luminiferously yours

The internet usage charges in Leh are apparently around 100 rupees an hour. If this is true, it is five times what I am used to paying and so it is likely that I wont be spending as much time online until i get back into connected space.

I found a reasonably nice copy of Brett Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park in a second hand bookshop in McLeod Ganj and devoured it in a couple of days. I read Less Than Zero nearly twenty years ago when i was in university or maybe high-school (I forget) and wasnt terribly impressed then. I didnt have a lot of patience for sexually ambiguous, self-centered, drug-addled and terribly lost hedonistic youth back then. When American Psycho was released to much controversy, I stayed away from it. I figured there was no point spending hard earned cash on much more of the same-ish.

Continue reading Lunar Park - Brett Easton Ellis…

Doesnt seem to be all that easy. But then I guess nothing is that easy in India.

The cheapest fare we could find online was in makemytrip.com. Actually, I have no problem with their service - they are helpful, the website is slick, the service staff are very responsive - but they just couldnt do what i wanted. No doubt because they were hamstrung by government regulations and/or the airline they have to deal with (in this case Air Sahara was the passport scan requiring / paper ticket issuing culprit).

Continue reading Buying online plane tickets in india…

For some reason, Australians have been turning up in McLeod Ganj in droves for the last four or so weeks. I walked by the Tong Ling school one day past a group of 10 or so westerners. I didnt think too much about it until i heard one of them asking if anyone knew where they could buy vegemite in town. A bit later, I found out that they were all students from the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne and were in town for two or so weeks doing some volunteer work in association with a subject. After four months or not meeting a single Australian, here were a veritable mob.

Continue reading Small world…

Just a quick update. The current plan is to head to Leh in Ladakh for the remainder of our visa in India. The monsoon in McLeod Ganj is getting us a bit down and we’ve been here nearly eight weeks! After India, we’re planning to travel to Nepal and wait for SG’s friend to return to Dubai at the end of August. So that means we’ll be in Nepal for probably close to a month until early September. The monsoon is there still but it’s not as constantly misty and rainy as in McLeod Ganj. The monsoon clears from Nepal by September apparently so we may well stay in Nepal longer depending on how much we like it there.

I meant to keep an electronic journal during the retreat but found that electronic devices were a no-no. I kept mine with me anyway as a security blanket but didnt end up using it. Instead I ended up scribbling in a recycle paper journal I’d bought as a notebook for my english lessons. This actually proved to be a good thing.

The contrast between my style of expression from the first few days to the last few days is quite incredible.

Continue reading back in the world again…

The Tushita Meditation Centre is up in the pine covered hills above McLeod Ganj. It’s quiet and beautiful and is run predominantly by western volunteers for westerners looking to learn about buddhism. After some thought and considering that it’s a good thing to spend a bit of time away from SG for the sake of the relationship, I’m going to the 10 day introduction to buddhism course starting tomorrow. It’ll cover some familiar ground but there’s a fair amount of time to meditate. So, I’ll be offline for that time.

My first entry in this blog was on the 30th June 2006. That’s not quite two years ago but since I’ll probably forget to write on that actual date, I thought i’d put down a few words about it while I am thinking about it.

In spite of the stuff I’ve got up on the “about this blog” page, I am still not really sure why i write this. SG sometimes jokes about how she has to read my blog to find out how I am actually feeling which might say a bit about our relationship given how emotionally sparse my blog is.

But i think she has hit on a part of the truth there. The VS Naipul book I was reading said something about how he had to write to organise his memories and to make sense about what has happened, to clear the decks so to speak. And this is true for me even if I do not write as much as I want to or as often as I would like or even as unrestricted as I occasionally wish to (this being a reasonably public medium after all).

However, I wouldnt say that writing this blog actually clears the deck. Rather, it unclutters it somewhat, enough for me to negotiate around for a couple more days.

i heard that there was a protest against the olympic torch being in Lhasa and so I rocked up early this morning at the main temple. It ran like many other protests and started with some speeches (mostly in Tibetan) before the crowd formed an orderly line and walked to the main square in town, shouting slogans as they did so. I noted with interest that most of the marshalls of the protests and probably the organisers were Tibetan women in their middle ages. They wore their traditional dress but had chosen to wear green and so they were quite easily identifiable.

Continue reading McLeod Ganj protests against the Olympic Torch in Lhasa…

With the rain and the mist and the generally unhappy if dramatic weather, i’ve been spending a fair amount of time indoors reading. The books i’ve ploughed through so far (not including the buddhist ones) are:

Karma Cola by Gita Mehta
Eat Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
India: A million mutinies now by VS Naipul

Of the three, Karma Cola was the most clever and entertaining and the travelogue by Naipul, really a series of interviews, being the most informative. The book by Gilbert is a reasonable confessional style travelogue and it has its good points (it’s inspired me to go to Bali for example) but is otherwise forgetable.

Continue reading Reading…