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.