A Treatise on Europe: Swedish Comedy

Sometimes you can’t predict what living in a rainforest will teach you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned that I miss out on living in North America, it is European national stereotypes. We’ve got our stereotype that Europeans as a whole are culture snobs with awkward-looking haircuts, but generally speaking most of us don’t know enough Europeans to have stereotypes about specific nationalities (the French being the exception, obviously). But in recent weeks I have become enlightened. It turns out that there is a whole plethora of hilarious national stereotyping going on that I wasn’t aware of. I don’t necessarily agree with all of these stereotypes, but the stated purpose of this blog is to educate the masses and as I do not support censorship I really have no choice but to pass this information on. I’ll start with what I’ve learned about Sweden.
The first thing I learned was that Swedish people are universally known for being unfunny. This came as a shock to me because the Swedish people I’ve seen all look so cool and Mats Sundin was a hero to me growing up. But then I realized that these two observations were completely unrelated to their sense of humor and might in fact prove the validity of this stereotype. In terms of how cool they look, I really only see “normal” Swedish people at the winter Olympics snowboarding events. The reason they look cool is that they’re always incredibly attractive (this is not meant to imply that people who are not incredibly attractive can’t look cool, because there’s lots of ugly people I would love to hang out with, i.e. the guy who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings) and are snowboarders, which in general is a good look. Now I’m going to speak in generalizations here, but the attractiveness that I associate with Swedes is probably an indicator of how unfunny they are. I mean, how many physically attractive comedians can you actually name? And honestly, can anybody actually name a Swedish comedian?
The British are obviously known for their comedy (although I think that Russell Brand guy is pretty lame). There aren’t that many French comedians I can name, but I remember the movie Bogus with Gerard Dipardieu having some funny moments. Also, I happen to think mimes are hysterical, so the French have that going for them. When I searched the term “German comedy” in Wikipedia it claimed there were 39 pages. I could only actually find one page, but somewhere out there are 38 more pages, which in my opinion is a lot of pages. But when I opened an article on Swedish humor in The Local, which is apparently an English language online Swedish News publication, this is what it had to say about Swedish comedy:

Swedes might often come across as a rather amusing lot. But as a rule, their idiosyncrasies raise a bigger smile than their comic timing.
When it comes to comedy, the Swedes are usually deemed a rather sober lot. But scratch the surface and you find a rich seam of ribaldry.

Now I’ve got no problem with rich seams of ribaldry, but this description doesn’t exactly make Sweden sound like a nation of Richard Pryors.
I should note that I think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Not everyone needs to be dropping wisecracks all over the place. By all means Sweden should keep doing what it’s doing and continue producing classy hockey players who will provide steady leadership to teams in troubled times (I’m referring to Mats Sundin here and not Daniel Alfredsson, who in my opinion is a bit of a prick). I’m just relieved that if I ever have to pick a European country to see a comedy festival I can cross Sweden off the list.
So there’s your first lesson in stereotypes that Europeans (not me, I’m just the messenger) have of each other. Sweden’s not that funny. I hope this information is useful to you.

The Fallout from Mumbai

Writing about my initial reaction to the terror attacks in Mumbai last week was easy. The vast majority of people worldwide are horrified by acts of mass-murder. To post about the reactions of Indians I spoke to, I simply needed to relate fears similar to those that I myself was experiencing. Over the next few days however, I tried and failed to write a follow-up post about how those reactions were evolving.
The Indians who I manage at the Rainforest Retreat are mostly born and raised on rural farms. Although they are brilliant at farm work and are caring and often charismatic with guests (in spite of massive language barriers), they are not educated in International Affairs. In the days following the Mumbai attack, their response changed from one of sadness to one of anger towards Pakistan. None of my staff are religious fundamentalists. They are an assortment of Hindus and Christians, and they live happily in close quarters. Not once have I heard one of them speak derogatorily towards Muslims. Religion seems to be a matter of personal belief, and Coorg is known as being a beacon of religious understanding. The anger they expressed towards Pakistan was deeply rooted and frightening.
My trekking-guide Ravi approached myself and two Dutch guests at dinner and excitedly informed me that India would soon be marching its army towards the Pakistani border. It was later related to me that many of the staff regretted that India had not gone to war with Pakistan over Kashmir in the earlier years of the decade. The staff’s initial sadness at seeing their countrymen murdered was replaced by a sense of anticipation.
The next day I decided to check with my bosses about the fallout from the attack. Their response was markedly different. They completely dismissed the notion that a war with Pakistan was anywhere near imminent, and explained that India’s news services have become increasingly sensationalist in recent years. It recalls the rapid rise in influence of right-wing pundits in the year immediately following September 11th. India, just like America, suffers from a news-media that manipulates it’s reporting in order to further a certain agenda. Much of the news in Coorg comes from Tamil Nadu, a state that is renowned for its deep distrust of Muslims (and other religions other than Tamil, which are seen as being foreign and a threat to the state’s Tamil traditions). Many of the Western opinions that I have read seem to be based more on these media reports and the subsequent reactions of their audience that the reactions of educated Indians.
In Madikeri, thousands of Indian congregated on December 3rd to show solidarity with those in Mumbai and to express their disapproval of terrorism. From what I have read in the Indian Free Press (based in Mysore), these demonstrations against terrorism are becoming more and more common. The fears I expressed in my last post about terrorism’s potential success (in demoralizing Indians and their faith in the government) appears to be being countered by mass condemnations of terrorism.
All of this brings me to an article by Eliot Friedman that was published in the New York Times on December 2nd. In the article, Friedman rightly praises the Pakistani government’s response to the terrorist attacks and promises of co-operation. He then raises a point which I find to be quite poignant. Recalling the mass protests against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, Friedman reasons that the Pakistani people have the ability to mobilize quickly and “express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective”. Friedman argues that the Pakistani people must at some point stand up and demonstrate their disapproval of the terrorists who are murdering innocent people.
As a good liberal I obviously believe that the hate that causes terrorism is bred by an unjust socio-economic system. But I also know that the vast majority of Muslims (even those who come from the exact same situations as terrorists) do not storm foreign cities and murder innocent people. I know this, but my Indian staff do not. How powerful a message would it send if this peaceful majority met en masse and full-heartedly denounced the acts of mass-terrorism being perpetrated by those who claimed to represent their interests.
I am not so naïve as to suggest that a mass-demonstration against terrorism in Pakistan would stop future terrorist acts from being committed altogether or resolve the hatred between the two countries. The suicide bombers who attempted to kill Benazir Bhutto proved that the peaceful majority could not silence the violent minority. But given the response of my Indian staff to Pakistan’s involvement in the terrorist attacks, a demonstration of this sort could certainly begin to aid the relations between the two countries. There is certainly a deep hate that I cannot fully comprehend between the two countries, but if relations are to improve in any way than it is possible that the Pakistani people must show Indians that the attack on Mumbai was not done in their name.

The Mumbai Terrorist Attack

As gunfights rage on around the Jewish Outreach Centre in Mumbai and the Taj Hotel has only recently been declared to be under army control, I thought that I might offer my thoughts on the terror that was unleashed on Mumbai two nights ago.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai yesterday night bear little resemblance to the other major international terror attacks since 9/11. In part this comes down to the method of violence used. It is perhaps a sad reflection on the state of the world that I have become de-sensitized to the horrors of suicide bombers. But something about this attack felt much more brutal. The attackers apparently arrived in speedboats close to the Gateway of India (where Mumbai’s tourist district is centered). Some of the men carried AK-47s, while others were armed with explosive devices for strategic locations and others carried grenades to fight the authorities.

The Daily Telegraph described the tactic as trying to imitate ghazwa, a tactic used by the Prophet Mohammed to destabilize political authority in Mecca. “The tactic consists of surprise no-holds-barred attacks simultaneously launched against a caravan or settlement with the aim of demoralising the enemy and hastening his capitulation”. The attacks on Mumbai recalled the devastation of the tragic massacres at Virginia Tech or Colombine more than the bomb attacks on London, Madrid, or even the commuter train attacks that previously hit Mumbai in 2006.

It is the level of organization of this imitation-ghazwa that is most disconcerting. Indians I have spoken to all seem much more concerned with the attack in Mumbai than they did with the bombings in Delhi, Jaipur, or Bangalore earlier this year. The consensus appears to be that the level of organization was too great to have been justifiably missed by Indian anti-terrorism officials. In a country with over a billion people it will always be difficult to isolate and monitor the miniscule minority who are prone to violence. Stopping one person from blowing up themselves and several dozen innocent bystanders is nearly impossible. But the scale of this attack was so large that there is little excuse for the Indian Intelligence agencies being caught unaware.

The planning that must have gone into this attack is astounding. Weapons would have had to have been purchased and deployed while manpower was recruited. The route of attack would have had to be studied and then related to the hundreds of men involved in carrying it out. For India’s government and anti-terrorism team to have been completely ignorant to this attack’s development represents, as MJ Akbar wrote today in The Guardian, “a collapse of governance”.

It seems to be the government and police’s failure that most frightens the Indians I have spoken with. Terrorism and violence are not new occurrences in India. Since achieving independence in 1947 the country has dealt with violent uprisings and terrorists from across the country. Throughout the recent wave of terrorism however the government’s response has seemed particularly inept. After every attack, top politicians promise that the perpetrators of the violence will be sought out and punished. Two months later however, there is inevitably another attack. If the goal of terrorism is political and is meant to destabilize authority, the lack of confidence in the government that appears to be growing among Indians may very much prove that the terrorist’s tactics are succeeding. It is this growing concern that seems to scare my Indian colleagues most of all.

I will end this post for today on that sobering thought. Fortunately, in tomorrow’s follow-up post I will explore the reaction to the Mumbai terrorist attacks Mumbai in 2006 and how India’s resilience throughout history suggests that the picture may not in fact be so grim.

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"The White Tiger" Review

It has been a long time since I wrote about a book without following a rigid set of essay guidelines. This is the first time in five years of writing about literature that I will not be referencing post-colonial or third-wave feminist theories in an effort to explain the hidden meaning of a character’s subconscious intentions. Bear with me as I fight my inner English-major instincts and attempt to review The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
Since being awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize The White Tiger has been nearly impossible to find in Indian bookshops. I had scoured the walls of bookshops from Mysore to Pondicherry in an effort to purchase a copy, but each store could offer only apologies. Fortunately guests visiting my retreat were encountering the same problems so when I finally found a copy in Chennai I was able to read the book with absolutely no pre-conceptions. For the record, if you are hoping for the same luxury this would be a good place to stop reading.
The White Tiger tells the story of Balram as he writes a series of letters to the Premier of China explaining his rise from a humble tea-shop worker in rural India to a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. It sounds like an inspiring concept for a story, if not particularly original. However, the entire book is filled with such an overwhelming cynicism towards both the “new India” of Bangalore and the “old India” of Balram’s rural upbringing that a reader with little knowledge of Indian culture would be left rather disgusted with the values of the country.
I learned long ago not to suggest that a likeable character is integral to good literature (after receiving a low mark for an essay written about why I hated Wuthering Heights). Balram never once comes across as endearing, but the character was so funny that his questionable morality was not what turned me off The White Tiger. From the beginning of Balram’s story he is absolutely never able to “catch a break” but because the narration is done by the character in retrospect he maintains his sense of humour. He excels at school but is forced to drop out and work in a tea shop to pay off family debts. He is mistreated by the family he is hired to drive and by the other servants they employ, while his family at home demands that every rupee he earns be sent home. Throughout all of this, Balram’s narration maintains a self-deprecating element that kept me laughing.
Adiga demonstrates the hardships of growing up without money or connections in India, and ultimately seems to want his reader to question whether or not Balram is justified in murdering his employers and stealing their money. This crime is revealed by Balram in the first chapter, and this technique works effectively to make the reader view all of the employers’ actions through the lens of this crime. In scenes where it seemed that Balram’s severe mistreatment was inescapable I could not help but support his decision to murder.
However, my issue with The White Tiger lies in the feeling that Balram was meant to represent the hardships and morality of all of “dark India” (the rural and poor) while his employers were meant to represent all of the rich. Adiga writes with an anger that seems intent on deconstructing the portrayal of “India Rising” that we are often exposed to in the West. The text does not allow for an alternative reality to Balram’s. It seems to suggest that all Indians, whether rich or poor, are amoral in their pursuit of the wealth this “New India” promises. No character is willing to offer a helping hand. The only character from the West is completely repulsed by India and the country takes a significant toll on her. This might be meant as a reflection of Westerners’ inability to recognize the beauty of Indian culture. However, when it seems that no other character possesses this ability either, the Westerner’s distaste begins to feel justified.
While Adiga’s writing is viciously humorous, his apparent loathing for modern India seems misplaced. Why does he feel such a strong need to dispel notions of the new Indian prosperity? I have yet to read an article about India’s economic rise that has neglected to mention the poor. India’s rise is not portrayed as being anywhere near complete but there is a growing middle class who are escaping the bonds servitude and poverty. There is absolutely work that still needs to be done to help the poor attain security from hunger and disease but to suggest that all Indians are only self-interested is in my opinion inaccurate and insulting. I see proof of Indian generosity every day when Indian guests tip my staff more than any Western guest. I see proof when my tour-guide will not accept a cookie for himself, but will gladly accept a gift for any of the children who live amongst the staff. I saw proof when I was sick in Pondicherry and an Indian rickshaw driver drove me to my hotel free of charge.
Adiga’s writing style is captivating, as Balram’s narration mixes the aforementioned humour with rising tension throughout the narrative. However, after I finished I was left feeling that Indians should feel deeply concerned that the voters for the Booker Prize chose to have millions of readers around the world be exposed to this biased portrayal of their culture. The White Tiger could have been salvaged if it had offered any sort of solution to the problems it described. But Adiga did not rise to this challenge and The White Tiger, instead of presenting a message of hope to those caught in the system it condemns, came across as a bitter and cynical attack on a nation with a diversity of cultures and traditions that deserved much better.

Sports that are named after insects...

If there is one thing I understand it is passionate sports fans. For all intents and purposes there is no reason why I should allow my temperament to be influenced by the success and failures of a North-London based soccer team on a weekly basis. But if Arsenal loses I am devastated. The same goes for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Raptors and Blue Jays. During the Olympics I am an emotional wreck. Sports that I pay no attention to for almost four years at a time can nearly bring me to tears. An Argentine grandfather is enough to make me vulnerable to heart break if Argentina underperforms at the World Cup.

I mention all of this only to make clear that I am not judgmental of the lunacy that often accompanies supporting a sports club. Being a real fan requires a level of irrationality I can absolutely relate to.

And yet, I simply cannot rap my head around India’s obsession with cricket. When I arrived in Chennai last week I had every intention of sitting in a coffee shop and studying for my GRE test. It took me exactly twenty minutes to realize this would be completely and utterly impossible. I had somehow managed to be unaware of the cricket test match being played between India and England. I say “somehow” because had I looked at the front cover of any Indian newspaper or taken notice of the hordes of men crowded around television sets across the country, this oversight would never have occurred.

Every coffee shop in Chennai was packed with people skipping work to watch England bat, while the windows of these shops were lined with people unable to pay for coffee but still wanting to watch the match. I am sure that an Indian arriving in Canada during our run to the Olympic hockey gold medal would have been just as baffled as I was, but a game of hockey only lasts three hours! A cricket test match is at least eight hours a day for five excruciating days. Imagine the sort of psychological damage that would be inflicted if you had to watch a forty hour baseball game. It would be absolutely intolerable.

Furthermore, one thing I have noticed is that almost all reminders of British colonialism are reviled in most areas of India. But cricket, the most British of all sports, somehow transcends this hatred. The British invented cricket, practiced for several centuries, and then exported the game to its colonies where they would prove their superiority by defeating the natives. Perhaps the importance of the match against the British can be traced to a need disprove the superiority of the former colonizers. If this is the case, then I will admit that this would be an acceptable explanation.

While trying to determine the circumference of a circle for the first time since I decided to study English, the rules of cricket were explained to me by a pleasant Indian fellow named Kumar. It turns out it’s really not as complicated as I had been led to believe. Basically, every team has ten batters and those batters hit the ball for as many points as they can. A batter earns points by running back and forth between two sticks (called wickets) once they hit the ball. Each batter bats continually and earns as many points as possible until the fielding team gets them out. A batter can become out by hitting a ball in the air that is caught, or if the pitcher hits the sticks with the ball when he pitches. As far as I can tell this is all that happens….for forty hours.

I should also note that the most traditional form of cricket involves playing five of these five day test matches. Therefore, you would play 25 days (or 200 hours) of cricket and I assume they would call it a super-cricket although I cannot be sure.

Kumar tried to explain what exactly he loved so much about cricket, and offered this theory (which is expanded on by me).While cricket is believed to be the second most popular sport in the world 90% of the worldwide cricket revenue comes from India. English and Australian cricketers are currently fighting desperately for the right to play in the Indian Premier League as the salaries are significantly higher in the IPL than in the West. Cricket represents the complete opposite of every other major sport. Kumar acknowledged to me that part of cricket’s appeal to Indians is that it is the one sport where India is most powerful. It is quite empowering for Indians to see successful Western athletes moving to India in order to make a living as it represents the fact that India presents opportunities that the West cannot. Cricket’s popularity in India has really exploded over the last twenty five years, and it could be said that India’s rise to power in the cricket world echoes the rise of economic opportunity for India. It is the only sport that accurately reflects India’s improving position in the world. This theory doesn’t necessarily explain how anyone can actually overcome the tedium of watching cricket for eight hours, but it does offer a frame of reference for why the game itself might hold some attraction.

Whether you buy this theory or not I am going to keep on exploring the inner Indian psyche in an effort to figure this cricket thing out. I can’t promise any conclusive results and it seems unlikely that I will become a cricket convert. However, to give cricket its due I definitely don’t think it is as stupid as golf and that’s got to count for something.

About those meat-consumption posts.....

Do you know what is awesome? Setting yourself a public deadline of posting three blogs exploring meat-consumption in three days before realizing that you had twenty school children arriving at your resort 12 hours later.

Do you know what is even more awesome? Setting yourself a public deadline of three posts on meat-consumption in three days before realizing that you had twenty school children arriving at your resort twelve hours later and then having to travel halfway across India to write your GREs three days later.

My apologies to the readers who were looking forward to reading about my opinions on meat-consumption. I will get back to it later in the week. Today however, I am going to post one for the sports-lovers out there.

The one thing everyone is talking about these days....

Most of my job involves interacting with tourists. I am responsible for some accounting as well as all of the bookings for our guesthouses, but a large part of my job also involves spending a lot of time hanging out with guests. This results in me having many of the same conversations again and again. I have learned that most travelers seem to really hate Delhi but love Hampi and the entire state of Kerala. Politically it seems that almost every traveler is concerned about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and most people will back down on criticizing Canada for the seal hunt as soon as I get defensive.
However, by far the most common conversation I have had with tourists revolves around one thing. Meat. Whether the tourists are vegetarian, vegan, or devoted carnivore like me, they all want to talk about meat. People are obsessed with it. The vegetarians want to know if I have seen the error in my ways and have sworn off meat forever. The carnivores want to know what type of meat I miss the most (obviously beef). Two nights ago President Obama was elected as the first African American President in history, and I ended up talking about the one time the Rainforest Retreat’s cook served pork even though the only guests were Israeli. Last night I discussed the fact that in India mutton is actually goat as opposed to sheep. I have no idea what animal mutton is in Canada, but I acted surprised because this seemed like the right thing to do.

It is far easier to be vegetarian in India than it is in Canada. Part of the reason I hate vegetarian restaurants in Toronto is that everything seems to be a vegetarian version of a meat product. A veggie-burger is inevitably going to disappoint because I associate a hamburger with a juicy piece of beef nestled gloriously between two buns. In India however, the vegetarian dishes are not pretending to be anything they are not. They are vegetables mixed with spices and at the Rainforest Retreat they can often divine. Therefore, most meals are not spent thinking about how much better what I am eating would be if it was beef.

All of this meat-talk began to make me think about whether I myself cold actually convert to vegetarianism. The inhumane aspects of meat processing are nothing new to me. I have no problem spending an extra dollar or two on a free range chicken and frankly, this is as far as I am willing to go. I happen to think meat is delicious (and easy to cook), and if it weren’t for pork chops my university diet would have consisted mostly of pasta and mayonnaise. From a political perspective I think there are other issues that my time would be better spent being outraged at. I read a book recently about chocolate production and I think trying to help out the child-slaves responsible for chocolate production in Cote D’Ivoire is more important than a bunch of cows. Not that I am actively helping these children at all, but I do try and avoid chocolate whenever possible.

Given how much of my life is now spent discussing meat, I feel as if this would be a good time to look into some of the issues surrounding meat production and consumption worldwide. With the global food crisis in full effect, what we eat and how it is produced is becoming more and more important. Beginning tomorrow, this blog will be devoted to a three-part series investigating various issues involving meat production I have been exposed to while in India. So if you are in to that sort of thing, please check it out.

Follow up on my Obama-Victory Post

Just a quick post for now, but I wanted follow up my blog on President Obama’s victory by linking to an editorial in the New York Times. The article talks about the youth’s use of communication technology during Obama’s campaign. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/fashion/09boomers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ). It is far less celebratory than my post, but my post was written amidst the euphoria of President Obama’s acceptance speech. I could have been writing about the return of the bubonic plague and the tone of the post would have still been pretty positive.
The Times labels my generation “Generation O”, and refers to Young Americans as “the ground troops of the campaign”. My mom pointed out that the effect of the youth and the internet was covered in the early stages of the campaign, but had not been touched on recently. I was really pleased to see that our contribution to the campaign was being recognized in as reputable a newspaper as the New York Times.
I should have a post on eating meat later on in the day so please check back if that sounds like something you’d be interested in.

Danny's Day in the Field

In my day I have worked on a golf course, installed underground irrigation systems, and at one point was the guy responsible for finding missing shoes at a major Toronto “sporting-lifestyle” store. Prior to this morning however, I had never been a farmhand. But as of 12 hours ago, I can officially say that there is some small part of Danny Austin that is a farmer. Hypothetically, if civilization crumbled and I was stranded with a friend who knew how to cultivate edible plants but for some reason didn’t know how to plant them, I just might survive.
This morning when the farm manager Mutuponde asked me whether I wanted to help out with planting in the fields I was pretty much priming myself for a good Internet cruise. My mornings in the office are spent corresponding with future guests, but there is always time to keep up-to-date on the latest news. I was going to try and find other overzealous Obama supporters and read their reactions to the election. I was going to read various previews of the Arsenal-Manchester United match taking place this afternoon in London. I was even planning on checking up on the latest Iron Man 2 script updates (apparently Terrence Howard has been replaced by Don Cheadle). However, once the offer to prove myself in the field came along, my internet-surfing itinerary was immediately a thing of the past.
My morning of farm work began with planting cardamom plants. Basically, any individual cardamom plant will provide a high yield of beans for five years. After those five years, most farmers will cut them down and replace them with new plants. If however, you pull a stock of cardamom out from the roots and replant it, a new stock with identical properties will grow directly next to it. You can therefore produce an entire crop of top-quality cardamom plants simply by monitoring what plants produce high yields or appear resistant to disease and replanting them. For the first hour and a half of my farming adventure I dug holes, and my boss’s daughter Maya would stick a six foot cardamom stock into the ground. It was such a fun change from sitting in an office that it made me feel like I should consider a change of careers. I thought to myself “Wow, I was born for this! I am such a great farmer!”
As it turns out though, when Mutuponde asked me if I wanted to help out with the farm work he declined to mention that after the first hour and a half I would have to kneel down with all my weight on the balls of my feet and plant young coffee plants for a full two hours more. It’s like playing leap-frog for two hours, but without any of the leaping or the hilarity of seeing grown adults acting like frogs. If you are like me and have a history of back problems, this ends up being incredibly painful. I should revise my earlier hypothetical end-of-civilization claim. It would appear that if I had to survive in a post-apocalyptic world by planting young coffee plants I would not last long. How anybody spends every day of their adult life crouched over in this position digging holes is beyond me. By the end of the morning I could barely move. I ended up spending a good portion of my afternoon lying in bed wondering when my Advil would kick in.
When I was in high school all of the supposed “tough guys” were obsessed with gangster rappers like 50 Cent. It turns out that they had it wrong. 50 Cent may have been able to sell crack on the mean streets of Brooklyn, but I do not think he would last one hour on a farmer’s field. Instead of baggy jeans and hooded sweat shirts, the teenage tough guys at my school should have been wearing overalls and straw hats if they wanted to prove how hardcore they really were.

Yes We Can? Nope....WE JUST DID!!!

Did they actually do it? Americans? The Americans who elected George W. Bush twice? The Americans who I have vilified as imperialists since I can remember knowing what "imperialist" meant? I find myself sitting here puzzled. They did it? America actually did it? Barack Obama is actually the 44th President of the United States?
I'm so used to major historical events involving the United States either being deplorable (Iraq) tragic (September 11th) or both (Katrina). But it feels like for the first time in my life, America truly rose to the occasion. They actually did it.
Americans got fed up with dishonest politicians. They got fed up of voting for the guy they'd want to have a beer with. They decided that the President of the Most Powerful Country in the World should be someone exceptional. And then they actually went ahead and voted en masse for the first African American President in history.
It almost doesn't make any sense. I've wanted to believe it was going to happen. I've told myself over and over again that it was going to happen. But it's sort of like being a girl who's dating a guy who constantly promises to make her dinner but always cancels....you get used to being disappointed. However, for the first time in my life, America delivered on its promise.
I think what makes it so special is that it feels as if my generation got the ball rolling on this one. We are so often criticized for being apolitical, but I think this is our victory. It was Facebook groups and Youtube videos that really made people stand up and pay attention to Obama. These are the tools of my generation. Would anyone have been able to watch Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention if it weren’t for people posting it all over the internet? How many students heard Obama’s name for the first time two years ago and then became inspired by his passionate words through Youtube?
These tools are different from organizing student protests like they did in the 1960s, but perhaps they are just as effective. Huge numbers of protesters showed up in 1999 to voice their discontent against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. In 2001, I joined tens of thousands of protesters in Quebec City to march the streets in protest of the Free Trade Area of the America. But these protests ultimately did not work. How could they inspire anybody when the mainstream media only showed the violent confrontations with riot police?
I genuinely believe that it was in response to this biased reporting that my generation turned to new-media. Through the Internet, we were able to communicate without the filters of CNN or FoxNews.
If you look at new-media in the last decade, it has evolved into a pretty powerful political instrument. Even "An Inconvenient Truth" was really nothing more than a Powerpoint Presentation. Al Gore is obviously not of my generation, but he represents the same phenomenon. When he could not spread his message through the conventional media, he informed the world about global warming through another outlet.
Between Youtube, Facebook, and the blogging community, I feel that the political left have become organized and are able to spread their message. Could Obama's campaign have happened four years ago? Or would FoxNews and CNN been too powerful? In 2004, John Kerry so brutally depicted as a coward in spite of being a war-hero with over 30 years of experience fighting for progressive social policies in the American Senate. Young Americans were not going to let that happen again. Bill O’Reilly’s criticisms of Barack Obama’s speeches and policies lost their power when millions of people are seeing those speeches first hand on Youtube.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that young people are entirely responsible for Obama’s presidency. But to say that we got the ball rolling is completely fair. His inspired words were delivered to computer screens around the country by a media-form that young people created and have used to give our political beliefs a voice.
The gut-wrenching disappointment of the 2004 election feels so long ago right now. I still am having a hard time believing this actually happened. Last night, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America. They did it. They actually did it!!!

The People's Party

I’ve never been one to criticize civic holidays. I may not always understand why I am getting a day off work, but the reasons behind the holiday are always less important than the free time it affords me. I don’t even try to understand why we have a “Family Day” in February while we only get one minute of silence on Remembrance Day in November. You would think that honouring our glorious dead would be more significant than extra recreational family-time during the coldest month of the year. But once February rolls around I couldn’t care less what the reason is, I am just happy for the paid holiday.

Well it turns out that this sort of cavalier attitude towards holidays doesn’t exist in India. It’s go big or go home when it comes to civic holidays. In the past week Indians have had three national holidays. The first day was for Gandhi’s birthday. If there is anyone out there who could possibly suggest that this is not a good reason for a holiday, I strongly suggest watching the Ben Kingsley movie and reconsidering. The second holiday was actually only in anticipation for the third day off and historically was set aside for workers to wash their tools and machines.

The third holiday, called Dussera, is the topic of this blog post. To put it in perspective, when I asked my ten-year old friend Maya why Dussera was celebrated she told me “Dussera is in celebration of Rama’s victory in the most amazing fight in the history of the world”. When I asked Maya’s mother for a more detailed explanation, she shrugged her shoulders and told me Maya pretty much had it right.

So Dussera is the celebration of this fellow Rama, and his epic defeat over his nemesis Ravana. From what I understand, Rama was the heir to the throne of Ayodyah and his name literally means “the perfect man”. In spite of being so perfect, his father granted a wish to one of his wives that her son Ravana would become king. Rama was therefore stripped of his right to the throne and sent into exile. Fortunately for Rama he had been a loving husband and brother, because Rama’s wife and younger brother decided to follow him into exile and live in the woods with him for 14 years. So I guess at least he wasn’t lonely.

Less fortunately for Rama, this fellow Ravana wasn’t satisfied with stealing Rama’s throne and forcing him to live in the woods. For some reason Ravana decided to kidnap Rama’s wife. I am not sure exactly what Ravana was trying to accomplish through this, but my guess is that Rama’s wife must have been exceptionally beautiful. Either that, or Ravana was just completely obsessed with making Rama’s life as pathetic as possible and greatly underestimated what sort of revenge Rama was capable of. For example, Ravana probably was not aware that Rama was capable of living a life of “perfect adherence to Dharma despite the harshest tests of life” (thank you Wikipedia). I have never considered kidnapping another man’s life, but I somehow think that if I was into that sort of thing I would avoid anyone who had literally never sinned. I don’t know that much about karma, but I know it would probably be on the perfect man’s side.

For the record, if you are beginning to find this post long please understand that I am trying to summarize India’s most important epic (The Ramayana) in three paragraphs. In an effort to make a long story short though, Rama raised an army of magical creatures and led them to battle against Ravana’s forces. Rama’s army managed to win the most destructive battle of all time, and in the Rama killed Ravana and is reunited with his kidnapped wife. Naturally, he then reclaimed his throne and apparently became Emperor of the world for the happiest eleven thousand years of all time.

Not a bad reason for a holiday in my opinion.

Madikeri, which normally has a population of 30 000 people, is swarmed with over 150 000 visitors during Dussera. I arrived at the festivities at 10 o’clock at night and was greeted by techno music blaring from fifteen speakers piled in a truck. The entire town was overflowing with dancing men. The entire town resembled the most insane and homo-erotic dance party I have ever seen. Every store was open from the time of my arrival until my departure at 4am and was surrounded by dancing teenage boys.

Periodically the music would stop and a procession of drummers emerge followed by giant floats depicting Rama’s army. Following the floats of course, would be another massive dance party.

I have never in my life seen so many men dancing. The women mostly congregated on the outskirts of the dancing with their families, but this did not stop the men from going absolutely wild. As I left I was told that all of the parties would eventually move behind floats to Madikeri’s central square where the dancing would continue until 8 in the morning. The procession was meant to symbolize Rama’s return to India, where massive celebrations met the return of the rightful king.

The Dussera celebrations completely defied every conventional Indian stereotype. The concept of Indians being conservative and quiet is quite clearly inaccurate. I have attended many Canada Day and New Year’s celebrations, but have never come close to seeing a party with as much enthusiasm as I witnessed on Dussera. It’s possible that Canadian history just doesn’t elicit the same hysteria as the greatest fight ever fought. I just can’t get that riled up over the eight minutes it took for the English to win on the Plains of Abraham. Either way, Dussera has raised my expectations of what a national holiday can be. Family Day is going to have a lot to live up to this February.

A Tribute to my Friend the Duck

A couple posts ago I got pretty heated while talking about the geese that walk around like they own the Mojo plantation. Some of my readers have questioned my manhood for complaining about geese-attacks. There have even been some who have questioned my understanding of the animal kingdom. They tell me that all animals are territorial and that I am invading their natural habitats. Others have reminded me that geese are beautiful and accused me of goose-envy. One particular grump e-mailed me to tell me that this sort of hatred for animals resulted in entire species going extinct. I’m going to stick to my guns on this one though, because I don’t think any of my critics have ever been attacked by geese and I am pretty sure goose-extinction shouldn’t be anyone’s top concern these days. The worldwide economy looks like it’s in a long-term recession and this idiot is worried about geese?
Now, I know that writing about geese for the second time in my first ten blog posts might call my credibility as a serious writer into question. If however, that is what you are thinking than you should reserve judgement on my writing for a minute. Because this post is not actually about geese. It is about ducks.
My literary reputation remains intact.
In my post on geese I commented on the duck that lives with the geese. I’m pretty sure my exact words were “the duck just goes about minding its own business and eating dirt”. It might not have seemed like a particularly endearing comment, but something about that duck waddling around eating dirt really connected with me. For an animal to gain my affection I don’t really ask for that much. I don’t need an animal to do tricks or play games with me. I don’t need an animal to protect me and my family. Generally speaking, my only requirement to enjoy the company of an animal is that it not attack me. So I’ve got to say that even though the duck hung out with the asshole geese, I came to appreciate it for not bowing to peer pressure and physically abusing me.
The last couple days I even started feeding the duck scraps of bread. This was doubly rewarding for me as I got to play with a duck and also make the geese jealous. I even thought about naming the duck, but then I remembered people were already questioning my manhood for being afraid of geese so I stuck with calling it “Duck”.
As you can probably tell me and this duck had a pretty good thing going. Nothing too serious, just some good company once or twice a day. But this morning I was drinking my coffee reading an old issue of “Us Weekly”, and I hear a commotion coming from where the geese had been holding fort. I look up from my article on Heath Ledger’s supposed out-of-wedlock child, and see the three geese go flying past me. I didn’t even know the geese could fly so I knew right there and then that there was trouble afoot. Without even standing up I turned my head quickly to the left. That was all it took for me to see what had happened. There, hanging from the mouth of Stella, the owner’s German Sheppard, was my friend the duck.
I’m not going to go into any details about the dead duck because in all honesty it was pretty disturbing. But this afternoon as I walked down to get myself some lunch I looked at the geese and I regretted writing that post a few days back. Those geese looked at me and they let me pass by undisturbed. I’ll bet the geese gave that duck a hard time back when it was alive. The probably treated it like their annoying younger brother who won’t stop playing with his Yak-Bak. But I’d be willing to bet even more that those geese are going to miss having that duck around, just eating dirt and minding it’s own business. And maybe it won’t last past tonight, but for at least one day that duck’s death helped the geese and I lay down our arms and live in harmony.
So tonight I’m pouring one on the curb in memory of my old friend the duck, who did what no one else could and brought peace to the Mojo Plantation.

The Effect of Honey-Bees on Coffee Crops in Karnataka

The Rainforest Retreat today hosted a presentation for 20 local farmers on the effects of maintaining a honey-bee population on coffee farms. The presentation was made in conjunction with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Envioronment (A-Tree) educated farmers on the increase in crop yield that honey bees can stimulate.
As an organization, A-Tree does not suggest that organic practices are the solution for all farmers. Instead it advocates for a best-practice method involving a high density of native shade trees, low chemical inputs, and a high usage of farmyard manure. By following these methods, honey bee populations survive and help farmers by naturally pollinating their coffee flowers.
In North America, the practice of “mobile pollination” has recently become much more prevalent. Mobile pollination involves the transport of huge numbers of bees in trucks that are released for a short period of time during pollination season. This practice is not only undesirable for a farm like the Mojo Plantation, where introducing a mono-culture of any species would be devastation, but is not practical for a heavy-rainfall region like Coorg. In spite of having nearly 3500mm of rain annually, many of the major crops flower during the rainy season and bees would not leave their boxes during a rainfall.
Therefore, the best-practice model that A-Tree advocates would simply generate larger populations of bees naturally. By substituting chemical use for manure use, Coorg’s farmers could prevent the wipe-out of useful pollinator populations through indiscriminate spraying. And as a region, Coorg is already an ideal habitat for bee populations because of the thick canopy of native trees that cover the hills.
While the presentation seemed to be advocating a fairly straightforward procedure that would drastically reduce the external input costs for farmers, many of those in attendance seemed unconvinced. Coorg’s farmers have seen the worldwide reduction in honey-bees firsthand, and many indicated that they had noticed no decrease in their yield in the last five years. The best-practice model however was widely accepted as being desirable as it limited expensive external inputs. Many of the farmers had already begun to decrease their reliance on commercially-marketed chemicals by increasing their manure use and agreed that their annual yield had not significantly decreased.
Aranin Chakdavarath, the student responsible for the presentation, defended his research but moved more towards the subject of how to popularize this best-practice system. As only 3% of farmers in Coorg own more than one hectare, it was generally agreed that some form of local body was require to form a co-operative among local farmers. Small farmers have little financial incentive to pursue these best-practice methods as they cannot afford to market their production practices and receive any premium price. Until a premium price was attached to coffee grown using the best-practice method, farmers would continue to farm either using chemicals or organically with little consideration for other methods.
Ultimately the A-Tree meeting provided the small farmers of Coorg with an opportunity to meet and discuss the issues that the all share. The likelihood of any concrete action being taken to increase the bee population in the area seems slim. Many of the farmers did however express their intention to avoid removing bee hives on their properties temporarily.

Maintaining Natural Bio-Diversity as an Alternative to Chemical-Use on the Mojo Plantation

It’s been a week since I arrived and I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten the jetlag. I still wake up at an ungodly hour, but at the very least I am able to stay awake long enough to eat dinner at 8:30. I’ve got to say that being able to sleep in past six is a bit of a relief because it turns out my roof is inhabited by a family of lizards. They scamper back and forth across my ceiling apparently playing some sort of lizard-tag or some other recreational lizard-game. They’re not quite loud enough to wake me up, but once I’m awake they sure as hell make sure I stay that way. At first I thought they were rats, and after my experience with the geese I was understandably upset that I was being tortured by yet another animal that nobody would find cool. Yesterday morning however I finally caught a glimpse of them and they are indeed lizards
I have spent the last two days mostly learning about organic farming practices. Part of the reason I accepted this job was because I felt that the term “organic” was losing meaning in Canada. I know that “organic” means non-chemicalization, but I also know that there is no way the organic oranges I am buying at Sobey’s in mid-February are particularly good for the environment. If I am buying organic products simply because I am worried about the chemicals, I might save myself some money on apples and buy Nicorette gum to cut out the thousands of chemicals I inhale every day.
But I try to buy organic products because at some time during my personal development I became convinced that they were good for the environment. But when I really thought about it I realized that a truckload of oranges (organic or otherwise) being driven across the continent does not exactly define environmentally-friendly. So I’ve got to admit that I was pretty skeptical about an organic farm in a rainforest. Didn’t David Suzuki say we should leave the rainforests alone?
Well it turns out that every once in a while a skeptic like myself can be converted, because this place not only preserves the rainforest, but that preservation is the only thing that allows the agricultural crops to survive. I’m pretty sure bio-diversity will be a pretty major them in this blog, because every single action taken on this farm seems to be motivated by not only maintaining the Rainforest’s bio-diversity but encouraging it as well.
One of the pre-conceived assumptions I had about organic farms was that they automatically produced lower crop-yields. I was convinced that by spraying crops, farmers were able to protect against disease and insects, thereby increasing their plants’ ability to produce fruits (or beans, or vegetables). Otherwise, why would farmers invest so heavily in purchasing chemicals and pesticides year after year? The Mojo Plantation however operates on the principle that by retaining the biodiversity within a rainforest a farmer can use the natural balance that exists within that ecosystem to control pests and disease.
The basic premise of this operating principle is that rainforests are able to survive for thousands of years because there are predators that control the population of each living organism. By maintaining the habitats that these predatory populations require, the Mojo Plantation can regulate the population of pests that would normally destroy their crops. When commercial agricultural farms spray their crops with pesticides, they wipe out the predatory population as well as their targeted pests. This creates a dependency on chemicals as the predatory population may take longer to return then the bugs that decimate their crops.
For me at least, this presented a pretty convincing argument for supporting organic farming. If the farmers are actively working to maintain the eco-systems in which they operate, than the ecological cost of transporting their products remains negligible when compared to the ecological cost of commercial farming. Buying organic products that are produced locally is obviously ideal. But if the term “organic” has sufficient regulatory standards, I believe that it does represent a substantial opportunity for consumers to limit the impact their purchases have on the environment.

The most dangerous animal in all of the jungle...

There’s a lot of animals I worried would give me a hard time while I was in India. I have never claimed to be any form of animal-fighting prize fighter, but in Toronto I generally think I could hold my own if a wild-animal attacked (note that I said “wild”, I am not claiming I could fight a dog). A raccoon might rough me up a little but if it really came down to it I think I would at the very least survive. When it comes to Indian animals though, I’m pretty sure I am overmatched. I would not just lose, I would die. There might be one or two people out there who would die more quickly than I would, but this probably would be little consolation as I would still be dead.
On the list of animals that I really did not want to encounter while strolling through the jungle, there is a pretty clear order. The top three would most likely include tigers, rhinos, and particularly big snakes. If anyone denies that they are scared of these animals they are in my opinion either lying, or idiots. Fortunately for the safety of my afternoon hikes, there are no longer any tigers left in my region of India, and my pre-departure rhinoceros research assured me that they did not live in mountains. There are apparently snakes but they are mostly non-poisonous and are afraid of humans, so I would have appeared to have had all my bases covered. What I did not anticipate however, was having to deal with a bunch of asshole geese every single day. Between my room and the eating area live three geese and a duck. The duck mostly minds its’ own business and goes about eating dirt and keeping out of my way. The geese? Well the geese will watch me as I walk down one of the two paths across the property, and separate in order to block both paths and attack me. They will literally waddle across a bridge and fly across a badminton court just to make sure I don’t get to eat lunch in peace. If this sort of behaviour was exhibited in a human being he would be sent to jail.
If you’ve ever been attacked by a goose you’ll understand how disconcerting it can be. It causes absolutely no pain because geese are stupid birds with no teeth or claws. For all intents and purposes if I were to be attacked by any one species in the animal kingdom based on their attack-properties I would probably choose a goose. But when it happens three times a day it begins to get pretty tiresome. I will be walking down in the morning thinking about the three coffees I’m going to drink before the guests get to breakfast and out of nowhere a goose will pop out and hit me with it’s chest before poking at me maniacally with it’s stupid orange beak. Lunch will come and I’ll be feeling good about how many bookings I managed to make that morning, and without realizing what’s happening I’ll be blindsided by a flurry of angry white feathers.
And what is a guy supposed to do exactly when he is being attacked by a goose? I would never respect myself again if I hit a goose, but I also don’t respect myself for getting bullied three times a day by a jackass bird. So far I’ve determined that as long as I wave a chair in their general direction as they are getting ready to attack they’ll back off and let me pass. The only problem with this is that it’s a pain having to trek up and down a mountain carrying a big wooden chair all day.
In conclusion if anybody has any advice on dealing with rogue geese please let me know. I don’t want to hurt or kill them. I don’t want to be friends with them. I really just want them to leave me alone.

Arrival at the Retreat

My journey being complete, I arrived at the Rainforest Retreat expecting no less than a full-on jungle paradise. I wanted to be so overwhelmed by the colour green that I forgot any other colours even existed. I wanted to fall asleep to the sound of countless bugs chirping away and wake up to the sun sneaking through the cracks in the canopy. And for all intents and purposes, I was not dissapointed.
I should note that the Rainforest Retreat is not technically located in a jungle. It is located in a Rainforest (a “shola” rainforest to be exact). To my eyes however, it is a jungle. I am not going to sit here and act like I’ve got a wealth of experience when it comes to identifying jungles, however what I will say is that compared to every single other place I have ever been, this is the most jungle-like of them all. If I were to shoot a movie called “Danny in the Jungle”, most people would probably not say “That’s not a jungle that’s a shola rainforest” and give my movie negative reviews for a lack of integrity. So in defense of this blog’s title, I would challenge anybody who denies my new home’s junglehood to explain the difference to me.
The property is stunningly beautiful. The plantation uses a thick ground cover of weeds and shrubs to protect against run-off in the rainy season and provide habitats for predatory insect populations. The entire property is also covered in a heavy canopy that protects from heavy rains and sun. This gives the illusion of being in a thick rainforest, even while you walk through thick crops of cardamom and coffee. I should note that this illusion is not accidental, as maintaining the rainforest’s ecosystem is central to the farm’s mission statement. By maintaining a rainforest ecosystem’s biodiversity, the farm is able to use the natural balance that occurs in this environment to regulate pest populations and maintain a healthy soil.
In terms of being eco-friendly and sustainable, the Mojo Plantation and Rainforest Retreat is unrivalled in my experiences. The very first thing I did once I had met my bosses was go to my bathroom for a well-deserved shower. It had been explained to me that my hot water was solar-powered. It had also been explained to me that the rainy season was not quite over. However, somehow I hadn’t managed to put two and two together and realize that this meant I wouldn’t be getting very much hot water. Literally every single form of power is generated from solar energy in my room. This is admittedly not a particularly huge amount of energy, as all I have are three small wall-lights and a tap for hot water, but it is impressive nonetheless. The fact that 15 people are able to live on the plantation, and not one of them uses any external energy sources is pretty remarkable.
Energy is not created only through solar-panels either. The gas used in the kitchen is exclusively generated from the methane gas of cow dung. The cow dung is collected and deposited in a large cylindrical shaped container that is mostly below ground. The methane gas is naturally released from the cow dung and rises through a hose into the kitchen’s appliances. Between the solar-powered guest and staff-houses, as well as the kitchen’s reliance on methane gas, it seems to me that the Rainforest Retreat comes as close as possible to it’s promise of being entirely sustainable. I do not know how practical these solutions would be for Canada (in particular solar, where we receive very little sunlight in the winter months) but it has certainly demonstrated to me that energy-technologies can and should be used on a small scale. The technologies exist, and it is simply a matter of time before they become affordable.
Ultimately my first day at the Rainforest Retreat has been breathtaking. The plantation balances new technologies (energy) with traditional agricultural practices and has managed to create a farm and retreat where external inputs are virtually unnecessary. I’ll be uploading a batch of photos soon, and I know that this first post comes across as a tourist brochure for the retreat, but it is impossible not to be enthusiastic. My next post will focus more on the agricultural side of the farm, and the practices that make this place be truly “organic”.

One last journey before reaching my destination

I woke up this morning and hitched a ride with Yohann’s friends to the bus station in Bangalore. My first experience with trying to actually get from point A to B on my own could have gone a lot worse. Essentially, I approached the ticket window and three men started yelling at me. Intimidated, and not knowing what to do I repeated “Madikeri, Madikeri” as loud as I could hoping that somebody could direct me to the bus headed for my destination. Much to my surprise, this worked. Three minutes later I was seated in as comfortable a bus as I would expect in Canada, and within ten minutes the bus was leaving the station on it’s way to Madikeri.
Observing Bangalore from the bus window I was struck by the socio-economic diversity from one block to the next. One block would be covered in what I can best describe as slums. People would be huddled in tiny bamboo shacks, cooking over a fire. The next block however would be a massive IT complex. The Lonely Planet describes these buildings as being “high-tech, high-security university campuses” and I can only wish I had come up with that description. The complexes often house three or four buildings surrounding a central green-space, and IT workers sat on the grass eating lunch or breakfast as I drove by. This socio-economic mosaic is really like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. In Toronto a low-income neighbourhood’s location is often described by it’s central intersection (Jane and Finch) or the name of it’s large public housing complex (Regent Park). To see middle-class professionals working right next to members of the absolute lowest-income bracket’s homes was disconcerting. This separation is probably a positive, as it means that the poverty in a city is not hidden from the middle-class and treated as if it does not exist. The middle-class in Toronto has no reason to enter the lower-income neighborhoods, and I suppose it allows us to ignore the poverty that does exist within our city’s boundaries.
After six hours on the bus I finally arrived in Madikeri, a town of 30 000 people Southern Karnataka. I really can’t tell you anything about Madikeri, as I had pre-arranged for a taxi pickup to take me to the Rainforest Retreat as soon as I arrived. It will however be my main connection to the urban world for the next five months, so I am sure regular readers of this blog will become well-acquainted with the ins-and-outs of Madikeri culture. So if you are interested in small-town-Indian culture, this is clearly the place to be!
My taxi drove me down a beat-up road that winded through the foothills of Coorg for twenty minutes, before dropping me at the gate of the Rainforest Retreat. I will save my description of Coorg for tomorrow's post, where I will most likely alienate anyone who has never been to Coorg by overemphasizing the natural beauty of where I now live. But after four days on the road and months of planning, I finally stood at the gates of my new home, ready to begin my life as an intern-organic-farmer-jungle-man….
Stay tuned for my first impressions.

September 15th, 2008

After roughly 36 hours of airport-related living, I arrived in Bangalore on a Sunday morning. Sujata and Anurag had arranged in advance for me to be picked up by a friend of theirs named Yohann so that I could have a day to rest up on his organic farm outside of Bangalore. As a first introduction to India, I got exactly what I needed.
What sort of guy was I expecting to have pick me up at the airport? The closest I can come to describing my vision would be sort of an Indian Jude Law (mild-mannered, clean-cut, drives a scooter). I was wrong. Yohann arrived in his vintage jeep sporting a headband covering his long hair, wearing Adidas sweatpants and a graphic t-shirt. He was smoking a Gold Flake and before saying hello apologized for his appearance, as “last night’s party hadn’t quite ended”. Far be it for me to say this wouldn’t be exactly what Jude Law would be like if he picked me up at an airport, but I sort of feel like if Yohann had starred in the “Alfie” remake it would have sucked a lot less.
What was the first adjustment to India I had to make? I guess 24 years of living in Canada got me used to highway lanes. Highway lanes sort of make sense. You stick to your lane, the driver next to you sticks to yours. Sometimes the driver in front of you isn’t in a hurry, and then you switch lanes and go passed them. If I was building a highway, I’d probably include lanes. But clearly I’m ethno-centric because Indians drive twice as fast with twice as many cars on the road and instead of lanes they just honk their horns. And somehow, it works. This isn’t like Paris where Parisians drive in the Arc-de-Triomphe and act like it’s no big deal. Clearly Parisians only take the route involving the Arc-de-Triomphe to prove their superiority to young and impressionable North Americans like myself. They could easily just have avoided the hassle of heavy traffic and taken a side street. Now, I can’t be sure, but as far as I can tell most of the cars on Bangalore’s highways aren’t driving tourists. So this is how they drive to get from point A to B on a daily basis. And even if my car-insurance was not expired and I desperately needed to get somewhere quickly (hypothetically my non-existent wife had just gone in to labour and it had caught me completely off guard because I hadn’t known she was pregnant or something along those lines) I still would not drive on the highways of India. I guess ultimately this paragraph just proves that Indians are better drivers than I am. Thanks for nothing Young Drivers of Canada.
Back to Yohann. Yohann lives on an organic farm about 30km outside of Bangalore. The farm has been in Yohann’s family for at least two generations, and his current crop includes tobacco and cocoa. But like farms all over the world that are situated close to urban areas, the city is rapidly encroaching. This has become especially prevalent since the completion of the Bengaluru International Airport. Yohann’s farm is about 5km off the main highway between the City and the Airport, and when I asked him if he has gotten offers for his land he laughed and tells me “Every single day”. The importance of this is that Yohann’s farm was my first exposure to the plight of the modern family farm. Yohann no longer markets any of his products commercially because agriculture in his part of India yields no economic benefit.
Yohann and Priyam (his wife) haven’t given up on farming completely, as there are still chickens, goats, cows, and rabbits (I’m not entirely sure why) as well as the cocoa and tobacco crops mentioned earlier. However, on the far end of their property, they designed and built a Montesory school. Students from ages 4 to 18 bus in every day from all over Bangalore and are taught in an inspired open-concept school. Built in red-brick, the spacious classrooms surround courtyards centered around trees and gardens. Outside, study areas are hidden behind garden-lined brick walls with streams and ponds twisting their way throughout the school yard. My elementary school had eight portables covering our sports field in order to house all our extra students, and what was left of the field flooded every time the snow melted. That being said, my grade six volleyball team also won the former Borough of East York’s grade six volleyball tournament, so we were doing something right. Getting back to Yohann’s school, it definitely goes to show that while urban sprawl is a serious threat to family farms like Yohann’s, there are ways in which to creatively keep your land. Ideally Yohann and Priyam may wish they could still use their land for commercial agricultural purposes, but for the time being at least the school allows them to maintain their way of life and keep ownership over their family’s land.
I should also add that apparently Bangalorians (Bangalites? Bangalomes? Bangalers?) defy every stereotype of Indians I’ve ever been told. It’s possible that they actually spend time researching Indian stereotypes just so that they can break them. I’ve now met two separate groups of Bangalorians (if you are reading this and you are from Bangalore and the term “Bangalorians” was ever used in a derogatory manner, I don’t have internet access as I write this otherwise I would have looked up the proper term) and all they seem to want to do is smoke hash and play Neil Young songs on their guitars. Unlike back home though, when you’re having a beer in Bangalore and they’re playing a Neil Young song, it is not “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” every time. In fact, I don’t think I heard “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” once during the entire 21 hours I was in Bangalore. I just naturally assumed that I must have heard it after four and a half years of going to the Frankenstein’s Hot Dog Themed Bar in Guelph. Apparently a few years back Bangalore had a vibrant live music scene, but a group of “traditional” politicians catered to the supposedly elderly Bangalorian community and banned all live music. But, as the “Silicon Valley” of Asia, a huge majority of Bangalore’s population is under-30, and according to numerous proud-Bangalorians I have met, it is due for a youth-culture renaissance unlike anything the world has seen since San Fransisco back in ‘64. To be honest I’ve never really associated revolutionary cultural, sexual, and political movements with young professionals working for multi-national IT firms, but based on Yohann’s friends’ rousing rendition of “Heart of Gold”, it’s not out of the question.
I’ve heard that Delhi and Mumbai can both be pretty overwhelming for a rookie touching down in India for the first time. Bangalore totally blew my mind and gave me a good taste of Indian life (albeit for only one night), but it felt like a good transition. Most of the people I met worked for IT companies and were modern in pretty much every way, but it definitely was not North America.

Brussels, and why I hate Belgium

September 13th, 2008
In my day, I’ve been accused of irrationally hating only two things. Those things are Margaret Atwood, and Belgium. Margaret Atwood went to my high school and I think that it’s understandable for anyone to hate their high school’s most illustrious graduate. Especially when that graduate wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which was inexplicably on the Grade Thirteen curriculum. And even more especially when questioning the inclusion of “The Handmaid’s Tale” on the grade twelve curriculum instead of “1984” or “Brave New World” gets you told to sit down and stop asking questions.
My hatred for Belgium however, is completely different from my hatred for Margaret Atwood. Because while I was predisposed to hate Margaret Atwood, I really expected to like Belgium. Two years ago on a drive from Switzerland to Amsterdam, I visited Belgium right after Luxembourg (which is natural, as they are situated next to each other last time I checked). Luxembourg would probably be a really nice place to go for a roller-skate or some other leisurely recreational activity, but my entire time in Luxembourg was spent getting excited to leave and explore a country whose existence I could actually understand and explain.
Unfortunately for myself and my two travel-mates, some transport-minister in Belgium had decided that it’s highways required late-night construction. This wasn’t just any late-night construction either. This was the type of late-night construction that makes you regret traveling with a man who punches people when they try to change the music. Apparently when Belgians do construction on a highway they don’t post signs warning you that your car will literally not move for three and a half hours. Apparently when Belgians do construction they insist on using trucks with flashing lights that beep when they move backwards. And apparently the one thing Belgians don’t think they need to construct on or near highways is restaurants. This ensures that when you get out of your three and a half hour traffic jam and start thinking about breakfast, Belgium makes you suffer that much more.
So needless to say I was not pleased that my flight to India involved a stop-over in Brussels. This time I guess I should take some responsibility for my experience, as I had decided to take sleeping pills roughly an hour before landing so that I could avoid spending any waking-hours acknowledging where I was. However, that does not change the fact that not only would the Brussels airport not convert my Canadian dollars so that I could buy a bottle of water, but for some reason all of the water fountains were turned off. What kind of airport turns off their water-fountains? That’s the sort of thing that jail-wardens do when there’s a prison riot. Or corrupt dictators do when their country's citizens have a general strike. I was literally stuck eating the box of 20 euro chocolates I bought at the Duty Free for four and a half hours, hoping that I could suck some of the milk out and regain my body’s ability to produce saliva.
If those two experiences aren't enough to push a man to resent a country, I don't know what is. I’ve got nothing against the people of Belgium, most of whom I’m sure could write a better book than Margaret Atwood, but on my list of top ten worst places I’ve ever been Belgium comes in at a close second behind Brampton, Ontario.

****By the way It’s debatable whether Margaret Atwood is actually my high school’s most illustrious graduate as apparently Prime Minister Stephen Harper also went to Leaside. However, I’ve never heard anyone outside of the high school confirm this and he seems to believe he was raised somewhere in the general vicinity of Calgary. Also how pathetic is it that the race for most illustrious graduate at my high school encompasses two of the absolutely least charismatic public figures in Canada. I can’t think of a single Canadian outside of the prison system who I would really like to hang out with less.