My Photographs from the Trip

I've now finished putting together a website containing some of my favorite photographs from the trip. You can access the site here. The photographs are divided into groups -- they really kind of sorted themselves out: People, People at Work, Streets, Signs, Facades (doors and windows), Mosques, Temples, and Villages.

Photos from Chennai/Madras

I've just uploaded some of my favorite photos from our last stop, Chennai. You can view them here.

The initial group of photos were taken at Arulmigu Kapaleeswarar Temple (Hindu) in the heart of the city. The other photos were taken at the beach on the Bay of Bengal at twilight. As I explained in a previous post, Indians don't go to the beach they way we do. No bathing suits, no swimming. They treat the beach more as a park, with friends and family lounging around in groups and food vendors everywhere helping them to enjoy the evening. Paulo and I had vowed to put on our speedos and go body surfing here, but that provided culturally inappropriate. There are a couple of shots of the group frolicking in the surf. At one point a wave came in and swept everyone's sandals out to sea. Miraculously, they were all recovered.

Our First Days in Pune

Saturday, July 26. We all had a wonderful time at the rural Sevagram Ashram and the surrounding villages, as I reported in an earlier post, but we were also pretty elated to arrive at the Park Central Hotel in Pune, which is air conditioned, roomy, and just on the edge of being a little swanky. Our first afternoon we just enjoyed the hot showers and air conditioning (not to mention the free wireless internet, which, alas doesn’t work in my room so all posting is done in the lobby) and we treated ourselves to pretty competent pizza and red wine at an Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. I felt like I went back to the U.S. for a few hours to recharge.

Pune is very different from the other cities we’ve visited, Delhi and Ahmedabad. The fact that it has sidewalks, which I’ve been remarking to others seem totally absent in India, immediately caught my eye and has become for me a kind of symbol of the relative prosperity and sophistication here. Pune is known as the “Silicon Valley” of India, and you can see the effects of software industry money everywhere in the new buildings, fancy shopping districts, and the abundance of restaurants. This last adds to the city’s cosmopolitan feel. There’s a much wider range of cuisines here than we’ve seen elsewhere, and the city is full of, hip, sophisticated looking young people in western dress. Which is to say the effects of globalization with its general trend toward westernization and homogenization is pronounced. It’s a little too easy to romanticize India (women in flowing saris, orange clad wandering sadhus, cows in the middle of traffic, men in turbans and imams hurrying to mosques, makeshift Hindu temples and cobbled-together commercial districts right out of the 19th-century or earlier) but this India is a little harder to find in Pune, which is westernizing at what appears to be a pretty torrid pace. The city is also one of the intellectual centers of India, which helps account for some of the sophistication and cosmopolitanism I’ve noted. It has some of the feel of a large college or university town. Everywhere there are huge billboards advertising new, luxury condominium complexes marketed as resorts (swimming pools, golf courses, gyms, etc.). They seem indistinguishable from what we’d see back home and caught my attention for the way they underscore the rapidity of modernization here, and the huge gulf between the poor and the young, aspiring middle classes who are being seduced by a kind of globalized style of living that seems rather incongruous when experienced in the context of all the poverty we’ve seen. I suspect, too, that some of these are stand-alone complexes with their own water and power sources. Some even have their own schools. Organic farmers are finding ways to live “off the grid” but so too are these luxury complexes, which I can’t help thinking of as versions of the 21st-century village. But not the kind of village Gandhi had in mind, that’s for sure. Pune in this respect represents all of the changes the Gandhians (or most of them) we've met with on our trip despair over, for the economic effects of globalization in India (as elsewhere) are dramatically uneven, sap resources (and poepole) from the villages, contribute to environmental pollution, and undermine or erase traditional cultural forms and practices.

For a selection of pictures associated with this post, please click here.

Yesterday, our first full day in Pune, was pretty jam-packed, fascinating and moving. We began our day with a long visit to a substance abuse rehab center called Muktangan Mitra. It’s run by Dr. Anil Awachat, a noted writer and social activist. The facility incorporates elements of AA and the kind of programs you can find in U.S. rehab centers but with a Gandhian focus on promoting self-sufficiency (derived in part by Dr. Awachat’s devotion to Thoreau, who of course influenced Gandhi as well). Dr. Awachat, trained as a medical doctor, gave up his professional practice (and his early devotion to socialism) to help set up Muktangan with his wife, and he’s particularly interested in working with people living in villages to promote self-sufficiency along the lines Gandhi advocated. We had an informative meeting with him, and a very moving exchange with a group of around 75 male patients at the center. Some of them told us their own stories about how they became involved in substance abuse, and we were able to ask (and answer) questions in a wonderful give and take. Muktangan Mitra is another in a series of examples of institutions created by people influenced by Gandhi who opted out of mainstream careers to work on behalf of other who are marginalized, deprived, or suffering.

After our visit to the center we had a wonderful lunch at a Persian restaurant Madhuri recommended. It was wonderful, a huge open-air wood and bamboo structure in a kind of tropical setting that was part restaurant, part hookah bar (lots of young people sitting around smoking and just hanging out together), and part jazz club, with huge posters of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Billie Holiday, and others on the wall. The food was fabulous (I had an Iranian dish, cranberry rice with chicken), and the ambience great. After lunch we went by coach to one of the main tourist sites in Pune, Shaniwar Wada Palace, a huge 18th century fort and palace that became one of the last centers of resistance to the British. The vast array of wood-built structures that formed the palace burned down in 1828, but the grounds and foundations are intact and the huge fortified wall in the front with its beautiful rooms above were wonderful to visit. After I’d seen the fort I walked out to the street and around to the front to get a picture of the whole fort, but I got distracted by the array of sidewalk merchants who were running ingenious little businesses on blankets. There was a woman selling locks, another fellow selling keys who was repairing the lock on a suitcase, jewelry vendors, palm readers and fortune tellers, and, my favorite, a woman sitting on a chair who simply had a bathroom scale sitting in front of her. That was it. A business pared down to the bare minimum. She didn’t care if I weighed myself but she wanted me to take her picture and she whooped with delight when she saw her image on my LCD screen. For me she symbolizes Indian ingenuity and the drive to find a way to get by under difficult circumstances. Again, it's easy to idealize or sentimentalize people like her, but she impressed me, and she seemed just as happy as could be.

Riding the Train

One adventure you don't want to miss in India is riding the trains, and I've just posted a few shots I've taken from our rides between Delhi and Dehradun. These train rides are a great way to experience India, both because you see so much of the countryside, and because you inevitably get to meet some Indian people, who are wonderfully friendly and curious. Some of these shots are of people in the group relaxing at cards, and there are a couple of shots of Ellen with a youngster who adored her. Then there are the hijra, Indian transsexuals I mentioned in a previous post. Barbara got to talking to them and soon a number of us got involved. I've included a few shots of them. They were great fun, gregarious, spontaneous, playful, open, and as curious about us as we must have seemed about them. You can view the pictures I've posted by clicking here.

Update on Pictures

It turns out the hotel in Pune has free wireless internet, blogger heaven. And the uploading of pictures to my web gallery seems much quicker now, so I'm slowly uploading a backlog of selected photos. While I'm pasting links to the photos into my previous posts (Jambughoda and Temples and Shrines so far) you can just go directly to my web gallery home page and see the pictures I'm uploading. Newest galleries will be in front. Click here to go to the gallery. The shot above is of me romping in a monsoon downpour yesterday. If I get the courage later I'll post the picture of Paulo and I dancing in the rain . . .

Jambughoda Palace

(For pictures please click here)

Thursday, July 10. We’re now at the Jambughoda Palace hotel near Tejgadh, far from Delhi and Ahmedabad and deep in the tribal forests of Gujarat. We’ve left the city with its hectic traffic and pollution for clear air and the sound of birds singing in palm trees. Jambughoda Palace is an old estate that has been turned into a kind of nature retreat resort. We drove four hours from Ahmedabad to get here, the last hour of which took us up into foothills and into the forest where people officially categorized by the government as “tribals” are working small farms off the main road. While we passed some of the same kinds of shanty towns here we saw in Ahmedabad the people seem marginally more well off than the urban poor. Some of the homes are stucco with tile roofs, and there are farmhouses dotting the landscape. People were at work in the fields sowing seeds behind cows pulling plows, and others were busy fetching water, keeping house, or selling things by the side of the road (there is a dizzyingly complex network of impromptu roadside commerce everywhere we go) and kids in uniforms were getting off school buses and heading home. These people are working hard to scratch out a very basic living, but the conditions here strike me as better than in the city, for the landscape is beautiful, the flora and fauna are dense and green, and the whole rhythm of life is much more relaxing than anything we’ve experienced before. But the poverty remains stark, the living conditions often bleak and unsanitary.

The somewhat pompously named Jambughoda Palace Resort is beautiful, but pretty funky. The building is stately and has a lot of character, but it’s quite run down, even dilapidated, and the rooms are very basic (no AC, but we’ve got ceiling fans, and the bathrooms are in a tile room out in back of our rooms—you can have a cold shower or fill up a bucket of warm water and dump it over yourself). No one is complaining too much, however. We’re pretty glad to trade AC and hotel rooms for the sound of birds and the absence of traffic noise, the constant din of honking that dogged us in Delhi and Ahmedabad. The grounds are beautiful, as you’ll see from the pictures, lush and colorful, with a large outdoor veranda adjacent to the main house for dining (we just finished a wonderful dinner out there). The Jambughoda is adjacent to a wildlife sanctuary featuring panthers, hyenas, and antelopes. We’re told panthers occasionally roam on the property. I’ll let you know if they do. Tomorrow we head to the Tribal Arts Academy for a full day. See the link on this site for details about the academy, which works to preserve and enhance the culture of the tribal peoples of the area.

This morning before leaving Ahmedabad we stopped for a tour of the Calico museum, one of the jewels of the city. The building and grounds of the museum are beautiful, and the collection of weavings, carved statuary, and bronze work is amazing. The collection is housed in a palace with beautiful marble floors, intricately carved wood inside and out, and a maze of rooms, stairways and terraces, all of which are covered with displays of quite stunning woven work of all kinds, carved statutes and carts, replicas of the interior of royal tents, and bronze works. It’s much too vast to see properly in less than a full day, and we only had a couple of hours with a guide. More an introduction than anything else, but quite marvelous. Take a look at the website if you want to see more since, as I said, photos were not allowed.

Old Ahmedabad

I’m going to keep this pretty short since we depart tomorrow for our next destination, the Tribal Arts Academy in Tejgadh. This morning many of us took the city’s “Heritage Tour,” which covers sites in the old walled city of Ahmedabad (please click here to look at a selection of the photographs I took there). As usual, half the fun was in getting there, for we finally had a chance to ride in India’s auto rickshaws, those little, three-wheeled green and yellow vehicles you’ve seen in a lot of the photos. They whiz through traffic (harrowing), zigzagging in and out of larger cars, scooters, bikes, and assorted carts. When the aim right at you, they mean business and you’d better get out of the way. But they get you where you want to go, and quickly.

The tour starts at the largest Hindu temple in the city, which was full of worshipers. These temples are colorful affairs, painted in bright colors and with lots of statuary (compared, for example, to the mosques and the Jain temples, which are built of natural, unpainted stone). The old city itself is a maze of narrow streets, alleys, and corridors divided up into discrete sections (the name of which I forget). The architecture is an eclectic mix of architectural styles (Muslim, Indian, Persian, etc.). The areas we saw were mostly residential. The entrances to homes are right on the street and you can see people preparing food, eating, or just milling around looking out at you as you walk by. Take a look at the pictures I posted to get a feel for the facades, which I thought were a wonderful play of structural styles and colors. The streets were filled with people living in the area. We never saw any other tourists, which has been the case at many of the places we visited (its off-season for tourists given the heat, and besides, we’re visiting a lot of places most tourists don’t get to), and we elicited a lot of curiosity, with some people following us for a block or two just to look. We ended the tour at the mosque in the old town, a smaller version of the one we had seen in Delhi, a beautiful place with just a few men lounging by the wash basin or sitting or sleeping among the pillars in the portico. From there we want on by auto rickshaw to a Jain Temple, beautiful again but in its own way, distinct in style from either the mosque or the Hindu temple. You’ll have to check it out online because they don’t allow pictures.

We ended our tour with another harrowing auto rickshaw ride to an elaborate 15th century well that is five floors deep and is an architectural structure unto itself, as long as a building with an elaborate array of pillars and stairways that descend to the well at the bottom, which is now dry due to a low water table. You won’t be able to imagine what this place looks like without the pictures I posted. I wish I had time to write in detail about the really illuminating talk we had later in the afternoon from a woman named Suchitra Sheth, who works at the Center for Social Knowledge and Action here in Ahmedabad. She helped clarify for us the various political debates current in India regarding Gandhi and his legacy, and reported on the important work she and her organization are doing in a state, Gujarat, currently dominated by a rigid and pretty intolerant party of Hindu nationalists (one of our speakers got arrested for saying this, so I hope they’re not reading this blog).

Dethali and The Vidyapith

Tuesday was a very special day for all of us because we finally got out into the countryside, to experience the village life Gandhi championed. Our destination was the village of Dethali, in the distract of Kheda, and to a school run on Gandhian principles, the Gujarat Vidyapith Rural Service Centre. As is often the case, the journey was nearly as exciting as the destination. The bus ride from the hotel took us through some of the busiest streets of old Ahmedabad, and busy here is way, way busier than it is in Chicago, New York City, or anywhere else. Three wheel auto rickshaws share the road with pedestrians, cars, buses, flat bed trucks, commercial trucks, bicyclists, camels, and elephants. The commercial activity along the sides of the road, which I’ve described before, is mind-bogglingly complex, run out of ramshackle shacks, push carts, stalls, and more conventional spaces like stores we’re used to back home. Many of these are make-shift repair shops, for everything here gets recycled, but these shops are interspersed with food, fruit, and spice vendors, clothing outlets, and tobacco shops. Every once in a while side streets run from the main road back to slums where people are scratching out an existence as best the can in shacks put together from discarded materials. I’ve taken to shooting pictures out of the bus windows with my camera set on the “sport” mode to freeze the movement, and it works surprisingly well. The shot of the three elephants in traffic I’m linking to this post, for example, was taken with my zoom lens from about 75 yards as we whizzed by at 35 mph.

It took a good hour-and-a-half to reach the turnout to Dethali, and after turning off the main highway we drove for quite awhile along a narrow road with rice paddies and small villages on both sides. Women in colorful saris were working the rice paddy fields or washing clothes in streams, along with a few men. Occasionally we passed camels, donkeys, and white spider monkeys, either in the fields on the road. We nearly reached the town when we found out the road ahead of us was blocked or out for some reason, so we had to turn around, drive all the way back to the highway, head up the highway to the next small turnoff, and start all over again. Nobody cared. We were enjoying the ride too much and could have gone on all day. Please click here for pictures of the drive.

Soon, however, we pulled slowly into the village of Dethali. This was the first real village we had seen the whole trip, and it presented us with a rural India magically different from the busy, kinetic ruckus of Delhi and Ahmedabad. People are poor here, the dwellings humble (mud or concrete) and the shops make-shift affairs like those we’d seen by the side of the road, but the pace of things was a world away from that of the city. More about the village later, for we drove right through and into the Vidyapith Institute where our guide had arranged for a tour. Some students from the village attend, but many are sent by their parents from all over India to get a “Ghandian” education, that is, one oriented toward hands-on practice with spinning cotton and growing organic vegetables and rice as well as courses in the traditional academic disciplines. We toured the facilities, met the director, and interacted with students in a number of classrooms. They were a joy to be with, so open and curious, waving, smiling, gawking at us in curiosity. In one room a bunch of kindergarteners began to cry when we overwhelmed their classroom. Some had never seen white people before, and it was too much. Not even Barbara’s balloons would placate them. We finally left them in peace so they could calm down. Another class, full of 9 or 10 year-olds, was giddy at seeing us and they couldn’t get enough of waving and staring. They sang us a wonderful song about the virtues of village life. It was marvelous. Later some of us gathered in the Director’s home to visit and hear one family member play the harmonium. At one point he offered Ted a chance to play, and he did a more than credible performance, with the young man accompanying him on tables. I shot a video of it and will post it some day when I can find the time (videos have been skimpy because they take a long time to upload). Please click here for pictures of the institute.

The school was an inspiring place to visit and it was exciting to see how they put Gandhi’s philosophy into practice. But I really wanted to get back to that village, and finally I decided I would head off on my own and ask the guide to just pick me up when the bus drove out. He agreed, and I headed off, joined by Adam, a great young guy who teaches history at Evanston Township High School and shares my passion for photography. We walked down the driveway to the school, out the gate, across the street, and down into a small field with a path that took us into the village. We passed a woman tending a water buffalo, saw kids with umbrellas playing on a bridge in the distance, and ended up where the road spills into town. It didn’t take long for us to be mobbed by kids and adults alike. You would have thought Brad Pitt and Matt Damon had come to the village. We chatted as best we could, exchanged names, and shared our curiosity about one another. We’ve discovered people love having their pictures taken and seeing the image on the LCD screen, so we did a lot of that. We were invited to stroll up streets and visit with shopkeepers, and at one point it began to rain pretty hard and we ran to the closest shelter along with about 20 other people. This turned out to be a Hindu shrine, tended by a garrulous man who spoke some English. He was eager to have us look in the temple and even blessed us by doting our foreheads with red powder. We chatted with him and the kids who were tagging along with us until the rain stopped, and then we headed down a road adjacent to a beautiful open field with grazing water buffalo in the distance and a huge flock of what looked like white heron nesting in a tree. Please click here for pictures of the village.

Its easy, and of course dangerous, to romanticize or sentimentalize this village and its people. Judged by the standards of modernity we bring to the village they live in economic and material poverty and seem to be scraping out a subsistence living in dwellings that seemed solid but in disrepair, with little in the way of what we think of as amenities, let alone paved streets, sewers, sanitation facilities, etc. Their happiness during the moments we were with them was clearly connected in part to the fun they were having with these curious white strangers (one of whom is 5’ 4” and the other well over 6’—Indians are quite short). Still, life here was to my mind preferable to life in Delhi (certainly in its slums) or in Ahmedabad. I’d choose Dethali without giving it a second thought. The natural beauty of the place, and the relative quiet, is striking, and people here are taking care of their basic needs with dignity. Visiting there was a highlight of the trip.

Jama Masjid and Qutub Minar, Part II

Last night I posted a quick note about our last day in Delhi and now, on the plane flying to Ahmedabad, I want to fill things in a little bit. Well, maybe more than a little bit. (Please click here to look at the pictures mentioned in this post.) We were met at our hotel in the morning by a young guide hired by our group leaders to take us on a tour of some selected sites in Delhi. We started out by walking around the corner to the metro station, which we hadn’t been in before. I’ve written earlier about the vast gulf in India between the well-off and the poor, indeed, this is probably the thing visitors from the west remark on most when they talk about their time in India. This gulf couldn’t be more stark than when you descend from the hurried, rough streets of Delhi into the wide, clean, marble stairway down into the city’s new metro system, built to accommodate the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Entering the station complex is like walking into a sparkling new mall in the U.S. If you’re from Chicago, think The Water Tower or Northbrook Court. The place is cavernous, sparkling new, and extremely well lit, with small food courts and other services. Because of ethnic and religious divisions in India, particularly between Hindu nationalists and Muslims, there have been bombings and attacks throughout India, and security is much more pronounced than in the U.S. (for example, our plane is currently sitting on the tarmac at a stop half-way to Ahmedabad and military personnel just came on the plane and searched all carry on baggage to make sure no one deplaning left an explosive device on board) so when you descend the escalator to the train you have to go through security, and you won’t see any pictures of the system because cameras and filming are prohibited. The train cars themselves are huge and comfortable, and there are no dividers between each train (they were made in Korea). This is simply a state of the art system that puts every metro station I’ve been in around the world to shame (but to be fair, it is brand new).

When we got off at the stop for Old Delhi we emerged to find ourselves in a narrow little street full of trash, garbage, and beggars. On our right was a Hindu temple built in a little square of the shopping area (indeed, Old Delhi seems to be one big shopping area with residents living above and behind the shops). An old, darkened man with long, stringy grey hair was bathing in a tub adjacent to the temple (the Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim temples all have some facilities for ritual bathing before entering) . You’ll find a few photos of the temple on the web gallery I posted. Leaving the temple we moved through the streets of the Old City, which I’ve described in an earlier post. We stopped to listen to our guide tell us how street vendors put together something called betel, which is a leaf folded over some paste and a seed which people chew on. The betel juice aids digestion but produces lots of saliva, and often the sides of buildings (inside and out) are stained with its juices. Again you’ll see pictures of the betel vendor in my web gallery, along with other shots of the street life along the way to the mosque.

You get to the mosque, an imposing sight from the street below, by walking up a steep, wide stretch of stairs, then through a gate into an expansive and breathtaking courtyard. Here you take in the full sweep of human activity at the mosque, which is not at all like a church where you file into a room full of pews, hear a sermon, sing, pray, and leave. People seemed to be spending the whole day here, lounging around with friends and family in the shade of the walls around the courtyard, washing in the large, square pool in front of the mosque itself, or in the entry to the mosque itself, which is a kind of long, pillared portico of shiny marble. There is space inside to accommodate over 200,000 people, but it wasn’t open during our visit (it’s open for prayers on Fridays). The play of color from the clothing of the worshipers against the cool, marble stones and the muted light filtering in was beautiful (again, see my photos, where I tried as best I could to capture the feel of this space). The play of color against marble, tile, water, walls, and the sky beyond in the courtyard where people were bathing was also quite beautiful. Looking back across the courtyard from the mosque you see a gate, and beyond the gate are stairs that spill down into a huge marketplace below. The mosque, by the way, was built by Shah Jahan (and designed by his daughter), the same Mugal emperor who built the Agra fort and the Taj Mahal (which, I learned from the guide, was an exact replica of a smaller building already in existence—so much for originality).

Our guide was really helpful in explaining the history of the place. We gathered around him in a circle and, as I listened, I began to notice Indians in the courtyard beginning to mill around behind us. Soon we had a very large crowd, 7 or 8 deep, ringing our circle. Young men with cell phone cameras were taking our pictures as we took there’s, another example of how our tourist’s curiosity about Indians, who seem in many ways to look so different from us, is matched by theirs. It’s all relative.

After our visit to the mosque we drove across town to some ruins that were part of the first city of Delhi (according to our guide there have been seven). This complex, called Qutub Minar, is dominated by the ruins of a mosque and a beautiful, quite massive decorated minaret. The mosque was built in part by pillars and stone taken from Hindu temples, a striking example of how the conquering Mugals established their authority. The catch, of course, is that pillars in Hindu temples contain figurative carvings, and these are strictly forbidden by Muslims whose mosques are decorated only with script and abstract designs. How did they deal with this? By scratching out, flattening, or obliterating the images. We spent a lot of time just wandering around this place, which is quite beautiful and was full of Indian families (it was a Sunday) and some tourists. There are some pictures on the web gallery, of course. The place reminded me of the forum in Rome, actually (which for centuries was simply used as a salvage heap for building supplies, especially when Christians took to building churches in Rome, all of which have a variety of pillars that often don’t match and that originally stood in Roman temples and government buildings). The look of the grounds here is very much like the look of the current forum, though on a much smaller scale and done in red stone rather than white marble.

We ended the day at a crafts museum. Our guide, Ranjith Henry (more about this extraordinary fellow a little later, for he deserves a long post all to himself) insisted we go here because we’d spent the whole day looking at monumental architecture produced by the elite ruling classes of India, and we ought to spend some time with art and craft produced by ordinary people in the villages of India. He was right. Although we got there too late to see the entire collection, the carvings (huge and tiny) and tapestries we did see were extraordinary, and the grounds, which contained authentic reproductions of typical villages throughout India, were quite beautiful (tropical, like Hawaii, and at one point we heard a huge peacock scream from atop a towering tree). Quite a sight. Quite a sound.

I’m leaving out the food for the day, a south Indian lunch and a farewell dinner at our hotel, but I’m written out. I’m sure you’ll hear from your friends and family about it. We eat a lot of Indian food because our home is just north of Devon Avenue in west Rogers Park, a very large Indian-Pakistani neighborhood, but the versions of the dishes there we are getting here (especially the uttapams and dosas) are much richer in variety and dramatically better. And of course we’re coming across food we never get there. More on that later in the trip.

Touring Jama Masjid Mosque and Qutub Minar

Today we had another extraordinary day touring Delhi (we get the weekends off from school!). We visited a part of the old city and were taken for a guided tour of the largest mosque in Delhi, the Jama Masjid. Simply extraordinary. For pictures that tell it all, please click here. We then went on to Qutub Minar, a wonderful site of ruins from a mosque in what was the oldest part of Delhi. There are pictures of this too on the link above. We also visited a crafts museum and had a wonderful final dinner. Tomorrow we're up at 3:00 a.m. to head off to our next destination. If I have internet there I'll keep posting. And I repaired the link to my Agra photos. Please see post below.

Agra Pictures

Something seems wrong with the link to pictures from the post below. Please try clicking here to access them.

Visit to Agra and the Taj Mahal

Yesterday (Saturday, the 5th) we took time out from our lectures and discussion of Gandhi and contemporary India to go to some of the great tourist sites near Delhi, the Agra Fort and Taj Mahal (that’s me in the photo, for those of you wondering what the guy who is doing this blog looks like), sites which are about a 2 1/2 hour train ride from Delhi. For a selection of photos I took yesterday, click here. The night before we had a chance to socialize with our speakers and some of their colleagues at a dinner we hosted for them. The talks we have heard have provided us a stimulating and challenging opportunity to discuss some of the crucial problems facing contemporary India, and the dinner provided us a relaxed environment for continuing those discussion. We’ve all found our reading and discussions about Gandhi, his ideas, and his relevance for contemporary India profoundly rich and challenging, and the dinner gave us a chance to extend our exploration. It has been wonderful being able to get to know a range of important Indian intellectuals and activists and, working with them, to consider the paradoxical challenges globalization, economic expansion, poverty, and environmental pollution present to India in the early 21st century.

I say paradoxically because that’s what visiting India and thinking about its growth and its problems is all about. When you visit call centers, drive around parts of New Delhi with fancy new buildings housing transnational corporations, and consider the explosive economic expansion India is experiencing you see first hand where all the talk about this emerging giant (along with China), is coming from. But when you move around other parts of New Delhi, or go to Old Delhi, or visit a town like Agra, and you could be in the 16th century. Shanty towns, people literally dressed in rags living on the streets in makeshift shelters or just sleeping on the sides of the road or the center median, trash piled everywhere and no sanitation facilities, and you understand the economic and social challenges facing the country. Will the wealth developing at the top just naturally trickle down, or does India require dramatic systematic changes instead, changes that will train the unemployed and create jobs to transform India’s infrastructure and redistribute it’s wealth, which is there, but concentrated at the very top. Modern capitalism argues that trickle down will work, but Gandhian principles argue for a dramatic humanizing of the systems of modernity currently ruling India and for social and economic justice to drive change. But how do you convince a county as huge as India to stop simply paying lip service to Gandhi’s importance as the father of the country and seriously consider how his moral and ethical system can be put in service for the good of all? And when this happens how will people deal with Gandhi’s sweeping critique of modernity in a 21st century rolling full steam ahead? Gandhi was committed to the village, to people spinning their own cloth, growing their own food, and living simple, humble lives. How can all of this work in a world of commodification, rapid modernization, technological innovation, and urbanization, the key engines driving development in India? And how will India find a way to be a truly multicultural democracy with the increasing divide between Muslims and Hindus, a divide, by the way, that is not deeply historical but caused by British colonialism, a divide deepening now into fundamentalist nationalisms on both sides? These are some of the vexing problems we’re grappling with on this trip, and it is inspiring to meet with people so committed with social change (some of them have been arrested, beaten, and picketed against, so you can rest assured they are asking the right questions and pushing back against the inequities of the system here).

But back to our trip to the Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal. We went by bus to the largest train station in Delhi, and for me the walk through the station (going and coming) was as dramatic an experience as seeing the Taj Mahal. When you travel abroad by train you not only see the countryside. You travel along side the people who live there, and they come from all classes and walks of life. The Delhi station was packed with people from all over India. They wait hours together for their train and while doing so take out dishes and pots and dine together on the floor of the station, or just fall asleep together on the floor and benches. Beggars of all ages roam through the crowds, men and women pass by carrying huge loads on their heads or pushing impossibly large loads on carts. I took some pictures in the station, so you’ll see.

We started at Agra fort, a massive palace built by Shah Jahan, one of the last of the Mugal rulers of India, who also built the nearby Taj Mahal. The fort is built of red stone but inside has many structures of white marble. It goes on, and on, and on, beautiful buildings, a dizzying array of courtyards, reception areas, and living spaces. The stone work and decoration (none representational, of course, for this is barred by Islam, just beautiful abstract decorations or script—same at the Taj) are amazing, and we had a wonderful visit there. You can check out the pictures I’ll upload to get a sense of the place.

Everyone has seen pictures of the Taj Mahal and knows it is one of the so-called “wonders of the world” but you have to see it (from afar and up close) to really understand why. It is all about grandeur, symmetry, color and texture. The play of these elements, that is, its grand scale, the aesthetic beauty of its symmetry (all four sides are exactly the same and reading left to right or right to left the structures mirror each other) and for me, the muted play of off whites and light and dark greys that create an eerie soft-focus texture when seen from afar, all combine to make the building what it is. The gardens show it off like a great setting for a beautiful diamond. You’ll see from the pictures I upload, but you’ve seen pictures like this before and you really have to be there to appreciate the place. Adjacent to the Taj on either side are a mosque and a palace. They are, of course, identitical, and I found their interior spaces dazzling. As you’ll see from the photos, I got carried away taking pictures of light and shadow (Jay Boersma are you out there?) and architectural details. A photographer’s feast.

In the town of Agra we experienced a more rural India with a remarkably vibrant set of shops, homes, repair facilities, etc. Here you see the same shocking disparity between the well off and the poor you see in Delhi. We visited a marble workshop where we saw craftsman at work producing the kind of work that went into the building of the Taj Mahal. The owner is doing just fine. His children are headed off to elite universities in the states. They may never return, or if they do, they will live in a world very different from those others we saw in the town who are living in shanty towns and make-shift enclaves with no facilities and little to do but try to grind out a living selling this or that or recycling bicycle tires. I wandered alone for awhile in the back streets of Agra and was able to see the people up close. I’ll post some pictures I took on the walk. By the way, I felt totally safe on this walk and others like it. People are very curious seeing this white guy in a Nehru shirt walking around with a camera, but they are wonderfully friendly in their curiosity and happy to have their pictures taken.

This reminds me of an incident that happened at the Taj I’ll close with. As I’ve said before, there are very few Anglos in the parts of India we’ve been going and we elicit a real curiosity. One Indian woman just walked up to my wife and took her chin in her fingers and wiggled it. At the Taj Wendy (she’s the one in the pictures with blond braided hair) was nearly mobbed by a big Indian family who wanted to take their pictures with her. And not just one big picture. Each family member, it seemed, wanted a separate picture. It was fun to watch, and for someone like me who sometimes feels ambivalent taking pictures of the locals on my trips, it was a little reassuring.

Another Great Day in New Delhi

We began our day with a visit to The Centre for Science and the Environment. The Centre is located in the bustling suburbs of New Delhi, but don’t confuse these suburbs with the ones we’ve got in the U.S. We drove for quite awhile (we’re traveling in two mid-size vans, by the way) along a busy, traffic-choked highway to get to the Centre, and on either side nearly the whole way out there was a sea of activity. These highways are crammed in places with small businesses, some in make-shift shacks, others in more established buildings. People are also selling food, drinks, and tobacco off of carts and tiny stalls. These spaces along the side of the road are shared by individuals and families who are literally living on the street. Some rickshaw drivers seem to live and sleep in their rickshaws. Others take shelter under pieces of wood, metal, or tarp that have been cobbled together to provide some shade and a little protection from the rain. Down side-roads and off in fields are whole shanty towns, again a mix of tarps, tents, wood, and metal. These are like little impromptu villages, and the poverty here is stark. You see such scenes repeated all over Delhi. Goats roam the sidewalks, live chickens are for sale in cages, and here and there is a bull, cow, or water buffalo.

For pictures, click here. Most are of street life taken from the bus, but others include the grounds of the Centre and interior shots from the Gandhi museum (see below).

The Centre for Science and the Environment is an important and impressive institution. The building itself is a model of water harvesting, and we started with a tour of how the facility works to re-circulate rainwater back into the soil and for use in the building. It’s a model of self-sufficiency, and the grounds are lush, nearly tropical. The facility is really impressive, but more impressive is work the Centre does to advocate for responsible policies to protect and enhance the supply of water in India. The Centre draws on the basic Gandhian commitment to the local solution of problems and to the use of traditional, environmentally friendly processes for harvesting and renewing water for both farming and consumption (and for avoiding pollution). They’ve been quite successful with the government and India’s Supreme Court in advocating for progressive change when it comes to the environment. We were extremely impressed with the programs they have in place (including the digitalizing of newspaper articles about the environment in India they are beginning to put online on their website).

After our visit to the Centre, where we also had lunch, we went to the Birla House, where Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life and where he was assassinated. On the grounds we visited the site where he was shot, marked by a simple column housed under a temple-like structure. The house itself contains a museum dedicated to Gandhi’s life and teachings, along with an impressive bookstore. We talked as much about the curatorial style of the place as we did about the substance of what was on display. Downstairs is a very traditional museum, Gandhi’s room as it existed on the day he was killed, and halls and halls of pictures of Gandhi from all phases of his life, with enough text on the walls to keep you busy for a couple of days. But upstairs is a different story. The whole space is a postmodern, interactive multimedia extravaganza. My own view was that this floor was an example of how a mania for multimedia and interactivity can overwhelm the substance of a presentation. Beneath all the bells and whistles the content struck me as, well, banal. But you might check with others and get a different story.

We ended the day with a wonderful visit to the Dilli Haat Crafts Bazaar, a beautifully kept commercial space for craftspersons selling silks, scarves, rugs, artwork, sculpture, jewelry, puppets, a dizzying array of things. We started with some food and drink at a little outdoor restaurant run by Navdanya, a biodiversity farm we’ll be staying at later in our trip (you won’t find drinks like we had in the U.S.—ask when we get back, but think a mix of fruit juice, sweetness, and salt), and then spent a couple of hours shopping. The place mainly caters to the Indian middle class rather than to tourists, though some find out about the place. But there aren’t parking lots of tour buses here, the quality of what’s on sale is impressive, and the prices are pretty reasonable.

Most of the pictures I took today were of the roadside shops and activity I mentioned earlier (the bus rides give us a kind of panoramic view of street life in Delhi and I’ve taken to shooting a lot of stills and video every time we stop). I’ll try to post some of them before I collapse.

New Photos Online

Hey everyone, I just posted a small batch of photos from today. They're on my mac.com web gallery. Just click here. You'll find shots from our trip to the Gandhi museum (the portrait is of the Director), some shots of workers on the museum grounds, a horse-drawn cart in traffic, photos at the site of Gandhi's cremation, and a few night shots I took after dinner in New Delhi. I've got some video clips but am struggling to find time to post them. Enjoy.

First Photos Online

Please check out my Mac Web Gallery for photos of our first day. As you'll see, I love to take pictures of people, but that off course includes many from our group, and there are some shots as well of streets and buildings in the city. Enjoy.