but we were about to enter a temporary insanity zone. It was 8.25am at the Dharamshala local bus station and the Manali-destined bus driver was saying his prayers to an electric blue Shiva.
We left at 8.30am and drove into the mayhem of the morning.
We hung on,
and our bones rattled to every thrust and jerk, pothole and near miss. Elbows were uncontrolled and often connected with heads,
We had had such a charmed and magical fortnight in Dal Lake. It was time we fucked things up. The bus only slowed up a tad when things got really close,
otherwise it was an 11 hour near-death adventure, the driver maximising the g-forces of the black-cloud-generating-metal-box we were travelling in, racing at gaps in the traffic, breaking hard to avoid road craters or cows or people or trucks, and often driving on the oncoming traffic’s side of the road.
We copped dust and petroleum fumes as they streamed in the open windows.
This rites of passage into the belly of daily experience on a local bus in India gave us further insight into just how mortality-fearing society is in Australia. We felt this in ourselves. It was for us another process of giving up on what we thought was common and logical, and accepting what is.
We arrived late to a hotel that boasted online rooms in the centre of town. It’s true, it was in the centre of town, but not the town we had searched for and thought we’d booked. The room was filthy and didn’t in the slightest way fit the online description, but we didn’t care. We crashed and awoke to a bright new day.
We auto’d several kilometres to Manali and then onto Old Manali,
where we found this lovely, sunlit room.
While in India and other countries in Asia, we have combated the all night dog barking parties by turning the ceiling fan on a low settling and drowning them out with this white noise. While this room didn’t have a fan, it was situated beside the Beas River, which offered a more perfect muffling from a quite different electrical source.
In cooler Old Manali we came across old friends and didn’t realise how much we’d missed them. Old friends like dandelion and clover,
mallow
and apples,
and nasturtium, which we found growing beside cannabis, which doesn’t grow wild back home.
As we walked the streets and hills, we adults foraged a small amount of seeds and took a micro-dose for three consecutive mornings, once again confirming this medicinal flora isn’t for us. But this plant is for some, and Patrick wrote a poem about a notable cultural group who have made Old Manali a transitory home, and who like to partake.
Beside writing poems, Patrick likes to make things with his hands. We came across Tisha in her shop and we enquired about local Manali wool. She told us to come back in two days, and when we did she had just finished the spinning of a 1kg ball, which we bought from her.
Patrick cut some local willow,
stripped the bark and dried the branches in the window,
cut them to size,
put a rounded point on each one, and got knitting.
He was shown how to knit as a kid by his mum, and has passed this skill onto his boys. Throughout our time in Manali, the ball of wool and the willow needles accompanied us everywhere.
Like Woody’s cricket bat being a calling card for a game or a yarn, Patrick’s fibres of both wool and beard have introduced us to many, including Jimmy,
We were never too far from the source here, of everything. Of water,
of the valley of the gods,
of the givers of apples (thanks Raj!),
of Deodara cricket forests,
of pack anarchy,
and pack horses,
of snake charmers
(who turn trickster at the point of the money shot),
and of Gaddi people and their flerds (flock of sheep and herd of goats combined).
The source of our greatest love in Manali where for these humble, present people and their mythological animals.
We watched the Gaddi herd their sheep and goats through the towns,
and set up camp for the night.
We feel such kinship with Gaddi folk and the oldtimer orchardists in Manali.
When we tell people here we grow apples and tend sheep and goats their eyes light up, as did the lady gardening outside her house when we stopped to admire her magnificent creativity.
While much of India is going down to development dogs like Adani and his corrupted political mates, the soul of India remains in the land and the people who tend it. And while trickster energy is present again in Manali, in people and other mammals,
we met many who have not covered their eyes, blocked their ears or masked their mouths to what is going on. Road development, according to Sohan, who ran Dream River guesthouse we stayed at, is the main cause for the increase of flooding and landslides in the north of India, yet it is always reported climate change is the sole culprit in the news. He said, “the road workers are told to dump tonnes of boulders and rock from the cuttings into the rivers, raising the water levels, and the cuttings themselves into the sides of mountains bring about more landslides. The combination of the two in monsoonal rain times are wreaking havoc.”
Tourism and mining are big business here, and better roads mean more money for ‘development’. The social and ecological impacts of such capitalist enterprise in India are palpable. A local Manali man told us that since the 1960s the forest tribal people, the Baiga, have been victims of forced evictions by Indian authorities, often in the name of conservation. The Baiga also live where Adani and co want to mine for coal. With similar intransigence, concrete in India is the answer to all construction today, yet the intensity of rain, the steepness of mountains, and the cost-cutting by business means that concrete structures are forever falling apart. Great chunks of new road or retaining walls are regularly washed away or collapse. The more cuttings into a mountain, the more problems it causes.
It is the old ways being lived in the contemporary moment that charmed us most about Old Manali and this region. Not because we are romantics, but because we are also pragmatic performers of ancestral lifeways in the contemporary moment. Our methods are different back home, and our tools sometimes too, but we also make compost to grow more life,
store and dry wood for the winter,
ferment things,
carry fodder to our animals,
collect apples,
and store them,
and build in ways that don’t cost the earth.
For in our ancestral bodies and minds we are the us in them. There is no and. There are only lives embedded in the processes of lifemaking, in the continuum of living and dying. All the craft beer joints, wifi accessibility, bourgeois coffee houses, demanding tourists and major roads leading to lithium or coal mines will not improve India, as with everywhere else, these things will only impoverish it.
Life in Old Manali and its region is rich because of the attributes of mother country here,
and dangerous, offering a tender closeness with death.
Life here has stung us,
and soothed our bodies in hot healing spring water direct from the source.
We didn’t get to play much cricket with others, although a spontaneous game popped up in the town square on one occasion,
however, we did get to spend most days among giants.
Hoping you too have spent time this week among giants, dear reader. And among friends. Thank you for joining us on this leg.
I sit with young Israelis
in a German bakery
in northern India
their coffee arriving
to cigarettes
and laughter
in dream catcher apparel
I read Krishnamurti
with chai and jaggery
“Religion,” he speaks,
“…[mostly] a matter
of propaganda, of
vested interest, with
much property, with a
great hierarchical,
bureaucratic system
of spirituality.”
I can see
the destruction
of Israel
in its destruction
of Palestine –
for, can a home
(even 77 years old)
ever be home
if murder is required
to sleep in it?
My chai
a comfort of sorts
with sweet Israeli youth
leaving the promise
in high numbers
drifting here
with roadside
cannabis
unsettlement
We have been asked a number of times in India what our religion is. We reply, we are animists. Then we are asked, but who is your god, your gods? We answer, Mother Country. Our response feels inadequate because our animism is not rooted in the past with developed belief systems or dependency on a story. Rather, it is an in-and-out-again presence with the living of the world.
At traditional Hindu weddings in India the groom leads the bride around a sacred fire. The couple take seven steps, each one representing a blessing – food, strength, wealth, happiness, progeny, cattle and devotion. Throughout our two weeks living in Dal Lake, near Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh in the north of India, these seven blessings travel with us. They travel with us, in us, through us, connecting us to everything here.
We arrived in Naddi above Dharamshala on dusk, and went exploring.
and out of the clouds came this friendly Gaddi goatherd.
We spent a night in a mouldy room with a stellar view, and only one double bed despite the advertisement stating three singles.
We have inflatable mattresses with us, it was cheap and cheerful, and the next day we left our packs in the room and went walking for the morning.
The temperature was cool and the tributaries flowing. This region has three main seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. It is monsoon season now, and it rains every day from July to September.
On our walk we recognised old friends, uncensored and unrestrained, growing autonomously in the mountains,
and came to shrines where daily offerings are made.
We crossed Naddi River,
and took masala chai and omelette at a stone built café on the other side.
We began making connections here,
but we had a mouldy room to leave and the promise of a cricket park to get to.
Just down from Naddi is Dal Lake, which boasts a well loved public cricket pitch. Teams are chosen, Woody a little nervous at first, clouds cover the lake, cattle watch on.
Just up from the pitch, Bittu runs a chai stand he’s had for seven years. He’s thirty now, and ready to walk the seven steps with a goodly woman, arranged or otherwise. He played Patrick’s guitar and the two men had a yarn,
while Meg and Woody set out on foot to look for a room close to Dal Lake’s cricket pitch. They door knocked at guest houses, some of which were closed as this is the off season in Kangra district. They eventually found Pong Dam View, under renovations.
We hired two musty but not mouldy rooms, which meant Woody’s parents, who like to wake early could get up, do morning stretches, make tea, make love, make blog, without waking the growing boy, who is a 12-hour-a-night sleeper. There is also a little kitchenette. We opened all the windows and doors and let the fresh mountain air flow through.
The kind owner of the home stay, Kali Dass, a retired soldier, gave us a 2/3 discount for staying long-term, so room 1 at Pong View Dam Home Stay became our little sanctuary for a fortnight. No other guests stayed during this time. A quiet sanctuary from which we stepped out from each day to go exploring, and where, across the road, another guest house and café was situated, sporting this truism at the front door.
Back in Australia we heard the news that the Labor Party have set up their own disinformation reporting site urging their believers to dob in what they deem as ‘disinformation’. Yes, we should absolutely trust a government and their supporters to hold the measure of truth on behalf of everyone else – it’s always worked well in the past.
The past is very present in India. Gandhi, like Mao in China, is the only fella on the notes here,
and his glasses appear everywhere as a potent symbol for the man who led the country to independence.
While in Dharamshala, over two nights, we watched with Woody the 3-hour film, Gandhi (1982) for a historical insight into how India moved from British colonial control over many different tribal peoples, to the modern nation-state republic (annexed off from Pakistan in 1947), it is today. We’ve also been reading the court statement and associated literature of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse,
and listening to Tibetans in exile here in Dharamshala speak about the intransigence of the Chinese government towards Tibetan people, culture, language and sovereignty.
As we write, the Dalai Lama is returning to his home-in-exile here in Dharamshala, after surgery in New York. The Chinese government continue to call him a separatist, which is an odd label and demonstrates how they either don’t understand or care for the beliefs and wishes of HH or Tibetans. (It also gives us context for why it was made so difficult for us to travel to Tibet from China. Foreigners are granted a two-week visa to China, but then need a permit to get to Tibet, which ordinarily takes 20 days, and you have to be chaperoned for the entire time by an accredited travel agent).
Sympathy for Tibet in this region is pronounced,
which contributes to the ongoing beef between India and China. One afternoon, while we were playing cricket, we witnessed two Tibetan dancers perform on the banks of Dal Lake.
It was joyful to behold such culture making.
The continuous attack on indigenous peoples globally is global capitalism’s conversion process of lively, connected souls into moribund consumers. Some colonial-capitalist institutions are brutal and unashamed in how they treat first people, like the Chinese government in Tibet, the Israeli government in Palestine and US-NATO alliance all over the world. And some are more subtle in how they foster the conversion process, like the lesser nations of the Five-Eyes countries, who increasingly participate in what we call institutional fascism. That is a trust-us-we’re-experts-go-back-to-your-shopping kind of fascism. Because there is no boot stomping, few see this fascism by bureaucratic stealth, rolled out by sophisticated propaganda.
Tibet’s sovereignty was once an important issue for leftists in the rich countries, but seemingly not now for The New Normal Left, who seem to be engaging in purity politics, dividing people into correct and incorrect categories. Purity politics is dangerous ideology as it strips away nuance and diversity of approaches; it is projection warfare predicated on fear and desire. Rather than a turning towards an open relationship with life, with shadows, with underworlding and knowing oneself, the dark is feared,
and ideology takes over.
The two performers at Dal Lake dance their culture into presence and away from fear. Dancing, not war, represents for us the spiritual anarchism required for this era of growing censorship and government overreach. Incorporating both the light and dark occurs in mature cosmologies. The Christian influence in the west has in large part attempted to cancel the dark, and the cult of scientism has carried on this peculiarity into the present. By not being in relationship with darkness, the tendency to mythologise that one is only a force for good comes into play. (See Charles Eisenstein’s brilliant The Sith: A political allegory). This conceit – that the dark cannot inform, give to, or challenge our civilisational hubris – is dangerous. There is no reflection, no shadow world, no trickster to learn from. For us, Mother Country is both light and dark, and this is why we are mother country animists, and why we find kinship with animisms in India.
The assassination of a political opponent did not bring about the reunification of India, as Nathuram Godse had hoped. We have played cricket with Indian soldiers on holiday here in Dal Lake, who express to us that they’re spending their youth keeping “terrorists” out of Kashmir. The continual bloody legacy of the 1947 partitioning into two separate nation states, India and Pakistan, which Gandhi created (albeit with great reluctance), has never gone away. Similarly, the assassination of Trump will not free America from systemic corruption and stop Congress from effectively being a chamber of bought stooges acting for the military and pharma industries, and others. Likewise, violence against China will not bring about Tibetan liberty. The persistence of culture and eldership, however, will.
Tsundue, a mutual friend of friends back home, filled us in further on the Tibetan story here. Tsundue was born in Dharamshala, after his family fled Tibet in 1959, and he and his wife have raised a family here. He too spent some of his youth at Ladakh with a Tibetan unit of the Indian army, resisting Chinese government forces there. Today he is a father, artist and beautiful soul.
If Kamala Harris wins office there will probably be global nuclear war. The Democrats are a New Normal party; they are a war party, and since 2014, when Obama allowed Democrats to receive money from Pharma, they have become a Pandemic Industrial Complex party. American politics is not some fairytale of good guys and bad guys. Rather, it is a culture war between working class discontents on the right and the bourgeois institutional fascists on the left who have abandoned them. There are no good guys, though redneck anarchists like Oliver Anthony, come close.
Dancing is what is required in this present moment, and just as with the truism painted on the wall of the guesthouse above, the monks filming this joyous display of life to share the story of Tibet’s continual culture making, is creative-political dancing. It is joyous sedition. Counter propaganda. Art has always performed a role of subversion, and there is no time like now for artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, anarchists, permies, neopeasants and musicians to joyously and playfully counter the propaganda of the global machine conglomerate.
There is a buzz here, currently, for the return of the Dalai Lama. He has been based in Mcleodganj in Dharamshala since 1960, when he fled Chinese state aggression after the Tibet uprisings, and set up the independent Tibetan government in exile here.
We booked in to hear him speak,
though his lecture was postponed, no doubt due to his health. It is not certain how many more Dalai Lamas will live in exile. China, via economic warfare, is probably set to become the world’s superpower as the US empire crumbles. Or, perhaps Artificial General Intelligence will devour the entirety of humanity in the next handful of years, who knows. But what is clear to us is that all rigid structures, all tightly controlled places, all inflexible dynamics, all static dogma, all government overreaches always signal fragility, sickness and inevitable collapse.
The antidote to all this is forever dancing at the propaganda, fear campaigns and inflexibility of wrong story authority,
and thieving when it brings liberation and laughter,
and daring to enter underworlds,
and connecting with earth others,
and practicing social and labouring solidarity,
and Himalayan thrifting,
and sharing joy through the shared love of a game,
and beholding the majesty of mothering mountains,
and giving where possible to people in need, while not being suckered by a well crafted racket,
and staying with the contradiction of beauty and barbarity mixed in the same moment,
and helping strangers without need of reward or flattery,
and learning from those more accomplished at being relaxed and oneself in private or public places,
and following, for a while, the flags of others with open curiosity, despite fomenting for ourselves our own processes and prayers unshackled from another’s authority,
and singing and playing more delicious life into abundant life, as guests in another world,
and occasionally grooming oneself, on the event of a shared birthday, and honouring the Dharamshala artisan (thanks Suninder!) who helped perform the operations,
and passing on our knowledges to youngtimers,
regardless of our species.
While there is much to learn from the world’s religions and spiritual movements here in Dal Lake, Naddi, Dharamkot, Dharamshala, McLeodganj, et al, we are finding more kinship with the wisdom and lifeways of monkeys,
and bulls,
and raptors,
and russula eating slugs,
and sow thistles,
and mountain clouds,
and street dogs,
and goats and their goatherds.
Pankaj is the son of Gaddi shepherds, and has, along with his kin, taken the family’s goats and sheep up into the higher country for summer browsing. The family normally has a flerd (a flock-herd) of around 50 animals, but a few seasons ago a snow slide took out half of this number. In the evenings we have walked up the mountain to Naddi, and Pankaj and other family members have cooked us some of the best curries we’ve had in this region.
Pankaj makes the paneer cheese that goes into the Kadai Paneer curry dish from his own cow and buffalo milk, and on one occasion the family offered us a goat curry, not normally on the menu. The Gaddi are people of dear interest to us. They are Indo-Aryan, semi-pastoral peoples living mainly in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. They are made up of many different cultural groups, and for generations they have been herding their animals through the high countries of northern India. According to locals, and the god Shiva himself who, it is told, has a special affection for them, the Gaddis are a graced and gentle lot. In the mid-twentieth century, they inspired the Punjabi romantic painter, Sobha Singh, to create his famous, Her Grace the Gaddan, which is hung in many guesthouses in the district.
We asked Pankaj whether our tracking senses were right to call this a tiger print, which we came across on one of our forest walks.
He confirmed our suspicions and spoke of how the tigers come into the villages after the snow melts each year, hungry after the winter, but they are around at any time. The way he spoke about this most revered animal without fear and with respect was beautiful to hear. On a number of nights, we walked home from his restaurant through the dark, awake and alert to the presence of tigers, but not fearful.
Monkey business here in Dharamshala is not always welcome. Apart from taking banana offerings from a shrine, we watched monkeys stealing corn cobs from a sleeping street food vendor, and use power lines as jungle vines to swing from tree to tree, sometimes bringing them down.
This particular cheekiness is another learning from India, which we can apply when necessary. If governments use communication lines to control us further and silence dissent, as is already happening around the world, then we will dance those lines down. Maybe our monkey dance in this instance will be reverting to dumb phones, and going off line. Monkeys ridicule the slingshot stones projected at them by house and store owners. Back home, since Covid, we have been slung labels such as conspiracists, selfish, right-wing and stupid, and even likened to colonists who intentionally brought small pox to Aboriginal communities.
A new study, a metadata analysis, published a few days ago claims that 3% of people who took Covid vaccines died suddenly. This adds up to millions worldwide. You may want to read the study before it is censored, cancelled, smeared or taken down. Remarkably, we were in a grass roots community group with the person who wrote the above opinion about the unvaccinated being intentional super spreaders. We were fighting institutional fascism in the form of overreaching local laws with her, before Covid entered the room.
We are reflecting here that we are still in the wound of Covid, and perhaps monkey business is another way to help heal that wound when dialogue or deep listening circles are not possible. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to monkey trickster energy here in Dal Lake and the little villages nearby,
and not just one kind of monkey business.
Nor can we get enough of cricket with the local fellas.
We played cricket with many local kids when school let them out, and many men and women.
These Punjabi tourists, who played ball with us, got out their boom box and created a spontaneous dance party. Having written about dancing through the morning in this blog, the dance was invited in the afternoon, and Patrick jumped in, while Woody declined but picked up the camera.
The dance went a little like this:
There has been much joy in these hills. Many steps of learning and living. One teenager turned to Patrick behind the stumps and said after facing a delivery, “Bowling is a beautiful art”.
Another cricketer we played with said, “In India cricket is cultural.” On Patrick and Woody’s birthday, we went to Dharamshala Stadium.
Meg took this photo of the birthday lads with their new annual haircuts.
Many Indian tourists also visit this northern temple of the game. As well as being cultural, it is often said cricket is a religion in India. Players like Tendulkar and Kohli are considered gods here, though the game is not parochial and other countries’ cricketers, especially Australian, are also revered and enthusiastically spoken of. Harmission, Jashan’s cousin in Punjab, was named after Steve Harmison, an English cricketer.
Integrating this game and other chance encounters with dance and cheekiness, with permacultural neopeasantry, with mother country animism, with subsistence-resilience, with spiritual anarchism, and with observation, connection and curiosity are our seven steps in Dharamshala.
Before we left Dal Lake we made a little offering to the local cricket shrine.
For those of you following this journey from the beginning, you’ll know this moment has been a long time coming. We are delighted to announce we have arrived in India, and we have several weeks here to immerse, listen, observe, engage and play. So we have more sharing to come. But first, let us go back a little, and unpack how we got here from Nepal.
~
We bumped and bounced and crazy’d all the way from Pokhara back to Kathmandu,
passing many intersections of wild, cultivated and industrial Nepal.
We didn’t want to arrive to India by air, we wanted to cross the terra,
but we were given no choice. The Indian government disallows overland travel as first time E-visa applicants. So we reluctantly caught a flight to New Delhi,
spent nearly two hours at the airport going through immigration, enduring invasive biometrics and interrogation, attempting without success to withdraw some rupees, and setting up an Indian SIM card with a US$10 note we had stuffed away in a bag for just such a moment like this. After all the airport hubbub and alienating processing we soft landed into a car
with Manjit, who was sent for us by Jashan’s family. For those who haven’t listened to our podcast with Jashan and Bei, it will give you some context for why we have come here, and where we are going now.
We began this journey hitch hiking, now we have our own driver. Mixed feelings ranging from gratitude to defeat sit with us in the car, as we are transported through the streets of Delhi.
Delhi, where cows freely wander the streets and no one moves or harms them,
where egotistical architecture
punctuates the streets,
where, in the intensity of the heat and traffic, beauty appears in many forms,
and where, on the outskirts of this city, which holds the same population of humans as the entire human population of Australia, a mountain of anthropogenic waste grows day by day.
After a few hours of travelling we stopped at a fast masala dosa joint for lunch. Woody has struggled on this trip with hot spicy food, despite his parent’s encouragement to push through to the pleasure and health side of such gastronomy. After we get the guarantee from the staff that the dish he has ordered is not spicy, it almost always is.
This lunch occurred at 5pm, and we drove on into the early evening, sitting on about 50km/hr due to the roads, which were full of people, animals and machines,
crossing into Punjab state around 7pm, and arriving at Jashan’s family’s farm at 9pm, exhausted and ready for bed. Our friend Jashan, who lives in Melbourne was not there. With little shared language we were embraced by his family and immediately treated to a beautiful meal that we sedentary travellers did not need. We found it difficult to refuse. Patrick struggled the most as the late lunch dosa went to war with his microbiome, but the meal had been lovingly prepared by Jashan’s mother, Paramjeet (left), and aunties (another) Paramjeet and Rajinder (right).
We felt awkward we couldn’t fully honour the love and care that had gone into it.
In the morning before the heat of the day we were taken on a farm tour, stopping first at the produce garden, which feeds the six families who live here.
Jashan’s cousin, who we call girl-Jashan, led the tour. The chilli patch was abundant.
The family is vegetarian; their main source of animal protein is from cow and buffalo milk, from which they make curd (yoghurt) and paneer (semi hard cheese). The cows and buffaloes are given fresh cut fodder twice a day. The fodder iys jowar, a relative of corn grown for cow feed. It is grown in small stands throughout the farms (see right of below photo)
Throughout the district farmers cut jowar and transport it on shoulders or by bicycle,
by bullock cart,
or by tractor.
The jowar is brought to the dairy to be threshed,
to turn it into fresh feed,
and given it to the cows and buffaloes, who have fans above them to keep them cool and keep mosquitoes and flies off them.
Mosquito nets are drawn across the dairy from before dusk to after dawn, and the buffaloes bathe for an hour every morning and afternoon.
We found the husbandry of the cows and buffaloes immensely respectful, providing cool and protective shelter, nutritious food, and herd companionship,
in exchange for milk,
for both the family and the local market,
manure for fertiliser, cooking,
and for methane gas production.
The main crops that support the family both in the monetary and subsistence economies are rice and wheat. The grain that makes the chapati bread is dried the traditional way,
and accompanies each delicious meal.
But it is currently rice growing season.
On this 15 acre farm, some of the rice fields are bordered by medicine plants such as turmeric.
Cannabis grows wild on the road verges,
as do medicine trees such as neem and various fruit trees. Many of the activities during the day are manual. Bodies are used often, not just machines, and as a result of this and the fresh farmed food, people are well here.
With Patrick’s unhappy gut, Karamjeet, Jashan’s father, pictured here with Woody in nearby Patiala,
put him on a strict diet of pomegranate from the garden,
and peeled apple for a few days. The apples come from cooler Manali, north of Punjab. The diet worked a treat and we were all then able to enjoy the wonderful dishes that we were served each day.
Jashan’s boy cousins, Harsh and Harmission, played endless hours of cricket with Woody,
from 6-9am in the morning and from 4pm until dark in the evenings.
Friends of Harsh’s came to join in, and the ball sometimes took some time to find when it was hooked or ramped over the wall into the rice fields.
Finally in India, Woody just couldn’t get enough cricket.
This game that came to the subcontinent with the elite of British colonialism has been hacked, enjoyed and claimed by Indians across the economic spectrum. It is a game that brings people together, and is a language itself.
On our last evening Jashan’s uncle, Hakam, took us to other farms in the district. At this farm a clutch of puppies had been born,
and although feral, the farmer (below left) had been feeding and looking out for the mother.
We are enjoying the reverence for life here, and the connections we are making with Jashan’s beautiful family and neighbourhood,
We have had so many sweet moments in Nanansu, Punjab.
We were treated with such respect and care. While change is in the air with the young generation – meet the delightful Jaskirat –
there is beauty in the old ways that is solid and noble in the culture.
We are sad to be leaving this family farm community. We’ve had a wonderful first week of landing in India in such a supported way.
We are now well nourished, landed, rested and ready for the next leg of our adventure.
“The word ‘individuality’ means ‘indivisible’, not fragmented. Individuality means a totality, the whole, and the word ‘whole’ means healthy, holy.” Krishnamurti
While in Nepal we briefly met this man.
Here’s a rough translation of what he sings (via a free translation app and our own poetic license):
Hello to everyone greetings with good luck Greetings everyone greetings to all I am living for you Loving at heart for I sing elegant Nepal Greetings everyone greetings with good wishes
Patrick later wrote this poem inspired by the brief encounter.
Minstrel
Hello
greetings, g’day
I am the listener
who feels your life
bind to mine
in the moment of
your playing
You appear
from some place
at the bus
when it stops
to let out
we stabled travellers
to urinate
Your music
is my old people’s too
(when we were not fragmented)
loose and wild
inside me
raw and free
dancing gaily at fear
I feel renewal
in this land slipping
bus shaken day
in hearing
your pleasure
to sing and
string
