Reflections on India

Simon and I honeymooned in India in the fall of 1990.   As one of the largest populated countries in the world, India was a nation we were eager to explore.  From a family standpoint, Simon's mother, Pippa Nason, was born in Calcutta during World War II, and we had many friends from India that we worked with at McKinsey.  And we had little money and lots of time so it seemed a great choice for our long adventurous honeymoon.  We were right.  We had a splendid time in India, setting the stage for our first couple decades of great life partnership.

21 years later I find this is still a fascinating country.  I love the warm people, spicy food, colorful clothing, bustling markets, riotous traffic, and majestic palaces.  And I find a country that has changed alot.  Here are some of the changes I see from 21 years ago.

1.) Technology is ubiquitous.  For my mom's 49th birthday, I called her from Delhi on our honeymoon.  It cost me $100 on a land line - Happy Birthday, Mom!  Now the country brims with cell phones, computers, and wifi.  We Skype with friends and family from our Indian hotel rooms.  Shopkeepers pull out their IPhone 4s (35,000 rupees or $US 636) to take pictures of us (more accurately, the two girls).  Families of 4 zoom by on one motorcycle with one of them texting on a cell phone.  School girls call their friends from auto rickshaws.  And schools in India heavily advertise technology education, even using IPads.

2.) Speaking of schools, education is a huge priority in India.   Billboards, newspaper advertising, wall posters are everywhere advertising for schools and education.  Our tour guides and drivers place their kids into private English speaking schools so their children are fluent in Hindi and English (and  a second Indian language potentially also).  In private school their school year is longer than in America; they have only about 7 weeks holiday in total plus extra days for Indian celebrations per year.   Newspapers report the results of students testing for entrance exams into universities.  Education taught in an English medium is viewed as the path to prosperity for  future generations of Indian children.

3.) Also powering the future are investments in city infrastructure and energy efficiency.  When we flew into Mumbai 21 years ago, we landed at a ramshackle third world airport and then took 3 hours to get through customs in a disorganized mob of passengers.  Today the airports we have traveled through in Delhi, Dehradun, Varanasi and Jaipur are beautiful first world terminals, typically with only 30 - 50% of gates occupied, built in anticipation of future growth.  Delhi has a metro system now, and most of its public transportation runs on natural gas, resulting in noticeably less air pollution.  Controversial hydropower is being planned and built on the holy Ganges river.   A huge sewer project was under construction in Varanasi.  We just traveled on a portion of the newly opened  4 lane toll freeway connecting Mumbai to Delhi (1300 km in length).  To support its young, growing population, India will require substantially more investment in transportation, city infrastructure, and affordable and safe housing.  But the growth in 21 years is remarkable.

One thing that hasn't changed in the last couple decades is that the majority of marriages remain arranged by the couple's family.  I'm told that divorce rates are lower for arranged marriages than 'love' marriages in India.  Simon and I were asked many times in 1990,  "What is a 'love' marriage like?".  Frankly, we really didn't know at the time, as we had only been married a few weeks.  But I think we've done pretty well for a love marriage.  So Simon, let's come back to India in the next 5 to 10 years so we can see what the next decade brings to this remarkable country!

Nikki Sorum

Jaipur

So what is new on the less informative side of our lives?

Well I for one have been showered with dozens of photos taken by the lovely Jacqueline, all of them showing me looking left. Seriously, were you to investigate my recent photos, it would be a logical conclusion to assume my face and neck are stuck that way.

I assure you, they aren't. We have been doing a lot of looking lately, left, right and particularly at ornate ceilings of which India is so fond of (and you know what they say about fancifying your ceilings...). We've also been looked at a considerable amount, and deny an average of fifty photos with random small children who feel the need to pose with us. My favorite incident was when I smiled at a particularly adorable girl, whose father then forced her to shake my hand. Her response walking away was "pon he baba?"

"Who was that, dad?"

Which is how I feel a lot of the time. Who are you, strange person, and why do you want me in your group family photos? This has been turned to my advantage before however as I shaved mega ruppees off my shoes purchase by agreeing to take a photo with the shopkeeper, and what turned out to be all his male cousins. Don't worry, he'll post me as his fiancée on facebook tonight.

Today we visited a gorgeous white marble temple, inlaid with scenes from the mahabarata (explanation: one of the main religious texts of the hindu religion). Apparently before the Moghul invasion (with Islam in tow), the Rajastani tradition was to let their women choose their consorts. The chosen one was picked from literally a line up of eligible men, and anointed with a garland of marigolds. This is a great idea. Unfortunately it didn't last, as the hindus adapted to the invaders ways of parental involvement and multiple wives.

We also visited a monkey temple. I've a had the lifetime experience of a baby monkey clinging to my ankle and mewling pitifully. I did this as a child to strangers on a biweekly basis, but I'm hoping this young primate did not mistake me for its mother. Yes, my legs are hairy, but I prefer to live in disbelief. Anyways, the monkey scurried off after I gave it a peanut, and I soon made other, less cuddly and scarier monkey friends.

More blog to come, maybe tomorrow. We are leaving in three days and return to the motherland. Running at a million miles an hour in 100 degree (F) heat and visiting every monument in northern India is not conducive to blog posting. I try, and please forgive my failures.

The Odyssey of Blog Posts

 Nikki and Marielle on a boat for the aarti in Varanasi

I am struggling to update the blog because our lives in India have significantly changed since our last post. Nikki, the lovely mother of the equally lovely Marielle, came to see us in Dehra Dun and then whisked us away on what will be a two-week tour of northern India. Thus far we have stayed in Delhi, Varanasi, and Jaipur. Up until this point, our experiences in India have had a lot of depth but little breadth; our lives were mainly confined to our work at the school and occasional visits to Swami Veda Barati's ashram in Rishikesh. Now we're going on a whirlwind tour of a huge range of cities, cultures and history.

Nikki arrived in Dehra Dun last Wednesday. We showed her around our main haunts (Lakshmi Devi Academy, Chhaya Café in the mountains, and the Bollywood theatre) for two and a half days before boarding a plane to Delhi. The school's art teacher gave us each parting gifts on our last visit: Nikki was given a painting of the lovers/gods Radhe and Krishna, Marielle was given a watercolor rendition of ancient paintings found in the Ajanta Cave, and I was given an ink drawing of Meerabai. Meerabai, for reference, was a lady of questionable sanity who decided that she was literally married to a bust of Krishna. She spent her entire life prancing around his statue and showering him with marigolds. Now she is a saint. I'm still hoping that there was no deeper meaning to our correlating gifts. 

In Delhi, we stayed at an urban bed and breakfast run by two devastatingly handsome/married Frenchmen. Our room was entirely pink in keeping with the theme of Jaipur (Jodhpur room was blue, Cochin room was white and gold, Gujarat room was orange, Bollywood room was a weird mix of glitz and Bodhgaya room was green). The complimentary pink bathrobes, homemade iced tea with crêpes and Ayurvedic beauty supplies were a great source of comfort in my days of "le heartbreak."

Our first day in Delhi, we went to the Qutub Minar Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It contains the Qtub Minar, which is both the tallest brick minaret in the world and a monument to the end of Hindu rule/the beginning of Islamic rule in Northern India in the 12th century. Along with the minaret, there were many mosques, madrasas or schools, tombs, an iron pillar from 402-ish C.E, that does not rust, and an unfinished tower by some guy whose dreams of building a minaret even bigger than the first one were decidedly abandoned by his successors. I was especially intrigued by the fact that the Muslim conquerors knocked down all of the Hindu and Jain temples only to hire local (Hindu) builders and artisans to erect their monuments using the same materials, meaning that the Persian architecture still contained a stunning amount of original Hindu and Jain art.

After touring the Qutub Minar complex, we went to the Russian Science and Cultural Center to watch a professional dance troupe from Moscow take on traditional Indian dance. We went through a gallery of Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh/Nicholas Roerich's art, much of which was informed by his perceived links between India and Russia.   

The next day, we went to the Red Fort in "old Delhi," which is notably more busy, narrow and congested than the part of Delhi designed by the Brits. What most amused me most was that the maharaja had a marble trellis from which he would wave to his followers every morning at a set hour to assure everyone that he was still alive. Nikki especially liked that, without the modern-day amenities of television and the internets, the Maharaja resorted to entertaining himself with a nightly lights show in the pool, complemented by 300 pretty dancing girls.

We then went to the Jama Masjib Mosque, which is the largest mosque in India and can hold 25,000 worshippers at a time. The mosque faced the largest spice market in Delhi, which was so full of chilies that everyone (not just the tourists) was coughing and sneezing. We visited a spice shop that let us taste dried melon seeds, masala for chai, cinnamon bark, and anise. We then went to the Gurudwara (Sikh temple) Bangla Sahib, where Marielle was happy to see that, instead of worshipping gods or idols, they worship the "living truth," or a book written by the first and only ten gurus of Sikhism. A Sikh belief is that the best way to attain humility is to serve food to others, so the temple housed an enormous kitchen (or langar) run on volunteer donations and work that feeds 20,000 people daily. We helped bake chapatis, or wheat flatbread grilled on metal griddle-like tawas. The day ended with a visit to the Lotus Temple, which is a modern temple for the Bahá'í faith. All Bahá'í temples are surrounded by nine pools of water, so being inside the soaring glass, marble and metal building was like, as Marielle put it, stepping into a glass of water.

After two and a half packed days in Delhi, it was time to visit the holy city of Benares, or Varanasi. Varanasi is the oldest living city in the world, having been inhabited for 5,000 years. The city seems mainly uninterested in riding the economic wave that has turned many urban points throughout India into fast-paced, achievement oriented hubs of business and education. Every night the 7,500 steps representing the Hindu gods are filled with worshippers who pray through hymns as the sun goes down in a tradition called the aarti. Worshippers also light candles placed on a bed of marigolds and set their wishes sail down the Ganges in a boat of leaves. The sun rises over women doing their laundry, men and children taking baths, pilgrims boating and brahmins chanting over the holy waters. Our guide told us that every stage of life can be found along the Ganges, from babies' first holy baths to the funeral pyres that cremate the dead all hours of the day.

In addition to watching the sunset and sunrise, we visited the Bharat Mata (Mother India) Temple, inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. The Bharat Mata temple is the only official temple in India to worship the personification of India and the mother goddess. Instead of busts of deities, the temple is dominated by a marble carving of India's geography. We toured the Benares Hindu University containing a large temple to Vishnu, and the site of Saarnath, where Buddha gave his first sermons. We  also visited a brocade workshop where masters worked silk designs so complicated that a day's work would yield less than an inch of completed fabric.

In Varanasi we stayed at a hotel that was once used by the Maharaja as a summer cottage. It was surrounded by a mango orchard and organic gardens, which are shared by a friendly horse named Munna and twenty-five antisocial peacocks. Marielle and I discovered on our last night there that, if I sing a high soprano aria in the bathing pool, all of the fruitbats from the orchard would come and flap around our heads. We also discovered that Varanasi is a wonderful place for cheese devotees; the best two cheeses we tried were the fresh mozzarella di bufalo made by an Italian expatriate in the high Himalayas, and an organic yak cheese made by Tibetan farmers.

We are now staying in Jaipur, which is famously known as the "Pink City." We secretly refer to it as the "City of Lies," as the old city is a decidedly more orangey brown color. This is very disappointing. We will stay in Jaipur for two more days before going to Deogarth, Udaipur, and lastly Delhi again to fly to cooler climates.   

We are now going to swim in a pool. Namaste, ciao ciao, ferme linge!

And Then There Were Three

I have been invited to write on the blog!  This is Nikki Sorum, Marielle's mom and honorary mom to Jacqui for the next two weeks.  I arrived last Wednesday in Dehradun India to join Marielle and Jacqui.  We spent a few days in Dehradun, visiting their school, having dinner with Pastor Chris Nelson from our hometown church, Bethlehem, and staying at Amaji Lalita Arya's home.  Thanks so much to Amaji for letting the girls stay in her beatiful home and volunteer teach in her school, the Lakshmi Devi Academy.   We are now touring in northern India, thanks to great advice from Vivek Agrawal, a friend in Minneapolis.

So I thought I would share answers to questions that many of you have asked me about Marielle and Jacqueline.

"How are the girls?". The girls are simply wonderful.  They are confident, healthy, world wise and French-speaking soul mates.  Two beautiful blonde 19 year old women get a lot of attention in India.  They are gently pursued by Indian paparazzi who wish to take their photographs.  When we go swimming in the hotel pool, there are at least a dozen hotel staff who have many jobs to do at the pool, sweeping, bringing towels, bringing drinks, walking by with ladders....
And they are aware of the local customs and speak enough Hindi to impress the Indians.  Every day I am complimented on their beautiful manners.  This has been an immense year of growth for both of them.  They are extremely brave in their adventures and fortunate to have this gap year experience.

"What have they been doing?". For the last two months, they have been teaching at a charity school in Dehradun, India.  They have taught English, Tae Kwan Do and dance.  There are almost 300 children at the school, ages nursery to 8th class.  The kids clearly loved Marielle and Jacqui and will miss them.  The children shared several dances, songs, and a Tae Kwon Do performance with me on the girls' last day at the school.  As impressive as working at the school was their hour long journey one way to work.  They boarded a vikram (tiny truck taking up to 8 people for 5 rupees each - 10 cents in US), walked for 20 minutes through the heart of Dehradun calmly crossing riotous traffic, and then negotiated for and rode an auto-rickshaw (a three wheeled covered motorcycle taxi) for the last 15 minutes ride (10 rupees each or 20 cents).  I've traveled lots of places, but this was impressive commuting by the girls.  They've lived as local Indians for the last two months, eating vegetarian indian,  loving Bollywood movies, and wearing kurtis (modest tunics over leggings).

"What are you up to now and when are you coming home?".  We are visiting Varanasi, Jaipur, Deoghar, Udaipur, and Delhi.  We have visited Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, B'Hai, and Muslim places of worship, visited and stayed in palaces, shopped in the markets, floated on the Ganges at dusk and dawn,  taken a cooking class, eaten primarily Indian vegetarian food., taken a yoga class by an Indian yogi.  We have traveled by plane, car, auto rickshaw, bicycle rickshaw, vikram, bus, horse and buggy, rowing boat, and elephant.  And we are only half way through our adventure!  We will arrive home early afternoon on May 30.  They are very excited to see their Minneapolis friends and family!



Nikki Sorum

Those Whom We Teach

Once again, sorry we haven't been writing. It is perhaps a sign of our immense enjoyment, or utter exhaustion from the heat wave, missing our Amajii who has left for the States, and determined efforts to hide from the 4th grade.

Honestly, our students are great, except for maybe the 4th grade, which has decided that to show their love, they will insist on shaking hands for the entire class, running away when we try to enforce order, and enforcing the less than charming habit of kissing on the cheeks when saying hello and goodbye. Yep, we definitely put an end to that one. There is, of course, the 2nd grade, which was bored with our dances and songs and instead regaled us for about 15 minutes with song after song in hindi, english and screaming. Or the 8th grade, for whom every lesson ends logically in a dance off between the two inept westerners and the Bollywood born and bred dance machines. Or the first grade, whose attempt at learning "head-shoulders-knees-and-toes"turned into an excuse to beat their neighbor in those particular regions.

Children, my dears. I recall a quote by Fran Lebowitz, to the order of...

"Not all of God's children are beautiful. Most of God's children, in fact, are barely presentable."

Our children are wonderful, but their talents seem to run to the order of tiring us out, screaming questions in hindi when we don't understand the first time (we assume they want to go to the bathroom, and it works about 20% of the time) nor the second, and fixing our dance moves when we try to pull out the stuff we saw in our latest movie.

This next week we have our last two days of teaching, and then my honorable mother is coming for a dose of life on the indian side. Some activities we have planned include...

1) Henna tattoos! Super fun, super cheap, and only really problematic when you can't shove people as effectively to get through low moving crowds.

2) Bollywood film! There is a truly dreadful looking film about a ferrari that came out, and then another one about how a woman keeps reincarnating in order to find her true love. The key to finding a good movie has nothing to do with plot, cute actors or subtle filming. We just need dancing. And crazy music. (EXCEPTION: Vicky Donor, about a indian sperm donor's quest for true love, was the best film I've yet to largely not understand but still adore).

3) Lassis! Pekora (not for Jacqui, more for me!)! Indian delicacies! We shall regale Mama with yummy foods and eat whatever we can lay our hands on.

4) Crazy transportation, and the ensuing admiration of our abilities to argue, navigate and politely reject all attempts at kidnapping, forced purchases, marriage, signing autographs and taking photos with strangers, and autorickshaw rides, while managing to cross the street.