Holi-day in India

This is an American we met in Brindavan. Or Vrindavan. Also known as "Krishna's Playground" because it is where Krishna danced and played with his gopis (Hindu for "groupies." no, seriously) it is referred to as one of the holiest places in India. We were there for Holi, and he was wrapped like this to protect himself from being pelted with color-bombs by roving gangs of youths on the street.

The spring festival of color, called "Holi" takes place on the first day of spring, which is the Spring Equinox, and the full moon. It is a celebration of spring , color and the playful dance of Krishna and his main babe Radha, (who was sort of queen of the gopis.) It is celebrated by people getting very drunk and pouring toxic, permanent color powder and liquid all over each other everyone and everything in reach, sort of like spring frat parties, only they just used beer. The holiday stretches into a week or more ahead of the actual day, and in some cases days afterward. It gets so rowdy we were told it can be dangerous, and were warned to absolutely not, under any circumstances, travel ANYWHERE, or even leave the house, for a day and a half prior to the actual day, as the festivities ramp up and the crowds get wilder and more aggressive, we were told it can actually be dangerous, even though it is just "play."

It was WILD!!! Beautiful, crazy, fun - and yes, as I - never one to pass up a dare - did venture out onto the streets for a short bit. Got pelted with color and then briefly groped before heading back to the safety of our hotel compound. We got video!! (Coming soon...)

On the Road with Dharma Boutique

Daily Dharma - Episode 2: Elecricity vs. Electronics

Apparently my ambition intention to upload a daily video podcast from India was just that - ambitious! Here is a brief explanation of some of the reasons why we have had trouble achieving our goal...

Almost HEAVEN!

We are in Jaipur now, known as the Pink City. It is beautiful and feels like nirvana after Delhi, which was really intense, to put it mildly. I got quite sick there and learned firsthand what the term “Delhi Belly” means. After four days of increasingly bad dysentery (on the third day I threw up and thought I was going to die, and although I’d hardly eaten in days and nothing at all in a couple days was still in the bathroom every ten minutes. Ew!) I was so weak I didn’t know what to do.

Finally I surrendered to the evil wonders of Western medicine. Having been to a hospital on my last trip to India that seemed like something out of a WWI movie (as sick as I was, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to EVER get better if I stayed there, and eventually fled to the relative** (see description of our room below) safety and sterility of my blessedly air-conditioned hotel room) I held out for as long as I could. I shuffled down to the local pharmacy, a couple doors down on the main bazaar (we’d moved to a cheaper and much less nice room at the Hotel Shelton, where we begged in vain for days to get a second towel, as we’d used one of the two we were given to sop up the water on the floor (the showers here have all been sans stall – meaning, you stand on the bathroom floor, which is marble and quite slippery, and the water comes out of the wall all over the room, like a ship’s bathroom. It isn’t bad, but wet marble floors are a deathtrap for anyone, not to mention this accident-prone writer, so we naively used one of our towels as a bathmat.) Unfortunately, the hotel staff saw how we’d treated their towel (filthy with stains and worn down to a nice 40-grit sandpaper, which I happen to like as it’s great for exfoliating) and refused to bring us any more during our week-long stay. The room wasn’t bad although we had to ask them to clean it upon moving in and even still were afraid to touch the walls.)

In India you don’t need a prescription to get anything, you just walk in and ask for what you want. I didn’t know what to ask for, and I don’t speak Hindi, so I just pointed to my stomach and said, “Sick. Belly.” The man gave me some pills – very strong antibiotics which made my extremities (and my brain) tingle in a somewhat frightening way. However, they did the trick. Some sort of thing I’d never heard of – noxiprocin? Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, couldn’t imagine the benefit of sticking it out any longer and the natural medicines Adam brought, which I prefer, didn’t seem to be working. It has been years since I’ve taken antibotics and I’m pretty sure there is not a single organism alive in my body now, but I will take it all in trade for the ability to walk upright and put food in my body.

Now I am completely recovered and back to feeling myself again – full of energy, curiosity and enthusiasm, ready to explore and eat the world! Adam has been a great travel partner, taking very good care of me, all the logistics and doing his business as well. It’s been amazing to see how much work it takes to do what he does. I envisioned a sweet, relaxing trip wandering through colorful bazaars, chatting with locals, bartering and drinking chai. While much of that is true, he is doing it all on his own, and it is far from relaxing. In reality he works long hours, slogging through miles of markets and piles of objects to find beautiful pieces, worthwhile businesses and people he can trust and wants to work with. He also must track each item he finds, the cost of purchase, packing, shipping, customs, unloading and marketing that piece, how many he bought last year, how much he paid, how many he sold, how many he can buy this year and on and on and on...all on India time, which means everything takes longer than you think.

Meanwhile I went exploring on my own a bit. Saw and rode an elephant yesterday, and I have finally managed to edit the FIRST of what was supposed to be our daily video podcast! The technological problems have been unbelievable. Still, all in all, a big adventure and lots of amazing footage and experiences.

PS - this tip from my friend Missy came in VERY handy when I was sick!! I didn’t bring Alka Seltzer, and they do not sell it here (or any American pharmaceutical products) but they do sell something like it called ENO and I put it in a lime soda (they give you a bottle of soda water, a small dish of fresh lime juice and a small dish of simple syrup – it’s make your own!) and it did help. What a great concept! Alkalize the system, I learned that in my yoga teacher training, how important that is, and yet I never equated ALKA seltzer - !! Funny!

Mumbai

Mumbai
is just as I remembered it – big, beautiful, hot, harassing, charming, chaotic. The water, the trees, the bougainvillea!! The street urchins, the vendors, the traffic! We stayed just two days there, long enough to go to the Mahalakshmi Temple, the Chor Bazaar (the famous Thieves Market) India Gate and the playa. I mean the beach. Chowpatty to be specific. We didn’t really GO to the beach, mind you, but it looked lovely from the taxi window as we passed it.

Adam reconnected with some business contacts, we saw some beautiful pieces of art, crashed the Taj Hotel, met up with a friend for lunch at the famous Leopold’s Café (big hangout for foreigners in the traveller-heavy Calaba district) began our search for the world’s best lassi and shot tons of video – I was a kid in a candy store, video-wise! Landing in Mumbai, it was immediately apparent that the question was not WHAT to shoot, but when to STOP shooting. Everything looked amazing! Strange! Beautiful! Different than anything we’re used to back home!

It was hot, but nothing like my last visit (April and May – ayiyi! Even the Indians complain about the heat and flee to the North if they can.) We didn’t sleep much, but were in good spirits as we explored and acclimatized. Our first experiences with technical difficulties began immediately, as we discovered our biggest problem was NOT difficulty filming people, as we’d thought (Indians, almost to a person, LOVE to be filmed, I’ve discovered) but electricity vs. electronics. Unfortunately for us, electricity won almost every round that first week. Oh sure, we’d brought adaptors and surge protectors – but we’d failed to realize that a) the power goes out randomly and often, all over India and 2) the wiring in most buildings is neither contemporary (by which I mean, of the last 80 years) or to code. If there is a code, which seems unlikely, now that I’m here. Plugging our electronics into the wall meant possible damage each time the power surged, went out, flickered or sometimes...just because. Inserting the surge protectors into the wall blew the circuits in our part of the hotel each and every time. Mind you, that is without plugging any electronics into them. Just the units on their own would do it. Sometimes the pop was so big the little surge protectors were smoking. The plugs were fried and etched from the battle. Hotel workers came to fix the circuits, but couldn’t do anything about the wiring. They looked at our electronics and smiled politely with the classic Indian head bobble. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it – sort of a side-to-side head wobble – neither a nod nor a no, it’s vague and essentially meaningless, which is really the beautiful thing about it. And everyone does it. All the time. You can see a great example of it in this video – look for the guy unwinding wire in the Chor Bazaar – classic!

Frustrated, but not beaten, we took a night flight to Delhi on Wednesday February 27, arriving in the tourist ghetto of Paharganj at 1am. Although Adam’s first choice (the Cottage Yes Please! Yes, that is the name!) was full, as were most other hotels along the main bazaar, we found a nice spot at the Metropolis, where we stayed for two nights, blowing more circuits and befriending the hotel electrician (ah! Improvement!).

Here we thought we’d gotten the electricity thing dialed, and I joyfully neared completion on the first video webcast – 3 days behind, but better late than never! - when we experienced the first of several Delhi daily power outtages. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to use iMovie, rather than my usual FinalCut, because it’d been recommended to me (by someone who’d clearly never tried to use it in India) as it was “so easy! So simple! Perfect for quick podcasting!” I learend the hard way that this sweet, simple program just isn’t sophisticated enough for these conditions, as each time the power went out, the hard drive went down and we lost EVERYTHING. In FinalCut of course it’s non-destructive editing, so whatever you’re working on is still there when the power comes back on. Bummer! I started over from scratch several times before I found out that the power goes out in Delhi every day for four hours, but you never know when and the hours aren’t necessarily consecutive! I also got a closer look at some of the wiring – it’s a Robert Crumb heaven out there, with wads of wires wrapped around each other, poles, tree branches, potted plants, hanging signs and anything else that might be close by. I couldn’t help myself and shot some some video which gives you an idea of what India’s electrical situation is like. Video coming...

India & Afghanistan

Ahh, India!

Ambitions of daily blog & video podcast aside, this has been an amazing trip. At least we have our health, heh heh...

We left Hartford on February 24 and landed in Mumbai (the official name, although many Indians still say Bombay) on the 26th, so we lost a whole day! Weird. I couldn’t help but wonder what I would have done with that day...

But first, a brief explanation of how & why I got here. My friend Adam Bauer has an import business and travels every year to India to buy goodies. This year, after seeing some of my recent video webcasts (www.youtube.com/sarakarl) he asked me to come along and document the trip on video, as a way of showing the story of Dharma Boutique: how he gets his products, where they come from, who makes them, and so on. We brought a great little Hi-Def camera (the Canon HV20 – it is TINY and takes amazing broadcast-quality video, can’t recommend it enough!) a Manfrotto monopod and my Macbook Pro, and set off with visions of daily vidcasts dancing in our heads.

But a funny thing happened on the way to India. Adam called me one chilly, dark, January morning to say, “Hey, how would you like to go to Afghanistan?” India is one thing, you might be thinking, but...Afghanistan? It sounded so out-of-left-field and full of potential adventure, of course how could I say no? He knows me just well enough to guess (rightly, as it happens) that I am just crazy enough to do it. Actually, as it turns out, it isn’t as out-there as it sounded at first. Adam’s friend Jenny Hartley has been living there for the past nine months – after getting her PhD and subsequently finishing medical school, she went to Afghanistan to work for an NGO called The Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

One of many organizations working to rebuild Afghanistan, TMF is working to nurture and nourish the indigenous arts and crafts, specifically pottery. It is one of Prince Charles’ charities, and is therefore well-protected and supported – they live and work in a 14th century fort in Kabul, and have luxurious facilities, including bathrooms and WiFi! They are the envy of all the NGOs in Kabul. The man who runs it, Rory Stewart, sounds amazing – he wrote a book called “The Places In Between,” about his journey walking across Afghanistan in 1992. What a story!

Jenny went there to work last year between medical school and her residency back in the US and has been helping them make a couple of documentaries – one about TMF, the other about the area in which it’s located. She emailed Adam and said, “Hey, since you’re going to already be in India, and since I’m staying here in this amazing situation until May – you should come visit!” Since no one at the organization, including Jenny, knows anything about filmmaking, they invited us to come and work as consultants on the films. We will have bodyguards, a car and driver, protection and will probably never leave the fort, much less Kabul. In answer to our questions about safety, Jenny replied that, like many places, it sounds more dangerous from the outside (having lived in LA and NYC, I understand this to a a degree). She said the suicide bombs always target the roads during rush hour, so you don’t drive before 10am, and the lobbed rocket-bombs (which have bad aim anyway) are only at night, so you don’t wander around after dark (I am hard-pressed to imagine doing so anyway).

Shortly after we decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance (who goes to Kabul?) the 5-star Serena Hotel was attacked and several westerners killed. It was the first terrorism targeting tourists, and shook us up a bit. However, there has been nothing since then, and life has pretty much continued on as usual in Kabul. While there is an element of danger there, I am sure we are more likely to die in traffic here in India - not to mention New York! - and have agreed that if we feel okay about it, we will go. We have our Afghan visas, and are waiting ‘til the last minute to buy our tickets. If we go, we will fly from Delhi to Kabul, and probably stay a week or so. Our visas start April 1, and TMF is expecting us to stay for two weeks, but we will see.

My feeling about it is this: there are lots of horrible things happening there, but there are also lots of amazing, inspiring things happening as well. Many organizations with thousands of westerners are living in Kabul and all over Afghanistan, working to replant the hills with trees, educate and empower women, get girls into schools, support and nurture growth of local crafts and businesses, and help the Afghan people have a home again – their home. We have a camera and can capture some of this and bring it back – how can we pass up an opportunity like that? I am sure that there are many ignorant Americans like myself who have no idea of what it’s like there, or what is happening there, and you know what they say – knowledge is power. How can we do anything about anything if we don’t know about it? For me, it falls into “wildest dreams come true” territory – a chance to do what I do – explore and broadcast what I find, in the areas I’m most passionate about – empowerment, environment, education.

And yes, we did see “The Kite Runner.”