Movin’ on up, and down and around

I am sorry about the depressing tone of the last two posts.  There’s nothing worse than a complainer, especially a complainer privileged enough to be traveling in India. I think I have caught my second wind.  As always, pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/.  I would totally learn to post them in this narrative if these connections weren’t so damn slow!  As I have passed the half-way point several weeks ago, there seems to be little time to waste feeling homesick.  In 3 weeks my dad will be here, and traveling with him in the tropical south will be awesome.  And then I’ll travel with my mother through N. India and Nepal, and this too I’m sure will be wonderful, and before I know it I’ll be on a plane heading west, and this will all be a rich, disturbing, bizarre dream.  I expect America to feel sterile and tame, but in a welcoming way.  Truly, I am an American and that is my home, and I could never live anywhere in India for a prolonged period of time.  But this trip is good for me.  Perspective is opening my eyes wider than I knew they could spread.  It has been a lesson in how different this vast world can be, and I continue to learn that I have an obscene paucity of answers.  That’s why I named my band “aporia.”

Varanasi was hard, one of the more difficult but extraordinary experiences of my life.  It is the Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem of the Hindu world, and to have experienced a place bathed in such holiness is an experience I’ll never forget.  I made musical progress too.  My teacher told me that I learned a year’s worth of material in a month, which is probably an unfair comparison since I have previous musical experience, especially on fretted string instruments.  I learned a raga composition, the evening raga yaman (ragas in N. India were always played at a particular time of the day.  But those were courtly days of leisure and as the music has developed into a concert music in a modern society, such concerns for the time of day are disappearing.)  This raga is beautiful, based off of what we know as the lydian mode (sharp fourth in an otherwise major scale).  Maybe one day I will play it well.  I have plenty to practice at home, and if I don’t get back to lessons in India before I leave, I think I will still feel that I accomplished the main thing that I came for, which was a somewhat in-depth experience of a completely different and developed musical culture.

But Varanasi was getting me sick and I had to leave.  I had been told that it was the dirtiest city in India, but having nothing to compare it to, I didn’t really know what to make of it.  As I left on December 5th, probably way gladder than I should have been to get out, I heard an English guy refer to it as “vary nasty”, and I had to laugh.

I have come now to Rajastan in almost two weeks, the eastern desert veering on the Pakistani border.  On my westward journey, I stopped first in Khajuraho, home to medieval temples beautifully preserved with the kama sutra in stone.  Pretty damn graphic!  Certainly not the only the theme carved, but a prominent one admist many other manifestations of life.  I came to India with the impression that it was perhaps a sexually free culture because of this heritage.  Actually, it’s the most sexually repressed culture I’ve ever seen.  It’s interesting that western society born of a heritage of sexual repression, what with Christianity, has become so oversexed, while Kamasutra-laden Hinduism has produced the very regressive sexual culture of India.  I can’t tell you how many people have asked if I’m married and stare at me dumbly when I tell them that in my country I’m too young.  “No you’re not” is their indignant reply.  The fact that almost all of my interactions with Indians are with men reflects the sorry state of gender inequality.  Then again, so much of everything in India is inconsistent and diverse.  I mean, Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the ruling Congress Party.  And Indira Gandhi ruled India with an iron fist during the 70s and again in the 80s until her assassination.  I’ve heard much of the mysoginism is not really a part of the Hindu tradition but comes from Mughal rule which lasted from the 1500s until the British Raj (Mughals are the non-magical people, or Muslims who ruled N. India).

The Muslim influence in North India reminds you that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were once all the same country.  An unclean partition dividing peoples along religious lines makes you wonder where all the Muslims are with so many Mosques around.  Orchha, on the road from Khajuraho, is a town of Mughal forts and Mosques, a beautiful collection of Indo-Islamic architecture.  Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, was the Mughal capital, and the Taj Mahal was the Muslim emperor’s homage of love to his wife who died after giving birth to their 14th (!) child.  The Taj is every bit as beautiful and inspiring as you’ve heard.  The light catches diverse gleams on the elegantly carved marble all reflected in the pools lying around the monument.  I thought to myself, “Damn, I will never ever be this romantic” (or this rich; it did take 20,000 people to build it).  Though there are people that rich today.  Amusingly, I randomly read on the BBC right before I visited the Taj, that a Bangladeshi businessman wants to replicate the building in Dhaka for the Bangladeshis who, he argues, are generally too poor to travel all the way to Agra.  The Indian High Commission is challenging this course of action, claiming it’s copywrited.   Puleezzz.  It is a Muslim monument after all; it just happens to be in Hindustan.

Agra was amazing but kind of a pain in the ass as a tourist ghetto.  I had to get to Jaipur, the capital of Rajastan and home to many study abroad students including my friends from Varanasi.  When I got to Jaipur, I understood why they stick so many western students here.  Coming from Varanasi to Jaipur was like coming from the 3rd world to the 1st.  So this is where all that Indian prosperity is that I had read about.  Jaipur is the best planned city in Asia, beautiful parks (one called Central Park, the nerve), wide roads cutting through.  It’s probably the most livable city I’ve seen.  It has the prosperity with only 3 million people, much better than overpopulated Delhi or Mumbai.  Its buildings gleam pink as they were all painted pink for the arrival of some diplomat.  The tradition continued and colorful Rajastani aristocrats bathed their cities in different colors (Jodhpur is blue for examle).  It was a strange feeling for me to feel at home with the signs of prosperity, the cars, the yuppie coffee shops that make you feel like you’re in Seattle, the first rate malls.  I had come to India to bathe in all that was other than 1st world prosperity.  But that made me sick, and 23 years in the 1st world isn’t going to make a month in the 3rd world come as easy or comforting.  I guess I’m being put in my place.  My airs of romanticizing the lives of the poor have disappeared.  The life of the poor in India fucking sucks.  I am very grateful for what I have.

Jaipur was great in other ways.  I met up with my American friends and sightseed the city, beautiful desert palaces (check), admist elephants (check), camels (check) and beauty (triple check) all around.  I climbed to the top of a hill to a temple to Surya, the Vedic sun god, to view the city glowing pink.  I saw one of the most beautiful museums I’ve ever seen, a tribute to the British empire, housing their findings (stealings) from all over the world.  I saw a quirky medieval observatory which accurately tells time within 2 seconds.  And I read books in real coffee shops with real coffee (thank god, I’m so sick of the super sugary and milky chai for which I longed in coming here).  I was happy to meet up with the Americans again.  I like Americans, at least half of them.  I guess they are kind of my people and I seem to feel at home with them.  Of course, the ones who come to study in India are a self selecting bunch.  But it reminds me that I want to live in America; I fucking don’t want to live in India, that fo damn sho.

Traveling in India is in some ways not as hard as I imagined, at least as a man (I marvel at young women who travel here, the victims of constant harrassment and sexual abuse).  It takes patience and an attitude that does not get annoyed at the constant annoyances of being a white person in India.  The trains run, though not on time, and they can take you where you want to go.  In some respects, traveling in India is easier, as the things that in Europe are prohibitively expensive are dirt cheap here.  You don’t need to figure out the public transportation in every city because a cycle rickshaw costs 40 cents for a ride.  The annoyances of sleeping in dorms in nullified by affordable rooms 5 times less than a dorm bed in Europe.  Food is good, diverse and cheap and eating out at 1-2 dollars makes me not feel guilty to eat, the main reason I lost weight when traveling in Europe.  Travelers range from fascinating to banal, usually a result of whether they came to India because it’s India or because they are outsourcing their vacations.   You know, the dope is cheap, beaches, cheap food, hippies, all the things you got at home, but you can do them for less in India, just like call centers.

I arrived in the small desert lake town of Pushkar.  Man it’s so beautiful here.  I was so sick of cities so this town of 15,000 seems a perfect place to rest from the craziness of Varanasi and traveling and, well, India.  I’m staying at the Pink Floyd hotel for 3 bucks a night.  Seriously.  It’s an awesome spot with awesome people where every room is named after a different Pink Floyd song, and they have a beautiful cafe facing the lake with a bunch of “special drinks”, and, well, I promise I won’t waste too much time.  Maybe a little desert camel trek, but I want to get to Rishikesh to live in an ashram and Bodhgaya to meditate and Goa beaches in the south to be a hippy on the beach before my dad gets here, and I’m kinda running out of time.

I’m happy, but I’m also happy this will be over and that the light at the end of the tunnel is faintly penetrating my vision.  Now I realize that I will do a fraction of all the things that sound amazing to do here.  But that’s okay.  I’m not sure if I want India to call me back.  I had such a passion to come and I’m so grateful, but man I am so tired of being a foreigner here.  This place is SO foreign.  It’s good to see though.  India is a sixth of the world, and Asia is half of the world.  To have experienced only the west is, well, a smaller fraction of the world.  I realize though that I don’t have a traveler’s mindset.  I don’t really want to spend all my time going from place to place, touring this and that.  I want to be an artist and so I should get started ASAP.  Right now, I am deferring my dreams.  But it’s good to have a break; I just spent 5 years in college!  I need to remember to breathe.  The appeal of a Ph d is starting to fly out the window, especially as I am rediscovering my love of fiction.  Giving up the freedom to read whatever I want to read badly written academic papers on things no one cares about and even worse written papers by students on things no one cares about seems increasingly less appealing.  I don’t think I want to sacrifice my twenties for that kind of knowledge.  I don’t want to sacrifice my choice of a place to live.  I want to live in Portland cause I love Portland and all you Portlanders.  Even if you’re not a Portlander, I still love you.  Well that was long but I hope not boring.  Love is beaming towards you westward (and eastward, and northward and southward-the world is round after all) from Pushkar, India.

Props to the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at the dog.