Mela

I walked with my Dad through his home village of Dhudike, where we always stay for a couple weeks in the house he grew up in with his seven brothers. Dhudike (DU-di-kay) is quite large now and still growing, but it retains the feel of a village in its narrow streets with slimy gutters on either side, dust everywhere, doorways framing courtyards that shelter the household buffalo and the dung patty-burning stoves. The dung patties, laced with straw and molded into large saucers, lie drying in little plots across the village, waiting to be used for heat, cooking fuel, even cremation. Recently interested in India's social hierarchies and sanctified division of labor, I asked Dad whether families generally made their own patties or bought them from established makers.

Dad answered that many produce their own patties, since it is customary for families who can afford it to keep their own buffalo for milk and status. Cows are all over in India, in the cities as much as the villages, oblivious of their holy status but nevertheless taking advantage of it, vying for space along the crowded streets. But the buffalo that can be seen through many of the entryways of houses in Dhudike stand apart with their size and strength and shining coats. So it turns out that buffalo are an informative social index in Punjab.

For all its village-ness, agriculture has treated Dhudike well, and the village is pretty wealthy. Even the low-caste neighborhoods are studded with newly built houses, and late model Scorpios SUVs navigate the lanes along with the motorbikes and bicycles. And this brings us to the town fair, an indication in its own way of the vibrancy of the village. It's happening now, scheduled to coincide with India's Republic Day. One of my uncles' donation to the fair links our family to the proceedings--our grandfather is featured on the main promotional poster. So we'd been looking forward to attending, especially since it's not just a lame carnival-game kind of thing. There's barely any advertising, and sports are at center stage. The thing has been going on for over 50 years, but it's only more recently, since 1990 or so, that bullock cart racing has been an event. My dad took this as a sign of success in Dhudike and Punjab in general--a village backwater can't sustain a big fair, let alone a capital-intensive competition.

Bullock cart racing is sort of the village equivalent of horse racing, but replacing all the aristocratic trappings with farmer rowdiness--a downgrade in class, upgrade in style. (By some standards there are humane concerns with these races; they would be dwarfed in number and severity by everyday practices in the country as a whole). One similarity with horse racing is that it is a hobby borne of some wealth (one can't raise an ox dedicated solely to racing without some money in the bank), gleaned from fertile soil and government-gauranteed price minimums, and likely also leisure, perhaps facilitated by some hired labor. I'm not sure, but similar races may happen in poor areas as well, though I doubt there that oxen are raised solely to race, as at least some are here. Last month we'd visited a neighbor and were shown his racing ox, which spent its time doing nothing but gaining strength and aggression in the lead-up to the race. As for the differences with horse racing, pictures tell it better.

The racing happened on a farm road about 1km out of town. A wheat field lined one side, potatoes the other. Spectators filed in from town to watch.















Seating was improvised. Some people populated the small lanes branching perpindicularly from the race road. Others lined the irrigation canals in the fields. The organizers had rigged up a sound system.















The bulls were escorted to the starting line,














as were the carts.















The drivers seemed to in a pre-game focus mode. Many walked alone.














And they were off. Even with the build-up of the gathering crowd and the teams' preparations, I hadn't expected this. It was almost like the drivers were using a temporary state of insanity to supplement strikes on the bulls' backs, trying to get the most speed and stamina from the animals. Pretty, pretttty awesome. The audio is sketchy, but Dad believes this driver is yelling something about the ox's mother.

Chennai today, my first time in the state of Tamil-Nadu. It was a quiet day, welcome after all the recent travel. I gleaned some interesting facts from Vivek, including some regarding the relative rectangularity of the Tamil script and the political inconsequence of Hindu fundamentalism here. But I must say that one of the main highlights was getting my ear cleaned. The left one had been plugged since Goa, at least 4 days ago, and my asymmetrically dulled hearing had been increasingly getting to me--in quiet moments, I caught myself straining to hear signs that some colony of organisms had moved in. But an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist referred by Vivek's family took care of the issue, which turned out to be a major chunk of ear wax. I feel a victim of injustice in that I had never heard of the importance or even existence of ear cleanings. I did not know that my ear, even after 28 years of accumulation, could even hold that much wax.

The doctor, of typical short Tamil height and with the requisite South Indian mustache, was a quiet man whose opening words to me were "Hello. Tell me." But after the wax was removed, he leaned back and the conversation came forward. He had found out that I live in the US. He smiled, kind of. "How do you like that man?" I have been in India for much of the time between the US election and Tuesday's inaugaration, so I knew the man was Obama. Before I could answer he told me that Obama likes to talk, but would any of his change materialize. I said that no, I didn't think so, that he is not a radical at all and that most things would stay the same. He bobbed his head in ascent and described how the platitudes offered in the inaugaration speech (which I haven't heard) about Afghanistan and Pakistan and solving the Kashmir problem were not so easy. Yes, I said. And then, awesomely, "I heard a speech by another American president. Eisenhower, I think." That speech of Eisenhower's about the military industrial complex is a singularly weird document. Prominently authored, conspicuously delivered, incredibly prescient and still relevant, it is essentially ignored. This doctor who I had met haphazardly was tuned into the fact, still heretical in America though proffered by a President, that American foreign policy is on more than one scale a capitalist industry. Of course this is a minority opinion about Obama in India, as almost everyone loves the guy, including and maybe especially many of those who sell tourist trinkets. But still, a small reminder that critical thought is alive.

There was that today, and also the signoff of a correspondent of the CNN channel that airs here. I'm not sure where it originates, but it's not the US one. In what seemed like their main piece about Gaza that hour, he ended his transmission with the statement that, to paraphrase, "Israel intended this offensive as a deterrent. But it's not clear that anything has been accomplished outside of the destruction of thousands of lives." Predictably, the sentiment echoed the dominant opinion here, which sides with the Palestinians--in Cochin yesterday I'd seen posters calling Israel terrorist. But still, being American, it was weird to hear truth spoken in the news about Israel/Palestine.

A visual

I don't have my laptop with me, but here's the one pic I have in my email. It's from the Himalayan foothills, taken by Vimal.

First pass

After considerable self-undiscipline and some recent harrassment from a couple of you, I'm finally doing a little communicating. With my old (10+ years!) friend Laura's departure today for Oakland, each of the three phases of this six-weeks-and-counting trip has come and gone at least once. I've spent time with my family in Punjab and Delhi, conducted some (preliminarily successful) research on my carbon trading project, and traveled some of the South for the first time with Laura and my sister Sheeba. So now seems like a good time to get off my ass and write a little.

I'm typing from Cochin, a city on the coast of central Kerala with strikingly Bay Arean geography, the grittier city of Ernakulam playing foil as Cochin's Oakland. I came to this place this morning with little context outside of the lone but important fact of Kerala's rule, since 1957, by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a descendent from near the base of Indian Marxism's family tree, where it branched in a Chinese direction from its more Ruso-phillic comrades. Even with the posters greeting those disembarking from the Fort Cochin ferry that generically decry war and solidarize with the Palestinians, this proves to fail as any meaningful context at all. But I realize, and it's a new admission to myself, that despite my three prior trips to India and my Indian descent, thin context is not much less than I've generally had in this country.

This is a partial statement since, for example, many hippies come year after year, seeking the Indian commodity of spirituality, harboring attitudes that Orientalism still, thirty years after its writing, fully prosecutes. That's a lack of context, truly. On this trip I've experienced India for the first time outside of a family caravan. This may not have resulted in any reportable advances in my understanding of this place, but it at least allows the beginnings of a context, of a rough vantage beyond that of a fleeting traveler or a 2nd-generation kid returned "home" from which to observe this country. Something that might allow me to make use of social reference points, in the way that we all naturally do on our home terrain.

I have always been puzzled by sites similar to what we saw in Goa, where no less than 15 sequential watermellon stalls, selling watermelons and nothing else, stretched with few breaks for a quarter mile. In each, a pyramid of watermelons stood as the foreground to one or two dark, shoddily-attired Goans. How do they make any money, with identical competition selling the exact same, cheap good in the immediate vicinity? It's not just a tourist phenomenon--in prior visits to Delhi I'd noticed the same arrangement in a sub-district specializing in marble for home construction. Many similar puzzles are all over. Why do Indians, who are properly known for colorful dress and lavish celebrations, almost universally live in comparatively drab interiors of their own making? Why have Indians imported computers but not spreadsheet software to replace the bulky ledger books in every store, and brought in western toilets but not shower curtains to provide some kind of a divide between baths/showers and toilets?

I don't have answers, but it feels like progress to begin to undestand how to identify questions, at least in a way that departs from my previous trips. The few days worth of solo traveling I've done has helped. As have V.S. Naipaul's books. His view of Hinduism is mostly dispassionate, anti-reverential and not ignorant, which for me is unique. His missives on the caste system and the mechinisms by which it continues to thrive and operate have finally given the concept some flesh. My thinking of caste before was a combination of textbook descriptions of picture-book simplicity (brahmins are priests; untouchables are despised) and what I'd taken by way of analogy with other stultifying social institutions, like race. But of course Indian caste is its own thing. From the way I see it now, it has the topography and complexity of India's array of hundreds of dialects. But it doesn't seem so much conditioned by cultural and social evolution, as languages for the most part are, but a primary force in the shaping of India's versions of these evolutions. It lies behind the visual scenes of India that are universally seen--poverty and dirt, business and activity, spirituality and carefreeness--but differentially understood. I'd always seen those things, simply, as glimpses of life. But Naipaul raises the idea, most likely not unique, but nevertheless new to me, that poverty has a place in the caste-dominated social order, as does spirituality among some, sloth among others, and entrepeunership among still others. That India's lack of dynamism is not only an emergent property of its history, but also a factor engendered by casteism and its culture.

It's a big idea in the sense that it sheds a different light on things I've seen while I've been here. I had a similar experience in differential understanding during my trip to the Himalayas with an activist/organizer from Delhi. I'll talk about that another time, but for now, he is Gandhian in his politics, and again I was afforded a new factor, a large one with which I am effectively unfamiliar, with which to consider people's responses to the political struggles, like development vs community, that in other ways exist everywhere that capitalism does.

So that's sort of an amorphous overview, if not of this trip, then of what I've been thinking about very recently. More later. For now, it's time to try some fish curry (first foray into meat after throwing up on the top bunk of a sleeper train three nights ago) and catch a train to meet up with Vivek in Chennai. Oh, and I'll put some pics up soon too.