The Cosmic Treehouse

Mumbai, Nov 26 2008

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:40:14 -0500

By now, we are all keenly aware of the bombings in Mumbai. Sorrow is the emotion of the moment. Our hearts go out the souls lost and their families.

All around us, we hear the cries for vengeance, the screams of rage and the demands for revenge.

Please ignore them. Never allow the haters to cause us to waver in our certainty of what is right.

Why not reach into our own hearts, cast aside any hatred or despair and do something good for someone else?
Cook a special meal for our family,

help someone who needs but did not expect our help,

shower our friends with kindness.

Buy a beggar some food.

Give someone a ride.

Read an extra tale to your kids.

Don't let go for even a single moment of the knowledge that this is the real you.

If you agree please post this or a similar message on your blog.

Peace.

Geoffrey

What Makes Us Tibetan Too?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:32:08 -0500

Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama represent a view of life in which the spiritual rather than the material is the senior. China on the other hand represents the material side of life with an economy that churns out manufactured goods as fast as the world can consume them. Tibet represents the Spiritual and China represents the Material. Quite simple really.
I am not Tibetan and I am not Buddhist but I can assure you that Tibet’s cultural survival is vital to my own. You see, each of us has our own belief system, our own ‘rules of the road’ and the real issue is not whether these rules are delusion or absolutely correct. The real issue is whether each of us has a right, a Human Right, to believe what we want to believe. I believe we do. Thus, it is our duty to respect the beliefs of others if we expect ours to be respected. Here is where the Dalai Lama has succeeded and here is where China has failed. I’m not saying that the Spiritual realm has prevailed over the Material realm since neither can exist without the other anyway, but the failure on China’s part is because China has not respected the religious and cultural beliefs of the Tibetans. That is their actual failure. But failure, like success is decided over a long period of time, not just several decades. Sometimes it takes centuries to understand what has actually happened.
If Tibet had remained a remote mountain nation, closed to outsiders as it once was, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies might have remained obscure, lost or hidden from public view for centuries to come. But thanks to China, Tibet, the Dalai Lama and Buddhism were thrust upon the world stage and became a beacon for oppressed peoples everywhere. So realize that your right to believe as you wish is a very precious right, and realize that the million Tibetans who suffered for that right were struggling for you too. Take a moment to thank them and do your best every day to honor them and honor the right of all people to believe as they wish because in this time and in this place, this is what makes us Tibetans too.
Geoffrey

A New President and The Chronicle of Racism in America

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:28:40 -0500

America has a new President-Elect, Barack Obama, who has both fulfilled a dream and provided great promise for the future. He is the first person of color ever elected to the office in a country that aspires to a government that represents all of the people. He faces a raft of troubles that he has promised to address. There is perhaps one problem that stands above the others as the single most oppressive factor in America today; the attempted genocide of the African-American by the very government Obama now steps forward to lead. It remains to be seen if he will rein in the oppressor and end the attempts at genocide or turn a blind eye as his predecessors have done and allow the selective chemical restraint of future generations of black children. Let us hope it is the former.
On December 17th, 1951, while the brand new televised version of the Amos and Andy Show hit the networks, several tall men dressed in suits and carrying briefcases, headed for downtown New York City. It was a cold gray day in Manhattan but that didn’t deter these men who were bringing with them a petition they would deliver to the United Nations on behalf of all African-Americans charging the government of the United States with genocide.
It proved to be an historic petition and it included the United Nation’s definition of genocide: “Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial or religious group is genocide.” Most Americans didn’t take the charges very seriously, if indeed they had even heard about the petition at all. It was entitled, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” A copy of the petition was also delivered to the UN delegates meeting in Paris, France. It had been drafted by the Civil Rights Congress and delivered by a delegation led by Paul Robeson and William Patterson, two giants of the movement to achieve equality for their race.  Robeson had many qualities possessed by the President-Elect today; great intelligence, political savvy, the determination never to give up his cause no matter the odds, and a love of people.
The petition began, “Out of the inhuman Black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease.”  The petition went on to document the extraordinary and brutal attempts by the American government to suppress and destroy the Black race and asked the United Nation’s General Assembly if it would take on the role of the Conscience of Mankind and act favorably upon the petition. It was the time in America of the Red Scare and the start of the Cold War. Communism became the new enemy and finding communists became all the rage. The government was therefore overly concerned with the alleged communist connections of some of the key people behind the petition. Using America’s power and influence, they prevented the United Nations from pressing the charges and inhibited any further discussion of them as Human Rights issues. Robeson and Patterson, received their just reward. They were persecuted by the FBI and the State Department for the next decade. Hopes for the petition to succeed rapidly faded and the genocide they had detailed was allowed to continue. However, over the next decade or two, the Civil Rights Movement gradually gained traction and there was an illusion that equality had been achieved and the nightmare of segregation was over.
But hiding in the shadows, plotting in the dark recesses and awaiting another turn to destroy the African-American culture, an oppressor sharpened his claws and selected the next weapon with which to continue the genocide. The ghettos remained inhuman but few cared and since many had escaped from them into a more middle-class life, the oppressor had time to get ready. The next weapon would need to be less obvious than the murders and the lynchings that had snuffed out thousands of innocent lives throughout the American South. But it had to be a weapon that accomplished its genocidal goal of, “lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease.” And they found it.
In 1951, a psychiatric drug called “Miltown” was synthesized and in 1955, it was marketed to “keep people calm.” Meprobinate was the chemical name and for many, it lived up to it’s nickname, “Happy Pills”. For others, the results were not so happy and they were not so fortunate. But it initiated the trend towards using drugs to restrain those people whom society didn’t favor or whom it wanted to keep “calm.” The oppressor saw his chance and pounced.  The next playing field was to be the unsuspecting public school system and the prey was to be the African- American child.
Look around you and you’ll see drug pushing in every town and city in America. On the corners, you will see people pushing drugs but pay them little mind because they aren’t the ones we’re looking for. The new drug overlords have become the pharmaceutical companies and the new weapons they use are willing child psychologists, teachers and psychiatrists. The new crack addict is the child labeled ADD or ADHD. If he’s a Black child he’s ten times more likely to be labeled and three times more certain to be put onto Ritalin or other dangerous anti-psychotic drugs than a White child. If he’s a Black child, he’s four times more likely to suffer from a side-effect called tardive kinesia than a White child. Tardive kinesia can cause the tongue to move about in the mouth involuntarily, or the lips to smack or random motions of the neck, shoulders, trunk or the entire body to occur. These symptoms can remain even after the drug use has been discontinued.  And in the grand tradition of the cultural genocide in progress, if he’s a Black child his chances are less than 50% that he’ll graduate from High School.
In 1992, a Reagan appointee named Marianne Mele Hall declared the cultural and genetic inferiority of black and brown people with this statement, “By 10,000 years of selective breeding for personal combat and the anti-work ethic of jungle freedoms, government programs spoiled them and encouraged a sense of entitlements that led to laziness, drug use and crime, particularly against Whites."
Under the guise of educational expertise and “research based” methodologies (despite decades of declining test scores) the oppressor stayed focused on minority children and ensured they were “over represented” in their “studies”, interventions and special education programs which heavily favored the use of drugs, paid for by the state. Some states paid tens of millions of dollars to the pharmaceutical companies for drugs for school children every year. Experiments using drugs and surgery were done on thousands of minority children as young as 6 years old in the name of “research.”
The oppressor saw a chance to gather a fortune in the tens of billions of dollars while doing his grim work but to do so, he had to find a “scientific” basis for his racist attitude so that those billions of government dollars could flow his way. The “science” he chose was the field of genetics and with his support, books and papers were churned out by the hundreds “proving” that Black people, Latinos and American Indians were not as intelligent as Whites. The oppressor counted on fear and prejudice to drive the point home. Once this was done, the final step was to show that African-Americans and other minorities were genetically predisposed to commit criminal acts of violence. It could then be justified that medicating Black and Latino children must be done to prevent this criminal behavior in later life.
They called this grand design, this “final solution”, the Violence Initiative Project and with massive funding from the Federal government and an abundance of grants from pharmaceutical companies, the grist mills began churning out their crippled and disabled products, children who were damaged for life. They rushed ahead, brushing aside or crushing all who stood before them, all who dared to challenge them or all whom they found to be a threat. Race-based biological theories had been with us for over a century and a half but in February of 1992, a psychiatrist named Dr. Frederick Goodwin asserted the ‘violence is genetic’ theory in a very public forum.  Addressing the National Health Advisory Council, Goodwin let the oppressor’s genocidal plans out of the bag with this statement:
“If you look, for example at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence.   That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyper-aggressive monkeys are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying. Now one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly with the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the evolutionary things that we have built up and maybe it isn’t just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, then we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution.”
Goodwin statement was immediately and heavily criticized by the Black press and the Congressional Black Caucus. He made an apology but only for being insensitive. He later that year re-iterated his views in a speech before the American Psychiatric Association which offered no criticism. The list of names of his illustrious colleagues is both long and broad and includes “respected” members of the faculties of many major universities. Though African-American leaders had been outraged by Goodwin's speech, his troubles only lasted a few days, after which he was appointed the head of the National Institute of Mental Health where his first official act was to approve funding for the Violence Initiative Project. The oppressor had struck again.
With the psychiatrists having established “genetic predisposition to violence”, they immediately lined up to siphon off the hundreds of millions in research dollars that became available. Universities in every state jumped in but they had to dodge the criticism of “racism” so they changed the name and focus away from violence and brought us sinister, racially biased drug-pushing programs with catchy names like “Teen Screen” or “Response To Intervention.” The “overrepresentation” of the African-American child in these programs was merely a “coincidence.” The final solution was again intervention with anti-psychotic drugs, but some new wind is in the air and perhaps in anticipation of a new president and a new era of social justice, billions of dollars in fines and settlements were paid this year by the pharmaceutical giants as the full measure of their crimes became known to the American people.
This point in time is a tipping point for America and for African-Americans. Will the new President rein in the oppressor, end the genocide and save countless future generations or engage in Business as usual? It is time for us all to let him know what we want.

Any comments?

India: Too much life had been washed away

Sun, 2 Nov 2008 20:28:47 -0500

A few years ago, we found ourselves back in Mysore, India. Mysore, in my estimation is a very beautiful city with quite a few wide boulevards, plenty of palaces and an abundance of parks and greenery. It lacks much of the overcrowding and congestion found in the larger cities and you feel you can breathe there. I had been invited to write a paper and present it at the Second International Conference on Rural Markets being held at Mysore University. It was early-December when we arrived for the conference and I can clearly recall my surprise at the coolness of the weather. This was, after all, India, where banana trees grow. It was cool and the locals wore warm jackets in the early mornings when the daily grind began.
I ate breakfast outside under the restaurant veranda at the Green Hotel every morning, contemplating my surroundings and watching the odd assortment of Brits who frequented the place to pursue their Yoga studies. I followed that morning experience by spending a fair amount of time at Reliance Internet Café and at the Coffee Day next door, doing some final preparation on my speech for the conference. Much to my surprise, when the week of the conference arrived, I was appointed a keynote speaker, the “first batsman”, as my genial host stated, using a cricket term to advise me of the agenda.
With some degree of trepidation, I began my talk that was entitled, “From Gandhi to Google. Can Rural Markets Save India?” In the introductory section, I mentioned the earliest memory I had of anything Indian. It was of me as a boy in England hearing that India had been “lost”. By way of contrast to that memory, I quoted that first passage from Nehru’s Independence Eve speech. It is so inspirational it still gives me goose bumps and yet its theme is completely the opposite of my childhood memories of “losing” India. One boy’s loss is a nation’s gain!

“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

Little did I realize that my chance mention of that childhood memory would ultimately lead to a relationship with India that has transcended all logic and defied all reason. My speech that day had a lot to do with Gandhi and his love of the villages. Gandhi understood that we survive to the degree that we can exchange with our environment. He understood it but was unable to carry it out as well as was needed. He was missing something.
In his landmark 1966 book, The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey made the point that groups and nations react to adversity in exact ways. He described what he called the amity/enmity equation which, simply stated, holds that the amount of enmity heaped upon a country (including k - natural factors) is directly proportional to the degree of amity – closeness – that its people feel towards one another and their ability to work together as a team. He marveled at the example of modern Israel, comprised of people who spoke over 100 different languages being forced to work together to become one nation because of the hostility of the surrounding countries.
I think India fits neatly into this category too. It is a nation that is comprised of many diverse ethnic groups speaking literally hundreds of languages attempting to function together as one country. Ardrey’s explanation would hold that this modern miracle is possible mainly because of the outside threats – be they Pakistan, Kashmir, China, Sri Lanka or the k factor of monsoon floods or the great tsunamis that have devastated the coastal regions since the beginning of time. Modern India began to experience it with British Imperialism as those words of Nehru drive home with passion.
Shortly after the conference at Mysore University ended, an event of momentous proportions occurred, certainly fitting Ardrey’s k factor. On Boxing Day, December 26, 2004, the latest tsunami hit the east coast of India and a 30-foot wall of water wrought devastation beyond imagination on the exposed coastal villages.
Agnes and I decided that we could do no less than help in any and all ways that we could. It was a pretty wild time. A few weeks earlier, Agnes and her friends had had the opportunity to meet with His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. We had made several forays from Mysore out to the refugee monasteries in both Gurapura and Bylakuppa. Bylakuppa is a Tibetan settlement consisting of seven monasteries set in rolling-meadows near Mysore where we had met with many of the incredible monks we had come to know and love over the years. Agnes convinced the chief abbots at three of the monasteries to “lend” us some monks to assist us with the work so we could head out to the coast to help the survivors of this disaster.
With one 25-gallon water drum, a huge branch of sweet little Mysore bananas, and a comfortable 44-seat motor coach, 44 of us packed ourselves in and headed out into the Mysore night to drive across India to Chennai (formerly Madras). The bus aisle was packed with rolled up sleeping pads and a variety of items each of us thought would be needed once we arrived. A sense of adventure and foreboding filled the night and most of us had trouble sleeping. We arrived there at dawn and headed for the apartment we had secured. Unloaded, we went out to find some food. The local language was Tamil, a language that none of us or the monks spoke but fortunately, one that a few friends with us did speak.
I quickly located a Reliance Internet Café but this one was completely full of kids playing in a video game contest. There were no available computers as the gamers screamed and cheered in such sharp contrast with the sadness in the Tamil fishing villages a few miles down the coast. I felt unusually upset at what seemed a callous attitude. Where are the Tamil fishermen in the caste system, the existence of which is so vehemently denied?
The roughest part emotionally was our first trip out to the waterfront. Life right after the tsunami was marked more by absence than by piles of rubble. Too much life had been washed away. Great stretches of emptiness along the beaches greeted us and translators explained somewhat hysterically that there had been thriving villages where now there was nothing. To sum it all up as 10,000 people killed is to devalue the suffering of the millions and reduce it to an irrelevant common denominator.
We traveled down the coast to the village of Cuddalore and much further down to Nagapattinam and everywhere the same scene greeted us – piled up fishing boats smashed beyond repair and dark eyes searching our faces to assess our worth as saviors. At one point, the Tibetan monks gathered together on the empty beach and began a low chant that was a prayer for the lost souls. It steadily grew louder until it captured the attention of everyone within earshot and a great calmness came over the area.
Later, I met with the doctor in charge of disposing of the bodies that had washed ashore in sections of Tamil Nadu. We were in Nagapattinam where he oversaw all the medical activities of his staff and over 70 village nurses. He was averaging an hour a night of sleep and in his deprived state, he explained to me in great detail the biological hazards of a high water table, the potential for the decomposing corpses in his care to contaminate the ground water, and the pressing necessity to bury thousands of broken and twisted bodies that had been suddenly wrenched from life and reduced to twisted mockeries of the human form.
He leaned forward, looked at me directly and shared his epiphany with me in a most intimate and personal way. In a low, lyrical voice, he explained he had found a way to do it that both preserved the dignity of the dead and ensured the integrity of the water supply and I sat there admiring him as I have admired few others in my life. He had accomplished something quite amazing that few would ever know about but in no way did that diminish the heroism of his deeds. He is one of my heroes. Such men and women were uniquely described by Robert F. Kennedy in his Day of Affirmation speech: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
That doctor was one of the million centers of energy. I do not think it is the great Indian religious heritage that leads one to enlightenment. I think that simply living life in India brings one to enlightenment in the most practical of ways. It isn’t the ancient verses of the wise men past that turn us into gods, it is the living of life itself that teaches us that we are and have always been gods from the very first.

Geoffrey

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Strange Blue Clouds In Space

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:08:20 -0400

In 1883, the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded happened in Indonesia. The volcano called Krakatoa erupted and threw giant clouds of volcanic ash 40 miles up into the sky. The sound of the explosion has been called the loudest sound ever heard on earth and was noticed and documented 3000 miles away.

World-famous artist Edvard Munch who painted “Scream” (shown here) attributed his inspiration to the sky suddenly turning blood red in his native Norway after the explosion. He said he stood there shaking with fear and felt an endless scream passing through nature.

The dust clouds lingered in the skies for years creating the legendary “blue moons” as well as some of the most spectacular sunsets ever seen. Sky watchers by the thousands went out at twilight to enjoy the sunsets making it a popular and often romantic pastime. Others shrank in fear thinking it was a sign of great disaster to come. Others feared it was the wrath of God and felt the world was coming to an end.

Vendors sold sweets to watchers gathered in deck-chairs along the shores near Southhampton in England and in France the viewers favored local wine. It was even noted that the birthrate rose slightly about nine months after the spectacular event started. In France, the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge with its famous high-kicking cancan dancers suddenly became all the rage, focusing on daring nudity and debauchery that then became the order of the night.

The dazzling sunset displays of brilliant orange, iridescent red, dazzling yellow and luminous green continued for several years but then something quite amazing and unexpected happened. A discovery was made in the skies above the earth that unveiled a mystery that even today remains unsolved.

While the French were preoccupied with Josephine Baker, a famous African-American “dancer” and singer who wore a tiny skirt made exclusively of suggestively placed bananas, an obscure Englishman named Robert Leslie saw wispy luminous blue strands of clouds like no others he’d ever seen before in the skies. He was puzzled but determined to discover what they were.

In Paris, despite his dwarf-like stature, legendary artist Toulouse-Lautrec was so inspired he could scarcely control his passions as Josephine Baker did her bumps and grinds.

The Englishman was so excited he published his observations of the huge blue clouds in the well-respected journal Nature
Robert Leslie was then was credited with the first discovery of noctilucent clouds. Toulouse-Lautrec was credited with having a disease that caused enlarged genitals and both men received the recognition they deserved. Scientists of the 19th century figured the clouds were some curious manifestation of volcanic ash but that turned out not to be the case. Toulouse-Lautrec’s malady, called hypertrophied genitals was believed by the cancan dancers to be a manifestation of a different kind.

The legend of Toulouse-Lautrec continues to this day as does the mystery of noctilucent clouds now known as NCLs. They are sighted every year all over the world in the mid-latitudes with the latest and most beautiful one ever seen photographed over Iran in July of 2008. The clouds are now believed to be made up of microscopic ice crystals but no explanation exists for the shape of this latest one anymore than there is an explanation for the dancers’ attraction to Toulouse-Lautrec.

- Geoffrey

The Dead Plant Society

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:28:22 -0400

American writer Erma Bombeck once said, “Never trust a doctor whose office plants have died.” I’m not exactly sure why this little warning has popped into my head at the exact time the US economy has chosen to get critically ill and go on life support, but it has. A doctor is desperately needed. Our economic troubles started, we are told, when back in the nineties, Bill Clinton forced the banks and mortgage lenders to stop loaning money to only those who could pay it back. Oddly, that turned out to be the group that lived in certain elegant neighborhoods. The lenders rarely loaned you money if you lived somewhere else.
The problem, as Bill Clinton and his colleagues saw it, was that this practice discriminated against African-Americans and other minorities who did not live in those elegant neighborhoods. Bill and the boys passed legislation to ensure that banks and lenders loaned mortgage funds in all neighborhoods to ensure that there was no discrimination going on. Thus, an era of new kinds of mortgages was born that allowed no or low down payments, low monthly payments with all unpaid principal amounts being added to the loan total to be paid back in the “future” when the property would be worth two or three times the purchase price. All this sounded great and could still be working if the prices had continued to increase. They didn’t.
The downward spiral began. First, the lenders had to take the houses back (called foreclosure) by the hundreds, by the thousands and now, by the millions. There were some greedy individuals who bought homes for speculation and when the crash came, they got hurt, then the greedy lenders who encouraged the greedy speculators got hurt. Then the huge and corrupt mortgage companies with cutsie names like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who backed up the banks who backed up the speculators got hurt. Then the giant brokerages and even a few countries that backed up the others have failed, one by one. And the American Economy and indeed the health of the world economy is in dire straits.
If we could learn a lesson from Erma Bombeck’s warning, it might be that the men who are proposing giant loans and guarantees to fix it all again are the doctors whose plants have died. $85 billion to one group, $50 billion to another and the opening ante for this latest proposal is $700 billion. This is a shell game, a high stakes shell game with the doctors who caused the illness moving the shells. And we are all members of the Dead Plant Society.
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt  that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt  that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat that killed the rat  that ate the malt  that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt  that lay in the house that Jack built.
Geoffrey

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Crossing The Roads in India A Guide To Avoiding Early Death

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:55:59 -0400

How could such a mundane event as crossing the road measure up as one of the supreme moments of my life? At this point, just to gain your own understanding of what I’m talking about, you must watch this video clip of someone in India named Kumar crossing the street.

Watching the video and feeling the emotion rise up within you, you can almost feel your whole life flash before your very eyes as your breath catches and you struggle to control your flight instinct. Fear and the desire to freak-out rise up within you as you watch but the truth is that in real life, it is ten times worse. The sounds, smells and turbulent air thrust against you by noisy, rushing trucks belching black smoke add to the confusion and you find yourself having to desperately grasp for some idea or plan that will enable you to survive the experience. But what?
What the people who live on the sub-continent tell you is that you need good luck to be safe. Actually, you need the best of luck, the kind of luck that is only attainable as part of local religious activity. If you are in India, the Hindu rites can help. If you’re a Buddhist in Sri Lanka, and you’ve accumulated enough Merit, as the Sri Lankans call it, you’ll get across that road unscathed. Earning that Merit isn’t so easy for a Sri Lankan as it may require a pilgrimage to the tomb of Buddha’s tooth. Frankly, the concept of a lucky tooth getting you safely across the road runs quite contrary to my upbringing, to say nothing of my keenly honed reflexes for fight or flight.
As a youngster growing up in England, I got my introduction to the correct method of crossing the road in school. In my class, the subject of “Crossing The Road” was given due respect and was taught as Safety First for Children. With baited breath and eyes wide, we learned about the Belisha Beacon and the Zebra Crossing and that their sole purpose on earth was to save children’s lives. For those of you unfortunate enough to have grown up in America, let me explain. A Zebra Crossing is a pedestrian crossing of alternately painted black and white stripes (vague but child-friendly reminders of a zebra’s stripes). Remember the cover photo of The Beatles, “Abbey Road” album? They were crossing the road on a Zebra Crossing. The Belisha Beacon is a black and white pole with a flashing orange ball on the top. It was named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Minister of Transport in England who started putting them up all over the world in 1934.
In my school days, in case I was ever called upon to cross a real road, I had learned by heart the mantra that was taught to all road-crossing children in England, “Look right, look left, then look right again before you cross the road.” This we repeated in class as often as any multiplication table and we drilled it on the playgrounds until we became experts. If there were an Olympic event called “Road Crossing”, England would win all the medals. As youngster I was never certain as to which was left and which was right so my mother helped me out by sewing tags that said L and R on my mittens. Thus, I hoped never to have to cross a road when it was too warm for gloves. That’s exactly what fate led me to, a road crossing experience in Indian heat. What rotten luck.
From Calcutta to Colombo, Zebra Crossings abound but incredibly, what they mean seems open to local interpretation. Quite an amazing concept, local interpretation, and one that tears at the very roots of my formal British education and thorough grounding in the technology of how to cross the road. In Sri Lanka, where road rules are often taken as suggestions rather than the law of the land. To many devoted Sri Lankans, especially the road crossing types, the Tooth of Buddha is worth more than all the volumes of legal mumbo jumbo stacked on shelves in their supreme court. With the luck bestowed upon them after visiting the Temple of the Tooth, they can safely cross any road they wish. I left the Galle Face Hotel one evening and decided to cross the main road. View the Kumar video again http if you need a reminder of what I experienced. In the oppressive heat of the Colombo night, I had no mittens to guide me.

Sri Lanka is and has been many things to many people. That’s part of the problem. It is a large, beautiful, tropical island off the East coast of India. The island has a long history of strife and violence, warring local kings and waves of colonial invaders. Like most newly independent former British colonies, it seems to have mixed emotions about its colonial past, despising parts of it, including, I suspect, the history of Zebra Crossings and Belisha Beacons.

A train ride from Colombo, the capitol city exposed me to an old and decrepit railway system that still works. Bursting with passengers packed back to back and belly to belly, the ancient trains creak and groan their way past the tea plantations, and elephant orphanages until they arrive at the jewel of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist crown, Kandy. The main attraction is the Temple of the Tooth. Legend has it that when Lord Buddha died in Kusinara, India, some 2500 years ago, among his Sandalwood cremated remains, some of his teeth were found intact.

The devoted followers of the Buddha eventually attributed great powers to his right lower molar which found its way to Sri Lanka. The tooth is now safely in its shrine in The Temple of the Tooth, where thousands of visitors file past its casket every week. While the tenets of Buddhism do not call for the worshiping of a god or creator, there is no doubt that the mere presence of the tooth as a religious relic of the Buddha evokes a passion in many of his followers. On visiting the tooth relic, some simply collapse, overwhelmed with joy or deep emotion while others make offerings which they pray will bring them good fortune. I simply wanted good luck as I knew I would be crossing many roads in my life. I got it.

Geoffrey

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