The Bovine Scourge

Now let's get this straight, I've never been a big fan of cows. I always found them to be a relativley brainless quadruped whose acomplishments included producing large quatities of milk, being delicious at times, and contributing significantly to global warming by exuding methane. Coming to India though has only really inflmaed things though. Here's 4 good reasons I find myself hating cows.

1. Traffic- Cows are a traffic nuiscance. They cause jams all the time slowly lumbering from garbage heap to garbage heap. Also, if you look on the US State Dept. website they advise fleeing from the scene of an accident if it involved injury or death to a cow because mobs of hindus may beat of kill you.

2. Shit- They poop everywhere. The frustrating thing is that living in India, you aready have to avoid stepping in human and canine feces. However, huan and dog shit is relativley small compared to the dinner-plate-sized plops that polkadot alleyways and roads.

3. You Never Know- You just can't tell when a cow will go nuts. Sarah tried to pet one and it swungs its horns at her. Being in very close proximity to the animals there is always the fear of being kicked as well.

4. A Personal Attack- This clearly is the best reason why cows are a menace. Today one was barreling through an alley and almost stepped on my foot. Unacceptable.

In reality, the real problem with the cows is just thier numbers. In Chennai, thier relative scarcity makes them less of an issue, but in cities like Delhi and Varanasi it's out of hand. One fun fact about Delhi is hat there are Public Service Announcements urging you not to use plastic bags because cows die when they eat too many. The Indian bovine is a menace and I may just exact my revenge on the entire species when I get state-side by sitting down behind a nice burger.

A Century!

So everyone, big big news! Today, at approximately 2.55 pm Indian Standard Time, I saw my hundredth incident of public urination. The sweaty gentleman of the moment had hiked up his dhoti and was urinating onto a wall across from the Comfort Inn Marina Towers. It's a big day.

No Country for Beards

My beard has been a subject of interest for a lot of folks here. Many ask whether I grew it before or after I came to India. Everyone wants to know why I have it. Two days ago I was taking the train and a man made eye contact with me and came over to talk. He wanted to know if I was a Palestinian. He assumed that because I had a beard that I was a Muslim and figured that I was either Palestinian or Afghani. Only my friends and family can know how ridiculous this assumption was on his part. It seems, by and large in the south, that only Muslims sport beards, while Hindus go around with mustaches or clean shaven. Mustaches in fact are so common that a running joke between us exchange students is, "Hey you know who I'm talking about, he's got dark skin, black hair, a mustache..." While of course not all Muslims have beards, many do and also wear white caps indicative of their faith. As for Indian opinions of my beard, they will range from dislike, to approval, to confusion, to "you should shave." Regardless of the wealth of opinions here though, my plans are to go with the status quo. In case you were worried, that is.

A Sea Change

I have seen the Arabian Sea. After coming back to Chennai from Kodaikanal, I found that the government had canceled classes in the city indefinitely. A young man, wishing to raise awareness about the ongoing conflict between Tamils and Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka, set himself on fire in front of a block government buildings. The state government was concerned that students may demonstrate or riot and decided to respond to the young man’s suicide by ordering all universities and colleges in Chennai to shut their doors. Of course, an organized closure did not happen and as a foreign student, had a friend of mine not read an article in The Hindu, I would have never known. Faced with the prospect of waiting amidst the haze of Chennai for an unknown number of days, I decided to repack my bags and head out to Kerala.

When I arrived in Ernakulam, I was tired. Sleep on the train hadn’t been easy. Sarah and I made our way to the jetty and managed to catch the 6.55 ferry to Fort Kochin. Walking through Fort Kochin’s streets of heritage buildings, I was reminded again of Casco Viejo in Panama City. The colonial style buildings looked the same and bore the same wears from the climate.

 

There is a long history here of foreign settlement that goes back to Jews fleeing Palestine after the Roman invasion. A few kilometers away from Fort Kochin, in Mattancherry, you can still see Jew Town. Of course, you have to admit there is an irony to all of the Muslim neighborhoods lined with green crescent banners that you have to pass through to get there. You will pass about three mosques and at least one church to get to the Synagogue. Islam came with Arab traders who sailed to Kerala, like the Europeans, for spices. Christianity got its start here from none other than Saint Thomas, the star of Santhome Church in Chennai. On certain streets, it’s easy to pass by women with bindis, burkhas, and nuns in sky-blue habits.

 

Fort Kochin is a tourist haven. The streets are relatively quiet, the food is good, and the alcohol is easier to find. In a region known for its sea food I could get pasta with fish and squid as well as sample traditional Keralan cuisine. However, one of my favorite restaraunts wasn’t memorable because of the food, but the beer. The Chariot Beach Restaruant doesn’t have a liquor license, but does serve beer. All you have to do is order a Kingfisher, even though it’s not on the menu, and the waiter will bring you a teapot full of beer and a mug to enjoy it from. When you’ve emptied the pot they even ask if you’d like more tea with knowing smiles. The thing that makes this really funny though, is that the tables are on an open patio by the street, with cop cars passing every once in a while, and every table has western tourists sitting behind teapots. 

The News About Booze

Alcohol is scarce in Tamil Nadu. It is a stigmatized substance that some consider to be a drug on par with highly addictive narcotics. Sarah, an American also studying at the University of Madras, has told me that a substantial portion of her Psycology of Addiction class centers on alcohol. Indian perceptions of alcohol, or at least Tamil ones, are largely negative. Men who drink are often abusive to their families and have addictions that can prevent them from providing for their families as well. And although I am know that not all men who drink are abusive, this certainly seems to be the perception of many Hindus as well as the entertainment industry.

 

There isn’t a drinking culture here and I feel that because of this, addictions are common. Young men and women aren’t allowed to learn their limits, to socialize with each other. Any newspaper you read will have several Alcoholic Anonymous notices in it. Drinking is something that only men do. Bars are not friendly places, they are dark, often with loud music even when you are the only customer and it is 5.30 pm, and they are usually tucked away from the street. In the city of Chennai, bars are only allowed in hotels and alcohol can only be purchased in equally sketchy government regulated “Wine Shops.”

Although this is a late breaking addition to this post, I'd like to add that if you look on the labels of beer bottles, you see a small government warning that reads "Drinking ruins country, family, and life." I think that this really sums up many of the attitudes about alcohol in India.

Dino-mite

The dinosaurs here look weird. I’m not sure what’s up with that.

The High Country

The side of the road that slipped past my window alternated with dark trees illuminated only by headlights and moonlight, and towns clustered against the roadside. The bus ride to Kodaikanal was long, and the majority of it was spent passing villages haloed in the bluish light of bare fluorescent tubes. Our longest stop was at a gas station in a town I can’t name at about three in the morning. The gas station’s bathroom urinal emptied from a rubber hose onto the floor below, flooding the floor tiles with about a quarter inch of piss and filling the room with the smell of old and new urine.


It was only in the last two hours that the road started the 7,000 foot climb into the Western Ghats. The villages grew smaller and further apart as the bus drove higher into an invasive forest of Eucalyptus, Mexican Pine, and Acacia. Closing in on Kodaikanal, the stray dogs plodding by the roadside looked healthier. Unlike the scarred, rib-baring dogs of Chennai, these appeared well fed and had full coats.

The morning I was greeted with in Kodaikanal was cold and clear. The days I spent there reminded me of early spring in California. From my time at the Vattakanal Conservation Trust and being driven around the Mountains in an old, blue Mahindra Jeep I learned how much the mountains had changed. Before the British and Indians imported invasive tree species, the ecosystem in the Ghats was grasslands and shola forests in protected ravines and the shadows of the prevailing winds.

The pictures I saw of still unchanged landscapes looked similar, from a distance, to California as well. Of course, at nearly 7,000 feet, the factors shaping life in Kodai are different, but from an atheistic and periodically homesick perspective, I guess I wanted to be reminded of home.

The thirty-minute walk from my friends’ house in Pambapurim to Vattakanal is among the most beautiful I have ever known. Every turn produces new mountain vistas of plunging slopes and when you find yourself right outside of the village, the left-hand side of the road turns into a pear orchard, which was just beginning to blossom with shy, white flowers while I was there.

Vattakanal itself is a strange dead end. The community is a favorite of young Israeli tourists and the sole café at the end of the road has come to serve exclusively Israeli food. From talking to a teacher at the Kodaikanal International School, I came to learn that there are even two rabbis who live in Vattakanal year round to keep the young people from partying too much. Nikola, another volunteer at the Vattakanal Conservation Trust, joked that I would have never guessed that here, at the end of the world, the people would speak Tamil, German, and Yiddish.

Extra, Extra

I'll apologize if you were looking forward to a post on the trashy TV show about Hollywood celebraties, Extra. But hopefully you will enjoy my post about headlines in The Hindu, India's national English-language newspaper, as much as you enjoy watching Extra in the middle of the day. The Hindu has some of the best headlines I have ever seen. They are often misleading, obscure, or completely unrelated to their respective stories. I will try to keep a list going to share some of its gems with you all. In one section of the paper printed Jan. 23, 2009, you can find such headlines as: "Campaign geared up to keep sea free from stink of evil: Coast Guard's Chennai-Kanyakumari expedition begins" now if that isn't a page turner, I don't know what is. Clearly, the seas should be free of the stink of evil. I mean really, how did people on the coast put up with that awful stench until now? However, if you read the article, you'll learn that when they say stink of evil, they really mean pirates and terrorists that may arrive by sea. Another pearl is: "North Chennai people bubble over with gratitude, hope" which makes me think of things in North Chennai as being both hot and a little soupy or perhaps milky. The headline of an interview with the former editor of Granta, a British literary magazine, reads: "Literary publishing is like playing a fruit machine' Now, I can only assume that by fruit machine, they mean slot machine. I can agree with that, but if a fruit machine is something else, that is probably why I have not gotten into the New Yorker yet. Now, I'm giving the Hindu a pretty hard time, but perhaps they're just trying to pep up the old newspaper format and move some paper. Either way, when I see the headline "Cremation engulfed by smoke" I'll read on.

Poster Politics

One thing I have come to enjoy here in Chennai is the posters. They are pasted to as many free walls as possible and some have regular turnovers. Every couple of days, the movie posters along my stretch of Poonamallee High Road change. Many walls in the city are actually textured with rocks and gravel to prevent “bill stickers” from posting. However, I’d say that the best wall space hosts political figures. There are murals of past and present candidates and office holders, there are party flags painted onto buildings, and there are great slogans. Aside from the current governor of Tamil Nadu, the most ubiquitous subject of banners, posters, and murals is the man I know as the Indian Jesse Jackson. He looks like him, right? When I find out what his name is, I will update this post to be more truthful. Jesse is everywhere here. I’ve seen his stickers on the back of rickshaws, on the trains, and on countless buildings. I’m planning on creating an album full of him, so when you see me stateside, don’t forget to ask me to see it.

A Day in Pondicherry

Pondicherry, now known as Puducherry and formerly known as Pondicheri was the seat of the French imperial ambitions in India. It’s known for beautiful old colonial buildings, cuisine, being one of the few places in Tamil Nadu where you can buy a drink, and subsequently, for being a tourist haven. I came to Pondicherry to get away from the haze of Chennai and to try relaxing. And right now, drinking Indian malt liquor in the dimly lit, seedy Court of Bacchus at Annamalai Hotel, things are good, if not a little bizarre. I am drinking from a bottle claiming to contain “India’s largest selling beer” in a bar full of chattering, smoking Tamils who seem like they can’t hold their booze.

The road here is long but beautiful. Between the outskirts of Puducherry and Mahaballapuram, flat plains covered in wide, blue rivers and shining palm trees stretch for miles. Rice paddies host statuesque egrets that hunt between the rows of green shoots. This time of year, you see farmers working muddy fields with water buffalo whose horns have just been decorated for Pongal. The Bay of Bengal appears on your left as you near Pondicherry and the ECR moves closer to the coast.

While Pondicherry is by no means completely tranquil, you can walk the streets without being engulfed in honking torrents of motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and bicycles. You can also walk largely without fear of stepping in excrement, be it human or otherwise. The French quarter streets are clean, garbage is collected, and sidewalks are swept every morning. It’s a step up from the status quo of Chennai.

Walking from the rooftop cafe where I had dinner, a small herd of water buffalo meanders aimlessly through the intersections of busy streets and bats dart around the lamplights, their wings transparent in the sodium vapor illumination.



Spending a day amongst the neoclassical and art deco colonial buildings, it’s easy to romanticize the legacy of the European empires. The picture you get of a peaceful community is disembodied from the probable brutality of the people who created it. But living in Madras, one of the British Empire’s largest outposts, you have to wonder how Pondicherry and Chennai came to be so different. While Puducherry is far smaller than Chennai, the colonial buildings here are largely intact. The beautiful Indo-saracenic and neoclassical buildings of Chennai are crumbling, even as they remain in use. The offices of the University of Madras are covered in dust, trees sprout between the red brinks of The High Court near Parry’s corner, and parts of the gorgeous Government museum are condemned. Perhaps there is a difference in relative revenue for the two cities, or maybe there is just a difference in attitude toward the colonial past.

Material Differences

So one thing I've noticed about India, or at least Chennai is that they use a lot of stone here. Most of the sidewalks and even the road medians (when they exist) are made out of granite. It's really something to see these bid slabs of granite laying around, waiting to be cut into paving stones. Another popular material is marble. A lot of buildings have marble stonework in them. There is actually a large, beautiful shrine next to my hotel that is carved out of blocks of marble. Down by the beach, workers have been putting together a park that goes along one of the main roads and they are cutting the sidewalk out of slabs of polished granite and what I think is black marble. This really amazes me because most of the sidewalks here are narrow and stained with garbage juice or perhaps worse, so seeing something grand under construction is very interesting.

It seems too that a lot of the buildings here get second storeys added on later. I've seen a few older buildings that are being added onto which is a little disconcerting considering that the building wasn't initially designed to accommodate a second floor.

The Flower Market

The flower market was a pleasant surprise. After walking through other narrow streets whose leaning buildings turned the sky into a cloudy slit, it felt good to find myself in the flower market. I had picked my way over flattened snowdrifts of garbage in the other streets of Parry’s Corner, passing a block of bicycle shops, a street of fireworks merchants, and two streets of comparatively less exciting stationers.

Turning off of Broadway, with the red High Courts behind me, I watched as the usual stands of fruit and vegetables gave way to stall after stall of flower sellers. Men squatted and dealt over baskets of yellow marigolds and small roses with yellow centers that gave way to red petals. Women in simple saris haggled over the price of blossoms to put in their hair. The alleyway floor was covered in leaf litter, palm fronds, cast out greens, all being trod into whatever strata was beneath them.

Man on Man Action

I can’t say if it’s a large or small irony that men here in India display physical affection towards each other. In a country largely uncomfortable with homosexuality, you have to admit that it is pretty funny to see two guys who most likely find homosexuals disgusting holding hands. In the short time I’ve been here it’s been something else to see men walking down the streets hand in hand and arm in arm. I’ve seen guys posing on their sides at the beach watching while their friends rough-house in the surf. I remember in my research before I left, I read that it is considered totally normal for straight men to pat each other on the inner thigh after hearing a good joke. Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with intimacy, I understand that a bromance is a good thing, but wow. What a difference in customs. All I can say is that as a guy who’s grown up in the Bay Area, if I didn’t know otherwise, I’d be making some very incorrect assumptions.

Santhome Basilica

The drive alongside the wide beach was long. By the road, vendors had set up stands for the patronage of the beachgoers. After passing Fort St. George and the University of Madras, we came to Santhome Basilica, where the bones of Saint Thomas lie.

Thomas, an apostle mentioned a blazing four times in the gospels, came to India to preach after the resurrection, and died here in Madras. The whitewashed cathedral is stark and beautiful against the blue sky, but it seems strange. Its proportions, its angles are different. The ambitious, steep pitch of the spires conflicts with the squat, arched towers underneath them. Inside the church, windows, with the exception on the one behind the main altar, are a simple stained glass of colored shapes. Wooden statues illustrating the gospels sprout off the walls on metal stalks by each window.

A larger statue of Jesus of the cross stands in front of the altar. His cross rises out of a lotus flower flanked by two blue peacocks. When you get closer to the statue you can see that worshippers have written their names on his feet and on the hem of his robes in blue ink.

The passageway leading to the recently renovated tomb of the saint was austere. Marble tunnels without carvings or moldings lead to a simple chamber with pews facing the tomb. Atop the earth where St. Thomas’ bones lie is an almost cartoonish statue of the saint. Although the plastic statue is encased in glass, its paint is still scraped and chipped. The simplicity of the tomb and its signs of wear are its most striking features. Catholic churches in the US and Europe tend to have a bit more flair. And although it seems almost un-Catholic to see such a simple place of worship, I suppose that this simplicity is consistent with Jesus’ style.

Public Urination

It happens a lot, guys piss by the road all the time.  They don’t really try to be discrete about it either, there is no peeing behind your car or hiding behind a bush, men will just whip it out and wet a wall on any given street. In my first few days, my daily average for public pissing is 2. Stay posted for a grand total during my stay.

An Inaguration

So here it is, my debut posting on a blog. I will now, for better or worse, be a part of the blogosphere. I'd like this space to be a way for me to communicate some of what I experience while I am here, in India. And although, it would be nice if my postings were of use to other travelers, I am really intending this to be a way of keeping in touch with friends and family as well as providing me with a format that will require me to write frequently. It is a disappointing realization that I have not written a complete piece of work in over seven months. This of course contrasts to when I was writing every day during the spring of 2007. I will admit that what I produced then was of poor quality, but hey, at least there was a lot of it. So, perhaps this blog will provide me with an audience and an impetus to write often and coherently. Four months is a long time so we'll see how I can keep up. Alright, I hope you enjoy poking around the site and I'll see you Stateside.