flying

my mind is blown by air travel. and beyond just looking out the window, which by itself is just amazing (amazing!). flying is in some ways so easy, too easy. the fact that you can just buy a ticket and end up nearly anywhere with an airport in under about 30 hours, is so unbelievable. but the relative ease of flying is in no way a good reflection of the much more difficult social, political, cultural, climatic, geographical changes associated with traveling or covering such huge distances, much too little time to accommodate the cavernous culture shock or deal with the political differences between different places (having to get visas, etc.). i still find it hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago i started out in india, transferred planes in qatar, flew up the coast of saudi arabia, over kuwait and baghdad, crossed kurdistan (nostalgia for eastern turkey aww), the black sea, ukraine, russia before heading for the more familiar white north atlantic.

lifting off from chennai at night, it looks just about like any other city but how untrue that is!

landing in doha, qatar, watching a guy in all white cotton and shades glide along the tarmac. i was having a good time with the security checkpoint, cultural juxtapositions of women in saris being patted down by female airport security staff in islam-appropriate uniforms, until they started manhandling my bassoon, all taking the pieces out, putting them back wrong, and yelling at me when i would try to approach to tell them how to not damage it. after rummaging through your carryons, they just dump them onto the floor outside security, awesome, thanks.

arriving back in the us (and in a tiny town in rural ohio no less), the quiet bore into my brain... being able to hear the sounds of my footsteps, the crushing of the snow, hearing myself breathing again. i found people to be both more and less friendly than in india... people here are much less reserved, more gruffly, loudly, physically friendly, but then on the other hand, courtesy on the street actually exists here, whereas there's nothing remotely like it in india. having the tap water be either cold (cold!) or hot (hot!); trying to not cringe when i hand someone something with my left hand.

but i feel like i've readjusted easier than i thought. but i still struggle to find any kind of logical relationship between india and here. i think it just doesn't exist. i feel like if someone told me i'd been in a coma the last 5 months and had dreamed the whole thing, i might believe them.

walking

i walk a lot here. sometimes upwards of 1-2 hours a day, purely for transportation. i hate taking autos (and they're expensive), and often the city bus system (which is really cheap) will only get you about half-way where you want to go. walking here is a little bit of a skill: constantly going from non-functional sidewalk into the street, around trees (which actually grow in the streets here), piles of rubble, goats chickens cows, sleeping dogs, dodging crumbling manholes, missing chunks of sidewalk that reach down to murky sewage water, being constantly not-quite-hit by autos, cars, bicycles, buses with bellowing horns, trying not to run into the usual cluster fuck of crowds and not step in who-knows-what on the ground (really... shit, food, who knows what it is...). when i first got here i was advised to walk in the street as though i were a water buffalo: with no concern or reaction on my face.

i've been realizing just how much you can tell about a person here by how they are dressed. cross reference with location and age and you have a pretty good idea of a person's background, what topics of conversation you might have with them. i'll start with men:
the typical would be nondescript sandals, button-down cotton shirt, pants. then there are variations:
-shoes: wearing no shoes at all is also pretty common. wearing closed-toed shoes instantly means more wealth.
-pants or lungi/dhotti (a kind of skirt, sometimes tucked up to be more like a mini skirt): wearing jeans and especially shorts (!) automatically jumps you to the higher echelons. the dudes on the street are all wearing pants, whereas the guys on the street wearing a dhotti seem more like workers, or like they live/work in the area, probably are more likely to not be wearing shoes. but the dhotti is also formal wear... a wealthy well-educated guy might wear a nice dhotti to a wedding. and old men on the street are also more likely to wear a dhotti... probably a white one in contrast to the usually printed plaid of the work dhotti.
-shirt: knit cotton/polo shirt again automatically jumps to a different level.

for women:
-sari: the worker women on the street are usually in saris as are older, wealthy brahmin women, but they're totally different: the worker women wear more nylon fabrics or simple cottons whereas older wealthy women would wear shiny silk/cotton
-salwar kameez: the uniform of younger women and middle aged women of the middle class. wearing a chudhidar (kameez top with tight, bunched up legging-like pants, an import from north india) is more stylish.
-jeans+kurta/western clothes: college students, more educated, wealthier

of course, these are not rules, they're only my observations....

for hindus (well, at least men...) you can also often tell what deity they worship. a shiva worshipper (iyer) will sometimes have ~3 white stripes across the forehead, whereas a vishnu worshipper (iyengar) will have a thin white U or V reaching down between the eyebrows sometimes with an orange vertical stripe in the middle.

i see all of this as part of this characteristic of public-ization here: so many things that in the us we're used to thinking of as private events become public actions in india. the streets are a place not just for walking and transportation, but for eating, shopping, socializing, drinking (tea or coffee... drinking alcohol is also done on the streets but not out in public), sleeping, peeing, playing, working (sawing wood, welding, car mechanics, tailoring clothing, etc.), brushing teeth, pumping water, shitting, worshipping (street temples are everywhere). everyone's all up in each others business here because it's all in public anyway. privacy is a major luxury.

i think when i first got to india, the life i saw on the streets is what i assumed was the "real" india. so when i would go to a coffee shop where wealthy and well-educated people come to drink expensive cappucino and look out at the street through floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the comfort of AC and the security of a guard watching their cars parked out front (places where I don't feel strange getting out my laptop), at first I considered these places "not-india," an escape or reaction against india. but really, the longer i stay here the more i realize that these places are just as much a part of modern india. sure, these places (which emerged only with the IT boom) are an escape from the insanity of the streets, but they're just as important an element of the face of modern india.

which i've been realizing, the longer i spend here, and the more of india i see, the less i feel like i have a good idea of what india "is." india is everything. it is cow-drawn carts in the street and swank highrises, barefoot flower-sellers and open sewers, laptop-toting businessmen and engineering schools, groups of young men pilgrims, white poweder smeared on their foreheads, all wearing the same color taking each others pictures with cameraphones, beggarwomen without fingers, old women in shiny silk saris whose children all live in the us, young couples wearing jeans going on dates, movie stars (not just bollywood but kollywood, tollywood...), marathon runners, the smallest men and women i've ever seen (how big you are here correlates pretty directly with how much money you have... not just fat, but physical size), old man pilgrims with wild eyes and crazy hair. india is so many religions, so many languages, so many individual states with their own individuality and identity (and new ones struggling to emerge all the time). even within a single religion, hinduism, there are so many different deities, so many different ways to worship. india's kind of a place where you do whatever you want because there is no one set way to do anything. i still feel here like i have no idea what's happening around me about 90% of the time, but really, i don't think anyone else does either, even people who've lived their whole lives here.

so, i've been struggling to figure out where i fit in here, who are the people i'm supposed to be friends with, what place in society i'm supposed to take. and i really still have no idea. while this has been frustrating, i think overall it's good, maybe it's why i came here. last year i started to think about defining "adulthood" as beginning at the time when you know who you are. eventually it becomes harder to throw everything to the wind and just strike out in a new direction. and really, eventually this is probably for the best. there's a major contradiction in my life between continuity and change... learning new things vs getting better at the things i already do. i feel like somewhere in this last year this transition happened to me maybe. as awesome as india is, i'm frustrated by the parts of my life i can't pursue here (contemporary music and climbing mostly... but cosmology too, though that's probably easier to do here than the others), parts of my life i don't think i'm willing to give up, and it makes me wonder if i can really be happy living anywhere besides the us (or, maybe the western world) (when did i become this square!? jeez). while i struggle with this here, maybe this is also an opportunity. one of my neighbors here is a pretty well-known musician and musicologist; i met him recently and he told me to learn music here like a child: don't learn grammar, analytically; learn by listening, absorbing without analysis or judgment. how much more we can learn before we get all caught up in what we already know.

the dude is now

in india, there is always the dude. the auto driver always has his friend hanging out, there's always the guy on the bus who seems to know the driver, always groups of men hanging out with each other sitting on the street. beyond just the dude, men seem to have a very special bond with each other. men holding hands on the street, behaving close and affectionate, is very common (whereas seeing men holding hands with women is pretty uncommon). the corresponding relationship seems largely to not exist between women, or at least to a much lesser degree. i'm not sure what the cause is (homosexuality is societally unaccepted)... i think it has a lot to do with the structure of society.. men seem to have much more free time than women... or at least, a lot more public free time... and maybe the male-male affection fills a hole not filled by marriage, which often seems a bit like a more functional relationship...?

speaking of marriage, it took me a while to realize that most marriages here simply function totally differently than what we think of as marriage... the expectation is completely different, the relationship doesn't serve the same purpose... they are effectively a totally different thing... and yet societally they have a very similar place and importance. i should say, i'm speaking of arranged marriages (which are juxtaposed in india against "love marriages"). marriage arrangement is still very common and happens at all levels of society (although dowries supposedly don't exist anymore, it seems like they can also still be important, mostly for lower classes). in a way, it seems like marriage here, as i mentioned above, is a very functional relationship. getting married is something that just happens when you reach a certain age... find a suitable match and it happens (A right person at THE right time rather than THE right person at A right time...maybe?).... it's a stage of life, something that happens. the relationship between husband and wife (at least initially) is a functional one (they could be nearly complete strangers); the expectations are therefore totally different. in some ways i feel like it's a healthier (or maybe realistic?) view of the relationship than how we view it in the west, where we idealize marriage as finding your soulmate/the person who completes you, etc... which seems to me (yes, i am cynical...very) to almost set itself up to fail. not that indian weddings always succeed... certainly there are innumerable examples where it doesn't work, and the lack of empowerment of brides (at least historically) resulted in a lot of nightmarish situations. but it's just interesting to think about completely different approaches to this relationship which is considered so pivotal in both cultures.

finally, a brief return to the ant issue... they eat everything! they seem to just choose/find something at random and completely take it over... there's not much that's more annoying after taking a shower than finding your towel full of tiny biting ants. ha. after twice returning to chennai from traveling to find infestations of my laptop (AHHH!) (and once of my bassoon case (AAHHH!!), luckily they were more interested in chewing on the foam of the case than the instrument), i think i've finally found a way to keep things safe: chalk for cockroach killing. seems to have quelled the onslaught well so far... maybe a little too well... i just hope i'm not poisoning myself in the process...

kerala: lovely!

didn't get a chance to finish this post before i left chennai to travel again: about a week ago i got back from traveling for about a week through kerala and tamil nadu with a friend from chennai: quite wonderful! hills and trees and clean air hooray!! rice patties, palm trees, rolling hills of tea bushes, cardamom coffee pepper plantations, eucalyptus and rubber tree groves, fields of sugar cane. so much green!

started out in fort cochin, beautiful chinese fishing nets, much more impressive than i was expecting. huge spider-web-like nets draped from long wooden arms, rocks hanging from ropes used as counterweights to help the fishermen heave the nets out of the water.
women sifting piles of ginger at a spice factory in jew town (yes, they actually call it that), cochin and the view towards ernakulam. i had no idea the depth of jewish history in kerala: most of the population arrived to cranganore around 70 CE as exiles from israel and a jewish kingdom was created around 370 CE. suppression began in the 1520s by the muslims then portuguese then dutch, and today most of the population has emigrated to israel (according to wikipedia...).
after cochi, we headed for alleppey, a main gateway town to the keralan backwaters, a system of something like 900km of canals, lined with forest and palm trees, village houses, footpaths and bridges, inland revealing fields of the most saturating green rice patties. took a town ferry to a smaller village, happy school kids all piling into the ferry to make the commute home. we got off in a village about 10km away, wandered inland to the rice patties where the landscape opens up and you feel as you look out, you're looking back in time.

from alleppey, we moved on to munnar, arriving at 9pm on new years eve to find the only place that had room was actually under renovation but was renting two rooms in the un-renovated part... at 300Rs for a double (about $6), it was probably over-priced by indian standards. but the view the next morning was lovely: dappled green hill sides shimmering with tea bushes, we wandered into the hills to get some sights: beautiful! there's a nice tea museum (actually, the history of tea in the region seems to be relatively short, developed mainly by the british in the mid 1800s), and apparently the company that runs it is a 70% worker owned coop. though sadly when we asked what kind of tea they used to make the (delicious) tea they serve at the museum, the guy pulled out a bag of instant tea-from-a-machine. hilarious.

we then headed down into the valley that evening to stay at a spice plantation 20km away from munnar (yes, the most expensive place i've stayed in india, but a relaxing break). the guy at the hotel told us there were cardamom, pepper, and coffee plants in the plantation, but i was a little embarrassed that i had no idea what the plants looked like. once we finally identified them, suddenly they were everywhere we looked (annie dillard yes).

we encountered these women on the road through the plantation as they were eating an early lunch (with maybe half a bottle of some kind of brandy-colored liquid poured into a big pan?). they were really friendly and showed me how to pick cardamom, pretty back-breaking work.

this post is getting long, so i'll write about tamil nadu in the next one.

learning what i don't know i don't know, but what about the things i don't remember i've forgotten?

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.

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.

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)