Subject: We Wish You a Delhi Christmas: Jaipur, Delhi, Pushkar
Date: Sun Dec 29, 2002

Jaipur boasts one of the most pleasant old cities in India. Instead of the usual dense maze of narrow alleyways, there are wide avenues with raised sidewalks on either side, and the whole thing is laid out in a sensible grid. Trees grow in the medians, and there are fountains at the centers of some of the bigger intersections. Rajasthan's pink-painted capital is, in fact, a planned city, established in the 18th century by the brilliant astronomer, scientist, patron of the arts and military leader Jai Singh, the first maharaja (and namesake) of Jaipur.

I make a point of this because city planning has such a curious history in India. The Indus River Valley civilization, one of the earliest in the world, planned their cities in immaculate detail. Cities hundreds of miles apart were laid out in exactly the same way down to the smallest details, as if some prehistoric architecture firm had faxed the same set of blueprints to builders from Afghanistan to Baluchistan to the Punjab.

The decline of the Indus civilization is shrouded in mystery, but when they disappeared, they took the art of city planning with them; according the historian John Keyes, theirs was the last example of urban design until the 18th century, when the British and other colonial powers reintroduced the idea.

To be fair to the Indians, it's not as if 16th-century Paris was a convenient place to park. And the elaborately dense, organic old cities -- Delhi and Varanasi are good examples -- are typically much older than Jaipur. They give one an enveloping, sometimes claustrophobic sense of being inside a very old, very strange animal. Jaipur by contrast feels rational, sophisticated, cool. The Jai Singh dynasty were promoters of art and science, close allies of the Mughals yet resolutely Hindu, tolerant and forward-thinking. The current maharaja still lives in part of the palace, and another part has been dedicated to masters of traditional Rajasthani crafts, whose work is supported by an endowment from the royal family.

In fact, the old feudal maharajas have played a vital role in the modern history of India. When India became independent in 1948, it was easy enough for the British to hand their territories over to the new governments of India and Pakistan. But the British were in direct control of only a portion of the land; the rest was still officially in the hands of independent (though always compliant) maharajas. An agreement was reached in which the maharajas would retain their residencies and some official status, including stipends, in exchange for joining their territories to the new states. (In India, those powers were largely curtailed during the Emergency period of Indira Gandhi's rule in the 1970s.) Each maharaja was given the right to choose whether he would join Pakistan or India. In Kashmir, even though his subjects were predominantly Muslim, the Hindu maharaja chose to join India, and this has been a centerpiece of India's argument that it owns the disputed territory. India's position would be more persuasive had India itself not annexed a chunk of Gujarat when the Muslim ruler decided to join his largely Hindu realm with Pakistan. To this day, Kashmir and Gujarat are focal points of the Hindu-Muslim tension that dominates the politics of the Subcontinent.

Jaipur manages to have a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims with relatively little tension, and this again might be attributable to the wisdom of the Singhs, who managed to align themselves with the ruling Mughals but were never subsumed by them. Among their relics are a phenomenal set of palaces and monuments. A few kilometers outside Jaipur is Amber Fort, the prior home of Jai Singh. It's a marvelous maze of passageways and halls and stairs and ramps that seem to fold in upon themselves in a way that M.C. Escher would have liked. The main gates are all fantastically painted with vines and flowers in bright colors, and the most prominent building is a small vaulted hall completely covered in shimmering mirror inlay. The effect is somewhere between Versailles and Hearst Castle, with a bit of Pink Floyd concert thrown in.

In the heart of Jaipur is the Hawa Mahal, or Palace of Winds, little more than a facade of elaborately screened windows behind which the ladies of the court could watch the action on the main boulevard of Johari Baazar. Nearby is the City Palace, which is now a museum. Among other things, you can see the clothes of one of the maharajas who just happened to be 7 feet tall and 250 kilograms. His jacket looks like a tent for a baby elephant who needs room to turn around. There are paintings of him in a boat with about six people on the other end to act as counterbalances. There are, fortunately, no paintings of him with his many wives.

But the most fascinating of Jaipur's sights is the Jantar Mantar, or astronomical observatory, created by Jai Singh. The instruments of masonry and marble look like some kind of weird modernist sculpture park, but our guide carefully explained and demonstrated how they all worked. Giant sundials told the time precisely; a whole series of devices helped to identify rising signs for newborns; azimuths and zeniths and a lot of other things I don't quite understand could be measured as well.

*

Sights are fascinating until they're not. While we enjoyed seeing these exotic palaces and forts and observatories, there comes a point when it all blurs together, like when you've spent too much time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can no longer tell whether you're looking at a Rembrandt or a mummy or a fire extinguisher. To some extent we relieved this burnout with shopping, but that too can get wearisome, especially as stepping into a shop in India means having an intense relationship, entirely one-sided, which goes as follows:

"Yes, hello! Have a look! We have more inside. What you like? Look, see, have a look, this one. Okay, this one. You like that one? Here, I have many more. No? Why no? Leaving? Why? What happened? Please, wait! I have many more! Very cheaper price! Wait! What's wrong? Hello!"

I remember that on my last trip to India, the stretch from Varanasi through Agra and Jaipur was one of the loneliest. They're big cities where it's awkward to talk to strangers, even other Westerners, just as it would be weird to go up and say hi to a random backpacker in New York or London. This time Jenny and I had each other, but by the time we finished up in Jaipur it had been weeks since our last non-commercial conversation with anyone else. What with the holidays and the isolation, Jenny was feeling pretty depressed. (For me, the lack of Christmas here is something of a relief; the holiday blues hit me in September, not December.) We decided to go back to Delhi on Christmas Eve so that we could have a festive dinner (and festive margaritas) at TGI Friday's.

Unfortunately, Christmas Day started out badly. On our way back from breakfast we stopped to consult our Lonely Planet and, as usual, were surrounded by faux-helpful Indians who typically either want to guide us to their travel agency or else just poke the funny white monkeys. In this case, it was a bunch of rich young men of the sort who get involved in "Eve teasing," India's euphemism for sexual harrassment. They began pestering Jenny with personal questions while I was consulting the book, and when we began to walk away they shouted at us. "Why are you so *rude*!" they cried. "You don't talk to Indians? You're too good?" It's a totally obnoxious and all-too-common ploy that plays on Western liberal guilt, which it shouldn't: we talk to Indians plenty, but we don't talk to crowds of strangers on busy city streets, and neither would any self-respecting Indian under similar circumstances. Still, it was enough to reduce Jenny to tears.

When she thought it through later, Jenny decided that it wasn't the rudeness or the attempt at making her guilty that made her feel so rotten, but the way that India required her to be nasty to people. I agreed. India is exhausting, and the worst of it is suspecting absolutely everyone you meet of having threatening motives. Jenny wasn't sure she could handle another three months of it, and frankly neither was I. But having traveled here before, I knew something that Jenny didn't: I knew the transformative power of Pushkar. "We'll go there," I told her, "and we'll meet other travelers, and we'll have conversations, and we'll relax. We can think things through once we get there."

The rest of Christmas was in fact an improvement. We met two Scotsmen in kilts and Santa hats who were off in search of liquor and the new James Bond movie, because "it wouldn't be Chraistmas without James Bond." Just that little conversation cheered us up enormously, and we spent the rest of the afternoon shopping with the hoards of Indians who had the day off.

*

By the afternoon of December 26th, we were in the charming little town of Pushkar, and life here is decidedly good. There are sunsets over the lake, made all the more pleasant by the crowds of hippies and backpackers who gather there each night, by the fine ensemble of Indian and Western drummers who play underneath the great tree between the Sunset Cafe and the ghats, and by the special green lassis served up by the Sunset's laid-back waiters. It's changed in the last five years. The crowds are bigger, and the Sunset has an elaborate new facade of curlicue arches plus a cement patio. But much has remained the same, too. Joseph David, Christian from Kerala (as he always introduced himself) is still on the staff, looking a little bit grayer. And there is still that super-mellow, aimless vibe that feels so good after the jangly bustle of the big cities.

These days Pushkar seems to be something of a way-station for long-term Western travelers who've spent the early season in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh, living among the Tibetan refugees at Dharamsala, and who will spend the late season on the beach in Goa, but don't want to be there for the overblown Christmas-New Year's scene. There are a surprising number of families with small children, most of whom seem to be well cared for. As in California, the "alternative lifestyle" scene here is now old enough that the first and even second and third waves now have kids, and it changes the dynamic. When you've got a baby, you become less interested in which gurus throw the best orgies and more interested in which temples have the best ayurvedic doctors.

Still, India remains a destination for the aimless: where else can you waste so much time for so little money? There are plenty of naive kids fresh from college or army service floating around here -- I was one of them the last time I visited -- and they're very much into the hippie versions of preening and posturing: making loud noises on their Royal Enfield motorcycles, twirling poles or fire-sticks, beating their drums, wearing their cloaks and bell-bottoms dashingly. It's all very high school in its way. (Daniel, I'm not sure if you'd love it or hate it, but I'm guessing that if you played your cards right, you could have scantily clad European girls worshipping you like a god in no time.)

The crowd tends to divide by age. There are the world-weary baby boomers who've been doing this for decades, know exactly what they think of everything, and have absolutely no interest in hearing anything new from anyone younger. They tend to sit up by the cafe rather than down on the ghats, and they have old-people-on-the-porch conversations about how it used to be better and cost less, and how Ibiza is such a *scene* these days, not like it used to be. The next bracket down are the older Gen-Xers, who like to gather and spew angry outsider leftist vitriol at each other for fun, always assuming that everyone will agree with whatever conspiracy theory they propound. If you used to read Common Cause in the '80s and miss it, you should come here; they all hate Reagan just as much as Jello Biafra and Dennis Miller did.

Jenny and I are in the age group between the Gen-X Leftists and the preeningly graduated. We like to get together and talk about the artful ways in which we've been laid off. We're still a starry-eyed bunch, but a lot of us are actually in the process of doing things that mean a great deal to us, no longer adrift but not yet disillusioned.

The night before last we had a long conversation with a couple who are on tour with Princess Superstar. He's a dj who's worked with the Chemical Brothers, she's a former London fashion-mag editor who went to interview Princess Superstar and immediately became her best friend. (And who's Princess Superstar? She's a New York hipster phenomenon, a sort of Lawn-Guyland Italian trash-talking princess type who happens to be a badass rapper and has worked with just about every other super-cool New York hipster musician.) So when Princess Superstar went on tour, she invited this woman along, and they've been touring the world with this bizarre, wild novelty act and meeting cool people wherever they go.

So this couple is doing something absolutely cool. Five years ago I might have felt jealous or pathetic talking to them, but I don't now. Jenny and I agreed that they definitely out-hipped us (and after a year in Korea, it feels so good to be around people hipper than us!), but they didn't particularly out-cool us. It's a subtle distinction, but it matters. Yes, they hang around people like Beck, Jon Spencer, Kool Keith, Prince Paul, Chuck D, and that's very, very hip. (If you've never heard of any of these people, just nod and smile and pretend you like their music very much.) Suburban Korean children and their teachers are not typically a very hip crowd, but it turns out that hanging out with them for a year is pretty spectacularly cool. And if you spend all your time with record company executives, expat kindergarten teachers probably seem that much cooler.

I guess Jenny and I are lucky to have so many friends who are doing very cool things that are pretty much what they wanted to do: producing and directing their own plays and movies, sewing wings for Victoria's Secret models, practicing law, doing social work, playing in a Judas Priest cover band, taking foster kids into their home, raising their children. And some of it is the luck of being American: we get a lot of opportunities, something you realize when you see children every day who are so poor that they'll probably never get to play with a kite. In any case, it's good to be past that first wave of anxiety that comes with stepping into the adult world.

It's also good to hear what the other backpackers have to say. For weeks we've been cocooned in our own experiences, with no reference point against which to judge them. Now at last we can talk to other people and find out what they like, what they hate, how they cope. We met a young Dutch man who got away from the tourist hype by looking at his map, looking at his Lonely Planet, and going to towns that were in the former but not the latter. He said he got stared at by great crowds, and some nights he ended up sleeping on the floors of temples, but that it was great. I don't know that Jenny and I will end up doing something like that, but it's an approach we hadn't even thought of. Other travelers have shared more conventional intelligence about which towns they liked, where there was good food, where it was beautiful and where it was ugly. It's gotten us excited about being here again. We're now half-way through our travel, and we're ready to plunge back in for an even better second half, armed with all the knowledge and experience we've gained so far.

Well, almost ready. For now, it's good to have an aimless week or two to just sit and absorb what we've done so far. We've been reading a lot, playing a lot of chess, sitting and staring a fair amount, then heading to the Sunset in the afternoons to do all of the above in a more social setting. I'm on a very tight schedule, and it's now sometime in the afternoon, so I think I have to wander back to the hotel now and get ready to wander somewhere else and eat. Or something. Whatever it is, it'll be mellow, and that feels very, very good.

More relaxed than ... um ... whatever's more uptight than me,
Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: My Global New Year
Date: Sat Jan 4, 2003

Long ago I decided never to do something on New Year's Eve that I wouldn't enjoy doing on some other day of the year. This is one reason why I have never chosen to huddle in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of drunk people in the freezing cold in Times Square. There were periods of my life when I had to bundle up and slog through crowds in Times Square as part of my daily commute; why would I want to add alcohol to that scene and do it at midnight?

So for this New Year's Eve, Jenny and I did pretty much what we've done every other day in Pushkar: we went to the Sunset Cafe. It's a great place to sit for hours on end, chatting with whatever tourists happen to be floating through, gazing out at the lights of the village reflected in the lake, and eating surprisingly good Italian and Indian food. They'd put up a sign up promising a buffet, a New Year's cake, live music and fire juggling, but we would have been there even without the sign.

As evening came on, the usual crowd of tourists gathered at the edge of the lake, but with some differences. The hardcore party element -- the fresh-from-the-army Israelis in purple pants, the Europeans fleeing the pressures of uni, the Renfaire-cloak hippies from Australia and North America -- were conspicuously absent. Pushkar is a dry town, so the serious chemical extravaganzas were held at random spots out in the desert nearby. (Also absent was the Bicycle Man, a terrifyingly underfed Indian whose nightly act involves posing in various ways on a moving bicycle; suspending the bike dangerously over a little girl, possibly his daughter, who looks bored to death; taking off his shirt, smearing his body with paraffin, then lighting an inner tube on fire and rubbing it all over himself; and, as a finale, eating of a fluorescent lightbulb. It's the sort of act that actually disperses crowds that are standing nearby.)

To replace the party crowd, we had an influx of middle-class Indian couples and families on short holidays from Delhi and Agra and Jaipur -- the sort of people who choose to go to a dry town near home to celebrate New Year's. So it was a mellow crowd that huddled in the cold and waited for something to happen.

Eventually a crash of drums signalled that the live performance was about to begin. We had been expecting Rajasthani gypsies or something, but instead we got a group of Aussies practiced in the hippie arts. Two didgeridoo players accompanied a few drummers, while the black-clad, face-painted jugglers dribbled motor oil onto their tools, careful not to let any polluting substance drip on the ground. Then they set fire to their poles and their balls on chains, twirling them impressively to trace circles of fire in the air. Each crescendo was met by Indian-accented cries of "Bravo!" and "Brilliant!" and "Wo-o-ow!" The Western gypsies have been in India long enough by now to have become a tourist attraction for Indians.

By the time the twirling came to an end, it was close to eleven and very, very cold. Jenny and I slipped away and passed the Moment buried in our blankets back at the hotel. We could hear fire-crackers exploding over by the Sunset, and then booming techno music that kept up until about three, but we were happy enough to go to sleep, praying that the beginning of 2003 would be at least a little warmer than the end of 2002.

A foreigner who can juggle dependent clauses but not fire,
Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: A Note on Geography
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2003

When I last visited India, I met a man on the beach in Puri who insisted that America was flat. Then he asked me, "What is tree of America?" That America might have many environments and many varieties of tree simply hadn't occured to him.

The world is very large and very complicated, and I understand that most people in most places have no real reason to know where Moldova is or whether Botswana even has a capital. It's necessary to generalize. Still, there are a few mysteries that can be cleared up with a quick glance at a world map, so my friends and family can stop being surprised that it snows in Korea and gets chilly in India.

WHERE IS KOREA?
Korea is on roughly the same latitude as Japan, Beijing, southern France and the American Mid-Atlantic states. It snows in most of those places; in the Mediterranean and Europe generally, ocean currents keep the weather warmer than at other places with similar latitudes. North Korea actually borders on Russia.

WHERE IS INDIA?
India is very big. The far north reaches as high as southern Korea and the American Mid-Atlantic; the south stretches down below Vietnam. Here in the Rajasthani desert, it gets quite cold at night, just as it does in the deserts of the American Southwest during winter; we are on a similar latitude.

REALLY? IT'S COLD IN INDIA?
Yes. Really. The far northern states of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh are not only not tropical, they're also mountainous. They're the Himalayas, after all. It snows and freezes plenty.

IS IT COLD IN ALL OF INDIA?
No. It's hot in the south. It's always hot in the south.

WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ALL OF THIS?
Because I'm a pedant.

WHAT'S A PEDANT?
For that, go to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Pedantically yours, but at least now you know where,
Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India