Only in India

The things you read in Indian newspapers. This one is courtesy of Indian broadsheet The Hindu:

Priest drowns during yogic feat

GUNTUR: A 33-year-old priest in Medikonduru mandal drowned in a well while performing ‘Jala Stambanam’ (a yogic practice by which a person can stay inside water for a long period).

Purnam Rama Sastri jumped into the well on Wednesday around midnight, after assuring his family members that he would come back the next morning. However, the man got drowned and his body was fished out in the morning.

According to Sub Inspector of Police Md. Osman the priest had been practising various meditation practices in Guntur. On Wednesday night, he jumped from a two-storeyed building and sustained only minor injuries.

Indian Spirituality

It pervades everything. I don't know why, but anything that would pass as cultish or faddish in the west comes across as genuine and sincere here. Yoga instructors radiate serenity rather than smugness and it doesn't seem strange that somebody, whom you've just met, suddenly starts reading your palms (I'm gonna be minted and have three kids). Conversations with people about their daily routine of yoga, oil massage and going to the temple are of great interest in comparison to my: have a coffee, make a resolve and boost it with extra paracetamol and hope I wake up sufficiently before I make it to work. If it was a blonde with an LA accent telling me their body is a temple and what routine is responsible for that crazed look in their eyes...I would have lost interest before they'd mentioned their morning wheatgrass shot.

Maybe I'm prejudiced, but maybe it's because Indians are the true original New Agers and us Westerners just come across as cheap counterfeits when we try and jump on the enlightenment bandwagon.

What got me on this riff was an unsolicited text message that I received from my mobile provider this morning:

"Every bad situation will have something positive. Even a stopped clock shows correct time twice a day. Think of this and lead ur life. Good Morning. Regards Airtel."

If this had happened in the west, I'd be sure I'd joined a cult not a mobile network. But here in India (the largest cult of them all), some spiritual guidance to start the day is all part of the service.

Masala Rider

When researching the riding of motorbikes in India I had a web-based nemesis, a portent of doom that followed me wherever I went. Everytime I posted a query on a message board, his dark log-in would emerge from the ether and proclaim that if I were to ride a bike in India, I would surely meet my demise. I dismissed it as a classic case of keyboard-hero fear-mongering or just some clown with a dark sense of humour (as clowns have). Strangely, I never thought his comments might have been based in truth.

After riding only 35kms from Varkala to Kolam yesterday, I may not have met my demise, but I was certainly sailing close to the edge of existence. After only one day on the road I don’t exactly qualify as an expert - but in the interest of traveler health and safety (and from the comfort of a stationary chair with four legs), I have managed to collate these unofficial, yet essential top-ten guidelines to negotiating Indian roads for your perusal:

1. When riding at any speed you will need to keep one eye on the road watching out for potholes and the other for oncoming traffic. Vehicles will regularly and unexpectedly veer on to your side of the road to avoid one of the numerous wheel-destroying potholes. You will end up doing this also.

2. Use hand signals when making turns or when coming to a stop. Other drivers will only notice your vehicle’s indicators once you have done this.

3. Use your horn…a lot! There is a constant barrage of horns around you. Use this cacophony as a bat uses sonar. Each horn is a vehicle telling you where it is amidst the chaos. Use your horn on corners, when overtaking, when approaching vehicles, pedestrians and livestock or when you see something funny. It’ serves a language that says “do you see me?” with the reply being “yeah I see you”. It can also say many other things like “Get the fuck out of my way sisterfucker” or “Hey check me out! I’m a dude on a bike with some cool Bollywood shades and a hot girl on the back”.

4. If you are unfortunate enough be on the apex of a bend at the same time as a bus coming in the opposite direction - close your eyes, breathe in to reduce your body-mass and hope for the best. If there is a shoulder on the road, use it, as the bus will use his lane, your lane and then some.

5. When being overtaken by a bus, let them get ¾ of the way past you then apply your breaks. They will cut you off. In fact – try and steer clear of buses altogether.

6. Don’t speed. Period. Apart from the above, there is always a multitude of reasons for having to stop on a dime. You will have to share the roads with people who cannot drive for shit, have a death wish & officials that tear down the roads sitting on their horns maintaining a beeline down the middle of the road regardless of what’s ahead. There is no emergency; they’re just propelled by self-importance and the official sanction to put everyone’s lives at risk so they can make lunch in time. You will also have to share the road with cows, goats, water buffalo, playing children, farmers drying grain across the road and using vehicles’ wheels to do the threshing for them and men pushing hand carts stacked impossibly high with goods ranging from coconut husks to metal girders.

7. Try and not get too distracted by what you see by the side of the road. Whether it’s breath taking scenery, village life, people screaming hello or any one of the forever surprising elements of India…keep at least one eye on the road.

8. If riding in the late afternoon, pay extra attention while answering all the questions being shouted at you from the school bus in front. Just because the kids are asking your name and where you’re from, doesn’t mean that Mr. Deathwish driving the school bus will drive any less erratically. He will stop suddenly - just as the pot holes will keep coming. Again, keep at least one eye on the road.

9.When the smell of Cardamom and Tea hits your nostrils – slow down, pull over and refresh yourself at a marsala tea stall.

10. And finally, when you eventually make it to the next town in one piece, the taste of adrenalin has subsided and the feeling has come back to your numb butt cheeks – you will want to get straight back on and do it all again.

A sting in the fairytale

You think there’s no room for magic anymore. You’ve grown up and the time for child-like wonder has passed. Some try to re-capture it with drugs or even Harry Potter books – but these are more exercises in escapism. The land where fairytales might exist has been submerged under weightier issues such as mortgages, careers, mistakes and possibly a few regrets.

Then one day you find yourself in Kerala, slowly drifting down the backwaters with a boatman and his long bamboo stick the only mechanism to get you anywhere. The people, their superstitions and the land itself has conspired with your imagination to suggest that maybe there is more to this place than meets the eye.

You round a bend in the river and see before you an island bathed in sunshine. As you approach, music seems to draw you in - a siren song. You gesture to the boatman that you would like to alight and explore the island and with an almost imperceptible head wobble, he changes the direction of the boat. As you alight, music emits from the forest like an echo from heaven. Sunlight dances on the leaves and the palm trees dip and sway in the breeze as if in time to the music.

As you negotiate the narrow paths in to the interior, you have step aside for the fairies – little girls moving to and fro wearing brightly coloured princess dresses. There are thatched houses with vegetable patches, enchanted gardens and swings garlanded with flowers. You move on through into a forest dense with columns of Coconut Palm trunks. The forest floor is carpeted in soft grass and decorated with ferns as another swarm of giggling fairies pass you by – the music still filling your ears.

In the middle of the island is its heart. You stumble across it in a clearing, a church whitewashed in sun-faded pastels. It is from here that the girls come running from, where the wires that feed the speakers in the tree tops throughout the island are powered at their source.

Though the curtain has been pulled on the great Oz pulling his levers, the island still maintains its fairytale quality. Inside the church, through the open walls, you see the matriarchs praying as a girl with the voice of a cherub coos her hymn into a taped-up microphone – piping her blessings out into the trees. Behind her is an altar festooned with flowers and disco lights and a kitsch portrait of Jesus Christ at its centre. The sight seems out of place until you remember that in India, there are many paths to God.

You move past the church where the sun (now low in the sky) warms your face and silhouettes the palm trees and boys playing cricket on the beach – the breakers behind them all thunderous and kicking up mist. Hidden by the glare are the fishermen at your feet, dressed in Lungis and Sunday-best shirts, staring at you with lines etched in to their faces as deep as the wells of their eyes.

Having walked the breadth of the island, it is here that you realize the precariousness of their existence, of this unique and enchanting paradise. It is no more than 1km long and a few hundred metres across. On one side the temperamental Arabian Sea, on the other the monsoon-prone backwaters. It is a thin green line between two powerful ecosystems that wax and wane at will and (at times) without warning. On this knife edge a community exists in a bubble, a haven of tranquility between the wilderness of the ocean and the chaos of mainland India.

The island cannot be higher than ten feet at its highest point - one storm surge, one monsoon deluge or even one melted iceberg away from obliteration. Only recently, a fishing community (just a few kilometers to the south) was decimated by the encroachment of large seas. Like anything of beauty, the island is fragile and possibly fleeting.

You slowly make your way back, leaving the same way you came. You try and etch it all in to your mind and don't even dare to take a memory tainting photo. As you leave the island and step back on to your boat you hope - for the sake of the girls in princess dresses, the praying matriarchs, the girl with the taped up microphone, the boys playing cricket and the fishermen in their Sunday bests - that this fairytale doesn’t have an ending any time soon.

It's not just cricket

I woke up in a daze and walked out on to the wall to watch the fisherman again. Cheryl suggested we walk through the village behind us and out on to the point to get a closer look.

There was a huge surf this morning and the men out in the sea guiding the nets in were experiencing some trouble. Nets were getting tangled and a double effort had to be put in by all. The process is more a tribal dance or ritual with up to thirty men chanting as they’re engaged in a mighty tug-o-war with the sea - hauling in the net from way out back beyond the breakers. The net finally lands on shore. There aren’t many fish this morning and the usual ecstatic dance and cheers are replaced by flat disappointment.

By this time Cheryl and I had attracted a fan base of five tenacious boys wanting money, a pen – but ultimately a game of cricket.

Cricket in India is like football in Brazil. Everybody plays it. From Brahmin to Dalit, Prime Ministers to Fishing Village kids – they are positively fanatical about it. Coming from the only nation that comes close to this across-the-board fanaticism means that the moment kids find out I’m Australian, a cricket bat is produced.

I am no cricket fan. I was no good at it as a kid, my idea of spending a whole day standing in a field never appealed to me and I certainly don’t keep abreast of the game on the international stage. Some have called this un-Australian. I call it having a life.

This unfortunately means that when an Indian discovers my nationality, the conversation inevitably turns toward cricket. I have to make do with polite yet uncomfortable vagaries about the current state of the game and its various teams until they realize I have no idea what I’m talking about - and eventually drop the subject.

I do, however, have an entirely different viewpoint of the knock-about version of the game. I grew up with backyard cricket. It’s a great leveler (skill-wise) and a fun way to pass to the time with a bunch of people you’ve never met. The most important difference between this and the real thing is that you can walk away the moment boredom sets in.

The boys beckon us back and set up the wicket in the middle of their village. The village is back from the beach and set amongst a dense forest of coconut palms that is also home to hundreds of Keralan Crows (whose squawks are only slightly less ominous than those of your garden variety).

With the ritual of the stumps being hammered in to the sand signaling that a game is about to commence, about fifteen kids come running out from nowhere. All of them are boys, no girls are to be seen anywhere and all the men are still hauling in nets. So it’s Australia V India. Fifteen kids against one overgrown one.

I win the toss and elect to bat. I can swing a bat OK and put in a decent effort. I kick off with a few singles and manage several slogs that get picked up just short of the boundary. I’m on a roll until I’m declared run-out by a very dodgy call. It’s fifteen against one and I’m not going to argue.

I hand over the bat to the ringleader whose swagger tells he’s something of a maestro with the bat. This is where my game goes to shit.

I can’t bowl for anyone’s money and I throw in a few wides for a very average start. Just as I get my eye in on the stumps, I send in a few plumb sitters, which this pint sized ten year old slogs for six – on several occasions. I haven’t had breakfast yet and my stomach rumbles from hunger (or is it embarrassment) so I call it time to pull stumps.

India 1
Australia 0

I tell them there’s gonna be a re-match tomorrow and they swarm, several of them holding on to each hand. We struggle back to the gate of our hotel holding five conversations at once until something has them leaping around even more than they already were. They’re jumping up and down screaming and pointing at a huge six-foot pale yellow snake making a break for it across the path (no doubt freaked out by all the commotion). We follow suit, using the distraction to slip in the gate promising a re-match tomorrow.

I’d better brush up on my game. Something tells me I’m gonna be playing a lot of it.

Delhi

If a director needed inspiration for a post apocalyptic vision of the future, he need go no further than Delhi. No imagination could conjure nor capture the essence of this city. I have never seen anything more alien. It felt like I missed my stop and ended up on the wrong planet.

Weaving our way through the medieval back alleys of the Chandni Chowk Bazaars I am a stranger in another world. The alleys are impossibly narrow instilling nighttime on to daylight. The merchants ply their wares virtually on top of one another and once the day’s trading is finished they scramble up a makeshift ladder on to the roof of their 2sqm shop and huddle under the shelters they’ve built from corrugated iron sheets, gunnysacks and tarpaulins. We constantly had to flatten our backs against the wall to let through loads fit for a mule with only two small brown legs visible beneath – deftly propelling it along through the claustrophobic space.

If a director were to go to Delhi, sure, he would find inspiration. But anything that made it up on screen would be a pale imitation – a mere symbol of the real thing. My even writing this is an act of futility. You have to go there yourself to breathe that air and see those unbelievable situations that happen every millisecond on every street.

Even if the director had the kind of budget necessary to attempt this, he would need a set designer that could create the kind of architectural chaos that would send a Bauhaus fanatic into a fit, with each building being a palimpsest of several – from Ancient to recent, from blackened cement to cardboard.

The art department would have to add centuries of grime to the structure as the Animal Trainers brought in mules that could sit out a mortar bombardment without so much as a flinch.

The casting department would have to seek out thousands of extras ranging from the heartbreakingly beautiful to the tragically deformed and everything in-between – all of them with their life story etched on their faces.

The Gaffers would have to abandon every Health & Safety measure they’ve learned and rig up kilometers of tangled electrical wire and suspend it just above head height above every alley, with each wire sprouting new branches – splicing off to power yet another light bulb, another TV set. The Gaffers must pay no heed to what might happen to this set-up if it rained.

The wardrobe department would have to source Saris of the most brilliant colours and delicate fabric and sew on little pieces of glass that dazzle the eye when they hit the light. The 1st assistant director would need the help of a choreographer to train the extras so they can move through the dirt and grime without so much as a mark on their clothing.

The Sound Engineer could record the din of an actual Delhi street – with horns, revving unmufflered motors, screeching breaks and shouting hawkers layering upon themselves exponentially until you have an impenetrable wall of sound – but the sound system to deliver such an assault in the required 3D doesn’t exist yet.

Even if the director were to succeed in capturing all of these approximations with the aid of a killer Director of Photography – what would appear on screen would be a disappointment. For no director (or writer) can capture the feel of that dirty air soup that lines the inside of your mouth, clings to your skin and seeps in to you pores or that combination of sewage, spice and incense that once it hits your nose stays in your sensorial memory forever. Not only are these impossible to capture, it is simply untenable that anybody could (through any medium) convey the fractal-like depth of what is going on around you. The deeper you look the more you’ll see - and the more you’ll miss out on seeing.

Delhi is like the universe. Indefinable, it never stops. Never stops creating, never stops dying and whatever you witness through the tunnel of your senses is at once everything and nothing at all.

Hairybones is going travelling

Hadn't had much to post of late due to some serious wrapping up for our trip to India.

With me trekking through the Indian Subcontinent, there won't be much in the way of video clips and car chases, but there'll be the occasional update and missive from the road.

Check in after October 20 for Hairybones' Indian Adventures.