Departure: T minus THREE DAYS!!!!!!!

Writing that title was a little surreal. Has it honestly already been seven weeks that I've been here? Scary thought.

Research Update
Since returning from Delhi, we've met with two more NGOs - these were sector-specific rather than integrated - and one social business. It's been a little frustrating that, with so little time left, we've been able to do so little, but it would seem that late July and early August is "Entertain Foreign Funding Agencies" season here in Indian-NGO-land, and there's not a lot we lowly American student researchers can do about it. The meetings we DID have were pretty great, though - they add a dimension to the research that I personally have been hoping to get ever since we met with Avvai all those weeks ago.

People Update
Harini (Teju's cousin) had "Culturals" at her college last weekend, an inter-departmental talent show cum debate tournament cum all-out battle for bragging rights and cultural dominance, which meant that the ten days preceding the auspicious event filled the house with literally 50 girls practicing at least seven different dances, musical numbers, and dramatic performances. "Hectic" is far too tame a descriptor. The contrast between one week ago and now is pretty drastic, though; Culturals ended, Harini went on a school trip, Harini's parents and other extended family members went to South Africa for a safari, and Teju went to Hyderabad for a cousin's wedding - well, come to think of it, he's probably at this moment somewhere between Hyderabad and Chennai... minor details. He left Wednesday night, the wedding was this morning, and he's due back tomorrow morning, and in the absence of the usual crowd, I've been having a jolly old time with various books, NGO profiles and blogs, Indian kitchens, and the roof.

A Story for my Mommy... and for the rest of you, too, I guess...
My mom keeps asking for STORIES about what we've been doing in India, so here's one: After a relatively slow week, calling people who were too busy to call us back or even send us to bother someone else, we finally got a hold of Purush Uncle Wednesday morning, and he finally gave us the contact info for another NGO in Chennai. We promptly called Mr. Hariharan, the founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, who said essentially "Sure I'll meet with you. How does half an hour from now work?"

Let me present the context: We'd been unable to reach Purush Uncle for the past week, and Teju had a train ticket to Hyderabad at 6 PM Wednesday night... eight hours from the time we spoke to Mr. Hariharan. So we were both just hanging out being lazy, hoping at best to talk to Purush Uncle and obtain from him the promise of someone's contact info if we would call him back in a few days' time.

We naturally assented; of course we could meet with him in half an hour, never mind that Teju needed his shirt ironed and I was still in my pajamas. After frantically scrambling everything together, we managed to get out there with the aid of a very helpful auto driver who even offered to wait for us as we met with the organization; it was in kind of an out-of-the-way location pretty far from the house (the drive was 40 minutes), so we agreed and told him we'd be an hour and a half, two hours tops.

Three educational hours later, we came out to find him still waiting for us, luckily, and not even that perturbed. "I know how meetings go" he shrugged, and we started the drive back to the house.

On the way, we were stopped at a light (it does happen, though rarely) near a school. Classes were apparently over for the day; some kids were walking along the sidewalk. Most took no notice of the jumble of traffic waiting for the light to turn, but one little girl looked over and met my gaze. Her face burst into a sparkling smile and she waved enthusiastically: "Hi!" Her companion, too, looked over and I was treated to the beautiful sight of two spectacularly grinning eight-year-old Indian girls waving at me so vigorously that their whole bodies rocked back and forth. I grinned and waved back, and as the light changed and the auto revved its engine the first girl blew me a kiss. I caught it and sent one of my own to them, and just managed to see the other girl blow a kiss of her own before we were away.

There've been tons of tiny stories like that - boys spontaneously dancing as I leaned out the door of the moving train and smiled at them, a little girl at the Taj Mahal who shyly watched me until her mom asked me to take a picture with her... Ask me about them when we're next face-to-face - which, for some of you, is less than one week hence! - It'll be much more enjoyable for both of us.

Things I Love About India

Cow count: 2153

Things I love about India:

Cities here - at least, the ones that I've visited - are built around trees rather than over them. In my experience, in the US, new developments are characterized almost inevitably by all the baby saplings that the developers have planted to replace the trees they plowed over when they built new things. US streets, when lined by trees, are lined by trees which are strategically placed, regularly spaced, and invariably younger than the street they line. Trees here are old and gnarled and sporadic, and usually have old asphalt splashed on their roots because they've been there much longer than that new-fangled road has.

Traffic. Traffic here has been more insanely exciting than I could have imagined. And the fact that you drive on the left doesn't even register on the list of insanities:

• When people usually describe crazy foreign traffic, they use the example of cars driving on sidewalks. Well, that wouldn't really work here, because curbs are about 18 inches high and so clogged with vendors and debris that any invading automobile would be more mauled than mauling in that attack. Also, as previously mentioned, there tend to be trees along the edges of the streets, so if anything it's the curb-dwellers who infringe on the territory of the two- and four-wheelers, spilling out into the spaces close to and between trees.
  
• But people make up for the lack of on-curb-driving by observing NO spatial restrictions on the rest of the road. I've only seen lines painted on a handful of roads here, but all of those were ignored. On roads with two-directional traffic, it's perfectly acceptable to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road - as long as you don't pick a fight with a bus or cow or bicyclist. The only medians which people pretend to obey are ones over 12 inches in height, and even then cars will nonchalantly drive over to the right-hand side if there's a break in the barrier and a 2-foot gap between oncoming traffic and the median they just crossed.
• I just said "don't pick a fight with a bus or cow or bicyclist" because, on the urban streets of Chennai, there are ample opportunities to pick fights with all three. That's right. Cows, dogs, goats, people, motorcycles, bicycles, buses, rickshaws and their myriad spin offs, autos... the prevailing mentality seems to be that all of the above have an equal right to be on the road, they just have unequal abilities to fight for that right. So don't pick a fight.

India is (to steal a gimmick from the government) !ncredibly COLORFUL! All of the colors I just used in that incredibly fun-to-format sentence are more prevalent in everyday clothing than any of the tame, pale, dark colors prevalent in American clothing. Very few grays, browns, tans, whites, blacks, and pastels. Okay, fine, so the professionals wear white shirts probably half the time, but we just had a meeting today with a project coordinator for an international NGO whose purple shirt was by no means unusual. Even the cows have bright blue horns! Flower sellers are everywhere, stacking and stringing heaps of magenta roses and aromatic jasmine between fruit vendors' mounds of vivid green and orange coconuts and mangoes. These fantastic trees called "the jungle is on fire," which have the most vivaciously crumpled red flowers I could imagine, sporadically carpet both street and sky in scarlet blossoms... I'm getting a little out of hand here, but hopefully you all get the picture.

I love Indian food. I thought I loved Indian food before I came, but that was just a childish infatuation. I didn't know the meaning of the word "love" until I tasted paratha and paneer butter masala served on a banana leaf in a small restaurant in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, India. Beginning every day with iddly, sambar, and coconut chutney has almost made a morning person out of me. Suffice it to say, I'm going to be incredibly bored with North American cuisine when I return to that part of the world. But, with any luck, I'll develop a thorough rapport with the local Asian market.