Happy Festivus Delhi Style

I haven't updated in a while so here's a mega entry on the last few weeks. Christmas is a big deal at Sahara. When I finally put out my Country Christmas Album, this will be the cover:

Suggestions for the album title are welcome.

The few weeks before Christmas consisted of decorating our GK2 premises and constructing our creche. Our Michaelangelo was Siavash and he lived up to his perfectionist artist role to a tee.

Mike, Siavash and I in the heat of the creative process.

The workshop when we were finished with the creche.

The finished product, minus Baby Jesus who appeared at midnight Christmas Morning. It really brought me back to my high school days of theatre set building. Doesn't the door look fab?

With the Creche finished we had to hang the star. We used rope and strung it over the street from our building to the building under construction across from us.

Gilly and Siavash help hang the star from the construction building across the street.

The construction labourers going about their business. This is how all new structures are built in India: by hand, pouring the cement and laying the brick, propping up new floors with bamboo poles and constructing support pillars from metal rods. Its mindblowing to watch.

In the run up to Christmas we did a lot of caroling around Delhi. It was good fun but I'll be ok if I don't ever have to sing O Holy Night again!

A visit to some nuns in GK2.

Our director Nev during the caroling. My Christmas gift to Nev was learning Bob Dylan's Slow Train to sing along with the Sahara House band.

Here's how the GK2 looked: amazing!

Christmas Day arrives and Nina and I get into the holiday spirit by shelling 15 kg peas.

Sudesh keeps a smile on his face as works his way through the onions for the feast tonight.

As the night arrived, Reeti and I made ourselves look 'pretty.'

Santa shows up.

Christmas night was great fun. Over a hundred people from all the projects around Delhi came and we had evening devotion and the feast and dancing for hours. I love Christmas in India.

Artsy Fartsy Gospel Times

It was Ines's last day on Saturday so we stuffed our day full of good-for-you culture and church. First up a trip to Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art. Not too many photos inside cause it wasn't allowed. There was a lot of good art there (and a bit of pretty dreadful offerings also) but I struggled to gain a complete picture of what Indian art is about. Maybe too much history of art makes me search for a narrative when there doesn't need to be one or perhaps I just saw too narrow a range in this museum but it exposed my ignorance about Indian modern art and culture. I don't know what has inspired this art or where it's going in the context of all the other Indian culture I have read about and experienced. But some of it was funny and at the end of the day I often go to the modern art gallery for a chuckle.

There was lots of good sculpture sitting on the lawn outside.

Don't you just have those days when you feel like a disembodied head engaged in a pulley system of weights atop an unseaworthy boat? No, neither do I.

Ines decided that this painting meant India.

Finally I couldn't resist posting this. In the corner of one busy colourful painting, Ines spotted: are those monkeys...?

We went to an Indian Gospel church where the Guy was playing bass in a band called Simple Truth consisting of Sahara friend and soundman Stanley and his three sons Ashley, Ashton and Avalon. At the end of the show, the Pastor got up to say the closing prayer. The flow was the familiar 'when I say Praise Be, You say Hallelujah' charismatic style, but it was all in Hindi. I found it pretty fascinating though that's not my style of worship. Being from good Puritan tradition I prefer the more reflective common worship we have at Sahara daily devotion. There we sing from our own Sahara songbook, have a short lesson that members take in turns, say a prayer and go back to work. Best lines from Sahara songbook classic 'The joy of the Lord is my strength': 'There are no grumpy faces in Sahara House,' and 'The Devil doesn't like it when we laugh, Ha Ha Ha.'

Here's a couple photos from the show. Avalon is an amazing drummer beside having my new favorite name.







































Ashton rocks out.

God bless the state of Kerala. God bless Tamil Nadu too.

God bless Karnatika. And the Goans in Goa too.

God bless the people. God bless the nation.
God bless the whole world too. And you.

God bless the Maharastran State. God bless the state of
Andra Pradesh. God bless the Gujaratis too.
God bless the people of Orissa too.

God bless the people. God bless the nation.
God bless the whole world too. And you.

God bless the place of Madya Pradesh.
God bless the place of Uttar Pradesh.
God bless the West Bengalis too.
He'll bless Haryana and Punjabis too.

God bless the place of Rajasthan and the people of Mizoram.
God bless Manipur and Nagaland.

God bless the people of the other states.
And God bless New Delhi too. And you.

God bless the people. God bless the nation.
God bless the whole world too. And you.

Simple Truth

Tribal Books

I love buying books way more than buying clothes. Even better than going into a bookstore and buying a book is leaving the store with three books. The best way to figure out if you want to buy a book is to sit down in the shop and read it for ten minutes. Especially if the shop is quite small. My favorite place to buy books in Delhi is Khan Market a.k.a. the place where you see lots of white people. I recently bought a novel called Twilight in Delhi from Bahrisons Books that rocks my socks. The introduction was written by the author Ahmed Ali fifty years after the original was published and he basically says, yeah my book is awesome:

Those who read it in translation said it could not have been written in English, while those who read it in the traditional English said it was untranslatable. This curious controversy was solved by an American critic when he said that the novel 'transcends language as any substantial work of art ultimately must do.'

Bahrisons is the best type of bookshop. Its cramped and a little musty and there are so many books that they are piled on top and in front of the existing articles on the shelves. Today when I was looking for a title the clerk couldn't find it but he seemed genuinely interested in my book. However, on my most recent trip to Khan I really fell for a bookshop called Full Circle. It doesn't have the old school, bump into Salman Rushdie round the corner stack atmosphere of Bahrisons, but they had my book and the cafe upstair is actually amazing and my new favorite place in Delhi even though I haven't even had tea there yet.

British morality kicks in in Bahrisons. That's unnatural that is.

The guy and I went to our friends Kim and Toto's for lunch on Tuesday, a holiday (did you know that India has the most official government holidays in the history of civilization. That's an official made up fact). Their place is in west Delhi and it took us two and a half hours to get there, including the stop at the black market. Kim and Toto are getting married in Jan in Nagaland. Yours truly is seriously considering going...

Toto started cooking before 11 and we ended up having lunch at 5 but we had a really great day. And the food was incredible. Naga food is really excellent. Pork is a very important part of many meals; we had two different types of pork.

Toto rocks out in the kitchen.


















Alem reacts as Kim livens up the dance party by putting Lobo on the stereo.

Toto and Kim both used to work for Sahara and there are a lot of people from the North-East in the organization. Toto and Alem are from Nagaland and Kim is from Manipur. Within their own states, north-easterners are tribal people. They have wanted independence from India ever since India's own independence. Theirs is a very sad history of freedom fighting (insurgency from the Indian government point of view) and in-fighting among the tribes and underground groups that has taken its toll on the states. As Toto said 'We are not Indians. We are Nagas in India.'

Slowly in my transformation from Indian to 'brown Englishman,' I found that I had lost not only my freedom but also my culture and individuality, and I have been engaged ever since in search of my self, my identity. Where between the heart and the mind had it been waylaid? Slowly, through the years, light began to filter through the pictures of Delhi to which I turned for my past.

Ahmed Ali

No hanky-panky in the park

A thought on Indian Parks...

Delhi has many parks to accompany its wild and twisty slummy urbany bits. You might think that meandering of a Sunday or an evening through these parks is a relaxing break from the traffic and the smell and the endless endless people. Well this is true up to a point, but the parks bring their own stresses too. When Indian youth couple up often face the dilemma of where to spend time together. A patch of green space offers a temporary respite away from the disapproving eyes of parents and more importantly a place to smooch and cuddle. This is of course quite sweet, but it is often the case that every single bench or nook is occupied by a canoodling twosome. At Victoria Memorial Park in Calcutta a couple is often gifted with a companion, a single man watching them from behind a bush or fence. This is actually more surreal than creepy to watch. Why do they put up with it? Do they really not have anywhere else to go? Well, the park is free I guess.

In Victoria Memorial I watched the hilarious scene of a young man trying to make the move on his lady friend. Every time his hand would get a little too friendly she would slap him across the face and he would retreat. But a few minutes later, the whole scenario would play out again. The smaller neighborhood parks cater less to lovers than to that Indian character: the evening stroller. Indians do not go for a jog in the early morning or evening, they walk. The average walker is middle aged man or woman. Most walkers are alone. They usually take their walking very seriously. And they are often talking on cell phones as they do laps around the park.

Here are some photos of the delightful Lodhi Gardens where I did NOT canoodle with the BF.

Picnic in the park with the whole family: perfect!

Just don't let the neighbors outdo your spread.

Other things I did this week include going to a Christmas fair. Some old women were not very interested in the attractions.
Alem played bingo.

Alem and I were cute and obnoxious in our matching scarves.

Pray for the people in Bombay please. And for us all.

There was elections on Saturday so I had the day off. Hurrah! Sometimes you should do the tourist thing so Alem and I went to the Lotus Temple.

This is probably the most iconic piece of modern architecture in Delhi. It's India's version of the Sydney Opera House or the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. It was completed in the mid '80s and is a house of worship for the Bahai faith. It's really beautiful.
Inside the temple you are suppose to be completely quiet. The Bahai religion has no rituals or sermons. You aren't supposed to take photos either, but I took a few. This is the ceiling.

I like this inside a lot. It is purposefully without any decoration whatsoever. It is kind of like if you took a marble parking garage and filled it would be light; it would be pretty and minimalist and spiritual.

There are lots of Indians hanging around outside the temple. I love this little princess with the ELLE bag.

Some people like getting their photo taken.

The Lotus sits amidst aqua pools into which people throw coins and beside which they pose.








































Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, 'Pathos, piety, courage- they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.' If one had spoken about the vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same- 'ouboum'. If one had spoken with the tongues of the angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present, and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge and bluff- it would amount to the same, the serpent would descend and return to the ceiling.

E M Forester, A Passage to India

Diwalimania

Here's the story of Diwali celebrated at Sahara less than a month ago. Diwali's kind of like the Hindu Christmas. It's also called the Festival of Light.

Flowers are a big part of decorating your home for Diwali. Here's the journey of our flowers:

First the phool wallahs (flower men) sell the flowers in the market and put them in burlap sacks.

Then the sacks lay by the side of the road for a while at Khari Baoli.

Then we sat on the floor and ripped the flowers up into little bits.

Here is the result of our efforts.

The boys made floor decorations out of the flowers.

I think it looks really excellent.















They made a message outside for our guests coming to the party in the evening.

Now it's time for the party to begin. Diwali is celebrated in different ways; with family, with sweets, with presents. But one way it is definitely celebrated is with fireworks. We had a party on the terrace and invited everyone. We all danced to Bollywood hits and the Venga Boys till the wee hours.

That's it till next Diwali kiddies.