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