Food, politics, and health care

I've never eaten loads of processed foods, but now, more than ever, I'm really going to try to make an effort to cut my consumption of processed foods down as low as I can.

I've always known that fresh and whole foods are better for you (kind of funny that Whole Foods Market calls itself Whole Foods but sells all kinds of processed foods. they may be "natural" or "organic" or "healthy" but they are still processed).
I mean, it would certainly be possible to completely eliminate processed foods. But in this day and age, in the US, it would take a lot of effort.
What I can do is this: buy fresh produce in season. Out of season it's harder. Produce gets shipped in from warmer climates and that means my consumption habits are responsible for carbon-emitting transportation and trade. The alternative is to buy frozen and canned vegetables and fruit. Canned and frozen veggies and fruits have been through processing, but at least it's a minimal sort of processing. The foods are still basically intact, with few or no extra ingredients added.
I get my dairy products locally. That's good.
I can get fresh baked bread at Wegman's. No more factory baked breads.
Where it's harder to avoid processed foods is in stuff like condiments. However, I loaded up on spices in India this summer. Those spices are not processed. They are hand mixed and I met the woman who mixes them. They should last me a while.

What I really want to avoid is pre-made meals. Frozen meals. Meals in boxes where you just add water. All that junk. Its the stuff that most Americans seem to live off of these days. I find it utterly depressing. I want to buy whole ingredients - meat, dairy, and produce - and turn them into meals from scratch. I've been good about that for the last year, but I'm going to be even better this year.
Last year I ate out a lot with friends in State College. Unfortunately, a lot of the restaurant food around here isn't necessarily fresh or unprocessed either. I've heard that the food at upscale chain restaurants like Chili's and Olive Garden are all pre-processed and frozen in some central kitchen somewhere and shipped out to the restaurants for thawing - not unlike McDonalds. Well, it's a good thing I've never eaten at a Chili's or Olive Garden.

One of the impetuses is that I recently saw the movie Fast Food Nation. I thought it was an excellent film, both in its political message and its human drama. I'm now reading the book that inspired the film and it's a sobering read. Did you know that the "natural flavors" in your foods are chemicals cooked up in flavor factories? The only thing setting them apart from "artificial flavors" is that somewhere in the process they were derived from actual foods.

My senior spring at Harvard I took an anthropology class called "Food and Culture" and it was one of my favorite classes in college. I'm planning on a taking a graduate course in the Ag department here at Penn State this fall on global food systems. There's a great relevance between food consumption, food production, and geography. It involves land use patterns. Changes that take place when small family farms are bought up by the agricultural-industrial complex, which is in turn partnered with the food processing-industrial complex and the restaurant-industrial complex, which are, of course, both products of the greater corporate behemoth that is swallowing the world.

You know...I wish politicians would stop referring to "special interests" as the big bad guy and start referring to "corporate interests" instead. The fact is that what gets lumped into "special interests" can include almost anything, including many interests which are worthwhile (such as unions, teachers, people in favor of some social justice or environmental cause). Whereas "corporate interests" really cuts to the chase and exposes the white elephant in the room.

I'm starting to get really interested in health care policy. I just saw Michael Moore's new film SiCKO and I agree with critics that it is by far is best, and least polemical, film to date. I have to admit that although I've been interested in politics for years, I never really cared much about the health care topic. Maybe that's because I was covered by my parents' health care until recently. But now I'm paying my own health care, through my paychecks at Penn State. And I'm seeing how much my prescription drugs for my chronic condition are costing me, even after the 80% discount. And I'm starting to worry about future health care. I've often thought about going off and working on my own for a while, but health care is something I really need and have to consider. And the more I learn about the state of health care in this country, the more it just sickens me (pardon the pun). And the more I learn how well universal health care works in other countries, the more it makes me think that yes I do want to live in another country.

One thing that Moore didn't really mention (and this might be a sensitive topic for him) is universal health care probably would be more difficult and expensive here than it has been in the European countries, and that is because Americans are so damn fat. With all America's obesity (I believe it's something like 66% overweight and 33% obese) are enormous health risks - and health costs. But that's where preventative medicine comes in. In Europe they stop most of the obesity before it ever occurs through public health and education campaigns. But here it is considered our freedom and our right to consume as much as we can and get as fat as we want. Which ties us back into the food system. The mass standardization and industrialization and corporatization of our food correlates directly to our deteriorating health, and to the corporatization of our health care, which also contributes to our deteriorating health. It's all a vicious cycle. But we have the power to take the steps to change things. All we have to do is stop eating the crap that fills 90% of the supermarket shelves. Fat chance of that happening (again, pardon the pun...honestly, it wasn't intentional). That's where advertising and marketing comes in. There are a gazillion more products on the shelves today than ever before. Even products that have been around for decades now come in dozens of varieties.

I remember the days when all you could get were:
Cheerios
Honey Nut Cheerios

Now, in addition we have:
MultiGrain Cheerios
Berry Burst Cheerios
Strawberry Yogurt Burst Cheerios
Vanilla Yogurt Burst Cheerios
Fruity Cheerios
Frosted Cheerios
Apple Cinnamon Cheerios

It's ridiculous. It's unnecessary. And it's not just Cheerios. It's every bloody product on the shelves. It's all the result of subtle differences in chemical flavorings manufactured in plants that manufacture 80% of all the flavors of all the foods in the United States and are concentrated along I-95 in New Jersey.

And it's all cooked up by marketing executives, the people I respect the least. I met the brand manager of Kool Aid at a party last Christmas. She was a sweet girl, a fellow alumnus of Harvard, one year older than me, and her job is to get America's children to drink more high fructose corn syrup-laden artifically-flavored, artifically-colored crap crystals. I mean, what a horrendous job. Lucifer's got it better than her. I met her and talked to her, so I know that she's not a bad person. And most of the folks on Madison Ave are probably equally nice people. But what they DO is sooo bad. I couldn't live with myself.

newfound appreciation for Pennsylvania; home, and place

When I first came east to live in Pennsylvania nearly a year ago, I admit that I had something of a complex about the state. I'd lived in the east before, in Massachusetts, so it wasn't that. It was Pennsylvania. I don't know. Somehow I think I thought I was better than Pennsylvania. I'm rarely deliberately snooty, so any feelings of superiority I felt towards my new home I tried to cloak in a discourse of being open-minded to new places, "oh Pennsylvania can't be THAT bad", "well I wouldn't want to LIVE here but I'm sure it will be fine for two years", that sort of thing.

I definitely wasn't the only one of the matriculants in my program to share these sentiments. In fact, all 20 of us were from out of state, and I during those first few weeks there was a great deal of commiserating about the sacrifices we were all making to come to such a backwater corner of such a dumpy state.

I was already biased before I even got here by words of warning from a family friend who was in the department and whom I emailed for advice, only to learn that he'd left the program out of dissatisfaction. Here's how he described State College:

"State College just kind of sucks. Unless you're into barhopping with the fratboys there's not much else to do. That's not completely fair--there are a few cool places--very few, but overwhelmingly it's not a great place to live and is nothing like other university towns i've been to like Chapel Hill, Athens, GA, Burlington, VT, Charlottesville, VA, etc. Penn State is the paradigm of the corporate university and while at least the library is very well-stocked, it's just not a very interesting place to be. It's about 3.5 hours drive to New York down a long, straight, lonely road. When I left I woke up every morning thanking God I didn't still live there. On the other hand, the countryside nearby is pretty and there are Amish people too, if you're into that kind of thing. Also there are TWO wal-marts, a target, and actually a really good supermarket called Wegman's I used to go to for retail therapy. "

Oh yes, the horror of it all!
I spent a good chunk of the first part of the fall here in dumbfounded amazement at just how DIFFERENT this place was than anywhere else I'd ever been. The fratlife. The rural life. The isolation. The poor white people. The tackiness. The chain stores. The small town nature. Did I mention the poor white people?

Well I'm here to try to set the record straight. I actually kind of like the place now. It's still not my favorite place on earth and I still don't see myself staying here for longer than the 2 years needed to do my masters, but I think I can now upgrade my old verdict "It's not so bad" to "It's actually pretty nice."

For one, the place is very pretty. Especially now, in summertime. The town is small enough that it doesn't take long before you're right in the heart of picture perfect farm country. And the farms are all in narrow valleys which are separated by mountains. There's all sorts of outdoors activities. Last weekend I discovered a state park with a lake where one can go swimming. No user fee; it's free. So are all the parks around here. The residential neighborhoods in town are also very pretty. People take care of their surroundings. There's not much traffic (except on game days). Everything is within a ten minute drive or so.

But it's not so backwater. You can get almost anything you need here. There are some good restaurants. There's Thai food, and Korean food, and Vietnamese food, and Indian food, and Japanese food. As the guy whose warning you read above admitted, there is a wonderful supermarket in Wegman's. Webster's cafe downtown is a nice little independent used bookstore, record store, and cafe, the kind that hosts community gatherings and has a bulletin board for community ads and requests. I'm at Webster's right now. There's an alternative newspaper that publishes articles such as "US Reputation Tarnished by Fascist President". And there's a group of students who set up a "Psychaitric Help 5¢" booth in the same style as Lucy of The Peanuts at the campus gate once a week. And they really charge 5¢

You know what else is nice about State College? People are NICE here. When I go out for a run, every person I pass on the jogging path smiles or greets me. I don't think that happens so much elsewhere. Okay, people might be kind of homey. But they are friendly people. The campus is nice too. And I shouldn't lose sight of the fact that I've gotten a lot out of this deal without having to put much in myself.

I'm taking full advantage of the summer farm productivity and eating lots of fresh locally grown fruits and vegetables and dairy products. Two minutes from my house there's a dairy where I can take my milk bottles for refills of fresh, cheap, farm milk. Where else in the US can you still do that?

I started to realize that I missed this place when I was in India. That's when I realized that State College has become my new "home", at least for a while. Although I spent four years in Cambridge Massachusetts, it's now far enough back in my mind that State College has replaced it as my home, as it's also replaced Larkspur California. I spent 18 years in Larkspur, but every time I go back there I seem to recognize it less and less. Not so much physically. It still looks more or less the same, with a McMansion here and there popping up. But socially it is something different. There are fewer and fewer people I know, it seems. My parents have described the demographic changes taking place. Extremely wealthy young couples are moving in, putting down millions of dollars on houses and pricing everyone else out of the market. They are having oodles of babies. When I was in elementary and middle school there were about 100 kids in each grade. Now there are nearly twice that number. These parents have so much money they don't know what to do with it, so they have lots of children and then they spoil those children rotten. I know this makes me sound like a very old cranky man, but I think there's something wrong when 5 year olds have cell phones and 7 year olds have iPods. It's bling this and bling that. Well I'm fucking tired of bling. Today's youth culture totally goes over my head. I don't even want to know what's going on. All I get out of it is one overwhelming message: materialism, greed, appearance, sex, and consumption.

Well I've gotten off topic. There may be more wealthy kids and teenagers in Marin than here, but the youth culture is still the same. During the school year, the streets of State College are packed at night with packs of drunken frat boys and sorority girls. During the summer most of the college kids have gone home, and this is apparently when the high school kids come out to play. Last night the streets were filled with them. I honestly didn't know there were that many high school age kids in State College. What has happened to society when 13 and 14 year olds walk around dressed like 25 year olds. I went to McDonalds late last night (see my next post about food) and the restaurant was mobbed with foul-mouthed young teenagers, the girls all half naked, as if they'd just come from the trendiest nightclub in New York. Is this what people where to high school house parties? (I wouldn't know...I never went to parties in high school).

Ah anyway. Pennsylvania. Eh. What can I say? It has some pretty stupid blue laws about when and where you can buy alcohol. But I'll get over it. This place has its nice parts and is a pretty interesting place to be..for a couple of years. I'll move on, but I dont feel like my time here is a waste.

to Delhi and home

Overnight train back to Delhi. Shared a compartment with two Swedish medical students, who, coincidentally know my Swedish friend who is also a medical student.

Back to Delhi for the final two days before flying home. Having been here twice now, I'm pretty familiar with the city.

However, in walking around Connaught Place I sort of rediscover the place and gain a whole new appreciation for it. When I was here last year Connaught Place was a big construction site. Now, the construction is over and the result is a beautiful new park in the center of the great circle. It's a fantastic public space - green, full of people and interesting architecture. The circular buildings that radiate out from the park I'd found rather underwhelming last year. But now they seem more spruced up and the whole area is a classy, friendly public commercial district.

I was impressed by the new Metro system last year, and I continue to be impressed. The Metro continues to expand, and by the time of the Commonwealth Games in 2010 will be massive and include a high speed rail link to the airport. The Metro is like a totally different world than the India above ground. It is clean, spotless, sleek, modern, quiet, orderly, efficient. The people who ride it seem to behave in a way that matches their surroundings. It is a totally different scene than anything above ground. People are orderly, polite. And it is busy, too. I'm glad to see so many people using this new form of public transportation. And it's cheap, too. I rode one of the elevated Metro lines out to its terminus, several miles out into the suburbs. It's a great way to sightsee. It was this way that I discovered a complex of four modern shopping malls, way out in the suburbs. I wouldn't have known they were there had I not seen them from the metro. They were so new that one of them barely had any stores. The others, though, were full of glitzy designer clothes and consumer products and food courts and expensive restaurants and rich teenagers.

On my final day in Delhi, I woke up at 4:30 am and went for a long pre-dawn walk. Then it was to the airport, and I flew Virgin Atlantic to Heathrow. They've got an excellent movie selection on that airline, and I saw Fast Food Nation (after which I resolved to become a vegetarian), The Namesake, and Half Nelson. There were so many other movies I also wanted to see, but not enough time to see them.

Unfortunately the next leg of my flight to New York was on American, one of the world's crapiest airlines. There was nothing worth watching so I slept.

Spent the night in New York, then next evening Chinatown bus back to State College which is where I am now.

There's some sort of Arts Festival going on right now. I saw a booth full of photographs of the places I'd just been. The photographer was selling them for several hundred dollars each. Many of them were photos of people. I don't know. It kind of bothers me that someone could take photographs of people for pennies (or for free) and then charge so much money for them here. How much of the essence of those photographs is in the people who are their subjects, and how much is in the photographer's skills as an artist? More the former, I think.

Jodhpur

Jodhpur is the second-largest city in Rajasthan. It is the "Blue City" to Jaipur's "Pink City". Indeed, many of the buildings in the old town's maze of streets are blue (several different shades of blue, in fact). The old explanation was that blue was used to demarcate the houses of the Brahmin castes, but the revisionist explanation is far more utilitarian: the blue color keeps the biting ants away.

I played the tourist one day and went to the great fort atop the hill that forms the dramatic backdrop to the town. It is very well preserved and there is an excellent audio tour.

On the other day, I rented a bicycle and set out riding to find some villages outside of the city. An English man with long shaggy blonde hair pulled up alongside me in his truck and asked if he could give me a lift. He said he'd been in Jodhpur for 30 years and it was the first time he'd seen a white man on a rural road on a bicycle. I'm not really sure it's that much of a novelty. I'd met plenty of white people on bicycles up in the Himalayas. He explained that he owns a factory where brass doorknobs are manufactured, then exported to Europe. He employs 50 Indian workers, although he uses the word "employ" loosely. In order to avoid red tape, he doesn't technically employ anyone. I guess that means he doesn't pay taxes either. And he probably makes a killing.

I seemed to be a hit in the village. To them, at least, a white man on a bicycle was also a novelty. I won't flatter myself into thinking I was the first white person they'd ever seen (a pretty grotesque assumption some white people often make), but I'll hazard a guess they don't see one every day. As I rode threw town, a procession of kids followed me. We looked like a parade. Everyone in the village stopped and stared, or smiled, or waved.

These bicycles in India are hard to ride. There are no gears and the seats are very uncomfortable. I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it is for the bicycle rickshaw-wallahs who have to pedal the contraptions while hauling a carriage holding up to two fat Indian ladies.

Jaipur

ah damn. I had a whole entry written for Jaipur and then it disappeared.

well, I'll try to be more succinct this time. plenty has already been said about Jaipur, which is on the "golden triangle" of major tourist destinations in northern india (Delhi-Agra-Jaipur). Speaking of Agra, the Taj Mahal just made it onto the "new seven wonders of the world". You should have seen the hoopla here. there was a huge campaign to "vote for Taj" as millions and millions of Indians voted by sending text messages. It is a huge matter of national pride for India, and made front page new today.

Also in the news today (the Times of India, that is) was a short mini-paragraph blip about problems in the Pennsylvania state house shutting down state services until the budget could be resolved. I was awfully surprised to see this make news in India.

So, back to Jaipur. It's the capital of Rajasthan, and the biggest city I'd been in since Delhi and Calcutta at the beginning of the trip. That meant there's all the MNCs and chain restaurans, like Baskin Robbins and Subway and McDonalds.

I got my first taste of urban monsoon. The rain only comes in bursts and only lasts a short while, but when it rains it pours. The lightning storms are most impressive. It's a nonstop light show, with the sky illuminated every couple seconds continuously for 30 minutes or so. That, on top of fireworks for the many weddings being celebrated on the occasion of 7/7/07 (7 being a very auspicious number in India). I saw at least four different wedding parties that night. They parade around on public streets, for everyone to see. These were some opulent weddings. There were elephants and camels and horses, all decorated in jewels. And there were 50-man wedding bands, which are very exciting and energetic. They use the same instrumentation as a western marching band, with a big drum corps, and the music they play is a very catchy and adrenaline-filled mix of marching band music, swing, free form jazz, and traditional indian melodies. There were also huge corps of lantern-bearers. I followed one wedding party into the Sheraton Hotel. I asked how much a room was. $270. Ouch! That's a lot of money, esp. for India!

Climbed up a hill to see a fort and look down on the city. Jaipur has a unique urban morphology for a premodern, pre-British Indian city. The Maharaja was a mathematician and astronomer, and he insisted that the city be laid out on a formal grid, long before grids were imposed by the British throughout India. Got a ride down the cobblestone path that descends 600 feet from the hilltop fort on the back of a local young man's two-wheeler. That was pretty fun. I always like it when Indians offer me rides on their two-wheelers and do it just out of the goodness of their heart. Very cool.

On my last night there, i'm walking along, not going anywhere in particular, when i see a ferris wheel all lit up in the near distance so i go closer and discover that its a whole carnival set up. Just 3 ruppees entrance (7.5 cents).
It's really not so different at all from the traveling carnivals in the state - rides, games, food, and people watching. It also had magic show but it was really bad. the magician totally messed up one of the tricks where he was supposed to make milk disappear into a newspaper. Instead, the milk spilled out all over the stage. His assistant was this teenage girl. I think she might have been his daughter, because she looked so bored, and embarrassed to be up there. I rode the ferris wheel. They certainly dont seem to have any safety rules (or enforcement of them) because wild kids and teenage hooligans were climbing all over the rides - as they were moving! All the time they shouted to me, trying to impress me I think. I'm not impressed by displays of stupidity. The carnival also had a tent with scantily-clad dancing girls under the innocuous title of "cultural program". The all-male audience was like a sea of testosterone on overload, and I'm sure that the gesture and comments the young guys called and hooted at the girls were not polite.

Rishikesh

Rishikesh is one of those famous places that most people have heard of. It is famous as a center for yoga and meditation, and spirituality in general. It's had that reputation for eons, of course, among Hindus, for whom it is a holy city on the holiest river in India - the Ganga - and in the foothills of the holy Himalayas. But it only caught on with westerners seeking enlightenment in the 60s. The Beatles' two month stay in Rishikesh certainly didn't hurt its international acclaim.

The environment of Rishikesh (and Haridwar), although in the same mountain range that I'd spent the previous many weeks in, is completely different. It is much lower in elevation and thus is hotter and more humid, and the foliage is thick and green and dense (and almost tropical-feeling, although not technically tropical since the latitude is too high...about the same as Los Angeles).

Haridwar and Rishikesh have the worst flies I have ever seen in my life. It's really perplexing because I have been other places in India with similar street hygiene and cows walking around the street, but nowhere else have I seen the flies anywhere near as bad as they are here. Walking down the street you walk through thick swarms of them. Not a pleasant experience.

In fact, I wasn't too impressed with Rishikesh in general. After all the places I'd been in the higher Himalayas, I just didn't find it that beautiful in Rishikesh. I like pine and cedar forests more than thick nondescript jungle.

And what of the yoga? That is what "everyone" comes to Rishikesh for, after all. Well the truth is I'm just not that interested in yoga. I don't have anything against it and, who knows, I might even benefit from it if I gave it try. But I didn't feel like enrolling in a yoga class at this time and place. Something about the religiosity of it all. I know that yoga doesn't have to be a religious thing and that plenty of atheists practice yoga in the West. But here in Rishikesh everything seemed to be imbibed with a heavy dose of Hinduisim (which is understandable, of course, given the place's holiness). So to take a yoga class, I'd have to do it with a yogi who I figured would also make it a religious thing. And I'm an atheist. I don't want any religion right now.

It's funny. It used to be that when people asked me what religion I was, I would respond that I was an atheist but that I "might be open to Eastern religions or spirituality some day". Well, here I am in India, birthplace of the two biggest eastern religions - Hinduism and Buddhism - and yet I currently feel more content in my atheism than ever before. Well, I'd still be interested in reading some Buddhist philosophy - especially that of the Dalai Lama, for whom I do have a great deal of respect. But I'm not interested in PRACTICING any religion. What it really comes down to is that I don't believe in God. And Hindus do believe in Gods (some 300 million of them!). And Buddhists do too. I used to have it in my mind that Buddhism was the most open, peaceful religion in the world and hat it allowed its individual practitioners to practice it as they want. Well, compared to other religions, there still may be some truth in that. But I think I was buying into the generally over-romanticized picture of Buddhism that is popular in the West (and especially in places like San Francisco where I grew up). But now I've seen Tibetan Buddhism up close, and I now know that they are some of the most fiercely religious people on earth. Almost to the point of fanatacism (although not in a violent way, like some religious fanatics). Some of the things they do for their religion - prostrating themselves, crawling miles and miles on the ground to Lhasa - are difficult for me to comprehend. If the Buddha was so compassionate why would he want his followers to do such things? The amount of devotion that people give to their religion scares me. I also learned that many wars have been fought in the name of Buddhism. And that Buddhism is just as intolerant of homosexuality as Christianity and Hinduism and Islam are. The Dalai Lama himself said that homosexuality is a sin. The Tibetans, bless their hearts, have also had a much bloodier history than most people realize. Tibet has always had an army, and it has fought many wars, some in defense, and some in offense. At certain points in history Tibet was an expansionist empire, and conquered parts of China and India and Nepal. Tibet was also archaically feudal, with the vast majority in virtual slavery to the monks, who owned all the land and controlled all the wealth. Those who rebelled against strict Buddhist dogma were arrested and tortured.

In this day and age, the Dalai Lama has renounced feudalism and all forms of violence and endorsed democracy and peace as guiding principles for a Tibetan state. Compared to the Chinese, the Tibetans certainly have the moral high ground today...my point, however, is that history is never black and white. Based on past events, the Chinese probably do have some legitimate claim to Tibet. When Tibetans claim that "Tibet has always been an independent country" that's just not true. Borders switch so often during history, and those switches are usually accompanied by bloodletting, xenophobia, and carnage on both sides, leaving neither with a categorical moral imperative.

In Rishikesh this German girl was astonished that I wasn't taking yoga. She admonished me and said "everyone at least TRIES it"....as if I was letting Rishikesh down. That only strengthened my resolve NOT to give in and do what everyone else does. Maybe that's silly of me. Sometimes I think I get overly reactionary. Like the Taj Mahal. I should probably go see it. I mean, why not? But so far, I haven't made a point of it. In fact, I've kind of avoided it. Just something about it being "THE Taj Mahal" that everyone else goes and sees. I'm sure it's a beautiful building, but in my mind I tell myself that it's just a pretentious, ostentatious monument to one rich and powerful emperor's vanity. It was built with the slave labor of millions. It represents power, oppression, violence, wealth, and waste.

Found myself in yet another conversation about Israeli backpackers, this time with two young Jews from New York. They were unaware of the discourse about Israeli backpackers and their alleged rudeness, so I filled them in on it, curious to know what they think. They laughed and explained that "Israelis are just rude people, period"...in India, in Israel, anywhere. "It's just their nature," they explained. They then said that people in India needed to understand that about Israelis and their culture, and once they realized that Israelis are rude to everyone, everywhere, they no longer would have any reason to be offended. "That's cultural relativism," they explained.

Um, no. I'm sorry, but it's not. That's the opposite of cultural relativism. That's cultural obtuseness and ethnocentricism. Cultural relativism says that when tourists visit a country, they are supposed to adapt to the culture of the place they are visiting. It does not give them the right to take their own bad manners, no matter how normal they are in their own country, and practice them in places where it is considered rude.

Left Rishikesh on a tempo (oversized rickshaw). It was like a clown car, packed to the gills with narcoleptic Indians, all with babies on their laps....and me.

Haridwar

Being back down on the plains, and sore after too many long, hard bus rides ithe mountains, I was eager to start taking trains again. But the train station in Chandigarh is a hassle to get to and the ticket counter had a sign saying "Temporarily closed. Inconvenience regretted" so I took another bus instead. It was nice not being shoved from side to side with each turn of a curve, but it was still a long, hard bus ride.

Haridwar is on the Ganga river, right at the edge of the foothills of the Himalaya, in the state of Uttaranchal, to the east of Himachal Pradesh. It is a major destination for pilgrims (basically, Indian tourists who travel around to different holy sites in India, of which there are many). The Ganga is, of course, the most holy river in India, and up here it is still relatively clean, so thousands of people bathe in it (in special areas enclosed by chains, because otherwise people would be swept off by the strong current.)

Every night there in an Aarti ceremony where pilgrims float lotus leaves filled with flowers and a candle down the river. It's a pretty ceremony, but I can't help but think that it all ends up as garbage in the river. But then, Indians in general don't seem to have a problem throwing garbage in their holiest of rivers. Culverts and drainage ditches leading directly into lakes and rivers are notorious dumpsites for garbage.

To an outsider like me, Hinduism strikes me as a very commercial religion. Everywhere you go there are opportunities to spend money in the name of God(s) - a million gift shops selling religious souvenirs. Temples often charge admission fees for tourists, rather than simply providing suggested donation boxes as churches do. Pilgrims are just another form of tourists, and there are millions of Indian pilgrimage sites and thus millions of Indian pilgrim-tourists.

One of the more bizarre things for sale in the souvenir shops are DVDs of Hindi religious pop songs, the voices being totally distorted by synthesizers, with little children dressed up as Gods dancing around and mouthing the lyrics to the songs in front of obviously artificial natural backdrops. There are real child actors in those videos, but they look so strange and bizarre, with such outlandish costumes and audio treatment, and weird sped-up video effects, that they almost look like cartoons.

Chandigarh

Everyone says Chandigarh is the "least Indian" city in India, and they are correct...to a degree. I would respond that it is very Indian...just a particular side of India that by no means represents the norm or the average. Chandigarh is one of India's wealthiest cities. As the capital of the Punjab, the second richest state (after Maharashtra) in India and home to the Sikhs, who are known for their wealth, this comes as no surprise.

Chandigarh was a new city built after Independence when the original capital of the Punjab - Lahore - became part of Pakistan. The new Punjab needed a new capital, and a great drive was begun to find an architect of world reknown to design the new city in the image of the new, modern India Nehru and India's leaders wanted to project. I learned at the 4-floor City architecture and planning museum that the original architects were in fact American, but when the died in a plane crash, Le Corbusier (the famous Swiss architect and planner) was brought in.

The resulting city is indeed unlike any city in India. It is made up of rectangular, numbered sectors laid out on a rigid grid. Each sector contains residences and services. Broad, tree-lined boulevards divide the sectors, the result being that traffic is smooth and free-flowing. None of the chaos and pandemonium, noise and pollution, normally associated with roads in Indian cities. But I don't know if the city is really better off for it. It is so spread out that driving seems to be the only practical way of getting around. Or maybe bicycle. But this is not a pedestrian's city. There is no real center. What they call the "city center" is just a big outdoor shopping plaza with fancy stores. The city has no sense of being urban. Instead, it resembles so many bland suburbs. Oh, the parks and greenbelts are all very nice. But you can have a dense, urban city and have parks. You don't need the city itself to resemble the park. I walked through residential neighborhoods that must be the Indian version of Beverly Hills, or Marin. Grandeose, architecturally distinct (and ostentatious) mansions sit side by side. The main difference between this and Beverly Hills is that the houses are relatively close together. There are no large yards and not a lot of privacy. But they say Indians like to be around other Indians.

Chandigarh is also the most expensive place I've spent the night. I had to spend $11. My room did come with cable TV, however....which included several channels in Engilsh. I caught up on world news through BBC, and even caught an episode of Seinfeld. I find it amusing that BBC does a one-minute "world weather forecast". Talk about macro-scale!

Why do news programs need additional people to read the weather? Why can't the anchor just read the weather? It's not like the TV personalities who read the weather are actually scientifically trained meteorologists...are they?

An Indian news show devoted 30 gushing minutes to the arrival of the USS Nimitz - the world's largest warship and aircraft carrier - in Chennai Harbor. All bombast and fury.

Not many foreigners in Chandigarh. A couple of architecture students from Italy, come to see their hero's work. There seems to be a lot of official ooing and awing over Chandigarh, but I don't buy it. Le Corbuier built a nice, clean city for rich people, but it hardly addresses the pressing social needs that a good, planned city should address.

back to Shimla

So I bid adieu to the remote sections of HP and high-tailed it back to Shimla on an 11 hour direct bus.

We descended to just 800 meters along the Sutlej River, the lowest point I'd been in a long time, but then climbed right back up to 2700 meters, a climb of 6000 feet, through some of the greenest hills I've ever seen. The monsoon had just reached HP, and everything was lush and green and wet. We got caught in a morning downpour, and drove through pea soup fog so thick you couldn't see 10 feet. All of this on a twisting mountain road. At least this was a national highway, and wide enough for two vehicles to pass, unlike most roads in HP. The driver felt the same need as the previous day's driver to put our lives in his hands with every hug of the curve.

But I'm back in Shimla now. It's nice to be somewhere for a second time. The place is still a madhouse of Indian tourists. And this time there are no views because the whole mountain and city are enshrouded in fog. It's kind of nice though - the cedars and pines floating eerily in the mist.

Tomorrow I will descend out of the Himalayas and spend my last 13 days on the plains.

Kalpa and Kinnaur

From Tabo took a bus to Nako, which is within the inner line and in Kinnaur district. Khibber is also a high village, way up a mountainside, and overlooking some even higher mountains. The old village, a maze of crooked streets and buildings made of stone, is charming. Next door to it is a massive construction site, where the new monastery is being built (ever village in Spiti has a monastery....for a district with only something like 15000 people, there are over 30 monasteries! basically, monasteries are just schools for monks, and monks make up a huge percent of the population here...both male and female....the female and male monks look almost identical, wearing the same red robes and sporting the same shaved heads). They are rushing to finish the construction by August, when the Dalai Lama is scheduled to come and consecrate it. Everyone in the village is piching in to help.

Kinnauris all wear funny, big, green felt hats.

My new English friends and I were the only people on the bus when it pulled out of Khibber and started screaming down the precipitous road on the side of the mountain as the river deep below us entered a trecherous ravine. Because it was paved, the driver must have felt that warranted driving at super fast speeds, even as we hugged curves with 1000s of feet of drop below us, and careened around 180-degree switchbacks. I was convinced he was insane and we would all die, but I didn't think that under those conditions it would be a good idea for me to lecture him on his driving. Nevertheless, we arrived safely at our destination 10 hours later, so I have to give him credit for that. We also passed through the inner line without ado (it all seemed a bit silly, but India think it's anything but, and keeps 1000s of troops stationed up there in the lonely high passes of the mountains all year. in face, we have India's military concerns to thank for the high quality road carved out of solid rock).

Gradually as we followed the river (the Spiti now having merged with the Sutlej) down, the gray and brown desert gave way to a few trees, and then more, and more, until the time we reached Reckong Peo, the administrative headquarters of Kinnaur, we were back in full-fledged forest, and it had been raining and everything was so green...such a change after nearly 2 weeks in the rainshadow deserts of the trans-Himalaya. I spent the night in a charming village called Kalpa overlooking the tallest mountain in Himachal Pradesh and surrounded by apple orchards.

There was more I could have seen in Kinnaur but I suddenly was feeling anxious. I decided that I'd been in the mountains long enough, and felt myself missing something more cosmopolitan, more busy. Heck, I missed internet. Went 10 days without it. I think that's a first for me. Spiti is the first place I've ever really been with no internet service whatsoever (to be fair, Kaza did have internet, but it was 9.6 kpbs, and it didn't work when I was there)

Kaza and Spiti

There is no direct bus from Keylong in Lahaul to Kaza in Spiti, so I took a Manali-bound bus as far as Gramphu, the junction where the road to Spiti splits off. Split off to Spiti...ha. But when I got to the junction the people there told me I'd just missed the bus and that there was only one a day. I was kind of bummed but resigned myself to spending 23.5 hours at this junction "town" which consisted of 2 dhaba tents but a whole mountainside of green grass and little streams and waterfalls. Just then, another bus came along and I was saved. Well, maybe saved isn't the right word considering what came next. Probably the worst section of road I've ever been on in my life. The Sichuan TIbet Highway in China was pretty bad, but I think this takes the cake. For several hours the road rumbles along through a rock-strewn glacial valley. It's like driving across a dry river bed. And I'm sure it was considerably worse given that I boarded the bus mid-route and thus had only seats in the back row to choose from. On the bright side, I was the only one resigned to the back row, so I had the whole row to myself. At one point an exhausted Danish trekker girl got on the bus. She'd been trekking several days and was suffering from AMS. She rode to the next campsite. Then we started climbing Kunzum La at 4800 meters (16thousand something feet). At the top is a Buddhist temple and lots of prayer flags. The bus circumambulated the temple then stopped so the passengers could go inside and prey. As soon as we crossed the pass we were in Spiti, the rainshadow high desert of Himachal Pradesh, where the monsoon never reaches and the rains hardly ever fall. It is a land of extremes, and home to Tibetan Buddhists....who practice what has been called the most pure form of Tibetan Buddhism left in the world, unadulterated for centuries by Spiti's remoteness and, most importantly, protected from the wrath of China's genocide in Chinese Tibet (some of the most remote parts of which lie just north of Spiti). We joined the Spiti watershed which I would follow for the next several days from its source downstream and down 14000 feet in elevation. The early Spiti River Valley is a somewhat broad valley with the river scattered across a wide sunken valley in thousands of braids. Perched on the edge of the valley's cliffsides are narrow, planted fields and small villages, fed by glacial melt coming down from the steep mountains on either side of the valley.

A couple hours down the valley we came to Kaza, the administrative headquarters for Spiti. It's not a very nice town. It has kind of an industrial feel, and looks like a giant construction site. There are very few traditional buildings left. Ugly, modern, 3 and 4-storey concrete buildings have taken their place. And the place is crawling with guest houses....way too many, if you ask me. There were tourists there, but not enough to justify all those guest houses, and I saw no real reason why tourists would want to be there anyway. But I needed an inner line permit, and this was the best place to get one. It involved negotiating India's senseless (yet arcanely sensible) bureacracy. I had to make three separate trips across the creek from Old Kaza to New Kaza, where all the government buildings, identical in their green tin roofs, were located. The first trip involved merely finding the Assistant District Magistrate's Office, which I finally found at the end of a tree-lined boulevard feeling very out of place in this desert landscape. Then I was sent back to obtain photocopies of my passport. On the second trip, I turned in my application, and they told me to return in 4 hours. Finally, that afternoon, I got the prized piece of paper that would allow me to complete my journey on a road which would take me within 10 km of the Chinese border. The whole valley of Spiti was completely off-limits to foreigners until 1992, and the inner line permits, though much scaled back, still remain as a remnant of those earlier restrictions, a result of India's testy border situation with China (China occupies a sizeable chunk of India called Aksai Chin north of Spiti and east of Ladakh, and India occupies a large chunk of what China claims is Tibet in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India).

I next headed up the hill to the lovely village of Khibber. At 4250 meters (about 14000 feet), Khibber used to claim to be the highest village in the world. Now it only claims to be the highest village in the world that is electrified and connected by motorable road, and even that claim is debatable. Still, it's pretty damn high. Luckily, I didn't suffer AMS this time, having already adjusted to the altitude after my stint in Leh. The buildings in Khibber were nearly all traditional. There were a couple of modern guest houses, but I stayed in a traditional family house. A very cute baby goat became very friendly with us and followed us around. The kids of the village seemed programmed to demand "picture picture" whenever they saw you. They also knew how to say "chocolate chocolate" and they seemed to have a monopoly over the fossil trade.

Together with a couple English kids and an Israeli guy who doesn't like traveling with Israelis, we set off the next day to hike downhill to Ki Gompa (gompa is the Tibetan word for monastery). But first we had to climb uphill. Hiking uphill from 14000 feet is not the easiest thing in the world. Finally we reached the highest point where we looked out over Spiti valley for miles. From there it was a steep descent to the gompa on probably the most intense path I've ever been on. The path zigzagged down hundreds upon hundreds of switchbacks on a near-vertical rock face. Descending the rock face was actually the east part, though. At least the rock was solid beneath our feet. Then we entered the gravel section, where the trail seemed ready to give out under our feet at any moment. In places, the trail was on a 45-degree angle, and a misplaced step seemed it would have sent us plunging to our deaths. We treaded ever-so-carefully and slowly down the perilous slope. At one point a monk scampered down past us at full speed.

Eventually we arrived the the monastery, which is over 1000 years old. It is an assortment of whitewashed Tibetan buildings perched atop a small hillock overlooking the valley. Atop the hill is the temple complex. The monks and novices live in the buildings below. Most of the monks we saw were young boys - novices. Nearly every family in Tibet has at least one son in a monastery...usually the youngest (while the eldest inherits the land). We stayed in the dormitories at the monastery and ate our meals with the monks.

Next day I walked then hitchhiked back to Khibber, along with Eduardo, from Portugal. One final night in the village.

Then down to Kaza again to switch buses, and onward to Tabo. Tabo is home to one of the two best preserved collections of monastery paintings dating back 600 years. It's a quiet little village but draws people from all over the world because of its artistic value (the guestbook in the guest house showed the curator of the Asian Arts Museum in San Francisco). There are also caves on the hills above the town, in one of which, a monk meditated for 15 years.