What's your sign?

I am almost afraid to ask. What is a leprosy BIBING hall?

Could they mean a sort of dining hall, as in, "imbibing"?

Seen near Tapoban, upper Rishikesh, UP.

Organic Orphans

A Child's Garden

Laxman Jhula, Uttaranchal

I have been very out of touch with everyone lately, since every time I talk to anyone, try to be a friend with someone or write anything, I get jumped all over and told how much I suck. (Total strangers seem to be fine, it's just those who know me who can't stand me. I guess to know me is to hate me.) Tends to make one silent and withdrawn.

I will be in Kathmandu next week to do the visa and now I have lots of little junk to get done before taking the bus. Today I had to return two books (The Wisdom of Forgiveness by Victor Chan and the Dalai Lama, and Cave in the Snow by Vickie Mackenzie) to the orphanage I borrowed them from. Ramana's Garden is a great orphanage here in Laxman Jhula, run by Western volunteers, for Nepali (mostly) and local slum children. The Nepali kids are fleeing the civil war; the local kids are mostly fleeing poverty. They also run a health food restaurant (brown rice and organic veggies!) and when the kids are old enough (about 13) they train them to work in the cafe, serving and preparing and such, so they get job training. The orphanage itself is beautiful, built very organically right into a hillside with lots of trees and gardens (they grow lots of their own vegetables) - a healthy place for the kids to play. They also get schooling, including English of course. Most of the westerners are college kids volunteering for college credit. I am very favourably impressed with it. There are so many sham orphanages here in which the proprietors accept donations and pocket them, it is great to see something so altruistic succeeding.

It was starting to rain (thankfully) when I made it to the bottom of the garden steps. The volunteers thanked me for returning the books. I tried to pick their brains for stories about the kids. They said the Nepali kids usually describe a scenario where "the bad men came to their house and made us leave, and we ran into the forest." It's difficult to tell whether the bad men are Maoists or Royal Army - the effect is much the same.

Prabha, the American woman who founded the orphanage, has been in India for some 29 years! She was meditating in a cave by the Ganges years ago and local kids started wandering in (strange white lady living alone in a cave, everyone has to come check it out!). She didn't get much meditation done, but did learn of the difficulty of their lives and situations. Eventually Prabha just gave up her meditation quest and began helping the kids full time.

It was a good thing I returned the books today. Tomorrow they pack up all the kids and head for their retreat in the mountains, to sit out the next 2 months of intense heat. Some time in August they will return and the cafe will reopen.

Check it out! Their web page is www.sayyesnow.org

Up for the download

Lakshman Jhula, Rishikesh, Uttaranchal

AAAGGGHHH!!!
It ONLY took fifteen minutes to get this Blogger Create page to open, after four or five "404" messages. I'd better type while the typing is good.

Sorry for being incommunicado. I haven't been able to read most emails; every five minutes, it seems, the account goes "Page Not Found." And this country is supposed to be the new IT capital of the world (one in which the power goes out, minimum, for an hour a day and the net is down as often as up). Be afraid, be very afraid. Maybe next India can claim to be the next world capital of Clean Water Delivery - it would make about as much sense. (Yes, I am sure that individual software developers and programmers here, working in individual offices in big cities carefully removed from the rest of the world, are very talented. How come none of this translates onto the ground where real people live?) Many of the engineers my dad worked with at DuPont, and lots of my Indian acquaintances in the US, were engineers. Maybe that's what's wrong - all the good engineers who should be working on the infrastructure here moved over there.

Greetings from Uttaranchal and my first North Indian summer. Uttaranchal is a new state; it used to be the Uttarakhand (literally "upper division") district of Uttar Pradesh. About six years ago they decided to take all the nice, scenic, mountainous parts away from Uttar Pradesh and make it Uttaranchal. All the major Himalayan pilgrimage spots are contained within this new state, plus many scenic river valleys and great trekking.

The dry heat is nothing to sneeze at, but it is a nice change from the soul-destroying humidity of the South. Monsoon is about one month away and the temperatures just build from hereon in. Today's high in nearby capital Dehra Dun was 95F, the low (that is, as cool as it ever gets even at night) was 72F. Here are some more examples of local weather:

New Delhi: High 102, Low 79
Varanasi: High 104, Low 85
Gaya (where the Buddha was supposed to have achieved enlightenment the first week of May about 2500 years ago, but he really just fried his brains) - High 106, Low 83
Pune: High 98, Low 72
Hyderabad: High 99, Low 80
Bombay: High 90, Low 79 (wow, made in the shade by comparison there)
Pondicherry: High 96, Low 81
Calcutta: High 95, Low 79

No sooner am I able to type than the net place is closing again. It took that long. The Garhwali village wedding was great, but I got sunstroke and nearly passed out on the way back down the mountain. Photos to come.

Hippy Hippy Shake

I'll say this for Rishikesh - it's really one place in India where a hippy can be a hippy. Every year, thousands of Western kids come to India in search of peace, enlightenment, spirituality and cool clothes, and are so often disappointed in their romantic notions. But here Flower Power is still in full flower with flowing caftans, dingly dangly rings on the fingers and bells on the toes.

Another sign of prolific hippiedom is the availability of brown rice. So far I have found no less than three restaurants that have it available on a regular basis. (My Indian friends may not recognize the significance of this for western vegetarians). So now I go to Mukti's hole-in-the-wall health food shop ("extraterrestrial mashed potatos") for my daily dose. Only yesterday, my brown rice and freshly steamed squash had some kind of flying bug in it. A dead one. I'm not sure if it's better or worse that the bug was dead when I found it.

Mukti just kind of plucked it off and handed the bowl back to me. I had to explain to him (he's been cooking for foreigners for about 20 years) that I didn't want the piece of squash the bug had died on, either. He looked puzzled as he picked out the piece and threw it away. There was no point in explaining that, by Western standards, he was meant to throw out the bug infested dish and offer a new, bug-free one. It just doesn't work that way here (unless you are in a five-star hotel - but even then, you should never ever give them the plate and let them de-bug it. All they will do is take it to the kitchen, and a few minutes later give you the same plate back, minus the bug).

Perhaps in recompense, Mukti invited me to a village wedding some 20 kms from here. A Garhwali village wedding sounded like fun, not to mention the free food. So we will take the local bus up into the hills tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 8am. It won't matter if we're a bit late - Indian weddings are an all day affair. My friend Laurie asked, "but when IS the wedding?" I said, All day. She thought I was kidding.

Rishi-Kitsch

The Spiritual Tourist
Rishikesh, Uttaranchal

My 12-year-old American friend Jason has come up with a description of the Great Indian Psychodrama in just one phrase. After watching some Indian TV, he commented, "it's all, like,

'You Ate Off My Plate!'

Dunt-dunt-DUHHHHH!!!"

Out of the mouths of babes.

Jason was equally perceptive when I described the Indian tradtion of worshipping one's dead parents. Once the parent "expires," it is the custom to put their photo on your altar in a place of honour along with all the other deities, and pray to them daily. Later, I heard my young friend ennumerating "Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene....""What are you doing?" I asked.Jason shrugged. "I'm just trying to imagine praying to my mom. Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene... Laurie Nieves?"

A Family Affair
Just arrived in Rishikesh, and am wondering why. It seems to have the worst of both tourist worlds - Indian and Western. The Indian tourists are dour-faced, unsmiling families plodding round in large groups, looking like they are carrying out some heinous enforced duty instead of holidaying on the Ganges. I wonder if they are all thinking, "how come I have to do everything with my family and never get a minute alone or with other friends?" They certainly all look as though they'd rather be somewhere else.

Occasionally (very) you see a young, "mod" Indian couple who have managed to break away from the tyranny of their family and squeeze in a weekend on their own. They probably get a lot of guilt for it when they return home ("why didn't you come to Sunday dinner? Always you are running here and there. And I made this special gulabacchanikicchhori just for you. Now it will spoil").

(I wonder, does anyone ever say the first thing that popped into my irreverent Western mind when I heard this? - "Food will spoil? Mom, that's what the fridge is for.")

Tangent Mode On: "If you love someone, set them free" could never catch on here. You can see how much they love the gods...they lock them up in cages. Laurie was told to look for a certain ashram with "devis in cages." We were sure we had found it, till we found another. And another. All the ashrams seem to lock up the painted plaster statues of the gods in cages. (I understanding guarding the valuable gold statues, but these are just plaster and stone.) They lock them up to immobilize them, to make sure they can never, ever, ever go anywhere else. I think that's the Indian way to say "I love you."

Tangent Mode Off:
Then there are the Western spiritual tourists dressed in bright red, orange and yellow "yogi" clothes with big chunky rudraksha malas round their necks to show how austere they are. I've lived in every major ashram in South India, and never seen quite the level of commercialization that's evident here. Tiruvannamalai, Pondicherry, Amritapuri, Puttaparthi - they are all towns with one primary ashram, but in Rishikesh it's a town chock full o' yoga schools all in competition.

All the statue-mala-yoga book-crystal stalls, with bhajans playing from every corner, the rectangular, institutional buildings that feel more like public schools or government buildings than places of meditation - I tried to put a grimy, road-tired finger on what it all reminded me of. It was a cross between Satya Sai Baba's Prashanti Nilayam (pink square birthday cake buildings, lots of enlightened junk for sale) but without the devotional focus on one charismatic figure - a cross between that and Callaway Gardens or other mid-1960s resort towns in Florida. Most of the structures look as though they were built in the early 70s and that seems to be the last time they were painted or repaired, as well. Strangely, the pastel pinks and baby-aspirin oranges are the same hues popular in Florida. Their perky optimism compares poorly with the reality of cracked cement, peeling paint and worn-down marble steps.

A little vintage kitsch is lots of fun, but not when it has that dogeared, down-at-the-heels feeling. Decay is perfected to an art form in, for instance, Calcutta, where it seems kind of classy and old world. Here it feels depressing, like the old shopping mall that's lost its following to the big new Galleria.

It's hotter here than McLeod (had been led to believe it was cool here, but it only means cooler than the rest of India) and there are lots of flies. The flies mill about as aimlessly as all the lost-soul Yoga tourists (why do so many young people who come to study yoga and meditation puff cigarettes? seems counterproductive).

I did feel much better after dipping my feet and hands into the Ganges, which, though not flowing at full capacity, is still cold and clear here in the foothills. For those not clear on the geography (I sure wasn't), Rishikesh is not in the Himalayas....it's not even in the foothills of the Himalayas. Rather, it is at the feet of the foothills of the Himalayas. After evening arati (the traditional fire-offering ceremony) on the riverbank, a delicious, invigorating breeze kicks up. At the Paramarth Niketan arati, they have a fleet of baby monks (in this case, dressed in saffron robes with shaved heads and tiny Brahmin tufts that gives them a whimsical look like a Dr Seuss character) singing and clapping along.

Maybe tomorrow I'll be rested enough to rise at dawn and have my first ritual bath in the holy river (can't believe I've been in India so long and still not had the cleansing bath in the Ganges).

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream....
My dear friend Darkhorse will never forgive me if I leave here not having gotten photos of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ashram where the Beatles came some forty years ago. I think the Beatles were bodhisattvas in disguise. After they made mind-blowing music and changed the world, one went on to promote peace (John), another to promote Eastern spirituality (George), and a third to promote vegetarianism (Paul).

I wonder what Ringo's mission was. Maybe just to show that someone has to be there for other people, be supportive, and stay out of the limelight. I think he will be the last Beatle standing. Maybe then the real Ringo will emerge and become a Starr.

Yes, it's corny. Way corny! I'm in RishiKitsch! It's compare and contrast: candy-coloured plaster painted statues of smiling caged devis vs. dour-faced matrons in technicolour saris living in the invisible cages of their families. Sickening sewage smells vs. sickly sweet incense. Indians wearing western clothes, who've come to see what the Westerners came to see; Westerners wearing Indian clothes who come to see something "Indian."