Trains & Temples: Bulls & Barbed Wire

I am writing again in Chennai after returning yesterday with Mirza on the train (my first in India) from the village. Last night I stayed with Santosh, a graduate student in politics here at the University, in his dorm room. Santosh's dorm faces the Bay of Bengal. You can stand on the roof and watch the sunrise over the water - and then walk down to the beach where there are tons of rickety old wooden boats the locals take into the sea to fish. With no visible means to propel themselves I asked Santosh how the boats manuver in the ocean. He said that they buy old honda dirt bikes - rip out the motors - and then attach them to small propellers. This evidently is also how they would move Tamil refugees from the Jaffna Penninsual in northern Sri Lanka during the war.

Spending time with Santosh has been an introduction to religious India. Last night we walked from his dorm on the beach into the Triplicane neighborhood of Chennai. Parts of Triplicane were built hundreds of years ago before the arrival of the British and there are warrens of small streets and alleys filled with people, bikes, motorcycles, auto-ricksaws and cars (at least the buses don't attempt travel there). At the center of the neighborhood is a 400 year old temple that Santosh visits every evening for his prayers. As we neared the temple there was a procession making its way through the streets with a band and Brahmins in white robes carring one of the idols from the temple. The temple is massive, taking up a giant city block, with room after room with priests and idols and flowers and incense and stone carvings. We moved from room to room and Santosh said his prayers to each God - I could enter everywhere except for the chamber with the main God.

Before returning to Chennai we celebrated the Pongol (harvest) holiday at the school. Ramu's mom brought us (Ramu and a contingent of 8 students and me) one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten. Pickeled coriander sauce and sweet rice with cardomom and one million other dishes eaten on bannana leaves. Before we ate Ramu's mom conducted a service setting up a small fire on a pathway on the school grounds and making an offering of flowers, coconut and other fruits for Pongol. Each of knelt and passed our hand other the flame dabbing our forehead with the ashes in turn.

On that same day we hiked to the top of a hill near the school to survey the landscape. On the trail up I got caught up in some vicious thorns that are everywhere in this part of the interior of Tamil Nadu that penetrate your clothes (and then body) at an angle so that when you tear away it will cause maximum damage. After carefully extricating myself we hiked to the top of the hill. On one side the school and a modern Indian village in the distance with the haze of fires, loudspeakers alternately blasting Hindu devotional music, Bollywood style numbers, and what seems to be Tamil language hip hop, along with concrete and paved (albeit mightily potholed) roads and powerlines. On the other side was a green jungle of thorn bushes, palm trees, and a smaller village of mud brick houses with straw roofs and rice fields.

That night we obtained fish from the village and walked back to the school and made a bonfire. Because the school is vegetarian we walked to a neighboring pasture after dark to eat our fish by moonlight surrounded by a chorus of frogs and grasshoppers and wild dogs ready to move in to consume our scraps after we left.

On Monday, the last day of the Pongol festival, I was walking back to the school from drinking tea in the village in the late morning when I saw twenty boys and men leading a bull with huge painted horns through the streets by a pair of ropes. I followed them to a dirt lot in front of a Hindu shrine where hundreds of villagers had gathered and there were more groups of people with their own bulls with painted horns and other decorations. The men were on the street and most women were watching from fenced gardens or doorways or rooftops. I soon discovered why when one group and then another released their bulls to freedom and general pandemonium. In one terrifying instance I was standing in the middle of the street and bull charged right at me after I thought it was going to go a different way. Everyone else had cleared out into side streets. I ran (losing one sandal in the process) towards the nearest doorway along a barbed wire fence. About halfway there I realized I couldn't possibly make it to the doorway in time and my choices were the bull or the barbed wire fence that someone had helpfully constructed around an unused garbage strewn lot. I glanced over my shoulder and realized that the bull had caught up with me but that he had no interest in impaling me and instead was running alongside to the cleared street and freedom.

Tomorrow I will give a lecture at the University of Madras entitled "The Politics of Mobilization" by Mr. Ryan Patrick Greenwood - at least that is what it said on the flyers Ramu printed up. Then we will return to the village where a group of people from Assam will conduct a workshop on building with bamboo. From there who knows. After attending various guest lectures and classes yesterday at the University and making plans with the other students to return to the village, Ramu told me, "you are no longer just a guest - you are now part of our system here!" I'll embrace that wherever it leads.

Ryan