How I Became a Right-Wing Nut Job

            I have now spent an entire week in Auroville, and still don’t understand the place.  I have, however, been getting increasingly strong vibes that I might be a conservative crackpot.  A la Rush Limbaugh.  And the funny thing is that my political views haven’t changed at all.

            Dami and I are here to look into all the sustainability research and development that is going on here.  The community places a very heavy focus on sustainability, and so there are many people working on reforestation, green construction, solar energy, and making the toilette water smell ever so much less like shit so that it can be sprayed absolutely everywhere under the auspices of irrigation and cleaning but with what I suspect to be the true purpose of making the entire place smell vaguely of a curry-infused horse stable so that everyone is constantly reminded of how granola they are being.  But then again I’m a cynic.

            But there is actually some really cool stuff going on here.  The communal kitchen serves 1,000 people lunch a day, and cooks it all entirely using a huge parabolic mirror to heat a steam coil.  The elderly mad who gave us the tour of the facilities rappelled into the dish, carefully avoiding the focal point so he didn’t get steamed like the green beans cooking somewhere below.  It reminded me of a geriatric James Bond movie.

            The architecture and design that is being employed is fascinating as well, focusing on trying to deal with the hot, humid climate while also providing ambient light.  Lots of developments about building materials that insulate well, ways to make windows that won’t roast while they light, diffusing light through the roof, etc.

            This leads me to the problem that I have with so much of Auroville.  We are here, ostensibly, with the long-term goal of potentially applying some of the developments in Auroville to rural villages, to promote green development.  But everyone here focuses on sustainability as a lifestyle, an integrated system of life choices and behaviors augmented with technology.  And when you phrase it like that, it sounds completely reasonable.  Here is the problem.  Auroville views itself as an example to the world, and essentially thinks that everyone should live in little cooperative communes.  At least three or four times we have heard long diatribes about how the economic crisis proves the inherent flaws of capitalism and that the only logical solution is that the entire system should be abandoned in favor of an egalitarian, cooperative community based on the mutual exchange of services and all that.  It takes just about all of my self control to resist saying something along the line of “You’re so right!  There are so many examples of capitalism failing, and communism has just a perfect track record.  Quick, call the Russians and the Chinese, tell them that I need to speak to Putin and Hu Jintao immediately, and that I have an innovative, never-tried-before model that shows real promise on paper…” 

There is all this self-righteousness about how sustainable their model, but then you ask about funding and it goes something like this.  “Oh, we get grants.  And donations.  And sell shit to tourists who come to gape in amazement at our ridiculousness.”  And I’m sure that all the money that is given to them comes from completely sustainable enterprises.  And then they start talking about scalability, not seeming to realize that if, by some mass hallucination or an act of a cruelly humorous god the rest of the world converted to this system, they wouldn’t be special anymore and all of their revenue would be cut off.  Minor details.

Some background.  Aurovillians are trying to model a society after the spiritual ramblings of an aged ‘Mother’ who gained this spiritual authority by being the ‘spiritual companion’ of Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who was a part of the Indian independence movement.  Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but the phrase ‘spiritual companion’ sounds a little suspicious, but anyways moving on.  They aren’t trying only to apply her teachings to spiritual life—that wouldn’t be any weirder than any other religion I guess, or at least only marginally weirder.  They try and apply it to things like city planning.  And architecture.  The zoning of the place is literally based off of a doodle she did on a napkin.  I couldn’t make this shit up.  Well maybe I could, but it would probably involve some form of rehab afterwards, and narcotics charges if I was really unlucky. 

There are some things that I can say for the regular Aurovillians.  For instance, they believe in the utility of the internet, and plastic.  And newfangled modern building materials, like metal and cement.  I mention this only because there is a subset of Auroville which has in fact shunned the nefarious effects of these newfangled capitalist plots, as I found out on Friday.  They do, from my observation, believe in cloth, although it seems as if that one might have been a close vote.  Or perhaps, if we had listened very carefully while approaching their remote jungle community, we would have heard faint cries of something along the lines of “quick, hide the fig leaves, the tourists are coming!”  But I am merely speculating.  Every week they lead a tour of their vegetarian-vegan-organic-tribal-simplistic-communal-sustainable-donation-based-economy society, which I went on.  I heard the phrase “the Community,” pronounced with the capital letter, 7 times (yes, I counted.  Are you really surprised?) in a fifteen minute period.  That tells you about all that you need to know.

But anyways Zack, tell us how you really feel.

I complain, but there certainly are some redeeming factors of this place.  Easily number one on this list is my means of transportation—5-speed motorcycle.  Auroville is spread out across miles of red-dust roads through nondescript lush green jungle, and it is essential to have some form of motorized transport to get around.  So I am renting a motorcycle.  It is important to note that I have never driven a manual vehicle before, which made the first day highly memorable.

Suresh, the bike guy, was getting me set up with transportation on the first day, and he had got the numbers of people wrong and so was one bike short.  So we went to his house, where he keeps the bikes when they aren’t being rented.  So I learned how to start, and how to shift gears, on a small dirt road in a tiny Indian village, dodging chickens as they crossed the road.  Why they did so is a question for the ages.  I should be shot for that joke.  Suresh and a couple other random Indian men laughed at me as I stalled it the first 124 times before figuring out how to actually get it moving, yelling out (essentially useless) advice in English broken by substandard education and laughter.

After that initial difficulty, getting around on the motorcycle has been excellent.  Going around Auroville in some places is quite similar to off-roading, ie rocky roads, huge bumps, sharp turns, mud puddles.  It takes me 15 minutes (conservatively, if I get stuck behind an obnoxious truck) to get to the beach.  One day I was bored, and I just drove down ECR—that’s East Coast Road, the Indian equivalent of HW 1 for those of you not ‘down with the lingo’—for about twenty kilometers, passing through villages and getting frequent views of the ocean.  A couple frightening moments, the most memorable one was when I realized that my safest option was to pass a large truck that was going about 80 kph by swerving into oncoming traffic.  The dangerous option was staying behind said truck and hoping that the coconuts precariously piled into its bed didn’t fall and brain me.

Another aspect of this place that has the potential to distract me from my relative-insanity is the beach.  I’ve now been there a couple time, but always in the wrong location.  Yesterday I found the surf spot.  And the number of a guy who rents boards. This looks promising.  The water is about 78, clean (yes, in India.  No, I haven’t completely forgotten what clean means.) with nice, rolling, medium sized waves. 

Summary.  ‘Normal’ is defined by the average person, and the average person here is a hippy communist who doesn’t believe in currency or private property.  And they are French.  And they don’t get the irony of a sustainable economy based on donations and tourism income from people who have almost invariably flown inordinate distances to get here.  Hence placing me far, far to the right of normal.  It will be nice to get back in the states again, and be frustrated because we cant agree on the small things and the petty differences.  I never thought that would be something that I missed.  But on the bright side, after I post this and eat lunch, I plan to ride my motorcycle down to the beach and go surfing.

On Renouncing the Capitalist Oppressors and Becoming One with the Frustrations of Formatting

            I now know why people like to be self employed.   But I get ahead of myself.

            Something from the end of our Thanjavur visit which I didn’t give the attention it deserves.  Elephant.  We saw it at the big temple in Thanjavur, where it was there to give blessings to/extort donations from tourists and pilgrims alike.  For 50Rs (marginally more than a dollar) you could ride it.  So of course, being the good little American tourists that we are, we did.

            I have seen a number of elephant-riding operations at zoos etc, and this one was a little different.  At the zoo version, you go from a raised platform that gets you up to elephant-height, then step over to some form of saddle on the elephant’s back.  I think that what I did was more akin to rock climbing.  Albeit with a rock covered in pliant and tough flesh.  It was unbelievable, scaling its shoulders and using its raised leg as a foothold.  And I sat on top, separated from the elephant by nothing more than the thin fabric of my pants.  I could feel the bones move beneath leathery skin as the huge gentle animal shifted beneath me.  Its hairs were course beneath my fingers. 

            We returned to Chennai, and that weekend we decided to go to Bangalore.   This was not a good idea in terms of sleep.  We took the train back on Wednesday night, getting somewhere in the realm of 4 hours of broken sleep before having to get off the train at 5 in the morning, take a taxi to our hotel, then go to work.  Tried to recover Thursday night, then boarded a bus Friday night.  Im not very good at sleeping on busses.  Not very good at all.  I think I got around 3 hours of sleep.  We toured around Bangalore—not all that much to see, a palace and another Indian city—then went out.   Bangalore has a much better bar scene than Chennai, and their officials have generously extended operating hours to 11:30, a big jump from the 11:00 last call that we have grown accustomed to.  Pretty crazy, I know.  Slept that night, more touristy stuff in the morning, then back to the bus station and another night of maybe 3 hours sleep, optimistically.  So in review, of 5 consecutive nights 3 of them were spent on a moving vehicle. 

            Getting on that last bus to Chennai was interesting.  We had split up, and me and Robert, without a functional phone between us, were trying to find our way to the bus.  We got to the station fine, only to realize how absolutely huge it was.  And all the signs were in Hindi.  And not very many people spoke English.  And those who did speak English tended to be just about as confused as we were.  We got ourselves pointed in what we hoped was the right direction, then started wading off, using a building as our target.  It was like a maze of honking, shifting walls.  We had to pass through a huge parking lot of busses, all of which were trying to maneuver around the others, get to their platforms, just sit there.  A ball of string would have been no help in finding your way out of this labyrinth—it would have been soon snapped by the weight of a passing bus.  By a pure stroke of luck the girls saw us and yelled, and we found our bus together.

            The last week has been boring.  We have been finishing up our final report, which has taken us somewhere in the realm of 6 days to do even though if any one of us had just gone and done it it probably would have taken somewhere in the realm of 3.  Some inordinate amount of time has been spent making all of the formatting work together, and this has made me wonder something about work in general.  How much time, at an average office, is spent actually producing something, as compared to the time spent talking about what people should be producing, fixing it when they misunderstood their project, and trying to fucking understand the ineffable mysteries of Microsoft Word auto-format.  

We also gave our final presentation, and discovered that Indian office culture is not very familiar with the idea of constructive feedback.  Once we finally did corner a number of people, we got very solidly confirmed what we have been suspecting all along—that our project was very confusing.  Most of the people we talked to were disappointed in what we had done, but none of them for the same reasons.  ‘You needed more quantitative data.’ We were told it was a qualitative study. ‘Really?  Oh.’  ‘It made too many recommendations , that’s for the design team to do,’ and then ‘we wanted you to spend more time thinking about your recommendations.’  Etc.  Apparently not only were we unsure about the point of our project, but they were too.  On the bright side the person we thought was our ‘point person’ at the IFMR was happy with it.  Questions still remain as to whether he was actually the point person.

            I think that the conclusion that we reached, and what I believe, is that we did the best we could with what we had.  If they thought that we were going in the wrong direction, there were plenty of intermediate products which showed what direction we were moving towards, and they never gave us feedback during the process.  And if they wanted us to be more quantitative, we needed more resources.  We simply did not have the translators, the data, or the skill-set to accurately assess risk profiles etc on education loans. 

            So a little bit of bitterness there. 

            Moving on to my next project.  There are three more weeks left of my internship.  I will be spending them living in a cult. 

            OK,  not quite a cult.  They only have to give up all their worldly possessions to join, follow the teachings of the Mother who has “left her earthly shell,” and use words like ‘universal,’ ‘tranquility,’ ‘harmony,’ and ‘spiritual’ a lot.  So judge for yourself.  They are doing a lot of very interesting green technology stuff, and we are looking to see if we can find ways to take that technology/their ideas and apply it in different situations.  Like ones where people don’t shave their head and spend much of their time meditating.  Some of the ideas are fascinating—the kitchen is completely solar, they clean dishes by letting fish eat the food off and then baking off the bacteria in the sun, and they are trying to improve mud construction technology.

            Im really looking forward to it.  Partly because of all the interesting technology stuff, partly because I think that the people living there are going to be really interesting, partly because I think it will be much easier to exercise (running in Chennai is difficult.  Especially if you are working during the day, and don’t want to wake up in the early morning) and then partly for another reason.

            We think that we are going to be renting scooters.  This is very exciting,  I have been wanting to ride a scooter or motorcycle since I got here, partly because relying on rickshaws for transport is frustrating (I really don’t want to bargain right now, just take me to work PLEASE) and partly because I’m a thrill-seeking teenage boy. 

            Im not exactly sure what the internet situation is going to be, so if you don’t hear from me for a while that’s probably why.  Or I’ve shaved my head, started wearing orange robes, started meditating on the meaning of life and the teachings of the mother, and started drinking copious amounts of Kool-Aid.  Either way.

On the Dangers of Mobs of Indian Alcoholics

Thanjavur, where we were doing field research, is called something to the effect of “Temple Town, Tamil Nadu,” AKA the only big thing that is there is this huge Hindu temple built in the 1200’s.  The thing is massive, and you can see the top of it all the time when you arrive on the train, and while going on wild rickshaw rides through poorly laid out streets to this school, or that bank.  It is the only reason that any tourists come to Thanjavur, and tourists do come to Thanjavur.  We had been in the city for about 10 days and still had not gone.  We had two more days.

            The decision was made that we would save some money (what worked out to be maybe $2.50 between the 7 of us who were going, but which sounds much more substantial when it is phrased as 150 rupees) by taking the bus.  So we got on one that would take us near the temple, and rode around.  For about an hour.  This was a big bus, one of the articulated ones that remind me of a caterpillar, and we were going down tiny streets.  I think I could have touched buildings or stolen from the displays of shops through the window.  Eventually we reached a bend in the street that the bus just stopped, some Tamil way yelled from the front, and everyone started unloading.  In the middle of some random residential area.  I came to the conclusion that this was not the bus’ normal route.  We walked the rest of the way to the bus stand. 

            We realized why we had been sent on such a twisted path—detours to avoid the motorcade route.   The chief minister—equivalent to a Governor—was in town.  Equivalent in many ways, actually, for the Californians at least.  The current Minister was a retired actor. 

            There were men everywhere at the bus station, in their best white shirts and either pants or the skirt-like cloth wrapped around the waste and kilted up between the legs.  The were everywhere.  Filling the streets, streams of men in both directions, near impossible to navigate or oppose.  We tried to wade through, but Shulpa was getting nervous.

            “They are here to see the Chief Minister.  And after he speaks, they will start drinking.”  An aside that will make this make more sense: we have noticed that to most of the relatively high class and socially sheltered IFMR employees, anyone who drinks at all is an alcoholic.  It is pretty entertaining at the office, because a good number of the employees are either from the west or schooled there, and they talk about partying in a veiled way, making sure they know who is listening.  Microcosm of the clash of cultures that is going on here.  Apparently as recently as three years ago self appointed moral police would go into the legal hotel bars (closed at 11!) and cause a ruckus if men and women were dancing to closely.  One of the top bars was apparently shut down because a married couple was found kissing.

            Aside aside, Shulpa was worried about all the drunks, and wanted to go back.  It was getting dark anyways, so there would not be much to see at the temple, so the girls decided to go back with her.  Robert and I decided to stay.  The prospect of unruly crowds, a drunken political Indian populace, and some foreign street theatre was too good to pass up.

            We were at an arbitrary street corner.  There were wooden structures up, displaying huge posters easily 40 feet into the air.  And this isn’t the kind of wood you can buy at Home Depot—we’re talking glorified sticks with the bark stripped off lashed together with cheap rope.  Those men brave, or drunk, enough and looking for a better view climbed up the open structures and peered out at the commotion below from behind the oversized face of their state leader.  These structures lined the street for quite a ways, and we were at just an arbitrary stretch of it, but by my count I could see around 6000 people from our vantage point sitting up atop a wall that separated the street from a school’s grounds behind.

            Groups in young men in special uniforms strutted through the crowd, proud roosters in the party’s red back and yellow, waving flags bearing a rising sun graphic in the air.  Soldiers kept order, and there were a lot of them.  All over the place.  Constantly moving, as vans unloaded a group here, then picked up some of the others, moved them to some other locations, then another group came running from a different end of the street, and they were all the while trying to clear a path for the motorcade that was soon coming.  Holding back enthusiastic mobs behind a rope, occasionally spotting a troublemaker and berating him with unfulfilled threats of violence.  It felt vaguely fascist.  This impression was probably not aided by the fact that some of the banners had swastikas on them.

            Both Robert and I had full liters of water.  The men sitting next to us asked for a drink, and our bottles were soon passed around without any further consent from us, returned when finally empty.  Not exactly what I had been expected.

            People kept on noticing the whiteys in the midst of all this Indian chaos, and waving.  It felt funny, with all of the pomp and so many people waving at me, I felt like I should be giving a speech. 

            Eventually the street was sufficiently cleared, an hour after the chief minister was supposed to come by.  He got into a car, as we could see from the giant screens that would end up showing the speech to those gathered in the streets, and drove by.  To me that was it.  His car passed, followed by a long stream of what I can only assume of other officials’ cars.  The crowd went wild.  It was strange to see—we weren’t anywhere near the epicenter of the event, and yet we could certainly feel these people’s earth moving.  We found out later that this happens once a year, and that the villagers come into town for that one night and live it up.  The one interesting thing that happens in the year. 

            Robert and I left after the motorcade passed, having no desire to watch a man we didn’t know give a speech on a screen of dubious quality in a language we didn’t understand.  Went and got parota (like naan, but more filling and moist) from a dodgy hole in the wall restaurant.  Definitely one of those places they tell you not to eat if you don’t want to get sick.  By far the best we have had yet.  Major points to Abha Dascupta, who told me that the tastiness of the food I got here would be directly proportional to the sketchiness of the eating establishment, a theorem which my observations have generally supported.

            We decided to check out the debaucherous drinking that, according to the Tamil Nadu government on the labels of any kind of alcohol “destroys country, family, and life.”  I feel like their surgeon general is taking liberties.  We hung out around one of the wine shops for a while, watched men returning from the festivities exchanging tattered bills for warm beers, or harder stuff.  We asked a smaller, older man if he liked beer.  He shook his head, grinned at us with his remaining teeth, reached into the crotch of his pants and fished out a fifth of whiskey.  Or, more accurately, half of a fifth of whiskey.  We engaged in a philosophical discussion.  We wondered about the stairs just to the right of the wine shop, which led to a mysterious upper floor.  Alcohol-bearing men were constantly streaming up and down the stairs.

            Returned to our part of town, and decided to grab a beer at the local wine shop, considerably quieter and out of the rush of activity that engulfed the middle of town.  Met some students from Sastra, one of the universities that we had been researching, and had some very different conversations with them than we had had while interviewing students about their education financing.   Eventually they said that it was getting late for them, and that they had to go.  It was 10 o’clock.  It was OK, the bar was closing anyways.

            It was a fascinating experience.  So much more real than anything else that I’ve seen here.  There was only one other foreigner there.  More importantly, we were there for more or less the same reason everyone else was.  It wasn’t us observing and studying them, or at least not any more than they were observing each other.  We were all there for the spectacle, and it was honest.  I sat, uncomfortable on a cinderblock wall painted with political graffiti, and waited for a politician to briefly drive by.  I did that, and do did thousands of other people, whose lives would in all probability intersect just that once with mine.

            The next day was our last in Thanjavur.  First thing we did was get into a rickshaw, not the bus, and pay that $2.50 premium to get taken right to the temple.  So we made it after all, at the last possible minute.  There were ancient, intricate stone carvings.  There was an elephant.  We left for the city that night.

We've Created a Nan-ster!

    Have spent a lot of time talking about a lot of the big things recently, and kept intending to change that but big things just kept happening.  This trend hasn’t stopped—still going to new villages, could tell long narratives about all that, but it would start getting repetitive.  If it hasn’t already.  So some random thoughts now, in no particular order.
    There are a number of things that I will never again take for granted.  Trashcans come to mind—my third story window just isn’t the same.  Traffic laws, or at least people’s willingness to follow them.  Black coffee.  That any store person should be able to break a $10 dollar bill.  That one is a serious problem.  The ATM’s here spit out 500Rs notes, which is a bit more than ten bucks.  Nobody will take them.  You basically have to be in a decently nice restaurant to use them.  Even hundreds raise eyes.  That’s the equivalent of someone not being able to break a $2 bill, if we still used those.  I got a 1000Rs once.  It literally took me 4 days to find someone to break it.  But the number one thing on my list of things-not-to-be-taken-for-granted is toilette paper.  They just don’t seem to have it here.  Anywhere.  You’re lucky if you get a toilette that actually lets you sit down. (seriously, if its just a hole in the ground I don’t need a special piece of porcelain to show me where to put my feet, I think I could have figured that bit out myself thanks).  To date, I have used a wide variety of things as TP instead of resorting to the favored Indian method, the mechanics of which I have not yet determines, that involves your left hand and a bucket of water.  My own stash of TP.  Kleenex.  Napkins.  Notebook paper.  Leaves.  The cardboard from a finished roll of toilette paper.  Newspaper.  The little paper strip thingy they wrap around the seat cover at fancy hotels to show that has been disinfected.  I’m probably forgetting some.  I always feel a bit like MacGyver when I feel the urge and realize I’ve forgotten my personal roll.
    I am baffled by the quantity of goats here.  They are everywhere.  This normally would not be so strange—if I saw the same number of say chickens, or even cows, I would not thin twice about it (well OK for the cows I would, but only because I would be watching my step a little more diligently), but there are some circumstances that make this puzzling.  Most people here are vegetarian.  Not everyone, but a large majority.  Furthermore, there are no goat milk products.  None.  I asked about it, and they said that nobody drinks the milk, and looked perplexed when I mentioned cheese.  So what the fuck do they use them for?  I mean the things are everywhere, large herds in the fields, stragglers on the streets, even the occasional herd wandering in the middle of the city.  Maybe they are there in lieu of a garbage service (see list of things I will never take for granted again, above), and if so I want to complain to their manager, because they are doing a terrible job.
    It is very difficult to nonverbally say no here.  Nodding still means yes, but shaking your head is not a recognized signal.  In fact, it is very close to a head-wiggle gesture which translates roughly to ‘I understand you’ or ‘this all makes sense so far,’ or, in most cases, ‘yes.’  (It looks like the Whit nod minus the vertical component, or a extremely calmed down version of the Garber Jig isolated in the head, for those of you who know what those things are…)  So to summarize, nodding means yes, and shaking your head also means yes.  If you want to say no, its best to stick to words.
    Having said that, it is also very difficult to verbally say no here.  Rickshaw drivers and street sellers don’t really seem to get the concept.  But my personal favorite is families trying to give you food.  It is a part of Indian hospitality that guests must be offered food and usually tea or something as well, and as we are visiting many households we get given a lot of food.  The best we can usually do is convince them that we will share, and don’t actually need 4 plates of cookies.  I’ve now had 2 meals in families houses in Alakkudi.  These are large scale events, with us seated on the floor eating off banana leaves and them serving food out of absurdly large containers.  If you finish what is on your leaf, this apparently is a signal that you want more.  If you refuse, say that you are full etc, they will withdraw their heaping spoon.  But only temporarily.  As soon as you look away, they swoop in and drop another heaping pile of rice in front of you. 
    Which reminds me—eating with our hands.  Or more accurately, hand.  Because of the customary use of the left hand (see toilette paper rant) South Indian custom (understandably) says that you should only eat with your right hand.  This does not seem to bad in theory, but think about it a little more.  The food we are talking about here is almost entirely rice based.  Doused in watery sauce.  And you are eating off the floor, so you can’t use the tip-bowl-and-shovel technique I usually employ when eating sauced rice with chopsticks. And there aren’t any edges in which one could corner rebellious morsels.  At both of the lunches with rural families that I have been at, the mothers have eventually taken pity on me and scrounged up a fork somewhere.  I feel slightly offended—did it really look like I was struggling that badly?—but mostly just relieved.
    Communication is also very difficult, we have discovered, at restaurants.  Frequently our visits go something like this: the first waiter comes over, and we start telling him what we want.  He leaves abruptly and begins a game I like to call ‘find the coworker who speaks the best English.’  Because it wasn’t obvious when the large group of white people walked in that Tamil probably wasn’t going to be the lingua franca.  Take to on ordering.  Many of the things on the menu are not actually available.  Nobody seems to have pallak paneer, even though it is on every menu in the state of Tamil Nadu.  We get our food.  Usually at least one of the main dishes is wrong, and we always have to engage in high level diplomatic interactions to end up with the right amount of nan and other breadstuffs.  Recently, at a relatively nice restaurant, we asked for 5 orders of nan.  We ended up with three.  We tried to explain the mistake, and ended up getting 5 more nan, and then 3 more from the guy who had actually understood what was going on.  I may or may not have cracked an incredibly terrible pun which gave this post its name, but that doesn’t really sound like me now does it?
    Another strange aspect of eating out in South India is the phenomenon of the AC room.  All of the high class people, and as foreigners we apparently qualify as such, apparently like eating in dark rooms with either no windows at all or windows shoddily boarded up with plywood, different menus (+10Rs per item) and an AC unit.  Apparently they don’t want us “eating with the plebes,” to quote Katherine. 
    There are frequently TV’s in these AC rooms, and this has led to another strange observation.  We have dubbed it the attractiveness differential.  This term describes the inevitable fact that in every single Indian music video—at least all of those that we have seen so far—the girls are significantly more attractive than their male counterparts.  We’re talking tall, young, thin, busty women opposite 35 year old men with mustaches, beer bellies and frequently oddly bulging eyes.  Inexplicable.
    We had our first run in with a pickpocket on a bus back to our hotel.  Jesse was standing, and it was crowded.  She feels something tugging at her bag, which looks deceptively easy to get into, and sees the hand of the woman next to her on the bag, tugging at the opening.  She stares the woman down, and the hand leaves.  Here’s the punch line—the woman in question was using a baby, which she seemed to be breast feeding at the time, for cover.  Starting him early in the ways of a life of crime.
    Finally my favorite/the most cliché of my little anecdotes.  We went into Alakkudi again the other day to do a focus group with 7 college kids in a variety of programs from the town.  We did the interview in a half constructed building on a palm grove, and got some really good insights.  The most interesting info came from them when they weren’t actually answering questions directly but instead joking with each other about the answers.  We then had lunch at one of their houses, off the floor, and that supplied the material for a number of the little blurbs above.  After lunch we were taken next door to admire their neighbors sound system and TV.  Which meant watching 20 minutes of Tamil music videos.  The only interesting part was a video where both the leads, man and woman, ended up at some point being the chief minister (the equivalent of Governor of a US state) of Tamil Nadu, and it was rumored that they had had an affair.  Good to know that the US hardly has a monopoly on absurd political story lines.
    Finally, went to play cricket in the fields with the boys that we had interviewed along with other guys from the village.  Was amazingly fun.  They went easy on us, pitching pretty slow, but it was still really cool.  Learned the basic rules, but also definitely felt the whole ‘sports bringing people of different cultures together’ thing that I always scoff at as being just too pat.  Also tried to explain water polo to them, which was an entertaining challenge.  Also bonded with one of the kids over whistling—he did the two finger whistle, and I surprised him by responding.  As we left, going to catch our train, he would whistle from the field and I would whistle back until the shrill noise faded into the distance.  Thanks mom for that surprisingly random point of cultural connection.  And as an added bonus, I was significantly louder than him too, so good job with the teaching.
    That isn’t nearly all of the little oddities so far, but all that I’ll rant on right now.  We’re almost done with field work for the time being, and will soon be heading back to Chennai (not exactly sure when—solid travel plans, like almost everything else at the IFMR, are rather elusive), where hopefully I will have reliable internet.  For the time being, I will post this whenever I can steal my way onto someone else’s computer.

Alakkudi

“Ka-Pe, Ka-Pe, Sa-Mo-Sa-Teeeeeeeeee”
“Ka-Pe, Ka-Pe, Sa-Mo-Sa-Teeeeeeeeee”
    The voices of confectioners combine and echo down the platform, reminiscent of some religious chant, Gregorian perhaps, or something more fittingly eastern.  A hymn of commercialism, selling (we eventually translated, after examining their wares) ‘coffee, coffee, samosas and tea’ to the trains passengers at the Thanjavur station, where we hastily boarded.
    We were off for our first day of real fieldwork in a town called Alakkudi, a name when spoken quickly in an Indian accent is indistinguishable, at least at first, from the English ‘allegory.’  I feel like there should be some poignant conclusion to be drawn from this confusion, but nothing comes to me at the moment.  A ten minute train ride lands us at our destination, seemingly just a strip of concrete, a simple awning and a tree for shade, and a sign declaring the name, and an expanse of fields.  The rest of the town is revealed when the train rolls on.  Not much more is there to be revealed.  As the vibration hum of the train fades the cacophony of birds makes obvious the stillness, the lack of the machine buzz of the urban that even Thanjavur had.  Here, nothing but birds.
    We go to the house of the first family, Dami, Shulpa and I, ducking low to avoid hitting our heads on the beams supporting the roof.  I don’t duck low enough.  This is a pattern to be repeated many times this day.
    The walls are a cool blue, lit by light filtering in the door and a single fluorescent cylinder.  The concrete floors are smooth on our bare feet.  Shoes have been abandoned in the sweltering heat and red dust of the street before passing over the threshold.  We sit in the seats of honor—cheap pink plastic chairs—while members of the family gather round and sit on the floor.  One of the men, himself also in a chair, attempts to give it up to the matron of the family.  He barely ahs time to move before she starts cheerfully yelling at him, scaring him back into the chair with fast gestures and a faster flow of Tamil.  He tries to get a word in edgewise, but eventually concedes defeat and retakes his seat.  She triumphantly and gracefully folds herself onto the floor.  Her daughter and the third generation, and 8 month old baby in nothing but a string around its waist, join her.  We start talking.
    We are here to talk about education and financing, and that is more or less the direction of the conversation.  Shulpa translates, and we occasionally meander off topic but it doesn’t matter.  Their son is in his first year of a masters program in computer science at a local university in Thanjavur, and is hoping to finish the three year program in two, so as to save on tuition costs and start helping the family out sooner.  They say that theirs is one of the few families to send a child to higher education.  The cost of an education is so high—around 2 lacs, or the equivalent of around $4000, or higher in some cases—and jobs are not guaranteed if you don’t do well in school, so many poor families are reluctant to take the risk, even if financing is available.  They would rather have their children start working, contributing to the family’s income as soon as possible.  This family says that they are relatively rare.  Their son always did well in school (a claim supported by the stellar report card they proudly show us after digging around in a back room for a while) and they are willing to take the risk in the hope that their people will not be farmers forever.
    There are long periods of waiting in the conversation for me, as ideas slowly move between languages.  I make friends with the baby in this time, attracting his wide eyed and curious stare, then letting him clutch my finger, then holding him and sitting it on my knee with the approval of his father.  Only a few minutes after I hand him back to his mother, he proceeds to shit all over her sari and the floor.  I knew we invented diapers for a reason.
    We had a while to wait before lunch.  We wandered to the outskirts of town, along dirt roads only distinguishable from goat paths by the motorcycles that occasionally barreled down them, often carrying three or four people, small children in front clutching the handlebars.  We found a large lot shaded by a grove of palm trees and asked the woman working among them if we could sit in her yard.  She sat and talked with us, and served some of the best tea that I’ve ever tasted.  She told us, after hearing that we were researching education, that she had forced her parents to let her stop after 9th standard.  She was much happier just farming.  A bit later laugher broke out and Preethi translated for us—
    “She says that her favorite pass time is berating her husband.”  The woman had a mischievous expression on, and watched our faces during the translation.  She seemed quite happy with her lot in life.
    Lunch in the KGFS office, where small loans are given out backed by family gold and social pressure.  Kids from the school we passed on the way back to the center of town crowded around the gate in the front of the building, looking at the foreign animals on display—a whole crowd of Americans. 
    We had some time before the next appointment.  I spent it wandering through the streets of the town, up and down the gridlike layout, switching between the upper caste residences on one side of the main road and the lower on the other.  Houses of plaster, houses of mud. Hindu temples hidden between houses, families sitting on their front porches stare when they notice me.  Children laugh and follow for a block or so when I pass, asking me in broken English and sign language to take their picture.  From the adults I get different reactions, ranging from illegible expressions to outright suspicion to cheerful smiles and even a childlike request for a picture.   The afternoon sun is golden on the white and blue walls, and reflects off the water that splashes on the streets as people wash themselves, their dishes, their porches using the communal spigot.
    One last interview—ours is with the son of the family that we talked to before, back from classes.  We finish and go to the other interview going on, of a secondary school teacher, one of the richest members of the village.  He invites us in, and we sit listening to his longwinded and circuitous answer for 30 minutes.  Answer singular—I actually never heard a question, he just kept answering one asked before I arrived until we realized that the train was leaving in anywhere from 20 to 5 minutes. 
    Walking to the train station, we heard the trains whistle and saw the light piercing twilight.  We started to run.  No time to get onto the platform, instead we leaped onto the train from the adjacent tracks. Preethi, who bought tickets, only just got on board before it lurched forward, back to Thanjavur.  We had left for the village at 7, and were to arrive at 7:30.  A full day.

The Project

Thought that I'd give some background on where we are and what exactly we are trying to do.  I started my trip by flying into Chennai, marked by B on this map.  That is were the IFMR is based, although they do most of their research/field work, and we have been/will be working, in Thanjavur, marked by A

Here is a map of Chennai.  The office that we are working at is very new--construction is still going on, elevators keep going out, etc.  The office is at A.  For the first week we stayed at the Crescent Park hotel in Nungambakkam, a district in Chennai, marked B on this map.  Google maps tells me that the commute is 12.1 kilometers, which I believe.  It also says that it should take 20 minutes.  This is bullshit. Maybe, just maybe, if you managed to remove all of the other people from the city except for one rickshaw driver and then made sure he had a full tank of gas and new tires, you might be able to do it, but he would probably end up getting lost and/or taking you on a wild goose chase around town so that he could try and charge you more.  An hour later, you would get to the office.

Here is Thanjavur.  As you can see, it is much smaller than Chennai.  Supposedly it has a population of around 200,000, but it definitely doesn't seem that way.  The Indians we work with always laugh when we mention this, reminding us that in India, 200,000 is nothing.  Our guest house is at A, which is a ways from the center of town, but not by much--it is like a 10 minute bus ride from the train station in bad conditions.  Much longer than that if you get on the wrong bus and drive around in circles, but still.

In terms of what we are doing.  Our team is working on developing an educational loan for higher education for the Thanjavur region, mostly focusing on the truly rural areas surrounding the city (town?).  Over this last week we did a pilot project, going around to schools and interviewing people and trying to figure out feasibility and any issues that we are going to have.  We went to high schools, various higher education institutions, a bank, and interacted with some local government officials over the three days we were actually in the field, which I think was pretty damn good.  We stuck to the town more or less during the pilot for timing reasons, so hopefully we will get farther afield in the coming weeks.  My team--me and Katherine and Priyanka, went to an engineering college and some high schools.  We interviewed people and talked about how they get into schools, how they pay for it, etc. Other groups did other high schools, other colleges and universities, etc.

What we found:

From the people that we talked to, the picture seems much less bleak than I was expecting.  Everyone seemed to want to go on to higher education, the government programs were pretty good, and people seemed to be able to finance what they needed.  The biggest issue that there seemed to be is that people in villages either were not interested in higher education, stopped their children from doing it for social reasons (ie married their children off early, etc) or needed them at home for financial reasons, although these were very infrequent given what we heard.  There is also a significant problem in that many of the rural students do not know how to work the system.  Banks here are required by the government to offer everyone in a designated region an education loan, but most of the student do not know this.  So from what we have seen very briefly, it seems like another loan product is not the answer--the banks are forced to operate at a loss, and the advantage that microfinance has is that it has a higher repayment rate so it allows banks to give loans to those who otherwise would have no access to capital at all.  To my eyes it seems like it would be dumb to enter the market where that advantage is wiped out by governmental mandates that traditional banks provide the service, especially since IFMR is trying to be fiscally sustainable and the default rate for student loans in the Thanjavur area is near 50%.  It would be much smarter to just inform the villagers of these programs, and help them take advantage of the programs that already exist.

Unfortunately our employers, or some powerful subset of them, disagree with this.  They really want to supply a product, and dont seem to understand the economic arguments that we are making--not surprising given that the people who disagree with us the most are a psychology researcher and a psych/agriculture major.  Plus it seems that the organization in general is very tied to the prospect of microfinance solving all of the problems which they encounter, whereas I think that our team has a more policy-based background/thinking.  Favorite quote from a recent meeting: "we need to be questioning all of our assumptions.  We know that there is a demand for this product..."  But we will see, we might start to agree with them more once we have gone into the really rural areas, and it does seem that some of the IFMR people were understanding and agreeing with our issues.  

Answer to the dilemma:  More data.  We go back out into the field on Monday or Tuesday, returning to Thanjavur.  More interviews, more banks, more cows and goats and chickens, more spicy spicy indian food, more dust, less cars and internet and office cubicles and horns and toxic fumes that do make the sunsets pretty interesting but otherwise are a pain in the ass.  Altogether a pretty good deal.

Illumination

Thinking back to the ride back from the first day out in the field, returning from a small rural Indian village.  Chennai snuck up on us, growing out of the countryside gradually until fields had been completely replaced by apartments mashed together and disorganized shops.  Darkness had fallen, a true darkness so unlike the false twilight that had accompanied the thunderstorm which had come and passed.

            Busses brought workers back into the city after a days toil in the manufacturing plants.  We had passed by a row of faces each time we barreled past a bus.  Tired men and women searching for comfort amidst the other bodies and the hard plastic seats.  Limp fingers draped out windows, heads resting on shoulders, hard stares bridging the space between the cool, confined artificial air of our van and the wet hot breeze passing through their pane-less windows.

            Our hotel-bound path brings us past one of the more desolate parts of town where some of the busses deposit their breathing cargo for the night.  Workers stand around in the dirt, waiting, presumably, for the next form of transportation, for someone else to take them from this cold place to their homes.  It is dark.  Busses drive away, empty, with the hiss of hydraulic doors and diesel farewells.  Distant bulbs provide just enough light for shadows, textures of darkness.

            One light breaks the monotony.  A spindly food cart illuminated by the single harsh fluorescent bulb that hangs over the confectioner’s head sits in the darkness, taking advantage of the waiting workers.  Its front is lines with warped glass jars full of foods not familiar to me, and packages and fruits hang from the roof , framing the confectioner’s busy form.  He moves back and forth, hands darting in and out of jars, in and out of pockets, in and out of the cold glow of his cart. 

            The workers gather to the lit cart likes moths to a flame.  A cliché metaphor to be sure, but fitting nonetheless.  Clichés become that way because they communicate some recurring idea especially well, and repeated ideas contain something that closely resembles truth.  The workers bring their money, clutching tattered bills and grimy coins and trade them in a brusquely handled exchange for a fleeting moment of human interaction.  They gather around that spot for reassurance, for proof positive of humanity beneath the dark abandoned buildings and concrete monoliths  Man hides from his own creations, seeking the voice of another human being, the bustle of the transaction, the interaction of otherwise unrelated lives.

            All of this seen, or imagined, in the instants it took to drive by, as we rushed to our hotel.  And I saw more of this, as we continued through dimly lit city streets and tried to keep strait in my mind the labyrinth of unintelligible names and symbols.  Shops painted in an incandescent  glow as customers make evening purchases.  Glowing embers shed warm light while simultaneously bringing oil to past its boiling point.   Single candle flames feebly shed photons and reveal shambling houses and squatters’ claimed patches of sidewalk.  Islands of illumination floating in the dark sea of the city, islands of concentrated humanity.  People define their spaces, define their home, and seeks the comfort of human contact and companionship within this space. 

This happens all the time.  In our minds we draw lines and borders, make our home and fill it with our heart, and hopefully in the hearts of others.  It is only at night, when the darkness arouses some primitive fear within us and draws us towards the light, towards other people to share in our emotions and in the trails of our lives, that this becomes visible.  Illuminated by wavering flames, glowing filaments and the nearly imperceptible vibrations of noble, exotic gasses.

We reached our destination and piled out of the van.  We stepped into the pools of light surrounding our hotel and climbed the stairs, wearily returning to our rooms.