Plot #18

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Tonight, the electrical current flows onto Plot #18 ‘Santhoshi’, C.R.O. Colony, 2^nd cross street, and then fades out, as if electricity were never here. Then again, all of a sudden, a sunrise on fast-forward replay generates and, once every two to three minutes, repeatedly eclipses itself, leaving only doubtful memory of its existence. Waves interrupt my navigation through this new space, Plot #18; single-minute long pauses pace my ambulating between rooms as I gingerly—elbows at seventy-degree angles, hands out; safety foremost in mind—stumble through doorways that, even soaked full-spectrum glory, appear approachable only in the same, unsure way, to shut off the lights in order to conserve back-up energy or, in the best of times, to turn on the fans.

“Power’s expensive in India,” appaṭinā solluvāṅga, ‘other people say it’s like this:’ As valuable as oiled, black-braided locks, some long & others short, pierced through with aged silver shackles descending from the rusted, mettled golden-brown crown like latches on luggage. Were the common contents of women, locked in cultural memory here, as ubiquitous as the progeny they nurture and protect, then the thinking people of this land may one day actually solve the world's philosophical problems; unlikely as we are to witness the world's end is translation alone likely to become the proper and sole action of humanity.

Until then, all sensitive souls must deal with these tremendously rusted-yet-retractable gates that guard many an entrance, like the one to my own apartment here in Madurai. You can see through it and all, just as well as you see the neighbors’ babies’ bottoms & dirty dishes, or laundry, and you plainly see that it opens onto an iron-ensconced terrace. My good-vibes rockin’ space, the apartment where I’m settlin’ hugs—on a slightly off East-West axis—this less-than-quaint space with eight rooms that I will describe in no apparent, successive order.

Despite the presence—immediately after entering, turning to face south—of another, more rusted who-knows-yet-if it opens ‘cause-I-haven’t-tried folding gate of the same ilk as the actual guard gate that comes after a smaller, less intimidating iron swing-gate just over a stone bridge that crosses a stagnant sewage moat, which adds something of a viscous olfactory texture to your first impression of the place as a lover of India, is a beige wooden door. It's locked.

Squarely opposite of what you may be thinkin' 'bout all these barricades, you're reading neither the prose of a known felon, writing from his prison palace, nor the ornate words of a rich man. This is the language of an addict. This is the shit you step in, sore, tired, and almost outta money & drugs, if you abuse ‘skrit, kids. Snort enough o’ that formerly ashenlivened, citronella smellin’ palm leaf and birch bark wizdom into your heartmind, and you, too, may end up in an eight-room flat above an elderly brāhman couple, about a twenty-minute, fifteen rupee bus ride away from the river Vaikai, Maduraile speakin’ Tamizh.

Due north from the second-that-I-take-as-first Lazer lock-bolted guard gate are three-quarter open-air, svastikā-embellished grate-iron doors. Locked & bolted closed. Still locked, the antechamber is only teasing your eyes.

At this point, with another beige wooden door identical to the one opposing the rusted, folding-guard iron gate, you still got six little, chiṉṉa keys plus one big, appā key to go until you’re free—home at last! Locked in securely (at least you feel that way inside… in the heart) and now at the mercy of the Indian criminal spirits’ courteous habit of not locking their victims in from the outside, even as a practical joke, not to mention aiding the accomplishment of crimes! It just doesn’t happen.

Six little keys, in all, is whatchyou got between yourself and Madurai village, folks, where ev-er-y-one knows your name and when you’re home and what you were wearin’ last time you left and expresses to you their curiosity about why you didn’t lock the first gate last night,

“nettuki rāthiri, Rao, enna moṭal gate lock paṇuvillai? koi bhī uppar jā saktā thā!” in a generous cocktail of Tamil, English, and Hindi, ‘Why didn’t you lock the first gaṭe last night, Rao? Anybody at all coulda gone upstairs!’

“Ahh… Uh,” I grab for the crown of my head as I slowly unlatch the still-lock-free first iron gate, after I just crossed the bridge over the muck moat to let myself in. Only the sound of the latch clanks on the rusty metal gate, “nāṉ gatai lock… paṇuvillai? innuki rāthiri kaṇṭīpā lock paṇuvēṉ. ‘I didn’t lock the gaṭe-ā? Surely I’ll lock it tonight.”

“Ahh…,” he’s all smiles now, “cherry, sir,” thinking that that’s alright, “cāppitthīṅgaḷā? O.K., sir. Have you eaten?’”

“Oh! Yes. āmāṅg. nallā cāppittēn. ‘Yes. Yes. I ate well,” I reply, “pāppom. ‘See you!’” and I turn to climb the bank of stairs up along the east-side of the house to my flat at Plot #18 ‘Santhoshi’.

A bay of windows 18” X 40” and 15.5” X 40” are ensconced in some wall space of the  first, dimensionless room—to the West the room opens to the outside. More iron grate, less svastikā and an unfortunately ill-hung clothes line jams the third-least conspicuous, beige wooden door mid-outward swing, and you can’t open it fully. The nail, too, yeah—it doesn’t budge.

We’ll skip the kitchen. Truly, it’s unremarkable. Tonight only I stocked the second highest of four inbuilt, concrete shelves with sanitizer, bleach, soap, whiskey, roach poison, and chocolate chip cookies. 

Buckets weren’t on sale tonight. For a bucket I had to buy a too-big bag of Tide; settling for the right size bag, I recused myself from bucket deal eligibility for the first time in one night.

That’s right, for the first time. And there were at least three times as many plastic buckets in at least two patterned varieties of at least four sizes in more than, I’d say, seven colors. But I wasn’t gonna argue

I mean, at first I just went for a jog to the gym.

But the manager at the gym has yet to determine a membership rate, so only tours are available during the daytime, before three o’clock. And the manager had just stepped outside as I was being sent away, which is why he approached me, fumbling to offer me his card with a cigarette in his right hand, his mouth mostly full, salivating on something, his chin ever-so-slightly pointed upward, preventing drool, with eyes peering out and almost downward, he managed to exchange his cigarette with one hand to give me his card.

“Oh! Herrro! Uh, I am miṣhṭer Kuldeep,” struggling only insofar as his mouth was full. 

He offered me his card while, now with his right hand, he replaced the cigarette in his lips, and went in for the handshake.

This is when I decided that I need to buy a bucket...

Takin' a dip in Departures / Please, One Carrion per Passenger

I don't intend to go away so much as a predatory departures sneak up on me. That despite what I recognize since yesterday as the 'extreme crazy factor' involved in a move to India!

Now people see me; now they don't. And then again, in reverse, a few months later.

In its worst moments, it’s a comedy of errors; but I’m awash in better scenes, many consisting of a flo’-row ticket at a fire-side chat with long-beard characters, whose black & grey ashen locks are lit as a night-skyward gaze roll into bees’ nest turned upside-down on the head top perched for long-term comfortability—buckle in for a long-haul conversation—‘cause this is gonna be a trip, ‘cause

here slows down and there 

where lots changes and a lot's changed, 

who's to match the slow

from the slower with the fast

from the faster how?

Now,

I don't intend to go on & away makin’ no sense so much as I gotta bait a prayer to prey on me. What better Revs. believers' compassionable engines ‘an first-hand witness, or even second-hand testifyin’ than travel in India?! Yoga moms and ‘skrit kids, hear this! But…uh, dear… yeah, you, don’t strain. Don’tchyou worry, I’m prayin’ you up, I’m prayin’ you up,

even in the midst of so much misery, I’m prayin’ you up so you jus’ enjoy yourself in this precious space for written word. We ain’t lookin’ for solutions here for problems there; but we I to detail below or above in fancy-type script with numbers and numbers and likely more numbers, lettering the pages so to forget me not that word is flesh and splendour of the holy isn't, indeed, misery; but misery it could be you experiencin’, if I started to share in this precious space from memory of this first week I spent arriving to India, when I mostly slept in Bangalore.

Mind you, I did manage to vicariously enjoy the fruits of a botanist who grows more variety of mangoes & jackfruits than you’d care to know about. Not that I’m sayin’ science is misery! This one, Dr. Sivan Paneer Menon, outside the exquisite glass house at Lal Bhag gardens in Bangalore, ensured I took notes for the reward he (now I know) intended to give to me. I was tired!

I’s still luggin’ all my luggage from Whiteland through Dehli and onto Bangalore to stop at Lal Bhag, where it was arranged I’d meet a diplomat friend on assignment to just chill in the park with this prospect (me), but then Dr. Menon caught me outside the glass house—it’d have been exquisite for a fruit exhibition--exquisite but not-to-be-used; set up outside, please.

Nonetheless, Dr. Menon insists me to jot down notes, “X variety of mango; that Y variety of jackfruit…gene sequence Q spliced with T chromosome and grafted onto an apple tree…” and at the end Menon sir hands to me this fruitbag. Seriously! A bag full of delicious, delicious fruit.

Taste of the fruit, you ask? Taste of Andhra aam mango is unlike any mango other than the common Andhra mango, which, of course, you’ve tasted before? Well, I mean, I’ve had some great mangoes in the U.S…?

Here & now I introduce you to one side of a possible misery, and to teach you how you avoid it on your travels for tasting the Andhra aam mango. Alright then. Imagine yourself in situ, Whiteland circa 2012. You’re engaging a mango-enjoyment process: Step first, “I’d like a mango.” So great a difference in the experience exists already here, already at this inescapable stage of the process, let alone what’s about to happen ahead—peel the skin, but not too close to the fruit; laterally cut only just firmly enough to continue through the husky, inner-fruit layer—already we’re in different mango worlds.

We’re in different mango worlds! But what, like a person’s name a subject, shapes the mango? Is it just a name? Is there magic, too?

I don’t know about magic, but I’d be miserable if I wanted to taste an Andhra aam mango in White Foods, or any other high-quality Whiteland grocery market. I’d be miserable because of expectation and possibility. A linear slope defined as a real number at expectation may meet a hot possibility function of all possible values at the precise force-point of habit. And it can be quite messy to reconcile the two; ‘reconcile’ itself is too nice a word, for it indicates something ‘ameliorable’, when, in fact, it’s more like fucking without genes in jeans a potsherd, or any broken piece of ceramic material, esp. one found on an archaeological site. It’d just give you a headache, and there’d be no relief in sight. None. Nowhere. At least not walkable distance.

And nonetheless after years I land, a metempsychotic turtle out to sea, to walk around, to encircle a home for my Self on ne'er so far an oceans’ shores of yore in bark & in palm cartographed, on playback to hear through what Ear left from the horn (Indian English mein, this word should be understood plural) or to imagine as a peaceful shanty kingdom come. But the kingdom’s, I think, come; and the kingdom’s gone. In attendance at this fascinating wake imperial louts and pillage capitalists from stage northwest and more northwest still. "'ear right! 'ear right!

No funeral 'ere! No pyre to see!" 

at this the longest wake in history.

Letters and books, 

of kośa moopht sāgara—

didn't think words came out like that there, eh?

well neither’s supposed to spinach—

but one's got the looks & the brains

young lass & young lad, when

in tie & starin’ at grampy's suit plaid

you thought, “I got it bad,”

no wonder they’re sad!

Plaid?! A fucking suit?!

Try a white sheet on for size,

like the one you sleep with.

Yeah.

Roll out of bed, roll it

into your dowsers

and walk away. Just walk away.

There’re Andhra aam mangoes waiting outside.

A pretty lady sells them.

She’ll peel the skin better than you could. Closer ‘an Ever

to the inner-fruity husk

Unless you sold mangoes, too,

outside of your house,

as a different person, which,

truthfully,

is possible only here in India,

Incredible India!

a note on language pedagogy and instruction

In the end, language is as mundane sound; it is also the symbolic representation of sound. Similarly, knowing a language is as mundane as experience; knowledge of a language is also a communion of experience with other persons knowledgeable of the language.
There are, in my opinion of language study and pedagogy, two general approaches: 1.) Language as a language; 2.) Language as a subject. You may ask, "What does that mean?"
Language is entirely constitutive of a subject like literature, but literature is not entirely constitutive of language. Especially in the linguistic context of classical languages, the second approach (language as a subject) tends to be overemphasized; because the classical study of India (i.e., Orientalism) still tremendously influences the study of Indian languages, the language pedagogy of even modern Indian languages is still overwhelmingly influenced by this second approach. That is changing for the better, specifically with regard to Hindi, due to the Hindi-Urdu Flagship program at UT Austin, where a comprehensive pedagogy akin to Spanish or French language instruction is being developed.
This is not to say that one cannot learn a classical language as a language; nor is it to say that such a pedagogy is altogether better than learning a language as a subject. In my experience, these are two general approaches that are complimentary and best incorporated synergistically into any language study.
The second-order methodological approach to Indian language study that I appreciate incorporates four aspects of linguistic experience conjoined with the two broad approaches described above. That is, I aim to equally emphasize listening (aural), speaking (oral), writing, and reading in concert. Each of these mutually reinforces the others, and naturally ensures that the second approach (i.e.,language as a subject) does not predominate over language as a language, which, like music, is to be spoken and listened to and sung and recorded in words.
I, too, am a student of these languages, but I would be delighted to share lessons on Sanskrit grammar, or to read selections of modern/classical texts that I have a functional knowledge of with another student who may be just beginning a personal discovery of new cultural landscapes, and the perspective afforded from hilltops and peaks of wisdom.

Seer

translating 'I'

                         I asked you to remember
if 'I' were sound
more intricate than a rainbow

how do ‘I’ know ‘you’

with language so delicate?

and though a child’s voice

may fade,

                        why does height

                        no longer tell age?

these words written

in chalk,

                        when did you zip 
                        before button pants?

remain in you&i

on that sidewalk

where the tree’s roots

well up on the walk home

                        How did I grow into you?

Zebra print on black with red pants, polka dot-lined jacket

Hurrying to obtain the energy for sleep
all too often we fail
in slowing ourselves.

Savor the richness of relaxed observation;
allow for a hug
to embrace those things
time hasn't the courage to share.

Possible regrets: A list

if there is to be a regret of this life,
it will be...

     1. not being able to grow a beard

     2. not dying of lung cancer and quitting smoking

     3. not having cried enough out of happiness and sadness

     4. not learning to experience the two in equal repose, and the hereafter now.

A Thought on Same-Sex Relationships

A 'tradition', like marriage, brings a well-structured past into the present, it connects to an otherwise shapeless present a past structured by formulations of truth:  Memory and ritual; ritual as remembrance, ritually enacted, births tradition into an ordered act of translating memory; love in relation is a reciprocated act of translating memory, freely chosen, enacted, and repeated often, often, and ever more often, perforce, like perceiving the time in a year diminish relative to age, it occupies less and less, and less awareness; when reciprocated, an act of translating memory learns and knows only this one How: to naturalize next to nearby ken, if not blood, then breath; that act of breathing begins to seem only ever as old as it is new, and in time ever newly, reflexively reciprocating an act of translating memory--such an act is only ever creative, a processural act, exercised to fitness daily when I and an other 'I' freely choose to enact and rinse and repeat often through time a choice that I for myself and an other 'I for myself and' remember increasingly every contour of his body, every mole and birth mark, and his may-as-well-be congenital tattoo, and I remember this my left big toe's repeated crossing the no-hair | hair boundary, where his ankle meets his leg, with little more documentation to account for this its small right than the very experiences of his happiest smile--still shining--and his crying and wiping his eyes, and his every meaningless sound: his moaning from those piercing, despairing eyes, and now our eyes crying for snuggles longer, closer, and as so close as in minutes again he moans and he moans for minutes after his cumming, and soon soon after tangling and disappearing, fixing upright that small tuft of hair on his tummy after my cumming inside of him, and finally I remember the words he wished the the trembling of his lip would not fail.

Panini and Padakaaras

George Cardona will deliver a lecture in the Department of Sanskrit at the University of Hyderabad tomorrow.  I have extended my stay here to attend the talk.  Dr. Cardona is a pioneer in the field of grammar and linguistics, retired professor from The University of Pennsylvania.

More to come.

Southern Hospitality

A city passing in eyes--

everywhere people--

eyes sipping coffee and smoke

frozen, eddying swirls of neon
ಕನ್ನಡ
Kannada, English
                 ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್

rounding from blue to purple

or eyes don't seem

to discriminate.

a tongue, nose, or mouse caresses

you control the pressure, do press.

Some clicking, too.

Not of growing bamboo,

but the equally speedy-to-develop buds

of friendship, buddies.  Sweet, huh?

All this on the first date!

Taste of morning chai, The Hindu and The Economist;

a sip of ras, Mālavikāgnimitram;

Evening tide: 

waves magical hips blooming to boom box boys.  

Men, samosa, kingfisher,  

a German, too!  Carlsberg for good measure.

Like black coffee, a real,

one-of-a-kind experience.

Pleasant people and poetic pass-age

in Bangalore where

dance moves tell smutty stories,

a back-bend smile, mental acrobatics;

modern art, media outlets, and food fun.

Cucumber?  Spicy Pineapple, anyone?

Hear this: It was all for a good cause!

a Queer Film Festival.

namaskaara mysooru!

I love this ophthalmologist's billboard advertisement!

If My Words Did Glow, with the Gold of Sunshine...

Wow!  How does one define an exceptional day?  Today.  That's the definition.

For the past three days (3, 4, 5 February), the Central Institute of Indian Languages (where I study Kannada) has been hosting an international poetry conference, Kritya 2010.  This is a venue wherein poets from all over the world come together and share their work.  I attended the first few days anticipating more of a 'local' flavour, but the 'international' rang more true at the end of days one and two; today, though--day three--was exceptional!

I will post some of the more specific poems as I meet with the poets over the coming weeks.  I have been invited to attend a number of different classes, and even to deliver a lecture on my research to a class of M. Phil. students of English literature.  That should be interesting!  But it will give me something to sit down and plan out a bit.  I'll try to even throw in some of my thoughts related to queer theory, which will definitely be a crazy experience for the students of Mysore University.  But it'll be great!

The English-Kannada dual language setting at the Kritya conference really made today's poetry readings shine for amateur audience members like myself.  Compared with most audience members, I have a fair amount more familiarity with the diction these Kannadiga poets use from my background with Sanskrit.  Clearly, though, I can neither speak nor understand well poetry spoken in Kannada by any means.  Presented, as these poems were, however, on a dual language stage with effective follow-up commentary on each piece, I really enjoyed a nice taste of numerous styles from about ten different Kannadiga poets, ladies and gentlemen.

We can see historically that generations of Kannada speakers self-consciously formed and birthed this tongue from poetic sentiment.  All the earliest works of Kannada are responses to a dominant, subcontinental and enduring tradition of Sanskrit poetics.  These early writers shaped Kannada into something of its own flavour, and thereby created their political and social-cultural landscape.

One of the objectives that I would have liked to see the conference deal with a little more was this political, social-cultural element of poetry; this is probably just the academic in me.  I read some blurb at the conference or in a dream that was jotted down on paper, and it brought my attention to the necessary difficulty poets undertake to inhabit experience with language, to infiltrate the readers' senses and thereby affecting a particular reaction.  The ancients' knew this fertile strength of language, and nowhere on earth--ever--was it refined and refined and refined to the precision that it was by the men who made it their means to moksha, or liberation, dwelling in the pre-modern lands we now know collectively as India.

Today, after lots of centuries, a particular model of discourse, or maybe a peculiar grammatical disposition, or a language of law that predisposes a person to think of their self in a particular way occupies this spot of power.  It's peculiarly eurocentric; Western.  The dream object that I read at the conference spoke about how poets today often choose silence, how poets increasingly navigate the corridors of absence.  Just like diction, silence, too, is a choice.  A choice, I think, that is one symptom of the particular model of discourse, or peculiar grammatical disposition, or a language of law that predisposes a person to think of their self in a particular way: Poetry?

The quiet power of the Kannada language really 'wowed' me on day three of this poetry conference.  This quiet power was barely audible to me; maybe I imagine what I heard?  But this is precisely the point!  Even with all these other distractions emanating from a peculiar style of self-enactment that political and social-cultural tendencies of modernity proscribe and prescribe--and this being a force that the poet, subject of, often chooses silence--the undercurrents of sentiment from these Kannadiga poets shone through, doppling the ears and mind with its tambour, its rhythm quite unlike any language I've ever heard; its appeal direct to that of aesthetic concern.

[I am still in process on this writing, along with a number of other pieces.  Check back in the coming days, please.  I'll be posting pics of a quick jaunt to Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebeedu--VERY impressive.  I plan to be in Sringeri for Mahashivaratri this Friday.]

A Journey to the Lotus Feet of the Guru

लभते जनिं यः परमे स्वमूले

     विचार्य् कस्मादहमित्युदायः।

स एव जातः स च नित्य जातो

     नवो नवो 'यं सततं मुनीन्द्रः।।

labhate janim yah parame svamuule

     vicaarya kasmad aham ityudayah.

sa eva jatah sa ca nitya jato

     navo navo 'yam satatam muniindrah.

He attains birth in the highest root of the Self having thought "From where does this 'I' arise?"

Constantly new, this Lord among sages alone is born, and he is born into eternity.

Well, it's apparent that I have allowed some lax in a 'blog lately.  A little laze, if you will, results from the return of an old friend of mine named schedule; and schedule's friend, habit, takes hold on somnolent and ambulatory patterns like a maid efficient in organizing one's living space.  In the former, a familiar pattern that I recognize from a number of years ago, has (re)emerged at mystical times between waking and sleep.

When I moved to Pune, Mahrashtra, India twenty-one months ago, I stepped into a dreamworld.  I told my mother as much before boarding my flight West from St. Louis, Missouri, "I feel like I am living a dream."

And settling in Pune, then, amidst a group of American scholars and peers, I spoke by phone with my mother:

"I want to make my study of Sanskrit relevant to today,"  I told her.  And she replied, "Good luck!"

But more than simply luck, my mother and father consistently display a humble and encouraging force that, like good-habit, affects some ultimately mystical grace that guides my life in ways mostly unrealized.  This in the form of love that they shower seems to fertilize a knowledge capable of coming to know that which is, at first, seemingly unknowable.  It is the stuff of dreams.  And in comparison to those dreams of two years ago, my recent dreams are of a similar nature: Too pleasurable to be a thing of waking conscious but too conscious to be a thing of sleep...

A glass within a glass.  Each one floods into the other.  The contents--one from the other--increasingly indiscernible, become some mixture of a world whose possibility is limited only by the thoughts that the mind chooses to hold.  Our collective limitation, the stuff of language, is realized to be a creative bind.

ಆಶಾ ನಾಮ ಮನುಷ್ಯಾನಾಂ ಕಾಚಿದಾಶ್ಚರ್ಯ ಶೃಞ್ಕಲಾ

ಯಯಾ ಬದ್ಧಾಃ ಪ್ರಧಾವನ್ತಿ ಮುಕ್ತಾಸ್ತಿಷ್ಠನ್ತಿ ಪಂಗುವತ್

Imaginative hope has become some sort of fantastic fetter: Those who stand unchained are lame like a cripple; those bound by it run forward.  They choose to create a mould for the future, realized (perhaps quixotically) in language.

The mangala shloka, or opening verse of this 'blog entry I memorized in the room where the mother of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi attained liberation.

The writing that follows that shloka is excerpted from a diary of about one month ago.  It seems fitting, now, that this experience preceded my journey to live for three days at the base of Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu.

From the late 19th through the mid-20th century lived Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. The Self-realization and teaching on matters of the soul that Maharshi exposed has garnered hundreds of thousands of devotees across the world.  Many of them (the fortunate ones, I suppose) descend upon what I can only imagine as a once quiet town in the South of India.  The town, Tiruvannamalai, takes its name from the Annamalai Temple that dates from about the mid-9th century.

This is one of five prominent temples of Shiva in South India.  Each one of these five prominent temples (four in Tamil Nadu and one in present-day Andhra Pradesh) is dedicated to Shiva.  I spoke with one Sadhu, Maheshvara, on the slopes of Arunachala who strove to assist me in memorizing the places of these temples by giving to me a handy acronym: Tk^2TC.  That is Tiruvannamalai, Kanchipuram, Kaalahasti, Thiruvannaikkaval, and Chidambaram.  Each temple in each city is dedicated to Lord Shiva existing as different different elements, respectively: fire, earth, air, water, and ether/space.

I laughed over this acronym with Maheshvar, and joked that this is the 21st century Maheshvarasutra.  (The Maheshvarasutra, for those non-Sanskritists, is a list of 14 phoneme clusters from which is derived elements of Sanskrit grammar.)  Indians, too, are fond of acronyms as my brother, Chris, can tell you all about from reading Indian English language newspapers during his visit last year.  He astutely pointed out that if you don't know a lot of acronyms, you're out of luck!

Maheshvara then told me that I had been enlightened by this acronym on b^2p, or the mathematical name of Arunachala-- beauty, bliss, and peace.  However, to see Arunachala is something of a waking dream-like experience.  To describe it with mathematical equations that signify adjectives like beauty and majesty falls short of its grandeur.

Maheshvar and I spoke for some time, and I sang some poetry for a small group of us who had gathered together on this path in a special place with all types of wonderful human experiences effortlessly packaged for us mortals by a respectable and great sage.

Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings focus a great deal on becoming increasingly aware of our self through a practice called self-inquiry: From where does this 'I' arise?  The question originally forwarded by Maharshi to his first disciples was in Tamil, naan yaar, which closely resembles the same question translated either into Telugu (nevu...?) or Kannada, ನಾನು ಯಾರು naanu yaaru: "Who am 'I'"  को 'हम्् ko ham in Sanskrit.

Jesus, too, is recorded as making a similar question in the form of a statement in Psalm 46.10: "Be still and know that I am god."

So what does it all mean?  The beauty of the statement, like the the best poetry, has infinite and always new potential meaning.  That is, it is timeless.  It is timeless in the most transcendent and most imminent way simultaneously.  It is both the core of our self and that which we seek.  Never not present; also, often, unrecognized.  When it is recognized, too, it is often not a conscious or fully aware recognition.  It is the stuff of heaven in which we walk here, and that into which we will be born hereafter.

Try to imagine not understanding the language you grew into your young self.  It is a difficult task, if not impossible.  Can we ever not understand our primary language, having acquired it?  Like our primary language, can we ever not know our self having understood the full breadth and depth of what the 'I' experiences?

Maharshi, the great seer, calls our attention to our experience of three types of awareness: Waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.  These are all aspects of experience to which we can relate an 'I'.  I experience the world awake, and I experience--perhaps--a world away in my dreamscape; but I have little, or altogether different, or no recollection of the material world in dreams; and while I am in deep sleep, there is no awareness of a world or an 'I' at all, be it of dreams or 'real'.  We can thus know via negative knowledge (the experience of waking in the morning) that 'I' exists even when we are not conscious of that 'I', an experience to which we can all relate.

Usually, too, I, while awake, have little or no recollection of 'I' in dreams; but when I do recollect, I also understand that 'I' in dreams to be different from the 'I' awake.  What I think Maharshi tells us, then, is to strive to become increasingly aware of this 'I' in these three different aspects of conscious experience.

This is the stuff Maharshi's unique blend of Advaita, or non-dual, vedanta philosophy.  Vedanta comes from the four traditions of sacred Sanskrit texts, the Vedas.  Veda + anta = Vedanta literally means the end of the Vedas, and therefore refers to a collection of nine texts known as the Upanishads, or--literally-- those which are spoken while sitting near [the feet of the guru presumably].

The question-- in all its various formulations: naan yaar, ko 'ham, naanu yaaru, who am I?-- I think, poses a really interesting challenge that is productive in a lot matters of life.  kasmaad aham itudarah?  From what, because of what did 'I' arise?  What did 'I' arise to do?

Clearly all of us will neither choose to sit nor are we destined to sit for years in meditation as the great sage, Ramana Maharshi, sat meditating in caves on the mountain of the dawn, Arunachala.  But it seems to me reasonable that we attempt to bring our dreams and the rejuvenating pleasures of deep sleep into ever greater dimensions of self-awareness.  The next step--and this is probably more important and more challenging-- is to give up that 'I'.

What is it, then, that we really need?  If we accept this challenge to increase our domain of conscious experience, very little remains essential.

Seven years' time has passed since I read 'Be As You Are', a compilation of Bhagavan's teachings edited by David Godman.  A friend, John, had given me the book during my first year of college at The University of Colorado, and reading it I began to meditate on Bhagavan regularly for some years; however, with a busy life and lots of study my focus shifted and lots of other things began to pile into my mind.  Life happened, I suppose.  Lots and lots of life!

Anyhow, I finally arrived on 23 January 2010 at 3:30 A.M. to the place Bhagavan regarded with such favor during his 71 years, at the foot of Arunachala.  Upon arrival I visited the room where Sri Ramana Maharshi attained Mahanirana.  Shortly thereafter, the gates to one meditation hall were opened and young students of the Vedas came from their morning baths to chant the sacred texts in front of Bhagavan's murti, or statue.  The students and their teacher were very kind to allow me to sit with them, and after they finished their hour-long rote recitations I surprised them all with a few minutes of Sanskrit conversation--they were thus pleasantly surprised, as was I, in the early morning at the base of Arunachala.

One of my great pleasures in India is to listen to Vedic chanting and inquire from the students to understand the sutras' meanings: both what it means to them as students of the tradition and what it means linguistically.  Vedic Sanskrit is an altogether different beast from the Classical Sanskrit that I study; but with my late foray into the tradition of Grammar, I am being to be exposed to a lot of examples drawn from Vedic literature that constitute grammatical exceptions from the perspective of the classical corpus.

Following the welcoming surprise, I was shown to the room in which I stayed.  I bathed and rested and walked to the mess hall for breakfast.  The style here is very down-to-earth, literally.  We eat on the floor from leaves pinned together by twigs and dried.  Cleanliness is not an issue--the place is spotless!  The food is prepared by a brahmin kitchen staff and it is considered as 'prasad', or a gift from Bhagavan.  It is 'sattvik'.  That is, very pure according to an ayurvedic point of view.  It is not too spicy, but not too bland; Ramanashramam is in South India so these are rice-based meals; and the food is meant to act from the inside together with the environment to cleanse the mind-body and promote general well-beingness.  It works as Arunachala does: Like a dream!

It is customary for devotees of Lord Shiva to circumambulate Arunachala, regarded as a naturally born manifestation of the god.  This is to be done barefoot over one of two paths.  One inner, the other outer.  The outer path is 14 kilometers, and it is along this path that I began to walk after my lunch in the late afternoon on 23 January.  The experience is a trying one, as the ground is hot and full of rocks and the road is full of big busses, horses, trucks, cows, pedestrians--some walking, some crippled, some otherwise destitute--tractors, goats, buffalo, sheep, bull-ox, rickshaws, elephants, motorcycles, and more!  It's pretty regular. Besides spending some time in walking meditation, I gained a greater appreciation for cow patties.  These little islands of dry turd on hot concrete are welcome relief to the sole!

To see Arunachala from all sides alone makes the walk incredibly worth-while.  A night walk, when the roads are more quiet and the moon is full, however, might be advisable for a potential future visit I would like to make with you who read this 'blog!

And so as I again spend my days in Mysore sitting in libraries to study ancient grammar and treatises describing the nature of poetic beauty, I feel my self again entering into the state of dreamscape expanded.  This is the place from where I pull my thoughts, and my thoughts, then, through language, become the medium with which I create some productive tension between myself and the divine that is to be reflected, ever anew, in the letters and words and sentences of paragraphs, papers, and concepts.

Knowledge and thought alone is the stuff of experience.  To recognize patterns in thought, and to create knowledge of those patterns which are not readily apparent is the stuff of scholarship.  This is how I have been trained to think by teachers in the past.  It is along these lines that I seek to engage a study of medieval Indian social, political, and literary history using materials that that are 1000+ years old to comment on and critique structures of power in the present.  This is no easy task.  Moreover, the possibility of this task is only barely possible from the knowledge intellectuals have developed in available scholarship.  How, then, might the fruits of such labour appear?  What are the means by which the student or scholar might realize such knowledge, and what cautions, or limits, must that student or scholar bear in mind regarding the possibility of such knowledge?

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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.