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.