Maharashtra - week 2!
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!
