internet setbacks

Woa-

I finally have made it back to the fabled internet (almost as storied in its recent history as this land i've been is for its looooong history). It's wednesday night in Amritsar, and my last real contact to email, and your fantastic comments, was Sunday morning here. I've been in a very small village in the Punjab right at the Pakistani border for the past few days. While there, I had lots of time to write blog posts, upload videos, and even record some This American Life (This Punjabi Life?)-style audio recordings.

HowEVER, the crummy Intenet cafe I've made it to this evening claims to have no way to connect my computer to the internet. I don't really believe them, but I poked around at the cords in this little capsule, and it doesn't really seem worth my time to mess with. SO, tomorrow hopefully I will find a decent cyber cafe, or just crash one of the five star hotels and pretend I belong, so I can upload all my stuff about Preetnagar, where I've been out of communication for the past few days - though, interestingly, I was up to date on all the US primaries due to a Hindi copy of Delhi Times delivered by bicycle to this little town where I was staying. Apparently Hillary contacted the Chief Minister of Bihar (as state in Eastern India) to ask him to rally the American-Biharis, of whom there are quite a few. The things you learn by not reading in English!

In any case, some news. I'm back in Amritsar as of this morning. My hosts dropped me off at the house where I'll be staying in the city. A very nice fellow named Navjit has offered to put me up in a spare room on his house. We arrived just as he was cleaning off the deck by dumping water and using a wicker brush (very effective, and more efficient than just running the hose, and includes your daily exercise). I have my own floor of the house, which is a large tiled patio overlooking a park, a somewhat spartan room with bed, table, chair and bathroom (pigeons included). I am grateful that something has finally worked out, and he and his wife are such a nice and caring couple. His English is almost perfect, and he is willing to drive me around places on the back of his motorcycle (which everyone seems to have in this city).

I arrived with my backpack, and a harmonium on loan from my friends in Preetnagar. Hopefully I will begin kirtaan lessons tomorrow with my ragi (who also arrives via motorcycle from a neighboring town). Then Navjit, his colleague Livtar, and I shared a lunch of omelet, soy beans, roti and whiskey (and INdian specialty which I had avoided until this time). After a few omelets and rounds of whiskey, Livtar (who spoke almost no English) managed to persuade Navjit that this was the opportune time to play a joke on their office-mates, and the ultimate fool, their boss. This boss, I gathered, was the type who liked to walk around the office speaking only in English, showing off his multicultural professionalism, while at the same time being not at all proficient in the language.

I agreed to all this in the spirit of gratitude for their hospitality, and ascertained that my party in the drama was to play Livtar's 'dear American friend', and overwhelm the poor guy with more English than he could handle. So, off we went roaring on the motorcycles (only I had checked their level of sobriety as being able to operate a motorbike...not that it would make that much difference in this traffic), and the play went off on the boss. I didn't really feel sorry for the guy, honestly, and he took it with a good spirit - but he did get up and leave after about two minutes of my conversation. Then it turned into a very interesting parade of other co-workers, each more gregarious than the last. I was glad to finally have an "in" to talk to people (even if it was a fake pretense, and even though people only asked me what country I was from and if I had seen the Golden Temple).

After that followed more whiskey, fried chicken and, I hate to admit, more driving around the city on motorcycles. In my defense, though, I will say that it was aptly demonstrated to me that the Punjabis are the Scots of the subcontinent - liquor only revives them. In any sense, it was a gregarious and invigorating re-introduction to the city. Actually, while I'm on the topic, a little more about the roads. It's not only insane, it's slightly hysterical. To the point that I'm beginning to see this as normal, and our manicured and pageant-like traffic jams a product of our lack of creativity. In the course of a day, not only do you see everything from giant army convoys to fifty-year-old cars, to autorickshaws, to motorbikes and scooters, to cycle rickshaws and bicycles, to horse and mule drawn vegetable carts, but the road is treated only marginally as a place to drive. Frequently it is a place to converse, conduct business, free-load - I saw a cyclist holding on to a chain from a supply truck and getting pulled along - and rub elbows, literally. It's quite astonishing, and so far I've only suffered a slightly-mashed toe when our motorbike bumped an autorickshaw.

Anyhow, hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow with true purpose. I'll be in a room that I can call my own until I leave the country. I plan to purchase a cheap mobile phone so I can keep in touch with my hosts and music teachers, as well as talking to other scholars of gurbani around the Punjab. I'll begin to my way in and around the city, finding food options that work for me and negotiating a little more like local.

Linguistically, I've made some leaps in the last few days, probably mainly in the area of confidence. Now that I'm hearing this language spoken around me all the time, it's easier to latch onto common words, expressions, inflections, that just weren't possible studying in a coffee shop in Portland. I'll end this post with perhaps the most common of those, which expresses how I feel ("everything's fine"). Theek hai!

Amritsar, first impressions

Here are some views of the famed Golden Temple in Amritsar. It really is stunning. I just went for a first visit on Saturday, as I'm sure i'll have many more trips there. It was particularly crowded, i think, because it was a weekend and a national holiday, so everybody was off work. Anyway, the marble and the gold, in the sunlight, combine to this really blinding effect. You feel a little like you're on the surface of the moon in this distant palace - i'm sure even more so when not getting jostled. Obviously, these pictures don't convey the sound, which is unique. Vast spaces, pilgrims walking and talking in hushed tones, a ragi singing gurmat sangeet (the music i'll be studying) over a loudspeaker.
It's a great social institution as well, of course. Free meals for upwards of 50,000 people a day, dormitory rooms... it's also the cleanest place i've been in India so far, because pilgrims come to do their sewa (volunteer duty) by sweeping, squeegeeing, and all that.
This is a Punjabi sweet shop (two sticky thumbs up!). I can't really tell what's in any of the things, though there's a lot of sort-of sweetened milk, coconut, even some lentils mixed with sugar. This could be dangerous. This particular counter was outside a neighborhood Hindu temple. Really fun, actually. As you enter the temple, they route you up the stairs through this jungle-gym obstacle course of different altars for many gods. It's all done in this gaudy reflective metal mosaics with lights flashing. You have to crawl under tables, ring bells, crawl through water, duck through a cave to get your Bindi painted in orange paste. It was far out, but really enjoyable.

Then, in the evening, just as I was feeling little down = realizing i'm in for a long-haul, and i'm still adjusting (gastrically and emotionally) to being here - there was a knock at my hotel, and a nice young Punjabi gentleman was inviting me to go to a theatre festival. Well, it wasn't out of the blue - actually he was a contact from my friend in Boston, and I think i'll be renting out a guest room in his house while I'm in town. But it was unexpected to me. So new thing I knew I was flying through traffic (ugh, a subject for another post) on the back of his motorbike, then sitting in a darkened theatre watching a Punjabi folk play.

It remains quite cold here - and i have to explain that relative to the US. I always scoffed when I got here and read about the 'cold snap', all this when it was still above zero centigrade. However, after a few nights in a culture where buildings are not insulated, and the power to the space heater fluctuates in and out, I can agree with the locals that it'll be good when this cold snap ends. Though I'd still prefer this to their 50 degrees centigrade weather in June.

Videos!

Auto-Rickshaw Ride through Delhi http://www.vimeo.com/633140 "This is one of those rare moments when traffic is "flowing". A little ways through you see the India Gate monument. You don't see me almost fall out the side of the rickshaw and lose my lunch... hard to believe i'm paying for this experience, but it's definitely exhilarating"

Qawwali and Nizammudin Shrine
http://www.vimeo.com/637071

Punjab from the Train
http://www.vimeo.com/637164

"Halfway between Delhi and Amritsar. A view from the train"

Punjab from the Train, Pt. 2
http://www.vimeo.com/637172

Not only do I love cupcakes, but I'm in India. There's so much to say about my first impressions, luckily I can claim a time constraint and skip out on being thorough. Really though, it's almost midnight here and I have to catch a train at a little after 7 from the Delhi train station. It may not be as crowded that early in the morning, but I know from going there today that it can be harrowing and I better get at least a little sleep.

Where to start? I've been in Delhi for three full days. The first day all I did was sleep, get up for lunch, and go back to sleep. But I've tried to make up for it in the past two days. The main operative words have been disoriented and overwhelmed, of course - of the billion or so people in this country, I feel like I must pass at least a cool million of them walking down the block from my hotel. Really, though, I've been comfortable in the confines of my hotel (which is a bit pricy even by US standards, and I'll be better informed next time I'm in town), and then almost lose my bearings any time I'm out in the city.

Granted it's been a little crazier week than normal in Delhi. Saturday the 26th is Republic Day, so they've been rehearsing for a huge parade all week. This snarled traffic through the city, increased security on public transportation, and shut down many important monuments for fear of terrorism. But that combined with the layer of smoke/smog which has thickened in the cool weather gets to my head by the end of the day. That said, the weather has been one of my favorite parts so far - sunny and cool, I can wear long sleeves and walk around in total comfort.

At the end of the first day, I made it to my first main tourist spot, Humayun's Tomb - a precursor to the Moghul architecture of the Taj Mahal in Agra. Unfortunately, my camera battery was dead, so you'll just have to imagine how lovely it looked in the sunset...red sandstone and white marble with lattice work and onion shaped domes.

Today was much more productive. After getting my ticket at the train station, I visited the Bangla Sahib Gurdwara (see above photo), which showed me how much I have to learn about Sikhism in India, as opposed to have I've learned it so far. This was a very diverse and metropolitan place, where everybody seemed to have their own activity and rituals, different than anything that had been explained to me. No kirtan (singing) while I was there, it was a sermon and then a prayer. Still, the pool (Punjabi word that escapes me right now) was lovely (and symbolic), and I'll be seeing much more of that in Amritsar.

Then, I met up with a Delhi-based documentary maker, Yousuf, who took me through the twisted alleyways to the Hazrat Nizammudin Shrine. If you're not up on your Sufism, Nizammudin was a 13th-century Chishti saint, who is buried here along with the poet/companion Amir Khusro. Anyway, Sufi shrines are sometimes the site of qawwali performance, especially thursdays, so after Yousuf showed me around we heard a little bit of music in the courtyard outside the tomb. Then, we went to coffee and met Yousuf's friend Dhruv, and the two of them reignited my enthusiasm for music, which had grown a little grimey under the soot and frustration of wandering Delhi. Dhruv is a very accomplished singer, who had much to say in our far-ranging dinner conversation about the state of India, the state of America, the world, the history of Indian music. Both of these guys were hugely helpful, and I hope to stay in touch and get back to Delhi soon to discover it as the high-brow capital of classical music.

My name is Kurt and I love cupcakes.