A Winter in India

Which 3 are not like the others?

If you zoom in on the little yellow sign, you will see that it says "Ladies are not allowed in side", so Lavina is looking in.

Lavina and Rajiv Shankar have arrived and have included us in many of the family visits they are making in their one and one half days here. We had a wonderful breakfast with Lavina's sister, Shavina. So many delcious things to eat and a pleasure to meet Shavina and her husband and his mother and sister.

We later went to a very old part of Delhi called Nizamuddin, a "village" that has grown up around the tomb of Hazrat Nizam-ud-din Aulia Chishti, a Sufi saint who died in 1325. Sufis are Moslem but Nizam-ud-din is revered by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists because of his message of tolerance for all religions. His prayers are credited with saving Delhi from a Mughal invasion in 1303, so it is interesting that his tomb was actually built in the late 1600s by Shah Jehan, one of the greatest of the Mughal emperors (and builder also of the Delhi Red Fort and the Taj Mahal in Agra).

This morning I had a great opportunity to visit a high school here in Delhi. One of the teachers who had attended the Workshop that Dave and I did in November invited me to her school. It was another of the Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) Schools, this one in a part of south Delhi called Sadiq Nagar. The KV schools are government run schools for the children of government civil service employees. The idea is to have a very common curriculum from one school to another so as the parent gets transferred around, the children have continuity in their schooling. The kids do also have to take an entrance exam to be accepted into a KV school. The kids I saw today were sure bright and highly motivated. The school goes from primary right through Class XII. I saw the Class XI group of about 35 kids for a biology class. Their teacher has a Ph.D. in genetics and was a lecturer at a University in Baroda for five years. Now she is teaching high school because her husband is in the army and teaching at KV schools gives her a job as they get moved around.

Today's paper announced that Amitabh Bachchan is out of the hospital after a successful surgery for diverticulitis. So you can all rest easy on that one.

The photo is the results of the poll that the Times of India did following the corruption sting. 70% of people think that zero or less than 10% of politicians are honest.

Besides this sting, the paper has daily articles on various sorts of corruption. A big one just now is that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is starting to demolish illegal buidlings, following a court order that the zoning laws must be enforced. These are mostly extensions to existing buildings that have in many cases been built out over the side walk, or have added a storefront onto a residential building. To quote the Times article: "People here turned up on the street in large numbers and cursed the civic body for first letting the illegal constructions flourish for a price and then turning up to demolish them."

This photo is a group of the women faculty of Maulana Azad Dental College. At least half of the faculty is women, and a very dynamic group they are. Almost all of them wear a sari or salwar kameze at work, with a white lab coats over. But today they wore ones that were even more elaborate and beautiful.

These photos are some of the hundreds of posters that the students had made. The posters were arranged by dental department: the Smile India and the one about shoes are from the Department of Conservative Dentistry (a combination of what would be called Operative Dentistry and Cosmetic Dentistry in the U.S.). Do you like the idea of good teeth as an accessory for good shoes? The fluoride cartoon is from the Department of Periodontics. Actually many parts of India have very high natural levels of fluoride in the water, sometimes 1000 times the beneficial dosage. In some areas they have to worry about fluorosis (tooth and skeletal problems from too much fluoride). So fluoridation of any public water supply is not done, in fact, many localities need to de-fluoridate. These students are good artists and good cartoonists. I mentioned that to General Singh, the Head of the Army Dental Corps, another of the honored guests, and he said, “All dentists must be artists.”

Yesterday was the opening of the Dental Health Mela (Fair). The students and faculty have been working on this ever since we arrived, and now that we see the finished product, we can see how much work it was. It’s a bit like Bates’ Mt. David Symposium, in that the students are presenting their work. But here the students are presenting to the general public, so it’s really a giant public health effort.

These photos are from the opening ceremonies. First is the poster with the official title, and the table where all the dignitaries will be seated, and the flower garland decorations. These garlands are mostly marigolds of different colors, thousands and thousands of marigolds. The second picture shows some of the students. The girls are singing a Hindu hymn, that was roughly translated for us as the goddess taking away your pain like taking water from the river. Seemed apropos for the opening of a dental fair. The singing was beautiful, and was accompanied by the boy student on the tabla drums, and by the lead singer playing the harmonium. Third picture is the Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit lighting the lamp, which is a very traditional way of opening any meeting or gathering. The man to the left is Dr. Mahesh Verma, Dean of the Dental College, and the man who has taken us under his wing from the first day. Next to him is Yoganand Shastri, the Minister of Health. So, needless to say with guests like this you can tell this was a Big Deal. The guy down front with the coca cola jacket is from the TV station. The girl at the right is another one of the students. It was such a treat for us to see all the students all dressed up, the girls all in gorgeous sarees. Most of them wear jeans under their white lab coats most of the time.

After alluding yesterday to one of the negative aspects of life here being corruption, the headline of this morning’s paper was “MPs on Sale for just Rs 10,000”. Over the last couple of months, investigative reporters from a television station had conducted a massive “sting”, the results of which they aired on TV last night. We don’t have a TV in our apartment, so we didn’t see the actual show, but the paper (Times of India) had quite thorough coverage. Posed as representatives of a group called the North Indian Small Manufacturers Association, the reporters went to various MPs (Members of Parliament, so comparable to our federal congress) and offered them money (10,000 to 50,000 rupees, or $220 to $1100) to bring up specific questions in Parliament. The Question Hour as it is called is a set time in the Parliamentary schedule in which MPs raise questions that must then be answered by the Minister named in the question. The MPs who took the money did not check whether the North Indian Small Manufacturers Assn was an actual group (it isn’t), and they didn’t quibble with questions that ranged from the trivial to special considerations for the welfare of small manufacturers (examples given were “Has the Ministry lifted the 1962 ban on the book For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway,” and “whether the government will permit the import of new technologies like Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Blogrolls, Splogs and Hitcounters”[Do these exist? I don’t know]).

Yesterday, Dean Mahesh Verma had arranged an opportunity for us to meet with the Chief Minister of Delhi, a woman named Sheila Dikshit (as Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up”). Delhi is actually a state, so the Chief Minister is comparable to a governor. She is a wonderful woman, very elegant, calm and quiet. She is the only politician I have met who actually said very little, and listened to what we had to say. We talked about how much Delhi had changed for the better since 1998. Considering that 1998 is when she was elected Chief Minister, a lot of these improvements are her doing: the Metro (subway), the conversion of all public transport vehicles to compressed natural gas, expansion and upgrading of the roads and bridges, revitalizing many parks and monuments, and providing the conditions in which private companies can flourish.

Amitabh Bachchan is in the hospital, and there is something about him in the paper nearly every day. He is a Bollywood actor. Bollywood is the movie-making center of India, Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay, hence the B in Bollywood. It also refers to a style of movie. All are in Hindi, although on the flight here we saw one (starring Amitabh) that had English subtitles. To my tastes these seem very emotive, even overwrought. The themes are almost all about arranged marriages, or some boy-girl problem or problem in an extended family. They usually involve highly stylized singing, and almost always dancing.