A Winter in India

Bhopal is a very beautiful city. This is a one thousand year-old manmade lake, one of five lakes in the city.

The morning of our day in Indore we had a very good meeting with Dr. S.P. Parashar, Director of the Indian Institute of Management, he is former USEFI Board Member. A very dynamic, articulate gentleman who is remarkably direct, which we found very refreshing in a land where we are daily trying to navigate our way through “ritual speech”, speech that to us seems designed to establish the speaker’s high rank or to weave a web of obligation. Dr. Parashar is trying to establish cooperative MBA programs in International Business, where a student would spend six months in India, six months in the US and six months in New Zealand, then do a thesis in the last six months. The existing curriculum at the Indian Institute of Management stresses such things as “verifiable outcomes”, the importance of deadlines, and an economy based on “value” not on obligation. Dr. Parashar is very positive about the direction that India is headed; he says that this huge democracy runs by consensus, so public debate takes a long time (decades) but that at least 60% of the people now believe that modernization and economic development through privatization and globalization are the keys to prosperity. He says that direction is now settled; opposition groups can affect how fast it happens, but they can’t (and for the most part don’t want to) derail it. In past decades people from low socioeconomic groups have thought that sowing chaos would help them get ahead and India has had decades of communal (i.e. religious) and caste-warfare. They have gradually changed to a point where few think that such chaos is productive. An example from this week’s news is that an area of Madhya Pradesh called Dhar has had religious riots with deaths and destruction every year on a particular day when Hindus and Moslems both want to worship at the same place. The state of Madhya Pradesh has been a hotbed of Hindu Nationalism, and in the past this unrest has been actively stirred up by some state government officials and the police have not stopped the riots. This year Madhya Pradesh has a new government and they said, riots will not happen. There were small skirmishes, but the police were sent in and kept the two groups apart, so there were no deaths and no damage, and Moslems were allowed in to worship during a specific time period. Similarly after last October’s bombings in Delhi, in the past there would have been backlash mob violence against Moslems, but there were none.

The Fulbright people asked if we would be interested in speaking at some of the cities that don’t get many foreign visitors, and we jumped at the chance. We left Delhi on the 6 AM train on Feb. 1 and went south, through Agra, and on to the state of Madhya Pradesh (“Middle State”) to the city of Gwalior. We were met at the station and whisked off to Jiwaji University, a beautiful, park-like campus for 4000 students, half of the seats reserved for students from Madhya Pradesh and the other half open to applications from any student who can meet the entrance requirements, which are quite stringent. Jiwaji has Basic Sciences (Zoology, Botany, Physics, etc.), which many universities do not have any more, with those having been replaced by Biotechnology, Molecular Biology, electrical engineering, etc. Jiwaji has a good mix of the “old” and the new. There is a pharmacy school that is testing 300 traditional medicines, a medical botany department that is developing standardized ways of growing the medicinal plants, and a reproductive biology/physiology department. We spoke to the faculty and students in the master’s degree programs in Neuroscience and Biotechnology. Dave spoke on “Oral Health is General Health,” an overview of the connections between oral disease and systemic diseases (heart disease and diabetes, as well as preterm low birth weight babies). I gave a summary of the molecular cell biology of HIV/AIDS. Both seemed well received. We had a very good meeting afterwards with one of their researchers who is doing work on the effects of chronic inflammation causing infertility. He has a mouse model for this and has found that intraperitoneal injections of LPS (a molecule from Gram negative bacteria) shuts down implantation of embryos. He is interested in finding out whether oral bacteria could also be a source for this LPS. So he was very interested in Dave’s talk, and in my mouse model.

At the luncheon at the Dental Meeting we got to see chapatis being made in a tandoor oven. Chapatis are the basic round flat bread served with every meal. A tandoor is a stone-lined oven, the traditional way of cooking many foods here in the Punjab. This particular version was a 55-gallon drum lined with firebrick, with a place for a wood fire underneath.

The balls of dough at the bottom of the first photo are made into thin flat circles by slapping a ball of dough rapidly back and forth between the hands. A circle is then affixed to a cloth-covered stone and then smacked onto the inside of the tandoor, as you see being done in the top photo. The young cooks were using a stone for that; the older one was doing it by hand.

Ludhiana is a three and a half hour train ride northwest of Delhi. It is the largest manufacturer of woolens in India and of bicycles in the whole world (Hero bicycles are made here). Ludhiana proudly calls itself the Manchester of India. It has recently seen a decline in its manufacturing because the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh has tax benefits and many pharmaceuticals and other manufacturing facilities had moved to Baddi which is just over the state line from Punjab State

The Dental Conference Opening Ceremonies were India in miniature. It began as all India ceremonies do with the lighting of the ceremonial oil lamp which derives from the Marabharata where knowledge should spread from its source like light from a lamp. There were thirteen people on dais and there were speeches, remarks and other types of orations from all thirteen. Each speech began with formal acknowledgements of all the other twelve dais sitters, in order of their rank in the hierarchy (Honorable IDA President Bhagwan Singh [who is a dentist in Ludhiana, and thus was our official host. He is also who invited us to come and give papers]; Primary Guest Dr. Anil Kohli, Chairman, Dental Council of India; Guest of Honor Lieutenant General Paranjit Singh [head of all dental services in the Indian military]; and so on down the line. At least half of each speech was the listing of acknowledgements and then other content-free ritual words.

Our good friends Ray and Connie Bedette have safely arrived. Their plane was delayed about an hour, as were three other international flights, while some V.I.P. arrived (we don't know who, but we presume it was someone coming for tomorrow's Republic Day celebrations). This is pretty typical here: 1200 people (if there were 300 per international flight) were inconvenienced for some V.I.P.'s movement. I estimate 150 huge pieces of luggage came up the ramp where we "locals" meet the incoming passengers. These were pushed by porters, not accompanied by passengers, so we assume the V.I.P.s went out by another route.

Many of you faithful readers have asked what did Dave wear to the wedding? Well, here is the answer. He wore a silk vest that he has had made here in the market near where we live, plus his suitcoat. Many of the men at the wedding were dressed in a similar fashion.

Carolyn and Milan are now in Agra. The last day they were here (Sunday) we went to a shopping mall in South Delhi to see the work of the Faith Foundation. I knew that Kaushik Moitra, the law student who Fulbright arranged to help us get oriented when we first came to Delhi, worked with this group and he had told us some about it. We now had the opportunity to see their work first hand.

Basically, they work with street children two days a week. Saturday they do a school lesson (English, math, writing, "public" speaking) and Sunday morning they do a craft project. Partly they meet on weekends because that's when the volunteers can be there, but its also because the kids are working all the rest of the week, typically 5 AM to 8 PM, as rag pickers. They aren't orphans; their families have moved here from Bangladesh (some as legal immigrants and some not) so most speak Bengali, not English or Hindi. None of them attend school.

After a visit to the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, and a great lunch at Karim's, we took bicycle rickshaws over to the spice market. This is a wholesale market of every kind of spice you can imagine. Pictured here are red peppers (upper left), turmeric (photo on the right) and coriander and dried mushrooms (bottom left photo). The market is within the remains of a huge old courtyard that still has some traces of what must have been beautiful towers and latticed balconies. Old Delhi declined after India was partitioned at Independnce. The Moslems who lived in lavish homes here moved to Pakistan (or were murdered). Hindu and Sikh Punjabis from the part of Punjab that had suddenly become Pakistan moved in to take their place (that is unless they were murdered on their way here). Many old buildings became warehouses or markets.

Today we took the Metro (Delhi's very new subway) up to Old Delhi. After riding on the quietest, cleanest subway I've ever been on, you come up out of the ground into narrow lanes with buffalo carts, bicycle rickshaws and hand-pulled carts. The contrast is pretty stark. Old Delhi was the center of Indian culture in the seventeenth century, and you feel like you are glimpsing the way it looked then. Well, that is, except for the electrical wiring.

The wiring has been added to and added to for decades. Some gets cut off, but it didn't look like any actually gets removed, so wires are dangling and intertwining.