Thursday, March 12, 2009

Wednesday, March 11 Entry from Tel Aviv

March 10 Good bye to India
The remaining days in Mumbai were essentially the same as those that preceded them. Relaxed. A few more trips into town, more shopping for nice, comfortable, baggy and cheap clothing. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel about that stuff once I’m out of India!

Nancy left for Casablanca on Saturday, the 28th and Dennis and I mostly hung around the Breach Candy Club and tried to organize ourselves for whatever was coming next. We were invited to go sailing with a friend of theirs. He is a member of the Bombai Yacht Club but not the owner of a boat. It seems that the club has a limited number of very old and very decrepit but nevertheless sail worthy boats for day or afternoon sailing excursions. We stood in the staggering heat on the dock near the Gate of India and in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel and waited for a rowboat with a motor to come for us and deliver us. Once on board with the sails up, it was comfortable and quite lovely. The pollution is staggering and once you are out a bit, you can hardly see the famous sight of the hotel and the Gateway. I was struck by the very small number of pleasure boats moored in the harbor given the population and relative wealth of the city. Astounding, too, was the number of huge cargo ships simply sitting idle off shore. Such is probably the effect of the worldwide depression.

I had turned down an invitation to go out into the countryside and see some water projects being run by a friend of mine from the Kennedy School, Crispino. It would have allowed me to see
some of the famous and monumental Buddhist cave carvings but involved lots of flights, expense, and changing beds every night or two. I’ve about run out of energy for that so I elected on Monday, the 2nd to take the ferry out of Mumbai harbor to Elephanta Island where a lesser but still famous group of these carvings exist. The carvings are in the form of an enormous atrium with two story high pillars carved out of sheer rock and statues and scenes carved all around telling the story of the life of the god, Shiva. While I got myself down to the harbor and on to the boat alone and without a guide, I was invited by a group of four Americans to share their guide which was nice. They had had a guide every moment of the three weeks they had been in India, were staying at the Taj, and thought I was very brave to have figured out how to navigate the city on my own. Of course, I had my driver to pick me up afterwards.
Dennis was meeting Nancy a week later in Morrocco for a week. I considered joining them but by now I’ve spent a lot of time going to and from airports and a twenty hour flight which would overshoot where I need to be next - in Israel - seemed silly. So, I flew to Goa on the south west coast of India on Friday the 6th and Marielle and Steve joined me from Delhi on Saturday. Goa was a Portuguese colonial entity and it didn’t become part of India until 1961, quite a bit later than the Brits let go of the rest of India. It was the scene of Bacchanalian drug and rave parties in the sixties and still has the aura of backpackers and vagabonds. You see an occasional ancient hippie on a motorbike, but most of them are back in the States wondering what happened to them in the current downturn. It’s also famous for Ayurvedic treatments and yoga etc. but, in fact, most of it is pretty rundown. I had my eye on one of the quieter retreats to the south of the main town of Panaji but Trip Advisor comments about rats sent me scurrying to the Marriot resort which Marielle had chosen. A very good choice.

My room faced the sea and the ambience was lovely. Tuesday and Wednesday were Indian holidays so the place was full of people taking the whole week off - or at least making it a long weekend. We mostly laid around the pool and read or played cards. We hired a car for four hours on Sunday night to take us to one of those famous sixties beaches and then to dinner at a great beach restaurant right. My whole red snapper done in a tandoori oven was one of the tastiest and most beautiful meals I’ve had. On Monday, the 9th, we again got a car and driver from the Marriot and explored Old Goa, once a magnificent Portuguese colonial city which has now completely disintegrated except for the slue of old Catholic churches and a few temples.

All in all, Goa was a big change from the rest of India. More like being in the Caribbean (with its poverty thrown in as well, of course) or interior Florida. Tropical, humid, palm trees, water buffalo walking in rice paddies rather than down the streets, one or two lane roads, no auto rickshaws. Very little in between five star hotel resorts and beach huts and grunge.

Thoughts on India after six weeks
While I’ve been sitting around pools and lying on beaches and waiting in airports, I’ve also done a lot of reading. Before the trip, I worked my way through William Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali and a book called Holy Cow whose author I forget. Similar travel logs although the former is a
very well known travel writer from Britain who lived for a time in India. The former head of Proctor and Gamble in India, Gurcharan Das has recently published India Unbound, one of many books by economists and political scientists. And, naturally, I had read Eat, Pray, Love before I left. Once here, though, I switched to more fiction and find that those books are interwoven with the places I’ve been, the things I’ve seen. One cannot pretend to be an expert on India when he/she have spent most of the time with Americans and their servants.

Those of you who know me well know that I think in broad strokes, not careful detail. My mind is always struggling to tie all the threads together, understand how the horrendous poverty of India squares with its reputed spirituality; how the world’s largest democracy is really a huge, corrupt, sluggish bureaucracy which is supposedly trying to wrestle with immense infrasctucture and social problems. Or are they problems? The New Yorker this past week has an article on the slums of Mumbai, naturally, given Slumdog’s successes. It speaks of the enormity of the slums right in the shadow of the airport which I just flew over and it is absolutely true. There are even "slum tours." And I’ve heard people say, hey, what’s the problem? They may be poor but everyone has a place in the system. Municipal recycling may not occur but all those women who sleep on the street with their children and comb through the garbage picking out the plastic and glass are just doing the same thing in a more or less efficient fashion. Grown up around every treelined neighborhood are dozens of little grocery and flower and fruit and battery and bike tire sellers. True, they don’t have licenses, don’t have deeds of property, but they are eking out a living - and providing services to theresidences of the neighborhoods.

One of the books I read here in Mumbai was called The Space Between Them. It is about the lifetime relationship between an upper caste/class woman and her maid, the parallels in their lives on many levels including having been abused by their husbands, and the ultimate betrayal. White Tiger is being sold on every street corner and it deals with a similar subject, the upper class business man and his driver. Did you ever wonder what all those drivers do all day long while they are waiting to be called to drive their masters for maybe two hours a day? Ah, the incredible knots of both loyalty and what we Americans can only imagine to be resentment.

Finally, though, I read Paul Thoreaux’s Elephanta Suite. I mention that I visited Elephanta Island and the suite in the book is the luxurious corner suite at the Taj Hotel which looks out toward the island of the same name in Mumbai’s harbor. Three medium short stories revolve around visitors to India and their involvement with the culture. I find that the ultimate conclusion that must be drawn is that "nothing is as it seems." Just as one thinks that they might have a handle on how Mumbai functions as a city, a new experience will negate that understanding. Just as one feels an intimacy based on relationship, a paradox will emerge.

I’ve taken that conclusion to mean that I have not failed in not being able to figure India out. In fact, it would be nothing but hubris to claim to have done so. I don’t feel guilty that I didn’t "feel" the deep spirituality of India. Yes, I have read about and visited the temples and churches of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, and Christians. I have observed the rituals in each. But I certainly can’t pretend that I will ever know the deep - or not so deep and only rote ritual - spiritual connection of any of them.

More importantly, as I enter what Jane Fonda calls the third act of my life and as I start the last third of this three month journey, I realize that the same can be said of all of life: Nothing is as it seems. As Edith Snow, Emma Willard School English teacher taught us, life is transitory. Chimera. Paradox. We are capable of sobbing at a movie or play about the holocaust and laughing at Mama Mia only a few hours late as happened to me in London last fallr. Somehow we find it possible to live with our conscience when we stay in a five star hotel in India. Paradox. Chimera.

So now I sit in the international terminal in Mumbai waiting for an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Ready for more cultural change and paradox.
Ain’t life grand?

Wednesday, March 11. Twelve hours in Tel Aviv
Even if things are not as they seem and all of life is transitory, I am experiencing here in Israel one of those spiritual or emotional confluences which has no good explanation - other than it is my experience. I’ll elaborate on many of the possible explanations but suffice it to say that I feel elated here. I’ve just walked the two blocks from the Mediterranean Sea shore where I spent several hours walking, observing, reading, sitting in the sun, having a glass of wine. The decision to come to Tel Aviv ahead of the Elderhostel trip was riskier than I’ve taken before. I’m alone here, chose a hotel on a whim, hoped that I could connect with some old friends from the Kennedy School but NOTHING had been settled when I landed including the hotel. Since then, I have had four invitations for events and dinners, have easily found the hotel which did, in fact have the reservation even though they had not bothered to confirm, etc. etc.

The most important explanation is probably my life long love affair with Israel and Jewish culture. But doesn’t that sound a bit too rational? One hears about fault lines and meridiens where spiritual forces might come togehter (Stonehenge, for instance Or Daraslama or Tibet. Or Machu Pichu). People who are at those places feel moved in unexpected and profound ways. I did not experience that sensation at Machu Pichu but this is my third time in Israel and I have felt it each time. An exhilaration, an elation that defies logical explanation.

This is a double thrill because I feared that my excitement for each leg of this trip was beginning to wane, that the Elderhostel trip, tagged the Journey of a Lifetime, was going to be an anti-climax; that I’d already seen so many temples and mosques (if not synagogues) that another wasn’t going to do much for me. However, now I’m really excited about each day and the trip ahead, seeing my Israeli friends and making new friends.

The day here is not unlike a day in Erie in the early spring. Perhaps I have more of an emotional and spiritual connection to the land there than I realized. Especially after India (the good, the bad, and the ugly), to spend a day in clear air, 75 degree sunny weather, along the sea shore facing west, not a beggar or piece of garbage in sight is been fabulous. I’ve walked the streets, taken the city tour.

Like the sense I had the first week in Cambridge, MA, I feel a deep affinity for Tel Aviv, Israel. I may not have the credentials or life history but I feel as one does when one has come home.

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