indian eyes look at me wide with wonder. they are childlike in the frankness of their curiosity. frankly curious, no hiding their curiosity, no qualms about invading your personal sphere with their piercing gaze, it opens up an unabashed gazing freedom. gaze where you want. allow your gaze to linger. everything is said by the eyes. i have come to know what it probably feels like to be a attractive girl. walking down the street, all eyes follow you - they cannot help following you.
therefore when the eye communication becomes too piercing i look straight ahead, conscious but unheeding. i have actually realised how strange a person i must be, often provoking eyes of surprise. i cannot hope to blend in, i will always be a wandering maverick.
i rolled into bangalore this morning, on the night train from mangalore. i arrived too late at the ticket office to reserve a bunk on the sleeper class so could only buy a general class ticket, which some people told me is overcrowded and uncomfortable and best avoided. i didn't mind it so much. it cost 110 rupees (something like one pound thirty pence) for twelve hours of train. first of all i got on the sleeper carriage anyway. when the uniformed ticket controller found me sitting by the doorway with my general class ticket he talked with some passion to his companion, making gestures in my direction and using the words euro and dollar. i felt that he probably disapproved of me sitting on the train floor with my barefeet and my old rucksack and not making the effort to wear a clean new shirt, when i probably come from a country where i am afforded the opportunity to earn good money and present myself better and conduct myself more respectfully. the train stopped somewhere in the dark and me and other general class ticket holders were barked out of the doorway into the night onto the sharp railway track rocks "come go to last carriage!"
i was ready for the general class; i liked the feeling of everybody hunkering down together. i found a space by the door and rolled out my sleeping mat and pulled out my hindi notes or got to dozing and felt myself lulled by the chug chug chug of the train drifting through the night, at the same time overhearing the people going to the toilet next to me and spitting into the sink and overlooking my slumber with their protective gazes. i was sitting on a bench looking over my hindi notes at mangalore station when a man leaned heavily over my shoulder and joined me in scrutinizing my rendering of the devanagri script: aaj aapki taviyat kaisi hai? (what is your health like today?) he wanted to know where i came from and why i was learning hindi. why was i learning hindi when i already speak english and english is a language spoken all over india? the phrase "a love of languages" swam into my head but i had the feeling that would not satisfy him. i had the feeling that i could not give him a satisfactory account of why i had chosen to come to india. "you want to meet indian girls?" he suggested, "you like indian girls?" well, yes, indian girls seem nice, but i haven't really got to know any, but ...indian girls are beside the point, i wanted to say to him. he wanted to know my cell phone number he wanted to know my facebook name, "why?" i asked him. "i want to chat with you" but i had become somewhat irritated by his forceful way of barking questions and i waved him away and boarded my train.
i rolled into bangalore this morning, reputedly the third biggest city in india. what is the difference between india and India? India looks more important, e.g. The High Commission of India.
india is just india.
still, india though...
india is india is some place. groves of palm trees slide past shimmering in the morning sun. people standing arms crossed are framed momentarily looking up at me looking out from the open door of the train. i see a woman poking with a stick among the rubbish and wonder what the purpose of her poking can be. occasionally childs wave to me enthusiastically. (why children? ...it is not worth asking the wherefore of the irregular pluralren, or any other grammatical irregularityren, of the english language) the side of the railroad is strewn evenly with plastic bags and other plastic paraphernalia as if somebody had displayed them there for some decorative purpose. as we near the city the dry weeds have occasionally been set on fire and the air is impregnated with the blackened acrid stench of burning plastic. an uncomfortable feeling entered me when i was told to sling all the old plastic piping in the big hole in the woods "and then we'll set it on fire" said tattva, the headman of bhaketivedanta ecovillage where i have been living for the past week. the next day the filthy odor billowed through the air and i mused on the misnomer of the term ecovillage. i said to tattva "surely burning the plastic is the worst thing to do? if there are no recycling facilities, and it cannot be reused, then why not just let it lie in the hole? better than polluting the atmosphere with those toxic gases". tattva talked about how twenty years ago when the community had been set up they were full of goals of ecological responsibility but over the years they have realised that people want their comforts and nobody wants to participate in an alternative alternative way of doing things which avoids the accumulation of plastic waste. "if we didn't burn it, you know, we would have to dig many holes all over the forest, and its not cheap to hire a digger to come up here and dig holes for us"
bhaktivedanta is set amid stunning special trees and rolling hilly land. it is quite isolated, about three kilometres of bumpy track through deep old forest and then another thirteen kilometres of potholed twisty downhill road to kollur, the nearest village. tattva said when he first drove along that road in the eighties there were no other vehicles. instead, there were leopards which became illuminated by the headlamps at night. once one was caught leaping across the road chasing a deer before the headlamps startled it and sent it away. it was a difficult place for me to find when i first arrived. i had phoned when i arrived in kollur, but could only speak to somebody whose english i did not understand easily. in the end, i got on a bus heading up the hill and got off somewhere not knowing where and began flagging down cars and asking people, and eventually got directions. very few people knew the name bhaktivedanta; nor was the term ecovillage very helpful. now i realise that hare krishna temple would have been the best label by which to identify the place.
i had already said hello to US volunteer danny and by the plate cupboard before prasada - food which has first been consecrated by being offered to Krishna - the first evening i had arrived, but it wasn't until the second day when she was watering the garden with the hose in the morning that i asked her, "can i ask you what you think of this place"
"really weird" came her quitely resolute response.
hmmm, i was sort of beginning to think along the same lines. there was a certain quality of oddness about the place. it is undeniably a beautiful place, a special spot, a special flourishing of abundant nature. i joined the wedding party one day on the trek down to the waterfall; two hours through the deep forest, picking our trail carefully, the women in their saris carefully descending the steep sections to arrive at the ring of cliffs, ringed by sprawling forest and trailing vines and there to gaze in wonder at the curtain of water particles which start as flowing liquid water but gradually turn into shifting mesmerizing clouds of spray before lashing the rocks at the bottom.
praveem clamboured round the base of the cliffs and dislodged a long gleaming black snake which then slithered away to a hidden recess in the rock. beholding its sinuous passage, i felt the snake's slithering energy slide into the scene and added to the magic of the hissing waterfall. the woman then got out a big pot of spicy rice and ladeled it into everyone's outstretched hands. i told the woman that i was surprised that the rice was warm but she thought i meant "hot, spicy". i said "yes, it is nice and spicy, but the temperature is also warm... did you heat it up or was it just left in the pot in the sun??" but they did not get my line of questioning, so my comment had to remain ....mmm delighty and spicy.
it is hard to believe the temple is less than twenty years old; tattva said he lived under a sheet of plastic during his first year. the wooden old hardwood carved columns must have been imported here from some other time, lending the temple its air of oldness. when i first arrived i thought that the statue of prabhupada - the founder of the hare krishna movement - was probably a real person sitting in silent meditation but perhaps aware of my cautious movements. it took me a while to muster the audacity to look directly into his reposed semi-closed statue eyes. tattva is the initiator and head man of the community or village. neither term really seems adequate. i think many people have lived and do come to visit the place at times, but since i arrived there has only been tattva and a handful of volunteers and other local residents who arrive on mopeds to work during the day and other visitors who have came and left. and a wedding party of twenty who came and spent two days. tattva says that prabhupada recommended that hare krishna devotees get back to simple living off the land. tattva says that if you come to chant mantras of devotion of krishna with a pure heart you will not feel tired. he gets up at half four every morning to begin chanting. i have never made those early morning sessions, but later in the morning, about seven or eight, the young russian couple often gather, and praveen - the indian with the hairstyle slightly reminiscent of a pineaple - will play the drum, and i have picked up the little symbols and clanged them together and listened to the hare krishna chanting and seen tattva at the front alter rotating something that looks like a feather duster, or rotating incense sticks, in devotion to krishna, or bringing round the candles for us to place our hands over and then touch our heads. sometimes everybody gets down on knees with head on ground and responds with "jai!" to the lead mantra. after that tattva reads from the srimad bhagavantam - principal holy scripture of krishna devotees - first in sanskrit and everybody does their best to repeat, then in english. in the email with the information, tattva writes that anybody is welcome to volunteer regardless of their religious persuasion, but during the exposition part of the text - where tattva becomes very expansive and talks in a very relaxed and spontaneous fashion, peppering his krishna commentaries with manifold anecdotes from life and shows to me his great capacity as an orator - i say, during his speech, he says that we have all heard the call to krishna consciousness and have been set inexorably along that path, whether we know it or not at present. that is the inescapable ultimate goal of all beings - to end the onerous cycle of birth and death, to attain the Godhead, to return to Krishna. "all we have to do is make the choice to devote our lives to krishna in this lifetime and we can escape from the cycle forever". at first i wanted to be open and to listen to and perhaps to learn from and understand other walks of life, but something inside grew restless upon hearing tattva's unflagging infatuation with the goal of ending the cycle of reincarnation and the phrase "reglious fanatic" fluttered into my consciousness, and i saw danny outside and went out and asked her what she thought of this place.
it is a comfortable feeling to have a place to sleep at night and good food to eat, and there is plenty of varied tasks to do during the day - so far i have been helped weeding and planting in the garden, i spent a whole day fetching buckets of sand and gravel and mixing concrete to repair the front entrance, i spent another whole day assembling a life-size model representation of the different stages of life - from baby birth to old man falling down upon his stick to a recumbent skeleton - a popular hare krishna symbol showing the transitory nature of this life of the body.
tattva's girth errs on the generous side and i had questions regarding his daily routine when i first arrived (the question "who are you?" is generally silently on everybody's lips when they meet another person, although it is usually preceded by the question "where are you from?", which also gives a hint of an identity and is more straightforward to answer) danny said that she asked tattva and he told her that he grew up in chicago "though that seems like a different life..." ; his accent still drawls in a midwestern way, slightly discernible even when he is chanting in sanskrit. as the days went by, i discovered that tattva in fact has an unusual energy, almost never stops to rest, is as willing to put his back into hard physical labour as any of us, and is a never-ceasing fountain of new projects and clear ideas about what he wants. he also is an aesthetician (i mean he pays attention to what looks good) he says things like "ah, leave those old logs where they are...they look good propped up against the stone". caring about what looks good must be the cause of the large aesthetic appeal of the place. when i said i liked to paint tattva was immediately interested. even when i said i would take part in a full moon procession around a mountain in tamil nadu over christmas, and probably wouldn't come back, he told me how much would like me to paint the garden shed, "i could even give you some money, you know...it doesn't have to be a wwoofer thing"
trisha visited for a few days and shook a tambourine during puja (devotional chanting) and helped me to clear out the house where i would stay on top of the hill a few minutes from the temple. she said "the religious attitude is essentially the same all over isn't it? i grew up going to catholic mass, and it feels very similar to the way we show devotion to krishna here" i had also thought of the parallel experience of attending the liturgies at the orthodox monastary in france a year ago. solemnity and shaking of incense.
how can anybody know that our souls can enter other material bodies here on earth after our deaths? it is a question that is thrown up for our consideration, but how does one attain certainty of knowledge on that matter? that is perhaps something which unites all religious beliefs - a knowledge, a certainty, a faith in the big questions of the wherefore of life and what happens after death.
another general feature of religions and something which i like - when religion is at is best - its attempt to recognise the Divine Essence of Life.
my friend anita has questions regarding the use of religious language to describe the everyday. this language exists and what meaning are we going to give to it? what words are we going to use to describe this experience? there are many differently nuanced ways of say the same essential thing. Sacred Life = life is very special = i am filled with wonder by the Life Principle, the life principle overawes me.
life, yes
jenny from montreal arrived and did not attend the puja and said she finds the lack of genuine freedom of expression stifling in such gatherings. so while evening puja goes on we climb up to the temple roof where we can hear the soft chanting from below and where we can dance freely under the brightness of the moon and see the stars coming out and the surrounding wooded hills becoming darker.
therefore when the eye communication becomes too piercing i look straight ahead, conscious but unheeding. i have actually realised how strange a person i must be, often provoking eyes of surprise. i cannot hope to blend in, i will always be a wandering maverick.
i rolled into bangalore this morning, on the night train from mangalore. i arrived too late at the ticket office to reserve a bunk on the sleeper class so could only buy a general class ticket, which some people told me is overcrowded and uncomfortable and best avoided. i didn't mind it so much. it cost 110 rupees (something like one pound thirty pence) for twelve hours of train. first of all i got on the sleeper carriage anyway. when the uniformed ticket controller found me sitting by the doorway with my general class ticket he talked with some passion to his companion, making gestures in my direction and using the words euro and dollar. i felt that he probably disapproved of me sitting on the train floor with my barefeet and my old rucksack and not making the effort to wear a clean new shirt, when i probably come from a country where i am afforded the opportunity to earn good money and present myself better and conduct myself more respectfully. the train stopped somewhere in the dark and me and other general class ticket holders were barked out of the doorway into the night onto the sharp railway track rocks "come go to last carriage!"
i was ready for the general class; i liked the feeling of everybody hunkering down together. i found a space by the door and rolled out my sleeping mat and pulled out my hindi notes or got to dozing and felt myself lulled by the chug chug chug of the train drifting through the night, at the same time overhearing the people going to the toilet next to me and spitting into the sink and overlooking my slumber with their protective gazes. i was sitting on a bench looking over my hindi notes at mangalore station when a man leaned heavily over my shoulder and joined me in scrutinizing my rendering of the devanagri script: aaj aapki taviyat kaisi hai? (what is your health like today?) he wanted to know where i came from and why i was learning hindi. why was i learning hindi when i already speak english and english is a language spoken all over india? the phrase "a love of languages" swam into my head but i had the feeling that would not satisfy him. i had the feeling that i could not give him a satisfactory account of why i had chosen to come to india. "you want to meet indian girls?" he suggested, "you like indian girls?" well, yes, indian girls seem nice, but i haven't really got to know any, but ...indian girls are beside the point, i wanted to say to him. he wanted to know my cell phone number he wanted to know my facebook name, "why?" i asked him. "i want to chat with you" but i had become somewhat irritated by his forceful way of barking questions and i waved him away and boarded my train.
i rolled into bangalore this morning, reputedly the third biggest city in india. what is the difference between india and India? India looks more important, e.g. The High Commission of India.
india is just india.
still, india though...
india is india is some place. groves of palm trees slide past shimmering in the morning sun. people standing arms crossed are framed momentarily looking up at me looking out from the open door of the train. i see a woman poking with a stick among the rubbish and wonder what the purpose of her poking can be. occasionally childs wave to me enthusiastically. (why children? ...it is not worth asking the wherefore of the irregular pluralren, or any other grammatical irregularityren, of the english language) the side of the railroad is strewn evenly with plastic bags and other plastic paraphernalia as if somebody had displayed them there for some decorative purpose. as we near the city the dry weeds have occasionally been set on fire and the air is impregnated with the blackened acrid stench of burning plastic. an uncomfortable feeling entered me when i was told to sling all the old plastic piping in the big hole in the woods "and then we'll set it on fire" said tattva, the headman of bhaketivedanta ecovillage where i have been living for the past week. the next day the filthy odor billowed through the air and i mused on the misnomer of the term ecovillage. i said to tattva "surely burning the plastic is the worst thing to do? if there are no recycling facilities, and it cannot be reused, then why not just let it lie in the hole? better than polluting the atmosphere with those toxic gases". tattva talked about how twenty years ago when the community had been set up they were full of goals of ecological responsibility but over the years they have realised that people want their comforts and nobody wants to participate in an alternative alternative way of doing things which avoids the accumulation of plastic waste. "if we didn't burn it, you know, we would have to dig many holes all over the forest, and its not cheap to hire a digger to come up here and dig holes for us"
bhaktivedanta is set amid stunning special trees and rolling hilly land. it is quite isolated, about three kilometres of bumpy track through deep old forest and then another thirteen kilometres of potholed twisty downhill road to kollur, the nearest village. tattva said when he first drove along that road in the eighties there were no other vehicles. instead, there were leopards which became illuminated by the headlamps at night. once one was caught leaping across the road chasing a deer before the headlamps startled it and sent it away. it was a difficult place for me to find when i first arrived. i had phoned when i arrived in kollur, but could only speak to somebody whose english i did not understand easily. in the end, i got on a bus heading up the hill and got off somewhere not knowing where and began flagging down cars and asking people, and eventually got directions. very few people knew the name bhaktivedanta; nor was the term ecovillage very helpful. now i realise that hare krishna temple would have been the best label by which to identify the place.
i had already said hello to US volunteer danny and by the plate cupboard before prasada - food which has first been consecrated by being offered to Krishna - the first evening i had arrived, but it wasn't until the second day when she was watering the garden with the hose in the morning that i asked her, "can i ask you what you think of this place"
"really weird" came her quitely resolute response.
hmmm, i was sort of beginning to think along the same lines. there was a certain quality of oddness about the place. it is undeniably a beautiful place, a special spot, a special flourishing of abundant nature. i joined the wedding party one day on the trek down to the waterfall; two hours through the deep forest, picking our trail carefully, the women in their saris carefully descending the steep sections to arrive at the ring of cliffs, ringed by sprawling forest and trailing vines and there to gaze in wonder at the curtain of water particles which start as flowing liquid water but gradually turn into shifting mesmerizing clouds of spray before lashing the rocks at the bottom.
praveem clamboured round the base of the cliffs and dislodged a long gleaming black snake which then slithered away to a hidden recess in the rock. beholding its sinuous passage, i felt the snake's slithering energy slide into the scene and added to the magic of the hissing waterfall. the woman then got out a big pot of spicy rice and ladeled it into everyone's outstretched hands. i told the woman that i was surprised that the rice was warm but she thought i meant "hot, spicy". i said "yes, it is nice and spicy, but the temperature is also warm... did you heat it up or was it just left in the pot in the sun??" but they did not get my line of questioning, so my comment had to remain ....mmm delighty and spicy.
it is hard to believe the temple is less than twenty years old; tattva said he lived under a sheet of plastic during his first year. the wooden old hardwood carved columns must have been imported here from some other time, lending the temple its air of oldness. when i first arrived i thought that the statue of prabhupada - the founder of the hare krishna movement - was probably a real person sitting in silent meditation but perhaps aware of my cautious movements. it took me a while to muster the audacity to look directly into his reposed semi-closed statue eyes. tattva is the initiator and head man of the community or village. neither term really seems adequate. i think many people have lived and do come to visit the place at times, but since i arrived there has only been tattva and a handful of volunteers and other local residents who arrive on mopeds to work during the day and other visitors who have came and left. and a wedding party of twenty who came and spent two days. tattva says that prabhupada recommended that hare krishna devotees get back to simple living off the land. tattva says that if you come to chant mantras of devotion of krishna with a pure heart you will not feel tired. he gets up at half four every morning to begin chanting. i have never made those early morning sessions, but later in the morning, about seven or eight, the young russian couple often gather, and praveen - the indian with the hairstyle slightly reminiscent of a pineaple - will play the drum, and i have picked up the little symbols and clanged them together and listened to the hare krishna chanting and seen tattva at the front alter rotating something that looks like a feather duster, or rotating incense sticks, in devotion to krishna, or bringing round the candles for us to place our hands over and then touch our heads. sometimes everybody gets down on knees with head on ground and responds with "jai!" to the lead mantra. after that tattva reads from the srimad bhagavantam - principal holy scripture of krishna devotees - first in sanskrit and everybody does their best to repeat, then in english. in the email with the information, tattva writes that anybody is welcome to volunteer regardless of their religious persuasion, but during the exposition part of the text - where tattva becomes very expansive and talks in a very relaxed and spontaneous fashion, peppering his krishna commentaries with manifold anecdotes from life and shows to me his great capacity as an orator - i say, during his speech, he says that we have all heard the call to krishna consciousness and have been set inexorably along that path, whether we know it or not at present. that is the inescapable ultimate goal of all beings - to end the onerous cycle of birth and death, to attain the Godhead, to return to Krishna. "all we have to do is make the choice to devote our lives to krishna in this lifetime and we can escape from the cycle forever". at first i wanted to be open and to listen to and perhaps to learn from and understand other walks of life, but something inside grew restless upon hearing tattva's unflagging infatuation with the goal of ending the cycle of reincarnation and the phrase "reglious fanatic" fluttered into my consciousness, and i saw danny outside and went out and asked her what she thought of this place.
it is a comfortable feeling to have a place to sleep at night and good food to eat, and there is plenty of varied tasks to do during the day - so far i have been helped weeding and planting in the garden, i spent a whole day fetching buckets of sand and gravel and mixing concrete to repair the front entrance, i spent another whole day assembling a life-size model representation of the different stages of life - from baby birth to old man falling down upon his stick to a recumbent skeleton - a popular hare krishna symbol showing the transitory nature of this life of the body.
tattva's girth errs on the generous side and i had questions regarding his daily routine when i first arrived (the question "who are you?" is generally silently on everybody's lips when they meet another person, although it is usually preceded by the question "where are you from?", which also gives a hint of an identity and is more straightforward to answer) danny said that she asked tattva and he told her that he grew up in chicago "though that seems like a different life..." ; his accent still drawls in a midwestern way, slightly discernible even when he is chanting in sanskrit. as the days went by, i discovered that tattva in fact has an unusual energy, almost never stops to rest, is as willing to put his back into hard physical labour as any of us, and is a never-ceasing fountain of new projects and clear ideas about what he wants. he also is an aesthetician (i mean he pays attention to what looks good) he says things like "ah, leave those old logs where they are...they look good propped up against the stone". caring about what looks good must be the cause of the large aesthetic appeal of the place. when i said i liked to paint tattva was immediately interested. even when i said i would take part in a full moon procession around a mountain in tamil nadu over christmas, and probably wouldn't come back, he told me how much would like me to paint the garden shed, "i could even give you some money, you know...it doesn't have to be a wwoofer thing"
trisha visited for a few days and shook a tambourine during puja (devotional chanting) and helped me to clear out the house where i would stay on top of the hill a few minutes from the temple. she said "the religious attitude is essentially the same all over isn't it? i grew up going to catholic mass, and it feels very similar to the way we show devotion to krishna here" i had also thought of the parallel experience of attending the liturgies at the orthodox monastary in france a year ago. solemnity and shaking of incense.
how can anybody know that our souls can enter other material bodies here on earth after our deaths? it is a question that is thrown up for our consideration, but how does one attain certainty of knowledge on that matter? that is perhaps something which unites all religious beliefs - a knowledge, a certainty, a faith in the big questions of the wherefore of life and what happens after death.
another general feature of religions and something which i like - when religion is at is best - its attempt to recognise the Divine Essence of Life.
my friend anita has questions regarding the use of religious language to describe the everyday. this language exists and what meaning are we going to give to it? what words are we going to use to describe this experience? there are many differently nuanced ways of say the same essential thing. Sacred Life = life is very special = i am filled with wonder by the Life Principle, the life principle overawes me.
life, yes
jenny from montreal arrived and did not attend the puja and said she finds the lack of genuine freedom of expression stifling in such gatherings. so while evening puja goes on we climb up to the temple roof where we can hear the soft chanting from below and where we can dance freely under the brightness of the moon and see the stars coming out and the surrounding wooded hills becoming darker.
