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.