Musee d'Orsay

No, that's not the picture of the hotelroom we stayed at in Paris. Hopefully you recognized this painting. It's Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles. This was at the Orsay museum along with many other fine art paintings. My favorites were the works of Van Gogh, Monet and Pisarro. This museum is filled with their work. It was so much fun to see so many of their work in one place. Surprisingly, they don't mind the visitors taking pictures, as long as flash is not used. I ended up taking enough pictures to make my own screensaver. I actually enjoyed my visit to Musee d'Orsay more than my visit to Louvre.
I had to have my picture taken in front of Monet's "Les dindons". I had never seen this one before.
This "Baby John the Baptist" sculpture was also calling for a picture. 

Yumm!

My blog about the Paris adventures cannot be complete without mentioning our favorite bakery/cafe here, called Paul. We went to this place every morning to get our Cafe Au Lait, Cafe Mocha, bread, croissont, etc. The bakery items are great, the coffee is great, the atmosphere is great. I am sure there are many bakeries/cafes like this in Paris, but this one happened to be on our way whenever we left our hotel for the day and it was a perfect stop to start our daily adventures. Later we noticed several other Paul's scattered around the city. In case you are wondering, this one is on Rue De Seine (and Rue De Buci) about 10 minutes from Luxembourg gardens. Their hot chocolate wasn't like a milk and melted chocolate mixture, it was like melted chocolate mixed with heavy cream. They don't skimp on fat here. Low-fat probably won't translate into French. 

Opera - March 29

Wednesday evening, we had tickets for a performance at the Opera Garnier. When we visited the Opera on Monday we thought it would be great to catch a performance here, because it is such a beautiful building. Our first choice was Figaro, but it was sold out. We were in the ticket line already and without thinking about it too much, we ended up buying tickets to a modern dance performance. It was unbearable. It wasn't even rajasic, it was tamasic. The music was disgusting and that made all the dance moves seem terrible too. I couldn't find anything enjoyable about the performance. There was no moment of upliftment and I thought, is this really art ? What is the purpose of this whole thing ? I might be ignorant about the modern dance, and that might have contributed to my dislike. However, I visit museums and I do see many uplifting pieces of art even though I might not know much about the particular art or the artist. Anyway, I would love to catch a more traditional performance in this opera house one day. For now, I am left with the pleasant memories of the interior beauty and I am trying to forget the performance alltogether.

 

Queen's Hamlet

At the end of our Versailles visit we also visited the Queen's Hamlet on the same property. This was a getaway for Marie Antoinette. The design was so unlike the Chateau Versailles. It looked just like an English country village. The interiors weren't open but the grounds were a delight to visit.

 

Versailles - March 29

On Wednesday, we tried our chance again at the Versailles. The RER was about 15-20 minutes delayed but we still got there at a reasonable time. We purchased the guided tour, which was great. The group was small and our guide was very informative.










One of my favorite pieces during the tour was this clock which was several hundred years old and still in great working condition. It showed the exact date, month, year and it was designed to show the date accurately until year 9999. That's up to Y10K. Who can match that ? It takes into account the leap years too. It has a special vibration dampening base to prevent the floor vibrations from reaching its mechanisms. It only needs winding once a month. Appearently there is full-time staff at Versailles whose job is to maintain and wind these clocks, there are quite a few of them, but this one was unique. This clock also was the reference clock for the entire France, kinda like the atomic clock of that age.
This last picture shows me taking a picture of this gorgeous malachite basin. 

Paris - March 28

On Tuesday we headed over to Versailles. It's about 40 minute ride from the city on the RER train and a 10 minute walk from the train station. When we got there we looked for the cashier to purchase our entry tickets but all were closed. We started asking around to figure out what's happening. People kept saying "la greve". We finally figured out that the museum workers were on strike. Lucky for us, the gardens were open, so we were able to stroll around and spend a good part of the day in its gardens. We made a full circle tracing the perimeter of the pool/canals which took over two hours. Later we found out that the property's perimeter is 42 kilometers. Even though the museum was closed we had a great time just visiting the gardens.

 

March 27 - Paris

On March 27, we arrived in Paris. We arrived at our hotel around 10am. After freshening up a bit, we went out to explore again. Our first stop was the Arc de Triomphe on Champs Elysees. The first picture you see us on top of the Arc.








This picture was taken on the other end of Champs Elysees at Place de la Concorde right outside the Jardin des Tuileries.















The third picture is inside the Opera.















This last picture shows Sacre-Coeur, a Byzantine-looking impressive 130 year-old church. 

Mumbai - March 26

A group picture of the afternoon (advanced meditation) session attendees. 

Mumbai March 26th Sunday

Sunday was the last day of the classes. I had originally planned to ship all remaining books and CDs back to Gurgaon. I called GATI while we were still in Gurgaon and made arrangements to have them pick up the boxes from the Indian Red Cross on Sunday at 8pm. When I called them back to confirm on Saturday, they said Sunday 8pm was too late and they couldn't do it. So, I had to come up with a backup plan. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 1:50am Monday (a few hours after the lectures) from Mumbai to Paris. I talked to Rammurti and he said I could leave most of the books/CDs in Mumbai for the next lecture tour (in 3 to 6 months). This would save a lot of rupees in shipping. Mr. Biswas generously offered to store whatever we wanted to keep in Mumbai. So, that's what we did. Whatever we had to ship back to Gurgaon, I marked them separately to be stored overnight and Yogesh offered to arrange shipping for those boxes. This plan worked out great.

Suzanne and I were able to leave the lecture hall around 9pm, went to the hotel for a shower and light dinner and headed to the Mumbai airport.

The first two pictures show Dhyana and Jaya demonstrating the spinal adjustment and the last picture shows the students trying it for the first time.
 

Mumbai - March 25th Saturday

Saturday morning, we arrived at the Indian Red Cross building bright and early (at 7:30 am). Suzanne didn't get much sleep as she was entering latest registrants' info in to the computer. It was another busy but fun-filled day. We had about 190 people attending the morning (beginning meditation) class. The first picture shows the attendees practicing the Superconscious Living Exercises. Second picture shows Jaya giving his discourse and the last picture shows the book table.
 

Mumbai - March 23

After a breakfast at our hotel, Dharmadas, Jaya, Dhyana, Ruby, Suzanne and I went to see the venues for this weekend. Our first stop was at K.C. College auditorium, which was only a few minutes away from our hotel. You see the front of the College building in the first picture. We looked at the facility and planned where to setup the registration table, book tables, etc. From there we headed over to the Indian Red Cross building next to the Asiatic Society Central Library (see second picture), which was another 10 minutes drive from K.C. College. We did the same type of planning there. We had the challenge of where to store the books Friday night until Saturday morning since we had to go to a different venue on Saturday. Luckily, I was able to arrange storage at the second venue thanks to a nice gentleman at the Indian Red Cross who collected the security deposit from me. I also became friends with the guard, which is one of the most important persons you need to know in order to get things done. If you know the guard, you can get to anywhere in the building, even if it is locked. This becomes important because often times we need access to other parts of the building to hang banners, etc. The third picture shows the entrance to the parking lot of the Indian Red Cross. The Saturday/Sunday lectures were to be held at the Taleyarkhan Memorial Hall.

We spent the daytime Friday doing further preparations for the lectures, mainly data entry, copies, paper folding and envelope stuffing.

We are in Mumbai

Around 10am we left the Ananda center, picked up Dhyana and went to the Delhi airport. After a pleasant and ontime flight with SpiceJet, we arrived in Mumbai around 2:30pm. A van picked us up from the airport and drove us to the Oberoi towers in the south end of Mumbai. The first picture shows the world's smallest taxi. Our van was a bit bigger than that one. The hotel is about a 45 minute drive from the airport. The hotel is quite nice but somehow not as nice as the Kolkata Oberoi. The service level doesn't compare to the one we encountered in Kolkata. The view is quite nice though. It is very close to the sea, so we get to see that from our room.

After we checked in to our rooms and got our luggage, we went down to the restaurant to have a late lunch / early dinner. Strolled around the shops in and around the hotel. Tomorrow we will be going to the venues for the weekend and do some preparations.

Last two days in Gurgaon

Sunday evening after the lectures, Suzanne and I took Jaya and Sadhanadevi out to dinner to our favorite Italian restaurant (Tonini's). The dinner once again was delicious. It was great to chat and catch up with them.

On Monday, Lakshman took us out to breakfast at the Hilton Trident. What a beautiful hotel that is. The food was great too and we were able to spend some quality time with our dear friend Lakshman. The service you get at these five star hotels are truly five star. I have been to some five star hotels (at least for business trips) in the US, but the Indian five star hotels definitely got the service figured out. You have to really be there to experience it. There are areas of the hotel we can't normally go to but at breakfast time they don't regulate it, so we took a walk towards the guestrooms. They are located around a courtyard made of reflecting pools with water trickling down the walls to a lower area where there is a real swimming pool. The rooms around this courtyard have floor to ceiling windows that face the reflecting pools. It is very cleverly designed because the constant sound of water dampens the traffic noise that you'd otherwise hear because busy streets are not too far from there. One more pleasant surprise was that when we went to the restaurant it was Swami's music playing in the background. In fact, the whole time it was Swami's music (it was Secrets of Love if I remember correctly). Lakshman said that they had given the hotel some of Swami's CDs and they were usually playing them in a shuffle with other CDs. This was the first time they played only his CD(s) the whole time.

The rest of Monday I spent with printer and networking issues. I must say it is quite challenging since there are all kinds of machines (Win2K, XP, MacOS 9.x, 10.x) that make it quite complicated to make all printers work from all machines. I don't think I have solved all the issues but hopefully it is a bit more functional than it used to be.

Suzanne has been working on getting the spreadsheets of the registrants ready for the Mumbai event. A lot of data entry with names that we don't see every day.

On Tuesday, we had a meeting with Dharmadas, Jaya, Sadhanadevi, Claudio and Deborah to go over the Mumbai lecture tour. The good thing is we have a number of Sangha members traveling to Mumbai as well as several volunteers joining us for the weekend. With all this help things should go a lot more smoothly than in Kolkata. We spent the rest of Tuesday doing more preparations for the Mumbai weekend.

We fly to Mumbai tomorrow (Wednesday) and the lecture series start on Friday evening. Dhyana arrives from Italy late tonight and she will also join us tomorrow for the Mumbai trip. We are taking SpiceJet this time (the previous one was JetAirways). It is supposed to be like JetBlue in the US, cheap with no-frills.

Sat/Sun of lecture series

Last Saturday and Sunday we continued to help with the weekend lecture series. There were only beginning classes, so both days the programs went until 2pm. We had lots of volunteers and staff members that made the setup and teardown really easy. The location was in a nice area of Delhi, where most of the consulates were located. You can see the before and after pictures of the venue.

I had the opportunity to chat with a few of the attendees. Suzanne and I talked to a very nice young couple both of whom work for the Gallop poll company. It is nice to see people from all kinds of backgrounds and all ages. The nicest thing is that it is very easy to talk to them about spiritual path and practices. They don't get freaked out when you use the word God. I also talked to another nice man who was in town for a few days to take his TOEFL (English proficiency) and GRE (math, analytical proficiency) exams in order to start a PhD degree. He had a Computer Science background like myself. He was flipping through the pages of newspaper and came across our ad. He had a day off so he decided to come to the lecture. How many people in the US would decide to use their free day at the last minute to go to a meditation class ? That's what makes India so special. There was another very pleasant gentleman probably in his fifties who said that he had learned about meditation some 40 years ago in school, and he said it took Americans to come to India to remind him about the beauty of it again. All the people I talked to were very impressed and inspired by the lectures.

Lectures in Delhi

This weekend there is another lecture series in Delhi. Friday evening is the open-to-public discourse on meditation and Kriya Yoga. Saturday and Sunday are two four-hour classes on beginning and intermediate meditation.

Friday morning I went to Swami's house again to meet with Lakshman. We installed the Vonage unit back into the network and made a few test calls. It all seems to work ok so far. Lakshman will try to test it as much as possible while I am still in Gurgaon. He also has an interesting setup for Swami where a cordless bluetooth-capable phone attaches to the phone switch in the house and via a special extension can get a dial tone in Nevada City through the Vonage unit. The bluetooth-capable phone links to Swamiji's hearing aid (which is also bluetooth capable) via another device called SmartLink which provides a bridge between the phone and the hearing aid and it also provides a microphone to speak into. This is quite an ingenious link of devices for Swami to be able to make and receive phone calls to/from America with highest possible quality and lowest possible cost, giving him the freedom to roam around the house with a cordless handset in his pocket (or on his desk) while talking on the phone.

Friday afternoon we hopped onto a Toyota SUV taxi with all the supplies needed for the weekend and headed over to the auditorium of the Delhi railroad museum where the Friday evening's discourse was going to be held. The location and facility was excellent especially compared to the facilities we had in Kolkata. We had many volunteers that made the preparations go very smoothly. Jaya, Dharmadas, Nirmala and Haridas were the acharyas present for the evening. My favorite part is the end of the talk where the audience is allowed to ask questions. Some ask the usual practical question such as "how long should I meditate?" and "what do I do with the noise?" etc, but you also hear much deeper and blunt questions such as "Can I experience the presence of God during meditation?" and "Do you feel the Kundalini rising during Kriya Yoga?", questions that we are not that used to hear in the U.S.

Short visit with Swamiji

Thursday (16th) I helped out with a number of network related issues as well as testing Vonage (Voice over IP) connections. In the afternoon, Suzanne and I went out to run a few errands. We stopped by the Metropolitan mall to check out the Ananda store called "The Wishing Tree". It's a beatifully designed store with spiritual books, CDs, mini statues, incense, water fountains, etc. The mall itself is very western, with all the top brands you'd see in the American malls. Inside there you feel like you might be in any mall in America. There is a Barista cafe there where we enjoyed cappuccinos, it has the feel of Starbucks.

After our little outing, we stopped at Swami's house where I was going to pick up the Vonage unit to test in the evening. Suzanne also came along so that she could see the house. As we were about to leave Swamiji saw us and we had a chance to visit with him. We talked about his latest book, "The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita", and his ideas about the upcoming projects. I had given Lakshman a copy of the Fast Company magazine which had an article about a new solar power system developed by a company called Stirling, because I had heard that Swamiji was very interested in building solar power systems in India in large scale. Appearently he had already heard about that company. He also mentioned that Ananda's upcoming Yoga Institute of Living Wisdom in India was invited to be a part of an international online university called "The World Wisdom Academy", which will be an adjunct to the Club of Budapest, founded by Ervin Laszlo. The curriculum of this university includes ecological sustainability, inner growth and personal development, development of corporate culture and social and political transformation all based on peace, harmony, individual and shared well-being. He asked me to work with Jemal and help out with the technical parts of this project, because it involves online teaching. This would be a great way to get the universal teachings of Yogananda out to the world.

The first picture you see is the Barista at the Metropolitan Mall. The second one is Suzanne with Jasbir, who taylored a couple of outfits for Suzanne.

Back in Gurgaon

After a late flight on Monday spilling into Tuesday (14th) we were back in action on Tuesday morning because we had to start preparing for the Mumbai lecture tours. We met with Jaya to talk about what went well and what we could do to better prepare ourselves for the next lecture tour. We also prepared a list of books we need to ship to Mumbai and I started working on that with Jemal. I made a few calls to potential attendees in Mumbai in the evening inviting them to the lectures. Those are really tricky since I don't know any Hindi. First of all, the list I had to call didn't have Mr. or Mrs. titles for the names, so I wasn't sure how to address them. In India, the more formal the better, but I had to skip Mr/Mrs lest I make a mistake. The person who answers the phone doesn't necessarily speak English and when I ask for a specific name I get an answer in some mixture of Hindu/English at which point I have no idea whether:
1. I am talking to the person I am looking for, or,
2. He/she is getting the person I am looking for, or,
3. The person I am looking for is currently not home, or,
4. I called the wrong number.

Each call becomes quite a confused conversation and at the end I end up with less information than I started with. After about five calls we decided it's best for a Hindi speaking person to make these calls.

Wednesday (15th) was Holi. For an outside observer it seems about as significant as Halloween in the U.S. Basically, if you are out on the streets during Holi, you will get covered with paint and it is normal. The pictures show some of our friends after having joined in this fun. I stayed indoors and helped with the book shipment preparations. For my own edification, I looked up the meaning of this day and here is what I found:

"The festival of Holi is celebrated on the day after the full moon in early March every year.

Originally a festival to celebrate good harvests and fertility of the land, Holi is now a symbolic commemmoration of a legend from Hindu Mythology. The story centres around an arrogant king who resents his son Prahlada worshipping Lord Vishnu. He attempts to kill his son but fails each time. Finally, the king's sister Holika who is said to be immune to burning, sits with the boy in a huge fire. However, the prince Prahlada emerges unscathed, while his aunt burns to death. Holi commemorates this event from mythology, and huge bonfires are burnt on the eve of Holi as its symbolic representation.

This exuberant festival is also associated with the immortal love of Krishna and Radha, and hence, Holi is spread over 16 days in Vrindavan as well as Mathura - the two cities with which Lord Krishna shared a deep affiliation. Apart from the usual fun with coloured powder and water, Holi is marked by vibrant processions which are accompanied by folk songs, dances and a general sense of abandoned vitality."

Wednesday evening, Keshava and Diana invited us to a dinner out at an Italian restaurant called "Toninos". The food was excellent. Being in that restaurant was like being in Italy. Pizza came from a wood-burning oven, which is my favorite. We had a great time of sharing and eating.