Christmas and all that

I'm in a tropical beach north of Goa. At midday is still too sunny so I usually have to hide, it's a good time to go in front of the cold one-eyed computer, and to update the blog maybe - it's been a couple of weeks since last time, but the simplicity of my days here leave me quite silent, not much to say then...

Yesterday it was christmas eve, you could say this is a good place to spend the holidays. Although I guess it's as good as any other. The best christmas in my life were probably last year, I was also in India and I went for a visit to a tibetan settlement in the south; but those days were for sure amongst the best in my life, I had just left everything and I was travelling with a very very good friend - christmas did not have much to do with it, neither against it, it was just a date in the calendar which was quite unrelated to what was happening to me.

Well yesterday I did not have many plans, did not feel like going into a party for sure, there's some friends around, mostly from yoga classes, and I was guessing I would meet them and have a quiet dinner with them. It's funny though that I had not seen them during the full day and I was getting a bit kind of anxious as dinner time was approaching: the perspective of spending christmas eve on my own did sound weird. I was surprised I had that feeling, (I have had lunch on my own yesterday and it was perfectly alright), but there it was.

Eventually I met them of course, and we went for dinner, it was not much different than usual, (we have food together pretty much daily), except for the fact that we decided to go to a good italian restaurant, supposed to be the best in town, for a change. Afterwards we were all tired and sleepy and went straight to bed.



If you believe that the external things are your problem, that you get disturbed and stressed because of the daily hassles, the job, the responsibilities, the family, or whatever else, then the solution should be easy, no?, then you would know what to do if you wanted to get out of that disturbance, of that stress.

But, whatever your reasons, if you actually do it and leave everything, maybe you find a lot of peace of mind, or even you find something huge you had not realised before, or you start feeling happiness, or I don't know which good things start happening to you. However, if you are lucky, you might also figure out what was the origin of that disturbances and the stress you felt in your "old life", because in your "new life" there's also annoyances, and you may get very angry about them, as much as you want...

It does not mean that you've learnt automatically to deal with all those problems, even worse, no matter how small they are they may go out of hand, probably you're even further away from solving them, and it is very frustrating since they are so tiny now that you are free and you have no reason to get disturbed. The good thing is that you've learnt something very very important, something you know it makes the difference!! - and it's so obvious you kind of wonder how it is that you've never known and you needed all these adventures to get to the point...

The sausage machine

It does not sound well in English, "the sausage machine". Not even in Spanish, but at least there is the expression "there are more days than sausages", and from there you can more or less guess it. I imagine a very big sausage machine in which the pigs enter alive falling from the trunk into a door on top, and then on the right side the sausages come out in a chain. The core mechanism of the device is quite complicated, not only mechanic but it also involves electronics, and there's regulators and bottons that look old fashioned like the ones on the chest of Darth Vader.

Well I could try to draw it, maybe it would make a motive for a nice Buddisht tanka. But I'm kind of busy you know in this tropical beach, attending to yoga classes in the morning, writing a bit, and I hardly have time to go for a swim before sunset... if anybody is reading, and bored enough to do it and send it, I would be very happy to post it in the blog. Besides I could show it to some indian artisans-for-tourism and maybe they like the design, and start selling tankas like sausages.

Anyway the point of the sausage machine is not the tanka. Some months ago I was talking about some "funny" characters in a neurotic mind like mine, such us the croupier or the thing, so that nothing never seemed to be really in peace. Even if I was emptying my days, my days were not becoming empty, etc.

These times I'm by far more relaxed; (probably because relaxation is a matter of practice also). When I thought about it, I was expecting that the croupier would leave me alone so that I could spend more time with the thing. But no no no. The croupier is indeed sleeping in his shinny shirt with his head over the green kind of carpet of the gambling table. But the thing is not closer or further away, and my mind has become a machine of sausages.

You know sausages coming one after the other look similar, but if you look more closely they are all somewhat different in shape, length... (I guess it depends on how precise the machine is). Anyhow that's the feeling, it's what's coming out in my head, all the time, the soft noise of the machine, the smell of the raw meat, always in the background.

Definitively, it is an improvement!.

Indian wedding in the dry season

... had nothing to do with the "monsoon wedding". Not that all movies should have anything to do with anything of course, but western expectations might be too high sometimes.

Even if it ended up not being an exciting kirsch party, it was very interesting. It was high caste and quite formal, lots of attendees, maybe a peak of 1000 (?), and the ceremonies and rituals were really complex. Although in essence not so different to the west I would say: there's more people invited than anything you can handle, there's a kind of script so that everybody knows more or less what's going to happen, there's a feeling that it is a very very special occasion. Ok there's the indian "exoticism" (to our eyes), and the colors, and the rituals, and it is soooo long - the full thing was one day and a half.


The most curious part was actually behind the scenes. The marriage was arranged, in India in most cases it is still arranged, even for the educated and wealthy people, (the example my friend who works in IT). Quite an unromantic deal: the "1st cut" of the candidates is done by the family, based on 3 main criteria: (1) caste is the same, (2) astrology matches, and (3) he/she looks alright at the photo and has the right height. Afterwards both families meet and have some lunch, and the husband and wife hold a private interview of a few hours and have the last word.

(Besides the situation is not balanced for him and her, but that's a bit like complaining about some of the monarchies e.g. the spanish which give preference to males even if there is an older daughter - either you like the idea of having a king or not, you cannot give a modern touch to something as old as that).

But the really surprising issue for me is that my friends are ok with it. I've been fascinated about this subject since my 1st trip to India, actually. I even got to understand that 2 people may fall in love with each other in that situation, if they are willing to go for it and they are very very honest - they pursue real love?. But why, why doing it this way.

Why there is no chance for men and women to meet in India?. In the wedding they were gorgeous ladies very dressed up, and my friends showed me how to know if they're married of not by their neck collars. But why, why did they tell me that if I kept looking at women we would all get into trouble. Why any kind of seduction, even the most innocent staring, seems to be banned in India?.