Week 7:

The weeks are getting busier and busier. Before I launch in to the activities of the weekend, I'll insert this small update: I took the CCNA exam this morning at a Pearson Vue testing center in Koramangala and passed it! Not quite with flying colors, but solidly at any rate. One of this summers goals is now clearly checked off the list. Now on to LSAT prep, bah.

As has been planned for a few weeks, we finally made it to Bandipur. We launched into the road trip at 6:30 in the morning, meeting up with Kumar and Sagar and heading out of the city. Once we had a few kilometers behind us we stopped at a hotel, which in Indian English is a place you get food, and grabbed a bite to eat; Puri, Samba, Idli: standard breakfast fare. Then it was back to the road. A road trip in southern India isn't much different than a trip in the US. It's accompanied by snacks like nuts, chips, drinks; although of their own variant. The chips were covered in masala, a combination of spices you find in everything, the drinks were "badam milk," a canned dairy product with small bits of almond. We had music blasting a good portion of the way, a mixture of western music and traditional Indian. I helped Kumar discover a passion for the older, Science-era Incubus music. It was shortly after breakfast that Chases digestive system started having a trip of its own, but you can look at his blog for that. (Link to come)

On the way out we stopped at some waterfalls which unfortunately mostly dried out since we are at the beginning of the rainy season. Chase shared a story from Thailand in which a group of elephants were walking across such a set of falls when a flash flood hit. In the middle of the current they were immobilized for three days and eventually died. In our situation there was no rain in sight and no elephants. While looking down into the rocky area that would be covered in water in another few months, we saw a crowd of monkeys cruising around looking for handouts and avoiding the plastic bottles that were periodically hurled their way. They weren't to keen to try the masala blueberries I tossed to them but they had no problem with aggressively stealing a mango from the woman standing next to me, prompting another wave of airborne bottles in retaliation.

Side note: several of the villages in the area make a living by growing sugarcane and refining it into sugar or one of the several sugarcane based sweets. While on the road we stopped by such a town and saw most of the process. The sugarcane is harvested from the fields, placed on the roads for cars to crush and speed up the process of collecting the seeds. They sweep the grains off the road, combine it with water and boil it in a bathtub-sized tub over a large fire for a full day. The sweet soupy liquid is poured into cast-iron shapes and cooked until it feels like a bar of handsoap; hard yet bendable and breakable, in sizes from 2" cubes to large approx 8lb blocks wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine to be sold to markets. After leaving the falls we got a little lost, driving back and forth over these piles of sugarcane before ending up completely by accident on the far side of the falls. I took advantage of the opportunity to cruise around on the rocks, jumping from one rock tier of waterless falls to the next, as it started to rain. I wasted little time in getting back off the falls, the story of stranded Thai elephants still fresh in my head.

Upon finally entering Bandipur Forest proper we stopped at a group of houses at the entrance to see if there was any lodgings available. Finding none, we through around my frisbee for a while, ensuring the black-faced monkeys didn't make off with it, and attempted to sneak into a group of 50-70 spotted deer. Some of these deer had racks about 5' off the top of their heads. Hunting is strictly forbidden in India, which is probably the only reason a group of deer as large as they were dared come within miles of people. Still, as quietly as I could and thinking "be a bush, I am a bush" with all my mind, I couldn't get within 50m of the herd.

As we continued into the jungle the trees started to get a little denser and the sun a little lower. We passed a jungle outpost where we were able to find accommodations for the night. In spite of their previous booking by government officials, two unused rooms magically appeared for our use. Kumar attributed this to our status as foreigners. Another side note: bribery and corruption in India is very widespread. To this point in our journey we had been asked no less than 3 times for "tips," baseless requests for a few rupees made by those with the guise of authority, which were all rebutted by Kumar. While not required to do so, the man working security for the nationally owned jungle huts inquired into the house status after reservations were due, cleared a previous unfilled reservation, booked us into the slots, and reserved breakfast for us, all while refusing to accept a grateful tip for his work. Corruption infuses Indian bureaucracy, but there are clearly people that carry out their responsibilities with a strong character. Tip of the hat to the jungle hut guard.

On the way toward the guest room in the jungle we drove pretty slowly, trying to pierce the darkness and spot some wildlife. Sure enough, in the fading light we saw a group of around 8 elephants about 10 meters from the road. If the trip had ended then I would have accomplished my purpose for it, but there were a lot more things to see and do. Which will have to come later! More on the trip and pictures to come tomorrow.

-Scott

Week 6:

I realized yesterday that I only have about 40 days left in India before heading back home. I really need to get on the ball about setting the rest of my plans in stone!
My birthday was this week, and while I didn't try to organize a party of any kind, birthdayish things kept popping up. A few girls that work at Cisco offered me some cake that was left over from an activity earlier in the day, completely unknowing that it was my birthday, and instead of playing modern Indian music in the Cisco gym as is the norm, there was some Audioslave and White Stripes!

In other news, I discovered that after attending a ritzy rooftop sushi & world cup party in uptown Bangalore last weekend a picture that was taken of a few friends and I ended up in the Bangalore times and the Deccan Chronicle. I guess it doesn't take much to make headlines here.

This week held a bit more Indian culture. During the week we discovered that we were invited to attend a wedding of a coworker at Cisco, which was being held here in Bangalore. We arranged to attend the wedding with Kumar and Sagar from the TAC lab. We arrived just in time, as the groom was waiting with his back to the brides entry, and a sheet being held in front of his face to prevent him from seeing the bride until the right moment. The ceremony was being performed by a Brahmin Priest, dressed in the traditional costume a priest would wear; I don't have a picture so you'll just have to think along the lines of a slightly heavier 50-year old Gandhi. Accompanied the entire time by the ringing of bells and a very loud "orchesta," (link to picture later) the two got married! The hall was very elaborately decorated; the center of the stage had a golden wedding pavilion, decorated with flowers, coconuts, and burning incense. In spite of the strong lighting that had been set up, the photographers felt it necessary to mount industrial strength bulbs on their cameras, causing momentary dizziness anything you glanced into one. At first it was just the priest up there speaking to them and ringing the bell, then somebody started bringing around a big bowl that people were pulling something out of. My first reaction was "fantastic, audience participation and I have no idea what is going on..." Fortunately it was just a bowl of rice which we were to take a small handful of and throw at the couple at the appropriate time. The bride and groom tied small ropes loosely around each other's hands, symbolizing their new bond, and the groom tied a necklace around the bride's neck, with 3 knots in the back, making the marriage official. They then sat on chairs facing each other and holding a coconut in between them while the audience came by, pouring coconut milk and maybe a few rupees over the coconut, sprinkling them with rice, and expressing their congratulations and blessing.

While the crowd of ~200 guests filed through, meals were served in the floor below the main hall. Large rinsed banana leaves served as the plates, which the caterers covered in biriyani, white rice, curry, onion vada, puri, papad, and a few other things I don't know the names for yet. As a gift from the newly-married, everyone was presented with a small coconut as a token of their appreciation in attending the wedding. I later found out that the coconut can be used as a symbol for goodness and health, which is why it's so prominent in Indian ceremonies.
On the way home I snapped a few pictures of some (hopefully) temporary housing, showing how some people even in developed areas of India still live.

Initially the plan was to go to Bandipur Forest this weekend, but it has been pushed off for another week due to the wedding. There are a few more things I'd like to write about, I'll try for another update during this week.


-Scott

The American and the Indian Engineer

For my summer class I was asked to write a paper on the Indian Engineer and their relationship to those in the west. If you're interested in looking over it, here it is.

-Scott

Week 5:

As previously mentioned, there was some work to be done in the office on Saturday so travel wasn't really an option. In place of a travel log, I'll try to elaborate on some things that have stuck out as unique to me so far in the month I've been here.
First off the general Indian personality is incredibly friendly and accommodating; if you say "hi" to people on the road or in the office you're almost always treated to a enthusiastic smile in response. If you're doing something wrong, you probably won't know it because they won't likely correct or rebuke you. In district conference yesterday the soon-to-be former Mission President Nichols shared an experience of his in the Goa Airport. While waiting for the gate to open, a crowd of 20-25 Australians set their baggage down in the terminal, inadvertently creating a wall preventing access to the gate. In order to pass most people (Indians) would patiently walk around the Aussiewall to walk single file through a gap at the end. The first non-Indian to come across this situation started accusing and yelling at the tourists from down under, causing a huge scene. The single-file line continued, feigning obliviousness to the entire ordeal.

In spite of the general patience, people selling their wares and services are NOT to be trusted with their suggested prices. Just the other night I got in an auto-rickshaw and asked him to take me to a nearby location, probably 3-4 kilometers away. This was in the evening, around 10:30, so the a typical auto fare would be around Rs12 per kilometer (approx $.25) When I communicated the destination the driver responded without hesitation (450 rupees). He tried countering my surprise and rejection of the price with excuses such as the time of day and traffic. After refusing continuously and walking a few meters away a couple times the price came down to 100Rs. While I still got taken advantage of, I managed to avoid the quadruple price initially suggested. This scenario is by no means atypical, I've been told by locals that any initial price suggested by street merchants for their wares is generally 8x to 10x the amount they will accept.

Sanitation here has a strange twist. Rather than washing hands before a meal, it's customary to go right into eating (typically with ones hands) then stop by the designated "hand wash" to clean up. A coconut will be rinsed off on the outside, yet when it is opened, a grimy rust-covered blade is used to cut off the top, allowing access to the milk. In a juice shop, the glasses provided are rinsed out after each use, but the blenders used to make the juices are left unwashed for hours at a time. Panipuri, while delicious, is typically hand-made by a guy on the side of the road, punching holes in the top of the hollow bread-balls with his thumb immediately after wiping sweat off his forehead with (hopefully) the other hand. You get to the point that you try not to think too much about what may or may not be in your food; to this point I've been very lucky to have avoided any health problems whatsoever.

As with China India has a huge excess of cheap manual labor; this results in a very different kind of work process than you see in the US. IE: Construction...Rather than collecting a number of well organized, specialized people and collecting precise equipment for the task at hand, a large team will be allocated to the project and equipped with the most rudimentary of tools sufficient for the job, usually a shovel bent at 90 degrees, a hammer, and a hardhat. The same concept applies to other fields, even at my workplace I've seen larger groups than necessary assigned to menial tasks. The determining factor of this situation is the leadership; if a queen-bee or alpha-male is in the area directing the crowd of workers, things come together very well. Otherwise objects move meaninglessly back and forth and holes which are dug exist only to be filled with dirt from the next hole.

A last thing I'll mention today is the mixture of languages. India is home to a few hundred of them but fortunately only a handful are spoken in each area. Most people in Bangalore speak Kannada, Hindi, or Telegu in addition to some amount of English. When two people meet each other for the first time they may be able to recognize their origin by appearance, in which case they'll try the language of their native area if they know it. Dialects of Hindi are spoken across the country, and is used as a fallback language if nothing more familiar is found in common. From what I can tell the vocabulary of these languages are overlapping and melding with one another. On several occasions I've asked what language a word is in and gotten conflicting responses. At least for those in Bangalore, the vernacular seems to be a hybrid of languages, a grouping of whichever words come to mind quickest or most specifically communicates what one is trying to convey.


Tomorrow night we're attending an Indian Culture dinner. I'll post some about that experience in the near future.

-Scott

Week 4:

   Our team lead, Kumar, reminded us the other day that in two weeks we will be getting transferred to a new, and to us as yet unknown, assignment. All we know is that we won't be getting as much hands-on time with the equipment, so if we should get as much time playing in the lab as we can. This weekend we went on the aforementioned trip to Mysore, starting with a 7:00AM train ride from Majestic Station here in Bangalore. It was about a 2 1/2 hour ride to Mysore, during which I got to know the people we were riding with a bit, and managed to shake the gaze of Antony, an 11-year old boy from Mysore for a total of perhaps 10 minutes. The kids eyes were glued to me the entire time, my very existence must be fascinating!

  Upon arriving in Mysore, our first stop was the Palace. Built in the early 1900s after the original Mysore Palace was accidentally torched by a ceremonial fire in a wedding, the palace was the huge residence and audience hall for the Monarch of the state of Mysore, now called Karnataka. Shoes and photography wasn't allowed in the palace, since it was in the same building as several temples. The place was incredibly designed, with granite columns, painted walls, and intricately designed woodwork with ivory inlays. The ceremonial hall was made almost entirely of granite, and featured a solid silver door, presumably to stop future wedding fires from getting out of control. In the front of the palace there is a balcony with stadium seating on either side of the center, as well as 3 floors of viewing windows for "guests and royal ladies" to observe the Maharaja on the balcony govern and take petitions from the ground, 25' below.

  While we had our shoes off, we entered one of the temples proper, there are actually at least 5 temples on the Palace grounds. The things that characterize Hindu religion were there in full force, brightly colored patterns, traditional music, statues and pictures of some of the core gods in the Hindu Panthenon such as Rama, Vishnu, and Ganesh. There was also a man administrating over the temple standing behind a candled collection plate with a small, flat bowl with a red paste on a table to his left. A woman approached the candles, heated her fingers above the flame, touched her head and put her hands together under her chin in respect. She then touched her finger into the small bowl and put a mark in the middle of her forehead. She then stepped over to her husband, who was looking at a picture nearby, and placed a mark on his forehead. It was an intriguing process to watch, I'd like to return to a Hindu temple in the near future and learn some more about their traditions and ceremonies.

  From the palace we took a short, yet wild, bus-ride up the hills to see Chamundi temple. One of the other passengers was so scared of the speed we were taking turns he started sweating heavily and had to put his head down to avoid looking at the drop we would inevitably take if the driver lost control. The hill was a lot quieter than the city. Cows roamed the area in greater numbers than the city itself, and you had to watch your food and belongings for fear of monkeys making off with them. From this high area there were some great views of the city and temple, I felt a little less out of place since even Indians were snapping photos of the area. On the hill I stopped by a museum where I was enthusiastically taught some Hindu theology, including the 5,000 year social cycle and the approaching commencement of the new Golden Age. On the way back into the city we saw the intimidatingly fortresslike Church of St. Philomena. Although a Christian building, people payed respect in the same way they do at other religious edifices, by leaving their shoes at the door. This can be a risky practice, as it's no mystery how the local street-vendors maintain their shoe stock. While leaving the city, we crossed the Muslim part of town and saw the mosque. In one afternoon we stopped by a Hindu temple, a Christian church, and a Muslim mosque, all three of the worlds largest religious families.

  An interesting side-note; Mosque aside, you can always tell when you're near a Muslim part of the city because you can pick up on the smell of beef. Cows are held as sacred animals in Hinduism, so they don't eat it and it's hard to come by. On account of it's rarity, Muslims (and American students) take advantage of every chance they get to grab some beef. My favorite restaurant is literally called "The Only Place," likely named as a result of it's position as very nearly the only place in Bangalore to get a good burger or philly cheese steak.

As it was about to get dark, we closed the day by attending a musical water-fountain concert in a very-well decorated and maintained garden by a dam, and jumped on a bus for the 3 hour trip back to Bangalore. I realized 20 seconds after I stepped off the bus, still groggy from sleeping on the ride, that I had left my cell phone on the seat...too late. The bus was out of sight. I got a slight rebuke from Savio, who then frantically, and fruitlessly, made calls to try and figure out where the bus was going. Fortunately, it wasn't an expensive (or even my) phone, so replacing it shouldn't be too difficult. There was a girls phone number in it I'm a little sad to have lost, but I'll likely be able to track that down.
  No traveling this weekend, as we're going to be staying in town on Saturday preparing for an internal lab audit at Cisco, so my next post is likely to be more of an article than a narrative. Until then,
-Scott

Off to Mysore:

Tomorrow morning, incredibly early, we're leaving on a train to Mysore for a trip. The ride supposedly takes about 1.5 hours, but it takes about an hour to get to Majestic, the transportation hub of the city, where we'll board the train. We're going to see a few palaces/temples, and whatever else Savio thinks is noteworthy in his city of residence. Sunday afternoon we're going to meet up with some work friends to throw around a frisbee and learn how to use a cricket bat. More on Mysore and cricket, and pictures to come.