Chennai (or Madras, whatever you say...)

For all of you still wondering, I landed safely in India, despite losing around 28 hours to travel and time changes combined, and I ended up in the less-than-charming town of Chennai, which was once called Madras, but now isn't, thanks to the Hindu nationalists. The market next to my hotel, which is in a suburb called Perambur, is what you are seeing above. I wanted to put that there just to give Chennai a little bit of a break -- it's one of the worst cities I've ever been in.

It normally looks like this:



The air is completely choked with pollution, there is no end to the honking of car and moto-rickshaw horns, it is deathly crowded, deathly poor, and always at least 90 degrees and humid. But it has its moments.

The reason I am here, rather than in Madurai, which is wear I will cool my dogs and get semi-permanent digs, is THIS MAN:



No, he's not holding me prisoner or anything. That is Vana, who we affectionately call "Vanarajan" (it's funny in India, believe me), my boss at Dasra, the NGO where I've been assigned to work by ajws. We are working with another NGO at present, called Jeeva Jyothi, which is based in Perambur and which focuses on ending child labor in India, and I will be here until Wednesday, at which point I will head to Madurai, then come back next Sunday to Madras, where I will stay until Diwali, because at that point it apparently gets hectic on the trains. God knows when that even is... (ahem, Gods know when that even is... sorry -ed).

Here's the office for Jeeva Jyothi...



And here's a book-launch I went to with Vana yesterday. Speaking at the podium in front of the camera is the Indian Communist Party's Women's Advocate, whose name (nor speech, because it was in Tamil) I didn't catch, but who got a great round of applause from the women watching. She was talking almost entirely about domestic issues, apparently, about avoiding abuse in the house and women asserting themselves to their husbands, and not so much about the more macro issues of women in Indian politics or education. Again, this is just what I garnered from Vana. I don't speak Tamil. ...Yet.


women watching...



The book Jeeva Jyothi was launching was a report on the status of their work with women in Chennai. It, too, was in Tamil, so I couldnt read it, but my job is specifically to help them edit a similar edition, only this one is on children's issues. The organizers of the NGO speak passable English, but it isn't passable in the international policy-making and money-donating world, and I am applying the skills I learned while drunk at the News-Letter office every Tuesday night for two years in college to saving the world.

But enough about my work, because I may even start keeping a separate blog about that.

Here are some things I've been eating:




that lovely-looking banana leaf of food is just called "meal". You can get it at any Indian vegetarian restaurant, and you mix it all together and eat it with your hands, and it is delicious. I have no idea what it was because I ate it the first day I was here, and no one was there to help me by telling me what to eat. I think it had spinach in it.


That's vegetable biryani (the rice stuff) and chicken kebab, which was actually just a chicken leg with veggies cooked to the outside of it. Everything is very spicy here... they don't have those convenient one- or two-little-red-pepper labels on the menus. Sometimes they don't even have menus.


That's lollipop chicken (wings, only more delicious) and rice with daal, which his yellow lentils cooked to perfection.


that's Dhruv, my temporary roommate, who also works for Dasra, but he is usually is based in Bombay. He is buying a custard apple, which I later ate, and which has a creamy, pulpy inside that tastes like sweet cream. It was delicious dessert.


and this is me chewing beatle leaves, which taste like a cross between mint and detergent, and make you spit brown. it's all the rage after dinner, though, and you all know I'm not one to miss out on the rage.

I went on a long walk today, with many train and moto-rickshaw rides interspersed, and I can tell you, it's not hard to see why even Lonely Planet had a hard time making Madras sound nice. It had its moments though, and here are some things I noticed, both good and bad.

Tamil is a very beautifully-written language. Here is the block-letter form:



Here's cursive:



Here are some bad-ass campaign signs, hand-painted on the walls that surround the streets. We're in the middle of local elections, which I may, at some point, try to fathom, but I haven't yet figured them out...





Here is the flagpole from the Fort Saint George, which is the oldest British outpost in South India. I took this picture because I was told that the flagpost is made out of the mast of 17th-century British sailing ship, and Mountain School taught me that the reason why there are none of the "White Pines, Silver Birch...giants of our northern woods" remaining in the Northwest is because the British kings had them cut down and made into masts. So basically, this flagpole is really a New England tree. Think about how crazy that is.



Here's the British East India Company's china, which they ate off of while getting lairy in the officer's mess...



The museum of fine arts, closed to viewers...



Some kiddies, playing in front of a cannon outside the Government Museum of archaeology and natural history...



Some vishnus, inside the archaeology wing...



The Governor's Museum was actually really nice... Very breezy and with a nice garden full of ruined old carvings.



I could not resist this shot of the garden next to the "anthropology" wing, which was also closed, but the colors of the women's sari's along with the color of the building was too nice to pass up. A fleeting moment of Madras beauty.



...tempered quite quickly by a shot of the shantytowns along the filthy, filthy river...



I took a walk in the gardens on the sprawling campus of the Theosophical Society of Chennai. It was the only place in the city where I got any quiet at all. There is rumored to be a 400 year old banyan tree there, and I wanted to sit under it and write in my journal, but this guard wouldnt let me into the particular part of the gardens where it was planted, because that part is closed on Sundays. So I took a picture of this banyan tree, which I hope is enough for the banyan-fanatics among my blog readership (they call themselves the Banyan Canyon, they sit in the back eating funyuns, and have a website called www.banyoncanyon.com), because I'm not going back to that place. It was a hike. Also, I truly hope that this is indeed a banyan tree. I'm no botanist:



Lots of theosophical coconut palms:



And it all led, in the end to this glorious, run-down, vine-eaten bungalow, which reminded me of a book by, I dunno, Naipaul, even though I've only read about 20 pages of A Bend In The River, and I don't think there were any bungalows in there, I just imagine they are something he would write about. Nice image, right?



More soon, and I always love your comments, folks.