Friday, May 31, 2013

Travel 2013

Stay tuned for updates from Goa, Ellora, and the Haji Ali in Mumbai.  For now, check out the photos:

Buddhist Temple at Ellora caves, hand carved into basalt mountains in the 7th century

Friday, May 24, 2013

Travel 2013: Indian Railway pt 2

5.24 – Night train to Goa
Anyone speaking in an elevated voice on the train is selling food or chai. Speaking of food, we’ve been completely vegetarian so far, and it’s very easy to be veg here.  However, it's rare to find raw vegetables, which I'm currently craving.  Most foods have veggies cooked into a sauce/gravy or chutney, or battered and fried -- the majority of which have been delicious.

A thought on the train: after thousands of years of burning our garbage, now it’s cancerous. Plastic, when burned, releases dioxin, a known and banned carcinogen. Whereas previously (and still, but more rarely), food has been served in leaves shaped into bowls and ceramic cups for chai, you could dispose of it on the side of the tracks and soon it would biodegrade. Now, evidence of plastic’s longevity is everywhere - on the roadside, in rural farm fields, in the stomachs of stray dogs, and burnt and sent up as toxic fumes.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Travel 2013: Indian Railway

A sheet on the sleeper car of the train - they all had dates they were made and the black slowly fades to gray over time

5.23, 1 a.m., night train to Goa

At 1 a.m. I learn the magic of the Indian Railway.  Even though the station smells of human urine, with sand bags and garbage lining the tracks, peppered with unshy rats, the station is still full of families travelling with luggage, sitting on the ground in the middle of the hot balmy night.  Every station prints a list of passengers that board there, with old-school printer paper with tabbed edges: here you consult your seat assignment. There were zero other identifiable foreigners and no women travelers unaccompanied by a man.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Travel 2013: Mumbai

5.22 - Mumbai
I’ve been wondering about race.  It’s clear that race is so connected to class in the U.S., and I’m pretty sure it’s not the same here.  I feel myself surprised to see darker Indians passing similarly (as far as I can tell) as the lighter skinned.  I asked about it during breakfast and received a history lesson/lecture on the caste system in India.  We also talked about the green revolution and GMOs, over a breakfast of small bananas (kela), sweet + mango jelly, mango jaggery + cheese sandwich, and my first chai.
Trying to get on the bus, I notice that Licia and I are not good at queues (lines) because everyone else pushes to the front, in any way possible – including using their children.  We have mostly gotten pushed to the back of the line because we’re too reserved to elbow people out of our way.  Also, personal space is smaller, and this is very clearly evidenced in driving.
Women are less prevalent in public spaces.  For example, on our full bus, there were 4 women. 

The feeling of sitting in the car with a kid tapping the window: a single pane(pain) of transparent glass separating and representing two wholly different worlds. Her barefoot in the street running into intersections with stopped cars, her face clearly dirtied and no sign of any parent/guardian, me sitting in A/C on fake leather car seat on my way somewhere with a $500 camera in my lap.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Travel 2013: Mumbai

People living in shacks and cooking over fire, taken out of a room with A/C and a flatscreen TV - click for more photos
5.21 - Mumbai
The first thing I smell in the morning is the faint but definitive thick scent of burning plastic.  The hard bed provided a balance of comfort and support to sleep well and not have an achy back.  We had the luxury of air conditioning for most of the night, but waking up without it means hot, frizzy hair and a grease-shined face.
Colonization here by the British is much different than it was in the U.S.  At least the way I see it, most Indians don’t bear physical resemblance to the British, whereas the majority of U.S. citizens have European descent – at least for now, before “latinos” take over the majority position.
My sister and I are staying at my friend’s parent’s (and grandparent’s) house, who own their own business.  They have a nice, clean, new car (where, by the way back seat belts are not compulsory and therefore do not have a hole to click it in to) and a big apartment – not crowded with stuff or technology. A wooden swing is the living/dining room separator – bars on the windows on the third floor.  Our temporary bedroom looks out to the construction of another neighboring tower. 
Uma asked us first thing in the morning what we’re doing still lounging in bed – “come out and make yourself at home.” She then proceeded to sweep the room and the rest of the house with a  small, short natural fiber broom. Breakfast was idly (kind of a soft rice paddy) and tomato coconut chutney; we talked about how globalization and development is, in the man of the house’s words “eroding the character of India.”

We took a $2 A/C bus with a TV and “tequila” song playing to downtown Mumbai. Building stories are propped up with bamboo and rebar sticking out like candles on the birthday cake for a 200 year old.  Extreme poverty butts up to the roadside: garbage, stray dogs, naked children squatting in the dirt.  The periodic rivers are littered with brightly colored plastic wrappers picked at by tall, leggy white shorebirds.  We mostly receive unabashed staring, kids’ warm, dark, curious eyes included, though not all are as friendly.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Travel 2013: Mumbai

HORN OK PLEASE, written on many trucks as a plea to notify the driver of intent to pass -- click for more pictures
5.20 - Mumbai, first impressions
Slums packed right up to the boundary of the airport, intense eye contact from male passersby, brightly colored traditional women's clothing, tropical plants and air that feels like an oven.  A thick mix of smog and humidity blankets the city.  Big trucks and buses that say HORN OK PLEASE on the back.  Many tuk tuks / autorickshaws buzz past driven by persistent shoeless men.

The smells of development - burning plastic, construction materials, underregulated vehicular exhaust - hint at a country eager to catch up in the global rat race to success and happiness.

Licia at India Gate - click for more photos

5.20
Spicy mango chutney and white processed, individually wrapped cheese on toast, with a juicy alfonso mango, banana cut into museli with warm milk which is somehow, deliciously, more like the consistency of oatmeal, a small cup of coffee with sugar and Tropicana pomegranate juice.  This was my first meal in India, prepared by a friend's mom, Uma, in her house in a northern suburb of Mumbai.  After, she gave us a tour of her shrine, just off the kitchen in their third floor apartment, naming off deities and gurus, "in Hindu households you always find a place for God," she says.

Uma hired a driver who drove us around for an air conditioned view of many sights of southern Mumbai - starting with the India Gate.  Built to commemorate British colonialization, there is no visible or audible hint of any hard feelings. There were lots of people, apparently kids are on school holiday.  Someone with a plastic film camera shot our picture.

We are objects of interest here.  Men stare penetratingly and make me wonder what they're looking for.  Sometimes they break eye contact first if I am able to convey no emotion on my face - a tough exterior which fights my U.S. reflexive smile as a response to two gazes meeting.  Their eyes don't betray anything I can read as desire to connect - no clear compassion, niceness, or willingness to stop for a chat.  I want to see how his expression changes as if I start conversation.

We crossed the street to the Taj hotel, now famous as the survivor of 2008 terrorist attacks.  We took refuge from the intense heat to a restaurant that overlooks the Gate inside the hotel had some traditional chaat (street food/snacks) served gourmet. When Uma insisted on paying, she said the mandate of "treating guests as your God."

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Travel 2013: USA via Shanghai and Delhi to Mumbai

Leaving the U.S. - click for more photos
5.18
It's 1am and 4pm at the same time.  I'm about to land in Shanghai after a 13 hour flight backwards (or forward?) in time.  I've never been to Asia before.  I've been realizing lately that smiling/looking nice is something unique to U.S. superficial social interactions - when we make eye contact, we usually smile.  Or when we interact and then say thanks, we smile.  It seems weird to me when (especially women) don't smile back - after making eye contact.

We landed into Shanghai with so much air pollution.  You can smell the air metallic on the plain.  I watched a ping pong game in the airport to pass the 5 hour layover.

From Shanghai, I flew to New Delhi, met my sister at 3 am local time, and then caught another flight to Mumbai.  Now we're staying with my friend's parents in a northern suburb.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Pre-travel thoughts


I imagine Thailand like Costa Rica –coasts rich in biodiversity, both on shore and off.  Lush, dense greenery with active mammal life.  Slow-moving and laid back people sipping cool drinks and partaking of the local seafood, with a tropical fruit twist.  Rundown machinery, from boats to street lamps, corroded by time and salt spray.  Probably a few sprinkled-in politically radicalized white, American ex-pats slinking by with few resources.

I caught myself in this imagery realizing that I also have no idea what Thailand will be like.  I’ve never been to a place where I didn’t remotely know the language or one of its linguistic cousins.  I’m apprehensive about going somewhere with clearly undeveloped communication skills.  I met someone a few weeks ago who said, though that communicating without spoken language can present a deeper, more human connection.  I’m not sure what she meant, but I’m excited to figure it out.  Excited and a little anxious – but that’s how it goes.

Some things I want to do in India:
  • Take a train ride.
  • Beaches?
  • See wildlife
  • Meet some people – Startup stay? Couch surfing?
  • Meet up with a friend in Mumbai/Pune
  • English tea
  • Taj Mahal
  • Eat: a mango, mango lassi, chai masala, a fruit I've never heard of

I'll let you know how it goes!  T minus 38 hours!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Thoughtful and artful video

Here's a short and entertaining video about remembering perspective: that we're human and can choose awareness.  We don't have to default to boredom in routine; we have the capability to snap out of it and choose.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Talking Back by bell hooks

Picked up bell hooks' Talking Back - thinking feminism, thinking black, and it's awesome!


I want to share a few quotes with you that I've found inspiring, and, as an appetizer a Ryan Gosling meme:


  • In the world of the southern black community I grew up in, "back talk" and "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure. ... To speak then when one was not spoken to was a courageous act - an act of risk and daring.
  • There are some folks for whom openness is not about the luxury of "will I choose to share this or tell that," but rather "will I survive - will I make it through - will I stay alive?"
  • The history of colonialization, imperialism is a record of betrayal, of lies, and deceits.  The demand for that which is real is a demand for reparation, for transformation.  In resistance, the exploited, the oppressed work to expose the false reality - to reclaim and recover ourselves.  We make the revolutionary history, telling the past as we have learned it mouth-to-mouth, telling the present as we see, know and feel it in our hearts and in our words.
  • Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.  It is that act of speech, of "talking back," that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject - the liberated voice.
  • [Poetry] was meant to transform consciousness, to carry the mind and heart to a new dimension.
  • The insistence on finding one voice, one definitive style of writing, and reading one's poetry, fit all too neatly with the static notion of itself and identity that was pervasive in university settings.  It seemed that many black students found our situations problematic precisely because our sense of self, and by definition our voice, was not unilateral, monologist, or static, but rather multi-dimensional.
  • When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words. In the act of overcoming our fear of speech, of being seen as threatening, in the process of learning to speak as subjects, we participate in the global struggle to end domination. When we end our silence, when we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence. Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited" to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important. It is our responsibility collectively and individually to distinguish between mere speaking that is about self-aggrandizement, exploitation of the exotic "other," and that coming to voice which is a gesture of resistance, an affirmation of struggle.
  • While the struggle to eradicate sexism and sexist oppression is and should be the primary thrust of feminist movement, to prepare ourselves politically for this effort we must first learn how to be in solidarity, how to struggle with one another.
Why I love it, a start:
I love how she sees voice as the mechanism to move from subject to object.  From colonized, to powerful. I love to hear her thoughts on how finding voice can be transformative, and how she also is critical of mainstream (white) feminism in that it isn't just about speaking, it's also about the content of what is said.
I love it because she makes me ask the question, again: "what does solidarity mean?"  She makes me want to understand and feel what she means by "an affirmation of struggle" - as it relates to finding a voice.
I love how she presents of the stakes of speaking up/talking back.  It's not a luxury of what to share, and does/has carry/carried serious punishments.  And it doesn't seem like she does so from a perspective of being a victim, which I've seen presented harshly recently.  Rather, she speaks a lot to the courage required and the power gained by speaking against these punishments.

Update, 1 hour later: just saw this on Facebook and I think it highlights a lot of what bell hooks brings up, check it out: