Our driver, a friendly man named Pintoo, arrived spot on to take us from Ahmedabad. Unlike most drivers Pintoo had no problems safely driving us out of the city traffic and onto the open highway. The national highway 8A was well maintained, on par with the average two-lane highways in America. For 300 km we cruised from Ahmedabad, through Rajkot, stopping for the occasional cowherd and wrong-way traffic. Once we were off the heavily used highway the road quality degraded significantly, forcing us to drop speed.
Somnath has a long history, dating back several thousand years. As always Wikipedia has a thorough history of the area. The most salient feature of the Somnath Temple is something unseen – the fact that it has been destroyed and rebuilt seven times. The most recent effort to rebuild Somnath was led by the Iron Man of India – Sardar Patel. Unfortunately all the history of the temple was written and spoken in Hindi, which I barely understand, so my dad translated for me as best he could.
The temple attracts massive throngs of pilgrims and visitors, and since it has been destroyed several times by Muslims, security is especially tight – on the order of TSA. Unfortunately no photos are allowed in the temple, leaving me to absorb the spectacular sunset over the Arabian Sea all in my mind. Notable among the crowd at Somnath was the lack of foreign tourists, including NRIs (Non Resident Indians). I suspect that is because tourists interested in architecture visit the southern temples more regularly, mainly because they are older. The lack of tourists was a premonition for the lack of decent amenities. Our hotel was barely up to middle-class Indian standards. (I’ll leave description of the bathroom to your imagination, but I’ll give you a hint – it involves buckets. Plural.)
The next day we left as early as we possibly could to the Gir jungle. (Side note – while trying to translate ‘jungle’ for my grandmother I realized ‘jungle’ is the Hindi and Gujarati word, and probably the other languages as well.) Gir is a protected national forest similar to national forests in the US. Industry is still allowed but within strict limits to preserve the ecosystem. (Enforcement of those limits is another story. Let it here be known a high-profile activist exposing illegal operations in Gir was recently assassinated.) Unlike US national forests, indigenous tribes and small villages are allowed to exist in the forest. The resulting juxtaposition between our resort and the nearby village was striking – one small river marked a massive differential in standard of living.
Gir is the last home of the Asiatic lion, and the government has capitalized on advertisements by Amitabh Bachchan, an epic Bollywood star, for tourism in the forest. Unfortunately the infrastructure to support the tourist influx was lacking. Roads were beat up, jeeps broke down, The most glaring flaw was the difference between available accommodations and entry permits. The daily available entry permits into the protected forest is 150, which is reasonable given the intense wildlife preservation effort. However the resort collective in Gir can host roughly 1500 people. Couple that with the adamant refusal of the hoteliers to speak this truth, and you have many pissed off tourists wondering why their reserved jungle safari is no longer reserved. Hiking through the jungle is not an option; only authorized vehicles are allowed, and a fine of Rs. 5000 awaits those who attempt otherwise.
For the tourist crushing to see some animals, there is the Devaliya Interpretation Zone. This is essentially run like the San Diego Wild Animal Park, with fewer animals over a smaller range. Animals are fed with some consistency so handlers and drivers can predict where they will be. 20-person coach buses rumble along various tracks through the zone with gawking tourists (including yours truly) snapping pictures. Complete with a museum and extensive ecological information, the Devaliya Zone is frankly good enough for a forest that already bans individual hikers and campers.
Just to verify this notion, we pushed for a jeep safari through Gir. Our reservation was at 3.30 pm on a Tuesday. We showed up at 3.00 pm, waited until 3.30 pm, and then learned our permits were unavailable. Complimentary passes were provided to Devaliya, but we had to wait for the hotelier’s henchman to amble on over and buy them for us, barely in time for the last bus of the day. We were guaranteed (my dad made the hotelier say ‘guarantee’ several times in three languages) that we would take the early morning safari at 6.30 am the next day. Of course permits for 6.30 am were unavailable, and we didn’t know until 6.30 am. We were finally able to obtain a permit for a 9.30 am safari, which in terms of wildlife viewing is the worst time of the day. Having already been satisfied by The Zone, we went along anyways, but I did feel bad for the massive line of cars waiting to see one sleeping lion.
A safari through Gir is like speed-hiking: The driver bangs along down a dirt road at 30 kmph, stopping occassionally for people to take photos of deers and peacocks. Capturing landscape is thus difficult, capturing animals is always difficult, and everyone just wants to barrel along until they see a lion. In essence, tourists to Gir are there to see a lion, not necessarily see Gir, which I find unfortunate. The takeaway from this experience is this: Don’t visit Gir anywhere near the holidays, and don’t trust anything a hotelier tells you.
For the first time in ten years I was able to revisit the mother city of my large, sprawling family. Fittingly, it is a large, sprawling city in the west of India. A prosperous city in a prosperous state, it is growing as rapidly as its emergent middle class. I found photographing this city (perhaps any city) extremely difficult; moments come and go quickly. A beggar standing under an advertisement for wedding jewelry, a monkey denting the roof of a car, a cow crossing the street, a policeman sipping tea and watching the resulting traffic jam. Nature poses well for pictures; her children (and their creations) most certainly do not. This is when I began to understand the “video” function of digital cameras.
I can’t pinpoint something about Ahmedabad that compels one to visit; however it is unquestionably one of the best cities in the country to live. The West is accustomed to thinking about diversity in terms of skin color; in India diversity is better measured by religion. By that measure Ahmedabad is and always has been an accepting religious melting pot. Jains and Hindus and Muslims have built their temples and mosques and they have remained standing near each other for hundreds of years. The downsides are common to Indian cities: pollution is high, littering is a plague, and traffic is bad, the display of wealth is pretentious and gaudy. Urban wildlife is plentiful, although not in the sense you may always want. Cows hold up traffic and monkeys steal food and damage property. Dogs howl through the night and weird bird calls start off the morning. Despite that, no animals are ever directly harmed by the human residents, either in traffic or otherwise.
There are two other traits of the city that stood out in my mind. First is its safety. Many other large cities in India, like Delhi, Bombay, or Calcutta, have such high violent crime rates, to the point where people (especially single women) are advised to remain indoors after 8 pm. By contrast, in Ahmedabad it is safe for women to walk home alone at 2 or 3 am. Coming to and from the airport during these times I saw many people at a street corner waiting for a ride or walking slowly somewhere without fear or suspicion of our car or other people nearby. People will watch each other at night, not out of suspicion but for their well-being. It’s not so much a communal thing – Indians tend to keep to their own circles – but it works in its own way, and it makes the city a much better place to live as a result.
The second concerns poverty. India’s poverty is no secret; the expansive slums of large cities like Bombay have made news and appeared in popular film. Driving around the city I found a smaller area percentage of slums in Ahmedabad. There is poverty, there are homeless, and there are groups of decrepit shacks, but at least on the west side of the city they seem to be distributed and slums remain small. This stands in stark contrast to the expansive slums in other cities, and perhaps is connected to the higher safety and lower crime rates in Ahmedabad. Beggars in Ahmedabad are fewer and generally less pushy; I only encountered a few stop-light car beggars as opposed to mobs of them in Bombay.
A final note concerns its spelling. I always thought the spelling Ahmedabad was an artifact of the British attempting to transliterate the Gujarati name Amdavad. However during my tour of the city I learned Ahmedabad was founded by a Sultan Ahmed, so of course it makes sense that it should be spelt Ahmedabad – Ahmed’s city. So looking at it now it seems the Gujarati transliteration, especially changing the ‘b’ to ‘v’, is incorrect. (This cannot be excused due to phonetic misalignment since the Gujarati alphabet definitely includes ‘b’ and ‘bh’ sounds.) I don’t think Sultan Ahmed could have been mistaken as Sultan Amd either, but those two would be spelt roughly the same in Gujarati.
Ahmedabad has turned out to be much more than I thought it was. It also has become more than I remember it being, due to my extended absence and its rapid growth. I can now state with more confidence and knowledge my ties to the city.
It took me a very long time, but I think I finally made my best playlist yet.
# – Artist – Title – Album
01 – Sigur Ros – Glosoli – Takk
02 – Album Leaf – Thule – In A Safe Place
03 – Psapp – Curuncula – Tiger, My Friend
04 – Vetiver – Everyday – Tight Knit
05 – Herman Dune – Nickel Chrome – Giant
06 – Fat Freddy’s Drop – Boondigga – Dr Boondigga and the Big BW
07 – Nitin Sawhney – Days Of Fire – London Undersound
08 – Bonobo – Stay The Same – Black Sands
09 – RJD2 – Games You Can Win – The Colossus
10 – Kev Brown – Albany – I Do What I Do
11 – Pete Philly & Perquisite – Mystery Repeats – Mystery Repeats
12 – Gnarls Barkley – A Little Better – The Odd Couple
13 – Rodrigo y Gabriela – 11:11 – 11:11
14 – Caribou – Lalibela – Swim
15 – Four Tet – Reversing – There Is Love In You
16 – Thom Yorke – Atoms For Peace – The Eraser
17 – Dan Deacon – Slow with Horns/Run For Your Life – Bromst
When I was a youngling of roughly 3 years, i set out on a formidable conquest of the English alphabet. I trained alongside my grandmother on the sacred battlegrounds, known in the ancient tongues as
Seriously, I think this show is the best way to learn the english alphabet. Where else can you win tons of money for just knowing the alphabet? The motivation for a child to learn the alphabet is orders of magnitude larger than any classroom could possibly provide. Watching grownups shriek out a letter and seeing it appear on the screen is just pure magic for a 3 year old. Add to it money and prizes and commercials for denture cleaners and you have a successful teaching plan. Shove that in your teaching credentials!
I imagine this is what recovering alcoholics have to go through.
Thanks to a diabolical friend who knows my weakness for complex systems, I have been addicted to this game for the past several weeks. Enough has been said on what this game entails so I will simply illustrate how this game has consumed my mind. What follows is a strategy for the 2-player version of this game that should result in 15 stone houses, 5 family members, and more for a ridiculous score of 98 points. Of course a devious opponent could fuck this all up. This assumes the opponent moves within reasonable bounds (i.e. using spaces you need sometimes but not all the time).
The strategy centers on reducing the cost of building a wooden room to just 1 wood, building all the rooms, and then renovating to stone. As always with 2 player games this strategy requires securing wood (maximum 8 wood actions required). Cards help gather the stone, and using the Chief and Mansion, you get 5 points per stone house! Feeding is done through grain abuse with Baker, Acreage and Baker’s Oven. Combos must be setup quickly and the order of importances (food->rooms->points) must be ruthlessly followed.
Needs: 2 grain (g), 4 clay (c), 1 reed (r), 23 wood (w), 16/19 stone (s), 4 food (f)
4-5 Stone grabs, 6-8 Wood grabs, 1 Clay/Reed grab (easily possible with 2 people)
Starting hands (how else would you expect a score to be this insanely high?)
I have long been in the curious position of understanding the horrors faced by animals in the meat factories which feed our country, yet not quite understanding the existence of alternatives. (Any documentary is inevitably dire, brooding, and full of fearmongering. What worse way to convince a population to change than through fear?) If I shop at a supermarket, the only difference to me between the regular chicken and the organic chicken is the price and packaging. I may know the organic chicken is better, has been treated better; yet I don’t see it, I don’t feel the weight of this knowledge.
In an effort to resolve this dilemma my old friend Kevin Watt and his wife Shae Lynn have started a local sustainable farm called The Early Bird Ranch in peaceful and beautiful Pescadero, and invited Dariya and I to visit and learn about how our chickens are raised and slaughtered. There are multitudes of such ranches in the Bay that espouse local, sustainable, etical, and other such buzzword policies, and make the end customer pay a heavy premium for the end product. Kevin’s farm stands out by smart land management and taking advantage of symbiosis between different species of livestock. He is able to offer birds of healthier quality at lower prices simply by avoiding the myopic tendencies of farmers. The power of his and Shae’s education is brought to full force in the disciplined management of the farm. Writing this so long after the fact limits my ability to relate the harmony of his techniques and how they reject so well the idea of conquering our environment, so I invite you to read about their methods on their website.
Here I would rather speak about my experience visiting his farm. Simply visiting his farm awakened something primal within me – the experience of meeting my food. Standing amongst the birds I realized that for the many many years I shopped at supermarkets, or even farmer’s markets, I never once saw the true source of my food. I could buy the local and the organic with the knowledge of where and how these food items came to be, but never the feeling, the satisfaction of that knowledge. I never saw anyone pick vegetables and fruits, I never saw anyone milk the cattle or slaughter the birds. What could possibly be more important than knowing and feeling, being fully and truly aware of where your meal is coming from? I have not yet found a satisfactory response to that question.
Visiting a farm affirms food as the primal element that connects us to our environment. Hiking and camping allows me to live in our ancient environment, yet unless I am hunting and gathering my food (which I have not so far) there is still a barrier, a non-physical separation between myself and nature. As apex predators, food is the product of nature which we most directly interact with. With food we can thrive. Without food we die. Without an awareness of where our food comes from, and how it has been taken care of, how different are we from the livestock we feed? I would like to repurpose the word ‘feeding’ to describe humans unaware of the source and care of their food. All of my life I have been feeding!
With food, results matter above all else. I am happy to say that his chickens are by far the most nutritious and the most delicious I have ever tasted. I am convinced that the deliciousness is directly caused by the nutritiousness. No longer does chicken taste like nothing! I do not claim a scientific explanation, only that it makes sense that foods rich in nutrition appeal to our taste buds; since our taste buds can distinguish poison, why not nutrition? What more primal experience could they possibly have been designed for, whether by evolution or by God?
