Bande Mataram!

So I am currently in India, on one of my annual trips to the motherland, where I will attempt to disgorge from my fouled system the white man's poison, cleanse from my corrupted consciousness the oppressive shackles of Patriarchy, cut from my diseased flesh the parasites of anthropocentrism, avarice and false piety. And suckle from the life giving breast of Bharati, bathing in her gentle streams and sitting as a king at her table.

Or something like that. In any event I'm here, and I'm here for two solid months. This will be the longest block of time I've ever spent in this hot, bright, gorgeous, loud, fragrant, malodorous, beautiful, blessed, rotten fucking country. As I write this, I am forced to steal precious time at the keyboard in between photographs. My cousin is getting married, and the whole family is gathered in the living room of my aunts house taking more pictures than Ansel Adams took during his whole career. I'm sweaty, disheveled, dazed from jet lag and uninterrupted travel, and a little worried that I may have inadvertently pissed off one of my uncles. I'm something like the loveable jackass of the family, and that act can get tiresome after awhile, for everyone. Still and all, I'm happy. Happy to be back in a country that has always captured my imagination, evoked intense and complicated emotions, and never failed to effortlessly crack my hard agnostic shell, albeit temporarily.

Traveling here via Taiwan and Malaysia, with a long series of connecting flights, one hotel stay and endless hours spent waiting at various terminals, it occurred to me that we should perhaps devise a way to quantify poise, grace, and savvy while traveling. Writing about Leonard Cohen, Tom Robbins said that he was a man of the future, equally comfortable hailing a cab in Paris and giving a lecture in L.A., or something to that effect. If such a scale were devised I wonder how I'd fare. Apart from a rather stressful moment when trying to get to the hotel in Malaysia, and an unfortunate episode, just moments from meeting my Uncle and cousin at the airport in Hyderabad, when I was reamed by a duplicitous customs agent who charged me $160 to bring in my cousin's wedding jewelry, it was a smooth journey.

This is hopefully the first of many updates which I'll post while I'm here. Hopefully they will be most edifying for the two or so people who regularly read this fucking thing.