I write this while on the top of three bunks, about six feet by two feet, on a lurching train from Thanjavur to Chennai. This is the second time in a few days that I have made this train trip, albeit in opposite directions. You have to love the efficiency. I will post this as soon as I find myself connected to the internet, and who knows when that will be. But I should start off with what happened after the last time I posted, and describe what I have been up to.
The weekend. Those glorious two days when you don’t have to work, or think about work, and in our case when we could pretend that we were just tourists on vacation. Because Chennai really, truly is a tourist destination. It is so much easier to tell lies when you are typing them.
On Saturday we had a lazy start, bummed around the hotel, and eventually went to the beach. It was very entertaining, and was actually a relatively nice beach—cleanish sand, the minimal amounts of human fecal matter (see picture…) and loads of interesting people (/monkeys dressed as people) to watch. I tried to body surf, and met some boys around my age playing in the waves. We played a game of chicken. To me it seems that they were trying to get the foreigner sucked out by the riptide for their amusement by challenging him to a game of who-can-swim-out-farther, but that is a game that I have invested far too much time in and was not to be bested by some playful punks in Chennai. I won, handily. We went to a nice dinner for Jesse’s 21st, celebrating her last night of illegal drinking. The drinking age here is apparently 21, although I have yet to see anyone get even close to being vaguely questioned about the prospect of maybe showing some form of something that resembles an ID.
The world cup 3rd place match was that night, and me and Robert wanted some beer for the match, so we could participate in true international style (well, other country international. Definitely not here) The bar, if you could call it that, was fascinating. Bars per say are only allowed to exist in very large hotels. Alcohol is sold, however, at these government assisted wine shops which seem to sell Kingfisher malt liquor, brandy and whiskey. We went to one near the hotel, and walked into the Indian equivalent of a biker bar. The shop had a little dusty yard enclosed in corrugated sheets out front, which was full of inebriated and social Indian men and their motorcycles. We approached the store itself—essentially the bar, everyone was just hanging around and drinking—and asked the bartender for beers. He pulled two warm ones out of the non-functional cooler and passed them to us. An Indian man, better educated than most, sitting near the bar laughed when he saw us feeling the beers’ temperature.
“You’re in Chennai. They are all warm.” Cheers to that. It was a good game.
The next day we wandered the old colonial part of town, went to a history museum etc. Not very exciting. But that night we were leaving Chennai. Heading for the country.
The Indian train experience. Kind of a cliché really, and certainly interesting. We had nice seats—or at least the guys did, the girls were shoved into smaller beds so that they could all be in one compartment together. I’m not sure who decided that they would appreciate that tradeoff, and that person should probably be glad that the girls don’t know who he is. The train left late at night, and I got yelled at for leaning too far out the door of the train as we whipped by the scenery at 50 miles an hour. I crashed early, and slept like a rock. Woke up early in the morning, and spent more time at the open compartment door, watching the land pass by this time bathed in the light of the rising sun. The Indian countryside makes you realize one of the major differences between there and the states. Agriculture hasn’t been industrialized here, partially because there are just so many people. The entire countryside is divided into small plots of land, and there are people pretty much constantly between Chennai and Thanjavur, in concentrations much denser then you would see in rural America.
We arrived at around seven in the morning. Someone described the change from Chennai to Thanjavur as analogous to traveling from Chicago to Des Moines. This is accurate. And Chennai has cows, chickens, goats and (from our observation) at least one vehicular confused pachyderm. (confused when he saw our vehicle, a tiny rickshaw, heading strait towards his path of motion in the middle of the street). And if that is Chicago, you can imagine what Des Moines must be like.
I like it a lot better. The roads are dusty. The air is hot and dry, so much more bearable than the humid and noxious vapor floating over the streets of Chennai. Fruit stands and street side vendors peddling samosas and small donut-esque fried dough balls dot the rusty unpaved roads and trees are everywhere. That first day we dove right into the interviews, deciding to visit the closest high school, St Michaels. We talked to the headmaster, Father Aryoka, about his students—their financial background, what higher education they tend to pursue, how the school helps them prepare for college, etc. We then toured around the school, causing a general ruckus and disturbing each class as we, the strange and foreign curiosity, were paraded around to each classroom like a prized pet. Not that we minded. It was funny seeing the same diagrams that I remember from school, of eukaryotic cells and tables of sin functions and diagrams of the skeletal system painted on wooden plaques above the door and labeled in Tamil.
That night I went up to the roof of our guest house before going to bed and watched the lightning over the town. It was odd—you could never see the bolts of bright white themselves, but instead could see the brilliant flash across the clouded skies. The rumbles that I knew were there were too far away to be heard.
The next day Katherine, Priyanka and I visited a technical college in town. Fell into a pattern that would become familiar—talked to the principal, got showed around the campus (look I really don’t care about those classrooms, we can really skip them, really is ok why don’t we just…Ok, Ok, fine, I’m going I’m going…) talked to a groups of students through Priyanka’s translations. Went to leave and realized that there was essentially no transportation from where we were to anywhere until the students got out of class at 6. So we started walking. In the blazing Indian sun, across an orange landscape studded with hearty plants that brought to mind Africa more than anything tropical. The bus stop was a few kilometers away, and Priyanka walks slower than any human being I have ever encountered. I felt bad about it, but I physically cannot walk that slow—I would walk my normal pace, find a nice shady tree and wait for Priyanka and Katherine (more patient than I) to catch up.
Had an excellent conversation once we got back as we all sat in one of our rooms. We were hiding from the heat of the day praying for the power to come back on. It was a few of us Americans and the four researchers from the IFMR who had come with us. We talked about movies, American politics, why Americans love guns, the caste system, the electoral college, corruption in the Indian government, why George Washington was president before Thomas Jefferson, which books were popular in India and how an American award, no matter how obscure, can bolster popularity here. It was fascinating. Have you ever tried explaining the electoral college to someone who has never been exposed to it? Not easy my friends, not easy at all. I was sad when the fan started spinning again and the fluorescent lights flickered back on, and people returned to their computers. That night we went into the heart of town (still much less crowded then Chennai, more like down town Palo Alto but with stray dogs (cute, but potentially rabid) and chickens. We ate street food, which was delicious. I had a tomato, uncooked, and have yet to die, which I consider a promising sign.
That night, after returning, I went for a run around time. Watched lightning in the faraway clouds as I ran. Ended up at a field of one of the schools that we had visited. Wandered around, listening to the distant shake of thunder and the barely audible calls of bats that hunted in the empty air over the field. I could see them as they passed briefly though the islands of light painted by the lampposts.
Another round of interviews an introductions the next day, this time at high schools. Nothing new, except for the fact that we were a spectacle, crowds of students gathered around to see what the hell the strange white people were doing. We headed back that night, again boarding the train and lurching forward towards Chennai.
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