We’ll post now-and-then, along the way.
A Conclusion (kind of)
As the lucky (or deeply unlucky) writer of the final blog post, I have the joy of attempting to come up with a conclusion for our month in India. Through these last three and a half weeks I have mentally written the intro to this post numerous times. India is a land...
Tiruvannamalai thoughts
During our short stay in Tiruvannamalai, we’ve seen many things: we visited an ashram and a Shiva temple, we climbed the Arunachala mountain (believed to be Shiva, the god of creation and dissolution), and we’ve seen monkeys, traditional Dalit dances, women making...
Kites
For whom do the kites of Hyderabad fly?
The Faluda Man
No one we have experienced yet on this trip has been anywhere near the cultural icon that Faluda man has become. Most days he lurks on the dusty highway outside of the Sai Baba temple, with hours as murky as the rest of India. You’ll find him past penny-a-piece candy...
A Little Piece of Home
In Hinduism, the most widely followed religion of India, cows are viewed as a sacred symbol that should be respected and protected. In the Hindu scripture, Vedas, it tells followers not to harm animals in any way and for this reason they live a life free of meat...
A Spiritual Experience
Today we had an interesting experience that I don’t think any of us were expecting. In the early afternoon we visited the Brahma Kumari Centre in the cyberabad area of Hyderabad. As we entered the large, mostly white complex, we were greeted by a few people dressed in...
Invited to Join Prayer at the Mosque in Hyderabad
There is something incredibly profound about an invitation, a granting of permission to step into someone else’s sphere. Walking the streets of Hyderabad we are hoisted utop pedestals, gawked at and questioned—strange Americans who appear out of place. We feel out of...
Hyderabad & Intro to HMI
After the whirlwind of Delhi and Agra, we travelled to Hyderabad, which is located in Southern India. As soon as we left the plane, you could feel the temperature difference. Walking from the plane, up into the airport, it was significantly warmer than our entire time...
First Days and Impressions
We've only been in India for five days now, but it feels like it's been much longer than that. When we first got into Delhi at 2:00 am It hadn't quite hit me yet that we were on the other side of the globe. And in the short amount of time that we've been here we've...
Inside and outside walls.
india is covered with walls. We are staying inside the HMI compound, surrounded by a wall which on one side faces the neighbor’s wall which is topped with wire. Inside we enjoy green grass, profuse flowering plants, quiet peace, interrupted only by the five times...
Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
In his 2003 novel set in Bombay, Roberts offers his readers this description of his main character’s early obersations about the city. It is not unlike our own first day in Delhi a decade and a half later. ”The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was...
Security, open road, and pilgrimage.
Setting out on a pilgrimage requires some preparation, some planning, even some packing. But my reading about Indian sadhus and the story of a Jain nun highlights the task of divestment, equally of processions and of desire to control one’s journey. Taking to the open...
Flashlight or photo paper? How do we see?
Several years ago my colleague Mary Griep accompanied my class “Sacred Places in Greece and Turkey.” Among her significant contributions to the course, that and subsequent iterations, was an article about looking at buildings. The author suggested two modes. In one...
Eternal Quandaries to Ponder
I am reading Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, in anticipation of our journey and discussions of it. In it he offers portraits of nine persons “in search of the sacred” as “keyholes” into the larger religious ethos of South Asia. In the introduction ( p. Xvii) he...
Preparations continue
Finals are underway. We have had our last on campus orientation session: checking out iPads, learning how to make optimal use of the apps, being reminded about plug adaptors, passwords, and the like. Those of us in Northfield saw Matt and he saw us. Our next gathering...
