Morgalogue

With a heavy heart and dodgy stomach I write to you from Bangalore. Lidka reluctantly flew home on Saturday to start her new job after 10 beautiful days spent touring Kerela. After moping around the completely uninspiring city of Kochi feeling sorry for myself with food poisoning, I have decided to jump-start my survival insticts with a trip to a frightening megatropolis. Also not a bad place to pick up a new camera. I arrived this morning on the night train, a little short on sleep, so I may become incoherent soon. I haven’t seen much of the city since the sun came up, though it has already confused me. I spent over an hour trying to find a hotel that wasn’t full with the mass influx of visitors to the big Farming Expo - not quite the IT boomtown I was expecting. Some outskirts of the city are also under curfew after rioting yesterday. At 5am this morning I was slouched at a newsstand trying to make sense of the following headlines: 2 dead, 40 vehicles burned as riots blaze Bangalore. Jade Goody admits racist slur. “Oh god, what has the silly cow done ? Maybe I should take a taxi” were my initial thoughts, but after reading on, the stories were thankfully unrelated.

Anyway, back to Kerela.

A day on unwinding the beach at Kovalam turned into 3. The owner of our lavish bright purple and pink guesthouse giving us a wry “I told you so” smile each time we extended our booking. One day we spent a couple of hours watching scores of fishermen handhauling a huge net in from the bay. It was a spectacle I’d heard about in Sri Lanka. Using small boats they string the net across the bay, taking it far out to sea. On the beach, ‘tug-o-war’ teams at each end slowly, metre by metre, close the net and drag its contents on shore. I’d heard tales of the whole village turning out to wrestle with a strip of thrashing tuna and blue marlin. People struggling home with sarongs bulging with kidnapped fish. As the expectation of big moment built up a small crowd gathered and the work songs started up. Then the mood changed. All fell silent and a sorry netfull of sand finally appeared like an insult from the sea. “HA !” Everyone stared at it. A totally wasted effort. It’s not uncommon, but kind of sad to see.

   
We travelled by boat up the coast on ‘the Backwaters’. Anyone who’s read ‘The God of Small Things’ should be able to picture them. Lush, tropical ‘Water Streets’ with little glimpses of temples, houses, children, animals on the waters edge, going about their business at a dreamy pace. It did live up to the hype though it is pretty hard to get anyone to take you down the narrow ‘water-backstreets’, we had to make do mainly with ‘water-avenues’ and the occasional ‘car-park-lagoon’. The traditional Kottu Vellum houseboats with their organic, oriental ‘Sci-fi’ rattan weave, actually add to the atmosphere despite being full of toursits. Apparently the whole boat building industry has been completely reveived from near extinction in the last 3 years. Not a bad piece of sustainable tourism if the boats stop spewing kerosene into the water.

   
I was fast becoming cynical of the India backpacker though. I didn’t occur to me till Lidka pointed it out, but in Sri Lanka no major sight we went to had more than a handful of white faces and no backpackers. They are having a terrible season. I just hadn’t had to do the traveller-chat thing. It started to feel like everyone we met was a Yoga teacher, fully kitted out with THE range of Indian beads, bags, fabrics and tattoos on their way to or from an Ashram. And it’s in their training to be really nice and positive, even if they are totally self-centred and vain. I was starting to feel completely out-India’d.

So both Lidka and I were rather suprised to find ourselves in an Ashram, with Tina Turner’s ex dance correographer, surrounded by devotees, being hugged by a Hindu Saint.

We were curious. Andrew, a Yoga teacher, Australian and a genuinely nice guy was spiritually awakened by Tina on the ‘Simply the Best’ world tour, and after his knees packed in, changed direction. He encouraged us to join him. We could be straight with him and he could translate ‘Ashram-speak’ into a language we understood and assuaged our fears about saying/doing the wrong thing, being ‘found out’, brainwashed or just bursting out laughing. Though we only stayed a night, it was a strange, strange place.

The Ashram is built around one woman, Amma, who people come to be near. Every day between 10am and 6pm, without stopping to eat, drink or go to the toilet, she sits on a chair in the temple and blesses and endless line of devotees by individually hugging them. At rallies in India she’s been known to go at it for 36 hours straight, hugging as many as 16 000 in a single sitting. A promotional video we were shown on our ‘orientation’ estimates that she’s up to a whopping 21 million hugs worldwide so far. Norris McWerter I hope you’re listening !

For a 60 yearold, her stamina is undeniably supernatural. After she’s done hugging, she pops round the back to her own 3000 seater auditorium and throws herself into heavy, trancelike, Indian gig where she sings many of her own songs to a mass, cross-legged gathering. Then from 9pm till 2am she’s apprently on the phone organising her numerous charities and the 4 universities she runs. This does seem to be a classicly Indian phenomenon. I’m reading a book about Ghandi at the moment. There seems to be no shortage of these superhuman people in Indian history, who barely eat or sleep and are worshipped by millions.

As ashrams go, it was a fairly liberal one - men and women were not strictly segregated and talking was allowed though not encouraged - and very popular with the white folks. Everyone is of course, very nice, but a often a bit gaunt and slightly ill-looking in white robes. As I sat in the temple, watching motionless people staring into space, listening to an American woman sing a song she had composed about the Ashram, it felt like a bizarre mix of church, luntic asylum and cross channel ferry entertainment. Why do these people want to lock themselves away from the world ? I can’t help but feel they’ve lost something rather than found it.

   
We watched the sun set over the ocean surrounded by cross-legged ghosts, on the ashram’s private meditation beach. After they left we stayed on, talking about ‘God’ till long after the stars had come out. Andrew gently answered my frustration with ashram life by saying “I don’t think I could be a devotee, but I guess some people just feel the need to be devotees”. I took this to mean ‘Yeah, maybe they are nuts, but I suppose it’s no slight on the philosophy of the religion’. They don’t judge.

Lidka was less forgiving. She was tricked into helping wash up the thousands of dinner dishes. A selfless, female-only task that is meant to purify the soul. By 11pm she took matters into her own feminist hands, upped the navel-gazing, purgatory tempo and stirred a rebellion against the sexist policy. She arrived back to our room after midnight exhausted, but at least satisfied that she’d shaken some life into the pilgrims. Go girl.

From there we carried on in style, hiring out a Kottu Vellum houseboat for the night with a young Danish couple. It was a nice relaxing way to spend the day though we were confined to the more boring parts of the Backwaters. From Kottayam we travelled up into the mountains to Kumily where we spent a relaxing few days walking about the mountains. We visited a spice farm run by a Bavarian guy and his Indian family. He’s something of a self-taught organic revolutionary, growing top quality coffee, cardamon, vanilla and pepper to his own defiant methods. Kind of weird, to meet a European living the hard, isolated life of a coffee planter in this day and age. We stayed, talked shop and ate his sordough german bread for a while while he put the globalised world to rights. Dark forces barred him from selling his coffee on Ebay. Free market … ?

   
And then, well … just when we were in the groove - She had to go. I don’t know what we’re going to do yet. Just have to see how it goes I guess. Anyway … I’d better go.

Take care all.