From Guest Blogger Jeff Stone: Just a few years ago, malaprops -- the ludicrous misuse, or mis-translation, of English words -- were a common and hilarious sight all around Beijing. During the first couple of days in Bejing this year, we saw precious few - proof, I thought, that the Chinese had gained a full command of our language. Not to worry! Susan and I found a trove of them in the menu of a restaurant near the arts district "798." Bon Appetit! Arriving in Paris after four days in Moscow, what was the most discernable difference between the two cities at first glance? The size of the vehicles people drive. In Paris bicycles, motorcycles and Smart Cars seem to be multiplying overnight. In Moscow, the same can be said of large, flashy sedans. True, at $8 a gallon, gas in Paris was double the price in Moscow. You would think crippling traffic would be incentive enough to downsize, but Russians don't seem to be feeling the pain. Maybe the explanation is as simple as the difference between a European society that's in a tight economic squeeze and a Russian society that's sowing its wild oats in the post-Communist era. Maybe it's the difference between a culture that believes in austerity in the name of the environment and one that won't worry itself about such things until every oil well is sucked dry. Or maybe it's both. Whatever the explanation, my husband Jeff observed there seems to be a simple inverse relationship between the size of people's apartments and the size of their vehicles in these two locales. According to his calculus, Muscovites have tiny apartments and big cars; Parisians have big apartments, tiny cars. I'll go with the Parisian model anytime. After all, what good is a big car if it's stuck in traffic all the time? Jeff's Unscientific List of Popular Cars:For more on traveling in Russia, click here
I can't say what's going on in people's homes, but from what I can tell from the hotels we frequented, conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions is on the minds of people in tourism and commerce in India. Every hotel we visited encouraged the reuse of towels, had exclusively florescent bulbs, power outlets with on/off switches that prevented energy loss from “phantom loads,” and master key switches at the entry doors that cut off all power on exiting the room. And even some of the smaller accommodations like the Brunton Boatyard in Fort Kochi and the Wilderness Camp in the Thar Desert sported spanking new solar panels and solar hot water heaters. We even saw small solar arrays on the houseboats in Kerala! While these energy saving improvements seem minimal, it’s more than I’ve seen in many of the American hotels we’ve visited in recent years. Aside from the hotel efforts, there was evidence that solar-powered rickshaws are coming soon to the traffic-choked streets. Ironically, we got a glimpse of what the rickshaws might look like in the workshop at the vintage car museum. While there were plenty of trucks hauling goods, there were also bicycles and pedal rickshaws piled high with deliveries. Ride sharing is a way of life. Several of the stores and stands we visited packed our purchased items into shopping bags made out of recent newspapers rather than plastic. What struck me most, though, was what I saw – or didn’t see – every time we took off in an airplane for another city. Even over the biggest metropolises of Delhi and Mumbai, the number of glimmering lights was a tiny fraction of what I’ve seen over even small and medium-sized cities in the West. With India growing at its current staggering rate, an increase in the number of lights is, of course, inevitable. We can only hope that the lion’s share of them will someday soon be powered by renewable energy sources. By far, the most modern and impressive buildings along the main roads here in northern India are not the tire, farm machinery and electrical equipment factories, they are the schools. Education is big here and it is serious business. Between Delhi and Agra, interspersed between farms and giant plants, we saw at least a dozen for-profit universities, each offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in, you guessed it, business, engineering and computer science. The students come from the grimy, bustling towns nearby and after graduation, many must feed directly into the factories right along the way, but I imagine many also move on to other sections of the country and beyond. The other morning I watched students, all of them young men by the way, sitting on the back of motorized rickshaws careening down the road in near-freezing weather with text books open. As we passed by them in our van, I could see them looking over math and engineering problems.
Take the Sri Venkateswara Group of Educational Institutions. Its motto, which I read in one of the regional business magazines routinely supplied in our hotel rooms, is "Come, Learn, Flourish." (I wonder what that is in Latin.) Like all of those I've seen, the school boasts accreditations by various state and national boards that mean nothing to me but must mean something to them and the school's students. And like all the factories here, Sri Venkateswara also advertises that it strictly adheres to international quality standards, including those famously administered by the International Standards Organization, headquartered in Norway. "ISO 9000 certification" is supposed to confirm that an organization, after many labors, has perfected its processes and zealously reviews them to weed out quality problems on an ongoing basis. In the educational context here, it is surely intended to connote pedagogical perfection -- though almost certainly through devotion to rote learning. This is not all bad, as many education reformers in the US, concerned about curriculum consistency and teacher training, will tell you. But, as you know from reading Susan's entries, most things here in India are rough not only on the surface but also below it; to wit: the magazine ad for Sri Venkatewara proudly announces that the university is ISO 9000 "ceretified." Oops! (Note: click on "Previous" below for earlier posts.) |
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