This is India #2 - Contrasts

In an interior village in rural Tamil Nadu, a large house had been converted into a vocational school to teach welding to teenage boys. We were visiting the school which was run by an NGO. The students attended a 4 week course, and if the boys passed a professional welding test at the end of the duration, they were guaranteed employment by auto manufacturers nearby.

We were talking to the principal and he repeatedly stressed that the school admits only those who are BPL (Below the Poverty Line, an economic term that gets used often by the media in India.) He was telling us that the boys came from the poorest of the poor families. They couldn't afford to pay the fees for the welding course. Therefore, from the salaries that the boys earned in the first six months, a percentage was deducted and sent back to the NGO to cover its training expenses. This way, the NGO was trying to become financially self-sustaining.

The principal told us that because this was the first time in their lives for the boys to be away from their families for weeks at a stretch they got very homesick.
"How do these boys keep in touch with their families?" I asked.
"By cell phone. They all have mobile phones"
Then he noticed my questioning look. "Yes, they are all BPL. But these days even the BPL boys have mobile phones. They use it for SMS," he said.

That evening, on our return our vehicle came on the Bangalore-Chennai Highway. It is an impressive tolled freeway with 2-3 lanes on each side. At the toll booths, you get receipts with a computerized time and date stamp. Just as we were driving past the toll booth, I noticed one man sitting in a folding chair with a notebook and pen in hand. As each vehicle passed him, he was frantically jotting something down. From what I could make out, he was jotting down the license plate number of each vehicle.

I then saw that this was happening in all the lanes, each lane had a man with a notebook. I have no idea why they were noting it down, and that too by hand. They could have used a simple surveillance camera, or even a digital camera or they could have at least keyed it in somewhere. In their way, the records wouldn’t even be searchable. But they were at it diligently, all day long. (Since that visit, I have also seen this furious jotting down in other toll booths in TN as well.)

Just another reminder that India will never cease to surprise me. People living below the poverty line who have cell phones for SMS; and fancy automated toll booths where employees also jot down license plate numbers by hand.

This is India #1

One fun aspect of being in India is that you never know what you will find yourself discussing where.

We were visiting a couple in their 80's in a very small town called Mhow in interior central India. The talk came around to the kind of work I'd done in the past. While talking about airlines, I said that pilots are well compensated. The elderly gentleman, who'd been mostly quiet suddenly came alive. Turns out that he had been a commercial pilot, and my remark had rankled.

He started to make a case for pilots and suddenly I was on the defensive. I braced myself and heard the many familiar arguments I'd heard before. I was surprised to find myself in a small agricultural town in Madhya Pradesh, discussing crew deadheading, good and bad pairings and the assorted pilot quality of life issues.

After I managed to extricate myself reasonably, I mentioned to him that in India, I could never anticipate what I'd be discussing with whom. "Let me tell you something about India," said the ex-pilot who had warmed up by then. He went ahead and narrated the following story. It is almost surely an apocryphal tale, but it still has a lot of truth in it which is why I am sharing it here.

The ex-pilot told us about a German lady who was returning home after living in India for many years. On her last day she was asked, "Madam, after all these years, what have you learned about India?"
"I can tell you 4 things about India," she apparently said.
"Every stone is sacred." (More shrines and temples per square mile than anywhere else.)
"Everyone is a doctor." (People will always suggest home remedies no matter what the ailment.)
"Any time is tea time." (Numerous cups a day is not at all unusual.)
"And every place is the toilet." (You can see men going everywhere.)

Trust and Distrust in Currency Notes

I witnessed a very small interaction at the Pune railway station while waiting in queue to buy a train ticket. It was a very ordinary incident, but it reminded me that there is a very thin line between trust and distrust, and one can become the other very easily.

By way of background, I should mention that people here in India are extremely wary of accepting 1000 and 500 Rupee notes. There is a widely-held belief that a good number of counterfeit notes are circulating in India. Therefore, vendors will spend a lot of time carefully looking at the note, feeling it, and scrutinizing the watermark against the light before they accept either of the 1000 or the 500 Rupee denominations.

In Pune, after a longish wait to buy train tickets, I was second in line. The man ahead of me handed a 500 Rupee note. The person at the ticket counter spent a good while checking it and refused to accept it. He wanted another note. The man ahead of me, who was wearing dusty clothes and looked to be a day laborer, said he didn’t have any other currency notes.
“Then go and get another note. I can’t accept this,” the ticket vendor said.
“Where will I go, saab? No will give me change. The train will leave.”
Meanwhile the other people in the queue were getting restless and started to murmur.
“Where did you get this note? Where do you work?” the ticket vendor asked.
The man said he worked in a construction site nearby.
“Do you have a mobile phone?”
“Yes, saab.”
“Give me the number.” The laborer rattled off a number, and the ticket vendor wrote it on the 500 Rupee note. Only in India have I seen people freely writing on currency notes. The ticket vendor didn’t do anything to verify the phone number or the identity of the person, but his distrust had somehow morphed into trust. Satisfied, he issued a train ticket and gave the man his change.

No Alcohol Permitted

On our way to Gangotri, I witnessed something that I haven’t still fully come to terms with.

After having found that traveling by buses in these mountainous roads was too perilous, we were traveling from Uttarkashi to Gangotri in a shared Jeep. Locals would wave the vehicle to a stop and squeeze in no matter how jam-packed we were. They’d go for a few kilometers, pay the driver and get down.

A priest who worked at the Ganga temple up at Gangotri traveled with us right from Uttarkashi. He had a small two-inch curly ponytail in his hair. He was really nice to us, suggesting places to sit in the Jeep where we might be comfortable and the fare we should pay. He said that his family lived in Uttarkashi, the district headquarters, where his children went to school. He lived and worked up at the temple in Gangotri, and came down to visit his family when he could.

It was slow going and at the pace we were traveling it would take us close to 4 hours to travel the 80 kilometers. When we reached Harsil, a town that was 18 kms away from our destination the priest spoke up.

“Roko, gaadi roko. Jinhone bhi pee rakha hai, wo uthar jao. Kal aana." ("Stop the Jeep. All those of who have consumed alcohol, get down right here. Come tomorrow.")

I hadn’t realized that some of my fellow passengers had consumed alcohol. But somehow, the priest had known. To my surprise, two men obediently got down. They were being ejected from the vehicle early but were asked to pay the full fare.

I had heard that many of the dhams (towns that are sacred to the Hindus) were alcohol-and-meat free. In Haridwar, for example, no shop will serve alcohol and no restaurant would serve meat.

Gujarat was a so-called “dry state” but it was often said in wink-wink tone. So I was surprised that in India with its very adaptable philosophy of sab kuch chalta hai (anything goes ) the people in our Jeep were taking the prohibition extremely literally. It wasn’t as if these two people were carrying liquor into the town. It was just that they had consumed some before getting on the vehicle.

But that was affront enough. The priest wasn’t done yet.
“Kyon Aisa karte ho? Sharam Aani chahiye.” (Why do you do this? You should be ashamed.)

I was unprepared for this high handedness, and even more surprised at the docility with which the two men accepted what was meted out. They even smiled sheepishly, a tacit acceptance of their guilt.

Eighteen kilometers before their destination, we simply discarded them by the side of the road so that could spend the night somewhere sobering up. Thus free of inebriated heathens who would have polluted the holy dham, and with a little more sitting room for the rest of us, our now-virtuous Jeep lumbered upwards, towards Gangotri.

"Let me carry that for you"

I used to think that Sherpas were only there to help mountaineering expeditions. I used to think that in Garhwal, a district that prided itself on literacy, all young boys would be going to school. And I used to hope that things don’t change too much in the tourist-friendly Himalayas.

We were walking to our hotel in Gangotri, getting ready to check out. Just as we reached the hotel, I felt a tap at my knee. A small boy asked, “Kuch samaan utanekho hai Kya?”. (“Do you have anything that needs carrying?”)

All across this part of the Himalayas, Sherpa porters can be seen. They are men who carry a cord of rope with a leather strap in the middle with them wherever they go. The strap goes over their forehead as they bear heavy loads and shuffle along slowly. They can be seen lounging in clusters while they wait for jobs. Short, thin muscular men, wearing Nepali caps and smoking beedis, their easy smiles revealing rotting teeth.

Sometimes, it seems that the reason to travel is not to gaze at pretty snow-clad mountains but to observe the things that aren’t mentioned much.

I saw these human porters carrying everything on their backs. Sets of bricks, bags of cement, boxes of merchandise and worst of all, red cooking gas cylinders. (Those cylinders are so heavy that even moving them a few inches is difficult.) Apparently the going rate for one load was Rs 30 (US $0.60).

And in Yamunotri, these Sherpa porters carry visitors in a basket strapped to their backs for a distance of 6 kilometers uphill – a task that takes 2 to 3 hours for which they earn Rs 200 (US$4.00). These porters weren't doing too well.

And now here was a little boy, definitely not yet ten years old, who was offering to carry my bags. He knew when the check out time at the hotel was, and had showed up right outside the reception area. Instinctively, I said no. We had just a small day pack with one change of clothes and 2 bottles of water. More important, how could I possibly let a boy who was half my height carry my bag for me?

I am always looking for simple explanations, but I could find none for why these Sherpa porters existed at all. Why have humans lugging loads when big lorries (trucks) and smaller tempos and bicycles are available for transporting goods? And in looking for pat answers, I guessed the only role models that the boy had must be porters themselves.

That boy lingered in my thoughts for a long time. He looked to be eight years old. He should have been in school. I felt bad about denying him some quick money. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said no so hastily. But then, I realized that I would be encouraging him. If I gave him money today, he would be back tomorrow to ask another visitor. What was easy money when you were little would soon become a way of life.

Much as I would love for things to remain the same, I hope the Sherpa porters find some other line of work. And I hope that truant boys start going back to school and don’t ever aspire to grow up to become Sherpa porters.

What I still remember from Angkor in Cambodia

I have forgotten many details of the trip to Angkor Wat since it’s been over two years. But there are a few memories that still linger of a few temple structures and in particular of one band of musicians.

Sooner or later Angkor Wat enters into every traveler’s wish list. Impressive though the grandeur of Angkor Wat was, I remember three other structures that impressed me even more.

In Bayon (Angkor Thom), I was amazed by the gargantuan face statues of the full-lipped King Jayavarman. His seemed like a very interesting choice – to make a statement in stone. In his quest to leave an everlasting mark, he opted to build dozens of statues of his own face, most of the faces taller than humans. They actually allow visitors to wander up and around the giant faces, and no one visiting the Angkor area should miss Bayon.

Since the guidebooks had recommended Tha Prohm, we went to that crumbling temple. It is one structure that is consciously not being restored. Consequently, the giant roots of silk cotton trees are engulfing the temple. The visual metaphors are almost too easy to reach for: the impermanence of stone, of the soft actually being the stronger force, of Nature slowly reclaiming what belongs to it. Even though this place is a little off the beaten path, I was glad we witnessed the awesome display of “immutable” stone structures being crushed by the vice grip of the mighty roots.

Ever since reading about Banteay Srei in Kira Salak’s Beheadings, where she goes searching for her estranged brother, I’ve wanted to go there. Among other things, I was curious to see if the poetry in stone that she writes about so well was really true. (Short answer, yes.) And so we went. Going there involves renting a vehicle since it is separated by several kilometers from the rest of the Angkor complex. Let me just say that I hadn't known that such delicate creations were possible in sandstone.

But more than the giant face statues of Bayon or the mighty roots of Tha Prohm or the fluidity of Banteay Srei, I remember the musicians. By the side of a path leading to the entrance to a temple, a group of 8 men had seated themselves on the ground. They were playing assorted Cambodian instruments for money. A sign in front of them identified them as victims of the landmines. All eight men had lost limbs, a part of a hand or a leg and they were playing music as a way to earn some money.

Their repertoire was a series of haunting melodies. I stood and observed for a while. While I watched, practically every passing visitor opened their wallets. US Dollars, the default currency that visitors in Cambodia use were dropped freely. Even after I had walked away some distance, the band’s poignant music trailed me.

A Lesson on Materialism from Migrant Road Workers in Bhutan

For the 2001 Thanksgiving break, my wife and I went to Bhutan. We flew in to New Delhi and made our way by land, traversing the northeastern part of India before crossing into Bhutan. That was the only time that I flew all the way to India from the US, and yet didn't visit my parents or meet a single relative of mine. It was two months after 9/11 and we were seeking to get away to some place really remote for a few days.

I recall one image from our trip back from Thimpu, after we'd spent a few days there. We'd hired a long-distance taxi to take us from the capital Thimpu to Phuntsholing at the Indian border. Those who live in the US are the elite class by default in Bhutan. The locals travel mostly by bus.

The road to the Indian border, though it was the single most important road in the entire country, was in very bad shape. The mountainous, winding road had huge potholes and was no more than a dirt road for long stretches.

We'd sometimes drive past clusters of workers repairing the road.
“Indians. Road work people,” our driver said.
Their methods were very manual, and the equipment used to melt tar was antiquated. The workers had whole families there working, men, women and children. From their attire and features, I could see that the workers were unmistakably Indian. It looked like Bhutan was importing its labor from nearby India.

And sometimes, our taxi would overtake groups of these road workers who were on the move. In the merciless high-altitude sun, they simply walked to their next assignment. Presumably, they walked for miles and miles because we were in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere
I remember them vividly. Men in shirts and dhotis that had turned brown in the dirt. Women in saris, some with a child perched on their waist. Small kids running ahead, carrying plastic bottles with water for their journey.

The men and women walked while balancing one round cloth bundle on their heads. It was a bundle the size of a pillow, made by tying the opposite ends of a dhoti or a sari. It contained everything they owned.

My wife and I pride ourselves on traveling light. We'd each taken only as many things as would fit in our backpacks for the entire two week trip.

But the reason I still remember the image of these workers is because of the thought that crossed my mind as our taxi overtook the workers: my backpack in the trunk of the taxicab for this short trip was bigger than those bundles, and had far more things than the entire life possessions of any of these migrant workers.


Here's an earlier post on possessions: The evolution of tourist kitsch

The Other Handbag

A Postcard from St. Thomas

I heard about the lady who switched her handbag from Sally, her daughter. I like this story for many reasons. I like it because it is a true story and not some concocted Caribbean tale. Also, it is blissfully free of any sanctimonious morals. And most of all, I like it because it could happen to any one of us.

Our cruise ship was pulling into Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the ridiculously beautiful St. Thomas, USVI with its unreal turquoise bay all around us. I was on the open 13th floor deck of the cruise to watch the docking when I heard Sally talking about what happened to her mother. I will call the mother 'Ma' since I didn't learn her name.

Back at home in Alabama, 78-year-old Ma was all packed and ready well in time for her flight to Miami. Ma would be taking a week long Caribbean cruise with her daughter Sally’s family. At the very last minute, she decided to change purses before getting on the taxi to the airport.

The cruise started on Saturday afternoon, so on Friday night they stayed at a nice hotel in Miami. And on Saturday, around noon, they all came over well in time to check-in for the 4pm sailing.

But there was one small problem.

Ma had forgotten that she had kept her brand-new passport in one of the side pockets of the purse before she switched to the other one. So she'd ended up leaving the passport back home in Alabama. Since our cruise destinations included stops in a few other countries the cruise company simply would not let her board without her passport. (I found this a bit puzzling because even though we had all brought our passports, we never once had to show it to anyone or even take it ashore, except in Miami.) After agonizing about it, Sally and her family boarded the ship and sailed away, leaving the 78-year-old Ma by herself in Miami.

Poor Ma went back to the same hotel. Her son, who lived in Alabama, was going to go into her house and get the passport to her. (I didn't get the details but perhaps he was FedExing it to her.)

The cruise had a full day at sea on Sunday. Then, our first port of call was the town of Samana in the Dominican Republic, but there were no flights there from Miama. So Ma had to wait three nights before possibly joining us in our next stop, St. Thomas.

I heard the story in the morning, just as our ship was pulling into port at St. Thomas. Her flight was supposed to land at 3.30pm that afternoon and we were departing at 5.30pm sharp. If everything went smooth, she would get to the ship just in time. The cruise line knew her story and had promised to help. I never did find out if Ma had made it to the ship okay.

Sally said that Ma ended up spending close to $1000 extra, what with three more days of forced confinement in a Miami hotel and her last-minute purchase of a one-way flight to St. Thomas. All this because she decided while waiting for the taxi that the she’d rather take the other purse with her to the cruise.

The Babushka with the Weighing machine

Though I have wanted to write about the old lady in Ulan Bator I have put it off because I couldn’t find any neat insights or conclusions to present. In fact, I haven’t even been able to make sense of it, which perhaps is the whole point. Writing about the Chiclets vendor of Cancun reminded me of her again and this time I decided to write anyway.

I've forgotten many details of my Mongolia visit this past May, but I remember the old lady with the weighing machine. I still remember her because of what I saw her earn.

In Ulan Bator, we stayed at the Khongor Guesthouse on Peace Avenue, which is the main street. For 4 days, we stayed at the hotel and walked to the various sights in the city. Each day, we'd walk in and out of the hotel at least two or three times and we'd have to pass the State Department Store every time. On the pavement right outside that store there was an old lady, a stocky babushka who stood with her back to the wall. She stood in her shoes, wearing a black coat and a long black skirt, a red scarf wrapped around her head. Mostly she was looking down. Right next to her, on the sidewalk was a weighing machine with a hand-scrawled sign. For 50 Togrogs anyone could get their weight taken.

Once, I saw a woman getting her weight taken. The old lady carefully removed the cardboard she had placed on the weighing machine. The babushka made the lady take off her shoes and step on the machine in her stockinged feet. The machine was made mostly of glass and looked very new and sleek. It was the kind you can get a Wal-Mart store for around $10 or $15. That was the entire business capital.

Though it was May, it was surprisingly windy and cold in UB. Day after day in that cold the old lady stood stoically, waiting for customers. I saw her everyday in the same place holding essentially the same pose. I remember having an unchristian thought, wondering if she had some illegal side-business going on, perhaps peddling drugs.

The reason for that thought was that in May, the exchange rate was over 1000 Mongolian Togrogs for each US dollar. So the old lady was earning less that 5 cents per weighing. We were right outside the State Department Store where the prices for fruit and vegetables were materially higher than what we pay here in Chicago. You couldn't have bought anything at all for 50 Togrogs.

In my 4 days of coming and going, the only time I saw the babushka earn anything was from that one lady.