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!
