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.
