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.