Pimping, Tinkering

For a few days before I joined my teammates on the Rickshaw Run, Rogier had been referring to our noble chariot as "Johnny." I had to explain to him, in English that a Dutchman might understand, that you never, ever give a vehicle a male moniker. He especially, should have known this rule, because, being freaky-deaky-Dutch, he was constantly warning us about jinxing the trip. So we plugged the iPod into our Rickshaw Radio, via cassette converter, and started thinking about names. Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally" came on, and that's how Sally was christened.

In telling this story, I'm given pause by my own mention of the Rickshaw Radio. I know what you're thinking. How did we get a radio? The simple answer is by paying 1,600 rupees, about four times what it's worth, for an incompetent auto-audio guy to solder a piece of junk radio to our dashboard in Hyderabad, but the Radio is really a part of a much more important part of the Rickshaw Run, which has to do with a certain degree of tender-loving care we gave Sally. On the RR website, this pampering was called "Distance Pimping" (for the geriatrics in my blog audience, that's a reference to the MTV program "Pimp My Ride," a reality show in which the rapper Xzibit chooses a lucky viewer each week with a beat-up car, then "pimps" it by repairing and sprucing up the body, the interior, the sound system, and most importantly, the hubcaps -- which are called "rims"), but we found that a little bit demeaning, so we called it "tinkering," or towards the end of the Run, "prettying up Sally". Rogier, Dutch as he is, would always mutter, "Saucy little minx!" in a strange accent every time we did something to pretty-up Sally, which I found strange, but I rolled with it. The radio:



It takes a lot of work to get a rickshaw looking like THIS:



Sally's paintjob, in stunning turquoise and grey, was done with a sponge by Benji at the outset of the event. I wasn't there, but I'm told that Rogier and Benji fought like a married couple about it, but eventually agreed that it looked good in the end. In fact, that bickering is actually all anyone remembers of Benji and Rogier at the start, as we found when we met up with the rest of the teams at the end. In any case, we didn't win the best paint job prize at the end of the trip, but we did paint some slogans, like "Three-Wheelin' to Darjeelin'" on the wheel-wells, and "Horn OK Please" on the rear fender. Here's Rogier modelling...



Both the above and below pictures were taken while we were putting on our shiny steel rims, which we purchased for about Rs. 50 (less than $1.25) at a village auto-parts stand. Needless to say, we were the only rimmed-out team on the run.



Here's Sally's underbelly (she's so immodest), taken just before she got her oil changed. Benji and I tried to give her the oil change ourselves, but had hardly found the drain plug when a loyal employee of the Tata Motors service center in Jarkhand stepped in. We discovered the same day that Sally's muffler was loose, which is why she was roaring like Rosie O'Donnell instead of purring like the proper Greta Garbo that she was.



Prettying-up also meant lots of stickers depicting the freaky-deaky pantheon of Hindu gods. We were looking for the rickshaw-walla's trinity: Ganesh flanked by Jesus and the Virgin Mary, which you see surprisingly often in India, but the Christian decal men were nowhere to be found. Here's Benji putting on stickers:



Ganesh, alone, on the front flank, plus an orange bead-and-flower garland that we put on the front to balance out Rogier's national fervour with the American and Australian flag bandanas that waved from Sally's rear-views.



And here, if you can make it out in the bottom right-hand corner, is our radio. We only had one working iPod, and obviously it was Rogier's, so we were stuck listening to Rod Stewart's greatest hits, some Dutch band called Blof, some Maroon 5/Jack Johnson/John Mayer mom-rock, and some Eurotrash DJ crew called the Freemasons, who Rogier insisted to me "really pushed the limit" with their beats. There were a few redeeming songs on the playlist, however, including Charles & Eddie's 1992 dance hit "Would I Lie to You?".

The radio fell out somewhere in Chattisgarh due to a sub-standard soldering job, and was dragged about 10 meters by a loose cable. We re-attached her, now without a front face and fastened to the dash with some copper wires we found, but she was really never the same again, and more and more, we had to resort to using the guitar we brought along to accompany Rogier's improvised, free-form funk songs about his experiences as an NGO worker treating scabies infections at rural Maharashtran schools, which was entertaining, and prevented drowsiness, but wasn't quite the same as having the luxury of "Handbags and Gladbags" blasted through scratchy speakers over the hum of the motor.

Fly-by-Night Andhraites

The odometer hit 2,000 km on my first day with the Boondogglers. They had seen the beautiful beaches of Kerala and Goa already on their trip. I would start by seeing what I like to call a "goat gathering". It happens from time to time in rural India: a bunch of guys meet up in the middle of a highway somewhere (how they arrange it, I'm not sure -- text messages? homing pigeons?) and scope each other's goats. It's like in midwestern Americana, where young men used to pull their Mustangs up to the parking lot of a burger joint, rev their engines, give hi-fives, peek under the hood of each car, and tinker. Only with goats. What's the equivalent of "tinkering" with a goat? Apprising it's leg muscles like a thoroughbred, to see how high it can goat-hop? Tickling it's goat-beard? Who knows?



Soon after the Goat Gathering, I realized that India plays host to ALL SORTS of mid-highway livestock hobnobbing! Here's a Water Buffalo Wing-Ding!





An oxen jamboree!



Rhesus Monkey MerryMaking!



Benji joins the fun!



And here are a few more images of Andhra Pradesh, the state of which Hyderabad is the capital, and driving through which we only spent about a day and a half. It was a bit of a drab state, visually, but there were some beautiful well-kempt roads through a national forest, and miles and miles of that great Indian crop, rice paddy:



Sally was going 63 kmph (her max speed, at which she shudders and yelps like cold, hungry puppy dog) on those roads, but that didn't keep us from seeing countless examples of what I like the call the "What the f*#%????" face, shown to us in all its varieties and nuances everywhere we went, all over India.

What the F*#% are these white guys doing in a rickshaw in my village, which takes pride mainly in the one day a year when old Ramesh lets us all into his house, the only one with electricity, to watch a VCD of the 1984 Z-Cinema adaptation of the Ramayana????!!?



What the F*#% is the deal with that rickshaw???!!?? The 12 of us are riding OUR rickshaw to the home of Sree Amartya Chitrapatya, the renowned accountant of Deogar, for a good day's work stuffing envelopes in return for a thali of dal-fry at lunch and 12 rupees each! What the F*#% are these jerks doing with their rimmed-out rickshaw and opulent luggage and leg space???!!??



Are you getting a load of this guy? He's like 6 feet tall, and has hair like a girl, and he doesn't even speak Hindi! Where the F*#% does he think he is???!?!?



Group photo, somewhere in Andhra Pradesh:



More is on the way. In the meantime, I don't know how many of you are aware that James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, died on Christmas morning a few weeks ago, but I didn't get a chance to properly blog-mourn. So, for all of you who feel the pain of his passing as I do, Get on the Good Foot and watch this amazing video. See if afterwards you don't feel like going down to the crib to let it all hang out, where funky people know what it's all about.

High times in Hyderabad

How do I start my rickshaw tale? Tough to explain, but I'll give the beginning a try.

About eight weeks ago, Marmar (those of you who don't know Marmar are beyond hope, so don't worry about it) gave me a shout-out from Cherbourg, France, where he was working, asking me to do the Mongol Rally with him. That race, in which a bunch of boozy Brits drive a car with a less-than-one-litre engine from London to Ulaanbataar, takes place in the summertime, so Marmar couldn't actually make it, but he pointed me to another event organized by the same company, the Institute for Adventure Research, called the Rickshaw Run, a 3,500-km charity rally in an auto-rickshaw, from Cochin, Kerala (the lush jungly southwest of India) to Darjeeling, West Bengal (the tea-famous hill station nestled between Bhutan and Nepal, in the country's almost-extreme northeast). You're in India, said Marmar. You must do this.



So we scrambled and we raised some money. We fenagle time off of work from our various NGO's, promising to raise some money for them (just a few drops of it, it turned out). We assemble our team (above), the Boondogglers, set up a website, and planned the trip as little as possible in order to stay perfectly in line with the Institute for Adventure Research's general ethos. We were (clockwise from the left, in the above photo), Rogier Jacobse of Holland, Benji Holzman of Australia, and yours truly. Check out the Boondogglers blog for more info.

The trip was pretty incredible. Almost indescribable, in fact. We made it, of course, after an excessive 4,200 km, near-breakdowns, scuff-ups, mild bribery, lost tracks, bumpy roads, and lots of biriyani and beer, and I'm still a bit stunned to be back in Bombay. Over the next few posts I'll try to sort through the images we made and remember what the Rickshaw Run was like. Because it's hard to describe. I'm a bit addicted to adventure, now, and I vow I'll do something like this again. Just watch me.



My leg of the journey began in Hyderabad, which means I was only along for about 2,200 km, because I was in Rajasthan with Mags and Dad for Christmas until a few days into 2007 (more on that trip in later posts). Above is the center of the city seen from the Char Minar (see below), a massive monument to the rise of Islam in India. Note the flocks of rickshaws. Really quite a beautiful city, Hyderabad.




There's the Char Minar, the Arc d'Triomphe of the Deccan, and the world famous Beard Minar with his monkey-eared son by his side. On the real, though, Hyderabad has a very Persian Muslim feel to it, and you see a lot more people like this, wearing hajj skullcaps and thick beards. Oh yeah, and you can get real meat there, which is a plus. Hyderabad is, incidentally, also where they invented biriyani.

The city's famous mosque, one of the oldest in India:



Inside, the beautiful tombs of the Nizams of Hyderabad. I spent a slow day in Delhi waiting for a plane to Hyderabad, the day before I met up with the Boondogglers, reading the final two chapters of William Dalrymple's White Mughals, the book that really put him on the map in India (an earlier book of travel writing about Delhi called City of Djinns was popular too, but not ground-breaking). Dalrymple (with whom, incidentally, I got a bit battered a few weeks ago at the launch party for his new book, The Last Mughal, at the Taj Land's end in Bandra... It was sponsored by Black Dog Scotch, and I had just gotten off work, and I had to deal with my empty stomach and an open bar... It was messy, but fun, to meet the historian) is a great researcher, and White Mughals is an imperfect history of a British colonial soldier who "falls in love with" and marries a Samayyid (descendent of the Prophet Muhammed) princess named Khair-un Nissa of Hyderabad and proceeds to bridge the gaps between the Mughal empire in the Deccan and the British East India company. The author conveniently overlooks the fact that the soldier, a rosy-faced charmer called James Achilles Kirkpatrick, was in his mid-40's when he impregnated the 14-year-old Nissa (ie, he was no cultural bridge-builder, really... just a lech), and that Kirkpatrick never, refers to the girl as his wife in any of his own writings. But a beautifully written book with lots of really interesting peripheral details.

I'm really sorry, I'm veering off track here. This isn't a book review site. It's a site about boondogglous travels. My only point is, the whole thing deals with the Nizams, or Mughal monarchs (Dad and I were talking about it, and can't figure out why they were called "Nizams" in Hyderabad and "Nawabs" everywhere else) of Hyderabad, and their political dealings. And here they are, the Nizams, entombed in marble. Pretty cool, right? I'm a dork...



On an unrelated note, we saw a pretty for-real Buddhist statue on an island in a lake in the city as well. Very green.



And early the next morning, no more bullshit. We hit the road!



My first day of driving, I was laughin' (did I say that right, Benji? Apparently when you're a 'roo, you say things that are a breeze are "laughin'"). Driving the rick is like driving a motorscooter, which I've never done, but you can just imagine how easy that is. It's like one of those 21-speed bikes with the sweet handlebar gear shifts, but the handbrake is actually a clutch and the real brake is a footpedal. You follow that? In any event, I'm a master rickshaw-walla at this point. You need a ride to Cafe Coffee Day, Carter Road? Wanna pick up some Masala Papad up in Santa Cruz West? Too drunk to drive home from Bollywood Spinners night at Club Enigma? I got you covered. Fifty rupees goodpricespecialforyou!

Rickshaw Run Over

Sorry it's been so long since I rapped at ya, but things have been pretty busy. See, I've been driving an auto-rickshaw from Hyderabad to Darjeeling, which basically means 2,200 km in a glorified and oddly shaped lawnmower. It was unforgettable, unbelievable, and a lot of other superlative adjectives that I'm too stunned to think of right now.

That photo is a triumphant finish-line shot of the Boondogglers with Sally, our noble steed, atop Tiger Hill, just outside of Darjeeling, on the morning after we completed the Rickshaw Run. Rogier, Benji, and I are wearing Nepalese yak-wool sweaters, and if you had been there, you would have seen, in the not-so-far-off distance, the peak of Mt. Kanchenjunga (8586 meters), the third highest mountain in the world, after Everest and K2. From the same lookout point you could see a very-distant tip of Everest on a clear day, but the Rickshaw Runners were mostly too busy drinking chai laced with Old Monk rum and doing fun tricks with our rickshaws, like doing donuts and purposefully flipping them to really take it in.

I will describe the whole trip in detail over the next few days, and you can follow our travels a little bit on the blog, www.boondogglers.wordpress.com. Everyone arrived safely, we partied it up, and now we're back in Bom.

Happy late New Year everyone! Take care!

Dharavi

"The Government doesn’t consult those it seeks to rehabilitate. You want to move me out of my house, but you won’t ask me where or how? Now they say they want to change Dharavi into Shanghai? Why don’t you change Dharavi into Bombay?"

- Jockin Arputham, founder of the National Slum Dwellers Association. 12/12/2006

A lot of people, most notably journalist Kalpana Sharma, in a 2000 book that she wrote, have referred to Dharavi as the "largest slum in Asia." Sharma's estimate of the population is 1,000,000 people spread over 178 hectares (0.69 square miles), but last week I went on a walk with a friend of mine who is a Ph. D. candidate in sociology from the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on Dharavi, and she estimated that it could be as low as 500,000 people spread over about 350 hectares (1.35 square miles).



Opening up my "calculator" function in my accessories menu, here, and punching a few numbers, that works out to, at the densest: 19 square feet per person, and at the low end, and 75 square feet per person for personal and living space. I've heard it's actually not even the densest part of Bombay (Dadar and Kurla probably hold that distinction), but Dharavi is really unique because it was started as a massive squatters' colony. The people were, and mostly still are, living there illegally on government land to which they have no claim. The difference between Dharavi and lot of other squatter colonies around the city is that Dharavi really took hold and became permanent. In the government's never-ending campaign to drive slum-dwellers from the city limits, Dharavi became subject to the 1995 Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, a Mumbai-wide cooperation with private developers to get people out of their chawls (hovels) and into public housing.

This year marks the inauguration of a new initiative, specific to Dharavi, in which all residents who have lived in the slum since 1995 will be removed from their homes and put into high-rise public housing projects (we visited the inside of one with our tourguide's research assistant, a 17-year-old called Subramani -- it was rather small, but quite nice, with all the modern appliances and a pretty sturdy set-up, overall). Their land (not technically theirs at all) will be sold to private developers, who will build free replacement public housing on one half, and market-rate sale housing on the other half.

This poster is in protest of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority's actions, which many community members -- particularly those affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) -- disapprove, because they don't think the community has had enough say in the matter. It's a bit like the dispute over the East Baltimore neighborhood near Patterson Park that the city seized last year to build the new BioTech park (for those of my readers who are Baltimorons).

The parties who hear, see, and speak no evil, respectively, are the Maharashtra Parliament, the Maharashtra Land Authority, and the City Corporator's Office (torn), which consists in the local governing body of wards.



Here's a little boy, looking for evil...



Here are some popads, these crispy tortilla-like patties that come with my tiffin lunch can every day (more about that in my next post), drying in the sun after they are fried.



Until the 1960's, Dharavi was home to thousands of the untouchable leather-tanning caste, whose very livelihood is somewhat blasphemous, for obvious reasons, even though they only tan the hides of cows that die of natural causes, supposedly. Many of these tanners were also Muslims, and most of them came from Tamil Nadu. Since the 1960's, however, the tanning industry has moved on to Kurla, and what remains are dozens of leather retailers and finish-work shops. I had an extra hole punched in my belt, because lately I've been busting a sag, which is not acceptable professional attire at work, apparently.



These flags, I was told, were hung to celebrate the Muslim festival of "Id," but after some research, I found that "Id" just means "festival" in Arabic, so I'm not sure specifically what the holiday was. Any investigations are appreciated.



And here, we have what I found to be the most fascinating part of Dharavi, the back-lanes of the industrial section. Despite being a "slum," Dharavi offers none of the indigence or abjection that word implies to western ears. Instead, you see productivity everywhere, and as a result, the area has a surprisingly wide array of incomes. This is why, for those of you who were wondering private developers are actually able to sell market-rate housing alongside public projects in a "slum".

Along one lane, we saw and spoke to Bihari workers in a factory shop that recycled ball-point pens. This guy is shovelling literally thousands of pens into an enormous machine that eats them and spits them out as little pellets of plastic, then separates the ink. The room reeked of ink, a smell I'd never really experienced before, and it was strange. The workers wore rubber galoshes and elbow-length gloves.




Clockwise from top left:
- A worker looking out from a welding shop during his break.
- A vacant soap-mixing vat in a chemical shop. The smell was clean and sterile, so I deemed black and white art-style appropriate.
- Welding shop, lit an eerie pale blue-green
- Subramani walking past three enormous sacks of discarded and re-collected audio tape (like, the kind from casettes). A guy poked his head out as I walked by, pointed to the sacks and said, "You see this? 45,000 Rupees." I wasn't sure if he was making an offer, telling me the price, or merely illustrating the fact that some things that others consider trash can actually be quite valuable. I walked on.





Another welding shop:



National Slum Dwellers Association, Dharavi branch.



Thanks for reading.

Now, all of you go support the Boondogglers in the Rickshaw Run!

Some Other Things that I've been Eating

This lovely dish is not, as you may have guessed, green eggs and anything. It is called hara bhara kebab, and what it is made of, I know not. I'm guessing peas. Maybe some spinach. It's really spicy. It's delicious. Janki and I ate it, with Dhruv in tow, on the roof of the Strand Hotel, at the cafe.



This man is making pani puri, which is a crispy hollow puff of wheat flour, filled with water and peas and lentils and stuff like that. I don't eat pani puri from just anybody (this guy is no exception) because it would give me the runs something terrible because it's made with local water, usually. Instead, I got me a couple of vada pav, which are like Whitecastle burgers, only with a potato chickpea patty covered in delicious green chutney inside the bun, instead of rancid horsemeat and rotten cheese. What I'm saying is, they're the same size as Whitecastle burgers.

They look like this. It was too dark for me to photograph my own vada pav.

Janki also has been raving about the Breach Candy Sandwich, as she calls it, for some time. You get it at this food stall called "Right Place" in the Breach Candy neighborhood of central Bombay. It's a toasted triple-decker vegetarian sandwich made with potatoes, capsicum (which means green peppers in Indian), onions, cheese, and a liberal slathering of grasshopper-green chutney. It looks like this...



And gets smeared with this...



And ends up looking like this...



But here I go again, stealing Janki's thunder again. Read more about the Breach Candy sandwich on Janki's food blog, which makes me hungry even after eating a whole sandwich 5 minutes ago.



In addition, if anyone is interested in seeing more pictures of markets and bazaars in Bombay, here's a whole blog devoted to them. Those of you who are thinking about clicking that link, ask yourself again, "Are you really interested in that?".