Bundi

With Rick’s stomach still a bit at ease, the two of us decided to take the shortish trip to the small town of Bundi for a quick weekend getaway. Along the four hour midday ride (we took the cheaper/slower/hotter/more crowded, but still pleasant, government bus system), I got a chance to see the closest major city, Kota, during the day for the first time. The city, like most of rural India I’ve seen, looked dirty and unkept. It’s not that I think all cities should mirror Pleasantville, but the public spaces there and elsewhere just seemed remarkably disregarded for a country whose government occupies such a massive part of people’s daily lives. The all over trash and tainted stagnate water reminded me of the numerous volunteer trash clean up efforts back home.

We dined at a fantastic rooftop restaurant (setting a weekend tradition we’d strictly begin following: they’re great places to meet other travelers, here we would find four Chileans on winter holiday). My pene pa sta with freshly made to mato sause (yet to find an Indian menu with under a dozen hilarious English errors) was excellent and I’d order it three times that weekend. We were approached by an only slightly sketchy man who led us to his nearby guest house, where we agreed to stay the night.

We woke up the next day to find we were right next to the base of the steep city palace/fort hill. We set off for the palace, which was still occupied by the current Maharaja but is semi open to the public. The views of the waking city were great and the foreigner entry fees were bearable. A great weekend was in progress.

We walked to the markets, stumbling upon some sort of street celebration where a DJ dropped beats through big tuktuk speakers and some guy in the middle of a dancing crowd threw out money and flowers. The markets, unfortunately, weren’t as exciting; just the same old same old shitty little retail shops you see every ten feet in India.

Made our way to the 84 Pillared Cenotaph, a 60 foot alter type thing. At the top of the steps, people were sleeping all about the cool floor (just like at the Patan temple) and on the highest open air platform were half a dozen twenty something Indian guys. The only people awake in the cenotaph, we talked (roughly through the language barrier) about college and money and phones and Indian/Westerner marriage and cricket and got the lowdown on being young in India.

Around this time, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice hotel. When told about our booking a two bed, AC room at Bundi’s largest three star hotel (with an awesome awesome pool) for only two thirds the going rate (because we were the ONLY customers and business is slow in the off season), strange guest house man kind of flipped and wanted us to pay for a second night anyways. Needless to say, we deliberately avoided meeting him for our preplanned fort tour that night. Things involving the guy were awkward enough.

We made the long hike up the hill, passing the city palace along the way up. The fort in Bundi is like a scene out of the video game Ico. Gigantic centuries old stone water reservoirs (you could fit a small basketball court in them) dot the complex along with overgrowth, crumbling towers, high walls, and walking paths on and along the structures. Save for two French girls and an Indian lawyer, we were the only souls around; a very surreal hike with all the huge ancient buildings around and all. From the fort level, you can see the entire city, along with the city palace ~150 feet below. We also ran into a few police dispatch workers who invited us up to the very highest tower (now used as an emergency dispatch center) from which you could see our hotel and the cenotaph, miles away.

Enjoying the view of the surrounding Jungle Book forests, we sat down on top of one of the higher towers and were then joined by three big monkeys. We kinda all stared at each other in a sort of old fashioned Texas standoff. Man vs Ape, they would all flinch everytime I'd make a sudden movement and Rick and I were both crouched and ready to fight for our lives if the damned dirty apes attacked. Rick took off his shoes and held them in the air. I clutched some gravel rocks I'd picked up at the base just for that reason and insulted them for never figuring out the wheel or fire.

In the end, we all cooled down and enjoyed the view together peacefully.

^The green courtyard on the right side of the palace is the same one as in the second picture above.

They don't call it WORLD Wrestling Entertainment for nothing

Finished up the Jaipur weekend by waking up early Sunday morning and hailing myself a private bicycle rickashaw. As the Nike shop was closed, I decided to go back to the historic old city/bazaar area (which my friendly driver happily accepted for twenty rupees, I think he was happy to have scooped up the only tourist that was awake and out in Jaipur at that hour). He took me the entire length of the path we’d walked the day before, and at under fifty cents, I’d say it was well worth it. Not a bad deal for the bike guy either – only having to cart around one tourist, weighing less than 150lbs.

During our makeshift tour, I basically read off all the Indian names of the sights I hadn’t seen from my map and he’d take me there as soon as he could mentally decode my seemingly horrible accent ("Can you go now to the jaemah mass jheed?" ...thirty second pause as I repeat and repeat..."oh jaemah mass jheed, yes yes") and wait while I took pictures and struggled to bargain with shop keepers. It was a good arrangement, and he even let me pay him whatever I felt by the time we’d gotten back to Evergreen. This gave me a fantastic (and still unimplemented at time of posting) idea to hire three separate bicycle rickashaws and have each of the three members of our group get carted off to some far off destination, promising to pay the first peddler to arrive quadruple fare ($2?) and the losers a normal fare plus a few rupees for the effort.

My other Jaipur inspired transportation game idea involves the mob of tuktuk drivers which inevitably forms whenever a traveler shows he’s interested in taking one (and sometimes even when he isn’t). I’d need a translator to explain it, but I would begin calling out progressively larger prices, staring around 10 rupees, until the first driver accepts the current floor offer. None of the other driver’s would earn fare if they were under bid by one of their comrades and I would call the auction off after reaching a certain unannounced reservation price and everyone would lose out on the fare. I know tuktuk drivers make well below $5 a day, but it never fails to insult when one tries to scam you by saying a certain ride will cost nine or ten times you know what its worth. It may only be a few quarters you’re getting schemed out of, but those rupees seem to add up quickly, especially when you spend a weekend in Jaipur. It’s the principle of the matter, isn’t it?


We ate lunch at a chic restaurant overlooking one of the main streets (meal at a nice restaurant in the city: US$2) and met three British girls outside of the Jaipur zoo. We collectively decided to avoid the zoo and its Rs. 90 foreigner entry fee (locals Rs. 5), and instead sat out in a park next to the gigantic Prince Albert Museum. Needless to say, a large crowd slowly assembled around us and passersby on the sidewalk would climb up onto the park fence and gawk in at our extraordinarily average conversation. We had become a zoo exhibit outside of the zoo. We talked a bit about England and the states and the novelties of India (the stares, the sneaky taking of photos, the wondering how we were so interesting) as people kept focus on us, snuck camera phone pics, and beggars and families and normal park goers alike slowly surrounded us in quite amazement. And it’s not like Jaipur is even that detached from the West; its basically India’s preeminent tourist city. We took a tiny horse drawn carriage the half mile or so to McDonalds for dinner.


Before heading back to Jhalrapatan, we had a few Kingfishers at an Indian bar. Like all bars here, they are very discrete – no large neon signs on the outside. The customers, it goes without saying, are all male. There’s usually some cricket playing on TV, but as the West Indies vs India match was under rain delay, good ol American Pro Wrestling was on instead. In addition to sitting next to an old man on a rickety carriage who fed our one horse power engine some grass after taking us to McDonalds, I think I’ll file watching WWE in a dark and quiet Indian bar under my memory’s ‘Only in India’ moments.

We got back to the house early Monday morning and practically reset off for class the minute we entered the door, allowing just enough time to fill our water bottles. During the next week of IDEX class, the older kids would be introduced to ‘Around the World’ and two team do-a-math-problem-on-the-board races and whatever other activities we could remember from our old elementary days.

While Magnus departed our camp to go back to the mountainous north, where the weather is cooler and the hash cheaper, and Rick fell ill midweek, leaving me to entertain the kids alone, I learned via email that the combination of slowly cashed checks and using my card in Jaipur a grand total of one time had conspired to cause me to overdraw my checking account for the second time this year. Finding myself insolvent for the third summer in a row, I believe I’d hit the low point of my time in India, and yet I really didn’t feel a grain of anxiety. I should probably put here that I was relaxed because during my time abroad, I’d truly found myself and had connected enough with my person to not be concerned with petty everyday issues which would have formerly wrecked me. Or perhaps I could say I’d adopted a more Eastern outlook on life after realizing the hollow pageantry my life in the West had centered upon and wasn’t phased by a few mere setbacks of that self. But really I just felt like my bank was half a world away and I wasn’t in dire need of money anyways and I’d actually taken a liking to the crippling isolation I’d been able to find in India (for the first time since first starting at Iowa and not really knowing anyone.) Not that crippling isolation’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s always good for the old soul to get some quiet in every now and then and probably the reason I came to India. And as far as that goes, what a good vacation it has been.

^Another scene I'd only until recently seen in history books. Did I mention Chandya Kheri reminds me of old time Iowa? There was one modern John Deere store in Bundi (John Deere who, if I remember correctly, got his start by selling innovative new plows like the one above) and I saw John Cena of the WWE wearing colors and clothing alluding to the Deere brand during one of the televised Monday Night Raw programs here. So it's not that different after all.

Jaipur Again

Since we didn’t really get a chance to see the city while passing through for orientation, we had decided to take the overnight bus back to Jaipur, Friday after class. After staying in for travel recovery the weekend prior, my first weekend excursion was kicked off with a nine hour bus ride back the way I’d come from. For under US$5, I got to ride alongside Devo in an (actually quite comfy) sleeper class double bed. We had two large windows right beside us, but the thirty to fifty minute long stops at every other highway town’s bus stations meant no window air flow AND no AC for large portions of the night. Add in the twenty note (believe it) novelty song horn our driver frequently relied, and you start to see the cruel irony in designating a section of the bus as ‘sleeper’ (though we had a private door so it was actually quieter than the train’s sleeper class).

We got into Jaipur around 6am, a little groggy and a lot lost. There were rickashaw and tuktuk drivers sleeping in their vessels everywhere. Taking care not to wake any for fear of being mobbed by the dozens (“Yes hello! Ok hello! Hello; Where you go? I take you hello tuktuk my tuktuk hello lets go yes”), we walked to our hotel – the one we’d read about in the book (Lonely Planet India Guidebook, “Evergreen Hotel, it’s like a backpacker’s haven meets dorm hall”) – taking directions from a group of very hardcore-looking-travelers from New Zealand who’d overslept on their bus for six hours and ended up at the end of the line, standing next to us in Jaipur.

Once to the Evergreen, I fought the urge to flop, opting instead to read in the lobby. I met two Koreans and another English girl and made significant progress on my book, yet still fell asleep on the lobby couch (incidentally, in the exact same spot the English girl had been sleeping). The lobby staff must’ve been amused. This was like a dorm hall.

Once we’d all rested enough to fool our bodies into thinking they could handle the sun again, we set off for the famous Jaipur shopping scene. There are many Western name brands stores throughout the city proper but the real fun is in the chaotic and crowded (words that can describe anything Jaipur-related) bazaar alleys within the city walls. My haggling skills weren’t quite developed by then and I realized days later (and sometimes instantly) how many rupees I’d go about overpaying all day. I did, however, find an econ book I’d been looking for forever (US$6!) and the prices at McDonalds were thankfully fixed.

Despite deciding against paying the ridiculous ‘foreigner’ charges to enter the main historical sights, we did manage to get a good (and free) view of the city. While waiting at a street corner, a man complemented me on not spending money on a guidebook and drawing my own tourist map (I traced it out of the Lonely Planet, now sitting in Magnus’ backpack) and gave us directions up a back alley spiral staircase leading to a rooftop panorama of the entire Jaipur old city and surrounding forts and mountains.

We were soon joined by three Europeans who’d also caught the local tip. When two Indian men then came up the staircase, I thought we’d just been had and had blindly walked into an elaborate mugging scheme. We were trapped on the rooftop so I decided to talk to one of the guys (cause friendly people never get mugged) who turned out to be a gem dealer, owner of the whole building complex, and not a criminal. He invited us into his office (a big one behind a big jewelry showroom) and we only left after another of his friends entered the office and locked the door behind him, thinking we were probably about to get jumped or sold into the sex trade or both (probably how that guy afforded such nice shoes).

The Jaipur McDonalds was packed each of the four times I visited. By the looks of it, I think eating there is a sort of hip thing to do for the younger generation of upwardly mobile Jaipurians (the girls who wear jeans). Maharajahs are the fifty two heads of the millennium old nobility lines throughout the state, which is why Rajasthan is called “The Land of Kings.” Even today they command great wealth and far reaching influence (though Indira Ghandi stripped them of their nobility titles forty years ago). The largest sandwich on the Indian McDonalds menu is called ‘Maharajah Mac’. Even by the standards of a kid who went to public school and grew up in the microwavable nineties, the chicken on all the sandwiches was horrible, especially the Maharajah Mac. That didn’t stop me from dining Mickey D’s a handful of times, as I don’t not mind fake chicken and it was, after all, the fourth of July so McDonalds just seemed appropriate.

And what a fourth it was! As the Fore Fathers would’ve wanted, we celebrated by drinking Indian beer on the roof of the backpacker’s hotel with a Japanese guy, an English woman, and a pair of French girls, listening to the music of a nearby Hindu wedding, and cheering some whenever fireworks went off (there were a few). Happy birthday Amurika (and Nolan).


^Speaking of America, there are many of these giant six story malls around the bustling parts of Jaipur. After visiting two, it was discovered that they are almost completely devoid of shops, save for the first one and a half floors. They look nice, at least.


^Took a tuktuk out to Bani Park to see the in-home studio of one of India's late great potters who also won the "Best Indian Citizen" some years back for bringing world class art back to Jaipur.


^The building that's featured on many a Wikipedia page on both Rajasthan and Jaipur (meaning it's a big deal).

My favorite Bollywood Music Videos

The dancing! Holy shit the dancing. Did Grease have a forty actor choreographed mid-badminton-match dance-while-hitting-birdies-in-tune number? Nah, only in Bollywood. Skip to about two minutes into this one for the best parts.



A love song.. as far as I can tell.



One of the great Bollywood idols Shah Khan's songs from Om Shanti Om, the same movie as the first video. In case you forgot, Shah Rukh Khan is the Bollywood star who won the government's "Best Indian Citizen Award." Yes that award exists and yes that makes 'King Khan' literally one in a billion. The translated chorus is "My heart is full of the pain of disco / the pain of disco!" I think it's a self parody of Bollywood but that's only cause it's pretty ridiculous itself. This is kinda what I had in mind when talking about some sort of national frustrated sexual tension expressing itself in Indian media, but that doesn't mean it's not an awesome music video!



Same girl as in Om Shanti Om (Deepika Padukone), but I think this one was a box office flop. Skip to like 28 seconds in for the actual start; sorry about the poor quality, best I could find.



Did I mention that Michael Jackson's death saturated the news networks and papers here for weeks (and still appears about every other day in the Jaipur based Times of India)? I know for a fact that he was/is very popular in India and I guess with all the great celebrities here being amazing dancers, you can probably guess why. Whenever I say I'm from the states, about two in three people will say "ah, Michael Jackson!" And I will acknowledge that he was my countryman and agree (while holding in a smile) whenever they console me of his death ("yes yes before death some weeks... great tragedy"). Rick and I saw a cheap souvenier backpack hanging in the shop of some Pushkar current events capatalist with "Micael Jackson" badly printed on the front... too soon?

Read all about it

I read four good books during my first three weeks in India.

Fast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser

Quick Review: Another hard hitting but insightful investigative journalism work by Eric Schlosser (see also: Reefer Madness). In true Schlosser fashion, the book takes hard swipes at the mistreatment of immirgrant workers, antiunion habits of corporations, powerful lobbiest groups (here the big Meatpacking companies), and the commodification and over reliance on technology supposedly running rampant in today's America. The book ends with only weak suggestions for solutions and a somewhat hypercritical afterword, but the heart of the book is grade A.

Relation to Iowa: Alot of the horror stories of meat packers and slaughter houses gone wrong come straight out of Iowa. Council Bluffs and Denison are both mentioned (one CB worker died falling into a renderer/grinder and a Denison guy lost his arm -if I can remember correctly?)

Relation to India: I've had maybe five meals with meat since landing in Delhi a month ago, three of those were at the Jaipur McDonalds. Even though I finished the book the weekend we were in Jaipur, even though I was fully repulsed by how embedded most Americans' fast food addiction has become, and even though the true scope of how un-foodlike modern fast and junk food has become, I STILL, without hesitation, ate three of my five meals in Jaipur at McDonalds, the only one I've seen while in India. While mulling over how industrial (Schlosser would say unnatural) and fake our food has become (artificial and natural flavors are simple lab chemicals that give food its flavor- in everything!), it helps to be on a steady diet of fresh veg Indian food. Really can't wait to get back to burgers in August.



Einstein
Walter Isaacson

Quick Review: The first big real biography I've ever fully read and a good un for sure. Isaacson paints an interesting picture of an interesting man: a person with a mind good for both revolutionizing science and helping to escape the lifey troubles all people have to cope, a man who embraced his celebrity and cared for all of humanity but was distant to those meant to be closest to him. Smoothly glides between biography, science writing, and narrative to create a great read about a guy you only wish you could've met.

Relation to Iowa: Book mentions Iowa City when talking about one of Einstein's travels through the states while looking for a job.

Relation to India: I'd like to think that, at least while in India, I've taken up some of Einsteins personal fashion methods. In his latter years, the aloof nature of his mismatched clothes helped reemphasize his whole absent minded professor-ness and some believe that without his famously unkept hair, he never would have reached the level of celebrity he did. As I planned to do laundry only once this trip (you have to hand wash everything), I've had to get creative with my outfit selection these last few weeks. And who knows? With everyone here trying to dress Western, maybe I'll start a new trend by going around in my brightly colored tees and maroon athletic shorts. (Actual quote: "Your fashion, it is looking the best. Yes.") I've worn my swimming suit out and about on multiple occasions and haven't gotten a haircut in three months; though I'll probably take up one of the street barbers' Rs.30 ($0.66) offers soon.



The Undercover Economist
by Tim Hartford

Quick Review: A quick pop econ book that covers about 70% of econ 101's most basic fundamentals and manages to use nearly 0% of the associated jargon. Pretty good everyday illustrations of a wide variety of concepts. The book goes along with us as we buy overpriced coffee from a stand, search for good prices at the supermarket, and surf the web on our phones.

Relation to Iowa: "There are two ways we can make cars in America. We can build them in Detroit or grow them in Iowa... in Iowa we simply water corn seeds and harvest a crop, load it onto an ocean vessel and send it out into the sea. It will return to us as cars using an amazing corn-to-cars technology called Japan." The book uses the state in any example involving agriculture. Yay Iowa!

Relation to India: Has some interesting stories about traveling to the Cameroon. Has some typical ideas about spurring development in places like Cameroon. Tells a very rich story about China's historic economic turn around. Good lessons on both stagnant growth and rapidly developing nations which can be applied (and seen) right here in India.



We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
by Peter Gourevitch

Quick Review: The saddest story I've ever read, but probably only because it all actually happened. Peter Gourevitch's recounted survivor stories from post-genocide Rwanda tell of a country desolated by harsh colonial rule followed by harsh dictatorships and rocked by an ethnic slaughter resulting in about an eighth of the population being killed, most commonly by way of machette. The book gives a reliable account of the history, before and after colonialization, of Rwanda and the more recent events preceding the 1994 Tutsi genocide. Gourevitch remains objective when berating the international aid networks and organizations (for ignoring the details of the situation and accidentally giving aid for years after the genocide to the killers and political leaders responsible) and the so called developed world, which vowed after WWII to never again let an ethnicity be cleansed, (for turning a blind eye during and after the genocide). The author is superbly introspective, especially when interrpreting the accounts of his informants. There is more to this tragic story than I can do justice explaining here, so just Wikipedia it or get the book.

Relation to Iowa: Only book that doesn't really mention Iowa. Not even once, go figure.

Relation to India: When Peter Gourevitch writes on the intricacies of visiting Rwanda, a nation with visible ties to its colonial past and a great many seriously impoverished people, I feel like he is writing about India. Almost. Although India has a somewhat corrupt police force and its people (at least outside of Mumbai and Goa) often act as if in awe when spotting a foreigner, there isn't really any remaining signs of India's inner country post colonial struggles (Pakistani partition in 1947 turned those into good old fashioned international hostilities). Also unlike in India, Rwanda suffers a dearth of foreign investment and economic growth, whereas Indians become gloomy when news spreads that their economy may only grow by six or seven percent this year due to the recession (taken into the context of human history anything over five can be considered extraordinary). Reading We Wish to Inform You.. makes it sound as if there is another planet I've yet to see: not just the (1)cozy or (2)growing, but the third. Better reserve the gonetorwanda-brb.blogspot.com url now just in case.

Kanjar

Thousands of years before the arrival of the British, the lush Indian subcontinent provided the setting for the independent discovery of agriculture and the birth of Indian civilization. Hinduism was founded, the caste system was implemented, and a culture was created. It is unclear (to me at least) whom predates whom, but a nomadic foraging sub group society, today known as the Kanjar, coexisted alongside and within this early India.

The Kanjar, existing outside of the rigid caste system subscribed to by greater Indian society, maintained their nomadic traditions well into the twentieth century. Precolonialism, their interaction with mainstream Indian society mainly consisted of part time work as entertainers and performers. With the strengthening of British influence in the mid 1700's, a bevy of modernization and imperialistic exploitation projects began slowly destroying the jungles and forests the foraging Kanjars depended. Taking action, the Kanjar resorted to rebellion and crime against their foreign guests; though again, it is not clear as to what direct total affect the British had on the decision to turn towards crime and what affect being generally outcast in an increasingly British-like India had.

In either case, the British criminalized by decree the entire Kanjar clan in 1857. Three years later, the Kanjar were scheduled by name under the British Criminal Tribe Act. An apparent attempt into pushing the various pesky tribes around India into shaping up, the 1860 Act had the rather unfortunate unintended consequence of forever stigmatizing the Kanjar within India; synonomizing even today their very tribal identity with criminal or felonious or immoral. It is the descendants of these eternally shamed persons whom I have the responsibility to teach the ABC's and 123's over the summer.

Our first day in Jhalrapatan was reserved for visiting two Kanjar villages and the schools we could choose to teach. The villages are similar to the ones seen on late night Christian infomercials urging viewers to 'save the lives of these children, for under a dollar a day'. Each village consists of around 80 people, ~30 of them school aged children (though education is by no means a priority); and a few dry (unirrigated) farm plots surrounding a few dozen brick rock homes. The houses are the families' bedrooms and living rooms, filled with little more than a few pots and beds. There are no evangelists or infomercial camera crews in either village.

As India's population ballooned after its 1947 independence from Britain (kudos, Gandhi) and land became an asset, the Kanjar were forced to end their nomadic ways and settle on government owned reservations. The Kanjar of today (popularly known under the umbrella term 'Untouchables' in the West) are a marginalized people, heavily discriminated against by law enforcement. Their remote locations offer isolation from the often corrupt police force, but (coupled with an understandable aversion to the authority of the state) also removes them from many mainstream government services. India is the world's largest democracy, but the Kanjar have no political lobby to protect their interests and are usually a minority even within their own districts (remember that the UNICEF Kanjar programs were abolished a few years ago to rid the state minister the shame of having aid programs in Rajasthan under her tenure) and so carry little political weight.


That doesn't mean they are desperately poor and suffering, however. On our tours, I counted many motorcycles parked next to brush or rock piles, at least one satellite TV, and heard music from a variety of cell phone and stereo speakers. I believe each resident is entitled to some form of annual government welfare, but I can never get a straight answer as to how much, or if any, is handed out. The other main sources of income for the Kanjar include 'selling' their daughters into marriage (a practice translated by the IDEX staff into the not-quite-correct-sounding "prostitution") and illegally brewing an alcoholic drank for retail out of berries (more on this later).

All in all, the villages were not in as desperate shape as I'd imagined, though certainly not a place high on the property ladder. With their one room school houses, the nonchalant attitude towards education (especially when it gets in the way of cooking or farming duties), the use of homemade booze, the conservative approach to women's rights, and their interesting farming techs (I had only seen ox drawn plows in museums before), the villages always seem to remind me of predepression Iowa. The high rates of alcoholism and welfare dependence, general state of their isolated government property communities, and low formal employment masquerading greater discrimination and a long history of marginalization make the Kanjar communities a slightly familiar but altogether different kind of Indian reservation than I'm used to.

Camp Jhalrapatan and TV India

We took a Bolero (imitation land rover) from the train station to our house. The ~30km (18 mile) journey took about half an hour due to narrowness of the highway, congestion, lack of street lights, animals and people walking on the streets, and it being generally difficult to navigate a large vehicle through cramped Indian cities at any time, let alone during the busy and dark night shopping period. Along the way and throughout many of the smaller cities scattered along the Rajasthani highways, large crowds of people could be seen gathering around single 22" TVs - what these groups tune into en masse I can only guess.


We reached our house at around 10pm, where our in house cook, translator, guide, and soon to be teaching assistant, Saroji had a large hot dinner waiting. A mother of two (who refused to marry her daughters off until after they had completed a full education), Saroji is self described 'brave woman' -- meaning she is more independent than your average forty something Rajasthani woman ("but not as wishful to be independent as your women of the West"). Accompanying us everyday to class, occasionally team teaching in our village, she never hesitates to bargain or defend on our behalf. As we passed through our front yard gate that first night, Saroji was there to greet us and adorn a traditional red paint dot on our foreheads (which normally signifies marriage but forehead marking can be symbolic for a great variety of other things; perhaps ours was a sort of welcoming wish). Sohan looked visibly happy to be settled back at camp Jhalrapatan.

Saroji's cooking is perhaps the single greatest discovery I've made while in India. Using only fresh ingredients (and you can't get much fresher than locally bought vegetables grown on locally owned and dry-farmed family agro plots), her dinner entrees usually consist of potatoes or okra or ladyfingers covered in various Indian (curry) spices and oils, served aside butter flavored white rice (usually with potatoes or tomatoes), cut fresh vegetables, and a bean and spices soup or two. And with chapati (or naan, but I prefer to call them tortillas). Always with chapati. A lot of it.

Breakfasts are usually some mix of bananas, toast, hard boiled eggs, or japarti stuffed with either potatoes or simply more japarti dough. Meat is never a part of the equation, though she does fry a delicious mixture of vegetables and uniquely savory dough into bite sized morsels with the texture and look of chicken strips. Cheese is a rarity but milk and plain yogurt are not. Soda is relatively expensive (which is to say pop here is priced on par with Walmart back home) and fruit juice is downright extortionate (along with toilet paper, artificial and fruit juices are strangely 'overpriced' -- probably due to some mixture of low demand/low production possibility?) but the food is usually flavorful enough that an old fashioned glass of filtered water is well enough for most days' in-meal beverage.

The house is not air conditioned, instead relying on ceiling and stand fans. Our room does have a water cooler, a sort of humidifyier that uses only cold water and a very big and noisy fan (it says "Snow Cool" on its side), which we're told is actually more effective here than air conditioning. It spends most nights unused because it causes too much cold water to condense on our sheets. There are two lounge spaces with great views on the third story. At night, it provides the best escape from the heat the house traps in its rooms during the day. The view is great and you can often see the celebratory Christmas lights hanging on far off houses (marking a family wedding) or hear Hindi DJs drop beats in the streets for neighborhood dance parties.


We have a high speed internet connection here too which I use to write retroactively on this blog and stay up to date on Facebook (because knowing that the new Harry Potter was 'SUUch a waste of my time' or 'AHHH bestie movie ever' is essential to living a fully satisfied life in India). And while the power (and sometimes water) is shotty, especially during storms and the hottest part of the day, we also have a TV with +70 cable channels.

While tradition still tells women it is inappropriate to show their bare shoulders in public, Indian TV tells us the best way to get the ladies to rip off their clothes is to use Axe. Commercials often fall into one of three categories: actual American commercials (sometimes redubbed in Hindi; ex. Axe, Garnier Fructis), Indian commercials for American products, or Indian commercials for Indian products but with a distintively American marketing flair (ex. Axe imitators which still carry on the typical body spray ad script; see: 'Set Wet' spray -actual heavily advertised product). Ads for condoms and birth control occasionally dawn the small screen (though never in actual daily conversation), and the music, reality, and soap channels always feature the sort of not-so-subtly sexed up styles and motifs normally reserved in the states for the Spanish language stations.

Before coming to India, I never thought the opinions of the nut jobs outcrying that immoral media ruins societies were worth much. But in a society that is adopting an appreciation for tooth brushing and TV concurrently, I'm having second thoughts. I'm not saying that no citizen outside of the G8 can grasp an appreciation of pop TV for what it realistically is, pure entertainment; yet there's no question that the current presence of the kind of popular Indian media that I'm talking about (see: last paragraph) will affect the future mindset of its people differently than the rise of similar popular entertainment forms affected the US in the last twenty/thirty years.

The result, which is already beginning to unravel -- as in the case of Bollywood, will be a national attitude towards its pop culture that will seem to an American vaguely familiar and yet totally strange. An example is the way the Japanese regard their video games or cartoons: both forms of entertainment arose at the same time as their US contemporaries, but the different national and cultural environments the two grew up in resulted in largely varied views of what is acceptable and normal within each (Americans tire quickly of cutesy Japanese characters and become confused with common anime conventions, Japanese largely view American story lines and styles blunt and overly unambiguous).

An India-relevant example would be the road/driving system: its a very typical cultural hallmark within America, but when viewing the Indian way it seems hectic and otherworldly (and dangerous). The difference, obviously, is how the car and modern road system were basically invented and gradually integrated into American life, while India's need for cars came later and quite abruptly post-independence. Only certain aspects of the overseas systems were appropriated while new conventions were invented; the resulting beauty (or terror) can be seen on every Indian road and within any Indian tuktuk driver's methods. You can easily define it as cultural hybridization, localization, or neoglobalism - but deciding whether it is a good or bad thing is a bit trickier.

All I know is that fifteen years ago it was legal here to set your wife on fire if you did so in your house and there was a legitimate reason (you wanted to). Whether or not the hundreds of millions of rural Indian TV viewers contemplate what kind of cultural reformations their ages old country is setting itself up for is unknown. What kind of thoughts they have, as they gather and sit on the dirt in the dozens every night, while watching images of McDonalds, Chevy, Axe, and their sexy Bollywood idols, and how these will in turn affect that very reformation is even more a mystery.

The Darjeeling Limited

Breakfast in Jaipur, while tasty, was consumed in relative silence. We received some last minute encouragement from the girls before they sent off to work with classes of their own. Thinking we would be given teaching responsibilities of our own within a day, an air of anxiousness draped our mini volunteering squad throughout the twenty minute ride to the Jaipur IDEX office.

Of course, this didn't prevent us from being able to skillfully pack ourselves, our luggage, AND our translator, Sohan, the newest member of our troupe, into a standard (small) sized tuk tuk. Sporting a baseball cap, tennis shoes, and a pressed collared shirt, the skinny thirty something Jaipur native had been an IDEX guide for some years before meeting us via human tuktuk compacting that morning. The project manager of IDEX Kanjar Camp Jhalawar since the program began accommodating foreign volunteers three years ago, Sohan is a typically quiet, respectful guy with a subtle sense of humor and a love for all sports Indian (cricket, carrom, badminton, etc). The children of the villages his project oversees run out to cheer him whenever his 100cc Hero Honda motorcycle is heard approaching the school house.

After another round of orientations and Hindi lessons, we broke for lunch with the Himachal volunteers (chatted with some punk-hardcore looking Spaniards and a few Dutch girls whose skin had already started to lose the ongoing battle against the relentless Indian sun). As we waited for our transport to the Jaipur train station, the electricity, which had been faulty all morning, went out for good, taking the fans and minimal air conditioning with it. The three of us sat and chatted with the workless IDEX staff, a group of about ten Indian yuppies whom care deeply about the positive work they strive for (running most of their projects year round) and comfortably accommodating the occasional foreign volunteers who can be placed within these projects (and bring with them foreign dollars and publicity). They conceded that electricity in Rajasthan, even in Jaipur (India's hopeful future world class city), was notoriously skecthy.

We also talked about the Kanjar communities, with one of the senior employees letting on that it was one of his favorite IDEX initiatives, the near future expansion of IDEX into South Africa (apparently South Africa and India have many overseas economic ties; think US-Germany), and how earlier work within the Kanjar villages, spear headed by UNICEF, was abruptly called off due to political reasons (the state minister thought the presence of international aid orgs in her districts would negatively reflect upon her leadership and ruin her future aspirations within the national political sphere). And while the communities have clearly suffered from the aid snub, the IDEX staffers noted that UNICEF is terribly corrupt at the grass roots/implementation level anyhow.


The seven hour train ride from Jaipur to greater Jhalawar was not, as I had really really hoped, anything like the movie The Darjeeling Limited (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman play reunited brothers of a dysfunctional family traveling India on a passenger train... a Wes Anderson movie, it's good). As it is with most things here, the train ride was filled with many distinct sights, sounds, and smells that made my first ever train experience, if not Andersonian funny, very enjoyable. The entire ride featured peddlers and buskers walking the aisle of the cramped train car: old turbanned, Gandhi robed, Rajputs singing and beating drums/steel bowls (even though we were traveling in a sleeper class?), ladies selling crappy toys, young men and boys selling tea and all kinds of homemade fragrant snack foods. When we pulled into a station, kids would run up to our windows, begging for money, cows could be seen eating trash, strange and often offensive odors would fill the air, and moping/frantic/tattered/stoic/harried/and plenty of other types of people could be seen filling every bit of floor space on the platforms. After four weeks here, you really get used to all the hustle and bustle, sensory hodge podge, but on my day two train ride it was all just too much for my mind to ignore and I didn't nap a minute the entire trip.


The highlight of the trip was probably the miles I spent standing in the open car doorway, watching the desertous landscape zoom by and wondering if our train would be bombed like in Lawrence of Arabia (the setting was certainly right for it). I talked with a pair of well to do salesmen about China (because I suppose I am Chinese). I asked them who built some of the enormous mountain top temples and fortresses all along the rail lines, and got the half ignorant half obvious answer of 'many people long ago'. I wondered how much poorer or better off the average Indian citizen of today is than his ancestors who carved these magnificent medieval relics but my thoughts were interrupted by a singing transvestite who would not stop pestering the three of us until I gave him twenty rupees not to curse us.