Ugh... The flight which had 1 number was actually 3 flights, each involving deplaning, going through security and waiting an hour or two to reboard.  I mostly napped and watched movies.

On my last Sunday here, I woke up early to go meet my friend Manoj to watch/play cricket.  This friend's nickname is "Dhoni" after the captain of the Indian cricket team because he plays so well.  I took the bus to a village about halfway from Bilaspur to his house, and had a glass of fresh mango juice while I waited.  After I was done and was standing and waiting, a rickshaw driver started asking me questions about where I was from, why was I here, etc., and a small crowd gathered around.

I was picked up and we went off to the cricket ground, which was a dusty field in front of a school.  Dhoni's teammates (who are all from his village) were waiting, and soon the game began.  Dhoni started out batting in both games, and in both games was out before he scored any runs - the only two times in his life it had happened, he told me.  He said he was so excited to show off that he got out quickly.  When it was their turn to field, I played with them, fielding 2 or 3 balls, and not making any real mistakes.  Dhoni made up for his batting by doing a good job of bowling, getting a few batters out.  They won both games, which were played for the stakes of 50 rupees per game.

After the game, I took some team photos and promised to send them to the team.  The players were all from the same village, and I went back with them to the small hotel where they go every Sunday after their match.  We filled up a table in the back and they got samosas.  I can't eat samosas, so I had a cup of tea and a Mazaa, which Dhoni insisted on buying for me.  One thing that happens often in the village is that people will always insist on paying for things.

It was a small village hotel, on the freshly (and only) paved main road.  It had an uneven cement/rock floor, and the front was filled with an open-air display of its fried foods. As we sat, the children of the owner snuck peeks at me from the back room, and a crowd gathered around the table.  The owner (who may have been drunk) asked me if I wanted a number of specific local wines, one by one... "do you want GP"... "do you want mahua...", etc.  At this point it was around noon, and I told him it was too too early to drink, but at night I would.

After the hotel, we went to Dhoni's house.  It was a fairly standard village house, two small buildings sandwiching a courtyard.  The front building has the father's bedroom, a small store, and a room that acts as something like living room during the day and a bedroom for everybody else during the night.  At one end is a small TV hooked up to a satellite dish that sits on their tile roof.  The back building has a kitchen with small wood/dung burning stoves and another with a gas range, along with storage room for a year's worth of rice.  The back building also has a bedroom for his older brother who is often away, as he works for the railroad.  His mom, dad, sister-in-law, and two nieces (from his oldest brother) live there.  He stays there on Saturday and Sunday nights, but otherwise lives on the JSS Ganiyari campus.  There is also a cowshed and a hand pump off to one side.

He had not yet showered, and I went with him and his friend Sanju to his oldest brother's house, where they have a small concrete shower area.  I think that the pump there is powered, so they can wash in the overflow from the tank without having to do extra work.  They showered, while I waited inside in the shade.  Everyone else in the house (his oldest brother, sister-in-law, and nephew - their son lives at home while the daughters live with the grandparents) was asleep in the afternoon heat.

We went back for a meal of rice and daal, accompanied by raw onions, kerela (a bitter vegetable), and pickle, and then we went back to the main road where I waited for the bus.  While I was waiting, I saw a scarf across the street I wanted to buy, so I asked Dhoni to come with me to help... I decided to purchase it, and once again he wouldn't let me pay.  When  I took out my money, Sanju put me in a bear hug, and Dhoni and the shopkeeper agreed to use this transaction to settle some earlier debt (I will find a way to pay him back before I leave, even if it means slipped money into his pocket!)

The day in the sun gave me my first (mild) sunburn of my India adventure, on one of the last days.  When I made it home, I put a plastic chair in the bathroom and poured cool water on myself.

After months of work (not constant work, I've been working on other things too...), the JSS web site is now live.  Check it out: http://www.jssbilaspur.org/

  -Seth

Dolly and I went to the local zoo last weekend, and met up with one of our friends who had been there about 50 times.  Its a local hangout, with a couple of animals - white tigers, lions, deer and mooise like critters, and some birds and small mammals, but no monkeys(!).  It also has many playgrounds and grassy areas where you can sit in the shade, which are rarities in this area, and is as much a reason for its popularity as the animals.

It was a bit difficult to get there, even though buses go right by.  We ended up on three buses that were going that way, before the conductor told us to get off.  Apparently, the fare isn't enough to justify the ride/stop, especially if they are running behind - and all of these shennanigans happened while backed up at the train crossing.  The locals have to deal with this, too, but some of the villagers will beat up the bus drivers for not stopped, so to be safe they usually pick them up.  We were clearly not from the villages, so I guess they weren't afraid of us showing up later with a vigilante posse.

After we visited the zoo we went to the next village down, Sukri, which is the first sizeable village past Bilaspur.  We go through it every day on the way to Ganiyari.  I was starving, so our friend took us to a Dhaba for chicken, even though he is a Brahmin and does not eat chicken.  It was my first time in a proper dhaba... it has a dirt floor, and the kitchen was an outdoor conrete counter.  The dining room in the back had a wooden bed with the blankets and thin matress rolled up... this was also the proprietor's bedroom.

We got chicken biriyani, which was as good as any I have had, not too greasy, the right amount of heat, and accompanied by a savory gravy.  Luckily we did not get sick later!  We followed that up with fresh mango juice for some refreshing after-dinner sweetness.

Outlook magazine, an Indian news magazine similar to Time or Newsweek has just published a very in depth article by Arundhati Roy about the Naxals/Maoists in this part of India and the Government's (and Corporations... not that there's much difference) war against them.

A few words from the article:

Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.
 
...

We passed the house of the Superintendent of Police (SP), which I recognised from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”

Walking with the Comrades

This post is more for people who may be googling "Kenstar" appliances or refrigerators than for people who may normally read this blog.  I am hoping that maybe I can save someone the trouble of buying one of Kenstar's poor-quality products.

We bought a Kenstar refrigerator in October, buying based on price.  We only needed the refrigerator to last a year or two (actually, it turns out we needed it for a much shorter amount of time), so we didn't concern ourselves too much with durability.  However, this Kenstar refrigerator broke in about 2 months, and it took a month to get someone to come and finally fix it.  Actually to get it fixed, we had to haul it to a repair center ourselves, even though someone was supposed to come.

The Kenstar customer service line was useless, all they could do was take a ticket and tell us that a ticket had already been taken.  Kenstar took no interest or responsibility in getting it fixed.

It broke twice more after that, the first time taking another week to get it fixed, and we've currently been waiting a month, though we've kind of slacked off on harassing the repairmen, since I'll be leaving and Dolly is unsure of her plans.

We suspect that part of the difficulty is that Kenstar is sexist (ok, its actually the local repairmen, but now google has the words "Kenstar" and "sexist" next to each other... twice!), with the repair center not taking Dolly seriously as she is a woman.  I don't speak Hindi, so I can't help much.

So... if anyone is India is thinking of buying a Kenstar appliance, don't!

... its only March and the temperatures are already hitting 100 degrees.  I've started waking up sticky and sweaty, I sweat through  my clothes on the way to and from work (especially the evening ride home), and our *^&^%$ refrigerator doesn't work - we've been trying to 2/3 weeks to get the repairman to show up and fix the compressor.

These lists apply mostly to Bilaspur, a place I am not too fond of.  India is a big place, and the conditions aren't the same everywhere.  Taking "I don't like Bilaspur" to mean "I don't like India" is the same as taking "I don't like Camden" to mean "I don't like America." I hope to return someday as a tourist, and I'm sure I will have a wonderful time.

Things I won't miss
Moquitos:  every night I kill around 30 of them as they fly around and try to bite me.  They fly low and stay out of sight and then get your feet.  Since the buildings don't have climate control, there is no reason to have insulation or even windows that close.  So the mosquitos can jusy fly right in and bite.

Buses:  Bus drivers drive like they don't get paid unless they're maniacs, so they're always barrelling down the road at too high a speed and passing in inappropriate places.  Unless they are picking up/dropping off passenegers, and they'll stop wherever they want, traffic be damned.

Horns:  Horns here aren't "push the button for the beep", they're "flip the switch for the cacaphony".  They are used all the time.

My celebrity status:  I stand out everywhere.  If someone wants to say hello or snap a quick picture, thats fine.  Sometimes they try to drag me into long conversations or take me over somewhere else to meet their family.  Thats not so fine.

The heat:  Last summer the high was 48 degrees C.  I refuse to convert that into Fahrenheit, but I think thats the temperature for slow-cooking BBQ pork.

Sanitation: Open sewers that overflow daily in monsoon.  Eww.  Also, people doing their business (both one and two) everywhere, and in plain sight.  This may be a cultural thing, but my cultural programming says "eww".  I have no plans on reprogramming.

Festivals:  There are more festival days than non-festival days.  There are so many that most half the time no one can tell us what the festival actually is.  I suspect its part of some kind of prank, and/or an excuse to get drunk and make noise all night. 

Random signature gathering: the other day I went to use the ATM, and as I was walking out the security guard pointed to the register to have me enter my name, bank, celll phone number and signature.  It was the first time this had happened... why do they need these records?  Can't they electronically track who's sticking cards into the machine?  There is also a habit of when a meeting is announced (work, or in the apartment building) of someone coming around to get signatures.  They are rather instant, and I'm not sure if they just want confirmation that you were notified, or if it indicates you will attend.  Also, sometimes shopkeepers want you to sign YOUR copy of the receipt.  Makes no sense.

Things I'll Miss
Cheap prices: The other day I went to the market and bought rice and vegetables.  Three dinners worth of veggies for 2 people was under $1.50, and the rice was $2.50 for 6.5 pounds, enough to last about 3 weeks.  Haircuts are under 50 cents, and as I've mentioned we have a woman who cooks/does dishes/sweeps and wipes the floor for about $20/month.

Monkeys: They haven't been around in awhile, but they sometimes hang around the neighborhood.  I was trying to think of good things about Bilaspur.  The best I could come up with was "they have some monkeys". (Second place was "the mosquitos don't carry malaria")


Both ways:
The food:  Indian food is very good.  I like Indian food.  However, I am not eating "Indian Food," I am eating a narrow regional cuisine. I am sick of white rice and potato curry and the same 5 or 6 vegetables.  I still haven't figured out breakfast.  (Idlis and dosas are good, but I don't make them at home).  A lot of the culture, including the food culture, seems dependent on having a woman to wake up early and do a bunch of housework.

Customer Service:  Customer service is personalized and attentive.   When shopping for clothes/fabrics, you sit and they'll bring you dozens of options.  The success of this depends how on-the-ball the shopkeeper is.  Sometimes they will listen to what you are looking for an expertly guide your selection.  Sometimes they will bring you things randomly in desparate effort to please.  If you are unlucky, your feedback will actually result in the opposite of what should happen - "I don't like the flowers... do you have plain patterns?" and they bring more flowers, or "I don't like the the purple, what do you have in yellow?" and they bring every hue of purple you could imagine.

What I have learned about India is that whatever you are trying to do it will be much more difficult and involve many more steps and days than you expected.  It took us 2 months to get a bank account open.  Our refrigerator has been broken more days than it worked.  So of course getting a plane ticket home proved to be more involved than expected.

Calling a travel agent in the US is difficult because of the time difference and international calling, so after a few attempts through an intermediary (my mom), Dolly talked me into talking to a local travel agent, on the grounds that whenever she or her friends have travelled to/from India, travel agents always got the best price.

The first travel agent I talked to seemed reasonable, but was from out of town.  She is located in Raipur, the nearest "big" city, and the city I will be flying out of.  She found a decent itinerary at a good price, but then when it came time to pay, it turned out that you can't just give a credit card number over the phone.  They needed a photocopy (or imprint) of the card and of the card-holders gov't issued ID... so basically you need to visit them in person.  The other option was to make a deposit to their account in the local branch of their bank and then mail them confirmation of payment.  Both options were way too much work, so we found a local agent.

Dolly talked to them for me because they are Hindi speakers, and I am not, and they had a little trouble answering basic questions: "What time does the flight leave Raipur?" "You land in Chicago at 10:50" "No, what time does the plane LEAVE from RAIPUR?"  "The connection is though Bombay".  So we went into visit them this morning to clear it up, and they guy we had talked to was gone for most of the day for an exam of some kind, even though we had talked to him earlier in the morning, and told him we were coming in.  You think he would have mentioned that he wouldn't be there.

We setup a flight plan with the other guy in the office, and then agreed to come back later that evening to pay.  In retrospect, I'm not sure why we didn't just pay then, but maybe the guy we were working with wasn't authorized to collect payments or something. 

I rode my bike there in the evening, and it was a festival day.  The second of nine nights of Navatri (basically translates to "9 nights"), where every day they worship one of Krisha's (or is it Shiva's) nine forms.  I smiled at a man who noticed that he was standing across from a mandir (temple), and at a rickshaw driver with his hair and bushy mustache dyed a ridculous red with henna.  I was in a good mood, happy to be on my way to obtaining my ticket home, and not bothered by the congestion and noise and chaos that is part of the culture with more gods to celebrate than days on the calendar. 

When I got to the agency, the price had gone up 7000 rupees (about $150)!  Though we were willing and able to pay in the morning, they decided that it wasn't important, and in the meantime, the price had increased 20%.  So I walked out, and rode back home, once again irriated by the traffic and the dust.

When I got back to the neighborhood and went to one of the doctors' houses, borrowed the Internet and booked online, like I should have done in the first place.  My mood was then restored.  If I had a working fridge, I would have bought a small bottle of vodka and a mixer, and chilled them for my not-to-much-later enjoyment.  I don't have a working fridge so I just went and got a popsicle.  I'm flying out of Raipur on the 7th, and will land in Chicago on the morning of the 8th.

When we were at Bahmni to see the clinic, we took a walk and came across this woman making brooms.

This was taken in January, just getting it up now.  The narrator is speaking Hindi,but isn't really saying anything important, and you get to see the layout of the mobile clinic and the activity within.

After much thought, I have decided to bring my trip to an end! I will be returning to the US next month (in April).

Though the plan was initially to stay for 2 years, it turned out being much harder living here than I expected.  Though I had been to Europe, both Western and Eastern, I was not prepared for how foreign a place I was coming to.  Not only is there a different language, there is a different set of ideas and values behind it, (as well as a new alphabet, and new sounds - there's 4 different t's and 4 different d's) and I didn't pick up as quickly as I had thought I would.

Beyond the broad differences in culture, the specific place in India in which we are living is a difficult place.  There are no young educated people here.  If they are lucky enough to be educated, they flee.  There are no supermarkets (there are places they CALL supermarkets, but they have only a little more variety than the small stores).  There is nothing to do, not even any parks or sidewalks for taking a walk.  It is hard to get anywhere as the roads inside and out of town are all small and of poor quality, and distances become magnified.  Going 200km isn't something you can do before breakfast - it takes all morning.

The result has been crushing isolation and boredom, and there is nothing I look forward to in my day to day life.  So in the interest of my happiness and mental health, I am coming back!

Last night our cook didn't show up, so we went out to dinner.  We walked to the main road, where there was only one auto (3-wheeler), which we took.  It had no shocks, and on the bumpy road out of our neighborhood, I hit my head twice on the metal crossbar.   After the second time, I told Dolly that if it happened one more time, I was getting out.  Thankfully, that didn't happen.

We went along, the decrepit auto struggling even to go downhill, and came to a busy intersection.  There was a rickshaw driver going in the same direction as us, pulling his vehicle across the road.  As we got to the middle of the street, we bumped into his back wheel with the front of our auto.  This was the first time I had ever been in an auto that hit something!  Then his handlebar got caught in the back opening of the auto, and we dragged his it the rest of the way across the intersection.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, until we got to the last stretch of road.  We told the driver to take a right, and he took the right and went down the wrong side of a divided road, and we drove against busy traffic for the half kilometer until we reached the restaurant.  He said we told him to go on wrong side, but by this point we couldn't take anything he said seriously.

Yesterday was Holi, the festival of colors.  Unlike Diwale and the autumn festivals, it does not have much religious significance.  It is a celebration of the winter harvest and the beginning of spring.  Basically, people buy a bunch of colored powders and throw them around.  The kids on our floor mixed them with water and shot them through squirt guns.  People were riding around on motorcycles throwing the powder as they drove by.  (Given how bright the colors are, it wouldn't surprise me if they contain lead or other heavy metals).  By noon, our apartment building was a colorful mess. 

The rest of the day seemed like any quiet, normal day... I guess my western expectation was that  the festival would be more evening based, especially since I was expecting more of a party atmosphere.  One of the traditional Holi drinks is supposedly a bhang (cannabis) based beverage, but aside from a few beers in the morning, there were no intoxicants of any kind (and supports my theory that they haven't figured out drinking here... starting drinking in the morning, and then stopping by lunch?  I just don't get it.)

Weddings and marriage are a big part of life in the villages, and almost all marriages here are arranged.  Its not a we-picked-this-person-for-you-when-you-were-4 arranged, but it is still very much a family affair to find a partner for a young unmarried family member.

I have been asked many times if I will have a "love marriage" or if my friends and family had love marriages or arranged marriages, and I have to explain that in America, we just say "marriage" and that we don't use the term "love marriage" because there's nothing else (except for in immigrant families/communities).

I was asked about the marriage ceremony in the US, and when I got to the "you may kiss the bride" part, I got some interesting responses... first: "Is it their first time kissing?", because in an arranged marriage you may not have had any physical contact with your partner-to-be.  The second "Oh my... in front of all those people?" because public displays of affection are very rare in India and indicate some kind of moral deficiency.

They are also shocked when they find out that Dolly and I have both had serious girl/boyfriends before.  Here, you fall in love once, and that's it.  If you're lucky you get to marry the person.  They have a saying "In America you fall in love and then get married, in India, you get married and then fall in love."  If you have had a serious relationship and it didn't work out, you are considered tainted or faulty, especially if you are a woman;

They think that their way is better because our way so often ends in divorce.  They overlook that divorce is not an option in India, as women are economically and socially dependent on their husbands' families and their own families may not take them back, a vulnerable situation which can lead to domestic violence and abuse. 

There is also a gap between belief and practice, and this goes for all of the moralizing.  Many of the people who will say, "Indian rules about love are perfect" are having affairs, they say "drinking is bad" but then they go get plastered, they say that you shouldn't date, but are seeing someone.  This is probably true of all small-town conservative societies, and I'm looking forward to returning to a liberal big-city!

Dolly and I were invited to a wedding by Ajay, one of the JSS workers.  It was his brother's wedding, and in India the groom travel's to the where the bride lives, to go get her and take her home.  We were told this bride lived some distance away, and they were taking a JSS vehicle to bring the guests.

We spent the night on the JSS campus so we would be there when the jeep left early.  We piled into the vehicle, filling every seat.  Then we picked up someone else, jamming him into the back.  We made our way to the groom's house about 20 minutes away.

At the grooms house a crowd was gathered, and they fed us an early lunch.  Fireworks were being set off outside.  At this point it began to be clear that even more people wewre going to be packed into the jeep, and we were headed to a location 6 hours away, the amount of time it takes to drive from Boston to Philly.

My plan was to sleep in the vehicle, and it became clear that would be difficult due to lack of comfortable space.  Staying awake was not a great option either, as there were no English speakers aside from Dolly, and my Hindi is not much better than greetings and pleasantries, simple questions, and being able to say what I ate last night.

So, I told them I wasn't feeling well, and got dropped off at the nearest town and I took the bus back.  I felt bad, as everyone was very excited to be going and also genuinely worried about my health.  However, I would have felt worse jammed uncomfortably in a jeep for 12 hours.

Dolly went, and they ended up staying at the wedding for a shorter amount of time than the car ride in one direction.  The men who went drank, including (and maybe especially) the ones who always say drinking is bad.  This attitude is partially because when they drink they drink like fools, and get stupid, falling down drunk.

Being in Bilaspur has given me some perspective on US road projects like the Big Dig.  India is capable of pulling off giant engineering projects.  They just opened the Sea Bridge in Bombay.  They have built nuclear weapons and enormous dams that.  But in Bilaspur, they can't build a simple bridge or pave a road.

I spent half an hour this morning waiting at a level crossing, where the road crosses the railroad tracks.  We sat for most of this time with no train coming.  I was not able to get a definitive answer as to why the gate was down for so long with no train coming, but the consensus was that people lack the discipline to obey the gate, so they put it down as soon as the train is scheduled to leave the station.  This discussion of the lack of discipline was accompanied by a demonstration; as we waited, vehicles filled the lane for oncoming traffic and setting up the inevitable traffic jam when the gate went up.

This scene unfolded in the shadow of the flyover they are building next to the road.  This has been under construction for over four years.  In the 9 months I have been here, there appears to have been no progress.  The two sides of the bridge do not line up properly, and the building stones on the side of the ramps are bulging outward from the pressure of the earth they are holding back.  The structure does not appear to be engineered to withstand the monsoon, and even when complete, I don't think I would want to travel across it.

Another project being undertaken in the neighborhoods is hooking up a sewer pipe.  Even in our middle class neighborhood there is currently no sewer connection, only open gutters (gross).  They are putting in the pipes, but not connecting the houses at this time.  So they are digging up the road to put in the pipe, and just pushing the dirt back because they don't want to patch thing up properly, as they will be dug up again when they connect the houses.  The result is that for kilometers in any direction, the roads are terrible.  There is a paved strip the size of a sidewalk down the middle, and the rest is dirt than gets torn up when it is wet, and then hardens like wavy concrete when it is dry and sunny, making a bumpy ride for any type of vehicle.

Over the weekend we got an invite to dinner from Joseph and Briana (the American girl) for Monday or Tuesday.  We choose Tuesday because it fit our schedule better, but it also happened to be my birthday.

When we got to their house, I was amazed to find out that they were making beef for dinner!  There is no beef available in Bilaspur, but Joseph is from Hyderabad, and when we was home recently his brother bought some beef.  Bilaspur is a day's train ride away, so they boiled the beef, wrapped it in plastic and put it in the freezer when they got home.

They used it to make a curry and a soup, and I would describe the cut, or at least the result, as being like a pot roast.  It was a really nice surprise.

I also got a few gifts from the JSS workers.  One of the lab techs bought me a shirt in true local style, red and white stripes with random English words on it.  It was a very sweet gift, as he only has a few shirts himself.  I also got a small Hanuman figurine from one of the workers who found out it was my birthday.  Hanuman is a monkey god and warrior, and so when I told Dolly I got a "little sparkly monkey" she pointed out the blasphemy, lol.