Piece of News: January 9, 2008

So, I'm in Germany now as I'm writing this, perhaps I'll be in Hong Kong before I mail it though. I have just a couple of remarks to summarize. A while back I discovered that there are two branches of Indian cuisine. The one is based off of Hindu recipes and they are all traditionally vegetarian. Most of them are excellent and generally consist of a sauce (or gravy) and some number of vegetables inside, as well as occasionally this type of somewhat solid yogurt cheese hybrid called paneer. The other branch is derived from food types brought to India by the Mughals when they took control of the land back in the day before the British. (Mughals were the Muslim rulers who took over India and prolly are serve as the origin of the word 'mogul'.) The Mughals being Muslims have nothing against eating meat apart from pigs. The dishes officially taken from them are of course then meat dishes. As far as I can tell though, the only type of meat dishes that survived are the ones consisting only of meat with or without some sauce. So essentially meat in the absence of any vegetable. My guess (and the explanation given to me) for reason behind the lack of vegetation in all the Mughal dishes is that people nowadays want to escape from all the vegetables and just eat meat for a change. The Mughal dishes are also pretty good, but generally I take the vegetarian ones because they are cheaper and still incredibly good. (A better reason would be that meat can be pretty sketchy, but that isn't why I usually avoid it.) It's scary, but I think I could be a vegetarian with this kind of food, since I don't miss the meat. Often there is no milk or egg products in the food either, so being vegan here would be pretty simple and very tasty. Although I don't miss the meat, whenever I have it I really enjoy it, so now that I'm back in the western hemisphere I have no qualms about continuing to eat other animals on a regular basis.

If you by some chance managed to read that far in one of my last monster emails, I made plans to interview the mess workers here. I ended up doing it with the help of my two closest Indian friends, Nitin and Amit. I unfortunately was unable to understand what they were saying as my Hindi has not reached a serviceable level yet. (I can ask many basic questions, but neither my vocabulary nor my aural comprehension is enough to understand the answers.) The interviews turned out very successful and many of the people seemed very flattered that I interviewed them. That was actually one of the motives behind it. I wanted to hear the stories behind how they had gotten to be in their position, understand what their position is, and give them a feeling of being interesting and important by interviewing them. I may have defeated the purpose of this, as I did not interview everyone, but for a few I think it was prolly postive. I interviewed 4 or 5 mess workers, a gardener, as well as a sweeper, and a guard. I wanted to interview my favorite guard (Sanjeev) who had taught me much of my Hindi, but I ran out of time, and also I already have talked with him about his story. Fortunately I've been spared the necessity of elaborating on what they said here as I still haven't gotten the interviews translated, yet. (My two friends who took the interviews still need to get that done. My Hindi skillz aren't enough to figure it out.)

The gardener seemed like a really good guy. I met him while juggling. He came to me and tried to ask about it in Hindi. I asked him for his name, which he told me was Akleesh. He, like many other people has had his name tattooed to his arm. At first I though it was some sort of a degrading ID tag, like for a dog or something, but apparently it's just something people do (it's usually more popular in villages). He was a pretty hardworking guy and from what Nitin and Amit have told me his was one of the better interviews.

I found a mint bush on the banks of some mountains at the hill station of Mussoorie which I mentioned last time. The weather was quite european and the markets there were very peaceful. No one called out to us to go to their shops unlike the usual practice in India. Besides chilling out though, there wasn't too much to do there. All I wanted was to chill though, so it was fine. While we were there we went to see a Tibetan colony and a waterfall. The Tibetan colony was mostly funded by Europeans, so the houses were really sweet. It took me a moment to figure out why I liked them, so much, but I'm pretty sure it was because of them being somewhat outlandish in appearance, but clearly up to western standards as far as everything else was concerned. They were also built upon a hill so the effect was quite cool. There was a Buddhist temple there too that we looked at. (Most Tibetans are thought to be Buddhist.) Amit was there so he was able to tell inform when the Buddhist priest/monk who was chilling in the temple observed to some other Hindi speaker in the temple that I was pretty superficial. I think he was referring to what I was looking at in the temple. I didn't speak a word to the guy, so the speed with which he managed to succinctly summarize me as a person is quite impressive.

The temple was very pretty and was situated on this mountain ridge in an incredibly scenic position. Apart from attracting tourists, though I don't think it was an extremely practical place to locate the the city. Massoorie as a whole is positioned on a mountain ridge, but in such a way that all the roads could be level, so it was a pretty cool place to walk around. It was also extremely quiet there before we arrived. I was there with this German guy Johannes with whom I get along really well. When we were returning to our hotel at some late hour we were by far the loudest thing around. We found a scorpion that was mostly dead on the road, and we were a little bit freaked out by the idea of them hypothetically running around our rooms at night. The waterfalls turned out to be not too exciting, and a bit annoying as it also attracted a ton of Indian tourists who have the habit of asking white people for the opportunity to take pictures with them. It is ok to take a couple of pictures, but if 15 people all want pictures and won't stop asking, it's incredibly annoying. Once or twice after I said no, people would try to casually sneak up next to me and have their friends take a picture inconspicuously. We avoided them and moved to more remote parts of the river after that.

All in all Massoorie was good, although getting there we took a bus. It was a tourist bus and cost somewhere between 2 and 4 times the local bus's price. The driver was much worse than those of the local buses and the seats were not that much more comfortable. Trying to sleep on the bus was next to impossible as there were speed breakers on the road and the driver didn't seem to care about slowing down. Thus every 5 minutes or so the bus would jump with a loud noise making it difficult to sleep. Since we sat in the back we got more of the effect and were often bounced up off our seats, which made sleeping very difficult. The last bump I was almost asleep, but not only was I woken by being thrown up off my seat, I also managed to bang my face off of the luggage rack above me, which cut my eyebrow. Fortunately I wasn't wearing glasses at the time, but the luggage rack had drawn blood. I thought it was kind of funny at the time, but I refrained from using the tourist buses afterwards. I had the thought at the time that it kind of sucked to be bleeding from the eye in the back of a loud bus which periodically threw me out of my seat, but at least it offered a pretty ridiculous story to tell afterwards. Often when stuff really sucks I console myself with the "it'll be a funny story later" or with the "it's an experience" rationalization. I've found them to be pretty effective.

One interesting thing about Indians is that they don't say "thank you" very often. Often if someone is just doing there job, there is no need to acknowledge any appreciation for it. Please by the same token is not used very often. It's also a reflection of the idea of asymmetric given relationships. Basically If a friend loans me some money, I should not pay him back, at least not precisely. I can give him more or less than what he gave me, but not in the form of cash usually. I would have to buy him something else or the like. Settling your debts is like saying the relationship is over in some ways. This is pretty cool as I will buy some people food or tchai, and someone else will buy it for me later. I really like this idea as it is only natural to help someone who is need now, even if they can't return the favor as someone else will help me later when I need it. Still, this makes saying thank you pretty rare and special, and so I got a ton of huge smiles when I arrived. I still say thank you, but what's interesting is that the word means something here as opposed to being a formality. A little brother of a friend of mine back home mentioned that 'please' and 'thank you' lose their meanings since they are overused, and I think I agree. I don't think we should stop being polite, I just figure it's something to think on.

Anyway, this is a good place to stop as I've written a lot so I'll cut it into smaller pieces. I can also just send a big mail, but I think this makes it more readable. (I'm in Hong Kong now, so I'll keep sending the India stuff periodically, and maybe some Hong Kong stuff eventually.)

Happy New Year!