India?...um...well, thanks for asking again... I've been procrastinating on this one, frankly, because I'm still sorting it all out. They warned us on the ship against wasting our short time in India attempting to evaluate it as it came in. "Take it in, take it in! You can sort it out later." Most of us are still processing the experiences we had there. Approaching India, we tried in the Core lectures to present a "balanced picture," whatever that is. Too often in the past, we were warned, the SAS Core had dwelt on the poverty in India and neglected the cultural achievements, to the particular horror of Indian students on board. So we were determined to stress the positive, while still preparing students adequately to take in all aspects of the experience--we even included one presentation on the cultural relativity of "dirt." So what happens? After our presentations, our Indian interport student sternly admonishes the ship not to "romanticise the poverty" of India. Ouch--right on target. So forgive my naivete, if I still seem a little confused about how to frame my India experiences--do I tell you about the cultural glories or the other stuff? You are aware of both my own India innocence and the absurd itinerary we attempted (and accomplished!) there in five days. Without much opportunity for walking around--my best way of gathering impressions--I misdoubt my reactions. I'm still taking it in.

Enuf prologue and apologizing. Clearly I'm still procrastinating.

OK, first, here's the cheery travelogue. By all touristic measures the time in India was a great success, both pleasant and fascinating. Read it if you like, or scroll down farther for the good stuff.

Madras (Chennai, whatever). Arrival in port was a little like the start of a raga: a slow, careful maneuvering with everyone attentive, no one sure what to expect. It was a little discouraging at first, beginning with the lighthouse, badly painted once with free-hand attempts at checkerboard, and the decrepit tugs that pushed us around the harbor. But at the dock, what an exhilarating rush of sounds, colors, and smells! A noisy little band of double-reeded nagaswarams and drums piped us in, and behind them a sweep of ladies in dazzling saris, tall mustached soldiers in fatigues, the vehicles a veritable museum of living fossils: auto-rickshaws, Enfield motorcycles, locally-made and unchanged since 1954, and that car that looks like an old Volvo and seems only to come in white. Decrepit, magnificent Victorian spires and domes rose above the docks and railroad tracks. Bob-the-music-prof, a one time resident and scholar of South Indian drumming, pointed out out all the accoutrements of the Raj: the train station, city hall, the university, all overtaken by dust and noise. And the musicians, he explained, were all members of the rather low barber's caste. Why? Because barbers handle the unclean body and its debris, and somehow this is analogous to allowing a double reed in your mouth. It makes sense if you look at it right. Welcome to India.

A wild, swaying ride through traffic in a fleet of auto-rickshaws brought our group of twenty-some to the University, where Bob had arranged for a concert by his faculty friends and their students. The music faculty was in a dusty, hot warren with an Edwardian tower and motorbikes heaped by a tree in the courtyard. It stank; the Ghoom River, a holding-tank for the city's sewage, festers just next to the campus, ruining any relief one might get from a cool north breeze. With growing misgivings, we shuffled past dim caves opening off the corridor, one lit only by the screen of a PC, flickering on a small group of students. At the entrance to the music classroom we were daubed on the forehead with sandalwood paste by our radiant hosts and welcomed inside. The students crowded onto the blanketed cement floor of the music classroom, Bob led to a a throne of honor at the front, I with my grey beard put on a plastic chair in the back with the other professors, all grave and bespectacled. Dusty wooden wall cabinets held variety of drums as if they were shrunken heads in the basement of a museum. The little electric drone started up, and eventually, all came to be ready. A beautiful young woman opened the concert with a vocal incantation to Saraswati, goddess of music and the liberal arts, and quickly the program fanned out into all the splendid colors Indian music can produce. Two hours of the most extraordinary music I have heard in years, as intellectual and complex as it was sensual., left me dazzled. I wish I could say that the music made me forget about the smell from the river, but I couldn't. I tried to focus on the one, then drifted back to the other, until eventually they just sort of merged, as Bob said they would,becoming a single spectrum of strong sensations. Every traveller to India is struck by the contrasts between the exquisite and the excremental, side by side, and this was my introduction. "Take it in, take it in!"

Touring the north. An insane four-day whirlwind tour of Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Sarnath and Varanasi (Benares) ensued. Our traveller got much food, little sleep, more music, and much more of the exquisite/excremental juxtapositions to think about. I'll spare you descriptions of traffic, trains and beggars--supply your own lurid mental images; they're not far off. Hotels, planes and airports, however, catering to international tourism, were reassuringly banal. Flights were remarkable mostly for the Indian prohibition on batteries in luggage, checked or carry-on. Why? They might aid a terrorist, apparently. And because this is the rule. So each airport arrival became a frenzy of preparations, as busleaders like me wrestled batteries away from all unhappy passengers to put in a single bag, surrendered to security. Do you know how many batteries33 people travel with? How hard it is to tell all those batteries apart, and to return them to their rightful owners while everyone else is eating? By the end of the tour, we had gotten to the point of dressing up our batteries with bright colored paper, markers and flowers like little dolls, or phallic shrines, or party favors. It helped morale, and the ornamentation seemed so much in the local spirit of things. My other project as bus leader was to pass around the hand gel, a.k.a. "Larry's chicken soup," after particularly intense stops. I don't know what it contains or what it prevents, but it seemed to make everyone feel better, and I'm not aware that anyone on my bus got anything worse than a hangover.

Fatehpur Sikri: Touring the Mughal sites was even more exciting than I expected, and my expectations were high. I did not expect Fatehpur Sikri to be full of bright green parrots, a small detail that nonetheless managed to turn a Major Monument into a real delight. There was a lightness of touch, a humor and fantasy element in the layout and sculpted detailing of the complex that was never suggested by pictures. I had expected dusty and ponderous, but found delightful surprises in the spatial sequences, and carved stone treated like papier-mache.

Agra: Red Fort and the Taj Mahal: [Blah blah blah: Ed.]

Agra: The bad news. What I'm still trying to figure out was the seemingly gratuitous squalor of Agra. I can't believe that general poverty is the whole explanation. The lepers and beggers at the train station were not a big surprise, since we'd been warned of "upsetting scenes" (and no, I'm in no hurry to see juvenile elephantiasis again). But the physical condition of the city was a shock. Whatta dump! I don't mean the dust and the slums; those one expected. I mean the fact that the state, federal or municipal government can't put a paved road between the Agra rail station and the Taj Mahal. I just assumed Agra would have boulevards and palm trees, but no.What gives here? What kind of humongously corrupt or at least criminally indifferent state government can't build a decent road to the Taj Mahal, the biggest tourist draw in all of South Asia?

This aspect of Agra I found depressing, really depressing, and not at all the sort of Noble Poverty I'd expected and braced for in India. Rather, I kept flashing back to the Soviet Union I saw back in 1991, just before the collapse, littered with broken-down factories, squalid public housing, instant ruins of government projects, and a population seemingly indifferent to the filthy mess everywhere. I'm a big boy, and I know there are cultural differences, etc. etc. but still... OK, what exactly does it mean when a person defecates in the street next to morning traffic? The guidebooks are no help on this point. Is it done because there is really no where else to go, or because there is no cultural reason not to, or because of apathy in a demoralized population? Just where does one draw the line between poverty and squalor? One old explanation for the povery and shabbiness, "Hindu fatalism," seems hopelessly dated, patronizing, and colonial; and the current favorite, "Debilitating effects of colonialism," seems too pat and self-serving, excusing the bureaucrats. Should one accept "cultural relativity" as an excuse for the endemic corruption here? That sounds too much like Mahathir Mohammed insisting that "Asian values" excuse despotism in Burma and corruption in his own Malaysian government. What I seemed to be seeing in Agra was civic cynicism on a positively Soviet scale. Varanasi and Calcutta would lure me back to the Ganges valley. I'm not sure when I'll be ready to go back to Agra.

Varanasi (a.k.a. Benares): It's supposed to be the scariest place in India for tender foreigners, but I really rather enjoyed it, burning ghats and all. Only in Varanasi was I able to sneak away and poke around an ordinary neighborhood for a few hours, buying normal stuff in little shops, stepping though the heaped debris, fending off the persistent and articulate rickshaw drivers. It seemed to put the boatride and ghats at sunrise into some sort of context of normal life. Varanasi is not just the funeral city of India; it is also the heart of classical North Indian culture and music. As we walked with the crowd to the river before dawn, we were surrounded by music--singing, chanting, finger cymbals--all in preparation for the climactic Shaivite moment of sunrise over the east bank. Our group was as silent as I've ever seen them--"awe" is overused, but we really were in awe of the charged spiritual atmosphere. (Why oh why didn't I tape the sounds??) I'll admit that being groped by lepers was a novel and rather disturbing experience ("Professor, is this contagious?" "Um, I hope not...have some more hand gel!"), and some of the group were clearly freaked by the whole scene. But for me the funereal culture of the river ghats was not such a shock as I might have expected. I realize now that my AIDS volunteer training was coming in handy, back in the bad old days before the triple therapy, where we were first acculturated to disease and taught to treat the dying with dignity. Varanasi and its culture of funeral and ritual felt dignified, beautiful, and even a bit familiar from that. Unfortunately, the place so upset some of the group that we ran rather than walked back to the bus, missing out on a city walk I'd very much looked forward to. I was fascinated by the mandala-like sacred geography of the place and wanted to explore. I'd like very much to go back, to get a sense of life (not just death) in the vicinity of the temples, and to poke around looking for more Hindustani music.

Back south. On our final day in India, I joined a lovely, low-key tour of the Tamil country outside Madras: to the pilgrimage city of Kanchipuram, with its tall temples and silk weaveries, and to the strange rock-carved temples of the ancient Pallava port of Mahaballipuram. First beach since Hong Kong: Our lunch stop was along a gorgeous stretch of Coromanel coast, with a dazzling white beach and blue breakers. No bathing suit? No problem! Peddlars materialized with cheap cotton prints. To the amusement of the locals and the censorious horror of our group, three of us seized the opportunity: bought the yardage, wrapped up, dropped trou, and plunged into the surf, modest but resplendant in our instant dhotis. Gawd, I realize this all sounds like bad letters from the British Raj ("The servants were so pleased when we dressed in fantastical native garb for dinner"), but well--I'm sorry, I am a tourist. I'm not sure what the correct political stance is towards third-world beaches, but my stance on any beach has always been at least knee-deep in water.

The southern India beyond Madras I glimpsed seemed magnificent, a completely different world from the grim Soviet Ganges valley. It reminded me of rural Thailand, and of the romantic images of India I'd gotten from literature. Great roads, lush tropical agriculture, solemn and ancient temple cities, neat new factories looking reasonably prosperous, not broken-down-Soviet in feeling. Fabulous music and food (ditto for the Northern cities). Thatched villages we drove through looking dirt-poor, to be sure, but without the broken-down squalor of villages we'd slogged through, say, on the busride to Fatehpur Sikri. Much of this, I'm told, is the result of a more benign (or less complete) colonialization in the Tamil South, with less resulting destruction of old economic patterns. Makes sense to me--it was heartening to see cottages with demonstrable cottage industry, like dyed skeins of silk drying on roofs, just as was once supposedly the case throughout the silk cities of the North as well, before British trade policies destroyed the old textile industries. The stark regional disparities in India are startling, even to the tourist. So how does it come to be that the state of Kerala has 90% literacy, while Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the North hover around 30%?  I'm eager to explore more of South India, from Madras down the Coromandel Coast through Tamil Nadu, across to the Malabar coast, through the ancient trading cities of Calicut and Goa, back up through the coffee country. Hey yknow, there are Enfield motorcycle tours that originate in Madras and follow this exact route...

India has been absolutely the emotional high point of the voyage so far, or at least the point of greatest intensity, just as we'd heard it had been on all previous trips. Thus warned, I'd scheduled nothing for my three classes the day after India except "discussion" which included show-and-tell and wide-eyed stories. Here's one more: Those of us on the Varanasi trip were taken first to Sarnath, where the Buddha first preached the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. The name meant little to most of the students, until they realized that they had learned the 4 and the 8 in Core, and were able to recite them in unison for the guide. Suddenly an archeological site clicked for all. We were blown away, he was blown away, the visit to Sarnath became a moving, deeply satisfying experience.

Rehashing India continued in all forums at all hours throughout the ship all the way to Egypt twelve days later, with the old India hands rehearsing their experiences, us newbies drinking it up, injecting "Yes, but--" Little about India reminded me of China except this: each leaves one grasping at every cliche one has ever read about the place, turning it over, trying it on, putting it aside, and then coming back to it for lack of a better alternative. How much of modern India that one sees in the streets is really explained by ancient texts and social systems? How much by modern economic history, or colonial history, and how much by the fate of place and time and human nature? I'm anxious to learn more and return better equipped to take it all in.

Educate me, friends, please. More anon------------------lorenzo.