Archive for April, 2007
“The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a litte luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.”
~Opening line in the movie Match Point, which is a very good movie.
I’ve seen a few movies recently, which is really odd considering how few I’ve seen in general. In the past couple weeks, I’ve seen Provoked and Parzania, both of which are true stories, which are typically the movies I like the most. I also recently saw Blood Diamond, which was also really good… So 3 activist-ish movies in the past couple of weeks.
Provoked is the true story of a Punjabi woman named Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai) who leaves India to marry a London-based guy (Naveen Andrews), and ends up being badly abused by her husband. She ends up lighting him on fire and in prison for murdering. It’s a pretty touching story, and Aish actually acts quite well (for the first time, I might add). She acts well enough that you geniunely feel sorry for this woman, despite the fact that she murdered her husband. My favorite actor in the movie is her cell-mate, and eventual closest friend “Ronnie” though… The tagline of the movie is “In prison she found freedom,” and it makes a lot of sense when you watch it. Basically, the harsh realities of the world inside the prison with criminals start to harden Kiranjit to fend for herself, and she makes a bunch of new friends.
The sad thing is, noone is watching this movie in India. I saw it with 2 aunts in Bombay, and we were the only ones in the theater, and there were tons of people watching other screens. I guess it’s still hard to make films that make you think and get a broad audience… I think the most successful (and one of my favorite movies ever) is Rang De Basanti.
Parzania is a movie by an American Director, Bakul Dholakia. It’s about a family that gets caught in the riots that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and loses their son. I saw a pirated version of the film… The actual film hasn’t been shown anywhere in Gujarat, because a terrible organization called the Bajrang Dal has threatened the cinema halls with violence. These are the same guys that are trying to ban Valentines day, inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, and even trying to disallow Muslims from owning land in Gujarat, by attacking traders who sell to Muslims and by attacking Muslim homes and forcing the sale of the house or flat. Their methods of accomplishing things are often very violent, yet they have a lot of support in the state.
Because the copy of Parzania was a poorly pirated version, I think it’s hard to be totally fair. The version I saw was full of terrible edits, a lot of gratuitous swearing, and uneccessary sub-plot lines, but I’ve heard that the final version doesn’t have these issues. I didn’t think the acting was that great, despite Nasserudin Shah being one of my favorite actors (Watch Iqbal!). They way they show the violence that occurs is pretty good, but I’ve seen documentaries that were far more powerful. I wish I’d seen a legitimate copy of the film. Still, it’s a good primer to the violence that occurred in Gujarat, although it only depicts Hindus killing Muslims, and its important to note that the reverse happenned as well.
Blood Diamond was great… I assume you know what it’s about… Blood diamonds are diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance the conflicts. Watch this movie. Also, read this article - it’s really really good and full of information that you should know before buying a diamond. It’s all hype. It’s from the Feb. 1982 Atlantic Monthly, but it’s a really really good read. From my Interesting Stuff I Read page, Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
Indicorps intern Kajal (link to her photopage) has been teaching me some photography skills of late, so I’ve spent some time practicing. Nothing great so far, but learning how to use ISO and exposure , how to frame a picture, and how to do some edits in photoshop (all of this stuff I sorta knew, but never used on my tiny digital camera). The biggest learning so far is about low light situations… I ever photographed them properly before, now I’m learning that flash is bad, and I like that because I hate that everyone knows that you’ve taken a picture.
Here are some pictures of a night where a bunch of us went to eat some Gola. Gola is an Indian Ice slushie type thing, very popular in the summer months. It’s shaved ice with some syrup on top. I actually don’t really like it. You can typically get them for about 5 rupees (12 cents)… The place we went to was almost 30 rupees though! This place puts actual fruit into the mix, and does a TON of business with this differentiation. Anand said he heard they do 15,000 rupees ($350) worth of business a night, which is a ton for a roadside business. It’s amazing to me that so many people were willing to pay so much extra for a slight difference. They have tons and tons of flavors:
So I was in Ahmedabad for 6 weeks after the last Indicorps workshop… It’s probably the longest I’ve stayed in the same city since college. After college, I worked for a couple of consulting firms and was travelling pretty constantly for work, and also for personal trips, so 6 weeks is a long time for me. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been travelling so much for so long.
I finally left last week. I went to Bombay for a couple of meetings. I have mixed feelings about Bombay - it’s too big and everything takes too long and is too expensive and dirty, and people don’t have time for you, but it’s nice because I know a lot of people and there’s always something new to do. It’s exactly the same as New York in that regard. The first night there I met up and stayed with my old music teacher from Pittsburgh. The guy that I took voice and harmonium (keyboard) lessons from a decade ago is now the CIO of Reliance Communications ($20 billion mobile and infocomm giant). Pretty cool how random connections and a person’s network can be.
Everytime I think we have a solution for getting Kiva.org started in India, there is a setback. My current worry is about this story that the RBI has had too much inflow of External Commercial Borrowing for this year. As you can tell from the article, it doesn’t seem like a very well thought out process (as is the case with many regulations in India)… we’re going through an approval process with the RBI, and I really hope that this doesn’t affect the approval (we’re only talking about $500k out of the $22billion!). Pray for us!
I’m off to Baroda, then heading to Pune, then to Panchgani, which is where we have our Indicorps workshop this time. I’m really looking forward to this little retreat. Here’s the site of our workshop http://www.in.iofc.org/ap.
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”
~Harry S. Truman
Chulha means stove. Many people in India still cook on a wooden fire, although this is both expensive (wood isn’t cheap in an urban setting) and the smoke is harmful to health. The idea of a smokeless chulha is to not let all of the smoke come out and get in your face while cooking. It’s not actually smokeless - the smoke goes up a pipe and (sometimes) through the roof.
Here are more details from the ESI website: http://www.esi.org.in/technology_smokeless.htm
They could also build gas stoves, but the startup costs are quite high (needs a cylinder, new stove, etc. As a part of her project with the camel cart community, Shaila has been trying to get people in the community to build smokeless chulhas. Last Friday was the big day - the first family decided to build a stove. I went to the community with the thought that I’d help in building the stove, but it turned a neighborhood mason, Devaji
decided to stay home to learn how to build the smokeless chulha, and that there was no way for me to add any value to the building aspect (I have no real skills anyway), so I decided to stay away from the actual building of it.
Instead, I spent time talking to family members of Hastimal-bhai, the person who’s home we were building in. It’s quite interesting actually… Hastimal Bhai is an economics professor at a local college. His family is from Rajasthan, but they moved to Ahmedabad several years back to make a better income in Ahmedabad. His father was a hawker of goods (don’t remember what specifically), and raised 9 kids. Hastimalbhai is the oldest of the 9, and is probably in his upper 20s or lower 30s. He lives in a very different environment than his fellow economics professors, partially because he also provides for his brothers and sisters families - his is the only income in a family of 15. This is his neighborhood:
Not exactly the image in your mind when you think of an econ professor. Mine drove a Yellow Ferrari.
It’s amazing how learned Hastimal-bhai is given his background growing up poor though. In India, it’s generally easy to tell what “class” someone is by their English (or lack thereof)… Hastimalbhai speaks perfect English and is very learned (I enjoyed talking econ with him)… He’s pursuing a PhD at the moment - his thesis is regarding urbanizations environmental consequences.
One of the duties I took on while watching the chulha being built was playing with Hastimalbhais 6-month old baby niece, Tanvi. Tanvi actually became really attached to me and would cry any time I tried to pass her off to someone else. Here are a few cute shots of me and Tanvi (click to maximize).
They were taken by Kajal - click for more of her photos. By the way, most of the pictures in this post are thanks to Kajal.
Her hand is smaller than my thumb… I love it.
The chulha-building was the perfect example of market-driven development. Shaila took the women of this particular area to the Gandhi Ashram, where the staff at ESI explained to them the benefits of smokeless chulhas: faster cooking, less wood used, better for health (here is her blog post on it). Hastimal bhai decided that he’d be the guinea-pig and ponied up 300rs ($7) for the materials (dirt, cement, bricks and a cement pipe) to build the stove. Jayantibhai came from ESI to help build the first stove. The neighborhood mason Devaji came to learn how to build the stove, which he now knows how to build and can replicate, charging 100rs for his time and building expertise. Hastimal Bhai lives on a corner so everyone walking by was naturally curious about what was going on, and a LOT of people stopped to find out what was being built. This was a great time to fill them all in on advantages of a smokeless chulha. The new chulha will pay for itself several times over in less than a year, because they’ll be using less wood, and their homes will be less smoky, so they’ll save on medical expenses as well. Most all of the spectators were sold on the concept, and if they live up to their word, the mason will be quite busy building smokeless chulhas. People do things when they are incentivized to do them, and I think people will be building chulhas because they know the advantages… a much better reason than having an NGO build it for them for free.
Here are some pictures of the process:
Mixing the cement
Early progress… The water bottle was to measure the hole for the pipe.
Shaila and the kids, and some moms.
Last-minute adjustments
Me and naked-boy observing the finished product
Flickr photoset that Shaila put up along with more descriptions - watch it!
Shaila’s blog-post on the smokeless chulha adventure
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
~Tom Stoppard
Saturday was my birthday… I didn’t really have anything planned in advance but ended up gathering a few Indicorps people together at Seva Cafe. It was traditional night, so we all ate on the floor.
The menu was all traditional gujarati delicacies, what I typically refer to as DBRS (Daal-Bhaat, Rotli Shak)… literally lentils and rice, bread and a vegetable… Here’s the menu:
I don’t know about the adjectives they used to describe these things… Knowledgeable Khir?
Anyway it was a fun night out, though very different from how I usually celebrate. I like birthdays because people call and it’s a great time to catch up with people you haven’t talked to for a while… It seems like I was getting phonecalls for 3 straight days… I was born on April 7th in Pittsburgh at 6:somethingpm, but it was already the 8th here in India, so my Indian relatives wish me on the 8th… Plus the 9.5 hour time difference from the East coast…
—
Eating habit update (for mom)
This picture looks much better in bigsize (click on it).
A couple of new eating habits. I’ve started eating watermelon every morning morning. I get a plate for 5 rupees.
There’s a temporary roadside stall that went up about a month ago for the start of the season. They sell watermelon at 5rs a plate or 12rs a kg (12 cents a pound), and they’ve started selling mango and sugarcane juice as well. These guys move to Ahmedabad for the season, put up these tent-like structures, and live in them during the season as well. 3 guys live/work here.
I’ve also started to eat “Vegetable puff” quite frequently. I have no idea how they are made… (Edit - now I do) I think we would call them vegetable pastry in America. They are pastry-ish and filled with some potato mix. They come with chutney and ketchup. I haven’t really talked about the ketchup here… The Ketchup here is quite different (even Heinz, which is a far 2nd or 3rd in the ketchup market in India!)… It’s pretty interesting, I’ve found ketchup to be different in almost every country I visit. You would think that such a condiment would be relatively standard, but it turns out that there is quite a bit of customization for tastes of the local market. My favorites are either Grace Ketchup in Jamaica or Heinz America… the stuff here is too watery, and I think the roadside guys add water to their own homemade mixtures. Anyway, here is a delicious “puff”… Cost: 7 rupees ($0.15). I usually end up eating 2 per day.
Will save the smokeless chulha post for next time, when I have more pictures of it.
“Great men live dangerously, small men don’t take chances.”
~Chinese fortune cookie
Last Friday, I went to see The Namesake with several Indicorps friends.
On the whole, I think the movie was enjoyable, but I was a little disappointed when leaving the theater. I think I had sky-high expectations based on what I’d heard about it from friends, Mira Nair’s other films, or the fact that it was written by pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri. Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of Jhumpa’s books, and now I don’t plan to.
One of the things that was slightly annoying is that there were lots of inconsistencies around time periods… like cars of the wrong period or ATM’s in Calcutta in the 70’s… Still, it was a pretty beautiful film. I guess part of it was just that I don’t identify with Gogol’s life, and his upbringing was pretty different than mine. It’s also possible that I’m being overly critical, and that if this movie was about a Taiwanese family, that I’d have more love for it.
Tabu and Irfan Khan were really really good. I think their portrayal of Bengali FOB parents was spot-on. Would’ve liked to see more about Tabu’s change from an Indian girl to an Indian American Mother.
It was also shot really well. There were classic scenes like this one:
I didh’t really care for Kal Penn in a serious role, I think he’s much better suited to comedy. I also didn’t like any of the other main roles (Kal Penn’s white girlfriend and Bengali wife). I think the white girlfriend probably played her part quite well, it’s just that her part was to be annoying.
It was below my expectations, but probably still worth watching, if only for Tabu and Irfan Khan’s great performances.
Saturday, I went to P Chidambaram’s speech at convocation at IIM-Ahmedabad.
Here’s an Mp3 of the speech from deshgujarat.com
Chidambaram is the finance minister of India. He was wearing his trademark white shirt and Dhoti bottom.
His speech was pretty interesting - he mainly focused on the divide between the haves and the have-nots in India. He talked about the 9% GDP growth rate of India, and mentioned that it was below it’s potential because, among other reasons, much of the population didn’t participate in the growth process due to lack of education or skills, jobs, capital or opportunity. I’d qualify education with useful… There are a lot of people with degrees that are pretty meaningless - I actually think that for the poor, skills training is far more important than proper education.
He talked about how far China has come in the past decade, owing its progress to the “one country, two systems.” He said that India follows a “one country, one system and as many interpretations as there are political parties.”
Chidambaram admitted that the government puts big bucks into Government programs for social service, but that the programs fail by design, delivery and implementation. Unfortunate, but so true. He said that development programs only work when there is participation from the people, but over the years in India many developmental programmes have bypassed the people and delivered poor results. People don’t have a sense of ownership on a half-constructed road or a school building in the rural areas even though it was constructed with their own money. The absence of public ownership of development programmes doesn’t ensure the necessary accountability on the part of those duty-bound to implement the programmes.
He said the “disconnect” between the “rich India” and the “poor India” must be bridged, and that “Deficiencies in design, delivery and implementation must be remedied. Time is of essence and the consequences of failure are too grave to leave the task to the Government alone”
The focus of his speech was interesting, especially given the audience of IIMA grads, who for the most part I’ve found to be concerned with little other than how large their post-graduation paychecks will be. He said, “I wonder if some of you, at some stage in your lives, will come forward and volunteer to work as monitors and evaluators at the block or district levels. That is the battle ground where the war on poverty, ignorance and disease will be won or lost, and we need more selfless foot soldiers on that ground.” Perhaps later in life, but I don’t think they will do so in the near future.
The other speaker was Vijaypat Singhania, Chairman of the Raymonds group (big clothing and textile group in India). He also is an acclaimed aviator, and is now Chairman of the Governing Council at IIM Ahmedabad, succeeding Narayana Murthy.
I liked most of what he said - advocating more autonomy for the institution to pursue an uncompromising pursuit of excellence.
He then said:
“With $140 Billion of foreign investment sitting in the Gujarat kitty, talk of Godhra signifies confused thinking that can easily erode a hard-earned reputation.”
So he says that because we’ve gotten a lot of foreign investment, we can forget about the communal rioting that happenned just 5 years ago, with the Hindu rioters getting support from the government that is still in power? The Hindu-Muslim riots were a huge blight on the state, and I don’t think that there is any amount of foreign investment that can erase what was done. It’s also important to continue to talk about it, just as we continue to talk about the civil war and civil rights movements in the US.
Next: Smokeless Chulha & my birthday
