Christmas in Cochin

We recommend Fort Cochin (the seaside part of the larger twin cities of Kochi and Ernakulam). A short train ride from Aleppey, Fort Cochin is a wonderful tourist spot -- pleasantly kept up, reasonably priced, accessible. It was the original landing place for travelers from the west -- Arabia and Europe.

We marveled at the numerous houses decorated for Christmas, with doors open, carols blaring, and happy families walking around. On Christmas Eve, we attended midnight mass at the Cathedral, for several hours with most of the neighborhood families.

We also enjoyed the seafront, with its "Chinese nets" and fresh seafood for sale.


And the antiques market street, near the old synagogue. KJThomas has a nice shop, where he sells beans.




St.Francis Church, the oldest in India, is well-maintained by the Church of South India now.

We also saw the classical dance performance style Kathakalli, with its incredible makeup and stylized silent dance.


Then we boarded the overnight train north, to Goa.

You say Aleppey, I say Alappuzha

Aleppey is the central town for the backwaters of Kerala, centered on Lake Vembanad.
As we see in the overpainted column in the train station, the town's name was recently changed to reflect its name in the local dialect.

The train station welcomed us with season's greetings.

We arrived at our B&B to find the owner scolding us for e-mailing rather than telephoning our confirmation! We settled in under the mosquito net and ceiling fan, explored the town.


Coleman liked the several large nativity scenes in front of various businesses.

I enjoyed the United Carol Singing celebration on the YMCA basketball court, with two stages running, and a large attentive crowd for the loudly amplified and earnest singing in Malayalam.

Alappuzha is sandwiched between ocean and lake. We went to the beautiful beach.

The boys particularly wanted some ice cream, as it was named after their Uncle John!

Lake Vembanad has a small outlet to the bay of Cochin, now regulated by a series of locks. In olden days, small cargo boats plied the waters -- but in more recent times those boats have been converted to overnight hotels.
We splurged on an overnight trip, and what a pleasant luxury!
Barbara thoroughly relaxed, on viewing the sunset over the rice paddies.

The next morning we saw workers commuting to their rice paddies
...


And we couldn't resist taking a photo of St.Thomas lakeside church.

For the full photo album, click here

Southern musings

The South, Far South. That expression usually has some meaning within most countries, especially when the capital city is not in the South. India is similar to the U.S. in the salience it gives to the north-south divide. Of course, in India, that divide is dramatically accentuated by the corresponding linguistic divide as well, in which the 4 officially-designated southern states speak and write languages that are totally distinct from the northern Sanskrit/Hindi-based languages. The only words they share are the religious or colonial idioms.

The capital of Kerala state is now called ThiruVananthapuram. We had arranged for a room at the YWCA Guest House – actually the 5th floor of the large office-like YWCA building, on the main road (just as every U.S. town has an MLK Boulevard, so every Indian town has an MG Road -- named after Mahatma Gandhi). The ‘Y’ was spartan, but clean and helpful, and very centrally-located. We took a day-trip to the tip (described in an earlier post), also to the fabled Padmanabhuram Palace and some temples on the way. Jeff was most interested in the subtle differences as we crossed the state line – from Kerala to Tamil Nadu. The language changes, of course – but the most noticeable differences otherwise were the political billboards, as the communist parties in Kerala literally dominate the landscape. The street scenes of the capital city Trivandrum/ Thiruvananthapuram (say that three times fast, and you’ll get an idea of the Mayalam language) are filled with red flags, banners, and posters emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, and pictures of the grand old men of the Keralan Communist party, photoshopped next to Lenin or Marx or other archetypal socialist hero, announcing a party meeting on the 26th!

The South is filled with religion, even more than the north – religious buildings are the most prominent: mosques and temples and shrines and varieties of catholic and protestant churches, all apparently prosperous. When we mentioned going South for Chrismas, most northerners said “Oh, all the churches will certainly be filled there.”
The mosques and the Hindu temples seem to be competing for audio status – most of them seemed to be blasting prayers or songs from loudspeakers as we passed literally dozens on our long bus-trip to Cape Comorin / Kanniyakumari.
It is ironic that the two southernmost states – Kerala and Tamil Nadu -- have the most avowedly secular governments. The longtime head of Tamil Nadu, affectionately known as SunglassesMan because he is always pictured in big dark sunglasses, recently enraged the Hindu fundamentalists when he repudiated their declarations that the sandbar between India and SriLanka was the remnant of a bridge built by Lord Ram thousands of years ago. And although Christianity’s social conscience probably affected Kerala’s development as the most literate state, with the lowest infant mortality rate, there remains considerable tension between the church and the avowedly-secular Communist government.

Another noticeable thing in Kerala is the peoples’ pride, both in their language – it seems more monolingual than other places in India – and pride in their state. Several people assured us of the wonders of Kerala, either reminding us of its current tourist-motto: God’s Own Country, or assuring us of its wonderful climate and completeness. That’s reminiscent of Texans bragging of their state.
The other analogy that comes to mind is Bombay residents’ pride in their crowded dusty exciting city, that sounds just like New Yorker pride.


Padmanabhapuram Palace
Our bus tour to Kanniyakumari from Trivandrum actually included a stop at the seat of Keralan royalty from 1700 to 1900, the Padmanabhapuram Palace. It is one of the largest extant wooden palaces, with intricate carving, as well as a notably different wing intended for European guests. The palace is now located in the state of Tamil Nadu, but is officially a little pod of Keralan territory, in small recognition of their former glory.

Christmas Holiday arrives at long last

A long semester, with discussions about the school’s official search for a new principal, Jeff’s election to a special Core strategy committee, and Barb’s service leading the elementary school, wound to an especially tight and busy close, with late-night grading and report-card-comment sessions. Happily, both Chris and Cole seem to have managed honor roll grades as well as good health.

We look forward to 3 weeks in the far south where it is always warm. First to Kanniyakumari, Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India. Chris and Jeff can now claim to have traveled the north-south extent in six months, after their July visit to Panamik in the far northwest – that area is isolated six months of the year by snow-covered passes.

Kanniyakumari (formerly known as Cape Comorin) is a notable Hindu pilgrimage site; its two tiny offshore islands recently gained more prominence with the addition of a temple to Swami Vivekananda on one, and to Tamil poet ThiruValluvar on the other island, and a small overloaded ferry to both. Swami Vivekananda was mentioned in the book Encountering God, from Bozeman to Benares, as the sole Hindu representativa to the World Congress of Religions in 1893, in Chicago.
Now, the guides at the tenple tell us that the Swami was uncertain whether to make the effort to take his message of enlightenment to the Americas. He swam to the island in December 1892 and meditated there without food or water for three days. Then he returned to the mainland and proceeded to Chicago

Soon after the Vivekananda Temple was built on the one island, the state government decided that the other island needed a bigger monument to a regional hero – the poet Thiruvallur whose great epic poem had 133 stanzas deserved a statue exactly 133 feet high. Strangely out of place and defiantly local (the Tamil separatist movement is a touchy subject in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and New Delhi), this monstrous statue to a literary hero is still quite impressive to visit.

The Cape is the official meeting place of three great bodies of water, as several guides reminded us: the Bay of Bengal on the east; the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Indian Ocean that starts here to the south. As such, it is a place of religious pilgrimage for certain devout Hindus, who visit the (rather ugly) temple there, and bathe in the waves.
Just before the end of the semester, Coleman was researching a report about Martin Luther King. He found in MLK’s autobiography a fascinating connection – King visited Cape Comorin in the spring of 1961 to observe the marvelous annual simultaneous sunset-and-moonrise over the oceans. We stayed for the sunset, though the moon’s cycle was not so aptly timed in December.

Advent Outreach

The combined congregations of St.Paul’s, Hindustani, and Christ Church do some outreach service every advent. The Woodstock school bus takes us all down the hill to DehraDun. This year we re-visited two past sites – the KKM Leper Colony and the Charisa Orphanage.

The residents at KKM requested our return because they remembered our Christmas carols. One member of Christ Church, Vijay Das, is the son of a songwriter who penned numerous Christian folk songs and carols in various Hindi dialects.

We brought a meal that we shared while sitting around on the ground: some fry-bread, a packet of cooked chickpeas in spicy sauce, and a sweet pumpkin squash packet, with a banana for dessert. The weather was sunny and warm (80 degrees F), and the welcome was palpable. Leper colonies are still important in India because of the elderly that suffered before modern medication, and the stigma that remains attached to the disease. This group is sponsored by a French charity that has formed a weaving cooperative, that sells high quality rugs and cloths.

We also visited Charisa Home, an orphanage for HIV-affected children. We visited there last year and found fifteen delightful children under-10. This year we arrived to see 30 more children in their day-care program. These newer children were even more needy, though still quite happy in this loving place. They all sang several songs for us, and the resident orphanage kids recited the entirety of Psalm 38 for us – in Hindi.

Jeff's Advisor Group

Every semester we invite Jeff’s advisees over to the house for dinner and games. A few, like Pritha, Samita, and Vedika, come over early to help prepare the meal and enjoy more conversation.

Early December show

At the beginning of December, the middle school dorms put on an open house and talent show.



A cold snap brought out all the winter coats, but Coleman and his breakdancing crew stole the show with their hot moves!








Cole and his buddy Sanskar later decorated their hair red, white and blue, for a special costume day at school.