Danger Pay

WORKING AT A SOUTH INDIAN BPO: TAKE ONE

I learned something very important down in Brazil: what we conceive of as normal business practice in Canada and the US is not normal for the rest of the world. The high stress, fast paced world we know and love/hate is really rather unusual. A lot of the rest of the world doesn't just do things differently than we do, they actually often find us needlessly uptight, overwound, and tiresome.

That lesson has only been underlined so far in India... with a big thick black sharpie marker. Not only is keeping to any sort of schedule a foregone conclusion, but having people show up at all is nothing short of a miracle. I've learned some more things since starting work down here:

Lession 1: The value of unions.

There is no unions in the call centres.... yet. It shows. There aren't many unions in all of India. That shows too. There are a lot of people vying for jobs that pay as well as call centre work pays, and that shows too. This job means a lot for the people who are training. It means a salary that will support their whole family. When the employee is a young woman who was told she'd never need to finish school and braved on anyway, or another (true story) who adopted her cousin's child when the child's mother died in childbirth even though it would mean that she was giving up her chance at a normal life, and would forever be be presumed to be a slut single mother who had slept around before marriage? Well yeah.. that means more than just a job, it means a life, and dignity and pride.

And that's wonderful that it becomes possible today, but it still shows. There really isn't much in the way of positive reinforcement in the workplace. Recognition is rare, reprimands are plenty. Last week, one of the new trainees had a customer who wanted to escalate. The agent handed off the call to one of her supervisors. The call was pretty brutal, and was escalated again to the other inhouse trainer. All-in-all it took about 45 minutes to resolve. The agent, the team lead and the trainer all missed their breaks. The team lead told the agent that she was buying both him and the trainer dinner. We thought it was a joke; it wasn't.

It's not totally unusual for people to get cuffed in the back of the head for doing something wrong. It's not very hard and it's not unless the thing is very wrong, but man is it startling to deal with. There have been a number of times where I have run interference on the floor. What do the agents say about all of this? Well, just that this company is a *fantastic* place to work, and that they are very excited to be on board. I asked one of them surrepticiously about the discipline one day and she tilted her head to one side and looked at me like something had gotten lost in the translation. When I clearly restated, she laughed and asked me what I meant. "The call centre is very positive, very friendly. It is not like some other places I have worked before."

So I guess terrible is relative.

Lession 2: Health and Safety is of no concern at all.

This is true not just in the workplace, but all over India. At the hotel one night, Theresa took a spill in the hallway because the staff had run cables across the hall, and taken great care to tape the cables down in the most inconspicuous and invisible manner possible, taping black cables down with black tape to the one black stripe of tile in the hall. So the normally flat floor she walked on everyday suddenly had an obstacle.

In the streets, traffic is a crazy mad place. There are no speed limits in Chennai, nor are there lanes in most places. Horns are used as voices on the road rather than warnings. "I am here." one horn says, "Approaching quickly" says another. Cars cut in front of bikes and swerve around motorists in the most harrowing of ways. The majority of vehicles on the road are: autorickshaws (known locally as tuk-tuks because of the puttering noise that their little diesel engines make)



, older model cars like Ambassadors, Ashok Leyland style delivery trucks:



buses,



minivans, like the one that carry us to work and back



cows, bikecarts and bullcarts,



and a whack of crazy motorcycles and scooters, some of which carry way too much in the way of cargo...



or, say, whole families of five, without a single helmet between them:



(As a side note, the women here astound me with their incredible balance. They ride everywhere on the back of bikes sidesaddle, sometimes without holding on to the driver or the bike, sometimes with a sleeping toddler pressed against them, sometimes dozing themselves in the noise and the chaos.)

Everything weaves in and out and speeds and slows. I have seen tuk tuk drivers keep their distance from other vehicles by sticking a foot out and resting it against the other vehicle to keep distance between. I have seen them utterly destroyed and discarded by the side of the road. Still, considering the madness, there are much fewer accidents than one would expect.

This carries over into work and hotel life too. In the first week we were here, we blew a fuse in the hotel room, and the maintenance man who came to fix the trouble tested to see if the outlet was dead by inserting a bare metal rod into the socket. I thought he might just be a crazy mofo, but since then I've seen about three other guys at home and at work try the same manoever.

At work, I have seen a fan, one that likely once terminated in a western plug, stripped at the end with it's two bare wires poking directly into the socket for power. I've watched the guys on the worksite accross from my building set up crazy scaffolding of trunks and planks to start the new floor of construction.



It's a zoo... and it still works, and I've yet to see anybody hurt from it. It's like the Indians laugh... nay chortle... in the face of death. Actually, it's less that they laugh and more like they give it no mind at all.

To be continued....

Mamallapuram III - Superman and Babies

So Brand has covered Mahabs pretty well by now, but there was a couple of things that I wanted to add, that were more notes about our interaction with the people there than about what we saw.

We get a lot of attention in India, which makes us both unlucky and lucky. On one hand, our touristy appearance: white skin, Tilley hats, sunglasses and cameras are beacons to the every tout and beggar in eyeshot. Women, with terrifyingly thin and small little babies come in death defying starts across four lanes (or what would be lanes if the drivers in Tamil Nadu cared about such things) of traffic to knock on your window, chant "money, money, money" and make gestures at the child's mouth, suggesting that money might buy the food that lets the child live. The babies are always girls, the women always very much too old to be their mothers. We've been advised that the babies are usually either bought or found... the most disposable of children in a country for whom the female infanticide rate has been raising steadily. Better that the child have a chance with a beggar woman than to put her to death; better the sale of the child feed her brothers than to have everyone slowly starve this season; better prosperity now than destitution later when her wedding must be paid for.

In Mahabs, which, as a world heritage site, attracts visitors from everywhere - we saw all manner of Europeans and North Americans in the time we walked around town. Here, as opposed to Chennai, the beggars are less and the touts are more. Young men come to chat with you on street and to make friends. They help you find a good hotel, and talk to the hotel owner for you. Once they leave, all in smiles, the hotel room you have purchased for the night is twice as expensive as it would have been if you had come on your own. The rest of the money goes to the helpful young man. Now, this is the difference between 15-20 dollars and 10 dollars a night in the hotel, so it's not horrific, but when you were planning to go to the hotel anyway, it's annoying.

It's the same near the big sites. When Brand and I went to the Five Rathas, a little boy about 10 or 11 found us sitting by the side of the road cooling in the shade, and tailed us for three hours as we went to explore the Rathas, just to convince him to come back to his "family's shop". It may well have been his family, but most likely not, he just got some cash if we bought anything. He was actually pretty fun to have around, except for the times when he would tell us "Friends, OK friends, it is time to go", whenever we thought it was taking too long to look at this temple or that. Once we started drawing crowds that wanted to take pictures with us, suddenly it became less important to go back to the shop and more important to tell the crowds that we were friends of his.

So... crowds. Brand posted a picture of one of the crowds that came a running to have their picture taken with me at Indra's Elephant. That was just one of the many groups that found us that weekend. I could even understand wanting people to take pictures of us, because, well, I keep wanting to take pictures of them. I find it funny that people just want us to take pictures of them on our own cameras. - pictures that they won't get to take away. Most of the people who want this, speak very little English, which is often a sign of less education or lower class or caste. In any case, it's hard to find out why having their picture taken by someone else is so fun. My running theory at the moment, is is in the knowing that their picture will travel all the way across to the other side of the world, where people in a strange and distant land will see them. I guess it's not dissimilar to wanting to wave to a television camera.

The thing that amuses me most, though are the babies. All over Mahabs, people in different locations, who did not know each other would approach me drop their babies into my lap so that they could take a picture of me and the baby together. Sometimes they wanted to be in the picture, sometimes not. It happened at least 5 times while we were there.



I thought at first it was just because I'm a western woman, but none of the other expat women have had even a single baby foisted on them. Then Brand posited that it was because I am round bodied like some of the Hindu pantheon's fertility goddesses, but one of the other expats has a similar body type and, nope, nada. So I really don't know. I don't mind at all, because even if the pictures of me turn out as terribly as the one above (because they only happen after a long day of activity and sweltering heat and sweat and sunscreen and bugspray) I got to hold their very cute babies, and even if I don't know why me, I have to think it's complementary. You have to trust a foreigner a lot to put your infant in her arms - especially when you can't communicate with her at all.

Brand has his own adventures with kids. Krish, a Hindi superhero, while not as big in Tamil Nadu as it is in the rest of the country, is a very popular movie. Apparently, so was Superman Returns. Brand, the second day that we were in Mahabs, was wearing his T-Shirt with the Superman emblem on it, and all day long kids would come running to him and call out: Superman! Superman! Superman! It became all the more the rage, when we went to Krishna's Butterball, a giant boulder that is actually an outgrowth of a hill looking like it is precariously balanced and may roll down at any time.

Now Brand and I had just been to see a cave temple to Krishna in which there was a huge carving of Krishna holding up the mountain to save his people from the torrents of Indra, the rain god, who was unleashing unholy terror down from the heavens. I wanted Brand to take the cheesiest kind of picture, but going up the hill, standing under Krishna's Butterball, and pretending to hold it up, saving all the people that were sitting under it to have their pictures taken.



Now I was telling him to do it because of Krishna and the mountain, forgetting all about the Superman on his shirt, but when he got up there and posed, the entire crowd decided that it was the best thing that they'd ever seen, and everybody started laughing and taking pictures and yelling Superman! It was terrific.

The other one that Brand has gotten a lot is "Dr Jones!" because the very cool Tilly Hat that my sisters bought him for his birthday resembles (a little) Indiana Jones's hat. Media Iconography is huge here. They call movie stars (not just the characters that they play) heroes and heroines. It's probably related to the cultural prominence of religious idolatry in Hinduism.

Tonight we go to out in search of people celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi - the first night of Ganesh's special worship days. More on this in a bit.

Mamallapuram II

There was a time when the British were dominating India when they would stumble upon great and ancient ruins and ask the locals what they were and the locals would say they did not know. Half the time the locals hadn't even known the ruins were there, as large sections of them had been devoured by the wilderness and people thought of them only as sources of stone or a place where snakes bred. It was a common occurrence that a foreign commentator would remark that the Indians did not know, or seem to care, about their own history.

This was wrong in many ways, of course, as the Indians just cared about a different kind of history than that about which the Europeans were asking them. But for a long time under the Imperial yoke there was a sense in many parts of India that their own history was less important, less spectacular than that of others. Even into the years of Congress and Independence it was often a complaint from the educated elite of India that the common Indian had little sense of pride or history, little ownership in the past and thus little ownership in the future.

This weekend in Mamallapuram among the ancient temples and rock cut sculptures it was very crowded, and finding a place to stand still for long inside any of the temples could be a challenge. Some of the pictures that I took, especially of the Krsna temple, took quite a lot of waiting to get a moment when there was not a throng of people in the frame. And of all these thronging tourists, come eagerly to gape and gawk and the ruins of ancient splendor, there was barely a handful of faces that weren't those of India. There was an older Japanese couple, two Canadians that we all know and love, some backpacking Australians, and a bare handful of Americans. The rest of the crowd was Indian. They were there from Chennai and Mumbai and Dehli and Varanasi and Banglore and Gujarat. There were brahmins who had to get special parking for their Mercedes SUVs, farmers who came in hanging off the side of a beaten old buss, school tours full of children barely old enough to comprehend what they were seeing, and elderly renunciates come to spend their end years in among the relics.


Not only where they there, and in numbers and diversity, but they were there with pride. Any time I would stop to look in my Lonely Planet guide (because I was looking for a place to eat, mostly) someone would stop next to me and start to explain the history of the nearest monument. They would tell me of the Palavas and the Cholas and the Mughals and the coming and going of the British. Many were surprised when they found that I already knew something of these matters, but some just took it as a due. People should know about these things because they are important.

India, it seems, has a sense of itself. A sense of purpose and place. A sense of history. But the sense of the future… that is the sticky wicket, as it always is.

The same weekend that we were in Mamallapuram being told about the rise and fall of dynasties there were meetings happening all over India to determine the country's future. This last Tuesday was Independence Day, you see, and so there was a great commotion as people got ready to celebrate and to work to ensure that India became the country that they want it to be.

As part of these preparations there was a conference in our hotel in which members of various political and social groups got together to talk about their combined platforms. Among the things they wanted to do were increasing literacy and newspaper readership, give away TVs so that people will watch the news and the western media, and to oppose recent court decisions saying that only Brahmins can be priests. They want to spread the word about condoms and let young women think that it is alright to have sex before marriage as long as they are safe. They want to remove superstitions and replace them with scientific thought and close down the colleges of Vedic studies and open more seats in bioengineering colleges.


In Andhra Pradesh there was another meeting in which the heads of state agreed that it was best to not spend more money in order to increase westernized universities, but to start partly subsidizing ashrams as places of religious education while simultaneously increasing the backing of Vedic colleges. They issued a letter of support for the courts decision that only brahmins could be priests, and praised their people for resisting westernized media penetration.


But opposite as these meetings were, they were not the worst. They were both carried out with civil decorum and a sense of order. There were other meetings that did not go so well. A civil liberties union meeting in Rajastan was stormed by "nationalist" thugs who beat and intimidated the activists, screaming that their words were sedition and were intended to weaken the country. Local universities braced for more protests and possible violence over the possibility of state-mandate affirmative action programs that reserve a number of seats for low caste and tribal students. And Delhi was turned into a no-fly zone as multiple credible threats of terrorist activity were logged – and many of those were not international threats, but terrorists from in-house organizations. At least three artists were forced to flee the country that created the kama sutra for having the gall to make paintings of goddesses naked, and a woman was given a medal of award for her long work in making the sex trade more respected. Oh, and there was a school blown up in Sri Lanka because the government thought it might be a Tamil Tiger training base.

India has a sense of herself, and a sense of her past. But sometimes it seems like she might tear herself apart as she decides who she is going to be in the future. Even being here I don't get a full sense of what India is or who she will become.

Mamallapuram I

From ancient times there was a port at Mamallapuram, and Romans and Han alike came to trade there. It was the Pallava kings who started to build the port into something more, turning it from a mere place to trade into a city that would show their magnificence and power. For generations they built, and the sea port became a city, second only to the royal capital of Kanchiapuram.

It was at this time that the Chalukya's were rising to the north, a fierce dynasty descended from the ancient trader kings of Satavahana. So fierce was their reputation that it was said they could not be defeated, and that the thunder of the charge of their elephants was enough to throw down city walls by its sound alone. Hsuan Tsang, Buddhist monk and world traveler, listed the great Chalukya king Pulakesi II as one of the greatest lords of the earth – and as Hsuan Tsang had traveled from China to Persia and throughout all of Asia, he had reason to know what made a great lord.

Mighty Pulakesi turned his eyes southwards towards the Pallava's, and the wealth they gathered through their mastery of the South and the rich ports there. Bringing his elephants he met the visionary poet-king of the Pallavas, Mahendravarman, and defeated him in battle. The Pallavas were forced to hide behind the walls of Kanchipuram while the Chalukya's sacked and seized the wealth of the country.

Palakesi moved on in time, for there were other kingdoms to conquer, and his greed could not be sated. Mahendravarman passed on, and his son took the throne. Narasimhavarman I was a visionary like his father, who gave great endowments to artists and poets and priests, but he was also a great warrior. His prowess in unarmed combat was such that he was known as Mamallan – the great wrestler. He gathered up the scattered armies of the Pallavas and marched north to fight against Pulakesi. In a battle that shook the world and changed the history of India forever, the great wrestler defeated the unstoppable king, sacked his capital city, and ended his life.

Bringing back gold and glory, Mamallan turned his attention to the port city his father had started to invest and turned it into a marvel the whole world would envy. The greatest artisans of the day were brought in, temples and monuments were constructed, and the port was expanded. At its height the great port of Mamallan, know in his honor as Mamallapuram, sent ships to invade Sri Lanka, to trade with Malaysia and Thailand, and to colonize Cambodia in a wave that would help birth the great Khmer kings.

This trade brought great wealth into Mamallapuram, and its artisans learned to do things with stone that defied imagination. They built and built their city, carving dreams into stone and making them soar until the gods themselves looked on in amazement. And when the gods become amazed, mortals should know fear. For that amazement turns to jealousy, and jealous gods do not let the works of man remain to mock them.

The sea itself rose up against Mamallapuram. The most beautiful city of the earth was swallowed by the waves, until only a fraction of it remained. Once, it is said, there were seven great temples that marched from the center of town down to the shore and the ports. Of these brothers six were swallowed by the waters, leaving only one temple alone to watch the waves that had taken its city and its worshipers.

Nor was the sea done. Time and time again it would come against the Shore Temple and try to wrestle it into submission, to drag it beneath the waves with the rest of the lost city. Three times the sea nearly succeeded: in cyclone, in hurricane, and in tsunami the temple was battered and bruised. Once its cap stone was even dragged out into the water, and only the reverence of the locals allowed it to be saved – dragged out of the deeps and returned to its plinth.

Ages passed, and the grandeur of Mamallapuram was forgotten, fading only to dim memories and myths. Its great chariot temples were buried beneath the sand and lost to the eyes of men for a thousand years. Its harbor closed and became nothing more than local fishers who would not sail past the seventh wave. No longer was it a place that men in far lands spoke of with wonder. But even then the shore temple stood, and those who sailed past that point would look at it and wonder. Who built this great temple, this lookout who defies the gods and the sea itself, wrestling with both time and tide?

In time it was that great wrestler who brought men of science to the city. They uncovered the rathas beneath the sand, they recovered the lost names of kings who had ruled the Indian ocean from this port, and in time they even found the ruins of the greatest city under the waters of the Bay of Bengal. And through it all the Shore Temple stood, watching the watery grave of its brothers and marking a still point in which the past refused to die.

It is the great wrestler of Mamallapuram. For 1338 years it has stood against the gods, the ocean, and time itself. While the whole city it watched over was swept away, while dynasties were ground into dust, while foreigners invaded and were driven out again, and while India forgot and finally rediscovered itself it has fought against all. Though scarred and battered, it stands and watches the waves so that its brothers, its past, and its kings will not be forgotten.

Come in to my bathroom, said the spider to the Mo

Sorry I've been letting Brand do all the talking. Between the strange hours, the work, the errands and the pool, I get very little chance to post. Plus, he creates more amusing posts than I, so I figure you're all enjoying yourselves.

So last weekend in Pondi, Brand mentioned my marvelous adventure with the shower. You have to understand a couple of things to fully get a sense of this story...

It is pretty common in Indian hotels that are only trying a little hard to be western styled to have a fully tiled bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower, and no division between them. Where there is a western style toilet, its plumbing, for the most part, works like a normal toilet, except that often there is two places to flush it, which provide different amounts of water. Brand and I haven't quite figured that one out yet.

Often though, the shower (and sometimes, as we found out in a restaurant in Mahabs this weekend, the urinals, ick) don't actually have full plumbing. Instead, they have a drain that leads to a flexible tube, that empties over a regular drain in the floor. Where there is an open shower in the room too (one with no walls) that drain under the sink is the same one that serves the shower. Sometimes the floor will be slightly slanted to make the water move that way, sometimes there will be a groove, most often, it seems that the water is just left to it's own devices.

So, the bathroom at The Dune was a circular hut about 10 feet in diameter with a six foot tall cement wall around it. Above that wall was thatched, wide roof that is held up on pillars above it. The benefit of this was that while you took a shower, the breeze from the Bay of Bengal would come in and blow around you, feeling rather delightful. After the hot 4 km walk through the 39 degree heat with 85% humidity (which translates into 48 or 50 on the Humidex), I felt like I'd just won this week's Reward Challenge.

The Hanuman looking fellow in the picture is just a little wall that stands before the door of the bathroom so no one can see you as you dress.



The other thing you should know, is that no one that has ever met me in person has ever mistaken me for a girly kind of girl. I'm not particularly squeamish, I don't notice when I break a nail, I get dirty, I kill my own bugs. When I was in the amazon a couple of years ago and I saw a foot long centipede squiggle it's way across my path, all I did was swear because I didn't have my camera in my hands.

But when I saw this Cthuloid beast in my shower, I shrieked like a 1950's housewife.

Ugly! Bugly! And it sort of ran in all directions at once! And then it hid beside the sink and stayed in the room. So I shriek, and Brand comes running, and when he sees it, he gives a squicked sound of his own. He takes off his shoe and tries to nudge it to move it up over the wall and get it to leave us alone, but it would not be ousted. In fact, as Brand found out quite terrifyingly, they also jump. It was that moment that, as much as his intentions were all about ahisma, his instincts were all about survival, and the spider went splat... and I do mean splat. I have never seen such a wet splooch of a dead bug in all my life, and frankly, I could do without doing so again.

So I spent some time on the interwebs and finally figured out what kind of spider it was... Brand and I agree, the Cthuloid beast is called a Huntsman, or a Fisher Spider. If you click on the picture below, it will open to one that is closer to life size.



And I'm glad that it's only in retrospect that I know that Huntsmen can often be found hanging out in groups. Eeeeee!

Is it too cold sir?

Two days ago I was in Hip Asia, a trendy and ultra-modern pan-Asian resturant in Chennai, hanging out and pretending to be cool enough to be there while sipping a cranberry and pineapple juice served tall with crushed ice. It was all a bit too Tokyo for me to pull off, and so I was playing it low key and going slow on my juice.

The waiter then comes over to me and asks, "Sir, is your drink too cold?" I replied that no, it was too tart and so I was taking it slow while I waite for my satay. I figured that it was some sort of indication from the staff that I didn't belong there.

Today I'm in the Verandah (a word that came from India, btw) -- a much more low key cafe downstairs in the hotel. I'm driking a sweet lime juice (like an orange juice but with lime and lots of sugar) served tall with crushed ice, and just enjoying the day and a long slow sip. The waiter, who likes me a lot and stops by to chat on occasion, comes over and says, "Sir, is your drink to cold?"

I give him the stink eye and he becomes afraid. The staff here is terrified of pissing off Americans because we're so wildly unpredictable. See, we don't signal what we want by doing things like calling across the room to get a waiter to come to us, or making eye contact and a hand gesture to get the bill when we want it. We sit there quietly and wait, expecting that (as at home) the waiter will magically know what we want. When they don't we get irked, and tend to get snappy and pissy and rude. But things don't work that way here, so in their eyes we just sit there enjoying the day, and then get explosivly pissed for no reason.

So now my waiter thinks I've gone and done that American thing, and I ask him what, exactly he means by that. "The ice, sir" he explains, "it makes the drink very cold."

"Yes" replies I, dry "that is the function of ice."

He pauses a long moment, and then says, "For many people it makes the drink too cold."

"Gopinatha" says I, finally twigging on, "do you ever drink cold drinks? Drinks with ice or pop from a freezer?"

"No sir. Most of the people I know do not. We drink our water and soda much warm."

So yea, the waiter at the trendy place wasn't slagging me. He was really concerned that I was finding my drink too cold. I now need to go back and tell him, "In Canada/America the only time a drink is too cold is when it is a solid block of ice. Even then its okay if we can crush it up and make it into a slurpy."

Culture shock, it gets you when you're not paying attention.

Nataraja

Shiva Nataraja dances the universe in and out of being. He is one of the most popular gods in Tamil Nadu, and copies of the famous Chola bronzes of him can be found in every art store in Chennai -- both those for tourists and those for the locals. Natraja is birth and death, beginning and end, preserver and destroyer. His dance rolls on above everything, through everything, and is the source of everything. He danced this world into life, eventually he will dance it out again.

Anna Salai is one of the main streets in Chennai. At any hour of the day or night it is crowded with a million motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, old junk Asian cars, and fancy European sports vehicles and SUVs with tinted windows. There are only sidewalks every so often, and so most of the time the thick foot traffic shares the road with the cars and bikes. Things like lanes and traffic signals are only as real as concrete barricades can make them, and it is common to see someone driving backwards, the wrong way, around a corner, through a red light. Despite the confusion and the crowd, however, it all works. The chorus of horns and honks, the gestures of hands and expressions of faces, all come together to give the street an energy that washes everything and everyone along with it. Eventually, everyone gets where they are going.



Along this street today I saw a group of private school kids, just out from classes, crowding around the entrance to a private club where a devadesi ("god dancer" - a professional temple dancer in the old style of classical Hindu dance) was giving a performance. She was beautiful, her movements telling a story of love and loss with the perfect mudras developed over thousands of years. The children pressed in as close as they could without being disrespectful, calling out in English and Tamil and Hindi and laughing with small, high voices. This was all not more than 10 feet from four busses vying with each other to pass a parked auto-rickshaw on a street not wide enough for two busses abreast. The kids eventually passed on into the movie theatre, the dancer went inside. Eventually, everyone gets where they are going.

Two minutes and a block later, just past a subway terminal, there was an old man dying. His ragged, stained clothes had fallen off of him while a police officer tried to help him sit up. His naked, brown ass was covered in his own shit, which formed a puddle around his toothpick thick thighs. A handful of citizens had stopped around him, trying to help the cops or just stopping to watch because they knew there was nothing they could do but mark the moment. I was one of them. I wanted to help, wanted to do something, anything at the last moments of this man whose life had obviously been long and full of suffering. But the police were already there, and were motioning us away. And while I watched he coughed, rolled his old head with the stringy white hair back, and stopped breathing. When I asked the cop what he had died of, he was silent a long moment while bobbling his head. Finally he said, "Of being alive."

Ten feet away traffic continued on. The police took his body away, and everyone went on to wherever they were going. Anna Salai never stopped, India rolled on. Eventually we all get where we are going.

Done well, Nataraj has a peaceful face, serene and calm and reasuring. However, if the artist isn't careful it becomes arrogant.

Pondy

This weekend Mo and I went to the Union Territory of Pondicherry. Said territory was the center of French presence in South India for some hundreds of years, until the French finally pulled out in 1954*. As such it has an odd ambiance that puts it in contrast with the dirty, hectic pace of Chennai. There are still beggars and touts on every corner, but in Pondicherry they beg in French and Hindi rather than English and Tamil. The roads are still dirty, overcrowded, and without a sense of traffic law -- but they are dirty, overcrowded and lawless with class.

The drive out to Pondy was an experience of its own. The countryside of Tamil Nadu is spectacular, full of conconut palms and sudden hills that rise as unexepected as waves upon a calm pond. And everywhere are little villages with their Ravana effigies hung to keep away the evil eye and women in saris as lovely as dawn sitting in the dust at roadside and waiting for a bus.


While in Pondy Mo and I went to Manakula Vinayagar Temple. Unlike many of the temples I've been talking about seeing on this trip, Manakula is a living temple. It is large and bustling and full of people coming to do puja to Lord Ganesh. It is also, despite the golden roof on the holy of holies, something of an ugly temple. Lacking the grace of the northern temples or the cosmological elegance of the classical Dravidian, its strength lies in the fact that it is pulsingly alive. Going into the temple feels like going into the belly of an elephant, hot and churning and overwhelming with the constant motion and heat.

Before going in we were blessed by the temple elephant, a beast with the wisest eyes I have ever seen on an animal. It was an amazing sight, and everyone in our group noted it -- the elephant seemed a bit wise and a lot sad with the kind of distantly beneficent expression you will sometimes see on the faces of holy men when they aren't guarded around their ambivalence about the world. For those that worry at such things, I checked the elephants legs, ears, and mouth and there were no signs of abuse. In fact, he looked well pampered and quite content in the physical plane.

Inside our guide led us through the temple, and got us a special blessing from the priest inside. He asked our names and then chanted mantras before the sacred golden Ganesh at the heart of the temple, marking our foreheads with ash and giving us both a lotus blossom to hold well as a banana to eat. The mantras were in Sanskrit, but other than OM I could not understand it, nor could I follow the Tamil the priest spoke to us after the formal blessing. It gave the whole affair a sense both of the mysterious and the ridiculous, holy and dirty all at once.

By the time we were leaving both Mo and I were dizzy with the heat and the smoke and the press of the people, and we worried that we would sweat the ashes away from our foreheads. We shouldn't have worried, as the ashes stick quite well. And should you happen to get them on your shirt or the face of your watch, your shirt or watch will retain the blessed touch for quite some time. No matter how much you try to wash said blessing away.


The hotel we stayed at was an eco-friendly resort run by locals who wanted to find a way to make a resort that would be friendly to the earth and the local community rather than just exploiting them. Each room was a hut of its own, done in different themes. Mo and I ended up with the Mud Hut, done in a rather eclectic style combining an African tribal home and a North Indian desert hut. It had thick walls of baked mud and brick, a thatched roof, and an old Victorian cast iron bed with mosquito netting to keep us from being eaten in the night. There was no AC, in the 38c/100f night, but the hut was designed to maximize the breeze coming in off the beach from the Bay of Bengal. It worked near dawn, but most of the night was hot and sticky and hard to sleep through.

Mo had an extra adventure with a 6 inch banana spider in the bathroom, but I'll leave her to talk about that.

The second day, rather than going into Pondy proper, Mo and I went to the little villages that were near the resort. There were two, one near the beach and one up near the main road to Pondy. The beach town was new, having been rebuilt in the wake of the tsunami by an Italian charity group. The startling whiteness and extremely non-Indian architecture of the houses made the whole thing pop right out of its surroundings, and drew Mo and I towards it on our way to the beach.



The locals were a bit hesitant about us at first, and several children approached us to ask why we were there. When we responded "Because we want to meet people" one of them told us "People here do not do that" and another said, "The people here are Tamils, you cannot speak to them." Meaning, of course, that they spoke no English.

As it turns out both of the nay-sayers were wrong. Eventually a group of locals involved in charity work approached us, and we had a conversation in broken English and Mo's 10 words of Tamil that ended with the day being spontaneously declared International Friendship day. They then took us and introduced us to the head of the local Indian Youth Federation, who was not at all impressed with us, but seemed to think we were harmless enough. After we finished speaking with him nearly every child in the village came out to ask us who we were and where we were from. Apparently we were dangerous and unknown until an adult approved of us, and then we were fit to be mobbed with questions.

Up the road was a much older, poorer village. The low huts were filled with folk who were cooking over fires made with stacks of manure of some sort or another, giving the whole area a pungent, cloying scent. We made it about half way through the village before a local ran out, showed us his cell phone, and then said, "CAMERA! CAMERA!" with such enthusiasm you'd think we'd brought him a birthday present. As it happened Mo did have a camera, and the moment she took it out half of the village lined up to get their pictures taken.



It was something to experience. Little boys would dare each other to go next. Girls came down from the far side of town, nerved themselves up, and then chickened out at the last moment. The men of the village either hung back or mugged it up for the camera. For everyone the act of having a picture taken was a big deal, and when we would show them their pictures in the camera's display they would laugh and laugh and tease each other. Only once everyone had seen their picture were we allowed to go, with much laughing and patting on the back. We promised to send prints of the pictures back, but I don't think they understood us.

The trip, as a whole, was exactly how I wanted to spend my first weekend in India. There was a balance of things that felt right to me: the fading colonial past, the rich and trendy resort present, and through it all the chanting at the temple and the hard and touching realities of the village life that has been the backbone of India for over 5000 years. High and low, I felt like the lotus opened for just one minute and I was allowed to glimpse its heart.

*Historical Details: It is worth noting that the area around Pondy is actually much older than this. It's first mention is under the name Poduke in a Greek document describing the Roman trading posts of the 1st century AD. Roman pottery and coins have been found in the area, and it was probably one of the ports that caused Pliny to complain that Rome was draining itself dry of gold and silver in order to purchase Indian spices and silks. Since then it has been home and host to trading fleets of all the great South Indian dynasties, the Pallavahs, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Vijayanagar and a Sultan or two. Modern Pondy, however, was set up by the French in 1673 at by the time they were done there was little left of the older towns. So though, as with so much of urban India, there are parts of Pondy that are thousands of years old but the actual structure of it is only from the 1800's on. When you're there you get a faint sense of France, but no sense at all of Rome or Satavahana or even the Sultans.

Otell

The Taj is a heritage hotel, the only one in Chennai. It is old and lovely, with a definate sense of "A Passage to India" about it. There are times when walking the halls and studying the faces of the Lords of England and Rajas of the Princely States of India that I feel a bit out of time, like some Lovecraftian investigator being teased into a world that isn't quite in geometric harmony with the world I was born into.

It doesn't help that its hard to not like being pampered by a well trained staff of beautiful, intelligent people. One of the waitresses in the cafe is one of the three most beautiful women I've ever seen. She turns me into a suttering idiot every time I talk to her, and every time I mouth some gibberish at her she laughs and smiles like I was the most charming man she'd ever met.

She has the face of one of the princesses in the paintings in the hall, one of the ones whose nation was destroyed by the British. I have a face not dissimialar to one of the Brits.

But the rooms are lovely.

Will Not Enter... CAVE OF DEATH

You expect international trips to be long and tiring. You expect trips that you take to exotic locals to have challenges and trials along the way. What you don't expect is the point where you suddenly realize you're one Twinkie short of a box and are about to snap because there is a scorpion in your shower. But perhaps I should back up and start from the beginning.

I left my condo in Toronto at 2:45 on Tuesday, August 1. I dropped the keys for the subletter off at the front desk, climbed into an air conditioned cab and started my trip in good time and good order. I got to Pearson International Airport, and due to the fact that I was traveling alone was able to jump past the lineups of families and get checked into my flight 15 minutes after coming in the door. All was good. All was lovely. I got some food, and sat about reading and waiting for boarding.

Boarding comes, and it quickly becomes obvious that the flight is completely full. No elbow room for me. It is only when I get onto the plane, however, that I realize how little elbow room I'm actually going to have. See, they've put 6' 2", 275lb me into a bulkhead seat next to the restroom – just in the perfect place to have the restroom door hit me every time someone opens it. But it isn't like anyone is going to use the restroom on a plane with 500 passengers and a 23 hour flight, right? And, because of that whole "completely full" thing, I couldn't make them change my seat. Nor could I find anyone dumb enough to switch seats with me. I almost got this old Sikh man to do it, but at the last moment his daughter figured out what I was doing and cursed me that "my balls would burn in a demon's mouth." After that no one on the plane wanted to talk to me.

Under the best of conditions I have trouble sleeping while traveling. I can't sleep in a plane or a car, and so I knew this flight was going to be on the long side. But when you have a bathroom door hitting you in the shoulder ever 5 minutes, it's hard to do anything at all to make the tedium and annoyance go away. I'd try to read (Summerland, by Michael Chabon) and WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! would go the door, and down, down, down would go my ability to concentrate. To rub salt into the wound at one point the lovely stewardess came over and asked me to stop growling at people coming out of the bathroom. Then she asked me to stop growling at her. She was cute, so I managed to comply.

I think the only reason I survived that flight was that there was a lovely woman named Anu seated next to me. She was a Delhi native who had been living in Toronto for 9 years, and she was happy to chat with me the whole flight about Delhi and India and moving to Toronto and everything else under the sun. She also gave me her phone number so that when I get back home I can call her when I want Indian food, as it turns out her family owns the fanciest Indian Restaurant in town. Of course, I lost the number.

But what about the views? Well let me tell you, that was something. I was flying over Newfoundland, London, Paris, Zurich, the ancient Zagros Mountains and Hindu Kush. Places historic and cultural, known for their beauty and majesty. Because I love you all, I will share pictures of these views.

Paris


Zurich


Iran


Ah, the memories.

All good things must end, but despite that my flight ended too. I came into Delhi at Indira Gandhi International Airport at 11:30 pm on Wednesday August 2. All I had to do was wait 10 hours, make it to the Domestic Terminal, and catch my flight to Chennai and all would be well. I was tired and strung out, yes, and had a huge bruise on my shoulder, but here I was in India and everything would be good. Until I remembered customs.

Everyone who has been to India warned me about customs in Delhi. It is a nightmare, they said, both in and out of the country. You can expect 3 hour lines and then to have every item in your luggage inspected, cataloged, and probed. The reality, however, was me being waved through by a bored looking guard who didn't even bother to look at my declarations slip. I just flew by, and figured that the worst of everything was over.

Never figure this. Ever. It never is. In fact, I think that it is some sort of taunt to the demons that control shit travel experiences to assume that the worst is over, for the moment you do is the moment they go into overdrive.

While wheeling my luggage about in the airport, looking for a money exchange and the pre-paid taxi service that the Lonely Planet guide assures me will be easy to find, I somehow make a grave error. I step, for one second, over the line between the arrivals area and the visitors lounge. In that moment I cross from the sane world into the world of half-awake nightmares.

You know those moments in movies where they show that the protagonist is going through an intense emotional experience such as extended insomnia or a near-psychotic break by doing strange things with the film speed? Cranking it up then slowing it down, dragging the shutter so that everything that moves leaves a blurred trail behind it, shifting to odd lens types so that everything is off center and out of focus? Well, it turns out that 24 hours without sleep, with naught but airplane food to eat, and the confusion of a huge and massively crowded airport terminal are the magical formula to turn your real life perceptions into just such a montage.

So, I stepped over the line. I went to step back. A man with a machine gun steps into my way and screams at me in Hindi, pointing me out the door and gesturing with the barrel of his gun. Not wanting to taunt happy fun Hindi, I go out the door and find myself in the parking lot. Then the taxi drivers jump me. 15 of them see my white skin, startled and vulnerable face, and obvious tourist outfit and start to holler, "OH SIR, GOOD SIR, DO YOU NEED A TAXI SIR!" They press in around me, forming a demented football huddle in which I'm the quarterback trying to call a play to a group of loud men with mustaches. I back up away from them, putting them off as well I can with statements of how I'm going to take the bus (to which they reply that there is no bus, it blew up) and make for another door back into the terminal.

Getting there, another man with a machine gun tells me that there is a 60 rupee fee to enter the airport. I explain that I have no rupees, only American dollars, and he gives me the hairy eyeball and allows me to go to the Thomas Cook counter to change my money – so long as I take an armed escort with me. My escort packed both Uzis and breasts, and both of them looked like the could kill you seven times before you hit the floor. The guys at the Thomas Cook place don't even blink when I show up followed by two women in military uniform, both carrying SMGs. I get the impression that it happens all the time. I get my money, all in large notes, and go back to give the guard a 100. He takes it, gives me a receipt and no change, and then looks at me flatly for a moment. When I go to ask for my change he says in a very low voice, "There is nothing else, right, sir?"

If I were a braver man, or if I had been in a sane mode of mind I might have said something cool like, "Yes, some honesty in the way you run this airport." But what I said was "No" and then walked away. He and the two babes with Uzis split the extra 40 rupees up between them before I'd even gotten out of sight.

I found the taxi stand, and was immediately told that I needed to check into a hotel for the night, as the domestic airport closes at midnight. Now this scam I knew about, and so I told them off and asked that they please just take me where I wanted to go. So they asked for 1000 rupees, and I smartly argued them down to 450. I later found out that the standard fee between terminals is like 100, but it felt good at the moment. This lesson shall remain with me: in India, when you haggle you have to actually be fully awake and sane if you hope to get a good price.

The taxi ride is long and dark, with a wiry little man who doesn't speak to me the whole trip. His boss loaded me and the luggage into the car, and was as polite as anyone you'd ever meet. (He should be, considering what I was paying him.) But the actual driver? He only spoke four words to me, and those were as soon as we pulled away from the international terminal: "I don't like you." After that it was 15 minutes with him going the wrong way down a highway, playing chicken with semi trucks, and me wondering if I was going to end up on the news.

Luckily I get dropped at the domestic airport without any machete action happening, and as I pull my bags out the driver says to me, "I don't like you" and then drives off before I can tip him. (Considering what taxi drivers here normally do for a tip, I guess that means that he very much did not like me.) I am then very aware that no one is moving around the airport, and all the lights inside are out. As it turns out the scam was not a scam – the Delhi airport really does close at midnight. It also happens to be not next to anything visible in the dark of the night, just a long black stretch of road along which things with eyes bright and reflective in the darkness lurked.

I got my bags to the door where another guard with a machine gun waited for me, looking not impressed. I told him I had no money, and that I had a flight leaving in the morning. I asked if I could stay in the airport until then. He eyed me, he checked my passport, my ticket, my boarding pass for the flight I'd just come into India on, then made me stand next to another guard to see if I was taller than him, and then laughed and took 50 rupees from the other when it turned out he was shorter than me. After this the let me into the airport, telling me to keep quiet and out of the way. They pointed me to an isolated corner, and when I got there I found a Swiss family camped out, hiding between the snack bar and the bathrooms. They hushed me when I tried to speak to them and told me, "We are not supposed to be here. Do not speak."

Having been so shunned, I tried to sleep. But the cleaning crews were coming through at that point, and the airport got very loud and stayed that way for hours. Around 3 in the morning the guards started letting other people in as well, and soon it was too crowded to even lie down, and my ability to end the pain that was growing in my brain was quashed. In a haze I wandered into the bathroom, to find to my joy that they were Indian style bathrooms.

For those that don't know what an Indian style bathroom is, it is a fancy hold in the ground with a little tap so that you can wash off your left hand after you've squatted, pooed, and wiped yourself with said hand. Being beyond caring, I found that it's less gross than you'd think, but that its much harder to keep your balance than would be expected. I washed my hands thoroughly afterwards, and that's when I spotted the shower.

How lovely a shower would be, I thought. It would refresh me and cleanse the sweat and grime of 36 hours of solid travel in the same clothes. So I went over to the shower and found that there were a few problems. First, it had no latch or lock on the door. Second, it was full of slime. A think grey slime that completely coated the back wall. Third, there was the scorpion.

Yes, you heard right. It was large and black and running about in a very agitated manner in the little hole that formed the drain for the shower. I decided, at that moment, that I was not going to enter the cave of death and returned to the terminal sans shower.

After that I remember having a discussion about religion with a man from Rome, who was Buddhist, and a man from Banglore, who was Roman Catholic. I tried to tell them about being LDS, and then realized that the whole thing was turning into a joke and stopped. I'd like to tell you more about that conversation, but I can't really remember most of it. Or, I should say, I can vividly remember looking at them and seeing their lips moving, but I cannot actually remember them saying much of anything. It's sort of like I was watching the world with mute on.

After that I only had 7 hours more in the terminal, as my flight was delayed twice. By the time I finally got on the plane, the whole world was changing colors around me. But the moment I was on board everything changed again. As I left north India behind and headed towards Tamil Nadu, everyone suddenly became nice. People on the plane helped me with my luggage. They gave me a row all to myself so that I could stretch out. They gave me extra water and a wet cloth so I could wash my face. They even brought me some candy that the stewardess had in her own bag.

And when I landed at Chennai airport, I found my bags sitting there waiting for me. No wait, no line, just my bags right there. Someone gave me a cart even, and helped me to the door. And when I got there, Mo was there with a hired driver, an AC car, and a hug. We couldn't kiss though, because PDAs are a no-no here. In fact the week before I got here a club was shut down by the government because there was a picture in the paper of a man kissing a woman on the lips while they were dancing at the club.


But kisses or no, I was so happy I almost ended up in tears in front of a large group of Tamils. I think they thought I was cute, because a few of them patted me on the back as I made my way through the crowd.

We got to the hotel in no time, and Mo tells me that I ate some dinner, talked to some of her work friends, and then went to bed. I don't remember anything past the front doors of the hotel though, and so I'll end my tale there: 3:45 on Thursday August 4 – 48 hours after it started.

And.... they're off!

So here I am in Chennai! The trip yesterday (and the day before) was very, very long. I left on Monday at about 6 pm and arrived Wednesday morning at 1 am, with a four hour stopover in Frankfurt. In that window, I learned about one of the big advantages to business class travel: the shower. Oh -man- I've never had a better shower in my entire life. After the first leg, I was drained and achy and strung out. One hot shower later I'm good as... well as good as anyone running on three hours of sleep can be.

My heart just aches for Brand right now, who must be terribly, terribly exhausted somewhere en route from Zurich to Delhi, and who has a 12 hour layover with a terminal change still to go. He thought he had an entropic fog going on when he went to get his Visa... I'd say he hasn't seen anything yet. I'll go pick him up at the airport tomorrow afternoon at 1 pm, and bring him home and tuck him in our (very hard) bed.

The hotel is beautifully appointed, and despite the fact that I'd seen a dozen pictures of the pool, none of them really did it justice. It is, in fact the largest pool in Chennai. On one end of the pool there us a screened hut complete with a Droni that is used for Ayurvedic treatments and massage. I've already been perusing the treatments available, and I'm suspecting I may indulge while we are here.

Just here, and already we have plans for the weekend (that I really hope that Brand is up to doing). We'll be going to Pondicherry, the so-called "French Riviera of the East" and staying overnight to see the local sites there.

That's about all I have to report for the moment. I haven't ventured out into the wider world as of yet. Until Brand arrives, I'm just trying to shake my jet lag, and get aquainted with the other expats. More soon. :)