On a river

WARNING: may cause drowsiness or jealousy.

It doesn’t get much better than this! I am reclining in a padded seat on board a tiny hand crafted wooden canoe not much wider than me. I am protected from the tropical sun by a curved thatched roof.  A nuggetty little man in his sixties, the colour of burnished mahogany is paddling and steering from the rear with a hand carved hardwood paddle. His weathered face has short white whiskers which are echoed in the fringe of his white cotton head wrap – the only protection he has from the midday sun. He is wearing the ubiquitous checked lunghi of south India and a white shirt.

A Russian, a priest, leopards and latrines

Kodaikanal was in the grip of polly fever when we arrived at the top of the mountain.  A delegation of state representatives was arriving the following day to open a new bus-stand, and so all manner of improvements were in progress, but only on the route the politicians would be travelling. Hundreds of political signs were still being erected a day before the big visit. Being a weekend, thousands of Indian tourists and a few westerners were flocking to the coolest weather to be found in south India. The narrow roads were choked with traffic: vehicular, pedestrian and bovine.

Music, monkeys and politicians

 

On the road

I was travelling with S.A.Samy of The Centre for Culture and Development, based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, to visit some of his projects in villages near Kodaikanal – a hill station someover 500km away.  We had taken the overnight train from Chennai to Madurai and then picked up the jeep and the driver and headed off late in the day. It was the night of Shivratri, so as we drove through the dark countryside, music, singing and wonderful aromas wafted  to us on the still air as the people of the villages and towns celebrated through the night.

Chennai to Madurai

After enjoying family life with Daisy and Samy in Chennai for several days, Samy and I are heading off to Madurai and beyond to visit some of the projects he is managing as the director of the Centre for Culture and Development (CCD), an NGO working to improve the lot of poor rural folk in Tamil Nadu. I had met Samy through my search on CouchSurfing for possible local NGO partners for a new organisation of which I am a founding member, WillOurWorld.

We bought two tickets on the night train from Chennai to Madurai on a waiting list basis. When we checked our ticket status on the day of travel, we found that only Samy’s ticket had been verified as the train has been overbooked. What to do?

Waking up in Chennai

February 2010

One of the great delights of finding myself in a foreign place is to wake early and to witness the start of a new day… so on my second morning in India this time, I find myself sitting on the verandah outside my rooftop bedroom at the house of my  hosts Samy and Daisy overlooking Chennai.
I woke before dawn – 4:30ish –

Riding the bus to Kanchipuram

The mullah’s call to prayer this morning is a call to action for me to get up early to catch bus to Kanchipuram, about 80km from Chennai. Kanchipuram is famous cenrte for silk weaviing, and I am keen to meet some weavers at work.
After a bad night of being the main attraction and meal for squadrons of mosquitoes, Samy appeared with a cup of chai for me and the offer of a ride to the bus station. 

An admirer at the museum

February 2010

Chennai museum

I was visiting the Chennai Government Museum with a particular interest in the anthropological and Tamil Nadu traditional handicrafts, which from the website, promised to be absorbing.

The Museum was moved to its current premises in 1851, built by the Pantheon Committee, an elite British group, dedicated to ‘to improving the social life of expatriates in the city’.

Well! If you think that museums are dusty uninteresting places, in this case you would be right: some of the display cases sported more topsoil than my furniture after the great dust storm of  ‘09!  It is not until after I paid the special foreigners entry fee + extra for my camera that I discover that the anthropological gallery is closed for renovations and that the ‘Tamil Nadu handicrafts’ consist of a motley collection of badly curated and attributed works of art – mostly paintings of dubious quality , including heroically sized portraits of an assortment of past British governors, ambassadors etc.  The glossy pamphlet I had received with my entrance fee gave a map of the site of some 8 or 9 buildings, but absolutely no legend, so it was less than useless.  I did however discover the bronze gallery with its wonderful collection of Vaishnavite, Saivite, Buddhist and Jain bronzes. On the path to the bronze gallery, a man, 40ish and wearing garishly coloured western clothes,  approached and asked me from which country I come: a not uncommon occurrence here.  After a very brief exchange of words, he then declared that he ‘dreally likes’ me.  Given the brevity of our meeting  (we are talking seconds, not minutes!), and given that I can no longer be considered drop-dead gorgeous (in truth, never was), I theorise that the main attraction may be my pale skin and that this fellow is suffering from a hangover from the time of British rule, when generations were trained to consider pale skin as exotic and somehow superior (this theory, sadly is borne out in the numerous advertisements for skin lightening products on sale and advertised widely in India).  I thank him and quickly move on to see the bronzes.

Bronze casting is a traditional artform of Tamil Nadu, and the artisans claim direct descent from Vishwakarma, the divine architect.  It is a highly skilled and labourious craft requiring special tools to create delicate icons in the the lost wax method.  The darkened gallery is crowded with showcases holding precious statues of the various gods in elegant and meaningful positions, most of which unfortunately is lost on me as there are no didactics to guide the inquisitive.

Bronze gesture

Suddenly, I am overtaken by tidal waves of school children, many of whom take the opportunity to practice their two sentences of English (“How are you?” and “What is your country?”), which is two sentences more than I have of Tamil. They are great kids & I don’t mind at all and after a while, I find them more interesting than the bronzes as I have started to become glazed over with the sheer number of gods in this small space and a low level of oxygen.  I am standing flattened against the back wall to allow the flow of kids to pass when a man steps forward & shakes my hand.  Thinking at first that he is a teacher attached to the students, I accept his greeting when I realise that this is the man from the pathway again, and this time he insists that he ’dreally, dreally likes’ me with what I think was intended to be a seductive waggle of the eyebrows.  I am guessing that this is meant to be some sort of  invitation which I am not at all inclined to accept, so quickly lose myself in the tsunami of kids which is still moving through the galley and get washed through the doors out into the sunlight, never to see my admirer again. He probably dreally likes some other pink lady by now.

Back on terra firma, I sit under a shade tree and do a little texting to a friend when I am psychically aware of being watched from behind. I turn to find three intense young faces very close behind me  (part of the tidal wave) watching my every move and no doubt amused at my texting skills.  They grin as we shake hands and they practice the 2 sentences again, then I play the high5 game where we high5 a couple of times,  then I pull out indicating that they are way too strong for me….great giggles all around.  The ice is broken & I am surrounded by all the kids – two bus loads of them and their teachers… we take photos of each other before they all pile into their coaches to return to their village near Kodaikanal over 500km and 10 hours away.  With grinning brown faces and waving brown arms from the bus windows, they disappear down the road.  I dreally dreally like them!