Welcome to India--zap!

Ah, welcome to India. It has been a frustrating couple of days of delayed jet-lag and nasty technical difficulties. In a solid and until now largely successful stab at wishful thinking, neither my road film producer nor I had fully wrapped our brains around one of the more obvious perils of trying to do any technical work here in India: electricity. Or, the lack thereof. 

Or, even worse, the unstable and potentially dangerous nature thereof: today we almost fried one of our two 750GB hard drives, almost losing the captured-to-date footage and the editing work done so far in the process--major bummer, though t'was a tragedy narrowly averted in the end. Our whole room ended up having just two good plugs in it--and with a slew of electronics to power, myriad batteries to constantly recharge and mobile digital workstations (a-k-a laptops) to edit on, we need some serious juice, always. It's a minor miracle we didn't lose everything today, but after spending all day regrouping, we finally got back to where we started--which smelled like victory by then!

And while I rarely think this, it also revealed one of the ways India is more responsive than the US. After pulling a goodly portion of our hair out, I finally called down to the lobby, showed the hotel guy the blackened, 'Cajun-style' outlets dotting the wall, and requested help. Within 10 minutes max, an electrician was there re-wiring the offending outlets--within 30 minutes we were up and running again. With no offense meant to my good buddy (and electrician) Geno, when was the last time any needed emergency service got to your house within 15 minutes? (Well, Geno got there pretty fast last month when my basement was flooding earlier this month, but still...) Another good moment for Indian ingenuity.

Still, nerves are rattled. After all, in Mumbai we already fried our ill-fated $60 surge protector, to the point of smoking the sucker after a few minutes in use. The other "protector" blew the room circuits five times in four minutes--and that was without anything even being plugged in to it yet! It's one thing to not have juice a few hours a day--welcome to the industrializing world--but when every room we're in has the potential to fry all of our work to date, well, that makes things a little dodgier than hoped for. Just another example of life and work here being fraught with perils and much more difficulty than my western-lubricated brain wants to remember. 

Anyway, hopefully we'll have the first edited road videos to share within another couple of days. Looks like my path to moving-picture stardom will be just a bit delayed. Meantime, Sara is like a kid in a digital candy store shooting footage on the journey so far. If nothing else, India is rich with imagery, that's for sure.

Still working on getting the web's scratch-n-sniff technology to work, so you can share the sublime pleasures of the full olfactory experience. Beholding the random sweet admixtures of something like a combination of the advanced and fetid decomposition of vegetal matter and your grandfather's breath is difficult to convey in words alone. Don't hold your breath though--we'll be doing that over here, so you don't have to!

More soon, with talkies...

Mumbai Landing

Neem Karoli Baba Maharaj ki jai!

Landed. Still working out kinks of blogland--can I really not cut and paste my previously-written post from a word doc? grumble mumble... Well, no time now to figure that out--meeting a Mumbai friend for lunch in 10 minutes. But, quickly: landed fine, smooth flights, with all my luggage actually arriving with my plane--amazing! Thank you Northwest Airlines--a far better experience than the one I had with Virgin Atlantic last year, when they lost my luggage for 6 days and didn't quite manage to even look for it, despite all my efforts. But that was then, and this, my friends, is NOW! And boy, what a 'now' it is. Mumbai, raging. Maybe some time I'll have the time to really explore this town. My film producer friend Sara, along for this crazy ride w/camcorder in tow, already this morning was offered a role in some Bollywood film--alas, no time to fulfill that dream.

Fly tonight to Delhi--decided against the overland car adventure; it would have been great fun but taken far too long and been a distraction from the current mission. So, land in Paharganj this evening late, and start rocking the sourcing tomorrow morning.

Web access spotty, should improve soon. But all is well, and the journey has begun!

Blast Off!

It's on now: T-minus 3 hours, and counting, until I roll out of the driveway, leaving the New England snowfields behind in favor of spending the bulk of the next 24 hours cruising 7 miles above the crust of the earth. Bags are zippered up, last hot bath is steaming and beckoning to me as I write, last super-greens smoothie ready for the blender, a little more putzing about as I put the Boutique to bed for the season... all the planning and preparations and running around and tweaking finally resolves into this one surreal moment of pre-launch.

I had an eerie moment yesterday--walked outside into late morning's wintry splendor, and was struck by how utterly still and silent was my little corner of the planet. I have rarely, even out here on my little dirt road, heard life as quiet as I did in that moment. Spooky, and magical. And a little weird. But cool.

Well, that's it for now. I hop into my warm tub mulling over my recent fortune cookies, and readying for the journey ahead...

I'll see you in India!

Pre-launch Tubble-Bubble

Hubble-bubble is another name for hookah, one of those funky, elaborate long-necked water-pipe smoking devices in common use across the planet. Today, I'm more interested in my rapidly diminishing access to one of my own favorite haunts--the bathtub. Sigh. I'm getting separation anxiety already. So as a grey dawn breaks across western Massachusetts, revealing the fresh dump of what looks like a solid foot of fresh powdery snow across the local universe, I am filling my tub with the liquid spiritual essence of blissful soul communion. And then, the final day of pre-launch preparations will spread before me like a vast and swiftly cooling buffet of details, to-do list items and opportunities to let go of tasks unmet, calls unmade and pre-trip specifics still unplanned.

I guess there's a 'letting go' process involved in any serious travel--we confront our need to simply accept that, having made our best stab at 'doing it all' before we leave, some things will remain uncompleted, for us to dig out of after our return. (For one, my 2007 taxes--yeesh. Well, it's always good to have something pleasant to return to.)

As well, we must accept--or vainly thrash about in misplaced and futile resistance--how little control we have over the journey to come. India is, among so many other things, a relentless reminder of how little influence we sometimes have on our immediate surroundings. Having refined a cultural ethos of apparent non-linearity, it leaves us little choice but to engage with it on its own terms. Sure, I've got a plan, of sorts--certainly lots of work I need to accomplish on the goods-sourcing side--but if I don't maintain flexibility in how the unwinding journey allows me to carry out that plan... well, let's just say that a little openness to the cosmic unfolding goes a long way.

And, just to bring it full circle: what breeds flexibility and openness of attitude, mind and body than a nice toasty morning tub? Followed by a few surya namaskars, salutes to the sun, my last full day in the western hemisphere will be off on a delicious and nutritious beginning.

More later.

My official invitation to Afghanistan

TMF_Invitation_Letter_Adam.pdf

Awesome!  I just received this official invitation from the Turquoise Mountain Foundation

to come and stay with them in Kabul Afghanistan. My good friend Jenny Hartley from upcountry Maine has been over in Pakistan and recently Kabul at several points in the last couple years (in between rounds of medical school) lending her considerable energy and skills to serve to the people of that corner of the globe. (And also offering her delectable cookie-baking skills, no doubt!) TMF is where her current life is, staying, as she describes it, in "a 14th century fort with wi-fi" that is apparently the envy of the international/NGO community in Kabul--one of the sweetest cribs in town, I guess. More on her work there later. (I didn't know they had wifi back in the 14th century...)

These invitation letters are arriving a little tight, timing-wise, but are hopefully just what we need to get into the country (despite the well-meant concerns of, oh, just about everyone we mention it to). 

Have I introduced my travel and India film project partner yet? I met Sara Karl, who's a spunky independent film producer and overall energetic dynamo, first by telephone through mutual friends in the Neem Karoli Baba satsang and then later while playing kirtan (Indian devotional chanting, a truly nectar-filled practice)  with Shyamdas and friends this past summer out at upstate New York's Omega Institute, where she was working for the season with the infamous Omega production staff (yo John and Ken and Ohia and all my friends at Omega!).  I saw some of Sara's podcast work and thought "wow, I'd love to have a little video like this to help tell the story of what I am doing with Dharma Boutique in a colorful and engaging way" and, well, one impractical idea followed another until...

For some odd reason (I reckon she likes adventure as much as I do), Sara accepted my invitation to work for virtually nothing (OK, for actually nothing)  traversing the globe with me to shoot footage of "Dharma Boutique on the road" and help tell the stories of socially responsible business and fair trade, and the various beautiful products we import and the sweet folks who make them, and generally share the other-worldly devotional splendor and modern madness that is India. Anyway, Sara is in NYC and heading to the Afghan Consulate today to try and score our travel visas for Afghanistan. So, the arrival of these invite letters comes con tiempo perfecto!

Return of the Birds

As planning and equipment provisioning are reaching a fevered pitch, I lulled myself to sleep last night wrapped in a cocoon of stress, with the vague sense of being not-yet properly prepared beginning to take on clearer features, the contours of the last-minute-breakdowns and clarifications of the still voluminous to-do list dancing like rancid little sugar plums in my tiny brain. Sigh. The last week before launch can be tough.

Imagine my delight, then, when upon awakening in the dimly dawning morning a few moments ago I heard the first pre-dawn bird serenade I've heard in months here in the frosty New England hinterlands. I guess yesterday's sudden, brief and unseasonable day of balmy foggy breezes was all the invitation Nature needed. My ears perked up; I knew something was different but it took me a moment to realize what had changed in the surrounding sonic landscape. What a peaceful and sweet, timeless little moment. Made me glad I hadn't drowned it all out with the sound of a running bathtub, like I'd almost reached to do in my early morning fog.

Spent much of yesterday ordering equipment for the journey, especially for the video-production aspect: a Canon HV20 hi-def camcorder with a frightening quantity of blank miniDV recording tapes, which I guess allow for a better and more stable back-up than recording straight to hard drive--but which will represent one BPA on the road. (Just imagine the Big Pain in the Ass (tm) of hauling around half a suitcase of heavy media in addition to everything else necessary for the road trip--my back hurts already!)

And I'll spare you the grumbling about my effete Sony W100 camera which is so sensitive to little bruises that, now in the shop for the second time since November, Sony wants to charge me the cost of a new camera to repair it, even though it should be under warranty. A far cry from my hallowed old Canon ELPH which took epic abuse for years--including being left outside overnight off the beach during one of the most elemental rainstorms in memory--and is still working fine. (Though it did take a few days to dry out.) My cheap advice? Take a pass on the Sony cameras. I usually love Sony gear (like their little PCM-D1 and D50 field recorders, great little units), but I can't take a glass-jawed camera with me to India and Kabul, no way. So say hello to my new Panasonic Lumix with Leica optics.

And now, with dawn fully broken, let the day begin...

Fresh Snow

Some days of genuine winter around here, I tell you. A recent New England classic: inches of gorgeous powdery wonderfulness at midnight, by dawn a dense wet slushy concretion of doom. Even getting a narrow path shoveled before one of my few remaining morning baths for some time was like digging a trench through cold taffy while getting battered by howling horizontal waves of icy pellets--some serious morning cheer. and still the rain falls, every foot now falling into either 6 inches of snow or slush or pools of gathered water--no dry land or branch within sight.

Snowfall in Leverett

Tuesday 12 Feb 2008 8pm

Leverett Massachusetts USA

Well here we go, in mad prep for launching to India and Afghanistan in less than 2 weeks. The snow just started falling and it's a good night to be indoors and huddled 'round the propane heater.

I think I'm going to start packing clothes into luggage tonight just to seek comfort in the illusion of preparation. Bought a battery charger and spare batteries and a padded travel pouch for my Sony D50 road recorder unit; saw the travel doctor the other day to confirm my dengue fever bona fides; rifling through files and books to find maps and the business cards of various contacts; knowing that the first day in South Mumbai I want to go visit the Mahalakshmi temple and the Chor Bazaar (Thieves' Market) but not really having any idea where I'll be staying when I arrive that after midnight in less than 2 weeks. 

But that is then, and this is now. Now, I pick t-shirts and sort medicines and start filling pockets of my travel bags and making more detailed lists of more gear to be gathered and bought and tested and hustled together. Ten days may seem like a long time, but man, it seems like the coming dawn to me now.

This, I suppose it might be said, is the first official entry in this new (for me) vlogging format. I used to broadspam my friends directly with ever-increasing reams of virtual road rants--now, it will all be here, the ongoing saga unfolding in quasi-real time. Here's to enjoying the ride!

But first, a little music...

The Dharma Boutique Blog Has Landed

Stay tuned. More content coming soon.