Live (more or less) from the jungle
Dear readers, it's not the chill (or the pinot), but the travel.
With a quick succession of visiting speakers in town, I've been trotting around Mumbai (if trotting = sitting in a traffic for hours), and scarcely got back from a trip to Aurangabad, before getting dragged into an Ambassadorial visit (conducted in such post-monsoonal heat that one staff member fainted), and then, where I sit and type now, to the middle of the jungle in a rarely-visited central state wracked by Maoist terrorism (but, Mom, on the bright side, I'm not in Damascus...).
There's no particular bar to mentioning where I am, I suppose, except I'm mildly superstitious about travel not yet completed. I'll tell you later. Hint: if you look it up in Lonely Planet, it mentions it exists, but doesn't really say much else about it; the entire 84,000-square-mile territory gets about three-quarters of a page.
I'm also hideously sick, with a sore throat I've had for a week, and a sort of pithed-frog buzzy feeling in my brain (again, not the pinot), and an ability to sleep for ten hours at a stretch, even if it's during someone's talk. (Especially if.) I gotta say, it makes a surreal state -- the geographic one, I mean -- that much more of a surreal state.
This place doesn't get many non-Indian visitors. I walked down the street today, in the middle of a protective huddle of my Indian colleagues, and traffic was literally screeching to a halt around me as drivers rubbernecked. A traffic policeman chuckled and shook his head as I went by. I mean, it was like something out of a Mentos ad -- except instead of being some photogenic crazy kid engaging in socially nondestructive highjinks, I was just trying to walk down the street. I'd even dressed in a salwar kameez thinking I might blend in better, though in retrospect: little green alien vs. little green alien in a salwar kameez? I may have just made things worse.
I have to run and bring my fiery-throated loopy extraterrestrial self to a dinner being thrown by some Vice Chancellor in my honor. Hopefully not a hostage situation.
With a quick succession of visiting speakers in town, I've been trotting around Mumbai (if trotting = sitting in a traffic for hours), and scarcely got back from a trip to Aurangabad, before getting dragged into an Ambassadorial visit (conducted in such post-monsoonal heat that one staff member fainted), and then, where I sit and type now, to the middle of the jungle in a rarely-visited central state wracked by Maoist terrorism (but, Mom, on the bright side, I'm not in Damascus...).
There's no particular bar to mentioning where I am, I suppose, except I'm mildly superstitious about travel not yet completed. I'll tell you later. Hint: if you look it up in Lonely Planet, it mentions it exists, but doesn't really say much else about it; the entire 84,000-square-mile territory gets about three-quarters of a page.
I'm also hideously sick, with a sore throat I've had for a week, and a sort of pithed-frog buzzy feeling in my brain (again, not the pinot), and an ability to sleep for ten hours at a stretch, even if it's during someone's talk. (Especially if.) I gotta say, it makes a surreal state -- the geographic one, I mean -- that much more of a surreal state.
This place doesn't get many non-Indian visitors. I walked down the street today, in the middle of a protective huddle of my Indian colleagues, and traffic was literally screeching to a halt around me as drivers rubbernecked. A traffic policeman chuckled and shook his head as I went by. I mean, it was like something out of a Mentos ad -- except instead of being some photogenic crazy kid engaging in socially nondestructive highjinks, I was just trying to walk down the street. I'd even dressed in a salwar kameez thinking I might blend in better, though in retrospect: little green alien vs. little green alien in a salwar kameez? I may have just made things worse.
I have to run and bring my fiery-throated loopy extraterrestrial self to a dinner being thrown by some Vice Chancellor in my honor. Hopefully not a hostage situation.
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