A Winter in India

We are heading off again tomorrow, for Lucknow this time, for Dave to visit a Dental Hygiene School. We may not make any enties for a few days. So here are some phtos from one of the major sites of Chandigarh: the rock garden. We were expecting a rugged landscape and flowers, but, no, this rock garden is really a sculpture garden made completely of trash. It has been built continously since 1988 by a road inspector named Nek Chanda. Its difficult to describe the size and scope of this. We were there moving through it for over an hour and only saw two-thirds of it. It ranges from huge waterfalls to ledges with several hundred individual statues of people or animals.

The groom escorted the bride to the table, settled several other women around her and then disappeared. We never did see him come back. Maybe he went with his armored truck driver to get the dowry from his new father-in-law!! As you can see the bride was absolutely stunning in her traditional wedding party regalia. Notice that her hands have been decorated with henna. Gold is a very heavy metal so I can only imagine what her ear nose hoop weighs. No tellin' the cost of all the jewelry visible. We have been told that some Indian weddings take one full week to do correctly. Each day's event requires a different sari and different jewelry.

We had watched the dancing and eating for quite a while, then went into town for almost two hours and came back. At that point the bride and groom were seated on gilded chairs on a platform on which was a room with walls made of ribbons. Guests seemed to come up one family at a time to greet the couple and have their photos taken with the newlyweds. We don't know if we missed the actual ceremony or if that had taken place somewhere else. After quite a while the couple and lots of accompanying family walked from the platform to a long table to eat. This photo is the groom, the bride and, we

These are some of the guests. Every sari was more colorful than the next. They were walking to the buffet. The buffet also went on for hours. There were probably 30 tables set up, although most people ate standing up, so they could talk to more people.

The day we arrived in Chandigarh there were two big weddings going on at our hotel, one inside and one out on the lawn. Our room on the fourth floor had an excellent bird's eye view of the outdoor wedding, so we got some great photos. This was the wedding of the son of some important Punjabi government official. We estimate 300 people, but people came and went so it's very hard to say for sure. The photos are pretty self-explanatory, and we have just loaded them in chronological order. So this first one is the dancing which went on for hours, but we never saw any women dance, only the men. Very expressive, but most of it with only with shoulders and arms. The footwork seemed to be mostly what looked like jumping up and down. It was great music, lots of drums.

On Sunday we took the train (the Shatabdi Express) from Delhi, 3.5 hours north to Chandigarh. There is a Shatabdi express train that connects each of the state capitals to Delhi. Very smooth trip, completely full train. We were fed about every hour. We came to attend a conference of all of this year’s Fulbrighters in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh) plus alumni from those countries who have spent time in the U.S. Altogether 65 participants and a very interesting group.

Chandigarh is a new city. By new, I mean only fifty years old. We are very close to the Pakistan/India boundary established in 1947. This area is called the Punjab and was part of a very, very old civilization, as old as Egypt or China, and probably as old as the area where many Americans are forced to visit today, Mesopotamia. When India was granted independence, the Indian Congress Party was unable to keep the country constituted as large as pre-independence. The Muslim faction insisted on partition, and the British colony of India became Pakistan and India. In 1972 Pakistan had a civil war and the eastern part became the country of Bangladesh (difficult to keep two parts together when separated by more than a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory). The more western part is the modern country of Pakistan.

The night before Thanksgiving, we wrote several blog entries and in one of them we described a wedding procession that had gone down our street, but we didn’t have any pictures because it was dark. Well, later that same night, another wedding procession came down the street, and this one was much more lavish and elaborate than the first. It was also very well lighted, so we got some pictures.

Let me try to describe the scene. This procession moved very slowly up the street, about 50 yards at a time. Each time it moved forward, it was preceded by a fountain-type firework that lit up the street for a full minute. Behind that was the band (Upper left photo), and behind the band was a line of wedding guests (upper right photo) kind of enclosed in flower garlands and electrical wires that powered the huge chandeliers that were being carried. When the procession stopped, the drummers (middle left) would really crank up the beat, and people danced in the street. It was very Bollywood movie style dancing: first a group of men would dance, then a group of women would dance (middle right). No men and women dancing together. Behind all this was a flower bedecked horse-drawn carriage carrying the groom-to-be (wearing a turban) and several young kids (lower left photo). Behind the carriage walked a man carrying all of the electrical wires, which were hooked into a generator, which was a full-sized truck following the procession. The band and the dancing were loud enough that it overcame the roar of the generator. What a show! Can’t even begin to imagine what this cost, or how far they went. We could hear it for quite a while after it went on past us. And this was just the Groom’s part!

We had an interesting Thanksgiving Day. Shortly after arriving at the Dental School, we heard lots of yelling and chanting outside, and looked out our window. Our office is on the third floor, almost above the front door of the school. There, just below our window was a protest demonstration. They were there for a while, then walked completely around the building and came back for a series of speeches and cheerleading by some very professional sounding organizer. Lots of rhythmic clapping and chanted slogans, all in Hindi, so we don’t know exactly what they were saying, but it was plainly angry. The Dental College has been named a Center of Excellence, and while we would consider this a good thing, the staff of the college are threatened by this “privatization”. There is a more general move toward privatization of the government-run hospitals here and there is concern that that will deny patients access to care. The Dean is adamant that there is to be no change in access, but that “politicians” are stirring up the staff. Meanwhile the faculty and the students were at work as usual.

We are thankful that this "arborist" did not kill himself last Saturday when he took down major portions of the big tree that overhung our porch and yard. We liked looking right into the tree, but someone must have decided it needed to be "thinned".

He was up there in his bare feet, walking around on the limbs with his ax. The ropes you see are what held the huge tree limbs from crashing down. There was nothing that held the man from crashing down, other than skill and experience. A whole crew down on the street manned the ropes to lower the tree limbs after he had chopped them free. They cut it all into about 6 foot lengths, some at least a foot across, and loaded it into a truck and away it went. Sure opened up our view. Hadn't realized how pretty the houses across the street are.

We are thankful that we don't have to carry bricks on our heads, especially not while wearing a sari.