heavy load

2.19.11 Boudha, Nepal

“Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify.”
-Thoreau

When you have to carry all your possessions, when one is nomadic,
it becomes much more attractive to let go of the unnecessary;
when all must fit into one bag, the surplus becomes burden, not luxury.
A forced lightening of the load, of the soul.
And yet still, I lay eyes on the old vagabond monk in the monastery courtyard,
see him in the morning laying out his simple maroon robe, his old, worn cloak,
his bowl, to dry after a wash, and I grow envious of his own lack of attachment, his lack of need, ; his lightness of load makes my own seem cumbersome and redundant.

Night Air

In my small room, more books than clothes; noticing this

put a smile to my face, chilled from the clear night air,

filled with moon, stars.

I walked home on the smooth stone path, chasing the sounds

of bells, of drums, of prayers from distant windows; my eyes

given only the distant glow of candles in the darkened streets.

The guard at the monestary gate was not at his post; I walked past

his empty old chair, my evening greeting met only by the empty earth,

the simple acts, the rituals, a goodnight to a stranger encountered so many

times.

india journals, rambles...

India Journal


Benares, India 6.2.11


Kites twisted in the dusk air,

their motions jerking, spiraling, diving, climbing, reds, purples,

superimposed against the pale blue sky, the late afternoon stillness,

filled with the sound of muezzins calling their faithful to prayer,

the sounds wailing from countless minarets dotting the ancient skyline,

beginning, sparking, like brushfire;

I pondered both the kites and the calls,

the former so simple, ingenious, ancient, relavent; to hoist into the sky, to send

prayers up to the heavens, such a simple pleasure in this manic, distracting age;

the mosques, their faithful, in this most holy of Hindu cities, a badge of tolerance

in this patchwork land.


Some randomesque quotations from personal inspirations...words worth a ponder, a dance in the mind...Theroux speaks of Rimbaud, as in Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th Century French poet, who, at a young age, in the prime of his career, left the ease and pomposity of Paris literary life for an existence of hard travel, settling and becoming a simple trader, nobody aware of his fame, his past, in northern Ethiopia, in the ancient town of Harar, where several crumbling buildings still mark his transitory presence....Rimbaud's words haunt the mind...a man so far from home, denying his past existence , living amongst strangers in a strange land, finding ease amongst hardship, contentment amongst the unknown...Rimbaud said, “I am used to everything. I fear nothing.”


“Other cultures are not failed attempts at being us, but they're unique answers to

a fundamental question -what does it mean to be a human and to be alive?”

-Wade Davis



“You go away for a long time and return a different person-you never come all

the way back. You think, 'I is someone else,' like Rimbaud.”

-Paul Theroux



“Hindu civilization is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai, one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of Ancient Rome. Indeed, it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism, that you realize quite how miraculous its survival has been.”

-William Dalrymple



“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”


-Albert Einstein



11.

Calcutta, India


Walking the old lanes of Calcutta, life is lived, laid out bare, in front of one's eyes. There is no shame in this act; it is simply life, simply survival, but something more resonates; laughter and joy echoing from the men sharing their morning bath at the community pump, this scene played out on every street, on every block; there is nothing self conscious in this act; simply life, dancing its dance; the denizens of the streets, sleeping in their makeshift lean-tos, sidewalk camping, if you will; they sleep, curled up in nuclear and extended families, which people pass, the busyness of life not seeming to notice, their ears calloused to the outside world; again, nothing self-conscious, no shame, simple life; the workers from the tall towers, names emblazoned, the corporate titans of the next century, crowded on the street outside, eating simple lunches with their hands on tin trays, jostling, crowded, never solitary in this city of so many souls.

French Africa.

“As soon as we have problems, we ask someone else to take care of them for us,” Isaac continued. “We ask the Europeans. We ask the Americans. We ask the Chinese. We will run this train into the ground, and then we will tell the Chinese we need another one. This is not development.” I thought of the wreckage by the tracks. In China, there is no such thing as metallic waste. Armies of migrant workers scour the countryside with hammers and chisels, collecting and selling every scrap to the insatiable smelters that feed the country’s industries. Here, by contrast, was a land without industry.”

-Howard French, in his fascinating Atlantic article called “The Next Empire”....in conversation with a young Tanzanian riding the Chinese-built Tazara Express from Dar Es Salaam to Zambia's copper belt, a relic of the idealistic imperialist presence of the Cold War in the 1970's, and a symptom, in this instance, of all that divides the booming economies of the East with the stagnation of the African continent, even with the current commodity boom fueled by Chinese demand.

French introduces the key questions facing 21^st century development: “China’s burgeoning partnership with Africa raises several momentous questions: Is a hands-off approach to governmental affairs the right one? Can Chinese money and ambition succeed where Western engagement has manifestly failed? Or will China become the latest in a series of colonial and neocolonial powers in Africa, destined like the others to leave its own legacy of bitterness and disappointment?”

India Journal, pieces

“In Africa, for the first time, I got a glimpse of the sort of pattern my life would take...that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk...I learned what many others have discovered before me, that Africa for all its perils represented wilderness and possibility...School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. I never wanted to be a tourist. I wished to be far away, as remote as possible, among people I could talk to.”
-Paul Theroux


The patterns of life; even spontaneity can be habit forming; the thrill of stepping into the unfamiliar, of walking down a simple street never before seen, of turning a bend in a small alley and allowing the world to unfold before your eyes; to become a 'beginner' again, to see with this 'beginner's mind;' lifes many paths, many divergent trails, alleys leading into this great unknown...a great, mysterious dance we dance on these footpaths...to step back, to see things as they really are, experiences, memories, that vanish into light and shadow; experiences yet to happen, that will succumb to the same fate.
Understanding that aloneness is not aloofness; a sense of solitude is more than alright; it is to be embraced, celebrated, seized upon, utilized, honored; possibility can whither like a dying leaf in the small sense of mind, the small mind that has forgotten wonder, that refuses to see the mysterious dance, to sit back and smile at it all, to not take it too seriously.
The wish of remoteness; being away, truly away; observing, witnessing both the beautiful and the terrible, the lights and the shadows, for the first time; a silent witness to the world, watching the dance unfold.


2.1.11 Bombay to Benares, India Railways

Swaying rhythmically, the sound of the tracks groaning and a distant diesel locomotive, a beast of man, groaning like an overloaded ox cart, riding into the Indian night. The oranges flashed through the opaque window, my little porthole into a strange world, a new world, though I have seen it many times already. Riding into the night; on a train filled with colors;
the car is half empty, yet I know this is a mirage.
I know upon waking and drawing back the small maroon curtain, which provides me a small, fleeting sense of privacy, illusory perhaps, that there will be bodies to fill every space, for this is always the case, in a land so small, with so many souls.
The swaying pulls me to slumber, but the journey has just begun.


2.4.11 Benares, The Ancient City of Kali, India


“I had the Rimbaudesque thrill that noone on earth knew where I was.”
-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari


The thrill of solitude. The thrill of seeking, of journey, of pilgrimage, of wandering.

The big boat, crammed with pilgrims in this holy city, the holiest of Hinduism, the place of Moksha, of liberation from the cyclical wheel of birth and death true to this faith, and others, its engine like a distant jackhammer pounding its way through the morning mist, its pistons methodically misfiring, a split second of complete silence, then continuing, makes its way up the most sacred of rivers, the Ganga, Mother Ganges. Its long, dark, backlit shadow casts over the glasslike surface of the water. Where these pilgrims are coming from, where they are going, I could not guess...the loud sounds of chanting, of what sounds like drums, a cacophony of human emotion, comes into range as the boat turns towards the muddy shoreline, towards home, or away, I do not know.

Tharoor on The Mahatma

“Gandhi's life was, of course, his lesson. He was unique among the statesmen of the 20th century in his determination not just to live his beliefs, but to reject any separation between beliefs and actions. In his life, religion flowed into politics; his public persona meshed seamlessly with his private conduct...No dictionary imbues 'truth' with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions; it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefor right. Truth could not be obtained by 'untruthful' or unjust means, which included inflicting violence on one's opponent. For Gandhi, the way to truth was not by the inflicting of suffering on one's opponent, but on one's self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one's convisions.”

-Shashi Tharoor


Tharoor describes Gandhism as “physical self-denial and discipline, spiritual faith, a belief in humanity and in the human capacity for selfless love, the self-reliance symbolized by the spinning wheel, religious ecumenism, idealistic internationalism, and a passionate commitment to human equality and social justice.....

truth alone triumphs

“How does one come to grips with a land of such bewildering contrasts? The world's largest democracy that is also home of the ageless caste system; a land steeped in superstition ad spirituality that is a world leader in information technology; the nation of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, that is convulsed by periodic bloodletting. The Paradoxes abound. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its government crest, is “Satyameva Jayate:” Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however: whose truth?”

-Shashi Tharoor

india

walking down a dusty road, its initial curves masking any sense of ultimate destination.

i came across a simple stone carving; it read:

Hello Wanderer,

Don't Forget

Inner Stillness.

I walked on; down the same dusty road,

the peace palpable. A distant chatter of unknown tongues

in the green fields shadowing the shallow river,

four brilliant yellow and black butterflies,

dancing a mid-air dance,

hovering over the most supple pink of pinks,

illuminated in the afternoon sun, effervescent,

fleeting, staggering.

LRA

I have written extensively in the past about the human-rights catastrophe that the failure to apprehend Joseph Kony, terror of Central Africa, has been in the last decade. Kony, following his self-proclaimed divine mission to implement a magical kingdom based on the Ten Commandments, has ravaged, raped, pillared, and killed his way through vast swaths of the continent, at times aided in a defacto struggle by the Islamic-fundamentalist Khartoum government in its own human rights abuses against its Christian South and Christian neighbors in Uganda. The U.S. Government, which has lent logistical support to the Ugandan military in the past, seems to be stepping up its action plan against Kony, long a scourge of terrified rural populations (well documented in the media through such brilliant films as PBS's The Lords Children, which documented the large numbers of children abducted and forced into a life of butchery and bondage by Kony and his senior commanders). This man, and his “Lords Resistance Army” has been one of the worst non-state violators of human rights in the last decades; the word atrocity does not do justice to his particularly vehement brand of terror. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, “Since 2008, Kony's men have massacred some 2,300 civilians and abducted over 3,000 more in a remote area straddling the borders of the Congo, southern Sudan, and CAR. More than 400,000 villagers have fled their homes there. In 2010 alone, Kony's fighters have so far led more than 240 deadly attacks.”
According to an excellent new report by the Pulitzer Center Crisis Group, Obama's new strategy seeks to, “'apprehend or remove from the battlefield Joseph Kony and senior commanders' and to promote the defection of his remaining fighters, bolster civilian protection, and increase humanitarian support.” While commendable, this action has come much too late for the millions already displaced, and the tens of thousands already killed or directly affected by this maniacal warlord. Let us hope that this new hardened stance of the administration (no doubt influenced by the work of Samantha Power in her role as special adviser) pays dividends, quickly and efficiently, to the long-neglected people of Central Africa; let us also hope that the new Republican Congress does not continue the neglect of the past in its rush towards fiscal “austerity” and isolationism.

crisis.

“The way this crisis will be solved will effect the future of democratic elections in Africa.”

-Ivorian Official (unnamed, Time Magazine)

Africa's hope for a democratic future lies on the tightrope of West Africa, a region so fragile, that something so innocuous as a stolen election (innocious as a well-trodden path to the village well, in this part of the world) could shatter the fragile illusion, the delicate veneer, of stability that has quietly blanketed the most volatile of political regions for the last 5 years. The list of regional tragedies is long; Sierra Leone; Liberia; Guinea; the lives disrupted, the countless flows of refugees across the man made borders, the collectively tortured consciousness of waves upon waves of landless refugee, forcibly migrating at the whims of brutal military dictatorships and even more brutal rebel armies.

While democracy and democratic elections are certainly not a collective fix all for the regions ills, the freedom of democratic voice, the pluralistic opening of societies so long under the strong arm of repressive governments, represents a strong, positive current in the struggle for human rights and the struggle for human decency that must be guaranteed to all citizens of this world. And while democratic elections are focused on the bloodless transfer of power, they have often simply rolled out the red carpet for brutal military uprisings and prolonged power struggles.

The troubling aspects of the current scenario playing out in Cote D'Voire are two-fold; the first being the fact that this was once the crown jewel in the Francophone West African Empire; a shining example of post-colonial development, now reduced to ashes by ethnic and tribal divisions and a protracted civil war, due to be settled by this very democratic process, which has instead exacerbated the widening rifts. The second aspect is that in a region so fragile, the struggle threatens to draw in fighters and ethnic sympathies of neighbors, threatening a regional-destabilization in the process. Rampant unemployment and slow reconstructions in previously war-ravaged Liberia and Sierra Leone will not help this process.

African political leaders have not shied away from heavy reliance on ethnic sympathies when fanning the flames of conflict. The case of Cote D'Voire is no different. The leadership curse of Africa must be vanquished once and for all.