India--Chhatisgarh

This is the first time I have tried to organize a group for a tour and here we are in India. We are currently in Raipur, capital of the new state of Chhatisgarh, recently carved off of Madya Pradesh to the east of Maharashtra.

We arrived yesterday afternoon on the Howrah Mail-that's the main train between Mumbai and Kolkata, formerly Bombay and Calcutta. First class sleepers on the Indian train means 20 hours of gentle rocking back and forth so many of us slept nearly the whole time, cradled and rocked like babies. We were stuffed to the eyeballs, like always here, between the samosas I hurridly bought on the platform, to the green pepper packed omelets, and toasted bread, the thick and lovely fried potatos, to the delicious spinach fried little bread things from the house, to the equally spectacular heavy round little pastries from the same house, laden with cardamom, pistachos and covered in beaten silver.

It's the beginning of the Ganesha Festival in Maharashtra, also known as Ganapati or Ganesh Utsov and already the city is crazy--people everywhere are bringing their Ganeshas home for the holiday, to be adored and decorated, festooned with flowers and fed sweet laddoos for the next 10 days. Bringing Lord Ganesha home becomes a minature procession--one hires groups of boys to dance and drum like freaks and then of course you dance like freaks along with them. Once ensconsed in his new alter, Ganesha is decorated with the beautiful cloths and marigolds, sandalwood and sweet pastes, then a small prayer with candles and incense, everyone gets to participate and wash ourselves in the clean flame. It was completely delightful to be welcomed as part of the Harlalka family into this ritual. As the days progress, there will be more and more music, more and more food, more and more incense, and the fever of excitment will build throughout Maharashtra, particularly in Mumbai, until the final day of Immersion, when a huge procession takes all the Ganeshas of Mumbai to Chowpatty Beach and slides him gently into the water. I would say that this is like Christmas but it is nothing like that holiday. India does festivals really well and seems inconceivable to western culture. Festivals here are like India itself--huge and colourful, noisy and chaotic. New York seems almost like a small tidy village, as though the whole of Manhattan could fit into one of Mumbai's neighborhoods. Maybe not quite, but Mumbai dwarfs New York, that much is true. And not just in population or space, either, but by the simple fact that wherever you are in Mumbai, something is happening, crowds of people are occupied in some activity, there seem to be no dark empty streets, there's always chai, always cows, always groups of women in bright colourful saris and happy laughter and family arguements.

Here in Raipur there is also some Ganesha celebration, but not the wild fever of the west. And tomorrow we board the train again for another 20 hour journey, back to Mumbai.
Today we have spent mostly at a Nagarmotha distillery--they are beginning to also distill vetiver there, as of today. A tree was planted in honour of each of us. The owner of the still, a Mr Awasthi, is kind and very forthcoming with his considerable knowledge.
Nagarmotha, (Cyperus scariosis or C. rotunda,) is first cut, then dried, and chopped and put into the still for about 12 hours. Afterward, the spent biomass is divided, with the fine dust going into agarbatti (incense) sticks and the more weedy bits being compressed into blocks and used for fuel in much the same way that cow dung is, only nagarmotha is a more efficent source of heat, giving off more kilocaleries.
We also visited a bio-energy plant, where seeds are grown and the oil expressed and this is then converted into fuel. And also took a walk through the botanical garden and solar energy park. Chhatisgarh has a goal to become completely fossil fuel free in the near future. Since it is only now developing, perhaps that day will arrive sooner rather than later, as perhaps they will get it right the first time and not have to redo their entire infrastructure.

Nepal

It's been over 20 years since I was last here. And it's changed quite a bit. The main tourist area, Thamel, looks like Khao San road in Bangkok--it's a shock. All the old gardens, gone. Every available space has been converted into guest houses, restaurants, bars, discos, cd stores, laundries, travel agencies, cyber cafes, bookstores, trinket stores, and the like. On the bright side, it's easy gettting things done in this neighborhood. Gone are the days when one had to go to the main telecom center and wait for hours to make an overseas call, or traipse down to the main post office to send some letters and look through the Poste Restante bins for mail. Freak Street is no more. And understandably but irritating, there are now ethnic-based fees to certain parts of town, Durbar Square and Pathupatinath for example. Foreigners must pay to walk though the first and to stand across the river from the burning ghats for the second.

Kathmandu itself has probably doubled in population since 1986, and while there are a few more outward trappings of wealth like more cars and motercycles, the city is chaos, a miasma of smog and traffic noise, horns blaring. These narrow streets were built to accomodate bullock carts--and I haven't seen any of those so far this week. But people do the best they can with what they have. And here there was been a 10 year period of trouble, a Maoist uprising, which apparantly devastated the tourist industry. A cease fire was agreed on a couple of months ago, so theoretically things should be looking up for the Nepalese. What is truely amazing is just how many tourist driven businesses have managed to stay open all this time, and throughout the curfews, strikes, bombs, and demonstrations.

I came to see what I could find out about some of our Nepali oils: Spikenard, German Chamomile, Japanese Mint, Tulsi, Lemongrass, Himalayan Fir, Wintergreen, Rhododendron and Sughandha Kokila.
Unfortunatly, I could have planned better. It turns out the spikenard comes from Jumla and in addition to being Maoist at the moment, is not accessable in less than a weeks walk each way. The second area, Dolokha, is east of Kathmandu and also Maoist at the moment. These areas are not accessible right now either. Only the Terai is. And this despite travel warnings from the American govt web site not to travel outside the Kathmandu Valley by car.
The Terai is the flatland in southern Nepal, on the Indian border, and Chitwan National Park is there--an area where one can still, with luck, see tigers in the wild. It's hot as hell right now, and very humid. Most of the crops in the Terai are out of season but it was finally agreed on that we'd go see palmarosa, lemongrass and citronella--not the most interesting plants, but I had to see something. It's about an eight hour drive.

Yesterday at 7am we set off--my contact here, his wife, and our driver in a bright blue vintage mercedes sedan. The descent from the valley is still lush and green, rice terraces, banana trees, villages, waterfalls, rivers.......The several thousand foot drop is no longer open, but protected by stone guardrails.
After driving a couple of hours we stopped at a tea stall and two young men came over immediately to ask my nationality. Once they learned I was american, they became quite angry, and one demanded to know if I was really Israeli and what I had to say about Israel. When I told him no, and nothing, he tried to trick me by saying his entire family was there in Israel, and what did I have to say now?
I am entirely aware of Israel stepping up the bombing of Lebanon in anticipation of the cease fire with Hezbollah so this conversation didn't take me completely by surprise except for its ferocity. I can't blame anyone for jumping at the opportunity to vent at anyone they see even remotely connected to the idiotic violence in the middle east. But I have never seen anyone so angry just for learning my nationality, even in Yemen. I do travel a lot and am accustomed to questions about America's foreign policy, which I cannot even think of adjectives to describe for its stupidity, arrogance, primitivity and short-sightedness. I am more and more ashamed and angry of how the US administration conducts itself. Yet I think it's important to remain as an example of a normal person, to show that not all americans are not fox-fed, jingoistic neo-cons, with complete disregard for the entire non-american planet.
Anyway, once we had finished this little confrontation, we piled back into the car and drove for another couple of hours, taking the left turn at Mungling, for another 40 km or so until we came to a stop just outside Narayangarh. And that was it, no more. Roadblock. In case one could drive get past the flaming tyres there were still more blocks--a tree across the road, buses parked askew, only 2 wheeled vehicles could pass. What I think happened is that a Nepali guy in India hit a pedestrian, was arrested and killed in police custody. So this strike was about this. It was sweltering. At first we understood that an accident had happened just ahead and an agry mob had killed the driver so I was a little unsure as to whether it was smart ot get out of the car, being so obviously foreign, but the heat soon drove me out.
Eventually the three of us piled in a rikshaw and drove into town, past the flaming barricades, to lunch and relax under some fans. Then we wound up at Krishna's aunt's house, which happened to be nearby. As the roadblock persisted for about 6 hours we decided to turn back to Kathmandu. I was not comfortable taking the chance that there might be another strike--then how would I get back for my flight to India? So it was another 4 hours back up the mountain. For agarwood I would have chanced it, and also for sandalwood, but not these grasses.

But it wasn't a day wasted. I didn't realize how much of myself has come from Nepal. This was my first trip outside the known world, when I was 21 and I spent many months here and in India. I became a vegetarian my first day in Nepal, and have never even thought about eating meat again. I saw my first cremation here, at Pashupatinath, the local Shiva temple complex, and the smell of the burning body had cemented any remaining doubts about meat eating. I first sang kirtan here in Kathmandu, every night I would sit with the same little band for hours. It was here that I first got a taste of the size of the world, and that it was all open to me. There are many other ways, many other things, but in general, I have to say that staying in Nepal all those years ago contributed more to my definition of self than almost anything else. Despite all this chaos and heat, it's impossible to not love Nepal.