celebrity update: bethraham takes bollywood

the small screen loves me.

This is the story of how Bethraham came to dominate Indian media.

Several weeks back we received a phone call out of the blue in which a man asked if we were available for a filming.  Sure, we said, not really sure of what we were agreeing to. Days later, a few scenes arrived, but there was nothing about the plot, our characters, the production itself.  Most notably we weren’t given any contact information, which was unfortunate, because the enclosed note said, “here is the script.  please confirm”.

A few days later a man named Aman called us again to ask if we could come the next day to film. It would commence atop the zig-zag path at Devdar Woods. It was, from beginning to end, a bewildering experience. When we arrived there was no sign of any film crew. Eventually some idle young men appeared and stood around smoking cigarettes.  Through broken English, they indicated that this was indeed the set, and that the others would arrive soon.  When a car full of more important looking men arrived (none of whom were named Aman), they seemed oddly surprised to see us there and asked us if we could come back later that afternoon.

So we went back to school, taught a couple classes, then made our way back up the hill. When we arrived this time, the property was buzzing: there were prop wallahs, make-up wallahs, chai wallahs, and other wallahs without clear roles.  They ushered us into a costume closet that doubled as a makeup room.  Bethany started with makeup and a man gave me jackets to try on.  He chose some black pants that were about 8 sizes too big around the waist and 6 inches too short in the legs.  Then he put on a 90′s era navy double-breasted jacket that was also several sizes too big.  Together, my costume looked like the result of a hurried $1.50 spending spree at the Salvation Army.  They very obviously weren’t my clothes and what’s more, that kind of suit jacket was about 30 years ahead of its setting.  Bethany’s costume was better, mostly because it was her clothes which actually fit her.

After we were dressed, we watched them film a scene in Hindi in which a rich woman with a dog slaps a village girl.  They only did 2-3 takes of each scene, each of which began with a familiar liturgy:

staffer: “order!”

audio guy: “silence!”

director: “roll!”

camerman: “rolling.”

director: “action!”

Then it was time for our scene. We still didn’t really know anything about our characters or the overall plotline, other than we were American missionaries living in Mussoorie, and someone had been murdered.  Our lack of background or context was not a concern to the director, who casually told me that the first scene will be in Hindi.

Excuse me?

Here’s what you say: “hamare church kayon nehi ahti.”

“hamale church cone notty.”

“hamare church kayon nehi ahti.”

“hamati kyo nehi church neeeoty.”

And so on until finally they wrote it down on a cue card and held it behind the head of the girl to whom I was saying it.  After several takes, each of which was more amusing than the last for the crew, I finally said something passable, but not before everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

It was around this time that I realized that film acting is a real job and a difficult one at that.  There’s a lot of pressure packed in the moments after the director shouts “action” and one must be able to maintain consistent accents, positioning, and characterizations with a battery of lights, cameras, and microphones trained at your face.  Being convincingly natural in a scenario which is so completely unnatural is a real talent.

A couple days later we filmed a second scene with one of the main characters, a real professional actor who was playing the Indian police detective.  We were hastily introduced then told to stand in our spots.  I stood facing him, trying to figure just how famous he was when he pointed over my shoulder with his police stick and said, “excuse me, but that’s my light.”  Evidently, I was standing in it.  What a diva moment! This guy must be a huge movie star.  It’s an honor just to be corrected by him.

It turns out he was quite a friendly and down-to-earth guy who was very helpful to us neophytes.  He came from the Joey Tribbiani school of acting, which suited him well for a role like this.

After two more days of shooting we had completed our roles as American missionaries John and Joan Simmons.  As we were leaving they gave us INR5000 and we learned that what we had just filmed was a TV serial called “Ek Tha Rusty II“.  It’s based on a series of short stories by local literary legend Ruskin Bond, and is a continuation of the original series, which aired in the 90′s.  In our episode, we are suspects in the murder of the Rani (a local wealthy woman).  You’ll have to tune in yourself on DD National to find out whether it was us or the equally suspicious butcher who did it.  (Heads up: In a scene where Bethany, strumming a guitar with furrowed brow, asks me how they could suspect good people like us, I put my hand on her shoulder to reassure her and stare creepily off into the distance as the camera zooms in.  Cue the scary music!)

Here’s some photos from the set, plus this photo of us which I randomly found on the internet.

bethany gets her hair and makeup did.

director singh monitors things from the veranda.

the police inspector and two staffers discuss the scenes.

the dining room, where the police chief questioned the simmons.

green day vs. bryan adams: a pentecostal teen worship leader’s dilemma

"hey, girl. let's sing this next song to jesus straight from the heart."

A few weeks ago a woodstock parent who lives on the hillside grabbed me as I was walking through the quad.  She was helping to mentor the youth at her church, a small local hindi-speaking pentecostal congregation, and she wanted to know if I would help them become better worship leaders.  I said I was happy to help in some capacity, but I should visit first to get a feel for the church and the kids and what they are doing in the service each Sunday before trying to teach them anything.

So come Sunday I skipped out on the traditional post-service omelette at Char Dukkan and headed straight down the hillside to the small cafe at the top of the bazaar where the congregation meets.  I say it is pentecostal not because of any denominational affiliation, but mostly based on certain mannerisms which are unmistakable to anyone like me who has spent any time in a “charismatic” church.

Inside the cafe, chairs were all arranged to face a corner of the room where the leaders stood.  Outside the window you could see all the way down to Dehradun and the plains beyond it, some 4000 feet below us.  Locals (plus one middle-aged white couple) were milling about and chatting while the two guitarists and drummer which comprised the “worship team” noodled on their instruments.  Valentine’s day had just passed, and the cafe had apparently celebrated by hanging red heart-shaped balloons upside down from the ceiling.  They were hung from the bottom, which, combined with their general state of post-valentine deflation gave the unfortunate appearance of red, shriveled scrota.  Nobody else seemed to mind worshiping under red ballsacks of love, but I found it hard to concentrate because I couldn’t stop thinking of how I was going sneak a photo of them for the blog.  Alas, I left my camera at home.

The service was mostly in hindi, so I missed large swaths of it, but the parts that were translated were remarkably similar to charismatic services I’ve been to before.  There was a kind of musical rhythm to everything that was said: a stately introduction cresendoed into climax of volume and intensity and the retreated back to a more subdued but poignant tone.  Most of the exhortations were about what God wanted for them right then and now.  And they tended to be very specific. “The Lord is saying to you today that you need to forget about any money worries that you have.”

It occurred to me as I sat there that if every denominational stream has a blind spot, for the charismatics it’s issues of control.  I can’t back that up with any hard data, but it seems like pentecostal churches seem to attract leaders who control others and followers who either need to be controlled themselves.  How else do you explain the obsession with creating a “spirit” of worship or the apparent infallible grasp the leaders have on God’s specific wishes for each congregant? (For the record, the PCA’s blind spot is misogyny or theological self-righteousness.  For the SBC it’s their obsession with gays.  For the progressive mainliners, it’s defining themselves by what they are not: fundies.)

The kids (who were all closer to twenty years old) did an admirable job.  The drummer played sensitively and made good choices that served the song.  The guitarist was earnest and mostly competent.  The female singers sang with gusto in the punchy, nasal style of Indian singing.  And the congregation went right along with it.  Sometimes, the band would stop playing but the congregation just kept going, forcing the band to start back up again.  It was like a power struggle (there’s that control issue again).  The band would propose to end the song and the congregation would veto that measure, forcing the band to continue on.  This process repeated itself several times.

At one point in the service, the woodstock parent I referenced earlier gave a long personal testimony.  It was untranslated, so I perked up when I heard the word “Woodstock” and then I noticed everyone in the room turned to look at me.  She went on and I heard the word “music teacher” and “workshop”.  Apparently the American from Woodstock would be doing a worship workshop.

At this point in my life, I’m a teacher not a worship leader.  We help with the music at St. Paul’s but it’s mostly a musical, not pastoral, role.  Whatever wisdom I thought I had about the topic of worship seems like a distant memory.  Nevertheless, two weeks later I found myself meeting with five boys in a tiny guest room underneath the cafe.  There was a powered speaker, a rickety drum set, a cheap guitar, and copies of a hindi songbook.  As soon as I arrived, a boy handed me his guitar and for the second time in a week, asked me to play “When September Ends“.

There was no one there to translate this time and I had only a vague idea at best of what I was supposed to be doing with them.  I took out my guitar and sat on a stool and waited.  They just watched me expectantly, as if they were waiting for me to do something.  Finally, the kid with the guitar said in broken English, “please, sir, can you teach us how to worship.”  At this I think I must have laughed aloud and suggested they play some songs first.  I could not teach them how to worship, but I did teach them how to appropriate the basic groove of the jam at the end of “Free Bird” for one of their hindi praise songs.  The idea of changing strum patterns in the midst of a song would be enough for the first session.  Let’s see how this goes over and then we’ll try something else next week.

After they had chosen and run through four or five songs, they asked me again to play “When September Ends”.  I fumbled through the chords for a few seconds while the drummer practiced the snare part.  Then I said I didn’t know it but they suggested I try “Summer of ’69“.  Being a child of the 80′s, I did know this one, and was surprised to find that I actually remembered nearly all the lyrics as well.  I don’t know why the boys were so fixated on these two songs, but it might be because they were young and restless, killin’ time and they needed to unwind.  I guess nothing can last forever, but for a few glorious minutes they jammed a microphone in my face and we filled the khud with the sentimental strains of Bryan Adams.

Mamallapuram: reptiles, surplus syllables and cycloptic cats

South India appears to Westerners as a land of excess syllables.  Due to a natural overabundance of M’s, L’s and the letter A, places have names like Ramanathapuram, Tiruvannamalai, Udagamandalam, and Mamallapuram (which is a convenient shorthand for Mahabalipuram).  All of these are easier to pronounce if you speak either Malayalam or Tamil.  Our poor efforts to pronounce the name of our final stop came out variously as Mallamapamarum, Mamalapurallam, or Mamamamallapuramamallapuram.  I could never remember how many syllables there were supposed to be, or what order to say them.

In any case, Mamallapuram is a tiny town on the beach only a couple hours north of Pondicherry.  Lonely Planet calls it the village of Backpackistan, due to the abundance of dreadlocked Western yoga tourists.  Despite the touristy vibe, the food and lodgings were good and very cheap, and there are some amazing ruins within walking distance from the beach.  And considering the state of our weariness and home-away-from-homesickeness, we weren’t sorry to have a few Western comforts at this point in the journey.

This part of India was enchanting: miles and miles of undeveloped ocean front land, the kind where forest grows right up to the dunes.  The sand wasn’t as white as Goa, but I was intrigued that in such a crowded country there was so much pristine empty beach.  We hired a local guide to tour some of the historical sights and he told us about the 2004 tsunami which revealed several previously unknown ruins when it receded.

some think this 7th century statue is India's finest carved elephant.

our ancient Pallavan ruins tour guide.

shore temple

krishna's butterball. it is a requirement that all westerners take a picture pretending to hold up the boulder.

~~~

Our hotel in Mamallapuram was a minimalist, bright orange cement block on the main road that runs parallel to the beach.  An insousciant youth manned the desk.  While he filled out the extensive and redundant paperwork required to rent a hotel room (it really is an ordeal in India), I waited in the courtyard.  I spotted an apparently domesticated cat on top of a parked car so I went over to say hello.  As I approached he suddenly he turned around and looked me in the face, revealing a wet, fleshy gaping hole where his right eye should have been.  Stepping back in disgust, I also noticed he was a bit thinner and worse for the wear than he initially appeared from across the courtyard.  I decided not to befriend said cat.

After we checked in and dropped our things off we went to get some food.  Upon returning to the hotel, Bethany opened the door to find a very startled and haggard-looking feline staring back at us with his vacant socket.  He did this from his spot ON OUR BED.  After staring at us wide-eyed, the way startled cats look at any strange person, he darted out of the room, but not before completely giving us the creeps.  We slept with our windows closed.

a classical dance festival we happened upon.

~~~

Virtually everywhere we went in South India we saw lizards.  They were on fences, ceilings, houseboats, and mosquito nets.  Mostly geckos, but also some dragon-like larger lizards that seemed like they would feed on rodents. I’ve always loved lizards; they’re like pocket-sized dinosaurs, so I enjoyed seeing the variety in South India.

But these were all just appetizers for the main course: Crocodile Bank.  Picture walled pens literally crawling with 400 crocodiles, the largest captive crocodile in South Asia, and a snake venom extraction exhibit.  The handlers for the latter come from a long line of venom extractors and have the bite scars on their arms to prove it.

Some of the pens were being cleaned.  Local women in saris went about their business scrubbing the water holes while the crocodiles went about their business–still inside the same pen.  Nobody seemed the least bit uneasy about the giant man-eating lizards a few feet away.  This place also had some of the best signs in all of India.

each of these urns contained a live and deadly snake.

Pondicherry: c’est pas France

An overnight train and early morning taxi took us to Pondicherry, where we went straight to our rooms at the Raj Lodge, a very orange block in the heart of town with charmless, cell-like rooms, complete with broken fixtures and rusty bars over the windows.  The room was big and there were three beds of various sizes arranged in an inconvenient row.  But the bathroom floor was elevated about 15 inches higher than the room floor, which meant that every time I exited the bathroom, I had to duck or else slam my head into the cement doorframe. What made it worse was when I did some laundry I was stepping in and out of the bathroom repeatedly to hang wet clothes on the door. Absorbed in the task at hand, I kept forgetting the danger of backing through the doorway and banged my head several times in the course of a couple hours.  It around this time that I considered becoming a terrorist.

Bethany can attest that nothing makes me violently angry like bumping my head.  It’s the only thing which regularly makes me see red and lose control.  Indeed, this is one of my least favorite aspects of life in India. While in Nepal for activity week last year we hiked up to a lodge in the mountains with Everest views. I awoke at 3am to go to the bathroom and walked right into the doorframe which was about 1″ shorter than I am, leaving a 1″ gash in the top of my bald pate.  The power was out so I had no light and couldn’t inspect the damage, though I could feel a groove in my scalp.  When I felt blood trickling down my head, I decided there was no option but to walk down the hillside in the freezing dark to locate the first aid kit.  Megan (the co-chaperone) seemed confused as to why I was at her door in the Himilayas in the middle of the night, but she was coherent enough to tell me that actually, she didn’t have the first-aid kit.  After stumbling around a bit I eventually tracked it down from one of the kids’ cabins and got the wound to stop bleeding but I gained a prominent scar to remind me how much I hate Nepali doorframes.

bethany recovers from trainlag in our cell.

~~~

Pondicherry, now known as Pudacherry, was a French settlement.  At one time it was divided into Villa Blanche (white town) and Villa Noire (black town), and to some degree those distinctions still exist, though the French-speaking population is now a small minority.  The Francs pulled out in 1954, but it still retains a strong French flavor, and nearly every white person we saw was speaking Francais.

The city is laid out in a very orderly grid, which is distinctly NOT Indian, but makes the city very pedestrian-friendly.  Hardly any rickshaw drivers even approached us, as if they had given up trying to make a living in a French-designed city.  The main canal that runs North-South has withered into a putrid trickle of sewage and trash that offends the nose from a couple blocks away.  Pondicherry, for all its charm, is the only city we visited which can be navigated by sense of smell.

the canal has seen better days.

urination is permitted anywhere but on this graffiti.

fancy french restaurant.

~~~

cyclone damage

Three weeks before we arrived, Pondicherry was slammed by Cyclone Thane which killed 19 people and just generally pushed everything West.  Walking around town we saw fallen branches, crushed roofs, and many west-leaning trees.  We came upon Sacred Heart Cathedral on what appeared to be a church work day, and saw nuns and local kids working together to clean up debris.

sacred heart, one of many outrageous catholic cathedrals.

At the entrance to the Cathedral, beggars, many of them sitting on useless limbs, held out their hands asking for handouts.  We have been in the habit of resisting these entreaties because in Atlanta such donations enable a lifestyle that is unhealthy for the beggar.  In India people may become enslaved to a life of working for a “pimp” who will engage in all sorts of unsavory tactics to keep beggars in the fold (see Slumdog Millionaire).  We’ve seen plenty of young women with drugged babies on their hips, mindlessly moving their hand back and forth from begging to eating position and mumbling like zombies, all the while making a very practiced sad face.

But in Pondicherry, the presence of actual crippled beggars on the steps of the house of worship hit a bit close to some stories I’ve heard about Jesus and I felt some pangs of conviction.  We decided we should give to adults who were physically disabled.  Back in Atlanta, you fear funding the alcohol habit of someone who refuses to work.  In India, begging may actually be the only way for those physically unable to work to feed themselves.

a beginning stage of handmade cotton paper

Kodaikanal: at bizarro woodstock even the dosas are bigger

this view was the nicest thing about the Kodai Rat Hostel.

To give you an idea of transportation costs in India, a public bus is far and away the cheapest mode of transport.  It’s also the most harrowing.  A cab is costly but will stop and start whenever suits you.  A train is probably the most comfortable (in the higher classes) and is quite affordable, though you still need to arrange transport to and from the train station.  For a typical 150km trip:

Bus – 6 hours, 150Rs ($3) per person

Train – 4 hours, 500Rs ($10) per person

Taxi – 5 hours, 2500Rs ($50) total

The drive into Kumily had easily been the most violent ride of my life.  The road was pocked and hairpinned and our lack of adequate suspension gave our driver no pause whatsoever.  At one point my phone fell on the floor and I couldn’t bend over to retrieve it until we stopped for fear of losing a tooth or adding another scar to my increasingly moon-scaped noggin (see forthcoming rant about the height of Indian doorframes).  All we could do was try to stay upright and not throw up.  I couldn’t stop grinning for the last brutal bit of it just out of pure disbelief and marveling that the bus didn’t disintegrate.

We had been taking buses whenever possible to save money.  In Kumily, the state border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu is located in the main square and looking across it was easy to see that TN buses would be even less comfortable than the relatively clean and comfy Keralan buses.  The drive from Kumily to Kodaikanal was supposed to be especially nauseating, worse than the drive from Mussoorie to Dehradun, which regularly makes Bethany hurl.  Also, it being the end of Pongal, buses would likely be full of rowdy returning pilgrims. (In India, if there is an increase in passengers, no extra buses are scheduled; people just pile more tightly into whatever buses are there.)

And so, because the prospect of spending six nauseous, noisy hours on a cramped, dirty bus with sweaty Indian men on your lap was not appealing to the ladies, we opted to hire a taxi for the drive to Kodakanal.  We were rewarded with the world’s greatest taxi driver: he drove slowly over rough road, he pulled over to answer his cell phone, he asked if his speed was satisfactory, he explained his actions and gave informative updates on the journey (“please roll up your windows; the next 4km are going to be very dusty”).  It was worth every penny.

~~~

At Kodaikanal (known colloquially as Kodai, pronounced “Cody”), we again met up with fellow Woodstock teachers Sachi and Jesse, who since leaving the houseboat had gone down to the southernmost tip of India.  Sachi graduated from Kodai 6 or 7 years ago and was for all intents and purposes our tour guide for our time in town. She was keen to take us to all her old haunts, including the Astoria hotel and restaurant, a pure veg joint known for its giant dosas.

this dosa was about $5.

we polished it off in about 8 minutes.

~~~

Kodaikanal International School is Woodstock’s sister school in south India.  Until maybe 10 years ago they even shared the same board of directors.  At Woodstock we hear a fair amount about Kodai: so-and-so taught there previously, or this student transferred there, and so on.  But none of us (except Sachi) had ever seen it.

Being at Kodai was not just bizarre, it was BIZARRO (or should I say bazaaro?).  “Bizarro”, as referenced in both Superman and Seinfeld lore, is the alternate universe where things are parallel but also somehow opposite.  Kodai–both the town and the school–felt so much like Woodstock, yet in very specific ways was clearly not Woodstock.  It was so striking that we kept a running list of similarities and differences. Both are in hill station towns built by the British, but Kodai is in the town whereas Woodstock is outside town.  They have a lake, we have the chukkar.  They are an IB school; Woodstock is committed to the AP program.

For the six of us, it was also a bit of a professional development field trip.  We met with our respective bizarro counterparts, observed classes and shared ideas. One of the most promising developments coming out of our visit is the prospect of future cooperation between schools.

~~~

Speaking of cooperation, let us tell you about our evening with Ms. Dash.

Naturally we were curious about the staff housing at Kodai and how it compared to our own homes.  When Bizarro Bethany (aka Ms. Dash) invited us over for drinks after school we readily accepted. Ms. Dash is a hard-partying New York-born-and-bred musical theater veteran with an outsized personality and a wicked cackle to boot.  She comes from a prominent Broadway family.  As the story goes, she was in India studying with her guru and took a walk around Kodaikanal lake when she thought to herself, “I would consider moving here if I found a job…”  At that moment, she saw the sign for Kodai International School.  So she walked onto campus, into the HR office, and asked if they had any openings.  As it turns out, they had been without a legit drama teacher for several years and the teacher they intended to hire had just fallen through.  The rest is history and Ms. Dash has now been there for 6 years.

While her home was comparable, Ms. Dash was not.  With help from her hyper dog, Squiggles, he entertained the six of us for the evening with outlandish tales (“Back when I worked for Alan Lerner…”), Austro-German sauerkraut recipes (“you put it in a ziploc and then you BEAT THE SH!T OUT OF IT”), and copious musical theater singalongs.  For about 3 hours, Bethany was basking in her element.  The rest of us were understandably amused and left late in the evening exhausted, full and shaking our heads in disbelief.

paddleboating on the lake. these are the slowest vehicles known to man.

kodai's gorgeous chapel.

complete with a working organ!

Kerala: communists houseboats and the multiple limbs of hindu gods

Before leaving Goa, I (abe) got a message on facebook from some Atlanta friends, Will and Christine Hong. It said, and I quote, “Hey Abe! This is so last minute as well as a shot in the dark, but we are in India right now.” As it turns out, they would be in Kerala through the 11th, which was THE SAME DAY WE ARRIVED in Kerala.

(To illustrate the unlikelihood of this, imagine you lived in Cleveland, and you were traveling to San Diego for a three-day conference. Just before you left, your Japanese exchange student high school friend emailed, from Japan, to say they were going to San Diego on vacation the same weekend, on the off chance you were around.)

We couldn’t contact them by phone because there is no reception in Agonda Beach, but we didn’t want to miss such divine appointment, so when we arrived in Cochin we simply took a cab to their hotel straight away. And there was Will on the lobby couch. He looked up to see Bethany, then went back to his iPad. A moment later he looked up again and his jaw dropped. We spent the next three hours hanging out with him and Christine at the hotel, then shared a cab on the way to the bus station/airport.  What an unexpected treat.

~~~

Alleppey (also known as Alleppuzha), from what we can tell, is only on the map because it offers the possibility of boating around Kerala’s backwaters. Unfair comparisons to Venice notwithstanding, this network of canals, bogs, and inland waterways make for interesting topography and truly unforgettable boat tours. For little more than the price of a cheap hotel, we (Bethraham, Nan, Kate, Sachi and Jesse) shared a houseboat for two days and two nights. The three-person crew motored us around the scenic boundary waters and parked wherever we were to prepare us fresh, coconutty Keralan meals that looked like this:

Lonely Planet describes this as “One of the top 10 travel experiences of your life”, which is a bit hyperbolic, but it was an incredibly graceful and relaxing way to tour the coastal countryside.  There’s nothing to do on the boat but read, talk, or soak in the scenery, so Bethany put her hands to work and found a use for those giant banana leaves.

so i married a basket-weaver

~~~

After the houseboat dropped us off in Alleppey, we took a bus inland to the Cardamom Hills and the tiny town of Kumily.  We had never heard of Kumily, but that seems to put us in the minority because it was crawling with western tourists. As travelers, we’ve come to see this as a double-edged sword: on the one hand it means the presence of innumerable tourist knick-knack shops, each selling the same unoriginal and overpriced (relatively speaking) vishnu carvings, silver jewelry, and fabric scarves. It is impossible to walk by any of these shops without the proprietor calling out, “Hullo sir. Please come. Just look inside. Wery low prices.”  But on the other hand, such touristy areas are, across the board, nicer that what one can normally expect in India.

We stayed at the Coffee Inn, a very clean, comfortable and even stylish guest house that abuts the Periyar Tiger Reserve, which is one of two main attractions in town.  The other is the tea and spice gardens. We visited a big tea plantation outside of town (which was closed for Pongal) as well as Abraham’s Spice Garden and got a tour from the man himself.  He seems able to get nearly anything to grow.

cinnamon leaf

the pulpy and strangely delicious custard apple

world's smallest chili pepper

~~~

On our last day in town we did a jeep safari in the reserve. Our safari guide (real name: Prince) had some kind of sixth sense for spotting wildlife and was able to pick out animals in the forest long before they were visible to the rest of us. When we jokingly offered to pay him extra to show us the tigers (there are now 46 in the area), he said in his 25 years of living there he had only seen three. Prince has lived his whole life in a village inside the reserve, and now works some days as a safari guide and other days in a Cardamom plantation, for which he is paid less than $3 per day.  He was a friendly fellow, fond of singing, and told us stories of his tourist encounters as a safari guide.  When we asked him his impressions, he expressed what seems to be the prevailing sentiment among Indians in the tourism trade: they’d much rather interact with Western tourists than their own people.  I found this interesting and relieving at the same time.  It’s easy to imagine that these shop and hotel owners secretly resent you for your money (while still hoping that you spend it with them), or because you are a high-maintenance westerner who complains that the shower is too cold and the food is too hot, or simply because you look British. But this appears not to be the case, and we can understand why.  We have not been impressed with most of the middle-class Indian tourists we’ve encountered. They are demanding and disrespectful toward their hosts and their children act like undisciplined brats.

prince takes us across the lake

cardamom factory workers on lunch break

bethany is turning into a hindu god and sprouting extra arms

tea plantation

~~~

All told, we really enjoyed Kerala.  It’s possibly the most put-together of Indian states: the highest literacy rates, the most affluence, least corruption, best infrastructure and a strong Communist party.  That’s right, Kerala is a two-party government, one of which is CPI, the Communist Party of India. Apparently (according to our cab driver), the two parties alternate terms of power, and the communists are currently in charge.  Everywhere we went we saw posters like this:

~~~

Kumily, like much of southern India, has a strong Christian presence.  We saw two big churches in town, one Catholic and one Orthodox. Lately I’ve been interested in eastern christian practice so we visited the latter on Sunday morning. We didn’t stay for the entire service, but from what we saw, it’s very similar to an orthodox service anywhere else in the world, except it was in Malayalam.  A couple thoughts: 1) it was impressive that the church was full and all the participants stood and sang the entire liturgy from memory.  I have no idea what they were singing but only one or two people in the room used a book. 2) I can see how both Catholicism and Orthodoxy have done well in India; physically they are strikingly similar to Hinduism, what with the iconography, shrines and ritualistic incense.  The impulse to make fragrant offerings to a physical icon is found in both their Hindu and Christian practice. I joked that when you pass a house of worship in south India, you can only tell what faith it is by looking at the figurine inside the glass case and counting the arms.  Two arms=christian; four or more arms=hindu.  And it reminded us that our faith, which we learned in the west, is actually an eastern faith, and that’s probably why we don’t understand it well sometimes.

Goa: beach, breakfast, books, beer, and bsunsets

A short flight from Mumbai took us to Goa, the beach vacation destination of India.  There is a range of beaches here, from crowded, noisy spring break party spots for young Indians to serene and secluded stretches of sand barely touched by tourists.  Towards the latter end of the spectrum was our spot, Agonda Beach.  Recommended by fellow staff (Nan and Kate) with whom we rendezvoused, Agonda is a quiet and picturesque stretch of sand about 3km long on the Arabian Sea.  Based on appearances, the locals number in the 100s during the busy (winter) season.  There is exactly one road, lined with shops, which runs along the beach and is only partially paved.  The whole town (if you can call it that; it’s more of a fishing village) gives the feeling of existing, Brigadoon-style, for only 3 months each year. It’s one of the few places in India that serves convincing western food and drink, though the local seafood specials deserve top billing.

The beach itself is lined with rental huts, which range from about 500 to 4000Rs per night. We stayed at Rainbow huts, which was 600Rs/night ($12) and had the best food on the beach. A plate of Chinese noodles ran about $2 and a local beer was about $.80.  Though we didn’t get much in the way of cultural education (90% of the people on the beach were European tourists), it was a perfectly idyllic escape from the chaos that is typical of Indian travel. There is nothing to do in Agonda, which is what makes it great. It freed us up to accomplish a lot of nothing while we were there.

As for what that looks like, I will paint for you a picture.  With pictures.

rainbow beach huts and restaurant

the bustling main drag

sea kayaking for $2

evening cricket

these local ladies were harvesting something from the rocks and putting it in coconut shells

bethany doing the needful

local youths playing evening wolleyball

happy dog

doing the hard work of breakfast

bovine beachcombers

fisherman with his net