Marathi Mother

     "Aee" pronounced "a" as in banana and "ee" as is "tea" means mother in Marathi, the local language of many Indian people in the state of Maharashtra, the state in which I have resided the last few months. When my roommate and I first met our host mother, three months or so ago, the first thing we asked was what we may address her as, and she replied, "Aee." At the time, this seemed sweet, even endearing, but I had no idea how much it would come to mean in a few months.
    It was not until I called out "Aye," how I had been addressing my host mother out of misunderstanding how to pronounce the Marathi word for mother, one day from the street, up to the window of the flat, to try to get my host mother's attention, and two young men passing by snickered over my act, that I thought to ask my host mother about the word "Aye." After I get upstairs and inside the apartment and relate the events to my host mother, she smiles. "Aye," she tells me, is not the Marathi word for mother, it actually means nurse-servant, one who works as a servant in hospitals. Things began making sense, like why my host mother's family also had a little giggle when I called my host mother "Aye." Feeling at first horrible that I was mistakenly insulting my host mother, my roommate, and later me too, got a good laugh out of the whole scenario.My host mother, told me to not worry, because she said that the pronunciation didn't matter, it was only the love between us that matter. Because she felt that the love was there, she never corrected me.
    And, because I love her, I now proudly call my host mother, my "Aee."

Trash Disposal in Pune: What a Pile of Rubbish!

     In the three months or so I have inhabited Pune, I have experienced nothing but wonderfulness, expect in one (or maybe two, if I count air pollution, mostly a result of a fun fact: Pune is the city with the most two wheelers- scooters and motorcycles- in the world) regard(s): the trash. In Pune, as in some other cities in India, trash disposal, collection, and processing is an infrastructural challenge, partly due to corruption.

     Most all residents and restaurants of Pune have separate bins for "wet" and "dry" waste, or organic and non-organic waste, and most Puneites do separate their trash. Yet the insufficiency of the city's trash processing plant, which was designed to process about ten times more garbage than it is currently processing, according to an article in The Times of India, has led to the common practice of burning trash in the streets.

      To my dismay, but to the numerous stray dogs' delight, trash is piled into overflowing dumpsters and left to sit around the city. The city employs people to sweep the streets and to sort through this build up of trash. These city workers and other citizens can be found collecting leaves, and piling them onto small mounds of trash, to set ablaze every morning. Not only is this a health hazard, as the burning of plastics release harmful toxins into the air, but it also worsens air pollution as well, further taxing the environment. Yet, if it wasn't done trash would surely overwhelm the streets, since the trash processing plant isn't serving the needs of the city. While I see this trash disposal method as problematic, I can appreciate citizens' need to take disposal into their own hands. I just wish a healthier solution can be found, for the people of the city's health.

A recently added trash can along the walking

 park of a jogging track nearby Gokhale Insitute.

India's 2014 Elections

     This coming Thursday, April 17, 2014, elections for the Indian Union Government will be held in Pune, and so thousands will votes. This election year has created quite a buzz in India and abroad. Narenda Modi, one of the prime minister candidates, has been the center of much of the commotion. As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate, the candidate of what is considered by some to be a right wing Hindu nationalist party, and what is the second biggest party next to the Indian National Congress Party (INC), Modi has gotten a lot of media attention. Many Indians, especially many youth see Modi and the BJP as the change they and India has been looking for.

   The Indian National Congress has been in power for over ten years, and many Indians struggle with issues like child malnutrition, lack of safe drinking water, unemployment, and corruption, which is not INC's doing, but inherent to Indian politics. The BJP has been campaigning on a platform of change, one of the biggest parts of that change being Modi's Gujarat Model of Growth. As the chief minister of Gujarat Modi has facilitated infrastructural growth in Gujarat, but some critics are weary that an economic model that works for one state of India will work for the entire country, given the huge differences in the dynamics of each of the states.

    With promises of jobs, industry, better roads, electricity, drinking water, "empowered" women and citizens, regardless of caste or creed, Modi has won the liking of many Indian youth, to which he has campaigned strongly. Yet, when I talk to college age, middle class Indians who say they will vote for Modi, they, like Modi's campaigners, overlook, if not outright disregard, the Gujarati riots of 2002, during which Modi did nothing to stop communal violence and mass murder and rape between the Muslimi and Hindu communities of the stage.

    So, with the elections coming up, and with Modi's and the BJP's success looking good- though one can never really say- we all wonder, who will win, and what will it mean for India?

For those interested, take a peek at Modi's, I mean the BJP's offical website:    http://www.bjp.org/

The Mysterious Rash: Part 2

     Desperate indeed I was. Handling things well, I wasn't outwardly showing my discomfort, so much so that most everyone in the program commented on how happy I was despite my condition. One evening, I vomited  and missed the next day's classes to recover. So, it was at the point where Uttarra (the program director) had to intervene, for her sake as much as for mine. She suggested a homeopathetic doctor. I was willing to say yes to anything, so later that day I went to the doctor. He laughed over how simple my situation was: I had acidity. All I needed to do was take two pills four times a day, another two pills twice a day, and drink a glass of water twice a day with ten drops of some medicine in it. Easy enough, right?

     If only. Not only can I not touch any of these medicines, I must put them in the cap and use that to swallow them, but after a week of them my conditions were the same. At this point Uttarra also suggested I change my diet again and so I began packing lunch again, to no avail.

   Then, a professor noticed my plight and suggested kokam. We all sat in Uttarra's office and talked about home remedies of tulsi seeds and kokam and rose leaf jam. I would drink kokam sherbets and apply dried kokam, soaked in water for a few minutes, to my rash, and drink tulsi seeds soaked in water overnight every morning inside a glass of milk, and eat a spoon full of the rose jam every morning, to cool my body down, because both the rash and the diarrhea are a result of too much body heat. I learned from the professor that according to Ayurvedic medicine there are different types of body compositions and I am a pitta person, a heat based person. The summer heat which has increased dramatically these last three weeks combined with spicy food intake has irritated my body and given the rash and stomach problems, or the acidity. Kokam, a fruit, and tulsi leaves, plant leaves, combined with buttermilk and ice cream will cool my body down. I was thrilled to hear the answer I was looking for was ice cream (among other things of course).

     And it worked! As of this last week without medicine, and just now with a glass of kokam sherbet and a glass of buttermilk I have no more rash and no more stomach problems! Home remedies were all that I needed. This meshed well with my long held distrust and dislike of pills and of the medical industrial complex, which is a whole other story. To leave it like this: now I am itch free, pill free, and hap-hap-happy.

The Mysterious Rash: Part 1

This is going to be a personal post,and medical in nature.Consider that a forewarning.

     Two weeks after I arrived in India from the United States of America, I have had a mysterious rash, and it has been an adventure in and of itself.I began getting very itchy everywhere, and would get red from all of the scratching. Small bug sized bumps were all over my body, and so for over a week I thought the it was just a horrific case of mosquitoes bites. About a week and a half later this impression quickly disappeared.

     While sitting in the room I share with my fellow Alliance student roommate I thought I was having a horrible allergic reaction because I started coughing and my throat was getting tight and itchy. I drank a bunch of water, and scared began to feel mildly panicked.  My roommate helped me out, she made some phone calls, but when that failed we tried knocking on our neighbor's door. She wasn't home, but some of the neighborhood children we play with saw us. We all returned to the apartment. One of the children, who was horribly distressed that I was unwell, was so concerned that he went to fetch their grandmother who has worked as a nurse for years. She came and unofficially diagnosed me with"acidity." A few minutes later my host mother and an Alliance staff member knocked on my door- they had gotten my roommate's voice-mail messages. A doctor was called and acidity was confirmed as the likely culprit. Medicines were gotten. Yet, I had gone to another doctor just two days before because I was also suffering digestive problems, and was already taking medicine.

     I just obliged, and the medicines knocked me out. After a good long sleep I felt a little better but needed to know what "acidity" was. In short, too much spicy food, eating too late at night, not getting enough exercise, and waiting too long in between meals causes the acids in the stomach to overproduce and this can cause both the rash and the stomach problems. I kept my diet more or the same, and still felt horrible. I visited the same doctor two more times, was given more medicine and now told I might just be allergic to something, and so should restrict my diet. I did all of this to no avail. I decided I might want to stop eating so much spicy food, and so I went out bought some food and prepared my own lunches. This didn't stop the itch. At this point my itch was so bad everyone knew about my situation because I was itching myself so much. I was desperate for an answer as to why I was so itchy and how I can stop it.


       -    -      -     -     -    To be Continued    -     -     -   -   -     -

North India

         North India. Dangerous- especially for women,being young and being a "foreigner" makes it even more dangerous, or so it may have seemed from the conversations I had with several people from Pune before I embarked on a solo week long adventure to what is commonly called "The Golden Triangle," the cities of Jaipur, Agra, and New Delhi in the Northern portion of India.

        Yet this regional prejudice, almost as common as North and South in the United States of America, was unfounded in my one week experience in North India. I was told to buy pepper spray and to ensure that I had a GPS tracking device switched on on my cell phone (an impossibility on my low tech Nokia). I was beginning to get the feeling people in Pune, Indians, not international visitors, were afraid of Indian people in the North and wanted me to be afraid as well.

       In my twenty years on Earth I have learned that fear is usually not healthy, so I put on my backpack and set off for the airport with a heavy sigh, feeling sad for all of those I'd be leaving in Pune who would spend a week worrying about me, and feeling exciting for my week of travel, by myself, at my own pace, and on my own terms.

     When I got off the plane in New Delhi and out of the cab of a taxi driver who was just as confused as I was about the lack of an exact hotel address on the hotel voucher (lesson learned here- from now on I'll triple check addresses), I found myself in the main bazaar. I wandered around the bustling market and a tourist hotspot, where hotels, eateries and shops line the pedestrian crowded streets, trying to find the hotel I booked online, Hotel Malik Continental. A shopkeeper asked if he could help me, and after telling him I was looking for the hotel, he pulled out his iPhone, looked the hotel up, called it, got an address, and helped me hail an auto-rickshaw driver to take me there. Twelve kilometers later I arrive safely at my destination. This was just one example of the kindness I experienced on my travels.

    Aside from a brief verbal dispute between a rickshaw driver and man on a bicycle who bumped into us, which was quickly resolved when a third man intervened, I encountered no mishaps in my week alone in North India. Not a single dangerous thing happened nor was I in any precarious situations, aside from being faced with the air pollution and lack of public toilets that plague many parts of India. Inside, I was inspired by the kindness of the people, the beauty and historical significance of the history of the architecture, and the peace of mind a week traveling in North India brought. While I acknowledge bad things have and do happen, they happen everywhere, and so debilitating stereotyping is more harmful than good.

And to prove my wonderful experience, enjoy some photos: