Last thoughts on Hampi

Samuel and Daniele who conducted the workshops in Hampi -
all pics here by Uma L.


In the workshop hut rock carving


Hampi recedes into the background every day as the Bombay fog takes over, accompanied by the usual din. I didn’t get to visit the old temple town though those who did swear that it was the most impressive thing. For me those ancient hillsides were enough, the gigantic rocks piled on other rocks, which when you stared at them revealed faces of monsters and kings and whales and all kinds of creatures leaving you gaping open mouthed as you kept staring.

Hampi, the site of the ancient kingdom of Vijaynagara seems imbued with awesome energy. A whole lot of people I know had really weird dreams, most of them violent. At least three people told me they dreamt of murders. One said she had dreamt of war. Peter, with whom I spent a night, woke up suddenly and woke me up too in the bargain, shouting, “Shit!” I just held him for a while until he went back to sleep and he told me that he had dreamt he saw me teetering on the edge of an abyss and was attempting to save me from falling over! I too had my share of visions of violence, both during the meditation we took part in in the second workshop and at times, at night and it was quite something integrating it all. Phew!

Peter and Franziska’s place was really beautiful – surrounded by hills. They have greened it too, and planted many flowering bushes and trees in the vicinity of the houses. It was ideal for the workshop – remote, quiet and somehow intense. Hope to carry some of the strangeness and wonder of that experience with me through the next months, if not years!



group website: www.basicindia.net

Just testing new blogging tool

Just testing to see if this works. Am posting from a blogging tool. Saves time! Courtesy Jyotsna.

1984!

“1984” has maybe not quite arrived but we’re getting there. George Orwell’s vision of Big Brother watching the world is a bit off the mark in terms of time, but the idea seems eerily true. I’m still thinking about all those goings on in the suburban cyber cafes. About modern technology. About web cams and the invasiveness of all this junk in our lives.

When web cams first made an appearance I felt the first uneasy nibbles of discomfort just to think of the manner in which they might be used. It looks like those fears were justified. Today it is not hard to see the uses to which modern technology can be put, to simply spy on others, to control the people in our lives, our neighbours, people at work.

A computer specialist I know, who is helping the police to set up new systems, proudly tells me that with the latest device - some kind of extra terrestrial mobile from the sound of it - you can listen to what people are saying within some hundred metres of where you’re sitting. This is supposed to be especially useful in your place of work. How horrible. What all this is leading to, is that you can’t speak, you can’t do anything and soon you wont be able to even think without everyone knowing what is in your mind and exactly what you have been up to.

Sometimes I think, maybe this is what we are meant to learn from the horrors of technology – even if in a rather grotesque fashion. To be more open to each other, to understand each other, not to judge, not to ridicule or control. In short, not to be afraid. In fact to aim for a society in which it wont matter terribly what other people think of us, because we will be able to say what we want to, to anyone, which will make “spying” redundant. If we could live like that, openly and with deep affection for each other there would be nothing to hide, and we would live the truth. We would live in the light of our connectedness, in the light of oneness. We would live, knowing that everything we do and say, has an impact on every other thing - not as we do now, in our own separate boxes in which you simply dont care what happens to anyone outside your box.

If some (or even none!) of this is making sense, maybe it is because a discussion on a subject like this can't be one sided (well a "discussion" by its very nature needs more than one person!!) and anyway, the topic itself can't be adequately dealt with, in a few sentences. There has to be a general sharing of insights and opinions – not of opinions arising from anger and indignation but rather of opinions resulting from really wanting the best for us all. After all, it is only possible to say this much and not more in a short post on a blog.

And now bye for the time being, I am off to Goa for a week with Jyotsna and we are going to be enjoying the sea, sun, and fish there. Not to mention beer and just plain chilling out! If I can get an internet connection I might be able to put in a few words now and then.

new space

Guys,

For further postings go to: Diary of a laidback Rebel (www.laidbackrebel.blogspot.com)


One moves on in life....

technological web

It’s raining and we’re driving home one afternoon, when I see this lady walking down the street. She’s just hopped off the bus and is now picking her way through the traffic on the road, an umbrella over her head, grinning to herself and opening and closing her mouth. Of course. She’s talking into a mobile phone. After all these years of mobile phone technology I still find it weird to think about people wandering about the city and all over the countryside accompanied by their private phones with their own private numbers!

Years ago I used to sometimes fantasize about it. About being able to go to the park or to walk down the street with something resembling a cordless phone in your bag. And how it would ring and you would be able to answer it wherever you were, and not having to hang around the house waiting for “that important call you couldn’t afford to miss” but to feel free to go where you wanted and be able to speak to whom you wanted, when you wanted to (or they wanted to). And now it’s not only happened, but the instruments are less than a quarter the size of a normal cordless and soon they will become microscopic chips which you just stick into your ear – only to operate those you will need powerful eyes and really tiny fingers. So maybe mobile phones will ultimately lead to some major evolutionary changes in the human race!

Except of course you do wonder at the end of the day, when you hear mobiles going ding ding ding and zipetty do dah ding, at the hairdressers or in restaurants or in movie halls, on the oddest of occasions, whether modern technology has brought us further in life or whether all this complicated and advanced know how, is being used to spin yet a few more threads in the web of addiction in which most of us are caught one way or another, and which will swallow us up whole, some day.

I sometimes think about computers and how dependent many of us are on the system. What would happen if there were a world wide failure of electricity or a world wide computer crash? What about all the trading and the securities and banking and our money? What about people like me who almost can’t write any more with a pen?! (I actually get cramps in my fingers and my hand if I sit with a pen for more than fifteen minutes at a time! And once upon a time I sat for examinations lasting for three hours!).

For this reason I am writing with a pen for at least two or three minutes a day – just in case. Hopefully a few of us will manage to extricate ourselves from the web!

The Rushdie's

Watched a documentary last night on Salman Rushdie. On the history channel. Salman is the closest I’ve come, I think, to knowing a famous person. I mean I didn’t’ “know” him as such but I did spend a lot of time playing with his two sisters, Sameen and Bunno when I was about ten years old, and I knew his mother Nagin. Salman and I used to frequently pass each other going up or down the stairs. I dont think he even bothered to look at me!

We were all living in this shady retreat in Bombay called Westfield Estate, with lots of gulmohar and copper pod trees around, and quaint bungalows with names like “Sandringham Villa” and Windsor House. (I think the latter was the name of the Rushdie’s home).

They lived in a bungalow, on the first floor and I remember looking out of the window of Sameen's room sometimes and getting a glimpse of the kidney shaped swimming pool at the Breach Candy club. Those days it was still pretty much a club for the whites and I don’t think the membership was open to Indians, as it is today.

The Rushdie’s left India around ’63 or ’64. They just packed their bags and vanished overnight. Sameen, Bunno and I barely got to say goodbye to each other, although Sameen and I wrote to each other for a couple of years and she, knowing of my passion for Cliff Richard even sent me a few autographed photos of him from London. (She had met him once while they were staying there). So coming back to yesterday's programme, it was weird to see her on the small screen, more than forty years later, being interviewed about her famous brother!

toilets - precious as gold

You have to pay the price for everything - even for a pee. This morning when Meher and I landed at the hospital for our meditation session both of us "had to go". So Meher led me to this room on the second floor with an attached loo which we normally use during our visits. Till recently there was a patient staying there who used to not mind us using her bathroom but today the room was empty. Maybe the lady was discharged.

Anyway I went in and as I came out of the bathroom I heard the hospital ayah telling off Meher about our using the loo, and that she didn't want every Tom, Dick and Harry using it. Bathrooms are a real problem in India - possibly its worst feature. Clean loos are more difficult to find than gold. Meher started to pick a fight with this rather tall, hefty, officious woman in a white sari. I told her (Meher) to shut up and not to waste her energy. As we got into the lift to go downstairs to the playroom where we were to conduct the meditation, we could still hear the ayah ranting and raving away upstairs. Poor thing, she must have been having a bad day.

+++

The Movement for Peace and Justice (MPJ) is organising a morcha tomorrow against "rape, dowry and alcohol." Rape and dowry. OK. I can see that nobody would want to support things like that. But alcohol? How does it figure in the same category? Alcohol in reasonable quantities is not a bad thing. It can help you to relax, and it said to be good for the heart.

Alcohol abuse is quite something else. Wanting to ban alcohol per se is like wanting to ban sex - because sex is the cause of rapes. Or banning money because money is the root of the dowry problem. Why dont they just say they want to ban greed, violence and irresponsiblity? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. As if morchas are going to help bring about any change in society.

Thursday Massage

Uma Mary was here early in the morning to give me my weekly massage. What a habit! When Charmayne first suggested it a couple of years ago I wasn’t at all keen and kept fobbing her off. But C. insisted and Uma Mary bounced into our flat one morning and since then (predictably) I have got addicted to her weekly visits.

Uma is her real name and Mary is what her husband’s people call her. She is a Maharashtrian married to a Catholic from Madras. This is her second marriage. Earlier she was married to a Maharashtrian who died, leaving her with two daughters. Now she has two more kids, a son and daughter, by the second husband, who according to Charmayne wears a gold chain and leaves his shirt unbuttoned almost up to the waist. Apparently he didn’t like the two daughters by her former husband so she packed them off to boarding school. The older daughter is now married.

Uma Mary is incredibly cheerful and bouncy. You would hardly expect that from someone who lived in a slum till recently and whose home was razed to the ground by the police and utensils and a lot of her belongings simply confiscated. That was some months back and about the only time I saw her a bit down. Then with Charmayne’s help she and her family moved into a one bedroom flat in Nala Sopara, so I guess now she really has something to celebrate.

Lunch with Asha

Lunch with Asha yesterday. She came huffing and puffing about half an hour late, grumbling about having had to wait over an hour for the bus. Then she apologised for having brought only karela sabzi and chapatti for me for lunch from home, which I didn’t mind since I love the way she prepares karela.

We sat and ate, watching one of my favourite lunch time serials – “Bhabhi” which has recently been fast forwarded so that we are now watching what’s happening twenty years later. Bhabhi, a pretty young thing who still looks and behaves like she’s twenty five, specialises in “making eyes.” The best part is when she registers feelings like shock. Her eyes bulge to such an extent you feel they might drop right out of her head and start to roll on the floor. There was a lot of eye-popping in yesterday’s episode because Bhabi’s daughter is turned down by her husband-to-be, right in the middle of the wedding ceremony because this “bad woman” (I think she is his mother – I haven’t been watching the soap in the last couple of months) has told him that his fiancé is carrying another man’s child. (All false of course but nobody believes it).

After lunch we lay down a bit and chatted. Asha says the next couple of months are going to be very busy for her, what with several weddings ahead. Her sister’s daughter is getting married. How old is the daughter, I asked her. Twenty three, Asha said very authoritatively. I said, Oh. Then how old is your sister? Asha thought about that a bit. Around thirty, she replied.

So I say to her, then your sister must have had her daughter when she was seven years old. Asha finds that hilarious and says, no. No, possibly the sister is a bit older than that, so maybe she is around thirty five. OK, I say, so then your sister had her baby when she was twelve years old. Asha says, what the hell, how am I supposed to know how old she is? Thirty, thirty five, forty. It’s all the same to her. Asha only knows that she herself is definitely fifty two years old and she knows it because she was born the year her family and the entire village converted to Buddhism after Ambedkar’s speech. That was in 1953.