Trivandrum Dreamscapes: Leading a Parade; Internet on Train

In the dreamscape of Trivandrum, Kerala, I experienced last night a strange reaction: Soft breezes cooled me through the early-early morning hours, but I awoke in sweat.  Unable to modulate the fan, Colin flipped the switch sometime around two A.M.  Instead of demanding the rise of consciousness to reverse the switch, my mind did the grunt work and I woke at six in the morning.

Our "Tourist Home" bears the same name, Manjalikulam, or "Collection of Bouquets," as the road it is situated on.  It was the most modestly priced receptacle we could find in God's own (sultry) country for our touring bodies; at Rs. 500/night it was neither cheap nor overpriced, but the staff (as per usual in my estimation) did take us for saps!

Colin asked if it'd be possible to get a sheet before sleep last night, so I placed my book down down and picked up the phone to call the front desk.

"Good evening, sir.  This Rao (read Ralph) in room 3 aught 6.  Would you please send a sheet or blanket to the room?"

"Mr. Rao, non-A/C rooms don't come with sheet.  No sheets,"  replied the man at the front desk.

"Oh, that's nice," I said.  "Please send a sheet up to 3 aught 6.  My friend would like it for sleeping."

"O.K.  Hold one minute, sir," replied the man at the front desk, and he handed the telephone receiver to another man at the desk.

"Hello.  Sir?" Another man at the desk said.

"Hello, good evening.  This is Ralph, Mr. Rao, in room 3 aught 6.  Would you please send a sheet to the room for my friend?"

"It's non-A/C room, sir.  No sheets for... Actually, the sheets are gone for wash," the other man said.  "We've been calling the washer, and they say 10-15 minutes."

I know better, but how can I disagree with such a statement?  I placed the receiver down and went back to reading my book, Textures of Time.  Colin was using the computer to access the internet and listening to Regina Spector through headphones.  About twenty-five minutes later, he completed his work and asked me, "What about the sheet, man?"

"Oh, they don't want to give us any sheets because we're in a non-A/C room," I replied.

"What?"  Colin said.

"Yeah.  Well, the two guys at the front desk are claiming that they're waiting for the sheets to come back from the laundry, but I'm pretty sure the sheets are 'coming from the laundry' and not actually coming from the laundry."  It's a fine distinction, I suppose.  From a Westerner's perspective, a lie?  But these men most certainly aren't lying, and they certainly aren't being lazy.  On they contrary, they would just have a boy bring it up to room 3 aught 6.  I am as hard-pressed to believe there are no sheets in the hotel as I am when I hand Rs. 100 for a Rs. 75 purchase, for instance, to believe that when someone asks, "Change, sir?" that they actually don't have change.  Sometimes, yes, it is true--they don't have change.  But more often than not a simple, equally honest or sometimes true, "No.  No change," ends up producing the correct balance.  Maybe, though, with not as big a smile.  I, too, want small-bill change.  When there's no meter or price tag, it's handy to have!  In the same way, I am thinking, this hotel must have a sheet.  It's a hotel!

So Colin went to the front desk and asked the men for a sheet; they told him they'd have to get it from another hotel, and it would take about 10-15 minutes and cost about Rs. 10.

Maybe they were telling the truth: There were, indeed, no sheets in the hotel and they had to borrow sheets from another hotel on Collection of Bouquets road.  The night passed and there was no sheet.  There was also no fan, because Colin got cold and turned it off at two in the morning.

And so, in the dreamscape of Trivandrum, Kerala I experienced last night a strange reaction: Soft breezes cooled me through the early-early morning hours, but I awoke in sweat.  Unable to modulate the fan, Colin flipped the switch sometime around two A.M.  Instead of demanding the rise of consciousness to reverse the switch, my mind did the grunt work and I woke at six in the morning.

Today (29/12/2009) the Bharatiya Janata Party organized a political strike in Trivandrum.  I found myself unintentionally leading one of the noisy parades of mostly yellow-lungi-clad and some crazily-costumed, or stilt-wearing men beating drums REALLY LOUDLY as they walked behind a jeep with a generator on its hood powering concert-grade loudspeakers that announced--in what sounded like Sanskrit--something I couldn't understand semantically, but it wasn't secular.  That much I got, and a bus ticket to pull myself out of the lead.

I made my way to the Sri Chitra Art Museum in Trivandrum's botanical gardens.  The exhibit is mostly comprised of Raja Ravi Varma's celebrated Sanskrit-literature themed paintings, and they are INCREDIBLE!  They are, in fact, more incredible than the BJP's parade was loud.  I'll try to work on this 'blog update a bit more to add details of Raja Ravi's work, but just google or wiki him for the time being, please.

Right now I am using wireless internet from berth number 26 on an Indian railcar with my computer charging from "lohagaminividyut" (that's train electricity for non-Sanskritwalas).  The sound of the rain, indistinguishable from that of my fingers at the keys, patters away on the train.  The breadth of India from Trivandrum, Kerala to Chennai, Tamil Nadu where I will spend New Years passes beneath me.

I miss you all, my family and friends, especially during these Christmas and New Year festivities.  I am coming to realize how my life has changed in these past two years; I look forward to spending the holidays in the years ahead back home in the U.S.A., or here in India, but together with you all.  Enjoying the finest company and the warmest hearts the world has to offer me, or to anyone, in my estimation.

I pray for all of your health, happiness, and continued successes in the New Year 2010!

The Mission of the Goose: A 21st Century Retake

I set off from Mysore, Karnataka a little over one day ago with a friend, Colin, who currently lives in Jaipur, Rajasthan studying Hindi.  Our departure was, from the start, unsure.  We had no tickets for the bus that departed Mysore 22 December; but a ticket broker suggested I bribe the bus captain, a man Colin and I affectionately nicknamed as 'Swami-ji'.  This is also the nickname of our Hindi teacher, and we temporarily fixed it to the bus captain because the appearance of the captain and our Hindi teacher resemble one another remarkably!  In executing their quite different duties, too, they use effective and efficient means.

We rode on the 'rajahams', or the "Goose King" class of Karnataka State Tourist bus.  Rajahams, though, was a leery king, and required numerous repairs during the routine journey.  Swami-ji called "Halt!" to the Goose King's mission no less than twice for extended periods to service the mechanical innards of the bus, still very pregnant with passengers on board.  Weather-beaten, dented and rusting shells add a surreal, almost comic effect to most Indian buses that otherwise glide along smoothly, safely shuttling a closely quartered community in time-tested metal as black plumes and gooslings straggle after it.  The Goose King, something of an inversion, bore neither dents nor rusting shell; the only thing surreal about this Goose's tale is how ruffled our ride was.

About one hour into the trip, we pulled into a bus depot and many passengers disembarked for a smoke and tea break.   On Swami-ji's order the Goose King advanced to the depot's garage with passengers, caught midway through break, frantically running from behind to jump on board.  Most of them made it as we parked under a large shed over mechanics, who quickly got to work on the underbelly of the bus.  About twenty minutes later, the technicians completed the first servicing and the mission to Cochin resumed.

Colin remarked to me, "The sound of the gears' grinding has gone away."
And I replied in Hindi, "jagad gaya [It's been temporarily fixed].  Just wait a few minutes," as I handed to him a headphone from the iPod.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later the sound of metal grinding on metal would again drowned a mixture of songs compiled on the eve of this great adventure.  As darkness fell and Karnataka State boundary gave way to Kerala, signs indicating "Tiger Crossing.  Drive with extreme caution and refrain from use of horn" showed that we had entered a wildlife preserve in South India.   The winding and narrow road shifted the prime perspective out the bus's front window from Colin's view to mine.  Along this long two-lane, underdeveloped stretch of wilderness, Swami-ji's unflinching gaze upon the negotiations between traffickers provided my only comforts despite a number of close calls and thoughts of sure collision.

The Goose King's mission was proceeding smoothly until a string of uniquely colorful goods carriers obstructed the left lane.  Of course, then, the Goose King, along with the rest of the flock, bore right to continue south and avoid the large, colorful distractions.  But southerners were also heading north, and the ensuing bottleneck on an otherwise apparently desolate road in the middle of a tiger preserve in South India revealed the size of the flock in the form of a traffic jam.  Pitch black forest peppered with "Tiger Crossing" signs and rife with competing calls of cars' back-up songs gave light to unending, motionless traffic in a situation that seemed to be the stuff of a horror film.

Fire suddenly ignited aboard the bus and filled the cabin with smoke.  We drew our handkerchiefs and stuck our heads out the window, whereupon I engaged the man in a neighboring goods carrier in Hindi: "kya huaa? [What happened?]" I asked him.

The man, smiling just a bit too much (maybe from a white man's Hindi?), reported, "aage bahut log mar gaye the [many people died]" in an accident that occurred ahead on the road.  Minutes later, however, he let me know he was joking and told me about a checkpoint forty meters from where the Goose King sat, motionless, filled with smoke; Swami-ji had the on-board extinguisher in hand and was quickly putting an end to the brake fire.

He lit up a beedi smoke and we, his gooslings, knew that everything was going to be O.K.  The brakes had burned, though, and another repair was necessary.  We proceeded slowly to the next depot as the driver kept the extinguisher close at hand to quell the fire as it reignited en route to the garage.

With most passengers on board the bus, our midway twenty-minute break turned into a long repair (read despair).

"kitna samay lagaega? [How much time will it take?]" I asked a man who guided the Goose King up a small ramp.
"Das minute. [Ten minutes]," replied the man, smiling.

And I braced myself for the longest "das minute" (read two and a half hours) repair I've ever sat through.  I pulled out my iPod and reached for photocopies of Panini to spend the time reviewing some grammar under the fluorescent light of the garage.

In the cool breeze of the Goose King's post-repair resumption to the road, due to a now tired brain and body, Colin and I fell peacefully asleep.  That sleep wasn't to be interrupted again until loud sounds of low-gear awoke me to signage reading "Tenth hairpin turn."  I don't know how many hairpin turns preceded, but when the next sign shortly came into view, "Ninth hairpin turn," I braced myself for several minutes of discomfort and prayer.  Now a hairpin turn I have dealt with before in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado; but in a state like Kerala, India public roads' projects are not up to the reassuring safety standards of the Western world.  My window, several rows back in the bus, at times edged over sheer cliffs whose elevation I could only estimate by the impecunious size of house lights and those of other cars in the distant valley below.  The elevation, in my estimation, was precipitous.

After a precipitated roadside repair of the Goose King's brakes the road's precipitousness made me fear for the integrity of my life (Colin's dreaming at this point), and brought to mind several conversations over tater-tots and grilled cheese that I have unwittingly engaged with three- and four-year-olds about the realities of life's end.  The only child this time, though, was my own inside.  Soothing reassurances like being able to be a princess, or to color a picture, did not offer to me the help I required in those moments as they have to the other children in my past.  So I dialed up a stotra on the iPod, and stared to the heavens as opposed to the deep, dark depths that plunged below me and beside the Goose King.  Here in Kerala the heavens are particularly visible, and the Milky Way was shining brightly.

The Goose King safely descended from the path's great heights, and came to rest peacefully in Cochin, Kerala at about 9:30 A.M. 23 December.  Colin and I disembarked the bus only to immediately board another bound for Allepey, Kerala--the Venice of India.

Just another Roz

This is a morning view from my room.

Thought-evoking Fun

I cannot come to decide how to begin a new entry in the 'blog; this suggests the now structurally-famous question, "to 'blog, or not to 'blog?"  And I respond to myself (because there is no one else around) in the positive, "To 'blog!"
This past week I finished two applications: one to The University of Chicago and one to the University of Texas at Austin; today I finished the first 15 lessons of my Intensive Course in Kannada at the Central Institute of Indian Languages.  The combination of a little less tension about finishing applications and continuously improving Kannada skills provoked me to begin exploring, in earnest, Mysore, Karnataka and its surrounding environs.  If you are a subscriber to facebook, then you can see some of the pictures I've uploaded there.
The jaunt was a success, and it makes me excited to begin making more similar journeys throughout "Suvarna Karnataka," or "Golden (literally, 'nicely colored') Karnataka" as the State is billed by advertisements on a system of tourist buses that transport loads of people from various places to tourist sites.  Precisely because I can read what is on the side of the bus and what destination is detailed in the bus's front window, I feel comfortable traveling out more and more.  People here also have absolutely zero issue speaking Hindi with me, so I am getting a lot of great practice with my Hindi as well!
This past weekend, I started off on a bus from Mysore to Srirangapattana.  It is about 15 kilometers distance, and cost 10 rupees to travel there.  Once there, locals guided me around with Kannada directions from which I was able to glean the meaning and get to where I wanted to go.  The city of Srirangapattana has a long history as it was a very important city from the time of the Gangas (reign beginning ca. 4th century) all the way up through modern times with negotiations of power going on between colonial occupations of British with more recent Muslim rulers.  One of my goals during my time here is to take advantage of history like this.  Read about it in a book, and go visit it.

The history is totally apparent in ruins of walls and tunnels that fill the landscape with a presence similar to plant life, there structure overtaken by centuries of power shifting attention to other endeavors.  It's a strange element to experience in a country like India where the linguistic and material presence of the past make circular-concave temporal realities, like Einstein's description of gravity bending light across stretches of the universe.

Only this universe--that of India--has long known its boundaries; the universe of modern science has yet to discover its own, and I doubt the conceptual tectonics of Western philosophy will ever allow such a boundary to be perceived.  And when one travels out into this beautiful land of circular-concave timescapes, utterly different from the very standardized and regular experience of time in the West, bubbles collide at speeds Cern scientists are trying to imagine ever more perfectly to reveal matter's first moments.  In a very real sense here, far-from-traditional wormholes made from language, thought, and action create some sort of a potential for time travel; the experience is on the order of trawling an incredibly different, intricate, and aesthetically addictive past from temporal depths into a present that yearns for clarification, order in the face of entropy as the universe of us moderns continues to expand and the world, paradoxically, becomes smaller.
Needless to say, it is thought-evoking fun!

A Wandering Man

A telephone call from home awoke me this morning.  Actually, I had been in one of those semi-sentient modes of doze: The type when everything feels still connected to you, when the room and the sounds of the birds are all one, and the current of waking consciousness gradually eddies into a comfortable position on a soft spot, tucked into a bed, savoring early morning peace.

After the conversation with home, I left to buy daily ration of milk and water before brewing up a cup of Indian joe.  Like a drying clay pot, its earthy color--if well-prepared--matches that of the brown-red cow that ate some spoiled bananas that I had to offer it while I purchased the milk.

There are sanyasis who wander the neighborhood some mornings.  These are older men who have renounced their worldly pursuits for a life of asceticism.  They carry only a metal basin for water, the clothes on their back, and this bell that doubles as the basin's lid.  The bell's sound is soft, meditative in comparison to the occasional bursts of voice that emerge from their frail bodies that shout for money to sustain their worst habit--being born.

I was taking my laundry down to hang out, so I grabbed three rupees from my desk and the old, gentle man offered me the bell lid, held out flat, for me to place the money on it.  I suspect the intermediary of the bell's surface purifies the money I offer him.  Here is a man, a slave--from one perspective--to the very social system he has renounced.  But the three rupees' clink, somehow, magically removes him from the interaction.  The gentle man funnels the rupees from the bell's surface into some or another fold of cloth; and falling in, the clink of rupees to rupees doesn't issue.  These folds must hide some secret.  One, I am sure, that is not easily known--if it is even possible to know it.

The bell sounded again, "Who might iron out the wrinkles the sun refuses to take?" I asked myself as I hanged my clothes, and relaxed into thinking on the solitude of the gentle man.

Like two deaf men communicating, their conversation--unfamiliar measures and strokes of silent signifiers made to dangle into an unknown space fraught with meaning yet untouched by words--exists in harmonious counterpoint to the general din of otherwise daily life.  A peace not too far distant from that of these two men must also exist in this gentle man's solitude.  Like deaf men he, too, cannot avoid the realities of the world.  Those coins clink not here, not in front of me, but inside the magical, unknown folds of some world known by words, yet far beyond anything they convey when wise men string them together over time, constructing a chain of behavior that contorts our heart, mind, legs, and knees into otherwise awkward positions at mysteriously specific times, measuring our genuflections.

We, too, are left to wrestle with this frustrating handicap: A body that doesn't care, at times, to recognize the quiet movements of its soul.  Ears, eyes, and sex.  These are things we can get behind.  Touch, taste, and smell our way safely through hordes of people; but when it comes to subtle operations of the soul, a body tuned to fives sees sevens as awkwardly bent, wearing a hula-hoop and going about daily business.  Strange.  Exhaustion characterizes operating in those realms free of truths emanating from a horn behind us, blatant like a thorn in our toe.  There's also uncertainty because reason, too, has its limits.

And so today I set off, and I won't leave any sound behind.

Hey, look. There's a pony. And an Elephant.

It's a daily bike ride to the gym and the ensuing workout that keeps me going.  Amidst all the peaceful chaos that could drive normal people (from the United States) mad, one regularly timed activity in the day seems to be going to gym.  A little ವ್ಯಾಯಾಮ "vyaayaama," or (a nice word my new Kannada dictionary tells me) ಅಂಗನಸಾಧನೆ "anganasaadhane," or perhaps a little more locally spiced ಕಸರತ್ತು "kasarattu" all meaning exercise.
A small etymological thought to chew on: "vyaayaama"--the first word there--is a nice Sanskrit derived word.  It comes from a dhaatu, or verbal root "yaa" meaning 'to go'.  There's one wonderful stotra to the goddess that I like to chant, and a line of it asks,
इदानीं चेन्मातस्तव यदि कृपा नापि भविता निरालम्बो लम्बोदरजननि कं यामि शरणम््।
idaaniim cenmatastava yadi krupaa naapi bhavitaa niraalmbo lambodarajanani kam yaami sharaNam.
"This instant, all-compassionate devi (Mother), if even your kind compassion will not be there to whose shelter do I go, supportless?"
You recognize "yaami" in the transliterated sentence; that is the verb of this particular verse and it means "to go."  I've here translated it as "I will go."  "kam sharaNam yaami?"  To which shelter/whose protection will I go?  And similarly, with exercise we have the same "yaa" dhaatu, or verbal root.  But this time we see it has a "vyaa" preceding it.  The "vyaa" are known as 'upsarga', or "those which follow before."  There's a finite number of them and they are:

प्रपरापसमन्ववनिरदुरभिव्यधिसू््दतिनिप्रतिपर्यपयः। praparaapasamanvavanirdurabhivyadhisuudatinipratiparypayaha
उप आङिति विंशतिरेषः सखे उपसर्गगणः कथितः कविना।।
upa aaNgiti vimshatireShah sakhe upasargagaNa kathitah kavinaa

"This, friend, is the collection of twenty 'upasargas' as told by the poet:
praparaapasamanvavanirdurabhivyadhisuudatinipratiparypayaha upa aaNg.

You can count as well as I can to see there are twenty 'upasargas'.  This is in a cool meter known as तोटकम् which supposedly sounds like a snake because it rambles.  Kind of like me.  There's actually the precise same number and order of short and long syllables in this meter (8 and 8 making for 16 per line and 32 for the verse).
We see, then, that before "yaa" in one of the words for exercise there comes first a "vi" and then an "aa."  If you say "vi" and then "aa" it naturally turns into "vyaa," na?
"aa+yaa," then, comes to mean something like "passing," and specifically the passing of time.  And then "vi" is an interesting 'upasarga' because it can be either one thing (a negation), an elephant, or the opposite of one thing which is an 'intensifier'.  Here, though, in "vyaayaama," my bike-ride-etymology making tells me that it is, in fact, an intensifier even though I saw an elephant on my way to the gym.  Exercise is something which makes time go by faster; but, paradoxically, not when you're timing yourself on the treadmill.  It's more liable to speed up experience, or, perhaps, condition the body to engage more actively its world.  Then, distracted, with mind occupied through exercising body's calisthenic engagement of the world, time just flies.  And that's what made me realize why my week has gone by so quickly!  It's "vyaayaama."  Time passing quickly.  Exercise.
The other word my Kannada dictionary shared with me is "angasaadhane."  "Saadhanam" in Sanskrit is the nominalization of a ninth gana (group, out of ten groups) verbal dhaatu, or root, meaning "to do, or accomplish."  "Anga" is a Kannada tatsamah adoptation of the Sanskrit word "anga," meaning a "limb," or "part."  "Angasaadhane," then, means "to accomplish something with the body"--exercise.  In modern parlance, going to the gym.
If you're still reading this, I am impressed with your ability to endure a few minutes of my inner dialogue expressed on the 'blog!

Every day Subhash, a bike owning man who hangs around/lives/works here at this new Dhvanyaloka spread I'm living at, lends me that bike to ride about 2.5 km to the gym.  Its wheels are a little shaky, its hard seat wobbles forward and backward, and the brakes don't work too well.  Needless to say, all this makes for a great ride to the gym everyday!  The ride is mostly relaxing on the way to the gym when I can still see the textures of the roads; but after the gym, coincidentally, I think of myself as having turned into a whale.
A new type of nighttime sonar-awareness switches on in the brain, as if it is adjusting to another new register of the many it gears into and out of through the day.  This language, though, is of the shadowy murmurs an ornately adorned Goods Carrier's harvest-moon headlights grease upon the road textured with potholes and dirt piles and rocks.  As makes its way toward me, from the distance, its horn grows louder against the backdrop of those coming up from the rear while I pass a drunkard lying half-naked on the side of the road with four of his buddies arguing--intoxicated over something--and three bicyclists, one coming the opposite direction to me along with a car driven by a man hurrying to get money from an ATM where a cow is grazing on cabbage left by a bhajiwala who doesn't have a card but knows as much to sit where those who do emerge after they've parked their car with which they nearly hit, while rushing, a man who was riding by on a bike with no brakes and then scream from their window, "I'm sorry!" as he gears into park and I into 'whale mode'.  I think I know now how the whales feel about nautical traffic interrupting their song on the seas.  Eventually, my thought tells me, they won't mind it so long as we keep to our laws about no whale hunting.
And in that moment I realized not only what I think to be a whale's perspective, but also that I can't fault the apologetic driver for nearly hitting me.  If there are rules on the road here (or anywhere for that matter), one thing is for certain that nobody knows them.  Rules of road in the logic of law are simply psychic substance--infrastructure, if you will--that allow one person to cultivate what they think to be a better understanding of the 'rules' in order to fault those who don't follow, admitting that they among all others don't really know.  Kind of like the perspective of a whale.  Who the fuck am I to know a whale's perspective?
All sorts of complaining about hyperactive lawsuits in the U.S.A., I realized in this bike ride, stems from the fact that there exists all of this infrastructure, letters making words into an Aristotelian logic that is pretty like Ceasar's face and (ass) cheeks.  Here I have to learn not to fault people but to outsmart them, or rest comfortably in my sweet-assed fate.  There's something liberating about it, however dangerous.

Unfortunately, the metempsychotic physics of fate, when sculpting this body-vessel into a greek god, forgot the 'r' and instead created a geek who loves Sanskrit, dusty bike rides, and books the same way.  And now I need to stop 'blogging to do Sanskrit work.

A Separate Peace

I shifted yesterday into my new place at the Dhvanyaloka Institute here in Mysore, Karnataka.  My room is spacious and cozy with a bookshelf, two sitting chairs, two cots, an eating table, another table, and a carpet.  The bathroom is highly utilitarian, as most Indian bathrooms are.  It's one of India's great traits of interior design, the bathroom: two bigger buckets and one smaller (to fill with hot water from an instant heater), a toilet (this time Western style), a sink and a mirror, a place to hang towels, and a stool.  I was chatting with Alicia (my sister) on g-chat a few days ago and remarked to her, "I just finished splashing some water around.  A.K.A. I just took a bath."  That about sums it up.  Don't get me wrong, with such a wide array of natural-scented, quality soaps and shampoos to choose from here I am cleaner and better smelling, generally, than I ever am in the States.  Mysore is actually known for one great brand of soap, "Mysore Sandal Soap."  As its name suggests it's made with sandalwood oil.  Anyone who knows me knows I love sandalwood above all other smells (and if you didn't know, now you know).  There's also Himalaya, an upper-end brand of beauty care products for sale at Whole Foods in the States at about $20 a bottle for which I pay less than 1/20 the price here in India.  Wow.  I am really getting off track here.
Living here at the Dhvanyaloka Institute, I will be the only resident student; I'll have access to a beautiful library, and my environment couldn't be more prettily filled with plants, trees, dogs, and birds.  There are a lot of servants around the Institute, most of whom work for Jay Shree, my hostmother and director of the Institute.  They promptly bring me whatever it is I might be in want or need of without me even having to ask.  For example: This morning I woke at 7:15 and just as I got arranged for the day around 7:30 there came a knock on the door with my morning coffee and news that breakfast will follow around 9:00.  Last night, after arriving from the gym, I was greeted with a delicious meal of bhindi masala (spicy okra), green beans, chapati (flat bread), curd, mixed fruit bowl, and rice.  After dinner I had a warm cup of milk and a bottle of water and read some history.  A wonderfully delicious and filling meal.
Earlier this week I got unfortunate news that one of my Kannada teachers, Dr. M.R. Talwar, has been in a serious motorcycle accident.  Class was canceled on Monday due to confusion in the normal schedule at the Institute due to his absence.  I plan to visit him in the hospital sometime this week, but he remains unconscious as of yesterday.  Please keep him and his family in your thoughts, prayers, and special intentions.  He is a very agreeable man, always the source of a quality laugh or two amidst a chaotic and great learning environment.
My Kannada, insofar as that goes, is coming along as can be expected of a new tongue.  I spend most of my free time just listening to people speaking, and picking up when they speak about numbers because that's what I get most practice on going to the gym everyday and counting my lifts or being told, "hattu nimesha madi," "Please do this for ten minutes."  I found upon returning to Pune in early November that this strategy of just feeling dumb and stupid in a language environment actually helps quite a lot.  I could follow and actually speak quite a bit more Marathi than I was able to do during the time that I lived in Pune; so here in Mysore I am adopting similar practices knowing that the acquisition of Kannada is going to be a long-term process, but exploiting the tool of submersion while it is available to me.  Also along the lines of language acquisition, I had yesterday a great test: A kind, though oddly proportioned man, Prakash, helped me shift from the old place to this new one.  Incidentally, I came to know of Prakash as I bought a new Kannada-English dictionary.  After purchasing the dictionary, the kind woman asked me in Kannada if I wanted anything else.  I smiled, broke into English, and asked, "Do you know anyone who has a small goods carrier?  I need to shift today from Sarasvatipuram to Bogadi Road."  I bet this is the third- or fourth-to-last thing she expected to hear from me in response to her rote, capitalist question; but being in India, she was prepared to meet any and all customer service obligations with kind professionalism and courtesy.
"Oh, just one minute, O.K.?" She said, and promptly pulled out two cell phones and began to make some phone calls.  Within about three minutes she had Prakash on the line.  She told him about me and inserted the directive, "He's a student of Kannada and Sanskrit and he knows Hindi, but speak to him in Kannada, O.K.?  He needs practice."  I smiled again, and she told me to take down the number.
In the afternoon a number of very challenging Kannada-based phone calls ensued during which Prakash would kindly break into Hindi just as my frustration levels met maximum.  Trying to find my old place on the less-popular 12th main proved challenging for Prakash, so I had to make the walk to wait for him.  But this time it wasn't my devilishly handsome fair skin that made me stick out.  No!  It was the name, ಪ್ರಕಾಶ, I can now read on the side of Prakash's truck that made me flail my hands and scream out, "Prakash!" across the bullocks and horns of traffic.  Thus began the ritual: I jumped into the vehicle, gave directives back to the house, we packed up, and headed off; but not without a little bargaining.  Prakash wanted 500 INR and I wanted to give only 200 INR.  We settled (I generously so) at 350 INR and I made him do the heavy lifting.
In this adventure I've discovered a whole new possibility of transporting larger items across smaller distances in India-- the small goods carrier.  It just yesterday became apparent that people invest in these small, three-wheeled Ape vehicles (remember how much I loved these cars in Italy, family?!?!  I got to ride in one!) to hire themselves out to transport office furniture and files, or gas canisters, or coconut husks, or anything else under the great big sky of India from one place to other locales, locally.

Chikkana is the name of one of the very helpful servants here at the Dhvanyaloka.  He makes my breakfast and dinner and keeps me appropriately caffeinated with South Indian brew--a famous type of brew I look forward to sharing someday soon with you who read this blog.  Only being here at the Dhvanyaloka for about twelve hours now, I already feel at home and more welcome than I had felt at my last flat.  Chikkana brought me idly and coconut chutney for breakfast this morning and it is delicious!
It sure is a great feeling to feel a comfort and a peace in a place that is so separated from many family and friends; but I have not been able to recreate the peace of home I experienced while back in Florida for September/October.  I think I'll need to go home for that, but I don't think my schedule will afford me such an extended stay as that I previously enjoyed.