So Gilbert the caretaker general dogsbody, has taken my demand draft for 450 rupiyah (mustn't mock but the Sri Aurobindo boys want a demand draft for six pounds then again the fee for that was about 20p and I got it immediately last time I tried to get a DD from a Bank in Britain it took me a week at least and they charged me ten pounds minimum for it). Anyway side effect is he will also get me some cards or envelopes not sure what his understanding of my version of english is but I shall write to some back home. Seems a little too easy but why not.
I had thought about taking the train to Pondicherry. But a man of a certain age, well I think 3k rupiyah for the one hour flight to Chennai then the scenic sea-side train journey via Mahaballipuram to Pondicherry, well it's too attractive. The Lancastrians arrive next Friday and some form of class will begin Sunday, plus a sort of tour of the place on Saturday and then the days will fill up for the three weeks. I am incredibly impressed with my meteoric appreciation of East Syriac. Two lessons and now I am reading the Our Father in Syriac. I had several months of Hebrew and still can't sight pronounce any word in Hebrew. It has struck me about the liberating power of Love even when Love has no direct object. I still like Rumi's Now I have seen your face even if he is an overrated drunk who just mislead wimin about his spirituality purely for sexual purposes hmm. . . Anyway I think also it being a dead language and one I can practise alone instead of having to rely on converstational practice with unwilling partners. Then again when I first took a look at the A4 printed page of the East Syriac Our Father, I figured it must be in Estrangela. The first letter was probably an Alep in Estrangela which figures because they use Estrangela script for title pages and anything really holy, it's the Gothic Script of ancient DTP. It was only after checking with an Estrangela script and realizing it was probably not Estrangela that I accidentally turned the page upside down and eh voila it's East Syriac. It's really more of a blonde event than it sounds. East Syriac is like Devanagari in that it has a sort of bar on which everything rests. Looking back did you not notice that the bar was on the top of the line instead of the bottom. Didn't this give you pause for concern. You know how trees and forests and I had just looked at the first letter and was convinced it was an Estrangela Alep. And intellectual humbling is good to assuage my intellectual arrogance. And it makes a good dinner table joke.
It's not that we have a rooftop garden. The roof is flat for Tai Chi but the tree line ends with it, so it looks a bit like Tarzan's penthouse from the series that never really took off circa 2000 CE in the USA. Finishing off the liturgy series with Fr Varghese. I don't think the man is that well. Last class next week he is looking forward to enjoying the rest of his retirement. But he has exchanged pressies with me and I have offered him anything from my travels, always safe to offer pressies to a real carmelite.
If the OIAHE come through with the appeal against TVU I hope to have some money for the Lambadis and the Mill Hill Mission. I am quite keen to help out the Carmelites here. This place is full of poverty and injustice. The reading today in the Qurbana was the one about it is better to be cheated than to go to court against an Xtian. Even with my exciting travel plans in India I think I could spare them a couple of grand a year for scholarships.
Sri Lanka shall be my stop over to renew the visa in November. About 3k rupiyah for a one way flight to Colombo from Chennai. Then I get a visa and fly back either to Hyderabad and my kids or Bangalore and classes. Then home for Ascension 2010. I figure if I post off the paperwork for my OCI in January then it'll either be ready for when I arrive or it will get complicated and I'll just go for a student visa.
Had a bit of an early warning about not tickling people too much. I just have to maintain the pace. I spend loads of time in the library anyway. A bit like don't mention the war I may have made a slight slip earlier but I think I got away with it. Except with Indians who knows. Hey I am an Indian too you know.
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