Kerala Sidesteps India's Beef Debate
Abdul Salam is a butcher at a beef stall in Ernakulam Market. (Photo by Richard Tamayo/GroundTruth)
KOCHI, India — Deep within the buzzing market, away from vendors who deal in spices, jewelry, fabrics and religious materials, a community of butchers finds space to do business.
In one corner, a half-dozen beef carcasses slowly rock back and forth on meat hooks as flies swarm around them. Bloody piles of discarded meat lay scattered on the table while three butchers sit around chatting in the local language.
For many Hindus, who make up 80 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people, cows are sacredcreatures.
India’s constitution encourages the prohibition of cow slaughter, but ultimately leaves it up to each state to decide whether or it’s allowed. In May 2017, India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attempted to impose a nationwide ban on the sale of cows for slaughter.
P.K. Radeesh, preparing the meat for sale at his stall (Photo by Richard Tamayo/GroundTruth)
In Kerala, the state where Kochi is located, the beef ban was met with opposition. The state’s ruling Communist Party of India (Marxists) decided not to enforce the ban. College activists organized across the state, staging public displays of beef-eating in protest of the central government’s decision. Mohamad Mustafa, 21, a member of the CPI’s Student Youth Federation, organized a protest at Maharajas College in Kochi. For Mustafa, a Muslim, the issue is personal freedom.
“It’s one’s privacy what to eat, and what to drink. There is a respect for each and everyone. Do you think if a person is eating vegetarian food, we will provoke him to eat non-vegetarian?” he asks.
The BJP’s political platform has been built from an ideology that is part Hindu and part nationalist. Since coming to power, the party has tried to rally support by focusing on religiously charged issues like the Sabarimala temple controversy and the Kashmir separatist movement.
Members of the BJP have condemned Kerala for the tolerance of cow slaughter. Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, a member of the state of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, suggested last year’s destructive floods in Kerala were punishment for the state’s liberal meat policy.
“‘In Kerala people openly slaughter cows,’ he told the Times of India last year. ‘What happened? Within a year, a situation like this (flood) arose.’”
Asha Latham (center, in red) owns a mutton stall in Ernakulam Market. (Photo by Richard Tamayo/GroundTruth)
In some states, especially those with large Hindu majorities, Muslims suspected of eating beef have been the victims of violent attacks by groups of religious vigilantes. According to the Human Rights Watch, the violence against Muslims has been fueled by the rhetoric of the BJP.
Despite the 2017 beef protests, harsh rhetoric by members of the BJP and the acts of violence committed in other states, people in Kerala don’t think that cow slaughter will be a prominent issue in their state in the ongoing general elections.
Radeesh, a Hindu, has been working as a butcher for 25 years and manages two other men, Abdul Salam and T. Irfan. Both are Muslim. Through a translator, Radeesh tells me that he thinks that although cow slaughter has been the subject of political debate in India over the past few years, Kerala’s strong Communist Party and its religious diversity prevents the issue from taking root there.
In Kerala, Hindus don’t hold as large of a majority as they do nationwide. The group represents about 55 percent of the population, while Christians and Muslims together represent about 45 percent.
P.K. Radeesh, a Hindu, is the manager of a beef stall in Ernakulam Market in Kochi. (Photo by Richard Tamayo/GroundTruth)
Sanjose A. Thomas, an associate professor of sociology at Sacred Heart College in Kochi, says that because Kerala has a history of Muslims, Christians, and even Hindus eating beef, the right wing knows it will not be easy to impose a blanket ban, and will therefore not be pushing this issue forward like it has in other states.
When asked about the BJP’s stance on cow slaughter in Kerala, party member CG Rajagopal would not directly say whether the party planned to push forward a beef banning agenda in the state. Instead he said that although he believed the slaughtering of cows was wrong according to his Hindu beliefs, the issue should be determined on a state-by-state basis.
Across from Radeesh’s stall, Asha Latha and her family hose down the bloody tile around them. Latha is a Muslim who eats beef but deals in mutton to avoid competition with the stall across from her. Latha says that slaughtering cows and eating beef have become normalized in Kerala and will never be a political problem like it is in northern India.
Some Hindus don’t have the secular stance that Radeesh has. Suresh Ranjendra Nair, the owner of Sree Ganesh vegetarian restaurant in Kochi, says he sees his business as a service that is trying to serve food that is “purer.” He has a garden where he grows Ayurvedic herbs for his vegetarian recipes. He says that because of the Muslim influence on politics in Kerala, beef will never be banned, but he would support a ban if it were possible.
T. Ifran, a muslim, works as a butcher in Ernakulam Market. (Photo by Richard Tamayo/GroundTruth)
For now, Kerala is a safe place for those who deal in beef. P.K Sreekumar, an English professor at Muharajas College, says that the state has more pressing issues that people will be paying attention to in the ongoing general election.
“People are experiencing higher levels of unemployment, poverty, lack of liquid cash,” he explains. There are a lot of issues. So you cannot depend on an emotional subject like beef for long.”
So Close, but So Far From the Land of the Free // for truthdig.com
I was in Tijuana on a Sunday in late November, moving west on the road underneath Puente El Chaparral—the bridge that crosses the Mexican side of the Tijuana River—when a group of a hundred or so Central American migrants made a run for the U.S. port of entry. The group of mostly men, who had broken away from a larger protest, charged toward me and a group of Mexican police officers, weaving around us to avoid collision. This charge was their last Hail Mary attempt to make it to the United States after uprooting their lives and making the 2,000-mile journey from Central America.
But the breakaway protesters appeared to not know where they were going. They ran past the road that leads to the United States, into a dead end on Calle José María Larroque, a street just a block away from the border wall. There, a group of Mexican police officers cornered them. For a moment, I found myself in the middle of a standoff between a group desperate to make it to the land of the free, and police dressed in full riot gear, determined to stand in their way. I thought the police were going to arrest the men, but they were vastly outnumbered and the men escaped by running down an alley that led back to the main road.
To block their way, the police rolled in a 15-foot-high rusted door and formed a blockade in the middle of the street, sealing the road from the United States into Mexico. The migrants ran back to the canal adjacent to the border fence, rejoining the protesters they had broken away from. One of the protesters yelled, “Estan haciendo el trabajo de Trump! Odia a los Mexicanos también!”—“You’re doing Trump’s work! He hates Mexicans, too!”
The protesters started a scattered march along the outer edges of the canal, some waving Honduran flags, some American. One woman had a sign that said, “El respeto a los derechos ajenos es la paz”—“The rights of foreigners means peace.”
Despite their anger, despite their frustrations, I never once saw anyone being violent or destructive, or behaving as people did in the video the Trump administration shared during the midterm elections campaign. I felt completely safe.
Out of nowhere, tear gas started wafting into Tijuana. My eyes began to water, and an uncontrollable cough racked me. As soon as the gas came, I heard someone yell, “No tiren piedras!”—“Don’t throw any rocks.” I never saw anyone throwing rocks, but I figured that someone at some point must have provoked the Border Patrol. If it happened, it definitely wasn’t something more than a few people were doing. Who knows what their motivation was?
I only caught a small whiff of tear gas. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for the men, women and children who were swallowed by the monstrous clouds down in the canal as they ran as fast as they could.
As this was happening, I heard someone say in Spanish that the Border Patrol agents were pointing their guns at us. I panicked. All I could think of was President Trump saying he considered a rock to be a rifle. I started to move quickly away from the fence, before I heard someone say that the weapons pointed at us were nonlethal.
As the gas dispersed, so did the crowds. I saw a mother giving water to her two small children, and I wondered why anyone would bring their children to a protest. It dawned on me that after traveling all that way and being blocked from the U.S. port of entry by Mexican police, the only option left was to keep protesting. Maybe their voices would be heard. Maybe not. But the reality is that the woman would probably go back to the tent city at Benito Juarez stadium, where a few days later a rainstorm would flood the encampment and cover their temporary homes with mud.
I got in my car, and as I waited almost five hours in line to cross the border back into San Diego I couldn’t stop thinking about the people I saw that day. What does it take for people to uproot their lives and try to move to a country that doesn’t want them? We can argue about policy and asylum laws in the United States. We can argue whether the Border Patrol was right or wrong to gas the men, women and children who were protesting for their rights. What I think can’t be argued is that these people are not a violent mob of criminals trying to destroy America. These people are strong and resilient in their quest for a better life, and they are currently facing horrendous living conditions that deserve human empathy, regardless of where you stand.
Dirtbag
Mychal, Sophie and friends sit in Mychal’s living room.
SoCal Dirtbaggers: Choosing Homelessness Over Paying Rent
It was midnight as I followed a caravan of strangers through the windy roads up Mt San Gorgonio. This was a spur of the moment climbing trip with Mychal Fierro, whom I had met only a week before, through a friend, on Instagram. Fierro, 27, didn’t hesitate to invite me on this adventure with his friends, and we met up earlier in the night at a gas station off of highway 330, about 10 miles from the city of San Bernardino.
At 2 a.m,, our three car caravan pulled into Holcomb Valley, where dozens of campers were already soundly sleeping. Moonlit rock faces towered over us as we pitched our tents and settled in. I was exhausted and so was everyone else, but the excitement of finally getting to the valley called for a celebratory beer.
Mychal and friends packed in the van.
The six of us crammed into Mychal’s 2004 Dodge Sprinter—a sprinter van is a commercial van typically used for transporting cargo—and I finally got a chance to introduce myself to the group. Our plan was to wake up at eight in the morning, before the temperatures got so high that the rock started to sweat, but we stayed up until four in the morning anyway, sharing stories and haphazardly playing Mychal’s moon drum. At one point in the night Mychal showed us his freshly scabbed wounds on his hands and shins from a mountain biking accident he had the week before.
Mychal, and his friend Joshua, looking through the San Bernardino mountains guide book.
At dawn, as the warm sun light started to push away the morning chill, the six of us brushed our teeth and packed our bags with snacks and water in preparation for the hiking and rock climbing ahead of us.
People were already flocking out through the dirt trails towards the giant granite rock formations in the distance. As Mychal inhaled his breakfast—cereal and milk in a zip lock bag—a man with a heavy eastern European accent and greasy golden hair, approached him to pay a compliment. “I’ve seen a lot of them, but this is a really good one,” the man said. He was pointing at Mychal’s van, which had the sliding door open, revealing it’s wood floors, furnace, bed, kitchen, wood stove, wall-mounted iPad that doubled as a television, and a small book shelf stacked with climbing guide books from Vancouver to Yosemite.
Mychal is a “dirt bagger,” a rare breed who lives life unanchored in order to pursue adventure. The label might sound like a pejorative, and the choice to be voluntarily homeless is far from everyone’s dream. But to many climbers, being a dirt bagger is aspirational.
Mychal preparing his breakfast.
For rock climbers, traveling from forest, to desert mountain peaks in search of new boulders to climb and big walls to conquer—without worry of rent or house payments in increasingly expensive urban California — is half of the fun. The other half is revisiting these places with friends.
Dirt bagging, however, isn’t all about, traveling, climbing routes and escaping urban life. It has become a creative economic strategy to deal with California’s housing crisis. “As affordability becomes more problematic, people ‘overpay’ for housing, ‘over-commute’ by driving long distances between home and work, and ‘overcrowd’ by sharing space to the point that quality of life is severely impacted,” declares a 2018 report by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. As California’s homeownership rate continues to decrease and rental costs increase, some members of the rock climbing community are choosing to turn their vehicles into homes, experiencing every climbers secret wish to live on the road, and in some cases, the challenge that comes with being homeless in urban environments.
The U.S Department of Health and Human Services defines any person living in a vehicle as homeless. While in many cases, the high cost of housing have driven people into experiencing homelessness, some of the members of the climbing community are uniquely homeless by choice.
ADAPTING
Daryl Del Rosario, a rock climber who works full time setting indoor routes for a popular chain of climbing gyms, was paying around $800 per month to rent a room in Culver City. He was spending fourteen hours at the gym—eight hours working and six hours training—and commuting up to two hours between gyms. It was then that he realized that he could be using his time and money more efficiently. So Daryl converted the backseat of his Toyota Corolla into his bedroom. He then upgraded to a Toyota 4-runner and then once more to a Honda Element before a car accident made him decide it was time to buy a van.
Sprinter vans are not cheap. Mychal spent around twenty thousand dollars to buy his van and convert his into a home. Daryl spent two years saving and had to make sacrifices to ensure he got the van he wanted.
“I had to sacrifice a lot,” he said. He spent less time eating out and hanging out with friends. “Pretty much all I was eating for a while was brown rice and cans of tuna and sardines just to make sure I had enough to pull the trigger,” he told me, laying on the gym floor surrounded by power tools and plastic multi-colored holds.
Daryl’s van is a tool that transports him from where he is to where he wants to be. He sees the lifestyle he has built as one that allows for constant self- improvement. Every climber has a project, meaning a climbing problem, that is on the threshold of ones own personal ability, and that can only be overcome with focus, practice, and peak physical performance. Being able to bring your home to your project can offer the flexibility of staying somewhere long enough to finally complete the climb that has become an obsession.
“I can put myself in a situation and never really feel like I shouldn’t be there. It’s always a step forward” says Daryl. These movements forward are enabled by the minimalist life that comes as a result of living in a van. Progress for Daryl means becoming a stronger climber and learning to be resourceful when standard commodities become difficult to access.
“As human beings we are adaptable creatures,” he says. “That's what makes us so amazing. If we set our minds to things we can change the environment around us and we can change ourselves. I really think that it's represented in climbing as well. The amount of focus. The amount of training. The amount of dedication you put into it can show you your progression.”
Daryl has adapted to living without a bathroom by taking advantage of gas stations and his local Best Buy. When he needs to shower or park his van overnight he goes to the climbing gym where the community celebrates the idea of living a lifestyle that allows more time and opportunities to climb.
There is a hierarchy in standard of living when it comes to living in a vehicle. When parking in the city streets, the windowless cargo space of a sprinter van makes it easier to hide. While Daryl was in the Toyota Corolla however, he experienced people peeking through his car windows and in some cases, screaming at him, as he laid in his back seat late at night, trying to sleep.
L-I-V-E L-I-F-E
Aaron Wilkins, 28, who I met one morning, spent time living in his Ford Explorer for the first six months out of California State University, Long Beach, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition Science. When the lease of his apartment was ending, he decided that it might be fun to live in his SUV for a while and avoid paying rent.
His first month was filled with paranoia from not knowing where to park at night. “I didn't know where I could sleep. I didn't prepare anything. I didn't have any curtains on the windows. I woke up with the sunrise every day. I always thought I was gonna be fucking robbed,” said Aaron as we sat in the back of my SUV in Malibu one morning before hiking out to the “tunnel boulders.” On each of his knuckles are tattoos: L-I-V-E L-I-F-E.
Like Daryl, Aaron learned to adapt. He parked his Explorer on a cul-de-sac where he noticed a group of high school kids smoking weed every night. His instincts told him that if the local kids were hiding out there, it must be a safe spot. His sleep improved but he found that the lack of stable electricity left him with little to do once the sun went down. Aaron found comfort by spending hours at Hangar 18 climbing gym in Long Beach where he would climb, nap on the the chalk-covered couches (climbers use chalk to dry their skin for increased friction between hand and rock), and shower. Working full-time as a food scientist at a dog food factory, made finding a place to shower and groom a necessity.
Besides boredom, Aaron had to learn to deal with loneliness. He coped by setting a routine where he’d visit different friends on different days of the week to ensure he didn’t over stay his welcome with any of them. He quickly started to sense that he was burdening them with his constant presence. “They feel awkward because they don't want to put you on the street but they also need to get on with their lives,” he told me.
Still, Aaron got some of the experiences he was hoping for when, in the spirit of one of his favorite books—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—he decided that living in his Explorer might be a viable alternative to paying rent. The savings allowed him to take climbing trips and solo hiking trips. Also, being alone didn’t always mean being lonely. Aaron learned to appreciate the calmness of solitude. He described to me one of his most treasured memories of being caught in his SUV while it was raining. “I was lying in the back of my car at night and it was pitter-pattering on my roof and I've never been so calm as I felt right then. I was never more happy living in my car than I was right then. Hands above my head, feet crossed up above me, and I was just listening for hours and hours.
BYE CRACKIE
Through the thick foliage, surrounded by pine trees and boulders piled more than 40 feet, I hiked with Mychal and the others trying to decide whether we should look for boulders to climb or set up a rope on one of the giant cliffs. Climbing boulders requires only a crash pad as protection since the climbs are much lower to the ground. As we trekked through the gravel, a young German woman in our group, Sophia, could not stop asking Mychal about his van. Sophia Pellmann, 23, wanted to know everything from the types of fabrics he used to sew his seat cushions, to the type of security he has in case someone tries to break in. Sophia is making the transition from her Ford Escape to a sprinter van of her own.
Sophia escaped the gloomy weather of Münster, in northeastern Germany, almost three years ago, preferring California’s year-round sunshine. She’s new to climbing but she is a seasoned unicyclist, surfer, and skateboarder. When she arrived in the U.S she rented a room with a group in Pasadena with friends she met through competing in unicycling.
About a year after moving to Los Angeles, she decided to buy a mattress so she could take over night trips in her Escape. It wasn’t long after that she decided she’d abandon her apartment and commit to living in her SUV full-time.
“Rent in LA is so crazy that I would have to work so much and I wouldn't have time to adventure. I'd always be working. I can just live in a van, work half the time, spend the other half of my time traveling in my van. That just seems better,” she told me. Sophia works as a circus teacher at a daycare, teaching kids how to unicycle.
Soon after deciding she’d abandon her apartment, she called her mother in Germany to tell her about her plans. Naturally her mom was worried and tried to dissuade her, but quickly came around and loaned her the money to buy the van. Sophia is planning to take a road trip with her mom once the van is finished.
Mychal, Sophia, Catherine and Joshua looking at “Bye Crackie”
Sophia was extra cautious in digging through sketchy Craigslist ads to find her perfect van. Still, the van she ended up buying came with a faulty transmission that took a month to fix.
Getting the van exactly where Sophia wants it means installing insulation, wood floors, electrical outlets, a ceiling fan for temperature control, and cabinets for storage. All of her time is consumed in making sure her home is up and running. For now, Sophia will rely on her friends and her Ford Escape for shelter.
Mychal ‘soloing’ Bye Crackie.
We decided we were going to climb an easy route—one that everyone in the group could do— called “Bye Crackie.” “Bye Crackie” stands about 60 feet high and is distinguished by the constellation of protruding rock chunks that make for good climbing holds. Getting to the rock face meant scrambling up piles of boulders to a slab with a view of the valley. Around us were dozens of climbing partners spread out across the rock face, some tied into the wall and some belaying—in a climbing pair, the belayer is the person who uses a belay device to feed and take rope from the person climbing. We decided that Mychal would lead—in sport climbing the leader sets the rope by clipping protection into the bolts drilled into the rock face and passing the rope through fixed anchor points on top of the route. Once everyone got a chance to try the route, it would be my job to climb to the top and rappel down to “clean” or remove all of the gear set on the wall by the leader.
None of us even had a chance to put our harnesses on before Mychal started to free solo (climb without a rope). He got about 35 feet up before he paused on a committing move. We all stood and watched him as he climbed down then climbed back up again, hesitating to throw his hand out to the large rock flake. If Mychal was tied in, this move would be no problem, but without protection, the move is precarious to say the least. One misstep from that height could mean death. We called up, trying to convince him to retreat. Finally, he climbed back down.
Mychal has been living in his van for the past year and has been rock climbing for two. “First I started climbing and then I started going places in my car and setting up a tent,” he told me. We sat on a slab of granite watching the others take their turn on “Bye Crackie”. It was experiences like these that encouraged Mychal to outfit his two-door hatchback with a full-sized mattress and cabinets. In late 2016 he drove the hatchback, a Volkswagen Golf, up to Squamish for a six week climbing trip. He also drove it to Salt Lake City where he caught a flight to North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota access pipeline near Standing Rock. When he came back he decided he wanted to buy a van to live in full-time.
The living area of Mychal’s van is about 35 square feet and is furnished like a miniature studio apartment. Underneath his bed is a mountain bike, climbing rope, and bouldering pads.
You can’t fit much into a van so moving in required him to shed most of his possessions, he told me. “I filled a lot of stuff [into] trash bags and dropped [them] off at Goodwill. You know [how] you have this huge closet so you just keep filling it? It’s like having a lot of memory on your phone, you don’t need it but you just kind of let it fill up instead of cleaning it out.”
Living in a vehicle presents challenges for most people, but Mychal feels he has his system is pretty dialed in. At night, Mychal parks his van on a cul-de-sac right down the street from his employer or at one of the various climbing gyms around Los Angeles and Orange County.
Mychal sees his van as an asset. He has no health insurance or retirement savings but he says that the money he could get from his van is probably more than the money he would have saved, had he decided to save for retirement. He has plans to sell his van and buy a 2018 Ford Transit with a medium roof, allowing him to stand straight up while he cooks—he cooks slightly hunched over in the van he has. He’ll drive the new van up to the Bishop in central California to work on last seasons bouldering projects: Acid Wash, Fly Boy and High Plains Drifter.
He sees himself living in the van for another five years. “Eventually I want to have a family. Have a normal sized house. Slow down you know? But right now is the time of my life where I can actually do whatever I want.”
Once everyone had their turn on “Bye Crackie,” I made my way up to the top of the route to catch the view of the army of pine trees and rock formations that surrounded us. I could see Sophia, Mychal and the others sitting on the rock platforms trying to decide who was going to make the hike back to the campground to grab the bouldering pad. I looked down at my belayer and yelled “good!” My belayer shouted back “off belay!” (you need to make more clear above (see my notes) what a belayer is – it’s a person, right, someone that does a particular job? I clipped into the fixed protection bolted into the rock and untied the rope from my harness so that I could pass it through the anchor points and rappel down.
The group decided to retire the rope and find a cluster of boulders they found in the guide book. It was getting late for me so I decided not to join. I needed to get back to my life and apartment in Los Angeles. Mychal understood. He smiled and shook my hand. “Till the next trip,” he said.