Marriage & Meditation

Wow, what a great couple of weeks the past few have been! For one thing, I had an amazing, transformative experience at Isha Yoga Center in the end of January. I took a three day yoga/meditation course there and had the most incredible experience. Since then I've been practicing the technique I learned there twice a day each day. My practice time may even exceed lunchtime as my favorite time of the day! :)

The week after returning from Isha was especially great because Deb, a friend and fellow Chennai-based AJWS volunteer, stayed at my place while she was attending a mediation course at Sivananda. We had great conversations about spirituality, yoga and judiasm every morning over coffee and fruit salad before we both headed off to work at our respective NGOs.

Knowing that I'm going to be leaving Chennai soon I've been savoring all my experiences here even more than usual. I've been so grateful for the absolute wonderful group of colleagues and friends who have greeted me so warmly here. Leaving this place for my next adventure is going to be truly bittersweet.

This past weekend in Chennai was my last, and it was definitely a good one. Balaji, a friend from Seattle invited me to his sister's marriage. Wow! 2000 people and three solid days of ceremonies. So many symbols, rituals, flowers, blessings, gifts, people, drums, cameras, and delicious foods. It was a lot of fun. I wore a sari and that was fun too.
A picture of the bride and groom:


A picture of Balaji:

Compassion

At a lot of ashrams in India, short little books on various life and spirituality topics are available from the ashram bookshop. These 20 page packets are great little reads. I wanted to share something I read about compassion and helping others that made a lot of sense to me. This one is from "A Guru Always Takes You for a Ride" by Sadhguru.

"Many times, human beings, once they reach a certain level of attainment, have an urge to be overly compassionate. Misplaced compassion always comes from your ego; you want to be the most compassionate person on the planet. Wherever anybody need anything - reach out. This is not coming from any kind of understanding, wisdom, or awareness... This problem is there among people - they want to be the most compassionate. True compassion is not about giving or taking. Ture compassion is just doing what is needed. You ave no preferences of your own; simply doing what is needed is compassion. Your revving yourself up into a huge amount of emotion and and reaching out to somebody is not compassion. This is just self-satisfaction, devious ways to fulfill yourself. Compassion is possible, genuine compassion is possible, when there is nothing to fulfill in you, you are just doing what is needed."

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.

Ahmedabad

This week I joined the staff of my NGO on an exposure visit to Ahmedabad. We're visiting an extremely innovative and impressive NGO called SEWA (pronounced seva), Self Employed Women's Association. SEWA goal is to organize female workers in the informal sector. I was amazed to learn that only about 7% of the Indian labor force works in the formal sector, which includes government and private industry. The rest of Indians work in the informal sector which includes everything from domestic workers, to street-vendors, handcraft-makers, midwives, agricultural laborers, auto-rickshaw drivers and the like. SEWA's goal is to promote the self-sufficiency and self-reliance of female workers in this sector and much of their work uses a market-based entrepreneurial approach. For example, SEWA will organize agricultural laborers into a cooperative, which will buy the product from the farmers and sell directly to traders in the market thereby cutting out middlemen and supporting higher prices for the agricultural laborers themselves. SEWA also operates a highly successful bank and insurance company, both of which develop financial products to meet the needs of poor, working women.



I of course was very interested in the insurance products offered. (If you don't also love insurance, you can skip this paragraph) SEWA Insurance has about 120 agents which they call Aagewans, or barefoot agents (barefoot because the agents go directly to the customers' homes and communities, where shoes are removed, on average the agents visit the household 3 times to explain benefits before the policy is purchased). They offer several insurance schemes, all are packages covering many household needs. The products are available to SEWA members (women only), who can choose to extend coverage to their husbands and children. The most popular (91%) is the lowest premium/lowest limit combination: 400 rupees premium per year ($8) covers the woman, husband and one child for the following limits (in dollars): life- 10,000 rupees ($200) for wife and husband; health - 2,000 rupees ($40) for each family member, House - 10,000 rupees ($200), Accidental death - 40,000 rupees ($1000) for wife and husband. SEWA Insurance has over 103,000 women as policyholders. They have a staff of only 75 plus the 120 agents. SEWA has found that this type of micro-insurance scheme provides essential economic support to poor, working families. In addition to helping those with claims, insurance plays a important role in the communities SEWA serves because it encourages women to begin planning for the future, rather than simply living day to day.



In other news, tonight is Christmas Eve. So strange it is to be in a land where Christmas is a non-event. There are Christians here but Christianity itself is not highly visible, and certainly not visible in the way of an American Christmas. Actually, there are three Christians who traveled in our group of 17 to Gujarat. I was surprised that this trip was planned for Christmas week but no one else commented. I spoke with the 3 Christian ladies about being away from their families for Christmas and they were sad about it but each felt it was their duty to participate in the exposure visit. As someone accustomed to being a member of a minority religion as well, I empathized with them and helped them locate a church in Ahmedabad where they could attend services for Christmas eve. The gratefulness they expressed for this small gesture absolutely made my day.

Yoga

This morning I attended my first yoga class in India. It took a while to find the right yoga center but now I think I have it. All credit for finding the center goes to my clever and resourceful friend Debbie (and long-lost near relative), who pointed out that the ashram we plan to visit has a branch center practically in my backyard. Actually, I'm finding that this is a trend - things I desire that seem very far away are actually very close at hand. I was recently wishing there were a western-style coffee house in my neighborhood and BAM - my neighbor points out just such a coffee house on an evening walk. I needed to fill a prescription and asked a colleague where a chemist is located, expecting a trek across town. Turns out there is one at the end of the block that I walk past all the time. I think what's happening is that I expect a coffee shop or a drug store to look like a coffee shop or a drug store from home, but instead they look really different here.

Back to yoga. Class this morning was at 6AM. It was still dark out as we made our way over to the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre, located 1 block from the beach in an open-air gazebo-like structure. In the front of the gazebo, there was a puja area with pictures of various Hindu gods. The pictures themselves were draped in flowers as is the style here and there were candles burning. There were also pictures on the wall representing most of the world's religions. Instead of sticky mats people rolled out straw mats for their practice, although I did see one woman with a sticky mat on top of her straw mat. I think I might do that next time as I found the straw mat a bit pokey. Aside from a friendly German man who works for the center, we were the only western-looking people there.

Overall the class followed a pretty familiar routine. Class started off with Ohms and then breathing exercises. We spent quite a lot of time focusing on breathing and I found the breathing exercises pretty challenging. It was terrific to be able to hear the birds chirping and feel the sea air on my skin. By the time I opened my eyes after the breathing routines, the sun had started to rise and the lush greenery surrounding the center was becoming visible. Next we moved into sun salutations, followed by leg lifts, headstand, shoulderstand, fish, backbends balance postures and shavasana. Class followed a pretty mellow pace and lasted about an hour and a half.

After yoga, we walked back along the beach, buying fresh young coconut along the way. The vendor used his machete to cut off the top of the coconut and handed it back to us with straws. For breakfast we made a fruit salad from papaya, pineapple and bananas purchased the night before. I felt ready to greet the day.