भारत

Does emotion count if it is induced artificially? Or - is alcohol artificial?

A single beer - albeit a large one - makes the hindi music in this internet cafe take on mystical dimensions. Suddenly I am overwhelmed with feelings of impermanence. The last two months have evaporated without permission; and I can feel the hours, minutes, seconds of the next three weeks crumbling before me, as thoughwe're chasing them down only to see each of the infinitesimal pieces crumbles away just before we can grab them. Time is escaping.

We landed long ago in an extremity of the beating heart in Mumbai, feeling the rhythym as India's blood pulsed past. In the mega-city we experienced both extremes - first walking through Dharavi Slum, learning how the inhabitants of the setting for Slumdog work to make themselves useful by providing labor to recycling and pottery "factories" or textile "mills," or as lunch-wallahs, delivering noon-time sustenance to the metropolis' workers. The life in Dharavi is not easy - smelting scrap aluminum into bricks wearing nothing but a lungi. But the life in Dharavi is not overwhelmingly depressing - harsh, cruel, difficult, dirty, unfortunate yes. But there are smiles on children's faces. Faces that don't know any other world - and Dharavi can teach a lesson on the ingredients required to alter the subjective mind. How does one erase decades of learned comforts to instead find meaning in a pile of garbage or a river of sewage?

The other extreme - we experienced also the famous and now infamous Taj Mahal Hotel, with it's five stars staring out at the Gate of India and its horse carriages. We experienced, that is, the money of Mumbai alongside its squalor. And both are equally India.

We departed Rushdie's home and gazed upon the ancient caves at Ellora and Ajanta. Then upwards we imbedded ourselves in meditation for 10 days in the city where the Buddha gave his first sermon. We sat in silence as our minds dissected themselves, making progress only gradually. But on day 7 (or was it 8) I experienced a preliminary yet profound truth - my mind, and not my body, was creating the pain in which I sat. Through certain thoughts, certain seemingly unrelated cravings or aversions, my mind tied my back's muscles in knots; it shot knives into my knees and thighs. By desiring to know what time it was (and how much time was left in a given session), I created my own misery. Or by aching for the familiarity of home, I suffered in physical pain. To know this truth satisfies intellectual curiosity. To experience it can depress the soul - for if one's philosophy is based on the assumption that one controls his reality with his mind; then the existence of a portion of the mind which drives needles into tissue yields a crushing truth:

You Are Not In Control Of Your Own Mind

You cannot keep the mind from producing pain. You cannot focus on your breath for more than a few seconds before the mind wanders to more interesting thoughts. You cannot feel the sensations that the mind has chosen to edit. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. And you want to scream.

But there is hope - awareness of weakness can be the trailhead to strength. And so we continue with our feeble minds of which we hold the reins of only the most superficial sparks, and we try to control the fire bit by bit, try by try. Slowly.... Slowly we cool some of the heat. Some sparks ignite again, some disappear forever. But we continue. Diligently. Vigilantly. Persitently. Patiently. We continue.

Bhavatu Sabba Mangalam
(in a very low, slow voice)

We continue to the beating heart of India - to Varanasi. Benares. Where bodies are burnt and ashes given to Shiva. Where allure of the holy trumps the repellent of raw sewage or dismembered corpses and dips in the sacred water proceed. Where the chaos of India reaches its height as thousands share the streets, and the tiny curving alleyways, with thousands of sacred cows. Where a rising sun can feel like the re-birth of our planet. But Godliness and chaos this time around are a tamed somewhat by the pertinent power of the same sun that gives us our repeated births. At 113 degrees, every afternoon brings hibernation by travellers and Indians alike. Pilgrims stay home. Tourists imbalance their electrolites with 5 liters of water a day, and wake up dehydrated. In a way, the fact that the spiritual yields to the immediate makes hinduism more accessible - it is at its heart a religion like all others: one than can be at times embraced with all the heart, soul, and being; and at others relegated to the corners of the mind. In Hinduism, as everywhere, God often gives way to heat, or to work, or to recreation, or to...anything here now. And on this trip in Varanasi - indeed in India - it is ever-more-apparent that the chaos in the streets is only a lining of the reason lurking behind closed doors. At times the voyeur can only see the results, not the reasons. And we are again, often regrettably, playing the voyeur.

The heat did provide one beneficial side-effect - that of easy discipline. With nothing else to do, I easily taught myself to read Hindi in just a day or two. And the fact that I can't understand that which I can now read is somewhat moot, as the heat, we claim, has made us run too (is it really the temperature ? Or is it mindset? Is it clinging? Is it a refusal to adapt?). Outwards this time, to higher elevations (and upwards too, I suppose, to slightly higher latitudes). In reaching Darjeeling we left Hindi behind for Nepali (which I can read as well, without a spark of understanding) and Tibetan. Here, we found also an astonishingly bizzarre British legacy - who else would build a "toy train" (with two foot wide tracks) 88 kilometers to a city they built on top of a mountain, where lightening and water are just a couple of the perpetual problems? Nobody. British.

But, then, see down there? It's 113 degrees. Okay, I get it.

Then upwards further towards immense mountains concealed by clouds (so far). Upwards to where I now sit in Gangtok - the capital of the land of the attacking dogs. Get 'em boys. Get 'em.

Sikkim. Boy.