Monday, February 9, 2009
A Modern Museum, An Indian Identity, A British Passtime
A Pretty Winged Visitor at Breakfast A slightly later start. We left the hotel and wandered back through Connaught place, the south, via, of all things, a street called Copernicus on the way to the Modern Art Museum. We are waylayed by a young Muslim man who is perhaps the tenth, though most articulate, Indian to express his approval for Barak and disdain for Bush, the “man who hates muslims and fucked Iraq”. The museum lies on one side of the immense roundabout that circles India Gate, Delhi’s answer to the Arc de Triomphe, which is situated at one end of Delhi’s answer to the Washington Mall. The Houses of Parliament stand in lieu of Lincoln's memorial, their bricks blending softly into the city's khaki fog.
In this immense circle, on this, a Sunday afternoon, hundreds of Delhiites play cricket. In one quarter are more serious athletes, in full gear, white clothes, with wide brimmed hats. Sitting on large tarps beneath the shade in skirting trees are fans who keep track of the score in thick legers. The adjoining quarter of the circle hosts local boys who set up makeshift wickets and play with red tennis balls. The rest of the vast roundabout is filled with families enjoying a sunny Sunday.
Cricketers in the Park
The museum is delightful. An explanation in Hindi of our status as students drops the price to 10Rs...roughly twenty cents. The central atrium explains the history of India’s post-colonial reclamation and modernization of its artistic heritage, free from “influence of and adherence to the Western paradigm”. Apparently borrowing from Japanese art is fully embraced. The complex is quite large, and as is the case with much of modern Delhi, the site is still under construction and seems to be rather inexplicably in all directions. Paintings, sculptures, mixed-media works -- created by individual artists and urban and rural collectives -- fill the four-storey main hall. Photorealistic, billboard-sized portraits of old Bollywood stars, modern takes on traditional art forms, and geometric and abstract works are arranged in collections that spiral up through the museum. Catching the rays of the dying sun, we sit beneath a tree in the courtyard and watch local labor, wild dogs, and Delhi’s educated classes, dressed both in modern and traditional garb, pass through the compound.
On the way back, we again pass through the circle filled with cricketers. We are again asked to join a game, playing catch and taking a couple of turns at bat before the interest of that particular mob shifts and, either wary of their association with foreigners or due our sudden expiration as a source of entertainment, we are asked to continue on our way.
Moonrise over Delhi
Walking back down Copernicus Marg (avenue), I am surprised to see a vintage Rolls roll by. Then a 50s Dodge, and a couple of extravagantly finned Plymouths and Pontiacs. Many only make it a few hundred yards before breaking down following their excited exit from a britisher-era club. As we approach the gate from which they exit, we see traffic stop in both directions to take in the impromptu parade.
This evening we eat in a local restaurant, dining on ghee-saturated dishes ladled from vats which simmer ceaselessly in the restaurant's front window. Only a few hundred feet from a TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut and McDonalds, in this wealthiest part of the city, penniless families with five or six children huddle around scrap-fed evening fires amidst the rubble of urban demolition and reconstruction.
A First Day In India
Delhi. The first day. I awake from a panicked dream: a dream I’ve had many times before. I’m in my closet. I wake up. The house is empty. The daylight is warm, and comes from my the window by my feet. It is well past noon. I have missed my flight. I have missed India.
From the Red Fort with its Muslim entertainment halls and cool, fountain-fed, open-sided chambers we head through a Jain temple and bird sanctuary on to a Shiva temple in the same physical building. The bird sanctuary is testament to the Jain’s extreme focus on ahimsa, or non-violence, most of the animals receiving treatment being local pigeons injured in traffic. The Shiva temple is fronted by a full clip of assorted deities, their names printed in Devanagari above their chambers though the altars are obscured from view by silver doors, slide bolts, and large padlocks. One by one the doors are opened by an attendant and Hindus take Darsan (pron. Darshan, the act of receiving a blessing by viewing/the auspicious act of viewing a deity) and receive a handful of Prasad (blessed food, usually sweets, that are transmuted into divinity in a consumable form, much like eucharist) and a flower from one of the malas (garlands) draped around the deity’s neck. I get a strange look from a local middle class man, until I ask him in Hindi whether he always comes to receive Krishna’s Darsan. He smiles and tells me that RadhaKrishna is truly beautiful, and in a little Hindi rhyme says, “Do you come? Do you go? Who is it that really knows?” I laugh, and turn to explain this to my friend, when this little man is smacked across the back of his head by a fat temple attendant who tells him to get out of the way. Mostly, I feel he is bent on asserting his superiority over this relatively poor temple visitor. We try to leave the temple, but find the way by which we entered barricaded by a descending metal grillwork: a modern portcullis. We are instructed to exit through the basement, and en route again pass the great painted plaster statue of Shiva, with his consort Parvati diminutively dancing above his head. Above the viewing point for this statue a fan slowly rotates, bearing a Hindi inscription noting its donor, and the date and event of its donation.
After exiting and reclaiming our shoes, we continue to the Jama Masjid. This enormous mosque, the largest in India and perhaps the crowning achievement of Shah Jahan, rises out of a market swarming with Muslim merchants, goat pens, and hovels where the charitably minded hand children food and medicine. I am asked for my water bottle. Though I haven’t finished, and use this as my excuse, I wouldn’t hand it over but in the most exceptional of circumstances. It would be refilled with street water, the cap resealed, and it would then be resold to an unsuspecting and soon-to-be-sick tourist.
Entrance to the mosque is free, but women are shrewdly assessed for appropriate dress, and even modernly clad Muslim women in capris, especially if young, are told they have to put on a more appropriately covering garment to be chosen from a seemingly random collection of dingy and amazingly tacky bits of clothing. You have to remove your shoes, but you can carry them in your hands if you proceed as if you know what yor’e doing. Just be sure to set them down sole-up if you must do so inside the mosque. Cameras also bear a charge of 200Rs, but removing the battery and explaining that it doesn’t work, or “is broken” (toot gya), can help you pass without charge.
The building itself is magnificent: a soaring clay-red structure that appears to be baked terra-cotta, but which is nowhere near as hot to the touch as might be expected. In the courtyard children run about chasing pigeons, playing with one another, and generally amusing themselves as their parents pray. There are guy lines stretched across half of the courtyard, and on these are hung coverings for the harsher sun of the summer months when the masjid becomes an open-topped tandoor. 
As I sat and faced one of these openings, I observed a man seated at 45 degrees to the back wall, his right shoulder closer. He read from the Qur’an, a prettily printed cloth upon his left knee. He looked up from his reading, regarded me kindly, and asked if I was Muslim. No, I replied, I come from a Christian people. Okay, he replied, and went back to his reading. When he had finished, he came over and took a seat beside us. He asked us where we were from. When he realized I spoke Hindi, his eyes brightened. “American, you say!” he continued in local dialect. “You have a new president: Barak. He is Muslim or Christian?” “Christian,” I replied, “but his father is from a Muslim family.” “Oh, very good, very good. I have traveled a lot, but not to America. Maybe one day. I go to Thailand, Indonesia. Thailand is good, but too much pleasure-taking, and not many Muslims.” As we chatted about our families and where we were from, a man and wife passed with their three children. As they reached us they paused and glared, seemingly unhappy with our presence in this place of prayer. “it’s okay,” our new friend told them, “this is a good one. He can speak Urdu.”
We walked from the masjid towards the nearest metro stop. Having missed it, we backtracked, and saw a sign down an alley that told us it was that way. After thirty minutes of being redirected through narrow, winding, market-filled gulleys (alleyways, and the source of the English geographical term “gully”) we were dumped back out on the same main road a couple of blocks down, right next to the Metro entrance. An interesting and not-so-dishonest marketing ploy, no?
We eventually made it south to the Tibet house, which turns out to be closed on the weekend. Nearby, on a small, sandy strip of land between the access road for these buildings and the main thoroughfare, a group of young men in their late teens and early twenties were playing cricket with a tennis ball and a precariously-perched stone-slab wicket. Chris wanted to watch, and upon our approach, he was invited to take a turn at bat. After playing for a bit, he was taken to the canteen of the school that all these boys attended, and asked about life in America. I stayed and chatted about studying in India, and my hobbies. If it isn't marital status, it's hobbies. They were all students of commerce, training to be freelance cost-assesive consultants. One of the students was soon to be returning to his home near where we were staying, and as it was by then quite late in the afternoon, we accompanied him. He waited for a fairly empty public bus, so we wouldn’t be too crowded, and wouldn’t hear of us paying our own way. On board, women sat down the left; men on the right. The bus wasn’t one of the more expensive modern affairs provided by the city, but a privately owned vehicle that ran the same route for a reduced rate. As our accompanying friend Pakaj said, “in India, with and for money, anything is possible.” He took us on a tour of Janpath market, and through an impressively labyrinthine, sweltering and stifling underground market in which everything from belts and shoes to western jeans and jerseys to iPods, PSPs and computer games could be bought. We resurfaced in the picturesque greenspace in the center of Connaught place circle, and went to drink some chai. While waiting in line, a man around my age tried to open my nearly empty backpack. Catching him in the act, I took him by the arm, gripped tightly, and asked him what the hell he was trying to do. He turned to Pakaj with a look of “who does this crazy foreigner think he is?” but I redirected his attention, saying that this was an issue between the two of us, that Pankaj was not involved. He stared at me blankly, not answering, then unabashedly cut in front of me in line to buy himself some chai.
Pankaj spoke to us of being short and young in Delhi. His family was middle class, so they could afford to life in a nice part of the city, but he didn’t have much money for frivolous pursuits as did many of his neighbors. Though it was conceivable that he have a girlfriend, they were expensive, he said, and he had high standards of romantic perfection. They were expected to pay for nothing, and if, for example, you didn’t call them at a minute past midnight to wish them well on their birthday, the relationship might be considered over. Regardless of his income and attentiveness, the fact that he was relatively short, about five foot five, would be a big hindrance when trying to find a girlfriend. Thus were his worries.
He repeatedly asked if he was being a nuisance, but asserted that it was a joy to share his neighborhood with foreign visitors. It was also an issue of status, he said. If he was seen with foreign friends, as a companion rather than a tour guide, he appeared to be a big person.
That evening, we ate at a local restaurant-club. The bar, empty of bottles, was impressively blacklit, a flatscreen set to HBO played soundlessly in a corner, and a tiny, tinny boombox played Like A Prayer, Thriller, Livin’ La Vida Loca, Hit Me Baby One More Time and early Beatles selections on loop. The seating arrangement was...organic, expanding and contracting as if in respiration as people came and left. Potted pants were shifted to give room to occupied tables, consuming the legroom of recently vacated seats in the process.
Only vaguely aware of the heavily dusk sneaking through threadbare curtains and the strong, alternating click-tok of my chamber’s wall clock, I drift back to sleep.
I awake again, this time brought more soundly to by the clammy chill that has clamped itself around my calves. I am in Kuwait, right? It’s dark. Nearly midnight, right? I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I wasn’t…going to fall...asleep… But I have. I did. Why am I cold? Why are my legs bound? As I slowly fade in I realize that I made it. I am in Delhi, in a small, damp room, sleeping through my first evening. I kick loose my legs, cover them better, and again drift away.
Finally, I awake fully. My mind has at last caught up with my fast-traveling, fully fatigued body, and both are now laying in this capital city. It’s five in the morning, but I cannot sleep any longer. I walk the street out front, and see the early morning chai stalls stoke their braziers and get ready for another day. From the roof of the hotel I can see a Christian cemetery, a small lane filled with vegetable vendors, a three-wheeled truck dropping off the day’s cauliflower and potatoes.
A call to prayer comes from the north, and from the south the clanging and chanting of a nearby Hindu temple awakening its hosted deities. The day fades from blue-gray through purple to russet brown. Eagles and ravens fly only feet overhead; flea-bitten they circle in slum-splendor. Delhi is rough on everyone.
The metro, two stories above the street in this quarter, begins to run more frequently and the skyscrapers of Connaught place fade into a golden ochre as the night’s mist is burned off by the morning sun. The city’s crescendo culminates at an astounding fever pitch. This noise is nothing new. But Delhi has changed. When I was last here, there was only one metro line which ran intermittently at best. Now, there are three fully operatoinal lines, complete with efficient security scans, English speaking ticket sellers, floors clean-swept to the corners and signs boasting the benefits of using stairs plastered in both English and Hindi.
I awake again, this time brought more soundly to by the clammy chill that has clamped itself around my calves. I am in Kuwait, right? It’s dark. Nearly midnight, right? I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I wasn’t…going to fall...asleep… But I have. I did. Why am I cold? Why are my legs bound? As I slowly fade in I realize that I made it. I am in Delhi, in a small, damp room, sleeping through my first evening. I kick loose my legs, cover them better, and again drift away.
Finally, I awake fully. My mind has at last caught up with my fast-traveling, fully fatigued body, and both are now laying in this capital city. It’s five in the morning, but I cannot sleep any longer. I walk the street out front, and see the early morning chai stalls stoke their braziers and get ready for another day. From the roof of the hotel I can see a Christian cemetery, a small lane filled with vegetable vendors, a three-wheeled truck dropping off the day’s cauliflower and potatoes.
A call to prayer comes from the north, and from the south the clanging and chanting of a nearby Hindu temple awakening its hosted deities. The day fades from blue-gray through purple to russet brown. Eagles and ravens fly only feet overhead; flea-bitten they circle in slum-splendor. Delhi is rough on everyone.The metro, two stories above the street in this quarter, begins to run more frequently and the skyscrapers of Connaught place fade into a golden ochre as the night’s mist is burned off by the morning sun. The city’s crescendo culminates at an astounding fever pitch. This noise is nothing new. But Delhi has changed. When I was last here, there was only one metro line which ran intermittently at best. Now, there are three fully operatoinal lines, complete with efficient security scans, English speaking ticket sellers, floors clean-swept to the corners and signs boasting the benefits of using stairs plastered in both English and Hindi.
Traffic is different too: the autorickshaws have functioning meters, there are traffic lights that are actually heeded, and traffic wardens keep roundabouts flowing steadily. Haggling is still the main tradition of business, but more often than ever before local merchants and taxi drivers will decide that negotiation isn’t worth it and instead opt for the possible gullibility of the next tourist. Is this due to the time of year? The lack of dreadlocks? Or the fact that I am not traveling with Western women?
We accidentally take the subway in a cornered loop and end up on the other side of the same train station lane from which we started. Signs indicate routes through urban construction, and we eventually make our way to the Red Fort. Telling the ticket-takers that we now live in India, we are able to but tickets at the local rate, spending 11 Rs. Instead of $2. The guards who check our tickets on the way in laugh at our having obtained such a fare, and when I explain that my friend and I aren’t normal tourists, they tell me to go ahead and try to get in with the actual ticket takers…but advise that I introduce my travel companion as my deaf-mute brother rather than a friend. This, they assure me, will more likely get me entrance and save me four and a half dollars.
We accidentally take the subway in a cornered loop and end up on the other side of the same train station lane from which we started. Signs indicate routes through urban construction, and we eventually make our way to the Red Fort. Telling the ticket-takers that we now live in India, we are able to but tickets at the local rate, spending 11 Rs. Instead of $2. The guards who check our tickets on the way in laugh at our having obtained such a fare, and when I explain that my friend and I aren’t normal tourists, they tell me to go ahead and try to get in with the actual ticket takers…but advise that I introduce my travel companion as my deaf-mute brother rather than a friend. This, they assure me, will more likely get me entrance and save me four and a half dollars.
From the Red Fort with its Muslim entertainment halls and cool, fountain-fed, open-sided chambers we head through a Jain temple and bird sanctuary on to a Shiva temple in the same physical building. The bird sanctuary is testament to the Jain’s extreme focus on ahimsa, or non-violence, most of the animals receiving treatment being local pigeons injured in traffic. The Shiva temple is fronted by a full clip of assorted deities, their names printed in Devanagari above their chambers though the altars are obscured from view by silver doors, slide bolts, and large padlocks. One by one the doors are opened by an attendant and Hindus take Darsan (pron. Darshan, the act of receiving a blessing by viewing/the auspicious act of viewing a deity) and receive a handful of Prasad (blessed food, usually sweets, that are transmuted into divinity in a consumable form, much like eucharist) and a flower from one of the malas (garlands) draped around the deity’s neck. I get a strange look from a local middle class man, until I ask him in Hindi whether he always comes to receive Krishna’s Darsan. He smiles and tells me that RadhaKrishna is truly beautiful, and in a little Hindi rhyme says, “Do you come? Do you go? Who is it that really knows?” I laugh, and turn to explain this to my friend, when this little man is smacked across the back of his head by a fat temple attendant who tells him to get out of the way. Mostly, I feel he is bent on asserting his superiority over this relatively poor temple visitor. We try to leave the temple, but find the way by which we entered barricaded by a descending metal grillwork: a modern portcullis. We are instructed to exit through the basement, and en route again pass the great painted plaster statue of Shiva, with his consort Parvati diminutively dancing above his head. Above the viewing point for this statue a fan slowly rotates, bearing a Hindi inscription noting its donor, and the date and event of its donation.
After exiting and reclaiming our shoes, we continue to the Jama Masjid. This enormous mosque, the largest in India and perhaps the crowning achievement of Shah Jahan, rises out of a market swarming with Muslim merchants, goat pens, and hovels where the charitably minded hand children food and medicine. I am asked for my water bottle. Though I haven’t finished, and use this as my excuse, I wouldn’t hand it over but in the most exceptional of circumstances. It would be refilled with street water, the cap resealed, and it would then be resold to an unsuspecting and soon-to-be-sick tourist.
Entrance to the mosque is free, but women are shrewdly assessed for appropriate dress, and even modernly clad Muslim women in capris, especially if young, are told they have to put on a more appropriately covering garment to be chosen from a seemingly random collection of dingy and amazingly tacky bits of clothing. You have to remove your shoes, but you can carry them in your hands if you proceed as if you know what yor’e doing. Just be sure to set them down sole-up if you must do so inside the mosque. Cameras also bear a charge of 200Rs, but removing the battery and explaining that it doesn’t work, or “is broken” (toot gya), can help you pass without charge.
The building itself is magnificent: a soaring clay-red structure that appears to be baked terra-cotta, but which is nowhere near as hot to the touch as might be expected. In the courtyard children run about chasing pigeons, playing with one another, and generally amusing themselves as their parents pray. There are guy lines stretched across half of the courtyard, and on these are hung coverings for the harsher sun of the summer months when the masjid becomes an open-topped tandoor.
On the far side of the courtyard, a cool, covered, arched walkway contains neatly aligned and well-worn rugs faceing arched openings with blank backings. In each sits a small set of shelves with an variety of donated Qur’ans, and even a few children’s books about Islam. Don’t touch them unless you are Muslim or are willing to say you are and receive a bit of a self-proving grilling. These archways are both closed and open: they enclose and protect the holy word of Allah, and, if open and if one were well enough sighted, direct one’s gaze to Mecca.
As I sat and faced one of these openings, I observed a man seated at 45 degrees to the back wall, his right shoulder closer. He read from the Qur’an, a prettily printed cloth upon his left knee. He looked up from his reading, regarded me kindly, and asked if I was Muslim. No, I replied, I come from a Christian people. Okay, he replied, and went back to his reading. When he had finished, he came over and took a seat beside us. He asked us where we were from. When he realized I spoke Hindi, his eyes brightened. “American, you say!” he continued in local dialect. “You have a new president: Barak. He is Muslim or Christian?” “Christian,” I replied, “but his father is from a Muslim family.” “Oh, very good, very good. I have traveled a lot, but not to America. Maybe one day. I go to Thailand, Indonesia. Thailand is good, but too much pleasure-taking, and not many Muslims.” As we chatted about our families and where we were from, a man and wife passed with their three children. As they reached us they paused and glared, seemingly unhappy with our presence in this place of prayer. “it’s okay,” our new friend told them, “this is a good one. He can speak Urdu.”
We walked from the masjid towards the nearest metro stop. Having missed it, we backtracked, and saw a sign down an alley that told us it was that way. After thirty minutes of being redirected through narrow, winding, market-filled gulleys (alleyways, and the source of the English geographical term “gully”) we were dumped back out on the same main road a couple of blocks down, right next to the Metro entrance. An interesting and not-so-dishonest marketing ploy, no?
We eventually made it south to the Tibet house, which turns out to be closed on the weekend. Nearby, on a small, sandy strip of land between the access road for these buildings and the main thoroughfare, a group of young men in their late teens and early twenties were playing cricket with a tennis ball and a precariously-perched stone-slab wicket. Chris wanted to watch, and upon our approach, he was invited to take a turn at bat. After playing for a bit, he was taken to the canteen of the school that all these boys attended, and asked about life in America. I stayed and chatted about studying in India, and my hobbies. If it isn't marital status, it's hobbies. They were all students of commerce, training to be freelance cost-assesive consultants. One of the students was soon to be returning to his home near where we were staying, and as it was by then quite late in the afternoon, we accompanied him. He waited for a fairly empty public bus, so we wouldn’t be too crowded, and wouldn’t hear of us paying our own way. On board, women sat down the left; men on the right. The bus wasn’t one of the more expensive modern affairs provided by the city, but a privately owned vehicle that ran the same route for a reduced rate. As our accompanying friend Pakaj said, “in India, with and for money, anything is possible.” He took us on a tour of Janpath market, and through an impressively labyrinthine, sweltering and stifling underground market in which everything from belts and shoes to western jeans and jerseys to iPods, PSPs and computer games could be bought. We resurfaced in the picturesque greenspace in the center of Connaught place circle, and went to drink some chai. While waiting in line, a man around my age tried to open my nearly empty backpack. Catching him in the act, I took him by the arm, gripped tightly, and asked him what the hell he was trying to do. He turned to Pakaj with a look of “who does this crazy foreigner think he is?” but I redirected his attention, saying that this was an issue between the two of us, that Pankaj was not involved. He stared at me blankly, not answering, then unabashedly cut in front of me in line to buy himself some chai.
Pankaj spoke to us of being short and young in Delhi. His family was middle class, so they could afford to life in a nice part of the city, but he didn’t have much money for frivolous pursuits as did many of his neighbors. Though it was conceivable that he have a girlfriend, they were expensive, he said, and he had high standards of romantic perfection. They were expected to pay for nothing, and if, for example, you didn’t call them at a minute past midnight to wish them well on their birthday, the relationship might be considered over. Regardless of his income and attentiveness, the fact that he was relatively short, about five foot five, would be a big hindrance when trying to find a girlfriend. Thus were his worries.
He repeatedly asked if he was being a nuisance, but asserted that it was a joy to share his neighborhood with foreign visitors. It was also an issue of status, he said. If he was seen with foreign friends, as a companion rather than a tour guide, he appeared to be a big person.
That evening, we ate at a local restaurant-club. The bar, empty of bottles, was impressively blacklit, a flatscreen set to HBO played soundlessly in a corner, and a tiny, tinny boombox played Like A Prayer, Thriller, Livin’ La Vida Loca, Hit Me Baby One More Time and early Beatles selections on loop. The seating arrangement was...organic, expanding and contracting as if in respiration as people came and left. Potted pants were shifted to give room to occupied tables, consuming the legroom of recently vacated seats in the process.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Around in Kuwait
Kuwait. What a strange place to stop off. What a strange place to find a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic community. Apparently, sandwitched between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, lies the world's third wealthiest country per capita. People from the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Europe walk down the streets and through the shopping malls side by side. And speaking of malls, what malls they have! Look at the architectual details, the wedding going on...I tried to get a photo of the art deco kitchen store and the six-foot-wide outdoor grills, but they wouldn't let me take the photo away. Designer stores. Whaddya know.
Oh, and apparently they think a fake pot of cannabis is a nice way to decorate their airport. the rest of the false plants were borad-leaved but this one slipped in, completely unrecognized.
Oh, and apparently they think a fake pot of cannabis is a nice way to decorate their airport. the rest of the false plants were borad-leaved but this one slipped in, completely unrecognized.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
root route
I am, of all things, sitting in a Sheraton hotel in Kuwait City with a Bangladeshi-American from Minnesota. How's that for the pleasanter of surprises that can come to those who don't read the details of their flight?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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