ONE MAN. ONE YEAR. ONE SUBCONTINENT.


Feb 28, 2010

Communists, Jews, and Heat: A Measured Discussion

It is time once again for me to move on to a new Indian state.I crossed the border from Karnataka into Kerala high in the Western Ghat mountains. The word 'ghat' means stairs, and sure enough descending from the southern tip of the Deccan Plateau to the Malabar Coast is pretty much the same feeling one recalls from being a small child who still falls down the stairs. One minute you're leisurely winding about on the road through the highlands, then all of a sudden the tree cover opens up and you see a drop of several thousand feet in what looks like spitting distance. You could probably jump from the top of the road to the bottom, though I opted to remain in the bus, clutching my seat as it swerved around one hairpin turn after another, narrowly avoiding striking smaller vehicles full force and launching them on an unexpected shortcut to the lowlands. It was absolutely beautiful though.

Kerala in general is a stunning place. It is also a strange place, exotic and enticing, seemingly created by a smug god to give American political conservatives nightmares. It is a lush, humid strip of tropical land - the most densely populated state in India - and it is chock-full dark-skinned multireligious Communists with tight financial ties to the Persian gulf. A land desperately crying for Our Freedoms.

I'm not exaggerating about them being multireligous. There are at least four major religious communities in Kerala; the Hindus, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Muslims, and the Catholics. The Syrian Orthodox Christians are quite the curiosity. They trace their lineage here all the way back St. Thomas himself, while the historical record places them here at least as early as 400AD. More noticeable than Hindu temples in this state are the number of churches, and the odd, narrow tower-shrines that dot the countryside. These are slender towers topped by a cross, with a little shrine at the bottom, typically to Jesus, St. Thomas, or St. George. Seeing an Indian man in full Orthodox vestments is a very weird sight. You won't believe how many paintings of St. George slaying the dragon you see around here. I'm not that surprised they like him, though; Indians love a good slayer. But not Slayer. This land is incorrigible.

I'm also not exaggerating their ties to the Persian Gulf. They've been trading with that area since at least Greek times, and now a huge chunk of the state economy is based on money sent home from laborers in the Gulf. All those crazy buildings in Dubai? Built by Keralans and Pakistanis. Half the banks, tailoring chains, and jewellers here seem to have a branch in Oman or the UAE. I'm telling you, it's only a matter of time before the next idiot president we get sends Predator drones to Kerala.

And I am definitely not joking about them being communists. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been in power here more or less constantly since 1957. You cross the state border and immediately you see little red hammer-and-sickle flags fluttering everywhere every street corner seems to have a union office affiliated with the Communist Party. In other states, political posters tend to be heavy on the national colors, lotus flowers, and frumpy-looking men with stupid mustaches being watched over by the subtly-haloed spirits of their political forebears. Here they have a row of frumpy men in little red stars next to a giant portrait of Che Guevara. It is at the very least an aesthetic improvement.

The thing is, the Marxists here have actually done a good job for once. Kerala, despite being the most densely populated state, has some of the lowest levels of poverty and is the only state in India to have achieved full literacy of its citizens. Perhaps having a higher democratic body to answer to has helped by restraining the party from committing the excesses so common to the governments of Communist countries. In any case, it's really a stunning achievement. And before you go thinking I'm just blindly cheering on the commies our of my childish affection for radical politics, I will point you to the example of the Communist Party in Bengal, where the same party's record in governance has been...less than entirely satisfactory. But hey, look at Kerala! You can enact land reforms, empower labor, and carry out a social revolution without killing 20 million people and throwing the rest in jail! Who'da thunk it?

Another great thing about Kerala is that they speak Malayalam, yet another incomprehensible babble with a beautiful script. Just look at this

കേരള എറണാകുളം കൊച്ചി മുന്

I just can't get enough.

On the other hand, certain things about Kerala could use a little improvement. For instance, if you are going to temporarily close your central bus station (*cough* Kozhikode), you should find a solution other than dispersing all out-of-town bus services to eight different roadside pull-overs scattered around the city, mmmkay? I've had yet another wearying travel experience that's left me a bit testy. The bus I finally caught was harrowing enough to put me on edge, driven by a man who had clearly spent his entire youth trying to master the shortcut on Koopa Troopa Beach and was still practicing this art using a lime green bus with an animated Ganesh pasted to the windscreen. Then I got stuck on this $%*#@! train which traversed a whopping 100km in 4 hours. I'm accustomed to things being slow here, but there were aggravating factors that contributing to a twitching, neurotic expression of my inner fury. For starters, it was ungodly hot. The weather in Kerala is sweltering. It was late February here yet my whole body felt like a nutsack after an entire night of slow, grinding sex waist-deep in a vat of unwashed laundry. Insects were crawling all over me, my skin was black with sweat-glued train filth, and it was late at night and everyone else on the train was either snoring or wheezing to death. Even reading the usually-captivating volume Philosophical Foundations of India couldn't keep me from noticing that this so-called "express service" had been stopped in the shithole town of Aluva for over an hour. Let me make one thing clear: if the town doesn't have a population exceeding 100,000 people or a Wikipedia subheading for "Culture", there is no reason for an express train to even brake for errant children playing on the tracks, let alone stop for an hour in the middle of the night.

I finally got to Kochi, the major city of Kerala, and I'm not sure it was really worth the trouble. Kochi gets rave reviews for its relaxed colonial heart and its setting on a number of islands and peninsulas that one traverses by allegedly endearing ferries. I actually thought the historical center was a tourist trap piece of crap and much preferred the greatly maligned modern quarter on the mainland. Probably the best part of Kochi is its Jewish quarter, not because it has a unique history of a now-vanished Jewish merchant community, but because it's full of cranky spice merchants and because they call the neighborhood "Jew Town". Jew Town is, predictably, full of Jew tourists. Jew tourists, and actually Western tourists in general, suffer from the impression that their own ethno-cultural group is the single most fascinating one on the face of the globe, and love stopping by heroic outposts of their culture in the teeming lands of the heathen masses. So the British traipse through Victorian Mumbai and cottage-filled hill stations, the Portuguese amble about Goa and Diu, and the Jews flock to Jew Town. Aside from Jews, Kochi (or Cochin as you may know it) apparently appeals to three types of people: rich Europeans who love going around the world to spend time in vaguely European-style towns with better weather, people who marvel at goats walking loose in the street, and people who find the idea of traveling across town by boat an inherently magical experience. Ghostface Buddha possesses none of these traits. If I found all these things in one convenient place I would drown the goat by dragging it behind the boat, give it an exotic name like "Maharaja Mutton Roast", and sell it at four times its worth to a rich European.

The boat ride wasn't even interesting, let alone magical. Oh look, we're in a bay. And what have we over here? Quick, honey, get out the guidebook! Do you think that's coal or bauxite? My word! Everything is so fabulous when you see it from a boat! And is that....is that the fabled mosque of the mighty Al-aud-Shah-al-Fazah Shahjah Shah kings?!?

No, it's a grain pier. Get me the fuck out of here. I feel like a scrotum.

Feb 24, 2010

GFB's Guide To The Ramayana, Pt. 2

Fact: if you start typing "how" into Indian Google, the top suggestion is "how to get pregnant". Clearly, this country needs my help with a few things.

Anyways, we're back with the second half of our guide to the Ramayana. This guide is part of an ongoing series on Hinduism starting...now. Read the first half first, or you'll find it even more confusing than reading a book about demons and shapeshifting monkeys should be.


We left off with our hero Rama vowing to protect the jungle sages from the predations of demons. However, he doesn't seem to run into any, and ten years pass without event.

By "ten years pass without event" I mean nothing directly happens to the protagonist. As usual, a bunch of crazy other stuff happens, not least of which is a story in which a pair of demons kill sages by transforming into food, then resuming their demon form when they are inside the rishi's stomach. One sage gets wise to the play and asks the gods for a boon. When he eats the demon, the other demon shouts that it's time to transform back and burst the sage asunder, but the sage just smiles and says that demon number one has been thoroughly digested. The reader is left to imagine the sort of gas the rishi must have had after dinner.

Anyways, ten years pass, and the heroes have made a new friend of the old eagle-king Jataayu, who tags along and becomes Sita's escort so the boys can go out hunting without worrying about her. For their last two years in exile, they decide to build themselves a proper ashram, which Lakshmana does skillfully.

One day Rama and Lakshmana are lounging out in the woods, reminiscing about what a sweetie their brother Bharata is, when the she-demon Soorphanakha stumbles across them. She is immediately overcome by the burning desire to jump Rama's bones, because let's face it, Rama is a hot hunk of man. She gets so hot and bothered that she forgets to even change forms and begins to hit on Rama, basically by calling herself the world's number one hot mommma, while still in full-on hideous demon mode. Rama has a good laugh at this, shrugs her off, and jokingly suggests she try her luck with Lakshmana, who is also a delectable slice of all that is man. When Lakshmana scoffs at her too, she realizes she's been played and becomes furious. She takes her anger out on Sita, making the ever-foolish choice of attacking her. She can't understand what Rama sees in her, but it's probably that Sita is literally the incarnation of the goddess of beauty and embodies the qualities of the perfect Indian woman. Soorphanakha gets a fight with Rama for her troubles, and he shoots her nose off. She goes crying to her brother Khara, who by the way is king of the jungle demons, and is also the brother of Ravanna. Fate begins to draw its noose ever tighter...

Khera assembles all the demon-warriors of his domain and marches against Rama's ashram. The demon army is 14,000 strong, and Sita becomes a little concerned for their safety. Sita, being the perfect Indian woman, is quite wise and raises reasonable concerns, but these are always pithily smacked down by Rama the way Socrates just so happens to have an answer to every question his challengers present him with. Rama's answer in this case is "sigh...women. I'll take care of this, sweetie. Here, let Lakshmana guard you." Rama then goes off alone to fight the demon army. Wave after wave assail him but he fends them off with a machine-gun-like spray of arrows and magic charms, slaughtering them dozens at a time until he has singlehandedly killed every last bastard in the entire demon army. He shoots incoming arrows and javelins out of the sky, launches arrows with such skill they pass ricocheting through seven demons in a row, and is generally un-fucking-touchable. He stands over a pile of 14,000 demon corpses, walks up to the last surviving demon general, and goes "You got some dirt on your shoulder...let me brush that off for you."

Far away in Lanka, Soorphanakha has run awauy and cried to her other brother Ravanna, who is even more powerful, having recently returned victorious from a campaign to the underworld and also having conquered the mountain fortress of Kubera, the god of wealth. Curses are shouted. Vengeance is sworn. He is still a little slow to act...until he hears about Sita and decides he would very much like to add a five-star biddie to his harem. The plot is hatched.

Ravanna slinks over to Rama's ashram and conceives of a ploy to separate Sita from her escorts. He teams up with the demon Maricha, who has a long-standing grudge against Rama. Maricha transforms into a gold-skinned deer and prances about merrily. Sita sees the deer and immediately demands that Rama capture it because it is just so pretty. Rama replies to the effect of "No, woman! You fool! Don't you see this could be a trap! Forget your womanly desire for shiny things!", but the quintessentially feminine Sita throws a fit and more or less implies that if Rama can't catch a bejeweled deer for her, he's going to find himself sleeping in the living room. Rama sighs, and sets off after it, leaving Lakshmana in charge. Once Maricha has lured Rama far, far away he parrots Rama's voice and cries out in distress "Oh ouch! Oh help! Lakshmana! Come save me!" Lakshmana hears the cries in the distance but isn't buying it. Rama has after all just slain 14,000 demons. He can take care of himself. Sita on the other hand is utterly duped, throws a hysterical womanly fit again, and threatens Lakshmana that if he doesn't go after Rama she will kill herself. Lakshmana says "ok ok ok, I'm going.....women" and runs off with a bad feeling in his gut. As soon as Lakshmana's gone, Ravanna easily kidnaps Sita and hauls her into his magical flying chariot.

Apparently there is some divergence in the tale here if you read the North Indian version. In North India they allegedly teach that Ravanna did not actually lay hands on Sita herself, but on a spiritual holographic projection of Sita's body. This, the translator points out, is because North Indians are raging misogynists, even compared to other Indians, and believe that a woman who is manhandled is as much a slattern disgrace as the man who committed the offense. And obvi, because Sita is perfect she could not be disgraced, so it must have been a hologram that was physically touched. Basically it's a lot of logical hoops to jump through to continue being able to treat women like shit. The South Indian version, which has traces of the attitude that maybe she should have been in the kitchen instead, at least concedes that it isn't her damn fault she got grabbed a bit while being kidnapped by a nigh-omnipotent demon king. Alas, in the getaway our dear eagle friend Jaatayu intervenes but he is too old to fight Ravanna and is tragically slain.

Lakshmana finds Rama and they piece together they have been tricked, and Lakshmana tells Rama everything he knows. They hurry back to the ashram and find the dying Jataayu, who tells them what happened, in full. When you read the Ramayana and one character recounts events to another, the poet never says "...and then Lakshmana told Rama all that had happened." The poet actually has Lakshmana repeat verbally every damn thing that happened, in slightly altered words, for the other characters' benefit. Many religious types think this style of writing is a good thing and love nothing more than reading over the same story five or six times, but for the reader who isn't trying to be put into spiritual bliss might question whether every one of the 25,000 verses is really necessary.

The damsel is in distress, and we have two heroes sworn to retrieve her. Rama and Lakshmana move southwards, turning over every possible place the demon could have taken her, but to no avail. Sorry, the princess is in another castle. In their dismayed wanderings they might the deposed monkey-king Sugreeva, and his minister Hanuman. Sugreeva is engaged in a tragic struggle with his brother who has taken the throne, and would very much like it back. Rama thinks about this for a minute and tells Sugreeva that if he gets the throne back, the entire monkey kingdom has to help find Sita. Hanuman strokes his monkey-beard throughout. To make a long story (a very long story) short, Sugreeva draws his brother into an unprotected duel and Rama rather sneakily shoots him in the back. A dirty trick, but you do what ya gotta do.

The Ramayana suddenly takes a turn into realism and has the heroes doing jack shit because they can't go marching around outside for months during the monsoon. As Rama and Lakshmana huddle in their hut under the torrential rains, Sugreeva spends the summer getting fat and drunk. When the rains finally stop, Sugreeva is still pretty much drunk all the time and doesn't move his fat monkey ass. Rama sends Lakshmana over for a little chat knowing that Lakshmana has ways of...motivating people. Just having Lakshmana show up is enough to scare Sugreeva shitless and he orders his army of monkeys to scour the ends of the Earth in search of Sita.

When I say "army of monkeys", strictly speaking they are vanaras a plentiful race of monkeys and bears that were actually offspring of the gods and capable of limited shapeshifting and other godly powers. So Rama has an army of a few million superhuman monkeys on his side now. Things are looking up.

The armies sent north, east, and west return with no luck, but the southern army accompanied by Hanuman meet Sampati, king of the vultures. Sampati has had his wings clipped off so he can't fly, but he still has incredible eyesight and sees all the way to Lanka, where he spots Sita. He then reveals he is Jataayu's brother. It is revealed that Jataayu is dead, and guess what, time for more obsequies.

For whatever reason, possibly because they are monkeys, it doesn't occur to the vanaras to ask Sampati where on the island of Lanka Sita is. They need to send a scout. Hanuman volunteers, and from this point on the Ramayana becomes one long stream of simian badassery. Hanuman grows to the size of a tree and jumps across the ocean. No...he doesn't just jump across the ocean. He half-jumps-half-flies and kicks the living shit out of anything that tries to stop him. As he reaches the opposite shore, he is ensnared by the tongue of a large fish. About to be eaten, he shrinks into a tiny monkey and painlessly enters the fish's digestive tract before regaining his massive size, ripping the fish apart from the inside, and landing on Lanka roaring with victory and drenched in blood and tattered fish guts. Hanuman is the shit.

Hanuman becomes a tiny monkey again and infiltrates the city of Lanka, eventually finding Sita in the garden where she is imprisoned. Sita has had a rather rough go of it but has nobly maintained her chastity through her despair. She tells Hanuman all that has befallen her, treating the reader to the third telling of those events. Having accomplished his mission, Hanuman decides to start some shit and climbs into Ravanna's palace, annoys the crap out of everybody, and gets into a fight with several platoons of demons who he kills in open combat, crushing walls and ceilings in a Godzilla-like struggle of titans. He hops off with a smug grin on his face from the chaos he's caused and says goodbye to Sita. He prepares to jump back to India, only to be seized by a magic rope. Some dumb ass demon supplements this with a normal rope, which negates the magic rope's power, but Hanuman plays along. He is brought before Ravanna's ministers, who decide to torture the monkey in the most cruel way possible: by setting his tail on fire. With his tail lit, Hanuman miraculously feels no pain and bursts from his bonds, then rushes about the city setting things on fire until he's burnt half the city to the ground and killed a few more notable demons. He hops back to Sita and says "Well, I could rescue you here and now, but.....nah, let's have a giant war instead."

Hanuman tells Rama everything that happened (and oh boy, he sure tells Rama everything that has happened). Rama presumbaly raises an eyebrow at Sita not having rescued already, but no matter. There's only one problem: Rama can't jump over the ocean, and neither can most of the monkey army. But there's a solution. The monkeys gather millions of stones and build a bridge all the way to Lanka. You can still see the bridge today on Google Maps. Yup, that was monkeys.

Rama's army invades Lanka, and after all diplomatic entreaties are refused by the stubborn Ravanna, war is declared. When your council of unvanquished demon ministers is divided on whether war is advisable, you might want to think twice, but Ravanna is trapped by his pride and his yet-unquenched desire to motorboat all ten of his heads in Sita's bosom.

The battle begins, and it goes on and on and on and on. Though not as egregious as the battle in the Mahabharata in this regard, it is still extremely tedious. The different vanara and rakshasa champions face each other off in duels many times, invariably destroying each other's chariots and so on but never managing to kill the opponent. Occasionally, after maybe seven duels one particular demon general might finally be slain under a hail of magical arrows or whatever. The good guys prove most luckily unkillable, constantly being knocked unconscious by their foes, only to be rescued in the nick of time by another vanara hero, living to fight another day and almost, almost kill demons yet again. While these duels are taking place, regular vanaras and demons are being killed by the champions in the tens of thousands and the fields sprout rivers of blood. The problem in this war is that every damn character is unbeatable. Hanuman can kill a thousand demons, but then he runs into demons that can fight gods, and calls on Rama, who can also fight demons and gods, but this demon is immune to Rama and can only be killed by Hanuman, who is currently overmatched by another demon who only Rama can kill, but right now Rama can't kill him so Rama goes to kill a thousand other demons instead and then an unkillable demon gets in his way and Hanuman has to....you get the idea.

Rama, Lakshmana, and Hanuman are the ultimate badasses in this fight, firing volleys of arrows that block out the sun, so on and so forth. However, they are not totally unbeatable. Not once, but twice they are immobilized by magic arrows that knock them unconscious. Hanuman knows the magic and flies off to the Himalayas in search of a magic plant to heal them, then realizes he doesn't know which plant to pick, and flies back carrying the entire mountain. Then rather foolishly he spends the time to put the mountain back, which is a mistake, because this is such a fucking ridiculous book that Rama and Lakshmana get immobilized again, and Hanuman has to fly back and retrieve the same goddamn mountain. LISTEN, POET VALMIKI, YOU POEM IS TOO FUCKING LONG. YOU ONLY NEED TO HAVE THE MONKEY FLY CARRYING THE MOUNTAIN ONE FUCKING TIME.

At the end of the war, Rama kills Ravanna. Big surprise. Hey, Valmiki, thanks for keeping us all in suspense. You had me thinking Rama wasn't going to fulfill his destiny for a minute there. Gotta say, it was one of my favorites of the eight million duels. Could use some touching up though. Maybe Lakshmana gets knocked unconscious and rescued by Neela the monkey? I'm just making suggestions. You're the poet; do what feels best.

Triumphantly, the forces of righteousness enter the city and Rama rescues Sita. They walk away, and one imagines they are soon to cuddle before an epic sunset. But no, Rama has to be a dick. He refuses to believe Sita could have been faithful for six months, and considers her rescue to be the completion of his duty and wants nothing more to do with her. She pleads and begs and Rama relents, provided she pass a test. Sita is outraged and resolves to burn herself alive rather than be subjected to a test. Way to go, girl,....sort of. Needless to say, this is the North Indian version of Rama's conduct. In South India they realize this is a little unbecoming of a hero and awkwardly try to patch things up by having Rama explain that he was only pretending to test her for the benefit of his troops, who would otherwise assume that the returning prince had been cuckolded. I guess that's an improvement.

It's a shame that while this is all being explained, Sita has jumped into a pyre. Oops.

But it's alright! Sita's divine truth and purity have saved her! Agni, the god of fire walks out carrying Sita in his arms, and flowers rain from the heavens in celebration of Sita's virtue! All of the gods assemble within the flame and continue to shower flowers. Rama is like, "Whoa man, all the gods are here! Yo, is that Indra? and Brahma? Holy shit!" and Brahma is like "Yo, dude, you're Vishnu! DUUUUHHHHH" and Rama is like "Say what?" and Brahma is like "You are the latest avatar of Vishnu" and Rama is like "Oh Brahma, you playin'" and Brahma is like "Nuh-uh" and flowers rain from the heavens.

Rama and Sita return to their kingdom in a magic chariot, Bharata gives Rama his rightful throne. And everyone lives happily ever after.

The end.

Except in North India; there's another act and Rama exiles Sita to the fucking woods.

The end.

GFB's Guide To The Ramayana, Pt. 1

Before I had completed my critical-authorial tour de force on the Ramayana and grew entirely sick of that book, I had actually half-completed a set of notes that I had intended to use for this blog. Having read the damn thing, which repeatedly implores the reader to never leave a thing half done, here is Ghostface Buddha's guide to the Ramayana, replete with typos because some asshole has put Firefox's dictionary in French and there are red lines under fucking everything. Suckez vous mon cock, Francois

The story begins in the abode of the gods, where the ten-headed demon Ravanna, drunk with power, causes incredible amounts of danger and nuisance to the gods and other celestial beings. The problem is that Brahma has rewarded him with invulnerability against all enemies but men, and there is no man bad-ass enough to take him. The gods beg Vishnu to incarnate himself on Earth as a man and take care of everything, again. In Hinduism there is the well-known trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, but nearly everybody has a favorite that they call the "one supreme God." In the tradition of this epic it is Vishnu, but many people prefer Shiva or various versions of the Mother Goddess. Shiva followers aren't too disturbed by their man playing second fiddle, as they are pleased to point out that Shiva is aloof from ever having incarnated himself.

Anyways, whatever, in this story Vishnu's the Man. At the same time the emperor Dasaratha has ruled his kingdom for many hundreds of years but has sired no heir. I think you see where this is going. Vishnu surreptitiously conceives four children by Dasaratha's three wives, who give birth to Rama, Bharata, Lakshmana, and Shatrughna. You can forget about Shatrughna, because he doesn't do shit.

At this point in the narrative, there are a lot of flashbacks and a lot a crazy shit with no connection to the plot happens. You don't want to know. For starters, some sage tries to create a second universe and almost succeeds, but this is given only a passing mention. Like I say, crazy shit happens. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that I read a mercifully abridged version that was still hundreds of pages long, and of course that I read it in translation, so this commentary is on the version I read, not the complete Sanskrit epic. Perhaps everything is beautifully linked and relevant, and all the wild stories are explained to the skeptic's satisfaction. But on the other hand this story is probably just insane.

Anyways, Rama and his brother Lakshmana are but lads when the sage Viswamitra, who is sort of a Merlin figure who regularly shows up the gods, asks their father to borrow them for an errand. Viswamitra wants to do a spectacular Vedic sacrifice but some demon keeps meddling with his plans. But Viswamitra, being omniscient, knows who Rama and Lakshmana are and sees the twisted path of destiny. Only a few charachters in the book know Rama's secret, of which even he himself is ignorant. Rama is just living his human life, completely unaware that he is God on Earth and is was born to save the universe. Viswamitra helps to put the wheels in motion and he decides to take the boys along for a little demon-slaying. The opening act of the Ramayana is kind of like the first season of Buffy, but with way more angst. Viswamitra teaches the boys in the use of magical spells gives them extremely powerful holy weapons, and then sets the young'uns on the demon. The demon's ass is thoroughly and comprehensively kicked.

Another interlude of crazy shit. Some far-away queen gives simultaneous birth to an army of 60,000 sons, who many years later are all turned to ash after pissing off a sage who is Vishnu's homie. Seriously, this book is nuts. Where else do you spawn 60,000 warriors from an enchanted coochie only to have them all die at the end of the chapter?

Years pass, and Rama isn't quite so wee a lad any more. It's time for him to get married. Our omniscient friend advises the king to try and get Rama to marry the foreign princess Sita, who is conveniently the worldly incarnation of Vishnu's wife Lakshmi. Rama goes to win her over, and finds her father has initiated a contest between the many princely suitors. He presents a mighty bow and says that whoever can string it wins the girl. The bow, by the way, happens to have belonged to Shiva, so nobody is pulling that bitch. The bow, I mean. Nobody but Vishnu, that is. Rama steps up to the plate and not only strings the bow but accidentally breaks it in half, unwittingly earning himself access to his own wife's earthly pleasures. When Rama strings the bow, the gods rain flowers from heaven. Flowers rain from heaven a lot in the course of this book.

One day when he's out walking, Rama stumbles into Parasurama, an angry, axe-wielding brahmin dwarf who also was an incarnation of Vishnu and has spent his life furiously unleashing his dwarven battle-priest might on uppity members of the warrior caste who think they're above the clergy. This prevents something of a paradox. Parasurama is all like "Whatever, kid, so you broke Shiva's bow. But can you string...VISHNU'S BOW" and Rama is all like "Well, I'll try" and then Rama strings the bow and Parasurama is all like "Oh snap. He Vishnu. I guess I'm not Vishnu any more" and walks off into newfound irrelevance. This episode represents a passing of the torch and is where Rama's period as "avatar" truly begins. Parasurama grants all of his (essentially Vishnu's) power to Rama, as well as Vishnu's bow. So now Rama is Vishnu, has Vishnu's power, and Vishnu's weapons, but he and the world still don't know that he is really, really not to be fucked with.

Moving on. Dasaratha is an old fart and he wants to retire to the forest and be a sage. He announces he will crown Rama, his eldest and most noble son.

This is where shit gets real.

A servant of one of Dasaratha's other queens decides to stir the pot. She is a hunchback, and therefore an evil, manipulative bitch, as all hunchbacks are. She recklessly ignores Lil Jon's immortal advice "Don't start no shit, won't be no shit", and to put it mildly, there is shit.

The hunchback convinces the innocent queen Kaikeyi that having Rama on the throne will result in terrible consequences for her branch of the family, and reminds Kaikeyi that the king owes her big-time. The king granted her two wishes for saving his life, and she still hasn't cashed them in. She is moved to request her first wish, which is that her son Bharata be placed on the throne instead. Her second wish is that Rama be exiled to the forest.

There is then an incredible amount of drama. Soap-opera levels of drama, where just about every single member of the royal household rolls around on the floor crying as they try and cope with their great emotional distress. And on it goes for many, many chapters. It's really quite tedious. The crux of it is that Dasaratha can't refuse the wish because the king's utmost duty is to uphold truth and justice and must keep his word, yadda yadda yadda. When Rama is told he's being shipped off to the woods, he also is obnoxiously noble, but at least stands on his feet and doesn't cry. He just chills there and makes a speech to the effect of "Nothing would make me happier than helping my beloved father comply with his duty! The woods will be lovely!" This is who we are supposed to emulate. But all is not over. Lakshmana hears about it and explodes with righteous anger, offering to help Rama overthrow the state. Lakshmana is cool because while he is also extremely noble, he has a hot temper and human reactions to things, and itches to kick ass at every oppurtunity.

Rama, being so very wise, is able to untangle the complicated interlocking web of dharma("duty") of the parties concerned, and concludes that the only solution is for him to go to the forest. Lakshmana, who isn't really bound one way or the other, vows to accompany him to the ends of the Earth. Sita also vows to follow her husband wherever he may go. This stuns everyone because she is a woman and obviously ill-suited for a life of hardship, but she then awes them with her wifely loyalty, her conviction that the woods will be lovely, and her trust in the two studly men who will be guarding her. Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana take up the dress of ascetics and go off into the jungle, while Bharata is crowned king and the entire kingdom weeps at Rama being sent away.

In the woods, our intrepid trio meets the king of the forest but decline his gifts because they are supposed to be ascetics. They go and build a hut and prepare for their life of twelve years in the jungle.

Bharata is summoned back to the city and informed he is going to be king. Bharata, like his father, is a big noble crybaby and a whole 'nother series of chapters ensues in which Bharata grovels at the feet of everyone, begging not to be king because he just loves Rama so much and Rama would be the perfect king and so on and so on. Bharata is supposed to be the embodiment of noble spirit and righteous ruling, but he's really rather irritating. Since he's such a darling little angel, he decides to go to the woods and bring Rama back. He assembles the kingdom's army and has them start cutting a road through the jungle to go fetch three people, an approach to environmental awareness the people of North India share to this day.

Whil they're gone Dasaratha recounts a story about how when he was young he was so good at hunting he used to do it with his eyes closed, and shot a human being by the side of the river while he was showing off this talent. The parents cursed him, and Dasaratha is convinced that all that has happened was due to fate. Then he thinks about Rama some more and cries himself to death.

A sage stumbles across the heroes and praises Mahadeva, for reasons unkown to the group. Mahadeva, you see, is one of the thousand or so names of Vishnu. The gods have many names but are all the same being. Confusing? Perhaps, but not wrong-headed. Do we not in our own pantheon have gods who go by many names? Is the RZA not also the Rzarecta, Bobby Steels, the Abbot, Bobby Digital, and Prince Rakim? Is Jay-Z not also Jigga and Hove? So as the Hindus have sacred verses reminding us of the many names of the gods do we not also have songs that proclaim this same quality? "Dirt Dog"? "Izzo(H.O.V.A)"? "The Real Slim Shady"?

Bharata eventually finds his brothres, and the whinery repeats itself. Rama reassures Bharata that is is his duty to rule the kingdom, but Bharata is so damn noble he comes up with a cmopromise. He takes Rama's sandals and places them on the throne. He himself takes up a life of penance and administers in Rama's absence from the shittiest village he can find near the capital. Harmony returns to the land. Flowers may or may not have rained from heaven.

Somewhere in all of this, Rama, Lakshmana, and Bharata perform the obsequies for their dead father. This is a scene you would see a lot of. The book is obsessed with people preforming obsequies for their relatives, and as more and more characters get knocked off there is a great deal of pausing the narrative to have someone stroll to a river and make offerings to the sun, etc. etc.

By the way, just so my friends who are reading this know, for the duration of the time I was involved with reading the Hindu scriptures, the "Document Rule" was most emphatically in effect.

Some time passes out in the jungle. One day a demon tries to eat Sita. There are several varieties of 'demon' in Hindu mythology. The baddies in this book are the rakshaasas, a race of super-ugly, usually wicked creatures with shape-shifting abilities who for some reason usually remain in their fugly-ass "true forms" most of the time. Anyways, Rama and Lakshmana come to the rescue but just can't seem to kill the demon. Turns out that the demon has received a 'boon' from the gods, probably Indra. Indra is second only to Brahma in giving out ill-advised boons. A boon is essentially a holy power-up. This demon's power-up is that he can'e be killed by any weapon whatsoever. He foolishly informs Lakshmana of this, so Lakshmana and Rama proceed to pump him full of arrows, which can't kill him but still hurt like a motherfucker. They then deliver a speech for the benefit of the demon's soul, and having thus absolved everyone involved, they exploit the boon's "catch", wearying the demon with weapons, and then killing him with their bare fucking hands. Rama and Lakshmana are Bad Ass.

The rishis (sages) who live in the forest hear about this exploit and are overjoyed. They have been plagued by demons for years. Countless rishis out in the jungle to meditate and do penance have been eaten up by rakshaasas. They see Rama's prowess and beg him for protection. As a member of the warrior caste, Rama accepts the duty of protecting the helpless, even if it means making enemies of all the demons in the woods.

Sita has a bad feeling about this...

Part 2 coming up

Feb 23, 2010

Deathbed Of The Demon Buffalo

There's a big announcement at the end of this post. I always put these things at the end so you have to wade through my musings on bus fares and goat tranquilizing first, because I do not respect you. Actually, now that you've been warned, I'm writing about something besides buses and goats, and the announcement is somewhere in the middle. Ha!

You know, I realized just how jaded I've become when I was trying to come up with something to put on this blog about the city of Mysore and gave up, only to remember hours later that a bus I was riding knocked a motorcyclist off his bike in front of a full detachment of police officers. I also almost forgot that on the way down the stairs from a sacred hill I had spent some time flirting with about 80 members of an all-female military training batallion until their big, bearded Sikh commander finally arrived and gave everybody a glare that said "I carry this large wooden stick for a reason." How could I almost forget these things? When nothing in my life makes any sense, everything begins to lose its meaning. Like the word "cutlery". What does that mean? Gee, I don't know.

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like Mysore. It's mostly known for incense, yoga, and a fairytale palace, which together draw in millions of tourists a year. Specifically, it draws the sort of people that come thousands of miles for incense, yoga, and a fairytale palace. The foreigners here are weird. There are large numbers of fatties walking around in between trips to magical centers of study where they presumably are taught that if they are going to order a large pizza they should give at least one slice to the dog. There's also lots of people here for the yoga which will de-stress there lives. The problem is the main cause of stress in a lot of people's lives is themselves. Last night I was sitting right here working when I witnessed the spontaneous combustion of the friendship of two middle-aged Minnesotan women, one of whom was absolutely outraged the other was making her wait a full twenty minutes at the net cafe before dinner, prompting the other to exasperatedly snap back "Soo just gooo then, eh! You dooont have to stay, I t'old you!" After also witnessing a German-sounding couple squabble about how far they had walked from their hotel ("No! It vas only von hundred and tventy fife meters to ze bas stop and zen fifty meters more to ze bakery!"), I concluded that yoga isn't always the answer.

In between wandering various corners of Mysore I took a trip to Srirangapatnam, which is a fascinating fortified island where....OK whatever, short version, this dude named Tipu Sultan was a huge pain in the ass to the British and was obsessed with the fact that he got the nickname "The Tiger of Mysore" and put tiger-related shit everywhere. Srirangapatnam is this guy's town. You can go see what's left of the town if you want. It's pretty nice.

Two things turned my opinion of Mysore around. The first was the fairytale palace, which really was some Disney-worthy material. You go in and there are these epic ballrooms surmounted by stained glass, plenty of gold leaf, and plush red upholstery. Probably my favorite part was when you go to the grand balcony and look at the massive ceiling tiles painted in a European neo-baroque style, except everywhere there would be a troupe of plump little cherubs blowing bible verse pennants out of horns there are instead levitating cows, goddesses riding swans, and Vishnu transforming into a fish. It was awesome. Also, if you come by on Sunday nights they light the entire place up with approximately 100,000 little light bulbs and it is pretty amazing to look at. One person I was chatting to asked how I, being a writer, would try and put the sight into words. "Some magical-ass shit" I said.

The other thing that changed my opinion about Mysore was when I learned that the name "Mysore" is a corruption of the place-name denoting the spot where the goddess Chaumundi slew a demonic buffalo. This is a celestial agenda I can get behind. In a few hundred years India is going to be dotted with towns called things like "Kowslap", marking the site of events from the Ghostfacebuddhana, an epic describing the liberation of Hindustan from bovine tyranny.

And now we come to the end, where I was going to reveal my momentous decision all along.

Ghostface Buddha is going to quit his job...but not for another month or so of high-profit writing in the far south.

After that...THE DOG IS OFF THE LEASH.

Feb 20, 2010

Karnatakarnage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feb 16, 2010

Fruit Against The Machine

I fell asleep on a bus today as we reached the crest of the Western Ghat mountains in southern Karnakata. The scenery was gorgeous: tall, steep-sided mountains covered in lush tropical forests, with blookimng purple flowers lining the road on the edge of sheer drops into trickling streams at the bottom of rather precipitous slopes. It was with some consternation that I woke up to find everything a vaguely yellowish color and my nostrils filled with the familiar scent of dust seeping through every possible opening in the bus's fuselage. I had completed the five-hour ascent from the coast, passed out of the rain shadow, and re-entered the southern tip of that scorching dustpan they call the Deccan Plateau, where I alighted from the bus blinking, sweating, and generally cursing myself for having cultural interests that take me away from the beach. If I were a dishonest writer I would say that the town of Hassan which I find myself in is a hot, dust-ridden shithole where one can find no more fulfilling activity than fatal self-asphyxiation. I will instead limit myself to saying that Hassan is merely a hot, dust-ridden shithole so lacking for entertainment that I almost don't mind that this cybercafe is playing "In The End" by Linkin Park on repeat.

This is all a far cry from where I found myself just yesterday, rousing myself from beachy indolence to hobble into town and hit police officers with bananas. But before we get to the part where I narrate how I came to pelt the corrupt pig-dogs of an illegitimate social order with unripened fruit there are a few things to get out of the way.

I have received notice from the bosses (corrupt pig-dogs of my own little social order) that the website launch has been pushed back from April to June. I won't bore you all with the various to-and-fro's that have plagued the professional relationship between your noble correspondent wandering India and the money men in Ohio, except to say that Midwestern venture capital has apparently been infiltrated by offspring of Jabba the Hutt. Since I completed my articles on Mumbai I have fulfilled the minimum obligations of my contract and I am essentially free to not do an ounce more of work for these people if I don't feel like I particularly desire expending my energies wrenching my joke of a payment from them like a hyena ripping a pungent carcass away from a flock of vultures. In short, for several weeks I have been seriously contemplating quitting the job and becoming a proper no-good Indophile loafer. I'll keep you posted.

On the subject of being a no-good Indophile loafer, I just spent a whole week doing fuck-all on a gorgeous tropical beach, and I've got to say, it was pretty great.

From Goa I crossed the state border and the magical line that separates it from Karnataka and entraps all the package-tour crowds and muttering, bearskin-Speedo'd Russians in the jet-ski, mixed drink paradise that is 21st century Goa. Not far from this heaven-sent political boundary, which is possibly the only good thing to come out of the Portuguese Empire besides Brazilian swimsuit models, is the quaint little Hindu pilgrimage town of Gokarna. I immediately got off the bus on the edge of town, shuffled past a handful of little temples and their cloth-shaded streets abuzz with staggeringly ancient vegetable sellers, and walked right on through to the other side. Gokarna is nice and all, but I had some serious beach-lounging to take care of, so I set off on a hike across the hot, almost barren lump of stone that separates the town from the first of its several chilled-out beaches. I quickly wearied of this adventure, as my luggage contains quite a few very thick books and at least one grapefruit-sized lump of stone. After I descended the treacherously rock-strewn slope to Kudlee beach, I began to look for somewhere to stay. Almost immediately I was waved into an unpromising cafe by a very happy-looking Indian man with no shirt. Behind the cafe he offered me my choice of several bamboo beach huts. I poked my head inside to see that they offered a bed, a mosquito net, no floor besides the sand, a thatch roof, and four surfaces which could charitably be called walls. I looked at him quite skeptically. "How much a night?" I asked. "100 rupees" he said. The price of two cheese sandwiches. The deal was made.

I wiled away a great deal of time doing absolutely nothing besides sitting in the cafe, eating pancakes, and listening to a Spanish guest's collection of underground reggae. Eventually I resolved that I should see more than the first 60 meters of the beach, so I popped out for a stroll. I learned a great deal. Both the north and south ends of the beach were comprised of sand, and it was apparently a popular place to learn the several hippie variants of juggling. I turned to walk back to my shack, resolving never to act so rashly in Gokarna again, when I ran into a pair of familiar faces: the two exuberant Brits who led me to such thorough incapacitation in Hampi.

"Oh hey! How are you?" they asked. "It's quite nice here on Kudlee Beach", they continued, "much nicer than Paradise Beach. We just came from over the hills. It's a pretty chill spot, if you like to brush your teeth in the morning to the accompaniment of last night's techno/trance music and a circle of twitching hippies." At that point I ticked Paradise Beach off my list, but felt compelled to put a good word in for trance music. The Brits conceded "Yeah it's not bad for a party, but fuck mate, I don't want a doped-up babu waving his hands in my face and going ooom*tis*oom*tis*oom*tis* while I'm trying to brush my fucking teeth at 9am."

We discussed the other beaches as well. "Have you been to Om Beach?" they asked me.
"Well, no, I'm going to visit but I don't want to stay there. I just imagine it's a little...well, it's called Om Beach."
"Yeah, it's very...om" they confirmed, "very...shambalaa".
"Shambalaa?"
"You know, like, shaam baaa laaaaaa."
"Ahhh."

It was thus resolved that we would all reside upon Kudlee Beach for the remainder of our stays. We played with the litter of puppies that lived in the bushes by the cafe and watched as Gokarna's much-loved cows (overly loved, in my opinion) ambled up and down the beach just as aimlessly as everybody else.

After this encounter I left Kudlee Beach all of three times. Once I walked into Gokarna to take pictures for work, and another time I walked over Om Beach to confirm that, yes, it is very, very om, except on the weekend when it's deluged by Indian day-trippers and banana boats. The third time I left I purchased a bundle of curvaceous, fruity projectiles and....no, still to early.

Kudlee Beach became a place where I accomplished absolutely nothing besides sleeping until mid-afternoon and losing badly in a series of hung-over chess matches. Gokarna's a place where all of us had intended to take it easy, and then we discovered that there were three of us and the ingredients necessary to produce three strongish rum-and-cokes costed less than a bowl of curry. More than once I awoke in the wee hours to question myself "How the fuck did my bed get so sandy?", only to realize that I was lying in a randomly chosen patch of sand. Many, many bowls of curry were left hypothetically unconsumed.

A typical night on Kudlee Beach would begin innocently enough with pizza and a beer or two, then the realization that the beers were about double-beer in size, then the fuck it let's 'ave us a round of Old Monk and some cokes. There would be a fire on the beach or in the back of a hut-camp, and shadowy hippies could be seen swaying about to the sounds of tabla drums and tambourines. "Oh, why don't we check out the jam?" we would say. Somehow, the jam always seemed to break up shortly after our arrival, particularly since one of the Brits, who was a saxophonist, would invite himself to play the drums. Meanwhile, I would be complaining louder than I imagined I was that I didn't much care for this flute-y Jethro Tull bullshit. It was the drums that really did it though, and they would be politely confiscated from my erstwhile bongo-playing companion, followed by a series of quiet congratulations like "oh that was nice" and "good jam, really good jam" directed at everybody except us. Those whom we had annoyed would then invite us to the next gathering up the beach, presumably because they couldn't plausibly conceal where a pack of people with bells on their ankles were heading. We would let them get a little ahead of us and then hold a conference. "Do we want to go over there?" "It might be pretty shambalaa." "Oh it's at that place by the rocks? That place is really om shambalaa. You go there to meditate until like....you die."

So the next morning, when the family types would be reading airport romances while watching their children build sandcastles, and the hippies would be hard at work on their auras and/or juggling, we would typically be miserable lumps on cafe chairs, groaning every time we forgot that in chess the queen actually can just take any piece you 'cleverly' move adjacent to it. Some girls we knew were chatting at a table halfway across the cafe. We heard them whispering "Do they have that much sand in their hair, like, all the time?"

One night I was shuffling home through the darkness, having forgotten my flashlight, when I suddenly stumbled over a large object and fell face-first into the sand. As I tried to pick myself up off my elbows and spit sand from my mouth I heard a very protesting muuOOOOOOO. I had tripped over a fucking cow lying on the beach. The bastards don't know when to give up the struggle. It shall be their own ruin.

I could narrate many more such stories, but I will desist for fear of somehow making time in your life appear as motionless as it did in mine. After about a week of idle sunshine and ill-considered social excursions, I realized I should finally leave. But not before the festival. The festival was our convenient excuse for lingering all along. "Well, shit, there's a festival coming up, we'd better stay a few more days." And indeed there was a festival in Gokarna. Nobody could have missed noticing the two massive wooden carts sitting in the main street. Each was a tower about three stories tall with white and red paper canopies and some massive wheels. We knew that these were going to be pulled up and down the street, and it was widely reported in our tourist circles that thousands of people were coming from all across South India to Gokarna for the occasion, and that furthermore they would all be throwing bananas at some eminent figure, whom rumor had to be the chief of police. Clearly not an opportunity to be missed. I loaded all my things into my pack and lugged them back into town, hoping to catch a bus out and escape before those same thousands of Indians decided to return home on the public bus network. As I passed through the streets they were completely choked with pilgrims lining up to offer prayers at the town's important temples. There were sassy rural women in tropical open-backed dresses selling bananas to sari-clad mainstream Indians like there was no tomorrow. Oh hell yes. I bought as many bananas as I could carry at the same time as my luggage, wiggled my way to an advantageous position, and waited.

In the early afternoon a team of a hundred men began pulling the mighty tower-carts. The towers were swarmed with rebounding fruit as the thousands of onlookers tossed their bananas with gusto. I noticed that the Indian men kind of threw like girls, while the Indian women got really into it, shouting praises as they cocked back surprisingly potent fruit-lobs. I like to imagine this is some sort of rural skill that women pick up, pummeling their husbands with an impenetrable barrage of fruit when they return home from a late night of drinking. As for my own throws, they were quite pathetic. I found myself much hindered by my luggage, and the inability to do much with my shoulders didn't really permit good tower-bananaing form. So while bananas were bouncing this way and that, splattering against walls and getting trampled underfoot, mine limply slid off the sides of the tower at point-blank range and kind of just sat there waiting to get run over. I was also a bit dissapointed to have been misinformed about the bananas' target. I had after all been expecting to grasp my half-ripe curved weapon and splatter my squishy goodness all over the police chief's face, or at least hit him with a banana.

I had listened to Rage Against The Machine in the morning to put myself in the right frame of mind, and I was not going to back down from my stance of vaguely directed anti-authoritarian produce-hurling. Fortunately, there was such a rain of rebounding bananas that from time to time I saw one of the hundreds of police officers standing guard shake off a banana-blow to the noggin, and I felt secure enough in the general chaos to get a little cheeky. Since my throws were a bit limp anyways, I just softly arced them at the heads of nearby cops, usually missing but occasionally tapping one on the cap. The police would feel a bump on their head, turn around, and look up at the wall from which the banana had presumably bounced, before brushing it off and continuing with their business as if nothing had happened.

THE ONLY REVOLUTION IS REVOLUTION NOW

Feb 11, 2010

As Cadelas Não São Merda

OK, enough of this heroic modesty nonsense: it's time for me to boast about something, for once. I am really, really good at travelling on Indian buses. In Hampi I challenged an acquaintance of mine to a race. We were both heading to the city of Panjim in Goa, and he was taking a private bus from the Goa travel agency cartels, and I was hellbent upon going by government bus. We agreed to time ourselves traveling to Panjim, with a system of deductions for whoever managed to save more money also. Needless to say, I blew my rival out of the water. I masterfully traversed 421 kilometers of countryside on no less than 5 local buses, including one to a town I had only heard of 2 hours before. I arrived there only 35 minutes slower on a 10-hour trip, having saved 67% of the cost. Who's the champion? I'm the champion. The champion of what? Of everything.

The bus rides were surprisingly enjoyable, as I got to watch the scenery transition from the dry, brown fields of the Deccan Plateau into the lush, jungled southwestern coast. Going down from a plateau of course you have to pass through some mountains, which in southern India form a textbook case of rain shadow. This is what the tropics are supposed to be like. Palm trees swaying in the breeze, rivers pouring down green mountainsides, monkeys jumping from tree to tree above the highway. Taking a bus down these mountains, however, could be a little more comfortable, as even the main highway was quite sinuous and bumpy and we bounced about like we were going downhill in a barrel. The worst part of it all was when me and my seat-neighbor simultaneously fell victim to the ever-present, probabilistic danger that when men are launched from a sitting position into the air, it is sometimes possible to land back in the seat on top of one's own testicles. While my companion was occupied with kneeling in the aisle and crying, I was curled up in my seat, trying to regain control of my breathing and biting my cheeks hard enough that now I can't eat salty foods.

Goa is an oddity in India. It's always been a little aloof from the rest of the country because it is a bit of a pain to get to, as you have to cross densely forested mountains to approach it from any direction. So while the rest of India was in constant flux between various warring powers, Goa was just chilling, which it continues to do to this day. Also, crucially, during the imperial days it was occupied by the Portuguese rather than the British, with the accompanying differences in cultural attitudes. For starters, even now there are Catholics everywhere. Walking around Panjim you find more churches than temples, and there are little Jesus shrines with burning incense on the street corners. The people have names like Laurenco de Souza, and you can even hear Portuguese alongside Konkani on the streets. Panjim is a lovely little place, even though it is an Indian state capital, which usually guarantees a place will be a shithole. It feels like a little piece of Central America plucked up and filled with really mellow Indian people, which is probably why I like it.

It isn't surprising that the Portuguese had more success converting the locals to Catholicism than the British did winning converts to Anglican Protestantism. Well, for starters the Portuguese had a little thing called "the Inquisition", which proved to be pretty convincing. If you thought heretics in Iberia had it bad, imagine how the Inquisitors reacted when they got to India and found Hindus worshiping elephant-headed gods and blue-skinned messiahs. On the other hand, it seems to me that Catholicism and Hinduism are naturally well-adjusted for conversions. They have a lot in common. The Catholic 'gods' are forever taking up various aspects. The Virgin Mary, who might as well be Shakti, is a great example of this as she is at one time Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Necessity, and so on. She even has place-specific manifestations, appearing on yams and shit around the world. Catholicism has its Supreme Being incarnate as a messianic "avatar" on Earth. (By the way, the film "Avatar" is HUGE in India because people are convinced that a film with the name "Avatar" starring a bunch of blue people must be hinting at Hindu legend in some way). The Catholics have an endless supply of saints, equivalent to Hindu sages, who are always undergoing the most improbable miracles like putting their decapitated heads back on. Indians love hagiographies. Catholic churches, like Hindu temples, have a large number of shrines attached that worshipers can go to to address a particular need. Vishnu or Jesus not the man for the job? Go pray to Lakshmi or St. Stephen. Catholicism and Hinduism both love bells, candles, and big processions in silly costumes, and neither is trusted in Alabama.

There is a popular belief going around India, propagated by various books on the subject, which holds that during Jesus's youth he must have come and lived in India. The reasoning seems to be something like this:

1) From the time Jesus was a teenager until his early thirties or so, there are the "missing years", in which the Bible doesn't mention what he was doing.
2) During that time he got all wise and shit.
3) So he must have been in India.

This blog is partly an attempt to document my time in India, so that none of my years may go missing and be open to the speculation of my many followers in centuries to come.

Aside from the religious aspect, which really is quite interesting, the people of Goa have also seemed to adopt a more Portuguese attitude to the pace of life, which is a refreshing change from the general intensity of the rest of India. If you've ever been to Portugal, you'll see that the similarities are striking, and that the Portuguese imperial regime, harsh as it was, was at least ameliorated by this pleasant approach to living. Portugal is basically Spain with its shirt-buttons undone. In Portugal you might see a sheared sheep walking around with a full layer of wool on its legs because somebody wanted a vest without any sleeves. The Portuguese in Goa raised pigs instead of goats, because pigs don't run as far if you fall asleep while you're watching them. Britain, France, and Portugal walk into a bar. Britain goes to the bartender and says "I'll have a gin." France says to the bartender "vin blanc, sil vous plait". They start sipping their drinks, and Portugal says to the bartender "What do you mean I'm cut off?!?! You can't cut me off! Your mother was a fish and your father was a grapefruit! I piss on the very name of your....I piss on my shoes."

That being said, Portuguese chicks are pretty hot.

In Goa I managed to check into an Indian hotel in a part of Panjim lying in the Twilight Zone. Indian hotels, by which I mean hotels where Indian people stay, are already "interesting" enough in that they are really goddamn annoying. Words cannot describe the feeling one has being awoken every single morning by a platoon of Indians clearing their throats, a dramatic ten-minute exercise which sounds like the throat-clearer is trying to dislodge a live kitten from his trachea while giving birth to the chest-bursting monster from Alien. Some mornings, such as this one in Goa, you are treated to an early-morning awakening by Indian guests who don't know which hotel room their friends are in and approach the predicament with a primitive heuristic scheme of randomly knocking on doors. "Shuwa!?" I heard along with the door-pounding some time around sunrise. "No" I groaned. The pounding grew louder. "SHUWA???". "NO" I bellowed. POUND POUND POUND "SHUWA?!?!?". "FUCK OFF YOU IDIOT". Silence...a pause....pound pound "Shuwa?" At this my patience wore out. I really don't understand what the people here find so fucking hard about locating the proper hotel room. I stomped over to the door, opened it and stepped into the hallway nude to shout something to the effect of "LISTEN YOU GODDAMN MORON, NEXT TIME YOU'RE IN A HOTEL, TRY FINDING OUT THE RIGHT ROOM IN ADVANCE, AIGHT? Now, this may have been a touch rude on my part, but I believe the experience of seeing a completely nude Ghostface Buddha burst into the hallway to chastise him probably made a memorable impression, and at least one person will henceforth think twice about knocking on random people's doors in the morning.

All of this though, was completely standard, par for the course in Indian hotels. Other incidents elevated this place to true strangeness. After touring about Old Goa and Panjim for a day, I returned to my room quite late at night. Some thirty seconds after I stepped into the room, I turned around to see the owner of the establishment standing about two feet behind me. He grinned, rubbed his fingers together, and said "Pay". My heart jumped at the sight of this man, some kind of Indian leprechaun that lurks in cupboards at night, waiting to pop out and ask for money as soon he magically detects that a guest has entered his room . I paid him and settled into bed. That's when things got weird. At about half past midnight, I noticed my room becoming a bit lighter, and realized that the door was slowly opening, and a member of the hotel staff was walking in. "Oh, you are sleeping?" he asked. No, I'm lying in bed reading the infrared newspaper.

"Yes, I'm sleeping" I responded. He then switched on the lights. "What the fuck?" I groaned. "Lights?" he asked. "OFF" I said, while making as much of a waving gesture as I could without blowing the small, flimsy sheet off my nude body. He looked at the light switch, left it on, and walked further into the room. "You are sleeping or may I sit?" he asked, pointing towards the other bed in the room. "I. Am. Sleeping" I said as authoritatively as I could. As this was clearly topsy-turvy world, he took it as an invitation to sit, and plopped himself not on the other bed, but at the foot of mine, where let me remind you I am quite naked. He then started poking through my things, read a few pages of my Mahabharata, and took a great interest in the Goa section of my India Road Atlas. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" I asked. He rotated the map about, apparently to read Portuguese upside-down, and leisurely examined the earmarks in my "Dictionary for Writers and Editors". Finally, he asked once more "you are sleeping?". "Get. Out." He took a minute or two to contemplate this, then decided he felt like leaving. He motioned me to get up. "You have to close the door" he said. In a tone dripping with contempt I answered "Trust me, I will be closing it quite securely. Don't be alarmed if you hear furniture moving." He continued to sit there, indicating I ought to get up right now and walk him to the door. So I did, instructively burning the image of my naked form on a deranged person's mind for the second time in twelve hours.

The next morning instead of checking out and risking any human contact, I tossed the spare mattress out of the broken bathroom window and jumped after it from the second floor into the empty lot below.

In between my various hostage conversations with deluded individuals, I actually got quite a bit of work done and did a full tour of Old Goa, the ruins of the once-great Portuguese capital upriver. Now, where there used to be one of the world's largest and richest cities, there isn't a whole lot but a cluster of very large and very impressive Catholic churches and some ruins. I ambled about admiring the architecture, gaping at truly massive altarpieces, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Francis Xavier. I grew hungry but realized it would be my fourth meal before nightfall if I ate and I feared becoming a hobbit, so I settled on sitting on a balcony and sipping a coke. As I left I handed the cashier a banknote and asked for my change. He sifted through the cash-drawer but couldn't find the proper change. Then he reached into a glass jar and in lieu of coinage handed me a roll of Mentos. "What the fuck is this shit?" I asked. (By this point, as you can tell, I was already having a rather expletive-laden day). "No change" he said. I looked at the Mentos in my hand. Seriously, what the fuck is this shit? Does this look like legal motherfucking tender to you? If you were up slinging on the drug corner and a fiend gave you a roll of Mentos would you take that shit? Would you walk into the Reserve Bank of India, hand a motherfucker some Mentos and ask to redeem that shit against fucking bullion? Are your Mentos on the fucking gold standard? No? You at least going to control its price fluctuations against the Yen, bitch? Get that shit out of my face...mmmmm these are delicious.

There are a lot of beaches in Goa, but they have a bit of a reputation. If I wanted to hear Balkan techno remixes of Nickelback songs I would go back to Croatia and look for a crowd of Serbs with the bottom of their asses hanging out of their shorts. That, and Goa had clearly become a Portuguese answer to Australia, but instead of becoming a penal colony it was a province for the mentally insane. Sorry, Jesus, but I'm going to have to leave you behind and spend my idle beach days across the border in Karnataka, hanging around flamboyant paintings of Hindu gods and flute-playing hippies. It's nothing personal. Oh, and if you are still in South India, we should hang. Call me. I know a great place if you like didgeridoos.

Feb 9, 2010

Quickie (Feb. 9)

I recently received via email a batch of photographs from the Mumbai slums. I wasn't allowed to take any photos of my own (nor would I have) because making a camera safari out of how crappy people's neighborhood is is a pretty dick thing to do. I decided to share these pictures though, since this site still has a pretty small, semi-exclusive audience, and because you can order the same photographs as postcards or whatever if you call the right people. I know some of you have written to me about this, so I posted them for the purpose of illustration, even though they are not my own but were sent to me by the organization that led me through the slums. Should you ever happen to be in Mumbai, I wholeheartedly recommend you go experience these places for yourself.

Also, I just posted a bunch of other recent photos too. Enjoy.

And I promise not to go around posting and immediately deleting drunken indiscretions any more.

*fingers crossed like a motherfucker*

Feb 7, 2010

Hampicapped

On second thought, let's pretend that post didn't happen. I'll do it again later with better..well, let's just not talk about that.

Sorry about that. Would have had to write myself up on a GFBWI, but let myself off with a warning. Hampi will do that to people.

Hampi is a village located in the ruins of the mighty city of Vijayanagar, capital of the empire of the same name. At its peak, in what we would call Renaissance times, it was one of the richest and most fabulous cities in the world. Then everything came to a crashing halt after a massive military blunder against an alliance of Deccan Muslims, and essentially the place was destroyed overnight and the vast majority of its people put to the sword. Now there are just ruins and ruins and ruins, scattered amongst rocks and rocks and rocks.

There are so many rocks that Indians actually hold it sacred for that reason. They built Vijayanagar on the site of what they believed was the capital of the monkey-kings of the monkey/bear demigod army that fought on Rama's side against the forces of evil in the Ramayana. The boulders lying everywhere as far as the eye can see were supposedly thrown there by the monkey/bear army while it was pumping itself up to go to war, like Kentuckians shooting into the air before a much-awaited night of heavy drinking and shooting into the air.

And speaking of the Ramayana, let us speak no more of the Ramayana. I just finished a wearying summary and commentary on the epic-poem-that-shall-not-be-named for work and don't want to think about it again for a good, long time. I did however consider the completion of this monogram to be as good a reason as any to get myself quite splendidly drunk.

Cut, as my memory did, to about four o'clock the next afternoon, and I'm wondering why the fuck there is a strip of Valium tablets next to my bed, where they came from, and why in God's name is this strip of Valiums completely empty. My suspicions turned immediately towards... hippies.

It would be fair to say that there are quite a few hippies in Hampi. Naturally so. The place is beautiful, as well as huge enough to justify spending many days here, and exhausting enough to justify sitting around doing absolutely nothing. So you can see why there are plenty of hippies. I did little to ameliorate the hippie-saturation of my life by choosing to sleep not in the village of Hampi, but in the village of Virupaggada across the river, which is much quieter and less full of idiot tourists and the rabble that leech on them, but is completely overrun with poorly-groomed people of the lethargic persuasion. In this regard, at least, I fit in marvelously. The reason Virupaggada, (pronounced "the other side of the river")is so much quieter is because to get there you have to take an extremely inconvenient boat across the waters, which keeps most of the swarms at bay but concentrates the intrepidly lazy in one spot. The Other Side Of The River is a veritable bastion of shirtlessness and floral tattoos, where people sit in dimly-lit exotic cafes between the palm trees listening to Bob Marley and Now! That's What I Call Vedic Chant Trance Remixes! Vol. 7, generally having a good time and idly contemplating maybe visiting a temple tomorrow until some asshole who won't shut up about ketamine totally kills the vibe, man.

Yet somehow, the other side of the river avoids the absurd heights of disastrous hippiedom found among the mixed tourists in Hampi Bazaar (pronounced "that side of the river"). There must be a mystical barrier above the river which prevents the passage of most of the countless Trustafarians and Om T-shirt wearers. This magical filter is, however, porous to Russians who still think the existence of underwear is American propaganda, and Spaniards from parts of the Iberian peninsula where shampoo commercials are broadcast in Swahili. Our side of the river may be hopelessly dominated by people with gender-neutral views on armpit-shaving, but at least we don't have that one guy I saw in the bazaar with a full-back tattoo of Sai Baba forming a yin-yang orb between his electrified hands, or the dude with a t-shirt of the villain from Sonic the Hedgehog as an eight-armed robotic Shiva with a red mustache.

You see now why I suspect hippies may have been involved.

Having thus lost a day to some serious sleeping, I resumed my exploration of Vijayanagar the day after. And what a day it was. You know you're going to have a good day when one of the first things you do is go to a temple where you can give a rupee to an elephant and it will kiss you on the top of your skull with its trunk. An auspicious beginning indeed.

I spent two entire days from sunrise to sunset clambering around the ruins of Vijayanagar, following paths up boulder-hills, poking through rocks to find temples by the riverside, walking along baking-hot paths to the ruins of yet another bazzar, temple compound, or palace. The place really must be seen to be believed. There is just so much. And the rocks....godDAMN there are a lot of rocks. At one point I had a distance of about three kilometers to cover, and as I did not want to retrace my path along the banana plantation road, I resolved to just go to the river in a straight line. A straight line, as it turned out, bushwhacking over some serious boulder hills, a stream, a canal, and about a billion thorn-bushes. I got to the riverside Vitthala temple and its famous stone chariot with my feet blackened by filth, my trousers a regal yellow from my new leggings made of pure burs, and my arms trickling with sweat and blood. I marched up to the ticket office, showed them my same-day ticket from the "Lotus Mahal" at the other end of my expedition, and triumphantly saved myself 250 rupees. A group of people I recognized got off an air-conditioned bus and did the same, but I earned it.

I can't tell you about everything I saw. I didn't know most of what I was looking at. Even while pushing through the brush I kept stumbling upon old stone hulks that bore no trace of their original purpose. There are just so many ruins you have to treat most of them as scenery, man-made piles of rocks to complement the rocks piled by cheering bears. But I will tell you about the single coolest thing in Vijayanagar, which is the Narasimha temple. It is a stone wall with a large statue of Narasimha inside. Narasimha, as you must be wondering, is the god Vishnu incarnated on Earth as a half-man half-lion being with four arms, sitting on a coiled, seven-headed cobra that is at once his throne and his parasol. Heavy fucking metal. Don't miss it.

But if you want something really fucking hardcore, I recommend walking along the river where you might be lucky enough to witness the same spectacle as I. I followed the sound of drums, not because I was the slightest bit interested in the would-be novelty of Indian people playing the fucking drums, but because it was directly ahead of me. Below me on a spit of sand in the river was a large gathering of people and a handful of religiously-decorated beach umbrellas. In the middle of the gathering a shirtless man was flailing about and yelping loudly. "A trance?" I thought at first. "Self-flagellation?" I thought as I drew closer, observing the back-striking motions he was making before each scream. Well, you could call it self-flagellation if your definition of that term includes repeatedly stabbing yourself in the back with a fucking axe. As the scene grew more and more intense, so did the drums, until eventually one of the crowd members intervened. He grappled with the axe-swinging man and wrenched the weapon from him. The crazed man collapsed, but then the interloper began swinging the axe at his own back in a gentler mimicry of what the first had done and was screaming unconvincingly. Then this second man started smashing the axe-blade into the ground all around the body of the first guy, who rose ferociously as if to wrestle again, only to be restrained by a quartet of writhing, wheezing priests while men in turbans frantically pushed the encroaching crowd back to safe distances.

People from around the way had stopped their tractors up on the hill and were watching this like it was the most natural of things. Children grew bored and splashed about in the water. And this is a country where people get worked into a screaming fit over fucking cricket. If anybody -even an Indian- tells you they understand this culture, they are lying.

I made it back to the other side of the river every night, and managed to spend even more time doing nothing, this time under the pernicious influence of people who were pretending not to be hippies...the most devious kind. It was around this time that I wrote this post for the first time, and I consider it one of my more astute moves that I struck that little composition from the record. In a burst of energy I had finished my writeup of Hampi and Vijayanagar, and for the first time ever I was actually up to date with my writing. This, I figured again, was as good a reason as any to get quite splendidly drunk. And that's how that happened and how this came to this.

The circle is now whole.

Feb 2, 2010

Deccan A Box

I quickly tired of wandering about the northern edge of the Deccan, so I decided to travel south and get all up in its guts. Its miserable, dessicated guts.

I crossed the state border into the northeastern Karnataka and immediately discovered why not that many people come around here: it is unrelentingly and unforgivingly hot and dry. This is the sort of place where daily average temperatures should be expressed in scientific notation but are typically expressed in expletives. Here's another unnatractive quality of the place: the food is terrible. Thus far I can't say I care for South Indian food. It consists entirely of unflavored rice cooked to order in the following variety of ways: dosa, fried and battered rice dough in the shape of a giant triangle and served with sambar and chatni; idli, a patty-shaped lump of mushed rice served with sambar and chatni; uttapam, a lightly-toasted mushed rice pancake served with sambar and chatni; vadar, a deep-fried rice dough donut served with sambar and chatni; and rice, a pile of rice served with sambar and chatni. Though made of a highly nutritious grain (rice), these dishes are usually so airy and puffy that they cease to quell hunger after a distressingly short time. How they even grow rice around here is a mystery to me. Presumably they need plenty of water, but the land is incredibly dry and the hue and texture of the soil suggest it should be about as fertile as a golem's womb. If you need further evidence that the people of this region could use a cooler climate and heartier meals, consider that the half-sleep of a typical bus here is about 5 kilometers, the "half-sleep" being a measure of human decay describing the travel distance after which half of a vehicle's occupants will be sleeping, unconscious, or dead.

I stopped first in the city of Bijapur, which like the rest of northeast Karnataka is decidedly provincial in character. It was for a couple centuries the capital of the Adil Shahi dynasty, a family you need know nothing about except that they were one of several Muslim dynasties ruling parts of the central Deccan around the 16th and 17th centuries before falling to the Mughals, and they built a bunch of shit. It was this shit they built which enticed me thence. Bijapur is one of those cities that has decayed in a good way: it hasn't grown much bigger than it was in its prime, and it's so unimportant and sleepy now that you can walk down most streets without being hassled with postcards or being hit by a bus.

And the Adil Shahis' shit was certainly impressive. The town is most known for the enormous tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah, a structure known as the Golgumbaz, an Urdu word which translates roughly to "Big-ass Dome". It is topped in fact by the world's second largest dome, only slightly smaller than the one on St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, a detail nobody in Bijapur will let you forget. The people of Bijapur possess that charmingly provincial quality of assuming that since people from all over the world come to see it, the Golgumbaz must be "world-famous." Show of hands: who here has actually heard of it? I promise not to tell the Bijapuris. They're too nice for me to break their hearts. When you go inside this tomb, you first notice how plain it is, and that it earns all its grandeur from its size. You look up and say "yup, that's a big dome" and you're about ready to leave. Then you notice amongst the clamor of echoing shouts and wails that nobody around you actually has their mouths open, and you see people milling about the base of the dome high above. You climb up about eight floors through one of the buttressing towers, and then re-enter the building at the terribly misnamed "Whispering Gallery". Perhaps in more refined times, when the lowly commoners knew their place or at least basic manners, the Whispering Gallery was used for its intended purpose: having incredible acoustics that whip even low whispers audibly around the circular base of the dome to the opposite side of the gaping hole above the massive cenotaph chamber. It also affords an incredible perspective of just how incredibly large the dome is, and how far one would tumble over the low bannister. Nowadays of course it is the "Fucking Loud As Shit Gallery" because people have discovered that it is even more fun to make your shouts three times as loud than it is to make your whispers reasonably audible. I don't really mind the noise in and of itself (this is India after all), but I find it slightly sad that every single person testing this remarkable feature uses it to shout "CAN YOU HEAR ME?!?!" when we could have fucking heard you already, you bloody twit.

The other relatively well-known monument in Bijapur is the Ibrahim Rauza (which was a gorgeous tomb-mosque pair in a tranquil garden), exactly on the opposite side of town. The majority of visitors who even bother with two (most stop by the Golgumabaz and get back on the tour bus) take rickshaws or horse-drawn tongas across the city. But I said "No! I shall walk, dammit!" It was a rewarding decision. I first headed to the Jumma Masjid, the Sultans' greatest mosque, which was graceful and pleasant to the eye. From there though I resolved to keep walking in a straight line until I crossed the city. I couldn't walk very far at a time, because every few minutes I would stumble across another little unremarked domed tomb or mosque, tucked away through alleys or in random people's back yards. I would approach through the enclosure's gate, threaten to kick the various barking dogs, and say hello to whoever of the family was home, relaxing with a cup of tea and admiring the nobleman's tomb they were using to store spare buckets and attach the far side of their laundry line to. I later had tea with a journalist from the Deccan Herald, and he told me that there are no less than 94 nationally protected monuments in Bijapur, which he claims is the most of any town in India. He entreated me to highlight in my writings that many of them are suffering due to encroachment. That is to say, basically because tourists haven't heard about them nobody gives a shit to watch over them, and people turn them into houses and barns and the like and damage the structures by drilling holes and adding beams to tie up their buffaloes or whatever. In one case this casual coexistence may be charming like I described, but in many other cases it can cross the line into endangering historical treasures.

Aside from generally bitching about the Deccan, this area has some appeal otherwise I wouldn't be here. One of my favorite things about Karnataka, and South Indian states in general, is that the writing is awesome. Kannada, the language of these parts, isn't even my favorite but there is no denying that the script kicks ass. It looks like this:

(This is a list of actual Karnatakan place names in Kannada but not a real sentence)
ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ  ಬಿಜಾಪುರ್  ಬಾದಾಮಿ  ಪಟ್ಟದಕಲ್  ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು
Like I said, awesome.

Now, on a completely unrelated subject, you may think Google is the ultimate search engine for all purposes, but this is not true. In my line of work I get to learn that there is a certain pleasure in loading up AskJeeves.com (now the sadly Jeeves-less ask.com, but imagine he's there) and inquiring of the affable chap "Which testicle did Lance Armstrong have amputated?" and "Do whales have vaginas?" My employers demand the strictest accuracy from my reporting. Also, if you accidentally enter "ghostfacebuddha.blogspot.com" into a Bing search bar instead of the address bar, this humble blog turns up on the page for entries 81-90 of the query ""i am" + stupid".

Back to India. From Bijapur I moved on to Badami, an even more provincial town that was also a grand capital back in the day. In this case it was the seat of the Chalukyas, a Hindu dynasty whose empire was around from the 6th to 8th centuries and at one point ruled most of southern and central India. There were of course temples and fortifications up on the cliffs above town, and the by-now wearying sight of cave temples, but the true appeal of Badami is in its setting. It lies beneath a horseshoe of bright red stone bluffs with a shimmering lake in the middle. Wandering about the edges of town and up above the cliffs, I noticed that the geology here has a distinctly wild-west flavor, with dramatic outcroppings of rock glowing in the sunset, and even a showdown-worthy road called Main Street. I was seized immediately with the desire to film a Bollywood Western, with Indians as the cowboys, Indians in makeup as the Indians, and myself as the anti-hero. This is how I envisioned one of the key scenes:
"Stop! Are you not Deadeye Dravid?"
"I suppose I am."
"Are you the rapscallious villein who has stolen my cows!?"
"Well, that's a-dependin' on if it was your cattle I was a-rustlin'"
"Return them to me at once, you foe of dharma, you treacherous dacoit!"
"I'm afraid I can't do that."
"You don't mean..."
"I do."
"No."
"Yes. It's too late for your precious steers."
"You....you..."
"I bitch-slapped your cattle, pardner"
"REVOLVERS AT NOON, VILE FIEND!"
I climbed up to the aforementioned cave temples past a sign that proclaimed, in three languages "BEWARE OF MONKEY MENACE". I was unimpressed. They seemed more concerned with sitting on rocks and drinking from discarded bottles of orange Slice and they hardly seemed menacing to me. Then, as I descended, a school group was coming the other way and a screeching rhesus monkey assaulted a girl, pulling violently at her dress until she shrieked and tossed away her package of creme-filled biscuits which it gnawed at through its half-open packaging with relish.

I felt like walking around the rim of the lake. Little did I know this would begin one of the weirdest mornings of my time in India, a superlative I do not grant lightly. I approached the edge of the lake, only to find that the bottom of the ghats were completely flooded. I was just about to walk in the opposite direction when the example of two Indians showed me what to do. For a moment my life ceased to be a movie and became a videogame. I found myself compelled to climb with some difficulty onto a chest-high ledge sticking about five inches out of a decorated waterside wall. I then had to shimmy sideways on this precariously narrow ledge above a body of vile green slush, pressing my body against the wall and gripping onto small ornamental outcroppings with my hand. The distance was some 30 feet, but progress was slow, not least because at some points I had to make dramatic duck-and-swoop movements along stretches of the wall where the tiny handholds were covered in monkey poop.

From here, already a bit exasperated at the travails required for a simple circuit of the lake, I pressed on through an overgrown, boulder-strewn path lined with sharp thorns. Through the thornbushes I caught a glimpse o what was unquestionably a painted concrete statue of grooming chimpanzees. Why the fuck this town needed to be reminded of monkeys, why the statue was of African monkeys, and why it was over here in random, hard to reach bushes were all questions that racked my brain. I pushed onwards, and soon discovered to my indescribable pleasure and confusion that just ahead were some rather over-the-top statues of cavemen. I shielded myself from the thorns as I went further ahead and found that this entire unvisited side of the lake was dotted with dozens of statues that chronicled, in hilarious fashion, the evolutionary and technological development of pre-historic man from ape to the dawn of war and religion. Here there would be agroup of terrified cavemen approached by a tiger. There there would be hairy-ass people launching the first canoe. As the figures grew more and more modern, and more and more Indian in appearance, they started wearing clothes, domesticating oxen, and falling in battle after being speared by an elephant-riding warrior whose weapon was nowhere to be seen.

As I delicately passed through this wild garden of delights, I found my path completely blocked by a trio of buffalo. There was no way around their leader, and up close one becomes acutely aware of how damn big they are and you reflect that their 16-inch horns aren't for nothing. However, I remained calm and found icy resolve in my training as a buffalo-herding warrior. Mere inches from the beast's horns, I raised my hand the High-Claw Tiger Pimp position. I then shouted "AAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!" and began the Flying Swan Slap, halting my attack in Hooker Cowered pose as the buffalo retreated before I was forced to administer the actual blow.

The remainder of my explorations of Badami were not quite as intense. Aside from some trivial bribery for trespassing, the most memorable moment came when I attempted to wipe perspiration from my brow. I swept my hand across my forehead, only to find not sticky, wet sweat but a flat, dry surface covered in small mineral grains, like a tabletop where a toddler has tried to salt his french fries but missed the plate. It is too goddamn hot.

I day-tripped to Pattadakal. Don't bother. It's another Chalukya capital, widely hailed as one of the cradles of Indian architecture. I was interested because it was said to have a number of "test-temples", some of which became prototypes for all Indian temples thereafter, and others which were supposedly unique because they tried innovations that nobody ever took up. I was excited for a little variety, but when I arrived only a few of the temples could even elicit from me a reaction beyond "My, my, that is a little curious." Here are the sort of innovations I am talking about. I had to take a photo to get the content of this sign right but it reads: (and just imagine I put [sic] everywhere)
GALAGANTH TEMPLE. This temple facing east built around a.d. 750 was originally a large one, probably having on plan garbha grima with pradakshina patha antarala entered by eastern door way. Sabha mantapa and mukha mantapa but last two are completely missing. The most striking feature of this temple is its majestic shikhar demonstrated an evolved state of rekha nagar prasad raising in four stages surmounted by amalka and kalasha. The easterned side of the shikhara had sokamasa projection evident by existing side walls. The deva koshta on the other wall of ghana dwara on the wall of the pradakshina patha flanked on either side by windows are empty except the southern ghana dwara accomodating a beautifully carved sculpture of eight-handed Shiva as Andakagurumardana. A testimony of the achievmen in sculptural art. Another note worthy of antarala having bas reliefs of Ganga and Jamuna on their respective vehicals at the bottom and elaborately carved Nataraj accompanied by musicians on the lintel. The close sytlistic resemblance betwee the Galaganath Temple and those at Alampur sugests that it was constructed by the craftsmen brought from Alampur in Andhra Pradesh.
I actually understand half this shit and I still don't care. The prototypes were even less interesting, because like all prototypes they were fairly small, old, and basic. They were faded from 1200 or more years of weather, had no active temple life, and offered no interesting new themes. Of course not. The rest of India adopted the same ideas, then built them bigger and better.

On the way back to Badami I had the pleasure of sitting at a bus stand next to a man who was curled up in a corner and laughing at nothing in particular. I was called onto a private minibus, a rattletrap no doubt, but the fastest way back. Then I noticed the bus driver was blind in one eye. And there are people say private enterprises don't need to be regulated. Of course some smug dickwad libertarian will come up to me and say "The market will regulate itself. Rational actors in the marketplace will of neccessity require that bus drivers possess proper depth perception." Then I will say to them "Counterpoint: India". Even so, douchebag will respond that that might be the way things are in India, but not how they are in a properly rational country like those in the West. You see, India may be fucking insane, but you could hardly call the West full of reasonable people either. I point this out. Then I call him a racist. Game, set, and match.