What does 'mouth mouth mouth mouth mouth' mean?

Well my historically trusty laptop has given up the ghost for the time
being. I'm posting from my phone, so my posts will be a little more
rough until I can get the computer fixed. Just another week and a half
in Beijing, then time for Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Feeling
particularly cut off from the world outside China these days - somehow
the powers that be decided that a good tribute to the earthquake
victims would be to cut off all foreign television programming for
three days. (to be fair, this was an extremely grave event - the
ever increasing official death toll numbers speak for themselves, and
unfortunately a lot of sad, gruesome, and heartstring tugging
anecdotes have emerged from the event. It's been unpleasant going
about 'business as usual' in the city feeling unable to do anything
about something happening not to far away apart from the odd donation)
So don't be afraid to send a message my way so i feel in touch. By
the way, one benefit to posting via phone is easy access to a chinese
script interface - 我想学习汉语在北京! Two points to the first person with a
translation. If you only see a bunch of squares, don't sweat it,
your browser doesn't support chinese. Or, maybe i just felt like
writing the character for 'mouth' several times.

Retrospective: Elephant vs. Dragon in a Developing World Free-for-All

I decided there was enough temporal distance between me and the subcontinent to post a little retrospective in light of what I’m seeing in China. Also it gives me the opportunity to blow the electronic dust off some photos to post. To kick things off, I hereby curse so many newspapers in the media back home for using the phrase “developing countries such as India and China” (I found 40,000 instances of the phrase in the English-language web on Google) . The phrase isn’t inaccurate, but the proximity of the two names in the sentence makes me imagine that the countries are in similar states of development. This is very very far from the reality that I got to sample.

I’ll talk about what I’ve observed about development and my thoughts comparing the two countries - I’ll leave it to others to debate whether and how development should take place in any country. Let me post a caveat before going further – in India I saw large cities, tiny towns, and the more easily reached of non-agrarian villages situated along my journey’s path. In China however, I’ve only seen its two most important metropolises, its favorite domestic vacation destination city, and what suburbia I could make out over the course of a two hour train ride, all in the months preceding the Olympics. Leading up to the Games, the government has made it its utmost priority to look good in front of the world, and, stoked or not with nationalism by the powers that be, the public imagination is completely consumed by this international spectacle. I frequently hear the phrase, “Will it be ready?” referring to the tying up and spit-polishing of construction in Beijing and environs. In other words, I’m seeing China firmly stomp its best foot forward, without sight of the rest of the beast.

To the photos. The first picture showing an oxcart with an om symbol, is probably the clearest one I have to illustrate the chaos and ramshackle feel of an Indian market street in just one shot. It’s from Bombay. Calcutta’s streets were actually much more chaotic with bootstrap commerce and myriad transportation means, but alas, no photos, since it was always so dark while I was in the middle of it. The one shown suffices to give an idea.

The second shot is a street in central Calcutta. The road’s been torn up to be repaved. When it’s finished with paving, it will probably look like those sections that weren’t torn up, and overall won’t be up to a good standard. Old bricks are used for filler. Neighborhood locals, as likely children as adults, do the work.

The third shot is from Kerala, still my favorite state (you think I'm excluding American states, don't you ;) ). Depending on your standards, these people aren’t poor. They are working to enable their livelihood, and they have no need or desire to ask you for money. But they probably can't afford quality goods and services.

The last (and unfortunately blurry) Indian shot is from along the beach in Chennai. Most Tamil girls in the city also wear saris everywhere.

To the China shots next.

First: Here go the Shanghai skyscrapers, taken from the Pearl Tower.

Second: This is a Shanghai street bordered by a mix of local Shanghainese, domestic tourists, and some international tourists.

Third: This is an Audi parked outside of Beihai park next to the Beijing's Forbidden City. It’s license plate has four “8”s on it which is why I took the photo. Mandarin for 8 is ‘ba’, rhyming with 'fa', one word for money. Therefore 8 is lucky, making phone numbers, addresses, and yes, license plates with 8 in them desirable and expensive. The souped up Audi probably ran upwards of $60,000 USD. For it’s lucky number 8’s, one local put the license plate cost at $125,000 USD. Unlike my Keralan friend on the canal banks, the owner of this vehicle did not present him/herself to be pictured. He or she could probably afford quality goods and services.

Last: A deliberately preserved Beijing hutong neighborhood. A really typical hutong should come off as a little bit slummy, but some, especially in central Beijing, perpetuate centuries-old historical traditions especially in architecture, and are themselves tourist attractions.

(I wonder if in future decades some of the bigger slums in India will be preserved and become tourist attractions like in Beijing. Dharavi slum in Bombay already hosts off-beat tours (development tourism). Except that the streets there still stink of human waste, and it’s really not intended as a tourist attraction that some people have as their chosen occupation to beat burlap bags containing scraped-off paint chips into a powder so they can be recycled into paint).

I’ll let the photos provide the study in contrasts for the most part. Let me speak to the potential for editorial bias. Far afield of major cities, and especially outside eastern China, I probably could take photos better resembling the first Indian shot suggesting street chaos, the third shot representing otherwise solvent people who lead a simpler lifestyle, and the last Indian shot representing the perpetuation of tradition irrespective of inconveniences incurred. But taking the reverse approach I promise there are no huge skyscrapers in Bombay, Chennai, or Kolkata. Newly-fabled Bangalore has only two real *highrises* in this IT powerhouse’s downtown, and no metro. (I challenge readers to do an image search for skyscraper plus any of these cities and see what comes up).

Referring to the third photo from each country, I freely admit deliberate, gross and profane editorial bias in juxtaposing the two. I really wanted the contrast.

I also promise that most cities in India will not soon have streets as clean or orderly as those of its neighbor’s to the East. Check out the third, fairly mundane China shot. The hordes of people packed on either side of the street, by Bombay standards, should have long since crowded onto the asphalt to make a traffic-pedestrian curry masala. Moreover the cars stay in their lanes, a practice which avoids gridlock and accidents.

This comparison is as much an indictment of government practice as it is of collective will. India teems with universally cursed yet universally tolerated corruption that the public actively participates in to accomplish much of their mundane legal needs (bribes for stamps on important documents, bribes for paying property tax). When streets are torn up to be repaved, it’s a local politician serving a powerfully large albeit poor constituency, who facilitated the construction contract at their behest. The same street could have been similarly torn up less than two years prior. Also, enforcement of quaint concepts such as traffic laws is a joke, certainly nothing that a palm padded with rupee notes couldn't handle.

The norms of daily life in the bigger cities cause anything that’s publicly owned or publicly shared to quickly become either a waste receptacle or a sitting duck for decay. By contrast, the insides of homes and businesses are strikingly well cared for. Therefore, all this isn't to say I didn't enjoy my time there, actually, I loved most of the conscious hours I spent there for the sense of discovery they afforded. And Kerala . . . ah

PS Need to remind especially to new folks to the blog, this is an *anonymous* blog, so please consider comments accordingly.

Now that's a stadium!

(reposted unmodified)

I've arrived in Beijing and I've begun taking a one month intensive Mandarin language course that I signed up for while in India. It's nice also to be able to settle down for a little while as a change from moving from place to place every two or three days. Some friends in Beijing set up an apartment for me before I arrived. I am for a long time in their debt. Attached you can see pictures of the place. I'm particularly proud of the kitchen, pictured. It's simple, I know, but I've cooked a lot since I arrived, so I've enjoyed just having the facilities for it. The building shown is one of the iconic structures that represent "The New Beijing" . This one is the Olympic stadium shaped like a bird's nest, definitely an architectural wonder. Because of security surrounding the Olympic construction site, it was hard to get a clear shot. I managed to find a hotel near the grounds, the far side of which had a clear shot of the structure.
Mandarin is a very very very difficult language to learn. Gone are the friendly cognates, pronunciation, tonality, and alphabet of more easily accessed languages such as French and Spanish. Learning this is like starting *completely* from scratch. In a (successful) effort to keep ourselves entertained and motivated, I organized a private lesson among my fellow students with my tutor to learn some of the more colorful Mandarin turns-of-phrase, not to mention useful sentences for the more, er, practical situations of daily (and evening-ly) life here. There was a lot of beer involved in the lesson.
Beijing is a huge city, development is everywhere. The capital has its towers and architectural wonders, but compared to Shanghai it has traded off such a large volume of towers for sprawling yet still somehow tasteful apartment blocks.

Shanghai'd

I spent the week in Shanghai, meeting up with a friend from the States. The sites were grand enough that I decided it was worth putting up a few photos, the first the blog has had! I hope you like them, their selection reflects how I perceive the Shanghai lifestyle and economy. I'm off to Beijing now to begin a language course! I'll be there for a month, having booked a stylish apartment to boot! I publish photos of it next post.

Automated update notifying

To loyal readers: If you want to get automated update notifications of this blog by email, just send me an email since you know me. If you're missing my email address, then just put up a comment in the blog containing your own email address, and I'll add you to the update list and (in the interest of preserving anonymity) delete the comment.

I bet those mountains look fantastic behind all that fog . . .

About two weeks ago, I arrived in K

olkata. For many travelers, Kolkata is the first port of call on arrival in India, just like Bombay was for me nearly three months ago. Kolkata earns its reputation for rampant overt poverty, but that doesn't distinguish it from other Indian cities. Newly arrived foreigners can't hide the fish-out-of-water expression on their faces. While I find the presence of children on the streets shocking, I've built a wall around my natural reaction to seeing deformed, grotesquely handicapped people on the sidewalks, or kids lathering and washing themselves at the street water-pump, and most disappointingly, mothers carrying babies tugging at my shirt growling out "baba" (friend) for rupees. For the latter, long ago I decided it was wrong to give money in those situations, as I'm as likely to incentivize them to have another baby to increase the shock factor, which they're well aware of. Stories abound in many cities of "begging syndicates" which transport the destitute to a tourist location for the day, then return them to their street after taking the bulk of the day's reap.
For all this, elusive New India is still out there, just primarily in the suburbs, (residences, offices and all) save for cultural islands in the dense urban areas.

Kolkata's been hot, so after some requisite sightseeing, I boarded a train for Darjeeling.
Darjeeling is a foggy mountain town in the same state, West Bengal, as Kolkata. It's a hill station - one of 50-100 high altitude townships throughout India chartered under the British Raj as a cooler refuge for British servicemen from the energy-draining heat of the lowlands. Walking into this town, it's like stepping out of India completely. For starters, the bulk of locals are of Nepali descent (actually Ghurka), with smatterings of Tibetan. Prices are much lower for all manner of food, lodging, and clothing, and yet the residents enjoy a standard of living far above the Indian average I perceive in the cities. Deservedly there are a lot of foreigners soaking in Darjeeling and environs, and more Americans than I've encountered elsewhere in India altogether (this means I met at least three there).

One thoughtful British traveling companion convinced me to visit the nearby mountainous but tiny state of Sikkim with him. Like the Darjeeling area, Sikkim is also completely distinct from the rest of India. It's composed mostly of, well, Sikkimese who have more east asiatic look, but also Nepali, and Bhutanese. Seeing so much greenery around me, I joined a trek here in the foothills of the Himalayas. In two days of hiking, I had justified every piece of warm weather clothing and outdoor equipment I had been lugging around with me all this time, including a sleeping bag, an inflatable mat, two sweaters, a (fantastic) North Face jacket from a good friend back home, a water filter, and . . . socks. (Elsewhere, you just don't need socks when you're gallivanting around such a warm country in sandals). All in all, I spent most of two weeks in the mountains trekking, sightseeing, or just plain hanging out. I didn't leave loaded with tea leaves - I actually don't like pure Darjeeling tea for being either too bitter or too bland. It's better mixed with other flavors and spices which I leave to the good folks at Unilever (Lipton) in Sri Lanka and Twinings and Bigelow in London to accomplish.

One thing I learned about the residents of the mountain areas, they like to go on strike a lot. Often this is couched in a protest for autonomy from India or to create a new Indian state. But my read was that they just like to collectively bring the entire local economy to a halt, going so far as to stage a hundred-plus person sit-in in the middle of the only street traversing town, deranging everyone's travel plans and overall costing a lot of people a lot of money. Depending on how you do the accounting, the strikes have cost me anywhere from $100-200 US for the alternative plans I had to come up with. (In retrospect, I think I understand now why the residents enjoy such a high standard of living amid otherwise low prices . . . ) I encountered strikes in Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Silguri, an important waystation to reach Darjeeling.

My time in India is coming to a close. I'm back in Kolkata, and tonight I'm flying for Shanghai, followed by Beijing a week and a half later. Time is getting on, and I have to go to the airport soon, so I will sign off. To my resident and foreigner friends who I met while traveling in the country who follow the blog, our discussions and shared experiences have made my time here thoroughly meaningful, and I know I will be keeping in touch with you going forward. I will hope always that we can make our paths cross again. Cover photo: These are advanced level engineering book. In the US you'd find them at a technical bookstore in a university town like Palo Alto or Cambridge, MA. You would be hard pressed to find them to this technical depth in your local Borders / Barnes & Noble. Yet I took this photo in a small bookstore in Siliguri, a small stopover town on the way from Calcutta to Darjeeling. I could have taken this photo throughout many parts of India, so I'm only doing homage to West Bengal's (the Bengali's)literary culture by highlighting the books here. The books may or may not be counterfeit, but only as facsimiles, not errors of ommission or commission.

Tamil Nadu

Outside India, Kanyakumari is rightly known for its beautiful sunsets. (Within India, Hindus come from all over the country to worship at a famous temple here, and Tamils celebrate the memory of a famed ancient poet immortalized in a colossus-like statue emerging from the water). For its location on India’s southern tip, the town probably should be equally renowned for its sunrises over the water. Of course, being the generally nocturnal person that I am, I couldn't be bothered to catch the sunrise, but the sunset was out of this world. Having made my way around this land's end, I'm now making my way up India's east coast.

North of Kanyakumari, Pondicherry was India’s only formerly French colony. So let’s do some math here: During the Raj, Britain controlled some 1.3 million square miles of India. With Pondicherry, the French managed to squeeze out a little less than 200 subcontinental square miles. I think it’s clear who won that particular game. What was the deciding factor? My theory: Cuisine. Have you ever tried British food? They’ve needed all the spices they could get from the East, and so were keen to get an early advantage in colonization. Meanwhile, the French were only too happy to continue farming their fertile home landscape to achieve their vaunted regional tastes. Like I said, it’s a theory, but I’ve found that much of the French psyche can be traced through their stomach.

Pondicherry is one of just a few cities in India that is laid out like a grid. The French quarter of the city has a very European feel to it, and is quite pretty and inviting. Historically, under French rule the Tamils were not even allowed into this neighborhood! Elements of French culture are only sporadically manifested: For example on the one hand, social welfare offices and other government bureaus proliferate throughout. However, French speakers, whether ethnically Tamil or otherwise, are mildly prevalent even in this quarter. At least the continental food in the trendy, posh restaurants is fantastic and authentic. While I’ve been sticking to vegetarian food for health reasons since leaving Bangalore, I made an exception in Pondicherry when I noticed my drool on the menu listing for coq au vin.

A stone’s throw from Pondicherry is the small utopian venture called Auroville. Auroville’s history dating from its founding in1968 is tied to a famous local ashram that is still very active today. The founders wanted to create a settlement that was independent of any nation’s sovereignty. Today, Auroville is a pioneer in alternative energy technologies including solar water heating, photovoltaic system deployments, water filtration, and wind power for electric and mechanical applications. The specialized cooperatives engaged in manufacturing these systems, which together contribute an important part of Auroville’s small export economy, count both small villages and urban homeowners throughout India as their customers. A busy greybeard engineer I talked to leads one of the cooperatives, drawing from thirty years of experience developing wind and water systems. The original intent of these systems was to sustain the settlement before they became a source of commercial gain for the community. He arrived in town when he was twenty.

Auroville’s technical prowess has a funny way of mixing with the village’s spiritual identity – for example, in water filtration, the final processing step (after a series of conventional steps such as reverse osmosis, UV and ozone treatment) resembles, as best as I could ascertain, a spiritual pep-talk for the water. No complaints here – the water was delicious.

The Auroville excursion also marked my first rental of a geared motorcycle (i.e. not scooter). A new local acquaintance in Kanyakumari showed me how to ride his brand spankin’ new Hero Honda bike (with Yamaha-style paint schemes and all). It’s a lot like driving a manual car – clutch, neutral, gears one through five . . . but no reverse =) . As I was riding back to central Pondicherry from rural Auroville, I wound up in the middle of rush hour Indian traffic (this kind of traffic is truly its own phenomenon). And so with my dilettante motoring skills I had to dodge oxcarts, rickshaws, cargo lorries, family-bearing scooters, and most importantly, buses whose rash drivers must in fact be closet philosophers; having clearly pondered the Hindu sense of fatalism to its extreme, they have absolutely no fear of death. During one close encounter with a few tons of mobile steel, it occurred to me that my trusty laminated medical insurance card, while eminently useful both logistically and financially when unfortunate circumstances befall (a comfort which in turn enables me to rent motorcycles in the first place), doesn't actually repel these hulking vehicles from merging into the modest square meter of road that I occupy.

Further north still on the way to Chennai, I reached Mahabalipuram, a town with temples and carvings in excess of one millennium old. The carving skills remain with the inhabitants today, many of whom make a living selling small statues of gods made of green granite and marble. My favorite: Ganesh, the god with the elephant’s head, kicking back and tapping away on his laptop.

Now I’m in Chennai, formerly Madras. The city is far from tourism-focused, and from a budget-traveling point of view, costly to get around, so after visiting the century-old markets of Georgetown and hitting some of the widest beaches in the world, I’ve decided to hunker down to do errands in preparation for the upcoming leg of the trip (in two weeks!) to Shanghai via Hong Kong. The highlight of my stay here was actually an evening spent with the local family of a friend living in California, particularly the impromptu course in cooking and Hinduism they gave me!

Tomorrow I’m headed to West Bengal starting in Kolkata. Looking forward to lots of fish – shortly after it will be time to justify all of the warm clothes I’ve been carrying around with a visit to Darjeeling!