Pune

This weekend Lindsay and I took our first weekend trip, to a small town called Pune. Of course "small town" is a relative term here as there are approximately 4 million people who live there. It is located about 4 hours from Mumbai and the best way to go is by luxury bus. In India luxury bus means Iranian dude sleeping on my shoulder on the way to Pune and rocking out to KT Tunstall on the iPod while we circle Pune trying to fill up the bus on the way back. That said, it was really nice to leave Mumbai and get to see a different part of the country.

While in Pune, we did a couple of cool things. The nationwide film institute is located in Pune and for students attempting to break into Bollywood without some sort of nepotism related connection, it's one of the few ways to get into the industry. We went to the museum they have there, but naturally forgot about the age old, second Sunday of every month meaning things are arbitrarily closed rule. Luckily Lindsay did some fast talking and a recent graduate of the screenwriting curriculum gave us an impromptu tour and showed us the famous "wisdom tree" where people rehearse and come up with the famous Bollywood song and dance numbers that take an inordinate amount of wisdom to create. Look out for our "guide" Sonnu to take Bollywood by storm in 2010.

On Sunday we went to check out the Osho Ashram. This ashram is a bit controversial as he's known for sexualized Nirvana and buying Rolls Royces to convince people to give up their material possessions. He is dead now, but judging from the crowd we saw on Sunday, his legacy certainly lives on! Everyone there was clad in maroon robes and clearly came from either the US, Israel, the UK or some other morally depraved culture. It was really funny seeing it and it's certainly a hilarious subculture in India.

Having survived the literal onslaught of the bus ticket sellers, we're back in Mumbai now, but this was definitely a fun weekend.