India has a homosexual community and two of them found me, yesterday evening. very nice chaps, but a first for me in India. I am losing that loving feeling and already I am excited to return home and get on with my life in progress.
Today there was a big rally CITU in Siliguri so I sort of covered it, did the march and photographed the people went to the stadium and heard the speeches, they mentioned America in the speeches a lot, but the context was unknown to me, Hindu is like Greek to me.
I don't have a card reader or a computer with Adobe Bridge on it so photos can not be posted at this time. I am hanging out with a friend here for now, Depkrah a local kid I meet at a cafe, he is showing me the place to get 3 marsala dosa and 3 chais and a bottle water all for 50 Rs. ($1.25) amazing. If you hang around long enough in any town the prices drop 75% off the beaten pathes.
I am now wearing a Punjabi a Bengali long shirt like thing, its excellent. Two reasons, One is light and airy, and secondly and most importantly, you can wash it everyday and it dry in an hour. It is really hard to stay clean here, and I am learning the ways of the indians, because most of them are pretty clean and that is a tall order in these DIRTY ASS TOWNS.
Still have a cold been a few days, probably from the trains, long 1 ot 2.5 day journeys. The punjabi shirt double well as a hanky! The pollution is the toughest thing here in the cities and I am not really getting used to it, the last four days have been rough, GOA was a breeze compared to anywhere else in India.
Varanassi the spiritual capital of India was my downfall, health was great till that shit hole. It is a very busy large and real dirty tourist trap and the people are the least honest in India in my experiences so far in my few weeks here. People go there to die so take the hint people. The Hotel Elvis has an inn keeper named Haroon and he is really cool so if you go check it out, expensive friends but a great hotel and if you split a room they are $2 per night. The traffic and congestion in Varanassi makes New Dehli and Mumbai look like Ocean City Go-Cart Tracks. Shit was nuts there, by far the most exciting and deadly streets in India for me.
Can't wait to get back and make some art, and finish my house, Since the job ended with Dave Lloyd and the photo shooting through Manila, Bangkok and Mumbai, these have been the longest days of my life. This place makes you feel blessed in so many ways. In Mumbai we visited a mosque out in the water, down a long walkway 1 Km maybe and along the way, there were deformed beggars one after the other, Polio? All kinds of fucked up shit, legless etc. By the time you got to the Mosque you felt the most overwhelming humility, it could not have been more fitting of an entrance to a religious facility. And the beach water the mosque was perched in reaked like a broken unflushed but constantly used stadium toilet from 1963.
Don't get me wrong though I love India. The cities are tough but the system and how it goes on is magic, and all of life here is allowed to grow and form organically. It's the most accepting socitey I have ever witnessed in that sense. Dogs know more about the city than all the tourist. They cross the roads they get their dinners, they siesta in the streets, and people just go around them, they are usually left to live their own lives, so cool. Who does that? Also the cows are another parts of the community, they live in the cities and do as they please as well, crossing 6 lanes roads, nosing their ways into restaurants, sleeping on medians, stoops, and train tracks if a fence goes down. These two groups ( and many others, like the monkeys, etc.) have rights so to speak in India, they get to live their lives among the humans. Who does this? Indians do and that is cool! That is something the rest of the world could learn from, because as a westerner, we have refined and refined and refined our way of life like all the foods we all now deathly avoid for 100% ORGANIC! Life is hard and that is personified here on the outside in India, and for me back home its all inside, my pain is not in the streets or the exterior but in a compartment designed by my refined society and western social values, kept out of the way as not to slow the system down, kept to a minimum just to a POP POP POP here or there, in some shooting spree.
Somehow this paradox of a society works with minimal street violence. Feet get run over everyday and a sorry and or an ambulance is all that is needed. The roads are aggressive at times but without too much anger, I am not sure how this works, but I am slowly learning how to walk in the streets knowing if I am fairly alert and not to avoidant I will not be hurt. Not sure how to explain India, It is fun to photograph and colorful, the people are warm, in the midst of total chaos that they shrug off like the cows roaming free in the streets. I am learning the zen of a cow, and it is a fuckin hard road for me.
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