jedicist.org Blog

I just posted a first batch of pictures in a page which you get to by clicking somewhere to the right.  I’ll do more later.

I’m sitting here with my oatmeal and chai reading the Times of India, and as a follow up to yesterdays NY times article, I thought I’d share some of it with you, though it might mistakenly make India seem like a horrably violent place.  The thing to remember is how huge India is–generates enough violence to report on every day while almost everyone lives in peace.

In Maharastra (near Bombay) a group of Marathi-speaking youth associated with Raj Thakaray’s (recently arrested and released, sparking opposing riots in two far-away places) MNS lynched two North Indian laborers on their way home for the Diwali holidays.  The MNS is a Marathi-nativist group with tremendous influence in Bombay, though I can’t figure out what their goal is in life except a few random acts of violence.  The Times decided to put a tiny editorial right there on the front page, next to the article, and it speaks to the influence of electoral politics on the violence that was discussed yesterday by the NY times:

“Times View: What’s happening in Maharastra, and Mumbai in particular, is much more than a law and order situation.  It calls into question the very notion of India as a Union.  Unless firm action is taken to stop the violence immediately and punish those responsible for it, the signals that will go out to all parts of the country will be disasterous.  At one level it would encourage other groups to flex muscle and use violence to settle real or percieved grievances.  At another, it would unleash forces that can completely destroy the cosmotolitan character of our cities.  The Maharastra government must act quickly to end this situation.  What’s happening may suit the elctoral calculations of the ruling combine, but that’s the worst kind of politics.  “  In the inside section on the issue, the big featured quote is somewhat mysterious but also telling about the population that’s being targeted by the MNS: “If outsiders leave Mumbai, dogs would weep there.”  I think that the idea is that the poorest people, the ragpickers and hutment dwellers, are famous for sharing their meager food with the street dogs.  Most of these “outsiders” are basically refugees from Bihar, which was hit really hard by flooding last monsoon. Bihar’s a total messof poverty and bad governance in the best of times.

A priest (christian) in Orissa, where there’s been that horrible Hindu-Christian tension, has died of injuries sustained when a “saffron-clad” mob beat him.

In the Kolkata section there’s a run-down of the goings on of Diwali night.  As I can attest to, all the firecrackers created a thick blanket of smog and smoke over the whole city, cancelling all flights into and out of the city.  Diwali is a festival of lights (firecrackers), and of course, being India, there aren’t organized fireworks displays, rather every single household buys a huge arsenal of crackers and lets em rip.  Some of them from wealthy houses and clubs are professional level huge fireworks.  The cops love it because the fireworks are technically illegal, so they can go around arresting anyone they want to, because everyone has them.  It’s up to the police.  In Kolkata, there were 791 arrests, including apparantly the Senior Executive of the industrialist family MP Birla Group–a very big Kolkata name–Krishna Damani but right across the river in Howrah there were none.  Hilarious.

Then in the global section, there’s a lovely headline: “The Messiah and the Hockey Mom in the divided state of America” 

So all those things I said I was going to do I did.  Kalighat was its intense and absolutely gross self.  That place has some dark energy, and also a lot of animal sacrafices.  Anyway, then I had a good Diwali; the puja in my apartment was really beautiful and auspicious.  It’s basically a matter of cleansing the space and offering the gods objects: laddoo (sweets) for Ganesha, a coin for Laxmi, holy water, a lot of candles.  The only element missing was the blowing of a conch shell–but at exactly the moment when it ought to have been blown, we heard the peal of a conch from down the block (a total coincidence, these things aren’t timed).  Very auspicious.  Then a delicious dinner at the Lal’s house and then a totally silly party in my house, with 18 year old boys pretending to play cards, but without any comprehension of how even Blackjack could be played, much less poker.  Anyway it was fun.

I thought that this article in the Times was a good overview of the myriad conflicts right now in India http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/world/asia/29india.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

you probably saw it; it was on the front page.  I still have trouble comprehending the energy and hatred that fuels these things, because they seem to be totally disconnected from the intelligent and benevolent and very lazy India that I know.  It all springs from the savage inequality in India’s development, of course.  There’s too much money in tiny pockets of the country and the masses are left hopeless.  They blame each other for taking away their jobs and their rights.  They blame their neighbors for praying to different gods.  I do think that the article is somewhat justified in tying the problem to the democratic system; it implies a constant competition for power and recognition.

By the way, the exchange rate is becoming totally absurd, almost degrading to India.  It’s 53 ruppees to a dollar.  It usually is around fourty. 

From yesterday’s post, my father asked how Indians can be without irony when Hinduism is such a self-contradictory religion.  It’s a good question because I’m not sure how I can relate the two issues.  The lack of sarcasm and irony in language comes from Sanskrit, which claims that each sanskrit word has an absolute and unchangeable relationship with what it means, that the word is somehow the essence of the thing.  It leaves no room for disengenousness in language.  That’s the reason why mantras are ascribed a real power, for example.  I don’t think that Hindus really consider their religion full of contradictions–it’s just founded on the idea that everything includes its opposite, it’s exception, an idea that I think Westerners can also relate to.

I’ve got to go back to work.  I’m making a digital catalogue of the books for the website, and soon I’ll set Writers Workshop books for sale on alibris.com where you’ll be able to buy them in America.  More on that later.

Oh, will the spammers please stop trying to post spam commets?  Somehow I don’t think that saying that will do the trick.

Tomorrow is both Diwali, and, in Bengal only, the first day of Kali puja.  I’ll post another after it, but I’m so excited tonight I thought I’d tell you my plans.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to face Kalighat temple, because it must be faced, and tomorrow will be the most absurd time to do it.  The first time I was in India, I was taken almost straight from the airport to Kalighat.  Kalighat is one of the most intense places in India–it’s pushy, full of people who demand money from you, and they do animal sacrafices with no warning.  All that happened and I wasn’t prepared at all.  I had never seen religion demand such chaos out of its devotees.  The idea was to shock you with India right away.  It worked, but I secretly loved it.  Anyway, I haven’t been back because I know what a sh*tshow it is.  Maybe I’ll chicken out of it.  But I want to go to the burning ghat on the river down by Kalighat because I haven’t been there, and because it’s special: it has the only Kali idol with her mouth closed.  The whole aesthetic point of Kali is her giant bloodied tongue, but everything in Hinduism must be contradicted once.  So that idol will be worth seeing.

Then, the Guptas, my hosts and landlords, will have their Diwali puja in my apartment, and they’ve invited me to participate.  They were suprised to see that I drape flowers around my Ganesha in the Hindu fashon–I like having fresh flowers near my desk, and they make Ganesha look great.  (Ganesha quickly emerged as the god that will be my best friend during this trip.  My desk at the Lals is surrounded by ancient stone carvings of him.  He’s a writer–he cut off his tusk to make a pen to write.  And a tabla player.  And, on my cheap hollow brass idol, he’s got long hair).

Anyway, I realized that they are having their puja at my place because the idols here are actually the dynamic family idols, and Diwali is the puja where they replace them with new idols, breathe the divine breath into them (not sure how to translate that idea) and worship them for the first time.  I find it odd that they don’t keep them over at their place–I had the strong sense that it wouldn’t be proper to leave them in my room and use them as my own, but I didn’t realize that these guys were the singular family shrine.  It’s Ganesha and Laxmi, right next to me now, looking at me as I write.  Ranjhit (I had his name wrong this whole time!–the guy who comes to my apartment every day and hangs out) puts flowers on them every morning and burns inscence, so I thought that they were his personal that he put here because he’s here so much.  But they are the Guptas, and he maintains them as part of (it seems like his only) service to them.  Which probably seems strange to readers in America, but it seems reasonable over here.  As long as devotion is continually demonstrated by the family–worship takes time and energy.

And then, it turns out that the annual young-folks Diwali party happens at my apartment, on the roof, where they set off lots of fireworks.  So of course I’ll go to that.  I’m excited to celebrate Diwali with a bunch of drunk 17 and 18 year old boys. 

I’ll let you know how all that goes.

On Friday I went to a short-film festival of socially relevant films held at an NGO here.  The films were uneven, but the message of each was very clear: the first one told a typical story of women traffiking in India, a tragic and massive industry, there was a very blunt one about discrimination against Muslims in America, one about transgenderd people in India and the struggles they face (for this one I would have appriciated some audience dialogue that didn’t happen; it was clearly too graphic and uncomfortable for many members of the Bengali audience.  People were laughing, some walked out.  Homosexuality is not so much discriminated against here as…hidden).

It did strike me that the name of the event was “Black and White,” which seemed to me to be a clear reference to American racism, because the discriminations and injustices that were addressed by the films were all pretty brown-on-brown.  This was never explicitly discussed or explained, but I’ve noticed an interest in India about the various American oppressions and injustices.  On multiple occasions here I have been asked about the massacre and displacement of American Indians–for a while I speculated that this was because of the name “Indian” but I don’t think that’s it. 

There’s no inherent concept of sarcasm or irony in Indian culture, there’s no system of meaning things other than what is said.  So I think that Indians are bewildered and facinated by the hypocracies of America; we claim to be founded upon equality and freedom when we are founded upon slavery. India is explicitly founded upon slavery and inequality, the caste system.  Educated Bengalis seem to need to constantly remind themselves that what America says and what America means are two very different things.  Indian politicians spout hate and they mean hate, but American politicans spout liberation democracy and equality and mean imperialism.  In order to resist this imperialism, they must first navagate the trecherous waters of hypocracy and doublethink.

That was obviously very oversimplified and myopic.  Indian politicans totally lie all the time, for example.

And then on Saturday I went to a gathering where young poets (ten to twentyfour) read their poetry.  It was really wonderful to hear all the voices of Bengal; there was a lot of cliche, of course, but there were a few exceptional poems.  Sadly, the event was on the roof of a tall building during a rain storm, so I couldn’t stay long–I was too cold.

Though I haven’t been so regular about keeping up the blog, if you are tuned in now I promise a lot of good media coming down the tube; the much promised picture post will happen whenever I plug my laptop into the internet. And I’ve got a chunk of fiction coming down the pipeline.  So bear with me.

Copied a few transcreations of the Upanisads into my notebook:

 

From the Taittiriya Upanisad:

“All things of the earth

       are born from food.

They emerge from food

     they merge into food.

Food is the first-born of creatures

      so food is the medicine of all.”

…

“She wished:

      I will be born

      I will be many.

By the heat of tapas

    by creative heat

She created

      all there is.

Having created it

     she entered it.

She entered

     the formed and formless

     the defined and undefined

    the sustaining and non-sustaining

     the thing and non thing

    the true and not true.

Whatever is

              is true.

Truth is

          whatever is.”

From the Avyakta Upanisad (a little text to the lion avatara of visnu that is rarely studied)

“Om Terrible Powerful Maha-Visnu

Flaming Everywhere-Facing

Terrifying Holy Man Lion

DEATH’S DEATH | praise”

“Pour self into self as gift into fire”

“The terrible one!

    terrible for he is lion faced

The powerful one!

    powerful for he is the essence of power:

The great Visnu!

  because he straddles the three worlds:

The Flaming One!

    For he is aflame with radience

Everywhere-Facing!

    Because he has many forms

The Terrifying One!

Afraid of him, the sun rises,

Afraid of him, the moon,

Afraid, the wind blows

Afraid falls the rain:

The Holy One!

Holy Holy Holy Sri-embraced:

Death’s Death!

For he is the death of death, giver

of immortality to food-eating creatures.”

 

 

And there’s a lot more where that came from.

Blogging’s been flagging recently.  Because I’ve regained daily humanity; I’ve stopped traveling in India and I’ve begun to live in Lake Gardens, Kolkata.  Which is as good as life can be.  I feel part of a community like never before-after a whirlwind week of introductions, I know all my neighbors, am a familiar face to a few vegitable sellers at the market, not to mention a really cool and expanding  circle of expats.  I have some sort of schedule and routine.   I usually wake up early, at 6.30 or 7.  Three days so far I’ve gone running around the lake.  I’m beginning a morning yoga class on Monday.  I have to be back by 7.45 so that a shirtless guy in a seethrough lungi can toss a packet of milk into my hands as soon as I open the door for him.  Futz about until Rohit gets here–he’s the guy who sits aimlessly in my apartment all day during working hours; he’s the employee of my landlord.  For a few days I floated the theory that while he wasn’t my servant, he might end up doing some things for me, but that’s not the case at all.  He pretty much tells me what to do in a vaguely maternal but monosyllabic way–wash dish tub, etc.,  I have a strong suspicion, though, that he does sweep the floors.  As soon as possible, I leave and go down to my desk on the varandah of the Lal house (next door to my apartment building).  Since I don’t have a laptop, I’m pretty much aimlessly reading Writer’s Workshop books during the day, browsing the collection.  And working on my Bangla, which the guys who work in WW (running the warehouse and bookstore), help me with.  They’re hilarious people, each with very strong personalities, and very friendly, and speak very little English.  I’m pretty much learing Bengali for their sake.  I get bored and mosquito bitten pretty quickly, so at two I go visit the printer, who is overseeing my laptop repair.  Etc. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the dramatic Fall of America, been following the news closely, and simultaneously educating myself about the political situation here, imagining what path India’s rise will take.  I have been reading about the Naxalite movement here–Maoist rebels that control a huge swath of India’s agricultural interior.  The book that  you should read, that I’m reading, is Red Sun by Sundeep Chakravarti.There is, literally, a violent revolution amassing within India.  Because of the dramatic inequity of India’s development, not just in terms of economic numbers, but also culturally.  Urban India, Middle-Class India, are on a totally different planet from the vast majority of India’s landmass, full of people who are finding the aeons-old struggle to survive harder and harder.  I genuinely expect that the Maoists will come to power in India in the post-America(n power) epoch.  Of course, this is unlikely to slow the economic rise or alleviate the inequity.  If anything, it’ll make everyone poorer.  I imagine that a  CPI(M) India would look something like today’s china–somehow using Communist ideas to fuel and sustain a massive capitalism founded on mass labor, free of any morality, but probably more corrupt.  Remeber that I’m writing about things that I don’t understand, am not a part of,etc.

I’ve been lagging on the blog because I’ve been writing a lot of fiction on my typewriter, and am actually feeling blissfully predigital and imaginative.  When I get my laptop back, that’ll change.  I’ll do my big picture posting, first of all.

The plastic cosmos

will outlast its makers.

 

At least,

something ought to

                             outlast plastic-

                                                     asphalt will not.

nor,

cloathing nor terabytes.

Nor,

LANDfills of silent machinery,

quiet LANDmines

                         waiting for

                                        a human’s heavy step.

OUTlast?

    I will not, My body says.

    I will, I say.

I WILL the rot.

-

So I find it difficult to avoid discussion of the dissolution of America, in conversations and in writing.  Starting with the financial issues–should Indians really expect to live in a world where America has little power?  How soon?  I have my own ideas, but I’m far away, I find it difficult to imagine already.  I follow news closely, of course, but I have no sense of what the tone is in your life over there.  If you read this, please comment and let me know…anything.  What your sense of the situation is.  If this thing has touched your life in any way already. Are people getting fired?  Your friends?  The election is the election, I’m just as plugged into that nt’l dialogue here as I was there.  But not so much with everything else.  Help me out here.

I’m thrilled to be in my space, the apartment that I’ll have throughout this year.  You can mail me things here if the spirit moves you, or you can use this address to watch me on google earth:

 533A, Lake Gardens

Kolkata 700045

but if you mail something in the first few months, put c/o Susmita Gupta, who is renting me this apartment.

This feels like an achievment of being here; now that I’m incorporated in a space, I can regain humanity.  I can be done travelling for a moment.

Lake Gardens is such a gorgeous place.  It’s a quiet little haven just south of the lake–which itself is beautiful.  Lake Gardens is quiet and it’s the only neighborhood with trees, as far as I can tell.  It’s an old neighborhood, and most of the families are old Calcutta institutions–lots of professors and doctors.  It’s also mysterious because the roads twist to hide secrets, for example I still haven’t found the big market, which, humorously, they call the “supermarket,” even though it’s just people with blankets on the ground.  My apartment was the old home of the Guptas, and it’s full of lots of random memories and objects.  It hasn’t been lived in for a really long time, and there’s an impressive layer of dust on everything.  I’ve been cleaning for the last 48 hours, guzzled a bottle of lysol last night alone.  Which labor makes the space feel more like my own.  Awkwardly, this apartment is where the Guptas’ two servants hang out during the day (I notice that people don’t put too much thought into where their servants go when they’re not serving them, 95% of the time. Mostly, they sit completely motionless in a chair for hours on end.  These two watched the TV in my room, which we can’t move because of the cable connection.  So, basically, my apartment comes with servants who aren’t mine and who don’t serve me, all of which will be less awkward when I’m learning Bengali).  I’ve got a typewriter in my room–some of you may remember me bragging about how my plan was to find a typewriter in India.  Now I just have to find a typewriter ribbon in India.  And its right nextdoor to the Lal’s house, where I work at the Writer’s Workshop. 

My cell phone is still off, and will be until wednesday. I’ll write a more substantive blog post soon.

I’m still typing on my child’s laptop, so pls forgive typos and potential insane formatting.

The Durga Pooja continues unabated thru this night, when the idols will get dunked, and I’ll be thre for that I hope; also my first glimpse of the Hoogely, which is sort of hidden in this city.  This is a long festival, and to be honest over the last few days, I’ve lost some of my steam for it, because it’s still so hot and seeing pandals requiers walking in expanding circles for long distances.  My cell phone stopped working, so I’m in a bit of enforced isolation.  So this week is truly a sacrafice to Maha Kal, mother time, which will end tonight when she leaves this earth (literally, my empty time will end just then,  because I think my friends will be there at the ghat, and then tomorrow I’ll move into my new apt andhopefully gain some proof of existance(address) for the cell phone company and life will begin again, renewed.)

I’ve been scribbling some in my notebook, looking through, not as much as I thought I had, but a bit.  W/o a computer, sadly, nothing creative and cohearent can be born.

“prutoham Zet was a Zephaier International representative. It was in this capacity that he survived the Meltdown and it was inthis caapcity that he had come so far to the Outside.  Which, hequickly discovered, had ceased to be outside anything , and was stilll reeling with cibfusion abou thow to behave on the Inside.  Nobody in New York could affort the inpu tcosts of the Machine anymore.’ well, you see whee I’m going. Tireed of hunt and packing this keyboard.

Well, today I’m going to make another effort to see the city.  I’ll go up north somewhere and look for some pandals to photograph for the future amazing blog photo post

edit. That was written this morning, and I got off my ass.  I had a great meander through North Kolkata in my tourist shorts (I packed as many shorts as I  did pants, and only when I got here remembered that no one wears shorts here.)  I found in N Kolkata east of the main road (chowranghee/whatver its called up N) the quiet alleys of old India.  It reminded me of Varanasi. I also saw what must have been the central ginger and garlic distribution point for the city.  And some truly amazing pandals for festival.  I can’t wait to have capacity to post them.  Then, through really truly random wandering West, I came to Nimtola, which is the buring ghat.  My first glimpse of the Hoogley river was at nimtola today, believe it or not.  Dark, right?  Then the oft-guidebook-cited Flower market, and then to Babughat, where I saw some early in the day Durga dumpings.  Devided to bail and come back before rain and crowds.  It’s crazy ou tther enow.  I think I needed my inertia over the last few days, and only started writing about on the blog when it had ceased to be plesent an I had to go back to India.  Sorry for the negativity, is what I’m saying.

Jai Mata Di