Archive for October, 2006
So after I last posted, I went out to a village about 5 hours from Pune, and met up with a women’s bank called Mann Deshi Mahila Bank… It was good and very interesting to learn how they disperse loans and collect money back (which they do almost 100% of the time). They only give loans which empower women, and won’t give a loan to a woman if they think that the loan will empower a man in the house… There are things I learned that sound a little crazy and that never would have thought of, like giving a loan for a Buffalo empowers women, but a loan for a “Jersey cow” empowers men because Buffalo milk is sold door-to-door but “Jersey Cow” milk is sold to dairy’s, where men are involved.
An interesting story - there was a lady who was doing “accounts” for her family and business - here are her thoughts on technology… “I didn’t trust the calculator for several days… I was willing to try it, but I still double-checked everything in my head… It took quite a while, but eventually I began trusting the calculator and realized that it was faster!” It’s interesting to think of calculators as a new technology that someone would be wary of trusting, but that’s the case sometimes - people are scared of anything new.
I met a lady named Vanita, who recently won the Woman Exemplar Award from the Prime Minister of India… Here’s her story, which is pretty cool - http://www.sheelm.com/blog/vanitamann.htm
… She got the award for doing some things that we’d consider pretty simple - operating a paper bowl making machine and selling it to other women!…
She’s taught me how to operate the machine - it’s pretty easy, you put a piece of wax paper in and another sheet of paper, and then clamp down. There is some heat in the machine, and it makes a bowl. You can make a few hundred bowls per hour and sell 60 of them for 10 rs ($0.21).
After that I headed back to Pune, hoping to get on a train to Jodhpur so I could spend time with my family for Diwali, an Indian holiday (festival of lights) that is the equivalent of our Christmas. I had booked the ticket 3 weeks prior to the trip, but I was still #69 on the waiting list. I tried a few different things to get on the train, and thought about just getting on the train and seeing what happens, but ultimately decided to cancel my ticket and plans for Diwali. I had already spent several hours in the Pune station waiting in line for various things, like the foreign tourist quota line, etc. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to be in a 2.5 hour line, to get near the front and then the guy decides to sit there and drink tea and talk to his friends for 15 minutes when there is a huge line. Indian service at the goverment level absolutely sucks!
Anyway, I still had to wait in line to cancel my tickets - there is no automated way to do this. I spent a little over one hour in this line to cancel my tickets - sooo frustrating. 
This is called the “festival season”, as Diwali for Hindus and Jains and Eid for Muslims happen to fall around the same time… So there are a lot of people travelling, and people just camped at train stations for some unknown reason… Here’s a picture of an area outside of the Pune station: 
So I wasn’t able to visit any family for Diwali, which had them all a little annoyed, but there wasn’t much I could do… so I got on a train with a bunch of companions that I met in Pune. We went from Bombay to Pathankot, Punjab, in sleeper class, a trip that took some 33 hours or so. We had 6 confirmed tickets, and one on the waiting list, which means we had 6 “berths,” and the last person was stuck without one. We came up with an innovative solution that may have never been done before on the Indian Railways - a Hammock!
During the day, it’s always fine because there is plenty of sitting space for 7 people in the group of 6, but at night there isn’t a place to sleep. Rick (drove from California to Argentina -taking a few years!) had brought a cool hammock with him so we tied it up and I slept in it. Sometime in the middle of the night, 2 huge police officers with guns started hassling me about the hammock, for no good reason really, and I spent the rest of the night sleeping on the floor. Anyway, we got to Dharamsala OK - our trip started in Bombay at 7am on the 20th and ended in Dharamsala at 10pm on the 21st.
We got to Dharamsala on the 21st, which is Diwali… the car ride up to the place was beautiful, because there were fireworks all over the place, and driving up around mountains and valleys you get to see so many different fireworks! Dharamsala is COLLD at this time of year - and there are no heaters! Its super cold, and it was even cold inside our conference!
We stayed with a family in Dharamsala that was a short walk from the conference. We all ended up staying in the same big room and eating breakfast there too. Staying at that place were Jay & Ryanne, 2 video-blogging pioneers, Rick, a worldy programmer, Freeman, a free-man and programmer, Ashish Saboo, who’s president of the cyber cafe association of India, Savitri, who I mentioned below as working in a village on a technology enabling project, and Vickram, an Indian tech guru who has a radio program on podtech. We all just slept on the floor together - cozy but fun. We had a lot of discussions about development and technology, and the diversity of our backgrounds certainly added a lot to the discussions for me - each of us had a different perspective on development, India, and technology that was cool to learn from.
The floor outside of our room - lit up for Diwali:
Dharamsala is where the Dalai Lama has resided since 1959, when Jawaharlal Nehru granted the Tibetans refugee status in India… It’s pretty awesome to me that India has granted exile status to the Tibetans and welcomed them to our (our? yeah sure) country. I’m here for a conference called AirJaldi, which is the name of a wireless network in this area. The conference brings together people in development with techies with political people etc etc… which is kind of cool, but there might be too many techies for me. We’ve been discussing how technology can make an impact in the rural world. At first, it sounds a little silly to put wireless access in a community where the villagers can barely get 3 meals a day and healthcare, but after learning more about it, you realize that the knowledge can help them with these issues.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama offerred his greetings to the conference, and gave this message which I thought was pretty profound - “By itself, the Internet cannot feed the poor, defend the oppressed, or protect those subject to natural disasters, but by keeping us informed it can allow those of us who have the opportunity to give whatever help we can.” I think it’s important to note that noone thinks that the first thing people in a village needs is wi-fi connectivity, but through wi-fi there are a lot of other things that can be done (for example, remote medicine, telling farmers and fishers weather patterns, etc).
The first day of the conference, we went on a hike around the place to some really beautiful spots…
Me and Savitri at a beautiful waterfall that goes all the way down the valley…
Me with some sort of Tibetan horn:
The 2nd day, there were festivities celebrating the 46th birthday of the Tibetan Children’s Village, where our conference was based… The Dalai Lama was there to give his blessings…
The kids performed this pretty cool calisthenics display, where they all (640 kids) did lots of things simultaneously, which was pretty cool to see. They were all performing simple actions, but the fact that they were all being done at the exact same time was awesome. At the end of their performance, they spelled out a bunch of different things and made different symbols, which was really cool… Every minute they would go into something chaotic and then you’d see them in a pattern-
It says - Long Live His Holiness
The conference itself was pretty cool from a personal learning standpoint. It was really good for me and Kiva from a networking perspective. I met a lot of people that I think will be helpful to me in the future. I was able to give a short presentation on Kiva to everyone at the summit, and got a lot of positive feedback and some offers to help from that:
I’m now in Delhi - meeting with an organization called Drishtee today, and then will be headed out to visit one of their kiosks later.
I plan on being here for a few days - there is a conference on microcredit from the 30th-31st that I plan on attending too. After that I might be off to visit a couple of MFI’s in Rajasthan if I can - there may even be an interest in using Kiva to finance Camels! - They cost around $450, which seems like it’d make a good Kiva loan.
After Waifad, I went to Nagpur for a conference on Farmer Suicides… I was told it would be in English, but when I showed up everyone was speaking in Marathi for the most part which was a little bit of a let-down since I can’t really understand much Marathi. So I headed to Pune that day… Pune is a reasonably big city that is growing fast (some say too fast)about 3 hours from Bombay…
Here’s the street outside of my friend & Kiva supporter Freeman’s place - there are 3 pizza places within 20 feet of each other - yeah, it’s very different than the villages I was in (to say the least):
In Pune, I met up with an MFI called DISHA operating in the area, which is basically replicating the Grameen Model - you probably have heard of Grameen esp recently since the founder, Mohammed Yunus just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Anyway, it was cool to see the good work that they were doing, but I could sense that the man leading it was getting fed up because his management team and funders were forcing some ideas down on him that he didn’t want to have.
I had some hours to kill on Saturday so I decided to visit Kiva supporter Freeman Murray (http://wheresfreeman.blogspot.com/), and he invited lots of street performers over to his apartment so we could learn about their craft and shoot some video about it. The first guy that came had 2 monkeys - Dharmendra (age 5, doesn’t like the keyboard we shoved in his face):
and Hema Malini (age 3, behind her man): 
Hema was also in the previous post (Dharmendra and Hema Malini are a famous bollywood couple of the 70s). We talked to the monkey guy about his life - he said he likes it but doesn’t make enough money and he’s trying to get his kids to study in school so they don’t have the same fate as him. His kids are ashamed of his dad’s line of business and lie about it in school. The “monkey business” has been in his family for several generations - he wasn’t sure who actually started it in his family.
Next, a Sarangi player showed up and showed us how to play the Sarangi. It’s actually a very simple instrument that the musicians make themselves out of wood, paper, and strings. It’s so simple, but it sounds so cool-: 
, Video coming soon!
The next guy to come show us his act was a snake charmer. He had 2 cobras, some other kind of snake that I forget, and - a MONGOOSE with him, all kept in these little fabric bags, which really irritated my animal-loving side. I’m not sure, but I think snake charming is now illegal, and so is the monkey business. We asked the charmer and monkeyguy about it- they said it wasn’t illegal, but who knows… If you get bit by one of these cobras, you typically only have 10-15 minutes to live, unless you can get an injection in that time, in which case you’ll be totally fine. These snakes have had their poison removed though, so if you get bit, its just a bite on your body. Somehow I didn’t feel like I should test it-
Typical charmer pose:
Male and Female Cobra:
Mongoose in action - note that the green snake has wrapped itself around the mongoose-
Me w/ greensnake… yeah, the hideous stache (see below post) is gone!:
The next guy to come was a Rajasthani Puppeteer… I don’t know, but puppet’s don’t do much for me. The first thing he did was an Ashwariya Rai puppet dancing to the hit song “Kajra Re”:
The next puppet was doing a really crazy dance to a silly but catchy song called “Just Chill”:
There were a few more songs, but I was actually a little bored by the whole thing - I guess it takes a lot to excite me nowadays -
The next guy was just the right thing - he was a magician - the father of the snake-charmer. He was really really good - some of the best magic I’ve ever seen - I was sitting a couple of feet from the guy and I couldn’t figure out any of his tricks! He had really stupid jokes and a lot of showmanship, but his magic/sleight-of-hand was really great:
The next performance was by this Karate-guy who claimed to be the 3rd best martial-artist in the world or something. The whole thing was absolutely hilarious, because by this time we’d seen so much silly stuff throughout the day that we were going pretty crazy coming up with random theories about what the karate guy would do. He brought 20 students with him - they were students from some local business school, so they came dressed up all alike in suits, which was funny in itself. The fact that they later did horrible Karate was just icing on the cake.
1st Hilarious moment - They get 6 huge blocks of ice and put them on bricks which the karate-master is going to break with his head. They set it up, and the blocks of ice break perfectly in the middle without the guy touching his head on it!
Next, the guy breaks 3 blocks of ice with his head, but it seems pretty easy since we’d just seen the ice break on its own. Added hilarity because the guy grunts and makes a ton of karate-noises. Haaaiiii-YA!
Totally reminded me of some Cobra-Kai shit from Karate Kid.
Next, the guy pulls out 4 crates of eggs, and proceeds to do more grunting and heavy breathing then ultimately jumps on the eggs. I think eggs are really hard to break when standing up, especially since his weight is evenly distributed among them (if you couldn’t tell, I’m pretty cynical about Mr. Karate-Master)… anyway he jumps, and some of the eggs actually do crack: 
Karate-master next does some nunchuk thing while standing on the eggs - seems pretty cool.
His next trick was actually really good and also really strange - he took these Cricket Stumps, had people hold them on a guy’s stomach, and then Hai-Ya’d them with his feet and broke them.
Holding the stump on a guy’s stomach with karate-master getting ready to break it:
Success!
Alright, the next thing was absolutely hilarious. All of these business-students in suits started following karate-master in punches and kicks and stuff… but they were really bad… and they were wearing suits - it was a surreal scene that you can probably only see in India:
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If you can’t tell, I’ve been having a total blast out here… everything I do is something new and exciting to me, so it never gets old, and when it starts to get old I do something else.
After all that “jhang” (Savitri’s word for something Gaudy or over-showy), we (A few of Freeman’s friends were in town from America) were pretty tired, but we stayed up late, talking about peoples experiences around the world that was pretty cool - I now have a few more places to visit in the world. The next morning I had to get up pretty early to go out and meet a guy from an MFI in Pune. It was weird, but when I walked outside and saw scooters and rickshaws it took me a minute to register that I wasn’t in America - might be the first time that it’s happenned to me… I guess going from villages & speaking mostly in hindi to Pune at Freeman’s place speaking American was a big difference that made me feel like I was actually in America.
I’ll upload some links to videos later - we shot a lot of video throughout the day, and Freeman has some guys editing it down.
For Diwali, I never got off the waiting list on my train to Jodhpur, so I’m stuck in Pune-Bombay for the next couple of days. I’ll just be sort of hanging out for a bit, should be fun. Heading to Dharamsala (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Dharamsala&s=int)for a conference on Rural Connectivity http://summit.airjaldi.com/ that should be really interesting. We have a 30-hour train ride up from Bombay that should be super fun.
I’ve spent most of the past week in a village called Waifad, about 17kms (takes over an hour) from another larger city called Wardha. I got there in a rickshaw that had 12 people (+ a huge thing of eggs and my luggage, etc - rickshaws are legally allowed to have a driver + 3 passengers). Theres a common practice called shared rickshaws which is basically a rickshaw driving around shouting out the name of where he’s going and if you’re going there or somewhere in between you can hop on and pay a set fare which is usually much lower than if you went on your own. Once, I drove the rickshaw 17 kms back from Wardha to Waifad- it was pretty fun, but a little intense, especially since there were 8 people in the rickshaw!
In Waifad, I was learning from some people at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation’s Village Resource Center, which is this really cool place that has a bunch of computers and aims to use technology to provide information and help alleviate poverty in rural areas. I really like the work that they’re doing, and when there I met an intelligent girl from Bombay (Savitri) who just graduated and decided that it’d be good for her life to spend a year working in a village… It’s so rare to find people in India who actually want to do good work and aren’t just doing NGO work because it is the only job they can find, so that was really cool to see. I realized realized that coming from Bombay to a village on the other side of the state might be as much of a different world than America to a villlage in India.
Anyway, so Waifad has been a lot of fun… I became buddies with some of the kids here, who try to wake me up at 5:30am to do all sorts of things like go for a long walk to the river and temple and stuff (I never take them up on it)… I went to the farm and tried to participate in some farming activities, but I sucked at it, so it was mostly a chance for the kids to have a good laugh:
I was trying to plow the field with these oxen or bullocks or whatever, but mostly I would fall off the plow pretty often and the Oxen would never do what I wanted them to, and one would stop to pee and the other would keep going and stuff…
Got to sit on a Ox-cart for a bit, which was nice, except for the road is so bumpy and muddy that it hurts quite a bit and we decided that we should walk instead:
One day, we went to the local school to try to convince the teachers to get their kids to come to the village resource center. Even though I knew a bit about the state of the education system in India, visiting and talking to teachers was a little eye-opening. The kids weren’t learning anything, and the teachers were hardly present… when we came, all of the teachers came and sat around a desk with us for about an hour without teaching anything… It’s amazing that kids learn anything at all. I also sat in on some English “tutions” that Savitri Madam was teaching… the english texts that the students have are riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, so its obvious that kids who learn English here will have problems with these things (it’s bad enough that they teach them to spell organise, flavour, and colour, the way they do, and they pronounce ‘z’ as Zed - crazy!)…
Here’s a reading comprehension section from a 12th grade exam - First of all, these kids have never seen email so its ridiculous… secondly - this thing is full of errors!
This is what was going on in the classroom (3rd grade I think):
Not a lot of learning to be sure. It actually makes me wonder how my grandfather and father (growing up relatively poor) learned such good English after being schooled like this - or were times different back then?
We went to Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram, which is where Gandhi lived from 1936-1942… The buildings themselves aren’t that much different than the Sabarmati Ashram, but the Ashram in Ahmedabad is better maintained.
Gandhiji’s House:
7 Sins:
I stood in for Dev (inside Joke) at a wax museumish thing of the Danda March:
At Waifad, the staff members have a cook come to make food for them, but I thought that we should cook one day, so Savitri and I decided we’d make the food. It turned out to be pretty hilarious and messy - here’s a picture of the roundest roti that we made most were probably worse than this one… note the flour “tika” on her head:
Me mixing up some daal (how hilarious is the ’stache?)… so when I tried to get them to shave my goatee completely off at the previous village, the barber looked at me like I was crazy and basically refused to shave off my moustache, so I decide to leave it for a few days to better blend in with the villagers):
I’m now in Pune, but I’ll have to blog about this place later on because I have another bus to catch to a village called Mhaswad. Pune is sooooooo different from where I just came… Yesterday was really cool though - here’s a teaser - a lot more where this came from with the next post (hopefully some video too, though no promises, because I don’t know what my connectivity will be like):
A lot has happened in the week+ since I last posted. I went to a village called Korchi, which is some 30 odd kilometers away from the other village I was at (Kurkheda). Everyone warned me about this area being “tribal…” the truth is I don’t even know what tribal means. On the jeep ride over there, I tried to find out what makes tribal people different from other people. All I learned was that they often don’t wear shoes and they have their own languages that are nothing like the surrounding languages. I’m pretty sure that those aren’t the only characteristics of tribal people… Anyway, I have no idea why people had to warn me about them, they don’t seem scary or anything. Korchi is a smaller town, with just a few shops in its town center
One interesting thing about the place is that in this village of a few thousand, there are 5 different languages spoken - Hindi, Chattisgarhi, Gonda, Kanwa, and Marathi. Even the folks at the NGO I stayed at didn’t know all of the languages. It was a pretty interesting dynamic to see… The neighbors of the person I was staying with spoke different languages than them… These people spoke Hindi at home… the neighbor on one side speaks Chattisgarhi, and the neighbor on the other side speaks Gonda. Chattisgarhi is somewhat similar to Hindi, but Gonda is totally different (very few similar words). The interesting thing is that they all have kids between the ages of 2-4 and the kids are best friends. When they speak together its some sort of mishmash of all 3 languages, but the kids seem to understand each other even though the parent’s might not. Pretty cool to see. I learned that if you go a little further south, there are villages bordering Andhra Pradesh, and then there is yet another language thrown into the mix - Telugu.
They say the shortest distance between 2 people is a common language - it’s hard to imagine how people in the village all communicate when sometimes there is none.
4 kids - 3 languages:
October 2nd was Dusshera. It’s a pretty big holiday over here… I don’t completely know the significance, but on that day we burn an effigy of Ravana (bad guy with 10 heads)… I got a picture of the Ravan they were starting to build in Korchi before I took off. It’s pretty cool… the whole village comes together and puts up a bunch of money when there are festivals and does stuff like this… This just looks like a scarecrow, but it’s really cool when finished:
I ended up going to Nagpur (relatively big city) for Dusshera because it’s a holiday and noone was working at the NGO, plus I had to meet people the next day in Nagpur. We went to the big Dusshera celebration there - there were thousands and thousands of people, they did this cool reenactment and there was a pretty big light and sound show (you would’ve loved it Tanya)… Lots of fireworks, some of the best I’ve seen in India. They burned the effigies of Ravana and 2 other bad guys (don’t know anything about this obviously, I should read or re-watch the Ramayana)… it only took about 15 minutes for all 3 of these to come down, but the light and sound show beforehand lasted over an hour. The effigies were probably 150ft high or so, pretty cool.
Here’s a sequence:
Then, back to Korchi… The people who I was staying with were renting 3 rooms from a landlord in another city… basically the room you enter into which is a hangout space with a few plastic chairs and a table, the next room which is the family room/bedroom (one bed which is also the sofa) and then the kitchen & bathroom is the next room. At first it seems like not a lot of space (probably a total of 400 sqft), but now I can’t figure out why you’d need any more space for a husband-wife-small child family. For this place they pay 250 rupees a MONTH ($5.43)… Crazy cheap right? More on this later.
In Nagpur I got to hang out with my grandparents and uncle/aunt for a little bit, which was nice.
I saw Lage Raho Munnabhai, a “super-hit” movie that’s out right now. I thought it was good, but a bit over-rated… It’s about this bad guy who does a lot of good things after being influenced by Gandhi. One thing that I find hilarious is that they are talking about submitting it as India’s entry to the Oscars… it’s a funny movie, but definately nothing Oscar-caliber. Rang De Basanti on the other hand is an awesome movie that could have a shot. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be Gandhian, and I’m not sure what the answer is. I probnably haven’t read enough of Gandhi to make any of the statements I’m making below, but here are my current thoughts on what being Gandhian means (these are some thoughts that may change throughout this year in India): In India there are a good number of people wearing Khadi (homespun cotton outfits), preaching self-sufficiency at a village level, and spurning modern technology. I think it’s great that they are all for Gandhi, and they are what we consider to be “Gandhian” people, but I don’t think it’s how I interpret Gandhi, and if he was alive today, I think his thoughts on technology would have been different… At Gandhi’s time, technology was used mostly as a way for the rich to suppress and exploit the majority of powerless people. Now technology is a tremendously democratizing and empowering force that I don’t think we should disregard. If Gandhi had seen the liberating power of modern transport, electricity, IT, and mobile technologies spread to the masses, I think his views might have been different. As much as we say he had a disdain for technology, I think he used whatever technology he was able to - the railways for example. With regards to Khadi… I think what he was really against was the British textiles of the day… If India was the worldwide textile powerhouse that it is today, I’m not so sure he would’ve been against other textiles. Home-spinning cotton seems like a total waste of time to me (I visited a village where they have one person still home-spinning - everyone else just uses machines from the city). With regards to self-sufficiency, I’m just not sure that its possible, and I think Gandhi’s economic ideals might not be realistic - I don’t think they were realistic 50 years ago, and I don’t think they are today. The movie Lage Raho is about a guy who lies, cheats, steals, and drinks, but still somehow is able to embody some Gandhian principles. I haven’t seen it firsthand, but I’ve read in the papers that “Gandhigiri” is catching on around the country - passive resistance… It’s funny that it takes a movie for such a thing to catch on in India.
Here’s a funny picture I saw in the Divya Bhaskar:
Indicorps requires us to keep a journal and make a minimum of one journal entry per week. Despite my penchant for posting to this blog, I totally suck at the journal entry thing. I consider this blog to be a journal entry of sorts, and don’t like being required to keep another one. They say “trust the process,” and that I will… Anyway, a friend of mine wrote me an email about the blog with some interesting questions. I figured I’d make a journal entry out of it, and post it to the blog:
“I’ve been reading your blog. I love the pictures you put up to show what India looks like. The phrase “A picture shows a thousand words” is so cliche but so true. Some of them really surprise me, such as how run down places look, and then in the case of your picture in the coffee shop - you can’t even tell that the shop is in the same country as the other places in your pictures. What does it feel like to be living in India? Do you feel Indian when you are there, or do you still feel a little foreign/American too? I guess it’s probably a little easier to adjust because you’ve been there so many times, but everyone always says it’s a little different to live in a place than it is to visit there.”
It’s interesting - a person who hasn’t ever been to India can’t imagine the place to be as “run-down” as it actually is. Maybe all of the recent media attention to India as a rising superpower masks the truth of India that few outside of India realize… The truth is that there are a large number of people in big cities in India who miss this picture altogether. There is no one India… there are thousands of them. A goal of mine this year is to explore and understand as many different Indias as I can… For example when I was in Bombay in January, me and my friends stayed in a Suite at the Grand Hyatt, which costs some $250 a night (I booked it on points though)… A few days ago, I stayed in a place that was probably the same size as that room, in the same state, that costs 250 rupees a MONTH, or $0.18 a day (a difference of x1400). It seems silly to compare Bombay to a small village in the same state, but what I’m trying to explain is that there is a massive amount of difference between the haves and have-nots in India. Sure, if you compare New York City to Upstate New York, there will be some differences, but I don’t think its anything near the scale of differences that we find here.
To me, urban India actually seems a lot more run-down than rural-India… I guess it’s just that rural poverty doesn’t neccesarily hit you in the face like a slum in the middle of Bombay does. Plus, urban slums are probably more degrading and dehumanizing. The dichotomy in India is so crazy - perhaps even more so than the pictures show, because there are millions of people every day who can’t even afford the 7 rupee idli plate, forget the 55 rupee capuccino at Cafe Coffee Day. So while there are glass-walled shopping malls outside New Delhi and high-end spa resorts in India’s southern backwaters, much of India struggles with barely paved roads, on-and-off electricity, rampant crime, problems with alcoholism, caste-ism, and religious intolerance. The interesting thing though is that as much as we talk about how India is divided amongst relgious and caste lines, it is more divided even more so among poverty lines. Hunger is hunger, poverty is poverty, deprivation is deprivation. Hindu poverty is the same as Muslim deprivation or Christian hunger.
I’m in Vidarbha (part of Maharashtra that is trying to become its own state because it hasn’t gotten a lot of state support because the western part of the state is more prosperous)… Farmers here are committing suicide at the rate of 3-4 per day. Policy-makers of India are providing temporary programs that don’t seem to have any impact. It’s a little disheartening to see, but I also think that the solution to this problem can’t come from government - it has to come from the people. The price of cotton worldwide has gone down by 4x over the past 15 years or so, partly because of subsidies provided by the US and European governments… farmers in this area are suffering because of it. It’s easy to blame the western countries for the problems, and indeed the US subsidies are an important factor, but there are so many others that are being overlooked - the Western world averages 1700kg’s of cotton on each acre of land… This region averages 140kg’s of cotton per acre. This difference has several components, but the biggest is that 85% of the land in this region is non-irrigated. If this region were to double it’s output per acre to 280kg’s per acre (still 1/6th that of the western world), we wouldn’t have such big problems. I have no idea how to make this happen, but I just want to present another side of the story. Farmer’s activists are proposing a blanket loan forgiveness program in the region - most farmers have an alarming amount of debt - the government has put up a program forgiving the interest owed on that debt, but the activists are crying for a full loan forgiveness. I don’t think it’s the right solution, but I don’t think I’ve spent enough time/know enough about Indian economics to come up with a better solution to end the suicides now. As much as this isn’t what people want to hear, I think it might be best to start shifting from an agrarian culture to another, or atleast supplementing the agrarian lifestyle with another. I read that in a survey, 60% of farmers in India would like to be in another profession. Anecdotally, when we were in the village in Kurkheda, we asked the farmers what they would like their kids to do… they all said that they would prefer them to work in the government or have some other job… It could just be that we want what we don’t have, but its alarming nonetheless.
OK, I’ve typed a whole lot without answering any of the questions that were posed… this was pretty much a stream-of-conciousness post…. most of what I typed is probably boring anyone still reading this thing. I still have to respond to the question of what it feels like to be in India. The short answer is that India feels more and more like home every day, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is so much new that I learn everyday. The long answer will have to wait until the next blog-post, because I have a bus to catch!
