I SAW MYSORE ON THE SEASHORE

Well, not strictly on the seashore. Mysore is landlocked in Karnataka, but I thought it sounded good so let it go..

Big times! A lot has happened since my last post. A LOT! Its been amazing. And I am only three weeks in. I am writing this from a luxury hotel in Mysore where I am staying for two nights before returning to the school for my last week. I never thought I would end up in a luxury hotel but I did, and not through my agency! One of the two brothers from Madikeri who are involved with the school runs a tour agency and I asked him to organise a visit to Mysore for me. He did, but didn't tell me what kind of hotel he had booked. I was astonished to wind up in this luxury pad last night and even more astonished to discover that my stay will cost a pocket-blasting fifty pounds! How will I cope???

But I am running ahead of myself. What has been going on?

Well, for another week or so I was still having a great time at the school, but then hit a crisis. For one, all the drama work I was doing with the kids was fab but exhausting, It involved a lot of running around, banging drums and being exuberant. Couple that with getting used to the Indian climate, sleeping on a rock-hard bed in a dusty little hut and still being a little freaked out by everything and you have a recipe for overload. And overload I did. I was running around playing a chasing game with the kids last Saturday and then WHAM I knocked myself out on a beam from one of the huts. I blacked out and found myself lying on the floor with all the kids around me. I went to bed, having been looked after by the other teachers and woke up feeling very wonky and emotional. I decided to go back to the house I had stayed in nearby for some rest and in my fragile state plunged into a Dark Night Of The Soul. All sorts of stuff came up which had been bothering me all week - what was I doing out here? What was I going to do when I got home? How could I go about travelling around this vast and often overwhelming (and sometimes terrifying!), unfamiliar country? Who was I? What was I doing? Had I made a terrible mistake? Was I going to die out here? Was a I horrible failure? In short, it was not much fun.

THe next day, I resolved to speak to some of the other teachers about what I had gone through. I had already had some wonderfully rich conversations with them and I thought they might understand. And thank God I did, because one in particular, Laurie, put me completely straight. She said that everyone went through what I was going through, that India was very intense and at first any Westerner feels totally freaked out and thrown by it, that the coming up of all sorts of big emotional stuff was all part of it and an IMPORTANT part of it and that I shouldn't worry and just let it happen.

Knowing that what I was going through was a common experience immediately helped me. I realised how I had become kind of schizophrenic - one part of my mind in India trying to come to terms with it all, the other part clinging to England to protect itself. No wonder I had cracked my head. I took it to be myself telling myself to stop running around so much and to stop thinking so much. Laurie told me that if I needed to rest I should take the morning off and I did. I lay in my little hut and had the most extraordinary three hours of just total letting go. It felt like a complete death and rebirth and when I reemerged feeling refreshed and strong again, I realised that I had gone through an immense change.

I almost wrote 'my little cell' there rather than 'my little hut'. As the days have gone by, I have realised that the school is the nearest thing to a kind of monastery or religious community I have been part of. I had been living in my little hut like a kind of ascetic, and the Dark Night Of The Soul I have described had really happened. Something old had died and for the first time I was relaxed and unafraid. It was as if I had given msyelf permission to be in India for the first time. I remember reading how the Cathars, as part of their initiation in the state of being a Parfait, spent three days in a sealed cave so as to reenact the time in the Tomb of Christ. When the reemerged, their old self was 'dead' and they had been 'resurrected' into a new self. Suddenly this made perfect sense to me. I also remembered the defining experience of Maharshi Ramana (whose Ashram it emerges a friend of mine has just been on and which I hope to visit) which was one of going through a kind of 'death' experience which he said purged him of all fear of mortality and enabled him to live as he did from then onwards.

What I had experienced wasn't on that level but it was a kind of death and rebirth nevertheless. I have said in conversation before that death & reincarnation/resurrection is something we go through periodically in life and now I realise more and more that it is true. We shouldn't be afraid of these things. More, its a measure of the ethos of the school that I felt I could talk about these things to people I had known for barely a fortnight. How hard it is to share one's vulnerability in our normal lives! How afraid we are of admitting problems or fear to those around us in our working experiences. And yet being able to share these things meant I could work through them.

Anyway, enough embaressing stuff. Since that turnaround things have just got richer and richer. Being with the kids is wonderful and has been bringing up enormous thought processes. I think a lot about my family's history out here, not just my grandparents but those members of my family who served in Wingate's Chindits. I began to think about how those ordinary soldiers, from the Raj to the Second World WAr (which was the Raj of course) must have coped being taken from the UK to other side of the world where everything was so different. I thought about my own distress and confusion at adjusting to India and then instantly understood why how for so long the bulk of our colonial ancestors, faced with a culture they did not understand which was so different to theirs, just shut down on it and kept separate from it. And yet even this was not total - as you live here you recognise how subtle and complex the relationship between the British and India was and still is. The two psyches were fascinated and repelled by each other. They still are, most probably, When you see a fellow Westerner out here, looking red or pasty, either pretending not to be all at sea or looking like a cliched hippie traveller, you recognise how silly we must seem and how we are still enacting the same confusions our ancestors did in an alien culture, albeit in not so violent a way...

And then as time goes by, one ceases to be quite so freaked out by Indian society and begin to recognise that it is not so unlike our own. In the end, the social problems the world faces are the same everywhere, as are the spiritual and emotional ones. We just all do it slightly differently...

So lots of new things - as well as a strange reliving and reclaiming of my own childhood. Memories are coming up as I teach and play with the kids. Memories of my own upbringing and home and my time at boarding school. I have said befoer what astonishing kids these are. And they are. THey are like a family - and one of real, genuine love. Every visitor who comes to the school remarks upon their quality and the enriching experience of being with them. One Swedish guy was discussing with me the horrors these kids had seen but also the wonder that they were experiencing at the school. He had only been there a few days but when I said I hoped that the darkness they had experienced hadn't scarred them, he said, with no trace or irony or sentimentality, 'One would hope that the love they are experiencing here will take care of that.' And he was right. It is a tangible thing here. We in the cynical West, or perhaps cynical England, get so embarressed even by the idea of discussing love as a concept. And yet it IS transforming. It has transformed me in the past and it is transforming me now. Its very real here. One doesn't need all the Scriptures which tell us it to be the truth to experience it. Perhaps we need to give ourselves to it more...

Of course it involves great risk, as one might get hurt, but here in this school I am experiencing it as a very real thing.

So... Mysore... Well, Mysore is great. Still a bit bonkers, but a terrific antidote to the shell-shock of Mumbai. Mysore is one of the great cultural centres of Karnataka, home of Tipu Sultan, who kicked British bum successfully for many years until the Duke Of Wellington shut him up. Its dominated by an amazing Palace which the ruling family lived in until the end of the Raj. I was there today. Its amazing. Surrounded by sixteen temples - of which I was able to see those dedicated to Vishnu, Lakshmi and Krishna (Krishna's being the one I really responded to) - it still comes as a surprise to discover that it was completed in the 1930s and was designed by a British architect! A wonderful explosion of Hindu, Muslim and European design ideas it is a real stunner of a place to visit. Your breath is taken away one minute by a hall of green and gold, then a vast chamber with stained glass ceilings covered in peacocks and then shocked to find a naff piece of pseudo-classical sculptuer of Hermes charging at you from out of a pillar. Oddest of all is a life-sizs statue of one of the RAjahs which is fully painted and looks like it might get up and talk to you (even the Rough Guide mentions this)...

THe Temples weer fascinating, although none of them struck me as the Jain temple in Mumbai had done. These were all Hindu temples and are so different in mood to Churches et al that it is a wonder to behold. On the one hand they are very old (and a bit run down) but on the other they are very quirky. In one I found the priest in traditional semi-naked robes catching up on the latest news in the local daily. But the sensuality and richness of the temples is fascinating, as is their informality. People come and go, take blessings, talk, worship, pray as the please and the Priest gives them the blessings they need. This informality is hugely appealing and is reflected in the richness of the temples' imagery. One thing you quickly spot is the fact that all Hindu Gods look happy. THey smile and dance, look well-fed and without exceptions have lovers. Vishnu, Siva, Krishna et al all have wives with whom they enjoy life with. Krishn even had mass group sex with a load of Gopis for God's sake!

Jung described Hindu temple entrances as anthills with Gods crawling all over them and in a sense he is right. Hindu temples are covered in hosts fo dancing Gods, smiling and sometimes making love. On one mobile temple I saw in Tipu Sultan's fort a woman was depicted having sex with a donkey! The sense of celebration and fecundity of the imagery is wonderfully rich. Being taken into the 9th Century temple in Tipu Sultan's fort one became overwhelmed by the number of Gods inside, most of which I had never heard of, and I thought I was well-informed about the Hindu pantheon! Polytheists take note - there is a wonderful delight to be had in the profusion of Gods out here, but one can also see how lost you can become within that! Fascinatingly, when we eventually went to Tipu's own palace and walked in his gardens, the breathtaking formal layout was a real contrast to the more intuitive, freeform sprawl of the rest of India. It was a classic example of the precision and focus of the Islamic mind at its best. I'm not saying it was BETTER than the Hindu mind (far from it!), only that one could see the contrast. Hinduism is so prolific, so rich and multifarious, so aware of the cyle of things and the onenes of things one can forget the equally fascinating formality and precision of Islam when it is really creative.

And this is what is so fascinating already about India. Yes, people still try to scam and cheat you (a group of rickshaw owners tried to spin me a yarn about how nothing was open today because it was Valentine's Day (!!!) but offered to take me to somewhere else. Happily my driver was at hand and once I had checked the truth of all this with the hotel I just spent the day with him, which was great as he knew where everything was and stopped me from being cheated), but all you see is the most incredible diversity. In amongst the teeming colours and noise and bustle of the streets you see a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks in their orange robes strolling around, a group of Muslims in their distintive dress doing some shopping and then, most bizarrely, an enormous neo-Gothic church rising up out of nowhere with its own Indian take on the iconography of Christ and the Virgin Mary. THroughout all this one is thrown back into thinking about all the different ways in which we have expressed ourselves spiritually over the ages. After a day of Hindu Gods in all their rich profusion, for instance, visiting the Church of St Philomena made me suddenly aware of something we have completely lost sight of in the West - just how humanistic Christianity was intended to be. THe delight of the Hindu Gods, which give us an insight into how it must have been to understand oneself in terms of the Egyptian, Greek, Celtic or Norse Gods, are many-armed, animal-headed, strange, unfamiliar creatures which, although they inspire us with their vitality, also remind us of their separateness from us (with the possible exception of Krishna, the one I relate to the most). Going into the Church, all you see are humans - Christ, Saints, Mary etc. You realise how the attempt was to show how the Divine was located in humans and not 'out there' beyond us. Of course, that's not how it worked out as we know, but the purity of that and the focus of that was brought home to me today.

So a day of the relative energies and merits of what we call Islam, Hinduism and Christianity... I don't want to chose between any of them, and would rather have them in the plural than in the singular. I am even more of the opinion that the Dawkinsian ability to be utterly umoved or unimpressed by the richness of their expression is a sign of deficiency rather than sophistication. They are part of teh rich inheritance of the human race and our imaginative/emotional/spiritual life. One is struck by how dangerous it becomes when we forget their central message - that God, nay all Gods are within us - and think they are entirely external and independent of us, but would I want religion entirely banished from the earth as I recently saw on a website? What do you think?

The Temple which has struck me the most out here has been the Jain one I saw in Mumbai. But in fact even this was dwarfed by the greatest Temple I have encountered out here: the Indian landscape. THe most mind- expanding, heart-filling experience I have had so far was the drive from the school to Mysore... But that can wait for another day...