The Challenge of Mysore

I have now been here roughly two weeks, and as I expected, practicing ashtanga in Mysore has been challenging. As I've passed through the initial tsunami of fatigue, the challenge has become a bit less physical and a bit more cultural.

Some of the differences are obvious: the traffic is driving on the left. For light switches, down is "on" -- the opposite of the American paradign. Some are more complex: the Indians don't use toilet paper, but resort to a system with a couple of buckets. (You try to figure it out -- or not.) Everything is more crowded, as there a lot more people. Food is complicated, and very different. I don't know the names for much anything on the menu, and if I go to a restaurant by myself, it's a game of food roulette. Every scooter jockey and auto rickshaw driver honks at every vehicle or pedestrian they overtake. Cacophony.

Surprisingly, the hardest part for me to adjust to, is dirt and litter. Is this my bourgeois, American bias? I'm not sure. It can't be good to have this much litter everywhere in the landscape, in front of the smallest shack or the larger house. The edges of the streets are full of dirt, and it's odd to watch women with hand-made brooms trying to clean it up -- an utter impossibility. I'm convinced that the principal function of sidewalks is for the storage of construction materials, such as sand and stone. You walk on the side of the streets, in the dirt. There was a cow pie on the sidewalk immediately in front of the gate to my fairly nice apartment building, for days. No one cleaned it up; eventually, we had a good hard rain. While no clean freak, I can't put aside a chronic feeling of unease about the (apparent) lack of cleanliness.

I've avoided (sound of knocking on wood) illness, and the ashtanga people are kind and friendly. Still, the feeling of being taken completely out of one's normal physical and cultural environment is not to be underestimated.

But I just had a cheese omelet at Santosha's, talked financial regulation with an economist from Canada, and I'm now ready to take a rickshaw to the downtown market. Life is good, especially after two excellent cups of coffee and a chance to play with Muffin, the cafe dog(shown at the top of the blog).

Below is a pretty poor photograph of a sandlot game of cricket at dusk last night, about three blocks from my apartment. Some things are beyond cultural differences. Kids playing pickup sports transcends all distinctions.






Cheers.