I randomly found my journal today, while looking for something else altogether. I suppose I had sort of hidden it and forgotten about it. Maybe now it will be more of an interesting experience to go through the trip on the other side of a couple of months.
Day 1
We grabbed a few hours of sleep and then had breakfast at the hotel. We piled all our massive amounts of luggage into a nice big tourist van, and now we're on our way to Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan. Jaipur is known as the Pink City; apparently, it was painted that color to celebrate the arrival of Prince Albert in about 1870.
I see so many signs of the land of contradiction India has been growing into. We drove by the construction site of a gigantic mall, built by DLF Retail, whose signs plastered across the city proclaim that it is "building India." And yet right next to the site were a dozen or so shoddy poor excuses for houses made of what looked like salvaged scrap. Underneath a highway overpass, I say five small boys all alone on a small mat. Two of them were lying down with their feet towards us, and I saw they were caked in mud and dirt. It's hard for me to understand, let alone accept, that a self-proclaimed modern "socialist" (in the sense that the government plays a much larger role in the economic sector) country could permit and promote such abject poverty, while all the while blasting news of India's newfound economic prominence.
We ate lunch on the way at this place on the highway called "Hotel King." I thought the food was pretty damn good, and I also discovered that Shreya is very much like I was when I was her age. Not only is she adorable with very curly hair, but she redecorates her face and clothes with every meal that she eats. She also loves playing with things she could easily break, as well as grabbing silverware and beating it against a table or plate as loud as she can. However, she is less sociable (at least at first) and far more attached to her mom than I was.
By the time we reached Jaipur, Kirtana and I had become steadfast friends, despite the fact that neither of us can speak our secondary languages very well. I'm starting to get a little bit better, though, and least with stuff I already knew or used to know. We got to Jaipur at about 4 PM, too late to see Amber Fort. Instead, we checked out the Jaipur City Palace.
Really, most everything of interest there will show up in the pictures we took. I guess now that forces me to make a photoblog. (I promise to post some photos when I have more time/motivation.)
Well, after we finished at the palace, we headed to where a group of people were selling camel rides. There I had a most interesting experience.
The leader of the group--the one who dealt with the customers--was a boy of about 11 or 12 years. His face was angular, and his eyes squinted from constantly blocking out the harsh Rajasthani sun. His clothes were relatively stylish (I saw hordes of men and boys wearing jeans and long sleeve dress-type shirts that resembled club wear) but rather filthy. He, my uncle, and our driver (who was the only one of us who spoke Hindi) argued and haggled for a healthy span of time, during which my brother was instructed to climb on and off the platform repeatedly based on the current state of the proceedings. There was an adult man with the group, but he seemed a few steps lower on the chain of command than the first kid. Finally, we settled on everything, and my cousin, my brother, and I all got up on the platform to mount the camels.
The camel seemed impossibly big in contrast with my mental image of what a camel should be: about the same size as a horse, if not smaller. I felt the hot, dusty air whipping across my hair as I made a precarious jump across the rather hard saddle. I looked down from my lofty perch at the camel's back and winced to see his spine standing out in painful definition from the rest of his body. Disregarding thoughts of disease or dirt, I tried to caress the camel discreetly in a small gap in the gaudily patterned cloths that served as cushioning. His hair was long enough, but so rough as to feel bristly. I began to feel slightly sick about the baubles and colorful fringed cloth covering and maybe even stifling the camel, but it was too late to give up the ride, and I wanted to see what riding a camel was like anyway.
A small, dark-skinned, slender boy came to lead my camel. He pulled hard to get the camel moving, but I saw no harshness or impatience, only a simple love and respect for his friend and means of survival. Being the last person to mount, I could see the other boys shouting their camels and yanking their ropes in an effort to speed up the ride to get back for the next customer. I looked down to see the boy leading my camel walking peacefully, smiling as he looked around at the dusty street and then up at me.
He gestured towards my brother on a camel and said in a fairly high, slightly hoarse voice, "Beeg broe-tha?" Confused because I was unsure what language he was attempting to speak, I looked at him for another second before he clarified. "Bhai?" he asked again. Recognizing the Hindi word for older brother, I nodded emphatically. He grinned widely at this breakthrough in communication.
After we had made the turn at the end of the agreed distance, he spoke to me again.
"Who are you?"
Misunderstanding him, I replied "I'm from America."
He leaned back to express his wonder. "America? Wow."
A few steps later, he turned to me again and asked, "You have name?"
"Siva," I repeated a few times until he heard me correctly.
He nodded with satisfaction and then explained, "I am Ali. This camel is name Suraj."
I patted Suraj again and felt overwhelmingly like a tourist.
By this time, we had fallen far behind the other camels. I could see my cousin's camel had decided it deserved a break and started to browse some of the foliage by the side of the road. Some of the other boys had been summoned to give the camel some physical motivation. Ali started to speak again.
"I am camel driver," he proclaimed with audible pride. I contemplated the probable fact that this was the only life Ali had really ever known and that he was more than happy to continue leading tired, overworked, dusty camels for people who didn't deserve to sit above him for the rest of his life. I wondered what the world really had in store for this friendly kid with a bright smile. Would he stay as happy and content as he was now, or would he slide into the crusty worldliness of the leader? He interrupted my musings as he gestured broadly out towards the fort visible in the distance across desert land and said, "Rajasthan is famous for camels." I nodded to show my agreement. By now, I had figured out the secret to riding without seriously endangering future generations of Sundarams; I had to lean back a bit and sway with Suraj. Ali noticed my smile at my riding success. He asked, "Is it good? You like?" I smiled and nodded appreciatively, not trusting speaking in English with my American accent.
We reached our starting point again, with my uncle snapping pictures of us as we approached. A very small boy on a bicycle rode up to the platform, a huge bag of presumably camel food on his back and the seat. I climbed down and walked around to face Suraj. I noticed his enormous, watery brown eyes and his extremely long lashes, flickering closed against the sun. I looked more closely and saw the rope tied to a small wooden rod through his nose. Before my moment of guilt washed over me, I was whisked away into the van to head off to our next destination. I glanced back once more before I got inside. I saw Ali, a small, dark silhouette dwarfed by the camel next to him. And that was it.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Introduction: Start Here
Hello, and thank you for taking the time to check out all the cool stuff I saw and discovered in India. Since this blog is largely for my own benefit (a way of preserving the memories), please feel free to skim through any parts that are too wordy or boring. A sizable portion of this blog will be personal reflections or other tangential ramblings, which I will put into italics to limit confusion. Again, I appreciate the interest you have already shown by reaching this page, and I sincerely hope you can join me in appreciating the beauty of India.
In Transit: To India
From the inside, the window is warm with sunlight, but a thin layer of frost persists on the exterior surface. The TV on the plane tells me the air is deathly cold outside, but I have a hard time believing. The vista outside looks alternately like a soft, fluffy world populated by cotton balls and wisps of baby hair and then an icy, frigid tundra, lifeless except for the white dragons that rise from the mist to feed on dreams. The plane's wing seems impossibly big, Brobdingnagian in the world of the cloud people.
The fog clears a bit to reveal a complete landscape of sugar-spun peaks, frothy valleys, and enticing dark rifts. Like black ice, the world of the clouds draws me inexorably, holding certain death in its false promises and deadly seductions. The blue of the sky is not quite her blue, the blue I see every night before I drift off into the world of the clouds. In fact, that difference is the only thing that lets me know that the world outside the plane is not the world of my dreams. When I sleep, the sky is the color of her eyes.
The sun hangs, suspended by the strings of a reluctant parting. The sky is black, then suddenly a murky, mysterious blue, and finally the color of full day. The daytime sky burns as it is swallowed by the night, igniting a fiery volcanic rift in the cloud world. The molten sea churns, incinerating the leftover life of the day in a glorious display of fire and light. I know this ritual. The day and the night, the sun and the moon, gracefully switch places on the parquet dance floor littered with stars and clouds. And yet the sun lingers on, refusing to hide until he may catch one last glimpse of his breath-taking love, who soars with the eagles and floats on moonlight. The last glow is fading, even as the plane tries to race the closing seam of the night sky. One last glimpse, one last reshuffling of the flashes of her in my mind, and I will float through the window and dream in the cloud world. Good night.
We started our trip with a 7 and half hour flight from Chicago to Frankfurt. Even though I had only slept two hours the night before (I stayed up until 4 to finish my US History final)), I only slept for maybe an hour total on the flight. I still felt far more alert than I had any right to. The flight went pretty smoothly, with one of the highlights being finding The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife 3" on the inflight radio. Hearing that song on the plane made me feel tremendously at home, as though I were at my keyboard burning time or talking to Colleen online (Colleen is irrevocably tied to The Decemberists in my mind). There were two movies on the flight "Freedom Writers" and "Night at the Museum." Cue movie-related ramble.
"Night at the Museum" wasn't bad; there were a few comedic gems in there that made me laugh out loud before I realized I was in a plane full of sleeping people. I really liked "Freedom Writers," though. Even though there were parts that didn't quite make sense or seemed too....easy (ALL the kids write in their journals the first day AND want the teacher to read them?), a lot of other parts of the movie helped make up for it. I definitely found myself very close to tears at a few points, especially when the recently-homeless kid talks about what the class means to him.
The movie made me think about myself in relation to the characters. As intelligent as I am, how do I stack up to or compare to the students that lived and thrived through unbelievable hardship? Yeah, my friends and I are most probably smarter academically than the Freedom Writers, but how much does that really count for? Even more, how much of that is just a result of the fantastic opportunities we've been blessed with to stimulate our growth and learning? Is what I have worth less because I didn't have to work as hard to get it? I'm not going to say I never have to work or work hard. That would be wholly untrue and highly arrogant to boot. But most things have almost always been in easy reach for me. What am I next to the kid who has seen friends die all the time and still manages to pull his shit together and not only graduate high school but also have the courage to step beyond the limits of behovior and character that society has placed around him based on his status as a black male? I guess I don't really think negatively of myself for these things, but I have so much more respect for these other kids.
Anyway, after we landed in Frankfurt at about 6:15 AM local time, we discovered that our connecting flight to Delhi wasn't until 1:45 PM. About an hour into the long haul, a random Indian woman traveling alone sat right next to us in the nearly empty waiting area. She managed to get us to watch her baggage as she used the bathroom and then later walked up and down the halls of the airport. She was rather odd-looking; She reminded me strongly of Dolores Umbridge. She also managed to be quite annoying to my mom and ask her questions like, "How much did your tickets cost?" When she came back from her walk, she asked my brother and me, "Do you people go for daily exercise?" Needless to say, we were rather relieved when she left on her flight. While we were waiting closer to departure time, we saw a family with two young boys, probably like 6-7 and 3 years old. My brother told me that the younger one was a lot like how I used to be. I believe it. The kid grabbed a half-full bottle of water and chucked it at his brother's crotch. I've done worse to my brother. We finally boarded the plane after 7 of the most boring hours of my life.
The second leg was even more uneventful than the first, as I was sleeping for a lot more of the time. I watched "Music and Lyrics" on the plane. Movie ramble #2.
I did like "Music and Lyrics" a lot more than I thought I probably would. Hugh Grant has a lot more comedic talent that I would have thought before; maybe British people are just born with that witty sort of flair. Now it seems like every time I watch or read some romantic story, I get reminded so clearly of the sticky problems I've recently gone through and helped cause. It makes watching the low points of the romance so much more poignant now; I see my own mistakes and shortcomings in the missteps and bad moves of the male lead. I've come to understand, and really only this year, that love is not simple. Love won't stop me rom hurting people of making mistakes. I don't know exactly from where I got my uber-idealistic notions of love and romance. Maybe it's just that I'm not personally ready to fulfill and play my role in that perfect relationship.
We landed in Delhi and made our way though immigration and baggage claim, and then we met up with my mom's sister's husband, Thangavel Uncle, and my cousin Gautham. This is a good time for a crash course in the nomenclature system of my family. Uncle and Aunty are generic terms used for all elders, but can also be used for actual relatives in cases where utmost respect is not so necessary and the clumsiness of the specific words is to be avoided. For whatever reason, Aunty and Uncle always follow the given name of the person in speech. We're spending the first part of our trip with Thangavel Uncle and his family. More on them later.
We walked out of the airport and got hit by a minor heat wave. I was actually expecting it to be worse, but I hear that I'll have to wait until it gets to be midday. Apparently, the temperature gets up to 45 degrees C, which I calculated as 113 degrees F! I think (hope) that's probably a slight exaggeration. If it's not, we're in trouble.
The fog clears a bit to reveal a complete landscape of sugar-spun peaks, frothy valleys, and enticing dark rifts. Like black ice, the world of the clouds draws me inexorably, holding certain death in its false promises and deadly seductions. The blue of the sky is not quite her blue, the blue I see every night before I drift off into the world of the clouds. In fact, that difference is the only thing that lets me know that the world outside the plane is not the world of my dreams. When I sleep, the sky is the color of her eyes.
The sun hangs, suspended by the strings of a reluctant parting. The sky is black, then suddenly a murky, mysterious blue, and finally the color of full day. The daytime sky burns as it is swallowed by the night, igniting a fiery volcanic rift in the cloud world. The molten sea churns, incinerating the leftover life of the day in a glorious display of fire and light. I know this ritual. The day and the night, the sun and the moon, gracefully switch places on the parquet dance floor littered with stars and clouds. And yet the sun lingers on, refusing to hide until he may catch one last glimpse of his breath-taking love, who soars with the eagles and floats on moonlight. The last glow is fading, even as the plane tries to race the closing seam of the night sky. One last glimpse, one last reshuffling of the flashes of her in my mind, and I will float through the window and dream in the cloud world. Good night.
We started our trip with a 7 and half hour flight from Chicago to Frankfurt. Even though I had only slept two hours the night before (I stayed up until 4 to finish my US History final)), I only slept for maybe an hour total on the flight. I still felt far more alert than I had any right to. The flight went pretty smoothly, with one of the highlights being finding The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife 3" on the inflight radio. Hearing that song on the plane made me feel tremendously at home, as though I were at my keyboard burning time or talking to Colleen online (Colleen is irrevocably tied to The Decemberists in my mind). There were two movies on the flight "Freedom Writers" and "Night at the Museum." Cue movie-related ramble.
"Night at the Museum" wasn't bad; there were a few comedic gems in there that made me laugh out loud before I realized I was in a plane full of sleeping people. I really liked "Freedom Writers," though. Even though there were parts that didn't quite make sense or seemed too....easy (ALL the kids write in their journals the first day AND want the teacher to read them?), a lot of other parts of the movie helped make up for it. I definitely found myself very close to tears at a few points, especially when the recently-homeless kid talks about what the class means to him.
The movie made me think about myself in relation to the characters. As intelligent as I am, how do I stack up to or compare to the students that lived and thrived through unbelievable hardship? Yeah, my friends and I are most probably smarter academically than the Freedom Writers, but how much does that really count for? Even more, how much of that is just a result of the fantastic opportunities we've been blessed with to stimulate our growth and learning? Is what I have worth less because I didn't have to work as hard to get it? I'm not going to say I never have to work or work hard. That would be wholly untrue and highly arrogant to boot. But most things have almost always been in easy reach for me. What am I next to the kid who has seen friends die all the time and still manages to pull his shit together and not only graduate high school but also have the courage to step beyond the limits of behovior and character that society has placed around him based on his status as a black male? I guess I don't really think negatively of myself for these things, but I have so much more respect for these other kids.
Anyway, after we landed in Frankfurt at about 6:15 AM local time, we discovered that our connecting flight to Delhi wasn't until 1:45 PM. About an hour into the long haul, a random Indian woman traveling alone sat right next to us in the nearly empty waiting area. She managed to get us to watch her baggage as she used the bathroom and then later walked up and down the halls of the airport. She was rather odd-looking; She reminded me strongly of Dolores Umbridge. She also managed to be quite annoying to my mom and ask her questions like, "How much did your tickets cost?" When she came back from her walk, she asked my brother and me, "Do you people go for daily exercise?" Needless to say, we were rather relieved when she left on her flight. While we were waiting closer to departure time, we saw a family with two young boys, probably like 6-7 and 3 years old. My brother told me that the younger one was a lot like how I used to be. I believe it. The kid grabbed a half-full bottle of water and chucked it at his brother's crotch. I've done worse to my brother. We finally boarded the plane after 7 of the most boring hours of my life.
The second leg was even more uneventful than the first, as I was sleeping for a lot more of the time. I watched "Music and Lyrics" on the plane. Movie ramble #2.
I did like "Music and Lyrics" a lot more than I thought I probably would. Hugh Grant has a lot more comedic talent that I would have thought before; maybe British people are just born with that witty sort of flair. Now it seems like every time I watch or read some romantic story, I get reminded so clearly of the sticky problems I've recently gone through and helped cause. It makes watching the low points of the romance so much more poignant now; I see my own mistakes and shortcomings in the missteps and bad moves of the male lead. I've come to understand, and really only this year, that love is not simple. Love won't stop me rom hurting people of making mistakes. I don't know exactly from where I got my uber-idealistic notions of love and romance. Maybe it's just that I'm not personally ready to fulfill and play my role in that perfect relationship.
We landed in Delhi and made our way though immigration and baggage claim, and then we met up with my mom's sister's husband, Thangavel Uncle, and my cousin Gautham. This is a good time for a crash course in the nomenclature system of my family. Uncle and Aunty are generic terms used for all elders, but can also be used for actual relatives in cases where utmost respect is not so necessary and the clumsiness of the specific words is to be avoided. For whatever reason, Aunty and Uncle always follow the given name of the person in speech. We're spending the first part of our trip with Thangavel Uncle and his family. More on them later.
We walked out of the airport and got hit by a minor heat wave. I was actually expecting it to be worse, but I hear that I'll have to wait until it gets to be midday. Apparently, the temperature gets up to 45 degrees C, which I calculated as 113 degrees F! I think (hope) that's probably a slight exaggeration. If it's not, we're in trouble.
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