Vacay

If you like traveling and think a semester’s worth of classes is just too long of a time commitment, I strongly suggesting planning South India into your collegiate future. Our classes last two months, lack Fridays, and are interspersed with long weekends to entire weeks of “cultural excursions” (read: vacays thinly veiled as education). At the end of the two months, we’re given three weeks to go off and be tourists free of scholastic obligation (although Syracuse students spend two of those three weeks in a three-credit traveling seminar—not such a bad deal). The final month is reserved for independent projects of the students’ choosing, which can be anything from intensive sitar to creative writing to an internship at a tribal school. Basically, coming to India is an open-ended question with a nice view and a lot of accredited time off. We’re always on the verge of some new trip, even when we’ve just returned from one.

Mysore, our home and base of operations in South India, is located in Karnataka. Dr. Rao, the program director, is somewhat of a celebrity as a result of his archeological and restorative exploits. Together, these two facts mean an intimate and cushy exploration of the southern state, brought to us courtesy our student fee and the Archeological Society of India. For the equivalent of about three weeks altogether, Dr. Rao and Bharanath Travels loaded all thirteen of us into a van and shuttled us from site to site, city to city, giving us a preview of what’s it’s like to be Kannada and closet temple-ophiles.

Now that all of our cultural excursions are finished, I can only say that I’ve had my fill and then some of Hindu and Buddhist religious architecture. I never need to see another carving of a yarla (a combination between an elephant, crocodile, and lion that really just looks like a tapir having digestive problems from both ends) or a dancing woman so awkwardly proportioned that she’d make Barbie jealous. All of the temples pretty much looked the same to me—and smelled the same too. I’m sure Axe and Tag and Bodman would be fighting over the rights to ‘Temple’ if they only knew of its existence. What woman, after all, can resist the pungent fragrance of soapstone washed with years of stale urine?

Ah, but the author doth protest too much. The excursions were not all temples, and the temples were not all bad. One, for example, came complete with its own secret identity. In Hampi, the Vithala leads a double life: mind-mannered worship site by day, entire symphonic orchestra by night. Once a famous musical hall, the pillars of the temple can be played like musical instruments. A mere tap on one of the stone columns summons drums, string instruments, bells, clay pots, and more. Each of the columns corresponds to a different instrument and each sounds like a different instrument, even though (to my untrained eye at least) they look as though they’re all carved in the same shape. I imagine any music major would be jealous of such digs. I know I certainly wouldn’t mind having a Vithala in my backyard.

Near the Vithala, the Virupaksha boasted a personal temple elephant which made rounds twice a day to bless the present visitors and help in the religious ceremonies. We just so happened to be there for the elephant’s morning stroll, and I just so happened to have her trunk on my head and her sacred breath in my face—a party story that I’m sure will never get old. I visited Pattadakal, a “neighborhood” of temples, wet and dripping after an unplanned and fully-clothed plunge into a sacred pool in Mahakuta, and Badami, while a bit on the smelly side, had some fabulous views and pretty entertaining signs warning visitors to watch out for the “monkey menace.” All in all, very much worth the chance to escape the classroom and set up camp in a hotel with hot water and toilet paper available at your whim.

Of course, no travel log is complete without touching on the Indian road system, which is a diverse combination of dirt, rocks, and pavement. Imaginative signs line the way with slogans like: “Come home in peace, not in pieces” and “Follow traffic laws, conserve rainwater!” Better yet, when we’re driving around on India’s jackhammer roads in the wildly bouncing van (a ride not recommended for pregnant woman or people with heart or back problems), Indian towns have a habit of transforming into baseball stadiums. As we pass through populated areas and the townspeople realize that a bus of white foreigners is rolling by, ‘The Wave’ is picked up en masse.

After all the time I clocked sightseeing in Karnataka, I can’t say I have a much better grasp on India. It’s a big country (all the better to build millions of temples in!) and Karnataka is only one part. Four months may never be enough to develop an understanding or familiarity with South Asia, but I’ve certainly learned a lot. Now when I set off for my traveling seminar, I’ll be extra sure to be judicious with my rainwater.