India, observations

Delhi-Belly on day two (paratha alley beat me)...

A killer dinner combo: brain masala + liver and kidney masala with potato paratha at Delhi's premier non-veg eatery, Karim’s...

Religious mosaics: visiting the holy places and talking with the disciples of the following faiths: Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh. My favorites were a flamboyant Jain temple in Kolkata and of course the Bahai Lotus in Delhi...

Greeting the New Year in the Nepali foothills of the Himalayas. The topography and flora changed constantly, local people swarmed about, and we stayed in “tea houses” – rudimentary hostels. It snowed a good three or four inches at the highest point – approximately 10,000 ft. And the mountains almost killed us...

Offering some roasted chestnuts to a random guy on the street, who reacts with rage and repulsion. Grossly assuming poverty and paternalism...

Getting stuck by a national strike in the middle-of-bumble Nepal due to political instability, thereby forming the bus trip from Pokara to the Kakarbhitta on the border with India: 8 hours from Pokara + 2 hours in Kathmandu bus park + 13 hours ride + 5 hours in limbo in a rinky-dink town through which no tourist had ever passed ever + 4 hours ride to Kakarbhitta , India + a carnivalesque evening crossing having to rouse border officials and avoid a parade of hasslers peddlers and touts + 1 hour bus ride to Siliguri, India ... pause... then, after a night’s rest, the 3 hours into the hills to Darjeeling. The destination merited the trip. I went to Kolkata by AC2-class train ticket, which I made by just a few minutes after sprinting slapdash out of the mountains (one of many very close-call transit transitions)...

Extremes of wealth distribution and omnipresent, relentless, and unassailable poverty...

Meeting a wild-talking, whiskey-drinking entrepreneur on the train. His Indian academic crew writes term papers and dissertations for students in Europe and the Americas...

Going to Kipling's Kim's school in Lucknow, or one enough like it. Roaming around the deserted complex...

Taking 12-15 hour overnight train's “sleeper” cars between Delhi and Varanasi and Varanasi and Lucknow. This ordering was an accident of scheduling; sleeper was the only available class and almost impossible to get nonetheless. Sleeper-class cars are not as romantic as Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. For all intents and purposes, they are open to the air. In winter in Uttar Pradesh at night the temp averages about 45 degrees F . In these trains, poorly-made and ill-fitted windows and shutters and doors don’t close or people don't close them. Christine and I only had one sleeping bag between us, which I allowed her to use. This left me shivering in the fetal position on my dirty bunk with the unmitigated commotion of the train and people pressing in from all sides, coughing up and spitting on the floor. This was our moving hotel, for we had elected to travel at night for our first three nights instead of book a room. I found my limits of energy and sanity, but felt my "suffering" mitigated by the people I shared the train car with: the tiny girl walking on bare feet, without pants, crying; the sick; people shitting in fields along the train track in the wan dawn. Later, I hired a bunk in an insulated, clean, middle-class car with bed linen the trip between Darjelling and Kokata. I met upper-middle class, sociable, generous people. I slept wonderfully, and didn’t have to chain my bag to my belt. Still, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

No crisis in an Iceland river

Allow me to be

I'm as boring as a book on tape,
As melancholy as a song,
As alluring as a nape,
As illicit as a bong.
I'm as bright as the night,
As petty as neighbors,
As pure as off-white,
As binding as favors.
I'm as open as a window,
As astir as passion,
As pampered as snow,
As free as sin.
I'm as one as Pangaea,
As holy as Aquinas,
As dissolute as Krishna,
As meretricious as highness.
I'm this-all and more,
As fundamental as a quark,
As latent as a question mark,
As welcoming as a paramour.