Generosity, Non-Violence & Non-Cooperation

Having escaped Bombay I'm now in Rishikesh, where this morning I was listening to an old lecture by Jack Kornfield over a second cup of mediocre coffee.

He was discussing the roots of generosity and what that force looks like when turned loose in the greater world. Specifically, he talked about how at its root generosity requires an embrace of all hardships in this world as well as all joys, and it is only through that embrace that we can see and change the greatest of the world's ills. To quote,

"...abundance means the willingness to open to life as it is, to face injustice and suffering. As Martin Luther King (Jr.) wrote, 'We will soon wear you down with our capacity to suffer in the struggle for the rights of others, and with that suffering we will win our freedom and (yours along with it)."

To wear down an oppressor with a capacity to suffer is something worth considering in the context of our current social struggles - from the protests over Tibet, to the war in Iraq and the reality of global warming. The truth of today is that we blame a complacent public, unresponsive governments and a corrupt media system for turning deaf ears to the troubles of the world while each one of us places the preservation of our own comforts and lifestyles before the suffering of the world around us.

Consider the description below of Indian citizens staring down the barrels of British guns during the Quissa Kwani bazaar massacre of the independence movement:

When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their chests bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The paper of, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o'clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away.

Can we even conceive of such a whole hearted embrace of a cause beyond ourselves?

The fault isn't our own, it simply points to the next great state of embrace required in order to face the problems of a global community and the global solutions we need. The movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were ones involving nations and race. The challenges of today - from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the one threatening Iran; to the global issue of climate change - require a new embrace of ourselves first as global citizens and then as citizens of the Earth itself.

Protests of today are seen by the public for what they are, staged events performed for a known audience where all performers - whether activists or police - go home to their televisions and lives after the sun goes down. Our complacency of response is not a social disease. It matches the level of involvement of those who design these displays of non-violence.

We need to understand that in embracing non-violence as our mode of protest, we have abandoned its sibling non-cooperation, and that estrangement is the primary reason for our current failures. At its heart, non-violence smacks of passivity and a passive action can only lead to a passive result. Gandhi himself said that if faced with a decision between passivity and violence he would choose violence every time. Protesting the wrongs of society needs to directly affect the perpetuation of those wrongs. Any action different from that is, by its very nature, passive.

What would happen if the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile, and the 100,000 Tibetans living in India joined with those who remained in their ancestral home to march upon Beijing itself for the opening of the Olympic games? What if, like that sole protester in Tiananmin Square, they put their lives in the way of Chinese police and guns to peacefully assert their rights over what is theirs?

What would happen if those employed by Exxon, BP and Shell walked out together from their well paying jobs to demand that the people who issue their pay cheques also act in accordance with their desire for a safe and healthy planet?

What would happen if those employed by the US State Department and Defense Department left in unison until the government that offers them the security of employment, also offers their children the security of a safe world?

The answer is that these institutions would be brought to their knees within moments, and it is this power that is the right of all people, that is at the heart of Satyagraha, and forms the greatest fear of the powers that be.

These are not the only possibilities. The solutions for our problems are as limitless as the imaginations of those who conceive of them. However, the common thread is that our actions must match in scope the problems they are meant to solve. Actions must directly affect the problem, those actions must stem from a sense of self and community as large as the challenges they face.

Many will disagree with this, and that is actually a good thing. The difference between the suffering of the world and our resistance in embracing that suffering - that is, to put our own personal safety on the line - defines the growth we need to achieve in order to create the world we desire.

Beleaguered in Bombay

I love cities. Though I profoundly love nature, I'll always choose to live within the human dense drama of the urban landscape. The bigger the better, and since first visiting there two years ago, Bombay has been one of my favorite cities in the world.

With sixteen million people, water in every direction, and all the chaos that India has to offer, Bombay makes the head spin, the heart hurt and has you running for cover or screaming for more - usually in the same 24 hour day. That said, my most recent visit had me doing far more running for cover than rejoicing. The flu, heat in excess of forty degrees, and an overwhelming dose of human misery and cruelty left me suffering and gladly departing town.

On the taxi ride from the airport to my hotel in the southern suburb of Colaba, my busted-up cab rear-ended a brand new Honda. We pulled to the side of to the side of the road and after getting out of the vehicle my nearly destitute and toothless driver was physically assaulted before having his mobile phone stolen from him. I can only guess that this was to ensure that he wouldn't bolt out of the area when the claim was filed; however, it was an unnerving act to witness given that the clothes worn by the other driver amounted to more than two months wages for my cabbie.

A few days later I visited the Buddhist ruins of nearby Elephanta Island, where a crippled dog was wandering in near insanity while seeking food wherever it could, as it's rear leg swung freely from a complete break halfway up. I was a gross disfigurement that could only have been accomplished through human hands. Meanwhile, Indian tourists were teasing monkeys by discarding their used water bottles as food, adding to the already substantial layer of refuse littering the once holy site.

Worst of all was the unknown fate of an infant toddler who had been paraded through a downtown intersection. No more than 2 years of age, she was being carried by a man who demonstrated not a hint of parental care as he thrust the pulsing, bleeding wound of her left hand in the face of every passing motorist. The girl stared on in mute shock as we handed over a stack of rupees while her guardian gripped her arm and waved it in our faces, goading us for more money.

The worst parts of Bombay grind you down and leave you wondering at the ultimate fate of the city. Although it possesses upwards of 40% of India's wealth, 55% of Bombay's residents live in slums. New high rises and renovated flats exist beside shacks of tarp and tin in a third world city where real estate prices rival those of London and New York. The lack of public conscience that plagues Bombay is summed up brutally and honestly by Suketu Mehta in his Pulitzer Prize nominated account of Bombay, Maximum City:

Indians do not have the same kind of civic sense as, say, Scandinavians. The boundary of the space you keep clean is marked at the end of the space you call your own. The flats in my building are spotlessly clean inside; they are swept and mopped every day, or twice every day. The public spaces - hallways, stairs, lobby, the building compound - are stained with betel spit; the ground is littered with congealed wet garbage, plastic bags, and dirt of human and animal origin. It is the same all over Bombay, in rich and poor areas alike.

This absence of civic sense is something that everyone from the British to the Hindu nationalists of have drawn attention to, the national defect in the Indian character.

They are words that are worth considering as India surges towards double digit economic growth. But in this city whose history is painted by commerce and currency there is a more striking example of this problem. In a time of soaring wealth and a growing divide between rich and poor, the image of Mahatma Gandhi has been quietly removed from India's new currency notes.

It would be well to carry his message of care forward, alongside economic prosperity.

More images of Bombay below.

A Morning at Elephant Junction

Although my recent elephant safari was entirely unsuccessful, I was able to spend a morning with several Asian Elephants at the Elephant Junction sanctuary in Kumily.

Throughout the three hour visit I vacillated through a range of emotions. A quiet grief for the confinement and captivity of these intelligent and sensitive creatures gave way to both exhilaration at being in such close quarters with them and optimism for the gentleness with which they were treated by their mahouts, all before feeling my heart spin back again towards remorse.

By all indications the elephants were well treated and looked after. Verbal commands alone were being used to instruct them, and this even applied to the completely unruly 11 month old infant Kanan, who required all the will his mahout could muster just to stop him from eating the thatched shed within a trunk's reach of his enclosure.

The enclosures themselves were immaculately clean. Dung was cleared out regularly, and all of them were layered with thick blankets of maize stalks and palm fronds, which acted as both bedding and a continuous source of food for the elephants' ceaseless appetites.

Some elephants were quite constrained, but in fairness this varied according the manageability of the individual. Some were kept on short chains, particularly the mother of Kanan who could be understandably intolerant of human contact with her infant, but others were left completely free and stood calmly among the visitors and staff. Most importantly, all harnesses are removed each day at 5pm after the tourist hours are through.

However, despite the quality of this particular sanctuary others fail miserably in looking after the needs of their inhabitants. Small pens, lack of contact with the natural world and abusive mahouts are all common. That greater context left me concerned for the future of the species.

The population of wild Asian elephants stands at just 30,000 with about half of those in India. Meanwhile, it's much publicized African cousin boasts a population in excess of 600,000. Meanwhile, while the African Elephants compete for land and resources with about 900,000,000 people across the world's third largest continent, India's 15,000 remaining elephants face the inconceivable population pressure of more than a billion people.

This is the mathematical fact of wildlife conservation in the world's second most populous nation, and until environmentalists address the overwhelming human need of a billion individuals within their calls for conservation, the Asian elephant, tiger and a host of less prominent species won't last the upcoming decades.

I don't have an answer for this one, other than to say that it's my gut belief that there must be a place for elephants in their wild habitats along side our own, for the simple reason that we both come out of, and depend on, the natural world for our survival.

Ultimately, our mutual survival will depend on the preservation of the same natural environment.

Leech Trekking in Periyar

Yes, that's a picture of a dead fish floating in a pond, and with the exception of a troop of monkeys, it represented all the wildlife I saw during a full day safari in Periyar National Park, India.

The differences between here and Africa couldn't be more striking.

While Africa has generally received most of the press about endangered wildlife, I walked away from every park that I visited filled with both awe and optimism for the future of species at risk. Periyar felt dead, and even though it boasts healthy populations elephants and tigers, as well as a few other large mammals, there was little sign of any. Meanwhile, the quality of the wilderness experience was greatly compromised by the carnivorous appetite of the jungles overwhelming leech population.

The Lonely Planet guidebook (which now borders on useless thanks to some key format changes. I'm switching to Footprint) kindly advises that "leeches may be present following rain". While it's sporting of them to pass on the tip (Rough Guide failed to do that much), any review of the park as a tourist destination is sorely lacking without an explanation precisely what this means.

Our tour began at 5:15 am on the heels of week long rains. By 7 o'clock we stopped to view a shadowy dot on the horizon that was meant to be a deer and noticed the roadway was already scattered with a few leeches - but not the variety you're likely familiar with. Unlike the slug-like black pest you've seen at your local swimming hole, these creatures spring across open ground like Slinkys falling down stairs, and as we were to find out shortly, nothing short of the tightest woven fabric will halt their progress towards bare skin. Worse yet, these first few become a plague of near biblical proportions once we reached the jungle proper.

Arriving at the park's headquarters shortly there after, we donned our 'leech proof socks' - a kind of canvas gaiter worn like a knee high sock inside your shoe - and were rowed across to the far side of the lake for the start of what was meant to be a three hour trek. Twenty feet down the path each of us had a half dozen on our shoes and ankles. One hundred feet in I looked down to see the ground crawling with not a handful, not a dozen, but hundreds upon hundreds of marching, swarming worms. The jungle floor moved as if alive and each person's legs were covered to knee height with close to a dozen disappearing inside every available shoe.

That was it. We turned back then and there having seen no more than a hundred feet of forest and a single troop of monkeys in the canopy above. The downside of the retreat was looking like colossal cowards for calling it quits after a mere five minutes. The upside was that the intrepid explorers who stayed with it went on to spend the next three hours getting soaked and infested while seeing no more wildlife than we saw in that first hundred feet. I'm calling it a victory for both our hides and our nerves.

Later that day we headed deeper into the forest via jeep, but again the story was the same. With the exception of a few more monkeys and the dead fish expertly framed above, the jungle revealed no wildlife while the leeches continued their assault, appearing inexplicably in the inside of our covered jeep, on our sleeves, and pasted to our faces.

Granted, I'm more than a bit squeamish when it comes to the creepy crawlies of the world, but on top of the abysmal wildlife experience, the concerted lack of information about the conditions on the trek bordered on negligence. Periyar is India's most visited national park. I highly doubt this would be the case if park officials, and more importantly the tourist guide books, offered valid information about the Periyar experience.

I'd be more than interested to hear about other's experiences here. For now, I recommend it to no one. Instead, head to Ranthambore where two years ago I saw a tiger and a vast array of other Indian wildlife.

Shark Alley - South Africa

Here's one I've been looking forward to, in spirit since witnessing the breathtaking footage of Planet Earth, and in practice since first stepping foot in Africa - cage diving with the Great White Sharks.

Before describing the experience there's a need to address the inevitable and already existing concerns about diving with the great white. In particular, some environmentalists take issue with the activity because they allege that diving with these predators conditions them to view human beings as food. After a day of close quarters observation, both in the cage and from the ship's deck, I can tell you with full confidence that this concern is both unwarranted and unfounded.

To begin with, conditioning an animal to change its natural response patterns takes time, and a unique aspect about the South African great whites is that they are a completely open population, meaning that any given individual shark is only spending about three or four weeks in the area. That's far to little time to ingrain a new conditioning pattern. More to the point, whomever asserts this as a concern has a feeble understanding of conditioning. In order for sharks to be conditioned to view human beings as food, they need to receive some form of reward that causes them to believe this. For starters, they aren't managing to eat human beings during these trips. More importantly, they aren't permitted to eat anything else either. The bait used to attract sharks is pulled away before they can reach it. The entire strategy of shark diving focuses on piquing the shark's natural curiosity in order to bring it within sighting distance. They are not fed, and most importantly human beings are never presented as food, nor are they interested in them as such. Case closed there.

As far as the experience itself goes, its a phenomenal opportunity to appreciate one of natures most specialized creations. In the cage itself we witnessed great whites of up to 4 metres in length passing within a foot of our eyes. The largest of the species can top 6 metres, but there was no shortage of awe and appreciation for the beauty and power of these animals as it was.

In totaly, we witnessed four individual great whites in close quarters, and on one occasion saw one consume a giant lion's mane jellyfish measuring a full metre in diameter. The shark sucked it back with one motion, and even the marine biologist on board the vessel enthused that she had never so much as read about a great white preying on jelly fish, let alone witness it. The sighting will be her next academic submission to the professional journals.

More than anything the trip was an opportunity to witness a species deeply in peril. Despite their dense numbers on the southern tip of Africa, sharks across the world are in steep decline. Each year 100,000,000 (no that is not a typo) die at the hands of long line fishing nets and cast aside as by catch (but only after their fins are lopped off as delicacies, often with the sharks still alive). Meanwhile, collectors across the globe are willing to pay upwards of $100,000 for their very own set of great white's jaws for display as a trophy to god knows what.

The work of the tour leaders and conservationists who bring these creatures to the public eye is one of the biggest forces working in favour of their protection, and from start to finish, I have nothing but praise for the professionalism of this trip and the enormous respect they help spread for the great whites of South Africa.

Tanzania to Cape Town Photo Highlights

The departure for India is fast approaching, but while I'm still in Africa here are the photo highlights from the past two months. I've included titles and descriptions on the files, so anyone wanting a bit more context for the pics can read those directly on my flickr account here.

My Father the Sun, My Mother the Moon

I've loved solo travel ever since my first trip across Europe more than a decade ago. The sense of freedom and endless possibilities that it offers are the rarest gifts, and I always find it difficult to give them up when traveling with others.

Unfortunately, there are also days when trudging alone begins to grind you down. Whether it's the petty annoyances and uncertainties that come from being perpetually uprooted, or not wanting to face a dinner on your own (yet again!), the challenges are always there. There are also the more difficult moments, the emotional events that come without warning and leave you limping and lurching through whatever city you find yourself in at the time. It was on that note, and with a bit of a heavy heart that I started the sunset climb of the Lion's Head yesterday afternoon.

The Lion's Head is a jagged 669m guardian of rock overlooking all of Cape Town from a seat directly before Table Mountain. The peak of exposed rock thrusts clear from the brush and low trees clinging to its flanks and forms a sentinel in the midst of the city's Atlantic suburbs and downtown core. In a word, it's stunning.

I began what was meant to be a two hour hike at twenty after five with the sun still pounding out of a clear blue sky. As usual I was caught without sunblock, forgetting again that the rays are relentless at these latitudes until the sun has all but sunk behind the horizon, but the walk was beautiful and fresh. The trail circled around the peak and brought every corner of the city into view one after another before cutting upwards in a vertical chain climb and the final ascent. All in, it was about thirty minutes and several photo stops before I was crossing the summit to look for a comfortable spot to await the setting sun.

Immediately in front of me was the cold Atlantic with the suburbs of Clifton and Camps Bay clinging to its slim coast line. To my right, the smaller peak of Signal Hill stood watch over my current home of Sea Point, while behind me spread the downtown core of the City Bowl where it was nestled into the flanks of Table Mountain itself. It was a stunning panorama that I had almost exclusively to myself until shortly after six when the summit started filling up with tourists and Cape Towners alike. The company was nice though, and somehow it grew and covered the peak without taking anything away from the quiet of the surroundings or the sound of my own thoughts, which were many.

It's amazing how wrong you can get things, how incomplete your own version of the truth can be, and how blind you can be to the right way of simply being with all things, most of all with yourself. You try to live from that place, but no matter how well you think you understand, so often you end up feeling like you need some sort of answer. Sometimes its moments like these.

The sun began its final descent behind the clouds and sea, and as it did the answer to a question I had whispered only to myself rushed in. What beautiful simplicity it always is, and how terrifyingly easy it is to miss. It's as if you're capable of accepting anything in the world, except what's in your own heart, and sometimes you just need a place like this, where you can be quiet for long enough, to remember how simple it really is.

A few moments later the sun finally disappeared and all eyes turned exactly 180 degrees to look out over the opposite face of the Lion's Head, for not only were we waiting for the rising of the full moon, but this night was also the lunar eclipse. Eventually the moon broke the horizon over City Bowl as the Sun and Moon embraced its creation, the Earth, in enfolding arms from either end of the cosmos, touching every corner of our world and in doing so touching everyone I love.

I spent some time in that place and gave thanks for all the gifts of the day before beginning the trip down. It was time for a burger, and a beer.