Days 16-20

Day 16: Monday, July 15
Free morning and a low-key afternoon of temple visiting in Delhi. First stop was the Birla Mandir, a Hindu temple built by the wealthy Birla family (a Bombay mercantile firm whose interests today include construction materials and telecommunications). It was opened in 1938 by none other than Gandhi and today is a clean and peaceful place with high ceilings and an appealing cast of glass-encased gods to whom quiet families somberly distribute flowers and sweetmeats. It's certainly one of the most visually pleasing temples I saw. From the street it looks like this:

Then a short hop around the corner to a Sikh temple, the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, sort of a more compact and rugged version of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, with a cleansing pool, golden inner sanctum, and Sikhs distributing buttery clumps of sweet, nutty dough to everyone exiting the temple. It looked like this:

Days 17-18: Tuesday, July 16 and Wednesday, July 17
Class on Tuesday, devoted to the medieval Delhi sultanate, about whom I remember little except that they didn't adopt the most sustainable building practices, insofar as they kept abandoning cities and building new ones for themselves anytime a new dynasty came along. On Wednesday morning we visited one such city, or rather the ruins of one, at Tughluqabad, built by a king named Tughluq in the 1320s. It was inhabited for all of four years before being abandoned, probably for want of a good water supply, and today its crumbling walls spread loftily over a surprising amount of prime south Delhi real estate. We were virtually the only visitors there, so we had our own security detail of bored guards who protected us from monkeys and children by chasing them off with giant sticks. The ruins looked like this:

We were far from the only visitors at our next stop, the Qutb Minar complex, another sultanate city built in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Qutb Minar itself is a massive sandstone-and-marble minaret, the tallest in India (I suppose this is a mark of some distinction, since all the literature mentions it, but ask me to name the tallest minaret of any other country and I'm afraid I won't be able to answer you), and it's suitably impressive - unusually textured for a minaret, it looks like it would make a pleasing "qutb-qutb-qutb" sound if you were to lay it on its side and roll it across the floor. It looks like this:

The rest of the complex is arguably even more interesting, since you can get really close to the ruins and investigate the weird, chunky asymmetry of a place that was built largely of bits and pieces of older buildings, mostly Hindu temples (although our guide here, an historian from Delhi University, was careful to point out that this kind of spoliation was not a uniquely Muslim practice - Hindus stole pieces of each other's temples all the time). The mosque is particularly fun in this respect: on its walls and columns one can easily spot defaced Hindu idols, and there's no effort at all to maintain stylistic consistency, so the place looks a little like it was built of ill-matched Lego sets. To wit:

Days 19-20: Thursday, July 18 and Friday, July 19
Free morning on Thursday (so back to the archives) and then class in the afternoon, where we met Ebba, one of the world's leading authorities on Mughal architecture, and the Taj Mahal in particular. Nice PowerPoint presentation showing the evolution of the Mughals' distinctive syncretic style, made all the better by Ebba's personal presence, which combines erudition, humility, and a sort of aristocratic languor - she reminded me of a Habsburg countess in a Marx Brothers movie, which I mean as a (very high) compliment.

So lecture on Thursday and then a visit to Humayun's Tomb on Friday morning. Humayun was one of the more hapless Mughal rulers: chased out of Delhi a few years into his reign, he had barely begun to enjoy his recapturing of the city when he tripped down the steps of his library (allegedly as he fell to his knees to answer the call to prayer) and died. He is decidedly more glorious in death than he ever was in life: his tomb, built by his son Akbar, is a sublime place of peace and symmetry, well preserved and tastefully restored. It looks like this:

Thanks to our friends in (ahem) high places, we were granted special permission to visit the roof of the tomb, where later Mughal rulers presumably had concerts and cookouts. This was very exciting, so I took a few pictures. Here's one of them:

After morning at the tomb the afternoon was free, so Steven and I decided to visit the Nicholson Cemetery, a Christian graveyard established during the British period and named after a psychopathic army officer who died during the 1857 revolt. It's a forbidding, overgrown place with cruel looking monkeys and silent people crouching in the grass slowly clipping the undergrowth. The tombstones are cracked and lopsided, and, were it not for a handful of shiny newish graves in one corner of the grounds, it would be a perfect metaphor for the fading of Britain's imperial grandeur. As it is, it is merely an imperfect metaphor of same. Here's what it looks like:

After ghosting around there for a while we decided to try walking the two-three kilometers to the 1857 Mutiny Memorial, but the neighborhood was fetid and homicidey, and we didn't quite make it. Instead (as some subsequent Googling would reveal) we made it to within a stone's throw of the monument before deciding that if we ever wanted to see our families again we should turn tail and retreat to the nearest Metro station. Buying our tokens and ascending the escalator to the clean, breezy platform was like entering another world: the 10 rupee charge was just enough to ensure that our only companions in the station were the crisp and airconditioned middle classes. We were protected from the mean streets of Delhi by a barrier precisely 16 cents high.

Days 14-15 (Varanasi)

Day 14: Saturday, July 13
Morning flight to Varanasi, one of the world's oldest continually-inhabited cities and spiritual center of Hinduism, where people bathe in Ganges to remove their sins (though it's just as likely to remove their skin). Varanasi airport is one big room with one gate for "arrivals" and another for "departures" - like the other Indian airports I've visited, and unlike pretty much everywhere else in the world, it's a quiet cavern of calm, refuge from the raging city outside.

After lunch at the hotel (Chinese/Indic fusion with several kinds of cheesecakes and mouses), it's an afternoon trip to Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon. Our slick, talkative, Hindu-nationalist guide tells us all sorts of improbable (or simply false) things about Buddha and on alighting from the bus we have to run for our lives to escape hawkers. First stop is a 1930s temple designed and built by the Imperial Japanese Government (just before they tried to invade India, in fact) with a room showing the stages of Buddha's life and a nice courtyard with kitschy statues showing Buddha giving a sermon. It looked like this:

Then it was the archaeological museum, home of the famous Sarnath lion capital (the emblem of modern India, found on coins and the flag) and a small but exquisite collection of Buddhas and other statues. Sadly, one wing of the museum was closed.

Then we popped up the street to the deer park, the site of early Buddhist monasteries and a stupendous stupa for circumambulating. This is what it looked like:

The deer park was lovely, but I spent most of my time there fending off teenagers trying to sell me souvenirs, trying (not altogether successfully) to enact the central Buddhist tenet of renunciation. This would be a recurring theme at Varanasi.

Before heading back to town we also poked around a brand new, supergigantic Buddha statue erected by the Thai government, which seems to be under the mistaken impression that Sarnath is suffering from a shortage of things to circumambulate. It looked like this:

Next came the undisputed highlight of the Varanasi trip: a rickshaw ride through the old town to the riverfront to watch the ceremonial tucking-in of the Ganges for the night. Bicycle rickshaws are somewhat dangerous and feel vaguely exploitative, but they do have certain distinct advantages over mere walking: they're faster; they protect your shoes from the ubiquitous cow dung; they insulate you from hawkers; and they immerse you in the insane hurly-burly of the streets in a way that no motorized vehicle can. This is what we looked like in our rickshaws:

The ride to the river was one of the most exhilarating and bewildering experiences I've ever had. It was a raging torrent of sound and color. Rickshaws and bikes and pedestrians and scooters swirled around each other in all directions, lights flashing and horns blaring, while cows lounged stupidly in the middle of the road, serene in their sacred bubbles. We lurched over potholes and through filthy puddles, past shops and roadside food stalls of every description. Crones with golden nose rings sat cross-legged on blankets with vegetables splayed before them like offerings to the gods. Teenagers with new mustaches and stylish jeans stared at us as they growled by on their motorbikes. The smells were indescribable.

Finally we reached the ghat and wormed our way through the crowd to a couple of boats moored to the shore. Had the river been in a better mood we would have gone out on the boats and viewed the city's famous riverscape from a nice panoramic distance, but the monsoons had made it swollen and violent, so we simply bobbed along on the shore. It was like this:

We lit candles in little floating vessels and launched them onto the river with a wish. We swatted at hawkers and listened in mute incomprehension to the chanting coming from the shore. I lay back on my patch of boat and watched the clouds part to reveal a single star, and then I sat up and saw seven priests rhythmically fanning incense with elaborate featherdusters. Then it rained, briefly but heavily, so I huddled up with two of my companions and formed an umbrella canopy that kept us mostly dry while the others scrambled to put up a tarp and huddle under it. It was perfect.

Day 15: Sunday, July 14
We celebrated Bastille Day with an early morning trip to the same ghat as the night before to watch people taking their morning bath in the ganges. I was too beset by hawkers to really appreciate what was happening, but some members of our group endeavored to join the bathers, wading a little into the river or splashing its waters on themselves. As of this writing nobody seems to have suffered any serious medical consequences from this.

Then we followed our slick and untruthful guide through the narrow streets of the old town, accompanied, for the entire journey, by teenagers trying to sell us things. I was lucky (or callous) enough not to attract much personalized attention, but some members of our group had a pretty hard time of it. I would look over at Keith, say, and actually fail to see him through the layers of hawkers who had attached themselves like leeches. Then there was the cow dung simmering away and swarming with flies in the soupy morning heat, creating a strong disincentive to lift one's eyes from the ground and observe the ancient city we were passing through. When we stopped at a platform overlooking the riverside cremation facilities (if you die in Varanasi you gain release from the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation, so there's always a steady supply of corpses for the wood-fired stoves) a number of "employees" of the cremation facilities came along to helpfully explain what was happening. When we, choking on corpse smoke, turned to leave, they demanded "donations," which a few of us were trusting enough to provide them. Only once we returned to the bus did our silver-tongued guide tell us that the authentic cremation people never demand donations; we'd been rooked.

The hot, odiferous, hawker-infested morning nearly undid the magic of the previous night, but not quite. Here's a what it looked like, complete with cows, hawkers, and a genius trying to ride his motorcycle through it all.

After the old town we made two more stops: one at a 1930s Hindu temple with a gigantic relief map of India on the floor, and the other at Sanskrit University to examine an ancient Ashoka pillar and marvel at the neo-Gothic, British-built, not-even-remotely-Indian-looking architecture of the main building. Then it was back to the silent, cavernous airport and the flight back to dear dirty Delhi, which, after Varanasi, never looked so serene and inviting.

Days 9-13

Day 9: Monday, July 8
Class all day. Mostly Krishna as depicted in myth and art. Highlight was watching excerpts from the 94-part TV version of the Mahabharata, which aired from 1988 to 1990 and apparently had the power to bring the entire country to a screeching halt, 45 minutes at a time, for two solid years. A brief glimpse at one of the extracts we watched, showing the confrontation between Krishna and Shishupal, should explain why.

Day 10: Tuesday, July 9
Trip to Kurukshetra, center of Krishna devotion, where the blue-skinned playboy is said to have recited the Baghavad Gita and perhaps done some other things. Three and a half hours there, three and a half hours back, along the Grand Trunk Road, which sounds a lot more romantic than it is. Intriguing glimpses of rural north Indian life - rice paddies, brickfields, smoggy cities, and painted temples - which sometimes looked like this:

And sometimes like this:

Pilgrimage sites in Kurukshetra were workaday and undramatic, mostly pools surrounded by marble or concrete with a few temples and statues sprinkled here and there. We made quite an impression on the sadhus and other loiterers at our first stop, who blessed us and sang to us and tried to sell us rosaries or whatever. A sadhu house looks like this:

Most impressive site was the complex surrounding the Immortal Banyan Tree, said to be the actual site where the Gita was recited, though scholars question this, since a) it doesn't appear to be 5000 years old, and b) it's unlikely such a tree would be standing in the middle of a battlefield. To me this seems like the least problematic aspect of the Mahabarata, factchecking-wise, but this really isn't my field. Unusually for an immortal tree, the banyan appears to be dying, its roots constrained by the marble platform surrounding it, but I'm sure everything will work out fine.

Before leaving the complex we all made a wish and tied a bit of string around another tree, an even older tree shrine dedicated to Vishnu. Then we went to the Krishna Museum, which has a handful of great ancient artifacts and perhaps a shade too many specimens of contemporary "folk art." Mercifully the electricity went out twice while we were there, so I may have skipped some of the gaudier or gorier ones (Krishna could get pretty gory - he makes Old Testament Jehovah look like Mahatma Gandhi). Also visited the multimedia Mahabharata exhibit, which included a video of Krishna and one of his consorts doing a Bollywood dance, and was careful to observe the posted prohibition on throwing feces. Long bus ride home.

Day 11: Wednesday, July 10
Ashram day. Went to the secret hideout of Swami Agnivesh, the first swami I ever met. Big social reformer, former Member of Parliament, active in combatting communal violence, as well as poverty, as well as alcohol. Big name in the interfaith spiritual world peace community, sort of a Gandhian figure, minus the anti-modernity schtick (he tweets). He's the current president of the Arya Samaj group, a Hindu-Vedic sect that promotes social justice and rejects things like caste and gender distinctions. The ashram is a simple place that works to empower the powerless through education and vocational training. We all sat around a green room and heard a bit about the Swami's life and beliefs, which actually got me thinking in a much more critical way about the Hindu beliefs and practices that we've been learning about. Our tendency as curious outsiders is to romanticize Hinduism - the picturesque gods, the complex iconography and numerology (the six thises and seven thats, the four thingies and twenty-two doodads), the seeming antiquity and dignity of it all - and it's easy to overlook some of the destructive aspects of the faith as actually practiced - the ways it can encourage materialism, misogyny, obscurantism, fatalism, etc. Swami Agnivesh (as I understood him) believes that once you strip away all the outer manifestations of the faith - the myths, the rituals, the social practices - you're left with an essential truth that underlies Hinduism but also transcends all religions, i.e., we're all one, we're all God, and we should all be nice to each other. As if to prove the urgency of his message we drove home through the booming suburb of Gurgaon, where the shiny headquarters of multinational tech companies loom over the muddy shantytowns of the people who clean them.

Days 12-13: Thursday, July 11 and Friday, July 12
Class both days. Thursday a talk by a well-known film journalist, Friday a lecture on Sarnath and Varanasi in preparation for our weekend trip. Free afternoons both days, so I hightailed it to the archives and managed to find some decent notes. Am getting accustomed to the Metro ride. This is how it goes:

1) Descend stairs into sleek, modern metro station and purchase token from human being who will always require you to repeat the name of your destination at least once, even though the destination has an English name and you are speaking perfectly ordinary English.

2) Place bag on airport scanner, pass through metal detector, and spread limbs for usually perfunctory, but sometimes surprisingly intimate, frisking.

3) Descend further to platform, observe orderly rows of men queued up to get on train. Note that most women are clustered toward the rear, where they will catch woman-only train, a perfumed paradise that your stinky ass will never enter.

4) Watch contentedly as train arrives and serried ranks of Indian men in slacks and shiny shoes wait patiently for passengers to exit the train before trying to board.

5) Watch in horror and confusion as crowd rushes into train before everyone has disembarked. See real pain on the faces of those who have to fight upstream to get off train, buffeted on both sides by men in slacks and shiny shoes, like a car going through an automatic car wash, the kind with the rolling vertical brushes. See grown men scurry and push one another like frenzied chickens while the last few stragglers, still determined to disembark, grab onto one another for dear life. Not all of them make it.

6) Stand around placidly with everybody else and ride train to destination.

7) When arriving at destination, disembark AS FAST AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN to avoid getting caught in the crosscurrent and getting trapped on train for the rest of your life.

8) Spin and twirl as people run by you on their way to this platform or that, where they will arrange themselves into neat rows and until the next train comes.

9) Take escalator up, drop token in slot, take another escalator, and exhale.

Days 7-8 (Amritsar)

Day 7: Saturday, July 6

Getting to Amritsar is a chore. Though less than 300 miles from Delhi, it's hard to find a train journey shorter than 10 hours (do the math) and even harder to buy a ticket for a train journey, since one has to have an Indian phone number in order to register for the website, which requires an Indian phone, which requires a passport and other documentation, and so on. And the website's only open for a small portion of the day, so if you want to book your train journey at night, that's just too bad. After enlisting a small army of tour operators and hotel staff to help us book tickets, and after seriously investigating alternative (though no more accessible) destinations, we (that is, myself and the colleague who joined me on the trip) ultimately forewent the train and booked a flight. On an airline we'd never heard of before, but what the hell, it got us there.

Amritsar: not the prettiest city, but site of several important things. Thing one: the Golden Temple, sanctum stanctorum of the Sikh faith, a very active pilgrimage complex with pool for wading, gigantic dining hall for free meals of chapatis and dal (dude next to us tells me it feeds 2 lakh people a day, that's 200,000), and the eponymous temple. Seized by Sikh separatists in the early '80s and stormed by the Indian Army in 1984; many innocent people died, then Indira Gandhi died, then hundreds of innocent Sikhs died in the fallout. You'd never know it today (though I'm told there are still some bullet holes at the temple): no security, apart from some burly Sikhs with harpoons who may or may not be keeping an eye on the crowd - no scanners or checkpoints - and thousands upon thousands of people, Sikh pilgrims as well as non-Sikh tourists (almost all Indian), flowing in and out by the hour. It's a friendly and welcoming place: Sikhs bathe, Sikhs pray, strangers ask to take their photos with us, people stand patiently in a very long line to enter the inner temple. It looks like this (note the massive queue on the left):

We eventually got in that queue, but had a few things to do first: buy orange bandanas to cover our heads, leave shoes and socks at counter, walk barefooted through mote of stagnant water in ritual footcleansing, squish along soggy mats laid out along pool, gawk at Sikh men swimming, wander into dining hall, watch men briskly ladle lentils and fling chapatis onto metal plates, eat lentils and chapatis, watch hundreds of volunteers gather and clean metal plates, gawk at impossibly filthy man who catches filthy plates flung rapidly at him and arranges them in giant buckets, and perambulate the remainder of the complex. Some of those things looked like this:

Standing in the queue wasn't so bad, because they had plenty of golden fans set up and some nice music being piped in. Took about half an hour - had a bit of a scare when, at about minute 25, the music changed and the crowd started chanting and the queue stopped moving while they performed some sort of ceremony - but it didn't last that long, and actually the spontaneous chanting and praying was quite moving, and we soon got inside. Couldn't take pictures, though, so you'll just have to believe me that there's a gigantic giraffe inside wearing a bow tie. Not really. it was actually the piped music was being performed live, by a small band (which included an ornate golden synthesizer) and readers/singers who take turn reading/singing the Sikh scriptures, nonstop, all day long. There was also a punkah-wallah and a small congregation of men, women, and children, all worshipping quietly together in a dark but beautiful little space.

Having not thought to bring in bottles of water, and not trusting the free water on offer, we were quite parched when we exited. So we bought some 5 rupee Sprites, the best Sprite I ever consumed, and managed to meet a linguist in the process.

Thing two: the Jallianwala Bagh, site of the 1919 massacre of peaceful demonstrators by British troops. A short walk from the Golden Temple. Have taught about this thing for years, and even wrote an article about it, so it was interesting to see how the space is being used today. First impression that struck is: it's much bigger than we'd thought, the size of several football fields, and the killing seems to have taken place all over the site. Plenty of interpretive plaques, mostly taking a strong nationalist line (denouncing British "tyranny," honoring the "martyrs," etc), but the crowd wasn't taking it too solemnly. It was a hot Saturday and great numbers of tourists (again, almost all Indians) were milling around - laughing, taking pictures (of us and themselves), lounging in the shade, picnicking. There are some strange decorative elements to the place, including barbed wire that wouldn't have been there in 1919 and some wire doodads intended to train plants into the shape of gunmen. The latter looked like this:

There were also walls with bullet holes and a well where hundreds of people had jumped to avoid the bullets. Not a solemn space at all, unless you carefully considered what had happened there, which I tried to do.

Thing three: this isn't strictly within Amritsar, but it's close enough to make an easy trip. The Wagah border ceremony, something I've also talked about in class (I show them a YouTube video) and was eager to see. In what we were coming to see as typical of Indian queue management, a great crowd of pushy, shovey people gathered at the gate into the border zone about an hour before the gates opened. Among those people were we, swaying and sweating and dearly wishing we had chosen a later time to arrive. After quite a bit of cruel teasing the guards finally opened the gate and the crowd surged to another gate, this one a security check, and then to another, and then another. We finally made it through, soaked and cranky, to the VIP and foreigners section. From here we watched what must be one of the strangest nightly rituals on earth: part rock concert, part dance party, part sporting event, and part aggressive nationalist display. Outdoor amphitheaters on both the Indian and Pakistani side held hundreds of spectators who munched on concession food, took photos with guards, waved flags, joined chants led by a tall white-clad cheerleader, and danced to Bollywood hits. The men were separated from the women, and the women's side was tremendously colorful. It looked like this:

After a happy half-hour the ceremony started. Guards, some of them putting on their most theatrical angry-faces and some seemingly amused, preened and stomped and shuffled and scowled. Wasn't able to get any terribly good photos (they were moving too fast), but this will give you the idea:

For more, I recommend this video.

This went on for about half an hour and then we climbed, exhausted and a little woozy, into the taxi of a murderous Sikh driver who shot us back across the Punjab countryside to the serenity of our colonial-era bungalow compound.

Day 8: Sunday, July 7
Quieter day, this. Cows walking the halls in the compound in the morning gave us quite a shock, but a pleased shock. Then a short trip to the Ram Bagh, the summer palace of Maharajah Ranjith Singh, which supposedly has a museum but we were only able to find the life-size panorama extolling the Maharajah's many brilliant exploits against the Afghans, Kashmiris, and other people. The French may have helped him just a bit, but we couldn't be sure. The panorama was quite stirring, but the grounds themselves were a little sad. The former looked like this (I didn't bother photographing the latter):

Then a bit of shopping and back to Delhi and the creature comforts of our fancy hotel, proud that we had poked our heads outside the planned-and-packaged bubble for a few days and encountered a few of the world's most interesting things.

Days 1-6

Prologue: Sunday, June 30 (early morning)
Arrived to sweltering heat and a friendly driver holding a sign and a sweating water bottle. Twenty-minute drive through south Delhi to hotel: streets chock-a-block with colorful lorries and cops, the latter principally involved in yelling at people. Arrived at hotel through several layers of security (three guards at gate, baggage screening, metal detector, polite pat-down). Lady posted at front desk gave me a marigold garland around my neck, a bindi on my forehead, and a glass of juice. It was 1:30am.

Day 1: Sunday, June 30 (day)
Breakfast buffet at hotel: juices, coffee, fresh fruit, sliced bread, croissants, candied croissants, two varieties of mini donuts, dinner rolls, french fries, and assorted spicy Indian food. They also provide eggs and homemade yogurt (a good way to expose yourself to the local bacteria), but you have to know to ask for it.

Comfortable in the hotel - everybody says hi, all the guards (and there are many) salute and press elevator buttons for you, the airconditioning is more than adequate - but feeling like I should try to see a bit of the city. First outing is to Khan Market (which I hear, perhaps not inappropriately, as "Con Market" in my head). Had been led to believe it was an upscale sort of shopping mall - turns to to be more of a double-decker strip mall with some posh-looking stores (most of them closed at 10am), a muddy and pungent interior pathway, and lots of taximen and rickshawmen and men who stand in doorways and appear to be trying to catch my attention from time to time. I ignore them and do some halfhearted browsing.

After lunch (an elaborate buffet, as they all will be, of at least four superb Indian dishes, soup, bread, rice, fruit, dessert, and usually something vaguely Italian) I decide to walk to the Purana Qila, or Old Fort, about a mile away. Sultry day: I begin sweating as soon as I step outside. Autorickshaw driver convinces me to let him drive me to the fort for a mere 40 rupees ($.65) - wants to take me to some craft market, but I'm not interested. Anarchic traffic, dusty diesel fumes. Big crowd outside fort listening to someone on a megaphone. Not many people inside the grounds, which are vaguely 16th century and look like this:

People stare at me quite unabashedly: only other Western couple is a Scottish mother and adult son who spend quite a bit of time arguing with ticket seller. Nobody asks to take their picture with me, but this will change.

After fort, I acquiesce as driver takes me to craft market after all. First real glimpse of slum area on the way there, though market is nice and, mercifully, air-conditioned. As will prove to be common in India, there are about eight times more people working in the market than is strictly necessary: one guy to try selling me the rugs, one guy for the brass gods, a woman with the shawls, another woman with the shirts, etc. I escape without spending any money: crestfallen driver tuk-tuks me back home.

Gathering for drinks in the evening at hotel bar: first meeting with fellow institute attendees. Then dinner. Friendly and diverse group: some with experience of India, some who know nothing about it, and some in between. Another gigantic dinner. Sleep.

Days 2-3: Monday, July 1 and Tuesday, July 2
First two days are for class. On Monday we introduce ourselves, and we have lunch with Rama Lakshmi, the India correspondent for the Washington Post (fascinating discussion about protest movement's, women in India, etc), then afternoon presentations on ancient Harappan civilization and art of ancient India. On Tuesday another presentation on Harappa and then a short presentation from Shashi Tharoor, novelist, member of Parliament, cabinet minister, runner-up for position of UN Sec General. Tharoor is smooth and charming, but as a neoliberal politician he's not uniformly popular amongst some of the Indian academics in our group. He escapes unscathed, however, and I begin reading his novel, Riot, which isn't very good.

Day 4: Wednesday, July 3
First institute outing to Old Delhi. Red Fort (seat of Mughals from mid-17th century), Jama Masjid (grand Mughal mosque), short bus ride through Chandni Chowk (central artery of Old Delhi), lunch at Karim's (whose chefs trace their lineage to the Mughal court).

Red Fort: a bit shabby, British destroyed most of it in 1857. Occupied by Indian army until fairly recently. Is, unsurprisingly, red. Several people wanted their pictures taken with me. Restoration of fort is ongoing, looks like this on the inside:

Chandni Chowk and streets surrounding: riotous, muddy, hypnotizing. Couldn't stop laughing in the chaotic traffic.

Karim's: splendid tandoori chicken. It began like this:

And ended up like this:

Jama Masjid: stunning, epic, blistering hot. This was happening inside:

Climbed minaret, 130ish steps. Nice breeze at top, but was full to bursting. Luckily, ironwork held as I pressed up against it:

Day 5: Thursday, July 4
Potentially tough day: third anniversary of Joey's death. Turned out to be meditative and quite profound. Morning trip to Rajghat, where Gandhi was cremated and is now memorialized with an eternal flame. Accompanied there by Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of the Mahatma, who also led us around the Gandhi Smriti, the house where Gandhi was killed, now a museum and memorial. Tushar was passionate and kind; he wept a little while standing at the assassination spot. This is Tushar:

Returned to hotel to find lunch room decorated with American flags and red-white-blue bunting - all the senior hotel people then presented us with a pineapple Independence Day cake. It was very touching. Then we sang "God Bless America."

Afternoon trip to National Museum of Modern Art (some of the group opted to visit the Nehru Mansion instead, which by all accounts was rather dry and unairconditioned). Special exhibit of Jamini Roy, some of which was quite pleasing, but the real discovery for me was Amrita Sher-Gil, a modernist painter active mostly in the 1930s who died of TB in 1941 - at the age of 28, same age as Joey. She painted this:

The art museum was an excellent place to breath deeply and think of my brother.

Day 6: Friday, July 5
Morning trip to the National Museum, with art from ancient India up to the 18th century. Spent most of my time with the miniatures from the Mughal period: marvelous colors, great mustaches, and some pretty amusing Krishnas. No photos, though. Sorry.

Free afternoon, so I went to pick up a letter of intro from the American Center (near Connaught Place: strange decaying modernist architecture, heavy security, only minimal confusion) and then to the National Archives to register for access. The building is grand (Lutyens building in the heart of New Delhi, which the British built expecting never to leave) but the premises are rudimentary: guards who grin and point instead of explaining how to navigate the labyrinth, no airconditioning, bare white walls and analog catalogues. But gaining access was quite easy (by Indian standards), and there were monkeys outside. Monkeys the size of labradors.