Om Nama Shivaye

November 23, 2009 at 11:03 am (India Blogs)

KALI MAAAAAA!!! You know when the guy gets lowered into the lava and he keeps going “Om nama shivaye, om nama shivaye, om nama shivaye…” That’s like a pretty common chant here, a guy singing it is the ringtone on a couple of friends’ phones. It basically means praise God, or praise Shiva. Om nama shivaye…

Did you know, India is a very religious country, I feel guilty telling people I don’t belong to one. I was in the elevator the other day and this lady I was sharing it with introduced herself and off the bat asked if I was a Catholic, I said no, she said, “Anglican?”
“<shifting weight> No…”
“What denomination are you?”
“No denomination really.”
“Achaa, so you’re just a Christian.”
“Ah, I’m not in a religion.”
“… So… religion does not interest you at all?”
“No no, I love religion! It’s fascinating.”
“<beat> I am a Hindu.”
“Cool.”

Religion religion. The more I travel and the more different people I meet and different religions I see, the more I come back to agnosticism, and I can’t help feeling like it’s such a cop out.  In “Life of Pi” the narrator says of agnosticism that “choosing doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” But there are so many different religions, and the vast majority of people belong to their religion because of the family they’re born into. And if they don’t belong to their family’s religion, they belong to another religion that they would have been converted to because of meeting some missionary by random chance, or by picking up a book on religion that they happened to have seen by random chance, or they happened to have a stimulating conversation with a friend on religion, but they wouldn’t have had that conversation if it hadn’t led there, if they’d been someone else.

I don’t think we have free will, there. Where we’re born determines who we are, and we don’t decide where we’re born, so we don’t decide who we are. Whatever religion someone is a part of, no matter how strongly they believe in the truth of that religion, there’s a lot of people that believe in an entirely different religion with the same certainty. I mean, it’s not like you can say that those people belonging to different faiths just haven’t thought it through as much as you have. Maybe not all of them have, but there are definitely very smart and analytical people in every religion. There are a lot of smart people out there, smarter than me, who have tremendous, unshakeable faith in Christ, and a lot of other smart people, smarter than me, who have tremendous faith in Allah, or Krishna, or Joseph Smith, or Meher Baba. And they all follow their faiths because of the lives they’ve led. If they’d led a different life, they’d be someone else. If you believe that there’s a God who has a path laid out for you and that nothing that happens is random, then I can see how you could disagree, but remember why you believe that in the first place. The only reason I believe this is because I was born into my family and have had the influences that I’ve had. When we’re born, we’re a blank slate, right?

If God were all-understanding, He wouldn’t cast someone into Hell because they were born into the family of a different religion, raised to have the temperament of someone who would reject other faiths. Although in the Qu’ran there’s a part in Surah 2:2 that says, “Behold, as for those who are bent on denying the truth – it is all one to them whether thou warnest them or dost not warn them: they will not believe. God has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and over their eyes is a veil; and awesome suffering awaits them.” So, God purposely made them unwilling to accept faith? He sealed their hearts and ordained that they wouldn’t become Muslims in anticipation of punishing them? I don’t get it. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. I just think maybe a good way to bring peace between people is to say, “If I were you, I’d be you.”

“The Wise Heart” is a pretty good book by Buddhist psychologist Jack Kornfield, in it he says, (the emphasis is mine) “A mature psychology requires us to view life from multiple perspectives… A mature life requires an ability to enter each of the roles given to us. Freedom arises when we hold them lightly, when we see them for what they are… You have so many views and opinions, what is good and bad, right and wrong, about how things should be. You cling to your views and suffer so much. They are only views, you know… when we believe our own thoughts and opinions we become fundamentalists. But no matter how strongly we believe our perspective, there are always other points of view. Learn to hold your thoughts lightly.”

I wish I could say I didn’t get this from a Wikipedia article, but it’s sound: “Religious persons acquire religious ideas and practices through social exposure. The child of a Zen Buddhist will not become an evangelical Christian or a Zulu warrior without the relevant cultural experience. While mere exposure does not cause a particular religious outlook (a person may have been raised a Roman Catholic but leave the church), nevertheless some exposure seems required – this person will never invent Roman Catholicism out of thin air.” Richard Dawkins calls religion “inherited tradition,” and forgive the excessive quoting, particularly from a bigot like Richard Dawkins, but other people are more articulate than me. In “Viruses of the Mind”:

“If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.”

Hurr, I can use Wikiquote. Mind you, I don’t conform to Dawkins’s “evangelical atheism,” he’s only an atheist because of where he was born as well, and I’ve met as many blockheaded atheists as I have religious folk. He claims to have reason and logic on his side, but I’ve seen God proved and disproved with logic so many times I’ve been convinced it’s a pointless way to try to understand His existence, or non-. For example, in the comments of some YouTube video (it’s a fun place to see people argue), I saw a Christian argue that the reason nothing needs to have created God is that God created the universe and all the laws that govern it, including gravity, thermodynamics, and the rule that something needs to have been created in order to exist – but God doesn’t exist within the confines of these rules he put in the framework of His universe, just as a painter doesn’t exist within his painting. That’s a pretty logical argument. Logically speaking, the deaths of innocent people shouldn’t bother me, because Earth will likely eventually explode with overpopulation and resource depletion, so the planet needs the amount of humans to be as low as possible. I mean, logic can only get you so far – the Life of Pi guy said reason is fool’s gold. Death and violence still bothers me, as natural as some people say they are. Others say that such feelings, the rejection of violence, that the existence of empathy or a conscience, come from God, but I don’t think we should sell humans short by arguing we wouldn’t be nice without some external force willing it. I think compassion might be an intrinsic human trait, however deeply buried it might be in a lot of people. Maybe it’s an extrapolated form of the evolutionary drive to protect your family? But what the hell do I know, I’m an unemployed twentysomething with a French degree.

Ultimately, the footprint you leave outweighs what you believe. Just be nice and don’t be a dick to people who are different, which is everyone. Respect how much like them you could be. No one’s better than anyone else, right?

This has been an unapologetically blog-like blog. I apologise. Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk has made me hungry.

Back to aging.

3 Comments

Make a wish, make a wish.

November 8, 2009 at 2:15 pm (India Blogs)
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edit: Ah, so it looks like Eros Entertainment won’t let me embed that video. Just click on it then and watch it at YouTube. Do it!

I totally saw this movie when it opened last week, it’s Aladdin with the legendary Amitabh Bachchan as the hip rock star genie who is hip and calls people ‘brother’ and ‘man.’ He is hip, boy howdy. Now, this Bollywood film can actually justify the existence of all the background dancers and phat beats that appear out of nowhere because Genius the genie magicks it that way, but I still don’t see why every other Indian movie has people leaping into immaculately choreographed dancing at the drop of a hat. But one thing I do know: Genius don’t got on shit on Kazaam.

So so, what’s been going on. I’m asking you. I’m not doing any more segments on Indian TV’s hyper-censorship because, in a grasping-at-straws attempt to improve myself and stop bitching I have boycotted TV, and cigarettes for good measure. I read on the box they give you cancer! Also, no matter how many times I get drunk and yell it at strangers, no one has offered me a job out of the blue yet, except for an e-commerce job that turned out to be a pyramid scheme and some teaching company but I don’t really want to teach again, so I’m still applying, still applying… Apart from that, I dunno. I gave this speech at a human rights forum the other week, it was this big gathering in Dadar East, I spent two days sending invites to it via SMS by typing out people’s phone numbers into a free SMS website that only lets you put in phone numbers one at a time and my boss wanted to save the cash it would cost to send it all in one go from a proper website, if you wanted a description of some of the retarded things I do at work, and I was just told to give a speech on whatever, they gave me a list of human rightsy things I could talk about, like oh this sentence has been going for like 6 lines. Full stop. Ellipsis…

Yeah so they told me to give the speech on anything human rights related, so I thought seeing as it was decriminalised only in July I’d give a speech about homosexuality in India, and I get up there and go blah blah blah, and mind you my talk was sandwiched between speeches about the importance of AIDS awareness, about the rights of the Untouchable caste, the possibility of poverty eradication, all wonderful things – but I get in trouble from my boss for getting up and talking about those icky homosexuals, they make us feel weird. “That wasn’t a topic on that paper I gave you!” “It said general minority rights!” “I didn’t mean gays! You should have just talked about where you’re from.” “Like that’s important!” Keeping in mind that most of my talk was about how prevalent LGBT topics are in Hinduism (gods change gender and tell people of the same sex to get together all the time, it’s great – click that link) and how it’s not illegal anymore so no one has any good reason to be homophobic anymore, but I get chastised for talking about the rights of a minority group at a human rights conference by a guy who runs a human rights organization. Hypocrisy, you know, hypocrisy, it’s hypocritical I think, these human-rights-but-not-for-everyone people, I don’t like the prejudice you see, these guys are meant to be changing things, it was an interesting and sucky little insight into the whole thing. I got grouchy on the ride home. I crossed my arms and pouted I did, let’s go to another paragraph I think.

LGBTs in India, LGBTS, you know there are these people in India called hijras, they’re not men or women (except they’re men who sometimes have cut off their genitals) and people believe they have the power to make you impotent (hijra means “this has never happened to me before!” – seriously), so they hassle men for money at traffic lights and stuff. Wikipedia says “If refused, the hijra may attempt to embarrass the man into giving money, using obscene gestures, profane language, and even sexual advances.” It turns out this is completely true and that, officer, is why the transsexual was tugging on my crotch yelling for money, I swear. Talk about uncomfortable, next time I’m breaking shis finger. A lady I met on a train once translated hijra as just “gay” so these people might be a reason gays get a bad wrap. It also turns out my roommate Ravi is mumbai-sexual so don’t jokingly crack onto him while unaware of this fact, because things will get weird. To try to help things blow over afterward, I taught him new swear words, and now every day he greets me with a jovial “Nick, your dick is a cunt!” and things are going just dandy. Fop. Life in the apartment is pretty good in general, except there’s still not much privacy, you know. There are 8 people in the 1 bedroom apartment and I guess the crowdedness of India makes people unaccustomed to giving people space, which is fair enough but my door is always unknockingly opening and closing with people wanting to get water or deliver me food or whatever, and, you know, I enjoy auto-erotic asphyxiation and spending a couple of hours a day crying in a wig as much as the next guy, but such dalliances are hard to indulge in with people walking in and screaming in horror so much. While we’re on home, the water on my filtered tap has not, in fact, been filtered as I haven’t been turning the right knob on it so I’ve been drinking Indian tap water for the last three months, while remaining eerily healthy. I like to think I just have a superb immune system but I’m sure all the eggs I must have drunk will be hatching in my colon any day now, so, to that I look forward.

I’m 90% sure I spoke to Aishwarya Rai yesterday. I was driving around South Central with Yogesh Dube, that politician friend of mine, and I always make self-deprecating cracks about how Aishwarya is my girlfriend and everything, and this friend of his said he could get her on the phone for me, and then he called this number and talked about a friend from Australia and then gave me the phone, and we briefly chatted about how stupid my friend is and how I was going to punch him for her, and she told me to box his ears for her, and then he got another call on his phone and the conversation was ended. I’ve met this guy before and he’s talked about knowing her before, and Yogesh does associate with powerful people, and it seemed like a pretty elaborate joke without any payoff if it was a joke. I’m pretty sure that was Aishwarya Rai. Next step: Murdering her husband. And who just happens to appear at her door after she discovers the body with a bowl of comforting chicken soup and a shoulder to cry on? Oh man, this is foolproof.

Heidi, you know Heidi, from Melbourne who I wrote about in the other blog, who is one of these new woman doctors (I’d sooner let a black guy operate on me, amirite?) who was in India for 5 weeks, well she came back to Mumbai and we spent a week in South Central Mumbai, a place where busting a cap is fundamental Mumbai, it was very nice.

IMG_2423_sml

3-faced Shiva carving on Elephanta Island

We visited these Sankara Caves on Elephanta Island (like the Sankara Stones in Temple of Doom!) (Sankara means it has to do with Shiva) which as you may recall were closed the last time I went to that island with Toby. What, you don’t remember every line from a blog I wrote almost two years ago? Well screw you, what are you even doing here, man? Anyway the island was cool, bigass carvings of Shiva and surprisingly aggressive monkeys. What do you do when a monkey is lookig in your eyes, striding toward you and growling loudly? Squeal and run like a girl, that’s what I say. I don’t need rabies, I’ve already got 3 months of tap water parasites battling it out for control of my lower intestine.

Ey, oh. Heidi is one of these do-gooder types so she got me to volunteer with her at this boys’ orphanage last Sunday, teaching, I was pretty terrified of teaching again but it came back to me – you have to yell a lot.  That’s mostly it.  IMG_2406_sml The boys were rowdy but enthusiastic, we didn’t get through half the activities we’d planned but it was very good and we had a nice chat with the guys that run the place afterwards. Don Bosco, the orphange, like a lot of charitable and humanitarian organizations in India is Christian, owing to Christianity being the dominant religion in the West and the fact that the West has most of the money in the world, so they can afford to set up such places in India. So a lot of schools and orphanages and such are Christian here, but the children who attend them are never Christian and don’t become Christian, because proselytism, trying to convert people to other religions, is illegal in India, something I’ve always thought is pretty cool and respectful. So instead of running around trying to convince people they’re unhappy and telling everyone they’re sinners to get them to convert, all any religion can do to make people convert to their religion is just be really nice and non-preachy and active in their community and hope that their example will make people want to convert of their own accord. Father Roger, the (Indian) head of the orphanage said that sometimes undercover cops walk into a church/mosque/temple and say they want to convert, and when the priest says OK the cops go all “Ha! See? This guy is trying to convert people!” and get him in trouble, so even if someone comes up to you trying to convert to your religion you have to tell them that it’s a big decision and they should think about it for a while and the priest/imam/shenme shenme will interview you a few times and find out about you and who you are and everything before letting you convert. Does this law make a lot of sense to anyone else?

After the orphanage, Heidi wanted to go a nearby leprosy shelter, as she is thinking of doctoring in places like that after her internship. It was an interesting place, lots of people there had leprosy. They seemed pretty happy, they’d done some cool paintings for the near-finished museum and  staff were playing some games with them too, games that didn’t involve fingers, like who can be the first to blow away a pile of flour and pick up the coin underneath it with their mouth sort of games. The shelter/colony was pretty big, with lots of nature and stuff. It was a pretty intense day though, with the orphanage and the leprosy shelter, the people who work in these places are made of way better stuff than me, I don’t think I’d be able to see that stuff every day. Good people, very good people…

Well, like an understocked herb salesman I’ve run out of thyme, ha-cha cha cha…  *starts soft-shoeing offstage* but before I go, this photo:
IMG_2404_sml

This is people standing outside a bakery last week watching a very important cricket game on the big screen TV that’s playing inside. I thought it was such a cool India picture. Also we saw this on Elephanta Island:

Cowtrain

There are so many cows in India. You know what cows are? Fucking huge. Way bigger than cats and dogs, the biggest animals we ever see in Australian suburbs. They’re these gigantic masses of flesh and bone that walk around the streets and have really big, sharp horns. How do they not terrify anyone else? They’re so big. You know what they are? Beasts. Mooing is just about the funniest sound in the world though. Finally, this:
welcome thrillho

Buy me Bonestorm or go to Hell! G’night everybody!

2 Comments

Thorpey says it’s fully Sikh

October 12, 2009 at 7:09 am (India Blogs)
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Thorpey_Says_You're_Fully_Sick
NO, the “fully Sikh” joke is not getting old and it never will. A Sikh girl told me that joke and if you don’t think it’s funny, well, you’re racist, there I said it. I think you should take a long hard look at yourself. “Fully Sikh” means “awesome,” if you didn’t know, apparently it’s an Australianism.
Speaking of Sikhs, I went to Amritsar last week, but before I get into that:
 
INDIA’S MOST RETARDED OVER-CENSORSHIP OF THE WEEK
It’s actually been more than a month since I wrote this last (I guess I should have given the segment a better title) so there are a lot of options to choose from here. I was thinking of choosing the fact that they’ve censored the entire film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – the movie this blog is named after – by not showing it with the other ones during an “Adventures of Indiana Jones” collection. They’re showing that shitpile piece of shit shitfest “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” but apparently, India finds Hindus drinking blood more offensive than Indiana Jones falling out of a mushroom cloud in a fridge and resurrecting aliens. How someone can find Temple more unwatchable is beyond me. God, I hate the last Indiana Jones movie.
indianajones-nukefridge1
Anyway, I’ll have to go with South Park for this one. While South Park beeps its own swears in the US (beeping is funnier than swearing), the show needs a little extra censorship in a country where they cut a scene in a Simpsons episode of someone decapitating a dummy. In a cartoon. That’s double retarded. So, in India, there’s extra beeping in South Park, like over the kind-of swears like “ass” and “bastard,” as well as blurring the bums, the drug use, the dog masturbation, that kind of thing. But they seem to have their finger quivering over the bleep button so eagerly that they censor anything that sounds remotely like a swear, as though they believe Trey Parker is trying to slip swears past the censors hidden in innocuous words. So when Towelie sings “Funky Town,” they beep “funk,” and when Butters says “He knew you’d say that, so he told me to tell you, ‘Up your ass, Jew,’” they not only beep the “ass” but also “that so,” which the censors must have assumed was a sneaky, purposely misspelled ‘asshole’ inserted into the script. The pick of the litter though would be when Butters’ parents came home to beat him for being disrespectful on the phone, now we only hear what happens inside his house, the shot lingers in the yard – when we hear Butters greet them, his dad screams, “Don’t you ‘hi mum and dad’ us!” they beeped the “us” – but the audio of him beating the living daylights out of his son remained intact. Ah, censorship. You make me wonder why I bother watching TV at all. Wait, why *do* I watch TV at all? <has existential crisis>

So, Amritsar, it was super cool. My friend Heidi Woolford, a whip smart young doctor from Melbourne who I once randomly bumped into in a market in New Caledonia, came to India a week before her 3 week Contiki Tour so that we could visit Amritsar and Delhi together. I took a week off from “work” – work fucking sucks by the way, if you wanted an update – and after Heidi almost got attacked by an ox she mistook for a gentle cow at Juhu Beach we hopped a plane and train to Amritsar, the spiritual heart of Sikhism. Sikhism is not as big as Hinduism or Islam in India, those religions forming about 90% of all Indians, but Amritsar had no dearth of Sikhs, if you’re “sikh”ing them… It’s a very cool religion I think, about five hundred years old, it emphasises truth and meditation as the path to God and championed equality of all men and women at a time when challenging Hinduism’s rigid caste system was practically unheard of. It also has some fun idiosyncracies, like declaring all baptised Sikh men must carry a sword on them at all times in case they need to defend someone (most swords are only about a foot long) and that baggy underpants are essential for maintaining modesty. Amritsar is also home to the famous Golden Temple, the holiest of holies for Sikhs, surrounded by a pool of sacred water within a big marble complex with verses from the holy books and names of people who have donated toward the temple inscribed everywhere. While I fear Heidi won’t have our photos uploaded for another month, here is a picture from teh interweb:

The temple itself houses the ‘eternal guru’ of Sikhism, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, a book that the final guru of Sikhism proclaimed as his successor, verses of which are read over the loudspeakers all day, accompanied by soothing music. The place is quite religious, dont’cha know. Lots of bowing, praying, prostrating. I never know if it’s more respectful to bow as well or not to, you know when you enter temples and approach shrines. You have to keep your head covered at all times, so it’s a good excuse to wear a bandana and not look like a douchebag, and you also have to keep your shoes outside the complex – not in your bag, as we found out when we were marched to a shoe booth outside the compound by a spear-carrying guard who saw the outline of our thongs in Heidi’s tote bag. The Sikhs are definitely commendable for walking the walk with their respect and acceptance of all people and religions and creeds – there’s a giant dining hall that always sounds like trays clanging against each other where volunteers give out free food all day to up to forty thousand people, and there’s also free beds for anyone who wants to sleep there, no matter where they’re from. I slept there on my birthday, which was awesome, though my memory is slightly patchy – mixing unidentified Indian spirits with lemonade in my mouth in an alley after bar hopping was about where the night got hazy, my next memory was being shaken awake by a Sikh to let me know a bed had freed up and I didn’t have to sleep on the floor anymore. I’m sure if I made too much of an ass of myself they wouldn’t have let me in though, right? *hopes he didn’t un-sacred the sacred water*

Amritsar is in Punjab, a state in north-western-ish India that borders Pakistan. The border is about an hour away from the city, so Heidi and I bought a trip in a 4 wheel drive containing about twelve people to see the famous border-closing ceremony, aka The “Fuck You, Pakistan!” ceremony. It happens at the end of every day, and I still haven’t rationalised what I saw there, now there’s a path leading down to the border gates that’s surrounded by grandstands filled with hundreds of Indians and flanked by the “Border Security Force,” some of whom are surprisingly hot women in conservative soldier garb, while the men had these gigantic headdresses that looked like the crest of a mad cockatoo (mates! dinky blinky bloo!), which was appropriate given the peacocking that went on during the ceremony itself. As the sun lowered before the ceremony started, Indian pop music played over the loudspeakers and a lot of people (actually invited by the guards) came down and danced unselfconsciously in the path leading to the gate – it appears that it’s not just religious festivals that call for public dancing in India, people seem to just like public dancing! I love it.

 
Every day I wish I spoke more Hindi, sometimes I really wish I spoke more Hindi (though it might have been Punjabi), like when the guy I can only describe as a cheerleader came out of the Border Security Force building with a microphone and whooped up the audience. I know some of it was “Mother India!!! <audience: ‘Hurrah!’>” (repeat) but I just don’t know what a lot of what he was hollering at the crowd was as he ran up and down the path getting them fired up as though at a cricket game. On the other side of the fence we could see the people in the segregated Pakistani grandstands waving their flags with the crescent moon, it made me badly want to visit Pakistan – a whole other culture so close! So close!! But no visa… One of the crested guards eventually stormed down the path to confront his Pakistani counterpart as the gates were swung open. When the two guards got to each other they both engaged in this amazing intimidatory dance that really was very birdlike and somewhat resembled the silly walk from Monty Python. They lifted their legs right up as high as they could, stamped their feet and strutted around, every movement had such bravado and aggression to it, there were even a few parts where the two guards stood, chests almost touching, with their arms spread out wide at their sides and glaring into each others’ faces like at the end of a dance-off, I’m pretty sure I heard them yelling “That’s what’s up, Pakistan!” It was insane. The crowd loved it. Heidi and I loved it. What I found amazing was that the whole thing was run by the government. The cheerleader and the guards whipping the crowd into a frenzy, the stamping, the aggression, it’s a government initiative. And it happens every day!

What I really want to know is how it started. Like, partition happens, borders are established, then what? The two guards see each other on the other side of the gate every day as they lock up:
“See ya tomorrow, Vern.” (the Punjabi guard in my fantasy is called Vern)
“Hey, maybe tomorrow we can do a little dance to symbolise our hatred for each other?”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea! Maybe with stamping and kicking? And I’ll invite some people to cheer me on.”
“Not as many as I will, fucker!”
And the rest was history…

 
Anyway that was Amritsar, though chronologically out of order, but what do you care. Then we went to Delhi, we stayed in Main Bazaar, a way cooler area than where I stayed last time I was in Delhi, and I haven’t been around as many white people as I was there since Australia, nor have I been around as many hippies since my last trip to Nimbin. I mean, I’ve never been to Nimbin. We met my old friend Jamal, who works for my volunteer agency, and we visited some markets, a gigantic mosque (the first guy wouldn’t let Heidi in because she was a woman and the second guy wouldn’t let me in because I’m a non-Muslim – we couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the “come on in, take a nap!”ness of the Golden Temple) and we ate at a Tibetan Buddhist refugees’ temple, and we went to a cool Jain temple too. Jains are a fairly different to Hindus, there’s less focus on gods and more on non violence and truth to attain liberation and to understand the true nature of the soul. They are also the most vegetarian you can possibly be without not eating anything at all – they don’t even eat garlic or onions or potatoes and stuff because that kills the plant. They’re sometimes seen using a brush to move insects off the footpath before they walk there. But they still acknowledge that death accompanies pretty much anything, bugs get killed in harvests and so on, so for them the ultimate act of non-violence is starving to death. Presumably naked. Pretty badass! They don’t do that very much though. Jains! So reverent for life. You’ve got to respect them.  
A rickshaw driver totally let me drive his auto while Heidi and I were coming home from a bar, it was awesome. People call my Hindi useless. I was way too intoxicated, but it was his idea. Prior to that, we went to a bar with Jamal and met with a bunch of expats. While trying to maintain my image of tryhard detached hipster while drinking in a corner as Heidi and Jamal were dancing, this guy approached and asked if me and the German I’d forced to drink with me if we wanted to be an extra in a Julia Roberts movie, “Eat, Pray, Love,” you know the book about the divorcee exploring life that you keep seeing on your Mum’s bedstand that you know you’ll never read? So I changed my flight back to Mumbai, I thought going to a movie set could be fun – Heidi’s tour started the night before I’d be going to this movie so she couldn’t come. So this guy comes and picks me up at 5 in the morning from the hotel, there are two French girls in the back and we pick up another expat from Singapore who are all doing the same thing. We turn up to this big field with four big tents that had food and costumes and lots and lots of Indian extras in them we’re the only foreigners there. In the first twenty minutes we get dressed up in Indian clothes — the girls were in these beautiful saris, I was given my first turban and an orange one of those long formal dresses Indian guys wear — and it only took them twelve hours to decide they didn’t want us in any scenes. Fun!

The day was still better than a day at work, there was lots of fancy food, I caught up on reading, I saw important people yelling at less important people (a lot), I saw how excruciating and repetitive filming is (“We’ve got to shoot the ‘Jimminy jillikers’ scene again!”), plus there was a festival scene so it was almost like I was at a party for the three cumulative minutes the time between all the ‘action’s and ‘cut’s added up to. Julia Roberts didn’t turn up though, but I stood next to the Singaporean expat while he talked to Julia Roberts’s stand-in though, so… so that’s pretty cool, right? When she was complaining to him about the director forgetting to put her in a scene she’d been waiting all day for, I tried to shoehorn myself into the conversation with a cringe-inducing “Ah, the glamorous world of film!” but my attempt to bask in reflected reflected glory only resulted in shamed silence.
Anyway, that’s my day on a film set, I didn’t do anything and I made exactly as much money as it cost to change my flight and extend my stay at the hotel, so you could probably call it the most neutral experience of my life, but when that movie comes out, I’m going to point at the scene when that guy takes that chick with the nosering’s veil off and people throw flower petals over them and I’m going to say, I was totally behind the camera wishing I was somewhere else when they shot that! And it will alllllll be worth it.

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Endless Gringo Paradise

September 17, 2009 at 11:32 am (Uncategorized)
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Seeing as nothing much has happened lately (I went to Borivali to get my mobile fixed, but when I got home my charger wouldn’t work so I had to go back to buy a new charger as well! If I’d known the phone and the charger were broken I would have just taken care of them both on the first trip! Hahahahaha!) I thought I would put up this “article” I wrote for a friend’s magazine. I say ” “article” ” because it’s not remotely formal and is basically just a longer blog. This is its unedited form so it’s a little rough, there are a couple of notes in there for the editor but, yeah, this is when I went to Mexico last December. You can see some photos… oh. Facebook doesn’t let me link to albums that aren’t mine. Well, forget it, what you can’t read without pretty pictures? No? You can’t? OK I’ll try to upload some…

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ENDLESS GRINGO PARADISE

It took three days for it to happen, but when I finally heard a live mariachi band playing the Mexican Hat Dance in a dusty café somewhere between Puebla and Oaxaca, I breathed a great sigh of relief and knew I was in Mexico. Because if travelling isn’t entirely about trying to justify pre-conceived stereotypes you held of the country, then I don’t know what travelling is. But I may be getting ahead of myself: Hi, I’m the author. During the most recent Mexican “winter” I ventured to Central America for a tour that would take me to the most interesting areas of Central and Southern Mexico (Everyone in Northern Mexico had crossed the border to be maids in LA! Wakka wakka!). As any writer will say about any country in the first paragraph of an article, the country is diverse. During my stay I toddled from mammoth Mexico City to the towering Teotihuacan pyramids, from peaceful Puebla the also-describable-with-alliterated-adjectives Playa del Carmen (uglily translatable into English as “Carmen’s Beach”). Come with me now!

I first landed in Mexico City (my bags arrived two days later – thanks, Mexicana airlines), home to almost twenty million people and considered the biggest city by population in the Western hemisphere. Having lived a year in Shanghai, another unfathomably large city, I expected more of the same: towering skyscraper jungles, excruciating street vendors, dilapidated everything and a smattering of extreme poverty. What I found reinforced the fact that you should never expect anything when travelling; the city utterly throbbed with tradition (read: Catholicism), uniquely New World culture and, though I’m far from knowledgeable on the subject, beautiful architecture – I could have strolled forever. I strongly recommend the Palace of Fine Arts if you’re a Frida Kahlo fan or a fine arts fan.

My hotel was located in Zócalo (on Cinco de Mayo Avenue no less), a hundred metres from the main square (Plaza de la Constitución) of the historical centre of Mexico City, looked over by the towering Metropolitan Cathedral, the oldest and largest cathedral in the Americas. Around ninety percent of Mexicans are Catholic, and as my tour guide, Sergio, proudly informed me, Mexico used to be 99.9% Catholic – until freedom of religion was introduced, he added with a shrug.

I met with an old friend for lunch, and as I ate cheese covered cheese enchiladas (with cheese) in Sanborn’s, a traditional Mexican restaurant off of the plaza, Raul described Mexico’s vibrant political climate. “Never go to the police for anything,” he warned. “Every single policeman is corrupt. If your family member gets kidnapped, the police are involved, so you must go to your embassy.” This attitude is far from unique in Mexico, and the more I asked around the more it appeared to be common knowledge that Mexico’s infamous kidnappings, such as that of a 14-year-old last August by uniformed members of Mexico’s own Federal Agency of Investigations (the ransom was paid but the boy was killed, which is commonplace), usually involve corruption in the police or the Federal Agency of Investigations. Mexico’s kidnapping rate is at its highest ever and apparently Mexicans are three times more likely to kill their hostages than their neighbouring Colombia, whose hilarious tourism commercials that play in Mexico centre around the fact that everybody thinks Colombia is a cocaine-fuelled abduction jamboree. (“Colombia – the only risk is wanting to stay.” As a decapitated corpse?) Raul informed me the increasingly powerful Mexican mafia, the unemployment/underemployment levels and slow economy is due in part to The Recession (capitalised for dramatic effect), from which Mexico is far from immune, particularly due to its strong business relationship with the United States. Sad face :’( But I wouldn’t want to steer anybody away from Mexico. We’ll say the kidnappings give the place “colour.” Plus, what a story you’d be able to tell!

Raul took me to the alleged best restaurant in town (called “Jaso,” 88 Newton, Col. Chapultepec Morales, Polanco. I recommend the lychee martinis.), we got filmed in a reality TV show among the celebrities and politicians there, he lost his passport and we parted ways. The next morning, lychee liquor oozing from my pores, I visited Teotihuacan, alternately translated as “birthplace of the gods” or “place of those who have the road of the gods,” a terrific ancient city of pyramids and temples outside Mexico City brought to life by the Nintendo 64 game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

 

Teotihuacan Teotihuacan

 

 

  

 The ethnicity of the ancient city is subject to some debate: the inhabitants might have been Mayan, Otomi, Mixtec, Nahua or they could have all lived there together under a rainbow of precolonial peace. From Aztec to Zapotec, Mexico has been home to a host of sexy civilizations and they’ve all left their mark on the country’s face – I saw so many pyramids during my trip (none of which approach the size of the Egyptian ones, if you were wondering) that I was seeing triangles. Or, something funnier. Christmas trees?

I went to Puebla, a state of Mexico known for containing the principal city of colonial Mexico (also called Puebla) and for its elegant 17th and 18th century architecture and ceramics. My ability to judge good architecture and/or ceramics begins and ends with a thumbs-up and a slow nod, but the place was beautiful, fountains and archways and all that noise. *does a thumbs up, nods slowly* While there, we visited the site of a great battle between the Spaniards and the Aztecs, and directly opposite the battlefield we could see who had won: on top of the ancient Great Pyramid of Cholula, on the site of a destroyed Aztec temple, a bright orange church (The Church of Our Lady of the Remedies) sat there, gloating. Now, we’re familiar with the story: foreign power invades, lays waste to everything resembling native culture and religion and converts or kills the savages (Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth’s battle cry of “Get them! Get them some love!” seems appropriate). Interestingly, several times during my tour I was shown churches built on top of ruined pre-Hispanic pyramids by the Spaniards, and it’s hard to think of a better literal representation of the history of Mexico than a destroyed pyramid with a church built on top. In Puebla at least, Quetzalcoatl got his revenge: the Church of Our Lady of the Remedies has been destroyed three times so far by earthquakes. Today, Mexico and Catholicism could be considered synonymous, but the country’s loveably subversive streak surfaced after leaving the church when I noticed the cover of the Mexican Playboy at a magazine stall, featuring no less than a nude woman resembling the Virgin Mary standing in a church with the Spanish headline, “We love you, Mary!” – a land of contradictions, indeed. Of course, I had to purchase it. For the articles. * insert footnote here: For the record, Playboy’s American headquarters apologised for the cover – Mexican Playboy did not.

After a six hour bus ride, during which I was lucky enough to watch a Spanish version of Hilary Duff’s Material Girls, I arrived in Oaxaca (pronounced: “wa-HA-ka”), another adorable colonial town famous for its markets, architecture and cuisine. While I unfortunately didn’t see any Mexicans snoozing in ponchos and sombreros, I can say that the food in Mexico is as stereotypical as you can imagine – every menu I saw was packed with a variety of enchiladas, burritos, nachos, tacos and fajitas (pronouncing this word phonetically brought me endless delight and childish titters). However actual Mexican food, particularly those bought at busy market stalls and street vendors, contains flavours and an authenticity impossible to find in Australia, particularly given the lack of Hispanics our melting pot so sorely needs. Mexico is, of course, a spicy food lover’s heaven; the country has over a hundred and ninety types of chillis, each with their own heat level and function, and any dish I ate wasn’t really considered complete without a splash of the ubiquitous neon-green habanero sauce. If you’re seeking something different to mainstream Mexican food, fret not: for a protein boost, chapulines – grasshoppers toasted in garlic, lemon juice and sal de gusano (chilli salt containing caterpillars) - are available in many areas, though Oaxaca is best known for it. As a vegetarian who would happily fumigate a bug infestation, I wasn’t quite sure where I was supposed to stand on insect-eating, but I thought it would be worth a story if I ate one. Not surprisingly, it was crunchy and spicy, though oddly creamy. On a side note, Mexican menus rarely have any vegetarian options, so veggies can expect to eat a lot of tomato slices and corn chips for meals. I think I just lost any authority on food I might have gained in that paragraph. Dammit.

After spending the night out in a fantastically grimy and lively bar (Café Centrale, Hidalgo 302) where they played Russian folk songs and made perfect mojitos, I left Oaxaca. On the way out, we visited nearby Monte Alban, an ancient Zapotec city. Though smaller than Teotihuacan and sans pyramids, it was green and very well kept, and quite beautiful despite its ruined state. The way the city was laid out made it a treat to stroll around, a good portion of it was open courtyard, and the views from the top of the buildings enabled me to see a good amount of the surrounding Oaxacan valley.

The next stop was San Cristóbal, my personal favourite of the trip, and I’ll tell you why: San Juan Chamula. San Juan Chamula is a town near San Cristóbal which I don’t even know how to begin describing. During the long-term blitzkrieg of Catholicism in Mexico (too much ripping on Catholicism, Mitch?) there were, here and there, some areas where instead of binning their millennia-old local religions, and against the orders of the Vatican, the locals assimilated Christianity into their traditional belief systems to create Mayan-Catholic hybrids. San Juan Chamula is a fascinating example. The few churches, while somewhat ordinary from the exterior, are internally closer to temples, the floor covered in a thick layer of pine boughs and locals murmuring prayers on their knees while purefying the area around their candles with soft drink. It was fascinating. Apparently they used to use checha, a traditional sugary drink, in their religious ceremonies, but in the later half of the 20th century a religious authority (that’s what they’re called there, “religious authorities,” and they kick your ass if you take their picture) who franchised Coca Cola managed to replace it with soda. Today Coke, Pepsi, 7up and others (apparently brand fidelity is not particularly important to Jesus) is used everywhere, even Coke brand plastic chairs are used to sit on in the temple. I’d heard of manipulation for capital gain before, but this was something else.

Also the priests used magic mushrooms, peyote, datura and other drugs I hadn’t heard of, and alcohol (pox, made from sugar cane and corn) is readily consumed by men, women and children in the church to liberate the spirit and allow them to speak (slur) frankly to God. Personally, I’d be worried about ending the service making out with a statue of Guadalupe, but I’m a slutty drunk.

San Cristóbal was great. Also, I saw Mayan boob at the markets. That was a productive day.

We proceeded to see ruins, ruins and more ruins in Palenque, Uxmal and Chichen Itza, and while they were all awesome, I’m clearly no wordsmith and there’s only so much I know about architecture and history and so many different ways to say “I saw some ruins, they were sweet.”
Palenque, I think. Palenque, I think.

 
So let’s skip to my final destination: Playa Del Carmen. About an hour’s bus ride from Cancún (SPRING BREAAAAAAK), I spent the last week of the trip chilling out in Playa del Carmen, and if you want to see a whole lot of sexagenarians with skin like sad leather and nine-year-olds wearing dreadful “Yes, ladies, I *AM* Your Type” t-shirts, I’d recommend hitting the beach. That said, for the middle of winter, the beaches were terrific, the sun was hot, the sand was granular and the water wet. What more could you want from a definition of a beach? While trolling the beaches and trying vainly to flex my abs under the weeks of travel-fat, I met Tony, a rotund, hook nosed 32-year-old businessman, who after sharing a cigarette with me decided to take me out on the town. In <insert nicer word for tacky> tourist towns like Playa del Carmen and Cancún, the nightlife is usually <insert meaner word for tacky>, and after spending a night barhopping with Tony, I can say the worst of them would be the bar chain “Senor Frog’s”, decorated with dozens of those hilarious signs with slogans like “One tequila two tequila three tequila floor!” LOL! “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m drunk – alcoholics go to meetings!” LOL!!1 “Alcoholics – someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do!” LOLOLOL!!!1!!11. Yes, I’m a cynical drunk.roof
 

 

  

  

 

daiq

 Over a two foot tall daiquiri, Tony discussed his work, and salsa music. He sold shawls, he explained, in Oaxaca and Tabasco (yea, the origin of the sauce), and even though he doesn’t target tourists, his business was still hurting from the recession. “The money in Mexico is just less,” he lamented, and like many he was unsure of the future of his business. “I also like salsa music,” he added. I cheered him up by getting him plastered and trying to sing “La Bamba.” Having lived in France and watched an inordinate amount of porn featuring Mexican housemaids, I was at that point able to bluff my way through most conversations in Spanish, but that song is just impossible. Afterward, while trying to haggle over taxi fare, which I assumed you can do in all non-white countries, I got thrown out and had to walk half the way home. Note to reader – prices are not always negotiable. After a few more days of hedonism, I chugged half a bottle of my morning tequila, boarded a plane for Los Angeles, and bid Mexico “adios.” (That’s what they say there, right?)

And so the trip came to a close. Mexico is one coolass place: the sugar white sand, the cuervo soaked nightclubs, the political dissent; it’s a vivacious and exciting country. It’s just underdeveloped enough to make you feel better than your friends who went to Europe, and just developed enough that you can still enjoy your morning venti cinnamon dolce frappuccino at Starbucks. What’s not to like? ¡Salud!

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Ganesh Chaturthi aka “Don’t call Ganesha sexy!”

September 4, 2009 at 11:22 am (India Blogs)
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 Yeah I guess Snoop Dogg isn’t the only white American Western artist to do Indian music, here we have Kylie Minogue singing an A.R. Rahman song with Akshay Kumar, and here you can see Redman rapping in one of the most popular Indian songs of the year with superstar Raghav – HOW MANY MORE ARE THERE? HOW MANY!?!?!

Ganesh Chaturthi has been going on since I put up the last blog, it’s a ten day holiday and they just won’t… stop… celebrating… I had to feel my way through firework smoke to get to my apartment last night, and though I’ve been told there are even more fireworks during Diwali (which is next month), everyone seems to agree this is Maharashtra’s biggest festival. Maharashtra is Mumbai’s state, remember? And so much fun to say. Almost every day you see processions of people walking, dancing and cartwheeling their way to a body of water (sometimes the nearest pond, sometimes a beach miles away) while carrying or wheeling a Ganesha statue, banging away on drums and cymbals, playing what sounds like flutes and throwing coloured powder on each other singing, “Ganesha, daddy, please come back next year”. Ganesha is supposed to come down to Earth for the festival, a priest invokes life into your family/community’s statue of him and after worshipping the statue for a few days (usually until the end of the holiday) they take him and immerse him in water and see him off until next year. The processions look like so much fun, sometimes people will just walk off the sidewalk and start dancing with them, and honestly there are so many drums and the sound is so loud and infectious that you do kind of want to join the walk, the air seems to like pulse. The drums, the drums, the drums… Actually last night I was taking photos of processions and one guy successfully got me to dance with them for a while, it was pretty awesome fun. I don’t have a cameraman so there are no photos of me but here are some of the procession… here:

DSC0052299

I wish that kid at the front was smiling. I took this from the front of a procession, you can see some raised drumsticks behind the dancing people and behind them you can kind of see the thing they're carrying their Ganesha in. This is in my street just outside my apartment building.

I wish that kid at the front was smiling. I took this from the front of a procession, you can see some raised drumsticks behind the dancing people and behind them you can kind of see the thing they're carrying their Ganesha in. This is in my street just outside my apartment building.

Once the festival has begun, big, occasionally corporate-sponsored tents (mantapas) appear in streets everywhere, if you go inside you see a big Ganesha statue adorned with lights and flowers and coconuts and stuff that you can come in and worship if you like. Tinkle, a guy I work with, took me to his slum near work to show me the Ganesha his friends and family had been working on with him but the photos were deleted… while I’m on slums, I think it’s noteworthy that half the time people call them “slumdogs” here – that movie had quite an impact in India. In short, Indians like it but Bollywood hates it like your kid hates the new baby. None of their films about Bombay ever won an Oscar. In a square near Tinkle’s place there was a big banpata where moving statues enacted a play, I think about the birth of Ganesha (Ganesh Chaturthi is his birthday).Last night, the last night of the festival, I went to Juhu Beach, a popular nearbyish beach I last visited on my first night in Mumbai with those Qantas guys, to watch what happens when people finally get to where they’re going and it was pretty cool, there were lots of people there, ummm… here:

I couldn't figure out how to take pictures at night properly but I think all the blurs look cool. You can kind of see the waves right at the back.

I couldn't figure out how to take pictures at night properly but I think all the blurs look cool and enhance the effect anyway. You can kind of see the waves right at the back.

There were even people selling plastic toys that make sounds like an elephant trumpeting when you blow through them, I thought that was funny. Some people’s Ganeshas were really little, like one carried by this little band of 10 year olds (who didn’t have any drums but still sang their hearts out) and some people had huge ones that needed to be lifted by heaps of people like this one:

DSC00497

Taking Ganesha out to the water.

Taking Ganesha out to the water.

I heard at Chowpatty Beach in South Central there are gigantic statues that need to be lowered into the water by cranes. When they get to the beach, people put Ganesha down and chant some prayers and clap (after lighting incense and/or a torch) and then they take him to the water and come out smiling. More photos of the night here. Shiva, his dad, says Ganesha can be worshipped before all other gods if you want, he’s meant to be the god for everyone, and this week he sure seems to bee. Buzz buzz…

So, I witnessed a canine gangrape on the way home today. There are lots of stray dogs in India. See this is why I don’t get people saying eating meat is natural because animals do it – animals are not a moral compass for humanity! Speaking of meating, nobody eats meat here, it’s hilarious! If you want “non-veg” you have to look for it, if you want beef or pork you pretty much have to go back to your own country. Even the dog food is vegetarian! Everyone being vegetarian absolutely does not mean India is some health paradise though, it’s naan and white rice and potato and oil and salt and ghee all day every day – Indian desserts taste awesome though. It’s funny because they love dairy but eggs are considered meat, so I get weird looks when I order it, they call me ‘eggy-tarian’, which I wish was pronounced “edgy-tarian”, but isn’t.

I’m averaging nine hours sleep a night here and it’s awesome, people always look and feel better with this much sleep, everyone should do it, screw being awake it’s no fun anyway. I had like a 7-layered dream within a dream within a dream (…) last night, every time I woke up and told people about my dream I’d wake up and have to tell the story all over again, it was exhausting. My dreams have been so weird since I got here, and feature so many odd players from the past, I think my subconscious is responding to the shift in location and lifestyle by just firing every synapse I’ve got while I’m asleep and seeing what gets spat out in my dreams. I read once that there’s a type of meditation you can learn where like you’re meditating as you go to sleep, and you have completely lucid dreams, and then you can just walk around your subconscious poking around and seeing what happens. That would be badass! I want to do that.

Swine flu has made all the Indians shut down their cinemas, it’s always on the news. I got the flu this week, but it wasn’t swine flu. I wish I could have written a blog about being quarantined. Moving on…

India’s Most Retarded Over-Censorship Of The Week: The Matrix was on this week (God damn is that a good movie) and of course, almost all of the famous(ly violent) lobby scene was cut, which was just heartbreaking. For some reason my favourite line in that film is right after Cypher kills Switch and Trinity goes “God damn you, Cypher!” – I always play that in my head when anyone says ‘God damn you’ (and that happens a lot) – but India cut out the word ‘God’ and, it was a little change, but it just grated me. I think the people who cut these movies up should be forced to listen to their favourite symphonies with every fourth bar removed. Training Day is on TV now and everything is cut. These are my movies, our movies, dammit! Now when I watch something I haven’t seen I don’t know if I’m seeing the real movie or if critical scenes/dialogue are being cut out – I don’t even want to see Inglourious Basterds because I know the Tarantino™ violence and cursing will have been cut. While I’m on the subject and as it was on the other day, have I really seen “Four Weddings and a Funeral” if the swearing and sex references have been cut out?

I tried chewing tobacco the other day, it was gross, and I don’t think it even got me high, but I was drunk so that might have masked it. To indicate the canceryness of the stuff, there is a picture of a scorpion on the packet, which on a side note, might be the coolest animal on the entire planet. What’s cooler? Tell me. Nothing, that’s what. Here there are roadside tobacconists all over the place and they sell a wide variety of chewing tobacco sold in little packets all stuck together and dangling from the rafters and they look a lot like condom packets. The vendors also make paan, which is like chewing tobacco they make in front of you, they put out a betel leaf and they put in anything you want like areca nut, cloves, coconut, sugar cane, dried fruit, mint, aniseed, maraschino cherries and a zillion other herbs and spices, and then they wrap it up and you chew it, it’s very cool. You don’t have to have any tobacco in it, a lot of people buy them as mouth freshener, they taste great without the tobacco. Aniseed and menthol combinations are always given to you in a little bowl after the check comes in a restaurant to freshen your breath, the first time I got it I tried to spit it and got in trouble. You’re meant to just chew it and eat it. Thus ends my glimpse into the pulse-poundingly riveting world of Indian breath freshening. Next week: Indian moisturiser. They’re all designed to whiten your skin! Hahaha! White people try to make their skin dark, and Indians try to make their skin light! Different races and cultures! DIIIIIIFFERENNNNT!!!!

Byee

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Pudongri

August 23, 2009 at 2:42 pm (India Blogs)
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I don’t know if I’ll ever top that video. I think I’m going to try to start every blog with a youtube video, it sure is easier than trying to think up an introductory paragraph. And don’t think that’s the last Temple of Doom video I’m going to post,  go to the video store and shill out the $3 to rent it, you cheap bastard. It will help things run more smoothly around here for the both of us. So, I’m freaking loving the head waggle here, you know the Indian head waggle? It’s not a nod, it’s not a shake, it looks kind of like you have a kink in your neck, it’s barely anything yet somehow it encompasses a myriad of meanings. It means Thankyou, it means Yes, it means It Doesn’t Matter, it means It’s Up To You, it means I Acknowledge You, it means Everything’s Fine – I’m starting to think if you have Indian blood it establishes some kind of telepathic connection between two people, because the amount people do it surely surpasses the number of meanings the gesture could have. Anyway, it seems confusing but I do it all day every day and eventually you just know when it’s right. It’s like love, man. It’s like love. <snickers>

Hey! There are fireworks and music going off outside! Is there some festival on I didn’t know about? Dammit! OK so this week has been pretty interesting, we’ve started getting emails back from other NGOs that want to start a relationship with our organisation, and as I’m technically the Head of International Relations (business cards on the way!) I’m supposed to be facilitating all that, and I think the time has come to acknowledge that I have no idea what I’m doing. How do organizations have relationships with each other?? Ahhhhh! ONE OF THEM WANTS TO MEET ME IN TWO WEEKS WHAT AM I GOING TO SAY WHAT AM I GOING TO SAY <BLAM>

soo it’ looks like I’ve got a lot of reading to do. On Wednesday night at 11:30pm Yogesh calls me up – oh, before I forget I have some photos of India up on Facebook here - that’s right, I learned how to put links in my blogs, expect me to overdo it. So Yogesh calls me up and asks me if I want to have less than 6 hours sleep and go to the “anniversary of birth” of the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi the following morning. “An ex-Prime Minister’s birthday party?!” I spluttered. “Fuck yes!” I wake up at 5:30 and doll myself up in my nicest suit, spend an hour getting driven to South Mumbai (which is actually the CBD, like the main hub - I call it South Central) only to find out that his birthday is such a big deal all over India because he was such a beloved Prime Minister – until he was assassinated in 1991. So I wasn’t meeting any Prime Ministers after all. Lousy Tamil Tigers. But, it was still a good day (I didn’t even have to use my AK) we went to this big function (there was a band!) in this park with a statue of him and I shook hands with Digvijay Singh, the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee, which is the <reading wikipedia> Presidium or central decision-making assembly of the Indian National Congress Party. I also saw the main super duper guy of the Congress Committee (or Congress Party, or something. I’m not great with politics) who was in from Delhi, and whose last name was also Singh, but he was surrounded by photographers and journalists and stuff, and at that point I was sweating so much under my whole two layers of clothing I didn’t care about anything. Also, can I mention that 100% of Indians have the last name Singh? The other 100% have the last name Kumar. There are two hundred percent in a whole, right? Look at the names of the Indian students who were attacked in Australia this year, they practically all have the last name Singh or Kumar. I cop so much flak for that by the way, the student beatings, everyone in India thinks Australians are racist just because Australians are racist – what gives? They’re good humoured about it though, like they are about everything, Indians are really funny, it’s way easier to get a laugh out of a room of Indians than it was getting a laugh out of a room of Chinese people,  and they don’t seem to have a notion of “off-colour jokes”. Thursday was my first trip to South Central (a place where busting a cap is fundamental) since I got here, we went to Leopold’s for morning tea, a super famous restaurant (that I totally have a t-shirt from my last trip here) that was blown up in the terrorist attacks last year, and no one seem to have any qualms about making jokes about those attacks. Yogesh kept talking about moving his fatter friend closer to the door so we’d be shielded from the bullets and so forth, Indians sure do like their jokes. I love it, it’s great, my stupider jokes are the only reason Yogesh hangs out with me (it’s not for my brains, trust me). That day he said that my sense of humour, presence of mind, memory and ability to adapt will get me places here. I replied that’s good, because I have absolutely nothing else going for me. Here’s hoping he’s right <sips whiskey grimly>

That didn’t come off as self-aggrandizing, did it? I apologize.

The next day I was at work and I invited myself to a trip Rajesh was taking to South Central (where I hear busting a cap is practically fundamental) because I wanted to visit the other office AIHRCO has in Dongri. So after visiting the secretariat’s office (where I had to wait outside like a leper) and Mumbai’s police headquarters we go to Dongri, this super super Muslim area not far from South Central (an area in which I’ve been told that busting a cap is absolutely fundamental) which had a very different feel to my super Hindu area of Malad. Rajesh’s quote of the day would have been “Muslims are very good friends if you don’t talk about religion.” Is it boorish of me to always wonder if the Muslim women that cover everything but their eyes are hot or not? It drives me crazy. And yes, I know that keeping cads like me from leering is exactly why they cover themselves up, so mission accomplished, possibly hot Muslim women. The Dongri office is much bigger and nicer than the HQ in Kandivali, and it’s where I found out that AIHRCO actually has several offices all over Mumbai in addition to the two I knew about and the others in Maharashtra and Delhi. All the offices are bigger and nicer than the one in Kandivali, which they said they keep small and crappy as a reminder of where the organization started out 15 years ago.

work

This is the entirety of the Kandivali office where I go every day, I'm standing at the entrance to the place. Rajesh is behind the divider, Jeetendra is in the foreground.

This is the entirety of the Kandivali office where I go every day, I'm standing at the entrance to the place. Rajesh is behind the divider, Jeetendra is in the foreground.

I thought the Kandivali office was so basic because it was a tiny and poor company! Apparently it’s a bit larger than I knew, and as I learned all this and sat in that nice office and was talking to AIHRCO-employed lawyers with far better English than the people I work with in Kandivali, the NGO I work for became less cartoony and more of a real-life whole-assed organization. As opposed to half-assed? Did that one land? Then they asked me if I wanted to move to Dongri and work with them there (it’s way too far away to commute), which I had no idea how to respond to, because working with people that speak fluent English would definitely make my tasks more achievable, you know, plus I’d be closer to South Central and living in a Muslim area I’d get to see the other side of India’s coin. But on the other hand, moving sucks. So both sides have valid arguments. Anyway for the moment they said they’ll send a motorbike to drive me there and back (that’s an hour-long motorbike ride) a few days a month and see what I think.

Oh, and while I was in the Dongri office there was a guy who kept filming and taking photos, which I didn’t think much of because that happens sometimes (Nick: “Do you guys have any make-up?” <uproarious laughter> ”<still joking> I was serious!!” <stern looks> “I… I wasn’t really serious.”) and then some dude with a microphone walks in and it turns out me Rajesh and the Dongri head are all getting interviewed by Live News India about having a foreigner volunteering for them. Of course, I’m unshaven and wearing a ratty tshirt, jeans and thongs, and realise that the crappier I look the more likely I am to be seen by important people. It happens every time, I’d just noticed it then - Murphy’s Law yada yada yada. But when I realised I don’t know anyone in India and thus have no one to be embarrassed in front of, I relaxed a little. When they asked why I came to India I thought I’d best avoid my usual answer (“I wasn’t doing anything else”) and I just parroted things from the letters I’ve been sending out to other NGOs, and I likewise answered all the other questions in as cliched a manner as possible, I was so completely unprepared (they asked why I chose that org, I said because they had a website) and I kept giggling during the interview (they told me not to) and during this photoshoot thing afterwards where a zillion photos and videos of me shaking people’s hands were taken. It was such a weird night.

I’m going to start a new segment to my blogs, something like… “India’s Most Retarded Over-Censorship of the Week”. Hm. I wanted something classier sounding but that seems OK, let’s put it in bold…

INDIA’S MOST RETARDED OVER-CENSORSHIP OF THE WEEK <cue theme music> Hopefully this segment will be discontinued as I watch less TV, but I’m getting a laptop this week and these street DVDs I’ve bought in anticipation of the event won’t watch themselves. Picking just one over-censored movie this week was tricky (see how I’m already acting as though this is a long-running segment?), because you’d be surprised how much of Forgetting Sarah Marshall you lose when you cut out the swearing and the sex and the discussions containing either – you miss most of the breakup scene, the cheating scene, the fights, most of the punchlines, it goes on. That movie must have been 20  minutes long after India was finished with it. Still, I think I’d choose India’s Spider-Man (not this) as this week’s selection, in which the famous upside-down kissing was cut out, so you have Kirsten Dunst in an oddly uncensored see-through shirt saying to Spider-Man:

“I think I have a superhero stalker!”

Spider-Man: “I was in the neighbourhood.”

Dunst: <sultrily> “Do I get to say thankyou this time?”

And then the scene just ends before she kisses him, which was supposed to clean it up but to me it made it seem as though she repaid him with a lot more than a kiss, don’t you think? As soon as it cut I thought “Hello! Spider-Man just got lucky!” Maybe it’s just me.

It turns out the fireworks and drumming I heard earlier (and which kept me up all night last night as it is now tomorrow) were for Ganesh Chaturthi, Mumbai’s biggest festival of the year,  I thought it wasn’t til September, I’ve been looking forward to it, I’ve been seeing people making Ganesha (the elephant-headed God that Apu likes) statues all over the place since I got here (some like a storey high, though I expect to see bigger ones this week). Apparently there are big processions and thousands of Ganesha statues get thrown in the ocean and kill heaps of fish. Unintentionally. Though maybe that was part of Ganesha’s plan all along… anyway, I’m going to the beach to take photos, see ya later!

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Naan burritos and other improv.

August 16, 2009 at 8:47 am (India Blogs)
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OK you absolutely have to watch that YouTube video, or at the very least watch the first 30 seconds and see Snoop Dogg give a gang handshake to a bearded guy in a turban in a Sikh hip-hop video. What?? How many other Western artists cameo in Indian music videos?! I saw this while flipping channels today and I wet my pants. The entire video is fully Sikh. (www.instantrimshot.com ) Choice lines by Snoop:
“Represent that Punjabi!”
“Watch me zoom by, make it boom by
What up to all the ladies hanging out in Mumbai”
“Singh is King
And Snoop D O double G is also the king”

But Snoop is also the king! Okay?? Awesome. Hopefully I’ll visit Amritsar around my birthday, then I can rap outside the Golden Temple too – without a green screen. Your move, Snoop.

I put on a shirt just to come down to this net cafe and now it’s soaked in sweat. I got maybe fifteen minutes out of this shirt. Damn you, Mumbai! It’s pretty humid here, I suppose I should mention the weather in one of these. Every room you go to has fans going full blast and work is airconditioned though, so it’s not the worst oh my God talking about the weather is boring. I gave a speech in a temple today! Checkit. India has festivals coming out its ass this week, yesterday was Krishna’s birthday and today is India’s Independence day (my suggested alternative name: ‘Hindependence Day’?), so today India has gone 62 years without British royalty on their money – when the crap are we going to follow suit? Man up, Australia. Anyway, everyone’s celebrating, yesterday all I could hear at work was drums and Indian techno and cheering and there were even more cows on the street than usual. Cows are meant to be Krishna incarnate or something, they get necklaces and dots and powder and stuff put on their foreheads like people and everyone gives their spare food to them – ah, to be reincarnated as a cow in India. While I’m here, someone told me killing a cow is a jailable offence. And Wikipedia just confirmed it! Unreal! Partly because Krishna liked cows (or was one, or I don’t know, look Krishna and cows are connected that’s all I know) but also because Indians love dairy products so much, and they use cow dung as fertilizer and all this other stuff, so it seems kind of rude to take all the cows’ milk and shit and then kill them to thank them for it. They’re sort of maternal figures? Still, it seems wrong to make religious laws state laws, theocracies suck and India’s meant to be democratic. Still, at least they’re trying, more than China can say *squints angrily* Plus I guess implementing a religious law that stops you from killing something is better than one that keeps women from voting, Saudi Arabia. Wow, I’m just crapping on every country I can tonight, huh. Moving on…


On Krishna’s birthday (which carried over to today as well, somehow) people all over the neighbourhood play this insane game called Dahi Handi, where there’s a pot suspended above the ground, and bands of young rapscallions have to form a human pyramid to try and reach the pot. The guy that grabs the pot breaks it and money and coloured somethingorather (people said it was curd but they might have been saying ‘colour’) spills out all over everyone that made the pyramid, I guess symbolising their unity through teamwork. Then everyone runs around laughing and wiping pink and green junk on each other. Despite the obvious health and safety concerns (some of the pots were a good two storeys above the ground, and the ground is hard), it’s pretty damn exciting to watch (it takes many attempts) and exhilirating when they finally smash it. Oh man it was great. Internet tells me that the mischievous adolescent Krishna and his buddies used to make pyramids to get assorted dairy products out of pots that used to be suspended so that dogs and cats couldn’t get in there. I guess it was curd in the pots after all. And apparently there are sometimes dozens of people that go all over the city breaking pots suspended several storeys above the ground! So that’s why there were all those trucks full of cheering guys driving all over the place yesterday. It all makes sense now! Thanks, internet!

Way more awesome than the ones I saw near my work. Now I feel short changed by India. Screw you, internet!

Way more awesome than the ones I saw near my work. Now I feel short changed by India. Screw you, internet!

So yesterday was pretty cool, today (Saturday, though I probably won’t get this up til tomorrow) work was putting on this big AIDS awareness campaign thing (I spent hours going across town on Tuesday to pick up a huge crate of condoms), so there’s this big going-on going on in the street, various volunteers and students and social work honchos turned up, I mouthed along to the Indian anthem, it was pretty cool. Does anyone else always feel naughty whenever condoms are seen or mentioned? Even though they’re a completely necessary and common part of life I kept giggling inwardly when they came up this week. I am infamously immature though. Correct the double negative though, and that sentence becomes “I am famously mature”. Ha! Halfway through the day, Yogesh Dube (that Special Executive Officer of the State guy I gushed about last week) and his posse turned up and said they wanted to take me to a Krishna ceremony at a temple. Rajesh said fine, so I get in the car and after hanging out in Yogesh’s office with everyone for a while (during which time I took note of all his achievements on the wall – that guy has done a lot of good stuff) we roll up at this somewhat delapidated but lovely temple, where this guy was singing hymns into a microphone in front of a big shrine. But not your grandpappy’s hymns! Indian hymns! Extreme! It was full of people, and I sat in the third row back with this extremely overbearing but well-meaning guy Krishnesh who goes where Yogesh goes, and Yogesh sat in the first row in a nicer chair. But then I got moved to the front row too, and then Yogesh and me and one other guy ended up sitting in front of the entire congregation, and the three of us got these religious scarf things and a bouquet and a cocount (?) and this guy and Yogesh gave long, very impassioned speeches where I kept hearing the word for “social work” and “India” (I’m fluent!) Three speeches mentioned “Australia” and “Nicholas English” and everyone clapped and looked at me like I hadn’t just done data entry and letter writing since I got here. It was uncomfortable but I waggled my head and did a wai (where you put your hands together under your chin with the fingers pointing up, you know) and people seemed satisfied. Then the microphone gets passed to me and I freeze. I stood up and whimpered a “Namaste” to everyone that they return. Then I said four different words I’d learned which all mean “Thank you”, pointed at the Indian flag pinned to my shirt and said the Hindi words for “Goooo India!!!” Everyone applauds, I waggle my head, do a wai, touch my heart and sit down, knees knocking and now reeking of B.O. Best speech ever!

After that I hung out at Yogesh’s pad one on one and we had lunch and talked shit together, it was so exciting! I kept trying to get information on what kind of awesome parties might be happening tonight for the double Hindependence Day / Krishna Birthday perfect storm of a weekend (each holiday is on a different calendar and it’s by coincidence they lined up), but he and everyone else keeps telling me that Indians aren’t huge drinkers, like alcohol just isn’t a big part of Indian culture (unlike every white culture, but I have no white friends to drink with!). Come to think of it, my roommate Ravi is from Gujarat, Gandhi’s state, and he told me alcohol is banned in the entire state. And get this, today is Independence Day and because it’s a holiday there is no alcohol being served anywhere in the city. Probably anywhere in the whole counry. It’s a holiday… so there’s no alcohol. *squints, not understanding* I was about to start like some bad schtick, you know:

“Whaddaya mean there ain’t no sauce?”

“I tole ya, there’s no booze nowhere, no hooch no sauce no nuttin’.”

“I know there’s no mutton, we’s in India, but are ya sayin’ the booze is marked up or marked down?”

“Get a load a’ this wiseguy, I’m sayin’ everywhere’s alcohol free, ya mug.”

“Oh, so now he’s sayin’ the alcohol’s free?”

“Why you…” <pinches nose> *HONK* <slaps> Nyuk nyuk…

Woah, sorry. I went somewhere else for a minute. Yogesh actually said “Alcohol is not completely accepted in Indian society, we are a more pious country. A man who drinks is often seen as having evil in him.” Pshh. He might be the coolest guy in Mumbai though, Yogesh, not to mention the best connected guy ever. Rajesh (my boss) took me to his community’s most senior police chief’s house last week for this funny “Pray to God then party” dinner social thing (after which Rajesh says “This is my life!” oh man he’s cute), but Yogesh this week took me to have tea with the Inspector General of the entire state! Yogesh wins! (“Fatality…”) He even said I could live with him if I’m having trouble at my apartment, which I won’t take him up on but it was a terribly nice gesture. Look at me going on. What are you up to these days?

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Fortune and Glory, Kid.

August 9, 2009 at 3:58 pm (India Blogs)
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Willie: You’re gonna get killed chasing after your damn fortune and glory!
Indiana Jones: Maybe. But not today.

Look, frankly I was expecting this blog to be nothing but references to Temple of Doom and that episode of the Simpsons where Homer and Apu go to India to seek the world’s first convenience store, so feel honoured that you’re getting actual content! Though I use the term “actual content” loosely, as this entire blog is clearly just stream-of-consciousness nonsense.

Well! Has it really been a week since our last entry? Or however long it’ll take me to end up getting this up? I have to be back at the apartment in an hour for dinner, and I tend to go on a bit. I’ll try to keep this short (*titters*) So! So, what a week, what a week, actually it was mostly spent complaining about how hard it is to find an apartment and how much money I was wasting living in the Hotel Manali, which burned through more money than I’ll spend during the rest of my time here, I think. The thing is since *26/11* <lightning crackles> it’s become pretty hard for foreigners to get a hotel room outside tourist areas, let alone get actual housing (I can’t remember if I mentioned this in the last blog). Like on Wednesday one guy refused to let me come to this apartment showing because I was foreign, it was such a pain in the ass. Nonetheless, after a lot of elbow grease and good ol’ fashioned… elbow grease… my boss’s behemoth of a brother, Baba (a former private eye?? badass!) managed to help me secure an apartment in Malad West.  It’s not much, I had to haggle to get a door, there are five other guys in the apartment, there’s nothing to cook with and the water only works about 10% of the time, but it’s a home, I get dinner delivered and showering with a bucket isn’t so bad. Except there’s a sink in my room (which I guess used to be the kitchen) which allegedly gives purefied water so I’m woken up at random hours of the night by people invading my room to fill their water bottles, and it’s too hot to sleep with clothes or sheets on.

The address is E-402, Akshardam Society Opp. Toyota Showroom, Link Road, Malad (West), Mumbai, 400064 in case anyone feels like sending me a care package… or a digital camera… anyone? Yeah so it’s just near this place called “Mindspace,” which is a collection of pretty fancy buildings full of corporate offices and call centres and stuff, it’s kind of like this little community, my really cool roommate Ravi works for J.P. Morgan (some American bank) there, and this chick who lives with my landlord works in the 3G call centre there too, so if you’re calling a customer service centre and you get someone with an Indian accent, chances are it’s someone across the street from my apartment.

So mostly this week was spent finding an apartment and enjoying the day off on Wednesday due to some festival that involves loving your sisters or something, but there were a few highlights, namely hanging out in a slum on Monday night with my boss (of the volunteer agency) and a Bollywood actor getting stupid. I’ve been emailing Jamal all year about getting set up in India and in real life it turns out he’s awesome (any cat who sincerely says “I’m trying to rationalise free will and destiny” is OK in my book), so we hung out in an extremely non-professional capacity after work on Monday, and I chewed paan (which is something wrapped in a leaf that you chew and spit, just like a cowboy! *thumbs up*) and watched his director friend’s demo reel on his laptop (which was just… weird stuff. Hot Indians telling you not to be a mama’s boy and bizarre psuedo-dating advice and girls slapping guys with comical sound effects.. I don’t know.) and took a walk through this slum near Juhu which had like, little kids playing cricket (which I always get in trouble for not being interested in) and the Hindu ceremonies and the dangling lights (some fairy) and the old women in saris washing stuff and and big murals of elephants with swastikas inside them, like it was intense and awesome. I was hoping when I got to a computer the whole experience would come out somewhat poetically, but my writing skills are still deplorable it would seem. Dammit. So the three of us we walk through this slum and out the other end and through at least sixteen lanes of traffic while trying to do a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat”, and after I don’t know how long we emerged, sweaty and grizzled, to find this great quasi-Western cafe in the middle of nowhere, and we sat and I ate eggs. And I met my first white guy! He was middle aged and thin, and I tend to assume every middle aged thin balding white guy is Gregory David Roberts, but he wasn’t. He was an actor. There are heaps of actors here! One of the Bollywood actor’s last lines of the night, over a cigarette, was “Welcome to India! You love smoke, I love you!” I think people with bad English are more fun.

Anyway that night was awesome, I came back to the hotel to jalapeno pringles and the beginning of Rambo 4, so I was content. Incidentally, Rambo with the violence and swearing cut out – not that great a movie. (“The son of a gun is gone!”) It’s driving me crazy, seriously in China they just censored politically sensitive stuff (which includes half an hour of “Iron Man,” apparently) but in India it’s like every swear, every kiss, all the particularly awesome violence, sometimes they just cut entire scenes and I have no idea where the movie’s going, it’s saccharine! Saccharine! OK, I just felt like using the word saccharine. I complain about it to Indians but they seem to actually be happy with it, they keep answering with things like “Well, you can imagine the violence and swearing without having to actually witness it” and insane, non-sensical jibber-jabber like that. Interestingly, they didn’t censor any of the drug references or scenes when Harold and Kumar was on Tuesday night, I guess cannabis isn’t as damaging to society as nipples are.

Did you know Barnes from Die Hard 2 is in that Eddie Murphy movie Metro? Man, that guy’s a bad actor.

Work is kind of cool, the plan for the moment is I scour the internet getting email addresses of NGOs from all over the world — half my time is spent here http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/ngo_guide/ngo_links/rights.html — once I’ve got a bunch of them we write up an email to go out to them and make them aware of AIHRCO and let them know what we’re doing and get advice and collaborations and stuff so we can get a whole lot of international relationship network things going, and I also have to fix up the website and make it prettier and more sensical, and basically I’m meant to be improving the image of AIHRCO and making them more international and stuff. And stuff. And stuff. There’s other stuff too that I’ll be doing further down the line but I forget what it is, that’s the main part. That and being driven all over Mumbai to be shown off, a lot of it seems to be just getting shown off. But if it makes them look more international that’s OK, but sometimes I worry that I’m becoming one of those white guys who goes to Asian countries in order to be treated better because he’s white. I’m not like that, right?? I just do it for the cheap shirts, I swear!

So my boss is Rajesh Singh and I’m spending a lot of time with him and his English is better than he let on during our first encounter. The amount of sweaty rooms I’ve been taken to where I’ve just sat and smiled and drank chai and listened to people speak Hindi and say “Your country? Australia! Shane Warne?” are innumerable, but sometimes it’s really cool. I went to this guy Yogesh Dube’s office where he had a bunch of people over one afternoon, and he’s like this insanely influential and powerful social work honcho, he won the national youth award and eminent citizen of India award and he’s <reading business card> the Special Exectuve Officer of the Government of Maharashtra (Mumbai’s state) right now. He also speaks really good English, is a great conversationalist and a teeny bit fey, so naturally we got on famously. Man that guy’s magnetic. I’m still swooning. I’ve started noticing his face on all these billboards in Mumbai. Weird. I met his Dad a couple of days later, he and Rajesh took me to a slum where I thought I was just going to visit it, but it turned out it was this huge Hindu ceremony in this slum on the edge of Mumbai (on the edge literally AND figuratively – now that’s prose) where Yogesh’s dad gave this speech and we all got dots on our heads and  wreaths and food and I sat up on this stage next to the ex-mayor of Mumbai, it was totally insane. I heard my name and Australia mentioned in speeches but Rajesh’s English wasn’t good enough to tell me what was happening so I still don’t really have any idea what was going on, but I got this cool shawl out of it. I was shown around the slum (which was slightly more intensely slummy than the one I’d seen a few days earlier with Jamal) and it was crazy, but the “houses” were made of concrete instead of grass, so.. that’s something. But they didn’t have sewage or running water or anything. It was dismal, I’ll tell you. Luckily I’m cynical and detached from reality and compassion, so I breezed through the whole thing <waits for eventual nervous breakdown>. I kept getting followed by masses of children so I tried to use my crappy Hindi on them to entertain them, pointing at my face and saying the word for “white guy” really loudly and slowly worked pretty well. On one of the fences was spraypainted “HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009 LET’S ROCK!”. It made me smile. On the way out I stepped on a shred of really old newspaper where you could just read the headline “Beat The Stress”. It made me cringe.

Time for me to run home, my dinner is being delivered in two minutes. Go Nick Go!

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India is not China – Take 2

August 1, 2009 at 2:59 pm (India Blogs)
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So like, India right? After leaving my sister, Toby and Luke at the airport on Tuesday I hopped a plane to Singapore. After almost sleeping through catching my connecting flight, I got on the next plane which was apparently run by an all-gay flight crew who delighted in pouring screwdrivers down my throat and watching me try to function while completely shithoused in the galley of the plane where I was hanging out with all the attendants while the rest of the plane slept. It was definitely still the coolest plane trip I’ve ever taken, the only problem was that I see flirting with gays the same way as flirting with ugly chicks: you have no actual intentions of hooking up, but it makes the other person feel good about themselves and it’s all harmless fun, right? Plus it got me free high quality headphones to watch movies with, ones that use all three of the plugs in the armrest! The thing is the whole crew invited me out drinking my first night in Mumbai and then I kind of had to answer for my heterosexuality, which was a little awkward, but it was still a terrific night. I spent most of the day sleeping and sweating and almost watching Rocky V (thank God I had to leave before the end), then hopped my first rickshaw (tuk tuk) to meet with half of Qantas at Santa Cruz, which wasn’t that far (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQlsG9zEX5k). We had dinner and drinks and then took a walk down the beach, then hung out at the Grand Hyatt where they were staying in Bandra and which also, as well as having unreal security (machine guns and baggage scanners), had this insane club underneath it which was quite the hotspot. Mostly, I was just glad to have some people to hang out with so I wouldn’t drive myself crazy alone in my hotel room. A big difference between India and China is that in China I started the year with a gigantic group of people who were all in the same boat I was, but in Mumbai I’m all alone and so far have rarely had opportunities to vent. Tear :’(

My second day in Mumbai was when it was stepped up. I feel I should note here that the city part of Mumbai that most people who’ve come here would be familiar with, South Mumbai, is almost an hour’s train ride away from where I’ve been staying and will be living, and when you hear people say there’s a big gap between India’s rich and poor.. well. Yeah, there’s a big gap. The areas I’ve been staying in are very crowded, very chaotic, very smoggy, very poor and very different to the Shanghai. I’m basically trying to view it as an opportunity to grow and increase my perspective, also most of humanity lives like this, so I guess I’m getting more in touch with what humans usually experience. If that makes sense? I feel I shouldn’t try to wax philosophical after having spent the last 24 hours making friends with my toilet bowl, I think most of my wit has gone down the toilet with the rest of my nutrients and intestines. It took less than 3 days to get sick. I’d hoped not eating meat would make it harder to get sick, but apparently not! Character building, character building, character building…. my stomach won’t let me stay in this cafe for too much longer so I’ll try to get this finished quickly.

So on my second day, I got picked up and taken to the Mumbai headquarters of iVolunteer, the volunteer agency I used to get placed at my NGO. The place consists of one room with a bed and an easel, and one room with 5 or so people at computers. And a hallway. It’s pretty small, but the people are very nice, my two main points of contact will be Shristi, a lovely girl my age who works there during the week and is completing her MBA on the weekends, and Jamal Mohammed, who I’ve been liaising with most of the year and heads up the logistical and orientation sides of the operation.

OK I think I’m going to puke right here. I’m going back to the hotel. Sorry for the brevity, will finish later.

************************************

OK so now it’s tomorrow. I sure am glad it’s the weekend and haven’t been missing any actual work being this sick, though I was kind of hoping to explore a little more. Anyway, I should get this finished before someone steals my shoes off the footpath. So I get to the volunteer headquarters and say hi, and get moved to a hotel closer to my workplace in Kandivali. Since 26/11 (the accepted shorthand for last year’s bombings) it’s become a lot harder to get hotels in non-tourist areas without someone sponsoring you, so I had to get a hotel somewhere else for the first couple of days. I’ve been trying to get up to date with where Mumbai is right now and 26/11 is still mentioned a lot in the papers. Also, a 22 year old died of leptospirosis from the monsoon this week in Kandivali, bringing this year’s monsoon death toll to 41, so that’s encouraging.

I keep getting sidetracked. Shristi was supposed to meet up with me later that day to take me to the NGO, but then decided she couldn’t, but I’d already organised the meeting myself, so I decided to hop a rickshaw and get there myself – by the way, even though they’re motorised, they’re called ‘rickshaws’ here, and trust me if I found one with a person pulling it you’d be the first to know. I arrived at the address I’d read so many times, Iraniwadi Road no. 3, Kandivali West. While “All India Human Rights and Citizen Option” is technically the biggest NGO in India, that doesn’t mean it’s big. Like, at all. It more means they’ve got more than one office, they’ve got two in Mumbai and a few others scattered around India, but where I’m going to be working, the headquarters, is one room, like, I’d say 5 toilet cubicles size. That’s being generous. And it’s divided into two halves so there are two rooms each about the size of 2 cubicles. It’s small! But air conditioned (it’s quite hot here). I was meeting with Sunil Sharma, a lawyer of sorts who would be my boss during my time there. He was two hours late, so I spent half an hour with two Indian volunteers, who didn’t speak English, and the rest of the time with Rajesh Singh, the founder of the organization, who as it turns out doesn’t speak English. I think I may have been getting ahead of myself when I said everyone here speaks English, especially as I’m outside expat areas, although there are still more people with a grasp of the language than in China. That said, I am going to have to get off my ass and learn some Hindi. Dammit.

Rajesh Singh is a rotund moustachioed middle aged man and the funneist part of our time together, apart from the fact that 90% of our communication was done with google translator, was how nervous he obviously was. iVolunteer had warned me that AIHRCO was very anxious about having their first foreign volunteer and worried that I would be disappointed with their lack of resources. One of the few English phrases Rajesh was able to bust out (and his very first one) was: “This office is very small.” I laughed and said it was fine. Then, the first thing he typed into google translator comes up: “This office is very small.” Me: “I.. I know, it’s OK, don’t worry!” After some google translations back and forth about how he’ll help me find a job for when I’m finished volunteering, there was a long silence, then he looks at me, looks around the office and says “… Are you happy with me?”

Oh, he is adorable. I wanted to coddle him. In a non-patronising sense. Other gems include “You are my brother!” and… actually that’s mostly all he came out with. It’s weird, he didn’t understand when I said “What did you do today?” but he was able to come up with a couple of strangely complicated sentences.. I don’t know. I expect he’ll continually surprise me. Eventually, Sunil turned up, who spoke fluent English and was quite lovely. Looking like an identical clone of Rajesh (because I’m racist, see, and all non-whites look the same and want to take our jobs) , he gave an infuriatingly brief run down of what I’d be doing there. Improving relationships with international NGOs, improving the website’s content, travelling around Mumbai to see different offices, government officials, prisons, etc (though he implied that wouldn’t happen very often). I kept trying to get more information out of him, but by this time we were eating dinner and he said not to worry about it and to eat up. After dinner we visited Rajesh’s brother’s business where Rajesh also works to get some more cash for the NGO – it was a used car dealership – and I went home and collapsed.

The next day (Friday) I went back to the NGO with Jamal and Shristi and watched them speak Hindi for an hour and a half, then I caught my first train (crowded!) back to the volunteer HQ, then went home for the weekend and arrived just in time to realise I wouldn’t be leaving the hotel room all weekend. There go my touristy plans. Oh well, kest la vee. Tomorrow is Monday, orientation, when I’ll find out what they were jibber-jabbering about me on Friday afternoon, what my role will entail, when I’ll be able to start Hindi lessons and some options for where I’ll live. For now it’s back to the hotel and more weirdly censored movies. It’s all censored here by the way, TV, it’s hilarious! Most English movies have English subtitles that replace swears with “darn” or “heck” or occasionally nothing at all, and all the kisses and sex are cut out. I saw that Sex and the City episode – I mean, some Sex and the City episode – where Charlotte’s story was all about this guy who kissed her so badly he licked all over her face and stuff, but every scene with them kissing was cut, so you have no idea what they’re talking about. I watched some shitty Zach Braff dramedy and I had to figure out from the dialogue if the two characters had slept together because they cut any scenes of them even kissing. It’s funny because despite the swears and the sex being offensive, the majority of violence is kept in. I saw the start of this crappy 1997 horror film “Nightwatch”, and the first thing you see is “This film has been edited to be more family-friendly.” Then the first scene of the film is a guy making a prostitute pretend to be dead then he stabs her to death. Very family friendly! Expect to hear more rants about my favourite movies being edited to oblivion – Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is on Tuesday night, I look forward to seeing how that one turns out! That, and my first day working for a human rights organization. I’ll let you know.

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Are we in India yet?

July 28, 2009 at 12:53 pm (Uncategorized)
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"Are we in India yet?" "No." "Are we in India yet?" "No." "Are we in India yet?" "No. Wait... now we are."

"Are we in India yet?" "No." "Are we in India yet?" "No." "Are we in India yet?" "No. Wait... now we are."

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