IHP Part I

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Saying goodbye (tata in hindi) to India

I arrived in Zanzibar a few days ago, and already India feels like a distant memory. The blue ocean, relaxed atmosphere, friendly people, and overwhelming heat is reminiscent of Colombia's Caribbean coast. I am just starting to put my mind to learning Swahili, but the few words I already know go far with the locals. Interactions here are more relaxed, more familiar than they were in India, as if my brain runs on the same wavelength as the Zanzibaris. In India, I often felt like I was trying to communicate with a different species entirely or had woken up on another planet. So what about the last month in India? I'll try to summarize what still hasn't settled in my head. 
I left India from the Mumbai airport. The last thing I did in India was drink a towering glass of hot chocolate at three in the morning in an airport cafe, while the beast of Mumbia was just beginning to stir outside. The drive to the airport (unfortunately the only time I got to spend in the city) did not fail to exceed my expectations. The entire city seemed blanked with wooden scaffolding rising out of the dust and disorder of street life. Children slept on cardboard side by side on the door step of towering office buildings. I was exhausted but couldn't let my eye lids shut.
How does one describe India? The underworld of Mumbai's slums, street children, and communal violence found a place in the American consciousness with the movie Slum Dog Millionaire, but unfortunately for the people actually living in the slums there is no possibility of game shows.
What did result is that Westerners with a few extra bucks can now get a tour of a Mumbai slum (a safari of India's charismatic macro-fauna?). There is a Facebook application called "Slumlords of Mumbai," so now Indians across the country can "cheat their friends" and rise to the top of India's now famous underworld.
Yet, these fleeting images hardly illustrate the complexities of the roulette with modernity that India is caught in. Friedman said the world is flat, but if you venture to leave your hotel room, such an analogy with be forgotten instantly.Other people have borrowed the opening from Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" to give perhaps a more accurate description:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way"
The government in Delhi, businessmen in Mumbai, and the growing middle class welcome India's bid to becoming an emerging superpower. Their main concern is rivaling China in its quest of regional supremacy. As I write this, India is seeking a spot on the UN Security Council, which would be a symbolic affirmation of their growing power by the West and also give them considerable diplomatic weight. As the Indian elites put development into overdrive, the rest of the country is wondering how much of the burden is going to be put on their backs. If India's past is any clue, the answer will be most of it.
It is this struggle over development-- for whom and on who's terms-- that we explored these past two months.
We arrived in Delhi to see India display its achievements, of which there are many, during the Common Wealth Games. We also saw the slums where those who don't fit into India's modern image have been hidden away to fend for themselves. We visited cotton farmers who have to compete with U.S. agriculture subsidies and inspected their failed crops supplied and engineered by Monsanto. We also visited organic farms that are fighting for the ability to plant their own seeds.
We visited Gandhi's last home before he died where he preached truth and non-violence, and we visited his home state of Gujarat. Its capital, Ahmadabad is known for its brutal history of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. It's a strife that has been encouraged and incited by the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, which has ruled the region for the past 20 years.
We visited dams -- "the temples of modern India" as India's first prime minister once proclaimed. Among the dams we visited was Sardar Surovar, the last dam on the famous Narmada river, which displaced 40,835 families by official counts and still hasn't reached its full height. We also visited one of the 800 communities displaced by the Ukai dam, then visited a community downstream that used the dam's irrigated water to grow 4-5 times the amount of food to gain considerable wealth. Further down chemical companies use a huge amount of the electricity produced and water to dilute the their industrial effluence to meets the regions loose environmental regulation. Dilution or simply paying the small fine is much less expensive than treating industrial waste.
We met "forest tribes," Their nomadic livelihoods halted by India's growing environmental consciousness and it's affinity for pristine forests.

We also saw resistance-- an academic from one of India's most elite business school supporting a slum's quest to avoid displacement, a formerly denotified tribe that uses theater to raise awareness of tribal issues, slum women who weathered blows from the police to protest the Common Wealth Games, and a farmers movement struggling to reverse the damage caused by GMO seeds, the green revolution's reliance on chemical fertilizers, and neoliberal agriculture policies to reassert their autonomy.
After two months in India, I am less sure of what to make of it. Yes, the food is fantastic and didn't make me nearly as sick as I had feared, but how can an outsider make sense of such a surging subcontinent. Overwhelmed by its shear size and foreignness, my first reaction is to block it out of my mind completely. It defies sense. Try as I may, I couldn't begin to enter the ethos, or plethora of ethos, that make up the contemporary state of India. One that is so diverse, yet young enough that its differences still show through the awkwardness of nationhood.  However foreign India remains in my mind, such distances are no long significant. I can't stir a spoonful of sugar into my coffee without thinking of the masked children in the sugar factory we visited, nor can I buy a tee-shirt without thinking of the daily struggle of cotton farmers. I was hoping I would come up with something less cliche, but what I am taking with me from India is that every decision I make, from what I buy to who I vote for has more serious repercussions for those outside the US than it does for us inside. Behind the comfort we enjoy in the US, there are people toiling in the rest of the world to make it possible. I can't say I didn't know this before IHP, but the serenity of Vermont is far too strong of a sedative and makes the rest of the world seem more distant than it actually is.  As for India, it is more than capable of deciding its own fate.

As always, please share your thoughts and experiences

Out of the city

On the 19th of October we left Delhi by train for an organic farm in Maharashtra. We stayed on the farm for a week before heading to Gandhi's Ashram. I'll work backwards.

To be brief, Gandhi was born in 1869 to a well to do family. He was married at 13 and went to England to study law at 18. After his studies he briefly returned to India before leaving for South Africa. There, he fought institutional racism for years before returning to India. Upon his return he was already seen as a Indian hero and was soon given the name Bapu, which means father. From then until his assassination in 1948 he fought for the Indian people, specifically their right to self-determination, which was won on August 15th, 1947. Gandhi's way of fighting for independence was markedly different than many of history's other independence movements. He embraced the idea that British rule was only possible with Indian submission and that violence was no way of creating a new country. He led a non-cooperation movement, and when it turned violent, he fasted until there was peace.
When asked what his message to the word was, he responded, "My life is my message." Cognizant of the violence caused by industrialization he spun is own thread and grew his own food, Gandhi was not just an Indian back-to-the-lander. He extrapolated his views to every aspect of his life. His messages were not complex or abstract; he was honest with himself and when he made a decision, he followed it unwaveringly. What I think is most relevant to us today is the courage Gandhi had to eliminate contradictions in his life. There was no dissonance between what he held as truth and the way he behaved.

He wrote on numerous topics from education to technology. Truth and non-violence have become the tenets modern Gandhianism. It does not prescribe a specific way of life beyond these two tenets and people have adopted his views worldwide. The farm that we visited was one example. Disturbed by the destructiveness of modern industrial Agriculture, Vacent and Karuna started one of the regions first organic farm after reading "One Straw Revolution" by Fukuoka. Their goal is to produce food without the use of chemical fertilizers or tractors and rebuild the fertility of land that had been constantly degraded since the Green Revolution. If there is one thing that he could give to his children, he said its topsoil. Walking through his forest garden I could spot orange trees, papaya, custard apple, and many other plants growing harmoniously next to each other without any intensive care. The plants may have been very different (papaya, mango, millet, and cotton)  and the farm followed to a concise ethic of truth and non-violence behind them, but it was a mentality that I have seen all over the world. I reminded me of the growing permaculture movement in Vermont and how a combination of a Japanese farmer /writer, Gandhi, and the global permaculture yielded such an amazing oasis that farmers, school groups, intellects are all looking to replicate. It was yet again another bazaar child of globalization, and a beacon of reclaimed self-determination in an age of increasing complexity and interdependence.

After hearing so much about the Common Wealth Game's displacement, the obvious next question was, "Where did they go?" As I said before, only a quarter were resettled. No one seems to know where the rest went. After speaking with a few Indian students, we decided that visiting the CWG's resettlement colonies was not a good idea. Touring white people around a recently established camp that was created because of a colonial event seemed like an insult to injury. Instead, a local film maker who has made documentaries on resettlement colonies offered to take us an older colony where she knew people. An invitation is important in these circumstances. Here is the story of one colony:

When India gained independence in 1947, cities like Delhi boomed with construction. Workers from all over the Indian countryside came for the prospects of a job. The jobs were there, but they did not include a place to stay, so most workers set up houses nearby the project they were working on and that is how little slums emerged all over the city. The government knew they were there; they had ration cards and could get subsidized food from government stores. Then the government decided to move them because they wanted to build something where the slum was or decided that the slum was just an eye sore. In this particular case, 20,000 people were moved between 2000 and 2002 to one colony. They were told to pay 7,000 rps for a 10 year lease and were left on their own to build houses. The colony is located next to a swamp and the water table is only a foot below the surface making construction difficult. Some houses are flooded and abandoned on the outskirts on the colony.
Children don't go to school. Families work together in the neighboring landfill sorting trash. Others make brooms or do season agricultural work husking lentils. The landfill has polluted the water causing skin and stomach problems that in some cases has led to death. Many people here lost their ration cards when the Indian government eliminated 1.7 million cards, a move to keep up with its poverty reduction goals. The house next door to our host's lacked a roof, but the family was still unable to get ration cards. The application process is tiresome and expensive. You must pay money to prove that you have none, while people in other parts of the city have the pink cards and "drive Mercedes." Even for those who get their ration cards, the fight isn't over. There is supposed to be one government store for every 800 families. Here, there is only one in an area of 20,000 people. It is over 3/4 of a kilometer away meaning that they must pay more to transport the food than the food actually costs.

After 10 years they are starting to get organized. They have filed a Public Interest Litigation to help everyone get ration cards and several womans groups are active. Earlier this month over a hundred woman blocks a nearby highway to protest the Common Wealth Games despite being beaten by the police.

Its hard to know what to take out of situations like this other than feeling very fortunate and wondering how our lifestyles might be contributing to these situations.

Delhi: The Common Wealth Games

I've been in Delhi, the capital of India, for almost a week and there is one thing on everyone's mind: The Common Wealth Games. The CWG is like a mini Olympics for all of Britain's former colonies. The Common Wealth's history of brutal colonization is an accurate foreshadowing for how the currents games are playing out. The government in Delhi is set on making it a modernized city, even if only for two weeks. So far the games have cost between $10-30 billion and has been the largest corruption scandal in the past 15 years. Streets were paved, stadiums built, and the poor removed. Estimates for the number of people displaced range from 30,000 to 400,000. The parking lot outside where I am staying was filled with small houses a month ago, many who had been there for over 20 years. Only 20-25% were resettled to degraded lands normally next to dumps on the outskirts of the city. The rest were told to leave on their own. If they showed up during the games, the police told them they would spend two months in jail. The city has been plastered with CWG signs. Views of slums have been blocked with large billboards. People say the city is under siege by the military for security reason, and everyone knows that the only part of the Games that will remain are the empty stadiums and huge public debt, yet none of this can be seen on the television broadcasts. During the closing ceremonies last night the announcer claimed, "The Common Weather Games have been a demonstration of equality" I must have missed something.

The CWG is just a shocking example. India has the most billionaires in the world, and many live a stones throw from slums. Its a country of contrast and one that is impossible to explain or understand. How can one justify spending billions of dollars when a recent study in India found that 70% of the population lives on 20 rupees ($.50 USD). More to come..

As always, please comment.

Gustavo Esteva

IHP is filled with interesting people. One in particular is Gustavo Esteva. Although I have never teased out his exact age, Gustavo grew up in Mexico at a time when the term "underdevelopped" just been coined to describe the majority of the world, especially the global South. For them "underdevelopped" left only one option, and that was development. Just like everyother boy his age, Gustavo wanted to be part of it. By his early twenties he was appointed IBM Mexico's youngest executive, then he went to on to work for Procter & Gamble. Quickly, however, Gustavo found that his development work was not helping the Mexican people. It was about making a profit. Eventually, he was asked to leave to when to refused to do what was asked of him.
After working in the development business, Gustavo swung to the left, Latin American style. This was the era of the guerrilla --Che and Fidel's era. It was not long before he realized that the Guerrilla life was not for him. It was too much about killing people. Guerrillas didn't live long, so Gustavo went into government. He began to climb the bureaucratic ladder quickly, and just shy of a minister position he quit. He "saw the logic of the government." It wasn't for the people any more than the corporations were. In 1983 he met Ivan Illich. By this time the discontents of development we becoming more clear. In 1960 the wealthy in Mexico were 20 times richer than the poor. Twenty years later they were 46 times richer. For many, Mexico's struggle with development culminated in 1994 with the armed resitance by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), which broke out the day that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) came in effect. Their slogan was, "Ya Basta!" or Enough! They've had enough of development, enough of free trade, enough of the Mexican government, enough of colonization. They wanted the autonomy to develop or not develop on their own terms. Since the out break of the movement and to this day, Gustavo Esteva has been an adviser for the movement. He also helps run Universidad de la Tierra and co-coordinates IHP.

Why Am I Blogging?

For the next 8 months I am going to be traveling with International Honors Program's Rethinking Globalization. If you want to know more about the program, go here: http://www.ihp.edu/page/rethinking_globalization/

I am creating this blog for two reasons. First, I am going to have limited internet access and want to keep friends and family updated. I would love to write everyone of you emails and letters this year, but it is just not possible. This does not mean that if you write me I won't write back, rather expect a short response.

The main reason, however, for this blog is to share the ideas that we are going to be exploring throughout this trip and to ask for your thoughts and feedback. I am going to pose questions and make public the internal dialogs that will be going on in my head as I travel. I am going to keep my posts brief, so that they are easy to read. I am approaching this with an intellectual aim rather than a creative one. I encourage everyone to share their thoughts using the comments feature whether you are a Cochran's racer, relative, friend, professor, or any combination of these. Thanks for reading and I am looking forward to sharing this trip with you.