Bangalore Sabbatical

Green India

2010-03-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

You have to be here for a while before you realize just how little waste, how little environmental load there is per Indian citizen. When you first arrive from the US or North America, you see traffic, dust, smoke, and for that reason you can miss what’s really going on.

Sensible high-rise design: Bangalore unfortunately has a few wall-o-windows high-rise buildings, which must be a nightmare to keep cool here within 14 degrees latitude of the equator. But more recently constructed apartment buildings have come to a better understanding of their environment. Our apartment building, like most of recent construction, has a sort of staggered façade, with lots of balconies and terraces and protruding horizontal and vertical slabs of concrete. The balconies are nice in their own right, a place to sit or hang laundry, but the main effect is that almost every window in the building is shaded between 8:30 and 3:30, which makes a huge difference in comfort and A/C use.

Commuting: Most high-tech companies facilitate or indeed subsidize a sort of carpooling, running seven-passenger SUVs over regular routes to apartment buildings and neighborhoods where the employees live. My company main building is on a side road about 500 meters back from the public bus stop out on the main road. Not a huge distance, but just the sort of thing that could tip the scales towards someone’s taking their own vehicle instead of the bus. My company runs the minivans continuously to and from the bus stop during peak commute hours. Buses run all over town, on most routes at only three or four-minute intervals.

“Smart-grid”: So-called smart-grid and smart-meter technology is coming to the US eventually. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are not always perfectly matched to the instantaneous demand. Yes, one can “store electricity” to use during peak periods but that can be costly. It will likely be easier to instead modulate demand, by charging more or less during the day, and by offering consumers incentives to use their high-power devices only when green power is plentiful. Much of that is already happening in Bangalore, albeit in a rough-and-ready way. There’s not much by way of renewable energy here, but many apartment buildings do have two sources of electricity: expensive, dirty power (diesel gensets) and cheaper, cleaner power (utility-provided electricity). The utility isn’t able to meet demand at times, and we fall back on the expensive back-up gensets. Our relatively modern apartment is wired with three different circuits, for AC and hot water, for other high-current devices, and for lights. When the utility is overloaded, it institutes rolling blackouts around the city, and when our apartment complex is hit, our diesel genset turns on automatically and its power is allocated to different circuits in the building depending on the level of demand. In the morning, everyone wants to heat hot water, so if the utility dumps us then, we certainly don’t have enough diesel power for hot water. In our apartment, we do a sort of manual smart-grid. Some nights before I go to bed I run the electric water heater for 15 minutes, and then turn it off. In the morning, if the power is off, I can use the still-warm water in the heater for a shower which is, if not piping hot, at least plenty warm to start off a day that will likely top 35 C anyway. With a “smart” hot water heater talking to a smart grid, and better insulation on the heater, we’d basically never notice that the power was out. I anticipate that eventually most US residents will be moving electricity demand around in a similar way.

Low-waste: It’s rare to see food left on trays at my company cafeteria. One is strongly encouraged to take only what one can eat. Posters on the wall chart the cumulative kilograms of food wasted (left on trays to be scraped into buckets by the dishwashers) over the course of the month. Can we do better next month?

Most hand-washing areas don’t have paper towel. Where I work, there are paper towels, but I’ve never seen anyone take more than one to dry their hands. Many men in any case by habit ignore the paper towel and reach for a clean handkerchief kept in their pocket for exactly this purpose. Others just give their hands a good shaking to get the water off -- it dries in few minutes anyway. When there’s no paper towel, the shaking’s what I do, but I often surreptitiously use my pant leg to help with drying, just like I see the Indian guy leaving ahead me do.

Recycling: No, as upper middle class consumers here in India we don’t separate our trash stream. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get separated. Recycling is happening in locations which are, from our point-of-view, behind the scenes. It’s driven not by “green conscience” or government mandate but by profit motive. It’s made possible by low labor costs or more precisely by the very high ratio of the cost of raw materials to the cost of labor. You see it all going on out of the corner of your eye. As the maid is heading out the door of your apartment with the trash, she is already pulling out the plastic bottles. On the roads around town we see flat-bed trucks with huge bags of crushed plastic bottles lashed to the back. They weigh hardly anything, so the truck can carry as much as the trucker is able to lash on – the load towers high over the cab and bulges way out over the edges of the truck bed.

Compostables: the maids don’t seem to mess with that stuff, but someone does. Here is what I observe: here at the very edge of Bangalore, we live in a neighborhood of apartment complexes interspersed with vacant lots filled with scruffy dry weeds. In patches in the middle of these vacant lots, piles of organic refuse, (peelings, stalks, cobs…) appear and gradually get bigger over a period of some days. When I first saw this, I thought “ew, we live next to a garbage dump.” But they aren’t random piles – in some cases their boundaries are marked out by cinder blocks. About once a week or a little more often, a small herd of cows appear. The cowherd tethers them to the cinder blocks at night but lets them wander over the vacant lot during the day. The cows don’t have much use for the weeds but they love the kitchen refuse. The cows reprocess the compostable stuff into milk and manure. I’ve seen the cowherd milking the cows into a bucket, but I’ve not been able to follow the process from there – does she sell it to consumers, or to a milk processor? The milk we buy here at the supermarket, ultra-pasteurized and plastic-bagged, did it first spend a few hours in a pail in an urban vacant lot? Every morning I have a bowl of home-made yogurt at our little restaurant. It was thoroughly boiled of course before it was set out to curdle, and is completely safe. Did the chef buy the milk from our neighborhood cowherd? As for the manure, yep, I’ve seen people collecting the cowpies as well, whether for fertilizer, fuel, or paint, I don’t know. I wonder how the economics of all this work. Does the cowherd pay the trash collector to sort out and leave the kitchen waste in the vacant lot? Does someone in the employ of our apartment complex sort out the garbage so that we residents can pay less, for a smaller volume of trash collection? Are the rights to collect manure from this herd also sold, the neighborhood cow-dung franchise?

On the topic of cowherds: Last week I saw five cows being herded from one vacant lot to another by a teenaged boy on a bike. I had to stare at the scene for a moment to understand why the bike seemed to make so much difference. Then it came to me – a cowherd on a bike is a mounted cowherd, and a mounted cowherd isn’t a cowherd at all, but a cowboy, a major step up the social ladder, or so it seems to my American mindset.

By the way, here in Bangalore, if you happen to be willing to do your own waste-stream separation, more power -- and money -- to you. We’re told that if you are willing to take the time to separate out and bale and twine your used newspaper, a guy will stop by your apartment to collect it and actually pay you for it.

As our stay in India comes to an end, an unanswered question in my mind is, can a country like the US, where average salaries are much higher compared to the cost of raw stuff, ever do as well as India does in terms of having a low environmental load per person? The professional motivation for my sabbatical here was explicitly to learn about technology related to sustainable energy. In many ways, that's been a big success. I know much more about the nitty-gritty of heat transfer, for instance, than I did three months ago. But both in India and now back in Colorado (as I get ready to finally post this we've actually been home a few days now) I found myself thinking a lot also about money.

Gods, Godmen and Gurus

2010-03-24T04:25:00.000-07:00

I can’t speak for the rest of India, but to my foreign eyes, it sure seems like Bangalore is full of religious fervor. Just yesterday midmorning in our courtyard I met a group of young girls all dressed in festival finery heading off to do puja (worship) at various aunty and uncle’s homes where they would collect presents afterwards. My girls didn’t have the day off from school so I don’t think it was a major holiday. (Meanwhile my girls tell me that a lot of people aren’t going to school these days because they are worried about exams; they can get more studying done at home than at school.)

Hinduism is a very diverse religion with tolerance for different ideas. Generally speaking there are three primary gods: Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer of evil). In practice, most families are either Vishnu or Shiva adherents. There are only a couple of Brahma temples in India. In addition to the three main gods and their avatars (or alternate identities – e.g.mother, daughter, wife, teacher, patient and customer may all describe the same person), each god has a family. For example, Ganesha (the elephant god) is the son of Shiva and Parvati.

Most families have a small shrine in their homes where they do puja. A foreign company planning to build apartment complexes in India was told they needed to redo their architectural drawings to include a space in each apartment for the shrine. In our family we also have a collection of dolls – oops, I mean iDolls. Oops again – “idols” is the proper term used in India. We have a portrait of Ganesha (as seen in Chitra Santhe), a Nataraja (dancing Shiva), a Balaji (avatar of Vishnu – see #3 below), a Saraswati (wife of Brahma and goddess of learning), a small portrait of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and a placard with the philosophy of Sathya Sai Baba.

Darshan is a common word in India. It means the beholding of a deity (usually an idol), a revered person or a sacred object. Because the viewing is considered to be reciprocal, the human receives a blessing. Here are some of the touted religious sites to see in and around Bangalore if you want to perform darshan.

1) Shiva Mandir. Mandir means temple. Below is a photo of its immense Shiva statue. Eric compares this temple to Disneyland. It has a frolicky, commercially-magic sort of atmosphere rather than a serious, holy atmosphere.

2) ISKCON Temple. ISKCON stands for International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas. The ISKCON followers believe that Krishna is the prime god. (Other Hindus believe that Krishna and Buddha [!!!] are avatars of Vishnu.) ISKCON’s Indian founder was told by his guru to go to the US because the US was the cultural mover and shaker; if the US would adopt the beliefs, the whole world would soon follow. A FOLK (Friend of Lord Krishna) proudly told me that the ISKCON temple in Bangalore was second in south Asia in visitors and collection of funds after the Venkateswara Temple in Tirupathi. I’m not very surprised. After a short visit to the main hall at ISKCON, you have to wind your way through about ½ kilometer of vendors selling wares and temple workers asking for donations. There is also a display of the new, grander temple that ISKCON plans to build although the current temple already seems quite adequate if not over the top. At the end whether you have given money or not, you are invited to partake of prasadam, a savory porridge served from a huge vat, because the founder believed that no one within ten miles of an ISKCON temple should go hungry. The standard salutation at the temple is “Hare Krishna.”

3) Tirumala Venkateswara Temple (aka Tirupathi). This temple is 250 km from Bangalore in Andhra Pradesh. The temple is also called Balaji Temple. This is the most popular pilgrimage site in the world. It is more popular than Mecca, more popular than the Vatican. Sleeper cars on trains are booked weeks in advance. It gets 40,000 visitors a day on average. It has 12,000 priests. We didn’t actually make it to Tirupathi, but we did go to Chikkatirupathi (small Tirupathi) in Karnataka. We visited a government school, not the town’s main temple even though it was across the street from the school.

4) Sathya Sai Baba’s summer ashram. Sathya Sai Baba is a godman who claims to be the reincarnation of the famous Sai Baba of Shirdi and preaches that there is one God which is present in all religions. His 6 million followers are not expected to give up their personal religion. (See photo below of the emblem over the ashram gate.) His most common miracle is the materialization of ash from thin air. I was given some ash during my visit to the ashram. The godman hadn’t arrived at his summer ashram yet so the place was fairly quiet. Sai Baba is now 83 years old and in a wheelchair. I get the impression that his popularity has peaked, but he has done some wonderful community service work including providing free health care at his hospital near the ashram. The standard salutation at the ashram is “Sai Ram.”

5) Art of Living Foundation headquarters. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a Bangalore native, is the founder of this United Nations-accredited humanitarian organization with centers in 140 countries. Sri Sri was recently named one of the 25 most powerful people in Bangalore. He encourages healthy and spiritual living through yoga and meditation. Like Sai Baba, he doesn’t demand that his organization’s workers and volunteers belong to a particular religion. Sri Sri has also focused on disaster relief and conflict resolution especially in the Indian subcontinent region.

For a different taste of religion, you could follow godman Swami Nithyananda’s travails. A sex scandal developed recently when a videotape of him with a Tamil actress was made public. Charges against him were filed in Bangalore. He has an ashram in Kerala, a neighboring state, and also one 40 km outside of Bangalore, but I never heard of him until the scandal broke.

If you tend towards Christianity, there are several Christian churches in downtown Bangalore, many built by the British. Winston Churchill used to attend Trinity Church which was the military church.

If your religious tendencies veer in other directions, here are some other local opportunities for darshan.
1) lions, tigers, bears, elephants, deer and butterflies – Bannerghatta National Park
2) science – Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) Heritage Museum (zoom in on the photo below) and the Vishveshwarya Industry and Technological (VIT) Museum (good for kids)

3) art – Chitrakala Prarishad (a school and museum) and the Venkatappa Art Gallery. I preferred the former.
4) food – Malvalli Tiffin House (MTR) near Lalbagh Park

I recommend darshan, no matter what your preferences are.

What Democracy Is Not

2010-03-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

On my first trip to India, which lasted only a week, I was struck by the religious diversity, especially within Hinduism. (Think of the diversity within Christianity or within Islam for a small sense of what I mean.) After staying here for a longer time, I’m struck by how my understanding of democracy has changed since I have been in India.

India is the world’s largest democracy. The online Oxford English Dictionary defines democracy as “a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise of power, typically through elected representatives.” All fine and good. However, I previously thought of democracy as comprising a country’s entire lifestyle or infrastructure, if you will. I expected the Indian government to be more like the system in the US. Let me tell you the ways it is not.

Democracy is not capitalism. The prices of many food items, fertilizer, and petroleum are controlled by the central government. (Where we would say “federal,” India uses the term “central.”) There have been many demonstrations and much political campaigning in reaction to what opponents see as lack of action by the central government to control prices.

Democracy is not freedom of speech. For example, a member of the high court feels compelled to speak out in his official capacity when a Bollywood star discusses her love life in a little too much detail. Universities are instituting policies to contact parents if students are found kissing on campus. (Keep in mind that Desperate Housewives, Friends and other American shows appear regularly on television here.) Even more drastic – on Valentine’s Day vigilantes were marrying young couples found together who weren’t related. In the art world M F Husain (also spelled Hussain) left India so that he could paint what he wished without having to show up in court to defend his choice of subjects. My impression is that a fair number of Indians are very sensitive about certain moral and religious issues. In general, Indians try to avoid conflict, but once Indians are aroused, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby. If there are enough angry people, the result is too often a deadly riot.

Democracy is not justice. We complain in the US about court cases dragging on for months or years, but in India a delay of a decade or more is not uncommon. (M F Husain is in his nineties so some of his cases have actually been resolved.) Eliza’s class had a long, depressing discussion about it. I hope the younger generation in India can take action to improve the justice system.

Democracy is no guarantee of honest officials. We know about this problem in the US also, but allegations of corruption in the US often lead to a politician’s downfall. Maybe that happens here, but I have only seen cases of politicians continuing in office despite allegations of corruption. Perhaps the delays in the justice system are partly to blame. Today the Times of India newspaper’s front page reported that the local JD(S) leader saying the party would field candidates with a criminal past as long as the party leaders thought the candidates had a chance of winning.

Democracy is not laissez-faire. At the local level in Karnataka some representative slots are reserved for the “backward castes” or women or both, and there is an attempt to extend the current reservation system at the national level to include women. The proposal has passed the Rajya Sabha [similar to our Senate, but more like England’s House of Lords – some members are appointed rather than elected] but the Lok Sabha [House of Representatives] has not yet voted on it. In the US a primary tool for promoting diversity in representative bodies is district boundaries; the resulting demographics give minority candidates a good chance to succeed in some districts. In India, on the other hand, residency in the district is not a requirement for election. In addition, the proposal at the national level would rotate the reservation system so that each district would have to elect a woman every third term. Some people say that the result will be mostly women in government. The thinking is that, once elected, a woman can run as an incumbent and win against male candidates. Meanwhile the next-door district will have to elect a woman per the reservation system. Can you imagine a government with a majority of women?

If you have never been to India, I hope you can now imagine a different style of democracy from a western-style democracy. I, for one, have had my preconceived, all-encompassing notion of democracy corrected. I now have a much more precise idea of what democracy actually means.

MTR - Less Ambience, More Flavour

2010-03-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

During our first week in Bangalore we bought a great many different things to stock our kitchen, including various spices. We were advised to buy the brand MTR. Later European tourists as well as one of dad’s colleagues recommended the restaurant called MTR or Mavalli Tiffin Room. He said that you couldn’t come to Bangalore without eating there. Last Saturday we had an opportunity to go.

Comprised of about four undecorated rooms, MTR has an atmosphere of efficiency and assembly lines. There was no waiter smoothing gliding over with glasses of wine to ask you what you would like to eat. There was no soft clink of polished cutlery blending with the equally soft voices of the clientele. Instead everybody in the room was given a glass of water, (similar to many Indian restaurants, you could request cold or room-temperature water) an aluminum spoon, and an aluminum tray with about seven little compartments. Lungi-clad men (lungi – an informal tube-like piece of cloth worn around the waist) toting slop buckets sloshed the food unceremoniously onto your plate. Everybody got the same food, but what food! A dozen toothsome things soon covered our plates and as Dad put it, “Everything tastes different; it’s not all sort of muddy.”

MTR is not only known for its food, but for its no-nonsense attitude. We heard horror stories about people getting there a few minutes late and finding their reservation given to someone else. The waiters gave you the food even when you shook your head. It reminded me of school cafeteria workers. One thing that did work was saying “selpa, selpa” (Kannada for “a little”) upon which you received a smaller ration.

Bharata Natyam

2010-03-20T04:18:00.000-07:00

Recently, I went with Mom to see an Indian classical dance performance by one of my classmates. It was located in a Kannada cultural heritage center in central Bangalore. All of the signs were in Kannada and I realized how spoiled we had become living in a foreign country where English is very commonly spoken.

Indian classical dance, or Bharata Natyam, is usually performed by one person and the style includes lots of stamping feet and forming arms and hands into complicated positions. It is set to devotional music, often singing without very many instruments. The costumes that the dancers wear are flashy; with vibrant colors, flowers in their hair, and sometimes bells attached to their ankles that ring when they move. In the performance that we went to, there were four musicians sitting on pillows off to the side. One woman was singing (devotional songs in Kannada), one woman was clashing together small metal cymbal-like things, and there were two men: a drummer and a flutist.

Every dance is centered around one story. The very first dance that we saw was about Ganesha, since he is the god of beginnings. (See Beginnings and Political News.) The singer in the background tells the story and the different gestures the dancer act out the story. I bet if I could understand Kannada, I would be able to follow the story line very well and see how the dancing and the words are connected. However, Mom and I can’t understand Kannada, so after the performance my friend explained what a few motions from the dancing meant and how they connected to the story. For example, Lord Shiva has three eyes. Two of them are normal eyes. The other one sits in the middle of his forehead. Normally it is closed, but when he is very angry he opens his eyes and fire shoots out, burning everything he sees. In the dance, this was symbolized by flicking two fingers in front of her forehead (showing the opening of the eye) and moving them forward while waving them back and forth (showing the fire shooting out). To see an example of Bharata Natyam go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQOdTmF8u0

Tibetans Are Welcome in Karnataka

2010-03-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

On the way to the Coorg rainforest we stopped to visit the first ever Tibetan exile settlement at Bylakuppe. Karnatakans tell me that Bylakuppe is the largest Tibetan refugee settlement in the world. Dharamshala, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government in north India, is more famous, but the Namdroling Monastery in Bylakuppe is well worth a visit if you are in the area.

The monastery is best known for the Golden Temple. (See photo.)

I was impressed by the beautiful buildings constructed in the last 50 years and by the Tibetans monks going about their daily routines. As the picture of the monks fetching water indicates, there is a large, active community here.

I visited Tibet in 1988. There was palpable tension between the Tibetans and the Chinese. I did not get any similar feeling during my short visit to Bylakuppe. In fact, the Dalai Lama claims a special personal relationship with his adopted country of India, the birthplace of Buddhism.

P.S. Sophia said to make sure to tell you that if you visit the Golden Temple, you should eat at Shanthi’s Family Restaurant.

Ugadi = No Newspaper

2010-03-18T05:48:00.001-07:00

Tuesday was Ugadi, the Hindu New Year. Schools were closed, but there weren’t any big public celebrations unless you count the cricket game. Families mostly celebrate the holiday at home with special food.

I thought everything would be back to normal on Wednesday so I was quite surprised when I went to read the newspaper and heard that there weren’t any and none were going to be showing up. It turns out that the presses don’t print newspapers the day after Ugadi. The newspaper workers get a day off for Ugadi. I was told that there are two other holidays which are also press holidays: Diwali and Ganesh’s birthday.

In the US I often hear about the demise of newspapers. Imagine the rumors if there were a press holiday!

An Amateur’s Guide to T20 Cricket

2010-03-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

There are at least three kinds of cricket games. The classic game is called a Test game and can last up to 5 days. Another kind is ODI which stands for One Day International. The shortest version is called “Twenty20” and lasts about 3 hours.

Yesterday we saw the Royal Challengers Bangalore team beat the Punjab Kings XI (called XI because there are eleven players on a team). The owner of RCB also owns a beer company (and an airline), but beer sales were severely restricted if allowed at all.

There are two halves called innings in T20. Each team bats (and scores) only during its inning. At the end of the first inning Punjab’s score was 203-3 meaning 203 runs and 3 batters out so RCB needed 204 runs to win. Like in the last inning of a baseball game, as soon as RCB got 204 runs the game was over. But, rather than report the margin of victory as one run, they seemed to calculate it by subtracting the winning team’s number of outs from the number of balls (roughly, a ball is an “at bat”) remaining when the winning team surpassed the other team.

In T20 the inning is over when 10 batters are out or when 20 overs have been played. Each over consists of 6 valid balls (at bats, or also “pitches”) so an inning consists of 120 valid balls. At the end of each over, a new bowler (pitcher) takes over, but the same bowler can return after resting an over.

Cricket seems to be primarily a contest between the bowler and the batters. There are 2 batters who run back and forth between the two bases. Either batter may be put out by being beaten to the base by a defender with the ball. If a fly ball is caught, the current batter is out. A batter plays until he is out. Not many cricket players got a chance to bat in yesterday’s T20.

The batter can score up to 6 points on each ball (pitch). If the ball goes out of the boundary on a fly, the batting team gets 6 runs (but unlike baseball the batter needn’t actually run). If the ball goes out of bounds on the bounce, the batting team gets 4 runs. Many people held cards with a big 4 on one side and a big 6 on the other and waved them when either 4 or 6 runs were scored. Triples are very uncommon. Even doubles are unusual. The batters were not aggressive runners last night. True, they had to run with their cricket bats. It’s possible to get zero runs on a ball, and it’s possible to run even if the batter doesn’t swing at a ball. There are also things called free hits, but now we are getting out of my league.

Unlike baseball, when the ball goes into the stands, the fans are expected to return the ball. The game only gets a new ball at the beginning of each inning. The degradation of the ball is supposedly an important factor in the game.

We noticed that the announcer seemed to be cheering for the Punjab team quite a lot during their inning. This seemed very strange to us, but I think I understand the logic. First of all, the game seems to be primarily an offensive game. The fielders didn’t make many amazing plays which the crowd could applaud. The bowler is the primary defensive player but his actual bowling time is very short and there aren’t really strikeouts. If the announcer didn’t cheer for the visitors, the stadium could be very quiet. That might not be a problem except for the second factor – for a stadium to be quiet for an entire inning (about an hour and a half) while the visitors bat would probably break some sort of rule about stadium volume at modern sports games. It seems like sports stadiums are supposed to be loud, and last night’s cricket game certainly fulfilled those expectations. Most of the music we heard were snippets from Bollywood songs, but at one point the PA system blared “Tonight’s Going to be a Good, Good Night,” a song often played at Rockies games. Except for that song, we wished we had earplugs.

Another contrast with American sports stadiums was the wave. In Bangalore the wave is called the Mexican wave. The announcer starts the wave with a countdown. The wave starts in a certain section and goes in the designated direction. It’s not a grassroots effort like in the US. On the other hand, the execution is very efficient and there is a lot of participation.

Many aspects of the game were similar. There was the same atmosphere of excitement before, during and after the game. There were roving vendors, but they didn’t yell about their wares, just politely standing nearby and occasionally asking directly if you wanted any of their products. There were little promotional items thrown into the crowd -- in this case, long stick-like balloons that people would clap together. There were cheerleaders, including some blondes, wearing the skimpiest outfits I have seen on people in India. On the big screen a Bollywood star catching the game waved to her adoring fans. She wore an RCB shirt like many of the other fans.

It was a good game, and people were very excited with the RCB’s win at their first home game of the season. To find out more about the league, you can go to IPLT20.com.

Rainforeat Retreat

2010-03-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

We have been on four trips here in India: one to Delhi and Agra, one to Mysore, one to Puducherry, and one to Madikeri. We got back from the trip to the coffee plantations of Madikeri yesterday. Madikeri is a one of the three parts of Coorg. Coorg is a region in southern Karnataka, which is the state that Bangalore is in.

We set off right after school on Friday, and drove¹ for three hours to Mysore, where we stopped and checked into a hotel. Since we had already explored Mysore we just stayed at the hotel. The next morning we drove for three hours to get to Madikeri.

Mom was interested in checking out some local culture because her guide book said that Coorg had never been captured by the British, but the one museum we found was pretty pathetic. Then we drove up some mountains to reach our hotel, named Rainforest Retreat, which is a cardamom, vanilla, and coffee plantation where I want to someday honeymoon, retire, or vacation. The owners are biologists and have a completely organic plantation.

The hotel part of it is just a rainforest with three or four cabins, a few tents, multiple hammocks, a badminton court, ping pong, and a pavilion where you could buy spices or check out books hidden in it. Everywhere there were canals, filled or unfilled, with logs that you walked over to get to the other side. Because it is pretty far out of town, they give you all three meals at another covered space, and provide entertainment in the form of treks, plantation tours, and the chance to help out with the plants. While I was there, we did a hike, tour, and picked tea all in a day. (See photo.)

The plantation tour was fascinating. If I hadn’t had a tour and was just walking down the plantation by myself, I wouldn’t have known it was a plantation because there are so many weeds and it was so untamed. The owners of the hotel have owned the place organically for 15 years. Many people believe that when farming organically, you must allow pests to take over your plants, but what these people did was really cool. They took the example of one such pest who has a name I can’t remember. These bugs like to live inside cardamom. The owners tried to find a natural agent that would repel the bugs. They mixed many different plants and sprayed their juices over one of these bugs. Some juices killed the bugs and some just made the bug want to go away. They sprayed the latter over the cardamom plants. The bugs then wanted to move somewhere else, and the farmers provided that somewhere else by letting weeds grow everywhere. Then the spiders and pest-eaters could eat the bugs because they could get into the weeds and not the cardamom. Due to this new food source for the pest-eaters, they multiplied and ate even more pests. After a while the owners stopped spraying the plants with the natural and organic agent, and the bugs moved back² but in a smaller quantity than before. That way, the plants weren’t damaged but you didn’t destroy an ecosystem of rainforest life.

If you ever go to India, a trip to Coorg and the Rainforest Retreat is definitely worth it, and I say this as someone who gets carsick in a stationary vehicle.

¹Foreigners don’t usually drive here because many Indians drive so crazily. The remaining options are to hire a driver to take us to Madikeri or take the bus. My stomach usually gets sick on buses so we chose the first option.

²Remember: no bug is a pest unless there are large numbers of them

Government School

2010-03-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

Today I visited the Indian equivalent of an "inner-city" government school in Hyderabad. As part of its community service activities, my host company for my stay in India, a large engineering firm, has adopted several of these schools. In most cases my company kicks off its relation with a new school by installing reverse-osmosis water filters (you can't learn when you are sick, as it was explained to me) and then gradually fills in other necessities.

In a previous visit the company had given each student a backpack. Each backpack came stuffed with notebooks, a writing board, pens, and a school uniform. The latter is a source of pride for the students, as every private-school student wears a uniform but many government-school students can not afford them. Today I noted that many of the students were in uniform and almost all still had their backpacks, looking dusty in most cases, but still serviceable. And what about that "writing board"?

The k-10 school consists of ten small classrooms organized in two tiers around a dusty central courtyard. There are 1150 students attending the school. That number is not a misprint. At any given time, about half the students are outdoors in the courtyard. Strips of carpet are laid down in rows, and can be moved around to define separate "classrooms" within the courtyard, and to keep as many children as possible sitting in the shade of several large trees as the day progresses. The students sit cross-legged, knee-to-knee along the carpet strips, with their small writing boards on their laps. Teachers stand in front of each "classroom" and speak over the sound of horns from the street. It's quite loud and seemingly chaotic. In the indoor classrooms, the scene is much the same. None of the classrooms has desks or chairs. There is no glass in the windows nor doors in the doorframes but it's still hot in the crowded rooms.

I had been told that one of the draws of the government schools is the free lunch served to each student at midday. My first thought on seeing the overstuffed school was that the lunch must be the main point here -- surely no real learning is going on. But after I had walked around for a bit,I realized my first impression was entirely wrong. In one kindergarten class (held in one of the indoor classrooms) the children were learning the letters of the Telugu alphabet. Under the watchful eye of the sari-clad teacher, the little children came up one by one to take their turns leading the class in call-and-response, pointing at the various letters and calling out the respective phoneme. To go upstairs, I had to edge past a class of sixth graders, sitting in two orderly rows all the way up the stairs but leaving me space along one side to get by. They were taking a social studies exam. I couldn't read the questions on the handouts, but they evidently all could, and were tidily writing their answers in the rune-like Telugu script. Obviously by sixth grade every child had attained more than just rudimentary literacy.

The purpose of my company's visit today was to distribute a free tenth-grade text book to each of the hundred-odd advancing ninth graders. (other than the books we brought, there were very few books in evidence at the school.) The all-in-one text book we handed out is inexpensively printed on thin paper, and each is the size of big-city telephone book, with separate sections on each of the subjects they will study in tenth grade, and sample questions to help practice for the all-important after-tenth-grade college board exams. I watched each student carefully as he or she came up to get a book. At least half of them took the book hungrily. I don't think I am imagining the slightly fierce look I saw in their eyes, a look that said "I am going to learn every last thing on every last page in this book and then so help me I will crush those board exams next year." I wouldn't bet against at least some of the students doing just that.

Elsewhere, in a very different India, more and more private schools are equipping each student with a laptop computer in a wi-fi enabled classrooms. But if conditions are right, you might learn a great deal, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of a government school with a writing board on your lap. Conversely, from a high-end laptop computer it's no sure thing that you will learn anything but fluff.

International Women’s Day – March 8

2010-03-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

India’s national parliament planned to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day by passing a law requiring that 33% of the members of parliament (MP) and the state assemblies be women. Some male MPs conceded that they would be voting against their self-interest; they could vote themselves out of a job after the next election. Coalitions were announced last week. Today pandemonium ensued. The coalitions fell apart. The parliament will try again tomorrow. Sonia Gandhi is a big supporter of this proposed law. Her husband pushed it when he was alive.

Most (all?) elected officials in India need not reside in the district which they represent. In Bangalore our wards already have quotas for women as well as for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Some districts are designated for women, others for SC/ST, yet others for women who are a member of an SC or ST. (The greater Bangalore municipal election, 4 long years in the waiting, was recently rescheduled from Feb 21 to March 28.)

In the judicial branch the Supreme Court of India consists of the Chief Justice and up to 30 other judges. No, they don’t all hear every case. There are a couple of openings on the Supreme Court, and there is talk of Indian President Pratibha Patil (first woman president) appointing women to fill those slots. There have been a handful of women on the Supreme Court in the past. The Supreme Court judges must retire at the age of 65.

India’s population is about 70% rural, but the iconic image of a rural woman balancing a heavy load on her head is not uncommon in Bangalore either. The women wear colorful saris as they work in construction or carry a load of wood home for cooking.

A female doctor friend of mine wears a sari to her office every day. I’ve never seen her wear a sari though. She prefers to wear a salwar kameez when she is not working. If she were to wear a salwar kameez to work though, people would think she was an intern or an assistant instead of the doctor. (See Blackouts for a photo of a salwar kameez.) Another woman who eats breakfast in the dining hall with us wears jeans every day at breakfast and then changes into Indian clothes for going to the office. Eric’s female engineering colleagues don’t seem to have to follow the wear-a-sari rule, but they often wear a dupatta (long scarf). I personally find wearing a dupatta a hassle. I also fear for all the women wearing saris and dupattas while riding motorcycles. Some motorcycles marketed to women have a special sari guard.

Most marriages in India are arranged and work out fine, but honor killings and dowry deaths are far too frequent. The story often told to cover up for a bride burning is that there was an explosion in the kitchen while the woman was cooking.*

I hadn’t seen any (noticeably) pregnant women in India for the first two months in India. Then I saw two in the space of five seconds. It turned out I was in front of a maternity hospital. When I asked some Indians why there were no pregnant women, they said that from the 6th month of pregnancy on women will often stay at home and not go out.

There is a saying in India, “We Two. Ours One.” (See photo.) It means “We two – mom and dad – with our one child.” It used to be “We Two. Ours Two,” but I guess India is trying harder to reduce the population growth. Among the families that we know, having one or two children is common. Siblings tend to be spaced several years apart. There is also a disparity between the number of boys and girls born in India though I haven’t noticed it. Ultrasounds for gender identification, although illegal, are reputed to be popular here, followed by abortions if the results are not satisfactory.

“Housewife” seems to be a common profession here. Along with not working outside the home, some women don’t do much (house)work inside the home much either. Many hire a cook and a housecleaner. There are some daycare centers for working parents, but the preference seems to be having a female relative watch the children.

I’m playing housewife here too, but I feel more like a tourist. I’m exploring Bangalore and playing bridge and not really living the typical life of a Bangalore woman. People are amazed that I go out by myself to explore the city. Sometimes it is nice to be a foreigner and “break the gender rules.”

*Depressing footnote – Most children’s accidents are poisonings involving kerosene. The kerosene is used for lamps. It is clear and children mistake it for water. Poisoning is also common among farmers committing suicide; the bills come due, the harvest hasn’t cooperated and lethal fertilizers are nearby. Students commit suicide because they don’t do well on their exams.

Heat

2010-03-07T03:31:00.000-08:00

Heat, heat, heat, it grows inside of you as the day grows on and never lessens. The next day it has not grown any colder but still rises in heat. It can be easier with a swimming pool, some ice cubes and a high powered fan. But it never disappears.

This morning I was running at the gym in our complex and had to stop because of the heat. Later, my mom saw some ladies going there in tracksuits. Even though the average temperature here is about 90° Fahrenheit, women are not supposed to wear shorts. Traditionally wearing fewer clothes meant you were from a lower caste and so men also did not wear shorts, but now some do.

At school I used to play basketball during lunch. Now I sit in the fanned library. I go swimming every day on the weekends and sometimes after school. Even girls’ bathing suits here are much more modest and have sleeves and shorts. The only women I have seen swimming so far, (and that’s only 3), have worn a complete set of regular clothes, albeit those that dry easily.

The lack of altitude isn’t the only factor. We are only 13° north of the equator. In this weather, however, I don’t sit around contemplating why it is so hot because my brain doesn’t function normally in this heat. Seriously, I could never live someplace this hot. I need snow.

Craving Beef or Pork?

2010-03-02T17:48:00.000-08:00

Non-vegetarian restaurants in Bangalore often offer chicken, mutton and fish. Beef and pork are much harder to find. If that is a problem, we have a solution. Go to Puducherry (aka Pondicherry). There is a convenient overnight train leaving Friday nights. Spend Saturday eating in Puducherry and hop back on the return train on Saturday evening. The 3-tier AC sleeper train is known as Garib Rath (poor man’s chariot) so the tickets are affordable. You rent bedding for 25 rupees (~55 cents) and sleep the trip away.

There is plenty to do in between meals. Pondi is a former French colony so check out the French flavor of the city.

If you want more than beef and pork, try the croissants, crepes and coq au vin available in numerous restaurants.

Admire the police in their képis hats.

Dip your feet in the Bay of Bengal.

There is also a famous ashram that seems to be the main item on most visitors’ to-do list, but we didn’t feel the need to do more than go by it.

If you crave bicycling, this is also your town. There are only 200,000 people in Pondi and the streets in the French quarter are relatively quiet. I think cycling in Bangalore is a dangerous mode of transportation, but not in Pondi’s French quarter, though we didn’t see much advantage to bicycling since the area is fairly small.

Puducherry, like Delhi (and similar to Washington, D.C), is a Union Territory of India rather than a state. It actually consists of 4 separate regions “in” 3 different Indian states. We went to the largest region, also called Puducherry contained within the state of Tamil Nadu. The girls made sure to alight from the train at a stop before Puducherry and touch the dirt so they could say they had been to Tamil Nadu. Puducherry (all 4 pieces) became part of India after India became independent. The smallest region, Mahe, is located on the west coast surrounded by the state of Kerala, and I was amused to learn that there is an overnight Garib Rath train that travels from Mangalore in Karnataka (the state we live in) through Mahe all the way across southern India to Puducherry.

At first we were disappointed that our only option for taking a direct train to Pondi was to spend just over 12 hours there, but everything worked out very well. We all enjoyed the sleeper train. Sophia who doesn’t usually take well to transport motion of any kind actually looked forward to the return trip. A plus for Eric was going to Pondi before the heat in March. And, as you can tell from the girls’ blog entries, they were delighted to get back in time to celebrate Holi with friends in our apartment complex.

Holi Demographics

2010-03-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

First of all: an introduction to Holi. Holi is the celebration of the defeat of the demoness Holika. That is why there is a ceremonial bonfire on the evening before Holi. Symbolically, the bonfire is burning up Holika. On the day of Holi, we celebrate her death by throwing water and coloured powders, known simply as colours, at each other. Hence, Holi is also known as the Festival of Colours. (Note – in order to glean full understanding from this entry, the following definitions should be noted: Uncle – the term used by kids for an adult man who is not one of their relations. Auntie – the term used by kids for an adult woman who is not one of their relations.)

One of the things that I noticed about Holi was how different groups of people used the colours and water in different ways. The small children and at the beginning the larger children mostly just squirted each other with water guns. Some of these were exactly like a water gun that you would see in the US, but some were rather like two foot long syringes. Large plastic buckets provided filling stations. When filling your gun at the same time as someone else, it was necessary to fill it as quickly as possible, since the first person to finish invariably squirted the last.

At the beginning the larger children (that includes me) also used water guns, but we soon fell back on other methods. We filled buckets full of water and mixed liberal amounts of colour in. We weren’t particularly exclusive and sometimes the water would end up a muddy brown. After deciding whom to target, we snuck up behind them and dumped it on their head. At least that was the idea. Once while we were creeping up behind an uncle, another uncle behind us upended the bucket on us causing general hilarity.

The uncles smeared the colours all over each other until it looked like they were wearing masks. It got so that you almost couldn’t tell them apart. They also manned the hoses. Sometime during the celebration someone had wisely brought a few hoses out and they helped in the efficiency of the fun. Whenever somebody wanted a bucket filled, the uncles obliged.

The aunties all held plastic bags full of colour. They anointed everyone while wishing them “Happy Holi!” Later on once the smaller children had tired, the aunties sat and watched them. This immobility made them prime targets for the older children’s buckets. However, anyone actually holding a baby was off-limits. One time my mom saw my friends and me zeroing in with the bucket. She quickly grabbed baby Purna from her friend Kiran and we had to retreat amidst general cries of “No fair!”

Holi – the festival of color

2010-02-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Holi is a festival where people pretty much just go around and drench others with water while smearing Holi “colors” on their clothing. The “colors” are just brightly colored powders that stick terribly to your clothing, hair and face. We celebrated Holi in our apartment complex by first having the typical Holi fight, then all having lunch served by caterers, and then finally having a bonfire this evening.

The first part lasted for a long time, almost 3 hours, and I actually left midway to take a shower, only to be dragged back. I had just thrown an entire water bucket at a boy whose water gun was outrageously large, the entire bucket and water, not just the water. He was angry and was expressing this by spraying me. I felt that it would be safer to retreat to our apartment and call it a day, Holi wise. Later when I was looking for Eliza, I was dragged in into the fight again, but managed to change back into my Holi clothes¹ before ruining a new pair.

These pictures were taken at the beginning of the fight before we were totally covered with Holi colors.

The lunch was fun and followed by most of the female population² of the colony³ dancing. Everybody seems to know the choreography to about 6 dances and they taught us that, while we taught them the Macarena and the Bunny Hop.

The bonfire took place this evening, at around 7:00. Security had set it up very artistically; the logs were arranged almost perfectly symmetrically. We watched the logs burn for a while as people fed them newspaper, then burned incense, and threw popcorn and other stuff into it. Some people walked around the fire and held a cup of water and let it drip to the ground. Many times more than three people held onto the cup at the same time.

¹Everybody wore old clothes because the Holi colors do not come out easily. At the end, you couldn’t tell who you were spraying because everyone was covered in such a thick layer of color and everyone’s clothing was a kind of pinkish-purple color.
²Only girls and women seem to dance
³The word colony is sometimes used to describe your apartment complex.

One Bus Stop Away

2010-02-26T05:43:00.000-08:00

I don’t feel like I know a place until I know my way around it. Being such a large city, Bangalore provides me with a big challenge. Most of the people that we socialize with don’t ride buses and are surprised that the bus is my main mode of transportation. I travel around the bus with a Bangalore city map and more detailed maps that I print out from Google Maps. Even when we are in a car or a tuk tuk, I want to follow along on a map.

I caused great amusement in one crowd when I described the location of some place as one bus stop away. Eric was there too, I was wearing an Indian outfit, and the whole situation earned me the moniker of Indian wife.

Tuk tuks are cheaper than taxis and more fun, but the drivers are notorious for not using their government-issued meters. Since even the Indians complain about being cheated, foreigners like me have no hope. Therefore, I mostly rely on buses. I’ve become quite the expert. Here is my how-to guide for riding buses in Bangalore.

1) It helps to know what your destination is and which bus you should be taking. Being such a high-tech city, Bangalore, of course, has a website that provides some route information, but I haven’t been successful with timings (i.e. schedules) even though timings are listed as an option. Don’t be surprised if the bus stop has one name on the website and a different one for common usage. Also buses don’t ply all the major streets. Some of the major streets are too narrow to service buses.

2) If there isn’t a bus shelter, then look for people congregating on the side of the street. They are probably waiting for a bus.

3) Women sit in the front of the bus, men in the back. People usually enter the door closest to their section. Be careful getting on and off buses. Drivers don’t always wait patiently so look for the handlebars for support in case the bus starts moving.

4) Usually a conductor will come by to collect your money. It helps to have small bills or coins. You pay based on the distance and the kind of bus. Air-conditioned buses are about twice as expensive as non-AC buses, but you are more likely to get a seat. The conductor should give you a receipt which you keep for the duration of the ride. If you are due change but don’t get it, look on the back of your receipt. If there is a handwritten mark, you have an IOU for the change, and the conductor will be back shortly with the change. Given how crowded the buses can be, I’m impressed that the conductors can keep all the passengers straight. Occasionally a bus driver is the lone bus employee, trying to collect and maneuver Bangalore traffic simultaneously. In that case, there is usually only one entrance and everyone pays before they sit down but not necessarily before the bus starts rolling.

5) On the bus if you don’t want to stand out in the crowd, then just sit quietly. You may talk to a friend next to you or on your cell phone or you can text, but reading on city buses is not an activity that people do. (I get a lot of reading done on buses. I figure I already stand out.) I have seen a garland maker working while riding on a bus. (See photos.) Neither do people eat on city buses though there doesn’t seem to be any injunction against eating. Sometimes a seated passenger is expected to help carry a schoolgirl’s backpack, no doubt to help relieve congestion in the aisle.

6) If you are getting off at an obscure stop or want to hop off the bus before the designated stop, stand by the door to signal your intentions. If the bus is crowded and a passenger wants to disembark at a designated stop from the back door, the conductor will often blow on a whistle to signal to the driver to stop.

7) When you actually disembark, LOOK LEFT. Indians, like the British, drive on the left side of the road, and two wheelers (i.e. motorcycles) like to squeeze between buses and sidewalks. If the coast is clear, then look straight ahead. Sometimes there are cement ditches between the bus and the sidewalk or service road.

8) If you are changing buses, don’t assume that the next bus you want comes to the exact same bus stop. Think of it more like a subway station, where you are changing from the orange line to the blue line. The station is the same, but you have to travel to get from one line to another.

Being a bus rider, I often consider the location of an establishment before patronizing it. For instance, I have settled on shopping at a grocery store about a 20-minute walk away along a busy street. After I get my groceries, I don’t walk to lug them home. There is no intersection nearby to safely cross the street, but, fortunately, the bus stop I want is on the same side of the street as the store. When I get off the bus, there is a traffic light for safe crossing. A movie theater on the other side of the street provides a different example. We only go to movies during the day because night presents us with two dangerous propositions: 1) not being able to see where we are walking and 2) crossing a busy street without a traffic light to get to a bus stop.

Since taxis are not always available when you want them and tuk tuks will sometimes refuse to go to your destination – what is up with that? – I recommend that Bangalore visitors be open to trying out the bus system.

Fire in the TGIF Building

2010-02-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon as I was heading toward downtown on the bus, I witnessed a fire. Smoke was pouring out of the top floor of a 7-story building recognized by our family from the TGIF restaurant on the ground floor. The restaurant wasn’t responsible for the fire; instead electrical problems somewhere else started the fire.

Nine people died. Dozens more were hospitalized. As my bus went by the fire, a couple of ambulances were already there. A fire engine was just arriving. Traffic was slow. The fire engine came in our lane toward us and cut over to the other lane at the last minute. Bystanders helped move barricades so that the fire truck could make it through. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators, some of them no doubt having just fled the burning building.

Reports say most of the deaths were due to people jumping out of the building to escape. The front page of The Deccan Herald newspaper showed large photos of two separate people as they jumped to their death. I personally found the photos a bit morbid.

This is the second big fire that I have witnessed in India. The first one was in Madurai in September when we visited that city. It occurred after working hours, and no one died in that fire.

There were several factors that contributed to the number of deaths and one lucky break that kept the fire from being worse. Witnesses said that their first indication that something was wrong was that the electricity went out (and didn’t come back on). The building had backup generators, but they must have been shut off when someone found out about the fire. No fire alarm sounded, and due to a water shutoff the sprinklers didn’t activate. The fire department had to bring water in from a distance to fight the fire. In addition, people didn’t know where the emergency exits (stairs) were and felt trapped.

The lucky break is that the diesel fuel for the generators didn’t catch on fire. That would have caused a massive explosion.

The building is on a major thoroughfare. The crisis led to a traffic jam lasting hours. My bus was probably in the last group of vehicles that made steady progress going by the building. My bridge partner was on a later bus, got stuck in the traffic and had to cancel our game. I was able to find another partner. My original partner finally showed up to bridge 1½ hours late.

The city has launched investigations to find the cause of the fire and to understand the lack of preparedness in handling the fire.

Through Indian Eyes

2010-02-19T20:57:00.000-08:00

Weather – The temperature in Colorado and Bangalore has been in the 30’s, but in Bangalore it is measured in Celsius. We had a high for the month today at 34.4° C (93° F). When I really feel the temperature these days is at breakfast. Over the last few weeks the low has increased from 11° C (52° F) to 20° C (68° F). We haven’t put on the AC yet, but the first thing I do when entering a room is turn on the ceiling fan.

Olympics – What Olympics? Cricket is the sport here. Cricket is not even an Olympic sport and certainly wouldn’t be a Winter Olympics sport. Today there were three pages of sports in the newspaper not counting a front page article about cricket. The Olympics got a total of 3 column-inches -- a brief story about an athlete who broke his tooth biting his medal. The Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi in 8 months are getting a lot more press than the Olympics, but nothing can compete with cricket. Cricket is always on TV, but I haven’t seen any Olympics on TV.

Elections – The greater Bangalore municipal elections were to be held on Sunday, February 21. After an appeal went all the way to the India Supreme Court, the election has been postponed so that the state can redo the reservation of wards (meaning district boundaries, I think). The state’s high court has ruled that the election must be held by March 30. The State Election Commission is in a funk saying that they would like to postpone the election for 6 months because school and college examinations are in March and April to be followed by a population census. (We will leave before the exams, but the net effect on our kids is that their teachers will be assigning less written homework in the coming weeks so that students have more time to study. In Eliza’s words: Ka-ching!)

Obama’s State of the Union Address – What do you remember about the SOTU address? Here in India, two parts got top billing. 1) “Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile…China… Germany… India is not waiting. These nations — they're not standing still. … They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure….” 2) “…to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas, and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America.” The Indians were proud of the former but a bit concerned about the latter given all the multinational corporations in India.

Terrorism – Yesterday I met a Spanish woman who had regularly frequented the Pune German bakery recently hit by the bomb blast. She left Pune just three days before the blast. Mumbai is talking about adding expensive extra safeguards to its future monorail because the line will venture near the prison housing the lone surviving terrorist of the 2008 Mumbai hotel blast. Every week I hear about shootouts with or incursions by terrorists in the state of Jammu and Kashmir near Pakistan. There has been violence over the Telangana statehood issue in nearby Andhra Pradesh. The states of West Bengal and Bihar are engaged in deadly fighting with the Maoist Naxal terrorists hiding in the forests and have vowed to eradicate them.

Mysore: A “New” City in Old Sheep’s Clothing

2010-02-18T03:13:00.000-08:00

Mysore was the headquarters of the Wodeyar maharajas whose dynasty ran from 1399 to 1947 except for the latter part of the 18th century when the Muslims Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan were in power. Mysore is about a 2½-hour drive on a modern highway from Bangalore.

From the roof of our Mysore hotel we could see rising above the horizon a couple mosques and three notable landmarks: the Maharaja’s Palace (south), the Lalitha Mahal (east) and St Philomena’s Church (north). Mysore and Bangalore vied for state capital in 1956. While Bangalore triumphed, the maharaja was named the first governor.

For such an historic city the main sites were surprisingly modern. The old palace burned down in 1897. The replacement was finished in 1912 and is well worth a visit. It is lit up on Sunday nights and other special holidays. The Lalitha Mahal (Mahal is Hindi for palace – think Taj Mahal) was built in 1931 to house the maharaja’s foreign guests. St Philomena’s Church is built in the Gothic style with the maharaja laying the foundation stone in 1933. We didn’t go in the Lalitha Mahal, now an expensive hotel on the outskirts of town, but the other two sites were all the more impressive because they were modern.

Our guidebook praised Mysore as a walkable city. If you know any blind people that want to visit India, Mysore is the place to go. In Bangalore and Delhi we have to constantly watch our step. There are holes, ditches, loose blocks of cement acting as sidewalks and, as the cuts on my palms and knee will attest, the occasional low-to-the ground pole to trip over as you try to cross the street. Mysore had some narrow streets without much in the way of sidewalks, but there were huge swaths of town with walkable sidewalks, or pavements, as they are called here.

Mysore seems to be part of the tourist circuit. In fact, our friend Greg saw some people he recognized from his side trip to Mangalore (which is not part of the tourist circuit). He and I also ran into a Spanish couple that we earlier met in Bangalore’s premier park, Lal Bagh. The wife can really carry off wearing a sari. I haven’t seen any other foreign woman able to do that.

Mysore is also a much smaller city than Bangalore. We kept running into Mysorean auto rickshaw drivers that we had seen before. There are some tourists who take a day trip from Bangalore to visit Mysore. Mysore (population: ~ 1 million) isn’t that small in my opinion. We spent 3 ½ days away from Bangalore, and we didn’t see everything there was to see. Fortunately, we were able to fulfill the Eric’s wish to climb Chamundi Hills south of Mysore where he got his picture taken in front of a statue of the demon that Mysore is named after. Chamundi is the goddess that defeated the demon Mahishasura.

On the way to Mysore we also satisfied the girls’ main wish to take a boat ride and see crocodiles at a bird sanctuary on the Kaveri (Cauvery) River. The sanctuary is near Srirangapatna, which was our first stop on the way to Mysore. Srirangapatna is an island in the middle of the Kaveri River. Tipu Sultan was killed there when British troops with the help of some of Tipu’s traitorous commanders breached the fort. Tipu Sultan had been considered the biggest threat to English dominance in India. After he fell, the maharaja was “returned” to power.

Parcel Or Having?

2010-02-10T05:49:00.000-08:00

Hindi and English are the two official languages of India. You might think that English would be as common in India as it is in the US, and it is certainly common on signs, in stores, etc. However, many Indians on the street and in the buses do not speak English very well…. Meanwhile, my daughters would tell you that they know a fair number of Indians at their school who do not speak Hindi very well.

Even people who do speak English speak it in a particularly Indian way. For instance, today I bought a little savory pastry and the clerk asked me, “Parcel or having?” (American translation: For here or to go?)

Every morning over breakfast I read the newspaper. In the US, words printed in a different language are often italicized. In the Times of India newspaper here, an entire phrase in Hindi, titles of movies and, notably, the word “allegedly” are printed in italics. Other words are just printed as though they are standard English. Below is a list of some of the words that appear regularly in the newspaper along with what I think the words mean more or less, maybe less.

bandh (a protest. See dharna.)
bunk (to skip, as in bunk classes)
crore (10,000,000, often written as 1,00,00,000. See lakh.)
dharna (a sit-down strike or protest. See bandh.)
goonda (gangster or mobster)
jawan (soldier)
lakh (100,000, often written as 1,00,000. See crore.)
manoo (a person, perhaps more specifically a citizen -- often used as Mumbai manoos)
neta (a politician)

The Indians seem much more comfortable with language ambiguity than Americans. There are many people in Bangalore who didn’t grow up in this region and therefore don’t speak Kannada. They often don’t completely understand other Indians, but it doesn’t seem to faze them much.

In September Eric and I were watching English news on Indian television. Suddenly the reporter cut to an interview with the Minister for Human Resource Development. The minister proceeded to speak rapidly in Hindi but threw in a few English words like post-doctorate and research. I don't remember the exact words and didn’t record them. Eric and I just stood there with our mouths open.

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible in conversation, but the alphabets are entirely different. Eric told me that because of increasing Indo-Pak (Indian-Pakistani) tension there is a concerted effort to stop using Hindi words that came from Persian and Arabic. If a word is not pure Hindi, i.e. derived from Sanskrit or another Indian subcontinent language, one solution is to substitute an English word for the impure word.

Recently there has been a big uproar in Mumbai (Bombay) about language. In January the state’s chief minister suggested that all new cab drivers should be fluent in Marathi, the local language, but has since retracted that suggestion. The local Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) parties are based at least partly on a “Mumbai for Mumbai manoos” brand of politics. Recently the Indian National Congress Party General Secretary Rahul Gandhi (son of Rajiv and Sonia, grandson of Indira, and great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru) responded by saying that Mumbai belongs to all Indians. The big Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan has voiced similar opinions. Mumbai is not only the largest city in India; it is also the film and financial capital.

Shah Rukh Khan leads me to another feature of English in India – abbreviations. Many people refer to Shah Rukh Khan as SRK. Almost every town has a Mahatma Gandhi Road, better known as MG Road. I was on CMH Road, and my host didn’t even know that CMH stood for Chinmaya Mission Hospital. Banashankari neighborhood is known as BSK, etc., etc., etc. Many Indian names are so long that people go by initials and last names. The full names are not even printed in newspapers. My first bridge partner here is known as RV.

Another language difficulty is that many names have officially changed, but habits die hard. Many city names have changed, e.g. Bangalore to Bengaluru, but the English name is still used at least in English conversations. Another example: To go to the central Kempegowda Bus Station, ask for Majestic. More frustrating is that street names have also changed. I haven’t found street signs to be standard fare here so I’ve learned to read the addresses listed at the bottom of store front signs. (See photo.)

The moral – Come to India to experience English like you never have before. Warning: You might want to give yourself several weeks to learn the little language tricks.

Michael Jackson and Sports Terms

2010-02-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been long overdue for a blog entry, but now I will tell you more about the playground kids.

I noticed some boys singing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” while swinging on the swings tonight, so I brought down the iPod speakers and rotated between Michael Jackson for the boys, and Taylor Swift for some of the girls. It was really fun and we pretended to be the singers, singing and air guitaring wildly. Some passersby, usually adults returning from work, gave us weird looks, but one grandmother brought her infant granddaughter and we danced with her. Some of the Michael Jackson fans were so passionate that I had to draw a line around the five-foot radius of the iPod speakers so they didn’t press their ears against the speakers. You might not know this, but half the eight-year-old boys out there are just Michael Jackson waiting to happen. I wish you could have seen some of the moves!

Usually, nights after I finish my homework, I go play soccer with the under tens, (which doesn’t work too well because they all want to be on my team), then go up for dinner at around 7:00, then play with the little kids for a while longer, until about 8:00, when the other older kids come out. Then I get to play the kind of soccer where I don’t have to go easy, explain the hand ball rule six times, or break up arguments about who can be goalie. This is really fun until about 8:30, when Dad drags us upstairs to shower and go to bed.

Some sports vocabulary is different here also. Obviously, they call soccer football, but there are other differences as well. Goal keep is goalie, table tennis is ping pong, and “area” is when you don’t clear the ball when playing half court basketball. We don’t have basketball at our apartment complex, but we do have table tennis, pool, and a gym in the clubhouse.

Life in the Complex: from Recycling to Swimming Pools

2010-02-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

For years back in Colorado our family had trash and recycling. Last year we acquired compost. After that I felt like I could never go back. I realized how much I had been wasting before. The apartment complex we now live in has neither recycling nor compost, although my dad thinks that the trash is sorted once it's outside the building. It’s really hard for me to throw away a banana peel or a cardboard box. Our school here has recycling and so do some other public places, but for the most part recycling is not yet a common phenomenon. I have yet to see a compost bin. I haven’t even seen that many in the US.

Our apartment complex is fairly new, and when it was built many young couples moved into it. Therefore, there is now a tremendous number of little kids. Out of the kids my sister and I have seen, only about ten are in fifth grade through tenth grade. I’d say we’ve seen about twenty kids aged four through ten and about fifteen infants. Mind you, these are only the ones we’ve seen. There is a smallish sort of sand box in the courtyard with various different kinds of playground equipment, and I’ve never seen it empty between 9 am and 8 pm. The little kids look up to me in awe, but they absolutely worship the ground Sophia walks on. Almost every night, there will be either be a phone call or a knock on the door asking Sophia if she wants to come play. Usually she will say yes, unless she has some more homework to do, etc. We have played many games, but the more common include football (soccer), freeze tag, and spud.

I’ve noticed a few differences about life in an apartment complex as opposed to a house. For one, you only have to walk downstairs to get involved in a conversation or a game of football. There is more neighborliness. When my mom wanted to borrow a rolling pin to make roti, she simply waltzed on over to her friend’s apartment. A few weeks later, that same friend taught her how to make saag paneer. As well, usually when I introduce myself to another kid, I mention my name and grade/age. Here you introduce yourself with your name, grade/age, and apartment number. For example, “Hi, I’m Eliza. I’m 13 and I live in X123.”

In our courtyard there is a lovely swimming pool surrounded by thick and quite beautiful foliage. My sister and I have taken a dip in it many balmy weekends. Here in Bangalore we are 13 degrees away from the equator so even in January it can get up to 85°F in the middle of the day. On one side of the pool there is a coconut tree, although my friend informed me that no one eats the coconuts; partly because no one owns a knife large enough to cut one of them up and partly because no one wants to climb up to get them down. I guess that coconuts don’t just fall off the tree like in stories or maybe our tree is just different.

Some of the foliage surrounding the swimming pool. Overhead, on the opposite side of the pool, you can see the coconut tree.

Chitra Santhe, an Art Fair

2010-02-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

Today Sophia and I had our picture in the Bangalore Mirror. I couldn’t find the picture online, but I took my own photo of it. We were photographed at the Chitra Santhe, a once-a-year event in which painters line Kumara Krupa Road displaying and selling their art. We went to the event with Eric’s Indian grad school buddy and his family. From reading the paper every day I get the impression that newspaper photographers like to take photos of foreigners at Indian events. One of the clues that I’m a foreigner besides my skin and hair coloring is that I wear sunglasses. I do see some Indians wear sunglasses, but they stand out.

Because a couple of photographers took pictures of us at the fair, we suspected that we might be in the paper. I checked the papers at the dining hall this morning but didn’t see our picture. Sure enough though, the photo of the art fair in The Times of India had a foreigner perusing the art. Later I was walking through the complex gate returning from grocery shopping and the complex guards were quite pleased with themselves; they had found my photo in the Bangalore Mirror. I put the groceries away and went back out and bought 5 newspapers. Newspapers are cheap here. The 5 newspapers together cost me only 7½ rupees, about 17 US cents. The Times of India, a national newspaper, is twice as expensive.

The friend we went with told us that the fair is usually at the end of December, but because of a lunar eclipse on Dec 31, 2009, the fair was moved to the end of January.

At the fair Sophia had her portrait drawn. She is holding it in the photo. I bought a Madhubani painting and Eliza got a Warli painting.

Madhubani is a town in northern India in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. The painting was traditionally done on mud walls, but now it is done on cloth and paper. A special nib – cotton wrapped around bamboo -- is used for applying the colors which are made from plants. The black outline is kohl, also used by women as eye makeup. A distinguishing feature of Madhubani paintings is that the entire canvas is filled with figures or designs.

Everyone tells me that Warli paintings are from Maharashtra, the state in western India which contains Bombay (Mumbai), but some research indicates that the Warlis spill over into a couple of other states too. The Warlis are an ST (scheduled tribe). [Along with SCs (scheduled castes), STs are specifically recognized by the Indian constitution, and efforts are made to safeguard and improve their welfare.] Warli paintings are traditionally white rice paste painted on a reddish mud background though we were shown a brownish cow dung background also. The paintings depict daily life. The people and animals are primarily constructed from triangles and circles. A circular folk dance is a prominent feature of many paintings. Here you can see the dance and a bullock cart plowing the fields.

Ganesh was probably the most popular painters’ subject at the art fair. We already had a glass painting of Ganesh (below) made by the mother of a colleague of Eric so we didn’t feel that we needed to choose from among the many Ganesh options in order to fill a void. You can see a mouse in the painting below. A mouse is Ganesh’s vehicle. Every Hindu god or goddess has a vehicle. A vehicle is much more than just an animal or a means of transportation, but I’m certainly not the one to ask about the deeper symbolism.

Cyclone!

2010-01-31T06:30:00.000-08:00

I promised to pass on the story told to me on the beach of the Bay of Bengal by the postdoc from Orissa. First of all it's worth noting that Orissa is one of the least-developed regions of India and that to encounter a PhD scientist from Orissa, especially from the rural areas as was this man, is a rare event, representing a striking example of social mobility that would at one time have been unheard of in India.

Along the northern end of the Bay of Bengal, the coastal regions of Burma, Bangladesh, West Bengal, and Orissa form a continuous strip of very similar, heavily populated land, some tens of km wide. much of it no more than ten meters in elevation above high tide. The land is intensively cultivated, and in many regions there is little by way of forest or other buffer zone to protect a village from whatever cyclones the Bay of Bengal should brew up. I know very little by way of meteorology, so BadMom should jump in with a correction, but a cyclone is very much like a hurricane. My understanding is that cyclones are huge, circular tropical storms, and that hurricanes are a subset of cyclones -- if a cyclone is large enough, and has the good fortune to have been born in the gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, or the waters off the eastern coast of the Americas, then it gets to call itself a hurricane. The cyclones that roar up out of the Bay of Bengal are by definition, then, not hurricanes, but the largest of the Bengal cyclones can put to shame even a Class V hurricane (think Katrina, Rita, Mitch, Gilbert, or if you're old enough, Camille).

View Larger Map

Half a million people died in the 1970 cyclone that hit what is now Bangladesh. Cyclones that kill 10,000 or more happen several times per decade. In a later post I'll talk about what makes cyclones so lethal in these parts, but for now, here is what the postdoc told me:

The 1999 Orissa cyclone had sustained winds over 250 km/hr, gusts to 300 km/hr. The winds and the low-pressure eye drove a storm surge (increase in sea level height) estimated to be in excess of 8 m. Storm surges are not like a momentary big wave that can be blocked by a a few rows of trees. They are a sustained increase in the depth of the water along the coast line. In the event of an 8 m surge, if you are taking shelter in a single-story house built on ground 5 meters above sea level (as could be true even if you live even 20 km or more from the coast) and if the tallest sturdy piece of furniture in your house is 1 m tall, and if you yourself are 1.5 m tall, then (5+1+1.5<8) either you drown or you take your chances on your open roof, in 250 km/h winds (if your roof hasn't blown off).

The postdoc was a teenager in 1999, and with his family was fortunate to live in a house on higher ground, so that at its peak the water rose only to the height of one meter above the floor of their single-story house. He and his family spent in total 36 hours in water. They had the foresight to bring the family cow inside as the storm arose. Unsheltered cows mostly died, as did birds by the millions. The postdoc spoke of how, as the storm came in, it was frightening but also thrilling to see the power of the winds, with birds slamming into the walls of their house and falling instantly dead. It was exciting to peek out the window and see trees topple. First the power went out, but still their battery-powered radio brought weather updates until (as they learned only later) the transmission towers blew over. When the water came in, he got very cold and the storm became less interesting. When the winds calmed and the waters receded, the family went outside and were astonished to have clear lines of sight in every direction, it seemed like forever. The winds had simply flattened many smaller trees, and most of the houses. Their neighbors lived mostly in bamboo-framed, thatch-roofed dwellings, and many of his neighbors had been killed. There was no way to cook rice, and the rest of their food had been spoiled by the filthy water, liquid cholera. But with the coconut trees blown down, there were coconuts by the tens of thousands lying around everywhere you looked. Tightly sealed against impurity, the coconuts' wholesome milk and delicate flesh was all the family had to eat or drink for three days, until at last the helicopters arrived to drop emergency supplies.

The postdoc said that he had had a relatively easy time of it compared to his friend who was earning his living as a fisherman, living some kilometers closer to the coast. His friend heard the warnings a day or so in advance, and knew of the risk, but was tired of evacuating for false alarms and so he and a number of other young men decided to stay put and ride it out. But this was no false alarm, and the waters in this village rose to much deeper than one meter, covering (or knocking over) all the buildings in the village. The friend with eight other men climbed trees to escape the rising water. The wind blew the leaves off the trees, and then it blew the clothes off the men. Some of the men lost their strength, fell into the water, and drowned. When the winds eased, there were only three men left, but the waters were still too deep to stand. The other two men, tired of clinging to branches, climbed down into the waters, but there they eventually drowned. Our postdoc's friend was the only remaining man, and he was determined to wait until the waters fully receded. Eventually they did, but when he tried to climb down, he fainted. (I speculate it was the effect of blood rushing back into his long-cramped limbs). He fell to the ground, breaking his leg. He lay there naked in the mud for some uncertain length of time. He was rescued by some returning villagers who set out to collect and dispose of corpses, but found one man alive. His leg eventually healed, according to my Orissan narrator.

All Politics Is Local

2010-01-31T03:24:00.001-08:00

Many of our posts have emphasized the novel aspects of India, but there are plenty of examples of how India is just like home. Here we are in Bangalore, a big city anticipating municipal elections in a month. And what happens in big cities a month before elections? Yep, all week long there's been a work crew filling potholes in the lane outside our apartment building. I for one am so grateful that I just might vote for the incumbents after all.

Scissors Are a Cook's Best Friend

2010-01-26T20:32:00.000-08:00

We bought lots of containers in our first few days here. MANY food items (e.g. oil, spices, milk, ghee, laundry detergent) come in plastic bags. You open a plastic bag of food and need to store the contents in a container. Fortunately, our service apartment comes with daily housekeeping because we spill a lot of milk and other food when opening plastic bags. Indians just seem much more skilled at pouring things. I read The Toss of a Lemon in which the author mentions several times how the characters would pour from a jug straight into their mouths without touching the jug with their mouths. I was excited when I saw a lady perform this feat at a street stall in Bangalore. It wasn’t a real performance. She was just getting a drink, and I was watching.

We have a three-step process for turning on the stove. First open the valve on the gas cylinder on our balcony, then turn on a switch on the wall, then turn the burner knob. If the fire doesn’t light (which is most of the time), use the little ignition tool to create a spark to make the burner light. When you are done with the gas, turn off the gas switch inside and close the valve on the gas cylinder.

Sometimes we have power in the apartment, but the washing machine stops prematurely or the microwave oven doesn’t turn on. Evidently there are two electrical systems in the apartment. (See Eric’s “Retrofit Technology” post.) The power will go out for the outlets connected to the heavy-duty appliances: fridge, microwave, kettle, toaster, iron, and washing machine. These outlets have a different configuration from the normal electrical outlets for plugging in lamps, laptops, etc.

Every morning after the girls head off to school, I eat breakfast in the dining hall operated by our apartment manager. There is always “bread” such as paratha, idly or dosa [picture of a dosa maker below] with a sambhar (spicy sauce) and a chutney (usually coconut sauce). These are eaten with one’s fingers, the fingers of one’s right hand. Often people put the sambhar, chutney and yogurt (to cut the spice) in separate bowls. Sometimes there will be another grain such as flavored noodles or couscous. We can also order eggs. Chai and coffee are available. Toast, butter and jam are always offered too. I’m used to the breakfasts now and quite like the paratha and sambhar. In the dining hall I read the paper every morning cover to cover. The reading is going faster now that I am more familiar with the context of the Indian soap opera – oops, I meant politics and Bollywood. I also check out the English-language movie selections in case there is anything I want to see.

Lunch and dinner are also available in the dining hall. Eric took advantage of these meals when we went to Delhi, and the family eats there when I’m playing bridge and therefore not cooking or we have some afternoon outing like going to see Avatar at the movie theater. The girls’s school offers breakfast and lunch though Sophia prefers to eat breakfast at home. The school food is pretty simple, often daal (lentils). The girls give mixed reviews of the food. In our apartment I sometimes cook Indian food, but I think the girls appreciate an “American” dinner after an Indian breakfast and lunch. Today a neighbor in our complex is going to help me perfect my saag recipe.

I made chapattis once. They were a big hit. We used them like tortillas to wrap up burrito fixings. Standard kitchen equipment includes a rolling pin and a very flat pan for cooking the chapattis.

A word often used in India is “pulse.” It means “edible seeds of various pod-bearing plants (peas or beans or lentils).” The price of pulses is discussed in the newspaper, but I have never seen the price of meat mentioned. It is difficult to find meat in grocery stores here though it is not so hard to order it in restaurants. McDonald’s here offers chicken and vegetarian options, but no beef. I did find chicken in a store two bus rides away. I’ve only bought meat once in a grocery store here. I sort of felt like I was committing a sin by buying chicken. That grocery store also carries Sophia’s favorite breakfast cereal -- we bought out their stock – and salsa and soy sauce.

A Day Off From School

2010-01-26T03:24:00.000-08:00

Today is Republic Day, the anniversary of India signing their constitution and officially becoming a republic. We have the day off school, and they are showing patriotic movies on TV. Also, while I was eating breakfast I heard shouting from outside in the courtyard, but not angry shouting. It was almost like chanting. It went like this:

Single person: “Mahatma Gandhi!”
Crowd: “Ya!”
Single person: “Mahatma Gandhi!”
Crowd: “Ya!

Sophia had already finished her breakfast. She was down in the courtyard, and later she told me about something else that happened before the shouting. It was a sort of flag unfurling ceremony. She said they hoisted the Indian national flag up to the top of the pole while it was still furled up. Once it was up, they pulled the string that was holding it together off and as it opened, flowers fell out. Flowers are a pretty big thing here. There is a whole garland-making industry and people will hang garlands on anything from their hair to rear-view mirrors to cows’ horns.

On another topic I’ve noticed almost everybody in my class is very neat. Their handwriting is gorgeous and they always take notes in full sentences. Whenever they have to draw a line, be it for a final project or a quick t-chart, they use a ruler. They use copious amounts of white-out.

Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes the assignments are very vague, like the teacher will say, “Please compare the case studies in Chapter 9 of your textbook and turn it in on Friday.” I’ll be left scratching my head and thinking ‘What? Should I write an essay? A t-chart? A Venn diagram? Brief notes?’ I’ve found that the best answer in those situations is to write in whichever format I feel best fits the topic. The teacher doesn’t usually care.

In response to the comment from Anne (see comment under School), I’d say in English my sister and I are slightly ahead of some kids and at the same level as other kids, because a few kids in my class are “native” speakers, but the rest aren’t. My sister now says the word “very” with a slight Indian accent. The yoga class seems to be mostly stretching and exercise, although I have only had two classes so I haven’t had a lot of time to observe. Thanks for commenting.

Sorry everybody for not posting in such a long time. I've had a lot of homework.

Retrofit Technology

2010-01-24T02:12:00.000-08:00

A friend asked me how modern-day high-tech India works in an infrastructure which remains kind of shaky. The key to the coexistence of these worlds is a strategy of local patches to fill gaps in the infrastructure.

The result is a sort of retrofit technology, that seems to work, at least for some people. Cellphones are the perfect example, of course. Cell phone coverage here in India is excellent. In the US, when the population density is too low, cell phone companies don't bother providing coverage. Of course, the residences and businesses in those areas have excellent landlines, put in place long before cell phones were invented. Here in India, cell phone coverage extends to regions of much lower population density, and provides coverage to regions that never had thorough landline coverage (and now, in all likelihood, never will have it). Prepaid cellphone plans are ubiquitous and cheap: you don't need to have credit to have a cell phone. To my mind, this is a particularly successful application of retrofit technology. Other aspects of RT work less well.

Take, for example, drinking water. The retrofit solution to problem of the drinking water not being pure enough for drinking is that most middle-class kitchens have a big water-cooler type jug of filtered water balanced on a dispenser on the kitchen counter. That's great, if you are middle-class.

How about power outages? Five-minute-long failures occur multiple times per day, and are symptoms of supply not being able to keep up with minor local peaks in demand. How can you do business, or research, in an environment like that? The main work-around is the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). Basically, a UPS is a rechargeable battery, with a dc-ac inverter built in. Plug something into a UPS, and it can ride out a power failure, at least if it doesn't last more than a few minutes. In the US, a UPS is a ultra-high-tech talisman, a pricey little bauble you buy only to hang around the neck of some awesomely important gadget. Here in India, UPS's are ubiquitous. Our apartment complex boasts a small gym with two electrically powered treadmills. Imagine jogging along on a treadmill and suddenly being plunged into blackness at the same time as the motor on the treadmill ground to a halt. No problem where we live: each treadmill is plugged into its very own UPS box. The other main retrofit work-around is the diesel "genset", a small diesel motor mounted together with a generator and a power conditioner on a pallet for easy transport. The electricity produced this way is very expensive per kwh, and generates a lot of emissions, but it is considerably more reliable than utility electricity.

The village fair I walked through in West Bengal remained open late into the night. It was lit by fluorescent lights temporarily hung from trees surrounding the field that served as a fairground and those lights as well as the PA system were all wired to a diesel genset, although utility power was available. At the meeting I was attending, dinner was served each night on tables set up on the lawn in front of the hotel. On several occasions, the power went out, and we sat in complete darkness except for the glow coming through the trees from the fairground. If anything, the music blaring from the PA systems (a mixture of devotional music specific to the Goddess to whom the fair was dedicated and dance numbers from Hindi musical movies) seemed to get louder during the power outages.

Big hightech companies in Bangalore will have two completely separate sets of power wiring in their buildings. One is an ordinary circuit, connected directly to the city utility lines, and one is the UPS circuits, backed up by batteries for the first few seconds of a power failure and by a many kW diesel generator that kicks in soon after. Computer infrastructure, telephone switchoards, and all fragile electronics are plugged into the UPS sockets. Of the office lighting in the ceiling, about one lamp in twenty is wired to the UPS, so it gets darker but not really black when the power goes out. One can basically work right through a power outage. OK, you can't make xerox copies, and over time you start to notice the lack of ventilation and AC, but failures rarely last long enough for there to be much inconvenience. I've yet to find out if the elevators are UPS wired.

The problem as I see it with all these work-around retro-fixes is that once someone or some company has made the investment, bought the UPS, the cell phone, the filtered water, those people stop providing the political pressure to get central infrastructure improved. If you can't afford a big bottle of water for your kitchen counter, or if you can't afford a kitchen counter -- many people live in shacks and get their water from public taps located here and there -- then you are out of luck.

I'll close this piece with a description of the single piece of technology I've found most striking since we came to India. In the Bengal village there is a long, low warehouse build along the river just before it reaches the sea. The fishing fleet offloads its catch here. Some of the catch is dried (odiferously) on racks by the beach, but some of of is stored under refrigeration in the warehouse. Out behind the warehouse is an enormous set of evaporator coils, open to the air, perhaps ten meters on a side and almost as tall. A circulating pump draws water out of the river and sprays it across the top layer of tubes in the evaporator. The water trickles down in a sort of 3-d waterfall, splattering noisly down, bouncing off and thoroughly wetting the outside of tube in the extensive network of coils, and cascades out the bottom to collect in a little pond there then flows back into river. Basically, it's a wet cooling tower, except without the tower (without the concrete shell around the outside). The rack supporting the condenser coils look homemade, in some cases reinforced with diagonal braces made of bamboo. The whole effect reminded me a little of the technology in the movie Mad Max.

Eric in Bengal

2010-01-24T01:48:00.000-08:00

First a geography lesson for those who know as little of the geography of India as I do. "Bengal" sounds a lot to me like "Bangalore", and one might think these two places are related. In fact, Bengal is a large region in the east of India, adjacent to the boarder of Bangladesh, unrelated to and located quite far from the city of Bangalore. The metropolis of Calcutta is located in the state of West Bengal. I have just returned from a a week spent attending a professional meeting in West Bengal. From the Calcutta airport, it was a five-hour ride in a van, traveling 200 km southwest, to the meeting venue, a beach hotel in a village on the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

The village economy rests on fishing year round, and on beach tourism during the few months when it is neither too hot nor too cold to go to the beach. January is held to be cold for the beach but for the first few days of our meeting the village bustled with visitors from the nearby towns to the village's once-a-year fair, partly religious and partly commercial. Our conference overlapped with the last few days of this boisterous event. The weather was pleasant: dry, cool, and sunny. The beach hotel is actually located about 1.5 km inland from the beach to gain some protection from the cyclones that roar in from the Bay of Bengal (more about which in a future post.)

After the fair ended, the village emptied out. I went for a walk down to the beach along with a young scientist, a native of the nearby state of Orissa, who was back in the region to attend the meeting.

The village boasts an active boat yard, and there were four or five wooden fishing boats in various stages of construction, being worked on by perhaps a dozen men: one is a mere wooden skeleton, one has the planking complete along one side of the boat; one is completely planked and with a wheelhouse being erected on the deck; one is painted white and looking tidy, seaworthy, and ready to launch. The boats are larger than the lobster boats but smaller than the sea-going trawlers of the fishing fleets of my own home region. These boats looked like they might be manned by perhaps three or four fishermen. Looking at the boatyard as an economic enterprize, I noted that its owners apparently do not believe in tying up their capital in unnecessary infrastructure or inventory. There is no warehouse, no shed, no enclosing fence, not even a dock. Just a smallish pile of lumber, a few hand tools, and some saw horses. Each unfinished boat frame is held upright with a minimal, jerry-rigged wooden cradle, and there are some winches, perhaps for dragging the finished boats across a short stretch of mudflat to a tidal estuary that at high tide would be maybe deep enough to float the boats out to sea. I believe the boats are to be propelled by an inboard motor, but I saw no trace of that equipment. I wonder if those are installed elsewhere*.

*After writing this, I went and had a look at the boatyard on Google. In the "satellite" image, you can see what looks like four boats under construction, with an empty "slip" among them, although I think the slip is just a dent in the mud. When I visited, the river was much lower than in this image, and the surf much lower as well. I did not see the docks shown in this photo as I walked along BenFish Beach Rd. down to the beach. When I was there, the docks must have been partially disassembled or hidden behind the long low refrigerated warehouse you can see just south of the boatyard.

View Larger Map

The beach in the depth of the Bengal winter was all but deserted. The beach slopes very gently and at low tide it is hundreds of meters wide, and stretches for many kilometers into the distant haze in both directions. Scrubbed afresh by the tide every twelve hours, it was quieter, emptier and cleaner than any other place I've seen in India.

Thousands of tiny beach crabs dig their holes all along the beach. These crabs are nature's obsessive-compulsives. Each time they emerge from a hole with a freshly excavated lump of sand, they dont't toss it willy-nilly in a heap, but instead arrange the successive lumps in long rows running radially out from their hole. They carry the lumps on their hind legs, I think, and after several hours' of fussy labor, a crab may have eight or nine rows of sand lumps, each consisting of dozens of tiny lumps evenly spaced about every five millimeters, with the rows stretching out like the radial strands of a spider's web from the central hole. Then the tide comes in and washes the whole thing away, and the crab starts fresh.

When my colleague and I got back from our stroll along the beach, I stopped at a little stall set up just where the village's main street ends at the beach.

Ever since I got to India I have been working up my courage to buy a coconut (see photo at bottom of Celeste's post for the Bangalore version of the coconut experience) from a street-side vendor, and this stall in the shade of what was in fact a heavy-laden coconut tree seemed as good a place as any to try it. What followed was a ritual I have seen enacted all over Bangalore as well. The vendor selects a coconut from his pyramidal stockpile. Holding the coconut firmly in his hand, he grabs his knife (a machete-like blade, very sharp, hooked inward at the point) and, thwack, thwack, thwack, he cuts off slices from the tip of the coconut's fibrous hull, with each thwack going a little deeper until he opens just a penny-sized hole in the spherical hollow interior. He puts a new plastic straw in the opening and hands it to you, the customer. In coconuts I've bought from supermarkets, the milk has largely dried up, leaving only a few spoonfuls of thickened, sweetish fluid. In a fresh coconut, harvested young, the milk fills the whole interior, perhaps 300 cc in all. Sometimes the milk is even slightly pressurized, so that a little spritzes out when the nut is opened. The sweetness is only barely perceptible -- a really refreshing drink.

After you slurp the last of the milk, you hand the coconut back to the vendor. He holds the coconut in the palm of his hand and hacks with seeming abandon with his blade, right down through the center of the coconut, towards his palm. Were the coconut to split apart faster than he planned, the sinews and bone of his finger would surely offer less resistance to his blade than the tough fibrous hull. From one edge of the hull, he slices a chip, maybe five cm in diameter and just a few mm thick. This is your "spoon." He prises the split halves of the coconut apart, and uses your spoon to scoop the flesh from the interior of one half and add it to the other half. Then he hands you the half shell and the spoon. I'm accustomed to the flesh of coconuts being dryish, woody, and with a pronounced coconut flavor. The flesh of these street-side coconuts is instead silky in texture, like thick yoghurt or thin ricotta, with a very delicate taste.

When you are done, you toss the empty hull and spoon onto a towering pyramid of "empties." Of various street-side food and drink experiences you can have in India, a coconut consumed this way is one almost certain to be hygienic.

My colleague the Orrisan postdoc did not join me in a coconut cocktail that evening but instead told me the harrowing story of a time when the naturally sanitary nature of fresh coconuts helped save the lives of his family. I'll transcribe that story to this blog, in a few days.

School

2010-01-23T22:43:00.000-08:00

Our school is from grades preschool-12th. The really little kids don’t even go to school a full day; they leave after lunch. The smaller grades are Montessori, but Eliza and my grades don’t do that. You have eight classes a day plus lunch. Each class is taught by a different teacher but instead of moving to different teacher’s classrooms, the different teachers come to you.

The school campus is divided by a small dirt (mud) road. On one side of the road are the little kids’ classes, the squash court and the outdoor amphitheater. On the other side is 5th grade through 12th grade, the cafeteria, (called the canteen), the library, the basketball courts and the tennis courts. It also has the computer lab, labs for bio, physics, chemistry and math, and the yoga room. The younger kids’ side is lush and green while our side is pretty much cement.

Every morning, before our eight periods of classes, we go to the amphitheater for assembly. The four houses[1] sit separately. Here we say a couple prayers, sing this one song (in Hindi?) for reasons I can’t understand, and sing the school song. On Monday we sing the school song in English, on Tuesday Hindi, on Wednesday Kannada,[2] on Thursday English, and on Friday Hindi. If we have school on Saturday, which happens every other week, then we sing the school song in Kannada.[3] After singing, students will come up and perform skits or poetry recitation. The music teacher will come to the stage and lead us in yet another song. The principal will remind us of rules and make announcements, and then sometimes there will be competitions between houses and the winners will be awarded points. Then we cross back over to the other side of the campus and school begins.

At our school we don’t have every class every day because there are so many. Instead of just having English, there is English Literature and Whole Language as well as English class. Although you may not take “English” every day, you will always have one or two English-y classes. It is the same with science. We have biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental education. You can’t choose any electives because there is only one class per grade, but we do have yoga, chess, computers, and games (PE) spread out over the week. The classes are taught in English, but you also take French and either Hindi or Kannada. Because we will only be here for three months, I do not have to take Hindi, Kannada, or French. During these periods I just go to the library and do my homework, but again I don’t have these classes every day so don’t think that I have two free periods a day.

This is off topic but I have noticed that when we are touring sites like the red fort in Agra or even the Lalbagh gardens here in Bangalore, random people want to take pictures with us, especially me and Eliza. At first I just assumed it was because of our charming good looks,[4] but Mom says these people have probably lived in more rural India and have barely ever seen foreigners so they want a picture to prove to their friends back home that they have seen us.

[1] Every student is assigned to one house. There are four houses.
[2] Kannada is the local language here.
[3] It is going to take me forever to memorize all of these songs!
[4] Hee hee.

Bangalore is Unique

2010-01-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

We had spotty internet access over the weekend, and then it went down entirely until a technician fixed the problem on Tuesday afternoon. I was asked to confirm with his supervisor over the phone that the “good man” had indeed fixed the problem. I love the way Indians say “good man” and “good name.”

Friday was eclipse day. I found it markedly cooler during the eclipse, and the interplay of light and shadow through bushes made interesting crescent patterns. Eric was on the roof at work looking through a pinhole with the Muslims and non-superstitious Hindus. Work was noticeably quiet with many Hindus absent. Hindus consider eclipses inauspicious and tend to stay inside. Restaurants in town suffered from lack of business. Busy streets were deserted.

I played duplicate bridge last week and have plans to play again this week. The community is very welcoming but quite small considering the size of Bangalore. Many of the players started off playing chess but never looked back once they started playing bridge. Chess is a mandatory subject at the girls’ school.

I’m learning some interesting facts about Bangalore. More than half the foreigners in India live in Bangalore. I’m not sure if that statistic includes foreigners from neighboring countries such as Sri Lanka and Nepal or not. Living on the outskirts of town, I can go for days without meeting any discernable foreigners.

A related fact is that more than half the multinational corporation (MNC) talent – not sure how that is defined – is in Bangalore. This statistic is from the newspaper, I think the Times of India, which also reported that the workplace gender ratio in India is 80:20, men to women. A few years ago it was 95:5 so changes are happening rapidly. Women tend to quit the workforce once they get married and have children. MNCs are offering bonuses to search firms that help their companies hire women.

The traditional big four cities in India are Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi, Kolkata (Calcutta), and Chennai (Madras). They are all coastal cities except for the capital, Delhi. Bangalore is one of Asia’s fastest growing cities and will pass Chennai’s population soon if it hasn’t already. The issues in the upcoming municipal elections bring home that point. Residents want access to clean water, regular trash pick-up and safe, well-maintained roads (as well as an end to corruption). A metro is being constructed downtown, but basic infrastructure seems to be a more pressing concern.

In addition to being India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore is known as the Garden City. Think nice weather, in particular a small temperature range throughout the year. A bridge player compared Bangalore to Florida, noting that Florida is well-known for its retirees who appreciate the mild climate. And, yes, there are lots of palm trees here. There are also coconuts for sale every fifty meters or so along the sides of roads. First, you drink the coconut milk through a straw, and then you eat the meat inside.

Trip to Delhi and Agra – Part 2

2010-01-15T07:22:00.000-08:00

It turned out that until you are 15 years old you have free entry to the Taj Mahal and all the other tombs/monuments. Agra was nice; the hotel had a revolving restaurant. Sadly, the restaurant didn’t turn like I hoped, which was that it would spin so wildly it knocked the silverware off the table. Instead, it turned slowly and continuously. The restaurant had glass walls on all sides so the view changed after time. We left late the second day for the train ride back, and didn’t have the best trip: (see Where is Eliza?).

Now I have made up lyrics for yet another version of On the First Day of Christmas:
On the first day in Delhi my own eyes did see a dead rat lying in the mud
On the second day in Delhi my own eyes did see…2 pinkish pigs
On the third day in Delhi my own eyes did see...3 billy goats
On the fourth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…4 horses pulling
On the fifth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…5 deer like creatures
On the sixth day in Delhi my own eyes did see… 6 monkeys playing
On the seventh day in Delhi my own eyes did see…7 water buffalo
On the eighth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…8 camels snorting
On the ninth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…9 crushed mosquitoes On the tenth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…10 peacocks preening
On the eleventh day in Delhi my own eyes did see…11 pigeons strolling
On the twelfth day in Delhi my own eyes did see…12 stray dogs

The Best Moment of the Day

2010-01-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

If I had to pick my favorite time of day here in Bangalore, it would be weekdays at 7:25 a.m. By that time, most of the dozens and dozens of children living in our apartment complex have collected by the front gate to participate in the colorful Loading of the School Buses ceremony. The children, including Eliza and Sophia, are variously decked out in the uniforms of at least seven different schools. White dress shirts, vee-neck sweaters in various primary colors, blue or red blazers, pants or skirts in navies, greys or earth tones. For some schools, both boys and girls wear striped neckties. One school's uniform is very similar to the one I wore during my one-year stint as a schoolboy in a British-run school in the 1970s. The uniforms are not the same every day (some schools have a "tee-shirt Wednesday", or a "track-suit Friday".)

The younger children have a parent, usually a mother, waiting with them, while children Sophia's age and older make their own way down from their apartments. I like to come along to participate in this community event, even if our girls are embarrassed to have a minder. The small yellow school buses pull up one by one, each with the name of a particular school painted in bold black letters along its side. Each bus has, in addition to a driver, a sort of conductor or kid-wrangler, who jumps out as the bus pulls up and stands by the door. A corresponding group of children breaks loose from the pack waiting just inside the gate and heads out onto their bus. If a smaller child dawdles climbing the steep steps, the wrangler bodily lifts him and more or less tosses him up into the bus. Then the wrangler runs to the back of the bus and helps the driver negotiate a difficult three-point u-turn in our mud lane which is not as wide as the bus is long. The wrangler hustles back to the front of the bus and jumps in as it rolls away. The whole cycle takes about 45 seconds. At the peak of the rush, the next bus arrives just as the previous one departs. Occasionally a kid comes sprinting out of a stairway and across the courtyard towards us in a panic, with a parent calling from a balcony several floors up, presumably saying something like "Hurry up, Vijay, I can see your bus coming already, and I'm not driving you to school."

I like the cool morning air and the sense of participating with our neighbors in a daily routine. The first morning, Celeste and I met the mother of a young boy who goes to the same school as Eliza and Sophia.

The Bangalore Barnyard

2010-01-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

The variety of animals just wandering around on the street is really quite amazing. Everyone has heard about there being cows on the street in India – it’s practically a cliché by now. It’s true that cows are often seen, but in the two weeks that we’ve been here, we’ve also seen the following animals:

-water buffaloes
-horses pulling carts
-stray dogs (more on this later)
-monkeys (especially around the Taj Mahal (see “Where is Eliza?”))
-a herd of goats being driven by a small boy and also several lone goats trotting the side of the road or tied up next to people’s houses
-a sheep
-donkeys pulling carts
-camels (they’re bigger than they look in the movies, although I’ve never made it through Lawrence of Arabia so how should I know.)
-a snake
-deer-like creatures (possibly related to antelopes) in the vast gardens around Akbar’s tomb
-birds (including pigeons, peacocks (near the cremation sites – see the last paragraph of “Where is Eliza"), chickens, geese, and some non-descript, unidentifiable fowl)
-a pig
-lots and lots of mosquitoes
-lots and lots of fruit flies (Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.)
-and a dead rat

Everywhere you look you see stray dogs. (See “Trip to Delhi and Agra – Part 1”) They seem to survive just fine on the trash on the street although they are all skinny, but the people are skinny too. There is basically nobody overweight in India.

I can’t speak for my sister, but I have been rather disappointed that I haven’t seen any elephants yet. My parents saw elephants in temples when they went to Bangalore and Madurai in September. One elephant would “bless” you by touching your forehead with its trunk when you gave its owner a few rupees.

Many people here are vegetarian or part-vegetarian because the Hindus don’t eat meat or at least don’t eat beef and the Muslims don’t eat pork.
There is also a religion called Jainism where not only do you not eat meat, but you don’t eat onions or garlic, either for fear of eating small insects that live in soil and have crawled into the vegetable or for fear of killing those same small insects in the act of pulling it; I’m not sure which.

In Hinduism, there are many gods in the shape of animals. Some examples are the elephant-head god Ganesha, god of beginnings and remover of obstacles (see “Beginnings and Political News”) and the monkey-head god Hanuman, who lead an army of monkeys against the evil demon King Ravana in the famous Indian epic, Ramayana.

Where Is Eliza?

2010-01-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

Eliza has to make up the homework from the 4 days that she missed while we were up north so she isn’t blogging these days. There is no school on Thursday due to a Tamil harvest festival holiday – Pongal. [Correction to previous post: Republic Day to commemorate India becoming a republic in 1950 (2½ years after India became independent) is January 26.] Surprise! The girls came home from school today with a note that there also won’t be school on Friday or Saturday due to the annular solar eclipse. The girls are not in the mood to go on another trip so we will hang around Bangalore. Maybe we will go to the planetarium to see the eclipse. The girls are also arranging get-togethers with school friends. Maybe Eliza will get in a blog entry this weekend.

Eliza is studying computer programming in school -- not too surprising given that we are in Bangalore, India, but not an experience many American youth get these days. In addition to the standard classes, the girls have a chess class, yoga, and civics. PE is called games. The school doesn’t have art, dance, instrumental music, or choir.

Agra was really nice. We could walk to the Taj from our hotel, and we were READY to walk after sitting so long on the bus. Sophia was disappointed that the Taj was basically empty except for the two marble caskets of the beloved wife and her husband. The monkeys lolling around the courtyard helped entertain the girls though.

The train back to Delhi was, in fact, canceled, and we ended up on a train which turned out to take 12 hours to travel the 200 kilometers. Our three tickets on the slow train cost about US $3, but I would have preferred to spend more money and less time on the train. Sophia was suffering from Delhi belly and threw up 3 times on the train.

We didn’t have much time in Delhi since Sophia wasn’t feeling great and we caught up on some sleep after the long train ride. We did see the Red Fort constructed by Shah Jahan who also had the Taj Mahal built. Every Independence Day (August 15), the prime minister raises the Indian flag at the main gate to the fort. We managed to escape the Delhi crowds and noise by visiting the cremation sites of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her sons Rajiv and Sanjay.

Trip to Delhi and Agra – Part 1

2010-01-10T00:16:00.000-08:00

Delhi seems poorer than Bangalore. On our first day there, we walked to the metro station and noticed this. There are thousands of stray dogs and trash on every surface. You’d think that the Indian government would hire people off the streets to work making trash cans, delivering them, installing them, and enforcing that they are used. The people who are already working cleaning up this trash could have first dibs at the jobs. Then Delhi would be so much cleaner and would attract more tourists.

We only stayed in Delhi for a night before going to the train station to catch the express train to Agra at 5 in the morning. The train was delayed but a guy at the government booking office said it was canceled, probably so we would buy a much more expensive bus ticket from him. Although Eliza had her heart set on taking a train, we got on the bus. The bus didn’t seem that unpleasant to me because I didn’t feel sick like usual, but Mom disliked it. The bus made it to Agra in six hours¹ and although the bus was going to the Taj Mahal and other landmarks in Agra, we decided to go with a rickshaw driver on his “tuk tuk” to our hotel. The rickshaw is shown above with Eliza in it. This turned out to be a very good move because not only did we get to relax in Agra and take our time looking at the landmarks, but we also befriended the rickshaw driver. His name was Nati. The next day we toured Agra with Nati taking us to see the sights.

¹ We were told it would take four hours.

Weather

2010-01-04T07:24:00.000-08:00

It turns out that school for the girls is not canceled this week after all. We already bought plane tickets to Delhi so Eliza and Sophia will be excused from school. I could try to explain the change from no school to school, but, after a day of broken promises and contradicting information, I can’t guarantee that I understand it myself.

On Saturday many flights to Delhi were canceled due to dense winter fog. There were also some fatal train accidents blamed on the fog. Despite these problems we are forging ahead. We plan to take a train from Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and other Mughal sites.

The Mughal Empire was an Islamic dynasty in power in India from 1526 to 1857. Just before we left Colorado, we watched the movie Jodhaa Akbar about the mixed marriage between Akbar, generally considered the greatest Mughal emperor, and his Hindu wife. It was a good movie but has been accused of inaccuracies. Akbar is buried at Agra. His grandson built the Taj.

It was reported in the papers today that India-born Salman Rushdie was at the Taj on Tuesday. This event provoked some Islamists to fax the prime minister over the weekend asking that Rushdie’s visa be revoked. The Islamists considered his presence at the Taj to be sacrilegious to Islam saying that the fatwa over his head has not been withdrawn.

The girls love to go swimming. On Sunday we went to the apartment complex pool to go for a swim, but we were told that the pool was closed for repairs. Since the pool is closed on Mondays for regular maintenance, I thought to present the girls with a hotel with a swimming pool, but I’m told, “It’s too cold to go swimming in Delhi.” Later I’m told by the same person, “It’s too hot to see the Taj Mahal in the middle of the day.”

December and January are supposed to be very dry months in Bangalore with a total average rainfall of 2 centimeters, but on December 31 there were monsoon-type rains that easily dumped more than the typical 2-month amount in one afternoon. No doubt the rain contributes to our apartment courtyard's beautiful foliage. One tree that I really like is the gulmohar tree or “Flame Tree.” I'm told that it grows in Florida, parts of Texas, the Caribbean and China, but I associate it with India. The tree is crowned with flowers. You can see one here: http://oii.net/image/scrapbook/poinciana.jpg

Trilingualism

2010-01-03T02:09:00.000-08:00

There are three main languages here in Bengaluru (aka Bangalore); English, Hindi and Kannada. Kannada is the local language of Karnataka, Bengaluru’s home state. Almost everybody speaks English (for an exception see “Motorcycles and Hot Water”) which makes our life easier but sometimes they have such a strong accent you can only understand every third word. Most signs have just one or two languages although we found an example with three.

To tell the difference between Kannada and Hindi look at the top of the writing. Hindi has a line over every word. If you can’t tell which one is English then you shouldn’t be reading this blog.

Blackouts

2010-01-02T22:23:00.000-08:00

Blackouts here are really common; there have been at least seven ones since we got here three days ago. The lights will flash off randomly and pop back on just as quickly; so far we have been in a blackout in a grocery store, restaurant, our apartment, and other places that you would think would have decent electricity. The people living here practically ignore them, it just looks like someone hit pause on a remote and froze us. Then the lights come back and everyone resumes shopping, walking, talking and doing whatever they were doing before. I wonder what would happen if for just one day, there were that many blackouts in Colorado. Usually, if we had a blackout there, people would talk about it into the next day: “Did you have the blackout too?” “Ours was out for an hour!” and so on.

Our apartment building has elevators but we never really use them. We are on the 3rd floor here and sometimes after walking around all day, carrying bags and feeling car sick from the bumpy roads; you really are not excited about walking up the steep, long stairs to go to your apartment. The risk of a power outage, however, discourages us from taking the simple way up, except when carrying vast amounts of our luggage up like on the first day we were here.

I have never done as much shopping in my life as I have done in these last three days. When moving into a furnished, but unstocked, apartment you really notice how much you need in an average house. Yesterday, as well as buying books which were amazingly cheap from a bookstore in downtown Bangalore, which is about 45 minutes from where we are living, we bought some traditional Indian clothes, two salwar kamises, one for Eliza and one for me. Salwar kamises are long sleeveless (or with sleeves²) shirts over tight or baggy pants with a scarf called a dupatta that usually matches the salwar (the pants). They are less formal than a sari.

¹ The 3rd floor is really four floors up because there is also a ground floor, which is what Americans call the 1st floor.
² Some girls do not show their shoulders or legs so the salwar kamise comes with attachable sleeves that you can sew on.

Beginnings and Political News

2010-01-02T21:55:00.000-08:00

Arriving at an airport in India doesn't mean that I FEEL like I have arrived in India, but when we passed the HUGE statue of Ganesha (the popular elephant-headed god) that I remember from my previous time, I felt like I was in India again. It was dark, but I think this photo that I found on the web is the same statue. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-l3O7o5jJVE/StrLu3ijSlI/AAAAAAAAFoY/28cCEsr5COc/s400/100_0039.jpg. Ironically, Ganesha is the god of “beginnings” and invoked at the beginning of rituals and ceremonies (or long stays in India).

The biggest political news around here is that the neighboring state of Andra Pradesh will likely be split into two states. The new state will be called Telangana. Supporters of Telangana have wanted a separate state since Indian independence. Hyderabad, the current capital of Andra Pradesh, will be the capital of Telangana. The big question is which city will be the capital of the new, smaller Andra Pradesh. Bangalore is the capital of the state of Karnataka which borders the Telangana area. The US State Department has a travel advisory for Andra Pradesh so we may not spend much time there. Here is a link to a map of India. http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/map-of-india-political.gif

On Jan 1 we went to register the girls at their school and heard that the government is suddenly closing the schools from Tuesday to Friday for a census. The girls will have 6 days of vacation -- probably the only 6 vacation days the whole time that we are here. The girls and I are going to Delhi and Agra – Taj Mahal, here we come – and probably won’t post during our trip. Eric will work because the government isn’t closing the companies for the census. Maybe he will post on the blog while we are gone.

Motorcycles and Hot Water

2010-01-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

The ratio of cars to motorcycles in Colorado is about 100:1. In Bangalore it is about 1:2. In Colorado you can go a whole day without hearing anybody honk. In Bangalore on the big streets there is almost constant honking. After having been here for two days I have already seen two cows just wandering around on the streets.

There is a completely different culture here, and I love it. Most people speak English but we just went to a store where nobody spoke it. We managed very well just by pointing and sign language. Then they brought their English-speaking friend in and he translated from there.

Since our hot water heater can’t heat up enough water at one time to have a real shower, we instead have sponge baths. We fill up a bucket with hot water and pour the water over ourselves with a measuring cup. It’s much more efficient than a shower.

Visiting Our School

2010-01-01T05:20:00.000-08:00

January is supposed to be the coldest month in Bangalore but it was about 80 degrees here both today and yesterday. A lot of people here think that 60 degrees is freezing and shudder as we describe the snow in Colorado to them. Bangalore is so different from Colorado because of the amount of people who are really poor. Also there will be glossy high rises next to piles of trash; there is a huge difference in between the income of the rich and the poor but very little difference geographically.

Today we went shopping in the morning, returned to our apartment, and then visited the school we are going to go to. Our school has uniforms, which are made up of the regular uniform, your typical beige skirt and beige shirt deal, a school t-shirt, school jeans, and a school tracksuit! You also get school paper notepads. They are going to teach us challenging science at my new school, a fact that was proven when I took a pre-exam¹ and was mystified by all the science questions. The English, however, is pretty simple.

¹ You see how I used exam instead of test? Am I picking up the kind of British English that most people speak here or what?