India continues to be full of contradictions. Recently the Indian government decided to crack down on pornography, by blocking just under 900 websites. This has the populace crying foul, as expected. The puritan values here are strange, given that we're talking about the society that is responsible for the Kama Sutra. For the most part they don't even let TV or movies show people kissing, as they censor it all out. All this makes the product advertisement below even more confusing:
Seems pretty suggestive, yeah? That ad has been in the paper for weeks. All of this suppression of sexuality has the predictable effect of causing people to be really uneducated about sexual health. For instance, the local paper has a daily column where people write in and ask sex related questions to an advice columnist. At least one of the questions every day is "my girlfriend and I rubbed our parts together but we had all our clothes on, is it possible she is pregnant?" Homosexuality is literally punishable by law, but transgenderism is both common and widely accepted. One thing that I found strange when I first arrived is that it's common for platonic friends of the same gender to show what looks like a lot more affection than you'd see in the USA. You'll see a couple mid-50's business men walking down the street, just holding hands like a couple.
All of this is from religious beliefs, of course, and is the same as the ban on beef that I've written about here previously. There's a constant struggle that seems to take place between the traditional religious values and the desire to become more enlightened about how the rest of the world works. I guess that's not too different from home, now that I think about it.
There is a crazy mix of religion here, the major ones being: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Parsi, Jain. The Jains are probably the one that is the most intriguing, as they seem to be REALLY strict in their beliefs. They practice non-violence toward all things, and are therefore almost exclusively vegan. They even go so far as to not kill insects, and won't eat certain kinds of vegetables if harvesting them kills the plant. Haven't seen an overweight Jain yet, as you can probably imagine. I hope to visit their temple here at some point. The thing that surprised me the most about them is they clearly display a swastika as a symbol:
Evidently that symbol means different things to different people. For the Jains, it means:
"the four arms of the swastika symbolize the four destinies: demon, animal, human and divine being. It represents the perpetual nature of the universe in the material world, where a creature is destined to one of those states based on their karma. It also represents the four columns of the Jain Sangha: sadhus, sadhvis, shravakas and shravikas - monks, nuns, female and male laymen. It also represents the four characteristics of the soul: infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite happiness and infinite energy."
We took a day this weekend to drive over to a neighboring city a couple hours from here, called Pune (pronounced poon-uh). It's just another big city, but it involved a nice drive through the countryside. I've not been out of the city for months, so it was nice to see something green for a change. The drive takes you through/over a feature called the Western Ghats, which is a north/south mountain range that is just outside of Mumbai to the East. I took several pictures, but due to the rains we were basically in the clouds for most of it, so they didn't turn out. Here are a couple off the internet though:
It really is that green up there, and as you can see in the first picture there are waterfalls that flow over the cliffs during the monsoon. It was really something. It would be nice to spend some more time up there.
Once we arrived in Pune, we visited the Aga Khan palace.
This is where Gandhi, his wife, and his secretary were imprisoned in the late 1940's during the Indian rebellion against British rule. Both his wife and secretary died while imprisoned there. As such, the site holds a lot of significance to the people here. I was surprised to see that some of Gandhi's ashes are actually kept there:
From there we went down to Shaniwar Wada, a 16th century fort:
The metal spikes on that door were installed up there because they would have been the same level of an elephant that an attacking army would have used to try to ram them open. The vertical slots above the door opening were used to pour boiling oil on anyone standing down there. That's our driver Khalid in the foreground, giving me the "WTF are you doing" look. From here we went back to Mumbai, which took 90 minutes longer than the GPS said it should, because thank you Mumbai traffic.
A couple more random tidbits:
Every morning as we approach our entry point to the airport grounds, we drive down a street that is just filled with walking commuters going to work/school/whatever. I've been meaning to get a video of it, and I finally got one.
You can see the mass of people walking down the left side in the video. There are cows in there sometimes as well. If you look closely, you'll see some red mass transit buses operated by a company called BEST. They have these manual squeeze-bulb horns that the driver honks, instead of a car horn. They're surprisingly loud, and they sound like a goose honking. I've been trying unsuccessfully to get one on video, as they crack me up all the time. You always know when one of those is around.
We have these little guys all over the front of our building, especially at night:
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| This is Frank. He likes mosquitos. |
Some of these are bigger than my hand. I'm happy to have them around, because it likely means fewer insects, which I'm a fan of.
One of my favorite things to do here is spot ridiculous signs that they put up about various things. Here are a couple that made me laugh recently:
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| All right then |
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| Makes you wonder what was going on before they put the sign up.... |
Thanks for reading, everybody!
