mangolandia

[Please think of this picture as lying down -- its head to the right... -tara]

April 16, 2009
Shikshantar is fertile for imagination; an ocean sunrise can be green. Denali and I, trying not to wonder what would have been if we had spent our 7 months here, but grateful for at least two days, and all that we have learnt elsewhere. [Malavika]

But the road beckons, ever onward… no matter how calm the waters, we cannot anchor here… [Denali]

Rise up, lonely suns! This is just a glimpse of the worldly carnival! Your true heart lies elsewhere — find it! Find it! [Ankur]

[From Ankurbhai, Malavika, Denali]

Rajasthan is made of ROCKS. That’s why the meals are so hearty and the people so hale — even their turbans and veils are crafted folds of stone and the sun is flaming granite.

We are inspired everywhere we turn. MKSS (organization for workers and farmers) is a portrait of humble constructive work, set at the feet of the people as an offering.

No end to gratitude.

Here I sit again. Perched on the edge of a plastic chair, ready for the next hot wind of destiny.

We’re in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Malavika, Denali, and myself. Surrounded by heat and moustaches and rocks and the clay-cooled buttermilk of the Indian summer.

Rajasthan is made of rocks. Hard smooth faces, their beauty as regal as their name (raja- sthan, the land of kings, i’m guessing). In such a land, hot and dry and harsh and stony, will piles of rocks (or sometimes each pile just one huge rock) for mountains, trees are a virtue. Worshipped, prized, even married at times (It’s unlucky to marry a woman for your third wife, so better to marry a tree and then the next woman you marry will be your fourth…). These trees — neem (azadirecta indica), pipal (ficus religiosa), vat (ficus bengalensis), tulsi (ocimum sanctum) — draw the shaded lines between life and death, between hot stones and burning coals below your feet.

Your feet ready for pilgrimage.

But first, a few notes from the last few days, a few images and quotes, snaps of the worlds we have been blessed to have received us in our brief journey North from Gujarat.

A.

At Shikshantar, the people’s institute for rethinking development, we read the following on the walls:

‘wherever roads are made / i lose my way
in the wide water / in the blue sky
there is no line of a track

the path is hidden / by the birds wings
by the star-fires
by the flowers of / wayfaring seasons

and i ask my heart / if its blood carries the
wisdom of the unseen way’

- tagore

*

We consider our choice of healthy and organic food as the best form of health insurance.

*

‘Working ‘within the system’ – if you beath them at their own game, you’ve lost’

- crimethinc.com

*

‘In our society, growing food ourselves has become the most readical of acts. It is truly the only effective protest, one that can — and will — overturn the corporate powers that be. By the process of working directly in harmony with nature we do the one thing most essential to change the world – we change ourselves.’

- Jules Dervaes

*

‘Love is a flame that, when it is kindled, burns everything away:
Only God remains.’
 
- Rumi

*

‘Beauty must be defined a what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy.’

- crimethinc.com, poster

*

‘What you people call your natural resource,
we consider our relatives.’

- [ankur forgets]

*

So. Shikshantar is two rooms of your house. The first is a library with mats and rugs to lie down and play concerts and eat lunch and otherwise laugh. Every book written and bound to play with and break your fragile notions of society and self sits willing on the shelf, and you may find yourself, like so many magnetic shavings, movings towards exactly what you need. The next room is the same room, and the next room, at once. It is full of musical instruments made from ‘garbage’, handlooms and spinning wheels, curtains designed from old photographs, homemade ayurvedic medicines and mosquito repellents, and pictures of smiling people. It is for the day after, when you wake up with discomfort at your ready-made clothes and read-made relationships, ready-made food and ready-made transport system, and you want to take your freedom and power back from where you left it. They have all the tools you need to see, once again, that we have all the tools you need.

B.

At MKSS (the workers and farmers empowerment organization, perhaps translated) I saw a type of town meeting I’d never seen before. I’ve been to plenty of Gandhian rallys, political rallys, educational camps, medical camps, etc. They all involve well-dressed well-intentioned well-educated people going to the villages to give, to teach, to offer,  to ask, and to tell.

But this was different. The MKSS has been working for years and a rural right-to-employment program, that is now nationwide and offers anyone in India the chance to work 100 days a year at 100 rs a today, for a total of 10,000 rs. Don’t worry about the conversation just yet: It’s a lot of money. What has happened in the past, due to bureaucracy and corruption, is that certain people would work and not get the money, certain would not work and get the money, others would have never heard of the program, and others would stick their finger in the cream.

So the MKSS goes to this village not to ask the villagers for anything or tell them to live in a different way, but rather to share the work they have already accomplished and see if they want to get involved. And the way they do this, the way they break through a cultural and power barrier that at times seems (literally) worlds apart (there are many worlds in these worlds, here), is through PUPPETS.

One gentleman gives the speech in the hot sun under the shade of the neem tree to the few hundred villagers (and our threesome band of trippers), giving the details of the employment program and how to get involvement. Another sits off to the side, at the milk shop, with his hand up the kurta of a beautifully hand-crafted puppet (glove-style), interrupting the speechgiver at will and fancy, asking as the questions he knows, from 20 years of experience, people could be thinking and not asking. He asks them through a puppet dressed like a villager, with an outrageous village accents, such that everybody is laughing and greatful and gets all the information spelled out in exactly the way they’re accustomed to learning. It’s a genius technique.

Later that day we go to the MKSS headquarters — two beautifully restored earthern goat sheds run off of solar power in the middle of nowhere — eat dinner, and hear local folk musicians. Everyone in the NGO has been working there for 20 years it seems, and everyone of the employees — those who need it and those who don’t — draw an equal salary equivalent to the government minimum wage: 100 rupees per day.

And that my friends is enough to make me cry in hope, for the day when all government and social-service organizations, and all of us who claim to work for justice and equality, take the minimum wage and live with it, to get a sense of what’s really going on.

Or, as Denali blesses our food “Let he who hungers have bread, and let he who has bread have the hunger for justice”

C.

The Tilonia Barefoot College.

I humbly request everyone who’se made it this far without fever, through scorching paragraphs of 120 degree heat and no neem leaves in site to ward off those swirling desert angels, to go to your favorite video tube site and look up “barefoot college”.

There is a woman named Bata Bhurji, whom we met, who has made dozens of incredible films about this little college in Rajasthan, ignorant of degrees and certification, training women from villages all over the world to install and repair solar energy equipment in their hometowns in Mali, Sierra Leone, Bolivia, Bhutan, etc. The movies we saw were the most incredible examples ever of local people organizing themselves with appropriate assistence from foreign organizations, learning from each other in a spirit of openess and fearlessness.

When we gave our concert at Tilonia, there were dozens of women from 7 different countries in Africa, singing and clapping along. They will be in Rajasthan for six months, learning solar engineering through SIGN LANGUAGE, and will go home and electrify their villages.

I’m leaving aside the issues of electric light in extending the working day and other responsibilities to focus on how Gorgeous and strong these women are, who had never left their village and are now in the middle of India (!), learning solar engineering when most of them are illiterate and have never been encouraged to learn anything outside of their homes (and possibly fields).

Not to mention the inventor in his early 20s who ran a community radio station at the college, building multi-thousand dollar radio transmission equivalent for pocket change, and making it available to all the students who came through. He told us he could barely write his name, but he could fix any electronic gadget he had never seen, and wasn’t even sure how.

D.
There’s been a lot of inspiration and I’m too blown away by the hot winds and good work that I have little in me to wax poetic or reflective about it. But seeing all this definitely makes me question the idea that I could even answer the question “And what work do you do” honestly — it is very clear me that, no, I don’t do any work at all, but, if it be the will of the prophets and space shuttles, I sure would like to soon.

With that, we undertake pilgrimage to the source of the Ganges, in honor of all water on earth, carrying with us the hundreds of people who have looked deeply into my eyes and asked me to take ‘darshan’ of the holy river for them. I have no expectations of that river or those mountains, and hope they feel the same of me.

Either way, we train tonight and begin walking tomorrow, from Haridwar onwards. The route is as always unsure, and the destination bathed in mystery and fog. But we’re all very excited about walking slowly, playing with the children, daily practices of music and meditation, and of course, sleep.

Blessings to all of you. And I’ll be back online in a month,
Enshallah.

- ankurbhai

It’s Wednesday in India, and how. I just wrote the following on a blue aerogram, originally a letter to Joe and Lisa and their new baby back in Sequim, but suddenly transformed into the Closest Paper At Hand this afternoon. As I’m trying to explain why, ever since arriving in India 13 days ago, I’ve only been here, meditating, exclusively, I think this points there.

At this point, of course, I am simultaneously ready to go. I have arrived. Something about processing the speed and beauty of the past 3 months, the past 14 plane flights since January 15th. I had a theory that the time it takes to adjust to a new place is how long it would have taken you to bike there. If that’s true I’m still back in Europe sometime in the summer of 1997, I’m sure, but maybe meditation or presence of any sort can act as a reset button from the cosmic tripper. Anyhow.

I can be called. The number is +91 9879 529 549. I’ll have another number soon, perhaps, but this is good for now. On Friday we leave for Ahmedabad, on the 15th for Udaipur, and on the 20th from Jaipur to Haridwar, from where we will commence our walk 300 km to the source of the Ganges, past Gangotri into the glaciers and mountains. Looks like it will be the three of us — Denali and Malaviki and myself — and Butter will join us around Uttar Kashi (a little more than halfway home) in May.

That’s the plan at least, which Gods and elves love to laugh at so.

* * *

Friends. The Delta is wide and radiant. Crossing each river a joy. Knowledge they all flow, together, to that vast ocean we call unity, our own telos, also a joy. Every time I sit up in awakening, every time I stretch my leg after meditation, every step on hot flagstone mosaics and every tumbler of water dripping off my body, a joy! So many rushing rivers. I roll along.

Thich Nhat Hanhonce wrote to me, from his scriptures, published and entitled “Cultivating the Mind of Love”, that all concepts, ideas, and notions are obstacles in our path — especially Buddhist ones.

I sit and stare at Mukeshbhai, perhaps 35, bald, a child clothed only in white robes, a teacher, a friend, a future, a past. Selfless, petulant, sometimes so very Indian (read: overbearing, demanding, generous beyond belief) and sometimes so very relaxed. I see him all melt away and there’s only his chair left and his eyes. 10 days done here and every Divine experience I’ve had or read about has mentioned — in foucs or in passing — the nonreality of Time. Even Kant!

He disappears (Mukeshbhai, not Kant) and there is no heat, no fan, no notions, no persons between us. He has just told me that I am just beginning — all the feelings I’ve had, expereinces over the last 10 days (and 3 years) were just grunt work, and now my heart is finally beginning to open. I hear none of it and there’s nothing no-thing no existence and no time no hint between my gaze and his eyes (and chair.

I unlearn. Inlearn concepts nouns relations. Attachment drops to the ground like a dress: there is no body no longer. I cannot say I have to a new peace or place with mind or emotion, with the occassional battering abd neatings, scratching and jumpings of the storms from my head, heart, chest, and stomach. I cannot say that because there I see all nouns and notions and in some way, in this moment of late afternoon sunlight filtered through waving neem leaves mosquito netting and a dull comprehension of bliss, they, these nouns and notions, are no longer relevant, they are no longer anything to me, they no longer are.

I apprehend. I apprehend tru sight and the illimitable depth of essence. I apprehend motion and fading, without bitterness. The light must change. Every step, knowing no space nor time to step through, brings me closer to that soft Now which awaits us all.

april 8th. 2009
santaram mandir

I saw a woman as old
And wrinkled as devotion
Not even teeth keep her from God

I’ve been one week in it, with Mukeshananda, the Santaram Mandir, Nadiad, Gujarat, India, Mangoland, Earthbound. Barely.

Trying to make sense of the teaching. The teaching is a radially-symmetric hydra of joy. It’s impossible to know where to start, and you start with the pre-Heraclean understanding that there’s no end. Any attempt to write about it immediately sends me towards

a) Gratitude for all those who already have so clearly
b) The impossibility of language (for mortals, not Jesus or Taha Muhammed Ali) to communicate anything worthwhile, the insufficiency of matter to hold the fullness of spirit.

Luckily, there’s music. Even my baritone ukulele, broken string and dusty frets, helps soothe the overwhelming insufficiency of being saturated in love.

This time, three years after meeting Mukeshbhai by accident on my pilgrimage to Dandi (you know, read the book) he’s telling me not to calm any mind nor observation any sensation, nor even focus on the heart or a once and future mantra, but rather, to Love.

“Ankur, Love is very important.”

The “I know” is very tempting. Straight is the gate and narrow is the path. But, “I’ve heard” at least. I wrote my thesis about it (extant somewhere, I believe) and have tried to love people now and again, on subways and mountaintops and even in the privacy of our homes. I tell myself every morning that it’s all there is. In truth, I fear to reveal, it’s been my only ambition for the last four years (since the Amazon): to learn not how to use or employ or act or embrace or accept love, but to Be Love.

During the same period, I’ve been learning how to meditate, according to the sense of the Mangoland tradition: sitting on a mat with a straight back and your eyes closed, building focus and awareness. I’ve experienced some incredibly insights, some flashy psychadelic paraphernalia (which I love), some deep peace. I’ve learned that all life has the potential to be meditation, and that almost everyone I’ve met, when you talk to them late enough at night, after enough drinks, or shortly after a car accident, is ready to reveal that they too have felt that presence of Love, acceptance, totality, presence, or whatever otherwords are equally insufficient as “God”. I’ve learned to recognize and cultivate this feeling while walking, laughing, playing music, painting, gazing, touching, eating, drinking, dancing, driving, sitting, observing, and participating.

It’s everywhere, all around us. And now Mukeshananda, in the fourth year of my training with him, tells me the only thing I should be doing, while I sit with him for hours every day, punctuated occasionally by mini-teachings and flute practices, papayas and coconuts, is to Love.

“Love is like a river flooded,” he says, “Washing away everything to the ocean. It is beyond discerenment and the knowdlge of right and wrong, it takes everything away and leaves you at the ground of pure being.”

When you sit, he tells us, just Love. Just feel, physically, the sensation of that sentiment. Not the emotional love of the body, but the spiritual love of the heart.

I interpret him to mean “body” as our physical incarnation, not narrowly in terms of sex or pleasure. And “heart” for Mukeshbhai, as always, means the soul, the Self, the deep power in us all that is at once unique and universal.

“Heart love not body love”

Hear love is unconditional. Some brother of ahimsa and agape, most hallowed ideals of the ancients in Mangoland and the Mediterranean, which came to me through Gandhiji and Martin Luther King, Jr.

A good teacher knows exactly how to speak to his students. He tells me to think of a Mango tree. The mango slowly ripens over months, and when it falls, it is because it bursting with sweetness and flavor. Be as the mango! Fill you heart fill your heart fill your heart with love: when full it will burst open in sweetness.

This is meditation, this practice of filling your heart with love, of sitting not to imagine nor recall – not with the mind – but to feel (physically, sensorily, I think) the greatest Love you have ever known, and to submit to it, letting it carry you gently down the stream.

The body gets tired,
The mind gets tired,
But the heart
Says Mukeshananda
Is a depthless lake,
And tires not.

Once you focus on this Love
Everything else is revealed.
We awake to see
There is nothing left
to demand
The heart has taken it all.

In the murks of the depths
Of the heart
All is clear
Revealed.

There are some tools of course. Ancient people loved tools. Hand tools and stone tools and calendars and poetry and things you could memorize. Which generally, I don’t, but you can.

He says there are 3 qualities of mind to help us balance and refine that which we learn from meditation to use in our daily lives, to integrate the teachings into our daily practice. He calls them shravan, mananan, and vidhi….

They translate, according to the dear Shivalbhai, with whom I first corresponded due to Mangolandia years ago and only met in person last week!, as follows:

Shravan – careful listening to the teaching, heightened awareness, and deep willinglnss to listen and learn. Openess.

Manann – reflection, going over the teaching 100 times for each time you heard it, churning it like cream, churning and churning until your doubts fall away and the solid gold of your learning extracts itself.

Vidh…. – dedicated practice, holding the gems you’ve churned and honoring them through practice in daily life.

I can’t help this phrase running through my mind – I don’t know from whence it came – “The Heart is Right to Love”. I can see out there, beyond the unseasonal clouds and unwholesome haze, the fear and doubt and gamut of human emotions and psychology that allow us to hold tension, that keep us from relaxing into this Lake of Love all around us. And yet, something deep within me, rising to the surface of the skin during these days of music and meditation and occasional solitude, knows the truth, has no trouble remembering, can feel it in the pulsing of my veins, over and across my mosquito bites and pores, “The Heart is Right to Love.”

“Ankur, Love is very important”.

Ninety-nine more to go.

in a few hours air india is taking me to the grandmotherland of samosas lions chutneys and scraggly beards. i wanted to give a few notes, in multimedia form, before leaving, and encourage the writing of letters as i scramble around the wilderness of my soul Over There.

*

ankur shah

c/o manav sadhana

sabarmati gandhi ashram

ahmedabad

gujarat

india

*

in india i will spend a month in gujarat, with my teachers mukeshbhai and jayeshbhai, anjali and nirali, malavika and denali. we will nurse the sick and play music for the dawn, until the may heat and snowy mountains push and pull us northward to the himalaya, to whom i’ve never been drawn before, and, this time, i know i cannot miss. i’ll be up there for much of may, cross the threshold into the epoch my greying hair demands of me lost in their grip, and then descend (triumphantly, atop a crowded train, with watercolors and no camera) to the futane mango farm for much of june. returning to ahmedabad in july to plan and execute the Inspire College Program, until i return to the US, god and diesel willing, in august to perform and attend some weddings hither and thither.

as always, i am here, and the majority of my practice this time, music and meditation both, will focus on integrating the spheres of here and there, present and past, to be full fleshy there for everyone whom i love, ignorant and innocent of space and time. as it should be.

i have spent the last few months on the road, the holy american road, from seattle to brazil and puerto vallarta to nuevo york. it’s been kind indeed. 2009 is, to quote the ancients, “kicking some serious ass”. the latest book has been distributing nicely all over the planet, and i’ll carry two dozen numbers to give out in india. the cookbook has emerged in its 2nd printing of its 2nd american edition, and is shiny and new and still selling/gifting well. i fully encourage all of you to consume both of these books, in the hope that you may be entertained, edified, or at least feel good about supporting the ephemeral work i’m doing in the world.

in other news, i finally visited the South of the united states, confusing named “north” carolina. i can confirm that people there do have a beautiful accent, a special kind of dialect, and their own cuisine, which involves lots of collard greens, black eye peas, polenta (named “grits”), and ice cream (apparently a regional speciality). apparently though my visit fell in the wrong season, as it has the best “fall colors” in the “western hemisphere” putting new england to shame. so say the locals. i did see some great color in the work of daniel nevins though, and even managed to record one of the locals singing.

there are some recipes, naturally. and other things to share

a. there was a road trip and my partner took pictures. not many.

b. kale chips

it’s a way to eat your greens and think you’re eating french fries. i was served these on numerous occasions up and down the east coast, but never got the recipe straight. i’m guess you rip redleaf kale into admirable chunks, then coat them with a mixture of tahini, olive oil, soy sauce, and apple cider vinegar. maybe with some pureed garlic. heavy on the tahini. and some miners salt. the oven is at 350, it seems (fahrenheit my dear) and you bake the chips until they are soft in the valleys and crispy on the peaks — the kale being laid out, more or less, on one layer on the tray. there is a fake-cheesy-junk-food taste i haven’t enjoyed in years. and it’s kale, so Nobody can complain.

c. hoppin’ john

something like the texas caviar matt brought us in brazil (and which made it into _cooking com bigode_), it’s a salad of black eye peas (when you made too much last night and didn’t season all of them after pressure cooking), leftover rice (not overcooked though, loose grains), fresh diced tomatos and green onions. i’d have a hard time not putting freshly ground roasted cumin dust on top, but they seem to avoid that down South pretty well.

d. rumi [Who Says Words With My Mouth?]

All day I think about it,
then at night I say it.

Where did I come from,
and what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere,
I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness
began in some other tavern.

When I get back around
to that place,
I’ll be completely sober.

Meanwhile, I’m like a bird
from another continent,
sitting in this aviary.

The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear
who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes?

What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste
one sip of an answer,
I could break out
of this prison for drunks.

I didn’t come here of my own accord,
and I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here
will have to take me home.

This poetry,

I never know
what I’m going to say.

I don’t plan it.

When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet
and rarely speak at all.

e. from the poem “fluent” by john o’donahue in the book
_to bless the space between us_, which is a book of blessings for all, or many, occassions

“i would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding”

f. i reiterate, this drunkeness began in some other tavern.

and i’ll see you there.

when next i write there will be a newly magical phone at my side, supposedly.

trust your own self, though.

love

ankurbhai

[a reuters article on the wsf somebody sent me]
Sun Feb 1, 2009 9:44am EST

By Stuart Grudgings

BELEM, Brazil, Feb 1 (Reuters) – The world’s biggest gathering of leftist activists ended on Sunday, after six days of discussions and protests that participants said showed there was an alternative to a crumbling global capitalist system.

The World Social Forum brought about 100,000 activists to the Brazilian Amazon city of Belem ranging from communists railing against U.S. “imperialism” to environmentalists and more moderate socialists.

Timed to coincide with the Davos meeting of business leaders in Switzerland, this year’s Forum attracted a record number of government leaders keen to burnish their leftist credentials in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“People see capitalism as not being able to maintain itself and there’s a hope that it can’t too,” said Shannon Bell, a politics professor at Toronto’s York University who attended meetings on “eco-socialism” at the Forum.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government spent about $50 million on the Forum and brought a dozen cabinet ministers. Four other leftist Latin American presidents also visited and received a heroes’ welcome.

Rather than making binding decisions, the Forum’s main role is as a huge networking and discussion opportunity for activists. The global crisis was a common theme, with many saying it showed that free-market capitalism was on its last legs.

“The financial side of the world was never the part that really moved the world. The world is moved by people,” said Luis Fabiano Celestrino, a 35-year-old self-described “idealist” with the Revolution of the Spoon vegetarian group.

“The World Social Forum shows what people are thinking about the most basic problems — just hearing proposals for solving them makes this worthwhile.”

hello dear friends.

ive been extremely true to the moment and irresponsible to the digital world, and cant really apologize for it. 3 weeks in brazil and 3 weeks in mexico since leaving seattle, and likely heading to india before this gregorian month is up. a millions smiles and loves have transpired and countless recipes more, and there is no guarantee i will ever pick up enough of the pieces to communicate it well but a few key takeaways from the past two months would put us at:

* it seems every strange religion, science, philosophy, cult, or dance i run into is a humanly imperfect attempt to Be Love. seen from this perspective, i can appreciate everyone’s foxsteps as my own.

* there is nothing more gratifying than a beautiful stranger smiling at you as you walk down the street (or airport or market or wherver), and stopping to turn a few steps later to catch them still smiling and laughing with you. this is, almost literally, ALL THE TIME in brazil. go there.

* we are put on this earth not alone in order to do things when not alone that we cannot do when we alone. this is mainly harmonizing, tickling, partneryoga, and holding each other crying, as far as i can tell. and, of course, diving catches for the frisbee into the shallow brown ocean of amazon.

* there is a book called “non violent communication” that many of us who want to work on untying the knots in our more venerable relationships (say, with mom, for instance) might read. it’s brilliant, and, i have to come realize, may ultimately best serve to prevent tying those same knots with our children and nieces.

* the ancient mayan calendar is a sacred tool given by the mayan ancestors to there people, which after having allowed them to survive oppression and humiliation for 500 years, is now availabe to guide the rest of us in attuning our intention with the attention of the environments which surround us. its like knowing to go to the MOMA on the first friday of the month, but on a cosmic scale.

but the most important sense i have felt in this last season of comings and goings — which has felt particularly intimate given that i spent 6 months in the cascadia bio region last year without so much as stepping foot on a plane — is that i am never actually

Leaving anybody
Leaving anyplace
Learning anything
Meeting anybody
Loving at first sight.

That is, it seems, this time around, that though we may try to leave each other and cry and grimace and make the best of living apart, we are actually Not. We are actually not different in time and space, we have all met and fallen in Love long ago. And here I am with a dozen ticket stubs and empty metro cards and a flat Sol string on the baritone ukulele, coming to town Again to laugh and cry in nothing more than simple, easy, Recognition. It’s like every taqueria and streetcorner and aiport I go to, I’m meeting people who by some strange act of cosmic coincidence, I’ve

a) met before
b) known forever
and
c) never been apart from.

or, to put it in succint capital letters

ALWAYS ALREADY ARRIVED TOGETHER

the best of course was after hiking to the waterfull and back in Yelapa with the Pyschic All-Star team, to a bar/restaurante that called itself “El Manguito” (the little mango) where the cook/waiter/owner ‘recognized’ me from San Francisco, from the kitchen of an Indian restaurant where we worked together with a bunch of other mexicanos and pakistanis and indians and others of gods creatures besides. Which I dont remember and I think its because it didnt happen, or, at the very least, it wasnt me. But maybe — and this is what Im seriously opening up to — I’m just being stubborn and egoistical about this. What if we’ve all met Gustavo before and we’ve all worked at every cheap Indian restaurant this side of the East River and we don’t remember it or believe it’s just our problem because, someday, under the waterfall and little mangos, somebody will…

love
ankur
ankurbhai
ankurcito
el manguito

ps amerikan phone number
347 . 586 . 7285
doesnt accept textos/sms
happy wallet after 9pm EST
always open for business.

1. On Globalization

The capacity of the `hospitality’ industry here in Belem, the city of mango trees and the mouth of the Amazon river, was around 30,000 before this event. The World Social Forum, which offically starts in 1 minute, and to which celebration I will likely arrive at an hour later, and still be early, expects 80,000 participants. And then some.

Yesterday Cholmes and I went to one of the campuses of the Forum to try to get registered. We ended up at the wrong site, met the right guy, and within 30 minutes had run into someone we had never met, who already had a pass with Cholmes’ names on it, and was willing to facilitate getting one for me.

So that happened, beautifully, perfectly, and without hassle. Another triumph of dusty Portuguese (it seems so wrong to call it that, when the language is clearly Brazilian) and the ever-present smile, so at home, here in the Amazon. While getting the passes we met three characters right out of the movie Cidade de Deus (City of God, full of gorgeous cinematography, violence, and Brazilian funk), up from Sao Paolo, making a documentary, and wanting to interview us.

We walked a few minutes towards one of the rivers, sat in front of a giant tent sponsored by the Cuban Government (celebrating 50 years of the cuban revolution with music and cultural programs), and talked. The thing I remember best, after the initial introductions of Cholmes work and my own, was when he threw forth a word and asked us to speak on it:

Globalization.

Cholmes grunted me the right to go first. And all I could think of was the Amazon, wide and brown and powerful and everywhere and right behind us. Globalization. the Amazon.

We just got off a boat, our shared home for 5 days, with 300 other passangers, motoring and floating and blowing along from Manaus to Belem (you~ll neeed a map), stopping along major and minor ports along the way to pick up and drop off humans and other cargo.

Friends on the boat included a group of 70 indigenous people from 7 different ethnicities, all living near the border of Brazil and Colombia, and all going to present at the forum. Friends including a travelling circus from Colombia, an industrial dropout from a South African accounting firm, itinerant professors of language and sociology. A couple — half German and half Brazilian — who bicycle all around South America and draw portraits for petty cash.

It was a pretty cool group for a while, with nothing to do but play music, drink beer, and be absorbed in the Amazon happening all along us.  And then, all of a sudden, maybe by day 3 or 4, it was a family.

We bought each other ice cream and drank from each other~s cups without asking, entered each others cabins and slept in each others hammocks. We even missed each other. Walked through the narrow verandas of the boat became a forest of thumbs ups and high fives, proferred fruits and impromptu jam session.

No two people spoke the same set of language, it seemed, and everybody~s hair blew in the wind alike. We became the Amazonian boat people, and raised a flag for cooperation, understanding, and ultimately, globalization.

That~s what I told the documentary anyways, and, in a way, I felt my World Social Forum was over by the time we arrived in Belem to join 70,700 other friends and lovers from all over the world. We~ve run into Ekta Pariksha from India, a whole Zambian delegation (women for change, with men with them wearing tshirts that said, women for change), and countless artists and performers from all over the globe. Tomorrow the workshops will start in earnest, and I~ll be wading my way through the 160 page programme in 8-point font, trying to figure out how best to participate.

But we ate 60 mangos in 5 days, 3 cupuaçu, 2 kilos each of maracuja, papaya, pineapple, bananas, and countless other fruits offered and shared. And that was the forum for me. Staring at the Amazon which reached unto the horizon and learning about lives in indigenous communities where hunger is the norm in the most abundant rainforest on the planet, because missionaries accidently wiped out food-gathering culture along with religious-culture when they came to preach to the heathens. You know the story, I~m sure.

There~s really too much, too much humanity, and too much river to get into. But a 5-day cruise down the Amazon is the best way to arrive at the Social Forum that much I know, so good it might just have obsoleted the forum entirely.

In any case, the miracles show no sign of letting up. Neesha and I have stopped to look for solidarity accomodation at a high school we passed on the road, and they made us wait for a bit before coming out, addressing us as honored guests of state, and asking if we wouldnt might waiting in the airconditioned library while one of their professors finishes an errand before taking us to the appropriate housing. Constant amazement at the random goodness of people, and I~m happy to acknolwedge its not just about India.

Anyhow, thats the fruit of the day.

As for what we~re doing here, Cholmes and I wrote a paper on the Amazon about some ideas weve been developing. I’ll post it tomorrow after the presentation.

harmony and açai

ankur