I wish I was a poet…
…. maybe then I would have the words to describe the sensory input I have experienced in the course of the last week and a half… I have heard it said that every place has its own sensory set, its own colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feel… India seems to have all of them: Brown dust on the ground is offset by loud colors be it of plastic products hanging in openings resembling stores or of women’s magnificient sari’s; beeping horns, Indian elevator music, the sound of a diesel motor grinding sugar cane dripping its sweet juices into plastic cups washed in a bucket of water that is as brown as the ground; the scent of delightful incense mingling with the scent of jasmine woven into women’s hair immediately followed by the smell of an open sewer running by the side of the street and the pile of possibly human shit at my feet. It seems impossible to walk in a straight line. The sidewalks are crooked, interrupted by hanging powerlines, plastic wrappings, an unfortunate sign of Westernization, lying there discarded with the same laissez-faire as banana peels that would not be there in another thousand years. Bananas… Never had one before I came here, I think. The green things they sell in super markets in the west seem if at all a remote cousin of the fruit I have had the pleasure of tasting here. The food in general has been most amazing. Every bite put into my mouth so far has been an explosion of flavors, tasting totally different by the time it is swallowed, in between jumping through a range of suprises, delights, tickles…
For the whole first week I was here I could not have taken a picture if I had wanted to. It was as if the sights had blinded my eyes and brain like film exposed to sunlight. Even now, I cannot honestly say that I have taken any real pictures. Below are a couple of touristy shots I took last weekend of a Dravidian temple from the 7th century and the building across the street from where I work. Although all new, every day as I am standing outside smoking, I see laundry hung up on a clothes line, people dressed only in Lungis washing themselves out of buckets of water, and similar sights that don’t seem to quite fit the steel and glass image the building is trying to pompously portray.
I apologize for not being anywhere near describing the experiences I have had here, I will do my best to capture more over the next weeks…
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