Christmas in Varanasi

On Christmas morning in Varanasi, Robert and I got up early and took a dawn boat ride on the Ganges, something that all tourists here are supposed to do. This is the second time I have done it and it is very much worth doing. We arrived here two days ago but only had a hotel for one night so we spent Christmas Eve morning finding a new hotel. These days in Varansais every hotel has wi-fi, usually free, so it was easy to find a new place. Booking.com, etc., has made traveling much easier. In Delhi, before Robert arrived, I met a German woman who recommended a place in Varanasi. When we needed a place I looked up her recommendation which I read as the Gita Guest House. I could’t find such a place. Then on our first evening here, we walked along the river and I saw the Sita Guest House and when I looked at my notebook I realized that what I took as a G was a fancy German S. Booking.com had a deal and here we are. The room is small but it has a balcony overlooking the Ganges and we are happy. Christmas Eve, there was a Christmas concert at our previous hotel so we walked over and had supper there and listened to a sitar recital. It was followed by kathak dance. Both were good although the amplification left a little to be desired. And then Christmas morning, we were out on the river. I am happy to be back in Varanasi. We are giving ourselves 8 nights here. It is good to stay put for a while and Varanasi is a great place to do it. The ghats along the river are always alive with people and at this time of year the sky is filled with kites. I can’t figure out how to post pictures on my blog. They have changed the procedure since I last blogged. I am posting pictures on Facebook. I have five from Lucknow up and today I posted some pictures from Ayodhya where we last were. Ayodhya is celebrated as the birth place of Rama. We tried to go to the new temple that honors the site but the times posted in the books were wrong and we arrived too late. We did go to a very busy Hanuman temple and joined the people climbing the stairs up to it and circumambulating the inner sanctum. It was very alive and throbbing with energy. In the evening, we tried to find a performance of the Ram Lila, the story of Rama and Sita. It turns out the name in the guidebook is different from the name the locals call the building so it took us awhile to find the place. When we did, the building was dark and the gate was padlocked. We found out that someone had died that day and performances were canceled for a week. We had a tough time in Ayodhya. I took some pictures on the shared taxi ride back to Faizabad where our hotel was. The ride was crowded and bumpy but I got a few good pictures. Those are the pictures on Facebook. We have had a good time but being sick, and having difficulty in getting from one place to another and finding a hotel have seemed more difficult than before and we are happy to have time to rest in Varanasi. I hope everyone is well and enjoying the holidays. Everyone, including our boatman, have been wishing us a Merry or a Happy Christmas or other words to that effect. One man added “Good Friday” to the list just to make sure he got things covered. I hope your holidays continue to be happy.

Chandigarh and Lucknow

I think of myself as a conservative, cautious, shy man but yesterday morning at 7:30 AM I was on the back of a motorcycle racing through Lucknow looking for an auto taxi. We found one and I was on my way to the Tila Wali Masjid, a mosque built by Aurangzeb that predates the founding of Lucknow which is, by India standards, a very recent place being founded in the mid-18th century. Persians were invading India and a fish jumped in the Gomati River and this was taken as a good sign and they built a city that became a cultural capital in India noted for the purity of its language and the skill of its poets, musicians and dancers. I have taken two walking tours of Lucknow. After the uprising of 1857, the British took control of Lucknow and the cultural life of the city pretty much disappeared although even today the citizens of Lucknow think their Hindi-Urdu is more refined and polite than elsewhere in India. On the first day in Lucknow, Robert and I went to the Residency where the British residents were beseiged for five months before being rescued. It is a large area with many multistoried brick buildings, all now in ruins and showing signs of fire. It is a moving site. The episode had tragic consequences for both the British and the Indians. Yesterday, at the mosque, I was shown the tree from which the British hung the rebels after the Uprising. The walk this morning was in Hindi and my Hindi wasn’t up to it, but I enjoyed walking through a series of crumbling palaces, libraries and other buildings of which I never understood the nature. Oh, one, I found out belatedly, was a tomb for someone’s mother that was finished by her grandson. On the first Heritage Walk, we visited the building where Ghandi and his two goats stayed. He traveled with goats apparently so he could have fresh milk. Before Lucknow, we were in Chandigarh. Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab-Haryana and is a planned city built in the 50’s and designed by Corbusier. We went for a auto trip around Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Except for the High Court we couldn’t get too close to the buildings because of security. If we had had more time, we could have obtained a pass, but we didn’t. I saw enough. The buildings are enormous in scale. Robert says they are designed to make people feel small and powerless. Now in their decaying state, I think they seem fragile themselves. Sic transit gloria mundi. But they are still very active. There were crowds around the High Court with a lot of attorneys dressed in black with white neck bands of various sorts. Quite British. In the morning we had been to a folk art rock garden built by one man over a period of 40 years. It is big in area and enormous in scale. It is truly amazing that one man could do all this. The builder took refuse from the building of Chandigarh and turned it into his fantasy. The first part is small and cramped and then it opens into a small ampitheater and a waterfall, one of two. The first part, as I remember it, is less colorful than the later sections, more monochromatic. The first part is largely white and gray with a lot of free form shapes. Later he became more representative. We had an excellent dinner last night, three kinds of chicken, kabob, a mirchi korma and one whose name I can’t remember but it was a large chickend ball in a sweet, mild gravy. The whole dinner was delicious. For lunch I had a kathi roll and that was also delicious. The Aroma food court is attached to a quite fancy hotel and has a range of food from fast food outlets to quite good places. The chicken place had it’s name in Urdu. The kathi place was Australia. After eating we went upstairs to MacDonald’s for desert and Internet. The hotel in Chandigarh did not have wi-fi. Tomorrow morning we head out for Ayodyah. It was reading about Ayodyah that first got Robert interested in India so it will be a pilgrimage of sorts. Then we think we are heading out for the place where the Buddha died. By then it will probably be Christmas.

Long Day, Short Blog

It has been two weeks since I have blogged and a lot has happened. I have had a cold, diarrhea, and tension headaches caused by bad posture when studying and using my computer. Now I am typing on a suitcase set on a chair in the hope that this will be better for my neck. I have started three blogs before this one, but have been too busy to finish them. I will finish this one. The big thing that has happened is that my traveling companion Robert arrived in India. He let me know on Friday that he was coming for sure and last Monday he was here. Wednesday we left for Amritsar and the Golden Temple. We had a good time in Amritsar (I hope to send the best of the unfinished blogs in a day or two) and then this morning, Saturday, we started out on a trek to the hinterlands of Punjab. We took a three-hour ride on a state bus (very basic) to Faridkot where there is a fort, a palace, a shrine to a Sikh saint-poet, a library and a clock tower. From the bus station we took an auto rickshaw driven by a stately Sikh that the young translator called Bap-ji. He took us to what we think is the only real restaurant in town, the hotel restaurant of the Trump Plaza Hotel. It turned out to be quite good. Robert had chicken soup, and I had chicken kabobs, yogurt with mixed vegetables, and tandoori roti. Both of us were a little under the weather by this point and ordered accordingly. I have been leery of Indian food since my bout with the runs. I hope I get over this. After lunch, we found a bicycle rickshaw whose driver had only one working leg. He took us to the palace, library, and Sikh shrine, but we missed out on the fort and the clock tower. The shrine was great. It honors Baba Sheikh Farid, a 13th century poet I have read. Inside the glassed shrine there is a large remnant of a tree. I don’t know what this is about. Research. The driver took us back to the bus station and we took a private bus with Bollywood music playing the whole time to our next stop where there is a big fort that we will see tomorrow. I have never been so deep into non-tourist India. Few people here speak English. I directed our rickshaw driver in Hindi and had to use it again with the young man at the hotel desk to find a restaurant. In this town so far, I have found no Western restaurants so it was Indian food tonight. There are a strip of small restaurants opposite the train station and I ate in one of these, dal made of small dark beans, Indian cheese with peas, rice and very good roti. The bread up here is great. It has been an exhausting day. Robert has been having trouble with his back and the bus rides don’t help. We can get a train out of here, but there is one more small town that Robert wants to see that is reachable only by bus. Riding through the Punjab countryside was great. It is very agricultural – a lot of wheat, a little rice, I think, and beautiful patches of bright yellow mustard that they were harvesting. I also saw a woman winnowing wheat by tossing it from a basket into the air. There are also a lot of brickyards with tall chimneys over the kiln and stacks of bricks around. The bricks here are used a lot in the local buildings and they are beautiful, a soft red, and molded not cut, so each one seems slightly different from the others. Long day, short blog. I hope to write again soon. Luke

A Bit of the Life of a Hindi Student

Sunday, November 29, 2015. New Delhi. It has been 10 days since I last blogged. Mostly I have been studying Hindi. I go to class five days a week for between 3 and 4 ½ hours plus a half hour lunch break. It takes me about an hour depending on the time of day to get there and about the same or a little more to get home. Then usually I spend at least an hour doing homework. This is in addition to the half hour or more I spend doing Hindi vocabulary in the morning using an app. So I am busy and also exhausted. Hindi twists my brain and taking the Metro twists my nerves. It is almost always crowded and sometimes it is very crowded. It costs a little more than twenty cents one way. If it all gets too much, I take an auto rickshaw for about $2.50 to $3.00. The ride is terrifying but sometimes I just can’t take the press and the shoving in the metro. Getting in and out at rush hour is the most frightening. You are pushed along in the crowd and have very little capability of determining your own direction or speed. I am getting better at it, but some days it is still too much. Well, I have been having a little fun. (Actually, Hindi classes are fun—there are four students and the students as well as the teachers (three in rotation) are great.) A week ago, I went to Safdarjung’s Tomb. It comes perilously close to the “if you have seen one minor Mughal tomb you have seen them all” category, but the grounds are large and well maintained, the tomb is larger than usual, and it has the distinction of being the last important Mughal building. Few people visit it so it is a calm oasis in Delhi and I enjoyed my time there. Then I took an auto rickshaw to Habitat Centre which is nearby. They have art galleries and hold music and dance concerts. I went to a couple of galleries. The second one had a group show by women. I lingered there and one of the women asked me to to speak into a camera for a video they were making about the show. When I came in and was looking at the first woman’s work, I was near a table where several of the women were talking so I talked about the importance of community in making art. Then another woman started talking to me and when she found out I am a performer she asked me to collaborate with her. I have emailed her since and told her I can do nothing until I am done studying Hindi. Then, if I will be in Delhi for a while, I would very much like to talk with her. I received an email from my traveling this companion this morning. He hopes to know in a week whether he can come to India for two months with the reasonable expectation that his brother will be alive when he returns. If that is the case, we will start traveling as soon as he gets here. All of this uncertainty has been a little wearing, but I am doing well. I bought three scarves yesterday as a way to compensate. They are more expensive than I usually buy but they are beautiful. It isn’t quite cold enough to wear them yet, but it soon will be. For more fun, yesterday morning I took a walk run by conservationists through the ruins of a predecessor city of Delhi, Jahanpanah, the city of the second Tughlaq sultan. It is obscure. The entrance we went through had no signs giving its name. It would be difficult to visit without a guide to lead you through the ruins and up and down the dark and narrow stairs. The history goes in one ear and out the other, but the ruins themselves are evocative and one ends up on the roof of a three-story building that would give a good view of Delhi if the air weren’t so bad. (Last night I thought were was a fire in my hotel because I smelled smoke, but when I opened the door I realized it was just the cooking fires outside the hotel—my room is not hermetically sealed.) At the beginning of the walk, we went by the unsheltered tomb of a 14th century Sufi saint. It was being cleaned by someone from the adjoining village. There were both Hindu and Muslim offerings at the shrine. This is usually the case with the shrines of Sufi saints. The walk ended at a 14th century mosque. It was huge and was built as a thank offering for something but I cannot remember what it was. We climbed up to the top of that and were terrified by four boys probably aged 6 to 12 who climbed to the tops of the domes and then jumped from one to another. If parents only knew what their children were doing. Oh, my Thanksgiving. I went to class in the morning, had a very good pizza with a friend in the afternoon, and then the two of us went to the most popular Sufi shrine Delhi in Nizamuddin, one of the seven urban villages in Delhi. Begumpur where I was yesterday is another, and Paharganj where I am staying is a third. They keep cows and other animals and the atmosphere is markedly different from the rest of Delhi. The shrine was very crowded because it was Thursday night and there was qwali, Sufi singing. Again I was on a guided walk and we were about 20 so getting through the crowds was not pleasant, but the atmosphere in the shrine was intense and moving. I have been there twice before in the day time. At night, the shrine was transformed. We stood or sat and listened to the musicians while being fanned by large green fans. The man with the fan on our side was old with a long white beard and gave a very convincing blessing. This afternoon I plan to go on another guided walk through the ruins of another early city. This evening will be devoted to Hindi. Tomorrow morning, Monday, my week will start all over again.

Mini-Blog from a Hindi student

Wednesday, November 18, 2015. I am settling in. By the end of classes on Monday I was ready to chuck Hindi and head for home, but I had a great conversation session Tuesday morning with Anshu and I decided to stay. Hindi is intense. I don’t have time for anything else. On Monday and Wednesday I have three hours of classes and on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I have four and a half hours. Then there is homework. I am using an irritating app to learn vocabulary. It helps. I have done hardly anything touristy. On Diwali morning I walked over to the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram and sat in the temple for a while. That was good for me, but not very touristy. I keep thinking I will go somewhere after class, but I am always tired and come home and nap and study. Hindi class is fun. The teachers are good and the fellow students are great and we laugh a lot. I work up at 4:30 Tuesday morning and realized it was Sanskrit class time in Los Angeles, so I called my teacher, Brother William, up on Facetime and had a little session. With both Hindi and Sanskrit, learning languages is my favorite thing to do these days. I had a great meal for dinner last night. The restaurant I go to gives some of its dishes fancy names and I didn’t write this down, but it is mixed vegetables and paneer (the Indian fresh cheese) in a spicy sauce. I had it with rotis (called chapattis in some parts of India) and was very happy. It is almost 7 AM when the hot water (well quite warm water) comes on and I can shower and do a little wash and then go have breakfast. My class doesn’t start until 11 but I will study at the school.Iif I don’t get on the Metro early, it is impossible. Very crowded cars and pushing when you get on and off. It’s the pushing I hate. The news from Robert’s brother is confusing. Sometimes he seems a little better and then he is a little worse. In general, he is staying about the same. It looks like I might finish the course in December before Robert gets here. OK. Time to get under the shower.

Hindi and Diwali

November 13, 2015, New Delhi. I have been engrossed in starting to study Hindi again. I enrolled in the last week of an Introductory Hindi course that finished today. Although the other students had been studying for three weeks when I arrived, I can more or less keep up with them. They know more vocabulary, but my grasp of the grammar is for the most part on a par with theirs, and I know the alphabet better since it is the same as Sanskrit and I have been studying that for the last two years. The next course starts Monday for four weeks and I will start that. My traveling companion’s brother is still in critical condition so when he will be able to join me is uncertain. The course I am starting ends on December 11th. If Robert can’t come before that, I will finish the course and then probably travel a little on my own. We will see. I am having to work hard, but the class is good. The old class had six people and the new one will have four students including me. The others are all interesting and I am having lunch with one of them on Sunday. Wednesday was Diwali, a major family holiday in Northern India. It is very noisy, fireworks and firecrackers being a major part of the holiday. The firecrackers had already started when I arrived in India and they grew more frequent and louder every day. Diwali itself started about 5:30 in the morning with a long sequence of firecrackers going off with one about every 30 seconds. The government has tried to curb them because of the extra pollution they cause. Colored sparklers are also sold that emit heavy metals into the air when lighted. Some people, though not a lot, are wearing face masks. I took a walk in the morning of Diwali and thought the holiday wouldn’t be much for a tourist. Shops were open and people were buying lights and sweets. There was one stall with a mound of candy and I was sure it wouldn’t sell but when I went by in the evening there were only a few pieces left. However mostly it seemed like an ordinary day. I took a nap in the afternoon and when I walked out in the evening just after dark, there were lamps and candles everywhere. There were candles all over the lobby of the hotel and on the outside steps. There were candles and lamps in front of every business and house. Some of the people living on the street had candles by their belongings. One man had a candle on the front of his auto-rickshaw. Paharganj is a relatively poor area and I found walking through the candlelit streets very moving. This was the best part of Diwali for me. In the evening there were fireworks in the sky everywhere and it was noisy beyond belief. The firecrackers had been going all day but they began in earnest at sunset. Apart from the hotel streets Paharganj is densely populated and every house and apartment was setting off firecrackers and sending up fireworks. The firecrackers are very loud, some the loudest I have ever heard. The fireworks make a wide variety of sound. The noise was constant from about 6 until after 2 in the morning. I couldn’t go outside, but fortunately I could more or less shut out the noise in my room and with earplugs I could sleep so I could get up early to go to Hindi class. I have been eating frequently at a restaurant with a lot of tourists and have talked to people from all over. There are a lot of Indian tourists from overseas here for the holidays. I have talked to Indians who are now living in Montreal, London, and Australia. I have become quite talkative and friendly in my old age. And have been chatting to all sorts of people. I talked to a group of people of Indian heritage whose ancestors had been indentured workers in Fiji. They speak English of course but also pure Hindi as well as a Hindi-Fiji pijin. The ones I talked to had never been to India before and were experiencing various degrees of shock. They were together on a tour. One woman would go home now if she could. The others were coping better and one man was very excited about everything, even being ripped off. He had bargained for a pair of jeans getting the seller down from three thousand rupees to eight hundred and fifty. Then he went to the next shop and realized he could have bought them there for four hundred rupees. It made him laugh which is the only proper reaction in my opinion. They were a big, noisy, bustling group of people and I was a little lonely after they left. But now with my Hindi class to go to I am doing fine. I have found a $15 a night hotel. It is here in Paharaganj. I like this noisy, crowded, smelly area. The new hotel is down a quiet, emptier, but still smelly, alley. I move tomorrow morning.

Getting Used to India Again

Monday, November 10, 2015. This is the beginning of my third full day in New Delhi. The flight over was grueling. I think it was 22 hours from start to finish with a two and a half hour stop in Beijing to change planes. Everything went smoothly though and I arrived at the hotel about three in the morning. There was a slight snag there. There was a problem at that hotel and they shifted me to another property they own. The room is fine and the location is better than the other one which was tucked away in Main Bazaar, a crowded, noisy area. Where I am is somewhat quieter and closer to the main road where the transportation is. While I have been thinking about “noticing more and doing less,” I have been busy. The first day I located an ATM, got my electronics in order and bought a pair of pajama bottoms for sleeping (and for rehearsing in when I get home). I found them at a khadi store that sells hand spun cloth. I bought a pair of green cotton pants that I like a lot. Since the material hasn’t been preshrunk or treated in any way, they need to be washed a few times before they are really comfortable but I am happy. At the end of the trip I am going to buy a couple more. Yesterday, I looked for a new hotel. Robert got this hotel using frequent flier miles. It is $40 a night and too expensive for a long stay on my three-month budget. I looked at a $10 dollar a night hotel, but I am too fragile at the moment for such a drop in comfort. In a $40 hotel, more or less everything works and you get breakfast. This one has great lighting, a good desk, air conditioning that I use to circulate the air because there are no windows, one of the best showers I have ever had in India, and a toilet without quirks. The $10 dollar hotel was very grimy, with little furniture besides a bed and I know it would be full of quirks everywhere. I settled on a $20 dollar hotel for three nights. Some quirks, mostly adequate furniture, and we will see about the toilet and shower. What I am hoping for is a quiet $15 dollar hotel, but I have yet to find it. I am getting used to living in hotels again -- getting the packing organized so I can find things, doing hand laundry every day, having to go out to get something to eat (depending on the hotel room service can be an option—it is useful for breakfast), and struggling with the Internet. The Internet here is good. It has dropped for a minute a couple of times, but it is fine. We will see what the $20 hotel can do. Food has been my support as I get over jet lag and disorientation. On the first day I had breakfast at the hotel. They had cold cereal and white toast, hard boiled eggs and coffee. I had the eggs and coffee but took the Indian option of fried bread and bhaji. The fried bread was tasty but tough, but the bhaji, a rather liquid vegetable stew, was great. I don’t eat them at home, but I like spicy breakfasts. During the morning I did business and then for lunch II went to my favorite South Indian Restaurant and ordered a South Indian thali. A thali is a set meal that includes rice, several vegetable dishes, a pickle, a fresh chutney, yogurt and usually a sweet. They do a good one at Sagar Ratna. When it arrived, I dipped my spoon into one of the vegetable dishes, added a little rice, and when the food hit my mouth, I got goose bumps from head to toe. It was so good, and so familiar, that my malaise and fatigue of the morning went away immediately. I was eating Indian food again and I was happy. In the evening I was tired and needed comfort, so I walked over to the Ajanta Hotel a block away. I have stayed there before. The restaurant is a little pricey for India, but I wanted a familiar place. I had an alu paratha, a greasy fried bread filled with a potato filling. It comes with pickle and yogurt. It was just the right amount of food and although I don’t usually eat parathas, this was good. They served a yellow, slightly sweet Kashmiri tea afterwards. It was very good. First impressions. Walking off the plane, I smelled smoke. Out at the airport, it smelled mostly like wood, but as we drove through the city the smell of burning garbage was added to it. I am already used to it and smell it no longer. There are open fires everywhere, some from people living on the street, but more from small stands, carts and open front restaurants the cook with wood or charcoal. There are more dogs than I remember. They are mostly somnolent and cause no trouble. The majority are that light brown color of Indian street dogs but some are black and white. There are fewer beggars, but still a lot of people living on the street. The first morning I was at Connaught Circus, a large colonial shopping area. It was early and I found it depressing but when the shops opened and it was full of people, I was happy again. I like the crowds. Los Angeles is probably the most crowdless of the big cities of the world. It is one of the few things I don’t like about LA – I like to be lost in a crowd. At breakfast, the second morning, I talked to an Indian couple who now live in England. They were very concerned about staying healthy. She said that since she stopped eating salads she has had no problem. I said I eat no raw vegetables at all and no fruit except bananas and oranges that I peel myself. He was a doctor and she has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit specializing in the portrayal of Sita, Rama’s wife from the Ramayana, in later Sanskrit drama. She said that she toned the dissertation down so it wouldn’t cause religious controversy. She has a friend who she said was blacklisted from teaching in India because she was less cautious. In spite of that, she believes Moti, the prime minister who is from a right-wing Hindu party, will improve India. I talked to a man on the plane who also has hopes for Moti. On the other hand, a group of film stars, writers and educators, petitioned the government complaining of the increase in religious intolerance and the loss of religious freedom. This was met with vigerous protests by Moti supporters. This afternoon I check out the Hindi school. I am not enough in tourist mode yet to take pictures but soon I will be and the blog will be illustrated.

Getting Mentally Ready for India

November 5, 2015, Los Angeles. Today, I am leaving for India for my fifth trip. I had this blog all written and then last Saturday I found out that Robert, my traveling companion, has a family emergency and will not be going out with me. He hopes to join me within the month, but at the moment his plans are uncertain. I was going to study Hindi during January after Robert went home, but now I hope to study now in New Delhi. I have contacted a language school there but I haven’t heard back from them yet. So I am flying off to uncertainty. Even more than usual this trip begins with excitement and some trepidation before the unknown. As a way of coping with this, I have made a list of my intentions and concerns. First, I decided to make this trip shortly after my friend Johnny Yamaji down on July 1. My friend Robert called and said did I want to go to India again. I traveled with him in India last winter and we had a great time. He wanted to be in India for Diwali, on November 11 this year. He was thinking of an extensive itinerary in North India and wanted to be gone for two months. I want to study Hindi over there so I decided to add a month. Another reason for adding a month was to have three months in which to sort myself out after Johnny’s death. Why mourning in India seemed like a good idea I am not precisely sure, but that was the first idea I had about how to mentally think about this trip. Since then I have had other ideas. I thought about the last trip as a way to gather information for a dance theater piece. This summer I was awarded a three-week dance residency at UCLA and I worked on that material. I intend to work on it more. However, I decided that I didn’t need more material so I thought I would think of this next trip as a performance itself. My writing and picture taking would be documentation and by the end of the trip the performance would be complete. I also am going to take less pictures. On the last trip, in four weeks in India I took about about about 1800 pictures. I thought of them as notes for my dance piece. That was about 450 pictures a week. This time, since the pictures are documentation of a performance in progress, I intend to be more discriminating and try to take pictures that best convey the experience I am having. I am not setting myself a quota. It is more that I am changing my picture-taking frame of mind. Robert suggested I read In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (2007). The work can be relatively accurately summed up by a sentence from the preface: “It is hard to observe and chronicle the workings of India’s political, economic, and legal systems without sometimes feeling outrage at the squandering of life opportunities for the hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in poverty.” He believes, as I do, that India has made some progress in dealing with poverty. In my last trip to Mumbai this past winter, it seemed there were far fewer beggars on the street than there were on my last trip in to Mumbai in 1998. This might be true to better policing. There were also fewer visible slums on the trip from the airport to the central city. This was certainly partly true to the construction of a multi-lane highway that cut a swath through the worst slums. There were cardboard shanties in sight. My overall impression of Mumbai was that the standard of living for many had risen, but it is also true that I think Mumbai has become better in hiding the worst poverty. I am interested in what New Delhi will look like to me after an absence of five years. On my last trip, I didn’t think much about these issues. I realize now I was very tired and very worried about Johnny’s declining health. I feel on this trip my energy is better and I have more time to pay attention to a wider variety of things. I am putting this book on my Kindle and will continue reading it during my trip. I also realize there are a couple of areas in which I have been more or less in the closet on my previous trips. The first is as a performer. Although I have been performing improvisationally since 1970, I have never taken myself as seriously as I should. One consequence of this is that I have never contacted any other performers or performing institutions in India and I have never sought out performing or teaching opportunities. How much this will change on this trip, I do not know. The other area is religion. As many of you know, I describe myself as a Hindu-Christian-atheist. Because of having my spiritual synapses destroyed by an overdose of fundamentalism at an early age, I am a radical materialist – what I see is what there is. Added to that though is an continuing interest in religion and a need for a daily practice that takes me outside myself. In the past I have done both Buddhist and Christian practices, but now I am doing a Hindu practice under the guidance of my friend William Schindler, Brother William, who was a monk in the Ramakrishna Order. I no longer worry about faith and belief, the content of religion. I just do. I have had a prejudice against religious travelers in India. They often, I believe, will go straight to the ashram and straight back home without experiencing India at all. However, I will be in India during several major Hindu festivals and I would like to be more active in experiencing them. We will be there for Diwali. We are still working on where we will be. I have been studying Sanskrit and will look for opportunities to chant Sanskrit hymns, especially during Kali puja on November 10. I hope I will be brave enough to check out the Ramakrishna center in New Delhi and see what is available. I cannot yet chant in Sanskrit alone but I can do it with other people. Finally, I am interested in how aging is affecting my experience in India. I noticed on my January trip this year, that my stamina was less and my recovery time was longer. I also don’t think I process information as fast as I used to and there is a constant demand in India for quick decisions. This is especially true when crossing streets. I have never been good at this. At the end of my first trip in 1998, I was standing immobilized on a street corner in Chennai (formerly Madras). I was 59 at the time. A man who was at least in his 70’s came up to me, took me by he arm, and said, “Choose where you are going and then walk there steadily without changing your path,” and he led me across the street. This is excellent advice. The worst thing one can do when crossing a street is pause or change direction. No one wants to hit you and they have all looked at you and estimated your path. If you change it, then the whole thing falls apart. Motorcycles and bicycles are the worst. They constantly change their path so you never know where they are going to be next and they both are often moving faster than the general flow of traffic. My only collisions in India, knock on wood, have been with bicycles and motorcycles. Finally, I have found my mantra for this trip, It comes from a recent Facebook post by my friend Alexx Shilling, dancer, choreographer and videographer: ”Doing less, noticing more.” Right now I am looking forwahrd to my first breakfast in India at a South Indian place near my hotel. Fermented rice cakes here I come.