Music, Meditation and Volcanic Ash

Irene and Paul

Paul and Irene who recently came here to help out with our training group workshop , probably never imagined what a great adventure they were about to embark on when they left Switzerland for Bombay on the first of April. Considering it was his first visit to India, just being here must have seemed very exotic to Paul. (Irene is here for the second time - her first trip to India was in the late eighties some time).

Everything was going just fine when this thing happened. The volcano in Iceland began to cough out mountain loads of ash and gases and here we all are biting our fingernails thinking of how P and I will get back to Europe. After much reflection they have decided to fly to Tunis and to take the ferry from there to Genoa. From Genoa they will have to take a train to Berne in whose vicinity they live, with their four children ranging in age from four to eleven years.

The whole incident has started off a serious inquiry in us as to how accustomed we have become to certain luxuries which include air travel and so many other aspects of modern life. Not for the first time, we are all looking at the possibilities of how we will travel in the future when petrol and diesel prices sky rocket due to scarcity. Will it be back to sailing ships? And within India will we be restricted to train travel? Maybe walking and cycling will come back into fashion?

It looks like for many of us, life will be turned inside out - and maybe that wont be such a bad thing in the long run, at least for the planet.

Irene helping A in the kitchen

Music And Meditation In The HIlls

The guest house at Panchgani might have been more than a bit run down but it did provide us with an ideal break from the city. The weather was pleasant, we could, at all times enjoy a view of the mountain range from our rooms and balconies and there was this wonderful sense of "being together" almost throughout, the bonding taking place equally during our meditations and dialogues, as during lunches, dinners or evening walks. One of the most interesting topics to surface quite spontaneously on the last morning, was that of "money". Without going into details I could say that it made each of us aware of a number or aspects to do with money ranging from how we dealt with it as individuals, to the general scene in the world where we face stark differences in earning and spending capacity.

A and S who came along to help out with the meals also had a ball, traipsing all the way to the Partapgadh fort one morning (they returned exhausted after climbing up 450 steps and all the way down again), running wild in the Panchgani market and generally enjoying the scenery and weather.

Here are some pics which I got from Suhail and Kalpana:

Su at Kamat's, where we stopped for breakfast on the way. (He threatened to kill me if I posted this pic so please dont tell him!)

Kalpana enjoying the evening meditation

Sunset

Vijay, who joined us after a longish break

Cooking with awareness

Another one on cooking which I actually posed for. My contribution consisted largely of watching other people chop, stir or fry the veggies

Basia and Kalpana

Basic nuts (this includes the photographer who doesn't appear in the pic)

And one last shot by Kalpana, of a poster on the back of a van, on our way back home

Two Tired People "Laxing"

A normal morning in our household, around 11.30.
Shambhu ( hard night's day) and Apu Moll "laxing" as our cook A puts it:

Waiting ...

Now back since Thursday, from Neredu, we're all slowly getting grounded again. As usual Neredu was an extraordinary experience - the place, the people, the atmosphere. I am still waiting for photos from Sharat and others who took their cameras along. I thought I'd forgotten to take mine but on returning I found it at the bottom of my rucksack. Anyway the result is that I have no photos this time but I think they should be rolling in in a couple of days from various people.

The day after I got back Shambhu was seriously sick. He'd been munching the usual kachra from the garbage bin and it almost looked like a case of poisoning. However, the vet who paid us a couple of visits, set him right with a couple of injections and since last night his appetite has returned, he is eating, mewing and purring and currently curled up on a chair in the kitchen.

Images Of Bombay

Some pics that capture the essence of Bombay - taken by Sophie who visited us along with Suhail in November.

Roadside salon

The heart of "town"

Baan Ganga

Dhobi Ghat

My favourite - crow conference

To refresh your memory - Sophie and Mansi

***

And meanwhile the deluge soon begins. On Friday the Turks arrive - Ozden and a friend, neither of whom I've met though both of them know Ayse. A day later, come Rupert, Brigitte, Ayse and Geraldine, with whom we will be doing the workshop in bodywork starting Sunday. If hotel bookings dont work out for the next lot we might also have Sabine, Dieter, Joseph and Jutta stretched out on the carpet in the living room - all of whom are actually on their way to Goa and need a place for two nights and a day. And then I am off myself to Bangalore and Xanadu for the New Year.

In case this turns out to be the last post of the year, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to y'all.

Rhythm Pharma

What a surprise to find Greg and Aparna at my doorstep yesterday morning. The surprise element was not so much in the fact of their having turned up, as Vijay had called a couple of hours earlier, to ask if these friends of theirs, from the U.S. could visit me for a brief while. They were really interested, he said, in the work that we were doing at Basicindia. The surprise was more in the feeling of having known each other for ages in spite of the fact that we were meeting for the first time. Aparna incidentally, is the daughter of a former school friend of Nirupa's (Vijay's wife). Anyway, as luck would have it I did have the morning free so they came along with their kids, Anouskha and Uma (my namesake - kind of).

In the hour or so that we chilled out on the balcony, we discovered we had so much in common it wasn't funny. Talk about "coincidence". I told them about our involvement with Xanadu and Greg a percussionist who has worked with several major bands and also with Bikram Ghosh in India, described his work, which involves creating a space to explore consciousness, through the use of rhythms. Check out the site: Rhythm Pharm
You'll soon find some more info on them and on Greg's work on the basicindia site (Basic Reflections).

Latest Topics Of Discussion

From our cook A, I have found out that the hottest topic of discussion these days is the price of food. No matter where you go, she says, at bus stops, in the train, in the chawl where she lives, they're talking about the impossibly steep rise in the price of everything from bhindi to potatoes and wondering how they're going to survive. As for the price of dal, says A, it's a joke. It's more than doubled in such a short while. We both talked about how scary it is when such a huge chunk of the population of a city or state is faced with a serious food shortage. Gear up for more violence, I tell her and she nods with a stoic look in her eye. Only, people are so dumb, she adds. Instead of confronting those whom they should, the people in power who are responsible for this state of affairs, they will go and burn some more buses and destroy public property and that will be the end.

The Mahalaxmi temple next door has its own way of dealing with these difficult times we are going through. In the morning we are blasted out by conch shells played over the loudspeaker and our evening meditations on the balcony, over a tot of Feni or rum, are accompanied by a loud, almost aggressive rendition of "Om Jai Jagdish". Well, the rum or feni or whiskey as the case may be does make it easier for us to cope with the ear-splitting pleas for mercy. It reminds me of that bunch of priests in Bombay who, a few months back, immersed themselves in drums of water for ten hours a day over several days, chanting Sanskrit slokas to bring on rain. The rain manager apparently was deaf and didn't hear it, so we still have a water shortage in Bombay and the crops have failed miserably which is also a likely reason for the steep food prices.

***

Ahh... Bombay!

Mansi and Sophie entertaining each other

Landing at Sahar airport was like a slap in the face. Sudden, unexpected (because when you're abroad you forget how things are in India) and stinging. There was this union strike, see, so everything was slowed down and I thought it would take not just a few hours but a few days before I got home. I most often ask for a wheelchair to circumvent the long queues at immigration and customs and am whizzed through like a rocket. This time the wheelchair took forever to arrive and when I raised an eyebrow, the air hostess told me that it was because seventeen passengers on our aircraft had put in a request for assistance. Seventeen??!! Yikes. Is India the only country where a sizeable fraction of the population is old and/or disabled?!

After a bit I saw that the wheelchairs had arrived but we were still waiting. It turned out that there were only about two assistants to push the whole lot of us because the rest of the workers were on strike. Somehow we managed (I began to regret having asked for a wheelchair and thought I might have gotten out faster on my own this time). As if this weren't enough there were some checks on account of swine flu and we had to fill in forms regarding the state of our health while we were screened for fever or symptoms of flu. The area around immigration was choking with passengers who had not been cleared but of course, there's nothing like patience. I decided to take it all with grace, even if I had to wait there till the next morning.

Finally when we got our bags I decided I'd had enough of the wheelchair and being pushed around together with seventeen others and decided to grab hold of the trolley on which my bags had been piled and made my way out. Here too, milling crowds, a mixture of passengers and those who had come to fetch them. In perpetual fear of being knocked down I made my way out to where I caught side of Tuks who had come to collect me, along with Pawar after which I stuck to his side until the car arrived.

***

My return home was marked with a lot of activity. To begin with, S's sister had come to stay for a few days along with her loquacious three and a half year old daughter Mansi who as long as she's awake, cant keep her mouth shut. Luckily she is at the stage when anything and everything she says is cute and you cant help laughing. Then Suhail arrived around 4 in the afternoon. He had come to meet his friend and colleague from Paris, Sophie, who was to arrive that night, and whom he went to fetch from the airport.

Sophie turned out to be a hit with Mansi who even learned a few words in French including "Bonjour" and "Comment ca va". She was also very popular with Shambhu who sidled past her as she was leaning over the railing facing the garden, raised a leg and sprayed her on the arm. I was aghast to hear about it from Suhail though Sophie just giggled and shrugged and said it was normal, if someone regarded you as his territory.

The first few days I was knocked out and mostly in a bit of a zombie like state but having slept and slept and eaten and slept this last week I am finally back to normal.

Skol!

In between all the heavy work which we were subjected to in the workshops :) Ayse and I would periodically take off, call up a couple of motorbike taxis and spin off into the village of Japaratinga which is right on the beach. Our first stop was invariably the internet café in the centre of the small town after which we would walk down to “Mama Pereira’s” , a replica of the beachside shacks you find in Goa. Even the waiters in jeans and T-shirts, resembled those in Goa, laidback but friendly.


What I loved was the beer, which everywhere was served chilled. To keep it cold the bottle or beer can itself is stuck into a kind of thermos flask flask which keeps it chilled almost to the end. Mama Pereira’s was good fun to hang out in, it was casual, frequented by dozens of people during the day, yet not overcrowded, and every now and then a vendour or fisherman would walk through, flaunting his wares. You have little boys cycling down the beach side road, flogging everything from ice cream to locally manufactured CD’s, their little tin containers fitted with stereos blaring out samba music.





While Ayse and I were chilling one afternoon with a glass of beer, this peanut seller strolled through the restaurant, little plastic bags of peanuts strung up along a bamboo pole. I stopped him to take a photograph. He nodded but asked me to wait. Then he fished around for a few seconds in his pocket and whipped out a pair of sunglasses which he stuck on his nose with a flourish. Now, he indicated, he was ready to be photographed.


The one big jolt I got in Brazil was that nobody but nobody seems to speak anything but Portuguese. One in a hundred maybe can get by with a smattering of English otherwise it is mostly sign language. The menu at Mama Pereira’s is entirely in Portuguese but by and by we picked up some of the essential terms. Abrigado means thank you. (If a woman says it, it’s Abrigada), Fish is Peixe (pronounced “peshe”), beer (the first thing I learned from Rupert at Mama Pereira’s), is Cerveja, cheese is queijo. Then I saw a word on the menu which I thought couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was – batata. In fact, like it does in Marathi, it means potato!



On the east coast of Brazil the sun rises so early in the morning that we were mostly up and about by five o'clock. By six thirty several of us would have gathered in the garden where we had our meals, waiting desperately for our morning coffee and by seven the multi course breakfast would start to appear in bits and pieces, at Willi’s resort where the group was staying during the workshop.

The sun also sets early in these parts. By three in the afternoon it begins to get cool. This is when, if we were at Mama Pereira’s, we would get onto the beach because it was no longer very hot. It is by and large a clean, quiet and pretty beach. By five the sun starts to set and by six it is pitch dark. During the workshop days dinner would be served by six and by seven it looked like there was nothing to do but go to bed. The first few days I was zapped, just not used to this kind of routine. Then things settled down and by the time Ariela, Thomas and others arrived, we would just hang out, order ourselves a Caipirinha (white rum based drink with sugar and lemon – very nice!) and chat till late. Sometimes Thomas or Paul or someone would get out their guitars and entertain us. At some point I will write about the workshops. (Four in the space of about twelve days!) Maybe when I’ve sorted out the pictures I got from Silvia, the Brazilian woman who attended the sessions. She is an anthropologist and film maker and one of the few people I met who spoke English fluently, mainly because she had spent three and a half years in Winnipeg doing her PhD in social anthropology.

Saturday Evening In Frankfurt

On Sabine's balcony

It was good catching up with Suhail this weekend. He came over on Friday afternoon and as usual a good bit of our time initially was spent in trading news and getting familiar with each other’s current situation. We were determined to stick to our Saturday evening date with the group which somehow seemed a bit different from back home because in Bombay (or rather India) our timing for the meditation is from half past ten to half past eleven whereas in Europe it is from 7 to 8 in the evening. It was a lovely evening, the sun was in the midst of setting, the sky was a lovely mixture of blue, grey and pink and suffused with a typical twilight atmosphere.

We had had kind of a hard day - most of all Suhail and my friend Sabine with whom I’m staying at the moment, who had done some hard core shopping after breakfast. The shopping was for the evening meal which was originally meant to be a surprise for Su. The surprise was that he was going to have to cook for us. In fact it was more of a shock as Su had been expecting to relax and have someone else take over the kitchen for a change. In spite of some nasty sounding rumblings from deep inside him, we ended up with the most delicious fish concoction, sprinkled with herbs and baked in the oven and an equally mindboggling dessert – ice cream with slices of fried mango.

Suhail had just spent an hour chopping and cleaning and putting things together before we settled down for the meditation. I played a CD which I had burned for him and for an hour we sat back and watched the evening sky. I realised how much this kind of simple ritual helps to bond people, to make space to integrate feelings one has been experiencing during the day, if not the entire week, space for gratitude - for everything, from your own body, (eg to the senses, which are like a window to the world,) to the presence of various friends without whom life would be like a saltless diet. The tiredness of the day miraculously slipped away and at the end of the hour we felt ready to go on with the rest of the evening which we then did, with great gusto, together with Sabine and her friend Rolf who joined us later.

Tomorrow Ayse and I take the flight to Recife in Brazil so I don’t know when I will next be able to mail. Anyway keep well all of you. And sooner or later we’ll catch up with each other.

(Incidentally while shopping Suhail bought a card reader for me which now enables me to transfer my pics to the computer so as to be able to upload them).

Greetings From The Home Of The Frankfurter

Sachsenhausen - the quarter where Sabine lives

This is really a dumb thing to do but though I remembered to bring my camera along I forgot all the connecting cables - the charger and the USB cable - which means I wont be able to post any pics until I get home. Or unless I manage to find a USB cable which suits the camera. The memory exercise they showed us to do in the acupressure class seems to have had the reverse effect. Think I was doing much better before I started to activate what they call the memory point. Oh well.

It is rather nice to be back in Frankfurt after a gap of three years. This time, since we're flying out of Frankfurt to Brazil I thought I'd spend some time with Sabine who has moved from the busy street she used to earlier live in, to a quiet neighbourhood in the same locality. In some ways the flat is much nicer. It's airy, more cheerful, and has a wonderful terrace adjoining the living room with its floor to ceiling plate glass windows from where you get a view of the sky and of a lot of shady trees through which you see the tops of the nearby buildings. The disadvantage is that it is not as close to the restaurants and shops which the other place was. There you had to just walk down to the street and within a hundred meters on either side you'd find a mix of Mexican, Italian, French or German restaurants. Now all the shopping and the eating out involves a steep climb down the hill and then some amount of walking.

As usual a lot of time has been spent in catching up with the news, and also in sampling the different cheeses spread out on the dining table at meal times, and also the variety of fruit. Talking of food, Suhail is probably already in the train from Paris, on his way to Frankfurt for the weekend, unaware of the plans which Sabine and I have, to get him to produce dinner tomorrow - just giving him an opportunity to exercise his culinary skills.

Brazil, Here I Come! (Take Two)

Beachnear Recife

The last time I set out for Brazil I ended up spending four and a half months in Germany with a broken leg, recuperating at Ariela's place. And though the experience finally turned out to be wonderful and something I would never want to miss, I hope the trip to Recife on the west coast of Brazil (where I am soon headed) will unfold, without the aid of any such excitement or dramatic incident.

The visa has come through after a lot of haggling by the Brazilian consulate who required a letter of invitation from the owner of the guest house in Brazil on his official letterhead. Willi Graber who runs a modest guest house in Japaratinga mailed back saying that as he was a really small operator he didn't have an official letterhead but that he would see if a hotelier friend of his would send us the invitation. Somehow my travel agent managed to swing a deal and the visa came through without my having to break my neck (or another leg). Now B who is also supposed to be joining the rest of the gang up in Recife is struggling to get his visa, having been asked to furnish a complete itinerary detailing his three week stay in the country. I mean, we're all going to be hanging out in Japaratinga with the local shamans.

You'd think that all Indians were scrambling over each other in their haste to leave their own country in exchange for Brazil!!

The Week Gone By

As I am sure my goddaughter (God-dottie) will testify, I make a lousy godmother. I am a zero at remembering birthdays, I dont remember to give people gifts (maybe I'm just stingy), I'm not the most sympathetic person on earth for a high energy teenager to turn to (oops I keep forgetting Dottie is no longer in her teens - she is entering her late twenties even if she doesn't quite look it). But one thing I'll say ... I am always happy to see God-dottie when she does bounce into view as she did last week, quite out of the blue.

Devika, studying dance therapy in the U.K. is back home on vacation and landed up here with Jyotsna and Ravi before they returned to Pune. I offered her our group to experiment on so perhaps she will take me seriously and when she is through with her studies, we can occasionally sit at her feet and get some gyan on our pscyhe through dance and movement.

***

Ever since Master Shambhu appeared in our lives last summer, S. my executive assistant, has become as soft brained about cats as I am. She keeps bringing strays home to feed though I insist on her taking them right back where she found them, as Shambhu doesn't like to share his territory with other felines and can get quite mean and grumpy when a visitor does occasionally saunter in. A couple of days back anyway, there was this cute as hell kitten wailing away in our compound so Saru asked the guard downstairs to bring it up, which he obligingly did. We fed it milk and some raw beef which it happily gobbled down, after which it settled down nicely in my arms, purring away so it was rather sad to have to send it on its way after a while. Luckily Master-ji happened to be gallivanting at the time so we managed to avoid high drama.

Some more photos of our Khandala trip

Here are Uma L's pics from our stay at Khandala

The approach

Bright n shining

Cheeselings

Tete a tete

Misty Memories

The house at Khandala

The lasting impression of Khandala this time was of mist floating in and around and through the house and everyone constantly going "Ooooh, there's a CLOUD coming in!" The house turned out to be one of those structures, about a hundred years old with two large bedrooms with beds so high, they almost needed a ladder to get onto, a spacious dining room with an old wooden dining table in the center and a long broad verandah running along the of the house facing the hills. There were enough beds and sofas and chairs strewn around to enable us to comfortably loll around and we were taken good care of by the housekeepers, Narayan and his wife, both of them from Nepal. Every now and then a stringy looking but very sweet and noisy half grown grey and white cat would come running in, begging for food and then disappear again.



Sudha lost in reflection

The verandah, everyone said, was the stuff Bhoothbanglas are made of although nobody felt very scared. Maybe all those rain songs belted out by Sudha and Kalpana purified the atmosphere. Ha ha. Meals were on the whole very saatvik, no chillis, very little masala and oil (good for the system) though we made up for all the health food with chilled beer one afternoon and shots of some out of the world Scotch provided by Sean and Pooja which helped me to win at least three games of UNO.

Thoughtful Pooja

The morning after we arrived Uma L insisted that I accompany her, Sharat and Kalpana to "the ridge" from where it was possible to get a spectacular view of the mountains and valley. I just about made it though we had just reached when it started blowing and in no time we were being spattered by drops of rain. Luckily we made it back to the bungalow before getting completely drenched.






Sean trying to meditate















Uma L and Sudha

And of course there were a couple of deadly
rounds of"Taboo" which had everyone sitting on edge and of "Uno" which was good fun - as indeed games are when you're winning a lot of the time.

Pics: Kalpana, Sharat

"Inner Peace" In Pune

Time and again, you see that inner peace is quite simple. It's all a matter of letting go of your expectations. The first expectation that crashed regarding our workshop in Pune, was that the cook whom Jyotsna had hired failed to turn up. Somehow that didn't matter at all because cooking just became a part of the curriculum. When the evening meditation was over, the team took over Jyotsna's kitchen and within an hour and a half we had produced quite an impressive meal of bhindi, palak paneer, kala dal, and raita and pulao which we rounded off with some chocolate chikki which Jyotsna had bought in Panchgani when we were there in May.

I have to clarify I suppose that my role in this whole feat was to keep Sharat company at the table while he chopped bhindis. The rest of the time I read "My family and other saints" by Kirin Narayan who it turned out is an ex BIS (Bombay International School) student, whose sister Maya I'd briefly studied with and whose brothers Rahul and Deven I knew slightly, though they were much junior to me.

In between the bai coming and going and trains whistling as they roared past, we did in fact, manage to unwind with the help of some music and plain exercises in listening and had some good dialogues. The surprise element was Kalpana, a new addition to our group who kind of discovered us through the net. She came from Delhi and turned out to be a real good sport, pitching in enthusiastically with everything we did.

On the way back we stopped at Khandala, to visit Uma L who had invited to stay with her at a friend's bungalow about which there will be more in the next post perhaps along with some pictures, yet to be sent by Sharat and Uma.

Century!

The birthday girl with Ulka

My grandmother Nalini’s expectation that she would live to be a hundred was not quite met. In July 2005, just four years short of her centenary, she decided to pack up and move on to some other part of the universe. But on Saturday 27th June we got to see Manik Lad hit a century at a fabulous lunch organised by her children Girish and Gauri and the rest of the family including Girish’s wife Rekha and their kids, Ahalya and Dnyanesh and their partners.

Arun and Dad with Tipkya

Talk about food. This was one lunch at which I almost passed out with the sheer joy of eating. From the time we arrived to the time we left drinks were flowing and snacks being passed around, whose memory still has me drooling. We finally ended with a whopping lunch rounded off by three desserts one of which was blueberry cheesecake. It was good to catch up with old friends like Jinx and Usha, as well as one of the two surviving feline members of the Lad family - Tipkya - who settled down comfortably for a couple of hours, next to my dad. "It was a fun" as Indians like to put it.

Tipkya

Girish and Arun (Ahalya's husband) put up an excellent slide show on Mrs. Lad's life and how she had got to witness the progress of transport from the bullock cart to the airplane and how these days she can't live without modern amenities. My grandmother also appeared in one of the slides and Girish very accurately described her staple diet - chocolate, ice cream and potato chips which contributed to her health and happiness till her last day.

It left me wishing that more people would turn hundred and decide to celebrate the big day.

Me and Usha

Mum at her party best