India Ink: A Reporter's Notes

-- By Tom Phillips

A lot has changed in India since I first went there in 1978.  But its psyche feels the same: Driven.

India is the only place I know where the energy is higher than New York.  In New York, motorists are warned not to honk their horns, on pain of a $350 fine, which deters even though it is never enforced.

In India, everyone honks their horn continually, 24 hours a day.  You honk when passing, turning, speeding up, or just getting angry.  Indian drivers keep themselves at a boiling point.  On our first night in the country we hired a car to go from Delhi to Jaipur, a 250 km straight shot that took five hours, from midnight to five a.m.   Nearly all the way the four-lane road was clogged with brightly painted, heavily used trucks carrying cement and other materials for India's never-ending national construction binge, honking their way around each other, jockeying for position.  In India, the preferred position is the center of the highway, straddlng the white line. Here you are King of the Road.

Our driver was Surinder Singh, a Rajput warrior from Jaipur, who loves his car and defends it against threats and slights, real and imagined. Half-a-dozen times he stopped the car and leaped out to wipe the windshield, scold the driver behind, dispute with a toll collector, or drive home a point to the guy next door.  (The Encycledia Britannica notes the ethos of the warrior Rajputs includes a "mettlesome regard for personal honour.")  He told us proudly that he lives in a part of Jaipur open to Rajputs only -- no other caste allowed.

Surinder takes tourists all over India, and sleeps in the car when his customers check into a hotel.  The passenger seat folds flat like a first-class airline chair, so he made it up as a bed for Rusty, after his marathon flight in economy class.

Halfway to Jaipur, at three o'clock in the morning, we passed a noisy parade of pilgrims, in buses and on foot, waving a flag and blasting music from boom boxes. It was the start of a Hindu festival honoring Lord Krishna, right on the heels of a national veneration of Lord Ganesh, the elephant god, the hugely popular remover of obstacles. The Times of India reports Ganesh is so beloved that the cast of a hit TV series took time out to perform the climactic pageant of the festival, right on the set.  Fake news, celebrity news, pictures.

Behind India's energy is religious devotion, sectarian rivalry, and a fervent desire to make money.  New York has only one of those three, how could it compete?

--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

My Detour to Germany

 -- By Tom Phillips

Frankfurt Airport

I hadn't meant to go back to Germany so soon after my first visit last year, but Pakistan and India are playing games of "gotcha" again, and the Paks closed their airspace the day I was to fly.  At least that's what United Airlines told me, so I wound up flying a different route, with a twelve-hour layover in Frankfurt Airport.

Last year's Tour of Fear cured me of my Germanophobia, convincing me that the Germans have done a much better job of repenting for their past crimes than we in the US.  But nothing prepared me for just how comfortable I felt among the end-of-summer German holiday crowd in Frankfurt.

My Passage to India: Prologue

-- by Tom Phillips

Just last year on the Road to Dotage, I began a Tour of Fear -- to places I've always  been too scared to visit.  My road to Germany was a revelation -- seeing how a great civilization can renew itself, even after a descent into Hell.

My next planned destination was Texas, the land of big hats, big hair, big boots and big shots. When I worked as a TV newswriter, many of the network anchormen were Texans, and I've always been afraid to go to a place where such personalities are the norm.

Once I was working with a well-known Texan anchorman in New York, when he came across an AP  story about the "hippest cities" in America. "NEW YORK!" he cried in disbelief. "New York is not the hippest city in America!"

Timidly, I inquired what city he thought was most hip.  He looked at me as if I ought to know.
"Why, FORT WORTH!"

I'm probably not hip enough to appreciate Fort Worth. So this year, in a detour, I'm going back to a place I've been, but one where a westerner always carries a frisson of fear.

In 1978 I spent two months in India, traveling with a fellow seeker after truth and adventure -- Arnold "Rusty" Glicksman.  Each of us has written a memoir in which that trip plays a life-changing part.  (Rusty's is still unpublished -- watch for it.)  In a few days, right after Labor Day, we're going back.

Rusty's red hair is white now, and he is winding down the jewelry-making business he's had since the 1980s, with gold and stones he buys in Rajasthan.  I'll spend a few days with him in Jaipur, and then head out for adventures in new places.  First to the Caves of Ellura and Ajanta, ancient temples carved out of moutainsides, with some of the finest and best-preserved religious sculpture in the world.  My must-see deity is a reclining Buddha carved in a wall.

According to legend, the Buddha didn't sleep -- his mind was so clear that he had no need to knit up "the ravel'd sleave of care."  He would just lie down and rest for a few hours.

My other most-desired deity is this sexy female in Ellura. Though present-day India suffers from a hangover of Victorian prudery -- kissing in public is still a crime -- its gods and goddesses cavort freely with one another and love every kind of sexual pleasure.

How I wish I could rest like the Buddha, and romp like Lord Krishna with his consort Radha!

That was back in the Axial Age, when human wisdom and vision reached its zenith.  I'm touring today's troubled world, and India is no exception.  Still, with God all things are possible.

More later, God willing.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Circumambulation 4: Turn, Turn, Turn.

-- By Tom Phillips

Dervishes   

Saving the airfare to Istanbul, I went yesterday to a one-day workshop on Sufi whirling in midtown Manhattan, hoping to learn the best way to turn. In a large, airy, second-floor studio, about twenty New Yorkers showed up -- mostly young and female, plus a few young men and middle-aged women. Most had some dance training, and many were spiritual seekers. I was by far the oldest student, and at 77 the senior person in the room. The teacher was 73.

A dumpy, grandmotherly presence, she introduced herself casually by her Sufi name, Khadija -- also the name of the Prophet Mohammed's first wife.  It didn't take long to recognize her as a quintessential New York intellectual, well-traveled and well-versed in several esoteric traditions, liberally seasoned with kosher salt. Look her up and you'll find she started out as a modern dancer in New York, then to San Francisco where she encountered Sam Lewis, the father of Sufi dancing in America. This sparked a pilgrimage, overland from Europe to India and back in search of true whirling -- which she found with the Mevlevi order of dervishes in Turkey. Forty years later, she runs an upstate retreat for devotees of whirling meditation and cleansing diets, and returns periodically to Turkey to teach.

She's also been a Zen student for decades, with Sasaki Roshi of Los Angeles.  But turning is better meditation, she told us. Sitting on a cushion one can look like a little Buddha, all the while obsessing  about work, sex, or lunch.  But whirling requires utter mindfulness. Think lunch for a half a second and you're in danger of falling.

My Road to Boston

-- By Tom Phillips  

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally got it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared me or my father for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston he concluded, “This is a small town.”

 

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

Circumambulation #3: Turning Left

-- By Tom Phillips

 Whirling Dervishes in Turkey 

Last year I took up whirling as a physical and spiritual exercise. After a while I drifted away and forgot about it, until something jogged my memory this year and I began again.  It's different this time.

Last year I turned clockwise, recommended for beginners. Clockwise whirling can give you a groove, a feeling of centeredness and calm. But counter-clockwise is the real deal.  It takes you out of your "comfort zone." This is my new practice.

The 13th-century Islamic poet Rumi wrote: "Do you know what whirling is?  It is escaping one's existence continuously tasting the everlasting experience."  If that sounds like nonsense, remember what the Talking Heads advise -- "Stop making sense."

To whirl counter-clockwise is to stop making sense, to step out of the patterns your mind has made for your life.  We humans have a primitive area of the brain that if left unchecked will make sense of life by killing it  -- that is, reducing it to routine tasks rewarded with mindless pleasures. Anyone can fall into this.  Housewives are encouraged to do it, as are civil servants.  But professors can do it almost as easily. This is why Rumi says we have to escape our existence.

Turning left instead of right, against the ordinary drift of life, I feel my outstretched hand is wiping dust off the table, knocking objects off the shelf.  This dust and these objects are the detritus of habit and routine. What is beyond them? A whirling cosmos, spinning too fast for the mind to do its job of categorizing and judging, picking and choosing. In this state the mind has no choice but to move toward what Rumi calls the everlasting existence, i.e. the present moment.

I say "move toward" rather than "enter into" because I'm still a beginner, doing it wrong. I know there's an ecstatic spiritual continuum out there, but it will take practice, refinement, and guidance to whirl my way to it. These days I can turn for five or six minutes at moderate speed, and the effect is energizing, refreshing to body and mind and spirit. Taste and see...

To be continued.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips