The Namesake

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Within three months they have clothes and toothbrushes at each other’s apartments. He sees her for entire weekends without make-up, sees her with gray shadows under her eyes as she types papers at her desk, and when he kisses her head he tastes the oil that accumulates on her scalp between shampoos. He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerge between appointments at the salon, and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known no greater intimacy.”

Not Randall Jarrell...

This photo:


Made me think of this poem:

"The Golf Links"
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
- Sarah N. Cleghorn

City Beautiful

“So missy” <<insert thwack on my back>>, “Where are you going? Where have you been?”

Thus spake my spunky colleague the morning after I returned from my weekend getaway to Chandigarh, or the “City Beautiful” as it is nicknamed. This lovely city functions as the capital of both Haryana and Punjab, the two states to the north of Delhi.

As you can see from the city plan by French architect Le Corbusier, the city is incredibly well organized as part of an initiative/pet project by Nehru to reflect the country’s modernization. We initially chose Chandigarh because it was advertised as India’s greenest, cleanest and most organized city – all designations which held true out of the cities that I have visited in India thus far.

One of the main tourist attractions of Chandigarh is the Nek Chand Fantasy Rock Garden, which began as a small scale, one man recycling project cum LP-described down-the-rabbit-hole surreal experience as you wind your way through his imagined world. The history of the garden is that following Independence and Partition, one of the many refugees from Pakistan, a city road inspector named Nek Chand, was struck by the amount of waste accumulated from the destruction of villages in building the new and modern Chandigarh. He slowly slowly began collecting these materials, from broken bangles to electrical outlets, from colorful china to used paper sacks, creating a jungle labyrinth that remained undiscovered for fifteen years. Upon its discovery, government officials could have torn it down because it was on state property; instead, they commissioned Chand to complete the garden, giving him a salary and a staff, making his garden one of the largest recycling projects in the world. Minus all the tourists and Hemant’s exasperation at my excessive photo-taking, I became enamored with the winding labyrinth that Chand had created, reminding me of a toned down version of Barcelona’s Parque Guell-Candy Land-amusement park-dream world.




We also visited Sukhna Lake though out of respect for Pooja did not embark on a swan paddle boat. Oh, clean bodies of water in India. Le sigh….


Our second day in Chandigarh we rented some bikes from the Chandigarh Tourist Office and took off for the Rose Garden, the largest in Asia.

Returning back to Delhi I found an email in my inbox from a dear friend and Delhi local; we have both commiserated about the negative sides of Delhi – the traffic, the noise, the pollution, the crime, the testosterone, the crowds, the rip-offs, the lack of green space. To my surprise it appears that my friend severely dislikes Chandigarh for being the exact opposite – a reaction that gave me a bit of a chuckle but one which I am beginning to understand. Where is the ruckus? The chaos? The sense of trying to discover and search for a market or a street because Delhi seems so incredibly discombobulated? With its tree-lined drives and geometric sector organization, Chandigarh seems a bit sterile and impersonal. Nevertheless, I truly enjoyed the escape - the roses, the rocks and the leisurely rickshaw rides all made it a lovely getaway weekend.

Delhi Belly

Congratulations to those of you who bet against my bowels at my going away party so many moons ago in D.C. I have officially experienced my first bout of Delhi belly, which kept me in a state of frightened suspense on the three hour train ride from Chandigarh to Delhi, home from work for a day, and forced me to surrender to my better sense and concede the preventative powers of Imodium for two days.

This post is dedicated to

• Neeraj, whose over-enthusiasm for my irritable bowel was a little annoying yet admittedly humorous (one down, five more to go according to him) and

• Rick, Hemant and Pooja, whose fierce reliance on Imodium pill-popping I had earlier scoffed at and disavowed. I am now a believer. You win. I lose.

Shifting

Shifting = moving.

Which is what I am doing. Shifting flats in the next week or so for a multitude of reasons, cost and location being the major two.

My decision was reaffirmed the other night when I came home from a lovely dinner at a friend's place (he recently had a houseguest who stocked him with cheese (take a moment, c.h.e.e.s.e.... not paneer.... c.h.e.e.s.e.....yuuuuum), wine, and chocolate). It was a lovely, relaxing evening amongst friends.

From there, I returned home and found a pigeon in my room. Yes, a pigeon, a dirty, dirty disease-carrying, filthy, nasty, sidewalk-polluting pigeon in my humble abode. My roommate and I tried to shoo him away but instead managed only to capture him in my bathroom. After stepping in pigeon poo, discovering that he had shat on my OSU teddy bear (don't judge me, it was a gift from John with high sentimental value), and cleaning up more shite in the sink after we successfully extricated him from the premises the next morning, I am more certain than ever that a shift of apartments is necessary.

Bah! Pigeons!
Yay! New flat!

Quotes not reviews

Apologies for not explaining the random appearance of book titles in this blog. A friend recently indicated that he did not read any of the book reviews found here, of which there are none by the way, at which point I corrected him that they were actually quotes from books I’ve been reading.

Since high school I have dog-eared the bottom corner of a page with what I consider to be little word gems, a sign of appreciation and attention in the midst of a story. I think that I also do it because of my faulty memory for plots and characters, trying to hold on to a bit of each book that I read. It is for that reason that I am usually quite disappointed in a book that affords no such dog-earing opportunity.

India has definitely been a great chance to catch up on pleasure reading, as my fellow fellow Suzanne pointed out in her blog last month. The books are cheaper than in the States and the bookstores here always seem to have an interestingly random assortment as you peruse the aisles.

Anyway, read the quotes if you want, they are a part of the blog that is exceptionally selfish and for my own enjoyment and record keeping. If you have read one of the books then I hope reading the quotes has a similar affect on you as it does on me – plopping you right back in the middle of the quoted author’s narrative, the fictional lives that become intertwined with yours for a couple hundred pages, exploring the Cave of Swimmers with the English Patient or the personal aftermaths of 9/11 with Joseph O’Neill. Enjoy!

South bound...

In a bit of a streak of traveling, I headed down to Bangalore this weekend to visit with some friends who were in country to see family. I sound a bit like a broken record, explaining that all I need on the weekends is a respite from Delhi, but this weekend was truly relaxing in a way that Jaipur and Pushkar were not as we were always on the go, trying to see as many things as possible. This weekend was truly about catching up with friends, getting a glimpse of the city from their point of view and eating lots of delicious food.

I arrived late Friday evening and was immediately struck by the cleanliness of the city. Over the next few days I would exhaust the phrase “it’s so clean here!” in my comparison of Bangalore and Delhi. The road from the airport was not littered with rickshaws and taxis, of honking vehicles struggling to maneuver through traffic to more traffic, there was minimal trash and foot traffic along the street - such a welcome site! It’s difficult to describe my amazement and envy of this very immediate and obvious difference between the two cities.

But as we said in Ko-rea… share, don’t compare.

Vidya’s parents could not have been more welcoming and our days started early, first with a tour through the famed Lalbagh Gardens. The guide was a jolly fellow who was trained as an engineer and had previously walked through the gardens for leisure and exercise, whereupon he noticed that each of the trees had signs with names in Latin. Intrigued, he started reading about botany and horticulture, about the history of the gardens and the trees from around the world that were housed there. He provided a full picture of the gardens, with interesting anecdotes, historical trivia and a Bangalorean context. I would highly recommend the tours and hope to return when all the flowers are in bloom next spring with John.

Unfortunately, I have no where near Vidya’s memory and penchant for tree identification and could not name most of the trees that we learned about during our three hour walking tour of the gardens, but brought some fun facts away with me.

Did you know?

• The ficus religiosa was the tree that Buddha found enlightenment under?
• That amber resin was collected from all over the world to recreate the Amber Room in St. Petersburg
• The ficus benghalensis has leaves that form two cups in the back for Krishna to store his butter in? And if you take a seed from this tree and replant it the leaves will grow as a regular fig tree but if you take a graft then you will get these same two cupped leaves?
  
  
• That languages such as Kannada, Thai and Cambodian have curly scripts because they were originally recorded on palm fronds which have strong horizontal fibers that would tear with straight, harshly lined letters?
• That the ylang-ylang flower is used as an ingredient in Chanel No. 5?
  
  
• That gooseberries have 20 percent more Vitamin C than oranges?
• That this beautiful flower is known as the shivalinga flower?

Another new experience was my ayurvedic massage (click here to get a description, this isn’t the place we went). I had heard about the massage from some friends, heard vague rumors of loincloths and feeling like a gulab jamun (for those of you not in the know, another comparison was a french fry in its oil bath at McDonalds, thanks Adam). A bit hesitant, I was happy to go with Vidya, who knew the ropes and the kind ladies there. All rumors were true, I was a little Korean gulab jamun that morning, and then a Thanksgiving turkey as they took a cheesecloth filled with hot herbs and patted me down with it. The jury is still out if I will repeat this new experience; the head massage is highly recommended though and overall definitely something you should try in

The rest of the day was spent eating, eating and then a little walking through Vidya’s neighborhood (again, shrieks of, “oh my god how clean it is! I can walk through the streets without horns blaring and rickshaws swerving! Paradise!). I definitely got to see the nice manicured side of Bangalore, with lunch (special: “Beer and Biryani”) at the Bangalore Club where her parents are members.

The weekend was absolutely splendid, I got to see some good friends and catch up, hear about election night in DC, eat homecooked food, see a new city, get my care package from John, and learn lots about trees! This weekend may take off as well, we shall see…

Here are some other purdy flowers and trees from our garden tour...

The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"A novel is a mirror walking down the road."

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

“A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

“But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.”

“’If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’”

“Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it is how much you can bear.”

“’I just want you to know. I don’t miss you yet.’
His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and its hits the side of a gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is accidental, is intentional. Her hand is near her temple.
‘You will,’ she says.”

“There is one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilization, a whole country ahead of them. The love of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or she had who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about his age, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was, after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, his orgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.”

“I promised to tell you how one falls in love.”

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked my nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

"‘Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.’”

Delhi is not far....

Delhi is not far by Ruskin Bond

"How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time. I wonder what they are doing now, the people on whom these characters are modelled, if indeed they have survived. We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes we hanker for the old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the days I loved you."

"Tagore wrote: 'Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.'"

"'I wonder why God ever bothered to make men, when he had the whole wide beautiful world to himself,' I said to Suraj one summer night. 'Why did he find it necessary to share it with others?'
'Perhaps he felt lonely,' said Suraj."

"A few things reassure me... The desire to love and be loved. The beauty and ugliness of the human body, the intricacy of its design. Sometimes I make love as a sort of exploration of all that is physical; and sometimes falling in love becomes an exploration of the mind. Love takes me to distant, happier places."

"Yesterday I was sad, and tomorrow I may be sad again, but today I know that I am happy. I want to live on and on, delighting like a pagan in all that is physical; and I know that this one lifetime, however long, cannot satisfy my heart."

Pushkar Videos

On our camel rickshaw ride we passed the cuh-ray-jee group that had formed around a dancing horse.



and to get a sense of the crowds on the spiritual walk...

Pushkar Camel Festival

The long awaited camel festival finally arrived last weekend and four AIF fellows were off to Pushkar in neighboring Rajasthan to partake in the crazy temple town camel fair. The camel fair is actually a market for selling and buying camels, cattle, and horses, but it seems as though the Rajasthan Tourism Commission has worked hard to market it as a must-see for foreigners, who were there in droves.

Highlights of the trip included:

(1) Jain Temple in Ajmer: The six hour train ride from Delhi landed us in Ajmer, the often neglected city for backpackers on their way to Pushkar for the camel festival. Hemant, Pooja and I took a day to explore the city and found the Jain Temple which houses an elaborate miniature world made of gold inside.


(2) "Urban" hike: Although we are still unsure if we stumbled upon Dargarh or Taragarh, we spent about two hours hiking to the top of a mountain. It began as a somewhat urban hike through small towns and ended as a proper hike to the top. The path, though, was littered with stands selling cd's for some reason, blasting music at multiple intervals in our journey. The view from the top was spectacular and reminded me of Korean hiking days. And then I wanted pajeon and makkoli and mountain food waiting for me at the top. Alas... can't have it all....


(3) Camels, camels and more camels: Camel racing, camel dancing, camel selling, camel buying, camel decorating, camel riding - anything and everything you ever wanted to do with camels could be done at the Camel Festival it seemed, with throngs of local and foreigners waiting for all the events in the main stadium. How bizarre it must be for the actual camel traders of Rajasthan to try and conduct a real marketplace amidst this constructed chaos.



(4) Spiritual Walk: We began our Sunday early to make sure and catch the mysterious "spiritual walk" that was advertised on the festival itinerary. Pushkar is the only temple of Lord Brahma in India and therefore a major pilgrimage site. We began our spiritual walk there and embarked on our own walk of sorts, not the Rajasthan Tourism Commission one seen below. We headed down to Sarovar Lake, which was created after a lotus fell from the hands of Lord Brahma. After an hour or so of walking through the various ghats along the lake's edge, we made our way to the Pink Floyd Cafe, where each room is named after a Pink Floyd album and the hippies abound.





(5) The Rules: Being a holy city, Pushkar has laws strictly forbidding the consumption of non-vegetarian food, public displays of affection between men and women, and alcohol consumption. Interestingly enough, it does not forbid, and seems to sanction, "special" lassis... hence... hotels such as the Pink Floyd....



This weekend off to Bangalore to see Adam and Vidya! Very excited for gardens, massages, beef jerky (shhh!!) and seeing some familiar friendly faces...

caro in the morning

American India Foundation Service Corps - Apply Now!

The American India Foundation Service Corps Program is now accepting applications for their 2009/10 class! As a current fellow, I think that there are many parts of the AIF SC program that I would highly recommend to potential applicants, and also some issues to be aware of as you approach what will in effect be an incredibly life-altering, perspective-changing, mentally/physically/emotionally challenging year. Before coming to India, I was able to speak with a then-current fellow and got a very candid rendering of her year here, the pitfalls and the successes, essentially the good, the bad and the ugly; her reflections truly tempered and established some of my expectations for these ten months. Please feel free to comment with any questions if you have them and I would be more than happy to share my thoughts.

Other programs that are similar to the AIF program include Indicorps and Princeton in Asia. I would highly suggest getting in touch with current participants in all of these programs if you are interested in applying.

Also, the current fellows having begun posting their experiences on the AIF SC blog, which also includes some posts from last year's fellows and links to personal fellow blogs.

If anyone is interested, The Brookings Institution also produced a brief on global service fellowship last year, providing recommendations to the U.S. federal government about how to increase civic engagement and participation through international volunteering, thereby encouraging diplomacy and cultural awareness/understanding/appreciation.

Dilli Discoveries

Two big finds in Delhi last weekend:

(1) Book Market: Each Sunday in Old Delhi there is a book market that spans about fifteen blocks (maybe more, this is all I saw). With everything from Anne Lamott to computer programming to GRE test prep (I did check for LSAT stuff Silpa but no go) to The Brothers K that I picked up, the book market truly has something for everyone. It takes some time to search through the stalls to find a gem, but they are definitely there... waiting...

(2) Seoul Food: After the Breakthrough training last Saturday, Silpa and I headed to Ansal Plaza in central Delhi to spend our Diwali gift cheques. First stop though was the Korean restaurant on the third floor of the mall. I splurged and got some tofu kimchi and Silpa the classic dolsot bibimbap. The kimchi was fresh and the panchan was delicious. Highly recommended if anyone is having a Ko-rean food hankering.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

“Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” ~ David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

“We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence.”

“With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. … It is the hunger, what we do not have, that holds us together.”

Taking it day by day

Last Thursday was a good day and one of the first indications that yes, I will be able to survive this big bad city of Delhi (and stave off the bottom of the lonely foreigner U curve for as long as possible). The day started with the (supposedly) auspicious pigeon pooping on me and ended with a man intentionally elbowing me in the chest, to which I got in his face, called him a male appendage, and asked if he was f*&%$#@ kidding me. He mocked me, but it felt good to get some of that hostility out anyway.

So one would think that my reaction to the day would be relatively depressed and angry (especially knowing me and what Jose believes is my perpetually angry state of being). But I wasn't! I had a fantastic day! I listened to Qawwali music for the first time! I took a walk with Silpa in the middle of the day, escaping the claustrophobic office space where my longest walk is to the loo! I met up with a fellow fellow, Pooja, and her brother and drank too many vodka tonics! I ate a Sbarro calzone!

My next job is to tackle these rickshaw drivers and not let them be the sore spots of my day...onward!!

Qawwali at Nizam-ud-din Shrine

Last Thursday, my friend Silpa and I finally made it to Nizam-ud-din to listen to the Qawwali performance which takes place every Thursday evening around 6:00 pm. I must admit that I had little understanding of what Qawwali was, only that it is a type of spiritual singing. So after work, Silpa and I met up with one of her friends and headed to Nizam-ud-din, which is a shrine of the Muslim Sufi saint, Nizam-ud-din Chishti, who, according to the LP, died in 1325 at the age of 92.

One of the most interesting parts of the night was watching the people at the shrine, the men inside and the women sitting on the floor outside of the main shrine (they are not permitted inside), grasping the sides of the walls and tying prayer strings to the intricately latticed designs. The shrine was a uniquely spiritual place for me, not knowing the ritual and symbols involved, but feeling a sense of grandeur that transcends physical space; somehow hearing the Qawwali music truly made Nizam-ud-din a spiritual place for me. Spiritual and holy, but chaotic, with people jostling for space and positions in line, women pushing to the front to see inside the shrine where their male counterparts were able to enter, men violently waving fans of cloth to cool the audience and requesting a small reimbursement for their services, five-year-old panhandlers tugging at your pants; like many things in India, it was a full on sensory experience.

But sitting down on the marble floor and listening to the Sufi devotional music was very special indeed. I have no idea what the content of the songs is, but did a little wikipedia research and learned that there are different types of songs: songs to praise Allah, songs to praise Muhammad, songs for Sufi saints, songs of lamentation of death, and poetic lyrics songs. There were a few percussionists in the group of maybe ten men singing. I took a quick video and the camera spans to the Nizam-ud-din shrine directly in front of the Qawwali party.