Coming home

A self-portrait taken at Leopold's in Mumbai, with daughter Kate and Carl Lindquist. I am  in the moment and in the picture.

Schilphol Airport, Netherlands ~

As we flew west, we pushed back against the time zones. Our journey from Mumbai to Memphis, including a seven-hour stopover here, is 25 hours for us. But since we left India at 1 a.m. and expect to arrive in Memphis at 5 p.m. on the same day, the time on the ground -- and on my watch -- is 16 hours. For nine hours, then, we existed only on airplanes.

And if time itself is relative, then what isn’t? As I re-read my first blog post about my existential angst and my frustrations, I find my problems, such as they are, are pretty damn relative, too.  It’s too easy, and a bit facile, to say that I am blessed to be a world-traveling university professor with good friends and a wonderful family and not a polio-paralyzed beggar asking strangers for small change in the Haridawar train station.

What I take away, at least for the moment, is that most of those confusing, vexing existential questions don’t matter, and neither do any answers I can come up with to address them. That’s because the questions are unanswerable and the answers can only be vague attempts to put structure on that which is beyond my understanding. Or anybody else’s for that matter.

What does matter, then, is … just being. For three weeks, I was, mostly, in a state of satori, the Buddhist idea of being “in the moment.” Americans call it going with the flow. I didn’t think too much about bills or my job, about my past or my future. It’s a concept that transcends cultures, In Swahili, they call it “hakuna matata,” or “no worries, and, yes, I know they used it in Disney’s “The Lion King.”

It also underlies the “serenity prayer,” usually attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr: “Give me the strength to change the things I can change, the grace the accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to tell the difference between the two.” If you are in a state of satori, you are dealing with the things you can affect. It’s automatic.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life entails suffering, and there is no way to avoid it. Furthermore, Buddhism teaches that most sadness and suffering comes from human desire and the central challenge in human existence is learning to deal with one’s desires.

The idea is consistent with the teachings if Christianity.  Jesus teaches that the first commandments are the most important: putting God first, and loving your neighbor before yourself. If you’re dealing with God and your neighbors, you’re not dwelling on your own desires.

India is a place and a culture that embodies that attitude, since Indian spawned Buddhism, and the Hindu culture on which Buddhism is based later re-absorbed its teachings in a Hindu “reformation” on the middle ages. Modern India is a mess. It’s disorganized, chaotic and corrupt. But it’s also very friendly and weirdly happy. People of different castes, religions, ethnicities and cultures get along, mostly, in a big, messy democracy. The culture accepts its messiness, maybe too much, but it’s also modernizing, growing and finding a balance with its desires and its realities.

Maybe I need to do that, too. As I look back on my first post, the angst I described is about desire, a desire for advancement and to move forward. Like India and the Indian people, I need to accept some of my own chaos, accept that the universe is beyond my control or understanding, and just do a better job just rolling with it all. And if I am doing that, I am indeed moving forward. I don’t think anybody can ask for more.

Namaste.

In the movie and media capitol of the subcontinent

The set of the Bollywood movie tentatively titled "The Dirty Picture" is as busy and complicated as any Hollywood set.

I admit when we signed up for a tour of a Bollywood movie studio, I expected to be with a large group, and when our morning ride failed to appear at the hotel, I worried that we had missed out on the whole thing.

As we looked around the entrance to the hotel furtively, a smiling young Adrian Grenier (The guy who plays Vincent Chase on HBO’s “Entourage’) lookalike walked up to us and asked us if we were the ones looking for the tour.

Sara E. McNeil and Preetam Mhatre, our Bollywood tour guide, check out a train car and some couches from a disco set on the back lot of Balaji studios.

Preetam Mhatre, tour guide, sometimes model and aspiring actor, was in fact our guide for a private tour of some of the facilities.  “Everybody is here to be in the movies and entertainment. This is the media center of India, and there are jobs,” he said. And he repeated what I had heard before: that Mumbai produces more movies than Hollywood.

Film crews frequent many parts of the city and the outskirts, and movie and media facilities are spread around many parts of town, at least the nicer parts.

He first took us to an audio production house, High Octane studios, where audio engineer Rahul Rao demonstrated some commercial production techniques. Rahul is a musician, but he said he got into audio production because it’s steady. He said there is a great deal of production work available for young people in town in commercials, radio, television and live and animated film. After he showed us how he put the soundtrack on a commercial, he had me do a voiceover for another 30-second TV spot. It takes a lot of concentration and I gained a new respect for voiceover actors.

Kate Zibluk explores the main room of a mythical wealthy family's mansion at Balaji studios in Bollywood, Mumbai.

A studio guard and his dog provide security on the set of an opulent soap opera.

We then went to Balaji Studios, which produces television shows and movies. Balaji is hidden in an average-looking commercial block, but after we cleared security, the gate opened to a 10-acre lot with sets, backlots, equipment, actors, crew, and the skeleton of a new high-rise on-site hotel planned to open next year.

Kate Zibluk checks out the spoiled daughter's room, complete with "family pictures" of the actors who play the spoiled brothers on the soap opera set.

The set of the evil drug lord's lair for a popular Indian soap opera filmed at Balaji studios.

We had the run of a big soap opera set about a wealthy family whose daughter marries into the family of a drug lord. It looked as much like a telenovella from Telemundo as anything from Bollywood.

We also visited the set of a theatrical movie, tentatively titled, “The Dirty Picture,” about the real-life struggles of a middle-class Indian family.

Actors rehears some lines on the set of "the Dirty Picture," a movie about a struggling middle-class Indian family.

Later in the afternoon, we visited the School of Broadcasting and Communication, Mumbai’s official, government-sanctioned, baccalaureate-degree-granting communications school. The school’s primary focus in feeding the needs of the communications industry – and there are jobs waiting for just about ever graduate, according to Tushir Choudary, managing director of the school. The program offers broadcasting and communications degrees as well as advertising and public relations degrees, and it also offers also master’s degrees.

Choudary’s heart, however, is in communications development in rural areas. He has spent several years setting up radio stations among tribal populations in central India. “When there is an accident or a storm, these people need to hear the news in their own language,” he said. “We set up three stations and we make a difference, and maybe we save some lives.”

Choudary, and Preetam, too, offered their services for instruction and tours in both the media capitol and into India’s rural areas, if ASU students return with us next year.

It’s nice to have options.

On the Arabian Sea

A young woman's traditional dupatta dress flutters in the sea breeze as she overlooks the high-rises of Mumbai on a ferry boat from the Elephantine Caves. India is struggling to balance the traditional and the modern as it grows into a world leader in the 21st century.

The word “posh” comes from Mumbai, and it still fits.

When British passengers sailed for the former Bombay, the empire’s major port of entry in India, wealthy Britons could specify special tickets -- Port Out, Starboard Home – to keep them on the cool, shady side of the ahip for the entire trip.

The remains of the empire, from the massive India gate in the old harbor landing, to the many Christian churches, to the banks, universities, government centers and insurance companies persist. All that financial, physical and cultural infrastructure provided much the foundation for the high-rises, the commerce, and the financial and entertainment industries that make Mumbai among the most modern cities in India. Along with the high-tech Bangalore, Mumbai is among India’s fastest-growing cities, surpassing Dehli in population, and perhaps cultural influence.

A young girl looks out at the domed roof of the Taj hotel, site of a 2008 terrorist attack, and next to it, the India Gate of the British Empire on the center of the old harbor in Mumbai.

Mumbai is the home of Bollywood, the largest producer of films in the world. The entertainment industry also produces music, television, videos, animation and advertising. It’s also the major media center, home of most of the nation’s media companies and outlets.

Business and communication industries are among the legacies of the “Britishers,” with whom the Indians have a love-hate relationship. “The Britishers gave us three things that pulled different states and regions together into one country: the English language, the railroads, and cricket,” said our friend Sangee Seth, owner of the Velvet Apple hotel, where we stayed in Delhi.

“They also gave you uniform roads and laws,” I added.

Banana salesmen sell their fruit in the shade of the many roots and trunks of a banyan tree in Mumbai. The unique banyan sends out roots from its branches. On tree can cover an acre of land.

Still, the Indians feel a certain resentment to the British, who colonized them, reducing their 5,000-year-old culture to subservience in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The word “coolie,” though generally used describe low-status Chinese laborers, originated in India.

So the Indians seem to try a little harder to preserve and show off their culture and achievements than other cultures, and they try a little more, it seems, to ignore their problems, such as poverty and corruption.

A golden Hindu temple rises at the edge of a waterfront slum in Mumbai surrounded by new high-rise apartments and businesses.

As the nation grows and modernizes, the entertainment industry of Mumbai and the tech industry of Bangalore are the prime examples of what they can accomplish.

We explored old and new Mumbai with a visit to the old waterfront, and a trip to the Elephantine Caves, a center of worship on an island a few miles off the coast of India in the Arabian sea. Still-unknown Hindu worshippers deepened the caves and carved out giant statues, temples and living quarters in the rock from the second century before the Christian era through the 11^th century afterward. There is no record of who made them or why they chose that spot.

Tourists take pictures in front of a giant likeness of the god Maheshmurti Shiva within the first of the Elephantine Caves.

Carl Lindquist and Kate Zibluk pause at the entrance to one of the Elephantine Caves.

We came and went beside the India Gate, a huge arch erected in 1911, at the height of the British Empire before World War I,  for King George V and Queen Mary.  The gate marked the major port of entry for the British, the East India Company, and the empire.

We sailed on a small ferry boat across the sea, and as usual, we were among the only westerners, we toured the caves, and came back to a tour of the city.

The history, western-style opulence and the values that opulence represents attract envy and anger among some more traditionally oriented groups. The power and size attracts attention, too. In 2008, a group of two dozen terrorists sailed from Pakistan, took over the Taj hotel on the waterfront and they attacked a few other sites  in the city, all but shutting it down for a week. They also killed several Indians and some western tourists.

The maitre' d of Leopold's, a famous Mumbai restaurant popular with ex-patriot westerners, pauses near the entrance of the establishment. The restaurant has preserved bullet holes from a 2008 terrorist attack in the upper part of the poster at left, and above the wall painting at right. Pakistani terrorists attacked the restaurant and killed several customers during their weeklong rampage.

The Indian army caught a great deal of criticism for allowing so small a force to control the hotel, and the attention of the world, for all that time. But many Indians are proud of the way the army handled the situation. Sam Sorami, our tour guide, explained that the army’s main objective was sparing civilians rather than routing the terrorists. He said it would have been easy to obliterate the historic hotel and the terrorists within, but many more innocent bystanders would have been injured or killed. “We did it right, and it took time,” Sorami said.

Security remains tight. Hotels and businesses screen cars and customers, and the navy retains a strong presence in the harbor.  There have been no instances of terror attacks since 2008. Indeed, the Pakistanis and the Indians are engaged in wide-ranging peace talks to secure their borders and solve their 60-year border dispute in Jammu and Kashmir in the far north.

Mumbai is warily moving forward, and quickly upward. Jammed between the high hills in the east and the Arabian Sea in the west, about the only way to grow is up, and apartments and businesses are increasingly housed in high-rises. Apartment living is a fairly recent phenomenon, Sorami said. “Most Indians didn’t live in apartments until about 20 years ago,” he said.

In Mumbai, they are moving into apartments and going to school and getting jobs. Of course, the slums and poverty are still here, but they are fewer than in Delhi or Agra.

And while Mumbai is growing up and cleaning up, the question remains of what culture and what values it's leaving behind. That’s among the major questions facing the largest democracy in the world as it grows into the 21^st century.