Falling for Pune

We have only been in India a long week now, and I am already drastically behind on our adventures. So, I have decided to abandon the chronology for now and record the more recent events while they are savory and fresh. With any luck, we will persevere and fill in the gaps later. I think traveling is much this way, patchwork memories clumsy sewn together.

Our first day in Pune I spend laboriously washing our dirty clothes, cleaning up our hotel room which Matt and I had utterly trashed in minutes upon arrival in a half delirious attempt to find something or other. The rest of the day was sleeping and watching 70s themed Baliwood movies in Hindi on the TV until Matt came home. It was not really until day 2, Pune that I really branched out and started to explore. After Delhi we had gleaned some insight and I wanted to start at the shallows and wade in.  It was not long, however, before I realized that Delhi is the Gary, IN to Pune's, Chicago... ostensibly, worlds apart. Pune is clean (relatively speaking) and charming. The streets have the same brashy driving, but there is a grace to it here. Pared with sidewalks, more westerners, and large, bushy trees everywhere, Pune is without question a rival for the most pleasant place I have ever been.

As advised, I started my adventures in Koregan Park, which is the most affluent, westernized and exciting part of Pune. In the early 60s Osho Ashram, located on the edge of Koregan park was founded by ____. With courses like "taste of your inner chocolate" it quickly became a pilgrimage for hippie westerners and European exoticness. Over the course of twenty years, the economy around Koregan Park grew and diversified as a result of the Ashram, but in the late 70s roomers of oddities surrounding the Ashram pushed it's founder to travel to the US where he founded a second Ashram. This new location blossomed as well until it was shut down for tax evasion, racqueteering and suspicion of prostitution, and the leader quickly fled to Switzerland where he died in exile in the late 80s. Anymore the scandal has very little to do with Koregan Park, but as I walk about the dusty streets I like to think of the overarching impact one crazy little man can have on a community. That thought is of-course dwarfed by the dominant presence of American memorabilia colorfully advertised in the boutiques and shopping plazas. Especially here in Pune, Indians drink up anything American like a dehydrated sponge; except for me, they largely leave me alone. Pune Indians want to be Americans not know Americans. They don't want to not know you either. I am simply offered goods, nodded to as I pass by and occasionally touched on the head followed always by either the phrase, "gold," or "sun gold."  In the four days I have been in Pune, my affection for this city spreads wider and wider. I think, unlike anywhere else I have been, this place suites me most of all.

It is busy, bustling and hectic. I relish in the communal intimacy that you get only in large metropolitans like New York and London. Here, I am one little lost bee. I sit at my cafe, walk along my streets, an undisturbed part of the buzzing, building hive. Unlike other cities, Pune has the softness of a Caribbean cabana shack left to age out in the sun. The city is breezy and old, the once brightly colored buildings antiqued with a think layer of dust. Women in vibrant colored silks and men in 1970s style tight shirts and thin cut pants decorate the streets and window sills. For how dense the population, there seems to be a one to one scooter/person ratio, and you are at liberty to park them wherever this is a blank space. Here all the cars, streets, and shops, are either well worked, well loved, or pulled together with what was at hand as best it could be. The effect is like living inside a vintage photo album.

Nature is also allowed to run wild here. Pune does not have the gaping-mouthed-hollowed-out corners of Delhi or Agra. Here the jungle presence is just that: present. In Agra there were monkeys galore, with plump little bellies from community feeding as a tribute to the monkey god, Honuman, god of power. Here in Pune it is mostly hawlks and cows which roam, roost and feed as they please. One of the few things I did know about India before we traveled here was the presence of the holy cow. The difference between knowing and experiencing should never be underestimated. I am still enjoying the presence of cows. They show up unexpectedly like pop up adds on a browser. One minute your going about your daily business and the next, "pop!"--- cow. I sat in a coffee shop yesterday and watched a bustling intersection at the corner of North Main St. and Mahatma Gandhi St. flail about in ciaos as three big sows chewed on a ruck sac they had absconded from a neighboring shop. Not more than an hour later I was exiting the loft of a carpet dealers shop while searching for gifts and turned to face the rear end of a cow who had wondered into the covered bazaar of the market. A group of men were trying to lour the confused beast out with food while sari clad women shooed it from behind with reed brooms. 

  

A huge tree outside of Osho Ashram. These huge trees are called batas by the locals and each have a numbered plate on them. Technically, they are protected but are unfortunately are often sick due to drunken locals urinating on them.

Cow in the road at M.G. St. 

MG street view