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.