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.

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.

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.

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.