The respective psychological states of Tom and Delhi: a comparison

I've been in a bit of a daze for the last few days. It's pretty hard to describe, but I'd classify it as a mix of restlessness and lack of motivation. Most likely they're complimenting each other, due to the fact that they probably originate from the fact that I only have about 2 weeks left in my undergraduate career. So close, but yet still so far: two essays to write in English, along with three exams within the same number of days. It's kind of driving me crazy, and consequently I've found it hard to sit down and firmly commit to getting things done as of late - kind of like a "fit of indecisiveness".

Luckily, this weekend was relatively free on my schedule, and I was able to experience a change of scenery via a trip to Delhi with Jared and John. We've only been here for a day (took a night train and arrived at 6:30 AM), but already I've recieved a good deal of consolation from this city with regards to my recently-emerged character traits, as previously described. You see, just as I've been unable to settle down and make up my mind as to what I'm going to do to be productive, I feel that Delhi is a place that is equally scatter-brained as to its purpose within the country of India, and in the world as a whole.

I think that throughout history, people (very scholarly individuals, I'm sure) seem to have had a tendency to associate human qualities to cities (personification). OK, so maybe Frank Sinatra's referral to New York as the "city that never sleeps" hardly qualifies as a literary device worth of a Nobel Prize in Literature, but you get my point. Well, in light of my recent mental state, I've been inspired to classify Delhi as a city with a touch of schizophrenia, that just can't seem to get it's own identity straight. On one hand, it's a place where people are thought to have lived for thousands of years - most notably, the Islamic occupants of India used it as their capital for the better part of 500 years, firmly establishing it as a place of political centrality and importance. Culturally, however, it's always been a place of diversity, with a number of religious and thought systems being interchangeably dominant over the centuries. For example, Hindu religion and culture, while being the dominant philosophy in the area up to the 12th century AD, was somewhat superseded by the Muslim and British hegemonies that controlled the area in the following 900-year period.

Independence in 1947 firmly re-established Delhi's place at the centre of Indian politics, culture and society as a whole. As far as I can see, it continues to maintain it's traditional role as a political centre in 2008 - in this sense, it's identity is confident and established. However, as I toured the city with my friends on foot and in rickshaw, I noticed that Western culture had gained a firmer foothold here than in any other place I've seen in India so far. Whether you look at the GQ-esque styles that youths are modelling, or the American magazines on display in high-end boutique plazas, it seems that Delhi's definitive role as a centre of Indian culture is disintegrating. Alternatively, maybe it never was a place where a distinct Indian culture was showcased - perhaps it was the stronghold of a type of syncretism, where different traditions from different places came and synthesized into the closest thing that this country has ever had to it's own definitive identity. Either way, Delhi, like myself, is unsure of itself - political centre of one of the world's next great superpowers, sure, but cultural protector against the infringement of foreign ideals? Not quite so confident on that one.

Anways, enough of that philosophizing; I'm not going to edit the past few paragraphs in any way, shape, or form, out of fear that they will make absolutely no sense, and thus represent a half hour totally wasted. I'd like to dedicate the last bit of this blog to a much more important subject - namely, the awesomeness of my host family in Jaipur, the Mathurs. They've been absolutely wonderful, and have made me feel at home to the extent that I feel like I've been there for the majority of the semester, and not only a mere month. Not only is their house huge and beautiful, and the meals excellent, but they have treated Jared and I like sons, and have even accomodated some of our friends on occasion, whether for a single dinner or room and board for an entire weekend. Forget the Taj Mahal and Fort Jodhpur - the memories that I'll really retain from this trip will be of this house, and people within it (Yogesh, Delilah, Anjana, Ruchika, Cheeku, Reena, Neehal, Anita - you know who you are, please forgive my spelling!)

Increasingly bad grammar and utilization of spell check indicates that my 4 hours of sleep on the train last night is losing it's ability to sustain my consciousness; therefore, I'm gonna jet. As I said earlier, exams are coming up quickly, so I may only get one more post in before I leave for Thailand on April 14th. Although it may be a short post, I'll try to get up my itinerary for the next couple months, in the very least.

Cheers everyone,
Tom

Tour buses, hot showers, and camel safaris

I'm starting to realize that regardless of how incredible a time one can have when he/she is playing the tourist, the experience is almost always tainted by their apparent need to bring along some of the amneties of home. In some cases, we're even inspired to invent our own types of "exotic luxuries" - an example of which is the camel safari. This sentiment may come as a bit of a shock to my fellow group members, as I didn't voice any dissaproval of last night's desert outing at the time. However, after thinking it over a bit, I've developed a bit of a negative view of how this very popular tourist activity seems to be currently practiced.

Probably the most salient negative impact of camel safaris, from what I saw, was environmental. Although the scenery was beautiful (the terrain that we covered in an approx. 4 hour trek ranged from scrubland to sand dunes), it was quite often defaced by garbage (the prominence of empty water bottles hinted that tourists were largely to blame for this). Also, although I'm no soil scientist, I seem to recall hearing that sand dunes are delicate formations, that perenially endangered by frequent animal contact (hence the instances of cordoned-off dunes that you'll often see at beaches). Sure, you could say that wild cames have been roaming through the desert since the beginning of time, and these piles of sand have remained intact throughout that pretty-long period. But tourism has surely increased the utilization of specific routes throughout the Thar desert, in this specific instance, which can't be any good in my amateur opinion.

My second major critique is related to the always-fiery topic of child employment. A good portion (if not the majority) of our guides were kids or adolescents, I'd say ranging from about 8 to 16 years of age. My particular escort was 15, and despite a significant language barrier, I was able to have a pretty good conversation with him. Turns out he was a 5 year veteran, having worked with the company (presumably not making a significant portion of the overall profits) since he was 10. Now hear me out: I understand the need for teenagers to drop out of school in some instances, whether due to pressing financial needs or a total lack of desire to participate in academia. But 10 years old? As I mentioned a couple sentances ago, I also saw kids that looked like they could have been as young as 8. Should we support an enterprise that employs kids at this age, in light of the fact that they'd surely be making more of a future for themselves achieving the most basic levels of education? Or, contrary to that rhetoric, is it important to realize that the income from those jobs is a crucial lifeline for their families? I'm a bit more stuck on this one.

So far, the justifications for my disapproval have been based mostly on objective reasoning, regarding socio-economic-environmental impacts. Although, when I push my conscience aside, I recall having a pretty darn good time on the trek, there were a few things that made me feel like I was participating in an activity designed for 65-year-old tour bus tourists from Mississauga. Especially notable was the after-dinner music performance that we had. Although this initially appeared to be pretty authentic, the singing to the tune of "Frere Jaques" (pardon my French, literally) at the end of the night, incorporating some corny lyrics about "enjoying chipatis and daal amongst the dunes", tainted what could have been an enlightening cultural performance. In summation, even the "carnal utility" that I derived from the trek was limited, in addition to my moral objections.

That said, my time in Jaisalmer has been a blast, despite being short (still only 3 days). I spent the better part of this afternoon taking a tour through the Maharaja's palace in the city fort which also contains my hotel. The traditional rulers of this area, the Rajputs, have a pretty rich - if violent at times - history, largely due to the scope of culture-sharing ("syncretism") with different people groups, such as the Mughals. It's off to Jodhpur, another town with a renowned fort (I love forts!), tomorrow, and then back to Jaipur for a final 2 weeks of classes.

Cheers,
Tom

P.S. I'd love to get your feedback on some of the stuff that I've written - It's been far from a normative account by any stretch of the imagination! Hit up the "comment" option, and tell me whether you agree with my sentiments, or think I'm out of my mind.

A quick note on social order in India

If I was in the mood to be concise, the text of this post would consist of the following: "social order" constitutes an oxymoron in this part of the world. But, as you've already learned, I naturally lack the ability to be succinct; therefore, I'm going to delve into a "short" anecdote.

Today is a holiday in India - specifically, the celebration of Shiva's birthday (something to think about: what would be economic state of this country be, if there was a public holiday for the birthday of every god and goddess? Thank goodness this isn't the case!). As this dictated that we didn't have to go to school, Jared and I decided it would be a good idea to take a gander over to Motidungari Fort, a massive colonial-era structure that dominates the skyline of Jaipur. This fort is somewhat unique, in that as well as containing the massive walls, guard towers, etc. that structures of this type are usually characterized by, it also houses a temple. As it happens, Mahashivaratrii (the birthday of Shiva) is a special day for this temple, in that it is the only day of the year which it is open to the public.

Think about what that means. A Shiva temple that is only open to the public one day every year.

Alright - if you didn't get it already, I'm elucidating pure, utter chaos. As has generally happened in various instances throughout this trip, Jared and I quickly made friends with a couple of guys at the bottom of the line (which was ginormous) to get into this place, and they invited us to stand with them in what quickly became apparent was the girl's queue (this type of segregation is common over here). From the relatively calm and serene domain of the fairer sex, we proceeded to observe the insanity that occured in the boys lines. Most notably, the guys would wait calmly in line for about 5 minutes, chatting amongst themselves normally, and then suddenly start yelling and pushing each other further up the path in what resembled some kind of schizophrenic fit of ADHD. After a few seconds, they'd revert back to civilization, and repeat the madness soon thereafter. In the end, this pattern proved conducive to Jared and I getting past the security check: when a cop finally told us to move out of the girls line (how'd he tell?), we proceeded to flow into the guys' line during one of these outbursts, and blend in as much as any pasty-white Canadian can hope to.

I'm sorry to say that this story doesn't have an overly happy ending - Jared and I didn't even end up going to the temple. Becca and Leah, a couple of friends from our study group, had managed to somehow "convince" the guards to let them pass the queue altogether, and after wandering up to the top of the hill to the temple, came back and informed us that we had at least a couple more hours to wait. So we made like bananas and split, before even coming close to our final objective. At the very least, however, the experience proved to be an informative lesson in how Indians "get-er-done". For that reason, I think it was worth it.

Oh, a quick note on my host family, although I'm sure a short summary can hardly do them justice. They are the Mathurs, and they live in really sweet digs - a wicked old early-20th century behemoth of a house. It's a non-nuclear type of family, in that a few extended family members all live under the same roof. Kind of like a granny-flat type situation, but just x3 and with younger people. We live with a sweet housekeeper named Anjana, who makes delicious food, and that man of the house is a freakin retired colonel!

More on the family/city later. Better get back to this paper that I've been procrastinating on for 3 weeks, and by that I mean I'd better go look at Facebook for the umteenth time.

Cheers
Tom

Back to the grind...well sort of

You're probably fuming after reading that heading. "Shut up Tom, you tool! You're in India, and you're complaining about work, while the rest of us slog through 4 feet of snow every morning, just to reach the Guelph Transit stop where we'll inevitably freeze before the bloody bus shows up? How dare you whine about the so-called 'schoolwork' you're engaged in over there!"

Your point is well taken. However, you don't know how hard it is for me to motivate myself while I'm constantly surrounded by samosa stalls, bicycle rickshaws and stunning historical architecture and other specimens (I'm not a nerd....)! Speaking of historical artifacts, I'm been on quite the whirlwind tour of North Indian Lonely Planet-reccomended sites since the stop in Varanasi. Our first stop in the journey west was at Orcha (spelling?), a little town whose claim to fame is a couple of spectacular palaces ("mahals"), including one built for the great Mughal emperor Jahangir. The next day, we took a fairly grueling 4-hour bus ride out to a place called Khajuraho, which is renowned for it's intricately-carved temples. Perhaps a segway into one of my trademark in-blog imaginary dialogues would help describe the latter experience more fully:

Q: Tom, how many temples have you been to already? Isn't it starting to get old? Why do you continue to bore us?
A: These temples were different, though! There's a reason that Jet Airways flies Boeing 767's into an town of 3000 people - that is, the temples are covered with not just any old carvings, but one's depicting people having sex!

Q: OK, so the temples have erotic carvings. So what? Why would stupid Westerners pay 300 bucks to fly out to some middle-of-nowhere town to see something they can get in much greater detail on HBO?
A: I dunno...Westerners are stupid?

I think I went over this conversation with my imaginary friend about 50 times during this day trip. Sure, the temples are immaculate, but so are countless others throughout this country, and foreigners don't invade them nearly this viciously. For some reason, just because 10% of the the depictions on the 6-odd temples are erotic (figure courtesy of Jared Wohlgemut Estimations Inc.), they become more interesting to fat-pocketed (as well as not-so-fat-pocketed) tourists. What does that say about our Western cultures? I suppose many people imagine ancient cultures as being generally more conservative than many current societies when it comes to sexuality (largely true, in plenty of cases), and thus find it quite interesting that such explicit scenes could be depicted on 1100-year old buildings. OK, fair enough. But there are so many other unique, engaging aspects of Indian culture that go largely unnoticed by people outside of it. Is there a certain shock factor related to these carvings, that can't be found in other mediums, and thus explains their relative popularity? I'm sure this is a factor too. I could go on forever about this, but I'm not going to. I'll leave you with the Wikipedia link to an article on the temples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khajuraho), and you can make some judgements for yourselves.

Considering I started this section as a chronological outline of my travels in the past week, the last 2-odd paragraphs probably represent one of the greatest tangents in the history of blogging. But hey, would it really be the "tomosutra" without a sexy topic of controversy? The next site we visited was slightly less on the carnal side, and more purely romantic: the Taj Mahal. Described by many as the greatest building in the world, I found that it largely met my expectations. Most importantly, it's MASSIVE. Everything is in perfect proportion, and the fact that it's made entirely of white marble boggles the mind. The carvings and paintings it contains are far from spectacular when compared to other Indian examples, but I get the feeling the Mughals were less about wussy details, and more about getting the point across that they rocked the world. The fact that it was full of middle-aged tourists who wear little slippers around the building instead of going customarily barefoot somewhat tainted the experience, but not all that significantly. It's one of those places that the fact your there is just as important as anywhere else - and that is generally a pretty cool feeling.

Oh yeah, as I was getting at in the first paragraph: I'm in Jaipur now, living with my host family and re-commencing my studies. That in greater detail later though...it's 11 PM, and I still have quite a bit of work to do.

Ciao,
Tom