Tag: India

yoga dream

by L. Valdez Karl

For Sale in Kerala, South India

AN EXCELLENT NAALUKETTU IN A COMPOUND OF OVER THREE ACRES

LOCATED ABOUT HALF KILOMETERS FROM PALGHAT / SHORNUR 4 LANE ROAD AT MANKARA. THE COMPLEX CONSISTS OF THE MAIN HOUSE WITH WELL VENTILATED ROOMS, AN ADDITIONAL KITCHEN BLOCK, 2 LARGE WELLS, A PAVED WATER TANK (KOLLAM) WITH SHED, AN OVERHEAD TANK ETC. THE COMPOUND HAS COCONUT, JACK FRUIT, MANGO, GUAVA, CHIKKU, BREAD FRUIT, TAMARIND BESIDES TEAK AND OTHER VARIETY TREES. THE ATMOSPHERE AND AMBIENCE IS SERENE AND FREE FROM NOISE AND DUST POLLUTION. THE WEST GATE CONNECTS TO ROAD, EAST TO THE PADDY FIELDS AND NORTH TO SRIKRISHNA TEMPLE.

PRICE QUOTED RS 1 CRORE 30 LAKH.

I was told that 1 crore and 30 lakh is about $300,000 in US dollars. click on the above link and you’ll see why it is my dream yoga shala.

mmmmmm…I can just imagine having a yoga and meditation center there, bringing in teachers I know like Gehlek Rimpoche, Paul Grilley, Sarah Powers, and Max Strom for retreats….

people have told me that since I love India so much, I should open a yoga shala in South India, along the same lines as shalas in Goa that are run by westerners. however, foreigners can not own property in India, especially property like this which is agricultural.

but one can always dream….

happy independence day, Ma India

by L. Valdez Karl

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7399792002477900458&hl=en

Today is India’s Independence Day. Sixty years ago today the world’s largest democracy was born. This video is a performance of India’s national song.

I have only been to India twice and will return to south India in January 2008 for my third trip. It’s been said that if one is tired of India, one is tired of life.

Good, bad, or indifferent, I love India. When my foot first hit Indian soil, I felt like I had come home. I stepped out of the Chennai airport at about 2 AM, stopping for a few moments to take everything in, just as an animal does when you open the door for its escape — it stops and sniffs the air and you can see its nostrils flare, and the eyes trying to take everything in at once, and you can see the hair rise almost imperceptibly on its neck, before it bounds away, never to look back. I felt free and powerful and alive. That night was my independence day.

There is not a day that goes by since I returned from my first trip that I do not think about India, the people I met there, the experiences I’ve had. My fourth and fifth trips are seeds in my mind’s garden, waiting to sprout — Rajasthan, then the Kumbh Mela. I travel to India alone, a solo female traveler of a certain age, which is just the way I like it.

Home is where the heart is, and my heart is in India.

good blogs and good laughs

by L. Valdez Karl

Taking a break from writing about serious things, I want to highlight some good stuff I’ve read lately:

Flower Girl’s Rural India
Flower Girl’s blog is “all about Indian culture and customs, religion and rituals”. Her latest post is about the boat races in Kerala. Kerala is a state in India that’s on the Arabian Sea completely on the opposite side of south India from where I always go, and where I will spend 5 days in January doing yoga, getting ayurvedic massages, and hopefully ride an elephant!

Flower Girl also has her other blogs linked to this one, one of which is a blog with all types of Indian food recipes, some of which are to die for!

India Outside My Window is all about “the colors, sights, and sounds of South India.” What is nice about this blog is that there are sound clips where you can listen to the sounds of India. The one clip I listened to was the train — I closed my eyes and listened and it took me back to my train ride from Rameswaram to Chennai, when we stopped in the stations and I heard the chai and food vendors calling out what they had for sale.

Shirley Two Feathers’ blog Mandala Madness is “an eclectic mixture of mandala art, poetry, and inspirational quotes to expand, enrich, and enliven your experience in the now moment.”

Images like this one can be downloaded to use as your computer’s wallpaper and you can also buy mandala prints.

I’ve written before about Scott Carney’s blog “Trailing Technology” (see blog links in the sidebar) and his latest post is about singing. In that post you’ll find this link to his story on NPR radio: A culture of song in India’s Tamil Nadu.

Scott says, “I love the radio in Chennai. When I’m driving around the city I always tune into FM rainbow and listen to a daily game show called Aantakshri. The game is really simple. One caller starts singing a few bars of a song. They stop and then repeat the last sound from the last line of the song. The second caller starts singing some other song that starts with that last sound. It’s sort of like musical chairs, but with singing.”

It’s very true that if you stop and listen hard enough, you’ll hear someone’s voice singing somewhere amongst the cacophony of the dogs barking, the car horns blaring, and the temple music on the Chennai streets.

Home is where the heart is and my heart is in India.

If you like MadTV watch this episode . Michael McDonald’s character, the rotund and always hilarious, Marvin Tikva, takes a yoga class. I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair.

For those of you who know The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, this video needs no explanation. Jamie plays a substitute yoga teacher and most of the students in the class get “X-ed” — watch the expressions on the students’ faces!

Finally, scroll all the way to the bottom of this blog and you’ll see my Meez 3D ID. It’s not animated here, but if you want your own little animated version of you — and who wouldn’t? — click on the link and get your own. It’s free and enter my code “lindias” so we both can get some “coinz”.

Enjoy!

one is too much

by L. Valdez Karl

India has a culture that worships the Feminine Divine such as Durga, Kali, and Parvati…a country whose ancient religion celebrates the union of Shiva and Shakti, where some depictions of Shiva show him as half-man, half-woman…the yin/yang that we all are…

Shunned from society, widows flock to city to die

If any of you have seen the movie Water, the above story will be familiar to you. Deepa Mehta was forced to film her movie in Sri Lanka because of the fundamentalist protests against the depiction of this subject in her movie. However, the plot of Water takes place in 1930s India, and the CNN story takes place now.

Indian widows, dowry deaths, female infanticide….for all of its “modernization” or “westernization”, whatever you want to call it, there are still aspects of India that make me shake my head. These are controversial subjects, and these practices are certainly NOT supported by the vast majority of Indians, but to burn even ONE bride, to abort even ONE fetus merely because of its gender, or to turn out even ONE widow is too much.

I know that a news story like this inflames passions, and I thought about whether I should post the CNN story. People are sensitive about how their countries or cultures are portrayed. The reporter’s tone is sensationalistic and the implication is that the majority of widows are treated like this, and that is not the case. However, that does not take away from the fact that the story is grounded in reality. The topic is something that should be thought about, along with the 50 MILLION WOMEN ARE MISSING PROJECT, a project started in India by an Indian woman (see earlier posts.)

To those of you who are upset about this Western portrayal of India, I suggest you channel that anger into something positive and make a donation to The Banyan, a Chennai-based organization “that cares for and rehabilitates homeless women with mental illness found in the streets of Chennai. …The Banyan provides the women a safe shelter, care, medical attention, and a supportive environment to enable them to recover and to take responsibility for their lives again.”

Instead of leaving negative comments on blogs or the CNN website, put your money where your mouths are and donate some rupees and dollars.

India is not all yoga, spirituality, and vedic chants. It’s a country and culture that has beautiful and wondrous aspects at the same time that terrible things happen — and that makes it just like any other country, mine included.

We are all yin and yang — the dark spot in the light, the light inside the dark.

shanti!

cool countdown to India

by L. Valdez Karl

As you can see over at the sidebar, I’ve installed a countdown clock — my countdown for my third trip to India in days, hours, minutes, and seconds! But who’s counting?…:)

I booked my flight today — leave for Chennai in December and will spend most of January in 2008 in Tamil Nadu. First week, yoga school in Chennai for private lessons, then travel by train to Thanjavur area and Kerala. This time definitely one and maybe two of my yoga students will come with me, taking the classes with me. I’ve also been invited to a wedding in Chennai where I will wear a sari! I’ve always wanted to see how I would look in a beautiful sari…

AAARGH! I haven’t even finished blogging about my SECOND trip!

The wave of feeling that I felt when I clicked “book flight” on the Lufthansa website could only be described as “I’m going home…”

Also in the sidebar is a little award graphic announcing that this blog has been selected as Coolpick.com’s Cool Site of the Day! Coolpick says that every day they pick “one extremely high cool factor web site worthy of your esteemed clickage” so that’s me!

Woo-hoo! I’m cool in cyberspace! And at my age!

shanti!

a holding pattern

by L. Valdez Karl

WOO! It’s been a while since I’ve posted my musings and rants and it’s time to get off my lazy yoga butt (the “yoga butt” I’m supposed to get by doing yoga ONLY 20 MINUTES PER DAY! according to some fitness magazines), but just want to let my yoga peeps know that I have a plethora of posts percolating in this old mind….

like finishing up my stories from my March 2006 trip to India, telling you about my plans for India for December and January 2008, my 10 day silent vipassana retreat that I took at the end of December (the story of which might make you cry or smile), and my recent training with Sarah Powers at the Chicago Yoga Center. All these stories are swirling in my mind like the skirt of a Rajasthani dancer…but all in due time, kiddos…

I will be posting about my three days next week with HH the Dalai Lama in Madison, Wisconsin…three days of teachings and a public address. If being with the Dalai Lama wasn’t enough, I’ll be meeting a fellow moderator from the website IndiaMike who is flying in from New York for His Holiness’ teachings. The fab thing about the internet is that it brings us new friendships, and I have made a few along the cyberpath. So it will be very cool to finally put a face to the user name…from our backstage conversations at IndiaMike it already appears that we are twins seperated at birth!

namaste!

I heart Rameswaram

by L. Valdez Karl

I arrived in Rameswaram about 3 pm on a Saturday after a 7 hour car ride from Kodaikanal. The ride was interesting as I watched India flash by. . .being caught in a “cattle crossing”, eating lunch for 10 rupees at a tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere where the proprietor took me in his kitchen to show me what he was cooking since he did not speak English. I can’t remember what it was called, all I remember is that it was delicious. I was famished and scarfed it down as all four people in the restaurant stood around my table with big smiles and watched me eat.

Got to the Hotel Tamil Nadu in Rameswaram, showered, and took a nap. Woke up about 5 pm and was going to walk to the temple and find dinner somewhere. The phone rang — being alone in India, getting a call in my hotel room was shocking — and a man told me “if you want to see the temple, I can take you.” Still groggy from my nap, I thought how did he know that’s what I’m going to do? I babbled something like who are you, who’s calling, where are you, what….? The man said he was downstairs at the desk, and I said, yeah, whatever, and hung up.

I got downstairs, still trying to wake up, and there was the clerk behind the desk and another man waiting, as if just for me. I had my torn out page from the Rough Guide that said “R. Kannen, who can also be contacted through the Hotel Tamil Nadu, happily gives foreigners advice, even if they do not use his services.” I asked the hotel clerk if he knew R. Kannen, and he pointed to the man who appeared to be waiting for me and said, “this is Kannen”. Wow. He materialized out of nowhere. But how did he know exactly what time I was going to leave? Ah…delicious serendipity. No….most likely he got the call, “foreigner in da house, come on over!” I stood there, thinking go with the flow, whatever happens tonight, happens…

As it turned out, I spent about 4 hours with Kannen that night. We went to the Gandhamadana Parvatam, where I took pictures of a beautful sunset, and to the Nambunayagi Amman Kali Temple, where I saw a man with a pet egret, and sat with him as he fed it worms he dug for in the sand. Kannen and I planned my weekend all within one hour — I was to spend it with him.

As we were driving back, Kannen asked me if I wanted to see the children dance — of course I did! We stopped at what looked like a school, the yard filled to the brim with people — local business people, politicians, parents, and children. The little girls were dressed in their beautiful South Indian dance attire, their hair and makeup perfect. One little girl was so beautiful I wanted to take her picture, but there were so many people, I got pushed along with the crowd. We ended up at the back of a long, narrow lot.

So many people, and me, the only westerner, once again. But the difference between where I was now and where I had been in the morning, Kodaikanal, was amazing. The energy, the attitude, the graciousness, was totally different from Kodaikanal. I did not feel claustrophobic here, even in this crowd of people.

We sat down and after a number of speeches, the show began. Little girls and boys dancing beautifully, carefully, with a few missteps that added to the charm, music that blasted my ears. Unfortunately I was sitting too far back to take any decent pictures. Then one group of kids dressed in street clothes started dancing to music I recognized from a Vijay movie. The only Vijay movies I had seen were on the Lufthansa flights from Germany to Chennai, but I know who Vijay is — a very popular Tamil actor. You’ve heard of Bollywood? Tamil movies are Tollywood with their own set of popular stars.

There was a group of boys sitting behind me and as soon as the Vijay music started, they got up on their chairs, and started clapping and dancing, hooting and hollering. I got up and started to take pictures. Of course that started a riot! “Madam, Madam, take me, take me!” I yelled “dance like Vijay!”, and put my hand to my forehead in the gesture Vijay uses in his movies. All their eyes got wide and suddenly I was in the midst of hip shaking, pelvic thrusting Vijays. It could not have been choregraphed any better. As soon as I took a picture, they all ran over to me wanting to see it, then ran back to start dancing again. I loved it. Kodaikanal was already a distant memory. The people in the immediate area weren’t watching the stage anymore, they were watching all this commotion and laughing.

We all sat down again to watch the show, and by this time of night, I was exhausted. Kannen asked me if I was OK, and I said we should go back, since I was dead on my feet, and we had an early morning walk to Danushkodi the next day. We started walking toward the front, but people were sitting on the ground, shoulder to shoulder. It was packed and not an inch of space between them. There was no way we could walk out through the front without doing major damage to someone’s hand or foot on the ground. It was also hard to see because it was pitch black with only the lights on the stage.

We turned around and Kannen asked “can you jump?” “Jump?” “Yes, climb and jump,” and he pointed to the brick wall topped with three strands of barbed wire that was our enclosure. “Sure, why not, what choice do we have?”

Kannen jumped over the wall and I threw him my camera. The wall was about four feet high, barbed wire on top. This woman of a certain age is very flexible so I put one foot on top of the wall. Suddenly I heard a low “ooooohhhhh” coming from all the young Vijays. I grabbed a corner pole as I pulled myself up and put the other foot on top of the wall, straddling the barbed wire. A louder “ooooooohhhhh” now, mass rumbling coming from the Vijays. Louder and louder whispers in Tamil. Now how often do these boys see an American woman straddling barbed wire on top of a brick wall? Making sure my salwar would not catch on the barbed wire, remembering that I had my tetanus shot, and hoping that I would not land in a big pile of whatever, I lept over and landed on my feet in a beautiful squat on the other side.

The young Vijays exploded! Laughing, clapping, cheering me on, fists pumping in the air yelling “Yes, madam!”, as the music blared and the little girls danced on stage, furious swirls of rainbow colors.

I turned around, curtsied, and ran into the Rameswaram night.

kodaikanal, part 1

by L. Valdez Karl

two of the friendlier citizens of Kodaikanal…

I arrived in Kodaikanal and the bus dropped me off in the middle of town. My two old Brahmin friends who discussed yoga philosophy with me bowed their heads and placed their hands in anjali mudra and told me that these “two old jivans” (jivan is a living being – the individual soul which in essence is one with the Universal Soul) were honored to sit next to me and they hoped I would be blessed for the remainder of my trip.

One of the scenarios the old jivan presented to me was this: he looked out the window and waved his hand at the poor people along the way. He said, “what do you think, madam? Why is one man born a king and the other born a beggar? Is that not fate?” I shrugged and said that karma is not fate, it is cause and effect, that karma is karma, no more, no less. I told him that the beggar could very well have been a king in a previous life, and because of his past actions was reborn a beggar, maybe because he treated beggars very poorly when he was a king. A man sitting in front of us turned around and said loudly, “She is right! Karma is karma!”, then said nothing more for the rest of the trip. I smiled because I loved these little Indian vignettes. The two old jivans laughed and discussed karma between themselves, maybe discussing how it was their karma to sit next to an American woman of a certain age who was dressed like an old hippie chick and who was reading an Indian book on meditation.

I was in Kodai only for two nights and I admit that maybe this was too short a time to form a proper opinion. But as of right now, I would not return to Kodai, at least as a solo traveler. I believe Kodai is best visited with other people, unlike the other cities I visited. Despite the beauty of the surroundings compared to the dry Tamil Nadu I was accustomed to, I felt claustrophobic in Kodai, I felt trapped. This was the first city where I felt bored and antsy. One thing that was remarkably different was that I was never besieged by touts or beggars in Kodai – that was a refreshing change! It was interesting how I was in a relatively clean, quiet town with the least amount of people so far, not hassled by touts or beggars, but I felt uncomfortable, and I did not feel that way in maddening Madurai or busy Chennai…maybe it was a past life thing….

The place where I stayed was considered a “resort” and was more for tourist groups or for families. Kodai is known for hiking trails, but I knew I would not feel safe hiking in the hills alone, as I did in the US. The center of town is small and there’s not much to do or see. The connections at the two internet cafes were exceedingly slow. Walking around town I found an ayurvedic store and made an appointment for another ayurvedic massage, hoping it would as wonderful as the one I had in Chennai. I thought it might even be better since the store was run by an ashram – they had a convincing brochure about their services but I should have relied on the old adage about not judging the book by its cover.

When I arrived for my massage, I was taken into the basement of a nearby hotel and was shocked. The basement was cold, damp, and scary, and it really looked like…an unfinished basement. I was taken into a small, dark room that was literally freezing, the first time I had ever felt that sensation in India. I looked around, disgusted. The “masseuse” put an old, ratty towel on the table that was a duplicate version of the one in Chennai, like a doctor’s exam table from the 1950s. Only this time the towel was greasy looking. No way was I going to go through with this massage. This room looked like the photos I remember pre-Roe v. Wade of where a back-alley abortionist would meet his customers.

I told the woman who brought me that the room was disgusting and cold. She turned on a heater that looked like it couldn’t heat up a closet much less a room, and she changed the towel to one that had smaller grease stains. I shook my head and told her in no uncertain terms that I wanted my deposit back NOW. She shrugged, didn’t try to argue, said no problem, and I left. So much for my wonderful ayurvedic massage.

Walking around town introduced me to Tibetans for the first time. The ones I met were open and friendly, very different from the Indians I experienced in Kodai. I found a wonderful Tibetan restaurant where I would hang out enjoying the “warmth”, and I’m not talking about the temperature. Fabulous steamed momos and an awesome soup that was so thick I ate it with a fork, all for less than $1.

As for the general atmosphere of Kodai, I felt an underlying tension, an almost imperceptible violence that was waiting to explode. This was a feeling that I never felt before in my travels and I’m a good one for picking up the “energies” of a place.

An IndiaMiker told me this when I told him my feelings about being in Kodai:

“Most of those people selling fruit and trinkets to tourists in Kodai are tribals. The only other source of employment in the area is the coffee and tea plantations, and the contracts are usually indenture. So they are bonded laborers who try to scrape together a little cash when they aren’t picking leaves or beans–it’s either that or starve. They live with all the caste discrimination and violence you would expect. They’re even included in Human Rights Watch reports. It’s genuinely cold in winter, at which time it also get the monsoon. Roads wash out. Living in a thatched shack isn’t easy.

There are also plenty of monied interests–hotels, property development and luxury real estate, the plantation owners, etc.–that keep a firm hand on Kodai with bribes, violence, and other incentives. The place is really a cesspool of corruption and environmental waste, with the people at the bottom little better than slaves…”

And here I was…

om muruga, goodbye madurai

by L. Valdez Karl

The last stop on the Madurai tour was the Thirupparamkunram Murugan temple, about five miles outside of Madurai. Unfortunately this was much later at night when everyone was tired, hungry, and complaining. Most of the people did not even get off the bus to walk to the temple.

The temple would have been the highlight of my day had it not been the last stop because it is a very important temple, one of the six abodes of Lord Muruga, an important South Indian Tamil god. Many people in the west are familiar with Ganesha, the god with the elephant head who is the son of Shiva and Parvati, but few know that Muruga is his brother. His temple is huge, carved in rock, and it is where Muruga married Deivanai, the divine daughter of Indra. In the main shrine, besides Muruga, the murthis of Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, and Durga are housed. There was no way I could have explored it in the time that was alloted to us, so I had to be satisfied with a quick walk-through. This made me a bit sad because for reasons having to do with someone in my life, I had promised myself that on this trip I would spend time at an important Murugan temple, maybe go to Palani, a town near Kodaikanal. I realized that instead of the bus tour, I should have hired a driver and gone out by myself to spend the better part of a day here. I should have planned my last day more carefully, but I was tired and wanted to rest my brain and leave the planning to someone else, even if it was a bus driver who did not speak English. Oh well…go with the flow, there will be a next time….

Less than 30 minutes was not enough time to explore this temple, so we piled back on the bus and headed back to Madurai, everyone quiet now for the ride home. Despite the heat, the dust, the migraine, the incessant touts that I experienced over these last few days, I again felt at peace here on a bus with strangers in a strange city in a strange land, and I almost fell completely asleep, dozing in and out of yogini dreams.

I woke up to people yelling. We were back in Madurai and people were yelling at the driver again. Apparently he wasn’t dropping people off at their hotels, he was dropping people off wherever he felt like it. It was late, and the streets were crowded with people walking to the Meenakshi Temple so the bus driver had trouble getting through the streets. I watched everything with detachment, as I usually did, a half smile on my face — watching group dynamics and mentally placing bets on who would win, on what the outcome would be.

Every few blocks he would kick people off the bus, and the people would complain as they tried to get autorickshaws to pick them up. Finally it came down to me and an older couple. I started to get off the bus and the husband started arguing with the driver. I assumed he was complaining about not being taken to their hotel, being dropped off in the middle of the street. They got in each others’ faces with much hand waving and head wobbling. It was just another Indian adventure for me. The husband finally got off the bus, the bus left, and the three of us stood in the middle of the street. Suddenly they start speaking to me, perfect English, complaining about the bus and driver. How funny, I thought, that they never said a word to me all the day, yet we had sat across the aisle from each other.

As we commiserated about the driver’s rudeness, the wife gave me their business card. They were from Andra Pradesh, a state north of Tamil Nadu. She was an artist, he ran some type of nature preserve. Two people whom I would haved loved to talk to during the day about two of my favorite subjects, art and nature. They told me to come for a visit…maybe one day…it is these chance encounters with people that I treasure the most from my trips.

They asked if I wanted to share a rickshaw with them, but we were going in opposite directions. I got back to my hotel and spent the rest of the evening in the roof-top restaurant, looking out over the temple complex, digesting not only my dinner, but also what India had taught me so far….more patience, being more present, and detaching from the outcome. Anyone on the yoga path knows that these are qualities that sink a little bit deeper into the consciousness the longer one does the work. But somehow, being here, my heart could open more fully, just as a lotus rises out of the mud and into the light.

Goodbye Madurai, hello Kodaikanal. Om Muruga…lead me from the darkness and into the light….

last day in Madurai

by L. Valdez Karl

My last day in Madurai was uneventful and actually a bit relaxing. I spent the last day on a city tour, going from an old palace to some small temples and a return visit to the Gandhi museum.

The bus picked me up and stopped at other hotels along the way picking up other passengers. An Indian tour bus (or a city to city bus) is usually not decked out with plushy seats, air-con, and a restroom in the back – most of the seats were ripped and frayed, but they were adequately comfortable. Sometimes you have the pleasure of listening to music played full blast through a shabby speaker that is circa 1970, driver’s choice of music, of course. And don’t ask about a rest stop. I settled in and waited for the day’s adventures.

Once again, as is so common during my trips, I am the only westerner on the bus, and I love it this way. Indians stare at all foreigners, that’s just the way it is, and if you are uncomfortable with being stared at everywhere you go, don’t go to India. But I was dressed Indian-style, and after I got the once over (or twice over or thrice over), I found that Indians generally left me alone (except in Kodaikanal, but’s that’s another story, stay tuned.)

I love watching group dynamics so I watched everyone get on the bus – young couples, parents with kids, seniors. It was funny seeing almost everyone have the same reaction to the condition of the bus. They walked up the stairs, stopped, looked around at the frayed seats, either gulped or sneered, especially the travelers who looked more “upscale”, then took a seat. Off we went, all windows open to the Madurai heat and dust.

I really don’t remember exactly what was on the tour. I just enjoyed being out riding around with a bus load of Indian tourists. The driver did not speak English, so every time we stopped, he would announce in Tamil what we were seeing and how long we would be there. At the first stop I asked him how long and he just looked at me and grunted. I was on my own – I had a feeling that if I didn’t get back to the bus in time, he’d leave without me, wherever we happened to be. Finally a man told me in English “20 minutes”, and at every stop I would look at him and he’d smile and tell me how long we’d be at the stop.

Everywhere we went, I loved the vignettes that were framed by the bus window, glimpses of Indian life. Sometimes I was lucky enough to snap a picture, but there were many that I wish I could have gotten – the huge ram with massive curled back horns sleeping peacefully in the gutter while a woman swept the street around him, not disturbing him; two flower sellers with their carts, talking quietly, engrossed in conversation as only women can be, as a street goat happily munches the day’s profits from one cart. Thinking of those scenes now make my eyes tear up because I miss India…

It was a lazy day and the only excitement we had was when the driver took a curve too fast and I literally felt the tires on my side of the bus lift off the ground for about three seconds. People started yelling at the driver and the woman next to me flew out of her seat. She would have landed face-first in the aisle had I not caught her sari and pulled her back down. My reaction to this was total equanimity — I shrugged it off, and went back to staring out the window, listening to the other passengers yell at the driver. I must learn more Tamil!

At one stop we were besieged by begging children, girls and boys. On my trips I saw that Indians do not usually give to beggars, so anytime they see a foreigner, it’s a no holds barred onslaught of constant cries for money. Trapped on a bus, I was ripe for the picking.

Some of us were sitting on the bus waiting for the others. I was sitting next to the middle door so it was the perfect place for one girl to plant herself on the steps in front of me with her hand out with a constant call that sounded like “ma” over and over and over again.

In India, you have to develop a hard skin and pick and choose which beggar you will give to, if at all. Right then I was not in the mood, so I ignored her constant cries and stared out the window. Occasionally I would look at her and shake my head and tell her no in Tamil, but she never stopped. Every Indian also ignored her, staring out the windows. Finally I got an idea. I saw how Indians rarely give money to beggars so I pointed to each person on the bus and told her “ask him” or “ask her” and rubbed my fingers together, the universal sign for money. I said, “they give rupees, I give rupees”. She left me, and went over the Indians. AH! That finally got everyone’s attention, and once she started harassing the Indians, a woman said something to her and the girl left the bus. We finally left and I looked back to see the children swarm the next group of tourists…..

One of the last stops was the Gandhi museum. This was late in the day and people were feeling tired and hungry, they moaned and groaned and really did not want to get off the bus. By this time I surmised that many of the passengers could understand English so I said that I had already been here, and it’s not to be missed. That perked everyone up and with big smiles most got off the bus. Some of the women didn’t, and the driver pulled the bus underneath a tree for shade. We could have stayed there the rest of the afternoon, that’s how peaceful I felt at the museum.

I got off and walked to the little book stall. The old clerk remembered me, gave me a big smile and put his hands together for “namaste”. He gave me more pictures of Gandhi, which he had also done the day before. I walked to the chai cart and ordered three cups of chai. An older couple said hello to me, asked where I was from and what I did, and we chatted for a while. I found out later that yoga classes are conducted at the museum. Mmmmm…if I lived there…how sweet that would be to take or even teach yoga at place dedicated to Gandhi….