Pondicherry is in a sense one of the strangest places I’ve visited in India. Amazed at the stark contrast between the old French part of town and the rest of the city. Basically what separates the two is a sewage canal that has been cemented now. All you have to do is step over it to go from one world to another.

The old French area is almost eerie – hardly any motor vehicles, beggars, cows, street vendors, etc. Mostly western tourists (especially French) zipping around on bicycles on clean, spacious streets lined by leafy trees. In the evening the beach boulevard gets a bit livelier as people – both Indian and Western – come to sit and hang around. The first impression of the bus station is not encouraguing but once you get into Pondi proper you can almost touch the Gallic air. A wonderful laidback little slice of France. It is unique in India and probably unique this side of Laos/Vietnam. the people to be more reserved. It’s a bizarre day when you eat a beautiful bagette sandwich and black coffee and then practice your French with an 8 year old school boy with his Magic accent…there are also a number of French restaurants which serve great food and the owners are usually extremly interesting people whop might play patanque as his counterparts might do in the suburb of Nice.

While crossing the canal to the Black Town (Les Francais used to call the Tamil/Hindu/Muslim/Christian Indian side of the town) is like stepping out of the front door of a well-insulated house into a raging storm! Hundreds or thousands of tiny shops, some hardly wider than a man’s shoulders, have available for sales seemingly everything the planet has to offer: silk, shoes, spices, bicycles, remedies-herbal and physical-palm readings, fortune-tellings, pots and pans, sweets, bits of bicycles, rugs, ear-cleanings, fruits, jewellery, ornaments, bits to make bicyclels bites, soaps, trinkles and, of course, everything manufacturable in plastics and stainless steel in every shape and size. Temples, churches and mosques, large and small, of every faith and creed, many garlanded with beautiful flowers and reeking of sandalwood and jasmine, stand on street corners, shabby or well-maintained parks, in marketplaces, at bus station, dotted along the edge of the highway even between the petrol pumps on garage forecourts.

The area is dominated by the ashram. Spent quite a while observing the happenings in the courtyard where Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are buried, people from walks of life, every nationality and personality, race and face, sitting quietly on the ground or putting forehead on the white marble of the shrine, meditating or concentrating, or just trying to wash out the sins? A bit disturbing to see all the merchandise on sale in the ashram – books, photos, etc, though. Was it what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo wanted?

Sunday. Just came over from the fish market. Olala that’s a scene NOT to miss. Women (surprise surprise this place seems to be deminated by women, how rare in a country as India) in all sort of sarees squtting on heir stands of shrimps, fish and shells, yielling to each other at the highest of their voice for the price and quantity, the wave of sounds and the strong smell directly from the Gulf of Bengle, the huge barkles on heads to carry the commodity, and the slippy sticky stingy ground… The Tamil language falling down like a waterfall from the peak to the valley in Himachal… All in all I LOVE the place. Most of the shops will remain closed all day along, another influence from the coqs?

Time for the beach!

Spent days on train from Shimla back to Delhi then Chennai and finally a three hours bus trip to Pondicherry. The toy Train from Shimla to Kalka was specially designed with narrow gauge less than 80cm, even with my long salwaz I could cross it with no difficulty at all. As the only foreigner in Shimla Queen Deluxe I had the Tahli with other honeymooners and businessmen together, of course., with my fingers.

The Kashmiri porter has been waiting for me in front of my hill top guest house for long before I checked out for the train. Indians like to talk and no matter what sort of education and experience they have, when you sit down with them cross-legged with a Chai in hand, the topics would cover everything from Hollywood to Bollywood, from George Bush to Gandhi family, and of course Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai, the forever fascinating comparison between the dragon and the elephant, from power cut to population policies. Interesting new field we had on the long way down from the end of the lodge to the proud Shimla railway station though: the Israelis’ behavior in India–I know I am obsessed to it…, but this time was really different—he was showing off his adventures with Israelis girls, sexually, of course. Rather shocked while trying to show him my calmness I shook my wedding ring in front of him several times almost hit his long eagle Kashmiri nose.

Then 30 hours crossing the subcontinent from Delhi to Tamil Nandu. After one month in the Himalaya from the peaks in Ladakh to the foothills in Himachal, I was almost surprised to see thousands of kilometers of flat land. Arriving Chennai at late evening, the sudden downpour and neon lights of multinationals from my auto rickshaw wallah’s yellow and black three-wheeler reminded me that I was back to the big city, indeed, one of the most dynamic cities in India, might be among all the cities in Asia.

The East Coast Road from Chennai to Pondicheery is perhaps the first and only world-class high way I have seen in India. With limited access to vehicles, almost no horn, no hassle, the journey with local bus was as smooth as the surface of the road itself. Surprisingly, I was contented, even proud, when I was looking at the neat sign boards, clean yellow lines and the beautiful coast scenery along the trip, as if India was my mother country and I was showing it off to guests and tourists from outsides.

Well, if there were not the SLUMS. Well designed initially with huge foreign investment and promising local government, Chennai’s CBD and major tourist areas are as organized as anywhere else is in the world. While right after the corner of the State Bus Station the slums are mushrooming to all the direction. Most of them are, as anywhere else in India, next to the wall of a major construction, so they only have to find materials for the other three sides and the roof. Eventually the temporary huts will turn to be permanent establishment, with some electricity and water supply and even toilet and sewage as some of the slums for Bangladeshis in Benares. Nevertheless, Chennai’s are still new; some even next to the basement of the yet-to-be evaluate way to Bangalore, which means the votes oriented politicians have not been there yet for the basic infrastructure, and there’s no power, no water and no toilet for human wastes yet.

So now I am in Pondicherry, the French part of l’Inde, an internet café 20 mintues away from my Ashram International Guest House, which closes the door at 22:30 (!) sharp. Just enough time to answer emails before I walk through the evening crowds in the boulevards, rues, beggars holding mini size babies, shaking empty palms as all the fingers were gone, calling me ‘Ma! Ma!’ with forever broken voice back to my airy huge room for the rupees it charges.

Bonne nuit.

Going on a holiday? Make sure that the Great Indian Family is not at the same place. RANJIT LAL

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/05/01/stories/2005050100480600.htm

IN the “old” days, your first worry when you checked into a hotel or guesthouse at a resort or hill-station was whether the bathrooms were clean, the beds free of bugs and the food palatable. Nowadays your main concern is what kind of people are staying in the rooms next to yours?

We seem to like holidaying in herds, either huge joint families or groups of colleagues and friends, which may be good for familial and social bonding, but not for the people in the rooms next door. The Indian joint family on holiday or a bunch of colleagues on holiday together, can (and often do) wreck the very raison d’ etat of your holiday.

Family holiday

For a start, the Family firmly believes that it is (the first and) only family in the whole country that has decided to take a holiday. Because they have (or at any rate will be) paid for their board and lodging — so have you but who the hell are you anyway — they have complete and exclusive rights to the entire hotel, resort, hill-station, district.

Thus, they will swagger into the hotel or resort, as if they are Americans taking over another country that cannot properly defend itself. For the period of their stay the hotel, hill-station and district are theirs exclusively. And so they may do as they please, monopolise all the facilities of the place, and indulge in their God given right to litter freely and with complete abandon.

The hotel staff is of course no better than bonded labour, to come when whistled at, serve and clean up the mess — and politely so.

Their beloved children of course, can do no wrong. So, naturally they may play football or volleyball outside your room at all hours of the day and night. Dare you protest or complain!

Their doting parents will look hurt and explain, “bachche hai” (they’re children), even if the children concerned look more like 20-year-olds. And even worse than the screeching, screaming children are their parents, when they’ve consumed more alcohol they can handle, and much too quickly.

Morning blues

It is at four a.m. the following morning that you get your most diabolical ideas for dealing with them. Like tiptoeing outside their doors, a huge steel dekchi and steel spoon in your hand… need one go on?

But alas, you know this is a hill-station and starting a steel percussion band at this hour is the equivalent of committing a capital offence, no matter what the provocation.

Besides, where the hell can you get a steel dekchi and spoon at this hour? Ah, but you could throw the empty booze bottles (littering the verandah) against their doors and politely explain that they “forgot to take them inshide”.

When the Family enters the dining room, service to all other diners must of course cease forthwith and every waiter in the area must scurry to their table. And try and make sense of the vociferous and completely higgledy-piggledy ordering that takes place — of items not anywhere on the menu, but cooked so well in their own homes by famous grandmothers.

Once this is over, the entire dining room must listen avidly as they discuss family politics, marriages, how Lovely is being given a hard time by her mother-in law, who made her drop out even though she got 50 per cent after “study-study-study”, and gut-busting, multi-crore business deals, all at 95 decibels. In between bellowing into their mobiles (each member of the Family has one and must receive/make at least five calls per serving).

Value for money

And what is it they want in these cool and pristine surroundings? They may have the Himalayas in all their splendour laid out before them, walks in pine-scented forests, lakes of a blue you can die for, wild flowers that would make mafia dons go gaga, and what is it that they demand? Forty-five channels of cable television, discos and DJs, video game parlours, speed-boats — anything that makes as raucous a noise as possible and preferably has them at the centre of attention. Any resort or hotel that has a view of the mountains or is tucked deep in some forest should be banned from having these facilities!

Sometimes, of course, tour operators aid and abet this process further. In a tiger reserve for instance, the clients must see a tiger or naak kat jayegi. Then they can go home with that smug glow on their faces and claim, “I saw a tiger”. Not so much because it was such a magnificent sight, but because paisa vasool ho gaya (they got their money’s worth). By simply goggling the tiger in its home, they somehow scored macho brownie points over it. Never mind that (thanks to the tour operators’ machinations) 16 jeeps and 12 elephants surrounded the hapless animal, pinning it down. They may as well have gone to the zoo — it would have been much cheaper and they wouldn’t have had to rise at some unearthly hour. You’re probably thinking that I’ve been exaggerating to the ends of the earth in this litany of complaints. But here’s a bit of reality that I’ve been saving for the end.

So be the judge: Some years ago, at a resort in Naukuchiyatal, we were giving thanks to the Almighty as one great Indian joint family took their leave of the place (after annihilating the word “tranquillity” from all of Kumaon).

They were finally getting into their cars, when one of the women looked up and shrilled in a voice that would have shamed the great barbet and must have carried all across Kumaon. “Sweety, susu kar lo!” (Sweety, have a pee!).

And loud and clear from one of the rooms, Sweety, a hefty 14 year old, bellows back. “Nahin aa raha hain! Kyaa karoo?” (It’s not coming! What to do?)

I eased in and out of cultures, switched tongues, I hold together with string, tape and staples. All of a sudden, I am tired of wondering around, I want to shut my eyes and rest. I want to go home.

At age twenty-nine, I found that when I looked in a mirror I no longer know my eyes. They are underlined, undefined, my outlines smudged like an ink drawing left in the rain. There are things I have to do before I die silently without any mark of passing through the world in my mind.

O. called this morning. We have clung together through 5 years now, on and off, shared the same roof, traveled extendedly, across distances, on the phone, broken up and reconciled, fought over smallest details. We are unable to acclimatize and remained addicted to each other over years, more warriors than lovers.

Months after I left China, a raining night in my tiny room at the top of the hill station in Shimla, O. still managed to sneak into my dream with the mountain winds.

I felt tears gather as I looked out from the terrace of my tiny Woodland Guest House room. It had been intense and wholehearted between us. Once O. wrote me an email of poems he wrote, I never forgot that.

Navigating in the British leftover of churches, rail stations and theatres, for a single moment I felt lonely and sad, for Ma Solitude. The needs of sharing moment, only if there was a person next to you so you could point out the grand hotel’s shabby clock tower as you shouted ‘Regarde!’ to him.

But it passed, the sort of feeling. Things pass. Forget about it, I told myself. You have a long way to go.

Architecturally Shimla could be any hilly town in England or Scotland with its Mock Tudor buildings and Christian Churches. The prohibition of traffic seems to also prohibit the real India from venturing up the hill, although back on the roads at the foot of the hill it is the normal hustle and bustle, the main town center seems to be the reserve of richer Indian who come here to holiday and honeymoon and show off their latest Indian fashions. Trendy Coffee shops and rows upon rows of knit ware shops line the roads. Not a single hawker, beggar, or street seller in sight.

Quiet, quiet, unbelievably quiet and shanti, as if you were in Beijing railway station with not a single cling of sound. The feeling of being at the edge of the world. Shimla wears a sleepy cloak. The small, patient movement of a street sweeper in their salwaz and vest, dwellers sitting on small pavement stools outside their shops or at a restaurant at the lower bazaar.

A furious wind from the west surged and swilled. From this height, I could see the plains all around, for miles and miles. The sky is grey, misty, a typical Monsoon morning. Several hawk of some sort are trying to fly up to the peek but just managed to bob up and down, pinioned by the wind.

‘You are from?’ Some questions are raised as if there’s a blank for your answers to be filled in. ‘Which country you belong to?’ ‘Which is your country?’ ‘From where are you come?’ ‘Your good name?’…

‘How old are you? Are you married? Do you have children?’ The India’s holy trinity of questions.

I invented an alternative domestic universe for these questions since I have arrived the subcontinent. It is a more acceptable one, with a busy working husband, a respectful job, planning for some children after I go back to the country I belong to, an apartment with a garden I bought with my hubby, a dog. Somewhere deep inside, perhaps, it was a world I wanted for myself. Without a flat, I am homeless. Women who wander around along were not acceptable if not shocking, I could see this from the other side of the burkhas when I was in the Muslim side of the country. It speaks of a certain breeding and status, to have men look after you. Upper-class women stay inside of their houses and alongside their husbands or daddies. I hang on to my journey, sink into it, because for the time being it is all I have.

There are always long journeys through the country, an overnight bus ride can hardly cover 250 kilometers along the foothills of Himalayas. On the Tata Sumos and Mahindra buses, listening to the rusty casstette recording of Hindi movies, Tere haathon mein sapneh ki dori hai, things felt torn and broken. Forests, gorges, rivers, waterfalls, snowlines, peaks, passes, orchards, apple trees, pinewoods, chai stalls, bridges, armies… Same Same, But Different, the most typical T-shirt slogan in Khao San Road of Bangkok came to my mind all in the sudden. Strange things happened in the mountains when I switch from town and town with local bus trips in between, or from bus to bus with stops in town in between? An old Taiwanese song, ceng jing yi wei wo de jia shi yi zhang zhang piao gen, I used to believe my home was the receipts of tickets, from destination to starting point, to another strangeness.

I can be a tumbleweed forever, I can keep going. I looked back at my pictures years ago when I was stuck into fashion, facial and fabulous side of the city I used to belong to, I feel like a different person now. There’s a softening at the edges of my mind. I want to keep going.

The Young

World News > Drugs, wild time lures Israeli bagpackers to India

Jerusalem, Apr 18 (IANS) :

Thousands of Israelis travelling to India each year are inspired not so much by its religious trappings but by drugs, trance parties and exclusivity, a Israeli researcher has said.

The visitors do not fan out to the regular tourist hubs in India, but retreat to a few villages and centres along the Himalayan foothills, says the study published in the local media.

The Israelis staying in these areas — who at any given time could constitute as much as 90 percent of local tourist population — are creating a cultural discord with their behaviour and conduct, it claimed.

The study, conducted by doctoral student Deriya Maoz with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, claims the young Israeli, most of them fresh out of the compulsory three-year military service, display indifference, if not contempt, towards their Indian hosts.

Some 50,000 Israelis visit India each year. The researcher, however, claims that there was a discontent simmering among the locals over the condescending and “neo-colonial” attitude of these bagpackers.

Her study is based on three visits to India where she spent weeks living among the backpackers. Apart from a few spiritual trappings, most had no knowledge of India and rejected outward symbols of Indian culture, she said.

Indian cabin walls are plastered with Hebrew advertisements of trance parties.
Hebrew is the lingua franca in these “enclaves”, and restaurants offer menus in Hebrew. Even the Indians serving Israelis often speak fluent Hebrew.

Locals — who are dependent on the Israeli presence for their livelihood — refrain from reporting the matter to the police even when raucous Israeli drug parties disturb their peace, local Indian residents interviewed by her said.

On the basis of these interviews she claims that there was a possibility of an “Indian backlash” if the discord continued any further.

Israel’s consul in Mumbai Yaron Meir, who acknowledged the problem, said the embassy was ill equipped to deal with it.

The problem represents a “cultural clash between peaceful Indian values and a loud and noisy Israeli herd behaviour,” the Haartez daily quoted Meir as saying.

Indian Embassy spokesman Shubrata Das was quoted as saying that no complaints had reached Tel Aviv.

“India was a big country and the cases referred to by Maoz were most likely isolated. They should not be exaggerated and were unlikely to upset our strong ties with Israel,” he said.

The Older

A few weeks ago, Zev Zaidman went shopping at Costco to buy what he’d need for Pesach. His purchase: 200 pounds of matvah.

His unleavened bread was then boxed up and distributed among a few of the guests who would be traveling to the seder.

“What could be better than the mitzvah of carrying matzah?” mused Serena Shaw.

Zaidman of San Francisco and Shaw of El Cerrito were about to take part in what was dubbed the “Liberation Journey.” Organized by Zaidman’s brother Zak, also of San Francisco, the group was bound for a seder here in Dharamsala, the home of Tibetan Buddhism and His Holiness himself, the Dalai Lama.

“Within five minutes of hearing about it, I thought, ‘I’ll go,” said Shaw, who is in the midst of studying for her conversion to Judaism.
Last week’s first-night seder, which drew a plethora of Israelis as well as visiting Americans, was about seven hours long, largely due to the use of both English and Hebrew, as well as a mix of Chassidic storytelling, singing and vocal percussion.

Travelers lounged on pillows on the floor, drinking homemade wine and eating the food prepared in a kitchen that had been made kosher for Pesach.

Jazzy Green, an 11-year-old from Santa Monica traveling with her parents, prefaced the Four Questions by asking guests to pray for Gedhun, the Panchen Lama, who is in line to approve the next Dalai Lama. The youngest Tibetan political prisoner, Gedhun is almost 11 and is under house arrest with his parents in Tibet.

“It’s important to remember him because he doesn’t have freedom like we have,” said Jazzy.

In another variation at the seder, the potato, which was served as the karpas, was dipped in salt, since the water here is undrinkable.
On the second night, Elizheve Hurvich of Mill Valley led a more alternative seder, with two Tibetan Buddhist monks in attendance. Surrounded by the mountains the Tibetan exiles escaped through, she was struck by the similarities between their exodus and that of the Jews, who fled through the Red Sea.

“Our freedom came through the waters, and theirs through the mountains,” she said.

SaraHope Smith of San Francisco, who celebrated her 34th birthday on the trip, said she had always felt an affinity for the Tibetans’ struggle for freedom.

“It’s so potent to be celebrating our freedom here.”

The long voyage to northern India began April 1, when 14 people from the Bay Area plus one from Los Angeles set out on a 2-1/2 week journey to celebrate the Jewish festival of freedom in the foothills of the Himalayas. Most of the travelers were affiliated with Chochmat HaLev, the Jewish Meditation Center in Berkeley.

Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile, has become a haven for spiritual seeks of all sorts. Westerners seeking enlightenment, Israelis on their post-military sojourn through Asia, hippies who have lost track of where they originally came from and how long they’ve been here.

The Bay Area group turned out to be seekers of a different sort. All but one are in their early to mid-30s. Most are at some turning point in their careers or, if not, at a point of significant change or transition.

The idea of the trip first came about when Azriel Cohen, a Toronto native now living in Jerusalem, came to the Bay Area in November. Cohen, who was raised Orthodox, is the founder of Ohr Olam, an institute he launched to cater to the huge number of Israelis coming through Dharamsala each year.

Cohen first came to Dharamsala in 1997, on a research mission to find out why such large numbers of Israelis were drawn here. He decided to do something to aid their spiritual quest.

For the past four years, Ohr Olam has been hosting a seder, serving approximately 250 people, mostly Israelis. With the help of some American expatriates who run the KhanaNirvana Community Café here, which hosts weekly Shabbat dinners complete with freshly baked challah, Dharamsala is no longer a one-religion town.

What confirms it is that Chabad moved in two years ago – after successfully operating seders for years to serve the huge numbers of travelers in Katmandu, Nepal, and Bangkok, Thailand.

Those traveling in the region now have their pick of two seders in Dharamsala. Ohr Olam also offers seminars on Jewish teachings of various types, with faculty members ranging from an Orthodox woman educator from a Jerusalem yeshiva to Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew and the Lotus, who was here for Passover.

Cohen’s efforts to establish Judaism in the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist enclave received the Dalai Lama’s blessing in 1997, when Cohen and his associates met with him. And when Cohen visited the Bay Area, he received the blessing of Zak Zaidman, who teaches and studies at Chochmat.

Although the initial meeting with Cohen was only exploratory, Zak Zaidman quickly began pondering how a group from
Chochmat could make a contribution to the work of Ohr Olam.

“There’s a certain openness that we cultivate in Berkeley and San Francisco,” he said. “I thought we could bring a piece of our community here, knowing that there would be a lot of Israelis and people exploring their Judaism.”

Said Smith of San Francisco, who was also in the planning stages: “It seems that Israelis can use Buddhism to find inner peace and then connect back to their Jewish soul.”

Furthermore, Zak Zaidman recognized that helping Ohr Olam fit into Chochmat’s mission. Quoting one of Chochmat’s spiritual leaders, founder Avram Davis, Zaidman said, “’We’re sweetening the root of Jewish,’ and a lot of that has to do with not just doing it on a local level but everywhere.”

Moreover, since Chochmat is also a meditation school, participants study other religious traditions as a means of deep-ending their own. That approach meshed perfectly with plans for an interfaith dialogue in Dharamsala.

When Zak Zaidman began to circulate word of the trip, mainly to those affiliated with Chochmat and Keneset HaLev in San Francisco, he soon had 40 names. By January, the trip was confirmed. As time went on, the group dwindled to 15, the maximum number he could take.
E-mails began to circulate rapidly, discussing practical matters such as what to bring, as well as how to get an extension to file income taxes. The group also met beforehand, to learn about Buddhism and Hinduism.

And then on April 1, the group left San Francisco International Airport, bringing the matzah as well as a Torah.

In The Jew and the Lotus, Zak Zaidman had read that the Jewish delegation meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1990 brought a Torah with them, as a gift to the Buddhist leader. Kamenetz wrote that he felt it kept the travelers safe. But the Torah that group brought was a replica. The one carried by the Bay Area group, which is currently used at Knesset HaLev, was not.

“I loved bringing it,” Zak Zaidman said. “It’s hard to carry, because you can’t carry it like a bag, but I never had difficulty in finding people to carry it, and I would see them beaming when they were holding it.”

The trip to Dharamsala was not easy, but then traveling in India rarely is. One group member – the writer of this story – was delayed when an engine quite and the plane had to return to San Francisco, causing a day-late arrival in India. Another participant was scheduled to be tardy, so the two made the journey over land together.

The rest of the group, after traveling 20 hours by air to India, had boarded a train for Amritsar, the home base of the Sikh religion and the site of Golden Temple. Between the bus strike in New Delhi and the difficulty in finding taxis, group members just barely made it onto the train.

Once in the Tibetan part of Dharamsala, called Mcleod Ganj, the group found spirituality could almost be found by breathing in the air.

One can hear the chanting from a nearby temple as often as a cow passes along the dirt road. The woman checking her e-mail alongside visitors to one of the many Internet places is likely to be a Buddhist monk, with a red robe and shaved head. Western practitioners of Buddhism walk pensively, fingering wooden prayer beads. “Free Tibet” signs are everywhere, with guesthouses, shops and restaurants all offering political pamphlets on the Chinese occupation and how one can help.

It is said that when travelers need a refuge from the chaos of India, they come to Dharamsala, where it is a tad less disordered.
But that being said, it is still India in all its extremes. It is a place where a beggar with no legs sits on the side of the road against a stunning backdrop of green mountains. There, too, bargaining for an exquisite carpet or piece of jewelry at unbelievably cheap prices will attract a young woman cradling two naked babies in a filthy piece of cloth. She will wait behind you until you complete the transaction; then she’ll follow you until you give her a few rupees.

It is a place where upper-caste Indians from the cities come on vacation, and women in their expensive saris must step over the gaping holes in the dirt road and breathe in the stench of sewage, just like everyone else; where a Kodak moment lies around every corner if it’s not totally obscured by the piles of trash, much of which, in many other countries, could be recycled.

As Rudi Halbright of San Francisco put it, “Every time we walk somewhere, it’s an adventure.”

The group arrived Wednesday afternoon, April 4, with the two late members arriving the following morning. Friday was dominated by Pesach preparations – since no work could be done on Shabbat. Group members pitched in with Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers from around the world to decorate the main building of the Yong Ling School with original artwork and festive paper cutouts, while others chopped garlic, onions, potatoes and carrots.

Everything was finished by 5 pm, and by the time Shabbat candles were lit last Friday at the KhanaNirvana, the arduous trek to get here and the preparation for the seder were all but forgotten.
Dressed in a new white outfit she bought for $5, Naomi Fine of Oakland said Shabbat was the first time everyone came together as a group. “We were there with those we knew, and those who were strangers, but we all spoke the same language. As the Shabbat candles got brighter, the sunset faded into the mountains. It was magical.”

But Shabbat also created a bit of tension. Ohr Olam’s goal is to provide an atmosphere in which the most observant and the most secular Jew will both feel comfortable. It’s not an easy task.
With the observant Jews needing to eat their last chametz at a particular time, as halachah dictates, as well as a few other logistical matters, there was no way the entire group could compromise on a way to hold morning Shabbat services together.
The Chochmat group conducted its own services on a lawn near the hotel, and later held its own opportunities for mediation.
There were other issues. One rabbi who had come from South Africa to teach all week as part of the Ohr Olam project left after the first day, convinced that the seder and everything else wouldn’t be up to his standards.

He attended the Chabad seder instead.

“It’s painful, but not surprising,” Zak Zaidman said. “We’re a deeply Jewish community that isn’t orthodox, and when you rub up against each other, this is bound to happen.”

That tension – as well as the differences between Ohr Olam and Chabad – brought all the conflicts being played out in the larger Jewish world to this Himalayan outpost. Dharamsala may indeed be a small village in India, but even so, it also represents a microcosm of the Jewish world.

“If we can challenge each other but still continue on and not call each other names and walk away, then I like to believe we can do it anywhere,” Zak Zaidman said.

The seders themselves provided an opportunity to bring people together – Israelis and Americans, Orthodox and Renewal, Jews and Buddhists.

The Jewish vistors were struck by the fact that the snow-capped mountains of such beauty, forming the backdrop for their experience, were the same mountains the Tibetan exiles had to cross over.
Two Buddhist monks were attending their first seder. One of the monks, S. Jumpa P., said he appreciated the opportunity to learn more about Judaism, as he wanted to continue the Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. And he was moved by Jazzy’s reference to the 11-year-old Panchen Lama. The Santa Monica girl had learned about his plight from Kamenetz.

“It is very sad for me,” he said. “She is the same age as him.”
At one point during Kamenetz’s seminar, the author was asked what had happened in Jewish-Buddhist dialogue since that initial group of Jewish leaders met with the Dal
ai Lama 11 years ago. Although a reunion is in the works, he said, “You’re the future of the dialogue. It doesn’t have to happen with rabbis and monks. It’s happening at all levels.”

That dialogue, too, seemed to continue into the wee hours of the morning, as group members got to know each other, talking about themselves and their own personal journeys. As Zak Zaidman put it, “You can’t come on a journey like this without cracking yourself open in some way.”

Almost everyone remarked on the compatibility of the people who came.
“The highlights for me have been the personal connections both with people in and outside our group,” said Halbright.

Judi Stanton of Oakland said that she debated at first about coming to India because Passover is traditionally a time spent with family. But she found the group “so open and supportive, and everyone is sharing in what their journey is. We’ve become like a family and a community that we can continue to build upon when we get back.”