For eight centuries before Kashyapa the activity in Sigiriya was monastic. Then for the next eight centuries, it was again a home for monks. After that it was abandoned and the bricks crumbled and the timber rotted and something that approached a pharaoh’s doing didn’t stay intact for as long except for the foundations, and the impressive hydraulics.

The guides prefer the midpoint of the sixteen centuries, of the time when it was Kashyapa’s abode—they can paint more color into the king’s life than the monk’s. “He had five hundred wives,” Milton told me, pointing to the four large pools laid in a char-bagh design. And he pointed out a wide stone seat installed at a vantage point: “The king’s throne,” he said. He wished me to imagine his own visualization, his fantasy perhaps, that the king was the only man watching while his five-hundred wives and concubines bathed all at the same time in those pools around him.

The pools are at the base of the mesa that is Sigiriya. For the women to play there before the king they’d have descended 200 steep meters from the top of the rock where the palace was. Between these water gardens at the feet of the rock and the palace on the top, on a wide indented rock face, there are painted the famous Sigiriya apsaras.

Some sixty-odd of them have survived a vandal attack. Their colors are bold, and they are vibrant portraits indeed, of women floating northerly to some purpose which is not apparent because the painting whole has not survived. Milton wished me to know that the women were Kashyapa’s, which, in a sense, many of them might have been, because the artists could have modeled their characters on the most alluring women in the king’s life.

The artists have been unabashed in expressing how much femininity they demanded in women—as much as our Indian sculptors did, who carved the shilabalike in the Belur-Halebid temples in Karnataka.

Milton was hurrying me through everything, not allowing me to reflect on anything. I’d made a final offer of seven-hundred rupees against his demand for a thousand for his “guide lecture.” He allowed me only grudgingly to sit and gaze at the lion’s paws that came after we’d climbed some more. Such paws! In its time there was a full lion on its haunches that wore those paws, but the bricks, and the wooden lintels that held up the mouth through which the ancients ascended to the palace on top, all those are lost to fifteen centuries of time.

Milton’s explanation was a long row of bee hives under the highest overhang of rock; he said the bees would begin to stir when the noon heat came upon them. So he rushed me to the top, where the view all round is of plains and, where the horizon should be, of hills. Behind the set of hills to the south is Kandy; beyond the northern hills is Anuradhapura, and also Pollonurawa—all of them capitals of old. The late-morning sun had begun to let know who truly has forever been the ruler of Sri Lanka, but a cool breeze dried and cooled and restored me.

Kashyapa is said to have killed his father, Dhatusena, murder being the only course to the throne available to him: he was born of a non-royal consort. Dhatusena’s capital was Anuradhapura, but when Kashyapa assumed kingship he ordered that his palace be built here on this mesa, on the fifth of a five-terrace structure. On the four terraces below, he located the dancing halls, the pleasure gardens, the royal baths. The living areas they kept cool for him through a clever deployment of waterways through rock and building. Thus lived Kashyapa in full view of his subjects who lived on the plains below, his splendor a flash in time on a strange piece of rock that a volcano left behind.

Milton was courteous when we parted in the heat. His hand was dry when we shook hands, and he looked still fresh, and good for another immediate “lecture tour.” I was covered again in sweat, and in dire need of more water to drink.

Sigiriya Rock from my room at The Kandalama Heritance

The tree in the outdoor section of Dome Cafe is wild in detail, and wild on the whole. From its twisted trunk its limbs are further twisted on their own axis, and also in relation to one another. Such a tree—rapt in a dance that takes, perhaps, a few years for every move—they have bound trunk and limb with a tough translucent tube with tiny lights in it, and converted the beauty into a creature of the night.

I was in its shade, sipping cappuccino and watching the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd on the other side of Queen Street. I’d come in after an hour in the Singapore Art Museum to which Dome Cafe is attached, after spending time in the permanent gallery of Wu Guanzhong, and the most time I’d spent there was before the scene of night by the river, in which black is cascading on darkness under a thin crescent-moon, and the river is fluid and gray and strong, but the sensuousness in the scene comes from the sharp-tipped reeds and grass on the viewer’s side of the river, curved and risen and also bent, etched into the oil painting with a knife.

The museum was behind me and behind the museum, Waterloo Street, facing which is the Spanish restaurant of Museum, where yesterday the waitress fixed for me a vegetarian soup and paella, which last tasted much better than any Indian pulao I’ve ever eaten. To mention Queen Street again, it runs down the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd and becomes Armenian Street with another fine church on it. On the section where I’m sitting there are more churches, and in sum in this district there are as many churches as there are malls on Orchard Road. I saw an aggressive one, the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, on whose walls red banners ask in white letters, “Called to Belong? Be a Catholic!” Right before this church is the Grace Church, which is exceedingly modest, or is lacking funds.

It does not seem necessary to sell aggressively in this nation where shopping is the national pastime, and where tourists arrive with the malls in mind, and try out their acquisitions soon after the purchase. But every business has targets that it must surpass. At dinner at the Outdoor Cafe by Peranakan Place on Orchard Road a band of youngsters dressed in dark and white hawk for Taka Jewelers, handing out flyers doggedly to every passerby—many pedestrians hurry past their corridor. I watched a long time and the youngsters didn’t score a single hit—people accepted the fliers but not the invitation to step inside. Over the sounds of the one-way traffic, in the cool of the evening, came the strains of Coldplay, and a clear voice trying to sound exactly like Chris Martin’s. It didn’t matter that the struggle came through stronger than the song; the applause was positively appreciative. From which bar the music came I cannot tell, there were a couple next to my cafe and several behind it. The bar next to me was Howl at the Moon, whose sign was a wolf on its haunches on a keyboard, baying to the heavens while a swollen orange moon shone behind it.

In the museums, the artists seem to decry the unstoppable push toward globalization and consumerism, of which movements Singapore is the apogee, as anyone will admit. In the annexe to the Singapore Art Museum on Queen Street the current display is “Classic Contemporary,” in which there is a curious exhibit of a full dress suspended on a hanger, with a hat and a pair of shoes on the floor. The dress, and the hat and the shoes are all laminated in mock $1000 bills, and lacquered. The creation is of Vincent Leoh, who performed in that dress in 1992, in the role of a three-legged toad holding a coin in the mouth. He who comes to possess such a toad is expected to soon receive great riches and Leow’s purpose was to criticize his materialist and consumerist society which will subscribe to every superstition to feed its greed.

Not too many were coming in to see these exhibits, so I wonder if they should have been out in the malls, or in other public places, like the works of that other Singaporean celebrity, the late Anthony Poon.

The walls come down the hill like two aged arms of the young Fort Canning Centre. People were shooting the Canning Centre, and the two plain two-hundred year old cupolas built by the architect Coleman, and the greens between the walls—with small and large cameras. None came up to the two old walls to see the tombstones embedded in them, mostly of Europeans—young men and women, some too young, and the old not very old. They have died in the first half of the nineteenth century, faced with a low life-expectancy, like Thomas Henry, Assistant Surgeon, remembered on these walls and who, at 22, has died well ahead of others whose lives he should have improved, or saved.

I saw the walls the day after the Chinese New Year’s Day of the Year of the Tiger. The day before, a rock band performed on the greens between these cemetery walls. They removed the props and the chairs and the dismantled stage while I read Alain de Botton’s book on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the pavilion by the entrance.

On the front of this Canning Centre is the gate of Canning Fort, and shortly down a bend from it is a remnant of the old fort wall. They speak modestly of this rather modest wall and gate, built in 1859, when the English in all their dominions felt the tremors of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in India; here in Singapore they built this shelter for protection against potential local trouble. The smallest Indian fort will laugh derisively at this baby-fort, but who worries for Singapore’s scant history when in its present it shines to the envy of most others?

Just beyond the reach of the old arms of Canning Centre are the Singapore Management University and the Singapore National Museum. The museum is celebrating some other dead, with relics from distant Egypt, on loan from Vienna until April. The displays are from the Old Kingdom five millennium ago, through to Ptolemaic times. Whereas the tombstones of the dead Europeans lacked visitors this holiday, the response to this “Quest for Immortality” (as the museum calls the Egyptian gallery) has surprised the museum officials. I stood in line for an hour, and for another hour I craned over others’ heads and bent and twisted into gaps between people to read the legends and to catch a glimpse of the relics.

People clicked more than they saw; even the legends they clicked, as though the right plan is to gather everything into digital memory and to view them later somewhere. So the remains of royals and nobles and commoners were digitized with great energy by common people armed with gadgets the ancients couldn’t have dreamed possible, and, in a way, the quest of the ancients for immortality was meeting with success, but in a way that I’m not sure they’d desired.

The men and women who became mummies would have known that their brains would be sucked out from their nostrils and discarded, but their liver and lung and other organs would be sealed in separate jars and would sit in the company of their mummy. Did they relish the thought of being immortal in that fashion?

I have been walking long distances, saying no to the taxi, enjoying the flora of this city. And I watched Avatar, and it seemed right to watch that movie in this city where the trees are like those in the film, if not in size and grandeur then at least in variety and complexity. Every morning at breakfast I look out to the trees and an embankment and higher trees above it, and the scene seems to have been created just to make this window perfect. But, after gazing through the window for a while, the trees begin to suggest the jungle this island has been, which now is no more a jungle, but is surely the loveliest of parks.

Speaking of Avatar again, if you consider that the word is of Indian origin, then consider that the gods came down in various avatars to settle matters with men, often with such men who’d gotten out of hand. Sometimes the avatar played mischief with man, but always to a good purpose in the end. Here in Avatar are men playing gods with the Navi people on planet Pandora and, when the film ends, the chief avatar helps the Navi to not accept tragedy from the hands of men.

This morning I saw an artwork in the Singapore Art Museum, by Ringo Bunoan who lost his mother on 1-June-1986 and sublimated his private tragedy, his “remembrance, loss, and sorrow,” through looking up another eight persons who had died the same day as his mother. His mother is depicted by four clean white pillows with a photograph of her memorial on each, and the other eight are identical pillows differentiated by a picture on top of each person’s memorial, and the total of twelve pillows are laid clockwise to communicate all things that life, time, and death mean. A Singaporean teenager standing next to me said the thing “looks eery.” I tried to find my emotion and name it, for I was born on a first-of-June.

An item today in The Hindu suggests the way to laughter, which is to look beyond anger to the absurdity of the situation. I glanced at the story and read only the big-lettered nut graf on my way to work and forgot all about the idea when we entered the gate, where, for two months and a half there is the sore sight of workmen on strike, and from yesterday the scene punches the gut, the unbearable vision of unwashed men on a relay hunger strike, and their unwashed cohorts who have slept there overnight.

My anger against those that have misled them, and have them still in their thrall, dried up many days ago.

They want me to talk to them, and their request they have sent to the newspapers and to the television channels, but not to me. A young man came with a TV camera today, himself the reporter, himself the cameraman. He spent good time outside with the workmen and his mind was made up before he entered the factory. “Can you not speak with them? On humanitarian grounds? How can you allow a hundred and seventy workmen to sit outside?” When the HR Manager came to me and told me these questions that the young man had asked him, I remembered my own youth and my strong belief then, which I don’t remember whence it came, that only the devil begat businessmen.

He left schlepping his camera and I wondered if I should call him and talk to him myself, and repeat to him that we’ve been beseeching them every day for seventy days to come in and work; that a matter gone to court is a matter abandoned to its time; that it is not done to press for the recall of workmen dismissed on disciplinary grounds. The things I composed for him sounded awful in my mind, and I decided to let him go, to allow him to indulge in the romance of outrage at capitalists and exploitation and at the oppression of the working classes. Then I cursed the owner of the news channel who is himself a businessman, and a politician, and I asked myself how his channel can send a kid to cover something of which he cannot see all dimensions.

But the boy has stirred remembrances, of when my tilt was toward red too, when my gear was meager, a ten-cent pen and a rough-woven kurta that fell below my knees and let the sun and the wind of Mysore and Manasa Gangothri through to my skin. Now in the evening I’m writing these notes and I’m thinking how I’d have enjoyed it in my time on the campus, if I’d had that boy’s large camera, and his freedom, and his access, and businessmen like me to make a mess of.

Photo: freeparking

I’m reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Finding the Flow, along with Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind and Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran. All together: Wild Mind when I wake, Finding the Flow in the car, and Tim Robinson at bedtime. Alain de Botton’s book on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I’ll open it Monday, but in the meantime I’m considering reading a book I’d abandoned after thirty pages two years ago, Ray Croc’s Grinding it Out. At that time I’d shut the book to open another, the Four Hour Workweek, and I’d even gone some distance with the advise I took from it, nursing a midlife crisis which departed recently, leaving me restored like after the flu.

I’ve enjoyed my bouts of flu, having always fed them well. I fed this other flu well too, with every indulgence it asked for, and, as with every flu, I took Sujaya down with me. She didn’t complain, but I’ve never looked so deep into her lovely eyes as to find there what I fear. She’s human, and a good one.

Last month I went to the Aravind Eye Hospital and its manufacturing arm, Aurolabs. They showed me a documentary on their founder, Dr.Venkataswamy. He died three years ago, aged 86, and until his last days he appeared for work every morning at seven. A month before I visited his hospital an incident occurred in my main factory which proved cathartic (I’m sorry to state it like in the horoscope columns). I should have gone down in that incident, but I seem to have fled upward.

I’d figured a retirement would be good for me, and that I’d go see the world at my slow pace. I read Amitav Ghosh and went to Cambodia and to Mauritius and planned a visit to Egypt, and I watched Kurosawa and walked about Tokyo and Kyoto for two weeks. I wrote a bit and believed I should write much more and searched in Istanbul and Kandy and Colombo for the sense of how Pamuk and Ondaatje had let fall their minds on hometown. For twenty years I’d been sunk in my work, had been lost in its slumber, been a van-Winkle. When I woke three years ago and went loafing I thought it would be fun, but it seems better to go back to work, to be lost up there another twenty years, to being Rip again.

This week in the office I used snatches of free time to progress a para at a time through Jim Collins’ Good to Great, and finished today the chapter on Level 5 Leaders. In the evening I lingered a long time on that English poet’s line, that there’s plenty of sleep after the journey is done. You may know the poem: Reveille.

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, in a cup larger than for espresso, smaller than for cappuccino. Fine South Indian coffee, the very best cafe au lait in the world. The coffee planter is a friendly guy, and immensely hospitable. Go on, knock boldly. It is possible he’ll also treat you to some akki-rotti. The real problem is how to reciprocate on his scale in your turn.

That is how you get good coffee in Malnad, where almost all Indian coffee is grown. Of course, the planter would rather spend the evening with you, to share with you some good whisky.

But it has been a bad winter for him. It rained on consecutive days for a week in December and ruined a promising crop across the belt; weeds have sprung at the feet of coffee and the berries cannot be gleaned (on a decent scale) from the chaos on the ground; in the meantime the rain has confused the plants and they have sprouted white blossoms in odd patterns and on random patches of plants. The planters are woebegone in all the three coffee districts, Coorg and Hassan and Chikmagalur.

Last week I went to Angadi from Sakleshpur, arriving where the narrow road splits into three, at which point you know you have arrived even if you miss the unmissable large sign: there is a stone tablet at the base of a large dried tree on the edge of the cross, rooting the place to antiquity. If you have come looking for Angadi, your turn is left, and you go a hundred meters up in the shade of the line of trees that flank you, and you come upon the mounds that you’ve come for, which hold the relics from the time of the founding of the Hoysala dynasty, from ten centuries ago.

The first Hoysala with detailed records to his name was Nripakama. He ruled from Angadi. He began a mere hill chief, but he packed the audacity to attack the Chola, the Chalukya, and a powerful neighbor, all of whom defeated him. But he displayed such valor as to win respect in his region, and yet not ruffle the emperors of the north and the south. The defeats did not deter him. Soon he attacked Banavase, the capital of the Kadambas down south from him in the plains. He won. By 1047, the year of his death, he was lord of an area large enough to be called a kingdom and commanded an army of hardy people, and both fell to his son Vinayaditya to extend.

Vinayaditya ruled a long time, so his son and grandsons were martially active with him while he ruled. Vinayaditya’s son Ereyanga, together with Ereyanga’s son Vishnuvardhana, went far north and torched the city of Dhara for the Chalukya, whose feudatory the Hoysala had become. Ereyanga would scourge three more cities, all before he himself became king. By the time Vinayaditya died, father and son and grandson had established a good sized kingdom, the nucleus of the major empire that the kingdom was to become within the next one-hundred years. Vinayaditya moved the capital away from Angadi on these ghats to Dorasamudra in the plains, a short distance away.

Why did the Hoysala’s sword—and the torch—travel only so far? His nemesis would arrive from such a distance. Did our peninsula, sealed by mountains, box our heroes within it? Were they denied the big bold dreams the grand terrain of Central Asia gave the Turkic men?

In Angadi, the monuments are small, and attest that what happened here was only a beginning. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. The one on the right had three Hindu temples on it, on which men from Hampi are working to a plan to restore them in three years. The rise on the left had a Jain basdi on it, its restoration quite advanced, the thirthankaras already standing in its garbha. Perhaps there are big plans for this small temple, now in the charge of Dharmasthala: the plan for this temple also extends three years.

If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. The men on this site didn’t know where Sala performed his feat. A schoolboy who now tagged along with me didn’t know either. I drove back down the street and continued further, to the school, on another rise, broad like a short wide table. They were teaching on a Saturday, and in the classroom which I passed the teacher asked what happened in a substance (I didn’t hear the name) if four electrons fused with a single electron. His class gave him a rousing answer, all in chorus. In the next room I saw a dozen computers, of HCL, new under plastic hoods, and thought, maybe now, after ten centuries, the mind of even the commoner in Malnad is no more boxed, not by sea, nor by mountain, and who among these young—with the world open and inviting—might soar to the heights of a Chandrashekar or an Amartya Sen?

The teachers didn’t know either, where Sala had performed his brave feat. But they were helpful. One went into the library and returned with the monumental Kannada Vishwakosha, and found for me the short entry on Angadi. We read it, but it didn’t tell where it happened. Where did Sala kill the tiger? They directed me back to the new temple, the one I’d first skipped.

It is new only on the outside. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I’ve seen.

They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala!

With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.

I spent an entire day at the Aravind Eye Hospital, founded by Dr. Venkataswamy thirty years ago, and which many say is the second great temple in Madurai. In the book From Here to Nirvana, which is a Lonely Planet kind of guide to ashrams and temples, the Aravind Hospital is one prominent destination. The first great temple, of course, is the temple of Meenakshi, the goddess with the fish-shaped eye, first built 2500 years ago and last rebuilt four centuries back. I spent the evening at the Meenakshi Temple, bemoaning that I’d only an hour to experience its splendor. But these notes are regarding Aravind.

I stayed at Aravind’s International Students Hostel, and met at breakfast the other inmates. They were management students from America doing a 10-day assignment at Aravind. Two among them were Indians, man and woman, and spoke with the born-in-America accent. I asked the young lady about her school: “We’re from a school called Wharton,” she said. “It’s in Philadelphia. Have you been in the US?” I was last in Philadelphia in September, and every time I crossed the river I had stared at it in disbelief, that all these wealthy people and mighty establishments have left so much water still flowing in it.

The river of Madurai is Vaigai, and on the day I was there it was only a long wide bed of sand indifferent to the thin stream on it that hardly flowed. My companion assured me the water runs below the surface. He was being kind to the city, for, though the water is gone from their river, the good graces of the people overflow, which we saw everywhere: on the street, in the shops, on the restauranteur’s face, in the hostel, and most of all, in all whom we met at Aravind.

Dr. V founded the hospital when he was 58, a clinic with only eleven beds. Now his hospitals are in six cities, and have hundreds of beds, and on the day of my visit they were treating 1600 patients in Madurai alone, and none of the patients had arrived with an appointment. No one takes an appointment; the poor don’t know such a thing. But the IT systems at Aravind can tell how many may check-in based on past data and the time of the year (holidays, school terms, festivals, the weather of the season). The forecast for the day was 1560. The patients may choose the paid service, or the free service, and in either case they receive first-rate treatment. Dr. V started the hospital on that premise: “I’ll first give you the best eye care. Pay me what you can. If you can’t, it is okay—pay me later.”

He employed a proven method to secure profits, the McDonalds method to mass-produce in multiple locations without loss of quality. Aravind’s strength is excellence is ophthalmology, combined with systems for mass delivery—in multiple locations—of diagnosis and treatment. They charge very less; two-thirds of those treated do not (cannot) pay; and in this manner of the charitable organization Aravind still makes enough money to pay the bills and invest for growth.

There is just enough room in each area of the hospital. No space is wasted. Each floor was built in answer to demand, and when money became available. On the computer terminals in every section the focus is always the same, to treat as many as possible as quickly as possible and to free the resources to take in even more. Every section can see on its screen how it is faring against the others. The focus serves both sides well: the patients need to go home quickly; the hospital needs to attend to everyone who came.

And they don’t wish for less to come. They go out into the villages and fetch as many patients as they can find. Their mission, after all, is complete eradication of needless blindness, and 12 million Indians are blind this way, against the world’s 45 million. And they’ve improved this process every year. First they brought patients by bus and did the diagnosis and the treatment in the hospital. Now they perform diagnosis in the field using a satellite link to the hospital, and screen patients on the spot to determine who needs to come to the hospital, and who should be dealt with right away. In separate strategy-sessions they are generating new ideas so as to innovate and reach even more numbers.

Aravind has performed the most number of eye surgeries in the world.

Dr. V saw more opportunities to reduce cost and make eye care affordable for every one. The IOL, for instance: That invention, made in the west, was a great gift to humanity, but costing $200 (rupees 9400), it served only a portion of those who needed it. He asked: That lens looks no different than a shirt-button; why should it cost any more than ten rupees?

Aravind established Aurolabs—a technology-development and manufacturing extension—to give substance to that question. They make affordable lenses that Aravind uses, and also export them to 80 countries. Besides the highly inexpensive rigid lenses, they also make foldable lenses for those who can afford them, but still at a lower cost. They’ve emerged a good manufacturer, and extended the range to produce surgical needles, and eyedrops, especially those too expensive outside, and drugs orphaned through being abandoned by pharmaceutical majors.

The man who gave body to Dr. V’s vision is his brother, Srinivasan, who doesn’t credit himself for anything. He says Dr. V had a way of asking for more: “As you were saying,” Dr. V would tell Srinivasan who’d never said any such thing, “I think we should build a hospital in a new place.” Today, Srinivasan’s son Aravind is the administrator for the group. Aravind is himself an ophthalmologist, and a management graduate who has studied under C.H. Prahalad in America. An astonishing number of family members of Dr. V are the management (and doctors and administrators) of the hospital, and a transition from the old to the young seems to be in progress.

I told Aravind, after the visit to Aurolabs, that I was moved by what I saw and began to explain, but he cut in to emphasize that Dr. V’s vision was in his own realm. Alarmed, I cut back in, and corrected myself, saying I was in Aravind to seek opportunities in Medical Electronics to diversify my own business. He was relieved, that I wasn’t going to begin a sentimental journey, and moved his hands quickly on the keyboard and the mouse, and pulled down possibilities, and mailed them to me the instant I asked for them. A young assistant interrupted us; she had a question for Dr. Aravind; but she was in a fluster for words; after she left I asked him his age—forty; but I’d supposed he was no more than thirty.

I hope I’ve made a friend of him. He was so affable, and so helpful, and so willing to partner.

Madurai Meenakshi Temple

In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Bangalore, and I see that the exhortations in Bangalore to celebrate the past of Karnataka are succeeding, and Bangalore is emptying itself this Christmas weekend, and in the process local tourism is shaking off a sluggish year. I am on my way from Hassan to Bangalore, and though it was the other lane that was full, and my lane was free, I am cross, because the cars from the other lane were spilling to ours and surging into us and drove us off the road a few times. Two fresh accidents were proof of the risk, but the sight of them was affecting no one.

This cafe is normally two tables full, but when we came in today only one table was free, with the leftovers from the last party littered on it. Brown and chocolate cake were smeared on the couches and the cushions, and fliers lay about, selling New Year celebrations at the Serai in Chikmagalur. The floor was full of crumbs and I kicked around to tidy it a little, and saw that cake crumbs are stubborn—they stay put or they stick to the shoe.

The tourists who have filled this cafe and the highway are headed to the ghats, to rest there among the quiet coffee, and to trek into the forests, there to turn inward; none may miss a visit to the monuments built by the Hoysala dynasty over four centuries, beginning tenth century, AD.

The Hoysalas began as men of the hills, of the thick jungles that matted the hills. They were virile, industrious, fired by a vitality that their environs imparted to them—qualities which they put to use to prey on traders carrying merchandise to the plains from the sea, or offer the traders protection against other forest brigands. Their other profitable occupation was to swoop down to the plains on marauding excursions, and bring home pillaged grain and stolen women.

Then, as now, these plains were irrigated by small reservoirs. Every few minutes on the road on these plains you notice a reservoir, which have provided water for centuries, to peasants under the Hoysalas, under the Turks, under the Vijayanagar kings, under British rule, and now to peasants in our socialist democratic republic. The plains were created by clearing the plateau of trees, and at the time we are discussing now, the clearing covered areas of today’s districts of Hassan, Mysore, and Tumkur.

click to enlarge…

In time, the plainsmen began to employ the hill-folk for protection of plainsmen from plainsmen in dispute, or for protection from man-eating tigers and leopards. They began to civilize a little, and came under the influence of Jain preachers. In the meantime, they began also to feel the need for protection for themselves, on account of uncertainties spawned by the wars between the northern and southern and eastern kingdoms. The fittest among the brigand chiefs emerged their leader, and the brigand-turned-ruler began to collect taxes from the plains—the brigand had become king.

It was a favorable time for the king who’d just begun his career. There appeared a period of calm when the surrounding kingdoms did not pose much trouble, and lesser kings offered their daughters in marriage. In that time of calm he consolidated a kingdom, and, shortly after, became a feudatory of the Chalukyas who ruled north of him.

Thus did the brigand chiefs from the Western Ghats rise to kingship. Just then, in the mid-East, the golden age of Islam had commenced, and the Turks had directed their ambitions eastward to India, and had begun a march that would in four centuries bring them to the Hoysala. In those four centuries, the Hoysalas would extend their kingdom to cover much of the peninsula, wrest sovereignty from the Chalukyas, change their faith from Jainism to Vaishnavite Hinduism, reach glorious heights in art and architecture and literature.

The Turks would go over treacherous mountain-passes to the northern plains of India; they would conquer Delhi and turn southward and come over the Sahyadri mountains to the Deccan plateau, and subdue the feuding southern kingdoms. The last Hoysala would fall to the Turk.

Today, we have only the temples from that time, apart from a public bath, some basic structures, and many tall stone-tablets (virgals) that are the records of the time. The virgals are in temples and also in remote places in the plains and in the jungles, across the vast stretch of the old kingdom, where they stand alone, bearing their fading stories on them. The temples are unarguably superb achievements, not so much for scale as for craftsmanship. But there is not one palace that has survived, not one house of a nobleman, or merchant, or commoner. Was there a secretariat? There isn’t a sign of it. Only the temples exist.

That is where they are headed, all these tourists.
——————————————
Here’s the blog of a young backpacker who has often been to the places of the Hoysalas.

Also, Payaniga’s Belur photo.

This December, as in every December, I approach Electronics City seeing the sun through the fog, and mistake it for a morning moon—I see it so absently. I wonder that the moon is so large, and after a while I realize there is no rabbit on it, and so it is the sun in its correct size. The fog is no more apparent when I enter my campus. The sun is out, and the leaves and the flowers and the lawn are all in a flutter, and the chill pinches just a little, a lover’s gentle pinch. How I love December.

Something has changed this time, though. On the way to Hassan the sky is blue but not so clear. There is haze before the hills, whereas last December I could check off the rocks even in distant hills. But the drive is still good, in that disorienting golden light, and the mild chill.

********************

A bright idea is being given shape shape from October, when from wall after public wall cinema posters were removed and slogans of various busybodies were scraped out. A base paint covered the walls and on them paintings began to appear, of ruins of ancient monuments from across the state. The spaces among the ruins are the lounge of the tiger and the elephant and the peacock; and the stage for girls dancing Indian classical; and on the wide edges are the Om Beach with a man in bermudas, and three men crouched in a boat on water. They are painting thus every wall and rampart and underpass in a rush even as I write this, and this morning I was afraid the men may soon bring their ladder and brush and can of paint to the walls of my own home. Indeed, the entire city is being transformed into a travel brochure for Karnataka.

There is a good part to this business, that it is awarded to poster artists, an absolutely splendid thing. I ask that they please offer some walls also to the Chitrakala Parishat so that we may see some imaginative art. I saw a wall on the way from Hudson Circle to Mission Road which bore simple floral murals on a terra cotta base which are designs of today, and are a reminder that the glorious culture of the past that our city-fathers are so besotted with has a shining young rival in the culture of the present, and it begs for some room.

********************

December is when the non-resident Indians come back to the extended family and hand down plentiful advise to the locals they encounter, whether the arrivals are minions from the foreign cubicle, or key executives, or brilliant professionals, or those from among the fired and the unemployed. I had my time yesterday with a big-corporation type who sought out financial ills that I might be afflicted with since we last met. He was frank and happy when he extracted an admission of a potential woe and today I am drained from having been on guard every moment I spent with him, from having to fend off his relentless dagger-sharp inquisition.

Also, he was dunking my head into old questions which are a dead bore: regarding our inept politicians, our terrible infrastructure, our damn corruption—as though I’ve had some role in growing these Indian warts, and as though I have insight into them, and as though I should go out and excise them forthwith. But, of course, those questions aren’t so much for answers as for reassurance that the decision to migrate was life’s best decision. In that colorless conversation he told me his most serious news, that a certain famous American golfer who maintained fourteen illicit amorous liaisons is facing a California divorce. We drank good French wine: it kept us light and saved this friendship that we have, for until next December.
——————–
previous post, on the urban experience in Bangalore.

Want to see the pictures of the urban art mentioned above?

The ride into town

Turn right to the north on NH-48 and then at the square which comes up turn left to the west. The road (Bangalore-Mangalore Road) goes straight and curves fine to the right after a while, and then it is straight again for the few furlongs into the town center. On either side of the street are restaurants and small hotels and movie halls, all in the unimpressive style of small-town buildings in India. There is no attempt at architecture, but at a short distance north of the road a large pergola of a new building is visible which leads one to suspect that change is coming. Hassan is a small town of only 300,000 people, a town dilated in the fashion of a leaf on two sides of this road which runs like the midrib of the leaf.

I’ve been to a show in one of those movie halls. There were enough mosquitoes in the full hall for each one to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the Telugu burst forth at peak volume over the proudly advertised audio system, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya Saran, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at that heightened effect that all desired, everyone put up with every suffering with no effort at all, ignored even the smell of sweat and the moist heat and cool that blew at us from hefty noisy fans on the side walls.

Among the hotels and cinema theaters are the small shops which sell liquor legally in bottles, and illegally in glasses for drinking on the spot, there at the counter. Men throng the counters from noon, buying those spirits that cost the least and kick the senses the most, drinking liquor and dreaming mutton-chops. Mutton they get only on special days, such as when a goat is cut down during festivals. Other days they’ve to make do with yellow little balls of fried lentil-flour laced with red chilly powder and mixed with oily roasted peanuts, a mixture which assures the eye that it will finish the job on the system that the cheap liquor has begun.

The Hotel Ashhok comes up a while after the last bar is passed; it is the hotel where I always stay. If we pass the hotel and go straight on we are in seconds in the town square, at which point, last year, they sliced down the shop-fronts deeply so as to widen the road and, for some time now, they have a wide space and not yet a real road. The road runs further a wee bit and splits into three narrow streets: the turn left leads to Sakleshpur and continues to Mangalore. We may take the straight road ahead and lose ourselves in muddy market streets lined with stores that sell farm equipment and fertilizers and pesticides and tools and implements and also the harvest of the farms. They are tiny shops, but they are at the core of this agrarian district.

Hassanamba, the Smiling Goddess

From there it is a circuitous path to the Hassanamba Temple. The easiest description for me is to say that it is in the middle of that maze, in the sharp north-west corner of a wide yard that appears suddenly, unanticipated among those tight streets. The goddess Hassanamba—the smiling goddess—gives Hassan its name, and so that is what Hassan means: the divine smile! The temple has existed from around 1100 AD, and now inside its walls in the courtyard today’s plebeian painter—with the approval of his modern master, the civil servant—has struck cheap loud paint on old stone columns sanctioned by the royalty of antiquity, and he has worked on walls which are a millennium old, and on the carvings on columns, on Hanuman and other divinities, and turned powerful gods into comic characters.

The columns are round the twin to the Hassanamba Temple which is right before it, called the Siddeswara Temple. The smiling goddess is here a hutta, an anthill. Some readers may not know, but some of our anthills are often taken by snakes, sometimes by cobras, and the cobras are very important divinities to us and, because we cannot see which anthill has a cobra in it, we revere each hutta that we encounter. We have a festival for the huttas, on which day we pour milk into the hutta for the cobra to drink. The hutta which denotes Hassanamba in this temple is actually goddess Parvathi bearing another name. Parvathi is the wife of Shiva, the god of destruction, a fierce god, terrible in his wrath, but most adorable in stone. Siddeswara is one other name for Shiva, another form of him.

The Hassanamba Temple is open for but two weeks yearly at the time of Deepavali and is shut the day following Balipadyami. When they close the temple, they keep before the goddess a lit lamp, about two seers of uncooked rice, and water, and flowers. When the temple is opened the following year, the rice is cooked and good to eat, the lamp is still burning, and the flowers of last year are fresh with morning dew on them. I told you of the mess in the courtyard, but ten centuries of worship by millions of devotees have suffused even hard stone with divine tanmatras and the feeling at the time of leaving the temple is light, and the heart is full once more with hope and optimism and the resolve to do good.

All that meat and …

In Hassan they produce as much potatoes as meat. Maybe more, and maybe Louis Armstrong would’ve liked that. They are serious here about agriculture, which you can tell by the vast cultivated greens that cover the district, and also by the radio broadcast in the morning that comes through the speakers at the District Stadium, on the best methods to grow ragi or sunflower or rice. The stadium is reached walking straight north for fifteen minutes from the gate of the Hassan Ashhok, and this week when I joined the walkers and joggers the topic was about growing uddinabele. The young ones in the stadium were engrossed in themselves, and I couldn’t tell if the older ones were listening, but a good several of the men I passed (or who passed me) were speaking of gains from this crop and losses on the other, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

I’m thinking of a man who sat behind me at the lobby lounge in the hotel, who looked like a foreigner, whose voice was curdled and extra masculine in the Louis Armstrong fashion, and confident and deliberate. He had three men before him and he told them he has been in the coffee business for forty-five years. After a while he told them he is an Anglo Indian, that his relatives have all migrated to Australia and England, and his wife cannot take plantation life any more and has settled in Mangalore. He spends his evenings alone in the plantation bungalow and watches sports on television. His drink is brandy and his sport was rugby.

The following morning I asked the reception for his name. They gave me also his number. I’m going to meet him when I next go to Hassan. If his story is as exciting as I suspect, I’ll tell it to you.

See also: Why did you come here?

Every introduction to Bangalore speaks of the four towers of Kempegowda that marked the corners of the capital he founded four-hundred years ago. But these small things are not towers—not in the way the Jin Mao or the Sears or the Qutb Minar are towers. Kempegowda’s Towers are small gopuras, tiny things built on dome-shaped virgin rock, each a mere nipple on a supine breast.

The Ramana Maharshi shrine is on a tangent down from the northern gopura near Mekhri Circle. I tried to meditate there today, but couldn’t, because of two men speaking fine Tamil at the door. I don’t know the language so well, but I could tell that there was nothing spiritual in their dialog, but words of commerce in this business city of Bangalore, and their voices had an excellent timbre which was doubly distracting. I opened my eyes after a while, but without anger. (I remembered the story from school of Sage Durvasa, upon whom, when he was immersed in meditation, a sparrow released itself from a branch above. He opened his eyes and raised his head to the sparrow. It burned to ash.)

I am no sage, and my eyes opened to the Bhagawan’s: inviting eyes; riveting eyes; loving eyes; the most unusual eyes I’ve encountered. Into them I melted, and felt no desire to resume meditation. I sat a long time. I like to pray here. It is clean and dry, unlike in our temples. It is quiet. There are no rituals. I can be religious in the way I want: I prostrate myself sometimes. Some visits, I do not even do a namasthe: I merely sink into veerasana and meditate and afterward I gaze into the Bhagawan’s eyes.

I ask for nothing.

Today I wondered who took this picture of the Bhagawan. And I thought of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was in Arunachala during the last two weeks of the Bhagawan’s life. On the night the Bhagawan died a meteor died a brilliant death in the skies: thousands saw its light over the Arunachala mountain. Seeing that sight in the heavens the poet Harindranath Chattopadhyaya shouted: mark the time! Cartier-Bresson, who was with him, shouted back: thirteen to nine! That was the moment of departure of the Bhagawan: the men ran to the ashram knowing it in their hearts.

The following day Cartier-Bresson tried to capture the frenzy of the devotees at the burial. It was delayed into dusk and he was disappointed with what he achieved with his camera, and cursed his luck.

I finished up the day watching The Sting, seeing Chicago of 1932, a post-depression story in which the thief robbed the burglar, and the conman swindled the fraudster, and all the money there was, was bad money. The famed blue of Paul Newman’s eyes didn’t show so much, but when he smiled, and Robert Redford too, all the gray of the time turned to shining silver.

This week, on the treadmill, it has been The Who and Janis Joplin. It was Joplin today, and I finished my exertions to the tune of Ball ‘n’ Chain and her messianic advise to stay locked on today, to hang on to the moment.

Zen. If I could do what she and zen ask I should feel better, so I’m trying to be present, but I’m also wondering which tomorrow will change these straits of today. Eleven days have passed since the strike in the main factory. Three workmen have come in and joined those who never went out. The supervisors and managers and other leaders are pitching in with their hands, the sum of them producing a fraction of the normal output. The rest are out at the gate, shouting in unison for justice that is rightfully due the company.

They’ve been shouting abuses that I didn’t think—for twenty-one years—they knew and used.

And they’ve been whispering lies: regarding the purpose of the strike; regarding the procedures at the labor office; regarding the outcomes before the Deputy Labor Commissioner; and that the management is sending conciliatory messages. Money in lump sum has been mentioned and who hasn’t a problem for which a lump sum is the exact cure they’re praying for? With such falsehoods they’ve drawn the numbers of workmen they want, and they’re saying they’ll sit at the gate for three or six or nine months.

A good number of workmen are women, and some among them are the most spirited.

They’ve called the media—the newspapers, the television channels. Early last week the TV channels arrived at the gate. We rushed our press releases to them. The channels carried the story the same night, and one of them took care to mention our version. The next morning, when we went through the gates, the shouts were the loudest of all days.

That morning, in the distance, an arm came through the bars above the wall by the gate and twisted and shook when I walked from the factory to the cafeteria.

My lawyer rued with me how far that defiance has gone: In Coimbatore, a few weeks ago, they killed the Chief of Human Resources of Pricol; in Chennai, the Managing Director of the Ballal chain of vegetarian restaurants was knifed in the kitchen by the cook who was also the union leader; in Tumkur fifteen union-hands beat up seven officers of the company; and the memory has not faded of the lynching with hammers and iron rods, of the CEO of Oerlikon Graziano in Noida, by a band of workmen protesting the dismissal of eleven colleagues for non-performance.

We have dismissed thirteen, for instigating and leading two illegal strikes last year. Our people haven’t shown murderous intent, but I saw the flame in their eyes when I stood before them last week and they cried their slogans at me—fiery eyes that wouldn’t look into mine.

Two men came from the press midweek and spent time interviewing them and taking pictures. We brought the two inside and gave them the full story and sent with them the prints of our statements. The story is in the paper today. The photograph has women in the foreground, arms punching the air above, mouthing slogans, looking so wronged. The men are in the rear. The union president has issued a statement that the administrative staff has been harassing women, that the thirteen are wantonly dismissed, and that they have suffered sustained exploitation. Not a word is written of our side of the story in the paper, one of the oldest, among the most respected.

I went through the hour of dismay that every such move from them causes me. Then I walked for an hour and my head cleared. My lawyer called from Bangkok where he has gone for a week and said it is alright, that I should focus on production and that he’d handle the rest. I floated back down to Sunday on that assurance. I’m good now, until the workmen strike me with their next idea. There is talk among them of shaving heads. I’m imagining how that would look. I will not laugh.

I’d not imagined I’d be at war with them one day.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll abide by Janis Joplin and not peer toward far-off days. This Sunday seems quite fine for today. As regards this moment, I’m mixing Pearl Jam and Van Halen and Coldplay into playlists for the next trip on the treadmill.

I’m also struggling with wishful outcomes that wiggle like worms in the mind; they’re clung to each other and won’t be shaken off.