Random notes on India

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty busy with work because my research team has been going out to the field everyday for surveys and data collection. We’ve been traveling 1-2 hours on bumpy dirt roads to get out to the really rural, tribal areas in the forests of Jharkhand, and the experience has been amazing so far – but more will come on this in a later blog post. For now, I want to catch up on some of the more random things that have characterized our visit as quite…unique.

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·      Noise: Everything and everyone in India is noisy (well maybe except for the cows that are on the streets). Amongst the colorful stimuli that will cloud your senses here, it’s the noise that is truly deafening. People are loud (usually in a happy and joyous way), cars are loud (they all honk, ALL the time, because there aren’t any traffic signs here), and music is even louder (Indians LOVE their music). So when you’re in a car that’s rattling because of the bumpy road full of potholes, you will hear endless honking, and the music will be playing loudly to drown out the honking, and the people in the car will be yelling at each other so they can hear one another over the music and honking.

·      Driving: Indians drive on the left side of the road (just like South Africans – from last year’s blog). Thankfully I don’t have to drive around here though. [Note: Frommer’s actually tells travelers to hire drivers because tourist driving = inevitable accidents.] There aren’t any traffic signs or rules here really, not unless you’re in the big cities like Delhi. But even then, not all drivers follow the rules. I’ve found that everyone on the road here is in a hurry –big vehicles always try to pass smaller ones (as well as rickshaws) whenever possible. And of course, they honk loudly to signal that they’re passing. But 80% of the time, these passes are dangerous because there’s an oncoming car or truck in the same lane. So last-minute swerving happens often…and unfortunately, many overloaded trucks fall over as a result. The roads are full of these giant utility trucks, usually filled with rocks or dirt or building materials. I’ve seen four giant trucks spilled over across the roadsides over the past week; in fact, one of these accidents happened literally five minutes before we crossed paths with a truck that tipped. Thank goodness we were running late that day, because we were safe.

·      Starch and fried foods: The north Indian diet has three staples from what I can see so far: rice (bhat or chawal), potatoes (aloo), and lentils (dal). From there, meals are made up of pretty much two food groups: starch and fried foods. Obviously the starch group is made up of the white rice and potatoes – which are served at practically every meal. Hence the many big bellies you tend to see in the Indian culture are usually starch bellies if not beer bellies. (Dal is served at every meal too because it’s the main source of protein for their commonly vegetarian diet.) The other group is made up of fried foods: roti or chapatti stuffed with potatoes and fried, chapatti that’s fried, veg potato and onion balls that are fried, samosas that are stuffed with potato mixes and fried, dosas that are fried and sometimes stuffed with potatoes, and even dessert like gulab-jamon that are dough balls of super condensed milk that are fried and soaked in sugar water. It’s quite an interesting diet – of course where people can afford it, you’ll find there’s a better variety of foods which will include: green vegetables (like spinach and okra), gourds (like white pumpkin), meat (mostly chicken), eggs, paneer (cheese), chickpeas, and fruits. So it's no surprise that nutrition indicators here are commonly void of essential vitamins.

·      Monsoon season: The monsoon rains have begun…hallelujah! The roaring thunder, lightning (which apparently our town, the “Steel City”, attracts much of), and pouring rains have begun to douse the state with cooling temperatures. One of my favorite things to do is just sit and listen to the simple beauty of a tropical rain (especially when there's a brownout). It’s the sound of an end and a new beginning, one of tranquility and rejuvenation at the same time.

    Brownouts: India is one of the top countries in the world that suffers from persistent brownouts (which severely hinders productivity and economic progress). So for at least 15 minutes everyday, we are without electricity. Yesterday we lost power for 8+ hours.

o   Being in the dark: When you have brownouts in the middle of the summer, it gets pretty hot, sticky and boring. And sometimes it gets dark – which is fine until you accidentally step on a cricket while barefoot and on your way to the bathroom.

The ubiquitous head wobble

June 9, 2010

Before coming to India, many of my friends told me that within the first couple of days, I would notice the “head wobble” and before leaving Delhi, I would pick it up. Well it’s the funniest thing to me, but it’s a cultural mannerism used all throughout India…so I think I finally got it down.

The Indian head wobble is meant to connote a non-verbal sign of understanding or thinking. It isn’t a nod, nor is it a shake of the head. The motion actually reminds me of a bobblehead – if you lightly touch it on the very top of it’s head and give it a side-to-side push, it starts to wobble a bit from right to left. So the wobble doesn’t always mean “yes”, and it doesn’t always mean “no”…it doesn’t even always mean “maybe.” From what I gather, since it’s kind of a side-to-frontish-side-back-side-to-side, it mostly seems to mean, “I heard you.” So you always have to follow up your wobble with a confirmation question or statement of some sort if you want to clarify something. It’s one of the funniest things.

So if you were to ask me right now, “How’s India?” Here’s my answer:

The Mess Hall

June 9, 2010

Here in Jamshedpur, we don’t have very many commercial plazas or restaurants to go to that are within walking distance. In fact, there aren’t any real food establishments outside our Tata quarters for kilometers. We have to travel by rickshaw to get to the nearest full market (meaning one with at least one reputable café or restaurant or retail outlet) which is at least 20 minutes away in the humid heat on unmarked streets, so we usually just don’t venture out. Instead, our group takes part in the meal plan we’ve been given.

So it’s just like we’re back at college, living in a large dormitory with a pre-purchased meal plan. The only difference is that with this meal plan, each meal that is served is pre-planned (so that you only have 2 choices) and set at company-dictated times. Breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner are all scheduled by Tata, so we have 2.5 hour windows in which we can avail of the dish(es) that are available for a meal…however, we don’t really get to choose what we want to eat from the menu; instead, we serve ourselves from the giant bowls that they place in front of us at the tables.

This isn’t a bad thing considering the fact that we get a pretty assorted menu of meals throughout the week – however, most of the foods we eat consist of a combination of rice, potatoes, chapatti (or roti), and dal (lentils which can be cooked a zillion different ways). And sometimes these 4 things are the only things served for dinner. There aren’t very many vegetables included, hardly anything fresh, there’s lots of fried snacks, and I think I’ve only seen one fruit – mango made into a chutney – since getting here over a week ago. The dishes are pretty tasty once you get used to the spices, but my low-carb, weight loss diet is now somewhat out the window.

It’s customary to eat with your hands here. However, you really only eat with your right hand, as your left hand is considered dirty. So to “blend in” as much as we can, our group of women clad in colorful American clothing, in a mess hall of usually 30+ men uniformed in blue Tata attire, eat with our right hands. It’s a pretty funny sight to see…four foreign ladies in a mess hall of mostly men; men who have (thus far) been too shy (or disinterested) to talk to us. So at every meal, we talk amongst ourselves. We’re like the random roadblock that gets in the way of worker ants, so they just carry on by going around us, not noticing that the roadblock is even there – although one ant gets curious from time to time and crawls over. But then he learns that we aren’t as interesting as he thought, so he folds back into the flow.

We have made a few women friends here in the hostel through the mess hall though, so it’s been an interestingly central part of our experience so far. We’ve learned that although pretty much everyone in this hall is single, both genders hardly interact with each other because it just isn’t the norm or custom here. [No wonder they aren't allowed to televise kissing.] 

Becoming a “Tata Princess”

June 4, 2010

My research group of four women is stationed in the city of Jamshedpur, in the district of East Singhbhum, in the state of Jharkhand in northeast India. We’ve been given more details about our task, so we are mapping and assessing the social exclusion of tribal communities into a government-run program called the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). ICDS is arguably the largest government-run child development program in the world, and since it started in the 70’s, it has helped to raise India’s child health indicators so that the country is coming close to achieving the 2015 Millennium Development Goals set forth by the United Nations.

The ICDS program is currently being implemented at several different levels across the country, and it receives major support in Jharkhand from UNICEF and some support from the Tata Corporation. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tata, they are one of the world’s largest steel and car manufacturers. As an industry giant, the company recently unveiled the world’s smallest car called the Nano, and they bought out Jaguar and Land Rover. Everyone here in India knows the Tata brand, and they have several major factories here in Jharkhand. Tata has a big corporate social responsibility (CSR) department, which focuses on giving back to the community through the areas of health, agriculture, and water and sanitation.

Our group is being hosted by Tata’s CSR arm, so we have been charged to work in tandem with UNICEF, the Government of India (which is the main implementer of the ICDS program), and PKS (the Family Welfare Center which is the main health center of the Tata CSR projects) to provide a comprehensive assessment on the ICDS program’s nutrition strategies. Since our host institution is one of the biggest corporations in India (and worldwide), we have been given some quite surprising accommodations here at our site.

Coming to India, I thought I would have to sleep with ice water bottles next to me in a cot draped in mosquito netting in a tiny-sized hostel to battle the exhausting heat and malaria in the region. However, my roommate and I have actually been granted a beautiful air conditioner and cal-King sized bed, ceiling fans, a sitting area, a 27” TV, a desk, large closet space, a powder/changing room with fan and sitting area, and a big blue-tiled bathroom with a fancy toilet here at the Tata “hostel.” Our rooms are cleaned every day, and we don’t have to buy our own toilet paper. Our group also has a large, cold filtered water system just outside our door, so that we don’t have to purchase mineral water daily. Instead, we can just fill up our water bottles as we please because Tata wanted to make sure that everyone at this hostel had clean water to drink.

One of the reasons why this hostel has some of the cleanest filtered water in Southeast Asia is the fact that this is a Tata establishment through and through. This hostel that we’re in actually houses over 160 of its engineers who work at the nearby manufacturing plant. That’s right, there are about 160 bachelors in our hostel, and some women (though I have yet to count more than four so far). We learned over dinner conversation in the Mess Hall [cafeteria] today that these recent college grads who choose to work with Tata are given the option to live here if they have no other reasonable accommodations nearby, and only 30% of their salary is deducted for living expenses. Food is charged separately. They work seven days a week, for at least 8.5 hours a day, with only eight paid holidays off. The assistant manager I spoke to earlier had worked 20 days straight so far. It’s a completely different culture, and another guy had told me that it’s fine right now because they were told that the industry is booming…and all this hard work means that everyone is going to get a promotion soon.

Some of you may be wondering, “How are you four women safe in an environment with 160+ bachelors?!” That’s easy --- we just pretend we’re on the Indian version of the TV show, the Bachelorette. We hold rose ceremonies every evening. Just kidding… Our host institution believes this is the most safe and comfortable environment available for us in the area. We actually have guards about 50 feet away from our door (literally). Also, the people here who know the kind of work we’re in Jharkhand for, give us a lot of praise and respect for wanting to help the local children. So it’s a really neat (and clean!) situation, which is probably one of the most comfortable, secure ones to be placed in when compared to all of the other sites assigned for our program. We even have transportation arranged for us for home-office commutes. This isn’t the India that I imagined, but I’m not complaining. It’s like a working vacation so far, which is fine because we’ve been told that we’ll be working in the office six days a week. Tata, relatively speaking, thank you for treating us like princesses. Next time though, can we have a Jaguar when we head out to our site visits?

The Research Program

June 2, 2010

(Yes, this one is delayed too)

Before I left the US for India, I thought to myself, “What the heck am I doing? Why am I leaving an amazing city like New York where I have a fantastic circle of people who love me, for a city half way across the world where I don’t know anyone at all?”

I wasn’t provided very many details on my program other than the fact that I was going to work with UNICEF, and that I was going to do research in child health for them in rural India. The rest of my project was pretty vague, and I was a little nervous about traveling solo to a country I had never been to before. So as my departure date grew closer and closer, anyone who found out that I was going to Delhi for the summer compounded my anxiety with questions like, “Are you kidding? Do you know how hot it is over there?” and/or “Why exactly are you doing this?”

I started my program 2 days ago (at the time that I am writing this), and I am beginning to remember what passion for a career really feels like. I’m surrounded by some really amazing people – post-graduate students from 37 different universities all around the world who have accomplished some really admirable feats such as: establishing sanitation facilities for rural villages in other developing countries, teaching in Tibet for three years without running water or electricity to provide more sustainable futures for nomadic kids, and serving in the Peace Corps in Africa and South America. It’s pretty amazing to hear how the humanitarian heart can move mountains. And it’s such a blessing to be able to share in the same spirit of compassion to ignite my own career flame.

I met with several organization heads today, one of whom was the Chief of Child Development and Nutrition for UNICEF’s India regional office. He likened this health development internship in India to a finance internship on Wall Street. So India is my new Wall Street.

I’m headed east on Wall Street though, to the state of Jharkhand. Jharkhand isn’t covered in any of the Lonely Planet or Frommer’s travel books because “this area is not included since there is nothing for tourists here.” The state is off the beaten path. There aren’t any tourist sights there because the area is mostly covered in farmlands and forests. So we’re supposedly in for a pretty interesting experience. We’ll be staying at a hostel in the city of East Singhbhum, where we’ll hopefully be able to find the so-called “Little Italy” of the area (which is apparently the one and only real restaurant of the town). But I’m not disappointed in the location placement, because the real sight for us to see in Jharkhand is the evidence that the state has the second highest rate of malnourished children in the country. 

Post #2: What is India like?

May 31, 2010

(Posted much later due to scarce availability of internet access)

For those of you who have never been to India before, Delhi is like Manila. For those of you who have never been to Manila before, it’s humid and terribly hot.

It’s summertime in India, which means that the heat blisters in Delhi at about 89-114 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s hard to gauge the heat just by looking outdoors because of the perpetual dusty haze that coats the air. The sky is void of any trace of blue color, and there is hardly any breeze to cool you off. Summertime is really only bearable in the shade and indoors…otherwise you’re best off carrying around an umbrella and ten billion gallons of water with you.

The people here are very friendly (usually), and they’re all pretty nice. I’ve been to markets and malls, restaurants and business centers, and they’ve all been very helpful. But one thing I should mention here is the fact that women in Delhi dress very conservatively, so I do as well. Sometimes I think I am treated better or receive lots of odd stares because I’m obviously a foreigner and obviously a woman; but I like to think that isn’t always the case. That said, despite my ability to attract odd attention and have random people ask for photographs with me, things move slower than molasses here. There are no “special circumstances” to move processes along faster for anyone in Delhi, and they’re quite unorganized (hence they’re still a “developing nation”). No one queues unless they absolutely have to, restaurants will move at their own pace (unless you’re paying top dollar), and business centers…good luck (unless you’re in IT).

Delhi is a city of vivid contrasts. From the beautiful and brilliant colors of women’s saris juxtaposed against the dry, dull dirt of the unfinished roads; to the sharp, biting tastes of sour, spicy, and sweet Delhi foods; to the massive inequities that divide the poor and rich classes, the city provides quite a sensory overload to the first-time tourist. But it is an amazing culture with so much to offer…I know I’m only discovering the beginnings of India right now…

And it begins again…

May 30, 2010

(Published much later because of difficulty finding internet access)

For those of you who followed my blog last summer, you traveled across the world with me to countries such as South Africa and Italy. It was such a fantastic adventure and the experience of a lifetime. Well I have been bit pretty hard by the travel bug, and I have become incredibly blessed with another opportunity to circumnavigate the globe this summer – this time in the opposite direction.

Although there aren’t as many stops on this trip as there were last year, this international adventure promises to be a very interesting one. Right now, I’m headed to India with UNICEF (I’m literally writing this on the plane) to take part in post-graduate research exploring the child health in tribal communities under the Integrated Child Development Scheme of India. I’ve been stationed in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, which is in the northeastern part of India.

I’ve never been to India before, but I’ve always had an interest in the country. Why? Firstly, because it’s the most populated country in the world next to China. With over 1 billion people in such a small space, India is jam-packed with exemplary public health case studies. For example, India is where major cataract surgery camps helped thousands of poor communities see again, and where innovative models of small birthing clinics across rural areas have helped reduce maternal and infant mortality.  So India is a fantastic place to continue gaining and diversifying my fieldwork as a public health practitioner. Secondly, India is an emerging superpower. If you haven’t already heard this, you may as well have been living in a cave. The implications are enormous. Super-power. Thirdly, why not? We all loved Slumdog Millionaire, didn’t we? Jai-ho!

I’ve been incredibly busy over the last few months with work and school, so I haven’t exactly had much time to prepare, let alone get excited for this trip. So when I got to the airport earlier today, I had to pinch myself to realize what was going on. Well, that and I needed a distraction because some kid vomited in the ticketing area. But I was reminded that everything really does fall into place when I started chatting with my seatmate on the plane. The gentleman next to me actually worked with UNICEF India for 5 years, and he is currently working toward his PhD in Health Communications at a very reputable University in the US. He gave me some great advice on the research program that I’m about to experience, and he shared his optimism on the field of health communications for my future career. It was a perfect start to a quest that will hopefully help me define a fruitful and fulfilling career path.

So it has begun…post-grad life, my trip to India, and a new adventure around the world.