Radio Silence

As I've alluded to in a previous post, I intend to spend most of my time in Thailand in 'retreat'—that is, investing this time in a very focused way toward a few specific goals. As such, I'm taking a blogging break, which is probably best for all of us since my readership is 95% Canadian, and I can't imagine you all want to hear about my tropical adventures from the frozen North. Late April I'll pick it up again, if anyone's still interested!

Bangkok—Round #1

I arrived in Bangkok two days ago after what was unquestionably the single worst experience I've had yet travelling. On no account should you fly GMG Airways (Bandgladeshi) if you value service, your dignity, or possibly your life. I could expound for some paragraphs about the details, but since I didn't enjoy experiencing them I expect I'll find recounting them equally unpleasant. Suffice it to say that I landed in Bangkok at midnight, instead of five o'clock in the evening, and as inspired to produce a limerick:

When travelling I suggest
That one avoids Bangladesh;
The plane's there won't fly,
But yet they'll try—
Effort, for once, won't impress.

And that concludes the dark chapter of my adventure I shall remember as Bangladesh (ok, this is entirely unfair—I never got past the airport, so under no circumstances am I picking on the country as a whole. But GMG Airlines, whew—don't do that). Thailand, meanwhile, has proven to be a marginally brighter experience if an extremely intimidating one.

I thought that Thailand would be a breeze after having spent so much time in India. Bangkok especially is a perfectly modern city with quite  a lot of amenities Halifax will likely never have, not the least of which is a cool-ass skytrain (for those who are not in the know, on any occasion where the word 'sky' is used as a prefix for a machine, 'cool-ass' immediately becomes a viable adjective). Yet, the one thing that every city in India has over Bangkok (from a strictly Western—indeed, English—perspective, you understand) is quite a lot more history being run by the British; in fact, Bangkok hasn't got any of this at all and it shows. Everything is different—everything, it's completely surreal and so far I've found it very difficult to cope. Food has been intimidating in the extreme, and though lots of it looks delicious and all of my previous experiences with Thai cuisine bode well, there is so damn much of it and I haven't the slightest idea what any of it is called or how to discover what's in it. So, thus far I've dined at a Subway, a Pizza Hut and just this morning I found to my utter delight a Tibetan/Nepali/Indian restaurant that is completely authentic and makes the best damn momo's I've had yet (momo's are stuffed Tibetan dumplings). **I'm finishing this entry two days later than I started it, and I have since dabbled in some Thai food and discovered that yes, indeed, it is amazing.

But I think the most challenging part of Bangkok so far has been the sense that I am not welcome. It's not pervasive, and I've bumped into several friendly Thais who contradicted this. However, I'm a young, white, North American male and that, sadly, is not a favourable signature to have here. Allow me to explain.

As I mentioned, I arrived in Bangkok very late—after getting through customs and then taking a taxi into the heart of the city, I didn't actually arrive at my intended destination until about one in the morning. Said destination was Khao San Road, the infamous 'back-packer' strip of Bangkok. And, perhaps, twenty years ago it was indeed a great spot for the budget traveller. I've seen it by day, now, and it looks more or less like a normal street, albeit more densely populated by bars and farangs, or foreigners. At night, however, it's an entirely different universe. A couple of friends had warned me that I wouldn't like Bangkok much, and that for someone with spiritual endeavours I wouldn't find much there. I've made a point of keeping my blog PG-13, so to speak, but I'll let you in on a little secret—when I was a little closer to eighteen I was also significantly more interested in the various sorts of depravity North America has conjured up under the label of 'a good time'. Spending so much time around Tibetans had begun to wear me down, a little; as I've written here before, I've not yet broke the habit of seeing myself through the eyes of those around me, and Tibetan eyes are about as far from depraved as I've yet seen. I, at least, have had to work very hard to keep my conscience clean in their company. So, secretly, I was looking forward to a couple of days bar hopping and letting myself off the hook a bit. Khao San Road however, at one o'clock in the morning, did not satisfy my naughty ambitions. Rather it was, frankly, disgusting. I mean that word precisely—disgusting.

Thailand is world famous for its sex tourism; prostitution here is rampant, cheap, and also customizable, a history that stretches back to the Vietnam war, when American soldiers discovered unfortunate ways to blow off a little steam. In doing research on Bangkok from India I even ran into a couple of websites that allowed you to completely design your 'fantasy weekend' (or longer); you could choose the number of women to accompany you, their ages, and also which sort of explicit acts you wanted them to perform. And worse, these packages weighed in at around $300CAD. In the north, where rural life is more common, as is poverty, women are often shuttled down to Bangkok (or even sold out of Thailand) because their bodies are more profitable on the streets than in the fields.

Khao San was littered with what I expect were various western military boys on leave; bulging muscles and crew cuts covered in designer hats and mismatched clothing, beer and cigarettes, vacant eyes. No one looked healthy, despite their bulk; sunken, dark rimmed eyes and pale, sickly skin sat in drunken postures all around me. The North American women reminded me of the sort who were very popular in their first year of university but had, by the end, failed to mature and thus given themselves over to their various appetites. Bright, orange tans, hair that had been forced blonde, and body shapes that smacked of bulimia or at least binge eating and crash dieting scanned the crowd, looking to garner the attentions of the boys. I don't have contempt for these people so much as pity; they just looked lost, or hurt, or both, and the medication they'd found wasn't helping.

The roads themselves were sticky from spilt beer, and Thais, looking depressed, sat at stalls or booths or wagons hawking beer, bongs, t-shirts and their own bodies. At an estimate I'd say one North American male in five had a Thai woman with dense make-up and revealing clothes at their side or on riding on them piggy-back. Most of them walked holding hands, an intimacy I find, in a way, more revolting than the sexual acts to follow because… because one should, at the very least, not have to buy affection. All of these men refused to make eye-contact; they wore their shame plane on their faces, and searched the place with their eyes—I had the impression that they were seeking confirmation that other men were complicit in their act; and, of course, they were. It was a noisy, raucous, dirty, drunken, abusive affair that I exited in about ten minutes. I hadn't slept in two days and I had about 40kg on my back, but I think I was still privately glad that ever guest-house I found on Khao San was full. Oh, and it is by no means a 'backpacker' spot; the cheapest guesthouse I found there was 600 baht, and most settled in near 1000; I'm currently paying 400 baht, and I've found a place that charges 150 (but only after I'd paid for the week at my current spot…)!

And you can see it on the faces of the locals, the contempt, their sense that you've come to use their entire city like a motel room. It's a very Buddhist country, the place is littered with gorgeous temples (wats), and people exchange little bows with each other everywhere. So they try to be polite, but sometimes you can just see it, naked contempt, and I hate it. I didn't earn it, damn it! I'm not that white guy. And I can communicate it, a little; the guesthouse I am staying is a nice example. It's taken me three days to get the staff to warm up to me, but with a quiet, gentle demeanour, polite questions and iterative thank-you's, and finally my continued sobriety and lack of 'company', I've finally begun to receive warm smiles and friendly 'hello's. My message to white people everywhere, and especially men: Please stay the hell home if all you want to do is be a nuisance. You're ruining it for the rest of us.

So, I've felt intimidated by Bangkok and have ventured into it very little. I have to return here, probably twice, before I leave; my current plan is just to get the hell out of it, for now, and perhaps to explore it further when I pass through again. Instead I'm intending to head north, to check out a retreat that's been recommended to me, and maybe to try my hand at a little trekking. But I'm keen to spend the last of my two months in Thailand in the south, among the vast archipelago of islands, where I've heard that if one searches persistently enough you can find a little solitude and a cheap shack to live in. A quiet spot on a tropical beach with only meditation, web design and a little yoga suits me just fine. And yes, I do intend to take pictures!

The Day It Snowed In India

If there is no such thing as karma—if the happenings of circumstance are really and truly nothing more than swirling eddies in the river Chance—then at the very least I can say that it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we should be so easily deceived. For weeks I have been saying: this is it, I am going to have an entire winter with no snow. With two days left before my escape to tropical refuge, the universe saw fit to notice me, smug smile and all. The ground went white, today.

But, my cynicism is really only for play. The weather here is nothing like that of home; where Nova Scotia is an indecisive prankster, India's mountains are a tenacious wizard. The weather, when there is any—and for weeks or months on end, there might not be—is always a performance. Up here, we are in the clouds; they move so quickly that, in the span of five or ten minutes, the valley can shift from utter opacity (sometimes you actually can't see across the street) to pristine clarity, especially since the wetness of the air briefly cleans away the blanket of pollution. Today, I watched spires of cloud go shooting up the face of a mountain, swirling up a kilometre or two of vertical slope in a matter of seconds. It's completely surreal. But with the clouds comes the rain.

For three days (so far) is has rained more or less without pause. I've just never seen anything like it; in Halifax eight consecutive hours of rain is like an eternity. Here, three days is a joke—soon, it will be three months. But, in the mountains where the air and earth are always cold, only direct sunlight brings warmth. And so, as the days of continuous cloud advance, the temperature drops steadily. For two days we've been watching the snow slip down the mountain slope, coming for us. This morning at 6:30am, at last, it arrived. By Canadian standards, there wasn't much to speak of; two or three inches of hail-born snow that's really only crushed ice. It was bizarre, to my coastal eyes, because all of this was happening during the loudest and more impressive display of thunder and lightning I have ever seen. Up here, the lightning is born a hell of a lot closer to you than it is at home, and the way it sunders the sky is straight out of a Jerry Bruckheimer flick. But today, at least, the snow was the interesting bit.

First, understand that the majority of vehicles here are both front-wheel drive and European; they're designed to be fuel and space efficient. So, if you take them four kilometres into the sky and place them on roads with disturbingly lethal outer edges, you're in a tricky spot. But if you then erase all visible traces of treading from their tires, and fold the roads into waves like a flapping bed sheet, what you then have is a lot of very, very dangerous opportunities to look very, very silly. I watched a car try to ascend an incline of about fifteen degrees this morning; after travelling about ten meters in roughly three minutes, he gave up. Which is good, because moments later a van came swimming down the hill in reverse—a make-shift version of rear-wheel drive that did precious little to reduce the number of snow angels the front (back) made as it flopped about like a dying shark.

But the real thrill of snow, up here, is the ridiculously festive atmosphere it generates. The entire town lost power about an hour into the snow day, which means that all the shop keeps and not an insignificant number of school children took to the streets to make the best of the snow. However, in truth what they made of the snow was simply quite a lot of mess and this is primarily because they spent most of the day throwing it around.

I believe that, as a consequence of having so damn much of it, Canadian's have lost the understanding of how to properly fight with snow. I wouldn't dream of throwing snow at, say, some old lady I saw passing me by. Here, however, every street becomes a gauntlet, and everyone in it a target. Tourists fought locals, locals fought Tourists and each other both. Indians fought Tibetans, Tibetans fought back. Friends fought  strangers, and strangers fought eachother. Hell, they even fought the dogs (which I thought was a bit unfair, actually!). In short, most of the snow that fell today did this at least twice. Lined by Indian and Tibetans, I could hardly get twenty steps without assault. From rooftops, from the street, from windows; it was like Black Hawk Down but with frozen water instead of smelted lead (err… ok, well, to be fair their were no smouldering helicopters either, but I'm confident there would have been if any had flown low enough to get caught in the crossfire). I saw more Indians than Tibetans doing this, however, and I think novelty is at least partially the explanation. It was really interesting to discovering the extent to which successfully being amongst snow requires technique. To my absolute delight I found that Indians who are not from Kashmir or Himichal (which get snow annually) are adorably incompetent at negotiating a frozen landscape. Walking up a hill, I sped past a man walking unsteadily forward in what I believe were meant to be steps. He looked at me, effectively running past him, and frowned in puzzlement at my lack of impediment. I did the obvious thing; I shrugged and said, "I'm Canadian." This was a phrase I had a number of occasions to use today, and I confess I was utterly gratified when he looked at me and knowingly went "ooh…". Fellow Canucks, our reputation precedes us. But the better anecdote is forthcoming.

I know, by now, quite a number of the local shopkeeps and usually enjoy a half dozen congenial pauses on my way to and from anywhere. Today, as I was passing a group of them, one in particular, Suzon, was grinning at me devilishly. He asked:

Suzon: Jon! How you like snow?

Me: I'm Canadian. I loathe it.

Everyone: He's Canadian!

Five simultaneous blasts of icy snow pummelled me from every direction. They roared with laughter, and then they waited to catch my reaction. I stood up, and I feigned indignation. For a second, their bonhomie wavered, but then I broke into a grin and said, "Ahhhh. It's good to be home." The joke went over well.

Before I retired to my room to hide beneath the blankets and await the return of electricity, I made one last stop; at my most favourite of convenience stores, Sanjay-ji's Confectionary. Sanjay himself was absent—his vehicle quite literally couldn't rise to the task of surmounting the local hills (ba-dum). The two fellows who were running the shop today were in good spirits, but underdressed for the weather, especially since their only heat source would have been electric. Neither of them wore a hat, and I asked if they were cold. They shrugged, presumably to say "yah, but… deal with it?". I told them they were better Canadians than I, we laughed, and I left. Little did they know my plan! Next door is Suzon's shop, which sells hand-made knitted clothing. A toque with ear flaps and an inner lining is about 100Rs, or approximately $2.40. I scooped up two, snuck into Sanjay's, and threw the hats at them, whereupon I made for the exit at a dead run. You have to understand: this was the only possible way they would have "accepted" my gift. I left with voices shouting a worried "sir, sir!" in my wake, but I made good my escape and they were forced, I presume, to be warm. If anything interesting comes of this, I'll keep you posted. But I leave for Delhi in two days, and Thailand in a week, so in all likelihood the next time I write will be from Khao San Road in balmy Bangkok. So long, winter, hello Southeast Asia!

Buddahood or Bust

Disclaimer: This is a damn long entry; if it doesn't suit, I reccomend Twitter. So you can read this in pieces, or not at all, but it's more important to me that it be right than that it be brief and not everyone who reads me digests these issues with the same ease. It's not about 'India' so much as what I've come here for, but it's really all I've got to write about, lately.


I keep a surprisingly large amount of secrets, not because I am particularly uncomfortable with sharing them, but because it's particularly arduous to do so; they're of the sort that the average person requires a rainy day with too much coffee to really bother with. No one who knows me would be surprised to hear that I'm concerned with questions about the progress of humanity, of spirituality, of geo-political concerns and all that comes with an megalomaniacal ethos. I'm stealing a gag from Douglas Adams when I say that I am not above a little bombastic diatribe in the same way that the Earth is not above the sky. But the truth is, musing and ranting aside, these concerns are truly of grave consequence to the value I place on continuing to exist, day-in, day-out. So the topic for today is honesty and doubt; an exercise of the former, hopefully to dispel the latter.

The logic goes like this: if, in the ranks of your psychological executive staff, there is a member whose job is to insist that you are more or less irreparably inadequate, then you are likely to experience quite a lot of doubt when making statements about how things ought to be in the universe. Afterall, ultimately the only thing against which one can judge themselves to be adequate must be the universe, in any or all of its myriad facets, simply because there isn't anything else. And you see, there's a lot of personal risk in actually asserting anything before the scrutiny of the universe because, as far as having the power to assert opinion goes, the universe is in overwhelmingly the more formidable position from which to disagree. So in the ivory tower of the subconscious the debate unfolds:

Good Self: I firmly believe [something].

Bad Self: Well I'm sure you do. [snicker]

Good Self: Oh yeah? Well why don't we just check with the universe and see who's right, shall we?

Bad Self: Go for it. But just remember: if you try and fail, we're both going to know who was right, won't we? [smug smirk]

So, what's a Good Self to do? Enter the origins of what would come be called, by the advent of capitalism so rampant it actually comes to your door begging,  the "foot-in-the-door policy". Good Selves are a strong and nearly indefagitable lot—but only nearly. There are just some things they can't really cope with, and Bad Self being ultimately the more correct of the two is just such a thing.

Often, Good Self nonetheless goes ahead and checks its intuition with the universe, but not straight-away, and not full-out because it's a hell of a lot safer to hedge your bets. Good Self goes:

If I really think [something] is a good and valid point, then surely the universe is both aware of prepared to confirm this, yah? If I can subtly intimate my thinking without you-know-who noticing, maybe the universe will throw me a bone.

And so it goes, with half-assed and timid little experiments, Good Selves the world over investigate their suspicions, hoping that reinforcement will be forthcoming, with the consequence that anything for which receiving reinforcement would have required a full and convicted effort never gets the green light. Yet lots of the time our equivocating trials do elicit confirmation, whereupon Good Selves experiment a little more boldly, and the accumulation of these tiny merits we eventually call growth, or karma, or if we're haven't managed to get very many of them, luck. In the best of us, Bad Self ends up with its tail between its legs more often than  not and eventually goes on to sit sullenly in the corner. Meanwhile, in the worst of us, Bad Self gets away with far too many "I-told-you-so's" and generally goes over like a post-Walt Disney (that is, like a good idea passed off to bad leadership). All of this I've offered simply to explain why my bombastic wailing is more often than not unaccompanied by praxis. Because it's a damn lot safer to be appraised for your opinions, which cost a pittance in energy to air before the universe, than for your actions, which collectively amount to your life and thus, by extension, you.

When I was quite a lot younger and completely lacking what one could call a firm grasp on identity I took hold of the possibilities offered up by the iconography of the music industry and clung to it like the jaws of crocodiles cling to mammilian legs. Anyone who's ever suffered my scornful stare at their taste in music will remember quite clearly what I'm referring to. This music showed people that I was of that sort of person which (I worriedly hoped) was also the right sort of person. Thus, failing to agree with me about music was, by extension, a failure to agree with me as an argument for demonstrating what a "me" ought be like. But, when I went to school for audio engineering and began to hang around with audio professionals I encountered a  haughty and caustic rebuttal to my conception of what constituted excellent music (as an aside, I may never forgive the people who taught me how to not enjoy Jagged Little Pill). Anyway, I met some audio snobs, joined them, and in the oval office of my mind a conclusion was reached. I wasn't present for it, but those who were sent me a message that went something like this:

We, the constituents of your psyche, have hereby concluded that Our Lady Peace may, in fact, not be the greatest assembly  of musical  genius in human history (indeed, they may not even have been granted press passes). Since we are unwilling to concede the critical dependence of a complete and worthy existence on a well-formed musical discrimination, we are therefore forced to conclude that on this matter the universe is correct, and you are wrong. Please amend your opinion post-haste, ummm, we hear this 'David Matthews' and his band are rather good.

And indeed, when I came home, Dave Matthews Band and whoever else I had been instructed to adore became the occupants of my musical pedastal. But gradually, as that pedastal failed to become the throne for one musician and one musician only*, I realized the fallacy of my thinking. So, today my scorn for other people's music is motivated by an entirely different sort of insanity called 'arrogance', about which I shall not write today [insert chagrin here]. *Daniel Johns, however, is making a good run at it.

But, back to the point: what if the thing, about which a Good Self is passively asking after the opinion of the universe, is of a more fundamental variety? What, for example, if it's something about which the board of consciousness executives are unwilling or unable to concede their position on? This is a game played for all the marbles, and it's just about the most terrifying thing that literally can exist (ie. fear is of the mind, therefore what ultimately threatens the mind must be ultimately fear-worthy). Ethics, religion and generally any question related to the identity of fundamental goodness are opinions of the sort that, once a Good Self gets itself solidly convicted about them, become devastatingly hard to relinquish. And so I spout, unaccompanied by sufficient action, my turgid opinions regarding—once more from Douglas Adams—Life, the Universe, and Everything. All the worst things in life are going to go on happening for quite a while after I've died, you see, but I have accepted this. But, if it turns out  hat the universe isn't even able to conduct itself in a manner that my conscience has deemed dignified then I, for one, with utter sincerity do not wish to live in it. The problem that immediately presents itself, however, is that there isn't anywhere else to go.

Now, I've run off to India. I did this for a lot of reasons, but a very central one is that I discovered, in a big contradictory web of ideas and buildings and budgets called a university, that quite a lot of hundreds of other Good Selves throughout history have thought and felt a lot of the same things I'd come to have feelings and thoughts about. Moreover, some of those Good Selves were still alive and, thankfully, teaching; consequently I've also found out a great deal about how many millions upon millions of Good Selves have been cowed into passive silence by Bad Selves, not to mention the consequences thereof. A complete account would be depressingly epic, but a sundry list looks like: war, poverty, famine, abuse, discrimination, hate, sadness, dissappointment, consumption, dissolution and generally an obscene number of years of human life failing to have been nourished, loved or to even have had a life in which to happen. It's not that I didn't also learn about all the love, inspiration, generosity and whatnot that we ape successors have been up to as well. In fact, I generally think there's been more of this activity than of the uglier variety. So, from where I'm sitting, I can't reconcile the fact that classical conditioning hasn't taken care of the issue. I've had  (and continue to have) a very painful time of coping emotionally with the facts about what people do to each other and why.  And, now that it's out, I've had no success at all with getting my head back into the sand. The rules, for once, are rather simple:

Do good stuff, get good results. Do bad stuff, get bad results. Choose.

The truth is that I prefer to limit myself to simply talking about these topics because I haven't fully, completely decided my position. Don't misunderstand me; if you ask about the firmness of my opinion outside of this brief moment of lucid honesty I'll contradict myself with all manners of elaborate diatribe. But the truth—the debate that's being had in a private boardroom on the top floor of my exhausted brain—is that Bad Self, with his entourage of attorneys (Team Bad Self) and Good Self, who's bravely but foolishly come all alone, haven't agreed on how I should address the inimical quandry that is life. Quite a lot of people seem to think that the thing to do is get as much money as you can, work out a lot and comfortably enjoy as much as you can until its over, with the historically recent addendum that, if you can, be nice to people—you don't want to be thought of as an asshole, right?

But, the argument prevailing from Good Self is disparaging of being nice to people "just so I won't be an asshole". Someone in the office with the view wants to be nice to people because people are nice, because he likes them, and whether or not they think I am (we are?) an asshole is not as important as whether or not their lives are failing to be full of pain and suffering and all the finest turmoil humans can muster. In a nutshell, I'm pretty certain that this disposition puts me in the camp that rests the blame firmly on the shoulders of ego and attachment. The debate runs like this:

Good Self: I don't think you're understanding this, guys—I don't really think that this business is about us at all. I think... you know I think there's a possibility that none of us have really got a clear sense of perspective. What we ought to do is try and leave the boardroom, to, you know... to see if we even can exist beyond the confines of... well, here. [whereupon Team Bad Self exchange lawerly glances that confirm the unanimity of the position that Good Self is off his head]

Bad Self: Well, that's your business. But if you're wrong, you realize,  you're not going to get to be wrong ever again. No sir, if you try to pull the plug on the whole enterprise we've worked so hard to build up here, and you're wrong, we're putting you in the white coat with the long straps and that's the end of it. I'm not saying we've never been wrong in the past... hell, I'll even give it to you—in the last couple of years we've been shooting wide the mark quite a bit. But on this one, well hey... this isn't just about setting up a  cubicle down on three for some whiny alt rock band is it? You're talking about giving up the lease on the penthouse suite, so don't hope for the mulligan if you screw the pooch.

It's an intimidating reprisal, so Good Self stares at the door, bites his lip, and fumes quietly for a few minutes before sitting back down to have anther go at concensus. But there's none to be had; Bad Selves are not the compromising sort. Good Selves either disobey them and come back with the proof or  suffer their authority. And that, dear readers, is what I'm truly, properly, really and honestly getting at: authority. If you want to be an anarchist, and I mean, really an anarchist (and I have claimed to want this rather badly), it's no good to go off half-cocked whining about the suits if you haven't even ousted the aristocracy in your noodle.

In plain English, I came here to learn about Buddhism and all I've found is a clearer way to frame the exact same argument I came here with in the first place. Not that it's been a waste, because the argument is clearer, and I'm staring at the exit sign over those mahogany double-doors quite a lot more earnestly. But I am waxing and waning between suicidal contempt for existence (read: samsara) and... well, I can't explain to you what the other margin is because I've got to exit the equation to get there. But when I come back from research trips into emptiness (clarity, selflessness, wisdom, social harmony, whatever), I'm certain (well, damn near) that it's the right thing. Not a right thing. The right thing; not Buddhism, not even religion, at least not in the "necessary and sufficient" sense. Methodologies, no matter how profound or sacred, are ultimately just instructional pamphlets and travel brochures. And with that analogy in mind, I confess that I'm becoming exhausted by the commute. I don't want to  merely visit anymore, but packing my things and selling the real-estate is a one-off deal. It's like marriage: because it takes a life time you can only do it once. You can call it marriage all you want but if it ends then it was never the real thing to begin with. It's just logic—how can you know the identity of something that, by definition, takes the rest of your life if you don't spend the rest of your life doing it? If you want to know if I'm having a successful marriage, ask me twenty minutes before I die.

And so, I'm asking myself: am I picking the right concept of what a life is supposed to be like? But, damnit, I surely can't wait until life is over to decide and it surely is elapsing now. When asked, here is my best argument for the value of faith: without it, you can't really do anything sincerely, because you can't really believe it's going to yield results. I have faith that my can-opener will release the delicious fishy bits inside, and so I really do use it and I really do get the (delicious) tuna. I have faith that the next Silverchair album will blow my mind and so I really will buy it and, I can tell you in advance, it really will render me insensate from musical bliss.

But at long last I have to confess: while I don't seem to feel this way, from the discrepancy between my words and my actions only one conclusion obtains: I merely suspect that we can be free of contempt, avarice, jealousy and fear.

What worries me is that I have seldom seen a person act wisely only upon a suspicion.

February 18th marks the day that my Indian visa expires. The new rules state that anyone who leaves India on a tourist visa must remain outside of the country for two months. So, I have decided to go to Thailand, alone and into retreat, to evict the suits if I can.

Three Children Who Could Save the World

I did it! At long,  long last I have uploaded a round of photos! But the next round might take equally long, so if you'd like more you'll just have to keep up with Ninotchka's blog. While she's decided that writing weekly is too unfortunately closer to work than play, she's nonetheless much more committed than I to keeping a steady stream of photography netward bound (the primary work Nosh has been up to here concerns writing—proposals, a new curriculum for an extremely impoverished school and a teaching-training program for slum-dwelling would-be educators; so, writing for leisure currently amounts to a sick joke, from her perspective). You can see my meager supply of visuals here (or, if you've missed the other photos I've put up, you can see them all here).

In December I had become dreadfully bored; there had been a shortage of students with both the prerequisite basic computer knowledge and basic English to whom I could teach Photoshop (or indeed, any of the computer skills I am 'qualified' to teach). English classes at Lha run in three-month semesters, and December, being the third month in the series, held no opportunities to scoop up some extra teaching time. I busied myself rather a lot with web design, but frequently I'd been feeling stagnant and underwhelmed. So, any time anyone asked me if I could do anything at all I unwaveringly responded with an enthusiastic "yes". Yet, what I failed to do was keep track of how many things I had assented to, the consequence of which is that, as 2010 spun into existence, I shifted abruptly from under to overwhelmed. Currently, I teach guitar lessons Mon-Wed-Fri from 11:00am-~1:00pm, and Mon-Fri I teach English from 2-3, and then Photoshop from 3-5. Then I go to my tutoring sessions, three amazing kids who live nearby, which takes place in their shared bedroom and tends to run until about seven at night. Coupled with my current allotment of four websites to build, I am more than a little exhausted lately. But, it's gratifying work—all of it—and I tend to prefer complaining about being busy to lamenting being bored.

The private tutoring, though, is in its own way the most gratifying. This has nothing to do with the work itself, which is in fact altogether gruelling and something that quite frankly I wish I had never agreed to do. I have come to realize (and grudgingly accept) that I am the sort of teacher who does very well if given a couple of geniuses to direct and mold. But the gentle, patient and repetitive prodding along a path walked by the tiniest of steps is the sort of thing I neither do well myself nor have the slightest idea how to get others to do. In short, I do believe I have a talent for explaining things well—in English. Actually teaching English, on the other hand, is frustrating in the extreme; it could be likened to teaching sign language whilst wearing handcuffs. If I had hair, I would tear it out.

So, why do I enjoy this part of my day so much? Because of the kids. They're just... these three are the absolute epitome of everything that's right and good and beautiful in the world, and if it were possible to distill their nature into a tonic that could subsequently be sold in all the wealthy bits of the Earth, Utopia would shortly follow.

There is Tsering, an eleven year-old boy, Sonam, a girl of ten and Tsering's cousin, and finally Phurbu (pronounced as an aspirated poor-boo, not fur-bu), who is Sonam's sister. They couldn't be more different, but collectively they are just heart-wrenchingly, ego-shatteringly beautiful. Tsering loves hip-hop and Buddhism,  and is a walking stereotype of an eleven year-old boy in at least a dozen ways; energetic, roguish, attention-hungry and very concerned with playing at being a man. This isn't helped by the complete absence of his father. Rather, he's grown up at a monastery with his uncle (who is also a friend of mine, for whom I did some meager design work, and it was by his request that I agreed to teach these kids). He's extremely committed to helping his family, and prides himself on his independence. When his Uncle is away (which is most of the time; he lives in Bir, a town several hours away by bus), Tsering tends to be the one who does the major errands for their home and it's usually his job to get things fixed (just yesterday I taught him how to safely use and understand their propane regulator, which is leaky if not used with great care). His aunt (who is also the girls' mother), suffers from very serious rhumatoid arthritis and generally can't bend significantly at the waist or traverse stairs more than once in a while. So, Tsering also cooks, and occasionally makes trips into lower Dharamsala and other towns to pick up medicines—by himself! The juxtaposition of responsible adult and playful boy is sometimes amazing; yesterday he paused in the middle of reconnecting their stove and the afore-mentioned propane tank (a heavy canister easily two-thirds his own body size) in order to go make-out with himself in a mirror—an unfortunately successful attempt to distract his cousins from their lessons (...sadly, I didn't fair any better than did the girls at resisting his joke).  One of my closest friends, Sam, kept a blog of his teaching experiences in Korea, those who read it came to know a character named Paul. This kid is simply never going to appreciate the celebrity he momentarily enjoyed, but his antics were a constant source of amusement to those of us reading about him back home; and I am finally learning to appreciate how hard it is not to encourage these children by enjoying their disruptive behaviour. Or, as Sam artfully put it when his student had decided to deploy a common Korean means of being a nuisance at the rump of a statue of Christ: 

 I"Paul?" I asked dumbfoundedly "Are you dung-chipping Jesus?"

He was indeed.

It was something no one else would have conceivable done or even thought, and as such (even if it's something I'm unimpressed with) it's something which instantly makes him stand out in the class. I think at his age, it doesn't register if the attention is earned or exasperating, as long as it delivers.

It's something I'm working to ignore, but it's pretty hard when a kid is pantomiming jamming his fingers into the Son of God's arse— so to speak.

Though, the rare occasion does present itself wherein I come out on top despite Tsering pulling these stunts. He'd been away for a few weeks, and he recently returned, so at the end of our lesson I told him that I'd missed him. He grinned devlishly and said he'd missed me too, whereupon he started to babble at me in Tibetan. Phurbu started laughing and appeared embarassed, so I suspected I was becoming the brunt of some joke I couldn't fathom. Phurbu insisted he was simply explaining that he'd missed me too; but when he got down on one knee and started looking me lovingly in the eye, the joke became obvious. My response was approximately: "Tsering, this surreptitious attempt to impune my admission of sentiment before you is quite unbecoming of even an adolescent rapscallion such as yourself, and I hereby insist you reform your conduct posthaste." A moment passed, during which his mischievous grin waned and confusion broke out over his face (as his English was absolutely unfit to the task of comprehending me). I had been on my way out the door, and now it was my turn to grin: "What, don't you understand my joke?" I went, and winked. His amused defeat was the last thing I saw before I left.

Sonam, who I've just started to teach, is the shiest, sweetest, angelic little figure you could possibly dream up. We shook hands on the first day, after I'd made everyone leave the room so she and I could become acquainted without anyone trying to speak for or over her. Since then, I cannot enter or leave her company without shaking hands, though the ritual has become a sort of metacarpal hug more than a handshake. While Tsering will concoct any manner of attention-grabbing distraction he can (a favorite being to sneak under the bed and grab at our ankles when we're not looking), Sonam will only speak in a hushed whisper if I am teaching someone else, and moves through the room like a shadow.  Yesterday I told her she didn't need to whisper, and she nodded that she understood. In fact, what she had understood was that she was clearly whispering loudly enough for me to detect her, whereupon her voice dropped to the decibel equivalent of absolute zero. But she has a quiet confidence that I can't help but admire, and if she makes me a promise she'll keep it no matter how it challenges her. Tibetans have such reverence for teachers that they generally won't admit to having failed to understand a lesson (they consider this to be their fault and are ashamed if they cannot learn everything  perfectly and immediately). Hence, I make all of my students promise me that they'll ask me questions if they don't understand, because the alternative tends to be me speaking into the air a lot and them failing to learn anything from it. Sonam is one of the precious few who's kept this promise, and the dignity and duty with which she undertakes any of her work exceeds what I would have  been willing to believe a ten-year old could muster. Finally, I refuse to believe that there exists an emotional barricade in any human being that wouldn't succumb like gossamer threads before a charging bull to her trust,  openness and affection. Yesterday, whilst I was teaching Phurbu, Sonam, with her gentle stealth, crept up onto the bed and put her head in my lap, whereupon she quietly sank into a deep concentration, trying to learn what she could from her sister's more advanced lessons. The feeling of having a child you barely know but deeply admire do this to you is something like having the entire universe alight onto your shoulder to whisper in your ear, "oh, by the way, no matter how you may have mistakenly perceived yourself as unsavory and inadequate, you are in fact the safest, kindest and gentlest thing in existence, to which beauty, grace and innocence are attracted like flies to honey. If any of this doesn't sit well with your conception of yourself, please don't hesitate to get over it because there other forces at play more qualified than  you to make this assessment and they simply don't agree." It's very necessary, at times like these, that I concentrate on my lesson because otherwise there's a very good chance I'll just start crying.

Finally there's Phurbu. I've spent more time with her than the others, and at fourteen she's reached that pivotal moment in life at which one begins to understand, with both dread and anticipation, that adulthood is coming for them whether they're ready for it or not. When we first met, I was tutoring her alone because her sister and cousin were away. At the time, she was living completely alone for about a month. She would get her own groceries, and cook her own food (and I mean meals, folks, not a box of Kraft Dinner). She would clean the house, daily, with no one to check to see if she had, and study with equal diligence. She gets up at 5:00am, now, which is sleeping in her for; January and February are the longest holiday from school Indian children get. At boarding school, though, Phrubu gets up voluntarily at 4:30am, half an hour before her schoolmates, to get in some extra studying before the day begins. After this, prayer, cleaning and class consume her day until about six in the evening, whereupon she gets to study a little more before going to bed. 

Phrubu is brilliant, especially in mathematics. When we do math together, it's like dancing; the numbers fly around the page, and she becomes visibly excited by the logic playing out in her head. She is emotionally moved by math, which is something I share with her and few others. Meanwhile (and ironically) she detests 'science' and refuses to let me teach it to her because adding English to the already unbearable task of learning the fundamentals of atomic structure and covalent bonding lies just beyond the threshold of her formidable patience. When I teach her science, I am fully reminded that she is indeed a fourteen year-old girl, and she is quick to whine and sulk and be altogether infuriating. She's found a Tibetan science tutor, however, so the enemy has moved on. Nonetheless, I sorely wish I could be there when she finally realizes how intimately connected are math and physical sciences; I can't yet decide if she'll experience chagrin, woe or a very sudden sense of reconciliation.

Phurbu and I have set up a schedule so that I can teach her privately; when I try to teach them altogether, her maternal (or...um... siblingal?...) instinct is too overwhelming to penetrate. She tries to learn from me, but her eye is constantly roving to her younger sister and cousin, and when I am trying to test Sonam, I can always see Phurbu waiting in agony for the answer to come. Her face contorts with worry and it's clear that she has to use every ounce of restraint to keep from shouting out the answer. While Tsering has the same problem, his primary interest is in demonstrating his own brilliance (which, I confess, I have trouble admonishing him for because I still have to take conscious control of this urge...). Phrubu, meanwhile, is simply desperately afraid of Sonam feeling inadequate, or else of Sonam failing to learn. It's amazing, it truly is; she is deeply concerned with and affected by how well and how much Sonam and Tsering learn. The way these three interact... they love each other so freely, and their concern for each other takes precedence over everything. Even when I am exhausted, famished and completely finished with my day I cant help but be charmed by them, and without ever trying to they always get me to stay far longer than I intend simply because I can't bear to fail them. If I could, I wouldn't teach them anymore; I don't really like it very much. But the very notion that they might think I rejected them, or worse, that they could believe they'd done something to make me go away, is completely unbearable.

So, this is what I'm up to these days; coding in the morning, teaching in the afternoon and evening, and finally a little TV before bed. Of course, it's not TV exactly... the vast  majority of anyone reading this will fail to appreciate at all the significance of what I'm about to confess, but... it turns out a friend of mine named Orion has brought, on her hard drive, ten seasons and two movies of a popular anime called Bleach.  And I, like so many of my friends before me, have become hopelessly, helplessly, absoringly addicted to it. All of the forthcoming "I told you so's" are warranted and accepted—worry not, my spirit-force is strong enough to withstand the reprimand. /wink

Sanjay-Ji's Confectionary: The Little Things

Let's be upfront about this: I'm not a particularly diligent blogger. One thing I've been remiss about  (and I gather there are several things) is the complete absence of characters in the telling of my story; partly this has been because too often the relationships I build here are fleeting and brief, and partly because some things just don't translate to the page well.  We often take for granted the recurrent pleasantries we exchange with the people who exist on the periphery of our lives. Taken as instances,  like so many frames cut from a reel, the moments we share with such people seem utterly mundane—apparently beneath the effort of retelling. Yet, when considered collectively the minutiae of our social worlds is sometimes revealed as a coherent tale that's simply been written by the smallest of chapters. So, having made a New Year's resolution to do better than two entries a month and to include both photographs and characters more frequently, today I start with the latter. Let me tell you about a man named Sanjay.

In fact, it is much more common for me to refer to him as 'Sanjay-ji'; "ji" being an honorific in Hindi that is applied when speaking with respect to someone who is older than yourself or above you in status. While Sanjay is certainly older than I, by the standard purview  in India very few people are of higher status than I simply because I'm a white male. Luckily, such things are as often as not a matter of opinion, and to that end let me be absolutely clear on the matter: to those of us who know him, even though we may on occasion fail to use the honorific, he is quite sincerely Sanjay-ji. He runs (and I believe owns) a local grocery. By the standards of McLeod it's a fairly large grocery, which means that seven people can comfortably fit inside it and still have some space to move around. To be precise, his shop is more of a confectionary that's got sundry goods as well. So, my incurable sweet tooth and the extra mileage ones gets from the dollar when it's magically transformed to rupees left little chance of my path failing to cross Sanjay's; yet, it's loyalty, now, much more than selection or price or calories that leads me back to his little shop on Temple Road.

He has an easy smile and a quite manner, and he always seems to be smirking with the patient grin of a man who's had the universe figured out for some time now but continues to be curious about why everyone else has failed to do so. One of the consequences of the extreme gender roles in India is that your average Indian man is exuberantly willing to provide ample advice on any topic at all that you might be interested in, or indeed were not interested in but were unfortunately patient enough to listen to them expound upon. I haven't fully understood the phenomenon, but my sense of the matter is that being seen to give advice not only demonstrates knowledgeability, but also authority—status—in a way we wouldn't recognize at home. Perhaps because, for us, education is something the majority of us did whether we liked it or not, whereas here having education is a much more salient indicator of your relative economic position because if you're too low on the economic ladder you quite possibly won't get to have any. Moreover, the higher the status of the person to whom your advice is given, the higher your own status becomes as a function of the value of your advice relative to the status of the one who's taking it. You'll probably want to read that sentence again, because it's exactly as complicated as it sounds. Being white, male and North American, then, means that your average Indian male is simply bursting with the will to tell me anything at all about absolutely everything and to go on doing it for as long as I can sustain the appearance of being interested. What I absolutely love about Sanjay is his complete failure to do this to, or more specifically, at me.

I visit his shop almost daily, and it's difficult to describe exactly what it's like to experience his greeting; his warmth and gentleness are enough to generate a pervasive sense of the sublime, which is a bizarre feeling to have when popping in for a bag of chips and some tuna. He is slow and careful and patient with his every gesture; when he gives me my change, he presses the bills flat and ensures the symmetry of the corners; when he gets me a bag to pack my goods, he checks its condition thoroughly.  One day I entered his shop carrying a stack of empty boxes I intended to use at home; as I was paying for my purchase, he was busying himself with cutting twine and tying my boxes into a stack, lest I have a difficult time carrying them home after visiting his shop.

While he doesn't ever unload reams of unwanted advice on me to alleviate his sense of inadequacy, he is nonetheless a resevoir of knowledge about everything from culture and custom to techniques of Indian cuisine. One day I asked him about a dish I've been trying to become better at making—rajmah, which is spicy kidney beans in curry—and he was quite helpful in informing me about the proper blend of spices. Another day we were looking for vanilla extract; he didn't have any, but was quick to point out that we needed to ask for 'vanilla essence', not extract, and to be wary of our purchase. Such an item was likely to be a rare purchase for the natives, and would be kept behind the counter in a box; be careful of how much dust the shop keep has to blow off the box, he warned, because their product might be extremely old. When at last I did find a shop that carried vanilla essence, they were sold out—a fact I only discovered when the shopkeep turned around, ruffled about under the counter for a while, and turned to face me wielding a box so ancient and dust-ridden that I couldn't even read the labels on the side. It's the sort of advice Wikipedia will never provide because you've got to have been paying attention to the smallest of details for many, many years to know it.

His employees are treated with the utmost respect, and they too are always happy to see me. On more than one occasion I've entered his shop just as he's sent one of the boys to go and get the staff some chai (Indian tea), whereupon he always insists that I have one and quickly sends the boy back for more. They operate together with a clock-like efficiency, and I often catch him asking questions to his younger staff; he trusts them with their work, enough to let them be the experts about it, and to let their opinion and knowledge matter. Small though their job might be, each of them is apprenticing, if not to become future shopkeeps than at least to become future men of diginity and wisdom.

At Christmas, Ninotchka thought to bake him and everyone who works there some macaroons. I think that this was quite possibly regarded by Sanjay as the kindest thing anyone has ever done to him, and when we stopped in a couple of days later we were shocked to discover that he had gotten us a small Christmas gift, a set of four glasses.

In junior high and elementary school my mother bought me a calculator every year that I invariably lost in the first six weeks. For a few years she replaced it once, after which it became evident that my company was effectively a blackhole into which calculators entered and never returned; thereupon, she would cease to feed the vortex and I would spend most the school year doing my math by hand. So, of necessity I became very good at doing arithmetic in my head, and Sanjay was very surprised on my first few visits to discover that I had already figured out what I owed him before he'd finished with his calculator. Today, I don't calculate my purchase when I shop with him, and he knows it—he knows that I no longer feel any need to check what I owe, because the number he provides will be, invariably, accurate. I don't simply mean that he's too careful to make mistakes; he's all too honest to short change me. After having shopped their only three times (back when I'd first arrived) I'd gone and placed around 400rs worth of goods on the counter (about $9 at home); however, I'd also only brought about 125rs with me. Without a moment's pause Sanjay insisted that I could simply pay him the difference on my next visit. I paid for less than half of what I'd taken after having met in only three times!

In any case, he discovered that I could add quickly because I would tell him to keep the two or three rupees he would have to give me back as coin before he'd finished calculating. Consequently, we now have a competition to see who can trick the other one in to getting the better deal. If my purchase is 97 rupees, I try to pay 100 and he tries to charge 95. So far, I confess, he is winning; and it's not merely because he's the one making the change and is thus in a far better position to simply ignore me if I instruct him to keep the change. No, indeed; I am so insistent sometimes that I make his employees awkward because they can't imagine keeping a customer's change, but they're equally uncomfortable disregarding a direct request from a customer. No, on this matter Sanjay is simply much cleverer than I. Only a few days ago, when attempting to pay more than I ought, he quietly acquiesced (or pretended to!), filled one of my hands with a grocery bag, and then—at the last possible second—slipped the coins into my other hand as he placed the handles of the second grocery bag around it. I would have had to put everything down just to be able to give it back, nevermind having to argue with him about it besides. I turned on him with a frown and a parody of disapproval, but was simply met with his grin which simultaneously communicated his humble committment to some esoteric inner code of shopkeeping ethics and a boyish pride at having beat me  at our game. And these, dear readers, are the sorts of idiosyncrasies, the daily exchanges of tiny gratitude and kindness that begin to really change you if you practice them long enough, and with enough attention to appreciate them. 

So maybe this story, which is really just a collection of little stories, is not terribly interesting or adventurous; but these are the details that characterize India, they are the sorts of subtle happenings that you can't fit into a succinct rebuttal when someone asks you why in the hell you have voluntarily chosen to endure intermittent electricity and all manner of biological indescretion, but which in the end make the difference. To conclude, people like Sanjay and the relationships that ensue are the sorts of things you can only have if you come and live here instead of merely visiting, so perhaps the real value in sharing this story is that it provides a window into life in India as opposed to travel through it. 'Till next time...