For Richer and for Poorer, Take Two (Buddhist Andhra Pradesh)

Vijayawada, Amaravati, Ghantasala, Machilipatnam, Guntupalli, Undavalli, Nagarjunakonda, Panigiri, Jaggaiahpet, Chennai government museum, and Hyderabad.

For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

Transcript

                  For Richer and for Poorer, Take Two 

Early in 2024, I went to India for about the 15th time.  “You’re kidding,” people said.  “Once or twice I get, maybe three times, but 15 is crazy.”  I’d say that I went this time to see some Buddhist sites in the lower Krishna Valley. That took ‘em down a notch.. They struggled a bit and managed to say something like “Interesting.”  Pause. Then,  “Are you a Buddhist?”  No, I replied, but I do like the idea of a religion without god. 

I could say at moments like this that I always come home from India with an idea that’s more interesting–oh, there’s that damned word again–than what I went to find.  But saying this is always a mistake, because it invites people to ask for an example.  You see the problem: presenting in casual conversation an idea that you’ve found and are trying to keep hold of is like standing ankle-deep on an ocean beach steep enough that the retreating wave washes away the sand under your feet.  Oops! You lose your balance or, in this case, your hold on that idea. Casual speech becomes your enemy.

And you’re right: my in-box isn’t loaded with invitations to talk shows.  Poor me.  Or lucky me, but I’ll give you an example of one of these ideas on the condition that you let me explain it more or less as I found it.  This will take an hour, maybe more, and I’m not going to spill the beans just because you’re impatient.  

It was January, the cold weather in North India.  But this was Vijayawada, a town of a million people at the apex of the Krishna delta.  The daily maximum temperature here in January is about 90 degrees.  (Sorry, I’m with Herr Fahrenheit, not old man Celsius.)  Worse than that, the air quality is terrible.  From the window of the plane from Hyderabad I couldn’t even see the ground until we were a minute or less from landing.  Later, I looked across a busy street and watched in awe as pollution drifted by like wisps of California fog.  Of course filthy air is one of many indicators of India getting rich, but I first went to India in 1981 and don’t need more convincing.   I just bet a lot of Indians have almost forgotten that somewhere up there the sky is actually blue.  

Experts and politicians and journalists trust statistical indicators of economic growth more than they trust their own eyes.  “Oh” they say, ”that’s just anecdotal.”  The trouble is that statistics mask the impoverishment that comes with wealth.  “What?” you say.  “That’s nonsense, We don’t become poor as we get rich.  Numbers don’t lie.”  But you’re wrong. Compare the size of the audience for Denzel Washington’s Equalizer movies with the size of his audience for his Macbeth.  I watched and enjoyed all three Equalizers and I bailed on Macbeth while the witches were still stirring their pot. Oh God, I thought, not Black and White.  Isn’t that sad?  It gives new meaning to the phrase “for richer and for poorer.”  

There are glimmers of redemption.  I managed for example to rent a little car from a brave soul who owned half a dozen of them.  He insisted on my taking a road test.  Not a bad idea, really.  The traffic in Vijayawada is terrible, despite some elevated highways that reduce congestion a bit.  A bit. I consoled myself by connecting the car radio to my phone and listening to a wonderful recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas.  I didn’t know who the pianist was, but she had to be a woman.  I don’t mean that Mozart is feminine, only that he’s joyful, and joy is an emotion inaccessible to men.  How some women are able to express it, I have no idea.

So you understand what I mean when I say we get poorer as we get richer, get dragged toward a cultural denominator profitable for someone.  High culture bites the dust, but not just high culture.  Not just Shakespeare and Mozart.  All the weaving and fishing and singing skills of illiterate peasants bite the dust, too.  Algorithmic convergence, I suppose.  

Near Vijayawada I listened to a podcast in which Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell chatted for an hour with Bill Gates.  Talk about poor while rich.  Everything was data, statistics about income, health, nutrition, mortality, education.  It was like a restaurant where the cook’s only concern is that the food has enough vitamins.  

Gates was convinced that our lives get better as global poverty is reduced. Q.E.D. or, in English, “duh.”  I waited for Stewart or Campbell to ask what we would do with ourselves once we were all statistically perfected.  I suppose Gates would have said that there are always new challenges.  “Dead ahead, captain, unknown galaxy.”  Great, another challenge.  Then I imagine Bill Gates meeting Anna Magnani.  If she’s before your time, imagine Gates remembering that precious moment in 10th grade when the sexiest girl in the school stood really close to him for maybe a minute.  

Well, we won’t go down that path.  Vijayawada in 2024 had 1,467,000 people or, in the metro, 2,097,000.  Having those numbers at our command makes us feel knowledgable–and knowledge is a kind of power–but those number also blind us to the fact that Vijayawada is a dump.   Now somebody from Vijayawada will say that I have a lot of nerve, coming as I do from a flyover state where presidential candidates don’t spend a dime advertising.  I reply that 40 percent of Oklahoma’s voters still vote Democratic and that the election results just prove the idiocy of our winner-take-all setup.  Yet even if I’m not from a coastal or mountain town of the rich and beautiful–or young–I have a right to an opinion, and I say that if you visit Vijayawada, you too will say that Vijayawada is a dump, provided you’re not worried about offending someone.   

Since the late 19th century Vijayawada has been a railroad center, with a long box-girder bridge across the Krishna and a passenger station with 20 tracks.  Maybe more.  It’s famous too for irrigation canals that fan out palmately across the delta.   When I arrived, however, the city’s leaders were busy dedicating a new statue.  It was made of some gold-colored metal and stood 125 feet high.  If the name Dr. Ambedkar isn’t familiar to you, you’re like an Indian who has never heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.  

The statue’s height was chosen to mark the 125th anniversary of Ambedkar’s birth–how’s that for analytical rigor?–but another city had the same stupid idea, so the city fathers of Vijayawada in their wisdom put their statue on a 75-foot plinth.  It brings to mind the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado.  Remember those lethal fins?  Tail lights, too.  Still, if Vijayawada’s city fathers were serious about respecting Dr. Ambedkar, as they should be, they ought to have gone metric so he could rise 125 meters. 

A clerk at one of the hotels where I stayed said I’d have a view from my room of “the Big Guy.” ‘ I looked at her and said, “What?  Did you just call him the Big Guy?”  “Yes,” she admitted with a shy smile.  “That’s funny,” I replied.  Was she mocking the taste of the city fathers?  I don’t know, but I am sure she would not have made that joke if the statue had been of an Indian billionaire.   Indians don’t joke about billionaires.  Well, Americans don’t joke about theirs, either.  Where’s my prayer rug when I need it?

India has literally thousands of statues of Dr. Ambedkar, usually more or less life-sized and often standing, as this one does, with his right arm extended.   Presumably he’s pointing to the Promised Land, not the old one of milk and honey but the new one, captured by chyrons crawling across millions of television screens with to-the-minute reports from financial markets.

Dr. Ambedkar died in 1956, but I think he would have said he was interested not in numbers but in dignity, especially for India’s Untouchables, of whom he was one.  But how much dignity?  You may object and say that dignity comes in only one size, but that’s nonsense.  For example, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell address their interviewees by first name.  Normally, that’s fine, but with Gates it was awkward.  He didn’t reprimand them, but you could almost feel him breathe: who did these peons think they were?  Be real. The dignity of human beings is proportional to their wealth, and that’s true no matter how much you or I object, evade, or resist.  Yes, you probably know people who treat rich and poor alike.  So do I, but not a lot of them.   You have to have had a really good childhood to be immune.

I’ll get back to the impoverishment that comes with wealth, and I’m still a long way from that example I promised, but the tourists who come to Vijayawada–there aren’t a lot of them–mostly come, as I did, for Amaravati, about 20 miles upstream on the right bank of the river.  If you’re looking for Amaravati on a map, which I think is a great idea, be careful.  The place I’m talking about is, as I say, about 20 miles upstream, but halfway there there’s another Amaravati.  It’s the aborted Andhra Pradesh state capital, begun a decade ago but left incomplete, with only a high court, a state legislature, and some unfinished, uninhabitable apartment buildings for civil servants.  No Corbusier here, no Chandigarh.  

My Amaravati, I’m tempted to call it the real one, was a major city two thousand years ago, with trading links west to Rome and east across Southeast Asia.  The city finally disappeared from the historic record in the fourteenth century, and little is known about it except that it possessed a great stupa. 

That’s a Sanskrit word for mound, but the people who built this stupa called it not stupa but mahachaitya or great sanctuary.  I like that name, but if you’re literally minded you’ll object that mounds don’t offer much sanctuary, especially in the monsoon.  You’re right, of course.  The Amaravati stupa was a hemisphere about 90 feet in diameter.  Its internal composition is unknown–maybe earth, maybe brick, maybe a combination of the two–but the mound definitely rested on a low drum clad with carved slabs of limestone and encircled by a carved stone railing or fence that delineated a processional path about 11 feet wide between the railing and the mound. At the cardinal points the railing was interrupted, allowing people to enter and process around the mound.   The stupa, in short, was an emotional sanctuary.

I think I first encountered Amaravati by accident in the British Museum.  The Museum’s Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities–I would die for that job title–wrote a book about 20 years ago called simply Amaravati.   It opens with this sentence: “The Mahacaitya or Great Stupa at Amaravati was the glory of ancient Indian Buddhism, surpassing all other monuments of the age in its huge size and elaborate sculpture.”  Well, huge size and elaborate sculpture don’t in and of themselves score points with me, but you can see that Robert Knox, the Keeper, was impressed.  So was I when I saw the Amravati room with its carved slabs and bits of railing covered with crowded but delicate images of people, plants, animals, and the stupa itself. 

Debala Mitra, who in the 1980s became the first woman to head the Archaeological Survey of India, wrote a book called Buddhist Monuments.  In it, she writes that the sculptors of Amaravati were “intoxicated with a creative impulse” and “went on producing reliefs after reliefs, which are now world-famous for their superb expressiveness and exuberance of beauty.”  Words, words, words, but I remember walking past these stones and feeling some kind of energy.  I don’t know if you can call it charisma, and don’t ask me to explain the sensation.  Go ask Bill Gates what happened in tenth grade when that girl stood next to him   

I’ve gone back to the Museum at least twice since then and to my disgust found the room locked.  “Budget shortfall: sorry for any inconvenience.”  Funny, the Brits cart off tons of stuff because they say Indians won’t care for it or study it scientifically.  And then it turns out the Brits are too broke to pay for guards, so you can only see the stuff through plate glass.  You might as well get Knox’s book.  It has lots of good photographs.  The museum’s website is another option.

Well, it’s true that Amaravati was a ruin when Europeans first saw it.  That was possibly in 1797 but more likely the next year, 1798, and that first white guy was a surveyor working for the East India Company.  Colin Mackenzie was his name–ask me again, and I’ll tell you the same–and he had been born about thirty years earlier on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.  In another 30 years he would die in Calcutta as Surveyor General of India.  Not a bad career and not bad at all making it to his sixties in those days. 

There’s a small painting of him in the British Library.  Perhaps he’s 60, but he stands very erect, lumbar vertebrae perfectly arched.  He’s whip thin and wears a bright red jacket with tails.  He’s shown with three learned Brahmans, dressed in white.  These were or perhaps just represent the men who helped Mackenzie make sense of what he saw as he travelled.   They’re a step behind Mackenzie.  You know: precedence matters.  

I think I’ve known men like Mackenzie: smart, energetic, impatient with what they think of as the balderdash of unmeasurable quantities.  He reminds me of highly successful businessmen on the other side of the water, men like James Dyson or Michael O’Leary.  Colin Mackenzie would have loved fast cars.  On the other hand, Mackenzie left five percent of his estate to the Brahman who had been his most important teacher.  I take it as a sign that Mackenzie wasn’t just another executive asshole.

Mackenzie visited Amravati twice, briefly when he found it and again a few years before he died.  This second time, he stayed for months and brought assistants who made meticulous drawings of the place.  Here’s a bit of what he saw, in his own words, which I’ve lightly edited.  “To the southwards of the village, close to it, is a circular mound of about ninety feet in diameter, which had been cased round with bricks of a large size and slabs of white stone, sculptured, so far as I could see by their remains there; for the best stones were carried into the pagoda (he means Hindu temple) which Vasu Reddi was repairing.”

Vasu who?  Here’s Mackenzie again: “About 23 years ago, the Raja Vasureddi, zamindar of Chintapalle, proceeded on a religious tour to perform his devotions at the celebrated pagoda of Tirupati; on his return, he felt disposed to change his residence from Chintapalle and found a new city.  He pitched on the site of Amaravati as the best suited for the purpose …. He invited local banias [merchants] from Chintapalle… to all of whom he made suitable advances of money to enable them to erect habitations… from bricks found  in the several mounds ….

“The Musalman people,” Mackenzie continues, “found a few fragments which possessed beautiful carvings which were removed to the raja’s new tank [or village reservoir], with which the flight of steps on the western side, to the number of twenty, was constructed…. In short, [I’m wrapping up this quote] these valuable stones of antiquity have been used in various buildings, both public and private; those applied to mosques have first been carefully divested of every carving by rubbing them on harder stones to prevent, as it is said, any pollution arising to Muhammadan faith from idolatrous substances.”  

Jesus.  Remember those statues the Taliban blew up outside Kabul?  Mackenzie is more tolerant than they were or I am, but he does say, quote, “the stones are far superior to any ancient or modern Hindu production.”

I wish Mackenzie had put a big fence around the ruins so that eventually the mahachaitya could have been restored as fully as possible.  This is what the British did at Sanchi, near Bhopal, but that came later.  (Sanchi, by the way, has no carved railing or peripheral slabs, but it does have grand entrance gates at the cardinal points.   Amaravati never did.) 

Apparently the idea of preserving the site never occurred to Mackenzie, or perhaps it seemed impractical.  Instead, he sent eleven slabs to Calcutta; of which nine were then sent to London.  In the 1840s a local officer named Walter Eliot sent many more stones to Madras, where they sat for 14 years before going onto London, where they gathered dust until discovered in 1867 by James Fergusson, Victorian England’s leading student of Indian architecture.  The stones were then transferred to London’s India Museum, and when that museum closed they went to the British Museum, where, after Walter Eliot, they’re sometimes called the Eliot Marbles. (Actually they’re limestone.  Perhaps the Elgin Marbles preempted the terminology.)  

Meanwhile, also in the 1870s, another local officer had a go at the stupa.  He was Robert Sewell, and in a report from 1880 he justifies carting off everything.  He writes of a “terribly mutilated slab, fully exposed on the top of the mound… and speedily mutilated by the shepherd boys of the village, who broke off all the exquisitely sculptured and delicate faces and limbs of the figures–a fate which will inevitably overtake every marble left unguarded at the village.”  

A professional archaeologist arrived a few years later and seconded the “take it all” strategy. The title page of his report modestly identifies him as James Burgess, LL.D., C.I.E., F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S., &c.   Literally, “&c.”  Anyway, Burgess reported that by the time he arrived, some 329 stones had been retrieved and sent away for safekeeping.  He himself found another 90 with sculptures or inscriptions, and he wrote that “had the time and means at my disposal allowed a systematic examination, still more might have been discovered,”  Indeed, more have been discovered.  Most have wound up at the government museum in Madras, now Chennai, or in the very small museum next to the mound.

All of which raises the question of why in the first month of the year of our Lord 2024 I bothered going to Amaravati.  The site had been stripped, hadn’t it?.  I guess I just wanted to see for myself.  It’s like the day I stopped at the spot where Dag Hammarskjold’s plane crashed.  It was there, and I was driving by.  I’m either curious or a gawker.  I suppose both.

So I arrived in what is now the small town of Amaravati–population about 15,000–on the same day that 700 miles to the north, in Ayodhya, the prime minister of India was dedicating a temple on the site of a mosque destroyed by a mob in 1992.  So much for India’s proudly secular constitution, but Prime Minister Nehru and Law Minister Ambedkar, both of whom had worked on that constitution, were dead and gone. 

To join from a distance in the new temple’s dedication,  hundreds of people had gathered on Amaravati’s main street.  They didn’t smile when they saw me.  They came pretty close to glaring.  A couple of days later, in another town, I heard the Islamic call to prayer and thought, “He’s brave.”

I wiggled through the crowd and went down a side street to the archaeological museum, which consists of one large and one small room.  Within five minutes I had worked myself into a lather because the ticket-seller and the guard seemed to live to make sure that I took no photographs.  Not their fault, of course; some distant official with the Archaeological Survey of India had laid down the policy because, because he could, and, as Genesis almost says, because he saw that it was satisfying.  Visitors were supposed to come, look, say they had seen the museum, then leave.  If they forgot what they had seen, which of course they would, no matter.  The point was to say they had been here, like Americans who stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, spit, and get back in their truck.

The only other visitors in the museum during my visit were a Scandinavian couple who impressed me by saying that they had just visited Palampet, a wonderful old temple that foreign visitors rarely see.  Of course they had a car and driver, which is cheating.

I asked the woman where the Amaravati stupa was.  She grabbed my elbow, pulled me outside and pointed down the street.  She warned me that there wasn’t much to see, and, boy, was she right.  I entered the gate, bought a ticket, and found myself in a few acres of well-kept lawn, proof that the site is managed by the Archaeological Survey of India. In the middle of the lawn there was a low mound, rimmed with two, tiered steps of brick and capped with concrete, courtesy of a so-called “grooming” done by the Archaeological Survey in time for a visit of the Dalai Lama in 2006.  It looked like a reservoir you could put on a hilltop in San Francisco. In fact the Raja Vasu Reddy, hoping for treasure, had dug a tiered pit in the center of the stupa and then, figuring that all the digging shouldn’t be in vain, converted the hole into a village reservoir or tank, approached via those 20 steps built of stupa slabs.  The tank had been filled in by the British, and I suppose the steps were taken apart and sent to Madras or London.  I did see a few broken white columns, but very little that was carved, except for a few lotus-flower medallions leaning against the brickwork as if to say, “see, there’s something left.” 

There have been archaeologists in recent years who have argued that it isn’t too late for restoration.  I’m thinking of the late Jitendra Das, but this assumes that whoever is doing the work can get the carvings returned.  You know how that’s likely to go.  Think of  the British Museum and its death grip on the Elgin Marbles.

Well, look on the bright side: I now knew for sure that there is no reason to visit the Amaravati Stupa.  That’s knowledge, isn’t it?  I decided to try my luck the next day at Ghantasala, about 35 miles downstream from Vijayawada.   Google reckons those 35 miles at 1 hour and 40 minutes.  That implies a speed of about 20 miles an hour, which is definitely possible in India, but which seemed odd because most of the journey was on a fine, four-lane toll road.  I zipped along until I got off the toll road and found myself on six or eight miles of a very rought oine-land road hopping from village to village.  These roads are the best reason for driving yourself in India, but I did wonder now and then if I’d made a wrong turn.  There were no road signs, and Google Maps sometimes loses her mind out here and starts going in tight circles, like my roomba at home.  

The villages were shambles of dire housing that mocked the New India happy talk.  Occasionally I’d pass a very spiffy new mansion appearing out of nowhere and probably paid for by some family member who lived elsewhere but had sent money home.  There were lots of people on the streets, along with hungry stray dogs, small and with a preference for sleeping on a sunny bit of the road.  I’m not sure whether I should think of the dogs as trusting or stupid, but drivers did avoid them and so the dogs survived.  Between villages, the road was flanked by harvested fields of paddy, with straw piled up like stupas.  Yes, stupas.  

Yet Ghantasala was another bust: a big circular mound of modern brickwork put together decades after Alexander Rea, a government archaeologist, excavated the site in 1880.  There was a good museum across the street but damn if photography wasn’t prohibited again.   I can hear someone telling me to get over it, but it’s not as if the camera on my phone was going to bother anyone, not when there were no other visitors except for one family.  The parents sent their daughter over to ask where I was from.  I told her and asked where she was from.  When I didn’t recognize that name she explained where it was.  Perhaps she was nine, and her English was very good.  I was impressed.  Another young Indian on the fast track.      

Rather than head back to Vijayawada, I drove an hour or so north to Machilipatnam, a town of 200,000 people.  It’s been the main settlement in the delta for centuries, but It’s another dump.  

In the old days it was called Masulipatnam, and young men seeking their fortunes with the East India Company came here and died.  A district manual published by the Government of Madras in 1883 includes a section called Annals of Masulipatnam.  We read of companies of 100 men reduced to 15 fit for duty, and we read of famines, with villagers dead of starvation.  There were tsunamis, too.  One apparently rolled inland 17 miles and when it rolled back to the sea it did more damage than when it rolled inland. 

The British built a fort a couple of miles from town. The sturdy whitewashed walls were intact, but the roof was gone.  There were no inscriptions, no plaques other than the standard blue-and–white sign declaring that the site was protected by the Archaeological Survey.  No lawns here, no visitors either.  There was an old British prison next door, along with an old hospital.  Their roofs were gone. 

I decided to visit the British cemetery, which was back in town and next to a church, St. Mary’s.  The cemetery was so badly overgrown that I didn’t explore it thoroughly.  Snakes bite, you know.  But Masulipatnam had been a Dutch settlement, too, and the Dutch had an amazing cemetery of their own.  I say amazing partly because it was immaculately weeded but also because the stones were works of art, with long inscriptions and beautiful ornamentation cut in rock so resistant to weathering that the carving was sharp as new.  The annals I mentioned a minute ago offer some translations.  Here’s one:  “Under this slab are the dead corpses of Catherein Van Den Briel of Amsterdam and John Krufy of Tousanan, junior merchant in the service of the Honorable Company, a young woman and young man.  May they rest in peace.”  The couple died at 29 and 21 a few months apart in 1678 and 9.  One curious detail: the Dutch cemetery is in a neighborhood called Valandupalem.  Did you hear that? Palem means village, so it’s Valandu Village.  Hear it now?  Valandu. Yes, it’s Holland. Holland Village. Valandupalem.

I enjoyed poking around Machilipatnam, but regarding Buddhist explorations I was now zero for two.  I decided to try Ghantupalle, a place with caves about two hours north of Vijayawada. The government of Andhra Pradesh published some years ago a tourism-promotion pamphlet for what it called The Nirvana Trail, and that pamphlet called Ghantupalle the state’s most beautiful Buddhist site.  It does stand in isolation atop a heavily forested ridge.  

Wandering Indian monks long ago discovered that caves come in handy during the monsoon.  The most famous are probably the 30 or so lined up at Ajanta, an hour’s drive north of Aurangabad and attracting thousands of visitors weekly or even daily.   Ghantupalle does not.  I passed a half dozen young men doing some maintenance work.  They worried as they saw me puffing my way up stairs and more stairs from the parking lot.  They volunteered a helping hand, which I appreciated but declined.  There was nobody else around until I was leaving, when a couple arrived.  They were Indians from Waco, Texas, where he was a neurologist, freshly transplanted from Wisconsin.  I thought about trotting out my classic but well-worn tale of moving to Oklahoma from Maine in 1980.  The clerk at the department of motor vehicles looked at me and asked, “Why?” The way she said it made me ask her what she meant, but with a wry smile, she said only, “You’ll find out.”  Anyway, Texas is full of Indian doctors, so a new arrival wouldn’t feel completely marooned.  I did tell the doctor and his wife that the caves and stupas up ahead were very simple, unlike Ajanta.  I also told them to be sure to see one cave whose ceiling, like some of those at Ajanta, had stone rafters.  These were carved so the monks would feel as though they were back home in North India, where prayer halls were built of wood whose roofs needed support. Parisians aren’t the only people resistant to change.

I was zero for three when I arrived at the Undavalli Caves the next day.  Ironically, they were just a mile or two above the low dam that ponds the Krishna enough to divert its water into canals.  The caves sit maybe 50 feet above the rich farmland flanking the ponded river.   It’s a nice view, but a busy road passes at the foot of the caves, and nobody has ever found a way to persuade Indians to stop honking.  Autonomous vehicles may just be the country’s salvation.

The thing that people come to see at the Undavalli Caves is a four-tiered structure perhaps eight bays wide.  The bottom tier is excavated.  The higher ones are excavated, too, but are fronted by a constructed or added facade. The bottom floor was presumably a Buddhist refuge, and so perhaps were parts of the upper floors, but the whole thing is now a Hindu temple.  A retired Indian army officer took me under his arm and chanted several Vedic hymns.  I was impressed, but then he tried to teach me to hold my hands apart and feel the power passing between them.  I should have told him that I’m a culturally impoverished American idiot, but I did like a statue of a reclining VIshnu, cut from bedrock and perhaps twenty feet from head to toe.

.  

The best bit–and I mean the thing I liked best since arriving in VIjayawada–was off to one side, where a more or less ignored path runs along the cliff wall.  There were other caves here, some no bigger than a pup tent but big enough to keep a monk dry in the monsoon.  And above a group of three such caves a decorative panel of animals had been carved into the rock.  It was about 10 feet long, and the animals were beautifully done: two elephants on either side of two perhaps mythical creatures.  I couldn’t identify them for sure.  Perhaps one was a lion.

Bear in mind, I live in a place where houses have lawns and foundation plantings, usually as symmetrical as headlights on a car. We like it that way.  I myself often wear monochrome T-shirts bought in packs of three–no logos, please, and for God’s sake no silly pocket–and here in Vijayawada I was wearing lightweight polyester pants.  Pants, not slacks.  American men don’t wear slacks.  They don’t dine, either, unless of course they have their own cooks–sorry, I meant chefs–along with a private banker and a family office.  Americans put up decorations at Halloween and Christmas, but the stuff probably comes from Walmart, which probably sources it from China.  And here at the Undavalli caves, and coming from people who never conceived of container ships full of dirt-cheap LED lights, was something beautiful.  If I rant about being poor while rich, the carver of these animals was rich while poor.  

END PART ONE

I still had three places on my list.  They all involved long drives, but after five days in India I couldn’t plead jet lag, so one morning I set out for Nagarjunakonda.  That translates as Nagarjuna’s Hill or if you’re a purist NaGARjuna’s Hill.  It’s four hours upstream on the Krishna River from Vijayawada.  I know: four hours doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re driving on a rural Interstate, and yes, India has lots of controlled-access divided highways these days, but time and again you’ll see someone coming along ever so placidly on the wrong side of the road.  Stare at them and they will stare back with an expression that says, “What’s wrong?  I’m just taking a shortcut.”  

Two thousand years ago, Nagarjuna or NaGARjuna was a monk central to the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism from the older Theravada Buddhism.  The most tangible distinction between the two is that images of the Buddha appear in Mahayana buildings but not in Theravada ones.  Mayahana Buddhism gives Buddhists someone to pray to; Theravada Buddhism does not.  Take your pick.  

There’s no evidence that Nagarjuna or NaGARjuna lived on the hill named for him, but Tibetan documents do say that he did live in this part of India, and his name does appear in the railing of the Amaravati stupa.  It’s also been applied for several centuries to a hill shaped like a grain of rice a bit over a mile long.  The hill is flat-topped, rimmed with cliffs and partly with medieval fortifications, and it overlooks the site of the ancient city of Vijayapuri, which flourished during Rome’s heyday.  Like Rome, it was in ruins by the 7th century.  Unlike Rome, and unlike Amaravati, Vijayapuri was too remote to attract people who wanted convenient building materials.  The city was instead destroyed by Hindu iconoclasts who needed something to do.  

The government of India in the 1950s decided to dam the Krishna five or six miles downstream from the ruins.  Prime Minister Nehru came to the site in 1955 to lay the foundation stone for a masonry dam a mile long and with a maximum height of 400 feet..  Nehru said that  laying the foundation stone was, for him, “a sacred ceremony.”  He was laying, he said, “the foundation of the temple of humanity of India.”  I don’t like the metaphor, but Nehru was as secular as they come, and he only meant that water from the dam’s long canals would save many thousands of farmers from crop failure.   It must have seemed like a no-brainer at the time, because India  was unable to feed itself and regularly imported American grain which it did not get for free but which it paid for with mountains of non-convertible rupees.  That’s how I got to India the first time, on a fellowship paid almost entirely from the U.S. government’s rupee pile.  I remember being asked at breakfast at a university guesthouse how much I was being paid.  I should have dodged the question, but I didn’t.  Several conversations around the table stopped dead when I mentioned a sum that wasn’t extravagant by American standards but was a lot more than anybody at the table earned.  I didn’t hear any muttering, but I bet that after I left the table people groused about it at length.

So the dam was built, but it was built over the protesting bodies of archaeologists.  They had only discovered Vijayapuri in 1926.  The regional superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India, Albert Longhurst, would spend the next five years working at the site.  He unearthed nine stupas, five dormitories, three monasteries, two temples, a riverside wharf, and a palace.  I know.  You’re waiting for the pear tree.

It seems from his official report that his work focussed on the great stupa.   When he found it,he wrote, it had been  “a large mound of earth and broken brick overgrown with grass and jungle…  The whole of the dome… had been demolished….”  Longhurst continues:  “the excavation of this monument was a very laborious task that took a month to complete,” but when he was done Longhurst realized that the foundation of the stupa was a set of concentric brick wheels, the largest 106 feet in diameter.   Brick spokes divided the structure into 40 cells.   Longhurst wrote, “At last, when we had given up all hopes of finding anything of interest, one of the coolies [that’s Longhurst’s word] noticed a small broken pot … crushed when the chamber was filled with earth.  The following objects were found: a fragment of bone placed in a small round gold reliquary three-quarters of an inch in diameter...placed in a little silver casket, shaped like a miniature stupa.”  Unquote. The origin of the bone is anybody’s guess.

Longhurst restored the drum of the stupa, but there was no railing to put back together.  He explained that the railing here had been made of wood.  Some later students have disagreed and stated that the railing was indeed of stone that iconoclasts had taken as an opportunity to refine their techniques.  

The most visually spectacular feature of the stupa had been at its cardinal points, where worshippers would have approached the structure through gaps in the railing.  Here, instead of the usual drum wall, there were square platforms about 20 feet wide projecting out from the drum about five feet.  Longhurst called them ayaka-platforms because each supported five ayaka-pillars, stones ornamented as fully as the torso of a fully tattooed man.  The pillars commemorated the five key events of the Buddha’s life: birth, renunciation, enlightenment, first sermon, and death, and Longhurst found all 20 of them, though only two were still upright.  In addition, the platforms themselves were profusely ornamented, which is why Longhurst could write that “All the best sculptures recovered at Nagarjunakonda originally belonged to ayaka-platforms.”  By the time he left India to become Ceylon’s commissioner of archaeology, Longhurst had assembled from the ruins of Vijayapuri what he judged to be the largest and finest collection of sculptures and statues in Southern India. 

Nobody knew how much more might be found, and nobody would ever know once the reservoir filled.  Ramachandra Rao, an art historian who at the time was making a cottage industry out of lecturing coast to coast at American universities, wrote that the dam would “completely inundate the valley of Nagarjunikonda, transforming it into one hopeless reservoir of water.”  I have no idea what a hopeless reservoir is, but I guess I know what he meant.  Think of that terrible photograph from 1948 of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug.  He’s signing a contract authorizing compulsory purchase from three Indian tribes of 155,000 acres of Missouri River bottomland that the federal government wants for a reservoir in North Dakota.  The Washington Post put the picture on its front page.  We see the tribal representative, George Gillette, with his hand over his face.  He weeps as a half-dozen observers stand politely behind the Secretary and think about lunch.  

In the 1960s, Egypt would set out with international help to save some pharaonic monuments from flooding by Lake Nasser.  India at that time might have said something like, “been there, done that,” because by then it had, on its own, already moved onto dry land much of what Longhurst had found–including the great stupa. 

I do not know who suggested that the monuments should mostly be moved from the floor of the valley to the top of Nagarjuna’s Hill.  I suspect that the suggestion came from someone so august that nobody dared to speak against what was a misguided idea.   I’m being polite.  The most generous interpretation is that Vijayapuri had always been difficult to reach and might as well remain so.  Longhurst himself had written that “the traveller has to arrange with the village Headman for porters to carry his luggage over the hills … a distance of six miles by footpath.” Now, with the reservoir, visitors had to spend almost an hour on a ferry sailing from a dock near the dam to a dock on the island that Nagarjuna’s Hill had become.

I arrived at the mainland dock midday on a Sunday, in time for the afternoon sailing.   Good, I thought until, stepping onto the island, I learned that I, along with a hundred other passengers, had to be back at the dock in one hour, when the last ferry of the day would leave. This was an impossibly short time, because it’s a steep climb up to the flat top of the island and then a 10-minute walk just to get to the museum, which is another ten minutes shy of the major rebuilt monuments, including the great stupa. I  decided right then that I’d run through the island’s museum–and run is not far short of the fact—-return the next day on the morning ferry, spend the day on the island, and return on the afternoon sailing.  Well, that was the plan.

The next morning I came to the dock well before the ferry was scheduled to leave.  There was nobody around.  I waited a bit.  Nobody.  I finally found somebody somehow involved with ticketing, and I asked what was going on.  He said that the ferry only went if 30 people bought tickets.  There were no customers except me, and the six or eight people who worked on or with the ferry looked ready to pack it in.  This is ridiculous, I thought.  I’ve come a long way; am I supposed to wait for the next weekend or holiday?  Who was the idiot who suggested putting everything on an island?  

Desperately, and almost rhetorically, I asked if the ferry would sail if I bought 30 tickets.  To my surprise, the answer was yes.  I didn’t have enough cash on me, and the office wasn’t set up to take credit cards, but one man–I have no idea what position he held–said these two magic words: “Apple Pay?”  I had never used it and didn’t have it on my phone, but with several people looking over my shoulder, we got it done.  I think the money went to a private account and then got shifted around, but no matter.  In half an hour a boat with a hundred seats was plowing through the reservoir with me and a crew of four.  

This was a very good deal, because the trip takes about 45 minutes each way and the roundtrip came to only about 60 dollars, but when we got to the island the crew said I should be back in an hour.  No way, I said.  We settled on two hours, which, combined with the hour the day before, was barely adequate.  I would see most of the reassembled monuments, though not the most distant ones.  And I had the island to myself, except for several dozen guards and gardeners and construction workers who apparently lived on it.  Yes, I said gardeners.  This is an Archaeological Survey of India undertaking, which means that this rocky butte has lots of sprinkler-irrigated lawns and shrubs.  My wife tells me they’re nice.  Maybe.  Anyway, I must thank a tractor driver whose tractor was hitched to a small trailer carrying rocks.  He told me to jump in.  Without his help I would have seen less than I did and would have had no time at all to sit down and look at what I saw. 

Imagine being given ten minutes to explore the Uffizi.   That’s how the museum had felt the day before.   Time was short, and to make matters worse the museum space itself overpowered the collection, simply because the room feels like a turbine (or turbINE) hall.  I did see several ayaka pillars and some long cornices from the ayaka platforms, but they made less impression on me than the brutalist concrete cylinders holding up the museum roof.  With more time, I might have better understood a few of the exhibits, but time was short and many pieces are unidentified.  Perversely perhaps, I like that.  Longhurst had written that, “the sculptors were given a free hand, each man choosing his own subject…”  Sounds chaotic, like India, but it’s more appealing than the alternative.  I vote for artistic freedom.

The tractor driver drove me past the museum and dropped me off at the site of a reconstructed monastery, with brick cells arrayed in a square around a pillared hall that had its pillars–plain stone posts–but not its roof.  In front of the monastery there were two almost identical prayer halls, apsidal in shape, by which I mean they were shoebox-shaped rectangles with a semicircular far wall.  The rebuilt walls were only thigh high, but that was enough to show the floor plans, and the two halls faced each other.  One hall held a replica of a statue of the Buddha.  (The original statue, partly restored, was in the museum.)  The other hall had a plain stupa.  It was a bit like a pair of churches, one Catholic, the other Lutheran.  In this case, one was Mahayana and the other was Theravada.  It suggests that the two schools could coexist without fighting, which is nice.  

The most interesting detail for me was that both halls had moonstones at the entrance.  These are, in form, just like rectangular doormats, except for a semicircular side facing outwards.  In Sri Lanka, in particular at Anuradhapura, moonstones brilliantly demarcate the transition from secular to sacred space.  Here not so much.  In fact, here not at all.  There were no concentric bands of animals on these moonstones, there was no transition between worlds.  These were just doormats with one curved edge.  They could have come from a building-supply store around the corner.  For all I know, they did.

The great stupa was a short walk away.  It had attracted visiting Buddhists the day before.  I know this because back on the mainland Sunday night I had chatted with some Nepalese visitors who said they had rushed to see it that afternoon.  I saw it on my own the next day and thought that this was much ado about a circle of bricks, with plain brick ayaka-platforms protruding at the cardinal points and supporting the stumps of ayaka-pillars.  You had to work really hard to find something attractive here, and a guard was keeping an eye on me as if i was about to whip out my graffiti tools. There was one interesting detail about the stupa.  It is that the bricks here and elsewhere at the site are very large, about 3 inches by 10 inches by 20 inches.  It is the same size as old bricks found in North India.  There are lots of ways to measure the footprint of a civilization, but they include the reach of standardized measures.  

With another ride in the tractor trailer, I got back to the museum and, behind it, to a reconstructed bathing ghat with steps like those of India’s magnificent step wells.  I’ve seen several of those wells, for example a spectacular one at Vijayanagar, so I’m jaded.  Besides, the steps here did not reach down to the water.  

The most intriguing reconstructed monument at Nagarjunakonda was not on the island at all but on the mainland and a few hundred yards back from the edge of the reservoir.  Why couldn’t everything have been put here? The place was called Anupu, and the next morning I visited without a ticket or time limit.  There was another reassembled monastery here with cells and a prayer hall with a moonstone that had an arc of animals: a full selection of elephants and lions, cattle, horses, and a hog, a reminder of the world one would enter when leaving the sacred space of the prayer hall.  

But then, a few hundred meters away, there was an amphitheater, not semicircular as in Greece or Rome but square, several tiers high, and made of those same oversized bricks, capped with flat limestone slabs  There are no other ancient amphitheaters in India. Nobody knows why there’s one here, and nobody knows what it was for.  It could seat a thousand people watching something.  Down at the lakeshore a dozen fishing boats were tied up next to trucks that I suppose were about to haul the catch to market, but from the theater I could see or hear none of that.  When you think how frenetic India is in its cities and how noisy people and animals are even in villages, the silence at the theater was a gift.  I heard only my footsteps and chirping birds.  I wonder now what Longhurst would have made of the scene.  He died the same year that Nehru came to inaugurate work on the dam.

Ancient Buddhist sites keep turning up.  Vijayapuri, as I said, was discovered in 1926; Phanigiri or Snake Hill came along in 1942.  There was some early excavation work, but then the site was abandoned for almost 40 years until 2001, when excavations revealed things that I hope made the archaeologists quiver or tingle at least a bit.

Phanigiri is really just the name of a village about a three-hour drive north of Nagarjunakonda. (If you’re looking for it, it’s about 15 miles north of the busy town of Suryapet.)  Somebody in the village must always have known that there were ruins atop the naked granite dome immediately north of the village.  The rock rises like a whale from a green ocean of rice paddies and is roughly oval, about a mile north to south, half a mile east to west and 150 feet high.  The rock is clean as Yosemite and a lot less crowded.  It’s always been less crowded.  I mean that Amaravati and Vijayapuri were cities, but Phanigiri was always just an isolated monastery.   Although the site is called Phanigiri in the archaeological literature, the ruins are properly called Karimahavihara or Kari great monastery.  I do not know the meaning of Kari.

There is a more or less developed path up the east side of the dome, but I didn’t know that, and Google, bless her heart, directed me instead to a bit of dry land on the west side.  “You have reached your destination,” she said.  What can you say to the lady?  Are you allowed to disagree?

There was no path up the rock.  I tried to find a point where the rock wasn’t too steep and where I might climb it without losing my footing, sliding downhill, and tearing my precious polyester pants.  Carefully, I did make it to the top but met a concrete wall topped with an electric fence.  That’s a first, I thought, even if the wires were broken.  You’ll get some sense now of how thoroughly I detest guides if I say that even at this point, stuck at the top, I did not regret having come on my own. 

I started circumambulating in search of a gate, found nothing in one direction and was close to giving up in the other when–you have to love India!--I found an open gate at the top of the path that visitors are supposed to use.  A few minutes later I found a half-dozen women already up here. They said they were studying to be teachers.  They had children with them and the kids stared at this sweating and red-faced, old, fat white guy. The women earnestly offered me water, and they wanted a group photo, which I tried but failed to evade.  I don’t recognize that guy.

I have to say there wasn’t a lot to see up here.  There were foundations for some more cells for monks and there were foundations for at least four apsidal prayer halls, all empty.  There were several small and plain stupas, and there was a drum for one large stupa, about 50 feet in diameter and now completely clad in protective concrete, including on the ayaka platforms projecting from  the cardinal points.  It was disappointing.  So was a storage room filled with chunks of sculpted rock, mostly bits of lotus flowers and all simply tossed here.  

I was staying in Suryapet, the nearest place with a hotel, and the next morning I decided to give Phanigiri another shot.  This time I ignored Larry and Sergei and just drove into the village.  Signs directed me to where I should have gone the day before.  Brilliant!  I started walking but someone called out.  I pretended not to hear but the fellow was persistent.  He asked if I wanted to see the museum.  What museum, I wondered, but I said sure.  He took me to an old, two-story house, gated and locked.  It was rented by the government, he said, but he had the keys.

It was a fine old house, with a staircase whose banister, solid from tread to handrail, seemed made from a single log all the way up the stairs. The upper floor was missing its floorboards, but the flagstones of the ground floor weren’t going anywhere, and they were covered with treasures.  Here was all or most of the stuff that archaeologists had found on the dome, and I was, as Brits sometimes say with real sparkle, gobsmacked.  The most surprising finds, discovered in 2002 or 2003, were the profusely carved posts and crossbars of a torana gateway seven or eight meters tall.  Paral Pandya Dhar of Delhi University has written that until Phanigiri no torana gate had ever been found in South India.  Perhaps this one was originally placed before the large stupa, but that’s unclear.  Dhar writes that the pieces of the gate had been deliberately buried near the prayer halls to protect them from vandals when the monastery, at an unknown date, was abandoned.  

The largest crosspiece fragment was about eight feet long and was lying right in front of me on the ground, where it rested on three thin logs or stout branches.  It was gently arched and had two main scenes, one a procession with an elephant and the other a group of monks greeting each other. One end of the piece was crudely  broken, but the other terminated in an intact lion combined with the head of a makara, a mythical creature.  Between those animals and the arch, there was a cube showing monks worshipping at an ayaka pillar.  Dhar describes the sculptures on the other side of the stone, but it was far too heavy for me to turn over.  

The man with the keys said that a proper museum was under construction close to the eastern base of the dome, but I’m glad I saw the stones before they were dressed for visitors.

Now the scholarly literature on Buddhist sculptures spends a great deal of time identifying the stories illustrated by the sculptors.  “Here’s the birth of the Buddha.  You can see his mother holding the branch for support.”  Or, “Here’s the Great Renunciation.  See the prince on horseback leaving his palace.” Or, “Look, it’s the moment of his Enlightenment.  You can tell, because he’s touching the ground with the fingertips of his right hand.” 

I’m sorry to be rude, but this is like visiting the Uffizi, seeing Michelangelo’s David and saying, “Oh, look. He’s just killed Goliath.”  It’s childish, or at least skewed toward the trivial.  Yes, it’s true that the scholarly literature does go further, showing for example that the icons associated with the Buddha, especially trees and snakes, derive from pre-Buddhist sources and suggest that, diffusing across India, Buddhism incorporated the nature spirits that were already worshiped there.  It’s no accident that the classic 19th century study of the Amravati stones is called simply Tree and Serpent Worship.  A recent book published in connection with a major exhibition in New York echoes that title and is called Tree and Serpent; Early Buddhist Art in South Asia.  

Still, I will muster my amateur nerve and say that even this fails to tell me what I most want to know.  I want to know, very selfishly, what these sculptures and reliefs can teach me about how to live.  Scholars seem to have no wish to answer that question, at least while they’re wearing their professional hats, and other people may say, none too kindly, that if I don’t know the answer to that question at 81, I should quit looking.

Too bad for them.

I still had one more Buddhist site to visit: it was Jaggayyapet, midway between Phanigiri and Vijayawada, but first I’m going to violate my simple, this-and-then-that chronology and tell you what I think the stones at these places do teach.  To do that, I am going to leave the Krishna Valley for a couple of minutes and visit the Amaravati Room in the government museum in Chennai. I’ll get back to Jaggayyapet.

The Chennai museum has about 300 Amaravati stones.  That’s more than anyone else, including the British Museum.  Since 1880 the stones had been cemented into an outdoor wall at the museum. Somebody woke up and in 2002 the stones were extricated with power tools and brought inside, where a hundred stones are now crowded into a very, very warm room measuring about 30 feet by 60.  (The other 200 are in storage.)  When I came by, in the putative cool season, the air-conditioning was turned off and the A/C ducting was up against the ceiling and smiling at me.  The haloid lights were worse, painfully bright.  The museum authorities were conspicuously proud of the room’s new, marble floor.

I know, I grumble, but I managed to focus on two stones.  One is cataloged by the museum as No. 221 and is a rectangle about two meters square.  The other is No. 17 and is a disc about one meter in diameter.

The museum calls 221 the best piece in the collection.  It’s certainly large and very well preserved.  The center of the stone shows a stupa complete with drum slabs, railing, gateways, lions, and ayaka pillars.  Deities and nature spirits hover off to both sides of the dome, which is flanked farther to the right and left by dharmacakra pillars, or pillars supporting the wheel of the law.  At the top of the stone there’s a frieze with three scenes from the life of the Buddha, including his renunciation and his temptation by the demon Mara.  All this I could see for myself, but I needed help with an inscription crediting this ”gift of coping stone to the great stupa of the Lord by the wife of the merchant Samudra…”.  We see similar signs today in hospitals and concert halls.  Some things never change.

No. 17, the museum says, tells the story of King Bandhuma, which I would not have understood at all without help.  The king sits on a throne and is surrounded, enveloped in a crowd of 20 people, along with an elephant and a horse. In the story he receives two valuable presents and gives them to his daughters, who in turn give them to the 22nd Buddha, Vipassi.  For their generosity, the younger daughter becomes a saint and the elder is reborn as Mayadevi, the mother of Gautama Buddha, the 28th and last Buddha, or, in short, the Buddha..  

This is about the extent of the museum’s discussion of both stones.  It’s like, back in the Uffizi, coming upon Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and saying, “Oh, you can tell that’s Venus because she’s scooting across the waves just as the ancient story says she did.”  Well, that’s fine, but there must be more.  For Nos. 221 and 17 I want some discussion of the fact that both stones are composed not merely in the sense of assembling many components but in the sense of radiating composure.  How they do that is a secret.  I want somebody to tell me about it.

There’s something else too, especially in No. 17, where we see a different world than the one shown in paintings by the Brueghels or Hieronymus Bosch.  There are lots of people in the paintings done by those guys, and every man Jack is shown as an individual.  I know: you’re going to say, Duh, these painters belong to the capital-W West.  Home of the capital-I Individual.  No surprise, then, that the crowd around the king in No. 17 is composed of people who are instead part of a community.  Nobody has any personal space, and nobody seems to want it or even know what it is.  

Yes, there’s way too much togetherness here for me.  I’m the last person to praise teams and group think, but these stones don’t ask me to do anything or think like everyone else.  They just radiate the sense that you can be part not only of the physical world but part of the community of the people in that world.  You can exhale.  Relax.  I think this gets very close to the Buddhist ideal, which brings us back to religion without a god.  It’s an antidote to credit cards and passwords and all the other junk that keeps us on our digital leashes.

End detour, at least for the moment.

Returning from Phanagiri to Vijayawada, I stopped at Jaggayyapet.  It had long been mined for building materials when, in 1882, James Burgess came by.  We met him in the last episode as the first archaeologist to dig at Amaravati.  You remember: Mr. Etc.   Alexander Rea, who had dug up Ghantasala, down in the Krishna delta, would also write about Jaggayyapet. Here’s a bit of what he wrote: “the stupa… has an outer brick casing with an interior packing formed of layers of earth about 2 feet thick, over each of which was laid a close flooring of very large bricks closely fitted together.  The diameter of the building is 31 ½ feet.”  Can you imagine going through life and seeing everything this way?  I like visiting London, but I almost get the shivers when I think of the men working there today and in the past while always seeing the world in that same logical, flat, one-dimensional, blinkered way.

As I neared Jaggayyapet, I was sure that Google was lost. She took me off on a side road, then a smaller side road, then onto a dirt track through a few acres waiting for a land developer to do something.  I decided she knew what she was doing when I saw a fenced area and another blue and white sign of the Archaeological Survey.  

Inside the fence there was very little to see except the base of the stupa Burgess had dug up.

Carved slabs had once wrapped the drum, but now the stupa was clad with plain ones. I walked around the drum the wrong way, which is to say counter-clockwise, but noticed that at a point about where I had started, let’s call it 6 o’clock, there was a bit of elegantly carved stone stuck in between the modern blank slabs.  This surviving wedge of an original drum slab might have been six inches wide by 18 inches tall, and it showed a young woman or parts of her–no arms or head but most of her legs and half of her torso.  She was in the classical posture called tribhanga, or three positions, with the body bent in different directions at the knees, hips, and shoulders.  It’s a common motif, and though perhaps awkward in life is exceptionally graceful in art.

Perhaps you remember the final scene in the first Planet of the Apes, a movie released in 1968.  An astronaut played by Charlton Heston thinks he’s landed on a distant planet but sees the ruined Statue of Liberty and realizes that he’s somehow returned to an Earth destroyed in a nuclear war.  The last line is him cursing humanity: “God damn you all to hell.”.  The scene is dated because we wisely no longer worry our pretty heads about nuclear annihilation, but the movie was timely in its day, because 1968 was the year of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  I got back to Vijayawada a few hours later and mentioned to someone that I had been out at Jaggayyapet looking at a graceful dancer but for some reason remembering the final scene of “Planet of the Apes.”  Wasn’t that an odd thing to come to mind, I said.  The person I was talking to didn’t miss a beat.  Not at all, she said.  I know exactly what you mean.

END PART TWO

I suppose that anyone standing on a deserted hilltop and looking at a fragment of an ancient ruined stupa might out of the blue remember a movie they had seen years earlier about the collapse of their own world.   

They might not be so likely to do that if they were standing next to the Parthenon or the Colosseum.  I say that because we know so much about the classical world that there’s plenty to keep our brains busy.  Not so with the stupas we’ve been looking at.  I can impress you by saying that the Satavahana dynasty ruled Amaravati and that the Ikshvaku dynasty ruled Vijayapuri, but we don’t know much about either of those dynasties other than  their names and some of the names of their kings.  We didn’t even know that much until the 1830s, when a British polymath named James Prinsep deciphered the script in which the names are carved on stupa stones.  It’s Brahmi, a predecessor of Sanskrit.   If Prinsep had worked his magic a generation earlier, Percy Bysshe Shelley might have written a poem about an Ozymandias named Rudrapurusadatta.

If it’s any help, both the Satavahana and Ikshvaku dynasties are wedged between the older and better known Maurya and the younger and better known Pallava dynasties.  There you go. Maybe we’d better stick, like Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major general, to (r how does it go) “fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.”

One thing I’ve learned about ancient India, however, is to stop assuming that the monks lived as the Buddha recommended.  That’s as foolish as thinking that Catholic priests live as Christ did.  Years ago, Burma’s generals taught me to see the difference between what the Buddha says and what Buddhists do, and Brahmi inscriptions reinforce that lesson.  For example, Vincent Tournier, a European academic, writes about a pillar found at Alluru, a monastery in the Krishna Delta.  The pillar records the gift to the monastery of 500 cows, 1000 coins, four cauldrons, and 24 female and male slaves.  I’m not sure if that’s 24 of each or 24 all together, but either way I have to get rid of the peace-and-love fantasy.  Time to retire my John Lennon T-shirts.  

Peter Skilling, a Canadian scholar in Bangkok, writes that monasteries sometimes owned many villages, which means that the monks ate rice grown with the sweat of the farmers in those villages.   

Out at UCLA, Gregory Schopen writes an essay called “The Business Side of a Buddhist Monastery.”  In it he writes that “monks could be as concerned with economics and accounting as they might be with formal doctrine.”  I like that “might be.”

Did monks have a hand in the spice trade?  Norman Underwood, an historian in New York, writes that “soldiers along Hadrian’s Wall flavored their rations with Malabar pepper, and Roman gourmands enumerated among the spices that must be in the house the Indian staples of pepper, ginger, clove, and cardamom.”  Ships from India regularly landed in Socotra, where, more or less midway, they met ships from Rome.  Maybe the monks left the spice trade to merchants, but in that case the merchants or their wives probably donated some of the earnings to monasteries.   The word rising in the back of your mind might be “complicit.” If that’s too negative, try “involved.”

Reading the work of scholars like these, I begin to feel like a child who associates the Catholic Church with St. Francis but then learns about the wealth of the Vatican. Reluctantly, I concede that the world of the dancing girl was not always as graceful as she is.  

Once I caught an attenuated glimpse of her world. You remember how the British put a little over half of India into a pot they ruled directly.  The rest they left in the hands of nearly 600 princes–familiarly called maharajahs–who were allowed to sit on thrones and pretend that they were in charge.  Important princes, those with large or populous states, had to endure the presence of a British officer called the Resident, whose job was to make sure the prince behaved.  Those who didn’t could be bounced off their gaddi or throne cushion. 

Lots of new hotels in India today are named the Residency.  It’s an odd choice, because that’s what the palaces of  the Residents were called.   So here’s a hotel owner seeking to create an aura of exclusivity.  What does he do?  He chooses a name arising from India’s humiliating subservience to foreigners. Go figure.  Anyway, I remember once visiting a magnificent residency–by the time I saw it it was a women’s college– and testing the bars on one of its porches.  A team of horses could not have pulled the bars out of their anchoring stonework, which testifies, I think, to an architect designing a building able to withstand an attack by a prince who had woken up one morning and decided that the time had come to finally get rid of that damned Britisher.

Hyderabad was the capital of the largest princely state, which itself was known simply as Hyderabad or as the Nizam’s Dominion.  That word nizam is Persian, and it was a unique title in India. Thanks to the Pax Britannica, the later nizams (they never used the title maharaja) enjoyed peaceful reigns so long that the sixth and seventh nizams between them spanned the nearly 90 years between the end of the East India Company in 1858 and India’s Independence in 1947.  

Viceroys, appointed in London, generally had five-year terms and often very little if any prior experience in India.  Railroads reached Hyderabad in the 1880s, and viceroys began visiting at least once during their term of office.  There’s a photograph of one such occasion.  Lord Willingdon, in real life Freeman Freeman-Thomas, sits next to the seventh nizam, Mir Osman Aly Khan. I read their body language as saying that each sees the other as a puppet.  I’m reminded of one Indian prince who consoled his son by saying that the English officer who had humiliated them would soon retire to a miserably cold country where he would shiver in his boring little house and remember his lost Indian days of glory.  

The nizams presided over an aristocracy whose wealth came from jagirs, groups of villages that a nizam in the past had more or less given as an inheritable property to one of his lieutenants.  Some fraction of the revenue collected annually from each village went up the chain to the nizam, but some stayed with the jagirdars, a title indicating ownership of a jagir.  If they owned large or prosperous jagirs, these men, the aristocrats of the Nizam’s Dominion, became fabulously wealthy.

Nehru despised them all.   Bloodsuckers, he might have said, and within a  year of Independence all the princely states of India had been abolished, along with the jagirs.  Hyderabad was the last to bite the dust.  It actually tried to fight to maintain its independence.  After all, British diplomats had assured the princes that with independence each princely state would revert to the status quo ante, which would leave open the option of carrying on as an independent country.  The Nizam’s Dominion, as big as Oregon, was large enough to perhaps make a go of it. 

Nehru was having none of that, and there are photographs of the nizam’s general surrendering in 1948 to Nehru’s, who amusingly carries a swagger stack.  All of which is background to how I met the nawab in Hyderabad in 1981, thirty-odd years after he was knocked off his luxurious, jagir-supported perch.  I don’t know his name or where he ranked in the Hyderabad nobility, but I saw a photograph of him on a wall in his small home, no more than a few rooms around a simple courtyard.  Talk about straitened circumstances.  In the photo he wears a tweed sportcoat and has one arm on the sill of a shiny new Buick.  There was also a picture of him carrying a rifle; I don’t remember but perhaps he had one foot on a tiger.  The nawab kept a few bits of his old furniture, too.  He showed me a cupboard where two doors, facing each other, swung open to reveal a dozen or more pairs of bespoke English shoes, all now covered in dust.  The doors of the cupboard swung as smoothly as the doors of a bank safe. 

Reduced to genteel poverty by the loss of his jagir, the nawab still wore an impeccable sherwani, buttoned up from knee to neck, and his posture was every bit as good as Colin Mackenzie’s.  The nawab, in a word, was courtly even though he no longer had a court to attend.  The man who would have been the eighth nizam, if Nehru had left Hyderabad alone, had emigrated to a sheep station in the Australian Outback.

Well, let me not get too sentimental.  When the nawab in the old days visited his jagir, which I bet he did at most once a year, he would have been treated as a god.  Still, I suspect he would not have enjoyed the visit.  I think he had a shred of conscience, or it may just be that aristocrats have such refined tastes that it pains them to see things that are not beautiful.  Yes, it’s a lot like France before 1789 or Russia before its Revolution.   Manners forbid me from seeking an analogy from our own time, though Ivanka and Gwyneth do slither into view.  

Good riddance, Nehru said, and I get it.   India didn’t need these elegant leeches, wasting their lives in princely inanities.  It’s a characteristic of aristocracies everywhere.   I recall an anecdote from the appalling but fascinating diaries of Chips Channon, an American from Chicago who did his damnedest to become a British aristocrat and did fairly well at it.  He writes that Field Marshal Julian Byng, a British general in World War I and then the governor-general of Canada, had been invited to Buckingham Palace.  He was denied entrance because he was wearing Court Dress and not Full Dress.  Heaven knows what the difference between the two was and probably is.  Who cares, say I, but then I would never be admitted to the places where such distinctions matter.  

I remember once walking into Karachi’s Sind Club.  I just strolled in and walked around.  No problem.  A few years later I came back and, unthinkingly, tried to enter while dressed in Pakistani-style shalwar kameez.  A few good shouts from the guards and I was back on the street.  And if you’re wondering why I was dressed as a local, it’s because an airline had lost my suitcase.  There are two lessons here, one about the importance of clothing and the other about never checking luggage.  

Still, I shall now defend the bastards.  I mean the aristocrats.  If the nawab were alive today and if he walked into a jeweler’s shop, he would recoil in disgust if anyone dared to present a tray of cultured pearls.  If the nawab walked into a carpet store, he would wave away with disdain anything shown to him that his trained eye told him had been colored with aniline dyes, rather than organic ones.

The nawab, in short, was a connoisseur, and when connoisseurs bite the dust, they take boatloads of artists and craftsmen with them.  So Virgil was a hanger-on in the court of Augustus.  OK, we don’t read Virgil any more, but Michelangelo ate dinner courtesy of the Medicis, and a lot of people still think Michelangelo’s pretty good.  John Singer Sargent, a superb Edwardian portrait painter, grew fat from fees fetched from fatcats.  Beethoven’s archduke trio was written, by golly, for a real archduke, and his Waldstein sonata was written for a real Count Waldstein.  Even Bach, struggling with a dozen kids in an apartment next to a church in Leipzig, welcomed the coins sent to him for coughing up the Goldberg variations for a diplomat with insomnia.  Sure, some artists starve in garrets, but most of them today hang around universities and hope for crumbs from the Guggenheim Foundation or MacArthur or Ford or whatnot.  It’s not so different from Virgil, and yes, I’ve done my share of it.  Yum, yum.

The nizam had court musicians and dancers and painters and calligraphers and barbers and tailors and shoemakers and perfumers and dastar or turban wrappers and seven kinds of cooks and… You get the idea.   They all did beautiful work, and they’re nearly all gone.  The seventh nizam had tiny feet, too: I’ve seen his silk wrapped slippers.  Delicate they are.  And he had palaces.  Most of those that survive were built in the late 19th century in a heavily Europeanized style, replete with iron railings and lamp posts from Macfarlane’s of Glasgow.  Only the best. One of those palaces, the Chowmahalla, is now a partly restored tourist attraction; another, Falaknama, is now a hotel with ridiculous prices.  

Perhaps 20 years ago, I visited Falaknuma.  At that time it was a ghost with a caretaker.  Actually it had lots of ghosts, because the entrance hall was rimmed with a tremendous staircase on whose walls hung oil portraits of the viceroys.  They had stayed at Falaknuma when they came to Hyderabad.   It does seem obsequious, but it was prudent for the nizams to massage British vanity.  There was a dining room, too, with bookshelves lined with dozens of copies of a heavy mugbook called Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominion.  Apparently the sixth nizam had ordered enough copies to guarantee the book’s publication. It’s a scarce item today, though reprints can be ordered for a piffly $50.  Speaking as a wannabe aristocrat, I would never buy a reprint.  

The best example of Hyderabadi architecture–by which I mean buildings devoid of European influence–may be the line of tombs built for a family at the top of the Hyderabad nobility.  These were the Paigahs, and like Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, the Paigahs ordered that their tombs should be outdoors, under the dome of heaven.  Each of the more important tombs, made of marble, was enclosed in a room-size space, unroofed and without solid walls.  The spaces instead were bordered with see-through stucco screens. 

As I was leaving India this year, I visited the tombs for the first time in many years.  It was a bit of a shock, because they’re now embedded in a residential neighborhood and are only about 600 feet from a busy flyover, an elevated highway.  I had once stopped to listen here to a street singer who accompanied himself with a harmonium, an instrument I like very much.  Now there was no room for a singer’s voice to rise above the noise of traffic. 

I pushed open the old wooden door to the grounds of the tombs and found myself in a construction zone. The stucco used in the screens is made of finely ground limestone and is very hard, but the screens were now broken in many places, leaving gaps big enough for a dog to jump through.  This would have been inconceivable to the Paigahs, who had built and endowed a mosque next to the tombs so that, as at the Taj Mahal, someone would be here forever reciting the Quran.  The money for that had apparently run out.

Still, a crew was fixing the screens. They are not made as solid panels that then have holes punched or drilled.  Instead, they are built as if you were weaving a chain-link fence from cookie dough.  There is no wire, no armature, just a patient forming of one link after another, leaving more than half the screen open, with holes big enough for two or three fingers..

And here were two men, sitting on the ground with a palette of fresh goo.  When I saw them, they were using a tiny knife to cut delicate traceries in the not-quite-set material.  Cut, blow, cut, blow.  Behind them,  a team was making fresh goo by sitting cross-legged on the ground and sliding a block back and forth across a wet board until the lime bits were like granulated sugar.  Old blocks of limestone were awaiting grinding into fresh goo.

I bet that somewhere you can buy similar screens made of plastic in a Chinese factory.  Why not do that?  Well, why not buy cultured pearls?  Or paste?  Why not buy rugs made with aniline dyes?  Why not buy Karastan?   It all goes back to taste, which any aristocrat alive today will tell you is everywhere in catastrophic retreat.  DId I mention that the sixth nizam accumulated his dirty laundry until he had a mountain of it?  Then he put it in trunks and sent it to Paris.  Why?  Silly question: Paris had the best launderers and nothing but the best would do.  Time didn’t matter.  As for cost, as the commodore says, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. 

I mock aristocrats, but I also thank them.  Think how much poorer we’d be without them.  I should point out that fussy as aristocrats are, the craftsmen and artists they supported are probably even fussier.  That’s the path to excellence.  Think of the young and promising violinist invited to play for Jascha Heifetz.   He comes with Brahms under his arm or some other masterwork, and Heifetz tells him to skip it.  “I just want to hear you play scales.”   I imagine a young ballerina who wants to perform the Dying Swan for Pavlova but who is asked instead to demonstrate her bar technique.  

Well, this defence of aristocrats is probably not the one that aristocrats themselves would choose.  Who wants to be reduced to deadwood supporting creative saprophytes?  Aristocrats I suppose prefer to think of themselves simply as superior persons.  “My hair is sleek, my cheek is pink, I dine at Blenheim once a week.”  Well, that’s understandable, and I can try to accommodate.  Do you remember that 1791 pamphlet by Edmund Burke, the one called “An Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old Whigs.”  The title isn’t helpful, but after many, many pages of palaver Burke gets around to defining what he calls a natural aristocracy.  Burke writes that these are the men (they’re all men), “without which there is no nation.”  

Well, I’m inclined to reply, buddy, there’s no nation without cooks and coachmen too, but let’s give the man some rope.  In a single sentence of prodigious length (I count 38 lines in the original edition), Burke enumerates the “circumstances” needed to produce an aristocrat.  Burke doesn’t say anything about their appearance, which is a pleasant surprise, and he doesn’t explicitly say they have to be rich, which is even more surprising.  He does perhaps brush against that sensitive topic by saying that aristocrats must come from an “estimable” background.  I fear that means that the young aristocrat’s parents must also be aristocrats, but again Burke doesn’t say anything about their having to be rich.  

So far, so good.  Burke says that the aristocrat in training must have the leisure to be broadly educated in the sciences and humanities.  No problem there.  He must also be taught, however, to be honest and brave and willing to fight.  In Burke’s sobering words, the young aristocrat must “be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty.” 

Gulp.  Do you feel the air getting thinner?  The word “values” gets beaten to death these days, especially by people who should not be allowed within 10 feet of it, but Burke is talking about nobility, not as a marker of social rank but as a marker of character. That’s another word on the cusp of obsolescence.

Burke gets us into even deeper water by insisting that a young aristocrat must “see nothing low and sordid from… infancy.”  Oh, oh.  Goodbye, Netflix.  Sure, parents can insulate junior from phones and tablets, but are they going to deny him friends with phones and tablets?  And even if we put a group of children on an island where they never see or hear a comedian with expletives in every hilarious sentence, how will the kids cope with the real world when they finally see it?  Here comes Prince Myshkin and life in an asylum..

I’ve been trying to think of people who come close to meeting Burke’s definition. My nominee is Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance man in both senses.  But that’s 500 years ago.  In my own lifetime, Nehru himself is a fair candidate, though inclined to lose his temper too often.  Americans might suggest John F. Kennedy, who had the charm of an aristocrat but who had earned his Secret Service nickname of Lancer.  Rory Stewart comes close, too, although he shamelessly hustles the books he’s written and the tickets he wants you to buy to his shows.  I know: it’s business.  It’s just not something an aristocrat would do.  Mind, I think Stewart is impressive.  My point really is that Burke’s natural aristocrat does not exist.  I will make an exception for the incoming class at Stanford.

So much for my two defenses of aristocracies.  I’ve done what I can for them.  Now it’s time for me to defend the other side, a much larger group both today and in the time of the dancing girl.

Many years ago, I was driving along a lonely road in India.  I passed an old woman so tired that she was struggling to put one foot after the other.  She was close to collapsing.  I slowed down, then stopped.  What should I have done?  I don’t know the answer, but I believe that I probably made her life worse, not better.  I reached into my wallet and pulled out a note worth perhaps five dollars, maybe 10.  I can’t be precise: there’s been a lot of rupee inflation.  I handed it to her.  She was too tired to react, though I read confusion in her face.  What happened after I drove off?  How much suspicion would it arouse when she showed the bill to a shopkeeper or even her neighbors?  I bet they just took it from her.  She had no business with that kind of money.  I should have given her a bunch of tiny bills, even coins.  Should I also have offered her a ride?  Sure.  I don’t know why I didn’t.

So I was an idiot, but you can understand where the impulse comes from.  It goes all the way back to what Cain says after he kills Abel.  I know, the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal deify Herbert Spencer and teach their children the Law of the Jungle, but nobody survives without help.  Just because Hillary agrees doesn’t make it false.   

And so along comes Eric Blair, alias George Orwell.  Born in India, educated in England, he’s off to Burma as a policeman.  A few years later he moves back to Europe and publishes a novel about Burma that guarantees he will never get his old job back.  He then publishes Down and Out in Paris and London, a book that says to comfortable readers “Look, here’s what I saw.  Here’s how the working class lives.”  Four years later, in 1937, he’s back again with The Road to Wigan Pier.  You don’t have to wait long to see Orwell’s cards.  On the very first page he uses the words beastly, defiled, hideous, and squalid.  That must be some kind of record.  Orwell is writing about a boarding house where his room ‘’stank like a ferret’s cage… the smell hit you in the face with a smack.”  In the second chapter, he’s moved on to writing about buttons down the back.  You won’t forget the image.  He’s talking about the line of scabs on the vertebrae of coal miners who have to bend over and walk long distances in tunnels whose roofs are low and bumpy.

You remember how American troops in 1945 forced German civilians to walk through concentration camps.  “Look what you’ve done” was the message.  Orwell’s doing the same thing.  He wants to force all the comfortable, cultured, polite, educated upper-class and maybe middle-class English to look at how the people who support them live. 

I don’t say that this theme is original with Orwell.  You’ll naturally think of other authors, perhaps Friedrich Engles or his colleague Karl.  Perhaps you’ll think of Dickens or maybe the Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew, documenting London’s workers, one occupation at a time.  Personally I remember “The Red Cross and the County Agent,” an essay by Edmund Wilson about Kentucky in the 1930s.  I suppose Steinbeck comes to mind.  Maybe James Agee.  We could make a game out of it: how many authors can you name who try to make us feel guilty?  You know, the ones who write books that Republican legislators these days are hot to burn.

But why, if it’s a common theme, do I discuss it at all, let alone focus on George Orwell and his Road to Wigan Pier?  I should say up front that there is no road to Wigan Pier.  There’s actually no Wigan Pier, either, or at least none that  Orwell saw.  Orwell’s title instead is a metaphor for the development of his own thinking about what should be done.  I read the book 50 years ago or more and now, rereading it, realize that I have completely forgotten that the title was a metaphor.

I spent a few hours in Wigan back in 2006 and walked down the remarkable set of 20 locks used by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to drop 200 feet.  The gates were all wood and all manual–very picturesque–and I suppose the canal was fun for vacationers on rented narrow boats, or at least fun until maybe the fourth or fifth lock.  I saw no coal mines; the last had closed in the ‘90s.  I saw no textile mills, though the old buildings survive, some of them repurposed for apartments and offices much as they have been elsewhere in England, such as at Ancoats, on the east side of Manchester.  Wigan was Tesco country now, with Lidl and Aldi for variety.  Orwell would be shocked if he saw the place, especially if he learned that there had been no socialist revolution and that the changes that had come to Wigan arguably owed as much to Conservatives as to Labour.  I know; now you’re thinking, “Aha!  I knew it.  He’s a closet Tory!”

Orwell’s book is divided into two unequal halves.  The longer part is descriptive, the shorter, analytical, and the part that I’m after is Chapter 12.  It’s in the second part, and in it Orwell digresses from his immediate concern with saving Britain from fascism.  Instead, he considers the long term direction of cultural evolution.  I’m surprised he does this, because it leads him to a truly dark conclusion, but that’s Orwell’s greatest strength.  He uses plain language to see things as clearly as he can, and he doesn’t shy away from what he sees..  

Here is a key sentence from the chapter: “The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.  That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there.”

Well, it’s another unpleasant image, even more unpleasant than Nehru calling the huge dam on the Krishna a “temple of humanity.”   But it’s hard to disagree with Orwell: we know that machines long ago reduced the need for muscles, and we know that today they’re well on the way to reducing the need for brains.  I don’t know how many examples one needs, but just on the way home from India I stopped overnight in London and took the Heathrow Express into town.  No more ticket-punchers on board.  Yes, there was a guard at the turnstiles to help people, like  me, figure out where to put the damned bit of paper.  Of course the cash registers at the grocery store an hour later were all self-checkout, again with someone to help customers to stupid to figure out how to use the machines..  A day after that, I whizzed through U.S. immigration without any documents.  It was delightful, though I wonder where the old inspectors went.  Out of sight, out of mind.  I took an airport tram, remotely controlled, of course.  And so on.

Orwell was seeing an end to work of every sort, and although we’re not there yet, the mountain of money invested in artificial intelligence suggests that lots of people think that many kinds of professional jobs will in the next few decades bite the dust as surely as bank tellers and full-service gas station attendants.  

Optimists argue, and Orwell points this out, that this is the best of all possible worlds, because we will all be free to climb mountains, write poetry, and explore the cuisines of the world, but Orwell also thought this was bunk. He wrote, “The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand.” 

Maybe you think Orwell is wrong, and that you’ll enjoy your leisure.  The problem is that before we can all bask our capabilities will have shrivelled.  Sure, I’d like to sing.  I sang in a choir as a kid.  But I don’t sing now.  I listen to professional singers so much better than I could ever be, People used to draw or sketch, too, but it’s so much easier to whip out your phone.  Women used to sew.  Now–maybe you live someplace where this isn’t true–it’s hard to find a fabric store.  People still do cook, but I’m astonished at how much space supermarkets devote to meals in a box, ready to heat.  You’ve seen it on TV: the detective goes home and takes some ready-to-eat thing out of the fridge. 

Yesterday I bought a loaf of bread.  It was in a plastic bag and sealed with a twist tie.  I handed it to a man behind the counter and asked him to please slice it.  It’s not that I can’t slice bread.  I can, same as I can change a light bulb.  I asked him to do it for the same reason that grocery stores now sell finely sliced cabbage all ready for coleslaw dressing.  We may resist some of these things and mock some of these things, but we almost certainly succumb to the convenience of some of these things.  

No American audience today could sit through a political debate from a century ago.  Does the U.S. senate chamber today hear anything that Lincoln or Douglas would recognize as a debate?   I suppose judges listen, but I bet that attorneys keep their speeches short.  As I said earlier, I will watch an action move but skip Macbeth.  The technical term is stupidification.    

We do want to be rich and pretty.  Sorry.  Nobody uses that word anymore.  I meant hot.  That’s hard to do, but wait: welcome my avatar.  That’s one step shy of “brains in a bottle.”   I read today that for the first time ever, TIME magazine this year chose an entertainer as its Person of the Year.  Bread and circuses.  The magazine’s owner crowed that the issue broke a sales record.

So Orwell was worried about fascism.  A later generation worried about nuclear incineration.  Now we have Orwell’s 12th chapter.  He knew nothing, or next to nothing, about computers, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or avatars.  He did have an inkling of how deeply society could be immersed in advertising and celebrities.  He would have no trouble understanding the rise of a politics based on “your facts” and “my facts,” a politics where blatant lies were all part of the fun.  A bit of spam arrived this morning from a hotel chain.  The subject line was, “We can’t contain our excitement.”  Me neither.  Forget the dancing girl; bring on pole dancing and twerking.

Thousands of words ago, I argued that as we get richer we get poorer.  Now it seems we may be really rich but dead broke.  

So the Satavahana Dynasty bit the dust.  Like the collapse of the Hyderabad aristocracy, its collapse was painful, but it was not terminal.  It was replaced, like a tree falling over.  Compare that with where we stand.  There will be no spring.  The good news is that sliding into winter may not be painful.  I’m betting it will happen without our even noticing.  We’ll be like the proverbial lobster in a pot.  Why just now I’m wondering what’s for dinner. I regret to say that my wife, who’s really quite wonderful, periodically lusts after hot dogs.