“I’ll always want to be inside that rhythmic rocking of the backwasters again” says his wife Kylee.

Kerala’s Spectacular Festivals, By Teresa Cannon, author of the Lonely Planet Guide to Kerala.

Bejeweled locals perform for Muragan, a colorful festival held in honor of the Hindu god.

In Kerala, elaborate festivals give life to fables and often commemorate religious figures or events. Several cultural festivals are staged in the tourist season, December to February, enabling travelers to experience a wide range of Kerala’s performing arts. Invariably these festivals involve vibrant music and dance. It’s often the rhythms and sounds—elaborate elephant processions and booming fireworks—that lead you to the celebrations. Since dates are mostly determined by planetary positions, it’s best to contact a tourist office before heading to a festival site (tourindia.com). Most festivals are free.

Each year from January 27 to February 3 descendants of former rulers of southern Kerala continue royal tradition and stage a Musical Festival. Amongst the ambience of oil lamps, every evening at the Thiruvananthapuram Palace in the south of Kerala, there are performances by some of Kerala’s finest musicians, who play works from popular dramas such as Kathakali and Kootiattam.

Just north of the palace there’s the Nishagandhi Dance Festival, where from February 21-27 each year, there are free performances of Indian classical dance.

Further north, in central Kerala, the Kochi Carnival, from December 25-31, offers a kaleidoscope of performing arts, including Kathakali, classical dance, martial arts, and boat races.

The Harvest Festival of Onam commemorates a mythical time of social harmony, peace, and equilibrium. In the first month of the Kerala year, Chingam, (August-September) floral carpets, made by women, grace the towns throughout the state; adorned elephants parade in Thrissur; and long decorative boats race the backwaters of Alappuzha.

The ten-day Saraswati festival, also known as Dussehra or Navaratri, is held September-October. It’s celebrated throughout India but takes on special significance in Kerala. Young children are taken to the temples and, before an image of a goddess—celebrated in Kerala as Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and learning—they are introduced to the letters of the alphabet.

The full moon in February-March marks Shivaratri, the festival of Shiva. All night people chant and pray in honor of the deity. In Aluva (Alwaye), just north of Kochi and Kovalam, rituals are held throughout the state and followed by a month-long celebration with bazaars and displays.

Krishna is an important deity throughout India and his festival at the famed Krishna temple in Guruvayoor, Kerala is celebrated February-March. Every day for ten days, decorated elephants parade near the temple. The festival culminates with a ceremonial bathing of the image of Krishna. Thousands of devotees join in the bath waters in anticipation of the deity’s blessings. The traditional dance, Krishnanattam, depicting the life of Krishna in song, dance and drama, is performed.

Thrissur Poorum, north of Kochi, held April-May, displays more elephants, color, and fireworks than any other festival. Lavish celebrations involve processions of decorated elephants, musicians, and dancers, all illuminated by a backdrop of fireworks.

The annual Snake Boat Races are a celebration of Kerala’s seafaring traditions. They take place on the second Saturday in August at Alappuzha. Long, low boats with elaborate sterns are rowed by up to 100 oarsmen, shaded by vibrant silk umbrellas. Tickets cost from just a few cents to $6 U.S.

Sabrimala, in Kerala’s south, welcomes thousands of pilgrims December - January, who come to honor their deity, Ayappan, esteemed for his power to conquer evil. People of all faiths are welcome at the temple except women of menstruating age. If you miss the temple, just follow the black robed pilgrims meandering along the roads leading to it.

Ramadan, known locally as Cheria Perunnal, marks the end of the Muslim month of fasting. It’s a happy time, with many local festivals involving family reunions and picnics. It’s a great time to sample a biryani—fragrant rice with meat or vegetables. This year Ramadan will be held December 15, 2001.

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Keeping Up With the Shidhayes: India's New Middle Class 15 April 2001, New York Times, By James Traub (excerpts)

There is an expression you hear nowadays in Aurangabad, a city of about a million souls located 150 miles northeast of Bombay, that would have made absolutely no sense when I lived there 25 years ago. People will say, "The traffic is too-too bad in old Aurangabad," or "The shopping is still cheaper in old Aurangabad." Back in 1976, when I served as a junior lecturer on the English faculty of the Maulana Azad College and its affiliated Ladies' Section, everything in Aurangabad was old. Not much else had changed since the glorious moment in the late 17th century when Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mogul emperors, moved the capital from Delhi to this little outpost at the top of the Deccan Plateau.

But a new Aurangabad has wrapped itself around the old. The new Aurangabad has modern factories and broad, brilliantly lighted commercial streets and houses as big as hotels and health clubs and cybercafes and Chinese restaurants and even, in what is widely considered the single deepest incursion of cosmopolitan culture, a Domino's Pizza. I used to take great pride in Aurangabad's authentic ordinariness - no god-men or yogic celebrities, no elephants, princes, movie stars or hippies. Aurangabad was the real India. But the real India is a very different, and very much more differentiated, place than it used to be.

But India began liberalizing its economy 10 years ago. This winter, India Today, the country's leading newsweekly, proudly devoted virtually an entire issue to "the new economy" and to the new middle class that it had produced.

A poll conducted for the magazine concluded that 86 percent of respondents in five major cities owned a color TV, 72 percent a refrigerator and 44 percent a washing machine. (The corresponding figures for Aurangabad in 1976 would have been zero, tiny and negligible.) These Indians probably represent a rarefied slice of the new middle class. In 1998, India's National Council of Applied Economic Research concluded that 32.5 million households - about 162 million people, at five persons per household - belonged to a more modest "consuming class." The typical member of the class owned a TV, a bicycle and a watch.

The Aurangabad that I knew was a city of beautiful ruins. Aurangzeb had ringed the city with 52 gates, and when at night their great, spiked doors were swung shut, the city was safe from the Maratha horsemen who came swooping down from the surrounding hills. The Maulana Azad College lay just beyond the Delhi Gate, which marked the city's northern terminus, and the fields all around the campus were filled with crumbling funeral monuments that over time had subsided into the hummocky earth. From the terrace of my house, I had a view out over the fields to a stand of custard-apple trees and an ancient domed structure, probably the tomb of some minor notable, both framed against the yellowing walls of what must have once been an enclosed fort. In the rainy season, the pits in the earth turned into ponds, and the water buffaloes that always seemed to be shambling dreamily across the fields used them for mud baths.

Aurangzeb was never able to subdue the Marathas: they picked his army apart, and the overstretched empire itself collapsed with the death of this austere and pitiless figure. But he left behind him a city of pools and gardens and palaces and mosques. It was, when I arrived, an overgrown small town of about 200,000 where everyone knew everyone else's business, no one ever seemed to arrive or leave and nothing much ever happened. My colleagues at the college were readers and thinkers, but many of them had never ventured more than 200 miles from home. Aurangabad was an Islamic version of R.K. Narayan's Malgudi, the mythical town where nothing ever happens and everyone is a commentator.

But all that was a quarter-century ago. Aurangabad now is Green Bay or Utica, circa 1900 -- a provincial town bursting with new industrial wealth. That is not to say that India is a century behind the West but rather that it occupies several different epochs simultaneously. The city had almost no industry until the mid-70's, but then Bombay, and even Pune, became so expensive that industrialists began looking for cheaper locations. In 1984, Bajaj, India's leading manufacturer of scooters and motorcycles, agreed to locate a large plant in a new industrial zone outside of town, and after that, Aurangabad's fortune was made.

Factories today employ more than 200,000 people, mostly drawn from the surrounding towns and villages, though some come from impoverished regions of northern and eastern India. The industrial sector includes about 200 ancillary plants that supply parts to Bajaj. The fastest growing company is Sterlite, which makes fiber-optic cable. Paradoxically enough for this orthodox old town, Aurangabad is said to be India's premier manufacturer of both whiskey and condoms.

Aurangabad now has a working class, an ownership class and a professional-managerial class, and new people have brought new demands and expectations. On the plane ride from London to Bombay, I got to talking with the young couple sitting next to me, Pavan and Bhakti Shidhaye. It turned out that in 1988 Pavan's father, Kumar, moved the family to Aurangabad, where he now owned a factory - a staggering coincidence that itself seemed to sum up the transformation of my old country home.

Among my own friends, I could see the signs of an incipient generation gap. When I went to visit Mazhar Mohiuddin, who was the principal of Maulana Azad College in 1976, his 19-year-old daughter, Shadab, popped into a chair and said that she had been looking forward to meeting me.

Shadab had her mother's pale skin and classically Mogul features, but as far as I was concerned, she was something absolutely new: an Aurangabadi girl who didn't cast down her eyes or murmur or generally look for means to erase the fact of her presence. She was a college girl, though a very polite and protected version of the species. And of course defying their parents was unthinkable, who had chosen medicine because in their world it was considered an acceptable profession for girls. Everyone's aspirations were running about a notch ahead of their possibilities; maybe they would push their own daughters a notch or two further.

Education is itself a new source of opportunity in Aurangabad. As recently as 1960, any youngster interested in pursuing education beyond high school had to leave town. Now Aurangabad has 40 institutions of higher learning, including medical colleges, dental colleges, engineering schools and a university. The Maulana Azad College that I knew had perhaps 500 boys; nowadays, the college and the women's college together serve about 4,500 students. And the college itself is now the core of the Maulana Azad Educational Trust, which includes the Millennium Institute of Management, the Horniman College of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Tom Patrick Institute of Computer and Information Technology and the Indian Institute of Hotel Management. The hotel-management school, which is affiliated with the prestigious Taj chain of hotels, draws 5,000 applicants from all over India for about 60 places. The day that I was visiting, a recruiter from an international company was interviewing students. A tall young fellow in regulation blazer and gray flannels, possibly late for his interview, came flying up the stairs and almost knocked me over, making him possibly the first person I had ever seen hurry in all my time in Aurangabad.

Educated Indians are deeply divided about the merits, even the authenticity, of the new middle class. In "Mistaken Modernity," Dipankar Gupta, a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, accuses the new middle class of "Westoxication," by which he means consuming Western goods while ignoring the core Western values of respect for the individual, acceptance of impersonal norms, meritocracy and public accountability. The new middle class, he writes, is not the engine of modernity but its chief adversary.

Dipankar Gupta was, of course, a modernist, while my friends were critics of modernity itself. But their sense of displacement was not just a matter of sentiment. Aurangabad had grown fivefold since I lived there, and the great majority of the new inhabitants were Hindus from the surrounding villages and towns. Aurangabad was a historically Muslim town; now it was perhaps three-quarters Hindu. The city was being subsumed into Hindu India.

The remorseless law of change that has engulfed old Aurangabad will engulf the new as well. This is a disturbing thought, and not just for my old friends who see a life they loved slipping away. Many of us who live in the whirligig of the West prefer an India that remains bound to an immemorial, folkloric past. Someone, we feel, should resist the forces of change - though, of course, not us. But nobody wants to.

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