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.