Bija Andrew’s Zen Blog

Chalo Dilli/Alive in the World

September 5th, 2011 . Posted in media, traveling zen | 2 Comments »

The plot of Chalo Dilli, a Hindi film from this year, is very close to the 1987 American film Planes Trains and Automobiles, except that Steve Martin’s character of a high-strung Chicago businessman is replaced by Lara Dutta as a high-strung Mumbai businesswoman named Mihika Banerjee. Chalo Dilli means “Let’s go to Delhi,” and the movie follows a series of misfortunes for two travelers, Mihika and Manu, who thought they’d get a quick flight between India’s two biggest airports.

Train from Chalo Dilli

Early in the movie, when it still appears to the characters that a short taxi ride will get them to Delhi in a few hours, Manu (the John Candy-surrogate) asks Mihika if she likes Bollywood songs. She says that she only listens to English music. She takes a pair of headphones out of her purse as the taxi takes them through the countryside of Rajasthan, and we hear the music, a woman singing over a lite adult-contemporary production, the style you’d hear on VH-1 around 1994. “These moments in life,” she sings, “will just pass you by.” Lara closes her eyes and smiles at the music.

The irony’s a little heavy-handed, but like many Bollywood road movies, it makes me think of my time in India. Sometimes when people ask me advice for travel, I tell them not to be afraid to bring their own music and books. You’ll spend most of every day seeing things you’ve never seen before, meeting people unlike anyone you’ve met before, stretching your comfort zone to the max. If you want to spend an hour or so every day, listening to pleasant, familiar sounds, there’s nothing wrong with that. Train rides get long, and you’ll appreciate having something to pass the time. And yet, perhaps sometimes I used my own music to let the world pass me by, to waste an opportunity to see the special scenes of Indian life.

Bus Ride in India

But then I think of one train ride where I’d put in my headphones, but kept my eyes open. I listened to this song and contemplated its lyrics while I paid attention to the sights all around me.

“…I’ll hear if another voice should call
to the prisoner inside me,
to the captive of my doubts,
who among his fantasies
harbors the dream of breaking out
and taking his chances
alive in the world….”

I thought of the doubts that hold me prisoner, the part of me that’s still afraid to take chances. Then I looked around the sleeper car, saw every other traveler on the benches with me, making our way from Benares to Bihar, each of us doing our best to be alive in the world. As Jackson Browne sang into my ears, I knew this moment would never come again, and I was alive for it.

And now that I’m home I need to bring this awareness again to Michigan, to White Lake, to Dearborn, to Detroit. If I closed my eyes in India and wished I could be home, I know that from time to time I’ll close my eyes at home and wish I could be in India. These moments in life–at the supermarket, at the gym, on the freeway, in the classroom–they’ll just pass me by if I keep my eyes closed.

At the end of “Alive in the World,” I took off my headphones. The train came to a halt at Buxar Station, and a flurry of new arrivals poured in. Children selling newspapers and bottled Pepsi came running through. A transgendered beggar came to our bench, clapped her hands and pointed to the college student next to me, who fished out a coin to give. A pilgrim came in carrying a staff decorated with red tinsel, with bottles tied onto it to collect holy water from the Ganges. He climbed to the upper berth and tried to rest the staff against the small fan on the ceiling. Its blades chopped at the tinsel with an angry sound, making a momentary rain of glitter confetti.

I thanked the gods for Sleeper Class trains. And for keeping my eyes open.

My problem with this year’s Beloit Mindset List.

August 25th, 2011 . Posted in media | No Comments »

I’ve seen a lot of the Beloit Mindset List over the last few days, shared by various Facebook contacts. If you’re not friends with as many college instructors as I am, you may not know about it; it’s an annual list of facts about the incoming college freshman class, designed to help understand what the new generation is thinking.

It’s a good idea, and it could serve a useful purpose, but in recent years I’ve been more and more disappointed in the list. It’s gotten to be less a useful treatment of generational differences, and more a roll-call of pop-culture trivia from 18 years ago.

Part of my problem with the list is that the writing style is convoluted and awkward, word choices that seem designed to be hip and funny but miss the mark. The writers seem to like “always” and “never” statements, and I kind of get why. An incisive statement on culture could be like those from Beloit’s Class of 2003 list–to say that in their lifetime, there has always been at least one female justice in the Supreme Court, or there has never been a Yugoslavia.

But when they try to press that sentence form onto a factoid, it leads to rough sentences like All their lives, Whitney Houston has always been declaring “I Will Always Love You.” or Women have always been Venusians; men, Martians. Of course, those statements were written to say that a certain song and a certain book were released before they were born, but it’s not like Whitney was hooked up to a 24-hour singing machine, constantly looped to the one song, and it’s not like the psychology-lite insights in John Gray’s book have been uniformly accurate and influential. Sometimes the sentence format just makes it illogical: Amazon has never been just a river in South America. I presume it’s saying they were born after the online bookstore Amazon.com, but really, “Amazon” has always had more than one meaning–a mythical warrior woman, or any woman seen as physically imposing. Why do the writers say it this way, and not, “They were born after the opening of Amazon.com”?

The real problem with the list, though, is that its pop-culture focus seems to be mostly through Baby Boomer eyes, not Millennial eyes. Sure, these young people are too young to remember Cheers, the Sears Big Book, or President Carter. What insight do we get from that? What does it tell us about their values? Pretty much nothing. The list seems to me like a group of over-thirties reminiscing, like, “Remember when you had to go to a midnight movie to see Rocky Horror? These kids don’t!” “Remember the McDonalds hot-coffee trial? They don’t!” Even the ones that are specific to their generation seem infantilizing–pogs, Mouseketeers, Tickle-Me Elmo. How does it help us relate to them, to understand who they are now, to be reminded that the catchphrases “Been there, done that” and “yadda yadda yadda” were popular when they were babies? If it simply reminds you not to use 1990s catchphrases in class, that’s really a small step. If you need a reminder that Lorena Bobbitt jokes will fly over the heads of 18-year-olds, I think it’s better as a reminder that Bobbitt jokes were never funny in the first place.

Every year, I get insights and surprises from my students. I find out how they see the world, what is significant to them and how it differs. That’s something the Beloit Mindset List could do, could help with, could start conversations. But it seems in this form to be less a conversation-starter than a conversation-closer. “Don’t bother talking to them about Andy Warhol,” it seems to say. “They don’t know him and don’t care.”

There’s one note on this list that could have been developed into an insight: The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major league sports. But, well, I’m not certain that’s true, or true as such. Considering that this list comes from a university in Wisconsin I think the claim calls for a little more scrutiny.

Impossible Hindi

August 9th, 2011 . Posted in traveling zen | 2 Comments »

After four weeks in India–on my third trip here–I realize that I don’t have time in this lifetime to master Hindi. Which saddens me, but it’s a fact of life.

I’ll keep working on it, keep learning and improving. I’m not too bad at figuring out what’s being said through listening, but this may be because of the shared vocabulary, English words that have made their way to Hindi, or personal or place names that are the same in both languages. But it’s such a rich, dense language, and so tied with culture, that often I hear a conversation and I think, “I can tell they’re talking about whether the window should be open or not. I just can’t figure out how there’s that much to talk about.”

Consider the difference in bargaining. Not the difference in scope of bargaining–in America, we generally only haggle over the prices of major items like cars and houses. But the practice is so different. I generally think of it happening with a note pad or calculator. The seller proposes a price by writing the number on the paper, or entering it on the calculator, and passes it to the buyer. The buyer then writes down a counter-offer and passes it back. Aside from any practical terms that may influence the negotiation, the motivations are left as unsaid and self-evident. Obviously, the seller wants as high a price as possible, and the buyer wants a low price. There’s no need to explain why.

So when I hear haggling in Hindi, I hear a lot of words on top of this. And I have to presume the meaning is something like this.

SELLER: I will sell you this for 400 rupees.
BUYER: Allow me to explain the complicated and mostly irrelevant reasons that I will only pay 100 for it.
S: Look at the quality of this item, and know that my wholesale cost is much greater, and that I would be quite foolish to part with it for 100. You should pay 400.
B: Now let me tell you the name of six other markets where I am certain I could get it for 50. And explain to me why you charge more than those markets.
S: Certainly, I’d be happy to explain to you the complicated and mostly irrelevant reasons I want to sell it for 400. My family needs money so badly.
B: And my family needs to hold on to our money more badly. But we also need to buy this from you, which is why I will give you 100.

Then after they run out of steam,

S: So, 250 it is?
B: 250 it is.

I can’t compete with that. I’ll never speak Hindi well enough to haggle the hell out of it. But I guess I’ll keep trying.

Real Monks in Bodhgaya

July 29th, 2011 . Posted in meditation, traveling zen | 2 Comments »

Yesterday I was sitting under the Bodhi tree–I know, right?–watching the various people walk by. I’d noticed a guy with blond dreadlocks around the corner from before, and when he passed I said hello. He greeted me back, with an American accent, the two of us in the wide world of India.

Then he said, “Hey, a warning for you. Watch out for those monks over there. They aren’t monks, just trying to scam you out of money.” I agreed, mentioned that in the Theravada tradition monks aren’t supposed to accept money, and I wouldn’t be fooled by them.

I’d heard about this before, but somehow my last two times in India I hadn’t seen fake monks. But then a while after Dreadlocks and I parted ways, I walked past a handful of teenage boys in monks’ robes who said, “Hello sir” in the way Indian touts do when they want your business. And it only took one moment to tell: these are not monks.

I can’t point to a facet of their looks or behavior that specifically was non-monkish. Monks come in all shapes and sizes. But here’s the thing I learned: the deep practice of the Buddha’s teaching turns you inside out. You become fully, honestly, inescapably, who you are.

I’ve seen monks and nuns who’ve polished their core like this, and every one finds a different jewel inside. There are grumpy monks and cheerful monks. There are timid nuns and bold nuns. I mentioned to another friend that a few Korean monks and nuns I know have a very earthy vocabulary–in other words, they cuss like sailors. Whatever their personality, it’s a solid commitment to tautology. You are what you are. And when other people practice, they’ll see it too.

Of course it’s not only Buddhists who emanate this sense of being good at being who they are. I’ve known people from all walks of life who give forth this energy, this dropped resistance. But for me, I know but one way to do it, which is to practice the Eightfold Path and let go of those practices that aren’t being me.

The impostors are struggling, trying to be something they’re not to gain something they aren’t sure they deserve. It’s sad and it’s unnecessary, but it is the predicament the Buddha wants us to overcome. We can be who we are.

These two monks in the picture are real monks, not impostors. See if you can tell.

Two Monks

Born This Way

July 8th, 2011 . Posted in media | No Comments »

I’ve been thinking about this video, in which comedian Paul F. Tompkins’ talks about his elderly mother’s rethinking her views on gay people:

Paul F. Tompkins: My Mom’s Final Decree	UCBcomedy.com

Watch more comedy videos from the twisted minds of the UCB Theatre at UCBcomedy.com

And of course, that makes me think of this song by Lady Gaga, presented here in a remix by the famous Bollywood producers Salim and Sulaiman:

When I first heard Lady Gaga’s song, I thought the sentiment was surprisingly retro. Among the people I know and see on a daily basis, the sentiment that LGBT people are predisposed to be so–born this way–seems like nothing new and surprising. Of course, the song is about more than that; the sentiment of “accepting who you are” is not limited to one kind of outcast. But when I heard the song, the Eurodisco beat wasn’t the only thing that made me think the song would be more in place in the 70s or 80s. Isn’t “Born This Way” common knowledge, old news?

But then, to Paul F. Tompkins’ elderly mother, this attitude wasn’t cliched, wasn’t something she’d even considered until her old age. Then she treated it as her own private revelation, the product of intense contemplation, “Why are gay people that way? Maybe it’s because they were born that way.”

I was especially moved by Tompkins’ story because I kind of identify with him. In most of his work, he’s taken a detached, ironic view. He was the host of VH1′s “Best Week Ever,” a show that has irony built in to the title. Not every week can be the best week ever, but we can sarcastically act like it is. So when he tells the story about his mother, he’s on the verge of cracking wise about it, but there’s also a very sincere appreciation.

It’s odd that a sentiment that seems hackneyed and cliched from one perspective can be profound from another. Statements like “Money can’t buy happiness” or “Every cloud has a silver lining” seem hollow, unless you’ve had a transformative experience that leads you to treasure them. Philosophers expand, question, seek further treasure from these little sentiments, but to people who have something else to do with their day, there’s only the space and energy to make it into a song, to express it as a simple topic of bedside conversation, to hum along with it on the radio.

The Coffeehouse, the Zendo, the Gym

June 17th, 2011 . Posted in meditation | No Comments »

Yesterday, I was at a coffeehouse with my netbook computer, working on some writing, when two women sat at the table behind me and started a very loud conversation. My writing was kind of slow going, and their voices were distracting. I thought about turning around and asking them to modulate a little; indoor voices. I know it’s not a library, and I can’t expect silence.

Then I had to reason with myself and wonder why I was at the coffeehouse anyway. If I wanted to drink coffee and write without hearing other people’s conversations, I could do that at home. But something about being around other people–something about the potential for annoyance, the invasion of privacy–makes me a little more productive in my writing. I hunker down; I tune out annoyances and keep writing. When trying to write at home, I get up and pace around the room. I waste time on clicky games like Jorinapeka. (Seriously, don’t click if you don’t want to waste hours.) Around other people, I’m at my best. If anyone happens to look over my shoulder, they’ll see me writing, not wasting time.

It’s also why I go to the temple to meditate. A few weeks ago, there was an especially fidgety Sunday service. A few people in the zendo were restlessly shifting during the meditation. It made it difficult to concentrate. I could have done my practice at home with fewer distractions.

my home altar

But I also know when I sit at home, I’m like that. I squirm a little. I clear my throat. These things aren’t cardinal sins, but I know that my meditation is much more effective if I sit still. Being around others, sitting with the sangha on Sundays, gives me more incentive to go deep in meditation. I focus myself because I don’t want to be that person, the one who distracts people. I think about using that pressure for good–not to be neurotic and chastise myself for sighing or scratching or fidgeting, just doing my very best not to. When I focus myself out of consideration for other people, it turns out I get most of the benefits–I get a deep, restful meditation, or I get a productive morning of caffeinated writing, because I clear away my own junk. And if once in a while it takes a twitchy sitting or a loud neighbor-table at Biggby Coffee to remind me of that, I’m grateful for it.

However, it’s also important to watch out for contagious behavior. I’m thinking of a phenomenon I call the locker-room sigh. I’ve noticed often after exercising in the gym, people changing clothes will make a little extra noise, as if to say, “Whoa, what a workout. Ugh, I really stretched myself today. Ohh, that was tough.” They aren’t saying the sentences out loud, just the vocalization, to no one in particular. I wonder if they think they’re starting a conversation, if they are doing it to commiserate with other people in the same situation or to show off how hard they’re working.

It seems to be the same principle, but I wonder if locker-room sighs only lead to more locker-room sighs, that they don’t have the same reminder to focus. I’m also not sure if there’s an equivalent, that I’ll get more out of my own workout if I consciously refrain from going “Ugh” afterwards. But one way or another, I react the same way. I’m going to keep trying not to be that guy.

Two Photos

May 17th, 2011 . Posted in two photos | No Comments »

Boy Sweeping Ice-Cream Shop
Ice-Cream Shop, Eastern Market, Detroit

Souvenir Shop, Near the Hanuman Temple, Varanasi, India

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries) and a photographer’s dilemma

April 25th, 2011 . Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

still from Dhobi Ghat, starring Prateik Babbar

Most Indian cities have an area called the dhobi ghat, a bank of a river or lake where laundry services send clothes to be cleaned. Just like these areas are often on the outskirts of the city, the film Dhobi Ghat (released in some English-speaking markets as Mumbai Diaries) is on the outskirts of Hindi film, not filled with song-and-dance fantasies or wild action, but some subdued drama and a personal view.

In the film, Prateik Babbar plays Munna, a young man who delivers clothes for the dhobi service. His first encounter with Shai (Monica Dogra) is a little hostile–she berates him for spreading the wine stain on a white shirt. Shai is an American of Indian descent, a banker and aspiring photographer on a year’s sabbatical in her parents’ homeland. In their next meeting, she seems a little apologetic, and invites him in for tea to make up for it. He tells her that he moved to Mumbai from Bihar in hopes of making more money, either through better-paying jobs or becoming a movie star. He has never been back to his home state, he says.

He notices her camera, and asks if she can take his picture, so that he can use it to audition as an actor. It becomes apparent that their goals for the pictures are quite different. He wants to show off his confidence, his Westernized jeans and tee-shirts, his rock-star/model glamour poses. She’s interested in the unguarded realness of his life, taking a few photos of him preparing for the shoot when he wasn’t looking. She agrees to take photos in a studio in exchange for permission to photograph him working on laundry at the dhobi ghat.

I recognized something of his puzzlement and embarrasment. A lot of the people I met in India wanted me to see the Westernized side of things, the side they thought of as impressive. Sometimes they were puzzled by my interest in the underside, or else just the everyday routines. They didn’t know why an American would find the dhobi ghat particularly interesting.

But that’s a risk you take when you try to cross a cultural divide. You have to risk saying, “Here is what I find interesting about your story,” realizing that the person living that story thinks of those aspects as entirely uninteresting. Maybe it’s a risk of objectifying or fetishizing the “simple life,” or a risk that you’ll find something that humiliates or exposes them. If you never take that risk, you don’t learn from them or see what their lives are really like. And maybe we all need to be told from time to time that our lives are interesting, even those parts of them we’d like to gloss over, ignore, or replace with a facade.

Here’s my dhobi ghat picture, taken up the steps from the Ganges in Rishikesh.
Dhobi-wallah's shop in Rishikesh

The Pursuit of Privacy

March 1st, 2011 . Posted in traveling zen | No Comments »

Our society values privacy so much that sometimes it seems to be an inalienable right, a need as natural as food or water. We might not notice just how unusual our expectations of private space and private knowledge are in a broader context.

It’s a theme I’ve been noticing in a number of places and discussions recently, including in Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal. In looking at what works for us in video games, contrasted to how we approach our lives, McGonigal notes that we’re more social and open-minded when playing a game, and that these things may be missing from our lives.

In most places in our lives, we can afford privacy because of our money. I noticed this most sharply when traveling on trains in India. If you paid 2300 rupees for a ticket (around $50), you could get into an air-conditioned compartment with a sliding door, where other passengers would mind their own business and you’d have plenty of space. For around $6, you could take the same trip in a crowded cabin, hot and dusty, with strangers sitting inside your personal bubble.

sleeper class train in Bihar, Indian Railways

And my conclusion, after trying all the classes of Indian Railways, was that sleeper class was a lot more fun. Or maybe fun isn’t the word for it. It was rewarding; it was life-affirming; it was beautiful.

This is a paradox of money in our time. When we can afford privacy, we take it, and we look for more ways to enhance privacy. Certainly some times we have excellent reasons to protect our privacy, even beyond convenience. We are wise to protect ourselves from stalkers, identity thieves, and contagious viruses. But the problem with privacy is that it can rob us of some essential nutrients we need to survive–human contact, surprise, wonder, generosity, both given and received. So maybe we seek this out online, then recoil from it, preferring the safety of privacy.

This may just be an accident of history, something that looks self-evident at one point but is actually very limited. Consider the security question, “What is your mother’s maiden name?” For a brief period of the 20th Century in the Western world, we could safely assume that this question would be secure. But before that, and in any village culture, the name of your mother’s clan is no secret–it would be rare that someone who knew you wouldn’t know that. In the future, in the global village, it won’t be that hard to figure it out either. Your digital footprints and connections will give that secret away. Yet I think we might gain something more precious in return for the disappearance of privacy. A new way to see and be seen, that won’t be painful if we’re happy with who we are.

Internal Affairs part 4

January 30th, 2011 . Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

This is the last of four posts on the concept of “internal” and “external.” Read the rest of the posts by going to part one, part two, and part three.

Because I started this discussion with the rules of games, like Scrabble and Chess, we should bring it around to the ethical rules of Buddhism. We call them “the precepts,” and phrase them this way:

Five Traditional Precepts:

1. Do not harm but cherish all life.
2. Do not take what is not given but respect the things of others.
3. Do not engage in sexual promiscuity but practice purity of mind and self-restraint.
4. Do not lie but speak the truth.
5. Do not partake in the production and transactions of firearms and chemical poisons that are injurious to public health and safety nor of drugs and liquors that confuse and weaken the mind.

Three Contemporary Precepts:

6. Do not waste but conserve energy and natural resources.
7. Do not harbor enmity against the wrongs of others but promote peace and justice through non-violent means.
8. Do not cling to things that belong to you but practice generosity and the joy of sharing.

Once we take the precepts, we vow to uphold them. But we must ask, are these precepts like the rules of Chess, or like the rules of Scrabble? Are they the lines we will never cross, or the principles that we will test?

I look at other traditions for signs of this. A friend of mine showed me a set of videos online, the Shaytan videos. These were a set of public service commercials that aired in some Muslim countries. In these videos, a person will, say, be contemplating whether to falsely call in sick from work, and then a man dressed as a red devil appears over his shoulder and says (in Arabic) “Sure! Lie to your boss!” Or a child is reprimanded by his mother for eating with his left hand, then the red devil comes on to say, “It’s totally cool to eat with your left hand!” And the insight I get from these videos is that these are the points of struggle in the Muslim world, the issues that people need some encouragement on. There are no videos where people face the truly unthinkable. The ethical rules in the videos are internal to Muslim life.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition of Vietnamese Zen, the precepts are called “mindfulness trainings.” To benefit from them, you do have to take them seriously, but you’ll never learn if you don’t stumble. In this way, the rules are very much internal. In a Buddhist life, we will have a discussion about what constitutes “truth” or “harm,” and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Bernie Glassman speaks of a distinction between “violating the precepts” and “breaking the precepts.” Violating the precepts is like getting a dish dirty; it’s what we do with the dish, a part of using the dish and a part of its function. We work to keep our dishes clean for our own health. I think breaking the precepts is more like denying their value–instead of trying to become more mindful, deciding that it doesn’t really matter because the trainings are “only suggestions.”

When we reconcile this, the precepts aren’t restrictive or oppressive. They are merely the rules of the game that we are playing. To play the game well, we learn the rules.