Getting Caught Up

Entrance to Muslim tomb at the archeological park
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I had hoped to stay current, but the rush of events here has me pretty worn out. Yesterday, we began with a trio of speakers. The first, and most outstanding one was Tarun Tejpal. He is apparently the pioneer of investigative journalism in India and has repeatedly broken stories about corruption and lack of accountability in Indian politics. His platform was a website, which no longer exists. His reporters had the Indian President taking bribes on camera. In the ensuing storm, the government almost fell. They then launched a huge assault on Tejpal and his website and slapped him with a raft of lawsuits that he is still fighting now, four years later. Much of his story was about the need in democracy for healthy institutions, such as the media, and for a citizenry that pays attention. He set out to produce a new newspaper with no funds and convinced 14,500 people to take subscriptions for a paper that did not exist, which brought him enough money for two issues, and it has grown from there. The paper is called Tehelka, and it’s a good read. We also heard from Dr. Jayshree Oza, Woman of the Year in India, on the struggle India faces to provide education for all, especially for girls. She was a bit more pessimistic than Tejpal was, and got quite fired up about female feticide, wherein the mother gets a sonogram and aborts if it is a girl. Finally we heard from another speaker, Riva someone or other, who spoke about the sources of pluralism in India. She prefers pluralism to diversity as a phrase, because pluralism pulls people together whereas diversity focuses on differences. She headed a national commission on education, whose report has guided the government’s efforts recently, but she sees many ways it has fallen short. Frankly, the job seems impossible, given the overlays of rural poverty, gender inequality, linguistic difference, casteism, and so on.

Rajasthani dancer
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That afternoon, we went for a cultural excursion. The first stop was at Mehrauli Archaeological Park, which is an area of old Hindu and Muslim temples and tombs that has only recently been rediscovered. There is little government funding for upkeep thus far. As we arrived, the monsoon gathered force and gave us a good soaking. It’s basically a weedy park with several ruins, along with some free-roaming cattle and oxen, lots of mud, and a depressing squatter colony where people huddle in makeshift tents and huts with an average ceiling height of maybe four feet. The ruins were cool, though, and the Qutab Minar looms over it in picturesque fashion. Light was failing fast as we exited and the muezzin’s prayer call through the gloaming was ethereal and beautiful.

Lunch at Pardada Pardadi School
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From there, we got bused over to the Sanskritti Kendra, a muscum and cultural institution. We saw an extraordinary program of dance and music. My favorite part was a Rajasthani group where the lead dancer danced with six bowls on her head. Another dancer bent over backward and picked up two rings off the ground with her eyes. Then we toured the museum, which gathered a lot of terracotta and regional folk art, as well as everyday craft items from life all over India. My favorite was an intricately carved wooden walker for a toddler. Dinner was excellent and we got back to the hotel at 11:15 p.m., weary to the bone.

The next day (which is yesterday now, as we have moved along to the city of Chennai on the Indian Ocean coast), we boarded an 8:00 bus for Bulandshahr, a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. We were told it would be about 2 hours, but in actuality it took 5 hours to get down there. First, the traffic in Delhi is simply unbelievable. It is a city twice the size of NYC, but it has only the tiniest of subways, and at least two-thirds of the traffic is bicycles, bike-rickshaws, auto rickshaws (a sort of motorized trike), and scooters or small motorcycles. All of these are weaving about at slow rates of speed. So it tool over an hour to get out of Delhi. Then there is a stretch of expressway where we could get up to 455 mph or so without the bus rattling to pieces. On this stretch there is a weird landscape. On either side of the road, you’ll find large apartment buildings in various states of construction, and each complex has a squatter colony, i.e. a dilapidated slum of tents and huts cobbled together with whatever comes to hand. Interspersed are rice paddies and sugar cane fields, with cows and oxen wandering about (including on the expressway), some goats, and a scattering of farmers, many of whom live in mud huts in their fields. Soon, though, the expressway ends and we head down a long, bone-shattering road. In places, it seems like the rice, cane, and wheat fields stretch on endlessly and you could easily be in the 19th century. Still, there are the ever-present bikes, trucks, tractors, and auto rickshaws, which means the bus must constantly swerve around objects, frequently in the face of oncoming traffic. I don’t think I have ever been on a worse road. The poverty in rural India still remains horrible, and the roads are lined with huts that are shared with cattle, no running water, and so on.

The point of all this was to visit the Pardada Pardadi School for girls, started six years ago by Sam Singh, a guy who grew up locally before a 30 year stint in the States. By his own admission, he is a feudal lord living in a feudal society, but he has started and funded a pretty amazing school. The basic problem he is addressing is that the local girls are forced into marriage at the age of 12-14 and exist only to keep the household functioning. He wants to give them academic and life skills that will improve their odds at a happier life. To do so, his school provides 3 meals a day, uniforms, and, after two years, a bicycle to ride to and from school. He also pays each girl 10 rupees a day to come to school. It’s not a cash payment but an amount that is put into an account held for the girl. She gets the money after graduation for further study or for marriage, at which point it might have 25,000 to 30,000 rupees in it (roughly $600). They follow an academic curriculum, but they also make handicrafts, which are sold to help the school fund itself. They have also gotten some sponsorships. I think it costs $250 to sponsor a girl for a year. After six years, he has built a fairly successful model, and spent about $500,000 of his own money. The kids were very excited to have visitors and were proud of what they were doing. The most impressive scene was at lunchtime, shortly after our arrival. 12 kids each day work at lunch cooking all the food and laying out the plates, which are completely laid out in rows of maybe 80 on long cement slabs. Altogether there are about 300 lunch plates to lay out before the kids come eat it. The same 12 do all the cleaning, and the lunch production is seamless.

On the way back, we stopped to see the Ganges River and dip our hands in the water of the holiest river in India. We were rapidly surrounded by hundreds of onlookers who were not accustomed to tourists or buses. The road was choked with people and livestock, and it was fun, but weird to walk through and be gawked at.

Today, we had to get up at 4:00 am to make our Chennai flight, and it was nip and tuck even then. There were eight of us who did not seem to make it into the computer, or they had overbooked. For a while it looked like we’d have to wait for a later flight, but we made it with a minute or two to spare. The flight was good, though, with an actual meal that was actually good. I read the Hindustan Times on the way down, and found a good tidbit for Karen, who some you will not know is the Upper School psychologist at Berkeley Carroll (and, yes, a damn fine one to boot). The article was about the difficulty parents in Delhi face when referred to a child or adolescent psychiatrist. 42% of the population is under 18, which means there are about 9 million kids, but there are only two child psychiatrists in the entire city! I’ll catch up on today’s news tomorrow, or try to. Now I’m nodding off.