Bulletin Post

It's a bit late, I'm tired and not in much of a writing mood, yet there are a few things I'd like to mention and apparently Blogger lets me generate bulleted lists:

• Went with my class of five to my Hindi teacher's house, allegedly for a make up class, but actually to eat her incredible cooking, play with her beautiful baby girl and see the inside of an Indian house. Mission accomplished, pictures en route.
• I finally finished and highly recommend Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Now reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (my heavy read) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (my light read and the reason I'm being so matter-of-fact in this post - I just set it down moments ago).
• I've started to learn guitar with my friend Tyler's assistance. I'm going to teach him and some other friends a bit of capoeira in exchange.
• Yoga, frequent biking and going to the gym has me in a constant endorphin-soaked state, doing wonders for my productivity, mood and general outlook.
• I've made a conscious decision to become proficient in Hindi, after which I will return to French and do the same. This will probably take a few years but is infinitely more likely to happen with those goals in mind.
• I sat in on a fascinating lecture in the Philosophy department (where a three-day seminar is going on) concerning the validity of testimony as a legitimate source of knowledge. I'll elaborate later because I think it's well worth sharing.

I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did. Oh, the joys of novel formatting.

Getting settled

Tomorrow it will have been a month since I left for Hyderabad and I can feel myself settling in. The little things let me know I'm getting used to life here: rickshaw rides no longer scare the living hell out of me, the chaos of mid-day in the city doesn't phase me the way it did and I've come to expect the stares and extended hands that come with being a white American. The novelty is starting to wear off, but it's giving way to a new sense of home and normalcy. Through daily exploration, I'm coming to know the city. Ive learned the bus system, train system and the reasonable price for a rickshaw ride from point A to B. Walking through the city streets, I'm piecing together Hyderabad's geography and gaining a sense of where all the places I've been lie in relation to one another. It's a good feeling, this slow transformation from alien to familiar.

I came to India, in part, to fling myself into as different and foreign a place as possible (I'd figured it doesn't get much more different than India) and to make of it a home. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and that human beings, anywhere in this world, share more than they endure alone. I'll save you, dear reader, the stereotypical, lengthy "People are just people" revelations. But it is a nice thing to see and confirm, I must say, especially on my first jaunt outside my own culture.

The prospect of being here for another four months is also starting to settle in as I slowly stop expecting to suddenly wake up back in Madison. It's a nice notion and makes me feel like I can take time to stop, breathe and reflect amid my travels, without fear of missing out on some crucial experience. So I think I'm striking a balance of ample exploration without forcing myself to be constantly, endlessly preoccupied. That said, I look forward to doing some traveling outside of Hyderabad over upcoming weekends. This process is somewhat difficult, as we have to submit all travel plans two weeks in advance, since the Mumbai incident. Train tickets also must be procured several weeks in advance as they inevitably sell out at the most inconvenient times. But I'm currently planning several weekend trips with friends, so I hope to get out into the unknown again sometime soon.

On that note, I've uploaded some pictures of my recent adventures and will be uploading more soon, including the ex-labor childrens' school, the French jazz concert, the Sankrati festival, the zoo, the flea-market-esque exposition grounds and Golcanda Fort.

Currents

India has no ivory towers and Hyderabad suffers a water shortage. So far I'm 0 for 2 on blog title/reality intersections, but what use is travel if you find what you'd expected?

What I mean to say is, there's little physical insulation from the everyman's poverty, here. One can escape into luxury for several hours, but even the most methodical reservation could not ensure total removal. There simply isn't enough space. So, for the locals, psychological constructs dam oceans of heartbreak and hold back flooding empathy.

It works the same way in Madison, really. There are people without homes, but they inevitably become "homeless people," invisible, irrelevant. If I sound like I'm on a soapbox here, I'm only chiding myself - it's a shameful fact of human nature that we shut out the sufferings of others to get on with our lives and I'm as guilty as anyone.

A big part of coming to India and a big part of living in India has been stepping outside of my own ivory towers, physical or otherwise. There's a system-shock in seeing the abject poverty on every street corner here, from having never seen it, let alone lived in it before in my life. And as I've mentioned before, there's no space to turn your head and no way to ignore it, not coming from where I am.

There's a big movement in modern India today to get children out of manual labor and into schools. While resistance has come from the widely spread "families need working children to survive" perspective, NGOs have found that many parents do want to send their children to school, but face social and geographical boundaries to doing so. And where the perspective does hold true, a number of NGOs have worked through communities, winning their support and generating a social norm of education for all children. It appears a slow, arduous procedure, but longer-lasting when compared to interventions which ignore communities' misgivings, uncertainties and challenges.

Today I had the opportunity to visit a school where children live and learn, children who previously worked long hours for less than half the minimum wage. I sat with my peers and heard their stories. Two sisters were cast out with their mother when their father had a second marriage. After their mother succumbed to alcoholism, the sisters returned to their father, seeking shelter. Their stepmother abused them, refused them food and forced them to live outside. The girls were put to work and forced to live like stray dogs until one day they escaped and found their way to the school.

The abuses these children had endured horrified me - some sufferings escape human understanding for everyone but the ones who lived it. I couldn't imagine the bond between those sisters, from the lives they'd endured and fled together.

The younger one is supposed to be a brilliant dancer and proudly announced her intention to be a doctor. If I knew the Hindi and thought it could mean something coming from a stranger, I might have told her never to let go of that dream. But believing that my older age meant I could pass some kernel of wisdom onto her would have been callously arrogant. In the boiling belly of Hyderabad, she has surely lived a thousand bitter winters and knows resolve and survival better than any human being should.

I don't doubt she can dance like a flame. Beauty is so strangely often born of suffering and her radiant smile was no exception. How someone could laugh, smile and play with a stranger after such heartwrenching rejection amazes and humbles me. Every child had a story and a testament to forgiveness, resolution and restoration. Lord knows we didn't deserve those smiles, and we could never have faulted them had they lived brutal, distrustful lives. We, as adults, others and unknown, would have deserved their hatred.

But they laughed, took us by the hand and led us to lunch, to play, to scrawl our names in their new, pristine notebooks. None of us deserved an ounce of it but they gave it, calling us brothers, sisters.

I've never seen God, but I fell weeping at their altar in my heart of hearts. Theirs was a love I've seen only a handful of times in this life, and it broke my notion of what a spirit can endure, how a person can live gracefully though staggering loss. Sometimes we forget what incredible things this flesh can overcome when there is no other option.

After their stories, some of the children sang and danced for us. They fairly insisted we overcome our shyness as well, so we sang in return.

And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me.
Shine until tomorrow,
Let it be.

It was their song, their stories as best we could retell them, that sounded in that dirt-floored classroom.

"So, is it everything you'd hoped for?"

I sincerely love the life that I am living here in India. I wake up before the sun, 5:30 when the predawn is cool enough to warrant a sweater. My drowsiness fades as I peddle to yoga, and after twenty minutes, I am warm and awake. My friends and I lay out our yoga mats and sing the Sanskrit prayer before calming our breathing to a deep, steady pace. The give and take of yoga alternates strain, relax, strain, offering pragmatic training for exploring Hyderabad, where one must foster constant alertness while maintaining calm repose.

Every yogic act is deliberate and self-aware. Each demands total physical and mental commitment, for which relaxation poses reward one with relief from dharmic effort. Like capoeira, my body rejoices in these movements, and I find comfort and stability in their already familiar execution. Here, action and nonaction manifest to breathy rhythm.

From this ancient ritual, I live my day from a point of inner balance, a plane of inner tranquility. I smile more loosely, laugh more easily and want less frequently, for the contentment in my limbs and quietude in my mind. This peace lifts my spirit and makes of me a new man, born with the rising sun into the infant morning.

Hereon, the day is my trove. My philosophy professors teach loudly with fire in their bellies, honest passion. My Hindi instructor and third or fourth Indian mother leads us through new fields of expression and beams through our stumblings and successes alike. I return to the hostel for two of the best meals of my life, twice a day, where smiling men offer generous portions.

With my spare time, I read, write and reflect, habits I'm realizing are nothing short of essential to my life. I collide and converse with the other students, each of whom possesses a passion and a genius for any number of pursuits. Hardly a day goes by without the passing of a deeply human thread through my life and another's.

And there is time for exploration, time for getting lost in the city's every nuance. Buses and rickshaws take me into a new world which bursts with color and life and I give into the current, let her take me away.

After it all, I fall asleep earlier and quicker than I ever have, expended from the day, restless only for the morrow.

I will carry this Way home; I will build from it a life.

Sights sans sounds

Thought I'd quickly mention that I recently uploaded a massive batch of new pictures including the Lumbini Park, Birla Planetarium, Qutb Shahi Tombs, Galconda Fort, Laad Bazaar, Charminar, Chow Mohallah Palace, New Year's Eve and yet another bus ride. Free vicarious expansion of cultural horizons, step on up.

Love Lived, Life Loved

I'm home from a very long, exciting, interesting day. Today we had a treasure hunt which spanned the city and resembled the Amazing Race (which, I learned, I would love and excel at for about three hours before crashing), called Khojo Hyderabad. Essentially, we were given money for travel and had to follow clues and hop rickshaws to reach our travel destination. My group came in second, winning us a small sum of rupees. It was fun - particularly when multiple rickshaws were racing to the destination, four kids crammed into the back of each, cheering the driver on ("Juldi, bahaee!" -- "Quicker, brother!") and jeering the opposing teams. In the process, we visited a small local business which produced numerous types of beautiful clothes and rugs (a traditional process which was essentially saved and revived by a single woman, who told us of her story and her art), a sprawling local art museum and a Hindu temple and community center, where a sadhu (ascetic) lectured us on his guru's teachings of yoga, strength, virtue and unity of thought, word and deed. During that last one, a second speaker and follower of the same guru wasted no time leaping into a discussion (he emphasized, not a lecture) on purpose, happiness, goodness and wisdom. Near the end, social barriers to philosophical discussion thoroughly dismantled, he asked if we had any doubts (a word Indians frequently seem to use meaning "questions", though doubts was perfectly appropriate just then).

So, I asked him a question which has plagued me ever since I took my first class on Eastern philosophy - how does one love fully without attachment? Buddhism teaches that all of life is transitory and impermanent, and that it is our perception of things as stable and unchanging which causes the suffering in our lives. Thus, if one frees oneself from attachment through the recognition of all of life as fleeting and in flux, one frees oneself from suffering. Traditionally, this realization is the essence of enlightenment, liberating one's self from the material world through attainment of nirvana.

Much of this sounds about right to me. I understand that attachment to some standard is at the heart of any pain and ultimately responsible for the experience of pain itself. What eludes me is how one could be free of attachment in human affairs without sacrificing some degree of passion, in turn sacrificing a bit of one's very humanity. It is easy for me to feel little attachment to material goods or power, for instance, because I place little stock in them. Necessarily, my passion for these things dwindles as does my love for them. In these two cases, I would say that's most likely a good thing.

But where love is concerned, for others and ideas, I see the death of love and passion as an end to life itself. Without these guiding forces, these basic principles which move us forward, directing and defining our lives, I should not find life worth living. And so for these matters, one cannot simply extinguish love and attachment together. Somehow, one must carefully blow out the harsher flame, leaving the gentler, essential one aglow.

How could one love, entirely, devotedly, humanly without attachment? Is not the pain of loss the proof of love extended? How can one feel so terribly much for an ideal or human being without the desire to maintain the beloved's presence?

Wondering how to live a brilliant, energetic life without delusion, I posed the sadhu this inquiry. He offered the example of his guru, a man who came and fulfilled his dharma (duty) avidly and lovingly before simply, elegantly, leaving. The how was shown more than it was told, conjured through images of indiscriminate love and humility. Such seems to be the way of wisdom; it cannot be transmitted, it rather must be realized.

He offered two closing prayers, so we chanted ancient Sanskrit with this smiling, gentle man, before joining him again in our native tongue. He spoke the first few words and I half-smirked in recognition.

We then shared the serenity prayer.

One Billion Guiding Forces

We've now got wireless at the hostel, which will make the process of updating my blog and uploading photos much easier, along with checking email, news, etc. I've gone ahead and uploaded a number of pictures to Picasa, catching me up, more or less. That said, I've found the recent lack of internet something of a relief, and I'm determined not to get caught up wasting time online now that I have it again. That's never been much of a problem for me, though I have spent decidedly more time doing "productive things" and it's a habit I'd like to maintain. I find there to be fewer distractions here, in general (that is, things which distract me from spending time the way I'd ideally like to), confirming my suspicions that I'd find a simpler life preferable to one muddled with haphazard excess. Honestly, I feel more free here than I have in a long time. There's a lot of room here, room for dreams and reflections, room to sort out the hows and whys of what's been and what lies ahead. It's good to stretch out here, out of the current for a spell, and consider these things.

I was thinking about what I write here, how I write it and why I'm writing at all. There's been a tension in my writing between an "x then y happened" sterile sort of recording and a more genuine account of what occupies my thoughts and the meaning I've gleamed. To be honest, I have a hard time making sense of what all these changes signify; I feel like an infant with some multi-levered, flashing-buttoned, chirping, whirling machine who can't make heads or tails of what he's even seeing, let alone how it works, let alone what to do with it. There is so much to take in, so many alterations to my environment that I'm still simply trying to put it all together. But when faced with the incomprehensible before, writing's often served me in connecting the sporadic, too often seemingly random dots of experience to form some sparse outline, a template for life and my place within it. So I think that will be this journal's purpose: a place to unload the jumbled days and sort the wheat from the chaffe.

That philosophy established, I may not not make a point of recounting each day's events or each new exploration in painstaking detail; I think the photos I take along the way will tell those stories instead. I should like to delve deeper than description and honestly, it should be a hell of a lot less boring to read. So, off we go - cheers.

I've never believed too strongly in fate, in some invisible guiding hand which intelligently directs the goings-on of this corner of the universe. Perhaps it's the scale, perhaps it's a belief in evolution, perhaps it's the atrocities of man which make life and existence seem so ostensibly absurd. Whatever the reason, I know existentialism struck a brilliant chord with me, in AP English, and has held a persistent tone for three years and counting. The individual's power to define and thereby create his or her identity and then affect the surrounding world is the stuff of legend to me, vibrant and inspiring, and it is one of those fundamental beliefs which accounts for much of my perspective on human affairs and my own life-vision.

Yet, it seems equally clear to me that beyond our capacity (and I reiterate - there is so, so much room) there are forces which define this place over which we have very little control: time marches on, seasons cycle and life ebbs, flows. Taoism's teachings of release and adjustment to these forces rang another bell in my heart, singing an equally beautiful song. Though ideas of peacefulness through nonaction seem at first opposed to the establishment of identity through the exercise of will, I would suggest that deliberate nonaction is itself an assertion of humanity and actually fits quite well with existential thought, generating a more complete picture of how we can be the people we decide to be through manipulation of perception and (non)action.

But while I can get quite carried away on our abilities and human power, I am reluctant to concede those powers beyond our grasp. For that reason, my enthusiasm for Taoism or any philosophy of release and surrender has never approached that I experienced when reading Sartre's "Existentialism as a Humanism." Yet, it's remained a truth I've known but determinedly ignored, preferring to soar on endless possibility.

And India is challenging that, bringing this fact to the forefront of daily life in a way that affords little wiggle room. The poverty cannot be ignored and taunts me with its prevalence. It's a miserable, undeinable truth over which I (alone, here, now) have precious little control. It's humbling and deflating, tempering my leaping spirits with clear, stubborn reality.

Between these ideals, I'm sure a balancing point exists. With a degree of release, there is calm, peaceful being and freedom from hopelessly massive, crushing expectation. But this release demands a constriction of personal ability and power of will. The answer to this riddle is lost on me, but the serenity prayer often fills my thoughts. Clearly the best one can do is to do one's best - and that seems to be the easy part. Understanding how much weight and responsibility to allot oneself for the world and its conditions is a much more difficult art, one I hope to make strides in during my time abroad. I do feel that I am learning to foster an inner peacefulness through acceptance of my place in this new world and relieving myself of the need to struggle beyond that. Stunned by this dramatically altered reality, I am recalling that understanding must precede action if any good is to come of it. So I am learning to be calm, quiet and attentive before trying to manipulate anything at all. It is an ancient lesson, born in this land thousands of years ago, and it is one I hope to learn through it's very practice.

From the ground up

Pardon the lack of updates - we moved into our new hostel where there's no internet yet and I've been too busy with orientation and the like to make it over to the library. Expect some lengthy posts to come, concerning my first time in the city outskirts, the Indian fusion concert, getting new duds at Fab India, New Year's Eve, and our jam-packed day of Hyderabad exploration, including a palace, mosque, series of tombs and ancient fort. Also, I saw my first Indian movie yesterday, Ganjini (a Bollywood take on Memento), at a local theater.

Everything is going spectacularly well. There are lots of adjustments, some superficial and some less so. The poverty is very hard to understand, let alone accept as another fact of life. I don't think I'll ever get used to the pleading eyes of a malnourished, hobbling child tugging at my pantleg - I don't think I'd like to.

This world challenges the boundaries of life and humanity as I've known it so far; I've seen more intense joy and sorrow than I recall having ever seen before. It's constantly said that India is a place of extremes, but what they don't tell you, is that it is a place of constant, simultaneous, seemingly irreconcilable extremes. Towering new office buildings grow out of roughshod huts, made of tarps and bamboo, until the work is done and another sprouts up by the same workers' hands. Women smiling brilliantly in shining saris pass the starving people, in their ragged nests. Chaos rules the streets through insistent merchants and motions, waves of people from all sides in all directions, while ten feet away, pigeons congregate outside a tranquil mosque.

That such extremes could exist comes as no surprise; that they could do so tangled up with one another, distinct and apart yet wholly integrated (each essential to the other), stuns and humbles me. It is overwhelming to feel my mental framework reworking itself anew to try and account for these paradoxical inconsistencies, like a toddler making sense of a language's ins and outs, learning an incredible lot in a very, very short time.

I came to India for a challenge, for a fresh start and to redefine my world, my life and in turn, myself. I didn't realize this wasn't about expansion - it's about reconstruction.