peculiar trick of perfection

from matt's prayer a night in late june, 2006. india.

 

"...even toxic waste dumps are part of it,

the one love,

in a peculiar trick of perfection..

i would like to prayer for all those

with open wounds,

puss,

injury,

and infection..."

 

      bleeding fingertip aside,

 

he's recording a cd. it's going to be called "monsoon wedding". or "hotel california". or "rice meal". one guitar with many appearances and ten years of matt's recalcitrant brilliance focused through a minidisc player with questionable connectivity.

 

keep your eyes on the prize...

this is the indian solution

i say goodnight and goodrain to neilu and chandrabose, step out into the world of young rivers and old millipedes, fallen bamboo and incessant questioning. always the questioning, internal and without.

 

the outside is cold, dark, and wet. i have moved from being in the monsoon to being a part of it. the village paths are new rivers, red with topsoil if i could see them. its the early night, after my evening class, and the powers are out. the televisions are silent. the lights are dark.

 

no moon nor stars -- even the heavens are on vacation.

 

im wearing the same clothes as i did three months ago, singing down dusty gujarati roads in 100 degree heat. it was that trek that made me gujarati, that made the land and the language my own. here im a foreigner again: light-skinned, illiterate, innocent, and foolish.

 

the path which slid down to our rented rooms is now a river, gurgling in competition with the official drainage ditch a meter to my left. everything is heard: water, frogs, insects, wind. only the fireflies are seen.

 

i stop to open my lungi and pee into the riverpath. total liberation. the indian solution. up to my ankles in mud, river, cowshit, and how many brothers' urine? totally free. as i walk on i see the only light in this lost valley -- matt's candles. the only sounds through these soggy fields of rice and ginger are matt's strings.

 

synaesthesia.

 

this is the indian solution. hard red floors we mop every morning, an empty kitchen and a large pile of mango peels. markered wisdom on the walls from malavika's addled futuremind and a nest of woolen blankets. my my matt, only matt, alone and dedicated to our task. to the Task.

 

back door and mysore sandalwood soap and prayers clean evil spirits from wet brown feet. voices.

 

india resists solution. matt sitting uncomfortably with his finger cut and bloody, a friendly teenager ive never met playing CCR and bryan adams on a tuneless guitar. one glance assures me its been like this for hours, a thin veneer of pain and politeness, the sonds of the american 70s.

 

this is the indian solution.

--
do you eat? www.somethingconstructive.net/jamanta

R E M Y A

another monday

and the moon is back again. in full force, after a sunny three week hiatus that worried me more than the rice farmers, it is now raining, effectively, all the time.

the latest update on the spacetime scene has our questionable protagonist moving, pathologically, once again. matt and i rented a filthy two-room concrete apartment for a thousand points monthly. it has a pretty maroon floor and we've expended 22 ounces of doctor bronner's favorite formula to tidy up it's full-spectrum vibrational presence.

we're going to be there for an eternal month, until matt heads to vipassana in madras/chennai and i welcome a suite (four) of lovely northwestern (hemispherically speaking) girls. for the first time in my hypercontinental adventures (now coming to eight months) i think i will have a kitchen.

to make dosa, naturally. overwhelming quantities of dosa. overdose. overdosa. overdosha. dosha, naturally, being the sanskrit term for "imbalance", used in ayurvedic shastras to describe all deviatons (quality, illness) our corporeal form endures in its ultimately illusional separation from pure satvic truth. an edgy, wet, and painful illusion that every moment teaches me how to engage with a compassionate presence while still smiling at the impermanence of it all.

there's nothing like aurobindo and rainy days to make that clear.

nothing except the infinite cycle of sa-ni-sa-ni-sa-ni that i can never seem to perfect on my bansuri.

nothing save the infinite cycle of "im learning", "i suck", "im learning", "i suck" that i can never seem to escape on my bansuri.

matt and mali are with me, separated by thin cubicle walls in the den of internet. my brother and my sister. the closest to me and the closest to me. and all i can feel is blessed. once again crushed by the weight of krishna's blessings, falling in large orange mangos and small red mangos and lank white men and beautiful malayali girls.

so, basically, this is all about Remya. sonnet still in progress and the homage of the eternal moment well underway.

Remya. Remya. posso escriver as lineas mais graciosas esta amanha. Remya.

we met at the margin-free market, under large yellow banners and tall shelves teeming with plastic.

she, who was one of many and yet, somehow, the only.

she who carried our basket with supple hands and policed our intents with watchful eyes.

oh, remya, how can an indian woman laugh?

oh, remy, how can an indian woman smile?

show us! show the world! show us the world!

lead us through lightbulbs whose compact florescents are but dim and expensive shadows of your own radiance.

lead us through mounds of airy markers which will dry up and crumble before your bindi and puja marks dream of smudging.

lead us through plastic clips for plastic clothelines and plastic cups for plastic buckets. lead to the paradise of home furnishing, to what it feel like finally to come home, for a month, but a month, and infinite month of writing and recording and singing and practicing.

remya! don't let them tell you that normal women smile or laugh or let their panjabis peek out from the folds of corporate smocks, for they do not.

remya! don't let them tell me that you can't negotiate with peons about the price or weight of candles, that we can't fold smiles out of monsoon evenings, for we can.

remya! how have you become that which we all roll towards? softly! how are you so nice! so beautiful! so normal! so carefree!

you, a sculpture of the one who reposes beyond and below, above and within, with no taint or runoff from the twisted knots of society...

oh, remya.

--
do you eat? www.somethingconstructive.net/jamanta

f(e)asting in kupady

Having broke a three day water fast last night at 4pm, Ank and I thought it would be appropriate to post some recipes.  As for the fast, it was amazingly smooth.  We both want to do it longer.  And I am committed to a fruit and nut diet for the rest of my stay in India because I can think better that way. 

 

So we live in a music studio with no kitchen.  But do not worry, this is India and India takes care of you.  The first set of recipes is from the neighbor across the street that cooks a feast for us once a day just casue it seems like a good idea.  Followed up with recipes from our feast at our music teacher's, Chandrabose, home on Sunday.  If you want to learn about giving, be open to it and come to India.  It is okay to be searching and penniless apparently.  Just no one ever wanted to tell you to go to India to do it.

 

Let's get to it.  A few recipes from Suhara Rahman's home across the street:

 

PUTA - tubular rice flour and coconut mix, eaten with any yummy, saucy, spicy thing

-- buy a metal cylinder that allows you to steam puta on the pressure cooker

-- fill the cylinder with rice flour, placing a layer of shredded coconut at the ends and in the middle

-- i think the puta flour can be made by toasting rice flour. i think the rice flour can be bought or made by grinding whole rice grains.

-- steam for five to eight minutes on the pressure cooker
[ take the cynlinder off the steam valve and pop out the tube of goodness  -ed]

 

KARDALA (Chickpea) CURRY

-- soak chickpeas overnight

-- cook chickpeas in pressure cooker with one sliced onion

-- in big frying pot, fry an onion in coconut oil

-- add chickpeas with the water

-- mix in tikka/chicken masala (ask ank or buy it), coriander, tumeric, chilipowder, mostly put in cumin powder, garam masala (misture of cinnamon, cloves, and that type of spicy blend)

-- take one cup of shredded coconut, put in blender til watery/coconuty mist appears, throw it in the pot

-- simmer for 10 minutes, eat with puta, nun-puta, dolsa, iddly, well anything will do if you are not in india

 

NUN-PUTA - saucer shaped rice product in noodle form 

-- mix rice flour and warm water and salt til dough forms. 

-- buy this tube that allows you to push the dough through (w)holes to create noodles

-- knead dough til pretty soft

-- put dough in noodle maker contraption, create mounds of noodles in something you can steam, sometimes a flat surface with holes in the bottom, sometimes there are no holes, anything will do

-- steam for 8-10 minutes, should bounce back when touched

-- depending on your desires, put coconut oil on the bottom of the thing you steam the noodles on. i like the other neighbor's version where she sprinkled real shredded coconut on top

 

CHAMANDI - blended goodness all around you could eat on anything anytime

-- take shredded coconut, green chilis, green unripe mangos (preferably from the tree in your backyard), garlic, and salt

-- blend it, grind it, mash it up somehow and eat:)

 

Chandrabose puts on the chef's hat [ and miniskirt lungi  -ed] in the home and takes a break from teaching us music, but he is still teaching all the time:

 

SAMBAR - if you ever want to know, ask ank, he drinks this straight, but i would not recommend this method

-- take drumstick?(have no idea if you can find this in america), tomatos, split chickpeas, potatoes, onions, eggplant, beet root, carrots, okra and slice the correct way for sambar

-- cook up all the vegetables in the pressure cooker with salt and water

-- mix sambar powder in the vegetable which is a mix of chili, coriander, and tumeric

-- heat some coconut oil, throw in curry leaves and cardamum for a minute, put some on the juice from the vegetables in the hot pan and return everything into the large pot

-- eat with any ricy type product you find, or pour into a cup for ank

 

UPERI - this spicy yummy thing I love, just another thing india adds to the table for the fun of it

-- grind in mortar and pestle 1c. shredded coconut, 1tsp. tumeric, 1/2tsp whole peppercorn, 5 small onions, 3 green chilis

-- take 2 cups of very thinly sliced green beans and cook

-- heat 2 tsp coconut oil on low heat, add 1tsp mustard seeds, 2tbls. white dal, 6 curry leaves

-- throw in grinded mixture from above, cook one minute

-- add cooked green beans and salt

-- increase heat, cook for 3 minutes continually mixing

-- taste a couple times

 

AVIEL - another vegetable, saucy delicacy to each with some dough/rice type product

-- cut up the same vegetables that were in the sambar but in thick matchstick shapes (get this right or they might not know what you are making)

-- take the same grinded ingredients you used in uperi

-- pour grinded ingredients over the vegetables and cook everything

-- mix tamarind in water, add to the pot

-- add salt

-- add 10 tsp. coconut oil and say "WE WANT MORE"

-- do not mix vegetables with a spoon because you will mash the vegetables and forget what you are eating again, flip the vegetables while they are cooking so nothing burns

-- add a hand, full of curry leaves

 

Okay, that is the end of our f(e)asting for today.  Wait, the finally [?  -ed] is Jacka Pulka, which you may have heard of already.  This is what the other neighbor cooked up last night so ank and i could break our fast.  But for some reason I decided to commit to fruits and nuts for the rest of my stay in india, so i ate coconut and some cashew nuts instead. [ ank graciously volunteered to eat her share, for the rest of the month  -ed]

 

JACKA PULKA
-- take one unripe jackfruit from your tree in the backyard

-- gather around 5-6 people and get the fruit out, save the nuts in the middle of each fruity delight, and slice the fruit up into small strips (beware of any sticky white substance.  it does come off with coconut oil, though, don't fear)

-- blend 1/2 coconut, some onions, some garlic, and three long green chilis

-- put sliced jacka fruit in a pressure cooker, dump in the blended items, add 10 curry leaves, 1tsp. tumeric, salt, 1c. water, and 5 of the nuts [ jaca kuro  -ed]

-- cook for 3 whistles

-- when finished, of course add enough coconut oil to satisfy your hearts' desires

 

let me know what happens.

[written by neilu, who was unable to figure out posting protocol  -ed]

the life divine

yesterday at kuppadi:

06h00: wake-up and morning bowel movements

06h15: morning medication and yoga

07h00: practice (flute = ankur, tabla = neilu)

10h00: invited to breakfast (puttu) at muslim neigbhor's place. note they do not wear headcoverings unless strangers come to the door.

11h00: resuming practicing

11h30: chandrabose arrives. 1st lesson

12h30: lesson over, resuming practicing

14h00: fifteen minute break for jackfruit

15h00: fifteen minute break for mango

16h00: try to call mali. busy.

16h30: resume practicing

18h00: chandrabose returns. 2nd lesson

19h30: lesson over, nightly fruit/meditation

20h00: chill

21h00: reading aloud from "the life divine" by sri aurobindo

*

the key takeway is that

a) playing music is very hard, mentally, and regardly of whether i ever learn how to play the scale correctly i will be a very different person after this month

b) sri aurobindo, technically speaking, is "the shit". if you've ever shared "the primary religious experience" either through management, medicine, sex, music, surfing, meditation, or (god forbid) organized religion, then it's for you. that experience is his unwritten premise and he does the best job of anyone i haven't met in clearing up the confusions and dark spots. of all the people that think they "understand" while they're inhabiting that Other consciousness, and wake up the next morning to find they've written "everything reeks of petroleum", he's the one that got it right.

just so we know. sri aurobindo. the life divine. do not try to read it silently.

dude, where's your aura

matt was with us for a week and i got to relive some of the "virgin india" experiences through him. him being at times indistinguishable from the overwhelming human rush to him, being white and a Meditator and everything.

one thing now clears itself. this notion of "aura" which always confused me and inspired visions of middle-aged new-aged women in bookstores bursting with crystals. aura is real, alive, and well, here in india.

it works like this:

- matt and i are walking down the street (a red clay country lane) to the highway (a barely paved country road) and pass a group of three people (in public, people are male). they, naturally, stare. we walk past them and down the road. matt turns to note they are still, naturally, staring.

- i am receiving dinner on my gandhian pilgrimage from a modest family of gujarati villagers. the sixteen year-old son enters the room and of all the places to sit places himself touching and perhaps on top of his father.

- on the same walk i am received in the mansion of a rich patel family of "farmers" (while their "laborours" coast lavishly through "houses" of blue plastic and other forms of filth), the seven members of which all sleep downstairs in the living room, leaving the rest of the palace empty.

- it is near impossible to pass someone on a country road or in a village without a series of questions: where are you going? your native place? what are you doing? if there is any doubt as to interrogation, the undisguised staring is assured.

this, i think, is all about aura. the extent of our dense phsyical bodies is well-understood. you slip by people or bump into them. the aura goes furthers, extends some meters perhaps, and is insensible. to most westerners at least. in india walking _by_ someone on a road is also walking _through_ that someone's aura. bumping into them. just as it would be natural to say "excuse me" or "watch where youre going asshole" to us, its natural to say something to them.

the villager's aura extends to the domain of his village. if you are anywhere in a village it is not only legitimate but natural for the residents to ask what you're doing. you've walked into their home and bumped right into them.

the other half, the jaggery caring half, you see between friends, parents and children, and other pleasant non-sexual relationships. indians are always sitting as close to each other as possible, always touching each other, holding hands, having their arms around eachother. men and men, women and women, parents and children. not men and women.

my music teacher while have his hand on my knee, or holding my hand, absently during a conversation or while i am practicing. it's all about this aura thing, i'm convinced.

basically, after seven months of being here and two more to go, i have given up any hope of being "socially acceptable" upon my return to amerika. in fact i'm going to have to recreate amerika in a hypercontintal image (plus diversity and minus the fuckedup gender relations, of course). but this is just so you know why im not sitting _over there_ the next time we get together to grate beets or whatever.

futebol

back in sultan bathery without a reputable spacebar and enmeshed in the humanity. sights, sounds, and the Odor of some special funk on the computer-savvy may understand.

understanding.

it's the worldcup somewherewhen and here in kerala amidst the sweezy blaring of a chennai and clouds of bus exhaust one distinguishes -- por todos lados -- huge posters of brasilian and argentine faces and uniforms, poised happily/aggressively (war is peace, aggression is happiness) around a soccer ball. a futbol. a fuchiboli, as it were.

everywhere. in seven months of mango'd wandering i ne'er saw a fo'otball and now they are everywhere. kids for once are not playing cricket but aiming penalty kicks through bamboo goalposts. brasilian and argentine flags are everywhere, with the occassional red burst of england. the other teams/countries don't seem to exist. maybe they don't. i have no idea who is in the world cup anyhow but according to indian propaganda its brasil, argentina, and england.

certainly not india.

these posters, i am told, are set up by fan's clubs, mainly, it seems, for the purpose of advertising and sponsorship. not sponsoring the teams mind you, but the posters. i imagine the hysterical excitement this creates is somehow tied to boosting the economy, or underwritten by the (mammot) keralan gold industry.

enough. just so you know futebol is alive and strong here and i already have two sandals and a thousand business cards with (detourned version of) the brasilian flag to show with whom my alleigances lie.

suspiros from patagonia

below find some words from mangolandia correspondent denali degraf (email available upon request) about his involvement, physical and spirititual in anti-mining efforts in his native patagonia:

 

 

***

 

sweet mother of all that is holy (as you would say, AMAZON)...

  

viz., my email of five minutes ago.  how does it occur to anyone, ANYONE that it could EVER be a good idea, anywhere, to dynamite a mountainside into a several-km-wide pit, grind it all up and pour cyanide solution over it?   i mean, really...

 

good lord.  so i've been becoming quite active in the Asamblea Comarcal contra el Saqueo.   what a great word, by the way, saqueo... must be related to sacking, in the sense of, "the visigoths sacked rome," and also to sacar.  but i favor pillaging, myself.  large assemblies of vecinos autoconvocados... lots of people speaking passionately about how this is a crime and we just can't let it happen, but also nobody has a bloody clue about anything... how to take on a canadian company, desde patagonia... we have no funds, we have no media on our side except (thanks heavens for their existence) FM ALAS, and radio nacional at least lets us speak our mind.    and of all those neighbors willing to truck out into the street with flags and banners and make their presence known (this did hit the media, at the provincial level), there are precious few of us who are willing to spend their "free" time heading down to lago puelo to get together and talk press strategy, for example, or go to the radio and help make public some of these goings-on, or find someplace for the next assembly to be held and make sure there are actually chairs for everyone when we get there.   to say nothing of going to the regional assembly in jacobacci last weekend—seven of us went, that was quite an accomplishment.  i spent exactly 70% of my total monetary assets prior to the trip on the bus and train tickets to get there.   that would be 50 pesos.  do the math for what i'm left with. 

 

and jesus.  jacobacci.  remember juanca, mapuche apprentice at ciesa who let my bread burn?   his territory.   jacobacci, town of 8000, surrounded by herder settlements out on the steppe, some of whom over 100 km away by dirt track across the scrubland.   lots of illiterate people, lots of people who've never gone anywhere else in their lives except maybe headed to bariloche once in a blue moon for some kind of extraordinary circumstance (like going to a hospital, though most people don't do that because by the time they would get there they'd be dead already.)   places where everyone lives off of the wool they shear from their sheep and the meat from selling lambs, there is no such thing as natural gas for heatingand since there aren't even any goddamn TREES, there's no firewood either and most people burn the horse dung they collect in order to heat the place.   20-below temperatures are commonplace in winter.  i mean, we're talking about the hardiest, most resistant, and most beaten-down people you can imagine.   nearly all of mapuche descent.   and this is where the canadians decide to do business.  the police harass the anti-mining organizers in the streets, poor claudia the 26-year-old who does the local news on the radio in the mornings does her best to educate people about the disasters the calcatreu mine project would bring, and as a result, when she leaves the radio at noon and goes to the grocer, the vegetable man refuses to speak to her.   after all, the mine is progress and jobs.  i don't know how many illiterate sheep-herders they think are going to be hired to do geological and dynamite work, but hey.   the truth is that there's no mine work going to be done around here anytime soon, the permission letters are so preliminary there's no risk in the immediate sense, but jacobacci, man, it's so intense, and they're right out there on the steppe.   and the company that has the permissions for el hoyo-epuyen, when you look on their website, this project doesn't even show up yet, but their major project at the moment is a pair of gold mines in north central el salvador.   and no, they're not at all far enough away from guarjila... and even if they were, they'd be too close to someone. 

 

so everywhere this is happening, and i log onto the mining company's website today and it's just so spiffy and clean and amerikan (even if it's canadian), and the big project on the website is "Calcatreu- Argentina", the graphic is a map highlighting argentina in the american continent.   as if to say, it's useless of us to show you a map of where jacobacci lies in argentina, since you probably barely know where argentina is on a globe, so we'll start big.   and there are all kinds of press releases and investment options, studies and figures and such, as if it were some kind of fiction... 6334 meters in 56 drill holes, finding 5.34 g/t Au (that is, 5 grams of gold per TON of raw material) in the Castro Sur site, feasibility studies for the extraction, samples being sent to australia, and so forth.   and nowhere do you get the sense that what they're talking about is REAL, that its a real meseta, real rocks they have to dig through, real water they're using, real people who are going to start drinking water laced with cyanide, real sheep who are going thirsty.   i mean, i look on the website and see a map that to 99.99999 percent of the people in the world is just some lines and names that mean nothing, but i was THERE, not four days ago.  

 

i don't know man.  that's what's on my mind.  and i think of you... "never forget you are a warrior."   well, the war is on, and it's been brought to our doorstep.  but the last thing anyone wants is to wage war.   as soraya once told me, "como hacemos para no hablar más de lucha?"   why can't we overturn the world order like we planned, by planting vegetables and building with mud and singing with children armed only with bamboo flutes.   world harmony through organic farming and music.   i'm so with you, man.  until now, we're here harmonizing our squash and our voices, and if we're not careful, both of them are going to end up with accumulated heavy metals.   i know, maybe i'm regressing to the basics in the whole "do we change the world through direct political action or slow education and lifestyle-changing activity?" but what the hell, man.   as much as we can opt for the latter, believe in it, work at it, throw our every atom towards it, at some point the former just shows up in your yard.   i have no eloquent reflections on the matter yet.   just nausea.  no, not true.  i also have this genuinely lovely sensation brought on by getting together with people i've never met and bonding passionately over our willingness to doanything to keep this destruction from being wrought upon us.   i mean, how else would i have ended up on a train to jacobacci last weekend with the motley crew that we were, spending the entire 5 hours debating the best way to completely overturn the argentine national mining code... truly, it was great.   invigorating, enlightening, and intellectually stimulating in a  way i have been lacking lately.  it has lit up an aspect of myself and my life that has barely had the pilot light on lately.   and for that i am grateful, and for that too i share this with you.

 

so that's that.  needed to put that out there.  truthfully, it's not nearly as important for me to actually send this message as it was to write it, but i'm sending it anyway.   even if you just write back with, "shit man, i know that must suck.   stick it out, in solidarity..." that'll help. 

***

 

brasilian portuguese rules the day

www.somethingconstructive.net/mangolandia/audio/matt-bose.mp3

matt coffman on guitar

and our music teacher, chandrabose, on tabla

more photos than news

matt and saskia got here and we're too busy eating mangos to write properly.

 

i will say that it's damn good to have a brother and home is certainly other people.

 

photos for the taking at

http://somethingconstructive.net/mangolandia/saskiajune

 

in housing new, neilu and i met a moustache. it curls up at the edges and is worn by a man named chandrabose. chandrabose handles the tabla, bansuri, harmonium, and human voice like buckminster with so many legos. so we decided to take a sunny hiatus from the keralan dream (kanavu) and move in to his studio.

 

instead of going to music school, we're going to music school. we'll live their for a month and he'll give lessons every morning. there is nothing else to do but practice. there is no kitchen so we'll eat mangos. it should be pretty great. we're all very excited. these are very, very exciting time.

 

and,

ankur

--
www.somethingconstructive.net | mangolandia.blogspot.com