The Banyan Tree Jugglers

I originally learned juggling from a man named Wayne Campbell (no, not that one), who taught an evening juggling class on the premises of the Burlington County College.  I was in high school at the time.  Pretty much all the others in the class were middle-aged, but I went regularly for about three years.  I learned the ropes up to juggling ५ balls, and passing clubs.


Since then, I've been almost continuously part of some juggling club, usually serving the club as president or faculty adviser.   At UPenn, where I did my undergrad, I joined the Amorphous Jugglers.  My juggling partner Mark and I went to work as juggling clowns at Hershey Park the following summer.  When we returned we became copresidents of AJ.  At grad school, my classmate Dan and I decided to start a juggling club.  We discovered that there was a defunct juggling club in the books named "The Juggling Cult", but started a new one with the less creepy name "Jugglers Enriching Lives Like Yours".  We had a delightful time passing clubs on the college green and met some fun people.  JELLY later served as a talent pool for the local student circus which was created a few years later.  Some JELLY alumni have become professional entertainers.


After grad school I lived in Bonn, Germany for a year.  There are very serious technical jugglers in the area.  Most don't bother to perform, but just enjoyed working on new patterns on the Hofgarten.  I learned an incredible amount of technically interesting stuff there.  I also got pretty good at conversational German.  I brought German juggling to my next move, and was instated as the faculty adviser of the Purdue Juggling & Unicycling Club.  This was a booming club that had lots of talent and did plenty of shows.  Although the officers were technically the undergraduates, the alumni grad students really ran the show.  PJUC was a great deal of fun and we invented a lot of cool stuff together.


Norman's University of Oklahoma didn't have a juggling club.  So I coerced one of the math grad students, Shayna, to help me start the OU Impeccable Juggler's Association.  This was an interesting endeavor because I got to teach a community of jugglers to do things "my way".  Thus, certain things like ५ ball १-count (Starfish/Bowtie), which are obscure in the greater juggling community, are part of basic training at OUIJA.  As part of my juggling recruitment, I joined Norman's Prairie Folk Circus.  I made no secret of the fact that I mainly joined to get more people juggling, and that plan worked out rather nicely.  It was also a cool performance venue, with lots of parades and carousing with fun folks who were not hippies.


This brings us to India.  It is more difficult here than in the U.S. to search for juggling clubs on the internet.  Things are done more through word of mouth, it seems.  So...there might be jugglers in the area, but I can't tell.  And probably I'd want to know some Hindi before I start nosing around the Mumbai Circus, if I ever find it.  Anyway I think it is quite natural for a juggling scene to arise here.  Most days apart from monsoon season seem like good weather for juggling, and folks hang out outside together much more than in the States.  The culture of yoga asanas is not so different from that of juggling patterns.  And did you know that the modern "juggling club" was inspired by the heavier "Indian club"?  (Yes, I'm using two different meanings of the word "club" throughout this post.)   


After Frank left, I started hanging out more with fellow expatriates Gerald and his wife Caitlin.  Gerald is a terrific Austrian mathematician and you should totally hire him.  Caitlin is a Musician At Large from Canada who spends her workday composing an opera.  She's also the only person around who intuitively understands my accent.  I referred them to this blog and so they found out I wanted to start a juggling club and, well Caitlin and I started the Banyan Tree Jugglers.  I have this odd feeling that I cheated a little bit from a literary standpoint, since the existence of the blog itself has affected this later chapter of the blog.    But I digress.


Here is how you can start a juggling club.  You simply find someone else who agrees to hang out with you outside for an hour juggling on a regular basis.  Next, you tell people you meet that "there is a juggling club" that meets at such-and-such a time.  When they express interest, you put them on an e-mail list, and send them reminders of when the club meets.  This is also how OUIJA got started.  Now I was warned before coming here that gossip spreads very quickly at TIFR, and I figured I could use that to beef up my juggling club.  Oh, and I did a little juggling demonstration for some professor's kids.  They made a little party out of it and it was good times.  More importantly, it got the word out. 


As the name suggests, we meet under a huge banyan tree in the housing complex.  Take a look.

Right now there are about ५ regulars, mostly math grad students.  I'm in a position where I pretend to be a juggling guru.  I'm inventing lots of little exercises to ease their way into the three ball cascade.  JYoga pedagogy now has "juggling bandhas" ("bandha" is a yoga turn meaning something like "lock"):  elbow bandha, plane bandha, over-your-head bandha, hands-down bandha, ....  I'm trying to learn the Hindi for these.  I am certainly training them for eventual JYoga as well, something I haven't done much of at the other clubs, since it hadn't been invented yet.  Of course we're also doing partner juggling, tricks, and all that.

Caitlin and Vaibhav

Anand and Shiv

Shiv has earned "the handshake" (when you get to २० catches with ३ balls).  The others will follow suit in time.  But we're all enjoying hanging out outside by the big tree.  As folks acquire more equipment, more will be able to join.


Hey!  This Sunday I'm doing "Juggler's Extravaganza" for the "Homi Bhabha Day" celebration.  Stay tuned.

The Isle of Elephanta

 "Beyond Bombay Harbor, across the blue waters, lies the green Isle of Elephanta.  A short walk uphill takes you to the cave temples, cut out of solid rock by the hand of man.  Inside the main cave may be seen some of the finest sculptures of Indian art carved about 1300 years ago."--from a comic book sold there.

My old officemate Frank and I had some fun times here in Mumbai, checking out the local scenes, strolling along the ocean, and pontificating as academics are wont to do.  You've probably seen him in a video or two on this blog.  (Not to be confused with the Observer from Fringe.)  For his last weekend here we visited the Island of Shiva, also known as Elephanta.  It's a favorite getaway spot for him.  So, we made a day of it.

To get to the island, you go to the Gateway of India, the tourist trap area I was photographed in before.  Some guy comes up to you from the crowd and hawks a ticket.  You don't blow him off like most of the annoying people, but go ahead and buy it.   You listen for the gate number, and then proceed over to your boat.  There are lots of boats that regularly make the trip to Elephanta; ours was the "M.L. Sahil", a nice big boat with two decks.

You might pay a little extra to sit at the top, away from the engine.  After ९० minutes or so of boating through the harbor, you disembark on the island with the other tourists.  Your goal is to get to the top of a hill where all the old stuff is, past a gauntlet of enthusiastic salesmen.  Like most of their ilk, they assume that if you look at something, you want to buy it.  And they call you their friend.  More interestingly, this is the only place in the area where you can see monkeys.  Lots of monkeys.  More about them in a moment.  At the top of the hill, you pay १० rupees if you are Indian, and २५० rupees if you are not.  Just because.  Then you can wander around and see some holy caves, other tourists, and lots of monkeys.

The first monkeys I saw were artfully stealing some food from the free-range dogs who also hang out there.  Evidently the monkeys and dogs are in an eternal conflict that the monkeys always win.  On the other hand they both seem to live harmoniously with the tourists, who give them lots of food and drink.  The monkeys are pretty adept; we saw one monkey twist the top off of a soda bottle so that it could spill the soda out and drink it from the ground.  I was a little timid around them, and wasn't carrying any groceries.  (Note:  I intended to be delighted if they steal my groceries, but never promised to make that happen.  I don't want to get, you know, scratched or anything.)

There aren't any elephants on Elephanta; the island was so named by Portugese who were impressed by a stone elephant that was once there, and is now in a museum.  What the island is really known for is the caves.  They are completely carved out of the solid rock mountain, so long ago that noone remembers who originally built them.  The main one has several large carvings of Shiva and friends depicted in various mythological episodes.

Shiva is another important Hindu god.  Actually Ganesh, the subject of my last entry, is the son of Shiva and/or his wife Parvati.  Shiva is the ultimate dancer and yogi, in case you are into either of those things.
He mostly meditates, but at the end of this phase of Hindu cosmology, he will do a dance as the world dissolves, preparing for its recreation.  So yeah, he's a big deal.

There are also holy shrines in the caves, defended by huge implacable stone warriors.

It is also guarded by smaller flesh and blood security guards, who get upset if you go into the shrine wearing shoes.  (It wasn't me, frankly...)  Sadly much of the ancient carvings and statues were destroyed by Portugese with guns, so I didn't get to see many of the faces and limbs of the figures.

We spent some time outside looking at the monkeys and getting a sunburn.  Folks were very friendly; many of them asked us where we were from.  Unfortunately I had been accustomed to blowing off strangers on the street and wasn't so friendly myself.  (Remember we were on an island with other vacationers, so there wasn't any danger.)  When we did start socializing, we were suddenly surrounded by kids and grownups who wanted to get their pictures taken with us.  Lots of pictures, with all different permutations of people.  I wasn't even performing or anything.  We shook lots of hands and fascinated lots of vacationers.  Did I mention there weren't many obvious foreigners on the Isle?  I think next time I should bring some juggling balls.

Speaking of, next time:  The Banyan Tree Jugglers!

Hey readers, check out the opposite blog of DAI:  an Indian mathematician from TIFR moving to Purdue, where I used to live...