Dear Friends and Family,
as I am writing this letter I have a dawning of a realization that most of you
have very little time for long letters. I imagine you looking at this letter sitting in your Inbox
with 100s of others and thinking whether you have enough time to read it between now and the next client/call/meeting/visit to the washroom. Of course I would like you to read it slowly and with full attention, while stretching out your legs and sipping on
a fragrant cuppa of tea, perhaps even covered with warm and fuzzy blanket or shawl, yet I know this scenario although desirable is unrealistic. So, just do your best. It has been great receiving replies from many of you and it has been helpful to have silent audience
of others. Some of you asked me specific questions about India and travelling, which resulted in the last two entries in my worldnomads blog (see "what is home" -reply to Felisa and "child labor"-repy to Lesli
http://adventures.worldnomads.com/members/articles/). I do not think I would have written as much and reflected as much on my journey, be it not for all of you. So, thank you!
In the beginning of October Teodora and I left McLeod Ganj for Bir, a small Tibetan colony, 4 hours bu bus, where we participated in a one week conference-"Satori and the arts" at Deer Park, the institute, sponsored by Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche, Buddhist teacher from Butan.
While originally his three days teaching there was our main motivation, we both ended up mostly enjoying the arts- and what a yummy edition to our contemplative practice that was! Ikebana, Haiku writing, Japanese calligraphy, music, shiatsu and film to name a few. I even managed to get my hands on a potter's wheel! Very inspiring! Khyentse Rinpoche did not inspire us- he was funny and unorthodox for a Buddhist teacher from Asia, but his lack of orthodoxy was mostly in form-in essence, he in my view was not that different from an othodox Buddhist teacher. I am sure my opinion is rather superficial as we only heard him for three days, however for me, his presence was not particularly captivating (as compared for example with an amazingly clear and compassionate presence of Tenzin Palmo whose public speech we attended in McLeod Ganj- see Teodora's coverage on her blog:
http://journals.worldnomads.com/tedigeorgieva/post/12044.aspx )
It is fascinating how various teachers appear so hugely different to students: we met one of the devoted students of Khentsye Rinpoche, who apparently waited for 12 years to be accepted by him. Wow, what a range-0 years (for me) and 12 years for her! Teodora wrote more about Guru shopping and associated disappointments in her "Guru Shopping" entry.
So in the absence of "my perfect teacher" I am exploring the art of learning from imperfect Gurus at present...as Tibetans say:
listen not to the Guru, but to his teaching
listen not to the words, but to the deeper meaning....
listen not to the deeper meaning, but to....
Bir was the quietest and the most charming place we visited so far: hazy blue silhouettes of close by mountains, brown and yellow terraced fields, blooming flowers of November,
And, of course hosts of colourful paragliders in the blues skies-it turned out that Bir is an international destination for Paraglders-there were many from Russia, Germany and France. I almost talked Teodora into taking a few lessons, but one day as we
ate our lunch at a roadside Dabha, a Russian paraglider hopped by on his new crutches, turning the balance of our decision towards more close to earth meditation.
While on occasion, we do form somewhat deeper connections with locals, more often we are bombarded by tourist industry. It was really good therefore to hang out with Indian people who are engaged in the arts-singers, film makers, poets, translators, students. Our exposure to Indian devotional poetry and film has definitely enriched our appreciation of Indian culture.
We rented a small room above the clothing store owned by a Tibetan family, just minutes from the Deer Park Institute itself. In our room was a real working TV set with sound and 70-odd programs! So after months of not watching TV, we were simultaneously hooked on Die Hard- like movies and repulsed. It seems that the Western entertainment is presented in its crudest form for mass consumption in India.
After Bir, we took a 6 hours bus to Amritsar,a city in a state of Punjab, just 30 km to the Indian-Pakistan border where daily change of the guard is a beautifully choreographed exchange of insults, is observed by crowds of onlookers from both sides. And of course Amritsar is a home to the famous Golden Temple, the place of pilgrimage for Sikhs. The Golden Temple was very impressive-not calm and meditative at all-it seems that in India places of worship do not need to be calm and meditative, in fact, around golden temple there is constant chanting and music coming through the loudspeakers; families with kids sleep, walk, eat, do ritual bathing in the pond of Amrita (nectar of immortality)
Through all this sensory overload, we still could appreciate the religious sentiment of many pilgrims, although after a sleepless night (we stayed in the Temple Complex for the night and enjoyed non-stop chanting and music), we were ready to look at my pictures of the Temple from a quieter place... (see Amritsar pictures on flickR:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69781927@N00/sets/72157603252840196/ )
Unlike at Istanbul mosques, entrance to Golden Temple is free, but what impressed me the most, is their 24 hours free communal kitchen, serving Dal (lentil stew), chapatis (flat bread) and sweets. All on simple metal plates (Thalis), on the floor mats. The kitchen is a complete miracle of efficiency-more then 30.000 people are fed here every day and the service is faster then at McDonald. It was very inspiring to see that such a grand act of generosity is possibly even in a country where millions are poor. Servers, dish washers, ushers, cooks are all volunteers, comprised of daily pilgrims who come not only to worship but also to serve.....
Surprisingly to us, Amritsar is somewhat out of the main tourist path and there are very few foreigners there. By implication, we were one of the attractions-Indians wanted to photograph us, ask us questions, such as "Where from?...Which country, Sir? What do you do in Canada?" and otherwise single us in a crowd. Only after reading a book "Being Indian" we began to appreciate the nature of most conversations-often Indian men would come to us and start boasting about their relatives in Canada, their jobs, their education, their connections etc..
According to this book, at a time where cast hierarchi is no longer visually descernable, Indians try to establish their relative power status early on in conversation, so that they can behave accordingly. Seemingly innocuous questions about job, place of residence, fluency in English, father's occupation are means of eliciting caste and power details. While reading this book I found many illuminating answers to previously puzzling encounters we had in India. For example, while walking in Shimla, we were approached by a friendly man who kept questioning us despite of our reluctance to reciprocate. He followed us to a small store, where he behaved as a host, pointing to locations of various products we needed, telling us that he is friends with the owner. While we shopped, he dragged out the owner who had a suspicious look on his face , introduced us as his "Canadian friends" and asked us to take a picture of him with the owner...
He continued pestering us on the way out, giving us his address and asking to send him this picture. I am pretty sure, he did not know the owner, but with some ingenuity tried to concoct a situation, where he may be seen in a respectful light of his doubly powerful "Canadian" and local business connection, with a picture of him smiling next to the shop owner for a future use where his powerful connections may need to be presented.
Most of the pictures of Amritsar you see on our flickR site are taken from a rickety cycle Riksha. One other highlight was an unplanned visit to a small but proud local Art Gallery, where 600 children of all ages formed colourful cross -legged serpantine rows. They came to partake in an art competition, on Children's Day commemorating Jewaharlal. Nehru, India's Prime Minister- successor to Mahatma Gandhi. It is always amazing to us to see how patiently even small kids can focus for hours ( 4 hours in this case), producing very interesting in many cases drawings, full of colour and intricate details.
We fled intensity of Amritsar on a night "first class " (ha-ha) train to Haridwar (try aspirating H and rolling Rs with gusto and you will feel the essence of this place)-another out of the tourist path place of pilgrimage on the Ganges (close to where Ganges emerges from the Himalayas and where according to the legend Lord Krishna has left his foot prints) Dust, noise, pollution, dense crowds were part of the experience here too.
The Ganges flow was incredibly fast here as we observed on our long walk along the many Ghats where pilgrims bathed, washed their clothes, their dishes, prayed, where many Sadhus (Holly Men) camped, some of them adept at selling Hashish.. In an overpopulated country like India, one must learn skills of selective attention ( or selective inattention)- one can marvel how a pilgrim can be completely immersed in a sacred ritual of bathing in the Ganges, deep in prayer, while completely ignoring the dirt and pollution surrounding him.
In the evening, the crowds culminated at a holiest point between two bridges ( please do not ask me to remember its name.), where pilgrims set afloat many hand made lief baskets of lit candles and flowers-offerings in Aart ceremony. Because of the fast flow of Ganges, the baskets toppled alot, however, the short moments of magic sparkled the night here and there.
Indian man who spent some years living in Switzerland and watched Aarti ceremony with us, told us that Indians were basically good ad that despite the fact that many try taking advantage of foreigners, they would never harm us. He then explained to us that scientists can not explain how the waters taken from this Holiest segment of the Ganges remain fresh for 500 years. We were doubtful, therefore, decided to run this experiment ourselves-will report back in 500 years-stay tuned!
Rishikesh-the yoga capital of the world- is where I am writing this letter from. If you expect to find serenity, clean air and noise free environment, stop reading right now!
Rishikesh was the place where we now doubt weakened by pollution and noise, have succumbed to cold and cough and to our so far lowest point ( in mood terms) in India. Suddenly all the harshness of travelling in India, instead of being support to our spiritual practice and self-learning, turned into "Bad India Days", a term coined by foreigners, which
attempts to describe a point where your previously bravely held cheerfulness collapses i the face of too much adversity. Now when we have recovered and are in good hands of "Mama", an owner of a Guest House we really like, we begin to nurture once again a cautiously more inspired outlook on India :-)
Mama cooks amazingly tasty Thalis (combo meals and great Masala Chai at embarrassingly low prices-we can stay here for 100 years before our money run out!
I am wishing you all good health and contentment in this stressful and busy times
leading to X-mas and New Year.
Be happy!
Misha
For those of you who are still sipping on your fragrant tea, here is a copy of Teodora's last letter:
Dear Friends,
were predominantly Tibetan, and the Indian flavour we experienced was very little if at all enough to give us a taste of what was to come.
And what came was the "muchness" of this vast land, and "muchness" is the only word that describes it for me. There are sounds and noises, collours and shapes, faiths and beliefs,people, people and when the buss is full, even more people...and all of it much...too much :-)
We are in Rishikesh, which proudly takes its place on the tourist Indian map as the "yoga capital of the world" ( just too much to say). In reality, it is just a tourist hub, only here every fifth Indian (an exaggeration of course) has a yoga or and ayurvedic massage studio (another exaggeration: the studio is most of the times a tiny dark room with moldy floor and a dozen of soiled yoga mats). Similarly to the neighboring Haridwar we visited on the way here, it is also a Hindu pilgrimage city and boils with hundreds of Indians eager to bathe in the Ganges, ring temple bells or just enjoy the nudge of the weekend crowds.
The air is almost as polluted as in Amritsar (a one day visit you can also read about on my blog:
http://journals.worldnomads.com/tedigeorgieva/post/12084.aspx ), so we have limited our walks to a minimum: yoga - lunch - Internet. After 10 days of searching for a quiet place to stay, which included the transportation of our backpacks and ourselves on two motorbikes ( the driver and the two of us on one of them!), we found a quaint place looked after by a petite Indian lady, who calls herself "mama" and looks like she lives up to her name.
It seems like the cultural shock we've been expecting since we arrived to India is finally happening and we are grateful to have each other to share this profoundly different world. We find it curious, annoying and amusing at the same time to wonder why the devotional fervor here easily co-exists with scam and corruption, or why our waiter insists on seeing cheese in the sandwich while looking at a peace of almost dry toast, or why it is considered acceptable to ask such questions as "what is your salary" at first encounter, or why in country where living is often a fight for survival people are incurably full of hope and benevolence... In attempt to solve some of the puzzle, I and Misha are devouring a list of books recommended to us by a couple of International Politics students from Delhi, who we met at the art conference in Bir.
One of the reads "Being Indian" by P.Varma suggests that in 21st century every sixth person will be an Indian, so learning about this ancient culture seems only prudent :-)
Besides nurturing our travel "wounds" we are also exploring the yoga market here. So far I have greatly enjoyed a class given by a British instructor in the round building of the Kria Yoga Ashram. Her calm and flowing vocalisations have made the practice harmonious and wholesome, unlike many other classes I've taken which remain just sequences of different postures.
The Indian teachers we've checked out so far have been of the "do it like me" type, where you have to copy the shown assana (posture) often with very little information on body alignment or breath. I am starting to suspect that this is a deeply Asian style of teaching: the teacher demonstrates - the student repeats....with blind faith, devotion, and reverence.
On the positive side, the student develops discipline and perseverance...
To explore the above theory and to challenge my rigid training I am planning to take some vocal lessons at the nearest music studio. On this note, music in India is an inseparable part of everyday life. People just burst out singing as they walk, work or rest. In Ladakh, our hosts had a song for every activity, be that cooking or ploughing the fields. The last one was my favourite: when for the first time I heard the simple call on a fourth up and then a gentle slide on a fifth down, I thought a professional singer was practicing warm ups on fresh air :-) To add to this phenomenon of singing voices, imagine singing men! I can see my choral colleagues always famishing for male voices in their choirs overwhelmed with longing and jealousy :-) Yes, men sing here, sing beautifully, everywhere: Misha's barbers sing (not in harmony but in tune), our Yoga teachers sing resonantly and with feeling, porters sing, cooks sing.... The intricate tunes they produce with ease and grace fascinate and inspire me.
Stay tuned for my Indian singing progress chart :-) already from Nepal, our next destination.
Meanwhile I would like to wish all of you a peaceful and relaxed preparation for the approaching winter holidays, and to my colleagues - fulfilment and joy from the upcoming concerts, and most importantly, gratitude to yourselves and people you work with for the immeasurable love and happiness you bring to the world through the art of music!
Thank you for your warm homey letters!
Much love,
Teodora
