Seven-ping Sunday (5)

Is it a hawk? Is it a circling drone? No, it’s Super-ping. (clutching at straws here 😊)

Another week spent in Bengaluru, where the senses register a thousand pings a minute, but which, by the same token, are too overwhelming to refine into seven points. Giving it a bash, though, for the sake of continuity, high on my priority list for living a meaningful life, however distant that may become physically.

Nostalgic ping: The street where I lived for nine years, and which I will always think of as second, or if I’m really honest, most authentic, home. Which is a difficult thing to explain and something I have pondered much. Longest I have ever lived anywhere, despite, or because, it was, contradictorily, totally foreign to start with. Starting out anew, albeit rented, came with all the excited anticipation of buying that first house when I turned 30, but more so, because everything was unexplored. We arrived before smartphones, and social media was still a fad. Taxi and tuktuk drivers would chat to each other to get directions, so we bought a Royal Enfield motorbike and relied on intuition to get us places via dark and colourful back roads. I felt inordinately free, and transfixed by the multi-layered magic India delivered on a daily basis. (We explored from north to south, geographically and spiritually, but more of that in another post.) My partner ran a business, I freelanced from home, and we were lucky to be able to go back twice a year, which allayed any homesickness for the motherland. There is also a lot to be said, besides always being three and a half hours ahead of South African time, for exploring your limits and consciousness in an alien, but cocooning, place, some of which at face value I rejected, but which, in the daily living, became so much a part of me I go into minor meltdown when I have to leave again.

Soundbyte of the week: Lucinda Williams ‘Seeing Black’ sent me by my brother in a moment of nihilism. Took me back to Charleston, in the deep south of the US circa 2016, where my partner and I were lucky enough to get tickets to her show. On a road trip from Arkansas to Charleston, we exceeded the speed limit in Georgia and were stopped, sirens included, by a full-fledged state trooper straight out of the movies, attitude and all. Flung the driver’s door open and demanded to see my partner’s driver’s licence. Informed us that the penalty for speeding in Georgia was a night in prison, but because it was Easter, we would have to spend the whole weekend. I have never seen my partner think so fast, his mental ratchets almost visibly rotating as he blurted, “But I forgot that you work in miles. I looked at the speedo and saw it was below 120 and, because I was thinking in kilometres, thought I was below the limit”. Said police officer went back to his car, where he clearly googled the information, before coming back to ours to verify what he’d found. And let us off the hook. At least nine lives lived in half an hour!

Substack post of the week: Of Iran, by a California journalist, Jeff Greenwald, who has since contracted Parkinson’s Disease, and with whom I did a 10-day workshop in Nepal. Click here.

Instagram post of the week: My intrepid niece on how a pair of underpants in a yacht laundry sent her on a mission to India which changed her life. Click here.

Out there pings: Twas full moon, a lunar eclipse, and Holi, a Hindu celebration of spring during which revellers gooi colourful dye over each other. Mythologies as to how it was all derived vary; we were presented with specially prepared sweetmeats and told that it is celebrated less and less as dyes are seen to be toxic. Spotted a few revellers en route to hunting down flowers at Krishna Rajendra market, one of Asia’s largest, but nothing like when we first got here. Elsewhere, a meeting convened by the Anti-Superstition Federation was being held to diss superstition around the eclipse, for which many follow rituals like placing Durva grass over food to protect it and which many believe is prime time to meditate. Not necessarily true, say meditation leaders at Pyramid Valley, home of the world’s tallest meditation pyramid, standing at 34m. We didn’t visit this time, but I have attended lectures on breathtarianism, astrology, watched plants dancing to music and listened to someone apparently channelling Gandhi there. We’ve also done whacky meditation sessions at the top of the pyramid, which literally vibrates with energy, the Art of Living headquarters ashram and I did 10 days of vipassana silence in Dehra Dun.

Ponderous ping: Random sighting in Bengaluru city centre of a monument to WW1 soldiers who died in Mesopotamia. Which is hardly a delight, but the synchronicity of it is, given that the US/Israel had just declared war on Iran (though ancient Mesopotamia corresponds more to modern-day Iraq, it does incorporate a section of southwestern Iran). Universe pings on high alert, it seemed! Negative offshoot being that there is high expectation that this could be Iraq all over again. Positive spin-off being that I now know all about the Mesopotamia Campaign in World War I.

Super-ping: And through the world’s best arrival hall - Kempegowda airport, Bengaluru – to Dubai, where we chewed on dates from Iran (gifted us by a friend fasting during Ramadan) for six hours while a drone missile apparently exploded two terminals down from us. We were herded to the basement, had a siren call and an SMS telling us when it was safe to proceed to McDonalds or KFC to get a free meal, but no other communication about status of our flight, which left six hours later than planned. Big shout-out to the two calm, organised mothers next to me, one of whom fed her toddler and lulled it to sleep with a phone app, the other of whom had her three daughters busily drawing and colouring in with rapt attention. Safe and sound in Cape Town, grazeless, and grateful for cool, unpanicked pilots (one of whom I met in the passage) and G&T-serving flight staff.

In peace, till next week,

Sharonski

PS Following on countries like Australia and Denmark, on the day we left, social media was banned for under 16s in Karnataka, of which Bengaluru is capital. Any thoughts?