Continued...

My new, post-India blog is called secretairplane: secretairplane.blogspot.com

Outro

At a certain point I stopped finding things I wanted to write about this summer. After a while I got so used to the lifestyle here I think that the things that were odd and different to me at the beginning began to fade into normal. For instance, it's totally normal now for me to walk down a busy road beside a huge cow. It's totally normal that drivers are on the wrong side of the road just barely swerving to not hit one another at high speed all the time. It's normal to eat with my hands and to constantly have a crush of people standing in line behind me pushing against my back. And I guess once things like that become normal there's less need to write about them.

The past few weeks have been more about deepening the normalcy actually; spending more time with the family that runs the hospital, going out to dinners, making videos of the patients, trying to cement the feeling of what daily life is like here in my memory. I've become a big lover of street food, which everyone tells me is a really dangerous habit; I haven't been sick since the first week, though, and I've eaten a lot of samosas off of banana leaves while standing at dirty stands on the side of the road. And I've gotten this sense that I'm going to be coming back here a lot over the years, so saying goodbye isn't so sad or nostalgic; everyone keeps saying "see you soon," and I feel like that's probably the case, like this is the first chapter.

I've tried not to make this too too personal (not being much a fan of public diaries), but here are a few pictures for the road; some of the people that I met who made me feel at home.

Signs

Patches

Travel

In the past when I've lived outside of the U.S. for longish periods of time (for the most part over six years ago), Internet connections were slow and the amount of stuff in my life online was minimal. I'd check in with email every couple of days, but I was still always surrounded by Stockholm or Prague or Paris 24/7, more or less out of touch.

Since then I've gotten used to spending eight hours or so a day working in some capacity on the Internet, to the point where the amount of information I process that way constitutes in some sense its own "country", which I can navigate well, and where I know I can always find the familiar. And while that reassurance of the familiar is nice, I've been wondering over the past few weeks (as I work toward the end of my stay here), whether it's kept me from really challenging myself to interact as deeply with the culture.

I recently came across an essay in Salon from 2000 by Pico Iyer (whose writing I've always liked), in which he tries to explain some of what motivates us to leave home and head to other parts of the world in the first place. He quotes philosopher George Santayana, who wrote that we "need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

While I don't think I travel in search of "hardship" per se, I do know what he means about needing to intermittently "sharpen the edge of life", and this idea of "being compelled to work desperately for a moment" has been a lot of the impetus for this trip; a desire to break apart my routines and comfort level, and start noticing details better; to be confronted with things I can't fit into the ever-hardening framework that I've developed to understand the world around me. But with the Internet available pretty much everywhere, I find I'm never really jumping out into oblivion. Even when I'm off in outer space wandering through the streets here, a few minutes later I can be caught up on whatever's on the Huffington Post or somesuch.

Anyway, this is an unfinished thought. But I wonder whether the otherworldly isolation people used to feel in the past when they were traveling (which of course helped them believe even more in the romance of their journey) is at all possible now that we know we can always be in touch.

Festen

Tonight is the culmination of some kind of neighborhood religious festival that has been taking place for the past couple of weeks in the empty lot across the street from where I am staying. Celebration of this particular deity evidently requires ear-splitting music to be blasted from massive speakers from 7am well into the evening. I'm told these sort of uber-local festivals aren't uncommon around India, with communities creating their own rituals around certain favored Gods and spirits.

In preparation for the finale, last night they erected a curious lights display that shows a helicopter with whirling blades suspended above a twenty-foot-high neon outline of an elephant-God that is intermittently shrouded in a long green curtain. Based on the decibel level, this one would seem to be a big deal, but despite all the noise (or perhaps because of it) the lot has been pretty empty every time I've walked past during the day, save for a few playing children, lambs, and random unattended garbage fires.


Wednesday update: I guess I was wrong. The festival seems to continue on. No one at the guest house seems to know when it will end, though I keep being assured that it will only be a couple of days. In the interim, a bigger crowd of children seems to have gathered there and are playing tag, or some local equivalent.

Moto

Six people, one motorcycle.

Taj, Wonders

My obligatory "you've got to do it while you're in India" visit to the Taj Mahal on Saturday coincided with this weird sham contest put together by a Swiss NGO to name the "New Seven Wonders of the World." The gist of it was that people all around the world would send text messages from their cell phones and through this American Idol-style process (which allowed for multiple votes, as well as for people to "buy" votes) seven monuments from around the world would be honored in a ceremony in Portugal on Saturday. Works out pretty nicely for the phone companies and the organizers, right? If anyone has ideas for a similar moneymaking scheme, I'm in.

Here in India, however, the poll was taken pretty seriously, with the networks all devoting wall-to-wall coverage of the countdown to the announcement. My friend Amu, who is a correspondent at NDTV, spent the entire day shooting spots and doing interviews, starting early in the morning and ending after 4am Sunday when it was finally announced that, yes, in fact, the Taj is wonder-ful.

Throughout the day, the news stations kept rhetorically asking regular people and "experts" about the importance of such a ridiculous and arbitrary poll in determining whether the Taj is a "wonder" — but in devoting so much airtime to the event, they were, of course, the whole reason why the poll was "important" in the first place. One channel, Times Now, even thought it worthwhile to interview me:


How not to take a picture of yourself in front of a monument:

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.