Archive for September, 2006
I typed this post up on my laptop and am posting it during the 10 minutes I have online during the day - trying not to spend too much time on their computer here.
Re: my facial hair - I told the barber to give me a “pukka” Indian cut and shave. My grandfather decided that I should shave my beard to goatee like Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star in Indian cinema (and my hero). I don’t think it looks very good on me, but I figure I’ll just shave it off the next chance I get. Cost for the shave and haircut: 30rs ($0.65).
Before: 
After: 
The 4.5 hour bus-ride to Kurkheda from Nagpur was not great… Picture a rickety school bus, with 3-4 adults in each seat, less shocks, and much more horrible roads. I’ve travelled on a lot of state transport busses, but this bus seemed to be worse than other states, and it was pricey too… 98 rupees ($2.13) for a 150km journey. It seems silly to say that $2.13 is expensive for a bus-ride of 150kms, but comparatively it is really pricey for such a crappy bus.
I haven’t taken many pictures in Kurkheda, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. I did take a few pictures in “stealth mode” with the camera held down at my waist. Here’s one of the main street in town, which has all of the shops and eateries.
My accomodations here are… spartan. Perhaps a little different than what I’m used to, but plenty good enough for me… 
The only problem is that there are TONS of mosquitos in this place. TONS. Like I’ve never seen so many in my life. Even the locals say that Kurkheda is known to have the most mosquitos around. No idea why this is, I don’t see anymore still water than I do anywhere else. Anyway, I don’t really sleep much at night because I get up every 10 minutes or so when I get a mosquito bite, plus my asthma and allergies don’t fare so well in the village. I end up taking a benadryl-induced nap of a couple hours during the day.
Outside of my room here, there is a bigger room with a chalkboard. This is what was on the board today… a “tough” lesson indeed, learning a non-phonetic language when you’ve grown up on being able to pronounce every word just by seeing how it’s spelled:
Awesomely, almost everyone here has taken a huge interest in me and what I’m here to do. Everyone is super-helpful and just wants to chat it up every chance they get. My hindi skills haven’t been a barrier at all, though there are occasionally words I don’t fully understand. Most of the people here (80%) speak hindi, and those that don’t understand it atleast. Yesterday I went to what I thought was a previously scheduled SHG (self-help group) meeting… it turns out that they just organized the meeting because I came. Anyway, it was by 6 ladies who run a “mess,” which is just a cafeteria where you can pay either by the meal or for the month. They charge 20rs ($.43) per meal, or you can get 2 meals a day every day of the month for 650rs ($14.13). I’ll take a picture of the place later on. These ladies took a 15,000rs ($326) loan from the bank… They weren’t sure what interest rate they got the loan at, but I asked the NGO, who said it was at 12%… It’s interesting that they didn’t even know what the interest rate was, more on that later. I then asked what their monthly profit was. This opened up a can of worms and led to a 10-15 minute discussion about it, and me doing a ton of calculations in my head… The ladies didn’t really have any measure of profit and loss… they said they couldn’t measure it by month because they buy grain that lasts 2 months, vegetables daily, rice that lasts 2 weeks, etc. I tried to push them on this, and then they started telling me what everything costs and how long it lasts. This ended up being quite a process, and then they forgot a lot of inputs etc… In the end, we never figured it out, but the ladies do know that they deposit 6,000rs ($130) to the bank every month, and each of the ladies takes home 400rs ($8.70) every month, on top of the free meals for themselves and kids. I asked what they do if a wedding is coming up or anyone gets sick… They said that they’ll give each other no-interest loans within their self-help group, but if anyone else needs a loan they will charge interest.
It was slightly alarming to me that the ladies didn’t know their monthly profit and also didn’t know what interest rate they were paying to the bank… I guess these numbers mean more to me than they might to someone else. At Indicorps orientation, I started to realize that I always examine situations of development with my head, when sometimes it’s better to look at these sorts of situations with my heart. With my head, I was thinking that these ladies have been at this business for a year, and they still don’t know how much money they are making, or what percent interest they were charged by the bank… have they really been helped? With my heart, a different picture emerges- One with 6 happy ladies, in a position of power, primary breadwinners for the family, having a great time at a business they own. Over time, I think my perspective on Microfinance loans given to women may change. I’ve often felt that microfinance programs targetted only at women do not seriously change the patriarchal structure of economic and political control, and that women are simply used as debt collectors for loans used by men. This situation has certainly altered that view of mine a little.
Til Next time,
Sheel
Navaratri is a 9-night festival in Gujarat that ends in a festival called Dussehra. I don’t know a ton of particulars about the festival, other than the garba part… Go here if you’re interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navratri
Although wikipedia mentions Navaratri being celebrated in March, I’ve never heard of it.
During each of the 9 nights, Gujaratis celebrate with dances. Traditionally, I think people just danced in the streets, but in cities it has now become quite an elaborate affair with invites, passes, and fees to get into the best garbas in town.
The best garbas are all during the last few days of the festival, but I had to leave after the 2nd night to get out to Maharashtra.
Last week, we went shopping for outfits at Law Garden in Ahmedabad, which is this public garden surrounded by street-stores selling clothes for navaratri garbas. I bought a really cheap kurta (Indian shirt top) for 150rs ($3.25), bargained down from 450rs… Shaila and Divya bought these girls outfits for 630rs ($13.70) bargained down from 1650rs. When I got to my relatives place, they sort of laughed that we had bought outfits at Law Garden, because apparently it’s known for being a place to get cheap outfits that don’t last very long. This held to be true, as on my 2nd night of garba-ing, 2 of the buttons from my kurta fell off.
Law Garden shopping:
The 1st night I went to a garba with my cousins - it was an invite-only one at a pretty posh “party plot” in Ahmedabad. It was fun, but I didn’t really get too into it, probably because there weren’t enough of my friends there. Anyway, there were some decked out kiddos that were super cute:
I took a video of some really cute kids playing garba too, but I’m on a pretty slow connection, so not worth uploading that video - maybe later.
The next night, Karishma’s family had gotten us passes to another garba at some private club… It was a lot of fun dancing with the Indicorps crew, though it seems that every year my dancing becomes worse and turns more and more into a mockery.
Here’s a pic of Divya (blog), me, and Shaila (blog)… we’re the Indicorps fellows based out of Ahmedabad, and we’ve become “fast friends.” (people in India love saying “fast friends”). Shaila’s project is to re-design the camel cart, which is super interesting to me… I thought about applying to this project, but I don’t have any engineering experience - it turns out that she doesn’t either. Divya’s project is the India Service Initiative, and they are trying to get educated people from India interested in spending a year to teach in India, similar to Teach For America.
Here’s me and Shaila, spinning really fast:
Karishma, Shaila, Archana, Me, Juie (Karishma is volunteering with Indicorps for a couple of months, Archana is Indicorps staff, Juie is a 2 year fellow who started last year):
I’m currently in Nagpur, going to head to Kurkheda in a few hours. Kurkheda is a small village of about 7,000 people in the Gadchiroli district of Eastern Maharashtra. Not sure what my connectivity is going to be like there, so this might be my last post for a little while. I came to Nagpur on a pretty long train journey. The journey itself is supposed to be about 18 hours by train, but our train started 6 hours late. I got to the train station at 11pm for my midnight train out of Ahmedabad. I ended up sleeping at the station for a few hours and got up in time to make the train. We finally reached Nagpur at midnight the next day, so it effectively took me 24 hours to get here. I didn’t take any pictures - maybe I’ll take some on the way back. The cost of my ticket was 352 rs ($7.65), and the train ticket says Ahmedabad to Nagpur is 1,052 kms (600some miles). The tickets are priced based on a multiple of kilometers plus some booking charges. I’m not sure if the 1,052 kilometers is as the crow flies or the actual path of the train though… if the train takes 18 hours to travel 600 miles its absurdly slow, but actually believable.
I think I’m going to shave my 45-day old beard… I had planned to not shave at all, but I’m now a little worried that when I go to this tribal area and start talking to people they might think I’m a Naxalite, which is a violent communist group that is active in the region… it’s funny because I also have a bunch of Mao Zedong t-shirts that I bought in China that I love wearing. I’m not sure that anyone here actually knows who he is, but I guess I won’t wear them while I’m here.
Alright, so you’ll hear from me when you hear from me.
Sheel
Update on Lalu - Recording of speech below
As you might expect - what I eat here is drastically different than what I eat in America. Against the recommendations of nearly everyone (doctors, relatives, some Indicorps staff), I eat most of my meals on the street. Because of that, what I eat is pretty different than what most people eat - even many of my relatives who grew up in India don’t like eating on the street - it’s generally considered very unhealthy because dirt from the street can get on the food, the people making the food aren’t as clean, and they might not use as good quality oil. Also they use a ton of oil in their cooking. That being said, street food is absolutely delicious and I can’t resist.
In the morning, I generally eat Idli/Sambar from the street. Cost: 5-7rs ($0.11-$0.15)
Here’s my morning idli guy:
And Idlis look like this - they are made of rice and stuff (I’m no cook, not really sure about anything)… they are delicious.
For lunch, some people get a tiffin service, but I either eat from the street again, or someone from the office brings food that they’ve cooked for everyone. You have to order the tiffin service the day before you eat it, and I can never plan that far in advance. Tiffins are the Indian form of lunchboxes. Each compartment has a different food in it. I think the origin of the word is some British word that actually means light snack. There was a picture of a few tiffin boxes below in the last post.
Afternoon snack: I might grab something like a Dabeli (Buns w/ potato mixture, pomegranate seeds, peanuts & sev)… 6rs ($0.13).
Here’s a picture of a street stall from the outside:
From the cook’s perspective, there’s a grille and all of the food:
The Dabeli, delicious:
Chai - Everyone has tea several times a day, but they are served in shotglass sized portions (literally). Cost 2.5rs ($0.05)
I usually don’t drink it because it always has milk and it’s a pain to ask for it without milk (I’m vegan)
The guys making the tea are usually pretty cool characters, willing to chat and stuff. They have TONS of milk… more milk than water in the tea sometimes.
A little more fancy… I occasionally go to fancyish places - there is one called Mint that I go to pretty often because they have free wireless. Food/drinks at these places costs between 3-8x what street food costs, so I try to avoid them. However, it is nice to get out of the heat and into some air conditioned space once in a while. These places look pretty much like cafe’s in the western world.
Here’s Cafe Coffee Day, near the office inside of a bookstore.
Late night, there is one really popular option called Paan. I don’t love it or anything, but if someone asks me if I want some I’ll usually indulge in a meetha paan (sweet paan). Paan is made of Betel leaf and some other stuff (go here for more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paan).
2 things - I’m leaving Ahmedabad to spend a few weeks in Villages in an Eastern Maharashtra region called Vidarbha. I’m pretty interested on how Microfinance/Kiva can help these communities - they have been seriously affected by Farmers committing suicide in the past several years, and debt is a factor in the suicides. Heres an article about the suicides that was in the New York Times last week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
I’m not sure what my connectivity will be like out there, but, most of you know me well enough to realize that I’ll find a way to be as close to the internet as possible. All of this food stuff will be totally different.
2) Went to Navaratri garbas the past couple of days. Will post about that soon.
Update on Lalu - I took my digital voice recorder to the Lalu speech (in Hindi)… Here’s an MP3 with the recording of Lalu’s speech at IIM (not excellent quality - I wasn’t sitting in the front and not all of the people asking questions had a microphone… adjust your equalizer so that treble and bass are low)… The most interesting question comes in at 46:30… the one about the profit from depreciation.
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The main work in my project involves setting up an MFI (Microfinance Institution) network for Kiva in India, and then marketing Kiva India to the Indian diaspora worldwide. I’m going to spend the first couple of weeks doing some research from Ahmedabad (and hopefully getting in on some Navratri) then travelling to visit an MFI and spend time immersing myself in the job of a loan officer to find out how the MFI’s operate. I’d like to go to one of the most efficient MFI’s to see how they operate - SKS, Basix, or SHARE… We’ll see where I end up though.
I went to IIM-Ahmedabad (wikipedia) a couple of times in the past few days. IIM-A is the best school of management in India. I have a friend who’s a PhD student who was able to show me around. It’s a pretty cool place, designed by Louis Kahn in ‘62. The new campus was just built a few years back:
Here are a couple pictures of the old and new campuses:
Old:
New:
I went to a speech by Lalu Prasad Yadav(at IIM)… the Railway Minister of India. He was formerly the Chief Minister of Bihar, one of the poorest and most backward states in India. He is generally considered to be a laughingstock amongst educated people in India, but has huge popularity in the masses… (Wikipedia). It was pretty difficult to get into the speech, you had to have an invitation and whatnot, but we finagled our way in thanks to a student friend - Another reminder that in India anything is possible.
Lalu:
It was interesting that Lalu was giving a speech at IIM - the laughingstock of the Indian political scene giving a speech at the top management school in India. His speech was on the turnaround of the railway system in India - 2 years ago it was losing tons of money, and now there is a profit of 15000 Crores Rupees (3.2 Billion USD). He talked about some of the reasons that it happenned - increase in freight, increase in passenger numbers, etc.
Its a little fascinating that he did not raise passenger fares at all during that time. His speech was interesting and definately amusing. He made a ton of jokes about himself pretty easily which was funny.
I had some issues with the speech though - at the end there were 20 minutes for Q&A - he never answered a single question fully! A lot of questions were asked about the rail lines in Gujurat - he just made fun of the Chief Minister of Gujurat (who is from a party opposing his party). The biggest thing that irked me was when someone claimed that the reason he’s making profit is that he hasn’t repaired the rail lines properly that have depreciated. Lalu answered, “hey, profit is profit, however you get it.” Lalu’s arrival to Ahmedabad and speech was by far the biggest news item in Ahmedabad for a couple of days - The next day, there were 12 full articles (and other mentions) about his speech in the Ahmedabad version of the Times of India - the media all put a positive spin on everything he said - so maybe I’m just a pessimist, or maybe the Indian media SUCKS. Here’s an article: “Lalu ki Paatshala” (Lalu’s class)
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2011319.cms
Enough for now… the next post will be about my daily eating habits… I need to take some pictures first - here’s a teaser:
The past several days have been totally different from the first 3 weeks… we haven’t really left our campus to go anywhere, and we’ve had a lot of free time to work on our Project Plans for the year. We’ve also done a ton of leadership games and excercises. Sometimes I feel like I’m at a leadership institute rather than at an Orientation for a year in India. We did an excercise where we have to define Indicorps and why we’re here in India in 60 seconds… sort of like an “elevator pitch.” It’s pretty interesting, because you have to have different answers for the kajillion different people that ask you this question. I’ve been pretty easygoing about this thus far, and haven’t neccessarily given the best answer. I guess I’ll try to articulate that answer in the blog soon. It’s also been really great to spend more time with the other fellows - I really enjoy their company. We range in age from 20-30, and everyone is incredibly smart and talented - I’ve attached links to a couple of their blogs on the left side… I don’t know all of their blogs just yet (it’s really hard for people to blog when we have internet access once every couple of weeks).
A few things we did this week that were enjoyable: We put on a talent show for our language teachers. My group (gujurati learners) put on a performance where we started off singing a popular gujurati tune called Pankhida, then broke into a surprise REMIX where we changed all of the words of the song to be about our teacher (Bhartiben)… Sounds pretty stupid, but it turned out quite well, and our teacher was really pleased. Here’s a pic of us w/ teach afterwards:
Today, we’ve been at a college called CEPT (center for environmental planning and technology) http://www.cept.ac.in/. It’s one of the premier architecture/design planning schools in India. Really awesome campus and kids… Reminds me of Rang De Basanti a bit. We’ve just been talking to some students about what they want to do, and trying to inspire them to make a difference. It turns out they are already making a difference or planning to do so, including some people working at Unicef or UNDP. Anyway, it is a really awesome place, and I’ve made a bunch of friends that are already google talking me even though they are sitting next to me - here’s a pic of the campus - there are murals EVERYWHERE:
So tomorrow is the last day of orientation… pretty bittersweet. On the one hand, I’m really looking forward to getting started on my project, but on the other hand it is really nice to be here on our little campus and have cool American people to talk to 24/7. We’ll meet up every 2 months for workshops, but I don’t think it’ll quite be the same. I’ll be back w/ Internet access more often in a few days, will blog then, though I don’t know if I’ll actually have much to blog about.
