Momos, mountains and monks... oh my!

This weekend, in order to escape all the fire-cracking chaos that Delhi would ultimately become with the Diwali festivities, some friends and I headed north, to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh. The trip was a much needed respite from Delhi, a time to appreciate clear gurgling rivers, fresh air, a star-filled night sky the likes of which you cannot fathom in Delhi, long treks through tourist-free countryside, and lots and lots and lots of chai. It was a weekend of many firsts: my first glimpse of the Himalayas, my first taste of fresh cow's milk, my first overnight trek, my first bucket shower, my first wind-blown, whispered supplication fluttering from a Tibetan prayer flag, and the first time I have ever been able to see my breath in the cold night air in India.

Some of the major highlights of the weekend:

• A total of 30 hours on trains, including two sleepers and one narrow gauge toy train chug chug chugging towards the Kangra Valley, and almost five hours in various taxis going up and down mountains. The toy train reminded me of the Nilgiri Express that Emily and I took last time (summer 2004) from Coimbatore to Ooty, minus the Chennai young men hooting and hollering every time we went through a tunnel.

• Tibetan foods - momos (dumplings), Tibetan bread (like a thick white roti, almost like a pita but more delicious), and thukpa (thick soup with noodles and veggies)
  
  
• Our destination was Bir in Western Himachal Pradesh (1300 m). Bir is a small Tibetan colony peppered with Buddhist temples, views of the snow-capped Himalayas and a friendly mixed local population of Indians and Tibetans. Walking through the small city on our last day, Nicolas and I happened upon children playing soccer in the street (more of a game of keep the volley cum soccer ball out of the sewer lining the side of the road), alleys lined with prayer flags of all shapes, sizes and colors, a music shop blasting a Korean ballad, a unique coffee shop called "Buckstars", and lots of dirty foreigners buying firecrackers, using Diwali as an excuse for reliving their boyish pyromaniac childhoods.
  
  We also stumbled upon two learning centers, one right in the heart of the city and the other about five to six kilometers away (Deer Park Institute for classical Indian wisodwm traditions and Sherbaling Institute for Buddhism studies, respectively).

• A gorgeous two-day, 36 kilometer trek on the mountain ridge overlooking a lush valley, spotting paragliders coasting through the chilly air above our heads, manuevering a ledge with bleeting sheep and goats, alternate careful steps between unstable rocks and donkey poop, and overcoming vertigo on the long, windy car rides up and down the mountainsides. The ascent began up the mountain to Billing (2600 m), which is famous for the annual international paragliding competition which unfortunately had been held just seven days before we arrived. Apparently paragliders take off from four mountain peaks around the Kangra Valley, descending upon a hay covered landing strip down in the valley near Bir.

• Accommodations:
  ~ Taking the advice of another friend, we stayed at a place called Namlang Himal, which opened only this May and was founded by a French ex-schoolteacher whose NGO has also worked in Nepal to start up local, eventually financially sustainable businesses. In Nepal, she worked with local community organizations to make handicrafts, and after five years the organization is fully self-sustainable. She is hoping that the model will work equally well at Namlang, and she employs a mixed staff of Indian nationals and Tibetans. Word has spread about both initiatives after an appearance on a French popular socially-minded television program. Below is our "cottage" and also some of the other accommodations for guests. Unfortunately, all the tents were booked. Shucks!
  
  ~ The second night of our trek we stayed near the small, almost completely deserted village of Raj Gunda. A kind matriarchal auntie looking after her three fiesty grandchildren took good care of us; we drank homemade moonshine while being warmed by a wood-burning stove as she cooked us aloo, saag, roti and dal. This was my first experience eating in an Indian household, and it was informative to finally watch the process and ingredients that went into every dish - many of which included generous helpings of mustard oil, garlic and onions.

A fabulous weekend, and I am already missing the mountains and blast of fresh cold air as you stepped onto the porch before hopping down to Namlang's outdoor restaurant to sip lemon ginger tea....

Netherland

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

"Perhaps the relevant truth - and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me - is that we all find ourselves in temporary current and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you into deep trouble."

"An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action."

"Smugness, however, requires a certain reflectiveness, which requires perspective, which requires distance; and we, or certainly I, didn't look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions - those feelings, of regret or gratitude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one's own. It didn't seem to me, for example, that I had dodged a bullet, perhaps because I had no real idea what a bullet was. I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children."

"I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love - even with a camera - was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice."

"Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize."

Weather conditions.... Smoke?

Dilliwallah?... oopsy... Dilliwali!

This weekend was one of the first times that I felt like a true dilliwali, what I can surmise to mean Delhi local. I started Saturday morning at the Naz India Foundation, playing with some of the 35 kiddies at their center in East of Kailash. Each time I have gone there I am always amazed at the friendliness and reception that I am greeted with. Cries of "didi didi" (which means older sister in Hindi) come from the kids and I recognize that I have forgotten how enjoyable it is to just play. No teaching, no lecturing, no positions of authority, just play with children. It's been quite a while since I have done this, whether for lack of opportunity, or fear of children in general as they seem such malleable, corruptible, breakable little beings. Unfortunately, play time did not last too long as I was summoned down to the meeting room to sit through a health sciences lessons for the over ten-year-olds on the urinary system. It was good to get a refresher on the bladder, ureter, and why black pee is a bad sign and you should see a doctor. erg....

Next on my list was teenagers and young adults. The organization that I am working for, Breakthrough, has different teams that thus far have worked in relatively independent silos of operation (something that we are working to change). One of these is the education team, which is composed of "Rights Advocates" which train youth and community leaders on issues such as HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness, gender and sexuality, and domestic violence. Saturday was the first in a series of training modules for a group of students from a few different colleges in Delhi, which mostly consisted of game-based getting-to-know-you activities. The students range in age from 17 to 22 and reminded me a lot of the Korean students I knew, mostly relatively shy and unsure of themselves. It will be interesting to see their interactions and exchanges during the course of the trainings, their reactions to relatively sensitive material. I'm looking forward to more Saturdays with them.

The rest of the weekend was spent at coffee shops, kickboxing, walking around the markets, and reading. Maybe this Delhi thang isn't so bad after all....

ladies ladies ladies

As I have mentioned before, Delhi seems to be a very testosteroney, male dominated, aggressive sort of city which has recently been called the "most unsafe city" for women working late night shifts. Great. Glad John supplied me with that mace before I left

But, as I have also mentioned, India is a land of contradictions and paradox. The other night I accompanied some new friends to a concert, part of the Kingfisher Rocktoberfest at the posh Vasant Vihar Continental Hotel that my fellow fellows and I visited during orientation. The band was Shaa'ir and Func, a mix of Mumbai electronic dance funk and a New York based lead singer with phenomenal stage presence who were featured in my new favorite Bollywood film, "Rock On". Here's some video footage from their show:

During the middle of the band's first song, the lead singer called out this guy in the audience. I won't repeat what she said here since this is a family friendly site, but basically he was dancing lewdly and making sexist comments. Her reaction was strong, empowered, feminist, everything that a woman should do when she encounters some jack ass trying to make her feel small, calling on the women in the audience to box him out, asking security to escort him off the premises.

I thought about this reaction, how standing in a posh hotel restaurant with Delhi's young elite with all their disposable income, sipping on Kingfisher and fancy cocktails, wearing their tank tops and tight jeans, this reaction did not seem out of the ordinary.

But then my mind skipped to the campaign that the NGO I'm working for, Breakthrough, is running. It's an anti-domestic violence campaign, Bell Bajao ("ring the bell"), supported by the government to promote the 2005 Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act. The campaign uses television commercial spots, advertisements, radio and a travelling video van to raise awareness, specifically among men to empower them to stop the violence against women, to get off their butts and intervene when they see violence being perpetrated. The statistics for India are staggering (and vary by state): 37% of women polled have experienced abuse, 34% have been slapped by their husbands, 62% experienced physical or sexual violence, and 55% of women think that spousal abuse is warranted. Fifty five percent.

It's inspiring to see young women standing up for themselves in the public sphere, but it's hard to divorce that from the fact that women still seem like second class citizens and some even view themselves as such at the same time. Paradox paradox...

One month e finito...

I keep trying to sit down and reflect on the past month in India - how I am reacting, adjusting, how I feel about living abroad again. One of my concerns before moving to India was that I am too old and stuck in my ways. India presents, in all its complexity and color and character, an assault on your senses in every way contradictory from one scene to the next.

Frail men with legs like arms pull carts of vegetables, people, cardboard, gas tanks on the precarious three inches of space between the cars whizzing past him and the curb. On the other side is a Mercedes Benz with a driver forced to wear a ridiculous sailor uniform as his employer works on his laptop in the air conditioned back seat.

Driving to meet a new friend at the swanky Oberoi Hotel in Sundar Nagar, a hotel charging 18,000 rupees (USD400) a night (on the World Bank's tab nonetheless), we pass makeshift housing of plastic sheets and discarded bamboo, begging the question of what truly qualifies as shelter, but upon seeing the men sleeping in the median makes the families inside the tents seem lucky to have even that.

Juxtaposition after juxtaposition, poverty and wealth, haves and have nots; I feel myself becoming numb to it all. When was it all right to avert one's gaze when the man with the three inch diameter of exposed flesh or the leper with gnarled hands knocks on your window, or the little boy with the marker mustache doing circus cartwheels next to your rickshaw starts tugging on your shirt asking for spare change?

In the month that I've been here, when did I become accustomed to all this?

Tai chi would just not cut it...

During my time abroad I've always found that having a release, some way to vent frustrations in a productive, physical manner, is always helpful. For my first year in Korea it was taekwondo - I sparred with those elementary school kids to the best of my ability until the unfortunate broken nose and thumb incident which ended my martial arts career. My second year in Korea was the batting cages on the walk home from school. Four hundred won (fifty cents-ish) got you twenty balls. I think that this form of release was far more productive than carrying around a stick as my disciplinary tool like the other teachers.

In Delhi, I think that I have found an excellent form of release, one where I do not have to worry about earning belts, impressing others, and where I can work at my own pace. The website even relays the following message:

Please note that martial art training within our Academy is highly controlled. The focus is not to hit hard and 'damage' other members of the class, however it is to learn an art form, improve confidence and fitness at the same time as having fun. Violence and aggression do not exist in Martial Art Academy of India's vocabulary.
CLASSES ARE FOR SERIOUS WORKOUT (NOT JUST FOR TIME PASS OR NETWORKING)

Welcome to my kickboxing gym. I've gone for only four classes which have increasingly kicked my butt (um, wow, five minutes left and yes I'd love to do one hundred face kicks around that punching bag now) but I'm excited to complete this month and possibly move on to thai kickboxing where I have been assured I will learn deadly skills to be executed using only my pinky. Or something like that.

Rickity Rickshaw

For those of you back home, this is part of my daily commute to the office. Sorry for the shaky camera as its quite the bumpy road; it costs about 50 rupees one way (a little over a dollar) and this is actually a bit expensive by Indian standards. My route takes me past some of the construction that you can see here on the Delhi Metro. Unfortunately, I won't be here to use it by the time it comes this far south - it's supposed to be up and running for the 2010 Commonwealth Games!

Pink City

It was time to escape the hustle and bustle of Delhi and go to the nice, small, manageable city (of 2.6 million people) of Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan. My Rajasthani adventures started on Friday morning when I woke up an hour late, rushed outside in the dark lanes of Malviya Nagar and tried to communicate to my eventual rickshaw driver the urgency and speed with which I wanted him to reach the New Delhi train station, approximately half an hour from my apartment. Luckily, India is a country of entrepreneurs and one man saw me frantically scrambling about the train station with five minutes to get to my train and led the way for a nice payment. We sped past security, ran up and down a few flights of stairs and poof! I was on my way to Jaipur (and out about four bucks).

According to the LP, Jaipur got its named after the Maharaja Ram Singh had the entire old city painted pink, a color associated with hospitality, in 1876 to welcome the Price of Wales. Who knew?

In Jaipur I met up with a fellow fellow, Michael, and some of his colleagues from Seva Mandir in Udaipur. Our first day we walked through some of the bazaars, the City Palace, Jantar Mantar and took cycle rickshaws to the Lake Palace outside the city. While 2.6 million people is nothing to sneeze at, it was definitely refreshing to be outside of Delhi, taking cycle rickshaws (something I can't even imagine doing in Delhi - who goes short enough distances to warrant such a thing?), and being able to walk if needed.

On Saturday we hired a cab for the day who took us to the Monkey Temple and two forts, Amber and Jaigarh. So the monkey temple. I must admit my trepidation having not received any rabies vaccine before leaving the States (hello $700 price and shortage of supply). Apparently, the temple is swarming with upwards of 5,000 monkeys at the dusk hours so when we arrived around 11:00 am there were about twenty to thirty monkeys frolicking about. There are three pools, although it was difficult to tell the function of each - supposedly one was for women, one for men, and the other for the monkeys with the temple at the top. As you can see, it was quite the elaborate campus and the monkeys were always provided with plenty of food. We snapped lots of pictures of monkeys jumping in and out of the water, eating, fighting, playing etc.

We then moved on to the Amber Fort which was absolutely spectacular and almost made you forget about the sweltering heat. Almost. The fort was pretty open so you could venture through its labyrinthine halls and passages and at times it seems like I would be lost there forever. It really presented a sense of history, the walls of the fort that wound up and around the mountainside to protect the city at one point in time.

Um. I would provide information about Jaigarh and its supposed largest cannon in the world, but I only saw the inside of the restaurant... Later that night we went to the fake Rajasthani village of Chokhi Dhani which was part Korean authentic village, part bomas in Nairobi, part Jurassic Park (literally, there was a huge T-rex as per Indian villages of yesteryear), part Disneyland.

All in all, a fantastico weekend meeting some new interesting people and seeing a new city. It was actually quite refreshing to meet people in India who are strictly volunteers, and working on a relatively tight budget; it puts this whole India experience in a bit more perspective. Similarly, I enjoyed speaking with Michael's roommate and colleague, a nice madrileño who bears a striking resemblance to Ali Baba (or so the rickshaw drivers in Jaipur seemed to think). We talked about how knowing that we have a finite amount of time in this country, there is a bit of an impatience in our work and our approach to life here, one that we recognize needs to be tempered sometimes, but one that exists nonetheless and brings with it expectations of what our time here should accomplish . It's good to know I'm not the only one who feels a bit restless.

For more pics, I've added a slideshow with a link to my Picasa album on the homepage.

Facts and Figures

Leave it to me to read World Bank reports after leaving, but I recently stumbled across a 2007 report entitled, "Unleashing India's Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth" and have been staying busy at work reading some of the introductory notes. India, the report states, must create an enabling environment for inclusive innovation to promote pro-poor initiatives, grow and in the end remain competitive. But it still has a long way to go. Some interesting facts and figures:

• The National Innovation Foundation in India has a repository of more than 50,000 grassroots innovations and traditional practices which it should be tapping into in a more systematic, productive way.
  
• Teledensity in urban areas is 40 percent and in rural areas only 4 percent. Connectivity is less than 1 percent that of China, Korea, the United States and European Union countries.
• More than half of the country's population is under 25 years old and only 17 percent of people in their mid-twenties and older have a secondary education.
• The average productivity in finance, insurance and real estate companies is nearly 23 times that in agriculture, but accounts for only 1.3 percent of employment, while agriculture accounts for 60 percent.
  
• (For John) Of the top 50 applicants for patents in India between 1995 and 2005, 44 were foreign firms, 6 private Indian firms (of which three were public institutions, one public corporation, and two private Indian pharmaceuticals).
• 90 percent of the workforce is employed in the informal sector.
• Two percent of India's population lives abroad, approximately 20 million people, and earn the equivalent of two thirds of India's GDP
• Illiteracy rates are 46 percent among women and 25 percent among men.

I also finally picked up the "Pocket World in Figures 2008" that I received free with my purchase of The Economist at JFK on my way to Delhi. I flipped through the pages to see on which lists India was number one, of which there were two: (1) Largest population in millions, 2025: 1,447.5 and (2) Cinema attendances, total visits, in millions: 1,6187 (the U.S. was second was 1,422.2)

Blank Noise Spectators

Follow up to my other post about the staring and whatnot, and just to make sure y'alls don't think I'm suffering from inflated paranoia (minus my frantic call to Hemant last night fearing possible attack the hands of a rickshaw driver who was only taking a shortcut) or narcissism.

Check out the following site, providing examples of what women are doing, seeing, how they are being treated, responding to street sexual harassment etc. in India. It's inspiring, hopeful and depressing all at the same time.

http://blanknoisespectators.blogspot.com/

Wonkette bringing the debate to Delhi

Since I was ten and a half hours removed from the debate last night in Nashville, my most trusted source of news and liveblogging is obviously www.wonkette.com. I hope that's all right. The below liveblog excerpt basically sums it up:

10:04 PM — What are the McCain and Obama Doctrines? Sarah Palin will be asked this question in her next interview with Charlie Gibson.

10:06 PM — MY FRIENDS MY FRIENDS. Oh John McCain. Did he say “this terrible clam base, we say never again.” He wants a cool hand at the tiller, and that is why he will be voting for Barack Obama.
This McCain fellow is so unpopular that even when he says “Petraeus” he can’t goose up a little interest from the undecided voters of Ohio. We must not exacerbate our reputation, he says.

10:09 PM — Katie asks, Can we treat Pakistan like the new Cambodia? Obama says Sure why not. He also says “Pockystahn,” like an elitist. And “Tollybahn,” like a terrorist. Kill! Crush!

10:11 PM — Come Mr. Tollybahn, tolly me banana! We must use Petraeus’ strategy, the same strategy but different. The undecided voters of Ohio are really not terribly swayed by this. Tom Brokaw says, “I’m just the hired help here,” and Obama says, “You’re likable enough, Tom.”

10:13 PM — “Senator McCain suggests that I’m green behind the ears.” Huh? McCain interjects with some angry/nervous little remark. He is like the only guy at the party who doesn’t drink…making awful interrupting jokes while everybody else is just trying to enjoy themselves. The crack about bombing Iran was just a funny little quip with a war buddy, which maybe Obama doesn’t understand, because FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, ALAN.

10:18 PM — Honor and victory! Not in defeat! “We’re not going to have another cold war with Russia.” Because maybe we will have a hot war with Russia! Oh Jesus he comes out with that fucking KGB-in-the-eyes joke. Now all he has to do is talk about how the approval ratings of Congress are down to relatives and paid staffers or whatever.

10:21 PM — Senator Obama, you have 20 seconds to answer this question because John McCain wasted a bunch of air recycling jokes he has told 400 million times to sadly clumped gatherings of retirees in Bingo halls from Baton Rouge to Boca Raton. Obama says, “I wrote a memo!” He has spent a lot of time the past few years, writing many memos and letters, which were ignored.

more pics...

details at Lodi Gardens


Lodi Gardens

India Gate on Gandhi's Birthday

message on my tv when the transmission was interrupted

Gandhi Memorial

Gandhi Memorial

Vishwa park - missing my morning walks

Lodi Gardens

Tombs at Lodi Gardens

Rock On!

This weekend I saw my first Bollywood film in theaters and was quite pleasantly surprised... and am currently nursing a crush on Farhan Akhtar, one of the main characters (and lead singer) in the film. The music was catchy, there were no random outbursts of song and dance, and the story was solid, with themes of friendship, love, death, betrayal, success, etc. Can't wait for my next one! Oh, and I did appreciate the message at the end of the movie which instructed the audience to download the movie's music legally. Which I will do.

Reluctant reader

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

“It seemed to me then – and to be honest, sir, seems to me still – that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own indifference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.”

“Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is not within us.”

Taking it bird by bird

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help up understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life – wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing detail during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

“E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

“’My mother’s first criterion for a man is that he be interesting. What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture. Robbie is about as interesting as a pair of red high-top Converse sneakers. But Robbie points to the mattress on the floor. He grins, slowly unbuckling his belt, drops his jeans. “Lie down,” says Robbie. This is interesting enough for me.’” ~ Abigail Thomas

“We read Faulkner for the beauty of his horrible creations, the beauty of the writing, and we read him to find out what life is about from his point of view. He expresses this through his characters. All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.”

“Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass – seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”

“Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?” ~ Violet Weingarten, Intimations of Mortality

Extracurriculars...

For the past two weeks I have been attempting to keep myself busy at work, sometimes in vain and sometimes with success. My semblance of a real project at Breakthrough will begin today; I will be researching the human rights context for each of these films which will be included in the program and on the festival website. More on this as it progresses over the next month or so.

In the meantime, I have been trying to get my hands into a couple side projects. John has aptly identified a restless, anxious, impatience within me that needs to be expressed in some way shape or form. My first outlet when I arrived was to get in contact with a former colleague whose project I supervised during my time at the Bank. I have mentioned this project team leader in past posts and fondly referred to him as boyfriend #2 at the Bank. In any case, he’s a tireless entrepreneur with a sincere passion for bringing sustainable, affordable technology to the poor around the world, mainly in the form of renewable light sources. I helped him with an application for a small grant last week and will hopefully do the same for another grant due at the end of the month. I secretly hope to continue my work with him, possibly at his campus outside of Hyderabad, after my fellowship in Delhi has ended.

My second outlet has been a re-introduction to service, although I have only lent my time twice thus far. During orientation, we had the pleasure of hearing from three Ashoka fellows here in India, one of whom began working with MSM populations about a decade ago and has since branched out to housing HIV/AIDS orphans, providing home-based care around the city, and, in partnership with Standard Charter Bank, began a program to encourage leadership amongst pre-teen and teenage girls through sports. This Saturday I had the pleasure of working with some of the youngsters who call this foundation their home, casually discussing their school life, favorite sports, movies and television shows. I do hope that this becomes a bit more of an organized part of their weekly routine and since I will be here until June and used to “teach” ESL, it seemed like a good fit.

Service is an interesting thing – sometimes it is motivated by pure selfishness, making the volunteer feel better about him/herself, being able to add a line to one’s resume, and sometimes, hopefully the majority of the time, it is completely altruistic, this seeming obligation to give back when you have so much. It is also quite the humbling experience for me; it’s odd to think how life moves, how it offers opportunities for some and denies others the same.

Interestingly enough, during my two years in Korea, I never once stepped foot inside an orphanage, one of the biggest regrets that I related to friends our last week there (others included my lame attempts at learning the Korean language, not making enough Ko-rean friends and an overindulgence in soju). I have tried to identify why, why I wouldn’t take that step, why I wouldn’t reach out to these children when I could have shared the same fate of not being chosen that day in the hospital in Seoul when Jan and Greg were making their choice for a family addition. Perhaps going to this orphanage in India, far from home, I am trying to make up for this regret...

Housing updates...

After almost a month at the air-conditioned Vishwa Yuvak Kendra, I have found an apartment through the cragislist equivalent here in India (many thanks to Nischala for the suggestion). It appears that the online classified ads have not taken hold here in India yet, as evidenced by my co-workers concern that my new roommate could be a terrorist. I assure you, she is not.

Please see attached some photos of my new pad. It’s in the southern part of the city called Malviya Nagar, a bit north of Saket and south of Hauz Kaus. It is quite close to a nice market, which includes a Café Coffee Day, bookstore, Airtel store, a delish South Indian restaurant and a Dominos pizza which I have not yet tried – the essentials basically.

Unfortunately, right after walking in the office this morning two of my coworkers who dropped me off this weekend after a work event informed me that I have to move ASAP. My locale apparently did not give them a warm fuzzy because it's a bit difficult to find (and with my sense of direction that usually adds another 15 minutes to the auto driver's search).