KNOMO CHOICIUS

The Yin and Yang of Anxiety and Longing

Waiting. I am always waiting. Blame Pandora, if you have a need to blame. As the Buddha taught, humans in our inherently socialized condition always have to live with an undercurrent of anxiety and it’s mirror image, longing. So I wait. Waiting is what gives direction to my life.

Waiting is the arrow of time. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Writing this way, in an impersonalized manner, allows any reader to fill in their own blanks. Seeing the arrow of longing speeding towards a desire, or, perhaps by its own heaviness, losing speed and falling to the earth, allows us the opportunity to see ourselves as one of the entities caught up in the human condition.

Once we can see that we are so caught up, and that our desires and fears make arrows, maybe we will be more careful about the type of arrows we craft. Are we making an arrow that will pierce someone else? Is this desirable or undesirable?

Why Yin and Yang? See how one defines the other, even if you don’t realize it at first.

Here’s another version that my writing group said sounded like a professor, less lively. BUT it provides some actionable information on ways to try to escape the pain of longing and anxiety.

The process of waiting draws the arrow of time. Time is inherent in waiting. Do tigers wait for their next meal? I am not sure. Probably they are focused on doing what it takes to get the next meal when hunger tells them it’s time to do so. Humans wait. And our domesticated animals.

Back to the arrow of time crafted by waiting. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Or, once we can see that we are fashioning arrows with our waiting for certain things, we’ll take the Buddha’s advice, and start to learn to wait, rather than waiting for a particular thing. Once we see that waiting for a particular thing inherently brings anxiety, we might be open to seeing the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha in a new way. Suffering is universal. The cause of suffering is craving. Letting go of attachments to specific outcomes leads toward liberation from suffering. There is a path that can end suffering.

Here is what I wrote from a different prompt, having to do with stars.

The stars. All the stars? No. A particular set of stars draws her attention. She had waited for years for this moment. The training to sit patiently. The training to direct the arrow of attention with the flashlight of consciousness. Illuminating just what was important. Cygnus, the Great Swan, slowly approached the position that would allow the leap from earth to heaven.

The Great Swan was merely the skeleton that marked the more important subject, the Mother Goddess herself. That was the true tens of thousands of years ago and it was true on the day that Zinnia waited. Cygnus no longer had to work as the pole star, doing the hard labor of turning the universe. That was the task of the Little Bear these days. Zinnia’s heart pointed her eyes toward Cygus.

This little piece refers to the emerging modern understanding that humans way back 30,000 years ago had an advanced religion based on finding our place in the universe. One of the major stars of the constellation of Cygnus marks the exit of the birth canal of the great female figure that is formed by our sideways view of the Milky Way. This star was pole star way back when, not our currently named Polaris. So the mythology of the day had our spirits longing to return to the Great Mother through the star portal. It had to be at a particular time of year. See the writings of Andrew Collins and others.

Well, I might be shocked if someone actually reads this far and shares the results of their subsequent researches!

Random Desires?

Life builds on little things. Randomly at first, then directed, or at least guided by, some aspect of desire, which itself, is guided, at least in humans, by culturally reinforced genetic programming. Desire takes us someplace, which may be different from what our consciousness thought it had its eye on, so to speak.

Let’s put some flesh on those sentences.

My great-grandparents, the earliest generation for which I have even the least specific information, somehow met, in four pairs, and made kids. Two became my grandfathers, and two my grandmothers. I know my father’s mother had sisters, and that her parents were well enough off to get her sisters’ husbands started in business, and at least one of them got started a second time after the first endeavor failed. I guess I need to ask my dad about his dad’s siblings. I don’t remember ever hearing him talk about anyone else in his dad’s generation. As for his dad’s parents, I only know that my great grandfather was a mercury poisoned mad hatter, and that’s why my dad’s dad left Russia. My dad’s dad’s mother is a complete unknown, kindof like the mother of Abraham of the Bible.

My mother’s mother came from a big family. She was born in Scranton, PA. So I have seen photos of her and her parents. They, like my father’s mother’s parents, apparently were of some means. They were property owners soon after arriving in the USA as immigrants. Likewise, my mother’s father had a fairly large family, who had paved the way for his participation in what we now call chain migration. His relatives had a job waiting for him in the family grocery store. Eventually, he became a traveling salesman, kept company by his male and female German shepherds.

So there we have the first level of random events that ultimately led to the production of my grandparents, a necessary precondition for the eventual existence of yours truly.

Apparently, despite the existence at that time in Europe of matchmakers, I have been made to understand that both pairs of grandparents were desirous of each other. My father’s mother’s parents were apparently not too pleased with their daughter’s choice. That history wave continued to be the case, in a milder form for my mother’s mother’s feelings toward her daughter’s choice, and in full force for my mother’s feelings toward my selection. Therefore, the history wave of parental disapproval skipped from XXXX family (I don’t remember my father’s mother’s maiden name) to the Spiegel family (mother’s mother’s maiden name) where it stayed, despite my mother’s change of name on marriage.

So now we have demonstrated the move from random, or at least independent, or at least apparently independent, chains of events, being influenced and thence ultimately determined by, desire. In my father’s father’s case specifically, he was said to have fallen for Dora because “she and her sisters were considered “hot.”

Never having believed that I personally was hot, even when several boys and later men, told me that they found me to be in possession of the hotness commodity, I found it hard to believe that the grandmother for whom I am named was hot. I am to inherit the slightly colorized photo of her when my dad passes, unless he forgets to specify it in writing. In which case, I would have little hope, having become the black sheep of the family. In the photo of Dora, I do find her pretty.

Despite my belief in my lack of hotness, I still chose a mate, or allowed myself to be chosen, and despite my lifelong desire to remain free of children, nature’s pull and culture’s push resulted in my gaining offspring.

Had my dad not encouraged my interest in science, had I not decided to become an engineer, I would not have gotten the jobs at the steel mills, where I met Nick, who was a mobile equipment operator on my team when I, along with a Swedish woman metallurgist and two black men who had risen through the labor ranks into management, ran one of three shifts of steelworkers. Nick and I became friends, and we (I and spouse) began visiting Nick and his family. His daughter was “so cute,” that we began to question our desire for freedom from children. So it feels like, if it weren’t for Nick and Mary and their Nicole, I would have been able to achieve the Buddhist goal of getting off of the hamster wheel of karma or dharma or I would have been able to break what Jews call the chain of the generations.

By the way, I picked engineering as a career choice, because I desired to be with guys. Their interests seemed more compatible, regardless of my inability to experience their attraction to me.

Anyway, back to the subject. So consciously, I was heading for having a family with cute kids, and a desire to show how effective our well planned parenting experiment would be. But that brief window of desire was interrupted by the reality of having to provide for the offspring, and stick with their other parent, whose laziness became more oppressive as the basic tasks became more burdensome. Subconsciously, I guess I was going for increased compassion for my fellow humans. I experienced being trapped by the biological need to protect the offspring. I experienced the burden of having to earn a living, not just to support myself, but others. I experienced being a hypocrite, unable to rise above the walls of the small circle defining my social responsibilities, unable to speak out against things I knew were wrong. Well, that was my excuse. Hell, it’s still my excuse. But now I don’t have kids to directly support. Just myself, my ex, and the neighbors who mow my lawn, weed my garden, and plow my snow. There are still those who depend on my finances. Or at least enjoy them.

OK. 53 words in the original impersonal paragraph, versus 925+ (due to post posting edits!!) in the version adorned with specific details. Which was more interesting? Which easier to understand? If the second version was easier to understand the gist of, did the first shed light on the fact of the universality of the experience, despite potential complete separation of particular experiences?

Please let me know!!!

Use the comment feature below!

The Moons of Jupiter, and, well, Spiders

Or How to SEE the world

Last weekend, for the 4th of July holiday, I visited my friends from my new church. The 4th of July is actually the center of the “Holy Week” for this new, semi-atheist church. The Alpha and Omega Celebration is intended to help people cement their new view of life, relatively unencumbered by what they now see as an overly limiting world view imposed by their parents before they were able to think for themselves.

They don’t believe in, as the founder says, “a Big G god.” I feel like many of them (well, the group is quite tiny…so many is relative) have embraced reductionist atheism. But the “dogma,” or “scripture,” now limited to a document entitled “The Distinctions,” allows for belief in spirituality.

I volunteered to help the founder, Dan, in whatever way I can, based on my longtime study of the world’s (and history’s, and pre-history’s for that matter) religions. I may be ordained as the first “Curate,” as soon as we sort out the fact that I finally paid dues to join another church that I have attended for over 20 years, and don’t believe I should have to renounce one in order to join the other. However, I may soon care less, as the leadership of that church is refusing to have any formal soul searching about civil rights in this nation that is now hosting our spirits’ “vehicles.”

Anyway, the moons of Jupiter. Yes, so we had our Alpha and Omega celebration at Harper Lake last weekend. I actually got in the water and swam a bit. Then I got in a kayak and tried to kayak around a bit. My shoulders were ok, which was a surprise. Concern about the shoulders had kept me from believing I’d ever be able to get in a canoe or kayak again, even as I had fond memories of these activities in my youth. Sadly, I was not able to deal with the waves from the power boats sharing the lake, and it had been so long since I had used this skill set, I needed more room than usual to steer. After the second time that I found myself heading for or being headed at by a large vessel, I went back to shore. But it still felt like an independence.

Later, Dan got out the two telescopes he had bought for the occasion. Freedom from the religious ties that bind allows us to center ourselves in the cosmos revealed by science, and call it a religious practice. After the telescope purchase motivating non-event of the partial penumbral eclipse of the moon, we turned the scope to Jupiter. Finally, I saw it. A disk, not a point, and a series of pinpricks from 1 to 7 o’clock. I realized that those were the moons of Jupiter. WOW.

I say finally, because while the optics of the telescope were beyond any hopes I might have had, the features used to control the position and direction of tube were poor quality at best. Granted, it’s still a crime against humanity that they were so good for the supposed price of $60.00. That price and its implied consequences might have gone unnoticed in the past, but not now.

I feel so different to have seen the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes. And while the eclipse was a non-event, the detailed features of the moon were more amazing than any image I remember seeing. There are fine cracks in the surface, and super bright pinpricks that are reflections from I don’t know what.

My respect for those who had to make and aim their own telescopes 400 years ago has drastically increased. My personal thanks to the workers who made the one I used, allowing me a new window on the universe, before my cataracts deteriorate my visual processing further.

The full moon is a strong anchor of my first sighting of the Dead Sea, but the stronger anchor is the memory of the nuns sharing the beach the next morning, whose eyes I felt on my wet tee shirt. I had forgotten my bathing suit. The salt water made the wet tee shirt even more revealing than it would have been in fresh water.

The full moon will be a strong anchor of my first Alpha and Omega celebration, but the stronger anchor will be the moons of Jupiter. Of course, had I not known they were there, I wouldn’t have noticed them. Ten days later, I am still amazed by the optical quality of what was most likely a Chinese telescope. A $60 National Geographic branded window to a bigger world.

I am grateful for the Alpha and Omega experience of being positioned at the body of the spider, while my technologically enhanced senses reach out in all the directions that a spider’s legs do. We can see the world as a network of spiders with a new spider body at the point of every spider’s toe. Some of the legs reach back to more central spiders, until there’s no center, because everywhere is the center.

LauTzuTu and The Wind

I just ran across this little flash fiction I wrote back in 2015. Maybe it is more appropriate than ever. Even though I made up the monk’s name. :>)

This might be a Buddhist monk and not a Daoist monk as I envisioned when I wrote this…. So much for the selection in my clip art software.

LaoTzuTu set the pails of fresh stream water down and unbent his lean frame to look up at the darkening sky. The grey streaks were rapidly being obliterated in favor of an overall dark grey. He turned to glance back at the yard surrounding his stone hut. The branches of the trees were strongly swaying. They didn’t have the word doozie back in the year 300, but if they had, it would have entered his mind. The hut was sturdy. He had built it himself, stone by stone. It had a cellar. The old monk had laughed at him when he started digging. But LauTsuTu now, fifteen years later, felt vindicated. Yes, he had taken a vow of poverty. But that was related to money. The Taoists had no compulsion to punish the body or deny the senses. LauTzuTu had also planted some peaches and plums. Dried, they’d be safe in the cellar. A treat if bad times came. Something to break the monotony of disaster food, or no food, for that matter.

This wind was proving that his inner knowing had been sound. Fifteen, twenty, twenty five years of meditation practice left him feeling calm in the face of the storm. He was confident he would settle into his upper higher world soul, not his reptile brain, when the debris started hitting the hut. He also knew that his stone mason skills were good. He had learned from an old master. Still, the option of the shelter in the cellar was a comfort. And there were a few dried peaches left along with some sausage he had traded for a few weeks ago.

The wind was picking up now. Time to turn inward. He listened. What exactly is it that makes the sound of the wind, he wondered. Then he chuckled as he walked deliberately toward the hut, the pails of water swinging easily at his sides. He’d have plenty of time to think about it as he waited out the storm.

Then and Now

Back in Time; Retroactive was a prompt at a writing conference I attended in 2017. I just found this and thought it was cute. A change of pace from the recent India posts. And maybe newly loaded with more layers of meanings. This could be my “higher self” talking to my mundane self….

How you sounded then,
and how you sound now.

How you walked then,
and how you walk now.

How you looked then,
and how you look now.

But what you know today,
and didn’t know then.

And how you now think,
but wouldn’t back then.

And how you now see,
but couldn’t before.

Oh, how you shine
a different light
now.

An unrelated question: Do you love mushrooms?

November 8, 2017

6th Asian Heat Treat Event

“I was wondering if I would figure in the post about the conference,” my colleague and friend Shankar wrote, when I still hadn’t posted anything after my return home. “You will FIGURE!” I informed him. After all, it was a lot of his unrelenting hard work that made the event happen in the first place. Here’s Shankar’s video image, while he is introducing one of the dignitaries.

Shankar, on the big screen, introducing one of the keynote speakers

The 6th Asian Heat Treat and Surface Engineering Conference and Expo was held in Chennai, India, the first week of March 2020. We all watched with dismay as the coronavirus spread, and fear and government restrictions started impacting many events world-wide. Several of the speakers who were scheduled to participate from overseas were not able to attend. There was still a lot of great content presented to an enthusiastic audience. For people who are not engineers, heat treating is a technology and an art form that makes modern technology possible! There’s some evidence that early humans were intentionally heat treating stones to improve their characteristics and usefulness as long ago as 45,000 years (or more!)

As you can see in the above photo, conferences in India are MUCH more COLORFUL than those in the USA. Of course, life in general is much more colorful in India than in the USA and Canada and Europe. That is certainly one of the things that I enjoy about traveling in India. Lots of colors and spices are what I enjoy. For those who have not traveled in India, two other senses can be challenging to deal with. Sounds, especially anywhere that they are intentionally amplified, tend to be LOUD. (I had to wear earplugs at one point during the weeklong religious ceremony that I attended in Rishakesh in 2019!). And the smells are wonderful when it’s spices and incense, but when it’s air pollution, it’s not so pleasant. As for tactile, the main difference that I experienced during this trip was that it was hot outside, and one of the Hindu temples I visited was extremely crowded inside (I literally had to be pulled toward and then back away from the shrine where I offered a prayer.) But the conference itself was in a well air conditioned hall, so it was comfortable!

There was even a dance performance as part of the evening activities.

This conference was supposed to be the first I attended in India, but I got a little warm up at the Royal Society of Chemistry Smart Materials Conference at Periyar University in Salem the day before this event started. Indian protocol requires a detailed introduction of dignitaries. We were honored by the Minister of Industry of the State of Tamil Nadu, Mr. M. C. Sampath, who attended wearing the traditional Indian men’s white clothing. Scottish men are not the only ones who wear skirts! The photo at this link is from a website selling clothes, and is not the Minister we heard from, but it gives an idea of this traditional garment.

Soon it was time for my presentation on the Yoga of Failure Analysis. Usually I not nervous when I give a technical talk, but here I was going to be telling Indian people about yoga! The talk was definitely different from the rest of the presentations. I mentioned how the great Patanjali, the compiler and editor of the Yoga Sutras, was teaching that direct perception of the world was a legitimate way to obtain right knowledge way back (scholars say no later than) 1600 years ago. This was at the time when Western philosophers were still completely enamored with Plato’s Ideal Forms, and distrusted any data coming through the senses.

Glittering elephant sculpture at the entrance to the Chennai Conference Center.

The audience was happy to hear that, and broke into applause. One of my major goals had been to remind my colleagues from the sub-continent that their ancient culture has more value today than many of them realize. Well, the grass is always greener….on the other side of the fence!

However, since my return home, I found out that I was apparently WAY OFF, and that Indian philosophers were actually discussing sensory input as a source of right knowledge as long as 2500 years ago. Someone I recently met at a semi-atheist church had called my attention to Matter and Mind: The Vaiśeṣika Sūtra of Kaṇāda, recently translated by Subhash Kak. Indian philosophy is just AMAZING. It has always been pretty much “self-evident truth” (at least to me, once I started thinking about it!) that there is NO source of knowledge that does not originate in the sensory organs of SOMEONE. There’s no other way to get raw data so that one’s intuition can effectively function. But Western science was held back for a very long time due to the way that Plato was practically diefied!

So, any of my Indian friends who are reading this, maybe you will invite me back in a few years to share my latest findings about how to cultivate clear thought! Subhash Kak is an engineering professor at Oklahoma State University with lots of side interests!

In addition to giving the Keynote and a second, more technical talk, at the conference, I had the opportunity to teach a short seminar on How to Negotiate Failure Analysis Work. There were about 60 people, so not everyone posed in the photo.

The woman to my right (with purple shawl) is my friend who I met in 2017 at the last ASMI Chennai Failure Analysis seminar that I presented. She traveled from Bengaluru, where she now lives and works, to attend. I was surprised and happy!

Teaching the Failure Analysis Seminar at the 6th Asian Heat Treat and Surface Engineering Conference

A Royal Enfield employee attending the conference! My neighbor Wayne loves their motorcycles, so I asked this friendly looking engineer to pose with me. See their product below!

Royal Enfield Motorcycle! A popular way to get around Asia!

Off to Chennai- No Wait- Salem

I flew on a ticket purchased through Orbitz on Hahn Air, and then eventually found out, after 3 months and 2 long phone calls later, Hahn Air has no airplanes. I was really traveling on Spice Jet. They don’t actually give you a confirmation electronically til you show up at the airport, if you don’t buy the ticket through an Indian company. But all went well on the non-stop flight from Guwahati to Chennai. I have found my uncertainty about loose ends less anxiety producing on this trip for some reason.

I actually prefer how Indian airlines board their planes. If there are two doors, they board from front and back based on where you are sitting. People don’t usually have too much carry on baggage on domestic flights, and it’s much more democratic. Like in the OLD days in the US when they boarded the BACK seats first, so people did not have to crawl on top of each other. The person sitting next to me was not talkative. So be it.

The coronavirus situation is causing problems worldwide. The reason for this trip to India at this time was a Heat Treating and Surface Engineering Conference and Expo that was sponsored by the Chennai ASM International Chapter. But five of the planned international speakers cancelled. At least one was taking the opportunity to present at two conferences.

So at the last minute I got invited to present my Keynote for the Heat Treating conference at a small university in Salem, Tamil Nadu, the day before the Chennai event started. This second conference, on smart materials, was sponsored by the British Royal Society of Chemistry.

It is pretty amazing to me to show up at a place half way around the world, and knowing a few people who I have kept in contact with since my last trip to Chennai in 2017, be immediately accepted as an honored guest. That’s the benefit of belonging to an international society.

I opened by telling the audience that before I became an engineer, I thought I wanted to be a chemist, having had Marie Curie as my childhood heroine. So, a few decades late, I will say that being the keynote speaker at a Royal Society of Chemistry conference is close enough to being called an “honorary chemist” for a day. Drs. Gopi and Gopi, a married couple, who organized the conference, she a physicist specializing in magnetism, he an actual chemist, sent me the below photo of me sitting up there (being stared at) as the center “dignitary” of the event! This was an article from the local paper, that is (presumably written in Tamil) and I do not understand at all!

Periyar University Holding British Royal Society of Chemistry Conference on Smart Materials. This gave me a second chance to give the talk on the Yoga of Failure Analysis. Here I am, the only woman on the stage, but 60% of the Periyar University student body is female!

Dr. Bela S was traveling from Chennai to Salem, so the Periyar U organizing committee bought me a plane ticket to accompany him to Salem. They put me up in a fancy Radisson Hotel. Drs. Gopi and Gopi are at left.

Periyar University is named after a famous atheist social reformer. India has many social reformers. But Thanthai Periyar (see link at left), who emphasized the dignity of every individual, was controversial in this very religious and spiritual country.

Statue of the atheist social reformer, Periyar.

The conference got off to a late start, and the Indians do not, apparently, “believe in” letting people read their slides themselves. And every one of the organizing committee members insisted on personally naming and thanking every one of the speakers. And every one of the speakers gets a full introduction. The organizers always think it is important for the attendees to know how smart, important, and etc. etc. etc. the wonderful people who have come to enlighten them ARE! So it was a good thing the main original keynote was not there, or we would have been off to a later start than we were. I was told to prepare a 20 minute and a 45 minute talk. As the introductions wore on, I eventually was given 2-3, maximum 5 minutes instead of 20, although I did use the whole 45 minute slot after lunch.

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many women students in the auditorium. I was told that the student body is actually 60% women. Yeah!

Two of the other speakers, Dr. John Philip and Dr. Zoltan Kolozsvary, are in front, as the attendees filter in. John Philip gave a very interesting talk about smart materials. He is at left. We discussed how he gave his son an Indian sounding name as he was tired of people asking him why he had a British name. Dr. K, at right, said that his MOTHER’s name was Zoltan. The only other Zoltan I have ever met was a man. Dr. K is Hungarian, but Romania ended up with that part of Hungary, so he is a Romanian citizen. He was a very early contributor to the design of nitriding heat treatment furnaces.

Lunch, that was another story. We had been told we were going to be taken to the Salem Cafe for lunch, which was where they served us giant Thali platters on palm leaves the day before. I asked “Why don’t we stay here on the campus and eat with the STUDENTS???” That idea was not even entertained. It would have put us back on schedule, but no, they insisted we could get to the Salem Cafe, eat and get back to talk in 20 minutes. I refused to have anything but a coke, my second one this trip. Because once you start eating, they keep feeding you and I knew I would get indigestion from eating too fast. Of course, lunch took an hour.

I wanted us to get back on time because I knew we had a 5 hour drive to get back to Chennai for the original conference. Well the 5 hour drive was really a 6 hour drive. We finally left after all the triple goodbyes, at 4:45 pm. With a short tea stop, we arrived at 11 pm. The student who accompanied us and the driver did not get back on the road until after midnight, because they wanted to make sure that the other foreign dignitary had gotten checked in to the Taramani Guest House at the Indian Institute for Technology- Madras. I had already checked in for one day before I traveled to Salem. Anyway, Indian professional drivers always amaze me how they can stay alert for so long.

Assam Gibbon Sanctuary and Tribal Life

We had a long adventure to get to the Gibbon Sanctuary after a short stop back at the Orchid Co-op to buy souvenirs. This was not the first time I would have been happy to spend more money to get a higher quality of craftsmanship, but it just wasn’t available. I bought one of the many roughly carved wooden rhinos, some Assam tea, and some locally grown Stevia leaves.

The Gibbon Rest House was our destination, but Google Maps (and the entire internet) does not know that this business exists. We did have the street address and finally made our way to the goal, which had a giant yellow sign marked Spot On Gibbon Homestay. But the owner, Diganta, insisted that the sign had nothing to do with his business and he would (FIVE YEARS after opening HIS business, FIVE YEARS of confusing his customers later…) ask Spot On to remove the sign. OK. Ok. Ok.

No. Despite the sign, we are NOT at Spot on Homestay.

There is very limited information on visiting the Gibbon Sanctuary available on-line, and when planning my trip, I had found a traveler’s blog, and they said they stayed in the “Forest Guest House.” The “Gibbon Rest House” was not IN the sanctuary. It was 15 km away in Jorhat. I complained to the travel agent AGAIN. He said there was no accommodation in the sanctuary. Finally, the guides provided by the government explained that there is a Forest Guest House, but it is only for use by the park employees. So I do not know how those westerners got invited, but I didn’t get the nice forest birdsong I had anticipated as my lullaby. I got normal Indian city noises, loudspeaker blasted Islamic calls to prayer five times a day, and reasonably quiet nights, interrupted by the occasional dog barking, and terminated by some loud roosters.

Compared to the views of the elephants and rhinos, the gibbons were less photogenic. They are entirely arboreal, and they stay high up in the trees, like probably a minimum of 60 feet or 20 meters, and they are not that big. So without special photo equipment the sharability result is limited. But they were a lot of fun to watch swinging through the trees. Thinking about it, I guess that means that if there were gibbons at the Brookfield Zoo (near Chicago) they were probably living too close to the ground for their ultimate happiness. In any case, here is a flavor of what we saw. Overall, in three half days, we saw an apparently unprecedented 6 groups of 1-6 gibbons. The guide provided by the national park, the armed guard (in case we surprised some elephants), our hotel owner host and guide all started telling me at the 10 am breakfast break the first day that I had brought them luck. I told them NO. It was a gift from Maa (Durga, great goddess of India). By the end, we all agreed that 1) I brought them luck 2) Maa blessed my visit and 3) the guides were skilled. I was told that there are people who make the trip and NEVER see a single gibbon. In fact, as we were getting ready to leave Kaziranga, a British woman said they had made a brief stop at the Gibbon Sanctuary and had seen no gibbons. So, there you have it. Diganta bought a wonderful cell phone with a fancy stabilizer, so his video was the best. Here is part of what he shot. The male is black, and female brown. She’s a bit harder to see. They are obviously enjoying life.

Since I am still at the IIT Madras Taramani Guest House with reasonably fast internet, I will now upload a few videos from the dancing at the Orchid Co-op. After the professional dancers finished their 20 minute presentation, the host invited the audience. The Home Science students I had met earlier in the day pushed one of their classmates to sing. She has an angelic voice. Then they all started dancing. They looked really happy. I will have to see what I can do later to add the video. The file is too big, and was captured sideways.

Happy Home Ec College Students Dancing at the Orchid Park

Everyone is always taking photos and selfies and videos of everything in Asia. The happy young women continued their dance, and toward the end of this clip, two Western women are joyfully welcomed into the circle.

While we are back in the orchid park, and on the subject dancing ladies, I will post the picture of the beautiful Dancing Lady orchid.

The last afternoon in eastern Assam, sated with my blessed and lucky gibbon viewings, we made a small jaunt to a village where the tribal people of Assam still try to maintain a hint of their old life-ways. First thing I see?????? A Baptist church!

Baptist Church in Small Village in Assam, near Nagaland border.

There was even a (dry) Baptismal Fount off to the side. Well, I have always been conflicted about Christianity in India. But it provides a counterbalance to the devastation created for the lower caste and out-cast people. All sisters and brothers in Christ is more appealing to the Western democrat than the hierarchical system of the bronze age, as much as modern India has struggled to reduce its damage.

We were invited into the home of one of the families. Everywhere in India, people have wanted to take selfies with me. Here are three family members, including two cute young girls.

Assamese Tribal Family. Many of the people of this region look somewhat Chinese. They are considered to be genetically linked to the Chinese, and we are not far from the Chinese border.

Baptist family roasting beef in Assam, India. They are Christians, so they eat beef. There has been violence against Muslim beef providers in India.

I also spent an hour or so talking with my taxi driver, Sarwal, and some members of a tribal “Self Help Group” that had built a small amusement park, complete with boating in a small lake. Like many places in India, it’s not for the weak kneed. I got to practice my Hindi a bit, even though the native language, Assamese, is preferred. These people did not refuse to speak Hindi with the same force as my friends in Tamil Nadu, who mostly claim they do not know any Hindi.

My taxi driver, Sarwal, explained to me that he only looks at Facebook when he is “boring” because he has to wait for his customers to see what they came to see. I tried to have Dharmendra explain the difference between BORING and BORED, but am not sure I had much success.

Sarwal looking down at the lake, from near the entrance of the small, still under construction, amusement park.

Well, I am going to post this already very long post, but will briefly jump ahead to my second to last day in India, when I went to the Arignar Anna Zoological Park. It’s the largest zoo in India. They do a lot of work to rehabilitate populations of endangered species. Dressed like an Indian, I was less popular as a selfie subject, but these young ladies asked for one.

I started getting tired of people asking for selfies. So I told them I wanted one too. One of the four of them took this photo for me. I had been walking more or less near them in the “walk through aviary” at the Arignar Anna Zoo, but was not sure if Muslim women wearing hijabs wanted to be seen with an American. It was exceedingly hot, which was the reason I had my shawl covering my dark hair.

The Horned Spoonbills, and other things…

We really got lucky with the wildlife we saw. In addition to some pretty close views of elephant groups and rhinos, we saw several pairs of Horned Spoonbills, large birds, and it’s their mating season.

Spoonbills Mating Video by Dharmendra

We had three total jeep safaris to see the wild life, and had planned one day to visit a tea plantation. There was ANOTHER communication problem and the tour company left us a morning to figure out on our own how to visit the tea plantations. There wasn’t much going on this time of year, and so there are apparently no ongoing tours. We did stop to look at one tea estate that had tall trees with black pepper vines growing up the trees. The still green pepper corns were plenty spicy.

Black Pepper Vines Climbing the Shade Trees on the Tea Planation

The tiny unfurled leaves are what are harvested to make the tea that is sold to prepare the beverage.

We then continued wandering around and found a rubber plantation, also without anyone to give a formal tour. But we ran into a field trip of a “Home Science” college class. The young lady and I bonded over our pink clothing and my limited Hindi.

My new “pink sister” and her Home Ec Professor. No I did not go down the very steep hill to wade in the water.

And finally, we ended up at a co-operative venture with an orchidarium, and an ethnic museum, which does dance displays from about twenty of the local tribes, some of whom are trying to maintain a traditional lifestyle of sorts.

Another beautiful orchid. Much easier to get to co-operate for photos than the gibbons turned out to be!

This photo was taken with the microscope mode on my Olympus TG5 digital Camera.

Ok. I have arrived at the Taramani Guest House on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology- Madras. They have blessedly fast wi-fi and so I have gone a little nuts uploading these photos and videos much less painlessly than the last post entailed.

Tomorrow, I am going to Periyar University in Salem, Tamil Nadu, to a Smart Materials Conference. It was a last minute invitation. I’ll be traveling with another person who is attending the main conference I came to India to participate in. So I will have two chances to present my Keynote Talk on The Yoga of Failure Analysis. We’ll be taking a short flight in the morning, staying overnight, giving our talks, then driving back to Chennai to participate in the Heat Treating and Surface Engineering Conference. So I guess it is time to practice my presentation a few more times!

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