In Gujarat, I got a lot of request to pictures of people. As I can do no more than show them their pic on the back of my camera, I’ll place them here.
Mother & baby near Asarwa Lake
Near Hutheesing Jain Derasar
Near Hutheesing Jain Derasar
Near Hutheesing Jain Derasar
Near Delhi Darwaja
Near Delhi Darwaja
Near Asarwa Lake
Near Delhi Darwaja
Near Asarwa Lake
Idgah Road
Adalaj Vav banyan tree
Mughli Bibi’s Tomb
Mughli Bibi’s Tomb
Kids near Dandi Kuch Chowk
Crazy For Alice by Alex Dunn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ben has a secret and keeping it sends him into a depressive spiral. He’d had almost everything going for him. With his high IQ, he was sailing through school on his way to a top-tier college. He was also an athlete of local renown on the swim team. The only source of consternation in his life was a deadbeat drunk of a father, and the fact that said father recently passed away. Ben was in the car accident with his father, and was the last one to see him alive. Fortunately, Ben has an older brother who’s a cop, Gavin, who looks out for him and tries to keep an overbearing mother at bay.
After an attempted suicide via wrist slashing, Ben is institutionalized. It’s during this time that he drops into a coma. While he’s not conscious of the real world, his consciousness takes up residence in a place he calls “Gray World.” Besides being monochrome, Gray World exhibits the characteristics of a dream. The laws of physics, cause & effect, and consistency of space and time are all freely violated. Ben soon meets a girl named Alice who is initially cautious about him. Over time, the two develop an increasingly close relationship. Then Ben comes out of his coma.
In the real world, Ben is obsessed with getting back to the Gray World to rescue Alice. It seems that all the residents of Gray World are individuals suffering severe depression. The problem is that Ben only has a first name and a probable city of residency. Of course, to his mother, brother, friends, and doctors, this obsession is a sign that Ben’s depression has migrated into a full-blown delusional psychosis. His mother, terrified of losing him, treats Ben as a prisoner. Gavin, while well-meaning, feels the need to prove that Alice was just a dream.
I enjoyed the story and also found it to be thought-provoking. The characters are well-developed enough to care about, and the reader can see how each of the key players is trapped in his or her behavior—behaviors that are sub-optimal. At one point, I thought that it strained credulity that Ben took so long to realize he needed to play along to get some space for his search. He kept being forthright about his intentions to find Alice, and this just made his mother more nervous and smothering–and made Gavin more insistent. But it occurred to me that Ben’s ego as a genius kept him in that state. He wasn’t used to being challenged in his understanding of the world, and reacted to it poorly. He had a need to be right that overrode his capacity to recognize what those around him wanted to hear. His mother was trapped by fear into an increasingly suffocating form of love. Gavin, the most emotionally stable of the trio, thinks he can force Ben to accept an understanding of reality through the brute force of reason—missing that being right might not be as important as being compassionate.
I’d recommend this book for fiction readers. It’s written for the YA (young adult) market, but is intriguing for adults as well.
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ronson investigates the US military intelligence community’s forays into extrasensory perception (ESP) and mind control. Those who’ve seen the movie loosely based on this book will be aware of the quirky-humorous tone it takes. (If the title wasn’t enough to convey that the author was aiming for quirky humor.) Ronson’s style, favoring punchy simple sentences, offers a kind of deadpan delivery that supports the tone of the book.
That said, the book also has a sad edge as it can be seen as a commentary on military officers who came back from the war in Vietnam damaged and grasping at straws as to how to prevent history from repeating itself. It’s as if what these men experienced made some eager to believe because they so wanted to believe they could win with the mind and avoid the carnage of war.
While the book’s sixteen chapters are not divided by the author, they can be roughly divided into three parts. The first is the pursuit of ESP starting in the late 1970’s. This includes remote viewing and the titular psychokinesis (i.e. starring goats to death.)
The middle section is the resurgence of these esoteric approaches in the late 90’s and, especially, after 9-11 (also speaking to how dire blows to the psyche lead to wild approaches.) Much of this section is about mind control rather than ESP. One may remember the news story of the “I Love You, You Love Me” song from Barney [i.e. the purple dinosaur] being played over and over again to break terror suspects. The question remaining unanswered is whether there was anything else going on besides torture by Barney song (i.e. subliminal messages or sonic / ultrasonic frequencies [as used in non-lethal weapon technology.])
The latter section deals with the famous case of a scientist who jumped from a hotel room window to his death. It was later admitted that the scientist had been the unwitting victim of hallucinogen experimentation as part of the famed MKUltra project, and his death was written off as a trip gone bad. Ronson presents the story of the scientist’s son, a man who firmly believes that the story copped to was neither the full story nor the true story.
This book is interesting and entertaining, despite the fact that many of the questions that Ronson sets out to answer remain unanswered and probably always will. While the author got several key people to talk to him, the projects discussed are highly classified and the possibility of disinformation is ever-present.
Ronson manages to walk a fine line throughout the book. He presents all this quirky and bizarre activity in a way that neither comes across as mocking nor even particularly skeptical. (His punchy delivery does hint at this intention on occasion.) He lets the reader do the mocking and be the skeptic. At times he comes across as a believer. That is, while many of the happenings of the book reflect bat-shit crazy behavior / decisions, he suggests that all but the most hardened skeptics would believe that some of the people involved had inexplicable gifts.
I’d recommend this book. If you’re interested in government sponsored esoteric activities like psi and mind control and related scandals / conspiracies, you’ll find it fascinating. On the other hand, even if you’re not, it’s still an entertaining read that provides a sort of commentary on the effects of war on the psyche.
A South Indian Treatise On The Kamasastra by Swami Sivapriyananda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Amazon page (note: they have a different edition, I can’t comment on its commentary and art.)
This book was originally entitled “Rati Ratna Pradipika.” It’s an unfinished manuscript penned by a member of the Wadiyar (Wodeyar) Kingdom over 350 years ago. The Wadiyars were a south Indian royal family that ruled out of Mysore from 1399 to 1950. Like the “Kamasutra,” which heavily influenced this text, it’s a sex manual. Readers of the “Kamasutra” will not find anything new herein. This book serves more as a window into sexuality, culture, and their overlap for the place and time written. That said, it’s a quick read to appease one’s curiosity. The edition I read was only slightly more than 100 pages and that includes extensive commentary, artworks, and front and back matter.
This treatise consists of seven chapters. Chapter one is largely about astrology and what sex acts are most auspiciously practiced on which days of the month, but it starts with a brief classification of women with regards sexual promise. There’s not much content in this chapter that has any validity outside of the culture and times of its writing, and one wouldn’t want to consider this information to be a relevant guide to one’s behavior in the present day.
Chapter two delves into greater detail in classifying women and men (by body type, demeanor, and genital size / characteristics.) Women are classified as gazelle, mare, and elephant and men as hare, bull, and horse. There’s a brief discussion of which classes are ideally paired. The influence of dosha (i.e. kapha, pitta, vata)–a three-fold classification scheme broadly referenced in yoga and ayurveda—is also described herein.
Chapter three describes “outer play” which—as the name suggests—consists of acts that don’t involve bodily penetration (at least not beyond the so-called “French kiss.”) There are subsections for embracing, kissing, nail marks, and bite marks. The nexus of pain and pleasure is seen in the discussion.
Chapters four and five both concern the practice of “inner love.” The first of these chapters discusses 27 styles of intercourse. The 27 ways of intercourse are functions of genital size, time to orgasm, and level of passion. Chapter five elaborates on the subject that most people think of when they think of Indian sex manuals, and that is the physical positions. As with the “Kamasutra,” these postures range from simple and straight-forward to contortionistic.
Chapter six describes sixteen varieties of oral sex (i.e. eight female to male, and the same number vice versa.) Perhaps reflective of the misogyny of the times, the male to female varieties reflect different physical approaches, whereas female-on-male oral includes varieties such as “post-quarrel.”
Chapter seven is sort of a miscellany chapter that describes approaches to “love blows,” sounds, and a tour of the traits of women of various regions of India. As with the rest of the book, there are some entries that read comedically. (e.g. “While the woman is either sitting on his knee or on a bed the man lovingly punches her with his fist.”… “In response to this cruel violence she will cry like a goose, cuckoo, or duck.” However, the commentary clarifies and reduces confusion over what is presumably an attempt to translate as literally as possible.
The edition that I read (ed. by Swami Sivapriyananda with art by Raghupati Bhatta) was well done. The commentary did a great job of elaborating on confusing elements in the text as well as clarifying points which are incongruous with what we’ve come to know about sex and sexuality through the lens of modern science.
As mentioned, the edition I read had artworks to help clarify the text. These paintings / drawings are exaggerated (not unlike Japanese erotic artwork) and stylistic, but give one the gist of what the author was trying to convey. Most of the pictures are in chapters five and six where they are most helpful, but a few are placed for aesthetic purposes in other chapters. There’s also a brief bibliography in the edition that I read.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who’s interested in the nexus of sex, culture, and yogic / ayurvedic thought.
Taken in October of 2016 in Vasco da Gama in Goa
The walls throb and gargoyles attack
an hour into midnight climax.
Pipe cleaner Kama Sutra twists
chronicled indiscretion lists.
His hand dissolves into puddle.
Giggling; he’s become befuddled.
She’ll take him for a midnight ride
while with acid he is plied.
A night to remember, he will have lost
until the Polaroids do accost
Taken in June of 2015 near Manali
Taken in May of 2017 in Botswana
