Songs for the Road: Music that Evokes India and Nepal

In traveling to India and Nepal, and now in thinking and writing about the experience, music has a central role. Music has always meant a great deal to me, and music had much to do with inspiring me to go to India, keeping me sane while there, connecting me to the experience, and helping me to interpret it afterwards. Here’s some of the best stuff.

(Note that I will be leaving out the Beatles songs George Harrison did with Indian musicians. I love and respect them, and they certainly inspired me, but you don’t need me to point you to the Beatles, do you? Also Ravi Shankar at Monterey Pop. Go find it for yourself.)

Pre-travel inspiration

Before traveling to India, I was drawn to music from it, but also music about it.

Duke Ellington, Far East Suite (1967)

I grew up with jazz, but Far East Suite was the first jazz album I got into on my own. From the disorienting jangle of those opening chords, Duke manages to evoke the East — most of the songs are about the Middle East and India, despite the name — without parody or pastiche, which is especially remarkable considering this came out in 1967, the same year George Harrison was putting sitar on Sgt. Pepper (which I love, but still). I wanted to go to where this was.

Paul Horn, Inside (1968)

This gorgeous album by British jazz flautist Paul Horn was in my dad’s record collection, a beautiful gatefolded thing with Horn’s intense, weary gaze on the front and a picture of the Taj on the back, with extensive liner notes explaining that the dome of the Taj Mahal has the purest echo in the world. This recording has a lot to do with the heavy reverb you hear on so much New Age music, but when Horn did it, it was both organically created and completely new.

Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “Face of Love” (1994)

I first heard this gorgeous song from the Dead Man Walking score (which seems to be out of print) on an episode of New Sounds on WNYC, which my grandmother used to listen to each night from eleven to twelve when I was living with her after college. Ry Cooder was involved, which usually makes music better, and this actually made me reassess my opinion of Eddie Vedder, who comes in and does his bit beautifully and without much fuss. I hoped to find this sort of sound and feeling in India, and I did come across something close to it: an old man and a teenage boy playing harmonium and singing in the courtyard of the Fatehpur mosque outside Agra.

Beastie Boys, “Bodhisattva Vow” (1994)

I’m not sure how conscious this was, but everyone knew this song because everyone had Ill Communication. By 1994, Tibetan Buddhism was the new Hinduism, the Eastern spirituality the cool kids dabbled in. America’s infatuation with Hinduism had by then turned sour — the Rajneesh gathering guns in Oregon, the Hare Krishnas creeping people out at airports and abusing kids — but Tibet was a cause that hip folks like Richard Gere and MCA and Uma Thurman’s dad were into, and its religious leaders seemed like the real deal. I was at the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996 in San Francisco, and so were an absurd number of my favorite artists. (Yes, this is Tibet, not India or Nepal, but Nepal was a major redoubt of Tibetan culture, and the Tibetan government in exile was in India.)

On the road 1997-1998

My first trip to India and Nepal was in 1997. Here’s what I listened to that still reminds me of that time. There was other stuff in the collection, of course — Everclear, Bjork, Pink Floyd — but these are the things that bring me back to that journey.

Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole (1997)

I loved listening to this hypermodern techno while rolling through the dark night of India. I felt global in a very late-nineties way. “It Doesn’t Matter” was a good mantra when India was driving me nuts, which was often.

Dil To Pagal Hai (Original Soundtrack) (1997)

Before I went to India, my idea of Indian music was Ravi Shankar, which is a little like going to Paris and expecting to hear dudes in striped shirts playing “La Vie en Rose” on accordions in all the clubs. What Indian music actually sounded like, blasting from lo-fi speakers in every cafe and bus, was old women singing as if they wanted you to think they were twelve-year-old girls.

It drove me nuts.

But over weeks and then months, I first got used to it, and then, grudgingly, realized I’d started to like it. There was one soundtrack in particular, for the Sharukh Khan blockbuster Dil To Pagal Hai, that was absolutely everywhere. I think it was outside of Pushkar somewhere that I heard a uniformed schoolgirl out in a field whistling the theme from “Are Re Are,” and something in me let go. Yeah, the songs really were that catchy. I couldn’t pretend anymore that I didn’t know them. I bought the soundtrack.

Daler Mehndi, “Bolo Ta Ra Ra” (1995)

Now this I liked. I have no idea why this 1995 song was everywhere in 1998, but it was, and I loved everything about it: that beat, that voice, the insane colors on those turbans, the hands-up dancing, the whole damn thing. It would be a few years later that bhangra would become a thing in the US — Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, from 2001, was basically a bhangra song, and Jay Z’s collab with Panjabi MC came out in 2003 — and the groove that caught fire was slower, funkier, undeniably hipper. In those years I started going sometimes to Basement Bhangra, a long-running DJ Rekha production in Manhattan where you could watch tall dudes in turbans and gold watches and shiny slacks cut loose with undeniable moves. But you could see all that coming with Daler Mehndi, if you happened to run across him. (The sound quality on this video is awful, but that’s more or less how I heard the song most of the time anyway. Go listen to it with good sound, but watch this video.)

Betty Davis, “He Was a Big Freak” (1974)

Pushkar. Sunset Cafe. Bhang Lassi. Weak, medium, strong? Strong. Strong? Strong. I can handle it.

I could not handle it.

Cancel dinner with the German ladies. I can barely speak. Try to find my way back to my hotel. Looks like the right road, but am I going the right way? All the cows and gutter pigs are looking at me, aren’t they? I need food. Here’s a Nepali restaurant. Momos please. I’m looking at my book, pretending to read but can’t read. Will they notice I’m not turning the pages? On the wall: To do good and never evil and to purify one’s mind, these are the words of Lord Buddha.

I make it back to my hotel. There I see the cassette I bought in the marketplace that afternoon, just a blank white cover with the word FUNK written on it. I have no idea what this will be. I put it on, and a woman’s voice is screaming, “He was a BIIIIIG freak!”

Bliss.

The whole tape is like that: deep cuts of American funk from the seventies, like Funk Funk by Cameo. I realize I haven’t seen a Black person in months, and the only Black music anyone plays is Bob Marley, which isn’t American Black music. I realize that Black culture, as distant as I may be from it, is a big part of what makes me different as an American from the Euro-travelers and Ozzies around me. I have missed this groove. We have blues jazz soul rock hip hop. We have the doo-doo funk. I need the doo-doo funk. I need Garry Shider in a diaper.

It took me years to figure out who this woman was, this woman screaming and cooing about whipping her man with a turquoise chain, which is so specific that you have to assume it really happened. I mean, turquoise? And when I did find out, it was even weirder, because Betty Davis was Miles Davis’s second wife, a brief late-sixties marriage in between Frances Taylor and Cicely Tyson. (Miles liked interesting women.) Betty Davis introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Without her, there might be no Bitches Brew.

So was the man she used to whip with her turquoise chain Miles Davis? I guess we’ll never know.

Aftermath

In the wake of that first journey, I would discover music that resonated with what I’d experienced.

Beck, Mutations (1998)

It came out the summer after I got home, but Mutations seemed to be all about what I’d experienced. Yes, there are Indian instruments on “Nobody’s Fault but My Own,” but it’s the overall mood of lonely resignation, and more than that the lyrics, that registered. Line after line seemed to connect. Listen to it for yourself and see how it goes.

Coco Rosie, La maison de mon rĂªve (2004)

This didn’t come out until after I’d already been back to India and Nepal a second time, but there’s something about the mysterious insularity of this album that reminds me of the strangeness, and the interiority, of that first journey. It resonates especially with the feeling of the lower Himalayas somehow.

On the road 2002-2003

I made a second journey to India and Nepal, this time for six months, after spending a year teaching English in South Korea to save money. It was a different experience in many ways: I was older, I was with a girlfriend (we would marry and divorce), I’d spent a year abroad, and 9/11 had changed what it meant to be an American in the world.

Beck, Midnite Vultures (1998)

Beck’s much maligned Midnite Vultures was supposed to be the real followup to the blockbuster Odelay, after the side gambit that was Mutations, but instead of the kaleidescopic Americana critics wanted more of, Vultures seemed to be a weird sustained mockery of nineties hip hop and R&B from a white guy who’d broken through with the drawling rap of “Loser.” What I think a lot of critics missed was that this was an international album. Both Mellow Gold and Odelay were American road trips (“I’m goin’ back to Houston!”), but by now Beck had become a global star, and Vultures is speckled with odd geographical references: “She looks so Israeli,” “Do you wanna ride on the Baltic Sea?” “Pop-lockin’ beats from Korea.”

I listened to this a lot during my year actually in Korea (2001-2). This was long before K-pop was a global phenomenon, and the pop-lockin’ beats felt like weird refractions of American music. Vultures also seems to predict the weird, unstable world of those years, with lines about refugees and riots and snipers passed out in the bushes. In trying to get a handle on the post-9/11 world, Vultures felt like a helpful companion.

Om Mani Padme Hum

This is the music, insipid and insidious, that oozed from dozens of curio shops around the Bodnath stupa in 2002. I can find nothing about its origins, though it sounds vaguely Chinese and feels menacing in the way of Shen Yun ads. I can only assume it was created sometime between 1997 and 2002, because I never heard it on my first visit to Nepal.

Indian Vibes, Mathar (1994)

So we’re riding in a car out somewhere beyond Pokhara, on our way to start our trek up into the Annapurnas, and the driver pops in a cassette, and this is what comes out: totally cheesy sitar rock from an anonymous band. Google seems to think Paul Weller was a member — yes, the dude from The Jam and The Style Council — but I haven’t been able to find much about this odd little musical blip. Still, it’s fun as hell, and since it was pretty much the last music I heard before heading off into the mountains, it spent a long time in my head.

DJ Doll, “Kaanta Laga” (2002)

This racy video — a porno mag! A girl in jeans! — was all over TV in 2002, in an India that was fast liberalizing economically after years of protectionism. These were BJP years, but the emphasis then was more on joining the capitalist world than on the Hinduttva conservatism that would come later. There were now beef restaurants in Mumbai, sexy videos on TV, and lots of internet cafes with IE5 and uninterrupted power supplies to keep you going during the inevitable power cuts.

Adnan Sami, “Tera Chehra” (2002)

Another song that was everywhere, with the kind of string arrangement Beck would borrow for Sea Change. The video is ridiculous melodrama, with Sami pretending to play a bunch of instruments he clearly can’t, but the song itself is lovely.

On the road 2010

I made it back to India once more, this time as a Google employee, traveling to Pune to talk to an outsource team there about how we could work together better. We were in a private from the airport to the Mumbai Oberoi, in the middle of the night of course, when the driver asked if we wanted some music. I said yes, expecting something Indian.

Nope.

It was tinkly lounge jazz, weird enough I’d been expecting Bollywood. But then I realized I knew these chords.

Could it be?

Was it?

It was.

Karen Souza, “Creep” (2011)

Now, as you can see from the date, something is off. This must have been released as a single before it came out on the Essentials album, because I could swear this is what I heard. Rolling through the Mumbai night, on the way to the poshest hotel I’d ever stayed at in India, here was a voice purring to me from the radio, “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”

Indeed.

Evocations

In the years since my trips to India, I’ve run across music that has evoked the experience particularly well. Here’s some of the best.

John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (1961)

In the Ken Burns Jazz documentary, Branford Marsalis tells the story of asking drummer Elvin Jones about playing with John Coltrane during this extraordinary stand at the Village Vanguard, music that is as intense and spiritual as any ever recorded. How did they do it? How did they stay so locked in, night after night?

“You got to be willing to die with a motherfucker.” That was Elvin’s answer.

John Coltrane was out in front in a lot of ways. Long instrumental jams over a single chord are so normal to those of us reared on post-Allman rock and roll that it’s easy to miss how weird this was in 1961, five years before the Beatles sheepishly brought the one-chord song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to George Martin. Also radical was the overblowing, the honking, the strange sounds, the chromatic runs. When I hear this, I hear it as someone who grew up on Primus and Sonic Youth and Public Enemy and Hendrix, but none of that had happened yet. This music helped it happen: David Crosby has said the earlier Live at the Village Vanguard record was all the Byrds were listening to on tour, and that the guitar solo on “Eight Miles High” was an attempt at the Coltrane sound.

And then there’s the India connection. No one was listening to Indian music in America yet. No one had any idea that John Coltrane was somehow pulling Rajasthani shehnai music into a bop jazz idiom. But he was.

Shivkumar Sharma, Brijbhushan Kabra, Shivkumar Sharma, Call of the Valley (1968)

I first heard this in one of those little Tibet shops that started popping up everywhere in the 2000s. This one, down in Greenwich Village, was was better than most, and so was the music they played. Call of the Valley was a worldwide smash and deserved to be. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Byrds were all fans. Though it’s meant to evoke a shepherd’s life in Kashmir, it brings Nepal to mind for me. (Note that the version on streaming services is some crummy later thing with bad synth washes, but you can hear the whole album on YouTube.)

Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda (1971)

If someone told you to check out this jazz harp record from the seventies that has bells and Indian drones on it, you might expect something kitschy and ridiculous. Instead, Journey in Satchidananda is a stunning album of the richest spiritual jazz.

Too often overlooked because her husband was one of the very greatest jazz players ever, Alice these days is beginning to get her due, with everyone from her nephew Flying Lotus to the whole London jazz scene citing her as an inspiration and an influence. Her connection to India and Hinduism was deep, and for much of her life she retreated from the jazz scene to focus on her ashram work, which has yielded some powerful recordings in their own right.

On Journey, Alice Coltrane plays harp like no one before or since, with a darting, shimmering, percussive attack, and her piano playing is almost as idiosyncratic. Pharaoh Sanders is here too, playing as well as he ever did. But the surprise star of the whole thing is Cecil McBee, whose monster bass lines ground this whole ethereal affair with an undeniable groove. It’s that mix of spirituality and earthiness that makes this record so true to India. It’s the dirt and the muck and the gods and the goddesses as a mystic whole, and it’s beautiful. You won’t regret adding this album to your life.

Emerging

View of Trojan Point on Mount Tam

“Am I alive?”

That’s the question my daughter kept asking as she gazed out from Trojan Point, high on Mount Tam. It was the kind of day when you could see clear out to the Farallon Islands thirty miles into the Pacific, then turn the other way to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the towers of San Francisco and Mount Diablo shimmering in the distance. We had spent the morning in Muir Woods, where my wife told my father that for some reason she felt like crying, and he told her that was a pretty normal response to Muir Woods. The redwoods were still dripping after two weeks of heavy rain that had ended just the night before, and the creek was full. When we finished, my mother reminded us of a beautiful lookout point we used to visit when I was young, and so we followed in our car up the winding road that passes onward to Stinson Beach, where later we would find some sand dollar shells that are now prized possessions in one of my daughter’s treasure boxes.

Even in a place as special as Mount Tamalpais, Trojan Point is special, and we had the good fortune to be there on a clear January day, cool but not cold, when the usually golden grasses had turned a bright, impossible green. For my daughter, who had never been to Northern California before, it was hard to believe any of it was real. Had she died and gone to some sort of heaven? And so she kept asking. For months afterward, Trojan Point kept appearing in her drawings, and sometimes at night when I would tell her sleepy stories — rambling meditations that take place in some or other comforting setting — it was Mount Tam, with its gnarled oak trees and green grasses and outcrops of soft, slippery serpentine, that she would as for again and again.

Something like normal

Looking back as I like to do on my birthday, I see this as a year of emerging.

COVID is still with us — my wife and I both got it again, my parents finally came down with it — but the emergency of COVID came to an end, and life got back to something like normal. Faces reemerged from behind masks, and I realized how much I had missed them. For the first time since the pandemic began, we traveled abroad, back to the United States. We stayed in hotels. Here in Korea, we took our daughter to Swan Lake, her first ballet. My company gave me a gift of season passes to Everland, an amusement park owned by the Samsung group (or maybe they own us, it’s hard to tell, the whole thing is an opaque web), and I’ve taken my daughter a bunch of times. We go on Friday afternoons when it’s not too crowded, do a couple of the county fair-type rides that make Daddy want to throw up, get some pasta for dinner, and then maybe ride the Amazon Express. It makes her very happy, and that makes me very happy. She’s nine and a half now, and it’s a great age.

Those trips abroad began with a visit to San Francisco to participate in the Samsung Developer Conference in October. I spent much of that trip — probably too much — up in Marin, revisiting the places I grew up, and it was a delight to be there. I realized how much it would mean to me to show all this to my wife and daughter, and then my wife had the lovely idea to invite my parents along so they could visit their old friends. And so the three of us made our way to visit my parents in Phoenix in January, and from there we all continued on to Marin County. We stayed in Mill Valley, and my Korean family got to see Lucas Valley and the house where I grew up and the hills where I played when I was a kid. We went up to the Elephant Rocks and Dylan Beach, and we visited the Charles M. Schulz Museum — my wife loves Snoopy — and we went up to a winery in the Napa Valley, and then we finished the whole thing with a couple of days at Disneyland, where my daughter was old and brave enough to ride the Matterhorn and Space Mountain. But it was the Redwoods and grasses of Mount Tam, I think, that stayed with us the most.

Composing

This was also the year that the words began to emerge. Last year I said this was the year I would begin writing my memoir in earnest, and so I have. I’m closing in on a hundred thousand words, but I’m nowhere near finished, in part because the process of writing turns out to be one of discovery, and I keep finding new avenues to explore, new topics that need researching.

If it were fiction, it would be almost a truism to say that you just need to follow your characters and see what they do, that your themes will emerge from that. When it’s a memoir, though, you tend to think you already know more or less what happened, and it’s must a matter of getting it all on the page.

Not so.

It’s a little weird to realize that you’re writing an unreliable narrator when the narrator is you, but here we are.

In writing about my arrival in India, my sudden decision to veer north into Nepal, my time in Kathmandu, and my experiences trekking in the Annapurnas, I’ve been able to recognize the development in my main character, moments when he — I — seemed to be a little changed, a little different. There’s still a long way to go just to write a first draft that takes me through the whole of the journey, but already I can see a lot that was hidden before the writing began. Which is why, on the cusp of writing about Varanasi, I’m suddenly reading histories of the Jews, Jerusalem, and the modern Chabad Chassidic movement. Who knew?

As with the trip to India itself, the journey of writing about it is one that keeps surprising me, and yet there’s a path ahead that I know I need to follow. So for this year, I hope to get to the end of that first draft — to walk it through the remaining parts of that old trip, to Varanasi and Agra and Rajasthan, down to Cochin and its old synagogue, the modernity of Bangalore and the Vijayanagar ruins of Hampi and the idiotic beaches of Goa (we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that). Hopefully by the time I see you next birthday, I’ll have made it all the way back to Manhattan in 1998.

Coronation

So one more thing. I ended this year of my life with a coronation.

Over the past few weeks, I have learned some things.

I have learned that my tongue is too big.

I have learned that my mouth is too small.

When I took a sore molar to the dental clinic at my office, the dentist suggested that I would need four visits to complete a root canal, followed by a fifth visit to fit a crown, except that maybe the crown would be impossible because of my big tongue and my small mouth. So what would happen if I didn’t get a crown? Well, the tooth would turn black and have to be removed eventually. She looked mournful and shook her head as she told me this.

Not entirely satisfied with this plan, I went to a nearby dental clinic, where they assured me they got many refugees from the clinic at my office. There they plunged into the challenge, and it was by no means easy, but they got it done at least. (And here is where I wonder why they can do heart surgery by going up through your leg, but scraping out a molar means opening wide enough for a dentist to shove his actual fingers in the back of your mouth.) Four visits was better than five, and though there was a lot of complaining about my tongue and exhorting me to relax — they don’t give you gas here, but they should — there was no giving up. And so, after a false start with a crown that didn’t fit, I got one that did, just in time for my birthday.

Time to dip that thing in cake!

Skiing, a Year Later

What a difference a year makes.

On New Year’s Day, I finally put on my fancy orange outfit, shoved my feet into plastic casings, clicked on some skis, and headed up a hill. This would be my first time skiing since I committed a year ago to getting in shape. I was anxious to find out whether all that work in the gym would make a difference on the slopes.

The day’s skiing came with a little unexpected drama: my daughter, a couple of weeks earlier, had her first ski lesson of the season, after which she declared that she would never ski again. That got worked out — we convinced her to give the teacher another try with a different approach — and on Sunday she did great, had a blast, and then just before bed delcared that she would never ski again. But then last night we talked, and she said she’d check my form and help me out next time, so who knows?

Anyway, I finally got out there to see what, if anything, might have changed since last year. And I can say definitively that working out made a major difference. Last year I was winded just carrying my gear up to the starting point and putting on my skis. Even after a few lessons, I was still stiff, and my feet and hips hurt every time. My heart pounded on the way down.

Yesterday I had none of that. I am still not a good skier — my glutes were shaking with fatigue, which I understand is a sign of poor ski posture, sitting back instead of standing up and leaning forward — but I could make it down the mountain and have fun, and today I’m not really sore.

A year of squats, planks, cardio, balance exercises, and stretching has, in fact, changed the way I experience physical challenges. It was nice to get the proof.

Capsule Review: Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)

As a kid I used to read Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Usually a series of small items of city gossip, occasionally a single poetic paean to some or other aspect of his beloved Baghdad by the Bay (referring to the historically beautiful, exotic Mesopotamean capital, not the war zone of modern imagination), Caen’s columns created a sense of the city as a community, hip and knowing and a little zany.

When I arrived in New York for college, I assumed it must have its own version of Herb Caen, and I went looking for whoever that might be. Only there wasn’t a Herb Caen of New York, a city altogether too large for such a thing. Herb Caen was unique, and only San Francisco had one.

The same might be said for Midnight’s Children and India, especially Bombay. Surely every country deserves a work of such vibrant intensity, such joyous, protean creativity, such depth, such breadth. But there is only one Midnight’s Children. Even Rushdie couldn’t repeat it. His portrait of Quetta in Shame is gray and flat, and his portrait of New York in Fury feels uncomfortably like a tourist writing a parody of Midnight’s Children. Only the London of The Satanic Verses comes close.

Never read an insider’s account of a place and assume that’s what you’ll find when you arrive as an outsider. I came to Bombay with Midnight’s Children in my head. I went to the Hanging Gardens of Malabar Hill to find an ordinary park, and I went to Chowpatty Beach to find a dirty strip of sand where I was harrassed by a snake charmer with a defanged cobra, and I saw the lights come up on the Strand and was unimpressed by a long line of dull orange globe lamps. There was no magical realism waiting for me in Bombay, just the all-too-real smog and heat and poverty and decay and administrative ineptitude most travelers find.

Midnight’s Children roams the subcontinent, of course: Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh. I mostly missed its other locations. But I was there in Bombay, looking for the magic. It’s not Rushdie’s fault that I mostly missed it. What I found in Bombay was important to me, even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant. But that’s a story for another day.

Capsule Review: The World According to Garp

John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978)

The World According to Garp was an enormous hit novel that won a National Book Award in 1980 and became a hit Robin Williams movie in 1982. What that means, if you’re in a Kathmandu bookshop and looking for something to take with you into the Himalayas, is that here is a book that promises to be both readable and not entirely stupid. And at 542 pages, it will keep you busy for many an evening, but fortunately it comes in convenient mass paperback format.

It’s an odd book to take on a Himalayan trek. In fact, it’s just an odd book. All the way back in 1978, one of its main characters is a feminist and another is a trans woman, and it delves, albeit a little ham-fistedly, into issues of male rage and reactionary feminism. There’s also some child rape for good measure. And, because this is John Irving, Vienna and a bear.

Garp is a self-indulgent novel — Irving throws in a long short story and the opening chapter of an entirely different novel, both written by the titular Garp, who’s a novelist — and I felt too often that characters were aggregations of characteristics rather than fully realized people. Its gender politics are out of date, understandably, but I’m not sure how well meaning they were even in their own time. There are also themes of death and parental fears of losing a child, which mean a little more to me now that I’m a parent of an eight-year-old than they did when I was a twenty-three-year-old trekking in the Annapurnas without much consideration for any fears my parents might have had.

What should have stuck with me then, when I was a young aspiring writer with no clue what to write and no great gift for creating either plots or characters, were the parts of the novel about how to be a writer. But when I came back to it, the only things I could remember were the mutilations: the women who cut out their own tongues as a kind of protest in support of a girl whose tongue is cut out by a rapist, and then the horrifying scene where Garp’s wife bites the cock off one of her college students during a car accident.

Does any of this make Garp a good novel today? I’m not sure. I wouldn’t put it high on my list of books anyone should read, but if you’re going somewhere far away from all available entertainments for a period of weeks, where you’ll be physically exhausted and need something diverting before you fall asleep or to pass the time on a rest day by a hot spring, you could do worse.

Capsule Review: The Indian Trilogy

V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)

I never liked V. S. Naipaul. I couldn’t get through A House for Mr. Biswas in college — so much whining! — and I found his essays in The New York Review of Books, which I read religiously in the nineties, to be tedious and cantankerous. So I was surprised to find that of all the travel accounts I have so far read of India, I like his the best.

Naipaul is, of course, a capable writer, a crafter of fine prose, and a skilled storyteller. What puts him above the other India writers, though, is the same cantankerousness that made him hard to take when reviewing other people’s work. More than anyone else, Naipaul owns up to the awfulness India brings out in him: the rages, the pettiness, the yelling at impassive bureaucrats, the scolding of poor hotel servants. He doesn’t hide it the way most of the other authors do, or downplay it, or try to excuse himself for it. He tells it in full, including the shame that comes afterward.

There are three books here. Naipaul is the grandchild of Indian brahmins who came to Trinidad as indentured servants. He is Indian and Hindu by heritage, but not by birth or nationality. An Area of Darkness is his account of his first foray into his ancestral homeland, and it is full of rich detail about the miseries and annoyances of Indian travel. India in 1964 was, of course, much more primitive than the India I encounter thirty-three years later, but it’s extraordinary how many of Naipaul’s experiences were similar to my own. Subsequent writers have called this book out for its obsession with shit — literal, actual shit — but Naipaul’s is on to something:

“It is possible, starting from that casual defecation in a veranda at an important assembly, to analyse the whole diseased society. Sanitation was linked to caste, caste to callousness, inefficiency and a hopelessly divided country, division to weakness, weakness to foreign rule. This is what Gandhi saw, and no one purely of India could have seen it.”

He isn’t just writing about shit to make fun of India or Indians, or to complain, but to recognize that the way sanitation is handled, or mishandled, says something important about the society as a whole. Again, there is a sort of bravery here in saying these things out loud, in pointing to the disgusting things and saying, without apology or excuse, that they are disgusting. Most other writers on India, especially foreign writers, feel a reflexive need to apologize for noticing, to explain away, to demonstrate their thoughtful respect for India and their understanding that its problems are not all of Indians’ own making. Naipaul alone is brave enough to show his loathing, both for what he sees and for himself for the ways he reacts.

In A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul attempts to reckon with the land that so overwhelmed him on his first visit. It’s the slightest of the three books, and it sticks in the memory less, but there’s a lot here, especially about Hinduism. And Naipaul begins to talk to Indians in a serious way, which gives depth to his writing.

That method becomes the main thrust in A Million Mutinies Now, which is probably the best of the three books, and certainly the most celebrated. By the late eighties, Naipaul is old enough to look beyond himself, and the entire book is essentially interviews with interesting Indians. There are gaps — Naipaul speaks to very few women, even in a chapter all about women’s magazines, and he mentions the poor, the backward castes, the harijans and adivasis, but rarely speaks to them either. He is a Western intellectual and also a brahmin, and he remains so throughout his travels.

He also falls into a trap that I notice is common to writers on India, which is considering Indian poverty somehow a moral burden when you are in India, but not when you’re elsewhere. I see this a lot, in Mark Tulley and Elizabeth Bumiller and others, and it’s a fallacy. Indian poverty is certainly much easier to ignore when one is in Manhattan than when one is in Calcutta, but there’s no particular reason why one should be more or less responsible for it based on where one happens to be, or on the accident of birth and citizenship. In terms of practicalities, it makes sense for people in Calcutta to focus more on Calcuttan problems and for New Yorkers to work on New York, but I find it disingenuous for a middle-class American to wonder how Indians can justify living a far more frugal middle-class life amidst such poverty. And this is particularly so for post-colonial nations like India, whose looted wealth makes our middle-class existences possible.

But that’s something of a side issue. Overall, A Million Mutinies Now is a fine book that, like the rest of the trilogy, takes unusual risks in the service of authorial honesty about his own flaws. Of the three, An Area of Darkness resonated most deeply with my own project, but anyone writing about India would be well served by these three powerful, honest, cantankerous books.

Why Learning Writing is Still Necessary in a ChatGPT World

When traveling through Laos a few years back, I visited a backcountry travel shop owned by a German man. As I entered, he was berating his Lao staff, in a mixture of Laotian and English, for having mishandled travelers’ enquiries while he was out of town. People would ask seemingly simple questions — Is there a bus to such-and-such town? Can I take a boat to the border? — and get convoluted answers that bogged down in irrelevant details. Instead of “Yes, you can take a bus there,” it was, “There is a bus that starts in Town A and goes to Town B first before arriving here, but it’s a dirty bus and usually late.” The owner couldn’t understand how his employees kept making these kinds of mistakes.

This was a few weeks after I’d been in Cambodia, hanging around with a local woman who’d gotten a seventh-grade education and couldn’t use Google Maps navigation on her phone because no one had ever taught her to read a map.

It turns out that intellectual skills we take for granted — reading a map, organizing ideas in particular ways — are not inherent, but learned. I tried to get this across to the German travel shop owner so he could have a little compassion for his team, and he seemed to get it, with a mixture of exasperation and resignation. He and I, though from different countries, had each spent years of our lives mastering certain formal structures of information packaging: the sentence, the clause, the paragraph, the multi-paragraph essay. We had been asked to find the topic sentence in a paragraph, and informed that this often came first, with detailed examples or supporting ideas placed afterwards. We had been given the task of replicating such paragraphs. As we grew older, the scale grew to essay length, requiring more complex layering of thesis sentences, topic sentences, supporting arguments, conclusions. We have come to think of these formal structures as the right way to organize information to be communicated to others, and we’re able to do it pretty fluently.

I now live in South Korea, where this kind of structured writing is much less often taught, and it shows. In discussions with colleagues, I often find that they’re not prepared to defend viewpoints or assertions, and there’s a tendency to fall back on authority (“A VP has requested it”) or consensus (“Everyone already agreed”) rather than to provide explanations in the way that I think of them.

Organized thinking, it turns out, is a learned skill. And writing is a very good way to learn it.

Calculators can’t count

ChatGPT and its inevitable successors will raise certain practical questions. A certain amount of in-class writing will be necessary to verify that students can actually do what their assignments suggest they can do. This has, of course, been the case for a long time, and students have been able to cheat on assignments but not on hand-written final exams. Some students will cheat anyway, others will half-cheat by checking their work in various ways (already a possibility for a long time with grammar checkers and the like), but in the end, they will still need to do the work necessary to develop the skills to pass the in-class exams.

But if ChatGPT can write so well, why should anyone except specialists learn how to do it? Technology has preempted all kinds of other skills. We don’t expect students to learn to start a fire or skin an animal or gather wild edible plants. We don’t teach how to hitch a horse or drive a stick-shift. Latin is right out. Cursive is ending. Why keep writing in the mix?

It’s there for the same reason that arithmetic has stuck around in a world of calculators: it’s a basic skill for organizing information, in a way that video editing is not. While you can (and mostly should) use a computer for complex arithmetic, it’s important at some point to get a sense of how the arithmetic works, because this is a basic way of organizing information computationally.

One could argue that we have abandoned certain skills we should not have. With photography we have given up teaching drafting as a basic skill, and I think that’s possibly detrimental to our ability to organize information in certain ways. And we may come to a future point where most people really don’t need to learn to write as a pedagogical path to learning to organize information. But for now, humans communicate largely in language, Even if you can get a machine to do some of the grunt work for you — writing cover letters, say, or cleaning up your resume — the ability to construct thoughts and ideas remains important, and there is no better way to learn that than through the discipline of writing.

I have seen a great deal of hand-wringing over ChatGPT, particularly in the context of education. If any high school or college student can go to ChatGPT (or its future, smarter iterations) to get a reasonably well crafted essay without grammar errors, what’s the point of teaching writing? And how can we know whether students are doing their own assignments or just getting everything from an AI bot?

I

Slip Sliding Away

A year ago on my birthday, I wrote about a project: a book I would write about my travels in India and Nepal. Since then, I’ve been getting myself in shape: mentally in shape to write the book, and physically in shape to slide down mountains dressed like a Lego man.

It should matter what you’ve fallen off of

The book began with a burst of inspiration. That was followed by a realization that if I wanted to do it right, I would need to do research first.

A lot of research.

I’ve read 17,000 pages so far, across some 45 books, chasing down various questions: Why did I choose India? Where do Western ideas of India come from? Why does tourism work the way it does? How do the best travel writers write? What was I actually thinking way back then? I have about 6,000 pages to go. (All this is in a spreadsheet. Of course.) I’ve also transcribed my notebooks, scanned some 500 photos, and tracked down and interviewed a couple of my old travel companions and the owner of the hotel I stayed at in Kathmandu, who turns out to have been a CIA-trained spy for the Dalai Lama’s brother. Who knew?

All of this has been fascinating and a brilliant way to avoid actually writing the book. Instead, I’ve agonized. What is my theme? What is my opening? What is my structure? Past or present tense? Do I even have a story worth telling? Did

When the doubts come on, though, I try to think of Elizabeth Gilbert, who made millions from Eat, Pray, Love. They sell it airports. Have you read it? Gilbert does next to nothing: eats pasta in Italy, sits in an ashram in India, hooks up with a guy in Bali. So what? About the most exciting thing she does is fall off a bike. I fell off a fucking camel. Julia Roberts should play me in the movie.

The truth is, it’s not what you did, but how you tell it. Well, in this my 48th year, it’s time to wrap up the research and tell the story.

The logic of costumes

Falling is also relevant to my other major project this year, which has been getting physically fit.

Years ago, when I was learning Korean dance in New York, my teacher said she’d buy me a costume on her visit to Korea. I said fine. Then she came back, showed me the costume, and told me I owed her two grand for it. I was furious and wanted to quit, but I couldn’t: I’d just bought a $2000 costume. I kept dancing.

Something similar happened when my family took up skiing last winter. I nearly quit after a first day of hips locking up, painful falls, and an instructor with nothing to offer but screaming, “A! A! A!” But my wife encouraged me to keep at it. She found an instructor who was kinder and knew more of the alphabet. I started to enjoy myself a bit, even if my feet and hips still hurt. And then my wife made a genius move: she took me to buy the outfit. Once I’d shelled out for the bright orange ski suit and the black helmet with the visor attached, what choice did I have? I was committed. I liked how I looked and felt in that outfit, and the only reasonable excuse for wearing it was actually skiing.

But I wanted to ski better, and not get exhausted just carrying the gear from the hotel room to the slope. I promised myself I’d be in better condition next time around. I took care of my plantar fasciitis, started doing balance and cardio exercises, started going to the gym more often. And, crucially, I bought nice gym clothes.

Once again, the logic of costumes prevailed. I feel cool in those outfits, and my only excuse for wearing them is that I’m going to the gym. So I put them on and I go to the gym. I even have workout gloves. Me. I do not look like The Rock, but it’s fun to pretend, the way it was fun to dress up and pretend to be a soldier or a cowboy when I was five. And it’s working. I’m stronger than I’ve been in years, maybe ever.

Which is important, because my daughter will be coming into her peak strength in the next five to ten years, and I want to be the kind of dad who can keep up, not the kind of dad who waits wheezing on a bench. I’m only getting one shot at this dad thing, and I want to do it right.

One more thing

For the last couple months, I’ve been working on something special at Samsung. This year I’ve been asked to speak at the Samsung Developer Conference. Mine will be a virtual session — I’ve already shot the video — but it goes live on October 12. It’s about our design principles as they apply to partnerships, which may or may not be of any interest to you. But hey, there’s a picture of me, and they spelled my name right.

Capsule Review: City of Djinns

William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993)

OK, so I can see what all the hype is about. William Dalrymple is a deft storyteller with a fine sense of pacing, an eye for detail, and the depth of research to back it all up.

City of Djinns isn’t his most famous book, but it’s the one most structured as a travelogue about India, so that’s what I read. In it, Dalrymple peels back the layers of Delhi’s history, moving in reverse-chronological order: Partition, the British Raj, the Mughals, and so on, back to the scant remains of the time of the Mahabarata. It’s a clever approach, one that creates a surprising degree of suspense that would have been lacking if we’d gone the other way: the Raj and Partition and modern India are well enough known, but the deeper threads, the long-lost layers, keep us wondering just how far back we can go and what strange wonders we might discover there.

Dalrymple marries this story to a cycle of a year spent in Delhi. His own personal adventures are limited and structured enough that they feel illuminating rather than self-indulgent, and his relationship in particular with his taxi-wallah connects with his various jaunts to historical sites and to meet with various people who represent different aspects of Delhi’s history. Still, one wonders whether Dalrymple’s personal activities really did map so neatly, so that he always ran across the next layer back in Delhi’s history at just the time of year when he’d finished with the last. There are just too many coincidences of this sort — sometimes presented with clunky cliffhanger transitions — which calls the whole framework into question. How much of this really happened? How much happened in the way Dalrymple described it?

For all that, I learned an enormous amount about Delhi from the always entertaining City of Djinns, and I would approach the city differently if I visited it now, having read this book. Some of Dalrymple’s approach, both to historical time and to the spinning of good yarns, seems well worth appropriating for my own work. In particular, I can imagine peeling back the layers of history I want to tell, from my own personal choice to travel to India, to the cultural millieu that made that choice plausible, to the world of spiritualism behind that, and back to the Oriental renaissance.

In City of Djinns, William Dalrymple shows himself to be a fine popular historian and travel writer with a flair for revealing anecdotes and a skillful way with research. These are high achievements for any writer.

Capsule Review: India Through Foreign Eyes

Sam Miller, India Through Foreign Eyes (2014)

Is this a travel book or a history? Both and neither, to its detriment. It purports to be a selective telling of the history of foreign (not, thankfully, always Western) descriptions of India, but Miller injects enough of his own story that it’s also about his own experiences and relationships in India that the book tilts out of balance, feeling self-indulgent in a way it might not have if it had just been a story about Sam Miller with some history thrown in.

Part of the trouble is with the personal story Miller has to tell, and with the way he tells it. He starts off by saying he’s married to an Indian woman and has lived for many years in India, which serves as a kind of preemptive defense should anyone think him too English. This is fine as far as it goes, but gradually little details slip out that show that this graduate of Cambridge and SOAS is something other than an ordinary traveler who fell in love. He more or less waltzes into a job as the BBC’s lead India correspondent — a position he takes first as a substitute for the well known travel writer Mark Tulley, who’s out of town when a crisis erupts — and later we discover that Miller is living in the same Delhi apartment where William Dalrymple wrote City of Djinns. No wonder he got blurbed by Dalrymple! No one is this well connected by sheer accident, and this degree of privilege, hidden but hinted at so you don’t miss it, makes Miller’s frequent protestations of ordinariness and commitment to Indian feel strained and awkward.

There were, here and there, some interesting nuggets that I’d overlooked, like the discovery that Steve Jobs, influenced by Be Here Now, quit his Atari job and wandered around Northern India with holy men for a while. For the most part, though, India Through Foreign Eyes felt like a competently edited summary of various books by John Keay and others, with a bit of travelogue thrown in. It was perhaps most helpful in pointing to the kind of travel book I don’t want to write: one where the erudition feels like summary rather than synthesis, and where the travel feels like interlude rather than adventure.