Aug 25th

The humidity and heat has robbed me of my super powers, I use to excel at falling asleep. I could drift off on command and sleep the whole night. Despite the fact that I am physically tired and mentally exhausted sleep seems to be impossible. My mattress feels like a warm, suffocating pad; my sheets a tangled mess of sticky cotton; my cold shower a tepid trickle; and my doors and windows a gateway for possible malaria bearing mosquitoes. The one relief I have found for the humidity is the evaporative cooling of a quick shower and a good stand underneath my ceiling fan, to bad I can’t sleep this way. I keep reminding myself of the pleasant weather that is promised to come after the monsoon season. For now the nights provide me with plenty of time to think; time to think about home and the people I love and miss and about my tenure here and how to make the most of it.

On the bright side I’ve had many opportunities to watch the stars and planets move across the sky until it’s no longer night. Jupiter isn’t where I expected, it’s much higher in the sky, and the North Star is so low that I haven’t spotted it yet. 400 years after Galileo first aimed a telescope at the heavens I would like to think that I was missing sleep for the sake of science and not from insomnia. Either way it’s an enjoyable way to pass the time. Venus is now the last thing to be seen in the early morning sky and with a little imagination you can sometimes convince yourself that you can see it as a crescent with its round edge aimed at the brightening spot on the horizon. A few days ago the moon was in a similar position in the sky at the same time in the shape of the letter C. In the not-so-great picture above you can see last night’s moon shortly after sunset in the shape of a D. My mother a second grade teacher tells her children (including me) that a Coy moon shrinks each night and a Daring moon will get larger and larger until full. Between these two nights was a moonless night with a sky slightly obscured by haze and the minor light pollution of Rajkot. For all the power outages we have had this week during school hours (about four or so) the power hasn’t once gone out during the night. It seems that I am not the only one watching the skies of India. The Hindu population follows a calendar synchronized with each new moon.

The latest lunar month started with the observation of ganesh chaturthi. In the last video I tried to capture this celebration as we passed by on the bike. This celebration caught me by surprise. The day of the new moon, or last Sunday as I like to call it, found me on the bike exploring Rajkot. While traveling down the road I heard a loud blast and thought it must a car back firing or maybe some other type of unimaginable car-thing. I didn’t pay it much attention and continued down the road another half a kilometer or so to the clockwise rotary. When I got there I found it occupied by a 10 foot tall ganesh and a wild band of drummers. I proceeded with my usual caution amidst all the distraction when it hit me, a blinding flash and a concussion that hits you right in the stomach, similar to the ones my grandfather used to wake the neighbors with on the 4^th of July. I must have been 75 feet or so when it went off, I guess someone thought the roads of Rajkot weren’t exciting enough. More likely there is some religious significance to it. How ganesh came to have a pachyderm head is an interesting story in itself but not crucial to appreciating the celebrations that are taking place now.

With the new moon, observers bring an idol into their homes for ten days and offer daily offerings to their god of prosperity. Now days most people purchase a plaster of paris idol, but recently there has been a return to the old diy ways of making the idol from readily available natural clays. At the end of ten days the families immerse the idols in a nearby body of water where it dissolves if it is clay and kind of melts if it is of the parisian variety, the later covered in modern paints, has a terrible impact on the aquatic life around it, not to mention the people who drink from these reservoirs. The cyclical nature of life is represented in the clay returning to the place it was harvested from. Still others use metal idols and just take them for a quick dip.

Perhaps I will document this firsthand next week, hopefully without the pyrotechnics.