The Pongal Installment When I left you last there were big waves. Today there are purple cows.

Saturday. It’s day three of Pongal, a four-day harvest festival here in Tamil Nadu (the state where I’ve been living for the past month). This day is for the cows. The ones lucky enough to live in a village get washed and painted and covered with flowers and bells. !!! Here in Chennai, the animals are grazing in the garbage, as usual, and it’s strangely calm.

Women here draw intricate chalk designs on the street (kolams), in front of their gates and doors—they’re like enormous welcome mats that change on a weekly basis. Usually they’re simply white line drawings, but yesterday they were special: filled in with all different colored dusts, and labeled, “you have happy pongal!” At the Yoga Mandiram, too, there was a special sidewalk design—this one was filled in with flower petals. It was for us--the international students--yesterday was the last day of our month-long intensive.

The program was, well... intense. The teachers were unbelievably dedicated, wise, inspiring. I'll spend the next month digesting as much of what they taught as I can (and in late February I’ll come back to the Mandiram for another course).

Today I’m packing. Tomorrow I leave Chennai, in search of cleaner air.

First stop: Pondicherry and Auroville, a small French town and a “universal city in the making…” just south of here. Next, it’s into the woods I go… back across the country by train into the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs parallel to India’s western coast. Almost one-third of all the flowering plant species in India are found here, but population growth and tourism has wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. I’ll be there for a few weeks, doing some work for a conservation council there—probably some drawings for publications and t-shirts. It’ll be cooler there. Um, I might even get to wear my jacket!  ¶ 6:40 PM