11/19/2006 Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

Walking along the thronging marketplace in Ooty, I saw a man whacking a young girl with a stick. She broke free of his grasp and ran into a shop stall, and he went in after her. There were many others in close proximity and no one took notice other than two young men who stood close by, watching. One looked at me and his gaze registered that he saw the sadness and disgust on my face. What could I do? I walked on. I felt at best powerless and at worst complicit.

Where in the world do people get the idea they can whack little girls around?

About a year ago, in a used bookshop, I found a copy of Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, Bhagavad-Gita being one of the utmost spiritual guides in India. I added it to my tower of books to read. As I prepared for this trip, this seemed the most timely time to read it, so I added the 800+ page, hard-back tome to my backpack. This version was writtent/annotated by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, (a Vedic scholar and head of the Krshna Consciousness society and movement.) The author criticizes other versions of Bhagavad-Gita, mostly for un-deifying Lord Krshna as the literal Supreme Personality of Godhead, to which all living entities (that would be us) must be servant. The book is written with the literal translation of each verse followed by the author's interpretation and comment. What made me put the book down was the following ~

"Text 40

Translation
When irreligion is prominent in the family, O Krsna, the women of the family become polluted, and from the degradation of woman-hood, O descendant of Vrsni, comes unwanted progeny.

Purport (author's annotation)
Good population in human society is the basic principle for peace, prosperity and spiritual progress in life. The varnasrama religion's principles were so designed that the good population would prevail in society for the general spiritual progress of state and community. Such population depends on the chastity and faithfulness of its womanhood. As children are very prone to be misled, women are similarly very prone to degradation. Therefore, both children and women require protection by the elder members of the family. By being engaged in various religious practices, women will not be misled into adultery. According to Canakya Pandita, women are generally not very intelligent and therefore not trustworthy. So the different family traditions of religious activities should always engage them, and thus their chastity and devotion will give birth to a good population eligible for participating in the varnasrama system. On the failure of such varnasrama-dharma, naturally the women become free to act and mix with men, and thus adultery is indulged in at the risk of unwanted population. Irresponsible men also provoke adultery in society, and thus unwanted children flood the human race at the risk of war and pestilence."

Maybe this explains why the waiter at our hotel restaurant keeps giving Eric a menu and not me ~ to save me from myself, obviously. (The first time I went and got one myself; the second I asked the waiter to bring me one too. Maybe it would have built some confidence (or horror) for me to tell him about the meals I've treated people to, personally and professionally.) And maybe this explains why the form I filled out for my phone SIM card asked for my father's/husband's name. (I left that field blank.)

Why does it seem fundamentalist everybodies have to demonize, marginalize, and control women? What are they afraid of?

In recent years, under the Bush administration, I've often been out and out embarrassed to say that I am an American. One place I show my patriotism, though, is my gratitude and pride for the intelligent, fearless women and strong, evolved men who have worked to create respect and equal rights for individuals, regardless of sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. And I'm grateful that we have enough free press that the works of people such as Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are available to teach and inspire others. There is still more to do and existing rights have to be vigilantly protected, but I am glad we have come this far.

Anyway, I am tossing this version of Bhagavad-Gita, and will find another.

Our last day in Ooty, Eric and I spent the morning at the tea plantation/factory and the afternoon walking around the lushness of Lake Ooty.

















Along the same road is an attraction we thought about going to but we ran out of time: the Thread Garden. Turns out this guy spent 12 years making a huge garden containing many species of flowers, all out of thread. Get that man to Burning Man!

Heading for Coimbatore via the Ooty train station reminded me that I wanted to write about queues in India. At the first train station of our trip, we stood in line for a very long time. (The lines take a long time in general and this time the computer network was down.) We were both wearing our big backpacks and at one point, as I turned to talk to Eric, I felt something behind me. I turned around and there were two young women standing close behind us. I asked if I had hit one and she said yes, but it was okay. I stepped out of line and stood a few feet away. Now Eric's bag was dangerously close to the woman, but she didn't back up. And when Eric stepped forward, she did too, with her nose about six inches away from his pack. I couldn't figure it out. More experience in lines revealed this woman's reasoning: if you let more than a foot get between you and the person in front of you, someone will surely cut in between you, and no one says anything about it. At the front of a lot of lines, people gather and try to cut in before the next person in line gets to the counter. At the maharaja's palace in Mysore, you had to check your camera + pay five rupees for the pleasure, at a station away from the ticket office. The "queue" was about 20 people thronging the window, stepping in front of each other, elbowing in, whatever worked, with their cameras and rupees thrust into the window. It looked more like they were placing bets than simply checking in a camera. And the only way to get in to do what you need to do is to step in and do the same. Leaving Ooty, we waited on the platform, along with a bunch of other folks, for the bus to Coimbatore. The bus pulled up, and this previously sociable group of folks stormed the bus, to where there was only some crowded standing room left. I wasn't going to stand in that crush with my backpack for the four hours to Coimbatore, so we left the station and took a taxi.

We are here in Coimbatore as a break on our way to the coast, and we are spending the day doing errands and writing. We are leaving tonight at midnight for Trivandum, then on to Varkala on the Kerala coast, where we plan to stay for maybe a week.