Geckos and Rain of Epic Proportions

The Geckos have landed. Or rather, the smallest one has decided to grace me with a photo, so here you are:

Aww, isn't he cute?! He sat there for a good half hour while I read Lila, after I took the photo.

Thus ends the story of the Geckos. Apologies to all, but they really are less interesting than you think they are. Shy and unassuming, they do not sell car insurance or dance or any such stereotypes that we apply to them in the States. They may, however, be eating my spiders, although Charlotte is doing just fine on my ceiling…so far.

The rain in Hyderabad, creates a far more interesting story, although I must admit I am a little disappointed in you all. Because Kindergarten and the Bedroom of Akbar are much more interesting than a rain storm, if you ask me. Nothing can get past these darned geckos.

Our little monsoon escapade began with an innocent American wish to take part in the Dark Knight movie phenomenon that seems to have hit everywhere. We had tickets and cash and rickshaw-bartering skills all ready, as well as our resident SIP house-and-student caretaker, Mr. Das. The weather had other plans, as we soon found out. Now, when I came to India I knew it was monsoon season, so I came prepared for rain of magnitude I had never seen. Up until that Friday night, the so-called “monsoon” had no more guts than a drippy rainy day in Seattle, let alone the strength to power our electricity. That one evening, however, made up for it all. Standing outside waiting for people to be ready we soon realized that no rickshaw driver in his right mind would drive 45 minutes across the city for any amount of money, as we watched the rain wash down the sides of the building like a flat-walled waterfall. Thirty seconds underneath an umbrella left you looking like you had just come in from a water fight, minus a yamukkah-sized dry spot on your head, if you were lucky. With no rickshaws to be had, Mr. Das called in the strength of a car, although we only had one car at first for ten people. This being India, we all piled in anyway, 10 people into something the size of our Geo back in the states, all sopping wet of course. We ride like this to the gate of the University before we call in another car and split up.

Only to be informed by our friends already at the IMAX theatre that the movie had been cancelled. All that and I still haven’t seen Batman, only a monsoon. The truly epic part of all of this is the duration of the rain, which kept us cooped up inside playing chess for the rest of the weekend, only occationally lightening up to a mild downpour.

Next monsoon weekend forecast: Gilmore Girls marathon

For lack of decisiveness, here's a list of potential subject lines for this next post:
Angels in the Bedroom of Akbar
Kindergarten in India
Geckos and Rain of Epic Proportions.
...ten days is a lot to summarize, and I don't want to leave anything out. So, I'll start with alif and work my way down to gaf.

Or you can vote while I go to the mailbox...

Hyderabad, Part Two

Enter photos of life on campus....

My dorm room, complete with laundry and mosquito net

The infamous bucket, also useful for protecting against gastrointestinal pyrotechnics.
Murphy's law of Buckets and Vomit never fails.

My bicycle, which must weigh 10 kg

Charlotte's Web, "City People," and Quality with a capital Q

The gecko made an appearance again last night, so perhaps I can concede that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination or a transitory visitor to usher in my arrival to the Ladies Hostel. More permanent to the landscape of my room, however, are the 8 spiders decorating my ceiling with their webs, which I have conveniently begun naming—starting with Charlotte, who occupies the upper left hand side above the bare florescent lightbulb. My usual reaction to spiders or other living creatures in my room is ordinarily to put them outside, or if they prove terribly resistant to resort to force. However I believe these spiders account for the significant lack of mosquitoes in my room and besides, I couldn’t reach them on the ten foot ceiling anyway. For as long as they remain confined to their webs and I remain confined to my mosquito-net-covered bed, we have a happy little ecosystem going. Eight spiders seems a bit of an excess, but so far none of my friends who keep buying mosquito coils have taken me up on the offer of a spider from my ceiling. . .

My study of Urdu has begun in earnest, beginning with the alphabet. A grand total of 51 letters, being the Arabic alphabet, plus a few additions from Persian, plus a 15 additions from Indian phonetics. Over the summer and during the week before my professor finished his filming session at Ramoji Film City outside Hyderabad (more on that later), I had managed to teach myself most of the separated letters. Separated, being the letters standing alone, not put together in any words. As those familiar with the Perso-Arabic alphabet know, Arabic, Urdu, etc. are perpetually written in cursive, so to speak, and so along with learning the names of all the letters, you have to figure out how to string them along together, cutting off bits here and there to make them flow. Thus I am again in third grade or below, writing awkward loops and dots. As Dr. Ali points out to me, certain lines must be visualized so that the ain or the jīm have flat stomachs, not pot-bellies. My saving grace is that Indians speaking Urdu are not so particular about the four types of zs as are the Arabs. I can resign myself to practicing my aspirated bha and correcting my “peculiar” handwriting.

All this is supposed to premise the difference between country people and city people, which was introduced in Friday’s lesson. Among the 51 letters I get to worry about connecting to each other, alif, dal, re, and waw don’t connect to anyone. Rather, they will connect, but only of their own accord—they are “city people.” Not any be off the street can saunter up to an alif and expect instant rapport. You have to approach them from the right direction, as my professor so aptly described on Friday, before drilling me with long and short vowels. What, then, would I do, if I were an Arabic letter, with my current identity crisis between the city and the country? Probably become a ء.

Now, as much enjoyment as I get from telling stories about Charlotte living on my ceiling and becoming a hamza due to identity crisis, I’ve received the question, “I’ve been keeping up with your blog, but I still don’t know what’s going on with you…” A perfectly valid statement. Sending me personalized emails is one way of getting me to drop the tongue-in-cheek attitude about alphabets and open up, but of course I don’t have the time to write thirty of them. So here goes…

I’ve begun a so-called “inquiry into values and morals”. Morals I should know a lot about being a religion major, although Robert Pirsig will undoubtedly have a alternate philosophy on the matter with Lila, his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [Side note here: that previous sentence had about thirty commas and/or clauses in it at one point, until I axed them at the insistence of Professor Stearns’ voice in my head. Those of you under the influence of his red pen will understand this] Morals, however, have made me throroughly sickened. Oftentimes I can’t think for the sheer amount of morals jockeying for position in my head, and India has done nothing to weed out the crowd. Instead, the confusion created by such chaos has forced me into a state of paring down everything I know to the very essence of it all—Jesus, and music. Music which was gifted to me by God in the first place anyway. In which case I am left with values which are theoretically useless in everyday life because as Mr. Pirsig so aptly likes to explain, they are impossible to define properly. Key example to this was my entrance essay to Middlebury College, in which I was asked to describe my values, and how they had influenced my life in a particular incident. I had such a time trying to put a name to one value, let alone come up with a particular incident in which that value had affected my actions, that I spouted off some poetic nonsence that thankfully the admissions officers didn’t throw out with the recycling.

Now before you knee-jerk on me and protest that of course Jesus isn’t theoretically useless in everyday life, let me explain. First off, I use the word “theoretically” because the “practical” and “theoretical” uses of the Gospel are two entirely separate matters. Theological or philosophical applications of Jesus and his life create an entire canon completely without use on a moment-by-moment basis. The theology and philosophy of Jesus is what gives my professors their jobs, and what I spend all my time reading and analyzing and spitting out into concise and eloquent papers free of extraneous commas and clauses. Yet all the philosophizing about why Jesus said this or that creates an underlying sense of values, not morals. Values of life and love and humility and repentance and justice and so forth. Morals, however, are what take a value like “life” and reduce it to the question of whether or not one should get an abortion. It is exactly this debate about whether or not one should get an abortion that I am sick of—the debate to finalize the moral ends of Christ, who if nothing else scolded the Pharisees for doing just that with the Torah. However, when I reduce my life to a bunch of abstract values, I am left with the question of what to do in the next five minutes, the next five hours, the next five years. To value life presents infinite choices when I walk down the streets, whether in Hyderabad, India or Middlebury, Vermont. I am thus faced with the problem of morals, which take care of the everyday decisions for you, while also removing the relationship and adventure from life. Thus my inner debate over values and morals, which in a few words, is what is “really going on with me.” [side note: to inadequately sum up a whole book, Pirsig goes on about how Quality is the essence of all reality, and so on and so forth, which somehow unifies values and morals. Which is why I titled this post with Quality with a capital Q, simply because I like the label and I’m still being tongue-in-cheek.]

Anyhow, you can have fun poking at my inadequate definitions and logic, and I’ll go back to reading Proverbs and Lila.