JUN-B-17

YET ANOTHER ALL-DAY BUS RIDE FROM MANALI,
 THROUGH MANDI TO DHARAMSALA
TO ARRIVE IN THE BAGSU IN MACLEOD GANJ
FOR A DAY IN OUR PENULTIMATE DESTINATION
June 25, 2002

            “It is all down hill from here,” said Kelly.  “Except those parts that are up hill,” I added.  She had been told by the same people who had assured her that the ride from Kaza to Manali was five hours (and turned out to be fourteen without any extraordinary interruptions) that we were setting out on a four hour, easy, downhill b us ride from Manali to Dharamsala.  I suggested that it would be more like ten hours, and just like the last ride, I was off by only five minutes.

            The big news this morning was that the Eifflings had two phone calls from home, and his wife has health problems (she has MS), car problems, and in essence, two months is just too long to leave home and wife and other child, so Michael is aborting all his plans to be trekking for two weeks and then joining me for the Ladakh trip.  This means that there will be no other MD---even one who was a medical student only last year—to share the burden of a dozen freshmen medical student s turned loose on patients under a single supervising physician---Moi!  Lingshed is still uncertain because of cancellations and the few residual are high maintenance types, including one of them a GW freshman medical student named Shafkat, who has been buzzing around me in trying to get the last full ride in funding so that he can go to visit his parents in Bangladesh.

            With these fresh news tidbits, I could begin the day with a solo run up and around the Hadimba Temple and around the Manali forest preserve, and across the bridge to go up the Beas River.  I returned to breakfast, and the “packing “ of my minimal carryon bag, which has been my sole support so far, down to my last roll of film through my third string backup throwaway camera, and my last tape cassette---all in all a rather remarkable achievement in traveling through many venues and strata without any checked luggage from the two large (overweight for airline allowances) bags, which were now alleged to be meeting me in the Hotel Bhagsu in MacLeod Gunj.  This would be a nuisance, since without having them to help me throughout, I would now just have to hassle them as I was leaving to get them back with me or once again entrust them to a system that was supposed to deliver them to me for this trip and hope that it might be able to do so now for the next trips.

            Good news!  Sort of!  I will not have to hassle them at the end of my trip.  They have NEVER caught up with me, and it is apparent now that because of the high cost of the air forwarding of the missed connection of the bags, they were never sent anywhere to join me, and I was just strung along to see if I could continue in good humor while being the only one here who had made the entire trip without any help from the carefully left luggage to support the different activities.

            As we began the very long bus ride, I consulted with two of my freshmen students who each had models of the small Sony digital cameras.  I could review their photos on the screen, and even video clips from the streaming.  I learned about their extra memory sticks and batteries and a warranty plan for four years to help, which sounded good.  I was impressed with the options, including the different kinds of pictures that could be taken, e.g. black and white, sepia, color, with more or less resolution depending on what you wanted to put into it in memory.  The 128 Meg memory sticks would probably never be saturated by anybody but me, and the same stick could hold about four hours of jumpy digital streaming video but without sound.  All of this comes to around 4—500 dollars with extras.  The chief feature that I see is that it eliminates the whole film processing delay and expense, and is almost like Polaroid, in that you can see immediately what you are getting and delete what you don’t want and crop and edit and enhance what you do.  The exposure can be by meter or flash, and it auto focuses.  The only thing that a digital camera cannot do is to correct the focus; all other options are open.

            For about twice as much in dollars and in size and weight, I then looked over Jim Blitz’s Canon Power Shot G-2, which has even more capability, including video with sound, and a feature in that you can make four exposures of a large object and have the camera put it all together to a single whole.  It seems that not only the camera but also the computer system that it would be plugged in to must be upgraded, and the album function could be taken care of by even someone as voluminously productive as I with a CD burner.  All of these can be dropped directly into Power Point presentations, which is another item I must “go to school” on.

            So, I have determined that I must “Go Digital” at some point, now that we are out of the prototype stages, but I want to get the most upgraded camera possible so as not to preclude any needs.  I will be ready to share everything I shoot now on email or in disc from and would not limit myself to just the Photo Works, which come at a long delay and high cost.  So, I am ready to replace the failed Nikon Tele Touch camera that failed to advance film on this trip with a digital as soon as I know which one.

            The next item that I know I must have a t some future point, and have missed already that clinical applications seminars on them—is a PDA, possibly of the Palm Pilot type.  This might eventually replaced my Smythson Wafer Diary, which needs complete updating and recopying each year end (even though I have a forty plus year history of these annual leather bound diaries) and the spiral notepads I have carried daily of the travel notes and data that I maintain on all my trips and daily activities and pocket storage of inspirations for later writings.  I have about ten of these per year also stored in file cabinets in the attic.

            My freshman medical student Brett from University of Buffalo tells me that a new edict from his medical school is that next year all students will be required to get a Palm Pilot which is going to be the source of downloaded home work assignments, patient data and clinical notes passed around among the clinical staff, etc.   I might imagine even more such ideas that I could plug into but I certainly do not want to have the wrong one or one that does not have the capacity to expand into the kinds of activities I might expand myself, such as the writing business or my references to encyclopedia type data or journalists; resources such as atlases and maps an d the GPS data that I carefully record by hand on altitude, etc, in what is called GIS.

            So, kicking and complaining a bit about how far invested I am in the state of the previous arts, I must join in now on the digital era and get just the right one after a period of further study and perhaps borrowing or using one for a while to see the potentials on and limitations of each of the models available.

            Now, that warming sun has melted the glaciers of collected winters and the snowmelt of this year’s collection on the Dhaulidar, and the water running off the mountains has been channeled by hand into the carefully constructed labor-intensive farming process that has changed little since the early days of the first domestication of wild plants and animals in this Indus Region now know as India.  I saw yoked teams of water buffalo or oxen pulling a wooden plow with a steel tip through the mud sloshed through by a barefoot male farmer behind them, turning them carefully so as not to break down the narrow mounds that separate one paddy from another o the stepping up the mountain’s flanks.  The barefoot man is stepping through he mud (a great opportunity for hookworm, guinea worm, and the miracidia of schistosomiasis, I keep thinking—not to mention tetanus or gas gangrene!) behind the plow-pulling ox yoked pairs is outnumbered about forty tone by a colorful group of hunched over women, also up to their knees in the same muddy gruel of the rice paddies, bent over at the waist, with their colorful sari scarves trailing behind them floating on the muddy waters, and somehow not seeming soiled or losing its colors. A fashion statement in the midst of cruelly prolonged stoop labor! 

            These hunched over hulks, colorful as they are—are making love to the muddy earth to bring forth life for another year, since they are individually hand planting the rice seedlings that have been started in nursery paddies.  They are transplanting every single blade to be stuck into the muddy clay to bring forth the miracle of photosynthesis from the two abundant elements of water from the Himalayan run-off and the long days of higher altitude sunshine.  Transplantation I seem to understand.  Here I ma thinking about being a bit behind the curve in the latest technology for collecting, storing and processing data, and here are colorful human beings re-enacting the drama that has been going on before them for at least 500 generations in an almost identical pattern—called subsistence!

            It is a little hard when one gets up in the morning to distinguish Monday from Thursday, or this season from last year’s quite comparable season, or youth from age, except in the time it takes to do the same task, and the creaking that accompanies it.  This sameness is a consistency that without which is not life.  That is simple enough—do this or die, since we know no other way to carry on.

            As I once said during my very first extended trip to India over two decades back:” Life in the subcontinent is harsh, simple and beautiful.”  Not one of these people is looking up from their stoop labor at the passing bus—an aluminum package of diesel soot belching aliens from another planet—and wishing—“Oh, if only I could be one of them and leave this paddy for the bright lights of another life”—since there would be no life without the brutally necessary tasks of this repetitive drudgery that can cause no complaint, since it would be like regretting life itself.

            At one point along our trip down the road along the Beas River, back where the steep gradient of the rushing water down slope is being channeled into the Beas River “Hydel Project” we were held up by a traffic jam.  We later learned that the reason for the traffic jam is that a despondent woman had come by the Hindu temple where we always stop on the way up or down the road to Manali where we see the monkey god Ram and elephant god Ganeesh in their idol forms, and the Hindu among us worship at the temple and get a dap of pigment anointed on their brows to carry on with their journey and a bit of anise and sugar to sweeten the breath and the thoughts.  |We were no doubt sweetened, but this woman who had stopped was not much improved by this process, since she had proceed down river just beyond the temple and hurled herself into the torrent below the cliffs.

            I can understand this.  The repetitive sameness of everyday life in India at the subsistence level must be mind-numbing.  Suicide is not a good thing, and she no doubt had failed in her Dharma, and she will come back lower down the phylogenetic scale according to her own beliefs, ---but that monkey god or that elephant god, in their avatars as monkey or elephant are not plagued by thoughts that there might be something else they might be doing, other than being the best monkey or elephant they can be. That entails less variety of hope, imagination and potential than it does for man---and at least one woman, at rice re-planting time.

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