Back in Jersey

Hi everyone,

I've been back in New Jersey since getting in at 4:30am on Thursday morning. I missed celebrating my birthday here in the States (and Continental didn't think it was worth giving me first class for), but more or less it was a pretty smooth flight. I've been battling jet lag and this weird sickness that has left me with a runny nose and crazy bouts of sneezing - but hopefully it'll pass over the next couple of days.

When talking about traveling overseas and coming back to the US, I've always heard of the topic "reverse culture shock," meaning the culture shock that you get when you return to your home country after being away for a certain amount of time. I have to say that during the last two or three weeks of my trip, I really felt like I started to click with the lifestyle I was living in India and that it became less of a "this is temporary" lifestyle. I had a routine of everyday things, didn't have to worry about what I would be eating for dinner or how to get from point A or point B, and really started to feel like I was getting to know a lot of the people around me both at work and outside of work. It's sad that things had to end so quickly after they were working out so well!

There have been some adjustments coming back to the US. I haven't been in such a quiet environment (my house...and my town) in a while. Nor have I seen a grocery store the size of Shop Rite or cars as big as American SUV's. To reference the sizes of cars, a Toyota Corola is considered a big car in India. Even as I've been driving around over the past couple of days, it's been tempting to honk my horn expecting the person in front of me to yield to me and the drive with the assumption that no police officer is going to pull me over.

But more or less, things will be moving quickly and I will be going back to Ann Arbor this Thursday. Even though I'm back in the States, there are still a couple things that I wanted to write about regarding the last couple of days and some conclusions that I came while overseas, so it might sound like I'm writing as if I'm still there. But for everyone that has been reading, thanks for stopping by and I'm looking forward to talking with some of you about your thoughts and my experiences!

"India's Goldfinger"

Today is my last day in India. I arrived back safely from Hyderabad last night and stayed with a friend for a night. This morning, we woke up and made omelets and watched the Olympics together. The papers have been raving about Abhinav Bindra, the first Indian to win an individual goal medal ever. Since cricket dominates the sports scene across the entire country - many people have never really considered India to be a sporting nation. Abhinav's win was huge for the entire country, it represents a step towards legitimizing India in world sports outside of cricket. He won his medal in the 10m air rifle - I watched the final round from my hotel room in Warangal. On the last shot of the round, he was tied with a shooter from Finland. One last shot to determine gold. Bindra shot a 10.8 - a really good score, while the shooter from Finland marked under 10, a big disappointment considering he was leading most of the way. All media has been going crazy and the endorsements have been flowing in for this Indian hero.

Since my flight is at 10:50pm tonight, I have the day to roam around one last time and finally do some shopping. I'm going to give my bargaining skills a test and see how much I can get with the last couple thousand of rupees I have left (you can't bring rupees outside of the country). Alvida!!

Testing My Travel Luck

Today is my last day in the New Delhi office of the Public Health Foundation of India. I will be leaving for Hyderabad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh this Sunday because our organization happens to be hosting a conference on "public health education in low and middle income countries" from August 12-14th. Even though I am coming back to the United States on the 13th, I still wanted to check the conference out for the sake of being able to hear at least a couple big public health figures speak as well as see another city/region of India.

Originally, I was going to meet up with a person from an organization called Acumen Fund, but it turns out she's going to be in Pakistan so it didn't work out. I luckily came across something else though. When I was having dinner with Dr. Seetharam last week, he introduced me to one of his friends who founded an organization called Modern Architects for Rural India. The people working in the organization are not "architects" per se, in that they are not designing buildings and building bridges in rural India. Instead, they refer to themselves as being "social architects," guiding people through different challenges in development work and designing initiatives that meet their needs. From what I've heard and read so far, they work ranges in areas ranging from HIV/AIDS to microcredit enterprise to sustainable agricultural development. Mr. Murali, founder of MARI, has agreed to let me visit some of the sites of the organization for two days, which is awesome news considering it will be a lot on the lines of what I saw when I was in Karnataka and Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement.

The travel schedule is going to be a little crazy. It will be a huge success if everything goes smoothly, but since I'll be new to the area, I'm a little nervous as to how everything is going to pan out. Because I'm not interested in spending 3,000 rupees to get around between Hyderabad and MARI (I should be brave enough to try some more conventional, everyday forms of transportation now), I'll have to try some new forms of transportation, like bus and train. I spent a couple hours at work today planning it out, so hopefully all will go as planned.

Sunday -
-7:30am flight from New Delhi to Hyderabad
-9:15am arrival into Hyderabad
-take bus from Hyderabad airport into city (about 1-1.5 hour ride without traffic)
-sight see around the city, try some biryani (Hyderabad special), shop for friends and family (I heard pearls are the specialty here, but can cost over 100,000 rupees).
-6:00pm get to the Secunderabad Train Station (hopefully I don't go to the wrong one, there's three) and get ready to board my train
-6:55 train leaves for Warangal (location of MARI)
-9:00pm train arrives into Warangal, take auto-rickshaw to hotel
-rest up and get ready for Monday!

Monday-day for field visits to the following sites:
-Parakala and Warangal, sites for HIV/AIDS work
-lunch with a couple staff members
-Visit to tribal habitations, which is a sustainable agriculture project
-Visit to Annaram, a women enterprise group working on nutrition for sustainable development
-back to the hotel and get ready for Tuesday!

Tuesday-busy travel day, again.
-9:00am-10:00am meeting with Mr. Murali, founder and chief functionary of Modern Architects for Rural India
-10:30am catch bus from Warangal back into Hyderabad
-1:30pm arrive into Hyderabad, take auto-rickshaw to Taj Hotel in downtown. This is where our conference on public health education is being held.
-until 6:00pm, attend different lectures going on and say bye to colleagues, contacts, and friends that I've made over the past seven weeks
-6:00pm take taxi to Hyderabad airport, which is technically not in Hyderabad. Hopefully reach by 8:00pm.
-8:00pm check in for Air Deccan flight back to New Delhi
-8:55pm flight back to New Delhi
-11:00pm arrive into New Delhi, take another taxi to (insert new apartment here).

Since I only rented my new apartment in Gautam Nagar for one month, that means it technically ends this Sunday when I'm supposed to leave. That leaves me three days short before I leave India. I'm going to meet with the landlord today to see if I can keep my bags in my room for a couple days at no charge. If that doesn't work out (as in they make me pay an extra months rent for 3 days), I'll have to look around for a place to keep my stuff and a place to sleep on Tuesday night when I return from Hyderabad. Though this is my last day in the office, I still feel like I have quite an adventure before me!

Props if you read this far!

India in San Francisco

I was looking through some of my old pictures from a while back at work today and I stumbled across this one, taken with a bunch of people I grew up with when we were on a missions project in the Tenderloin districts of San Francisco. I can't remember why we decided to stop and climb all over this India sign that was on the sidewalk somewhere, but I do remember a lot of homeless shelters, urban culture, and fireworks on the bay while we were there. When I saw this picture today, I asked myself, "what did you think and what did you know about India when you saw this on the sidewalk?" I probably would have said "cool sign" and "not much, besides many of my friends from high school are Indian and that there is a huge Hindu temple five minutes from my house." For anyone who's from the east coast and knows of Hindu temples in the region, I live in Bridgewater, New Jersey.

A lot has changed since this picture was taken in 2004. I've graduated high school and am about to enter my senior year like I was in this picture. I've learned a lot more about India and experienced it firsthand. I've traveled to a couple countries in the mean time and developed a sincere appreciation for experiencing and tasting other cultures. One thing hasn't changed though, I'm still roommates in Michigan with the guy sitting on the left. Hi Jon!

Wordle

I found this nifty little website on a blog that I read once in a while on media, culture, and faith. The website is called Wordle, and it basically takes all the words on a particular website (in this case, I used my blog) and creates a word mirage based on the frequency of words used throughout the website. I was interested in what this website would look like if "wordled" so I gave it a try. I'm glad that "people" is amongst the biggest ones but I'm surprised at some of the larger words. At the end of my trip I'm going to do one final Wordle and see what were some of the most emphaisized things that I wrote about over the course of my trip.

Agra

This past weekend, we finally made it to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It's about four hours away by car, so we were out on the road by 6:30am to get there before all the crowds arrived. A lot of people don't actually what it is. Some people think it's a temple, some a government building, but it's actually a tomb. It was built as a mausoleum by an emperor for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. I've heard different stories about the construction of the monument, that the emperor brought in thousands of workers and cut their hands off so that they couldn't build another beautiful structure like the Taj ever again.

There's a lot more than meets the eye when you look at the beautiful building. As we walked through it, we noticed a lot of inscriptions and carvings all over the walls and ceilings of the place. It turns out there are passages of the Quran written throughout. One other really interesting thing about the way the Taj was constructed is how the designs of all the flowers and designs were placed onto the stone marble structure. From far away, one might guess that maybe they were engraved or painted on, but what we learned was that every single flower and design was put together by what could end up being hundreds of small shards of different stones arranged in a particular pattern. Each stone had to be the exact color desired for the design and was hand cut to fit its exact place on the wall. We found out that a simple flower could have over a hundred tiny shavings put together to get the image of a flower.


We walked around outside the local Agra markets and stumbled across a shop that was making handicrafts in the same way the designs in the Taj Mahal were made. There were about eight guys sitting next to their wheels, carving tiny stones in precise shapes to make things like flowers and leaves to be placed on boxes and plates. The guy next to me is either telling me to "watch my hand" or "not to touch" (there were about 7 flowers laid out right next to me that hadn't been glued together yet).


Of course, our friend Caroline was like a celebrity again!


...I thought this was slightly humorous.


Group picture of the four of us - myself, Jin from UPenn med school, Caroline, and Emily from UPenn nursing and UMich alum 04!


Besides the Taj Mahal, the other big site to visit is the Agra Fort. It's similar to the Red Fort in New Delhi and was built in the 17th century as a military outpost. This picture is of the entrance once we entered. We heard that this fort was built specifically to have ambiguous entrances so that the enemy wouldn't know where to invade from.


As different rulers came to power over the course of history, each ruler decided to add different things to the fort. As we walked through, we saw things ranging from a mosque to a tomb. This was another space on the inside with intricate carvings and designs like we found at the Taj Mahal.


Picture of a pond inside of the fort. Just kidding! It's monsoon season and it rained really heavily for about an hour just as we were leaving the Taj. We felt bad for a couple reasons - one, the line to get in was really long just as it started to rain and two, the streets started flooding badly soon after the downpours came and our car probably splashed quite a few bikers and walkers trying to keep dry!

Culture Shock #1: Food

While I would say that I experience some degree of culture shock every single day, there are certain recurring themes that are always there that remind me that I am away from home. One of the aspects is food. The other is family structure, but I'll save that for another time.

To highlight the shock that I experienced upon coming to India, I should describe my food situation in Ann Arbor, where I attend school. To get to a decent grocery store, you have to have a car. That, or you can take a 30 minute bus one way and carry all your groceries back to your place after another 30 minute bus ride back. As a result, eating fresh vegetables and fruits consistently was fairly difficult unless I bought things that lasted a long time, like carrots and grapefruit. But even then, I could only stir fry things so many ways before even that became old. To survive, I would end up eating out most of the time, often with friends or groups to catch up or talk over some particular issue. My favorite spots were Buffalo Wild Wings, TK Wu (Chinese restaurant), and No Thai (A "Thai" restaurant - but not quite). Not the healthiest spots to eat, but that's what a college student has to do to survive. For some reason I always tended to round out a day by making a stop of Pancheros or Big Ten (burrito joints) or ordering a late night special from NYPD (10inch pizza and large soda for 5.95 including delivery). Definitely not contributing years onto my life.

My diet in India has been completely different. To start, I've eaten meat probably about five times and since my visit to SVYM, I decided to give vegetarianism a try. Every dish is cleverly disguised with some sort of tasty spice or unique combination of vegetables that makes me forget about craving for meat. I always used to joke around in the beginning of my stay that I loved everything that I ate, but had no idea what I was eating. I would say that the difference vegetables make in the food here is that in the US, they would simply be a complement to the main course/dish that I would be eating whereas here it is the highlight of a particular dish that we'd be eating. You can't escape from vegetables!

Another thing that's different is the way people get their food. I haven't seen any Shop Rites or Kroger's or Meijers. The largest grocery store that I've seen is called Spencer's, and I can walk up and down the isles in about ten minutes. People always seem to buy a bag of vegetables here and another bag there, and often off the streets in a local market. I remember back to my first apartment where I lived for two weeks and how there was hardly any fresh fruits and vegetables in the fridge because Ramu or Haresh would buy them fresh nearly everyday. On the note of freshness, I was shocked when someone at work this week couldn't believe that I was eating leftovers that were 24 hours old. Apparently the night before is fine, but the day before is inconceivable! I responded by telling her that normally, if it doesn't have mold or fungi, it's fair game. You can guess her response...

People are so disciplined about their food too, at least the people that I've met. It's accepted that everyone eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner. During the school year, I almost never ate breakfast, unless I managed to stay up late enough to make a 6am Denny's run. They also eat lunch and dinner a little later than I would be used to as well (lunch at around 1-2pm and dinner after 8:30-9pm). When I got my body type done by the Ayurvedic doctor at SVYM, I was told that for my "body type," I should stick to regular meals high in salty foods, fruits, and vegetables. While the vegetarian decision hasn't been too bad at all here in New Delhi, I'm questioning how easy it will be to maintain when my dad does his special recipe bbq for the family when I get back!

Off to the Taj Mahal this weekend!


Nothing can beat this meal right now. Meals typically have some type of bread (naan or roti), a "daal" (which is any dish that has pulses/legumes/nitrogen fixing plants...aka potatoes, lentils, chickpeas), a dry curry/gravy dish, and what people usually call "salad" which is usually tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers cut into several pieces. Those green peppers at the top are really spicy. They say the smaller they are, the hotter for your mouth. My record in one sitting is five!


I got to visit Dr. Seetharam from SVYM who's in Delhi for a conference. He was staying at a pretty nice hotel, where they converted these old train cars into actual rooms. They were quite comfortable.


Inside one of the train cars/Dr. Seetharam's room.