A Hindu Marriage

Photo: S. Strand 2007

It seems like every day I am doing something more exotic than ever before (with a little exaggeration).
It is a long time now since I have blogged so let's see if I can give a debrief of what has happend. Most sadly the Nordic course came to an end and we all had to say goodbye to each other. The course was excelently organized by Mr. Ninan and Prof. Sastry which had put a lot of effort in to arranging for a wide spectrum of professors and lecturers to teach us about different aspects of environmental issues in India. On top of all those arrangements there were also the field trips which were both very well organized although the students found the first field trip more interesting than the second. The food arrangements as I have told before, were absolutely fantasic, a lady, Anju, wich runs a restaurant in the city came every day to superwise and there were at least three people on the cooking team. Being very helpful like Bangalorians all are, Ninan and Sastry also helped us arrange for a City sightseeing tour and Dancing classes (wich Anju also helped us arrange)and at the end of our stay, Anju and her chefs tought us how to cook some Indian meals - our favorites from her menu during the month. My favorite was Palak Paneer, wich is Cottage cheese in Spinach sauce.

In the middle of the course, our coordinators had to do some rearrangements as prof. Hatti, the head of Nordic Centre in India envited us all to the wedding of his friends son!! So off we went, to the famous tourist place Mysore in Karnataka. We spent two nights there on a decent hotel and checked out the Mysore Palace wich is very big and grand, and the city marked. Some students also climbed a hill but during those days I had fever so I had some lazy days. In the palace garden I had a first time experience... riding an elephant.

Photo: S. Strand, 2007. Mysore Palace

The wedding was a traditional Hindu marrage, Brahmin style, as the groom is from a Brahmin family (Brahmins are the highest cast of the Indian cast system). As I understood it, this was the they first ceremony and the biggest, when they actually got married, but later, during the hole week after this day there would be some happenings, both in the brides and the grooms house.

So the people I mostly want to thank for making this all possible and making it happen, the course, the nice stay in ISEC and the opportunity to attend the wedding ceremony, is Prof. Sastry, Mr. Ninan and Prof. Hatti!

Small things

Photo: S. Strand, 2007 Our course organizers Mr. Ninan and Prof. Sastry at ISEC.

It's funny with all the big and important things that I am exposed to and hear about every day, my urge to write is mostly about the funny small things, the details of a culture that is so similar but still different from my own. Like the Indian Elites urge to write only initials for a lot of things. Take for example a headline in a newspaper..., MG meets SGK on Monday to talk about PRD!!! I just made that one up, but common!! During our lectures it is the same, and the poor Nordic students have to ask a few times a day, "what was this SP again?" And so on.

For some reason only the Icelanders attending the course got a special stamp in our Visas saying that we had to register in the country within 14 days of arrival. So we have been visiting the Police Commissioners Office a couple of times and still have to go one more time as the beurocracy is incredible. The Embassy in Norway that gave us the Visas will have to explain this discrepancy. For me it is more ok as I am staying longer but for the other two that are only staying for a month and have to spend 4 or more afternoons filling out papers and running around to arrange this registration, it is horrible. But I learned that what I thought was a tourist visa in my passport was actually an entry visa, which is the kind of visas women get if they are married to Indian men :) So we have been joking about maby I have to find an Indian husband and get married to be able to leave the country! ... But it is also for study tours, meetings and professional work so I guess that is the reason I got this kind of visa. The down part is that I have to have an Indian person write a financial guaranty for my hole stay here and I am not allowed to send it to SAM (Social Action Movement) and get it back, it has to be somone from ISEC (Institude of Social and Economic Change :) I hope the director will do it for me today.

Yesterday, me and my Finish friend had a very nice Sunday, we started with going to St. Marks Cathedral, for a Mass at 10:30, after that we went to the City Marked, then to a 3/4 Chinese restaurant and in the end we did some shopping on Briget Road. Our biggest wonder after the Church Ceremony was why the Priest said 'Holy Catholic Church' when he was reading from the confession, as it is an Anglican church. We have not found the answer yet. It was my first time in the City Marked and it was the richest experience until now here in India. It was actually what I had expected India to be like but the rest of Bangalore is not like this. Loads and loads of stalls selling all kinds of things, people sitting on the ground selling fruits and vegetables, so many people making flower decorations, mountains of flowers all around, pyramids of colors for dying fabrics and every kind of smell anyone can imagine, changing in every step we took. Everyone wanted his picture taken and then to see it on the screen afterwards, and two men were very advanced and handed us their cards with email addresses and asked to have the picture sent to them.
But the biggest wonder we saw this day was the more than 1 km long cue to a temple on our way down town in the morning!!
In the Chinese restaurant we had a very nice traditional Mongolian dish, boiled vegetables and tofu with only salt. It was a good variation from the spicy and oily Indian food and rice although the Indian food is actually much better, we are just not used to it always and every day.

A happy crowd

Photo: S. Strand 2007

It's my second day of not feeling well, I'm not sure if I have fewer but feeling week and sleeping a lot so I missed lectures today and the latter one yesterday as well. A fiew of us have had some illness now but noone really seriosly. My stomack is perfect though and for that I am very greatfull. I have not started telling anything about what we are learning here at the course, in short I can tell that the perspective on the environment is very broad, we learn about ground- and surface water issues, irrigation, cultivation, forestry, pollution and so on, both from an environmental point of view, social and economical as well as laws and regulations. The biggest problem to overcome here in India in all of those aspects is corruption. All the good incentives seem to go down the drain because of corruption and money don't find their right way through the beurocratic system.

Our Kashmiran friend had birthday a few days ago, turned 26 and we made a CD for him with music from our 4 countries and a cover with the above picture (one is missing). At 12 aclock midnight when his birthday started some of us marched to the other student-building and found him partying with his friend, all dirty in his face! He was drying his face with a napkin and one of the girls asked him if he was bleeding! But no, he had just had a cake in his face!! Well, in Kashmir and India people don't celebrate birthdays traditionally so I guess this is a way to start celebrating, at least there was a cake involved!! :) Well, outside, in the middle of the night he got a happy birthday song sung for him in 7 languages, Sweedish, Finish, Icelandic, Danish, Hindi, hmmm, the language spoken in Calcutta and, ah I don't remember the last one.

On Saturday we had a field trip with ISEC to a village outside Bangalore. In this village there has been a social/environmental/economical = sustainability program running since 2004 wich was extreemly impressive. An NGO is running it together with the households that wanted to participate in the village and that is the way to go as programs ran by NGO's seem to be much more successfull here than those run by the Gorvernment. Still, some NGO's are scams and are only given names to be able to apply for money, wich are never used for the right purpose. But in this program people had been building watersheds as it is a very dry region, they had been able to borrow money to by a cow, they had made holes in the ground to put cowdung in and substract metangas from it wich gave enough electricity for lighting and cooking. They put all their garden/agrigultural waste in to boxes with worms in so it was changed very fast to good fertilizers etc. To avoid corruption and keep everything open, the bookings and numbers were written on walls in the village were everyone could see them. There is a lot more to tell from this visit but I videotaped a lot of it so I can show it to those interested when I come back home. What had changed in the last three years was that people were feeling more happy, there were not as many problems with poverty, the villagers had started to understand and use bank facilities and they felt connected to the bigger society wich they had not felt before.

Rickshaws and traffic

Photo: N. Darre, 2007

Photo; N. Darre, 2007

The days pass. And somehow it is a bit difficult to get seated in front of a computer and write about them. But it is important to do. I have to say that as I listen to more lectures from different professors the perspective starts to broaden and connections to form. It is a lot of fun, and of course very interesting.

The food at the Institude is absolutely fantastic. The most famous resturants we have been to have not topped it and we get cooked meals three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. For breakfast there is always some toast and cornflakes for those that find it to much with spicy Indian food for all three meals and for lunch there is normally som Europian dish as well, but always at least two other indian dishes that we can choose from, both vegetarian and meat/fish. I stay on the safe side and am a vegetarian while I am here.

No one in the group has fallen ill yet. We are 18 students and we have been here for 1 1/2 week so that is quite good. But many of us have had problems finding mosquito nets for our beds so prof. Ninan (one of the coordinators of this course, together with prof. Sastry) is going to look into it and order some for us. It is better to be on the safe side as Bangalore is not completely malaria free. Anyway we don't get many bites during the night as we can turn the fan on, it is the sitting outside in the evening that is worst. Then it would be best to wear a mosquito suit from top to toe.

Yesterday we had a great frisby game with some of the Indian PhD students that stay here also in the student rooms. Thanks to our Finish friend who brough this soft aero-thing with him from Germany :) The game was really good but the mosquitos in the field were fierce.

Today, four of us, from Finnland, Iceland, Denmark and Peru took rikshaws down to Commercial street, specifically to check out the FabIndia shop wich was supposed to sell organically grown cotton garments. But as we found, the clothes were not made from organic cotton but they said they were in a transition stage to make the cotton farmning organic. Well, hope that is true. Anyway we all bought something and were really happy with our purchases. Everyone in the group is slowly starting to look more native Indian, I even have a fancy drop-shaped dot between my eyebrowes right now.
Well, when it looked like it would start raining, we ran to get a Rickshaw back home, as they are really hard to find and much more expensive when it rains. The drops started falling and we all mooshed into one Rikshaw, two girls and two guys. It started well, the driver said he knew where he was going and we agreed on 200 Rupees. Shortly after we started driving we almost hit a big car right in the face as somehow we seemed suddenly to be on the wrong side of the road! The rest of the trip was equally exciting as the driver didn't speak English, his driving was crazy, he didn't know where he was going, it was raining and the he kept trying to make us laugh and communicate be giving us a thumb up or making faces as he kept looking back. The traffick was extremely heavy, but finally, we reached ISEC and had a good dinner with a little trouble because of the big laughs.

Here is a little insight to the trip:



The Hare Krishna temple we visited on Saturday must not be forgotten. Hundreds of meters of people standing in rows to get inside. As spoiled rich brats we got to pay our way past the 2 hour long rows (this was the custom), took our shoes of and put them together in big bags. Then we went for the 1 1/2 hour journy in to the Krishna temple, always in the long cue. First there was a small room with a fancy statue welcoming us and after that there was the main temple, kind of hard to describe but after watching a ceremony the cue went on, past different kind of shops, a book store, pastry shop, dining rooms, gift shops with all kinds of godish statues, candles and so on. Actually this day we had arranged for a bus trip, taylored for us around the city and saw also other interesting plases like the Tipu Sultan's Palace and the Bull temple, but the Krishna temple was the hit. In the evening we dined at the Coconut Grove in Church street and ended up on a rock bar as the club we wanted to go to was closed because of renovation.
Luckily our Kashmiran friend from ISEC came with us on the tour this day and totally saved the day as he was able to talk to the driver in a mixture of Hindi, English and Kannada. Kannada is the language spoken in Karnataka state but his native language is Kashmiri or Kashmiran, I don't remember what it is called and he has only been studying here for a year.) He is very nice and now I know a lot about Kashmir wool :-)

Exciting start

Photo: S.Strand, 2007

I am sitting now in the computer room at ISEC (Institude for Social and Economic Change). It is the 23d so the course is starting in a few minutes. What I found out already is that Indian people have a great sense of humor, they are frank and really nice. The campus here at ISEC is neet and nice, some students share rooms (with other students) and all of us share rooms withs a few ants, occational spiders, mosquitos, sometimes cockroaches and some of us are so lucky to have a small lizard witch is very good as it feeds on the mosquitos. Outside we have allready seen a scorpion and lots of colorfull big butterflies. Around the city are a lot of strey dogs and it seems that at night, some monkeys from the forest besides the university like to come into the campus and argue. We haven't seen them yet but we hear them.
The students attending the course are all very interesting people, from Iceland, Finland, Denmark and Sweden. We all have different backgrounds, most of us are doing our masters programs but in political science, environmetal politics, international communication, education, anthropology, forestry, biology etc.

In to the future

My trip started early thursday morning in Iceland, on the 19th of July. With Icelandair to London went well but at the check in with British Airways I learnd that the flight was overbooked and I might not get on it. So I had to wait along with 20 or 30 other people in the same position. After a while I got called forward and they had decided to let me go through and have a seat on buisniss class!! In my mind I had cind of been prepearing myself to simple living in India so this came as veeery big treat, especially as it was a 9 hour flight over night. And what a buisniss class. Never seen anything like it. A privat screen, a seat that could turn into a bed, no one beside me (like a wall between), and servise all the time, starter, dinner, desert, breakfast, coffee, drinks, hot towels to wash hands and face before meels, and even a bag for everyone with things we needed for the night like toothbrush, extra socks, lotions, eyescreen and stuff.
Well, eneugh of buisniss class descriptions. We flew in great weather and with good view, in a Boeng 777, in 10-11 km hight, on 900 km speed in -40 degrees Celcius, away from the sun and 4 1/2 hours in to the future (5 1/2 from Icelandic time). We landed in Bangalore at 5 aclock in the morning Indian time. I met up with Elin from Sweden, also heading to the same course at ISEC and we took a taxi to the Institude.