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.) Here in Northern India, garbage is a constant blight. For 120 miles from Delhi to Agra, a river of discarded snack wrappers, plastic bags and paper runs almost uninterrupted along the roadside, punctuated frequently by large mounds where stray dogs and sacred cows scavenge. Somehow, I've never once seen anyone throw refuse from a car or even from the endless array of food stands that are everywhere. But there it is, in inorganic heaps and I can't imagine how such a problem could ever be brought under control. Still, frequently I see billboards or signs on buses boasting of a green and clean New Delhi. That must be some parallel universe I haven't seen yet. In the meantime, maybe my daughter Sylvia and her colleagues at the environmental studies department at Brown can devise some way for people in places like this to turn the garbage into harmless building materials or fuel that magically doesn't pollute or something!!
It's hard to know where to begin. But my overwhelming impression is one I've heard mentioned again and again with regard to India: the contrasts in this country are startling. Rich and poor, squalor and grandeur, graciousness and indignity. It all hits you full force after only a short exposure. I've been in many crowded spaces in my life -- Times Square during holidays, Japan, China, and New York City subways -- and I've seen my share of vehicular traffic. But there was an orderliness to those spaces that doesn't seem to exist here. Yes, people will line up in neat queues to file into a monument, but on the streets there seem to be no rules of personal space. Humans and animals rush in every which direction; cars, rickshaws, trucks buses and bicycles wander all over the road in a chaotic rush like particles in entropy looking for order. Everyone surely gets to where they're trying to go, but at the same time they appear to be going nowhere.
At this time of year, the landscape is dull and dry, the skies mostly gray, but the women are wrapped in rainbow colored scarves and the men in bright sweaters and hats , which gives almost every scene a vibrancy that can put a smile on your face. Still, nothing can take away from the grimness of the conditions here. In the city it's filth and want for even the most basic things. In the 40-degree nights, people go barefoot and lack shelter. They sleep under tarps and in their rickshaws. Everywhere you go, you see the smoke from small campfires along the roadsides, men and dogs huddled around them in tight circles. These fires fill the air with a smog that spreads far and wide and reaches into your throat as a constant reminder of the poverty that is everywhere. But the people are resourceful, piling 18 to a rickshaw that comfortably seats six, and four to a scooter. They collect cow dung, dry it and fashion it into bricks for their huts. And they sell you whatever services they can: a chance to take a picture of their monkey or the offer of shooing away the people crowding the background of your family picture at the Taj Mahal. It can be heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. That's India in a nutshell. Before I try to say anything else about our travels, let me say this: what we are seeing here so far is indescribable, in words or even in pictures. The depth of the humanity here -- the sheer numbers -- doesn't relate to anything I've experienced ever before. It reminds me of trying to wrap my brain around the idea that there are billions of universes that are out there in the vastness of space. You just can't imagine it. But I'll do my best to translate the experience here in this blog. In the end, though, you'll have to come here and see it for yourself, if you're not faint of heart. And if you do, we have a great guide in New Delhi. His name is Manoj.
Here we are, 7400 miles from home, and on our first day, among the 1.2 billion Indians, Ben runs into three familiar faces in a shop in New Delhi.! It's a family he met while on a community service mission in the Peruvian Amazon two years ago, during his gap year. New Jerseyites, Rick is a gastroenterologist, his wife Trini and their daughter Natalie -- all of them close friends of our dear friend Jeanette Grauer, the dentist who organized the Amazon expedition. The next day in our hotel, Ben bumped into one of his classmates at Wharton, Sachit, visiting his family in India. So it is a small world sometimes.
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