one more for the road

Pig Fever

Unfortunately this is the first chance I've had to write in two weeks. But things have not been quiet. Since the last time I posted, Pune has become the center of India's imaginary swine-flu "epidemic".  If you believe the hype, no one is safe. The newspapers have barely covered anything else for two weeks now, and everyone has taken to walking around the city wearing flimsy cotton face masks that would be so pathetically inadequate if this were really the deadly outbreak everyone thinks it is that I'm not sure whether to consider them an under- or over-reaction. It's especially comical watching people ride by on motorcycles with a cotton mask and no helmet on. The actual numbers behind this epidemic are pretty simple: a few people have the sniffles and a whole lot of people are hysterical. Across India, a country of almost 1.2 billion people, the death count remains around 20 (20!). I myself was almost certainly infected at the beginning of the summer, as was almost everyone else on my program, and we, like the other 999 out of 1,000 people who get swine flu, survived. You have more of a chance of choking to death on a samosa than you do of succumbing to swine flu.  For that matter, you have more of a chance of dying in any one of the other many, many ways people die young in India. But it's a little hard to get these statistics across to people when Pune newspapers do things like publish the headline "MUMBAI'S SWINE FLU HELL" in flaming letters across a black background on the front page, and then bury an article about how doctors say the swine flu is actually no big deal on page 7, behind the advertisements. I guess that's how you sell newspapers.

But if the reality behind all this is benign, the reality in front of it, so to speak, is less so. The government, in what I have to assume is a frantic attempt to prove to the world that India is a "modern" nation that can handle a "modern" epidemic like swine flu, has been behaving like a regular old pain in the ass, and being quite counterproductive in the process. Not only are they doing nothing to curb the mass hysteria that is already disrupting life and hurting the economy here, they are actually exacerbating everything by telling people to stay out of public places and doing things like forcibly closing all the schools and colleges in Pune for 3 weeks and sending the students home. I went down to the big shopping district yesterday to get some things, and half the businesses were shuttered and the streets were half empty except for a truck full of worthless, aggressive police officers who were wandering around with their lathis harassing innocent people, and who angrily scolded Sam and me for not wearing face masks. I have no numbers on how badly local businesses have been hit, but it must be significant.  Our teachers, fearing that our little Sanskrit program was about to get shut down as well, decided last week to switch the schedule around, administering final exams and collecting final projects a week early in case it was the last chance to do so. Thankfully, the mayor or commissioner or lieutenant or whoever it was decided not to bother with us, or else forgot about us, and we are having classes until this Friday as originally planned, and now without the stress of looming exams. But the change in schedule meant last week was unexpectedly, exceptionally busy.  So that's why I haven't written in a while.

Even though the city is sort of dead and Independence Day celebrations on Saturday were all messed up, I still managed to have a couple adventures over the weekend, including being fed a communal lunch by a bunch of young Muslim guys in a gigantic mosque that I wandered into. (Quick summary: best dal I've had yet in Pune; I was wearing a little plastic Muslim yarmulke that they gave me at the door; little kids were straining to get a peek; the Muslims had an I-told-you-so field-day with the swine flu epidemic; I had to decide whether or not to admit to them I was Jewish when they asked what religion I was [I admitted it. Everything was cool. I think]; one sanctimonious young zealot tried to give us a fire and brimstone routine; and on the way out they gave me some foul smelling medicine decorated with a caricature of an African man with big lips holding a spear.) (Also, fact check--India has about 154 million Muslims, by the most trustworthy estimate. That's 13.4% of the population. The Muslim population of Pakistan, by contrast, is about 170 million. Pakistan is home to about 3 million Hindus, or 1.8% of its population.) But the most interesting part of the weekend was when I found a little tiny synagogue in a small corner of the city, on a tiny street called Jew Lane. I noticed the sign and stepped into the courtyard on Saturday afternoon and found a little old Indian grandma wandering around, and I wasn't sure if she was a care taker, or a shabbos goy, or if this was even still a working synagogue, or if she had any idea why there was a six pointed star on the door of her building. And the Indian grandma spoke no English, but eventually she got me to sit on a bench and sat down next to me, presumably to wait for a maintenance guy to open the door so I could see inside but really I wasn't sure what was going on, and we sat there together for a while in pleasant, alinguistic cameraderie, enjoying the day, and then after some time she turned to me and said, "Jews." And I smiled back and agreed: "Jews." And then I said, in the tiny bit of Hindi I know, "I'm Jewish." And she nodded and said back in Hindi, "I'm Jewish too."  Not what I was expecting.

So what I find out, later, when I have come back at 6:30 for the evening service, is that this synagogue was built in 1912, and its congregation consists of a population I have read about and have been looking for ever since I got here: the descendants of Jews who wound up on the Western coast of India in 200 BC, in the wake of the Babylonian exile. I'm not really sure how their history worked, or how much of a Jewish identity they maintained in the two thousand years before European Jews found them and taught them how to do Judaism European-style, but I think their identity, theology, and also their population, were bolstered over the years by contact with Persian and other central Asian Jewish trading populations, who set up trade routes and built communities in the coastal cities here. In fact maybe they are mostly the descendants of these medieval traders. I really don't know. All I know is that before 1912 they didn't have a synagogue in Pune and just had services in private homes, and that attending the service there was one of the most identity-bending things I've ever done. Imagine going to the weirdest place you've ever been to in your life, spending a few weeks there until you just start to adjust to it, and then suddenly finding a part of it that is intimately enmeshed with one of the deepest parts of your childhood. These people were Indian--they looked Indian, they spoke Marathi, their body language was Indian. But they wore yarmulkes and chanted familiar Hebrew prayers and talked to me about Israel and the Torah. (Actually they didn't look entirely Indian. I swear there was a moment when the Rabbi looked exactly like an Indian uncle Franklin.)  There were only about five old men at the service, but halfway through a young Indian couple walked in, the woman in traditional Indian clothes, and they got the rabbi's blessing during the service and said some prayers in Hebrew and walked out, and I found out later they were recently married, and Jewish.  Do I have anything in common with these people?  Should I feel anything in common with these people?  Do I feel anything in common with these people?  I don't know the answers to any of these questions.

And I guess that's sort of a poetic way to wrap up my time here in Pune--bringing it all full circle and still being kind of confused.  This will probably be my last blog post.  Friday afternoon I take the train to Bombay, and early in the morning I fly to Calcutta for two days (Live goat sacrifices at the Kali temple every Saturday!  Be there.) and then I come home.  There are so many things I still want to do in Pune, and there are many places across India I still want to visit, but I guess they'll have to wait for other trips.  For this week, I'm posting two small photo albums I have been putting together over the summer.  The first is a collection of random shots from around Pune and some of my trip to Bombay.  The second is an album of some of the hilarious signage I have seen while here.  If I get a chance I may post about my time in Calcutta, but probably I will just see you all in New York or Boston in the next week or two.  Thanks for reading!  

Click here for some Pune living.  Click here for some Pune signage.

The Shakedown or Cop Calculus

Today is a holiday in Maharashtra and our classes are cancelled for the day. Yesterday after class I went home and got a little work done, and then I went to meet up with Sam and Cary to hang out and figure out what we were going to do with our free night.  We talked about a lot of things, and eventually fell to talking about all the music we like that we haven't heard in a while, and we suddenly had the great idea to ditch all of our more ambitious plans for the night and just get some beer, go to Sam's porch, play some cards and listen to some records, which idea we were all very pleased with.  So with our decision made we headed back to my house, grabbed a little to eat, and then headed to the liquor store to get some beer.

There are plenty of liquor stores within a few minutes walk of here.  Liquor is much more taboo here then it is at home, especially since we live in a Brahmin neighborhood, but it's not illegal (the way it is in Gujarat, for example) and the liquor stores are all legitimate, well-lit, well-established stores.  Still, for the sake of discretion, the liquor stores here give you your purchase in a black plastic bag, and the idea is that no one will be able to see through the bag and know that you are carrying something dirty and shameful.  The only problem is that no one needs to see through the bags, because liquor stores are the only places in the city that have black plastic bags in the first place.  Walking around with a heavy black plastic bag dangling from your hand basically feels like having a neon sign flashing above your head that says: "I am a dirty white degenerate with no morals!!!"  On the walk back to my house we realize we didn't really think this out well beforehand, and we notice we are drawing attention from a lot of the people we pass, and we start to feel very uncomfortable.  We have the right to drink, and I personally don't think there's anything morally wrong with drinking some beers and playing some cards, but walking through this neighborhood I am definitely starting to wish we had at least brought a backpack or something to conceal our black plastic bags.  Sam and Cary strongly agree, and just as we get near my apartment we are in the middle of talking about how we will never do this again without a backpack or larger bag, and suddenly I hear someone say, "hey".  The someone turns out to be an Indian police officer sitting on the back of a parked motorcycle with a chubby older man who isn't in uniform but has that dull, lazy confidence that marks him out instantly as a cop or someone very used to authority.  The uniform strolls over and says in broken English, "what's this?" and peers into the bag.  I decide not to piss him off, and to just play it open and honest, and I respectfully say, "oh, it's just some beer.  We are going to my apartment to have a quiet night sir."  And he says, "Beer?  Where is your license?"  Um, what?  "Your license, permit, to carry beer," and after a little confusion we realize that he is asking to see--not our proof of age--but some sort of license allows us to legally walk down the street with closed containers of alcohol on our way somewhere else.  All three of us look at each other, and in an instant we all come to the same conclusion.

Under the circumstances, here is what we assume: we are foreigners walking down the street at night in a Brahmin neighborhood with visible alcohol--something perhaps suspect and a little inappropriate, but by no means illegal.  The police are bored and have found what they think is a great opportunity to have some fun and hopefully make a little money by harassing some white kids who are on shaky ground.  The "license" they are asking for is a code word for the money that we will have to pay them to "buy" the license and continue our walk home without problems.  And there is a chance they are making all of this up on the spot.

This is what we all think, and it's a little bit scary, but there are a number of options open to us yet, and we decide to start out slowly.  The first trick we try is to fake stupidity.  We pretend we don't understand, and when he insists I hand him my driver's license and Cary gives him his passport, as if that's what he was asking for.  This was our first mistake.  Not only is the cop not placated, but now he has our IDs and won't give them back.  Okay, lesson learned.  Now we are one teeny, tiny bit older and wiser.  Next move: we try to give the cop the beer.  Here, you take it and we will just walk away.  We're sorry.  We don't want it anymore.  Nope, uniform is not having it and neither is his mentor, to whom he seems to look often for guidance.  Then we try: look, we will leave the beer here on the sidewalk and just walk away.  Nope.  That's not it either.

So next we trot out the good old fashioned, American, one-white-guy-to-another routine, the one where you say, "Oh, gee whiz officer, I had no idea.  Really, I didn't know.  I'm really sorry," and unless you are unlucky or doing something serious or aren't white, the cop thinks about it and says, "All right you knuckleheads.  Run along and be safe, and don't let me catch you out here again."  It doesn't always work in the States, and even if the Indian officer could have understood our English well enough I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work here.  And it doesn't.

Now it's the cop's turn.  He says, "You come to station.  Okay?  You come to police station," and he hails a rickshaw for us to get into.  Now things are getting more serious and we are getting pretty scared.  There is no way I'm going to an Indian police station unless my other options are seriously exhausted.  I don't want to think about what it will be like if we follow them to the station.  The best-case scenario probably involves mountains of forms and bureaucratic wastes of time and money and possibly drags on for days.  Plus there's a fair chance we'll have to spend the night in a cell until it's "business hours" again, and meanwhile they'll be thinking of all sorts of ways to screw us and take our money.  No, we are not going to the police station, and we don't even have to look at each other to agree on that.

Then Cary, in a stroke of tactical brilliance, tries out a new approach.  He says, "A permit for carrying liquor?  That doesn't sound right to me.  Are you sure?"  And when they say, "yes yes, come to station," he just says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Nope."  The cops are unarmed and have no radio, and Cary is trying to feel out how serious they are about this and whether it's a bluff.  And surprisingly, we see the cops flinch and get a little sad, and we can tell they aren't quite sure what to do now.  They just meekly insist again that we come to the station, and Cary, sensing the advantage, pushes it further.  He says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Either you let us go, or you take us to the US Embassy.  We want to talk to the US Embassy."  At the mention of the US Embassy the cops flinch more.  Cary's message is understood by everyone involved: 'Okay Mr. Police Officer.  You can play a game with us, but we're not going to make it easy.  We want you to know that if you go through with this, we are going to make this a serious bureaucratic and legal pain in the ass for you.  Plus now you have to know how the US Embassy works.'  So we come to an impasse.  The cops keep insisting that we get in the rickshaw they have hailed and come to the station, and we keep insisting that we want to get the US Embassy involved immediately or no deal.  There are moments when everyone stands there quietly looking around, waiting for something to happen.  No one knows quite what to do.

Late that night, after all this is over, Cary and I sit around parsing all the angles of this encounter as we remember it.  The cops had a big upper hand, not only because they were on home turf, but also because they knew the laws and we didn't, and moreover, they knew that we didn't know the laws, and we knew that they knew, and they knew that we knew that they knew, and all this compounded their advantage.  And in fact, it turns out that they had an even bigger advantage over us than we realized, and this is that it actually is illegal to carry alcohol in Maharashtra without a special permit, even if it is sealed.  So they had legitimate grounds to detain us.  They knew this the whole time and we didn't, and it sort of gave them a rock solid foundation for harassing us.  

However, we were not totally helpless; we had our confidence that we weren't doing anything wrong (misguided but useful to us), and our obstinacy, and our US Embassy ploy, and whatever else we could come up with before the situation ceased to be manageable.  Cary, examining all the angles in retrospect, came up with an interesting question.  What if we had just walked away?  The cops had no weapons, no radio, no hand cuffs, not even a club, and it was dark, and we were three tall young men and they were only two.  Would they have chased us down?  Would they have tried to tackle us?  Cary proposes that the cops would quickly have seen that forcing a violent confrontation with three white guys over a tiny infraction is not worth the risk or the time, and they would have let us go.  It's an interesting possibility, and one that I am very happy to leave completely hypothetical for the rest of my life.  Because the fact of the matter is that we were in a game with the police and we didn't know most of the rules or what was at stake for us or for them.  We didn't even know if we were breaking a real law or not.  Maybe the cops would have let us go because that would be the better decision for them.  On the other hand maybe hurting an Indian cop's pride and challenging him to save face would lead him to do things that weren't strictly "worth it" for him in cool, mathematical terms.  Moreover, there's a good chance that any cop who is accustomed to patrolling and confronting people without weapons and without radios has thought about this possibility before, or maybe even dealt with it, and has already come up with plenty of ways of handling it that we couldn't foresee.  I'd be very interested to know what they are, since I can't imagine them.  Any parents reading this are hereby assured that experimenting on this hypothesis was not ever at any point close to happening.  It's just good conversation.

Back on the street the situation is not resolved and we are getting pretty shaken.  And actually, the cops seem a little shaken too.  They are starting to get embarrassed that they don't speak English very well and have gotten themselves into this situation that they can't really handle, and they are probably starting to worry that this is going to be more trouble then it's worth if the US Embassy gets involved.  I would guess that they are small city cops who have never confronted Americans before and probably don't really know how the US Embassy works or what it can and can't do, or how much trouble they can get in for denying us access to it.  Of course, we don't really know this either, but this is a bluff that seems to be working for us because this time we have the advantage that they are the ones with something to lose if the embassy gets involved, and plus they don't know much about the US Embassy, and we know that they don't know, and they know that they don't know, and we know that they know that we know that they don't know, etc. etc.  

And in the face of all this pressure, the cops soften even further.  They say, "No Hindi?  No Marathi?"  And we say, "no, only English," and they say, "Come to station.  Translator. For Hindi.  Come to station for translate."  So now their game is that we should come to the station to get a good translator so we can sort this out easier.  But we still don't know what's going to happen at the station, and we don't trust them, and we still assume we weren't actually doing anything wrong and that this is just a shakedown.  So I grab a local guy walking by and I ask, "do you speak English?" and when he says "yes" I enlist his help as a translator.  I do this for two reasons.  One is that I want to disable the cops' attempt to get us to the station for language purposes.  The other is that I want to get the situation plugged into the local community's gossip circle.  I figure that since we are foreigners and we are alone we may have seemed at first like some sort of anonymous free zone away from normal rules, and this may be exciting the cops to try and pull off more than they normally would.  I figure that if the situation becomes more public it can't hurt us, it can only keep things the same or push the cops closer to the law.

Our translator has a friendly little chat with them, and then explains to us again what's going on and that they want us to go to the station.  Again we turn down their request, and after some more chatting the magic word finally comes up.  "You will just have to pay some fine," the translator tells us.  Now we are down to "brass tacks" as they say.  This is where the conversation was heading the whole time, and all the back and forth and move counter-move was probably just an elaborate way of evaluating what this will cost.  Cary wants to keep arguing and insisting that this is wrong and our rights are being violated, but I see that the game is now drawing to a close.  All the cards have been shown; it is now clear who stands where and what's what.  We have no more tricks up our sleeve and neither do they, and we are not going to the station.  So the only question left is, "How much is the fine?"   The cops have now to name a price that is high enough that they are satisfied, and yet not so high that we decide we can't pay it and they lose the money, or so high that we feel backed into a corner and decide that we are better off trying to create a huge, gigantic legal headache, which we have shown we are prepared to do and the cops have revealed they do not want to deal with.  And so this elegant calculator, this subtle social abacus of power and disadvantage and value that has been clicking and rearranging itself all through this confrontation, gracefully and finally arrives at its precise conclusion, and the answer comes back through the translator: "1,000 rupees."  This is about $20 dollars.  I make a halfhearted attempt to bargain, and propose that we pay 500 rupees, but the cop brushes it off and stands his ground, and I suddenly realize that this is not just futile, but naive as well.  I was still under the impression at this point--and this was really foolish--that bargaining is what it looks like on TV, where one person simply says a price, and the other simply says a lower one, and they meet in the middle; and I thought that now that the issue of a "fine" was out in the open it was time to bargain.  What I completely failed to recognize was that everything we had just been through was the bargaining; that that's what bargaining is and it had already run it's beautifully logical course and was complete.  What was my silly little proposal in the face of this well-oiled and fine-tuned machinery, which has been balancing power and exchange value for God knows how long now?  Sacrilege, that's what it was.  The cop had no reason to take it seriously, and he didn't.  We paid the 1,000 rupees and left quickly, still shaking.

So were we taken advantage of?  I submit that we were not.  If you want to be pedantic you could call what happened "corruption".  But it's not exactly corruption.  If you want to be realistic and precise, you could maybe call it para-systemic justice.  The actual system, the official system, doesn't really work.  The courts are back-logged for something like 200 years in most of the major cities here, and the police stations don't really receive enough money from the federal government to run themselves properly.  So a practical system for handling these kinds of problems has been hammered out, and it exists alongside the official system--a para-system.  We were introduced to it last night.  Although it has many problems, it is at least somewhat predictable and stable, and that goes a long way when you are just trying to get by.  It is also more efficient than the official system is, in certain respects.  Of course this kind of system isn't always fair, and I'm sure people get screwed by it in terrible ways all the time.  It's not hard for a cop to take money from people who have done nothing wrong at all.  But name me a system that doesn't screw people unfairly.  At least this time, this way was quick and easy, and everyone got what basically amounts to a fair deal.  The police could have taken us into the station and put us through all the legal proceedings, and in the end we probably would have had to pay a fine anyway, but what good would that do anybody?  It wouldn't do us any good, because we would have to pay the same fine with much more hassle, and it wouldn't do the cops any good since they would never see any of that money and these kinds of exchanges are probably how they support their families, given that the salary of an average policeman here is not very high.  Plus there was the unknown US Embassy variable.  So under the circumstances I actually think this is about as well as it could have worked out for everyone involved, and I was very relieved.  We learned some important lessons, we practiced some valuable skills, and in the end we only lost a little bit of money.  

And we got to keep the beer.

Ferris Wheels

I stopped by Parvati Hill again yesterday afternoon because I was nearby. There was a little ferris wheel set up on the hill above the slum, and the little kids were loving it.


All the ferris wheels I have seen here have no motor and no electricity. Here's how they work:


Those guys in the middle walk from bar to bar, and the weight of their bodies turns the wheel. The kids sit cross legged in little baskets. When the guys want to get off, they drop down onto the outer rim, ride it up to the top, grab the edge of a basket, and casually dangle off it by one arm as the wheel turns and brings them around to the ground. They were wearing flip flops.

If you click on the pictures you can see them enlarged.

Manuscripts

We took a field trip today after class to the very small museum at Tilak Maharashtra College. The museum is "currently" having an exhibit of implements for Vedic sacrificial rites, which looked like it has been up for a long time now. There were lots of big wooden spoons and swords and bowls and diagrams of sacrificial grounds and models of various containers for fire (the "Oblation Eater" in Sanskrit parlance), etc. etc. There were also lots of backlit black-and-white photographs of a Vedic sacrifice being performed by Brahmin priests, which was cool because I've never seen one. (Yes, in case you are wondering, they still go on, not infrequently, although in some parts of India, especially the south, the rituals which call for animal sacrifice are now "vegetarian", meaning the priests slaughter a little goat made of dough and toss its tasty dough entrails into the fire, instead of a using a real goat.)

I was mildly interested in all this, and was lazily wandering around the cases looking at these things, until I noticed one case off to the side that contained a small exhibit of Sanskrit manuscripts. Many of them were illuminated, and some of them had really tiny calligraphy, sometimes in decorative patterns, and they were really well done. They were breathtaking, actually. I really like illuminated manuscripts, and these were gorgeous. Like all great illuminations they managed to be evocative with very little material; if you looked at them closely enough they would transport you into their tiny world. I was told they were "only" a few hundred years old, and that the museum has hundreds of them in the archives, but not on display. The archives, as far as I could tell, were a bunch of green metal lockers that lined the walls and were full of dusty pages of paper tied between pieces of cardboard. The Indian National Mission for Manuscripts estimates that there are about 5 million manuscripts in existence across India, most of them in family collections or in monastery libraries or languishing in collections like this. Some are in Sanskrit and some in vernacular languages, and hundreds of thousands of them are unpublished. It kind of makes me think of the final shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Some pictures are posted here. They don't do them full justice, obviously, but they'll give you an idea. In case any of you are still wondering what to get me for my birthday (coming up soon in February), now you know.

Matheran and Monsoons

Since it's the most fundamentally important part of life in this area of the world, and since it's in the news all the time, and since I live every day with it, it's time for another

MONSOON UPDATE: Maharashtra has now received record rainfall for the first time this season.  Before this morning I literally hadn't seen the sun in twelve days.  It's even been enough rain to compensate for the drought earlier in the summer.  Reservoirs are almost back up to full capacity and should have enough water in them now to last until next monsoon season.  Everyone is very relieved, but water rationing is still in effect in Pune, partly because it's difficult to purify turbid monsoon water (another problem the monsoons bring: dirtier drinking water and more disease) and probably partly because of plain old bureaucratic incompetency.  This is making some people angry.  Yesterday, for example, representatives of Shiv Sena, a well-known Marathi cultural awareness group/charitable organization/Hindu nationalist political party/right-wing paramilitary organization, which is involved in local politics on many levels, walked out of a meeting with people from the Pune municipal water department in protest.  Shiv Sena seems to campaign on these sorts of anti-corruption, social improvement stunts; for example.  But basically the real problems here are over.  Sooner or later things will go back to normal, and Maharashtra will have dodged a bullet for another year.  Other parts of India are not so lucky.  The drought is still particularly bad in western Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, the so-called "bread basket" of India.  Combine this with Hillary Clinton's recent visit, during which climate control initiatives were discussed and negotiated, and you can imagine what's on people's minds here.

One of the smaller consequences of all the rain was that I missed the solar eclipse on Monday morning.  Okay, actually I missed it because I slept through it, but if I HAD been awake I WOULD have missed it because it was raining hard.  Apparently, you could see it very well in Varanasi.  The Times of India reported on the front page: "For three minutes and four seconds on Wednesday morning, an ethereal blue-grey darkness descended on this city of light.  To the east, across the Ganga, it was like God's own eye flashing in the sky . . . A roar went up at the ghats as people gasped and screamed in awe.  Some stared in stunned silence while others shook hands with total strangers in fits of joy."  I wish I had been there.  The story is complete with a picture of wrinkled old sadhus watching the eclipse through futuristic eclipse-glasses.  There was also a stampede at one of the ghats that killed two people.

Another consequence of all the rain is that a lot of roads and railway lines have been washed out, closed, or disrupted.  One of the lines that got disrupted was the line that was supposed to take Sam and me to Matheran for the midterm break.  We found this out two hours or so into the train ride, after the train had been stopped at an anonymous station for 45 minutes and we started wondering what was going on.  A young Indian business manager named Vishnu who had befriended us and was practicing his English finally decided to ditch the train and offered to help us navigate the train system.  Vishnu took us with him to another train, argued with the conductor in Marathi so that we didn't have to pay a fine, and then introduced us to a few of his friends, and we all sat around trading curiosity and good-will for the rest of the ride.  "What's the biggest difference between India and the US?" Vishnu asked me.  The best I could come up with on the spot is language.  In America there is one native language, or probably two if you count Spanish, but in India there are like 50.  "I think it's efficiency," he told me.  "India is rich; full of resources.  But it's poorly managed.  And there's corruption.  That's why it's still like this," and he gestured around him.  It's a common sentiment I've encountered, and it's changing the country little by little.  It's also the sentiment that Shiva Sena tries to capitalize on with the activities described above.

Vishnu finally told us where to get off, bought us some tea, put us on a bus that was still going to Matheran, and eventually we made it there.  (Seriously, he was amazingly kind.  Incidentally, he was slightly confused when we tried to thank him for the tea.  Saying "thank you" here--who would ever have guessed?--is totally different.  I can't figure out exactly how it's used, but it's used rarely and seems to imply a level of formality and grandiosity that is not normal between friends and family members.  My professor, Madhura, said that she thinks if she said "thank you" to her mother for something her mother would actually get upset with her.  Habits, however, run deep, and it just feels too strange not saying anything after even a minor exchange like buying something or getting out of a rickshaw--not to mention the kind of help that Vishnu gave us--so I usually just do it anyway.  Indians sometimes make fun of Americans for saying "thank you thank you" all the time.  I'm told "I love you" works the same way.)

Matheran is beautiful.  It's an old British hill station that is a common vacation spot for Indians, but has very few foreign tourists.  It's way up high in the mountains, like WAY up, and there are no cars allowed in the town, so it's quiet and clean.  The bus dropped us off at a parking lot and we walked about two miles along the tracks of an old small train that used to take people into Matheran but was shut down a few years ago.  The views from the tracks were unbelievable.  We were in the clouds, and all the hills for miles around were covered with waterfalls.  When we crossed a little stream, we could walk to the edge of the cliff and see a giant river miles away flowing down the valley, clearly originating in the stream at our feet.  This is serious jungle up here.  It's also full of monkeys, which I've never seen before, and which did not disappoint.  Monkeys are just awesome.  They're like weird, goofy little wrinkled people who can't stop making fools of themselves.  They were everywhere too, picking at pieces of fruit with their little hands and carrying their wide-eyed babies around on their bellies.  

Matheran, unlike the rest of the country, does not have any lack of rain.  It rained a LOT there; all day long.  I've never seen so much rain in my life.  We knew there was going to be rain, but we didn't quite appreciate just what that meant.  Also, I thought I wouldn't mind spending time reading and relaxing in a nice hotel, but our hotel wasn't really nice enough to enjoy sitting around in.  There were gaps when the rain cleared, and in those gaps we explored the main strip and the surrounding jungle, and found some great views and little temples.  But the town itself was a little boring, and also the food wasn't very good.  (Quick aside on food: although it would seem to go without saying, it is worth mentioning that the food in India really is the best Indian food I've ever had, by far.  Even the food on the plane over was better than a lot of the Indian restaurants in Boston.  That said, after 6 weeks of Indian food, many of us are starting to go a little crazy.  I finally couldn't take it any more and made a trip to a fancy supermarket downtown, where I paid too much money for a jar of Prego tomato sauce and some pasta.  In the States, I consider Prego sauce unworthy of eating.  Here, after 6 weeks away from anything like it, it was so good I almost cried).  So we decided just to spend two days in Matheran and then head back to Pune.  Technically I guess it was a bit of a bust, but everything is so new and we're in the country for such a short time that there aren't any wasted experiences.  Also on the way back we stopped at some ancient Buddhist caves carved into the sides of mountains which were truly amazing.  They are about 2,300 years old.  Pictures are up on picasa.

The other amazing thing I did recently was go to see a Bollywood movie in the theaters.  I don't even know where to start with this one.  My mind was bent in so many different directions I'm really not sure how to explain it.  It started at the very beginning of the movie, when instead of a little jingle about snack food in the lobby, there was a video of handsome young Indian men and women, dressed in pure white cloth, singing the Indian national anthem, and the entire audience--EVERYONE--stood up at attention, fists at their sides.  That's not something you see in the US.  The movie itself was called Kombakht Ishq (Combat Love?  Combat of Love?  Something like that).  It's about a stuntman living in LA who doesn't believe in love but falls in love anyway with a supermodel training to become a doctor who hates him at the beginning of the film, and whom he hates in return.  It has a cameo by Sylvester Stallone complete with rip-off Rocky theme-song music and a small part for Denise Richards, who rehashes her sexy pool exit from Bad Girls.  It was a 2.5 hour movie entirely in Hindi, which I don't speak at all, but the plot developments were so heavily emphasized that I'm pretty sure I understood almost everything that happened in it, and actually it wasn't at all boring.  What else can I say about it?  . . . it was a comedy; a lot of women got slapped in it; the songs were pretty good; it displayed an interesting awareness/anxiety of the fact that Bollywood, despite it's success and size, is nevertheless not as highly regarded or important as Hollywood; there was an intermission (there always is here); it had some fairly distasteful racial bits mocking black Americans (including an Indian guy in blackface(?!)); and it got panned by most of the critics here.  I could go on and on, but really you'll just have to see it yourself.  Preferably in the theater.  Everyone should see a Bollywood movie in the theater once in their life.  (Also, movie theater popcorn tastes surprisingly like home).

Pictures of my mountain trip are here.  And finally, I found out what the spice mixture is that they put in paan.  It's called catechu, and it's a syrup made from the wood of the areca palm.  Catechu is what turns your spit red.  

To Kolhapur

Assuming the sun is masculine, and not feminine, which seems to be how most cultures understand it, there is really only one appropriate way to depict him, when you think about it, and Indians have figured it out.  When they draw the sun they give the him a big, fat mustache.  You may remember that I saw this when I went to Parvati Mandir, but I've now learned that this was not a quirk of that particular temple.  I've seen it many times since then.  It's just the way Indians depict the sun.  As Americans give him a round smiley face, so Indians give him a thick mustache.  The Indian sun looks much more vigorous and more likely to do nasty things like spoil your mayonnaise if you don't respect him.  The American sun just looks kind of putzy in comparison.  To be frank, I think the Indian sun makes our sun look like a puffy eunuch with alopecia, and I consider myself a convert to this method of depicting him.  I don't think anyone would disagree that the sun kicks serious ass and is not to be trifled with.  So why would you personify him as a goofball man-child who looks easy to push around?  It makes no sense.  Indians understand this and have far surpassed us in this respect.  Admit your defeat, America.

               Which one do you feel the need to protect yourself from?

Another area in which Indians have us beat is livestock decoration and adornment.  I discovered this over the weekend on our field trip to Kolhapur.  Kolhapur is a small city about five hours south of Pune.  To get there you have to drive into the mountains and through the Maharashtrian countryside, which is extraordinarily beautiful, especially during the rainy season.  The hills are lush and bright green and look like you could use them as pillows, fog and clouds are blowing in and out of all the passes and hanging over the fields, and the rivers are swollen.  It's all farmland, and there are miles of sugar-cane, corn, banana, vegetables, and even some grapes (India has a small but growing wine industry).  It's much cleaner than the cities, and the air is fresh.  Farmers in this area still use oxen to plough their fields, and so there are oxen everywhere, out in the fields and walking on the sides of the roads.  But the farmers are not nearly uncouth enough to leave their oxen languishing in plain, natural simplicity.  The oxen are painted.  Sometimes they are entirely painted.  In one area we drove through, the oxen were all dyed neon yellow right down to their big ox-toes.  Some had aqua blue horns, some had hot pink or aqua blue stripes or dots on them, and some had flowers or bells on their horns.  Not all of the oxen were painted this elaborately, but I didn't see one working ox the whole weekend that didn't at least have its horns painted.  I'm told that the reason for this is that farmers perform rituals to honor the oxen and thank them for their help in the fields, and I heard from one source that they even give the oxen marriage ceremonies (presumably so that they make more babies), for which the oxen obviously have to get decked out.  Whatever the reason is, I can tell you that I never want to see another ox in its birthday suit again.  It's just uncivilized to leave them in their raw state.  Nor, for that matter, do I ever want to see another plain looking delivery truck, which Indians also decorate and paint elaborately.  Why not hang some bells and CDs on that sucker and paint it with birds like they do here?  I know that Americans probably will never follow India in this respect and I'll just have to get used to it.  But I'm not happy about it.  Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a picture of any of the oxen, which is really too bad.  It was too hard to snap the shot as we drove by in a car.  The only shot I got was of a mopey little donkey who looked like he had gotten a half-assed hot pink spray-paint job and seemed embarrassed about it.

Livestock aside, the trip was fantastic.  First we stopped at a tiny farming village in the middle of nowhere called Khidrapur, which is home to an 1,100 year old Shiva temple that is still in use.  The temple was solid stone, and full of elaborate carvings and decorations, and it was dark and silent inside.  We were the only tourists there, and we got to explore the temple pretty much by ourselves, except for groups of school children who were running around playing, and some curious villagers who stopped by to see what was going on.  There is a stone inscription in Sanskrit on the side of temple from about 1200 AD recording a proclamation of the king of the Yadava dynasty that the revenue from such and such villages is to be donated to the temple for maintenance and expenses.  We spent the previous week translating a transcript of the inscription, so we knew what it said, but it was still hard to read, since it was in an archaic alphabet and was partially worn away.  The proclamation consists of a small portion towards the end that actually gets to the point, prefaced by 26 lines of effusive, hyperbolic epithets for the king: the great king of the earth, the abode of shelter who performs the protection of all beings, the sun for the blossoming of the lotus that is the Yadava clan, whose enemies are bowed down before him simply from the glory of his mighty valor in battle, etc. etc. for 26 lines . . . this king donates abc and for xyz purpose.  There's an interesting question of what the purpose of this inscription actually was, since it spends so much space describing things other than the actual donation, and especially since most of the villagers probably couldn't understand Sanskrit.  But that's a whole different subject and I don't have a good answer for it.

Before we left Khidrapur we saw another temple in the village from a similar time period.  This one was a Jain temple, also still in use, and there was a class going on there when we showed up.  It was all women, I guess because the men were out in the fields.  We squeezed by into the inner sanctum and looked at the statue, and then left.  Then we drove to Kolhapur, checked into the hotel, and early the next morning went to another temple, this one dedicated to the goddess Mahalakshmee.  This temple was also incredibly old, also still in use, and also completely mind blowing.  It was much bigger than the others and much busier.  It was originally a Jain temple, but was dedicated to the worship of Mahalakshmee by a king about a thousand years ago, in a royal order which is also recorded in a stone inscription that is still there, and which you can just run your fingers over if you want to.  None of the devotees were interested in the inscription.  It's all alone in the corner, ignored.  There is a private section of the temple, directly above where the head of the statue of Mahalakshmee is, that houses a small shrine to Shiva.  The priest unlocked a door for us and took us up there and I saw it for myself.  Because of this small, semi-secret shrine, there is a question about whether the temple is Vaishnava, that is, dedicated to the worship of Vishnu, since Mahalakshmee is a Vaishnava goddess, or actually Shaiva, dedicated to the worship of Shiva, who is placed on top of Mahalakshmee's head and thus superior to her.  It might not seem like much of a difference to us, since most Americans think of "Hinduism" as a monolithic religion, but Shaivism and Vaishnavism are traditionally separate religions, and have even gone to war with each other during periods of Indian history, although relations between Shaivites and Vaishnavites have almost always been congenial in this part of the country.  Now, of course, with the development of Indian nationalism in the colonial and post-colonial era, the concomitant rise of Hindu reformist movements and Hindu right-wing movements, and the conflicts with Muslims pre- and post-partition, the issue of the differences among religions that are all nominally "Hindu" is much more complicated and difficult to untangle, sometimes deliberately so.  But again, that's a whole different subject and I don't know very much about it.  I couldn't get any pictures of the statues inside the temple, since photos aren't allowed.  It was very hot inside, which is oddly disturbing when you are surrounded by stone.

After that we came back to the hotel and I got sick.  Really sick.  Like laid out for the entire rest of the day and night sick.  I'm sure the details would entertain some of you and horrify others, but I won't go into them.  I don't know exactly how I got it, but it was some kind of water borne bacteria, and I just took antibiotics and felt better within 24 hours.  It's the second time I've gotten sick here, and it sucked both times, but India is so incredibly cool, and the adventure of being here is so fun, that there's not even a question of whether it's worth it.  I would gladly get sick again if it was necessary to spend more time here.  Anyway the water borne diseases you get here are uncomfortable for a short time but won't do any real damage.  Other than typhoid, which I'm immunized against, and malaria, which I'm immunized against, there's nothing terribly dangerous that you can get here.  If you eat meat, that's another story, but I don't eat meat, and wouldn't eat it here even if I ate it in the States.

I know it sounds like I have been doing nothing but visiting temples.  Partly it's because technically I study religion, and partly it's sort of just a coincidence.  Temples are definitely not the only part of India that is interesting to me, and they're not even the part that is most interesting to me.  They are just easy to find and easy to visit, and always pretty cool.  But on Sunday, on the way home, we stopped at an ancient fort way up on top of a mountain that is associated with King Chatrapati Shivaji and explored it in the rain, and it was great to see something not explicitly religious.  Like the temples, it was completely awesome.  We stumbled upon a group of musicians entertaining a crowd with Marathi folk-songs celebrating Shivaji's exploits.  The fort has been out of use for hundreds of years, it seemed, and was actually just ruins, but it was impressive.  And there were great views, as all good forts require.  Also, since it's India, there were no restrictions on where you could go or what you could touch, which was great in a way, but also made me ambivalent, since it's helping to rub the monument out for future generations.  But what could I do?  Not my chair not my problem, that's what I say.

Now I'm back and I'm leaving again soon for our "midterm" break.  I'll spend 5 days in Matheran, which is a hill station nearby that is supposedly quiet and clean.  Click here for as many pictures as you could ever want of my weekend.  

Also, the food in Kolhapur was not that spicy.  Don't buy the hype.