Travels with Tavish

On the 13 th , I took a morning walk through the village alone. One of the first chores of the day is washing clothes; most of the people I saw were women were squatting outside their homes over buckets filled with clothes and soapy water. I made my way down to the river via a street I had not walked before; on the way, a man sitting on his porch offered me to come for tea. I declined politely, continuing my walk down to the river. As soon as I had passed his house, I realized I should have (for many reasons) accepted the tea. I returned up the same street and invited myself in for tea. The man who had invited me to his home was named Maoli Kaka (Kaka means “uncle” in Hindi) and was picking small stones out of the rice he had harvested from his field previously. The rice was still inside its husks; I had never seen rice like this before. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to see the de-husking machine, which he had inside. We chatted for a few minutes over tea until I had to go bac...

Note: I will be writing about my Vipassana experience in a separate post, to be uploaded at a later date. For now, I will continue blog updates from May 4 th , after my Vipassana meditation course ended. The Vipassana course ended at 7:30 in the morning on the 4th. With no plans until my evening train, I headed in to Ichalkaranji, a nearby town to Kolhapur, with Madhuram, a student I met on the day I arrived in Kolhapur. We had chatted a bit on that day and had not talked for the next ten days, as is a requirement of the Vipassana course. We went to his house along with another student, Ravi, and spent the morning driving around the town on motorcycles and chatting about music. His mother cooked us an excellent lunch and then sent us on our way, me south to Kolhapur and Ravi north to his home near Pune. I took the public bus for an hour then was picked up at the bus station by a friend of Professor Sardeshpande’s, Mr. Ashtekar, whom I had met during my first visit to Kolhapur in ...