Tuesday, July 21, 2009

On Travel, Solar Eclipses, and David Foster Wallace

I'm officially coming to grip with the fact that blogging has no logical, sensical progression; that there will be gaps, leaps, assumptions, etc. that exist between and within entries, and it's unrealistic to hope for a complete, logical 'whole' that is a collection of blog entries (it's unrealistic to hope for a complete, logical idea, even...the mind oftentimes can't finish what it starts).


This morning, as I was watching my first solar eclipse from the roof of my house, I started thinking about the millions (perhaps even billions - in India, this is not an unfair assumption) of people in India and other parts of Southeast Asia doing the same thing at the same moment. I came downstairs to find my host mother watching the local Indian news channel, which was covering the eclipse in 5 different Indian cities, filming the parties, festivals, etc. happening in honor of the event...images of thousands of people gathered early in the morning with special glasses, waving flags and balloons, celebrating the occasion.

I guess I've had the concept of 'entertainment' (in its broadest,most philosophical sense) on the mind since I finished the only-recently-late David Foster Wallace's social commentary Infinite Jest about 2 weeks ago. For some reason, the book was made all-the-more powerful given my current context...I've been thinking a lot about why this 'semi-novel' feels so pertinent to my time here. On the surface, it couldn't have less to do with this context: a story set in the future, in both a drug rehab clinic and elite tennis academy in Boston, discussing a plot by wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists to sabatage the US by distributing a film that is so entertaining you die when you watch it. Okay, so here I am having finished this 1,000-page book, and I mysteriously feel like I was supposed to read it here...it was very strange. Throughout the final stages of the book, I felt like it was some sort of holy text or something, like whenever I opened it up, I was like Muhammad receiving some text for the first time. Very powerful, very odd given the fact that I've never experienced this sensation before. Reading, that is.

I've been thinking a lot about what entertainment actually is, how we qualify it, how it motivates everything we do. Going to touristy cities in Rajasthan, seeing how a large percentage of the Rajasthani economy (about 60-70%) revolves around tourism...around providing entertainment, a certain type of experience. In the simplest terms, that's what it comes down to.

Some people travel seeking entertainment, and some go seeking something else. There's this whole other aspect of travel - the part that involves a great deal of personal growth, discomfort, challenges, depression, loneliness...the things that can't really be provided for you, in the sense of externally providing entertainment, but things you find yourself. Perhaps it's the growth that many people seek, the growth that happens when we step/are forced outside of our comfort zone...

At least for me, I feel like I grow the most when I continually expose myself to new ways of being human. There is just nothing more jarring, nothing more enlightening than experiencing a way of living (a way of dancing, eating, praying, cooking, sleeping, working, relaxing, socializing, marrying, being born, dying, etc.) I've never experienced before. Of course, we know that it's possible to live differently than we do, that is, we can conceive of it, but to actually live in a completely different way - that's something else. That's experiencing another way of being human. I think that's why I love Anthropology so much - it's essentially an exploration of what being human is, how we got that way, and all of the ways we can be human. These seem like some of the most important inquiries out there.

I sort of had this moment the other day when I realized that an enormous piece of Indian culture involves sentimentality. One of my host brothers was returning back to engineering college in Gujarat (an adjacent state), and before he left the house to go on the train, there was a 'traveling' ritual. This is a Hindi ritual that families do before someone goes on a journey: each member of the family puts kum kum (the red powder) in a tilak (bindi for males) on the persons forehead, puts some grains of rice on the sticky red powder, and then feeds them a bit of sweets and a spoonful of yogurt (yogurt is supposed to be the official food of luck for traveling). Just like packing and showering are rituals before leaving home, so is this good luck ritual that brings the whole family together for about 5 minutes before someone leaves. It was extremely personal and moving, I suppose because these types of rituals are all over the place in India, and they do an amazing job of making moments sentimental and memorable.

2 comments:

  1. I can't tell you how many calls and emails I got this week asking the burning question
    Did Dani see the eclipse?
    so thanks for addressing the issue....

    and I won't name names but I did try explaining RSS feeds to the usual cast of characters.

    Glad to see you finally get blogging.Me...I follow my current bliss . I now have a small following on my favorite food blog because I have a "column" called Saturday morning chick pea blogging. It started with my obsession with Bobs Redmill chick pea flour and my chick pea balls that I invented for you. Anyway every Sat I post my weekly chick pea and or chick pea flour recipe.

    I started my high def camera and lighting class. We are getting all sorts of useful information about lighting for video...very different than film from what I remember from back in the olden days of film ie the analog days. One of my class mates is Indian who wants to be a Bollywood cinematographer and he is going to be a real pain in the ass because he hogs the class showing off what he knows. He spent 10 minutes trying to convince the teacher you can use different lens on the camera. I finally had to ask him to stop as it wasn't relevant. Judging by his expression I violated some Indian sense of propriety.

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  2. Thanks for giving us such nice information about the Indian culture. If you are travelling in Rajasthan and looking for the taxi service then you can hire a Cab Hire In Jodhpur from the My India Cab Service. They have the AC and Non-AC premium cab service for the destination places of Rajasthan.

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