"God's Own Country"
Kerala's state mantra is "God's Own Country".... just to quote Ani in two consecutive blogs: "This may be God's Country, but this is my country too, move over mister holy, let the little people through..."
One week left. Thus far I've stayed in eight of India's 29 (or so) states, adding two more, Haryana and Maharashtra if you count transit. As I recount the trip, it seems both to have taken an immense amount of time and it seems cut short. It seems I've done a million things and had as many experiences, and it also seems so limited. The thought of coming home to familiar circumstances and familiar conversations has made me reflect, why did I come here? What did I expect to find? With endless trails of roads and jet streams behind me now, what, exactly, is supposed to be different?
India is an interesting place because the nationals live a life so often confusing to a foreigner who is a passive witness, yet all the other foreigners are in a state of flux also. Most foreigners, in India, are simply not settled. India makes a foreigner surrender to the hectic speed and rituals of daily life, and it still manages to jostle the surrendered foreigner out of comfort. Visitors here move. Conversations of the visitors are about movement-where one has been and where they are headed. It is rare for a foreigner to be holding any place in India that constitutes for a regular life, and those that do have a weathered state of detachment about life in India that dazzles more transient foreigners. For the average foreigner, India is something that happens between two fragments of reality. It is the evanescent transition, that moment in the night when you are awake between two periods of sleep-the comforting sleep of a familiar life.
Hindus and Buddhists subscribe to the doctrine of samsara, which I see translated in a lot of precursory introductions to the philosophy as "reincarnation." Yet, particularly Buddhist teachers will not give this definition. Samsara is an endless ocean that one crosses in search of salvation, enlightenment, nirvana. Samsara is a wheel of births that one is pinned under, and as time passes, samsara is the direct attachment to suffering. We are on shaky rafts cross this endless ocean that is usually under high-storm.
Living in India, at least as a foreigner, I feel like such a philosophy being born out of the land is really understandable. Suffering is everywhere, life and plans are rarely certain, and there's always a pinch of pain to wake you up when things get jostled. In a way, a trip to India is like the stormy night on the Ocean before one can return to the comforts of a new incarnation, the protection that the physical body provides for the soul. A return to home.
I realized at least once in my last days at Bangalore that part of what I was experiencing was my anticipated reverse culture shock. I had left so much of India behind by growing roots in the center of the comforts of Bangalore. (Actually, a book that I saw in a store about the modernization and cosmopolitization [I just made that word up...] of the city, called Bangalor'd has, for it's cover, a glassy photo of Brigade street, taken from exactly the spot where my hotel was!) Leaving "India" and returning to my own mirage of conceptions of "material culture" as presented itself in Bangalore left me like a ghost-searching for home because I thought it might be there, but unable to find it in hollow illusions. So much shopping, so much "normal food", so much coffee, after all was said, I was almost able to be "myself."
This occurred to me again as I got on the train for Trivandrum. I had been told before leaving home that riding on the train was one of the quintessential experiences of India, and that I simply must do it to sample Indian life. I managed to put off the infamously confusing and frustrating experience as much as possible, but I did take the experience, saving myself about $50 versus the airfare from Bangalore to Trivandrum.
I was about ten minutes early for the train, paying the porters far too much, and sitting down in a lifelessly blue seat under unforgiving lighting in a train that smelled unmistakably like urine. I flagged down the first chai-wallah to pass, and enjoyed a cup as I settled in to my seat, wondering who (and how bad) my neighboring passengers would be in the 6-8 sleeper beds that faced each other.
I could have cried when, after about 5 minutes, my first neighbor arrived-a Westerner somewhere near her fifties who, to my very pleasant surprise, was also headed to the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala, and to my astounding shock, does all of the Art of Living practices daily. My neighbor was a Godsend.
I almost did cry when my other neighbors set in-two families of young Indian parents with small children. Would there be any peace? Would there be any hope for it?
The heart of the train, unsympathetic, pulled us all Southward, and the 17-hour journey began.
Unwisely, I think I had one chai too many. When the mother of one of the families related that she needed me to turn off my light if her child was going to sleep, I laid, very awake, contorting my position to refract more light on the pages I tried to read, or hold a key-chain light up to the words. After one or two hours of this, I gave up, and stretched out, listening to the sound of tracks being swallowed back by the train, a flowing water that marked distance and passing night.
One of the fathers woke me up clumsily as he thrust his hand into one of my body parts, supporting himself with my sleeper bench as he balanced himself to sit up in the early morning. Wide awake and startled, not to mention infuriated, I acted like I was sleepily tossing and turning and sent a heavy leg down on his hand, pushing it off my sleeper. Revenge had been taken; the enemy was pushed off my territory. I tried to cool my mind and fall back sleep for about an hour, but eventually gave in to one mother talking with an auntie on the bench opposite mine, and the all-too-proximate sound of children waking.
Much of the rest of the ride was spent working through readings and trying to guess what was being served as chaat-wallahs walked down corridors or outside the train at stations bull-frogging the name of their item, "Chyaaaaaaaayaaaaah." Tea. "Kofeeeeeeeeeeee." Coffee. "Vaaaaaaaaaaaadaaaaaaaaa-doooooosaaaaaaaaaa." Vada-rice fritters or Dosa, rice pancakes; as you like. Those are about the only ones I figured out; though the banana pakora was amazing, I never figured out how to tell if someone was selling it. Whenever I was hungry, the hot-dog vendor voices of chaat-wallahs sporting tasty Indian goods were a consistent source of frustration and distraction: "What's he selling? Man... where are the banana pakora?"
At some time around three, we arrived in Trivandrum and, still sporting my crutches, I panicked about getting my luggage off the train before it lurched forward again. With the help of my Godsend and the porters she sent, all was taken care of, and we quickly got a taxi up to the Sivananda Ashram, Neyyar Dam, via a very nice snack restaurant for fresh water and edibles.
Driving through Kerala was quite striking after my other experiences in India... I quickly met with my first wall branded with hammer and sickle in the traditional Soviet style, and realized almost as quickly that these were the abundant norm. The occasional BJP symbol-an orange and green lotus, rears its head through the myriads of hammer and sickles; it's almost heartwarming to see some political competition, even if it is the BJP. My doubts about the BJP's association with Hindutva movements, those of racial and ideological "cleansing", are somewhat milder now, as I've come to understand that actually most of the political parties in India are seriously questionable in American strandards. Varma (see closing note below) dedicates the first quarter of his book asserting that Indian society is traditionally undemocratic and amoral and everything here is at the whim of power dynamics and an infinite cornucopia of circumstance-this makes for strange politics! That being said, the run-of-the-mill Communist parties of Kerala aren't the Maoist Naxalites that cause havoc further North-East; the BJP is not the Nazi regime that some of their associates may be quoted as glorifying. It's just India, simultaneously harmless and virulent. Also more noticeable here are the myriad of Christian churches and prominence of invocations of a more familiar God and Prophet on billboards. Even Bangalore has a marked Christian presence, but further South, it actually seems to hush theological competition. Muslims never successfully dominated India's deep South, what is now Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but that only means Hinduism has remained especially strong with uninterrupted traditions. So, I assume the noticeable occurrence of Christianity here is due only to effective missionary work, but a part of me always hopes it is from dutiful St. Thomas traveling to Chennai and studying there, leading to Christian churches in southern India that predate the Vatican.
The Sivananda Ashram is set in the almost redundantly beautiful Keralan Malabar Coast. The entire coast seems to be lined with palm fronds and coconut trees, above which no buildings are taller, as the Rough Guide notes. The trees and foliage give Kerala an endless synonymy with the color green. Actually, Neyar Dam is particularly lovely. The road climbs up to the foothills of the area and there is a wildlife reserve and park situated around Sivananda Ashram and the dam. One effect the wildlife preserve has is that during pretty much any time of day, silence is broken not by winds passing through the palms, but what Lucy Edge described in her book, Yoga School Dropout, as lions copulating in the reserve, the other side of the lake in front of the ashram.
Satsangs, the evening gatherings of chanting and meditation, are a bit low-key here and ritualized, making me long for a healthy Art of Living satsang. Actually, pretty much everything here I am comparing with Art of Living, and it's giving me some space to step back and look at both Sivananda and Art of Living. The asana classes are great, and are providing the healing I was looking for, and it is great to be with so many cool people.
After five days or so, we met with out first weekly "day off" and a trip was organized to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. Kanyakumari is the southern tip of India, where the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal surrender to the Indian Ocean. Its namesake is the chaste goddess who stood in place performing tapas, religious austerities, on a rock off the shore, waiting to have her hand given to Lord Shiva in marriage. The town has a large Vivekananda Ashram and a memorial to the same saint, so famous for bringing Eastern philosophy abroad, and also offshore on the same rock. Kanyakumari also features, on a nearby rock, a giant statue of sage Thiruvalluvar (see the photo), and, on shore, a temple dedicated to Kanya Kumari.
The trip sounded great. En route to Tamil Nadu, we stopped in at a natural waterfall near the Kerala - Tamil Nadu state line, Triparappu Falls, and had breakfast served on a banana leaf. (Photo included of a particularly wonderful friend at the Sivananda Ashram with his idli-sambar.)
These next photos are from Padamanabhapuram Palace, the old headquarters of a South Indian dynasty, the Travancore Kingdom... it's a remarkable complex of wooden palaces...
The next stop was the Vivekananda ashram where we ate lunch. A few of us walked out to the beach, where the included photos were taken, and on the way back, I was realizing just how worn out my newly strengthened right leg was. I had just given up the crutches two days before.
After the bus ride down to the beach in the main part of Kanyakumari, I felt refreshed and able to walk a bit more, which was good because I was hustled to the ferry, about 3/4 of a mile away, the whole group rushing when I was barely able to keep a strolling pace. Arriving at the Vivekanda memorial (offshore, on the rock) I convinced myself it was worthwhile to walk around and see it since I was there. About half way through my chin was crunching up, my lips quivering, my throat shaking-completely ready to cry in pain and frustration. Interestingly, I kept making the same decision-to walk around and see the temple or what not, to walk out and get cash from an ATM that I desperately needed, or to walk, again, through one more temple. My ankle was visibly swelling as the day passed, and each time I sat down, I wasn't totally sure I'd be able to walk any more for the day.
When all was said and done, I walked at least three or four miles on a weak ankle, and have spent the three days since then on my back in my ashram room, coming out only for meals and for asana classes, and, increasingly, for service. This is convenient, as I wanted to avoid the lectures and rustic satsangs, however, doing so without injuring myself would have been preferable. I have plenty of time to rest, in the beautiful ashram refuge from the surrounding coconut and palm jungle of Kerala.
Regardless, tons of pictures are included, and it is time for asana class again! Lots of friends are making plans to escape the ashram and go to the local beach towns, but I think I'll pass, and enjoy my last stint of ashram life in India. The idea of organizing travel right now seems so beyond me it's not funny. Anyhow, I'll probably right next time from the airport, as Internet's not so easy here. I don't know the date at all, but I have very good reason to believe I have just one week left. Jai guru dev!
PS... for anyone who's keeping up with my reading, I finished Stanley Wolpert's (rather good) book India, on national history, and have moved on to Pavan K Varma's (I think that's his name!) Being Indian which is actually totally amazing and compelling....
One week left. Thus far I've stayed in eight of India's 29 (or so) states, adding two more, Haryana and Maharashtra if you count transit. As I recount the trip, it seems both to have taken an immense amount of time and it seems cut short. It seems I've done a million things and had as many experiences, and it also seems so limited. The thought of coming home to familiar circumstances and familiar conversations has made me reflect, why did I come here? What did I expect to find? With endless trails of roads and jet streams behind me now, what, exactly, is supposed to be different?
India is an interesting place because the nationals live a life so often confusing to a foreigner who is a passive witness, yet all the other foreigners are in a state of flux also. Most foreigners, in India, are simply not settled. India makes a foreigner surrender to the hectic speed and rituals of daily life, and it still manages to jostle the surrendered foreigner out of comfort. Visitors here move. Conversations of the visitors are about movement-where one has been and where they are headed. It is rare for a foreigner to be holding any place in India that constitutes for a regular life, and those that do have a weathered state of detachment about life in India that dazzles more transient foreigners. For the average foreigner, India is something that happens between two fragments of reality. It is the evanescent transition, that moment in the night when you are awake between two periods of sleep-the comforting sleep of a familiar life.
Hindus and Buddhists subscribe to the doctrine of samsara, which I see translated in a lot of precursory introductions to the philosophy as "reincarnation." Yet, particularly Buddhist teachers will not give this definition. Samsara is an endless ocean that one crosses in search of salvation, enlightenment, nirvana. Samsara is a wheel of births that one is pinned under, and as time passes, samsara is the direct attachment to suffering. We are on shaky rafts cross this endless ocean that is usually under high-storm.
Living in India, at least as a foreigner, I feel like such a philosophy being born out of the land is really understandable. Suffering is everywhere, life and plans are rarely certain, and there's always a pinch of pain to wake you up when things get jostled. In a way, a trip to India is like the stormy night on the Ocean before one can return to the comforts of a new incarnation, the protection that the physical body provides for the soul. A return to home.
I realized at least once in my last days at Bangalore that part of what I was experiencing was my anticipated reverse culture shock. I had left so much of India behind by growing roots in the center of the comforts of Bangalore. (Actually, a book that I saw in a store about the modernization and cosmopolitization [I just made that word up...] of the city, called Bangalor'd has, for it's cover, a glassy photo of Brigade street, taken from exactly the spot where my hotel was!) Leaving "India" and returning to my own mirage of conceptions of "material culture" as presented itself in Bangalore left me like a ghost-searching for home because I thought it might be there, but unable to find it in hollow illusions. So much shopping, so much "normal food", so much coffee, after all was said, I was almost able to be "myself."
This occurred to me again as I got on the train for Trivandrum. I had been told before leaving home that riding on the train was one of the quintessential experiences of India, and that I simply must do it to sample Indian life. I managed to put off the infamously confusing and frustrating experience as much as possible, but I did take the experience, saving myself about $50 versus the airfare from Bangalore to Trivandrum.
I was about ten minutes early for the train, paying the porters far too much, and sitting down in a lifelessly blue seat under unforgiving lighting in a train that smelled unmistakably like urine. I flagged down the first chai-wallah to pass, and enjoyed a cup as I settled in to my seat, wondering who (and how bad) my neighboring passengers would be in the 6-8 sleeper beds that faced each other.
I could have cried when, after about 5 minutes, my first neighbor arrived-a Westerner somewhere near her fifties who, to my very pleasant surprise, was also headed to the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala, and to my astounding shock, does all of the Art of Living practices daily. My neighbor was a Godsend.
I almost did cry when my other neighbors set in-two families of young Indian parents with small children. Would there be any peace? Would there be any hope for it?
The heart of the train, unsympathetic, pulled us all Southward, and the 17-hour journey began.
Unwisely, I think I had one chai too many. When the mother of one of the families related that she needed me to turn off my light if her child was going to sleep, I laid, very awake, contorting my position to refract more light on the pages I tried to read, or hold a key-chain light up to the words. After one or two hours of this, I gave up, and stretched out, listening to the sound of tracks being swallowed back by the train, a flowing water that marked distance and passing night.
One of the fathers woke me up clumsily as he thrust his hand into one of my body parts, supporting himself with my sleeper bench as he balanced himself to sit up in the early morning. Wide awake and startled, not to mention infuriated, I acted like I was sleepily tossing and turning and sent a heavy leg down on his hand, pushing it off my sleeper. Revenge had been taken; the enemy was pushed off my territory. I tried to cool my mind and fall back sleep for about an hour, but eventually gave in to one mother talking with an auntie on the bench opposite mine, and the all-too-proximate sound of children waking.
Much of the rest of the ride was spent working through readings and trying to guess what was being served as chaat-wallahs walked down corridors or outside the train at stations bull-frogging the name of their item, "Chyaaaaaaaayaaaaah." Tea. "Kofeeeeeeeeeeee." Coffee. "Vaaaaaaaaaaaadaaaaaaaaa-doooooosaaaaaaaaaa." Vada-rice fritters or Dosa, rice pancakes; as you like. Those are about the only ones I figured out; though the banana pakora was amazing, I never figured out how to tell if someone was selling it. Whenever I was hungry, the hot-dog vendor voices of chaat-wallahs sporting tasty Indian goods were a consistent source of frustration and distraction: "What's he selling? Man... where are the banana pakora?"
At some time around three, we arrived in Trivandrum and, still sporting my crutches, I panicked about getting my luggage off the train before it lurched forward again. With the help of my Godsend and the porters she sent, all was taken care of, and we quickly got a taxi up to the Sivananda Ashram, Neyyar Dam, via a very nice snack restaurant for fresh water and edibles.
Driving through Kerala was quite striking after my other experiences in India... I quickly met with my first wall branded with hammer and sickle in the traditional Soviet style, and realized almost as quickly that these were the abundant norm. The occasional BJP symbol-an orange and green lotus, rears its head through the myriads of hammer and sickles; it's almost heartwarming to see some political competition, even if it is the BJP. My doubts about the BJP's association with Hindutva movements, those of racial and ideological "cleansing", are somewhat milder now, as I've come to understand that actually most of the political parties in India are seriously questionable in American strandards. Varma (see closing note below) dedicates the first quarter of his book asserting that Indian society is traditionally undemocratic and amoral and everything here is at the whim of power dynamics and an infinite cornucopia of circumstance-this makes for strange politics! That being said, the run-of-the-mill Communist parties of Kerala aren't the Maoist Naxalites that cause havoc further North-East; the BJP is not the Nazi regime that some of their associates may be quoted as glorifying. It's just India, simultaneously harmless and virulent. Also more noticeable here are the myriad of Christian churches and prominence of invocations of a more familiar God and Prophet on billboards. Even Bangalore has a marked Christian presence, but further South, it actually seems to hush theological competition. Muslims never successfully dominated India's deep South, what is now Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but that only means Hinduism has remained especially strong with uninterrupted traditions. So, I assume the noticeable occurrence of Christianity here is due only to effective missionary work, but a part of me always hopes it is from dutiful St. Thomas traveling to Chennai and studying there, leading to Christian churches in southern India that predate the Vatican.
The Sivananda Ashram is set in the almost redundantly beautiful Keralan Malabar Coast. The entire coast seems to be lined with palm fronds and coconut trees, above which no buildings are taller, as the Rough Guide notes. The trees and foliage give Kerala an endless synonymy with the color green. Actually, Neyar Dam is particularly lovely. The road climbs up to the foothills of the area and there is a wildlife reserve and park situated around Sivananda Ashram and the dam. One effect the wildlife preserve has is that during pretty much any time of day, silence is broken not by winds passing through the palms, but what Lucy Edge described in her book, Yoga School Dropout, as lions copulating in the reserve, the other side of the lake in front of the ashram.
Satsangs, the evening gatherings of chanting and meditation, are a bit low-key here and ritualized, making me long for a healthy Art of Living satsang. Actually, pretty much everything here I am comparing with Art of Living, and it's giving me some space to step back and look at both Sivananda and Art of Living. The asana classes are great, and are providing the healing I was looking for, and it is great to be with so many cool people.
After five days or so, we met with out first weekly "day off" and a trip was organized to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. Kanyakumari is the southern tip of India, where the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal surrender to the Indian Ocean. Its namesake is the chaste goddess who stood in place performing tapas, religious austerities, on a rock off the shore, waiting to have her hand given to Lord Shiva in marriage. The town has a large Vivekananda Ashram and a memorial to the same saint, so famous for bringing Eastern philosophy abroad, and also offshore on the same rock. Kanyakumari also features, on a nearby rock, a giant statue of sage Thiruvalluvar (see the photo), and, on shore, a temple dedicated to Kanya Kumari.
The trip sounded great. En route to Tamil Nadu, we stopped in at a natural waterfall near the Kerala - Tamil Nadu state line, Triparappu Falls, and had breakfast served on a banana leaf. (Photo included of a particularly wonderful friend at the Sivananda Ashram with his idli-sambar.)
These next photos are from Padamanabhapuram Palace, the old headquarters of a South Indian dynasty, the Travancore Kingdom... it's a remarkable complex of wooden palaces...
The next stop was the Vivekananda ashram where we ate lunch. A few of us walked out to the beach, where the included photos were taken, and on the way back, I was realizing just how worn out my newly strengthened right leg was. I had just given up the crutches two days before.
After the bus ride down to the beach in the main part of Kanyakumari, I felt refreshed and able to walk a bit more, which was good because I was hustled to the ferry, about 3/4 of a mile away, the whole group rushing when I was barely able to keep a strolling pace. Arriving at the Vivekanda memorial (offshore, on the rock) I convinced myself it was worthwhile to walk around and see it since I was there. About half way through my chin was crunching up, my lips quivering, my throat shaking-completely ready to cry in pain and frustration. Interestingly, I kept making the same decision-to walk around and see the temple or what not, to walk out and get cash from an ATM that I desperately needed, or to walk, again, through one more temple. My ankle was visibly swelling as the day passed, and each time I sat down, I wasn't totally sure I'd be able to walk any more for the day.
When all was said and done, I walked at least three or four miles on a weak ankle, and have spent the three days since then on my back in my ashram room, coming out only for meals and for asana classes, and, increasingly, for service. This is convenient, as I wanted to avoid the lectures and rustic satsangs, however, doing so without injuring myself would have been preferable. I have plenty of time to rest, in the beautiful ashram refuge from the surrounding coconut and palm jungle of Kerala.
Regardless, tons of pictures are included, and it is time for asana class again! Lots of friends are making plans to escape the ashram and go to the local beach towns, but I think I'll pass, and enjoy my last stint of ashram life in India. The idea of organizing travel right now seems so beyond me it's not funny. Anyhow, I'll probably right next time from the airport, as Internet's not so easy here. I don't know the date at all, but I have very good reason to believe I have just one week left. Jai guru dev!
PS... for anyone who's keeping up with my reading
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