12/13, Saturday, Chennai - Boat Club
During the day we went to the Marundeeswarar Temple, near Nalini's house, which is a Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva in his avatar as divine physician. Much of the land originally belonging to the temple has been sold off, and it is a busy area with lots of shops. Inside the complex there is a small pond where people used to wash their feet before entering, (now railed off), images of saints and other deities, and several shrines. There are also cattle stables around the perimeter. One of the shrines is dedicated to the composer-saint Thyagaraja, and there is one shrine dedicated to a saint who is deaf, so to get his attention you have to bang on the bars around the shrine. Nalini's mother-in-law was with us and she told us all of this as we followed her around. She goes there most Fridays to workship.
After that we went back to Media Mix where Nalini sat down with us and helped to plan out a tour of the city for the day. We got into an old white cab and were taken to the Snake Park, the Santhome Basilica, and Mt. St Thomas. The snake park had tons of crocodiles in it, which was fun, along with some snakes. There were a lot of school groups there and it was fun to see the kids getting so excited about the animals. Here's a film of one of weirder animals we saw there, called a gharial:
St. Thomas mount was exciting to get to - it's a little west of the main city of Chennai, and to get there you have to make a right turn across huge torrents of oncoming traffic, then wind past a military base and up a hill. There, we passed a few small houses and mounds of garbage, where pigs, dogs, and cattle were scrounging for food. From the top of the mount, a 300-ft hill, one has an amazing view of the entire city.
Legend has it that St Thomas the Apostle (Doubting Thomas) was one of the first Christians to preach in India, between AD 52 and 72, when he was martyred at the site of the mount. The shrine itself was built by the Portuguese in the 1500s. There is also a cross there, said to have been shaped by St Thomas himself, called the "bleeding cross" because it "used to sweat blood on the 18th of dec every year from 1551 to 1704".
We finished up the day at the Boat Club, which is a beautiful place right on the Adyar River. We got there early, did a sound check, and played some tunes on the river banks - it was beautiful. Gopal, our original contact in Chennai, also arrived early so we had the chance to visit with him a bit.
The concert at the Boat Club was one of the best - we did our thing and the crowd loved it. We ended up playing over two-and-a-half hours, and could have gone longer. We were still having trouble judging how to time our shows...every time we said, "I think we'll do three more" and then played them, one of our contacts would come running up and ask us to do a few more. It was fun, but made it hard to program our sets. And since dinner would always be after the show we'd be really hungry by the time we were done. People always offered us appetizers while we were playing, but it's hard to eat and play a concert at the same time.
After we played we went and sat with the Scottish dancers, who had done a short demo and a party dance. We sat there sipping drinks and Nalini said, "Isn't it nice to say that you are having a drink with friends on the banks of the river Adyar?"
I thought so!
We stayed at the Gandhinagar club that night as the Boat Club was full, and it was so late when we got back that we had to wake up the staff to let us in. There were several men who worked there and a few of them were sleeping on the floor on blankets in the lobby - we felt awful waking them up.
12/14, Sunday, Pondicherry
The next day, we woke up early and went down to meet the car that was to drive us down to Pondicherry. As we left town the houses got smaller and sparser, and we saw more dust and people on the streets and animals pulling carts. We stopped at a craft village called Dakshin Chitra. There are craft villages set up near Udaipur and Agra as well, and from what we could tell they are sort of living museums set up for tourists and sponsored by the government. There were many different styles of south Indian houses there and all of them had been donated by families who wanted to build modern homes instead.
Outside one of the houses we stopped to watch a glass blower, who whipped on a jet of fire and worked with tiny little sticks of glass to shape a figure of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. It was fun to watch him do such detailed work. In the middle of the demo his cel phone went off but he answered it and continued working away. That seems to be really standard here. Most people have cel phones and they are on all the time, going off constantly, and rarely go unanswered.
There were several booths set up near the front of the village for artists who came to sell their wares. I couldn't figure out if they were paid some kind of grant money to be there or if it was just of a chance for them to come and sell to visitors, but we saw some really nice stuff. We met a young man who was doing some beautiful etchings on palm leaves. He would scratch a drawing in with a thin metal pen, then spread ink over it. We chatted with him for a while and ended up coming back at the end to buy a couple of pieces. We also bought some paintings from an older man who had come from a village near Udaipur. In both cases, the artists came from families where their fathers and grandfathers did the same kind of work. I liked that the crafts were passed on in families from generation to generation.
Our next stop along the road to Pondicherry was the Crocodile park. This place was huge, and we could have spent a lot of time there, but our driver cam running in to get us after about 30 minutes and urged us on. (Whenever we were dropped off anywhere the driver would say, "ok, take 20 minutes, I'll be waiting" but inevitably we took longer than that. There was no way we could get through some of these amazing places in 20 minutes, and we didn't want to rush. Sometimes we said we'd be longer, but they didn't seem to care. Time is generally very flexible in India, so we decided that 20 minutes
could mean many things, depending on the situation. We always came out and they'd be there waiting for us and that was that.)
We were driving south and caught glimpses of the ocean and vast stretches of beach. There were long green fields of what might have been rice (very wet), inlets where people in long narrow boats were fishing, many carts pulled by oxen, small crude shacks built in empty lots. We also passed through numerous villages that were packed with people, from vendors to workers to kids or all ages dressed in school uniforms. We also passed motorcycles with whole families on them, usually driven by a man with a woman sitting behind him clutching small children who were sandwiched in between or hanging off the sides.
Towards the end of the drive we passed through a fishing village, the most rustic of anything we'd seen. The road was incredible muddy and rutted, the houses were mainly low thatched huts, with a few bigger homes built out of stone or concrete. Children were playing in the road, some without clothes and all without shoes. We bounced and jolted through the village, came around a curve and onto a nicely paved drive and glided through the gates of a luxurious resort. Wow. The contrast was a little overwhealming.
The resort is called Zest Big Beach and it is only 8 months old. The buildings are very modern, clean lines and simple in design. They have cultivated native plants and flowers and it feels very lush and green.
When we arrived they loaded us and our bags into a golf cart and drove us rapidly along little windy paths to our room. The driver of the cart addressed his comments to me, and finally stopped outside a room saying, "I have chosen a very nice place for you." Fortunately, he went in first because there were other guests already staying in that room. We went along to another very nice room and were happily installed there.
Then we went down to the beach. It was amazing - so powerful and loud. We were told that no one swims there as the waves are much too strong. But the fishing village is just a little ways away and they must set out in their tiny little boats every day. I stuck my toes in the water and we walked along the shore of the Bay of Bengal.
Our concert that night was fun, although very small. It was Sunday evening and most guests had gone home for work the next day. But the few who were there seemed to enjoy it a lot.
After we finished, people clapped loudly and then sat there and continued to visit and enjoy the evening. Barun, one of our contacts at the hotel, came running up and said anxiously, "They're still sitting there. Maybe you should play another one." So we played a couple more. When the audience continued to sit and talk after we were done, Barun went to the front of the stage and yelled, "It's over, they're finished!"
We played on the early side and had a great dinner afterwards with Dhana, who had come down from Media Mix. Nalini had instructed us to make sure that he announced us, but as we were getting ready to perform he looked nervous and said, "Oh, I think I'll just let you announce yourselves." We gave him a hard time about that! He is such a nice guy and we really enjoyed talking with him. The hotel restaurant served a large buffet, although it seemed like you could order things as well, and the food was great. Some dishes were familiar to us by now but others were new, including mulligatawny soup, which was very yummy. At every meal there were Indian and Chinese dishes, as well as idlis (spongy rice cakes) that were served with chutneys, and of course rice and sambar (spicy kind of veggie gravy).
12/15, Monday, Pondicherry and Auroville
The next morning we hired a car to take us around to the local sites. The first stop was Pondicherry, which is a city that was colonized by France. We spent some time walking along the beach, which was full of big black rocks and nice sand, then wandered into the Aayi Mandabam park. Then, we went to a temple for Ganesh. This is the story of Ganesh, as told to us by a painter in Udaipur.
Ganesh is the son of Shiva, born while his father was away. When Shiva returned, neither recognized the other. Ganesh tried to prevent him from entering the house, so Shiva chopped off his head. When Shiva found out that Ganesh was his son, he went to the forest, killed an elephant, and brought back the head for his son to use. So Ganesh is the elephant-headed god. He brings good luck and is always a big part of any new venture, including weddings.
At the temple there were musicians playing, one of them blowing a loud reed instrument and the other playing a long oblong drum with a head on either side. People were pulling a cart around the temple with a Ganesh figure on it and worshipers were touching the cart and placing fruit and green grass (alfalfa?) on it. It was very loud and very exciting!
We stopped for lunch at a random restaurant (our driver had been instructed by the hotel to take us to a certain place, but he couldn't find it, even after stopping and asking several people and after calling the hotel) and then went on to Auroville.
"Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity." These are the words of the founder of Auroville, Mirra Alfassa, also known as the Mother. The city was begun in the 1960s and is now a thriving community with all of the benefits of any other city - schools, medical facilities, etc. There are about 2000 people living there now, although it was conceived to eventually hold about 50,000. The center of the city is a meditation room enclosed in a huge golden globe, called the Matrimandir, which looks like an object out of a sci-fi film I once saw. Some really neat things about it are it's promotion of sustainable farming practices, the use and development of renewable energy resources, the vast number of artisans living there, its international community, and it's hope to create good schools and better situations for the local villagers. I find the whole "Mother" thing a little weird, especially from a community that "is above all creeds." And there have been allegations of abuse in the village schools there...I don't know how that situation has played itself out. And I love the idea of bringing higher consciousness to the world, but if one shuts oneself away in a community separated from the outside world how does that work out?
It's an interesting place, and we really enjoyed talking with one of the women who works in the visitors center. She is French and used to be a ballet dancer, and seems to really enjoy living there. I think it would be a fun place to explore in more depth, so I hope to go back some day.
We went back to Pondicherry after that, because I wanted to visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (he was the spiritual leader of Auroville). It was a very peaceful place in the French district of Pondicherry, which felt much more European than India. The streets were wide and less crowded and everything seemed to be planned out. In Chennai, one gets the impression that construction projects and trees and buildings just sort of pop up and flourish wherever they like. As we headed back to the car we saw a huge crowd of people in front of the temple that we had visited earlier in the day (the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Temple) so we went to have a look - there was an elephant standing outside the temple! He was clearly there with a handler, and had been decorated with chalk designs. People were trying to feed it bananas and other treats but it must have been full, because it was mostly looking around and reaching out with its trunk to explore. Beautiful!
Back to the hotel, where we played some music with one of the managers. He liked to jam over riffs, so we did that for a while, then we took turns singing songs. He went off to play some music for a party in some other part of he resort, saying that he'd rejoin us in an hour. But we went and had dinner and two hours later he still hadn't come back, so we finally left him a note and went to bed - we had to leave early the next day.
12/16, Tuesday, Mahabalipuram and Chennai - Gandhinagar Club
On Tuesday we woke up early and went down to the beach, hoping to catch the sunrise. It was too foggy to see much sun, but it was still beautiful. There was really loud religious music being played in some ethereal location and it made everything seem mysterious and exotic. We walked back up the path to the hotel, collected our things, checked out, and headed back to Chennai.
On the way, we stopped in Mahabalipuram. I was confused by the name, because some people call it Mamallapuram. We were told that Mamallapuram is the name of the old worship site where sacrifices were made, and that Mahabalipuram is the name of the city itself. I haven't found any info about that on line - everything I read says that Mamalla was the name of the Pallava king who founded the city in the 7th century, but that it is currently called Mahabalipuram. We hired a guide and he showed us around, which was much better than us trying to find things on our own at that point. The place is full of incredible architecture, all from, I think, the 7th century - beautiful temples carved into the rocks, a huge rock relief, sculptures and statues. We visited a temple where there is an enormous statue of Vishnu reclining. I'll put a couple of photos down here:
This huge rock is called "Krishna's Butterball". It's a natural formation that is perched there on the side of the hill - it looks ridiculous! You can see how big it is by the people sitting underneath it.
The stonework is so amazing. Apparently, they would carve into these huge granite rocks working from the top down so they had to have a very clear idea of dimensions before they began. In order to split the big rocks they would drive wooden wedges in and then add water to make the wood swell. Eventually, this would make the rock split.
We headed back to Chennai, dropped our things at the Gandhinagar Club and met Gopal and his wife for lunch at the Madras Club. That was a beautiful place! It is right next door to the Boat Club along the banks of the river, but the architecture is totally different, with really high ceilings, a porch that runs all around the building, and a huge green lawn. We had a slight problem - they had warned Larry that he would need to wear close-toed shoes and a collared shirt to go to the club, but they didn't say anything about jeans...so we ran into a little snag there. We ended up not eating in the main dining room, which everyone said was just fine, but we felt really embarrassed!
After lunch, we visited their apartment for a few minutes. It is a lovely place, up on the third floor of an ordinary-looking building but they have created a lawn on a terrace outside their living room! It's really extraordinary. Sitting there, with the sunlight streaming in and the breeze coming through the windows it didn't feel at all like we were in the middle of a city of four million people.
Back at the Gandhinagar club we got ready for our last show in Chennai. This seemed the least fancy of all of the clubs we had played in and the concert space was smaller than the others, so we weren't expecting a big night. But it ended up being our biggest of all. Tons of people came and they loved our music! We played for about 90 minutes, but just as we were winding up Rohan came up and said, "Could you play a little longer, because more people just walked in?" We did a few more but at 10 we had to stop and take a break - we'd been playing for two hours! At this point many people came up with requests: Zorba, Fiddler on the Roof, Besame Mucho, and Carol King. We did the best we could, and it seemed to go over well. Talk about drawing on everything we knew...
After the show we had a really nice dinner with Nalini and some of her family from the US, who told us about the awful wintry weather we were missing (they live in CT). It was a nice evening and a great end to our time in Chennai.
