Chris Tyrell's Blog

"What is it you love so much about India?"

2007-05-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

It all started when I saw a film in the early 1970’s called Siddhartha. I learned that it was filmed in Sri Lanka and the dazzling scenery made me want to go wherever it had been filmed. I decided to go to Sri Lanka and on the way I would visit India. Then I chickened out. I was too afraid of what I would see on the streets–poverty, lepers, crippled people and animals in sorry condition. But twenty years later and after a personal crisis, I resolved to go. That was eleven years ago.

I had the best learning vacation of my life on that trip, but it took me ten years to go back. From January to the end of March 2006, I returned to many of the places I had seen before and to some new cities. (India is a vast and extremely diverse country with a land mass larger than that of continental Europe.) This second trip was so exhilarating and rewarding that in January 2007 I returned and I am writing this editorial in Jaisalmer (Rajasthan) in late March. I still have another month to go here and I will not waste a second–this trip has proven as wonderful as the previous two.

This visit is almost entirely devoted to places that I have been before–except for Jaisalmer and Nepal (where I will be in May), so a primary objective for this trip is to answer the question so many people ask me: “What is it about India that you like so much?” I now know the answer. Hence this editorial. As artists, I am sure that you will be interested, especially if you have never considered visiting India or never been to “Incredible India.”

What I love about this country is that it is a sensate nation and I, like many artists, am fully engaged with my senses and emotions. More than anything else, it is my sense of sight that is stimulated–colour astounds my eyes all day, every day. There is even a festival here about colour each February called Holi. The women in their saris are, as a friend said to me, human jewels. The saris, often adorned with rhinestones or mirrors, sparkle brilliantly in the sun, and they are everywhere–on women working on road construction, in the streets, in the fields and especially on ceremonial occasions and in the temples. Saris of every colour are everywhere. I am constantly agog at the beauty of the women, their jewelry, their make up and their clothes. (The men, by contrast, are the world’s worst dressers for the most part.)

Besides the saris, your eyes are constantly seduced by the display of fruits, spices and vegetables. The vendors of hammocks, clothing, cloth, fabric arts, bangles and pigments are all artists, judging by the way they display their wares. To all this, add the architectural beauty of the temples and monuments. Everyone knows about the Taj Mahal, and so they should. It is the biggest beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life and its majesty is overpowering, as is its story. But fewer visitors know about the Itmad-Ud-Daulah, also in Agra, or about the Jain temple in Ranakpur. Here in Jaisalmer, I believe I am in the most beautiful city in the world. The architectural features of the havelis (mansions), palaces and all the houses of those of sufficient means just stupefy. And the Jain temples are beyond description in their beauty. They still build the buildings of Jaisalmer in the styles created by craftsmen from Kabul and Kandahar hundreds of years ago. I have never seen anything like this city.

Then there are the flowers. I believe we in BC live in the most beautiful part of the world for flowers, but there are flowers here that astound with their perfume or blossoms. Tuberoses are everywhere, so are plumeria. Each one is a feast for the nose. And there are trees that, as with plumeria, bloom without foliage. I do not know what they are called but they are covered in bright orange or red blossoms and these trees just shout out at you from the gardens and boulevards. And there is bougainvillea everywhere. It grows like a weed here creating multi-coloured hedges running for miles along the highways. And add to all this the brightly-coloured turbans on the Rajasthani men and the sculptural beauty of the cows that fill the streets and you can get an idea of how stimulated this colour maniac is every day and all day.

After sight, the other sense that fills my days with delight is taste. One of the things I like best about travelling is seeing and eating local foods. In India, there is an amazing diversity of choice and there are many specialties of each state: there are vastly more than the curry dishes for which India is best known. The choice in vegetarian dishes alone is enough to paralyze one when faced with the decision of what to have for dinner. And everything tastes delicious. Thali, my favourite dish, is the best choice for single travellers like me–you get up to seven or eight delicious small servings of food with rice and bread. Wash it all down with a lassi, chai or kashmiri tea, and heaven’s gates open.

As for smell, there is everything from the smell of sewage to the heavenly fragrances of essential oils, perfumes and incense. The incense fills the streets and temples, vying for attention with the scents of spices and cooking food.

And finally, there are the people. Of course there are the hassles of “touts” (con men, hustlers and merchants who will do anything to get you into their shops), but it is the kind people, the warm and friendly people of India, whose interactions thrill me and give me unforgettable moments. And perhaps it is the Indians who make me want to return. They are a physically and spiritually beautiful people. It is hard as a tourist to meet “average” people, but I have been lucky enough to meet a few. And it is they, plus the gracious strangers who have helped me choose food, find amenities, get a taxi or understand a celebration or event, who call me back. Will I come back again soon? I am not sure, but I hope I have opened a door of consideration for other artists who love idyllic sensations.

THE MOGUL MONUMENTS: Scale, Beauty and Immortality.

2006-05-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

“Will you come with me if I pay your way?”

“You bet,” I said, “if you’re sure that’s what you want to do.”

I was speaking with Steve, my ex, in Agra, a city where he had decided we would spend two days. As I was in India for two and a half months and he had only two weeks, I was happy to do whatever he wanted, but so long in Agra seemed to be an unfortunate decision. It is a pretty unattractive city. But there we were, about to part on that first afternoon (or so I thought)—he to the Taj and I would have a massage and a bath (two luxuries to me) and read my fabulous book. But just as we were to say goodbye he made his offer.

“I don’t want to go alone,” he said.

“And I don’t want to pay to go three times,” I said having agreed to visit the next day with Steve and again later with other friends.

So off we went. We lined up for our tickets and got the water and little booties you need to cover your shoes while you walk on the Taj’s marble foundation. Then we walked through the entrance courtyard that is an expansive assembly and information area. It is bordered by high walls, landscaped in an open plan and contains several panels explaining the history of the Taj. It is valuable to read the historical information if you are visiting — especially if you know nothing of its history from guidebooks or research. Why? Because the vast majority of visitors to the Taj with whom I have spoken reference the Taj’s history as playing a significant part of their emotional reaction to the magnificence of the building. That was certainly the case for me.

From the entrance courtyard, you pass through a main gate that is exactly aligned with the Taj. As you pass through the gate, visitors are aimed directly at its centre— straight down the reflecting pools.

I didn’t even care about seeing the Taj—we were in Agra because Steve wanted to see it—twice! And this sunset visit was the result of a bribe. So I was absolutely stunned to find myself in tears at the sight of it. I turned around to find Steve but I started crying again as I tried to tell him about how beautiful a sight it was. I was truly overcome—a mild case of Stendahl Syndrome. We stayed there for three hours, and although I returned again, nothing matched the beauty of the first sighting at sunset. I am truly indebted to Steve for wanting me with him that night in Agra.

“So why the tears?” I wondered, and as I sat there watching the marble floor of the foundation reflect the golden light of sunset and take on the look of a sacred river. "Because sometimes size does matter," I thought. Whereas I was used to the beauty of a face, a painting, a flower or a tree, and whereas even truly enormous and beautiful paintings, sculptures, rooms and palaces are something with which I have familiarity, nothing prepared me for the scale, exoticism and beauty of the Taj Mahal. There is something extraordinary about curved lines in architecture that resonates with me. The Taj is simply the biggest and most beautiful thing I have ever seen. But I have seen the chateaus of France, the Parthenon and Disney Hall, so why is this building so spectacularly more impressive than any other? Part of the answer is, as I mentioned earlier, its history.

I am not a historian and this is not a history lesson, but my favourite sites in India are all of Moghul origin. The first six (of seven) Mogul emperors ruled in an unbroken succession from father to son from 1526 to 1707 in spite of there being no tradition of primogeniture and the passage of power being a treacherous and brutal one. The Moguls left a magnificent historical legacy in India; they are wonderful places in which to escape the chaos of their host cities. They are oases of historical magnificence and tranquility.

The first Moghul emperor of India was Barbur. He arrived, Hannibal like, through the Khyber Pass into the north of India in 1526. With 10,000 men, he defeated the defending army of 100,000. He won because he utilized the new Chinese invention of gunpowder.

When Barbur invaded India, his eldest son, Humayun, joined him and led many campaigns in support of his father. (Humayan's tomb is pictured left.) After Babur's death in 1530, Humayun became emperor at the age of 23.

Humayun inherited a divided empire and his brothers were mean and disloyal to him. He was defeated in battle in 1540; he became a fugitive and fled the county. When he died he was entombed in a mausoleum that established architectural norms for the Mogul rulers of India and the precedent of setting the tomb in a geometrically arranged garden crisscrossed by numerous water channels (representing paradise). Humayun’s Tomb is easily my favourite place in Delhi.

(Akbar's tomb is pictured at left and below.) Akbar, third Moghul Emperor of India (1556-1605), had a brilliant military mind but also imported rare plants and grasses, grafted trees, crossbred doves, maintained zoological notebooks, commissioned translations of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, wrote letters to the Pope and to two Spanish kings, and initiated Anglo-Indian diplomatic relations by writing to Queen Elizabeth I.

Akbar’s mausoleum is four kilometers from Agra. It is a perfect blend of Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jain motifs. The beautiful park surrounding Akbar’s Tomb has a herd of antelope-type animals with extraordinarily graceful long and twisted horns on their heads. They lend a magical, mythical beauty to the park as do the black-faced monkeys that are so gentle and tame.

The fourth Moghul Emperor, Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, had a harem of 300 royal wives, 5,000 more women, and 1,000 young men for alternate pleasures. Outside the palace, he stabled other kinds of pets: 12,000 elephants, 10,000 oxen, 2,000 camels, 3,000 deer, 4,000 dogs, 100 tame lions, 500 buffalo, and 10,000 carrier pigeons.

Shah Jahan was the fifth Emperor and it is he who built the Taj. It is his story that so adds to the impact of the buildings physical beauty to make the tomb a sacred place. He built the Taj as a monument for his wife—one of three wives, but the only one who bore him children and his favourite. Her name was Arjumand Banu Begum (and later Mumtaz Mahal) and she died giving birth to their fourteenth child together. Shah Jahan was later overthrown and jailed by his eldest son for the lavish expenditures involved with the building of the Taj, and he killed his brothers in order to become the sixth Mogul Emperor.

The Taj Mahal, considered one of the world's most beautiful buildings, was scheduled to be torn down in the 1830's so that its marble facing could be removed and shipped to London for sale by auction to the landed English gentry. Wrecking machinery was moved into the garden grounds and work was about to begin when word came from London not to proceed. The first auction of marble facades of Indian monuments and edifices had been a failure, and it would not be worth it to tear down the two-hundred-year-old mausoleum. The story of the Taj through time to its present status as the crown jewel of the United Nations’ World Heritage Sites is a compelling one.

Also in Agra, and also part of the Mogul legacy, is the I'timad al-Daula. The name means Emperor’s Pillar and was the title bestowed upon Mirza Ghiyas Beg by Emperor Jehangir. Of Persian descent, Mirza Ghiyas Beg became first the treasurer and then the prime minister under Emperor Jehangir. His daughter, Nur Jahan, later married the Emperor and commissioned the mausoleum now called the I'timad al-Daula to honor the memory of her father upon his death in 1622. It is called the “Mini Taj’ colloquially. It is like a jewel box, built entirely of pure marble, it marks the transitional phase from the grand and massive red sandstone architecture of Akbar’s Tomb to the softer architectural style of Shah Jahan. Many aspects of its design foreshadow the Taj Mahal. The I'timad al-Daula was the first Mughal structure to be completely encased in marble and extensively use pietra dura, the marble inlay work that is associated with the Taj Mahal.

These exquisite places, and many, many more were the places where my body went in India. Where my mind was at is covered in my blog post “Two Solitudes.”

RECONCILING TWO SOLITUDES: How India and a Good Book Changed Me

2006-04-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

I was born with a love of science, but it was my life experiences that rendered me completely disinterested in religion, faith and God. Not that long ago, more of those unforgettable life experiences rekindled an interest in the divine.

When I was a child, I would often fall asleep at night imagining that I was in a spaceship with a rear-view window that departed from our rooftop and traveled to the edge of the universe. From the top of our house, the view would rapidly take in the neighbourhood, then the city, then the lower half of the province of BC and all of BC, and then of Canada North America, then the whole globe and then I’d see the planets flying by back behind us as I sped out through our galaxy. It was hard to imagine the part of the universe now known as the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud fills the rest of space and hosts an estimated 140 billion galaxies. It was impossible to imagine. Impossible!

I did this visualizing for the rush. The rush was the physical reaction I had—a feeling through my body like the one that happens when you are going upstairs or downstairs and you take one too many steps last, going for a last one that isn’t there. Your whole body reacts. Once I had that rush, I could have another one by trying to imagine what the universe was in. O knew I was dealing with the incomprehensible.

No celestial map, no book on astronomy, no science teacher ever referred to heaven, and Catechism classes ignored Darwinism. Science and faith seemed to me to be polar opposites like fact and fiction—for me and for society, as I understood ours. Besides, the Catholic Church in which I was raised as a youngster had condemned my birth mother because she was unwed, labeled me a bastard as a consequence of my conception and later condemned me as well when, at puberty, I discovered I was gay.

Fast forward to 1995: I am fourty-eight years old and in complete despair. The sorrow of having lost my partner of almost 15 years to divorce had become the soul-deep pain of being all alone in a universe of unimaginable size and a world full of an incomprehensible number of people, not one of whom considered me to be essential. I felt I could not live with such a feeling of loneliness so I decided to have a God in my life. A God who loved everyone and considered everyone equal—a God who loved me as much as anyone. Not a Christian God, a God of my own invention, and one who needed no interpreter. A God I could talk to; a God attached to no prophet or church.

But I could not say I “believed” in God. “Belief” was something I reserved for facts and facts, I thought at the time, were universal not personal. Science was a religion of facts for me; I believed only in things that were proven to be true. My bibles were the various professional publications that published research. I concluded I had faith in God and faith involved the acceptance of theories for which there was no evidence or proof. I believed in all things “scientific” and had faith in a self-determined God.

To put an end to the pain, I went to India in February 1996. I went on my first trip to Asia with no list of sites to see and I had the most exciting and rewarding vacation of my life. Why was it so amazing and different than any previous travels? Because, I think, my trip focused on a culture, not a place—on the people, not their buildings and national possessions. Almost everything I saw and did was linked to the faith of the Indian people—past or present. Their faith was front and centre; it was part of every day and touched many, many aspects of their lives. I was also struck by the seeming happiness of the people regardless of their worth or social position. Their confidence in who they were, their happiness with life and their identity had to do with their faith, not their wealth or social status. At least that is what I saw in spite of my historic view of the country as stratified by caste.

When I returned home, my western life seemed rather empty in comparison. But I did not have long to think about how I might improve my life with the lessons learned in India because soon after returning I got my awful, terminal diagnosis. My doctors turned into fortune tellers—they told me how long I would be ambulatory, bedridden and alive. In those dark, dark times, I was extremely happy that I had a God who loved me. I read a lot and learned that no known civilization was without God(s).

In September 2004, my father died. Although we enjoyed a friendly rapport, we were not close. For many years, we stayed in touch mostly by phone, but when he suffered first a stroke and then a heart attack, I started spending more time with him than I had since being a young child. The medical crises changed him—he became more fatherly and kinder. His death flamed my dread of being unconnected and financed my return trip to India for a spiritual “booster shot.”

Unconnected. No one, not one of my friends understands my sense of isolation. I feel like a star in the Oort Cloud where everything is 20 million miles apart. Although I was adopted, my mother’s departure at my young age and my father’s estrangement from me made me an orphan with parents. People genetically linked to others cannot possibly know what it is like to grow up as isolated as I felt; my genetic isolation was a mirror to my emotional solitude. Without a God to love me I’d not have survived the emotional onslaught of my AIDS diagnosis.

To “move on” from the crisis of my divorce, I had gone to India. It was time, therefore, to return. And so I did in January (2006), ten years after my first visit. I stayed for two and a half months. I landed in Delhi and then went to Agra, Mumbai, Varcac (Goa), Gokarn, back to Mumbai, Cochin, Alleppey, Madurai, Mamallapuram, Pondicherry, Kolkata, Veranasi, Delhi again, Agra again, then back to Goa and finally back to Delhi to return home. I saw many, many temples and ashrams, reacquainting myself with a people who bring religious practice into so much of everyday life.

At nights, I was with Bill Bryson and his thoroughly analytical mind reading about the big bang and our expanding universe. I am a non-fiction junkie and I particularly like reading about Geology and to really understand the materials of our planet and its history you need to read about all the sciences. Biology explains the more “recent” history of our planet and life and biology involves a lot of chemistry. Astronomy tells us our early history and, with physics, helps us understand the forces that shape life on earth. I had Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” on my shelf when I left, so I took it with me.

Reading Bill Bryson was like being back in my bed as a child, zooming out from West Vancouver to the edge of the universe in the rear-view spaceship of my imagination. He told me:

“Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it—the sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus—fills less than a trillionth of the available space…. Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t even possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale…. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away…. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.

“Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between starts out there is 20 million million miles…. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way…. And the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours.”

The rush is gone and I don’t know why. The incomprehensibility, the enormity of space still overwhelms me but there is no visceral response anymore to the mystery. I have, perhaps, tried to go there too many times and the thrill is gone. I accept more comfortably, that which I cannot comprehend.

Hindus have tens of thousands of Gods. Hinduism mystifies and enthralls me. I love how you can choose which God to worship and, that at different times, you can worship Gods who concern themselves with specific human needs and dreams. There are Gods to worship when you want a child, or are hungry, or when your crops need rain. In Hindu-holy Veranasi, I met a sadu I call Smokin’ Sadu because he smokes hashish. He noticed the Om necklace I wore and he told me something I didn’t know: that “om” was the sound of the beginning of the universe.

Lying in bed that night, I recalled what he had said and suddenly there seemed to be a “bridge” between to worlds that had always been separate and distinct—Om and the big bang were the same thing. Then it occurred to me that the utter incomprehensibility of the universe paralleled the equally unattainable comprehensibility of God. Two separate and distinct worlds started coming together. The edges of my beliefs softened. And then BOOM—I had a rush. I was shaken by the realization that everything I truly “believed” had changed. I now felt my conviction in science was a choice that I was making every day, a choice just like faith. Suddenly I understood how those I have always considered stupid, dangerous and regressive—those who believe in creationism—“believed” in what they believed in. There is no truth, I discovered, only a choice in what to believe, what to have faith in.

All through my trip I cried in the temples and ashrams I visited. When I asked myself why, I concluded that it was because my culture, our Western life seems so empty compared to the Indian way of life and the spiritual consciousness made manifest all day, every day. I saw the fervent adherents of the faith in all the temples carry their faith with them through every day and every aspect of their life and it made me cry with self-pity for this absence of spirit in our western lives. I cried because I feel so alone in my faith and beliefs. There is no spiritualism here, only religion. Because India is pluralist in its faiths—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jaynes, Sihks, Buddhists—there is a national social convention of faith. As long as you believe and worship, you are right and good. Over here, there’s only one faith. We are spiritually undemocratic here—you're Christian or you’re damned. It’s something to cry about.

Religions disappoint me but God never lets me down. I need my God. I do not want to be alone. I do not want a sentence of solitary confinement.

So now what? Where do I go from here? I don’t know, but I’ll keep reading and I am planning on returning to India perhaps every year for the next few years, and to stay even longer so that half my life is spent with people who live with a reverence for life, beauty, the senses and who share with me a desire to celebrate the gift of life every day through a divine acknowledgement of the universal.

This is where my mind was in India. To learn a little of where my body was while these thoughts grew, see the "Mogul Legacy" post.