Preamble.

Before I start to write about Sundance I think it's appropriate to question why I'm writing about Sundance. I have, after all, let this page sit idle for over a year.

I should get one thing out of the way - there's a lot of self-indulgence here. Like, even more than in a typical blog. This envisioned series of posts is but one symptom of an entirely unearned wave of self-importance that surged over me from the moment I touched down at SLC. Others include a veritable tsunami of facebook (friend me!) activity - three status updates in three days, each one practically shouting "I'M AT SUNDANCE." I'm not blind to all this. I can picture the wee version of me reading over those somewhat breathless, graspingly elliptical notes and sighing, "Dude, we get it. You're about as subtle as the movie Homework" I hope, though, that it's not purely self regard behind this uncharacteristic oversharing. I also feel that there was some innocence in my excitement. I was a little giddy walking down the Main Street and overhearing other people talk about movie stars. I was thrilled to wake up at 6am and walk shivering to a tent, there to wait for an hour to maybe get entrance to a movie. Willing (eager!) to pay $15 to watch something I knew virtually nothing about -- that even the internet didn't know much about (occasionally this backfired - cf Homework). Engaged, for four days, in the entirely self-indulgent & precious (in all connotations) activity of observing things around me and observing my own reactions to them. I want to share what I can of those feelings and experiences. I like that version of me, and hope you do too. Because he's doing the writing for the next few days.

Pictures

I've uploaded some of the non-phone pictures from the trip in a Picasa album. Hope that you like them.

Pleeze stop

Yet another demonstration of the US's ability to export terrible advertising, preferably with some anti-didactic elements.

We and the village

We went, my brother and I, cycling on a narrow half-dirt road past the small grouped settlements that I guess you would call villages, here. We'd gotten our bikes at the gate of the resort, a pair of large wooden doors set in concrete walls that generally kept us in and the villages out during our stay, now coming to a close. The resort was something else, and I can't describe it without sounding admiring, which I'm not, or ungrateful, which I hope not to be. But for now it might do to think about countless staff in gleaming white shirts (so white, nothing in India is so white) serving Indians in real-not-knock-off-Gucci and Germans on yoga holiday. And me, of course, and my family.

I'd often wondered what people meant by villages in India. My only reference point was the small rural idyll terrorized by bandits in the movie Sholay, itself based on Sergio Leone's westerns, so that the place looked more Dakotaish than Desi. In Westchester, where I mostly grew up, there are towns and there are villages, though the distinction between the two seems partly size and partly real estate marketing. Mostly the latter.

In India the people I know who come from the villages are drivers and cooks, and I can't say, unfortunately, that I know them well.

We passed through the villages just before noon on a Sunday, when the children were out in their yards and many people were walking on the narrow road with nowhere, it seemed, to be. Some carried things hither and yon, women with large bundles on their heads. Children yelled in English as we passed, "Good morning, what is your name?" and repeated my reply, and told me theirs when I asked. There was washing by a small creek.

The houses were not all of one type, but ran from the ramshackle thin-walled tin-roofed through to sturdy multi-story and solidly middle class. I took no pictures of them. Already the cultural imperialism of the voyeurism of the expedition bothered me.

I did photograph this small place to gather and pray, though. The population of Kerala is about 20% Christian, tracing back to 52AD when Thomas the Apostle is held to have come a-calling. The churches I have seen here are beautifully colored, blue and yellow cropping up in the deep green jungle. This building, not a church, but a strange little site to show and sustain devotion, stands against the lake, which perhaps you can see. To me it seems (and this is strange, go figure) like a ruin-in-waiting, for anthropologists of the future to photograph, study, analyze and puzzle over after we are gone.

The state motto for Kerala, omnipresent as you drive through downtown Kochi, is "God's own country."

Where in the world

This is what I see, right now. Somewhere in here is a rumination on the nature of being always connected, even here, blissfully in the middle of nowhere. But I should probably put away my phone right now.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Aamar Bhalo Lagche

This transliterated Hindi, so far as I could glimpse, was on a billboard I saw this morning on the way to the airport. Roughly translated, this is "[Something] leaves me feeling good", which may be as close to "I'm lovin' it" as you can get in Hindi.

I saw one McDonald's in Calcutta, in the Park Street neighborhood, which is old and fashionable and largely populated with ancient restaurants where the waiters wear funny hats (different from the funny hats they wear in McD's). I don't know what it replaced, but it was pretty big, two stories I think, and it was down the street from KFC, and both were reasonably busy, but not swamped.

I'm interested in two things about this ad, which I'll ask you to picture as, in addition to the quoted phrase, the golden arches writ large on a field of red.

1. The direct translation of the US slogan. I guess there are a couple of reasons I can imagine for this. One is that McD is lazy and somewhat time-constrained and so they were not about to test into an India-specific slogan. After all, in the States this one covers a pretty wide demographic swath. Second possibility is that the strategy for the India entry is, either in whole or in part, to use Indians who have spent some time in the US as a wedge for market entry, and hence they've used a recognizable slogan.

Problem with this theory - these customers would obviously know English, so why bother with the translation?

Possible reason - Desi pride?

2. The transliteration to roman script, rather than writing in Devanagari, which, let's face it, looks cooler (but in fairness rarely can look playful). There may be an entirely practical reason for this - few and fewer people can read proper Devanagari. I've got no data on this (when do I ever have data?), but I do know that when Hindi is taught in schools, it is partly to instruct people in how to read and write. Hindi is obviously a 'live' language, and Bollywood films alone will make sure it stays vibrant as a spoken language for the foreseeable. But I wonder, to put on my alarmist hat for a second, whether transliteration may ever become the norm, so that the cherished bar-bar loopy text that even I, in my deep ignorance of Indian culture, know and love, vanishes.

Intellectually, the interesting thing about this is that, as you would expect, there are some characters in Devanagari that have no equal in English. They get transliterated with various N's and H's in awkward places. If the alphabet is somehow replaced, what happens to these sounds? Are they slowly rounded into oblivion?

Any precedents out there?

Comment on comments

Hey, I turned on comment moderation because I was getting some spam messages and couldn't seem to selectively remove them post facto (strange, I may be missing something, but the screen is small and the connection slow so I didn't conduct an exhaustive review of the blogger site).

Options seemed to be:

1. Allow spammy comments to appear, which is probably the most practical option but which tickles the small part of me that cares about aesthetics. This part of me does not like to be tickled. Seriously. Stop it. I'm not kidding.
2. Ban comments altogether, which would offend my insatiable desire for positive reinforcement, or, I guess, the possibility of positive reinforcement. Even in its absence. Perhaps this should be reconsidered.
3. Use that 'captcha' system where you have to copy some loopy numbers and letters into a box to prove you're human if you want to make a comment, which, that just sucks.
4. This, where I approve all comments. Feel free to insult me, viciously and unrelentingly, to test how censorious I am.

Hopefully a temporary fix, and I'll try to approve all comments promptly. That said, I may be dropping off the grid for a few days, starting today (hence up at 3am). I'll keep you posted. Or rather, I won't post anything, and you can figure it out.