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Published: April 5th 2011
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"The streets are filled with idiots: CEAT tires." As this commercial brought the 2011 World Cup Cricket final to a close, the rooftop bar was rocked by a firework that hit our building. In the square below were hundreds of men, some in turbans, some without shirts, some with epic beards, all grinding provocatively on one another. A ball of fire rocked the street as a box of firecrackers exploded. A firework, supported only by a small pile of gravel, tipped over and shot off, exploding along the window of the coffee shop across the square. A car parked along the side of the road had two half naked men grinding on one another as the car thumped Eminem. Another vehicle pulled through the crowd with the driver hanging out the window while laying on the horn. "Ahh, there one is" pointed the Englishman I'd watched the match with, "Wouldn't be India without a cow." A terrified brown and white cow staggered through the group shrieking as firecrackers went off all around it. Men began throwing empty beer bottles in the air, howling as they fell randomly to the ground and shattered on the pavement.
In the afternoons I have
been attending classes run by Gu-Chu-Sum, an educational organization for Tibetan Refugees. It is run from the basement of a small apartment complex that offers housing and education for ex-political prisoners. The classes have ten to fifteen Tibetans, most are men in their thirties or forties. The first day we were paired up and given topics to talk about. I was paired with a monk named Conchuk, whom I really liked and befriended. He had been in India since 2007. He was the most positive of the men I would meet over the next few days. While in India he had traveled to Varanasi and Bodh Gaya and he said he had met so many new people from all over the world and had learned English and met the Dalai Lama, that his mind had expanded over the past four years beyond anything he could have learned in Tibet. He spent four years studying Buddhist Philosophy at a monastery in Tibet, though when I asked him about it he replied "Chris, I am a very lazy man, I don't understand it well."
Another day we went over the body parts. The woman in charge had everyone in the room
sing"If you're happy and you know it...." The idea being to mix a body part and an action, while reinforcing positive emotions. In the middle of this I looked around and all of the white people were clapping and stomping and singing with big smiles on their faces in a blissed out trance while all the Tibetan men were looking around completely lost as to what was going on.
One evening I was approached on the street by a Tibetan man named Yoni, who asked if I would come see his traditional TIbetan dance and song program. He wore tight jeans, green converse shoes, had a wild head of hair, a massive beard, and heart shaped sunglasses. He led me to a rooftop bar where there were two rectangular tables with 13-14 people seated around them. All the spectators were white though it was a healthy mix of gender, age, and nationality. Yoni sat on a stool at the end of the table and began his story of coming from Tibet in 1998. He left in the middle of the night with his mother and brother and was smuggled into Nepal. There they were detained for several days until
a TIbetan refugee advocacy NGO arranged for their asylum in India. He spoke softly as he explained what each of the songs meant. He sang unaccompanied by music as he danced lightly and gracefully around the room.
Then he turned on what I believe was a Kenny G light jazz album. He began rubbing his hands up and down his body. Behind him was a bush that he began stroking, running his hands up and down the trunk. He put a leaf in his mouth and bit it off. He walked over to a man sitting at the end of the table and tried to stick the leaf in his mouth. Then he climbed on the table and began crawling down its length. Diagonal from me was a German man in his early 20s. He was wearing a light gray sweatshirt that zipped up the front. Yoni stuck his face into the sweatshirt up under the German's armpit, then with his hands and legs on the table stuck his butt high in the air and began gyrating wildly. The poor German had the most horrified disturbed look on his face while the girl next to him was in tears
from laughing so hard. The rest of us were in shock, not sure what we were seeing. When he turned around toward me I closed my eyes and could feel his breath on my face. When I opened them he was only an inch or two in front of me, staring into my eyes. Then he stuck out his tongue and licked me across the forehead. For his finale he stood at the front of the room facing away from us, stuck both his hands down his pants grabbing his butt cheeks and hopped up and down making a low screeching noise. As soon as the music ended he turned around, put his hands together in a prayer position and thanked us for watching his performance. As I walked down to the street to leave, the German caught up with me, "I think we were just sexually assaulted by a man on E" he said. I could only shrug my shoulders and say, as per usual, I had no idea what just happened.
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alicia
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love
your india blogs. i've been dreaming of going and started reading the blogs to live vicariously through adventures such as this. yours are especially amusing, keep them coming!