Part of the reason for that had to do with a little adventure I had back in July. My lungs, for reasons known only to themselves and [insert name of higher power here], decided to no longer play well with others, and quit doing the whole process-oxygen-in-a-timely-manner thing.
For those of you following along from the States, know that the whole Indian hospital experience is definitely a “kids, don’t try this at home” style of activity. As a bonus, getting to the Indian hospital is a whole separate “adults, you must be this high to take this ride” experience. “Ambulances” here are basically a taxi service to transfer people between diagnostic labs, clinics, and hospitals, but aren’t available for emergency services. So for emergency transport, you call a friend with a vehicle, and hope they’re home. Or a taxi. The drive from Rewalsar to Mandi is, at the best of times, 45 minutes or more of scary mountain driving. The somewhat nervous taxi driver attempted to drive slowly so as not to jostle the sick Western lady, and it took a little bit of hypoxic yelling to explain the need for speed. After which the hills and valleys fairly flew by.
So, the hospital. Ya know those emergency room scenes like on Grey’s Anatomy, or House, or whatever, where the sicko du jour speeds in on a gurney, and oodles of medical professionals pop out of nowhere with all sorts of arcane equipment at the ready? Yeah, well, about that…in a remote Indian hospital, that all fails to happen, pretty much. What did happen is the taxi driver and a friend dragged me up the stairs into the trauma department–the local term for the ER–where a gentleman was prepared as could be with….um…pen, notebook, and stethoscope.
Editrix’ note: Some time after getting out of the hospital, I learned that in the ER doctor’s opinion, if I had waited one more hour to come to the hospital, I might not have made it. How long does it take to drive from Rewalsar to Mandi again?
A good friend stood by and translated my wheeze-filled symptom descriptions into proper Hindi. During the intake, a woman in street clothes marched into the room with an uncapped syringe, and attempted to inject me. Doctors, it turns out, don’t necessarily wear white coats or uniforms, although the “behaniya” (”sisters,” referring to nurses and female medical assistants) wear coats and uniform salwar suits. There was a tense couple of minutes while I got the newcomer to understand that doctor or no, she wasn’t injecting me without telling me what was in the needle. That settled, I finally allowed the injection, and a few minutes later was admitted.
My hospital room was downstairs. Elevator? What elevator? Good thing I arrived with enough muscle to transport me down the stairs to my bed…
The two most important things to know about Indian hospitals are:
You play, you pay. The whole nightmarish American healthcare model–where a worker comes in to check on your health insurance and your ability to pay as soon as you’re in the door–gets replaced by a much simpler scenario where you get only the health care you can pay for directly.
You never go to a hospital by yourself. Always take along a “looker-after,” someone to see to your meals and chase down a nurse if you need something.
That second rule doesn’t sound like much, but it actually means all the difference between getting better, and, well….not. In an Indian hospital, the basic assumption is that you can do stuff on your own if you don’t have a handler standing by. My first morning in the hospital, a lady bounced in to tell me my medications were waiting for me in the pharmacy, two floors up. All I had to do was walk up two flights of stairs to retrieve them.
I looked at her, looked at the IV dripping high-velocity antibiotics into my arm, looked at the oxygen feed tethering me to the wall behind my bed, and shook my head.
My visitor repeated her good news about the meds, and looked at me expectantly.
I shook my head again, and explained in my horrible but by now somewhat passable Hindi that a trip two floors up to the pharmacy would not be happening soon.
Finally, my medical messenger seemed to see the IV and the oxygen feed for the first time, and reluctantly allowed as how she might have the meds brought to my room.
Later I discovered meals could be ordered from the hospital canteen, only three flights up.
About a couple hours after this, a man cheerfully entered my room, to inform me that I needed to get an X-ray, one flight of stairs up. “Chello! (”Let’s go!”) It’s time for your X-ray!” No amount of polite refusals or pointing at the oxygen and IV feeds could dissuade this man, so up I got. After taking about five minutes to walk from my bed to a meter or so down the hallway, my X-ray escort asked me if I wanted a chair.
I agreed instantly, thinking he meant a wheelchair. Silly me. This is India, so the x-ray guy literally meant a chair–one of the plastic ones good for indoors or out. Once seated, three other guys were drafted into carrying me up the narrow flight of stairs and into the X-ray lab.
By the time I was carried back to my room, Chinta (our current bhi-bhi) had finally arrived to act as my looker-after. For the next four days, she slept in the room with me, chased after nurses whenever my breathing went south, fetched in food, water, and the very occasional chai, helped me wash, and basically acted as my legs within the hospital.
I suppose I should mention the occasional power outage, which would instantly shut off the flow of oxygen from the machine in the wall…fortunately the hospital did have its own generator for such magic moments. Just outside my room was some loud machinery or some such that ran noisily and randomly at odd hours. This being India, I found the noise reassuring, because as long as I could hear it, I knew the neighborhood had electricity.
When I finally got discharged, as is the Indian custom, I bought sweets for the behaniya, medical assistants, x-ray techs, chief doctor, and other folks who helped me fail to die while in the hospital.
The month of August was spent taking more antibiotics, and not moving around much. The worst thing about being that sick was the combination of boredom and cabin fever. Looking at the same four walls for a solid month, with only the occasional bathroom or kitchen break, was so boring that any reason to take a trip out of the house was welcomed as a major expedition. My first trip to town on my own feet took forever as I negotiated the rocky footpath, but it was worth it to be back in town and hoisting cups of chai again. It was only recently that I got back into the routine of going to town on my own.
So yes: much better thank you. To the list of prayers recited during kora I’ve added one extra one along the lines of, “Can we not do that again, any time soon?”
The other day I was ranting to Joy about how, after living in India for two years, I felt that somehow my home country had turned into a cartoon. (Probably this one.) I think this every day after checking out the news online. The daily election headlines– usually featuring either a presidential candidate busy contradicting what he said just last week, or a vice-presidential candidate who should probably not be allowed to speak in front of recording equipment, ever–are just so weird. I want to email Reuters, AP, and CNN, asking: “Dude–is this a joke? Are you pranking us?”
Then there’s the whole economy going-to-a-hot-place-in-a-woven-wicker-product situation. The bailout plan sounds so much like that episode of House where everyone in the hospital decides to help keep House supplied with Vicodin, because he’s so much more functional on drugs than without. Without drugs, a misanthropic genius who happens to be good at saving lives turns into a gibbering, pain-crazed sociopath who will happily bust up every bone in his hand to take his mind off the pain in his leg. Each new bank failure, takeover and stock market drop seems to include yet another CEO getting handed a multi-million dollar check with his pink slip. Because, ya know, the alternative is having a gibbering, pain-crazed, financial analyst on your doorstep….
And then…there’s the baconfetish fad. I mean, I grew up on a cuisine that featured all the salt-cured piggy goodness you could suck down. And yes, after a good long time without any real bacon to be had, I really miss the stuff. I even said so. But. Bacon-flavored vodka? Bacon flavored spray to add to your food? Bacon-topped sugar cookies? Bacon music?
WTF? I ranted to Joy for a good ten minutes about the bacon mania on teh Intarwebz. She sympathized with me quite a bit, a great show of emotion which turned out to involve a great deal of trying to keep a straight face.
Because, you see, Lena was on her way back from Dehra Dun that very day with a kilo of real bacon, already sliced up and ready for the pan. Joy knew this, and happily allowed me to make an ass out of myself with a rant about bacon on the Intarwebz. And both of them laughed a great deal to see me do a little happy dance when unpacking the bacon from the 10 kilos of newspaper, ice, and plastic that had been used to insulate it from the vagaries of Indian mountain roads.
Today I slapped a pan on the stove, fired up the trusty gas cylinder, and cooked bacon for the first time in about three years. Was it tasty? Yes. Was it greasy? Yes. Did it absolutely fill the niche of salt-cured pig meat I had been missing for so long?
Yes. Yes it did. I meant to take pictures of the crispy little bacon slices after cooking, but….um…I eated them.
Long-time readers of this blog know I have no love for Microsoft. For those of you who need proof, Exhibit A would be this post. Exhibit B, this one.
I run an Ubuntu Linux system and browse with Firefox. When I run searches, it’s through Google or Wikipedia. The likelihood of my wanting to use Microsoft Live Search, MSN, Hotmail, or any other online product Microsoft touts is up there with the chances of a snowflake in hell. So you can imagine my reaction when browsing along the Intarwebs, I click on a link to a web page, and get this:
No, the link itself doesn’t point to Live Search. Not at all. No, I don’t use Live Search, nor do I want to. This is happening while browsing a site I’ve seen before, to a page I know exists. But somehow, stuff gets redirected to Live Search anyway. Worse, this redirection happens even while editing blog posts–WordPress dialog boxes get completely derailed in order to show me Live Search results for the word “customjuju”. Um, yeah, that should make me think your search engine is indispensable. And the best part is, after Live Search takes over a page link this way, that’s where the link always goes–unless I kill my Internet connection and reload. Why? Because Microsoft Live helpfully plants a bunch of cookies to make sure their site loads again and again and again until I use their search engine.
Now, y’all know that ain’t right. When other people who aren’t Microsoft do this, it’s called hijacking. I mean, people pay me to fix their computers when something like this happens. This is obviously some kind of click-piracy to “prove” many people are using Live Search, by showing how many people load the site. In some cloud-cuckoo-land the Microsoft execs inhabit, this kind of server request sleight-of-hand is supposed to prove they’re better than Google, or Yahoo!, or whatever, rather than showing they can’t get market share without sleaze-baggery.
No. I refuse to go along with it.
But you don’t have to take just my word for it. Webmasters have been having problems for a while with server logs spammed with live.com results that um….didn’t really happen.
So I think it’s time to show Microsoft where the money really is–in other products made by companies with a better ethics system.
Who’s with me?
Editrix’ Note: If, like me, you don’t want Firefox/Linux spouting Live Search when you’re trying to read a cool cartoon like Girls With Slingshots or Day by Day, do this:
In Firefox, go to the “Edit” Menu and click “Preferences”.
Choose the “Privacy” Tab.
In the “Cookies” section, click the “Exceptions” button.
Block the following sites:
live.com
search.live.com
msn.com
search.msn.com
Next, close the “Exceptions” box, and click the “Show Cookies” button.
In the “Cookies” window, search for any cookie names with variations of live.com and msn.com, and delete them.
Close the “Cookies” window.
Close the “Preferences” window.
Restart Firefox.
Outside of major metropolitan areas, India is literally an uphill challenge for the differently abled. Sidewalks are nonexistent. Stairwells are frequently built without railings. Homes and temples and even our own Guru Rimpoche statue are accessible only by rocky footpaths, like this one:
Travel in and out of the area is just as bad: few people own private cars, and usually get around by scooter, motorcycle, or non-kneeling bus. Much of the time, in our part of the world, “disabled access” actually means hiring a Bihari kid to run errands for you. As our tale of Sonnam Yutron and our Emergency Medical Fund demonstrated, just leaving the house can be considered a major accomplishment for a differently abled person.
So it was with more than a little interest that I began to hear about Savera Research and Rehabilitation Centre, a home-grown NGO (non-profit organization) dedicated to serving local disabled children. Savera, in Hindi, means “dawn.” The idea behind the name is the intention to help disabled children in the area experience newer and brighter days. Among other activities the organization sends out trained specialists to assess the children in the area, document their medical condition, and suggest courses of physical therapy or educational assistance for the child. The visits are recurring, so the Savera counselor has a chance to assess the child’s current condition and review any physical therapies with the child’s parents. The circuit Savera’s counselors travel is not small, when you consider that they serve not just Rewalsar proper, but many of the remoter hill villages that are barely accessible by bus or scooter.
Some days ago I was invited to a “camp” that Savera held in Rewalsar. At such camps parents are invited to bring their children down for registration in Savera’s programs, and have them assessed for therapy, hearing aids and wheelchairs. This is a part of the world where congenital defects and polio are still very prevalent. As I looked around at the various families, it struck me that these were the folks who were able to transport themselves and their children to the camp, while there must be dozens more families up in the surrounding villages who couldn’t get there.
The first step in the process was registration to determine which category the disabled child fit into.
After a brief discussion, the particulars would be entered longhand into a notebook. Bookkeeping out here is done by this method, whether it’s by an NGO, a shop, or a construction site. With Rewalsar’s random power outages, electronic bookkeeping isn’t as reliable as a pen and a piece of paper.
To one side of the room, a physical therapy-trained counselor assessed children with physical limitations, and suggested therapies. I’m not sure if the pictures show it all, so I’ve also taken a couple of videos–I should have them up soon.
(AVI video, 27MB)
To the other, a couple more of Savera’s counselors did field-testing for hearing problems, and supplied hearing aids for children who needed them.
(AVI video, 27MB)
Few smiles were more beautiful than the one on this young lady when she discovered she would be hearing things clearly for the first time in her life:
By far the most heart-tugging part of the camp was the distribution of the wheelchairs. As I mentioned before, Savera is a non-profit organization, scraping together what it can for supplies. And the supplies for this particular camp included a truck full of wheelchairs, costing R5500 (About US$140) apiece.
Six children merited wheelchairs; each one was ceremonially seated in his or her chair, and the parents given a quick tutorial in folding the chair, adjusting footrests, and operating the brake.
Just another day in a small hill town on the edge of the world.
Seven hundred and thirty days, give or take or week.
Seven thousand, five hundred and twenty hours.
Two years since I first stumbled off a plane in Mumbai, severely jetlagged, stupified by the 82 degree heat baking the city at 2 AM, and somewhat doubtful that my latest MommyWizard adventure was a Good Idea.
The original plan (well, yes, there was one) was to stay in India for several months, and then rejoin civilization. As those of you who have followed along with the blog for the last two years already know, I never did quite get around to boarding a plane headed out of the country and in a westerly direction. At times the timing for a trip to the West simply didn’t work. At others, financial snarls of this-and-that combined to make a plane ticket hard to obtain. So I stayed, keeping my visa legal with obligatory trips to Nepal, and finally registering for residency.
In that time, I’ve done my share of “going” local. Instead of T-shirts and jeans, my wardrobe consists of salwar kameez suits, kurtas, and dupattas. (Dupattas are an absolutely necessary item. An Indian woman would sooner forget her head and leave it home, than leave the house without a dupatta draping her shoulders. It’s just the way it is.) Chai is the drink of choice, rather than coffee. I no longer grumble when the Sikh temple begins broadcasting prayers at 5:30 AM. In fact, if I don’t hear it, I grumble more, and light a couple of candles to shower by, because the silence means the power’s out again. And I now snicker along with the local ladies when a Western tourist slinks through town wearing yoga clothes and attempting to look mystical.
I should really expand that last thought, because I had a similar experience after spending several weeks in Mexico. San Miguel was far enough off the beaten track–despite the large expatriate population–that I soon grew used to moving through crowds of short, brown-skinned people, all with straight black hair, all close to my height. On my return to the incredibly spiced melting pot that is the Bay Area, it took me a little while to readjust to crowds of people that were all shapes, sizes and colors.
The process does not work at all well in reverse. Rewalsar is, like San Miguel, far away from anything cosmopolitan and filled with crowds of short brown people with straight black hair. Westerners tend to stand out. And….well…
They look funny.
Part of the problem is the Western perception of India as a sensuous place devoted to physical sensations. You know, the Kama Sutra. Yoga. Temples filled with the smoke of exotic incense. All of which overlooks the India with moral conventions out of the 1950s, Sanjaya, and a fetish for cell phones and cricket matches. The result is usually an attempt to dress “Indian” without really buying any Indian clothes. So from time to time we have folks putter through wearing kurtas and pants made from the material that’s normally used for djolas (purses) or as mattress ticking. Sorta like wearing a jacket with a “Saranwrap” or a “Tempurpedic” logo….Then there was the one young lady who attempted the “yogini” style of dress. Unfortunately she decided to wear salwar pants with a white tank top. To most Indian women she looked like she had forgotten to get dressed before heading outside, and they wondered aloud where the rest of her outfit was. I know, I did my share of wardrobe malfunctions before understanding how clothes actually functioned socially here, but two years is long enough to have me snickering along with the natives at other folks’ faux pas.
India is a place where there is no social restriction against staring. Having been the staree for at least a year, it’s sometimes surprising to find myself now the starer–especially at Westerners kitted out in the tourist uniform of t-shirt, shorts, sandals, backpack, hat, and expensive camera. Strange to step through the mirror, and see out…
Many times when I mention the “MommyWizard life” I often describe the effects without writing much about the attitude that created the effects in the first place. What’s been interesting to us over the years is the number of people who say, “Oh I wish I’d done that!” But when it comes down to cases, the same folks will happily choose sitting home in the burbs to watch some reality TV instead of eating some rat on a stick, traveling through a revolution, or building a dual-system dirigible .
The decision pattern sounds something like this: “It’s too weird not to do.” Or “I’ll always wonder if I hadn’t.” Or: “The timing on this is just too coincidental…” Nobody we know has ever spent a lot of time wishing for a normal life. Occasionally I’ll try to picture myself in that life my mother originally intended me to have–good middle manager job, husband, kids, a nice house in the burbs–and give it up after a minute or so. Because, let’s face it, the MommyWizard life involves being very very bad at being normal.
India is a place that’s really conducive to this attitude. Few things you expect to happen do, while things that would never happen normally in the States do happen here, with an immediacy that’s often startling. This is all by way of explaining that last Thursday morning, I fully expected a regular day of shopping for vegetables in town, followed by a day at the computer, and so on. Instead, by about 10 AM I found myself packed in a truck with a mob of women, children, and a couple of goats, all headed for the temples at Naina Devi, near the Holy Caves of Padmasambhava.
I guess a little background is in order. Our landlord Bitu lives just down the road with his extended family including four out of six brothers (of the others, one works in Dubai, the other in Simla). In the beginning of our stay here, I couldn’t keep track of all the brothers’ names. So in my mind there was our landlord; Eldest brother Naru, who drives a tractor, was “Tractor Brother”; while a younger one with a truck was “Truck Brother”; another brother located next door to was a schoolteacher, so: “Schoolteacher Brother”; while the one working in Dubai was “Dubai Brother”. Yes, I know that list is two brothers short. the other two don’t come into this story, so work with me here.
Anyway, Tractor Brother was scheduled to marry off his daughter this past weekend. But Indian marriages are actually drawn-out affairs lasting for days, while this ritual and that puja are carried out. A number of weddings in Rewalsar proper involve a visit to the temples, complete with a band, while the bride and groom promise Shiva, Hanuman, Durga, and company that they’ll play well with each other, or at least not run with scissors, as long as the marriage lasts. On this fine Thursday morning, I was at my desk when I heard a band start up a cheerful tune. This is not a rare occurrence; wedding bands often pass by the house either on their way down to Rewalsar from the upper villages, or headed the other direction, back to a bride or groom’s home. This band stopped for quite a while, and sounded as if it was in front of the complex Bitu and his assorted brothers live in, so I went to take a look.
There I found Truck Brother and Tractor Brother puttering around, while a gaggle of women from the family were clustered around the family truck. As I arrived Schoolteacher Brother told me they were heading up to Naina Devi, and invited me to come along. But only if I came now–they were just about to leave! Well, there was really one answer to that, which was to rush to the house, collect my dupatta, djola and good sandals, and rush back to get in the truck.
Indian trucks are not at all like Western ones. They’re middling size open topped wagons, with railings above the main compartment. In case of rain or goods that might fall out, a tarp gets thrown over the top. Sizable families that need to get from point A to point B without going broke on taxi fare often hire out a truck instead, stuffing as many folks in the back as will fit. In Rewalsar, since it’s a major pilgrimage point, you sometimes hear comments about “truck tourists”. I climbed in with the other women, and found that two goats–a mother and baby, both white–would also be joining us for the ride. In a truck, there’s really only two riding options. Option one is to sit on the floor of the compartment, jouncing along like a marble in a kid’s treasure box, and hope you don’t get stepped on, or peed on, by a goat. Option two is to stand next to compartment wall and hang onto the railings, and hope you don’t get stepped on, peed on, or gored, by a goat. For the kids and the musicians, there’s a third option, which is to climb all the way up on the railings or on the cab of the truck. Once there, you cling there like a limpet, and hope you don’t fall out of the truck entirely and into the road…or on a goat…
So this is how I ended up clutching the railings of the truck as it bounced along the road to Naina Devi, with mama goat’s right horn pointed rather frighteningly at my stomach, and a band player’s trumpet trying to stick itself in my armpit. Once I was settled as much as I was going to be, I looked around for Tractor Brother’s daughter Meena, the prospective bride-to-be. In a Hindu wedding party, the bride is easy to spot–she’s always the one dressed in a red and gold sari, with a headdress of red fabric and gold tinsel. Unfortunately, this time Meena turned up right next to me in the truck–dressed in a regular salwar suit. Hm. I spotted the actual bride, and realized that I had no idea who she was, and that I’d accidentally crashed someone else’s wedding party. Oops.
Well, alrighty then. The truck was already a good 4 kilometers into the 8 kilometer trip when I made this fascinating discovery. The women were singing temple songs at high volume, while mama goat did her best to get herself untied and out of the truck, and baby goat followed along, because that’s where its next meal would be coming from. About a kilometer away from Naina Devi proper, the truck pulled off the road onto a pull out with a small shrine. We were actually going first to the older Shiva temple on a hilltop across the way. The temple turned out to be “Just up here”–a direction I’ve warned about in a previous blog post. It turned into an hour-long uphill hike, during which I got badly winded and people took pity on the poor American lady. The trail was narrow, rocky, and well-furnished with thorny bushes. Partway along I turned to Meena, and asked her how much further we had to go.
“Oh, just two (vague gesture uphill) or three (vague gesture)..”
By plugging away at it, and taking frequent rests, I managed. I’m good with the path from our house to town, but this was as difficult as the trail from Rewalsar up to the Holy Caves. In time we made it, and sat on cool marble in the shade, while waiting to offer dhoop (incense) and small coins at the shrine. The goats got blessed, as well, and got doused with red powder. We all noshed on prasad–food cooked for Hindu pujas–while the band played a few tunes, and the bride made her obeisances to Shiva. A bit of roti, or dalia (cracked wheat) cooked with sugar and ghee, and we were all set for the next stage. We plugged our way back down the hillside again, and piled back in the truck for Naina Devi.
Naina Devi is not just one temple, but a whole complex of them, and many local families come up there for the various ceremonies of Hindu life. So instead of a solemn atmosphere of quiet, there’s the kind of chaos you normally see at mehlas. Two different sets of brides and grooms came up to have a pandit declare their marriage while folks threw rose petals. Meanwhile, just behind us, a family was having their toddler undergo a different ceremony, complete with head shaving and a (mostly) voluntary bath. The goats also underwent their bit of ceremony, having the families of the bride and groom toss a bit of water and red powder onto mama while a barefoot farm girl tried to keep her from bolting out of Naina Devi altogether.
All of that accomplished, we snacked on a bit of pani puri and chana dal, piled back in the truck once more (with the goats) and headed for home.
Oh, I did finally make it to the correct wedding. But that’s another blog post…
Y’all remember that game, back in the day, where you turned the sound down on your TV, turned the dial to 11 on your stereo, and played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching whatever random stuff came up on the TV? And remember how mindblowing it was to see the sounds and images come together as if they were always meant to? No? Well, if you don’t, here’s the next best way to re-create that experience (chemical enhancements optional):
The Band Meme
Here’s how it goes. You are about to have your own band’s CD cover. Follow these directions to the letter. It’s fun and requires no thought at all. Go to……
Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result in your own journal because it’s more amusing that way.
Well, alrighty then. I played this little game out, with results I quite liked.
And then I did it some more:
And then I discovered I couldn’t stop:
This meme’s kinda on the honor system, so I’m not tagging anyone. However, if you’ve played this one and had fun with it, go ahead and post a link to your own album cover goodness in the comments.
There’s a visual convention in blockbuster action movies. Everyone loves a good train wreck. Something about them makes us want to drink in every significant detail. There’s this hunger involved witnessing them, kind of like what the Romans must have had when watching the lions doing for the Christians at the circuses…
When the large vehicles collide, when the bomb finally goes off, when the airplane finally makes full contact with planet Earth…that’s when the movie drops into slow motion. Every last fireball is lovingly brought to the center of the screen. Large, photogenic pieces of shrapnel gracefully cartwheel through the air. And if there are any casualties? Most movies shy away from graphically depicting the worst of the injuries, settling for the visual shorthand of a motionless hand or a body huddled on the ground. The timing for the whole scenario is important: a train wreck that goes on for too long makes that inevitable shift from the “action-blockbuster” category to the “horror” category in a matter of moments. Each new explosion or flameout makes one wonder when the whole thing is going to end: “Oh, no, not another cartwheeling family sedan…Gawd, another fireball? Isn’t everything exploded yet…When is this wreck gonna be over?”
Now, where things get awkward is when the train wreck is a person. Sure, an actual train on the verge of being rapidly converted into several tons of scrap metal isn’t exactly stoppable. (Unless you’re this guy. Or maybe this one.) But a person? Theoretically, a person can be stopped. Talked off the ledge. Quietly led away from the tinfoil. But that voracious bit of Roman circus hunger keeps us all watching, rather than doing anything.
Well, for a while, the town’s most vocal crazy person had settled down somewhat. He was actually keeping himself a bit clean and groomed, and seemed to be holding actual conversations with the people he was talking to, and maybe even remembering their names. He even stopped thinking I was his mom.
Then he stopped taking his meds. Why that happened isn’t all that important. It’s a common thing among the schizophrenic and/or bipolar to decide to stop taking their medications. One otherwise okay but admittedly bipolar woman I know is completely off her meds right now, because she “doesn’t need them in India.” Yikes. Anyway, to make the lake chowkidar’s long story much, much shorter, he went off his meds, and has gone back to dressing up in garbage and ranting at tourists.
It’s “on-season” here in Rewalsar. Winter is here, but the weather is still relatively warm to visitors from points further north. The town’s filling up with Ladakhis and Kinnauris escaping the snow of the higher elevations, and many Western groups who are coming either on pilgrimage, or for a teaching or meditation retreat. In the midst of them is the chowkidar, occasionally ranting at nothing (or everything) or cadging change for a cup of tea. Because of his unpredictable outbursts, most locals (including your humble Editrix) keep a weather eye on this man. For the most part his antics earn looks of bemusement; but every once in a while his tone will have nearby menfolk edging their way off teashop benches and out of shop stalls in case he needs to be subdued or disarmed or whatever. But by now, everything has an “oh no, what is it NOW?” feel to it, as the decline and fall of a single human being continues.
Here in Northern India, there’s very little here to remind me of life back in the States. More often than not, I turn to the Internet to keep myself up-to-date. I read the news. But not just any news. Is it CNN? No. NPR? Nope. The Christian Science Monitor, even?
Uhn-uh.
It’s all the Hollywood gossip about the latest adventures of Britney Spears.
For some reason I’ve become fascinated by the epic decline and fall of this pop star. The whole downward slide from America’s favorite professional virgin pop princess, to “Can I borrow some panties? I left mine home again” skank has this horror movie can’t-bear-to-look-gotta-see-more feel to it. I’ve never even heard any of Britney’s music, even. But the arc of her particular rise-and-fall seems to be this combination of legendary and just damned weird. By now there’s not even any point in mentioning specific scandals. It’s kind of like watching what happened to Michael Jackson back in the 90’s, only faster and trashier. I mean, I can remember the days when Michael Jackson was a Black person, compared to now, when he seems to have transformed himself into a whole separate species. With Britney, each new round of bad taste/bad judgment/bad karma is like that next fireball in the explosion that’s already run about 35 seconds too long. Has she hit bottom yet? Oh, something else wtf-able just happened with her? Well, how about now? Isn’t someone going to intervene? Oh, the family did, and it didn’t work? Let’s check the latest headlines…omg. This should be it, it really should…whaddaya mean, “there’s more”? And as a bonus, here comes Britney’s younger sister, Jamie Lynn, with her own bit of drama in the form of an unwed pregnancy at 16.
The thing I really feel odd about though, is the fact that what we’ve got here is a crazy person with–well, not exactly unlimited income, but pretty damn close–running around loose while everyone else stands by and waits to see if she kills anybody. I’ve seen my share of nutty folks who didn’t have enough money for their next MD 20/20, let alone a psych med prescription. Britney Spears, even as messed up and whacked out as she is right now, is still pulling in something on the order of $US 700,000. Per month. That’s enough over the last year of crazy frappuccino drive-thru purchases for Britney to buy out half of Rewalsar, and put up a statue of herself next to the one of Guru Rimpoche. I know money can’t buy happiness, I really do, but I would think that much money would at least make it possible for a down payment on some sanity. There’s something wrong about being able to watch antics like this while no one intervenes.
That still leaves us with the question of “what kind of intervention?” Court orders haven’t worked; rehab hasn’t worked. The latest thing that’s been tried is an actual honest-to-God 5150, bt it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. Now what? How is the trainwreck finally going to end?
Customjuju is a concept. Customjuju is a mode of thinking. Customjuju is a way of life. It is the belief that magic is as useful a tool as a RJ45 crimper or a Hitachi Magic Wand. That floating in a tank is as productive as sitting behind a desk. That the global village really is right next door.
