A Hill Chronicle

^{The view from our garden.}

The name “Coonoor” comes from “kunnu” which is Tamil for hill, and “ooru” which means village or home or something like that. So “Hillville” might be an appropriate (fr)anglicization. During this trip I’ve been taking stock of all the little things I like about Coonoor and the Nilgiris.

The Tao that can be expressed

The following is the first part of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching – it’s my favourite piece of eastern philosophy. I’ve quoted it many times, ever since I started blogging, but I’ve never really written about my take on it.

“The Tao that can be expressed
Is not the Tao of the Absolute.
The name that can be named
Is not the name of the Absolute.

The nameless originated Heaven and Earth.
The named is the Mother of All Things.

Thus, without expectation,
One will always perceive the subtlety;
And, with expectation,
One will always perceive the boundary.”

There are many translations, each offering strikingly different interpretations of the basic Chinese text. This is my favourite version. I keep returning to the last stanza about expectation. I think it is one of the best clues about the ways we can respond to life’s challenges. Another translation renders it as follows: “Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.”

What does it mean to live with expectation? I think it means to be ambitious, aggressive, competitive, and goal-oriented. These impulses –  the passions and desires –  are important, because goals cannot be achieved without them. However, with expectation, we always come up against boundaries. Walls. Obstructions. We fail. We are stymied. We see things as black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. We enter into the game of life, and all its ups and downs become manifest. The life of expectation is the life of yang — it is “hot, fire, restless, hard, dry, excitement, non-substantial, rapidity, and corresponds to the day.” One could even go so far as so say that the West’s great successes can be attributed to it’s relentless ambition.

What does it mean to live without expectation? It is that calm, desireless state that we frequently associate with eastern philosophies. The Buddha recognized that desire is the root cause of evil, so he advocated the elimination of desire, rather than any attempt to satiate it (as most people do). Proceeding without expectation, we perceive the subtlety — the nuance. Looking at things without a goal in mind, we are free to view them from a variety of angles, appreciating the mysterious complexity: the dynamic interplay between countless shades of grey. This is the territory of yin — “soft, slow, substantial, water, cold, conserving, tranquil, gentle, and corresponds to the night.”

The great difficulty in life can be expressed as the problem of when to proceed with expectation, and when to lean back and perceive the subtlety. In a sense, this problem is about dealing with free will. Let’s jump into some examples.

Just before the Mahabharata’s great battle, Arjuna finds himself in a quandary: how can he fight his own flesh and blood? His friends and his teachers? A Kshatriya suddenly starts seeing the subtlety, so Krishna  attempts to bring Arjuna back into the field of action — there is a time for doubt and contemplation, but now Arjuna needed to execute his duty.  His dharma. A warrior needs to see things as black and white, or he will drive himself mad.

Hamlet’s primary dilemma can also be seen in this light.

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them[.]

Should he sit back and suffer the slings and arrows of his terrible fate, or get off his ass and do something about it? Should he commit the sin of killing his treacherous uncle in order to avenge his father’s murder? Despite supernatural intervention, Hamlet takes a verbose four acts to finally work up the courage to do the deed. And as Fortinbras and Horatio survey the carnage, we’re still left wondering — should Hamlet have unleashed all this death and destruction?

Science requires proceeding with expectation. If we ask nothing of the world, we are at the mercy of mysterious and capricious forces of nature. If we examine the origins of these forces, some of the mystery clears up, an many new things become manifest. [If you're know a little about quantum mechanics, you will quickly see why some physicists like eastern mysticism. But I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.]

The reason I’m picky about the translations of the Tao Te Ching is that most translators make a virtue out of living with subtlety, belittling the boundaries. I prefer the value-neutral version. Both yin and yang and needed to make the world go round. However, the primary thrust of Taoism is to live without expectation, always perceiving the subtleties. This is probably why I gravitate to this philosophy, whose exemplary element is water. Water humbles itself by sinking to the lowest places, and there finds calm and stillness. Yet water can break rock when it has to. Even if I recognize my passive, watery side, I often find myself expecting things. I have my hang-ups. My judgemental tendencies. My competitive streak lies dormant most of the time, but I’m pretty sure it’s not dead.

There are interesting knots one can tie oneself into while examining cryptic verses such as these. The next part of the section goes as follows:

The source of these two is identical, Yet their names are different.
Together they are called profound.
Profound and mysterious, the gateway to the Collective Subtlety.”

So is the fundamental subtlety the recognition that yin and yang spring from the same source and must needs coexist? Or is the fundamental boundary our very quest for consistency, unity, and a common source for all knowledge? Do we not expectantly seek out subtlety? The author humbly preempts even these attempts at cleverness, warning us that “The Tao that can be expressed / Is not the Tao of the Absolute”.

Profound and mysterious, this Tao is. And of course, the rest is silence.

I’m allergic to India!

It sucks. I come here for a few weeks, and my nose begins to reject my surroundings, attempting to violently eject my brain through my ears.

I’ve aways had allergy issues and assorted respiratory ailments, but now whenever I return to Coonoor these niggling problems become debilitating handicaps. I guess it’s the dampness. I’m never coming here during the monsoon again, if I can help it. You know how it feels? It’s that feeling you get right before you sneeze – all the time. And when I’m not being sinus-tickled to death, I sneeze. And sneeze, and sneeze and sneeze. Even the all-powerful cetirizine dihidrochloride (Incid-L) doesn’t seem to work it’s usual magic.

This nose-itch feels like I’ve been put on some sort of sedative with a cruel and unusual sense of humour. The saving grace this time around is that I’m not bedridden. There’s normally a sickening pattern: I start sniffling and sneezing, then my nose gets blocked, then I have to breathe through my mouth at night, then I wake up with a throat infection, then I get a fever, and then I have to wait until the sore throat becomes a phlegmy cough before things start improving.

Well anyway, today I feel better, so I’ll do some long overdue blogging.

I flew into Delhi this time. Tawakley took me to a place in Def Col (Market?) called 4S — apparently it became a Stephanian hang-out after I left. (We did run into Aney, and I think Pawar was there too.) Tawakley got Perakath, Udayan and Gupta to come. Good to see them all. Lawyer, copywriter, reporter. I’m happy that the (often wacky) people I knew in College are enjoying what they’re doing now.

I was returning to St. Stephen’s after 3 years. I was more reminded of my first year — 7 long years ago – than the last time I was there. Weird grab-bag of emotions. Seven years ago I was an awkward, prudish child. (Now I’m an awkward, prudish adult.) Tawakley and I were expecting some sort of disaster in College, given all the depressing news coming out of there. Nothing physically wrong with the place (unless you count the apparent increase in Mallus and South Delhiites).

I met Dr. Phookun. He was zapped by my appearance. He accused me of becoming fully Americanized. He asked if I had grow taller. (’Wider’ might have been more accurate — although I’m not as chubby as I was last year.) He then took me to the physics lab to address the 3rd physics kids about what I’m doing. In the lab I met AG, who was also excited to see me, and described me first as a punk rocker, and then as a Shankar-Ehsan-and-Loy type. Don’t know whether to take that as a compliment.

We wandered about the campus. Rud North is a girls block now! So it’s three and three. When I was in College there was just Allnutt South. I had the mandatory scrambled-and-toast at the Cafe. Mohan and Bhaiyyan are still there. Tawakley and I simultaneously concluded that the situation vis-à-vis the fairer sex was good, having noticed one pretty girl. Amazing how one pretty girl can change one’s opinion about a place. If I hadn’t seen her, I might have written the following: Where did all the English Honours types go? Hehe.

From Delhi I flew to Trivandrum, and spent a couple of days with my grandmother. On the way to Coonoor we made the usual stops at Kottayam and Cochin. Kottayam — the Syrian Christian adda — featured aunts who made half-joking references to the arranged marriage market. (It’s all a game for them.) Which, in principle, I’m not opposed to. I’m just too young right now. Thankfully. But this time around I started thinking: how on earth would my aunts describe me to people? They don’t know me particularly well. I imagine the word “intellectual” might be bandied about, what with the arcane graduate studies and all. One family friend called me the intellectual of my generation. Good grief. A better description would be: “music geek who giggles a lot and dabbles in Taoism.”

I’ll leave off here, and write about my meeting with Thoma later.

Some of the Islands We Passed

[Warning: this post is just some rubbish I've posted for my own amusement. Kindly proceed to the previous one. Carry on up the Khyber.]

I received quite a humdinger of a spam-mail the other day. Normally I just delete them, having ascertained that the email contains the usual offer of stock tips, viagra or “male enlargement”. (Hmm. I think spam is mainly targeted at men. Or unsatiated wives of stock brokers maybe.) Anyhooooo. For some reason I read this one. I have converted it into a rather stylish poem (adding only punctuation and capitalization, but leaving the text as it was). Be warned: a careful reading will reveal the poem’s dark core of sorrow, lasciviousness, and quiet insanity.

Labiodental Fricative

In India, they should replace the phrase “mind you P’s and Q’s” with “mind your V’s and W’s”. I am deeply perturbed by the subcontinental tendency to confuse the voiced labiodental fricative (the ‘v’ sound) with voiced and voiceless labialized velar approximants (the ‘w’ and ‘wh’ sounds).

^{For more of this kind of thing, check out this site.}

This confusion about the relative positions of lips, teeth and soft palate takes different forms in different parts of the country. Many North Indians replace all W’s with V’s. Tamilians often do this too. Vhat shit yar taaking! Some people with a smattering of education, having discovered the W, over-compensate by converting many V’s to W’s. Wery well thank you. Awoid woylence.

Malayalees and Maharasthtrians tend to turn their V’s into W’s. Technically the Maharashtrians use a sound that floats somewhere between V and W. I have a friend who was trying to say “valve”, but said “wall” instead. Very confusing. I think Malayalees just speak so fast that when they try to say V their lower teeth miss their upper lip — even the words of Sansrit origin lose their crisp V-ness. The missing V’s occasionally resurface in words where they have no business being. Id iss wery fenny when they zay “wondervull”. All this is doubly confusing in America — where “vegetarian” is never abbreviated to “veg” — when an Indian asks for “wedge” in a restaurant.

Meanwhile the hardcore Bongs replace their V’s with aspirated B’s! Bhat are you talking about?

Don’t think I’m being elitist. Even members of the elite get things muddled once in a while. I know two Stephanians — parent and child — who regularly pronounce “allowed” as “a-loved” for some reason.

If it hasn’t already, all this should remind you of that classic series of Channel V ads featuring Jawalkar without a V. I just found them on youtube! Woo hoo! Gheun Tak!

^{I also found Quick Gun Murugan (best if you know a little Tamil, because the subtitles are a bit different from what’s being said, but it’s still funny otherwise). Simpoo is there too! Search for yourself. Ah, the 90s.}