Hi! I wrote a bunch of entries, forgot to write my name on them, and back-dated them so they're in an order that makes some sense. so scroll down for new out of order entries, if you like. Now going for a week of teaching teenagers to build a cob oven, then off to a school garden on the coast. Thanks for reading!
Sarah
Friday, November 12, 2010
Deepawali
Deepawali, also known (in the North) as Diwali or the Festival of Lights, is celebrated on the first new moon in this changing-from-fall-to-winter season. This is one of many things I like about India--they follow the lunar calendar and pay attention to the moon. For Deepawali, people give each other gifts, though it's not as central as it is for Christmas. More important is the lighting of lamps and the prayers--to Ganesh, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, to the gods of your house and family. People dress nice, cook and eat special meals and sweets. It is a family holiday. Sunita has bought me a sari for a Deepawali present and I wear it. Some friends from the Isha Yoga Center have come, Lakshman (an ex-Navy man who now practices agriculture, teaching and yoga with missionary zeal, particularly for a certain soil-building technique called Amrit Mitti, "Nectar Soil") his quiet wife Sujatha, and their fourteen-year-old son Anugraha (which means, "blessing.") Anugraha goes to Gurukula school, the ancient Indian form of education. With other young men and women, he is under the teaching of a certain guru. They learn Sanskrit, English, Tamil, yoga and meditation, Karnatic classical music (singing/chanting) martial arts, and dance. Also somewhere in there they learn math and standard language arts, and Anugraha knows a fair amount about biology as well. The guru is also entrusted with educating his students about the things you learn from your parents: ethics and in general how to live well.
You should see this guy. He looks like an Indian prince out of the Mahabharata, with his long hair and kurta and dhoti, but most of all it's the way he carries himself. I sort of forget he is fourteen--he acts more mature than most college boys. He is very disciplined in his meditation and talks like an adult, articulate as anyone. But it's not like his childhood has been sacrificed either--he loves to play Uno, and crows more gleefully than my brother when he wins.
But here's where the secret brilliance of this Gurukula system comes in. Who listens to their parents at 14? I know I tried to be exactly the opposite (and then found myself behaving like other people that I wanted nothing to do with, and learned the important lesson that you can't be the opposite of everything, and you can't be anything but yourself.) I have long thought that adolescence could be such a powerful age if adolescent kids weren't so absorbed in petty power struggles with their parents and petty social struggles with their classmates. If they had somewhere to direct all that change happening in minds and hearts. This kid is what I wish I had been like at 14: gracefully, on his own terms, growing from a child into a man. Independence is taken care of--he lives with other students in a hostel--but responsibility is now to his Guru and his studies. I'd like to meet the girls in his class.
Anyway. Besides friends and family, also integral to Deepawali is the Go-puja, where cows are thanked for all they provide: the daily eaten yogurt, ghee, milk, and other milk products as well as essential dung and urine for fertilizers. All morning bells have rung for this puja; at about noon we go to the cow-shed.
The cow-shed has been decorated the night before.
Savitri has drawn a beautiful rangoli, with kumkum and turmeric colors, at the door.
...and a neighbor, Vinoudaka, has come over to do the paintings on the cowshed walls. First she made dots, then connected them into beautiful symmetry.
This is Balarama, named for Krishna's incredibly strong, often drunk brother with his message of "Peace!" This bull is a Malnad Gidda--a local cow breed adapted to lots of rain and eating forest plants. Now these cows are fairly bad-ass. They can jump five-foot fences and yes, go down stairs. So much for that old high school prank...
This is Gauri, also named for a goddess. Now I want you to look at something. Look at Balarama, and then look at Gauri. Do you notice a difference in their bodies? That Gauri's ribs show much more and her hip bones jut out? It's extremely evident when you see them side by side.
Gauri is giving milk, which is one possible reason. However, she is given three times as much cattle feed as the other cows, and still she is thin like this. Gauri is half Jersey, and thus needs more food because Jerseys have been bred to be high input, high yield cows. The work Vanastree is doing--promomoting locally adapted varieties--is applicable even to livestock. And it has serious implications for farmers--what are you going to do with a ranch of Jerseys if your grazing land is forest, and you cannot afford the volume of cattle feed that your cattle need?
Then at night, we light lamps and put them at all the entrances to the house, and the round hut, and Manju and Savitri's house. When you place a lamp, you think of someone (or many people, as I had to with so many friends far away!) who is not here. This is my favorite kind of meditation, of little magic.
by request...
You should see this guy. He looks like an Indian prince out of the Mahabharata, with his long hair and kurta and dhoti, but most of all it's the way he carries himself. I sort of forget he is fourteen--he acts more mature than most college boys. He is very disciplined in his meditation and talks like an adult, articulate as anyone. But it's not like his childhood has been sacrificed either--he loves to play Uno, and crows more gleefully than my brother when he wins.
But here's where the secret brilliance of this Gurukula system comes in. Who listens to their parents at 14? I know I tried to be exactly the opposite (and then found myself behaving like other people that I wanted nothing to do with, and learned the important lesson that you can't be the opposite of everything, and you can't be anything but yourself.) I have long thought that adolescence could be such a powerful age if adolescent kids weren't so absorbed in petty power struggles with their parents and petty social struggles with their classmates. If they had somewhere to direct all that change happening in minds and hearts. This kid is what I wish I had been like at 14: gracefully, on his own terms, growing from a child into a man. Independence is taken care of--he lives with other students in a hostel--but responsibility is now to his Guru and his studies. I'd like to meet the girls in his class.
Anyway. Besides friends and family, also integral to Deepawali is the Go-puja, where cows are thanked for all they provide: the daily eaten yogurt, ghee, milk, and other milk products as well as essential dung and urine for fertilizers. All morning bells have rung for this puja; at about noon we go to the cow-shed.
The cows, before their hay, are given dosa (like a crepe) with turmeric added, and also some paysa, a sweet like rice pudding but made with vermicelli noodles and milk and sugar, that has been blessed. They have also been given these necklaces of mango leaves and areca nuts, and have had kumkum and turmeric rubbed on their foreheads (Manju and Sunita had to dodge their horns to do this! They did not like it.) Flowers are placed at their feet; touching the feet of something is a sign of utmost respect and reverence.
The calf is called Guru.
Gauri is giving milk, which is one possible reason. However, she is given three times as much cattle feed as the other cows, and still she is thin like this. Gauri is half Jersey, and thus needs more food because Jerseys have been bred to be high input, high yield cows. The work Vanastree is doing--promomoting locally adapted varieties--is applicable even to livestock. And it has serious implications for farmers--what are you going to do with a ranch of Jerseys if your grazing land is forest, and you cannot afford the volume of cattle feed that your cattle need?
Flowers and fire, two very important parts of puja.
Monday, November 8, 2010
A belated Photo Post
Monday, November 1, 2010
Back in Sirsi, and What I Want To Do When I Grow Up
It’s nice to be back in Sirsi. The weather is cooling down, there isn’t a predictable downpour after 4 pm anymore, and I can at least understand some of the language, if not say much. Coming into Sirsi felt like coming home. Chitti leapt up to us, whining and wagging her entire dog self, and I can dig in the dirt and chase kids around making chicken noises.
Sunita and I went to the office and spent the night there. This office has sleeping stuff, because even from the hills 18 kilometers out of Sirsi, the commute takes a while, and Sunita has to either hire a driver (in Sirsi it seems that few people have cars and those who do often offer taxi service) or take the bus, which is infrequent, slow, and often very crowded. That said, I like to take the bus, because I get to see a lot of people, and school girls will sometimes talk to me in school English. Or old ladies will talk to me in Kannada and I can’t understand much, but if I say a couple Kannada words, they keep talking. Both are nice. I learned in Pondy that being a friendly foreigner makes being foreign feel much less wrong-footed.
One of the office chores is to sort out fabric scraps into piles of colors to be taken to the quilt lady to make into quilts, or to be made into cloth menstrual pads by the seed collective women. And what fabric scraps! Bright oranges, reds, green-blues, silver and gold thread making intricate designs on the colors. So I sit cross-legged with a rainbow in a circle all around me. I get to thinking what I used to call Handwork Thoughts: long, long thoughts that chase each other in circles and can be thought as long as it takes to knit or sew. I think I would like to be an old lady who lives in the mountains and makes quilts, makes bread, makes a garden, keeps goats and sheep and ducks, all of her own love and her own hands. I want to be a holdout, you know, one of those people that Michael Pollan or Gary Paul Nabhan writes glowingly about, the old-fashioned people who are dying out, the lady who still hand makes tortillas of corn she grew herself. I want to breathe new life into this sort of work, I don’t want all the old fashioned people to be old, and then to be gone. But—but—there’s something keeping me, just yet. I tell Sunita this when she looks up from her work.
“I want to be an old lady who lives in the mountains with phone service, good road access and internet. And I don’t want to do any intellectual work!” says Sunita. I laugh, because Sunita lives in the mountains, with the trees and rice paddies and the purple-rumped sunbird...but she hasn’t got phone service, good road access or internet. You have to walk out the paddy field, on narrow raised mud paths that squelch under the feet, scattering frogs and paddy-crabs, and then out the red mud road. Or you have to go in Muthalif’s little van out the other red mud road, which is scarred by rain and cows and rocks.
And she does absurd amounts of intellectual work. Her mind functions at about a million miles an hour. Sunita sighs then and says slowly, “But if you don’t think, they’ll just ride right over you.”
Exactly.
These days, it isn’t enough to be a holdout. Lone holdouts can be ground down—by time, by companies, by money, by the bank. Holdouts have to be farmers and fighters, teachers of that which is blacklisted by the economic system and banned by the media. We have to stick together. “Use those modern networks,” says my favourite professor-mentor Steve. We have to do that. I found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on Sunita’s shelf, started reading it. It’s eerie just how much what happened there in the Midwest a little over half a century ago is echoing here. Sunita’s neighbours have a loan. 13 percent interest and areca farming doesn’t pay enough to barely pay the cost of living and the loan itself, let alone the interest. Are we going to let history repeat itself, at great cost to the land and the people, because a place is too far away? Although the companies engineering this slow trapping of the people who work the land are housed on our own soil? Are we going to stand so much longer for inhuman treatment of our own land—the sterilization, the rendering of farming into pure chemistry and biology, the removal of human souls from the land? I hope not. Because I want farming, and other land-based livelihoods, to be something I can do when I grow up. To be viable choices for young people.
“...They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, no matter how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.
Now the farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos...And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer.”
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Here's what Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, said (7 September 2010:)
"The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of agriculture."
...to migrate into Mumbai slums? to make room for multinationals like WalMart and Monsanto, two members on the board of the Indo-US Knowledge Iniative? to be poor in the city instead of poor on land that their grandfathers owned, but that is being taken by the bank in the same way it was taken from farmers in the Dust Bowl in the US?
How about subsidizing knowledge and the people who hold it, grow it, steward it as they do the land, instead of chemical companies? How about putting farmers in the seats that make decisions about farming? How about society putting a higher value on the food we eat and the people who grow it, so that farming becomes a job with respect in its very name? Do farmers have to be poor? I don't think so--if I did, I wouldn't be doing this sort of work.
I just want to work for myself, but I want to do it with dignity, I want that to be possible, I want the economic system not to be stacked against the kind of living where you’re either the boss or the bossed, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to work for anyone, and I don’t want anyone to work for me. Sure I want to help my neighbours, sure I love to work with other people, but with, not for. There’s a big difference.
P.S. I've also been to Pondicherry and Kotagiri for a Conservation Education conference...I'd like to write about those places too, we'll see. Thanks for reading,
Sarah
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Conservation Education Network in Kotagiri: Kind of like PICA on a Larger Scale, at least in terms of Inspiration
A tight cluster of people, some with binoculars pressed to their eyes, some squinting up at a tiny flash of orange amid the branches above, whispering so as not to disturb the subject of their awed ogling.
“Shhhh...”
“The scarlet minivet?”
“Haa. Yes, the scarlet minivet...”
“Male?”
“Haa, yes...”
Where are we? Natural History Field Quarter? Wrong. (hint: scarlet minivet is not found in California.) Sunita has wrangled it so that I can come along to the Third Annual Retreat of the Conservation Education Network, which as I understand it is a bunch of people doing a great diversity of awesome environmental education work. These people are working for the most part in ones and twos to play a vital part in conservation and education: leading a garden class in a school, sneaking environmental lessons into textbooks, teaching about snow leopard conservation in Ladakh where snow leopard conflict poses risks to livestock, villagers and leopards alike; a guy from Auroville who has school kids conduct water audits in the surrounding villages and then helps the villagers to fix leaky taps (saving some insane amount of water in a water-poor area); people who work at the Bee Museum in Ooty; people who work with indigenous communities on sustainable harvesting, help elders to be recognized as teachers, and teach communities to advocate for themselves and their rights. I am quite humbled by the volume of vital, good, grassroots work these people are doing. Storybooks and teacher-training books on conservation, with lessons that we might teach at camp, they're so well thought out; Sunita's good work that I get to help with; I wish I could tell all the stories the way I heard them. Someday, will we inspire enough people that we will tip the balance in favour of sanity, of wonder, of hope that is not flashy and grand but works? Here, I am most hopeful.
The amusing cultural similarity of bird lovers the world over was made plain to me on a hike in Longwood Shola, outside of Kotagiri. Kotagiri is a former British hill station. Its more popular lower neighbor, Ooty, is the subject of a thoroughly entertaining David Attenborough movie about Ooty's steam engine. Back in the day the British came to these mountains and, finding that they were mercifully cool, tried to rebuild Olde England in them. The photos will explain. If they love home so much why didn’t they just go home after a while is my question...but one of the good things they left is a great naturalistic appreciation.
This place is in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, which contains a baffling assortment of towns, villages, indigenous communities, tiger reserves and small places like this Longwood Shola. It is managed by the Forest Departments of three different states. And this Keystone Foundation, which is hosting the conference, is working to get it legal status as an independent reserve. Should that happen, they have the perfect staff all ready, trained and working: representatives of the tribes who live in the reserves doing a mixture of education field work and botany, writing or whatever their specialty is; professional people from other states; and a great network of local people with various sorts of expertise. India, if I haven't said this already, is all about networks. And this Conservation Education Network is a good one, boy. Many of these people work in isolation amid skeptical local populations (more on this later) and sporadically grateful schoolchildren; the relief and gratitude at being among like-minded people, able to ask for counsel, and merit congratulations was quite striking for me.
The last night, some folk dancers from the Kurumba tribe show up to teach us some dancing. They bring a sheet of corrugated tin and some rocks; upon this they light a fire. Portable fire pit! Brilliant. They are all drunk as skunks and grinning. One tiny little man has exactly one front tooth. He is wearing a beanie and smiling so drunkenly and happily, playing a drum. He looks just like a gnome. But can he ever play this drum! Once in a while he holds it over the fire, to heat the leather so it tightens. That music, drums and little nasal-sounding horn-flutes, will echo in my head for a long time to come. Nor will I easily forget the sight of all these Indians, of all kinds of castes and backgrounds, attempting to follow a lithe, graceful little man in dance. I still have not grasped the reality of how far India has come, that this caste-blind sort of interaction can occur.
Then to Ooty, where we eat Chinese food, buy chocolates, and check out the Botanical Garden. I steal some seeds. From Ooty we drive through a tiger reserve (no tigers, but we did see two tuskers—big bull elephants with long tusks and men on their backs, carrying huge loads of bamboo, tusks under, trunk on top. If I were a park ranger in India...)
We reach Mysore just before dark. Sunita's aunt from Chennai wants her to check out this house that needs renovation, so we take an auto to some other family member's house, get the key to the house in question, go see the house, meet another cousin, and go back to the family house. An old auntie named Aka (older sister) Pati lives there. Aka Pati has had a hard life, but she is the best kind of old lady. When I am old I would like to hold myself like Aka Pati. She has a long, long braid, and she's sitting in her sari in a plastic chair on her porch when we first arrive. She's there when we return. Everyone presses her hands, hugs her around the shoulders, speaks loudly for her benefit. I say “Nimma nori santosha”--happy to meet you in Kannada and she laughs—a warm, kindly cackling, unstoppable toothless laugh. This old woman loves, is loved, is love.
It makes me happy to know that this sort of family may continue to exist in a city, not just in communities where everyone lives together because they always have. It makes me glad to know that people keep it on purpose. It makes me glad to know that Sunita, who lives alone in the Western Ghats, has this sort of family to come home to one day.
“Shhhh...”
“The scarlet minivet?”
“Haa. Yes, the scarlet minivet...”
“Male?”
“Haa, yes...”
Where are we? Natural History Field Quarter? Wrong. (hint: scarlet minivet is not found in California.) Sunita has wrangled it so that I can come along to the Third Annual Retreat of the Conservation Education Network, which as I understand it is a bunch of people doing a great diversity of awesome environmental education work. These people are working for the most part in ones and twos to play a vital part in conservation and education: leading a garden class in a school, sneaking environmental lessons into textbooks, teaching about snow leopard conservation in Ladakh where snow leopard conflict poses risks to livestock, villagers and leopards alike; a guy from Auroville who has school kids conduct water audits in the surrounding villages and then helps the villagers to fix leaky taps (saving some insane amount of water in a water-poor area); people who work at the Bee Museum in Ooty; people who work with indigenous communities on sustainable harvesting, help elders to be recognized as teachers, and teach communities to advocate for themselves and their rights. I am quite humbled by the volume of vital, good, grassroots work these people are doing. Storybooks and teacher-training books on conservation, with lessons that we might teach at camp, they're so well thought out; Sunita's good work that I get to help with; I wish I could tell all the stories the way I heard them. Someday, will we inspire enough people that we will tip the balance in favour of sanity, of wonder, of hope that is not flashy and grand but works? Here, I am most hopeful.
The amusing cultural similarity of bird lovers the world over was made plain to me on a hike in Longwood Shola, outside of Kotagiri. Kotagiri is a former British hill station. Its more popular lower neighbor, Ooty, is the subject of a thoroughly entertaining David Attenborough movie about Ooty's steam engine. Back in the day the British came to these mountains and, finding that they were mercifully cool, tried to rebuild Olde England in them. The photos will explain. If they love home so much why didn’t they just go home after a while is my question...but one of the good things they left is a great naturalistic appreciation.
This place is in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, which contains a baffling assortment of towns, villages, indigenous communities, tiger reserves and small places like this Longwood Shola. It is managed by the Forest Departments of three different states. And this Keystone Foundation, which is hosting the conference, is working to get it legal status as an independent reserve. Should that happen, they have the perfect staff all ready, trained and working: representatives of the tribes who live in the reserves doing a mixture of education field work and botany, writing or whatever their specialty is; professional people from other states; and a great network of local people with various sorts of expertise. India, if I haven't said this already, is all about networks. And this Conservation Education Network is a good one, boy. Many of these people work in isolation amid skeptical local populations (more on this later) and sporadically grateful schoolchildren; the relief and gratitude at being among like-minded people, able to ask for counsel, and merit congratulations was quite striking for me.
The last night, some folk dancers from the Kurumba tribe show up to teach us some dancing. They bring a sheet of corrugated tin and some rocks; upon this they light a fire. Portable fire pit! Brilliant. They are all drunk as skunks and grinning. One tiny little man has exactly one front tooth. He is wearing a beanie and smiling so drunkenly and happily, playing a drum. He looks just like a gnome. But can he ever play this drum! Once in a while he holds it over the fire, to heat the leather so it tightens. That music, drums and little nasal-sounding horn-flutes, will echo in my head for a long time to come. Nor will I easily forget the sight of all these Indians, of all kinds of castes and backgrounds, attempting to follow a lithe, graceful little man in dance. I still have not grasped the reality of how far India has come, that this caste-blind sort of interaction can occur.
Then to Ooty, where we eat Chinese food, buy chocolates, and check out the Botanical Garden. I steal some seeds. From Ooty we drive through a tiger reserve (no tigers, but we did see two tuskers—big bull elephants with long tusks and men on their backs, carrying huge loads of bamboo, tusks under, trunk on top. If I were a park ranger in India...)
We reach Mysore just before dark. Sunita's aunt from Chennai wants her to check out this house that needs renovation, so we take an auto to some other family member's house, get the key to the house in question, go see the house, meet another cousin, and go back to the family house. An old auntie named Aka (older sister) Pati lives there. Aka Pati has had a hard life, but she is the best kind of old lady. When I am old I would like to hold myself like Aka Pati. She has a long, long braid, and she's sitting in her sari in a plastic chair on her porch when we first arrive. She's there when we return. Everyone presses her hands, hugs her around the shoulders, speaks loudly for her benefit. I say “Nimma nori santosha”--happy to meet you in Kannada and she laughs—a warm, kindly cackling, unstoppable toothless laugh. This old woman loves, is loved, is love.
It makes me happy to know that this sort of family may continue to exist in a city, not just in communities where everyone lives together because they always have. It makes me glad to know that people keep it on purpose. It makes me glad to know that Sunita, who lives alone in the Western Ghats, has this sort of family to come home to one day.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Flowers at Pondicherry hotel, Auroville
Last night there was a terrific thunderstorm at 1:30 am which kept me awake until about 3:30. I ended up going onto the roof when the storm had passed out over the Bay of Bengal, and I just watched the constant flickering of far off lightning in a murky distant night sky. It was very quiet then, something which cannot be said for most times of day in Pondicherry. I have been spending time with an Indian man who works at the Sacar hotel at which I am staying. It is definitely nice to be able to interact with places in the area with the experience of someone who lives there. My internet time is running out, but I will write more soon I think. Best to all of you.
Nathan
Monday, October 18, 2010
A couple more photos of Pondicherry
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