Category: Travel
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The Rann of Kutch
The Rann of Kutch, an area of 18,000 sq km, lies almost entirely within Gujarat along the border with Pakistan. The Little Rann of Kutch extends northeast from the Gulf of Kutch over 5,100 sq km. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann (“salt marsh”) has been closed off by centuries of silting. During Alexander’s time it was a navigable lake, but is now an extensive mudflat, inundated during the monsoons, salty and cracked otherwise. Settlement is limited to low, isolated hills.*When I visited the Rann in April, 2006, the highs were already soaring past 110 F. The best way to see it, as I did, is in a 4WD stocked with lots of water. Dotting the parched landscape are desolate desert-like encampments, where a family or two combine forces to eke out a living by mining salt from the saline ground water, the biggest local industry. Legend has it that when a salt worker dies and is cremated, the soles of his feet survive – a lifetime of salt pan labor bakes them so hard that even fire cannot fully burn them.* Tata lorries transport their salt to small trading villages along a railway line. In the dry season, such villages host veritable hillocks of salt as far as the eye can see, where it’s packed and sent out on trains.
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City of Joy?
(Text below written by Usha Alexander in Oct 05. For pictures and more, click here.)
Calcutta is a difficult city to be in. With its illustrious past as the one-time heart of the British Empire in India, its seemingly endless roster of lettered luminaries, social activists, freedom fighters, entertainers, and scientists, with lush tropical forests and fields along the Gangetic delta as its backdrop, the city has long since fallen into a sad state of decay, where it stubbornly remains. More than in any other major Indian city, the grind of poverty, pollution, and desperation were front and center at all times during our visit. It felt like a city left behind. But people with close ties to Calcutta maintain that its intellectual life and revolutionary spirit are not dead. Given that its culture and education system still produce a disproportionate number of India’s scholars and artists even today, I suppose that must be true. Unfortunately, this isn’t evident to the casual visitor. What I saw were the destitute widows of the Calcutta cliché—society’s refuse—and sidewalks lined with sleeping families pickling themselves in the thick, black exhaust of autos, cars, and buses.We went during Durga Puja, the region’s most spectacular festival. At this time, every neighborhood constructs a pandal that depicts Durga, flanked by other gods, slaying a demon. For days these doll-like statues are fussed over, dressed up, prayed at, entered into competitions, and then with great fanfare and emotion, they are foisted into a nearby lake or river to dissolve back into the mud from which they were made. All day long during the week of the puja, loudspeakers all over the city hysterically amplify the beating of drums or sacred recitations—with interludes of film music—for those who somehow manage to retain their hearing. Frankly, to me the whole thing felt like just one arduously long, painfully loud puja, and I did not find it all that charming. Still, the joyful and festive spirit of the participants was frequently evident.
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The Giant Tortoises of Galapagos
Tortoises are land-dwelling turtles. They are exclusively terrestrial and vegetarian reptiles. In folklore they represent slowness, determination, and long life. Though found all over the world, the majority of the 40-odd living species are confined to Africa and Madagascar. They are characterized by high, domed shells; heavy, elephant-like hind legs; and hard-scaled forelegs.* The largest of them, the giant tortoises—with shell lengths (measured along the curve) up to 1.3 m (4.25 ft) and weights up to 180 kg (400 lbs)—are now rare or extinct because they were slaughtered for meat, or their habitats were destroyed by people, or due to the introduction of non-native animals (pigs, goats, rats, etc.) that prey on the young or compete for food. Of the giant tortoises native to about thirty islands in the Indian Ocean, all are extinct except on South Aldabra Island. The 10 to 15 Galápagos tortoises, commonly considered races (or sub-species) of the species Geochelone Elephantopus, are either severely depleted or extinct.*
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Al-Beruni’s India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, destroyer of temples, and plunderer of their wealth, but in his own dominion he was known as a patron of the arts, literature, and science (not unlike Genghis Khan who is a great and beloved hero in Mongolia today, gracing its currency, plazas, airports, etc.). He assembled in his court and the university he established at Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan) the greatest scholars and writers of the age.
One such scholar was al-Beruni (973-1048; another was Firdausi), “commissioned” by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental commentary on Indian philosophy and culture – Kitab fi tahqiq ma li’l-hind. “In his search for pure knowledge he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in Islamic history.”* Romila Thapar calls him “perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia … His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms, religion … are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India.” -
Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka
In Aug 2005, I visited a remarkable site in Madhya Pradesh, India: the prehistoric rock shelters and paintings at Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957-58 by Dr. Vishnu S. Wakankar. Of the nearly 750 rock shelters, 500 or so are adorned with paintings; about 15 are open to the public, though few come due to their relative remoteness and lack of public transportation. The site, 45 km from Bhopal, is at the foothills of the Vindhya mountains and is surrounded by forests of teak and sal that had grown lush green in the monsoon season.Bhimbetka remained a center of human activity from the lower Paleolithic times—the oldest paintings are believed to be 12,000 years old (a disputed estimate); the more recent ones date from the first millennium BCE. One can plainly see that the same surface was often used by different peoples at different times.
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Land of the Asiatic Lion
The only lions in the wild outside Africa are in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in the Sasan Gir Forest Reserve, created in 1913 and accorded sanctuary status in 1965. Hundreds of Asiatic lions have been bred here and now number close to 350. Other notable fauna includes leopard, wild pig, spotted deer, nilgai, four-horned antelope, and chinkara (a type of gazelle). A large water hole contains a few crocodiles. The sanctuary lies in a hilly region of dry scrubland. Spread over 1,295 sq km, its vegetation consists of teak with an admixture of deciduous trees, including sal (Shorea), dhak (Butea frondosa), and thorn forests. ♣ Lions were once plentiful in Asia, which explains their prevalence in folk stories like the Panchatantra. Even in the 19th century, they ranged from the Middle-East to Bihar. While the lion population at Gir has grown in recent years, they compete for habitat with 52 human settlements of various sizes inside the sanctuary. Livestock constitutes about 25% of the lion diet and this loss is tolerated by the locals (the dominant group is called Maldharis).
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An MSc and a Ph.D
(An excerpt from an account of my travels in Jordan a few months before 9/11)
Two days earlier, on the bus from Amman to Petra, I met Mohammad, 27, and Zayed, 29. Muhammad wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, a moustache and a two-day stubble on his square face. Zayed, dressed in “business-casual” attire, had a slim, clean-shaven face. Both spoke a halting English. I initially mistook them for old friends but they had just met on the bus. Category: Travel -
Servitors of the Divine Consciousness
In Jan ’06, I visited Auroville for the second time (first in ’96), but my interest was still purely anthropological. Yet again, Auroville—a township in Tamil Nadu founded in 1968 by the Mother (Mirra Alfassa), a French collaborator of Sri Aurobindo Ghose and a great believer in his teachings—struck me as an immensely audacious and, in some ways, a naively idealistic experiment. The Mother dreamed of a place where “all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities … where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions.” Auroville aspires to be such a place, “a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and harmony, above all creeds, all politics, and nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.” Today it is home to 1800 people (600 Indians) from 35 countries in over 100 settlements.
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Who’s That Pretty Pachyderm?
One of the pleasures of traveling in India is to unexpectedly run into elephants. Almost always decked out by the mahout, they’re typically found blessing visitors at temples and festivals, strolling down a street, or giving rides at tourist sites and national parks. I’ve also seen wild herds in the African savanna and tropical forest, and in the grassy woods of Uttaranchal and the hills of Kerala. But elephants never cease to amaze and delight me. That elephants are smart is common knowledge, but a new study has moved them into a super-elite club of smart animals: the great apes and humans
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Melting Girls and Serpent Women
Two days ago I went on a day trip to Pushkar, a Hindu pilgrimage site, from Jaipur. It has what is said to be the only temple to Lord Brahma in the world. Bathing ghats encircle Pushkar Lake, which, like the umpteen other polluted lakes and rivers in India, is believed to have miraculous healing and purifying power. Though alcohol and meat are banned in this holy town, soft drugs are tolerated (Lord Shiva partakes of it himself!) and are a major draw for Westerners. Pushkar’s history goes back a long way but all its temples date from modern times; the earlier buildings were summarily razed by the bad guy Aurangzeb. 
This was my second visit, occasioned by the annual, weeklong Pushkar camel fair that attracts over 250,000 visitors from India and abroad. Villagers turn up for both business and pleasure. In the animal market, amid women gathering camel dung for fire and children frolicking in tanks that hold drinking water for the camels, I felt transported back by decades, save for the large telecom company ads and the camcorder-toting tourists. -
A Day Trip to My Alma Mater
I got a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT, KGP). Sixteen years after graduation, I visited it again from Kolkata during Puja 2005.Most students had gone home but the institute, though fairly deserted, still evoked a flood of memories. But this felt different from nostalgia (it’s been a while since I felt any nostalgia for the IIT), which I find plentiful in most IITians I meet (“the best four years of my life”, they typically say). This gap may be because I have long viewed my IIT stint as, at best, a passage to a richer life in more ways than one (for which I feel fortunate but not nostalgic; for me most four year periods since have been better), and, at worst, a relative waste of time that played only a trifling role in my intellectual and moral development. I went again partly because places from our past teach us something about our present.
For an elite college that attracts some of India’s “sharpest” kids, its near total lack of liberal education now seems like a deprivation to me. That the IITs see no value in leavening technical instruction with the humanities should give us pause about the quality of its graduates. In my former department, only three non-professional courses are on offer today in four years, including English for Communication, which comes with eight other courses in semester one. The incoming freshman must take nine courses in the first semester and eight in the second! And all that while negotiating life away from home. How can he learn anything well? UC Berkeley averages three or four each semester. The IIT KGP curriculum offers nothing even on the history of global science and technology, nor on the unique challenges of technological development in India.
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Nalanda University
(See my updated and expanded article on Nalanda University.)
In July this year, I visited Nalanda in Bihar, India, one of the most spectacular archaeological finds on the subcontinent. Nalanda was once a famous Buddhist monastery and university. The region’s traditional history dates to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira (6th–5th cent. BCE). Nagarjuna, it is said, studied there. -
Reporting from Home
I’m a non-resident Indian (NRI). I left India in 1989 for a masters degree in the US. I then lived in N. California and W. Europe and had traveled to 50+ countries by late 2004, when I moved to India for two years to read, write, travel, and rediscover the country (I’ve since visited over 110 destinations in almost 20 states).
I recently thought of recording my pros and cons of living in India again after 15 years in the West (if I had never left India I would surely see things quite differently). What doesn’t appear below either didn’t impinge enough on my consciousness (or I’m yet to identify it for this list), or it wasn’t distinctive enough. (—Oct 2006)
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Land of Two Rivers
“Punjab” comes from two Persian words, panj (“five”) and ab (“water”), thus signifying the land of five rivers (the Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, and Sutlej). The present Indian state of Punjab is the result of two divisions: a) during the partition of India in 1947, and b) during 1966, when the majority Hindi-speaking areas were separated to form Haryana. “Punjab” is a misnomer today since only two rivers, the Sutlej and the Beas, lie in its territory. Chandigarh, a union territory, is the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana. ♣
Cultural clichés associate Punjabis with prosperity, hard work, straight talk, tolerance, a relaxed yet enterprising spirit, stellar contributions to Indian defense, politics, media, sports, and entertainment, a huge presence in Bollywood, truck/cab driving, dhabas and Punjabi food (the best known Indian cuisine worldwide), turban and beard, a butt of ethnic jokes, and a joie de vivre that manifests itself in the exuberant song and dance routines of the bhangra. Women here seem among the freest in the north. Literacy stood at 70% in 2001, higher than the Indian average of 65%. Sikh Gurdwaras are cleaner and more charitable and welcoming to outsiders than most temples and mosques I have visited. From the road, the harsh edge of poverty is visible here far less than in most parts of India.
