My friend Jefi was kind enough to answer the question posed in the last entry concerning the origin and/or meaning of my emotional response to being in Israel. So succinct, so perfect that I will directly quote it here. "I think that anyone with a Judeo/Christian background or even a profound love of history is moved on visiting Israel. I have heard this so many times from so many people. It's where so much actually took place. Whether one is of the Christian persuasion, Jewish or Muslim...where your feet tread so did all...Roman soldiers, Jesus, John the Baptist, Persians, Egyptians, the first cultivating...it makes me tingle just thinking about it. It's where everything started...the beginnings. It's a place of love and hate, peace and war, desolation and lushness, growth and destruction. if quantum physics is right, the whole country is absolutely vibrating with the energy of the past! It is where your history lies and for that reason I think, it resonates within you much more deeply than the far east."
Let me say, in addition, that I have completely fallen in love with Tel Aviv. A lively but not huge, secular, ambitious but romantic city filled with people trying to fulfill a dream of Israel without an extremist edge. I would return here in a moment and suspect that I probably will.
My four days in Tel Aviv were truly wonderful. Five of ten of the Israeli contingent in my Kennedy School Mid-Career MPA program 2001-2002 made time to see me. I was wined, dined and entertained by each of these people of whom I had become so fond seven years ago. It is a testimony to the intensity and powerful emotional impact of that program that friendships this strong can be picked up where they left off that long ago.
Several of these people are very visible figures in the Israeli public and/or occupy extremely controversial and powerful positions so I will not name them. Each lives in Tel Aviv, however, and three of the five are right around forty and each is busy having babies while occupying important professional positions. I met one woman with her three month old daughter in a lovely urban neighborhood for dinner. The number of strollers passing by, children cavorting with their parents on the sidewalks, and obviously strong Israeli family entity was palpable. I loved it! The Israeli government is highly supportive of all things family. My friend was the beneficiary of help with artificial insemination along with maternity leave and excellent health care for herself and her baby who is named Rainbow in Hebrew.
I was so aware of the intensity with which the Israelis live. Three are having babies with great joy. The other two have nearly grown children, more than half of whom are in or have been in the Israeli Defense Force. Hovering in the background of all this family activity - at least in my mind as I observed it - is an awareness of the threat of danger and isolation that can never be very far from consciousness. My instantly recognizable newscaster friend took me to the nightclub his pregnant-with-twins wife owns and as I watched and participated in the every Wednesday night tradition of a packed house of people singing popular Israeli songs, dancing on the tables, laughing, smoking, drinking, and having a ball, I nevertheless couldn’t put out of my mind that these were the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people whose stories I would see chronicled in the Yad Vashem holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in Tel Aviv at the City Hotel. Two blocks from the Mediterranean, it was great. Each morning I walked miles on the beach. One of my friends took me to brunch with his wife and two friends- also pregnant - along the sea to the north of Tel Aviv. Secular or religious, most families observe Shabbat and while he does not come from an observant family, he committed himself to uphold the traditions which she holds dear. All the preparations for Friday’s family dinner are completed before sundown. Each and every Friday night, families dine, celebrate, and commune together in one of their homes. Schools and work places let out at about noon. At my friends suggestion, I walked down along the bars and restaurants on the sea in downtown Tel Aviv in the late afternoon. There were throngs of people and families enjoying the sunshine, having a late lunch and a glass of wine or cappuccino. At five the crowds began to thin and by six, the scene was deserted. Literally, the city shuts down - although not as completely as in Jerusalem where many more ultra orthodox Jews live. There, the streets are literally chained off and anyone mistakenly attempting to operate a car or any other mechanical device might well be jeered if not stoned. I was able to get a coffee at about six near the hotel but interestingly, the automatic doors of the hotel were blocked and one gained entrance through a manual door. The elevators did operate; breakfast was served and some of the food was warm but all had been prepared the day beforeand kept warm. Apparently the food may be served warm on the Sabbath but the warmers may not be turned on that day..... Some elevators operate on automatic pilot, stopping automatically at each floor all day long so that no one has to push the actual button....
While some of this ritual activity verges on the absurd in terms of legalistic silliness, the dedication of twenty four hours to family meals, quiet, reflection, shutting out of the world of shopping and consumption and just plain busyness seems extremely appealing to me. I realized that only once a year in America do we have anything like this suspension of the real world and that is at Christmas. Wouldn’t it be lovely to bring that kind of peace and togetherness into our lives more often?
On Saturday morning, I hitched a ride with the military man, his wife and one son to Jerusalem where they go every other week to have lunch with their other son who is in the military there. The road from the sea shore of Tel Aviv through the foothills and mountains to Jerusalem about forty minutes away is magnificent - green, pine treed, rolling. Acres of olive trees, pines actually brought from America, and rocks line the way. It was a gorgeous ride, quiet and free of traffic because probably more than half of the population doesn’t drive on the Sabbath.
By the time I reached Jerusalem, grabbed a cab to my friend Beth’s house and started a load of wash, it was cold and gloomy. Beth is a management officer at the US Consulate in Jerusalem. While the US Embassy is in Tel Aviv and interacts with the government of Israel (which is located in Jerusalem but the Palestinians object to that since the 1967 takeover and the US insists on the pretense that the government of Israel lives in Tel Aviv), the US Consulate General in Jerusalem is the interlocutor with the Palestinians. It happens that my previous direct boss, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Athens, is and has been for four years the consul general in Jerusalem, not a job to be envied.
My childhood friend Diana’s friend Jane who now lives in London but was previously stationed with the British Council in Mexico City had connected me with her friend Candace whose husband is with a major US newspaper in Jerusalem now. I met her for lunch, a delightful meeting of a couple of minds trying to wrestle with the contradictions of Israel. From both Candace and Beth I immediately picked up the notion that one cannot ever get away from "the situation." It is never far from the surface in any conversation. Many insist that the state of Israel, haven to the oppressed Jews of the world has become the oppressor. Later in the trip one sees the wall running along the west side of the West Bank of the Jordan River. Everyone knows the religious identification of every neighborhood in Jerusalem and it is as divided a city as any can be without a concrete wall running down the middle. "The situation" colors everything and the power of the Orthodox sects which live completely on the dole of the state because they are dedicated to "study" only and who have at least ten children each is ubiquitous. The city is absolutely shut down from sundown on Friday till Saturday. Candace and I had lunch in one of the three restaurants open on a Saturday afternoon. As I said earlier, a car wandering into the Orthodox area truly risks being stoned. Everyone who is not on one side or the other simply tries to stay disengaged from anyone who IS on one side. Which makes for a difficult living situation. Foreign service officers and, I’m sure, journalists, want to engage with the people of the country in which they are guests and it isn’t much fun trying to NOT talk about the realities.
Beth and I "hung out" on Saturday evening and drove to the ancient mountaintop city of Masada built by Harod the Great overlooking the Dead Sea. On this mountain top, the entire Jewish population committed suicide rather than succumb to the seige of the Roman legions below. Don’t ask me the exact chronology but presumably they had taken over this Roman city during the rebellion of 70 AD and the Romans were trying to get the city back.... More of the same. God is always on everyone’s side.....
Soooo.... On Saturday night at 10:00 pm I checked into the Prima Palace Hotel. It seems that hotels also observe the Sabbath so guests cannot check out, rooms are not cleaned, and nothing can happen until the sun goes down. Elderhostel had arranged for me to be able to check in a night before the rest of the group arrived and at their significantly lower rate. The hotel is located in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood in the Israeli (western) side of Jerusalem. I’d call it a three star probably.
On Sunday at 6:00 we had our first get-together for introductions and biographies. The biggest surprise was the number of people traveling alone. Not just women in pairs as one might expect but husbands and wives whose spouse was not interested in travel at all or at least with this particular trip. In order to avoid paying the single supplement, I had signed up for a roommate but, lucky for me, each of the other singles HAD paid it so I got off free. Lucky thing, too, because the room was mighty small.
So, yeah, they’re old - but then so am I. Nice people, smart people, educated and successful people, many former or current educators, well traveled people. Besides the cruise which is slightly different (there are 600 people and you aren’t schlepping around as a group at all times) this was my first tour group. I think the oldest is 84 and the youngest is actually younger than I am.
I won’t give a long description of the places we have been, the things we have seen except for a list in order to refresh my own memory when I am sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch twenty five years from now. We visited places I had been before like the Dome of the Rock, the Western or Wailing Wall, the Mount of Olives, and the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. The latter was crowded and we were rushed through with our guide without the chance to also see the Children’s Memorial, one of the most moving places I have ever been. What I was not prepared for was the beauty and poignancy of the whole Sea of Galilee area. I have no religious affiliation nor allegiance. Jesus is a historical figure who brought a message of love and forgiveness into the world which promptly ignored it and began killing in the name of the church it had spawned. But to walk on the ground and imagine the scene where Jesus walked, preached, purportedly performed miracles, went to weddings, collected and charged a group of disciples was far more moving than I would have anticipated. The lake sits low in the Jordan River valley, a verdant and peaceful agricultural area wreaking with history. We stayed in a Kibbutz cum hotel for two nights and the whole experience was wonderful.
On the way to the Galilee we also visited the ruins of Caesaria, a complete Roman town built right on the Mediterranean, half way between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Herod the Great, an obsequious Roman want-to-be but, in fact, the King of Israel or whatever it was called at the time, built this brand new city where no city had been before - a real first - on a beautiful harbor; he chose the spot because it had no association with anything Jewish or religious. I think he died before he ever got to spend a night there but it is a fabulous ruin.
We continued on up the coast, had lunch in and toured Akko, one of the oldest settlements in the world and an ancient harbor on the major trade routes from the east. We drove through Haifa which turns out to be a really appealing ancient city also on the sea and built on hills that roll down to it. I loved what I saw of it.
In sum, I love Israel and for different reasons than I had left with four years ago. There is enough to see, experience and feel here that one could easily spend two weeks. I said when I left on this trip that I would probably never pass this way(s) again but I would jump at the chance to return to Israel. While it was Jerusalem which caught my imagination last time, it was Tel Aviv, the thriving Mediterranean city, and the northern area around the Galilee and Golan Heights that drew me this time.
Jefi is right. This land is the home of our myths, the religious education of our childhoods even if that education didn’t "take," our ethical and moral compasses, our history and our literature. Not only the history of the Jews and the Christians but heavily the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines upon which Western civilization is based all converge here.
They also clash with the rest of the history of the area. The spread of Islam and its 1500 year old ownership of the land. The travesty of colonial empires and their later demise. The carving up of the whole world east and south of western Europe by those same colonial powers in such a way that constant warfare and ethnic clashes were bound to result. The Holocaust. The Zionist movement and the sense that the world truly owed the Jewish people a refuge and a land of their own, the first land they had ever "owned." The pushing out of the people who were native to that land at the time. The refusal of the rest of the Arab world to do anything for those people except use them a pawn in their own games of propaganda.
And on and on. Where does it stop? Most of the people I have talked to, Israelis themselves and their observers, those who have spent years studying and working on the issues, and the people invited to speak to us by Elderhostel expect little. The problem is truly intractable and the more deaths that occur, the more intractable it becomes.
I was reminded at dinner tonight, however, that twenty years ago apartheid in South Africa was equally intractable. It was assumed that the impoverished underclass majority population (which the Israeli Arab population will also be before long) could never be allowed to take over their own government and live in peace with those who had settled in their land several generations earlier and claimed it for their own. But it happened. Somehow people got over it. Not simple. Not all the problems solved. But a solution which everyone seems to be able to live with and no bloodbath.
Everyone assumes that if there is ever a solution it will be a two state one. How that gets worked out given physical realities here is more than I can imagine. George Mitchell negotiated a peace in Ireland which has not only held but this very week when two policemen were killed there both communities rallied in solidarity against the violence. Tony Blair, too, has spent the last year as the EU (or is it the UN?) Special envoy to the Middle East. If I were one to pray, I would be praying that now might be the time, the window, the opportunity for peace in this holy land.
Friday, March 20, 2009
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.
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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