Various Photos

The Zanana in the Alwar Palace, Rajasthan

Dwelling in the far western area of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, near the Pakistan border

An evening chat in Jodhpur, Rajasthan

The Himalayas near Bardinath

Sometimes TomTom does not put you on the 'right' road

This is Patan and ShriDevi Selvaraj,(and their son Vishnu Vardhan) who I first met in the mid 1990's while working in the town of Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh. He is (was) a sociology professor at the college and she teaches younger kids.

They are from the famous hill town of Ooty in the far south yet took teaching jobs in the north.

Patan was fluent in some 8 languages. He was my translator when I was speaking to groups.

Two years ago he invited me to a conference he was organizing but I was not able to attend.

When I went back for a visit last year I found him incapacitated and barely able to to make sounds.

On day 3 of his conference he was run over by a drunk on a motorcycle as he was crossing the road to the conference. He was in intensive care for 4 months, bout 1/3 of his skull is now missing and he urinates through a tube in his stomach.

They were a classic case of the rise of a 'middle class' in India enjoying previously unheard of prosperity for teachers. They had bought a car (why I dont know as they almost never used it) and a house back down in Tamil Nadu for when they were going to retire.

The 4 months in the hospital eliminated all savings and forced them to sell most everything. They of course had no insurance that would cover anything and the drunk they could not sue as as he was impoverished.

No social safety nets here.

Traveling the back roads of Karnataka

The citadel of Chittorgarh in Rajasthan

Then on to the ancient city of Maheshwar, known as Mhishmati in the Mahabharat epic. It is like a small version of Varanasi

Laundry and tooth brushing

A boat on the Narmada River

My cottage in the woods near Madikeri in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. Here they grow cardamom, pepper and some coffee.

Here is the hot water heater for the morning bath. You have to start a fire and it takes about 45 minutes.

The forest in the plantation. the plant in front of the tree is cardamom.

On the way I stayed over at Halabeedu. the main temple has been repaired but what I found interesting were the bits of other temples just scattered about.

Then it was on to Hampi (actually I never went to Hampi as I try to avoid tourist locations but went to the area to the north of the Tungabhadra River, Hampi is to the south.

This is Kishkinda if you have read the epic Ramayana 

The ferry across the Tungabhadra

A fisherman casting his net into the Tungabhadra

In the hills north of Bangalore, after a stormy night, the lowlands had filled with clouds so only the tops of the hills protruded in a glorious dawn

Orccha, Madhya Pradesh, the palace/fort built in the mid 1500's is fairly modern architecture by Indian standards

Corruption

In most places when you buy a kilo of oranges or peas or cucumbers they come in a nifty paper sack made of folded newspaper with a little wheat paste to glue the edges. I was heading north from the deep south, Tamil Nadu, and was eating my lunch in some field or forest and one of these newspaper sacks caught my eye. It was a newspaper from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and the headline was “Fake Court: HC [High Court] Says Yes to Lawyer’s Suspension”. It was about the equivalent of our Barr Association that had argued in court that it did not have the authority to dis-bar attorneys for corruption. Of course the High Court disagreed.

In the US we are insulated from corruption. Its not that we don’t have corruption, we have massive corruption but its all at the upper levels of society and while we are all effected by it it does not hit us in the face everyday. In India, the disease of corruption affects everyone’s daily life and occurs from the top all the way to the bottom. But back to the article…..

The corruption that they were caught at was the breathtaking thing barely mentioned in the article. What these lawyers did was band together and created a totally fake judicial system where the verdict is never in question. So one lawyer posed as the judge, they set up a fake court room. The judge was even set up with a fake official government car, the bailiff was fake, the only thing that was real were the lawyers arguing the cases, yet they were in cahoots with each other to rig the outcome.

How they got cases from the corrupt police was not explored in the article, but the outcome is everyone charged was heavily fined and then the ‘fines’ were split among all the participants according to their share in the process.

This particular court lasted for more than 7 years and was only ‘caught’ when they were exposed by a reporter and the government was forced to deal with it.

http://www.ndtv.com/cities/in-the-heart-of-chennai-a-fake-police-station-and-court-424382

This one even set up a fake police station

http://version1.mylaw.net/index.php/Article/Madras_High_Court_takes_note_of_Coimbatore_fake_courts/

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Notorious-fake-courts-back-in-Tamil-Nadu/articleshow/21076562.cms  

http://www.tehelka.com/2013/09/duped-by-fast-track-justice/

It is mindboggling how many people would have been involved and paid to turn a blind eye to have such an enterprise flourish for so long.

Road Deaths

On Planet Earth 1.25 million people are killed each year in traffic related 'accidents'.

India which makes up 17.5% of the world's population kills off a quarter million humans a year through this method. This is second only to China at nearly 300,000 people a year.

For context, the US road death toll is about 1/10 that. Norway had 146 in 2013

In 2015, one person dies every 4 minutes in roads accidents in India, according to NGO 'Indians for Road Safety'.[1]

Most of the people killed are pedestrians.

Moving about India on sees the most amazing wrecks on regular basis but given the craziness exhibited it is amazing the numbers are not twice as high. People think nothing of passing with only inches between them and oncoming traffic.

It is not infrequent to see traffic going both ways  on divided highways.

I was driving on one highway a while ago and came up behind a big truck driving a long that looked a bit lopsided and as I overtook it I see that the entire cab was crushed in and the driver was sitting in front of what used to be the windshield.

There is also the habit of driving in the inside of any curve no matter if its your lane or not, this is the source of most of the the mountain road deaths.

In the Western Ghats I was driving along and came across a fresh one (people still sitting around stunned) and looking at the skid marks it was obvious one of the drivers was fully in the wrong lane.

The method in use to avoid this is the magical tooting of the horn to ward off mishap.

Waste Pickers Union

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12670-on-the-environmental-frontlines-waste-pickers

When in Hong Kong Stay at the Mental Asylum

For quite some time I have wanted to head around to the west instead of the east as going east you always have to spend a night traveling 550 MPH and I am lucky to get an hour or two of something remotely related to sleep, with the result being horrid jet lag that takes 3 days (for Europe) and 5 days (for India) to recover from. So after numerous attempts I finally did it, with a few days in Hong Kong on the way.

So exploring this option I did a search for 'quiet places to stay in Hong Kong' and most of the hits were essentially there is no such thing but one thing came up called the Heritage Lodge in Lai Chi Kok on the campus of Jao Tsung-I Academy, a recently renovated arts and cultural center that the website describes as:

The Lodge is part of a building cluster in red bricks boasting over one hundred years of history, Jao Tsung-I Academy.

For more than a century, this place has reflected the historical and social changes of Hong Kong. The heritage cluster, through its sequence of historical events, conveys many stories. Its various functions in different periods, providing a convincing testimony of Hong Kong’s social landscape over time.

In 2009, under the first batch of the “Revitalising Historic Buildings Through Partnership Scheme” of the HKSAR Government, formerly Lai Chi Kok Hospital is now revitalized into “Jao Tsung-I Academy” (JTIA). It is a cultural hub that promotes Chinese Culture and facilities world-wide cultural exchanges, at the same time contributing to the needs of the Society at large.

http://www.heritagelodgehk.com/en/ 

But a quick search on Lai Chi Kok Hospital came up with a Wiki entry:

The hospital first served as the labor's dormitory of The Chamber of Mines Labour Importation Agency in the 19th century. In 1912, the British Army set up the Lai Chi Kok Barracks and stationed for two years. It became Lai Chi Kok Internment Camp later in 1924. The camp was then closed until the establishment of Stanley Prison in 1937.
In the same year, Hong Kong became an epidemic zone under the spread of smallpox.^[3] The site was then rebuilt to a hospital for infectious diseases. Those patients from the hospital for leprosy,^[4] which was located in Hei Ling Chau and closed in 1974, were sent to the reconstructed hospital. The hospital was later changed to serve long-term psychiatric patients after the number of leprosy patients declined.

In the early 2000, the Hospital Authority planned to send her 400 mental patients to different psychiatric hospitals and transformed the site into a long-term nursing home under the supervision of the Social Welfare Department for patients who were queuing for such service. While the SWD refused to take over it, the HA then set up H.A. Care Limited to manage the hospital. In June 2004, patients are relocated to Caritas Jockey Club Lai King Rehabilitation Centre, which completed in April 2005, and the former site of Lai Chi Kok Hospital was returned to the SAR government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lai_Chi_Kok_Hospital

So after reading this I thought maybe I should look elsewhere, which I did but turned up nothing than fancy high rise hotels at high prices.

Not finding anything else I took the plunge and put in a reservation at the indentured servant's quarters cum military barracks cum prison camp cum small pox quarantine facility cum leper colony cum mental asylum conveniently located near a Metro station and on a hill overlooking the city, and I have to say its great. If I stop in Hong Kong again I will definitely be staying here again.

It is beautifully renovated and filled with artists space, theater, galleries etc.

Now on to Hong Kong....Coming in from the airport on wonderfully developed Metro system, even fancier than Delhi's, one finds underground cities at each of the main Metro stations with hundreds of shops, restaurants, banks etc  

The city is mostly these massive 40-70 story apartment buildings

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong

 Since arrival I have been enjoying pomelo a very thick skinned fruit somewhat like grapefruit but about 4 times the size, which seem to be very popular here as the shops are filled with them of various varieties. In India they have pomelo trees too but it seems they are consigned to forest food as I never see them in the market.

As far as jet lag prevention, the daytime flight to the west makes a major difference but in the 9-12 hour time zone change nothing eliminates the impact completely.

A few days of real Chinese cuisine (along with some excellent Thai for lunch this afternoon, shredded mango and tofu salad with cashews and peanuts and long eggplant braised with Thai basil was pretty amazing).

And I realized this afternoon I have yet to see an obese Hong Konger yet

The Caves of Ellora

While I avoid tourist areas and particularly avoid non-Indian tourist areas like the Taj Mahal in Agra or the world famous ghats along the Ganges in Varanasi, there is one that happens to be on my usual route north to south and makes a good place to stop, so I went to the now recognized World Heritage site called Ellora, about 40km north west from Aurangabad in Maharashtra state. So I spent the night in Ellora and then had to get some work done in the morning so it was late morning before I got to the caves and it was already starting to get busy so I headed straight way to the farthest cave to get some caves to myself.

For some background, some millions of years ago there was a major volcanic eruption and what now is Ellora was a tongue of lava flowing into a valley. Around the 6^th century some monks began carving caves out of the ‘soft’ lava stone for temples and for meditation spots during the monsoon. Over the next 800 years, what began as a small effort turned into a massive construction project of unbelievable proportions. By 1400 or so the last one of the current 33 temples or so had been completed.

So when I entered the first one, one of the earlier, cruder works it was breathtaking, literally I stopped breathing in wonderment at the level of effort, grandeur and size of it.

Over the next few hours I walked about from complex to complex in awe of the master builders to had construct such marvels.

The largest complex is not actually a cave at all but instead carved straight down some 220 feet into the stone and covers a number of acres. Just for this one complex it took some 7,000 people, 200 years to carve out of the solid rock. So maybe 15 generations of architects and because everything is carved from a single piece of rock there can not be any mistakes and the entire design has to be there from the very first.

The carving is intricate and what we see today is only the crude underlayment. When they were completed, they had a fine layer of plaster that was then intricately painted to add to and accentuate the carving. Only a very little of the original plastering remains.

This is of a small bit of a remaining ceiling  mural

  

About 30 miles to the north of Ellora there is a smaller complex within the same formation call Ajanta. 

If this were somewhere else than India, like the middle east, Europe or China it would be world famous but since it is in India no one has heard of it.