Chatting With Your Ferns About Love and Weather

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight.

(Shakespeare)

In the southern state of India's Tamil Nadu, an enormous banyan tree in a dry, dusty plain had been the original inspiration for the experimental city that has become Auroville. A large meditation center was built nearby and all roads in Auroville generally run to this tree, heart and soul of a utopian village populated by eco-conscious foreigners and likeminded Indians. A no-noise zone, the shade under the canopy is a pleasant place to gather, rest, and contemplate. It's not unusual to see the banyan's trunk embraced by visitors, literal 'tree huggers,' whose state of grace smiles seem to suggest they are being hugged back. And perhaps, as I later learned, they are.

I recently watched a 1970s documentary called, "Journey to the Secret Life of Plants," one of the weirdest psychedelic movies ever made, the apogee of the flower-power movement (pun intended). Its soundtrack was arranged by Stevie Wonder who appears briefly in the movie in an incandescent dreamcoat traipsing through a similarly effulgent landscape. Star power, sure, but the real interest here is the idea of plant life having a higher consciousness.

This idea is not at all novel. For centuries, Hindus have believed in the unity of life. Man can witness his spiritual flowering reflected in flora, understanding the elements of the human body as being one with the "infinite cycle of creation." This belief in the unity of existence is reaffirmed through chanting of Vedic hymns (at this point, those familiar with the inequities in India's social caste would likely reference Mark Twain's famous assessment, "In India, all life is sacred, except human life.")

One could convincingly argue that Christianity makes the same argument, as in funereal rites: "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."

This complementary relationship between man and flowers was for centuries founded upon faith. In recent years however, we have learned that the cognizance of the green world is more alert than we could have ever guessed. In 1960s San Diego, California, an inquisitive member of law enforcement, Cleave Baxter, decided one night to investigate what would happen when he attached a polygraph's sensors to his house plant. His intention was to record the plant's nervousness if he were to approach it in the most threatening manner: with fire. A non-smoker, the administrator would have to retrieve some matches from his secretary's desk. However, the moment he consciously decided to burn the leaf, Baxter noticed the polygraph needle jerk violently. The plant, it seems, read his mind and reacted fearfully. Baxter, a no-nonsense all-American empiricist, was sold.

More experiments followed. For example, a timer drops a thimble of salt water into a plant's soil, leading to flustered needle marks on the polygraph paper. Analysis of numerous tests confirm his hypothesis. Explaining in his own words, the clean cut officer sounds not too different from a Hindu Brahmin: "even on the lower levels of life there's a profound consciousness that binds all things together."

Some progressive scientists have attempted to build on this discovery with fascinating results. In one such test, a man was connected with a plant to the same polygraph machine. He was shown a movie with various scenes designed to elicit strong emotions at selected intervals. The man became excited when viewing a sensuous breast and then despaired at archival footage of nuclear testing in the Nevada desert. The plant responded correspondingly.

(What does this say about those people who can't seem to take care of plants, for whom flora becomes wilting petals, browning leaves, crackling textures? Can we read into a man's state of emotions through the state of his succulents?)

A team of scientists and engineers was able to build an interactive greenhouse in which machinery translated the energy emanating from plants into sound; visitors to the greenhouse exploring the botanical garden affected the mood of the plants so that the "music" emanating from the speakers modulated according to the interaction between the two distinct species of life, a conversation, or a "live concert," if you will.

Similarly, engineers in Japan created a computer capable of transforming the electrical output of plants into modulated sounds. At a temple in Kyoto, the president of Fuji Electronics and his kimono-clad wife demonstrate to a group of journalists how the machine enables one to communicate with a cactus. The wife attempts to teach it the Japanese alphabet; it murmurs back to her an approximate sound (but does not titter in response to her own nervous giggling).

Even the scientists in 1970s Soviet Russia became involved in testing though their methods were a bit more torturous. For example, a scientist blows tobacco smoke on a plant to test its irritability (he seems to enjoy peeving the plant). The sentience of a cabbage plant is then tested. A scientist slices through a distinct cabbage causing the unharmed plant to register alarm. That fits accordingly with the tests from San Diego. But what is especially interesting is that when the same scientist wielding the sharp knife enters the laboratory room two hours later (sans knife), the cabbage plant becomes agitated once more.

Wow. So plants can not only read our thoughts but they may very well have memory as well... what are the philosophical implications of these conclusions, particularly for vegetarians whose diet is a protest against the cruelty of meat-eating? What might carrots, cauliflower, and zucchini feel about being boiled, steamed, sliced? The agony of the silent scream (and the end of the riddle of regarding a tree falling in the forest... if the surrounding trees are perceptive to its collapse then it certainly makes a sound, doesn't it?)

Roald Dahl, that visionary genius of fiction, has a story dated from 1953 called "The Sound Machine" in which an inventor has created a means in order to record low and high-pitched noises inaudible to the human ear. His next door neighbor, Mrs. Saunders, is creating a cacophony of howling agony with her gardening. Confronting her, he asks pointedly, "How do you know that a rose bush doesn't feel as much pain when someone cuts its stem in two as you would feel if someone cut your wrist off with a garden shears? How do you know that? It's alive, isn't it?"

The inventor takes the machine and its earphones to a tree and hacks at it with an ax: "a harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low-pitched, screaming sound... drawn out like a sob..." He feels terrible about the wound he's gashed and contemplates the horrors of agriculture: "He thought immediately of a field of wheat standing up straight and yellow and alive, with the mower going through it, cutting the stems... Oh, my God, what would that noise be like? Five hundred wheat plants screaming together... no, he thought, I do not want to go to a wheat field with my machine. I would never eat bread after that. But what about potatoes and cabbages and carrots and onions?" (The story ends with the inventor insisting that his doctor friend rub iodine on the tree's laceration.)

The idea of interconnectedness explicit in this film reminds me of the water crystal experiments of Masaru Emoto. Emoto believes that words not only give form to powerful feelings but have vibrations that affect our everyday invisible world as well. Projections of appreciation and anger are written on test tubes of water, left aside, frozen, and when the ice is melting, there is a two-minute window in which to photograph the consequences language has on the crystals. His findings, taken at face value, are fantastic.

For example, this crystal was formed from the word "happiness:"

And this one, conversely, from the word, "despair:"

Significantly different, right? Similarly, this crystal was viewed from "good job:"

And this one from, "You did it wrong!"

Emoto assumes that because humans are composed 70% of water, it's natural to conclude that our wavelengths, whether positive or negative, are projected and assimilated towards those around us. In a somewhat related experiment, Emoto photographed Tokyo tap water which looked distinctly unhealthy, contaminated as it was by chemicals. He then had five hundred people pray for its health. Following this consensus of hope, there had been a detectable change in the crystal makeup.

One can criticize Emoto for being selective about which crystals are photographed and that scientifically, his methods could be considered spurious. But if you want to examine the argument from dissenters closely, they seem to suggest that our thoughts, feelings, and ruminations have absolutely no effect on our environment.

Does this not seem as outlandish as the discoveries of Emoto and Baxter?

It's not just a crisis in imagination on their part, but an indifference to the metaphysical. You don't have to be a hippie to be excited by the vitality of the living world, its chatter and its music.

So do not forget to wish your flowers, "Good morning," when you are watering them. It might make a difference...

Sakura Flower

You Can Lead A Camel to Water, But...

"Can you teach a camel to dance?"  booms the hoity-toity voice of the English-speaking emcee on the crackling public address system. Instead of answering his question, he continues, digressively, "What you see will remain vivid in your late years." Drummers rattle bombastically and a camel gallops onto the main stage, its head swung back so that its neckline is exposed sunward, the animal staggering forwards and backwards not dancing so much as appearing to be in dire need of urination. "Bravo, what a clever beast," gapes the emcee, rhapsodic.

The city of Bikaner has always played second fiddle to its beautiful sister, Jaisalmer. Both cities are in Rajasthan, set squarely on the edge of the Thar Desert, the southern frontier between India and Pakistan, but Bikaner is never included in fly-by-night tourist itineraries: Jaisalmer is the chosen desert dream locale. Perhaps one could fault the city planning of Bikaner, which beyond the claustrophobic alleys of the Old City, is too spread out, too suburban, too dull while the fort in Jaisalmer is an inhabited relic; a few thousand people still live there, mostly Brahmin families, connecting a contemporary intimacy with a mythologized past, a sense of wonder that feels quite remote while dodging the busy buzz of Bikaner's traffic. But for three days a year, Bikaner is queen of the desert during its annual camel festival.

The city holds the first day of the festival at a stadium named for a famous local son, an Olympic clay pigeon marksman. The groundskeepers have set up three sections of plastic chairs, one for the Indians, one for the tourists and one for press. Unsurprisingly, organization spirals quickly out of control and within the first hour of the show, nearly everyone has wandered past the police line onto the field itself for a closer look.

"Look at the shine! Look at the raiment of the Pied Pipers!" When the emcee mentions Pied Pipers I immediately think of mice at the nearby Rat Temple at Deshnok but he wants to draw attention to a battery of musicians—horns, reeds, drums, bagpipes—leading the cavalcade. "Dressed in most gorgeous finery, propped lovingly to be incomparably beautiful, the camels will demonstrate a gorgeousness to silence their harshest critics." I've never met anyone critical of the aesthetic quality of camels—indifference is slightly more common. But indeed plenty of brouhaha has gone into bedecking these passive beasts—attired in garlands, tassels, confetti, bells, inlaid mirrors, plastic flowers, nose piercings, silk scarves, marigold necklaces, pink balloons, India national flags, Kohl eye shadow, even their enormous ungulate toes look pedicured— "stunning" as the emcee declares, as I like most others, bravo with our cameras. 

Gentlemen of the B.S.F. (Border Security Force) enter, riding the animals accoutered in corresponding vestments but of a martial couture: epaulets, gongs-and-pips, ironed-on patches, and immaculate uniform creases. Rainbow-turbaned and armed to the teeth they brandish spears, swords, crescent knives, and goofy smiles (watch yourself, Pakistan!). Most conspicuous though are their waxed mustaches, where in this particular detail, size matters. Protected by extraordinary facial hair, they chaperone a princess in a purple sari in need of a parasol.

Following India's finest are some camels lugging a cart loaded with Kashmiri rugs. Then a camel pulls a large cardboard house reading State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, the proud local sponsor getting its air time. And then, oddly, the show progresses into real life logistical examples of the humpback experience. Camels slog past its audience tugging the most quotidian loads: wagons overloaded with bundles of broken tree branches, another with carefully chopped firewood, the next with food in open air sacks, another crowded with poor farmers and so on "in recognition of their contribution in desert transportation." The obviousness of their usefulness bores the audience, who stir from the their descending torpor only when we move on to camel acrobatics.

The first camel in the contest genuflects to the audience, a salutation not especially acrobatic despite the emcee's euphemistic encouragement: "Not an easy thing to do. Certainly not!" The next act involves a man rising to a standing position on the animal's hump as it gallops before the grandstands. ("Great sense of balance!") The next man does a headstand on a strutting camel ("The duty of the camel is to take a man to his destination no matter how peculiar his riding preference."). The following camel runs past us with a man balanced like the Nike Swoosh ("Even yoga can be performed on a running camel. Camels are so important in our daily life.") After this stunning stretch is a comedy act featuring a joker doing the rodeo clown bit, rolling under the animal, connecting an air pump to its rear, administering air, and checking the pressure. His gag ends with him riding backwards ("His own particular way of riding camels.") I glance at some Kuwaiti sheiks in VIP chairs, expressionless behind their dark sunglasses.

The camel dancing seems redundant after the acrobatics exhibition. Led by bearded men in dhotis, pulled by the reins like marionette strings, camels move herkyjerky as if they are dodging Pakistani machinegun fire. More photogenic is the camel-shaving festival in which several camels are paraded before us with intricate geometric designs shaved into their flanks, reminding the viewer of henna, mandalas, and carpets. The camels are escorted by their barbers around a circle of spectators posing at specified positions for the cameras to encapsulate the ephemeral beauty. ("You know it's like the catwalk, a real fashion show. Bravo.")

Well, not like any I have ever been to but this is India. More germane to the spirit of a fashion show is the Mr. Bikaner contest. Representing the different cities of Rajasthan, the contestants' turbans are varieties of pattern and color: red, saffron, shades of purple and green--if you even notice the colors once you've gotten over the men's outstanding mustaches, the longer ones unrolled and curling out stretched to their fullest diameter. "Just look into their faces, ladies and gentlemen, and witness…the glory," the emcee intones with situational gravitas. But glory can be superficial and the true determining factor for Mr. Bikaner is personality. Taking turns addressing the audience, their handling of the mic would be decisive. Some, despite the swagger of their facial hair, are short but sweet. One bursts into song. A bearded Mr. Bikaner wannabe shouts a maelstrom at us, blowing his chance of victory, though to be honest if one of them has the chutzpah to unsheathe his sword and feint, he would have clinched my vote (the announced judges are army officers and doctors to a chair which leads me to presume military service and medical knowledge are essential qualifications for evaluating the ideal Mr. Bikaner). Bizarrely, in a flagrant push for cuteness, a small boy and girl dressed in the height of desert fashion are brought on stage. The tiny boy embraces the tiny girl and kisses her cheek and the crowd goes nuts for this saccharine outburst (organizers manage to pull the stunt off in spite of the risk of controversy, for Rajasthan is infamous for child brides being married off in group dowries and here could have been poster children).

Following Mr. Bikaner against the backdrop of a soft, magical light, begins the Miss Meridan contest, which is named after a woman involved in a folk tale that includes drought, seeds, floods, love, and camels. "This contest is about grace, style, poise, personality." Yes and it is just like a real fashion show because the girls have to utilize their feminine charms to woo our cheering. They work mostly from the same template as the camels:  henna, bangles, jewelry. Of course, they are wearing swirling, colorful saris but the garment, like the Japanese kimono, is justly famous for the intricacies in its folds and certainly requires a touch of finesse to make it work. In fashion you capitalize on your strengths, you work with what you have, and some of the women do well exploiting the flirty potential of a veil, conjuring an aura of mystery and romance. ("Sometimes sexy is not what you can see, but what you can't!")  Like the contest for Mr. Bikaner, personality goes a long way and the women finish their catwalk performance with an address to the audience. Some sing village songs, some are cheered by local factions, but most of the girls flop the personality bit, but for this they can hardly be faulted—they are not only shy but also bewildered to be standing before such an enormous (mostly male) audience. Traditionally accustomed to modesty rather than stage events, the women betray not only their girlhood but also a lifestyle that has not conditioned them towards spectacle.

I do not stick around to hear the winners announced, nor do I return to the stadium that night when another local hero is scheduled to perform (the winner from a TV talent show—the American Idol equivalent). I worry the celebrants might have dug into their moonshine in the interim and having been to several Indian weddings, I have had enough of moshpits and juiced-up, excitable Indians, their elbows in my teeth.

My reliability as a Bikaner Camel Fair witness deteriorates from the moment the Miss Meridan contest wraps up. I do not attend the last day of the festival due to outgoing travel arrangements and the day I do go to Ladera, a desert village within the Thar Desert, I don't have the patience to decipher the slipshod scheduling of the events. A certain fatigue plagues my notetaking and without the exclamations of the ironic emcee, my enthusiasm does not respond critically to the events. Or perhaps the novelty of camels has begun to wear off.

On the way to Ladera, civilization disappears when we leave the main highway and the claptrap bus takes to a potholed dirt path. We pass mud huts, thatched roofs, idle children and village elders surrounded by a landscape of desert scrub and top-heavy sand dunes. Bunting twined on some cables indicates the festival's presence as well as a Vodafone banner in some dusty, leafless tree.

By the time I alight from the bus, the first event has already begun, a variation of Greco-Roman wrestling. One prone to conjecture has to wonder whether the source of the sport is a residual consequence of Alexander the Great's incursion into the Punjabi region. That theory can not be guaranteed and neither can a view and I don't feel like using the tourist card to push myself through the crowded male audience. I wander the dunes slightly incoherent, taking in the landscape, emptying my shoes of sand, failing in conversation with a stoned sadhu, and waiting for the next event, a foot race up a dune. This, too, lacks camels but provides an outlet for hyperactive locales to exhaust themselves for no suitable reason.

Nothing like the Indian Air Force for a strong pick-me-up. Two fighter jets practice maneuvers over the event leaving sonic booms in their wake and stunned shoeless farmers gasping for their gods. Then higher, from an aircraft built for such purposes, skydivers leap into the void, floating down on bright parachutes and who, once they land, are mobbed by impressed children.

How are the camels supposed to follow James Brown at the Apollo? The camel jockeys whip their animals across a 200-meter field, wiping out for me at least the animal's cliché reputation for slowness. Tragedy is narrowly averted on the final race when halfway through one of the camels right-turn off the course and stampede in the audience's direction, his rider perhaps aiming for a creditor he has spotted in the sands.

With the sun thus setting I mill around the trail leading back to the village, Ladera, and beyond, my hotel in Bikaner. Wandering, I see a camel's cart being loaded with what must have been the entire female half of a local family clan. Squished together, they giggle at me as the camel's handler mutters his familiar orders to the animal, a genuine moment of truth within the staged artifice. I walk along the wagon, waving farewell to the blushing ladies.

Perhaps a Long Way Home

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2008

The Serendipity Factor Divided by the Butterfly Effect

Those skilled in 'Where's Waldo?' workbooks would perform admirably in any sort of safari but particularly in one in which we are searching for the Siberian Crane. You presume we would have to journey into the Russian heartland in order to spot this large and gorgeous bird, yawning its dazzling wingspan, wading in some ice-cold creek, scouring for small fish with an elongated, orange beak. Well, the Siberian Crane is a migratory bird, sensibly fleeing the miserable Russian winter for the savannah plains of Keoladeo National Park in India's eastern Rajasthan. Only, this year, as it has been annually for nearly a decade, the rains failed, the monsoon didn't hit and the water levels at the park looked depressingly shallow. So the birds did not come, flying the proverbial coop, resulting in a tranquil landscape, but eerily so.

Fortitude, patience, and an encyclopedic knowledge make bird watching quite worthwhile; skills most of us lack in considerable sums. Nevertheless, I journeyed into the park optimistically. Hardly an expert on the birds of South Asia, I was mostly excited to ride a bicycle through a national park. Before that, I hired the service of a cycle rickshaw driver hoping he might acquaint me with the prime vista spots.

Unfortunately, he was able to reveal very little. The birds must have flown across the continent, thousands of miles, bursting with anticipatory glee for the Indian winter only to be disappointed by the water levels and compelled to continue their peregrinations. Or had their expectations already been lowered considerably? Maybe this year they flew right by, or simply paused long enough to rinse out the dust.

As we rode past kiosk signposts with illustrations of the migratory birds, the rickshaw driver mumbled in a low voice, "No come." The greylag goose: "No come." The Asian Open Bill Stork: "No come." The truly radical Painted Stork: "No come." But he pointed out the kiosks, regardless-- something to look at since there was nothing much moving in the trees. "Many parrot sightings," someone at the hotel had quipped facetiously. He might have added crows, swallows and various sundry fowl familiar from home.

There are no Big Five birds to market the pastime (as there is such a trademark in African safaris where you can count on five fingers your sightings of rhinos, cape buffalo, elephants, leopards, and lions). Like all cultural subgroups, birders have a particular vernacular that isolates them from the greater population who "doesn't get it." One theory that explains their phenomenon is its relation to the male hunting instinct. Another is that it appeals to the male habit of "systemizing" (men are disproportionately represented in this particular pursuit). Birders can be handy if you are in the market for new binoculars or a telephoto lens. Of course they have a thriving online presence. On birdwatching.com, you can peruse new technologies ("gifts for birdwatchers"), advice on birding with your kids, tips for "watching birds with your ears", and even a special section entitled "Birding for Hard Times," which contains a number of bromidic themes referring to the activity's high returns on a low-cost investment: stress relief, good exercise, family fun, friendship, and happiness: "the ultimate wealth." However, in Keoladeo, morale was low among the amateur ornithologists, birders, and bird nerds, who grumbling into their zoom scope, spoke wistfully of better days.

Riding through a small, narrow path on my bicycle I spotted an altogether different sign posted explaining all so much: "In your next incarnation you might be an endangered species. Please help save the Siberian Crane." Appealing to one's better karmic instincts is a nice maneuver, especially in a Hindu nation. However, as far as animal conservation goes, India's karma is somewhat dubious. Bureaucracy has done little to heed the warnings of animal rights activists. The Bengal Tiger-- one of the symbols of India's majestic history and its many kingdoms-- is near extinction. As for the birds, the droughts have not helped. Yet even when the monsoons don't fail, there is not enough water for India's ever-expanding population. And as tourism and industry improves the lot of many, an emerging middle class is going to use more water simply because it can. With the arrival of new money lifestyles evolve in kind. Consequently, when golf courses go up so does the dust from an empty lake. And the birds: they just fly on, abandoning the park for something greener, wetter, and perhaps more pristine, wherever that may be...

I spent two days exploring Keoladeo. Unfortunately, officials insist that visitors use bicycles issued by the National Park. Thus your sole option is a noisy, clanky, single gear bicycle, which tends to notify most wildlife of one's presence long before you are able to view the animal yourself. There is no element of surprise. Nevertheless, there were a few moments of accidental sightings. I surprised a family of jackals savoring a cow's carcass and a mongoose and I enjoyed a fierce stare down. I was charmed by mud flap turtles, giant creatures, wrestling in their gooey environment beneath a small copse of deciduous. Owls and kingfishers delighted.

And that night I dreamt of the Siberian Crane. She was lovely in that cavernous, blue sky.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2006

The Queen of Chapati

During a festival seven years ago, Shashi, a woman of the prestigious Brahmin caste lost her husband when his best friend murdered him over a sum of 35,000 rupees (the equivalent of about $1,250). During the 45-day period of mourning Shashi was not allowed to leave her house and was expected to lament his death with the many members of his family as they arrived day-by-day to pay respects. When it had come time to move on, Shashi was not allowed to remarry or to work, and if she were to follow her role in Hindu tradition she was required to shave her head and dress in white rags, living the remainder of her life in poverty, for those who supposedly knew better held her responsible for this senseless tragedy, which had certainly been a terrible consequence of dour karma. With two young sons to raise the option of renunciating the world was quite unfeasible. She needed work or at least help of some kind but her husband's family, who lived upstairs, refused her requests for aid and in fact stopped paying her utility bills. Shashi's downstairs flat went into a dry darkness, as she lost access to water and electricity. These were the desperate circumstances in which the widowed mother of two had to restart her life.

That Shashi would eventually manage to overcome the tragic circumstances endemic in this "secular democracy" is a tale of perseverance. Her story is not generally heard by most vacationing westerners and is not on Saturday's itinerary sandwiched between Buddhist rock caves and Jain temples. And if it weren't for her ingenuity I might not have been fortunate enough to meet her and her story would have remained an internal affair, a covered-up pimple nevertheless scarring the diamond face of India.

Two Women, Jodhpur

Shashi lives in Udaipur, which any badge-pinned guide worth his hyperbolic salt will tell you, is the "Venice of the Orient," flying past exaggeration into outright distortion, Venice being a coastal city of canals and Udaipur being an inland, aggregated city situated around a lake. The city is certainly most famous for being the primary setting of Octopussy, one of the James Bond franchise episodes in which Roger Moore is at his most cheeky (the movie plays ad nauseum every day in the numerous lakeside restaurants; will play in all likelihood until the end of the world—a waiter told me he's seen the movie 10,000 times). When the monsoons are good and drought is remote the lake shimmers, landmarked by a gorgeous palace in its center (rooms about the better suites running $2,500 a night). In fact, water—as a source of life and nourishment— is nearly supplementary to its aesthetic value, for when the lakebed dries business dies and India being a large country, the tourists roam elsewhere.

Shashi is not from Udaipur but from a neighboring village with very traditional values. Being from a good family of respected caste, Shashi was wedded to a handsome man of similar social standing and solid career prospects. Like most marriages in Hindu tradition, her marriage was arranged and the day before the wedding she had not yet met the man she was to spend the rest of her life with, having only seen his photo once before the ceremony. After the marriage, she left her family and village and the people she had known all her life for the big city.

Her husband ran a lakefront restaurant geared towards tourists. Like nearly all eating establishments in Udaipur, meals were served on the roof with a view to the lake and palace, insinuating the romance of the maharaja and a more gilded age. She bore him two sons and their family lived well. When a ten-day festival came to Udaipur seven years ago, Shashi's husband and his best friend set up a food stall to cater to the crowds. Their profits were excellent and when it came to split the money, the best friend proved to be his worst enemy. After arriving by scooter at his house, the friend suggested supper before business. Unbeknownst to Shashi's husband, the food had been heavily drugged and after he passed out his friend used a plastic rope to strangle him to death. Despite the cover-up, a police investigation found evidence of rope marks but even though the friend was indicted, tried and convicted for murder, he managed to bribe his way through the courts, serving a jail sentence of just one year, allowed to keep the balance of his dirty money.

Meanwhile Shashi received nothing that was rightfully hers and no compensation for the heinous crime. Instead of empathizing with her situation, her husband's family blamed her for the bad luck, cutting off her electricity and water hoping she would go away for good. They lived right upstairs, they saw her every day, and they did nothing for her.

Left to her own device, Shashi betrayed the rules of her caste. She had her sons visit the guesthouses to retrieve laundry, which she washed in the very early morning as not to attract attention for she was not supposed to work. Later she snuck out at dawn to clean hotel rooms. It went on like this for nearly five years, a desperate time with almost no money and both fear and shame dominating her emotions. Then, less than two years ago, one of her sons brought home two Australian tourists who wanted to learn how to make chutney. And that was how she found a way out of the darkness and a calling that would utilize her charms and talents: cooking classes.

In Udaipur, the competition is cutthroat. Around the streets of the tourist enclaves on the north side of the lake, signs, bulletins, and flyers for cooking classes are as ubiquitous as announcements for the 7pm Octopussy showing. Many of these schools have been in operation for years and in becoming profitable have, in the balance, lost a certain homespun touch. Classes can fill a dozen spots, can charge up to $25, and with nearly all the vegetables prepped there is little hands-on participation for students—consequently the event is more that of an expensive meal rather than a learning experience.

Shashi restricts her classes to three students for that is the limit that can fit comfortably in her kitchen. The kitchen adjoins her living room, where her home-from-school sons put their feet up on the family bed and watch television. It took us four hours to prep and cook the entire menu—masala tea (mixed with fresh-ground cardamon, peppercorn, and ginger), potato and onion pakora, coriander and mango chutneys, aubergine and tomato curry, vegetable palau, naan with cheese and tomato, potato parantha, coconut sweet parantha, and a stack of chapatti, the dishes variously spiced with anise, oregano, garlic, tumeric, cumin, chili pepper and sugar, a comprehensive overview of a very regular Indian diet.

Two years ago when Shashi began her classes she did not speak a word of English. Raised in a Rajasthani village and a fixture in the household under her husband's shadow, she did not learn any vocabulary until she discovered her talent for teaching. In the beginning she relied on hand signals for communication, but being attentive to the tourists' a-ha exclamations regarding what she wanted to express, Shashi catalogued a phonetic dictionary of common words, culinary and otherwise, that began to pepper her vocabulary: "grind," "stir," "heat," "boil," "flip," "cauliflower," "peas," "waste," "burn," "knead," "dough," "rolling pin," "spatula," and eventually she learned the tragic words which chronicled her life story: "murder," "bad man," "police," "bribe," "injustice," "widow," "bad luck," "abandoned," "shame," "fear." In conversation she makes the grammatical mistakes typical of people speaking English as a foreign language, dropping noun articles and mixing tenses; she has a preference for imperatives ("Flip now!"). Nevertheless, her concise speech is quite clear, her culinary directions nearly flawless, and it is quite a feat to learn how far she has come in so short a time as a result of her assiduous note-taking.

Indian food continues to be a mystery for Westerners. Quality in most restaurants is often elusive. I could taste the difference in the food Shashi taught me to cook: the recipes being quite specific about spice content, length of cooking time, the balance of ingredients. Her precise interpretation of common Indian dishes is spectacular. Having spent six months in India on various trips, the food I cooked under Shashi's guidance had been one of the great meals I have had. She is a bit of an underground sensation in Udaipur, surviving and succeeding on word-of-mouth alone. Still despised by her husband's family she shares the building with, she is now envied for her good luck and the well-deserved popularity that she's earned for herself. Her sons are nearly of age, university-bound, likely for positions of hotel management and decent salaries which according to Shashi means the misshapen fortune that darkly characterized the family in the past is gone and they have grown to be most eligible bachelors.

It's been suggested in some Indian literature that a woman directly transfers her emotions into her chutney so that the eater of samosas and pakoras consumes not only mango, mint, or coriander but regret, sorrow, love, indulgence, heartbreak, tenderness…and perhaps this may be the very reason her meals are so wonderfully palatable. There is a strong, redemptive spirit here, seasoned with salt and lemon juice, blending effortlessly into the chili taste. Like all the very best meals, it is rejuvenating.

Prayers Made, Rishkesh

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2008

It's Great To Be Indian (And Not...Pakistani)

As soon as I exit the taxi four small children carrying handfuls of India's national flag surround me. One of them, waving the saffron-green colors, yells, "Go, India, yeaaaa! Go! Go! Go!" I push off, following the large crowds past tea vendors and other makeshift refreshment stands. Everyone is walking very quickly because we are late for the performance. At the gate I am shocked when I see the grandstands. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people, murmuring excitedly, many of whom carrying those little flags sons and daughters whirl in the air, pockets of color flashing against the falling light.

Every evening, the sleepy border community of Wagha improvises quite a party. People from all over India drive some hundreds of miles just for the event, which in its pomp, spectacle, music, dance, and lowbrow entertainment is not much different from a circus though one could fairly call it a political rally with a not-to-be-taken-lightly subtext. What is happening is the daily closure of the border between Pakistan and India, a checkpoint between the electrical barbed-wire fences where visa papers are examined, passports are stamped, and bags occasionally searched, a process of dull but necessary bureaucracy. But life in India is hardly ever dull. So if life can be dressed up at all, then it may as well put on a great costume.

And certainly the border guards look great. India has a huge standing army, largely kept in place because of frequent diplomatic fallouts with Pakistan over the situation in Kashmir. Like the United States, the army in India represents an opportunity for social mobility and perhaps glory. So they have a large talent pool from which they can cast stars and the border guards are stars. Very tall, lean, and handsome, they sport handlebar mustaches of a quality I have only seen in photographs of French Foreign Legion officers. Their hats are indescribable: a dark cap with a striped, tasseled sash wrapped around, crowned by a Chinese fan in red and gold colors. To me they look like cockatiels rather than gladiators though I am not sure what the intended effect is. It becomes comic when you examine the whole uniform: the brown shirts look all right but the chinos finish halfway down the calves and white underpants with stirrups trail down to shiny, polished boots.

I am ushered into the stands. The seating capacity is huge, probably roomy enough for three thousand, yet it's such a large turnout there are hundreds sitting on the sidewalk. Literally, it's standing room only. On the other side of the international gates, the cheering potential for Pakistan looks dismal in comparison. Not only were the stands smaller, they were barely half filled, a last-place team kind of crowd. Just the day before, in India, an explosion had detonated an international train killing around 70, most of them Pakistanis, though Muslim extremist groups were suspected. I didn't know if the mood at the border ceremony would consequently be subdued or hot-blooded. Instead it turned out to be vaguely ridiculous.

I don't suppose the program varies too much regardless of current events. An emcee moderates, while guards march back and forth in exaggerated gaits. Then a male performer finds the spotlight, leaping and lunging and lip-syncing to some Bollywood hit with operatic intensity. He looks like a regular Joe, a little pot-bellied, but he has great hair and Elvis sunglasses. When his performance concludes, dozens of men rush the stage and start dancing. A few modern women form their own circle and the dancing goes on for about ten minutes with the stadium crowd clapping along. I can't believe how weird this all is.

After some time the emcee breaks up the party and we get back to marching, along with some call-and-response vis-a-vis the audience. Some of it was in English and some of it in discernable Hindi. The emcee would cry, "HINDUSTAN!" which the audience would repeat. This was followed by "ONE DAY!" which again the audience repeated. The context of the cheer was disturbing: India is ostensibly a pluralistic society. There are 130 million Muslims as well as substantial populations of Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. The northeastern regions near the Burmese border are so "wild" and "tribal" that some practice animistic rituals,  living almost completely independently of the greater economy. It's commendable that India should have as its motto, "Unity in Diversity." But hearing such a chant now declared in such bald language causes me to wonder how genuine is the sentiment Indians regard their multiculturalism.

There's more marching. And then the guards line up and sound off a long cry into a microphone while their nemesis competes for the biggest lung pull on the other side. There's some more marching, more call-and-response. And then the flags are rolled down, carefully folded, and locked away. I feel something's missing like fireworks or a cannon boom. Everyone poses for pictures with the handlebar mustaches and attempt to stride past little kids aggressively hawking the show's DVDs.

When I return to the parking lot I find the taxi driver, who leads myself along with the other passengers up to the side of an embankment. He points to the electrical fence. Every now and then a crow is fried when alighting the wire. The taxi driver is a small man and excitable. In his wallet there's a 1973 military identification card where he looks handsome and slightly defiant. Proud of his service, he tells me, "India is great." This simple, declarative axiom is a bumper sticker you see on buses and taxis all over the country. When we climb down the hill there are a few kids waiting by our taxi, stragglers with flags bunched in their tiny hands.

Of all great human passions, the one I find least endearing and probably most dangerous is nationalism. This is a sad fact in America, of course, where people confuse patriotism for nationalism (which is perhaps an inevitable consequence when the military is wealthy and education underfunded). No one, and I mean no one, should love their country without reservations. Though they go out of their way to proclaim otherwise, governments (including the United States), do not have the interests of their people at stake. To put brutal policies into effect— war, counterterrorism, as well as the revocation of "certain, unalienable rights"—devastating measures are promoted, masked in Orwellian double-speak, dressed up as the devil or the debutante, depending on the expedience of the situation.

Samuel Johnson, a British lexicographer, famously said patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel; perhaps you could say in my nation's case, so-called patriots draw the line between America and the un-American. But though I may loathe my congressmen and the former Bush administration, I feel very patriotic about my country. I'm not ashamed to be American and I have never lied about where I'm from and have defended it against those who blindly attack it baselessly. For me, patriotism is wanting what's best for the people of a country, not what's best for the state's power, which is nationalism, an unexamined allegiance to authority. This simple discrepancy in semantics is typical in the United States, where the educational system fails to inspire curiosity in the details of day-to-day governance. Politics: along with sex and religion one of the great dinner table taboos. Add a mainstream media complicit in simplifying the message with its narrative filters and sound byte propaganda, the citizen's misinformation opens them up for irrational military programs that they would otherwise protest.

And then there's the idea of a nation-state, a country that is supposed to represent our collective interests. Despite advances in technology, especially television, which have led to homogenization, I still feel the idea of a country is an abstraction, especially as a tool for defining personality or social characteristics. For example, in America, there are many cities where I'd feel out of place, philosophically as well as socially. I prefer the city to the suburbs, walking to driving. An empty street makes me nervous—it's not right, counter to millions of years of evolving social beings. Red State/ Blue State: in only the most general sense is there something so encompassing as 'American culture' (which if one is to believe the media has been at war with itself since the 1960s). I think of culture as a disposition, a perspective as well as a common knowledge, much more micro than macro, grass roots rather than 'sea to shining sea.' It can be aesthetic like an interest in the arts or it can be functional, related to sundry necessities like shortcuts to beat freeway congestion or the location of a town's most authentic tacos. I'm talking about intimacy in culture on an everyday footing.

India, as a country, is even a larger abstraction. The facts supporting this are indisputable. For one thing, what has come to define the modern state more than anything is a shared national language. India has eighteen of them. English is the language of politics and finance and the lingua franca of the rich. Most people in the north speak Hindi though it's very rare you will find a native Hindi speaker south of Bombay where most people speak Dravidian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada. Ironically, Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, India's arch-enemy, is an Indo-Aryan language: thus northern Indians would be able to converse with Pakistanis better than hundreds of millions of their own countrymen!

Beyond the difference in language are the details that make cultures so unique: religion, cuisine, music, dance, art, literature. Then there are different concepts of political thought, economics, and education. Boston and Miami may be pretty different in temperament but that is nothing compared to Madras and Kochi, which are roughly in the same region.

Because India is unnecessarily large it has always been in a sense, unmanageable, three regions, in particular: Kashmir, the Northeast territories, and Bihar in the Gangetic plain have been in open revolt or characterized by rampant lawlessness for years. Violent banditry in the historical holy land of the Buddha has devastated Bihar while secessionist movements in Kashmir and the Northeast have been exorbitant for the government to suppress. The conflict in Kashmir in particular has precipitated four wars costing tens of thousands of lives, years of civil unrest and has led India to the expensive and dangerous program of nuclear proliferation. When India detonated its first nuclear weapons in the Thar Desert in 1998, it was met with great jubilee. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the madness of irrational nationalism than the fact that the greatest exultations were among the poor, who have had basic services like education, health care, electricity, and basic plumbing denied them because of the disproportionate investment in war instead of infrastructure. Substituting basic human decency for a national identity has preserved a status quo of Dickensian disparity.

It doesn't make sense. Why should India fight four wars in addition to an ongoing civil insurrection to keep Kashmir? After all, more than seventy percent of the population there is Muslim. Just as important, the common language is Kashmiri, which though similar to Hindi (as a branch of Indo-Aryan), is nevertheless distinct. A region of tall mountain passes and rugged peaks, Kashmir for centuries has celebrated a unique and vibrant culture in arts, literature, and especially music. Yet I met only one Indian out of dozens who believed that Kashmir might be better off without India, seceding and becoming an autonomous state. Everyone else believed that it was to be subdued and preserved at any cost, even if were to bring the conflict with Pakistan to an irrevocable brinksmanship.

I tend to empathize with Indian (or should I say Keralan) author Arundhati Roy, who interpreted the explosions and resultant fervor as a "crisis of imagination." But that's where nationalism leads us, up in the smoke of a mushroom cloud.

The first thing Indians will want to know when I meet them is where I'm from. And I always want to know where they're from too. I'm always dumbfounded when they tell me, 'India.' That seems rather obvious. But of the hundreds of conversations, very rarely did anyone tell me first and foremost, they were from Delhi, Bombay, or regions like Gujarat or Tamil Nadu. India would always come first as a point of identification.

But what's interesting is how much people love India. Kids and people who don't speak English will shout out at me, "India #1," prompted simply by my foreignness. Sitting with businessmen or guesthouse owners I learned how optimistic Indians are for their economic future. I heard many businessmen speak of India's glorious future quoting fancy forecasted numbers for GDP and GNP growth. One businessman told me that within thirty years India would be wealthier than America. I thought of the rickety, overcrowded bus I had taken that day, bouncing against potholes, passing rural settlements made of mud and straw. He had decided to focus on numbers rather than what was happening right in front of him.

It's true India has enjoyed tremendous economic growth in the last two decades. This bull market began when the national government decided to privatize the economy. What did deregulation mean for India? Outside conglomerates trickling into the country buying up India's major industries. Control of the nation's resources moved from the state to private enterprise. Monopolization of industries as well as bribery have enabled special interests to run India as a corporate oligarchy. The rich getting... you know where this is going. Twenty-five percent of the population lives below the poverty threshold. Roughly estimated we're talking about 300 million people living on about one U.S. dollar a day. That is nothing to be proud of. It should bring great shame to the patriots. But the media, like its counterpart in America, crops the picture to fit the story. "India Shining," as the government's current promo-tag is called, beams its spotlight selectively.

As I'm in my thirties I find it amusing along with other Americans when we discuss how powerful the Pledge of Allegiance shadows our unconscious. I adore pop music but I cannot seem to remember the lyrics to any of my favorite songs. Yet, I can place my right hand over my heart and recite the Pledge verbatim. I can do it in my sleep. It scares me sometimes. And it should scare you.

I bring this up only because I found a clue to Indian nationalism while on a bicycle ride on country roads outside the fallen kingdom of Vijayanagar or its present offshoot, Hampi. This was in the morning and I stumbled upon a school assembly. I had been attracted by the drumming, which sounded martial in its cadence. I found a few hundred kids standing in locked formations while a principal yelled and the students called back, all the while the drumming never ceased. I imagined this went on every day of these school children's career until they entered the university.

What I think the kids were saying was something like, "I pledge allegiance…"

How do I stay optimistic then? For India's sake? I must admit there was a bit of flair in that border ceremony. The mustaches, the dancing, the music, and the crowds contained all the elements of the absurd. Rather than interpreting the show as a playful method of indoctrination, I want to believe that this was, if not an outlet, then another opportunity to indulge in a love of spectacle. I didn't think anyone there would feel comfortable annihilating Pakistan. Anyway that would not be good sportsmanship. As long as we could scream louder than the other side, maybe that would be enough.


Edited from an earlier draft dated 2007