This Is India Podcast 2

September 2, 2010  |  Featured, General, Travel  |  View Comments

Wel­come back!

This is the second pod­cast in the This Is India col­lec­tion. It tells of Cesca and my jour­ney high above the swel­ter­ing plains of India to the moun­tain retreat of Ooty. We recor­ded it last night and both really enjoyed revis­it­ing what was one of the most pleas­ant sec­tions of our trek around this enorm­ous country.

Ooty holds the envi­ous pos­i­tion of being high enough to be cold by Indian stand­ards, but still within the heart of the coun­try that it over­looks. It has a a very fam­ous train ser­vice, upon which the ded­ic­ated crews work tire­lessly to bring tour­ists, loc­als and trav­el­lers alike up and down from the plains of Ker­ala to the high sta­tion at Ooty. The people here, com­pletely the most Eng­lish influ­enced of Indian peoples, dress uniquely, wor­ship in their own way and all exhibit the strength that high sta­tion liv­ing gifts those who end­lessly pitch their lungs against the thin­ning air.

We hope you enjoy it and as before we have setup a slideshow of pic­tures of our time there that we will refer to as we talk on.

If you like the pod­cast, please con­sider leav­ing a com­ment or spread­ing the news on face­book, twit­ter or whatever is your per­sonal social medium.

CLICK to play:
 
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Click the more to get the altern­ate player, com­ments and links from the pod­cast:
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A Sudden Dawn: Book Review

A Sudden Dawn: Book Review

July 30, 2010  |  Featured, General, Philosophy, Review  |  View Comments

The story of a simple Buddhist priest trav­el­ling from India to China in the 5th Cen­tury doesn’t sound like some­thing that would make for an inter­est­ing novel, but the after effects of this sol­it­ary man’s jour­ney still rever­ber­ate today. In all parts of the far east, the name Bod­hid­harma is still very well known. In Japan, for example, little girls have Bod­hid­harma key-chains and all sorts of other cul­tural influ­ences and foot­prints can be found. And not only in the geek fringes or the reli­gious halls, no his is a vis­age often seen in paint­ings; most of the time shown as an old priest with a par­tic­u­larly fierce expres­sion of con­cen­tra­tion, and it is for this abil­ity that he was most highly prized. Bod­hid­harma didn’t bring Buddhism to China or Japan, but he star­ted a school of Buddhist thought that spoke to some­thing deep inside the East­ern people that heard it. Spoke to their mar­row with a simple and unselfish mes­sage of com­pas­sion, ded­ic­a­tion and submission.

This effect changed them forever.

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Mysore

Mysore

July 26, 2010  |  Featured, General, Travel  |  View Comments

“Can you take us to this hotel please?” I asked the tuk tuk driver.

He shook his head, “No, that hotel burned down.”

“Burned down? I just spoke to them on the phone…”

He held his hands apart and looked slightly hurt that I was doubt­ing him, “Hotel closed,” he insisted, “I take you to one much better.”

Time for the Bad Cop.

In India, catch­ing a tuk tuk and nego­ti­at­ing the fare – or even the simple exist­ence of the des­tin­a­tion – is a national pas­time. Not one driver, in three months, took us where we wanted to go without com­ment, argu­ment or an all out fight. At first, this grates on the nerves and then you cant help but be brought down by it. Then you feel vic­tim­ised for being west­ern and (rel­at­ively) rich. You start to think that they are all out to get you per­son­ally. How­ever, it is none of these; it is an offi­cial sport. Take it as a sport, a spar­ring match, and you sud­denly find it fun.

And you develop tactics.

Our tac­tic is to use the old Good Cop, Bad Cop routine, but with a twist. The twist being that I, the large white man in slightly mil­it­ary cloth­ing, am not the bad cop. Cesca is. There is some­thing about con­fid­ent Eng­lish women that is like Krypton­ite to a tuk tuk driver. We some­times really played it up. Cesca would fake anger at the guy and then I would step in and take his side.

“But Darling,” I would plead, “he has to earn a liv­ing, I am sure he is not rip­ping us off.” I would then give the driver a look, one I prac­ticed, which said ‘Hey buddy, look at this, I have an angry white women here. I know you need to rip us off, you know I know, but please let’s just defuse this bomb before it goes off and we both look embar­rassed’. It was a kind of shared-trauma plead­ing look.

Worked 90% of the time. The 10% is a story for later…

It was very easy to feel a little guilty about such beha­viour, but hon­estly this is just part of the game as well. There is no White Man’s Bur­den, I didn’t owe any­one being “gouged” (the trav­el­ers term for rip off rides).

Cesca looked the guy in the eye and scowled – some­thing she is very good at, “We want to go to this one please?” She said prof­fer­ing the Lonely Planet aloft.

This guy was not crack­ing, “I not take you to that one,” he said.

Time for Phase Two. Read More

What is Daoism?

What is Daoism?

June 27, 2010  |  Featured, General, Personal, Philosophy  |  View Comments

Before we start, I should add a caveat to this art­icle. I am a philo­sopher and a Daoist. As such, I sup­pose, I am not the best per­son to judge. I offer only my own under­stand­ing of the form, which is lim­ited. I do not claim to have a “mono­poly on the truth”, nor to be a teacher. Any mis­takes are my own. But since, as we shall see, Dao­ism is mys­ter­i­ous — I can hardly be blamed for that!

Intro­duc­tion

I am often asked, “Just what is Daoism?”

This is a nat­ural enough ques­tion, as since I “came out” as a Daoist many people have been genu­inely inter­ested. What the ques­tion really asks is, “Please can you encap­su­late the con­cepts of Dao­ism into a single sen­tence and com­mu­nic­ate that to me?” The per­son then nor­mally looks a little askance as I sin­gu­larly fail in the attempt:

“Well,” I begin, “it’s, er…”

“Yes?” they ask, wait­ing on my answer, clearly form­ing the opin­ion that I cant be a very ser­i­ous Daoist without being able to enun­ci­ate at least that.

“It’s com­plic­ated…” I man­age after a rumin­at­ing struggle, made plain on my face.

These are not par­tic­u­larly com­fort­ing moments in my life. I once attemp­ted to write an answer for a work col­league and acci­dent­ally sent him a blank email with the sub­ject, “Dao­ism is…”

He wrote back, “Are you try­ing to make a point, or did you miss off the text?”

I wasn’t, but I wish I had thought to do so. I could then cre­ate an email that reads:

Sub­ject: What is Daoism?

(THIS MESSAGE IS LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK)

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Sennybridge, a Basho film about

Sennybridge, a Basho film about “The Chernarus Conflict”

A  few week­ends ago my air­soft broth­ers and I were play­ers at the TA Event’s, “The Chern­arus Con­flict”. This was a 24 hour Milsim game using the, freshly revised, Battle­Sim rules developed by Iain of TA Events.

To those of you who play com­puter games, the coun­try of Chern­arus may ring a few bells. As any­one who loves the Arma series of games from Bohemia Inter­act­ive will tell you Chern­arus, or Black Rus­sia, is a fic­tional post-USSR coun­try some­where in the East that is used as the main game loc­a­tion. TA Events have licensed the entire storyline from Bohemia mean­ing that play­ers at the event could sign up to the vari­ous fac­tions found in the series. When someone says that you should get out from behind the key­board and get some exer­cise, these events enable you to re live the bril­liant, in-depth storyline for (almost) real. A detailed account of the fac­tions and back­ground to the event can be found here and it has a very pro­fes­sional depth to it not usu­ally avail­able to airsofters.

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Malvern 2010 Show Garden - Losing Control, Releasing Nature

Malvern 2010 Show Garden — Losing Control, Releasing Nature

May 26, 2010  |  Babeski, Basho Films, Featured, General  |  View Comments

When Cesca first showed me the draw­ing plans for the UCS garden at RHS Mal­vern, I knew that it was going to be spe­cial. But noth­ing could pre­pare me for the final res­ult. More a large scale high-art install­a­tion than a garden; it is play­ful, fun and def­in­itely send­ing a mes­sage that we can all understand.

I have been read­ing a book recently, called “The World Without Us ‚” in it the author, Alan Weis­man, writes of how nature – that per­vas­ive force – would take over after we are gone. Con­crete would fall down, build­ings would crumble under vines and the remains of human­ity would dis­ap­pear; and quicker than you would ima­gine. Of course, for us Daoists we don’t see the human and so called “nat­ural” worlds as dif­fer­ent at all. They are all parts of the same thing; and it is only human arrog­ance that dis­tin­guishes us and our achieve­ments. When we see meta,l and we think that it is not a “nat­ural” sub­stance, we for­get that we stand upon a 50 tril­lion ton ball of the same stuff. Given the size of the Uni­verse, our small scratches on that metal ball amount to a glint of light in a mil­lion years of sun­shine, but we don’t see it that way. We still think we are in con­trol. As Weis­man shows in his book – that is the ulti­mate illusion.

And so it is with the UCS garden, los­ing con­trol leads to organic growth and non-human cycles of birth and decay tak­ing back the ground. Return­ing to the rhythm all of its own. It wont be rushed, it is like the blow­ing play­ful wind, and as garden­ers we might con­duct this orches­tra briefly, but we hardly could claim con­trol of it.

We work with it.

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Basho and Cesca visit Bangalore, and kind of wish they hadn't

Basho and Cesca visit Bangalore, and kind of wish they hadn’t

May 20, 2010  |  Featured, General, Travel  |  View Comments

Ban­galore is a strange place because it is just like cit­ies at home. Almost slap bang in the middle of India, it sits like a jig­saw piece put in the wrong box. To some, it is the epi­tome of the “two tier” soci­ety out­siders see when they look this coun­try. But that is just in mean eco­nomic terms, and when you actu­ally get here you soon real­ise that West­ern ideas of how soci­ety struc­tures itself into two halves down purely how much cash is in your account is the worst of mod­els. It just doesn’t work in India; there is another dimen­sion to the whole thing, a spe­cial dimen­sion of multi-layered reli­gious and social tiers lay­ing next to each other for a thou­sand years. Most of the time, India provides a refresh­ing change for vis­it­ors. How much money you have does not define you and your world.

And then you come to Bangalore…

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