Madurai, I love You, but You're Bringing Me Down

My mother informs me that I am falling down on my blogging duties and insists that I write something. So here I am. Blogging. What a dumb word.

Things that Have Happened Since I Wrote a Month Ago:

1) We went to an American hill station in the Western Ghats, the second largest mountain range in India (first being the Himalayas) in Tamil Nadu (the state I'm in) called Kodaikanal (Kodai for short). American missionaries set it up when they came to proselytize to the savage natives. The poor missionaries desparately needed a cool place in the mountains to retreat when they needed a break from spreading the word of Jesus and saving the poor ignorant third worlders. So they displaced tribal peoples to build a resort town for themselves. They decided that the jungles of the Western Ghats weren't good enough, so they destroyed them, and planted their own more orderly pine forest. The trees are literally planted in rows. America! Despite its unfortunate origins, I appreciated our weekend in Kodai because a) it's a beautiful place and b) it was COLD. COLD is a relative term. It was probably a damp 50 degrees with a nippy wind. However, when you've been living in 95+ degree heat and waking up every morning drenched in your own sweat, a damp 50 feels COLD and NICE. In Kodai we ate Tibetan noodle soup, drank hot ginger tea, wore sweaters and socks, and slept under blankets for the first time in a long time. Bliss.

2) Visited some really neat religious sites in and around Madurai. Now, religion's not really my thing, but I think wild peacocks, monkeys, rocks the size of malls, animal sacrifices, and gods posessing humans is something we can all get behind. We went to a Hindu cave (I'm a delinquint for not knowing the name or the god that its in honor of) and the cave itself was...a cave. The area surrounding the cave, on the other hand, is home to beautiful wild peacocks (see photos below) and snarky, agressive monkeys (again, see below). We also visited Jain Hill, a GIANT rock that you can climb to the top of and see all of Madurai and the surrounding fields and mountains. More importantly it's an important pilgremmage sight for Jains across South India. Yesterday we went to Pondykoyl, a temple that honors the god Pondy. People go to Pondy to ask for help in really tough situtations (finances, health, family, etc) and in return will make commitments, often times in the form of an animal sacrifice or a shaved head (mostly women who offer their hair). Tuesdays and Fridays are auspicious days so yesterday the temple was packed. There were so many women and small children with their heads shaved and we saw a goat pre-sacrifice and a goat head post-sacrifice. And a twitching chicken who had apparently just been sacrificed. Pondy is also notorious for posessing people. This manifests itself in various ways but yesterday we saw a lot of posessed women jerking and flailing about and uttering gutteral, primal sreams. Thought it may appear scary, its supposed to be a very empowering thing for women. They're allowed to withold sex from their husbands and the husbands aren't even allowed to talk to them. A couple of SITA students and staff have been posessed in the past. You have to do puja (praying to the god at the temple) to become de-posessed and the line for puja looks like the line for Space Mountain at Disney World. On a Saturday. In the summer. In other words: real long.

3) I started working on my independent research projet on bonded labor, specifically what happens to children after they're released. Basically, kids end up in bonded labor one of two ways. First, they come from poor, lower caste, landless agricultural families who are indebted to an upper caste landowner for whatever reason. A middleman/broker will come to the family with a "great" offer to take their children to work in their snack factories in their sweet shops or snack factories in North India. This "great" offer includes a hefty advance payment for the parents and minimum wage, three meals a day, and living accomodations for the children. In reality, these kids are forced to work 20 hour days in abhorant conditions, often with an open flame or scalding oil, given two meals a day of old rice, and sleep on the factory floor. They are abused mentally, physically, and sometimes sexually and are allowed no contact with the outside world. Needless to say they don't go to school. The age of the kids range from 6 to 14 and they often work for two years at a time. The "hefty" advance payment that the parents are offered is generally between $100 and $200. The second way thay children are suckered into bonded labor is when a broker rounds up street kids and offers them a wonderful place to live and then destroys them (think Slumdog Millionaire). What I'm going to look into specifically is how these kids are reintegrated into society and whether they're ever able to fully recover from such extreme abuse at such an early age. My hunch is no.

4) We went to Kerala (the state on the western side of Tamil Nadu) for a week which was stellar. It was nice to take a little vacation after spending day in and day out studying the evils of humanity and how truly fucked up the world is (read: caste, bonded labor, globalization, IMF, strucutral adjustment). In Kerala we went hiking in a tiger reserve which was beautiful (photos below) and saw wild elephants. I also rode an elephant in captivity with my friends Bridget and Scott which is something I would recommend that you never, ever, ever do as long as you live NO MATTER HOW COOL YOU THINK IT WILL BE. DON'T DO IT. These elephants in captivity are an unhealthy shade of grey (wild elephants are brown), they're chained up and beaten, they make pitiful little honking sounds and shudder, and live an average of 40 years less than elephants in the wild. As karmic retribution, while disembarking the poor elephant I promtly slipped and fell in the mud. We went to a spice garden and tea plantation which were beautiful and got covered in leaches. We took an oppulent houseboat to Cochin which was very cool and along the way stopped for palm tree moonshine. Fermented coconut milk (I'm pretty sure) that tasted of popcorn, peanut butter, and apple cider all at the same time. In Cochin we visited the oldest church in India (St. Francis) and went to Jew Town, one of the oldest Jewish settlements inthe world. The day we were there one of the elders, one of the 12 (now 11) remaining direct descendents of the original Jews, passed away. Appropriately, the weather in Cochin was grey and dreary. We ate Italian food and drank more coffee and got ripped off because of the color of our skin. We met an artist who has had shows all over the world and let us poke around his studio/loft and look at his work and we met an Iranian Brit named Camilla who just finished three months of building eco-friendly pit toilets in rural Karnataka. My friend Scott and I spewed up all of the seafood we consumed (according to our rickshaw driver "it was a bad fish day") in front of more people than I would have cared to watch me spew. We took a night train back to Madurai which would have been pleasant had I not shared a compartment with Snoring Man, a man who snores lounder than any other man on the planet I'm sure, and Snack Man, an elderly man who turned on the florescent light at 4:00 am to eat the sandwich I'm sure his wife so dutifully packed for him. Thank you Snoring Man and Snack Man for making my night train experience one I'll always remember.

From the house boat on the backwaters of Kerala

Periyar Tiger Reserve

Again

Mama Monkey

Wild Peacock

I leave you with this final image.
It has nothing to do with anything
I wrote, but aren't these dolls
frightening?

ALSO, I realize everybody has very busy lives and I feel dumb even writing this, but if anybody has a free second to drop me a line, maybe with some twizzlers or a photo or something small in it that would be unbelievably wonderful. Even just a letter would be great. Anything. The address here is:

South India Term Abroad
34-B H.A.K. Road
Chinnachokkikulam
Madurai, Tamil Nadu 625002

If you do send something that might tickle someone's fancy as it comes through customs, don't declare it. One boy received a package the other day from his girlfriend and on the outside where it asks for "detailed description of contents" she wrote a letter, a drawing, and a piece of a rock. It was untouched.