Our last trip in pictures (words to come...)

Kolkata

Silliguri to Gangtok, Sikkim

Darjeeling

Molly and Dana in Delhi

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.

Seelampur (pt. 2)

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.

Coronation Place (pt. 3)

Coronation Place (pt. 2)

Coronation Place

Random Photographs: Silver-haired rickshaw-wallah and the Delhi Daredevils

A New Year, A Hidden Treasure

This week marks two months for me in New Delhi, and finally, finally, I'm starting to get the hang of things here. Or, maybe really and truly finally get a sense of humor.

I will admit, there are times when India still baffles and enrages me---like, when, today while trying to buy a three-ring binder for a student I am tutoring (more on my new glamorous career later), I was first ignored for 25 minutes by the shopkeeper who was texting on his cellphone and then proffered, in this order, a plastic sheet ("sorry, ye three ring binder nahin hai. ye sheet of plastic from 1964 hai. Please keep looking."), half an envelope that had been torn down the middle, and finally, the only three ring binder that was in stock, which had clearly survived both world wars and been digested by a camel at some point. Or, the occasional man who falls off his motorbike while craning his head in traffic to stare at me.

But mostly, I am finding that my relationship with New Delhi is evolving beyond the first (primarily abusive) stages into something more nuanced. I'm not sure if this is love, or even really a romance, but something good is happening and I like it.

I. Coronation Park

What I like most about Delhi is that it is a city of multiple personalities---none of whom seem aware that the others exist. One of these dichotomies is the difference between North and South Delhi. South Delhi, where we and almost all other members of the middle and upper class live, is fully engaged (if not successfully engaged) in the march towards modernity, while North Delhi lags behind like the ragged entrails of the past. In search of a bit of this, yesterday afternoon we set off for Coronation Memorial, once the site of coronation ceremonies and ascension celebrations in India's past life as a British colony, now an overgrown plot not far from the Yamuna River where the statuary ghosts of King George V and several Viceroies were dumped and forgotten at Independence.

We arrived at dusk, after a metro ride from Connaught Place in Central Delhi and a bicycle rickshaw ride down a dusty stretch of highway rimmed by crumbling one story buildings and banyan trees with the glowing pink orb of the sun slowly sinking in the sky. Soldiers lolling by a clearing alongside the road claimed the park was closed, but after a few minutes of pleading they allowed us in so long as they came along as escorts and only stayed five minutes. Lucky for us meant the typical variety of Indian army escort--two soldiers leaned against the gate, smoking beedis until they were overcome by boredom after three minutes and left us to this otherworldly gathering of statesmen in the jungle. A small black bird perched on King George's head and peacocks meandered like shades through the long grass as the shadows grew longer and longer. In the silence I tried to imagine the grounds when Queen Elizabeth arrived on elephant for her coronation as Empress of India, with throngs of well wishers and Britons in full regalia, but instead found myself wondering if instead of the Yamuna River we had crossed the Styx.

II. Diwali

I know what you really may want to hear about now is the monkey we accidentally hit at extraordinarily high speeds (it wasn't my fault), but as that is pretty much the entire story right there, I will now enchant you with a tale about Diwali in Delhi.

Two weeks ago was Diwali, the festival of lights and the Hindu New Year. What this means in practical terms is that local markets that would otherwise sell bangles, tupperware, and Hanes underwear rejected by the first world markets, convert themselves for a short while into a mecca of glitter--snow globes filled with glitter, terra cotta statues dipped in glitter, objects constructed entirely of tinsel, vendors with dried fruits and nuts, and, in the eastern version of the Christmas spirit, speakers blaring Bollywood music at every corner.

In addition to it being an ideal opportunity for your landlord and landlady to invite you for the world's foremost awkward beer drinking and temple attending, it is also an open invitation for anyone with opposable thumbs and a lighter to set off firecrackers---and apparently almost everyone meeting these humble criteria do so. While this did yield a priceless sign on the Delhi metro, "No crackers allowed", it was also an experience I feel prepared me to better understand the Blitz or everyday life in Kabul. Apparently, common sense as applied to the Indian teenager specifies that the best place for lighting something like an M80 or a string of bottle rockets is in the middle of a narrow street or under the carriage of a car, which never failed to make walking outside after dark a terrifying experience. It brought me back to the old days when I was terrified of being electrified randomly in Delhi, though the chance of losing a limb or experiencing grave bodily harm did seem genuine.

But this post is supposed to be about how I have come to enjoy living in Delhi, and it still is. We did not explode, remained ambulatory, and did not permanently lose our hearing during Diwali, and we were invited by our landlord and landlady, Uttam and Poonam, to a Diwali drink. This being Delhi where nothing is what you expect, we were served beer and mini pizzas while Uttam told us a long dramatized story about the various shunts he has had inserted throughout his body, and were then forcibly stuffed in the car and dragged to the local temple by Poonam, who we have been instructed to call Aunty and who, I do truly believe, treats us the way she treats her children, albeit perhaps when they are wayward or acting disabled. At the temple, a napkin was promptly tied on my head and I was instructed to light candles while Poonam prayed and Uttam complained that his calves were sore, and when it became apparent that I was inept even at the simple task of lighting candles with no wick and balancing them upright somehow in a line on ground outside the temple, I was relegated to waiting by the side holding a box of cookies. Oh, the holidays. How they bring even faux families together.

A glimpse into my research... [Link Fixed]

Here's a draft presentation I developed to give my academic advisor an overview of my project and explain the methodology I used to select the districts in which I will be doing field work.

Again, its very draft, but also exciting, because it lays the groundwork for what I hope will be my first week or two in the field in mid-November. Also, depending on which version of Microsoft Office you have, the fonts I use may not display properly.

The North Country

Hello, there. It's been a while.
To give you a quick summary of the exciting events that have occurred since my last post (a month ago?).......we took the LSATs, traveled to Ladakh in the north, fired our cleaning lady, hired a new cook (this one old enough to have a 7 year old son, which means she must be at least.....19? That's old enough to cook), ran over a monkey, and celebrated Diwali, in that order.

But let me start from the beginning.

A few weeks ago, we set off for Leh, the principal town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of India that sticks out like a bun on the top of India's head, wedged between Pakistan and China. Ladakh was, before being annexed by the British in the mid-1800s, an independent kingdom ruled by a Tibetan Buddhist king. Now it is a minority region within a minority state (for those of you who didn't get the foreign affairs memo, Kashmir is a Muslim majority region that belongs to India but is the center of a bloody dispute between India and Pakistan that has raged for decades and continues to suffer from violence and instability as it is frequently infiltrated by Pakistani militants. No, Mom, Leh is not in Kashmir) which is a distinctive designation even in a country as patchworked as India.

Landing in the Leh airport after the short, brilliantly scenic ride from Delhi is like landing in an alternate India---one that is possibly located on the moon. The airport, a small hangar located on the Air Force base there, is empty, cold, and quiet---three sensations that immediately tip you off that you are not in regular India. The town is a collection of traditional flat-roofed mud brick buildings sprinkled in a flat(ish) valley of poplar trees along the banks of the Indus river. Immediately beyond the floodplains all signs of life immediately cease and there is nothing but desert and giant metalic peaks jutting into deep blue sky.
What is so fascinating about Ladakh is that it is really not"regular" India. Ladakhis are ethnically related to their northern neighbors, the Tibetans, rather than to the Aryan stock that comprises the rest of the country, and thus look Tibetan rather than Indian. Ladakhi, the local language, is written in the same script as Tibetan and shares linguistic roots, and Ladakhis are predominantly Buddhist rather than Hindu or Muslim. And, lest you think those reasons were enough to make these people different, for the six or so months every year that it snows, Ladakh is completely cut off from the outside world, allowing local culture to continue to flourish without the dilution of globalization. Old men and women still dress in heavy woolen robes with little slippers and carry bundles on their backs over the mountains and families in remote villages outside of Leh slurp bowls of boiled Ladakhi noodles in their tiny houses decorated with pictures of the current Dalai Lama and the Tibetan city of Lhasa, while prayer flags flutter in the breeze overhead, sending prayers to the gods. In downtown Leh, the signs of seasonal tourism are visible in the embroidered t-shirts that say, curiously, "yak yak yak Ladakh" and the couple of internet cafes that get intermittent reception, but there are no beggars and the furry donkeys that wander the streets outnumber the shopkeepers. *

But what most endeared me to the Ladakhis was their perpetually rosy cheeks and layers of clothing---cold weather people everywhere are cut from the same (insulated) cloth. I have hot tea and sweaters in my blood and so do they. Just as you will never encounter a rural Mainer swathed in a flourescent polyester sari encrusted with rhinestones going for a stroll through the mountains (though this is extremely fortunate on account of the physical construction of most rural Mainers rather than most saris), Ladakhis are much more inclined towards practical outfits of black and green with the occasional sassy red belt, and towards quietness and reservation rather than the boisterous clamour that characterizes most of the country. Passing stout little farmers trudging home along the road at sunset with their donkeys and sheep in tow, bound for warm huts in small villages, I imagined I could sense a little of the familiar Puritan work ethic of Northern New England. And for once I finally felt like I had a leg up on the Indian tourists that disembarked from the plane with us, clad in the aforementioned attire and who instantly began to look as miserably uncomfortable with the temperature as I do on any given afternoon in Delhi.

Anyway, I don't want you to think I've lost my edge and am not going to poke fun at a few things in Ladakh. Part of me almost doesn't want to, I had such a heavenly time wearing six layers and complaining that my toes were going numb and staring at the mountains through a blistering altitude headache, but I'm going to anyway.

Because we were only in Leh for five days, not enough to resign ourselves to joining a trek to trudge over some ridiculous pass, wear the same underwear for a week and eat ramen noodles in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains (all things I did legitimately want to do), we decided on a series of day excursions around Leh.

The first was a visit to the Shanti Stupah, a Buddhist prayer monument perched on a hill above Leh that was constructed by the Japanese in the mid 1980s. It is not exactly as historical as some of it's 11th century neighbors, but it is shiny, white, and very clean, and has a cafeteria where you can get Nescafe and the ramen noodles you are missing by not trekking---all good things.
It also had the most horrifying bathroom in India. I wish to qualify this statement with the background information that I have had the honor of previously using the facilities in some truly unusual places in my life---an absolutely pitch black outhouse in Costa Rica where I nearly fell down the hole, a cabin on the side of a sheer mountain face in Peru during gale force winds, a rock on the side of the road in the desert as the Indian Army was passing in a convoy, but this still wins. I won't elaborate too gruesomely lest your stomachs turn and you become unable to continue, but nearly every person who had ever used this particular place must have been confused about what exactly one ought to do when confronted with an outhouse.
In this respect, Ladakh certainly was India. By way of a brief analogy, every time I have ever been to an ATM in India, there is a small waste paper basket in the cubicle beside the machine where you receive your cash, where you are meant to deposit your receipt. For reasons I cannot fathom, the waste paper basket is always invariably completely empty and every single person has thrown their receipt on the floor, so that there are hundreds of scrunched up balls everywhere. Ladakhi bathroom 1, Dana 0.

The next day we drove to Pangong Lake, a psychadelically blue strip straddling the India and Tibet border. I don't know why I thought, in a valley surrounded by 21,000 foot peaks that the drive to the lake would be dull, but I did. It was not.
The guide service we were using had provided us with a 4WD Toyota Qualis and a driver named Sherab, who said he was 23 and from a village near Leh. Sherab, I might add, had certainly experienced the influences of globalization and was wearing acid washed bell bottom jeans, a t-shirt and whose hairstyle was a chin-length bob, the proper maintenance of which required stopping at every instance of water (streams, rivers, mud puddles) to be wetted and slicked back--call it nature's extremely-short term hairgel. Sherab had also brought along a musical selection for the 8 hour round-trip drive that included Ladakhi pop music (which sounds like Incan flutes and could pass for ethnic elevator music) and a CD of someone who sounded like Chris Rock doing standup comedy about the state of black men and how rotten the Bush administration was. So, winding up a one lane road with no guard rails at 16, 000 feet and rounding blind corners at speeds that were beginning to make me internally promise a range of things including born-again Christianity if we survived, we were treated to long rifts about 'the motherfuckah who fucked up eeeeeverythang' while Sherab grinned wildly and ran his fingers through his hair in the rearview mirror.
Then, as if things hadn't quite become surreal enough, we rounded a corner, came down into a valley, and across a clump of tourists standing in a mushy field pointing at something. It turned out to be a marmot, the squooshy mustard-colored-rodent-like creature that dwells at about 12,000 feet, who had come out of his hole and was wandering around standing up on people's legs and begging for ritz crackers. There are pictures to prove it. I have no idea if this marmot was friendly, rabid, or insane, but he nearly sat on BJ's lap--though he quickly abandoned us and went back in his hole after he realized we had not brought baked goods.

The rest of the trip was much less exciting. We made it to Pangong Lake, where Sherab had a chance to slick back his hair using lake water rather than a roadside puddle, and I had the chance to use another toilet perched on a mountainside, and then we returned over the same terrifying roads back to Leh, the journey only punctuated when we would occasionally swerve to avoid a rock in the road and nearly plunge us over the side to our deaths and then Sherab would laugh and say something in broken English about how we had nearly crashed.

The rest of the trip went as such: We visited a monastery where I slipped down the stairs and nearly snapped off my tailbone, went for a hike with a guide who trotted ahead of us as we (I) wheezed desperately in the thin air and sat down every five feet vowing never to move again, and then spent the rest of the time reading a German Marie Claire on the roof of the guesthouse peacefully getting a sunburn severe enough to qualify as a facial peel. But it was all wonderful, really.

And now I fear this post has become too long and you will have to wait for the next installment to hear about the death of the monkey and how Diwali in Delhi is not unlike living in Baghdad during an airstrike.
Until then, love, kisses, and best wishes for a clean bathroom in your future.



*Granted, this is a country that by and large remains woefully untouched by the improvements of globalization in ways that are largely detrimental and carrying a bag of potatoes on your back seems less quaint when contextualized with the fact that a majority of people in Mumbai still shit in the open and most villages do not have paved roads or access to health care, but give me my moment in the sun. Ladakh is lovely and feels still very much like a mountain kingdom in the sky, okay?

Adventures in Ladakh

More to come on our weekend trip, but in the meantime, some photos (click images to see the full albums):

Leh: Day 1

Leh: Day 2

Leh: Day 3

Leh: Day 4

Leh: Day 5

India's Epcot of Lies

Its amazing to me that I haven't yet posted on this, as its been several weeks since I visited.

Early on here, a few friends and I were eager to do a bit of sightseeing. We'd been so engrossed in apartment-searching that - a week or two into our time here - we'd hardly had the opportunity to see any of Delhi, particularly not historic Delhi. Like any good tourists, we started our day at Humayun's Tomb, which I have described before as a marvel of Mughal-era architecture. Thereafter, it got a bit strange.

Our next destination was Akshardham, which is described on its website as epitomizing "10,000 years of Indian culture in all its breathtaking grandeur, beauty, wisdom and bliss. It brilliantly showcases the essence of India’s ancient architecture, traditions and timeless spiritual messages. The Akshardham experience is an enlightening journey through India’s glorious art, values and contributions for the progress, happiness and harmony of mankind."

In other words, its a bizarre temple complex run by an extravagantly wealthy and extraordinarily odd sect of Hinduism. It consists of a magnificent central temple, with facades, pillars and sculptures that were handcarved by 11,000 volunteers over the course of 5 years. The entire complex was designed to perfectly replicate ancient temples, and as best as I could tell, it did. But beyond this central temple, the campus - and I say campus because inculcation seems to be the primary objective of this cult, ahem, sect - consists of: an animatronic tour of a Swami's life, an animatronic boat ride that takes you through a complete mythical and fabricated history of Indian ingenuity and invention, and an IMAX film that is translated into multiple languages and was filmed with the support of tens of THOUSANDS of extras. They also have a snack stand that sells delicious popcorn, a personalized photography set-up, with the temple as a backdrop, and a musical fountain show that is the showy and surely completely traditional denouement of every evening.

When I arrived, I had no idea what to expect. When I learned that there would be animatronics, I had every idea of what to expect and I was excited, because animatronic-anything is guaranteed to be both hilarious and awesome in equal measure. And it was. The animatronic Swami brought fish back to life, healed the sick, and became one of India's most important figures (so the believers say) in a series of seven or eight mechanical scenes, operose in the disturbingly funny way only robots are capable of.

With the tour of the Swami's life over, it was time to pull the lens back and focus on the rich lineage of India's cultural, scientific and philosophical traditions. When was the first space ship invented? Did you say 1950? Well, you are wrong. Ancient Indian's invented the first spaceship more than two thousand years ago. They also invented nuclear fission, modern day medicine, yoga (ok so we knew that), and EVERY OTHER THING UPON WHICH HUMAN CIVILIZATION HAS BEEN BUILT. This fact - and the error of Western history as we know it -was presented to us during a 20 minute indoor boat ride that ended with a trip to the future where, evidently, small children of different colors (not races, I mean primary colors) will walk through the sky on nearly invisible pieces of glass.

I would go on to describe the IMAX, but I mostly just fell asleep, despite it being the single loudest film ever made. How could I stay awake after such a tiring day of having my entire belief system and cultural heritage shown to be a fiction?

The evening closed with the dancing fountains. Jets of water, illuminated by multi-colored lights danced through the air as though summoned by the Swami himself. We were all amazed and then bored. So, we left early, went home, and spent the next days sorting out dreams from reality and reality from nightmares.

One thing I've been dogged in trying to figure out ever since is where their money comes from. The temple complex literally must've cost billions. But there is no information about it anywhere, as though no one else is interested in such an oddity, or as though they're Scientologists. Which is my theory of the moment.

Neighborhood at Night

Mediocre photograph of the iron-wallah's shop.

Protecting the status symbols from dust.

All that remains of a house that has been demolished by hand over the past week.

Late-night eating in the market.

Urbanization and Revitalization in Delhi

In my last post, I noted that Delhi is a city abuzz with change of all varieties. Having just attended a three-day conference addressing India’s rapid urbanization, I wanted to put that remark in a broader context.

Currently, the population of Delhi itself – a 1,500 square kilometer jurisdiction - is ~14 million people. But within the National Capital Region – a 12,000 square kilometer area – there are nearly 40 million people. Compare this to New York, with approximately 8 million people in the 5 boroughs, an area of 900 or so square kilometers, and just 21 million people in the broader metropolitan region – much larger than Delhi’s at 17.5 thousand square kilometers.

from Urban Age

One stark way of highlighting this data is to look at population in terms of density. Despite having no skyscrapers or substantial high-rise development of any sort, Delhi and New York have similar densities of around 9.5 thousand people per square kilometer. But Delhi’s maximum density – again, with no high-rise development – is almost 100,000 people per square kilometer, nearly double high-rise NYC’s maximum of 50,000 per square kilometer.

Delhi’s size and the need to effectively manage city space become even more critical when viewed through the lens of anticipated future growth. In the city-proper alone, the population is anticipated to double by 2020, rising to more than 25 million people. Prior to the economic recessions, NYC was predicting a population growth of just 1 million people by the year 2030. 1643 people move to Delhi every day. And this is expected to more or less happen every day, for the next decade at least.

As you can imagine, this type of rapid growth poses enormous problems for Delhi, and Indian cities in generally. Indian academics and urban planners are desperate to implement policies that shape this growth into liveable, sustainable cities and to avoid the trajectory of many other South American and Asian cities (and even New York) that only began developing comprehensive, integrated and inclusive planning mechanisms after periods of widespread social upheaval and startling economic polarization.

That task is a tall order. Governance is extremely poor in India, and this is particularly so in Indian cities. The “mayor” of Delhi – currently the much-beloved and very progressive Sheila Dikshit – is also the Chief Minister of the State of Delhi (much like D.C.). But significant portions of what would ideally be within her policy portfolio are instead relegated either to federal agencies or one of Delhi’s three municipal corporations, all of whom have poorly defined jurisdictions and are staffed with babus – India’s name for ineffectual, often-corrupt public servants who, in the urban context, are often rural transplants with skill sets that are woefully incompatible with city management.

(Often too, India’s obsession with the engineer class excises urban planners from the city building process, a prime example of this being the master plan for Gurgaon, a hellish satellite city of Delhi, whose guiding principle was a complex mathematical formula that resulted in an urban area with no sidewalks and 33% of all land area covered by roads.)

Poor governance also means poor enforcement capabilities. Indian cities recover only a fraction of levied taxes, fines and utility fees. Local laws are flagrantly violated, with enforcement rare.

All of this means that, despite several concerted efforts to develop “master plans”, most cities in India – Delhi perhaps in particular – are facing serious problems and responding insufficiently. 24% of India’s urban population lives in absolute poverty. 40 million people in India’s cities still live in slums, and, despite rising costs of living, only 16% of Indians in urban areas earn more than 11,000 rupees/month (~$230/month). In Mumbai, 63% of residents still defecate in the open. And in Delhi, 50% of its historic structures –potential development assets - have been lost in the last 90 years due to mismanagement and neglect. In Delhi, the water and energy supply are becoming increasingly scarce (for those who had them in the first place), with outages in many areas frequent and often lasting for days. Sanitation facilities are poor at best. The municipal corporations have no way of knowing where pipes exist, which leads to frequent backups and innumerous illegal overflows into the Yamuna, the river that courses just to the east of Delhi’s downtown center.

And if one thing is making all of these indicators worse, it’s the rise of India’s car culture. In 2002, the last year for which I have accurate statistics, India’s air pollution ranked worst in the world for large cities. Delhi had 8 or 9 times the particulate matter of New York City, and in nearly every fiscal quarter since 2002, car purchases have increased in India by double digits. In 2004 there were 4.5 million registered motor vehicles in Delhi, with motorcycles most prevalent, followed by cars. As car ownership increases, this trend is changing, and though motorcycles are still the most popular form of transportation, cars are quickly closing the gap. Every day, 150,000 cars ply the 8 line highway between Gurgaon and Delhi alone, leading to a 10 minute average wait time at the toll booth, even with the widespread implementation of EZ-Pass-type technology.

from Urban Age

And in India, cars are not respectful of boundaries. Dedicated – and segregated – bicycle lanes are crowded with auto rickshaws. Cars crowd dedicated Bus Rapid Transit lanes. Traffic is pervasive and unavoidable. And so far, the government’s response has been to invest in costly flyovers, elevating one road over another. But these infrastructural modifications are almost always implemented discretely, with no integration into a broader planning effort. Zooming over a flyover, you’ll quickly be stopped at the next light, which hasn’t been changed to reflect modified traffic patterns. Even more importantly, this investment in road infrastructure has been detrimental to equivalent investment in alternative modes of transformation, most notably walking. Only around 10% of Delhi-ites own cars, which means the vast majority take public transportation, bike, or walk. But Delhi is a city of crumbling sidewalks, where they exist at all. Pedestrian fatalities – at the hands of automobiles – remain a leading cause of death. And beyond all of these quantitative metrics, the shift towards a car-dominated urban form represents a serious move away from ideas of sustainability, inclusivity, and livability.

Despite these obstacles, Delhi is a city that is gradually developing appropriate responses and solutions. An enormous metro system is nearly complete. The pilot stages of what will be a vast BRT network has been successful (assuming you’re not a privileged car owner). Delhi will host the Commonwealth Games this summer. A federal urban renewal scheme is pouring billions of dollars into urban infrastructure. And increasingly, citizens and private firms are contributing to conversations about the city’s future. For someone interested in city administration and planning, the potential of Delhi is unparalleled. But progress will likely be slow. Power needs to be centralized and granted more authoritatively to the municipality. The organizational and administrative structure needs to be more holistically integrated. The civil service needs to be reformed, anti-corruption measures enhanced, and enforcement mechanisms developed. And the government needs to start communicating with its residents and become more of a public-facing institution, in order to change behaviors and ensure the successful implementation of key initiatives. And beyond all of these reforms, service delivery needs to become effective. Land use policies need to be developed. Delhi needs to involve its citizens (all of them, not just the car-driving, well-educated elite)and visitors alike in a comprehensive discussion of what it wants the future to look like, what matters most to the people living here.

As for me, I’m still digesting three days of extensive discussions about what this future might look like, and will post my own thoughts here from time to time. I’ll also post more information about some of the urban management strategies Delhi has developed, or is developing, that I find particularly promising, with resonance beyond India, for cities around the world.

On With Our Lives...

The LSATs are done. Taken under remarkable conditions (relative to our worst fears), we took them yesterday, after a sleepless night of anxiety and panic, and have now begun the long wait for our scores. Which is to say, we're never thinking about them again.

The test center was substantially better than anything I've heard about in the US: digital clock for all to see, cookies and tea at the break, and a box-lunch to take home. Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a long nap, and then went out for a luxurious dinner at Diva, a nice Italian restaurant in Delhi. LSATs are officially a thing of the past: on to research, working and exploring India.

First up: the Himalayas. on Friday, we'll fly to Leh, in Ladakh, for a long weekend. Expect photos of snow-capped peaks, mountain lakes, Buddhist monasteries and hearty food.

All this optimism seems in contrast to the tone of our previous entries, so let me acknowledge that they represented slight exaggerations, in the case of my posts, and complete fabrications, in the case of Dana's. Just kidding, but things here have been wonderful on the whole. Delhi is an amazing city, abuzz with change (physical, demographic and socio-economic) and full of hundreds of markets, restaurants and cultural institutions, where chaotic street bazaars are improbably juxtaposed against serene and unmoving 1000 year old remnants of forts, temples and mosques. And our apartment - despite its occasional leaks and shortages - is quite nice too. Spacious, quiet and overlooking a lush park. We've even just hired a cook.

So our lives are anything but hard, but leisure is not as amusing to recount. So, with this disclaimer of sorts, we'll make a quick return to cynicism and hyperbole. Because you love it, and because its cathartic for us.

Not dead, yet

To allay your worries as to our whereabouts, and also to shut up those who have been whining that we have not posted recently, know this: we are taking the LSAT on Sunday. In Delhi.

Well, in Gurgaon, a southern suburb of Delhi filled with glassy high rises belonging to the likes of Ernst & Young, Deloit, Dell, and also filled with half-cultivated fields, cows, goats, and a weird quasi-modern not-totally-abandoned-but-maybe-partly-abandoned complex called Greenwood Plaza where our test center, Planet EDU, is located.

Amazingly, despite the fact that we learned upon visiting this week that the other inhabitants of the "Plaza" include a bootleg whiskey shop and a roadside cart that sells food out of a brass drum (quite good food actually) in a neat setup where a wild mud-covered boar serves as the trash can for all scraps and utensils once you are finished, the test center seems normal. They say they have air conditioning and I know for a fact that the woman at the desk speaks English. If you adjust your standards properly (and believe me, I have), those two facts are a dream. What that also means, unfortunately, is that if I do poorly on the LSAT it will be my own fault and I won't be able to blame it on roving livestock entering the classroom or the temperature in the room cresting at 130 degrees---both things I'd secretly been counting on as excuses for admissions committees. Oh well.

And with that, I leave you to return to the desolate world where my sole purpose in life is to determine where student X must sit if students Y and Z do not sit together but student B is out sick, given that the room is painted green and the teacher is ugly. Cross your fingers, toes, eyebrows, whatever you can cross for us. See you Sunday evening.

I am John, I am an American, and I am happy.

This picture was taken nearly a year ago, and is not indicative of life in Delhi in recent days, both because the people in the picture are wearing sweaters - its 9 o'clock at night and 99 degrees right now, so that's clearly an impossibility - and because it captures a scene not able to be seen from my apartment, which, until this afternoon, I hadn't left in more than 72 hours. Still, I thought a picture might entice you to read on. Only now you know better, and are fearing that what follows will be a banal recitation of my apartment bound life these past three days.

But, your intuition would be wrong, and always will be in India: quiet study and simple domesticity are but dreams here, never to be fulfilled. Banality: if only. Our best efforts to buckle down and study religiously for the LSATs were thwarted at nearly every turn.

First, the water. Or the lack thereof. We haven't had it in three days. Occasionally, a turn of the faucet will produce a slight trickle, enough to wash one hand, or perhaps one dish, if that hand or dish was already clean. This means: showers are infrequent (but with bottled mineral water - ah, luxury - when they do occur) and - worse yet - dishes piling higher by the day.

I don't enjoy doing dishes, and if we were in the US, I'd be content to let them pile for a few days, as disgusting as that sounds. But here, with dirty dishes come ants. Hundreds and thousands of ants, criss-crossing our apartment like graph paper. And unlike any ants I've ever encountered in the US, these ants don't just like sugar: they'll eat anything. We've found them in toothpaste. They devour globs of sunscreen. They've also developed a particular taste for eating pasta and cornflakes, and slowly seem to be adopting the proclivities of my own appetite. The one thing they don't seem interested in is their poison. Which is surprising, given that every inch of the apartment is covered in powdered insecticide that I know to be illegal in the US, and whose possession there would carry a prohibitive fine. And its not illegal because its ineffective. Other people here have described insects running through it and shedding two or three limbs immediately - but not these ants. Instead, I'm sure the powder is slowly becoming airborne and crystallizing in our food, and in our mouths and noses when we sleep. Neurological problems are sure to develop rapidly, and I expect my organs to cease functioning by next week. But what else are we to do? I certainly haven't learned how to request "EPA-approved ant traps" in Hindi.

In fact, the only thing I have learned to say in Hindi is the title of this entry. (To be fair, I've only taken one class so far, but optimism is difficult when a cold shower seems - and likely is - so far away).

(The cruel irony of this drought and its attendant pestilence, is that, for several days last week, it rained so hard that water began to seep into the concrete roof and poor in steady streams into our kitchen. The floor was littered with buckets, bowls and rags, all of which had to be emptied or squeezed every 30 minutes. Even with this Sisyphean effort, there was a half inch of standing water on the kitchen floor at all times. And worst of all, the roof is slowly rusting, and with a rusting roof comes rusty water that stained everything it touches. Clothes, the floor, dishes. Everything. We never expected to be punished so cruelly for the simple and seemingly modest wish that our apartment - what with its four walls and roof - actually effect a difference between the out-doors and the in-.)

So, in this land of extremes, we press on, hoping for a time when the heat and monsoon are weakened by cool, crisp winter air, and the city is once again a land of sweaters, (albeit polyester monstrosities that more resemble bear costumes than clothes). Until thatEdenic time, we'll sweat without respite in the cruel heat, knowing full well that as soon as we forget ourselves in the rigors of a timed LSAT section, the doorbell will ring us back into purgatory, and at the door will be seven or eight toothless men wanting to fix our leaks and mark the tortuously slow march to winter with heavy swings of their blunt tools against the semi-porous roof over our heads.