Photos from Goa and Mumbai!

https://plus.google.com/photos/101737615291512796999/albums/5713703862698343809

I'll post about it later!

The most inaccurate comparison ever

I was looking through recipes online, because I'm making egg curry tonight. One of the "similar" recipes was coconut barfi. Barfi is an indian sweet that I don't particularly like. It's mostly sugar and dried milk. They called it "Indian Fudge" on this site. So. Insultingly. Wrong.

You know how I feel about this topic already.

Embracing Dehradun When the Mountains Are Snowed Out

(The link for pictures is at the end of this post.)

Dehradun has it rough, I know. It’s trying to get me to have a good time here, but I’ve already been up to the mountains, so Dehradun has less appeal in comparison. It is a very livable city. But it is in an awkward adolescent phase. Uttarakhand only became a state about 10 years ago; before then Dehradun was a relatively small city. Now that it is the capital, it is consistently growing. But it lacks many of the cultural and social opportunities that a long term city can offer. So in some ways, it’s a lot of the bad without a ton of the good. It gets crowded, there’s a lot of traffic, and there’s not a lot to actually go to or to see.

I will say that Dehradun is a very nice North Indian city. This cannot be said for most North Indian cities. Many are very intense and in-your-face. Dehradun is not like that. It is clearly still very much a mountain city, even though it is being transformed. An example is Chakrata Road. Chakrata Road branches off from the main bazaar. It had some of my favorite shops. Like a chemist shop that had been in the family for three generation, and which was run by the most intelligent and elderly chemist that I’ve ever met. I say this all in the past tense, because all of these shops have been demolished to make room for a bigger and better Chakrata Road. I get it; the city needs to grow. But I can relate to locals who hate the fact that Dehradun has become a capital city and therefore must terminate so much of what made the city charming.

While I originally planned on spending as much time in Joshimath as possible, the bad snows have cut off even low-elevation field sites. I might go out next week; but it will be a short trip, because Peter is coming to India on February 19^th! In lieu of the mountains; I’m trying to embrace Dehradun and enjoy the city while I’m here.

My quest to like Dehradun began with me throwing a birthday party for myself. This might sound pretty lame; but it was a good opportunity to spend more time with the PhD students here. Being around a lot of Indians who are my age is one of the perks of living in Dehradun these days. I ended up making ravioli from scratch. I made the dough, the ricotta, and everything. It was a lot of work, but my friends seemed to enjoy it. I also made Italian-style chickpeas, which they appreciated as a divergence from the very spicy food that they get every day on campus. I’m going to post some pictures of the party. It was a lot of fun. My parents sent me a cake and my friend Ridhima bought me one. Apparently, in India you cut the cake before you eat dinner. Also, you’re supposed to put frosting on the birthday person’s face. I explained that we really only do that for weddings.

The next day, I went to a dinner for “Lady Scientists.” All the female researchers at the institute were invited. It was at a hotel and we got a ton of free food, so that was already worth it. There were also “cultural events,” which is essentially a talent show. The Indian perception of dance is strange to me. It is overall a very sexually repressed culture. But my friends performed some extremely sexual dances and all these old lady scientists came up to them afterwards and hugged them, telling them what amazing dancers they are. There was a lot of “first class, first class!” being yelled. After the talent show, there was time for everyone to dance. All of my friends were impressed that I could dance “Hindi Dancing” so well. I tried explaining that shaking your ass is pretty much universal, but they didn’t seem to get the point. I think I also waved my hands around in a generally Bollywood manner. Now that I think of it, all the white women in Bollywood videos are there to fill the role of the Western whore who is sexually open enough to allow the male actors to grind on her. Maya and I watched a lot of Bollywood when we were travelling, and literally every time an actor got hot-and-heavy with a woman, she was white. I don’t mean that they don’t portray Indian women as sexual. It’s that white women are perceived as sexually loose. So maybe my friends were just impressed that I didn’t dry hump anyone. It was a challenge. Us American women are extremely promiscuous.

The photos of all of this are included in this post. I think that you’ll enjoy seeing me with my friends here. You’re probably going to be surprised that so many people in the photos look very distinct from one another. India is perhaps the most ethnically and linguistically diverse country in the world. My friend Malem is from Manipur and looks Burmese or Chinese. She speaks Hindi pretty well, but not fluently and she much prefers using English for important conversations. It’s almost as hard for her to go home as it is for me, because Manipur is constantly undergoing riots due to the ethnic clashes between the different tribes there. It is easier for her brother in Thailand to get home than it is for Malem. I don’t have photos of all of my other friends, but there are also students here from Nagaland (near Manipur,) Ladhak (higher up and west than Uttarakhand,) Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. Ladhakis are Buddhist, a lot of people from Nagaland and Manipur are Christian, Kerala also as many Christians, as does Tamil Nadu. Nevertheless, Malem is Buddhist and all of my friends from Kerala are Hindu. My Ladhaki friend doesn’t eat meat because of Buddhism. Malem will eat anything with a pulse. Sam, a friend from Nagaland, told me that she also is a meat eater. I didn’t mention that Nagaland is home to the formerly “head hunting” tribes of India. But I’m sure if head hunting is not unheard of, then it’s a bit dramatic to be a vegetarian. Many of my North Indian Hindu friends are vegetarian. The South Indians could seem to care less. But then there are exceptions to those generalizations as well. It gets very complicated.

The great thing about all of this diversity is that it shows me that I am not alone here. While I am not Indian, I am not the only one who looks different or struggles with Hindi. Of course, my Hindi is the worst of the bunch; but it’s still a relief to know that conversations aren’t in English just for my benefit. English is very much a common ground language here.

Also, Dehradun has a very large Tibetan population. Therefore, I’m an outsider in a city that is used to outsiders settling here. Today I went to the bazaar to buy some camera batteries, get some photos printed out, and to buy something delicious (I chose butter cake.) When I got to the bazaar, there was a huge procession of Tibetans. They were protesting India’s lack of political pressure on China. This I completely understand. On the one hand, India has given refuge to any Tibetan that can get across the border. On the other hand, the Indian government doesn’t have a strong political stance on Tibet. As the Tibetan New Year gets closer, I’ve been reading about more and more Tibetans being killed in Tibet. They’re trying to celebrate their own New Year rather than the Chinese New Year. It’s disgusting what China is doing in Tibet. If I were Tibetan, I’d be angry at India too. It’s hypocritical to absorb an entire nation, but not to do anything with regards to that nation’s status. Of course, I understand why India is hesitant to do so. China and India have an uncertain future, but it will certainly be a rivalry. The question is, how serious will that rivalry get?

China has never attacked India through the northwest Himalayas. Regardless, every other town near my field site is home to an army base. The only reason that anyone can move around at all during the winter is that the army clears the roads in case they need to bring tanks up to the Tibetan plateau. There is an uneasiness that cannot be ignored. While I sympathize with Tibet, seeing Indian troops ready at the Chinese border makes me hypersensitive to the severity of what an Indo-Chinese war would mean for the world. But even with these serious thoughts, I want you all to know that butter cake is as delicious as it sounds. 

Here are pictures:

https://plus.google.com/photos/101737615291512796999/albums/5707397646360437601

Pictures from my trip!

Here are the photos to accompany the previous blog post!

https://plus.google.com/photos/101737615291512796999/albums/5706331470133053601

Enjoy!
Erica

My Trip through Punjab and Himachal Pradesh!

Here is the summary of my recent trip through Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. I'll upload pictures tomorrow!

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As some of you have already heard, I just travelled around Punjab and Himachal Pradesh with another Fulbrighter and friend—Maya. Maya and I are both studying women’s health and she is currently a medical student at Northwestern, so we both had a lot to talk about and rant about.

During my trip, I think most things that can go wrong with transit did go wrong, but I was always able to get to where I wanted to go. That’s the nice thing about India: enough people don’t have cars that there’s always another form of public transit available. It started with me getting onto my night train to Delhi and finding out that my seat was also assigned to a very annoyed woman. She kept insisting that I check my ticket; but we eventually found out that she had been automatically upgraded to a better class. Of course, by that time she had already kicked me out of the booth and set up her blankets. She did however; give the conductor as much trouble as she gave me when he told her about the seat change.

When Maya and I met in the Old Delhi Railway Station, we couldn’t find our train on the board and no one in the Enquiry Department could tell us if our train even existed. Finally, we found out that our train had been delayed 2 hours. The train didn’t get any timelier after that, and we didn’t get into Amritsar until after midnight. The most annoying part was that the train stopped right outside of Amritsar for over an hour. I can only imagine that the track it was coming in on was already occupied due to its lateness.

After that things did get a lot easier. We ended up staying in a nice hotel right across from the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple was beautiful and actually very peaceful for such a huge tourist attraction. The Golden Temple, for those who do not know, is the primary holy site for Sikhs. As with all Sikh religious sites, everything is free, but a donation is appreciated. The Temple is situated in the middle of a manmade lake. Some Sikhs bathe in the lake, and I felt really embarrassed when I saw some tourists filming men trying to take their religious baths in the water. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that tourists can be as obnoxious with their cameras as young Indian men can be.

Outside Amritsar is completely chaotic, as it is a huge tourist destination. Taxi drivers and rickshaw wallas were constantly trying to get us to go to the border with Pakistan, at which there are elaborate guard marches on the Indian and Pakistani side. Maya and I don’t care much for military displays and a friend of hers told her that it looks like a Monty Python bit, so we decided to skip it. Instead, we walked a short distance to the memorial for the Indians killed in the 1919 massacre in Amritsar. If you’ve seen Gandhi then you know what I’m talking about. In case you haven’t: In 1919 the British Government created laws that would make it legal to arrest and detain Indians without a trial. (Sounds like the United States now.) In Amritsar, there were several riots over this. But during the day of the Punjabi Harvest Festival, a peaceful meeting was organized in a park to discuss the issues at hand. A British troop came in and the commanding officer ordered his men to fire on the peaceful crowd, including women and children. The park is walled in on all but one side, so the people who attended the meeting were trapped. I learned that the officer—O’Dwyer—never slept soundly again after the massacre and eventually killed himself. That seems to be about the right amount of guilt for such an unprovoked and bloody attack.

The next day we went to Chandighar, but our train stopped for about an hour to unload some packages that had been stored on the train. Therefore, we missed our connecting train and had to take a taxi to Chandighar. Chandighar is the capital of Punjab and Haryana. It is a surprisingly ritzy city for being a place about which no one ever talks. It is the only city in India that I’ve been to which was completely preplanned. It was built after Partition to become the new capital of Punjab. Lahore, the old capital, is now in Pakistan. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Chandighar except go to gardens and eat, which was a nice change of pace after Amritsar.

The second most visited place in India after the Taj Mahal is the Rock Garden in Chandighar. A refugee from Partition began creating art out of all the scraps and garbage created when Chandighar was being built. The government found out about his work and gave him acres on which to build his own garden. I will upload pictures of this tomorrow. It is a very interesting and geometrically amazing place. I appreciated being around some modern art after living in the mountains for so long. We also visited a rose garden, which was also pleasant, but less visually stunning and intriguing.

Probably the best part of Chandighar was the food. We had Mangalorean fish curry and Italian food as well as complimentary breakfasts at our hotel. It was pretty amazing. But it was also expensive, so we left earlier than we planned and took the bus up to Shimla.

Shimla is a hill station in Himachal Pradesh. It was the summer retreat of the British Raj. Shimla is very similar to Mussoorie, but it is far bigger and the entire state is more developed than Uttarakhand. Sometimes I forget that Uttarakhand is a new state. But seeing what Himachal has in comparison to Uttarakhand really drove home just how poor Uttarakhand is. Himachal has the same terrain, but much better roads, governmental organization, electricity and water. Although Shimla has a water crisis, I think this is largely because it is a city with the capacity of a hill station.

We stayed in a very nice hotel, which had a very friendly and helpful owner. It was the coziest place that I have stayed in so far, and it overlooked the mountains. Most of what we did in Shimla was walking around. On our second day there we did two treks. The first one was up to a Hanuman (monkey god) temple at the top of a hill. As we went up, someone told Maya that the monkeys would steal her glasses. But it was also icy around the temple, so Maya had to wear them just to walk around safely. As she was sitting down in the Temple complex, a monkey ran up to her and grabbed the glasses off of her face. Monkeys do this type of thing we they think they can get food in exchange. Everyone was telling her to give the monkey food, but we didn’t have any. I followed the monkey until it was on a rooftop, where it sat down and started eating the nose guards off of Maya’s glasses. Fortunately, some workers bought some prasad (food for the gods) and offered it to the monkey in exchange for the glasses. The monkey dropped the glasses and ran away with the food. This must be a normal occurrence, but the workers had a ladder ready to climb up and get the glasses off of the roof.

We decided to go to a less exciting place afterwards and took a taxi to a rural village close to Shimla.   It was nice to see rural Himachal Pradesh, which is also much more developed than rural Uttarakhand. It was also very nice to go to a place where there were no tourists and a lot of clean air.

The British built a railway that goes from Shimla to Kalka, which is in Haryana. We had been told that the train was a highlight of Shimla, so we decided to take it. We ended up getting a private compartment, which was a nice surprise. The trip down was beautiful. The best part is that the train goes so slowly that you can open the train door and look out at the mountains passing you by. The train also goes through a much more rugged and rural landscape than what the roads go through.

The train was also late, but we still made our connecting train in Kalka. Unfortunately, the original schedule that we saw said that we would get into Delhi around 5:10; but in reality we got in around 6:30. That meant that I missed my train to go to Dehradun. We took a taxi to the Interstate Bus Terminal, only to be told that it was the other ISBT that has buses going to Dehradun. The next bus station actually did have Uttarakhand state buses leaving from it. I got a deluxe (meaning it has AC) bus to Dehradun that left at 8:00 AM. All the conductors were very confused as to why I was going to Dehradun instead of Rishikesh. Rishikesh is where The Beatles went to learn about eastern religions, and it is where white people flock to this day for the same reason. It is an hour from me and I’ve never been, because I’m a snobby academic that way.

I was exhausted when I got back to Dehradun; but I was also excited to get back to work. Traveling in India is trying and I feel that I at least have a good grip on my work now. I am glad that I was able to see other parts of India and get to talk about my work and emotions with another American researcher. Right now, I am adjusting to being immersed in another culture again. I feel awkward talking to my Indian friends after being with an American for so long. But I’m sure that I’ll get over it soon enough. I’m making dinner for some of my friends here in Dehradun on my birthday. I’m looking forward to breaking the ice a little bit more. Let me know if you have any dinner suggestions!