Episode 1 - Why Bollywood and Books?
[00:00:00] Join me on an adventure. A literary romp through India. Meet me at the corner of Patchouli and Chai, where books, cinema, and conversation collide. I'm Lovelace Cook. I'll be your tour guide. Welcome to Bollywood and Books.
[00:00:23] Travel to India was never on my radar. I awoke one day like Rip Van Winkle, and I felt like my life had slowed to a state of torpor. It was the month before my 62nd birthday. My life was just stale. I wasn't growing, my friends were retiring nearing retirement age, but they seemed like they were approaching life as if it were the last chapter.
[00:00:58] I couldn't see that for myself. There had to be more. So I decided to open myself to the universe and I literally said I'm open you're limitless. I did it fearlessly, not anticipating what was just around the corner. Life handed me in an adventure, an unexpected journey. I just wanted to get out of my comfort zone, but I learned be careful what you wish for
[00:01:26] By chance, I met an Englishman who was visiting my little town. He talked about India, showed me photos of his travels and we fell in love. Of course, life is never so simple, but it does make for a good story. I was saving to travel to Machu Picchu. I envisioned myself on a trek, riding horses and camping with a group in Peru.
[00:01:53] The Englishman plan to travel back to India in January, 2013. And he asked me to meet him in [00:02:00] Mumbai. It almost became a dare. It must've been after midnight when we were on a Skype call on a cold January night, the Englishman was in Gokarna in the marketplace. It's a little town South of Goa. He said, you're not coming are you.
[00:02:21] I heard a chanting in the background, Ram Nam, Ram Nam and I asked him to turn his iPad so I could see what was going on. There was a procession of Indian men, all wearing white, and they were carrying a stretcher with the body of what had to be a Holy man. He had long white hair. A long, white beard. He was dressed in white and covered in marigolds. The sun seemed to envelop the procession in an other worldly glow. There was magic in that moment and it [00:03:00] touched m
[00:03:10] Okay. That's it I'll come. I didn't have a clue what was in store for me. Two weeks later, I was living in a tree house on the beach next to the Arabian sea. This was not your Airbnb luxury tree house, not even a Tarzan and Jane tree house, but a crude little dwelling perched in a tree with Palm fronds for its roof, and a bamboo ladder to climb up through a hole in a plywood floor no less.
[00:03:43] There was a naked light bulb hanging from the rafters. It was crude. It was outhouse, an outdoor shower, rugged. Who knew two people could be so different in their travel styles. He was used to wild camping, and I'd been a miserable girl [00:04:00] scout. It became apparent from the start that our trip was to be nothing like the film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
[00:04:08] My friends all imagined that was what was happening for me, but it was much more of a Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad experience. And I'd brought along a copy to share with my Englishman thinking it apropos, but not really understanding just how well it would fit the situation. The heat and humidity in India were incredible.
[00:04:32] It was a challenge. I left comfortable, sleepy little town life with hot and cold running water temperature controlled environment. People I knew who went to India, went on a yoga retreat or maybe a spiritual quest, or even for mission work. I simply went to see what I was made of and when the going got tough, as it did pretty quickly, I felt I needed to prove myself to myself.
[00:05:00] I confess at the outset, I was truly the ugly American. It didn't occur to me until much later, maybe three months after I got back home later that I traveled, expecting things to be more comfortable. The joke was on me and in reflection, I was simply embarrassed by my behavior. But my eyes were opened to the magic and the mystery, to vibrant colors and life teaming with the exotic, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes inspiring wonder.
[00:05:38] Through my travels I had time to read and I picked up books in secondhand shops and at the cheap hotels where we stayed and by sharing books with other travelers, it never occurred to me I could return so changed. So inspired. I wanted to go back and attend the Jaipur Literary Festival.
It took several years before I saw the possibilities.In 2015 I started crafting a memoir about the travels. I worked on it for two years with the Curtis Brown creative writing courses in London. But later when I discovered Shawn Coyne' Story Grid and the podcast with Tim Grahl, I decided to write it as fiction using tools from Story Grid methodology. In 2018, I created a presentation, A Literary Journey Through India.
[00:06:31] I began reading again, this time reading widely, I started with the EM Forster's book A Passage to India. It felt very dense when I began to read it before I traveled to India, but after my journey, I had a deeper understanding and I felt that Forster's book, published in 1924, and probably informed by his travel to India in 1912 to 1913 about Colonial India, blatant racism, false accusations, and an unfair judicial system.
[00:07:07] It helped me to see just how relevant, how timely, how almost prescient the subject matter was. I thought back to my visit to the small Gandhi museum, a house in Mumbai where Gandhi had safe passage. It was easy to see uncanny parallels between his life and Martin Luther King's, whom Gandhi had influenced
[00:07:30] I saw India's march toward independence and the civil rights movement as topics on a continuum. Nothing had changed, but everything had changed. And so Bollywood and Books became the new name for my podcast that grew out of a presentation, A Literary Journey Through India that all stemmed from a chance meeting
[00:08:03] Rather than giving a travelog about my experiences in India. I wanted to share the books and authors, I discovered along the journey. I travel for two years through India, the first time, three months. And then I returned to India and lived in Varkala on the Malabar coast, in the state of Kerala.
My plan is to look at India, places about which books have been written. By Pulitzer Prize winners, Man Booker Prize winners, well-known writers and authors about whom most people probably haven't heard.
[00:08:40] The places I want to visit in Bollywood and books all have to do with the evolution of India. From colonialism, with EM Forester's A Passage to India, to Gandhi and his fight for India's independence to present day Indian literature. I hope you'll join me on this journey.
[00:09:02] Thanks to Glasgow resident, Jonathan Chapman, classically trained musician, artist, website designer, and a really great guy who introduced me to Edinburgh-based Red Note Ensemble and their album Reels to Ragas, whose music you're listening to with renowned tabla player Kuljit Bhamra.
For more information, see the show notes at bollywoodandbooks.com ...where East truly meets West.
Please visit my website: lovelacecook.com and tune in and listen to episodes of Bollywood and Books on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
