I have been reading my dear friend Sarah’s blog chronicling her stay in Dakar, Sénégal (sarahdakar.wordpress.com), and from that, I have realized that it is possible to blog-vent without sounding like an ungrateful, negative piece of shit. Therefore, before I begin, I'd like to vent a little bit, partially as an excuse for not blogging as much as I'd like, partially because I'm a little frustrated, partially because I’m a little bored.
The internet: a bizarre series of wires and tubes that lets us access wireless. The thing about the internet that I learned here is, well, it can explode. I was about to send in my cover letter to an internship I am applying to about a week or so ago when, alas, a bunch of hardware allegedly worth 50 lakhrupiya a.k.a. 5,000,000 rupees a.k.a. $100,000 burst into flames. Needless to say, the application remains unfinished. Also, we still don't have A.C. They are mostly all installed, but the administration refuses to turn them on until every room in the ~70-room hostel, half of which are uninhabited, have air conditioners. Also, it is consistently in the middle 90s or higher during the day, and a bone-chilling 70-75 at night. And we've been told to expect the heat to climb roughly 20 or 30 degrees in the next month. Think of the difference between 50 degrees and 80 degrees. Now add that onto 90 degrees and you get the sauna I'm about to live in. With no A.C. Also, the library doesn't allow bags or outside books, including books from the library that you had previously checked out, back into the library. Apparently the library is not for books in India. Go freakin' figure.
Okay, done with that.
I've been traveling a whole lot recently. In the last three weeks or so, I have been not only all over Hyderabad, but also to Hampi, Chennai, Pondicherry, Auroville, and Mamallapuram. Let's talk about it.
The trip to Hampi was amazing. My friends Martha, Tamar, Jamie, and I decided that we should go visit Hampi for our first excursion out of Hyderabad. So we take the 12-hour sleeper train from Hyderabad to Hospet and a one hour rickshaw ride at 5:30 AM to Hampi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is the site of thousands of temple ruins, thousands of monkeys, and thousands of Israeli backpackers on their year off from Army. This was a while ago, and I don’t remember all the details, so I’ll restrain and recap it in a Letterman-style Top 10:
10) Monkeys are people; I witnessed the monkey miracle of life.
9) Get garlic curry if you see it. No matter what.
8) The chai-walla outside Virupaksha Temple may have the best chai on the subcontinent.
7) Don’t get a pedicure unless you want your feet and calves scraped off by an Indian woman with a steel brush and nothing to lose.
6) Don’t get a massage unless you are into getting your naked boobs doused in some kind of animal oil and violently felt up for about an hour.
5) How to count to 3 in Hebrew: ahkhaht, shtahyeem, shalohsh.
4) If you stick a rupee in an elephant’s trunk, it will bless you a.k.a. slap you across the face with its snot-filled hairy trunk. And you just paid for it.
3) No matter where in the world you go, Hare Krishnas just want your damn money.
2) Do NOT get in a rickshaw with the words “Funky 007” driven by a 14-year-old drug-dealing rickshaw-walla who claims to be 21 and will only answer to the name “James Bond.”
1) If you find yourself on top of a mountain in the middle of the desert surrounded by fire dancers, naked yogis, and boulders, do NOT drink from a bottle of water given to you by an Israeli backpacker named Thom. Even if his friend Moti says it’s okay. Trust me. But what happens in Hampi, stays in Hampi, and the only important thing is that I’m here to tell the tale.
Hampi: done.
Next, about two weeks later, we took a Wednesday off school and gave ourselves a 5-day vacation through Tamil Nadu. Disregarding the e-mail Kavitha, our program director, sent regarding “a bandh (city-wide shut down) enacted as a result of orange threat-level insurgency in the city of Chennai, the province of Tamil Nadu, and Sri Lanka by the Tamil Tigers (read: anti-Indian establishment, anti-Hindustani “freedom-fighters”)” we set off on a great trip. After the 17 hour sleeper train ride spent next to the cast and luggage (21 bags) of My Big Fat Indian Wedding (the groom was from Birmingham), we get off in Chennai, which is beautiful but smells like fish. After our hubcap-sized dosa, we get on a bus from the train station to another bus station to another bus station where we are asked by a man with two lazy eyes “nsjfal,kejfhrln mamallapuram hjlfabdbjnakds?” This is how we decided to go to Mamallapuram.
Mamallapuram is a cool, sort-of touristy Indian fishing village halfway between Chennai and Pondicherry where you can do cool things like eat whole fish covered in onions, peppers, and masala with your hands, buy sandalwood necklaces and erotic sculpture on the beach, GO SWIMMING!!!, see “Krishna’s Butterball,” a boulder on a hill that should have rolled down and crushed the town about three millennia ago, brush up on your Kama Sutra with the help of street-vendors selling erotic flip calendars, &c. Bottom line: fun was had by all.
After Mamallapuram, we get on a three-hour bus ride from hell, sitting in the aisles a.k.a. canal for a mysterious liquid that we thought was chai but turned out to be, you guessed it, VOMIT! Off the bus, off with the clothes and into Pondicherry! After we found board at “French Guest House” a.k.a. 2 double beds in one room on the ground floor for nine people, we set out to stroll through the stunning parks, see the French Colonial architecture, relax on the promenade near the vaguely Maine-ish beach, and drink vin rouge and feast on coq au vin, poulet cordon bleu, and soupe à l’oignon gratinée like there was no tomorrow. And there wasn’t, since we were off to Auroville.
I’ll let Auroville do the talking about Auroville:
AUROVILLE CHARTER
1) Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2) Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3) Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4) Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
http://www.auroville.org/
There are five main attractions at Auroville (another list, here it comes!):
1) An awesome Tibetan restaurant above some guy’s garage where you are served delicious momo by an illiterate 12-year-old, his friend, and another friend.
2) Auroville was started by Sri Aurobindo and an unnamed woman refered to only as “The Mother.” It is meant to be a transcendent, religion-less, self-sustaining communal living peace experiment. A fun feature of the commune is the kushy shopping complex where things like incense, essential oils, soaps, and postcards of The Mother’s eyes are sold. Goodbye Rs. 450, but at least now I can smell like cedarwood and opium flowers EVERY DAY!!!
3) A really cool tree, a neem tree to be precise, where vines grow down from the tree’s huge canopy and grow back into the ground.
4) A bizarre, sort of inappropriately-shaped hollow sculpture of a lotus bud that contains dirt from something like 27 countries who sent representatives to the opening of Auroville.
5) The main attraction: the matrimandir. Think Epcot ball, but gold and in a 7 square kilometer garden where you are not even allowed to think about going. Inside the ball, however, there is not a ride sponsored by AT&T, like one would expect, but a room with a white ceiling, white walls and white floor. The room is dark inside. In the middle of the room, there is a crystal ball. Into the crystal ball, a concentrated beam of sunlight is projected. This light refracts, and apparently if you stare into it for long enough, you either go blind or see your soul. Only permanent residents of Auroville are allowed in, but they were nice enough to play us a movie about it.
But the real fun began only after I drank the Jim Jones Juice and left Auroville behind: the trip, no, Odyssey back to Hyderabad. All 28 hours of it.
We get onto a bus in Pondicherry, which is about a half an hour north of Auroville via really cool Ambassador coupe. This bus takes us the 4-ish hours from Pondicherry past Mamallapuram again and into Chennai. Three people to a seat and not enough leg room for Bubba from Forrest Gump (reminder!: Bubba has no legs). This busride ends, and we get on another bus to take us to another bus station where we catch another bus to the train station, where we basically beg to get off the wait-list for seats on the train home. At this time, we eat dinner in a shack. Two hours later, we get on the train, which is great, until we wake up in the morning. Pause.
Many of you know this already, but I love Wes Anderson, specifically his movie The Darjeeling Limited with Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, the whole gang. Despite my quick realization that Indian trains have neither private compartments nor “Sweet Lime” women waiting for you naked with cigarettes in the bathroom, and the realization that it portrays more a funky Wes Anderson alternate reality that looks a lot like India more so than India itself, there is a grain of truth in the thing: trains are unreliable. We wake up on the Charminar Express around 8AM to find that the train stopped. When we ask around and figure out what’s going on, a line from Darjeeling pops to mind:
Brendan: The train, well…the train is lost.
Jack: What did he say?
Peter: He said the train is lost.
Jack: How can a train be lost? It's on rails.
Peter: I don’t know…
After receiving this along with other ridiculous answers in Hinglish, we find out that the train in front of us has derailed, and we cannot continue. Also, we learn we are about 150km outside of Hyderabad, on the outskirts of a town on the outskirts of Warangal, a small city in the desert of Andhra Pradesh. So, we unload from the train and walk across the tracks and into the great sandy expanses of Mother India until we find a road, where the busses we’ve been promised are supposed to come. The busses don’t come. So we basically convince a man with a TATA Commander, like a Jeep Wrangler but a little bigger, to squeeze the nine of us in plus luggage plus 3 other people and two drivers into a car meant for no more than seven and drive us, limbs flailing out of the door-less doors, about 2 and a half hours to Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s sister city, and about an hour by commuter rail from our hostel. In the car, we met this Indian guy who is an Assistant Director in Tollywood (Telugu Bollywood), who asked us our favorite movies so he could propose them for Ramoji Studios to rip off. We also learned of his ability to sing the words to Britney Spears’ “Lucky,” his penchant for quoting every Will Smith movie with disturbing accuracy, and his undying love for the Backstreet Boys. Surprise! Welcome to India. Anyway, in Secunderabad, we wait with him until the train to Lingampally comes, what should have been 10 minutes but what actually turned out to be 2 and a half hours. Then, we get on the train, get to Lingampally an hour later, and decide to get rickshaws back to campus. When we get back, we find that all the gates are closed and they are not letting anyone inside because of protests regarding a University of Hyderabad Ph.D. student’s suicide which was attested to the fact that a professor didn’t give him a grant extension. Not to sound insensitive, but I honestly have no idea what the deal with this was, besides feeling mild offense and extreme confusion regarding students protesting professors who were blamed by friends of the student who killed himself for causing the suicide by not reforming grant referral and renewal bureaucracy. Anyway, we ditch the rickshaws so we can squeeze by the reporters and cameras crowding the main gate, and just as we do, they resume traffic flow through the gate, and our rickshaws go speeding past. Now, we get to walk a kilometer or two to get our bikes and ride another two or three kilometers through the freakin’ desert back to the hostel. And 28 hours later, we thankfully got to eat a (cold) lunch that was saved for us, go to our respective rooms, and sleep. But THEN we find out that classes were not all cancelled due to the protesting, and I had to get myself back to North Campus, a few kilometers on the bike again, for Hindi, which I needed to do just as much as I wanted to shoot myself in the head. My friend Martha put it best when she screamed “Punch me in the stomach while I’m drowning JESUS!”
So, that’s my novel for tonight, I have to go tend to the four thousand mosquito bites covering every inch of my body. Oh, and I ran out of anti-itch cream. If you want, please send anti-itch cream, or anything else like a letter or deodorant, to:
Tagore International House
South Campus
University of Hyderabad
Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500046
धन्यावाद और फिर मिलेंगे !
-Nick
Hyderabad 2/12
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