Ellora and Ajunta Caves

“I think the atmosphere in India suits you. Before, when you come, you are a little bit thin. Now, you are just a little bit fat.”

HA. People here crack me up. This was one of the first things my co-worker Vanitha said to me this morning. As much as I would like it to be true, I think she’s probably crazy.

On to the update. There is SO much to tell you all! I have been having the most wonderful time lately, largely because I have stopped taking my malaria pills, which have notorious psychological side effects and were making me exhausted, depressed, and pretty darn homesick. Not to mention the nasty nightmares. I stopped taking them a couple weeks ago, and since those last two weeks I have been chipper, energized, and happy-- I’m assuming there’s a connection. So that’s been a relief.

Another source of excitement has been my recent travels. The B’s and I planned a mini-adventure to coincide with the ceremonious dropping-off of Barbara at the Pune Airport. She’s leaving us for the Himalayas and a 3 weeks trek, before she finds other NGOs to work with for the remainder of her 2 year stay.

Mann Vikas generously offered up the use of a car and driver for our trip, allowing us to get everywhere twice as fast as state buses would allow and with a completely intact sense of sanity, which buses certainly DO NOT allow. If you can imagine sardines in a can, you have a very minimal idea of what it’s like to take a bus ride in this country. But I digress. So we drove to Aurangabad to stay with Ann, a beloved fellow AIF-er who is working with migrant labor education programs and has a fabulous and spacious apartment all to herself. She had the apartment beautifully prepared for our arrival—a bounty of fruit in the kitchen, extra mats and sheets to sleep on, curtains in the spare room. It was so sweet! We used Aurangabad as a home base and from there took two day trips to the Ajunta and Ellora Caves. Both sets of caves are religious temples, hand-carved (not naturally formed) and intended for use by monks during the rainy and flooded monsoon seasons.

The Ajunta caves are all Buddhist, and were carved between 200 BC and 600 AD. There are 30 in total, and they ring around the inside of a circularly curved canyon (see my semi-aerial picture to the left). Inside, the caves were dark and cool and had some remnants of what must have been beautiful fresco-style murals on the walls, columns, and ceiling in addition to chiseled and detailed work everywhere. Huge Buddhas were, of course, the central sculptures of most caves, and the acoustics were amazing. Barbara has a pretty funny video on her camera of her singing a few notes, which were held beautifully in the air for the longest time by the breadth of the room, and me, randomly on the other side of the temple responding her to her spontaneously with another note, and eventually, we had picked out the tune of a symphony we both knew by going back and forth with operatic notes. It was funny at the time. I should note, too, that we got to the caves as early as we could and had the good fortune of having the caves to our ourselves, initially, before hoards of school children came encouraged us always to stay at least one cave ahead of them. Acoustics can amplify annoying noises, too :)

While I think the Ajunta caves were my favorite, the Ellora caves were impressive in their own right, and according to Lonely Planet are MORE impressive. The Ellora caves have a few Buddhist caves, but are from a later time period, 600 AD to 1000 AD, so they’re reflective of the fact that Buddhism had “gone out of fashion” at a certain point in time, at which point all the other caves (maybe 30 out of the 34 Ellora caves) are either Jain or Hindu. The most famous and awe-inspiring of these caves is the Kailasa temple (see picture below), which is apparently the largest monolithic sculpture in the world. Hewn from rock by over 7,000 laborers over a period of 150 years, it covers twice the area of the Parthenon in Athens and is one and a half times as high (all facts are courtesy of Lonely Planet). The temple is hard to explain, but I’ll try- it’s as though someone dug a donut-shaped area out of the inside of a cliff, so that there is still high rock in the middle, which was carved elaborately into a building/temple, but around that central piece is a ring of wide floor which is exposed to the sun , and around THAT are the high, vast walls of the mountain, carved into columns and internal caves. It’s incredibly hard to explain, but was quite literally the most amazing man made thing I have ever seen. Really. It was breathtaking.

From there we picked up Ann from work and headed on down the road to Pune for the weekend. There, we stayed with other wonderful AIF-ers (Sara, Alissa and Vaani, who was in Gujarat for the weekend), who have just gotten their own apartment in the heart of the city, next to the gloriously creepy Osho Commune, and the delicious German Bakery (which is where all the commune people hang out, but the muesli and coffee and wheat bread you can buy there makes it more than worth it). It’s really strange to be sitting in an internet café plastered with pictures of the Rajneesh and know that, despite his criminal reputation in Oregon and the minor infraction of trying to poison and overtake an entire town, he has still managed to maintain a religious following amongst white hippies from all around the world. But anyway. Over the weekend I was able to drink coffee, buy some books, do a little Christmas shopping, eat almost an entire chicken (involuntarily, but it was delicious), and mail some letters. It was a productive weekend, but Pune is crazy enough that I am always very happy to be heading back to my quiet little hamlet when my trip is over.

So that was my trip—it was pretty wonderful! It felt great to be a tourist and see something other than fields of crops, livestock, and the narrow streets of my village. Nothing official is planned for the future yet, but for now I’m feeling content to have at least a few uninterrupted weeks of being “home.” Ann and the girls in Pune are planning to get the village experience in early November by visiting Mhaswad for Diwali, the next big holiday and a BIG deal here. Diwali lasts for 5 nights and involves women wearing brand new saris, a bunch of country-fair style rides which attracts people from nearby villages, dancing at night undoubtedly by only men, and probably other things that I’ll have to get details about and write about later on. BUT, yesterday I happened to find an absolutely beautiful cotton sari while helping Brenna shop for sari blouse fabric, and bought it so that I could celebrate Diwali in style. I’m pretty excited.

Other thoughts:

-My NGO just launched its new website, which I haven’t even seen yet, but it’s supposed to be pretty nice. The address is: http://www.manndeshi.org/

-If you are so inclined, I would love to get mail! I would even go so far as to tastelessly beg for care packages. Things I would love are: granola bars, coffee beans, a New York Times, books, DVDs, a cloth handkerchief, a small pillowcase (random assortment, I know). There is, of course, the understanding that reciprocity demands I bring souvenirs for all who generously respond to this personal plug.

-Thank you for the comments you’ve been leaving on the blog!! I look forward, every day I get internet, to checking to see who may have written something. It keeps me connected to you, which is wonderful! Keep me informed of what you’re up too as well!

That’s it for now! Love you guys!

(I would love to post an album of all my pictures if I had more access to internet, but for now, I'll try to include more in the posts...)