Isha Yoga Ashram, Lunch with the Interviewer, Ramana Maharshi

11 January 2010, Coimbatore:
Yesterday we took a taxi to the Isha Foundation Ashram, which was big and clean and very efficiently run.  I had found out about the ashram through a friend at work (an Indian-American PhD) who has a friend who lives there.  It seems to me to be a kind of a theme park for spiritual seekers.  We entered the grounds, removed our shoes, and were greeted by our own personal greeter who took about 5 minutes to explain the various activities awaiting us.  We were suppose to bathe in the holy water, but as this involved getting naked, renting a dhoti and immersing ourselves in separate men and women pools, we decided to merely wash our hands and feet instead.  Then we progressed to a truly amazing large dome built of bricks, which had us looking up and wondering how they supported all those bricks prior to inserting the one at the very apex of the dome, the 'keystone' brick.  Probably used some sort of yogi levitation trick, some special pranayama or something.  At the center of the dome was sitting a huge black shiva lingam, perhaps 20 feet tall.  We, along with a hundred or two Indians, filed in silently under the expert instructions of several guides and sat cross legged around the lingam in silent meditation for about 10 minutes, then were ushered out.  We spent some time wandering the grounds (they have a huge black statue of a bull and a lot of land on which they are currently building a big structure of some sort) in the gift shop (actually Catherine did, while I sat outside) and the snack bar.  The foundation has hundreds of acres on which they are doing sustainable agriculture.  The guru's name is Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, and I really know nothing about him, although it all seems a bit slick to me (although that's probably an unfair comment as I know nothing about him other than what we saw on our short trip).

We traveled back to Coimbatore (about an hour and a half) by bus.  I stood holding the rail the whole time as the bus was pretty full, although not so full by Indian standards.  The people on the bus were very nice to us (they were all coming from the ashram, so they were religious people).  A couple of teenage girls offered to give up their seats for me (do I look that old?).  More than one man gave us instructions as to which connecting buses to take and where to get off.  The bus didn't have very good shock absorbers, so we felt every bump.

We've had good coffee every where we've gone in southern India so far.

On our trip from Tiruvannamali to Coimbatore last week, I saw something in a rural village that seems to epitomize the contradictions of ancient and modern India.  I saw a large grass hut with a large satellite dish sitting just adjacent to it.

I read that only 7% of India's workers are in the "organized" economy, which means that they pay taxes.  The rest are under the table, which includes all those small businesses, all the little shops that line every street here in Coimbatore.

We bought tickets for the movie theater a couple of days ago, and went this morning to watch the movie.  We had to buy the tickets in advance because they were sold out.  We watched "Avatar" in English, in 3D.  The special effects were really amazing.  Catherine said it was a typical Hollywood movie in that you could predict what was going to happen after the first 5 minutes.  It depressed me because it presented America in such poor light, and here we were sitting amongst a few hundred people being indoctrinated into this anti-American viewpoint propagated by the American film industry.  Oh well.  Upon leaving I was wishing that I had brought my sunglasses so that I could hide my blue eyes.

That's the problem with being associated with a group, whether it be a country or a race or a tribe or a caste.  People make judgments about you based on your membership in the group.  I cringe so much when I hear Americans in a foreign country making derogatory comments in public in loud voices about the country they are visiting.  That happened to us yesterday, and it really depressed me.  Then we attended the movie today, adding further to my Ugly-American-related depression (UARD - maybe I will become famous for being the first one to identifying this new disease).

At 5:45 AM every morning a procession goes down our street banging drums, ringing bells and chanting "Radha Govinda".  I hope they come again tomorrow.

At Indian restaurants, strangers come and sit at your table, wherever there's a free seat.  We had the pleasure of sitting with a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi today at lunch.  He is a student of Advaita Vedanta and is also a TV interviewer who has interviewed many modern-day gurus.  He is of the opinion that almost all of them are just into marketing themselves, although he also thinks that they do a lot of good along the way (by supporting orphanages, schools, and other social projects).  He referred us to an ashram called the AHAM Meditation Retreat and Spiritual Training Center.  We might try to spend a night there.  It's suppose to be pretty close to Coimbatore.