Chennai

Arjuna's Penance, bas relief
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I am again having to play catch up as the program has remained very busy and I am running on fumes (of which there are plenty here). I am writing now from Mumbai, and from the business center in our new hotel (quite a glorious one). The room broadband is not working correctly, so the upshot is I will not get to load photos until later.

Chennai brought a sea change in the weather and the mood. Delhi felt dilapidated, even in the nice areas, and I am sure that was partly because of the monsoon weather. Chennai is sunny and nice, and not as hot as I had feared. The city is better kept, with less obvious poverty, or shall I say a lesser density of it. The hotel is in walking distance of some nice areas, which was not true in Delhi. As I am on the business center clock, I'll keep it somewhat brief.

Another of the Mammalopuram temples, carved out of an enormous rock
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We met briefly with the American International School, which was undergoing major expansion. They have a beautiful modern school, but are quite small (about 100 the high school). They are 11 years old. Chennai is booming like Bangalore, with IT companies and a lot of auto makers. Hyundai and Ford are the dominant players, but BMW is building a factory, and VW and Toyota seem likely to follow. So they will probably get a bumper crop of students in the next few years. We then went out and visited some of their partner schools. The one I saw was a school for girls in the Mylapore area. It was started in 1869 under the Brits and has a name that defies memory. We were greeted in traditional fashion with a marching band of girls in kilts. What they lacked in talent they made up for in enthusiasm. It's a Hindu school, with a prayer room at the center, and with class sizes of as high as 70, so I was expecting rote learning and passive, demure girls. To my surprise, the administrator, after a long and really boring speech, broke us into groups to meet with the senior girls who had been sitting passively and demurely by the side. Again, I expected a lot of yes sirs and nods. These girls were totally unafraid, very eloquent, ambitious, dynamic, and oh so hungry to succeed. They blew me away. They reminded me of some passages from the Thomas Friedman book where he is trying to warn us that our kids will get beaten badly by a very hungry competition and now I know exactly what he means.

The Shore Temple, a built temple, that survived the tsunami thanks to a good sea wall. 5 more are submerged offshore, and were seen for the first time in centuries as the tsunami neared and pulled the sea back before smashing forward.
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That night, I and a couple of my friends headed out for a walk that turned out to be very long, in search of a restaurant listed in the Lonely Planet guide. Walking by the roadside is very nearly a contact sport as scooters and motorcycles whiz along with inches to spare between the car they are passing and the curb, and hence one's head. One of the scaries things is that you will often see 3 or 4 people on a motorcycle. Usually, it's dad driving, mom riding sidesaddle on the rear with one arm around dad's waist and the other harm around her child (or even 2 kids) in her lap. No helmets--it made me crazy. Anyway, we found the restaurant and tucked into a divine meal of food from the Andra Pradesh region. It was totally a local place, and we attracted a lot of attention, but not in a rude way. The bill for the four of us came to 513 rupees, or about 11 dollars. Amazing.

Streetside fish market south of Chennai
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The next day the group went 2 hours south to Pondicherry and Auroville, and had a great visit to a school for fishermen's families. I spent the morning in Mammalopuram, visiting a series of Hindu temples from the 6-8 century. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and truly amazing. I'll put up a picture or two later. Essentially the temples have been carved out of enormous monolithic rocks, some with incredible bas reliefs. The same folks went on to do Angkor Wat in Thailand later on. I then traveled through time to Bangalore to visit the 21st century. The city is beautiful, with a central park, cool and dry weather, an ideal climate. It is also the wild west, with enormous wealth and real estate booming, even more so than Manhattan in the last decade. The apartment that Suresh bought (but does not yet live in) has tripled in value since he bought it less than a year ago, and that is a very ordinary rate of return. The Mallya Aditi School where his kids are is very nice and the principal is eager to work with us on a range of possibilities, including possible teacher exchanges. Bangalore is the nicest city I have visited here and I was glad I went. After the school meeting, I had use of one of Suresh's drivers to take me sightseeing and shopping, and I have some great tales about that. However, time to move on...