Sub Ubi

Joel is a good college friend, currently… well, currently living life in India. It’s hard to keep up with exactly what he is doing, but his notes simply make me smile. If you know Joel, you can easily picture him riding through the jungles of Nepal on top of a bus. If you know Lost in Gambier, imagine Brian M. on top of the bus with Joel: you can almost hear him saying “I don’t think this is very safe…”, clutching, white-knuckled, to anything that looks like it might not move (too much), and Joel, grinning like a madman, saying “What?! Look at this! Isn’t this amazing! Come on, guys, I’m going to stand up… take my picture! Ooops! Watch out for that branch!”

This post is just a reminder that to everyone that when they say you can do anything in life, they really mean it. Even if you live in Nowheresville, and think your life is so far from the exotic that even your housecat has seen more of the world than you, go taste something new today. Do something different. Challenge expectations, surprise yourself, enjoy the gifts you have.

Another guest article from Joel Lee.

It’s a cozy place where I live, a guava tree with ripening guavas outside my window, no need for a mosquito net, the fragrance of freshly processed chewing tobacco occasionally wafting from N.K.’s “home industry” tobacco cannery in the basement next door.  The hostel caretaker is a veryfriendly Sikh man and renowned poet, whose name appears on the advertisements for Urdu poetry sessions in Bombay, Calcutta and Hussein Tekri.  The screen door fell out of the doorway, frame and all, about the third time I opened it when I first moved in.  But there’s hardly a need for it, since, as I mentioned, there are unbelievably few mosquitoes here considering the warm, lush, monsoon climate and the fact that we live across the street from Lucknow’s Gomti River.

Urdu studies are coming along swimmingly, but language learning is above all time consuming, so I’ve had to abandon “free time” for the duration of the program.  I’m skipping out on a field trip today in order to write this and catch up with a few personal things.  Please do keep writing and know that I appreciate every little typed line of affection I get from you all.

I get around Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India (a friend recently pointed out that Lucknow itself has the same population as all of Ireland), on a 1984 Enfield Bullet, the Shah of Indian motorcycles.  It’s old and funky, fun to drive, and belongs to a college friend.

As I’ve been out of touch with almost all of you, I’ll mention that before coming to Lucknow and after the Dalit Human Rights survey work, I went to Udaipur in Rajasthan for a wedding, passed through Delhi several times to pick up the bike and play Dictionary and watch films like Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible Part I” - which I’ve wanted to see for years - with Delhi University friends, and then spent a few days in Nepal in order to fulfill Indian visa requirements.  I wanted to write you all from Nepal, but in the face of the silent, terrifying, impossible enormity of the Annapurna massif of the Himalayas, mundane things like writing email or, well, being indoors at all, seemed ridiculous.  One highlight of the sojourn in Nepal was the 9 hour bus ride from the Indian border to Pokhara, most of which I spent with 27 other men and eight pigs in burlap sacks on top of the bus, and god only knows how many people crammed into the bus interior (we came upon another bus that had broken down on those remote mountain roads, so we had all their passengers as well as our own), enjoying truly fresh air and a 360 degree view of the bursting green jungle-covered mountains of central Nepal, from a road that drops off on one side about 500 feet to the boulders and crashing milky waters of the Kali Gandaki River.  On the other side the mountains continue their dizzy, racing ascent into the ungaugeable heights of the monsoon clouds above.  Bus-top is the way to travel.  I cannot recommend it enough.