Monday, April 10, 2000

I met Rakesh on the streets of Mangalore. The conversation began like any of the hundred conversations I've had; where I'm from, how long I'm staying. The questions usually conform to a pattern, petering out shortly after "are you married?" This one had enough surprises to keep it going, and eventually Rakesh invited me to visit his school the next day. Which I did.

The college chapel, mentioned in the guidebooks for the religious paintings which cover its walls and ceilings, is very Catholic, as is the college, St. Aloysious. The campus museum has a scattered sampling of animal bones, tribal tools and jewelery, art reproductions, and the preserved remains of the first car in India.


Rakesh is on the top right.
More interesting to me was talking with Rakesh and his friends later in their dorm room (being on the lookout for the warden -- smoking is prohibited in the rooms). Looking at a dial-a-world reference wheel, we discovered that India has about three times the population of the U.S. in about one third the land area. The conversation turned to marriage: even in the relatively "modernized," higher educated, and prosperous areas of South India, marriages are still largely arranged by the parents of the bride and groom. Also I gathered that (without taking a poll) most of the young men in the room had never had sex and didn't plan to until they were married. "In India, sex is sacred," said one.



Dye, salesman, dye.
Chai. For a few weeks prior to leaving for India, I'd been drinking chai a lot. You know, as part of preparing myself for the culture shock. As it turns out, that was probably a mistake. You see, the chai here is completely different. And I liked the chai I had been "getting used to." It was a little spicy, a little sweet, a little milky...and a large cup of it gave me the caffeine I needed.

Here, on the other hand, what they call chai is served by the thimble-full, and is a steaming concoction of sugar and milk, the latter of which soon forms an epidermal layer as it cools. Any tea that managed to find its way into this dessert liquid has probably expired from a beavis-like sugar high. Even worse, the coffee tastes almost exactly the same. It's either made from instant coffee crystals, or it's got a nice layer of sedimentary sludge, but either way I max out my sugar intake system long before the caffeine can kick in.



A fisherman in Varkala.
Recently I began to practice meditating. I say practice because, although I don't know exactly what it means to meditate, I'm pretty sure I'm not doing it yet. My knowledge of its methods and effects comes primarily from reading. The books say that by its nature, it is an experiential process, not something one can know by memorization or intellectual understanding. This is consistent with my views on life in general, or I would have been content (or discontent) to stay at home and read travel books instead of actually traveling.

My first goal, as much as those kinds of things exist in this novel endeavor, is to tame the rational mind. This is a strange concept for me because my awareness lies primarily within the framework of the rational mind. To say, "hey you, shut up for a while so I can think," doesn't make sense to someone who thinks he does all of the thinking.



I bought a textbook on learning Sanskrit. Of all the languages I could decide, on a whim, to learn while in India, why an old abandoned one like Sanskrit? Good question.

You might guess it has something to do with my developing interest in meditation, and you might be right; many of the authoritative ancient writings on the subject of meditation and eastern mysticism all seem to have been written in Sanskrit or its predecessor Vedic. There is even a claim that the language itself was designed to have specific phisiological effects, hence its use in mantra.


Some guys who had given me raisins and beer the night before.
Another way in which it might be related to meditation is that learning a language is a very structured, left-brain activity. If I'm going to be devoting a lot of energy trying to take my left-brain out of the driver's seat, maybe a good project will help distract it, or keep it from feeling used, abused, and neglected. Does a rational mind have feelings?

Or maybe it's because of an unfulfilled desire I have to learn dead languages -- I was disappointed in school when Latin was not offered. In fact, now that I think about it, I've been learning computer languages since even earlier...but whenever I started to learn an actual spoken language I stopped short.

In any case, it's a fun project.