McLeod Mornings

Being a fan of both alliteration and getting all the mileage out of any schtick I come up with, I decided to document the local counterpart to Mumbai Mornings, though for those of you with less appetite for extensive descriptions this second account might be a little more palatable. As I've mentioned before, I really get a thrill out of juxtaposition. It's just a great way to shake up your perception and divide your concept of the universe, a sort of cytosis of the possible. The partner of a dear friend back home once asked he and I why we found concepts from astrophysics so amazing since, for all practicable purposes their net relevance to our daily lives was approximately zero. And the best answer I could offer (besides the obvious, which is that astrophysics is to cool as genocide is to wrong), is that the psychological vertigo induced by even trying to conceptualize the scale of all things related to the cosmos, creation and interstellar cartography powerfully serves to reify one's relative position in the universal fray: vanishingly small and cheerfully insignificant. After a good hour of trying to wrap ones head around the (in fact impossible) task of visualizing gravity bending the path of light through curves in space-time, I tend to be a great deal less concerned with trivialities such as how often I'm doing crunches or whether or not I should yet again have cornflakes for breakfast. And finally, quite aside from the psychological exercise ist provides, juxtaposition is often just really funny; a recent (and favourite) example: one of my closest friends moved to the high arctic a few days after Ninotchka and I moved to India, and a week or two ago we found ourselves in a phone conversation together. The more or less hilarious discrepancies in circumstance are too numerous to list, but maybe the most amusing went as follows:

Jon: It's strange here; we've got to keep all the doors shut in the day lest the monkeys raid our kitchen.
Dylan: Yeah? Right now, it's not safe to leave the town borders without a gun because we're on polar bear watch.

You get the idea.

So, while McLeod mornings don't differ from Mumbai mornings quite as drastically as, say, the incubation period of a new galaxy and that of an infant, apart from a rising sun and a largely non-western audience they've got precious little in common. First of all, you can see the sun rising here, after a fashion, which is quite a lot less likely in Mumbai; even if you secure a vantage that overcomes the development horizon, there's still a blanket of smog over which the sun requires nearly an hour to climb. While there's still intense smog up here, it's thin enough that even the weak morning sun penetrates it (and, strangely, is occasionally beautiful if you subtract your conscience from the moment). In my 'Mumbai Mornings' post I detailed the emergence of the cacophony; it's just too salient to overlook, Mumbai is a raucous place. Mornings here are almost devoid of human sound. Our particular corner of McLeod is squeezed into a loop of roadway that circumscribes a cross section of hill behind H.H. the Dalai Lama's temple; thus, it's relatively secluded. Even the motorcycles, which outnumber the automobiles here because of their fuel efficiency and the predictability of the weather, are quiet; they tend to shut their engines off and coast down large hills like ours to further reduce the cost of fuel. The only real morning noise here comes from the dogs, which are numerous and stray. They remind me of nothing so much as thousands of sports fans in a stadium, rising and falling in stands to produce the famous 'wave'. One dog gets going, and another—not to be outdone—starts to bawl and howl, and soon another, and another until the chorus of idiot barking passes from one pack to the next in succession, off beyond ear shot. If you look in their faces while they're doing it, the vacant, confused expressions you find there become the perfect depiction of peer pressure. They've clearly no clue what they're doing or why, but everyone else is doing it and damned if they aren't going to as well. The only other sound is the water; there are vast (honestly, vast) expanses of one-inch-thick piping jutting all about the town and mountain, spanning dozens and dozens of kilometres because the all the water here that's not trucked up in bottles is fed by mountain streams. The piping is all above ground (which amazes me; teenagers back home would be unable to resist the opportunities for vandalism and prank there to be found) and is as often as not mounted on branches or loose boulders, if not just the left upon the ground. So leaky pipes and imprecise faucets mean that many building complexes have small brooks running out of their foundations; ours whispers out a pleasant trickling sound into the morning calm.

But the real treat, unlike Mumbai, is not the smell (which here is a much gentler aroma of pine trees and breakfast). Rather, the centrepiece of the McLeod Ganj morning is its afore-mentioned sunrise, though my telling you about it is a bit frivolous since it's perfectly impervious to any usefully sensual account. I think I've lost my camera, however, so I might as well try. We're in, effectively, a cove; a small valley between two peaks that opens at it's south-eastern end into the much, much larger Kangra Valley. Our balcony faces due East, and the combined effect of the geography and our orientation is that the sun rises mid-way over the slopes of the nearest range. So even though, from our perspective,  the earliest bit of sunrise is obscured by mountain, the valley floor is nonetheless illuminated an hour before the first direct rays cross the slopes; it glows rather beautifully in the smog. Finally,  the positively stunning part is that the snow-peaks, jutting significantly above the front-most range, begin to reflect the purple-pink-orange display even earlier than the valley floor, like magnificent, frozen prisms. So, the sun itself is the last thing to make an appearance. Taken together, the whole thing is a routine bit of masterpiece that I very seldom miss; it's scenes like these to which words like 'picturesque' were meant to refer. For my own part, it's a pacifying and profoundly gentle way to start my day. Usually, I sit in front of the whole affair with my little Buddhism book and allow my usual freneticism to start a little later in the day than it otherwise might.

Plus, there are a few residents here who share my enthusiasm for early mornings (I've accepted at long last that I am simply a happier person if I get out of bed by six); while in the first ten minutes of being conscious I consider conversation to be a form of violence, once I've got a cup of tea in hand it's generally a pleasant way to get over oneself and get on with the day.

There's nought to report in terms of adventures or anecdotes, for the moment; web design is not particularly interesting business, on the whole. But I've been planning to write an entry dedicated entirely to the local monkey population, so if something autobiographically interesting doesn't present itself soon, you can at least expect that sometime in the near future. Be well, everyone.

The Cracks in the Manic Mirror

Well, as is probably apparent, I've been spending a rather lot of time working on web development. I have a predilection for taking on too much; while in school, I embraced a terrible habit of pseudo manic-depressive behaviour, lounging in ambivalence and lethargy for a period which is immediately followed by span of frantic ambition and obsessive dedication that tends to yield results. But, this invariably becomes exhausting, whereupon I reason myself into a 'break', and the process repeats. If you manage to nest this cycle inside the annual turn of the semestered wheel, you end up with remarkably good grades at the expense of what appears to have been not very much work. However, having exited the centripetal flow of academic time, I am now realizing that this pattern is simply less efficient than would be a more precise and consistent balance of work/play. At least, this is my theory; as is too often the case with insight, implementation is forthcoming.

So, having undertaken quite a lot of web-dev for a couple of different organizations, as well as teaching  and, shortly, to tutor daily the nephew of a monk for whom I've been doing some print design work on the side, I confess I've been reluctant to blog. It's akin, I imagine, to the sensation professional cooks must occasionally feel when preparing food for themselves. Not that I'm a professional with regard to any of these undertakings, you understand, but I've been spending what might be considered 'professional' amounts of time with them nonetheless. It's all very ironic; I'd come here to explore religion and to put into practice some of the anthropological/sociological skills I've been sat in front of rather a lot, and primarily I've been glued to a monitor for hours on end, roving the internet and trying to teach myself the things I need to know in order to make good on the commitments I've made. But it's difficult to feel resentful or even guilty about it because my skills, however meagre beside those of my Western professional counterparts, are nonetheless sorely in demand here. So, I haven't been up to much that anyone except the most dedicated of nerds would find very interesting (in fact, being one I therefore  know several, and I doubt even they would be engaged for long). But I've had some introspective development, so perhaps I'll share that.

The Words of My Perfect Teacher is a book that is functionally akin to a Bible to Tibetan Buddhism (although it is not a Bible insofar as it's publication is much more recent and has been, by the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism, much more democratically compiled). In any case, I do my best to read it daily, or at least weekly, and I came upon a gem of a quote this morning. "Popularity is like an echo; don't pursue esteem, pursue its very nature," (Padampa Sangye). Well let me tell you, dear readers, esteem and popularity both have been pursuits of mine from about twenty-minutes after I acquired an ego, so this passage struck me like a bell. It's the imagery about the echo that registered; we're popular because, we can surmise, other people can perceive good qualities in us. But why look through their eyes? Why not just get on with looking inwardly to see if those good qualities are there, and skip the middle man? But we don't; we do things, and then we look around and see how they've been recieved, identifying with those receptions like a baby zebra imprinting upon its mother's stripes. So, the confession: I am privately—and ashamedly—aware that my good deeds are very often at least partially motivated by transactions of regard. In short, not unlike a captured dolphin, for a pat on the head I do tricks.

With this in mind, I've come up against an unsettling experience here, but one that's slowly proving to be an immense relief. If I am not disciplined with introspection, than I am not disciplined with anything (a possibility I am not discounting, you understand); and so I am always surprised to discover motivations or what we might call foundational logics that lurk just beneath the surface of consciousness. When I do finally glimpse them, there is always a latent experience of recognition, a reverberation in memory. It's like having walked for a some distance with a very small pebble in your shoe. The discomfort grows from an essentially imperceptible pressure to a proper antagonism; then, at last looking in your shoe to find the thing, you are surprised to realize that the  image of the pebble matches up rather nicely with the memory of the shape of the thing which had been bothering you while you were walking on it. I'm not at all sure if that analogy is going to be helpful to anyone, but there you have it. Long story short, the moment I finally get hold of these implicit motivations, they appear with a matter-of-fact clarity as a hitherto invisible intellectual counterpart to the emotional discord I had been feeling all along.

I know this psycho-babble stuff comes out as industriously complicated and maybe even unnecessarily thus, but it's my hope to avoid being so esoteric as to make my experiences mine and not relatable. Apologies if my waxing introspective bores.

Anyway, when I do good, I am always looking for a pat on the head, and I've known this for some time. I suppose I just didn't realize how hungry I was for it. I am volunteering a lot of my time and energy, and while I've met plenty of gratitude, it's somehow felt disproportionate. This morning, though, sitting on the balcony at 6:45 waiting for the (gooorgeous) sunrise, it felt very much as though the sunlight breaking over the mountain tops shone straight through my skull and into my mind, there to chase away a few opaque and crippling shadows. At home, the kind of effort I've been 'giving away' would be seem much more remarkable; under capitalism, we are expected to fend for ourselves, and in an ideological frame that doesn't even remember that wage-labour is but one of many possible manifestations of economy, what we do with our bodies is implicitly understood to be an engine for cash. So I, for one, have been secretly (even to myself) feeling as though the extent of my 'philanthropy' has warranted quite a lot of celebration. I expect a number of readers older and wiser than I will utterly fail to be surprised that it hasn't elicited this at all. Two important questions therefore invite particularly useful answers; the first question to ask is why my volunteering has only been met with adequate but unremarkable gratitude, and the second is why it should be that, celebrity and awe not forthcoming, I nonetheless wish to continue being of service.

Tibetans are, regrettably, people, and therefore susceptible to all the consequences that obtain; don't let me place them on a pedestal, they're just as corruptible and fallible as the rest of us. That said, they do hail from a social millieux that predisposes those born inside it to certain attitudes, practices and ethical codes, the practical upshot of which is that a great many of them end up being humbler, happier and more wholesome than, say, your average Western urbanite (though I concede that this might not, in fact, be all that hard to do). This fact, combined with the relentless efforts of H.H. the Dalai Lama to garner the sympathies of wealthier nations, means that its possible to have the sensation, here, that 'everything's fine'. McLeod Ganj, as far as global refugee centers are concerned, is quite a lot better off than, say, the West Bank. But what is has in common with every refugee center is of course that everything is not fine. People are estranged from their loved ones and will be probably for the rest of their lives, people are trying to find a way to live in a cultural setting they didn't generate, have almost no say in and weren't born within, and all manners of foreign convention and regulation govern their lives in ways they would never have chosen. Poverty is rampant; people just take care of each other very well, and a lot of effort is made to make sure no one goes without the basic necessities (though compared to Western standards, 'basic' has a fairly elastic defintion). But, a life of failing to starve and one possessed of real opportunity ride in different carts altogether, and the truth is that the thin veneer of relative comfort and well-being here is sustained only by unbelievable personal sacrifice and diligent communal support, every day, all the time. I call it volunteering, they call it life. So, my efforts are peanuts compared to the daily lives of most of the inhabitants here, and reflect, proportionately, a much, much smaller fraction of my overall resources than do theirs. Sure, they're grateful. But when you've crossed the frozen ceiling of the planet, at night, sporting only the few possessions you could carry in the company of a tiny fraction of your loved ones in order to escape the enforced disollution of your way of life, finally to set up shop in a foreign universe where the rules are different and you're wildly unequipped to play by them, the tourist who taught himself Photoshop in his foolishly ample free time doesn't strike you as all that special, to be honest. And when, casually sipping my lemon green tea in the splendor of the dawn, I finally saw myself through their eyes, I am relieved to confess that I felt altogether foolish. Relieved because, were it not for the timely arrival of this realization, I might have just kept on living in the shadow of my own need to be fed, clothed, educated, entertained and complimented. 

The second realization, which for those of you who are getting weary of this novel begs a much briefer explanation, concerns the very easy choice to keep on doing my little part despite realizing that no one's going to hold a banquet in my honor over it. It's an easy choice because of everything I've just explained; it's just not really about me. I'm here, I can help (at least a little), and so... I will. But, beyond that, there's an inherent irony pervading my every experience in that these people are inadvertently helping me, probably more than I'll help them. Infused with the reality that there won't be any personal gain for what I do, the doing itself becomes strangely... safe. Since I don't stand to gain anything, I don't stand to lose anything either; there's so little anxiety about it all, because there's no destination. There's the doing, and that's about it, and the decision to regard it as the good sort of doing as against the bad is my own; I don't answer to anyone except my future self for what I do with this time. My imagination toys with me; what if we did things as mundane as talking to each other with this same sense of submission to humility? What if we made love this way, and played sports this way, and wrote our songs this way? What if people just got over themselves long enough to really grasp that there are other people? The answers to these questions are likely to be regarded as being of the too-good-to-be-true variety, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that this is a weak and speculative reason to discount them. No one misquote me; Buddahood's as far away now as it ever was, and I'm not even saying I've moved on from my lust for thankyous and admiration. But now that lust is a sensation I can recognize and point an accusatory mental finger at, and at least that's something, as the saying goes, to write home about.