Thoughts about Taking Photos

It's not always easy to know when to take, or how to use, photos we take in another culture, where particular sensitivity may be required.  As we've thought about the issues involved here in India, there seem to be several things to consider, in three steps.  (Note: this issue may not be of interest, but I do include some new photos you may want to see below.)

First, what is the role of taking photos for us as photographers and travelers?  It's difficult not to take at least some photos in a place like India, where images new, colorful, and interesting abound.  We do all take photos here.  But what role do we want that to play in our experience?  Is there a danger in taking too many photos, in thinking that because we've taken a photo of something we have actually seen it, experienced it?  When we're shy, is it easy to "hide" behind our cameras, seeing India through a lens or on our viewscreen rather than in an unmediated way?  When does photo taking complement and even enhance our experience, and when does it replace or get in the way of that experience?

Second, what ethical and cultural obligations and sensitivities do we need to bring to bear when we are making choices among what things, events, people, and places to photograph?  Here, there are several things we should not photograph: a close-up of a Muslim woman dressed in modest clothing that calls us to respect her privacy, for example.  Or the interior of a temple where photos are not allowed, even explicitly forbidden.  (I do not include photos of this kind as examples, for obvious reasons!)

There are also photos that are clearly o.k. to take.  These include the one below of me at our recent visit to the Taj Mahal.  No problem there, it's just me, and I'm joined by a thousand others taking a similar photo!  (Interesting fact for you Taj Mahal fans: the minarets all lean slightly out, away from the Taj, so that in this earthquake-prone region if they were to fall they would not fall on theTaj itself!)

Likewise, photos taken within our group seem o.k., unless they capture someone doing something too embarrassing or personal.  For example, see the photo below in which our group is enjoying large rice-flour crepes called dosas at a roadside eating stop.  This is the kind of photo we are constantly taking of each other and sending home.  Implicit permission to take photos seems clear.

A similar photo is the one below: some of our students, and some students with whom they were doing an observational research project.  We were all taking photos of each other, with "implied consent" the probable norm involved once again.  Here, too, all the students were taking photos of each other to remember their shared experiences. 

In other situations, it's polite to ask people if you may take their photograph.  This is important whenever the person is a stranger, or you're doing a close-up, be even if you just want to be on the safe side.  I asked permission to take the photo below of two women psychology professors whom I spent some time with during our week in Bangalore, particularly one morning at a large park where we strolled.  We were taking photos of each other, we were roughly similar in social status (perhaps me a bit more "senior" due to gender and age, but still using the same terms of address for one another), we were beginning to be friends, AND I still asked if I could take their photo. 

On the other hand, sometimes I've taken photos from a distance, such as at the Taj Mahal, of a crowd of folks, without asking permission, but in a context when we're all taking a lot of photos and crowd scenes are common in a photo.  This photo below might be more a "gray area" photo, but you can think about that for yourself.  Does it seem invasive or rather harmless?

Finally, there's the third consideration: when to circulate a photo as I'm doing here.  I sometimes take a photo but then decide afterwards that I shouldn't share it widely--that is, on a public blog such as this one, even if I keep a copy for myself and what the moment means.  It's not always enough to decide whether to take a photo, but also when to share it.  For example, I have some close-up's of children at several villages where we visited for some time, and the children asked me to take their photo so they could see their image in my viewing screen.  And they are adorable.  But I'm uncertain about putting photos of children out there on the web, especially without their parent's permission.  They are too young to give me real permission for the uses to which photos might be put. So the "last step" in the ethical considerations of photography for me has been not if I've asked to take the photo, but whether on reflection it seems like I should not put the photo "out there" for general viewing.  Related to this, note that I've not given names of people in the photos, or names or locations of the villages whose photos I've posted; this has been another "post-photo" consideration: whether I need to keep the likelihood of viewers identifying the photo or people in it even if I decide to post it on this blog.

And that's it for now.  Stay tuned. 

Religious and Rural Traditions

When we (people in the West) think of India, or at least what we think of as the "real India," we often have in mind India's historic traditions and culture: perhaps the "many gods" of Hinduism, India as home to one of the world's great food cultures, temples, the Taj Mahal (Muslim and not Hindu in origin), perhaps other things like meditation or yoga, or village life.  

New things also come to mind: Bollywood films, or the high-tech centers of places like Bangalore (where we are now), but we may think of these as very recent developments that are somehow, in our images, exceptions to the rule.  

What we are experiencing is that there are many Indias.  Some are very old, and some very new.  For centuries (or millennias!) India has been a place of dozens of different languages (we began our time here in a Tamil-speaking city, and are now in one that counts Kannada as its "home" language, and the other night saw a film in Telugu).  It's been a place of not only Hinduism, but also the birthplace of Buddhism (now found among just a remnant), a place where St. Thomas the apostle left behind Christian churches in the first century C.E., whose descendants we see even today, and Islam, as well as the Sikh and Jain faiths.  There are a number of primary castes, and hundreds of sub-castes, as well as "tribal" peoples in various places, especially the northeast and east of India.  It's a complex place.  

We've had a chance to visit a number of Hindu temples, some in each place we've been.  To the left is the outside of Nandi the Bull's temple here in Bangalore.  Nandi is associated with Shiva in Hindu belief, among other things the massive bull which Lord Shiva rides.  The image of Nandi, in the photo below, was carved out of a massive boulder centuries ago, and the temple was later built around it.
   We take off our shoes before entering, and join others, including pilgrims, who are walking around the statue; at the rear, some drink some sacred water, and as we continue around to the front of the image a priest dips his fingertip into

vermillion (bright red) paste, and puts a mark on each of our foreheads.

Another day, we visit the ISKCON temple, a more recent one (while Nandi's is centuries old).  It's the temple and movement from which a "missionary" left for the U.S. in the 1960's, and helped give rise to the Hare Krishna movement which older readers of this blog may recall.  It's a huge temple, ornate inside; a priest greets us when we arrive, and guides us past images at which worshipers are praying; we are uncomfortable getting what seems like special treatment, especially if we are intruding on people's religious experience, one not our own.  Still, we are impressed by the videos we are shown in a conference room of the temple's good works feeding over 1.5 million poor children each day.  And we eat an excellent buffet lunch (pure veg, of course) in the temple's restaurant before we leave; we enjoy it, yet our students are beginning to ask more questions about their own privileges and affluence, and the contradictions of which we are a part.

In another instance, we visit a temple to watch a performance of traditional karnatic dance.  It's moving and impressive, a single woman dancer, carefully costumed, stomping and twirling and moving in a way both athletic and graceful, with hand and facial and eye movements to help her tell the story about the gods which a small music group is accompanying, including a wonderful male violinist and a woman singer.  Our students seem mesmerized, either by the dances, or by the young local girls who are moving their hands along with the dancers from their seats, perhaps aspiring to such grace themselves someday much as girls in our own may wish to become ballerinas.

We also had a yoga class from a woman psychology professor at the university which is hosting us here in Bangalore early in our time here.  All 22 of us plopped down on mats in one of the classroom buildings, and she led us through a series of increasingly difficult poses or movements, though gently, warning that anything that hurt should be a sign we should sit that one out (was it my imagination she was looking right at me?).  We also worked with our breath.  I was in the front row; as good Muslim women might at a mosque, the women wanted "the boys" in front so they wouldn't peek at them while moving in yet-unknown positions.  It felt good, even though there were several positions I could not do at all, even while our teacher seemed to do them with  such grace, strength, and ease.  It was clear that she is devoted to yoga as a spiritual practice rather than just another kind of exercise; some yoga teachers here seem to lament that yoga practices in the West have been stripped of their spiritual meaning and context.

I'll close with mention of another aspect of "traditional" India.  An earlier posting talked about our long visit to a Dalit farming community for Pongal, the harvest festival.  But we've also visited farming villages here in the state of Karnataka (where Bengalore is located).  A view of the farmyard where the harvest is being processed is shown below.

In this photo we see women winnowing the grain by hand, primarily millet, as well as the tall piles of by-product which can be sold later for animal feed.  We see farm animals wandering about, and a cow peeking into the left side of the photo.  Blue barrels of water are there as well; there's no running water (modern plumbing system) in the village that we saw, though there is some irrigation.  Much of the work is done by hand, though there are other signs that things are changing--there is electricity, and some homes have television, and there's a paved road that meanders through the village along which a bus rolls by several times a day, past the small school.  There are several health and education programs which are sponsored by the social justice folks at the university where we are living while in Bangalore, which is how we happen to be there--once again hosted by some local activists.  We visit the classroom, and spend time with the children, a high point of each day we have a chance to visit schools.  Below is a photo of the side of the service program workplace, illustrating healthy baby issues.

The panel on the left shows a baby in a sling on which a baby is weighed to make sure it's within the parameters (shown in the green band) for healthy development.  Bring your baby in for weighing!  And while you're there, panel to the right, it's good to make sure your baby has its vaccinations (India just celebrated three years as a polio-free country, in spite of reservoirs of the virus in next-door Pakistan).  Another panel, not shown, encouraged mothers to breast-feed.

We visit the home of one family, an extended family of 11 people, who by village standards seem "middle class."  They have a three room home, plus one for the cattle (also part of the house), and a small but tidy kitchen.  The women cook over propane gas, but also have a fire pit for cooking over, in the kitchen.  And the woman of the house has an admirably-organized collection of cooking utensils and dishes (photo below, through a turquoise-painted doorframe), including some pots large enough for Serious Rice Cooking.  Note the orange plastic "pot" for water, as running water inside doesn't seem available, nor an indoor toilet.

Our host cooks "ragi," or balls of cooked millet, and offers them with some green curry; the curry is a good addition, as to our tastebuds the ragi is rather plain, though a nutritious grain.  We are served on the floor, as in the other village we visited; people don't eat on tables.  Yet, we find, the household does own a car.  "Tradition," at least in these times, is a changing and complex thing, hard to define.

And there are paradoxes in efforts to bring better health and education to the village.  Electricity brings new visions of life from the cities on television (Bangalore has grown by several million people in recent years, mostly rural migrants).  More education and literacy for the children, especially girls, may lead to the possibility of more education that the village cannot offer, and once in the city the young people may not return to the life of a farmer.  Girls may have more choices, and both education and lower infant mortality may make choices about children more plausible.  Will the villages die out one day?  Who will raise the food for 1.2 billion people, especially when imported food is becoming too expensive?  Will the virtues of rural traditions and small-town life be enough to keep enough young people at home, or will the changes that have made village life better in some ways undermine its future in others?

In a future posting: life at InfoSys, and the rise of the malls.

Gender on the Street

Here in India, we can't help notice gender patterns and differences--some familiar from the U.S., and some a variation or different.  You see this when out on the street, in traffic, or walking around our current campus (Christ University in Bangalore, or Bangaleru).

What do we see in the photo above?  Lots of traffic, for one thing--though this is a rather less crowded scene than one usually sees on most streets, into the late evening (!).  Among other things, you might be able to see that nearly all motorbike drivers are men, often young men (perhaps because weaving in and out of traffic is a younger man's sport?).  Though one occasionally sees a young woman driving a bike, they are almost always the passenger (and if married, sometimes with a small child in between the couple).  As you can see with the woman in the blue sari, they usually don't hang on to the male driver, but rather balance as best they can, perhaps holding on with one hand.  She's also sitting modestly, side-saddle, with no bike between her legs (having to negotiate her sari might also be a factor), though I think that must also render her perch more precarious; the girl in red on the right is riding more firmly, wearing loose pants.  

The photo also suggests that women, in addition to dressing differently than men, also are more likely to dress in traditional Indian wear, either a sari (especially for married ladies), or at least a kurta (a long shirt, almost a dress, that comes down to the knee, with loose pants underneath, matching the top if one is being stylish).  The men, on the other hand, would likely be wearing dark pants with a western style sport or polo shirt; businessmen or other more elite men would likely be wearing a dark suit, often with a tie.  We see this in the photo of students on campus below.

While some of these young women are wearing jeans, most are wearing more traditional pants (the more daring are wearing tights, but note that no actual legs are to be seen; neither men nor women wear shorts).  Some arms are bare, but I've only seen bare shoulders a few times.  Overall, modesty is the expectation for both men and women, but for women a more traditional version than for men.  (I should add that I love the styles and colors the women wear.)  Another important thing to note in the photo above: there are lots of women students in this photo, taken during the change between classes one day; while female illiteracy is still common among poor women, expectations of not only literacy but also college are common among the growing middle class (at InfoSys, a major Indian high tech corporation we visited the other day--more on that in a later post--about a third of the employees are women).  

Gender also seems to be a largely homosocial world here.  On campus one does see mixed groups, talking and joking, but on the larger street, apart from couples married or who are doing the Indian version of dating, women are often walking around with other women, and men with men.  Men sometimes hold hands with each other (no gay identity implied here by that), and less often one sees women linking arms (but not holding hands).  Cross-sex touching in public seems rare; I've only seen one male-female couple holding hands, and no hint of public kissing or hugging (kissing is almost non-existent even in Bollywood films that feature a certain amount of female skin in the dance scenes).  

Pedestrian traffic continues well into the evening, but my impression is that women "drop out" of street life earlier than men; women alone would be more conspicuous than men alone, and presumably less safe, subject to harassment, or perhaps worse (given some well-publicized recent events of rape).  So who can be out on the street, and when, is also gendered.  Our faculty hosts have told us it's good for women to be settled in by around 9:30.

Much of what I've said applies "more so" for observant Muslims (India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia, even though our program engages primarily with Hindu and Christian India).  Muslim women often cover their hair, and sometimes their face, when out in public, and wear a robe that is even less revealing than kurtis and saris for Hindu women.  Muslim women seem much more likely to wear traditional Muslim clothing, though of course those who are not may not be "seen" by me as Muslim as easily.  (There are some neighborhoods where I feel like I'm back in Cairo, and one does see modest-sized mosques and hear the call to prayer if one is familiar enough with it to hear it amidst the din of constant traffic noise.)

I've been writing here in terms of our conventional gender binary, women and men.  But the other day when we were on a commuter train, a quite tall woman got on the train, and clapped her hands loudly, then began asking passengers for some money.  She looked different in some ways from the usual woman, and acted differently--usually women beggars are very quiet, if sometimes insistent.  We realized she was a hijra, or a "third sex" person, someone born a male who's living as a female.  It's a bit different than what we usually mean by a transgender person, though in fact when we were applying for our visas for India we were asked to check one of three boxes: male, female, and transgender.  Being an hijra goes way back in Indian culture, and involves some ritual and wedding roles, among other things.

Possibly related to this is my experience one day trying to find a kurta for Barbara.  She's not here, of course, to try one on, and Indian sizes are different than in the U.S., so since we are roughly the same size (if not necessarily the same shape), I took the kurtis to the women's dressing room, seeing no men's, to try on.  The ladies who help were gracious, and when I came out a young salesgirl asked me "Would sir be needing some cosmetics to go with his kurtis?"  I felt like I had fallen into some ambiguous gender category.  (I didn't get the cosmetics.)

And one more "gender on the street" observation for the moment: whitenings.  Our students have noticed that beauty or cosmetic shops often advertise skin lightening treatments, often specifically called "whitening."  A "fairer" woman is considered more desirable; one local woman showed me a photo of her brother's fiancee, and commented that she's not as fair as the photo shows, as photographers can lighten the soon-to-be bride's skin to make her "more attractive."  My own personal reaction is unbelief: most of the local southern Indian women I've seen (faculty, local students, on the street) are often darker than many African Americans back home, and they are also lovely in the deep golds, oranges, reds, yellows and other colors, perhaps with a dark green or turquoise scarf.  But I also know this is not necessarily a helpful reaction, any more than if I tell a woman student back home who's worried about her looks that she looks just fine.  

A more sociological response is to think about why lighter skin might seem preferable.  I'm not sure, but there may be several factors at work: class and caste might be one, if darker skin connotes someone who works in the fields, and so is a lower-class farm worker or laborer.  Another might be the increasingly persistent presence of media images of white/European women as the standard of beauty for women everywhere; we often see advertisements that feature white women many shaders lighter than those women towards whom the ads are aimed.  And third, colonialism might be at work: British colonialism, ending only in 1947, justified itself with assumptions about race and racial inferiority, with the darker the people the less civilized they might be.  But there's also an earlier wave of "colonialism," when the Muslims from the areas northwest of Indian established the Mughal caliphates, ruling for centuries (remember that the iconic image of India, the Taj Mahal, was built by the Mughals, and is closed on Fridays, the primary Muslim holy day of prayer); the incoming people were from areas of Persia and Afghanistan and farther west, much lighter in color than the more indigenous Dravidian people of the South.  The Southern peoples with whom we've so far spent most of our time speak different languages than northern ones, are more conservative Hindus, and share various cultural differences with those in the north.  But, bottom line, color makes a difference, and evidently much more so for women than men, for whom beauty is more an issue.

I'll be posting later on some differences in family and marriage patterns, another key aspect of gender here.  

So, how's the food?

As with the travels with students to the Middle East and Asia that Barbara and I have done in recent years, eating local foods is a significant highlight of the experience here in India.  When we were in China in 2004, we realized how much more diverse Chinese food is than what one gets in Chinese-American restaurants back home--and the same is proving true here in India.

At one of our hotel stays (a short one at our most upscale hotel), the breakfast buffet included the following: idlis (soft rice cakes), corn dumplings, vadas (very light doughnut shaped buns), sambhar (a nice sauce that goes with several other things), pongal (a variation on what we had at the village in an earlier post--a rice and sugar cane porridge with whatever else one wants to add), puma (a multi-grain dish), poori (puffed-up, deep-fried items), bhaji, sweet lassi, fresh papaya, curd (a denser, richer yogurt), shikanjii (a sweet and salty drink), watermelon juice, and spider rolls (little dumplings with little sticks of something on them).  And coffee--while we think of tea as particularly Indian (and it is), including spiced tea with milk (chai), coffee is popular here, often served with hot milk (sort of an Indian cafe con leche).  Yum.

Another buffet menu (served yesterday for lunch at our visit to InfoSys, here in Bangalore, to which we've moved in recent days--part of the complex of major information technology corporations here): dahi wadi (small grain dumplings with sweet chutney), Indian green salad (with lots of red onions), tomato with dal shorba, kadai fish curry, tindly varuval, gobi mutter masala, dal tadka, rice pilaf, cured pickles, papad(am) (a very thin, crispy bread), a variety of naan (thicker flat breads), gulab jamoon (like doughnut holes served in sweet syrup), and fresh fruits (papaya, watermelon, pineapple).

We don't, of course, have such extensive buffets often.  We're now staying at Christ University in Bangalore, with a good but modest breakfast buffets: idlis, vadas, hard-boiled eggs, perhaps a rice dish, and some (excellent) fresh fruit, as well as milk coffee or tea.  We also are sampling from the food court at a mall several blocks away, which features a variety of small places (see photo below) with inexpensive ($1-2) items, many of which are tasty, and which we haven't encountered back in the U.S.

We've also cooked our own Indian food--we had a cooking class the other night, taught by the chef who teaches restaurant cooking classes, and his student assistant.  Our group divided into six groups, each responsible for one of the six dishes we would be preparing in the large professional kitchen on campus as part of the Hotel Management Program.  We each got a hat and an apron.  My group was responsible for making dessert, a carrot and raisin halwa (ingredients included many grated carrots, sugar, khova (milk solids), liquid milk, ghee or clarified butter, hand-chopped almonds, cashews, and raisins).  Other dishes included fish tikka (with both fish and prawns), cottage cheese tikka, corn and potato patties, lamb chops (spices/ingredients included coconut, coriander leaves, chili, mint, onion, pepper, cinnamon sticks, cloves, ginger, garlic, salt and oil), peas and potato curry, and mint and cumin pulao or pilaf.

It took several hours to pull all this together by hand (no machine processing!), and the chef had us wash everything (pans, knives, counter-tops) before we were to sit down at a long table to eat our results.   We did most of the actual work, but the chef circulated throughout the process to help us with tricky steps or techniques (his almond splitting technique with a large knife was admirable).  And the results were great; eating them was almost as much fun as the work in the kitchen.  It was an enjoyable group activity, but also gave us insight into the work that goes into Indian cooking, and the kind of knowledge that has made it one of the great "food civilizations."

I should mention a few other things about food here.  One is the north/south India difference: in the south, where we are, rice is the basis or accompaniment to many dishes, and appears in many more forms than just pilaf; in the north, wheat is the basis for breads and some dishes.  The South is also more conservative in its Hinduism, and there are more vegetarians (the upper Hindu castes in particular would avoid meat), while in the north, which is more Muslim (especially the northwest), there are more grilled meats.  Most restaurants have large lettering out front indicating whether they are "non-veg" or "veg" or both; some are "pure veg" (like "glatt kosher," not only veg but more strictly veg--no fish, for example, though foods cooked with ghee would still usually be allowed).  Dana and I went to a cafe last night with a local woman to a cafe which lists further considerations: some dishes were marked with a symbol indicating they were suitable for Jains (one of the Indian religious faiths), including no garlic or onion.

Some of our students encountered such things in unexpected ways when, weary of delicious Indian food all the time, they sought out a McDonald's--not hard to find.  But: no pork sausages (forbidden to Muslims, a number of whom live here in Bangalore), but also no beef (forbidden to observant Hindus), so no Big Macs!  Instead, there's a chicken Maharaja Burger (which the students declared delicious).

And I end with a more somber note about food: not everyone here has enough.  We learned in one of our social work lectures earlier that almost half of India's children are malnourished, sometimes chronically so, resulting in stunted growth (a larger proportion of Indian children are malnourished than in sub-Saharan Africa, they tell us here).  We spent time in classrooms the other day with a program that seeks to educate slum (the local term) children, and found that they provide three meals a day to the children involved; during the month breaks in the school year, teachers said that they could see some of the children "shrink" without the food they normally got at school.  The gap between the middle class and the poor is a key issue here in India.

Until the next post!  Bruce

Winter to winter

Greetings once again from India.  And apologies to those of you who were not able to get access to this blog with the address I sent earlier.  At this point, I think either bruceinindia.blogspot.com or bruceinindia.blogspot.in will work.  No "@"'s!

For local people here in South India, this is "winter."  Yet, in Chennai, it's been in the mid-80's daily, with some humidity.  The experience of weather seems relative; we see some folks with wool hats pulled down over their ears!  But when summer comes, the wet, hot monsoon season, I imagine the weather here now does seem like winter.  In any event, for those of us refugees from a cold Minnesota winter, it's been a welcome burst of summer.  We spent part of one afternoon at the beach just south of Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal.  A few local people were swimming, but most, like the three ladies in the photo below, were content to just enjoy the crashing waves and a day away.

Our group of 20 students seems to be doing well.  For most, India is new, and Dana (the psychology professor who organized the course) has provided a number of ways for us to experience the culture and people.  A key early one has been our contact with faculty and students at Madras Christian College, noted in the first post.  As part of our program with them, we spent a day at a Dalit village (Dalits were formerly referred to as "untouchables," the group below even the lowest of the social castes in India).

That day was the first day of Pongal, or the harvest festival in Southern India.  This included making a special food in terra cotta cooking pots over outdoor fires, a mixture of the recent rice and sugar cane harvests with a few other spices, to make a tasty meal.  A number of such pots are set out to cook at the same time as the village gathers, and they are let to boil over for a moment to symbolize the bounty of the harvest (our pots are overflowing).  In the photo below, we see some of the women around the pongal pots, one of whom is stirring it.  We were included in a brief Hindu ceremony afterwards, and then given a portion of the new harvest food to eat (anything that's been freshly cooked is safe to eat, but we avoid unknown street foods, for example).

After these ceremonial aspects, we shared in some of the music and games (some drumming and dancing--I was invited up to help drum but was well outclassed by the older boys, but some of our women students were active dancers).  One of the more dramatic games included small teams of young men trying to tag and capture one another, hoping to successfully throw the person sought to the ground (see photo below).

Afterwards we adjourned to a house where women who are involved in the various programs seeking to improve village life spoke of what they do in the areas of education and health (these programs are part of social justice outreach from the college) (the woman in the green sari, photo above, as one of the leaders, and helped arrange our visit).  It was inspiring to see some of their efforts, and we were also fed more of the festival food, on banana leaves, most of us sitting on the floor (except for some of us older folks, such as myself, whom local people see as an elder, who were encouraged to take one of the few seats).  A tasty bit of fish curry was added.  Their welcome and their hospitality were humbling.

Some of our students were uncomfortable, as this was a poor village and we were relatively affluent Americans.  How do we know what we're doing here?  Our students want to be sensitive and respectful of the culture, and its rules and etiquette, but we're not always certain we know what they are.  Yet we experienced what is sometimes called an "extravagant welcome."  And no one else would usually visit a Dalit village (nor would ordinary American tourists), nor perhaps accept food from their hands (whose touch was once considered to make that food ritually impure), or hold their babies.  And the kids found our visit exciting, asking our names and we theirs in turn, shaking our hands.  And we were invited and expected.  But are these the kinds of rationalizations it's easy to make when you're having a good time?  And, too, we come from a society ourselves in which welcoming the stranger has a ragged history.  Now we, in a small way, are "strangers in a strange land," yet also privileged ones, uncertain what that means.

I was grateful that some of our students were asking these kinds of questions, as the kind of interaction we hope for between us (our group) and local people of varying genders and classes is always complicated and needs a sensitivity that takes time and care to develop.  On the one hand, there's no differences between our and their (local villagers) ability to dream, to take small pleasures, to love one another, and to find purpose in something larger than ourselves.  Yet we do differ in important ways, in social class, comforts, language, safety, health, color, access to safe water, and education.  We have privileges of which we are usually unaware, or take for granted.  We are trying to learn, to find a way through to our common humanity in situations in which that humanity has sometimes been denied--in this situation, particularly for Dalits.

I'll conclude for now.  Stay tuned for more!  Namaste (see last photo below).  Bruce

Early Days in Chennai (south India)

I open the curtains in my hotel room here in Chennai (formerly Madras).  The apartment building next door is a bright lime green, shaded by tall coconut trees.  On the outdoor stairs two older women in saris are chatting, while nearby a younger woman stands and joins in.  The late afternoon sun lights up her deep yellow sari, and she glows.  It is a peaceful sight, yet set in the constant background roar of traffic and honking and city noises in this town of eight million people.  

I am, once again, traveling with students to a place I've never been before: India, for the month of January, with one of St. Olaf's study abroad programs.  It is strange to be here with 20 students without Barbara, as leading such programs together has been one of our more significant experiences over the years.  And I'm playing her role, helping to manage the finances and other such tasks, as well as helping in other ways.  I'm assisting Dana Gross, a psychology prof and friend (and long-time carpool rider) with her course here on human development issues in India (family, gender, children, poverty, caste, economic development).  But it's good to be here, as India's been a place I've long wanted to visit, and I continue to enjoy time with students in this kind of setting, learning and experiencing along with them.  In the photo below, Dana and I are on the lower right, and Prince and Miriam, local social work professors at Madras Christian College who have been generous hosts to our group, are on the lower left.

We are getting used to being here.  We left on a Sunday morning (Minnesota time), and arrived in the middle of the night on Tuesday morning (India time), a long journey--to a local temperature over 100 degrees warmer than the one we'd left behind.  We're almost adjusted to jet lag, and find our hotel is both modest and comfortable, often with some warm water, and always with some good food.  Students are enjoying idlis, round white rice cakes with coconut chutney, dal (lentils in a wide variety of preparations), fresh juices, coffee with milk and sugar, a spicy rice dish, and a few other things that rotate each day.  (Southern India is more rice and lentils based, often vegetarian, while northern India is more wheat based, and more meat-eating.)  

We are almost used to the traffic.  It's always busy, a little scary for first-timers; busses, trucks, auto-rickshaws (motorized three-wheelers for a few passengers), two-wheelers (motorbikes), and occasional bicycles compete with each other for space, avoiding what looks like an inevitable collision at the last moment, on streets in which lanes are optional and pedestrians are often on their (our!) own in getting across a street (while also avoiding the occasional cows that do indeed wander the city streets).  Travel times on the bus are sometimes an hour or two.  But we do get a chance to see more of the city, which is often a dizzying mix between very modern business and apartment buildings and some fancy malls, and shacks and shanty communities, or people who are simply homeless and on the street.  

The faculty and students at our host college, MCC, have been very good to us.  Students went with our folks to some local shops to get inexpensive "kurtas" (long pullover shifts that go down to mid-thigh or one's knees, something in between a dress and a shirt), and so our students are each day looking a bit more local (at least superficially).   The picture below shows a lunch with both groups of students in the courtyard by our classroom.

I will post again soon.  This is a sampling for the moment; you can decide whether future postings might be of interest to keep up with!