Old Town School – On The Road

Dispatches from the road from our wayfaring travelers.

Arrival in India

The Old Town School India reconnaissance team has been here for a week and it is has been a pretty wild time. Reggio McLaughlin, Dan Fulkerson, Mary Peterson, Ronnie Malley, Pranita Jain and I (Bau Graves) have seen some rather awe-inspiring sights and some gut wrenching scenes as well. We’ve had several performances — all very positively received — and have been treated to extraordinarily generous hospitality by Indian musicians. A few impressions:

Contrasts. Everywhere we go, there are ancient monuments, forts, palaces, remarkable and grand scale expressions of Indian culture and they are enormously impressive. Last Saturday night we performed in a courtyard of a palace on top of a cliff with the sun setting on one side and the moon rising on the other, with intricately-carved marble screens silhouetted by the clear Rajasthani sky. You could not ask for a more amazing performance venue. But on the same day I saw some little girls of 3 or 4 years old dodging in and out of traffic to come knock on our taxi windows to beg for a few rupees. We’re talking about kids not much above wiggleworm age. It takes your breath away.

Music. We have been very fortunate to meet a large number of musicians already. Our group was invited to dinner with a singer and flute player that performed with us in Delhi, and it was really something special. Night before last we spent sleeping in tents in the desert after a musical evening with a large group of musicians and dancers. You would have been proud of Reggio dancing with these three elaborately costumed Rajasthani
women, while Dan and Ronnie played along. It’s a special experience to wake up at dawn with sarangi music drifting across the desert to your tent.

Food. Plentiful and great. So far we’ve suffered only a few short bouts of Delhi belly and everyone is enjoying the local cuisine — except Reggio, who brought along his own peanut butter and jelly!

Traffic. I thought Italian drivers were insane, but they don’t come anywhere close to the Indians. Not only are the drivers crazy, but they have to contend with cows wandering at random all over the roads, even major highways. Sometimes the cows, who seem impervious to human cajoling, travel in slow moving herds that can block up the whole road. Sometimes they just stand there in the middle looking holy. Yesterday, our driver used a moving herd of cows as – I’m not kidding — a makeshift slalom course at 50 or 60 miles per hour. And that’s just the cows, there’s a lot of othjer animal life on the roads here, too.

The gang is calling me now for a trip into the bazaar, so I’ll sign on for more later. We’re building up a good store of stories. — Bau

Filed under: India,Notes from Bau by Bau | October 6, 2009 | Comments (1)


1 Comment so far

  1. libby on October 8, 2009 8:18 am

    can’t wait to hear more!

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