On Train Rides and Extremes

Above Photo: Jeena Shah, AIF Fellow

Over a south-Indian meal of uttapam and coconut chutney, one of the wonderful individuals I met in New Delhi, a consultant to the American India Foundation named Payal, appropriately stated that even a walk down the street in India can be an intellectual experience. It’s now the end of my 4th week in India, and everything I have experienced so far has confirmed her opinion (I must add that it's equally easy to intellectualize a walk through any part of San Francisco, but that's besides the point!). So I thought I'd describe a small part of my overnight train ride from New Delhi to Ahmedabad to highlight this truth.

Leaving New Delhi in the first place was a bittersweet moment: I was excited to head toward Ahmedabad – the city in which I currently sit to type this post, and will continue to reside until the end of June – but sad to leave the individuals that I had so much enjoyed getting to know. With me for the ride, thankfully, was my new roommate (another AIF fellow placed in Ahmedabad), Jeena Shah. We arrived on platform 6 of the train station a good hour early, but were told that we couldn't board the train until 15 minutes before departure. So we stood around awkwardly, shifting weight from one leg to the next, swatting at flies, moving our western bags out of peoples way every few moments, simply staring at the train which would soon carry us across a good part of India’s northern region to a city we would attempt to call home. After finally being admitted onto the train and shoving our luggage under and above our seats, we anxiously awaited the arrival of our cabin mates. Moments later in strolled a family of 4 (mother, father, uncle, child), followed by a young man traveling alone with shiny black hair, shiny black shoes, and a shiny silver ipod-shuffle clipped to his belt.

Relieved that we would most likely be avoiding the horror stories of aggressive or unfriendly cabin mates, I cozied up against the window with my headphones and a book. As we pulled out of the train station it soon became clear that the title of my book, “Plant of Slums”, would teach me less than the observations right outside my window. So I watched. I watched mothers and their children dig through trash mounds, I watched squatter settlement (under bridges, between buildings) after squatter settlement pass by, I watched young boys chasing each-other barefoot by the tracks, stray dogs barking at each other, children and old men alike bathing with buckets of water and a bar of blue soap, cows eating grass, cows eating trash; the city felt like it just kept going, and the reality of urban life thinned and thinned until the scene out my window shifted from urban, to semi-urban to rural. When my mind finally caught up to my eyes I turned away from the window, and right there inside my comfortable AC cabin was the young child of our cabin-mates being force fed by his parents and uncle: bright orange cheese puffs, followed by rotti (think flatbread) and a potato stew painted yellow with turmeric, then biscuits, more cheese puffs, some more rotti with yellow potatoes, and finally they helped him wash it all down with bright orange soda. I watched him chug the sugary substance and wondered how soon he’d be spewing it all back up, but just as he put the bottle down out came a new bag of chips, harder to open this time because of all the grease on his hands. In a matter of seconds I had gone from watching severe poverty and malnourished adults and children in New Delhi’s urban sprawl, to watching an upper/middle-class family force-feed their child into what will soon be type II diabetes (not to mention the child later peed on my backpack, so I was unimpressed all around). I thought of a NYTimes article I had read last year about malnourished youth in India, raised my eyebrows in uncomfortable disbelief, and asked Jeena if she had any fiction I could borrow – my brain could take no more.

A few hours later I picked myself up out of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, and noticed Jeena’s report on caste discrimination peeking out of her bag (a report she recently wrote in law school for Human Rights Watch), so I asked her to tell me a bit about the focus of her research. Ten minutes into our conversation about one of India’s darkest and ugliest realities – caste discrimination and the fate of manual scavengers – we were caught off guard as we witnessed the extreme opposite: the beauty of India's plurality. Right before us in the cabin, in the small space between the benches and bags, the young man (the one with shiny hair, shoes and ipod) laid out a small green and white carpet and began his evening prayers. I had noticed moments earlier that he had gotten up to go to the restroom, but had no idea that it was to wash his hands and feet. As he stood and fell to his knees repeatedly before an Agnostic (me), a Jain (Jeena), and a family of Hindus, all the while murmuring his prayers, I found myself overwhelmed with euphoria, so much so that my mind went blank and all I could wonder was whether he was praying in Mecca's actual direction*. As I turned to face Jeena I could sense she was experiencing the same emotions; we exchange a smile of appreciation, tacitly ended our conversation, and gazed back out the window. The setting sun had turned the sky an awesomely rich and peachy blue, and at that very moment I knew I had made the right choice in coming to India.


*We would see the young man pray twice more before reaching Ahmedabad the next day and each time he prayed in the same direction, so I'm pretty sure that there was no way to know where Mecca was in relation to the moving train, but who really knows.

Chak De India!

Above Phote: Front Page, Times of India, Sept. 25, 2007

So it’s been pretty darn fun to be in India during the World 20/20 Cricket World Cup. To top off the general excitement of watching cricket in a cricket-obsessed country, India faced Pakistan last night in the championship game – and it was as close as a match can get, ending in a win by India. Most people left work a good half hour early to make it home in time to plop themselves before their TVs and watch the showdown. Looking out the window from my apartment the streets of this hectic city were practically empty, but every few blocks you’d see a huddle of rickshaw drivers who parked their yellow and green vehicles -- giving up their evening’s income -- to watch the game on a tiny screen with terrible reception at a chai-stand with 20 other guys. My guess is that the chai-stand owner gave up his own income as well and dolled out free cups of warm chai to each of his guests. Even for someone like myself, who has just learned the rules over the past few weeks (thank you Brian), last night was full of tension and excitement. But Americans can relate, because everyone knows that you don’t necessarily have to be a Red Sox or Yankees fan yourself to enjoy turning on the tube when the two face off in baseball’s postseason action. The city where I reside, here in the state of Gujarat, had to take extra safety precautions for the game as this was the site of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim communal riots (India is home to the worlds largest Muslim population outside of Indonesia; Hindu fundamentalists -- and the key word of course is fundamentalists -- believe that with partition the Muslims in India should have been forced to move to Pakistan.. and that's a simplified version of the politics). A glimpse at this morning’s paper makes me think that no major violence broke out post match, and I'm sure it didn't hurt that two of India's strongest players last night - one of whom won "man of the match" - were a pair of Muslim brothers. Sports, afterall, do tend to unite more than divide a country and its people.

In other sporting news, I saw the Bollywood film “Chak De India” a couple nights ago on the big screen, and it may very well be my new favorite sport movie (okay okay at least it ties with Bend-it like Bekham and Pistol Pete). It’s a fictional tale about India’s national women’s field hockey team – and while it follows the team-sport movie formula to a T, it was still really amazing overall (it was better than Bend-it like Bekham in that the actresses were all really great athletes!)! The movie perfectly and humorously highlighted how diverse India is, as the team was made up of girls who had very little in common in terms of language, color, and culture, but they all called India their home and country. Admittedly there were no subtitles, but Bollywood throws in a sprinkle of the English language here and there, and on top of that many of the words in Hindi and Urdu come from Farsi (Bollywood movies use an amalgamation of Hindi and Urdu – which has come to be called Hindustani), so between English and Farsi I followed as much as I needed to enjoy the film. All in all it's been a fun few days of feeling India's national pride through sports!

Reflections on Orientation

Above Photo: Jama Masjid, New Delhi

Greetings Greetings: Welcome to my first post (I know, I said I wouldn’t do, it but here I am). I arrived in India on September 1st, and on the morning of September 2nd a 2-week orientation period in New Delhi began. I’ll admit that the concept of Orientation did not necessarily settle well with me, as the word brought back memories of awkward firsts, silly name games, and other usually painful “icebreakers” (I’m sweating with anxiety just thinking about partaking in icebreakers). Such word-associations aside, I can comfortably say that I was blown away by the programming, and more importantly, it truly felt like the perfect and most appropriate stepping stone into these next 10 months in India.

Over the two week orientation period we were lectured by Indian historians, anthropologists, journalists, bankers, publishers/writers, government officials, NGO leaders, and artists (and a private tour of the National Gallery of Art in New Delhi to boot), each of whom had something unique and eye-opening to share with us about this extremely complex society and country; we had three dance classes from a famed (so I’m told) Bollywood choreographer, which culminated in a group performance; we visited New Delhi’s major sites; we spend two days in rural (breathtaking!) Rajasthan visiting school children and their teachers in pre-6th grade schools (classrooms) set up by a local NGO, and later met with women from Ibtada’s self-help groups; and to end the orientation period we had a meeting with the US ambassador to India. Each lecture and site visit deserves a posting of its own, but the purpose of this blog is more to share observations and reflections rather than indulge in too many details. To comment on the visit with the Ambassador, however, I can say that I left the meeting feeling as though our Ambassador is in India more to promote US Business than US Policies. I suppose I shouldn’t be too disappointed, as the two have become one and the same in many respects, but there’s something unsettling about a political appointee from the banking/finance sector serving in the Foreign Service. You can imagine how a group of young idealists took his arguments that the cure to India’s agricultural sector is a “Wal-Mart-like model”, and how Monsanto’s legal rights have not been rightfully recognized (Monsanto is a seed manufacturing multi-national corporation; in India close to 70% of the people are dependent on the agricultural sector and most seeds are farmer-produced, so when a MNC comes in to patent seeds, taking away farmer rights to save and sell their seeds… you get the picture). Yikes.

To sum it up in a sentence (or more) I would say that orientation was an intensive learning period - learning not only from the programming put together by the American India Foundation, but as well from my peers, the entire group of fellows, many of whom I can imagine I will stay friends with for the rest of my life. I’d go as far as to say that the group itself impressed me more than our speakers. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, venture capitalists, social workers, public health specialists – the list goes on and on - all with an international and social focus. During breakfast, tea breaks (of which there were many – and wow do they like their tea sweet here!), lunch, dinner, and even at day’s end when we would all be exhausted from the programming we somehow had the energy to engage and argue (the healthy kind, of course) about all that we had been exposed to on that day (and on a few occasions we had enough energy to experience New Delhi’s night life – more on those observations some other time, perhaps). It was amazing to hear people reflect on the issues at hand from their various professional and personal backgrounds, be it health, human rights, finance, education -- and be they Buddhist, Ismaili, Jain, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Atheist, Agnostic, from Texas, Wisconsin, Jersey, New York, Cali, Mass, etc etc etc! Needless to say I feel lucky and humbled to be among them. By the time I was able to crawl into bed each night I literally felt like new information was oozing from my ears. As it turned out the only thing irritating my ears during orientation were the crickets that had infested our rooms (my roommate and I had it the easiest, I must admit).

You can probably gather that I’m feeling enthusiastic about this upcoming year. While I’ve only been here three weeks the one thing I know for sure is that I cannot begin any sentence with “India is…”, because this place is so diverse and so complex that there is no one way to speak about the entire country and all it’s people/cultures/religions/languages at once. My enthusiasm and optimism in part stems from this reality: one can imagine the precedent that will be set if India’s development sector can create models to enable the millions living in abject poverty to move forward in a sustainable, healthy, and equitable manner with the rest of India’s economy – all in the face of such religious and cultural diversity and perhaps the most complex social structure (I’m referring here to the caste system, which is still a strong force). And all this at a time when the most prevalent model in our world is one of fearing thy neighbor, let alone the “other,” and isolating oneself from people of different cultures and religions (even different sects within the same religion!). I know that 10 months in a country will not do a thing to change this world, but I’m excited to be here learning about and engaging with the multitude of issues going on in this country from the ground level. And so these are my thoughts as the rest of the fellows and I break off to our separate NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). I’m sure my enthusiasm will wax and wane as the months carry on, but you’ll have to check back in to see for yourself!