14 March 2010
20 February 2010
07 December 2009
17 November 2009
Baby Dogs!
As previously promised, photos of puppies. In the future you can probably expect this sort of emotional deterioration to yield pictures of cats wearing Santa hats and me dressed as a reindeer. But for now, street puppies.
Something is stuck on your face
After the somber tone of BJ's last post concerning life in Delhi's slums, I'd like to bring the attention back to what I know you really care about: my progress mastering Hindi.
As with all things here, my journey as a Hindi learner has been an uneven one. I can barter with a rickshaw driver and almost sometimes express myself to a shopkeeper, but habitually forget words like "this" and "is", once again reducing communication to a pantomime that a monkey could pull off. In our class we have plowed through the verb tenses, covering compound past tense ("I walked"), past continuous ("I was walking"), a weird verb combination that in Hindi that means specifically "I have already walked". The only thing we have yet to learn the conditional tense--which I desperately desire ("I would buy this, but it looks like a cow sat on it" seems like it could come up a lot).
However, at no point have we stopped to learn any vocabulary words that might go along with these constructions, and have rather surged ahead into what I would consider quite specific territory. In our last class, for example, we practiced saying "Something is stuck on your face" (Aapke muh par kuchh laga hai, if you were dying to know) and a few sentences I had a slightly harder time making sense of in English, including "we didn't like your going" and "I got frightened with snakes", but which I can only trust will serve me immensely well in Hindi if we are memorizing them before learning to say such things as "apple" and "shirt".
I suppose I should not say that I do not know any vocabulary words---I do know that barf means "snow" and banana in Hindi means "to prepare food". You may also be interested to hear that farsch, which is the Russian word meaning chopped meat and hence in my mind always conjures up a in image of a pile of chopped liver in a dimly lit butcher shop in the Soviet countryside, means "floor". I have also learned that a Hindi speaker will almost never use the words "please" or "excuse me", and that there is simply no expression meaning "have a nice day"----which, frankly, doesn't particularly surprise me.
But what struggling to learn Hindi in this city has impressed upon me the most is the myriad ways in which the language you speak defines you. This is of course true in America, where the drawl of a southern accent tells a different story about the speaker than the broghue of the woods north of Boston, but in India the differences are even more pronounced. In my office, which is populated entirely by university educated South Delhites, my colleagues speak to each other in heavily accented English, only rarely slipping into Hindi for the occassional bilkool (absolutely) or thikkay (okay). The only Hindi I ever hear is when the chai wallah comes on his morning rounds or the sweeper being given instructions. One's English ability in India is, like in so many other parts of the world, often directly correlated to your lot in the universe. Those with little access to education and who are resigned to life in the slums rarely learn it, even though in a country with 18 official languages it would be their only means of communicating with a Marathi speaker from Mumbai or a Telugu speaker from Hyderabad. And yet, even in those who cannot speak English and are barely literate in Hindi, such as our recently departed cook (don't worry, she is not dead, I just fired her), English has seeped into the marrow of the language. Hindi speakers never use the Hindi word for drinking glass, school, student, telephone, police, pencil, and a host of other words---in some cases original Hindi word is so far out of use that it is barely recognizable.
While I would make an educated guess that this is more likely a result of a century of British imperialism rather than globalization, it is still startling to hear babble punctuated with "Mein school gaya, aapke paas cake hai?" or, on the rare occassion you can squeeze an apology out of a local (usually for something really truly agregious involving a vehicular-corporal collision, like nearly amputating a few toes with their Suzuki Maruti or accidentally mauling you with their 5 ton cart of custard apples), to hear a wizened 4' tall old man in salwar khameez and a skullcap mutter "sorry".
And now, after many years of promising I would never turn into the sort of person who would post pictures of puppies on the internet, I leave you with a photo of a pilla, another word I am increasingly finding a use for. These pille are currently living under an abandoned car near our apartment......that is until I trick BJ into letting me adopt all 6 of them.
As with all things here, my journey as a Hindi learner has been an uneven one. I can barter with a rickshaw driver and almost sometimes express myself to a shopkeeper, but habitually forget words like "this" and "is", once again reducing communication to a pantomime that a monkey could pull off. In our class we have plowed through the verb tenses, covering compound past tense ("I walked"), past continuous ("I was walking"), a weird verb combination that in Hindi that means specifically "I have already walked". The only thing we have yet to learn the conditional tense--which I desperately desire ("I would buy this, but it looks like a cow sat on it" seems like it could come up a lot).
However, at no point have we stopped to learn any vocabulary words that might go along with these constructions, and have rather surged ahead into what I would consider quite specific territory. In our last class, for example, we practiced saying "Something is stuck on your face" (Aapke muh par kuchh laga hai, if you were dying to know) and a few sentences I had a slightly harder time making sense of in English, including "we didn't like your going" and "I got frightened with snakes", but which I can only trust will serve me immensely well in Hindi if we are memorizing them before learning to say such things as "apple" and "shirt".
I suppose I should not say that I do not know any vocabulary words---I do know that barf means "snow" and banana in Hindi means "to prepare food". You may also be interested to hear that farsch, which is the Russian word meaning chopped meat and hence in my mind always conjures up a in image of a pile of chopped liver in a dimly lit butcher shop in the Soviet countryside, means "floor". I have also learned that a Hindi speaker will almost never use the words "please" or "excuse me", and that there is simply no expression meaning "have a nice day"----which, frankly, doesn't particularly surprise me.
But what struggling to learn Hindi in this city has impressed upon me the most is the myriad ways in which the language you speak defines you. This is of course true in America, where the drawl of a southern accent tells a different story about the speaker than the broghue of the woods north of Boston, but in India the differences are even more pronounced. In my office, which is populated entirely by university educated South Delhites, my colleagues speak to each other in heavily accented English, only rarely slipping into Hindi for the occassional bilkool (absolutely) or thikkay (okay). The only Hindi I ever hear is when the chai wallah comes on his morning rounds or the sweeper being given instructions. One's English ability in India is, like in so many other parts of the world, often directly correlated to your lot in the universe. Those with little access to education and who are resigned to life in the slums rarely learn it, even though in a country with 18 official languages it would be their only means of communicating with a Marathi speaker from Mumbai or a Telugu speaker from Hyderabad. And yet, even in those who cannot speak English and are barely literate in Hindi, such as our recently departed cook (don't worry, she is not dead, I just fired her), English has seeped into the marrow of the language. Hindi speakers never use the Hindi word for drinking glass, school, student, telephone, police, pencil, and a host of other words---in some cases original Hindi word is so far out of use that it is barely recognizable.
While I would make an educated guess that this is more likely a result of a century of British imperialism rather than globalization, it is still startling to hear babble punctuated with "Mein school gaya, aapke paas cake hai?" or, on the rare occassion you can squeeze an apology out of a local (usually for something really truly agregious involving a vehicular-corporal collision, like nearly amputating a few toes with their Suzuki Maruti or accidentally mauling you with their 5 ton cart of custard apples), to hear a wizened 4' tall old man in salwar khameez and a skullcap mutter "sorry".
And now, after many years of promising I would never turn into the sort of person who would post pictures of puppies on the internet, I leave you with a photo of a pilla, another word I am increasingly finding a use for. These pille are currently living under an abandoned car near our apartment......that is until I trick BJ into letting me adopt all 6 of them.
15 November 2009
Seelampur
Since 1991, when then-finance minister Manhoman Singh (now second-term P.M.) ushered in economic reform, India has become a country of spectacular wealth, much of which is concentrated in its urban areas, particularly Mumbai and Delhi. Mumbai - India's cosmopolitan city - was consciously designed to accommodate just 8 million people, a decision spurred by - ironically - a deep provincialism and near-fanatical fear of cultural and economic dilution by outsiders. Today, it is a city of 16 million, with formal neighborhoods themselves archipelagos in an ever-expanding sea of slums. The housing shortage is so acute that even the middle class in Mumbai live in these informal settlements, without infrastructure, lapping at the gates of spatial and social inclusion.
In Delhi, there are stark contrast to be sure. Driving through the city, you frequently see roadside enclaves of tents and makeshift houses. But in Delhi - as with all things here - these areas are largely decentralized, so the city landscape appears less like floating islands of wealth, and more like a badly pockmarked tapestry of socio-economic division and exclusion. There are a few exceptions to this systematic decentralization of poverty - one is Nizzamudin, a large slum in South Delhi near the western bank of the fetid Yamuna. Another is Seelampur, a slum of 150,000 near the east bank of the Yamuna, directly across from the warrens of Old Delhi that Dana has described previously.
Both of these slums have one thing in common: they are largely Muslim. As an assistant professor from the Delhi University School of Social Work recently told me, "Muslims are demonized all over the world, but nowhere as systematically, effectively and broadly as in India" (or something along those lines). A fundamental divide between India's two major political parties - the BJP and Congress - is their approach to this minority. The BJP, led by right wing Hindu fanatics masquerading as public intellectuals and economic reformers, espouses the idea of Hindutva, or a pure Hindu state, and has won the majority of their electoral victories by stoking fears of fecund Muslims overwhelming the Hindi majority. At least rhetorically, Congress has been friendlier to this minority, though one development indicator after another shows the routine and systematic deprivation of Muslims. As a group they fare far worse than even low-caste Hindus when it comes to critical metrics like literacy, access to public health infrastructure and employment.
Visiting Seelampur, as I did this week, the meaning of this exclusion becomes apparent. The average family in Seelampur earns between 3000 and 4000 INR per month (around $50USD), primarily by salvaging the copper from old electrical wires, which they can sell for 2 INR per KG, or around 2 cents per pound. To earn the meager amount they do from this tedious and difficult job, 4 or 5 members of each family need to be actively engaged in the work as much as 12 hours per day. Partially as a result of this (but also because of high infant mortality rates), the average family in Seelampur has between 6 and 7 children. These children are frequently ridiculed and abused at school, and most drop out by Class V.
Seelampur is lucky in some respects: because it is a formal resettlement, the labyrinth of houses, alleyways, smalls shops and mosques are not constructed illegally on private land, and should - barring abuse of eminent domain by corrupt government officials - remain there, without the threat of bulldozing that faces so many other communities in India. However, ownership of land is small consolation. The average home in Seelampur rents for 500 INR a month, and is often a single, 8x8 room. To own a house costs 35000 INR or more, or around a year's wages for the average family. And because of neglect by local municipal authorities, few of these houses have access to any public infrastructure.
Years ago, the municipal development corporation purchased pumps for Seelampur, in order to divert drinking water to their few taps. The government has failed to operate these pumps, however, so the residents of the slum must pool their own money to pay for electricity, staffing and fuel. There is only a single public toilet in the slum, which costs 1 INR to use. The majority of the slum residents defecate in a field of open trenches that borders their homes, but at night this leaves most women without options, as it is too dangerous. There is a public hospital that borders Seelampur, but the slum residents have been treated poorly there, and they have little trust for government services. As a result, most residents visit a local quack with no medical training.
I was given a tour of Seelampur by the D.U. School of Social Work as part of a conference I have been attending this week about globalization in India's urban context. The arrival of westerners at the slum was a source of much curiosity for local residents.
We were led through the small alleyways of the slum, followed by ten or twenty curious school children, all desperate to use their few English words and hear Westerners respond. Lots of "hellos", and sometimes just a recitation of the numbers 1 through 10, or portions of the alphabet. Most of the wire-strippers work from home, so even in mid-afternoon, the slum was alive with activity. Small shops sold basic household essentials and dry goods, a Suffi madrassa full of small children sitting on a concrete floor in front of rough-hewn wooden benches did their best to sing in a shaky unison. And we encountered woman after woman involved with a local village council that had lobbied for the meager resources the community now has and who were eager to show us everything their advocacy had reaped.
And I'll let the photographs capture the rest, lest my prose become affected by the sort of naive - but impotent - romanticism with which so many Westerners approach poverty.
02 November 2009
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