India! Where do I begin? In the South. A Land of head bopping Hindus, the ubiquitous cows twining through the streets eating chiapati, and beautiful powdered and adorned elephants. Here are some of the highlights of Southern India.
Ayuverdic Massages and Panchakarma
I remember when I first got to India and people were talking about Ayuverdic medecine. I had never heard of it, and could never remember the name, Aya....?? Well, this is my new mantra. After one ayuverdic massage, I proceeded to have one a week. The first I heard of these, I was strolling through Kochi with my travelmate, Jana, and we decided to treat ourselves to a nice massage. From the menu, I picked the ``relaxing massage``, and when the guy at the desk told us there was only one female masseuse, would one of us mind having a male masseuse, I shrugged and said sure. As soon as I got into the room, the masseuse guy handed me two rectangular strips of hospital gown cloth and asked me to take my clothes off. [What now?] I laughed and said, ``Yeah, I´ll be keeping my underwear on, thanks.`` He gave me a suit-yourself look and said, ``Okay, but you clothes get dirty when I pour on the hot oil on your body.``[What now?] This did in fact prove to be the case. He gestured to this wooden coffin box, no padding, where I had to hop inside and sure enough he poured the oil all over me and proceeded to marinate and karate chop my entire body. I don´t remember any of this from the brochure and called over the wall to Jana to see how she was proceeding with her massage. I had to declare a few ´no go zones´ but his hands were frottering so fast from head to toe, that your whole body basically gets treated as one cut of beef, so to speak. After this dubious massage, which in fact felt incredibly good, I moved to the shower room, where I had the female masseuse, thank God! She sat me on a stool and soaped me up and down, shampooing me vigourously, before towelling me off like a recalcitrant toddler and then braiding my hair. The whole experience was disconcertingly odd yet so rejuvenating that I ended up in the massage parlour (with women) five more times. [I once had an ayuverdic massage where the woman put me in a steam coffin and had me breathe through a mentholatum humidifier. Magnificent! Sauteed and steamed!]
When we got back to our hotel, I was explaining the whole thing to my roommate Francis, who had already spent 10 days in India, and she nonchalently proceeded to explain that yes, this is how it´s done, only she had had her ayuverdic massage at a friend´s wedding, so in lieu of the massage coffin, she was massaged by [wait for it] one of the bride´s male relatives, who was suspended from the roof of a garden shed by a rope, and used his earth-trodden bare feet to massage her body. So, as it happens, my massage was relatively tame! Many women in the Lonely Plant report being ´´molested´´ by their masseuses, and I wonder if this is actually true, or if they just had the same massages we had and don´t understand them. I later asked Ravi, our tour leader, ``Why is it prohibitive to touch women, even wives and girlfriends, in public, yet a male masseuse can give a woman a massage like that?`` Ravi´s response: ``Because it´s science.``
Which brings us to the next topic: Panchakarma! (Same, same but different to Ayuverdic Massages)
So basically, Panchakarma is another, ``enhanced`` way to purify the body and eradicate the toxins and bad ``doshas`´ (humours) from the body. The way they do this is through: nasal therapy (Nasya), enforced vomiting (Vamana), purging (Virechana), therapeutic enema (Vasti) [Is this not an oxymoron?], and (I´ve saved the best for last) -- bloodletting! Since I was having an intense nasal congestion situation while I was in India (this actually was in Northern India), whereby I felt like someone had removed half of my brain and replaced it with a giant phlegmball, I asked our Trip Leader, Veerendra, to take me to the Panchakarma Master. Though I told him, ``Just for the Nasal Therapy! No enemas or bloodletting. Me be on vacay!`` Also, I kind of had the bloodletting in the South when we went on the Jungle Walk, and Ravi said, ``Oh, you don´t need leech socks!`` and I ended the walk with a bloody anklet of leeches.
Getting to the Panchakarma site involved a very nefarious motorcycle trip through the cobbly, cow-entwined backstreets of Udaipur (Rajasthan), dodging auto and motor rickshaws, bicycles and pedestrians. I was imagining some kind of Frankensteinian nasal drip, but really it involved some acrid nasal drops, a dehumidifier and a very vigourous metholatum chest massage. And repeat. I have no idea what kind of magic was involved in all this, but that night I felt like my head had been used in a gong show, and could eat only tomato soup. But the next day, pow, my sinuses completely cleared. It was insane. I am a total convert to the mysteries of Ayuverdia.
Yogis and Ashrams
After reading about India, I was thinking I would like to go to an Ashram, but after visiting the Auroville Ashram outside of Pondicherry, I changed my mind. This Ashram was like a cult, with pictures of ``The Mother`` everywhere (very 1984/Big Brother), a huge kaleidoscopic gold orb in the middle of nowhere, and video loops with scrolling words and a haunting narrative inviting you to relinquish all religion and worldly possessions to join ranks with the Natural Ones. Looking around, I couldn´t fathom what these people were doing with their time. How many hours can you actually meditate, as an Everyman? I asked Ravi, our tour leader, what he thought of these blonde gringas wearing saris and bindi dots, with dreadlocks and journals. He just rolled his eyes and said, ``No comment.`` He told us about an accomplished friend of his who renounced all his worldly goods, and left his job to enter one of these ashrams. He ´went missing´ and his parents were imploring Ravi and other friends to find him. They found him in an Ashram where the leader was keeping all the passports hostage was. They ended up having to threaten the guy with baseball bats to free their friend. So, yeah, no interest in ashrams. But I did participate in quite a few yoga classes. Let me tell you. Yoga classes in India; yoga classes at Goodlife...different.
One class I went to at 6 am ended up being a private lesson with the yogi outside the pool. The first thing I learned was that I breathe all wrong and have been doing so for my entire life. The yogi was absolutely apalled that I would ever breathe through my mouth. He chastised me beligerantly: ``No!!! Why would you do this? The mouth should only be used as an escape hatch! Why would you use it for normal breathing, then we abuse the escape hatch!`` I still can only breathe using my nose exclusively for about five minutes, before I feel like I´m suffocating softly, despite his teachings. The yogi taught me how to use wooden blocks to support the various poses and had me contort my spine, cobra-esque, into all kinds of positions, culminating in a shoulder lift at the very end. I remember the days when I used to think yoga was liquid and soft. My butt muscles, which I don´t even remember using, were sore for three days.
I did another yoga class with the houseowner of our homestay in the Backwaters of Kerala. His class involved a lot of breathing too, but he was modelling how to breathe by snorting the evil doshas out of your nose, the way a horse would eject a bothersome fly from a nostril. I couldn´t really manage it, diplomatically. He also had me do the shoulder stand and then uncoil from it, vertebrae by vertebrae. This didn´t work either as I invariably came crashing down like a piece of scaffolding. Most of his class was dedicated to breathing rather than poses, and though 60, this man could ripple his stomach like a belly dancer, concave, convex, concave, convex.
In the North, my travelmate Matt and I did a dawn yoga class on the rooftop of our hotel, overlooking the multitudinous palaces of Udaipur. This yogi was all about the poses. He would tell us things like: ``Put your feet into Lotus position. Now press soles of the feet together and flatten thighs to ground. Wrap your arms around your back and press them to your feet.`` [What now?] Matt and I just took pictures of him doing the various contortions. For posterity. We did manage to do a few backbends. I forgot how much strength and flexibility it takes to hold your own body weight like that.
Cows and Beggars
One of the most endearingly frustrating things about India are all the cows. Of course, you hear about them, but there is something about seeing this proliferation of stray cows wandering about the streets that discombobulates you. They are like stray dogs, but they are huge. And clueless. And sometimes irascible. I was trying to enter a pharmacy one day and two cows, (one a bull!) were blocking the entrance. I asked a passerby, in Hindinglish, if I could pass through. He laughed and said sure. I asked if they would spear me and he found that very amusing. (Clearly he has not attended the Pampleonada in Mexico!) The other thing is that these cows are not vegetarians. I was eating at a restaurant one day and was about to ask the waiter to wrap up my stuffed pepper, as I was going to give it to a beggar. He had already absconded it, so I chided him and told him that I didn´t want to waste food, when I could give it to someone. He looked at me incredulously and said, ``Not wasted! We feed it to the cows!`` That night, the cows were eating buttered chicken, massala, stuffed peppers and chiapati. Which explains the rampant diarrhea street cows have, further contributing to the nastiness of the streets. One day I saw a cow happily munching apples off a fruit stand, while the cow down the road was eating sewer garbage (he hadn´t cottoned on yet.)
Beggars are everywhere. One of the saddest sights I saw were all the huddled families around bonfires by the side of the road outside of Delhi, dirty, emaciated, and desperate. It´s a hard sight to see, but as Ravi has explained to us, there is a mafia of begging here, whereby the Pimp gets all the spoils of the begging, while children are maimed or babies rented to elicit more sympathy from the foreigners. You are often approached by women with nicotine-stained teeth, addicted to beetlejuice, who pirate their rented babies in front of your face, pretending the money will go to feed the mouths of babes. You also can´t give sealed food to the beggars as they then resell it for money which fuels into the whole mafia of begging. At times, I have given open bags of food to beggars. One woman and her bare bottomed son were sitting cross legged on the railway platform to go to Chennai, and I gave them an open bag of crisps. They were elated. Jana had a sweater she was tired of and gave it to the woman, and she wrapped the boy in it, waving happily as she boarded the train. That said, in the North, at the Ajmer train station, we encountered a high density of beggars. One boy had an infected toe which he had put salve on, but being barefoot, had nothing to cover his toe. I rummaged inside my first aid kit for a bandaid to give to him, but the other teenage boys must have thought I was going inside my purse for cash, and descended on me in a writhing mass of scratching arms and pushing hands. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock´s ``The Birds``. For the first time, I seriously understood how someone can get trampled to death in a crowd.
One day, outside the Hindi Temple in Pushcar, a charming boy with a flute was shadowboxing me down the road, begging not for money, but ``just for chiapati to eat. One for me, one for you,`` he added solicitously. I acceded to his request with a smile, thinking we were going to a stand to buy one chiapati, but no, he took me to a grocery store where instead of paying 2 rupee for a hot chiapati, I paid 20 rupee for a box of Chiapati mix! Gotta respect the entrepreneurship though.
They say that a third of the global poor are in India and that 25% of India´s population survives on less than 20 rupees a day. That´s less than five dollars a day. 220 million people are living below the poverty line and I read somewhere that for every 2 million people there are 17 public washrooms. Which would explain the onmipresent scent of urine and the multitudes of people peeing against buildings and pooing into the railway tracks. Our tour leader was telling us about a woman who lost her diamond engagement ring down the train urinal...not a ring I would ever want to put back on my finger. I don´t understand these women I see travelling with their engagement and wedding rings on, in developing countries. That is just an invitation to disaster. As I´m writing this, I´m in Salvador, Brazil, and you just don´t bring anything on the street with you. The crack kids will get it. A girl at my hostel had a gold bracelet on (Why?) and a crack kid stole it from her, ran down the street with her in hot pursuit (Why?) and when confronted by the Tourist Police, swallowed it.
But, back to India. One day, I saw a woman wearing a beautiful magenta sari, with her gorgeous black hair twined in a braid down her back, peeing down the side of her leg into the road. India is filled with oxymoronic sights like this. The beauty of this country defies the poverty and desperation. One thing I found hard to get used to was going barefoot. Because we were in Kerala State during Pongal, the Harvest Festival, there were a lot of celebrations in Temples. It´s not proper to wear shoes in the temple because it´s perceived as irreverant (cow hide) and unclean. However, I get nervous leaving my awesome South African sandals in the shoe box (remember that episode of ``Sex in the City`` where Carrie had her Manolo Blaniks stolen at the Bridal Shower), and am repulsed by the idea of trodding barefoot through the urine-soaked streets frequented by the cows afflicted by diarrhea. We visited a Hindu Temple in Madurai during Pongal and the streets were so congested with people on Pilgrammage that our Tour Leader had us retreat and go again the next morning. Four people had been trampled and killed in one of these pilgrammages in Kerala four days prior, and he didn´t want to take any chances. The sheer volume of people here is astounding. Similiar to the situation with the beggar boys, I could see how people could be trampled to death in the outbreak of emotion and impatience.
Head bopping and Bollywood
One really endearing thing about the South is the head bopping. People have this way of letting you know they are listening to you, by weaving their heads in a type of figure eight pattern, while entertaining you with this type of bemused expression on their faces. At first I thought it meant yes, until one day I ordered a banana lassi and was waiting half an hour for it. It always reminds me of those dolls with the bopping heads on coiled springs. I asked our tour leader, Ravi, one day why he doesn´t have that idiosyncracy and he told me he used to do it, but that people made fun of him, so he trained himself out of it. I think that´s too bad because it´s such a cool characteristic of the South. The saris here are also striking. The colour combinations are beautiful and you see vibrant swatches of magenta and orange and pink like match strikes against the verdant green of the rice paddy fields. Because people adore gold jewelry, you also see flashes of gold twinkling in the fields. I love seeing so much colour every day. It is such a contrast to the monochromatic sandpaper colour of Jordan.
I also fell in love with the Bollywood movies. I met this European traveller, Cristophe, at my hostel in Mumbai, and one night we took a tuk-tuk to the movie theatre to see a Bollywood film. Though it was a very simple movie theatre (full of pre-feature advertisements about noise pollution [don´t honk your car horns!!] and anti-corruption) with hard seats and 2 rupee samosas, we watched a 3 hour Hindi movie with no subtitles in complete rapture! I was completely drawn into the colours, costumes, singing and dancing, despite the fact that I couldn´t understand a word. This movie had the most intensely wound kissing scene I´ve seen in any movie, and I could not stop staring at the costumes. I actually had a green velvet smoking jacket with a purple silk lining tailor made for myself in Udaipur, modelled after a jacket the main protagonist wore in the movie. I had to laugh though, when I saw this Bollywood movie in the Pink Cinema in Jaipur. To ``exoticize`` it, they had a scene set in suburban Vancouver, showing a Punjabi man married to a Canadian woman. She was this Playboy Peroxide Jenny McCarthy type, very ditzy, speaking very bad Hindi. I had to put in a disclaimer to the group about Canadian women. Not a good representation! My travelmate Matt and I liked the music from the movie so much that we hunted down the CD in Pushkar.
Religion
During our trip, we were able to visit many Hindu Temples and one Sikh Gudwara, in the North. They believe in community service, so we were able to help the women make chiapatis for the people coming to worship. One thing Veerendra, our Northern Tour Leader, told us which I found really surprising was the fact that the Sikh people won a contentious court battle in India, allowing them to carry the kirpan (dagger) on board airplanes as it is one of the five K´s baptised Sikhs are bound to wear: (uncut hair [kes], small comb [kagha], iron bracelet [kaa], special undergarment [kaccha], and the dagger [kirpan]). One can only hope the Sikh people I am travelling with are all well-adjusted individuals! I find it ironic since anti-terrorist measures are so tight here. I had to present my passport just to use the internet and pass a screening process more exigent than the visa-screening process to be able to activate my Indian SIM card.
The Hindu temples are amazing, especially the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai. It´s so exceptionally elaborate, perhaps a bit gaudy, that you wouldn´t be able to take in the detail even if you were to spend a month examining it. The Hindu temples used to offer the only form of sex education to children, so there are Kama Sutra-esque carvings along the outside of the temples. I definitely learned a few things! Sadly, they have chained elephants, decorated with pastel designs and flowers, inside the temples. From what I´ve learned about elephants in Africa, one day that elephant will realize he ain´t diggy being chained to a pillar and will trample them all!
It´s interesting seeing the genesis of a culture through the looking glass of the temples, because the depictions of unveiled buxom women draped provocatively in harems pre-dating the Mughal invasions challenges the notion of women in burquas, heavily draped despite the weather. What I find interesting is that woman can bare their midrifs without censure, but the breasts, bottom, shoulders and knees must be covered. [As I am typing this, I´m in Brazil, at 8:30 at night, sweltering like I´m in a sauna, wearing a tank top and skirt. I positively cannot imagine how women in India withstand a heat of 40 degrees, wearing saris.] We visited some mosques in our travels as well, though the South is mainly Hindu. They are peaceful places, and you are invited to rest inside, but our guide told us we could only visit each mosque or temple for 20 minutes max, due to the risk of terrorist bombings.
One other fascinating thing about India was the overt displays of affection between men. Though men and women are not allowed to touch publicly, you often see men with fingers intertwined, strolling along the boardwalk or locked in an embrace. I asked Ravi if that meant that it was easier for homosexual men to go undercover, but he said absolutely not, because although the culture is ostensibly open to it (gay marriage is legal) society still considers it perverse and supposedly people can ´tell´ if the look goes on too long, or the embrace is too intimate. Again, I am noticing such a contrast in Brazil and Argentina, as people make out here publicly all the time. My friend and I got flashed by a twelve-year-old in the Pelorinho yesterday, who then wanted money from us! Like a tip! That said, in India, as in Egypt, there is a lot of ass-grabbing and ass-slapping going on. And then they run into the temples! Very santimonious! As well, they have women-only cars on the metro. I´m beginning to wonder if Canada is one of the few countries that doesn´t have this.
Tea Plantations and Tigers
Continuing my cat hunt from Africa, I spotted two tigers on my trip. I must have honed my spotting skills in Africa, as I was able to catch a glimpse of tiger butt and tiger tail, where others missed it. It was exciting, but since it was just a glimpse and I was exposed to such sites in Africa (it´s hard to top the Lion At The Campfire) I wasn´t incredibly excited. What I found funny was that there was a convoy of jeeps full of elementary kids on a school trip, despite all the disclaimers of being eaten by a tiger. I can´t imagine that school trip going through in Canada;) Speaking of school trips, we were staying in the mountain village of Ooty and some school kids were on a field trip. They had booked out most of the hotel and were having an insanely loud bonfire in the parking lot. I figured ´If you can´t beat them, join them´ and went down to participate. They were absolutely hilarious. They had me dance in the centre of the circle (a little too close to the bonfire if you ask me) and had me lead the ´´catwalk fashion show´´. School kids here are hilarious. Or people in general. They always want to do a photo shoot with you. My friend Christophe and I went to the museum in Mumbai, and barely saw a thing, we were so busy doing photo shoots with the kids on their school trips.
In Ootacamund (Ooty) we also travelled by toy train, preceding a tour of a tea plantation where we were exposed to all kinds of teas: red, green, white and black, my favorite being chocalate tea, of which I sent a kilogram back to my Mom and Dad in Canada, in lieu of apres-ski hot chocolate.
Such was the South, land of rice paddies, tea plantations, saris and head-bobbing....J.
Ayuverdic Massages and Panchakarma
I remember when I first got to India and people were talking about Ayuverdic medecine. I had never heard of it, and could never remember the name, Aya....?? Well, this is my new mantra. After one ayuverdic massage, I proceeded to have one a week. The first I heard of these, I was strolling through Kochi with my travelmate, Jana, and we decided to treat ourselves to a nice massage. From the menu, I picked the ``relaxing massage``, and when the guy at the desk told us there was only one female masseuse, would one of us mind having a male masseuse, I shrugged and said sure. As soon as I got into the room, the masseuse guy handed me two rectangular strips of hospital gown cloth and asked me to take my clothes off. [What now?] I laughed and said, ``Yeah, I´ll be keeping my underwear on, thanks.`` He gave me a suit-yourself look and said, ``Okay, but you clothes get dirty when I pour on the hot oil on your body.``[What now?] This did in fact prove to be the case. He gestured to this wooden coffin box, no padding, where I had to hop inside and sure enough he poured the oil all over me and proceeded to marinate and karate chop my entire body. I don´t remember any of this from the brochure and called over the wall to Jana to see how she was proceeding with her massage. I had to declare a few ´no go zones´ but his hands were frottering so fast from head to toe, that your whole body basically gets treated as one cut of beef, so to speak. After this dubious massage, which in fact felt incredibly good, I moved to the shower room, where I had the female masseuse, thank God! She sat me on a stool and soaped me up and down, shampooing me vigourously, before towelling me off like a recalcitrant toddler and then braiding my hair. The whole experience was disconcertingly odd yet so rejuvenating that I ended up in the massage parlour (with women) five more times. [I once had an ayuverdic massage where the woman put me in a steam coffin and had me breathe through a mentholatum humidifier. Magnificent! Sauteed and steamed!]
When we got back to our hotel, I was explaining the whole thing to my roommate Francis, who had already spent 10 days in India, and she nonchalently proceeded to explain that yes, this is how it´s done, only she had had her ayuverdic massage at a friend´s wedding, so in lieu of the massage coffin, she was massaged by [wait for it] one of the bride´s male relatives, who was suspended from the roof of a garden shed by a rope, and used his earth-trodden bare feet to massage her body. So, as it happens, my massage was relatively tame! Many women in the Lonely Plant report being ´´molested´´ by their masseuses, and I wonder if this is actually true, or if they just had the same massages we had and don´t understand them. I later asked Ravi, our tour leader, ``Why is it prohibitive to touch women, even wives and girlfriends, in public, yet a male masseuse can give a woman a massage like that?`` Ravi´s response: ``Because it´s science.``
Which brings us to the next topic: Panchakarma! (Same, same but different to Ayuverdic Massages)
So basically, Panchakarma is another, ``enhanced`` way to purify the body and eradicate the toxins and bad ``doshas`´ (humours) from the body. The way they do this is through: nasal therapy (Nasya), enforced vomiting (Vamana), purging (Virechana), therapeutic enema (Vasti) [Is this not an oxymoron?], and (I´ve saved the best for last) -- bloodletting! Since I was having an intense nasal congestion situation while I was in India (this actually was in Northern India), whereby I felt like someone had removed half of my brain and replaced it with a giant phlegmball, I asked our Trip Leader, Veerendra, to take me to the Panchakarma Master. Though I told him, ``Just for the Nasal Therapy! No enemas or bloodletting. Me be on vacay!`` Also, I kind of had the bloodletting in the South when we went on the Jungle Walk, and Ravi said, ``Oh, you don´t need leech socks!`` and I ended the walk with a bloody anklet of leeches.
Getting to the Panchakarma site involved a very nefarious motorcycle trip through the cobbly, cow-entwined backstreets of Udaipur (Rajasthan), dodging auto and motor rickshaws, bicycles and pedestrians. I was imagining some kind of Frankensteinian nasal drip, but really it involved some acrid nasal drops, a dehumidifier and a very vigourous metholatum chest massage. And repeat. I have no idea what kind of magic was involved in all this, but that night I felt like my head had been used in a gong show, and could eat only tomato soup. But the next day, pow, my sinuses completely cleared. It was insane. I am a total convert to the mysteries of Ayuverdia.
Yogis and Ashrams
After reading about India, I was thinking I would like to go to an Ashram, but after visiting the Auroville Ashram outside of Pondicherry, I changed my mind. This Ashram was like a cult, with pictures of ``The Mother`` everywhere (very 1984/Big Brother), a huge kaleidoscopic gold orb in the middle of nowhere, and video loops with scrolling words and a haunting narrative inviting you to relinquish all religion and worldly possessions to join ranks with the Natural Ones. Looking around, I couldn´t fathom what these people were doing with their time. How many hours can you actually meditate, as an Everyman? I asked Ravi, our tour leader, what he thought of these blonde gringas wearing saris and bindi dots, with dreadlocks and journals. He just rolled his eyes and said, ``No comment.`` He told us about an accomplished friend of his who renounced all his worldly goods, and left his job to enter one of these ashrams. He ´went missing´ and his parents were imploring Ravi and other friends to find him. They found him in an Ashram where the leader was keeping all the passports hostage was. They ended up having to threaten the guy with baseball bats to free their friend. So, yeah, no interest in ashrams. But I did participate in quite a few yoga classes. Let me tell you. Yoga classes in India; yoga classes at Goodlife...different.
One class I went to at 6 am ended up being a private lesson with the yogi outside the pool. The first thing I learned was that I breathe all wrong and have been doing so for my entire life. The yogi was absolutely apalled that I would ever breathe through my mouth. He chastised me beligerantly: ``No!!! Why would you do this? The mouth should only be used as an escape hatch! Why would you use it for normal breathing, then we abuse the escape hatch!`` I still can only breathe using my nose exclusively for about five minutes, before I feel like I´m suffocating softly, despite his teachings. The yogi taught me how to use wooden blocks to support the various poses and had me contort my spine, cobra-esque, into all kinds of positions, culminating in a shoulder lift at the very end. I remember the days when I used to think yoga was liquid and soft. My butt muscles, which I don´t even remember using, were sore for three days.
I did another yoga class with the houseowner of our homestay in the Backwaters of Kerala. His class involved a lot of breathing too, but he was modelling how to breathe by snorting the evil doshas out of your nose, the way a horse would eject a bothersome fly from a nostril. I couldn´t really manage it, diplomatically. He also had me do the shoulder stand and then uncoil from it, vertebrae by vertebrae. This didn´t work either as I invariably came crashing down like a piece of scaffolding. Most of his class was dedicated to breathing rather than poses, and though 60, this man could ripple his stomach like a belly dancer, concave, convex, concave, convex.
In the North, my travelmate Matt and I did a dawn yoga class on the rooftop of our hotel, overlooking the multitudinous palaces of Udaipur. This yogi was all about the poses. He would tell us things like: ``Put your feet into Lotus position. Now press soles of the feet together and flatten thighs to ground. Wrap your arms around your back and press them to your feet.`` [What now?] Matt and I just took pictures of him doing the various contortions. For posterity. We did manage to do a few backbends. I forgot how much strength and flexibility it takes to hold your own body weight like that.
Cows and Beggars
One of the most endearingly frustrating things about India are all the cows. Of course, you hear about them, but there is something about seeing this proliferation of stray cows wandering about the streets that discombobulates you. They are like stray dogs, but they are huge. And clueless. And sometimes irascible. I was trying to enter a pharmacy one day and two cows, (one a bull!) were blocking the entrance. I asked a passerby, in Hindinglish, if I could pass through. He laughed and said sure. I asked if they would spear me and he found that very amusing. (Clearly he has not attended the Pampleonada in Mexico!) The other thing is that these cows are not vegetarians. I was eating at a restaurant one day and was about to ask the waiter to wrap up my stuffed pepper, as I was going to give it to a beggar. He had already absconded it, so I chided him and told him that I didn´t want to waste food, when I could give it to someone. He looked at me incredulously and said, ``Not wasted! We feed it to the cows!`` That night, the cows were eating buttered chicken, massala, stuffed peppers and chiapati. Which explains the rampant diarrhea street cows have, further contributing to the nastiness of the streets. One day I saw a cow happily munching apples off a fruit stand, while the cow down the road was eating sewer garbage (he hadn´t cottoned on yet.)
Beggars are everywhere. One of the saddest sights I saw were all the huddled families around bonfires by the side of the road outside of Delhi, dirty, emaciated, and desperate. It´s a hard sight to see, but as Ravi has explained to us, there is a mafia of begging here, whereby the Pimp gets all the spoils of the begging, while children are maimed or babies rented to elicit more sympathy from the foreigners. You are often approached by women with nicotine-stained teeth, addicted to beetlejuice, who pirate their rented babies in front of your face, pretending the money will go to feed the mouths of babes. You also can´t give sealed food to the beggars as they then resell it for money which fuels into the whole mafia of begging. At times, I have given open bags of food to beggars. One woman and her bare bottomed son were sitting cross legged on the railway platform to go to Chennai, and I gave them an open bag of crisps. They were elated. Jana had a sweater she was tired of and gave it to the woman, and she wrapped the boy in it, waving happily as she boarded the train. That said, in the North, at the Ajmer train station, we encountered a high density of beggars. One boy had an infected toe which he had put salve on, but being barefoot, had nothing to cover his toe. I rummaged inside my first aid kit for a bandaid to give to him, but the other teenage boys must have thought I was going inside my purse for cash, and descended on me in a writhing mass of scratching arms and pushing hands. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock´s ``The Birds``. For the first time, I seriously understood how someone can get trampled to death in a crowd.
One day, outside the Hindi Temple in Pushcar, a charming boy with a flute was shadowboxing me down the road, begging not for money, but ``just for chiapati to eat. One for me, one for you,`` he added solicitously. I acceded to his request with a smile, thinking we were going to a stand to buy one chiapati, but no, he took me to a grocery store where instead of paying 2 rupee for a hot chiapati, I paid 20 rupee for a box of Chiapati mix! Gotta respect the entrepreneurship though.
They say that a third of the global poor are in India and that 25% of India´s population survives on less than 20 rupees a day. That´s less than five dollars a day. 220 million people are living below the poverty line and I read somewhere that for every 2 million people there are 17 public washrooms. Which would explain the onmipresent scent of urine and the multitudes of people peeing against buildings and pooing into the railway tracks. Our tour leader was telling us about a woman who lost her diamond engagement ring down the train urinal...not a ring I would ever want to put back on my finger. I don´t understand these women I see travelling with their engagement and wedding rings on, in developing countries. That is just an invitation to disaster. As I´m writing this, I´m in Salvador, Brazil, and you just don´t bring anything on the street with you. The crack kids will get it. A girl at my hostel had a gold bracelet on (Why?) and a crack kid stole it from her, ran down the street with her in hot pursuit (Why?) and when confronted by the Tourist Police, swallowed it.
But, back to India. One day, I saw a woman wearing a beautiful magenta sari, with her gorgeous black hair twined in a braid down her back, peeing down the side of her leg into the road. India is filled with oxymoronic sights like this. The beauty of this country defies the poverty and desperation. One thing I found hard to get used to was going barefoot. Because we were in Kerala State during Pongal, the Harvest Festival, there were a lot of celebrations in Temples. It´s not proper to wear shoes in the temple because it´s perceived as irreverant (cow hide) and unclean. However, I get nervous leaving my awesome South African sandals in the shoe box (remember that episode of ``Sex in the City`` where Carrie had her Manolo Blaniks stolen at the Bridal Shower), and am repulsed by the idea of trodding barefoot through the urine-soaked streets frequented by the cows afflicted by diarrhea. We visited a Hindu Temple in Madurai during Pongal and the streets were so congested with people on Pilgrammage that our Tour Leader had us retreat and go again the next morning. Four people had been trampled and killed in one of these pilgrammages in Kerala four days prior, and he didn´t want to take any chances. The sheer volume of people here is astounding. Similiar to the situation with the beggar boys, I could see how people could be trampled to death in the outbreak of emotion and impatience.
Head bopping and Bollywood
One really endearing thing about the South is the head bopping. People have this way of letting you know they are listening to you, by weaving their heads in a type of figure eight pattern, while entertaining you with this type of bemused expression on their faces. At first I thought it meant yes, until one day I ordered a banana lassi and was waiting half an hour for it. It always reminds me of those dolls with the bopping heads on coiled springs. I asked our tour leader, Ravi, one day why he doesn´t have that idiosyncracy and he told me he used to do it, but that people made fun of him, so he trained himself out of it. I think that´s too bad because it´s such a cool characteristic of the South. The saris here are also striking. The colour combinations are beautiful and you see vibrant swatches of magenta and orange and pink like match strikes against the verdant green of the rice paddy fields. Because people adore gold jewelry, you also see flashes of gold twinkling in the fields. I love seeing so much colour every day. It is such a contrast to the monochromatic sandpaper colour of Jordan.
I also fell in love with the Bollywood movies. I met this European traveller, Cristophe, at my hostel in Mumbai, and one night we took a tuk-tuk to the movie theatre to see a Bollywood film. Though it was a very simple movie theatre (full of pre-feature advertisements about noise pollution [don´t honk your car horns!!] and anti-corruption) with hard seats and 2 rupee samosas, we watched a 3 hour Hindi movie with no subtitles in complete rapture! I was completely drawn into the colours, costumes, singing and dancing, despite the fact that I couldn´t understand a word. This movie had the most intensely wound kissing scene I´ve seen in any movie, and I could not stop staring at the costumes. I actually had a green velvet smoking jacket with a purple silk lining tailor made for myself in Udaipur, modelled after a jacket the main protagonist wore in the movie. I had to laugh though, when I saw this Bollywood movie in the Pink Cinema in Jaipur. To ``exoticize`` it, they had a scene set in suburban Vancouver, showing a Punjabi man married to a Canadian woman. She was this Playboy Peroxide Jenny McCarthy type, very ditzy, speaking very bad Hindi. I had to put in a disclaimer to the group about Canadian women. Not a good representation! My travelmate Matt and I liked the music from the movie so much that we hunted down the CD in Pushkar.
Religion
During our trip, we were able to visit many Hindu Temples and one Sikh Gudwara, in the North. They believe in community service, so we were able to help the women make chiapatis for the people coming to worship. One thing Veerendra, our Northern Tour Leader, told us which I found really surprising was the fact that the Sikh people won a contentious court battle in India, allowing them to carry the kirpan (dagger) on board airplanes as it is one of the five K´s baptised Sikhs are bound to wear: (uncut hair [kes], small comb [kagha], iron bracelet [kaa], special undergarment [kaccha], and the dagger [kirpan]). One can only hope the Sikh people I am travelling with are all well-adjusted individuals! I find it ironic since anti-terrorist measures are so tight here. I had to present my passport just to use the internet and pass a screening process more exigent than the visa-screening process to be able to activate my Indian SIM card.
The Hindu temples are amazing, especially the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai. It´s so exceptionally elaborate, perhaps a bit gaudy, that you wouldn´t be able to take in the detail even if you were to spend a month examining it. The Hindu temples used to offer the only form of sex education to children, so there are Kama Sutra-esque carvings along the outside of the temples. I definitely learned a few things! Sadly, they have chained elephants, decorated with pastel designs and flowers, inside the temples. From what I´ve learned about elephants in Africa, one day that elephant will realize he ain´t diggy being chained to a pillar and will trample them all!
It´s interesting seeing the genesis of a culture through the looking glass of the temples, because the depictions of unveiled buxom women draped provocatively in harems pre-dating the Mughal invasions challenges the notion of women in burquas, heavily draped despite the weather. What I find interesting is that woman can bare their midrifs without censure, but the breasts, bottom, shoulders and knees must be covered. [As I am typing this, I´m in Brazil, at 8:30 at night, sweltering like I´m in a sauna, wearing a tank top and skirt. I positively cannot imagine how women in India withstand a heat of 40 degrees, wearing saris.] We visited some mosques in our travels as well, though the South is mainly Hindu. They are peaceful places, and you are invited to rest inside, but our guide told us we could only visit each mosque or temple for 20 minutes max, due to the risk of terrorist bombings.
One other fascinating thing about India was the overt displays of affection between men. Though men and women are not allowed to touch publicly, you often see men with fingers intertwined, strolling along the boardwalk or locked in an embrace. I asked Ravi if that meant that it was easier for homosexual men to go undercover, but he said absolutely not, because although the culture is ostensibly open to it (gay marriage is legal) society still considers it perverse and supposedly people can ´tell´ if the look goes on too long, or the embrace is too intimate. Again, I am noticing such a contrast in Brazil and Argentina, as people make out here publicly all the time. My friend and I got flashed by a twelve-year-old in the Pelorinho yesterday, who then wanted money from us! Like a tip! That said, in India, as in Egypt, there is a lot of ass-grabbing and ass-slapping going on. And then they run into the temples! Very santimonious! As well, they have women-only cars on the metro. I´m beginning to wonder if Canada is one of the few countries that doesn´t have this.
Tea Plantations and Tigers
Continuing my cat hunt from Africa, I spotted two tigers on my trip. I must have honed my spotting skills in Africa, as I was able to catch a glimpse of tiger butt and tiger tail, where others missed it. It was exciting, but since it was just a glimpse and I was exposed to such sites in Africa (it´s hard to top the Lion At The Campfire) I wasn´t incredibly excited. What I found funny was that there was a convoy of jeeps full of elementary kids on a school trip, despite all the disclaimers of being eaten by a tiger. I can´t imagine that school trip going through in Canada;) Speaking of school trips, we were staying in the mountain village of Ooty and some school kids were on a field trip. They had booked out most of the hotel and were having an insanely loud bonfire in the parking lot. I figured ´If you can´t beat them, join them´ and went down to participate. They were absolutely hilarious. They had me dance in the centre of the circle (a little too close to the bonfire if you ask me) and had me lead the ´´catwalk fashion show´´. School kids here are hilarious. Or people in general. They always want to do a photo shoot with you. My friend Christophe and I went to the museum in Mumbai, and barely saw a thing, we were so busy doing photo shoots with the kids on their school trips.
In Ootacamund (Ooty) we also travelled by toy train, preceding a tour of a tea plantation where we were exposed to all kinds of teas: red, green, white and black, my favorite being chocalate tea, of which I sent a kilogram back to my Mom and Dad in Canada, in lieu of apres-ski hot chocolate.
Such was the South, land of rice paddies, tea plantations, saris and head-bobbing....J.
