Life on the Ganges

We’re in an airport again (there’s certainly been a lot of that, this trip!), this time in Varanasi, the city where we’ve spent the last three days with our friends Jeanne and Wally. Now we’re about to fly to Chandigarh, not too far north of Delhi, where we’ll meet up with them again tomorrow morning. The reason we’re going separately is that they are taking an overnight train from Varanasi to Chandigarh – not only a 12+ hour trip to begin with (they leave in the late afternoon, and arrive at 4:30 a.m.), but also, according to the Internet, one for which the average delay is nine hours. When Bob heard those statistics, there was NO way he was going on that train. Jeanne argued that prolonged train rides, delays and all, were an important part of the full Indian experience, which may be true, but this was a part of the full Indian experience that Bob wanted no part of. So we are flying to Chandigarh instead.

After living in gritty, land-locked, Anand for three months, I found Varanasi liberating by contrast. The hotel we were staying in, the Ganges View, was right on the river, with sweeping views of the water and the ghats (the stepped plazas leading down from the city to the water’s edge). Converted from an old mansion, the hotel had spacious terraces, colorful with many pots of flowers, on the second and third floors on which you could drink your morning tea while looking over the lively scene below. Both the terraces and the rooms were furnished with beautiful old furniture that looked like it could have come from the original mansion, as well as decorated with paintings, masks, textiles, and other art pieces depicting gods, goddesses, and scenes from the various Hindu epics. It was a lovely place.

The first morning I woke up in time to see the sun rise over the Ganges, which was gorgeous, since the view was directly to the east. The sounds at that time of day are also glorious: the clanging of bells and the soothing music of chanting as people do morning worship before starting their day. Below on the plaza closest to the river at the bottom of the ghat on which the hotel sits (Assi Ghat), people are beginning their day’s activity: boatmen taking their first load of riders out on the river, stall owners setting out their wares, flower sellers piling up bright orange garlands in their baskets. I was happy just to sit and watch the swirl of humanity. The other wonderful thing about that time of day is the weather, which is cool and refreshing; as the sun rose, it got progressively hotter, so that by 11 or 12 it was intensely, and unpleasantly, warm. That was the major downside of being in Varanasi in late March, as opposed to January, which is when I visited once before on my first trip to India. In the middle of day, the heat was exhausting.

Mostly while we were there we just walked along the river by the different ghats, each with its own particular character (some busy with commerce, some almost deserted, some set aside as cremation ghats for the funeral pyres of the dead – it is a great honor to be cremated in Varanasi, by the holy Ganges). But we did try to go to the biggest Hindu temple – I’ve forgotten its name – which is down a twisting maze of alleys crammed with multitudes of shops selling scarves, spices, souvenirs, and jewelry. For reasons I’m not sure of except general levels of “communal” violence (this is the term that’s used for Hindu/Muslim conflict), there was a huge amount of military and police presence – uniformed men with guns stationed regularly along the alleys, and clustered at the entrances and exits that led into or out of the temple grounds. When, after winding our way through what seemed like a corkscrew journey, we finally came to the place that led directly into the temple area, we had to give up our cameras, cell phones, and purses (we let Bob and Wally, who were willing to go second, held on to them, rather than the soldiers) before going in. Once we were inside, it turned out there was an extremely long line of people waiting to get into the temple, many of them holding offerings of flowers or fruit – and that even if we had been willing to wait on the line (which looked like it could easily be more than a half hour wait), we weren’t going to be allowed into the actual temple anyway, since only Hindus could go in. We glimpsed the grounds through some openings in the fence, and took our leave.

It was also in Varanasi that I had my first -- and really only -- experience of feeling totally alien from the Indian experience, when one night at our hotel there was a concert of "dhrupad" singing. I find a lot of Indian classical music something of an acquired taste, with its unfamiliar scale and wandering, unaccustomed melodies, but this was truly extraordinary. Two large stringed instruments -- I'm not sure of the name -- put out a constant, almost one-note drone, and two brothers, who were the singers, made sounds that had almost no "musical" qualities in the western sense whatsoever, but seemed to emerge and disappear out of nowhere, mostly quite quietly. At the same time, the "singing" was accompanied by gestures and heavenward looks by the brothers that could only suggest either a deep devotional trance or being completed stoned. Jeanne was so shocked by the performance that she whispered to me it must be a fraud meant to bamboozle the western tourists who stay at the hotel, but if it was western tourists they wanted to appeal to, this was not the way to go! Besides, the audience was actually more Indian than western, and I was pretty sure this was, in fact, a totally legitimate art. It was, however, something I could not relate to in the least -- perhaps if I had been stoned, it would have worked better for me. Discreetly, I left about midway through -- as did the rest of our party.

The Final Weeks

I’m writing this as we drive down the highway from Anand on our way to the airport at Baroda, where we will catch a plane to Varanasi to meet our friends Jeanne and Wally. I can’t quite shake the feeling that now I’m leaving home rather than returning home; somehow that apartment on the IRMA campus really became home to me in the three months we were here. We’ve been saying our good-byes to people in the last few days – to Kajri and her husband over supper, to Ajay and Mokul at Café Coffee Day, to Vivek over a South Indian meal at a restaurant downtown, to Ashok on the telephone, to two of the students who came by our apartment to say good-bye as we were finishing our packing last night – and it made me realize that despite the disruption of our late February trip home, we really did start to make strong connections to people. I console myself by imagining that I’ll be back, although I have no idea how or when.

Since I think the picture of the town of Anand that’s been given in this blog has not been very flattering – I’ve described it mostly as a dusty, unattractive, small-town outpost, which is true enough, but perhaps not the whole story – I want to close our time in Anand with a peek at another side, as illustrated by these photos. One is of an event we came upon one day as we bicycled just before dusk down one of the dusty, littered, residential streets riding back from shopping in town: a circle of girls and women right in the middle of the street, dressed in gorgeous saris, clapping and dancing a slow, simple dance to rhythmic music pouring from a boom box, some of them balancing brass water jugs on their heads. Round and round, round and round; it reminded me of people dancing the hora at a Jewish wedding. And indeed, when we asked later, we were told that most likely it was exactly that – dancing as part of a wedding celebration, which often goes on for several days. An unexpected, public, sudden beauty – with people on motorbikes, us and others on our bicycles, the usual stray dogs and cows, casually passing by.

The other two photos are the two main buildings of a temple complex that is a short walk down a dirt track off Amul Dairy Road, one of the main downtown streets. You go from a road full of honking cars, auto rickshaws, buses and other vehicles, strewn at the edge with trash, plastic bags, pedestrians, and mangy-looking animals, crammed with stalls selling everything from snack foods to auto parts, to a quiet open space with grass and flowers from which the temple buildings rise. Shoes are lined up at the bottom of the steps; each person, as he or she enters, rings the brass bell at the front of the temple; and on the floor sits a small circle of worshippers, melodiously chanting and clapping, over and over and over. Here, for me, is the soothing other side of the noise and chaos – not the religion exactly, which, to be honest, means little to me, but the sense of something outside of the busyness of normal day-to-day life, something that has nothing to do with striving and getting, something that just repeats itself, timelessly, pointlessly, comfortingly, like a nursing mother or an old grandfather in a rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth.

Picking up the threads

As most of you who are reading this know, our time in India was interrupted in mid-February by the sudden illness and death of my father, and the difficult trip back to the U.S. which that entailed. This isn't the time to write much about that, except to say that I think my Dad himself, who as he got into his eighties feared nothing more than a long, lingering illness, would have been pleased with the way it happened: while healthy and still playing golf three times a week, he entered the hospital for a minor adjustment to his pacemaker, but went into congestive heart failure and passed away within a week. The good news is that despite being so far away, I was able to get back in time to spend his final day with him while he was still conscious and able to communicate; I arrived in Florida, where he was hospitalized, on February 20, and he passed away on the morning of the 21st. Tova and her partner Harris, having a much shorter flight from New York, had already arrived the day before. So we were all able to be together with him on his last day. He died 12 days short of his ninetieth birthday.

Since I still had half the semester left to complete in India, I decided that I would like to return, and Bob agreed to come with me. It was a bit bewildering to settle in again after the intensity of the time in the U.S. -- not to mention just the physical toll from two trans-Atlantic flights and several flights in both the U.S. and India in the course of two weeks -- but actually returning to this green and peaceful campus was very calming, as was resuming the routine of classes and class preparation, which gave a familiar rhythm to my days. What had changed, however, was the degree of energy I had for activity beyond my teaching: I was happy to be at IRMA, and enjoyed my time in the classroom, but apart from that I was more likely to want to read a book or watch a movie on the one English-language movie cable channel than anything more ambitious. Perhaps not surprising. It's only now, almost a month after returning, that I feel I'm fully "waking up" from the not-unpleasant daze that I've been in. Which explains the long gap in this blog.

But, for the relatively short time remaining to me in India, I want to resume writing, which I enjoyed doing immensely in the first month and a half we were here. My course is now over -- my last class was this past Wednesday -- and tomorrow, Monday, afternoon my students will take their final exam. I think one hint that I was fully "awake" again was how much fun I had coming up with the questions for the exam -- something I don't get to do at exam-adverse Hampshire. Since one theme of the last part of the course was to investigate the pros and cons of biotechnology (including genetically modified crops) and the efforts that are being made internationally to regulate it; and many of the students here are familiar with the dairy industry, since Anand is the home of the huge and highly successful Amul dairy cooperative and the government's National Dairy Development Board; I decided to come up with a question about biotechnology and the dairy industry. I considered use of artificial growth hormones or applicability of GM techniques, but after a little Internet searching I discovered that there has actually been commercial cloning of prize cattle to serve as breeding stock for future generations -- so that the genetic advantages of the original prize cow can still be taken advantage of after its death. Who knew?? Anyway, that led to a question about cloning of prize milkers and selling their milk -- amazing to realize that what seem like "science fiction" possibilities to someone of my generation will be the actual choices of my students' generation. Not surprisingly, polls in many countries around the globe indicate that consumers don't like the idea of eating meat or drinking milk from cloned animals -- but then, how do consumers in the U.S. feel about the fact that almost all the packaged food in their supermarkets already incorporates genetically modified corn or soy? I doubt that most of them think about it at all, and if they were told, they'd be surprised. Over the last twenty years, GM crops have proliferated tremendously as consumers weren't really paying that much attention. Now, even in places that were much more GM-averse than the U.S. (which was always a booster at the government level), such as the EU and India and Africa, GM crops are mushrooming. As I tell my class, this is one of the hardest issues for me to reach a definitive personal opinion about. It's true that there's no hard evidence to suggest that these crops are harmful to human or ecological health -- and some to suggest they can actually be ecologically helpful, as for example by less pesticide use. And the alternative argument often used by some on the left -- that GM techniques allow multi-national corporations to take over the agricultural seed supply -- doesn't end up holding much water when you actually look at the facts (consider, for example, Ronald Herring's work on Bt cotton in India, see http://www.agbioworld.org/pdf/CASHerringMonsanto2006.pdf ). Supposedly, as a sophisticated academic, I know better than to oppose something simply because of the gut feeling that "it just isn't natural" -- after all, a heart or kidney transplant isn't "natural" either, and I certainly don't oppose them. But I don't know. Although it's hard to pin down exactly what's wrong with GM food, if anything is -- and, given how rapidly the acreage planted in it is increasing all over the world, the question may be moot in any event -- I'm still left with an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.

But you probably are wondering with some concern: "Did she re-start this blog in order to give us lectures on genetic modification?" -- and indeed I didn't. So let me end this entry with a forecast of what lies ahead for us in India until we return to the U.S., and then, perhaps next time, I'll pick up on whatever interesting events I've missed during this month of blog-silence.

As I said, my teaching here is completed, so once I grade my final exams, we are going to move on. On Thursday 3/26 we're flying to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, where we're going to meet up with our good friends Jeanne and Wally from Miami -- he's a doctor who's come to India for several weeks of consultation with Indian colleagues in different cities, so they're combining work and vacation. Varanasi is the one place I visited on my previous trip to India that I really wanted to visit again, so we'll see how my impressions this time compare. I found the eerie spirituality of it -- people bobbing in the holy waters of the river, mist rising off the water, bodies burning on the cremation ghats, monkeys jumping around the walls of the temples -- completely captivating. The head of the Fulbright Program here in India, Adam Grotsky, recommended a hotel overlooking the river that was converted from an old Indian mansion (or haveli) that looks quite lovely on the Internet, and it sponsors concerts and art exhibits as well, so I'm looking forward to that. I remember the sitar concert that my friend Lydia and I attended when we were in Varanasi in 2001, which was quite amazing.

After Varanasi, we are flying to Chandigarh, where Wally has medical business, and Jeanne, Bob, and I will be tourists. Chandigarh was designed as a "new city" after independence with input from Le Corbusier -- and according to the guidebooks, it's very different from any other Indian city. We shall see how that strikes us. After that, Jeanne and Wally are going off to Rajasthan, and Bob and I are flying to Dharamsala, where I am going to be meeting with a small group of lawyers and administrators from the Supreme Justice Commission of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. I am very excited about that. And then, on April 4, we fly back to Delhi for our flight that night to the U.S. -- so on the morning of April 5, we will land at Newark Airport. I am excited and sad, delighted and bemused, about going home -- even after 3 months, it feels in some weird way like this is my home and I will have to get used to having that other, Northampton, one. But more on all of this soon -- now that I've started, I will be a regular blogger again.

On the Road to Rajasthan

Since I wasn’t able to keep up with my blogging while on the road, now I’ll go back a week in my mind and try to recall all our adventures in Rajasthan. We left Anand last Friday morning for a week’s trip during mid-semester break. A car and driver from IRMA drove us to Udaipur (about 200 miles; a four hour trip) for the first leg; since this driver was a particularly aggressive honker and passer (which in India is really saying something!), Bob – in the front seat – had a white-knuckle ride, while I, comfortably fatalistic in the back, enjoyed the passing scene, both the crowded, trash-filled small towns and the intervening stretches of green countryside.

Udaipur, where we settled for the first four days, was a relaxing, quite lovely small city, made particularly enjoyable by the facts that 1) we lucked out with our hotel choice, the unusually pleasant Mahendra Prakash Hotel (more on this later); 2) the scale of the city and the location of our hotel meant that we could walk or take a short auto-rickshaw ride most everywhere we wanted to go, which made everything feel very manageable; and 3) since we knew Vidhi and Manish Jain (Vivek’s sister and brother-in-law) we were able to spend time with them and people they knew as well as on our own.

According to the guidebooks, Udaipur’s three biggest claims to fame are its very large lake (and chain of outlying lakes), which led Lonely Planet to label it “the Venice of India,” the extremely pricey luxury hotels that have been created out of old palaces on two islands in the lake, and the City Palace, an absurdly huge palace started by Maharaja Udai Singh II, the city’s founder, in approximately 1560 and added onto by numerous other maharajas over the decades, which is now a historical monument with museum. All of these things had their charm, but also their limitations, so my favorites were different. The lake, for example, while indeed lovely, especially when viewed from the heights of the City Palace grounds or at sunset, when the light sparkles on the water, flocks of birds are silhouetted against the sky, and the mountains rise mistily in the distance, was also pretty swampy and covered with unattractive patches of green goo when seen close up, since several years of drought had evaporated a lot of it – hardly Venice material. The City Palace has beautiful grounds overlooking the lake in which to walk (and, at Rs. 25 admission, are a bargain pleasure), but the palace itself is SO big and confusing to walk through that it is more like a feat of endurance than a total treat. I haven’t visited palaces in Europe, which may be the same, but most of the palaces I’ve seen here so far strike me more as something to marvel at rather than something to enjoy – and I haven’t found them at all tempting, even in fantasy, as places to live.

Mostly I find myself thinking about how many people must have worked themselves to the bone to build the place and how many more would be necessary to make living there on a day-to-day basis even vaguely bearable in the days before electricity, not to mention plumbing – just to light the candles necessary to bring some light into the gloom after sunset must have taken a staff of dozens! I’d never thought much about Indian royalty before this trip, but now I feel clearly it wasn’t only the British who oppressed the Indians – whatever the British sins (and I’m not denying they were many), the indigenous ruling class, with its maharajas, nawabs, and maharanis, certainly did a good job of standing on people’s necks itself.

So my favorite things about Udaipur were 1) the Jagdish temple, a magnificent carved Hindu temple built by Maharaja Jagat Singh in 1651 that was right in the center of town up a long flight of stairs from the street, 2) just walking around the streets filled with endless stalls of fabric, clothing, jewelry, leatherwork, miniature paintings, vegetables, block after block after block of crowded, lively, colorful, intriguing markets, 3) our hotel and the huge public park and garden across the street from it, and 4) meeting the painter Shahid Parvez, a friend of Vivek’s sister and brother-in-law (Vidhi and Manish Jain) who live in Udaipur, who shows his work at his own gallery, the Gallery Pristine, on one of the downtown streets. I think I’ll pause now and post this much; I’ll save for later why these were my favorites, and the rest of the stories about our trip.

Three Performances and a Plan

The last week or so has continued to be quiet as we've mostly stayed on campus, but the weekend before last was alumni weekend at IRMA, which brought a lot of graduates and their families to campus, as well as featuring various speeches, seminars, and other activities, including two of the three performances I'm reporting on here. The first, on Saturday night, was a student show -- part talent show with dancing and singing, part satirical skits of student life, and part nostalgic photo shows of various classes past and present. The most wonderful thing about it was the infectious enthusiasm of both performers and packed audience -- it's hard to communicate in words how joyfully boisterous and high-energy it was. The photo above of one of the dance acts only captures a bit of the spirit. In one skit of classroom life, apart from the very familiar types that Bob and I had no trouble identifying despite the Hindi dialogue (the sleepy student with disheveled hair, the flirting couple paying more attention to each other than to the lecture. . . .) there was one student character dressed like Superman with a big red CP on his costume who spent most of the skit with one hand raised high in the air. "Is this about the Communist Party?" I whispered to Bob. He shrugged, not getting it. Only later we found out from a faculty friend that "CP" actually stood for "class participation" -- the extra some professors added onto student grades for excellence in class participation. And thus that constantly upraised arm -- which we had interpreted as some kind of political gesture -- turned out to be about grade grubbing instead.

The second performance, on Sunday night, was a professional group singing and playing traditional Indian music -- not a formal classical concert, but what seemed like music that fell somewhere between folk and pop. While some of the music was good (and some just o.k.), again the real pleasure of it was the enthusiasm of the audience -- people shouting out their favorite numbers for the group to play, people coming in groups up on the stage to dance, people snaking in dancing lines through the audience. It was just tremendously enjoyable to see people enjoying themselves so much.

The final performance was unconnected from alumni weekend, and quite a bit more homey, but very nostalgic for Bob and me, since it brought back memories of many long-ago performance events starring Tova, Rebecca, and Ariel. This time the stars were Vivek and Charu's daughter Barkha and her friend, and Vivek's sister's daughter, who was visiting with her parents, on the drums. A medley of songs and dances, finishing with a musical prayer, was quite captivating, as perhaps the photo suggests.

At the end of this week, after this quiet period of laying low, Bob and I are going to hit the road for Rajasthan, so stay tuned. Between mid-terms, which happen during several days of cancelled classes, and then a break week following them, I have almost two weeks off from teaching, so we are going to visit Vivek's sister and brother-in-law, Vidi and Manish, in Udaipur, and his parents, Ashok and Usha, whom we've gotten to know here (they've been visiting for over a month, since before we arrived) in Jaipur. They are all interesting people in quite different ways -- more to come soon, but now I'm off to bed so I can get up early and write my mid-term exam in the morning.

This and that in Anand

It’s been quite a while since I’ve added to this blog; mostly because I was actually very busy working last week. I’m somewhat embarrassed to confess that this was because I was finishing some Hampshire work that I brought from home with me (and should have finished even before I left the U.S.) – but no need to dwell on my procrastination problems here. In any event, this, on top of my regular classes, kept me mostly in my office in front of a computer all week. Not very exciting blog material!

On the other hand, since we haven’t been anywhere beyond Anand since we got back from Baroda two weekends ago, this gives me a chance to write about some of our more day-to-day experiences here. So, in no particular order, I’ll mention:

We Discover Walmart in Anand

We thought we already knew downtown Anand – one long main street, Amul Dairy Road (Anand is the home of the famous Amul Dairy, India’s largest cooperative enterprise and major dairy supplier), a bunch of side streets and residential streets, and a market area. But no – two weeks ago we discovered that there’s an entirely different part of town with a whole other commercial area, residential areas, and even a large university called Sardar Patel University. And, on a more personal note, it’s in that area that the one “real” coffee shop is, which certainly motivated Bob to explore it. So one day we got in an auto-rickshaw and told the driver to take us to town hall, because we’d been told that that was the landmark that drivers would recognize (not the coffee shop or even the university). Off we went, through totally unfamiliar territory, past an area with houses that had hundreds of pastel-colored ceramic sinks and other bathroom fixtures spread out in front of them (the plumbing section of town?), into a slightly classier part of town where there were actually more stores than stalls. We had no real idea of where we were, but the auto- rickshaw stopped, so we got out. And directly across the street from us was a store called Big Bazaar (see photo), the closest thing we had seen to anything like a Walmart (or Target, or Caldor) since arriving in India. Being apparently more retail-starved than we realized, we were held in thrall by this place, which turned out to have three floors: the first selling sheets and towels, small appliances, toiletries, pots and dishes, and food, the second, clothes, and the third, which we didn’t even get to fully investigate for lack of time, luggage and sporting goods. We walked around slowly as if intoxicated, discussing with one another the relative merits of different varieties of plastic storage dishes and chutneys, and carefully studying the prices of things and trying to translate them back into dollars (it isn’t so hard – fifty rupees to a dollar – but we get very confused). We made some exciting purchases on the first floor (two coffee cups, two different kinds of plastic storage dishes, food that included – oh, the thrill of it! – a wide range of 100% natural juices from South Africa – I told you we were retail-starved!), but the big excitement was on the second floor, where I got to shop for new clothes. A photo of me in my new shalwar is included above.

Then, after getting directions, we walked a ways down the road and finally found the Cafe Coffee Day coffee shop. As you can see by his picture, Bob was in heaven! Now he was truly at home in Anand.

Inauguration East – Very East!

True, it wasn’t quite the same as being on the mall in Washington (which our daughter Tova and niece Rebecca were), but the four Americans, two Indians, one Syrian and one Argentinian who gathered in our living room at 10:00 p.m. last Tuesday night to watch Barack Hussein Obama take the oath of office could not have been more thrilled if we had been standing right there. How wonderful to finally be rid of that Other Guy ( I don’t even want to mention his name anymore). I won’t include the photos here, but those who want to see images of our inauguration night festivities (and other events) can check it out at www.picasaweb.google.com/stephaniealevin.

On Jan. 20, the Big Day, I had a class at noon, so that morning I had the sudden inspiration to show my class the inauguration by projecting it from my laptop. Then it hit me – my noon class was actually 1:30 a.m. in DC; so much for that idea. But by then I’d gotten so caught up in the American spirit, and was also so sorry that I’d forgotten to say anything the previous day in class about Martin Luther King Day, that I decided a video of King was in order. A quick review of YouTube turned up a fine video of the “I have a dream” speech, and the first twenty minutes of my Tuesday class was all taken care of. The class definitely liked seeing it (they all knew who M. L. King was, but most weren’t familiar with the speech), and I, of course, was moved almost to tears. And then, that very night (my time) Obama! Whatever he may do in the future, bad or good, it was quite a happy conjunction.

My Class

All of which brings me to a few comments about my class – again, not very exotic as blogging goes, but it is, after all, the main reason I’m here. One thing I can say about my 31 students right away is that they laugh at my jokes, which certainly endears them to me. When I showed them the King video, I told them my favorite M. L. King story, which is that when Tova was in first grade, she came home one day and told me that they were learning the “I have a dream” speech, a few sentences per kid, to perform in the auditorium. Hoping to impress her (what mother doesn’t like to impress her child?), I said to her, “You know, I actually met Martin Luther King” (which is true, when I was 18 and doing civil rights work in Mississippi). She looked amazed, and I thought, wow, that’s great, I’ve really made an impression. “Mommy,” she said, her voice awed, “I didn’t know you were that old.”

They laughed at that, but the one that really cracked them up was when I came into class and said, first thing, in a very serious voice: “You know, after a great deal of thinking, I’ve finally put my finger on the essence of the difference between the U.S. and India.” They all leaned forward eagerly to hear what I’d concluded. Taking a long scarf that I had as part of my outfit that day, I draped it over my shoulders with the ends coming down on either side of my chest. “In America,” I said, “the women all wear their scarves this way.” Then, with a flourish, I reversed the scarf so that it went around my neck from the front, the ends coming down on either side of my back. “And in India,” I concluded triumphantly, “the women all wear their scarves this way!” They roared. I really should have been a stand-up comedian instead of a professor!

Old Home Week -- and a Day in Baroda

We got back from Ahmedabad late last Friday night, and first thing Saturday morning, before we were even up, Frank Holmquist and his wife Mary, and Omar Dahi and his wife Cora, arrived on campus on a flight from Syria. Frank and Omar both teach at Hampshire, and Omar is Syrian -- this was his first trip back to Syria in five years, and it was Cora's first time there ever (although she had met his parents and at least some of his siblings in the States). She's from Buenos Aires, and they met while in school at Notre Dame (she's still finishing her Ph.D. there). Anyway, all four of them are very nice, and it was fun to have people to hang out with for a few days with whom conversation was a little less stiff than our conversations with other faculty members have so far tended to be. They all were going to stay on campus (in the facility that's used to house in-service training groups) for several days, then go off in separate directions to visit other places in India, and then arrive back next Mon., 1/19, when Vivek will also be back from the U.S. Vivek had arranged for them to do some kind of workshop with the Ph.D. students at IRMA.

Saturday they slept late (jet lag) and Bob and I went about our normal routine: breakfast, email, time in the office (sometimes it's genuinely hard to tell that we're really in India rather than the U.S!). But we all gathered for lunch at Vivek's house, which was fun (Vivek is gone, but his wife Charu, their daughters Barkha and Annika, and Vivek's father Ashok and his mother are all there). We all had supper together too. It was a bit like old home week (old home day?).

Sunday Ashok had planned an outing for everyone that involved going to an art museum in Baroda (the older name for what's now called Vadodara), then a visit to the palace of the Maharaja Fateh Singh, the former Maharaja of Baroda (Baroda was not part of British India, but was the capital of the princely state of Gaekwad, over which the Maharaja ruled -- there were many such semi-autonomous kingdoms during the colonial period, which somehow got folded into independent India after 1947), and ended with a buffet lunch at an upscale hotel. The art museum, which showcased the undistinguished collection of the Maharaja himself, was mostly dull and dusty, and the palace was almost overwhelmingly enormous (see photo) -- some of the rooms to which the public was allowed entrance (only a small fraction of the entire place) were lovely or impressive, but mostly I was struck by two things: 1) that one person could have such an opulent place built for himself and his family, and the amazing number of poor people's labor that must have generated the wealth for it, and 2) that the descendents of the Maharaja actually still live there, in the rooms that aren't open to the public! In fact, on Sunday afternoon at 2 the public was being kicked out because in the great hall where the Maharaja used to hold audiences with the public, the granddaughter of the current head of the family was going to be having a naming ceremony. We were allowed into the room, which is normally on the public tour, because it was still morning, and so we saw the ornate silver cradle, the draperies, the white upholstered couches strewn with rose petals, that would be the setting for the ceremony later in the day. I found it hard to get my mind around the idea that such things could be happening in 2009 (of course, there is the British monarchy and all, but stilll . . . .)

The buffet lunch was great, since we don't often get to be in upscale surroundings in Anand, and also since there was carrot halwah for dessert, which I had had in Delhi and really liked (it's basically shredded carrots, a lot of sugar, and spices all cooked up together into a pasty consistency). We also took group photos of our party, which I've added up above.

Second Day in the Big City

For our second day in Ahmedabad (Friday), we decided to go to a museum in the morning and in the afternoon to the Gandhi ashram, a spiritual community Gandhi created in 1915 to live in, when he came back to India at age 46 after many years of practicing law and being an activist in South Africa. From several appealing museum choices in Lonely Planet, we selected a folk art museum on the edge of town, which turned out to be an inspired pick, because it had amazingly beautiful textiles of all sorts and embroidered, beaded, and decorated clothing that was out of this world, as well as other lovely objects. Unfortunately, no photographs were allowed inside, so I can't share the beauty, but if you are ever in Ahmedabad, don't miss it!

To get there, we had to take an auto-rickshaw, and the driver of the first one that pulled up in answer to our signal seemed sufficiently unclear about where we were going that we decided to pass on him and wait for another. At that moment, one directly across the street from us did a daring U-turn right through traffic and came alongside us -- a reckless (but completely typical) maneuver that might have made us hesitate, except that the driver turned out to be an "old friend" from the night before -- someone who had helped us get across the street when we were engulfed by the traffic and crowd from the holiday! He not only took us out to the museum, but ended up waiting for us for almost two hours there and then taking us out to the Gandhi ashram, showing us a good place to have lunch, and waiting for us again before finally taking us back to our hotel (his photo is above). All this, basically a whole day's work, for, I'm embarrassed to admit, less than $10 -- and that's with a generous tip over what he actually charged. This tells you something about wages (I'm guessing that was more than what he would have made in an average day's normal driving, or he wouldn't have chosen to do it) and it also tells you something about our privilege -- which it is easy to be reminded of every day here, not just from the inexpensive prices, but from the much less luxurious way that even middle-class people live.

The gorgeous folk art museum is on the grounds of a large campus called the Shreyas Children's Educational, Cultural, and Social Welfare Centre that was established in 1947 by a wealthy Indian couple, Manorama and Leena Sarabhai. The grounds, which are large and beautiful, contain a children's school, a home for neglected or abandoned children, a physical education centre, an art centre with music, dance, drama, and art studios, and several theatres, as well as the folk museum, a children's museum of toys, a camp ground, and a deer park. It is like a huge green oasis on the outskirts of the city, and it seemed like it would be a fabulous place to go to school, especially since there is a tremendous emphasis on the arts, as you could tell from a photo exhibit of the children's work that was in a room adjoining the museum. When I got a pamphlet about it, it turned out to my surprise that the first supervising teacher was Maria Montessori, who has always been somewhat of a heroine of mine. Some quick Internet research revealed that she was forced to leave Italy by Mussolini because of her refusal to conduct her school in a manner acceptable to fascism (i.e., militaristically), and went to India in 1939, where she stayed for the duration of the war and developed many refinements of her educational method, including apparently during her work at Shreyas. Montessori education remains popular in India to this day.

The Gandhi ashram, about 5 km north of the center of the city overlooking the Sabarmati River, was very moving, because of the simplicity of the grounds and few buildings, including the room in which Gandhi himself lived (see photo), because of an excellent museum with photos of his life and actual documents he had written (such as a letter to Adolf Hitler urging him not to continue his push toward war), and especially, for me, because of a large placard on the side of the main building containing Gandhi's rules for the ashram in his handwriting, as well as in Gujurati, Hindi, and English (see photo). Because reading them made such an impression on me, I'm tempted to type them all right into this blog, but because it's a fairly long document, instead I'll give a website where you can find them all -- http://www.gandhiashram.org.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=45 -- and limit my quoting to a few favorites:

Non-violence
Mere not-killing is not enough. The active part of non-violence is Love. The law of Love requires equal consideration for all life from the tiniest insect to the highest man. One who follows this law must not be angry even with the perpetrator of the greatest imaginable wrong, but must love him, wish him well and serve him. Although he must thus love the wrong doer, he must never submit to his wrong or his injustice, but must oppose it with all his might, and must patiently and without resentment suffer all the hardships to which the wrong doer may subject him in punishment for his opposition.

Non-Stealing
It is not enough not to take another's property without his permission. . . . It is also theft if one receives anything which he does not really need. The fine truth at the bottom of this principle is that Nature provides just enough, and no more, for our daily need. Hence it is also a theft to possess anything more than one's minimum requirement.

Non-possession or Poverty
This principle is really a part of the previous one. Just as one must not receive, so must one not possess anything which one des not really need. It would be a breach of this principle to possess unnecessary foodstuffs, clothing or furniture. For instance, one must not keep a chair if one can do without it. In observing this principle one is led to a progressive simplification of one's own life.

I don't have much hope, or even intention, of reaching any of these goals, but there was something very affecting about contemplating them. And so ended our second day in the big city. We had tea and something to eat, went back to our hotel to meet our car and driver, and left from there -- getting back to our apartment on campus at about 10 p.m. I even knew my way around Anand well enough that I could help the driver find the campus from downtown -- that showed me that I'm really getting to be at home!

We Go to the Big City

We're just about to end a two-day trip to Ahmedabad, one of the two big cities nearest to Anand (the other is Vadodara, which is the city we flew into). We came up on Thursday morning, leaving at about 10 a.m., and arriving shortly before noon, and the same car and driver from IRMA that brought us here should be arriving in about 15 minutes -- at 7 p.m., today being Friday -- to take us "home." A lot has been packed into these two days; I'll try to hit the high points.

The drive up was easy and very pleasant -- a road that we're told is one of the best highways in all of India (actually two lanes in each direction, which is highly unusual, and also with limited exits and entrances, ditto), and very little traffic. Once we got beyond the sprawl at the edges of Anand (which isn't that bad, since Anand is quite a small city), the countryside was lovely -- flat, but almost all cultivated with extremely neatly tended fields of crops, tidy looking houses and outbuildings (at least they looked tidy from the highway), and big haystacks; goats and cows wandering around; trees and flowers; and -- quite notably -- no roads -- it was obvious that these were farms and villages that people only walked between. One drove quite a way between seeing any roads at all, which only added to the serene and scenic quality. After the almost overly-tended campus of IRMA, and the chaotic noisy traffic and blare of "downtown" Anand, it was quite a pleasure to see the fields unrolling outside the car windows as people went about their rural business (of course, seeing it through car windows is probably far more pleasurable than actually having to do the work, but that's another issue. . . .). But then -- bang! -- we entered the outskirts of Ahmedabad, and oh my God! it made Anand seem like a tranquil paradise. The road, once we got off the highway, was terrible (dirt, bumps, occasional asphalt), the traffic was incredible, and on both sides of the narrow road it seemed like the place was in the midst of some gigantic upheaval of destruction and re-construction: huge ditches being dug on one side of the road with mounds of earth thrown up nearby, houses literally sliced in half in the process of being torn down, with interior spaces and furniture thrown open to the passing eye, animals wandering around, stalls stuck into nooks and crannies selling all kinds of stuff, and here and there, in the midst of this chaos, an occasional new, modern building, perhaps a foretaste of what was to come, perhaps an effort at development abandoned to the sprawl. As we actually got closer to the city center, things started to smooth out a bit -- the streets were consistently paved and regular, the buildings lined up on either side in a more predictable fashion, the animals gradually thinned out and disappeared -- but the noise, the traffic, the dust, the general overabundance of people and places everywhere you turned your eyes, persisted. We snaked our way through traffic on some major busy streets and finally turned down a narrow alley at the end of which was the hotel -- Hotel Volga -- recommended by Lonely Planet at which we had made our reservation. We had deliberately chosen a mid-price rather than a western-style "regular" hotel, and although it wouldn't be the choice of those who like to stay at the Ritz-Carleton, or maybe even the Holiday Inn, it was actually totally clean, the lobby and room were both spacious and perfectly decently decorated, and the bathroom -- always an important feature -- had a terrific shower and completely functional, if not particularly modern, toilet and sink. For $24, it was a good deal in our estimation. For those who might be a little less flexible in their standards than we are, a photo is attached so you can judge for yourself.

After checking in, we decided to head across the river (the city is divided in half by the Sabarmati River, with the "old" city on the east side and the newer metropolis on the west -- our hotel was quite near one of the bridges on the eastern side) to a bookstore-coffee shop touted by Lonely Planet. Bob was almost salivating at his first chance to be in a decent coffee shop since we had arrived in India. Since the distance didn't seem very far (we had a map), we walked across the bridge and then, because we were hungry by that time, stopped at a place we picked at random for lunch, which turned out to have excellent Indian food. After getting lost and retracing our steps several times, we finally made our way to the bookstore/cafe, which was underneath a pretty sketchy-looking small shopping mall, but did, indeed, have a western-style coffee shop (again, we're not talking upscale here -- marble countertops and the like -- but a pleasant place with tables and chairs, a range of hot and iced coffees, tea, and snacks -- even cappucccino, which was what Bob went for. He said it was the worst cappuccino he'd ever had, and he would have been better off just ordering regular coffee, but hey -- it was at least a shadow of what he wanted). I had a coffee and ice cream shake, which was delicious. The bookstore itself was gigantic and the most "western" place I've been in so far -- 80% of the books were in English, so it obviously serves the English-speaking population, such as it may be, in Ahmedabad, and there was everything: fiction, non-fiction, children's books, DVDS, stationery, history, self-help, etc. etc. -- a regular Borders (o.k., maybe not quite as big or fancy as Borders, but pretty close). This made it fairly uninteresting to me, however, so although I looked around while Bob read his newspaper over his cappuccino, there wasn't much to capture me. I did, however, get a children's book for learning to write the Hindi alphabet and simple words, since I think the Hindi writing is very beautiful and I have the idea that I will learn (we'll see . . . .).

Despite the somewhat shabby exterior of the shopping center, it turned out there was quite an upscale clothing store in it as well, which Lonely Planet described, quite accurately, as looking like it had lost its way on the road to NYC, so we checked that out as well. That was even more upscale than the bookstore. The women's clothing (Indian style saris and shalwar kameezes) was, indeed, extremely beautiful, but the prices were actually -- while not NYC level -- high compared to anything we had seen anywhere (e.g., $60 for the long top and matching pants that make up the standard alternative to a sari), so I decided to hold off for a bit. I may go back!

By then it was late afternoon and we were beginning to flag, but we pressed on to a crafts market that Lonely Planet said had lovely things, taking an auto-rickshaw to get there. The crafts market was in stalls around the perimeter of a park, and it did have beautiful fabrics, scarves, wall hangings, etc., but again -- this being our first exploration of what's out there to buy -- we decided just to scope stuff out and save the actual buying for another time (we will be here for almost 4 months, after all). We were just too tired to be able to handle choosing the right things from the absurd profusion of beautiful things that existed in stall after stall after stall, let alone bargain properly for their price. Although we enjoyed seeing the stuff, when we entered the park afterward for a walk at twilight, it was actually a relief just to look at trees and greenery. It was a lovely, big park, well-planted and tended, and well used by couples, families with children, old people, all of whom were striding (the young exercisers) or strolling (the old folks) around the circling paths.

We got another auto-rickshaw to take us back to our hotel, and the driver told us that because of the holiday parade taking place on the main street near the hotel (which we knew about -- the hotel manager told us it was happening from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m., and we had actually been eager to get back to see it, since we left the area before it started), the bridge would be closed and he couldn't get us there. No problem; we said he could drop us off on the western side of the bridge and we would walk across and go the three blocks or so from there to our hotel on foot. The holiday is Muharram, a Muslim holiday that commemorates the defeat of Mohammed's son-in-law in some long-ago battle -- and although we think of India as Hindu rather than Muslim, it's celebrated big-time in Ahmedabad, whether just by the Muslims who live here (many) or by Muslims and Hindus alike, I have no idea. Walking back across the bridge, now closed to traffic, was fun, sort of like when they close Memorial Drive in Cambridge -- everyone out in the street, obviously in a holiday mood, no cars to get between you and river, lights that are strung along the bridge twinkling in the evening dark.

But as we got to the end of the bridge, the crowd started thickening, and the music from the procession (the manager of our hotel, who spoke pretty good English, for some reason rejected "parade" as a word to describe it when we used it, and said it was a "procession") got louder and louder, which was pretty loud considering it was drums rhythmically banging -- bang! bang! bang! -- and Indian music blaring over a loudspeaker. People were crowded onto the ramparts of the bridge from which you could just get a view of the procession a few streets down, and as we stepped off the bridge, there was a profusion of carts selling street food of many sorts, and entire families sitting on the ground having picnics in the dark. The crowd kept getting thicker and thicker as we got nearer to the main street off which the alley to our hotel ran, which was the same street on which the procession was passing. By the time we got there, it was a throbbing mass of people, luckily liberally sprinkled with enough women and children that it didn't seem threatening, but also plenty of young men in groups, definitely making it quite difficult to thread your way through. By the time we were almost at the street where the procession was passing, the crowd was so dense there were moments when it carried you along almost despite yourself, and while I was actually somewhat exhilarated by the whole thing, Bob was -- perhaps more reasonably -- getting uncomfortable, and insisted I put away my camera, with which I was trying to take pictures, hold his hand, and get out of there. Reluctantly, I complied. although I really wanted to get photos of the procession itself, which was an apparently endless stream of people bearing large elaborate silver or tin models of temples or mosques on their shoulders. Even in the relatively short period of time we were out there, we must have seen more than a dozen of these go by, and plenty more seemed to be coming. Although I kept my camera in my bag while we pushed and shoved our way through the crowd (we're talking the worst possible rush hour on the NYC subway here), when at last we somehow emerged, in one piece, into the relatively calm breathing space of the alley in which our hotel was situated, I was able to take a few photos, which give you an idea 0f what I'm talking about. Meanwhile, don't forget that the music is going like crazy the whole time. This is somewhat of a trance state I'm describing. By the time we got up to our room, Bob was completely spent and I was all jazzed up -- not a very compatible combination. Although it was after 8, we hadn't yet eaten supper, which we had been planning to have at a very highly recommended restaurant on the top floor of an upscale heritage hotel that was right around the corner from our hotel. But there was no way that Bob was going back out into that crowd in the street again, so we just sat in silence, each in our quite different mood. Finally, however, as the hour approached 9:30, we both began to relax, and the noise from the street seemed to be dying down, and we were hungry enough that we decided we could at least go back out into the alley and see how things were. As it turned out, although the procession wasn't completely over, the crowd had thinned out a fair amount, and we decided we could make it to the restaurant, which we did. The hotel itself has been created by the conversion of a gorgeous old early 2oth century (late 19th century?) mansion that belonged to a huge upper crust extended Indian family; there were striking large photographs of them in groups and individually hanging in the halls. The place was both faded and grand: muted mustard and red colored walls, old furniture and decor in the lobby, slightly shabby even, but clearly a magnificent thing, with stairways rising up in various directions through a huge interior courtyard to the balconies of rooms, almost like being inside an intricate Escher drawing. The restaurant under a canopy on the roof served a prix fixe dinner of a dazzling number of courses of different vegetarian dishes, mixed with sweets of various mysterious kinds -- a fire in a brazier on the floor in the middle of the room sent off small sparks of light and a bit of warmth (unnecessary, since the temperature was lovely), so it was dim but not dark -- quiet and far removed from the madness of the street. The very final dish was a fruit plate with two leaves neatly folded into packets to hold the anise seed mix that Indians use after eating to "refresh" their mouths -- I hope the photo conveys the charm of the entire meal. We ate well, unwound, enjoyed -- an excellent ending for a busy day. Then we walked back to our hotel to sleep, and that was our first day in the Big City. To be continued. . . .

Wherever You Go, There's Daily Life

Spending a semester in India sounds quite exotic, but we’ve already discovered that on a day-to-day basis here in Anand, our life, not surprisingly, follows a pretty ordinary routine. We get up, maybe go for a bike ride around campus before breakfast, eat a standard breakfast in our apartment, and then bike over to my office so, on the days I have classes, I can prepare for class while Bob writes, and on the days I don’t, I can do email or other chores (I still have some work from Hampshire hanging over my head, a sign of how badly I procrastinated on things in the weeks before I left!), while Bob writes. Then three days a week at noon I teach my class, while Bob takes a break in the staff room (where they have a coffee and tea machine that, while it produces only instant coffee and not cappuccino and lattes, at least in his coffee-deprived state helps fill the void). Perhaps because we haven’t gone at the right hour, we haven’t found a lot of other staff hanging out in the staff room, but Bob did strike up an acquaintance with one faculty member he encountered there who teaches micro-finance. Getting to know other people, when mostly so far we talk only to each other, is definitely a plus.

When I get back from class, at about 1:30 (class ends at 1:10, but usually a student or two comes up to talk after class, which I like), we bike back to our apartment for lunch, which is often leftovers from the previous night’s supper. After lunch, we might read for a bit at “home” and then go back to the office for an hour or so, or go into town on an errand, or take a bike ride beyond the campus. The “events” are things like being invited by some students to come to their “mess” (as they call it) to have late afternoon tea and talk, or hanging out at the children’s playground that is right in front of our apartment block with Vivek’s father, who has been visiting since we got here and often goes there with Vivek’s two daughters in the late afternoon, or playing with the girls, Barkha and Annika, or with the boys who are out there flying kites. Pretty exotic, huh???

This lack of excitement gives me a chance to write about some of the ordinary aspects of our lives that are, nonetheless, different from Northampton, so here they are:

Cows: As everybody knows, and as you see in the photo, cows are all over the place in India, hanging out in the streets and eating garbage. I always thought it was because of some religious symbolism they had (and maybe that’s part of it), but we just learned that at least some of the reason turns out to be that it’s simply too expensive for people to feed and house cows that a) are male and can’t give milk, or b) are female but are not good milkers, for whatever reason (since they’re vegetarian, they can’t eat them, either). So these are basically abandoned cows. In the U.S., of course, if people were abandoning cows to the streets, we’d have somebody round them up and slaughter them, but apparently slaughtering cows is just not done here. So they continue to wander.

Masters and servants: As I already mentioned a few entries ago, we have already acquired – for the first time in my life – a servant: a woman who cleans the apartment, does our laundry, and cooks us supper every night. She comes in the mid-morning, when we’re not around, to clean and do laundry, and at 6 p.m. to prepare supper, which she puts on the table for us at 7 before leaving for home. This is quite standard. In addition, there’s a separate guy who comes every day to clean the bathroom (this is apparently so routine that it’s part of the rent – no one even asked if we wanted him or not). And someone else delivers milk whenever we put a coupon indicating we want it outside our door. And someone else comes each morning to pick up our garbage, which we also put outside our door. I already mentioned the guys who sit on the very ample lawns of the campus pulling weeds out of the grass one by one by hand. You get the picture – there’s a lot of labor available. In addition, the whole set-up of the campus community is quite feudal: the apartment blocks (not tall buildings, but two story units the scale of garden apartments) are labeled “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D” units, with D, the “lowest,” being where the non-professional staff live, and C, B, and A for faculty and administrators, who start out at the low end in C, and gradually as they’re promoted from assistant to associate to full professor move up to A. We’re in C, which could either be a reading of our status, or – on the optimistic side – be the only place an empty apartment was available.

Weddings: This is wedding season in Gujurat, and weddings are going on constantly. You know they’re happening because there is loud music and very often loud fireworks every night that we can hear easily from where we live, even though it’s coming from outside the campus walls. Since the weddings take place outside, in special parks that are the equivalent of U.S. catering halls, the music carries easily. I’ve been trying to persuade Bob, so far unsuccessfully, to leave the campus at night and try to sneak in on one of these affairs (which certainly sound like a hell of a lot of fun), but today – to our surprise – as we were doing errands in town, a wedding party suddenly came pouring out of a nearby wedding park, music blaring. I don’t know why this one was happening during the day, but the costumed musicians, the very dressed-up guests, and – most marvelously – the shimmering fairy-tale horse-drawn carriage in which the bride and groom ride (see photos) give you a glimpse of the fantastic romantic quality of the Indian wedding. It puts even the wedding in the movie of “Sex and the City” to shame. Once again, Tova, Ariel, and Rebecca, if you’re reading this blog, consider this – when you’re ready for your wedding, do you want to think about opting for one in India? The jubilation couldn’t possibly be better, and I bet the price is right, too.