We freed 43 people today! Read about it here:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/article926029.ece
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/117323/39-bonded-labourers-rescued-quarry.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mangalore/Bonded-labourers-freed-from-Bantwal-quarry/articleshow/7025185.cms
Friday, December 3, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Things I've done the past two months but was too lazy to sit down and update my blog: Part I
Wow! I have not updated this in a long time! I apologize for the long delay. I guess I've just been kinda lazy...BUT that's all going to change because I'm actually going to make a greater effort to update this with more consistency. Since it has been so long, I'll try to share some scatterbrained stories/events/thoughts.
The monsoon season has come and gone and has brought instead lovely winter here in Bangalore. All along the streets of my neighborhood I get to see all these beautiful trees in bloom with these lovely orange blossoms. It's especially nice to sit out on the office balcony alone during devotions and looking at this site:
What's even better, is that the weather has just been perfect! I mean it was good before but because of the monsoons, we would get a lot of days of continuous clouds which got kinda depressing after awhile. However, now, the nights are nice and cool and the sun warms you up when it's out. On the rare cloudy day, you'd almost swear you were back in America experiencing a milder autumn. That is you'd think that until you smelled the burning trash and cow refuse, here the endless honking and jump out of the way of some guy on a motorcycle who made a turn that was much closer to you than was necessary. Then you quickly all of a sudden remember where you are and it's definitely not America! I guess the past few weeks this has really been hitting home that I'm in India and I'm not leaving for a long time! But, hey, it only took me five months to come to this profound realization!
I guess due to the fact that I'm into a routine now, things that once seemed really cool and new and exotic just sort of seem run of the mill now. I guess that's to be expected after living so long in the same place which makes me sad that I didn't do a better job documenting my reactions to different aspects of India. Honestly for most of the month of November I just read a lot in my free time (Pillars of the Earth: Entertaining / Brideshead Revisited: Very Good / Never Let Me Go / Sad but good). This in part is due to the fact that Bangalore has absolutely no nightlife really. Before coming here, I had head that Bangalore was 'the pub capital of India'. That may have been true during the British Raj but is definitely not anymore. Not to say that I have an immense desire to go to bars like back home, but when you and your roommates have reading parties (yes reading...we sat around and read by ourselves) then you start to develop a desire to get out and be around real humans instead of imaginary ones. I began to think that maybe there just really wasn't much of a nightlife at all in India until we went to Mumbai!
Mumbai is very different in many ways from Bangalore. Whereas Bangalore is a quiet, smaller ('smaller' really is a relative word) city with a perfect climate, Mumbai is a massive, crowded, humid, busy city with so much pollution that your average 'sunny' day still seems relatively cloudy. As much as it might sound like that makes Mumbai an awful place, it's quite the opposite. It's actually a really awesome city with a ton more to do than in Bangalore! The first thing that's very noticeable about Mumbai is the wave of heat and humidity that hits you as soon as you step of the plane. Luckily we were met by mine and Henry's former DC intern turned Mumbai intern Kaisa Kinkaid.
(That's me, Kaisa and Henry)
You'll also notice that we are standing on a black stone beach next to the Arabian Sea. This is what your average beach (average? wait that's not right...this is what a nicer beach) in Mumabi looks like:
Yes. A very lovely place to hang around and, as you'll see in later pictures, the trash did not deter many people from sharing quite a few...(ahem) romantic moments at the beach. After this we went to an old Portuguese Fort located on the tip of one of the peninsulas of Mumbai. Now, for the two of you out there that have ever seen a Bollywood movie, I THOUGHT this was the place where 'the kids' hang out in Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na, but I was disappointed that it looks like it wasn't that place. But, I digress. The Portuguese Fort:was pretty great but, due to the smog, the view was very underwhelming. However, very close by to the fort was the house of the famous "Bollywood Hero" Shah Rukh Kahn!
Settle down ladies, he does not currently look like this anymore. This was about 20 years ago so...he's not looking like this anymore. However, that did not stop 40 year-old women, hoping to get a glimpse of their crush from years ago. We happened to be most fortunate to come at the exact time when Shah Rukh Kahn's guards were taking His trash out. The following is the amazing sequence that we witnessed:
This is the gate. You can see his house looks like an apartment complex. It rises up on the left side of the picture.
Guard, scoping out the streets to see if it's safe to bring out the trash.
And the trash comes out! What he learned from his trash is that he drinks Aquafina and his kids have a lot of Nerf guns. So for the first and last time in my life, I became a celebrity stalker and was completely disgusted with myself. Seriously though, it is very interesting seeing how the rich live in Mumbai. Here in the middle of a city that has somewhere around 40% of its population living in slums, it made me wonder how you could live like that when, literally, just outside your house there might be a family living underneath a tarp lean-to against a building. How could you honestly spend so much money on yourself when people are living in these poor excuses for shelter? I guess, as I thought about it more, we have the same problem in America but it's covered up so we don't have to be confronted with this day in and day out. The poor aren't right outside our houses; we've made it so that the communities are divided with wealthy towns/villages and poor ones. I guess it's hard to say which structure is better or worse because, while in America you just ignore that the poor exist, in India, eventually just get used to seeing the poor and crippled walking around begging for money and before you know it you aren't bothered by it. You start to tell yourself, 'Well they could get help if they wanted to, they just don't' or 'The money I give won't go to them, it'll just go to their 'bosses''. Sadly, this is all true. It's especially hard when you see the kids begging for food because they're being completely manipulated by older people who are using them for money. How do you care for them? What we've sometimes done is taken some candy or a toy and give it to the kids. This usually makes them happy but who knows what their bosses do to them if they don't bring back money...
Anyway, the rest of Mumbai was truly a great time. We went to the Taj Hotel and the Gateway of India which was actually really cool:
What made this trip to the Gateway especially memorable were the amount of people that came up asking, 'Sir! One snap sir with you? Please sir! One snap only.' For some reason I got roped into having my picture taken twice with 4 guys from Goa and one with a 60 year-old man. I wish I could find the photo but I must not have gotten one. Now the great thing about the picture above is that behind the camera there are maybe 5 Indians who are taking pictures of us with their cameras or phones. One fancied himself to be an especially gifted photographer who told me, "Sir! Go to the center! That way there will be two girls on both sides! It will look very nice!" As great as his advice was, we declined. After this we watched the sunset on a beach in South Mumbai:
It was a really beautiful sunset and the beach had a lot of people watching the sunset. As I mentioned before, the beach also had a lot of trash:
Literally the whole massive beach was covered with this. Mumbai is a really cool city but it would be absolutely amazing if they just cleaned up their beaches.However, once again, as I mentioned before, this did not stop a couple of romantics from sharing a moment amid the trash:
It's strange because in Bangalore you really don't see PDA at all. Sure, maybe if you're hanging around the rich people who have been influenced by western culture you may but you would never see this in Bangalore. What's really hilarious, is that on the side of a highway, there is, nightly, a row of motorcycles with couples, young and old, married and unmarried, just making out. Kaisa called it makeout road or something. We drove passed it. One of my biggest regrets of my time in India will be that I was not able to witness this. I was passed out in the back seat of the taxi. But it was a great to and Mumbai and I'd like to thank Kaisa very much for acting as our tour guide, activity planner and for putting Henry and I up for the weekend. It was great to finally see a city with more to do and a more active nightlife as well.
That's it for Part I I'm going to try to do Part II tomorrow but we're going to Pondicherry tomorrow (a French colony in India) so we'll see how much I get done.
Stay tuned...
The monsoon season has come and gone and has brought instead lovely winter here in Bangalore. All along the streets of my neighborhood I get to see all these beautiful trees in bloom with these lovely orange blossoms. It's especially nice to sit out on the office balcony alone during devotions and looking at this site:
What's even better, is that the weather has just been perfect! I mean it was good before but because of the monsoons, we would get a lot of days of continuous clouds which got kinda depressing after awhile. However, now, the nights are nice and cool and the sun warms you up when it's out. On the rare cloudy day, you'd almost swear you were back in America experiencing a milder autumn. That is you'd think that until you smelled the burning trash and cow refuse, here the endless honking and jump out of the way of some guy on a motorcycle who made a turn that was much closer to you than was necessary. Then you quickly all of a sudden remember where you are and it's definitely not America! I guess the past few weeks this has really been hitting home that I'm in India and I'm not leaving for a long time! But, hey, it only took me five months to come to this profound realization!I guess due to the fact that I'm into a routine now, things that once seemed really cool and new and exotic just sort of seem run of the mill now. I guess that's to be expected after living so long in the same place which makes me sad that I didn't do a better job documenting my reactions to different aspects of India. Honestly for most of the month of November I just read a lot in my free time (Pillars of the Earth: Entertaining / Brideshead Revisited: Very Good / Never Let Me Go / Sad but good). This in part is due to the fact that Bangalore has absolutely no nightlife really. Before coming here, I had head that Bangalore was 'the pub capital of India'. That may have been true during the British Raj but is definitely not anymore. Not to say that I have an immense desire to go to bars like back home, but when you and your roommates have reading parties (yes reading...we sat around and read by ourselves) then you start to develop a desire to get out and be around real humans instead of imaginary ones. I began to think that maybe there just really wasn't much of a nightlife at all in India until we went to Mumbai!
Mumbai is very different in many ways from Bangalore. Whereas Bangalore is a quiet, smaller ('smaller' really is a relative word) city with a perfect climate, Mumbai is a massive, crowded, humid, busy city with so much pollution that your average 'sunny' day still seems relatively cloudy. As much as it might sound like that makes Mumbai an awful place, it's quite the opposite. It's actually a really awesome city with a ton more to do than in Bangalore! The first thing that's very noticeable about Mumbai is the wave of heat and humidity that hits you as soon as you step of the plane. Luckily we were met by mine and Henry's former DC intern turned Mumbai intern Kaisa Kinkaid.
(That's me, Kaisa and Henry)You'll also notice that we are standing on a black stone beach next to the Arabian Sea. This is what your average beach (average? wait that's not right...this is what a nicer beach) in Mumabi looks like:
Yes. A very lovely place to hang around and, as you'll see in later pictures, the trash did not deter many people from sharing quite a few...(ahem) romantic moments at the beach. After this we went to an old Portuguese Fort located on the tip of one of the peninsulas of Mumbai. Now, for the two of you out there that have ever seen a Bollywood movie, I THOUGHT this was the place where 'the kids' hang out in Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na, but I was disappointed that it looks like it wasn't that place. But, I digress. The Portuguese Fort:was pretty great but, due to the smog, the view was very underwhelming. However, very close by to the fort was the house of the famous "Bollywood Hero" Shah Rukh Kahn!
Settle down ladies, he does not currently look like this anymore. This was about 20 years ago so...he's not looking like this anymore. However, that did not stop 40 year-old women, hoping to get a glimpse of their crush from years ago. We happened to be most fortunate to come at the exact time when Shah Rukh Kahn's guards were taking His trash out. The following is the amazing sequence that we witnessed:
This is the gate. You can see his house looks like an apartment complex. It rises up on the left side of the picture.
Guard, scoping out the streets to see if it's safe to bring out the trash.
And the trash comes out! What he learned from his trash is that he drinks Aquafina and his kids have a lot of Nerf guns. So for the first and last time in my life, I became a celebrity stalker and was completely disgusted with myself. Seriously though, it is very interesting seeing how the rich live in Mumbai. Here in the middle of a city that has somewhere around 40% of its population living in slums, it made me wonder how you could live like that when, literally, just outside your house there might be a family living underneath a tarp lean-to against a building. How could you honestly spend so much money on yourself when people are living in these poor excuses for shelter? I guess, as I thought about it more, we have the same problem in America but it's covered up so we don't have to be confronted with this day in and day out. The poor aren't right outside our houses; we've made it so that the communities are divided with wealthy towns/villages and poor ones. I guess it's hard to say which structure is better or worse because, while in America you just ignore that the poor exist, in India, eventually just get used to seeing the poor and crippled walking around begging for money and before you know it you aren't bothered by it. You start to tell yourself, 'Well they could get help if they wanted to, they just don't' or 'The money I give won't go to them, it'll just go to their 'bosses''. Sadly, this is all true. It's especially hard when you see the kids begging for food because they're being completely manipulated by older people who are using them for money. How do you care for them? What we've sometimes done is taken some candy or a toy and give it to the kids. This usually makes them happy but who knows what their bosses do to them if they don't bring back money...Anyway, the rest of Mumbai was truly a great time. We went to the Taj Hotel and the Gateway of India which was actually really cool:
What made this trip to the Gateway especially memorable were the amount of people that came up asking, 'Sir! One snap sir with you? Please sir! One snap only.' For some reason I got roped into having my picture taken twice with 4 guys from Goa and one with a 60 year-old man. I wish I could find the photo but I must not have gotten one. Now the great thing about the picture above is that behind the camera there are maybe 5 Indians who are taking pictures of us with their cameras or phones. One fancied himself to be an especially gifted photographer who told me, "Sir! Go to the center! That way there will be two girls on both sides! It will look very nice!" As great as his advice was, we declined. After this we watched the sunset on a beach in South Mumbai:
It was a really beautiful sunset and the beach had a lot of people watching the sunset. As I mentioned before, the beach also had a lot of trash:
Literally the whole massive beach was covered with this. Mumbai is a really cool city but it would be absolutely amazing if they just cleaned up their beaches.However, once again, as I mentioned before, this did not stop a couple of romantics from sharing a moment amid the trash:
It's strange because in Bangalore you really don't see PDA at all. Sure, maybe if you're hanging around the rich people who have been influenced by western culture you may but you would never see this in Bangalore. What's really hilarious, is that on the side of a highway, there is, nightly, a row of motorcycles with couples, young and old, married and unmarried, just making out. Kaisa called it makeout road or something. We drove passed it. One of my biggest regrets of my time in India will be that I was not able to witness this. I was passed out in the back seat of the taxi. But it was a great to and Mumbai and I'd like to thank Kaisa very much for acting as our tour guide, activity planner and for putting Henry and I up for the weekend. It was great to finally see a city with more to do and a more active nightlife as well.That's it for Part I I'm going to try to do Part II tomorrow but we're going to Pondicherry tomorrow (a French colony in India) so we'll see how much I get done.
Stay tuned...
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