Wading through Varanasi

It has been several weeks since I have written anything here, and I’m sure infrequent writing will not guarantee me a dedicated readership.  I have been weighed down by a number of things, and my heart grows heavy as the length of my stay is prolonged.  Sickness has also encumbered my enjoyment of Varanasi; fevers have plagued me twice in the past two weeks.  Insomnia almost drove me to the brink of wanting to leave and come home.  I’m on the mend of all this and hope that my second month in Varanasi will be much more enjoyable.

Today is Thanksgiving.  It’s also been a day of terrorism in Mumbai where Quincy is now residing.  I hope she’s okay, of course.  But it is worrying, as my entire family plans to travel in India and we will be passing through major cities, and tourists have been targeted.  If I needed anything else to increase my uneasiness in India, this will probably help.

However, life is not all bad at all.  My days are spent in enjoyment of the overtones and resonance of my sitar, reading, eating, doing yoga, meditating on the roof of my lodge, going to concerts.  I’m living in a family lodge, which is also the home of a bunch of study abroad students from colleges in America.  These kids are studying projects including women in India, NGOs, representations of the Ganges, and astrology.  They’ve all become my friends and have given me a community.  Tonight we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving on the roof of our lodge with very un-American foods.  The Indians at the Ashram, literally one big multi-generational family, have been amazingly welcoming and friendly.  I eat every day with them, and they have become the large Indian family I never had.

A week ago, I met two other music students from Canada, studying in Lucknow.  They were way more hardcore than I, practicing about 7 hours a day and spending 8 months just studying.  Both named Dan, with the same birthday, played quite well together, pretty cute I must say.  I spent a couple days playing sitar with them and realized I was beginning to feel some technical fluency with the instrument.  I’m starting to feel listenable.  While I’m interested in learning ragas and about how they work, rhythmic cycles, etc., I feel little obligation to learn to play exactly as Indians play.  Since the west discoved the sitar, we have used it for fusion, adapted it to our own devices and audiences.  From the Beatles to the trancy and funky sitar fusion now being made, I feel in a legitimate tradition of stealing someone else’s instrument to diversify and enrich the soundscape of my own music.  I’m hoping to play with some drums, maybe a bass, saxaphone and figure out what points of musical contact are possible.

But while I’m here I’m enjoying learning about the musical culture as it is.  I’m attending concerts every other night.  Last night, I saw an amazing dance performance, Kathak classical dance.  The performer wore bells on his feet and mirrored the subtle and nuanced rhythms of the tabla.  It was clear that a dancer must have not only a highly developed rhythmic sense but an indepth knowledge of how rhythm (tala) works.  I have never been so impressed by such a powerful and colorful dance performance.

Varanasi makes sense as a place to live.  It is the spiritual and cultural capital of India, and to be surrounded by the depth of history and tradition of the oldest city in the world is a constant enjoyment.  But Varanasi is not an easy place to live.  The hassles and touts, which were only a minor annoyance, have turned me off from walking around.  It is so dirty here.  Trash just piles up on the sides of the street until it is burned.  It is difficult to get excerise outside of yoga, which is making me flexible, strong and balanced but is not very cardiovascular.  I miss my bike and trees and open space and my friends and the comforts of home.  But I know this time will fly by and the complacency of home will make me long again for foreign tastes and pursuits.  My return to Portland does not offer much of a track, and I know I should savor this time off because pressure to find jobs, start a career, etc. is not far off.  One more month here with a probable break to somewhere to chill out and then down to the south to meet my dad.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sinking into antiquity

Obama won 9:30 AM on Wednesday in India. I sang the national anthem on the sacred Ganges and my only answer to inquiring beggars and shopkeeps was “Barack Obama USA!” I feel allowed to be weird as a foreigner. Most people were just confused but sometimes people would understand and share my joy. India is extremely pro Obama. In the Times of India newspaper, there have been no less than 4 pages devoted to Obama every day. They seem to think he will save the world. I hope they’re right.

I think I’ve figured out how to upload photos to this page but I’m too lazy to try right now.  However, there are long over-due photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/.

I’ve been in Varanasi now for almost a week. I split up the two-day trip from Katmandu with a visit to Lumbini, the birth place of Buddha, on the Nepali border. It’s a serene place. Unesco has devoted an entire plot of land to the spot. A canal radiates from the actual spot, and monasteries from every Buddhist country, as well as several European countries, dot the sides, Theravada on one, Mahayana on the other. I can’t think of another religious site I’ve been to that is so ecumenical. The monasteries were beautiful and of diverse eastern architectures. Definitely a place I could spend several weeks. Lumbini is one of four Buddhist pilgrame places (place of birth, enlightenment (Bodhgaya), teaching (near Varanasi) and death). My mom will be staying in Bodhgaya, the largest world-wide center of Buddhist pilgramage, on a two-month meditation retreat. My mom’s so cool! I’m not so hard-core, but I would like to do a ten-day retreat. It’s only a few hours east of Varanasi.

Currently, however, I am mired in learning sitar. The International Music Ashram is everything I hoped for. It is located in a beautiful old building, many leveled, with an open center. It is run by an 18 person family, classical musicians for several generations. Each lesson costs 3 dollars (a fifteenth what it costs in the states). I am taking a lesson six days a week. I’ve never studied any instrument so intensely, and I hope to improve quickly. I have a lot of the finger strength and technique from guitar. I need to learn the fret board better and increase my speed, but I think these things will come relatively quickly. I’m attending a lot of concerts to gain familiarity with form and performance practice. The raga is a vague and all encompassing concept, not quite a mode, not quite a melody, not quite a mood, not just improvisation, but all of these things. Performances begin thoughfully with the melodic instrument playing slowly. The tabla comes in with a fixed composition. The players gain speed, improvisation and energy, trading the spot light and finishing in a brilliant show of virtuousity. And then they give you chai (nothing is ever too screwed up not to take a break and have chai). Oh and there are world-class concerts every night here, and they cost about a dollar.

My teacher is 24, an award winning performer who is now doing a ph d in musicology with a focus on the Indian orchestra. I don’t know too much about the subject yet. But I think I’m going to Delhi with him on the 20th to see him take part in a concert of 1000 sitars! He and his tablist brother want to start a guitar/sitar/tabla fusion band with me, but this has not yet taken form.

I’ll be staying soon in a family lodge for 2 bucks a night with my own room on the roof top over looking the city. Varanasi, by the way, is insane. It is perhaps the oldest city in the world and definitely the holiest city in Hinduism. The sacred Ganges borders it and much of the life of the city takes place on the ghats (the docks). Pujas (prayer ceremonies) take place every day along the river. Being cremated on the Ganges, especially Varanasi, is thought to be karmically advantageous, and there are two burning ghats where you can see dead people burning throughout the day. I actually have yet to go over to them. But I’m sure they’re intense.

Varanasi is intense because it’s so incredibly Indian: dirty and colorful, every breath you take absorbs a new smell. It’s strangely serene, however, since the old city along the ghats has no traffic, only people and animals (monkeys, rats, mangy dogs, and, of course, cows). My biggest concern, actually, is getting hit by a bull. They charge at you, seriously. But I think getting hit by a van still trumps a bull. Maybe if I’m good in this life, I will one day be reincarnated as a cow in Varanasi, the most free creature on the planet. If you injure a cow, you will go to jail. They walk meditatively among traffic, like “what you gonna do? I’m fucking holy!” They eat freely from the ground and shit on it, as people pass and touch them for blessing. If there was any doubt over who’s in charge here, you may defer to the cows. I wonder if they have any idea of the state of their oppressed sistren and brethren…I’m glad I’m vegetarian.

Varanasi will be a good place for me stay. I’m really uninterested in traveling from city to city to see every sight. Temples all look pretty similar and pretty soon you can get what they call in Europe the ABC effect (another bloody cathedral). I want to invest my energy and time and learn and sink into the oldest city in the world. Maybe inherit a bit of 5000 years of knowledge and cultivation. 

Speaking of years, my birthday is this Thursday.  I’ll be 23.  Trying to resist loneliness.  Loneliness is just attachment, right?

I’m quite relieved by the election results…talk about a landslide! I actually feel the strange, foreign feeling of pride in my country. And for the first time I don’t feel embarrassed to admit my nationality. Now I can go to France and lecture them on how to improve their country (that fascist Sarkozy!). Thanks, fellow Americans, and be well!

 

Last Thoughts in Nepal

Exoticism is wearing off and the reality of being here for several more months is becoming more palpable.  I have confronted the first staves of homesickness and am beginning to get in the groove of being here.  As this happens the need to write about these experiences is dissipating; as the first superficial layer of experience yields to deeper ones I find it more difficult to translate into writing.  To encompass the enormity of what I’m seeing around me seems staggering, and several times I have begun to write in this blog only to realize that my excess of things to report induces me to report nothing.  But I’ll try…This would be easier with pictures, but the infuriatingly slow speed of the internet prevents me from sharing the visuals.

I’m coming to the end of this Nepal holiday, and it really has been a holiday.  Part of me expected to jump straight into the things I want to learn in South Asia as soon as I arrived, but now I’m sure my vision wasn’t wide enough.  I was still just learning that Parvati was Shiva’s consort and that Ganesh, their elephant-headed son, rides a rat and that bathrooms have no toilet paper and that trash cans don’t exist and that people are trying to screw me out of my money at every turn.  I’m much more prepared, becoming much more of a hard ass on the street, treating the inquiring rickshaw drivers, store owners and hash dealers with cold neglect and uninterest.  I guess this is called cultural shock, the act of seeping into the otherness and beginning to grapple with one’s self within the context of that otherness.

So this holiday has been good for me.  I needed also to completely relax and regain calm and center after not only this horrendous summer but five years of college and an entire life in school.  Even though more school is most likely waiting for me somewhere in my twenties, and I’m actually excited about this fact, I am so happy not to be in school right now.  This is the first fall in which I have not found myself back in the class room.  I need to recoil back upon myself and reevaluate my interests.  I know many of the interests that Reed provoked in me or expected from me were artificial interests, totally abstract (you know, like French symbolist poetry, a major subject of my thesis).  I need to recoil back upon myself to find the practices and interests that retain themselves or are being born without external force.  Then school can be just a method of better realizing them.  But also I needed this holiday to regain composure.  I think that in the intense state of disarray and victimization of this summer no attempt at the sort of practices I’m now contemplating would have been fruitful.

I’ve been in Katmandu for about a week.  Beautiful Pokhara got way too small way too quickly.  Though I grow weary of crowds, I think I am much more suited for the city.  Katmandu is actually a pretty awesome city; many people think it’s the most livable city in Asia outside of Japan: medieval winding alleyways interrupted by unexpected shrines bring a plethora of intense smells, colors, and motorcycles trying to run you down.  Katmandu has been a hippy mecca since the 60s. I’m staying on Freak St., where apparently 30 years ago you could rent a room for 5 cents and hash pastry shops dotted the streets.  While Katmandu is still pretty hippied out, it is apparently a far cry from what it used to be.  Damn, I feel like I keep turning up 30 years, or more, too late, to San Francisco, Paris, New York, Katmandu, like “alright awesome, I’m finally here” only to find that the yuppies have already bought it up, living off the glorified past and pricing out those that made it great. 

But Katmandu is still pretty sweet.  It’s pretty cosmopolitan; I actually arrived the week of Jazzmandu, the international “biggest jazz party in the Himalayas.”  Surprised that there was one at all, I had low expectations, but they flew out musicians from all over the world.  The concerts ranged from spectacular to bizarre.  One was an attempt at fusing N. Indian classical music with jazz, the result of which was not so much fusion as collage.  While there are similar performance practices (improvisation, head or fixed composition as basis for exploration, etc.), the rhythms, harmonies (or lack there of in Indian classical), scales, and melodic designs are totally different.  While the stark juxtaposition of celebrity improvisers from disparrate traditions was interesting, I’d say it was, mostly, unsuccessful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about religion mostly because the depth and variety of religions here are overwhelming.  I went to the most atheist college in the country, the fact that I went to mass every week was totally not understood by my friends, even though I had very different reasons for going (ie, music).  The complete skepticism, lack of openness and lack of experience towards religion at Reed is staggering, though understandable and not necessarily regrettable.  But I find it funny that religion majors chiefly learn to anthropolize religious practice and deconstruct it (an Islam course forces you to buy the latest in academic scholarship, but the Koran is optional). Religion here is impossible to escape, incredibly public and potent.

Last night was the last night of Diwali, the festival of lights commemorating the illumination of Rama’s path of return from a successful battle against evil personified.  Lights adorn the streets, marigolds adorn shops and homes, and fire works explode unexpectedly so close you can feel the blast.  Officially there are several days for the festival.  A few days ago, the cows that walk around the streets so assured of their sacred status (because Shiva rides a cow, btw) are fawned over even more.  Two days ago, even street dogs, worshipped for their honesty, walked around the streets with marigold necklesses and a tika (you know the dot on the forehead, symbolizing the all-knowing third eye, one focal point during meditation and a chakra).  Yesterday brought in the new year and mayhem ensued with trance dance parties taking over squares and people drinking on top of temples.  For the goddess of prosperity, people painted pathways into their homes to lead Lakshimi to a place where she could leave her blessing of benediciton.  Today there was some kind of noise parade. 

Hinduism feels like what Greek paganism must have been like before the west was swallowed up by monotheism.  The plethora of deities, imaginatively anthropomorphized, the diversity of temples to whomever, the lack of literalism, the power of mythology over text, the power of local tradition over orthodox centripetal dogma.  Damn it!  I’m doing it again.  Hinduism is just bizarre and fascinating, and slowly its diversity is starting to seep in to my awareness.

I have been reading obsessively and have actually bought the tao te ching, a buddhist anthology, and the bhagavad gita.  Why the hell not?  As long as I’m here I might as well embrace all this, but not with a skeptical and scientific eye; rather, as poetry and beauty and practice and truth.  Why not?  I want to go live in an ashram or a monastery and be forced into a discipline of self-exploration, release myself from attachment to negative and destructive thoughts, practice love, practice presence, practice yoga (the yoke).  I want to begin these things and incorporate them into the musical practice that I hope to begin next week at the music ashram.  I know that I could never live in the east; there is too much cultural separation (even if that amounts to just regular harrassment due to my skin color).  But I want to learn and engage in whole-heartedly the practices that are universal and can be adopted independent of background, transplanted independent of place.  I find myself more and more ready to participate in these practices, less skeptical, less judgmental, less distracted.  Otherwise I’ll be just another hippy traveling around aimlessly…not that they’re all bad.

I think the intensity of south Asia is the coexistence of extreme beauty and ugly, intoxicating and putrid smells, beautiful mandalas surrounded by trash, crazy congestion of women clothed in the most colorful saris, abundant firework blasts and blasting Bollywood beats.  Personal space left well behind, it offers a brunt exposure to humanity, and now that I have gotten somewhat used to the in-your-face-ness of it all, hopefully I will begin what I came here to begin.

aaaaaaaauuuuuuuummmmmmm

Gone Trekkin’

I was planning on writing about my recent 8-day trek into the Anapurnas yesterday, but, as I had just gotten back the day before, I had to do basically nothing.  Soooo sore.  I got a five-dollar massage that combined all of these Asian techniques, Ayurvedic, Shiatsu, Thai.  Way more personal than in America but incredible for my beaten muscles.

My trek was awesome, of course (pix at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/).  Its route was unplanned.  I had planned to do a intense trek on my own after a “warm up” with Quincy, a four-day trek to Poon Hill (the name of which inspired no end of jokes; a tourist t-shirt with the words “Mount the Mound-Poon Hill Trek” was the best).  From Poon Hill is a huge vista of the Anapurnas, one of the highest and probably the most spectacular Himalayan Range (and if it’s a superlative in the Himalayas, it’s a superlative in all the world).  Many of the highest peaks (over 8000 meters) in the world are in the Anapurnas (aptly named after the Goddess of Abundance).  One can hike around Everest, but that’s only one peak and the difference between it and many of the Anapurna mountains is a couple of hundred meters, visibly imperceptible.

Quincy was unsure of the experience having never done much hiking.  She convinced me to hire a porter and we trekked for three days to Poon Hill.  Unfortunately, this is the easiest and most accessible trek from Pokhara, and Poon Hill was packed (Poon Hill gets around).  A tourist tradition of waking up to see the sun rise over the Anapurnas mobbed the place.  Quincy had a good excuse for being done trekking (asthma), but I wanted an intense and upclose experience of the Himalayas.  With arguably not enough cash and Quincy’s pack, I left Poon Hill in pursuit of the Anapurna Base Camp (ABC), the site of the first expedition to climb the highest peaks in the Anapurnas, the base from which the mountains soar into the sky.

I have a high degree of contempt for the guide/porter culture here.  A guide is pretty much completely useless.  Many people, especially tourist groups, bewildered by the idea of trekking in the highest mountains in the world, seem to think a guide will keep them oriented.  All I could see that they do is point out the next stone in the trail.  These trails have been traveled for centuries, maybe millenia.  They are the least ambiguous I’ve ever seen.   With a good map, one has NO need to pay a guide for babysitting.

Porters are perhaps a bit more understandable.  If you really can’t bear descending and ascending into difficult valleys with a pack on your back, perhaps you should hire a porter.  But trekking in the Himalayas is really way easier than backpacking.  Last summer, Jess and I went for a week into Yosemite, carrying all our own food supplies, cooking equipment, and tents.  Here room and board is cheaply accomodated about every hour on the trail.  So the thought that I’d have to hire someone to carry a few pairs of clothes, some books and a sleeping back is pretty astonishing to me.  The porter thing feeds into the entire servile and hierarchical culture here; like in India, it seems for every upper class person there are two servants.  If someone else carries my shit up a mountain they’ve really accomplished a lot more than I have.  Nevertheless, scores of Europeans asked in amazement, “you ‘ave no guide, not even porteur?!”  Give me a break.

The trek was intense.  I was walking for 7-10 hours a day.  The descents and ascents were difficult and without end.  Wide valleys cut accross each other, huge cliffs overhang with crashing waterfalls, and avalanche warnings abound.  The scenery was completely stunning, never have I seen anything so dramatic.  Just caused by India crashing into the rest of the world.

The Anapurna Base camp itself is at the center of the world.  I arrived there at 10 AM and just stayed there the rest of the day in awe.  You are surrounded on the west and north by the Anapurnas, in the east by Machupucchre (the 6500 meter “Fish Tail” mountain), and in the south by still more moutains.  At the bottom of a saucer of mountains, you can almost be alone, as the hordes who mob Poon Hill do not make it up this far).  So stunning, I just stared around me for hours, a totally unparalleled awesome experience.  From the beginning elevation of 1000 meters, I reached at ABC 4200 meters (the peak of Mt. Hood is 3400 meters for some comparison).   The entire trek lasted 8 days, and I was happy to get back to Pokhara and chill out.  But I feel so good, so in shape, so strong.  And I’m so glad I didn’t cheapen my experience and waste money with guides and porters.

The experience of just being in the wilderness was awesome too.  For one thing, it’s not really the wilderness.  People actually live there; the Gurung tribes have been living there for centuries.  In America, it is inconceivable that a person would live in a place inaccessible by car.  I met one Nepali couple now living in Britain, who were on their way on a three-day hike to get to their parents house.  Surprisingly, you can get fresh food, beer, and all sorts of amenities.  But all these things cost more than in the city becuase everything you buy has been ported by foot for days (a good reason to pay more).  Some of the settlements I stayed at had schools and temples.  Children really do have to walk for two hours, uphill both ways, often in the snow, to go to school.  I explained to one Nepali that American old people often claimed such feats and he said, “yes, people are so lazy now; my father told he would walk from here to Pokhara in one day; now it takes people three days”.

There were a lot of tourists, mostly European. For some reason, there are few Americans, but the ones I did meet are awesome.  At ABC, I met a girl with a love Oregon sticker on her waterbottle.  Turns out she’s from Portland but is sponsored by a British mountaineering company and lives to climb peaks in France and Nepal.  She just climbed her first 8000 meter peak and she’s contemplating Everest.  The other American was a girl from Madison on a Fulbright in India to study population health (apparently a super depressing subject in India).  Neither had a porter or a guide.  Lazy Europeans…

My mind, unstimulated by conversation and focusing on not tripping and falling down a crevice, wavered between an abundance of thoughts and complete nothingness.  I realized a lot of reactions I have which are completely useless and perhaps harmful.  I had total distance from them.  I had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, with my friends or family.  It was pretty awesome.  But I was also excited at all that is before me, everything I can do: live and work in France or anywhere in the world, come back to my people in Portland, do a performance program, go to grad school and study what I love.  I am so blessed by opportunity and I’m very excited.  But first I’m excited about my experience here.  Soon, I will go to Katmandu and soon after I will be in Varanasi, living in a music ashram and studying sitar.  Awesome!

Mayhem in Pokhara

Tomorrow I will be trekking in the Himalayas.  I am so freaking excited to be virtually alone in the mountains.  The industry is set up in such a user friendly way (so I hear).  Stone paths cover mountains and valleys with teahouse-lodges set up every hour or so, charging usually less than a dollar for accommodation.  My first trek will be shorter, 3 or 4 days, an easier walk into the largest rhody garden in the world (suck it, Reedies) amidst the Anapurnas.  The second will be longer than a week, and it may be here around Pokhara or around Katmandu.  It’s awesome to feel like I have all the time in the world, that from one day to the next I can decide my day and not feel too guilty because it’s so freaking cheap.

 

Still I struggle with a lack of discipline and have been trying to keep active.  I’ve been riding these pretty shitty Nepalese bikes around the city.  My Western comforts for safety have had to be adjusted.  No one rents helmets, no bike lanes, crazy drivers.  The traffic and the bike, however, seem to go slowly enough that I don’t worry too much.  The past few days have been Dasai, a Hindu festival in remembrance of some story in Ramayana.  A couple days ago, I rode to a temple complex where musicians were singing a musicalized version of the story.  People were dancing and drinking.  Hinduism is so much awesomer than western religions.  I went to temple (actually almost every day I’ve had a dot on my forehead, signifying that I went to temple).  So many smells, gods and colors, such disorder of a religion.  Monotheism is so boring. 

 

I have more Buddhist sympathies though.  I am actually starting to feel that I’m reaching the point at which I would call myself a Buddhist.  I need to practice, but it just makes sense to me.  You all knew this would happen, that I’d come back even a bigger hippy than before.

 

So the day after I visited a Buddhist stupa with Quincy, high atop a hill above the lake beside the town of Pokhara.  To get there, we rented a canoe and rode to the other side of the lake, stopping by a temple island.  An hour and a half steep climb brought us to the stupa, the “world peace pagoda”.  The four holy places of Buddhism, the place of birth, death, teaching, and enlightenment were represented.  Some Tibetan teenagers lectured us on their actions to Free Tibet.  As we began our descent, it began to rain.  By the time we were at the bottom it was monsooning.  We tried to wait it out but it only rained harder and darker.  So we got back in the boat and attempted to row through the lightning storm back to our side of the lake.  When we finally reached it, sopping, we couldn’t find the dock where we rented, so we secured the boat by sticking an oar into a bush (not so secure) and tying the boat to it.  When we looked the next morning, the boat was gone.  I hope that the owner found it and took it, but it was pretty cheap anyway.  Now we have to avoid the boat renters…

 

I might shave my head, but then I’d have to buy a hat.  Decisions, decisions…

Hippying out in Nepal

I finished last night what seemed like a five-day journey to Nepal. Five days because the flight from Atlanta to Delhi took 24 hours, and just being in Delhi, especially jetlagged, is one of the most taxing experiences imaginable. We then took a twelve hour train to a city near the Nepali border, which arrived twelve hours late; then four hours more to the Nepali border in an intensly crowded bus. Indians fold into strange yoga poses to fit anywhere on a bus (and they sit on the roof and hold onto the back in droves). We were so weary of traveling that we opted for a taxi to Pokhara, the city of our destination in Nepal. Driving through beautiful scenery on incredibly slick, badly maintained, and curvy roads without seatbelts we arrived admist an intense monsoon-like thunderstorm in Pokhara. This was the most intense and tiring journey of my life.

Fortunately, Nepal is paradise. Where have all the hippies gone? Nepal. Nepal is finally a communist country with the recent Maoist takeover. It’s a Buddhist and Hindu country. People paint Om signs, peace signs, and Buddhas on their buses and cars. There is an evident Tibetan presence that adds to the Buddhist population. Western hippies are plentiful, people who have been here years (pot is basically legal). Pokhara is serene, set between a lake and the stunning Anapurna mountain range. We will be in Nepal for probably a month total. We hope to go trekking for about a week and spend the rest of the time living in the cities, Pokhara and Katmandu, doing yoga, meditation, seeing music, reading, riding my dollar-a-day bike and chilling. This is exactly what I need, as I am still feeling the intensity of this summer and just being in India was incredibly stressful. I’m considering playing my mandoline on the streets for tourists here. Considering I’m spending about 2 dollars a day on accomadation, I might be able pay for most of my expenses. I’m not sure I want to do anything more to westernize the atmosphere though.

India is, of course, my main destination, and I don’t want to stay in Nepal and hippy out forever…or do I? but I am glad not to be in India right now and to ease into the intensity of the sub-continent through the much more easy-going Nepal. I think I will go to Varanasi from Katmandu. The international music ashram in Varanasi has said I can stay there and study sitar, so that is my plan for November and December.

My first impression of India was Delhi, and while I’m sure that Delhi intensifies everything already crazy about India, my first impression of India is of total insanity. I have never seen so many people. In Delhi so many extraordinary things happened, things that I would normally recount for days but cannot even begin to remember for their quantity. Motorcycles running into bike rickshaws, the most startling maladies I’ve ever seens, extreme disfigurement, the worse smells possible, insane driving, mad poverty, and constant harrassment. Of course, in a city of 14 million people, many of whom are extremely poor, one should expect nothing less. I’m hoping there are places in India as serene as Nepal. Still, I must say that I feel safe in India. Though people might want to charge me more than usual, they really want me to get into their cycle rickshaws, and people are despereate as hell, no one has guns, and I don’t sense that people are going to jump me, like in Mexico city. Oh, on the issue of the second ammendment, India staved off the British government at the point of a gun through mass non-violence. Given recent events in America, it seems quite unlikely that possessing guns has any link to reducing government oppression.

India is of course extremely polarized. There are also the richest of the rich here. My first night in India was far from what I expected. Quincy is working in Bollywood for an advertisement agency. She is staying with a crazy rich woman in Mumbai that her father taught in college. She has been completely “princessed” in India, with servants, massages, chauffeurs. And she couldn’t wait to get out because this is not what she came to India for. The first night that we met up I went to a party in the suburbs of Delhi at the house of the friend of Quincy’s host in Mumbai. The house was one of the largest and most opulent I have ever seen. Everyone spoke perfect English and would not even think of speaking Hindi, even to their servants, who didn’t speak English. This was a party for Eid, the last day of Ramadan when everyone indulges after fasting. Of course, none of these people fasted (like going to Mardi Gras without enduring Lent). I think I must be doing pretty well to be drinking with actors, developers, people in finance, club-owners and professors on my first night in India! Obviously there’s a disgusting wealth gap in the US, but the US seems positively socialist compared to India. Being in India definitely puts me in my place. Just being from middle-class America makes me such a spoiled brat. I have resources unimaginable to most people here and it is difficult to come to terms with. There are many practices, though, that I’d like to take home with me (like handwashing my clothes, etc.).

I hope the ills of the west and the economic crisis are not getting people down. All that seems extremely far away. Still, go Obama!

Damn, it’s monsooning again. Off to yoga!

WTF?

I am in Delhi and safe; however, what happened tonight is exactly why I wanted to leave Delhi immediately, why I don’t want to travel much here and why I want to stay out of big cities.  Unfortunately, I got here way too late (on time, but late).  I reserved a very cheap hotel with a driver who was supposed to meet me at the airport, so after 24 hrs of air space half way across the world I’d be taken care of in a city of 14 million people.  No driver.  Some guy tries to help me.  He calls on his cell phone the hotel number (actually he could have been calling anyone) and they tell me to come along.  This guy tries to arrange a taxi for me.  He’s obviously not official, though maybe he wasn’t sketchy.  I go back to the prepaid taxi area.  The prepaid taxi takes me along only to tell me that my hotel doesn’t exist, doesn’t have an address, or some other bullshit (this is the official taxi!).  He takes me to another hotel, a (relatively) luxurious place that costs way too much. I know he’s trying to screw me.  I ask him to take me to the right place, which is on the same street, but I’m not going to walk down that street of cows and sleeping families (on the street).  He “can’t” find it and takes me back.  I spend way too much for this room though I did bargain it down 15%. This is the first and last time I will get screwed!  It will really pay to learn some Hindi.  Mom, we have got to make sure this doesn’t happen to you cause I think you’re getting here on the same flight, no? I’ll figure out something.  

 

The worst part is that my friend from Reed, Quincy Cardinale, is in Delhi.  She had sent me a message telling me to call her immediately when I got to the airport, because she’s staying with a friend here and has a place for me to stay.  But she sent it after I got in.  I learn this minutes after signing for this hotel. 

 

I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow, but it is the last day of Ramadan and it is not advisable to travel on so much jet lag.  Quincy and I are planning to leave for Rishikesh and on to Nepal soon.  I am glad that there is an American friend here to help because I would feel at sea.  I feel like I’m going to be absorbed into a huge wave of experience.

 

Dad, this is why I was nervous

 

Apparently cell phones are cheap, and after what happened tonight I think I will actually get one. 

 

First impressions: a run down airport

smells, mostly foul

Ganesh statues in the hotel along side “modern” art

Hassling

Conspicuous absence of women in public areas (not at all total)

 

I’m sure it will get better.  I’m so sleepy…and at least I have a nice luxurious bed to sleep in (about which I’m extremely bitter).

 

Be well…

Georgia-my first foreign country

Many people have asked me why I am going to India, and I have given variety of responses, from the very specific to the vague “well I’m not sure…I had a free ticket, and old people tell me to travel before I have commitments.” A lot of confusion is resulting from the feeling that I do have commitments–maybe not a steady career, a house, monthly payments, kids or the pragmatic things they’re referring to. But I have practices that I know are the seat of my happiness-music especially, reading, writing, biking, meditating, drinking with friends, yoga. I have amazing friends and I live in an glorious city. And the development of all my practices seems contingent upon having an established home. Traveling is one of the most passive things to do. If I know what I want to do, why don’t I just do it and not blow my world apart, especially after this summer, the most traumatic period of my life?

I have ambivalence about leaving Portland, although I am all but certain I will come back in the spring.

But the fact remains that I’m finally out of school (most likely temporarily), I have the luxury and fortune, foreign traveling may become a thing of the past after peak oil, my bandmates are writing theses, and Portland is just going to get rainier and colder. Some distance between me and Ptown might make my capacity to be effective much higher; that is certainly what happened when I spent 8 months in Europe. I felt wrecked when I came back but with a much more acute awareness of how I wanted to spend my time.

And I don’t know why I want to go to India, but I know I’ve always wanted to go there. I wasn’t raised by hippies but I was raised in proximity to hippies, and hippies romanticize India to no end. It’s such a place of spirituality (whatever that means), intensity, beauty, etc. One of my first memories is of Ram Dass, Timothy Leary’s Harvard associate, holding me when I was 4. That entire generation, which I have a tendency to romanticize as an alienated child of the Reagan-era, fascinates me. All the stereotypes continue to grip me. The Beats, the Beatles, the acid-heads, the hippies, the soul searchers, the new agers. The western imagination of India has commanded a sort aesthetic backdrop to American counter-culture. And because I find it impossible to identify with the mainstream, I’m intrigued why this sort of orientalism has always provoked those dissatisfied with the West. All my mom’s new age friends, her meditation practice, the hippies at folk festivals and Reedies have a fetish for India, Hinduism and Buddhism. I guess I’m interested in how valid our fetish is, because I want to see the dark side of India too, the not yet erased caste society, the untouchables, the poverty, the mysoginism. But mostly I want to see elephants roaming the streets, rickshaws, a multiplicity of colors and spice, cremations on the Ganges, sitars and all the other stereotypes that make India seem like a totally different place.

I do have specific plans. My current plan is to go for five months. I’m leaving this Tuesday for Delhi, and I hope to make it up to the Himalayas immediately before it gets too cold. I want to go to Dharmsala, home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, then Rishikesh, the “yoga capital of the world” and the site of the Beatles’ foray, and then into Nepal to trek in the Himalayas. I plan to go on to Varanasi for two months, the oldest Hindu city, and a continuing center of Hindustani music (north Indian Classical music). All your household names are from Varanasi (Ravi Shankar, etc). I just want to experience the musical culture, continue my sitar lessons, learn about form and style. There’s an international music ashram in Varanasi I hope to stay in; I think it’s for people like me: Westerners who over-romanticize India and have vague musical interests. In December, I plan to go to Chennai in South India where there is an American composer from Portland who is willing to show me the scene. Chennai is the center of Carnatic music (S. Indian classical music), and this composer works at a conservatory there, where I’m told I can hang out and even be a guest lecturer! I hope to come back with a deep, first hand exposure to North and South Indian Classical music, because I’m deeply drawn to it: the crazy rhythms, the sympathetic strings, the ornaments, the improvisation.

But I think I’m going to India because so many of the practices that are important to me do have an origin there. When I picture my ideal day there, I’m taking music classes, doing yoga, meditating, eating delicious spicy food, learning foreign languages…all things I could do in Portland, but at the removed periphery and not for 5-10$ a day. I guess I’m terrified that I won’t want to come back to America if the economy crashes and Sarah Palin becomes president, after I’ve built a life in Portland. But I suppose there are worse things than being an expat.

I am in Atlanta now, in transition, seeing my family and friends. Georgia really feels like a foreign country now that I’ve been in Oregon for so long. I’m leaving on Tuesday and my contactibility will dwindle to this blog and my email: nul.ptyx@gmail.com. I hope to be updating this blog regularly, if only to write my own story. There will also be a flickr site for photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/), for those of you who love to vicariously travel through the internet (no photos at the moment). Thanks to Stacia for setting this blog up.

I remember when I went to the Republic of Georgia on a music tour, and I felt so totally disoriented. And I complained that I didn’t know why I was there in a such a strange place. And then that night I attended a lavish supra, a six hour feast with professional singers who drank a gulp of delicious wine at every toast. The bases would intone a deep drone, vibrating the intoxication, and the higher voices weaved around each other climbing and falling off eachother like a waterfall into its basin. And then I knew why I was there. Music. Music might be the only reason I do anything. My friend Ian told me that I’m going to India to get them raga knowledges and I suppose he’s right. As a budding ethnomusicologist, that’s the kind of thing I love to do.

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