Art appreciation

As some of you know, I spent about four years travelling around India and Nepal, and about two of those were following HH the Dalai Lama to his many places of teaching and discourse throughout India.

Nowadays, some wags probably consider that stalking. There was a day when it was considered pilgrimage. That's what you do with saints, in the Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Saints don't stay in one place, they keep travelling. You follow them around.

Anyway, some of my favourite moments were in and around the teaching sites, where "Life's Rich Pageant" coalesces.

This photo was taken one morning in 2006 at Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh at the Central Institute of Tibetan Higher Studies, where everyone was queuing for the metal detector to get into teachings.

Last week, I received some Art Appreciation from a Flickr user named East Med Wanderer:

Great shot! All life is there - it has the quality of composition of one of the great master painters. And with a point and shoot - terrific!

Sometimes that's all it takes to make your day, or week. One of the great master painters probably would include the entire face of the purple-wearing woman at left, though - for compositional balance. That way, there would be two women facing each outside corner.

I can no longer post the larger versions of the photos - they kept getting stolen off the blog site. You can view (but not right-click) a larger version here.

Still missing

The 50 Million Missing International Campaign project on Flickr.com continues (despite my absence of nearly a year) to raise awareness of Indian women's situation in what has become a silent gender war.

Sex-selective abortions (female-fetuses only), female infanticide (killing baby girls immediately after birth), and dowry deaths are just two of the factors that have skewed India's gender ratio (aka "sex ratio" or number of women vs. number of men in the population) to dangerous lows. Discussions on these issues and what to do about them continue here.


Due to a traditional preference for sons, daughters are regularly dispensed with through selective abortions and the practice of infanticide. The medical journal Lancet recently announced that about a 1000,000 female fetuses are aborted in India each year. In the state of Kerala, India's most literate state, it is estimated that about 25000 new born infant girls are annually killed. The figures of female infanticide in Bihar are far worse. There, mid-wives admit to being paid to kill at least half of all baby girls they birth. It is also estimated that at least 25000 women are annually murdered by their in-laws and husbands, after being subject to extended physical and mental torture for reasons of dowry. This is India's silent genocide, and it is time for it to STOP.


And, the (now 2,078) international members continue to upload photos that show the breathtaking expanse covered by Indian women and their lives, such as the one above, contributed by Ahinsajain , or the one at left, by BagLady. The project has now collected and catalogued some 13,583 such photos, with dozens more uploaded daily.

Founder Rita Banerji's original goal was to attempt to collect one photo to represent each of some 50 million estimated Indian women who have vanished from the population as a result of such practices.

Sign the petition here, and visit the group's own website.

Competitive spirit

If you participate in Flickr (the best photo-sharing service there is), log in now and go vote for my photo here.

My photo of the Tibetan nun protestors ("Snow lions of peace") is one of the final 10 selections for the Lonely Planet Publications challenge, "Events."

Thanks for playing!

Amaravati's Most Wanted

The new Flickr stats device shows that my all-time Most Viewed photo was not my portrait of the Dalai Lama of which I'm so proud, nor even the portrait of my Tamil Muslim friend Mumtaz in the slums of Chennai (though she has quite a following).

It's not even the news photo I snapped of a Tibetan monk being attacked in Kathmandu, which made MSNBC.

It's this photo of a young Telugu lady in Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, sporting the traditional south Indian half-sari. So far, she's gotten 7,871 individual views (not including my own). I think the half-sari is also called "skirt and thavani" (thavani being the top part).

In these days of internet porn, there is something very comforting about this. As the jewelry salesman said in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "Do they still put the ring in the box of Crackerjacks? It gives one a feeling of...solidarity."

My friends Vijay and Teja still live in Amaravati, the town where the 2006 Kalachakra was performed by the Dalai Lama. Maybe they know the name of this young lady.

The occasion for her special dress was Pongal, the south Indian holiday that falls in mid-January. (It just happened to fall that year during the Kalachakra.) Otherwise, it's increasingly rare to see this elegant dress for young "unmarried" ladies.

Whassup Ode Skool?!

A note from Flickr
Kathmandu

Back in February, you may remember I attended the Tibetan New Year celebration Losar out in Boudha. The Tibetan community, like Ladakh, is a cinch for "beautiful old faces" photos.

One of them was this lovely white-bearded Gandalf of a Ngagpa, or non-celibate Nyingma yogi. (Nyingma is one of the five Tibetan Buddhist schools and literally means, "Old School.") I wish I could have illuminated his face better, but it was still a good composition.


He spoke a bit of English and invited me up to see his monastery in Helambu (about five days' walk from Kathmandu).

Just yesterday, a Flickr member named Joakkim wrote in with this note:

Hi I also met Lama Rechung is his name by the way, at his home in Helambu in 98. Read more about Rinpoche at arobuddhism.org/encyclopaedia/shared/text/n/n rr_ph_01_eng...

The Rinpoche does not appear to have aged a great deal in the 10 years since Joakkim met him, if the website photos are any indication. There must be something to those Tantric Arts.

Time for a closing cliche: What a small world it truly is.

Here are a couple more photos I took that day. Old school indeed.

MyTube

Plan for worldwide multimedia domination
Delhi

Since all I've done is run to offices the past 24 hours, this seems like a good time to mention other sources of Siren-based content on the web.

First, there is my YouTube channel, SirenTV.

As some stupid folk singer beat me to the username "Sirensongs," I had to register as Sirensongsindia. Connections and bandwidth are so poor here, I have only been able to upload 9 videos so far, each one taking at least half an hour.

The most popular has proven to be that of a young Bharatanatyam dancer (viewers recognized her and wrote in that her name is T. Sangeeta).

My favourite is one from the Mahabodhi Society in Sarnath, showing four young orange-robed monks chanting the Buddha's first sermon in Pali language, by candle-light.



YouTube seems to attract very abusive commenters, for some reason. After five various abusive, profane and disgusting remarks from users, I disabled the Comments section.

Judging by the names (south Asia is a lot like Africa in that you can determine "tribal" affiliation by names) alone, two abusive commenters were Indian men, one Nepali male, and one Sri Lankan male. I had my own south Asian diversity-program of verbal abuse!

Welcome to my world
What is it about the internet that brings out the absolute worst in people?

The derogatory comments included the predictable - "Why don't you include the so and so. You really know nothing and are not a real blah blah and a REAL blah blah would do such and such, and...." (no extra points for guessing this nationality was -- drumroll please - Indian!).

Naturally, this guy had nothing up on his own page, he just roamed around criticizing others.

...- to surprising allegations and ethnic slurs ("end the slave culture of child abuse that is Buddhist monk culture"; "you MONK-ees have to understand...")

...- to the outright vulgar ("if you like the Kumari so f**ng much why don't you make your own f**ing daughter the Kumari").

I guess it really sucks to be a mama's boy all your life and be spoiled rotten the first 18 years and handed everything you ever look at, then get out into the big bad world and realize it isn't going to be like that. This appears to be the disease afflicting a lot of south Asian men.

However, my page is not the place to vent your spleen. That's the beauty of the net, you can have your own page to spew onto. (Don't worry, either your Mom or your dutiful wife will clean up after you.)

Eye of the Siren
The other Siren-supplemental audiovisual site is my Flickr account.

Organized into geographical sets, this features about 600 photos from my travels all over India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

For whatever reason, the Flickr community is far more laid-back and less confrontational than that of YouTube, which explains why I spend more time there.

Here are just a couple of photos from my Flickr.

At left are women of the Lambadi/Banjara group, originally from Rajasthan. They had migrated to Pune for construction work. I met them on the job site.

They were building - one head-load of cement at a time - a high-rise mall, the kind they would almost certainly not be allowed to enter themselves once it was completed. (Such malls 'reserve right of admission.' Gypsies like these are considered, sometimes rightly, to be habitual thieves).

Amazingly, they wore their full traditional garb during work hours as well. This photo was taken after hours at their "hutment" or corrugated tin hut erected as temporary housing on the building site.

The masked skull dancers in the photo above are novice bhikkus or young monks at Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh, at the annual Thiksey GuStor festival. They are all dressed up as the Cemetery Lords or harbingers of death. These young dancers get license to run about and tease the audience, sitting on laps, messing with cameras and so forth. The idea is that Death makes a mockery of us all!

Photobloggin

And backloggin

Kathmandu, Nepal

Sharing old photos you haven't seen yet was so much fun, I think I'll continue today. Here are just a few. You can see about 200 more on my Flickr.com page.

There is a guy at the next terminal, and his girlfriend is standing behind him massaging his bald head. Of course, they are European. I guess I really am Asian now - it's just too much for me to stomach this kind of PDA.

If it's Monday, this must be Shiva: This young man would dress as various gods on different days of the week, and go begging in the Koregaon Park area of Pune. Monday is a day traditionally associated with Shiva, so he would dress himself as the snake-toting god of destruction and change. December, 2004

To Mahalingam: Waiting on the railway platform for the train from Trivandrum (Kerala) to Kannur. This boy was so lost in thought, he didn't see my camera. May, 2003


Fields of mustard crop in bloom, near Panauti Village. Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, On a clearer day, you can see the snowcapped Himalayas from here. October 2005

This little girl was dressed up for Gai Jatra, an annual festival to honour the previous year's deceased, in Bhaktapur, Nepal. August 2006

Burmese (as they said on Seinfeld, "isn't it Myanmar now??") monks at Bodh Gaya. New Year's Day, 2007

Dry spell

Who'll start the rain?
Kathmandu, Nepal

The monsoon season has supposedly begun. No big deal. It rains for about an hour, every other day. That just isn't enough rain. Come ON man, this is Asia in the monsoon! It's spozed to be up to our ankles already!

Maybe it's because the chariot festival of Rato Macchendranath was halted for nearly two weeks. Rato ("Red") Macchendranath is one of the local deities propitiated to bring rain and keep the agricultural cycle on track. Every year they drag a skyscraper-like (really, it's about eight storeys high and looks like a giant rolling Christmas tree) contraption around Patan to honour him. This is supposed to mark the beginning of the rainy season. But this year, the makeshift wooden chariot (which is quite a - did I already use the word contraption?) broke down on May 23 and had to be repaired. It just got rolling again yesterday.

All I have to do is cross the border, and I start thinking like a Nepali ("maybe it's because the chariot broke"). I wish it were so simple. In fact, monsoons get shorter and later every year, it seems....throughout the region. Could it be because they're cutting down all the trees in the Tibetan plateau - which happens to be the weather-generator for the entire south Asia region?

No. Must be just a coincidence.....

Well, if you think we're dry now, wait till China dams and diverts all the rivers that originate up there. That's where all the water in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan comes from. I predict the next world war will be a Water War.

In the meantime, between rainfalls, it's really, really hot - even here, in the temperate Kathmandu Valley. When I say "really hot," I mean, anything above 80F.

Right now, the planets are aligned in a near-perfect row. It's cool, even from the city, to be able to look up and see the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter all in a row. If we were in the countryside I could probably see Mercury too.

Flickring
Since the days are hot, I 've been spending a lot of time on Flickr.com organizing and uploading photos. I did so much in the past six months in India, I almost forget till I look at the photos. Here are just a few. (below)

My friends in the United Arab Emirates say they can't open Flickr.com there. Well, at least in Dubai you have really good air conditioning .

I've also spent a lot of time online in my role as Co-Administrator (wheee!) of the 50 Million Missing Project, a photo project to raise awareness of the gender genocide ongoing in India. Because of a traditional preference for sons, Indian couples are using ultrasound to detect the gender of a fetus, then aborting it if it's female. This has resulted in a "skewed sex ratio" of as much as 800-1000 (female to male) in some areas of India.

Here's the link to 50 Million Missing (above). Check it out - there are now nearly 3,000 photos of Indian women and girls, from all communities and walks of life, and some great ongoing discussions of the gender-ratio issue, as well as links to news stories about it.

Okay, here are a few shots from my past 6 months in Buddhist India, and a few you haven't seen before from the Kathmandu Valley.

Young Sri Lankan monks read the sutra of Buddha's first-ever sermon at Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh, the place where the Buddha first delivered the first sermon. (there has got to be a better way to state that....)

Butter lamps and water offerings at the Kagyu Monlam prayer ceremony, Bodh Gaya, Bihar

Tibetan monks going home after preparing the stupa for the ceremony; Bodh Gaya

Ladakhis in their trademark black robes, walking round the Dhamekh Stupa in Sarnath.

Tso Pema, or Rewalsar, in Himachal: site of an ancient Buddhist legend linking the lake to Guru Rinpoche, and home to a number of Tibetan monasteries.


Tiny dancer - these minstrels from Rajasthan had set up shop in Bhaktapur's Taumudhi square, Nepal.