Bharoter Dinratri: Days and Nights in India

Days and Nights in Boston...

2009-01-26T09:49:00.003-06:00

Thank you very much to all the readers of Bharoter Dinratri. You have obviously noticed that I am no longer posting to this blog, having returned to the US last summer. Please find updated information and new blog entries at the locations linked below. Thanks again for visiting! I will keep the site alive so that you can still read the old essays and have links to my AIF hosts and colleagues.

New professional website: http://www.brianheilman.com
New blog (opening soon): http://bleedingmoments.blogspot.com

Peace.
Be well.
Brian

My Space

2008-06-11T00:13:00.000-05:00

One of the five "suggestions for successful travel blogging," according to the document of the same name that I wrote for CSB/SJU study abroaders, is "Always always always be thinking of your next blog entry." And although you might think, seeing how long its been since I've posted anything good, that I've abandoned this and other principles of good blogging, it's simply not true. I am, now as ever, geekily dedicated to my blog writing. I am always always always thinking of the following three blog entries, all of which I have (obviously) yet to write:

1. I've Gotten So Gram. "Gram" means "village" in Bengali (pronounce it to rhyme with "mom," not "Sam"), and the blog at its core is about all the ways in which I have converted myself into a functional village resident here in India. Sound boring and obvious? It's not. Superficially, it's about Shah Rukh Khan and Rani and cricket and various brushes with stardom. All of which, as in a good personal essay it must, makes its way back to a boring but potent point about adapting to new surroundings.

2. My Relationship. No, this is not about "Sushmita," the imaginary girlfriend for whom (or so I convinced my mother on April Fool's Day) I have decided to live in India permanently. This blog is about my relationship with the Bengali language at present. I've been navigating my whole life in Bengali for the better part of the past year, and I have yet to reflect on it properly in writing. Again you're thinking that the blog sounds boring. No way. This blog is constant action. Verbal fisticuffs. Racism in the public square. Tension and more tension.

3. Missing The Game I Hate. No, not baseball. I don't hate baseball. I love baseball. The game I hate back home is dating. As in, being a single guy out trying to make new friends and "meet people" in the loaded sense of that phrase. Back home this game is suffocating to my introverted sensibilities, and very frustrating. But still it's easy enough in the U.S. to dismiss the exercise as frivolous and sit on the bench (read: wear grandfather's handed-down clothing, stay in more often than go out), but still catch a lucky break and meet people elsewhere (work, coffeeshop, concerts, wherever). This cannot be said about where I live in India. In Murshidabad, there is no dating culture. There is no dating. There are no mixed-gender social activities for twenty-somethings, most of whom are married. There is little eye contact between opposite-gender peers. There is no physical contact. And in this arid dating environment, I've found myself missing - ever so slightly - the game I love to hate back home. I'll write about some fake dates I've had, the lengths to which I've gone to get a fraction of physical affection (yup, back to the shave-and-massage saloon!), and so on. Very sexy.

I will write all of these blogs - and I WILL write them - just as soon as I get a chance to do anything other than work. I have found myself suddenly with only 12 days remaining of my life in Murshidabad, and given that my team of data entry staff never materialized, I had to punch every last baseline survey sheet into Excel on my own. I've finished the worst of it now, and just might be able to type in the last data tomorrow. It's as boring as it sounds, and although I get through the day quite happily listening to episodes of "This American Life" while number-crunching, after ten hours I can't stand to look at the computer screen anymore and bike out into the rain-drenched village for an evening recharge. Then I read and sleep and rehash the strange recent decisions and comments of my boss over and over in my mind and wake up feeling vacant and start it all again. No surprise, perhaps, that this has been one of the least creative months of my life here.

But it's sure great that this is here. This website, I mean. This notebook this outlet this space. This writing life. It's one of very few things that feels completely my own, completely indomitable by invading forces. It seems precious to me now in a way it never has before, given that the prevailing present atmosphere in most other "spaces" of my life - my bedroom, my fellowship work - is oppressively tense. When I need to, I can return here, to this electronic simulacrum of a sheet of paper, and write a few sentences. It's a home, in many ways. A place where I feel comfortable; where the longer I stay, the more my stresses seem to fade.

I won't belabor this boring introspective point too much. But today I see my blog writing life, not to mention MOCIAB and other deceptively public creative projects I've done, as an attempt to establish, inhabit, and cultivate a space for myself. Just that. A place to experiment with ideas, and in so doing to find a sense of peace.

That's all. I'm sorry to be so boring, and to have to continue using such vague language about the work/life drama currently gripping Katna and everyone in it right now. It's a matter of safety, and also of respect to my host organization. Soon enough we'll be chatting about it over coffee. And you'll have some great star-power, fisticuffs, and sexual tension blogs to hold you over in the meantime. Just give me a week or two.

So Much For Sohojogita

2008-05-18T22:52:00.005-05:00

After the marathon-running and hoping-against-hope had finished, polling day in Murshidabad was a decisive defeat for the voices of cooperation. Sunday, May 18th, 2008, was the bloodiest day of election polling in the history of Bengal. The latest reports show that 18 people were killed in clashes between CPI-M and Congress party workers, with at least 16 dead in Murshidabad. Countless polling booths were captured by both parties, and as a result both parties are now calling for re-polling before the corrupt returns have even been counted.

I was not in Murshidabad on polling day by choice: I came down to Kolkata to avoid election day in the village. Still, the news is unsettling (particularly so if the idea of re-polling becomes - an almost certainly violent - reality). To be clear: there were no deaths in my village or the closest neighboring villages.

Read:

18 Die On Bloodiest Day Of Polls (Times of India)
Dad Dies In Search Of Son (The Telegraph)

See:

Cover of Anandabazaar Patrika, May 19 2008
Headline: "Bhoter Shikar Bhotar" - "The Victim of the Vote is the Voter"

Please don't worry for my safety. I was and will remain as far away from this violence as I am able. There is no reason for any of the involved parties to target a non-politically-aligned foreigner building schools in their district. I just wanted you all to be aware of the realities of democracy in rural Bengal, especially after the previous post about my half-marathon and message of cooperation. More posts to come very soon.

M'bad to A'bad and Back Again (An Experiment In Hypertext)

2008-05-15T00:10:00.001-05:00

After another cooling evening thunderstorm made way for a miraculous orange-vanilla twilight, and as sweet mango juice dripped down my chin and intermittent rain drops plip-plipped on my glasses, I remembered for a moment today that Murshidabad might just be heaven, if it weren't so often hell.

My boss is running for political office, as the district-level candidate of the monstrous (and monstrously powerful) Communist Party of India - Marxist. The CPI-M, as they're called, and their coalition of smaller parties known collectively as "the Left Front" have been in power in our state for nearly 30 years. They are famous for being the longest-serving democratically-elected communist government in the world, and although the party has supervised a higher-than-India-average increase in rural incomes in their lengthy rule (thanks in no small part to Bengal's fertile soil's adaptability to the technological innovations of the nationwide "Green Revolution"), they are also responsible for the ever-sinking standards of the state's education system, among other social setbacks.

Late last year, members of the party's local cadre in Nandigram - a small town in the southwest of the state - murdered a group of their own citizens: farmers protesting the forced conversion of their farmland to an petrochemical plant (part of a CPI-M sponsored economic development package in collaboration with an Indonesia-based MNC). This shocking event attracted national and international disgust, especially after chief minister (the most powerful state official) Buddhadeb Bhattacharya unapologetically declared that the protesters had been "paid back in their own coin." Today "Nandigram" has developed into another place name immediately synonymous with its tragedy, i.e. "Tianenman Square" or "Columbine," and is certainly the first word to enter the mind of a casual observer of Indian politics upon hearing any mention of the CPI-M.

As I wrote in my blog about the half-marathon I created and ran, these local elections often lead to violence at the village level. Indeed, seven party workers - from the CPI-M and RSP - were killed yesterday at the polls in districts farther south (our polling date is May 18). Given my proximity to such a high-profile candidate in a very heated race (Murshidabad is one of only a handful of districts where the CPI-M face stiff competition from the Congress and other parties), it seemed a wise moment to take my AIF-funded exposure visit to another fellow's host NGO. And thus I traversed the entire breadth of India from right to left (geographically) and left to right (politically) and arrived after a nearly 50-hour journey in Ahmedabad, an historic and rapidly developing city in the dry, western state of Gujarat.

Gujarat, one of the true cradles of civilization on the subcontinent (with many Harappan settlement sites and the world's oldest discovered seaport), is every bit the stronghold of India's far right-wing politicians that West Bengal is for the leftists. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the central political arm of the so-called traditional "Hindutva" movement, controls both the will of the state legislators (led by chief minister/badmash Narendra Modi) and the fears of all those minority groups (Muslims, Dalits, among others) against whom their exclusionist politics regularly run.

Please note the absurdity, as Amartya Sen and scores of others have in published works, of claiming to represent the ideals of "traditional Hinduism." Hinduism has no central scripture, no organizational hierarchy, no established creeds, and incredible geographic diversity of practice. For the BJP to declare their particularly narrow version of Hinduism the "official, traditional" practice is a heinous crime against the vital diversity of faiths, passions and practices that make up the undefinable creature of "Hinduism" worldwide. Please read Sen's "The Argumentative Indian" for a full treatment of this issue.

New theory of life (especially life in India): Moving from one absurdity to another and another.

Ahmedabad

Most major cities in India, in response to rapid recent economic progress, have developed multiple personalities. The most common form of this "disorder," so to speak, is the "old city" and "new city" phenomenon. Delhi is a potent example, where Old Delhi - with its characteristically frantic narrow lanes and layers of history - lies within fort walls that protected empires of various persuasions down through the ages. The green, spacious New Delhi, on the other hand, is the home of the Indian central government, shiny new skyscrapers and drivers on wide paved highways who - gasp - actually try to stay in their lanes. The same can be seen in the sprawl of "Navi Mumbai" expanding outward from the British-era heart of the city, and in the "Salt Lake" satellite city in Kolkata.

Now I'm no urban historian or anthropologist, and thus I don't have the appropriate vocabulary for all this. "Urban multiple personality disorder," as I call it by default, is certainly global. Yet I get the hunch that the symptoms are particularly intense in ancient and rapidly-developing societies such as India and China. There are urban-suburban dynamics everywhere, but not everywhere does it feel as if a city has been fast-forwarded four hundred years into its own future.

That said, Ahmedabad is unlike any other city - single or multiple-personalitied - that I've ever seen. The Sabarmati River, the famous backdrop of Gandhiji's ashram and "experiments with truth," bisects the city with perfect precision into the eastern "old" and the western "new." Simply by crossing the river, one moves from Sultanate-era mosques to New Boom-era mega-malls. From frantic sabji bazaars to bastions of world-class management training. From streetside debates on the price of fresh buffalo milk to streetside debates on the merits of the new Radiohead album. Even in a nation of dual-personality metropolises, this hard contrast was striking to me.

Gandhiji's room, Sabarmati Ashram

Naptime at Jama Masjid, Old Ahmedabad

One of dozens of malls lining CG Road in New Ahmedabad

NGO Visits

Khamir Craft Resource Centre

Luckily for me, there are three AIF fellows working in Gujarat, and I got to see all three of them in action at their host NGOs. The first visit was an overnight bus-ride out of Ahmedabad in Bhuj, the district headquarters of the famous Rann of Kachchh, a vast salt desert on the Arabian Sea. Service Corps Fellow Brenna is living and working there with the Khamir Craft Resource Centre, an organization that works on a variety of exciting projects with Kachchhi artisans. Khamir's beautiful campus, built with innovative earthquake-safe materials after Gujarat's devastating earthquake in 2001, hosts training workshops for local weavers, block-printers, bell-makers, leather-workers and more. The Resource Centre also provides raw materials for various affiliated artisans, markets local products to major national retailers, and provides various credit and wealth management opportunities to rural artisans.

Brenna, who unfortunately was battling a lingering stomach infection when I visited, has been spearheading several new documentation projects for Khamir, including an exciting series of documentary films on village artisans.

Navsarjan, Centre for Dalit Human Rights, Dalit Shakti Kendra

I next spent a great day with fellow fellow Jeena and her host organization, Navsarjan. Navsarjan is a front-of-the-pack dalit rights organization, indeed one that is recognized by name across India and the world as the current leaders of the Dalit movement started by the great Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. While the organization started as a legal aid organization for persecuted Dalits, they now supervise a wide variety of programs focusing on human rights for all, including the two sites I visited: the Dalit Shakti Kendra and the Centre for Dalit Human Rights. At the vast and impressive Dalit Shakti Kendra campus, Navsarjan provides affordable 45-day training courses in various professions (from clerical work to carpentry, law enforcement to tailoring) for Dalit youth. The campus also hosts Navsarjan's main offices, and thus their administrative and research staff (along with world-famous renaissance man and Navsarjan founder Martin Macwan, whom I was lucky enough to meet). Jeena's mentor and current Navsarjan executive director Manjula Pradeep also works there, and continues Navsarjan's original work in providing legal advocacy for Dalit victims of human rights abuses.

It was a thrilling experience for me, having a bare minimum of legal knowledge or experience, hearing Jeena and Manjula converse briefly about the various cases they're currently working on. Their intense and important daily work includes: prosecuting murderers and rapists, working with the victims of such crimes, building media coverage of these types of still-frequent atrocities, and so on. A far cry from quiet learning centre philosophizing in rural Bengal.

Saath

My last NGO visit was with Leila at Saath, an organization that is working to, in the words of its mission statement, "make human settlements equitable living environments where all residents and vulnerable groups have access to health, education, essential infrastructure services and livelihoods options, irrespective or their economic and social status." In other words, its another in a proud tradition of NGOs trying to do just about everything. And although their focus was historically on urban communities, I see on their website now that they have also begun a selection of rural projects. The project that most attracted me to Saath was their Urban Resource Centres (URC) project, similar in scope and aim to the Shiksha Shakti Centres that Street Survivors will start building late this summer. And luckily once again, Leila took me to visit one of the resource centres right before I fell sick with the classic "traveling to new places and drinking new water" stomach bug.

I had a fascinating conversation - through translators - with the director of the Juhapura URC, sharing with him information about the Shiksha Shakti Centres project and the various political/social challenges I expect it to face over its first couple years. One great positive about Saath's URC model is that they didn't move into a new area and attempt to create a new service from scratch. Rather, they built partnerships with existing small community-based-organizations (CBOs in development jargon, but really just a bunch of neighbors who have united to work for some aspect of improvement in their communities) and then provided the space and gentle training for these grassroots CBOs to become proficient "connectors" between community members and their various needs (health services, job training, small loans, and on and on). The URC, thus, isn't a service-provider at all. Rather, it is a connecting hub between service-providers (including but not limited to Saath) and local-level beneficiaries.

There's a lot more to say about what Street Survivors can learn from the Saath URC model, but given that you've already:

Read about the unexpected new political direction of the director of Street Survivors, and
Spent 48 hours reading every word on every hypertexted article on this blog,

I'll spare you the details. It's not exactly clear where Street Survivors and/or Shiksha Shakti will move ideologically if our director is elected. I'm doing my best to build the best possible framework for launching the project after my departure, but it seems likely now that the only community-based organizations that Street Survivors will work with will be the local CPI-M party offices. Given the strength of Congress support in our district, we may not come to the same level of quick community buy-in and togetherness that seemed to occur in Juhapura. But for the sake of (my) safety and (political) fairness, I'll let you all come to your own opinions about the merits or faults of "engaging with the government" in the way our director is hoping to do.

City Mouse, Country Mouse

Within the coming weeks, I plan to devote a post to the topic of how "village" I've become after my near-year in Katna. Yes, "village" as an adjective. Yet I'll mention it here as well, because it was really during my trip to Ahmedabad that many of my newfound village sensibilities, previously invisible to me as a fish in the water of Katna, fell awkwardly in front of my eyes. Indeed, Jeena and Leila must have grown tired of hearing the phrase, "Oh wow, in the village we never get to..." over my week with them. I expect these types of experiences only to increase in number, especially after my return to the U.S. Look for a post soon.

Okay this post got long, boring, and outdated. Better post now or trash it. Thanks, if you read this far. Go to Ahmedabad if you get a chance.

Peace.
B

P.S. See the post above (So Much For Sohojogita) for an more complete understanding of why heartbreakingly beautiful Murshidabad can fairly be called "hell."

P.P.S. My boss lost the election.

The Katna-Sundorpur Half Marathon

2008-04-30T09:04:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been running a lot over the past few months. And after completing a string of progressively easier ten-mile runs, I decided to add a pinch of race-day excitement to my first half-marathon distance run (20k, 13.1 miles) here in India. So I created and ran in the inaugural "Katna-Sundorpur Half Marathon for Peace and Cooperation," which took place this past Saturday, April 26th.

For the week prior to the run, I built excitement by posting notices at school and talking up the event with other villagers and neighbors. I even rode the whole length of the run on one of our school buses a few days before, both to spread the word and to identify where exactly I'd have to reach to make 10k one way.

Unfortunately, other than assuring me stubbornly that I'd never be able to run that far, no one showed any real interest. So I cranked the excitement up a proverbial notch by shaving my head bald (as in razor bald, shorter than it has ever been in my life). That, I thought, might bring a little more attention to the race and the message.

The message of the race was "Hingsha Noy - Sohojogita Koro," which means essentially "No Violence - Cooperate!" It's a timely message as tensions in the area are crescendoing ahead of the local and state elections on May 18. Historically, these elections lead to (at best) bitter arguments among villagers supporting competing parties and (at worst) attacks on candidates and party officials. Given that none of the parties ever follow through on their campaign promises to villagers anyway (new roads, repaired levees, school improvements, and so on), the violence strikes me as doubly useless. So I decided to be one voice for peaceful cooperation, at least in the eight or nine villages lining the road from Katna (my village) to Sundorpur (10k away, over the Mayurakshi river).

That said, I'm sure that the message most people absorbed was "that white guy is nuts for running so far in the sun," rather than "no violence, cooperate," but what the hell. It was still fun. I got to make a t-shirt, write peace slogans on my body, and run really far.

Although I tried to attract more participants, the race ultimately ended up consisting of only four people: Me, my friend Moti, our school's art teacher Rajesh, and my site mate Maria. Both Rajesh and I set out to run the full distance, but the unpracticed Rajesh gave up after just 2k and rode backseat on Maria's bicycle thereafter. Moti was the support crew, carrying our vast array of racing equipment (one stopwatch, two water bottles, and bus fare for four in case we needed to abandon the race altogether) on his bicycle. Maria (joined by Rajesh after kilometer 2) was in charge of encouragement and photography.

Up until the tough last two or three kilometers, the race was a blast. As loitering dudes left and right stopped to stare at me, I returned with exclamations of the race motto: "No Violence - Cooperate! Keep the Peace!" The most common responses, apart from more prolonged staring, were "Of course!" and "Won't you stop for tea!?" At one point a crowd of dudes ran to me with a notebook. I signed my name and wrote "Hingsha Noy - Sohojogita Koro" in Bangla while running. That was a highlight.

The messages on my body melted away quickly with my sweat, and by even the middle of the race the slogans had become inexplicable blue and red splotches on my chest and back. One guy-on-the-road asked me if his body would turn colors if he ran also. I told him no, this only happens to white people.

And I guess that's all. The race made for a really fun day, and that was probably more the point than preventing political violence. But without the "message" and the publicity stunts (read: baldness), the same amount of fun certainly would not have followed. So, success on all counts for now. Let's just wait and see what happens as the election gets closer.

Thanks for reading, and check out photos below.

The friendly Kuli town barber who gave me my naera haircut and a nice twenty minute massage before the race. He's a doctor for people who can't afford a doctor, he told me, reciting stories of eye infections cured by his homemade ayurvedic potions. Sweet dude.

Naera Brian just moments after the hair sacrifice. I have to admit - the absence of hair, although decidedly ugly, is pleasantly convenient in the oppressive heat of the dry-hot season we're in right now.

Brian, Rajesh and Moti at the starting line. We had a short opening ceremony including an explanation of the race motto (by me) and a keynote address by our honored guest (Maria). The race kicked off just after 4:00 pm, ensuring a beautiful sunset backdrop for the last hour. Notice our hand-painted t-shirts, which included the name, date, and distance of the race on the front, the race motto and signatures of all participants on the back, and names-and-numbers on the left sleeve. Niiiiiice.

Health/Safety/Support/Morale crew chief Matiur Rahaman (Moti). Moti bragged a lot in the week leading up to the race that even if Rajesh and I couldn't finish the whole race, he definitely would (by bicycle). I think I spoiled his fun a bit by finishing comfortably. There really is no "running-as-exercise" (or plain "exercise") culture here, so in most villager's minds 20 kilometers was an impossibly long distance to run.

Easy peasy, kilometer three.

The landscape didn't change much throughout the run: dhan (rice paddy) and more dhan. There's a huge bridge over the Mayurakshi River just before Sundorpur, though, and that was a little bit more exciting.

Another note:

It was only afterward that I realized that the date of the half-marathon was the same as the Fruit at the Finish Triathlon at St. John's, in which I've participated three of the past four years. I guess my body had some secret memory of physical exertion attached to this specific week, and wouldn't let me relent even 10,000 miles away from Collegeville. Huh.

Jah!

2008-04-14T09:59:00.005-05:00

Friends, another short post. One fun side project I've recently started is compiling and translating my friend Moti's best Bengali poems. I want to make a little chapbook for him as a gift before I go, and at the same time the exercise is a great for expanding my Bengali vocabulary and bringing poetry back into my life.

I want to post just one short poem to give you a taste of the project. As more good poems emerge, I'm sure I'll want to post them as well. But for now, please enjoy "Jah!"

First, in Bangla:

Then, in English:

Jah!

The foot of my dream slipped
Off the cornice and broke;
Serves it right.
How often it had rushed
To some paradise in the sky,
Ignoring my warnings and disturbing me
In quiet moments at work.

For the femur in pieces:
Two operations.
For the nagging pain:
Four months’ bedrest.
Finish all this, dream--
And then will you go again?
There’s a dustbin for you in the attic.

Note: a "cornice" is a huge concrete shelf found jutting out from a wall, about two feet from the ceiling, in many homes here. I have a feeling that the Bengalified version of this English word (karnish) is used more frequently than the original English. I had never heard it before arriving here.

Let me know what you think about the poem. It's not too late to make translation changes, so break out your notebooks, Bengali readers. As for me, I've had fun thinking about the idea of disobediently ambitious dreams/fantasies, and how best to deal with them. Does it serve them right when they fall and break? How many such dreams do all of us have in our hearts' attics? Great poem, great questions, great work Moti.

An embarrassing photo of Moti modeling a costume from a play he wrote for our schoolchildren to perform.

Ashesh Dhonnobad

2008-04-13T04:28:00.003-05:00

Given my sparse internet time, I have no other way than this puny blog to express my overwhelming THANKS to everyone who called, wrote, emailed, facebooked, or otherwise buzzed me to wish me a happy birthday. Ashesh dhonnobad - endless thanks - to you all.

You all helped to make this birthday, which was clouded by some (hmm... how to put this) political village discomfort, nevertheless extremely warm and memorable for me. It really means a lot to me, especially given how undeserving I am of the treatment (I am horrendous about remembering birthdays).

Joto tara aache gogone,
toto dhonnobad aamar mone.

There. A cheesy impromptu Bangla couplet for you, and it even rhymes! (It means "there are as many 'thank yous' in my heart as there are stars in the sky," but it sounds a bit prettier).

Thank you, seriously.
Brian

P.S. Check out the Fueled by Rice blog posts about visiting Katna:

The Quarter Century Awards

2008-04-11T10:13:00.002-05:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final day of the first quarter century of my life. Yes, I turn 25 tomorrow, and I'm honored that you have chosen to share this moment in celebration with me.

Without further delay, the moment we've all been waiting for: the announcement of the winners of the Brian P. Heilman Quarter Century Awards. The QCAs, which seek to honor the works of music, literature and film that have most influenced my life, are the highest cultural honors that I award, and are distributed only once every 25 years. The winners of the "Best Album," "Best Song," "Best Book," and "Best Film" awards, which you can read below, have been chosen on the following autobiographical criteria:

Level of influence on my personality.
Level of influence on my taste in music/film/literature.
Presence of immediate connection with significant autobiographical events/periods of my life.
Number of times I have played/read/seen them.
Itness value.

The four winners also earn a nomination for the prestigious "Most Influential Cultural Item" award, the crown jewel of the QCAs. The winner of this award will receive 25 million dollars cash and the following prizes: a pet blue whale, lifetime Minnesota Twins season tickets, a date with Rani Mukherjee, and a key to the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Please find 25 nominees and one winner in each category listed below, followed by the announcement of the "Most Influential Cultural Item." All decisions, hereby verified by the Brian P. Heilman Quarter Century Awards Quality Verification Committee (BPHQCAQVC), are final. Happy April 12th and happy reading.

Nominees for Best Album:

Beck - Mutations
Beck - The Information
Basement Jaxx - Rooty
Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
The Beatles - Abbey Road
The Beta Band - The Three EPs
Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue 1
Eels - Daisies of the Galaxy
Elliott Smith - Either/Or
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Folk Implosion - One Part Lullaby
The Format - Dog Problems
Fountains Of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers
Jet - Get Born
Jimmy Cliff, et al - The Harder They Come
Radiohead - Kid A
Radiohead - Hail to the Thief
Rhett Miller - The Instigator
Rufus Wainwright - Want One
Sondre Lerche - Two Way Monologue
The Strokes - The Strokes
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
Tom Kain - Unnamed, Unreleased Album That Was But Never Was
The Who - Tommy

Winner:

Rufus Wainwright - Want One

"No other album comes close in the tally of full album singalongs while cruising on midwestern interstates in the old Isuzu Oasis. Catchy, beautiful, cohesive and smart, 'Want One' is the best album I've heard in a quarter century."

Nominees for Best Book (Fiction, Poetry, Memoir):

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
Kafka On The Shore - Haruki Murakami
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkein
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
My Place, Sally Morgan
New and Selected Poems, Volume One - Mary Oliver
Night Letters - Robert Dessaix
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Some Ether - Nick Flynn
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice - William Shakespeare
Welcome To The Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut

Winner:

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Perhaps the best example of that rarest class of cultural items - the ones that live up to their hype - and a lifelong talisman for me, Marquez's breathtakingly brilliant 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is the best book I've read in a quarter century."

Nominees for Best Film:

Amelie
American Beauty
Annie Hall
Babel
Better Off Dead
Blade Runner
Charulata
Dave
Dumb & Dumber
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
The Fountain
Gattaca
Ghostbusters
Good Will Hunting
Hackers
Harold and Maude
High Fidelity
Kal Ho Naa Ho
Kill Bill
Parineeta
Reality Bites
Remember That Day/Remember Tomorrow Double Feature
The Shawshank Redemption
The Shining
Zoolander

Winner:

Kal Ho Naa Ho

"It's not high cinema, and it may not even represent the heights of Hindi film achievement, but nonetheless the songs, stars, and scenes of this film are among my original and most valued companions in discovering and embracing India. 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' is the best film I've seen in a quarter century."

Nominees for Best Song:

Badly Drawn Boy - Something To Talk About
The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
Beck - Loser
Ben Lee - No Room To Bleed
Big Star - Thirteen
Billy Bragg & Wilco - Someday Some Morning Sometime
The Clash - Train In Vain
Datarock - Fa Fa Fa
Elliott Smith - Between The Bars
The Faces - Oh La La
The Flaming Lips - Waitin' For A Superman
The Format - Oceans
Fountains of Wayne - Hey Julie
Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come
John Lennon - Imagine
John Kamman - Cameo
Juvelen - Summer-Spring
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Pete Yorn - EZ
Radiohead - Karma Police
Rhett Miller - Your Nervous Heart
Rufus Wainwright - One Man Guy
Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy - Kal Ho Naa Ho
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
Wilco - Far, Far Away

Winner:

Big Star - Thirteen

"This gorgeous song-after-my-own-heart is simply dripping with itness and poignant memories. It should come as no surprise to anyone that 'Thirteen' is the best song I've heard in a quarter century."

Nominees for Most Influential Cultural Item:

Best Album: Rufus Wainwright - Want One
Best Book: One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Best Film: Kal Ho Naa Ho - Karan Johar/Nikhil Advani
Best Song: Big Star - Thirteen

Winner:

Big Star - Thirteen

Congratulations, Big Star, and thank you for proving to me and to my fellow birthday celebrants that despite all the heaviness and struggle in the world, one tiny burst of perfect creative energy (two minutes thirty-four seconds long, to be precise) can make all the difference.

None of us will record the perfect album, after all, nor are we likely to finish a novel, direct a film, or write a brilliant song. But "Thirteen" is, in my life anyway, the quintessential example of the lasting value of one very small work of beauty. And we are all capable, I believe, of creating at least one very small work of beauty in our lives.

Please report to Brian's Room, c/o Jagriti Public School, Katna Village, P.O. Nabadurga, District Murshidabad, West Bengal 742 168, India, to claim your $25 million, whale, tickets, date information, and key to La Crosse. If these prizes are not claimed within 90 days, they will be put in long-term storage for the winner of the Half Century Most Influential Cultural Item Award, to be announced via positronic global braincast on April 12, 2033.

Appendix One: Comments

My decisions are final, but please feel free to point out the egregious errors I have undoubtedly made in compiling this list. I have a massive music collection with me (in digital form), but without being able to scour through my full collection of books and films, I'm afraid that I've made some unforgivable omissions in these fields. Email me or post comments. I'll even bring home a special 25-rupee gift for the person who points out the most emotion-heavy of my omissions.

The process of selecting this list was very fun, especially listening to dozens of formerly-favorite songs and comparing the relative emotional weight of the memories they provoked in me. I've determined from this process that the majority of my most powerful stores of poignancy lie in memories of my freshman year of college, and thus these lists include a disproportionately high amount of cultural material from that year of my life. The other popular sources of emotional weight, so to speak, were my various international travel experiences. Sondre Lerche's "Two Way Monologue" album would never have made the list, for example, if I hadn't played it constantly in China and Japan, nor would Ben Lee's "No Room To Bleed" been a Best Song nominee if it wasn't for my late-night journal-writing sessions in Australia with this album on repeat in my headphones.

I encourage all of you to try this project. You'll be surprised at how many of your greatest memories are actually filed under songs, books, albums, or films in your head, and not in some purely chronological memory system as you might assume. If you ask me to tell you exactly what was most important to me in December of 2001, for instance, I could probably recount a few important topics simply by the context. But play any song from the first Strokes album and I'll instantly be back precisely to that month.

It's the closest thing to time travel I've experienced in waking life.

Other discrepancies I notice in the list:
- Memories from college and thereafter way outnumber pre-college memories, making this a pretty top-heavy, "recent" review of cultural influences.
- Male musicians and writers way outnumber women, making a pretty gender-unbalanced list.

Appendix Two: Just Missed the Cut

Just Missed the Cut: Best Album
The Band - Greatest Hits
Daft Punk - Discovery
Datarock - Datarock
Elliott Smith - XO
Kanye West - The College Dropout
Pixies - Doolittle
Sondre Lerche - Faces Down
Underworld - Beaucoup Fish

Just Missed the Cut: Best Book
As You Like It - William Shakespeare
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
The Driftless Zone - Rick Harsch
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino
Life Work - Donald Hall
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Just Missed the Cut: Best Film
Apur Sansar
The Matrix
Napoleon Dynamite
Rudy
Tommy Boy
Veer-Zaara

Just Missed the Cut: Best Song
The Band - Acadian Driftwood
The Band - Up on Cripple Creek
Brian Heilman and Josh Franke - Scenic Highway
Jens Lekman - The Opposite of Hallelujah
M. Ward - Postwar
M. Ward - Fuel for Fire
Radiohead - High and Dry
Rhett Miller - Come Around

Appendix Three: Goal For The Next Quarter Century of Life

One very small work of beauty.

What I Eat

2008-04-06T22:27:00.004-05:00

If it's true that "I am what I eat," then I am certainly a very inauthentic, disgusting person. In the U.S., pining for India, I am a just-heat-and-serve pack of crummy moong dal from the laughable "Oriental" aisle at Cashwise Foods. And here in India, pining for home, I am a single-serving pouch of the dreadfully awful pizza-flavored Sunfeast Pasta Treat. (Do not under any circumstances, dear readers, eat anything purporting to resemble pizza that has been processed into powder. Trust me.)

With all seriousness, however, at the moment I appear destined always to be a bad imitation of good foreign food. I am the metaphorical equivalent of bland mass-produced dal, or worse, of pizza without pepperoni or a sea of melted cheese. A simulacrum of a true cultural participant. After all, what type of authentic Wisconsinite abandons his childhood football hero for the last glorious burst of his career, for instance, and what type of authentic Bengali gives a shit about Brett Favre's touchdown-interception rate? What type of authentic Bengali builds interest in baseball among cricket lovers, and what type of authentic Wisconsinite gives a shit about Sourav Ganguly's ability to produce big runs in Twenty-20 matches?

The Sunfeast Pasta Treat kind. Yuck.

It's an unavoidable consequence of establishing centers of my emotional landscape 10,000 miles from each other, I'm realizing this year, that I will always be missing something. And the missing - the craving for a familiar item or experience that is suddenly unattainable - leads to the types of compromises in authenticity that I've just listed. A topic like food is a palpable - literally - but superficial element of this troublingly constant sense of lack that my chosen lifestyle provides me. The full list of cultural compromises goes on and on: food and sports, film and philosophy, health and hygiene, clothing and career, laughter and love. Friends, family, interests, passions and more get caught in the space between my two alternatingly competitive and cooperative lives, and I'm finding it consistently impossible to keep all the elements of my personality from degrading into imitations of what I'd actually like them to be.

I realize that it would be just as easy to conclude that my ability to have such a wide-ranging list of personal interests is a very authentic result of my American upbringing and education. And in the vast plurality of India, where the apparently absurd is so often synonymous with the conservatively traditional and where absolutely nothing is universally true (apart from the lack of truisms of course), any claims of inauthenticity, even by lungi-wearing white Wisconsin kids, hold little water.

But even if I am some kind of new-era globally-interested authentic American, or an authentically honorary admirer of Bengali culture, I still feel like a poser in both places. The pizza powder is no less disgusting with a prettier label.

So, a life characterized by missing. And we all know how missing works, right? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, the grass is always greener on the other side, and so on? The truth of these proverbs is, I believe, the engine of the personality paradox I'm describing. Here I am at the beginning of a beautiful Indian summer thinking, "but what's summer without the smell of barbecue?" Were I in the U.S., eating said barbecue, my thoughts would no doubt drift to, "but what's summer without fresh mangoes?" It works year round. Winter without snowball fights vs. winter without pick-up cricket matches. Autumn without baseball playoffs vs. autumn without Durga Puja.

Without. Without. Without.

It took a visit to my village by the Fueled by Rice team (friends from CSB/SJU bicycling across Asia and Europe) to teach me how focused on this dangerous "without" mindset I had become. My visitors raved about my village life, expressed overwhelming jealousy of the sense of community here, the sincerity they saw in village relationships, the peace of it all. My Katna life was exactly their longed-for "without," I realized. And for a couple days anyway I forgot about all of my own withouts - nightlife, cuisine, and other distant pleasures - and enjoyed the blessings of Katna the way I did when I first arrived. We played music under the stars, walked the village at sunset, and enjoyed the company of Katna's carefree children. We cooked together, and we ate and ate. And yes, I enjoyed the ghoogny and mughlai and begun and bhat just as much as the greasiest sea of cheese that Gary's Pizza could ever fling.

That's probably the most authenticity any of us can hope for, I suppose: friendship, community, cooperation. Wherever we are, whatever we're longing for, if we're "with" supportive companions, life ain't so bad. Even if the food is.

"Fueled By Rice" in Bangla.

The Fueled By Rice mission statement in Bangla: Spreading the spirit of tolerance and cooperation around the world one pedal stroke at a time.

The Fueled By Rice and Street Survivors teams after our concert for villagers (the FBR band played about seven songs for a huge crowd of Katna residents after I 'opened' for them with a couple songs of my own).

Nakia Pearson of FBR walks Katna's rice fields with a group of village children.

Nakia and Nilon, one of my best village buddies.

FBR posing in arches at the Khatra Mosque in Murshidabad city, the famous Bengali Islamic center of learning and burial place of Murshid Quli Khan, the namesake of the district. Please notice that 6'7" tall Peter got the taller archway!

A scene from Brian Sir's computer class.

FBR guys sharing their instruments and musical gifts with Jagriti Public School's Class V students.

Sumana and Sainara try their hand at some new instruments, facilitated by the inimitable Mr. Jim Durfey.

My friend and Bangla teacher Matiur Rahaman reads a Bengali poem of his for the FBR visitors in his home.

The "Jim Durfey Applying Mosquito Lotion Song," a Kammanesque improvisational performance from just outside my kitchen.

A huge crowd of Katna kids accompanies us as we tour the village.

5 Holidays, 5 Thoughts

2008-03-21T11:40:00.005-05:00

As you certainly must have read/realized, today (21st March 2008) was simultaneously five holidays. For Hindus, it was Holi, the spring festival of colors (in Bengal we call it Dol Purnima or Bashanto Utsab, but it's the same thing in essence). For Muslims, it was Id-e-Milad, the commemoration of the birth of the prophet Muhammad. For Christians, of course, today was Good Friday. Today was also Navroze, the Parsi New Year, as well as the Spring Equinox for the spiritually non-aligned.

Five holidays, all of which (not by chance) land on the most beautiful full moon night I've seen in Katna as yet AND (by chance) on Rani Mukherjee's thirtieth birthday. No joke.

In commemoration, a list.

1. First, the obvious. I know that in the intercultural studies lexicon it's terribly "minimalist" of me to say so, but isn't there a bit of "we're-not-so-different-after-all" in this five-holiday mega-bash? Sure, dancing around and throwing colored powder on everyone in sight is a far cry from sitting in an unlit church for a somber Good Friday service, but in two days we Christians too get around to our celebration of rebirth, spring, colors and hope, don't we?

I won't dwell on this blatantly obvious point unduly. Just remember this: our planet is beautiful precisely because of the spectacular diversity of the human experience. Yet it strikes me as so completely right that all of us, with our different family values and social arrangements and languages and literatures and cultural passions and hairstyles, are celebrating simultaneously today.

2. My Holi story.

For me (and by me, I mean a card-carrying member of the White Guy India Geek Society), the festival of Holi, along with other quintessential India images such as fields of yellow mustard flowers and exuberant back-up bhangra dancers, was always part of the dream world of Hindi cinema far more than it was ever a part of my real life.

(Sadly, this same statement is also true for many American images. Upon seeing the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time, the thing that thrilled me most was the mental image of Shah Rukh Khan walking alone across the bridge in that white sweater, singing the title song from Kal Ho Naa Ho, still my favorite Hindi film. Har ghari badal rahi hai roop zindagi / Chaon hai kabhi, kabhi hai dhoop zindagi...)

Widespread passion for Hindi cinema notwithstanding, Indians don't generally share this mentality, having grown up playing Holi every year, picking mustard flowers from their village fields, and (in Panjab anyway) dancing bhangra whenever the opportunity arose.

There is nothing I can do about the absence of Holi, mustard flowers and bhangra from my childhood, of course. And frankly I wouldn't give up Christmases at Grandma's, the smell of a baseball field, and high school dances for all the quintessential Indian childhood experiences possible. But nonetheless, I was hopeless to try to engage in Holi with any mentality other than, "Oh boy, this is gonna be just like the movies!" (Like the mentality I had when dancing bhangra with my fellow fellows in Delhi, or running through the mustard fields in Katna).

The biggest Holi bash of the year in Bengal is at Viswa-Bharati University, the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore in a town called Shantiniketan, which means "the abode of peace." It's a couple hours from Katna by bus, and I made it there yesterday afternoon.

In very un-glorious, un-cinematic fashion, I couldn't find a hotel room anywhere. I rode up and down the length of Shantiniketan and nearby Bolpur shouting at every hotel owner I could see, but it was very obvious that the whole town was booked. Occasionally hotel owners offered to put me up in their own homes, for the bargain price of 4,000 rupees (over $100 and ri-di-culously expensive). This is the unfortunate side, I guess, of that famous Indian entrepreneurial spirit: take advantage of suckers - especially white ones - in a tough spot.

Just before my spirits dropped too far, however, a loitering dude (there are just so many of them in India, aren't there?) called out to me and told me that I could stay in the room above his mobile shop for a reasonable price. I saw the room - a couple thin mattresses on the ground, a door that locked from the inside, bas - and was satisfied. I took the key, went to a nice handicrafts fair, ate dinner and came back to sleep.

12:30 am. Banging on the door. Khulun! Khulun! (Open the door! Open the door!). I'm a bit spooked, respond that I've paid for the room and that they - whoever they are - should leave. It seems that they follow my suggestion.

1:00 am. Banging the door and window. Previously-mentioned loitering dude shop owner identifies himself outside, and I open the door to talk to him. There's a new plan. He's caught wind of several more stranded Holi visitors, and he's going to put them up in my room as well. People will come in a little while, he says, probably ten of them.

Now I've been scared before while traveling. At the Delhi airport back in 2005, for example, when my CSB/SJU tour kids and I were held without explanation by dudes with big guns and thought that we might never be allowed to leave the airport, let alone catch our connecting flight.

Last night was probably the worst, though. And I'm still trying to figure out exactly why. First, of course, is the fact that it was pretty stupid of me to be in that place on that night. It wouldn't have been hard to call a week before and book a room somewhere. And in my mind, these ten people coming were guaranteed to be more standard-issue Indian dudes, with all likelihood of drunkenness on the night before such a big festival. It wouldn't be a totally strange turn of events for ten drunk Indian dudes to harass me a bit, perhaps take some money, and so on and so on.

Now I know what you're thinking, and I was thinking the exact same thing lying there sleeplessly from 1:00 to 3:00 a.m. waiting for the new guests: I'm a racist. Why should it immediately follow that ten new guests would lead to danger? Would I feel the same way if I knew they were Western sightseers?

I'll spare you all of my race-relations baggage, my explanations for stereotyping "loitering Indian dudes" so ruthlessly, the alternatingly awestruck and awful ways I'm treated by working-class strangers here. That's a different essay for a different day.

The facts remain: dozens of dudes-in-hotels had tried to rip me off, the one seemingly helpful dude had deceived me, it was 2:00 am and I was curled around my backpack in an otherwise empty room alternately fearing for my safety and cursing my borderline-racist instincts.

My Yash Chopra item number getaway was going goonda in a big hurry.

In the end, my shop-owner buddy overestimated his market by a bit and brought in two graying middle-aged men at about 3:00. After a bit of shuffling around and lighting mosquito-killing coils we all slept (or tried, anyway) for the next few hours.

One more paragraph before I (finally) get to Holi itself. These kinds of experiences, which creep up unexpectedly and often wrapped in misguided pretensions of Indian bliss, are ultimately the very stuffs of India's fight that keep me committed so deeply to her. Sometimes we need to get thrown off course to start thinking about what course we're on, don't we? India nudged me a bit last night, and in a way that I expect to be very helpful in the coming months and years (whether or not it resulted in a good night's sleep).

Holi was great fun. Not a perfectly-produced Hindi film song, but great fun nonetheless. I immediately understood the absolute lack of hotel rooms when I saw the vast field of Viswa-Bharati completely filled with people. This, I thought, must be what Beatles concerts in the early 60s were like. After the end of a beautiful series of dances set to Rabindrasangeet, the whole mass of people began throwing colored powder in the air, on their neighbors, on themselves, on complete strangers, and anywhere else.

I shouted a lot, smiled a lot, abandoned inhibition and wiped bright colors on hundreds of strangers. It was exactly what it was, and because of my inflated Bollywood expectations, it was less than it could have been. But that's life.

The massive crowd.

Dancers.

Overeager attendees can't wait for the dances to end before launching their rong-powder into the air. Notice also the huge boom camera. The whole shebang was broadcast on TV throughout India.

Shabnam (my mentor, in the front) dances a traditional Saotal (an adivasi tribe from Bengal) dance after the Holi game.

Me with Gulap, SSI employee and fellow Katna-ite.

Holi Face 1.

Holi Face 2.

Holi Face 3.

3. I've been running a lot lately. Three or four times a week, usually with a long run on the weekend. I've gone as far as Dakbangla (12 km round-trip) a few times, and I'm scheming for longer runs in the future. I usually go right before sunset, and watch the blazing red sun sink into the paddy fields (or, more appropriately, into the smoggy-hazy purple horizon above the paddy fields), heading south on the Kuli-Burwan highway.

The following things regularly happen during my runs:
- Children follow behind me, smiling enormously and laughing the whole way.
- Loitering dudes and mashis stare at me ruthlessly from roadside shops.
- Lorry drivers shout rude sexual suggestions at me (galagali, as they call it in Bangla, which translates in my head anyway as cheekacheeky, as "gal" means "cheek.")
- Dudes sitting on top of barreling buses cheer for me.
- Village kids ride their bicycles next to me, often for the whole duration of my run. Mostly it's fun, and once I even conducted an hour-long English language lesson while running to-and-from Dakbangla with one particularly persistent boy at my side. But occasionally the bicycle mobtourage gets a bit unwieldy and I have to discipline them to go home lest we cause an accident. I'm violating established Katna cultural norms by my running habit anyway (as the lungi-clad village elders often remind me: if people in Katna run, they run in the morning, the morning), and the last thing I need is a bunch of mangled bicycle boys on my hands.

4. Big news. I'm dumping Rani and becoming signed, sealed, and deliveredly single both in my real and fantasy lives.

Why? She turned thirty today. She never wrote back to my letter, and she seems more engaged-to-be-engaged to Aditya Chopra than ever.

Rani, it's over. Happy birthday.

5. Happy Holi/Dol. Id Mubarak. Happy Triduum/Easter. Happy Navroze. Happy Equinox. Happy happy happy.

B

For Once, A Real Blog

2008-03-15T22:57:00.003-05:00

Okay. For the first time in awhile I'll write a standard blog entry. No fictional narrators, no table of contents, no photos with irrelevant captions, no haiku. Absolutely no existential questions or theories. Just good old (boring) first person prose about what I've done lately. I should say thank you, though, to everyone who read "The End Of The World As We Know It" and gave me positive feedback. I really appreciate your patience and attention. Thank you.

(If you're visiting for the first time in awhile and don't know what I'm talking about - narrators, haiku, existentialism, etc. - scroll down a few entries to the monster 4,000-word blog from mid-February. It's unwieldy and long, but something of a cornerstone of my blog writing so far.)

So. Three updates.

One.

After a couple unsettled months of sparse communication with our funders, the Shiksha Shakti Centres (SSC) project is back on its proverbial feet and progressing, although more tentatively than originally planned. The project's first phase, the oft-mentioned baseline educational survey, officially launched in February when I coordinated a team of sixty temporary employees in a survey of nearly 4,000 houses.

These 4,000 houses were spread over 12 particularly poor villages near the anchal headquarters of Andulia, about 20 km east of Katna. We intend to build the first of our SSCs in this region. Because of the distance, I spent a lot of time in transit (at least two hours per day), and indeed many of you received phone calls from me during one of my morning cycle-rickshaw commutes. It's just so obviously "global citizen" to chat with American friends (about, say, graduate school) on a cell phone while rickshaw-ing my way through a village Bengal sunrise. I couldn't refuse.

I entered the whole area essentially cold. I knew one young man, Gobinda, who had visited our school once to chat about the project, but beyond him the whole area was new to me. So as you can imagine it was (stressfully) thrilling management and language practice to build such a big project on my own. We started by recruiting a team of ten guys to survey Gobinda's home village of Chandnagar, which gave me a chance to see my survey instrument in action and fix all the problems that arose with the questionnaire before scaling up to the remaining eleven villages. Gobinda and the Chandnagar boys hereafter became my team leaders, and the six of us proceeded to recruit another sixty temporary employees for the launch of the anchal-wide survey.

Up to this point I took things slowly, giving myself time to build familiarity and goodwill in Chandnagar (where upon first arriving I was greeted alternately as a Christian missionary and a chicken-killer; see "Words" post below). Shabnam, my boss at SSI, had told me to finish the whole survey by the end of March, which in late February looked a cozy deadline. Then Rupchand, one of my Chandnagar boys, informed me that the majority of my surveyors could only work until March 10, after which they would all sit for their month-long state board exams.

So. Management exercise two: cram five weeks of survey into two. I reverted to reporter-on-deadline mode, gave up the idea that any of my evenings, Saturdays or Sundays would be work-free, and in the end we cranked the whole thing out with a few days to spare.

I realize that the idea of a household survey - even one in hyperspeed - isn't fantastically exciting. But to de-excite the whole thing even more, keep in mind that this nonstop work mostly involved tedious English-to-Bangla translation, xeroxing of SSC brochures, and waiting patiently for delinquent publishing house employees. Ooooh baby, the sweet taste of self-fulfillment!

On the serious side, I consider it a major accomplishment of my Bangla language study that I successfully undertook the whole project, interacting with both my staff and hundreds of villagers, without a translator. I wrote the survey forms and SSC information guides in Bangla, I trained my team in Bangla, I problem-solved in Bangla, and moments of real struggle were rare. I'm also really excited about the new task of digging into the stats and learning - at a more deep and nuanced level - the educational complexities of my neighborhood. And, thus, to strategize about how best the SSC might intervene.

Not to mention that we have a very functional ten-day blueprint for how to conduct similar surveys in the nine additional SSC locations.

Finally, all jokes about chicken-killing aside, the villagers were incredibly welcoming to me, our SSC project, and the whole survey process. We strolled unannounced into the houses of probably 20,000 people, only to ask them very personal questions about their age, level of income, educational accomplishments, goals for their children and so on. Not once did anyone refuse to participate. Can you imagine anything like this working in the U.S.? How many doors would have been slammed in my surveyors' faces?

A typical home in the Andulia anchal.

My face reflected in Latu's helmet one day while motorcycling home from Chandnagar. I put my helmet back on after the photo, Mom.

A young woman shows the survey team her kantha blanket. We were also recruiting women to join new kantha-stitching SHGs under the Swayam Shakti banner.

My field office and the location of our survey training session. In free moments, I also taught my Chandnagar team how to play euchre here.

(Some of) The Chandnagar Boys.

The road to Chandnagar: my daily commute.

Two.

Maria got chatting with people on a train a while back (as happens frequently to India-comfortable Bengali-speaking Westerners seated next to friendly people with twenty hours of nothing to do), and it turned out that they work for a foundation based in Kolkata that provides free surgeries to children born with cleft lips and palates. Very rewarding work, but their problem at the moment is locating candidates for their surgeries. Cleft cases in Kolkata are declining, and the foundation isn't very well connected with village communities.

Enter Maria.

Within a couple weeks we had posters up in all eleven of our village libraries, flyers in the packets of all sixty of my surveyors, and a cleft registration camp planned for Sunday, March 2nd at our school.

I believe they call this a "partnership." (Insert smile here).

The camp was a big success; a doctor and five foundation staffers drove up from Kolkata and registered 25 candidates for surgery from our area. There really isn't a catch, apart from these wary villagers having (getting) to navigate Kolkata for the first time. It's totally free, everything from transportation to the hospital stay to food and speech therapy and everything else.

The first batch of surgeries will take place in Kolkata at the end of this month, leaving me and Maria with plenty of time to enjoy all the new smiles in Katna and its surrounds. (Not that that's the point. But still.)

Three cheers for Maria, train ride conversations, partnerships and smiles! Hip hip! Hip hip! Hip hip!

Three.

I found out recently that I was accepted to both of the International Affairs masters programs I applied to: first at The Fletcher School at Tufts and second at SIPA at Columbia. It's exciting news, of course, especially because I didn't give myself much of a chance to be accepted. But now, although I'm still waiting for all of the financial aid business to be sorted, I'm smack in the middle of the hardest decision I've had to make since, well, the last time I got accepted to two colleges I thought quite highly of.

And add to all of that the fact that I'm very seriously thinking of deferring enrollment for a year to extend my fellowship (pending approval by SSI, AIF, and the schools, of course, but that all seems likely). So it's really four choices, and not just two. Stay/Go multiplied by Fletcher/SIPA equals, well, restlessness. I seriously wake up every day believing the exact opposite of what I had convinced myself the previous day.

So anyway, let that be that. I'll keep you updated if you're interested. If any of you have any great insights into "choosing between great goods" or "what contributes most to happiness in grad school," please let me know. Post a comment or email me.

But of course, it will ultimately be my decision, and the result will be greater-than-or-equal-to "just fine." Another Keilloresque predicament, eh?

Brian Hamlet

2008-03-10T00:51:00.003-05:00

As part of my fellowship-midpoint promise to "stay put in Katna" more often, I haven't been on a personal trip to Kolkata in a long time (over two months). There are pros and cons to this sacrifice of course, and you'll read about some of the pros below. One of the cons, though, is that in my rural neighborhood it's difficult to get to a bank where I can withdraw my monthly stipend. The nearest bank is about an hour-and-a-half away by bus, in the touristy historic area of Lal Bag (Red Garden). To get to Lal Bag I have to pass through Baharampur, our district headquarters and the hometown of several of our school's teachers.

So a couple weeks ago I decided to go to the bank. For convenience sake, I rode along to Baharampur with Abhigyan, my fellow teacher of Children's Day Dance Performance fame, who lives there. I figured we'd share some nice bus chitchat and part ways in B-pur. Not so.

(First, let me share quite proudly that Abhigyan and I held hands on the bus for about the first twenty minutes of our ride. Male friends in India are always displaying these kinds of public affection - strolling around arm in arm, holding hands willy-nilly - and there is absolutely nothing romantic about it. Dude friends in the U.S. might punch each other to show affection; in India they cuddle. I love this cultural quirk, but am pretty out of practice at it myself. So it was awkward and funny and glorious all at the same time. He held my hand, and held it and held it, and it was very nice.)

Anyway we got to B-pur, ate lunch, and climbed onto his bicycle together (yes, double-cycling, just like being thirteen again!) and rode into town. I thought I was going to catch a Lal Bag bus, but I was way wrong. Abhigyan's mother was releasing her new book of poems as part of the Murshidabad District Poetry Academy's 100-year anniversary celebration, and we went there instead. There was buzz, a big crowd spilling out of the upper-floor meeting room, and (apparently, as I didn't recognize any of them) a lot of famous writers in town from Kolkata. I tried to be inconspicuous, but Abhigyan - as the son of one of the day's biggest honorees - strolled in boldly and approached the head table to greet his mother.

Do you know where this is going yet? Do you remember the story of how I met Aparna Sen at a bookshop in Kolkata, after I very similarly sat in the back row at a book release trying to look inconspicuous?

Abhigyan approached me shortly thereafter, a cheesy grin on his face. "Brian sir, I have a nice surprise for you! I told the organizer that you are here, and they want to make you an honored guest!"

(Quoth sick John Kamman: "Oh God.")

Brian: "No, you really don't have to do that. I'm okay right here."
Abhigyan: "Your last name is Hamlet, right?"
Announcer on PA: "Brian Hamlet, please come to the front... Brian Hamlet."
Abhigyan: "Sir, sir, they are calling you! You must go!"
Announcer: "Brian Hamlet... Brian Hamlet."

Brian Hamlet?

Of course I went to the stage, laughing internally all the while, and took my seat with the other honored guests (all of whom, unlike me, deserved the title). The face of Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet came to mind, staring at himself in the mirror for the famous "to be or not to be" monologue. They gave me a bouquet of flowers and a nice cup of tea, and I listened from the front as several poets read from their new books.

And then it was my turn to speak. And sing. I rattled off a few minutes' worth of clumsy Bangla, telling everyone to keep writing and that I would do my best to raise interest in Bengali literature in America. Then Abhigyan made me sing "Aami Chini Go Chini," as he always does.

After finishing and receiving a certificate from the Poetry Academy leaders, I made a quick exit. Abhigyan and I double-cycled our way to the bus stand, I made it to the Lal Bag bank and back to B-pur and Katna, and soon enough the embarrassment and exhilaration of my momentary stardom degenerated back to humor.

I pulled out the certificate they gave me. All in verbose Bangla, it awards me a lifetime membership to the poetry academy and thanks me for my presence at their function. For my name, they had written the following:

Sri Kobi Ebong Songeetongo Brian Heilman
The Honored Poet And Musician Brian Heilman

Not Hamlet.

Brian Hamlet live and ungrammatical

Six Faces

2008-02-24T11:22:00.002-06:00

Six faces of Katna from 10th February, 2008.

Words

2008-02-24T06:15:00.003-06:00

Five-year-old girl to her parents as I entered her village house recently: "Hey! The chicken killers have come!"

(There's bird flu in the area, and the government has sent culling units across the state. Still, a fabulous greeting.)

Middle-aged man (with two wives, as I learned later in the survey I was conducting) to me as I entered his village neighborhood: "Hey, I'll become Christian!"

(Legacy of Christian missionaries. Creepy.)

Brahmin priest to my sculptor friend Rajesh during his recent performance of the Saraswati Puja ceremony: "What is the name of this club?" Rajesh's club had, like many others in the city, raised the funds for the puja pandel and constructed the idol itself. Rajesh, in reply: "D-Generation X."

(Saraswati is one form of the Hindu mother goddess, most revered by students, teachers, writers, and artists. "Goddess of Learning" isn't a bad way to think of her. D-Generation X was, if I'm not mistaken, the name of a group of WWF wrestlers circa 2000. "Antithesis of Saraswati and/or Brahmin culture" isn't a bad way to think of it.) (I promise, Rajesh was not in on the joke; he and all of his club member friends sincerely thought that their club name was cool, hip, appropriate.)

Hand-painted in red above a Kuli-Kandi bus window: "EMARJENCY GET"

(Emergency Gate.)

Co-teacher Saurav to me in a recent session of dude-bonding: "You can go up to any girl in the world, and if she gets mad, if she doesn't love you, you can tell her that you had a sister who died and she looks like her."

(Wow.) (If only my fantasy deceased sister could possibly look Indian, if only any twenty-something women around here weren't married-with-children, if only they didn't all veil their faces in shame and fear when I walk by, I might try this.)

The End Of The World As We Know It

2008-02-18T05:30:00.003-06:00

Table of Contents:

Prologue: Notebook Of Dreams
Epigraph: Magellan
Chapter One: A Rat Fell On My Face
Chapter Two: The End Of The World As We Know It
Chapter Three: Mumtaz At Logan Senior High
Chapter Four: And That Is What Makes Life So Beautiful
Epilogue: Endless Existential Crisis Update

Prologue: Notebook Of Dreams

Hello. My name is Herman Bilian, and I have written the words you are about to read. Well, not technically I guess. I haven’t written them yet, but I will. (I just know that by the time I publish this on Brian’s blog I will actually have written all the aforementioned “words you are about to read.” So that’s probably the more accurate tense to use when addressing you, sitting there in front of your computer, looking at the final published version. I mean, right now while I’m writing, you are completely oblivious to the existence of this document, right? You’re probably sleeping or driving or thinking up comebacks you should have used in arguments you had today. Unless you’ve somehow disembodied and floated over to this sweet shop and perched up on my shoulder, there’s no way you could be reading this sentence without many words following below it on the page. Even though that’s how it looks to me right now. Or looked, just before I wrote that last sentence, or this one. Oof, this is a bad start. Forget it. Please keep reading.)

Nothing bad has happened to Brian, the usual author of this blog. He’s fine. In fact he’s sitting here with me, drinking a glass bottle Coca-Cola and playing with his collar. He looks fine, mostly. His neck hair has grown a bit unseemly; in fact it’s kind of sticking out around his collar and just begging to be cut. It makes me wonder if he’s started growing back hair. I bet so. Gross. But anyway other than that there’s nothing he can complain about, at least not that I know of.

Brian asked me to write “The End Of The World As We Know It” for him for a couple reasons. One, he knew that I was looking for some quick money and can turn a decent sentence. Two, he was experiencing, in his own words, “a particularly dense load of mental clutteredness,” probably due to all the things that I’m going to write about in a minute. I mean, that I’ve written about below.

So he’s giving me twenty bucks (800 rupees, technically) to write these stories for him, which will have the dual effect of relieving his “clutteredness,” whatever the hell that actually means, and paying for my bus ticket back to Kathmandu. It’s not a bad deal, and I hope you don’t mind.

So please read on. There are words and stories below, I promise (even though right this instant, on my computer screen, there is nothing but whiteness there).

Epigraph: Magellan

(Note: Brian wanted this poem to come at the beginning of the post. So what can I do but include it? It’s mostly about immortality, I think, but it’s definitely also about how Brian is scared of the ocean. Which he is.)

Magellan
by Mary Oliver

Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, far from anywhere
Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,
Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.
Let us be heroes, or, if that's not in us,
Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?
And what is death but a refusal to grow?
Magellan had a dream that he had to follow.
The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

And when the fever would not set him free,
To his thin crew, "Sail on, sail on!" he cried.
And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.
And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Chapter One: A Rat Fell On My Face

If it’s true what they say, that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, then I don’t know what to make of these first stories. Brian insists that they are completely true, and I believe him. But then again he was reading Murakami at the time. Decide for yourself.

One. Brian’s site mate Maria (a very nice girl and the first Rhode Island native I’ve ever met) has had awful luck with technology during her stay in India this year. First, her elderly PowerBook crashed and burned after only a month of life in Katna. Then not too long ago her USB drive caught a virus while computer-hopping at a fellow volunteer’s office in Delhi.

Now anti-virus software in rural Bengal isn’t exactly cutting-edge. There really isn’t any, actually. So it was only after two weeks and all-out computer infection that Brian and Maria finally realized that all of their school computers had Maria’s virus. The dreaded Trojan Horse.

The day that the computers crashed, the day that the Trojan Horse unleashed its hidden army of code and crippled Street Survivors India’s already frail computer network, Brian sat in on a meeting of the organization’s village librarians. There on the desk was a shipment of new books to be disbursed around the block. On top of the pile was a Bengali translation of “The Iliad.”

Two. Like I said, Brian was reading Murakami at the time. His newish book of short stories, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.” About a third of the way into the book is a story called “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” in which a man and a woman share a characteristically Murakami growing-up-thoughtfully-in-an-increasingly-disorienting-world sort of relationship. The reader experiences this relationship through the couple’s Monday morning visit to the zoo. To see a baby kangaroo. They went to the zoo specifically to see a baby kangaroo, and that is what the story is all about.

Brian read this story in bed on Sunday night. On Monday morning, as he sat down to start work, his co-teacher Nargis turned to him as she often did to ask for clarification about an English word.

“Brian, what is the word for a baby kangaroo?” she asked.

Three. Brian and John (Kamman) and probably everyone who knows Ann Mailander likes to retell the story of the rat and the boa constrictor. It’s not even really Ann’s story, let alone any of her Minnesotan friends’. But even three or more degrees of separation removed, it’s a great story. Here’s the short version:

1. Peace Corps volunteer in Panama wakes up repeatedly with scratches on his face.
2. Peace Corps volunteer realizes that a rat is guilty of the scratching, but fails to catch the rat for several days.
3. Peace Corps volunteer wakes up one night with the rat on his face.
4. (Are you ready?)
5. Boa constrictor falls on Peace Corps volunteer, eats rat.

It’s like a great joke, building up to a completely – perfectly – unexpected punchline.

Now imagine a slightly wine-exaggerated retelling of the story to Brenna, Brian’s Service Corps “buddy” and subject of that old “Gujarat in Brian’s pocket” story from an earlier blog. Brian and John, giddy in each others’ company at a swank Mumbai dinner party, take Brenna through all five steps of the story, sprinkling in as much suspense and surprise as they can.

Now imagine the next morning, Brian and John milling about on their hostel balcony, waiting to go to breakfast, and seeing a sleepless-looking Brenna stride to them from her room.

“A rat fell on my face last night,” she says, and stares hard into the storytellers’ eyes.

And it was true, and it happened, and it was real. Like all three of these stories. A rat fell on Brenna’s face, and she didn’t sleep at all.

Chapter Two: The End Of The World As We Know It

For two whole days before the fire, Brian’s friend John had only spoken (groaned) the following five sentences:

1. “Ohhh God.”
2. “I feel like crap.”
3. “This sucks.”
4. “Uhhhhhhh.”
5. “Oh shit.”

Which, as you may have guessed, was because he was sick. Something nasty set up shop in his stomach, and kept him TKO’d and prostrate on Brian’s floor for 50ish hours straight (apart from the zillion or so trips to the bathroom, of course). Uhhhhhhh.

Luckily plans were already in place to move Operation Oh Shit to Kolkata, as John was scheduled to leave in just two days’ time. Brian and friends arranged for an emergency doctor appointment in the morning, and the boys boarded the Shantiniketan Express to Howrah Station. Which is just over the Ganges from Kolkata proper.

Which made all the difference.

* * *

4:30 PM

Brian and John arrive at Howrah Station, right on time. The crowds are even more frenetic than usual. Why?

4:45 PM

Emerging outside the station, Brian searches for the quickest method of access to the city. Remember, Howrah Station is across the Ganges (called "Hooghly" in Kolkata) from the city itself.

Brian: Which way to the ferry ghats?
Coolie: It’s Sunday - the ferries aren’t running.

5:00 PM

Brian: Will you go to New Market?
Taxi Driver: Why won’t I go? Get in.

5:15 PM

The traffic, like the crowd inside the station, is particularly crazy, especially for a Sunday.

Brian: What happened?
Taxi Driver: The Howrah Bridge is closed. Because of the fire.

Brian remembers. One of the biggest buildings in Kolkata’s Burrabazaar, at the foot of the bridge across the river from Howrah Station, had caught fire. Closing the bridge, a landmark of Kolkata and a vital vessel of city transportation, was unthinkably awful for traffic from Howrah.

John: Oh God.

5:30 PM

Taxi Driver: We’ll take the new bridge. It might take four hours.
Brian: Take the new bridge. What else can we do? Why will it take four hours?
Taxi Driver: Because of the Red Brigade.

And, as the new bridge comes into view, Brian remembers again. This weekend was a huge statewide rally for the ruling Communist Party. Hundreds of thousands of party faithful from across the state were arriving by the busload to the Brigade Grounds. Which lies right at the foot of the new Hooghly Bridge.

There are only two ways to enter Kolkata from Howrah by road: the old Howrah Bridge and the new Hooghly Bridge. An uncontrollable fire blocked the first, the Red Brigade the second.

6:30 PM

The word traffic isn’t even appropriate. The Hooghly Bridge has become a parking lot for a thousand private buses, spilling with Red Brigaders from Siliguri to the Sundorbon and everywhere in between. After an hour, Brian and John have made it just past the tollbooth at the entry to the bridge.

John: This sucks.
Brian: Should we walk? The bridge is huge, and I think it’s illegal, but should we try?
John: Uhhhhhhh.
Taxi Driver: You can’t walk on the bridge.

7:00 PM

John loses a slipper out of his bag as the boys step out of their cab, but that hardly matters now. Brian and John are walking over the Hooghly Bridge, weaving their way through the Red Brigade, heading toward a great mysterious mess of concrete jungle that holds their only chance of sleep, food, medicine and health. Oh, glory. Kolkata.

7:15 PM

The apex of the bridge. Brian pauses between cars to glance at the ash-gray river, now clouded by the tower of black smoke rising from Burrabazaar. The horns and cheers of the Red Brigade surround him and his prematurely decomposing friend; the moment is drenched in tense energy.

Brian: Doesn’t this feel like one of those ‘end of the world’ movies? You know, when the city is burning and everyone is trying frantically to escape?
John: People are not meant to live like this.

A new sentence!

7:45 PM

Brian and John follow signs and street advice down several on- and off-ramps and finally make their way to somewhere vaguely familiar to Brian. After another half-dozen pieces of advice from strangers, the boys make it to the Rabindra Sadan subway station. John is alive, if barely. The walk was easily five miles.

John: I hate cities.

* * *

And then John ate and slept and then Brian met with a Bengali friend from Madison who had come to visit his parents. And the next day, octogenarian Jyoti Basu left the Red Brigade reeling with a fist-pounding speech. And the army put out the fire the day after, and the bridge reopened. And John took his medicine and felt better and made it home in one piece. And the world didn’t end.

Though one day it will.

Chapter Three: Mumtaz At Logan Senior High

High aspirations, low expectations. This is the secret to happiness, Brian and John decided during their month together in India. It’s basically Expectation Theory with a loophole for ambition. “Go ahead and think that your own life and accomplishments are going to be great,” it says, “even though you’ve already figured out that there’s never a reward for having high expectations.”

It’s happiness hypnosis, and it definitely won’t turn out to be psychologically helpful to either of our young heroes. You’ve got to keep motivated somehow, though, right?

But the Taj Mahal.

The Taj Mahal is the shimmering, ghostly antithesis to all things Expectation Theory. I don’t care how high your expectations are before you stroll through that glorious southern gate and face the white “teardrop on the face of eternity,” you’ll still be overwhelmed with a heaven of surprise.

And that’s how the four of them felt that day, Brian, John, Mom and Grace. It’s very comforting, after all, to realize that in addition to murdering each other with frightening efficiency and destroying the planet that sustains them, humans also occasionally create works of exquisite beauty.

This capability, though rare, is what keeps us going, I suppose. It’s what allows for hypnotically ambitious aspirations from otherwise rational people. “It can be done, so maybe – maybe – I can do it,” we think. And we’re right. We can create beautiful things.

After the sun set on heaven and the Taj gates closed, the team chatted over a rooftop dinner of Indian Chinese. Mom(taz) told Brian the stories of how she courted his father and how he proposed marriage. Brian had never heard these stories, never had a love myth upon which to understand his parents’ marriage or the family life that followed from it. There were no princes or emperors, no usurped thrones, and definitely no marble mausoleums involved. No, Brian’s Mom used to stroll by a certain field on Sunday afternoons when she knew that Gary would be playing pick-up football games there with his friends. That, you see, was her pick-up game. She went after him, she was proud to clarify; it was not the other way around.

And then they dated and then they graduated and then, when it seemed like the next thing to do, Gary proposed marriage. Casually. Not like a poet, not like a prince, not like an emperor. Like a twenty-year-old from the North Side of La Crosse who knew that he didn’t want to lose the great gift that strolled into his life at that Sunday afternoon football field.

He was nervous, I suppose, and so was she. You never imagine Shah Jahan or Achilles or Magellan or anybody in a story to be nervous. But real people get nervous. When she has to pin a boutonniere on her new boyfriend’s lapel before the Logan Senior High School Homecoming Dance, a real person gets nervous. When he has to make that touchdown catch in the corner of the neighborhood park endzone where his admirer is sitting, a real person gets nervous. And when they have to walk out of Saint James Church on a golden autumn afternoon to start a new family together, real people get nervous.

Let me try to bring this together. This is really Brian’s story to tell, if he ever can, and I’m just trying to do justice to his family and his very serious thoughts about all this Expectation-Theory-and-what-I-should-expect-to-get-out-of-life kind of stuff. I think he’s a bit too deep about it all for a twenty-four-year old, but I won’t tell him that to his face.

Never aspire to be or do anything great, and you’ll never be nervous. Never be nervous, and you’ll never create anything beautiful. Let that be the lesson of the Taj Mahal this time around. And let our families be our monuments of love, when we don’t have the means for all those tons of gleaming marble.

Chapter Four: And That Is What Makes Life So Beautiful

Well it's been a quiet week in Katna, Murshidabad, my hometown, out there on the edge of the delta...

So might Brian start the "News From Katna" segment of his weekly radio show "A Delta Home Companion," were that he had such a thing. Were that Katna was his hometown. Were that anyone would listen from abroad and mourn the kilometers separating them from this at-turns-magical-and-at-turns-mundane Bengali village. But he doesn't, it isn't, and they wouldn't. The "News From Lake Wobegon" is the actual segment, coming from "A Prairie Home Companion," the classic public radio show about life in at-turns-magical-and-at-turns-mundane Midwest USA. The place for which Brian is mourning today, at least, if not every day. Homesickness, thy name is Garrison Keillor.

Among the great Christmas gifts John delivered to Brian in Delhi (including candy canes, internetless Wikipedia, a dozen copies of "Short Side Of The Wishbone" and more) were the past three months of "News From Lake Wobegon" recordings. Now Brian was a frequent, if not avid, Prairie Home Companion listener in the USA, but has quickly discovered that Lake Wobegon stories acquire new emotional depth overseas. In Minnesota and Wisconsin we are all fish in the water of Wobegon, aren't we, but here on the subcontinent all of those Sunday masses, brunch buffets, frozen lakes and leaf piles suddenly explode with novel mental presence. With palpable itness.

And on a lonely Sunday night in the Ganges delta, these types of under-enjoyed routines become seductive fantasies for a midwesterner masquerading as a "global citizen." A coffee and omelette at the Chatterbox Cafe (read: Kay's Kitchen) is suddenly the sexiest thing on earth. A craving for this simple pleasure, a Sunday meal, keeps Brian rolling in bed beneath his mosquito net.

If we're to believe what Garrison said on September 22nd of last year, during Brian's favorite of all the Lake Wobegon stories John delivered him, this kind of yearning is an essential life experience. "The heart wants what it cannot have," Garrison said that week, "and that is what makes life so beautiful."

I wonder, does this also apply to the stomach? Kidding.

Is it true, though? That life's cannots (heartbreak, the knowledge of death, "the things we cannot say," to cite Garrison's examples) are what make it so unbearably beautiful? It strikes the ear as counterintuitive, the heart as undeniably true.

Enter mental clutteredness. I'm starting to get a glimpse of what that actually means.

"Cannot" as the source of beauty.

1. It's the same reason that form poems are beautiful, isn't it? When you write a sonnet, for instance, you cannot write any old thing you want; you have to assemble exactly fourteen rhyming lines with exactly ten syllables each. And that, far from any connection to freedom, is why this form is time-honored for its beauty.

2. It's also a factor in why simplicity or a lack of choices leads so often to happiness. People raised in our (read: middle class, well-educated, Western industrial) society believe dogmatically that they have the freedom to do, be, buy, and enjoy anything they like. Anything. That's pretty damn difficult, isn't it? No matter what we choose, aren't we going to be plagued by regretful thoughts of "what if I would have done/become/bought some other, better thing"? This uneasiness, which I would classify as pretty unbeautiful, has become a hallmark of our over-depressed, over-medicated culture. All because of a culturally-embraced "can" in place of the quietly more beautiful "cannot."

3. But then put on your village India goggles for a moment. No, put on your traditional Muslim village India goggles. This is a whole culture of cannot. Cannot find a good school. Cannot earn a comfortable living. Cannot feed your children. Cannot choose a profession other than farmer or criminal. Cannot look at members of the opposite sex outside your own family. Cannot fall in love. Cannot see your family after marriage, work outside the home or enforce your own reproductive rights, in the case of most women. Is this beautiful?

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Clutter.

To be frank, Brian's life hasn't seen a great deal of cannot (apart from, at the moment, the lack of greasy diners in the Murshidabad area). Which isn't to say that he can do everything - don't get him started about being "a jack of many trades but a master of none"; he'll introspect you to sleep - but rather to say that he's been able to do most things he's wanted to do. Schools, trips, cities, jobs, that sort of thing. Not skills. His life is shaped by his own choices, and "cannot" usually lasts only as long as "doesn't want to."

Can this lifestyle go on? Should it, if what Garrison says is true? No and no. Real beauty comes from missing a couple chances, saying "no" from time to time, and perhaps most importantly, being told "no" just as often.

Brian's Mom missed chances. Like the chance to go to college. Brian's Mom said no. To selfish professional ambition. Brian's Mom was told no. As in, "No, I won't come home for Christmas." "No, you will not be the mother of a bride."

There's a lot that Brian's Mom cannot do in this life. There's a lot that her heart wants, I think, that it cannot have. But to return to the refrain of the day: that is what makes her life so beautiful.

I know, I know, I'm no expert of the beauty of the life of Linda Heilman. But Brian might be close, especially after the five hour Life with a capital L interview that he gave her before seeing her off from Delhi just over a month ago. He's talking about it all the time. About how inspiring and grounding her simple lifestyle - far though it may be from an inflated American dream - was to him. About how quietly confident she is with her decisions, as if she gave up his brand of wishy-washy introspection decades ago.

About how her leadership - which he is only now fully starting to discover and appreciate - is showing him a clear path through the various challenges of his awakening to adulthood.

And the mental clutteredness too, he's telling me now, is clearing up and fading away like the last storm in a lionlike March, ushering in a verdant Wisconsin spring...

That's the news from Katna, where all the women are pregnant, all the men are mustachioed, and all the children are up to no good.

Epilogue: Endless Existential Crisis Update

So. Now I can officially say that I have written the stories you've read. And, in a few minutes, I'll publish this on Brian's blog, take my 800 rupees and head back to Kathmandu to eat my favorite fluffy puris with hot aloo dum. (Unlike Brian, I am not yet craving Kay's Kitchen Sunday brunch. Or turkey sandwiches, which he cannot stop talking about. Give me dal-bhat any day.)

But first, after such a long reading/writing assignment, I think it will be helpful to sum up. To review the latest developments in Brian's endless existential crisis. (Gag me, I know... but this is, after all, what you're supposed to do as a guilty middle class American "living simply" abroad: figure out what life is all about. Or so the brochure says.)

We have learned the following:

- There is an important difference, which is sometimes confusing to locate, between saying and doing.
- The word "coincidence" might just be an easy way to ignore the fascinating strangenesses surrounding our individual life experiences. Weird things happen, full stop.
- Haruki Murakami * (Mary Oliver + Garrison Keillor) / Expectation Theory = Brian's current existential outlook.
- Sometimes other people's stories become our stories. Intellectual property rights be damned, I'm telling that boa constrictor story as often as I want.
- People survive (for now). The world doesn't end (for now).
- A life without nervous moments, drenched in Mughal glory or otherwise, is not a very beautiful life at all.
- "The heart wants what it cannot have, and that is what makes life so beautiful."
- Mom rules times 2.

And above all:

- Home is where the turkey sandwich is.

Thanks for reading. Not too many people do it any more.

And do come again.

Team America Photo Haiku Contest

2008-02-18T05:21:00.003-06:00

You’ve seen my Team India photos. You've read my awful haiku. Certainly, you’ve thought, “I can do better.” Now prove it.

If there is indeed a drop of creative juice inside you... if indeed you are still reading this blog despite my major internet drought... and if indeed you read (or scrolled to the bottom of) the ginormous post above this one, then it's time for you to interact a bit.

Here are the instructions: 1. See the photo below. I took it at a "jatra," a traveling play, about two months ago (I know, I know, awful experience-to-post delay). 2. Write a haiku about this photo, inspired by this photo, or in the character of my haiku, that has nothing at all to do with this photo. 3. Submit it as a comment to this post.

There are awesome India prizes for the winners, and there are bound to be very few contestants. So write! Remember: three lines, less than 17 syllables total. Good luck!

Destiny

2008-02-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

It’s a bold, simple idea. We at Jagriti Public School seek to provide our students the rarest of chances in village India: the chance to, through a combination of hard work and opportunity, shape their own destinies. It’s also the job I find myself engaged in during my AIF Service Corps experience: Assistant Facilitator of Destiny-Shaping.

Not bad work, as the saying goes, if you can get it.

Sainara Khatun has a plan. The eleven year-old, who finished first academically in her class last session, wants to be a doctor and to work with children. She’s bright, talented, a dedicated student. There’s only one problem: girls from Kuli town don’t grow up to be doctors. They get married, often as adolescents just a year or two older than Sainara, and have children soon thereafter.

It’s certain that no girl student from Kuli has ever attended a top-quality college, let alone become a doctor. I believe Sainara can change all this, thanks both to Jagriti and to her primary facilitators of destiny-shaping: her parents.

“Sainara’s always planning out her life, and it’s just school and school,” chuckled Sainara’s mother. So what about marriage? “That’s Khoda’s (God’s) business, and that’s Sainara’s business,” her mother said.

“Anything that can give our daughter what she dreams of, that we have to do,” Sainara’s father added.

I’ve heard this same thought repeated dozens of ways by parents of our school. Parents like Janehar Bibi, who was abused and abandoned by her first husband and father of her three children (the youngest of whom, Minhajuddin Shekh, studies at our school). Janehar, who discovered our school after filing domestic abuse cases against her husband in our court mediation project, echoed Sainara’s parents’ comments when I spoke to her recently.

“He tells stories of everything he does in school,” she said. “As soon as he gets home from school he wants to start studying.”

“Anything he wants to be, he can be,” she said.

Nilchand Shekh told me almost exactly the same thing about his son Habibul, who studies in Class I. Nilchand has had a string of bad luck lately: first, his father refused to give him any of the family land to cultivate, distributing it instead among his brothers. This prompted Nilchand, pride fully swallowed, to move in with his wife Hadisa’s parents. There he set up a small poultry-selling business.

Then bird flu came to Bengal.

The day before I spoke to him, Nilchand had taken the money he received from the government chicken-cullers and bought a train ticket to distant Pune, where he hopes to find daily wage labor. There, like so many young Murshidabadi men who have migrated to Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, or farther, Nilchand will work restlessly on behalf of his son’s – not his own – destiny.

“Whatever he wants to do, whatever he’s good at – that’s what we want Habibul to do,” Nilchand told me.

Again, it’s a bold, simple idea. The humble residents of my forgotten corner of Bengal simply want their children to have access to their own ambitions. To be subjects, not objects, of the stories that shape their lives.

For a few families out of a great many, we’re finally making this a possibility.

(Interviews translated by Brian; learn about Murshidabad, Street Survivors India and Jagriti Public School at: www.streetsurvivorsindia.org)

Team India Photo Haiku, Part Two

2008-01-16T00:41:00.000-06:00

This time around, Kuli Mela Children’s Toy Names Found Poems. (Key: Kuli = a town near me; Mela = a fair, with ferris wheels and all that; Found Poem = some words, sentences, or lines discovered out in the world that strike a poetry-minded person as ready-made poems).

Yes, the following haiku are assembled from the names of children’s toys for sale at the Kuli Mela, which is just finishing up today. I did not make these up, nor could I if I tried.

Unless denoted by quotation marks, each line is the name of a toy. The “Desert Hero Camel,” for instance, is a plastic camel with a turbaned, guitar-toting camel man on top of it, which walks while playing American club dance music and glowing red. The “Eggbeater Powerful Whirlabout” is a plastic helicopter. The “Party Action Singer” is a doll dressed in American military clothing, complete with grenades and baby-sized AK-47. And so on.

1

Merry Circus Jhoomer
Ruf And Tuf
Eggbeater Powerful Whirlabout

Lovely Action Singer
“The Truth Eho
The Eyes Met Before”

Art Exquisite Article
(Music Gift)
Desert Hero Camel

Battle Gallop 2
“New Concept of Energy-Saving
Light on Earth”

Luckiness Bird
Delicacy Present Craftwork
Contraption

King Airport Sun Goggles
Party Action Singer
Famous Dhoom Car

Accompanist Contraption
Russian Shining Joker
Mini Gypsy Jeep

Car Antiterrorism
Beat Magnum True Hero
Super Function Cinemagraph

Hot Elephant Motor Driven
Magical Hen Music
Sound A Beautiful Music

“Exquisite Sound-Controlled
Toy Cages”
Container Truck Drumbeating

Team India Photo Haiku, Part One

2008-01-16T00:18:00.000-06:00

A haiku is a poem of three short lines comprising no more than 17 syllables (believe it or not, the 5-7-5 syllable rule is not hard and fast). The best haiku contain one word referencing a season, one “cutting” word, and a deft comparison of scenes without the crutch of metaphor.

But as you will see,
I don’t write the best haiku.
I write horses’ eggs.

The following photos come from my mother-and-friends’ recently-concluded trip to India. The boring haiku beneath the photos take the place of boring captions, which you can imagine with relative accuracy anyway. Enjoy the smiling faces. Come to India. It – in all its unquantifiable itness – is not boring.

1. Where’s Will Smith When You Need Him?

The end of the world
Always happens on a bridge
Over blind dolphins.

2. Cowboys and Indians

Second-hand sweater
Sold to its third set of hands
And the Packers win.

3. The Tree’s Jackfruit, The Mustache’s Oil

Fresh honey,
A pool in the hand,
Water’s voice.

4. Moharram

Steam and flour
And the echo of wind:
Winter fever.

5. Absolutely Impossible

Please understand
How much I love to eat
Corn flakes and milk.

6. The One That You’ll Never Understand Unless You’re A Snooty Poet Like Me

I miss two things:
Hot mustard on my Dome Dog
And stand-up doubles.

7. I Actually Miss Way More Than Just Two Things

Kolkata nightlife,
A million people moving:
That’s my loneliness.

8. Broken D String On A Powerless Night

Between the birch bark
The eyes of a snow demon
My dream aches.

9. My Favorite Word Is Palimpsest, I Think

And the princess too
Lies on the cool marble floor;
Meanwhile my mother

Come back soon for part two!

Modes of Transportation, or, The Hectic Way Home

2008-01-15T22:03:00.000-06:00

I left John and the Mitras this morning at about 8:00 and walked through Lake Town to the VIP Road crossing, where I caught a shared autorickshaw to Bidhan Nagar Road station. There, I jumped in another auto to the Shobhabazar launch ghats, where after a short wait I caught a ferry across the Hooghly to Howrah Station. My train to Bolpur departed right on time, and arrived promptly at 12:30 p.m. In Bolpur, I took a cycle rickshaw to the railway booking office, and after booking tickets for my upcoming meeting with AIF trustees in Bhubaneshwar, I continued on (with the same rickshaw-cycler) to the bus stand. I jumped on the first private bus to Kandi, but because it was taking the longer route via Salar, I got down at F. Sala and caught a government bus into Kuli. From there I hired the first cycle van I saw and rode it back to school. My bicycle was still at home, though, so I had to walk back there and pick it up before I could ride it to tonight’s dhuki dinner at Azizul’s house.

Let’s add that up:
1. Walking
2. Autorickshaw
3. Ferry
4. Train
5. Cycle Rickshaw
6. Private Bus
7. Government Bus
8. Cycle Van
9. Bicycle

Nine different modes of transportation today. Nice. That will be hard to beat.

A Prologue to Deep Thinking

2008-01-14T05:03:00.000-06:00

Friends, thanks for your patience over the past month, as my blog entries have been (not even a) few and (very) far between. As you know, my mother and friends John and Grace came to India for a two-week adventure that is only now concluding in the smoke-filled skies of Kolkata, where John will board his departing flight tomorrow afternoon. The trip was very rewarding for all of us, I think, even if it was mostly void of the characteristic inconveniences that India often gifts its visitors. Things were silky smooth, actually, and I'm confident that everyone will land back in their respective homes with a very comfortable and kind image of my life here (perhaps an unexpected conclusion).

But that's just one of a couple thousand conclusions I'll hope to draw from the experience. There is an enormous heap of post-world-clashing internal debriefing to do, and I assure you that you will be privy to all of it over the next couple weeks. I just wanted to post something to lure you back to this site which you may have - for good reason - abandonded for the past few weeks. So give me a few days to get back to the village, clean my room, and spew my cluttered brain onto my computer screen. Plus, world-clashed notwithstanding, there are also many exciting new developments taking place at Jagriti and with visitors coming from the AIF.

So come back soon and find out more, this January, right here at Bharoter Dinratri!

Oh, and Go Packers.

TEAM INDIA!

7 Days, 7 Cool Things I've Done With John Kamman

2007-12-26T10:56:00.000-06:00

John and I are killing the last hour before Mama Heilman's India arrival in a speedy little net shop in Paharganj (Delhi), and we thought that a quick list would be a worthy summary of our first week together. So here it is, after an unprecedented drought of blog lists: a Christmas list miracle starring Mr. John Kamman.

John and I:

1. Found Rani Mukherjee's house in Mumbai and delivered a letter to her (via her guards). See the previous post.
2. Made 16 color back-and-front laminated photocopies of the eighth grade graduation picture of Tom Steingraeber that I carry in my wallet. This is slightly ruining the surprise, I suppose, but some of you readers may expect one of these as your India souvenir gift from John. We did this nearly a week ago, but it hasn't yet ceased to be an source of explosive laughter. The photo and note on the back - which I will let be a secret - are hilarious. Sorry Tommy.
3. Attended Christmas Eve midnight mass at Delhi's cathedral, where we sang along to club beat-ified Christmas songs and hung with a sari-clad Santa Claus. This annual party is so popular that everyone can't fit inside the Cathedral itself; there was a huge tent on the school grounds next door. Everyone was overflowing with cheer, and many people even came to the decidedly un-solemn proceedings wearing Santa hats. Nice.
4. Hung out all Christmas Day with 35 HIV-positive children in the Nav Foundation orphanage. We decorated their bedrooms, sang Christmas songs, danced, drew photos, and gave these sweet kids a surplus of physical attention and goofballness.
5. Spent Christmas night visiting the two oldest mosques in India (unknowingly and in succession). The oldest is at the Qutb Minar complex, and the second oldest is the incredible Nizamuddin Mosque (slash mausoleum of Nizamuddin, the Sufi saint), where I met a Bengali mullah who sat me down for a Bangla conversation just long enough to surmise that I didn't make enough money volunteering here to be able to offer him any baksheesh. He was a sweet (dyed-bearded) dude though, and he told me that all of my work was a gift to Allah.
6. Went to a swank dinner party in Juhu. Of course, it was just us and the rest of the AIF fellowship people, but still. That's what Bollywood stars do with their free nights in Mumbai. Go to swank dinner parties in Juhu. Yes us. Swank.
7. Prepared thoroughly for Mama Heilman's imminent arrival in India. We booked a kickin' room at the "Hotel Relax," which has tons of kitschy Christmas clutter and a couple gorgeous balconies. We bought a marigold garland to toss over her head upon arrival. John even brought a Christmas tree from the U.S. which, with any luck, we'll smuggle into the airport in about an hour's time. And we already have a car booked for the morning, when we'll hit the town Linda style, rocking the Lodi Gardens and Purana Qila and any other south-ish Delhi spots Mama feels like seeing.

The clash of worlds is upon us! John is here, Mama is midair and Grace is making her way to Tokyo for her flight tomorrow! Happy Christmas me. Thanks for reading.

Rani's House

2007-12-22T02:36:00.000-06:00

Friends and foes,

My first-ever trip to Mumbai has seriously exceeded expectations. This is mostly due to the presence and inspiration of John Kamman, but also due to some handy passion-created luck. Consider this: I am sitting in Rani Mukherjee's neighbor's house right now.

I'll spare you the details. This is the letter I delivered to Rani's security guard a couple hours ago (along with a photo of myself and contact information):

***

Priyo Rani,
(Dear Rani,)

I will be flattered and honored if this letter ever meets your eyes. Aamar nam Brian, aar ami aekhon bharote thakchi (kintu aamar ashol bari Americate). (My name is Brian, and I am living in India right now (although my real home is in America)). I have been a great fan of yours for many years now, both because of your stellar film work and because of the beloved role that Bengali culture and its language have played in my life of late. You, the favorite daughter of Bengal, hold a very valued place in the hearts of my Bengali friends and students, and through their lead I have come to honor and respect you equally.

I have just come to Mumbai for the first time in my life; I was here to meet with the 30 other members of the 2007-2008 American India Foundation Service Corps Fellowship. The 30 of us are working with leading NGOs throughout the country on various development issues. I am living in the tiny village of Katna in Murshidabad, West Bengal, working to build new learning centres for children out of the reach of high quality education.

After the conclusion of our meeting, I have been staying in the flat of one of the American India Foundation's Advisory Council members in Juhu. I was shocked and delighted to learn that you lived in the colony beside his, and thus decided to write you this quick letter of appreciation.

Tai, aami shudhu likhte chai je aami tomake aar tomar sinema khub bhalobashi. Bollywooder onno mohilar cheye, tomar beshi grace aar somman aache. Aami asha korchi je aamra ek din aalap korte parbo, kintu aamar mone hoy je se bhaggota hobe na. (So, I just want to write that I really love you and your movies. You have more grace and respect than any other woman in Bollywood. I am hoping that one day we can meet each other, but I doubt that this chance will happen).

I wish you all the best in your life and career, and will continue to watch your new movies, cheer loudly when you make your entrance, and dance along to your great classic songs from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Chalte Chalte, Paheli and more.

I won't take any more of your time. Peace and love from your number one American fan (with a Bengali heart).

Brian

***

Of course I wrote the Bangla lines in Bangla script and photographed the letter for my own purposes of posterity. I'll try to post the photos later with a better internet connection.

Below is a video of the letter-delivering moment:

The ball's in Rani's court now!

Photo Update

2007-12-12T06:07:00.000-06:00

Please find the latest and the greatest Katna photos below. Thanks for visiting.

My room. Notice Rabindranath, the ektara sitting atop my TV, and the nifty mosquito net-hiding device/aerial hamper above my bed.

The other side of my room.

The face of Ma Kali on a thakur's peacock axe. Yow.

My site mate Maria and me after our Children's Day performances. I wore a dhuti. Maria wore two feet of fake hair.

Jagadatri puja procession in Kolkata. She's huuuge.

Our teaching staff team.

The path into Katna village (from the roof of the new hostel next door to my house).

My house is on the right. My balcony is on the far side of the building.

Katna sunset.

Computer class students making a picture alphabet.

Job Opportunity

2007-12-07T23:42:00.000-06:00

Before I leave for Mumbai and Delhi (and the midpoint-retreat/mother-and-friends reunions that will take place there), I'm zipping all around our subdivision spreading the word about the survey we're doing and trying to recruit some of the 250-odd graduates we need to hire to perform the basic work of the survey. It's been really fun - even if mosquitoes get caught in my beard when I ride on the motorcycle - and I'm learning a lot about the history of our area at the same time (most of which I'll have to creatively reproduce for the activity report book that our organization is beginning to design; I will write most of the copy).

But in the interest of sharing information about this chakrir sujog - job opportunity - far and wide, I'm posting the flyer I made below. So if any of you readers are actually recent BA graduates in Kandi subdivision looking for a temporary job, give me a call or show up for the placement exam! We need you!

In Kandi: Click to enlarge. See you there!

In the U.S.: Bangla is beautiful, tai na?

India Life Statistics (Installment One)

2007-12-07T23:33:00.000-06:00

My greatest wish for the future of technology (other than downloadable brain chips, duh) is that every tiny detail of our lives could be automatically recorded, analyzed and statistic-ified. Like baseball.

For instance, I’d love to know (and thus be able to celebrate) when I take my one billionth step, when I grow 1,000 feet of hair, or when I finish my five hundredth book. I could be aware of the precise moment when I scoop out my hundredth pound of earwax, or climb 30,000 feet of stairs, or finish an entire week’s worth of laughter.

Even if these nice round quantities are arbitrary to the consciousness of the universe, a handful of automatic accomplishments might bring a glimpse of satisfaction to otherwise unhappy days. Right?

Plus think of how useful this data would be. You could rank your lifetime performance in sales or school work according to factors such as: the breakfast you had that morning, the precise amount of sleep you had the night before, the TV program you watched most recently, the temperature of your morning bathwater, and more. And you would know, then, that leading up to your big meeting or entrance exam you should watch reruns of The Wonder Years, sleep just over seven hours, bathe in 100.4 degree water and eat Golden Grahams with an apple and lemonade. Think of the confidence!

You could determine the time of day (perhaps 10:50 to 11:15 p.m.) when catchy melodies are most likely to fall into your head, and keep a guitar and notebook nearby. One step better, you could deduce from the style and phrasing of melodies that fall into your head which kind of music (and thus instrument) you would be statistically and instinctively most likely to succeed at playing.

You could calculate the precise likelihood that you will fall in love on a Tuesday in January (34%, lets say) as opposed to a Friday in October (6%). And you could plan your wardrobe and personal hygiene accordingly.

You might realize that the winning percentage of your favorite professional football team increases by twenty percent if you are watching the game with four or more friends. You might realize that the vast majority of your friends’ names have between 19 and 21 letters altogether. You might realize that the noun most frequently repeated in your favorite novels and songs is “chance.”

You might realize that you’ve never been happier than on November 16th, 1995. Or that you’ve never cried in such great quantity as on February 9th, 1998.

We’d each have our own record book, our own annual report, our own hall of fame. In short, it would be awesome.

So get to work, scientists, while I finally reveal the long overdue point of this post: I’ve started to keep statistics about my life in India.

They’re tallies, really, as there is a bare minimum of analysis involved and the technology I’m using to track them is a dry erase board and pen. The credit for inspiration goes to Casey Peterson, who upon completing his Peace Corps assignment in Ukraine published a statistical overview of his time there (with categories such as # of books read, # of TV show seasons watched, etc.). Long standing and longwinded statistical technology wishes notwithstanding, I’m following in Casey’s low-tech footsteps.

With no further ado, here are my India life statistics for the months of September-November, 2007:

Books Read: 11
(top three in order: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, and Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Blog Entries: 17
Pushups: 319
Situps: 960
Poems Written: 0
Stories Written (Fiction): 0
Songs Written: 0
Bags Of Corn Flakes Eaten: 8
Boxes Of Milk Finished: 33
Hindi Movies Seen: 10
(top five in order: Chak De India, Life In A Metro, Om Shanti Om, Pyaar Ke Side Effects, and Bhool Bhulaiyaa)
Rotis Cooked: 66
English Movies Seen: 8
(only three of these are movies I hadn’t seen before: The Producers, Pollock, and Jarhead)
Bangla Movies Seen: 1
(Sonar Kella)
Team India Cricket Victories: 11
Engagements To Rani Mukherjee: 0

I can’t draw any major life conclusions from this admittedly tiny data set. But I’m hoping for an increase in my creative output (poems, stories, songs) and for my movie-watching focus to switch to Bangla in place of English and Hindi. I will keep eating tons of Corn Flakes and drinking tons of milk. That’s a sure thing, but it’s doubtful that my Core Revivalish pushup/situp routine will continue for long. And hopefully my roti-rolling and book-reading rates can steadily increase in the New Year.

And as for engagements to Rani Mukherjee: I leave for Mumbai in ten days. Let’s hope that all of my (and Rani’s) untabulated life statistics point to a miraculous Christmastime love union in the city of India’s dreams.

Oh, to be able to flick the pen for that glorious single slender tally.

The Enemy Of Love (and more village stories)

2007-12-03T06:17:00.000-06:00

Ghoogny

Had there been any ghoogny in Kuli that night, Suman and I might never have become friends. As it was, the ghoogny man took the night off for the strike, and we had to go to the fair in Burwan the next night to get our ghoogny.

Me: "What is ghoogny anyway?"
Suman: "Um, it's potatoes and peas and, um..."
Me: "Is it sweet?"
Suman: "No. It's really good."

Suman had skipped the cricket game at school that day to represent Katna in the second of three matches against a group of boys from Kuli. Everyone else had also skipped the cricket game at school that day - to cheer for Suman and the Katna side. We lost, despite the cheers.

A portion of Suman's bicycle's frame had snapped, so he had taken it to the repairman earlier in the day. After the defeat, I gave him a ride there on my bicycle. While I was there I bought a basket for the front of my bicycle and helped the repairman attach it. Might as well, I thought. That was the night we first searched for ghoogny, and given the strike had to settle for singharas at Akash Sweets. They were so hot that I burned my mouth and couldn't taste anything after the first bite.

It felt like I was thirteen again, biking the five kilometers to the Burwan fair with Suman, Samir, and Ratan two nights later. Except they were the locals and I was the new kid. They knew exactly where all the potholes were in the roads; I struggled to spot them with my flashlight and dodge them in time. They knew exactly where the road became smooth and sped up accordingly; I trailed behind confused at the sudden burst of cycling energy.

The fair was bathed in neon light, blanketed with stove smoke. The effect was invigorating, like walking through pure adolescent energy. After a few intoxicating breaths the transformation was complete: I gazed upon the clambering ferris wheel with gape-mouthed awe. Charte hobe! We have to ride!

Suman: "Did you see any beautiful girls?"
Me: "No. Show them to me."
Suman: "Right side."

It turns out ghoogny is a soupy mash-up of potatoes, chickpeas, and the cook's spicy masala-of-the-day, garnished as usual with a few slices of cucumber. I enjoyed my first plate immensely, but feared that the ghoogny conquest would necessitate a return to post-adolescence, to twenty-four-going-on-thirty, to a world where my friends are the people next to whom I sit staring at computer screens and not the people with whom I ride ferris wheels, gawk at girls and eat deep-fried fair food.

Suman: "The ghoogny in Kuli is way better."
Me: "We'll have to go there sometime."
Suman: "Yeah."

Dude, Where's The Dudh?

Nothing remains unusual. Anything can only be new - and carry the allure and excitement of this novelty - for a very short period of time. And once this time has elapsed, the good old human brain finds a way to get annoyed at the very things that once dazzled it.

This happens with books, with music, with food. This is a defining characteristic of love. And, yes, this happens with life in Bengal.

That's right. Despite being an unabashed lover of all things Bangaliyana (except Subhas Chandra Bose), I have started to get frustrated by several elements of my Bengali life. Ox carts meander in front of my bicycle as I’m about to pass them on our village path, for instance. This used to be idyllic. Now I swerve, brake, huff. Even in personal paradise, I am my father in rush hour traffic.

There are other examples, including the fact that every shopkeeper, train seat-mate and dude-on-the-street whom I meet wants to (as they turn the phrase) "make friendship with me," which usually involves taking my cellphone number and calling me several times the very same day. It very rarely involves them doing the actual service for which I entered their shop, or giving me the simple directions for which I've politely asked them. In the U.S. I rejoiced at chance friendships with Bengali speakers. Now strangely I'm missing the pathetic anonymity of a country where now you can ring up your own groceries and not even talk to a cashier.

So the other day I was in one of those meaninglessly pissed Brian moods that perhaps Steve Devereaux knows better than anyone. I just wanted some milk. Cold, pasteurized, drinkable, corn-flakes-pourable milk. Dudh, in Bangla. In a country of a billion cows, I didn't think that a good dudh would be so hard to find. But alas. I did three laps of Kandi town, asking for milk at dozens of little food shops and evading at least as many unwarranted friendships. The refrain was constant: there was either powdered milk for mixing in tea or "Amul Gold," which boasts a remarkable 10% fat content. Yuck. I gave up and stormed through the chaos back to the bus stand. Another week with no cereal.

Then as I walked - no, stomped - into the middle of a hectic intersection, a bicycle bumped into my arm. The impact didn't hurt terribly bad, but it was hard enough to take notice. I turned to face the driver, and before I could shout "Arrey, apnar kono ghonta nei!?" (Hey, don't you have a bell!?), I noticed that it wasn't the bicycle that had bumped me at all.

It was the enormous bucket of milk that the driver was carrying on the handlebar. Exactly the poetic justice I deserved.

Epilogue: I eventually found one store in Kandi where Amul Gold's 2% fat blue-boxed cousin - the delicious Amul Taaza - is occasionally sold. I have, of course, "made friendship" with Ashim, the proprietor of this shop. Not only have I visited his house and seen photos of his son (a promising engineering student in Mumbai), but he's also shown me how to order bulk boxes of Amul Taaza straight from the supplier in Gujarat. Boo-ya. (Or, rather, Moo-ya.)

Children's Day: Or, The Story Of How I Slept With My Tabla Player

This is the story of how I slept with my tabla player.

I vaguely recall an annual "Student Appreciation Day" from my grade school years, but this might only be because my mother - a former Hallmark store employee and compulsive greeting card writer - used it as another excuse to leave a cheesy note in my lunchbox. Indeed I received so many of these notes (ranging in cheesiness from the relatively mild cheddar "Have A Super Day!" to the sharp "Someone's Thinking Of You!" and beyond) that I might be imagining this holiday altogether. The school-day holidays which meant something to me as a child were: Halloween (party, costumes, candy), Valentine's Day (party, cards, more candy), my birthday (baked goods, presents) and, of course, St. Patrick's Day (green clothes, cookies), which after my unbelievable four-for-four-with-four-homeruns kickball performance in fourth grade gained legendary status in my mind's register of good luck charms and superstitions.

In my childhood memory there is no such thing as Children's Day, which I'm learning quickly is India's equivalent of Halloween, the Christmas Concert, the Spring Play, and the Dance Recital all smushed together and wrapped in a stress tortilla. Almost since the day I arrived in Katna, preparations for the school's Children's Day program - scheduled for November 14th but ultimately moved to November 17th - were underway. This, I might add, is a longer planning period than the school employed for the $600,000 grant I worked on or for the construction project currently doubling the size of the school building. Children's Day, I'm afraid, is one heck of a big tortilla.

My role in the two months of stress was quite small actually. I was nominated to participate in a dance with six other teachers, and we practiced our routine (which changed substantially in choreography and participation at least a dozen times) after lunch every day. The final version of the dance, set to the song "Akash Dake Aaj Amay" (The Sky Calls To Me Today), involved a lot of twirling and skipping.

Other teachers had it way worse. My friend and Bangla teacher Moti, for instance, wrote an hour-long play for Class Three and Four students to perform. Yes, he wrote the play, in which the evil demon-king Jamraj returns to earth and is awestruck by the evils of syringe-reusing nurses, kidney-selling doctors and judge-bribing lawyers, among other corrupt village characters. Our art teacher Rajesh also put in incredible hours painting an enormous backdrop for the stage (which was constructed with bamboo and canvas in the style of puja pandals specifically for Children's Day), as well as designing the sets, costumes and props for the whole show.

I told Moti after many long nights of playwriting, "Just think of how well we'll all sleep after Children's Day is over."

The week of Children's Day arrived and the state's political parties threw all variety of proverbial wrenches, sickles and hammers into the plan, calling statewide strikes on Monday and Tuesday and giving my boss just enough extra time to demand that I sing a song in the show. Yes on Wednesday, the original and official Children's Day, I learned that I would join the school's newly-appointed Academic Coordinator (a stellar violinist) in performing my favorite Rabindrasangeet song, "Aami Chini Go Chini," at Saturday's show. Just when I thought I would squeak by with some stress-free twirling and skipping, I was assigned a rhythm section and given the last slot in the whole show. Suddenly I was headlining Children's Day.

Although the stress level at school (and the fact that almost all classes were suspended to make way for rehearsal) frustrated me in the weeks leading up to the show, I have to admit that the actual program was fantastic. Our students are very talented, and out of the whole four hour show the only boring moment was when the microphones temporarily stopped working and held up the Rituranga dances. The stage looked gorgeous and Moti's play had the audience rolling. My song went well enough and everyone breathed a collective sigh of exhaustion when the last guests left the pandal.

I chose not to collapse into my room after the show, however, and instead travelled with my colleague (and tabla player) Debashish to see our fellow teacher Abhigyan perform in a dance show in Baharampur. Abhigyan was also massively overworked leading up to Children's Day, as he was simultaneously choreographing dozens of dances both for our school's program and for his own show at Baharampur's most prestigious cultural venue. The strike-induced delay meant that both of his shows ultimately took place on the same day. Yikes.

Abhigyan's performance was excellent, and despite the constant murmuring and shuffling-in-and-out-of-seats characteristic of Indian audiences, Debashish and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly from our VIP seats in the second row. We met Abhigyan after the show, ate mutton biryani with 7-Up, and returned to his parents' house where we would spend the night. We chatted briefly, scanned through my photos of the day on his television, and decided to turn in.

As I was lying in Abhigyan's father's bed, beneath a bright pink mosquito net and beside my tabla player Debashish, I remembered my previous reassurance to Moti: Just think of how well we'll all sleep after Children's Day is over.

Of course nothing about this situation struck Abhigyan or Debashish as unusual (namely, sleeping in a colleague's father's bed with a fellow teacher and musical co-performer) and indeed I have encountered enough bizarre cultural challenges to respond to this arrangement with a simple smile. Yet this certainly wasn't the stress-free post-Children's Day sleeping arrangement I had imagined.

That is the story of how I slept - very well and with pleasant dreams, I might add - with my tabla player. On Children's Day.

The Enemy Of Love

Brenna is my "AIF buddy" and probably the one fellow (other than my sitemate Maria) with whom I've stayed in the best contact over the past couple months. We were all assigned a "buddy" with this goal in mind - extra phone contact, emotional support in times of work frustration, homesickness, etc. - and I suppose Brenna's and my buddyship has been particularly successful because we got to know each other well during orientation week and before our outwardly-imposed buddy status. But last night was creepy.

Makhon and Maloti, who met and fell in love as children, have been married for ten argument-filled years. Whenever Makhon isn't clinging to the last of his youth playing cards at the club, he is at home practicing his latest spousal one-upping tricks. His latest trick, however, which he thought would be his cleverest yet, has just backfired. He told Maloti that he wanted a divorce, and that to make it final all she had to do was sign the form in his hand. Maloti couldn't read English, Makhon knew, and thus she wouldn't realize that the form was actually a scrap instruction sheet he nabbed from the floor of his office. When she confidently signed the paper and kicked Makhon out of the house (which, incidentally, was deeded in her name), he found himself in a real mess.

This was the Somresh Basu story I was studying during last night's aforementioned creepiness. Moti, my Bengali teacher, was prompting me with short essay questions about Makhon's husbandly foolishness, and I was responding as cleverly as possible in my simple dictionaryless written Bangla. In other words, it was a normal night in Katna.

The final, most challenging question of the night was, "Monitar sbamir songe sorboda koloho bandhate chaito kaeno?" Why did Monita always want to engage her husband in arguments?" I leaned over in my chair to place my notebook on my bed, and started writing my reply. Onekjon lok bhabe je premer shotru... (Many people think that the enemy of love...)

And then, as I lifted my pencil from the word shotru (enemy), I could hear Brenna's voice. From my pocket.

Hello? Hello?

I later examined just how complicated a maneuver it was for my phone to fingerlessly call Brenna from my pocket. It required a precise series of no less than twelve button-pushings. When I leaned over my bed so as to more clearly write the word prem (love), the arm of my chair no doubt performed the final, most crucial step: the pressing of the green phone button.

Startled and dumbfounded, I explained the situation to Brenna and wished her a pleasant evening. But how weird. Moti and I now repeatedly celebrate this moment as, "The time when I had Gujarat (the state where Brenna works) in my pocket."

Moti eventually gave me zero marks for my grammatically awful and culturally imprecise answer:

Onekjon lok bhabe je premer shotru ghrina, kintu eta thik noy. Jokhon kono aabeg nei, se obostha hocche premer shotru. Ekta jora jodi sorboda koloho kore, prem nishchoy thake. Ekta jora jodi kokhono jhogra kore na, tahole oder shomporke kono aashol prem thakbe na. Monita sbamir songe sorboda koloho bandhate chaito karon o sbamike bhalobashto.

Many people think that hate is the enemy of love, but this isn't right. The enemy of love is a situation without any emotions. When a couple is always fighting, then they are definitely in love. If a couple never has an argument, then there is no true love in their relationship. Monita always wanted to engage in arguments with her husband because she loved him.

Scenes

2007-11-21T23:36:00.000-06:00

My cycle rickshaw driver crashed us into a standing bicycle because he was talking on a cell phone and couldn't steer properly.

The geckos sometimes pounce on insects three times bigger than themselves. Unsuccessfully, of course, but admirably.

"Stand By Me" came on the satellite radio while I was slicing onions for dinner. I sang along. For the next week my pomegranates tasted like onions.

The moths with the slender golden wings leave behind a silver dust when they land. The silver dust slices through skin like a million microscopic swords.

The twenty-foot Statue of Liberty replica at the Kandi bus terminus glows aquamarine every night after dark.

Homesickness means a greasy omelette and overpriced milkshake at noon, in the same clothes I wore yesterday and slept in, casually displaying my favorite college football team's mascot.

If you need a blanket, you have to get it in Nagar. Of course you could buy it here or in any number of nearby towns. But Nagar is famous for its beautiful blankets, and everywhere else you'll pay too much.

If you need a bicycle, you have to get it in Dakbangla. Of course you could buy it here or in any number of nearby towns. But Dakbangla is famous for its beautiful bicycles, and everywhere else you'll pay too much.

And so on and so on and there's no Walmart.

Yet.

More Nonsense Acronyms, or, What We Do Here (MNAOWWDH)

2007-11-02T06:31:00.001-05:00

Friends, let this post serve as an overdue introduction both to my host NGO and to my individual fellowship project. I've been in Katna for a month and a half now, a time period which can very easily be divided into three two-week chunks. The first two weeks were what we might call "Gradually Figuring Stuff Out Time," or GFSOT for short. GFSOT was followed immediately, after the return to Katna of our organization's leader and my mentor, by "Ferociously Finishing A Bunch Of Stuff Before Durga Puja Time," or FFABOSBDPT. And we might call the third time period, which is just now finishing, "Durga Puja Holiday And Planning For The Next Eight Months Time," DPHAPFTNEMT. And given that we successfully completed the PFTNEM element of DPHAPFTNEMT, I am prepared to discuss my fellowship project in detail. But first let me introduce you to Street Survivors India and some of the discoveries I made during GFSOT.

Discoveries:

Short version (for skim-readers):
1. Street Survivors India doesn't work with street survivors.
2. Street Survivors India is like the palm of a hand, and its five main projects are the fingers.
3. It's all about the Shakti.

Long version (for lots-of-time-to-kill/eager readers):
1. Street Survivors India (SSI) doesn't work with street survivors. It isn't located on or within five kilometers of what one might call a "street," and it is even farther from the types of streets on which someone in India might need help to survive. SSI is therefore a misnomer, but it wasn't always that way. The organization started in the Motia Khan slum, very close to the New Delhi railway station. Like Sealdah in Kolkata and dozens of other examples, railway stations in urban India are dropping-off points for villagers seeking new, more economically viable existences. Slums grow on and near railway platforms because these new entrants to cities have no other place to stay. They are desperately poor places, with no physical or social infrastructure (including everything from toilets to clean drinking water to schools, clinics, etc.). SSI, for about eleven years, operated a school and night shelter in Motia Khan, until in 2002 government officials bulldozed the school and its slum neighborhood to make way for a five-star hotel and shopping mall. There was very little anyone could do to stop the demolition; the slumdwellers were, by all "official" considerations, squatting illegally. But thankfully the demolition, which put a stop to SSI's "street surviving" elements, didn't extinguish the motivation of the organization's leaders, Jugnu and Shabnam Ramaswamy.

2. Street Survivors India is like the palm of a hand, and its five main projects are the fingers. The palm links the projects and gives them unity, but the fingers do the actual work. The first and most important project, perhaps the "thumb" to stretch the metaphor, is the Jagriti Public School (JPS). The school is the main headquarters of the organization and the continuation of the educational work the Ramaswamys started in Motia Khan. After the demolition in Delhi, SSI relocated to Shabnam's family home of Katna, a place where they could purchase land (and thus be free of the nightmare of demolition) and also deliver quality English education to people without a glimpse of India's recent economic and educational progress. Jagriti, which was also the name of the Delhi school, means "awakening," and in my opinion "Jagriti" should - if paperwork and Indian bureaucracy didn't exist - replace Street Survivors India as the official name of this organization (given Discovery #1). Anyway, JPS currently offers English-medium education up to Class Four to students from Katna and several other villages in the area. Every year, the school adds another class and will ultimately teach fourteen total classes (Nursery, Kindergarten, and Classes 1 through 12). The start-up expenses for the school came from individual donors as well as foreign governments (Japan and the Netherlands especially), but within two years it will become self-sufficient, when the students' tuition fees match and overtake the operating expenses. About two-thirds of the students pay full tuition fees (350 rupees per month - about $9.00), while the remaining one third are subsidized (both by the others' tuition fees and by donors). The subsidized students pay 50 rupees per month (about $1.25) or nothing at all.

3. It's all about the Shakti. The power. The power and the awakening both, I guess. The other four main projects of Street Survivors India are: Stree Shakti, Swyam Shakti, the Jagriti Gramin Libraries, and the Shiksha Shakti Centres. The Shiksha Shakti Centres actually don't exist yet. It is partially my responsibility to make them happen. But more on that later; I'll go chronologically here. Stree Shakti (Wife Power or Womens' Strength) provides access to justice to village women. Upon arriving in Katna and building a respected reputation, Shabnam Ramaswamy gradually became a resource for women suffering from domestic disputes. Women in Katna who were abused by their husbands or other family members previously had no outlet for their complaints other than the male-dominated and unsafe local police station (which was staffed, most likely, by their husbands' friends). And even the few cases that did make it into the infamously sluggish Indian legal system took decades to resolve. So Shabnam pestered the police until they let her sit in the police station during appointed times every week to hear women's cases. The outlet proved so popular - and necessary - that the system eventually moved to Shabnam's own porch. Since 2002, Shabnam has - as judge and jury - heard and resolved over 2,000 such domestic cases. It is my site partner Maria's project to computerize all of these court records and prepare a final report from them (and I will help a bit along the way). Yet while hearing all of these cases, it struck Shabnam that the village women needed long-term economic solutions; by becoming economic contributors to their families, she reasoned, the women would force their husbands/in-laws to respect their place in family life more fully. So she created Swyam Shakti (Power of Independence or Self-Sufficiency), a economic livelihood project for village women. The group, which has expanded now to about 1400 women, engages in traditional weaving, animal husbandry and vegetable cultivation for profit. The signature brand of the 700 traditional weavers of the group is "Katna's Kanthas," and their hand-stitched blankets and saris are now sold in bazaars in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Bangalore (as well as overseas as part of the Craftmark catalog). I will be in Delhi after Christmas to greet my mother when she arrives in India because I will be helping to sell our kanthas in a major bazaar there. That leaves the Jagriti Gramin Libraries, which are exactly what you might think they are: small libraries in ten villages ("gram" means village in Bengali, hence "gramin"). This project is funded by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and provides after-school access to books, tutoring and games to government school students in the area. This, along with what follows, is what we do here.

* * *

Now I'll move on to the afore-promised detailed account of my fellowship project, as submitted to AIF earlier this week. These best-laid-plans are almost guaranteed to be revised if not completely changed, but nonetheless the basic framework of my project follows below.

My Fellowship Project:

Short version:
1. I was the head writer on a successful $600,000 educational grant application to a major corporate foundation here in India; this grant will fund #2 and #3.
2. I will help coordinate a huge educational survey in our subdivision, and write a report based on the findings.
3. I will help prepare for and oversee the construction and staffing of the first four Shiksha Shakti Centres.

Long version:
1. I was the head writer on a successful $600,000 educational grant application to a major corporate foundation here in India; this grant will fund #2 and #3. While the idea wasn't mine, the vast majority of the writing in our 52-page grant application (which put the FF- ferociously finishing - in FFABOSBDPT) was mine, and I'm very honored by the fact that the foundation to whom we applied almost immediately accepted the proposal. We won't start receiving the grant money until the first of the next financial year (April 2008), but Shabnam has nonetheless decided to begin the project with SSI funds to be reimbursed in April. The grant will fund two major projects, and I will be a member of the administrative team for both.

2. I will help coordinate a huge educational survey in our subdivision, and write a report based on the findings. Before we can build the Shiksha Shakti Centres (SSCs - see #3), we need to assess the state of educational access and achievement throughout the five blocks of Kandi subdivision, where our organization is located. Within each block we will choose 30 villages with a population of 400 families or less, and conduct a survey in two phases. The first phase will be a basic “house listing,” intending to determine the basics of each family’s socio-economic and educational status. This will include the following pieces of information:

Personal: Names, number of members per household, age, sex
Economic: Household income, main earning members, sources of income, landholdings
Social: Ration card, Voter ID, occupation, religion and/or community
Educational: Qualifications, or degree of education claimed for all members of the household

The second phase of the survey will focus on the twenty “poorest” families in each village. We will meet again with these families, who will likely become beneficiaries of the SSCs, and add qualitative data to the quantitative figures gathered in phase one.

For the first phase of the survey, which requires interviewing some 60,000 families, we will hire 250 temporary field workers, 5 team leaders, and a team of 10 data entry workers. 125 field workers, along with the team leaders and data entry staff, will continue to the second phase of the survey. We will then analyse the data and use it to prepare a final report on educational status in our subdivision, which I will take charge in writing.

3. I will help prepare for and oversee the construction and staffing of the first four Shiksha Shakti Centres. Following the completion of our survey, our grant project will begin in full stead. The major project is the construction and first five years’ operation of ten new learning centres (two in each of the five blocks listed above) intending to serve 100 poor government students each with remedial classes, and their parents with innovative adult learning opportunities (out with the alphabet, in with wealth management and civil action). This proposal is in direct response both to our organization’s personal experiences in the region and the recent Sachar Report on the Status of Muslims in India, which specifically recommends that the government, NGO and private sector collaborate on just such “study centre” projects.

According to the latest plan, the first four centres will be built and inaugurated as soon as possible after we begin receiving funds in March or April. This will likely take until late May or early June. The next three centres will be built and inaugurated by the beginning of the following school year, which starts in April, and the final three by the next April (2010). Prior to the first inauguration, in addition to construction of the centres, we will also need to hire and train the staff of the centres, in addition to building community awareness and support of the projects through various means (traditional cycle prachar ads, meetings with major school officials, etc.). I expect to take a leading role in these preparation projects, especially the training of the teachers.

* * *

Those are the basic facts/motivations/ideas/projects that I'm planning to deal with during my time here. Of course, I am also: teaching computer classes to Class 3 and 4 students, helping Maria with her work, being the random-computer-task go-to-guy at school, taking Bangla lessons, taking Rabindrasangeet singing lessons, attending AIF retreats, playing regular cricket matches with school staff, writing this blog, growing a mustache, staying up on Indian cricket news and scores, reading like a maniac, learning Bangla songs on guitar, planning my mother-and-friends' trip to India, fighting off hordes of insects in my room, learning to cook simple Indian dishes, dancing at school programmes and staff dinner parties, and sleeping very well.

I think sleeping is the only thing I'm doing "very well" so far, but I'm working to change that. Perhaps these next two weeks will earn the title "Learning To Do Many Things Very Well At The Same Time Time," or LTDMTVWATSTT. Let's hope.

Thanks for reading.

Shubho Bijaya

2007-10-22T06:47:00.000-05:00

It's destined to be a day or two late for all of you, but nonetheless let me wish you "Shubho Bijaya" from the world capital of Bijaya, Calcutta. Bijaya is the final day of Durga Puja, when all the Durga statues are paraded through town to the river and then immersed. I just finished a night of street-procession dance revelry and wanted to spread some sindoor-stained cheer.

Here's a potentially cheer-inducing nugget. During my dance performance, I met a handful of posh Laketown kids, one of whom was hell-bent on getting my phone number. Trying my best to be sneaky, I instead took her phone number and gave her a missed call, the catch being that I didn't dial zero before the number - usually necessary - and therefore expected the call not to go through to her phone. Unfortunately my sneakiness failed miserably and her magical phone zerolessly plucked my number out of the sky.

She called me five times within the next hour. I never answered. Then I woke up this morning to find the following SMS waiting for me from the contact I've now officially programmed in my phone as "THAT GIRL:"

Hi,bryan,priyanka

here. We met 2day

during

bhasan,hope u

rmembr?So u lft

so early?Ws lookin

4u,neways,can we

b friends?Cn asure

u, wnt repent. Do

rply,im waitin.

From: THAT GIRL

I laughed my morning face off. Sorry Priyanka, but this isn't the way to English major Brian's heart. I was born just a couple years before the SMS generation of romancers, and this just strikes me as hilarious.

My favorite part is, "Cn asure u, wnt repent." I always thought repenting was a good thing. That the thing from which one repents is bad or evil. Mahishashur didn't repent, and he got a huge Durga spear through his chest. Pretty bad omen for our budding friendship, wouldn't you say, Dur-, I mean, Priyanka?

One of my favorite thakurs of the year.

A Good Day In Gamcha Sales (and other village stories)

2007-10-21T23:49:00.000-05:00

One.

A few singalongs south of Beharampore is Beldanga, a town known around India for its gamchas (the ubiquitous colorful sweatrags put to all variety of uses by India's millions of manual laborers). I went there today, and yes I bought a gamcha. Two actually, but one's a gift.

Today was a good day in gamcha sales in Beldanga, and not just because of my meagre purchase. The women's handicraft wing of my host organization (Katna's Kanthas) is using gamcha fabric for their latest collection of hand-stitched bed covers and sheets, and today was sweatrag stockpile searching day. Destination: Beldanga. Objective: purchase a couple hundred blanket-to-be gamchas. I rode along.

Indian textile merchants are notorious (in my mind if not in universal shoppers' consciousness) for rolling out dozens and dozens of their wares - be they saris, dhutis, lungis, blankets, pillow covers, wall hangings, or more - until a mountain of cotton refolding-to-do towers over their customers (who might buy one or two of the afore-rolled dozens).

It is, therefore, the rarest of blessings for a shopkeeper - or shopper, for that matter - to see the "yes" pile grow into a taller mountain than the "refolding-to-do" pile. But that was the blessing that fell upon one Beldanga babu today, October 4th, 2007: a good day in gamcha sales.

Two.

It's impossible to think of a figure in the U.S. consciousness who comes anywhere close to Rabindranath Tagore's place in Bengali culture. He is, with only the tiniest bit of exaggeration applied, the best poet, playwright, novelist, academic, linguist, political mind and, yes, songwriter in Bengali history.

So it should come as no surprise that my interest in the Bengali language and its culture has led to countless intersections with the legacy of Tagore. I’ve read his poems, debated the social implications of his novels, seen his paintings in Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts, and generally made myself a passable conversant in all topics Tagore. But on this trip I’ve decided to crank my Tagore proficiency up a proverbial notch: I’m taking Rabindrasangeet (Tagore’s beloved Bengali songs) singing lessons.

I visited the home of my teacher, whose wife is the music teacher at our school, about a week ago, but my teacher himself wasn’t there (nonetheless, dare I say, I wowed the whole family with my a cappella rendition of Aami Chini Go Chini - see the video on the right). My first actual lesson was yesterday. Focus your mind and re-imagine this with me.

The sun is setting and a lavender haze hangs over the narrow gullies of Kandi town. The orchestra of chaos crescendos around you - rickshawallahs jangle thumb-bells, caged chickens squawk cries for mercy, veg-sellers woo wandering mashimas and little Rishi Chakraborty licks roshogolla syrup from his fingers - but your mind is focused, your steps swift. You don’t even notice when a last-minute mud-and-straw Durga follows you with her conquering eyes.

Turning now to the lane where the music awaits, you wonder how long it will take before any of this looks familiar, before any one of these hundred lanes looks somehow different from the others, before the orchestra will reveal its staff and notes. And then the world goes dark in a blink.

And you know, reaching for your flashlight, that the power will only return the moment you forget that it is gone.

Stepping out of your shoes now you peer into a candle-lit room. There, in the corner, is the slender tanpura, the tablas tucked into their padded cases, a set of tambourines. There, at their feet, is the blanket and harmonium that will become your classroom. And there, on the sofa, the six members of the family who will be your constant audience. Everything flickers and glows as the solitary flame bounces in silence.

You exchange niceties and sit in the designated place. In a moment, your guruji appears and gently suggests, "Gao na," "Sing." And there is simply no option but to entertain the family - now complete - with your mind’s one rehearsed song:

Aami chini go chini toma-a-a-re, o go-o bide-e-shini,
Tumi thako Si-i-ndhu pa-a-a-re, o go-o bide-e-shini,
O go-o-o bide-e-e-shini...

I know you, O foreigner, though you live across the Sindhu,
I know you...

If your guruji is pleased, he doesn’t let you know. He just nods, opens the harmonium, and starts it sighing. It’s a new song now, slower and more pensive. This is where you will begin. Listen and then sing. Again and again. Shuno, tarpor bolo. Aar aekbar. Aar aekbar.

Se di-in dujo-o-ne, dulechino bo-o-ne-e, phulodore bandha jhulona-a-a...

That day the two of us swung together in the forest, on a seat knotted with a chain of flowers...

Your ears have not heard these syllables before, but perhaps the melody, the tragic pain of being separated from a lover, finds a place in you to reverberate. And so finishing your repetition you listen, and perhaps hum, as your guruji reintroduces you to lovers’ lament.

Aekhon aamar bela nahi aar, bohib aekaki biroher bar -
Bandhinu je rakhi parane tomar, se rakhi thulo na, thulo na, thulo na-a-a

There is no daylight left, I carry the weight of love loss alone -
The knot of unity I have tied on your heart - never untie it, never...

And then, just as you forget that it is happening, the lesson ends.

Three.

I'm convinced at times that I have not just traversed a couple oceans and landed in the nation of India, but that I have also somehow crossed an unknown threshold of consciousness and landed in a practice ground for magical thoughts. I am perhaps in some hidden nook in the mind of Rushdie or Marquez, perhaps touring a more collective factory of human fantasies, or perhaps navigating the imagination of Nature herself.

On my morning walk to school I find the rice paddy three inches taller than it was the night before, and by the next morning another five inches have grown. It is as if the Khoda is trying to determine the exact rate of magical growth - for what is photosynthesis if not magic - that will simultaneously keep her creation toiling and touched by awe.

I chance upon an abandoned palace in Kandi and see trees biting right through it. Five meaty tal trees are the incisors, cleanly and precisely chomping through the platform that in recent memory hosted alternating deities and dancers. Endless tongues of vines lick the outer walls of the courtyard, and lest I too be swallowed into the belly of History, I scamper for the exit.

Our river dreamt one night that she had become a sea, then rolled over in the morning to find herself lying among strange, distant, new bedfellows: the dream had come true. She was the new queen of the horizon, submerging those ambitious souls who dared insult her with their futile concrete bridges and embankments. She sent insects and cattle alike swimming, scared snakes into trees, and for the first time in her life couldn't see her far edge from the near. Yet this new power began to pollute her previously pure soul, and she knew it. It was more fun to feed the sweet sugar cane than to destroy it, she realized, more fun when the buffaloes swam in joy than when they drowned in fear. And so she tried night after night to dream herself back into a river, to no avail. Finally the merciful sun, warning his friend against the dangers of such destructive greed, dried the sea back into her original lissome shape. As penance, she delivered the villagers fish of quantities, sizes and colors they had never dreamed possible.

And the trees by night sing the songs of the choirs of fireflies. (It's a silent music, an orchestra for the eyes, a mystery of swarm rhythm I have yet to solve. Yet I know that nightly thousands of fireflies gather in the trees lining our village road, and after a few moments of conversation begin illuminating themselves in time with one another, following the beat of some unseen conductor. Each tree throbs with a strange pattern of darkness and light, obscurity and clarity. The display is what blinking Christmas lights might be if suddenly given artistic souls in the place of their lifeless circuits. Alive, independent, emotional.) Is this a rehearsal or a nightly performance? Is this an as-yet-undeciphered language of love? The silent melody - is it a carol? A lullaby? A lament? Why can I still hear it when I drift off to sleep?

Back To Paradise

2007-10-20T00:15:00.000-05:00

Early in 2006, having just returned from my six month stay in Calcutta, I wrote an essay called "Notes From Paradise" reflecting on my experience in that city, now undoubtedly my favorite place on Earth (hence the "paradise" label). It was published by the CSB/SJU English department, which might mean that more readers than usual had a look at it. Given that I closed that essay with some ideas about my "return trip to paradise," it strikes me as appropriate to write a short follow-up now that I have reconnected with Calcutta and many of the major characters of my previous life there.

In March of 2006, I wrote:

I lived for six months in an English major’s paradise, but I learned that, even in paradise, we don’t write our own endings. I planned for the perfect child-enriching, world-changing, post-college volunteer experience, but both God (in whichever form you desire) and India tossed my best-laid plans into the holy Hooghly. I wanted to teach grammar but got decked with world politics and life-consuming poverty. I wanted a sense of accomplishment, but came home unsatisfied and hungry for a second chance.

Nevertheless, I remain hopelessly in love with Calcutta. It is paradise - a paradise made more perfect by its noncompliant attitude, its unwillingness to accommodate laziness or presupposition, and its fight.

In Calcutta, I discovered that life is always ready to thicken its own plot, especially at the moment when we think we’ve figured it out. I haven’t figured out how to teach, how to live, or how to be a good person yet. I’ll be returning to paradise soon to see if I can’t change that. This time, I’ll pack a hundred empty notebooks and an open mind. I’ll keep the premature conclusions at home.

I lied. Truth be told, I only brought five empty notebooks with me to India this time, and three of them are pocket-sized and rapidly being filled with mundane daily-life notes (Pay Moti 70 Rupees, etc.), not deep lessons on how to teach, live, or be a good person. And the idea that Calcutta is paradise is just one of many premature India conclusions that I am as yet incapable of discarding. So my bold final statements turned out to be tacky sentimental hyperbole of the sort I'm all too fond of writing.

All deceptions aside, however, my return to Calcutta exceeded its hype. It was an impossible feat, given that "coming back to Calcutta" was my raison d'etre for the past two years, but the city of my constant daydreams managed to completely surprise me.

The first great pleasure was simply in reuniting with Bappa and Mashima, two members of the family which I consider - both in the U.S. and India - my best Calcutta friends. It wasn't a complete reunion, as Madhu and Munu are in London until December, but nonetheless it was a very comforting experience to return to their company and to their Lake Town flat (the setting of my beloved "First Dhoti Experience" and "You Laugh, But I Hated The Mosquitoes" stories, among others). This time, however, it felt like more of a homecoming than a visit, as they've offered me a room in their flat for whenever I visit Calcutta. I settled in, enjoyed conversing in their city Bangla (which is clearer and slower than the taratari villagespeak I struggle with in Katna), and gorged myself on biryani and mishti. And, as icing on the cake (or, to make the metaphor more location-appropriate, syrup in the roshogolla), they have wireless internet. Ba!

The Mitras' advanced connectivity was just the first of many surprises. Next, Wayne Tinsey, my Australian India guru and the man most directly responsible for India's honored place in my life, just happened to be in Calcutta the same weekend. Yes, this is the same Wayne Tinsey who just happened to be leaving a Calcutta restaurant my friends and I were walking to on an otherwise unspectacular October evening in 2005 (this is the subject of "Rooftop Reunion," one of my Top Ten India Stories). The meeting wasn't as miraculous this time - he emailed me a couple weeks ago with the surprising news of his visit - but nonetheless Wayne and I, despite living almost 10,000 miles from each other and rarely communicating elsewhere, are three-for-three on experiencing Calcutta together. We had lunch, caught up on our latest life projects, and rejuvenated our friendship that would be - were it not for Calcutta - completely impossible.

But let me delay the inevitable no longer: I went back to Loreto. After almost two years away from that epicenter of my personal and professional life in India, I was back. It was a moment I had imagined dozens of times in the US; in alternating fantasies, I either weepingly touched the ground at the gate of the school or emerged like a rock star, singing and playing the hit song "Main Hoon Na" (I Am Here) from Shah Rukh's movie of the same name, while the entire student body emerged from their classes in a jubilant cheer. Of course neither fantasy happened. I just walked in, gamcha over my shoulder, and strolled unnoticed to the office.

Sangeeta and the office staff were happy to see me, I think, and delighted to hear my much-improved Bangla. We talked all about my Bangla classes, Murshidabad and Street Survivors India, and Sangeeta even gave me some contacts of NGO workers in our district. Sister Cyril was still in New York at the time, so I didn't get to see her (I will over the upcoming Durga Puja holiday).

Then Mohammed came in. Mohammed, a former student and one of the stars of my "Two Conversations" essay, has somehow managed to get even thinner (in a constantly-playing-cricket way, not in an underfed way). He was, true to his traitorous fashion, wearing an Australian cricket jersey. I noticed that above his lips lay a first-ever try at a mustache. His office work has increased, I gathered from the types of assignments he's being given, and this struck me as hopeful. He only got through about Class Four before dropping out from school, as I recall, and he's far too old now to be matched with others of his skill level. Mohammed and I shared a hug and a quick conversation, but he was very eager to reintroduce me to the characters and locales of my previous tenure in the school.

First we went to the library that my CSB/SJU trip participants and I created. True to expectation theory, I had expected the library (which, in addition to hosting reading sessions for the junior classes, served during my time in Calcutta as an impromptu office for the constant stream of international volunteers visiting the school) to fall into ruin after my departure. It's located in the dustiest, muggiest corner of the school, and the supply of donated books inside was always stretching the capacity of the shelves. One new shipment of books, I had thought, and the room would transform right back into a closet for overflowing donations.

I was way off. The library looks better than it did when I left. All of our original shelves, labels, and posters are still in place, and while the room isn't shiny-clean it is definitely being cared for and utilized. I find two Irish volunteers inside waiting to hold a reading class. They tell me that one of the new Class Two teachers has been put in charge of the library - this is part of her job description - and that volunteers are continuing the reading program the CSB/SJU team and I started two years ago.

I was floored. And terribly proud. I snapped a bunch of pictures to send back to everyone who helped with that project and stepped out of the library beaming. Then just as I was scanning over the always-frantic courtyard of the school, I heard a familiar voice from the opposite balcony. "SIR!" It was Puja.

Puja was easily my favorite student at Loreto. She was the hardest-working and most sincere of my Class Eight students, the most mature of all the Rainbow girls, and probably the most frequently-reoccuring subject of my essays from that time. She fascinated me, with her street-grown spunk, leadership skills, and modesty. Unlike many of the girls in the school, to whom I was first and foremost an entertainer, re-singing the same songs and re-dancing the same dances, Puja approached me as a brother figure, sharing her ambitions and struggles with me and demanding honest support in return. Puja became a very important character in my life over those six months, and I think I became important to her as well. She gave me a quarter-sized photo of herself with a signature on the back before I left. I've kept it in my wallet these two years and seen her face almost every day. When I thought of Loreto Sealdah during my time in the U.S., more than anyone else - Sister Cyril included - I thought of Puja.

Puja was in great spirits and great health. She is perhaps slightly taller, but I doubt she's crossed five feet; living off of scraps at the Sealdah train station stunted her early childhood growth. She's also on the verge of finishing Class Ten, which in India is similar in prestige if not in academics to high school graduation in the U.S. It will be a tremendous achievement for her. After this point, she will move to a home for older Rainbow girls and choose to study either Arts or Sciences for Class Eleven and Twelve (which she can complete at Loreto). It was the middle of a school day when I visited and as such I couldn't fully "catch up" with her; this will happen over the upcoming school holiday when I'll be in Calcutta for nine days.

I showed her the picture in my wallet and she was mildly impressed. She told me that she still has some of my photos, but that she's lost the sheet of lyrics to the song I wrote for Children's Day about the school. She'd like a new copy. This is the exact request Puja and many other students made of me in the week before my departure in 2005. Our conversation had picked up exactly where it left off, and for a moment I felt a great lightness, a breath of vindication. Perhaps I was not the only person for whom those brief months in the fall of 2005 remained vividly alive so long after they occurred. Perhaps this curse of Calcutta had not struck me alone. For a good minute, I had to convince myself that two years had actually passed, that I had lived in Winona and St. Joe, ran a marathon, recorded a CD and visited New York City. That my sister had joined a convent, my father taken a new job, and that John Kamman "wished that he could be your leading man." For that minute, all of those things could just as well have been dreams. I was back and Calcutta was claiming me like a jealous lover: forget whatever else you've done, you're mine now.

Yes, I told Puja, I can make you another copy.

Mohammed tugged me away from Puja and her crowd for another great surprise: Amresh, he told me, was down in the courtyard. And after a laudable display of restraint, my head finally exploded.

Amresh, my Loreto little brother, had told me multiple times before I left that he wouldn’t be staying at the school much longer. His father was eager to return to his ancestral village in Bihar and thus, Amresh assured me, we wouldn’t ever meet again in Calcutta. I obviously believed him, and the decision to move seemed all but final when Amresh wrote to me in America to say he was leaving Calcutta at the end of 2006. While Puja sprang relentlessly to my mind when I was in America, I did my best to gently nudge Amresh’s memory away, lest I become too sad at the prospect of never meeting him again. Of course his memory stayed alive as ever, and expectation theory thus demanded that my return to Loreto would have a tinge of sadness due to his absence. But Calcutta was not in sad spirits on this day, and like the vast majority of its surprises, this one was joyful as well.

Amresh is as suave and sassy as ever, having grown two years closer to the film hero/cricket star he is destined to become. Perhaps following Shah Rukh Khan’s latest style, he has let his hair grow just long enough to demand constant heart-flutter-inducing swooshes to keep it out of his eyes. He is studying in Class Five at Loreto (for reasons unknown to me he was never transferred to St. Mary’s or Don Bosco like the other boys) and has become an even better illustrator. Again, there was no element of “let’s catch up” or “what have you done for these two years” – rather, we picked up right where we left off with chit-chat about school, cricket and movies. It was a thrill and an honor to see him again – in my mind anyway it was a relationship miraculously saved from a premature conclusion.

By this point, having suffered multiple head-explosion-inducing surprises, I let my students return to class and maneuvered toward the exit. I needed an emotional break, a lonely walk through the hordes on Chowringhee, some mental processing time. But there was one final surprise remaining, one that brought crushing emotional balance to the earlier thrills of the day. Before I could leave, Puja stopped me to tell me that Teresa Raphael, another of the Class Eight girls whom I got to know so well, had been married away very soon after I left. Her mother found her a husband in Assam, and since early 2006 she’s lived there and not made any contact with her former school or classmates. At the time of the marriage, which Teresa certainly could not have seen coming, she was 17.

These are a few of the surprises my personal paradise gifted me upon my return. This post has gotten long, and thus I’ll save my wrapping-up thoughts for another day. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Please check out the photos below. After my upcoming stay in Calcutta for the Durga Puja holiday, I’ll write something stylish and concise about reuniting with paradise.

But for now I’ll leave you with a first draft, a story/experience/life in need of revision. In need of more clarity and more purpose. In need of an answer to Sister Mara’s aggravating question, “So what?”

So what indeed.

Our still-functioning library.

If you squint you can see that all of our shelf labels and posters are still intact. Way to go Theresa, Sarah, Jess, Melissa and Aisha! You made a lasting improvement to a school already honored by the Indian government, the U.N., President Bill Clinton and more!

Two years later, another silly self-photo with Puja.

Me with (from right to left) Mohammed, Amresh, and another dude kitchen worker whose name eludes me. The ol' cricket team back together again.

That's No Pukur

2007-10-05T14:51:00.001-05:00

Yes, that's my head. I'm standing on the main road of our village (Katna) at the height of the flood. Later that day I swam into the village, and Motida (my Bengali teacher and swim tour guide) made me jump off of a tree into the flooded paddy fields. CANNONBALL!

Yuck.

(You should be able to click the picture and enlarge it. It makes nice MacBook wallpaper.)

Mur-shi-da-bad... Mur-shi-da-bad... Moor-SHEE-dah-bahd

2007-09-25T05:02:00.001-05:00

It's a word full of kisses, really. At least four by my count. Try it. Start with a pucker and release your "moo," and glide it into the gentlest upward tongue flick you can manage, rolling the "r" right into "shee." Let the "ee" lead you into a huge natural smile and then feel the kiss of "dah" so perfectly on the back of your teeth (this is the Bengali dental unaspirated "d," the one that looks like a lightning bolt and places the tongue farther forward in the mouth than the English "d" sound - touch the back of your front teeth with the tongue). Then bring the lips back together for kiss number three - the exultant "bah" - before closing to that inaudible final tongue touch.

Let your tongue stick to the back of your teeth as long as you like. What a delicious word.

Try it a few times and let me know how it goes. Think of the word "bad" in English: if you're saying it quickly in a phrase like "bad guy," for instance, you won't actually give a strong "duh" sound for the letter "d". You'll just touch your tongue to the top of your mouth and glide to the "g" sound. Shoot for that sort of kiss, but right front and center, indulgently touching the teeth, both in the middle and at the end of the word that people have called this new home of mine for 400 or so years.

Peace Is Flowing Like A Ri-i-ver

2007-09-25T05:01:00.000-05:00

So I've met two Christians here in Katna (my village, which is near Kuli, which is near Kandi, which is near Beharampore, which is the capital of Murshidabad district, which is a particularly beautiful part of West Bengal, which is a state in the eastern part of North India). Both are proud to share with me their love for and interest in Jesus, Mary, and the rest of the pantheon familiar to the spiritual Westerner. Both are, like most everyone I've met here regardless of creed, incredibly hospitable and giving. Both have assured me that even in India there will be Christmas carols sung in December (yes!).

But also, they both might as well have "Only In India" stamped on their foreheads.

First and foremost is my great friend Ali Ahmed, one of Jagriti Public School's (a.k.a. my new school's) driving/security staff. Yes you read that correctly, the name of the first Christian friend I've made here is Ali Ahmed (Ahmed being, of course, another form of Mohammed). He was born into a Muslim family but converted of his own accord and now he and his wife raise their children Christian (Baptist, I think, because that's the only church in Kandi) in this almost entirely Muslim village. Most of the time Ali goes by his nickname of Latu, which softens the contrast quite a bit, but nonetheless I get a big proverbial kick out of my Bangla-Bible-pounding, carol-singing, proselytizing Christian friend named - of all things - Ali Ahmed. And no, if you're wondering, he wasn't asked - nor did he want - to change his name upon conversion. Way to go Latu.

Second is the school's dashing young art teacher Rajesh Das, who lives in nearby Kandi and has instantly plugged me into the Bangla rock scene in the area. Rajesh is a very talented painter, wants to play the guitar, and to his family's full knowledge dates a Muslim M.F.A. candidate from across town. Rajesh showed me his paintings of Mary hanging in his room, right next to which hung the obligatory faces of Rabindranath, Satyajit Ray, and Kazi Nazrul Islam, cornerstones of the Bengali artistic psyche. Rajesh plays cricket with his friends, writes all sorts of gorgeous looking Bangla poems, and is basically the exact kind of classic emotional-minded Bengali guy friend I thought would be impossible to find in the village (in fact they are in abundance). But Rajesh doesn't make much money at school, not being a full class teacher, so for his real income he works in the family profession: sculpting life-size or larger-than-life-size Hindu gods and goddesses out of clay.

On Sunday I visited his family's home (with molds for the faces and hands of gods pouring into the kitchen) and factory (where I held a fresh bellowing Mahishashur head in my hands). Durga Puja is rapidly approaching, so the family (including Christian Rajesh) is hurriedly putting the final touches on the classic Hindu image of good-conquering-evil: Devi (the goddess Ma Durga) atop her lion piercing the heart of the demon Mahishashur (literally buffalo-demon) as her four children (Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Karthik) look on. There are growling lions emerging out of clay mounds, piles of smooth cylinders-soon-to-be-fingers, all varieties of scowls on the Mahishashur faces (easily my favorite part of the Durga thakurs), but definitely no crucifixes in sight.

That's all. I don't need to turn these friends of mine into something they might not readily accept as part of their identity (i.e. symbols of spiritual freedom in a time of radicalism). Just add their stories to that part in my Why I Go To India essay about the "peaceful plurality" of India.

Horrendously Uncreative Cultural Reference In The Place Of Actual Creativity #1

2007-09-25T04:59:00.000-05:00

Hey remember that part in Forrest Gump when Forrest is in Vietnam and he's talking about how much it rains there and how it rains from all different directions and how everything gets totally wet and all that? Yeah that's what it's been like here for about three straight days. I'm told that the whole village will be underwater by the end of the week, and that we'll have to ride in tree-trunk canoes or large cooking vessels to school. No joke. Don't worry about me; I'm on the second floor of my building, safe from submersion, and will take photos for the sake of reminiscing. Worry about the poor families in Katna who go through this twice every year, getting sick from snakebites and losing their crops. Ki obostha (what a mess).

A wise man (JP Franke) once said: "Water takes up over 70% of the globe. Don't let it take over you."

Our flooded front yard (I live in the building on the right, in a nice little second-floor veranda-room like the one you see... except mine is hidden by trees in this photo).

Our back yard.

Rajesh (our former cook, not the Christian Durga sculptor) with my new cycle.

The road to school.

Main Street Katna

Guy Stuff

2007-09-25T04:48:00.000-05:00

So I've been doing some classic Indian guy stuff, some of which I'm happy to be returning to and others to which I'm totally new. I'll start with the latter.

For the first week and a half of my life in Katna (which is close to Kuli, which is close to Kandi... this is how I always have to identify it outside of the village itself), I didn't have my own method of transportation. So I would walk the 25 minutes or so to school, walk back, walk the hour to Kuli, blah blah blah. I was dying for a bike - I mean a cycle (In India "bike" means motorcycle and "cycle" means bicycle). Luckily though, my aforementioned Christian friend Latu has a bike (yes, a bike) and was more than happy to share it with me in the classic Indian guy way: two, three, or four people piled on at a time.

I'm totally scared of motorcycles will never drive one, but I will admit this: riding backseat (or middle seat, or middle-front seat) on Latu's twilight Hero Honda tours was a thrilling - and certifiably 'classic Indian dude' - way to acquaint myself with our greater neighborhood. Ritually, we started each drive with an off-key singing of "Yeh Dosti" from Sholay, everybody's favorite riding-on-a-motorcycle-together song (see the video on the right-hand sidebar). From there, it was just a matter of picking a direction and keeping my mouth closed to avoid a feast of pokas (bugs).

Wall-clinging cow dung cakes never looked so beautiful.

Truly, the whole area is shockingly beautiful, both in the obvious twilit ways and in the more subtle past-meets-present ways. More on this later. Sadly, though, the most recent bike ride probably signals a decrease in this particular guy activity: we rode together to pick up my new cycle. So, more freedom for me, less dosti for the two of us.

In other news, I've given up shaving myself. But not in the "living the dream" sense - in the shamelessly indulgent sense. In Kuli I can get a full double-shave and 20 minute head-and-back massage for five rupees. Five rupees. People pay megadollars for this kind of spa/salon treatment in the U.S., and I can have it for fifteen cents anytime I want. The mathematical possibilities are endless here: my Mach 3 razor blades cost about $2.00 each, right? And those are good for maybe a couple weeks of shaving... figure it out. It's a steal, and is certain to be my go-to activity for warding off a bad day. (And yes, I make sure that they use a brand new razor and dispose of it afterward. It's totally safe; everyone here is on the barber shop shave system).

As I mentioned before, I have also fallen back into previous Indian dude habits, including eating tons of Bengali sweets (of course), capping evening cups of cha with jhal muri (my favorite spicy puffed rice street snack), following cricket passionately (India won the World Twenty20 Championship last night - YES!), and cring-cringing my way through town on my shiny new Hero cycle (complete with puffy rainbow spoke decor). I also spent all of this past Saturday in bed and/or crouched over the toilet with my first bout of Body Explosion Disease since the infamous Jaipur movie theater explosion of 2005. This time, thankfully, it passed in a day instead of a week.

Thanks for reading. I’m going to do my best to get this slow internet connection to accept some photos of aforementioned things. Until soon. Brian.

In the flood plain village everything is defined by whether it will be submerged.

2007-09-23T06:38:00.000-05:00

In the flood plain village a man might walk a mile to have a shave. And then walking back, he might notice his shadow on the trees ahead as a lorry approaches from behind. He might watch the shadow shrink, in inverse proportion to the lengths of the snakes he remembers from childhood flood stories. He might sit alone in a brick room, touching his newly smooth skin, watching geckos by candlelight chase the bugs drawn to the light.

(...and that's what you're going to have to live on in terms of first impressions of my new home village, at least for a couple days. I'm still working out a decent communications/internet strategy. I miss you all and thanks for reading.)

13 Days, 13 Notes

2007-09-23T06:31:00.000-05:00

The fellowship program started with a 13-or-so day orientation session in New Delhi, which as you all know by now included my first-ever organized Bollywood Dance experience (see photos in previous posts). In addition to the dancing, we had a fabulously thorough orientation program which acquainted us with many of the details/processes/nuances of our fellowship, Indian development, civil society and more. During this time, we met leaders in all areas of development work, along with famous politicians, businessmen, and artists. But perhaps the most incredible and important part of the orientation session was the fast-track friendships the fellows all formed with each other. It was, more than anything else, their company that led me to the easy conclusion that those two weeks will stay in my mind as one of those rarest experiences of truly constant happiness. In fact, inspired by how good I felt at the end of every day, I embarked on the challenging process of using this feeling to write a "formula for happiness" in my AIF-issued orientation notebook. The formula, which like the feeling probably won't have a terribly long shelf-life, goes as follows:

Ingredient 1: Be constantly learning.
Sub-ingredient: Being taught is easier than self-teaching, but both bear fruit. Shoot for balance between the two.
Ingredient 2: Surround yourself with intelligent, motivated, thoughtful people.
Sub-ingredient: Engage in conversations of all kinds, with people of all kinds (a.k.a. abandon shyness).
Ingredient 3: Lose the desire to sleep.
Ingredient 4: Be passionately interested in at least one, if not four, things.
Sub-ingredient: Engage in work that, if only in your own head, contributes to positive change in the world.

It may be that I'm committing my usual sin of overstating my emotions and that the true formula at work here (for me anyway) is just Be In India. Or perhaps Talk With Smart People About India While You're In India. But there's no need for pessimism just yet. I met incredible people over the last two weeks with whom I hope I'll remain close for a long, long time. I learned a lot and gathered a huge stockpile of motivation for the year ahead. And I had a ton of fun. And that's way more than I could have asked for.

Moving on. I wanted to share, in my classic list format, some of the more important lessons of our orientation program, both formal and informal, plucked from my notebook. This might be a good time to stop reading if you're just here for fun India stories. This will be a bit homeworkish. Here goes: 13 Days, 13 Notes.

1. Perhaps as important as financial independence is DIGNITY when building livelihoods. (Rita)
2. Community-centric development always works best. Outside people like to assume what a problem might be and thus its solution, but this also assumes that poor people are incapable of doing anything for themselves. Unless those who will benefit are involved in the design of a project, it is very unlikely to succeed. (Shankar)
3. Scale up a process, not a product. (Shankar)
4. Sharing good practices AND FAILURES is really tough because each creator/NGO is very attached to his/her/its own ideas. As such, they rarely report what doesn't work. DON'T fear failure, because it is only through failure that we can really learn what does work. (Shankar)
5. Unless you organize people into an organization not necessarily based on ideologies, they will not be able to act independently to animate themselves. "We" must build capacity to to the job once "we" leave, and then "we" MUST leave. (Ved Arya)
6. A city can only operate because of its working poor, but it rarely provides this group with the services they are - by the Indian constitution and international mandate - guaranteed. (Hanumant)
7. Registration will suck... Be worried about falling into holes... Sleep with your doors locked to keep the monkeys out... (Jonathan)
8. Disability is god-given; handicap is man-made. (George Abraham)
9. To identify a true minority in India, you have to get to a pretty small group already and then find the marginalized. Or, more simply stated: if you are exploited, you are a minority. (Professor Ahmad).
10. Contrary to what people assume, India is a pyramid market. The rich/comfortably well-off constitute a tiny part of the market, unlike in other places. Thus, poor people aren't a sliver of the market like in other places; they ARE the market. (Nachiket Mor)
11. Sumit: "I really don't find Indian men attractive." Menaka: "Have you looked at yourself?"
12. Focusing thought for sustainability: Can the ultimate goal be that your organization won't need to exist? (Sridar)
13. India has the world's largest, most open, and most empowering women's movement, but this exists in contrast to a unequal society which includes: violence to women, a disproportionate population, poverty, and trouble accessing public space. (Urvashi Butalia)

Thanks, if you read. This exercise was more for myself, and just to keep some things alive in my head. I kept really good notes, but they'll die if I just hide away that notebook, tai na?

Room #49

2007-09-23T06:24:00.000-05:00

I arrived in Delhi late on Friday the 31st, after my 18-hour flight from New York via London ran remarkably punctually - it was only an hour and a half late! But of course, Indira Gandhi International Airport (the home of the infamous "Battle Against The Air India Monster" of 2005) quickly asserted itself as the cruel welcoming presence I knew it would be; my bags didn't make it.

Some 300,000 pieces of luggage are temporarily misplaced by airlines every year, so this story isn't particularly notable. Plus, I was too excited to have my feet on Indian soil to let it bother me much at all. The only potentially at-risk item in my luggage was my trusty old guitar, and I was already mentally prepared for her to suffer some scrapes in the luggage hold. So I borrowed a few t-shirts and made do with one pair of jeans basically without a worry until yesterday, when Maria and I (Maria having lost a bag as well) got the good word over the phone that our luggage had arrived and was ready to be picked up.

All we needed to do, the Air India rep told Maria over the phone, was show up to good old IGIA and come to Room #49.

What follows is a step-by-step description of what we did to receive our bags. It is 100% true and 0% exaggerated. If you've ever battled the peculiar foe of Indian bureaucracy, you might have an idea of what's to come. If not, prepare yourselves for a fourteen-point tour of bliss.

Step One: After a traffic-ridden ride from Chanakyapuri to IGIA, we bid farewell to our driver and attempt to obtain an Entry Ticket to the Arrivals Hall from the Entry Ticket Window. The attendant, however, points us to Room #49.

(Go to Qatar Airlines and turn right, he told me. And so we did. And there at the end of a dank hallway was a clunky old door, closed, with a sign above it reading "Room #49." Mind you, there was no Room #48 or Room #50, nor any rooms with numbers at all. Just Room #49, Air India.)

Step Two: We enter Room #49, wait for a few minutes, and once greeted hand over our passports. After copies of our passports are stapled into our individual Inexplicably Large Green File Folders (ILGFF) for Air India's record-keeping, we sign two forms and receive a partially-completed Temporary Arrival Hall Entry Ticket (TAHET). We are to take this to the Airport Manager's Office (AMO), next to Gate 4 in Departures, we are told.

Step Three: We walk to Gate 4 in Departures and find next to it not an AMO but rather an Air India Assistance Window. The clerk there points us to the real AMO, just around the corner behind a very meekly labeled door.

Step Four: Inside the AMO, we find four men seated at desks and on couches. Couch Man scans our passports and unfinished TAHETs and points us to another room. In the other room we chat with the Airport Manager about her son's cricket-playing ambitions while she reviews our passports and TAHETs. She signs the TAHETs and sends us back to the Couch And Desk Room. This time Couch Man ignores us and Desk Man #1 re-re-re-views our passports, finishes our TAHETs, and hands us each freshly-torn-by-ruler Entry Ticket Approval Forms (ETAF). We are sent back, once again, to the Airport Manager, who promptly stamps the TAHETs she signed just five minutes ago.

Step Five: We walk back downstairs to the Arrival Hall entry door. There, the Jobsworth Security Guard (JSG) reviews not only our hard-fought TAHETs and ETAFs, but also our passports (once again, although they had already been seen by a full cricket side by this point). We are allowed entry.

Step Six: At the entry to the Customs Hallway, Mr. A. Maria Narayan, a.k.a. JSG #2, a.k.a. Moustache Guy, repeats the exact process that his JSG counterpart had completed not 30 seconds ago. Having verified that our passports hadn't magically transformed in those same thirty seconds, he allows us entry into the Baggage Claim Area.

Step Seven: We find the original Air India desk where we filed our Missing Baggage Reports (MBR) and ask about the next steps. We are pointed to "Desk #1," which unlike Room #49 actually does sit just next to Desks #2 and #3. We walk to Desk #1.

Step Eight: At Desk #1, the sari-uniform clad Mrs. Geeta Rani Garg completes and signs two new Warehouse Claim Forms (WCF) for us, and instructs us to hand them to the man behind the Central Warehousing Corporation Window, just two steps from her desk.

Step Nine: We hand, in turn, our WCFs to Warehouse Man, who finds our names in his Inexplicably Large Blue Record Book (ILBRB) and charges us Rs. 200 each. Before he can send Warehouse Boy to find our luggage in storage, however, he needs to - you guessed it - check our passports for sudden magical revisions once more. Having again passed the identification test, we are rewarded with our bags (YES!) after fifteen minutes or so. We sign the ILBRB twice and proceed to the x-ray machine.

Step Ten: As our bags slide through his x-ray machine, X-Ray Man pays no mind to his bomb-detecting screens and instead examines more closely than ever... our passports and forms. And it's a good thing, too, because although our identities hadn't changed, there was some faulty math on my original MBR. X-Ray Man sends me to the Lounging Customs Dudes (LCD) for help.

Step Eleven: In the Lounging Customs Dudes' Camp, everyone is wooden-spooning almond flavored ice cream out of teeny cardboard cylinders. Casually, the LCDs and I attempt to figure out how two suitcases valued at Rs. 4,000 each can have a total value of only Rs. 6,000. After the last bites of ice cream, the LCDs decide that whoever filled out the form (surely some JSG or another) had made a mistake, and allow me to fudge an 8 over the 6. Back to X-Ray Man.

Step Twelve: Satisfied by the fudging, X-Ray Man signs the back of my MBR and points us back to Desk #1.

Step Thirteen: Geeta Rani Garg welcomes us back cheerfully to Desk #1, signs our post-X-Ray-and-ice-cream MBRs, and sends us to the last stop on our fourteen point journey (which was of course also our first intended stop), Room #49.

Step Fourteen: Back in Room #49, we turn in the result of our three hours' labor - handfuls of signed-stamped-and-resigned forms - all of which gets stapled into our ILGFFs, surely never to be seen again. We are given, straight out of the Air India clerk's wallet, a Rs. 200 refund for our warehouse fees and Rs. 400 for our taxi fare.

And the adventure was over. In the same place it was meant to start: the mysteriously named Room #49.

Particularly astonishing about the day's events is how little they bothered me or Maria. The fourteen-point adventure was the height of inefficiency, the dictionary definition of inanity, but at the same time it was really fun. And we didn't meet an angry person along the way. All of the JSGs, the LCDs, the Narayans and Gargs and dare I say the two of us were happy to be filling our roles in the run-around.

It was a great way to spend three hours in India, and in the end we even got paid. And I suppose I have nothing more to say about that.

The door to Room #49

Dancing, Etc.

2007-09-13T02:24:00.000-05:00

Here are a few photos (low res, sorry; it's faster for me) from our orientation session in Delhi. Enjoy!

These are all the men in the program (we're definitely the numerical minority but the coolness majority). From right to left: Jonathan (the program director), Chad, Jimmy, Me, Krishna, Arun, and Sumit.

All of us busting an SRK move during our final Bollywood dance performance.

Sumit (my roommate for the week) and me displaying another part of our awesome Bollywood dance during one of our smashingly schmansy dinners.

Here Krishna and I are rehearsing the big whirling-dervish-Bhangra finale to the boys' dance.

Everybody! (Plus Sridar Iyengar from the SC Advisory Board, Anjolie Boi Menon the painter, and Suspenders Guy, the NGMA curator).

This lovely woman is Vaani, one of the fellows, and she insisted upon taking this picture perhaps for the sole purpose of getting me beaten up by her boyfriend. I think it's funny. Very prom. Don't worry, I haven't given up on the Rani Mukherjee dream quite yet (although especially considering that Vaani's name rhymes with Rani, this might be as close as I ever get to my dreams.) Ha.

We visited a primary school in rural Rajasthan and in order to break through the students' shyness I joined them in their Devanagari writing lesson. Later we played Kabbadi, which was way awesome.

That's it for now. I'm leaving for Bengal in a matter of hours! My train ride will take about 15 hours, with another 5 hour car ride thereafter. So, within a couple days I'll know all the details of my home, village, potential work projects, and so on. Hopefully all of these discoveries will include some form of easy internet access. Thanks for visiting!

NEW Delhi

2007-09-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

Friends,

There is a lot more to come, but I have a moment before Bollywood dance practice starts (seriously) and I thought I should send a big THANK YOU and THINGS ARE GREAT to everyone who responded to my mass email. I reeeeally appreciate the energy you took to write to me and if I don't get a chance to respond individually to everyone, I will pour all of that effort into great blog entries/essays.

A few fragments:

The other fellows are incredible. Talented, motivated, thoughtful, sweet, and so on. It will be hard to leave them all when we split up for our individual placements.
Air India lost my luggage. Big shocker. The story of reclaiming it will be my next blog entry.
My overwhelming impression of Delhi so far is that the word NEW has never been a more appropriate prefix for the city. Granted, we're staying in the spacious and green NEW part of the city, not the crammed OLD part, but nonetheless I have been shocked by Delhi's cleanliness, emptiness, newness and vitality. The place we're staying, the places we're eating, and especially all of the air-conditioned air we're breathing don't remind me of the India (or even the Delhi) I knew two and four years ago. It's been a very very comfortable intro to India.
Yes, we are taking Bollywood dance classes. All 30 of us will perform a big dance on our last night in Delhi. Our dance instructor, a real Bombay choreographer, told me, "It's cool dancing with you." I've been told by others that while dancing my face expresses pure joy.
Our dozens of presenters/lecturers are seriously BIGTIME. Chief Ministers, Padma Shrees, Bazillionaire IITs and IIMs, and so on.

I'll write more soon. Gotta go dance. BEST.
Brian

Why I Go To India

2007-08-22T11:38:00.000-05:00

I feel very lucky to have attended and worked for a university where international travel is seen as an essential element of education in this rapidly shrinking and uniting world. Because of this basic element of the culture of St. John's and St. Ben's, most of my friends from college would never conceive of questions like, "Why do you want to live in a 'third world country'?", "What do you have against America?", or "What's so great about India?".

Without this community of support, I most likely would never have become the confident traveler/student of India that (I think) I am. And, by extension, I wouldn't have had a vast majority of the most rewarding experiences of my life to date. But at the same time it's dangerous to assume that my fellow travelers and I are more 'enlightened' or even 'correct' than those (from previous generations, perhaps) who never experienced such a community of support or array of travel/study opportunities, for cultural, financial, or other reasons. There's certainly nothing 'unenlightened' or 'incorrect' about the kinds of work that our parents and grandparents did, even if it included a bare minimum of first-hand international experiences.

So I feel a responsibility, especially to my family, to explain at a bit more length why I am so drawn to India and the work I do there. Without such an explanation, and given our completely different culturally-gathered mindsets about international travel, I fear that the people I love the most might drastically misunderstand my motivations. At the same time, perhaps my comments will strike a familiar note to some of my outward-looking friends, and start a conversation about the comparative merits of work in 'the home' and 'the world.'

I'll be concise, I hope, and rather than trying to justify the whole growing culture of international travel and humanitarian work, will stick to my relationship with India (although the two will not remain consistently separable).

Why I Go To India (in no particular order).

1. The Knowledge of Opposites. (By now I've probably distorted his original, heavily astrological idea for my own uses to a point where he wouldn't even recognize it, but) W.B. Yeats believed and wrote that in order to truly know yourself, you must know - and experience - your opposite. This idea has had a powerful influence on me since I encountered it my sophomore year of college. It's a simple enough idea; analyzing our own personalities, lifestyles, and decisions exclusively from our own perspective is pretty subjective, biased, and therefore inaccurate, isn't it? We all want to be friendly, helpful, self-aware and well-liked people, but those and all other desirable characteristics must be defined by people other than ourselves. The power of the conscience notwithstanding, it's awfully hard to know the truth of your identity and place in the world from only your own point-of-view.

An easy way of dealing with this dilemma, which we all do on a daily basis, is to seek input from other people in our lives. Before making a big decision, we ask friends and advisers for their opinions, for instance, or we gather information about a new friend from other people who know him/her better. We don't always trust ourselves to make big decisions alone, just as we don't always trust new acquaintances to paint an entirely accurate picture of themselves to us. We need more points-of-view. But almost invariably, the other points-of-view we seek come from close family or friends, and therefore very often from the same social class/location/temperament/level of education and so on.

If these small-scale perspective differences are of daily value to us, then wouldn't more drastically different points-of-view therefore be proportionally more beneficial in attempting to understand ourselves/our decisions/our world? I believe so.

Today's middle and upper-class Americans enjoy a widespread and high-quality standard of living unmatched in the history of the world. We (I say "we" because my friends, family and I are of this fortunate number) are richer, safer, and vastly more comfortable than any citizenry the planet has ever seen. We are, at least a hundred-million strong, living lives that only a very few emperors and kings from previous centuries would recognize.

In my effort to understand the meaning and implications of this fact, I seek the perspective of the opposite, which I find in abundance in India, where over one-half of the world's most desperately poor people live. The street-dwelling orphan with her fierce courage. The sharecropper planting paddy the way his ancestors did five hundred years ago. The sixty million children who can not or for other reasons do not attend school. The day-laborer who crouches on the street every morning praying for work, and therefore a meal.

What do these people say about me and my American lifestyle? What can I learn about those same topics first-hand by living and working alongside them? What is the objective truth about my and my friends/family's role(s) in the world?

These questions drive me to experience, re-experience, and attempt to understand India. The same opposite perspective can certainly be found elsewhere, including countless places in the U.S.A. itself, but for now I choose India, for these and other reasons you'll read about soon.

Physicist E.C.G. Sudarshan, although reflecting on his experience of moving from India to America ('the opposite' experience of mine), states the same idea much more concisely: "If you look at the world with two eyes," he writes, "you see more."

2. Serendipity. I'm not likely to use the words "fate" or "destiny," but I will endlessly assert that India chose me much more than I chose India. And twice, at that.

My first date with India came at the end of my five-month study abroad experience in Western Australia. From August to December 2003, I lived and studied in Fremantle, Western Australia, an historic and picturesque colonial town on the salty and serene Indian Ocean. I enjoyed my time in Australia greatly, but in ways very similar to my college experience in Minnesota: playing sports with friends, attending concerts, reading great books and writing reflectively. Fremantle was a very pleasant place to spend a semester, but for this precise reason it frustrated me. Where was the culture shock I was promised, the bewilderment of 'foreignness' and 'being foreign', where was the fear, the challenge?

As these questions occupied my thoughts, India slyly and shrewdly made her entrance in the form of a simple orange flyer for a human rights study tour. It might just as easily have been to Indonesia or Micronesia, Malaysia or Myanmar, but it wasn't. It was to India, and for a very affordable monetary and family-disapproval price, she offered me a month of bewilderment in the place of boredom.

But even after this certainly life-changing first date (the month of December 2003), I wasn't in love. I was fascinated, to be sure, but still I never anticipated returning to India's embrace anytime before old age. Luckily India didn't give up on me.

My second date came after an even more impressive string of serendipitous events. An award-winning school principal I met in Kolkata visited the U.S.A. soon after the beginning of my senior year. Her two stops in this country were the U.N. and St. John's, and while I love and respect St. John's it is nonetheless shocking that we should be reunited in the pine woods of Central Minnesota. During her visit, she invited me to work at her school. I perceived this offer as an honor, and began to consider the idea seriously, but nevertheless I couldn't afford a return trip right after college. But then a selfless professor took me under his wing and helped me get funding from SJU and the University of Minnesota, and I was back, no less than 38 years earlier than I thought I would be.

I review this information, which many of you probably know, to illustrate just how little active energy I put into making India a part of my life, at least before 2005. Instead of studying abroad in a place where I was likely to encounter "culture shock" or "an opposite perspective," I chose the comparatively easy destination of Australia. And India struck. Instead of pursuing the developing-world or service-work interests I discovered my first time to India, I started my senior year by taking the GRE and lazily considering a master's in English. And India struck again.

The boldest decision I ever had to make was simply not to ignore these loud and consistent calls. India knew that she had something to teach me, and I showed up for class. And the lesson is not quite over (in fact, it gets more complicated every year).

Very few, if any, of you would ignore constant courting of this nature.

3. The Orchestra of Chaos. The greatest, most exciting challenge of life in India is adapting to what I call 'the orchestra of chaos.' Particularly in urban India, one can never spend a moment living in 'autopilot mode,' as we’re too accustomed to doing in the relatively calm U.S. In India, one must be constantly engaged, be 'living in the moment,' lest he/she step in something unsavory, collide with a barreling auto-rickshaw, or fall victim otherwise to the chaos. If a person can embrace the orchestra, be alive in every moment, and make every previously mundane action a deliberate one, then he/she will begin to find life at its absolute best and most fulfilling. India has no Walden Pond, but it’s the surest place I know to live Thoreau’s deliberate life.

But I realize, from first-hand experience, that work in India is difficult. And try as I might to remind myself of the previous lessons I have learned in battles with India, I will undoubtedly have moments of frustration with the “rules” of India’s bureaucracy, education system, government or otherwise. The trick is to be endlessly flexible, to loosen one’s hold on pre-conceived cultural notions such as efficiency or convenience, and to embrace the chaos. This challenge draws me repeatedly to India.

4. The Past and The Future. It's certainly helpful for Americans to conceive of India as "developing" in an American societal and economic sense, given the not quite state-of-the-art circumstances of India's national infrastructure, education system, and otherwise. Americans aren't generally interested in nuance, and for people with no lasting interest in India it's quite convenient to label the subcontinent "developing" as opposed to America's "developed."

But it doesn't take a supreme intelligence to realize the inappropriateness of the terms "developing" and "developed" when comparing a 5,000-year-old continuous culture on the one hand, and a 300-year-old culture on the other. Certainly there are some cultural attributes about which one could call the elderly India "developed" and toddler America "developing," right?

Shashi Tharoor, in his characteristic one-liner style, addresses this issue by describing India as "a highly developed civilization in an advanced state of decay." I'm not crazy about the word "decay," but it's a helpful adjustment of the paradigm nonetheless.

Still, the history of India convinces me that in some of the societal factors most vitally important to the future of ALL civilization on Earth, India is perhaps the most "developed" nation of all, with very few signs of decay. Truly, I believe that India is in a place to lead our world, including the so-called "developed" nations, to a future of cooperative diversity, of peaceful plurality.

India's geographical, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity almost exceeds explanation. The flood plains of the world's largest mangrove forest lie but a few hundred miles from the world's most enormous mountain range, "the roof of the world." The nation of India simultaneously holds the enormous Thar Desert and more permanently ice-covered land than any nation outside of Antarctica. Again just a few hundred miles apart, a Rajasthani could be hospitalized for heat stroke simultaneously as his Kashmiri counterpart is treated for frostbit fingers.

While India recognizes 18 official languages, linguists believe that some 22,000 distinct languages and dialects exist on the subcontinent. And over two dozen of these are mutually incomprehensible languages with unique scripts, syntaxes, grammars and written histories. The numbers of native speakers of even the mediocre members of this language club dwarf speakers of such beloved Western languages as German, Greek, Italian, and certainly their little brothers. And the vastly underappreciated major languages of India - Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Tamil - are among the most spoken in the world (although don't expect to see them taught in American high schools anytime soon).

But in the perhaps more important cultural factors of ethnicity, religious beliefs, and economic development, India is even more bafflingly diverse. This isn't an appropriate place for a thorough discussion of these topics - for that pick up any of the great introductory Indian culture/history books by Stanley Wolpert, Thomas and Barbara Metcalf, or my current favorite Shashi Tharoor - but nonetheless I'll give a couple worthwhile quotes.

Tharoor writes, "No other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India." The only singular thing to be said about India, Tharoor repeatedly says, is that you can only speak of it in the plural.

And isn't this exactly the type of planetary society that ALL of us truly inhabit, now that we can access information from every corner of the globe in a heartbeat, now that all economic prospects are so internationally intertwined, now that "long distance" has become an oxymoron (as NewsHour correspondent and SJU faculty member Fred de Sam Lazaro says)?

What can we in America, as another election year approaches, learn from the astounding events of India's 2004 election, for example, when after the largest democratic exercise in the history of the world, a female Roman Catholic party leader and prime-minister-apparent (Sonia Gandhi) instead asked the Muslim president (Abdul Kalam) to confer the prime ministership upon a Sikh (Manmohan Singh), who still leads a nation 81% Hindu?

How "undeveloped" are we by comparison, when after nearly 300 years of nationhood the prospect of a female or African-American president is still novel and unlikely, and a non-Protestant Christian president all but impossible?

Sure, the most unscrupulous of India's citizens occasionally disturb the "peaceful plurality" with bursts of communal violence, but nonetheless India holds vastly more inter-ethnic/religious/communal friends than tragic ends. India the united nation has emerged after 5,000 years of fruitful and peaceful dialogue, the entrance and subsequent subsumption of various invading races/empires/cultures, and is now an enormous and chaotic microcosm for the cooperatively diverse future of the world.

There is more to be said, but I hope I've made something of a useful point. The experiment that has taken place on the Indian subcontinent for millenia is exactly the planetary experiment that is only now beginning to pick up speed. India's past and present is the planet's future: people of myriad ethnicities, languages, religious beliefs and economic blessings cooperating under a single banner for the good of all. This is certainly the "glass-half-full" approach to India's history and lessons for the future, but I am not alone in ascribing to it. And I am very excited to be returning to a culture where I can fruitfully participate with people of such vastly and fascinatingly different cultural experiences.

5. A Few Really Fun Things. This essay strikes me at the moment as far too long and yet completely inadequate. There are a hundred more reasons that I love India, and even the few areas I have explored feel dreadfully unclear. But this is a first draft, and even though I'm already on the third draft (I suppose) of my Indian story, I know that I'll have plenty more experiences and chances to revise. But, I'd like to finish with a simple - and simply explained - list of Indian cultural elements that are just damn fun. Because on top of all of the heavy "opposite perspective" and "future of the world" reasons for my fascination with India, I also have a blast whenever I'm there.

Bollywood. Because we all need to escape, to cheer, to boo, to sing and dance, and to fall in love.
Catching Buses. At full sprint. If my high school baseball coaches saw me sprinting down Lenin Sarani after my city bus, they might wonder why I didn't steal more bases in my playing days. An essential part of "embracing the chaos."
Cricket. Sure, baseball is in my blood, but in cricket I have discovered a wise, patient older sibling to America's game that drives the national pride of Indians in ways that even democracy can't. Tharoor writes, "Baseball is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus - the basic moves may be similar, but the former is easier, quicker, more straightforward, and requires a much shorter attention span." I haven't totally swallowed this pill, but I predict that I'll be 100% sold after this coming fall, when both Australia (the world's best team) and Pakistan (India's prime cricket rival) tour the subcontinent to play the national team. Look for me in the stands of the late November India-Pakistan test at Eden Gardens in Kolkata.
Hospitality. From my several Bengali-American friends who repeatedly insist that I hang out with their parents in India all the way to my lost Kolkata love who brazenly held my hand outside Nandan, my Indian friends are mind-blowingly selfless and hospitable. I may not know a huge number of people in the cities where I'm heading, but I know that that will change in a matter of days upon arriving, and that every next colleague, jhal muri wallah and neighborhood tailor will greet me with a smile, a cup of garam cha, and more time and attention than most American working parents make for their spouses and children.
Indian English. As a writer and lover of India, of course I'm apt to adore Indians' brilliant creativity in using my mother tongue, whether it's throwing in Hindi or Bangla words, clinging to pre-1947 British slang expressions or otherwise, I get a major kick out of Indian English.
Music. Hindi film songs are a HUGE guilty pleasure of mine (if my accomplished musician friends in La Crosse and Madison ever heard the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs I adore, I might be shunned forever from their company), and the improvisational soul of Hindustani classical music impresses and intimidates me greatly. There's so much to learn and learn about, and isn't that vitally fun?
Poetry. The joke in India is that all Bengalis think that they're poets. Well count me among that number, and count me as an admirer of a culture dedicated to creativity, emotional expression, and its under-appreciated and beautiful language.
Schoolchildren. I love kids, and the kids I've met through teaching and otherwise in India have brought me incredible amounts of joy, humor, and compassion. I'm thrilled to meet more faces of India's future in the coming weeks.
Taj Mahal. It's seriously that awesome. The Taj Mahal is the one most vibrant example that Expectation Theory is simply a theory and will never be a rule: the sight of it exceeds even the most fabulously exaggerated expectations. Ohhhhh beautiful ghost.
Weddings. From the lights to the parades to the costumes to the food, Indian weddings are the height of excitement for Indian families (everyone except the bride, of course, who contrary to Western notions greets her wedding day with sadness and reluctance). I hope I stumble upon an invitation or two this upcoming year.

If you've read this far, then you are a dear dear friend to me. This is long. Thank you. And don't forget, I guess, that the number one, most important, so-obvious-that-I-hope-it-goes-without-saying reason for my current trip to India is that I want to work hard for my host, for my foundation, and for India's social future.

All the best.
Brian

Obhiman

2007-08-15T23:04:00.000-05:00

I have just a few words about emotions for today, the nation of India's 60th birthday and the 60th anniversary of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. It's been an emotional day for my family (not at all because of the complicated historical significance of this day in India), and I'll get to that in a second, but given the purpose of this blog, Independence/Partition is far from inappropriate thematic background material.

I had one of those rare pure experiential learning moments sitting in church this morning. Many members of my extended family and I had come to the small town in southern Illinois where my younger sister's convent (and home) is to participate in her Reception ceremony. While she's still a few years from her first vows, today was nevertheless cause for celebration and complex emotions, as Heather received her new name, habit and veil in a gorgeous ceremony (including, on an inappropriate sidenote, a hymn set to the melody of Holst's "Jupiter" from "The Planets," which I had never heard in church before).

But back to the learning moment: watching my beaming and beautiful sister (now Sister Mary Renata with a capital S) process down the center aisle in her full habit and veil for the first time, I had a surge of emotion. Overwhelming support and excitement mixed with love, sadness, awe and more as I found tears welling in my eyes. Now I'm no stoic warrior, but this was not an everyday or even an everyyear experience. I couldn't pin down exactly what I was feeling, try as I might. And then one Bengali word came to mind, a word I had learned just weeks ago and whose definition in my notebook reads, "a good, complex mix of many emotions." Obhiman.

I'm not entirely sure if a Bengali would use "Obhiman" to describe this situation, being as far as it is from the Bengali cultural experience. But reflecting on the day, with the topic of Indian Independence and Partition alive in my mind, made me realize that powerful emotional experiences tend to be quite hard to quantify as simply joyful, sorrowful, wonderful, or mad, for they are all of those things and a hundred labels more, all at the same time. Obhiman, I didn't truly learn until experiencing it in church this morning, captures the truth of the multiplicity of emotion like no English word (in my vocabulary) does.

So congratulations, Sister Mary Renata, FSGM. Happy birthday, India and Pakistan. I'm proud of you. I love you. I mourn the divisions you and I create and maintain. You are awesome. I am with you, even when I'm not. And I'm sorry for everything. And I'm grateful for everything.

Peace,
Brian

In the fifteen days until my departure for India, I hope to write a lot more on this blog (including a letter I want to write to Shashi Tharoor after reading his "India: From Midnight to the Millenium," which is a fabulous nonfiction work on contemporary Indian history). I also hope to finish my "Top Ten India Stories," six of which you can currently read on brianheilman.com if you click the "Ten" link. I also hope to share with you a concise answer to the question "Why do you go to India?"

I probably won't be able to do all of these things.

Ponchish Din, Ponchish Dharona

2007-08-07T19:38:00.000-05:00

Bengali readers: you can read an alternate version of my 25 Days, 25 Thoughts post in Bangla here. They're DIFFERENT thoughts!

Bhalo theko.
Brian

25 Days, 25 Thoughts

2007-08-05T14:45:00.000-05:00

I leave for India in 25 days, a period of time which given my remaining summer commitments is poised to pass with mental-world-record-smashing speed. I have made this new blog public today not for any special reason other than that I had a few free hours (which may or may not happen again before August 30th). Nonetheless, welcome. Please peruse the previous posts and various video/poll offerings at your leisure. I will officially inaugurate this website the only way I know how: with a list. One thought for each of the 25 remaining days of pre-India American life (version 3.0).

I have spent the last two months of my life in Madison, Wisconsin, studying the Bengali language. I have four hours of class and at least that much again of homework every day, and thus my brain currently struggles to think of - and in - anything other than Bengali. This will undoubtedly seep into this list and probably the entire life of this blog. Mon-e kichu koro na - don't mind at all. My purpose is not to preclude anyone from understanding or to be pretentious about these weird-sounding phrases that I know. Just to be honest and write my mind.
Obvious Bengali Culture Observation I: Satyajit Ray's movies are incredible. After seeing Pather Panchali for the first time about a year ago, I thought that Ray's fame might be an accident of his time period or the lucky result of a contemporary boost in realism in film. Not so anymore. The guy is a genius. Each of the films I've seen since then has played with my mind in new ways, and while that might be a weak standard I nonetheless pass on the highest of recommedations to: Devi, Charulata, Jay Baba Felunath, Aranyer Dinratri, and Agantuk. These films span from the early 60s to the mid-1990s, and each impresses in a new way. And for the most part, the subtitles do justice. I know because I still have to use them!
Today is Ryan Ziegler's birthday. Shubho janmodin!
"Wait wait wait! You see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity!" -Amitabh Bachchan as Anthony Gonsalves in 'Amar Akbar Anthony.' YouTube "Anthony Golsalves" for a real treat.
Okay, let's see if I can make any sort of comment on a non-Indian topic. Here we go: Why the crap did the Twins trade Luis Castillo!? Estupido!
Recommendation to the World I (if you don't count 'Watch Satyajit's Movies"): Datarock, "Datarock Datarock." I've had this album on repeat for over a week.
Facebook is great because... I just reconnected with a friend and first India trip travel-partner from Australia. He even bought my CD, which means that there are now owners of MOCIAB on 5 of the 7 continents. This certainly isn't of any great benefit to the listeners/owners of that shoddy recording, but it's a cool thought nonetheless. Africa and Antarctica, step up to the plate!
Relatedly, I currently wish that MOCIAB never existed. This thought fluctuates greatly on almost a daily basis, but still. It's way scarier and embarrassing than you might think to release songs to the world. Especially when you're not good at writing songs, and/or when you write very honest lyrics. It's like a chunk of my circa-2005 soul is circulating the world, forever unchangeable, and free for anyone to experience/use/criticize/love/hate at their will. Nischoye odbhut obhigota.
Relatedly, brianheilman.com is now a tiny fraction of what it used to be. And myspace.com/brianheilman is no more. For not-so-dissimilar reasons. See the 'Nomoshkar and Salaam Aleikum' post.
Relatedly, the internet. Wow. Remember when it was new? Slow? Required cables? Not the lifeforce of the world? Wow.
Still my favorite Shakespeare play: Othello.
Recommendation to the World II: Huston Smith, "The World's Religions." This book provides anybody in the world concise and empathetic answers to questions such as "Why in the world would anybody want to be a (enter religion name)?" and "What is (enter religious practice) all about anyway?" Especially valuable, in my opinion, for Americans - especially American Christians - baffled by Islam. Not to minimize differences, but Catholics especially should be able to empathize with the allure of Islam's strict code of ethics in preparation for the Judgment. These groups' historical antagonism baffles and saddens me. With the help of Smith, the future need not do the same.
Speaking of the future, by my estimation we're running a few years late on driving flying cars and wearing metallic bodysuits. World community, let's get on this.
Last night I slept from 6pm to 10am. That's 16 hours. I blame it on the rain and 'perfect sleeping conditions', very consciously denying the obvious evidence in favor of stress, laziness, anxiety, and all-round unhealthiness.
Relatedly, what percentage of 'belief' is actually lies we tell ourselves to feel better?
Relatedly, what percentage of our 'favorite' cultural material (esp. books/movies/music) is really just the stuff we've been told or culturally trained to like best?
Relatedly, 'new' or 'classic'? Which is better?
Unrelatedly, I guess after all I AM okay with onions and radishes.
Related to the new unrelated topic: I have a special connection with green peppers whereby whenever I feel sick or a little gastro-intestinally unsettled, a few big chunks of green pepper will really settle my stomach. Eta amar bishesh osudh - it's my special medicine.
Before ultimately deciding to scrap the old/original brianheilman.com, I wrote this as a possible journal entry to defend its overwhelming pomposity: As you can see quite clearly after a few minutes on brianheilman.com, I have (of late) become almost obsessive about collecting and preserving “stuff I’ve done” over the past few years. I’m not entirely sure why this phenomenon came about, and in fact I’m a bit embarrassed by it (a feeling which is sure to grow in the coming months and years, as I grow intellectually farther and farther from the things I wrote/created/recorded in these early parts of the 2000s). I swear, no matter how egotistical all of this stuff might seem to you, that these hoarding efforts are not meant to be boastful or even proud. Very very few of my essays, poems, songs, photos or otherwise strike me as very good anymore. Most of them haven’t for years, if they ever did at all. Brianheilman.com, my poetry book, my collection(s) of essays about India, and even MOCIAB were all more exciting in the making than in the finishing. I was trying to keep myself busy more than anything, not to make any real contribution to the world(s) of web design, literature or pop music. I don’t think I have. I feel very motivated to preserve as much as possible, to observe how I grow and change from year to year, and to take advantage of the technological resources that allow me to do so creatively and efficiently. Yeah, it’s exciting to see my songs for sale on iTunes or my photos in a newspaper, but that’s not the point. As MOCIAB sales have shown, my creativity (musical, anyway) has proven to be unprofitable. So whoopity-woo.
Whoopity-woo. I trashed it all anyway. Like chemotherapy for the internet.
Obvious Bengali Culture Observation II: It's only 72 days until Shashthee, the first official day of Durga Puja. I'm curious to see whether I'll have an exclusively gram (village) Puja experience, a re-play of my 2005 Kolkata Puja experience, or a mixture of the two this year. Given that my Murshidabad surroundings are predominantly Muslim, I'm also excited to see how this community celebrates the Puja (in a cultural and not literally religious sense, and especially given how close it always falls to Id). But, um, so as to leave no doubt about the obviousness of this cultural observation: Durga Puja is awesome.
If you've read this far, you deserve these two comments: First, thanks, seriously. Second, I'm sorry to anyone who has come looking for more specific information about my life and work in India. Due both to my dedication to Expectation Theory ("exaggerated expectations cannot, by definition, benefit an experience") and to the lack of real information I have at present, there is precious little to say. Communication with my host agency and sponsoring organization is understandably sparse at the moment, given intercontinental time differences and lack of access to the internet in rural West Bengal. But of course you realize that "sometimes things that rule are sparse" and that my lack of knowledge now will only lead to a fountain of surprises in the coming months. So please come back to reap the fruits of your forebearance. And check out the links I've given elsewhere on the blog to appease your appetite in the meantime.
Obligatory Rabindranath Tagore Quote: "Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."
For two months I have been immersed in Bengali, one of the great Indian languages. But in the Indian context, one cannot overlook the other meaning of "immersion:" releasing a loved one - perhaps a god or goddess, perhaps the ashes of a relative - into a body of water that will return them to their spiritual home.

Peace.
Brian

Bangla Video From Summer Class

2007-07-26T01:19:00.001-05:00

Gour

2007-07-25T22:50:00.001-05:00

This is an artist's depiction of ruins of the ancient city of Gour, which is very close to where I'll be living.

Nomoshkar and Salaam Aleikum

2007-07-25T20:13:00.000-05:00

Hello friends. Please come back soon and often to share in my upcoming Indian experiences.
Thanks for reading, especially those of you who came here on a link from brianheilman.com, which I've recently redesigned (and almost entirely removed). I'm hoping to give myself something of a clean slate here, without the ghosts of all my previous India experiences hovering around the fringes of these new essays and travel narratives. Plus the whole brianheilman.com thing was a fun adventure in web editing, but far too egotistical to be exposed to public view for more than a few months.
Bharoter Dinratri literally does mean "Days and Nights in India" in Bengali, and the words you see at the top of the page are 'Bharoter Dinratri' in Bengali script. Pronounce it like this: BHA-roh-tehr DEEN-RAH-tree. It's a subtle reference to the classic Satyajit Ray movie Aranyer Dinratri, which means "Days and Nights in the Forest." It's one of my favorite Bengali movies.
I'm still rather unsure what EXACTLY I'll be doing for this upcoming year in India. I know that I'll be working with Street Survivors India, and most likely living in their Jagriti Public School in Katna, Murshidabad, West Bengal, but any further details remain to be sorted. Such is the nature of 'planning ahead' in India. But keep in mind that this empty-mindedness also lends itself well to the tenets of expectation theory. It's pretty hard to have inflated expectations of an as-yet-undetermined project, right?
Nevertheless, I do know a bit about the school/organization, and I urge you to visit this website and learn a bit too: CLICK HERE. You'll find that the site is a radio program and summary; the half-hour radio program is well made and definitely worth the time. You'll notice too that should you be so inclined, there are several other such articles and radio programs about the same school/organization. Knock yourselves out.