high - but now would be a good time for you to start looking into personal spacecraft.
No machine is any less devilish than its animal counterpart, and they shall all be vanquished forthwith.
Trains, those laggard mules of the rail, plodding along at the slowest serviceable pace and halting stubbornly at whatever interval suits their hulking iron fancy...
Buses, the uncomfortable, sweat-stenched and indignant camels of the road...
MP3-enabled cell phones, the screeching, raspy parrots blasting the Procrustean din of Indian pop music across the aether...
Megaphones and amplifiers, the bastard offspring of perpetually crowing cockerels and 800-pound, priapism-afflicted gorillas trembling the Earth through sheer volume and inanity...
Rickshaws, the hungry, scrapping dogs of the street, biting one another's flea-ridden flesh for rights to the freshest walking carcass of a customer...
Shit-slow cybercafe computers, monkey-like entities capable of near-human intelligence that use this power to squeak "Hey! Let's throw some poop!"...
And grainy televisions, perpetually tuned to second-rate Bollywood dance tunes and WWF pro wrestling, the nefarious bovine menace of the whole electronic world...
ALL SHALL FALL BEFORE MY WRATH
My temple fatigue was already starting to set in by the time I finished my first temple visit in Tiruchchirappalli (and yes, that is a real name). The sole distinction of that city's temples are that they are located on a curious pile of golden boulders in the middle of the city and that the builders have done a remarkable job of crafting fake "cave temples" by building on top of rocks and making you enter through a dark, windowless passageway filled with vaguely archaic music and statues of gruesome creatures. Even after bribing the priests to take me into the forbidden Shiva sanctum I can't really say I was very moved. Really, I could stay home and get the same experience from hanging out in a friends' basement and watching him play World of Warcraft for five minutes, or until I kill myself, whichever comes first.
After an episode getting lost in Tiruchchirappalli's small Muslim ghetto for a short time and accidentally dispersing about half a crab's worth of fried crustacean onto my neighbors' table at a restaurant, I was going to take a bus to the nearby town of Srirangam.
Srirangam holds the distinction of possessing the largest Hindu temple...pretty much anywhere. The outer wall encloses a courtyard of 60 hectares. That's 600,000 square meters. It's so big in fact that at some point the people of Srirangam decided they couldn't be assed to walk all the way out from the center of the temple, and proceeded to build most of their town within the outer two courtyards. Now you have to penetrate as far as the third wall before the temple ceases to have zebra crossings and bus services. From the top of Tiruchchirappalli's rock temple you can see over to Srirangam and notice a number of temple towers popping out from the trees on opposite sides of town from each other. What you don't realize is they are all towers of the same temple, and it's the town that's in the temple and not vice versa. Some of the towers are awesome structures, and from strategic rooftops you get a marvelous view of them lined up in different color schemes and sizes, shrinking until they reach the golden dome of the sanctum sanctorum.
You may have noticed I said I was going to get a bus to Srirangam. I got on a bus, but it was the wrong one. I was quickly notified of this, and the conductor had the bus slowed so that I might jump off, which I did. Now, jumping from a moving vehicle is never an entirely safe idea, and this bus was going just a wee bit too fast. I focused on the cardinal rule of jumping from moving things, which is to jump out parallel to the way you're already moving, otherwise when you land you will be perpendicular, while your body continues to move on a parallel axis, which is not good. I also focused on the second important consideration: making sure there is open space where you are about to be skipping along. Obviously, you don't want to jump into a pole. Now, while I was so cleverly accounting for all these factors I forgot one thing: I'm in India. Just because I'm at what I call the side of the road doesn't mean that I'm at what someone else is going to decide is the side of the road. I also didn't look behind me, where, about two feet closer to the pavement than the bus I was leaping from, was...another bus. WHACK. I already described the immediate results here.
I shuffled off in my tattered trousers to the restaurant which I had so recently repainted with crab innards and washed off in the sink, then caught a rickshaw to my hotel and somehow communicated to the hotel boys to run off and get me a selection of bandages and other medical supplies. As I sat in my room controlling the bleeding with scraps from a giveaway turban, I had an epiphany.
All along I've believed I've been in a war against Indian beasts -my numerous combats against cowkind and their animal lackeys need no retelling- but I've been forced to realize that my war has also always been against Indian machines. Like my forebear Tupac Shakur, it's Me Against The World.
Yeah, me against the World. Watch the fuck out. I'm not saying the outcome is certain - the odds are stacked high - but now would be a good time for you to start looking into personal spacecraft.
No machine is any less devilish than its animal counterpart, and they shall all be vanquished forthwith.
Trains, those laggard mules of the rail, plodding along at the slowest serviceable pace and halting stubbornly at whatever interval suits their hulking iron fancy...
Buses, the uncomfortable, sweat-stenched and indignant camels of the road...
MP3-enabled cell phones, the screeching, raspy parrots blasting the Procrustean din of Indian pop music across the aether...
Megaphones and amplifiers, the bastard offspring of perpetually crowing cockerels and 800-pound, priapism-afflicted gorillas trembling the Earth through sheer volume and inanity...
Rickshaws, the hungry, scrapping dogs of the street, biting one another's flea-ridden flesh for rights to the freshest walking carcass of a customer...
Shit-slow cybercafe computers, monkey-like entities capable of near-human intelligence that use this power to squeak "Hey! Let's throw some poop!"...
And grainy televisions, perpetually tuned to second-rate Bollywood dance tunes and WWF pro wrestling, the nefarious bovine menace of the whole electronic world...
ALL SHALL FALL BEFORE MY WRATH
Mar 12, 2010
Island Getaway
Probably the best part of reviewing all the major temples in Tamil Nadu is that I am also working on a supplementary guide reviewing the quality of each temple's resident elephant. I've devised a whole system of marks based on the size, charisma, appearance, and talent of each sanctified pachyderm. I really, really wish this was my full-time job, because nothing fills my heart with more joy than writing "Talent: 3 stars. Fulfills his duties efficiently, but swings his trunk too hard, such that infants are frequently brought to tears" and getting paid to do so.
I began this venture while passing through the great temple on Rameswaram island and realized that many of the temples here have their own elephants. The one in Madurai is still my favorite, but I will keep you posted.
The Ramanathaswamy temple in Rameswaram is perhaps the most famous individual temple in India. It lies on an island in the Indian Ocean halfway to Sri Lanka, and marks the spot where Rama prayed to ask Shiva for pardon after killing a member of the highest caste (who, incidentally, was also the demon king...). Not far away are the beaches from which you can see the chain of sand and rocks that make up what remains of the bridge that Hanuman and his monkey army built so that Rama could cross the sea and rescue Sita. The temple itself is quite impressive. It consists of three quadrilateral corridors surrounding a pair of highly sacred shrines. The corridors themselves are the most famous parts, with their incredible use of symmetry and linear perspective. It's one of the few places in the world that can get away with pulling in visitors to see its corridors. "We have TONS of columns. Check it out." Around sundown the passages facing due west are briefly illuminated by an utterly perfect red light slicing through small windows and the western entrance. It is really a sight to behold.
But this temple isn't one you just see; you have to feel it. Specifically you have to enjoy walking barefoot around thousands of yards of sopping wet stone floors following bunches of soaked pilgrims dripping holy water with every step. Before entering the inner sanctums (whitey not allowed), pilgrims are expected to bathe in a series of 22 holy tanks, wells, and fountains. Often this involves a priest sloshing buckets of water on people's heads, and decorum requires that the vast majority of pilgrims get splashed while fully dressed. This makes for a rather comic spectacle, especially when sari-clad women and lungi-wearing southern men shuffle down the hall as their dress flaps heavily against the stone floors...flap splop sshhlop, and kicks up little splashes in the puddles left by pilgrims before. As a tourist, one becomes even more conspicuous than usual, as non-pilgrims are generally not heaving under drenched articles of clothes. I found it amusing that all this dripping about inside the holy temple was not only permitted but encouraged. In my experience, soaking trails indoors are usually the result of hosting a pool party, and everyone secretly knows to pin the blame on the fat kid who won't take off his shirt.
The town of Rameswaram has its own peculiarites. For instance nobody (including the temple staff) seem to think they are required to stay open all day, or even be present for the duration of their shifts. Walking into any local business, there is about a 60% chance that the person on duty will get up within five minutes and tell you "I'm off for my lunch break...come back at 7pm". At one restaurant I walked in, noticed a lack of activity and asked if it was open. The waiter replied "Yes sir, restaurant open". I began ordering a meal when he interrupted me. "Kitchen is not open". "Well thank God the restaurant is open", I said, "I just cooked myself a five-course meal but I don't have any tables in my house to eat at". I then walked into a wide-open cybercafe for the purpose of typing up a draft of my article on Madurai and found two people clicking away at their Yahoo apps. "You work here?" I asked. "Yes. Shop opening at four in afternoon." "You're not open now?" I asked, standing there at midday in the middle of their store while a half-dozen unoccupied computers' screensavers slowly bounced around little morphing balls. "No sir, opening is four."
In tourism-writing circles (or at least the numerous guidebooks I peruse for my profession), Rameswaram is also infamous for bad food. These people are clearly sissies. My guts have risen up in revolt more times than a Colombian peasant and you don't see me crying. Hell, my dietary life is essentially an anologue of the war in Iraq, except my entire strategy hinges upon trying to prevent a "surge". Yeah, the food in Rameswaram is pretty terrible, but these are the same people who naively applaud the chewy "mutton" concoctions of Mughlai cuisine in filthy North Indian cities where goat heads are tossed casually down the street.
Having come all this way, I was not going to miss the chance to see the nearby Adam's Bridge for myself. Just offshore is a string of rocks placed by warbound monkeys. How could I pass it up? To that end I rumbled along to the end of the island, past the village of Danushkodi ("Rama's Bow"), which is pretty much the definition of 'ramshackle'. The town got obliterated by a cyclone in the 1960's, but it looks like destructive weather is a weekly occurence. Danushkodi consists of about 60 lopsided bamboo shacks on a pile of sand surrounded on three sides by the Indian Ocean where people sit around and seem to contemplate maybe going out to catch some fish. I continued out on the 'road' past the village, which was really just a long stretch of dry shifting tire tracks in the sand with the occasional toe-stubbing outcrop of pavement, now useless for anything besides picking up and throwing at goats. Finally I reached the tip of the island and looked out on the majesty of the famous bridge: a strip of sand. There are rocks and islets along the way, but from the shore you can see one tiny islet and a long ribbon of sand just across a very shallow little strait, where small groups of local fisherman wade out in shin-deep water to pee together. At this point the island is just 18km from Sri Lanka, although you can't see to the other country. The view is by no means awe-inspiring, but if you're going to lug yourself hours and hours all the way out to this inconvenient island, you really are obliged to go look at the geographical curiosity with a thoughtful face and listen to endless retellings of episodes from the Ramayana. Also it's quiet, the breezes are nice, and there's a chance you might stumble across a fisherman staring equally thoughtfully at Italian men frolicking naked in the surf.
I really must be off. I'm just pausing between stops on a busy work day and [GFB]'s Guide to Tamil Nadu Temple Elephants isn't going to write itself. Here's another excerpt, from Thanjavur. "Charisma: 3 stars. Personable and charming, poses coyly with its trunk hanging from its mouth and a stupid look on its face, resembling a 12-foot tall Golden Retriever. Has the unfortunate habit of constantly trumpeting and raising its tail like it's going to poop." I smell a Pulitzer. No, that's a taxi stand.
I began this venture while passing through the great temple on Rameswaram island and realized that many of the temples here have their own elephants. The one in Madurai is still my favorite, but I will keep you posted.
The Ramanathaswamy temple in Rameswaram is perhaps the most famous individual temple in India. It lies on an island in the Indian Ocean halfway to Sri Lanka, and marks the spot where Rama prayed to ask Shiva for pardon after killing a member of the highest caste (who, incidentally, was also the demon king...). Not far away are the beaches from which you can see the chain of sand and rocks that make up what remains of the bridge that Hanuman and his monkey army built so that Rama could cross the sea and rescue Sita. The temple itself is quite impressive. It consists of three quadrilateral corridors surrounding a pair of highly sacred shrines. The corridors themselves are the most famous parts, with their incredible use of symmetry and linear perspective. It's one of the few places in the world that can get away with pulling in visitors to see its corridors. "We have TONS of columns. Check it out." Around sundown the passages facing due west are briefly illuminated by an utterly perfect red light slicing through small windows and the western entrance. It is really a sight to behold.
But this temple isn't one you just see; you have to feel it. Specifically you have to enjoy walking barefoot around thousands of yards of sopping wet stone floors following bunches of soaked pilgrims dripping holy water with every step. Before entering the inner sanctums (whitey not allowed), pilgrims are expected to bathe in a series of 22 holy tanks, wells, and fountains. Often this involves a priest sloshing buckets of water on people's heads, and decorum requires that the vast majority of pilgrims get splashed while fully dressed. This makes for a rather comic spectacle, especially when sari-clad women and lungi-wearing southern men shuffle down the hall as their dress flaps heavily against the stone floors...flap splop sshhlop, and kicks up little splashes in the puddles left by pilgrims before. As a tourist, one becomes even more conspicuous than usual, as non-pilgrims are generally not heaving under drenched articles of clothes. I found it amusing that all this dripping about inside the holy temple was not only permitted but encouraged. In my experience, soaking trails indoors are usually the result of hosting a pool party, and everyone secretly knows to pin the blame on the fat kid who won't take off his shirt.
The town of Rameswaram has its own peculiarites. For instance nobody (including the temple staff) seem to think they are required to stay open all day, or even be present for the duration of their shifts. Walking into any local business, there is about a 60% chance that the person on duty will get up within five minutes and tell you "I'm off for my lunch break...come back at 7pm". At one restaurant I walked in, noticed a lack of activity and asked if it was open. The waiter replied "Yes sir, restaurant open". I began ordering a meal when he interrupted me. "Kitchen is not open". "Well thank God the restaurant is open", I said, "I just cooked myself a five-course meal but I don't have any tables in my house to eat at". I then walked into a wide-open cybercafe for the purpose of typing up a draft of my article on Madurai and found two people clicking away at their Yahoo apps. "You work here?" I asked. "Yes. Shop opening at four in afternoon." "You're not open now?" I asked, standing there at midday in the middle of their store while a half-dozen unoccupied computers' screensavers slowly bounced around little morphing balls. "No sir, opening is four."
In tourism-writing circles (or at least the numerous guidebooks I peruse for my profession), Rameswaram is also infamous for bad food. These people are clearly sissies. My guts have risen up in revolt more times than a Colombian peasant and you don't see me crying. Hell, my dietary life is essentially an anologue of the war in Iraq, except my entire strategy hinges upon trying to prevent a "surge". Yeah, the food in Rameswaram is pretty terrible, but these are the same people who naively applaud the chewy "mutton" concoctions of Mughlai cuisine in filthy North Indian cities where goat heads are tossed casually down the street.
Having come all this way, I was not going to miss the chance to see the nearby Adam's Bridge for myself. Just offshore is a string of rocks placed by warbound monkeys. How could I pass it up? To that end I rumbled along to the end of the island, past the village of Danushkodi ("Rama's Bow"), which is pretty much the definition of 'ramshackle'. The town got obliterated by a cyclone in the 1960's, but it looks like destructive weather is a weekly occurence. Danushkodi consists of about 60 lopsided bamboo shacks on a pile of sand surrounded on three sides by the Indian Ocean where people sit around and seem to contemplate maybe going out to catch some fish. I continued out on the 'road' past the village, which was really just a long stretch of dry shifting tire tracks in the sand with the occasional toe-stubbing outcrop of pavement, now useless for anything besides picking up and throwing at goats. Finally I reached the tip of the island and looked out on the majesty of the famous bridge: a strip of sand. There are rocks and islets along the way, but from the shore you can see one tiny islet and a long ribbon of sand just across a very shallow little strait, where small groups of local fisherman wade out in shin-deep water to pee together. At this point the island is just 18km from Sri Lanka, although you can't see to the other country. The view is by no means awe-inspiring, but if you're going to lug yourself hours and hours all the way out to this inconvenient island, you really are obliged to go look at the geographical curiosity with a thoughtful face and listen to endless retellings of episodes from the Ramayana. Also it's quiet, the breezes are nice, and there's a chance you might stumble across a fisherman staring equally thoughtfully at Italian men frolicking naked in the surf.
I really must be off. I'm just pausing between stops on a busy work day and [GFB]'s Guide to Tamil Nadu Temple Elephants isn't going to write itself. Here's another excerpt, from Thanjavur. "Charisma: 3 stars. Personable and charming, poses coyly with its trunk hanging from its mouth and a stupid look on its face, resembling a 12-foot tall Golden Retriever. Has the unfortunate habit of constantly trumpeting and raising its tail like it's going to poop." I smell a Pulitzer. No, that's a taxi stand.
Mar 10, 2010
Maximum Hindu
I believe I have found it: the Ultimate Hindu Temple. It's in Madurai, a biggish city in southern Tamil Nadu. It's one of the oldest cities in India, dating back to about 500BC, and it's pretty much always been spectacular. Hell, the Greeks knew about it. Nowadays I wouldn't call the city spectacular -it's the usual hive of concrete blocks and congested streets- but once you get to the center of this city you only need to look at one building to say "Oh, my my my".
In the heart of the urban tangle, it is only a matter of time before you find yourself facing a gigantic pyramid of technicolor Hindu gods. You've stumbled across one of the twelve towers of the massive Meenakshi temple, each one a soaring, psychedelic cacophony of twenty-headed gods, roaring tigers, twelve-armed demons, dancers balancing on each other's heads, and strangely colored monsters from every corner of the cosmos. Climb on top of any of the shops around (they have viewing galleries on the rooftops to lure you into their 'antique' shops) and one of the most fantastic city skylines you will ever see spreads before your eyes. The twelve gopura towers rise out of the temple grounds, facing off at various angles and heights between loose groupings of trees and an impeccably blue sky. It looks rather like the rebel base near the end of the first Star Wars movie, only with way more six-armed people riding elephants.
The temple is dedicated to Shiva and Meenakshmi, and celebrates the divine faithfulness between the couple. I don't know which scriptures they've been reading, but citing Shiva as a paragon of monogamy is a little...unique. Shiva is basically the big pimp daddy of the universe. In Shaivite legend he proves his superiority over Vishnu and Brahma by turning his cock into an infinite column of fire reaching from heaven to hell. The right honorable rapper Ludacris boasts of keeping hoes in many area codes; Shiva fucks hoes in many planes of existence. The priests at least have some justification for their claim. They say Shiva never dogs around on Meenakshi because she is dynamite in bed. At least they've got a better story than the priests in Kanniyakumari. The main temple there is dedicated to Kanya Devi, the Virgin goddess, another form of Parvati, wife of Shiva. Let me tell you, based on numerous sculptures I've seen, it's hard to believe that any form of Parvati could be a virgin. I've inspected the anatomy quite closely, making such astute observations as "What's that between Parvati's legs? Oh. It's Shiva's dick." It's pretty laughable to think that Shiva hasn't gotten around to plumbing the depths of his consort. Shiva doesn't exactly need red wine and a smooth jazz anthology to get the night off to a good start. He's just like "Heeeyyyyyy sugar, why don't we turn these lights off? Or naaww, we should leave them on. That's the universe. Either way you're going to have the night of your life...lives. Yeah, guess how long I can keep going, baby... Eternity."
From the outside the Meenakshi temple already an architectural stunner, but the interior is what really makes it the Ultimate Hindu temple. It's everything you think a Hindu temple should be: A massive labyrinth of dark and mighty corridors painted with exuberant designs that trail off into the darkness. At every turn there is a small carving or an idol smeared with holy paint, pilgrims' dye powders, ceremonial costumery, and garlands. Eery music echoes through the hallways and you're never far from the waft of incense or the flickering of candles. One hallway will take you to a sacred tank in the shadow of the captivating towers, and another will take you into a grand hall with golden pillars, aromatic shrines, and sacred diagrams placed seemingly at random. There are pilgrims everywhere, most of them everyday people reveling in the proximity of the divine, while the legion of priests patter about imperiously attending to the never-ending schedule of truly arcane rituals they are obliged to perform. I was walking through one such massive hallway deep inside the temple, looking up through the darkness to examine the vibrant floral motifs on the ceiling when I heard the jangling of bells approaching me, and out of nowhere comes this elephant, painted all over its face with magical symbols and marks of devotion to Shiva. I spent hours and hours in the temple, stalking groups of pilgrims to see series of rituals, hanging around popular idols to watch offerings, and above all lurking about near where the elephant had been led to dispense its trunk-tapping blessings to the masses. It's pretty much the coolest place ever. You should check out the photos I posted of Madurai (because they're banging).
There's more to Madurai than just the temple. There's also a pretty cool vegetable market, which is the place to go if you want to wander around smelling four-foot high piles of cilantro (and who doesn't?), then walk into the main street and awkwardly hobble over the enormous pools of discarded vegetable matter in the street. There's about four city blocks that are paved almost entirely with carrot stalks and onions, and smashed pools of dry chillies large enough to kill a horse. Some of the other bazaars are actually inside other little temples in the city center, so when I went and had my Awesome Teal Pants made, I hired the services of a local tailor whose foot-powered loom was under a solid black goddess idol draped in flowers, colored paste, and robes. Two Indian dragons flanked the shop from which I bought Learn Tamil In 30 Days.
By the way, I am not learning Tamil in 30 days. Even just learning the system of writing is diabolically complicated. In Tamil not only are all the names really long, but each letter is a convoluted squiggle that is only a teeny bit different on one stroke from the other squiggles. To make matters worse, like Hindi you have to combine letters a bunch, but the Tamils only came up with about three different symbols for twelve or so vowels, so they just shift the ordering of the same symbols around the convoluted squiggles. The overall effect is that Tamil writing looks like Morse code, except that instead of dashes and dots each letter looks like something you would use to tie up sails on a yacht. You couldn't be blamed if you assumed that the writing was a hieroglyphic system and that the scribes concerned themselves only with tapeworms and noodles.
Oh, and also being told that getting my Awesome Teal Pants repaired after my bus accident would be "Impossible", I just found a place that did it in about a minute for ten rupees. The bandages I bought put me back another fifty and my various jets of blood seem to be closing up and should heal pretty soon, so all getting hit by a bus set me back was...about $1.25. Yeah, I had a clash with a bus and won. "But Ghostface," you ask "How can you be left bloodied and pained and still claim a victory???" Ha! You should see the bus!
In the heart of the urban tangle, it is only a matter of time before you find yourself facing a gigantic pyramid of technicolor Hindu gods. You've stumbled across one of the twelve towers of the massive Meenakshi temple, each one a soaring, psychedelic cacophony of twenty-headed gods, roaring tigers, twelve-armed demons, dancers balancing on each other's heads, and strangely colored monsters from every corner of the cosmos. Climb on top of any of the shops around (they have viewing galleries on the rooftops to lure you into their 'antique' shops) and one of the most fantastic city skylines you will ever see spreads before your eyes. The twelve gopura towers rise out of the temple grounds, facing off at various angles and heights between loose groupings of trees and an impeccably blue sky. It looks rather like the rebel base near the end of the first Star Wars movie, only with way more six-armed people riding elephants.
The temple is dedicated to Shiva and Meenakshmi, and celebrates the divine faithfulness between the couple. I don't know which scriptures they've been reading, but citing Shiva as a paragon of monogamy is a little...unique. Shiva is basically the big pimp daddy of the universe. In Shaivite legend he proves his superiority over Vishnu and Brahma by turning his cock into an infinite column of fire reaching from heaven to hell. The right honorable rapper Ludacris boasts of keeping hoes in many area codes; Shiva fucks hoes in many planes of existence. The priests at least have some justification for their claim. They say Shiva never dogs around on Meenakshi because she is dynamite in bed. At least they've got a better story than the priests in Kanniyakumari. The main temple there is dedicated to Kanya Devi, the Virgin goddess, another form of Parvati, wife of Shiva. Let me tell you, based on numerous sculptures I've seen, it's hard to believe that any form of Parvati could be a virgin. I've inspected the anatomy quite closely, making such astute observations as "What's that between Parvati's legs? Oh. It's Shiva's dick." It's pretty laughable to think that Shiva hasn't gotten around to plumbing the depths of his consort. Shiva doesn't exactly need red wine and a smooth jazz anthology to get the night off to a good start. He's just like "Heeeyyyyyy sugar, why don't we turn these lights off? Or naaww, we should leave them on. That's the universe. Either way you're going to have the night of your life...lives. Yeah, guess how long I can keep going, baby... Eternity."
From the outside the Meenakshi temple already an architectural stunner, but the interior is what really makes it the Ultimate Hindu temple. It's everything you think a Hindu temple should be: A massive labyrinth of dark and mighty corridors painted with exuberant designs that trail off into the darkness. At every turn there is a small carving or an idol smeared with holy paint, pilgrims' dye powders, ceremonial costumery, and garlands. Eery music echoes through the hallways and you're never far from the waft of incense or the flickering of candles. One hallway will take you to a sacred tank in the shadow of the captivating towers, and another will take you into a grand hall with golden pillars, aromatic shrines, and sacred diagrams placed seemingly at random. There are pilgrims everywhere, most of them everyday people reveling in the proximity of the divine, while the legion of priests patter about imperiously attending to the never-ending schedule of truly arcane rituals they are obliged to perform. I was walking through one such massive hallway deep inside the temple, looking up through the darkness to examine the vibrant floral motifs on the ceiling when I heard the jangling of bells approaching me, and out of nowhere comes this elephant, painted all over its face with magical symbols and marks of devotion to Shiva. I spent hours and hours in the temple, stalking groups of pilgrims to see series of rituals, hanging around popular idols to watch offerings, and above all lurking about near where the elephant had been led to dispense its trunk-tapping blessings to the masses. It's pretty much the coolest place ever. You should check out the photos I posted of Madurai (because they're banging).
There's more to Madurai than just the temple. There's also a pretty cool vegetable market, which is the place to go if you want to wander around smelling four-foot high piles of cilantro (and who doesn't?), then walk into the main street and awkwardly hobble over the enormous pools of discarded vegetable matter in the street. There's about four city blocks that are paved almost entirely with carrot stalks and onions, and smashed pools of dry chillies large enough to kill a horse. Some of the other bazaars are actually inside other little temples in the city center, so when I went and had my Awesome Teal Pants made, I hired the services of a local tailor whose foot-powered loom was under a solid black goddess idol draped in flowers, colored paste, and robes. Two Indian dragons flanked the shop from which I bought Learn Tamil In 30 Days.
By the way, I am not learning Tamil in 30 days. Even just learning the system of writing is diabolically complicated. In Tamil not only are all the names really long, but each letter is a convoluted squiggle that is only a teeny bit different on one stroke from the other squiggles. To make matters worse, like Hindi you have to combine letters a bunch, but the Tamils only came up with about three different symbols for twelve or so vowels, so they just shift the ordering of the same symbols around the convoluted squiggles. The overall effect is that Tamil writing looks like Morse code, except that instead of dashes and dots each letter looks like something you would use to tie up sails on a yacht. You couldn't be blamed if you assumed that the writing was a hieroglyphic system and that the scribes concerned themselves only with tapeworms and noodles.
Oh, and also being told that getting my Awesome Teal Pants repaired after my bus accident would be "Impossible", I just found a place that did it in about a minute for ten rupees. The bandages I bought put me back another fifty and my various jets of blood seem to be closing up and should heal pretty soon, so all getting hit by a bus set me back was...about $1.25. Yeah, I had a clash with a bus and won. "But Ghostface," you ask "How can you be left bloodied and pained and still claim a victory???" Ha! You should see the bus!
Mar 9, 2010
FYI
You may have been wondering "What does it feel like to get hit by a bus?"
Well, let me tell you.
(I'm fine, by the way)
Actually getting hit by the bus doesn't really hurt that much. You have time for a lot of thought, or rather, time seems to slow to accomodate all the thoughts you have in a flash. Somewhere between the side of the bus and the pavement I had quite the conversation with myself. It went something like this:
"OWWWW FUCK"
"What the fuck?"
"Wow, I really didn't think that bus was going to hit me."
"Who does this asshole think he is? All these other buses driving like maniacs haven't been hitting me."
"Ohhhhhhhhh fuck PREPARE FOR IMPACT"
Getting hit by the bus doesn't hurt that much. What does hurt is hitting the road.
"FFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKK"
"OW MY FUCKING HAND"
"FUCK MY KNEE"
"This could have been worse"
"My face? OK, didn't hit my face..."
"Oooooooh fuck I'm still moving..."
"Oh fuck oh fuck I'm gonna roll"
"OK, no I'm not"
"Oh shit, is my camera broken?"
"OWWWWW FUCCCCCKKKK SKIN SLIDING ON ASPHALT"
"FFFUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK"
"JESUS FUCK FUCK THAT HURTS LIKE A BITCH MOTHERFUCK"
"aaahhhhhhhhhhh"
Then you finish hitting the road and it still hurts.
"Ok, it's over"
"Fuck, my hands hurt"
"Where the fuck am I?"
"OK, right here, OK...got it"
"Fuck, I ripped a fucking hole right in my awesome new teal pants"
"Oh shit, my camera"
"Camera's fine"
"Do I have wounds? Let's see..."
"Ayyaaahhhaaaa shhiiittt gonna need to wash that hand pronto"
"Oooooo hoo hoo fuck, look at that shit coming out of my leg"
"OK, water, soap, go."
"Where the fuck has that bus gone to?"
"Jesus fuck that fucking stings like a fuck."
I think I horrified every single patron of the restaurant I stumbled into to wash my wounds in, looking like, well, like I got hit by a bus. I think I was also in shock because I was pure mission, pure focus until I got back to my hotel half an hour later I was a bit limpy and very volatile. Everyone who rubbed me the wrong way got an unusually emotive earful from me. Anyways, I got washed up, bandaged up and all those good things. I'm out one pair of pants, got some blood everywhere, lost more skin than I do on a usual day, got a little asphalt ground into my hand, but all told it really could have been worse. Even though I was still physically shaking from the shock of it, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Jackie Chan film "The Myth", which to my surprise was partially set at a bunch of ruins I visited in Hampi, and also features a scene in which Jackie Chan is forced to rip a hot Indian woman's skirt off to save her life. A note to aspiring filmmakers: when you are faced with the question, "Should my film have a hot Indian woman or a hot Chinese woman?", 'The Myth' shows us that the answer can be "Why not both?"
So that, my friends, is what it is like to get hit by a bus. I am a fountain of information. And hemoglobin.
Well, let me tell you.
(I'm fine, by the way)
Actually getting hit by the bus doesn't really hurt that much. You have time for a lot of thought, or rather, time seems to slow to accomodate all the thoughts you have in a flash. Somewhere between the side of the bus and the pavement I had quite the conversation with myself. It went something like this:
"OWWWW FUCK"
"What the fuck?"
"Wow, I really didn't think that bus was going to hit me."
"Who does this asshole think he is? All these other buses driving like maniacs haven't been hitting me."
"Ohhhhhhhhh fuck PREPARE FOR IMPACT"
Getting hit by the bus doesn't hurt that much. What does hurt is hitting the road.
"FFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKK"
"OW MY FUCKING HAND"
"FUCK MY KNEE"
"This could have been worse"
"My face? OK, didn't hit my face..."
"Oooooooh fuck I'm still moving..."
"Oh fuck oh fuck I'm gonna roll"
"OK, no I'm not"
"Oh shit, is my camera broken?"
"OWWWWW FUCCCCCKKKK SKIN SLIDING ON ASPHALT"
"FFFUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK"
"JESUS FUCK FUCK THAT HURTS LIKE A BITCH MOTHERFUCK"
"aaahhhhhhhhhhh"
Then you finish hitting the road and it still hurts.
"Ok, it's over"
"Fuck, my hands hurt"
"Where the fuck am I?"
"OK, right here, OK...got it"
"Fuck, I ripped a fucking hole right in my awesome new teal pants"
"Oh shit, my camera"
"Camera's fine"
"Do I have wounds? Let's see..."
"Ayyaaahhhaaaa shhiiittt gonna need to wash that hand pronto"
"Oooooo hoo hoo fuck, look at that shit coming out of my leg"
"OK, water, soap, go."
"Where the fuck has that bus gone to?"
"Jesus fuck that fucking stings like a fuck."
I think I horrified every single patron of the restaurant I stumbled into to wash my wounds in, looking like, well, like I got hit by a bus. I think I was also in shock because I was pure mission, pure focus until I got back to my hotel half an hour later I was a bit limpy and very volatile. Everyone who rubbed me the wrong way got an unusually emotive earful from me. Anyways, I got washed up, bandaged up and all those good things. I'm out one pair of pants, got some blood everywhere, lost more skin than I do on a usual day, got a little asphalt ground into my hand, but all told it really could have been worse. Even though I was still physically shaking from the shock of it, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Jackie Chan film "The Myth", which to my surprise was partially set at a bunch of ruins I visited in Hampi, and also features a scene in which Jackie Chan is forced to rip a hot Indian woman's skirt off to save her life. A note to aspiring filmmakers: when you are faced with the question, "Should my film have a hot Indian woman or a hot Chinese woman?", 'The Myth' shows us that the answer can be "Why not both?"
So that, my friends, is what it is like to get hit by a bus. I am a fountain of information. And hemoglobin.
The Latest News
Some of you may have heard of a deadly temple stampede in India recently. If only such things were rare. There was another stampede yesterday. One person was killed and about a dozen injured. And it happened at a police academy. Some 30,000 people had come to file applications for open positions in the Mumbai police force, and chaos ensued. This is beautifully ironic because the Indian police is a desirable place of employment to many people specifically because it is concerned with anything but preserving safety and order. They couldn't even be assed to enforce an orderly proceeding for applications at their own academy (an academy, which among other things, is supposed to teach crowd management), and people died. In the words of one cop, "some people broke the queue and that is how the incident happened." ...some people in a large Indian crowd broke the queue? A shocking turn of events. How could anyone have foreseen it.
Fuck the police.
There was a bit of a furore in the Indian Parliament yesterday, and by 'furore' I mean "members of parliament opposed to a bill stormed the podium, stole the legislation under discussion from the chairman's desk, ripped it to shreds, and threw it into the seats." The bill in question? A constitutional amendment to enforce a minimum quota for female members of parliament. Most of the parties endorse the bill, which has failed repeatedly over the decades, while others offer grumbling support. A handful are in steadfast opposition, and it is they who stormed the podium. They claim to oppose it because "having simultaneous reservations for women and for the lower castes would make an impossible to implement dual quota system." So basically they mean "BACK IN THE KITCHEN!...ARE THOSE SHOES YOU'RE WEARING?!?!" but they have to use the really embarrassing excuse "wwaaaaahhhhhh we're really bad at math." But the opposition parties have a point. They really are terrible at math.
But the real reason I've made this post isn't to keep you abreast of India's latest political developments, it's to share with you a single-line news story from a recent printing of The Hindu, which in one sentence encapsulates everything you need to know about the Indian state. Each word, each number and date in this sentence is laden with meaning that reveals deep truths about the judicial system, government employment, and the depths of the national psyche. Take some time to peruse it, syllable by syallable. Here is the story, in full:
New Delhi: the Supreme Court has upheld the 1989 dismissal of a railway constable found glued to his radio, listening to cricket commentary, during duty hours.
Let's see just a few things we can learn from this.
1)The Supreme Court has just resolved a case from 1989.
2)Haha, people like cricket. (har har har, cricket, har dee har)
3)Indian Railways is not the most efficient organization ever conceived.
4)Indian constables do not possess an unflinching dedication to duty.
5)Somebody actually found grounds on which to contend this dismissal, AND PURSUED THE CASE FOR TWENTY YEARS ALL THE WAY TO THE SUPREME COURT
Truly a landmark case. Here'e my submission for news story on the same topic.
New Delhi: In the landmark case Asshole v. Indian Railways, the Supreme Court has upheld the 1989 dismissal of a railway constable found glued to his radio, listening to cricket commentary, during duty hours. Writing for the majority, the Chief Justice opined "Don't want to get fired? Quotum sic pro forma hoc jure ad nauseam, do your fucking job."
But enough of my idle mockery of another culture. Let's get back to the real news, in all seriousness, only repeating that which respectable journalists have deemed fit to print.
Bullock Race:
A bullock race was held in the district. Six pairs of bullocks competed in the long bullock-race category. There was also a short bullock race. Fifteen pairs of bullocks competed in total.
Well, now I've heard it all.
A bullock race was held in the district.
Six pairs of bullocks competed in the long bullock-race category. There was also a short bullock race.
Fifteen pairs of bullocks competed in total.
Fuck the police.
There was a bit of a furore in the Indian Parliament yesterday, and by 'furore' I mean "members of parliament opposed to a bill stormed the podium, stole the legislation under discussion from the chairman's desk, ripped it to shreds, and threw it into the seats." The bill in question? A constitutional amendment to enforce a minimum quota for female members of parliament. Most of the parties endorse the bill, which has failed repeatedly over the decades, while others offer grumbling support. A handful are in steadfast opposition, and it is they who stormed the podium. They claim to oppose it because "having simultaneous reservations for women and for the lower castes would make an impossible to implement dual quota system." So basically they mean "BACK IN THE KITCHEN!...ARE THOSE SHOES YOU'RE WEARING?!?!" but they have to use the really embarrassing excuse "wwaaaaahhhhhh we're really bad at math." But the opposition parties have a point. They really are terrible at math.
But the real reason I've made this post isn't to keep you abreast of India's latest political developments, it's to share with you a single-line news story from a recent printing of The Hindu, which in one sentence encapsulates everything you need to know about the Indian state. Each word, each number and date in this sentence is laden with meaning that reveals deep truths about the judicial system, government employment, and the depths of the national psyche. Take some time to peruse it, syllable by syallable. Here is the story, in full:
New Delhi: the Supreme Court has upheld the 1989 dismissal of a railway constable found glued to his radio, listening to cricket commentary, during duty hours.
Let's see just a few things we can learn from this.
1)The Supreme Court has just resolved a case from 1989.
2)Haha, people like cricket. (har har har, cricket, har dee har)
3)Indian Railways is not the most efficient organization ever conceived.
4)Indian constables do not possess an unflinching dedication to duty.
5)Somebody actually found grounds on which to contend this dismissal, AND PURSUED THE CASE FOR TWENTY YEARS ALL THE WAY TO THE SUPREME COURT
Truly a landmark case. Here'e my submission for news story on the same topic.
New Delhi: In the landmark case Asshole v. Indian Railways, the Supreme Court has upheld the 1989 dismissal of a railway constable found glued to his radio, listening to cricket commentary, during duty hours. Writing for the majority, the Chief Justice opined "Don't want to get fired? Quotum sic pro forma hoc jure ad nauseam, do your fucking job."
But enough of my idle mockery of another culture. Let's get back to the real news, in all seriousness, only repeating that which respectable journalists have deemed fit to print.
Bullock Race:
A bullock race was held in the district. Six pairs of bullocks competed in the long bullock-race category. There was also a short bullock race. Fifteen pairs of bullocks competed in total.
Well, now I've heard it all.
A bullock race was held in the district.
Six pairs of bullocks competed in the long bullock-race category. There was also a short bullock race.
Fifteen pairs of bullocks competed in total.
Mar 6, 2010
Halfway There, Whoaaooah-oh
Yesterday I was at the southernmost point in all of India, and it felt good. Well, it felt good if you discount having to peel my sweaty clothing off at night with pliers and a chisel. The place is called Kanniyakumari, and like India itself it is beautiful and ogre-fucking-ugly. There's a lighthouse here where the Indian Ocean meets the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, to prevent sailors from any of these waters from wrecking themselves upon Cape Comorin. Like the lighthouse, the dilapidated concrete piles of the town itself serves as a warning to those arriving by sea. "DANGER", Kanniyakumari warns, "Here lieth a strange land, and it doth look like shit".
Aside from its geographical location,Kanniyakumari has some actual attractions to boast. For instance, you can see the sunrise on one horizon and the sunset on the other. This is fun, I suppose. I guess you could lock someone in a dark cell for a few months, then bring them out and play "pin the tail on the donkey", except make them guess whether they are facing the direction in which the sun is going into or out of a homogeneous expanse of water. Once a year in April you can actually see the sunset (or sunrise?) at the exact same moment the full moon is rising. Let's see...it's March. Never mind.
The real heart of Kanniyakumari is actually about 400 meters out to sea...because it got hit by the tsunami. OK, no actually it's because there are two sacred rocks just offshore and these have developed into full-fledged religious sites. One rock holds the Vivekananda Memorial, a shrine to a 19th-century Hindu saint who did many important things such as...well, I haven't done my research for my Kanniyakumari article yet, but he's important. The other rock is now the base of a colossal Statue of Liberty-esque sculpture of the Tamil saint and poet Thiruvalluvar, who is best known for his masterpiece...I'm not even going to look that up.
You get to the rocks via boat, which is a nuisance, but the short ride ultimately proved supremely enjoyable. The ferry operators insist that every passenger wear a crusty old lifejacket. The sight of some two hundred Indians from all walks of life -jowly businessmen, bearded Saddhus, Gujarati nomads, bored housewives, Catholic nuns, hip muscular dudes with their hair shaved off for Shiva, turbaned Rajasthani farmers, and a veritable gallery of frumpy mustachioed men- all awkwardly fumbling with their stupid orange lifejackets is a memory I will carry to my deathbed. It was my greatest wish to go on a photographic frenzy.
I envisioned taking this ferry for weeks and publishing a renowned coffee-table book and winning prizes for my captivating art. But the ferrymen wouldn't let me. They have a very strict no photography rule on the boat. For security. To prevent terrorists from gleaning useful information about the design of ferryboats. Oh, how right they are. We all know every terrorist hails from a sandy Ayrab country that hasn't seen a drop of any fluid besides camel spit since the Prophet fled to Medina, so not a single member of Al-Qaeda has ever seen the general scheme of a damn boat in his entire life. It's this type of vigilance that keeps the forces of terror from ever striking in Ind...shit.
The ride was worth it. The Vivekananda memorial is a pretty good place to just hang out, get a little bit of culture and watch other people look at the ocean. You also get great views of the colossus in profile, and can sit about enjoying the breezes until you return to the shore.
On the mainland there's also a temple (which you can't visit) and a Gandhi memorial, commemorating the place from where his ashes were scattered into the three seas. The outside is a rather bizarre modern attempt at blending Hindu, Muslim, and Christian architecture, though I must say it is much more pleasing to the eye than most of the British "Indo-Saracenic" cack that attempted the same feat. Inside it is rather bare. It was explained to me that this was because the seaside memorial got utterly walloped by the tsunami. This part of the country took a beating that day, and over 8000 people in Kanniyakumari district alone lost their lives. The caretaker of the memorial told me he was there when it happened, and that the sea twice receded out beyond the statue rocks, both times returning to wreck utter devastation. He was in the memorial itself, and climbed to the upper level before the second wave hit, probably saving his life but leaving him blind in one eye from where the sea battered him with currents of sand. The town is pretty much rebuilt, and has that look of neglectful decay common to other Indian communities, but every now and then you see a suspiciously empty building and you just have to wonder if its decrepitude can be traced to the fateful day Kanniyakumari paid the price for being on the tip of a continent.
Kanniyakumari is in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is full of Tamil-speaking Tamil people. I just purchased a book called Learn Tamil In 30 Days. We'll see about that. I bought it because the Tamils are so fond of their ancient tongue that they are even more obstinate than other South Indians about not learning or writing in Hindi, except they take it so far that there is a notable dropoff in English signage. In short, I'm learning the basics of Tamil as fast as I can so I know which unidentifiable cow-infested crater to jump off the bus in.
Even for South India, Tamil has some pretty crazy writing. Here's a sample for those of you who are fly enough to have web browsers with Dravidian language unicode enabled:
தமிழ் நாடு கன்னியாகுமரி மதுரை திருசாப்பள்ளி கோயம்புத்தூர்
I must admit that as much as I look forward to leaving my General Ghostface Sherman swathe of destruction through the heart of India's deep south, I sort of miss Kerala a bit, so I came to a compromise. I did a little day trip to the palace at Padmanabhapuram, the capital of the Travancore kings of yore, a little dot of exquisite Keralan culture just inside Tamil Nadu. It's a huge wooden palace, the largest in Asia, and I found it very charming. All the interiors are made of finely carved dark wood, with screen-like walls that keep the breezes blowing through the dim chambers. It's ornate and exotic, but it exudes that familiar charm of going into a well-off relative's dark wood study to poke about at his collection of musty old encyclopedias and prewar commentaries on Roman history.
Just outside the palace gates there is a typical South Indian canteen, albeit a little grubbier than those I usually frequent for my midday rice-and-slop combo. I asked for the thali, fully expecting a pile of rice and a series of spicy and direly overcooked vegetables of indeterminate origin, but was delighted to hear that the thali here comes with fried fish. I sat down and merrily waited in anticipation. When the plate arrived it consisted of rice, two incredibly insipid soups, and a small portion of hot chili paste that looked like it could fell a moose. Where the fish should be was what I will call "a little taste of history", because it was three horrific piscine forms that appeared to predate the palace itself. I stared in disgust at the near-fossilized carcasses and wondered how it was possible to safely fry something that was only a week or so away from becoming a form of coal. I took my fill of the rice and sauces, but when the proprietor came to take my plate he looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and whimpered "No feeeshes?". I went to settle the bill, and saw that the "special fish thali" was 80 damn rupees. "50 is for the fish", the owner said. I gave him a look which he must have understood immediately because before I could open my mouth to insinuate that he would have better luck getting 50 rupees for those fish from the state archaeological society, he sheepishly said sorry. Let that be a lesson. Never trust a man with a fish.
I returned to Kanniyakumari and took care of some business, namely resting on my laurels. I've made it down the entire west coast of India, from the barren beaches of Kutch in the north to Kanniyakumari in the south, and now I'm going up the east.
I also had one other piece of business, being at the undeniable end of India and all. I walked up to some hawkers on the cape and asked them curtly "Where is the nearest cow?" I found the beast a few hundred yards away in a side-alley off the market. It must have known it was the Last Cow in India and what that meant, because before I could get within ten yards, it let out a loud MUUUUOOOOOOOOOOO and turned in flight, trotting up a lane of wonky stairs in complete rout. As I stood there smirking in the market, a woman offered to sell me a flower garland. I think that's what they call "being greeted as a liberator."
But getting to the end of India isn't what was most special for me. It just so happened that my arrival in Kanniyakumari coincides almost exactly with the halfway point of this journey. By the time I reached the tip of India, I covered over 16,300 kilometers of this country, mile by plodding mile. I look back at everything I've done so far, and my first reaction was "WHAT? That was only HALF the trip?" And that was supposed to be the easy half. What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Anyways, I'm alive and kicking and I'm halfway there...and no, I am not about to quote that Bon Jovi song. I haven't a need for any prayer. Though there be a thousand faiths and a million gods in this country, all I need to know is that I shake my fist at the sky in defiance of them all. If a prayer must be, let it be this prayer, made timeless when uttered by Conan the Barbarian
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important! Valor pleases you, Crom... so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!
Aside from its geographical location,Kanniyakumari has some actual attractions to boast. For instance, you can see the sunrise on one horizon and the sunset on the other. This is fun, I suppose. I guess you could lock someone in a dark cell for a few months, then bring them out and play "pin the tail on the donkey", except make them guess whether they are facing the direction in which the sun is going into or out of a homogeneous expanse of water. Once a year in April you can actually see the sunset (or sunrise?) at the exact same moment the full moon is rising. Let's see...it's March. Never mind.
The real heart of Kanniyakumari is actually about 400 meters out to sea...because it got hit by the tsunami. OK, no actually it's because there are two sacred rocks just offshore and these have developed into full-fledged religious sites. One rock holds the Vivekananda Memorial, a shrine to a 19th-century Hindu saint who did many important things such as...well, I haven't done my research for my Kanniyakumari article yet, but he's important. The other rock is now the base of a colossal Statue of Liberty-esque sculpture of the Tamil saint and poet Thiruvalluvar, who is best known for his masterpiece...I'm not even going to look that up.
You get to the rocks via boat, which is a nuisance, but the short ride ultimately proved supremely enjoyable. The ferry operators insist that every passenger wear a crusty old lifejacket. The sight of some two hundred Indians from all walks of life -jowly businessmen, bearded Saddhus, Gujarati nomads, bored housewives, Catholic nuns, hip muscular dudes with their hair shaved off for Shiva, turbaned Rajasthani farmers, and a veritable gallery of frumpy mustachioed men- all awkwardly fumbling with their stupid orange lifejackets is a memory I will carry to my deathbed. It was my greatest wish to go on a photographic frenzy.
I envisioned taking this ferry for weeks and publishing a renowned coffee-table book and winning prizes for my captivating art. But the ferrymen wouldn't let me. They have a very strict no photography rule on the boat. For security. To prevent terrorists from gleaning useful information about the design of ferryboats. Oh, how right they are. We all know every terrorist hails from a sandy Ayrab country that hasn't seen a drop of any fluid besides camel spit since the Prophet fled to Medina, so not a single member of Al-Qaeda has ever seen the general scheme of a damn boat in his entire life. It's this type of vigilance that keeps the forces of terror from ever striking in Ind...shit.
The ride was worth it. The Vivekananda memorial is a pretty good place to just hang out, get a little bit of culture and watch other people look at the ocean. You also get great views of the colossus in profile, and can sit about enjoying the breezes until you return to the shore.
On the mainland there's also a temple (which you can't visit) and a Gandhi memorial, commemorating the place from where his ashes were scattered into the three seas. The outside is a rather bizarre modern attempt at blending Hindu, Muslim, and Christian architecture, though I must say it is much more pleasing to the eye than most of the British "Indo-Saracenic" cack that attempted the same feat. Inside it is rather bare. It was explained to me that this was because the seaside memorial got utterly walloped by the tsunami. This part of the country took a beating that day, and over 8000 people in Kanniyakumari district alone lost their lives. The caretaker of the memorial told me he was there when it happened, and that the sea twice receded out beyond the statue rocks, both times returning to wreck utter devastation. He was in the memorial itself, and climbed to the upper level before the second wave hit, probably saving his life but leaving him blind in one eye from where the sea battered him with currents of sand. The town is pretty much rebuilt, and has that look of neglectful decay common to other Indian communities, but every now and then you see a suspiciously empty building and you just have to wonder if its decrepitude can be traced to the fateful day Kanniyakumari paid the price for being on the tip of a continent.
Kanniyakumari is in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is full of Tamil-speaking Tamil people. I just purchased a book called Learn Tamil In 30 Days. We'll see about that. I bought it because the Tamils are so fond of their ancient tongue that they are even more obstinate than other South Indians about not learning or writing in Hindi, except they take it so far that there is a notable dropoff in English signage. In short, I'm learning the basics of Tamil as fast as I can so I know which unidentifiable cow-infested crater to jump off the bus in.
Even for South India, Tamil has some pretty crazy writing. Here's a sample for those of you who are fly enough to have web browsers with Dravidian language unicode enabled:
தமிழ் நாடு கன்னியாகுமரி மதுரை திருசாப்பள்ளி கோயம்புத்தூர்
I must admit that as much as I look forward to leaving my General Ghostface Sherman swathe of destruction through the heart of India's deep south, I sort of miss Kerala a bit, so I came to a compromise. I did a little day trip to the palace at Padmanabhapuram, the capital of the Travancore kings of yore, a little dot of exquisite Keralan culture just inside Tamil Nadu. It's a huge wooden palace, the largest in Asia, and I found it very charming. All the interiors are made of finely carved dark wood, with screen-like walls that keep the breezes blowing through the dim chambers. It's ornate and exotic, but it exudes that familiar charm of going into a well-off relative's dark wood study to poke about at his collection of musty old encyclopedias and prewar commentaries on Roman history.
Just outside the palace gates there is a typical South Indian canteen, albeit a little grubbier than those I usually frequent for my midday rice-and-slop combo. I asked for the thali, fully expecting a pile of rice and a series of spicy and direly overcooked vegetables of indeterminate origin, but was delighted to hear that the thali here comes with fried fish. I sat down and merrily waited in anticipation. When the plate arrived it consisted of rice, two incredibly insipid soups, and a small portion of hot chili paste that looked like it could fell a moose. Where the fish should be was what I will call "a little taste of history", because it was three horrific piscine forms that appeared to predate the palace itself. I stared in disgust at the near-fossilized carcasses and wondered how it was possible to safely fry something that was only a week or so away from becoming a form of coal. I took my fill of the rice and sauces, but when the proprietor came to take my plate he looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and whimpered "No feeeshes?". I went to settle the bill, and saw that the "special fish thali" was 80 damn rupees. "50 is for the fish", the owner said. I gave him a look which he must have understood immediately because before I could open my mouth to insinuate that he would have better luck getting 50 rupees for those fish from the state archaeological society, he sheepishly said sorry. Let that be a lesson. Never trust a man with a fish.
I returned to Kanniyakumari and took care of some business, namely resting on my laurels. I've made it down the entire west coast of India, from the barren beaches of Kutch in the north to Kanniyakumari in the south, and now I'm going up the east.
I also had one other piece of business, being at the undeniable end of India and all. I walked up to some hawkers on the cape and asked them curtly "Where is the nearest cow?" I found the beast a few hundred yards away in a side-alley off the market. It must have known it was the Last Cow in India and what that meant, because before I could get within ten yards, it let out a loud MUUUUOOOOOOOOOOO and turned in flight, trotting up a lane of wonky stairs in complete rout. As I stood there smirking in the market, a woman offered to sell me a flower garland. I think that's what they call "being greeted as a liberator."
But getting to the end of India isn't what was most special for me. It just so happened that my arrival in Kanniyakumari coincides almost exactly with the halfway point of this journey. By the time I reached the tip of India, I covered over 16,300 kilometers of this country, mile by plodding mile. I look back at everything I've done so far, and my first reaction was "WHAT? That was only HALF the trip?" And that was supposed to be the easy half. What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Anyways, I'm alive and kicking and I'm halfway there...and no, I am not about to quote that Bon Jovi song. I haven't a need for any prayer. Though there be a thousand faiths and a million gods in this country, all I need to know is that I shake my fist at the sky in defiance of them all. If a prayer must be, let it be this prayer, made timeless when uttered by Conan the Barbarian
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important! Valor pleases you, Crom... so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!
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