Encountering Counterculture!
Whatever happened to Earth Day being one of those
weird counterculture festivals
that neo-hippies celebrate to parade their
lifestyle and environmental citizenship! I don’t like
how everyone seems to be interested in the collapsing
ecosystem these days! Can we please leave
sustainable living to the real
environmentalists? :) I can't afford to have
millions of young and old people actively
volunteering on green projects! It's takes a
lot of time, commitment and physical labor
and is not an easy thing to do! It's making me
look bad!
Now that I got that out of the way, this weekend has been fun, as have been the last couple of weekends since the Cherry Blossom Festival! In the last two days alone, we went to two volunteering events, three music concerts, four bars and restaurants with many different people, each with their own idea of fun! The weather has been pleasant and unpleasant alternately, and threatened to be a spoilsport on Sunday during the Green Apple Festival.
It began on Friday night, with four of us going to the Tokyo String Quartet at Strathmore Hall. It was a three segment concert. The first two segments were Haydn and Beethoven's compositions, which were pleasant-sounding, but the last segment composed by Schubert is all I can think about right now! It was his richly textural String Quartet in C Major, D 956, played along with Lynn Harell, the guest cellist. The whole segment was suffused with emotion. There was that sense of poignant melancholy that lingered throughout the Adagio piece until the very end where it took a dramatic turn, which was then followed by a very stately and imposing Scherzo. It had a certain regal symphonic splendor to it! Strange that I should mention just this one segment when I enjoyed the whole concert, but I continue to experience this segment even now and quite liked how it made me go through a rollercoaster of emotions!
The next day, Tapi and I, and a group of 10 people walked on the River trail at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens for two hours quite by accident. We were there to volunteer to clean up the river at the “Anacostia Watershed Earth Day Cleanup” event, but it turned out we were in the wrong location. Where we were walking, the scenery had a pleasantly distinctive or unusual atmosphere, rather serene and picturesque and didn't seem to require cleaning! (although I hear they have their cleaning event scheduled for next week).
There were some mallards, loads of very restless canadian geese flying hither and thither, a lot of little perching birds on the trees that i was thrilled to be able to recognize - like two tiny blue-gray gnatcatchers flying rather quickly, a warbling vireo perched precariously on a tiny branch, a carolina wren, a fat little song sparrow! It reminded me again of Heinrich’s observation that until you know the names of things, they don't even exist in your closed world, and then you begin to see them everywhere!
I learnt a lot about chickadees this weekend and am quite peeved that I haven't seen any even though they are supposedly all over the place! There were a lot of discussions on how the black-capped chickadee and the carolina chickadee look almost exactly alike. What is to say that they are not the same? The more I read about birds, the more I feel like the emperor in emperor's new clothes.
Back in Dupont, as well as at the Green Apple Music Festival yesterday, I found it utterly fascinating that several birds of many different kinds were sharing the same space. There were rock pigeons, sparrows, american robins, european starlings, purple martins, all hopping together on the steps at the Air and Space Museum! There was also the that killjoy Raven (or American crow. I still cant tell the difference) that was sitting aloofly on a tree! Whereas, the crowd of thousands of people at the fest and these volunteering events was mostly white! I couldn't help but wonder why it was so!
At home, the mourning doves seem to come and go on their own. The northern cardinals seem less ubiquitous these days. Those tiny chats and warblers (I will never learn what they really are!) just wont sit still long enough for me to observe them!
Anyway, the River Trail was lovely! It eventually turned out that we were not the only people in the wrong location. There were at least 60 or 70 people who arrived at this scenic place, including a bus full of volunteers who were hopping from one destination to another to volunteer on different projects on their designated route (bizarre?). The real location turned out to be a mile away, at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park. By the time we arrived there, people were already muddy from head to toe! It was admirable seeing over two hundred people, including kids less than 10 and older adults over 60 traveling in canoes, filling up bags of trash, and then climbing up-hill to drop them off at the trash center! The sheer enthusiasm and eagerness to do good and work pro bono was humbling. We quickly wore our gloves and boots and began to chime in!
Volunteering at these events is always eye-opening no matter how many times you have done them before. I am always taken aback at the number of well-intentioned people in this city! Unless you are in an event, working alongside all these inspiring people, it is hard to grasp the volume of benevolence! Your own goodwill seems trivial in comparison! Just the day before, as I read about the farmer suicides in India, I was angry, cynical, and contemptuous of human nature, of our motives, our goodness. Now the world doesn’t seem as bleak! I am more hopeful!
The river cleanup took longer than we anticipated, forcing us to postpone other volunteering events we had signed up for- like removing garlic-mustard weeds, planting trees and so on to next few weekends. In the evening, some friends and us went to the Waterfront near Georgetown after lunch at Woodlands, lied down on the lawn by the river, staring up at the sky, and talking for hours over beer! It was a clear blue sky, with just a few clouds floating hear and there! We tried to find shapes of animals and things in them. Life doesn’t get better than that! We then went to M Street and had some more beer, and then walked back to the waterfront again and had dinner at this place, where we bumped into Swapna and Srikanth who were meandering romantically by the river to celebrate their first anniversary! First anniversary! How thrilling is that!
Yesterday was mostly celebratory! We went to the Green Apple Music Festival, where thousands of people came to celebrate Earth Day in spite of the rain. After the event many continued to stay back to clean up the trash even! It was a very laidback event, even though there were thousands of people, all sitting on the lawn or walking to the tents and learning about green practices and the work that nonprofits have been doing in the environmental field! The free concert had Flaming Lips, Moe, Los Lobos and DJ Spooky playing at the mall. Moe was phenomenal, and Flaming Lips has to be the most entertaining performance I have seen! People went crazy as the lead singer got inside a plastic ball and rolled himself onto the crowd! There was confetti being thrown all over the place, and lots of gimmicks to keep us entertained! We mostly sat on the lawn with our legs stretched out and listened to the speeches of Lisa Jackson and the likes and watched the concert lazily, until I began to shiver in the cold. Tapi then silently walked to the neighboring Air and Space museum and bought me a blanket! :) We sat wrapped in the blanket by the museum for the rest of the evening while listening to “yoshimi battles pink robots”. There were rikshaw pullers tandeming past us and advertising earth day, which I found utterly amusing!
Tapi and I then drove Gori Café, a hole in the wall type Ethiopian restaurant where we had Sambussa and a very weird tasting Thelma Juice (which Tapi thought tasted healthy, like a protein shake and greatly enjoyed it!). We then went to the Bohemian Caverns with Arvind, the very first bar that Tapi and I went to in DC and heard the George Washington Jazz ensemble artists make their first debut performance. Nithya, Arvind's friend, was one fo the singers in the opening band! They were all quite spectacular. The guy on the drums and the saxophonists were exceptionally good, as were some of the main singers! The vocal recital by Elizabeth Hai a lot of fun too!
The four of us had coffee in Tapi's favorite coffee place and that was that!
I’m done! Off to hear Arvind brilliantly defend his PhD thesis!
Now that I got that out of the way, this weekend has been fun, as have been the last couple of weekends since the Cherry Blossom Festival! In the last two days alone, we went to two volunteering events, three music concerts, four bars and restaurants with many different people, each with their own idea of fun! The weather has been pleasant and unpleasant alternately, and threatened to be a spoilsport on Sunday during the Green Apple Festival.
It began on Friday night, with four of us going to the Tokyo String Quartet at Strathmore Hall. It was a three segment concert. The first two segments were Haydn and Beethoven's compositions, which were pleasant-sounding, but the last segment composed by Schubert is all I can think about right now! It was his richly textural String Quartet in C Major, D 956, played along with Lynn Harell, the guest cellist. The whole segment was suffused with emotion. There was that sense of poignant melancholy that lingered throughout the Adagio piece until the very end where it took a dramatic turn, which was then followed by a very stately and imposing Scherzo. It had a certain regal symphonic splendor to it! Strange that I should mention just this one segment when I enjoyed the whole concert, but I continue to experience this segment even now and quite liked how it made me go through a rollercoaster of emotions!
The next day, Tapi and I, and a group of 10 people walked on the River trail at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens for two hours quite by accident. We were there to volunteer to clean up the river at the “Anacostia Watershed Earth Day Cleanup” event, but it turned out we were in the wrong location. Where we were walking, the scenery had a pleasantly distinctive or unusual atmosphere, rather serene and picturesque and didn't seem to require cleaning! (although I hear they have their cleaning event scheduled for next week).
There were some mallards, loads of very restless canadian geese flying hither and thither, a lot of little perching birds on the trees that i was thrilled to be able to recognize - like two tiny blue-gray gnatcatchers flying rather quickly, a warbling vireo perched precariously on a tiny branch, a carolina wren, a fat little song sparrow! It reminded me again of Heinrich’s observation that until you know the names of things, they don't even exist in your closed world, and then you begin to see them everywhere!
I learnt a lot about chickadees this weekend and am quite peeved that I haven't seen any even though they are supposedly all over the place! There were a lot of discussions on how the black-capped chickadee and the carolina chickadee look almost exactly alike. What is to say that they are not the same? The more I read about birds, the more I feel like the emperor in emperor's new clothes.
Back in Dupont, as well as at the Green Apple Music Festival yesterday, I found it utterly fascinating that several birds of many different kinds were sharing the same space. There were rock pigeons, sparrows, american robins, european starlings, purple martins, all hopping together on the steps at the Air and Space Museum! There was also the that killjoy Raven (or American crow. I still cant tell the difference) that was sitting aloofly on a tree! Whereas, the crowd of thousands of people at the fest and these volunteering events was mostly white! I couldn't help but wonder why it was so!
At home, the mourning doves seem to come and go on their own. The northern cardinals seem less ubiquitous these days. Those tiny chats and warblers (I will never learn what they really are!) just wont sit still long enough for me to observe them!
Anyway, the River Trail was lovely! It eventually turned out that we were not the only people in the wrong location. There were at least 60 or 70 people who arrived at this scenic place, including a bus full of volunteers who were hopping from one destination to another to volunteer on different projects on their designated route (bizarre?). The real location turned out to be a mile away, at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park. By the time we arrived there, people were already muddy from head to toe! It was admirable seeing over two hundred people, including kids less than 10 and older adults over 60 traveling in canoes, filling up bags of trash, and then climbing up-hill to drop them off at the trash center! The sheer enthusiasm and eagerness to do good and work pro bono was humbling. We quickly wore our gloves and boots and began to chime in!
Volunteering at these events is always eye-opening no matter how many times you have done them before. I am always taken aback at the number of well-intentioned people in this city! Unless you are in an event, working alongside all these inspiring people, it is hard to grasp the volume of benevolence! Your own goodwill seems trivial in comparison! Just the day before, as I read about the farmer suicides in India, I was angry, cynical, and contemptuous of human nature, of our motives, our goodness. Now the world doesn’t seem as bleak! I am more hopeful!
The river cleanup took longer than we anticipated, forcing us to postpone other volunteering events we had signed up for- like removing garlic-mustard weeds, planting trees and so on to next few weekends. In the evening, some friends and us went to the Waterfront near Georgetown after lunch at Woodlands, lied down on the lawn by the river, staring up at the sky, and talking for hours over beer! It was a clear blue sky, with just a few clouds floating hear and there! We tried to find shapes of animals and things in them. Life doesn’t get better than that! We then went to M Street and had some more beer, and then walked back to the waterfront again and had dinner at this place, where we bumped into Swapna and Srikanth who were meandering romantically by the river to celebrate their first anniversary! First anniversary! How thrilling is that!
Yesterday was mostly celebratory! We went to the Green Apple Music Festival, where thousands of people came to celebrate Earth Day in spite of the rain. After the event many continued to stay back to clean up the trash even! It was a very laidback event, even though there were thousands of people, all sitting on the lawn or walking to the tents and learning about green practices and the work that nonprofits have been doing in the environmental field! The free concert had Flaming Lips, Moe, Los Lobos and DJ Spooky playing at the mall. Moe was phenomenal, and Flaming Lips has to be the most entertaining performance I have seen! People went crazy as the lead singer got inside a plastic ball and rolled himself onto the crowd! There was confetti being thrown all over the place, and lots of gimmicks to keep us entertained! We mostly sat on the lawn with our legs stretched out and listened to the speeches of Lisa Jackson and the likes and watched the concert lazily, until I began to shiver in the cold. Tapi then silently walked to the neighboring Air and Space museum and bought me a blanket! :) We sat wrapped in the blanket by the museum for the rest of the evening while listening to “yoshimi battles pink robots”. There were rikshaw pullers tandeming past us and advertising earth day, which I found utterly amusing!
Tapi and I then drove Gori Café, a hole in the wall type Ethiopian restaurant where we had Sambussa and a very weird tasting Thelma Juice (which Tapi thought tasted healthy, like a protein shake and greatly enjoyed it!). We then went to the Bohemian Caverns with Arvind, the very first bar that Tapi and I went to in DC and heard the George Washington Jazz ensemble artists make their first debut performance. Nithya, Arvind's friend, was one fo the singers in the opening band! They were all quite spectacular. The guy on the drums and the saxophonists were exceptionally good, as were some of the main singers! The vocal recital by Elizabeth Hai a lot of fun too!
The four of us had coffee in Tapi's favorite coffee place and that was that!
I’m done! Off to hear Arvind brilliantly defend his PhD thesis!
