Purple Pyro

Earlier this week I went to a Professor Yogananda’s laboratory for a workshop in making stabilised mudbricks.  We learned about getting the right proportions of sand, mud and cement and made some test bricks and saw how they are loaded to failure to determine their strength.  I took lots of video, but have no editing software so if you have lots of patience, here they are:

Yesterday the elephant parade went by the office. Chitra told us to go take pictures, so I took my camera and followed the procession. There was an elephant at the front with a headdress and blanket, followed by a crowd of men in white with orange hats. Some of them were playing drums and little cymbals. Behind them was a crowd of women in bright, shiny sarees holding coconuts in silver vases on their heads.

We followed the parade around the block and past Chitra’s place and then we came to a tent set up over the road. The elephant went through it and stopped on the other side and the women started dancing. They held hands and spun in circles, and encouraged me to join. I tried it once; it was fun.

Then I gave the elephant 10 rupees which it took in his trunk and it touched my head to bless me.

I have to coolest boss ever!

Here are three of the many reasons why:

1. I said that I missed baking, and she said “Go buy an oven.”  And that was that.  I went with her and Sandya, the Office Manager, during work hours, to buy an oven for her house that I’m welcome to use whenever.
2. She invited me over for dinner last night and it was really good.  She made roti from scratch (which, I guess everyone does here, but these were really good) and the veggies were really good, too.
   
3. We were walking back from the site yesterday on an isolated road when she pulled over a tractor and asked him to give us a ride.  That was so much more exciting than taking an auto.
   

Pancakes are not a common breakfast here.  There is no wonderful breakfast restaurant like Cora’s. So, when I was thinking about pancakes the day before yesterday, I thought it was pie in the sky to think that I could get them without making them myself.  I told my roommate about them while we waited to meet coworkers for a site visit and I imagined all the things I’d need to make them at the office, and wondered whether or not our tawa would suffice as a frying pan.  I put a spatula on my mental shopping list.

After our site visit (see the next post for details) Chitra knocked on the door of the house of a previous client of hers, the owner of the complex.  They talked for a couple minutes in Hindi (or Kannada, I don’t know) and I heard the word pancakes.    I thought I was hearing things – that maybe a Hindi word just sounded like pancakes.  Then Chitra said “but I’m sure Carolyn would love some.”  I don’t know how she knew, but it made my day.  We all went in for pancakes while I marveled at the nature of the universe that manifested pancakes for me.

Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: 8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

Tomorrow I’m going to think about crepes all morning.

Here’s the blog article about the cottage in the ISKCON ecovillage that I went to last week.

BIOME  Govardhan Cottage Article

I love how instead of “Detour  –>”, construction signs here say “Diversion  –>.”   There’s something fun and exciting around every corner!

Last night I went on a night trek to Anthargange.  It’s a cool mountain range with caves formed entirely of huge boulders piled up.  Some parts were difficult to navigate and some caverns were quite large.

Since I’m so incredibly lazy right now, here’s someone else’s blog about it. And someone else’s.

I didi the night trek, so it was nice and cool, and much more exciting in the dark.  We got to a viewpoint at around 4am, sat around and chatted until the sun rose over the town below.

The tour was good, but there were way too many people for the guides to manage.  They had to help the non-athletic types manouvre around the rocks so there was a lot of waiting around for everyone else.  I was the adventurous one who kept wandering off ahead.  I think I must have travelled three times more distance than most of them; I just found every dead-end until  I figured out which way was the right way and kept going.

Yesterday my co-worker made an awesome analogy.  I was watching him drafting and I pointed out a time-saving command that he could have used.  He said that AutoCAD is like Nintendo.  Back in the day, everyone found out about all the secret worlds and invisible boxes and stuff by word of mouth.  There was no internet.  AutoCAD is still like that.  There are so many commands that you can’t really remember them all, so you just find the ones you need when someone else tells you.  It really is like a game with ‘hidden worlds’.

In Wada I met a girl from New York who’s parents are Hare Krishna, and she was born a Hare Krishna.  For some reason I never considered that people were ever born as Hare Krishna.  I just thought that everyone became one when they saw some guys playing drums and chanting on the street and thought “Hey, that looks like fun!”

Anyway, I ran into her again in Mumbai because she was staying in the room next to mine.  I’m glad we bumped into each other because I had no idea what I was going to do while I was there.  She called a friend for suggestions and we went to Elephanta Island, an island with a very old cave temple for Shiva.  It was full of statues of Shiva and we hired a guide to explain them all to us, although my new friend seemed to know it all already.

Something I learned:  Don’t buy a souvineer guidebook until you’ve had at least three opportunities to get it because it will only get cheaper.

The next morning, we got up ridiculously early to go to a special _____ at a Shiva temple nearby.  The blank space is because I really can’t think of a word to describe the proceedings.  At 4am, we participated in an ‘event’  where Shiva worshippers gathered around a Shiva lingam and poured and sprinkled all sorts of offerings on it.  Two guys knealt close to it and chanted while they continuously smeard the offerings all over it.  What a mess.  The offerings included milk, honey, sugar, mango puree, ashes, and red pigment.  The lingam was periodically rinsed with water, and then the pouring and sprinkling and smearing continued.  The last offering was sandalwood paste smeared all over it, and then flowers and leaves were piled on top.

Here is someone else’s video of the temple.  The black stone at 0:26 is the Shiva Lingam that got smeared with stuff and piled with flowers.  There’s a little mote around it to drain all the mess.

It was really an experience to be participating in an ancient ritual.  It felt very cult-like and yet, aside from the getting up at 4am to smear stuff on a phallic statue, the participants seemed very normal and sane.

The temple itself was also something to see.  It’s not visible from the street except for an arched entrance.  There’s a procession of several staircases to get to the actual temple.  One of the rooms (technically it was a landing in the stairway)  was absolutely magical.  It was dim and lit with big red lights and the walls were covered with a mish-mash of different sized photo frames, all looking rather grungy, there was religious paraphernalia and a man was meditating on a platform while kittens played on an old, patterned rug.

Farther up the stairs was the temple.  It was all white, carved stone and marble and there were inscriptions in Sanskrit all over the floor.

On Thursday morning I decided to go to Mumbai on Friday morning. My boss and a co-worker were going for a site visit to a Hare Krisna ecovillage a couple hours out of Mumbai, and I thought it would be a good experience to see the place, and a nice change from the city. I was at the ecovillage for Friday afternoon and Saturday. Just when I think I’m getting used to India, I see a whole other world in it. The village has about a hundred residents, and they raise cows and grow rice and vegetables and manage a program that feeds starving children to help them be able to go to school. First, we drove there in a car full of devotees who were buzzing like bees as they mumbled their daily chants. First we went to the almost-completed cottage that was to be a demonstration of the future project. There was a festival arranged on Saturday to welcome the guru to the village, show off the cottage, and to get funding for future projects. There were workers all over the cottage, inside and outside, sitting on the floor or standing on rickety wooden scaffolding. It was a huge mess. I followed Chitra around for a while as she discussed last-minute details with the contractors. Then I took a nap under the fan. It was 43 degrees.

For dinner we grabbed segregated stainless steel plates from a big pile and guys in dhotis scooped rice and veggies onto our plates frm huge stainless steel buckets.  Then we sat in a line on a mat on the floor and ate with our hands.

More to come later.  Time to go have more fun.