In action

I have taken pictures everyday for a month, but none with me in them. The arrival of my dad prompted Pati to establish a new temporary position at Vidya Vanam - he was quickly appointed "Action Photographer". In exchange for room and board, Dad agreed to take shots of the teachers in action (really just me). I love these photos.

A Wake in the Village

Since coming to India, I have been to a wedding, two birthday parties and a reception or two. Good fun and very colorful (and delicious!). Certainly I did not expect to experience a funeral. On Tuesday evening, one of our Vidya Vanam teachers lost her older brother. He has a wife who has been in the hospital on life support since the complicated birth of their son one year ago. Paying for never ending medical bills and two other children, the burden became too great for him and on Tuesday he got very drunk and took poison. His brother came to the school looking for money to pay the ambulance to take him to Coimbatore, which Pati gave, but it was too late. He died leaving his two children essentially parentless and his wife with little hope for recovery.

Wednesday was the funeral and all the Vidya Vanam teachers went to the wake that followed it. Not wanting to distinguish myself, I went along, completely unprepared for what I was about to be hit with. Walking along, I noticed that literally the entire village was on its way to the same place. About 3,000 people on the narrow road looked like a march on Washington. When we arrived we were ushered to the front of the line and taken to a back room, where all the women in the family were gathered. The second I walked in it felt like a wall had hit me in the face. The room was extremely hot, crowded with women sitting in groups on a filthy floor, wailing and crying like I have never heard. I sat down with everyone else, held hands with them and just watched. Many of the women laid down and cried into the floor. The phrase "I wanted to die..." came into my head - this family was so truly devestated they wanted to lay down and die. This went on for a long time and as it got hotter and smellier and darker and louder, I felt as if death was actually in the room with us. I thought about my own family's funerals - we might have cried publicly for a moment or two, but most of the adults were expected to keep their composure AND return to work Monday morning. Very different. This experience drained me and I really felt their sadness.

After we walked out and paid our respects to the men in the family, I walked back to school by myself. I had not even made it through the door before Pati had my shower turned on. Hindus leave funerals and bathe immediately - it is an absolute must (and it was the only thing I felt like doing). An hour later I felt normal again, but that dark room, full of grief and despair, is definitely something I will not soon forget.

[I promise to return to comedic writing after this]

Eatin' Some Fried Chicken in India

Well no, but I am feeling a bit more southern this week, with my dad here and "Dusty" on the American pay-per-view channel in Madras. Here are some pictures of our first couple of days. I am glad to have my #1 fan close by for a week or two :)

Morning coffee with Dad. Roll Tide.

Ultimate frisbee - just like Monteagle

Lunch at the school. Look closely and see that I am wearing my Mardi Gras crawfish polo. I love India but nothing beats Carnival.

Can you tell how bummed he is not to be at UBS?

Playing slap games with the girls. How lucky I bought this super cool hat for him in Australia.

Poverty

“India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.”

This is a line from the main character in Aravind Adiga’s book, The White Tiger, which recently won the Man Booker Prize and excellent reviews. I read it last week and thought it was pretty average, but this line struck me as very accurate as I tour India and uncover many different worlds inside this massive country. Every day, the truth in these words becomes more evident.

As if enveloped in the Darkness, poverty in India is suffocating. It is a part of every living moment and there is no escaping it. In the big cities, everywhere you look, you see literally millions of people each day who could only wish to approach the poverty line. The more I understand about India's poverty, the more I see that the universal definition of poverty does not do any justice to a person who is truly poor. My own definition of poverty is out the window - the fact is I am just beginning to understand this concept I thought I knew so much about. In places like New Orleans and even Nashville, I have seen poverty - bad schools and worse jobs, bad health care, awful prisons and the like. But that kind of poverty, the "one textbook for 25 kids" kind of poverty, does not begin to describe what I have seen in the India of Darkness.

In Chennai (Madras), one place to escape the poverty is the English bookstore. There are only rich, healthy and clean looking people with white teeth in these bookstores - they come from the Light. Everywhere else I look I can only cringe and try to keep walking. If you make eye contact with a beggar, things can be tough. They will literally crawl after me if they don’t have feet, or try to put their tiny, lifeless baby in my purse, or thrust their ghostlike children out into oncoming traffic to keep up with me. I can’t really describe how it feels to see people in this condition – there is nothing like it. It takes a lot of energy to justify not giving them money - 10 rupees (20 cents) could feed them for a week. But the second you hand out a bill, the whole city seems to descend on you, naturally wanting a piece of the action. It can be dangerous and scary. And it will never solve the problem.

In the village where I teach, a different kind of Darkness exists. Next door to Vidya Vanam is a brick kiln - there are thousands in the countryside in every state in India. Land owners recognized long ago the value of a combination of dirt and cheap labor: a profitable business of brick making. The growing populations and buildings in the villages mean endless demand and cheap labor to supply it. During my visit to one of the kilns in Anaikatti, I realized that this is not just cheap labor, it is indentured. Land owners altruistically loan money to villagers in their times of struggle in exchange for labor in the kilns. They will even offer the laborers a place to live. Entering into this deal, most villagers do not understand that they will never earn enough to pay off this debt, and as they continue to borrow from their employer to pay for weddings, medical expenses, water during a drought, etc., their debt deepens and their options vanish. Their children will help to pay off this debt by taking part in the labor, thus assuming the debt when their parents are too old or ill to work. The cycle has begun.

To be fair, these land owners are far from wealthy. In fact they may technically be considered poor, in relation to the poverty line. But there are many more levels of poor below them – non-land owners who never make more than enough to buy food for one day. And as summer approaches I am realizing that most of these villagers will not die of starvation, but of dehydration. Maybe not this summer, but one day. The rivers and creeks that I see on my walks are drying up at an alarming rate, and the rains will not come here until late June. The air is so dry it hurts my skin – the little guys I see on the road have cracks in their lips and faces from lack of water and nutrients. One little boy is so dehydrated I swear he looks sixty.

It wears me out thinking about it all - no wonder the politicians never get anywhere and end up using funds on a new cricket stadium. A cricket stadium shows progress. The millions upon millions of people I have seen suffering from starvation and nutrition deficiencies, deadly health conditions, zero education or job prospects have very tough lives, now and always. They may work 19 hours a day for the next twenty years and barely earn enough to live meagerly. They do not know progress. They do not have a place in the Light.

Let me be sure to state that I love India. I will never forget the things I have seen here. But that feeling of walking past a young woman with three kids, skin and bones, picking knats out of each others hair, silently begging for help with expressionless eyes, is a feeling only the strongest can learn to live with. It is the Darkness.

The Finance Minister comes to India

The Minister of Finance has arrived in Madras amid much fanfare and a boom in the consumer market in anticipation of his future spending habits in the city. You heard it here first: my dad, esteemed citizen Melville M. Barnes Jr., has arrived in India, complete with sugar free granola and his Vermont ball cap (and yes Julie, wearing tevas with socks). His arrival has prompted a flurry of events, parties and invitations to travel all over India - I really am only here as an escort. Looking very dapper in his Indian outfits, America's financial guru is sure to enjoy the low prices and friendly service here in the spicy country.

Stay tuned!

Five Things I Say Everyday

[A quick regression to my old theme]

1) "Oh man this one is my favorite!"
Every time we have lunch or dinner, I am on and on about how much I love the food. KM thinks I am off my rocker as I shovel his meals in my mouth while the rest eat nicely. Dosas, chipattis, onion samba, dahl, purri, idlees - you name it, I love it. Here's the crazy part - I eat everything in sight but I am still losing weight. What can I do? I vacuum this stuff up and nothing happens. My poor little wrists look like toothpicks. I know what you all are saying: How can I afford to lose any weight? Well I can't. So go on ahead and get your reservations now at the following places: Ruth's Chris, Port of Call (New Orleans), and Krystal's (West End Ave).

2) "I love that kid"
You have seen their pictures - they are the cutest little things on earth. But what I really love is their personalities. The quiet ones who all of a sudden start babbling on to me, the tough guy who comes in the afternoon for extra reading, the little grinner who showed up yesterday in sunglasses so we would match. One of our little six year olds gets picked up from school by his grandmother. I swear she is shorter than her grandson, and he definitely walks her home, not the other way around. Manoj comes to class and instead of sitting in a desk, he sits in the middle of the floor. He is such a talker that I always end up moving him there anyway - it cracks me up that he now predicts this and starts off class at his "special seat". Everyday I love another kid for a different reason, and I can't stop talking about them.

3) "Very good!"
My students absolutely love that I write "very good" or "excellent" at the top of their papers. They love looking at the red pen I use. And they love hearing it even more. I kid you not when I say that while doing a worksheet in class, every single student brings their paper over to me at least 35 times, just to hear me say "Oh very good!" A five letter word needs five "very good" comments - one for each letter. Each leg of a cow needs a "very good!". They simply love it. I sound like a broken record.

4) "So I've been thinking..."
Being at a growing school with so many positive things happening is such a great opportunity - to push for more. Pati and I sit around every night, chatting away about the day, constantly thinking of new ideas and new programs. In the works is a playground. As of now the kids play with a few balls, jumps ropes, plastic pipes and a pile of dirt - and they love it. Think of how they will love this playground! We are also working on getting a special education program installed in the curriculum. A couple of our students are definitely learning disabled, but there is no way to really pinpoint their struggles, so our next big step is to have every child tested for disabilities and put on a special curriculum course. Nothing like this has been done at rural schools in India - a huge step. New ideas are abound every night in our living room.

5) "What did he say?"
I have made a good solid effort to learn some Tamil. Nothing shocks one of my chatty students more than when I bust out "Enough!" or "Quiet!" in Tamil. I don't know enough to form any sentences of significance, but everyone around me seems to forget that. Tata starts chatting to me on my front porch and literally 20 minutes later, when I haven't understood a thing, Pati finally breaks in and tells him I am totally lost. But it continues everyday and I have no clue.
These are some of the things I have been told in Tamil and then had translated:
"You can't be walking off by yourself like that little girl!" [cleaning lady]
"I hope you are only going away for the weekend since you have not told me goodbye!" [Tata]
"Those shorts look so funny - where are your pants?" [random village lady]
"You can't carry all those coconuts! Let me send my son to help you. He likes you!" [village lady #2]
"My son is naked because he heard your voice and jumped out of the bath" [lady #3 explaining why her three year old came out to say hi in his birthday suit]
"Where did she learn all this Tamil?" [one of my students clearly disappointed he can't pretend to not understand me anymore].

Dear Vanderbilt Travel Clinic,

I would like my $345 returned to me. Tell Dr. Quacktastic that her "Traveler's Diarrhea" concept is a sham. The $80 consultation I received on my "inevitable" GI struggles was devised by a bunch of spin doctors using scare tactics. Only a crazy person would show up in India after 19 hours of traveling and ask to have their water boiled before brushing their teeth with it. I have easily side stepped your whole Malaria phenomenon with a bug zapper, and I don't see any polio or hepatitis in sight. Tell your brilliant medical technicians they can use my money for cancer research instead of wasting it on a pamphlet that advises me not to eat off utensils washed in tap water. What do you propose I wash it in Dr. Commodore? Thanks for the sound travel advice.

Sincerely,
Katherine "Strong Stomach" Barnes

A Day in India

When I arrived here, completely gobsmacked by everything I saw, tasted and heard, I thought things would never feel normal. I was completely out of place. I wasn't homesick but I felt very strange - like I was walking around in a glass bubble with a "Keep Back 10 Ft." sign on it. Then today, I walked in to town to do some photocopying of worksheets, put the bill on my weekly tab, picked up my usual snack of fresh coconut from Baboo at his roadside stand, took a quick picture with the Xerox man’s wife and new baby, and rushed back to school just in time for afternoon classes. All of a sudden I realized I was completely used to it all.

My schedule is basically set each week. Monday through Friday I teach five, sometimes six English classes. I have my usual four classes of Vidya Vanam students in the morning and after lunch. In the afternoon, I take the other teachers in to class for about an hour and we go over grammar (today we did contractions and I had to use a lot of self-discipline not to introduce “y’all” - I think it will be a great extra credit question on their test). They are great learners and always want to do more work if I offer it, which is fantastic. They also thank me everyday, which I really appreciate. They are such hard workers.

The five full time teachers at Vidya Vanam. They love to laugh at the funny Indian outfits I come to class in. I took this picture because I loved their colors!

Then at around 4:30, a seemingly endless number of kids from the government school next door come for extra help with their English. By then I am usually so hot and hungry that I have little tolerance for anything, and they seem to have learned that if they talk out of turn, they’re out. It’s an awfully hard line to draw for someone who probably deserved to be kicked out of class every week of my junior year of high school. After classes are over, I put on my shorts and obnoxiously bright SEC t-shirt of the day, and go for my usual walk, which never fails to make me so happy. My fan club has expanded and they all come out on the street and walk and talk with me as I pass through. I love it and almost never miss a day, just to see them.

Right when I get back about 6:30 the mosquitoes start. Mosquitoes here are the size of birds, and they fly much faster than the slow ones I’m used to down south. And since I am too lazy to figure out how to get my malaria pill prescription filled in Tamil (sorry Dad), something had to be done. So the school invested in a battery powered bug zapper, shaped like a tennis racket. I am getting a lot of use out of it. And maybe enjoying it a little too much – see below.

My electrical tennis racket - a wise investment. The 'zap' is a very satisfying sound. I use it for about an hour each day.

We all take dinner around 8 and then I get to work on lesson plans and creative ways to keep my little rascals focused. Not that I came to India to laze around, but this has turned out to be quite a schedule. I spend most of my time worrying about my lessons and whether my students are progressing. I love the big family dinners we have and I really enjoy the many Indian newspapers that show up at the school - The Hindu, India Express, Times of India. They give me a great inside look at the issues here. Ah speaking of issues - Elephant alert! I just heard firecrackers, very close too. Off to investigate.

More Pictures

Uploading each picture takes about a year. My super speedy broadband connection works for about 6.27 minutes out of each hour, only when the wind blows NNE. So I upload around the clock hoping to get at least six up by March. Posting as I go, here are some more...

Trouble #1 and Trouble #2: Manoj and Ramkumar

Mosque in Hyderabad ("They" say it is very beautiful inside, but no women allowed - I was very peeved)

The best smile in India


These two are the sweetest kids, and Rahul below, is absolutely my hardest working student.


India celebrates Pongal, which is like New Year's. This design, made entirely of dyed rice powder, can be found in various forms all over Tamil Nadu.

Bird's eye view of Vidya Vanam and the village behind it.

Inside the Nizam's tomb in Hyderabad. Look at me, practically Indian in those clothes. You can hardly tell I'm a Westerner.

Scorpion

"What are the funny looking insects with giant claws and tail that look like scorpions?" That was my question to Pati when I woke up this morning. I had seen said creature in my room last night, crawling across my computer. Pati promptly freaked out and had half the school's staff tearing my room upside down looking for this thing. Apparently it is an actual scorpion, not just a look alike and in India (maybe everywhere?), they are very poisonous. I think I missed that part of 7th grade science. Whoops. We still haven't found it, but I am very amused at the commotion :)

More Funny Things

Elephant Alarm System

Elephants in this country are nothing to be sneezed at. They are harmless - if they stay in the mountains. But when they come into the village looking for water, all hell can break loose and everything can be destroyed (I think my childhood love of Babar was a farce). In the same waterless, solar powered village, we discovered a thick metal wire running its perimeter (that is, I got clothes-lined and then we discovered it). This wire is attached to a homemade contraption that holds a very heavy rock in place. When the wire is disrupted at any spot, the small boulder drops onto a flat rock at the exact place where fireworks have been placed. The fireworks go off and the elephants are spooked and run away. Well let me tell you exactly how "spooked" I was - after I hit the ground thinking we were being shot at, the concept of EAS was made very clear. Got it- Patent No. 5,687,104 coming right up.

Funny Things I Have Seen in India

I think the "Five Things..." theme has about run its course for now. Look for "Five Things I Will Miss About India" in a couple of months.

Traveling Salesman

Four weeks ago I visited the remote village of Kurimundi with a few Vidya Vanam donors. By remote, I mean miles and miles from everything - roads, stores, utilities. Kurimundi is about 100 yards long and is made up of six houses, two barns and about 100 or so people. We were given a tour of the village by the head elder, a cute little man about my size, all smiles to be displaying his lifelong domain. This village has an eternally broken water pump and electricity poles without wires, but to my amazement they have solar panels to power their street lamps. Now wait just a hot second, I said, do you mean to tell me that for a grand total of eight buildings they need street lights? Of course...to light their way home from dinner and a late movie. All joking aside, how much sense does it make that the local government cannot get potable water flowing to this village yet there is money for solar panels? We also had full cell phone service - good, so we can check the movie times. It totally blew my mind.

So there we are on the tour, all 20 steps of it, when out of the blue comes a man with a little suitcase in tow. Everyone seemed to know him and he went in and out of all the houses. Curious, we asked who he was - as expected, he was a traveling salesman. HE must be who the street lights are for. Selling clocks, watches and toothpicks - I am sure his village customers were only in the market for one of these items. I took a picture of this funny fellow, who absolutely took this golden opportunity to make his sales pitch to us.

Our shock to find a self-proclaimed traveling salesman in a zone of no transportation, selling clocks in a place where the concepts of time and consumerism have never existed, is still cracking me up weeks later.

Carnatic Music

My devotion to country and bluegrass music has been complete and confirmed for most of my life - except for a quick dabbling of Lil Wayne and Akon on the iPod in the gym, I have rarely ventured away from steel guitars and banjos. I happily grew up with John Denver and "Ramblin Man" being played by the guitar and banjo lovers in my family and haven't really gone far from that. I once took an Indian and Arabian music class for a fine arts credit and barely got a B - needless to say I was not inspired.

So when I heard that Prema's son and daughter in law are Indian musicians, I was not struck in any way by the significance of what I would soon discover is their genius and gift for the art of Indian carnatic music. Carnatic music is traditional South Indian music, originating soon after the 5th century A.D. and evolving with major contributions made by the saints of the 15th and 18th centuries. It is based on a 22 note scale, as opposed to Western music which is based on the traditional 12 note scale. Carnatic music in the Tamil Nadu state is likened to a religion - its followers are devoted, respectful and adoring. And when I arrived here, I had little knowledge of the fact that I was entering into the world of the First Couple of Carnatic music. Prema's son and daughter in law, T.M. Krishna and Sangeetha Shivakumar, respectively, can be compared to the Tim McGraw and Faith Hill of this genre, equalling the country music couple in charisma, popularity, and certainly talent.

Being a bit skeptical of this style of music due to my unfavorable experience with my Arab and Asian (Indian and Arabian? Asian and Indian? who knows) music course, I did not expect it to be any different this time around. My first experience, actually, was to see T.M. Krishna in concert on a movie screen. He has ventured away from the traditional live performance and put out a two hour film of a Carnatic concert - to skeptical audiences who are subsequently blown out of their seats by his performance. I was one of those audience members who thought I might get a two hour nap out of this movie trip and came out in a daze. When other audience members found out it was Krishna's mother in the seat next to me, they literally dropped to the ground at her feet, praising the genius and talents of her son. Like their religion, Indians are devoted to their music, and its deliverers. The national response to this movie, his now worldwide tours, and his book on the art has been huge in every corner of the country.

For me as a Westerner, listening to a Carnatic music is less like a religion and more like a massage and a yoga session all in one. I can only describe it the way The Hindu reviewed it: "the haunting sound of T.M. Krishna's perfection washes over the viewer like the waves of oasis." I am not sure if an oasis has waves, but the jist of this line was right on. The sound of his voice almost carried me away from the movie theater and into another world - the music was the perfect culmination of instrument and human sound. A sound that on first listen one would think could only be made by an instrument because no human voice can sound that perfect. Then yesterday I went to the Indian Fine Arts Society to see Sangeetha perform live and was equally surprised - her sound was just as perfect, this was not a studio made phenomenon. To consistently match and repeat a sound this pure takes extreme skill, and my reaction was as it should be - pure amazement.

I don't think I will necessarily be bringing home a CD of Krishna or Sangeetha's and playing it in my car. My appreciation is more about the experience - sitting with their families at concerts and being surrounded by an audience of admirers who have followed Carnatic music for decades. My understanding of their devotion or the art itself is far from complete, but one thing I am sure of is this - I have landed smack dab in the middle of the Indian dream.