Anne earns her Chandigarh merit badge

I've said it before: you can take the woman out of architecture but you can't take architecture out of the woman.  And so I fell back on the old architourist's practice of visiting buildings by either the modern masters or the latest and greatest Gehry so that you can boast that you've "done Ronchamp" or "done Falling Water" or "done Bilbao", like a boy scout proudly displaying their merit badges.  From Manali, then, I headed to the Corb-designed city of Chandigarh to visit his capital complex buildings, which include the Secretariate, the Assembly and the High Court building - all late '40s early 50s brutalist concrete with reflecting pools out front that haven't seen a drop of water in decades and so much security around that the open spaces between the buildings are completely empty of people - so that I could add Chandigarh to my merit badge collection (Ronchamp, La Tourette, Falling Water, Darwin Martin House, Scarpa's cemetary, Scarpa's museum in Verona, Salk Institute, Barcelona Pavillion, Parc Guelle and other Gaudi stuff in Barcelona, LeDoux, Sverre Fenn blah blah blah).

The bus from Manali was a night bus, as usual, arriving at either or 4am or 6am, depending on whose word you took.  I was hoping for the latter, so that at least the sun would be up and I wouldn't have to worry about a hotel when I arrived.  And given the tire repair and the mexican-standoff with a car on a hair pin turn mid-way along, I thought it might work out for me.  But no luck.  Not only did the bus arrive right on time at 4am sharp, it arrived in the middle of the first regional power failure that you might have heard about in the news.  In the circumstances, I didn't have a clue about the power failure.  All I knew was that when I got out of the bus it was ABSOLUTELY PITCH BLACK outside and all I could make out was a field to my left and a field to my right.  I could just make out a dim brick wall the height of a fence on one side, but that was it.  Maybe my sleepiness was confusing things a bit too, but as the auto-rickshaw drivers swarmed around the just-arrived bus and circled in on the single white lady (i.e. sucker) to give me the hard sell, I quickly realized that I was completely lost, there was no way I was going to be able to hang out till morning and that I was just going to have to take one of them up on their offer to drive me to a Sector 17 hotel, sight unseen.  Sector 17, I knew that much, was the commercial centre of town, so I accepted a Rs 50 ride there, thinking that I was on the outskirts somewhere.  Turns out, that the ride was about 400m and two left turns, so call me a sucker for falling for that one.  We were right downtown after all, but Chandigarh is a peculiar 'new-city' designed by modernist principals and not what you've come to expect in India.  And you just wouldn't believe how black and bizarre things were in the middle of the night.  The next day in the daylight, I went back to the where I got off the bus and saw it was really just playing fields/parks either side and we were pretty much at the downtown bus station, but who could tell.

Anyway, the hotel was safe but soulless.  I bargained the room rate down by about a third and the auto rickshaw driver hung around to collect his commission for bringing me there.  

After 4 hours of sleep and a shower, I headed back out to start to get the paperwork in place to visit the Capitol buildings.  Given security in this country in general, to be honest, I'm a bit surprised they even let architects visit the government buildings at all.  It took two tourism offices and four layers of security but I was in.  Apparently, we were lucky to get inside the two Assembly halls at all and only did so because the Assemblies weren't in session.  There was another young architecture student dragging her uninterested parents around with her: reminded me of myself dragging mom and dad around to some modern building by Peter and Alison Smithson or Adolf Loos and them just shaking their head in disbelief that I could be interested in such an ugly building.  "This is what we paid all that good tuition money for?" they asked.

Assembly viewed from Secretariate roof.  High Court in
the distance.  (The internet cafe I'm at isn't
reading my phone, so I'll try to send some more
pix directly from there later. )

After solidly earning my merit badge by visiting every storey and roof area that I could get access to and sneaking a few clandestine photos, I headed back through Chandigarh to find a restaurant, which turned out to be nearly impossible.  Strange city.  Then caught the night train to Jaipur, where I had a day to kill before my next night train to Jaisalmer.  I started out in high spirits heading for the old city but things went downhill from there.  After a day of insults, slurs, angry shop keepers and being hit on by 10,000 people on the make I couldn't wait to get back on the train again.  Congratulations, Jaipuri's you've just set the low bar for my experience in India this summer.  From now on, I think every place will be measured against your city.  I hope that all of Rajasthan isn't going to be the same, because I'm going to be here for a little while.  (Fortunately, I've traded in my ongoing train tickets from Jasailmer to Udaipur via Jaipur again for a direct bus ticket and, as a result, I'm pretty happy that I don't have to spend any more time in Jaipur.)

BTW, I also wanted to visit Dakka or is it Dakha, Bangladesh, to visit the Louis Kahn government buildings and earn another merit badge, but the conditions of my tourist visa state that if I leave India, I can't return in less than 2 months.  Another security measure, presumably.

Leh to Manali: the vomit comet

Mini-bus ride from Leh, in Ladakh, to Manali, in Himachal Pradesh: 473 whiplash-enducing, gut-wrenching kilometers that takes 17 or 18 hours depending on the number of vomit stops.  This works out to an average speed of 28km/hr, so you can imagine how slow we were bumping along when we were things were really rough.

We left Leh at 1:45 am.  In fact, all buses leave Leh at pretty much the exact same time, even though the town rolls up its sidewalks at 10pm and there's next to nothing to do in between.  I think I experienced something of this phenomenon leaving Nainital: there are lots of different bus services, but they all leave at exactly the same time, giving the customer no range of options.

In any event, off we went at 1:45 headed to Manali, across what is apparently the second highest drive-able pass in the world at over 5,200m in elevation.  Indian pop music blaring over the loudspeaker helped the driver stay alert, I guess, but didn't make sleep any easier and was a far cry from the subtle pony-bell music camping in Markha Valley.  Also, the guy beside me was a bit creepy and took more than his share of the double seat so my ride wasn't as great as it could have been.  But at least I didn't have to sit upright and awake on a metal box in the aisle for the first 15 hours like that other guy had to until one of his mates spelled him off.  Crossing the pass meant driving across a broad dish-shaped plain, rather than up and over a quick saddle.  On top, especially in the pre-dawn light, the landscape was lunar: just dust, stones and the odd clump of thorny shrub.  In fact, there wasn't even a road a lot of the time, so driving was more like dune-buggying or moon-buggying at times.  In my half-asleep, half-awake daze, it was a pretty bizarre experience.

I think the combination of the bumpy terrain and the high elevation can make the ride pretty hard on some people and, as a result, two puke-stops were required for us (not me, thankfully) and we could see other mini-buses stopped in the middle of nowhere for the same reason.

Finally, we made it over the hump and started the bumpy way down to this parachute cafe stop at Pang, just in time for sunrise at 6am.  Needless to say, it was freezing.

Sunrise at Pang parachute cafes in the middle of nowhere

My long shadow, as the sun just
tops the horizon

On it went, gradually grinding, bumping and hairpin-turning down through valleys and more passes for hours and hours while everything got greener and hotter and started to more like the Himalayas than the moon.  In fact, by Manali, things were so lush and it looked a bit like British Columbia: tall pine trees, sharp mountains, ferns etc.  But also cactuses: a bit of a wierd combo.  But what a difference all that foliage made to the air quality.  Goes to show you how well trees and plants clean the air.  No more dust and diesel.

Our driver was great, but could be a bit of a cowboy, trying to overtake everything in sight.  More than once, he was too impatient to take the hairpin turns and just short-cutted straight down the hillside.  Good way to pass multiple vehicles at once, I guess, until we got stuck together while construction crews removed landslide debris on the road.

Finally, we arrived in Manali and drove into the bus parking lot.  Not five feet from where the bus came to its final stop, one poor sod, who'd probably been struggling for hours to hold it in, couldn't any longer and launched projectile vomit from the back row of the bus - not the same fellow who was in trouble at the top.  Your's truly, one row ahead got it in the hair, shirt and pants.  Nice.  Strangely, didn't bother me that much.  I mean what can you do?  It's not like he meant to do it.  Maybe I was just delighted to have arrived, high on oxygen-rich air or just happy to get away from my seat mate.

All in all, it was actually a really beautiful drive and an experience I probably won't forget: the moonscape, dune-buggying accross the high level pass, sunrise at Pang and the gradual descent to the green mountains of Manali.  Beautiful.

How do you know you are Indian

With apologies in advance to anyone I might offend for this gross generalization.

I read this in a joke book titled "how do you know you are Indian."  One of the ways was: if everything in the house is still wrapped in the plastic it came in. I thought of that when I saw this kid's bike in Leh, still wrapped in plastic, even the tires which. Needless to say, the wrap was worn off the tires. Poor kid, I thought. Would get so badly harassed for that in Canada.

Anyway, I wanted to clarify what I wrote in the last post about the bells around the ponies' necks. They were like cow bells but of all different pitches and sounds. There might have been about 12 or 16 different bells.

Ladakh: where it's easy to forget you're in India

Okay. I was off the grid in Ladakh for a few days but I'm back to the land of cell phone reception and electricity.

I flew directly from Delhi to Leh, in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, at 3,500m elevation.  I don't know what Delhi is at, but Leh is high and flying there direct is a shock to the system.  I was dizzy just waiting at the baggage carousel.  And then my body did what it usually does when over-stressed and I caught a cold.

Ladakh is a mountainous desert region (not the picture of the Himalayas that you might have in mind, though it is part of the Himalayas, I guess).  More eroded mountains reminiscent sometimes of Death Valley.  If the Himalayas are being formed by the Indian subcontinent crashing into the Asian plate then erosion must be happening here a lot faster than the mountain building process because it looks more like mountains dying away than being born. 

Here's why it is easy to forget you are in India: signs of Buddhist religion everywhere (monastaries, gompas, stupas, prayer flags etc.), Ladakhi dialect spoken by Tibetan looking people, not much sign of Hindi and, of course, the very un-Indian landscape described above. 

If you remember the guide I that took me around the slums and such in Mumbai, he recommended me indirectly to a trekking company in Leh, Ecological Footprint, who took really good care of me.  Stanzen, the owner, picked me up from the airport, put me up in a guest house, organized a trek for me, lent me sweater and sleeping bag and put me on the bus at the end of my stay.  So, after a completely inadequate 2 days to acclimatise to the altitude, I headed off with a group on a 4 day trek to the Markha valley.  Trekking, Ladakh-style, involves a group of hikers, a guide, a cook, a helper and a pony man for the ponies and donkeys that carry all the tents, pots, pans and other gear so that all you have to do is carry a day pack.  It also involves being woken each morning with hot chai served at the door of your tent.  Can't complain about that and really well-cooked breakfast and dinner.  Typical breakfast: porridge, more tea, eggs, fresh made chapattis etc.  One morning I had peanut butter and honey on chapattis, which made me think that camp food can be the same just about anywhere.  Typical dinner: soup, chicken if anyone can bring it in fresh, rice, daal, two kinds of paneer dishes and salad veg like cuc, toms and carrots carved into butterflies and flowers and such.

6am chai served at your tent door

Parachute cafes: I'd read about these ahead of time, but didn't really understand what they were.  Since Ladakh is on the border with both China and Pakistan, there has been a big military presence and the military drops supplies to troops stationed on glaciers and other inaccessible places by parachutes, which they then leave behind (being the military).  So the locals collect the white parachutes and use them for tents at cafes and rest stops that you find along the roads and along the trekking routes.  Trust me, after an hour or two of hiking across sometimes pretty barren landscape, when you come across a parachute cafe and can get a hot chai, coke, chips, noodles, beer, rum, safe drinking water, whatever, it is a treat. 

Typical parachute cafe

Day one of hike: 4 hours pretty much uphill for 800m to a camp at 4,150m elevation.  At that elevation, climbing was really hard and sleeping was even difficult.  I had a cold, which didn't help.  But I wasn't the worst off.  Others had nose bleeds and massive headaches.  Made me pretty apprehensive about the next day's climb: 750m straight up for 2 hours to reach Gandala Pass at 4,960m elevation.  But next morning, we set off slowly and made it to the pass.  You should have seen us though: picture zombies slowly dragging their feet 120-year-olds trudging along with stooped shoulders and heads down.  That's what we must have looked like slowly taking baby steps up the mountain.  Once up, we celebrated a bit and then headed downhill for 4 hours through amazing desert mountain landscapes.  What a day!! To hell with the fact that my cold was getting worse. 

Buddhist stuppas along the trek

 Two more days of relatively level hiking in the Markha Valley, which was beautiful.  At the last camping spot, there were about 4 sets of ponies and donkeys who overnighted by the river.  Our tents were not so far away, so I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of the river combined with the bells around the ponies' and donkeys' necks gently and randomly ringing as they moved about and nodded their heads.  All night long, a gentle concerto of bells.  It was so beautiful.   Sadly, I had to leave the group after 4 days and they went on ahead.  Actually, 2 other people had to leave the group after 3 days, so I guess that's just the way it goes.  The last day was a rude awakening for me as I had to carry my own pack all day (7 1/2 hours) in the heat because the ponies went ahead with the remainder of the group.  Needless to say, by the end I was wiped out and my cold was worse.  Still, it was beautiful.

Drive back to Leh.  I couldn't believe how awful the air was in Leh.  I know, I had a cold, but it wasn't just that.  I felt like I could hardly breath for all the dust and diesel in the air.  Other people talked about it on the trek, saying it had something to do with the air currents created by the Himalayas that pulls in pollution from China etc. I don't know if that is true or conspiracy theory, but I hadn't noticed it myself coming from Delhi because the air is so shitty there, but I sure noticed it coming back from the Ladakh countryside.  Kind of say, if you think about it, for the air to be so bad in that kind of location.  Boy, that is something I won't miss when I leave this country: the dust and the diesel. 

Stanzen picked me up at the end of the hike (which, by the way, involves pulling yourself across a wide river valley in a wooden box suspended from a steel cable) and took me back to his place to shower and rest up before getting on the bus to Manali, which will have to wait for the next blog post.  I passed on dinner and just slept.

Manali, in contrast to Ladakh is lush and green and has the sort of mountain shapes that you would expect in the Himalayas.  Tall pine trees, trout for dinner, snowmobiles (parked, not in use) etc. also makes it easy to forget you are in India, that is after, you forget the auto-rickshaw drivers who all try to rip you off.  The temperature is pleasant, so in other words, cold by Indian standards.  Doesn't explain the highway worker I saw yesterday in a snowmobile suit though.  Today, I'm pretty much taking a rest day before getting a night bus to Chandigarh.  The guest house I'm staying at is a relic from the english colonial era and has beautiful balconies that overlook Manali valley.  I could sit there all day.  (So why am I in the internet cafe instead?)  Pot grows like weeds along the roads here.  When I arrived, I felt very bullish and energetic, which I put down to the relatively oxygen-rich air. 

One week of travelling down, 4 to go. I see I have 9 followers.  Let's make it double-digits. 

DEF intern at the mBillionth awards

Yesterday was my second last day interning at DEF. Wrapped up my research project into the complex life of the mobile phone in India by happily dropping my report with a thud on Osama's desk. Created a nice sense of closure.

Today: the last day of my internship (can you believe it). Spending the day at the mBillionth awards, an all day conference and awards ceremony about mobile phone innovation in south Asia.  Helped out with the registration rush first thing in the morning but the DEF team has things so well in hand now that I'm pretty much free to attend breakout sessions until called upon.

This afternoon's session: crowdsourced platform to report power cuts in the country, similar to canadian or US platforms for reporting potholes, only more of a nuisance factor. One person suggested that if people tweeted every time the power goes out in Delhi then it would regularly start trending on twitter.

Other interesting factoids:
- in some places people have developed a fairly sophisticated language around missed, or dropped, calls. One ring means this. Two calls in a row means that. Three means something else. All to avoid actually paying any mobile usage charges.
- apps built around a phone's vibration feature for the deaf blind
- Android is big here. I-phone, Nokia and Blackberry, not so much.

Anyway, it's been quite a trip interning here and an honour working with the DEF team. Big thanks to them for being so welcoming, being my tour guide and translator when I needed to speak to people in Gaffar Market, Seelampur etc, for introducing me to gol golpe (sp?) - yumm  yumm - and for patiently explaining how to dial a phone in India.

Tomorrow morning, at what my mom would have called the crack of birdshit, I get on a plane to Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, which should be quite a change of scene.

One more thing you can do with duct tape

Bringing a little rainy-day box with needle and thread, spare buttons, strong shoelace for repairing a broken napsac strap or what not, a little bit of duct tape and a sandwich-baggie sized zip-loc bag turned out to be pretty handy today.


Friday night I noticed these bites on the back of one leg and the weird thing was that the bites were in perfectly straight lines.  And what kind of bug lays down bites in a straight line?.  Guess what you get if you google "bites in straight lines"?  About 10,000 hits about bed bugs.  In hindsight I should have twigged sooner, but the monsoon rains (the few that we've had) brought so many various bugs with them that it was hard to tell what was what.  All weekend long my suspicions got stronger and the pain at one particular spot on my behind at my underwear line got more painful.  Sunday evening when I got back to the dorm after dinner (and after dark when they like to come out) I found some of the little black bastards on my bed and crawling along the base of the wall adjacent.  And here's where the duct tape comes in.  I used the duct tape like fly paper to pick up about 20 or 30 bed bugs in total - mostly from the floor, thank god - and lay the tape flat inside the ziploc bag and sealed it tight tight tight.  The thing is that collecting so many on a few square inches of duct tape made it look like we actually had that density of bugs in the room or on one bed (yuck!!!), which wasn't the case, thank god.   Suffice it to say, it looked gross and packed dramatic punch.  


One convenient thing about the ashram is that there is a medical clinic on the grounds.  So Monday morning I dropped in to have the doctor look at all those bites - especially the more painful ones (near my bum) but it turns out that doctor's appointments aren't very private here, at least not here at the ashram.  I shared the doctor's office with two men, two female high school students, six or seven kindergarden kids and a young woman who was either a nurse or a teacher and whose job was to keep the kids sitting in a neat row on the bed, which they politely did.  The doctor looked at some of my bites but didn't ask me to drop my drawers, which I'm thankful about, but didn't exactly boost my confidence in his examination.  In fact he didn't ask much, just wrote out a scrip and told me to come back in two days.  I showed him the baggie with the bugs but didn't get any reaction out of him.  To be honest, I wasn't sure his eyesight was good enough.  


Realizing I wasn't going to get much more from him, I headed to ashram Reception toting my baggie and showed them.  To be honest, even at this point I wasn't entirely sure what I was dealing with because a lot of the websites I'd been reading said that if I had bed bugs then there would likely be tiny blood spots or stains on the sheets, which I hadn't found.  So I approached Reception a little sheepishly, suggested that they might have bed bugs and showed them the evidence.  "Yes", they said, "we've been telling them," pointing at Tara-Didi's office, "for a long time and they won't believe us."  Sheesh, I thought, thanks a lot.  How many of you have known about this, for how long and just let it go?   "You will have to show Tara-Didi yourself," they told me.  


Background info: Tara-Didi is the Elle-Supremo here.  She runs the place and inspires a combination of love, devotion and obedience from the ashramites.  This is what I found about her on a website, that actually suggested that she was Sri Aurobindo's daughter, which would explain a lot, but I'm not really sure about.  Maybe it was meant figuratively:

• "Thus, when three years after the Mother left her body, Tara came to Delhi in 1976 to be by her father’s side to help him in developing the Delhi Branch of the Ashram, Chacha ji got a person who was not only physically and mentally well-equipped, but who also had the right level of consciousness for the job.  She soon became popular in the Delhi Ashram as Tara Didi.  Under the guidance of Chacha ji, and with the help of her brother, Anil ji, (Tara-Didi) became a powerful instrument of the Mother’s Force for developing the Ashram.  Under Tara Didi’s guidance and with her initiative started the Vocational Training and Teacher Training Courses at Delhi, and the Study Camps, Youth Camps and National Integration Camps at Van Niwas, Nainital.  Tara Didi’s planning and organization has led to the construction of several new buildings on the campus, and with that the expansion of the activities of the Ashram."  

I'd never even said hello or talked to her since May.  Why would she talk to me, afterall?  Why is it that now I have to talk to her about bed bugs?  Why does she even have to deal with bed bugs?  Doesn't she have all that middle-management and staff to deal with mundane and dirty little problems like them?  Anyway, yes, I had to march in and see Tara-Didi like I was going to the principal's office and show her the bugs on the duct tape.  Needless to say, this time, it got a reaction: many expressions of shock, orders over the phone to reception to have maintenance clean out the room right away, assurances (more than one) that this was the first she's ever heard of it (so obviously someone is lying) - and all in English so that I'd be sure to understand that she was taking charge.  And yes, they will move us out of the dorm into double rooms, but only charge us the dorm rate, just come back after work and we'll sort it all out, blah, blah, blah.  

Turns out by 5:30 when I got back from work the afternoon reception staff didn't have a clue about us changing rooms and tried to fob us off on the after-dinner crew.  Eventually, I got a double room key out of them and got us moved over but, needless to say, there's no sign that any cleaning or airing out of mattresses  happened in the dorm.  In fact, they even checked a new Italian or German woman in this afternoon.  Last I saw after dinner, she was still trying to convince reception staff to move her into a double room.  I guess I'll find out at breakfast if she was successful and, if not, speak to the morning staff about it.

So whatever everyone (even me, I think) was saying about the ashram being so clean - take that with a qualification. Just one week to go before getting out of here.  So close, but so far.  Problem is, it is really difficult to get hot water to properly wash the blighters out of your sheets and if you leave everything out in the sun it might get rained on, so dealing with our stuff might be a bit of a problem.


Anyway, no pictures in this blog post.  Tara-Didi kept the baggie of bugs and, in hindsight, I should have photographed it in case the evidence goes missing.  Don't tell anyone, but I still have of them crawling around the floor.    


On a couple of separate notes:
- I've developed a weird little heat rash on my left cheek under my eyeglasses rim.  And it's not even that hot now, but maybe it's the humidity.  I'm absolutely sure, it is unrelated to the bed bugs.  
- some of the ashram men caught a cobra in the ashram grounds on Saturday afternoon, outside the kitchen.  So from now on, I'm going to have to watch my step in the gardens.


Last weekend: Saturday, I was a tourist and poked around Old Delhi and visited the Jama Masjid, a big beautiful (slightly crowded at 1pm) mosque in Old Delhi.  Then I bought an accessory for my mobile phone from Nehru Place Market, so all that research I've been doing about grey market mobile phone stores in Delhi came in handy.  I tried to dedicate Sunday to writing but found it too hot to concentrate.  I guess I was also distracted about my growing beg-bug suspicions.  


I expect the rest of this week will be spent report-writing and getting ready to hit the road on Sunday.  Work at DEF has been great, but I have to admit I'm looking forward to a change of scene.  No offence, anyone who's listening from DEF.  Hopefully, I won't be bringing a family of tiny stowaways with me.

Too much typing. Not enough mangos.

Sorry, this won’t be the most exciting blog post.   

Only a week and a half remaining of my internship (can you believe it?) and my task is to compile all the information I’ve been collecting about mobile phone culture, electronic waste and the associated grey market economies in India into some kind of report that will make sense even though I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.  So for the last few days (and probably the remaining 10) I’ve been pretty much keeping my nose to the grindstone and pounding the keyboard.  Suddenly, this internship thing feels like the end of last term when all my papers were due.  I pounded out more than 2,000 words yesterday and about the same today.  Yikes, how long is this things going to be?!?

I did take last Saturday off to tour Old Delhi and the Chandni Chowk market area and then sample mangos at the Delhi Mango Festival and watch a mango eating contest.  (Okay everybody listen up: nobody can think about the starving children in India just now for this paragraph.)  Have to admit, all those mangos made me a little sick of them for about 48 hours, but I got over it and had some for lunch today.  Dee-lish.

So, with not much more to report, here’s some photos to give you a sense life at the ashram.  I hope I’m not repeating myself.

Here’s Archana in front of a picture of Sri Aurobindo, the founder and namesake of the ashram, in the dining hall.  Archana is an Ashramite in charge of keeping the dining hall spick and span, and since that’s where I do my one hour’s cleaning-duty every morning before breakfast, she’s my boss.    She’s sweet, though, and I like her

And a toothy picture of the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s right hand in the pursuit of enlightenment through integral yoga that apparently only gets going at Nirvana where old yoga leaves off, or so Meena-Didi told me.  Their images are everywhere.  Sometimes it feels like you are being watched.

A gothic image the Mother.

Here’s my 5 star accommodation: the bed with the blue sheets.   To be sure, I shouldn't complain about the thin mattress.  It's more than most people in India get.  The place is clean and serves three meals a day.  

I don't think we're in the Taj Mahal Hotel anymore, Toto !!

There is a pair of peacocks on the grounds and they had chicks this summer.  One of the chicks was bitten by a mongoose and is lame but we hope it will get better.  Mongoose are famous for being the only animal that can take down a cobra, so how the little chick survived the mongoose attack is beyond me.

This is the view of the ashram building from the grounds where there is a big well and a vegetable garden.

Squash anyone?

 The shrine with some little relic of the Mother’s remains.

One of the nice things about staying at the ashram when we did was that it coincided with a class of young men and women who were here to learn spoken English.  Cathy and I got to know some of them when they started using us to practice their English, or relieve their tedium, as the case may be.  In any event, their course ended about 10 days ago, they all went home and the place seems lonely without them.  This is Anu.  Happily, she returned yesterday to start 3 years of teacher training at the ashram affiliated school.

Anu and somebody with a double chin

And this is Ballav.  He and his brother Madan didn’t take the English course nearly as seriously as Anu and, not surprisingly, didn’t get to move on to teacher training.  They were a lot of fun too but they’ve gone back to Orrissa.  I still get broken-english texts from them but the dialogue is pretty limited since they are a lot better at spoken english than written.  (The photo also shows me after my haircut, since you were asking.)

Ballav

Line up at the dining hall for breakfast and the usual instructions about not wasting food:

The breakfast line

More instructions about sugar

Most of our socializing with Anu, Ballav and the others takes place in the dining hall and you never know who’ll you’ll meet there.  Two nights ago, Meena-Didi, not an ashramite but a semi-regular of some sort, sat down at our table and before long was scolding me for drinking water with my dinner.  (Who knew you shouldn't?)  She went on to tell me ad nauseum about how water dilutes the juices in your stomach, prevents proper digestion of your food and makes you constipated.  No water, therefore, from half an hour before meal time till one hour after.  Since being bunged up is exactly the problem I’ve been having since I arrived I was receptive to her theory.  (Who’d have guessed, eh?  You expect a westerner with a westerner's typically fussy tummy to have the opposite problem in India.)  So I promised to try out her theory for a week and get back to her.  File that under too much information.  Obviously it is a slow news day.

At dinner the next night she sought me out again and talked my ear off about Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga and the fact that he was so enlightened, in body as well as mind, that when he died a light shone out of his forehead and his body didn’t decompose for five days.  I don’t mean to make light of the more sensational details, but sadly, most of what she went on (and on and on) about was lost on me.  Truly, I wish I’d had a tape recorder to capture it.