New purchases

I bought a recliner! A la-Z-boy at that. I think I need to buy a smoking pipe and develop a taste for gin. Those government grants went to good use - I'm stimulating the economy, from the lounge room...

Leaving India

Was quite a muted experience. A few plane delays, a shopping trip in Delhi, a bit of cable TV, a flight to Malaysia, change planes to Singapore, stay in hotel in Singapore, attend conference, eat Singaporean food. All muted, not a sense of emptiness, just a sense of it doesn't quite feel right.

I went to DLF Emporio. I think the phrase is white elephant. In a country where most people earn less than one australian dollar a day, this super mega mall has opened in the middle of nowhere and a short distance from slums not pictured in Slumdog Millionaire. More marble than Taj Mahal and all of it imported from Italy. Crass.

Anyway, it is a high end mall, the comparison of King Street in Perth or Collins Street here in Melbourne. I think they built it as a mall so the common man couldn't come in. A street side shop means riff raff, the sheer size of the mall would frighten off most people.

It was empty, surprise surprise, I was the only customer in nearly every store apart from Tag Heurer and Christian Dior. I suppose it was designed in a pre-credit crisis world, where all lived on debt and no one paid cash.

The problem with the concept is three fold - it is isolated in South Delhi near the airport, meaning there is very little through traffic, but because of the desire for a mega-mall experience, it could only buy the land in the boondocks. It is excessively large and expensive and not many people have the money to shop there anymore apart from expats and tourists and finally, by being placed so close to slums and proper vibrant malls like Vasant Kunj, it only highlights the inequity of life in India.

Google maps informs me it is on Nelson Mandela Marg (road) (points A and B)


View Larger Map

Random cute photos

Random cute photos

Curious baby
(also called Naina says what are you doing)

India Visa photo (looking all grown up)

The thinker (apologies to Rodin)

Patna

Patna's a friendly town.

Our driver Shravan (though I kept calling him Sarwan and Deepti kept telling me I had it wrong) was very proud of a cutting in a newspaper discussing his act of honesty where he returned a wallet to the owner - containing 15000 rupees or at least 3 months salary. He had kept and laminated the english and hindi versions of the article. Patna and Bihar are obviously so use to the corrupt past, that it is looking for heroes in every day people.

Getting to Deepti's parent's house is not easy. I'd only been once before, and that was in a rush, so this time we had time to take it slowly. The directions are: turn right at Jamuna Apartments, go down the alley, across the intersection, turn left (I think), turn right, honk the horn to get people to move their bikes they have parked in the alley and then you're there. In other words, I was lost. It's a high density part of Patna, but actually inside Deepti's home, it's quiet and peaceful (apart from the man who seems to know when I call Deepti because that's when he starts yelling out he's got potatoes for sale).

It was funny how the things I thought would be challenging about Patna were not at all; nobody tried to rip us off, we found nappies and baby items very quickly and easily and people were welcoming. After the torturous trip to Ranchi, coming to Patna felt like coming home.

Observations #2

Indian roads are scary. I thought city roads were bad with car, three wheelers, the occasional cow, children, trucks (large trucks) and bicycles. Then I saw the roads in the country side.

We saw two accidents on our way to and from Ranchi. One, some poor soul was hit by a truck. The second, a jeep carrying probably ten people hit a motorbike and rolled. This would be considered front page news in Australia. For India it is a way of life.

Most cars don't have rear seat belts, which scares me. Our driver drove extremely fast even though we told him to slow down. I think they see it as a car race. And of course there's all that dipping and weaving on bad roads that make it a tragedy in the making. No wonder people travel by train so much.

I have a theory that people operate on survival of the fastest in India. With chronically short infrastructure and services, there's a need to be first to get anything done. If you go to a government office or post office, there are no queues, the same as on a foot path or on the road. If there's a space, there's room to push in. Some guy pushed in front of me at the airport. I tapped his shoulder and told him that he should go to the back of the queue. He looked me up and down and then moved behind me, where the next guy did the same thing to him. I just smiled, but the fellow behind me had more angry words.

Patna, a city on the grow

I suppose it must seem odd to those who have visited Patna and those who haven't as well, when they hear Patna'ites and regular visitors say that Patna has really improved. It is condescending for us regulars to speak of a city, a group of people, a community like that.

But it's true. Patna's really changed, even since 2007. The airport is spruced up (they now have screens with live flight information). The main intersections look like Times Square and Piccadily Circus. The roads are being widened, footpaths improved. Poverty is still present and many people live in slums still. Perhaps what I am saying is whilst India sailed ahead in the 90's an the 00's under the BJP, the casteist politicians made Patna and Bihar suffer for more than 15 years under Lalu Prasad Yadav and his illiterate wife Rabri Devi (former chief minister of Bihar who could not sign her own name). They tore millions and millions of rupees away from the state of Bihar, which was once the best run state in the country. Anyway, their time has gone, and Bihar, under Nitish Kumar, has prospered. It is still a crowded, dirty city, but it has hope and strength and is forward looking. No mean achievement since the corruption of the 90's.

One thing to note though, despite all criticisms of Bihar and its past, it has no history of religious persecution. Whilst many states in the north labour under violence against Christians or Muslims, Bihar has had none of it. Obviously, Bihar also has casteism, which is a blight on all of north India.

Getting to Patna

For me, the highlight of the trip was meeting my grandmother and it was not a great time because N was miserable for parts of it. That said, being in Ranchi felt like prison in comparison to Bokaro; we didn't have anyone we could rely on for help, we were pretty much left to our own devices. With N being unwell, we stayed home on the Sunday and watched N recuperate (floor licking continued).

My parents have a (and I have to pronounce this carefully) a ghatia in their Ranchi flat. A ghatia is like a bench, but weaved out of plant material and wood. Anyway, N decided that it was hilarious to crawl under the ghatia first thing each morning after being released from boring sleep time. We could not encourage her to do it anyother time of day. The ritual would involve crawling/slipping on marble out of our bedroom, turning right at ghatia, giggling away as she went under the ghatia and then emerging the other side. I captured it on video, so I'll bore you all with it one day.

We left Ranchi for Patna on Monday 9th of February. This was going to be interesting for me. Deepti's been in Australia about 1.5 years and left home after the wedding. So it was two years since she had spent time with her family and of course they hadn't met N.

A guy I sat next to on the plane answered his phone at between 10000 and 15000 feet. This had me freaked out as surely we were all meant to crash and die when that happened. And he was talking to someone. Obviously we did not all crash and die.

Arriving in Patna (Jai Prakash Narayan International Airport), Deepti ran ahead to meet her parents whilst I grabbed my dad's favourite, toothless airport porter who looked like he'd fall over everytime he picked up a suitcase. Deepti's family had organised a car for us and we went back to the Maurya Hotel, which some of you may remember. Due to the wedding, just about everyone in the hotel knew us. Kind of freaky when staff would ring the doorbell just to say hello.

Ranchi to Bokaro

My grandmother lives in Bokaro. She and her sister are the last of their generation on my mother's and father's side, and all of Deepti's grandparents have passed away, so it was important to both of us that generation 1 meet generation 4 (i.e. Naina).

To get to Bokaro was spectacular. The road is dangerous, unsealed for a 100 metre stretch and panoramic. Ranchi is at 1500 feet whereas Bokaro is at sea level (or thereabouts) so to get down the hills means long and winding roads. To get there we took NH 33 northeast out of Ranchi and then turned right at Ramgarh and took NH 23 to Bokaro through Phusro.


View Larger Map

The panoramic part was just before Ramgarh, if you enlarge the map, you can see the curving roads and winding roads as we descended from Ranchi.

This was also the stage that N showed her predeliction for motion sickness. She would be jumping about in the back seat of the car, thoroughly enjoying her trip and then would go quiet, refusing food and water. It took us a while to read the signs. Coming back, I started to work out when she would be sick, but she still "surprised" us and the car floor from time to time.

Parts of Jharkhand (including areas surrounding Ranchi) are known for Maoist sympathisers and Naxalites (a type of regional freedom fighter or disorganised guerilla fighters). These sympathisers are in a violent struggle against the government and the commonly held view is that these sympathisers are funded by China, in order for it to increase its sphere of influence.

There is a scene in Yes Minister where Humphrey is describing the urgent need for an upgrade of nuclear deterrents because of the enemy. Hacker replies, what the Russians? Humphrey replies, no the French. Likewise, India is surrounded by two enemies, one well known, Pakistan and, the other not so well known, China. Tensions wax and wane regularly.

Arriving in Bokaro was like arriving in Paris compared to Ranchi. Bokaro is full of grand boulevards, tree lined roads and organised chaos. If Bokaro were not so remote, it should have been the capital of Jharkhand. Unfortunately, a mistake was made and Ranchi was chosen.

On meeting my uncle, aunt and grandmother, Naina was unsettled after vomiting and did not want to be close to anyone except Deepti. But slowly she opened up, her curiousity to explore a new surrounds got the better of her and she started being N like. She was muted though, a sign of still feeling unwell.

She got the intergenerational massage with mustard oil (with unhappy sounds like most Indian babies make) and was particularly amused by the mosquito net that we put up around the bed to sleep at night.

My grandmother regaled us with tales of my sisters when they were young. Usually they involved them being naughty and running around too much. The story of my oldest sister running at 6 months came up, as it does at every family gathering. I wish we could have spent more time there. Getting to see her is so hard when we visit India as we have to fly to Delhi then Ranchi, then drive to Bokaro. It felt unfair to be leaving so quickly.

One for the geography nuts out there

Totally off topic, but this is a great blog I enjoy regularly. Ignore the most recent post about war.

Strangemaps

O Ranchi!

Our stay in Ranchi was eventful.

Shopkeepers in Ranchi are generally rude - poor service, misleading deliberately, poor service again. We were stopped for carrying a baby bag into a shop and not allowed to enter. We were told that if we wanted to look at cheaper saris we had to stand and could not sit, even with N. Foreign credit cards are not accepted. Just the beginning. We got ripped off by the taxi service.

People are extremely aggressive for money in Ranchi, very much like the old India, but not much like the new India that lives in Delhi or Mumbai. These things were shocks to me; I 'd noticed it in Delhi, people will try to rip you (e.g. taxi drivers taking you to their shops) but the level of customer service is so much better in Delhi that you can forgive them and then go to the shop next door.

People bemoan Bihar, but at least in Patna, there's great service and people are friendly in the shops. My uncle in Patna says that the villagers and thugs in Ranchi have become millionaires overnight when Ranchi became a state capital. I understand him now.

Blah blah blah grumble. I didn't enjoy Ranchi.

Observations of India 1

So a few observations over the first few days in Delhi and Ranchi.

Indian houses seem to have an obsession with marble. Being cold, N had to wear cotton fleecy pants and a jumper. Thus without feet or knees to get proper traction whenever she moved too fast there was slipping movements and occasional (scared) tears. Marble is not baby friendly. Not that we like to let N fall over in Aus, but at least here if she falls while trying to stand, she hits her head on the carpet and she cries a bit and we move on. Marble doesn't quite give like carpet does.

Indians do love babies and small kids, but I felt how people view babies and mum's is very different between Aus and India. I can't really put my finger on what it is, how it is different, but certainly, the attitudes are very different. One twerp, and I use that term as insult to modern twerps, decided to lecture us on "You are not allowed to give the baby milk during take off". To say I was unamused was an understatement. This was from a guy who refused to give Deepti an aisle seat so she could get up and walk with N up and down during the flight. Cuttingly, I told him to mind his own business. He insisted on carrying on with his lecture. My next words were still quite "choice" but a little more cutting. He was quiet after that.

Getting back to marble. Arriving at the hotel in Delhi, N took a look around the room. She also started to ... um... lick the marble. We'd never noticed this before. Obviously Melbourne houses don't feature a lot of marble. We think she could see a slight reflection in the marble of herself and wanted to be more involved. This continued in Ranchi and Patna. She cleaned the floors better than the housekeeper did. Stamping of feet never really stopped her. I will have to ask Deepti if N is still up to this one.

Final observation, getting Naina in to a bath tub for a bath and wash is difficult enough. Using bottled water to wash her hair and face out of fear of her getting sick is plain ludicrous. N would try to drink the water from the shower so we were left with only the difficult choice in this matter. Thanks to the hair handicapping, at least Deepti doesn't have to wash any hair for a few more weeks.

Getting to Ranchi

I think somethings, small things, were organised well about our trip. Our first flight, for example, was an afternoon flight with a bassinet. Naina travelled fairly well. Those small packets of cheese they give on the planes went down well.

Things then became a little tougher. The first night in Malaysia we got to bed at 945pm (so about 12:45 Melbourne time) but it took Naina a while to settle down, the bed was small, we were hungry and we knew we had a connecting flight at 8am the next morning. Getting N up at 6 am after only 7 hours or so felt mean and it was a sign of things to come. We had organised too much in too short a period of time.

After reaching the amazingly "buildifying" and "construct-tor" city of Delhi (in preparation for the Commonwealth games, they are extending the Metro to the airport, building massive freeways and roads and building two new terminals at the airport), Deepti's brother showed up at the hotel, ostensibly to meet us, but really to meet N. Once he left, we fell asleep at 4:30 pm (10 o'clock Melbourne time), with our body clocks totally whacked. We slept 12 hours.

And the next day (Tuesday 03 Feb) we flew to Ranchi and were met by mum and dad's housekeeper. For two days N had been cramped up in bassinets and pouches and hotel rooms and airplanes and taxis, at least in Ranchi, she could play unimpeded. Except everyone wanted to pick her up.