Ahmedabad Medley

Tired after a long day and my best ambitions to blog about yesterday's amazing walking tour of the old walled city of Ahmedabad will not be fulfilled, not tonight in any case. However  I have put together a little collage of images from the tour. Enjoy!

Pilgrimage

We have had a simply amazing day, which began with a walking tour of the old walled city of Ahmedabad and continued with a fascinating visit to Gamthiwala, a purveyor of fabrics close to the Queen's Tomb. The Benetton like order of the tiny shop was turned to a jumbled chaos of colour as the most amazing array of shawls and fabrics were unfurled before us. Inevitably tea was served throughout and we eventually gathered up our purchases and headed for the Auto Rickshaws. Our afternoon concluded with a visit to the Step Well, one of those haunting, magical spaces that inhabit childhood dreams. The eerie beauty of the place was enhanced by the fading evening light.

However for me the highlight of the day was our visit to Ghandi's Ashram. I had been looking forward to it for weeks now and was delighted to see it on our first weekend's itinerary. Perhaps it was because I was still trying to absorb the wonders of this morning or because I was distracted by trying to choose an image from the hundreds of photographs I had taken already today as well as trying to choose a theme for today's blog, but for whatever reason I was completely unprepared for what happened when we stepped into the Mahatma's simple room at the Ashram. I found myself standing very still and choking back emotion , hoping that my colleagues would not notice that I was welling tears. 

So in the end, the image of the day chose itself, as did the closing words of this blog, which are from Ghandi's prayer:

Lord of humility, 
dwelling in the little pariah hut.
Help us to search for Thee throughout
that fair land watered by Ganges,
Brahmaputra, and Jamuna.
Give us receptiveness.
Give us openheartedness.
Give us Thy humility.
Give us the ability and willingness
to identify ourselves
with the masses of India.

O God!,
who does help only when man
feels utterly humble, grant that we
may not be isolated from the people.
We would serve as servants and friends.
Let us be embodiments of self-sacrifice,
embodiments of Godliness,
humility personified, that we may know
the land better and love it more.

Sights and Sounds

So far I have not seen a great deal of the outside world, but even from the air conditioned tower of our hotel, there are hints of what is to come. My curiosity has definitely been aroused by a glimpse through a corridor window of what I'm assuming  to be some form of palace or temple. The sound of horns is as constant as the twittering of birds, and surprisingly enough the two co exist nicely together here.

Passage to India (how could I resist?).

After an extended absence from the Blog-sphere, I'm back. The catalyst is a trip to India working with IBM's Executive Service Corps on a project in Ahmedabad in the Gujarat province. Today's contribution will be very brief , being as I am , thoroughly jet lagged after the long journey from Ireland. The adventure began, after many weeks of preparatory calls, with a stormy flight to London and a bit of a scramble to get from the tin shack that is Terminal One at Heathrow to the grandeur of T5. I boarded hot and flustered but it's amazing what an unexpected upgrade and a glass of Champagne can do to settle the nerves!

Eight hours later I was in Mumbai and fours hours after that I was in Ahmedabad to a welcome that deserves a post all of its own, perhaps when I'm rested and fed. In the mean time however, I thought I'd share a poem by the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu, which ironically speaks more to what I left behind than what lies ahead in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned!

Autumn Song 

Like a joy on the heart of a sorrow,
The sunset hangs on a cloud;
A golden storm of glittering sheaves,
Of fair and frail and fluttering leaves,
The wild wind blows in a cloud.

Hark to a voice that is calling
To my heart in the voice of the wind:
My heart is weary and sad and alone,
For its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone,
And why should I stay behind?

Let Them Eat Cake

We had a plan for the day, a long , collective "To Do" list. It would have been a lie to say that any of us were particularly enthusiastic about anything on that list so it wasn't that hard to persuade the three younglings (though that's an increasingly anachronistic term for the giant of a teenager who fills the front passenger seat) to jump in the Mini and head to the midlands for their cousin's birthday party.

Quasar, coffee, bowling and cake. Sunny garden games, home made cup cakes and sunshine. Cliff hanging football on the television and great conversation in the kitchen. Doing rounds of country roads with the roof down, my ears ringing with the delighted screams of my God Daughter's friends. The modern equivalent of donkey rides on the beach (someone suggested getting the car a straw hat!).

An unexpectedly lovely afternoon.

Oh and the cake? Another magnificent creation from my baby sister.

Inspiration

Every once in a while, a seed of inspiration settles in one of those small, fertile crevasses in my soul, and manages to take root just long enough for me to be able to recognise its presence and nurture it before it is dessicated by the dry winds of work or torn up by the storms of life.

Sometimes that little seed will blossom into a poem or a turn of phrase that I'll feel confident enough about to want to share it with others. If I'm really really lucky, someone will say "I see" in response.

People: their presence; their absence; their words, have been the most recent sources of inspiration for me. The discovery that I had an ability to respond to that inspiration , however halting and inconsistent that response might be, is something for which I am truly grateful.

Places, whether it is the memory of laurel walks and the smell of turf smoke, or the sound of crunching gravel and the cooing of pigeons high in wind rustled trees have also fueled my imagination released crystal streams of words that surprise me every time they begin to trickle and flow.

The wonderful thing about words is that we are hardly ever without the means to share or capture them. Visual inspiration is a much more troublesome thing, for me at least. I can see in my minds eye, brilliant pictures, shapes and colours, but all too often they are as fleeting as a rainbow and I can never find the means to share them.

Sitting by the water's edge recently, on a brilliant summer's afternoon, in a place which as been the source of so much inspiration for me, a place where creativity and talent are so plentiful it must surely have infected the air and the water, I had a rare and lovely moment of inspiration. One where the idea , the means to express it and the joy of having someone say "I see" all came together in an instant.

Picking through a hoard of sea glass, I was struck by two pieces in particular and turned to my youthful beach combing companions and said "doesn't that look like....." , and soon we were caught up in excited chatter and plans for a little piece we called "Bride and Groom".

Beachcombing

A jumble of thoughts for today's blog, inspired by a recent trip to the beach where I watched my younglings explore the muddy , lovely, haven that is the Cove in Baltimore. Between mudbaths and body boarding, they searched with growing excitement for mermaid's tears. We sorted our hoard, grading colour and shape, throwing back those sharp edged fry whose formation by burnishing sea and sand was incomplete.

Amidst the glass, small shards of crockery reminded me of a lovely project by local artist Ginny Pavry which reflected on how the value of seemingly worthless things is transformed by their association with people , places or events.














And later, failing to find a poem or a song that captured the magic of that afternoon, I thought of this, by Pablo Neruda.



Ode to Broken Things

Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
It’s not my hands
or yours
It wasn’t the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
It wasn’t anything or anybody
It wasn’t the wind
It wasn’t the orange-colored noontime
Or night over the earth
It wasn’t even the nose or the elbow
Or the hips getting bigger
or the ankle
or the air.
The plate broke, the lamp fell
All the flower pots tumbled over
one by one. That pot
which overflowed with scarlet
in the middle of October,
it got tired from all the violets
and another empty one
rolled round and round and round
all through winter
until it was only the powder
of a flowerpot,
a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.

Let’s put all our treasures together
– the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold –
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway.