5.11.10 Diwalpacolypse.

First things first. I’d like to condemn Judge Perry’s pathetic sentencing of Johannes Mehserle in the Oscar Grant case. Unfathomable that Grant’s murder took place and pitifully unsurprising that Mehserle’s punishment was so slight. Could I just point out that the former Army officer stalking Ryan Seacrest also received a 2-year prison sentence? For stalking Ryan Seacrest. Vs. shooting and killing a totally unarmed man while he was facedown on the ground. HELLO.

On a brighter note…

It’s Diwali! The Hindu festival of lights, and what I can only sum up as a combination of Christmas, Fourth of July and Spring Cleaning all in one week! Storefronts have been piling with goods: freshly painted deities, pyramids of chocolates and sweets and a new cart sprouting up on every neighborhood corner, offering the likes of tea cups to tablas. And ohhhhhhhhhhhhh the fireworks! Despite the painfully slow and inefficient carbon-copy-paper-work (!) government of this country, I must commend the Indian Democracy for offering equal firework access to all of their citizens (and non-citizens).

To set the Diwali stage: All of these three storied structures (with a different family living on each floor, or sometimes one family residing in the entire building) have hung strings of Diwali (aka Christmas) Lights from their respective balconies. Not as ridiculously lit up as a Chrstimaphiliac’s home, but gorgeous! The subtly is fabulous and the colors more varied, less blinking! Many houses will go for one color: so like one level is drenched in peach colored light and the bottom floor gold. Or an entire building sheathed in Indigo, Cerulean and Teal strands. Or a descending cascade of gold-white. Glorious!

And in this surreality of bright lights, echoing memories of home, it sounds like a warzone. Loud cracks we hear before bursts of confetti are violently sneezed up in the sky. On the real though, it literally sounded like bombs dropping and gunshots everytime one of these fireworks went off. We’ve been hearing these explosions all week, but they still make us jump a little. That natural instinct! If we heard this sound in America, classrooms would be in lockdown. Like bags of nuclear popcorn being popped in the microwave of the sky, on rooftops and parks and middle-of-the-streets. And the rockets that sing sing sing, screaming towards the stratosphere, the halcyon in cacophony. A sky grown hazy from the newly arrived layer of fog sneakily massaging its way into Delhi—the already putridly heavy, polluted air made more milky with the smoke of rockets, the clouds of crackers (that’s what they call them here!), the feces of fireworks, the remnants of the vivid bright vanished into ghost.

Let me go into a little of who is responsible off these behemoths of sonic and visual mas(s)turbation that have been erupting throughout Delhi all week (the culmination being last night). Mostly kids! Duh! But the really young ones lighting up these bad boys are the most terrifying. It is such a sight to see 6 year olds helping set off explosives with sparklers that are nearly as big as them. To be fair, I never played with fireworks when I was little, but I know many an American parent has been so adventurous as to let their offspring play with fireworks so I can’t discriminate on Indian parents who do the same on the holy Hindu day of Diwali! But it is crazy to see this kind of dangerous activity on such a large scale. Dangerous….ly awesome! Seriously, I was standing on my roof and fireworks were going off RIGHT over my head. It was like—have you ever been on Fiesta Island in San Diego when the 10 o’clock fireworks are going off from Sea World? It was like that, but panoramic surround sound and it lasted for like 5 hours. 5 hours at least!

Am I doing this justice? In so few words: Like if Fourth of July fireworks lasted from as soon as darkness fell to the wee hours of the morning. And you don’t have to drive anywhere for the show. And you are part of the show! Instead of neighbors battling for who has the best Christmas light set up, neighbors are battling to see who has the best firework finale. And you live right in between them!

After some gazing at the roof, watching the airborne rockets explode into too many cascading particles of bright bright bright and smoke, and watching funnybeautifullittle volcano fireworks that spurt so many infinite particles of light 6 feet in the air like a glitter filled Mt. St. Helena sprouting from pavement, our journey to the other side of the neighborhood to meet up with some friends and set off our own fireworks began.

A surreal sojourn (surreal!). Every few houses, a family would be outside lighting fireworks and holding sparklers. So weird to walk through the usually docile neighborhood (excepting the growling, mangy dogs loyal only to the inhabitants of their respective territory), now filling with smoke and flame and sound! I can’t get over the sound! The overplayed simile of war! What sounded like bombs going off—some so loud as to trigger car alarms, that cacophony of sound! And the popcorn explosions coupled with their copious kernels of napalm light blocking thoroughfares, but only briefly. And so many mushroom clouds joining the dense atmosphere and decreasing our visibility gradually. There were troupes of bandana-ed boys plotting where to launch their next rockets. Streets uncharacteristically devoid of the traffic that defines them. We hop in an autorickshaw, literally 1 of maybe 3 outside, though the street is usually teeming with them! Bizarre driving down the trafficless street, the incessant honking of horns replaced with gunshots, backfiring incandescence, baby bombs that turn Delhi “air” from a gas to a solid. As we walk through the maze of residential streets from the metro where the rickshaw driver drops us off, we dodge more volcanoes and see mini-rockets launched from glass Coke and Limca bottles, see red sparks illuminate the neighborhood park, and literally duck when we hear a singing rocket come dangerously close to our heads. Actually quite terrifying. So joyful, yet terrifying. Like a jolly apocalypse. Jollpacolypse. Diwalpacolypse.

We arrive at our friend’s house. Stacks of fireworks litter the dining room table, crowding off glasses full of whiskey and Thums Up soda (Yes, there is a soda here called ‘Thums Up” no b! But the label on the bottle does indeed proudly display that well-known digit protruding upwards out of a fist. False advertising?!). The firework packaging: hilarious. Hate to be immature (no I don’t), but it was all COCK brand. Fitting for this male-dominated sport of recklessness. Each box covered with grinning, gleeful Asian children; cartoon characters; scantily clad blonde women; and a few sultry, sari-ed Indian women too. As if COCK brand wasn’t obvious enough, right? Anyways, let’s just say some fireworks were set off, and that college kids(boys) are really stupid (despite the fact that we are all from UCs, Brown, Vassar, etc).

We waited until 2 am for the fireworks to subside so we could actually walk back through the neighborhoods without dodging launch pads and sparklers and volcanoes and grenades. It was utterly silent compared to the earlier audial carnage. Eerily deserted and the air was legitimately yellowed, clouds of smoke that had hung impatiently after explosion had healthily copulated with the too listless fog. I borrowed a friend’s scarf to attempt to spare my lungs the searingly dry pollutants in the air, but I swear my lungs have never felt so violated and invaded! I can only compare the experience to being in a zombie movie. Something in the air wasn’t quite right. And where was everyone? And those residual explosions of fireworks of a rocket just discovered: emergency flares? And the few groups of kids around our age walking to their respective homes: the other survivors. Dogs sniffing at the old casings and eying us wearily, defensively, were we infected too? Ohhhh my god and at one point on the walk, just after we had seen the other survivors, I swear visibility was not more than 10 or so feet! It was wild! It totally took me back to a Burning Man white-out dust storm.

As I write this, the day after the onslaught, there are still a few fireworks popping throughout the neighborhood. And miraculously, all the wrappings and trash of the fireworks swept away incredibly quickly by poor neighborhood women asking only for sweets in return (oh which every Indian house has copious amounts. And also to clarify: I mean sweets like: this), erasing any evidence of the battle for airspace last night. And the smoke seamlessly united with fog, air hazy from worsening weather or what. Such a chaotic episode of surreality!

Common Wealth Games Break: A prelude

So if everyone didn’t already know: Common Wealth Games = equivalent of the Olympics for former and current British colonies/protectorates/what-have-yous. Held in Delhi, India from Oct 2-14.

Endless construction and endless corruption. Basically, the entire time I’ve been here sidewalks, bridges, roads, buildings, city identity have been constructed before my eyes. Bamboo scaffolding (Actually quite quaint, effective and sustainable! Much less garish than the wrought iron “safety” scaffolding found overseas.) adorned the likes of the mighty Red Fort, office buildings, houses, and even the YWCA we stayed in near Connaught Place. Busy roads with no sidewalks! Gaping holes at major shopping centers with no fences blocking pedestrians from the orifices choked with waste and wires. Hardhats?!? You’re funny. Of course there were no hardhats, or at least they were very rare. And blinding metal work in the streets at all hours of the day and night. JUST LIKE FLASHDANCE. Not really but you get my drift.

The construction made life difficult at times. Like when my dear friends Erika and Kate were here around the end of August and it was monsooning ridiculously as we got off the metro at Connaught Place and had to weave our way through seas of mud and tile and electrical wire, stepping on Styrofoam icebergs bobbing in those unknown waters, walking planks of plywood to reach salvation: the covered alcoves of CP. This is off of a major metro stop that handles thousands and thousands of people a day. One might have expected some kind of walkway to be there considering that many thousands more people were expected for the games in a mere month and a half, but I digress. So was the nature of Games preparation: procrastination in all its painful, anxiety-filling, break-neck glory.

Luckily for us, Delhi University (and pretty much every other school in the entire city) cancelled school for fear of the impending clusterfuck impeding student transport to places of learning. (Sidenote: it didn’t actually get that crowded, the games were kind of a fail in terms of attendance, buttttttt we weren’t even here so ha!). And I decided to extend my 2 week break into 3 weeks. Why? WHY NOT?

Itinerary:

Wed. Sept 29: 44 hour train ride to Chennai commences!
Thurs. Sept 30: Train!
Fri. Oct 1: Arrive in Chennai and straight to Ponidcherry (4 hour bus ride)!
Sat. Oct 2: Pondicherry
Sun. Oct 3: Pondicherry→ Trichy (5 hour bus ride) →Thanjavur (1 hour bus ride)
Mon. Oct 4: Thanjavur→ Madurai (4 hour bus ride)→ Kanyakumari (6 hour bus ride?)
Tues. Oct 5: Kanyakumari → Varkala (3.5 hour bus ride + 1 hour autorickshaw ride)
Wed. Oct 6: Varkala
Thurs. Oct 7: Varkala →Aleppy (2 hour train ride)
Fri. Oct 8: Aleppy—24 hour backwaters boat ride!
Sat. Oct 9: Aleppy→Ft. Kochi (I don’t even remember, 3 hour bus ride?)
Sun. Oct 10: Ft. Kochi
Mon. Oct 11: Ft. Kochi → Goa (14ish hour train ride)
Tues. Oct 12- Thurs. Oct 14: Goa
Fri Oct 15: Goa → Bombay (14ish hour train ride)
Sat. Oct 16 - Tues. Oct 19: Bombay
Wed. Oct 20: Arrive in Delhi in PM (after a 20 hour train ride)

Okay so by my rough, forgotten guestimations of time:
44+ 4+5+1+4+6+3.5+1+2+3+14+14+20 = that is something like 121.5 hours just in transit. Which comes out to how I spent about a 5th of my break. Crazy!

The amount of traveling actually wasn’t so bad. I feel like a totally zen traveler now. Throw me on a bus and I will sit patiently. For hours. And hours. Me! Can you imagine? I hardly can.

Anyways, some highlights of my adventures of south India are to follow!