The old man with cats gives me hope. Everyone else, ...

Last Saturday there was another trek. It was much shorter this time. Pictures are here:



After the trek people got together at Gokul. Fun, but something seems to have followed me home lodged in my gut and is causing general unpleasantness. Regardless, the most memorable thing of the day was meeting the man who fed the cats. Yogish and Shoba had told me about him earlier that day, and we came upon him walking from where the taxi dropped us (everyone else had a desire to go home and take showers that somehow overpowered the desire for food and beer). The man who fed cats is an old man, and according to Shoba, he spends about 150 of the about 200 rupees (approximately $5) that he makes every day on fish for the city's stray cats. We stopped to watch the cats eat. There were about a dozen, tabby, calico, a couple not yet full grown teenager-kittens, all of them looking sleek and tough. They devoured the bombil fish that the man would pull the bones out of and tear into small pieces that he gently tossed to these cats. Shoba tried to pet a tabby who was devouring a piece of fish on the recessed part of a wall, but the cat didn't seem so keen on having its back pet while it was eating so she let it be. I learned that the cat feeder has about fifty cats that come to the three or four places where he regularly brings food. He knows them all, and they recognize him.

Sunday was a slow day. I eventually made my way into the office to check the internet. (I still don't have a connection for my apartment - which wouldn't be such a big deal if I had a phone that could make outgoing calls, but my "phone" is really just an intercom that can receive calls from the outside world. I could also get a mobile, but the general hassle of getting one is a common topic of discussion for other expats, and I'd rather avoid it...)

Anyway, I ended up reading this article in Rolling Stone about Tibet. I visited Tibet 20 years ago. I remember Lhasa as a place where I ate momos and fried bread from the market, drank tea with butter and salt with a family who adopted Eric and I just because. In the Bharkor market I bargained with thumb and pinky for a brown corduroy chupa (and then acquired the nickname "Khampa Chunchun" when I wore it) and some leather glacier goggles. I remember hitchhiking out along a dusty dirt road towards the valley with caves where one version of a Tibetan creation story holds that the monkeys decided to come down out of their caves and become humans. We camped in a field by the side of the road and woke up in the middle of the night as a herd of yaks wandered by. In the morning we climbed the ridge of rock and sand. I made it about 100 feet from the top and couldn't keep going because I felt altitude sick for the only time in my life. I read the article's description of what things are like there now and my eyes swam with tears. That place where I was is gone. Tibet is consumed, and with the spoils of the carnage, China creates missiles to move an arms race into space, fighter jets to sell to those who can't get them from the US, Russia, Great Britain or France, and building the largest dam in the world.

Many people in China and India have the attitude that it is soon going to be their turn to be at the top of the hierarchy of world power, and that exploiting land and people in order to get there is perfectly allowable, perhaps necessary, because that is how it has always been done. And that "getting there" largely means having lots of shallow material junk that is all as new as possible. This may be truly the way things will play out, and I've had a number of chances to hear people spell this out for me. I tend to respond with the observation that they're a bit late in the game, that the map is pretty much closed and that there's not going to be much left if they can't come up with something more creative than copying the west. If you want to live way beyond your means and exploit the rest of the world to do it, it kind of requires a rest of the world. India at least seems to have quite a bit more compassion towards than China. Not that it's a nation of saints by any means. Ahimsa is largely a myth, but there are a few cat-feeding old men and people who know that getting along is the only way to make it work in and among the noisy bustle of those who just want more flash.