It's been a full 12 days, and we're in the process of finding our rhythm and balance, working through jet lag, our aging and less resilient bodies adjusting to all things India, connecting with people we know, figuring out again how to get most of our needs met and even what our location specific needs are altogether, visiting familiar places, meeting new people, some of whom I regrettably neglected to get images of. In fact, I find that I routinely neglect to get images of people. This is no doubt a reflection of the I'm-not-really-a-photographer truth of things. It doesn't come automatically to me to think of getting images of anything, really, so if I forget to remind myself in the moment, or if Nancy doesn't say "there's a picture", well, it doesn't happen.
Right now I'm thinking of three images I wish I had, all from Bir as it turns out. Two of them I may be able to come up with later on our next visit there, and one is just lost.
1) Martin, the young French para-glider who we met at a local restaurant eating momos, and spoke with for while about his home region in rural mountainous Alpine France, as well as, inevitably, about some politics. We ran into him again yesterday just after he'd landed from his first flight on this visit, after a week of waiting for the weather to clear up enough to fly safely. One week out of his three lost to mist and clouds and rain. He had naturally worked up an appetite, and was hurrying off almost desperately to the momo shop for replenishment.
2) Showba, the owner/cook at said momo shop/restaurant, university educated, with whom we entered into a lovely getting-to-know-you-a-bit conversation about the restaurant, her family - local Indian Bir-ites in this Tibetan "colony" - who live there with her: her one child, a 9 year old son, her grandmother, parents, and sister; who speaks English quite well as well as making great momos and I'm sure other dishes which we'll try on another visit there; and who, upon learning Nancy's name, became alight with glee saying that it was a "very good name", because, it turns out, it was the name of a teacher of hers. We don't yet know which teacher - English perhaps?
3) A 20-30-ish couple taking their one month old, tiny Rotweiller puppy for a training walk up and down the one road through town as we sat waiting for our taxi back home. "You could put him in your pocket" I offered as they approached our position. With a smile the fellow responded that this would only be possible for a little while, as this dog was programed to attain about 60 kilos (135 lbs) when grown.
Ordinary interactions with ordinary people, but which take on a simple, somewhat luminous extra-ordinariness by virtue of their happening in India. While sitting on the concrete bench waiting for our taxi to come from Sherabling - we could have easily taken one from Bir, but we'd told Bihari Lal, a driver we'd met before, and then again as we were walking out from Sherabling earlier that day, that we would call him when we were ready to leave Bir - I experienced what I told Nancy was a surrealistic quality in the just-so activities of sitting and waiting, watching the para-gliders circle above and come in to land, interacting with locals in the street, in the rural mountains of northern India, in a tiny town settled by Tibetan refugees in the early '60's and now developed to cater to a mix of monasteries and institutes and medical centers and students of Buddhism and tourists and expats and para-gliders from all over the world. It felt like a dream state, or an otherwise ordinarily natural altered/expanded state, in which there was precisely nothing else to be doing and exactly nowhere else to be doing it.
Nancy and I had a conversation a couple of mornings ago about something that was upsetting her, triggered primarily by a novel she'd just read, The Inheritance Of Loss, written by the Indian author Kiran Desai, and by a drama we'd just watched, Amu, both partly or wholly set in, and/or to do directly with dark or despairing sides of India; and also by her not feeling altogether well.
The issue for her was, as I understand it, the way people ignore, or are unaware of, or otherwise neglect important and troubling human realities because of their "white privilege". She shared that a mentor of hers can no longer travel to or be in "third world" countries because it's too painful for her to be there and to experience the disparity between her own American privilege and the conditions of many of the people in these countries; and that the decision to no longer go to these places was, for her, a moral decision, meaning, I take it, that she sees her being there as a kind of affront to the people she encounters; or that it is perhaps rubbing their noses in their own perhaps distressing conditions.
I can understand this view, if I have it right, and I can appreciate the sensitivity and the sensibility behind it. It is, in a way, perfectly the opposite of what I described as my experience above, and there is here also a sharp example, potentially, of the coincidence of these opposites, or of the essential and universal truth of paradox. Is one of us right and the other wrong? One moral and the other something less than that? One sensitive to privilege and the other insensitive? My answer is: of course not.
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| An early part of the beautiful walk to Bir goes through this rice field |
Right now I'm thinking of three images I wish I had, all from Bir as it turns out. Two of them I may be able to come up with later on our next visit there, and one is just lost.
1) Martin, the young French para-glider who we met at a local restaurant eating momos, and spoke with for while about his home region in rural mountainous Alpine France, as well as, inevitably, about some politics. We ran into him again yesterday just after he'd landed from his first flight on this visit, after a week of waiting for the weather to clear up enough to fly safely. One week out of his three lost to mist and clouds and rain. He had naturally worked up an appetite, and was hurrying off almost desperately to the momo shop for replenishment.
 |
| I surely don't play the naal as skillfully as she does! |
2) Showba, the owner/cook at said momo shop/restaurant, university educated, with whom we entered into a lovely getting-to-know-you-a-bit conversation about the restaurant, her family - local Indian Bir-ites in this Tibetan "colony" - who live there with her: her one child, a 9 year old son, her grandmother, parents, and sister; who speaks English quite well as well as making great momos and I'm sure other dishes which we'll try on another visit there; and who, upon learning Nancy's name, became alight with glee saying that it was a "very good name", because, it turns out, it was the name of a teacher of hers. We don't yet know which teacher - English perhaps?
 |
| Under construction Chenrezik shrine hall on the monastery grounds; the above drummer will be part of the peripheral ornamentation |
3) A 20-30-ish couple taking their one month old, tiny Rotweiller puppy for a training walk up and down the one road through town as we sat waiting for our taxi back home. "You could put him in your pocket" I offered as they approached our position. With a smile the fellow responded that this would only be possible for a little while, as this dog was programed to attain about 60 kilos (135 lbs) when grown.
Ordinary interactions with ordinary people, but which take on a simple, somewhat luminous extra-ordinariness by virtue of their happening in India. While sitting on the concrete bench waiting for our taxi to come from Sherabling - we could have easily taken one from Bir, but we'd told Bihari Lal, a driver we'd met before, and then again as we were walking out from Sherabling earlier that day, that we would call him when we were ready to leave Bir - I experienced what I told Nancy was a surrealistic quality in the just-so activities of sitting and waiting, watching the para-gliders circle above and come in to land, interacting with locals in the street, in the rural mountains of northern India, in a tiny town settled by Tibetan refugees in the early '60's and now developed to cater to a mix of monasteries and institutes and medical centers and students of Buddhism and tourists and expats and para-gliders from all over the world. It felt like a dream state, or an otherwise ordinarily natural altered/expanded state, in which there was precisely nothing else to be doing and exactly nowhere else to be doing it.
 |
| Doing kora, or circumambulation of the 8 stupas |
Nancy and I had a conversation a couple of mornings ago about something that was upsetting her, triggered primarily by a novel she'd just read, The Inheritance Of Loss, written by the Indian author Kiran Desai, and by a drama we'd just watched, Amu, both partly or wholly set in, and/or to do directly with dark or despairing sides of India; and also by her not feeling altogether well.
The issue for her was, as I understand it, the way people ignore, or are unaware of, or otherwise neglect important and troubling human realities because of their "white privilege". She shared that a mentor of hers can no longer travel to or be in "third world" countries because it's too painful for her to be there and to experience the disparity between her own American privilege and the conditions of many of the people in these countries; and that the decision to no longer go to these places was, for her, a moral decision, meaning, I take it, that she sees her being there as a kind of affront to the people she encounters; or that it is perhaps rubbing their noses in their own perhaps distressing conditions.
I can understand this view, if I have it right, and I can appreciate the sensitivity and the sensibility behind it. It is, in a way, perfectly the opposite of what I described as my experience above, and there is here also a sharp example, potentially, of the coincidence of these opposites, or of the essential and universal truth of paradox. Is one of us right and the other wrong? One moral and the other something less than that? One sensitive to privilege and the other insensitive? My answer is: of course not.
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