recent news

sorry for the long time between posts.

i spent last week in aurangabad, nashik, and bombay. near aurangabad are the ajanta and ellora caves, both really old carved-rock cave temples. it's amazing how well they have been preserved (they were only rediscovered in the 1800's i believe), particularly the wall paintings. my hard drive crashed recently, which partly accounts for the delay in posting and is the reason i cannot post pictures from the trip just yet. we also saw the poor man's taj mahal in aurangabad (bibi ka maqbara).

i only decided to go to nashik because it's the napa valley of india. yep, indian wineries. we spent the day going from winery to winery and in the vineyards. particularly impressive was the sula vineyards (http://www.sulawines.com). sula's the largest wine producer in india. i think the sula folks may not have appreciated me nearly as much as i enjoyed them given that they had to send a couple of men to hunt me down as i frolicked through their vineyards picking and eat from the hanging bunches of grapes. apparently these grapes are the late season variety, which means they are naturally very sweet and juicy. simply picking a grape from the bunch would often cause the juice in the grape to squirt a foot away!

finally, bombay. i was corrected a couple of times for calling it bombay, especially by the bus stand man in nashik who rather poignantly informed me that there were no buses to bombay, only mumbai. true, its name is mumbai. but i grew up calling it bombay. people in chennai don't get mad when the city is called madras. it's not derogatory to say bombay. same to same, as the indos say.

every time i go to bombay, i love the city more. the people are by far the most hip, well-traveled, and fun-loving of any indian city. some say bangalore is great in these respects - i'll write back at the end of the month when i'm there. bombay: the food is great - variety, quality, quantity, price. i went to a wine bar one night to meet the old roommate of a med school friend, which turned out to be a lot fun. in contrast, i cannot legally buy wine in chennai. i only say that to highlight the contrast because i do really really like chennai. but it's very different from bombay. i had great cheesecake at basilico, a cafe in colaba. a pitcher at a pizzeria on marine drive overlooking both the sea and the south bombay skyline after having spent the day roaming the narrow, hot and poverty-stricken yet cheery alleys of dharavi - the largest slum in asia. great pancakes and brownies at theobrama in bandra. the victorian architecture, the broad avenues, the parks (maidans) with their greenery, the cafes at every corner. it's hard to reconcile my experience of bombay with for instance the grim depictions of its workings in suketu mehta's maximum city.

will post pics soon. and i'll try to write something humorous tomorrow.

Varanasi photos

Quick story to go along with (and explain a few of) these pictures. I had a flight from Delhi to Chennai last Monday morning at 6:45. I woke up at 6:05am, so I went back to sleep. As a punishment to myself and to avoid paying for a last minute plane ticket, I decided to make the 30-hour train ride from Delhi (northern India) to Chennai (southern India). Fortunately, I got a ticket leaving the same day and only had to miss one day at work. The last few photos are in Andhra Pradesh on the train ride back.

Varanasi Feb 2010

Varanasi panoramic

put together from 28 individual photos. you can see the Ganges River on either end of the picture. click on the picture to see the enlarged image for full effect.

video in Old Delhi

I've been in Delhi, Jaipur, and Varanasi for the past week and a half. Delhi to find myself some new projects to work on, Jaipur to visit family, Varanasi to scope out a new place in India.

One of my favorite parts about being in Hindi-speaking India is talking to people I encounter. The conversations are always interesting and often amusing. It makes photographing more fun as well. While I enjoy Chennai and southern India, it's the sort of interactions captured here that I cannot have in South India. I am not sure how informative or formative these types of interactions are, but I tend to be a believer in experiential learning. You're obviously closer to people who you can communicate with and problems that you can internalize through first-hand encounters.

A friend took her camera and captured the two of us strolling through Old Delhi, traversing a vegetable market, heading toward a bread omelette stand, all while on our way to Karim's near Jama Masjid. We stopped to talk to the kids on the streets selling vegetables and making omelettes. Actually considered one of the "less safe" areas of Delhi, it's fairly evident that a little bit of personal interaction can turn a seemingly unsafe place - admittedly, it is not very inviting if you're not conversing with the people - into an incredibly safe one in an instant.

Pictures of Varanasi to come soon. I'll also try to post the pictures that I am shown taking in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWoIFnNG29o

really...I work?

I should devote some space on this blog to my job - seeing that work is the reason I am in India. It's easier to start out with a pictorial tour of a fun day at work and work my way toward more specific duties and projects. For the verbiage inclined: I work at a private, diabetes research foundation in Chennai - the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF). I propose and devise studies and then implement those that are feasible given my time and resource constraints. All of my work has to do with populations, though MDRF spans the research spectrum from the bench (laboratory and basic science) to the bedside (translational research).

Less than urban Tamil Nadu

flight of tears

Humorous, very Indian, probably 99% accurate:
Flight of Tears

Also, eggsplosion number 2 happened yesterday. I will always set a timer from now on.

the zero rupee note

simple solutions to often complicated, pervasive problems deserve more attention:

Paying Zero for Public Services

Kerala

Kerala dubs itself God's Own Country - I think the pictures may convince you.

Kerala is an Indian state in the southwestern corner of the country. Endowed with amazing natural beauty and kept pristine by local governments and people who do much to maintain cleanliness, it is a truly unique place. Within a hundred kilometers of each other you find phenomenal beaches, backwaters, historic sites, hills, and mountains.

In the photos are Mayank, one of my college roommates (the only one I have not yet disowned), and Sohum, a friend from Atlanta.

Kerala

still coughing about that one (or eggsplosion)

it should be noted that loud noises are common in india. explosion-type loud noises. usually, a kid in the neighborhood is setting off fireworks. other times, there's some festival i don't know about (just about anything qualifies for festival status here) going on that calls for celebratory fireworks. or a wedding, etc. i've become quite numb to loud noises. these noises are so common that sending american veterans to india for ptsd treatment via exposure therapy might actually work.

so today i came home from the gym, ate my standard post-workout meal, and set some eggs to boil on the stove for later. i showered, sent a few emails, was distracted by a phone call, and then my mom called.

my mom and i play this game where she asks me what i have eaten for the past three meals. i never can remember, and i always say i have no clue and then ask her to stop annoying me by asking what i ate. she says she doesn't understand how a person cannot remember what his/her previous meals were and that my memory is faltering. so she encourages me to remember and never forgets to ask.

true to form, she called and asked what i have been eating lately. i jumped out of bed and bolted downstairs. the smoke had already wafted up the stairwell and was settling just outside my shut door. i was scared i was in the process of burning my house down; this notion was supported by the many loud pops i suddenly recalled hearing over the past hour. luckily, there were only eggs splattered everywhere in the kitchen. i managed to turn the burner off. i went to my maid's house and pleaded with her to help me out. we settled on how i would make her dinner one day if she came to help me clean tonight. much better than the new sari she asked for to start off the negotiations. but she really is a nice person. crisis averted.

morals of the story:
never take an explosion-like noise for granted
let your mother ask you inane questions

it's not all rosy here

At times, I have been told that I am an unwavering optimist with regard to India - that I refuse to see the darker side of the country, the angles and perspectives that are truly a thorn in the side of, if not an absolute impediment to, its development and progress. Of course, I do not agree. And really, it's hard to know who's right and who's wrong at this juncture (and thinking in absolutes is probably not the best way to adjudicate anyhow) - India is a remarkably young country (and a young idea as well - this loose amalgamation of what seem to be countries that we call states, all complete with their own customs, languages, traditions, superstitions, etc., is still in its infancy and ever-so-slowly learning to crawl). Many external indicators portend a bright future for India, namely economic indicators. At times, however, I feel it's justified to read someone else's sobering opinion of this country. My enthusiasm for India's potential should not be mistaken to mean that I feel that we are on a definite path to all things desirable in a nation. Rather, given proper, insightful leadership and steady improvement in a variety of arena, there is much hope for India's tomorrow. But today, the place is riddled with problems - the extent of many are unimaginable elsewhere in the world. I copy and paste below the opinions of an individual who has traveled in India. Disregarding his factual errors, a few misspellings and grammatical errors, he does truly describe India today. As my adviser said, he speaks the truth insofar as truth is a perception and not an absolute.

As I said, he describes India today. But I disagree entirely with the reasons he says have caused India's status today, as well as the conclusions and projections he pulls from his experiences. Ruminate on this for a while. I'll post some responses and thoughts in a few days. Feel free to comment in the interim, even if your comment is only another question or another personal narrative of India.


Reflections on India
by Sean-Paul Kelley

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.

India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older. Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.

The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation
, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.

I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!

One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates, nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing. The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime.

Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it. And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.

from:
http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620

Festival Time

Chennai has a music, dance, and Tamil cultural festival every year from the middle of December to the middle of January. I try to take in the performances whenever possible, especially the traditional dance (Bharat Natyam), which is often fantastic. Today, however, I experienced something new. A co-worker encouraged me to come along with her to an Alliance Francaise sponsored event entitled "The Giraffes." Essentially, there were large, red, inflated giraffes manned by (French) people pulling strings (causing the extended necks of the giraffes to lengthen and then wilt) making their way through crowded (but blocked-off-to-traffic) streets, while two opera singers sang and twirled rings of fire through the air while being catapulted by enormous see-saws. If the mental image conjured by that description is hazy, think of what it was like to be there. The crowds, of course Indian and timid, were constantly scared of the performers who would suddenly swing by, leading to many near stampedes. Perhaps the event can best be described as opera, circus, parade, and cultural extravaganza all in one. Too bad I didn't have my camera on me.

today

i have been inspired to write shorter but more frequent entries. let's see how long this lasts.

1. went to the dentist today to get my teeth cleaned (teeth 'scaled' is the appropriate term i believe) - uneventful. 1000 Rupees. 30 mins. i asked if they autoclave their instruments before i sat down.

2. joined a new gym today. i'll start there when i'm back from kerala.

3. 5 minutes in india never really means 5 minutes. in the past 2 weeks, i have had >10 different people tell me to wait 5 minutes (usually it's something like "just 5 minutes" or "5 minutes only" coupled with a side-to-side head bob). the shortest actual time to fruition was 20 minutes. on the flipside, i have now started to respond "wait 5 minutes" for any number of requests.

4. i thought i found a decent falafel joint in chennai today until i realized that my falafel wrap included a surprise ingredient: french fries.

5. hair in and around my food doesn't phase me anymore.

6. off to kerala tomorrow morning! if i haven't told you yet the extent to which one my travel mates insists on luxury in all aspects of travel, ask me about it. should be a great time!

thoughts about water from the office

1. water bottles are fair game for anybody to use. i buy a 750 mL bottle of water daily to drink while at work. i am lucky if i ultimately drink even 375 mL of the original 750 mL.

2. pilfering water is not something that needs to be done covertly. many people come up to me, knowing that i always have a bottle of water around, and ask me for water. then they drink to their heart's content from my bottle and give it back to me.

3. but nobody puts their lips on the bottle. in north india, there is the concept of 'jhoota', which is best translated to mean contaminated. as long as you don't put your lips on the bottle (ie. you pour the water from the bottle into your mouth), all is well and nothing is contaminated. jhoota can also be applied to food, though i have yet to understand the rules of jhoota to food.

4. water bottles can be recycled and re-filled over and over. but after a bottle has been around for one week, it needs to be discarded because the plastic from the bottle (somehow) starts to enter the water at this time, making it dangerous to drink. go figure.

5. i buy bottled water because i drink neither tap water nor filtered water of suspect origin. there is a tank of filtered water just outside my office for drinking. i guess my water tastes better.

6. all of this happens at an institution of higher learning in india.

Recent pictures

Below are some pictures - a few are from Trichy, a city south of Chennai known for its temples (like most south Indian cities). The rest are from the terrace of my house, since some people want to know what my accommodations in India are like. I will get around to taking pictures of the interiors of the house at some point.

Trichy & My Terrace