Taj couple; Child with goat sheep; Agra scene

On the south bank of the Yamuna river in the city of Agra, life revolves around the Taj Mahal and the two to four million tourists that visit it each year. Although there's some tourist activity happening on the opposite bank of the Yamuna, agriculture remains a way of living for many of the people who reside there; I spoke to one 18-year old native of the city who boasted that his family owned three goats, one cow, and several chickens.

It's monsoon season here, and as dark clouds open up, scattering children and goats and goatherds, I'm reminded of a line I read in an India guidebook. The book opined that the Taj tends to overshadow the nearby Agra Fort, which is an attraction worth seeing. The line comes to mind, I think, because the Taj might just overshadow three goats and a family cow as well.

UPDATE: I fixed the post title. Because that animal is decidedly not a goat.

Hello, boat?

First three are from the centuries old ghats on the Ganges river in Varanasi. The fourth is from our first day here in Jaipur. We were planning to leave Rajasthan today but have decided to stay a bit longer; there is something unabashedly captivating about this place. The last is at the train station in Varanasi... the stations are always a hub of buzzing activity yet I find them increasingly difficult to photograph.

Disconnected.

Just after arriving on Majouli, the biggest river island in the world.



A woman of the Mishing tribe at night... most of the villagers live in traditional bamboo huts without any amenities (like electricity), so in the evening the village takes on an ominous candlelit glow. (See candle kid in Jordan's previous post; a much better representation of said glow)



A Majouli villager carries rice early in the morning. Paddy fields as far as the eye could see.



A tea estate worker sweeps up the tea that has lost its way in a factory in Jorhat. Tea leaves undergo a long series of cutting, squishing and drying before they are ready to steep.

Sorry for the terrible captions and lack of timely updates but we are really loving the internet hiatus that is apparently inevitable while traveling India. Try it.

catch up

yeah, what Courtney said times two...here's a few from the last couple weeks, and what a couple weeks they were...wow...sorry for the lack of words, gotta catch a train...more later.


at the ferry to majuli island



loading rice bags on the ferry



making dinner



traditional tribal dancers on majuli



tea estate



malaria clinic doctor



on the bus to shilong

Guwahati Street life

And we're back! Writing from Shillong, definitely my favorite city that we've visited yet. We've been through some completely insane experiences since we were last in vicinity of a wireless connection while tribal village hopping through the Northeast states. We've dubbed it our Unconventional India trip. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Shot these over a week ago during a "layover" between trains in Guwahati, a city we've all grown to dislike; the streets are packed with touts trying to swindle you. I felt like a bunch of lame wildebeests roaming through a plain full of hungry cheetahs. Regardless, here are some photos.

a plane and a train

There may be a... well... significant dropoff in the posting for the next couple weeks. We're headed northeast, to a region where our contact warns that even cellphone coverage is highly iffy. So fear not, the blog will be back soon enough. But for now, a plane, and a train, and a bus to Jorhat.

The kids

I've spent the last week consumed by these children, their stories and their futures. They are dealing with incredibly complicated issues, yet their daily lives seem surprisingly simple. One cold, one fever is enough to let the disease take their lives away, yet they live each day with fervent passion for the next. These kids endure more obstacles in a week than most experience in a lifetime.

This project has forced to me to stop and ask myself, "Why do I want to spend my time, emotional and physical energy documenting the struggles of others? Why do I feel the need to tell these stories? Am I really getting a degree in this?" I've been forced to stop and reexamine my intentions, my purpose over and over again. And I think I've got it.

It could have just as easily been me born into an uncaring family with an incurable disease that would eventually end my life. No one decides what kind of life they are born into. These kids do the absolute best with what they have been born into, and I see no other option but to do the best with what I have been born into; eyes to see and ears to hear the stories of others. Yet, these stories are also my story because we are all human, and this is the story of humanity. The struggle of mankind is universal.

Enough about me. Here's to the kids.





Anitha, sits on the floor of the common room in the children's center as everyone crowds around to talk about their first day at school. Anitha's mother was admitted to the adult ward after her father died. Christopher, a Freedom employee, took a promise from Anitha's mother that her two HIV positive children (the girls, Anitha and Anu were positive, their three brothers were negative) would be taken care of. After their mother died, Freedom Foundation opened its doors to the two year old girls, the first of many children who would call the center their home.



Varsha, 14, gets her hair braided by Mangala Gowri, a caretaker at the center. Varsha struggles with issues of security, often comparing herself, her skin color and her appearance with the other girls. Maduri, a caretaker and Freedom employee who is like a mother to the children, says that she needs a lot of assurance from friends. The friends get frustrated with her desire for assurance, and Varsha blames herself, thinking that she's not "good enough".



Raju, 13, sits on a bed in the boys dormitory at the center. Raju's mother was a beggar, could not take care of him, and put him in a hostel. He switched hostels a few times, then came to Freedom Foundation. The first line Anti-Retroviral (ARV) treatments are no longer working for Raju, so they moved him to the second line medication, which is more than three times the price of the first line ARV treatment. Raju was also incredibly fun and rambunctious and was always jumping onto the backs of the older boys.



Before getting ready for bed, the children get their cuts and scrapes examined by Maduri. Maduri and the other caretakers teach the kids how to avoid situations where they might get cut as well as what to do when it does happen.



Anitha laughs as she cleans herself up after an afternoon spent in the playground at Freedom Foundation. In 2000, Anitha's sister Anu died. After her death, Maduri says it was hard on all of the children, not just Anitha, because they are essentially all family.



Annappa, 14, moans in pain as Mangala puts a cold towel on his head to calm a fever. The next day, Annappa was admitted to the mens ward (next door to the childrens center), where he was put on an IV and his condition watched closely. The third day, he was on his feet again. According to Maduri, Annappa has had the most health problems of all the kids, including recurrent tuberculosis and respiratory infections.



Each child has to take their prescribed medicines twice a day, without fail. The blue medicine is the ARV treatment, the orange and black is a multivitamin, and the white is paracetamol, for fever.



Prassamma, 16, pours water into Raju's mouth to gulp down the medicine.



Counselor Shashidhar K.J. tries to maintain order while passing out school supplies on the evening before the first day of the new term. The air was chaotic as the kids grabbed for notebooks, pencils, markers, erasers and rulers before the supply ran out. In the end, there was plenty for everyone.



Anitha rides on the "bus" to the first day of the new term at school. The center owns an ambulance that doubles as the children's transportation to and from school. The caretakers and staff at Freedom Foundation do their best to make sure that the kids have an equal opportunity to get a good education and prepare for their futures.



The HIV/AIDS center has received a notice of eviction, stating that they have to be out of the property by the end of September. The city of Bangalore is constantly sprawling, so the area around the center that was once open fields is now littered with new apartments and housing developments. As the horizon becomes obscured, the staff at Freedom Foundation continue to search for a new location that they can make their permanent home for the patients and children. The alternative is unthinkable; the kids would have no where to go but the streets.

manicure

maintaining the immaculate opulence of the gardens at the Leela Palace

The Two Markets

left, City Market, Bangalore, in the shadow of Mysore Road; right, Indigo Nation, about 5 miles east, 100-Foot Road, Indiranagar.

I'm reading Thomas Friedman's award-winning 2005 book "The World is Flat" at the moment. In case you haven't read it, it's his thesis on how the technological and cultural developments of the late 20th and early 21st century have changed global markets fundamentally by — for lack of a more precise term — rendering geography obsolete. Friedman was inspired to write the book after a visit to Bangalore; he saw the call centers, to be sure, but he also saw the outsourcing of everything from income tax preparation to software-writing. When he realized that Bangalore could effectively be "a suburb of Boston," he decided the world was flat.

The flattening of the world has had an immense impact on this city. The community of Indiranagar, in which land used to be given away as a pension to military officers, has become a burgeoning commercial zone. The 100-foot road houses tony shops from international brands; the Dockers store, most memorably, sits next to a ten by twenty foot picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. The nearby Leela Palace Hotel — a five-star hotel with attached three-level shopping mall — gives a great sense of the growing economy here. Looking to another neighborhood, we drive almost every day down Hosur Road, passing by the Koramangala office of MphasiS, the outsourcing firm whose founder reminded Friedman that America will need to invent a new future in order to survive.

"The great challenge of our time," Friedman would later write, "is to absorb [the changes inherent in globalization] in ways that do not overwhelm people or leave them behind."

—

For most of the history of life itself, survival didn't depend on markets, global or local. For most of the history of life, it didn't matter whether the world was flat or not. In primordial pools, there wasn't even a sense of life forms. There was just life. At some point genes settled down and species became clearer; Darwin's rules took over and suddenly organisms gained a purpose: survival. We went from ingesting sunlight to eating plants to eating animals, and somehow we survived.

Nowadays, survival is completely different. For most people, the only thing that remains unchanged from our animal stage is breathing. Eating is still dependent on finding food, but that's largely bought and paid for. Development has sullied sources of water, so it must be purified, and whether it's from a pipe or in a bottle, this too must be purchased. In other words, survival for most people requires finding a niche in a market and earning.

Why bother mentioning all this? Because walking around the same Bangalore that inspired Friedman to say that the world is flat, I see that there's a round world here too. There's a world of traditional markets as well as a world of global ones, and — this is the important part — far more people live in the round world than the flat one.

Friedman sees an accounting firm in Chicago. It outsources tax preparation to Bangalore; this cuts the firm's costs by, say, 80%. But even at 1/5 the price, in Bangalore this may be a job with prestige and high pay. This brings wealth to Chicago and Bangalore — and creates a market here for more stuff, like motorbikes and Dockers pants and washing machines, which creates wealth elsewhere. This is the rose-colored glasses version: innovation creates new markets and more wealth.

But then I see Ravichandran at the dhobi ghat washing the neighborhood's clothes for three rupees a shirt. While we were speaking to him he bought a two-rupee cup of tea from a Sikh man with a thermos. That man — hypothetically — may have purchased the tea from a seller at an open-air market like City Market. These people are getting by too, in the only market they know. But with less work for the dhobi, it's a round-world economy that suddenly seems vulnerable.

Friedman is right: the great challenge of our time is to digest the globalized world in the least painful way for people. The problem is that the globalized world, the flat world, isn't the only world we need to be worried about.

[edit: you can read some of my initial reporting notes in this post at my personal blog.]

driving in bangalore...

...is not a thing to be taken lightly.

Freedom Foundation

I've started working on a project at an NGO called Freedom Foundation. They help out in a variety of ways at centers throughout India, but I've been hanging out, meeting and talking with people at their HIV/AIDS center.

This woman, Ramalakshamamma, is a patient in the ICU women's ward at Freedom Foundation. The story I'm working on is focused on the eleven orphaned children that have lived their entire lives at the center, but I've found some time to spend with the adults as well.

The children are incredible; I can't fathom the lives they've been forced to live with since birth. Yet they seem to be some of the happiest kids I've met. They are so thankful for a second chance at life, for a place to live filled with love and understanding, without judgement.... I'm stopping before I get on a rant... more on the kids later.

The Palace at Mysore

The Amba Vilas is the most well-known palace in Mysore, and a very popular destination for tourists traveling in South India.

Anyone who's worked with me as an editor will probably understand the concept a photo deathmatch, so, here we go. One of these images must die; there can only be one:

— or —

Kitchen, Kerala 2008

Snake Boys