Finally in India - First Week (or so)

August 22nd, 2006 by Sheel

I haven’t had internet access for the past several days, so apologies if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t replied.

Not really sure where this blog is going - but I think a big reason it exists is to let people know what I’m doing out here… I guess I’ll blog everytime something relevant happens…

The first month of Indicorps is an orientation to India, Service, and Development as a whole. We’re about one week in, and so far, it’s been great. Everything we do is very Gandhian - all about living simply (hand-washing clothes, minimizing possessions, etc.) Anyway, that’s part of the reason I haven’t had internet, cept for a few minutes a WEEK (eek!)… you can call (and text) me at 94276-22277…

The Gandhian Gram Swaraj philosophy isn’t one I’ve bought into 100% just yet - it also is a very anti-technology, anti-globalization philosophy that tries to get all villages to be sustainable.

Anyway - here’s sort of a daily rundown of what we’ve done so far:

The first day of orientation is India’s Independence day (Aug 15), so in the morning we went to a nearby village to celebrate Independence with a flag raising ceremony at the local school. We marched around some Indian nationalistic saying, which you can hear in this video:

We had a pretty good time, but there wasn’t enough time to really bond with the kids. Here are a couple more pictures:

Not sure why i did this black and white thing, I don’t think it works

In the afternoon, a bunch of 15-16 year olds were bussed in to hang out with us… I had a crew of 7 kids to take around to this amusement park place… We had an awesome time, and my kids really really liked me… In fact, they have been calling me almost every day just to talk. I hope that I’ll get to hang out with them in the future…
Here’s a couple pictures.

The 2nd day, we stayed at ESI the whole day… ESI is the Environmental Sanitation Institute, outside Ahmedabad. We got a tour of the place - is an incredible facility - they recycle all of their water, and even reuse water from the toilet 5 times… It’s also beautiful, clean, serene, and an awesome place to have this sort of event - lots of rooms, outdoor space, etc. Here are a couple of pictures of the facility:

I don’t have any pictures up from the rest of the week yet, but there was a lot of doing service in Ahmedabad with Manav Sadhana because there has been some flooding recently.

I guess I’ll have to blog about the rest of the week next time I have internet (not sure when that’ll be)

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This was written last week but just posted since I only now have internet

In India!
I’ve arrived safely in Ahmedabad, on time, with no real problems… The extra security for the Euro-bomb threat was essentially a non-issue. They found a hotel-sized bottle of lotion in my luggage and removed it, but that’s about it.

My delayed flight out of Pittsburgh made me drop my few hours of chilling time with Sangya and Shawn - pretty bummed about that.

Singapore was mostly a bust, I didn’t find anything …
After everyone telling me where to go shop in Singapore (not interested) I have a conversation with a tourism ambassador that goes like this:
Me: I’m really not interested in Shopping, I have a day in Singapore to kill, what should I do?
Tourism Ambassador: Well, you can go to Paragon
Me: What’s that
TA: The best shopping mall in Southeast Asia
Me: What’s the best thing to do if I don’t want to shop?
TA: Spend some time in Suntec City/Marina
Me: What’s that
TA: The largest shopping mall in Southeast Asia
Me: I’M NOT INTERESTED IN SHOPPING! What else?
TA: There is the worlds largest fountain, blah blah blah.

In Southeast Asia, I’ve noticed that everyone loves having “The World’s Largest” of anything, or they talk about how they are the best in Southeast Asia - is it really that great to be the best in southeast asia?

Anyway, I love fountains, so I HAD to see the “world’s largest” in Suntec city… There were huge signs everywhere advertising the World’s largest Fountain. I was excited.
Here’s the fountain:

So is this thing really the World’s Largest? The Guinness book seems to think so, but I don’t know.