i think i mentioned this back when i'd first arrived in india, but over the course of time i've been here, i think the only reliable way to describe my collective experience of india is the feeling of "who-are-these-people-and-what-am-i-doing-here?"...including the most awful and the most wonderful. i feel perpetually under-prepared for the experiences that i have here. i have no adequate frame of reference to gauge my experiences.
some of this creates some stress... sometimes it's hard for me to get a sense for how safe my surroundings are, how safe the food and water is. so many experiences that are totally unlike anywhere else i've ever been that it's hard to know where to draw a line. (for example, sometimes there are actual macroscopic animals alive in the tap water in my house (which i don't drink of course)... like little fish-like things... i have no perspective to judge this from... is this bad? is this normal? i have no clue.) here, these experiences are a perpetual state of being. in the end, you have to get used to them in order to have any kind of productivity here (otherwise you'd never be able to even cross the street haha). but sometimes i wonder what risks i'm getting used to here that i should be more careful of...? i would say i could try to be less careful, but that already got me dysentery once. the rational part of my brain really wants to try to calculate risk here, but it's just not possible.
but these are also some of the most wonderful experiences i've had here. this morning i went to the first hour of a pooja in a lord ayyappan temple (a hindu god worshipped in south india, the son of shiva and vishnu...). there is a 41-day fast called vratham that some men (only men) undertake this time of year as followers of ayyappan. as pilgrims, the men are not allowed to wear shoes and wear a rosary-like string of beads around their necks and orange cloth (a color that often indicates a pilgrim). a pooja is a kind of daily prayer. in this case, the men, wearing white and orange dhotis with their sacred threads across their chests, sat clustered on either side of a shrine covered with small burning votive lamps (string wicks burning in pools of oil), pictures and statues of ayyappan draped in thick garlands of chrysanthemums and roses, lead in chanting prayer, throwing, with every verse, yellow chrysanthemums, white flowers, pink rose petals, and green leaves onto the shrine, amid clouds of smoke drifting from a smoldering incense box. the temple itself was nothing particularly special, and i've found that to be true of a lot of temples here... the buildings and shrines, which you see all over... on streetsides, tucked into alcoves on the walls of buildings, small shrines hanging on tree trunks... are themselves often not so impressive, but the spiritual awe they convey is incredible.
india throws everything at you constantly, the wonderful and the horrible. i've realized my memory here is terrible... i find it so hard to remember things that happened even a few weeks ago... i think because my brain is just under constant bombardment with things that are new and confusing. this is definitely a feeling i was searching for in wanting to live abroad, but the extent of it here has taken me a little off guard.
Friday, December 25, 2009
signal'kku right'lu pohanam, roomba thank you (tamglish?)
some (rough) ideas i've been thinking about for a while now on the limits of universality in meaning:
talking with one of my new friends on the train ride back to chennai, he stated quite triumphantly that body language is a universal language, citing the example of the shrug (+ flipping both hands palms up) to mean 'i don't know' in both in the west and in india. of course that doesn't make it universal, i'm sure there are cultures out there where a shrug means something totally different, and of course there's historical relativisim to take into account. do we only share these similarities as a result of a history of the globalization of ideas? would two humans living in total isolation from one another both come up with a similar meaning to the shrug? probably not.
but we can go to a more fundamental level: emotions and their manifestations: smiling, laughing, crying; fear, joy, anxiety; a feeling of at-homeness, of ostracism, the feeling of ones-self as opposed to the outside world/the other, of nostalgia (is this universal?). these things we all share as humans and therefore serve as a common denominator for meaning. how much of the meaning in a shrug is conveyed through the physical gesture and how much is through the emotion in the facial expression associated with it (a look of bewilderment)?
furthermore, why is it that most languages (at least in my limited experience) tend to have similar words for things... like interrogatives--who, what, where, why, when, how much? these concepts so fundamental to our human way of observing our world that most languages seem to evolve including them? (this reminds me of the anecdote annie dillard tells about how when she was a kid she thought that foreign languages were just codes for english (pilgrim at tinker creek)). obviously such similarities between languages don't go very deep, that's what makes poetry translation such an art. and again, historical relativism is important here... why is it that nahuatl, basque, turkish, tamil, and japanese all have similar grammatical structures (they (not exclusively) are all agglutinated... meaning that case endings are attached to the ends of words as suffixes). did they evolve these similarities coincidentally and therefore maybe there's some element of the human brain that in a particular manifestation causes this kind of thinking? (like, as all these different civilizations exhausted the space of human language development, the options were few enough to cause the development of similar structures serendipitously... not sure how one would do the calculate the statistics to get a sense of the significance of the coincidence... hmm.) or is contact between these civilizations over the course of history responsible for the similarities (i'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me knows this... as usual, i wish i knew more history).
humans do seem universally to be pattern-finding machines. our survival is based on our ability to recognize similarities at the right level of generalization (the ability to recognize food... be able to distinguish that this plant in front of me is indeed edible, because i ate it yesterday, to distinguish that while this piece of broccoli is not exactly like the one i ate yesterday, it's similar enough that i can make the approximation and identify it as the same plant). we live in a world of seemingly infinite particularity (well, at the macroscopic level), and in order to survive, we must become approximators, generalizers in order to be pattern-seekers. (also, in order to process all the information that comes at us all the time, our brains rely on patterns that limit what we are able to notice based on what we've observed in the past... annie dillard says children are often much better at noticing things than adults, because they haven't formed these patterns yet, objects haven't taken on meaning yet (read her accounts of people who had been blind having their sight restored as adults... producing a discrepancy between sight and meaning (pilgrim at tinker creek)).
this fundamental characteristic seems to imbue our other, higher level pursuits like the arts. we make patterns in pitches, shapes, rhythms, which form music, the arts, etc. when we listen to music or look at visual art, we naturally find causal relationships between component elements. music can be thought of as fundamentally composed of different textures, and our brains naturally try to draw comparisons between these textures (thanks to randy coleman for getting me to read meyer perception and cognition of complex music)
but what i'm interested in is the place where universal meaning breaks down. in the context of body language, i can come to india and understand a shrug, but i can't necessarily understand a head wobble without first gaining some experience with its usage (could mean yes, no, okay, maybe, depending on the context). in the context of art and music, the levels become even deeper. I went to a dance performance recently of bharathanatyam (one of several kinds of south indian classical dance/ballet). all the times i've seen it the dancing has been very narrative, and especially expressive in facial expression (almost over-expressive.. expressionist even..? it's intense) and symbolic hand gestures. in the performances, the actual narration for the story lines was only described in tamil, so i had no idea what the stories were about. but the dancing uses a lot of expressive pantomime, and i found it interesting to see at what point i could no longer understand what was happening. the emotions all come through in gesture and facial expression (tearful sadness, serene joy, derisively haughty laughter, etc), as well as some of the basic elements of the story line. but at a certain point i just stopped understanding the overall story arcs (most of the dances seem to follow hindu stories from sacred texts like the ramayana or bhagavadgita, most of which i'm not familiar with). in addition, there are hand gestures used which just don't mean anything to me, but clearly have some prescribed meaning in the structure of the dance. it's a little bit like watching opera without reading the subtitles.. there's usually only a handful of stock narrative scenes that could be happening, but whereas with opera i know more-or-less what these options are, for bharathanatyam, i don't really have a clue. so... there are cultural limits to the transference of meaning.
but in the arts, these limits run even deeper. sometimes i think about the sciences and the arts as existing at opposite ends of a single line, a spectrum of languages. science is a language whose fundamental axiom is that it must be universally communicable. scientists make theories to describe the world around them, but the condition is that they must communicate information 100% successfully/they must have the same fundamental meaning to everyone (interpretations can be different of course, but there's a fundamental agreement that there is one way that the world physically works, if two theories seem to describe it equally well, then there must be some way of making them equivalent). if we don't agree, then we need to run experiments to come to a consensus. disagreements must always be in a process of resolved. only the consensus is the content of science. the scientific method is the way in which science as a language creates meaning. so science is a language that must always transmit meaning universally.
at the other end of the line is the arts. as a language, the arts seem to me to be in essence flawed, perpetually failing in the communication of meaning. we think of the arts as a form of self-expression, but the meaning that an artist puts into a piece of art is inherently incommunicable. i'm not saying this is a problem, this failure of communication is what makes the arts incredibly beautiful. each person takes away from a piece of art their own unique meaning, formed by their personal histories and perspectives. take an apple. as a language, what science is concerned with is that we all can come to the conclusion that the apple is indeed an apple, from a certain kind of tree, with a particular genus, etc. only the things that we all agree on can be science. but from the perspective of the arts, an apple has a uniquely personal meaning for each person, and this meaning is too fine to be adequately communicated by language (just another way to communicate meaning, existing somewhere on the line in between science and the arts... it communicates meaning with an intermediate level of certainty and to a subset, not universal, group of people). this isn't to say that no meaning can be communicated by the arts, but just that the arts can't reliably communicate a particular piece of information.
anyway, sorry for the long post, not sure where all of this is going, just a lot of ideas all stuck together at this point.
talking with one of my new friends on the train ride back to chennai, he stated quite triumphantly that body language is a universal language, citing the example of the shrug (+ flipping both hands palms up) to mean 'i don't know' in both in the west and in india. of course that doesn't make it universal, i'm sure there are cultures out there where a shrug means something totally different, and of course there's historical relativisim to take into account. do we only share these similarities as a result of a history of the globalization of ideas? would two humans living in total isolation from one another both come up with a similar meaning to the shrug? probably not.
but we can go to a more fundamental level: emotions and their manifestations: smiling, laughing, crying; fear, joy, anxiety; a feeling of at-homeness, of ostracism, the feeling of ones-self as opposed to the outside world/the other, of nostalgia (is this universal?). these things we all share as humans and therefore serve as a common denominator for meaning. how much of the meaning in a shrug is conveyed through the physical gesture and how much is through the emotion in the facial expression associated with it (a look of bewilderment)?
furthermore, why is it that most languages (at least in my limited experience) tend to have similar words for things... like interrogatives--who, what, where, why, when, how much? these concepts so fundamental to our human way of observing our world that most languages seem to evolve including them? (this reminds me of the anecdote annie dillard tells about how when she was a kid she thought that foreign languages were just codes for english (pilgrim at tinker creek)). obviously such similarities between languages don't go very deep, that's what makes poetry translation such an art. and again, historical relativism is important here... why is it that nahuatl, basque, turkish, tamil, and japanese all have similar grammatical structures (they (not exclusively) are all agglutinated... meaning that case endings are attached to the ends of words as suffixes). did they evolve these similarities coincidentally and therefore maybe there's some element of the human brain that in a particular manifestation causes this kind of thinking? (like, as all these different civilizations exhausted the space of human language development, the options were few enough to cause the development of similar structures serendipitously... not sure how one would do the calculate the statistics to get a sense of the significance of the coincidence... hmm.) or is contact between these civilizations over the course of history responsible for the similarities (i'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me knows this... as usual, i wish i knew more history).
humans do seem universally to be pattern-finding machines. our survival is based on our ability to recognize similarities at the right level of generalization (the ability to recognize food... be able to distinguish that this plant in front of me is indeed edible, because i ate it yesterday, to distinguish that while this piece of broccoli is not exactly like the one i ate yesterday, it's similar enough that i can make the approximation and identify it as the same plant). we live in a world of seemingly infinite particularity (well, at the macroscopic level), and in order to survive, we must become approximators, generalizers in order to be pattern-seekers. (also, in order to process all the information that comes at us all the time, our brains rely on patterns that limit what we are able to notice based on what we've observed in the past... annie dillard says children are often much better at noticing things than adults, because they haven't formed these patterns yet, objects haven't taken on meaning yet (read her accounts of people who had been blind having their sight restored as adults... producing a discrepancy between sight and meaning (pilgrim at tinker creek)).
this fundamental characteristic seems to imbue our other, higher level pursuits like the arts. we make patterns in pitches, shapes, rhythms, which form music, the arts, etc. when we listen to music or look at visual art, we naturally find causal relationships between component elements. music can be thought of as fundamentally composed of different textures, and our brains naturally try to draw comparisons between these textures (thanks to randy coleman for getting me to read meyer perception and cognition of complex music)
but what i'm interested in is the place where universal meaning breaks down. in the context of body language, i can come to india and understand a shrug, but i can't necessarily understand a head wobble without first gaining some experience with its usage (could mean yes, no, okay, maybe, depending on the context). in the context of art and music, the levels become even deeper. I went to a dance performance recently of bharathanatyam (one of several kinds of south indian classical dance/ballet). all the times i've seen it the dancing has been very narrative, and especially expressive in facial expression (almost over-expressive.. expressionist even..? it's intense) and symbolic hand gestures. in the performances, the actual narration for the story lines was only described in tamil, so i had no idea what the stories were about. but the dancing uses a lot of expressive pantomime, and i found it interesting to see at what point i could no longer understand what was happening. the emotions all come through in gesture and facial expression (tearful sadness, serene joy, derisively haughty laughter, etc), as well as some of the basic elements of the story line. but at a certain point i just stopped understanding the overall story arcs (most of the dances seem to follow hindu stories from sacred texts like the ramayana or bhagavadgita, most of which i'm not familiar with). in addition, there are hand gestures used which just don't mean anything to me, but clearly have some prescribed meaning in the structure of the dance. it's a little bit like watching opera without reading the subtitles.. there's usually only a handful of stock narrative scenes that could be happening, but whereas with opera i know more-or-less what these options are, for bharathanatyam, i don't really have a clue. so... there are cultural limits to the transference of meaning.
but in the arts, these limits run even deeper. sometimes i think about the sciences and the arts as existing at opposite ends of a single line, a spectrum of languages. science is a language whose fundamental axiom is that it must be universally communicable. scientists make theories to describe the world around them, but the condition is that they must communicate information 100% successfully/they must have the same fundamental meaning to everyone (interpretations can be different of course, but there's a fundamental agreement that there is one way that the world physically works, if two theories seem to describe it equally well, then there must be some way of making them equivalent). if we don't agree, then we need to run experiments to come to a consensus. disagreements must always be in a process of resolved. only the consensus is the content of science. the scientific method is the way in which science as a language creates meaning. so science is a language that must always transmit meaning universally.
at the other end of the line is the arts. as a language, the arts seem to me to be in essence flawed, perpetually failing in the communication of meaning. we think of the arts as a form of self-expression, but the meaning that an artist puts into a piece of art is inherently incommunicable. i'm not saying this is a problem, this failure of communication is what makes the arts incredibly beautiful. each person takes away from a piece of art their own unique meaning, formed by their personal histories and perspectives. take an apple. as a language, what science is concerned with is that we all can come to the conclusion that the apple is indeed an apple, from a certain kind of tree, with a particular genus, etc. only the things that we all agree on can be science. but from the perspective of the arts, an apple has a uniquely personal meaning for each person, and this meaning is too fine to be adequately communicated by language (just another way to communicate meaning, existing somewhere on the line in between science and the arts... it communicates meaning with an intermediate level of certainty and to a subset, not universal, group of people). this isn't to say that no meaning can be communicated by the arts, but just that the arts can't reliably communicate a particular piece of information.
anyway, sorry for the long post, not sure where all of this is going, just a lot of ideas all stuck together at this point.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
கொப்பன்ஹகனில் நம்பிக்கை
the votes are in and the consensus seems to be... that i have amoebic dysentery... yes. actually so far not as bad as it sounds. starting my ameobicidal drugs tonight.. sorry little guys.
joined the greenpeace human chain this afternoon at marina beach:
maybe not as many people as i was hoping would be there, but it was interesting. as the token non-indian i got put next to apparently some local celebrity (though i didn't get a chance to figure out who she was).
lastly, a few running tallies that i have been keeping in india:
1. dead bodies (human): 2
(funeral processions... they usually parade the dead body through the streets on a cart covered with garlands of flowers, leaving a trail of flower petals behind)
2. trees falling over before my eyes: 1
(it rains a lot right now, there are a lot of huge old trees in the city (which is nice). fortunately the one i saw managed to exactly not hit anything.)
3. children shitting on the street: 3
(note i'm not counting people, kids or otherwise, urinating on the street... that would be waaay too many to count)
joined the greenpeace human chain this afternoon at marina beach:
maybe not as many people as i was hoping would be there, but it was interesting. as the token non-indian i got put next to apparently some local celebrity (though i didn't get a chance to figure out who she was).lastly, a few running tallies that i have been keeping in india:
1. dead bodies (human): 2
(funeral processions... they usually parade the dead body through the streets on a cart covered with garlands of flowers, leaving a trail of flower petals behind)
2. trees falling over before my eyes: 1
(it rains a lot right now, there are a lot of huge old trees in the city (which is nice). fortunately the one i saw managed to exactly not hit anything.)
3. children shitting on the street: 3
(note i'm not counting people, kids or otherwise, urinating on the street... that would be waaay too many to count)
Thursday, December 10, 2009
um
by the way, i have to say, that even given my high expectations for seeing the taj mahal, it completely lived up to them and then some. it's definitely a structure that hits you square in the face. it's so much bigger than i'd anticipated, i think because when you see pictures of it, they usually don't have people in them. so it really doesn't matter that you're there with a thousand other tourists, because they are dwarfed in comparison. it's the kind of place where as you're walking around you kind of forget how amazing it is, and then you look up and stagger a little bit, caught off guard. anyway, i realize how trite it is to wax poetic about the taj mahal. but really. it's amazing.
swaganam choomchoo
i think i finally figured it out, figured out why i travel, what makes me the most excited about going new places, meeting new people... well, at least one of the things.
but first.
i've returned to chennai, 31-train-hours-later, my mind readjusted (maybe..?), my stomach likely housing some new friends (yikes!). went up north to travel around delhi-agra-rajasthan for a couple weeks with my cousin and one of her friends. ended up not really seeing as much as i'd been anticipated, was just pretty frustrated with the reality of how intense traveling is here and especially the prospects of traveling alone as a girl up north. i mean, we still saw some beautiful stuff, but i definitely suffer from guide-book-optimism here (leafing through the guide book getting excited by all the beautiful pictures of places and somehow always managing to forget the lesson i learned my first week in india, that pictures are a totally innacurate representation of what actually being here is like). i think a lot of it is just the built-up stress... dealing with transportation (waitlists for trains, sketchy buses/bus stations, etc), having to fight for everything all the time here (it's the only way to get anything here), getting sick, not necessarily feeling safe (being alone). having to put up walls all the time (otherwise having to deal with being hassled/followed... situations that feel safe can 5 seconds later feel incredibly sketch). reading indian newspapers and hearing stories from other people makes it hard to approach situations without negative expectations. i struggle to find an intermediate between being closed all the time, which cuts out the good as well as the bad, and being too open, which seems naieve and potentially dangerous...? there's maybe a fundamental element of trust that i'm not sure i can count on here sometimes, and this is really scary for me. (don't get me wrong, my feelings are colored by a small handful of bad experiences, but these are sometimes hard to escape from.) For me most of the negative experiences stem from interactions with men here (which is much worse up north than down south). never in any other place i've ever been have i felt such an uncontrollable desire to encourage and support women and women's rights. anyway, i should probably move on, this tangent could take a while...
i realized that the places i was enjoying the most were the ones off the tourist track, places where i felt like i could still make connections with people through feelings of mutual curiousity, where people were amused with my photography, kids would say hi just to say hi, want to have their picture taken just for the fun of it. i realized that this curiosity is the most important and wonderful part of traveling for me. without it traveling feels hollow. india sometimes makes this hard. the incredible economic disparities between parts of society here make it feel totally legitimate that people might come to see foreigners as only a source of income, as something to be manipulated for the purpose of making money. it's completely understandable, but the reality of the situation just makes me pretty sad. it's definitely still possible to have good connections, but they're just less common.
kids in bundi:
but i had one of these wonderful experiences on my train ride back to chennai, where i met a group of social workers from different villages in maharashtra. when they found out that i studied physics and especially astrophysics and cosmology, they had lots of questions. we talked about global warming and black holes and the big bang. in exchange they taught me some marathi (a language related to hindi which is spoken in maharashtra... not sure if i mentioned it before but india has 18 official languages..! swaganam means welcome and choomchoo means spoon). it was such a refreshing interaction (plus helped remind me that i can make connections with people through physics, that studying the universe is pretty awesome (a reminder i need right now as i have grad school application deadlines rapidly approaching...)).
the outer gate to jama masjid, delhi, the largest mosque in india (holds up to 25,000 people). had an awesome cultural moment here: after waiting for prayers to finish with a couple of other foreigners, when we entered, the guys at the gate demanded that we all pay a 200Rs camera fee just to enter. i didn't have much time and i didn't really feel comfortable taking pictures in such a holy place so soon around prayer time, but they refused to let me enter without paying the fee even though i said i was not going to take pictures. in preparation for entering, i'd already covered my head with a scarf i'd brought, meanwhile the guys were draping a ridiculous orange dress over the other foreigner woman since she'd come wearing a skirt. i wasn't super happy with the double standard of the camera fee, so i turned to leave and was putting on my shoes when one of the guys came out and asked me if i promised to not take pictures, to which i agreed 'absolutely,' and they let me enter. i realized once inside the reason for the double standard. there were a large number of foreigners, nearly all of the women wearing the huge drapey dresses since they'd come wearing shorts and tank tops, etc. none of the women covering their heads, all posing and taking pictures of each other. i was pretty taken aback by the cultural insensitivity, and even happier at having been able to make a connection with the guy at the gate.
the dargah in ajmer: the tomb of a sufi saint khwaja muin-ud-din chishti (entering through metal detectors)
but first.
i've returned to chennai, 31-train-hours-later, my mind readjusted (maybe..?), my stomach likely housing some new friends (yikes!). went up north to travel around delhi-agra-rajasthan for a couple weeks with my cousin and one of her friends. ended up not really seeing as much as i'd been anticipated, was just pretty frustrated with the reality of how intense traveling is here and especially the prospects of traveling alone as a girl up north. i mean, we still saw some beautiful stuff, but i definitely suffer from guide-book-optimism here (leafing through the guide book getting excited by all the beautiful pictures of places and somehow always managing to forget the lesson i learned my first week in india, that pictures are a totally innacurate representation of what actually being here is like). i think a lot of it is just the built-up stress... dealing with transportation (waitlists for trains, sketchy buses/bus stations, etc), having to fight for everything all the time here (it's the only way to get anything here), getting sick, not necessarily feeling safe (being alone). having to put up walls all the time (otherwise having to deal with being hassled/followed... situations that feel safe can 5 seconds later feel incredibly sketch). reading indian newspapers and hearing stories from other people makes it hard to approach situations without negative expectations. i struggle to find an intermediate between being closed all the time, which cuts out the good as well as the bad, and being too open, which seems naieve and potentially dangerous...? there's maybe a fundamental element of trust that i'm not sure i can count on here sometimes, and this is really scary for me. (don't get me wrong, my feelings are colored by a small handful of bad experiences, but these are sometimes hard to escape from.) For me most of the negative experiences stem from interactions with men here (which is much worse up north than down south). never in any other place i've ever been have i felt such an uncontrollable desire to encourage and support women and women's rights. anyway, i should probably move on, this tangent could take a while...
i realized that the places i was enjoying the most were the ones off the tourist track, places where i felt like i could still make connections with people through feelings of mutual curiousity, where people were amused with my photography, kids would say hi just to say hi, want to have their picture taken just for the fun of it. i realized that this curiosity is the most important and wonderful part of traveling for me. without it traveling feels hollow. india sometimes makes this hard. the incredible economic disparities between parts of society here make it feel totally legitimate that people might come to see foreigners as only a source of income, as something to be manipulated for the purpose of making money. it's completely understandable, but the reality of the situation just makes me pretty sad. it's definitely still possible to have good connections, but they're just less common.
kids in bundi:
but i had one of these wonderful experiences on my train ride back to chennai, where i met a group of social workers from different villages in maharashtra. when they found out that i studied physics and especially astrophysics and cosmology, they had lots of questions. we talked about global warming and black holes and the big bang. in exchange they taught me some marathi (a language related to hindi which is spoken in maharashtra... not sure if i mentioned it before but india has 18 official languages..! swaganam means welcome and choomchoo means spoon). it was such a refreshing interaction (plus helped remind me that i can make connections with people through physics, that studying the universe is pretty awesome (a reminder i need right now as i have grad school application deadlines rapidly approaching...)).
the outer gate to jama masjid, delhi, the largest mosque in india (holds up to 25,000 people). had an awesome cultural moment here: after waiting for prayers to finish with a couple of other foreigners, when we entered, the guys at the gate demanded that we all pay a 200Rs camera fee just to enter. i didn't have much time and i didn't really feel comfortable taking pictures in such a holy place so soon around prayer time, but they refused to let me enter without paying the fee even though i said i was not going to take pictures. in preparation for entering, i'd already covered my head with a scarf i'd brought, meanwhile the guys were draping a ridiculous orange dress over the other foreigner woman since she'd come wearing a skirt. i wasn't super happy with the double standard of the camera fee, so i turned to leave and was putting on my shoes when one of the guys came out and asked me if i promised to not take pictures, to which i agreed 'absolutely,' and they let me enter. i realized once inside the reason for the double standard. there were a large number of foreigners, nearly all of the women wearing the huge drapey dresses since they'd come wearing shorts and tank tops, etc. none of the women covering their heads, all posing and taking pictures of each other. i was pretty taken aback by the cultural insensitivity, and even happier at having been able to make a connection with the guy at the gate.
the dargah in ajmer: the tomb of a sufi saint khwaja muin-ud-din chishti (entering through metal detectors)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
பிரச்சனை இல்லை = problem yok = no problem
everything stops working here: electricity, internet, running water, cell phone service, cooking gas, etc. for every system, it seems like there's one little trick keeping the whole system running, everything just on the brink of dysfunction. though, when the power went out (because of the rain) at a concert i went to last week, and the musicians kept playing and singing for a few minutes, despite the sound system going out, and in totally darkness you could hear the whole audience softly clapping the thalam (rhythmic pattern underlying the music, which you beat out with your right hand on your right leg), that was pretty awesome.
yesterday i went to another (2nd) bhajana class with the elderly woman i live with. she gets together weekly with a group of other mostly elderly women (also mostly relatively-wealthy brahmans) to sing bhajans: popular, sacred (hindu) songs sung in collective worship, a tradition that came out of the bhakti movement of the 14-16th centuries. going around the room, each woman chooses a song to be sung in antiphonal style (call and response). i went to my first one a few weeks ago, and wanted to go back to make some recordings of the songs.
india is an amazing human machine. so much unskilled labor and everything here is done by hand. on my walk to my teacher's house, i pass an area where people (mostly women) sit all
day and break largish lumps of broken bricks into smaller lumps with hammers. there's construction next door to add a floor to the house, and there are women who all day carry stacks of bricks and bags of sand on their heads from the pile in the street onto the construction site. every couple of weeks it seems there are men who dredge the sewers by hand, standing in open man-holes, waist-deep in black sludge, passing hand-shovel-fulls of muck out to their women helpers to be dumped in oozing piles in the street. it's all human-powered. and in addition (conjunction?), society here is overwhelmingly service-oriented. there are people to deliver your groceries, your water, your medical supplies. thinking about the number of men who are employed as guards, nightwatchmen, gardeners, taxi/auto drivers,
women as maids to cook, wash dishes, clean, it boggles the mind. and whereas in the us, having a maid or a gardener would be seen maybe as extravagant, here, it's commonplace
(and relatively cheap, like you can hire a guy to climb and harvest all the coconuts from the tree in your garden for $2).
a couple of weeks ago, I went with a few friends to dakshina chitra, an artist colony about 45-min-drive south of chennai. while it definitely had the feel of catering to tourists, it was about as awesome as these kind of places can be, presenting architecture and handicrafts from four southern states: tamil nadu, andhra pradesh, karnataka, and kerala:
yesterday i went to another (2nd) bhajana class with the elderly woman i live with. she gets together weekly with a group of other mostly elderly women (also mostly relatively-wealthy brahmans) to sing bhajans: popular, sacred (hindu) songs sung in collective worship, a tradition that came out of the bhakti movement of the 14-16th centuries. going around the room, each woman chooses a song to be sung in antiphonal style (call and response). i went to my first one a few weeks ago, and wanted to go back to make some recordings of the songs.Friday, November 6, 2009
there is a war in the kitchen
where i live, the kitchen leads a double life. by day it seems like any other normal indian kitchen, but at night it becomes a war grounds for geckos and cockroaches. somehow they sense when the kitchen door gets shut and bolted for the night. when i wander in after to get some water before i go to sleep, i'm stepping into a foreign world i don't belong in. a gecko bolts noiselessly and 7 or 8 cockroaches scuttle for cover. they're everywhere, on the floor, on the counters. apparently the geckos eat the cockroaches, and one time i saw a gecko with something that looked like half a cockroach hanging out of its mouth, but most of the geckos i've seen are only slightly larger than the cockroaches themselves and they're desperately outnumbered.
the rains have arrived! there's apparently a post-monsoon monsoon season that hits tamil nadu (because of the bend in the east coast of india) as the monsoon is receding. and it's wonderful, driving temperatures down into the mid 80s F... awesome! though i did get caught in a torrential downpour a couple days ago (walk outside, weather is totally clear, 10 seconds later it's like a mini-typhoon hits, soaked through completely even with an umbrella, right as my friend and i are hurrying to try to catch the last bus home of the night)... kind of the most hilarious thing that's happened to me yet.
went to another wedding yesterday... well, technically, i've only been going to the betrothal ceremonies, i haven't been to any actual weddings, they always take place the next day. but my teacher sometimes plays at the betrothal ceremonies (wedding gig india-style), so i've been coming to hear her play. this one was complete with cotton candy and people in big furry animal costumes. basically the ceremony involves the couple standing on stage bedecked in jeweled saari and kurta, huge flower garlands draped around their necks, receiving a seemingly endless stream of guests bringing them presents and getting their pictures and live video taken. after that, there's a huge meal. if anything, it's been an interesting exposure to the different manifestations of wealth in india. i feel like there's a big difference between old money and new money here. old money seems to be a lot more conservative, more frugal, the women might dress up in saaris vs. new money is more ostentatious, women seem more likely to wear modern-fashionable chudhidar. apparently there were no fancy cafes in chennai until the IT boom. now these places cater to expats and the wealthy, where you can get a cappuccino for about 10x the cost of indian coffee at a street stall (still, only about $1-1.50). unfortunately, these places are kind of the only relaxed havens in the city... it's been hard to find a compromise between the crazy that is india and these places, which, while comforting sometimes, are kind of an escape from india.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
intelligent ants
there are these ants here, really tiny ones, redish brown and black (and they bite/sting which is pretty painful given how small they are), which can find food pretty much anywhere in my room within 1/2-couple hours, a little stream of ants hurrying back and forth along a scented path, crawling out of some crevice across the room.
i take back everything i used to believe about hotter, more humid climates fostering cultures that are more relaxed and laid back. might have worked for hawaii, but india is completely the opposite. the schedule here is nuts: people generally seem to eat dinner at 9-10pm yet wake up at 5-6am, plus it's a 6-day work week. though my tamil skillz are still coming along very slowly, people seem, at least especially in the streets, to use the language pretty aggressively, and this seems to be reflected in tamil television (which the elderly lady i'm living with watches a lot of). the streets of chennai are definitely not the place for politeness and courtesy. it's take whatever you can get whenever you can get it.
went to an interesting concert last week, called a jugalbandi (a duet for two instruments). in this case, the concert was a contrast of carnatic (south indian) with hindustani (north indian), so the instrumentation was carnatic violin+mridangam (south indian drum) (+tanbur) and sitar+tabla. the first hour was a carnatic recital, the second a hindustani recital, and the third hour (3 hours is not unusual..) was all of them playing together, playing in the ragam charukesi (major scale+flat7+flat6... sounds like major on the bottom and minor on the top). having not listened to hindustani music at all since i got here, hearing the differences between them was eye-opening. while the two often use similar pitch material, the treatment is very different, hindustani seems to sit on the dissonant pitches of a scale (say, scale degree 2, 7, sharp 4, etc), while carnatic music seems to tend more to realize these notes as aberrations away from the more consonant intervals (tonic, dominant). of course, the rhythmic content is totally different between the two... both are mathematical but in really different ways. but actually what was probably more striking for me than the differences in musical content were the differences in presentation, reminding me of conversations with my teacher about the use of gimmicky styles of playing. while i enjoyed both soloists' performances, it was hard to really compare them because the sitar player played in so much more of a virtuosic style than the violinist. when the two played together, the violinist seemed to try to match the virtuosity, but didn't quite get there. but i think that was partly due to instrumentation and acoustics (sitar has an incredibly bright, vibrant timbre compared to violin, which (especially with the mic-ing) is much darker and as a result ended up covered sometimes).
by the way, the ants theme is only further expanding the uncanny parallels i've been feeling between india and 100 years of solitude (marquez)... magical-realism (currently reading midnight's children). there's a building in chennai called vivekanander illam but commonly referred to as 'ice house,' built to store brought in from america before ice-making processes existed in india.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
bicycling pondicherry
last saturday was diwali, and i went to pondicherry for the weekend with some friends (mostly other expats working at ngos in india). a small town on the coast south of chennai, pondicherry was a french colony until 1954, and the town still has a distinctly french flavor: architecture, street names, you can hear a few snipits of french, and find a bakery selling decent croissants. it's also the site of an ashram of sri aurobindo, a spiritual guru figure, and his disciple, the mother, who sought life transformation and higher consciousness through yoga and a concept they invented called the supramental. india's spiritual personality cults are unlike anything i've experienced before, adding to my many experiences here where i find myself in situations wondering "how did i get here?/who are these people?" not in a bad way, so far in only an awesome way, but still surprising.
we rented bikes and rode to a beach a few km north of the city. probably the most fun i've had in india so far, weaving rickety bikes through perpetually ridiculous indian traffic, but reminding me how much i miss riding bikes. the beach turned out, unfortunately, to be where the local village people come to defecate (turns out, i learned, 50% of india's population shits outside), but the water still felt pretty amazing. thank you ocean, the great global sanitizer.
streets in pondicherry:
turning off the main road to get to the beach:
we rented bikes and rode to a beach a few km north of the city. probably the most fun i've had in india so far, weaving rickety bikes through perpetually ridiculous indian traffic, but reminding me how much i miss riding bikes. the beach turned out, unfortunately, to be where the local village people come to defecate (turns out, i learned, 50% of india's population shits outside), but the water still felt pretty amazing. thank you ocean, the great global sanitizer.
streets in pondicherry:
turning off the main road to get to the beach:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
run #2 and ragam #8
the sweet veranda off of my room:
and a goat eating leaves out of a garbage can about a block away:
there are animals everywhere here: goats, dogs, cats, chickens, cows roaming the streets. it's hard to tell if they have owners or not, but most seem relatively well fed and taken care of. the elderly woman who lives in the house where i'm staying told me she gives food to a squirrel and a crow, which take turns eating separately on the window sill outside the kitchen, and apparently the crow can tell if it's getting leftovers and will refuse them.
things here are all a little bit magical-realism, i think because religion is very much tied into daily life and ritualistic action (like making an offering from the first food cooked of the day, and welcoming the gods first thing in the morning with a design outside the front door made out of white sand). my teacher told me the other day that it's been scientifically proven that playing in shankarabaranum ragam (effectively the western major scale) is good for health and the prosperity of the home. i'm not sure what i think of all of this yet, but i do think that the human mind is a very powerful tool, at least as a feedback loop with the body.
and a goat eating leaves out of a garbage can about a block away:
there are animals everywhere here: goats, dogs, cats, chickens, cows roaming the streets. it's hard to tell if they have owners or not, but most seem relatively well fed and taken care of. the elderly woman who lives in the house where i'm staying told me she gives food to a squirrel and a crow, which take turns eating separately on the window sill outside the kitchen, and apparently the crow can tell if it's getting leftovers and will refuse them.things here are all a little bit magical-realism, i think because religion is very much tied into daily life and ritualistic action (like making an offering from the first food cooked of the day, and welcoming the gods first thing in the morning with a design outside the front door made out of white sand). my teacher told me the other day that it's been scientifically proven that playing in shankarabaranum ragam (effectively the western major scale) is good for health and the prosperity of the home. i'm not sure what i think of all of this yet, but i do think that the human mind is a very powerful tool, at least as a feedback loop with the body.
Monday, October 12, 2009
or
something a little familiar or, hello thailand?:
went to an incredible concert last night, my first time hearing my teacher play. she seated me onstage behind her, a little nerve-wracking yes. but completely amazing. concerts for me here are like breaths of fresh air, so much revitalizing energy.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
landing
so i stepped off, with expectations fuzzy, a feeling of impending impossibility, and have landed in a bit of an upside-down world. i'm still struggling to find words to really describe what india is like, and i've found my photographs so far come up short in embodying the experience. maybe something about a photo being still and quiet, two words that are just inappropriate to use in reference to india. it's all texture here, heat and smell and noise and color. hard to get any perspective, it all just floods in all the time. there is no 'why,' even though it's the question i find people are always asking me here.
but, on the ground. i've been in chennai, india, for 3 weeks so far. it's gone by both incredibly quickly and extremely slowly. getting anything done takes forever, but then suddenly something falls in your lap. i'm still finally getting the last logistical details settled. i've found a permanent (well, for the next few months anyway) place to live, will move in tomorrow. after a couple weeks of ambivalence about how to best use my time here (here?)/now(/in life), i've started taking south indian/carnatic flute lessons (went for my fourth today). i have a ton to learn and a lot of practicing ahead of me! but so far so good, my teacher is pushing me as hard as i'm pushing myself, so i think it'll be a great relationship and i'll be able to get a lot done. the more of the music i hear, the more convinced i become that this was the right thing to do (or, at least, a good thing to do...). not so sure where it'll all end up, but for now, i'm along for the ride.
but, on the ground. i've been in chennai, india, for 3 weeks so far. it's gone by both incredibly quickly and extremely slowly. getting anything done takes forever, but then suddenly something falls in your lap. i'm still finally getting the last logistical details settled. i've found a permanent (well, for the next few months anyway) place to live, will move in tomorrow. after a couple weeks of ambivalence about how to best use my time here (here?)/now(/in life), i've started taking south indian/carnatic flute lessons (went for my fourth today). i have a ton to learn and a lot of practicing ahead of me! but so far so good, my teacher is pushing me as hard as i'm pushing myself, so i think it'll be a great relationship and i'll be able to get a lot done. the more of the music i hear, the more convinced i become that this was the right thing to do (or, at least, a good thing to do...). not so sure where it'll all end up, but for now, i'm along for the ride.
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