power, trips

In her recent collection of essays War Talk, Arundhati Roy writes, "The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as nonfiction, is the relation between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in...There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a storyteller who wants to share her way of seeing."

While I adore the way Roy wrapped flesh around this power question in her brilliant novel The God of Small Things, these essays struck me as so crippled by anger that they rarely got past a litany of grievances against American foreign policy, right-wing Indian Hindu nationalism and the violence it encouraged, and the aggression of transnational corporations. I sympathize with her because the power question has been on my mind too, when I read news from home and when I watched a confused kid I've come to know get expelled for getting caught with drugs here at school. Still, because of my faith in the heart-changing power of fiction I'm deeply disappointed to hear her write, as David James Duncan has, that she's unable to follow up her masterpiece novel with another one because she feels compelled to protest in a world that becomes increasingly unaccepting of art, creativity, and real democracy.

All this to say I continue to wonder whether its words or teenage boys that I should be dealing with, trying to get comfortable with. I haven't found much to write about at school lately, and I didn't want to reduce this page to monthly reports on my excursions and weekend trips.

But here's a weekend trip I want to report about. Last Saturday three fellas and I rode motorcycles down to Haridwar, got a hotel room overlooking the main bathing ghat on the Ganga, and let our foreign tourist instincts run rampant, gawking and snapping photos at every saffron-robed holy man in sight. Maybe not every one--there were hundreds. At dinner we sat next to an Austrian couple, shared stories, and they showed us a once-in-a-lifetime home video of wild tigers they'd just seen in a nearby wildlife park. I can't show you that, but instead here's a page with some of Doug's pics from our trip.

Winter break is tantalizingly near, and I comforted myself during the freak hail storm this afternoon with thoughts of the beaches in Goa and Kerala on which Hannah and I will soon be lounging.