Josh Philip Ross

Early on the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I walked into the Icheon Sports Complex, a stadium in the middle of South Korea. I was there to run my first-ever 5K. Up on a big monitor was the taeguki, the Korean flag, matching the little taeguki on the sleeve of my running shirt, which had arrived in the mail a few days earlier, along with my bib number, courtesy of the 25th Icheon Ceramics Marathon.

Icheon isn’t famous, but if it were, it would be for having its role in ceramics production during the Joseon Dynasty. A smallish city of about a quarter million people, it’s now home to Hynix, the world’s second-largest producer of memory chips, which I suppose means the city has retained its heritage of wringing value from dirt. On the drive out, I’d passed through thick fog that clung to the dark green late summer mountainsides in a way I love because it makes them look like old ink brush paintings, and then driven across farmland redolent of shit, but now the sky was cloudless and the air smelled faintly of sunscreen.

In the stadium

I had arrived early, and now I had a long time to wait. I found a booth labeled “Information” in Korean and asked if there was anything I needed to do before the start of the race. “No, just run,” the woman told me, demonstrating for clarity by jogging in place. For a while I watched a woman on the main stage sing trot music, the warbly, disco-inflected pop style of the seventies that’s become a kind of requirement at any sort of local festival in Korea, like classic rock at an American county fair. I sampled a free sample of a sports drink that was dark red and salty, like blood. I saw a long line and considered standing in it until I figured out that it was for sports taping; I could too easily imagine the horror and confusion of some poor tapist trying to manage the hair situation on my Ashkenazi legs.

Mostly I people-watched. What with my neon-green running shoes and my headband and my knee sleeve and my photochromic Oakleys — a birthday gift from my wife — I was pretty sure I looked like a total nerd, but so did almost everyone else. I don’t know if it’s quite such a thing in America, but Koreans, when they do anything athletic, tend to dress the part. Up on mountain trails, you’ll see packs of people in very specific hiking gear. Go to a beach, and everyone’s in long-sleeve swimming outfits to keep the sun off. I don’t golf, but my wife does, and she’s got the outfits. So while there were a few people in something like street clothes, nearly everyone had some well known brand of running shoe — Nike, Adidas, Asics, Hoka — and some kind of slightly complicated mesh shirt. The old guys all seemed to have knee sleeves. Around the sides of the track were tents set up for different running clubs, each with its clump of people in matching outfits taking group photos.

Nothing anywhere had anything to do with ceramics.

I waited, restless. I walked around, walked around again. I went to the bathroom three times. On the stage there were speeches, more songs, exhortations, and a group stretching program that everyone ignored. Then at last it was time to line up. Marathoners went first, then the 10K runners, and then us, the 5K rabble in the back, each pack assembled behind two volunteers holding up a banner across the track. When the marathon gun went off, there was a cheer, but our group mostly stayed quiet, trying to save strength and also to stay cool as we waited in the sun, which was growing more intense by the minute. This has been the hottest summer ever recorded in Korea, and though the early mornings weren’t that hot anymore, they were humid as hell — 91 percent on this morning — and the heat climbed fast once the sun was out, especially if you stood under it unprotected.

The packs moved up. The 10K runners began their race. And then it was our turn.

Running for the clock

We 5K runners hadn’t been given chips to measure our times, so all we had was the clock at the starting line, which was also the finish line. I didn’t remember to check it as I tried to maneuver my way to an open running path, but it must have taken at least twenty or thirty seconds for me to cross. Just navigating the crowd took a certain amount of energy. In my workouts I tend to take off at a bolt until my heart rate hits the target level, but that was impossible until we got out of the stadium and could spread out on the road. I passed kids as young as ten who would sprint for a few paces, then walk again. I passed people pushing strollers. And faster runners passed me. A lot of them.

Soon we were all running down a long hill — not too steep, but still, enough that I knew it would be murder on the way back. When that bottomed out, it was up another, similar hill. I was just starting down the other side, running past ginseng fields, identifiable by the black shade covers over the crops, when I saw the first runners already on the way back up. Soon I could hear the crashing clang of traditional samulnori percussion music blasting from loudspeakers at the turnaround point.

I was in the middle of the pack somewhere, and there were times throughout when I had to maneuver around some cluster of people who’d slowed to a walk. As time went on, I fell in with certain people going at something like my pace: a very tall woman, an older man running next to a younger friend and shouting, “Hup! Hup! Hup!” With the race more than half over and the exhaustion creeping in, I had the rather ungenerous thought that I had rightly fallen in with the other fat-asses.

The last hill, as I had expected, was brutal, and more and more people slowed to a walk as we climbed. But I had promised myself I would run the whole way, and I fought for it. Somewhere in my running mix was “Freedom,” by Beyonce, and I thought of it now: “A winner don’t quit on themselves.” Then the hill leveled out and we turned into the stadium’s blacktop parking lot, which was radiating heat. I slowed, but I kept running. The temperature dropped when we got back onto the painted surface and into the shade of the stadium walls, and then we were inside, back on the soft, springy track.

I looked at the clock.

My best 5K time in training was 35:43, as measured by my Samsung Galaxy Watch, which may or may not know exactly how far five kilometers is. What with the crowd and all, my goal for the race had been a modest forty minutes. But now I saw that we were still somewhere in the 36th minute. In a final surge, I hurled myself down the track and ran under that archway before the clock ticked over to 37.

Participation trophies

On the far side of the line, hot and tired as I was, I didn’t collapse. Actually, I headed straight for the bathroom. This is what happens when you’re a fifty-year-old man who has hydrated. After that I grabbed a bottle of water, and then a snack pack with a box of grape juice, a bun filled with sweet cream and red bean paste, and a medal on a red ribbon. I put it on. (The medal, not the bun.) It was heavy. (The medal, not the bun.) Yes, it was a participation trophy. (The medal and the bun, actually.)

I’m Gen X. I never got participation trophies. I’d earned this.

I spent a while milling around the stadium, not quite ready to leave. I wanted to savor this. I was proud of myself.

Was my time a good time? Depends how you look at it. It wouldn’t impress serious runners, but it was about average for men in my age range (50 to 59, which I was as of that day), which is a lot better than where I was a year earlier, when I took up running and went on 20-minute trots so slow grandmas passed me on their power walks. My 5K pace then would’ve been close to an hour, but I never would’ve made it that far. Now I’d completed a real, honest, actual 5K, running the whole way and arriving somewhere in the middle of the pack.

And it was my birthday. There was a booth selling fancy carbon-plate running shoes that are super light and supposed to give you more bounce. I bought myself a pair.

When I got home, my family welcomed me like a hero. My ten-year-old daughter made a big fuss over my achievement, which was sweet of her. My wife, who first coaxed me into going to the gym and working with a personal trainer some years back, and who bought me my first real fitness clothes because working out deserved better than ratty old shorts and T-shirts, cooked up a delicious plate of bulgogi and rice and then sat there watching me eat, wearing her adoring fangirl face the whole time.

Then I took a nap.

By the next day I’d already signed up for another 5K. This one would be in late October by the Tancheon River, the same river where I do my training runs. A couple of days after that, I took my new shoes out for a spin. And you know what? They worked. I hit a new personal best of 35:36. So can I do the Tancheon run in under 35?

Stay tuned.

Today, on my fiftieth birthday, I’ll be running my first-ever 5K race, which fits.

Let me explain.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to arrive: first just to grow up, and then to find that career, that passion, that place to call home, that person to stand next to, that achievement, that experience — that thing, whatever it might be, that will finally make us happy and safe forever.

I’ve been lucky to get a lot of these shiny things, and I’ve enjoyed them in the moment. But the moment passes. Life may pause, but it never stops.

There are, of course, good things that last, some longer than others. In my forties I finally came into a few of those things. I moved to Korea, and it feels like home, and I intend to stay. I met my wife and became a dad, and those are things that will be with me for the rest of my time in this world. But even those things will change with time. The marvelous ten-year-old who pirouettes around our apartment and collects New Jeans trading cards is not the adorable five-year-old who used to put on princess clothes and yowl, “Let it GOOO!” and in the next decade she will be a teen and then an adult, changing along the way. And a marriage isn’t static either: it grows and flexes over time.

And what happens when you get as old as I am, maybe, is that you relax about all this. You stop looking for the Big Arrival because you know there isn’t one — not until the one that stops everything, and that one’s not very interesting. Until then, it’s all just the journey.

And maybe that’s why I’ve taken up running: because now I’m not trying to get anywhere in particular.

It was this past summer, not long after I finished the first draft of the India travel memoir I’ve been working on for the past three years, that I discovered, more or less by accident, that I had become a person who can run five kilometers at a stretch. I was doing my usual thirty-minute morning run, up from the twenty minutes that were all I could handle last fall, and I looked at my watch one day and noticed that I didn’t have that much farther to go if I wanted to make it to 5K. And so I did. And the next day my legs hurt.

I told a coworker about this, a guy who’s been a runner all his life, and he asked if I was going to sign up for a proper 5K. It had never occurred to me, but it sounded kind of cool, and I found one on my birthday, and it seemed like a good and life-affirming way to start my fifties. I can now run the distance a lot faster than I did that first time — not fast, but faster — and my legs feel better under me. And so I’m gonna do it, and try for the best time I can manage.

There is, of course, no real point to this. Most of the challenges we set ourselves are pretty arbitrary, and a 5K you’re not trying to win is especially so. You start somewhere and you end somewhere, and there is absolutely no purpose to traversing the distance in between except to experience the journey. How you experience it, and what goals you set for yourself along the way, are up to you. In other words, it’s a lot like life.

I posted a version of this to Threads, where it got some traction, so I wanted to put it somewhere at least a little more permanent.

So some thoughts on JD Vance, misogyny, and closeted homosexuality.

I haven’t heard it talked about all that much, but there’s a weird passage in Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s memoir, where he says he thought he was gay when he was a kid, only to get talked out of it by his grandma. It’s presented as a way of saying it’s OK to be gay, but also as a way of saying Vance was definitely not gay:

I broached this issue with Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and I was worried that I would burn in hell. She said, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, how would you know that you’re gay?” I explained my thought process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally she asked, “J.D., do you want to suck dicks?” I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, “Of course not!” “Then,” she said, “you’re not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.” That settled the matter. Apparently I didn’t have to worry about being gay anymore. Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.

Now, I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having more context, but this is weird on a lot of levels. It seems intended somehow to be pro-gay, or at least anti-anti-gay, but it’s a weird way to get there. And also, as evidence for not being gay, a nine-year-old (I think he was around nine here) not wanting to suck dick is pretty thin.

What does this have to do with Vance’s views on women? Maybe nothing. But let’s just, as a thought experiment, see how it all might look if we think of Vance as a closeted gay man: someone who is emotionally and sexually drawn to men, and not to women, and who very much wishes to deny this to himself and to others.

Because Vance’s misogyny is not the grabby, sexualizing misogyny of Donald Trump. It’s something very different.

Trump’s misogyny is gross but familiar. It’s Hooters, porn, titty bars, rap lyrics. Trump reduces women to their ornamental or functional sexuality, and he mocks women for being sexually unattractive. It’s relatable, too, for men who are attracted to women, because we all to some extent and in some contexts sexualize women. This can be healthy, like Biden saying his heart still races for his wife, Jill. He should be attracted to her. That’s lovely. What’s problematic with Trump isn’t the desire, but the lack of boundaries, as when he sexualizes his daughter or rapes a woman in a store or says he can grab women by the pussy, and the lack of respect for women’s full humanity outside of their sexual desirability.

Vance’s misogyny, though, is weirder. He never sexualizes women. Instead, he casts them as reproductive devices: they bear children, and when they can’t anymore, they should help raise children. Premenopausal women without children make him uncomfortable. Teachers without children disorient and disturb him. This is weird. What is it about?

If you’re a man who is supposed to be attracted to women, but you’re actually very not, then attractive, unattached women can be terrifying. What if they want you? What if you’re supposed to perform wanting them? “Disorienting” and “disturbing” starts to make a kind of sense. They literally disrupt your orientation. Which is angering, humiliating, upsetting, dangerous. You want control, and you want revenge. And none of this is conscious, which makes the crazy harder to manage or contain.

Vance turns this disorientation into ideology: if they’re not sexually attractive, and if their sexuality is threatening, but if heterosexuality is nevertheless absolutely required, then what is it for? Procreation. Women are there to make babies, raise babies, and otherwise keep their distance. When they exist as autonomous, sexual beings who haven’t yet had some man’s children, they’re a threat.

Now, Vance is married. He has kids. But he speaks weirdly about it, calls them his wife’s kids. And it’s worth considering that his wife comes from a culture of arranged, often transactional marriages, where a hot-and-heavy romantic relationship is not considered a necessary or normal stage of courtship, and that their relationship was sort of arranged by their mentor Amy Chua at Yale. This would’ve been ideal for a gay man needing a wife, and perhaps for an ambitious but bookish Indian-American woman needing a husband who was going places and wouldn’t demand too much.

Is this all a lot of conjecture? Absolutely. But it maybe gets at the offness of Vance’s views on women, the weirdness that’s so unlike Trump’s all-too-familiar gropey sexualizing. And it maybe helps to contextualize the offness of so much of his persona: the hillbilly drag, the odd sense that there’s no core. If we see him as a man in deep denial of who he really is, perhaps it all makes a little more sense.

It even helps to put the whole couchfucker thing into perspective. We all knew that was a gag and not really true, but it caught fire because there was something plausible about it — something about Vance’s presentation of heterosexuality that seemed off.

No one makes similar jokes about Trump. With Trump, we know he fucks women, and the main joke is that he’s not very good at it, but even that doesn’t really land, because no one imagines that pleasuring the woman is ever the point for him. With sex, as with all things, pleasuring Trump is the only point.

It’s also notable that this is the second time Trump has picked a running mate with a peculiar sexual persona. The last guy, you’ll recall, calls his wife “Mother” and can’t be alone in a room with another woman. Like Vance, he seems to see women’s autonomous sexuality as threatening. For Trump, this may be ideal because it’s never in competition with him. Any sexual energy in the room must flow to Trump and no one else. If the guy next to you is frantically waving away any possible vibing, that’s perfect.

Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Vance’s name changes as evidence of his shifting persona. This was incorrect, as the name changes came early in life for reasons unrelated to the issues discussed in this article.

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 rêve (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)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjlmltN0pNk

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.

“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!

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.

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.

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.