26 January 2010 Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Yesterday I went to a drugstore called Nilgiri's (it's a chain). They actually had a scanner to scan the bar codes on items... the only one I've seen so far in India on this trip.
Power outages occur almost daily here in Coimbatore, for a few hours mid-day. Most of the shops have generators, which add to the din when they're running and also to the air pollution. One of the main impressions I've received from cities in India is the noise, from the motors and horns of various types of vehicles (cars, buses, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles). Horns seemed pitched to the size of the vehicle, low base tones "hong, hong" for the buses, high frequency "beeee, beeeee" from the scooters, bells "brrrnnnggg, brrrnnnnggg" on the bicycles.
We see a few beggars every day, not any more than one would see in any warm climate city in the U.S.A. I never give them money (although Catherine sometimes does). It seems to me that giving a beggar money is not helping them, it's creating dependence and an unearned sense of entitlement. Instead, I tip waiters, rickshaw drivers and other service providers lavishly. They are productive members of society, and I love the idea of giving them a little extra to help improve their life a bit. Maybe some of that tip money will help fund their child's education or help them start their own business or pay for a dental appointment.
Several excellent books by Indian authors or about India have fallen into my hands on this trip, and I've mentioned them in previous posts. I bought another novel yesterday, called "Shantaram", written by an Australian. I'm about a hundred pages into it, and it is really good. Really funny and insightful. It gives one the flavor of India, and addresses many of the same interesting and delightful quirks of the culture that I have written about in this blog. You've got to read this book. I often burst out laughing while reading it, resulting in sidelong glances from nearby strangers.
When one shakes hands with an Indian man, it's a very soft handshake, like a man would expect when shaking hands with a woman in the west.... not the firm, hearty shake one would expect in the west. Probably it would be considered aggressive to shake hands in the western way.
One sees oxen pulled carts carrying a man and a two hundred gallon cylindrical metal water tank slowly wheeling down the street every once in awhile, or stopped in front of a restaurant with a 3 inch hose draining water from the cylindrical tank into an underground concrete tank. I don't know if the water is potable or not. I don't understand why people would buy water from these people when they can get it from the city pipes. Perhaps the water in these tanks is for drinking, and one can't drink the tap water.
You take your life in your hands when you cross the street here. And, since they drive on the left and we are used to traffic that drives on the right, when we step off the curb, we tend to look the wrong way, adding to the danger. Catherine and I each want to lead, which elevates the danger to the level of folly. She, having the more advanced and subtle state of consciousness, finally agreed to take the subservient position, and now she takes hold of my shirtsleeve as we cross. We've actually got the hang of it now, just as we are about to leave. I find it quite hilarious that there is a crosswalk across the busy street we cross several times per day. It's hilarious because nobody ever uses it and I'm sure that it has no meaning to the cacophonous horde of vehicles and pedestrians crisscrossing every which way up and down and across the street. Or perhaps the driver of a vehicle would get more points for hitting you if you happen to be in a crosswalk at the time. No, that's not fair, they don't really try to hit you, they just figure an inch or two clearance is plenty.
Doing hatha yoga twice a day, eating a pure vegetarian diet and no alcohol has made me feel really good. I must have lost more than 10 or 15 pounds, my asanas are surprisingly good (considering that I was very stiff when I left New Hampshire) and my mind is quiet and serene. Upon leaving the USA, after several days of eating pure vegetarian in India, my sweat no longer stank, and I could wear the same shirt for a few days without it stinking under the arms, even though I would sweat quite a bit in the heat. When we traveled to Kannur, they served us fish and beer every day at lunch, and even though I would eat only a very small piece of fish and drink only a small glass of beer, my sweat started stinking again. Back in Coimbatore now on the vegetarian diet, no stink. Body feels really good.
I'm going to invest in an India-centric mutual fund when I return home. India doesn't have the demographic problems that China has (China will have relatively few young people supporting a lot of older people in a few years, as their one-child policy catches up to them). Also, Chinese banks have over-lent and Chinese infrastructure has been over-built in the name of fiscal stimulus. India is chaotic, but it is also very dynamic. The Indians are natural entrepreneurs. Yes, they have a lot of government bureaucracy and corruption, but I am willing to bet that those will decrease over time rather than increase. They value education and they work hard. And they have a huge, inexpensive labor pool to draw from.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Pirated Software
Monday, 25 January 2010, 11 AM Coimbatore
The Internet cafes here charge 20 rupees per hour (that's about 40 cents). I had been ruminating over how they could pay for the computers and software when charging such low rates, and I guessed that the Windows XP and MS Office Suite must be pirated. Reinforcing my conclusion is the fact that most of the computer clocks in most of the Internet cafes are set back to some date in the past, thereby defeating some trial license. When we were on the train a couple of days ago, I asked a young professional who worked for Dell in Bangalore if he thought that this was so, and he replied, "Oh yes, you can get the pirated software anywhere, anything you want, Windows, Office, anything. The software license protection gets defeated in China and then the pirated software gets imported to India. The Chinese are very good at getting around any license protections that anybody can think up."
Then I asked him, "But what about the hardware? When I have seen new computers for sale in India, they are even more expensive than in the United States, though the general cost of living is much much lower in India. How does anyone afford a computer?" He replied that very few people buy a complete computer. They buy the parts and build it themselves. The parts are relatively inexpensive. You can build your own computer for maybe $300. There's a street in Chennai named "Richi" street crowded with about 300 shops selling computer parts, chassis, accessories and pirated software.
Yesterday Catherine and I were sitting on the patio of a sidewalk cafe having a latte and a masala tea ("masala" tea is the term they use for the spicy tea we call "chai" back home) and a couple of ponies ambled by, doubtless on their way to some haircut or manicure appointment. These ponies had no harnesses, no brands, nothing. Just out for a leisurely stroll in the crazy, busy traffic of Coimbatore, filled with autorickshaws, cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, etc. I couldn't help but contrast this with the panic that accompanied the times when my sister's horse would escape from her pen in our relatively quiet Southern California neighborhood when I was a teenager. It was "call out the National Guard" time. It certainly points to a cultural difference. Exactly what that cultural difference is, I'm not quite sure. Perhaps here in India the feeling is that, if the ponies get stolen or run over, it's God's will, so why get excited about it?
Many of the road names here in Coimbatore seemed to have been changed recently. I was standing this morning at one street corner that had a sign on a pole listing the name of the street and another stone indicator near the ground indicating another name for the same street. Yesterday we were looking for (and finally found) a restaurant that had advertised its location as "Arogya Sami Road", yet our map showed it to be on a road of another name. An autorickshaw driver pointed us to Arogya Sami Road, that's the only way we found it. Presumably it is our map that is out of date. It's hard to know because street name signs are very rare here.
We can usually understand the English of well-educated Indians, but often have difficulty understanding waiters at restaurants. There often are no menus, so we have to just order (somehow) and then accept what we get. It's kind of a crap shoot. We go to vegetarian restaurants, so that narrows things down a bit. So far it has worked itself out.
We found a drugstore called Nilgiris, where I bought some Ayurvedic powder that you dissolve in water and drink, for cough, bronchitis and such. I had a bad cough that only manifests itself in the evening as I lie down to sleep. This stuff worked wonders, so I went back today and bought a bunch to bring home.
We leave for home in a couple of days. It will be good to be back.
The Internet cafes here charge 20 rupees per hour (that's about 40 cents). I had been ruminating over how they could pay for the computers and software when charging such low rates, and I guessed that the Windows XP and MS Office Suite must be pirated. Reinforcing my conclusion is the fact that most of the computer clocks in most of the Internet cafes are set back to some date in the past, thereby defeating some trial license. When we were on the train a couple of days ago, I asked a young professional who worked for Dell in Bangalore if he thought that this was so, and he replied, "Oh yes, you can get the pirated software anywhere, anything you want, Windows, Office, anything. The software license protection gets defeated in China and then the pirated software gets imported to India. The Chinese are very good at getting around any license protections that anybody can think up."
Then I asked him, "But what about the hardware? When I have seen new computers for sale in India, they are even more expensive than in the United States, though the general cost of living is much much lower in India. How does anyone afford a computer?" He replied that very few people buy a complete computer. They buy the parts and build it themselves. The parts are relatively inexpensive. You can build your own computer for maybe $300. There's a street in Chennai named "Richi" street crowded with about 300 shops selling computer parts, chassis, accessories and pirated software.
Yesterday Catherine and I were sitting on the patio of a sidewalk cafe having a latte and a masala tea ("masala" tea is the term they use for the spicy tea we call "chai" back home) and a couple of ponies ambled by, doubtless on their way to some haircut or manicure appointment. These ponies had no harnesses, no brands, nothing. Just out for a leisurely stroll in the crazy, busy traffic of Coimbatore, filled with autorickshaws, cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, etc. I couldn't help but contrast this with the panic that accompanied the times when my sister's horse would escape from her pen in our relatively quiet Southern California neighborhood when I was a teenager. It was "call out the National Guard" time. It certainly points to a cultural difference. Exactly what that cultural difference is, I'm not quite sure. Perhaps here in India the feeling is that, if the ponies get stolen or run over, it's God's will, so why get excited about it?
Many of the road names here in Coimbatore seemed to have been changed recently. I was standing this morning at one street corner that had a sign on a pole listing the name of the street and another stone indicator near the ground indicating another name for the same street. Yesterday we were looking for (and finally found) a restaurant that had advertised its location as "Arogya Sami Road", yet our map showed it to be on a road of another name. An autorickshaw driver pointed us to Arogya Sami Road, that's the only way we found it. Presumably it is our map that is out of date. It's hard to know because street name signs are very rare here.
We can usually understand the English of well-educated Indians, but often have difficulty understanding waiters at restaurants. There often are no menus, so we have to just order (somehow) and then accept what we get. It's kind of a crap shoot. We go to vegetarian restaurants, so that narrows things down a bit. So far it has worked itself out.
We found a drugstore called Nilgiris, where I bought some Ayurvedic powder that you dissolve in water and drink, for cough, bronchitis and such. I had a bad cough that only manifests itself in the evening as I lie down to sleep. This stuff worked wonders, so I went back today and bought a bunch to bring home.
We leave for home in a couple of days. It will be good to be back.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Modernization vs Westernization
Saturday 23 January 2010 20:00, Coimbatore
We took a train today from Fort Cochin to Coimbatore this morning, about a 4 hour ride. We rode in 3 tier AC class, which was comfortable. By the way, I revise my previously stated opinion that the Southern India trains are usually on time. Further experience has shown me that they are often as not significantly late, but not horribly so.
We shared the compartment part of the way with a nice young couple from Bangalore. He was an IT professional who worked for Dell. It sounded as though he worked in a call center. His English was excellent. They had their baby boy with them... a beautiful child, but a bit cranky at first because, as his parents explained, he got the idea that the train compartment was a doctor's office, and he didn't like going to the doctor. His wife had retired from her teaching career (she had an M.S. in Engineering) when they had the baby. Theirs was an arranged marriage, just like every Indian couple we have had extensive conversations with on this trip. And like all the others, they think it is a good system. All the relatives are involved in the search, Vedic horoscopes are computed and castes are taken into account (although I get the feeling that the whole caste thing is a touchy subject, so I usually don't ask). The potential bride and groom have veto power (at least with the couples we spoke to), so there is no coercion there. Although there may be coercion in the villages, where brides are sometimes very, very young.
This brings up a point that was made in "In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India". The author makes the point that India is going through a period of dramatically quick modernization, but that modernization is very different than westernization. In the western mind, we tend to mush the two concepts together. I, like the author, don't see any evidence that India is throwing away its culture in its headlong rush into modernization. Sure, the employees of a cutting edge call center or software development firm in Bangalore may learn the American version of English and call themselves "Tom" or "Jane" when trying to help a frustrated American computer user on the phone, but they see no conflict between that and arranged marriages, caste systems, Hinduism and Vedic astrology. None of the young twenty or thirty-somethings we spoke to showed any signs of even questioning those things. Indian youth value their traditional culture, while wholeheartedly pursuing modernization and education, particularly technical education.
Compare that to the more extreme forms of Islam (such as the Taliban and Wahabism), where modernization is rejected, perhaps due to its implied association with westernization.
I'm still drinking the water in restaurants (not bottled water, this water is poured from stainless steel pitchers into stainless steel tumblers) with no ill effects.
We took a train today from Fort Cochin to Coimbatore this morning, about a 4 hour ride. We rode in 3 tier AC class, which was comfortable. By the way, I revise my previously stated opinion that the Southern India trains are usually on time. Further experience has shown me that they are often as not significantly late, but not horribly so.
We shared the compartment part of the way with a nice young couple from Bangalore. He was an IT professional who worked for Dell. It sounded as though he worked in a call center. His English was excellent. They had their baby boy with them... a beautiful child, but a bit cranky at first because, as his parents explained, he got the idea that the train compartment was a doctor's office, and he didn't like going to the doctor. His wife had retired from her teaching career (she had an M.S. in Engineering) when they had the baby. Theirs was an arranged marriage, just like every Indian couple we have had extensive conversations with on this trip. And like all the others, they think it is a good system. All the relatives are involved in the search, Vedic horoscopes are computed and castes are taken into account (although I get the feeling that the whole caste thing is a touchy subject, so I usually don't ask). The potential bride and groom have veto power (at least with the couples we spoke to), so there is no coercion there. Although there may be coercion in the villages, where brides are sometimes very, very young.
This brings up a point that was made in "In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India". The author makes the point that India is going through a period of dramatically quick modernization, but that modernization is very different than westernization. In the western mind, we tend to mush the two concepts together. I, like the author, don't see any evidence that India is throwing away its culture in its headlong rush into modernization. Sure, the employees of a cutting edge call center or software development firm in Bangalore may learn the American version of English and call themselves "Tom" or "Jane" when trying to help a frustrated American computer user on the phone, but they see no conflict between that and arranged marriages, caste systems, Hinduism and Vedic astrology. None of the young twenty or thirty-somethings we spoke to showed any signs of even questioning those things. Indian youth value their traditional culture, while wholeheartedly pursuing modernization and education, particularly technical education.
Compare that to the more extreme forms of Islam (such as the Taliban and Wahabism), where modernization is rejected, perhaps due to its implied association with westernization.
I'm still drinking the water in restaurants (not bottled water, this water is poured from stainless steel pitchers into stainless steel tumblers) with no ill effects.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Fort Cochi
22 January 2010, Fort Cochi, Kerala State, India
I read over yesterday's post and discovered that I had not made my main point clear. The point was that Indian culture has a different attitude towards risk than Western culture. We in the west tend to expend quite a bit of effort to minimize risk, taking precautions such as life preservers, insurance, strict building regulations, strictly enforced vehicle laws & regulations, etc. Here in India, you see situations every day that would be prevented by law, regulation or general cultural attitudes in the west.
We took a 3 hour trip today on a rattan covered boat through the backwaters today. The boat was powered by a man in the front with a bamboo pole, and another in the back. The backwaters are tidal rivers and canals throughout Kerala, with coconut palms, mangroves, cashew trees, betel nut trees, pepper vines and mango trees on the surrounding land. There's not much fishing, as the fish have become quite scarce due to pollution and reputedly also due to climate change, although I would guess that climate change is a scapegoat and that pollution and overfishing are probably the real culprits.
Although Kerala pollution is much less than the pollution we saw in Tamil Nadu, it's still much more than one would see in Europe, Canada or the USA. Why is that? Part of it is due to poor handling of sewage. The rest seems to be due to the lack of inhibition against littering. In my country, it's the "hicks", the "yahoos" that litter, but there aren't that many hicks left, as our citizens have become more sophisticated over the last few decades. For non-Americans, I would like to explain that those are derogatory terms referring to rural, uneducated people who have backward attitudes. The vast majority of our citizens would be horrified to see a companion throw an empty plastic bottle on the side of the road or into a body of water. Here it seems to be much more acceptable. I think that the only way to solve the litter problem is with education and publicity campaigns (billboards, television, radio). As Catherine said, it's the young people that will really take such a message to heart, so it might take a generation to change.
Although Kerala pollution is much less than the pollution we saw in Tamil Nadu, it's still much more than one would see in Europe, Canada or the USA. Why is that? Part of it is due to poor handling of sewage. The rest seems to be due to the lack of inhibition against littering. In my country, it's the "hicks", the "yahoos" that litter, but there aren't that many hicks left, as our citizens have become more sophisticated over the last few decades. For non-Americans, I would like to explain that those are derogatory terms referring to rural, uneducated people who have backward attitudes. The vast majority of our citizens would be horrified to see a companion throw an empty plastic bottle on the side of the road or into a body of water. Here it seems to be much more acceptable. I think that the only way to solve the litter problem is with education and publicity campaigns (billboards, television, radio). As Catherine said, it's the young people that will really take such a message to heart, so it might take a generation to change.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Risk
Thursday, 21 January 2010, Cochin, Kerala State
Indian people accept a higher rate of risk in their lives than we do. For instance, we went to a martial arts performance today, the Kalarippayattu , the tribal martial art of the Indian state of Kerala. They demonstrated the use of one weapon that was like a combination of a whip and razor wire. Talk about nasty! This guy was whipping this thing around at hypersonic speeds. There would be no way to get inside those defenses, unless you just tackled him and accepted the multiple cuts that would undoubtedly be inflicted on your body. In the grand finale, he whipped this thing pretty close to the faces of those of us in the front row. Such behavior would never be tolerated by the insurance company or lawyer of a stateside performance theater.
You see tourists being floated down a river, nary a life jacket in sight. Most people drive motorcycles with sandals and sans helmets, often carrying their wife and baby girl on the back. The doors on two of the guest houses we have stayed in can be locked either from the outside or the inside with a sliding hasp lock, so if Matt were to leave the room while Catherine was in there, and absent-mindedly lock the door behind him, she couldn't get out (think fire). By the way, I actually did this a few nights ago (without the fire), causing Catherine to be a bit late for dinner. You can imagine the chuckles amongst our international bevy of house guest companions, my chagrin and Catherine's exasperation.
You would never see such a thing as a lock that could lock someone IN in my country, except in prison. Why the stark difference in attitudes and practices? I think it has to do with lawsuits. If a western hotel had that kind of lock design on their doors, they would eventually get sued into non-existence. Lawsuits here in India get tied up in court for decades, and winning or losing depends on who you know and how much cash you can put in the judge's pocket (although honest judges exist - especially in Kerala - I think that they are still few and far between). And I'm sure that we have dishonest judges in my country, but I'm also sure that the percentage of dishonest judges is much much higher in India. I have no special expertise, I've just been reading a lot about it. See The White Tiger and In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India.
We're staying in Fort Cochin, right on the Arabian Sea. We ate lunch overlooking the water, with a gentle breeze. Tell you about it later, Catherine is waiting for me. She shops and explores while I type, which makes us both happy.
Indian people accept a higher rate of risk in their lives than we do. For instance, we went to a martial arts performance today, the Kalarippayattu , the tribal martial art of the Indian state of Kerala. They demonstrated the use of one weapon that was like a combination of a whip and razor wire. Talk about nasty! This guy was whipping this thing around at hypersonic speeds. There would be no way to get inside those defenses, unless you just tackled him and accepted the multiple cuts that would undoubtedly be inflicted on your body. In the grand finale, he whipped this thing pretty close to the faces of those of us in the front row. Such behavior would never be tolerated by the insurance company or lawyer of a stateside performance theater.
You see tourists being floated down a river, nary a life jacket in sight. Most people drive motorcycles with sandals and sans helmets, often carrying their wife and baby girl on the back. The doors on two of the guest houses we have stayed in can be locked either from the outside or the inside with a sliding hasp lock, so if Matt were to leave the room while Catherine was in there, and absent-mindedly lock the door behind him, she couldn't get out (think fire). By the way, I actually did this a few nights ago (without the fire), causing Catherine to be a bit late for dinner. You can imagine the chuckles amongst our international bevy of house guest companions, my chagrin and Catherine's exasperation.
You would never see such a thing as a lock that could lock someone IN in my country, except in prison. Why the stark difference in attitudes and practices? I think it has to do with lawsuits. If a western hotel had that kind of lock design on their doors, they would eventually get sued into non-existence. Lawsuits here in India get tied up in court for decades, and winning or losing depends on who you know and how much cash you can put in the judge's pocket (although honest judges exist - especially in Kerala - I think that they are still few and far between). And I'm sure that we have dishonest judges in my country, but I'm also sure that the percentage of dishonest judges is much much higher in India. I have no special expertise, I've just been reading a lot about it. See The White Tiger and In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India.
We're staying in Fort Cochin, right on the Arabian Sea. We ate lunch overlooking the water, with a gentle breeze. Tell you about it later, Catherine is waiting for me. She shops and explores while I type, which makes us both happy.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Tropical Beach Paradise
Monday 18 January 2010, Kannur
If you had to picture a tropical paradise, what would it look like? The scene from your second floor tropical beach house would be looking out through the coconut palms to the beautiful deserted beach and the fresh blue see with periodic 3 foot waves, would it not? Exotic bird calls, a cow grazing next door with his accompanying egret (there always seems to be at least one egret accompanying every cow - don't ask me why). Oh, and throw in delicious home cooked meals, home cooked by the one of the owners, who calls herself "Rosie".
Forget it, I ain't giving you the phone number or the email address, not without a sufficiently large monetary inducement.
If you had to picture a tropical paradise, what would it look like? The scene from your second floor tropical beach house would be looking out through the coconut palms to the beautiful deserted beach and the fresh blue see with periodic 3 foot waves, would it not? Exotic bird calls, a cow grazing next door with his accompanying egret (there always seems to be at least one egret accompanying every cow - don't ask me why). Oh, and throw in delicious home cooked meals, home cooked by the one of the owners, who calls herself "Rosie".
Forget it, I ain't giving you the phone number or the email address, not without a sufficiently large monetary inducement.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Pongal
14 January 2010 14:30 Coimbatore:
Today is Pongal, the Hindu Solstice Harvest Festival celebrated in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore is a large city in Tamil Nadu). People put some cow dung in a bucket, mix it with water to a soupy consistency and brush the yellow mixture on their driveways and on the sidewalk in front of their shops. Then after it dries they draw intricate, often beautiful geometric designs (mandalas) on them with colored chalk. Pongal is celebrated by boiling rice with fresh milk and jaggery in new pots, which are later topped with brown sugar, cashew nuts and raisins early in the morning and allowing it to boil over the vessel. This tradition gives Pongal its name, which means "to boil over".
Kolam decorations in front of house during PongalThe moment the rice boils over and bubbles out of the vessel, the tradition is to shout of "Ponggalo Ponggal!" and blowing the sangu (a conch), a custom practiced during the festival to announce it was going to be a year blessed with good tidings.
The place I told you about yesterday, Swami Dayananda's ashram, if you go there, be sure to get a GSM SIM card from BSNL, as this is the only mobile phone carrier that has service in the area. It's pretty amazing that there is mobile service there at all, as it is way out in the forest. Especially compared to the supposedly much more modern USA, where in much of rural New Hampshire we have no cell phone service.
The 3 month in-residence Vedanta course there is free, although you would be expected to give some donation to help defray the cost of the facilities and food. The Vedanta that they teach here seems a bit too tied into Hinduism for me, and too intellectual as well, I think. But if you want to become a real expert on the Upanishads and Vedanta, this is the place to go. It seems to me that the truth pointed at by Advaita Vedanta is very, very simple, and efforts to intellectualize it are missing the point. The finger pointing at the moon has all sorts of designs painted on it with henna and all sorts of intricate rings and painted fingernails. But we're suppose to be enjoying looking at the moon, not at the finger! But what do I know? These guys have studied this for decades, and I've just read a few books, and perhaps not even the right ones.
On the way to the Gurukulam we saw some horses grazing on the side of the road, the first we've seen in India. These horses were not fenced in and had no halters or anything, they were just grazing there while cars whizzed past at 45 miles per hour.
The tea that they serve here is not what we in the USA think of when we hear the word, "chai". We think of tea with cardamom and other spices, but in reality "chai" just means tea. What you get here when you order chai is just tea with milk and sugar. There is an all-night guard named "Shankar" at the Institute, and he taught me how to make chai the other night. Shankar is from the village of Ooty, which is on the foothills of a nearby mountain, in the forest, near the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam we visited the other day.... very beautiful and unpopulated elephant & monkey & wild boar country. Shankar stays in town working most of the time, with periodic (weekly or monthly?) visits to his family. I think that this is a pattern with the people that work as guards. I think most of them are villagers looking to make some money to support their very poor families back in the village. The villages are very poor, relying on subsistence agriculture and remittances from sons and fathers sent to the cities to work. The caste system is still very strong in the villages, but not as strong in the cities. In the village, everybody knows your caste, and though you may have a PhD and be wealthy,. you still won't get any respect from higher caste people when you come back to your village, even if they are illiterate and poor. In the city, they might be able to figure out your caste from your name, but you can change your name, and lots of people do change their name as a sort of social upgrade.
Today is Pongal, the Hindu Solstice Harvest Festival celebrated in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore is a large city in Tamil Nadu). People put some cow dung in a bucket, mix it with water to a soupy consistency and brush the yellow mixture on their driveways and on the sidewalk in front of their shops. Then after it dries they draw intricate, often beautiful geometric designs (mandalas) on them with colored chalk. Pongal is celebrated by boiling rice with fresh milk and jaggery in new pots, which are later topped with brown sugar, cashew nuts and raisins early in the morning and allowing it to boil over the vessel. This tradition gives Pongal its name, which means "to boil over".
The place I told you about yesterday, Swami Dayananda's ashram, if you go there, be sure to get a GSM SIM card from BSNL, as this is the only mobile phone carrier that has service in the area. It's pretty amazing that there is mobile service there at all, as it is way out in the forest. Especially compared to the supposedly much more modern USA, where in much of rural New Hampshire we have no cell phone service.
The 3 month in-residence Vedanta course there is free, although you would be expected to give some donation to help defray the cost of the facilities and food. The Vedanta that they teach here seems a bit too tied into Hinduism for me, and too intellectual as well, I think. But if you want to become a real expert on the Upanishads and Vedanta, this is the place to go. It seems to me that the truth pointed at by Advaita Vedanta is very, very simple, and efforts to intellectualize it are missing the point. The finger pointing at the moon has all sorts of designs painted on it with henna and all sorts of intricate rings and painted fingernails. But we're suppose to be enjoying looking at the moon, not at the finger! But what do I know? These guys have studied this for decades, and I've just read a few books, and perhaps not even the right ones.
On the way to the Gurukulam we saw some horses grazing on the side of the road, the first we've seen in India. These horses were not fenced in and had no halters or anything, they were just grazing there while cars whizzed past at 45 miles per hour.
The tea that they serve here is not what we in the USA think of when we hear the word, "chai". We think of tea with cardamom and other spices, but in reality "chai" just means tea. What you get here when you order chai is just tea with milk and sugar. There is an all-night guard named "Shankar" at the Institute, and he taught me how to make chai the other night. Shankar is from the village of Ooty, which is on the foothills of a nearby mountain, in the forest, near the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam we visited the other day.... very beautiful and unpopulated elephant & monkey & wild boar country. Shankar stays in town working most of the time, with periodic (weekly or monthly?) visits to his family. I think that this is a pattern with the people that work as guards. I think most of them are villagers looking to make some money to support their very poor families back in the village. The villages are very poor, relying on subsistence agriculture and remittances from sons and fathers sent to the cities to work. The caste system is still very strong in the villages, but not as strong in the cities. In the village, everybody knows your caste, and though you may have a PhD and be wealthy,. you still won't get any respect from higher caste people when you come back to your village, even if they are illiterate and poor. In the city, they might be able to figure out your caste from your name, but you can change your name, and lots of people do change their name as a sort of social upgrade.
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