Conclusive Dharamsala posting

Thanks to this town, I'm one of the few people in the world who's ever spent two full weeks organizing her days solely around the changing light.

Today I've stumbled on a quote from Jean Renoir in a commencement address by Samatha Power: "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." (Read the entire, phenomenal, thing here.) Well, I've put in enough of that to start my own nation, and frankly, I see the advantage.

See y'all in Delhi.



Insensitive but Hilarious Bonus:
Headline of the Day:

Cheney Apologizes for West Virginia Inbreeding Joke

Jesus H. Christ....

Did you all know you can download whole lectures, whole lecture serieses, and occasionally recordings of whole courses from universities like UC Berkeley on iTunes? Most of which are free?

Can you imagine how much free information there is here? I feel like I'm having a heart attack, or discovering the internet again for the first time. This is a really, truly, for-real, god-given miracle. I really might buy an apple laptop now, purely out of gratitude. Steve Jobs needs my money.

Looks like we know what I'll be doing for the rest of the summer!

Of course I didn't just come here to share my excitement about aspects of iTunes that most of you probably discovered 5 years ago. Mostly I came to share my excitement that I bought myself two more days in Dharamsala by swapping my train ticket to Delhi for a much less comfortable overnight bus ticket, meaning I'm still in sunny, temperate Himachal Pradesh and not in sticky, sticky Chandigarh. Meaning it's a good day.

But meaning also that I'm coming to the end of my relaxing shopping from Tibetans rather than Kashmiris (sigh... it's been so nice...) and that I'm already choosing where to eat my last Dharmsala lunch. This town's been good to me.

Alright, so I have nothing to say, and I really did just want to share my excitement about free iTunes lectures. Sue me.

Been away a few days

Walking, being social for a change, etc. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Four days ago I met Connie, a girl from Mississauga, totally by co-incidence, in this little Tibetan lunch place, we ended up hanging out that whole night and most of the next day - she'd found a place in Bhagsu, a few km up the road, that had avocado sandwiches. That night we bumped into Kelly and David, when Kelly heard me talking trash about a book he'd read recently. All it took was him eavesdropping my dropping the word "narcissistic" and that was that. 5 hours later, realizing that Connie and I might now be locked out of our respective hotels due to the late hour, we all stumbled out of the only joint still open in McLeod Ganj, this neon monstrosity called McLlo's, the menus of which have a bizarre full-page photo of Pierce Brosnan eating what we think was an omelette and giving a very suave thumbs up. Connie left the next morning but I spent the next 48 hours hanging around the Yanks. Those were some great folks - the kind of people who open the conversation with a story about an ex, make a joke about murdering someone, then jump right into nuanced arguments about your religious and political beliefs. (Okay, that was all just Kelly.) I've basically been laughing my ass off and talking about the primaries for four days - amazing. Yesterday we hiked to Triund, which might be Tibetan for "little patch of grass on the top of a pretty big mountain." Beautiful, I know it was, but underwhelming; mountains don't look like they used to, and that's how I know that it's almost time to come home.

Unfortunately, I lost Connie without getting/giving emails, which is too bad. Unforeseen circumstances. David I'm keeping - I'm very happy to have met him. The next time I'm in New York, I'll be visiting. He'll be at Columbia for another few years at least... Ph.D. in Political Economy. Can show me around the city once I get into that NYU program. Cough.

The Yanks took off this morning, so I'm on my own again. Where has the time gone? I only have three days left here before I have to head for Chandigarh to catch my train to Delhi, that stink-hot people-bog. You know, McLeod Ganj is really only about 3 streets about 500m long each, dotted with hotels, restaurants, and shops, and when I first got here, I was happy but couldn't understand how anyone could spend two months here. Now I feel like I could get through that time easily. I ran into Momo again today - the girl I took the bus here with. She's changed her mind, she's staying for a month. She says the community pulls you in. I don't disagree. Everyone here is just friendlier and... better. Just better.

So now I'm thinking: what is it that I'll want to take with me? Something in scarlet and saffron, to remind me of the monks' robes; something forest green, something slightly iridescent. A string of prayer flags, and something in silver.

And something for you!

I keep meaning to tell you

In the restaurant attached to my hotel is a poster. It is a custom-printed poster. In a column down the right hand side it reads: "Green Hotel: Where the World Meets Tibet, Where Tibet Meets the World." The rest is covered, in a grid, with flags of nations from around the world, labelled, and beside each flag, a few coins from that country are taped to the poster. I gather that these have all been left by travelers who Met Tibet at the hotel. There are probably 50 or 60 flags, from everywhere - South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America. The poster and coins are behind glass.

There is a small band of white space at the bottom, left (I assume) so that more flags and coins could be added when appropriate. And so, drawn up clumsily in marker and taped to the outside of the glass, are a few more: Turkey, Columbia, and one with no label.

Red background, quarter-circlet of yellow stars around one larger. In rough marker, and the coins are there, this small gesture of sympathy and hope.

I started thinking, maybe there's still time to do all of this right.

It's a good day today

Feeling all connected and stuff. Got to the Tibetan Museum today, a really wonderfully well-put-together archive of Tibetan history pre, through, and post-invasion. (Oh, that prefix, "post," you rascal, you never tell the truth.) It was extremely affecting.

I'm amazed by the depth and duration of the freedom struggle. Under immense brutality and oppression, in a country where "legal action" means something very different than it does in Canada, people have been organizing and demonstrating and resisting for more than fifty years. Multiple generations - people born twenty years after the Dalai Lama left Tibet - fighting the same battles, facing the same hostility. I read a first-hand account today of a nun who, with six other nuns, knew what would happen when she planned a demonstration outside her convent in Lhasa: they peacefully demonstrated for 15 minutes, then were arrested, beaten by the Chinese police, and sentenced to 7 years in prison. During this time, she and the others were regularly suspended by the wrists, denied food, kept from sleep, and two of her 6 companions were raped with electric probes. For 15 minutes of peaceful demonstration. 7 nuns outside a convent. Millions of Tibetans, over the last half century, have made the same choice. Millions more have fled their homes, over the highest and most dangerous mountain passes in the world, rather than say (at gunpoint) that they denounce their spiritual leader. Believe me when I say that seeing all of this in photos is much more effective than in writing.

We're all finding our way back into history, aren't we? We lost the thread for a while. The Cold War ended and we weren't sure where we were going. I wasn't there, not really - too young - but it's the feeling I grew up in. All that is different now, or at least it should be. I flatly reject the concept of a "post-9/11" condition - I am one of the many who believe that the rights we should have had on Sept. 10 2001 are no different than the ones we should have today, and by "we" here I mean everyone, everywhere - but if there is a single change in our collective awareness, I think this was it: we got pulled back down onto the timeline, where everyone else was all along.

There was this long period where we thought nothing meant anything, that we could never hurt the world enough that it would come back on us. We were sort of floating in it, and we kind of stopped being able to see each other; these long years where we weren't talking about race, about class, about women or gays, or the uncountable brown people we couldn't name - how passe, to be a feminist, to eat brown rice, how old-school. The few voices shouting in the background, the butt of jokes, the slur returns as a major genre of popular comedy - nigger, paki, faggot, bitch, scheister, hippie - history itself becomes unfashionable, and suddenly that damned prefix "post" is popping up everywhere, telling us all kinds of bullshit we won't see through till later, if we see through it at all.

2001 called bullshit on all of that, I think, and everyone did one of the three things people can do when something seriously calls bullshit on the tidy narrative (or lack thereof) they'd organized their life around:

Some ignored it entirely.

Some dropped off the scene for a bit, staggering, came back knowing they needed to get in this more than they were before - those of us (yes, us, this is me) who hadn't yet figured out how they fit into the big picture realized there was no path they could take that didn't lead them into the center of this clusterfuck, that each step they take, in any direction, is a step forwards through time and therefore towards the culmination of the last century, the sum total of everyone's choices all over the world, and that they better get the fuck in there and start helping out where they can - not to save their own asses, or those of their loved ones, but because it's about fucking time we did. It's just our turn. We got ripped back into history, like I said, and now we know we were here all along, and always will be, so we need to start being smarter about it.

Some, those (often) with the most invested in all those bullshit "posts" - post-racism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-communism, post-responsibility, post-capitalism - initiated what can only be called The American Beserk. Here you find, among other things, the Patriot Act and its correlated bullshit, this suddenly renewed (or, I should say, suddenly legitimated) hostility towards immigrants, these mouthpieces on wingnut welfare unleashing this avalanche of crap on the rights of women, gays, minorities. A new, more aggressive phase in the American theatre of neocolonialism dressed up as development, or not: a war that could never be won, paid for with money and lives that will be horribly missed.

Maybe that's what this trip is really about, for me. I've looked around, I see where we are in our history... Canada, the States, Western Europe (to a lesser extent). I feel where I am in it, and I'm starting to see how I fit in, where I can go. And in all directions, I feel live wires tentacling out into darkness, hot pulses of white light sent shooting off every time any one of us moves. But I can't see where they go. Maybe this trip is about being able to follow just a couple of them, out to wherever they're grounded. This is where we are; where are you?



Plus I learned how to embed YouTube video in my blog posts, so, good day.*


*Yeah, I know, you just copy-paste the embed code. Quiet.

"No momo" no mo

My long weeks of trying to get momos from Indian restaurants are over.

I have arrived in Dharamsala, what feels like yesterday but was really at 5am this morning. On the long overnight bus ride from Rishikesh (via Dehra Dun), I met a lovely girl from Austria and an absolutely radiant man who was returning to his adoptive home - he fled Tibet 12 years ago.

I was expecting a heavy Tibetan presence, but this is even more than I was expecting. I've barely seen any Indians since arriving here... the population seems to be almost entirely Tibetans (many via Ladakh), mingling with just hordes and hordes of foreigners, some of whom don't seem to feel like visitors here anymore. The expat community is pretty stable, as far as I can tell.

What's nice here is everything. The people here are by far the warmest of anywhere in India I've been. This morning, waiting in the square for our hotel to open, we bought Tibetan bread and chai from a street stall - and then were offered more, home-made, by a quiet girl in the crimson robes who'd been in a taxi with us, and whom we'd thought couldn't speak English. At 6am I was put into a bare but warm single room with an entirely unblocked view of the Dharamsala valley. I finished Ondaatje's "Running in the Family" with the windows open, smelling the morning fog and waiting for the restaurants to open. At 7 I was wandering the streets, mothers tugging their children along beside me, humanity piled on top of itself despite the stillness. Book shops, chai stalls, long narrow stores full of warm clothes, cafes putting out cakes and sweets I didn't recognize. The smell of real coffee. The valley right there. My mind gone quiet and no pictures popping up of personal car wrecks. A cautious, rich peace resounding around the cavern hollowed out by years of anger and loss.

I think it's too bold a comparison to say that I see a similar peace in many of the people here. Anyway, I haven't felt that fine in a long time.

Breakfast of tsampa porridge with banana and honey (okay, so I wish E. were here) and coffee. The restaurant had a copy of the official journal of the Tibetan government in exile. They are keeping a detailed and, I imagine, invaluable history of their unfolding conflicts; there were 25 pages of newsbrief-short reports of monks being arrested, peaceful protests broken up with big guns, spiritual leaders of communities being subjected to "patriotic re-education," which consists mostly of swearing oaths to China at gunpoint. NGOs informed that their communications with all bodies outside China were being monitored, and that any complaints - anything, actually, other than reassuring the world outside that all is fine, yes, the protests are dying down, thank god, the Chinese are handling it wonderfully - will become the subject of immense legal trouble. I bristled, and remembered an article I read in The Economist a few days ago: China making mining deals with the Congo, its own unprecedented growth, its search for resources sending it everywhere. It now consumes a third of all the world's steel. What are these people going to do?

Bittersweet, being here, but I feel at home. I need to learn how to stare directly at conflicts that seem impossible to win. We all do.