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.

First time in the bazaar

Saturday we went to the bazaar (market) in Anand in a pedicab for the first time; I'm attaching photos so you can get a sense of the profusion of goods, people, vehicles, dust (and the occasional cow). We had a pretty modest shopping list -- we wanted to get mugs to complement the tiny doll-sized tea cups that are all the apartment came with, an electric kettle to heat water in, if possible, and towels a little softer than the two thin scratchy sheets with which we were supplied -- but the overwhelming nature of the whole place made even that a bit daunting for first-time visitors. We did, however, manage to get two mugs that we could stand looking at from the fairly small number of ugly choices that we found (small tea cups seems to be the way to go here) and while we didn't find an electric kettle that we liked, we did find an excellent stainless steel thermos-type tea pot that could hold multiple cups of tea and keep it hot for a prolonged period. I was still feeling too shy to get my bargaining mojo going (I'll need a bit more acclimatisation for that), so Bob did the dealing (English here, unlike in Delhi and other tourist spots I visited on my last trip, is quite minimal at best) -- and we agreed that by offering two-thirds or so, rather than half, of the stated price we probably got "rooked," but for at most a dollar or two, it's hard to get exercised about this. On the towel front, we totally struck out -- maybe we just didn't know where to look (could they hide towels under the row after row in stall after stall of sparkly, bejewelled fabric and saris?, but we didn't see any, or even anything that came close, anywhere. We can try again next time.

Another Day, Another Small Adventure

The photos to the left give you a glimpse of our housing: the kitchen and the front of the building (we're the unit to the right of the stairs). Maybe this gives you an idea of why we were a bit shocked at first, although we're feeling increasingly comfortable (and these don't show either the dining room or the living room, which are the "showpieces" of the house!

And this is another shot of the campus, underscoring again how very pretty it is. There are, however, some things you don't see on a U.S. campus, like monkeys jumping from branch to branch, green parrots flying through the trees, and groundskeepers sitting on the lawns literally picking out the individual weeds by hand. This reminds you that you are in another country.

Slowly we're exploring our surroundings more -- yesterday we took our first unaccompanied trip into town. We rode our bikes (did I mention that we both got bikes? Mine is purple and says "Miss India"; Bob's, black, says "Nitrogen." They told him at the store that he couldn't buy a black one for me -- only purple and pink were for girls) out the campus gate and down the relatively quiet road that goes into the center of town (not far -- maybe less than a kilometer?), but when we hit the main street we had to park our bikes and walk. That's because the campus and the town are -- to use an eastern phrase -- like yin and yang: one peaceful, leafy, quiet; the other noisy, dusty, chaotic (at least to our eyes), crammed to the gills with stalls selling things while in the street cars, pedicabs, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians all dash madly past and around one another, merrily honking horns. We didn't walk far this trip, just to a grocery store that we had been to with Vivek before where we bought a few items -- this store, which is smaller than the average 7-11, is the biggest and "fanciest" we have seen so far. As I mentioned, most of the selling is happening from stalls rather than stores, except for a few electronics stores (also small), which are stocked with the absolute latest in digital equipment and the occasional bank or commercial-type building. And we haven't even made it to the actual marketplace yet -- that's a possible trip for tomorrow.

After we'd walked a bit "downtown," we were sitting on a stoop by the side of the road for a moment and a guy came up and started talking to us who turned out to be the perfect former NRI -- which is what they call "non-resident Indians" here. Turns out that many, many Gujuratis -- most of whom seem to come from one giant very extended family that has the name Patel -- have emigrated abroad, to Britain, Canada, the States, etc. and at least in the U.S., they have absolutely monopolized the motel business -- about half of all U.S. chain motels are now owned by Patels. With a little prodding from us, this guy seemed happy to tell us his life story, which began with his going to New Jersey in his early twenties with $10 in his pocket to live with a sister (he is one of nine children). He had already gotten a B.A. and M.A. in chemistry here in India, and after a little while he got a job with the NYC Police Dept. forensics unit, which seemed pretty good to me. But apparently most Patels are incurably entrepreneurial, so he wanted to go into business, and the only business he had saved up enough to afford at that point was a dry cleaners, so he went to dry cleaning school (who even knew there was such a thing?) and bought a shop. With his wife working there while he continued at the NYPD, they were able to save up enough to buy their first motel, in Pennsylvania, and he gradually traded up through various intermediate motels in West Virginia, among other places, until now they own a 7 1/2 million dollar motel in San Antonio, TX. Not only that, but he's now come back to Ahmedabad to live (although occasionally flying over to the U.S. to attend to motel business) in a spiritual community run by someone called Da Da Bhagwan (or, at least, that's the website: dadabhagwan.org). Check out the website -- it's a very elaborate venture. In fact, I wouldn't be the least surprised if there's a group of devotees of this guy in Northampton and Amherst.

He talked to us at some length about his spiritual beliefs -- certainly, though subtlely, in a proselytizing mode -- which is the second time in the less than two weeks we've been in India that we've been plunged deeply into spiritual discussion by a total stranger -- the first being in our guest house in Delhi, when the Indian man in the next room introduced himself over breakfast as a student of metaphysics and proceeded to elaborate an abstruse philosophy of life which I've, perhaps fortunately, mostly forgotten. I'm pretty sure proper breathing and reincarnation were both a part of it, but beyond that I can't say.

On a more secular note, we spent some time this afternoon meeting one of the new faculty members that Vivek has hired since he came here, a very friendly and interesting guy from Kerala who teaches "Cooperative Movements," among other courses. He's involved in a research project with people from around the world, coordinated by someone from the U. of Minnesota, that's looking at comparative government responses to global warming, so we had lots to talk about. His wife is also about to have their first child (he's young -- maybe thirtyish?), in late February, and he told me she had just left for her parents' home in Kerala, where she will be for and after the birth for about three months in total. This, I gather, is completely typical -- clearly the extended family is alive and well here in a way that is long gone for most people in the U.S. Ariel, Rebecca, and Tova -- if you are reading this -- beware! If and when your time comes to have children, perhaps your moms will scoop you up for months at a time as well!