Bernie Poole's Fulbright to India

Kanniyakumari to Tirupathi--a trip to remember

2010-10-08T16:19:00.008-05:00

I'm writing this entry in my “Fulbright to India” blog long after I completed my teaching stint in India—it is over three years, in fact, since I returned to the United States. I'm far from diligent as a writer; well, I'm far from diligent, period. But today, October 10, 2010, my mind has wandered back to the eventful return trip I made May 9, 2007, from Kanniyakumari in Tamil Nadu state to Tirupathi in Andhra Pradesh. It started out so scripted and carefully planned and turned out to be punctuated with unexpected experiences which, in retrospect, were as typical in the life of this absent-minded child as they are still typical in the life of this absent-minded (but very, very lucky) adult. I never wrote about it then and I should, which is why I do so now.

By way of reminder, Kanniyakumari, also known as Cape Cormorin, is the town at the southernmost tip of the Indian sub-continent. I’d decided to do just one touristy thing on my own before the end of my tenure as a Fulbright scholar. I’d been invited to give lectures in Coimbatore, in central Tamil Nadu state, and it seemed like the obvious thing to do to continue on down the line to India’s Land’s End. I took a train out of Coimbatore west to Cochin in Kerala state, then all the way on down the agriculturally-rich and lush Kerala coast before crossing back into Tamil Nadu, to the end of the line at Kanniyakumari.

I’d planned to spend two nights in Kanniyakumari and had reserved a hotel in advance. After settling into my room at the Sea View Hotel, I wandered out for a stroll in the early evening, taking a left-hand turn which took me down an unpaved street defined only by the stick-built structures on either side. The street was lined with simple, open market stalls and shops selling everything a tourist could desire. I was travelling light and so browsed without buying anything.

The next day I awoke early to see the sun rise and watched a fleet of small fishing boats, powered by outboard motors, scurrying back to shore to sell their catch of the day. Later I took a boat to the nearby offshore rocky outcrops to visit the monuments to Saint Thiruvalluvar and Swami Vivekananda. I was the only recognizably non-Indian tourist, so the scene at the various sites was a kaleidoscopic swirl of saris and shalwar-kameez, the beautiful Indian female dress which always brightened my days.

The evening before I left Kanniyakumari, after dinner, I walked out to the end of a quarter mile of rock-strewn breakwater pier where, surrounded on all sides by the lapping waters of the merging oceans, I enjoyed a spectacular sunset. On my way back to the hotel I passed through streets lined with the hovels of the local residents, mostly fisher folk, and was reminded—again—that poverty is never far away in India. I stopped at the taxi stand in front of the hotel and arranged with one of the drivers to be there for me in the morning to take me to Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) for my flight to Chennai; then, at the hotel desk, I arranged for a wake-up call.

I slept soundly after my day of sight-seeing in Kanniyakumari ("Land's End at Journey's End"). The mingled waves of the Arabian Sea, the Sea of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean lulled me into blissful sleep. In my dreams I revisited the wave-swept monuments to Thiruvalluvar and Vivekananda--dreams that frequently recur to this day, as daydreams during my waking hours.

And so, early next morning, my return journey to Tirupathi began. My driver was waiting outside the hotel in his Ambassador automobile to take me on the two hour drive to Trivandrum. I had allowed four hours for the trip in case of mishap along the way, but we arrived safe and sound well in time for the flight to Chennai. I settled down in the airport lobby with a book to keep me company while I waited for the Air Deccan desk to open so I could check in for my flight. Time passed and no airline personnel appeared at the desk. I asked discreetly when the desk would open and no one knew for sure. Fifteen minutes left till my flight was due to take off. Yikes! What the heck was going on? Then it suddenly dawned on me that I was not booked on an Air Deccan flight at all; I was booked on Jet Airways, for heaven’s sake!

I rushed to the Jet Airways desk (which had been noticeably busy an hour earlier) and tried to check in. The clerk told me I was too late; the plane was ready to leave. But he called the flight deck anyway, just to confirm. Lo and behold, God bless India, I was told I could go ahead and board the plane as long as I didn’t check any baggage. I had my one small, “rolly” suitcase with me, which had to go through security before I could board the bus that was waiting to take me from the terminal to the idling plane. I’d intended checking the suitcase in and had thus stowed in it my Swiss Army penknife, which had served me so well in myriad situations during my stay in India. The penknife, of course, failed the security check; I was not allowed to take it on the plane. So I abandoned it to the airport authorities, thankful that at least I had kept it safe till the very end of my tour.

As it happens, I was not alone on the transit bus that took me from the terminal to the plane. An elderly gentleman in traditional South Indian male dress—a long white dhoti (wraparound sheet-like skirt), white shirt, and a beige waistcoat—was waiting patiently for me to climb on board. I still was not sure if I would catch the plane before it left, so I asked the gentleman if we would make it on time. “Of course,” he said. “I am here, am I not? The plane cannot leave without me.” To this day I have no idea who that gentleman was, but he either had considerable clout in that part of the world, or else he had hutzpah beyond belief.

The plane took off soon after I buckled into my seat and climbed north-west out of Trivandrum on the north-westerly-aimed runway, affording me a view of the Kerala coastline before the plane banked north-east, headed for Chennai. Less than two hours later we landed at Chennai airport where, easily now since I was experienced, I negotiated an autorickshaw to take me to the railway station for the final leg of my trip back to Tirupathi.

The autorickshaw driver dropped me at the station and left me to find my own way onto the waiting train. I had my ticket in hand, with a numbered reserved seat in AC Executive Chair Class on the Chennai-Tirupathi Express, leaving at 5:00 pm, arriving in Tirupathi some three hours later.

Until now, every time I’d travelled by train in India, I’d either been with others whom I followed to my reserved seat on the appropriate carriage (seats in AC class are always reserved), or I had been chaperoned to my seat by some solicitous soul prior to departure. Thus I had never learned how to “read” the system for myself—rather like being driven from point A to point B and never learning how to get there.

Stupidly, instead of asking someone to help me, I decided to guess at which end of the train I’d find my designated carriage—and I guessed wrong. By the time I’d wandered all the way to the end of the very long train, I realized it was the wrong end and, rather than risk missing the train by walking all the way back to the other end, I jumped on the very last carriage without noticing that there was no way, once the train was moving, of getting from this particular carriage to the next. I was stuck where I was, and where I was was on a Third Class carriage. Every seat was taken, and the only standing room was in the open “T” at the end of the carriage formed by the space between the doors on either side and the small corridor of space between the two toilets.

The stench from the filthy toilets was something else, but I soon got used to it. I propped my two bags (a rolly suitcase and the bag containing my laptop computer) against the far wall between the toilets and stood opposite them in the corridor between the doors so I could keep an eye on them. As we pulled out of Chennai station, there were half a dozen other men occupying the same T-shaped space at the end of the train, but I thought they would be getting off at stations down the line and that I should soon be able to move into a seat in the carriage as we got further from the city. I’m such an optimist! At each station no one got off, and more got on. I was soon completely hemmed in by people, mostly men, to the point where about the only floor space I had to stand on was defined by the size of my shoes!

Mercifully, after about an hour of this, the carriage started to empty and I was able to move to an open seat. I reflected to myself that at least I now knew firsthand how the other half travelled in India, that my stupid mistake had thus been a blessing in disguise.

About ten miles (14 kilometers) from Tirupathi, the train for some reason had a scheduled or unscheduled stop for an hour at the town of Renigunta. My good friend Dr. Thasleem Sultana lived near there, so I called her on the phone and asked her if she could have one of her employees take me on his motorbike from Renigunta to my house in Tirupathi. No problem; about 15 minutes later I was being whisked in the dark along Airport Road, my suitcase precariously balanced on the handlebars of the young man’s bike.

What an experience! During what turned out to be a long, hard day’s journey, I’d travelled by taxi, plane, autorickshaw, train, and motorbike to get to my destination. The people I’d met and chatted with along the way were, as ever in India, personable, pleasant, and, above all, kind. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Land’s End at Journey’s End--Coimbatore and Kaniyakumari:

2007-10-14T15:28:00.000-05:00

May 7 saw me boarding a train at Tirupati station, bound for Chennai and, thence, for points south in India—way south, to Land’s End! I was to fly from Chennai to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu State. I planned to stop for one night in Coimbatore, where I had been invited to lecture at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU). Then I had a sleeper-AC berth booked on an overnight train which would cut across the state of Kerala and sweep down the coast, via Cochin and Trivandrum, to the southernmost tip of India—a place called Kanniyakumari.

My good friend, Dr. Gunashekar (Guna), made all the travel arrangements for me and I’m ever grateful to him for that. The same is true for Dr. Jamuna, his wife and my facilitator while I was in India. Officially, as you may recall, Jamuna was to help me for just the first five days after my arrival in Tirupati, but she and Guna took care of me until the day I left. That's their daughter, Dipti, sitting with Guna and Jamuna in the first picture above. I can’t imagine what a problem it would have been for me if I had had to make all my travel arrangements on my own. I guess I would have learned the ropes soon enough if left to my own devices, but I’m glad I didn’t have to.

Guna had reserved a comfortable seat for me in an air-conditioned compartment on the Tirupati-Chennai train, and the ride through the afternoon was pleasant enough. When I arrived at Chennai station, the place was packed with people. Guna had advised me about how to pre-pay for a taxi to get me from the railway station to the airport, but I decided to save some money and go by auto rickshaw instead. I’d been told how much that might cost, so when one driver after another came up to me and demanded outrageous amounts of rupees, I haggled hard to get the price I wanted. I guess they realized I knew what I was doing because it didn’t take long before one driver agreed to my price and we were on our way.

To my amazement, what transpired next was déjà vue all over again!

The auto conked out half way to the airport, just as had happened soon after I arrived in India when I was at a conference in Orissa state! The last time this happened, as attested to by the pictures above, taken by Dr. Jyostna (Josi), my friend and companion in the auto, I helped push the auto into a nearby gas station and the day was saved. But this time it must have been a mechanical problem of some sort because my driver didn’t take long to do what he did next.

I was keeping an eye on my watch since time was of the essence and I didn’t know how long it took to get to the airport. My auto driver, however, was unperturbed, which did nothing to relieve my anxiety. He soon solved the problem by flagging down another auto rickshaw. He haggled with this other driver to get the best price he could on the cost of the remaining leg of the trip to the airport. Then he asked me for the agreed amount of money that he and I had originally settled on back at the railway station in Chennai. All the while he assured me that I would not have to pay any more to this new auto rickshaw driver when I arrived at the airport.

What choice did I have? I had to trust this man. It was either that, or I was stranded at the roadside, flagging down some other auto or taxi in the hopes that I’d make it to the airport on time. But here’s the point, as far as I was concerned. By now, after more than 5 months in India, I had become comfortable with the people and with the culture of India. I gave both auto rickshaw drivers the benefit of any doubt and I was once more on my way.

As was always, always the case throughout my stay in India, I was not cheated. Everyone I dealt with in India was, in my opinion and based on my 64 years of experience, honorable and fair. No, Indians are no more or less perfect than anyone anywhere else, but the Indians that I got to know have proved to be perhaps the most delightful and trustworthy people I’ve ever had to deal with in my life.

The rest of my trip to Coimbatore was uneventful. I was met by a driver at Coimbatore airport and taken to the TNAU guesthouse—easily the most palatial and well-appointed guest house I stayed at in India. It helped that it was spanking new, like the one I stayed at in Dharwad, Karnataka State. But this one provided me with a suite of rooms with all modern conveniences, including cable TV! A delicious South Indian dinner was served in my room and I slept soundly after my long day on the road.

The next morning I was brought by a driver to the campus at TNAU, founded in 1865. The university was relocated to Coimbatore in 1909. My breath was taken away by the Indo-Sarcenic architecture. It is very beautiful indeed—and well-maintained, too.

On arrival at the campus I was met by the Dean of the Psychology Department and he immediately took me to the auditorium where I would be giving my presentation. I was amazed to see a huge banner on the wall behind the dais, probably 4 feet high and 10 to 15 feet wide, welcoming me to TNAU as a guest of the university. Technicians were on hand. I’d brought my laptop and projector along, just in case, but it turned out that the whole hall was wired for overhead projection and sound amplification, with a booth in one corner where the technicians monitored the equipment during the course of a lecture. I gave the technician my pen drive, showed him where my PowerPoint presentation was stored, and left him to get everything ready for me.

Meanwhile I was taken to the office of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor C. Ramasamy. Over tea and biscuits, I chatted with him for a while about his goals for the university, especially as regards technology, since that was why I was there. I have met the Vice-Chancellors of a dozen or so universities while I’ve been in India; I think Professor C. Ramasamy demonstrated the clearest understanding of what it takes to effectively—effectively—integrate computer-based technologies into teaching and learning.

He knew it was hard, and that it had to be done right. He didn’t just sort of wave a wand and assume that tossing a few hundred computers at buildings and offices would somehow magically transform how things were done at his university. The reason he had invited me to travel all the way from Tirupati to talk, at his university’s expense, about technologies for teaching and learning, was because he wanted to learn as well as to do.

I thoroughly enjoyed giving the lecture, as I hope the audience of professors and students did, too. There was a journalist there from the Times of India, and afterwards she sat down with me for half an hour or so to find out about me and about the Fulbright Scholarship and, especially, about technology in education.

After the interview, I was taken back to the guest house to rest and get ready for my 14-hour, overnight train journey to Kanniyakumari (also called Cape Cormorin)-—India’s Land’s End. The train departed Coimbatore station shortly after midnight. I had a berth in an AC sleeper carriage and slept soundly till dawn, when I got up to greet the new day.

For the next few hours, till I arrived in Kanniyakumari in the early afternoon, I took pictures of the Kerala countryside. It was wet and lush and green, quite unlike anything I’d seen in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, or Orissa. This was verdant, fertile country. Fruits of every kind grew in the fields amongst the rice paddies and plantations.

The people were out there in those fields, working away, ten or more hours a day. I’ve been given to understand that some of these workers are paid, at the end of each day, not with money, but with food to eat—-some rice, whatever. In inflationary times, food is better than currency, but how do the many millions of poor in India get to escape their poverty if they are only paid enough to survive till the next day?

This I do know for sure. I didn’t see much of any laziness in India. People can’t afford to be lazy. Even the beggars work hard to make a living.

It was great to get to Land’s End, even though there’s not much to see there, other than the two impressive monuments built on rocky outcrops a mile or so offshore. One is to Swami Vivekananda, arguably the greatest social reformer and saint that India has produced. The other is to the Mahatma Ghandi, whose ashes were placed in the memorial here the night before they were scattered in the waters of the Indian Ocean. I stayed overnight at the Sea View hotel in a room with a huge picture window overlooking the ocean. To my left, in the east, I could see the Bay of Bengal; to my right, in the west, the Arabian Sea; and dead ahead, where both seas merged in the south, lay the mighty Indian Ocean.

The trip to Kanniyakumari was the only major touristy thing I did while in India. I didn't see the Taj Mahal or the Himalayas. Maybe next time. But I just had to make the effort to get to Land's End and I’m so glad I did. I enjoyed the sunset looking back from the far end of a long, rock-built quay that had me perched alone on the edge of the watery ocean void. A stiff, warm, zephyr breeze kissed my skin. My eyes watered as I stood there soaking up the sunset. Tears of joy welled up as I reflected contentedly on how far I had come to be where I was that day, Land’s End at my journey’s end.

Thank you, India. Thank you, my Indian friends. Shukria. Danyawadalu. Thank you, again and again.

Duplicating excellence in Baroda

2007-10-09T03:16:00.001-05:00

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2007

I arrived in Baroda (also called Vadodara) in the early afternoon of May 2nd. I’d travelled there by car from Ahmedabad on the Ahmedabad-Vadodara Expressway, which is a 98 km piece of the National Highways Development Project. The expressway has apparently cut travel time between Ahmedabad and Baroda from 2.5 hours to 1 hour. That’s about how long it took us do the trip.

In May it is hot anywhere in South India, and Baroda was no exception. I was scheduled to give a presentation to the faculty in the School of Educational Administration at the famous M.S. University, named for Maharaja Sayajirao, reformist ruler of Baroda from 1875 to 1939. Long before Indian independence, Maharaja Sayajirao banned child marriage, did away with untouchability and, in 1906, introduced compulsory, free primary education in his state of Gujarat—the state, by the way, in which Gandhi was born. Gandhi never acknowledged this in his autobiography, but I do wonder if his own enlightened views on such matters were informed by the Maharajah’s example and influence. The Maharajah also established the university where I was to give my seminar on educational technology. He gave one of his palaces to the university and it stands there proudly today amongst the hallowed halls of academe. One of the illustrious alumni of Baroda’s M.S. University is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution.

I gave my presentation to an attentive, appreciative, and incisively questioning M.S.U. faculty. I had brought my laptop and projector along with me, but it turned out I didn’t need it. These people were on the ball. All I had to do was give my USB flash drive to Dr. Pushpadanam and, in no time at all, my presentation popped up on the screen.

One question that made me think came from a professor who specialized in the economics of educational administration. I had talked about “duplicating excellence,” a concept I conceived some years ago to describe the ease with which teachers can now share, on the internet, the teaching materials and ideas that they come up with every day. The professor raised his hand and asked: “What about peer review?”

Good question. I had to think for a moment, because no one had ever asked that before. But then it quickly occurred to me that peer review really is built into the World Wide Web. If people value your ideas they’ll come back to your website; they’ll tell everyone about it; they’ll hopefully quote you in their own papers. Quite literally, peer review takes care of itself. If you have nothing of value to offer, you’ll quickly disappear out of sight. If, on the other hand, you share material and ideas that are useful, maybe even valuable, they’ll be gobbled up and duplicated around the globe.

I spent two delightful evenings with Dr. Pushpanadham in the company of another M.S. University professor and her two children. They wined and dined me and made me feel very much at home. I have to tell you, though, that the first night I spent in the M.S. University guest house was horrible. My room was plagued with mosquitos and the air-conditioning didn’t work. I moved my bed directly underneath the ceiling fan and fell asleep right away after an exhausting day travelling and presenting. But the fan didn’t help much at all. I woke up at 2:00 in the morning to find that I’d been more or less eaten alive. I spent the rest of the night insanely killing mosquitos, but it was a losing battle. They had my scent and I had nowhere else to go. I bought mosquito repellant the next morning and left it plugged in all day long so that my second night was blissfully undisturbed.

I set my alarm for 4:30 am, May 5th. A taxi came to the guest house at 5:00 am to take me back to Ahmedabad for my flight to Hyderabad and thence to Tirupati, where I am now. Never did I think that I would ever travel around India lecturing like this. One of these days I’ll wake up and discover that it was all a dream.

Update on my blog's status

2007-10-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

I’ve been back in the United States for a while now, since May 16 to be precise, and it’s now October 8. I’ve not been idle, and I haven’t neglected the blog. I still have a half dozen or so postings to write, covering the period from May 2nd through May 15 when I finally flew out of India to return to the US. I’m about to write those blogs now.

Before I do, I want you to know that I’m working with a colleague at SPMVV, the university where I was based in Tirupati, India. Her name is Dr. Indira Jalli and she is translating my blog into Telugu, the local language of Andhra Pradesh State. We have a publisher lined up and the book should be published before Christmas of this year, all being well.

So what I’ve been doing over the past few months has been to revisit each of my blog postings, one by one, and rewrite them all, editing where necessary and adding this and that here and there. It’s been fun; an opportunity to relive the incredible time I had in India, an experience beyond my wildest dreams.

So there you have it. You’re all caught up. Now let me get back to work.

May Day at the Mahatma Ghandi Labour Institute

2007-10-08T08:39:00.000-05:00

This morning, May 1st, 2007, I’m at the Mahatma Gandhi Labour Institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat State, where I’m attending a two-day conference timed to coincide with May Day, otherwise known as Labour Day around the world. As with most of my engagements since arriving in India, I’m here at the invitation of a professor who I chanced to meet at a conference elsewhere. In this case, my acquaintance is Dr. Harshida Dave who is a professor of Women’s Studies at this Institute. I met her when she came to SPMVV to attend the International Women’s Day conference held in early March at my university in Tirupati.

The conference here has not yet begun. Its theme is Gandhian Trusteeship, on which subject I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning. As I understand trusteeship in Gandhian terms, it has to do with the responsibility of those who accumulate wealth to share that wealth with the masses of the people, especially the poor. My take on this in my presentation will be that education is key to raising the status and prosperity of the destitute and deprived. In a country such as India, where this community of desperate and deprived people numbers in the hundreds of millions, technology can, I believe, hasten access to education and, therefore, to shared prosperity. All it needs is will and willingness on the part of those in control of wealth—Federal, State and Local government, wealthy individuals, national and international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the like.

These umbrella administrations must be determined in their commitment to supporting the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of good people at the grassroots level in India—philanthropists such as several of my new-found friends in Tirupati, and so many others—who are not themselves poor, nor are they rich, but they are in a position to spearhead the trusteeship work of helping the masses of the poor lift themselves up by their bootstraps from the grinding poverty in which they live out their days.

But these grassroots philanthropists can do no more than scratch the surface of the problem if they are left to work in isolation. So Government at all levels must, in my opinion, reach out, gather together, and recognize such local efforts so that they become, collectively, a mighty force for the alleviation of poverty in India, as elsewhere in this world of ours. Failure to do this will be catastrophic, in my humble opinion. It’s just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, the gathering of Ghandians was impressive. It was quickly clear to me that I was privileged to be amongst national leaders in Ghandian scholarship. As so often since I joined the Indian academic community last December, I have been humbled by the credentials and clear intellectual credibility of the men and women with whom I have been associated in Indian academe. At the conference on Ghandian Trusteeship at the Mahatma Ghandi Labour Institute I made my contribution. I learned much and I consider myself blessed to have had the opportunity to take part. Thank you, Professor Harshida, for the invitation.

Mumbai

2007-05-18T13:39:00.003-05:00

I am in Mumbai for three days. Mumbai, the financial hub of India, is the capital of Maharashtra State. Mumbai is also the center of India’s Hindi-language film industry, otherwise known as Bollywood. I’m here to conduct a seminar at SNDT university, about which more anon in another blog. I spent the first full day (Sunday) touring the city with a local driver as my guide and discovered more about India that touches my heart.

It was fascinating to visit the Gateway to India, built to commemorate the visit to India in 1911 of Britain’s King George V and his wife, Queen Alexandra. The only way I’d seen it before was in film (Gandhi, Passage to India, etc.) or in picture books. Now, here I was standing before the real thing. My own father, William Gerard Poole, was born in South Asia, just a few hundred miles from Mumbai (Bombay as it was then), in the hill town of Maymyo, Burma—Pwin Oo Lwin, Myanmar now. Throughout my stay in India I have wondered wistfully about how close I am to my dad’s birthplace, where, growing up, he must have experienced a way of life similar in some respects to what I am experiencing during my stay in the traditional, olde worlde town of Tirupati, in South India.

I feel like I am retracing my roots. My father was the first of 5 children of my grandfather and grandmother on my father's side. My grandfather was a non-commissioned officer in the British army during the halcyon years of the British Raj. My father was seven years of age before he saw for the first time England's "green and pleasant land." I like to think that this is the reason why I have not had the slightest difficulty adjusting to Indian cuisine. My mother, engaged to my dad and no doubt anxious to please him, learned how to cook a hot Indian curry from her future mother-in-law. Needless to say, we children grew up enjoying those Indian curries, too.

It is Sunday, so during our morning and early afternoon drive around the city, I enjoyed the relatively traffic-free sweep of Mumbai’s boulevards and beaches. My driver/guide was careful to show me only the more salubrious side of the city. The architecture runs the gamut of styles from traditional, old-Bombay's balconied apartments, to the mostly Victorian, neo-classical, governmental monuments to the British Raj, to the glistening, glass-faced skyscrapers of modern times. It was not until two days later, when being taken by another driver to the airport, that I discovered the other, seamier, side of Mumbai—the bleak, neglected, ramshackle, rampant poverty in the backstreets where the majority of Mumbai’s twenty million citizens live.

Religion is never far from people’s lives in India. I saw it represented in Mumbai by majestic, pseudo-Gothic Christian church spires, colorful, marbled Hindu temples, and a particularly striking mosque, the Haji Ali Mosque, poised on the extreme end of a spit of land that reaches into the Bay of Bombay. The arcing semi-circle of ocean beach is lapped by the waters of the Arabian Sea. At night, the bay is defined by a glittering necklace of lights that strings along Marine Drive.

But the highlight of my touristy day in Mumbai was a visit to Mani Bhavan, the house—now a museum—where Gandhi lived not long after he returned to India for good in 1915. It’s a rambling, colonial, three-storey building in a quiet corner of the old town, not far from the center of the city. He lived here with his family from 1917 to 1934. Prior to that he had worked as a lawyer in South Africa where he learned, developed, and honed his skills in satyagraha—peaceful, non-violent resistance to the injustices inflicted by the strong and powerful on the weak and defenseless.

We arrived at Mani Bhavan before opening time, but a word from my driver to the attendants who were hanging around outside gained us early entry right away. They opened up the house just for me and I had the run of the place for a good half an hour before anyone else showed up to disturb my quiet, pensive, somewhat dreamlike enjoyment of this place in time, this piece of history that memorialized the impressive achievements of the man who led India on its march to independence.

The house was wall-to-wall pictures, photographs, dioramas and artifacts that recalled Gandhi’s life and times. As I wandered the corridors, stairways, and rooms, I was moved over and over again by memories triggered in my mind by my lifelong love of all things Indian. Here I paused over the very place where Gandhi sat spinning cotton—a place I’d only previously seen in photographs. There I gazed from the balcony over the front door where, in the company of his wife and Jawarhal Nehru and others of his political devotees, he greeted the crowds gathered to see the man who made such a relentless nuisance of himself in his dealings with the representatives of the British Raj.

I’ve learned much about Gandhi since coming to India. Everywhere there are statues to his memory—iconic depictions of well-known milestones in his life. The icon most frequently captured in monumental stone or cast metal is of a sandaled ascetic, head pressed forward, stubbornly stepping out, staff in hand, to lead the people in a non-violent challenge to the “authorities” over a Salt Tax. The “Boston Tea Party” in the American Revolution comes to mind as a parallel political statement of discontent. It is significant that tomorrow I fly to Ahmedabad (pronounced Am-da-bad), capital of Gujarat, the state in which Gandhi was born. It was from his ashram in Ahmedabad that Ghandi began his 400 mile march to the salt-strewn shores of the Arabian Sea.

Gandhi, who trained as a lawyer and was a politician to the core, devoted his entire adult life to advocacy on behalf of the underprivileged, such as the migrant Indian workers in South Africa and the Indian peoples subjugated by the British during the time of the British Raj. With all his faults—and he had many—it is only fair to recognize the success he had in galvanizing against their oppressors those people whose rights were being abused, whether in South Africa by the Boers or in India by the British.

Gandhi carefully and shrewdly cultivated an image of austerity and self-denial and he did so with great effect. He wanted to be identified with the poor and oppressed even though, as his popularity and fame grew, it was hard for him to live a life of abnegation. He courted imprisonment but, because of his standing, was rarely, if ever, treated as a common criminal.

It took more than a mere image, though, to place him amongst the pantheon of God-like figures in India’s storied past. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying: “I am not concerned about what history will say of me, because I intend to write it myself!” So, too, Gandhi. He was accompanied everywhere on his travels across India by an amanuensis. His every word was recorded in writing for posterity. The biographies of Gandhi that I have read thus far unashamedly toe the Gandhian line, usually quoting directly or indirectly from Gandhi’s own autobiography, which I read first, soon after I arrived in India. I’m looking for a biography of Gandhi that uses more than Gandhi’s autobiography as a primary reference.

That said, I do admire the man. I certainly don’t have the guts, determination, chutzpah, and high threshold of tolerance for discomfort and pain that Gandhi had. Nor do I have his charisma. In many ways he was a public relations genius, but above all he had an extraordinarily focused mind. You’d have to have a focused mind to doggedly hold on to non-violence in pursuit of political goals when faced with the indignities and physical suffering inflicted arbitrarily on his followers and himself by the South African and British overlords.

So I take my hat off to the Mahatma Gandhi and sing his praises, even as I hold onto my personal reservations about him until I’ve had the opportunity to study the man more.

In my studies of Gandhi, the name Ambedkar keeps popping up, especially when I read anything written by someone other than a Gandhian devotee. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) is considered the father of the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar was a dalit—a "broken one," one of the Hindu outcaste "untouchables." He championed the dalit cause as did no other. An Indian friend of mine reminds me that Bombay belongs to Ambedkar, too. I'll have a lot more to say about Ambedkar in an upcoming blog.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast"

2007-05-05T03:09:00.000-05:00

Soon I’ll be leaving India. I have a packed schedule till May 12, when I fly out of Tirupati bound for Hyderabad and Frankfurt en route to the United States. Yesterday, though, was very special. I finally got to see what I had been looking for—an elementary/secondary school where modern computer-based technology is sensibly incorporated into teaching and learning.

Granted I’ve seen only the tiniest fraction of India’s schools. I’ve visited some 15 universities and half a dozen elementary or secondary schools in 7 southern states. Not much of a sample on which to make a judgment or draw any conclusions. For this reason, I’ve been careful to reserve judgment, for the most part. Yesterday, however, was a bright spot in my Fulbright experience, giving me further grounds for hope that India is moving in the right direction to implement its long-range goal of free and compulsory education for all children.

I spent the morning at one of the Bright Day Schools situated in Gujarat. Dr. Pushpanadham of M.S. University in Baroda, brought me to the school, located on the outskirts of Baroda (Vadodara), and introduced me to the principal, Ms. Rupa Sharma. Rupa took us all around the school and I was able to interact with the students and see everything that was involved with the school’s day-to-day running. It was quite a tonic after what I had seen elsewhere.

First of all, the whole school was well-maintained, brightly and freshly painted, airy and clean. Then, to my surprise, every classroom has a computer system installed in such a way as to make it easy for integration into teaching and learning. I’d never seen a setup like it. The flat panel display was fixed on the wall right beside the chalk board in front of the class. Speakers on either side of the display provided good quality audio. The system was wired to the internet. I asked one teacher to bring up my home page on the Web. The access speed was not bad at all, though the teacher said she usually downloads ahead of time any pages she planned on using in class.

What I liked was that the display was visually aligned with the chalkboard. I’d never seen an arrangement such as this and it struck me as very practical and ergonomic. The screens need to be bigger (the ones I saw were only about 17” displays), but a screen can be easily upgraded when money becomes available. It also would be easy enough to connect a projector to the system for display on a larger screen. If you only have one computer in the classroom, this, it seems to me, would be a good way to go.

The teacher-pupil ratio at the school is 1:27. There also are 120 uniformed “maids,” two assigned full time to each class. Their job it is to keep the school clean, fetch-and-carry for the teachers, cook and serve meals, and so forth.

I met, and chatted with, many of the teachers. I was treated to delightful impromptu singing and dance performances in the music department. I spent quite a bit of time in upper level classes. I discovered, to my surprise, that almost all the students had computers at home! When I asked them how much time they spent using their computers, the answers ranged from half an hour to three hours a day. This is in India! This is in Baroda, an out-of-the-way town in Gujarat! I never saw anything like this in Mumbai or Bangalore, where they’re supposed to be so ahead of the times.

I also stopped off in the kindergarten and pre-kindergarten classes where I was entertained with whole group song and finger play recitals. In one classroom, a three year old boy came running up to me as soon as I walked in, his arms out, inviting a hug. I bent down and scooped him up into my arms where he immediately clamped onto me like a limpet.

I have 34 nephews and nieces and 48 grand nephews and nieces, so I’ve scooped up many, many children in my time. I’ve never before been held like this child held me. After a minute or so, the two teachers in the class came up to take him off my hands, but this kid was having nothing of it. He held me tighter than ever and wrapped his legs around me, too. I could feel the heels of his shoes digging into my sides. It was incredible; it was also very, very moving. I’d have been quite happy for him to stay stuck to me for the rest of the day. He weighed no more than a feather and it felt great to be so wanted and loved.

Turns out the kid thought I was his grandfather, who’s also bald as a coot! Eventually the teachers prized him off me limb by limb and we were able to proceed on our way.

What a great school! It’s all happening in India. I predict great change in the infrastructure of education over the next 20 years, with technology being more and more integrated into what goes on in the classroom. India’s already taking its place amongst the leading nations on the economic front. Watch out when India eventually implements its goal of 100% free and compulsory education for all.

Of Women, Widows, and Child Brides

2007-05-01T15:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had a truly delightful time with the faculty and students of the Department of Educational Technology at SNDT, the first women’s university in India. For the record, I googled the acronym SNDT (Shrimati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey) Women's University and learned that the university was founded in 1816 by Dr. Dhondo Keshav Karve in response to a crying need to educate women—specifically Brahmin widows—as the only way of escape from the degrading realities of their lives, a reality which still lingers in modern Indian society.

Widows? Why widows? Why were widows, in particular, in need of an education? Well…

I’m lately learning about widows in India—more specifically about widows in Hindu India. I’m reading a book by Uma Chakravarti about the life and times of Pandita Ramabai, an eminent Indian Christian social reformer and activist, especially concerned with the plight of Indian women who survive their husbands. The rules for widowed women are relaxing now, but in 1816, and still today in some areas of the country, a woman widowed may not—may not—remarry. She belongs to her husband even after he has died.

Now there are plenty of widows, including my mom who’s been a widow since my dad died in 1965, who don’t want to remarry after their husband has died. But at least my mom, in England, had some choice in the matter. Women in Hindu India had no choice then, in 1816, and many widows even in present day India feel like they have no choice now.

It takes a long time for cultural prescriptions to die.

The fact is that widows in India have been treated disgracefully in the past. They were forced, by Brahminical law, to have their heads shaved and to labor in the household of their dead husband where, essentially, they lived as a slave for the rest of their lives. Rather than face this miserable future, many a widow preferred the option of suti—immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre.

Apart from the gross injustice of forcing anyone—literally or figuratively—to do something they don’t want to do, many a Hindu girl, in the old days, was widowed young. Brahminical law made this an inevitability.

In 1816, Hindu (i.e. Brahman) law required that girls be married off by the age of 10! The reasoning was that a girl married off by the age of 10 was unlikely to lose her virginity (read "purity") to anyone but her husband--a very important consideration when the goal was to maintain the "purity" of the caste system. But the outcome of this practice was that, inevitably, before medical science had advanced to the degree it has today, far too many women died in childbirth, including young women married to old men.

Indeed, it seems that it was not remarkable at all for a man to marry one, young, under-age-10 bride after another, until he died. Thus, when he did eventually die, he inexorably left behind a young widow.

In 1860, obliging British overlords, bent on legal compromise, fixed age 10 as the legal age for Indian girls to marry—not before! So I guess that’s progress. Did the British legislators condoning that 1860 decision have their tongue in cheek, or did they honestly think that this was OK?

We’ll never know.

By 1884, because of deaths of child brides as a result of too early sexual abuse at the hands of adult husbands, there began serious discussion to raise to 12 the youngest age at which girls were married off. Still today, as I read in The Hindu newspaper just last week, child brides are married off (sometimes to child grooms) in their early teens, though it is now, thankfully, the exception rather than the rule.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, men always married child brides, who were not older than 10. This is because there weren't any other women to marry. Every girl was married off by age 10. If a wife died, say, in childbirth, the man would marry again, and again it would be to a child bride. There were no other brides. All the girls were married by the time they were 10 because it was required by Hindu Brahmanic law.

Strange that widowers were allowed to remarry, but the same didn’t apply to widows. Oh, silly me. I forgot that men wrote the law!

It was not unusual for a man to marry several times before he died, which meant that his final marriage was at an advanced age. What was a girl to do when her aged husband died within a few years of the marriage, as was not uncommonly the case? The child bride became a child widow. She could not remarry; she was shunned by society; she was a slave in her dead husband’s home; she had to have her head permanently shaved as a kind of enforced castration.

What was a girl to do?

Suti, not surprisingly, was sometimes preferable to a fate worse than death. Thank goodness for men and women like Dr. Dhondo Keshav Karve, Dr. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Shrimati Pandita Ramabai, who railed against injustices such as this and did what they could to right these egregious wrongs.

We, too, today and every day, should do our part to work, slowly, but surely, for a society where everyone—-male, female, black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, disabled, non-disabled, red, pink, yellow, sallow, brown, light brown, bald, hairy, whatever—-has an equal opportunity to enjoy the good things of life on this beautiful earth of ours.

Hi, Auntie!

2007-04-21T13:09:00.000-05:00

This is cute.

Every day when I walk into class, I give my laptop bag and the projector case to my students and they set up my system for me while I chat with other students before the class begins. As it happens, I have a picture of my wife, Marilyn, on the computer desktop. When the machines fire up, there she is in all her glorious beauty smiling down on the class.

One day I overheard one of the students refer to her as “Auntie.” Only then did it occur to me that, just as they sometimes call me “uncle”—a term of respect for an older man in India—so “Auntie” would be the corresponding term of endearment for my wife.

And so it goes.

Now every morning, when Marilyn’s picture comes up on the screen, I tell everyone to say “Hi, Auntie!”

And they do; and I think it’s sweet; and I hope you do, too.

Lionized

2007-04-21T07:49:00.000-05:00

Things here are heating up in more ways than one. Yes, daytime temperatures consistently soar to 100F; but things are heating up as regards my schedule of engagements, too.

Today is Saturday, and this week alone, aside from teaching my regular classes, I’ve been involved every day with one extra-curricular activity or another.

I’ve given presentations at my university, to the faculty of the Education Department (Monday) and the English Department (Tuesday).

On Wednesday (9:30 pm) and Thursday (12:30 am!!) I gave online presentations at the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2007 conference out of Hawaii, USA.

Thursday morning saw me at Akshaya Kshetra as the chairperson of a three hour workshop for elementary school children on “Integration.” 100 children from a Renigunta primary school spent time with the Akshaya’s disabled residents learning about the plight of people with a disability.

On Friday I was guest of honor at the Valedictory function for our graduating Masters of Education students. It was a beautiful ceremony where the students performed with recitals, songs and a short skit in between speeches by all and sundry. I was “felicitated” once again, garlanded and shawled, perfumed with sandalwood paste, my forehead daubed with a flash of red paint. I also was presented by my students with the most gorgeous gift of a beautifully carved figure of a Indian woman in tribal dress.

Today, Saturday, I’m not long back from the Sri Venkateswara private elementary and secondary school in Renigunta, from which the children came for Thursday’s Integration workshop at the Akshaya Kshetra.

I'm used to what I call "Indian time," where the starting time of anything is never--I mean never--at the appointed hour, and usually as much as half an hour late. But this morning was ridiculous even by Indian standards. The car to bring me to Renigunta was scheduled to pick me up at the guest house at 7:30 am. It eventually showed at 8:45 am!

To add insult to injury, the car was a truly clapped-out banger, a bone-shaker of a thing, which stalled every time the driver took his foot off the accelerator! No A/C, of course.

We eventually got to the school in Renigunta at around 9:30 am and I told the headmaster that I was on a very tight schedule. I absolutely had to leave by 10:30 so that I could be back at my university in time to teach my 11:30 class. I also said that I simply had to have a more reliable vehicle for the return trip--a motorbike, a scooter, a push bike, even a bullock cart!--anything rather than the jalopy they brought me in.

A deal was struck. I gave my speech, after which I posed for photos with the students and staff. Then I foolishly accepted one student's request to sign her notebook. Next thing I knew, I was absolutely mobbed by students thrusting notebooks and scraps of paper at me.

I scribbled a few more signatures, then I realized that I'd be there all day if I continued. So I threw up my hands, refused to sign another one, and pushed my way through the throng of clamoring boys and girls.

It was like swimming against an ocean tide. Everyone wanted to shake my hands on the way back to the headmaster's office, where I gratefully sought refuge and downed a thirst-quenching bottle of coffee-cream milk.

An air-conditioned jeep was commissioned to take me back to Tirupati. Now that's more like it! I made it back to the university with five minutes to spare.

Wedding Bells

2007-04-14T17:12:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday I attended a reception and dinner for Srikanth and Vineela on the eve of their wedding. Srikanth is the son of Dr. V. Kodandarami Reddy, a professor at Sri Venkateswara University. Vineela is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. N. Rosi Reddy, probably related, though not necessarily so. Reddy is a very common surname in these parts, like Smith or Jones in England.

The reception was held at R.K. Kalyanamandapam, a wedding center in Tiruchanoor, a suburb of Tirupati. A couple of hundred guests milled around in an open space in front of a stage where Srikanth and Vineela, after a formal ceremony of betrothal, were greeted by, and photographed with,a succession of guests, including eventually myself. This was not the wedding, just an opportunity for everyone to meet the bride and groom before they "tied the knot" the next day.

The next morning, bright and early, determined not to miss a thing, I took an autorickshaw back to the wedding hall for the wedding proper. Breakfast was served in a large hall, a very informal affair where everyone sat down where they pleased at long tables while waiters came by with tasty South Indian tiffin tidbits such as idli, sambar, rice, chapatti, curry and so forth. In South India light meals and finger food is always referred to as "tiffin," an Anglo-Indian word meaning 'snack'. I love this stuff!

Just after I finished breakfast and moved outside, the groom arrived at the mandapam (marriage center) and the musicians swung into action. Srikanth was dressed like a maharajah in a full cream and gold-lined coat and pants and matching turban. With mom and dad in tow and an entourage of attendants, led by the musicians he proceeded to the hall where the wedding was to take place.

The reverse of what is customary in America or England, the bride was already there awaiting the arrival of the groom. This is because the mandapam, in a city setting, represents the bride's home. The groom comes in procession to claim the woman who has been chosen to be his mate and the mother of his children.

In the foyer of the hall, the groom is prepared for the wedding. His feet are bathed. Garlands and gold chains are placed around his neck and gold bracelets on his wrists. Gold is everywhere. Everyone's dripping with it. Indians, especially the women, love gold; they can't get enough of it. It's passed down from generation to generation; it's an important slice of the dowry the bride's family has to pay for the pleasure of being absorbed into the family of the groom.

As you perhaps see from the pictures above, the bride is bedecked in a gorgeous red and gold sari. The gold thread is real gold, by the way. She's also covered in gold jewelry from head to toe. She's beautiful.

The wedding ceremony proper, being Hindu, is supervised by Vedic priests. They chant mantras and direct the groom while he "ties the knot"--Kappu, the holy thread--on the bride's wrist, which is meant to ward off evil spirits. The groom also ties the gold Mangala Sutra around the neck of the bride. She will wear this to her grave. Holding the bride’s hand, the bridegroom now walks seven steps with her. This is the most important part of the marriage ceremony, and only when they walk seven steps together (this is called Saptha Padhi) is the marriage legally complete. The belief is that when one walks seven steps with another, one becomes the other’s friend.

Finally, the guests file up onto the stage to congratulate the bride and groom, pouring rice on their heads to wish them prosperity and the blessing of children. Not too many children, though. "We two, ours two" is the guideline given by the Government of India to try to limit the number of offspring. India's population, over one billion and growing, is second only to China, and it's projected to become the world's most populous nation by 2030.

Fortunately, Indians have always, for thousands of years, had a yen for settling in different parts of the world. I don't know how many Indians live in diaspora, but there must be many millions of them by now. Srikanth and Vineela will be joining them when he takes his bride back with him to Lexington, Kentucky, where he's gainfully employed as a Firmware Engineer.

Let me live…. Or let me die

2007-04-08T09:08:00.000-05:00

Those are the words of Ramachandra, the teacher at Akshaya, a school for children with disabilities in Renigunta, about 20 miles from Tirupati, which I visited yesterday afternoon. That’s Ramachandra and his wife in the picture above. Ramachandra, at the age of two, contracted polio and has been unable to use his legs ever since.

Ramachandra is a beautiful man.

I’ve known him for only a few hours, so how can I say such a thing? Simple. Because I choose to do so, and because I sense that this is so.

Life is constantly thrusting at us realities which we choose to either accept or deny. One day, about two months ago—every day seems like an age here in India where my experiences are so frequently fresh and new, like those of a new born baby—there was a knock at my door in the guest house. In walked Thasleema, with her friend Madhu.

That’s Thasleema, wearing the off-white sari third from the left in the front row of the group picture above.

I’d never met Thasleema before. I had met Madhu. We bumped into each other by chance at the Mother Teresa convent next to the Catholic church where I go every now and then for Sunday mass. On one side of the convent compound, the sisters and their aides take care of the elderly; on the other side, they take care of children with severe disabilities. I wrote about them in my blog in January.

Madhu was at the convent with some of his Hindu friends, distributing food to the old folks. Ours was a chance acquaintance, like ships that pass in the night. I never expected to meet him again. But we’d exchanged business cards, so anything was possible.

A few days later, along comes Thasleema, brought by Madhu to visit with me and ask for my advice. She’s about to defend her dissertation. Any day now she’ll be Dr. Thasleema. Her area of expertise is Special Education; it’s been her passion all the way through her undergraduate and graduate studies. She’s driven to help people with disabilities.

“What do you recommend I do, now that I have my doctorate in Special Education?” she asked.

“Why don’t you start a school for children with disabilities,” was my reply. I expect she already had this option in mind, but maybe she needed to hear someone else say it to give her the courage to go ahead. Who knows?

Fact is, Akshaya, Thasleema's school for children with disabilities, has been open for two months.

Like the Don Benny school I visited a few days ago, Akshaya is a beautiful place, out in the countryside, surrounded by the sun-burned, fractured, gnarly hills of the Eastern Ghats, with lush green rice paddies nearby. The school grounds are blessed by a steady, cooling breeze that softens the air, especially at dusk, and sighs soothingly across the wide open plain.

Paradise.

But paradise with a purpose. These children need help. The challenge is well nigh overwhelming if one dwells on the huge scale of human suffering, of human disability. We all suffer, of course. Indeed, we all have disabilities of one sort or another. But there are so many whose suffering is extreme.

My friend Yvonne was born with severe cerebral palsy. Ramachandra has been without the use of his legs since the age of two. In the United States, with all our magnificent medical care and limitless supply of cash, there are 54 million people who are registered with a disability. That’s one person out of every five or six of the population.

If your family doesn’t have someone in it with a disability, count yourself lucky.

In India, the ratio must be at least equal to that of the United States. So I estimate there must be around 180 million people in India with a disability. From what I’ve seen, many, many more of those people than in the United States have a severe disability, like Ramachandra.

But people with a disability like Ramachandra don’t want our sympathy. They want our empathy; they want us to understand their plight. They don’t want us to feel for them; they want us to feel with them. Above all, they need our help.

Thasleema’s husband, Latif, who has supported her through school and who provided the seed funding for this venture of hers, was on hand for my visit. Latif and Thasleema are Muslim. Madhu is Hindu. I’m Christian.

Latif, Madhu and I joined hands and had our picture taken to capture the simple symbolism of our common brotherhood.

It’s not about religion. It’s about human compassion and human love. Those are the eternal values that make a difference in this world of ours.

Before he got involved with the Akshaya, Ramachandra wrote a story about his life and gave it the title: “Let me live… Or let me die.”

“Help me,” he pleaded. “I’m trying all I can to overcome my disability. I’ve put myself through school and qualified as a teacher. Someone, please give me a job. Let me use my skills. Let me do something useful, too—-or let me off this hellish merry-go-round we call life.”

People with a disability anywhere in the world, regardless of qualifications, have a notoriously hard time getting meaningful, gainful employment.

Ramachandra's article caught Thasleema’s eye when she read it in the newspaper. She remembered him when she came to start her school. She needed a teacher for her children with disabilities; Ramachandra needed a teaching job.

Perfect fit.

Thanks to Thasleema and Latif and the community they’ve gathered around them, Ramachandra and his wife of two months now have a lot to look forward to, as the beautiful smiles on their beautiful faces attest.

Sigh...

2007-04-06T02:16:00.000-05:00

My butterflies are gone.

Do you remember them? They used to greet me every morning when I took this shortcut through the bush on my way to school.

My butterflies are gone, their habitat scorched to nothing by fire set to clear the bush. I understand the need to clear the undergrowth; it stimulates fresh growth, including amongst the trees that occupy the space. But it’s a shame my butterflies have had to flutter off to another place.

When I saw what had happened this morning, I couldn’t help but muse on what we humans do to the planet in our pursuit of personal well-being. Each one of us looks for space to plant our feet, space to live, space to support ourselves, space to support our families and friends.

How much space do we need?

Well, I guess that depends on how much we can afford. Rich people like to have lots of it; poor people are sometimes lucky to have the space they find themselves in at any point in time. Rich people surround themselves with luxurious spaces that poor people can only dream about.

What do we do when everyone has the wealth to buy themselves a sizeable piece of the planet’s pie? What do we do when billions of Chinese and Indians and South Americans and South East Asians can all afford houses and cars and shopping malls and six lane highways, just like the Americans and the Europeans and other rich folks?

What do we do when they all want the same space as us? How many people can the planet sustain when each person has the kind of impact on the planet that I do?

David Quammen, a sociobiologist graduate of Yale and Oxford universities, said this in his beautiful book “The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions”:

"Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, total them up--and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpet like stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."

What a frightening analogy for what humans are doing to the planet earth! We're inexorably dividing it up into smaller and smaller sections, smaller and smaller habitats, squeezing out the larger species other than ourselves because they need a larger space to survive and we're taking it away from them.

We're getting to the point where the larger species can survive only in zoos.

There seems to be no way of stopping it, no end to the steady depletion and destruction of this our earthly domain.

I sometimes think that we humans are a kind of cancer. We invade our own place, our own space, slowly overwhelming it, till it’s incapable of going on--till it dies.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Maybe the best thing that could happen to the planet is that we just go ahead and render it uninhabitable, like a bush fire that destroys most everything in its path--except for the life that survives to live another day.

I hope my butterflies are still there after we're all dead and gone.

An amazing place

2007-04-05T00:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, at around 3:30 pm, I was picked up at the university guest house by Mrs. Ivy Katherine and taken to the Don Benny Public School. It’s a couple of miles outside of Tirupati in what is still a rural area. The school—actually a private school—is the dream-child of Ivy Katherine and her husband, Ramesh, who bought the land on which it stands 12 years ago. Over the ensuing time, they have developed it into the awesome, ashram-like place it is today.

It is a school for children from kindergarten through age 14-15. All classes are taught in English. Class sizes are small (max 25 students) compared to most other schools in India, where class size is normally anywhere from 40 to 50 students. But the best thing about this school is its location, in the middle of nowhere, yet close enough to the town of Tirupati to have a ready catchment of students.

From the moment I arrived I was captivated by the serenity of the place. The 200 or so students, along with the faculty, were all assembled in an open area under the trees, where they were sitting quietly while Ivy Katherine and Ramesh took me on a tour of the establishment. Fortunately, there was a cameraman on hand to take pictures, so I gave him my camera and told him to shoot away whenever he pleased. The photos above give you some idea of the beauty of the school, set, as it is, amongst the surrounding hills.

Mrs. Ivy Katherine, soon to be Dr. Ivy Katherine, is the principal of the school. Her husband, Ramesh, is a Phys Ed teacher at a college about 50 miles away, but the Don Benny School is as much a realization of his dream as it is of Ivy Katherine’s. He manages the plant and supervises all the construction, which has been ongoing over the past 12 years. He also coaches the sports teams and I watched him later in the evening playing soccer with some of the boys. For a 49 year old, he’s remarkably fit, agile, and full of energy in a very quiet, unassuming, really beautiful sort of a way.

Together, Ivy Katherine and Ramesh have created what I consider to be a model school where the children are able to grow up as part of a close-knit family in an environment where homespun, simple, unalloyed values can be nurtured and acquired. To see all the children sitting around me, from the little kindergarten kiddywinks to the soon-to-graduate 15 year olds, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in a kind of time warp, like I was stepping back 50 years or more to a time and place when innocence had not yet been shattered by modern mass communications.

I was introduced to the students by Ivy Katherine and one after another they came up and presented me with garlands and bouquets to welcome me to the school. Then I gave a little speech. As you can see from the pictures, I had a lot of fun, and the children seemed to enjoy it, too.

Afterwards we had a photo shoot with the teachers and with the different age groups of students. The students were then dismissed for the day. I sat down with Ivy Katherine and her daughter and we chatted for about an hour while watching Ramesh and some of the students playing soccer. After that we went indoors (Ivy Katherine and the family live in a house on the school grounds), and watched a movie while dinner was prepared. Dinner was delicious, as usual. I love South Indian cuisine and Ivy Katherine seemed to know all of my favorite dishes.

Around 9:00 pm I said my farewells and, with a wistful sigh of inner contentment, settled onto the back of Ramesh’s motorbike for the ride home.

What an amazing country this India is. I'm falling in love with it more and more with each passing day.

Suma

2007-04-04T00:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday evening, April 3rd, I was invited to the birthday party of authoress M.Suma.

I first heard about Suma when her mother, Dr. Rama, gave me a book Suma had written and which had just been published by the printing press of the school she attends. The book is titled “The Wings of Dreams,” and it is the story of a young girl’s Harry Potter-esque adventures in a fantastic realm of make-believe.

Dr. Rama asked me if I would like to read the book and comment on it. I readily agreed to do so.

That’s Suma, wearing the green sari in the picture above. The other girl is one of her classmates. As of yesterday, Suma is 15 years old, but her age belies her maturity. Over the phone, prior to my meeting her in person, she came across as very much an adult in her tone of voice and use of language. I would never have guessed that she was only 14.

When she came to the guest house with her father to bring me to her home for the birthday party, I didn’t recognize her from her picture (which is on the cover of her book) and wondered who was visiting me unannounced. I was expecting a young girl. When she told me who she was, I was mildly flabbergasted. Suma is a graceful, eloquent, refined young woman who, in her appearance and demeanor, would not have looked out of place amongst my Masters of Education students at the university.

I enjoyed reading her book. Since I’d been invited to comment on it, I read it with editor’s pen in hand. It quickly was apparent to me that Suma had not benefited from an editor’s touch before her book was published. I learned in conversation with her during the birthday party that she had hand-written the manuscript in a note book, then had the manuscript transcribed onto the computer by someone else, and the electronic file was then passed directly to the publisher for publication, without further ado.

I could have “read” her book, as others had done, and ignored all the errors. But I thought it important, for Suma’s sake, to give her a critical evaluation. So, as my wife, Marilyn, did for years with her student’s papers, I identified every mistake I came across. I marked up oodles of mechanical errors, just as the editors of my published books had marked up my own work.

I loved the story, and the writing style, though I had one question when I was done reading it: “Where’s the rest?”. It sort of peters out at the end.

Well, Suma is aware of this and is already writing the continuing saga of young Felishia Adornis Yaflowne, affectionately known as Fay, and that of the cast of characters who progress through the first part of her tale. I'm looking forward to reading more about Fay’s further adventures, and about her blossoming relationship with her magical, winged friend, Levion.

Suma has a computer at home, so I asked her why she hadn’t used it to prepare the manuscript for the publisher. It would have allowed her to edit her own work. Most important of all, the computer would have enabled her to present the publisher with an electronic version of the manuscript, thus eliminating the error-prone process of transcription by a typist who may or may not have had much familiarity with the English language.

When I asked her why she hadn’t used the computer, Suma just shrugged her shoulders and told me it hadn’t really occurred to her to do so. Anyway, she much prefers to do her writing pen in hand, rather than typing directly into a computer, as I prefer to do.

But Suma does have the electronic version of the manuscript on a CD-R, so she’ll easily be able to update it based on all my edits, prior to adding the sequel to the story. Along the way, she’ll no doubt tweak things here and there as new ideas, insights, and intrigues come to mind. A work of art is never finished, as such. It reaches a stage where the creator feels compelled to let it go, and thus it becomes, so to speak, etched in stone. Even fiction writers, though, will sometimes revise their books between printing runs when given the opportunity to do so.

I’m looking forward to reading the next edition of Suma’s book. As she told me in our conversation during the rooftop gathering of family and friends, every character in “The Wings of Dreams” reflects a part of her personality, so it will be fun to find out more.

Meanwhile, you’ll no doubt be alarmed to know that I was invited to sing at the party! “No way,” I said. “Even if I could sing, I don’t know the words to any songs.” But then I thought: “Wait a minute. I do know the words to one song.”

And I stood up and got everyone to join me in singing “Happy birthday to Suma!”

Uma

2007-04-01T13:23:00.000-05:00

Uma, pictured here, is one of my students. Intelligent, sharp as a tack--and thoughtful, kind, and considerate to boot. She’s also highly articulate and skilled in computer use, the most skilled of the 51 students in my M.Ed class.

She'd be a great snag for a would-be suitor.

Well, guess what? Yesterday, shortly before I took this picture, she gave me an invitation to her wedding. She's to be married in four days' time.

Uma and I get along pretty well. I was surprised she hadn't told me before that she was so soon to be married. I asked her when it was that she first found out.

"About ten days ago," she said.

"Did you know the man before the announcement of your engagement?"

"Oh yes," she said. "He's my cousin. My uncle’s son."

Not necessarily a first cousin, I hasten to add; maybe second or third cousin. I don’t know. As in Africa, in India the term “cousin” and “uncle” can have various interpretations. My students often call me “uncle,” for example. It’s used out of respect and is a polite term of endearment.

The families of Uma and her beau had put their heads together and arranged for this marriage to take place. I don’t know how much choice Uma or her husband had in the matter. For all I know, the marriage may have been arranged by the parents a long time ago. In South India, as elsewhere in the world, all kinds of considerations factor into the family selection of marriage partners for the children. Love is not usually one of them. Love is expected to come later--maybe.

But Uma was bubbling with excitement when she gave me the invitation. She was passing invitations around to several of her classmates, too. Uma is about to become the wife of a man who will whisk her away to Kuwait in the Middle East, where he works as an accountant.

Together they’ll make a fortune and a family and live happily ever after.

If it’s customary for marriages to be arranged in India, what’s the harm in that? The divorce rate here is about 1-2%; in America and England it’s over 50%.

They’re even beginning to wonder, in England, if it’s worth getting married at all.

Which system works best? You decide.

March Madness

2007-03-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

It’s that time of year. Conferences, workshops, seminars, symposiums--you name it--are springing up like crocuses and daffodils in Spring.

Money that has been made available for grants to cover the cost of academic gatherings must be spent by the end of the financial year, which, in India, is the end of March. So everyone’s been scrambling to spend it.

As a result, in recent weeks I’ve been kind of inundated with requests to speak here, there, and everywhere. I estimate that I’ve addressed well over 1000 people in the past two weeks alone. Not that I've received much of that grant money that's been floating around; my services are usually given gratis.

I’ve been guest speaker at a gathering of Sanskrit professors. I was the “opening batsman” at a conference of the National Academy of Psychologists. I was the keynote speaker at a two-day workshop on “Open and Distance Learners” for the Directorate of Distance Education at Sri Venkateswara University here in Tirupati. At the same university I addressed the graduating seniors in the College of Commerce. The following day I spoke to the students studying for their Masters in English Literature.

I’m obviously not being asked to give speeches because I’m famous or anything. Nor am I being invited because I’m recognized as an expert in any particular field. I’m being asked to speak because I’m willing and available and can be slotted in at a moment’s notice.

For example, I was asked to give the Keynote Address for the Open and Distance Learners conference only five days before the event! I’m guessing that originally they must have had someone else in mind; but they failed to snag whoever it was, so I was an afterthought. What also happens is when some professor will come up to greet me after I've given a presentation and ask me if I’d be willing to come to his or her university to do the same. I’m in the habit of saying “Yes” to all such invitations, so inevitably I’m kept busy.

No problem. Put me behind a podium, flip the switch, and I can talk the hind leg off a donkey. It’s fun, having a platform where you can express your opinion. It’s even more fun when people appreciate what you have to say.

You won’t believe this, but after one presentation in a town called Guntur in Andhra Pradesh state, I was mobbed by students wanting my autograph!! Honestly; I was mobbed. For the first time in my life I appreciated what it must be like to be famous.

There’s no question of this "celebrity status" going to my head, by the way, even though, as my dear wife, Marilyn, will attest, I am “a legend in my own mind!”

Believe me, any inflated delusions I might have had about where I fit in this grand scheme of academic affairs were very effectively deflated when the university where I was to deliver the Keynote Address sent a motorbike to bring me to the venue!

A motorbike, for heaven’s sake! No private, air-conditioned car; no air-conditioned taxi; not even an auto rickshaw.

But I’ve come to love riding on the back of motorbikes and scooters. It’s a great way to experience India and, as I said in my Keynote Address at the Open and Distance Learning conference, I’ve come to love India, too. One way or another, I hope to experience it a whole lot more in the years ahead.

Thwack! Thwack!

2007-03-27T11:43:00.000-05:00

I hear this every morning around 7:30-8:00 am when I’m in the bathroom taking a shower--or reading the newspaper, if you know what I mean. It’s the sound of one of the women next door doing laundry.

As you see from the pictures above, all you need is a ready supply of water, some soap, and any kind of flattish rock or stone slab. The process requires the repeated smacking of the cloth against a hard place. The lady is doing her washing on the banks of the river that runs by the temple of Sri Kalahastri. The gentleman is the dhobi who does my laundry, so those are my duds that are being beaten to death.

It’s fun to watch. The sight and sound conjure up timeless images of a simpler lifestyle, before we industrialized ourselves into our present ecologically precarious state.

Don’t get me wrong. Doing laundry this old-fashioned way is hard work, so I’m all for washing machines. It’s just that, with 6+ billion people on the planet and rising, the human impact is going to be devastating if everyone has a washing machine—and a house with a TV or two, and a car or two, and a microwave, and a telephone-computer, and a water supply and electricity, and a fancy wardrobe, and so forth.

Right now, it’s the small minority of people on the planet who enjoy such earth-depleting “luxuries.” What on earth are we going to do when all the Chinese and all the Indians have enough money to join the club?

Population isn’t going to decrease any time soon. Conservative estimates put world population kind of peaking at from 10 billion to 12 billion by the end of this century. The desire for the good things in life is what makes humans get up in the morning. With globalization, more and more people are joining the ranks of the reasonably well off.

Really. Whatever are we going to do when the planet’s overrun and everyone wants a piece of what’s left?

One of the reasons I so hope there’s a life after death--somewhere comfortable where I can sit in an armchair sipping a G&T—is because I want to watch and see how things pan out.

It’ll be very, very interesting indeed.

Religion and politics

2007-03-25T12:02:00.002-05:00

I was out enjoying my evening walk just now. I had to take a different route than normal because, these days, the university campus is out of bounds after 6:00 pm to anyone other than students, or so it seems.

While I was in Aurangabad two weeks ago, one of our students committed suicide. It is difficult, if not impossible, for me to understand what would bring someone to such a point of utter despair, but it's not that unusual. Every day I read in the newspapers of people committing suicide because they've gotten themselves deep in debt, or, in the case of students, because they've cracked under the pressure of family expectations in the face of public examinations.

So sad. When one looks around one, there's a lot of sadness in this world of ours. Perhaps this has always been the case, and perhaps this is why a lot of people turn to religion to find solace and meaning in what might otherwise, according to their perceptions, be a pointless life.

All I know is that the specter of religion has reared its ugly head in the aftermath of this girl's untimely death. She apparently had converted from Hinduism to Christianity and there's a feeling around India, amongst Hindus, that some Christian groups go to excessive lengths to gather folks into their fold. I won’t repeat the stories I’ve heard, because they don’t ring true to me, but the fact is that the university has been in a semi lock-down mode for the past two weeks, with extra security on hand and a curfew of sorts.

Hindu concerns are sometimes well-founded. On a few occasions, I have had to resist some blatant Christian proselytizing myself. This very evening, indeed, towards the end of my walk, two men on a motorbike sidled up, announced that they were evangelicals or something, and invited me to their church service at 7:30 pm.

I told them I was Hindu and that I was up for Darshan at the nearest temple, if they cared to join me!

Why does religion, where everyone professes love and peace and brotherhood, so often result in hatred and violence and enmity between people? It’s very odd. I’ll never figure it out. No wonder some people are driven to despair despite their affiliation with some religion or other.

I was brought up Catholic, though I long ago eschewed Catholic practice. Any alignment I might have with Catholic thought is purely coincidental. I think what I think, and believe what I believe, because it makes sense to me, not because I’ve been told to by some priest or pope.

I recently read a beautiful quote from Mahatma Gandhi who said: “After long study and experience I have come to these conclusions, that: (1) all religions are true, (2) all religions have some error in them, (3) all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism. My veneration for other faiths is the same as for my own faith. Consequently, the thought of conversion is impossible. … Our prayer for others ought never to be: “God give them the light thou hast given to me!” But: “Give them all the light and truth they need for their highest development!”

Now that makes complete sense to me. The world would be a whole lot better place if Gandhiji’s philosophy were understood and accepted by all.

Hot, hot, hot!!

2007-03-23T11:27:00.000-05:00

Things have been heating up in South India since the middle of January and now the soaring temperatures are something to be contended with. Typically, these days, we have a high of around 37C (99 F). Whichever way you look at it, that’s hot.

It’s a dry heat in Tirupati, though, so not unbearable. The same was the case in Saudi Arabia, where we experienced temperatures that rose well above 40C (104F) by early afternoon.

So, as you see in the picture above, when walking outdoors in the middle of the day, I use an umbrella to protect my bald pate from the direct rays of the sun.

Even some of my Indian students use umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Alternatively, they’ll cover their heads with the yard or two of extra cloth at the end of their saris which, in most cases, they otherwise drape gracefully over their left shoulder.

If they’re wearing a salwah, as shown in one of the pictures above, they’ll often cover their heads with the long, loose, silk or cotton shawl that they wear from front to back across their chests and over their shoulders for purposes of adornment and decorum. They look beautiful to me when they do this with their saris or shawls, their faces framed by the flowing dress material.

This afternoon I saw a girl on the back of a motorbike covering her head with a newspaper.

It’s hot!

In the steamy sub tropics of Nigeria and Florida, because of the humidity, it gets distinctly uncomfortable in the summer months. In Florida we can count on air-conditioning, so we can go from our air-conditioned houses, in our air-conditioned cars, to an air-conditioned store anywhere in town. In Nigeria, on the other hand, where I lived for two years in the 1970s, there was no electricity, so no question of air-conditioning or even fans, other than those made by the locals out of straw, which we held in our hands and flapped at our faces in a useless attempt to try to cool off the old-fashioned way. The energy required to flap the fan actually generated more heat and just made matters worse—and I couldn’t afford a servant to do it for me.

Ah, for those halcyon, decadent days of the British Raj!

Earlier this week, in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), which is on the ocean, the humidity was predictably high. I was housed in a hotel where there was no air-conditioning, but I did at least have a fan. I figure I can survive any kind of heat if I have a fan. I just collapse in a comfortable chair and flake out under the fan.

They didn’t have air-conditioning in any of the classrooms or lecture halls at the universities or colleges I visited in Vizag (a college in India is a school students go to for the two years prior to university). I didn’t benefit from the fans in the lecture halls, either, because I like to move around; it didn’t even occur to me to park myself under one of the fans. So by the time I was done with a presentation I was usually soaked with sweat. I swear I could have wrung out my shirt and produced a glassful of the stuff if I’d chosen to try.

Drinking water has become liquid gold, nectar indeed. I carry a bottle of it with me in my laptop bag and ply myself with it at every opportunity till the supply is gone. Then, when I get home from the university, I engorge myself from the 25 liter bottle I have in my room, before stepping under the blissfully soothing shower, where the water from the cold faucet is almost too hot from the sun's beating on the rooftop tank.

Believe it or not, in order to cool down the hot water coming from the cold faucet, I turn on the hot faucet. The relatively cold water from the geezer's tank in the bathroom mingles with the hot water coming from the roof and makes it cool.

Go figure.

Barbara Gasdick, my wife Marilyn's best friend, asked me why I wear long sleeved shirts when it's so hot. Well, I'm very susceptible to skin cancer and have been treated for a couple of lesions over the past few years. So I cover up as best I can.

Visakhapatnam

2007-03-21T13:22:00.000-05:00

This city, called Vizag for short, is on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, in the northeast corner of Andhra Pradesh. I flew here from Tirupati last Sunday (March 18) at the invitation of Dr. Prasad, Dean of the School of Education at Andhra University.

He’s kept me hopping! He’s pretty much unflappable, sharp as a tack, and really good at adapting quickly to unexpected circumstances. If I were a military man, I’d be very comfortable with Dr. Prasad as my fearless leader! By the time I leave Guntur tomorrow, I’ll have lectured to four groups of faculty and students at four different colleges or universities and visited two local schools, where I’ll have been given the opportunity to check out the state of technology-integrated school curricula.

I will have addressed close to 500 faculty and students.

Right now, I’m on the train with Dr. Prasad, bound for Guntur, about 300 miles south of Visakhapatnam. I’ll be lecturing there tomorrow at a School of Education and visiting a local elementary school where they’re doing good work integrating computers into the classroom.

More and more elementary and secondary schools in India have computers. The model, for the most part, is to put them in a computer lab where the students go to learn how to use the computer. It is rare to find computers in the actual classrooms. Very few teachers have computers; they’re too expensive. So there’s next to no attempt made anywhere to integrate computers into the curriculum.

There are, however, exceptions to every rule. This morning, for example, after climbing to a high point above Vizag to get a view of the bay and the city below, I visited Visakha Valley School, a private high school, with Mrs. Radha Chary. Radha is one of two Pre-Service Program Mentors in Andhra Pradesh, for an ongoing project, funded by Intel Corporation, called Intel Teach to the Future. If you want to check the project out on the Web, you can go to http://www.learninglinks.org. Other interesting and related websites are http:www.educationinindia.net and http://educate.intel.com/in/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/GradeIndex/.

I met first with the Principal, Dr. Sharada, who just happened to have lived in Pittsburgh for a little more than a year in 1988 when her husband was a consultant with the Bureau of Mines. Our paths may well have crossed during that period of time. It’s a small world anymore. Dr. Sharada was gracious and welcoming. In our introductory conversation, we talked about the challenge of introducing computers for teaching and learning. It was quickly clear to me that she knows what it takes to successfully integrate technology into the curriculum.

Judging by what I saw, albeit all too briefly, her students are using computers across the curriculum to bring learning to life. I attended a session in a classroom where the students demonstrated what they were doing with the computers. Their teacher, Mr. Prasantha Kumar Panda, is one of the Master Trainers in Intel’s Teach to the Future program. I saw two classic science projects where the research the students were required to complete involved social studies, language arts (writing and speech communication), mathematics, art and design, presentation skills, along with a solid core of science.

Very impressive, and it was evident that the students loved using the computers to help them do their academic work. Radha told me that Intel has funded this project in India since 2000. There are offices in every state and I would love to see more of what’s being done. I asked Radha lots of questions and I have many more that have occurred to me since we parted ways at the railway station in Vizag this morning. Fortunately, we’ve exchanged email addresses, so our dialog will be ongoing. I intend to follow this project closely over the years ahead.

I’d like to know if Intel pays for all the hardware and software in the schools where they are training the teachers. If so, how often do they update it? If not, how often is it updated by whichever agency is the source for the money? Does Intel provide the essential technical support? If not, how is technical support handled? What percentage of the students in the Intel schools get to use the computers for the kind of learning across the curriculum that I saw demonstrated this morning? Are there any other non-government organizations as seriously involved as Intel in this effort to help Indian schools?

Radha will be reading this posting and I look forward to hearing from her. She’ll be sending me some of the pix she took during our sessions together and I’ll share them here soon.

It’s nearly 11:00 pm now and I’m settled in my rooms for the night at a Catholic college in Guntur (St. Joseph’s College of Education for Women). It’s a convent, and I spent a couple of hours this evening watching World Cup cricket with one of the nuns. Cool. I’ll be lecturing here in the morning; then, after lunch, I’m off to visit another school where they’re making an effort to integrate technology into the curriculum.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, the pix are of the seafront in Vizag taken from the balcony outside my hotel room (the local YMCA). Then there's me and Radha at the Academic Staff College, where I gave one of my presentations, and me and Radha again at Kailasgiri, the hilltop viewing point above the city of Vizag. The rural scenes were taken in the Araku Valley, a spectacular volcanic geological formation that runs for miles north out of the city of Visakhapatnam.

We took a day-long trip through the valley, stopping along the way to visit various locations of interest. Amongst the pictures, you can see Dumbriguda waterfalls. During the rainy season, this whole area is deluged with rain and the waterfalls explode into raging torrents. The women working by the truck are digging up silt and loading it into the truck so it can be used to make concrete. No backhoes here; labor is cheap (these women probably earn little more than a dollar a day doing what they do), and the people of India have all the time in the world.

At a reservoir not far north of Vizag, there's Dr. Prasad (waving), his wife, Esther, and Dr. Rao and Dr. Douglas, during a boat trip to a lake island for a picnic lunch. Dr. Douglas, the gentleman on the right in the boat, is another pretty amazing guy; he has a PhD in Chemistry and he's now pursuing a second PhD in Educational Technology.

More pix from the Ellora Caves

2007-03-15T14:10:00.000-05:00

The Daulatabad Fort and the Ellora Caves

2007-03-15T12:14:00.000-05:00

Today I accompanied a group of 14 Fulbrighters on a visit to this fort, about 20 kilometers from Aurangabad and on the way to the world famous Ellora caves. It was a moving, at times breathtaking, experience. The fort was built in the 12th century AD, a good 100 years before the Chandragiri fort near Tirupati that I visited in January and told you about in my blog of January 20.

At the fort, there were plenty of black-faced monkeys to keep us amused. There also is a 14th century minaret--the second highest minaret in India.

The Ellora caves are spectacular. Like the Ajanta caves that we visited yesterday, the Ellora caves were carved out of the mountainside during the 7th to 9th centuries, by the monks, using nothing but chisels and hammers. There are some 34 caves in all. Some were worked by communities of worshipping Buddhists, others by Hindu monks, and the most impressive by Jains.

The resulting sculptures and structures leave one awestruck by the technical, architectural, and artistic skills that the generations of monks must have had. The most impressive temple is a Jain temple, carved from the top of the mountain down and from the front of the mountainside in. Most of the Ellora Cave pictures above were taken at this site.

One of the Fulbrighters with us, Aparna Keshaviah, is an Indian Dance specialist (she also has a Masters in Biostatistics from Harvard). She wanted pictures taken of herself posing against the background of the ancient monuments. I think you'll agree that the form of her body appears perfectly in place amongst the timeless beauty of the architecture.

Another Fulbrighter, Roopa Mahadevan, is studying, and specializing in, improvisational aspects of Carnatic music. In one of the caves, where the resonance of the chamber was particularly full and reverberating, she sat in the center and we gathered around while she sang a soulful rendition of an ethereal song.

That's Roopa in the red-orange top and blue jeans in the pictures above, standing next to the moat that runs along the cliff face at the fort.

I'll let the rest of the pictures speak for themselves.

Aurangabad and the Ajanta Caves

2007-03-14T12:31:00.000-05:00

I’m staying at the Ambassador hotel in Aurangabad where 52 Fulbrighters have gathered to get to know each other while sharing experiences about their work in towns and cities all over India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. I find them to be an inspiring group of people whose work amongst the people of South Asia is varied and fascinating.

Those are fellow Fulbrighters in the various pictures above. In one of the pix, the tour guide is explaining some things to us about the caves before we went on the tour of them.

Aurangabad, named after the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, is 250 miles east of Mumbai (Bombay) and has a history which goes back 2,500 years.

Today we visited a piece of that history, the Ajanta caves, once a secluded retreat for Buddhist monks and now a World Heritage site. The first of the caves was cut by the monks, in the second century BC (BCE), into the curved mountainside above the Waghore River (a dry riverbed at this time of year). The remaining 29 caves were carved during the ensuing 800 years.

The whole area was abandoned in the seventh century AD (CE) when Buddhism there waned. The caves were effectively lost to the world, like the Mayan civilizations in South America, only to be “discovered,” over a thousand years later, in 1819, by a group of British officers out on a hunting trip. Their leader, John Smith, good Britisher that he was, started the graffiti that marred the beauty of some of the wall paintings by carefully scratcing his name and the date on a pillar in one of the caves.

Our tour guide told us that Aurangabad has lately become an industrial city, with Australian beers and Indian whiskeys amongst its stable of products. It’s also famous for silk and cotton textiles, as well as being India’s biggest producer of motorbikes. Motorbikes and scooters are the most common motor-driven vehicles on India’s roads.

The drive there and back to the Ajanta Caves was made memorable for me by my companion on the bus, Professor Prasad, who teaches Law at the V.M. Salgaocar College of Law, Panaji, in Goa. He's the son of a farming family in Andhra Pradesh, and he was able to name the huge variety of crops that are grown in Maharashtra state, fields of which we passed along the way. I’ve been curious about Indian farming methods, too, and he was able to answer all my many questions. We also discussed everything and anything under the sun, which today soared into the 90s once again.

Yesterday I visited a Center for Electronics Design and Technology, where they have one of the only two Government of India-funded e-learning centers in India. I met with a group of the professors and presented to them my ten pillars of successful technology integration in education. We had a lively discussion. The center invites local teachers to come in for three week-long, full-time workshops in which they learn to use computers for teaching and learning. This is rather like the ITEC centers in Pennsylvania, for which I worked between 1985 and 1995. In so many ways, Indian elementary and secondary technology-integrated education is in the early stages of development that were common in America in the mid-1980s.

Hopefully, it won’t take India 20 years to catch up.

A miracle in Mumbai

2007-03-12T13:06:00.000-05:00

Today I arrived in Aurangabad for a Fulbright conference. To get here from Tirupati I had to fly from Tirupati to Hyderabad, then fly to Mumbai, and from there take another plane to Aurangabad. Aurangabad is about an hour's flight from Mumbai.

The trip was uneventful until I got to Mumbai. All the computer systems were down at the airport, which naturally caused a certain amount of confusion in this day and age. I got an airline bus from the Indian Airways terminal to the Jetways terminal, a two minute ride. Then the fun started.

I quickly spotted a small clutch of travellers who I took to be Fulbrighters. It turned out they weren't, and that was good because of what happened a while later. These friendly folks were travelling together on a tour of India, led by a remarkable young man named Ati K. Jain, an American of Indian descent, who is president and co-owner of the Cross-Culture tour company. Once a year, he steps out of the office and becomes a tour guide himself.

My lucky day. He took me under his wing when he saw that I was on the same plane as his President's Tour group. He asked me for my ticket and disappeared into a mass of people waiting to get boarding passes. The passes for every flight were being processed manually and the airline was calling out flight numbers one by one in the order of departure to clear the backlog of delayed flights.

It looked like we would be leaving at least an hour late. Meanwhile I chatted with the people in the tour group, two of whom, Dr. and Mrs Zieve, were particularly friendly. We had a great chat. After a while, it occurred to me that Mrs. Zieve--Elaine--looked a lot like my sister, Barbara. I told her so and asked her if I could take a picture of her with her husband. So there they are above.

If you read this blog, Barbara--or anyone else in the family--what do you think?

Finally, Mr. Jain returned with my ticket and boarding pass. Talk about a guardian angel! He pointed me in the direction of security and off I went. Security was a relative formality since I'd already been through security twice en route. In no time at all I was on the plane and settling in for the flight.

Next thing I know, there's a tap on my shoulder, and it's Mr. Jain handing me the black pouch in which I keep my passports and other precious travel documents. I'd left it behind in a tray after taking it from around my neck to go through security!!

I practically had a heart attack when I realized what I'd done. I probably wouldn't have noticed until well into the flight, if then, and I probably would have really had a heart attack when I discovered that I'd left it behind in Mombai.

It was Elaine who saved the day. While we'd been chatting, she'd noticed the label on the black pouch I was wearing around my neck, and when she came through security some time after me, she spotted it, figured it was mine, and Mr. Jain grabbed it and brought it along.

Wow!! Thank you, Elaine and Mr. jain. Thank you again and again. Now I really do believe in miracles.

To all my faithful readers...

2007-03-10T08:18:00.000-05:00

Thanks for reading my blog. A special thanks to those of you who post comments. It's great to get your feedback. Please keep it coming :)

The first picture is of the students in my Masters of Education class. The second is of the students in my Bachelors of Education class (if you look carefully, you'll see me nestled in amongst the girls in this picture).

Bernie :)

While I was out a-walking this day...

2007-03-10T05:43:00.000-05:00

I went for an early morning walk today to make up for the walk I missed yesterday evening. I missed yesterday evening’s walk because I was waiting for someone to visit with me at 6:00 pm and he never showed up. Another example of “Indian time,” I guess. (*smile*) But I can’t complain, since I forgot to meet with someone else a couple of days ago.

Once the sun’s up in these parts, temperatures soar into the 90s, so 5:30 am or pm are good times to venture outdoors for any length of time. I usually walk for about an hour. I head straight for the university campus, the gates to which are about 100 yards down the road from the guest house where I’m staying. Once on campus, I wander along the asphalted pathways more or less at random, purposely varying my route for variety’s sake.

Here are some of the interesting scenes I observed this morning. I’m sorry, I don’t have any pictures; I forgot to take my camera (*sigh*). But let me see if I can paint some of the pictures with words.

With International Women’s Day still very much on my mind, my attention this morning was drawn to a domestic scene that unfolded during the course of my perambulations. Near a building site where a new auditorium is under construction, there’s a small house in which a couple live. When I pass by in the evenings, I always see chickens wandering around the open yard and across the road (the only “domesticated” animals I see tied up are buffaloes and bullocks; dogs, cows, goats, and chickens, for the most part, roam free).

Sometimes, as I pass by the house, I’ll see either the husband or his wife, or both together, doing this and that. Nothing special. I greet them, as I go by, with a smile and a joining of the hands in front of my chest and a softly spoken “Hi” or “Namaste.”

This morning, at 6:00 am, only the wife was outdoors, cracking kindling to start a fire under a cooking pot. We exchanged smiles and I walked on.

About 20 minutes later, I passed by again. This time the hubbie was up, sitting sleepily on the porch outside the front door, while his wife prepared his breakfast.

The third time I passed by, the hubbie was sitting closer to the fire, sipping a cup of tea, while his wife was bent over the cooking pot about to serve his breakfast.

This scenario is repeated in one form or another all over the world, isn’t it? Women get up early to attend to their husband’s needs. The women are attending to their own needs, too, but the husband never, or hardly ever, takes his turn at the domestic chores.

Now this was a fair distribution of responsibilities in the hunter-gatherer days, when your man was off getting the food that your woman put on the table. But more and more, the women of India have to go out hunting and gathering, too—working to earn money to supplement the husband’s often meager income. And the men of India—as elsewhere, I know—don’t lift a finger at home.

In India, the husband/father is the dominating figure in most every household, from what I’ve been told and from what little I’ve had the opportunity to observe with my own eyes. Marriages are arranged. The couple come together. The woman effectively is expected to give herself to her man as a vessel for his children and as a servant to all his needs.

It’s a very, very unequal and unfair arrangement. Gandhi, good man though he surely was and much as he loved his wife, Kasturbai, he was horrible to her at times—dominating and demeaning in so many ways. He'd be the first to admit it; in fact he did so in his autobiography.

Still today, all over the world, men tend to get away with this, and it’s sad to see.

On another subject, this morning, for the first time, I had a grand opportunity to take a picture of the big blackbird with the gorgeous, burnished, golden-brown wings which I described in an earlier posting (January 16, 2007). The one I saw this morning was 10 feet up on the branch of a tree, and preoccupied with keeping some snatched food in its beak. So he didn't see me watching him (or her) and I could easily have got a fine picture if I’d had my camera with me. The food in its beak was wriggling, trying to get away. Then, suddenly, a squirrel leapt from an adjacent tree onto the branch my feathered friend was perched on, and I realized it was the squirrel’s baby that the bird had grabbed. The bird took off; the squirrel continued the chase, leaping unbelievably and desperately from limb to limb in a pointless and vain attempt to rescue its child. So sad; so sad; but that's life, "red in tooth and claw."

I had a moment, during my walk, when a flicker of fear fluttered up the back of my neck. A dog was racing towards me like a bat out of hell. I thought it was a greyhound at first, it was running so fast and so gracefully. It wasn’t looking at me, so I figured it must be after something else. I looked behind me and could see nothing untoward, nothing that might attract a hungry dog’s attention. Then, in the distance ahead of me, I saw a pack of five or six dogs coming up at a canter and slowing down to a walk, looking around at each other like they’d decided to give up the chase. The dog that streaked past me must have been running from a fight. I’m glad he got away.

A few girls were up early, either studying or exercising. Some were wearing pyjamas (an Indian word, by the way), others a light house dress which reaches down to their ankles--what my wife Marilyn would call a muu-muu.

At one point, in the distance and in the shade of overhanging trees, I saw what appeared to be four girls, dressed in salwahs (light trousers and a loose top that goes below the waist, like a long shirt), walking together towards me. They were in twos, each pair holding hands. This is not unusual in India. Men and women, boys and girls, hold hands with friends of the same sex, or they put their arms around each others’ shoulders or waists.

As the couples got closer, however, I realized that each pair was a boy and a girl. “This is a first,” I thought. “Boys and girls holding hands on campus. What a thing!”

At the university here, I’ve never seen a young man make any kind of physical contact with a girl whom they’ve come to visit. Such visits do appear to be allowed, but the couple just stand around and chat, almost always with another girl in tow as a chaperone, and always during daylight hours.

Yet here were these couples walking along hand-in-hand. Bless my soul!

Fortunately they kept coming in my direction, otherwise I might have drawn the wrong conclusion. I eventually figured out, though, that the two boys had some kind of disability. It wasn’t until I greeted them, and we all stopped to chat, that I realized that the two boys were blind. The girls, students at the university, were taking them by the hand to a test center where the boys were due to take an academic exam. The girls were their aides.

Beautiful, and I told them so, and wished the boys every success.

By now it was getting hot, so I scurried back to the guest house before the sun climbed any higher in the sky.

Indian time

2007-03-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

One of the things I was told before I came to India was to be flexible. Well, let me put it this way, my gift for flexibility has been stretched close to the limit!

Nothing ever happens on time. That is to say, everything happens anything up to several hours later than planned. I now know that this has always been the case in India. I’m reading a biography of E.M. Forster and he observed the same phenomenon about 100 years ago. This is not a problem once you get used to it, but every now and then it gets to be a bit frustrating.

For example, my class first thing in the morning never begins on time. This doesn't bother me at all; it's just the way it is. The students start to dribble in between 10:00 am and 10:15 am or so—and continue to dribble in till about 10:30 am. Meanwhile I usually get cracking at about 10:10 am, just because it seems the right thing to do. I’ve even got into the habit of filling in the “dead” time early on by giving whichever students are there a slide show on my computer (which I project onto the classroom wall) of the pictures I’ve taken with my camera. I probably take a couple of dozen pictures a day, so there’s always something new for them to enjoy. They love that, especially when the pictures are of them!

Where it gets to be frustrating is when my boss walks into the classroom unannounced, as she did at around 10:10 am last week. As usual, only about 10 students were there (out of 50), and she looks shocked, like this is the most unusual thing she’s ever seen!! I feel bad; the looks on the faces of the few students who are there show that they are embarrassed, even though this is not unusual at all. Yeesh!

Take right now, for example. I’m typing this blog posting while waiting for a session to start at the International Women’s Day conference. The session was scheduled to begin at 10:00 am. It’s now 10:27 am and there’s not a presenter in sight!

It’s really quite amazing. How do they get anything done?!!

Here’s another example. Yesterday evening, the Phys Ed students were “scheduled” to perform at 5:00 pm as part of a Women’s Day concert. I told them that I would be there for the event to watch them doing their gymnastics.

[An aside from the International Women’s Day conference] OK, it’s now 10:31 am and there’s still not a presenter in sight. I’ll keep you posted as we go along here.

I turn up for the concert at 5:00 pm on the dot. The band’s warming up and a few students have already taken up seats in the front rows, mostly the PE students dressed in their uniforms of white sport shirts, burgundy sweat pants and sneakers. Their presence is a clue that I’d got the right time for the show.

[An aside from the International Women’s Day conference] One of the presenters just turned up, folks. It’s 10:34 am. No one’s on the dais yet.

Back to the concert. I’m combining my evening walk to coincide with my attendance at the concert, so I just do another circuit of the campus while waiting for things to happen. 5:30 pm comes and goes. 6:00 pm comes and goes. By this time, the audience has swelled to a couple of hundred and the band is merrily blasting away with some not unpleasant Indian pop music. I take a couple of pictures of the crowd. Some students run up to have their picture taken with me. Dignitaries are taking up their seats on stage. The students are enjoying the music; a couple of them are standing and gyrating and doing weird things with their arms and hips and legs, as only young things and older drunks dare to do.

Absolutely no sign that the gymnastics are about to begin.

I continue with my walk. Pop concerts really aren’t my scene at all. 6:30 pm; the music rolls on. Another lap; my feet are getting sore.

7:00 pm; I give up and go home. After all, the girls did give me a preview of the show the day before. On the way home, I see the Vice Chancellor’s car turning into the driveway of the VC’s house on campus. She’s the guest of honor at the concert. So that’s who everyone’s waiting for!

[A whispered aside from the International Women’s Day conference] Things might be happening here at the conference. It’s 10:45 am; the dais is still empty, but the ripple of conversation behind me in the auditorium suggests that something’s about to happen. I’ll continue this blog posting later...

Shhhhh....

International Women's Day

2007-03-06T11:59:00.000-05:00

This evening, while I was out for my walk, I came across the Phys Ed students preparing some cheerleader-style routines for the celebrations to mark International Women's Day. SPMVV is a women's university, so it's only right that they should make a fuss of the event.

Tomorrow begins a three day international conference organized by the Center for Women's Studies. I've been asked to say a few words at the inauguration ceremony and then, on the last day, I'll be chairing one of the conference sessions.

Next to no one reads my blog, so I'm going to give my faithful readers a preview of what I plan to say tomorrow. That way I can get in a blog posting for my pains. Here goes...It is shocking that women are exploited in this world of ours. It is time to say ENOUGH!

Enough of human trafficking of women!

Enough of the subordination of women in marriage!

Enough of unequal opportunities for women in education and jobs!

Enough of unequal pay for women who do the same work as men!

Enough of women playing second fiddle to men!

ENOUGH! ENOUGH! Enough… This must not stand.

Men AND women, we ALL must work to stop this abuse of the better half of humankind.From the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor, male and female, we all have dreams.

Listen to what the revered Mahatmah Gandhi had to say:“I shall work for an India,” he said, “in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice, an India in which there shall be no high class and low class of people, an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony… There can be no room in such an India for the curse of untouchability… Women will enjoy the same right as men… This is the India of my dreams.”

Actions speak louder than words, and as we all know, Gandhi was a fearless man of action who galvanized this beautiful nation of India in its march to freedom.

This conference, too, is all about action.

This conference is a call on all levels of government to design gender-sensitive budgets. It sounds like a dry topic, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s one that is crucial to achieving a civil society where all citizens can, with equal opportunity, pursue their dreams.

Education is the key, isn’t it? If all the women of this world had the same, equal opportunity to education as men—which they don’t—it would be a much better place for everyone. Education must be free and of high quality. We need many more schools, many more qualified teachers, so that EVERY child has a seat in a classroom where the teacher-pupil ratio is of a manageable size.

It is absurd that many, many children, especially female children, are kept out of school through no fault of their own.Free, quality education for all is expensive. But the money is there; it’s just that it’s allocated in budgets to other priorities. What greater priority can there be than the education of our children?

I’m no expert on any of this, ladies and gentlemen. I simply have a voice which I choose to use to express my opinion and to help others. And when Professor Parvathy invited me to address this gathering, I seized the opportunity to learn about women’s issues beyond what I already know from simply living out my life. I do have six sisters, after all, so I guess it was a matter of survival for me to listen to what they had to say!

I’ve always admired strong women. I married a strong woman. I’ve lived and worked on five of the world’s continents, and here in India I’ve met, and come to know, more strong women than I have known anywhere else in the world. Strong women like those at this university—students and faculty—who have arrived at where they are in their lives in spite of the many and severe disadvantages that they, and their families, have had to overcome along the way.

I mention families because none of us could be where we are without help, especially when it comes to education.

Women and men together must keep knocking on the doors of the male-dominated corridors of Gender Justice, demanding equal rights and equal opportunity for all. We must not cease to knock until our demands are met--met by deeds, not by empty words.

So I commend Professor Parvathy and her team for organizing this conference. I commend you all for being here to add your voice to theirs. As we celebrate International Women’s Day, may our voices combine with those worldwide to become a cry of rage against the abuses and inequalities that women, to this day, continue to endure.

Dharwad and Bangalore

2007-03-03T13:20:00.000-05:00

I should tell you the tale of my visit to Karnataka state.

It happened during the days, four weeks ago, before I flew to England out of Bangalore. Earlier, in December, while attending a conference in Bhuvaneshwar, I’d got to know Dr. Indira Prakash, chair of the Psychology department at Bangalore University. She asked me if I’d come to Bangalore to lecture at her university. I readily agreed and, after checking out schedules and so forth, it seemed convenient to go there en route to my two weeks of vacation in England, since there was a direct flight from Bangalore to London.

The plan became a three university lecture tour when Indira got in touch with Dr. Ashok Pal and Dr. Mewa Singh, at Karnatak University in Dharwad, and Mysore University, Mysore, respectively. I was to take the overnight train to Dharwad on Monday evening, February 5, lecture at Karnatak University on Tuesday, take another overnight train to Mysore, lecture at Mysore University on Wednesday morning, see the sights of Mysore in the afternoon and evening, stay overnight in Mysore, take the early morning bus to Bangalore on Thursday, lecture at Bangalore University on Thursday and Friday, then fly off to London, England in the early morning hours of Saturday, February 10. Phew!

That was the plan. But this is India, where plans “oft gang awry.”

I was met at Dharwad station by Dr. Ashok Pal, a bustling, super-charged dynamo of a man. He greeted me with a hearty handshake, a beaming smile, and the news that the whole thing had been cancelled. Turns out there was a water rights dispute with the adjoining state of Tamil Nadu. Everyone in the entire state of Karnataka was on strike. People were picketing the streets. They were even picketing the railway lines in, and between, Mysore and Bangalore. And, of course, the universities were closed.

“Oh well,” thought I, “I have a big, fat book to read and maybe Dr. Ashok Pal can sneak me into a room on campus where they have internet access. No problem.”

Ashok had a different idea. He got on the phone and rustled up a bunch of students for me to lecture to, put me up overnight at the university guest house in Dharwad, and had me lecture again the next day, before putting me on the overnight train to Bangalore. By this time, the water rights dispute had been put on hold while someone tried to sort out the political mess.

In Bangalore, I was the guest of Mrs. Indumathi Rao, who founded and, for the past 25 years, has managed what has now become the South Asia Center for Community Based Rehabilitation. Indumathi is a quiet, unassuming, super-charged dynamo of a woman. I had a wonderful two days in Bangalore, lecturing and visiting schools for children with disabilities and training-to-work tech centers for disabled adults. I lectured to Psychology majors about Assistive technologies and Universal Design. I lectured to the Education majors about Instructional Technology. I met so many beautiful people. It was pure joy.

The pictures show people and places in and around Dharwad and Bangalore.

I was puzzled by the small seismological observatory at Dharwad's Karnatak University. There wasn't a single crack in it...

How about those monkeys on the guest house roof?

The little boy I’m holding in the next picture has hydrocephalus. His mom (sitting next to me in the picture) attended my lecture on assistive technologies the day before. At the end of the lecture, trying to hold back her tears, she asked me if I knew of any assistive technologies that would help her son. I said I couldn’t answer her question without seeing the boy, and I offered to come visit her at home. She said she’d love for me to do that. So the next day I went to her home nearby and visited with the family for a while. I offered to stay in touch, help her in any way I can, and I will, as long as I’m alive.

The gentleman in the pink shirt in the next picture is Dr. Ashok Pal. We’re standing in front of the university guesthouse, along with another professor from the Psychology department.

The picture of the students working on a group activity was taken at Karnatak University in Dharwad during my presentation about instructional technology.

The impressive, ornately-architectured, palace-like structure is one of the government buildings in Bangalore, which is the capital of Karnataka state.

The lady on my left in the next picture is Dr. Indira Prakash, chair of the Psychology department at Bangalore University. We’re standing in front of the new building she designed. On my right is Srimathi Indumathi Rao.

In the next picture, the lady standing next to me in the blue sari is the principal of the school for children with disabilities that I visited while I was in Bangalore.

The four ladies standing together in front of a ramp outside the restaurant where we’d just had lunch are all professors in the Department of Education at Bangalore University. I took the picture partly because I thought the ramp was a good example of Universal Design, but I also think the ladies look delightful in their saris.

Games people play

2007-03-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

There appears to be an up tick in games activity on campus these days. This may simply be a perception of mine based on the fact that the daytime temperature has increased significantly on what it was when I first arrived in early December three months ago. I don’t know if the hostels have air conditioning, but if not, perhaps the students are more inclined to spend the evening hours in the cooler, breezier outdoors.

It could also be because I go for my walks later. For all I know, the students always have come out to play in the early evening time. But it was chilly in December and January, in the evenings especially, and I think sport was more of an indoor thing. They sometimes had basketball matches in the Sports Stadium next to the running track, for example.

Whatever the case, there's a lot more going on outdoors these days, so much so that I have to organize my walk so as to avoid the milling crowds of students, especially on the sports fields and along the road that fronts the hostels. Many students also can be seen, singly or in clutches of two or three, sitting cross-legged in the walkways where I pass by, often in isolated, out-of-the-way places, their notebooks and textbooks spread out around them as they study to prepare for the many tests they have to take.

I'm an easily recognized figure on campus now--and not just because I'm this weird, lop-sided white guy who wears a funny hat to protect his chrome dome from the sun. I've taught many of the students, even those outside the School of Education, because of guest lectures that I've given in the Engineering, Science, Business Management, and Humanities areas. So during my walk, I'm constantly being greeted as I steam on by and, of course, must extend my greetings in return.

The pictures here illustrate some of the activities that go on all around. Just now cricket is very popular. The girls are as competitive as any boys I've seen play the game. India, like many countries, now has a women's cricket team. There's nothing men do that women can't take on, too. We men just have to learn to wrap our heads around that idea and get used to it.

The closeup picture of the girls shows the uniform they wear for PE (not including the baseball cap!). I made a movie of one of the 100 meter races, but the blogger won't post it, so I've just included some still clips.

Enjoy!

Snake!

2007-03-01T12:23:00.000-05:00

Finally a snake sighting, though I didn’t see it myself.

I was about to set off on my evening jaunt around the university campus when I heard these cries of alarm coming from the garden below my apartment window. I looked down and saw three men milling around one of the flower beds. I knew right away what was going on, grabbed my camera, and hurried on down.

Snakes are everywhere, but it's not often we catch sight of one. Sensibly, snakes prefer to go under cover, away from human and other predatory gaze. Human snake predation is primarily premised on fear, isn’t it? Most of us are convinced that the snake we’re looking at is deadly—just in case. It’s called “playing safe.” I mean, you never know, right?

But I’ve never been attacked by a snake. Have you? I saw a few when I lived for two years in Nigeria, West Africa, and gave them a wide berth. I've seen snakes in England and America, too. They scare the heck out of me; but that's because I'm ignorant.

Fortunately, the snake the men sighted in the garden of the guest house got away. I hate to kill anything—except mosquitoes. I enjoy killing mosquitoes. I hunt them down. I have a whole arsenal of weapons handy at all times. Any mosquito that strays into my apartment is soon toast. But I carefully step around or over most anything else, just as I stepped around this mother and her puppies while out walking yesterday. Don't you just love how that one little guy's guzzling away!

Incidentally—and surprisingly—I can’t remember ever in India being bothered by flies. Why is this? The climate is hot and dry; maybe that helps. Maybe, too, the free rein given to cows and dogs and bullocks and goats makes them bait for the flies, better grazing ground than me. All I know is that I can’t recall ever seeing a fly in my apartment. I’ve been caught in the flight path of one or two on my daily evening walks, but I’ve never been plagued by them, not by any means.

I wonder what it would be like if I were here during the monsoon.....

During my walk today I was glad I had my camera with me. I usually do, because when I don't I invariably see something priceless that I wished I could snap for the ages. Tomorrow I'll tell you all about the games people play around here. Stay tuned :)

Tirumala

2007-02-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

The Tirumala Hills that tower above Tirupati are famous throughout the Hindu world. The Temple of the Lord Venkateshwara is nestled on a high plateau amongst the hills. Anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 pilgrims a day swirl through the temple to gain a glimpse of the God who resides therein.

Deity viewing is called Darshan. I did the Darshan on the evening of February 4th, the day before I left on my recent travels to Karnataka and England. My hosts were Drs. Gunashekar and Jamuna Duvuru who, because they have friends in high places, assured me A1 VIP status for the occasion. As a result, I was able to complete the pilgrimage in a fraction of the time it would have taken had I gone under my own auspices. I also was privileged to approach within just a couple of feet of the doors to the inner sanctum which, when opened, revealed the diamond-encrusted statue of the deity.

Any wish made at this time before the figure of the Lord Venkateshwara is granted. I wished for the safety and happiness of the many loved ones in my life.

The pictures you see above were taken during two earlier visits I made to the town of Tirumala with Dr. Jamuna, prior to the day on which I did the Darshan. We ran into half a dozen of my students who insisted on posing for photographs. Then a lady who I didn't know came by with her baby and put him in my arms so she could take some pictures. The little lad was a bit of a handful and started screaming the moment he clapped eyes on me, but I'm always happy to oblige.

Monkeys abound on the slopes leading up to the temple heights and there's a farm where they protect a species of spotted deer. In the right light (sunset in this case) the cliffs, too, present a magnificent spectacle.

Tirumala is a beautiful place. The temple is wealthier than the Vatican, and much of the money that pours in from pilgrims is spent on maintaining a pristine environment that is conducive to prayer and meditation. Jamuna took me to the Temple farm, near Tirupati, where elephants, cows, brahma bulls and other animals and crops associated with Temple worship are cared for. Definitely the cleanest, most well-run farm I've ever seen. One of the elephants I called "My Dancing Lady" because she never stopped rocking from side to side as she scooped up her sugar beet meal.

Jamuna also took me to the Veda School, where boys from 8 to 18 are trained to become temple priests. The school was founded only recently, in the early 1990s, I believe, in response to a concern that the incursions of modern, global influences might curtail the supply of properly-prepared ministers for the thousands of temples dotted around the Hindu world.

This is a problem shared by other faiths, too.

Hinduism is perhaps the oldest religion in the world, its roots reaching back over 3,500 years. I believe it is the Hindu religion, the religion of over 90% of the population of India, that has made the Indian people the gentle, caring, loving and lovable people I have always found them to be. There are, however, aspects to Hindu culture that even Hindus abhor, such as the injustices of the caste system, which, though officially dead and done with since 1950, when the Indian Constitution was promulgated, still creates silly divisions amongst the people.

Today, for example, I was talking to a man who has a Masters in Philosophy and who was bringing his sister to enroll at the university in the School of Education, having completed her Bachelors degree in Mathematics. Innocently—and ignorantly—I asked him if he was a Brahmin, the top caste from which the Hindu priests are chosen. He told me that No; he’s a member of the so-called Backward classes.

Now if that’s not a silly situation, I don’t know what is!

But it takes time to eradicate something that has become ingrained over millennia of social stresses and strains, so one shouldn’t expect the problem to go away overnight, just because the government of India says so.

There is a will to do so, though, and India will, I’m confident, find a way.

Testing.... Testing...

2007-02-26T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is a test.

I’d love to know if you’re reading my blog, so I’d appreciate it if you’d click on the Comment button at the end of this posting and drop me a line. That’s all. If you want to tell me who you are and why you’re reading my blog, so much the better.

Have you missed me? I’ve been out of e-circulation for a good three weeks now (I just coined that word e-circulation, btw, so maybe I can claim to be first!). On February 4, I took an overnight train to Dharwad, which is a city in the adjoining state of Karnataka (I’m in Andhra Pradesh). On the Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, I lectured in Dharwad at Karnatak University before taking another overnight train to Bangalore. Thursday and Friday I lectured at Bangalore University. Then, early Saturday morning, February 10, I took off from Bangalore airport on a direct flight to London. I stayed overnight at the Tavistock hotel near Russell Square.

In the meantime, my wife, Marilyn, was on her way to London from the United States. I made sure I was at Heathrow when she arrived. Her plane was nearly five hours late! Poor Marilyn looked understandably frazzled. Not only was the journey horrendous; to make matters worse, her checked-in baggage had been left behind in Chicago.

We both hate traveling by air and now we have further evidence of what a diabolical way it is to get from point A to point B.

Some generous TLC was in order, so we holed up in the Tavistock for the next three days, recovering from jet lag and taking in some of the London sights. Wednesday the 14th, Valentine’s Day, we took a train to Stoke-on-Trent, which is near where my mom lives. The following day, Thursday the 15th, was her 98th birthday.

We found her in great spirits and in great shape. She bossed everyone around, as usual. It was just like old times, if you’ll pardon the pun. After lunch at a local restaurant in Stone, we all came back to her place, where she blew out a few candles on her birthday cake before opening her presents.

We rented a car in Stoke-on-Trent and, the day after mom’s birthday, Marilyn and I tootled off to the West Country, taking in Land’s End along the way. We had a great time, staying at the best hotels (one night at my brother, Anthony’s, generous expense) and eating whatever we pleased for a change. It was wet a lot of the time, and chilly, too, but we enjoyed the warmth of each other’s company after so long apart.

All too soon, our two week stay in England came to an end and back we went to Stone to visit some more with mom and to prepare for our return, in Marilyn’s case to the United States, and in mine to India.

So that’s why I’ve been out of e-circulation, folks. Now click on that Comment button and drop me a line, OK?

Three funerals and a wedding

2007-02-12T05:13:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was in my room in the guesthouse when I heard the distant sound of firecrackers (it could have been gunfire, and I considered the possibility). The sound was sporadic, a quickfire burst of bangs every minute or so. The sound was getting closer, till it seemed so close I decided to check it out by sneaking a peak out the window from the safety of my room. Eventually a slow-moving procession passed along the road in front of the guesthouse gate.

It was a funeral. Leading the way were two men carrying a bag full of firecrackers. Every 20 yards or so, they lit a round and dropped it in the road.

Following them was a tight group of mourners--all men, some beating drums. Next came a team of four men carrying on an open, wooden-frame bier the body of the deceased. The body was draped in cloth and covered with flowers.

Immediately following the body were more mourners and an autorickshaw full of garlands and loose flowers. Men were strewing the flowers on the road as the procession proceeded to the cremation grounds.

A long line of about a hundred mourners, women as well as men, straggled along behind the bier, everyone on foot.

Since then, I've watched two more funeral corteges pass by. For one, I went outside and stood by the roadside to pay my respects. I joined my hands flat together in front of my chest in the prayerful Hindu gesture of respect.

Whenever I see a funeral, I recall John Donne's poignant words: "Every man's death diminishes me; ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

Last Sunday, by contrast, I attended my first Indian wedding. It was a vibrantly colourful and elaborate affair. Whereas the funerals reminded me of the passing and fleeting nature of life, a marriage in India is all about the promise of new life, birth, and rebirth, in the cycle of life and death.

Most marriages in India are arranged by the families of the bride and groom. This does not appear to be a bad thing, judging by the marriages of the people I've come to know and love during my short time here. I still have a lot to learn about married life in India, but I have a sense that the making and rearing of children, with its contribution to the extended family, is central to the enterprise. Love may, and no doubt often does, come later. But the parents and close relatives of the bride and groom match their offspring up with very practical considerations in mind.

In the "West," love between the couple is the central issue before the marriage is etched in stone. It's the couple who decide the match and predicate it on the love they have for each other. Children also are often the issue, if you'll pardon the intended pun, but not necessarily, by any means. It doesn't really matter whether they have children or not.

In India, a childless marriage is a sad situation as far as I can tell. But it is not a broken marriage. I am amazed to learn that only one or two percent of marriages in India end up in divorce.

But things are changing as the mores of the developed world seep into Indian life. Apparently, more and more marriages are patterned after the "love match" model. One wonders, as one wonders about any change, if this is a good thing.

The sure thing is that change will happen, and only then will we find out.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

2007-02-03T11:56:00.000-05:00

Some of you may have noticed that I don't have a lot of hair. Indeed, I have been told I'm follicly-challenged, which is interesting because I'm not.

This afternoon, to check the spelling of "follicly," I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and discovered that a follicle is the tiny sac in the skin in which hairs and other things take root. I always thought a follicle was a hair; but there you are, once again I discover that I don't know everything after all.

So I have lots of follicles; maybe as many as I had when I was born. It's just that hairs don't tend to grow in them any more (*sigh*).

I do, however, still occasionally need the services of a barber. So off I toddled this afternoon to one of the local establishments with the intention of combining business with pleasure--go for a walk and along the way get my hair trimmed.

The first barbershop I tried had a customer in the barber's chair, so I sat down to wait my turn. The customer had a magnificent head of hair and the barber was meticulously clipping away, one hair at a time, with a pair of scissors. After ten minutes of watching this, I figured I'd be there all day, so I took my leave.

About half a mile further down the road I found another barbershop (there are lots of them in India because the men are very fussy about their appearance and they just about ALL have full heads of hair). Here the place was empty except for a little boy who was busy cleaning things. I assumed the little boy wasn't the barber and he didn't understand a thing I was saying, not even my stabs at Telugu, so I was about to take my leave when in came the barber himself.

He looked at me strangely, like I was from another planet. I'm not sure if this was because I'm Caucasian or because I'm bald. Like, "What's this guy doing here? He's bald as a coot!"

Anyway, I tugged at my poor excuse for a head of hair to indicate why I was there--like he couldn't figure that out for himself! Then I asked him in what I thought was my best Telugu: "Kitna? --How much?"

Like the little boy, he appeared to have not a clue what I was saying. Again, I'm not sure if this was because my pronunciation was horrible, or, as is more likely, he couldn't believe what he'd heard. Like, "Whoa, did this white dude just say something in Telugu, or what?"

Turns out that "Kitna?" is Hindi for "How much?" In Telugu it's "Enta?"

Anyway, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a few rupee coins. Holding them out to him, I said again: "Kitna?" This time, his understanding assisted by my visual aid, he thought for a moment, looked me up and down, and then, using his hands, flashed ten fingers at me twice.

R20 (20 rupees--45 cents). "Not bad," I thought. I can afford that.

So we struck a deal, he sat me down in the chair, draped me with a white cloth, and got to work. The whole job took about five minutes, just like in America. The only difference was that this guy not only cut my hair, he also took care of everything else--eyebrows, ears (inside and out), mustache, and nose (also inside and out--too much information?). He even put a fresh blade in his razor to take care of the back of my neck.

For Jane Debacco's benefit (and for Marilyn's, too, since she'll find this a hoot) I'm going to say that again in my best pseudo-German:

"Ir trimme mein augenbraue, und mein ohr haar, und mein schnoz haar, und mein schnozbart!"

Yeah, yeah, Jane, I looked the words up in an online English-German dictionary and now know that nose is actually "schnauze" and mustache is "schnurrbart," but Marilyn and I much prefer our own coinage of "schnoz" and "schnozbart."

Back to my story, the barber finished the job and whisked off the cloth with a flourish. I stepped out of the chair and gave him a R100 note. He rummaged around in a draw to get me my change. I was feeling generous, so I gave him a R10 tip (22 cents). Hey, that's a 50% tip, you guys! Gimme a break, OK?!

And remind me to get a haircut immediately before I leave India. It'll be my last chance to take advantage of a great deal. A haircut in America costs me $15 any more. That's R675 at the current rate of exchange.

I'm getting used to this place

2007-01-31T13:55:00.000-05:00

When I first arrived in India I was mildly appalled at the garbage lying aorund all over the place. I was taken aback by the dust and pollution (I spent my first three days in Delhi!). I was forewarned about the cows, but still it seemed odd that they should be given the run of the place. Then there are the poor, mangy-looking dogs that look like they’ve been in some awful scrapes in the course of their miserable lives, and the altogether-too-many people who look like they can barely make it from day to day, and the crazy driving and the constant blaring of horns.

Funny thing about the litter is that I'm getting used to it now. I’m completely accustomed to seeing cows in odd places, leaving evidence of their passing here, there and everywhere. I’m still sad for the dozens, probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of dogs running wild and fending for themselves. It’s going to take longer for me to get used to that. But for the rest, it’s all now no big deal. I don’t mind it at all.

The dust’s clean, dry soil that’s gotten fluffed up a bit; it settles down eventually before it’s fluffed up again. The air in Tirupati, especially on the outskirts where I live, is as clean as can be expected in this polluted world of ours. The crazy driving—and this is scary to think about—actually seems normal to me now. Back in America it’s all going to seem so boring out there on the roads.

The horns? Why, that’s necessary. How else are you going to tell whatever it is in front of you to get out of the way? And as for the poverty, the poor people still have their dignity. OK, so they don’t have much, and they look down-at-heel, but they don’t bother anyone, they go about their business, they make their way. Occasionally, I’m asked for money and I gladly give it. In fact, I collect small notes and coins for just that purpose. No big deal. I notice other of my Indian friends here do the same thing. Professor Ramamurti keeps his coins in his shirt pocket and the only time he reaches for them is when he’s going to give them away.

The driving conditions are awful, though. Traffic lanes are in the eye of the beholder. If there’s room to go through, it’s a lane—even if it’s on the wrong side of the road. If you can get away with it, do it. Professor Ramamurti’s driver, Nagraj, is a real daredevil. He scares the wits out of me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why Professor Ramamurti always sits in the back seat and has me sit in the passenger seat up front.At first I thought he was just being polite, but now I know he’s even more scared for his life than I am.

Yesterday, the car I was in had to drive around this huge cow that was just wandering down the middle of the road, against the traffic, quite unperturbed. But I've yet to see an accident or anything get run over, which is a miracle in itself, considering the Indian disregard for traffic signs and rules.

They routinely drive on the wrong side of the road, like I said, or go the wrong way round a roundabout. Imagine you were going the wrong way around the Ligonier Diamond, for example. They do that all the time here. My theory is that, precisely because everyone drives so outrageously and erratically, everyone is on their guard against the untoward. The untoward becomes the norm, so they're always on their guard!

How's that for logic?

Everyone has to be very alert, even pedestrians, because there are no sidealks. I'm serious. Disaster lurks every few seconds. Overtaking is done on a wing and a prayer. Drivers just assume that ongoing traffic, if it's smaller than you, will yield and move out of the way--even if that means driving off the road.

But no one argues with buses or trucks. They do whatever they please.

Flying the Flag

2007-01-27T11:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Republic Day in India. On January 26, 1950, India declared itself a Republic, with a newly written Constitution fresh off the presses.

The day is marked by parades and ceremonial hoistings of the national flag. I helped hoist two myself. I was invited by one of the professors at Sri Venkateshwara University to be the guest of honor at a local elementary school named for Mother Teresa. It’s not a denominational school. The nice thing about the Hindu religion is that it welcomes people of every religious stripe under its umbrella, and Mother Teresa is perhaps even more revered amongst Hindus than she is in the Catholic church.

As you can see, I finally got to wear my tie! I brought it all the way from America for just such an occasion as this.

I was picked up by Professor Govinda Reddy on his Enfield “Bullet” motorbike—an antique, if ever I saw one—and whisked off to an unfurling of the flag at a little school for mentally retarded children, which operated under the same management as the elementary school. Both establishments are funded and managed by Dr. Reddy on a purely voluntary basis, the children, from rural areas around Tirupati, receiving their education free of charge.

After hoisting and saluting the flag, I distributed sweets (candy) to the kiddiwinks. Then I was scooted off to the elementary school, where all the children and staff were waiting for us. Outside I hoisted and unfurled my second flag. I was getting good at it by now. A little girl draped a garland over my shoulders and I scooped her up to give her a hug. After that The assembly stood to attention during the singing of the National Anthem.

Dr. Govinda got the ball rolling with a brief speech. I’m not sure what it was about since it was in Telugu, but I did recognize my name every now and then, so I think he was welcoming me and inviting me to say a few words. I started out by thanking everyone for inviting me to join them on this auspicious occasion. No, I didn’t use the word “auspicious,” but Dr. Reddy must have figured the children might need some help understanding what on earth I was saying, because he spontaneously decided to act as my interpreter.

After reminding the children that the Constitution entitles them to a free education up to the age of 14, I got them all to clap their hands for Dr. Reddy, since he’s the provider of the free education as far as they are concerned. Then I got them to clap their hands for the principal, Mrs. Daniel, and her staff for running the school and actually giving them the free education. Next, I told them that they wouldn’t be able to come to school without help from their parents and extended family, so the children gave a round of applause for them. Finally, I told them all to turn to the person on either side of them and shake his or her hand and say: “Danyawad-alu!” (Thank you) and “Challa bagundi! (Well done!) for being their school buddies, since school buddies are an important part of education, too.

Now it was the children’s turn to make little speeches and sing songs. I definitely recognized “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” amongst the repertoire, along with an acted out: “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands…” The children really enjoyed that one, especially when I joined in.

At the end of the proceedings, I helped distribute more sweets and was kind of mobbed by all the children, who wanted to shake my hand. Breakfast (called “tiffin”) followed. Everything was delicious and I was very proud of myself for eating with my fingers without getting a single stain on my tie.

God bless India. May she prosper and gain the recognition she deserves as one of the greatest nations on earth.

Things I’d do differently a second time around

2007-01-25T04:03:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I pondered in my blog upon my woeful lack of understanding of the state of technology-readiness of my students here in Tirupati, India. My awareness has slowly increased over the weeks since I arrived. Finally, I see the light.

Oh, that I could start over! Next time I would do a much better job.

Certainly, if I were here for the duration as a full-time employee of the university, and not here for a mere five to six months, I would relish the opportunity to begin a new year with a new slate of students.

I now know that I should have spent at least a couple of weeks, in the computer lab, going over the basics—how to use the mouse, where the various keys are on the keyboard, how to use the shift key for uppercase characters, how to save files, where to save files, and so forth. Absolutely basic computer literacy.

That my students need this kind of help has nothing to do with intelligence, of course. They are all at the Masters level, and many will go on to do their PhD.

Learning to use computers is a bit like learning to ride a bike: it’s all skills based. Do it and you learn it. If you’ve never done it before, it’s tricky and it can take a while before you get the hang of it. The only way to learn is to climb on board. The more you practice, the more skilled you become; but it helps if you’ve been shown the right way from the start.

I noticed one student today using the Caps Lock key every time to type an uppercase character. I’d shown her a few minutes before how to use the Shift key, but she’d already gotten used to using the Caps Lock key, so she kept doing it the way she’d figured out for herself.
Habits, once formed, are hard to change.

Day One I should have shown everyone this basic stuff, but that’s all water under the bridge now. I should mention that there are a few students—maybe 5 out of 50—who have had lots of experience using computers. So they have become my teaching assistants. They’re not learning much about computers, but they are learning how to teach, and that’s as it should be.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to get another go at it here in India, so I’ll never know if I’d have done a better job with prior understanding of what I was getting into. Not that the problems are all of my own making. The way the computer lab is set up leaves much to be desired. The computers are not networked. Nor are they locked down in any way. Students can do whatever they please with the system. They can even delete programs and, of course, install programs of their own. The latter is unlikely to happen, but it could.

I’m not worried about my own students messing around; I’m always with them in the lab. But we have Masters of Computer Applications students and Electrical Engineering students who use the same lab outside of class time. They are programmers who surely know a thing or two about computers. In fact, I know they do because they’re constantly tweaking the interface—the Windows OS theme—changing the cursor, the screen resolution, the color scheme, and so forth.

Grrrrrrrr….

To make matters worse, quite a few of the 50 computers in the lab don’t have the same software on them. It’s a bit of a lottery when you sit at a machine. Like, “Hmmmm…. I wonder what I’ll find on here today.”

I checked out each computer and noted which ones didn’t have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, which ones are missing Microsoft Office, which ones are behaving weirdly for reasons unknown. Those missing Acrobat Reader I’ve fixed by installing it myself. Microsoft Office is a whole different matter, so I’ve pasted a postit note on each of these machines so my students don’t waste time booting up, only to find that they can’t do their work.

The fact is that I’ve been spoiled, coming as I do from a university in the United States where the computer systems I use with the students are set up and maintained by a team of experts who take care of everything for me. My U.S. students, too, have all been using computers for years in most cases. Even non-traditional, older students, have at least used computers at home or on the job before deciding to return to school to get their degree.

I feel bad for my students here in Tirupati because I know I could have done a better job. But we’re managing and we’re getting along. One of the first phrases I shared with them way back when is “No problems, only solutions!” I even had them teach me how to say it in Telugu, the local language of Andhra Pradesh state. So here it is, for the record: “Samassyalú levú, paríshkaralú matramáy.”

No problems, only solutions! I haven’t given up by any means.

Today I do believe I might have made history

2007-01-23T05:22:00.000-05:00

Well, actually we each make history every day, don't we? No two people have ever been identical, and no two days are alike. So our entire lives are unique, and therefore we make some kind of history every day, if not every moment of every day. But you know what I mean. Today I did something that I think was very special in the history of Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam.

I pulled down the internet and projected it onto the wall in front of the class. And I'd be obliged if you'd please suppress that yawn, if you don't mind!

I don't think this has ever been done before at SPMVV. I’ll ask around, of course, and I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, much to my delight, my boss happened to slip into the classroom unannounced just in time to witness the historic event. Talk about making my day!

I was a lot more excited than the students. Some of them at least are accustomed to using the internet for research and email. They go to small internet access booths which, because they don’t supply coffee and such, can hardly be called “cafes.” The cost is R10 (10 Rupees) an hour—that’s about 20 cents. I used to frequent these booths before I got myself set up with internet access on my own account. The booths are cheaper, but the access speed is barely tolerable and, more significantly, there’s no escaping the mosquitoes. So I decided to shell out about R1000 a month ($22)—which is why I’m now able to download the internet while in class.

Before I worked my magic on this historic day, I asked my students to fill out a brief questionnaire. I wanted to know, once and for all, in writing, just how much experience they had using computers before I came on the scene. I should have done this on day one, of course, when I first started working with them. But, silly me, it never occurred to me that maybe some of them had more or less never used a computer before. This I have discovered, through observation, as time has gone along.

Let me explain.

I arrived in India on December 6, but I didn’t start teaching this particular class until December 11. I’d been told that they all had taken an Intro to Computer Applications class as part of their undergraduate studies—every college student in India does. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the course does not involve the actual use of computers!

I took my students to a computer lab for the first time on December 13, but it was really just an introductory visit where I handed out CD-Rs, showed them a couple of things on my laptop for them to do on their computers, and didn’t do much besides. I had them in the lab a few more times before it began to dawn on me that at least some of the students had never, ever touched a computer before. They didn’t know how to hold the mouse, for example, let alone use it, and they’d take forever to find the correct key on the keyboard.

But just as I was coming to this awareness, I got carried off, on December 20, to Bhuvaneswar for the gerontology conference. I didn’t get back till after Christmas Day. Meanwhile, quite a few of the students had taken off for an extended holiday, which took in New Years as well as a harvest festival called Sankranthi, which meant I didn’t see them again till January 17.

The questionnaire I gave them this morning had two purposes. The first was to find out if my suspicions were correct about the extent of the students’ lack of computing experience, and the second was to give me some data that I could use in a paper I’m writing for an upcoming conference.

What I discovered was that 80% of my students, before taking my class, had never used a computer for anything other than occasional internet access. Only one student (out of 50) has a computer at home. One in six students uses the computer off campus once a week (presumably at one of the internet booths). One in three students does this once a month. The remaining 50% of the class never uses the computer off campus; and bear in mind that the only time they use it on campus is during the classes I hold in a computer lab.

In other words, to all intents and purposes, I started out with a class of complete beginners. This is not a problem. It’s just a bit more of a challenge than I expected. There are three or four students who do have solid computing experience and their assistance is invaluable in the lab, where I have the students working on my Microsoft Office tutorials. We’re still wrapping up Lesson 1.

In the few short months that remain of my tour, I’m determined to leave behind a cadre of Education graduates who will, for the first time in most of their lives, be comfortable using the computer and capable of taking a leadership role with regard to promoting computer use in schools. Since, as I suspect, the large majority of the teachers in the schools have had next to no opportunity to learn about computers, achieving my goal should not be hard.

Meanwhile, we did make history today at Sri Padmavati Women’s University and that’s something for me to write home about.

The Fort at Chandragiri

2007-01-20T03:56:00.000-05:00

I’m beginning to feel like I’ve been adopted.

Professors Ch. and G. Vijayalakshmi have taken care of my every need at the university where I teach. Professor Ramamurti, Dr. Jamuna, Dr. Govinda Reddy, Dr. Lalitha—and Dr. Chenchulakshmi and Dr. Sudha, too—have welcomed me into their academic family at Sri Venkateswara University (SVU). SVU Students Subramanyam (Subbu) and Saritha Reddy have been especially kind.

Professor Ramamurti and his wife, Sudharta, along with Dr. Gunashekar and his wife, Dr. Jamuna, have taken me out to dinner a couple of times. Gunashekar and Jamuna also have invited me into their home to see in the New Year. A few days later I joined them for a lovely convivial evening shared with their daughter, Dipti. Saritha Reddy invited me to dinner at her home, too, and I talked about that in an earlier blog. Mr. John Joseph and his wife, Dr. Philomena Joseph, have been taking me back and forth to church on Sundays and have entertained me in their home, too. John also calls occasionally to check that I have everything I need.

There are many others I could add to this list. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge my gratitude to one and all.

I never know when I get up in the morning what my agenda will be for the rest of the day. I’m getting used to going with the flow. Take yesterday, for example. I taught my class at 10:00 am. At 11:30 I went to SVU where Professor Ramamurti, Dr. Jamuna and Dr. Govinda Reddy helped me organize a travel schedule for my upcoming lecture tour of three universities in Karnataka State. At the end of the meeting, Jamunah asked me if I’d like to visit the Fort at Chandragiri that evening and take in the son et lumière show. I accepted her invitation. In the meantime, when I got back to the guesthouse after the meeting, Dr. Govinda Reddy dropped by to invite me to dinner at his home when I returned from Chandragiri.

In the early evening, Gunashekar, Jamunah and I, in a car driven by Professor Ramamurti's driver, Nagraj, travelled the 12 kilometers to Chandragiri, following the Tirupati to Chittoor highway. We spent some time wandering amongst the extensive ruins of what was once an elaborate fortified town on the banks of the Suvarna River, which curls sinuously around the Deccan Plateau. The walls and watch towers and gates were constructed over 1000 years ago using the solid granite of the Eastern Ghats, at the foot of the Seshachalam mountain range. There is an imposing, and well-preserved, 400 year old palace, too, now a museum.

As long ago as 1921, the whole upper and lower site of the Fort at Chandragiri became a national monument when it was transferred to the Archaeological Survey of India Department.

On our way home, we stopped not far from the Fort at an ancient Hindu temple, where I experienced the darshan of the Goddess Ellema.

The son et lumière show was a beautiful way to bring to life the history of the place, which included a 1639 visit to the court of the King of Chandragiri by representatives of the British East India Company, precursors of the British Raj. The agreement signed, and preserved in the museum, gave the Company—a front for exclusively British mercantile interests—the right to trade without any import or export taxes. I bet his majesty, King Charles I, was as pleased as Punch.

A few days later, Guna took me back to Chandragiri earlier in the day so that I could take a closer look at the fortifications in daylight amongst the rugged, barren, mountainous terrain. Then we spent a fascinating hour or so in the Raja Mahal Palace museum where Gunashekar impressed me with his knowledge of all the exhibits and his enthusiasm for the history of the Vijayanagara empire and the myths, legends, and beliefs of the Hindu faith.

I'm OK; you're OK

2007-01-16T02:26:00.000-05:00

During my walk this morning I heard a soft cooing sound. It was the call of two birds chatting to each other from their perch on different trees. The only way I can find to reproduce the sound is by making a mid- to high-pitched gulp. Try it and you’ll maybe see what I mean.

For all the world, it sounded like the birds were whispering sweet nothings, like lovers do when they’re in each other’s arms and really don’t have much to say. One of the birds took flight a short distance to another tree, just long enough for me to see that it had a black body with a burnished, almost golden-brown, spread of wings, made more golden as the feathers glinted in the sun.

A short while later I heard the distinctive sound that I’ve come to associate with the cawing of a crow. When I spotted the bird in a nearby tree, I noticed that it looked very much like a crow, quite large and black, except for a grey hood, collar and underbody. It was keeping company with a small flock of its own kind. I stood still and watched them for a while and noticed that one of the birds was balancing on one leg as it perched on a branch. On closer inspection, I could see that it had only one claw.

This reminded of something I’d seen the other day from my bedroom window. Another of these crow-like birds was hopping around on a balcony of the house next door. I watched it merrily pecking away at crumbs, tilting its head sideways so as to slide the length of its beak along the flat surface of the balcony to scoop them up. “Odd,” I thought to myself. “Why doesn’t it pick up the crumbs with the tip of its beak as I’d seen other birds do?” Indeed, I don’t remember ever seeing a bird pick up food in this way.

Then I noticed that the bird had only one leg. “Ah,” thought I, “it must pick up stuff the way it does because of its disability.”

It eventually flew off, and almost immediately another “crow” alighted on the balcony and proceeded to pick up the crumbs in exactly the same way the first bird did—yet it had two fine legs. So much for my theory, which I would have concluded to be established fact if I hadn’t been proved to be so obviously wrong.

I continued my walk and mused along the way about how silly I am to consider anyone or anything abnormal just because they appear to be so. Most people don’t know that I had polio when I was a little boy and, as a result, have a deformed left leg. It definitely affects how I do things, but it hasn’t stopped me living my life. And I would be very upset if someone told me I was abnormal—or disabled, for that matter.

Yet we do this all the time when we use the term “disabled” to describe anyone who doesn’t fit what we consider to be some “norm.” According to that norm, I am disabled, yet I have never for a moment considered myself to be so. This is largely, I suspect, because my disability is not immediately obvious, with the result that I rarely have to explain it to others; and that’s just fine by me.

It must irk people who have more obvious disabilities no end when they’re treated differently, especially when they’re assumed to be incapable of doing thus and so. My friend Yvonne Singer, who has had severe cerebral palsy since birth, who is quadriplegic and has significant difficulty communicating with speech, has graduated with a Masters in Psychology and now is a professor for online courses at Middlesex County College in New Jersey. But she had a dickens of a job getting hired, not at Middlesex County College, where John Gutowski, the Dean of the School of Psychology, recognized her ability and gave her a chance, but at the hundreds of other schools where Yvonne applied and got nowhere.

All she’s ever wanted is a chance, but for so much of her life she’s had to deal with people who wanted to put her on the shelf.

You’re OK, Yvonne, and I’m OK, too. We’re both very normal, and beautiful, just like my birds.

Palaver at the Post Office

2007-01-13T01:31:00.000-05:00

The other day I wrote a circular letter to my family and friends, ran off 25 copies, added a handwritten paragraph at the end of each one, popped them all in envelopes, addressed them and got them ready to send off in the mail. Narissima Rao, the man who manages the guest house, took me to the Post Office on his motorbike (always an exciting experience) and helped me take care of business.

Outside the post office is a bright red cylindrical mailbox, just like the ones we have in England. Nice reminder of an English past, I thought to myself. Inside, we were immediately attended to by one of the clerks. Narissima spelled out the various mailing options open to me, and I chose regular airmail, at a cost of R30 (30 rupees) per—that’s about 80 cents American, much the same as it would cost in the States.

I was asked to take a seat while Narissima and the clerk stuck the stamps on each envelope. This was a messy job since it seems the stamps don’t come with adhesive already on them. There must be a good reason for this, though I didn’t ask. I’ve learned from too often drawing silly conclusions in the past that it’s always best to give others the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they have good reasons for what they do. So Narissima and the clerk dipped their fingers into a small bowl of glue and spread it on the back of the stamps themselves before sticking the stamps on the envelopes.

As you might expect, some of the glue flowed beyond the edges of the stamps, which would have been OK if they’d allowed the envelopes to lie somewhere separate from each other till the glue dried. But no, the envelopes were immediately stacked one on top of the other and, en bloc, passed across to another clerk. Her job was to enter the names and addresses into a computer so as to produce a sticky label for each envelope (yes, these labels did have glue on the back, just like regular mailing labels—and regular stamps, for that matter).

I had to stand at the counter now to help the lady read my handwriting as she typed the data into the computer. It was mildly alarming to see that she had to kind of unglue each envelope as she worked her way down the pile of 24. As she processed each one, she placed it, still sticky, right on top of the ones she’d already completed, till the stack was reassembled.

I noticed that the letter I’d addressed to my mom was now on the top of the stack. So I have this vision of her eventually receiving a solid block of envelopes in her mailbox in Stone, England. She’ll have a wonderful time separating them all and sending them on their merry way.

What's in the news?

2007-01-12T13:24:00.000-05:00

OK, so it’s Friday and I’m on vacation. I’m sipping my early morning cup of tea and munching on some cookies (what we Limeys—and folks in India, too—call biscuits). I don’t have much in mind to do today, so I’m kind of killing time, browsing my daily copy of The Hindu, “India’s National Newspaper Since 1878.” The Hindu is very well written and, for this Anglo-American ex-patriate, it has the bonus of all those quaint English spellings and word usages.

Talking about 1878, that was the year Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India. The Brits took it upon themselves to accord her the title, by the way, without a by-your-leave to the several millions of Indians who just happened to have owned the place for thousands of years before the British decided to take it over. But that’s another story.

Did you know that, in honor of Empress Victoria’s accession to her purloined throne, a whole new Order was established called the Imperial Order of the Crown of India? Only women could join, as long as they were wives or female relatives of Indian Princes, or wives or female relatives of anyone who was the Viceroy of India, the Governor-General of India, the Governors of Madras, Bombay, and Bengal, the Secretary of State for India, or the wife of the Commander-in-Chief in India.

Nice little club. I bet they all spoke the Queen’s English and had blue blood running in their veins. The membership has declined somewhat since 1947, when the Indians politely (with a campain of non-violence) asked the Brits to leave. Queen Elizabeth II is the only surviving member. The Order of the Crown of India dies with her, though it would be a nice gesture on her part if she abolished the silly thing now.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about the history of colonial India lately. It’s a sad tale, like most of the tales told by colonizing powers. They bask in the glory of their conquest while raping the colonized country of its mineral and material wealth, leaving behind little except a smattering of the colonial culture, a legacy of hate, and a lot of dead people.

But at least the Brits gave India cricket, which especially here in the south of India is an absolute passion. Every day, in The Hindu, I get caught up on international and local matches. If I had a TV, I’d have been able to watch every ball bowled in the recent test series where England got totally trounced by Australia.

To be fair, Britain brought India the English language, too, about which I'll have more to say in another post.

A national newspaper’s a great way to learn about India; better than TV which, if it’s local, is more often than not in the local language (Telugu in Andhra Pradesh). If it’s not local, it’s CNN or ESPN or MSNBC with an Indian slant, but the stories (other than cricket) are always reduced to mind size bites on the assumption that anyone watching couldn’t possibly concentrate on the same story for more than about 3 minutes. That’s how it is in America at least. I’ve only watched TV a couple of times since I came to India, and never for more than 3 minutes at a time.

But you can sit back and relax with a newspaper. It’s in the newspaper that I’ve learned what an extraordinarily democratic country India is—messy, but determinedly democratic. Ghokale, Ghandi, Nehru, and a host of other great leaders have left a legacy of activism. The newspaper’s full of stories of this and that activist group, here, there, and everywhere, creating a fuss over some perceived injustice or other, more so than in any other country I’ve lived. I’ve never met a gentler, more generous, more helpful, and more solicitous people than the people of India, yet they don’t put up with any you-know-what and they always seem to be complaining about something or other.

How the British got away with colonizing India for as long as they did I shall never understand. But it had to help that Queen Victoria’s empire was the mightiest military power in the world at the time.

No doubt the ladies of the Imperial Order of the Crown of India did their bit, too.

You can run, but you can't hide.

2007-01-10T11:57:00.000-05:00

Privacy is hard to come by in India—for me, at least. I’m living in a guest house, which more often than not has other guests. I usually eat in a public dining area where other guests join me for dinner, or I join them. Out and about, being “white,” there’s no way I can blend into a crowd. I feel I'm the center of attention, and I'm not being egotistical.

This is not a bad thing; it just takes some getting used to. But there’s one thing you can do in India that you can’t do at home any more, and that's enjoy freedom from electronic surveillance.

For years now I’ve been warning my students at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown that “privacy is dead.” Books have been written about this, so it’s not as if I’m revealing a state secret.

Ever since computers started talking to each other (1950s), people have dreamed of connecting them to form a web that would encompass the globe. By 1996, this web (the World Wide Web) had reached a stage of maturity where everyone and their uncle wanted to climb on board. But long before this, in the 1970s, businesses such as the banking industry already wanted us to use credit cards to conduct financial transactions (ATMs). Soon we were using those credit cards for shopping, too—at stores and gas stations and so forth; then we used them to shop online after 1996.

Ever checked in at a hospital? You know the drill; you wait till you’re called to a data entry work station where a clerk fills out an online form with all the details of your treatment—to add to all the other details about your medical history that have been amassed over time.
We willingly give up all this information about ourselves—our shopping habits, our medical condition, our financial status—because we like the convenience and efficiency of it all. We want to use the Web for myriad purposes, fully knowing that our every word and deed is being tracked and logged, whether we like it or not.

It’s not being tracked, initially at least, by a person—that would be humanly impossible. No, it’s being tracked by highly sophisticated networks of computers which are programmed to sift through the mass of data about each and every one of us, profiling us, and fitting us into more and more tightly indexed categories. This data is then shared (sold) to the highest bidder, which includes not just every enterprise that wants to sell us something but also, one way or another, the federal government.

And now they’re installing cameras everywhere, too, connected to computer systems, which are programmed to recognize who we are and to automatically take action if there’s any reason to do so. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we’re aware that it’s going on.

Case in point in the UK, where I originally hail from. One of my brothers-in-law, whose wife, Mary, must be the only woman in the world who routinely tells her hubbie: “Frank,” (‘cos that’s his name) “for heaven’s sake, drive faster!” was astonished to get a hefty speeding fine in the mail. It’s a bit of a joke now, and he loves to take out the paperwork to proudly show it off.

“See, honey,” he smiles, “I got a speeding fine just like everyone else.”

In India, I use an ATM to get cash and use that to buy everything I need. I don’t use the Internet nearly as much as I do back home in the States because the connection speed is so slow here. I’ve never been one to use the phone much either; just a daily call to Marilyn is about it.

I’ve not had to go to hospital here yet, though I’m told the hospitals are excellent. I have, however, had to get treatment, including antibiotics, for “Delhi Belly,” and I discovered to my delight that no prescription was necessary, not a computer was in sight, and the cost was a fraction of what insurance companies make us pay back home.

In this neck of the global woods, my physical appearance makes me stand out like a sore thumb, but at least I’ve regained some privacy of the electronic kind.

A Jack-of-all-trades

2007-01-06T19:27:00.000-05:00

Since arriving in India, because of my status as a Fulbright Scholar, I’ve been lionized by all and sundry to give lectures to students and professors on a range of subjects only loosely connected with my current academic forte, namely instructional technology.

I’ve presented at a conference on Ageing, where I took Gerontology, Universal Design, and Assistive Technologies as my theme. I’ve addressed professors in Business Management who wanted my thoughts on appropriate pedagogies for the college classroom. I’ve talked to Electrical, Environmental, Computer, and Biotechnology Engineering undergrads on the subject of population studies and human impact on the environment. I’m giving a series of two-hour lectures on Software Engineering to a class of 100 or so Masters of Computer Applications students. Then, six mornings a week, from 10:00 to 11:00, I have my regular class of Masters of Education students, with whom I work to promote the theory and practice of technology integration in teaching and learning.

And as if that’s not enough, I’ve been invited to give a presentation to the National Seminar on Yoga – The Ancient Tradition in the New Millennium! This is to take place next month at Sri Venkateswara University, located just down the road from Sri Padmavati Mahila (Women’s) University where I’m based. I’m taking as my theme the past, present, and future of Yoga (which I’m now furiously studying) with a view to proposing that Yoga practice is significantly affected by the increasing and global prevalence of modern technologies.

Do I have the credentials to talk about Yoga? No! Should I offer my services to talk about it nonetheless? Why yes, if they’ll have me.

The whole purpose of the Fulbright Program, founded by U.S. Act of Congress in 1946, is to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” What better way to do this than to represent the Fulbright Foundation in as many forums as I possibly can during my brief stay in India?

Yoga is stretching it—if you’ll pardon the pun—but I’m thoroughly enjoying the challenge and learning as I go along. After all, as we say in the profession, teaching is the best way to learn!

The Indian Ageing Congress - 2006

2007-01-02T08:33:00.000-05:00

Click on a picture to see a larger version

In retrospect, I enjoyed every aspect of the Indian Ageing Congress in Buvaneshwar the week before Christmas.

The journey to and from, a trip of some 700 km each way, which took approximately 24 hours spread over two days, was somewhat arduous. But I was with a companionable group of professors and students from Sri Venkateswara University, who made the time in the trains pass pleasantly enough. Professor Ramamurti proved to be a particularly welcome companion, a mine of information, and a good listener, too. We discovered that we have a lot in common both spiritually and philosophically, his expertise in gerontology and my interest in assistive technologies jiving felicitously. I always came away from our conversations more informed.

I got to see the mile after mile of fertile farmland that runs the length of Andhra Pradesh. Rice paddies dominate, but there are stands of coconut palms, sugar cane plantations, and an abundance of other fruit groves and vegetable crops all tended by a workforce of local villagers who rise early with the sun and toil in the fields till the sun goes down. Temples dotted the hilltops in the middle distance.

It struck me this must be a timeless scene, for there are few if any automated machines in the fields. Bullocks are everywhere, pulling carts and drawing ploughs, and men and women with machetes and hoes can be seen striding home single file at the end of the day.

Livestock includes bullocks and goats and chickens and domesticated pigs. Pigs also run wild, as do the dogs and cats. India’s milk supply is provided, not by cows, which are sacred, but by bullocks, whose milk is considerably creamier than that of cows.

Cows are everywhere. To my western eyes, it still amazes me, in the midst of the most chaotic traffic scene, to see cows lying about or ambling across the road, utterly unconcerned as the cars, and trucks, and buses, and auto rickshaws, and motorbikes, and scooters, and bicycles, and carts, and people swirl around them. It is a scene that has to be seen to be believed.

The conference on Ageing was an education in itself. I went without expectations, tagging along more for the sake of seeing a slice of India than to learn anything about gerontology. But from the first presentation to the last, I quickly discovered that the topic was highly relevant and of significant interest to me. It was easy to make the connection with assistive technologies, a subject about which I’d learned much since meeting Yvonne Singer, my friend with cerebral palsy, some two years ago.

My own presentation, which focused on the promise of assistive technologies and Universal Design and its relevance to the field of gerontology, was well received and proved to be a springboard for fruitful engagement with many of the delegates, who were all either academic researchers or medical doctors in the fields of gero-psychology, bio-gerontology, or geriatrics.

Academically, I am a jack-of-all-trades and most definitely a master of none, so I came away from the conference like a thief in the night, having gained much and given little in return. I suspect that this will be the story of my Fulbright to India, for I already feel enriched beyond measure by my immersion with this land and its people.

The purpose of the Fulbright Commission is to foster peace and understanding between peoples. If, by my presence in India, I can contribute in some small way to this worthy goal, then my brief visit will have been worthwhile.

I spent Christmas Day with the good folks from Sri Venkateswara University. As you see from the picture, they helped me celebrate in traditional style and I'm very grateful to them for making me feel so at home.

New Year's Day, 2007

2007-01-01T12:10:00.000-05:00

I'm with Father John (l) and Father Joseph (m)

2006 has come and gone. It was another quiet, but eventful year, with weddings in both my English (congratulations, Mark and Julie!) and my American (congratulations Casey and Cassidy!) families. There were other weddings on the Poole side of the family, but that’s such a huge brood it’s almost impossible to keep track any more. There were exchanges of visits from either side of the Atlantic, my brother Andrew and his wife Kerry staying in Ligonier for a few days en route to Australia, while Marilyn and I crossed the Pond for Mark and Julie’s wedding and for a restful few days away-from-it-all in the south of England.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my good friends Professor Ramamurti and Dr. Jamuna and their spouses. They took me out to dinner at a hotel in Tirupati, where we feasted on vegetarian fare rounded off with ice cream and another delicious rich liquid cream dessert.

I later saw in the New Year at Dr. Jamuna’s home, a beautiful house in a colony on the edge of Tirupati. Every floor, including the stairway to the upper floors, is laid with a different hue of polished granite. The ceilings are high against the summer heat, and every bedroom has an en suite bathroom with hot and cold running water and all the sophistication of a modern American or European home.

Dr. Gunashekar, Jamuna’s husband, borrowed the design from a model he saw in Paris. Even the outside walls are finished in granite. I’m looking forward to going back in the day time so I can take a closer look at the garden, which has been carefully laid out by Jamuna with palm trees and many varieties of flowering shrubs.

New Year’s Day was interesting.

A gentleman named Mr. John Joseph, husband of Dr. Philomena who is a professor my university, came by the guest house yesterday evening to ask me if I’d like to go to mass today at the Christian (Catholic) church in town. I’m saying “Yes” to every invitation, provided it doesn’t conflict with a prior engagement, so we set a time for him to come and pick me up. This morning off to church we went.

The priest, Father Joseph, a retired school principal, was walking up the aisle towards the main doors as we arrived, so he greeted me right away and then went off to the sacristy to get ready for mass.

Last week, in Bhuvaneshwar, the mass was in the local Oriya language (the language of the people of Orissa state). This week it was Telugu, the language of Andhra Pradesh state. But before the mass started, Father Joseph made an announcement from the altar in English to tell everyone that I was a guest from the United States, and he formally welcomed me to the church. He also interspersed his Telugu sermon with, here and there, an English translation and generally made me feel very much at home.

As if this wasn’t enough, after mass I was invited to the presbytery to join Father Joseph for breakfast, along with his co-celebrant, Father John, principal of a local secondary school. We had a wonderful time. Father Joseph was a gentle, gracious host who obviously loved the people he served.

After breakfast, my companion, John, took me next door to a convent run by the Sisters of Charity (Mother Teresa’s nuns). One half of the compound was for orphans, the other for old folks. We went across to the orphans’ side first. There, in the corridor, lying on mats against the wall, was a line of little children all of whom looked like they had some severe physical and/or mental disability.

The last little girl in the line was sitting in a wooden chair, her wrists strapped to the arms of the chair and her legs straddling a raised peg in the middle of the seat to prevent her from sliding forward out of the chair. I’d seen pictures of seats like this when I was getting to know Yvonne Singer, my friend in New Jersey who has Cerebral Palsy. Sure enough, when I asked the Sister who was with the children in the corridor, she confirmed that some of the children had Cerebral Palsy; others looked like they might be severely autistic.

Thanks to my friendship with Yvonne, I now know to assume that these children are bright, intelligent, and aware. I stooped low to bring myself close to each one of them, reaching out to hold their hands. I talked to them, stroked their cheeks, cupped their heads in my hands, and tried to show them that I loved them and wanted so very much to help them if I could.

None of them spoke or made any sound. Some of them looked deep into my eyes, their only means of communication, and beamed back at me, reaching for me, wanting to touch my face while I was touching theirs. One little girl never looked up, but when I stroked her cheek she pressed her face back against my hand, especially when she sensed that I was about to take it away.

What beautiful work those Sisters do! I left a generous donation with Mother Anna Sicile; it was the least I could do.

I’m holding back tears as I write this, ashamed that I don’t do more.

Sri Kalahasteeswara, a Temple near Tirupati

2006-12-30T12:52:00.000-05:00

Today (Dec 30) Saritha Reddy and her cousin, Nirajan, took me to visit this temple, located in the town of Sri Kalahasti, about 30 miles east of Tirupati.

By now, I’ve seen lots of temples, large and small, dotted about the landscape. This was the first I actually entered and progressed through, along with the hundreds, if not thousands, of other pilgrims who thronged the place.

I took off my shoes and socks in the taxi before stepping out onto the stone pathway that led to the entrance to the temple. We proceeded first through an open enclosure where an elephant, worshipped by Hindus (along with cows and other creatures), was drawing crowds who paid a small amount in order to be bestowed a gentle blow on the head from the pachyderm’s trunk. I was so blessed.

Soon we were snaking our way through the temple proper, where brass barriers guided us from one sacred shrine to another, culminating in the inner sanctum, where Shiva reigns supreme. A spot of red powder was pressed upon my forehead as I paused in front of Shiva to pray for my family and friends.

A small bowl of temple-blessed food (Prasad) concluded our visit. Just as an aside, a snake charmer came up to our car on the way home and showed off his pet cobra, which I snapped for the record.

The Indian people are overwhelmingly and genuinely devoted to their religions. But the culture that makes India what it is has emerged over thousands of years from an assimilation of religions and cultures as they have come and gone. The huge majority of Indians follow the Hindu religion, but it is history that shapes a culture and it is history that has made the Indians the beautiful, gentle, purposeful, hard-working, thoughtful, contemplative, all-embracing people they are.

Unfortunately, there are gross inequalities everywhere in India, notwithstanding the government’s close to sixty-year struggle to overcome it. But we should bear in mind that it took a thousand years for so called developed nations to put behind them the dark ages and the gross inequalities of feudal societies. Indeed, these developed nations still harbor significant social inequalities. So we cannot expect India to emerge as a fully developed nation overnight.

India deserves to succeed. They're on their way. They've just had a spectacular year on the stock market. Brave decisions are being made to level the playing field by offering equality of opportunity to all. But it's going to take a long time to get to where they want to go and, as everyone readily recognizes, universal equal opporunity to education is the necessary road to success.

On this New Year's Eve, 2006, may the coming year 2007 bring them ever closer to their goal.

Dinner at Saritha's

2006-12-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

Saritha Reddy is a doctoral student at Sri Venkateshwara University (SVU) in Tirupati. She was one of the group of students who accompanied the team of SVU professors and students to the Indian Ageing Conference in Bhuvaneshwar last week. I got along well with everyone, but especially struck up a friendship with Saritha and with a young doctoral research scholar named Subbu.

Saritha has sort of adopted me since we got back from Bhuvaneshwar. Her father was at the railway station in Tirupati when we arrived. In his presence, and somewhat to my surprise, she invited me to dinner at her home the following evening. I accepted the invitation without hesitation.

I called my mentor, Dr. Jamunah, to let her know what I was up to and to ask her advice about what I should take as a gift for the family. A bouquet of flowers was deemed appropriate. The following evening, Saritha and her father arrived in a taxi to bring me to their home in downtown Tirupati.

I was invited to take off my shoes before entering the house. Inside, I sat down on a sofa while family members came by one after another to greet me and stay a while to chat. I met Saritha’s mother. Saritha has two sisters and a brother. I met the sisters and their husbands, along with two young boys aged 4 and 6. I met the brother’s wife, who was holding a 15 month old girl; the brother was out of town on business. I met Saritha’s aunt—her father’s sister—who has lived with the family since she was widowed many years ago (in India, a widow rarely remarries). I also met another brother-in-law who stayed a while, leaving just before I was called to dinner.

Before a meal one must wash one’s hands and I was invited to the kitchen to do so. Then I sat down at the dinner table, which was already laid out with an array of dishes containing the food we were about to eat. Chandrashekar, one of Saritha’s brothers-in-law, joined me at the dinner table, I think because he spoke very good English. Saritha spread a large banana leaf on the table in front of each of us, which was to serve as our “plate.” She then proceeded to place on the leaf one dish after another, mostly on a bed of rice with some sauce or curry to go along with it—and chapatti (thinly baked unleavened bread). On the side were puri (a light, thin, crisp deep fried dough) and some other crisp item made from rice.

I decided to eat with my fingers, notwithstanding the fact that spoons were provided for me, since everything else was being done in traditional Indian style. Everyone I’d eaten with since I arrived in India ate with their fingers, so I decided it was time to try it myself. I asked my dinner companion to show me how to do this without dropping the curried rice all down my front. I quickly got the hang of it--sort of. Apparently the food tastes better when eaten with the fingers, but I was too preoccupied with the logistics of getting the food from palm leaf to palate to notice the difference.

All I can say is that everything was delicious.

After the main meal, Chandrashekar and I went to the kitchen to wash our hands and thence to the sofa where we were joined again by Saritha’s father. We chatted some more while Saritha brought us two small desserts and a banana. Then, as a final touch, she gave me a present to unwrap, which turned out to be a set of pretty brass Chinese wind chimes—made in India, of course!

As per Indian custom, once eating was over it was time to leave. I said goodbye to everyone, thanking them for a wonderful evening. Saritha, Chandrashekar, and his two boys came with me in the taxi back to my guest house and thus ended a lovely evening—my first in an Indian home.

A tip for travelers: Get yourself a safari vest!

2006-12-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

I neglected to mention earlier that the best gift I got in preparation for my trip to India was a safari vest (see picture). Marilyn’s best friend, Barbara Gasdick, bought it for me, along with a travel pouch that you wear round your neck to hold tickets and boarding cards and passports and such. It’s lightweight and has pockets (ten of them) all over the place for carrying everything under the sun, including bottles of water! It was almost like wearing an extra carry-on bag—a great way to get around carry on restrictions. I recommend it!

Josi

2006-12-28T11:58:00.000-05:00

I first met Josi over the phone. She teaches at Penn State’s New Kensington campus in Southwest Pennsylvania, USA. Her full name’s Dr. Jyotsna M. Kalavar and she’s Indian, from Bangalore.

I’d called her several months back because she’s a former Fulbrighter and I wanted to ask her some questions relating to my upcoming trip to India. She was gracious and helpful and we promised to get together at her place in Monroeville or ours in Ligonier before I left so we could have a good natter face-to-face. But time quickly passed and the best we could do was a brief exchange of emails prior to my departure.

Very soon after I arrived in Tirupati, Dr. Jamunah, Professor of Psychology at Sri Venkateswara University and my Fulbright “Facilitator,” came by to meet with me at my university guest house. In the course of conversation she asked me if I’d like to accompany her, and a team of students and professors, to Bhuvaneshwar in Orissa State, for a conference on Ageing. She mentioned that Dr. Jotsnya would be coming from the United States.

I got the go-ahead from my Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of the School of Education and informed Dr. Jamunah that I’d be on board. She took care of all the preparations; all I had to do was show up. That’s how it’s been since I landed in India. I’ve been simply overwhelmed by the generosity and solicitousness of everyone—and I mean everyone.

One of the things Josi had told me when I first talked with her on the phone was that in India I would be treated as a revered guest. She was right. The people I’ve met in India are beautiful; so many of them have been angels to me. From the well-off to the poorest of the poor there’s a dignity about them all that’s difficult to define and they’re the reason why I’m falling in love with this country.

So off we go to Bhuvaneshwar. The trip by train took 24 hours, more or less. I arrived at my guest house accommodations at about 10:00 pm. Josi was already fast asleep in her room across the hallway from mine. I crashed for the night, exhausted from the trip.

The next morning, after completing my ablutions and dressing for the day, I emerged from my room to find Josi there waiting to greet me. It wasn’t long before we were comfortable together, like old friends. Because we were the only members of the team staying at this particular guest house, we spent a great deal of time together over the next four days.

We had a ball! Josi’s sense of humor is infectious. She laughed at all my jokes, even the pathetic ones, and we quickly developed a rapport which transcended words, where we seemed to see India through each other’s eyes. She constantly anticipated my thoughts and reactions to things going on around us, commenting sensitively to help me “see” things as they are, rather than as I thought them to be.

I got to see India through her eyes, when she took me shopping in the Bhuvaneshwar bazaars, and to the Sun Temple at Konark, where she worshipped as I watched her pray for good fortune for her family at the Sun Temple’s Nine Planet’s Shrine, and where I was blessed by the priest with a spot of red powder on my forehead. She took me to the beach at Chandrabagha. When I hesitated to go for a ride on the one lonesome camel waiting with its driver by the ocean’s edge, she encouraged me to “Go for it!” and I did. And I’m glad I did, because it was quite an experience, and I’d come a long way…

She took me to Puri, where we’d been briefly the night before with the group attending the conference, but she’d wanted to go back and spend time worshipping at the temple. I wasn’t allowed in because I’m not Hindu, so I wandered around the bustling market place outside, chatting with groups of people here and there. I bought a brass replica of one of the famous Konark wheels.

Josi taught me to count from 1 to 10 in Hindi. She took me to church on Christmas Day, while she went off to worship at another temple in town. After church, we went around to the other Guest house where the rest of our group was staying and, for my benefit, we celebrated Christmas together. I got a huge card signed by everyone, and a gift, and cake, and Josi led us all in an interesting rendition of “Jingle Bells.”

After lunch at a restaurant where I absent-mindedly left behind my floppy white hat, I went with Josi to the airport to see her safely on her way to Mombai and thence to Pittsburgh, where I know we’ll meet again.

Meanwhile, there’s a man in Bhuvaneshwar just now who’s wearing my hat. Fortunately I have a spare.

Mossies!

2006-12-28T11:57:00.000-05:00

I was right to bring a mosquito net with me. Those pesky mossies may not be females of the anopheles variety (the ones that carry malaria) but they sure are pesky!

And you don’t need a lot of them to drive you crazy at night.

I’m not long back from Bhuvaneshwar, in Orissa state, immediately north of Andhra Pradesh, where I’d traveled for a conference. I didn’t take my mosquito net with me because I didn’t think of it, and anyway it’s all strung up in my room over my bed and would have been a pain to take down and put back up again.

The other night, in Bhuvaneshwar, at 4:00 in the morning, I wake up to this horrible whining, like I imagine a kamikaze plane might sound when it homes in on its target. I’m reminded once again of just how unbelievably stupid I am when I vainly—and violently—smack myself on various parts of my head, thinking that in this way I’ll somehow subdue the beast.

Seconds later the whine returns. I cover my head with the blanket, but then it soon gets to be too hot under there, so I turn it down and hope for the best.

Seconds later the whine returns.

It always seems to hover near one or other of my ears on its way into land, like it knows that that’s where I’ll direct my attack. I wait till the whine stops and, as my pesky friend has predicted, I smack myself hard over my left ear. Meanwhile the mossie is sucking the blood out of my neck.

I no more than momentarily disturb its meal, and the whine returns.

After half an hour of this ridiculous behavior on my part, I decide to get up, turn on the light, and use my God-given vision to get the bloody thing. I prop myself up in a sitting position, pillows stacked behind my back. I pretend to be reading a book to fool the mossie into a false sense of security.

There it is; now I welcome the whine. I’m alert, every sense strained in preparation for a counter attack.

I see it now, dancing in the air nearby, but only briefly while it’s against a backcloth of white sheet or pastel-colored wall. It disappears each time I grab for it, cleverly swooping into the camouflage of some dark backdrop or other. Then it lands on the sheet and, like lightning, I swoop down with my hand and gleefully smash out its life.

I hate to kill anything; but I make an exception for mosquitoes.

I confirm my kill. There it is, squashed flat as a pancake in the palm of my hand. But there’s a smear of fresh red blood, and it’s mine, so the bloody mossie got what it came for in the end.

Getting around in India

2006-12-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

In America I have a choice of public conveyance. I can take a train or a plane, a taxi or a bus; or I can drive my own car. In India, I have many more options.

So far—and I’ve only been here a little over two weeks—I’ve traveled by train, plane, taxi, auto rickshaw (which uses calor gas for fuel), scooter and motorcycle. I’ve also had a ride on a camel, with dreams of following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia. But that was a jaunt for amusement at Chandrabhaga beach, near Konark, on the Bay of Bengal. More about Konark and its magnificent Sun temple in my next blog.

I have other transportation options should the need arise.

I can take a bus, of course. Alternatively, there is quite a range of transportation powered, like my camel, by animal (including human) muscle.

I can ride a cycle rickshaw, a small, two-wheeled covered carriage attached to the front end of a bicycle.

I can hitch a ride on a regular bicycle, too, either sitting on a metal frame behind the “driver,” (ouch!) or ensconcing myself on the saddle while the driver peddles standing up.

Then I could hire a flatbed wooden cart, pulled either by a bicycle or a bullock—or by a man.

I have seen all these forms of transportation-for-hire over the past three weeks during my daily trips from place to place. In some cities, one can go for a ride on an elephant, too, though I suspect this alternative is offered, like my camel, for the primary purpose of extracting dollars from tourists.

Muscle power has one decided advantage over automated alternatives: you can count on it to get you where you want to go, even if it takes a bit longer to get there.

The other day, on our way to the university here in Bhuvaneshwar, Orissa state, where our conference was being held, the auto rickshaw in which my Fulbrighter colleague, Dr. Jostnya, and I were traveling ran out of gas. The driver made various attempts to start the vehicle, which mostly consisted of rocking the thing violently from side to side to redistribute whatever gas was left in the tank. No luck. So I had the dubious pleasure of helping the driver push the vehicle to a nearby gas station!

Fortunately, Dr. Jostnya had her camera with her, so I hope to share a photo or two after I post this account.

My favorite form of transportation over the short haul (a couple of miles, say, which is all I need in and around Tirupati), is most definitely the motorbike—driven by a competent, careful driver, of course. While some taxis have air conditioning, you have to pay extra if you want it turned on, and by the time you reach your destination, it’s barely begun to take effect. An auto rickshaw can get crowded (my gerontology colleagues at the conference here somehow managed to squeeze 9 passengers along with the driver into a space not much larger than a sardine can). Another problem with the auto rickshaw is that it’s a three-wheeler which, like a 3-wheeler ATV, is notoriously unstable--or so I suspect.

Needless to say, they don't have air bags--or sides, for that matter.

On a motorbike, however, you have all the air conditioning you could desire—and more. Though it’s not unusual to see three riders on a single bike, I prefer to have the passenger seat all to myself. Most significant of all, on a motorbike you can much more easily negotiate the unbelievably chaotic traffic conditions.

Imagine a sidewalk in the most popular shopping precinct of any town or city. Crowds of people jostle together, weaving in and out and around each other, every now and then clipping a too-close passerby. Now put all those people in or on a vehicle, and you have some idea of what it’s like to drive in downtown cities and towns in India.

It’d be scary if it weren’t for the fact that I’m kind of used to it—from when I lived in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, and now in India.

The traffic has to be seen to be believed. If Marilyn were here with me, she’d be having conniptions, eeking and shrieking every few seconds as only Marilyn can (she does this when I’m driving, and I’m a model of discretion and decorum at the wheel—lol). But my darling’s eeks and shrieks would go unheard in India, drowned out by the incessant honking and hooting of horns.

Of tamarind trees and butterflies and other wondrous things

2006-12-21T13:21:00.000-05:00

This morning (Dec. 18) I was walking towards one of the buildings on the campus of the university and noticed some students reaching up and pulling something off a tree. I wondered if it might be one of those trees the twigs of which people in Africa and China, and maybe India, too, use to clean their teeth. But it turns out this was a tamarind tree and the girls were plucking the fruit.

When I asked what they were doing, I was offered some of the fruit. I took it (it looked like a pea pod) and I held it in my hand, wondering what I was supposed to do with it. I asked, and the girl bit into it and invited me to do the same, which I did. It had a sweetly bitter taste and was deliciously refreshing. Later, I looked up tamarind in the dictionary and learned that it’s a fruit used to flavor drinks, apart from other things.

Talking about drinks, I haven’t touched one—alcoholic, that is—since I arrived in India. According to what I have read prior to coming here, public consumption of alcohol is frowned on most everywhere. But when the Indian is at home, apparently anything goes. So I’m awaiting my first invitation to a soiree. Meanwhile, I have absolutely no idea where to buy alcohol other than in a hotel bar and, quite frankly, that’s just not my scene. But I wouldn’t mind a G&T right now. It’s nearly 5:00 in the evening; the sun’s soon to set over the yard arm; it’s about that time….

Six mornings a week, on my way to teach at 10:00 am in the School of Education, I take a shortcut through the bush. At a certain point along the way, I daily disturb a posey of pretty butterflies, which flutter up like a gossamer cloud from their butterfly garden and show off their finery—light blues and black and orange and white and cream. I hope they never go away, though I fear their life cycle may soon leave me bereft of their company.

On the other hand, like humans, one butterfly’s life cycle is independent of another’s, so there’s no reason why they should all disappear at once. The only reason that might happen would be if the butterflies lost their habitat. Sadly, the shortcut through the bush already threatens that as we humans, in our haste to get from place to place, heedlessly cut swaths through their territory. It’s not enough that we’ve carved asphalt roads through the bush to create the university campus; we have to carve out shortcuts, too?

In an earlier, pre-industrial age, Shakespeare’s Hamlet exclaims:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in form and moving

how express and admirable!

in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god!

the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

I wonder if he would say the same today.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that power cuts are not uncommon in this part of the world. We’ve had fewer than one a day since I arrived, and they’re always of short duration. But today was an exception. It seemed that the power was popping on and off all morning and all afternoon long. The first power cut this morning was particularly ill-timed. I was in a computer lab with 50 students. I’d given them each a CD-RW to use to store their files when they work their way through my tutorials. As Murphy’s Law would have it, half way through explaining to them how to save files on a CD, and about 15 minutes before the end of the session, we had a power cut.

It took a while for the implications to sink into my aging brain. We couldn’t continue with what we were doing; however, that’s OK since I can always come up with Plan B, even if it means yammering on about something vaguely intellectual for half an hour or so. But then one of the students pointed out that they couldn’t retrieve their CDs from the drives….

I never did like CDs for secondary storage; now I had another reason to hate the wretched things.

One of the students solved the problem by suggesting that each student write her name on her CD case and leave it on the table next to her computer. Then three of the students volunteered to stay behind till the power came back on, at which point they'd gather up all the CDs and return them to their fellow students later in the day. The power came back on a few minutes after the scheduled end of class, so their vigil was not prolonged.

This afternoon, after I finished guest lecturing to a group of Electronic Communications Engineers, I was invited over for a cup of tea in the Engineering office. The man who takes care of the building—a sort of general Engineering Department factotum—was sent off to get tea. While he was away, I was told that he had typhoid…

Yikes!! What on earth was he doing at work, let alone getting me tea, if he’s been diagnosed with typhoid? When he came back, I noticed for the first time that he did look a bit like death warmed up. I wasn’t concerned on my own behalf, mind, since I’ve recently been inoculated against typhoid, but what about everyone else in the office, in the building, in the university? Isn’t typhoid contagious?

I resolved to find out.

I did, and, well yes, typhoid is contagious, but not by contact with someone who has it. It’s a water-borne disease, so no worries.

Pix with my students

2006-12-17T02:59:00.000-05:00

Pix of Tirupati (from Hotel Bliss)

2006-12-17T02:14:00.000-05:00

My ‘umble abode in India

2006-12-17T01:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting, folks. I've been somewhat inundated with teaching, socializing, getting things sorted out in my apartment, discovering what I can and can't do technology-wise, and generally doing a whole lot of low-level problem-solving. But things are coming together nicely, especially as regards my accommodations :)

Boy, did I luck out!

Prior to coming to India, I had prepared for the worst. I assumed I wouldn’t have a fan in my “digs,” for a start—and I seriously considered bringing a fan with me. But then I knew there’d be frequent power cuts, so I figured I’d not be able to count on using even a fan, let alone A/C. I also figured I’d not be able to count on the use of technology at home or at school, whether for lesson planning or for in-class use. I expected to have to fend for myself for food and other necessary supplies. I also assumed I’d be bathing out of a bucket—if I was lucky. I doubted I’d have the use of a western-style commode; that I’d have to get used to squatting over a hole in the ground (ask Heather Mohr about this!). Above all, I doubted I’d have the luxury of hot and cold water for a shower.

None of these expectations (fears) have proved to jive with reality.

My 'umble abode is an apartment in the university guest house with an en suite bathroom. It has a reasonably spacious living area which I’ve kitted out with a desk and easy chair by scavenging from other rooms in the house. There are two fans in the living area, plus an A/C unit (wow!). Power cuts, though almost daily, last for only short periods of time—never (yet) more than an hour. There is what I choose to call a dressing room between the living area and the bathroom, with ample closet space. The bathroom has running hot and cold water, and a western-style commode!!

As if this is not enough, I have, literally at my beck and call, several “houseboys” who clean my apartment every day, get my food (from a local eatery) and serve it in the dining room downstairs, where I often eat with other guests staying in the house. Laundry is done on demand and takes a day or two. It’s returned to me pressed and folded like I just bought it from the store.

When I described all this over the phone to my wife, Marilyn, she exclaimed: “Bernard, you’re living like a maharajah!!” And she’s right.

Talking about the phone, I bought a cell phone the day after arriving in Tirupati. I dialed Marilyn’s land line phone number (including the international code for the United States) and, to our utter amazement, got right through clear as a bell! Then I called our son’s cell phone (he lives in Pittsburgh) just to see what would happen. No problem, connected clear as a bell once again. Incoming calls are not charged to my cell phone, so Marilyn calls me every day—and what a lifeline that is.

In correspondence with my hosts at SPMVV, I’d been assured that I would be able to use the internet-ready computers at the university, and that I’d be able to project from my laptop to a display in front of a class. But I wasn’t taking any chances, so I brought along my own projector, just in case. Turns out that was a great move on my part. I’ve used the laptop and projector constantly and it’s made a huge difference in engaging my audiences and helping me prepare for, and deliver, presentations.

So far I've addressed student groups in Business Management (a group of professors who are meeting to discuss pedagogy issues), Biotechnology Engineering (environmental engineering and population studies), Computer Science (I talked about Software Design in Software Engineering), and Education (Instructional Technology). Everyone wants a piece of me, and that's OK with me, since that's why I'm here.

The university is preparing an office for me, in which I’ll apparently have an internet-ready computer. Watch out once I’m established there, folks. I’ll finally be able to be in regular touch. But once again, I'm not taking any chances. The internet connections I've found elsewhere in the university are exceedingly slow, so I've arranged to have wireless access on my laptop with a company called Reliance Web World, which will allow me to access the Web anywhere in India--including during class, which is sure to be a hit with my students.

So no worries. I couldn’t be more blessed. I wish Marilyn were with me (*sigh*), of course, but under these circumstances I can easily survive until we meet up in February, when I’m entitled to a vacation outside of India. We’ll be rendezvous-ing in England around the time of my mom’s 98th birthday. What a celebration that will be!

Settling in in Tirupati

2006-12-11T03:54:00.000-05:00

The picture is of Dr. D. Jamuna, a professor of Psychology at Sri Venkateswara University (SVU). Dr. Jamuna is my Fulbright facilitator, and she has helped me get settled in Tirupati. She’s a former Fulbrighter herself, having spent a year doing research at Penn State.

I spent my first night in Tirupati (Dec. 7) at the Bliss Hotel, which was as blissful as its name implies.

I’d been met at the airport by two professors from Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam (Women’s University), henceforth to be referred to as SPMVV. Both professors have the same first name, and that’s how they like to be addressed, so I’ll refer to them as Professors Vijayalakshmi. They couldn’t have been more welcoming or solicitous that I had everything I needed. We arranged that I’d go with them next day to the university in order to meet with the Vice Chancellor (President), Rector (Provost), and the heads of various schools and departments who might be interested in using my services as a lecturer.

I’d decided ahead of time that I’d play safe food-wise and go vegetarian for the duration of my stay in India. So far the food has been, without exception, delicious and, more to the point, without gastronomical repercussions. I spent two days in Delhi without even a hint of the dreaded “Delhi Belly,” and the same continues to be the case after almost a week in country.

Before I left the States, at a sendoff dinner with the UPJ Division of Education faculty, my good colleague Bob Swanson had thoughtfully given me the gift of a couple of boxes of Pepto Bismol and Immodium ID pills (*lol*). Needless to say, I brought them with me and carried them everywhere in one of the pockets of my safari jacket. Now that I’m settled into what I expect to be my permanent residence in Tirupati, the pills are in a cabinet in the bathroom.

I know where they are; I fully expect to have to use them; it’s just a matter of time…

Meanwhile, my accommodations in the university guesthouse far exceed my expectations. I have an upstairs room with AC and an en suite bathroom. There are also two ceiling-mounted fans. It’s a reasonably new house, so it has electrical outlets all over the place. I’m using three of them now—one for my shaver, another for my cell phone, and a third for my laptop.

But the best news of all is that I have running hot and cold water! The hot water is supplied by a “geezer”—an electric-powered water heater. This takes me back to my childhood in England where the hot water in our house was similarly generated. Before coming here, I’d told my wife that I’d be ecstatic if, when I turned on a faucet, any kind of water came out. Well, I’m happy to tell one and all that I might just as well be in a hotel in the US, except that this is a whole lot cheaper. My rental cost is R200 a day (about $4.50) and food is costing me about $1.50.

Six bucks a day for a well-appointed room with a view. Not bad.

The $6 view is of the surrounding garden, which is cared for by an entourage of staff. When there’s a breeze, the fronds of a palm tree softly caress my window. This is winter in South India, but I’m only about 13 degrees north of the Equator, further south than Florida, I believe, so the climate is really quite pleasant just now. Come April and May, though, things will start to heat up.

But I don’t have to worry about that since I’ll be preparing to travel back States-side by then.

The past couple of days I’ve been reminded of the fact that I’m not here for a vacation. I’m already lined up to address a class of Education majors at 10:00 am this coming Monday, Dec. 11. Then, immediately following that, I’ll be giving a presentation at a seminar for in-service faculty from nearby universities who are new PhDs looking for ways to “update their knowledge on pedagogy,” especially as it relates to the discipline of Business Management. Not quite my area, though my background in Information Science will help, and I do have 41 years of teaching experience to draw on! So no worries, as they say “down under.” The next day (Tuesday, Dec. 12) I meet again with the Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of the School of Education to plan my teaching schedule for the rest of my stay.

Dr. Jamuna has invited me to accompany her, along with some of her SVU Psychology department colleagues and students, to a conference on Gerontology. She wants me to give a presentation while we’re there and she’s left it up to me as to what I want to talk about.

I figure I can tell the attendees how it feels to be growing old….

Whoops! Power cut. We have one or two a day; no biggie. My laptop here switched to battery power without a hitch.

I might as well go back to bed. Night all :)

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..

I believe in angels

2006-12-11T03:50:00.000-05:00

The pictures above are ones I took in New Delhi during the couple of days I spent there visiting with the USEFI personnel before flying on to Tirupati. The gentleman in the splendid outfit is the doorman at the Hotel Grand Sartag where I stayed.

I should begin by defining what I mean by angels.

OK, angels are people who appear out of the blue and help you get to where you need to go, often without any expectation of reward. On Thursday (Dec. 7) I met a couple of angels in Delhi and I simply do not know what I would have done without them. I met another one yesterday (Dec. 8) in Tirupati whose place in heaven is secure.

In Delhi, the day I was to fly to Tirupati, I fortunately got up earlier than necessary and arranged to be taken to the airport with lots of time to spare. If I hadn’t, I would most definitely have missed my plane because the dumb taxi driver took me to the wrong airport! Ironically, I’d been chatting with him while he navigated the absolutely chaotic Delhi traffic. You know me, I like to be friendly an’ all. I asked him to teach me some Hindi words, and one of them was “achowa” (my spelling—that’s how it sounds). It means “Well done!”

Well, guess what my last words to him were after I paid him his fare, along with a handsome tip, and before I realized that he’d dropped me off at the wrong airport?

You guessed it: “Achowa! Well done, mate. I really appreciate it.”

Not!

So there I am, with close to 200 lbs of luggage loaded on a cart, blissfully unaware that I was essentially stranded. An airport official guided me to the entrance to the terminal, where a security guy checked my ticket. Imagine my dismay when he told me I was at the wrong airport; that the correct airport (the domestic airport) was 10 kilometers (6 ¼ miles) away.

That’s when my first angel appeared at my shoulder. I can’t believe this guy was just standing there waiting for me to show up; but who knows? Maybe a putz like me shows up all the time. Fact is, I was so amazed to see him beckoning me to follow him that I was immediately skeptical (yeah, I know, it’s sceptical in British English, but I’m wearing my US citizen hat these days). I was convinced I was about to be the victim of a rip off; maybe I was about to be led down a dark alley and bopped over the head with a blunt instrument. I actually looked at the guy as if to say: “Are you kidding me? You think I’m an idiot? C’mon, this is obviously a scam. Whaddya take me for?”

He wanted me to go with him into an elevator, which further heightened my suspicions. When he realized I was suspicious of him, he walked me over to a balcony and pointed down to where there was a bustling taxi rank below. He didn’t speak English, but somehow he knew exactly what my predicament was. He whisked me down to the lower level, directed me to the prepay kiosk, waited while I got my ticket, escorted me to the designated taxi where the taxi owner, who did speak English, loaded my luggage on board and told his driver to take me to the domestic airport.

Long story short, I was the last passenger to board the plane with 5 minutes to spare. I gave my angel what he considered a really nice tip (R50; that’s 50 rupees, not much more than a dollar), but I’m telling you, I was ready to empty my wallet into his pocket.

Phew!

This posting is getting too long. I’ll put you to sleep if I tell you about my other angels. Maybe I’ll keep their story for when I write the book (*smile*). Suffice to say that my other angels were equally unexpected and a total godsend for this beleaguered traveler (yeah, yeah, I know it’s “traveller” in British English…).

The journey begins

2006-12-11T03:40:00.000-05:00

Well, the journey actually began a while ago, in early 2005, when I took my first, very tentative, steps along the road to a Fulbright Scholarship. Since then, I’ve had to negotiate various hurdles, which finally brought me to the day, December 4, 2006, when I left the United States on my way to India.

I flew out of South Florida International Airport. A couple of days ahead, I had driven down to Cape Coral, Florida, along with my wife, Marilyn, the dogs, and a small mountain of luggage. We traveled in convoy down to Cape Coral. I led the way in the Subaru Outback, on top of which I had loaded a car-top carrier so that the dogs would have the lion’s share of the space in the back—our dogs always travel in style. Marilyn followed in the Subaru Imprezza. There were some tense, if not scary, moments, especially for Marilyn, when we hit heavy traffic on the beltway around Washington, DC, and when we ran into the occasional heavy downpour. But otherwise the trip was routine—if tough going for Marilyn, who is accustomed to being chauffeured on long trips like this.

Aside from the fact that I was anxious, post 9-11, about going to India, it was especially hard to say goodbye to Marilyn. This will be the longest period of time we’ll have spent apart since we got married 26 years ago and I didn’t want to let her go. After I’d cleared security and turned back to wave goodbye for the last time, I got teary-eyed, especially when, finally, we just stood there looking longingly at each other, neither of us wanting to turn away. But I’d come too far to not do this, so with a last waved kiss and a hand on heart gesture to tell her that I loved her, which she quickly reciprocated, I turned around and disappeared into the mazy time warp of international travel, a maze made more nightmarish since the events of 9-11.

But I didn’t mind the added security one bit; I even smiled to myself when it was announced over the intercom that the security level had been notched up. This sense of well-being was reinforced when, in Hyderabad, India, where my plane landed to off-load passengers and to take on others en route to Tirupati, a couple of military guys walked through the plane checking that any baggage left on there belonged to someone sitting in the plane. “Hey, you can check my bags any time you want, bud, as long as you get me to Tirupati in one piece.”

It surprised me that, of the various airports in which I spent some time, the least well-designed and well organized was the one in Frankfurt, Germany. Indeed, I’d have to conclude that that proverbial Prussian persnickety attention to detail is in decline. The lines were unnecessarily long, people were allowed to push in ahead of you, the bathrooms were minuscule and not easy to find, and one fatuous official created a scene which had us all—mostly Indian, by the way—rolling our eyes, as if to say: “What kind of a country is this!?”

In India I rediscovered my belief in angels, but I’ll tell you all about that in another post.

Well bless my soul!

2006-11-29T21:23:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, sometime, Marilyn and I leave for Florida. I'll be en route to India. Marilyn will be staying in Florida with her mom, Anne, who, at 92 and bravely recovering over the past few years from two broken legs, will definitely enjoy having a daughter around to keep her company and help her out from day to day.

We'll be in two cars for the trip to Florida because of the huge amount of stuff we'll be bringing along. I have a couple of hundred lbs of baggage; Marilyn has whatever she will need for 5 months in Florida; and then there are the dogs... So we decided we'd just take both cars, with a car top carrier on top of mine.

I can hardly believe this is happening. The reality will only sink in once I set foot on Indian soil in the early hours of the morning of Dec. 6.

We're more or less all packed up and ready to go, but tomorrow morning I have to make a quick trip into school to go over my courses with the instructor who's going to teach them for me next semester. I expect we'll be on our way by midday, though.

We'll be taking three days to get to M's mom's place in Cape Coral, FL, because M doesn't have the stamina I do for driving long distances. We'll stop every couple of hours for this and that, and we'll stop overnight before dark, because in the dark it's too hard for either Marilyn or me to keep each other in plain view.

It's going to be an interesting trip!You'd be amazed what one has to consider when doing something like this. For example, I now know all there is to know about airline baggage allowances. I discovered, for example, that the cheapest way to reliably and swiftly ship, say, 150 lbs of goods is to take it along as excess baggage. UPS, DHL, FedEx would charge around $800 or more. As airline excess baggage I should get away with paying maybe $400.

My Fulbright scholarship grant covers me for up to $500 of excess baggage.

Bingo! No brainer.

At the airport in Fort Myers, I'll check all my luggage through to New Delhi—other than my carry on laptop computer case, which, aside from the laptop, will include sundry items such as meds, etc. that I don’t want to lose sight of. I'll pay whatever excess baggage fees I have to, and then claim reimbursement from the Fulbright folks at some later date.

Why do I have excess baggage, you may ask? What happened to "traveling light?"

Well, I got a couple of educational software developers to donate about 1100 CD-ROMs for me to take and distribute in India. Then I had my university produce 250 CD-ROMs of my own professional and teaching materials—again for distribution to students and faculty in India. Finally, I asked the print shop at my university to produce 6 hard copies of each of two of my books--so I can donate them to libraries here and there in India.

The CDs and books alone weigh in at over 130 lbs. So there we go; there ain't no way I'm going to avoid excess baggage on this trip!

Getting it all together while teaching a full schedule of classes is exhausting, however; more so than I ever anticipated. In fact, I'm looking forward to being in India so I can finally slow down!

One day at a time, though. All will be well :)

By way of compensation, I've had a couple of lovely send offs from my colleagues and students. My colleagues took me out to dinner last week to wish me bon voyage. Then, this evening, I had a lovely send off while I was at school.

I was busy in the computer lab with a few students who were finishing up their work for the semester when I heard this commotion in the hallway outside. In walked 30 or so of my students to wish me bon voyage!! What a beautiful surprise!

They came bearing gifts—cookies and farewell cards and such—and something wrapped up in silver foil.

Well, I kind of guessed what it was because of its shape (and also because I'd joked about it often enough in class—and you'll have to ask my students what the context was!). But when I literally tore open the wrapping paper, the contents turned out to be a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey!!

Now there's a first. I never before had students buy me any kind of alcohol.

But I think it's a tradition I'd like to encourage them to maintain.

Getting a Visa to Enter India

2006-11-20T10:20:00.000-05:00

Acquiring a visa to enter another country is stressful no matter where you want to go; India is no exception.

I'd been told that I shouldn't apply too soon, since the visa starts from the day you receive it, not from the day you arrive; and apparently it can be difficult to get an extension to your visa once you're in country.

I had options. I could mail in my visa application, along with my passport; or I could take it to the appropriate Indian Consulate--which in my case, coming from Pennsylvania, had to be the consulate in New York City.

I decided the risk was too great to send off my application by mail, especially since my departure time was imminent. Moreover, on the NYC Indian Consulate website there was an ominous note indicating that, because of a significant increase in demand for passports and visas, it could take two weeks to process a visa, not including the time it would take to mail it back and forth.

So I downloaded the visa application form from the website and carefully filled it out. I added supporting documentation about the Fulbright award, along with the Government of India clearance which had been acquired for me by the Fulbright representatives in New Delhi. I'd already renewed my passport. It was good till 2016.

I had all my ducks in line; I was ready to go to the consulate.

NYC is 6 hours drive from my home town of Ligonier, in SW Pennsylvania. The Indian Consulate office in NYC opens at 9:00 am. I wanted to get the visa taken care of the same day, so I figured I needed to be the first in line.

On the advice of my wife, Marilyn (whose advice I ignore at myperil!), I planned to drive into Newark International Airport, park the car there, and then take trains and subways to Lexington Street in Manhattan. A Fulbrighter friend, Denise Burnette, who teaches at Columbia University and whom I'd met in June at the Fulbright to India orientation in Washington, DC, had given me precise directions on which trains and subways to take to get to where I needed to go.

I hit the road shortly after midnight, last Friday morning (Nov. 17). Traffic on the interstates was light in the middle of the night. As a result, I got to Newark International Airport, 16 miles from downtown Manhattan, by about 5:00 am!

No problem, I thought to myself; I preferred to be early rather than snarled up in some nightmarish New York congestion. So I parked the car in the airport parking lot and headed for downtown Manhattan.

Surprise, surprise! At 5:00 in the morning, even in NYC, you're one of few travellers on the train or subway system, and those that are sharing the ride with you are essentially semi-comotose. More to the point, though, there were all these uniformed attendants standing around waiting for the surge of rush hour traffic and they all wanted to help me find my way around.

It was wonderful! I love New York :)

So... the upshot was that I was standing outside the Indian Consulate by 6:00 am. And yes, I was the first in line!

On the walk from the subway station to the consulate, I'd passed several retaurants, so I moseyed on back to one of them, ordered a coffee to go, used the bathroom, and strolled on back down past the consulate into Central Park, where I sort of made myself comfortable, gathered my wits, and sipped a very welcome first hot coffee of the day.

But I didn't dally long in Central Park. I'd come a long way to be first in line and I didn't want to lose my spot.

About 7:00 am, just 5 minutes after I parked myself next to the gate that led down to the basement of the consulate where passports and visas were processed, I was joined by the second in line, a young Sikh from the Punjab in India. Within half an hour there were maybe 30 people in the line, and by the time they opened the gate at about 8:40 am there must have been 100. And they kept coming throughout the morning. I estimate there must have been well over 400 by midday.

Anyway, the process was simple enough. You got a numbered ticket, like at the supermarket deli counter, and when your number was called you went up to the counter to submit your visa application and passport. You were then given a numbered receipt and, because I was #1 (*smile*), the lady told me to come back at midday to get my visa.

Whoohoo!

It seemed an interminable wait, though, because I was dog tired. I tried to revive my flagging spirits by going back to the restaurant where I'd bought the coffee. I treated myself to a healthy Eggs Benedict breakfast. I lingered in the heady, aromatic atmosphere of the restaurant, reading a book while nursing cup after cup of coffee. I left a generous tip on the table for the waitress to see so she wouldn't try to hustle me out of there.

It worked; she hustled others, but not me :)

I dawdled back to the consulate on what turned out to be a bright, sunny, warm, November day. There, outside, I stopped and chatted with several others who were waiting with me. One was the Sikh lad whom I'd already met in the line. He was a graphic designer for a newspaper publisher. He'd lost his passport when, trusting the mail, he'd sent it off to the New Zealand Embassy to get a tourist visa stamped into it.

His tale of woe made my day; I no longer felt I'd wasted time and money slogging it into NYC.

Shortly after midday we were told to form a line to collect our visas and, lo and behold, I picked mine up without a hitch, retraced my steps to Newark International Airport, picked up my car, and moseyed on back to SW Pennsylvania.

I got home around 8:00 pm, having stopped along the way to grab a MacDonald's large fries and a mess of McNuggets. By 9:00 pm I was in bed.

I slept for 14 hours......

Fulbright to India: Preliminary Ruminations

2006-11-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

Well, it's Monday, November 20. Two weeks from today I'll be on my way to India.

This will be the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

It's the end of one journey that began in early 2005, when a form letter from the Fulbright organization crossed my desk in my office at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. The letter invited me--and a thousand other professors--to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship. It was not the first time such a letter had crossed my desk, but it was the first time I'd taken the time to read it and follow up on it.

I won an award to go lecture in India at Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam, an all-women's university in Tirupati, South India, some 150 km (about 93 miles) from Chennai. I'll be there from four to six months.

This blog will tell the story of my experiences in India. I hope I keep it up, and that you will find it interesting reading as you accompany me along the way.