More fun at the Infiniti Mall

OK, I may have been a bit premature about the Karaoke guy yesterday. Today I went back to the good ole Infiniti Mall after work, to get a little dinner, and the evening circus extravaganzic activities were in full swing. The Karaoke guy had moved to the stage set up on the ground floor, and there was some kind of contest going on, and they were indeed charging 100 rupees to register. There were supposed to be prizes for winners, but they were a little vague about that, something about coupons. I still didn't want to pay to sing, tempted though I was, because of the stage set up, but I thought I'd have a little fun, so I said to the guys "You want me to pay you ? YOU should pay ME to sing! When SRK does a movie, does he have to pay to be in the movie, or does he get paid to do it? When Sachin plays cricket, does he have to pay to play, or do they pay him to play cricket? So I shouldn't have to pay to sing, you should be paying me to sing!". They all took it in the playful way in which I intended it, and we all laughed about it.

Anyway, it just goes to show that misunderstandings can happen frequently here, even if I'm speaking a little Hindi or Marathi and they're speaking a little English. In the vast majority of cases, no one is really trying to cheat anyone.

Then I went to the display where they were giving samples of a skin lotion for women, which had some skin-whitening properties. I think this one was just cosmetic, a white cream that didn't totally disappear, not lemon juice or anything harsher, but still. I've written about this trend before, and tried to tell the woman working there that Indian woman are beautiful, why should they want to lighten their skin, but she wasn't really interested in getting into a philosophical discussion about it. But she blushed a little when I called all Indian women beautiful, and we laughed a bit too.

Then I got some pav bhaji for dinner and headed home for the night.

The 100 rupee day

For some reason, people kept trying to overcharge me today. First was the Karaoke guy at lunch. On my lunch break, I went across the street to the Infiniti mall for some pav bhaji (dosas are starting to get jealous because I really love pav bhaji these days). The mall is having some kind of circus extravaganza, including a karaoke machine that you can sign up for. It figures out how well you're doing (like the wii karaoke game) and if you get a good enough score, it's free; otherwise it costs 10 rupee. I know this because last week I sang a James Taylor song and got 99 out of 100, so didn't have to pay.

Today I sang Hooked on a Feeling (ooga chucka, ooga chucka). They didn't want me to do it because there was something else going on, so they kept turning the volume down, but I insisted and they relented, and I sang away, gathering a bit of a crowd, of course. It was really fun, and I finished with an 85 or something. So then, the karaoke guy comes over to me and tells me that there's a 100 rupee charge! Ha! Who does he think he's dealing with? I told him I happen to know that it's free if you get a good enough score, and even if you don't, it's 10 rupee per song. 10! I handed him a 10 and he smiled sheepishly.

Then, after work, I was riding in a rickshaw home, and the rickshaw broke down. So I got out, paid what was owed so far, and flagged down another one. Now in most of India, rickshaws have meters but they are never used. You haggle a price before you get in. But in Mumbai, they actually use the meter, always. So I told the driver where I was going, to Carter Road in Bandra to visit my friend Ramu and his street dosa stand. (pav bhaji for lunch, dosas for dinner, yum!!) And the rick driver says it'll cost 100 rupees. Again, with the 100 rupees!! So I said, nahin-ji (no, sir), meter, meter. He repeated his demand for 100, so I started getting out, and then he said OK, meter, meter. Darn tootin', meter meter. We arrived at Ramu's dosa stand and the cost of the ride was 38 rupee. puh-lease!

(okay don't do the conversion to dollars or I'll look ridiculous. It's the principle! And when I can eat for less than 100 rupee a day (2 dosas from Ramu cost 45 rupes), it's a lot in local terms.)

Nice try, guys. What, do I look like I'm not from here or something?
:-)


Oh, as I'm ordering my first dosa, a very well-built guy comes up next to me and orders a plain dosa. He was young and obviously worked out a lot. For a plain dosa, Ramu usually slathers it with butter, and when he did, the guy complained and said he wanted it without butter. I told him, oh, but it's so much better with butter, and he said that he knows, but he has to maintain. I told him it looks like he's doing just fine and he laughed. Then I said I wish i was maintaining as well as he was, and then noted that the butter may have something to do with my lack of, er, maintenance. We laughed together.
Later, he ordered a 2nd plain dosa, and I ordered a plain dosa for my 2nd dosa of the night (the first being a masala dosa, filled with potatoes and spices), and I made sure butter was going on my plain dosa. So there were 2 on the grill, one all brown and buttery, and one without butter, and I turned to him and said "see if you can guess which one is mine and which one is yours". hahahahaha. a good time was had by all.
I don't care if I have a bit of a belly. Those plain butter dosas are crispy and YUMMY!!!!

Mumbai by Motorbike

I paid rent today; my day is the 12th, I moved in on September 12th of last year, so I pay rent on the 12th. Actually it's a couple days later, but this is the first time my landlord and I could get together. When Heather was here, we went out with him and his wife, and since then we've been trying to go out again, and tonight we did.

He picked me up at the Cafe Coffee Day down the street, which is being renovated, but is still open even though the outside is a big construction mess. So I got an iced tea and waited, and my landlord, Viqar, showed up on his motorcycle. The first time I rode it, when I first got here, I must admit was a little scary, but I've been on the back of his bike a couple times since then and by now I'm pretty comfortable, just leaning against the back rest, hands in my lap.

First we went all the way down to central Mumbai, past the Haji Ali, a beautiful mosque built out in the ocean, to get some pav bhaji. Pav bhaji is a popular restaurant and street food here, it's kind of like refried beans, made of potatoes and lentils and tomatoes and other vegetables and spices all mushed together, served with buttered rolls. We went to a place called Sardar, where it was supposedly first made, and even if it wasn't the first, it seems to be the best. It was a very crowded restaurant, and everyone there was eating the same dish. It was the first time I tried it, I was kind of waiting to try it with him, he told me he would take me to the best place for it. And it was fantastic! So deliciously yummy. Some places apparently use water to make the mush, but this place uses only butter; butter in the bhaji, butter on the bread, it was great.

After that, we hopped back on his bike and went on a little tour of the city, starting with the red light district. I didn't really know Mumbai had one, but it was a little grungy street, filled with working women, in rooms together with the front doors open, or out on the street in groups of 3 and 4. They looked to be in pretty good shape, clean, pretty, not particularly unhappy, but the scene was quite seedy. Still, it was fun to see, and I got a couple of nice smiles. We pulled over for a second when his bike stalled, and immediately some man came over, waiting for us to ask for what we wanted. He just wagged his head when Viqar started his bike and took off.

We drove through some more alleys, including through Chor Bazaar, a market place where you can get anything. Chor means thief, thieves' bazaar, and apparently it got its name from a story about Queen Victoria. Once when she visited India, some items went missing from her ship's stateroom, and when she went to that bazaar, she found people selling her stuff there. Anyway it's more of a daytime marketplace, so there was not much going on at the time.

All along the way, we were talking on the motorcycle, We discussed everything from religion to sex, and although sometimes some ridiculous things come out of his mouth (he trash talks the Hindu religion, being some combination of Muslim and Christian himself, and he seems to be of the Bill Clinton school of thought about what qualifies as sex), he's always entertaining and sincere.

Oh we did have one kind of scary moment. We were riding along, and there was a local commuter bus next to us. All of a sudden, the bus driver, who was probably drunk, veered to the left. Viqar was fine, he's a very good driver and extra careful when I'm on the bike with him. We pulled over to the left and stopped. But I looked back and someone was on the ground, rolled over a couple times, and then got up, filthy from the street. He looked okay but it was way too close. At the next light, Viqar pullled in front of the bus and yelled at the driver who yelled back. Apparently the driver was telling him to climb onto the bus so they could fight about it. If the driver came down, he would be fired, but he could retaliate if anyone gets on the bus and starts something, so he was egging Viqar on. Viqar is generally quite sweet and peaceful (earlier that night he helped push another motorcycle who had run out of gas to the gas station, when he saw the owner pushing it along), so after a few acerbic words we moved on.

We rode back home along the scenic route, seeing the coast and the new Worli Sea Link bridge (though we couldn't ride over it, no 2-wheelers allowed), We made it back home after almost 3 hours of riding around. Which was not easy on the body, it felt like the camel ride. All in all, it was a great night riding around Mumbai by motorcycle.

Proof of the Spiritual World

(I have written on these matters before, but I'm corresponding with someone about it, and I though I would publish this letter I have just written.)

The subject is Dimensionality vs Multiple Universes.

By dimensions, we mean the physical dimensions of space. 2d, 3d, etc.

you can think of them as degrees of freedom, or the amount of information you need to locate something.

for example, a flat sheet is 2d. like a map, you need only 2 pieces of information to locate something on a map, latitude and longitude. left-right and forward-back.

3d is space. you need a third: up-down. that's the real world we live in. 3d movies add depth to the otherwise flat movie screen.

to get from 2d to 3d, you draw lines at right angles to both 2d dimensions. we can see that to do that, you take a flat picture, and move up. those up lines are at right angles to both left-right and forward-back dimensions of a flat picture.

4d gets interesting. we live in 3d, so we cannot really know it, we can only imagine it by metaphor. if you take a cube, and draw a line at right angles to all 3 dimensions, that would be the 4th. we can't do it, we can't even really imagine it.

but just like a 3d cube can cast a 2d shadow, the 4th dimension casts a shadow on our 3d world, and that shadow is time (that's part of relativity).

we live moment to moment, but our 4d selves is the self made up of adding all the moments of our life together. see each moment added together as one thing, and that's the 4d version of yourself.

5d adds another level of choice. take your lifetime, the 4d version of you. then imagine all the possible ways your life could have turned out. add them all together into an even larger, more inclusive version of you, and that's your 5d self.

that's when multiple universes get introduced. each possible 4d self is a different universe in a way. but they are not real, they are possible. only the real life you are having is actual.

people who like the theory of multiple universes think that each possible 4d self is actualized, but in human life, we take the set of possibilities and extract one actuality from it. only 1 life is real. the others are potential.

that's how quantum physics gets involved. it describes, in multi-dimensional terms, the set of all possible outcomes. but humans don't experience all possible outcomes, just one. one actuality is extracted from the set of all possibilities.

i think it's wrong to thing that all possibilities are actualized, but some people go there because it['s one way to explain the weirdness of quantum physics. because quantum physics just describes the possibilities, and says nothing about how or why one actuality is extracted from the set of possibilities. but that doesn't mean they all exist, it just means we don't understand how the one that exists comes into being.

to me, it proves that there's more to human life than the physical world, more than what science can explain.


to put it more succinctly, quantum physics is a complete description of the physical world, but it is not a complete description of human experience, therefore, there is more to human experience than the physical world.

Musings on Passover

Monday night was the first night of passover, and in India, this year it corresponded to a full moon festival for Hanuman, the monkey god. I have just returned, and am busy cleaning my apartment, which has been gathering dust for 2 months (yes, all the windows were closed, but still, somehow, the outside enters). I've also been going to all my favorite restaurants that i've missed the past 2 months. And although I was volunteering for American Jewish World Service when last I was here, I was thinking that passover would come and go for me.

As it turned out, I went to 2 seders, and it was one of the more meaningful Passovers I've experienced.

I do like Passover, as I like many of the calendar-based Jewish holidays. It's an opportunity, at certain times of the year, to do some introspection and self-examination. It's a chance to check in, each year, think about the past year, and set intentions for the coming year. Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in the fall are a time to think about sin and redemption. The Hebrew word for sin means "to miss the mark", as in an arrow. During the high holidays, we can look at the ways in which we've missed the mark, not lived up to our expectations of ourselves, and set the intention to come a little closer next time. It's not about punishment; it's about self-improvement; always trying to be a better person. While this is a daily activity, the fall holidays gives me a chance to put some focus on that endeavor.

Passover, on the other hand, is all about freedom.

Of course, we tell the story of the Jewish exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt, which may or may not be true, (some say it was written during the Jewish exile in Babylonia, to give hope to the people that they would return to Israel someday. (we were exiled once before, and we returned, so it will happen again.) The reason that this idea appeals to me is that it changes our notion of how the ancient Jews entered the promised land. Instead of a people coming in from the outside and conquering the people living there, another narrative emerges.

In ancient Israel, there were many peoples, with many gods. But in any society, there are outliers, misfits, square pegs for the round holes (do I sound like an Apple commercial?). Individuals were coming up with new ideas that didn't fit the mainstream. Ideas like taking care of the poor, living ethically, working for peace, the importance of education etc, began to emerge in individuals. These people were not appreciated by the others; eventually they left and gathered together. They became a group of people brought together by the similarities of their ideas, by a new way of thinking. These people became the Israelites. They started the first conscious community, gathering together in a common purpose, for freedom and equality and truth and knowledge.

I realize that this theory of the origins of the Israelites is, well, un-orthodox, but all of the bible (and much of life) is symbolism to me, and I appreciate the symbolism of a home grown conscious community far more than stories of a war-like people conquering a land. Of course, those war like stories are great if you are a people in exile, as the Jews were later in Babylonia. They are inspirational and helped people feel that they could and would fight back. But when it comes to how origin stories can be meaningful to our lives today, I much prefer the idea of the community of misfits.

But I digress.

As we tell the story of the Passover, the exodus from slavery into freedom, we are inspired to think of notions of freedom and slavery as they affect us today. What freedoms do i enjoy, and how can I be more grateful and appreciative of them? How can I not waste the opportunities they provide? In what ways do I enslave myself, through a lack of self-confidence, through mindless habits, through negative reactive patterns which cause me to robotically react to situations instead of authentically responding to them. How can I become more authentic, live in the moment, and act through love and not fear? And in what ways do my actions enslave others, either personally or politically? These are all questions I like to ponder during the Passover season.

As the great Jewish/Hindu mystic Ram Dass has said, the goal is not to get high. the goal is to get free.

to be continued...

I'm back!

After 2 months in exile, I have made it back to Mumbai. I miss my traveling companion but I'm so happy to be back. There are some crazy stories to tell, but they will remain untold for now. For now, know only that I have returned, back to the land I love.

Football and Furthur

I saw bob weir and phil lesh play music tonight, went with my cousin, in downtown miami. it was a relatively small place, oudoors, and all around was a great view of miami's skyline, which i barely recognized. the music wasn't bad, i must admit. the guitarist did Jerry better than most of them, and the sound was good for an outdoor show. it's a good lineup this time and the music came together more than the last time i saw them.
it's still not the same though. never will be.
coming back from the show, we passed by the Intercontinental, which is where the New Orleans Saints are staying for the Super Bowl. We went into the lobby for a while, until they kicked us out. Then when we were outside, we saw Reggie Bush entering the hotel through a side door, without going through the lobby. We wished him luck and he thanked us. Cool.