Mahabodhi Temple / Bihari Monk 

Back home safe from travel.. will put up some more stuff soon. Happy holidays.

Ill be back for Christmas!

Host parents.

The woman pictured is a villager of Yurutsepa in Ladakh- a village consisting of two people. The village itself is one large, 150 year old structure that houses this family, surrounded by earth from which the family harvests barley and peas during the four months when they aren’t buried in snow. When they are buried in snow during the remaining eight months, they relax, they sleep, and they have wedding festivals. There are over 350 Ladakhi wedding songs. Every Ladakhi I have met hitherto has a different song that they carry with them through the day.. 

 She was tying up her dzo ( a burly yak-cow hybrid that loves escaping their masters) when I hastely took this photo of her. The painted ram horns pictured are a sort of village protector. 

Ladakhi people are the most emotionally stable and beautiful people that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.. Despite recent disruptions to their economic and ecological balance as the result of India opening the area to tourism in the 70’s (something described in a beautiful book called Ancient Futures), they are a culture that transcends the anxiety of mere subsistence without preoccupying themselves with the woes of materialism and overconsumption. The middle way of Buddhist economics…

If you’re going to travel abroad to India and want to study,

you should not do it through an expensive program with a multitude of other Americans.

Inevitably, an American micro-culture is borne out of the fear of living in a new land,

and you will seek solace in your Computer.

This will happen.

But a true experience will be fabricated easily

through Ideal persona devices such as

Facebook™

Study abroad with a colloquial institution.

It will be cheaper, and it will be total immersion.

There will be no possibility of herding yourself into an office

everyday with twenty other Americans, communicating through networking sites,

afraid to open the blinds.

Thank you. 

Edit: This is not to slight either the ACM program staff or beautiful fellow peers, but rather to the very notion of an abroad program that consists of a bunch of affluent mid-westerners going abroad together as a group. It is paradoxical to the nature of living abroad! I do not disassociate myself from this demographic, and the aforementioned message is thus meant to be self-referential..  

One of the monks with whom I recently spoke for my independent study project put to words to how I’ve been feeling for a while now. He spoke of how his daily interactions with people can either be of the Soul or Mechanistic in nature. Often they take the route of the mechanistic, in which we use each other as a means to an end as opposed to an end within oneself. A class example: the interaction with the rickshaw driver as a vessel from point A to B versus interacting with this Soul sub specie aeternitatis. 

So I try for this. I try on a ferry in Dabol- a small fishing town. I try with a grumpy man who has a five rupee coin lodged into the folds of his ears. The five rupee coin will buy that man his thambaku paan, or a chai. The five rupee coin is the medallion of the Indian proletariat. And I can tell by his leathery, defined arms that he’s a manual laborer. He walks off with pride in his makeshift earring, unresponsive to my attempted interaction.

Then a kind soul walks on to the ferry, gives me a handshake and a Good Morning, and walks to the underbelly of the vessel. I follow him, and we begin to talk. His name is Dildar. I ask him about this old mosque that I saw in Dabol. He says its over 400 years old, and that he prayed in it this very morning (khoop sundar- very beautiful, is this mosque). I ask him where home is. He leans over the edge of the ferry, orients his vision, and motions to a very specific point where the Arabian Sea meets the sky. “Dubai”, he says nostalgically. He hasn’t been to Dubai since he was a child and it’s still Home. 

There seems to be a common string that binds all us humans on this planet, and I’m not talking about something of the physical realm. I think it has something to do with eye contact. 

This is Mala, a Chaiwala in Pune. Mala knows four languages and is raising two children through selling ginger chai to rickshaw drivers. ‘I don’t meet chaiwalas who even speak English’, I think to myself. Her English is perfect. I ask her how this is possible, and she replies that it is because she functions on a principle of Happiness. But this statement isn’t communicated in one of her four tongues- it’s communicated in her gaze.

For a second we are suspended in one another’s stare. To generalize is to err when referencing anything regarding India, but most women in India don’t let this happen to male strangers as per social conditioning. Yet this chaiwala tore through thousands of years of patriarchal oppression with a stare. In an instant the gaze ends as we feverishly try to restore our respective gender and social roles that our forefathers have prescribed to us. I drink my ginger chai, take a photo of her and one of her many friends and walk on. “Eyes show the strength of the soul”, says the Spanish poet.

Learning to play the tabla!

This is Pailo, a deaf Buddhist that I met at the Buddhist caves of Agora last full moon. Local Buddhists come to the caves on auspicious days to feed on their energy. Pailo was a very beautiful soul. He was so calm. The most communicative deaf man that I’ve ever interacted with, and all we used as a means of engagement were our eyes.  

The other night was the full moon. It was also the last day of the Ganesh Chaturthi. People fed on the light of the moon as they drummed away for Ganesh through into the morning. The moon was surrounded by a peacock feather colored iris. Like a giant bulb, she stared down on the procession. 

The Hindi word for moon is Chandra. In Sanskrit, the word literally means “shining” and is also a deity; a “lord of the night”. The maharajas of Mysore believed to be ancestors of the moon. 

Chandra is often represented by a mother or queen in Vedic astrology. Yet for all of the charisma in her beautiful iris, no one in the procession noticed her. The final day of the festival is now a patriarchal procession of drunken manliness. Any women who dare enter in their yelping dances (especially the naive westerners who haven’t a clue of this being a time for their sexual repression explosively coming home to roost) find themselves caught in their grip and assaulted. I’m ashamed that this has happened. I think Chandra is too.