What is happening to time?! I’ve got barely two weeks left in India, and still feeling like there’s not enough time to do all the things (including doing nothing). And including blogging – I’ve still got three of the five senses left to write about, dammit. I’ve got a followup post in mind about Missy and Rorschach that would read like a soap opera. And yet another week goes by, vroom. It’s been a weird few weeks, actually. I had some kind of unpleasant digestive stuff going on – not food poisoning, but obviously something had thrown my system out…
Category:
Travel
Street dogs are an everyday sight in India. Like a secret network that spreads itself out over a city, they have their territories and areas of influence; as you wander down any given street you’ll see a variety of dogs dotting the area. Wander down the street often enough, and you’ll get to know these dogs and their usual haunts, their personalities, and witness natural free dog behaviour that we don’t often get to see in a land of sweater-clad Chihuahuas and full-service dog spas. These dogs’ lives are nothing like the lives of Western dogs. They are not seen…
Last week, I started having a lot of trouble with my right wrist. I have occasionally had trouble with repetitive stress injuries in my wrist or elbow from all my computer work, but I’ve always found a way to manage it with ergonomics, massage, and rest. But this seemed like something different. I’d been sick with a cold at the time and only lying around anyway, not on the computer much. I started noticing a slight ache around my pisiform bone, and it got a bit worse every day, swelling and getting tender. By the third day I could barely…
Let’s get this right out of the way: yes, there are open sewers. Yes, they can smell truly awful. There are certain streets in Tiruvannamalai where they are especially… breath-taking, even when they’re mostly covered with slabs of concrete. You learn to walk across them on an exhale, or if you have to walk parallel to them, stay as far across the street as possible. I don’t remember it being quite as strong last time I was here. Either the rain last month made it more noticeable, or perhaps I had blocked the memory. Sometimes you’ll catch a whiff of…
You hear a lot about the intensity and vibrance of India in the West, and you see pretty colourful pictures and shocking filthy ones, and you watch some Bollywood movies and you read excellent novels. But it’s hard to convey what that intensity is actually like in person. In fact, once you come back to the West and India isn’t part of your present moment any more, it fades into memories that just look and sound a lot like the pictures and stories you’ve seen and read. In a series of five blog posts over the next few months, I’m…