Category: Travel
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Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy
Check out “Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy”, an engaging documentary film by Rakesh Sharma. Set in Kutch, Gujarat, it tells the story of people in two remote villages whose lives are plunged into upheaval by an earthquake, an apathetic state, corporate greed, religious myth, baseless optimism, and other human tragedies (64 mins, 2002). Sharma is better known for “The Final Solution”, a really good film on the 2002 Gujarat riots. You’ll find both films at his Vimeo channel.
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A Place Called Home
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Former changing rooms in the Birla Industries Club‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, ‘for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ One could also say this about ‘home’, making it less an enduring place, more a state of mind. Or as Basho, the haiku master, put it, ‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ Still, in an age of physical migration like ours, one of the most bittersweet experiences in a migrant’s life is revisiting, after a long gap, the hometown where he came of age. More so perhaps if, while he was away, his neighborhood turned to ruin, crumbling and overrun with weeds, as happened in my case.
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Sri Lanka in Pictures
For most of April, I traveled in Sri Lanka with my partner, Usha. Not only a beautiful island with a rich cultural history and ample wildlife, it’s the only country in S. Asia rated “high” on the UN Human Development Index. It has relatively low economic disparity, little abject poverty, high literacy, and universal healthcare. To most Indians, Sri Lankan urbanscapes and rhythms of life will feel familiar and comfortable. I found traveling to be easy enough, the locals friendly, and the food delicious. Sri Lanka even has seven UNESCO world heritage sites.
It’s also a country whose major ethnic communities—mainly Tamil and Sinhala but also the Muslims—haven’t learned to live with each other. Their troubles mostly began in the 1950s with Sinhala nationalism and majoritarianism, driven by chauvinistic monks and militant buddhists, and fueled by cultural insecurities and jaundiced readings of religio-historic texts like the Mahavamsa. Humiliated and cornered, the Tamils demanded their own homeland; many resorted to violent resistance, leading to harsh reprisals from the Sinhala-dominated state. Over nearly three decades, Tamil areas suffered great destruction, mass exodus, and genocidal violence; ruins of war abound in the north. The LTTE may be finished, but will the great many atrocities committed against Tamil civilians near the war’s end be forgotten or forgiven easily, esp. with no reconciliation underway, tens of thousands forced off their lands, and 100K+ refugees still in India five years after the war’s end? Under the Rajapaksa family’s authoritarian regime, Sinhala pride and triumphalism have resurged, public corruption is rampant, there is little freedom of the press and disappearances are common, especially in Tamil areas that have an oppressive army presence. The economy, however, is growing again and new infrastructure, often funded by the Chinese, is coming up: an airport, modern highways, high-rise apartments, casinos, resorts, and more. For a country its size, I found Sri Lanka to be enormously complex and interesting.
Read a brief history of Sri Lanka here. For a closer look at contemporary Sri Lankan society and politics, start with the following: How Not to Win a War, Buddhists Behaving Badly, Beyond the Beach, Sri Lanka After the War, Five Years On (an archive of recent journalism), and the harrowing documentary, No Fire Zone. Below are some of my pictures.
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Dispatches from India 2: On Hiring Domestic Help in India
(Usha Alexander’s periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013. Read Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions.)
Shoreefa‘All you get here are these Bangla maids. They’re so lazy! To get them to work you have to shout at them and shout at them,’ lamented a neighbor. I had casually asked her, two days after our arrival in Gurgaon, if she knew anyone looking for work as a cook or house cleaner. Her voice tensed as she spoke, and her forehead crumpled with the pain of a woman in search of commiseration.
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Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions
(Usha Alexander’s periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013.)
Jamun sold in Old DelhiSo here I am living in Gurgaon for the last four months. We arrived in the hottest days of the year and to summer’s sweet deluge of fruits—mangos, lychees, jamun, watermelon—which we enjoyed daily. Within three days of arrival, we found a furnished rental with adequate water and power backup, and we lucked upon the services of an excellent cook and a cleaning woman, both recent migrants from West Bengal. We soon identified some take-out places, a barber, dairy outlet, and other services in the small bazaar two streets over. And we found a gleaming mall with a modern gym, theater, grocery stores,
bookstores, and electronics, just a 15-minute walk from our
door, across lots filled with cows, stray dogs, mansions, and shanties. -
Of Meenas, Migrants, and Medicine
By Usha Alexander (Also cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
Two days in south Rajasthan with AMRIT Health Services, a not-for-profit initiative
We’re Moving to India!
Friends, we’re excited to announce a big change coming in our lives: a month from today, we’ll leave the United States to live in India for an indefinitely long time. Both of us (Usha and Namit) have resigned from our Silicon Valley jobs, which, while spiritually and intellectually dreary, were at least lucrative, and for this we feel very lucky indeed. This is a move that we’ve long considered and planned, so we can stop working for wages and take on new adventures in life. What will we do in India? We’ll do more of the things that we’ve long enjoyed doing, like reading and writing. We’ll also backpack in India and in other parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. We’ll try some new projects too, such as making documentary films and finding new ways to make ourselves useful to others. We share many hopes and aspirations for this move, but for Namit this will also be the fruition of a desire and responsibility he has long felt to be close to his parents in their later years.
We can’t know just how all of this will unfold, since the change is huge and the uncertainties many. But we are keen to move into a new chapter of our lives and grow from our discoveries. India is a phenomenally interesting place to both of us. Namit grew up there, and we both visit often and lived there for two years from 2004-06, so we know the challenges we’ll face — power and water shortages, bad driving, pollution, corruption, and more — but we also expect the compensating factors to be numerous enough. We’ll be busy the next few weeks with packing and farewells. And by early May, we should be settling into a rental apartment in Gurgaon, a few miles southwest of Delhi.
Category: Travel‘River of Faith’ meets Amazon
Folks, it turns out that River of Faith has done well, amassing 27K views on YouTube in its first 3 weeks [and 75K at the end of 6 weeks]. Which means it has even bested a whole lot of cat videos! Furthermore, I’ve been persuaded to offer it on Amazon.com for those who like DVDs, including institutions. Check out the DVD cover below (sans barcode and DVD logo). This should be up on Amazon in early April and ready to ship within days (I’ll announce when it is). Also, for the first time ever, a magazine introduced me last week as “a documentary filmmaker”. Watch out, you documentary filmmakers! 🙂
Update (25 April, 2013): The DVD on Amazon is now shipping!
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Culture, Environment, History, Religion, Travel, VideoRiver of Faith
A new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013, Prayag, Allahabad. 56 minutes. Also available on DVD from Amazon.com.
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
The Kumbh Mela
is an ancient pilgrimage
festival that happens once every three years, rotating across four
locations in India. The largest of these riverside fairs happens every
12 years in Allahabad at the confluence of two rivers, Ganga and
Yamuna. On its opening day in Jan 2013, I was among its estimated ten million visitors. During the 6-8 weeks it lasts, tens of millions come to bathe
in these rivers — as a meritorious act to cleanse body and soul —
making it the largest gathering of humanity on the planet. On the festival’s most
auspicious day in 2013, an estimated thirty million pilgrims
came. The Kumbh Mela is also a meeting place for
ascetics, sadhus, sants, gurus, yogis, sannyasis, bairagis, virakts,
fakes, misfits, and crooks of various sects of Hinduism, who camp out in
tents on the riverbank, lecture and debate, smoke ganja and drink milky-syrupy chai, and
are visited by pilgrims seeking spiritual renewal. The sprawling floodplain resounds with devotional movie songs and bhajans, some strikingly melodious and
familiar to me from childhood.The Kumbh Mela, 2013
NEW: River of Faith, a new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013 by Namit Arora (56 minutes).
Last week I attended the greatest of the Hindu pilgrimage festivals, the Kumbh Mela, a riverside religious fair that takes place at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. Bathing in the river during the Kumbh Mela is considered a meritorious act, cleansing body and soul, and it attracts tens of millions over 6-8 weeks, making it the largest gathering of humans on the planet for a single event. A hundred million might attend the 2013 event that opened on Jan 14 with about ten million in attendance, including me and Usha. Click on any photo below to see a lot more of my photos (with captions) from the Mela’s opening days. Next month, I also intend to put out a travel essay and a video documentary on the Kumbh Mela, including many interesting interviews with naga sadhus.
The Pearl of Africa
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
A few years ago, Usha and I spent twelve days in Uganda. We visited two national parks to see chimpanzees and other animals, the Ssese
Islands of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, the town of Jinja, and
Kampala. As far as possible, we used the average citizen’s mode of transportation
and made no advance hotel reservations—choices that I think foster a greater engagement with the locals. As I often do when I travel, I shot some idiosyncratic video footage mostly as an aid to memory, akin to keeping a journal. Watching it again recently, I thought: why not make an amateur documentary? That’s just what I did and here is the result (20 mins; also check out some pictures).Trujillo’s Castle on a Hill
On our recent visit to the Dominican Republic, we passed through San Cristobal, a quiet city of a little over two-hundred thousand souls, in the shadow of its nation’s bustling capital, Santo Domingo, which lies an hour-and-a-half to the east. Its one claim to fame is as the birthplace of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a brutal strong-man dictator, considered one of the worst in Latin American history, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. During his decades–long tenure, ordinary Dominicans were spied upon; tens of thousands of were abducted and tortured or “disappeared.” Centers for torture were established and run by Trujillo’s secret intelligence organization. And tens of thousands of Haitian laborers and those suspected of being Haitian laborers were brazenly massacred. Meanwhile, Trujillo was also building roads and schools for the middle classes, as well as transferring ownership of all the major sugar, lumber, and other agricultural industries to himself, his family members, or his supporters. Trujillo’s family and supporters enjoyed outlandish wealth, while the campesinos and the laborers in the bateys remained in abject poverty with little hope of a better life.
Trujillo built two mansions in his hometown of San Cristobal, at enormous cost. His favorite, Mahogany House, was looted and vandalized after his assassination and now sits as an empty shell. The other, Castillo del Cerro, or “the castle on the hill,” he rejected the first day he saw it and never spent a single night within. It has been converted to a police training academy, which seems fitting, since it looks like a prison from the outside. We stopped by there for a brief tour. From the ornate ceilings, after the fashion of European castles, to the gleaming marble floors, to the wedding-cake ballroom, to the imported, handcrafted tiles, it’s clear the sort of opulence Trujillo enjoyed in his lifetime. Also on display is a replica of the electric chair that was regularly used to torture and kill his citizens. A large, evocative mural of a country dance is said to have angered Trujillo, because the party-goers look sad. We’re told the artist was only painting what he thought was real, and that he fled the country in fear for his life. In another room, the molding lining the ceiling depicts tiny figures of people in the electric chair. Trujillo apparently hated that touch of inspiration, as well. I had to wonder whether the details that enraged Trujillo were intended to please him, or if they were a kind of silent protest.Cuevas del Pomier
The Pomier Caves are located within a ragged limestone quarry a few miles north of San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic. When we visited earlier this month, it took us some time to find them, since there is no signage indicating the way to these 55 protected caves, nor that they represent the largest collection of ancient rock art in the Caribbean. Inside the caves the 6,000 pictographs and petroglyphs—the oldest of which date to about 2,000 years ago—were created over a period of 1,500 years by the Taino, Carib, and Igneri peoples. They had inhabited Hispaniola and the other Caribbean islands beginning about 8,000 years ago until their cultures were destroyed by European colonization, starting in 1492.
We visited the first three caves, guided by the local ranger. Inside the air was fresh enough to breathe easily, though it was humid, and in some spaces we saw bats darting around. It was absolutely dark and we could not have made any progress without the aid of our guide and a few flashlights. The floor of the cave started out wide, smooth, and flat, but as we went deeper into the caves systems, passing from one into the next, the going often got more challenging, the way suddenly littered with jagged rocks. Here we had to scramble up a jumble of small boulders. There we had to slide down a dry wash. Around us, the beams of our flashlights revealed deep passageways and cavernous chambers. Great stalactites clinging to the ceiling and walls, stalagmites spiking up from the floor, gave the interiors a lushly organic irregularity, like the inside of a monster’s gullet. And as we walked, the guide pointed out the drawings on the walls around us. We were allowed to photograph only a single group (photo above), using our flashlights for illumination; we were permitted to use the camera flash only if it was not aimed at the drawings.
As Though We Were Immortal
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.
In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.BBC Series on the Ganga
Here is an excellent BBC documentary, Ganges, on the river’s Himalayan birth and descent, its journey through the plains, and its end in the Bay of Bengal in what is the largest river delta in the world. The series focuses on the natural history and human life along the river’s course. The three episodes embedded below (one hour each) are: (1) Daughter of the Mountains, (2) River of Life, (3) Waterland. One critique I have is that by concentrating the most beautiful and the rarest nature and wildlife footage, the series encourages the highly misguided impression that the environment along the river’s course is robust and thriving.
On Change in India
An excerpt from Siddhartha Deb’s portrait of contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned.
The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were traveling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway. Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle.
Curiosity for Mars
An Indian-American in China
In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.
The Chinese are Coming
This breezy BBC documentary (early 2011) explores the nature and impact of China’s rising influence around the world, especially in Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., and how China is reshaping the balance of power among nations.
Over a million Chinese now live and work in Africa, running high-yield chicken farms to giant mining operations, selling goods, lending money, building infrastructure. Inevitably, they have also brought with them a range of cultural values and economic practices that cause friction at times. Pop pundit Tom Friedman says of the chinese: “what’s most unsettling to most Americans is not their communism, it’s their capitalism”. That said, you can also see this two-hour documentary as a series of human stories from a rapidly changing world—from Angola, Zambia, Congo, Tanzania, Brazil, and the U.S.—and ponder the role each of us plays in the unfolding of the world as it does.
The Lost City of Ugarit
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
With Syria in the news, I’ve dusted off an account I wrote a few months after my visit there in Feb 2001. I’ve also created an 8-min video from my archives, using music by Fairuz for soundtrack. While I look at contemporary Syrian society and politics, the bulk of my narrative is on Ugarit, a nearly 4,000-year-old city held to be the birthplace of the alphabet. We know a fair bit about it from its surviving clay tablets, written in this first alphabet. One tablet even has this timeless reminder to men: ‘Do not tell your wife where you hide your money.’
The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops. The pop Arabic music in the bus gets louder but does not deter my fellow passengers from dozing. Handsome villages with brick houses, clean streets, and small domed mosques appear now and again. The bus stops at a rest area with gift shops and restaurants and arrives in Lattakia by early evening. I take a cab to the city center and find a hotel. It is my tenth day in Syria.
