10/17/11 India

After 6 wonderful days in India, it's time to catch up on my blog.  India is a land of excitement and possibility, of extreme poverty and tremendous wealth, of ridiculously delicious food and unbelievable hospitality, of smothering heat and scary pollution.  One of our preport lecturers said, "Whatever you say about India, the opposite is also true."  In the few days I was there, I certainly had enough experiences and heard enough stories to support that quote.  I was taken twice by by auto rickshaw drivers to places I did not want to be (because they would get a cut from the store owner if I bought something) and was lied to about why I was there.  Another auto rickshow driver spent 17 hours with a shipmate helping her get through a stressful experience, telling her to "put back her tears," and staying with her until he knew she was ok.  When asked what she owed, he told her to pay whatever she thought was fair, if she felt he had treated her with kindness. I saw the slums with people living in "tents" made of pieced-together plastic bags, and stayed with a wealthy business owner and his family in a beautiful home. It is a land of contrasts.

Jeff and the boys stayed with the above-mentioned host family for 2 days prior to me joining them, because I was on-call those first 2 days.  I joined them the morning of the 3rd day.  The family-hired driver, the son, Madhu, and Jeff picked me up outside the port at about 9 am.  Upon getting to the home, I met Rao, the father, and Malathy, his wife.  Malathy was very busy in the kitchen cooking a feast for breakfast, which she and her son served to my family and her husband.  Since this was my second breakfast of the day, I tried to take it easy with the delicious homemade fried Indian flatbread, curried shrimp, and vegetable side dishes she served.  She refused to sit with us out of need to serve us, and absolutely forbade me to help cook or clean.  This was all translated through her husband, because she and I did not share a common language.

Jeff and I sat and talked with Rao for the next 2-3 hours about family, social issues (such as the place of women in Indian society), and spirituality.  He is Hindu and we asked a lot of questions about that religion.  Because they believe that God is present in everything, practicing Hindus are very kind to their fellow humans and to animals.  Rao told me that when people act poorly it doesn't make him angry, because to him it just means that they have not yet connected with God.  If they knew God, he said, they would be unable to act in a way that was angry or not kind. When I asked him to explain the multiple Gods in the Hindu Faith, he stated, in a nutshell, that he believes there is only one God, and that the different Hindu Gods are all part of that one God.  They are a way for humans to connect with, and explain the various attributes of God, and a way to make something that is totally intangible, more "real."  It was an exciting conversation and I felt very connected to this spiritual human being.

I was then told that their family has a tradition of giving a saree to all the women guests who stay with them for the first time, on the condition that the guest will wear it that day.  Not wanting to upset the apple cart, I gladly picked a beautiful pink and silver saree from a pile of new sarees.  Rao's daugher Sujathe, and her husband Kartic, then arrived at the house to go to lunch with us. Sujathe took me to her old bedroom and began the complicated process of dressing me in the saree.  After twisting, folding, tucking and pinning me in to yards and yards of material, I felt like a princess.  Sujathe and her mother then adorned me with matching jewels; a pink and gray pearl necklace with pink pearl earrings, bright pink bangles for my wrists, anklets, flowers and jewels for my hair, and a pink bindi for my forehead. Now I felt like a queen.  We all piled into cars and went to eat at an Indian restaurant, where an amazing South Indian meal was waiting for us.  Rao refused to let us pay for any of it.  Stuffed full of delicious breads, vegetables and sweets, we got back into the cars and drove to the school where the kids and Jeff were to do their "$100 solution" presentation.

The "$100 Solution" is a project that encourages small donations of $100 to communities to help fund projects that will become part of sustainable solutions to issues of concern for those communities.  Reade, Tate and Jeff are leading the Semester at Sea pilot program to see how the concept works with school-age children.  If successful, Semester at Sea hopes to make it part of the school age children "curriculum" while at sea. After making their presentation to the school kids, ideas for how best to use that $100 were discussed, and it was decided that they would use it to help fund a "green" project to reduce plastic bag usage by replacing them with reusable canvas bags.  Part of the proceeds from each bag sale will go back into the project to fund more bags, thus making it sustainable. The kids and Jeff did a wonderful presentation in a stuffy, VERY hot classroom while I sat proudly and suffered with rivers of sweat running down my saree-clad body.  After the presentation, the school fed us again - sweet rice, vegetable filled pockets, and sweet, milky tea.  The plan was to go out to dinner a few hours later, but the Warner family was so stuffed full of Indian deliciousness, that we decided to skip that idea, and went back to the host home.  Forever the hostess, Malathy and her two servants cooked us an amazing dinner anyway.  When it was time to leave, I took off my jewerly to return it to it's rightful owner, and was flatly refused.  In fact, the jewerly was taken upstairs, packed up carefully, and given back to me as a gift I "must" take. Then we were given a wood-inlaid "picture" of Ganesh, one of the Hindu Gods. With this gift, Rao said they were hoping we would think of them every day, whenever we saw the picture.  Their driver took us back to the ship late that night.  We hope they will come visit us in Colorado some day.

From this experience, I was forced to think hard about generosity and hospitality.  The small gestures I've made to my guests in the past now seem embarrassingly little, and I hope I will do better in the future.  India felt like a very spiritual, hospitable country, and the USA could certainly learn from some of India's cultural attributes.