not even sure where to start. I have many many very disconnected thoughts about India. I’ll spew a bunch of them here (with some photos), but they are very unprocessed. I think I’ll need a bit of time to put any cohesion to my time here.
Here was the view from the ship. They are making cars and waiting to load them onto ships. The port here is very industrial.
It is unbelievably hot & unbelievably humid.
There are people everywhere. We were little (mostly) white magnets. Everybody wanted our attention, our energy, our money.
Everything needs to be bargained for. And hawkers and retailers are all incredibly aggressive. Shopping is hard work, getting around is hard work. You’d negotiate a price with a rickshaw driver to go to a place & he would take you to a completely different place & argue for a completely different price. It was a bit exhausting.
(those are onions ...)
The cities are dirty and grimy. They’ve put plastic down everywhere over the carpets on the ship and given us blue towels, rather than the normal white, to hide the grime.
Here are my feet from an outing today that lasted no more than 3 hours.
I’m sitting in the faculty/staff lounge now and the crew has been through 3 times to wash the deck in the short time I’ve been sitting here. You can still see the dirt on the wood. The windows are filthy, despite the fact that they also have been washed multiple times. They closed all the outdoor food areas for the duration of the time we were in Chennai. I thought they were over-exaggerating, but looking at the deck this morning it is clear that they were not.
And everything is beautiful. The sarees are incredible, the fabric is incredible, how these woman stay so beautiful & so clean amidst all the dirt & grime is really difficult to figure out.
The temples are beautiful. The colors are vibrant & startling & everywhere. Why don’t we have color like this?
The mosquitoes here are not deterred by deet. I got very bitten despite heavy dousing of deet & promethrin.
The first day we did a little shopping and then I left immediately for an overnight train trip to Kerala. We were in 6-person compartments, air-conditioned, thankfully (have I mentioned that air conditioning is the best invention EVER?), a curtain separated us from the hallway that people walked back & forth along all night. Our group was great, there were only 18 of us and about a third of those were “adults” (faculty/staff/life-long-learners). I had a top bunk and slept ok that night. Dia claims to have seen a rat and is now calling the experience: “rats on a train”, but other than that the trip was uneventful. I like trains.
We arrived about 6 am in Madurai, we checked into a hotel briefly just to change clothes (there was a “boys” room and a “girls” room) and have breakfast and then we went sight-seeing. We started at the Hindu Temple in Madurai, called Meenakshi, which is dedicated to Shiva. It was built by the Nayaks, who ruled Madurai from the 16th to 18th centuries. The Temple was incredible & colorful. There were visitors, like us, and then many people worshiping. We weren’t allowed in the most center area because only Hindus are allowed in there, but we got a really good sense of the very large temple. I have a ton of pictures that I’ll put up on flicker over the next few days, but I was particularly drawn to the ceiling paintings.
We also visited an ancient palace of the Nayak Kings, which was interesting mix of Hindu elements and Islamic architecture.
You can immediately see the resemblance of these arches to those of other Islamic-influenced countries, like southern Spain for example. Driving through Madurai, it reminded me also very much of the little town outside of Madrid where my Spanish family had their vacation home. I can’t remember what that town was called and, of course, anything that would answer that question is at home. I’m not quite sure honestly where the similarity lies, and I kept wondering about it all day -- why that struck me. The town outside Madrid was a vacation-home-town in the mountains, with much wealth. There was not wealth in Madurai. But something about how the roads edged off into dirt on either side and the presence of that dirt in the air as it was kicked up by all the people out doing early morning daily shopping (before it gets too hot), and the congregating and chatting and doing business and laughing, the noise, the mopeds, it struck me all as very familiar.
After lunch, we drove 5 hours in a bus (also gratefully air conditioned) to Periyar. Periyar is in Kerala in the mountains and we drove the very big bus up very windy narrow roads. There was a fatal bus accident several years back during Semester at Sea and it was very hard not to think about that. Periyar is beautiful and high up and everything was lush and green and very unlike the city we had come from. We stayed in a lovely hotel that night where we were treated to a cooking demonstration (yup) and some Indian dancing. One dance I’m almost positive was also one we saw in Mauritius at the Mahatma Ghandi Institute.
The next day started at 5:15 when we were woken up for breakfast so that we could take an early morning boat-ride on Lake Periyar at the Wildlife Reserve. We didn’t see any large animals. They have a few tigers but haven’t spotted them since last August. Elephants are supposed to be prevalent, but we didn’t see any elephants either. Since I had just done the safari, I wasn’t too disappointed. And, since we arrived so early, the fog was burning off the lake and the boat ride was quiet and peaceful and sleepy and perfect.
As we were walking back to the bus, we saw a bunch of monkeys and mama monkeys carrying baby monkeys.
One monkey swatted at me for taking her picture. She came right up to me and reached up and swatted at my knee. It was a little bit scary, actually. Dr. Matt warned us not to get bitten by monkeys. It was hard to gage if it was play or anger. Maybe she didn’t want her picture taken?, which of course I would be perfectly willing to sympathize with.
We then got back on our bus and drove to a town called Kottayam. We passed tea plantations, which I don’t think I had ever seen before. I had seen coffee plantations in Costa Rica, but this was pretty cool. And also beautiful:
The area we drove through here was clearly wealthy and there were beautiful homes and much greenery & flowers and again, very much in stark contrast to Chennai or Madurai. In Kottayam, we boarded a small boat to sail along the backwaters of Kerala. There is a lake system that takes you through various different villages. Not surprisingly, it is referred to as the Venice of India. As we traveled along, we saw people living and working, women washing clothes, children swimming (or bathing?), and there were also some very beautiful homes. There were water-hyacinths in the water and Monty, who teaches environmental science (as well as documentary filmmaking), says they use them as water filtration. 'Cause lots of unpleasant stuff goes in the water, and yet they were bathing & washing clothes. Monty says they are starting to use these water-hyacinths in the U.S. also.
You can also travel the backwaters by houseboat. You can rent a houseboat for a night or two and hire a crew who cooks for you and get off in the various villages to talk to people. Several faculty/staff did this for their port stay and we ran into two of them as we were traveling along the waterway. The boat dropped us off in the town of Alleppey where we met up with our bus again and traveled about an hour to Kochi.
That evening, we had dinner and heard a lecture by a local college professor who talked about Kerala and answered questions. Kerala has a 95% literacy rate and it ranks very high in India for both education and wealth. A lot of the call-centers we’re all familiar with when we call tech-support are located here. Monty was trying very hard to pin the professor down on the question of “why Kerala?” -- why is Kerala so different than the rest of India? The professor talked a lot about how the British brought their educational system to Kerala and also the impact of Christian missionaries who set up schools. (Did you know that Christianity came to India before it came to Europe? Probably from Syria.) It struck me as odd that a country that is trying very hard to re-define itself post-British-colonization would credit the British for so much. Monty continued to be disturbed by the question of “why Kerala?” -- why not other areas where the British were highly influential, but he didn’t really get a good answer to his question. The students asked great questions, many about gender equality and economics and poverty. One of the students asked about the technology call centers. He said to the professor that outsourcing technology jobs to India is a source of much debate in the U.S. What were the problems that India saw with this outsourcing? The professor said that India doesn’t see any problems, that they were happy for the job creation. But, a few students continued to press and did learn some about sociological problems. For example, women who work in the call centers are working different hours (because of time differences across the world) from what is traditional, even for women who have worked, and that creates tension at home. The professor's university has a language lab where they teach U.S. pronunciation for the call centers employees. I remember Bess saying once that she had to take formal classes to lose her North Carolina accent when she worked at a helpdesk answering phones. Same thing here. The lecture was supposed to go 45 minutes but we were there much later because students continued to ask questions.
The next morning we toured around Kochi (Cochin was its British name). We started at two churches built by the Dutch. The first is now a Protestant Church & the second is a Catholic Church. Unlike western churches, we had to take our shoes off in both places. Vasco de Gama was buried in the Catholic Church until his remains were returned to Portugal. He died in India.
From there, we walked along the sea (Kochi means Queen of the Arabian Sea) to see the Chinese fishing nets, which were incredibly cool. 3 or 4 fisherman manipulate huge nets which catch surprisingly few numbers of fish. It may have just been the time of day, but we didn’t see large catches.
The fish are all then laid out in the fish market, where both people & cats enjoy:
From there, we went to a Dutch Palace that had beautiful paintings, but no photos allowed. And then on to the Jewish synagogue of Kochi, built in the 16th century. Photos were also not allowed there. The synagogue was small and beautiful and also had much Hindu influence in the color and the decoration. Like the Hindu temples, there is an outer square area where you first enter and then an inner square area where worshiping occurs. We had to remove our shoes here also before entering. After not being able to read the Indian scripts, it made me smile to walk up to the ark and be able to read the Shema, with even my not-very-good Hebrew. There are only 14 Jewish families living in the area now. The tour guide said they can’t get a minyan. The area surrounding the synagogue is called “Jew Town”.
The synagogue was built by the Portuguese and it first it seemed like they must have built it for themselves (their own Jewish community immigrating to India), but the guide said there were black Jews living in India before the Portuguese. And that white Jews came later. After we left the synagogue, I walked into the only store in Jew Town that is still owned by a Jewish family. The woman in there was definitely elderly and definitely white. We asked her a few questions but she didn’t seem to know much about where her family had come from. She told us she didn’t know and her parents didn’t know and they didn’t know their names. Their original Hebrew names, I imagined she meant. She said they did not know Hebrew either, just Malayalam, the language of Kerala. I walked in thinking maybe I would get a mezuzah and when I asked if she had them, she looked at me and said “you Jew?” They had only one mezuzah which was nothing terribly special and it was clear that most of what she did was embroidery. I bought a challah cover, as did Larry & Barbara, who I was with. Here’s Barbara with the store owner, her name was Sarah Cohen (also not so Indian):
It would have been interesting if she could have told us more about her origins. I bought a little booklet on Jews in Kerala, so when I finish reading that, maybe I can tell you more. India has only one other synagogue. Christianity in Kerala is 30% of the population, which is much higher than any of us had guessed. We think of India as so predominately Hindu, but there is significant religious diversity.
We did some more shopping in Jew Town, and then had a relaxing lunch and headed back to the train station. We boarded the train about 5:30 and so we had many hours to kill before bed. But, we chatted about I-don’t-know-what until 10, when lights-out on the train happened. I didn’t really sleep. I was on the bottom bunk this time which I found much less comfortable. We arrived back to the ship about 7 am yesterday morning. Erica, one of the resident directors and our trip leader, had told us nightmares about her previous voyage when she returned from the Taj trip hot and sweaty and exhausted to find out that the ship was on water restriction and no one was allowed to shower. Fortunately, that was NOT the case this voyage. We could shower, although we are still being asked to conserve. I showered, had breakfast, and then joined a field trip to the Working Women’s Forum.
The WWF is a “micro-credit” cooperative, which I confess to knowing nothing about before the Global Studies lecture on this topic. Muhammad Yunus recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Grameen Bank, which has popularized micro-credit. Micro-credit is when a bank or a cooperative (like a credit union) gives out small loans (on the order of a couple hundred dollars) to encourage poor people to start small businesses, like weaving or other handicrafts. They claim to have a 98% loan re-payment rate. The cooperative provides training both for the actual craft skills and for fiscal responsibility. They are doing a lot of on-the-ground work and providing small loans to women to help start to pull them out of poverty. The work of the Grameen Bank is at http://www.grameen-info.org/ and the WWF is at http://www.workingwomensforum.org/ You can read more about micro-credit (and microfinance) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit
We met with the President of the WWF today, Jaya Arunachalam, who told us about the organization and they took us through the bank where women were lined up to come in to make their monthly payments.
Gloria is critical of the micro-credit model and she was on the trip today too. She had spoken to this topic also at Global Studies last week. The micro-credit model encourages groups of women to come together around a particular trade and they receive the loan as a group, usually a group of 8 women. There is a leader (who would have been the women we saw today) who is primarily responsible for the loan-repayment. Gloria says several things happen. One is that women are given the loan but their husbands actually take the money. In order to repay the loan, the woman has to then borrow money from somewhere else (at a very high interest rate), which causes her to be in further debt. And the women in the group pressure each other to repay the loans. The micro-credit model sees this as a good thing -- both peer support and peer pressure for each person to make their contribution. Gloria says this shifts the burden from addressing the real causes of poverty to creating a situation where women are pressuring each other to repay loans that none of them can afford and which require them to take out new loans at higher interest rates to cover the original loan. The art of distraction. She wants to know how many of these small businesses survive 5 years and whether these woman are really working their way out of poverty over the long haul. Many people believe that organizations like the WWF are doing amazing things. And Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. There are many different opinions on micro-credit and they were on display this morning which was pretty interesting.
After lunch, Dean Mike & Sherri & Joyce & I went to the Khadi Government Emporium which is a shopping experience of the local variety that also doesn’t require bargaining. It was incredibly opposite of all the hawkers/retailers of the rest of the trip, who were really very aggressive. Here, I had a very hard time getting someone’s attention to help me. You’d think there’d be some kind of happy medium. We were the only non-Indians in the store. We took a rickshaw, which was my first rickshaw [death-defying] experience (I loved it!) and bought stuff and it was quite an enjoyable afternoon. I definitely racked up some loot in India. Yipes. I love the fabrics and the colors and it was really hard to resist. No more rupees left in my wallet …
