Morgalogue

Aside from the famed Meenakshi mega-temple, rising up out of a warren of hustling streets, like a walled city within a city, first impressions of Madurai weren’t great. Hot from our spiritual investigation in Tiruvannamalai however, Eitan and I were keen to scratch the grubby surface and somehow connect with what lay beneath. (more…)

Sorry - this has turned into a bit of a novelette. Get a cup of tea.  

It seems to me, that you can’t really know Asia without understanding religion. Here, it’s a lesson in both history and mainstream culture. Being completely and indiscriminately ignorant of all faiths however, the mind of the believer is taking me alot of effort to get grips with. Without ever properly having stopped to think about it, I guess I’d always explained the continuing devotion of millions worldwide to gods and goddesses as tradition. Self-serving ideas and institutions built to explain a world we assumed to be flat, still tangled up in our cultures and the identities we give ourselves. If people really wanted to think rationally about it, surely they’d realise it’s probably not true. The millions can be wrong - look at James Blunt - so what’s to know ?

Well, while actual faith may be beyond me, the last week has been a fascinating ride into the 3rd eye of Hindu spirituality. (more…)

This week I have been living in the strange, minature world of ‘French India’. I’m not entirely clear on the history, or why the Brits let them keep it at all, but the French clung on to a tiny capsule of territory around the city of Pondicherry until 1954. Unlike the British colonial sites however, the French don’t really seem to have left. Police still wear red kepis hats, people play boules, there are boulangeries galore, street names have largely resisted the re-ethnification process thats working its way through the country. And in a way that seems particulary French to me, French tourists flock to visit ‘the French part’ of the country and compalin about how crap the crepes are (no joke - I overheard a 10 minute moan about the flour used). We clearly have very a different relationship with our ex-colonies. (more…)

I am now (finally) the extremely proud owner of a Canon G7 camera. By far the most high-tech thing I have ever owned. Getting hold of the item was an exercise in ‘modern India’ that took me on a journey of several hundred kilometres, from coast to coast and just about reduced me to tears on several occasions. (more…)