25 Things

It seems like there is an explosion of 25-things lists so I thought I’d go with that. Here are 25 things about my experience in Chennai so far.

1. Tender coconut
2. The 8PM rush at the neighborhood shrine: people, song and incense spilling out into the street
3. “Had your breakfast?” (morning greeting)
4. “Sit down”
5. “What did you pay for this?”
6. Yoga class commands: Relax! Stretch! Breathe! Focus! Concentrate!
7. Drinking from vessels without lip contact
8. Stares
9. Techniques auto drivers employ to solicit more money than the agreed sum
10. Girls with flowers in their hair
11. Bindi stickers
12. Bangles
13. The mysterious fluctuating availability status of various menu items over the course of a day
14. Household shrines
15. Creation, Maintenance and Destruction
16. “Is it not so?”
17. Billboards and placards advertising shops that no longer exist, or do not exist yet
18. The entire office staff sharing one email account
19. Nescafe, sugar and boiled milk
20. Locking the bathroom door closed when no one is in there
21. Hand washing after eating
22. Poop, crows and trash
23. Straight men embracing
24. Chai wallah, fruit-and-vegitable wallah, real-estate wallah, knife-sharpening wallah, tailoring wallah, ironing wallah, ear-wax-removal wallah, cotton-candy wallah, sugarcane-juice wallah, handyman wallah, fortune-teller wallah, spoken-english wallah, SAP-C++-JAVA-.NET-Oracle-CAD-training wallah
25.

Pongal O Pongal

Pongal is a harvest festival celebrated throughout Tamil Nadu. The traditional Pongal food is sweet pongal, made by boiling milk, adding rice and dahl, jaggery (sugar cane), ghee (clarified butter), rasins, cashews, cardamom. It seems like everybody I talked to has a different idea of how long pongal is supposed to last. I ended up celebrating for four days which resulted in my consuming of a lot of sweet pongal.

Making Pongal


Getting ready for pongal puja


Pongal Puja


Getting ready to eat pongal


A god dressed up for pongal


A cow dressed up for pongal


More pongal puja, at the home of my friend's relatives.

Happy New Year!

After visiting SEWA in Ahmedabad, I met up with a fellow volunteer for 3 days of sightseeing in Rajasthan. We started in Udaipur, continued on to visit a mountain fort and temple between Udaipur and Johdpur, and then I traveled to Jaipur on my own for the last day. Here are a couple photos:
The Lake Palace in Udaipur, now a Taj hotel (we did not stay here).

Kumbalgarh Fort - the journey there was as marvelous as the fort itself!


Ranakpur Temple, a 15th century marble Jain temple.


I know I know - I can't resist the food pictures! This one is of my extremely large and tasty Rajasthani Thaali.

I returned from my trip from to the north in time to celebrate the new year in Chennai with an evening of Bharatanatyam dance (traditional Tamil Nadu style) and a visit to my favorite South Indian restaurant, the Murugan Idli House, where a delicious New Years dinner for two ended up costing us the equivalent of $4.

Many people are asking me about the cost of living so I thought I'd write about that topic a little. The dollar goes a long way here. In general I find that most things cost anywhere between one-tenth to one-fifth of the price of a comparable product in the States. My observation is that agricultural products and goods and services that are labor-intensive cost more like one-tenth. Some examples: a good lunch in a nice, air-conditioned restaurant costs about 60 Rupees or $1.25. A small cup of chai or coffee is around 5 Rupees ($.10). My morning trip to the fruit stand, yielding two pomegranates, two guavas, one papaya, and 10 small bananas, cost 80 Rupees ($1.75). Rent for a "posh" two bedroom western-style flat is around 15,000 Rupees per month ($300). The only things I've found with roughly equivalent cost are: 1)dried pasta 2)cocktails at a fancy hotel bar (both are purchased almost exclusively by foreigners).

A few words also about what I've learned people earn: a well-paid domestic worker working every day 4 hours per day may earn 1000 Rupees ($20) per month (note this is far less than one-tenth the US equivalent wage). The college-educated coordinators at my NGO earn 10,000 Rupees ($200) per month. It is not surprising that many Indians see Westerners and assume that their big backpacks are stuffed full of cash. When discussing this assumption with some colleagues, they were genuinely shocked to learn that there are poor people and homeless people in America.

It's hard not to want to help people here by giving handouts when American dollars go such a long way. But is it appropriate to do so? My observation is that giving handouts has a number of adverse effects:
-perpetuates a mentality of dependence
-handouts actually reinforce social inequality because they are distributed unequally
-encourages parents to use their children for begging
-handouts may allow the giver to feel good and move on, while doing little to truly alleviate suffering.

I'm interested to hear others' views since this is a topic I've been thinking about quite a lot.