the green can be overwhelming

01/Aug/2024

The Indian-style lavatory with yellow piss overflowing, a damp cigarette stub to its side, water dripping into a little water tank, the dank walls reflecting light off the solitary yellow bulb hanging from a low cieling, moss growing through every edge threatening to take over this seemingly last bastion of civilisation anyday now- it felt like I'd walked into the innards of a tropical beast. That was the final nail in the coffin. I was disgusted with Bali by the end of our first day here.

That was two nights ago and things seem better now. A combination of tiredness, jet lag, some form of anxiety I seem to have been carrying over the past few weeks, a gut-wrenchingly off-putting accomodation, a general sense of poverty, unhygieneness, the desperate fake smiles of street vendors, the obnoxiousness of a certain kind of white tourist, being drenched by rain in the traffic, the general drabness of the Kecak dance, and finally walking into that toilet in the restaurant. The core of my being couldn't grit its teeth anymore and try to adjust. It lashed out with revulsion.

Would I have felt the same way if I'd come from India instead of Australia? Was it the first-world snobbery? Two and a half years ago, when I went to Varanasi with Bujji mama, I refused to touch waters of the Ganga. I was repulsed by the floating dirt and the rot and the effluence. I could see nothing spiritual about it. But the life overflowing onto the street didn't seem to be as overwhelming as it did this time around. My standards of what is acceptable has definitely gone up but it seems not in the sense of 'let me endeavour towards a better life for all on the planet', more like 'this is off-putting please take it out of sight'.  Or was it just  middle-aged entitlement? The unconscious insistence that the world should adhere to my desires; That if I'm here for a relaxing, spa-ish holiday, things should fall in place accordingly? Why should I have to confront the horrors of the world that such large populations take for granted?

It was an absolute shock to the system. For all my romanticisation of traveling through India in trains a la Monisha Rajesh, if my stomach churns at the sight of an old lady hawker, and I can't handle dirty toilets, I can kiss that ambition goodbye. A large part if it is also the expectation. Without the thought ever floating into my consciousness, I was preparing myself for something similar to our Hilton Denarau holiday in Fiji. How ironic because I hated that holiday then, constantly bitching about how we were in this insulated bubble when I wanted to see the actual place. Which is probably why once the new benchmark had been set, the last two days have been much better.

The place reminds me a lot of Goa, though the I suppose people are more polite and there is no never-ending supply of harranguing street vendors (I reek of arrogance, don't I?). After quickly checklisting the Ubud Palace and the Saraswati temple on the first day and, despite my strongest efforts, being lured into the Kecak dance on Day 1, we visited the Pura Tirtha temple and the Tegallalong rice fields yesterday, and the Monkey Forest and the Puri LukisanMuseum today, and I must confess I feel like I'm appreciating its charms better. It is how I've always imagined the West Indies to be, and is similar to what I could gather from our one day outing to Nadi in Fiji. It is a carnival of sights and smells. Yesterday, in the Pura Tirtha temple, Sravani said, looking at the lush landscape all around, that she feels uncomfortable amidst such dense, overwhelming greenery. I got a sense of what she meant, and I think it is analogous to social life here too. Life is abundant here, in all its shapes and forms, in its most intense expressions, in its insistence on surviving and thriving amidst the confusing, contradictory, and contingent happenings all around. And that for someone who has been slowly lulled into the controlled standards of the first world can be terrifying.

It should perhaps be stated unequivocally that for all the rhetoric of free markets that first world politicians and lobbyists make, a lot in the developed world is strictly controlled so much so that we can't even imagine, let alone act on, varied ideas- hacks, expressions, bricolages. This is what real free markets look like- expressing both their ferocious power-grab and exploitation, but also in their ability to create surprisingly fecund gateways to growth. In one of his old posts, Venkatesh Rao pitted the chai-drinking habits of the North Indians against coffee-drinking habits of South Indians, and posited if it could shed some light on the perceived languidity of Hindustani Music and the obvious technical sophistication of Carnatic Music. Similarly, I wonder if there is something about the tropical eco-systems that teach its inhabitants that the soil is fertile, the weather is conducive, both friends and enemies abound, so there is a chance to thrive if only you manage to fight another day, versus the harsher, less forgiving temeprate climate zones where things don't change as much, there is stability so it is better to optimise what you have and proceed slowly- Hell, this is quite similar to Amit Varma's (via Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati iirc) dichotomy of the Chinese as Profit-Seeking and Indians as Rent-Seeking peoples.

02/Aug/2024

I can already see that this is a specious argument. That these lazy generalisations and unrobust mood-driven inclinations cannot hope to hold deeper truths. Or maybe they can in the proximate, personal sense. Over the past few weeks, I have stepped away from striving for and obsessing over long-range, general truths and am trying to focus on specific, intuitive insights that an embodied being needs to OODA. As always, there is a trade-off, on a bad day both approaches fill me with despair for not being the other, but I cannot doubt the intensity and the viscerality of what my body and mind went through. What is the insight, what is the takeaway, how will I place these experiences in the context of larger structures in the next few months, how will I apply this to improve the way I live- I don't have answers of any of these though I really wish I did.

Sometimes the green is not just a metaphor for the world, it can be for one's life too- who's to say that's a bad thing though?