Kickstarter Project Results

Here's some files you'd probably like.

The complete files of interviews with introduction.

Audio .mp3 files from interviews:
Interview 2
Interview 3
Interview 4
Interview 6

Raw video from Interviews:

Pre-Interview Footage from Interview 4


Footage from Interview 8

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Nepal Photos

I took a lot of photos in Nepal because I was actively touring a new location, as opposed to Dharamsala where most of my photos are spread out over the month and concerning daily life. I'm not going to caption every photo. I just don't have the time. Enjoy!

Monkey Temple

Boudhanath

Durbar Square

Bhakatpur

Kopan Monastery

Dakshinkali Temple

(severe content warning)

Patan City

Pharping Photos

Burning Ghats Photos

Nepal

I'm back in the States, and posting has been slow do to travel and jetlag. I had a great week in Nepal, touring the Kathmandu Valley intensely before resting over Shabbos and beginning the journey back to Delhi and then Newark on Sunday/Monday. I'll eventually slide back into my evening schedule lifestyle now that I have things to do at night other than shiver under three blankets, but it was fun while it lasted.

Four days of intense touring in Nepal was about all I needed. A lot of people go there for the trekking (they have mountains other than Everest) but I was more of a cultural/historical tourist, interested in daily life and religious sites both Buddhist and Hindu, and most of those sites are in the Kathmandu region. Oh, and I saw some live animal sacrifices, which were not as gross as I was expecting, but still pretty gross. I was really glad to see it after spending so many years of Jewish education reading about our own extensive sacrificial traditions. It says in the Mishnah that one of the miracles of the Temple in Jerusalem was that there were no flies on the Temple Mount (specifically, in the stables), which let me tell you would have been a hell of a miracle, because it was a slow day at Dakshinkali and the flies were still a problem. I did not include any pictures of it in this post despite taking extensive amounts.

I will say something about Kathmandu, which is about their city planning. They have a section of town called Thamel, which a lot of trekkers are down on as being a "backpacker ghetto" which is the opposite of what it is. At some point, Kathmandu decided that if it was going to host a lot of Westerners, it might as well put all of the things they need (hotels, money changers, shops, restaurants) in one area, keep it well-lit, and make it a good deal cleaner than the rest of the city. People felt it was touristy, which it was, but Nepal is a developing country, so touristy means "plumbing that works" and "at least 12 hours a day of non-generator electricity." You know, things we take for granted and actually really need, especially when we're spending more money on a single transaction than most Nepalis will see in a year. My experiences in India, which to be fair has a wider range of economic statrum, was that cities were very spread out, and harder to navigate on foot to do touristy things, like mail home some art you just bought or hit the bookstore before it closes because of rolling blackouts. So thanks, whoever thought of Thamel. I appreciate it.

Below are some of my favorite pictures from Kathmandu.

Last Havdalah

If my plans to go to Nepal go through, this was my last Shabbos in Dharamsala. It was a pretty quiet one, especially because the power as out for most of it, but it's warm enough now that I don't need my heater during the day. A lot of people take a walk on Shabbos, but no way in hell was I going out after racing around trying to get errands done for the last few days with everything on an uphill slant. I'm somewhat packed, with only assorted things left to get done before leaving for Delhi Monday night. The only reason my trip isn't one hundred percent booked is I need to triple-check some new visa rules, because as of the month of March, India has decided to get needlessly restrictive about tourist visas and sometimes whether you can enter an airport is somewhat to the whims of the officer behind the desk, or so many people have told me despite the consulate's reassurances. India has always been a little silly about visas - it makes the volunteer and other visas needlessly hard to get (this may be a matter of national pride), so everyone gets the six month tourist visa and then violates it by doing things other than tourism. Some Lubavitchers were kicked out of Chochin last month for violating their tourist visa by holding religious services, though it's hard to really know what's up with that, as some Indian-Israeli politics and Pakistani threats may have been involved.

I am sad to be leaving Dharamsala, but not as sad as I thought I'd be when I started working here. This is an incredible place, but it's also exhausting, and I admire people who work here for a year or more. Many long term volunteers develop some kind of sickness that isn't necessarily related to external factors, or at least have severe weight gain/loss or insomnia by the end of their trip. I read a lot of unpublished travel memoirs because it's the kind of thing both my bosses are interested in at work and lots of people write them, so I know it's true even when people don't admit it outright. I've been very healthy this trip and very grateful for that fact, but I've also been sleeping a lot more in the States, partially because there's not a lot to do at night here and partially because I need to keep my health up.

The main thing still to do for the project is make transcripts from the audio files and get people's names written out in Tibetan script because it was something I promised backers at Kickstarter and for some reason like everyone chose that one and I totally forgot about it until Thursday. I might do one transcript as a literal transcript to show what the translator really said, because English is her third language (after Tibetan and Nepali) and there's a lot of interpretation going on into what she actually said and how I'm actually going to write it. Transcripts, as a general rule, take twice as long as the audio file, either because you keep stopping to write it down or you write really quickly the first time and have to go through it twice. And then there's historical notes explaining things after, which I will put in the file. That's plenty of work to do when I'm a zombie trying to stay awake in the US after I come home (I also plan to see "hunger Games" and whatever else is playing in the middle of the morning and is shiny and loud).

There may be another post here in India, there may not. For people to whom this is a concern, please note that my Indian cell phone will not be on after Tuesday, and email will be the way to reach me again until April 2nd.

It Does Not Get Better

Today was the thirtieth day of the Tibetan hunger strike in front of the UN building in NYC. That's right - there are people starving themselves to death in Manhattan and you can go talk to them when you go in to see a show. They probably won't be able to respond very well, which is what comes with only drinking water for 30 days. There's only two left, as the third member was put in a hospital by the NYPD after he failed to stand up, reasons cited being his advanced age. Public safety laws in NYC are actually pretty tricky if the person poses no threat to other people or themselves (they're not trying to die, they're trying to get the UN's attention). But past the 30 day period it gets tricky, as the body's internal functions start to shut down and they run the risk of actually expiring on the sidewalk.

Their request is that the UN - or ANYONE - send an exploratory body into the Tibet to politely ask, "Hey, so China - what's with all these dead bodies and disappeared people?" China would say no, of course, but so far the UN hasn't really been upfront about asking, and only Australia has offered to do it by themselves, which immediately caused a diplomatic crisis with Beijing.

Haven't heard about this? Well, to be fair, you don't live in McLeod-Ganj, where it's really big news, and people check the papers in the morning to see if anyone has set themselves on fire in Tibet in the last 24 answers (as of this post the answer is no). And China has been really clear that it's not interested in other people's opinions. But the thing is, it COULD be interested, if people were to step up to the plate about it, something which Bush was perfectly willing to do but Obama is not.

We are major trading partners with China. They own a lot of our debt, though to be fair less than 10%. People say that we don't do anything because we owe them money, but it's far more complex than that. China still has a large portion of the population living just above the poverty line - the real one, not the American one - and it relies on American trade. There are an increasing number of developing countries, particularly in Asia, where we could take some of our business and do. Shirts that were made in China are now made in Malaysia; India is moving forward in the computer industry. Plus, hey, we're partners. Partners who share things - like trillions of dollars - should be able to say things like, "I've heard some of the news coming out of your country and it makes me uncomfortable about doing business with you."

I don't think boycotting China on a personal level does anything. In fact, I'm almost positive it doesn't. Plus, it's not really fair to ordinary Chinese workers who assemble the products we produce. So there's not much I can do, as an American, except vote for a politician I think will do something, which is pretty much never the case (or other issues take priority).

There's actually a lot of hunger strikes by Tibetans - most of them are in Delhi. They are not effective; the Dalai Lama has asked people to stop doing them, or did so when he was still the political leader of the Tibetan community. They're following in the tradition of Gandhi, except that people really cared if Gandhi starved to death, and basically no one cares if a couple Tibetan refugees starve to death. Also, his hunger strikes were not particularly effective, and usually only served as a temporary cure to the current situation. But that gets lost a little bit in mythologizing Gandhi, which people in India sure like doing.

I know people want to hear about daily life here, but this is kind of daily life here. It's a bit like living in Israel during the Intifada, when we were always wondering when the next pigua (terror attack) was coming. This is wildly different, even to Tibetans here, because there's no risk to their own lives, but there is a bombardment of bad news that you know will only be followed by more bad news. Like when you read your Google News in the morning, and you see that the AP has reported another self-immolation, and you have to scan the article to see if it's old and they're still talking about the one from a few days ago, or if it's a new person.

Unlike Israel I can step out of it fairly easily, which I will do next week when I go to Nepal and leave Dharamsala. I'm emotionally invested, but I can choose not to have it effect my life if I don't want it to. I can't bring myself to feel guilty for that; I'm already a rich white American who speaks English so that leaves me with pretty to feel guilty about in rural India.

Monasticism

I just spent two days at Dorma Ling Nunnery and Institute (for Buddhist Dialectics), which is a nunnery in Lower Dharamsala, which by the way is a lot warmer than Upper Dharamsala, where I live. No, I didn't achieve a new level of consciousness or have any divine revelations while I was there. I did meditate long enough for my legs to hurt, which was precisely half an hour, but that was on my own. But I had a good time.

Dorma Ling is the chief nunnery of the Tibetan Nuns Project, which does a lot of good things for nuns and Buddhist women in exile and has a lot of nunneries, but this one has the distinction of offering the highest level of learning available to Tibetan nuns anywhere, in India or otherwise. In Old Tibet, nuns lived within male monasteries and received only minimal religious instruction so they could pray all the time. In the 1970's, some prominent members of the exile community felt this should change, and nuns should be taught complex scholastics and test for the geshe degree, which is the PhD of Tibetan Buddhism. They're still working on it. One woman tested and passed last year, but was rewarded a newly-invented "geshe-ma" degree and not permitted to test at the three main monasteries in the south (Sera, Deprung, and Ganden) were monks are tested. So it's a bit like the situation with women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism, and by that I mean almost exactly the same, with women getting stupid titles like "Maharat" and "Rabba" last year and then those being ditched anyway.

There was no sitting meditation, which is what we think of when we think of meditating. They were encouraged to do it in their spare time (of which they had little), but their day went like this:
5:30 am - wake up
6-7 am - puja (prayers)
7-7:30 am - breakfast
7:30 am - 12:15 pm classes
12:45-3:30 pm - prayers
4-7pm - classes, debates
7-7:30 pm - dinner
7:30 - short walk followed by bed

I was there for Sunday to get interviews, because it was their day off, which most of them spent doing laundry.

So what do they learn all day? Buddhist thought, which is incredibly complex. It takes 7 years to qualify to take the geshe degree. I didn't understand the classes (they were in Tibetan) though there were also classes in math, history, and English. In the afternoon was formalized debate system where they test each other's logic and memorization abilities.

Other nunneries are different. Some also have learning, but focus more on prayer or sitting meditation, as opposed to text meditation that they were doing here. Anything that is focusing your mind is meditation, pretty much. Every year nuns apply to this nunnery for higher learning, and some are rejected and remain in their prior location.

All of their free time is spent doing chores, and they've worked hard to become self-sufficient. They clean their own rooms, cook their own food (mostly rice and vegetables), produce tofu and crafts to sell, and help out cleaning up in the general community. They are here to train their minds, not sit around and wait for a personal revelation to happen. In that sense, it was very intense.

To read more about Tibetan Nuns Project, a charity I whole-heartedly support, go:

www.tnp.org

Morning puja

A few moments of Tibetan television (produced in Tibetan by China) on Sunday

Afternoon puja

Class. Monks are brought in to teach. This class was on the mind or something.

Ritualized debating

Dress like a Tibetan

Since I arrived in Dharamsala, I've mostly been wearing Tibetan dress, which is a long chuba gown with a colored apron. The apron actually signals that I'm married, which as you know is not true, but then again I've also seen 4-year-olds wearing them. They make them in kiddie sizes. So cultural traditions are breaking down a little.

The dress serves three purposes:

(1) It sends a signal to shopkeepers that I am here for more than a few days, and they shouldn't be so aggressive in hawking their tourist items to me in the street - this definitely cut down after I bought my gown.

(2) It tells Tibetan and Nepalese men not to bother hitting on me. Some unmarried Tibetan women wear the apron for this reason, if they don't like casual flirting. Yes, it could send the wrong signals to some nice Jewish guy who's also religious AND knows what the outfit means, but I wouldn't put money into running into one of those in McLeod-Ganj.

(3) It seems to make old Tibetan ladies thrilled. Yeah, it looks ridiculous to a lot of people, but it looks respectful to way MORE people, and I get compliments on how nice my apron looks and these old women are so excited to see me wearing it, it just makes their day, if they can even say that in English, but it's usually in some kind of pantomime.

In other news:

- Don't get between a monkey and her baby. I know this seems obvious, but it took me a minute to realize what I was doing when I stepped onto my porch, because the baby monkey was on the awning on the left side and the mom was on the next porch over on my right side. So, monkeys: better seen through windows.

This monkey does not care for me.

- I finally figured out why it's so cold here: The weather report for Dharamsala reports for Lower Dharamsala, which is much lower in the valley, while I live in Upper Dharamsala, in the mountains, where the wind chill can make it ten degrees lower. Also that's why it'll be hailing here and Accuweather will say "cloudy."

- Next week I will probably finish the project. I have 8 interviews now and I'm shooting for 10. My tentative plan is to go to Nepal for 6 days at the end of my trip, which is why I planned it for 5 weeks instead of 4. I can't get into Tibet; the border is closed to foreigners because of that whole "Tibetans setting themselves on fire" thing, which is bad for tourism. They didn't say that, they just said they weren't issuing visas.

- Yes, the roads are really steep for the most part, because this is a mountain, so it takes a long time to get anywhere in the valley because the road is one lane and it winds its way down. When walking, a lot of people use shortcuts through the brush like this one:

It looks nice, but you don't always want to do it to get to breakfast.

- Shabbos is at 6:15 PM IST. I am looking forward to it. The first Shabbos was pretty stressful, because I was still jetlagged and had been on the go for an entire week so my body and mind weren't interested in just laying around, which can make Shabbos hard when you're traveling alone. Last week was much better, me being tired and stocked up on books and sick of running around anyway. This week I've got a bunch of comic books about the life of the Buddha to read. Good Shabbos everyone!