Thank you for sharing

Travel shakes up your sense of what's right and what's wrong.  If you're even minimally open to reflection, you are confronted again and again with the assumptions you make about the universality of just about everything.

Kerala, the Indian state we are docked in, is a small sliver of land between the sea and the mountains.  It has a literacy rate of nearly 100%, and an almost even split among Christians, Hindus, and Moslems (40-30-30).  Judaism remains only in signs and historical sites.  Wikipedia tells us there is one Jewish woman of childbearing age left in Kochi.

The Wikipedia entry also diverges considerably from the version I heard aboard ship, which included a great deal more rescue of a persecuted people.

Jewtown remains as a street full of shops run by Indians who are not Jewish.  It is a tourist attraction which has no shops other than those catering to tourists.  This also means it is cleaner and more expensive than other areas of the city.  It sits at the end of the ferry, which costs 2 rupees (4 cents US).

The "God's own country" signs are everywhere.  It is the motto of Kerala, referring to the natural beauty of the area.

Our guide on the Agra trip, Arvind, is very proud of Indian diversity, and very concerned about income disparity.  He told us more Swiss bank accounts belong to Indians than to nationals of any other country.  I present this as unverified, since my understanding of Swiss accounts is they are numbered in order to be untraceable.

I wonder if God, who evidently resides in Kerala, has one of those Swiss bank accounts.

Close encounters of the school kind

After our day in Agra, we had one day in Delhi before coming back to Kochi.  Our first stop was the Deepalaya School.

These school/service visits are included in almost every SAS trip.  In China we went to a school for children whose parents are in prison.  In Burma, we went to a school for blind children and another for girls who have no better educational opportunities.  In India, it was underprivileged children whose parents have come to Delhi seeking work. 

(It’s not clear to me why these children don’t go to public school, which is free.  The government provides uniforms and school supplies when necessary.  Perhaps it’s the transient status of the parents. Our guide told us they come from families who do not have a history of education.)

I feel like a curmudgeon for not liking these trips.  I have heard people describe them as the highlight of their visit.  To me, they seem more like zoos for children.  We make a donation to the school and it purchases a little performance from the children.  They seem good natured and obedient, but not particularly interested in the parade of Western faces coming through their school.  It doesn't look like they have any say in the matter.

My discomfort here is a variation of my general discomfort at being a tourist.  For this trip, I grabbed a skinny book from the "take one, leave one" shelf in the library.  It was Jamaica Kinkaid's A Small Place, a memoir of Antigua.  The basic message: tourists are horrid people who think they own us for the time we are here, but they have no idea how much we hate them. (So that's the translation when the waiters, or tour guides, or vendors speak to each other?  Thanks, we were wondering.)  We make this kind of deal with the adults--this is how you make your living here--but it seems unfair to enlist children, trading on their big eyes to shake loose a few bucks.

I felt most comfortable in the blind school, where the gawking occurred unobserved by the children.  We watched them stream out of morning worship, sort their shoes out of the piles of shoes at the door, and zip off to the next thing.  They know their way around the school and you'd better not be in their path!

At this school, we were invited into a kindergarten class, where the children were coloring worksheets.  The worksheets said they were an exam, and each question had a point value.  The front asked them to identify examples of air, land, and sea transport and to identify creatures of the sea (including a garden snail).  On the back, they were to match the parent and offspring of dog, cat, chicken, and owl.  As far as I could tell, however, they were simply coloring.  They couldn’t read, they hadn’t written their names on their papers, and they weren’t labeling any of the pictures.

The coloring was painstaking work.  Each child was carefully pulling one crayon at a time out from their box, then putting it back when done.  Most of them slid a cover onto the box and put the whole box into their schoolbags each time.  There was no squirming, no talking, no distractions.  These children were here to work!

They were carefully copying each other’s work.  At several tables, there was a clear “alpha” child, and one or more children copying the alpha’s color choices.  That self-censorship seemed very sad to me.  What kind of pressure is exerted to make a four or five year old unwilling to risk using the wrong color crayon?  The motto of the school is "Enabling self reliance" --they have a long way to go!

The children sang for us, and then we sang “Itsy bitsy spider” for them.  The teacher declined to translate.  They are, in theory, taught in English, although the children I spoke to did not respond to anything I said, beyond confirming their names which I read off their papers.  The kids gamely imitated our hand motions, but I don’t think they understood the words.  We also sang “If you’re happy and you know it” with the same results.

Evidence of aliens among us

In another room, one of our students made balloon animals for the children.  One balloon artist, 30 children.  Jessica was racing to try to make one for each child, and was working from right to left.  The children on the have-not side were straining to see and clearly envious.  The children on the have side seemed perplexed.  I wondered what would happen when the 30 became haves in a school of 470 have-nots. 

George came to the school with us, and one of our students found a Curious George book in a pile of children’s books.  I wondered how that would play over the dinnertime bowl of rice. 

A monkey from a book came to our school today.  And he was wearing a t-shirt that said “F*** swag.  I’m gangnam style.”   

Education is learning the ways of the world.  Sometimes, the world doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Taking Time for the Taj

Say what you will, the Taj is just a big tomb.

Stunningly beautiful big tomb, of course, but it serves no other purpose.  Or at least it served no other purpose when it was built.  Now, it brings millions of visitors to Agra, and they bring millions of dollars, which brings out what seem to be millions of street vendors and millions of beggars.

Our ship is docked in Kochi (also known as Cochin), on the western side of the southern tip of India.  So going from Kochi to Agra is like pulling into New York City and deciding you need to see the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  But only if you had to fly into Chicago and then take a train to St. Louis. 

We’re in India for 6 days, and I spent 4 days going to see the Taj Mahal.  The only way I can really justify that is that I didn’t fly from Washington, D.C. to do it.  By comparison, Kochi is just around the corner.

Our landing was scheduled for 8 AM and our flight for 2 PM, which doesn’t sound like a difficult connection to make, but nothing is simple when you’re dealing with immigration.  Because we live on the ship, it can be easy to forget that we are coming into a foreign country as fare-paying passengers and the security is as stringent as your average airport.  One thousand people have to pick up our passports, show them to customs officials, get stamps, and officially enter the country.  Then we each have to go through ship security and port security to leave the area where we are docked.  The airport is 90 minutes away, and there’s a whole set of security measures there, too.

I was in the first group of people to get off the ship because of my flight schedule, and things went very smoothly, so we made it to the airport in plenty of time.  Leaving the ship around 9:30, we got to our hotel in New Delhi around 8:30. 

The next morning, we were up by 4 to take a train to Agra, arriving there are around 8:30.  After touring the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, we drove back to Delhi via a bear rescue center.  We got to our hotel around 7:30.  We had one full day in Delhi and then back to the airport (leave the hotel at 7) to return to the ship.  In all, two and a half days of travel to see the Taj.

Also:  ship, bus, airport shuttle, airplane, bus, bus, train, bus, electric bus, Taj, electric bus, bus, plane, bus.  Add tuk tuk and ferry for yesterday’s travel around Kochi.  Have not gone anywhere by rickshaw, motorbike, or elephant.

The Taj is definitely worth going to once.  It’s big and it’s beautiful, and being a “high value woman” I got to go inside.  You go through separate lines for security—yes, there’s airport type security here, too—and there are signs pointing the way, but in fact I didn’t even have a ticket.  Our tickets were good for both the Taj and the Red Fort, so our tour guide kept them until we were done with both.  Perhaps the assumption is that every Western face belongs to a high value ticket?

You can’t take pictures inside and there’s nothing spectacular about the inside, so touring the grounds is actually quite sufficient.  (A hint for those who might find themselves in the vicinity some day soon.  Also, closed on Fridays.  You’re welcome.)

The Taj Mahal is in the middle of two smaller, identical buildings.  One is a mosque.  The other is not; it was built for symmetry.  (Being symmetrical with the mosque, it is facing away from Mecca.)  It was built, as you probably know, as a memorial to the favorite wife of one of the Moghul kings, and it took over 20 years to finish.  A 2-mile ramp was built to haul stone to the top.  It was never intended to be a public monument, just a private expression of his grief.  It was the British, our guide told us, who “romanticized it” and put it on people’s must-see lists.  The king planned to build a black marble replica for himself across the river, but he wound up imprisoned by an ungrateful third son (who also assassinated his two older brothers, suggesting that first-born ascension to the throne is not a universally appreciated custom), so now both the king and his wife are buried together. 

In modern India, people are cremated rather than buried, and their ashes are taken to the Ganges for interment.  Some people whose families cannot afford cremation just dump the bodies into the Ganges.  This makes the Ganges a very holy and very polluted river.

On our way to the airport the final day, we happened upon a funeral procession.  Four men carrying a wrapped body on their shoulders.  We zipped past it too quickly for me to get a picture.  Our guide told us that in India, whether the deceased is male or female, only the men go to accompany it for cremation.  The women stay home and mourn (for 13 days). 

A happy birthday today to the wife of my own first born; here is your “funerary customs in India” post.