Only Disconnect

I've taken the next week off of all of my jobs and am heading north to see a friend, be a tourist for a bit, and visit the Tibetan Buddhist part of the country. (Dalai Lama holding bear = Best. Panda. Pic. Ever.) I am going to try not to be on the Internet at all while I'm away — mind-blowing, I know — and maybe give my laptop the rest it needs to not conk out every couple of hours. In the interim, please continue to email me with love letters, chapters from forthcoming novellas loosely based on my life, and offers of high-paying-and-emotionally-satisfying employment.

Food Run

Drove around this morning with a man named Krishnan who dropped out of a career in hotel management a few years ago to feed mentally and physically disabled homeless people around Madurai.

He's only 25, but he's created a little cottage charity where a bunch of different people and companies sponsor his program for one day per month (it costs him about $25 a day to feed 150 people three meals). A small staff of previously homeless people do the cooking and preparations in a little apartment (where they sleep at night), and then he goes around the city himself in a van, stopping frequently at the side of the road to serve rice and sauce wrapped in newspaper pages. Many of his regulars are schizophrenic and can't remember their own names, so he makes up names for them. When they occasionally die, he makes the funeral arrangements and pays for cremation. Infosys gave him a grant last year, and he is in the process of building a large house on the edge of the city where he says he's planning to gather these people (he refers to them as "lunatics", but in an endearing way) for rehabilitation.

Outline

There have been a bunch of different things going on lately that I've wanted to write about. For (relative) brevity I'm just going to put it all in note form:

1.) Feeling what it's like to have people stare at me just because I'm white; the implicit understanding among people I meet that I'm obviously not from here; how little kids run up and ask me what country I'm from and "will I give them five rupees?"; wondering what I represent to them as "white".

2.) The pseudo-utopian community of Auroville; its amazing architecture and peacefulness; how it's the only place I've been in the past month without a constant din of honking car horns in the background; conversations about consciousness and spirituality that I only partially understood; the giant gold dome that looked like a spaceship.

3.) Administrators from NGOs show up at the guest house and talk excitedly about bringing the Aravind's eye care system to remote villages in Africa or elsewhere; the way such people are always describing nightmare flights between tiny airports in countries I know nothing about (Cameroon? Ghana?); how they have this rough, tanned, Paul Bowles romanticism and are relentlessly upbeat about making a positive impact in the world; how I fake my way through conversations with such people.

4.) Driving to Dr. Venkatesh's farm in a small village outside of Pondicherry; coconuts, and how people climb very tall trees to get them; briefly considering what it might be like if I moved somewhere rural and tried to grow things; picturing myself as some sort of gentleman farmer; thinking that I should start by gardening, or at least properly taking care of my houseplants.

5.) Two religious ceremonies to open a new hospital building and to honor the hospital's founder, Dr. V; flaming pyres stoked with butter, hypnotic chanting, and everybody tossing flower petals at framed photographs; how the basic rituals and practices are not so different in concept from Jewish ones (though of course different in execution); how I am distracted by the thought that inhaling thick clouds of incense in poorly ventilated rooms could probably cause lung cancer.


6.) Overnight train rides in compartments packed with snoring people; how those don't bother me so much.

Elefant(2&3)

Siren, Surgery

Have been sort of light on posting lately because of technical difficulties with my rickety laptop that no one seems able to solve. But wanted to briefly put up a couple of pictures in the interim, while my connectivity ever-so-tenuously holds.

Up here in Pondicherry (a former French colony that still has a distinctly French feel to it), I saw this woman the other day, standing by the sea, wailing (moaning, maybe) intermittently in a low voice, just outside the gates of an guest house at the ashram. It was unclear whether she was doing it out of spirituality or something else, but I found it sort of weird and beautiful, like the women in the Odyssey.



Then yesterday I scrubbed in and watched one of the surgeons, Dr. Venkatesh, operate on cataract patients for a couple of hours, cutting out cloudy lenses and putting in artificial replacements, one after the other, in amazingly quick procedures. One would be wheeled out as the next patient came in, and he would switch to the new patient in a minute, already working on the new eye.

Must-Dos

I went for lunch yesterday to this "hip" coffee shop not too far from the hospital, part of a Starbucks-like Indian chain, and was greeted with this on the cover of the café's in-house publication. I'm evidently their target audience. I was briefly worried that there would be a bunch of things I'd have to suddenly shoehorn into the next two weeks, but, luckily, I think I've got most of them taken care of:

1. Travel the world. (Check.)
2. Drive the coolest car ever. (1964 Corvair named Pedro. Check.)
3. Date outside the box. (Um... Check.)
4. If you're going to drink a lot, do it when you're under 30. (Check.)
5. Live in a cool place. (Check.)
6. Be physically adventurous. (The blurb says this has to do with hiking or kayaking, so, sure. Check.)
7. When it comes to your job, take a risk. (Check.)
8. Take your parents out to dinner. (Maybe?... Anyway, looking forward to it.)
9. Go extreme. (Cliff jumping or skydiving? Not really.)
10. Volunteer. (Check.)

Sugar Cane

Class

Before this morning, the only course I'd ever taught was third grade Hebrew school, which, as I remember it, was a little easier than my Journalism 101 seminar was today. At Central Synagogue, whenever my co-teacher and I didn't know the answer to a student's question ("What does 'bris' mean?", say), we would sometimes just respond "It's a small furry dog" and then walk briskly in the other direction. Speaking to a room full of accomplished medical administrators, I didn't really have the option of that particular out.


This is not to say that I totally bombed; I made it through most of the three-plus hours without nervously sweating through my shirt, and possibly conveyed some useful information about the fabled "Inverted Pyramid". But it was a little more daunting than I'd thought it would be to play the expert.

My teaching style is kind of a mixed bag. I can veer toward the pretensious (paraphrase): "Faced with zillions of details at any given second, the act of writing is really about editing and imposing order on reality and framing it for other people to understand." Or the painfully obvious: "When you're doing journalism, it's really important not to make stuff up." But I did get across the basics: "Try not to repeat the same idea several times in one paragraph."

Actually, it probably went fine. My reviews were clearly better than those of the actor whose case study we examined and edited together. The unfortunate Mr. Ganesan from the Dindigul district was evidently in the middle of performing in a folk drama last month when an audience member threw a stone that hit his right eye (which was enucleated the next morning with great care and compassion at the Aravind Eye Hospital). "'With the remaining left eye I will continue my profession successfully,' he told the doctor in a voice that echoed his extraordinary self confidence."

In setting up my notes, I came upon this really interesting feature from Esquire last year (that evidently won the Ellie for best article) about a man who was blind all of his life and then regained sight in his forties through a new stem cell procedure. It's *very* long, but very worth reading: "Into the Light", by Robert Kurson. Maybe one day I'll be able to write like that. Then won't my class be wonderful...

Danger

Because I have gotten used to pedestrians drifting aimlessly and carelessly into the street here, it took a few extra seconds of watching curiously as a little girl, *literally* only one or two years old, all by herself, tottered out into a busy two-way road in the twilight as I was on my way home this evening.

She crossed one lane slowly, on a diagonal, and then paused at the center, bicycles and motorcycles dodging her on both sides, looking around unhappily. And my first reaction was just to see it as some sort of cultural anomaly; sort of like "That would be totally insane in America, but here it's different and she must know what she's doing. Plus, nobody seems to be getting off their bikes to help her. This is probably totally normal." The whole "cosmic order" thing.

But, as a bus rumbled toward her, it suddenly dawned on me that this particular situation was universally insane, and I rushed out to grab her small hand and drag her amid protest to the side. Wearing a wide neon yellow dress, she was almost the exact size and shape of a traffic cone.

We hung out together for a moment at the side of the road, her hand wrapped around two of my fingers, before a woman, presumably her mother, appeared quickly from one side and picked the girl up into her sari, scolding her (I guess) for wandering off. I'm pretty sure the woman hadn't seen the street scene — and likely she thought it was weird that this white guy carrying a laptop was standing around holding her kid's hand — so we just sort of nodded at each other and they walked away. Puzzling.

Shrines, Kids

Cash

As my meals and housing are graciously taken care of by the hospital, I've now racked up quite a few days here where I haven't spent a single rupee. Zero.

This strikes me as interesting, because in New York I feel like every time I leave the house (and often when I don't) money just sort of flies away on coffees and beers and newspapers and suddenly necessary taxis; it's always a bunch of small things, but then I realize that $30 or $40 is gone, and all I have to show for it is a mysterious stain on my collar, a couple of obscure literary magazines, and a hangover.

Here, walking around with 100 rupees in my pocket (about $2.50), I feel kind of loaded. For 4 rupees I can get a cup of coffee and some kind of bready street-food (that I probably shouldn't be eating); 13 buys a big bottle of water; 30 will get me a pirated DVD with Spider-Man 3, E.T. and Troy (all three movies on one disk, with Thai subtitles and the shadow of some guy's head through 30-40 minutes of each); and for 40 or 50, I can totally overpay for a rickshaw ride to just about anywhere in the city — I'm an easy mark for hagglers; part of me wants to bargain people down and get the best price, but I can't bring myself to stand around and argue over paying an extra 20 cents that I know means much more to the other person than to me.

It's not really an enforced frugality, since there's not particularly much I would want to buy, but it's interesting to strip off all the layers of what I might need in a day, and to not be accruing anything.

Monsoon, Wetting

Late in the day it began to pour. Not a regular rain, but heavy, with unbelievably loud peals of thunder and big drops onto the terrace outside my window. I don't usually like turning on the florescent lights in my office (flashback to the cubicle I left), but suddenly it was like night, the streets below instantly mud rivers. The building I am working in has a glass dome over a kind of central atrium, and the sound of the rain beating on it was unbelievable. Then, just as quickly it stopped and the sky cleared.

Walking home, I came to a crosswalk that had water at least foot deep all the way across. I stood for a moment, trying to look for a way around it as bicyclists and mopeds sloshed through. Finally, I just took off my sneakers and rolled up my jeans and waded barefoot across, and all the way back home, through huge cloudy puddles, like everyone else.

Accident

I saw my first traffic mash-up today. Not a big one; just a motorcycle skidding fast into an auto-rickshaw in the middle of an intersection; a scrape really, with squealing brakes and curses and banged-up chrome. But it sort of challenged my idea that even though the streets seem totally insane here -- helmetless, seatbeltless, four-people-on-a-scooter, pedestrians frequently wading out in front of oncoming cars -- there was some kind of cosmic order to it all by which it all worked out and everyone was safe. How else to explain the father with his three-year-old son sitting on his lap as he weaves in and out among trucks, over huge potholes, on his motorcycle?

Trusting in this cosmic order, I've become a little addicted to riding around in auto-rickshaws. To get into something so small and fragile (which invariably wedges itself at top speed only inches away from much larger vehicles) is to essentially give over all sense of safety. In America there is such an over-emphasis on being in control and minimizing risk that it was a little jarring at first (and in my first ride in Chennai I was white-knuckled the whole ride, bracing myself against the seat), but I now find it sort of freeing to just relax and let the driver buzz through the city, wrong side of the road, in the hand of fate.

Editor

Yesterday afternoon I met with the Madurai bureau chief of The Hindu, a national newspaper, just to get a general sense about the media here (can't totally throw away all my old interests), and see about writing a couple of freelance pieces if I can think of anything worthwhile to say.

As noted in the LA Times last month (and I think elsewhere before that), India is one of the only places in the world where newspapers are actually thriving. With increasing literacy rates -- and not terribly good Internet access -- more and more people here actually read the print pages. The editor I talked to, who was a little cautious in characterizing his paper, said that the Hindu was kind of "above the fray," and less interested in tabloid scandals that its competitors (he says that he competes equally with newspapers in English as well as others in Tamil).

I'm still having trouble compressing the video to a feasible size. It keeps coming out kind of low-quality, but my computer isn't letting me adjust that. For these interviews, though, it's more about the words anyway, I think. Maybe not as interesting for non-journalism nerds, but there we are ...

Fix-Up

Mary, one of the women who works at the guest house where I am staying, is leaving her job this weekend to get married to someone her parents picked out for her. I asked her a little about the arrangement.

Booze, Cows

I went out for a long walk last night, trying to figure out the neighborhood a little. There's simultaneously a lot and not much around here. It seems like there is an endless array of the same store, each one selling sodas, newspapers, and potato chips; each with a crowd gathered around it until late.

I found a makeshift liquor store on a dark street, which is I guess the way it works when you're in a dry province. A young kid, maybe 18, sat in front of a couple of shelves of breast-pocket-sized flasks of off-brand vodka and whiskey, along with a little fridge full of "superstrength" beer and half-bottles of wine. I've decided not to drink while I'm away this summer, just as a discipline, but stood and watched for a while as men (and it's all men) ambled up, plunked down their rupees, and walked away quietly with their stash. Reminded me of a deli on the Upper West Side that we used to go to in high school, similarly furtive...

Everywhere I walked there were large cows and their offspring just kind of sprawled out and moseying around. Funny to see them in a city setting, grazing on garbage in empty lots, or lying next to the curb, hooves out, dozing. I'm told that they mostly belong to people, and somehow they know where to go back to in the evenings to be fed and milked. There are also quite a few lambs, with long ears and bony bodies, hanging out in packs at the side of the road, and a few stray dogs and chickens.

Verse

By coincidence, a little John Updike poem about the city I'm in from the new issue of The Atlantic::

"Madurai"
From our terrace at the Taj Garden Retreat,
the city below belies its snarl of commerce—
men pushing postcards on the teeming street,
and doe-eyed children begging with their words
so soft the language can’t be understood
even were we to try and were not fleeing
the nudge of stirred pity. Can life be good,
awakening us to hunger? What point has being?

Vishnu, sleeping, hatched the cosmic lotus
from his navel. The god-filled polychrome
great temple towers—glaring, mountainous—
assume from here a distant ghostly tone,
smoke shadows in the sleeping cityscape
that dreams a universe devoid of shape.

Bridal Glower

When I was at the temple the other day, I came across a wedding party, and took a quick photo of the couple (below), which they seemed happy to pose for (though not particularly happy otherwise). Weirdly, they then called me over and had me pose with them for a bunch of pictures, I guess to put in their album or something.

Traffic

I didn't make this video, but it gives a pretty accurate picture of what the streets are like here.

Eye Camp

Went out this morning to one of the hospital's "eye camps" near the edge of the city. People can just show up and have their eyes checked out, and if they need surgery for cataracts or whatever they are bussed over to the hospital and operated on the following day. Kumar, one of the hospital's administrators, gives a brief summary of the system in the video below, which has also got a few scenes from the clinic.

Monsoon, Soon

The sky got dark yesterday afternoon and suddenly, briefly, it got cooler. The monsoon has allegedly come to Kerala, the state to the west of us, meaning it should be here fairly soon as well. There were some drops of rain, but nothing too dramatic so far. Today it's again somewhere between ridiculous hot and ludicrous hot.

I spent yesterday wandering aimlessly through the city, taking one little alley into the next and shooting a lot of pictures and video. I edited some of it up, but I think I probably won't post it. Everything that I want to record, or that's interesting to me right now, seems like it's probably what everyone gawks at in their first few days of culture shock, but then which becomes normal later on -- the workers balancing piles of rubble on their heads; the street butcher chopping away at a piece of lamb, literally, covered with flies; the massive, colorful, ornate temple in the center of the city that I couldn't go into because I was wearing shorts; the brand new "Ambassador" cars that look like they were designed in the early Fifties. I'm sure I'll get (more) used to all this later on, so it seems silly to present it without context after just a week.

Elefant

Map

Thulsi

My first order of business today was to meet with R.D. Thulsiraj, the hospital's administrator, who, along with his wife, Chitra, will be in charge of my projects here this summer.

Madurai

It's afternoon, a balmy 95-degrees-plus, and I'm in the guest house of the Aravind Eye Hospital, tapping out the Mediabistro newsfeed and drinking endless bottles of water that I trust has been somehow purified (the seals on the caps are all broken). I spent the morning meeting the doctors I'll be working with, taking a tour of the hospital's paid facilities, and hanging around for a bit in my so-far-empty office (one step up from cubicle life already!).

So far, after propeller flights and motorcycle-rickshaw rides, I am a little stunned by the chaos. Not in a bad way -- just the constant movement and energy, and cows blocking the road while slicky-boys on mopeds weave around them and in between massive trucks, constantly honking horns. Somehow, all of this has triggered an even deeper calm in me than I'd already been feeling after leaving behind my job and all of my other responsibilities in New York.

I mean for this blog to be mostly video, but I haven't shot much of interest yet, so I figure it's not a bad idea to just get started with some photographs. I'll try to add a little to this every day or two throughout the summer.