Jain Shwetambar Shree Sambhavnath Prabhu Derasar, Delhi

Posted on April 14, 2025 by admin

On foot is pretty much the way to go when you’re on the twisty little market streets of the Chandni Chowk district of Delhi. That includes where we found ourselves, at the smallish slice around a street called Khari Baoli, where vendors sell spices, herbs, nuts, dried fruits, herbs, pickles and preserves and an effusion of other goods.

There has been a market at Chandni Chowk since Old Delhi wasn’t old, or even much of a city, and from what I’ve read, the variety of goods is well-nigh inexhaustible. These days, it’s a good place to wander. Always something to see, but also a good idea to keep your eyes on the ground, which wasn’t entirely smooth or level. Come to think of it, neither were the wires overhead, but at least you aren’t at risk of a trip and fall because of them.

Took in the aromas. Dodged foot traffic. Heard the muffled roar of people and machines. Kept aware of our valuables at all times. Bought some tea.

Examined ornate doors.

Something unexpected was behind this one: a Jain temple.

Jain Shwetambar Shree Sambhavnath Prabhu Derasar.

Our friendly guide for a few minutes. A lay volunteer, I think. Otherwise the temple was empty that morning.

The last time I thought much about Jainism was in a VU class focused on Dharmic religions, except for a brief visit some years ago to a Jain temple in suburban Chicago, a colorful and sedate place. Even in class we didn’t study the religion long, with a few days for it and Sikhism tucked in between Hinduism and Buddhism.

I remember a bit, and I’ve read a little more. Sounds pretty strict, but if you’re going to be strict about something, nonviolence seems like a good choice, though I suspect that such an attitude has inspired more aggressive members of other religions to take whacks at Jains down the centuries. As an ancient religion, the fine points of its origin are debated, including how much of an offshoot of Vedic religion it is, or how much it is or isn’t like Buddhism. The founder isn’t really considered the founder, but one who understood what the universe had been saying for a long time.

In any case, I’m sadly unfamiliar with Jain iconography. Our guide had a few words to say about some of the works, and I’m sure he was knowledgeable, but it didn’t stick with me.

But I know stunning work when I see it. Glasswork, especially.

Glasswork that tells stories.

The details might be opaque, but you can see a lot is going on.

A Small Selection From the Large Universe of Indian Truck Art

Posted on April 7, 2025 by admin

Our driver in India, who took us around to places in Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, seemed like a good fellow, but it was hard to say for sure. He was perhaps a decade or so younger than us, so none of us were youngsters. He had less hair than I do – and indeed might have used some of his tip money one day to have most of what little he had shaved off – and less stomach, but not none. Even in modern India, I take that as a sign that he has done reasonably well in his job driving foreigners around, though probably not well enough to ever to be a foreigner himself somewhere.

We of course have no Hindi, and he had only enough English for basic communication about stopping for meals and destinations, and to exchange other bits of other biographical information, such as his status as a father of five, and ours as parents of two. Riding on the dashboard, looking back at the driver and the passengers, was a colorful image of a deity. I didn’t ask him about it, but after some thought, realized was probably Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and fortune, among other attributes. That would fit for your place of business.

He typically would receive two sorts of calls, which he answered in what I assume was rapid-fire Hindi. One kind from his boss – the fellow who rented us the car and driver, and who had a salesman’s command of English – probably asking where we were and, for all I know, where we were going to stop for lunch that day; all I can say about that is I hope the driver got a cut, because his boss surely got one. Or at least a no-charge lunch. The other kind of call involved the voice, or voices, of young women, who were pretty clearly his daughters asking for something. You don’t need a common language to understand that.

It might be just as well that we couldn’t distract him with a lot of chit-chat. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand, namely driving in urban India’s packed streets. Packed with every sort of vehicle you can imagine and then some: trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, motorized tuk-tuks, human-powered tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters and other moving thingamabobs, horns blowing and each edging around the other in a tide that sometimes moved and sometimes didn’t.

When there was no motion for any more than a short time, beggars would appear in amazingly short order, and so would merchants toting their wares: one that stood out was at a jam near one of Delhi’s enormous traffic circles, which circle forlorn green spots with forlorn monuments. A tall, healthy-looking youth, who was at that moment a book-wallah carrying packages of books wrapped in clear plastic. Heavy-looking books, too, text books for learning programming or coding or whatever the tech industry calls it these days. I got a glance and he was off. I’m sure he knew we weren’t in his customer base.

Add to that a steady flow of other pedestrians, and not just ordinary walkers or people hanging out in the street — though there were plenty of those — but also men hauling goods on their backs or pushing carts or wheelbarrows. I swear I saw a guy pushing along a couple of chandeliers on a cart down one street.

In short, traffic like a lot of urban agglomerations in the world, down to details like rolling chandeliers. It’s one thing to know that in the abstract, another to see it so many years after the last time you did. I thought the traffic congestion was bad in Bangkok. (And it was.) But Delhi seems to have a special flair for congestion.

We passed a temple in Jaipur as pilgrims arrived. For a few miles, we passed pilgrims in small groups, headed for the temple, with vendors along the way giving them drinks or bits of food at no charge. Our driver was able to communicate that to us. Life spills into the streets.

I don’t want to forget another important source of movement on the roads of India: animals. Many dogs in the city, idle-looking by day but undertaking noisy turf quarrels by night, and not far from town, bovines in profusion, but also monkeys, horses (ridden and riderless), camels, goats (singly and herded), sheep (ditto) and more. The animals weren’t generally in the road, except when they were. I didn’t see any elephants rambling around, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had, after a few days on the road.

Our driver navigated it all without incident. Of course, it’s home to him, has been for a long time, but even so, he had admirable skill. Not that I would ever want to do it myself – it’s not home to me, never has been – but I had long enough to watch his technique and, in a wider context, get an inkling that there is some method to the madness of the roads.

He mainly used the horn to announce I am here to vehicles he probably was going to pass in ordinary driving, as opposed to their prime use in North America, which is to announce I AM HERE! in emergencies. (Unless you’re an asshole.) Our driver was hardly alone in his liberal use of the horn, which made for more beeping than I’ve heard since my earlier trips to urban glops like Rome, Beijing and, beepiest of all for some reason, Pusan, South Korea.

I close my eyes and I can recall those Pusan nights in ’90 in my non-climate controlled room, drinking the tea available in pots just outside everyone’s door, swatting mosquitoes that had clearly feasted on me moments before they died, and listening to the irregular beep-BEEP-beep-beeps wafting in through the damaged window screens, along with more mosquitoes.

Cruising down the intercity highways in India was another kind of education. Namely, I remembered reading about the Republic of India’s efforts in recent decades to build good highways. We only experienced a small sample, in a well-traveled part of north-central India, but from the looks of that, and things I’ve read, I’d say achievements along those lines have been made. Roads to gladden the heart of my civil engineer and South Texas road-building grandpa. Progress. I agree, though at an environmental cost.

Such roads facilitate commerce, and that means trucks – painted trucks. During the long drive between Jaipur and Delhi, I started paying closer attention to the trucks, which were typically not the 18-wheelers you might see on an Interstate, but smaller vehicles. Bigger than pickups, though. Each with a unique paint job.

The rolling canvases of India – A symphony of truck art design and culture

Like manhole covers in Japan, trucks are an art medium of renown in India. Wish I’d been paying attention earlier, I might have had a better perch for taking pictures.

Enroute, which is devoted to Indian history, tells of the origin of painted trucks in India:

“The transformation of these trucks began with the construction of intricate wooden crowns on their cabins, a practice that originated as Bedford trucks gained widespread acclaim. As trucking expanded, particularly during the 1940s, companies began personalizing their vehicles with unique logos, becoming a form of truck art recognizable to all, regardless of literacy.

“These embellishments evolved into elaborate designs, akin to the competitive decorations seen in buses of that era, aimed at attracting customers. Even after India gained independence, the influence of British Bedford trucks persisted, as Hindustan Motors [still around, what a great name] commenced assembling them locally in 1948. The design legacy of Bedford trucks laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of Indian trucks, with echoes of their aesthetic enduring in the majority of trucks on Indian roads.”

Great India is a popular slogan.

Even more popular, Blow Horn, or some variation.

More from Enroute: “In India, the landscape of truck design is significantly influenced by laws and regulations, notably the Central Motor Vehicles Act (1989) and the Code of Practice for Construction and Approval of Truck Cabs, Truck Bodies, and Trailers, among others… [Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me.] The phrases ubiquitous in Indian truck art, such as ‘Horn Please,’ ‘Keep Distance,’ and ‘Use Dipper at Night,’ have origins in legislative requirements mandating their presence on trucks.”

Use Dipper at Night? I saw that sometimes as well. One meaning: use dipped headlights. Don’t be the guy that uses your brights on a busy nighttime road, in other words. But that’s not all, according to an Indian site called Onlymyhealth.

“In the late 1980s and 1990s, India faced a rising HIV/AIDS epidemic, with truck drivers identified as a high-risk group…. Tata Motors along with NGOs initiated creative strategies to reach this mobile but hard-to-target demographic. Truck drivers were known for their love of truck art and slogans, so organisations leveraged this cultural quirk as a medium to promote awareness. Tata Motors, in collaboration with the TCI Foundation, adopted the widely recognised phrase ‘Use Dipper at Night’ to launch a creative initiative aimed at promoting safe sex among truck drivers.”

Later, Dipper became the brand name for a condom in India, marketed in a colorful way that has won some awards in the Indian advertising industry. Come to think of it, Blow Horn might just have another meaning, but never mind.

Humayun’s Tomb, Isa Khan’s Tomb, Delhi

Posted on March 31, 2025 by admin

Just outside the gates of Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, I spotted postcards for a sale from a street vendor, which was a rarity. I paused to look. That was a mistake. Before you could say boo, several other vendors – those that didn’t even have a spot on the near the gates, but who carried their wares around – were in my face. Inexpensive jewelry-, souvenir- and tchotchke-wallas. The only thing for it was to keep moving.

We were at the tomb on February 19. As a Mughal emperor, Humayun (d. 1556) rated one of considerable splendor.

“Persian and Indian craftsmen worked together to build the garden-tomb, far grander than any tomb built before in the Islamic world,” notes UNESCO, for indeed the tomb complex is a World Heritage Site. “Humayun’s garden-tomb is an example of the charbagh (a four quadrant garden with the four rivers of Quranic paradise represented), with pools joined by channels.”

“The mausoleum itself stands on a high, wide terraced platform with two bay deep vaulted cells on all four sides,” UNESCO continues. “It has an irregular octagon plan with four long sides and chamfered edges. It is surmounted by a 42.5 m high double dome clad with marble flanked by pillared kiosks (chhatris) and the domes of the central chhatris are adorned with glazed ceramic tiles.

“The interior is a large octagonal chamber with vaulted roof compartments interconnected by galleries or corridors. This octagonal plan is repeated on the second storey. The structure is of dressed stone clad in red sandstone with white and black inlaid marble borders. Humayun’s garden-tomb is also called the ‘dormitory of the Mughals’ as in the cells are buried over 150 Mughal family members.”

A precursor to the Taj Mahal, it is said. I can see that. But Humayun wasn’t the only eminence to have a mausoleum on the grounds. There are others, such as that of Isa Khan (d. 1548), who was there first.

A more manageable-sized mausoleum.

Isa Khan wasn’t royalty, but rather a noble, in service of the short-lived Sur Empire, whom the Mughals eventually overcame.

Seems easier to appreciate the details in a smaller-scale edifice.

Not far from his tomb is a mosque named for him.

Also has some worthwhile detail.

Humayun and Isa Khan: Not on the same side in life, but in death good neighbors.

Qutb Minar, Delhi

Posted on March 24, 2025 by admin

When it comes to historic ruins in Delhi, the Mughals aren’t the only game in town. Qutb Minar, a 238-foot pre-Mughal legacy of the Delhi Sultanate, rises above the southern part of the metro, part of a larger complex that’s a World Heritage Site. That was how it went for us as tourists in modern India. Another day, another World Heritage Site.

I’d say Qutb Minar deserves its modern status.

Casual visitors can’t climb to the top any more and I’m not sure I could have anyway. “Access to the top ceased after 2000 due to suicides,” asserts Wiki. But you can stand right under the tower and behold the detail, as we did on the afternoon of February 20.

Monumental structures this old come with extra layers of marvel, at least in my reckoning. It’s one thing to admire a tower like Tokyo Skytree or Burj Khalifa, which are certainly impressive, but whose construction also had the benefit of all sorts of machines and experts in their use — enormous cranes come to mind, as do CAD systems with more computing power than the entire Apollo program.

On the other hand, Qutb Minar is essentially an artful stack of brick, one of whose characteristics turned out to be longevity. I’m certain some machines were available for the task, but I also imagine much of the building involved human and animal power. How did builders beginning around AD 1200 – around what, AH 620? — undertake such a feat? It only goes to show that machines might augment the result, but technique lies in the human mind.

Various sources tell me that Qutb Minar counts as a minaret for the nearby Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque, built around the same time and now a ruin, and as a “victory tower.” That is, presumably to remind the local population who was in charge now: one Qutb al-Din Aibak, the Ghurid-aligned conqueror of Delhi and founder of the Delhi Sultanate, whose military efforts were part of the hard-to-follow wave of Central and South Asian conquests and counter-conquests that played across centuries now remote.

The Ghurids, who were Tajiks, seem to be one of those peoples that pop up in history with some regularity, a minor group from somewhere remote from most urbanized civilizations, suddenly expanding by conquering its neighbors and basically kicking butt for a few centuries across a wide area before fizzling out. They also had the distinction of being also first Muslim conquerors of north-central India.

Quwwatu’l-Islam is noted for any number of reasons, including its columns.

Their distinctiveness has been long noted. From Treasure spots of the world, by Walter Bentley Woodbury (1875): “… no two columns of this structure are alike, and this peculiarity applies also to the almost endless number forming the colonnade surrounding the building… the portico of the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque framing the courtyard area consists of columns/pillars from destroyed Hindu and Jain temples…”

Views of the courtyard.

Details. including what look like restorations.

In the middle of the courtyard is the Iron Pillar, covered with faint inscriptions.

Three Raj-era tablets offer translation in Arabic, Hindi and English. Perhaps not up to the latest translation standards, but worth a read all the same.

The pillar is an echo of an even earlier time, created during the Gupta Empire in the fourth to the sixth centuries as reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, and thought to laud the warrior deeds and memory of Chandragupta II (d. 415), also known as Chandra. What is it doing at Quwwatu’l-Islam? Brought from somewhere else as a bit of loot by one ruler or another many years after its creation, though exactly who or when or from where are matters of scholarly debate.

More.

The grounds also include a surprising amount of green space.

We only spent a short time in Delhi, but it didn’t seem overloaded with green space.

The Taj Mahal

Posted on March 18, 2025 by admin

Back in the planning stages for our recent trip, which was last fall, Yuriko wasn’t entirely persuaded that we should visit India. Not at least for any reason I might think it was a good one: because we would already be on that side of the world (more or less) by visiting Japan; because we’d never gotten around to India, even in ’94; or because as a modern state built on a long series of storied civilizations, it would surely would be an interesting place to visit.

No matter, I had an ace in the hole. “Of course, we’ll be able to see the Taj Mahal,” I said. That did it.

So, on February 22, we did.

From a number of vantages.

I sent the first image to a number of friends via email, since I didn’t expect to find many postcards in India, or if I did, I wouldn’t want to deal with a post office to mail them, especially considering that delivery would be uncertain anyway. The email message:

A physical postcard from India is unlikely, but here’s an image you aren’t likely to see in a card or Instagram. You are likely so see it, however, if you stand in front of the structure, as we did… Entirely worth the effort to get here. I didn’t mind the crowds that much — they are a happy crowd, after all, and you’re one of them.

Even in a crowd, assuming they aren’t jostling you, you can pause, stare and consider where you are. The Taj Mahal. A place only ever seen in pictures before, considered one of the top works of human beings. In person, your eyes are apt to agree.

The story of the Taj Mahal is too well known to relate here, as are descriptions of its beauty and architectural transcendence. But I will say this: What would the Indian tourism industry do if the Mughals hadn’t been so keen to build monumental structures? The Taj Mahal is just the crown jewel of a large collection that has survived to our time.

One can visit the terrace.

For closeups of the intricate marble work.

It is believed that an eventual total of 20,000+ masons, stone-cutters, inlayers, carvers, painters, calligraphers, dome builders and other artisans from throughout the realm, and probably beyond, worked more than two decades on the mausoleum and outbuildings.

Inlay, not painting. Twenty-eight kinds of stones, I’ve read.

Imagine the graceful lines of the Taj Mahal main dome without the companion minarets. That would be like Saturn without its rings.

You can also go inside the chamber where ornate slabs sit above the internment sites of the empress Mumtaz Mahal, and, almost as an afterthought, the emperor Shah Jahan, who ordered the Taj Mahal built in the 17th century. We joined the line.

The mausoleum faces away from the river, but it is back there. The view from the mausoleum of the wide Yamuna River, tributary of the Ganges.

A structure that doesn’t get enough love. The main gate of the grounds, through which you pass to see the mausoleum. It is outshone by the mausoleum, but wow.

Not everyone loves the Taj, however.

Around the World ’25

Posted on March 16, 2025 by admin

At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.

Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.

All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.

How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?

But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.

I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.

Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.

It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.

India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.

A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.

And yet — a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.

I went on alone from India to the UAE.

In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.

Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.

Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.

A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.

Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.

Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.

Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.

The Lesson: Go Look at the Elephant Yourself

Posted on October 10, 2023 by admin

“Shop epic deals influencers love,” says an ad I saw today, one associated with an online retail behemoth oddly named for a major tropical river. Instantly I found a use for that Reagan-era phrase: just say no.

Influencers would be about as useful for finding worthwhile goods as the blind men in describing the elephant.

I didn’t know until today that the inestimable Natalie Merchant set the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” to music. That comes of rummaging around the Internet about blind men and elephants. She might have sung it at Ravinia in 2012, since the recording would have been fairly new then, but I don’t remember.

The poem by John Godfrey Saxe is much older, of Victorian vintage. I didn’t know much about the poet, so I looked into some of his other work. His rhymes tend not to be dense with complex images, as far as I can tell. One begins:

Come, listen all unto my song;
It is no silly fable;
‘Tis all about the mighty cord
They call the Atlantic Cable.

That’s from “How Cyrus Laid the Cable.” I have to like a poem about early communications infrastructure, though I don’t think Natalie has set it to music.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant is much older than the 19th century, of course, a dash of ancient wisdom from the Subcontinent. I might have first heard about it in one of my Eastern religion classes. Or perhaps when I bought the record Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs in the mid-80s, the disk that kicked my admiration for Pete Seeger into high gear. On that record, he performs a comic spoken version of the parable — the second spoken interlude during a song called “Seek and You Shall Find.”

I like all of the stories. Especially the first one, which is about boiling all the world’s wisdom down into one book, then one sentence, then one word. A re-telling for our time wouldn’t involve a king and wise men, but perhaps a tech mogul and his AI specialists. Eventually, sophisticated AI boils all the world’s wisdom down into a single word, and the result is the same. Maybe.

The Palace of Gold

Posted on April 3, 2023 by admin

What do you know, today’s the 141st anniversary of the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. We happened to watch the movie of that name over the weekend, and found it slow-moving but impressive. Nothing like a high-verisimilitude work of historical fiction to take you into the past, especially if there are no outrageous anachronisms.

Frank Lloyd Wright on Monday, Hare Krishnas on Tuesday. That’s possible in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Some years ago, I was poring over a road map in anticipation of a road trip that didn’t happen. Looking roughly where we eventually did go last month, I noticed the Palace of Gold at a spot in rural West Virginia, in the odd northern panhandle of that state. Such a thing cannot go un-looked up, so I found out that it is part of a complex run by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

We’d been to ISKCON Chicago. Time to drop by the Palace of Gold, I thought, as long as we were in the neighborhood. The palace is part of a larger settlement known as New Vrindaban, which was founded during the heady early days of the Hare Krishna movement in the New World, namely 1968. You know, when the Beatles were hanging out with sect founder His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, or vice versa.

This isn’t the Palace of Gold, but it is a major part of the New Vrindaban complex, Sri Sri Radha Vrindaban Chandra Temple (RVC Temple).

ISKCON had a lean period after its counterculture heyday, but someone is paying for the vigorous reconstruction at the temple, as well as plans to restore the Palace of Gold.

Maybe Alfred Ford kicked in some dosh. I didn’t know till our visit that a great-grandson of Henry Ford, also known as Ambarish Das, is a member of ISKCON, and is a major donor for a major project in India.

You can’t go too far in the temple without encountering Swami Prabhupāda.

Many depictions of Krishna and his flute.

The centerpiece. At least, that’s what I assume; it was front and center.

I heard the story of the founding of the ISKCON from two different Anglo monks, two of about 200 people who live in the settlement, one young and at the visitors center, the other old and at the Palace itself. Their stories had a mythical quality to them, emphasizing the travail of the founder of the sect, especially his sea voyage from India to New York by cargo steamer, under hardscrabble circumstances, age nearly 70, to bring Krishna consciousness to the West.

Swami Prabhupāda thus brought one of the many branches of the massive flowering tree that is Hinduism to America, and at an auspicious time – 1965. Not only had U.S. immigration laws just been loosened, one of the periodic effusions of bohemianism was just then under way in the West, making for a receptive audience. Double good fortune for the swami, or perhaps the timely intervention of Lord Krishna, made exponentially greater when he caught the attention what we would now call influencers.

The founder did not, however, live to see New Vrindaban come to full fruition, since he died in 1977 – cast off his body for another, presumably – and his followers took up the task of developing the place. As you’d expect with a new religion, any religion really, not all went smoothly. Violence, murder plots, a racketeering conviction. New Vrindaban spent a period in the late 20th century excommunicated from ISKCON, but it is back in the fold now.

The grounds of New Vrindaban are extensive, including a pond and other structures, such as a dorm and cabins for monks and visitors. And a concrete elephant and cattle.

Krishna consciousness gazebos, by golly.

These are Gaura and Nitai, I‘ve read, but I can’t pretend I understand their function or which is which. The one on the left, recently refurbished. The one on the right, awaiting new paint.

The Palace of Gold itself is on a slope overlooking the rest of the complex, and looks to be on one of the higher points in this part of West Virginia, surrounded by the sect’s roughly 1,200 acres. Why West Virginia? Cheap land would be my guess. The monks had a story about that, too, formalized in its details as much as the story of the swami’s passage to America. Something about answering a random ad in a newspaper. Anyway, here it stands.

“Palace of Gold Leaf” might be more accurate, but also an exercise in literalism.

Nice detail.

A sign at the entrance says that restoration will soon be underway. The palace needs it.

We did our little part for the restoration, each taking an $8 tour in turn. No one else was on either of our tours, since even at New Vrindaban, mid-March would be the slow season, though a few other people were visiting at the same time as we did, including a sizable, multi-generational South Asian family.

The interior is as ornate as the exterior, even more so, with crystal chandeliers, mirrored ceilings, marble floors, stained-glass windows and plenty of gold leaf and semi-precious stone accents. Not bad for a structure that is entirely nonprofessional architecture.

No photography inside, except I took some pictures in the lobby waiting for the tour.

“I’m old enough to remember Hare Krishnas at the airport,” I told my guide when he asked whether I knew anything about ISKCON.

“Yes, we used to do that,” he said with what I took to be a wistful smile.

My guide was an old hippie. That’s probably unfair to the fellow, a lanky gentleman perhaps in his early to mid-70s, dressed in the Hare Krishna robes we’re all familiar with, head mostly shaven. Who would want to be described by stereotypical youthful attributes more than 50 years out of date?

Still, as he told me about his wanderings as a young man in the late ’60s, and his discovery of ISKCON – he was happy to say that he’d taken classes from Swami Prabhupāda himself – the thought kept occurring to me.

Pre-Holiday Nattering

Posted on May 26, 2021 by admin

Back again after the Memorial Day weekend, when it will be June already. June, now that’s a fine month.

Lilly arrived for a short visit today. We all went out to a restaurant to eat this evening. Sounds ordinary, but that was the first time since March 2020. We went to the last place we all went together that month, SGD, or So Gong Dong, a Korean place with about a dozen locations in the Midwest and on the Eastern seaboard. It’s a wonderful place, glad it survived.

My meal.

As usual with a commencement program that lists everyone’s full names, I spent some time during Ann’s graduation on Monday examining those names, and again just now. As usual, the variety is remarkable.

Last names, for instance: Ahmed, Awdziejczyk, Bhandar, Cwik, Degrazio, Garcia, Gomberg, Jayawardena, Jones, Kaspari, Kobe, Lavrynovych, Mapembe, McCoy, Michalowski, Nguyen, O’Connor, Onilegbale, Picadi, Schoefernacker, Shah, Stribling, Wang.

Common names aren’t so common. There are no Smiths and two Joneses, three Browns and one Johnson (and a single Johnston) and a pair of Williamses. There are four Garcias and three Sanchezes but only two Gonzalezes and one Hernandez and one Gomez. Rodriguez is fairly common: seven. No one is named Kim, though there is a Lim. The aforementioned Wang is the only one.

Far and away the most common surname among the Class of ’21 is Patel. How many? Twenty-one. It’s a common name from Gujarat state on the west coast of India, and apparently Patels are well-represented in the diaspora.

One reason: Idi Amin. “When Idi Amin turfed out some 100,000 Indians (mostly Gujaratis) from Uganda in 1972, most of them descended on Britain before peeling off elsewhere,” notes the Economic Times of India. The timing was right, since the U.S. had junked its racist immigration policies that effectively kept out most South Asians only in 1965.

“There are said to be more than 500,000 Patels scattered across the world outside India, including some 150,000 each in Britain and the US,” the paper continues. A good many in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, clearly. Then there’s this associated term, which I’d never heard before.

During research for an article not long ago, I came across the persnickety food site Eat This Not That!, whose very title screams judgmentalism. One article is called “20 Vegetarian Foods That Are Surprisingly Aren’t.”

The subhead: These supposedly animal-free foods will make you gag, regardless of your dietary lifestyle.

I don’t have anything against principled vegetarianism or veganism, though I don’t plan to be either. But I do think an article that essentially says, Look how gross food additives are! is an exercise in simplemindedness. Overthink just about any food and you can say it’s repulsive.

The additives the articles objects to include animal bones, sheep’s wool, pork fat, shellfish, bird features, beaver musk, crushed beetles, fish bladders, pig hooves and calf stomachs. I don’t see that list and think, ew, gross. I think damn, human beings are awfully clever, using the most unlikely things to improve our food. Is that not a virtue among primal peoples anyway — using every part of the animal?

My favorite entry:

If you’re eating … Lucky Charms
You’re also consuming … Animal Bones
Those marshmallow moons, clovers and horseshoes are made with gelatin, derived from animal collagen (aka cartilage, skin, tendons, bones). True veg-heads — and those who keep kosher, and cannot mix milk and meat — have known this for years, staring regretfully at the taunting leprechaun. Also containing gelatin: Smorz, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and Rich Krispies Treats Squares.

There may be legitimate reasons not to eat a lot of sugar-coated cereal, but animal collagen doesn’t strike me as one of them.

The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago

Posted on May 24, 2021 by admin

On a pleasant Sunday in the spring, metro Chicago offers any number of things to see. One of them is the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago.

The HTGC is in southwest suburban Lemont, tucked away on a moraine hilltop off Lemont Road, not far south of I-55. It’s a temple complex, actually, including Sri Rama Temple, Ganesha-Shiva-Durga Temple, a mediation center and other structures.

The Sri Rama exterior.

Entry meant a temperature check and a few questions by a slightly suspicious hired security guard. The interior features a fascinating array of religious artwork and devotional alcoves.

Next to Sri Rama is a structure called balipeetham, also styled bali peetam. As far as I can understand, it’s a place to ditch your unholy thoughts before entering the temple.

As hinted at by the temple’s generic name, it was an early — maybe the first, I haven’t confirmed that — Hindu temple in the Chicago area, founded in 1977 with the rising tide of immigration from the subcontinent. Many more temples have been established since then, of course. The first structure on the HTGC site was completed in 1985, according to this incredibly detailed and professionally written history of the temple at its web site. (There’s no reason such a history can’t be detailed and well written, it’s just that web-site histories tend to be otherwise.)

This is the outside of the first structure, the Ganesha-Shiva-Durga Temple. Its interior is interesting, but not nearly as elaborate as Sri Rama.

Elsewhere on the grounds are other structures. The one on the left protects a statue of Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902).

Swami Vivekananda is best known in this country — at least among people who know such things — for representing India at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. Which, I have to add, seems like a remarkable event all by itself.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: India