Rama Festival & random Meerut pics

Hanuman Chowk is of the main intersections in town, near the market area. It's meant to be around-about, but you can pretty much drive whichever way you want around it. You just have to have the loudest horn, or biggest vehicle.

The scene gives you an idea of the importance of religion around here. The figure is Hanuman, an ape-like humanoid, one of the main characters in epic Indian poetry. You can basically read any paragraph on this wikipedia page to understand how awesome these stories are!

Here's a short snippet:
Hanuman appeared as a small talking monkey before Arjuna at Rameshwaram, where Sri Rama had built the great bridge to cross over to Lanka to rescue Sita. Upon Arjuna's wondering out aloud at Sri Rama's taking the help of monkeys rather than building a bridge of arrows, Hanuman (in the form of the little monkey) challenged him to build one capable of bearing him alone, and Arjuna, unaware of the monkey's true identity accepted. Hanuman then proceeded to repeatedly destroy the bridges made by Arjuna who became depressed and suicidal, and decided to take his own life.
[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman#Hanuman_in_the_Mahabharata ]

Something tells me that this generator has been here for a few weeks -- maybe it's that the wheels are almost fully submersed in the sludgy ground? And that it's chained up?

Best way to transport your propane tanks along a "major" highway? Obviously to strap them on a bicycle! (The max that I saw was 9 on one bicycle rickshaw!)

A monkey movie that I shot during the Mussoorie weekend, posted by request!

It's Rama's Birthday!

(It's kinda a big deal, as Rama is the seventh avatar of Vishnu, a god very central to Hindu beliefs.)

This is a very typical (modest) float for the front of the parade that took place last weekend. It was Rama's birthday, so there were floats for lots of the various gods that Hindus celebrate. In this particular parade, Rama's float was the biggest & most important, and at the end.

Some floats were more traditional...
others were more... loud. :-)

walked up the street against the flow of the parade, working my way towards Rama's float. I really dig the tunes! The mix of traditional sounds + electronic enhancement seems to make all the folks around to dance.

Weekend trip to the Mountains!

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This past weekend Nikhil and I went up to the mountains north of us, to a town called Mussoorie, India. It's a town of 20k people with a few very good, internationally renowned schools. It's also got some really awesome views of the plains of India as well as the mountains to the north (it is on the southern edge of the Himalayan mountain range).

It took us about 7 hours to make our way the 209 kilometers (yep, that's an average of 18 per hour) from Meerut to the mountains. The road is said to have been improved, and we could definitely see signs of public works going on... but the speed attests to it's quality. Here's what a normal part of the trip might look like:

As we made our way into the mountains on Friday afternoon, the views were quite nice, although I didn't snap any pictures, banking on the weather report: Perfect all weekend.

It turned out to be raining quite a bit and because of the elevation we were in clouds the rest of the time. Bummer.

Some good news is that they have some really awesome omelet shops! Some are quite tiny, as you'll see in the video below, while others can be up to twice as big. Very tiny shops. Another one we went in, twice as big, seats about 5 people, and goes through up to 600 eggs in one day. Wow.

On Saturday, despite the rain, we decided to walk to the very top of the hill outside Mussoorie, in the hopes that the weather would clear. No dice. At least the rain was refreshing (I was about 50 degrees out and we were soaked and cold all weekend. Okay, now I won't mention that any more.).

That night, Nikhil introduced me to an after-dinner snack called paan. It's a digestive, and there's a great picture of a shopkeeper selling some at this wikipedia page. It was basically a green thick leaf, wrapped up with sugar and other "spices" (sometimes, but not in this case, tobacco), and then finally wrapped in a a thin leaf of some shiny metal. Which you put in your mouth. And it's kinda like chewing tobacco. But in a leaf. But its sugary. Fascinating.

Sunday we took our time coming home and drove through Dehra Dun to see the old clock tower.

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