Land's End

I won't be blogging for the next week or so because Gilles and I have taken on an assignment to help tsunami victims in Tamil Nadu. We'll be traveling to the Southern tip of India, Kanyakumari, to interview fishermen about the difficulties their villages are facing after the disaster. We should be back by Saturday, Feb 5th. Check back next week for our report!

Shouts and Whispers

I saw my very first Indian riot last Friday. I was supposed to go saree shopping with my Indian friend Kasturi, so we arranged to meet outside the local supermarket. As I was walking there I noticed that all the stores were closed, which is unusual even on holidays. I saw a group of motorcyclists at the intersection, shouting and whistling - I thought that something might have happened, like a minor accident. Even the US State Department advises travelers to run away from the scene of an accident because of the possibility of an assault by onlookers, so I thought they might be about to take down a rickshaw driver. But, when I reached the supermarket, I realized they had a different target. The shop had a sign on its closed metal gate saying it would open at 10:30, and it was already 12. A security guard kept lifting the gate halfway and then bringing it down again. A few minutes later I understood why: the motorcyclists arrived and started throwing stones at the door. I thought it had something to do with the Muslim holiday of Eid, and that perhaps the Muslims were angry that shops were open on a holy day (the day Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac). But I found out later that they were part of a general strike against the evangelist Benny Hinn, who had the support of the government in his three-day "pray for India" session on an airfield in Bangalore. He promised to cure the sick and generally bless everyone, and non-Christians were angry.

On Saturday I attended the Sports Day at the school for the deaf, which was quite a loud affair. I wore my first saree, but unfortunately I didn't get any photos. The kids took part in a number of fun races, such as the Funny Bunny competition, in which the smaller children had to run up to a table and then eat a carrot. The first one to finish the carrot won.

Saturday night we had a party at our house. I invited friends from the sign language institute, so there were about 5 deaf people and 5 hearing. The Indian people said they had never seen sign language before, so I was happy that they learned something. We had a good time and I met Gilles' new friend from work, Anne-Julie, a charming French history student. On Saturday our friends from Macromedia took us bowling; I embarrassed myself as usual. We had a very late dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where I was shocked to discover there are Chinese people who don't know how to cook rice.

Today I was ready to find my deaf village at last, so I went to the Sign Language Institute to meet with the coordinator, who knows a journalist at the TV station that broadcast the original story. She told me to arrive at 10, but when I got there she had not yet come in. Half an hour later she arrived with a policeman and a man in handcuffs. He was a deaf man from the countryside who murdered his brother. They called in one of the deaf instructors to interpret from his gestures into sign language, and then the coordinator wrote down his confession. The police had even brought the murder weapon with them, a long stick! At 12 they left to see the crime scene, and handed me the confession to type up. I have to say, this is the most involvement I have ever had in police work!

They left and I chatted with two very nice students of sign language who turned out to be Jehova's witnesses. They asked me if I was interested in the Bible so I tried to make bypass the topic discreetly by saying I was Jewish. They asked if my father was a big banker, and I didn't get why until much later in the conversation! They told me that Jews were all right but were unfortunately cursed for not accepting Jesus. Only Jesus is not God for their church either. I didn't quite get it and didn't really want to go into details, but I was surprised to learn that the man's family had been members of that religion for 5 generations.

I thought I had made an escape when I went to lunch with some other deaf guys. We went next door to the canteen, and I was amused to see the kids from the oral school attached to the Speech and Hearing Institute signing to each other. They all knew the deaf teacher and asked him if I was deaf. I tried to explain that I spoke, but didn't speak their language (Kannada). I'm sure they thought I was deaf. Halfway through lunch I realized that my deaf friends were all members of the mormon church. They have been quite successful in converting deaf people in Bangalore, though they all seem to drink coffee and tea. Some habits die hard.

The secretary's daughter arrived and charmed me into looking for chocolate for her and making her a butterfly out of paper. Finally, around 4:30 the crew came back with the police. The deaf man was back home, and would be taken into jail tomorrow. The interpreters explained to me that he probably wouldn't go to prison for long, since his parents would bail him out. Since he killed his own brother, there would be no one to prosecute him, and he would go free as long as the fine was paid. He might even marry his brother's widow, who has a three-month-old baby!

We did finally make it to the TV station, where the journalist we had wanted to see raced by us on her way to report on an all-night concert. We were introduced to the regional manager, who offered to help us and vaguely recalled the report. Hopefully he will be able to tell us more about the deaf village and even give us a video tape. I'll just have to wait and see...

The Secret Village

I am still hot on the pursuit of my "silent village," though my pursuit of the infamous GOI research clearance is more and more riddled with difficulties. Everyone tells me that the Indian government is concerned with how India is viewed in the world, and that perhaps they are worried I will portray the situation of deaf people here in a way that reflects negatively on them. This of course is not the case, but since I have no direct contact with them it is difficult to convince them of my goodwill. I am still sending monthly reminders to Fulbright to send reminders to the Ministry of Human Resource Development to send reminders to the Ministry of External Affairs. I hope they don't find my blog and say I am giving a bad image of the Indian government's efficiency in processing visas.

I am still moonlighting as a sign language intepreter, though given my lack of professional (read: any) training I am often just making signs up. After meeting deaf people and volunteering at schools for the deaf in Wales, Ecuador, the US and France, I am thoroughly confused about which sign goes with which country. Some of you might think it's universal, but in fact every country and sometimes even community has its own sign language. In fact Bangalore has one, while Delhi has another! The deaf people here are working on a project to videotape a dictionary of Bangalore signs - I've been helping them with some of the lighting, though I think my training from Tom Denove might be just a bit too cinematic for their purposes. What's interesting to note is that when I lit for one of the Indian signers and then stood in the lights myself, I looked terrible - washed out and pasty! So I think I really might be white after all. The people of Karnataka often have a very rich, brown skintone - I can't tell whether I'm not tanning very fast or I'm just much pastier than I thought.

Next weekend the sign language team and I will visit a town in Northern Karnataka, on the border with Maharashta, to give seminars to rural deaf people. I am hoping they will lead me to the "silent" village in Tamil Nadu, since my searches through archives have so far led me nowhere. If the silent village doesn't work out, I will probably resort to making a film about a silent person in a normal village, which is essentially my original idea for a documentary about deaf people who invent their own language or have no language at all, just rudimentary gestures. I think I am still a linguist at heart - I find the idea of the personally invented language fascinating. I just read about a village in North Bali where 50 out of 2000 people are deaf and everyone has used sign language for the past 800 years. The head of the research is keeping the location of the village a secret to protect the integrity of the project; so if I find my village, that will be a secret too!

Sign Language

Things are looking up for my project on deaf people in India, though I still don't have any word from the government research clearance people. To make matters worse, I think Fulbright has completely abandoned me. This is turning into the toughest $600 a month I've (n)ever earned. I think I would have been better off getting a job teaching English at a call center.

Anyhow, last week I went to the Sign Language Department at the Institute of Speech and Hearing. It's a funny place, because there is a school for deaf children that is completely oral, meaning no sign language is used, and then there's a little office and a classroom devoted to the study and teaching of Indian Sign Langauge. There I met Ramakrishna, a deaf instructor, and Ida, who completed an interpreter training program at the school. There are hardly any interpreters for deaf people in India, compared to thousands in the US. I was just commenting the other day that I thought it was funny that there were only two or three programs for foreign language interpreting in the US, whereas there are dozens of sign langauge interpreting programs. Here it's the opposite.

I even met a deaf guru, who is affiliated with the Hare Krishna branch of Hinduism. He runs spiritual education seminars for deaf people and encourages them not to eat meat, smoke, drink, etc. He looked a little like Jeff Goldblum.

Anyway, these various people are willing to help me with my project, and even told me about another two deaf villages in India. One is in Kashmir, which presents logistical problems, and the other is here in the south. My only problem is that I located the one in Kashmir through CNN transcripts, but the other one is still without a name and location. Still, this is somewhat encouraging, as it means the idea of the village is not that far-fetched!

Saturday morning Ramakrishna contacted me through his mobile phone and asked me to interpret for him at a hearing school. He visits schools and teaches the children about sign language and the deaf. He arrived at the bus station half an hour late, and then we missed our stop. I was happy to see that autorickshaw drivers try to cheat even deaf Indian people, as I watched them negotiate by writing numbers on their hands. Finally we reached the school. They had never heard of us, but we forced our way into a classroom of 50 smiling 13-year-olds in white uniforms. The girls and boys sat in different sections, of course. They were very polite and enthusiastic and learned the sign language alphabet with little effort. They seemed to enjoy the visit from two "aliens" as well.

It turns out we were supposed to meet the woman who arranged the visit before we went to the school - I think my colleague was just a little spacy. So we went to her house afterwards. She is an elderly woman who started learning sign language after the death of her husband. She was obviously quite lonely. She fed us lots of rice, dal, and eggplants and kept heaping things onto my plate. Then she brought out fruits, desserts, and anything else she could find. I succeeded in eating the entire meal with my hands, though I found it difficult to use sign language at the same time.

The big event of Sunday was the purchase of 63 plants for our terrace and our living room, including 10 large palm trees. We now have shade and a nice breeze on our terrace, which we will proudly display to guests at our first party this Saturday.

Our Temple Tour

carvings at the Halebid temple.

We headed to Belur last Friday. The trip began on a sour note, as we had thought the bus would take about 3 hours and in fact it took 5. We arrived at our destination, a small town between Bangalore and the west coast, at around 11, and all the restaurants were closed. We bought some odd pastries at the local bakery and then threw most of them away after the first few bites.

Gilles tries to blend in.

In the morning we walked over to the Belur temple, which is famous for its thousand-year-old carvings. We were quite a tourist attraction ourselves and posed for several photos with Indian young people. After being stared at by the local people at lunch and fighting our way through crowds of vendors (some of them little kids) reducing their prices on things we didn't want, we took the bus to Halebid, another town nearby. We enjoyed traveling through the countryside - the harvest had just been completed and oxcarts carried huge piles of hay along the road.

a Jain prophet
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

In Halebid we visited three more temples and learned about the prophets of Jainism.

In the evening we had an aperitif with a very nice middle-aged French couple. The wife was a computer scientist and the husband was a nuclear engineer from the CNRS, where Gilles wants to work one day. They told us, in true epic French fashion, about their trip to Pondicherry and Kerala on December 27th, just after the tsunami. They made us want to visit Kerala (if you remember, it's God's own country. Still haven't figured that slogan out).

On Sunday we took a local bus from Belur to Shrivanbelgola to see a huge Jain statue on top of a hill. Apparently we missed out on the real event, which will happen next month and involves hundred of people showering the 50-foot statue with coconut milk and other "offerings." I had a truly religious experience on the way to the town, as we were sitting at the very front of the bus and had a very good view of the driver's method of navigating the road, which was under construction: he would drive very fast, even though we could see another vehicle coming straight towards us, and then he would honk loudly until the other vehicle swerved onto the dirt road beside us. I suddenly understood why everyone here believes in some sort of god, and came to the conclusion that so much spirituality is not good for road safety.

We walked the 500 steps to the prophet barefoot, as is required, and enjoyed the view from the top to the town below. Then we walked through the village to a few other temples, where we gave away all our change to prominently displayed charity boxes and/or prominently displayed charity collectors.

Gilles makes a new friend
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

We got a bus back to the larger town quite easily, but then had some trouble getting onto one of the "super deluxe" buses back to Bangalore. We ended up having to take a local bus. We got a bit tricked, as we were herded onto a bus just before it started, and before we could see that there were hardly any seats. Luckily a few people got off and we were able to get seats together before the big rush of people, coconuts and sacks of grains arrived for the long haul to the city.

Back to School

School is back in session after a 10-day holiday. I was beginning to get bored, like any good schoolgoer, so I was happy to go back. The kids seemed happy to see me too. They told me all about the tsunami they had seen on television, and some of the girls had even donated old clothes and money to help the victims. Sneha and Nandini gave me a little pocket-sized Happy New Year calendar they had gotten from a hot water heater company.

School sports day is January 22nd, and preparations are in full swing. Every afternoon the kids go outside to practice their events. Yesterday the boys were practicing their human pyramid. They put one small boy on top of an older boy's shoulders, and the little boy immediately started screaming and crying, so of course he couldn't balance up there. The teachers started yelling at him not to cry. He put on a brave face for the next one.

Other events are going to include lemon-spoon racing and obstacle courses. Nandini informed me that I would have to come to sports day, so that week I should come on Saturday instead of Friday.

My parents sent me a Hindi learning CD, which is just in time, because people keep yelling at me in Hindi. Nishaant explained to us that Hindi is a sort of lingua franca in India (for many it's the second or third language they learn in school) so some people think it's the lingua franca for everywhere. I took a package to the post office today and a man at the door asking me what I wanted went through 5 words in different languages before he arrived at "stamp." I took an autorickshaw in the evening and asked him to turn right, and he argued with me in Kannada saying it was the wrong way. He even enlisted the support of a young man in a van next to us, who first argued with me in Kannada and then (I think) gave me the same argument in Hindi. They didn't seem bothered when I argued back in English. They either didn't notice or just thought I was crazy, I guess.

The New Silicon Valley

electronic city
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

This is where we buy our computer supplies in Bangalore. Gilles bought a wifi card there and still hasn't gotten it to work on his linux system, so we went back yesterday and bought a long ethernet cable. We asked for the longest one they had, then realized that they had a huge spool of cable under the counter. We watched as the man from the shop cut off a 15-meter piece and then attached the connectors at the end.

We also visited the Lalbagh gardens, where we were gaped at by large families and then informed about the wonders of Kerala by a group of drunken men from "God's own country." The gardens are quite beautiful, a real haven of greenery in the middle of the city. There is even a huge reservoir with interesting rock formations around it, and a giant glass pavilion. It's clearly a popular spot for an afternoon walk, and we can see why.

me at Lalbagh gardens

When Nishaant was in Bangalore he visited the ISKCON temple, which is a huge modern structure that houses Bangalore's International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which I think is better known in the US as the Hare Krishnas. They were holding a "feast of India" buffet today to raise money for charity, and Nishaant got talked into buying a ticket even though he wouldn't be here, so he gave it to me. We decided to go along to the feast, and were quite surprised by how huge and organized the temple is. It's set up for long lines, with those snake lineholders they have at Disneyland (I'm sure there's a real word for those...) and metal detectors. We were spotted right away and asked to donate one hundred and eight rupees, for which we were given a speedy entry through the shoe-drop and a special pass that let us go through all the exits and bypass the lines. We reached the top and were admiring the smoggy view when a young man named Abhi asked us if he could talk to us. He took us into the main hall and let us sit with the temple members to watch the ceremony. It started out quite sedate, but then erupted into a loud procession, with much chanting, singing and jumping. It was kind of like Hare Krishna hip-hop. Gilles was invited to join the procession but he wasn't too sure about it.

As we left the main prayer hall we walked through a series of gift shops and then into the buffet hall, where we were served a very odd Aruyevedic "welcome drink" made from ginger and orange juice; it had medicinal qualities and coincidentally tasted like medicine. The videographer seemed a little too excited to see us - I'm sure we'll be on television tomorrow somewhere, or maybe just in the temple archives. A very nice Gujarati man befriended us and took us from stall to stall introducing us to the "tastes of India," and Gilles bravely tried everything. I was not quite as successful. The only real difficulty was walking barefoot through a food fair with carpeting on the floors - our feet were just a little bit sticky at the end.

After the dinner we somehow found our shoes (I was worried they were keeping them) and walked outside, and a rickshaw driver immediately came up to us and said "Would you like an auto?" Other drivers tried to take us, but he insisted, saying he had gotten there first. We couldn't understand the conversation that followed once we were in the backseat, but we were somehow sure that the driver was bragging about how his English skills had snagged him a nice couple of foreigners. I think we were the first foreign passengers he's had. The other drivers shook Gilles' hand and wished him a happy new year. Anyway, it was a fun evening. Thanks, Nishaant.