I awoke. Everything was a golden brown. I looked around in bewilderment. This was not the same bus I had fallen asleep on. Had I unconsciusly transferred buses? And if so, where was I? I crinkled my nose at a fleeting smell and felt that in the dry, oppressive heat my boogers had fried themselves into sharp chits with the consistency of an Aztec obsidian dagger within my nose. There was no doubt about it; I was back in the Deccan.
I came to my senses and looked around. Everything seemed to confirm that I had passed Hyderabad and was on my way to Bidar, a dusty backwater even in a land of dusty backwaters. Everyone else in the bus was sleeping too, beaten into unconsciousness by the currents of scorching air tearing through the windows of the bus. It was a neccesary misery; if the bus were to slow down, the furnace-like gusts of air would be replaced by flocks of vultures bursting through the windows and squabbling over perches in the luggage racks as they wait to see who's the first to die.
So this is freedom, I thought. Upon leaving Tirupati I had made a decisive cut, a final end to my toils for the ever-ungrateful bastards who henceforth held the purse-strings of my travels in India. I've now reached the threshold of self-sustainabilty so now, I am proud to say, I'm on my own shiat, biatch. One alter-ego has been consigned to the rubbish-bin of history, whence it shall probably be thrown into a gutter or an empty lot to be nibbled on by pigs until it is set on fire in giant trash-burnings that spill into the street and set people's car paint ablaze (that happens here). Only Ghostface Buddha remains.
I woke up some 700km from the scene of my last labor, and took immediately to savoring the taste, the feel, and the smell of Freedom. I squirmed in my seat to try and stretch my muscles after a night on the road, and found that I had I had clearly left the sweart-drenched climate of the far south behind. Only where I stuck to my chair was there any feeling of moisture. Elsewhere, I noticed odd accumulations of salt on my body, crusting up my collarbone and getting knotted in tangles of Brillo-pad tummy hair. Freedom indeed. Somehow I had expected a big sloppy chili dog accompanied by the sounds of a college marching band, or at least a plate of cocktail sausages with little flags in them. As for the smell of Freedom, out in the baking nothingness, all I could detect was the fumes of the bus itself poisoning my charred nostrils with an odor not unlike a napalm-coated village of Communist sympathizers. The smell of Freedom, at least, was just right.
Bidar is such a dusthole that the Indian Air Force has put its training academy there. The Indian military brass are the first to admit that when fast-moving vehicles are concerned in this country, it is best to center them where there is nothing of value to crash into. Even if a trainee loses control and ejects, leaving his training jet to crash into the desolate countryside and kill a passing goat, the military wouldn't even have to compensate the farmer. "The goat would have died out there anyways" they'll argue. Aside from the odd fighter jet screeching overhead, there isn't a whole lot of motion once you get off the main roads of Bidar. I would turn into a small red-dirt alleyway to check for any quaint scenes to photograph, only to find myself on the edge of town looking off a slope into miles and miles of emptiness.
In the town itself are varios attractions including the requisite fort and the ruins of a once-esteemed Islamic university. Right next to my hotel was a park full of the tombs of the Badir Shahi sultans, who were kings here after the Bahmani sultans but before the Adil Shahi sultans, who were in turn conquered by the...whatever. I have a theory about medieval Deccan history. The only reason their culture was able to flourish so greatly in those war-riven times was not despite the era being centuries of bloodbaths, but because of it. A good battle was probably the only form of irrigation you could hope for in ten months of the year. I imagine grateful peasants bowing before the king and saying "Thank you, oh Master, for spilling the blood of our enemies upon the fields, such that it flowed like rivers, whatever those are. We may have wheat this year." I entered the park as usual to poke about the tombs and was miffed to find they charged a little entrance fee. This fee, I discovered, was for the aesthetic upkeep of the park, and by "aesthetic upkeep" I mean "bizarre Barcelona-esque landscaping around the ancient tombs complemented by statues of naked golden babies hugging geese and fish."
About a mile outside of town lies a cluster of large, crumbling tombs (these ones belonging to the Bahmani sultans), some of them in such an advanced state of ruination that their domes look like half of a cracked eggshell. They call the village Ashtur, but I don't know where the village is. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of life around, just a handful of huge tombs, the hot, brown earth, and an endless sky. The air was so still, and the scenery so implacably limitless and monotonous that even tumbleweeds disdained to roll on through. What plants there were to be seen were firmly rooted. I stared at a bush for a moment, entranced by its utter motionlessness, even for a bush. Not a twig stirred in the still silence of the countryside and the bush seemed to roll its would-be eyes at me and say "What? You want me to move? To where? Look at this shit, what's the point?" before grumpily resuming the silence of its timeless, dusty squat. I tromped about from one tomb to another, and found myself most unpleasantly reminded of that other Deccan sensation, the infiltration of dust in one's sandals, from which is created a sticky brown mire where the pressure and sweat of your feet turn the surface of your footware to a wet, grainy, shit-colored morass. I tried to remain optimistic. This was my first day of freedom, after all. I told myself that at least if I was lost and starving out in the countryside I would be able to catch insects to eat by taking a nap with my gluey feet pointed at a termite mound. I almost didn't mind taking my shoes off to enter the tombs. I hopped across the scorching stone floors with great dispatch, only to be utterly dismayed that the hot floors were a blessing compared to the Deccan crabgrass towards which I had so urgently and gracelessly bounded.
As I shuffled back across the stone making little puffing sounds of "Ooo ahhhh ahhh", I was pulled into an open tomb by a curious Muslim man. Oh great, soon he shall kindly offer his services as a guide, I thought. He did, but he was no ordinary guide. He led me over to a leather messenger bag in the darkness and started pulling out reams of documents, grabbing my hands and forcing me to flick through them. He seemed particularly intent on showing me a genealogical table of the Bahmani kings that continued to the present day. Just like Indian royals, I thought, to continue their dynastic pretensions even when they had lost their throne to another line of sultans in the 1500's. He laid the document side-by-side with a local newspaper clipping in which he was clearly illustrated. I began to read. "Descendant of Bahamani kings maintains ancestors' tombs in life of penury." I was there face-to-face with the current head of a much-declined royal household that had once controlled all of south-central India and was now reduced to a snaggle-toothed man whose best luck in life so far seemed to have been being given a free village hut from the Archaeological Survey of India when they evicted his family from squatting in the tombs themselves. I had the vague feeling of brushing dust off a walking exhibit of Bidar's history, and that this history was about to use the sudden revelation of its ancient mystique to ask for money.
I may not have had to pay our tax-loving, freedom-hating, communist, fascist Kenyan Nazi terrorist President a dime in taxes this year, but I did have to give the fucking Sultan of Bidar twenty rupees.
Freedom is dead.
Showing posts with label Karnataka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karnataka. Show all posts
Mar 24, 2010
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.
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."
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
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 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.
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:
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)
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.
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 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 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 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.
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