Shona

Hiring a Saint

“I took the liberty,” Dharmendra said, “of asking a saint to come with us.” I must have looked a little confused. “A saint?” I asked. “Yes, he’s a saint. I asked him to come so he can do a ritual for your mom.”

We were on our way to a thousand year old temple in the Kumaun (click for some maps), a division of the State of Uttarakhand, on the Indian side of the borders of Tibet and Nepal. I had already traveled twice to the Kumaun, and always found myself wishing I used some type of prescription tranquilizer as the taxi travels along the narrow roads, along the edges of nearly vertical mountain slopes. Dharmendra has been my guide all three times. We’ve never actually gone to the peaks of any of the tallest Himalayan mountains. Only the foothills. But the views are fantastic.

During the last trip to India, in 2008, which was a birthday gift from my parents, my mother, who was born in West Virginia, and could not wait to move away to a big city, but who always loved mountains, turned to me at one point, and said “I see why you wanted to come back.”

Swami Shivachaitanyananda at Shangrila Resort, holding a children’s book in English, that someone had left behind. The Swami doesn’t read English.

My mother was quite an impressive woman. She passed the CPA exam in 1956, and the Maryland and DC bars in 1967. There were not very many women lawyers at that time. In any case, she certainly impressed Dharmendra on that trip. He informed me that MAYBE my mother was as good as packing suitcases as he was. But he seemed to acknowledge that she was going to get what she thought was her due, and he learned some skills in that vein from her. I had gotten the news that she had fallen, and was unlikely to survive, a few days before I was to leave Chennai and head to north India, for the “vacation” part of my trip to the sub-continent. There was nothing I could do for my mother at that point, by going home right away. So I continued my trip, with modifications in case I had to cut the trip short, which I did.

An Indian engineering colleague had a question for me at the time I was planning the 2008 trip. “Is it wise to use Dharmendra’s services? Is he accredited by the Government of India?” I said no, but I couldn’t let myself worry. Dharmendra’s tour guide service is no ordinary tour guide service.

Dharmendra is going to give his clients an experience to remember. It’s never mediocre. Apparently, as I found out on this trip, it includes the services of a saint to pray for your mother’s soul, should the need arise. Dharmendra arranged for me to do what he would have done had it been his own mother near death.

Swami Shivachaitanyananda, I found out the next day, really is considered a saint.

After spending twenty years in a cave, he decided to rejoin society. He loves to talk. Making up for lost time, he’s extremely cheerful and active for 70. He is a self appointed concrete inspector. If he sees the wrong mix of sand and cement, he complains to the authorities. Apparently, a large construction in Rishakesh was redone after the contractors were caught cheating by the Swami.

His materials engineering skills don’t interfere with his regular swami activities. He taught me a few Vedic mantras on the way to the mountain temple. He was impressed with my Sanskrit pronunciation, which I had learned at the beginning of my trip at a chanting yoga retreat.

After driving for 5 hours, to get to the town with the nearby temple, we got out of the car, bought around 150 pounds of rice, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, etc., and called the temple priest to send down people to carry the food up the 3.5 km switch backed, gravel, rock, and tree root covered, steep path. I only had to carry myself and my purse. The taxi driver carried my sleeping bag and knapsack, along with his own stuff. As I looked up, and reminded my dear friend and tour guide that there was a reason I brought a cane with me, and that there was a difference between 3.5 km horizontal and 3.5 km vertical, he assured me it wasn’t strictly vertical. I made it. Slowly. The Swami beat me. Easily. Here’s the view from the “guest house,” at the 3.5 km mark. A mere half km from the top of the mountain, where the actual temple is. It was worth it.

Hopefully there will be a photo of the guest house itself in a later post, but for now I will say that we took the room that did not smell like burned plastic. The rest of the amenities? A concrete floor and a metal door, and two small windows with metal shutters. They were nice. They gave the spoiled American 3 extra blankets.

The resident priest made dinner for us. The most delicious dahl (spiced lentils) I have ever had. Dharmendra claimed it was because it was cooked on a wood fire. Despite the hot meal, I had never really warmed up after breaking into a sweat on the hike up. The mountain air was cold.

“No, Dharmendra,” I said. “Narendra (our driver) is not sleeping in a different room. He’s sleeping with us, to add his hot breath and heat radiations to the three of us.”

I asked if I had been snoring when we all woke up, and an affirmative answer let me realize that I did probably sleep for a few hours. Morning light at 7 meant time for me to eat the chapati that the priest had made specially for me so I could take my pain meds before walking up the last half km to the temple.

The last part of the climb to a mountain temple is reliably steeper than the rest. Getting to a mountain top temple is most of the prayer. As one of my companions on the earlier part of the trip, the yoga retreat, said, “The Indians With Disabilities Act has two words: Tough Shit.”

But with the cane, I made it. And the Swami performed the healing ritual for my mom. It turns out that she started breathing on her own, right around that time.

Never underestimate the power of prayer, whether it is from your own tradition or not.

Ultimately, as I already knew would be the case, my mom did not survive. But because she was breathing on her own, they were able to remove the ventilator mask, and my dad got to see her face, and kiss her face, and that meant a lot to him at the time.

Seeing her face, he was able to see that “she” was gone from the physical shell that had housed his wife of 59.5 years. It was still hard to let her go, but I think easier than it would have been otherwise.

Back at the guest house, the priest and Dharmendra had a little disagreement. Turns out that the Swami really is considered a saint, and the priest did not think that we should pay if we brought the Swami with us to bless his facility. Dharmendra had to clandestinely leave the money to pay for our accommodations.

Back at the bottom of the trail, as we got in back in the car, Dharmendra told me “Now you realize you are stronger than you thought you were.”

Dharmendra at
http://www.exotic-himalayas.com/

Miraculously, my arthritis pain was greatly reduced the day I got off the plane in India. Still, after two years of severe inflammation, my fitness condition wasn’t great. Back in the US for a month now, the arthritis pain continues at a much lower level than it was before I left. Maybe this is part of why old people go south for the winter. And probably why this wasn’t my last trip to India, even though I had said before I left that it was my bucket trip.

It was supposed to be MY bucket trip, not my mom’s.

UPDATE: Back in India for a memorial ceremony for Dharmendra’s mother, who sadly passed away a little more than a year after mine, I found this youtube link of a trip to this Temple, called Kartik Swami. It really give you an idea of the roads and paths and STEPS.

It was cloudier and there were more people there than when I went.

The link here is to another, longer video, that has better views of the far away Himalaya, more like what I saw, but is narrated in Hindi. It shows some other places along the way from Rishakesh to the temple, which are beautiful in their own right.

Spiritually Attached to India

“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”

“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”

My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”

sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)

Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.

Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.

If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.

So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.

Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”

Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.

Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.

I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.

Something Silly: Cataboolie, the Unicorn Hunter

From some fun writing prompts at Mid Michigan Word Gatherers!

a unicorn hunter, a planet inhabited entirely by cats, a glitter gun, and “strange times at the cupcake pagoda”

Chapter 1: The Unicorn Hunter of Catatanga

Catatanga orbited Star X-teen 43, as it had since the birth of the multiverse, or at least as long as any of its cats could remember. The great mountain, Catmandu, towered over its base on the smallest of the five continents which pierced the surface of the smooth, green sea of Catatanga.

“Today!” Cataboolie told herself. “Today.” That was the only word Cataboolie needed. Indeed, using any other word would dilute the strength of her incantation. And Cataboolie had more self control than to do that.

She strapped her holster on, and slid the new device into the pocket. She looked out the sky light, and nodded, satisfied, at the complete darkness. She turned, and opened the door to the tunnel out of her lair, and started out toward Base G of Catmandu, her silent paws bringing her ever closer to the unicorn camp. Her skin tingled as she thought of the honors she would receive as she led the Unicorn through the streets of Tangatown.

Cataboolie found the rock she had scouted at the last dark of the moon, and slipped behind it. She steadied her breath, pulled out the glitter gun, and peeked around the rock to see the circle of prancing unicorns. “Beautiful invaders,” she thought, then quietly saying, aloud this time, “Today,” she jumped out from behind the rock and sprayed the circle of white and yellow unicorns with green glitter.

“Success!” she called. This was the cats’ price for the unicorns’ settling on Catatanga. The ritual completed, Cataboolie mounted the glittering being and urged him back toward the city.

Chapter 2: Strange Times at the Cupcake Pagoda

Business went on as usual at the post card pavilion. Briskly. Catapoochi made sure of that. His photography skills were far superior to those of the other cats of Catatanga. His network of outlets gave him economies of scale that his competitors could not even dream of achieving. Now, the Annual Festival of Uncertainty had arrived. It was the biggest event of the cats’ year, and Catapoochi had every intention of using the opportunity to build up his retirement nest-egg.

Likewise, Catakowie of the sausage pavilion was doing a brisk trade. The aromas of spicy mustard and fresh hot rolls mingled with that of the meat to attract yet more customers. Tangablu had his nephew out in front of the beach paraphernalia stand, demonstrating the latest styles of sunglasses and umbrellas. The Temple of Catachristus had a long line of devotees waiting to pray their respects.

Catapoochie looked at his pocket watch. Time to head back and make sure that Junior was keeping up with the customers. One last place to check along the way: The Cupcake Pagoda.

Catapoochi stopped and stared, along with those being pushed out of the way, as the Cupcake Pagoda expanded and bright lights flashed along the edges of both roofs. The pagoda floated off the ground. The last customers were being pushed off the floor, which was now several meters above the ground. Fortunately, the unlucky customers were encased in transparent foam bubbles, so they bounced gently as they landed on the hard planet. “Indeed!” thought Catapoochi. “Strange times at the Cupcake Pagoda!”

Good thing he had his new camera. There weren’t many who’d be able to compete with him for this postcard. Catapoochi clicked one last shot, and rushed back to relieve Junior, so his son, too, could see the miracle of the Cupcake Pagoda, with his own eyes, before it left the atmosphere of Catatanga, perhaps for good.

Happy Holidays!

Fake News and the First Amendment

Fake news is very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and we have to balance actions against fake news with First Amendment rights.

REALLY? Is that true, I wondered, as I listened to NPR’s talk show version of CNN style hyper news, “On Point,” hosted by Tom Ashcroft, from WBUR.

This topic is perhaps more important now than it was when I first posted this. I’ve added some new links at the bottom of the post, and will try to keep this updated.

The event that precipitated the show was the “Pizzagate” scandal. A man, acting on his own to investigate the completely false accusations of Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC area family pizza restaurant, (if she was so tired and weak from the campaign activities, I wondered how would she find time to run a sex ring??? And oh, by the way, according to CNN, the pizza place has NO basement) fired an assault rifle in a room crowded with families enjoying their pizzas.

Thus, we have entered a new age, where fake news not only influences people’s opinions about who to vote for, or what to think, but starts chains of actions that have a lethal potential. Of course, there might be those out there who think that it should be a capital offense (benefiting from vigilante action, and needing no criminal proceedings) to eat in a pizza parlor that is owned by someone who donated money to the Democrats. But assuming for now that most Americans have not gone that far, what other lessons might we look for in Pizzagate and it’s origins?

What was surprising to me was the juxta-position of the First Amendment with the right to publish fake news.

But what is the First Amendment FOR EXACTLY? Is it to protect liars and libelers? That was never my impression from my civics classes in school. I thought it was to protect the expression of opinions about how we SHOULD live. Even the Nazis have a right to to assemble and speak and try to convince the rest of the country that we should kill or oppress all those they don’t like. That is protected speech. However, we do have laws against libel and slander, and that is much of what fake news is.

Here is what Scholastic.com says (red is Shona’s highlight)

Freedom of Speech. This freedom entitles American citizens to say what they think, provided they do not intentionally hurt someone else’s reputation by making false accusations. Neither may they make irresponsible statements deliberately harmful to others, such as yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. There are many issues about which Americans disagree, from child-rearing practices to baseball teams to Presidential candidates. Freedom of speech enables people to state their opinions openly to try to convince others to change their minds.

The First Amendment also gives you the right to disagree with what others say without fear of punishment by the government authorities….

Freedom of the Press. This freedom makes it possible for Americans to keep informed about what is going on in government. It helps them to be responsible citizens. Reporters and editors can criticize the government without the risk of punishment, provided they do not deliberately tell lies. Newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as television and movie scripts, do not have to be submitted for government inspection before they are published. This censorship would violate the First Amendment.

Back to Shona’s thoughts now… What I can’t figure out is why the journalism and philosophy professors, the journalist, and the host of the show could not see that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the individual going about their business as a free citizen. The idea of the First Amendment is not and never was to protect liars whose goal is to interfere with the democratic process, or to intentionally harm law abiding citizens they do not like. In other words, we don’t have the right to help God punish those who we don’t like, for something they did not do.

My understanding of the First Amendment was in line with what Scholastic.com wrote. Now maybe some would consider this a “dumbing down” of the First Amendment. All parents teach their kids not to lie, since they don’t want their kids lying to THEM about household matters. But the God of the Hebrew Bible did not make a commandment against lying. That God knows that lies have a valid purpose in life. The God of the Hebrew Bible prohibited BEARING FALSE WITNESS. This is a specific TYPE of lying, that would undermine the foundations of a just society. Bearing false witness in a court proceeding before a judge is a crime in American law as well. We call it perjury, and if we bear false witness we can be held in “contempt of court,” since the court proceedings include swearing that the witness will tell the truth.

I understand that becoming a public figure widens the opening for allowed criticism. However, outright lies that harm an individual’s reputation should not be protected “speech,” whether they are a public or private person.

Currently, if someone slanders or libels an individual, the individual is responsible for bringing the legal action against the perpetrator. Maybe this should change. If someone physically or psychologically harms or kills an individual, the STATE (the government) takes the action against the alleged perpetrator. If I am killed, my family members do not have to sue the alleged murderer in order for the murderer to be brought before the justice system. There are problems with this system, as the OJ Simpson trial showed, and the victims’ families did end up having to go to civil court to get some justice… But there will always be times where individual justice fails in the interest of having a “neutral justice system.”

Maybe it is time to rethink the way libel and slander laws operate. When the target is a public figure, a political figure, maybe it is of interest to all of the people to know the truth, and the State (Government) should represent THE PEOPLE in an action against the liars.

I just keep scratching my head about why the two professors and the journalist could not come up with this “angle” on how to slow the tsunami of fake news while protecting the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not there to protect liars. It’s there to protect the ignorant. And we are all ignorant of a lot of things, even if we are experts in others.

NEW LINK: Check out this interesting editorial about how fake news is used by those in search of power.

The Sacred Media: Another new link to some thoughts about freedom of the press, from a fellow writer of Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers.

Another link to how to tell fact from opinion. A well done video.

Critical thinking and fake news webinar in French https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6544146427755409409

Yet another link on how tech companies are dealing with hateful speech.

Flash of Darkness

The unknown beckons,

a flash of darkness calling,

with silent echoes.

Can you hear them too?

Isn’t it time to meet me

there?

Murderer’s Lament

The water opened in front of me. Ripples at the edge of the lake transitioned into sun-speckled wavelets. I bent down to feel the coolness, and brought my cupped hands to my face.

A small silver dart exited the brown forest of underwater plants. Pink granite and grey feldspar protruded from the sand, carrying memories of their faraway origins.

I lifted my head. A wall of late-summer-green leaves edged the far shore, framing the emptiness of the water’s surface. A few cottages, white, turquoise, lilac and pink, punctuated the living barrier. I silently thanked the houses’ inhabitants for their contribution to what would become my lasting vision of tranquility.

It had been years since I had seen so clearly. The memory of this last moment of quiet freedom has played over and over again in the cinema of my mind, as I knew it would, long after the small fish forgot all about the looming shadow that briefly darkened its way.

Driver’s Haiku

Fog wall rises, clear,

reflected in the mirror,

this wet, grey, fall morn.

Looking back, mistakes’

reasons emerge and take shape.

Peace from grace is born.

A message from The Great Merwegon

Still not getting anywhere with the second novel, I’ve been “helicoptering,” a creative writing technique where you write whatever scene occurs to you, even if what comes before it has not yet been created. I realize that my character, “The Great Merwegon,” was not developed. So I’m making up her teachings. Oh yeah, I decided she’s a female prophet. Most wisdom is wisdom, but maybe Merwegon will come up with some teachings that only a woman would. Of course, she’s not a woman. She’s a Winged Being of Kosbar, that planet far away that exists only in my mind.

The prompt was “It’s not all in your HEAd.”

“And this brings me to my next point,” Merwegon said, her finger pointing, in turn, at each of the members of the small group gathered around her.

“It is never all in your own head. Never. Whether we believe it or not, we always depend on knowledge stored in the collective consciousness. At the time of specific need, the tendrils of our mind reach out to access the facts, opinions, stories, legends, and myths of all the contents of eternity.

“The quality of the transmission back to your brain depends on how hard you have worked to maintain the health of your mind tendrils. This is done by cultivation of clarity.

“If you don’t also minimize the static in your physical neurons, by proper lifestyle, you won’t be able to isolate the wisdom signal.”

Merwegon sat down, and looked, in turn, at each of her disciples, coming to rest, with a longer gaze, on the face of Alitonia.

Who’s Sorry Now?

Super Flash Fiction

“Who’s sorry now?” Juliana demanded, her face glistening in the streaky light of the late city night.

George stared down in disbelief, as the contents of the bottle of single malt joined the rain water rushing into the storm drain.

“Who’s sorry now?” Juliana repeated.