Our Trip to Mother India

Water Wallah

2010-01-26T11:18:00.000+04:30

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.

Pirated Software

2010-01-25T10:44:00.001+04:30

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.

Modernization vs Westernization

2010-01-23T19:28:00.000+04:30

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.

Fort Cochi

2010-01-22T18:00:00.004+04:30

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.

Risk

2010-01-21T17:18:00.001+04:30

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.

Tropical Beach Paradise

2010-01-18T11:54:00.000+04:30

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.

Pongal

2010-01-14T14:04:00.000+04:30

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 Pongal

The 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.

Arsha Vidya Gurukulam

2010-01-13T20:43:00.000+04:30

Today we visited Swami Dayananda Saraswati's Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. The Arsha Vidya Gurukulam is an institute for the traditional study of Advaita Vedanta and Sanskrit located about 25 Kms from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, in the picturesque Nilgiri Mountains, only 5 km from the Indian state of Kerala. There are so many elephants, cheetas and bison there that they close the main road in and out of the area at night because it is so dangerous to drive at night. It is out in the forest, really nice country. The ashram is wonderful... clean, well maintained and no marketing slant at all. They can accomodate 150 people in their courses. Each room has its own western style toilet.

Swami Dayananda is reputedly the world's leading expert in Vedanta. He was a disciple of Swami Chinmayananda, who was a brother monk to Swami Satchidananda and Vishnudevananda. Swami Dayananda was not there today. A man with a long white beard dressed in a white dhoti named Ramanji graciously showed us around and fed us lunch in their cafeteria. Their Vedanta courses last 3 months, in residence, and I get the impression that they are very hard core, very serious, sun up to sun down. They also have an ashram in Pennsylvania, which Catherine told me that two of our friends / acquaintances have been to. We just happened upon it because someone who we met at lunch mentioned it to us. The people we met there were just wonderful.

Swami Satchidananda's Boyhood Home

2010-01-12T08:49:00.000+04:30

Yesterday Karthi drove us out to see Swami Satchidananda's boyhood home, about 45 minutes drive from the Integral Yoga Institute. It was situated on an acre of land, partially fenced in by an 8 foot whitewashed concrete wall. The house was one story, approximately 1,000 square feet. The roof was shingled with clay tiles. The floors seemed to be concrete, but the caretaker told us that they weren't concrete, they were a mixture of crushed limestone and sand that is manually compacted. It is traditional to rub cow dung over the floor, which gives is a yellowish finish. Cow dung is reputedly antiseptic and also acts as an insect repellent. We'll try that on our floors when we get home. The home is very well maintained, with painted teak posts and beams, painted patterns around the edges of the floors, and pictures of Swamiji's family. There were two places in the main room where the concrete floor gave way to a concrete tank about 5 feet by 5 feet by 4 feet deep, and the roof drained into these two pools inside the house. The pools had drainage pipes at their bottom to drain that rain water out to the yard, but the pipes could be stopped up to allow the water to collect into these pools. The caretaker informed me that they would use this rainwater to make a certain sort of dahl (similar to a thick lentil soup) that was very good for the stomach.

Isha Yoga Ashram, Lunch with the Interviewer, Ramana Maharshi

2010-01-11T20:38:00.003+04:30

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.

Belching, bricks, scaffolding, electronics

2010-01-10T19:39:00.000+04:30

10 January 2010, 8 PM, Coimbatore.

Belching appears to be socially acceptable in Southern India, judging by the prolific eruptions from one of our yoga teachers and the more minor eruptions from one of the pretty little gals assisting throughout the Institute. I will use this back home when Catherine castigates me, "They do it in India!".

Those broken white lines indicating traffic lanes don't mean much here. I sometimes think that one is supposed to try to keep the midline of the vehicle over the lines.

In fact, any sign prohibiting or prescribing any sort of behavior doesn't seem to be taken too seriously. When we went to the hospital for our dentist appointment (the dentist's office was in the hospital), they dropped us off at the emergency entrance (where the ambulances come), and one of the hospital staff directed us to walk through the emergency ward to get to the elevator, despite a big sign clearly stating, "Not a thoroughfare". When we saw the sign and saw emergency patients, nurses and doctors busy saving lives in curtained off areas on either side of the non-thoroughfare, we balked, but he urged us on with greater vigor, so we walked timidly through, and nobody paid any attention to us.

This country makes a lot of bricks! It's something that can be done manually, without a big capital investment. They just mix up a slurry of clay, sand, dung and water, put it in a wooden form, remove the form and let them dry in the sun. One sees big stacks of bricks throughout the countryside, presumably going through the drying process.

I've seen a few backhoes so far, although manual labor is much more common. The laborers use a single tool that does the job of both a shovel and a pick. It has a wooden handle and a blade that looks similar to a round nosed shovel, but the blade is attached perpendicular to the handle, like a pick. They use it to till the land, and also use it to shovel, although the blade angle is different, so the shoveling action is different.

Scaffolding is almost always made of saplings lashed together with jute, even for multistory scaffolding. It wasn't until we got to Coimbatore that I saw my first steel scaffolding, but even here it is rare.

There are Internet cafes every couple of blocks here. The computers are somewhat dated, but not really too bad. They are all running Windows XP and some of them have Skype. We used Skype this evening to call our twin nephews in Quebec to wish them a happy birthday. We went in an electronics store to buy some rechargeable batteries and a charger. Everything was the same price or more expensive than in the states. My charger with 4 NiMh batteries cost the equivalent of $22! I guess all the electronics are imported, so they're not going to be priced for India.

Catherine had two pairs of pants made. For a pattern, she gave them a pair of pants that she had made when she was in India years before we met. She bought the material in another store here in town. I think that, between the cost of the material and the cost of the tailoring, it was about 9 dollars per pair, and they are beautiful and fit perfectly.

The cars here are mostly Maruti Suzukis. Maruti is a joint venture between the Indian government and Suzuki. They're a decent economy car, and they only cost about $6,000. There are also Hyundais and Hondas. I think I've seen a Lexus or two as well. The little 3 wheeled motor rickshaws are produced in India by Piaggio India, and a similar vehicle is manufactured by Bajaj Auto.

I'm reading a really good book right now about India that I believe is on the NY Times best seller list (though I bought it here). It's called In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India. I highly recommend it. It is written by a British journalist who married an Indian and lives in India.

Indian marketing images often show surprisingly risque models in underwear or provocative poses, contrary to the general idea of India as a prudish society.

Coimbatore - the trash truck

2010-01-09T09:36:00.000+04:30

9 January 2010 10AM, Coimbatore: Even though Coimbatore is one of the biggest, most modern cities in India, trash pickup is done by an ox-drawn carriage. The carriage is kind of like the back end of a stake bed truck. The oxen all have horns painted, I assume to identify who they belong to. This one had one green horn and one blue horn. Catherine got a picture, which we'll upload and share when we get home.

She also got a picture of 3 of the guys at the Institute. One is a fellow yoga teacher, one is the janitor and one is a boy (perhaps 12 years old, maybe older) who runs the little snack bar where we have our soup and juice. This kid has a face and a smile like an angel. He is truly radiant. If I could see auras, I would be blinded by his.

When we went to the gastroenterologist the other day, just as with the dentist earlier in the week, it was so nice that he sat down and spent the time to explain things to us. There was no sense of hurry, no time pressure.

He had a picture of Sai Baba on his wall, and Catherine asked him about it. He said that, although he knows nothing about yoga (here I am sure he didn't mean "hatha yoga", but "yoga philosophy"), Sai Baba is is guru, and that is enough. He implied that this is mostly the attitude of Indians, that they take a guru and give their devotion to that guru. I don't think that a large number of them actually meditate on a regular basis, and I doubt if the number of hatha yogis per capita is any higher than in the west. But it seems that most of them are devoted to one or another Hindu deity or realized master.

India just passed a law that, when you're 6 month visa expires, you have to leave the country for at least 2 months before coming in on another visa. I think a lot of people were hopping out to Sri Lanka, getting a new 6 month visa, and immediately returning. Boy, you could sure stretch your retirement income here. I think you could live pretty well on $20 per day.

Yoga Similarities and Differences

2010-01-08T10:50:00.003+04:30

Catherine taught a Hatha I/II yoga class last night. She was careful not to touch any of the men. Any posture adjustments were purely verbal. Everybody seemed to follow well, as they know the routine and most or all of the students understood English, though they may have had trouble with her non-Indian accent.

It got me thinking about the differences between yoga classes here versus in the states. Here most of the students and teachers are male, in the USA most are female. Here the teacher's delivery is reminiscent of a calisthenics class, whereas in the USA classes are usually delivered with more yin than yang. The Indian students here are at about the same level as American students in Catherine's classes back home. They are not any more or less flexible or advanced.

Catherine has had some stomach pains on and off over the last several years, for which she had an endoscopy 5 years ago, with no big revelations. In our walks near the neighborhood of the Institute we walked past the home office of a gastroenterologist. The sign said "Endoscopy here with Doctor T. Ravishankar." She went in to get information and get the "feel" of the place, since she is still having problems. The cost was $1,000 rupees, or about $20. I think that her last endoscopy cost more than $2,000 back home. She got the endoscopy this morning, while I watched, and it was "interesting". The doctor uses an anesthetic spray into the back of her throat, then she swallows, thereby numbing her throat. In the states, they actually put her under anesthesia. She laid on her side while he snaked the scope down her throat, her esophagus, down through her stomach and into the upper part of the duodenum, while she fought the urge to gag. I watched the television display the whole time... a moist, pink corrugated tube. The doctor brought her right out and drew some pictures to show us what was wrong. He said that she had some inflamation due to H. Pylori.

We went to the same restaurant as the one I described in my post of yesterday, and I decided (as an experiment) to drink the water they poured out of stainless steel pitcher into my stainless steel cup. It tasted very good, just like the water out of my well back home. I must have drank 16 ounces, and had no bad after-effects.

I closely observed the other diners at the restaurant. They weren't tipping 15%, they were just leaving any coins that came with the change from their bill. For instance, on a 70 rupee tab, they might leave 2 - 5 rupees for a tip, or none at all.

Okay, here's the deal on the Indian head wobble. It means "yes" or "no problem". I've been practicing, but I can't do it very well at all. Catherine does it pretty well, but this is her fourth trip to India.

I love this food. I'm not eating much, though, because I'm never hungry. Losing weight like crazy.

Catherine and I like to travel like this.... instead of taking a tour and seeing a bunch of sites. I feel like we're immersing ourselves in the culture by going to the Indian doctor, dentist, buying a SIM card for our mobile phone, doing yoga with the locals, doing our own laundry, etc. We're figuring out how people live here, what's different and what's the same.

I came across legal notices in the newspaper regarding people changing their names, and wondered how that worked. It wasn't women changing their last name when they get married. So I found the answer in this article on Wikipedia.

I was lying in bed last night listening to the ever-present honking, and decided to compute the probability of no horn honks in a one second interval. You'll be happy to know that it is under 1%, throughout the hours of 5 AM through midnight.

When they serve you coffee or chai here, you get it in a stainless steel cup, and that cup is sitting in a small shallow stainless steel bowl. Steel transmits heat really well, so you can burn your hand on the cup. The idea is to grasp it delicately by only the rim (which is not as hot), then pour the coffee back and forth between the cup and the bowl, until it's just the right temperature.

Integral Yoga Institute in Coimbatore

2010-01-07T11:28:00.001+04:30

7 January 2010, Noon, Coimbatore: The thing that has surprised me the most during this trip is the diversity of languages in India. Today's yoga class was given in Tamil. Actually, it was given in Tamglish.... a combination of Tamil and English. I was able to follow without too much trouble because I know the Integral Yoga routine so well and could also catch a word or two of English here and there. Tamil is quite distinguishable from Hindi. Catherine described it perfectly this morning when she said that it is "rolling"... it's as if the words roll over each other. Hindi sounds more like sanskrit, which we are somewhat familiar with due to all the Yoga and Vedanta that we have studied.

Whenever we hear someone talking on the phone, they always mix in English words with their Hindi or Tamil. It reminds me of when I was growing up, my mother and grandmother would always speak Greeklish amongst themselves, and in Southern California (where I grew up), my Chicano friends spoke Spanglish.

Can an economy thrive when that economy has 27 different languages? The lack of a common language acts like friction in the drive train of the economy. If India had only one or two languages, I would invest a good chunk of my portfolio here, but the language thing gives me pause.

I think India must have the highest number of small businesses per capita in the entire world. We walk down the street in Coimbatore, and it is filled with small mom and pop shops. This is vibrant small business entrepenurship at its finest.

Unlike Pondicherry, there are no open sewers here. They seem to have mastered modern plumbing in Coimbatore. However, when walking down the street, just like in Pondicherry, one encounters open electrical junction boxes with exposed conductors. At least they are up high enough where a child can't reach them.

We walked to the Western Union office down the street from the Institute to get a cash advance from the credit card. The lady there, who spoke very good English, said that we would have to go to another of their offices across town. A man who worked there took me on the back of his motorcycle to the other office while Catherine returned to the Institute. It was about a 15 minute ride. My mantra was, "little children do this all the time, and they are not afraid, so there is no reason for a grown man to be afraid". This turned out to be a very effective mantra, as I arrived calm and safe.

The Integral Yoga Institute is run jointly by a wonderful man and a wonderful woman. She is a Doctor of Naturopathy and he has a Bachelor of Science. They have yoga classes twice per day (a beginner's class, a mixed Hatha I/Hatha II class, and a ladies class). Catherine and I take the mixed class, which typically has about 3 women and about 12 men. When they chant here, there are many off-tune voices, but there is no inhibition like there usually is in our yoga classes back home. They really project their voices. They have 3 group meditations per day. They also have a little snack bar that serves soup, juice and snacks. The accommodations are simple but adequate. We feel very much at home here.

To give you some idea of costs: Exchange rate is about 45 rupees to the dollar. Breakfast costs about 50 rupees per person (roughly $1). A 15 minute taxi ride costs 150 rupees (roughly $3).

The motor rickshaws have 2 cycle engines, so they put a little oil in with the fuel when they fill up. Street signs here are in Tamil and English, or in Tamil exclusively, and not all streets are labeled (sort of like New Hampshire).

Coimbatore, a big, modern city

2010-01-06T14:39:00.001+04:30

6 January 2010, 3:20 PM, Coimbatore: We took a taxi from our hotel in Thiruvannamali to the train station in Jolarpettai. Our driver was much more reasonable than the last crazy man. He drove relatively slow and didn't try to kill any livestock or dogs. It was a couple of hours ride through some really nice country. Lush vegetation, lots of farming, including coconut palms, sugar cane, orange trees, rice paddies and lots more. There was very little litter, because in rural areas of India, all the trash is organic and biodegradable. You don't have plastic water bottles and goods that come wrapped or bottled in glass, plastic, aluminum or paper. However, wherever there was standing or running water, it looked polluted. It seems to me that massive construction of water treatment and massive construction of sewage treatment plants would be something that would really benefit India. Also massive public relations campaigns to try to instill an inhibition against littering in the population. You see people unwrapping some food or other item and throwing the wrapping right on the street.

I would say that 90% of the people here wear sandals, even on motorcycles. Perhaps 5% go barefoot and only about 5% wear shoes. The weather would make shoes uncomfortable. Catherine pointed out that women on motorcycles with saris seem in great danger of the sari getting caught in the wheels and dragging the woman off the bike to be killed in traffic. At least in Coimbatore the vast majority of motorcyclers wear helmets, and there don't seem to be any mopeds. Coimbatore doesn't have near as many cows and oxen roaming the street. We only saw two so far, and they were pulling a cart, under the control of a human. It seems a much more modern city than Pondicherry or even Chennai.

The weather has been nice during our trip, typically in the seventies, with a light breeze.

The trains seem pretty efficient, leaving and arriving on time. We got a first class, non-air-conditioned cabin, which was pretty inexpensive. The railway cars are old and showing their age, but they were clean and moderately comfortable. Second class is crowded. If you have luggage, you'll probably want to travel first class.

I forgot to tell you about when Catherine and I were walking around in Pondicherry one night, and stopped and listened to a singer with a couple backup musicians. Indians have this habit of turning loudspeakers up so high that I am sure that it damages your eardrums. Seriously, they turn it up louder than the loudest rock concert you've ever been to, crazy loud. I wanted to stay and listen, but I didn't want to damage my hearing.

We went to the dentist today. The dentist is a lady, ex-Captain in the army, I think, since her sign still said "Capt". She's a Punjabi. She manages to be motherly and professional at the same time. She had two assistants and one younger lady (probably a trainee) just watching. Where labor is cheap, you can afford lots of help. Which got me thinking of an economic metric to quantify various economies: the ratio of the cost of labor to the cost of capital. For instance, in India, how much would a dental x-ray machine cost in terms of man-hours of dentist time? The ratio would be much lower in the USA... an hour of a dentist's time is expensive in the USA, and the cost of an x-ray machine is probably about the same in both countries. When labor is cheap and capital is expensive, it gives rise to a totally different type of economy than if the opposite is true. Therefore my dentist in India has 3 assistants and a 1960's vintage x-ray machine, and my dentist in the USA has one assistant and the newest, fanciest x-ray machine. Oh, and by the way, my Indian crown is costing me 5,000 rupees (about $100). It would probably cost 10 times that in the USA.

The dentist speaks 5 languages, including English, Punjabi, Hindi, and a couple of others. Between her and her assistants, they can usually find a way to communicate sufficiently with their Indian patients of different ethnic origins.

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I had purchased an unlocked GSM cell phone on E-Bay before I left the USA, then bought a SIM card for it in Chennai, so I have a Chennai phone number, which is definitely what you should do if you are going to be visiting India. EVERYONE (except the very poor) has a cell phone here.

Catherine and I lunched in a cafe here, where the locals come in and sit down anywhere there was a free chair (two sat across from us). The waiter slaps down a rectangular banana leaf (about the size of a placemat), then pours a little water on it. The diner (using his right hand) wipes off the banana leaf, then the waiter puts a stainless steel bowl of rice by his left elbow and plops three different types of goop (thick sauces) in piles on the banana leaf. The diner makes a big pile of rice in the middle, then mixes some of the goop in with the rice and eats it with his right hand. Catherine was the only female in the dining room. It was only as we were leaving that we discovered another room where women and families dined. I think we were in a room where everybody got the same basic lunch and ate fast and cheap. I think the other room might have been for more leisurely lunches, ordered from the menu.

The Indian people are almost always friendly, open and welcoming. In Coimbatore we are staying at the Integral Yoga Institute. We are doing hatha yoga twice a day and meditation in their hall in the morning. I really liked the hatha yoga class this morning because it was a very traditional Integral Yoga class.

Hotels, small change & credit cards

2010-01-05T07:29:00.000+04:30

5 January 2010, 0800, Tiruvannamali: It seems that few hotels and fewer restaurants accept credit cards in Southern India. Even if they accept them, it seems that you have about a 50/50 chance of their credit card reader not working. And if their credit card reader cannot read your magnetic stripe, then you're out of luck. Despite the numeric keypad plainly visible on the card reader, either it is not possible to enter the card number manually in India, or they just don't know how to do it. Oh, and by the way, nobody accepts American Express, so you might as well leave that card at home.

We had to pay cash at this hotel due to their credit card reader problems, thereby depleting our cash stash. We're almost certainly going to run out of cash and will have to try to get a cash advance against the credit card or have someone wire us some money.

The other problem is the lack of small change in amounts appropriate for tipping and motor rickshaw rides (i.e. 10 or 50 rupee bills). If you go to the store and buy a bottle of water for 20 rupees and hand them a 100 rupee note, they may not have change. I changed some dollars into rupees yesterday at Western Union and even they had nothing smaller than 500 rupee notes. They said that I could come back at 6:30 PM when the man delivered the money, and maybe then I could get something smaller.

Tiruvannamali, Ramana Maharshi's Town

2010-01-04T16:14:00.001+04:30

4 January 2010, 1700 Tiruvannamali: We took a taxi yesterday from Pondicherry to Tiruvannamali (try saying that three times very fast). After that experience, I think when I get back I am going to hire a really good video-game software developer and make a hit video game called, "Driving in India". The object will be to drive from Pondicherry to Tiruvannamali in the shortest time possible without killing any people, cows, dogs or goats. I think our driver will always hold the record, although we came very close to killing a baby goat and somewhat close to killing various dogs and people, which would have ruined his score. "Very close" would be defined as an incident which leaves some hair or skin on your vehicle and causes sharp gasps from your passengers. Merely sharp gasps qualifies as "close" but not "very close", and therefore does not award the player as many points. "Go with the flow" is a principal nowhere quite as perfectly manifested as in Indian traffic flows. You gotta experience it to believe it.

Whereas Pondicherry is Sri Aurobindo's town, Tiruvannamali is Sri Ramana Maharshi's town. I guess you could call them the patron saints of their respective towns. Street names, business names, the name of each town's patron saint is everywhere. The Indians don't seem to separate business from religion, so that the names of Hindu gods and the names of saints are used to sell everything from clothing to financial services. Ramana Maharshi is the Tiger Woods of Tiruvannamali, his image endorsing many products.

Isn't it interesting that in the non-Hispanic western cultures, nobody is named "Jesus", and the image of Jesus would never be used to sell laundry soap? Yet here, nearly everybody's name and everybody's product has a religious meaning. We in the west separate the "spiritual" and the "profane", but in India there does not seem to be such a separation.

The temple in the center of town covers 22 acres and is truly awesome.

Ramana Maharshi was a boy of 16, and was sitting alone in his father's living room one day, when he was suddenly gripped by an intense fear of death, for no apparent reason. Instead of resisting the fear, he embraced it, even laying down and pretending to be a corpse. While engaged in this experience, he intensely investigated the nature of self... "if my body dies, will I still exist, what will be left, etc." And in this short time of just a few minutes, he realized the true nature of the Self, and from that moment forward his attention remained focused on the Self even in the midst of other activities. From what I understand, he never did any spiritual practices. I have to get a book and read up on him.

In Tiruvannamali, Catherine and I visited the amazing temple. I stood in line to get the special darshan of some statue there.... when I finally got to the statue after crowding in a single file line that snaked back and forth for half an hour, I couldn't even tell what deity the statue represented, it was too far away and there was too much pandemonium (loud bells, chanting, etc). I was in line behind a professional man and his wife. He looked like a doctor or lawyer or government man or something... well dressed in western clothes. He asked me if I was a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi. I hate that sort of question, because it is the sort of question it would take me too long to answer, longer than the questioner would want to sit still for. But I will explain it to you. No one would ever ask me if I was a devotee of Sri (I mean Sir) Isaac Newton or Sri (Sir) Roger Bannister (who was the first one to run the 4 minute mile). These people did something great. They advanced humanity, as did Sri Ramana Maharshi. I am grateful, and I wish to honor their contributions and learn what I can from them, but I think that it is probably some sort of perversion to worship them. Perhaps it relieves us somehow of the responsibility of implementing Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings. It's the same with western religions. Instead of acting like Jesus told me to act, if I go to church once a week I can call myself a Christian.

So when somebody asks me if I am a devotee of this or that, I have to say, no, but I have studied their teachings and try to implement them. It never seems to satisfy the questioner.

In the USA, one occasionally used to hear about a group of black people filing a lawsuit against a restaurant because the waiters had a pattern of serving all the white people first. I doubt if it happens much any more, now that we have a black president. We (a group of white foreigners) had a similar experience in our hotel last night. As soon as the native Indians came in, our waiters were yanked back to serve them and they had their whole dinner while we waited and waited and waited. It was not just bad service, it was racial discrimination. The Indians got great service. The waiters were friendly, but it was the floor manager who was mandating and directing the discrimination. I can sure sympathize with those black plaintiffs in the USA.... Rosa Parks and her compatriots, who just decided not to take it any more. Of course, we just sat there and took it, remaining polite to the end.

Auroville

2010-01-02T17:30:00.000+04:30

Saturday 2 Jan 2010 Pondicherry: We had to switch hotels today due to a mix up in our reservations, but the new hotel is nicer anyway. We took a taxi to Auroville, which is a community (almost a town, really) that was initiated by "the Mother", Sri Aurobindo's French spiritual co-conspirator. (Was there any hanky-panky going on there? I don't know). It was built in the sixties and is still growing. The residents are from all over the world. It has a utopian vision, but I get the impression that utopia is a ways away still, like most (or all) such communities. However, it is green and clean and into alternative energy, sustainable agriculture and alternative architecture. They eschew religion, yet use a lot of religious terminology, so I think that they're a little inconsistent on that front. They built a huge golden dome for meditation. We could only see the outside, as the inside is reserved for meditation, not a tourist attraction.

Regarding the bovines who wander throughout Pondicherry, I can't stop wondering where they live. Do they live outside and just trek into the city each morning to eat garbage, returning to their homes in the evening? I will have to ask our yoga teacher tomorrow.

Our yoga teacher is Gujarati (so was Gandhi). She told us that she doesn't go out much because she doesn't speak Tamil. There are 27 different languages in India and something like 150 dialects. It seems everybody here (except perhaps the lower castes) speaks at least 3 languages. Some of the English is quite understandable to me. It seems to be correlated with education level and economic class. It is very difficult for me to understand most of the English I hear. For instance, when I placed a room service order this afternoon, I wrote it down and walked my order to the front desk so that I wouldn't have to struggle to make myself understood over the hotel phone.

I had brought some short pants on the trip that had a ripped out seam. There is a tailor who worked under an awning on the corner adjacent to our hotel. I snuck over there with my pants and he stopped what he was doing and put them right on the sewing machine and fixed them in about 3 minutes. The sewing machine was an ancient model powered by him pushing his feet back and forth. It seemed to work very well, and left me wondering why we think we need electric motors in household sewing machines. I gave him 50 rupees (about $1) and he was quite pleased.

Paul and Sue are taking us out to dinner tonight in honor of our wedding anniversary.

Getting ready to leave for Pondicherry

2010-01-02T17:04:00.000+04:30

Morning, Wednesday 30 Dec. 2009, Radisson Hotel, Chennai: It is a very strange conversion that the world has gone through over the last 100 years or so. Here at the Radisson Hotel Catherine and I go to breakfast, and the staff are impeccably dressed, with the men in nice suits and ties and the women in nice pantsuits. Meanwhile, nearly all of the the guests are dressed casually. I am sure that the clothing that the staff are wearing costs much more than the clothing of the people that they wait on. I doubt if that was true 100 years ago. How did that happen? I guess that the people with disposable income had the freedom to choose comfortable clothes and the people who were striving for disposable income were required to wear formal clothes in their service industry jobs. It's kind of strange. On first impulse you would expect the wealthier folks to wear the better clothes.

In addition, the staff of the hotel seem very cultured, whereas my country bumpkin demeanor is somewhat embarrassing even to myself. "Hey Verne, rustle me up 'nuther cup of that java over here, will ya?". Our driver yesterday told me that he speaks 5 languages: Tamil, Hindi, Nepali, English and Bengali, and he's working on Japanese. Much of the English is difficult for an American to understand, and it is difficult for them to understand our English as well. The Indians speak English between themselves across their own cultural divides, such as when a Tamil speaker is speaking to a Hindi speaker. Ironically, English is the language that unifies this country. They have their old colonial master (Britain) to thank for that.

Part of the discomfort here is that when I am India (or any other developing economy), I live like the upper class, but I am not upper class by any stretch of the imagination, so it just doesn't feel right. This whole class thing makes me squirm. It's a game whose rules I don't understand. I don't know how to dress. I don't know how to behave. I don't know how much to tip. When I tip, maybe it insults the service person because the tip is too small or maybe my tips are inappropriately too large, thereby inadvertently creating some other transgression.

I have a theory that the world is composed of two types of people, those focused on form and those focused on function. Catherine is the former, I am the latter. Catherine never has problems with class or dress or proper behavior. But I am better at fixing the computer or the plumbing and making the investments and paying the bills.

Later on today we take a taxi to Pondicherry, the home of the great Indian saint Sri Aurobindo, (1872 - 1950) whose name I am quite familiar with but whose books I have never actually read. We plan on doing yoga and meditation there every day. We'll be staying outside their ashram, as they didn't have any rooms available when we made reservations. Pondicherry was ruled by the French from 1816 to 1954, so I think French may be more prominent than English there.

Pondicherry

2009-12-31T18:09:00.003+04:30

Thursday, 31 December 2009, Pondicherry: I was a day ahead of myself in previous posts, so subtract one day from those. We started the day with a yoga class. Our new yoga teacher was referred to us by the lady that owns & runs our hotel. The yoga teacher is a middle aged female. She's got the round matronly body typical of Indian women her age, but is flexible and well qualified. She's also a naturopath, and approaches yoga as a therapy, with special emphasis on pranayama and diet. Her pranayama techniques a quite different from those that we were taught. She concentrates on the chest and head, as opposed to the diaphram during breathing. Pranayams are done forcefully, with a lot of noise generated in the nose. Contrary to a lot of western yoga classes, the word "gentle" was never used, much to my delight. My head was simultaneously buzzing and immersed in tranquility during and after the class. Definite increase in sattva, decrease in tamas, which is what I need.

We ate breakfast at a little place on the beach (facing the Bay of Bengal) called "Le Cafe". It's open 24 hours and serves great cappacinos and lattes. I had two, contrary to my new yoga teacher's advice to avoid coffe and milk products. C'est la vie! Three very upper class looking young Indian girls sat at the table next to us, with beautiful saris and faces like movie stars, typing messages on their cellphone. Young Indian women can be incredibly beautiful, but very few of them bring that head-turning beauty along into middle age.

You see a lot of cell phones here, used by men and women alike. You see a lot of mopeds driven by women as well. In some ways, it seems like a very modern society, then you see a small herd of water buffalo saunter out into the middle of a busy street, bringing traffic to a standstill, as we saw today. When the last one was dead center in the intersection, he decided to stop and take a large, wet, sloppy crap, so the busses, cars, mopeds and bicycles all had to stop and watch this performance.

The vast majority of the women dress traditionally in saris and the majority of the men dress in western clothes. I've seen this phenomenom in my travels throughout the rest of Asia, and Africa as well. It seems that women are the holders of tradition.

Catherine vomited yesterday, but got over it within a couple of hours or so.

I bought a pair of loose muslin pants that I can wear for yoga and also out and about. I also bought a nice, light, cool muslin shirt. Catherine bought a couple of pairs of pants and a very pretty Indian style shirt.

There is a whole lot of litter lining the streets in parts of Pondicherry. It seems as if the residents don't have the same inhibitions about littering that we have. There is also a lot of cow poop and dog poop in the streets. You really need to pay attention when you're walking the streets. I would bet that the raw sewage goes right into the Bay of Bengal untreated.

Pondicherry

2009-12-30T08:49:00.000+04:30

31 Dec 2009 9:25 AM: Well, I wrote a nice long post for you yesterday from the hotel in Chennai, then lost it when I attempted to publish it to the blog. Ganesh is the half-human, half-elephant god who is the remover of obstacles, but it is my understanding that he also places obstacles in your way occasionally, so I reckon it was Ganesh's doing. No doubt he was attempting to eliminate any budding attachments I might have to my newfound career as a word-traveling blogger.

When someone from the developed world travels to the developing world, the currency exchange rate allows them to live higher on the hog (an old country expression from the southern USA.... must be that the more expensive meat on a hog is higher.... wouldn't know myself, as I don't eat the stuff). Therefore, you have middle class people suddenly thrust into an upper class life, and we feel awkward and perhaps sometimes act foolishly in the role. I think that this is a contributing factor to the "ugly American" phenomenom. The hotel in Chennai was a 5 star Radisson, with an incredibly solicitous staff, a really great gym, a really great spa, pool, steam room, sauna, fantastic restaurant, etc etc. I felt like I should have been working there rather than staying there.

Yesterday afternoon we took a hotel shuttle from the hotel in Chennai to Pondicherry. Pondicherry used to be a French possession, so there is some French spoken here, although I think more English. Pondicherry was the home of Sri Aurobindo and his French female disciple who they call "the mother". The ride from Chennai to Pondicherry was the usual wild adventure, with countless near misses, accompanied by the gasps of my traveling companions. For some reason, Indian driving never bothers me. I just have faith that the driver knows what he's doing. This faith is not a religious, blind sort of faith, it's a faith based on my knowledge of statistics and my use of reason. I figure, if this guy is working as a driver for a hotel (a plum assignment), he must have several years of experience as a driver, and an accident-free (or nearly so) record. Since these jobs are plum jobs in the developing world, you know that the drivers are top-notch. So, if this driver has driven full-time for several years without an accident, what are the odds that he will have an accident during your trip? Vanishingly small, I reckon. Of course, there is a wild card, and that is Ganesh, who is not confined to the strictures of statistics.

Woke up this morning very early and did a nice long asana / pranayama / meditation routine. Today we visit the tomb of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and arrange a visit to Auroville for tomorrow.

First day in Chennai

2009-12-28T19:35:00.000+04:30

Evening of Tuesday, 29 December 2009, Radisson Hotel, Chennai: Today we hired a driver from the hotel and drove around Chennai all day. One of the places we stopped at was called the Ice House outside of Chennai were Swami Vivekenanda stayed for a week after he got back from the famous 1897 World Religious Conference in Chicago. He was the first Swami ever to visit the Americas. He ended up staying in the US for an extended period, and became all the rage there due to his forceful personality and charismatic speaking skills. Swami Vivekenanda was a disciple of Ramakrishna. This "Ice House" is now a museum devoted to his memory, with a short film, lots of photos, paintings, books and a meditation room that had been Swami Vivekananda's bedroom while he was there. They called it the Ice House because in the 1800's, for the first time ice was brought to southern India by boat from Boston, and stored there. Ice became quite popular to these southern Indian (who had never experienced it before), and the Bostonian who ran the scheme made a fortune. But then a process was developed to make ice locally using evaporative cooling and the bottom fell out of the market for Boston ice.
So while I was there I felt a need to use their public restroom for #2, as some of my spicy lunch was reacting with my delicate intestines. And of course, we're talking Indian toilets here, which is basically a porcelein basin with a foot-shaped area on each side to place your feet as you squat. And then a plastic measuring cup (2-cup size) sitting under a faucet for you to use to wash your privates with after performing the dirty deed. But it takes a very skilled yogi indeed (in my opinion) to be able to perform this operation while squatting with your pants down around your ankles, without getting your pants wet and/or soiled in either the excretion or the washing stages. I finally decided to just take them off before proceeding, and that seemed to work fine, but it takes longer.
The thing you see quite often here that you would never see back home is the 4 person moped scenario. It goes something like this. Dad is driving the moped. Oldest daughter (around 10 years old) behind him, arm around his waist. Mom sitting sidesaddle behind her, holding youngest daughter (about 5 years old). Snaking through dangerous traffic at about 20 mph as everybody (taxis, motorcycles, mopeds, pedestrians, motor rickshaws and the occasional dog or cow) weaves in and out, horns touting periodically as if they were controlled by an extremely talented cosmic teenage video game player, amazingly accident-free.

We're here now!

2009-12-28T09:36:00.000+04:30

Tuesday, 29 Dec 2009, morning, Radisson Hotel, Chennai, India: We arrived last night in Chennai (used to be called Madras) a little after midnight. Before that, on the plane, an Indian man and his daughter sat in front of us. They both lived in the US now, and we're coming for a visit to family in India. I think she was born in the US, attending Purdue, majoring in Mechanical Engineering, having done summer internships with General Mills and Proctor & Gamble.... as American as apple pie. He also was some kind of professional, although I did not ask for details. We got to talking about yoga, Vedanta and various spiritual teachers.
As I told him, my first exposure to Indian culture was when I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation in 1973. He also had been initiated when he was 17, by a couple of Germans who had been trained by Maharishi and were teaching meditation in India at the time. We also talked about Yogananda, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Swami Vishnudevananda and Swami Satchidananda. I owe so much to my Indian spiritual teachers, and also my engineering professors. So much of my heritage comes from Mother India. When we left the plane, the man said, "Even though you are not from India, I say to you, welcome home." I responded, "Thank you, it feels like home. Namaste."
The most interesting sight one sees in developing countries is the scene that invariably presents itself to you when you pass customs and begin to walk out of the terminal toward the taxi staging area. You are faced with a huge crowd of men, women and children all pressed up against a restraining rope, waiting for the arriving passengers. Many of them are drivers holding signs with the names of their guests. Others are family members awaiting their loved ones. Remember that this was about 1 AM in the morning, but still there must have been a few hundred people there, all pressed hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, brightly colored saris. No such sight greets a visitor to New York or Boston, especially at 1 AM.

Christmas Day, Leaving Tomorrow

2009-12-25T16:59:00.000+04:30

Friday, 25 Dec. 2009, New Hampshire: Well, like a parent postponing the "birds and the bees" conversation with his child, I can put it off no longer. I am going to have to explain the "left hand issue" with our traveling companions, Paul and Sue. To put it off any longer would be irresponsible on my part.

But I just hit on an idea! A cop-out, basically. I will copy and paste something from the web, thereby relieving me of responsibility for the contents and the indelicate phrasing! Just like a dad might email his son an explanation of how one makes a baby, rather than suffer all the hemming and hawing that a verbal explanation might entail. So I went out on the web and found the perfect thing. Here it is.
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Clothing
In India the best thing to do especially for women is to dress modestly. As a general rule, your clothing should be below the knee and should cover the shoulders. Bare shoulders are a sign of immortality [note from Matt: "and immorality as well, no doubt"] especially for women who will attract unwanted attention from men. Traditionally, Indian women wear a sari and blouse.. Only in major cities will you see women wearing skimpy clothing and then very rarely. The local men mostly wear shirts and pants. It’s acceptable for traveling males to wear longish shorts and tea shirts. You should avoid going bare chested especially in the remote areas. Most of the old people put a topi (hat) on their head. Wearing appropriate clothing is respectful and people will treat you accordingly.

Food
Most Indians eat with their hands and don’t feel comfortable while eating with utensils. They use their right hand for eating and left hand is used for toilet hygiene purposes. If you are invited into a house to eat you may find that they don’t have cutlery. You will be shown a place to wash your hands and face before and after eating. Your plate is considers as only yours once you commence eating you should not share or offer this food to anyone else. You should also eat everything that is put in front of you. If you feel you have been given too much food, ask them to take some away before you commence eating, this is perfectly acceptable and is more appreciated than wasting food.

Hygiene
All bodily secretion and products are considered polluted. A Hindu person will not step over your feet or legs. You should not touch people on the head nor should you touch or point your feet at people. This can be a grave insult. [Note from Matt: members of western audiences sitting on the floor listening to an Indian guru often have their legs outstretched with the soles of their feet pointing at the guru, not realizing that they are being extremely rude]. The left hand is also considered polluted; you should never offer it to someone. Normally Hindu people do not use toilet paper or tissues they find it unhygienic. In the toilet there will be water for washing your parts with. You should use your left hand only for this. Don’t expect to find toilet paper in private houses esp. in remote areas. Also you should note that in most hotels and restaurants toilet paper is provided but you should put it in the bin provided, not flush it down the toilet as this can block the plumbing. [Note from Matt: better pay attention to this. It would be a major faux pas to cause a toilet's contents to overflow because you are too squeamish to put the used toilet paper in the bin].

Men and women
Physical contact between men and women should be avoided in public. Though you will notice that it is acceptable for boys and to hold hands etc and vise versa for girls. Don’t be surprised to see boys walking arm in arm and hugging. These things are signs of friendship and should not be taken any other way. You will never see Indian men and women displaying signs of affection towards each other.

At The Temple
You should be especially sensitive about etiquette in places of worship. Dress conservatively and keep shoulders and knees covered. Always take off your shoes before entering. Beware that some Hindu temples do not allow non Hindus to enter. Also you should ask before taking photos of religious festivals, cremation grounds and the inside of the temples. If you are wearing leather belt you will be refused entry into the temple. Also you should note that cows are a sacred animal in India and injuring or killing them is an offence. You will find cows roaming freely all over the place.

Preparing for the Trip

2009-12-25T03:25:00.001+04:30

Being gone a whole month is intimidating, mostly due to financial issues. The problem is that bills come due on monthly cycles, so you have to make sure that you've set up a way to pay them automatically, or prepay enough before you leave to cover the bills that are due before your return. I believe that Internet cafes will be common in Southern India, in which case we could just pay our bills online.

I have never had my wallet stolen, and I've traveled to about 40 different countries, but still I take (perhaps extreme) precautions against it. Having your wallet stolen in a foreign country is probably much more traumatic than having it stolen at home. So I stash cash in various caches on my person and carry a decoy wallet for pickpockets. I never leave anything of value in the hotel room.

The dining room table has been our staging area for a month. We pile anything we think we might want to take there, and also keep lists of things to bring. I will pack my suitcase tomorrow, then we leave the next day. I didn't want to actually pack too early, because in the past when I have done that I end up unpacking and packing about three times.

Catherine has planned and reserved all the flights, train rides, hotels, ashram stays and dental appointments. I don't know how we're going to work this, because I want her to walk three paces behind me in order to conform to Indian custom, but I don't know where the hell I'm going!

Last time we went to India (in 2001 for the Kumbha Mela) I was sick with a cold even before I left, and progressed to bronchitis during the trip. I was sick the whole damn trip. This time I am determined to stay healthy, but caught a cold when unexpectedly exposed to my cute and lovable little nephews and niece a couple of days ago. So, although it is as yet a mild cold, I'm spending a lot of time in bed and started taking antibiotics yesterday. I know all the arguments against antibiotics, but I just want to say, "antibiotics bin bery bery good to me". I intend on kicking this before we leave on Saturday, even though my relatively tough wife makes fun of me for being such a baby.