Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

New comment on your post #273 “Ra’hel – Flowers of perhaps”
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Mieke – look for it here:

http://www.ecampus.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=1874320020

To delete this comment, visit: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/blog/wp-admin/post.php?action=confirmdeletecomment&p=273&comment=383

Mieke – look for it here:

http://www.ecampus.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=1874320020

New comment on your post #321 “On foreigners and cows”
Author : Piotr
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Is this post inspired by a visit to Madurai temple ? It was tough for me as well. Essentially, you need to be constantly in motion, any time you stop someone will come after you.

The good news is that if you move fast, people wont follow you (not worth the effort . So ideally you would just jog all the time. But it is kind of hard to do in the full sun…

Is this post inspired by a visit to Madurai temple ? It was tough for me as well. Essentially, you need to be constantly in motion, any time you stop someone will come after you.

The good news is that if you move fast, people wont follow you (not worth the effort ! . So ideally you would just jog all the time. But it is kind of hard to do in the full sun…

On the trip to Thanjore, I was traveling 3AC on a bottom berth. Now, traveling back to Madras, I am traveling 2AC but unfortunately on a top berth which is aligned with the direction the train is traveling on. Traveling in this situation can be best compared to vegetables being cooked in a wok. You are being tossed around vigorously, actively and continuously. The temperatures gets less and less comfortable as time passes (i.e., the air conditioning kicks in, and you are freezing). But this comparison is inherently unfair, since there might be some monetary transaction involved in the process that lead to the vegetables finding themselves in the wok, but it is pretty certain that the vegetables did not pay for the pleasure. Furthermore, the vegetables know that after a few minutes the tossing will end, while traveling on the trains takes many torturous hours.

In the next entry, what is better, drinking a glass of tap water in India, or being a fruitcake dropped from the height of 1000 meters. As W says about evolution, the judges are still out on this topic.

I am back in Madras, but tomorrow early morning I am flying to Udaipur through Mumbai. I will post my vane musings when the internet and me meet again.

Today we rented a car and went temple hopping. It is not clear whether is was out of choice or we followed the suggestion of the driver. In any case, in the **temple hopping problem** you are given a root **r**, a time limit (say 5 hours), and distances between all temples in the area, and times when they are open. Your purpose is to maximize the number of temples visited. Visiting a ranked Vishnu temple give you extra credit (but only if you visit it for the first time).

Temples visited today:

1. Aman temple (a new temple just outside Madurai) [Driver recommendation and not in the original plan]. Full of huge new statues, under construction, painted. Nice to see a temple under construction. Not necessarily good taste. In fact, the word kitsch comes to mind. In fact, I think using size (i.e., huge buildings, statues, etc) is a cheap trick to impress the ignorant, and personally, I think it should be avoided. But nobody asked me. So sad.
2. **Noopuraganga temple** – Aman temple
Top of a hill with a stream where people bath inside the holy steam, with a nice staircase for the last 25 meters, with monkeys all around. A lot of people walking 1-2 kilometers to arrive to the temple from the entrance. A very nice hike with a nice wooded hill around it. Feels more like people going on a hike and doing a temple in the process.
3. Pazhamudircholai temple
(zh is pronounced as raah) [= growth of ripe fruit] [100 meters down hill] The last of the six houses of Murugan (Murugan = handsome son of Shiva who rides on a peacock)
4. Azhagar temple [A ranked temple!]
5. Thirupuramkundram temple [The first of the six temple of Murugan]

The temple located in a bottom of hill. Climbing to the top of the hill gives an amazing view of the area, which is a small city with a very nice lake. We went only a third of the way up. Then we went to the temple. The temple is very busy and there are long lines to see the deity (i.e., the status where the ceremonies are taking place). We paid 10 Rs and stood in the God Express line, which required only one hour of wait (instead of two or three). As the line of people (all of them Indians, me the only whitey at least around me) sways inside the temple, the crowd get denser and denser and the air get more and more suffocating. This temple (and others) is a old massive structure with thick walls and poles to support the ceiling. The interior is lighted with (ordinary) neon lights, which in mind are always associated with grocery stores, and remove a lot of the charm. At the diety itself, you get about one minutes of exposure to the ceremony taking place there, and then you c!
ontinue to go out, where you might stop at some lesser deities on the way out.

We also went to the local palace, which was the original purpose of the trip. No credit for this, I think.

There are other topics worth covering, including bathrooms in India and eating habits, but they both would have to wait for later time.

On other topics, I realized that since travel here is so slow (unless you fly), it follows that distances here are larger than in the US. On the other hand, traveling here by (day regular) train is very cheap. For example, going from Madurai to Thanjore by day train costs 33 Rs, which is quite cheap if you consider that this is over 150 kilometers distance. But it takes four hours (since this is a slow train).

Anyway, this afternoon me & K went back to the Temple area. We went to the Supreme hotel, which had a wonderful view of the whole town. Sadly, it was too far from the temple to give us a nice view of the temple. Tomorrow, we will try to go the restuarant “Temple View” which supposedly have a nicer view of the hotel. The guide book warns that if you go around the temple, people would offer you beautiful rooftops views of the temple, but then on the way they would take you to a
shop, and it would be hard to leave without buying something. However, we were told that there is a new more violent version, where they just take you up to the rooftop and then rob you. Caveat emptor.

And here is a story related to the temple here in Madurai, told to me by K:

During the time of the Pandya kings there was a singer that was the best in the world, but was proud of his talent. He traveled around and came to the Pandya king and challenged him to find an equal to him in singing. The king was insulted by the singer, and he asked his court
singers to challenge him, but they refused. The king is confused, but his advisor tells him about a devotee of Shiva in the temple which is a good singer. So the king asks the devotee to sings against the singer. The devoteee does not know what to do, so he prays and sleep for help from Shiva. The story is that the night before the competition Shiva comes close to the camp of the singers, and sings a song. Of course the song is pretty amazing. Shiva (the god) claims that he just picked a bit of singing from the devotee and has no real education. The singer which is completely flabbergasted by his singing get scared and escapes town, and so the devotee wins the competition.

The more stories about a specific temple, the better its reputation, or so its seems.

And now it is time to sleep.

To a large number of Indians, not to mention the Indian government, a foreigner is just a cow that should be milked regularly and efficiently, for all it is worth. While to some extent I do not mind paying more than an Indian for things, at times this attitude gets to you. From a temple or museum where a foreigner has to pay ten times more than a native, to the “guides” that just feel that they have the right to be employed by the cow, whether the cow wants to be guided or not, to the baggers that converge on the foreigner faster than you can count to three in Tamil.

(Here are a few helpful tips on how to distiguish between a cow from a foreigner: (i) a cow has four legs, while foreigners only very rarely have more than three legs. (ii) Cows do “Mooo” sounds while foreigners do “not interested” sounds when you offer them 10 postcards for an unreasonable price , and (iii) At least 45% of foreigners know about cows, but research shows that only 10% of cows are aware of foreigners.)

On one hand, one feels bad for the beggars that are poor and so on. But I feel so irritated by their insistence that I should give them money, which causes me to not give them anything at all. I am a selfish cow, you see.

I just realized that I come accorss as a jerk (or more of a jerk than usual). So, let me emphesize that my visit so far in India was marked by hospitality. From M brother (and his wife) in Delhi, to M hospitality (and maybe more importantly his parents hospitality) in Madras, to K’s hospitality, K’s wife family hospitality in Thanjore and Madurai. People are really nice, welcoming and open, it is just the rest that makes me want to scream.

I left Madras the day before yesterday. I took a night train with K to Tanjore (i.e., Thanjavur). This is the first time in my life I am taking a night train, and this was an interesting experience. We were traveling in the 3AC class, which means that the compartment is air-conditioned, and that every bench has two folded benches above it. When the time is right, the benches are unfolded, and people go to sleep. Since there is a corridor that goes through the whole car, and the benches are accessible from the corridor, the fear is of course that somebody would steal your luggage. To this end, you lock your luggage and tie it with a chain and a lock to the bottom bench.

As for sleep, I did get some sleep on the train, but it was spotty at best. In any case, we arrived early to Tanjore, and checked into an hotel, where we met some relatives of K. There is a large temple in Tanjore (the Brihadishwara temple) which we visited, and was very impressive but is somewhat relaxed temple. We also visited the Maratha palace complex, which similarly nice. There is a museum there which is full of various gods statues which is nice if somewhat overwhelming.

After a lunch at K’s relatives, and an hour and half of siesta in the hotel, we took a car to Madurai, and we left just before 4:30pm which was an auspicious time to leave (since 4:30-6:00 is considered to be an inauspicious time on Sunday). I am still surprised when I discover how bad the infrastructure is here. The trip took well over four hours (we stopped at a mid-point temple known as Thirumeyyam [a ranked temple! More on that later]). This is about 160 kilometers distance, and would take less than two hours in the west. The road was the usual small “two lanes” road going through villages and so on. As the night descended, we were traveling in complete dark, with no lights around, and one could see the stars if looking from the back window of the car. The music played in the car was loud Tamil (pop) music which K found disgusting because of its content, but I found OK (since I did not understand the words).

Going or roads, especially in cities, is always interesting, with snapshots of women wearing saris of all colors. Women riding the back-seat of a motorbike sideways (because of the saris), auturikshas with six or more people riding them, a guy riding a motorcycle with a huge pile of banana in front of him. A bike with a small carriage behind it, is loaded with more than a 100 pipes (each pipe of length at least 5 meter, and each pipe of diameter 10 centimeters or so) that form a huge package which is longer than the bike and the bike is being leisurely navigated by (a walking) guy in the busy street.

We arrived in the evening to K’s relatives in Madurai, and after dinner went to sleep in a hotel nearby. This morning (Monday 12/26/05 – known in the UK as boxing day, since you open the boxes of the gifts you get for Christmas on this day), we went to K’s relatives again, had breakfast and went to the main temple in Madurai (Sri Meenakshi temple). The temple complex is quite big and is full with people. The towers are minutely painted with colors and beautiful statues, which if you do not look carefully, look like a huge messy gray towers (OK, at least for me they look like that). The temple complex is full of paintings on the walls and the ceilings which are very nice. I did not get to see the deity since entrance to infidels is forbidden. There is a temple tank (i.e., a pool) which looked very dirty but had lotus flowers in it, and a huge gold lotus in the middle. Overall, the hassle in the temple was quite impressive, and I thought that this probably how it must have fel!
t to be the Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

So far, the only disaster that attacked me, is that I forgot my camera charger in Madras. My camera died yesterday, but it is alive today again, but I assume I can take at most ten pictures in the next two days. Ha, the choices we have to face in this world.

I spent a lazy week in Chennai, relaxing, having good food, and relaxing. I went to the IMSC. I also had a two day trip to Mamallapuram (not shortned to Mahabalipuram by the natives), which was fun. Tonight I am taking a train with K to Tanjore and then to Madurai. After that I am going to a trip to Rajasthan, and then back to Delhi.