Happy Krishna

Gokulashtami started because Krishna's mom had the same idea as mine: when your kid wants some food that's not so good for them, elevate it. While my mom had the "lady jar" of cookies and candy in the high cupboard, the deity's mother combatted Krishna's penchant for ghee (yes, that's clarified butter) by hanging a clay pot of the good stuff from a rope by just under the ceiling of their home. To honor Krishna on his birthday the people of the state of Maharashtra suspend clay pots from several stories up in plazas and along streets and compete in building human pyramids to break the pots, which rain a fuchsia liquid. The lucky kid at the zenith happens to break the pots with his or her head, which seems to have no specific ceremonial significance, but works to offset the balance of the pyramid more times than not. Said kid is also often wearing a neon bike helmet, which is advisable since medics are attentive but supplies are minimal.
The picture to the right shows a group of neighborhood guys around the boys' hostel in Sion hanging the pot the night before on a rope with gorgeous floral arrangements. Krishna was born at midnight, so there's a traditional puja, or worship service for him at that time. The photos below show the puja set-up and sweet cakes at the business school on Tuesday. Captain Kanade, the pesticide and internet superhero (our contact for all things lodging) is standing next to the man with the tray.

After several practice rounds and a puja out back, the Welingkar Institute mens' and womens' Dahi Handi teams mounted the steps at the front of the building while students who were not participating sprayed them with garden hoses and tossed flours and confetti from the first balcony. Meanwhile, sneaky cafeteria employees, maids and security guards dumped buckets of water on the crowd and the students on the balcony below, leaping away from the railings when the victims craned their necks back. The band was deafening and the students, who are from all over India, competed in terms of regional dancing. I kept getting pulled into circles and getting laughed at as I tried to imitate each style.
This picture shows the sopping result of instruments, confetti, hoses, buckets, and previously unwashed Welingkar Institute blue t-shirts, whose dyes ran with abandon. Below is a shot of onlookers on Napoo Street, facing the steps.


This shot to the right shows the smallest member of the boy's team breaking the ghee pot outside the school, which was a thrill to watch, but the two tour buses and three cargo trucks were waiting to take us to Thane, an area north of Matunga, where 25,000 people were rumored to have gathered every year. You can see the red cargo trucks in the pictures of Napoo: these are the propellers of the Indian economy. Transport of cargo by train is highly unionized ($), regulated ($$), and yet also corrupt($$$), so companies use these trucks to haul goods from manufacturing centers to cities. They all have "GOODS CARRIER" artistically painted on the front and "HORN OK PLEASE" in the same style on the back. This is due to the fact that side mirrors are a liability in the close traffic of Mumbai and a luxury that is often quickly reappropriated everywhere, so it's necessary to sound your horn to indicate that you're behind someone. The city is harmoniously filled with call-and-response beeps of all shapes and sizes. They call it "horning."
As you can see, the trucks are commandeered on Gokulashtami to haul Dahi Handi teams to competition sites. Our truck is in the background. I got to spend a half-hour holding on to the high sides, listening to students singing Hindi songs and teaching American camp songs (we came up with "Roll Over" and "The Ants Go Marching" -- strong refrains being key) while the scenery whizzed by on an Indian highway. We were of course soaked from earlier, but the students had the ingenious (if not original, apparently) idea of throwing and smearing pink/red powder liberally on each other, the truck, and us.
So we arrived in Thane, wet and hoarse, turning everything we touched a little purple, and were informed that it was not a very safe crowd for women, so the men were to link arms in a large circle around us, and we were to move as a unit to the plaza. By "not a safe crowd for women," they meant that our group contained the only women present, among thousands of people. Women had just begun competing in Dahi Handi events two years ago, apparently, and they have not yet become sightseers. We were herded over to the foot of the main stage with much urgency, which turned out to be a great vantage point. DJ Akil, a big name in India, was dropping "Pump Up the Jam" as we arrived, seguing into Indian favorites later on, like the one that you dance to by leaning in and out of the circle (like the hokey pokey, but with class). My music education has not really gotten off the ground here. . .
Both Welingkar Teams successfully maintained their pyramids from start to finish, and while the international students were congratulating them, we realized that we were being summoned onstage. We climbed plastic stacking chairs to get to the stage, where the MC welcomed us by telling Indians that the country has reached a point where foreigners are seeking to educate themselves here. He pulled my friend Stella to the front, and announced that the Chicagoan who has lived in Switzerland for the past two years had come all the way from Africa. She demurely refrained from mentioning that she had in fact come farther. Then we were all invited to dance onstage, which was a little embarrassing, especially when I learned that I'd made it to a Hindi newscast. Here are some views from the main stage:

Actually, a female onlooker did arrive while we were in Thane, clad in a lacy tanktop, jeans, and plenty of makeup. We asked our friends who she was as she addressed the crowd. The answer: a celebrity, which should have been evident by her close attention to maintaining a pale skin color, which is a big deal here--the #1 skincare brand is Fair and Lovely, which used to run commercials showing that darker-skinned women couldn't get married. Apparently, it was anyone's guess as to which celebrity this celebrity was, though, despite the hue. (I guess I'm not the only one claiming to be almost famous. . .)



The highest pyramid that I saw is featured below--six stories!! As you can see, the team was nowhere near touching the ghee pot, which had an uncanny trick of raising and lowering for different teams, which may have been due to different divisions of participation, whims, bribes, or, of course, the will of Krishna. The Welingkar teams' pujas had worked, and they walked home with trophies, a given for the Welingkar womens' team which faced no rival Thane Toppling Queens or Sion Stacking Stormtroopers, for example. The last picture shown is the one that ran in the Times of India. I should be getting a burned copy of the Hindi newscast soon, but I don't know how likely I am to want to share it! The next festival, right after my September-term finals, is Ganesh Chaturthi, where elephant-sized statues of Ganesh are paraded into the Arabian Sea, statues being the only thing to safely submerge in the oceans here, unfortunately.
As a side note, I'm getting a better handle on Hindi, and while almost everyone around Mumbai has been very open and kind, I've met a few people who I'm getting to know better outside of our group of international Temple students, which is doing wonders to combat the stir-crazy nature of cooping 15 people together in the same room for 36+ hours of lectures a week! My October-December schedule will free things up, and I'll have more time to get a more holistic experience, and more time to write, too.

In A Tiffin

Happiness is a warm tiffin at 7:30 . . . this is my tiffin, a thermos (minus any cartoon affiliations) loaded with hot vegetarian Indian foodstuffs. Every night the tiffin man comes, wearing shorts (rare here) and a combover (more prevalent, but not so common as the mustache) and looking like he just came off of a golf course in Augusta, bearing about 25 plastic thermoses for the girls living in our hostel. He speaks better English than most of the shopkeepers here, and is unfailingly friendly and attentive. He saw that we weren't eating the home-packaged yogurt (partially because people insist on calling it "curd," which sounds inedible to begin with) and started getting us Dahi brand, a respectable yogurt here. He charges about 75 cents a day for a full meal in stackable metal dishes: each night we get white rice, roti (indian wheat tortillas), lentil soup of some fashion--could be yellow, could be brown--and an entree. There's also a little plastic container of cucumbers and limes which I'm not supposed to eat, but I don't know how long I can really hold out. Entrees range from really spicy green beans to barbeque-spiced kidney beans to spicy cauliflower to spicy potatoes. There seems to be a theme. . . but I think it's all great. We all spend a little too much time relating digestive stories here, but I've been incredibly lucky so far (knock on Redwood). Also, I've been eating tiffins for three weeks and haven't paid a dime yet. He bills at the end of the month. My bill will be $19.50 for a whole month of dinners Monday-Saturday. Below is the typical spread:
Since Mumbai's a large city, many workers don't get to go home for lunch, and others who come from the villages make a trip about once a month. Actually, we've found out that the cafeteria workers at the business school live there, sleeping on the cafeteria floors at night. Just like Horn & Hardart's replicated home-cooked meals in the big cities of the early and mid-twentieth century, Mumbai has establishments with signs outside saying "Lunch Home." It is the same language, they just use it differently. We realized quickly that we weren't really welcome in these places when looking around we were the only women inside and while others were served in 5 minutes, our lunch took over 45, but in general I haven't felt unwelcome often, which is more than I can say for a lot of tourists and immigrants in Philadelphia, I'm sure.

Matunga Central

Here are some scenes from my neighborhood, Matunga, named after the train station down the street. Unfortunately, there are two Matungas in Mumbai. I'm all for giving the other one an alternate name, but others seem to disagree.
My school is a large modern building, just a few blocks away from my dorm, on the main street, "Napoo."







There's a market just a few blocks away where you can get a DVD player, a guava, nailpolish, etc.

This is my favorite picture so far, taken right outside of the market. I'd have zoomed in on the vendor's face, but I wanted to show the atmosphere in the background, too. . .
I'm going to catch an American/Bollywood film, but I'll post more pictures later this weekend.

Namaste!. . . Hello?

Welcome to Mumbai! The picture above is the gate of my hostel out to the street--big, leafy palms and other trees, crumbling slate (?) sidewalks and the occasional car. It's a sleepy pathway, two blocks removed from a bustling market street:


I soon learned that the only word of Hindi that I know, the greeting "namaste," is pretty much obsolete in the big city, especially among the more cosmopolitan crowd. When I asked some of the girls in my dorm (called a hostel) how to say "thank you" in the semi-official Indian language, they all looked at each other for a moment before telling me that I'd seem pretty antiquated if I tried to use it. My best bet is to go with plain old "thank you."

It's taken me a while to share my first posting--I've been here for a whole week now, but some things are slow going around here, like internet hookups. Just like in the US, the IT guys have their own odd corner (their nook is shared at the college with a separate glassed-in room where the server sits in brightly-lit wired isolation like an electric-chair victim), their own secrets, and apparently, their own timetable. There's a fluidity of time best described, I think by the following actual conversation:
Me: "So you said that your servicemen were going to be here at 4:00 pm yesterday and we waited for them for three hours."
IT: "Yes. They will be there today. What time will you be home?"
"What time should we be home?"
"Well, 4:00. They'll be there 4:00, 4:30."
"No problem. We'll be here at 4:00 to let you in."
"Yes, they'll be there 4:30, maybe 5:00."
"Ok. But will they really be there?"
"Yes. 5:00, 5:30 maybe."
This chronological line of bargaining went on for several days. And just like in a modern Indian fairytale, the third time was the charm.
Meanwhile, my roommate's modem blew out temporarily somehow, and we were wondering if they had chug-through tech support stops for Dell customers on autorickshaws.

I have more pictures and many more experiences to post in the next few days, just not more time tonight. "Thank you" for reading. . . did I pronounce it right?

So you're moving to India . . .

This pending move has been difficult for a lot of people to fathom (including myself). My friends are excited, my family's curious, and as for others, well, there have been a spectrum of reactions. Some people have been concerned about my preparations, making sure that I "don't eat too much curry before I go," and that it's occurred to me to get a visa. Others are more interested in my trip itself. While many people have expressed concern about health precautions, some are focusing on cultural exchange and sensitivity to diverse ways of living. I have been warmly cautioned by two people, "don't fall in love with a guru," seeing through my protestations that I'm not going to Mumbai for 5 months just to find a husband. A concerned acquaintance notably asked if I'd have to wear a burqa (?!). Only for powerpoint presentations. Helps with masking public speaking-related facial tics.

My travel medicine provider told me a story about how the day after she moved her son to college for his freshman year, the boy who sat across from him at the dining hall breakfast fell ill and died of meningitis. Thinking of the New Jersey-on-steroids population density stats, I sprang for the vaccine. She also advised me, after I opted out of the $700 rabies shot series, not to pet cows, even if they "look cute." I've often said there's nothing more adorable than a rabid cow, so this might be a particularly difficult hurdle for me, lonely in a foreign country.

Some people did proffer incredibly helpful information: one of my new classmates gave me information for Suma Travels, a midtown Manhattan discount travel agency which caters mostly to Indians in America planning visits home. I'd highly recommend their rates for anyone interested in traveling to India soon (*visiting me*).

In terms of my preparations, I've gotten my shots and Typhoid pills (which need to be refrigerated at 46F max, but I was permitted to carry home from the doctor's in 95-degree heat), bought my tickets and gave my notice at both jobs. I've paid my last month's rent at the trash-moated South Street Castle.

But I'm still approaching malaria limbo (how $high can you go). Pill D costs $.60 per day but causes digestive problems and other lovely issues. Pill M has virtually no side effects, but costs $6 a day. Pill L is affordable taken only once a week, but can cause and intensify depression. None are covered by my insurance. Since my tourist visa will render me inelegible for a call-center job, I'm not looking kindly on taking out a loan to cover preventative malaria costs on Pill M ($900 total), but Pill D's warnings would compound math homework and the expected constant low-grade stomach disturbance. So I'm hoping against hope that Powerball comes through and/or Pill L doesn't shut me down. . . and wondering what others have selected.


P.S. Thanks, Alli, for titling my blog. Genius at work.