Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Bulleting in Delhi



Non-functioning stop lights, Buick-sized road craters, insane autorickshaw drivers and suicidally oblivious pedestrians (not to mention itinerant cows!) make riding a motorcycle in Delhi quite an adventure. Add the fact that you are riding a Royal Enfield, an infamously troublesome but oh-so-sexy bike, and also the fact that you have never ridden a motorcycle before, and it makes for an interesting Autumn.

Above is my Bullet on the side of the road. She and I have spent quite a bit of time there over the past few days. This situation should improve as soon as I have a few more things done, such as getting it rewired. Oh: and it would help if people didn't randomly snap off my clutch handle while the bike is sitting in the parking lot of Khan Market.

Below are pictures of what a Bullet does to your leg when you are learning how to start it. My foot is not dirty; that's a Chaco tan.









Upon buying the bike for a whopping 23,000 rupees (or about $460), I was so excited that I roared off without taking the title with me. Fortunately, the dealer/mechanic makes house calls. Then I promptly lost the keys to it. The pictures below are of two locksmiths making me new keys. I was somewhat disturbed by how quickly they were able to make a key with just a file. They never did ask me for any proof of ownership.


So next on the agenda is to get an extra-fat gas tank, install a cigarette lighter to power my GPS, rewire the whole thing and paint it. I also want to get one of those World War II-style split seats. All Royal Enfield accessories and modifications are very cheap in Karol Bagh. I can recommend a really good dealer and mechanic there, if anyone needs one.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

More from Lahaul and Spiti














Just so I can keep a collection here in the blog, here's a link to Global Post's version of my polyandry article. Here are some photos from the trip.


Monday, August 3, 2009

Public cremations and Nepal's first comic book





































Prayer bells at the Swayambhunath Stupa, the most ancient and holy site in Kathmandu.


Spire of Swayambhunath Stupa seen through flags.
























No wonder Sherpas can climb to such ridiculous heights and carry such loads! They do it every day! This guy was barely four feet tall.




















Kathmandu


























Priest and prayer bells at Swayambhunath Stupa, also known as The Monkey Temple.


























Representation of the phallus of Shiva, seen here at the Pashupatinath. To my immediate right, an outdoor, public cremation was taking place. You see dozens of these phallic symbols (and yes, it is depicted here running through the stone representation of a vagina) in Pashupatinath and throughout Kathmandu.



























Monkeys, as one might expect, are everywhere at The Monkey Temple.


























I am at the Swayambhunath Stupa. A new friend, from England, took the picture. I forget her name.



























This is Abin Shrestha, a political columnist in Nepal who illustrated the country's first comic book, in the foreground.



























This nun must be ancient. She seemed so sweet, but then she charged me 100 Nepali rupees for this photo. I really like Buddhist monks. They seem so peaceful and sweet. But I hate to see them in a situation where they feel like they need to beg.


















Another funky monkey at The Monkey Temple.



























Still at The Monkey Temple.



























You have to go up 365 stairs to reach Swayambhunath Stupa. The elevation is high, and I was definitely feeling it by the time I made it to the top. It was quite discouraging to see runners charging up and down these stairs. But even if I were accustomed to the elevation enough to try something like that, it seemed pretty dangerous. The steps are quite narrow, and thousands of years of climbing feet have worn them down so they are slick and mostly tilt downhill.




























Playing guitar above the streets of Kathmandu




















According to www.tibetanprayerflags.com:

Prayer flags are inscribed with auspicious symbols, invocations, prayers, and mantras. Tibetan Buddhists for centuries have planted these flags outside their homes and places of spiritual practice for the wind to carry the beneficent vibrations across the countryside. Prayer flags are said to bring happiness, long life and prosperity to the flag planter and those in the vicinity.





















Kathmandu


























People are more relaxed about PDA in Kathmandu than in New Delhi. There were probably half a dozen couples canoodling in this park area.



Spires at Pashupatinath Temple. Below, temple workers are preparing for a cremation.


Thursday, July 9, 2009

Mountain Pot and Delhi Transgenders

Here are links to my latest two articles in Global Post:

Himalayan Hashish


Hijra article

And now, I really will be without Internet access for a while.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

In Search of Polyandry

Polyandry, or a family structure involving one wife and multiple husbands, is a rarity in most places around the world. But in Himachal Pradesh there are at least a couple of villages that still practice it. In the Lahaul-Spiti Valley -- a deceptive name, since the elevation is over 14,000 feet -- polyandry has been practiced for centuries.

In about six hours I am taking a bus there to write an article about polyandry's simultaneous rise and fall here in India.

What might come as more of a surprise is that polyandry is also becoming more common in the Indian State of Haryana, just north of Delhi. What I'm hearing is that wealthy, landed families are opting for polyandry because it automatically limits the number of children a family has, thus consolidating wealth by obviating the need to split it up between a large number of children.

Getting to Lahaul-Spiti is going to be even more of an adventure than I had originally thought when I started planning this trip (all of two days ago). First, it's an overnight bus ride to Manali, a resort town in the mountains to which many people travel to escape the summer's heat. But then I'll take a four-wheel drive or maybe a bus on some of the worst roads in the country. The monsoon has hit the region, and rock slides often are making the road impassible (or fatal, if you're already on them). But this is about the only time you can go, because ice and snow obstruct the pass during winter months.

When I get back I plan to figure out how to embed a Google map into a blog, but until then, here is a link to my route.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Sikh Moves

It seems like dancing here is a one-gender-at-a-time thing, unless maybe you're in a big club, and even then I rarely see men and women dancing close to one another. But the guys really get into it, and do all kinds of pretty dirty dance moves with each other. These photos aren't very artsy, but I thought they were funny. It was at an Indian wedding, and all the guys were dancing to beat the band. They were mostly teens through 30-somethings, except for this little Sikh boy who was just tearing it up.


Saturday, June 27, 2009

Delhi heat

One of the biggest reasons I haven't blogged in a while is that I haven't had power for long stretches of time. For almost three weeks, the power has gone out every night. Sometimes it goes at 11 p.m., sometimes midnight. Sometimes it goes out for an hour, and sometimes for 30 hours straight.

The reason for the outages? It's hot, and people are using more power to try to stay cool. Monday, it's forecasted to hit 115 degrees, and, as the delayed monsoon approaches, humidity is climbing. I imagine that if you grew up with these conditions, you might be able to cope with it better. I'm not sure. I know that I complain a lot more than my Indian friends, although they do their share.

But the heat affects everyone. After weeks of unscheduled power outages, people in my neighborhood, Dwarka, started rioting, charging the power stations and beating power company employees. My neighborhood was actually the hardest-hit by power outages.

I had only lived in the house for a couple of weeks, having spent some time up in the cooler mountains of Himachal Pradesh on a reporting trip, and hadn't had a chance to buy an air conditioner. In a way, I'm glad I didn't sink the money. I hadn't realized that some neighborhoods would lose power more frequently than others. In Pakistan, especially Islamabad, power outages are scheduled, so you might lose power one hour out of eight. That's easier to deal with, because you know it's coming, and when, and with a generator or an inverter you can keep fans going for that one hour.

But the past two weeks have been rough. Night before last, the power went out around 10 p.m., and I went out onto our fourth-floor balcony, as it was the coolest place in the house. It had been 'cool' that day, around 108-110 degrees, I think. A couple of minutes later, my flatmate, Mike, and his girlfriend and her friend also came out. Mike has an air conditioner, but that doesn't do much good without power. We must have sat out on the balcony for a couple of hours, sweating and reading marriage wanted ads (you really should check them out, if they're online -- some are hilarious) with the assistance of our LED headlamps.

The problem was, the power just never went back on (I hope I'm not running my days together here, there have been so many outages). I spent half the night lying on a beach towel spread on the floor of my bathroom, drizzling water onto my head from a spigot in the wall. Sometime in the morning, the power came back on, but the sun was up, and the temperature was, of course, climbing. It was Saturday, and I've been averaging 3-4 hours of sleep a night for weeks, and I was desperate. All I have is a couple of fans, so I tried something a fixer told me about in Pakistan: wrap a sheet around you, take a quick shower to soak it down, and then go to bed with it still soaked. It feels exactly as clammy as it sounds, but it does keep you cooler when you're under a fan. It's crazy how quickly the sheet dries out, though. In two hours I think I soaked it down three or four times. In this heat, you can get maybe 15 minutes of sleep at a stretch like that.

One of the most infuriating things about the situation is the response of the power companies. On Friday afternoon, the city hit its highest-ever peak hour for power demand -- 4,171 MW. There was load-shedding of well over 1,000 MW. So, I, not being an engineer, take that to mean that the damn power company's stations' capacity fell short by more than a quarter of what the people needed. Naomi, Mike's girlfriend's friend, said she'd read that the power company was blaming the differences between supply and demand on the fact that air conditioners are so readily available to the general public. If people weren't using them, the company said, there wouldn't be outages. That's like saying, "if people in the Sudan just quit eating food, then we could quit hearing about this whole 'famine' business." It's an outrage. There seems to be some sort of aversion to building or maintaining infrastructure in Delhi (I have so far only been to Delhi and Himachal Pradesh). Even the pricing structure is set in an attempt to reduce power usage, rather than just building the mechanism to give people what they need. In most other parts of the world, if you buy in bulk, you pay less. Here, you pay more per unit the more you buy. Ok, so for all the environmentalists out there, we're not talking about driving a Hummer around. We're talking about people trying to survive 115-degree heat. And some don't.

Anyway, I hope I'm not scaring away my friends from the States who were talking about visiting. As I mentioned, Dwarka was the hardest-hit out of all of Delhi, according to the Hindustan Times. And I doubt you see power outages like this in the cooler months. I am moving from the place in Dwarka, even though my landlord and his family are great, and I liked the space. Several neighborhoods just don't lose power nearly as often, and so I chose this place based on what I could research. Well, also, Saket happens to be the neighborhood of the only place I've found in Delhi where you can buy both beer AND beef hamburgers -- Bennigans.

For now, while I wait for this other apartment to become available on July 1, I've taken refuge in a hotel room, which is inordinately expensive, but one night's sleep was worth it. Oh, and just to finish my point about some neighborhoods not getting hit so hard: it's morning here, and the power didn't go out once last night.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

मोरे फ्रॉम हिमाचल प्रदेश


Two friends in Rumsu, near Nagar. If anyone is curious as to why I tend to put more photos of women on this blog, it's because a lot of the guys in the villages do exactly nothing, as far as I can tell. I am generalizing from the few I've seen in Himachal Pradesh, but I'm also corroborating my observations with others who've explored similar villages. In Malana, for instance, the guys sit in the town square and smoke and sell hashish while the women hike up and down the mountainside carrying ridiculous amounts of firewood, or work the fields, do the laundry, take care of the children, etc. So yeah, I mean, I could put in a few dozen pictures of guys smoking hash to balance things out, but that would get old pretty quickly.

Rumsu.
Girl in Malana.

The town of Nagar, Himachal Pradesh, as seen from my guest house.


Woman harvesting near Chochogi, a village near Nagar.


Smoking in Rumsu, another village near Nagar.


Boys playing on handmade scooters in Chochogi.


Krishna Temple in Nagar.


This little boy followed me around the village, then picked two lotus (?) flowers from a neighbor's yard to give to me. His mother wanted to take our picture.