flickering pictures

I’ve been posting my notes from India, scribbled and scrawled all around the country last summer, while I get things up and running around here. Now that things are humming nicely, I’m spending less time fixing things, leaving me more time to post tasty content. But although I’m not quite so desperate for filler anymore, I’m honoured to see that some of you actually seem to like these, so I’ll keep posting them sporadically until they’re all up. If you like, you can keep track of them on a brand spanking new dispatches page.

Thanks for reading!

-mark

________________________

9:29am Sunday, Jul 22

It’s raining.

Here in the South, where the monsoon hits hardest, the water is everywhere. It colours work, family life, transportation, health, the news - everything is dictated by the rains. In Manipal it turns the roads to mud — in less fortunate towns, shacks and people are washed away. The streets here flow with a beautiful bright red mud, the product of earth that could bankrupt PEI’s tourism industry in a heartbeat. And although it’s a sleepy town with only a few thousand residents, it has a planetarium and a food court and therefore more to do than Charlottetown.

I’ve been in the bubble college town of Manipal for a few days now, and my gastro is almost gone so I think it’s just about time for me to be heading on to the next stop: Varanasi, in the north. This is a great place to relax, slow down, and take a minute to get over a bug, but there isn’t much to see and my camera hasn’t had much of a workout. I should be leaving in a couple of days and hopefully my stomach will be 100% again by then. The plan is to hop on a bus to Bangalore, fly from there through Delhi to Varanasi, spend a few days there, then hop a train west to Khajuraho to check out the Kama Sutra-style temples. Then another train west to Agra to finish off the trip with the Taj Mahal before heading back to Delhi to fly home. The original over-ambitious plan was to see nine cities in five weeks, and I’ll be happy to have managed these seven (with Manipal/Udupi, Delhi, Bangalore, and Dharamsala/McLeod Ganj).

If my postings have been slow these past few days it’s because I have been too - it’s hard to be adventurous when your wandering is limited to a ten-second bolt from the nearest bathroom. And in any case Manipal is a sleepy little town in the south, concerned only with its medical school and, at the moment, its monsoon.

While I haven’t been doing much adventuring down here, I have been doing a bit of thinking at this halfway point in the trip. Two weeks in India, and I’ve seen the worst abject poverty I could imagine. I’ve seen disease, desperation and huge nightmarish slums made of plastic and rust that house tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of people. I’ve also seen amazing friendship, surprising generosity, and the best kind of kindness — the kindness of strangers. I’ve seen peace and joy emanate from a holy man in an airport lounge, and have had my balls knocked into my throat on a 16-hour bus ride up a cliff with three adolescents sharing the driver’s seat. But the whole way I’ve felt that all these experiences are bigger than I am, outside of everything I know, and that to make sense of them I’ve had to grow myself to include them. As if I were a circle on a page, with everything I know and understand inside the circle, and everything in India outside my little borders. In order to get the Indian experiences into the circle, to internalize them, I’ve had to grow the circle. And I feel like I’ve become a bigger person as a result, even after two brief bewildering weeks. And that was exactly the point of all of this - of setting out across the world to learn and grow and explore and see what I could see.

What I saw is that this place is a sleeping giant - a huge, writhing mass of humanity impatiently awaiting its moment to shine. Even in the dingiest neighbourhoods there’s a foreshadowing in the streets, and the feel of a world power rousing slowly from its infancy. Even the poorest Indians know that their country is finally moving into the world’s limelight, pushed there not only by its sheer populousness but also its unbelievable industriousness. They’re thrilled to talk about it — even people who have so far not reaped any rewards from India’s 9% annual GDP growth rate. (Canada’s is something like 3% - the highest, I believe, among G8 nations.)

If the rewards of growth have been unevenly distributed, they are at least spreading. People who make a few dollars a day here have cell phones that make mine look like a relic from a bygone era. The cars in the streets are new, and everywhere billboards are advertising plasma-screen TVs and stainless steel washing machines. This place is exploding, and the transformation looks painful, but it has such momentum, such power, and is backed by such a fury of human industriousness, that I can’t imagine it slowing anytime soon. I’m telling you, almost nobody sits in the street doing nothing - everyone scrambles to produce whatever they can, collecting garbage to sell if necessary, and even the beggars are the most hard-working I’ve ever seen. They’ll follow you for blocks, then run back to their spot in time for the next guy.

What else? Just an observation: I’m not a huge guy, but compared to everyone else in this country I’m a mastodon. It must be a nutrition thing - I’m always ducking under doorways and my toes stick off the end of every bed I’ve laid in.

Oh, and I’m finally eating big wonderful Indian meals again… With Sumi as my guide, I’ve been hitting *real* restaurants around Manipal and good god, this food is wonderful… I know I pledged to be vegetarian while I’m here, but some butter chicken was shoveled onto my plate by accident and I had some without realizing what it was - the stuff was absolutely glorious. I didn’t know food could taste like that. Wow…..

Okay, I’m off - Sumi must be finished her nap by now, and it’s time for supper…. Take care everyone, and to the people I love, (you know who you are), I love you!

Mark

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